7-Foot Mantis Alien, Bigfoot Divorce Case, Giant Fish Swallows Mermaid, Rogue Replicating AI and More Mysterious News Briefly

A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week. 

His father, King Charles, and especially his grandfather, Prince Philip, were more focused on UFOs but William, the Prince of Wales, revealed an affinity for the Loch Ness monster when he visited NatureMetrics, a leader in delivering nature data and intelligence on biodiversity using environmental DNA (eDNA), at their Surrey headquarters and asked Dr Kat Bruce, its founder, if they could use eDNA samples from soil, sediment and water in Scotland to find the Loch Ness monster; Dr. Bruce replied, “People came from New Zealand to try that. They took about 500 eDNA samples in Loch Ness. They said they found eels, and it might just be a very big eel, but that felt like it was clutching at straws a bit”; she also told the Prince that NatureMetrics has been asked to aid in the hunt for Bigfoot and the Yeti. Finning Nessie could be the only way he ends up being more famous than his queen grandmother.

Bigfoot is back in court again, this time in a divorce court in British Columbia where the wife of an unnamed man filed for divorce after he took his ex-wife instead of her on a Bigfoot hunting expedition to Vancouver Island; in the divorce proceedings, the man requested spousal support, claiming he was disabled due to injuries (a fractured ankle and vertebrae) that he suffered nine years prior on a different Bigfoot hunt (apparently with neither spouse) and he is unable to work; Judge Robin Baird pointed out the obvious – that “The claimant continues to enjoy camping, fishing, hunting, riding ‘quad’ motorcycles, and exploring remote areas of B.C. in search of sasquatch” and “has made no effort since 2016 to seek or secure employment in lighter or more sedentary occupations, or to retrain for better paying low-impact jobs in keeping with his superior intellect and aptitudes” which the man claimed to have; Judge Baird granted the divorce but declined to award spousal support or legal costs to either party. Bigfoot could not be subpoenaed because all of the ID photos are blurred.

‘Man Bites Dog’ is always a better story than the other way around, so there was much interest in China and elsewhere when the media reported that a mermaid had been bitten on the head by a giant fish in front of children who were watching the mermaid; the incident occurred at the Xishuangbanna Primitive Forest Park in southern China where a Russian aquatic artist (fancy term for mermaid) named Masha was doing her show when a giant fish engulfed her entire head in its mouth; Russian media showed videos of her struggling before she freed her head and swam to the surface with head, neck and eye injuries; Masha claimed she was given less than $100 in compensation and none of the reports identified the fish, other than to say it was native to the Mekong and Yangtze Rivers. Was the fish jealous of the attention given to the mermaid, turned on by her looks or getting back at humanity for inventing sushi?

It is a well-known fact that the Pentagon used psychics and remote viewers in the 1970s and now a former CIA agent has come forward to reveal that the agency seeks out people with a certain kind of ‘superpower’ that he himself has - Andrew Bustamante, who spent seven years working covertly as a CIA officer, says the superpower is anxiety, which the CIA believes makes agents more attentive, mentally sharp, suspicious and have a stronger recollection of events; Bustamante’s wife is also a CIA agent with anxiety; John Kiriakou, another former CIA officer who was jailed for exposing the CIA’s interrogation techniques, adds that the agency looks for sociopaths, which are the opposite of the empaths that psychics often are. Is a sociopath with anxiety a super-duper-power and if so, does Marvel know about this?

In a recent interview, US congressional representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee said an admiral who wished to remain anonymous told him the Navy has encountered an unidentified underwater craft “moving at hundreds of miles an hour underwater... as large as a football field, underwater" but Burchett is not concerned these are aliens with evil intentions and uses an interesting form of logic to explain why: “I'm not worried about them harming me. I mean, with that capabilities, they would have barbecued us a long time ago". It seems unusual that aliens with a superior means of powering high-speed spacecraft and underwater ships would use barbecuing as their preferred form of food preparation.

Dr. John Blitch, a former Delta Force commander and cognitive scientist, has come forward with an account of his alleged encounter with a 7-foot-tall, mantis-like, non-human intelligence that appeared in his bedroom and communicated with him about the nature of consciousness and the physical body while he felt "terrified, frozen, paralyzed on the bed"; he claims the giant mantis opened his mandibles and “starts grabbing chunks of my cheek and he's ripping it. And there's blood spattering on the wall”; the mantis warned him: “See we can't get your soul. We can do a lot of damage to your body if we want to. We don't. We're trying to help you. But this is how bad it could get. So stop squiggling around and let us get this done"’ although he felt the bites, Blitch said there was no physical damage or bite marks; Blitch says he will reveal more in his upcoming book on the abduction phenomenon. Did he consider distracting the mantis by asking it to pray with him?

A swell shark (Cephaloscyllium ventriosum) was born at the Shreveport Aquarium in Louisiana in January 2025 in a tank holding two females and no males - the female sharks have not been in contact with a male in over three years – so the media is calling it a ‘virgin birth’ while marine biologists say it’s a rare reproductive phenomenon called parthenogenesis where female sex cells called gametes can develop without fertilization; it has been seen in plants, some ants and bees, sharks, a few snakes and lizards, but not humans; at least not for another year or two according to a report produced by the UK’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA)which reveals that scientists are close to developing the technology to create eggs and sperm in the laboratory using one person’s skin or stem cells, allowing them to fertilize each other and grow in the lab into a human baby with only one parent. Even sharks think this is unethical, not to mention creepy and unhealthy.

While Elon Musk and SpaceX focus on Mars, astronomers at Oxford University have discovered an exoplanet just 20 light-years away from our solar system that is six times the size of Earth, orbiting its star in the habitable or Goldilocks zone, and may have water and other conditions suitable for creating and sustaining life; Dr Michael Cretignier, a postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford, discovered HD 20794 d in 2020 and says now says “With its location in a habitable zone and relatively close proximity to Earth, this planet could play a pivotal role in future missions that will characterize the atmospheres of exoplanets to search for biosignatures indicating potential life”. Is Elon looking for life or a place to get away from it?

UFO whistleblower Don Paul Bales, a 25-year veteran of the United States Armed Forces and law enforcement, confirms in an interview the testimony of fellow whistleblower Jake Barber that secret government programs involving UFOs have been operational for decades and he himself is aware of a variety of non-human spacecraft, including some shaped like living organisms and others that are transdimensional, allowing them to disappear and reappear; he claims some of these crafts have specific and sometimes understandable functions, while others are more advanced than anything humans have developed and he implies that they may be reverse-engineered extraterrestrial technology; he says revealing this information is dangerous and some people may have been ‘eliminated’ for doing it, so he’s pushing for government transparency so the knowledge can be revealed to the public safely, saying that would be “the most significant event in our history”. It will also be the day a number of cable channels go out of business.

In 2023, The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life issued a paper looking at signals sent from NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) to the Voyager 1, Voyager 2, Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and New Horizons space probes which have reached the edge of the solar system and calculated the time the signals would reach nearby stars; they determined that a signal sent to Pioneer 10 reached a dead star known as a white dwarf around 27 light-years away in 2002; if there was intelligent life on one of the star’s planets and they sent a response back immediately, it could reach us as soon as 2029; being good scientists, they recently went over the data again and confirmed their calculations, suggesting that radio telescopes should be positioned at the white dwarf in 2029 and set to ‘listen’. Let’s hope the message they send back is ‘Telescope on Do Not Disturb’.

The mysterious disappearance of a colony of British settlers who landed on Roanoke Island off North Carolina in 1587 and vanished without a trace three years later has a new possible solution after researchers at the British Museum took the 400-year-old “La Virginea Pars” map drawn by one of the colonists, John White, and held it to a lightbox to see what was behind a blank spot covered up due to an error and found a symbol for a fort which researcher Kim Sloan thinks is a location near present-day Bertie County, on the western end of Albemarle Sound, less than 100 miles from the ‘lost’ colony; in 2007, archaeologist Nicholas Luccketti of the James River Institute for Archaeology found pieces of English ceramic artifacts at this location and the map could confirm that at least a small contingent of the Roanoke colonists, possibly just a family, lived there for a time. Back in those days, the Lost & Found was just called Lost.

At about the same time the Chinese AI company Deepseek released its controversial bargain-priced open-source large language model of the same name to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, researchers from Fudan University published a paper describing how they used LLMs from Meta and Alibaba to demonstrate that a self-replicating AI could multiply beyond control, showing that AI may already have the capacity to go rogue; they said they hope these findings " can serve as a timely alert for the human society to put more efforts on understanding and evaluating the potential risks of frontier AI systems, and form international synergy to work out effective safety guardrails as early as possible"; one concern was about "a number of unexpected behaviors" when the AI was trying to overcome obstacles like missing files or software conflicts and ended up killing the conflicting processes. You don’t need AI to tell you that if scientists are telling us to put up guardrails, the ‘chat’ is already out of the bag.

One of President Trump’s promises is to release the files on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, along with those on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy (JFK’s brother) and Martin Luther King Jr., and conspiracy theorists say this may inadvertently reveal whether aliens exist; UFO researcher and filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee, along with many others, claims that JFK was planning to tell the American people and the world about UFOs when he was killed; Lee also claims, again along with many others, that Kennedy had already shared the information with actress Marilyn Monroe and that may have contributed to her death by a drug overdose in 1962; Lee says Trump may have been blocked by military officials before is trying again. This could be a case of killing two conspiracies with one file.

From the ‘Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?’ comes a group of red-faced Harvard University-affiliated astronomers from the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who announced the discovery of a new asteroid passing very close to Eart; they registered the space rock and named it “2018 CN41” – but just 17 hours later, they had to retract their discovery after learning that the asteroid was actually the Tesla sports car launched by Elon Musk as a publicity stunt in 2018 and is still in orbit 150,000 miles from Earth; Center for Astrophysics astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell warned Astronomy magazine that this could happen again with worse consequences: “Worst case, you spend a billion launching a space probe to study an asteroid and only realize it’s not an asteroid when you get there”. This is one Elon can’t blame on aliens or another billionaire.

From the ‘Are you going to believe me or your lying ears?’ comes a report that the US Navy picked up some strange sounds in the waters between the Isle of Raasay and Applecross in North West Scotland and believed that a Russian drone sub had dropped a listening device on the sea floor; the sound was concerning because it was first detected traveling north towards open sea, then came back a few days later and moved south towards the Skye Bridge before turning around and leaving again; that was also a clue as to the real source of the sound, which a Naval spokesperson admitted “We have been analyzing the sounds and now believe it was a marine mammal. A whale” – not just any whale, but a farting whale which confused the most powerful Navy in history. We saw Farting Whales open for Hootie & the Blowfish.

Climbing to the record-breaking top of Mount Everest is on the bucket list of many people, but they may be disappointed to find they didn’t climb the tallest mountain on Earth because that distinction belongs to two newly-discovered mountains more than 100 times taller than Everest - scientists from Utrecht University located these mountains 1,200 miles beneath Africa and the Pacific Ocean; the mountains are at least half a billion years old but probably back to the formation of Earth four billion years ago when they began to sink to their current location on the boundary between Earth's core and its mantle where they lie amongst a so-called 'graveyard' of sunken tectonic plates; scientists knew there was something in these spots and called them the Large Low Seismic Velocity Provinces (LLSVPs) because of their damping effect on seismic waves. Are they on the bucket list of Hollow Earth beings?

The extinct Roccamonfina volcano in southern Italy is home to a set of footprints called the Devil’s Trail because the people who made them crossed over a hot volcanic terrain; other than them being 350,000 years old, little was known about the footprints or the hominids who made them until recently when researchers published in the journal Quaternary how they determined that the footprints were likely produced at a time when the ignimbrite or pyroclastic flow deposit was still soft but had cooled down enough to be walked on; the grade was steep and uneven, not to mention wet and slippery, which caused the ancient walkers to alter their gait and the placement of their feet; while previous researchers assumed the ground was flat, this new information allowed the team to determine that the individuals who walked the Devil’s Trails weighed between 55.5 and 64.6 kg (122.4 to 142.4 pounds) and stood at heights ranging from 152.9 to 176.7 cm (5 feet to 5 feet 9 inches), with the averages being 166 cm (5 feet 3 inches) and 60 kg (132 pounds); that matches the size of Homo heidelbergensis, a now-extinct human species that lived in Europe during this time period and is thought to be a common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans. What was the H. heidelbergensis sound for “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Hot! Hot! Hot!”?