Outrunning a Yeti, Return of the Dinosaurs, Asparamancer's Predictions, Fairy Whisperer and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

British actor Brian Blessed, who has played everyone from Old Deuteronomy in the 1981 original London production of Cats to Boss Nass in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, may be 88 years old but he thinks he can still outrun a Yeti by using the advice given to him by John Baptist Lucius Noel, the official cameraman on George Mallory’s historic ascent of Mount Everest in 1924 – Noel told him that female Yetis have “long sagging breasts” so one can escape by running downhill” while “they throw their breasts over their shoulders”; Blessed is the oldest man to have reached the North Magnetic Pole on foot and claims that while there he punched a polar bear in the nose. Punching must be the alternative if you can’t tell if the Yeti is a male or a female.

A hunter in Mansfield, Ohio, reported to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) details of his recent alleged encounter with a Bigfoot while hunting for deer on 150 acres of farmland (with the permission of the owner) in Richland County, Ohio; Andrew Baum was sitting in a tree stand at around 4 pm when he says he saw “a Bigfoot or a very big person fast moving across the wide open field. It had fast big steps, not running but still covering ground faster than someone should”; BFRO founder Matt Moneymaker reported that he and Ohio BFRO Investigator Brain DeyErmand spoke with Baum by phone and found him credible, so DeyErmand later met with Baum at the site and saw a spot where some wheat was matted down and a tree with some unusual damage; unfortunately, there were no footprints and Baum did not take any photos. Ohio’s Bigfoot is called the Grassman, but that may change as soon as a legal pot vendor copyrights it.

UFO researcher Steve Te has obtained under Canada’s Access to Information Act details about a meeting between Larry Maguire, a Canadian Member of Parliament, and David Grusch, a U.S. UFO whistleblower on May 31, 2022, more than a year before Grusch at a Congressional UFO hearing; in the redacted document, Grusch responded to Maguire’s questions on U.S.-Canadian collaboration on UAP investigations, NORAD’s involvement, theories about UAP activity near nuclear facilities and other topics; Grusch talked about the existence of UAP footage held by the U.S. government, noted that cooperation between the two countries has been minimal, and stated a need for collecting physical evidence; the document is heavily redacted and leaves many questions unanswered, and Te notes that Maguire is a minor member of the Canadian Parliament, but the meeting is still significant enough that it was kept secret. Will this open more communications between the two countries or send Maguire to the penalty box?

There have been many theories on how the flying dinosaurs we call pterosaurs managed to get off the ground and stay aloft but proving them has been difficult because of the lack of fossils from the fragile creatures; to overcome that, a team of paleontologists from the University of Edinburgh used a new technique called Laser Simulated Fluorescence which causes minute organic tissues to glow; when scanned by the laser, the 150-million-year-old skin fragments of a pterosaur known as Rhamphorhynchus showed large "vanes" at the ends of their tails that acted like sails which allowed them to steer in flight and maintain stability, a technique that could be helpful on modern aircraft. It’s too bad the pterosaurs can’t help to keep modern planes from losing their doors too.

The mysterious drones of New Jersey have crossed the Atlantic to Denmark where witnesses reported seeing about 20 large drones over a harbor in the small town of Køge south of Copenhagen; the witnesses included police officers and a video of the drones was uploaded to X/Twitter; the website Codigo Oculto (Hidden Code) reports that the Danish secret service PET was informed, NATO has increased its military presence in the Baltic Sea area, drones have been sighted over Scandinavian power plants and in September, drones shut down air traffic at Sweden's Stockholm-Arlanda airport. Are these drones controlled by Nordic Tall White aliens from the Pleiades or are they just the toys of teenage Swedish meatballs?

The so-called ‘Surgeon’s photo’ of the Loch Ness monster, which appeared in 1934 and was hailed as the best evidence of the creature until 1991 when it was revealed to be a fake made from a toy, was back in the news this week with the passing of Bill McEwen, the man who ran the Wm Ogston’s pharmacy in Inverness from 1971 to 1997 and found the original photographic plates of the Surgeon’s photograph in a basement storage cupboard where they were developed; McEwen’s family recalled him using the plates to print postcards which “flew off the shelves” by the thousands; Bill McEwen was 85 when he died. Local souvenir shops should fly their flags at half-staff.

If you are planning a trip to the UK to hunt for extraterrestrials, UFO researcher and former UFO investigator for the British government Nick Pope has compiled a list of UFO hotspots and shared them with The Sun; he notes that many people are surprised that “they didn’t necessarily occur in remote, rural areas” but were in the major cities of “London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow” and explains that the reason is simply that “the more people there are in an area, the more likely someone is to spot something unusual in the sky”; he notes that many UFO sightings are close to military bases but this doesn’t mean they are all military aircraft; he says that UFOs in the UK are underreported and the actual number of sightings could be in the tens of thousands annually; he fully expects the existence of aliens to be proven and that “impact on humanity would be transformative” and looked at as “the moment everything changed” for millions of years after. Is that worth a trip to England or should you wait for the big moment?

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) keeps making huge discoveries as astronomers from the University of Central Florida analyzed near-infrared images from it and found an object “like nothing” they had ever seen before; they call the object 2060 Chiron but a better name would be a ‘centaur’ because it is an unusual asteroid-comet hybrid; however, this one, unlike others, has a unique surface chemistry containing carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide ices along with carbon dioxide and methane gases in its coma or dust cloud; UCF FSI Associate Scientist Noemí Pinilla-Alonso led the research and says “What is unique about Chiron is that we can observe both the surface, where most of the ices can be found, and the coma, where we see gases that are originating from the surface or just below it” unlike any other trans-Neptunian objects (TNO) and will help give astronomers a better picture of the early solar system. Why do centaurs always have a man’s torso and a horse’s rear and not the other way around? (Asking for a strange friend.)

The Asparamancer Jemima Packington, the favorite psychic of vegetarians, tossed her spears into the air and after reading how they fell, is predicting 2025 will see a major health scare for Donald Trump, more deaths and unrest in the Royal Family, the Liverpool FC will win an important title, European car makers will have major problems with their electric vehicles, stock markets worldwide will be more bear than bull, scandals will bring down some big influencers on social media, a catastrophic climate change event will occur involving major loss of life, and the Great British Asparagus Festival will go on; while she’s speared some accurate predictions in the past, the big Asparamancer prediction for 2024 was the election of the first female president in the U.S. Maybe Kamala Harris should have eaten more veggies.

From the ‘This is why we need fact-checkers’ file comes a video that claims to show how crocodiles in Indonesia are luring humans into the water to attack them by pretending to be a person drowning by flailing their front legs in the air like someone who can’t swim and needs rescuing; while many headlines were claiming that these crocodiles have evolved to be smart enough to catch unsuspecting tourists, Brandon Sideleau, a human and crocodile conflict researcher at Charles Darwin University, says this is actually normal behavior for a saltwater croc who has some prey in its mouth and is spinning around underwater to drown it; however, he still warns tourists to be careful because “crocodiles are also much more intelligent than they are often given credit for” and “In Indonesia roughly 100 people are killed by saltwater crocodiles annually, despite having relatively few crocodiles compared to Australia”. That low-pitched vibration you hear is American alligators going “Hmmmm”.

There are many serious consequences of global warming caused by climate change and the latest comes from Antarctica as researchers from Brown University simulated the melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and saw that the removal of its weight on the Transantarctic Mountains would expose at least 100 subglacial buried volcanoes and increase the possibilities and size of subglacial eruptions by allowing compressed magma to expand and increase pressure on magma chamber walls, leading to eruptions and the release of volatile gases which could weaken the remaining ice sheet and trigger more volcanic eruptions. If penguins had fingers, you know who they would be pointing at.

If you feel the urge to swim while in the bathtub, you may be a mermaid according to Karen Kay of Cornwall who is best known as a ‘faery whisperer’ and the organizer of the annual three-day Three Wishes Fairy Festival, but in a recent interview she reveals how she turns into a mermaid by adding a handful of sand to her bath water and places mermaid figurines, soaps, shells and candles around her which takes her to a point where it “literally feels like I've got a tail, it can feel so powerful”; she has also seen fairies and helps other people who have seen them cope with the experience and the response from family and friends. She says she’s half mermaid, half fairy and half human, so one of those is less than half mathematician.

Dr. Ed Bloomer, senior astronomy manager at the Royal Museums Greenwich in London, said in a recent interview that he believes Planet X will be discovered by astronomers using the new Vera C Rubin Observatory in Chile which will go live in May, but it won’t be a classic ‘Eureka!’ moment – as he describes it, “Directly discovering a “Planet Nine” in our solar system might start with an astronomer noticing (or being told by their computer), “Hey, that pixel is brighter than it was a few days ago. I should make sure to check what it looks like a couple of days from now.” Now you can tell your parents you’re training to become an astronomer when they complain about how much time you spend staring at the computer screen.

Another consequence of climate change could be the return of dinosaurs according to a new study by researchers from the University of St Andrews School of Earth and Environmental Sciences who say a massive rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels after volcanic eruptions 294 million years ago led to ideal conditions for dinosaurs to thrive and that same rise may be happening today; study co-author Dr. Hana Jurikova says, "The end of the Late Paleozoic ice age was a turning point in the evolution of life and the environment leading to the rise of reptiles. Now we know it was paced by CO2”; we know that dinosaurs thrived in this environment for 165 million years and only left because of a sudden catastrophic event that was either an asteroid impact or another series of violent volcanic eruptions that reversed the levels of CO2. Be nice to those iguanas in Florida because they could be your next overlords.

From the ‘Are you going to believe me or your lying eyes?’ file comes another alleged sighting recorded by a passenger on a commercial airline of what appear to be beings walking on clouds; the video was uploaded by paranormal researcher Myra Moore without any other details, so the mainstream and social media outlets were free to speculate whether these were aliens, angels, “Cloud storage engineers checking servers and data in the cloud” or a hoax; cooler heads proposed they were “a fog layer, and you are seeing steam rising from exhaust stacks” or some other logical and natural phenomenon. Kudos to whoever proposed ‘cloud storage engineers’ for creating a new conspiracy theory – a difficult task these days.

In an attempt to put another conspiracy theory to rest, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report addressing cloud seeding, where silver iodide crystals are spread in clouds to help form rain in areas of drought, as an attempt by the federal government to sinisterly control the weather; the GAO reported that while “cloud seeding may increase water availability and result in economic, environmental, and human health benefits”, it is costly, rarely works well, does not do anything to help fish populations and there are some concerns about its effects on plants and wildlife; finally, there is no proof it results in “healthier, less dry forests with reduced susceptibility to wildfires”.  Like most other conspiracy theories, conspiracy theorists will consider the report to itself be a conspiracy theory.

An old conspiracy theory came back recently as mysterious thick and sometimes odorous fogs occurred across the United States in Texas, Wisconsin, Iowa, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Florida, and Minnesota, and many people complained of eyes and noses burning; the incidents reminded many of 'Operation Sea Spray’ which occurred in September, 1950, when the  US Navy, in an attempt to show how vulnerable large coastal cities were to biological warfare,  sprayed massive amounts of bacteria into the air two miles off the coast of San Francisco, California; while the Navy thought the bacteria, Serratia marcescens, was harmless, 11 people checked into Stanford Hospital near San Francisco with extremely rare and serious urinary tract infections that doctors ultimately determined were caused by the operation, and the bacteria was later shown to cause respiratory issues and meningitis and can be lethal to immunocompromised individuals; in the latest incidents, the National Weather Service (NWS) had issued dense fog advisories in these states and blamed the smells and burning sensations on sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and other polluting gases being picked up by fog water droplets and then lingering in the humid air, allowing them to become more concentrated and irritating. There was a time when meteorology was taught in science classes – perhaps it’s time to bring it back.

If you’ve ever envied Rip van Winkle and wished you could fall asleep and wake up when things are better, artificial intelligence may help, according to Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov, a generative AI scientist and anti-aging researcher, and Hashem Al-Ghaili, a molecular biologist and science communicator, who together founded TimeShift, what they are touting as the world’s first cryopreservation facility which will one day preserve human bodies in suspended animation to stop the progression of neurodegenerative diseases and aggressive cancers until cures are found; cryopreservation will use AI to continuously monitoring vital signs and maintain optimal conditions within the cryopods; AI will also be used to create an “avatar’ of the person to interact with loved ones until they return; the developers plan to test their device on animals and produce a functional prototype in 5 to 8 years. Will AI admit that the cartoon ‘Futurama’ came up with this idea first?