Tasmanian Tiger De-Extinction Update, Yeti in Court, 'Living Leather' Monster, Nessie DNA and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

A journalist asked Google’s AI chatbot Gemini if a Tesla grocery store would be a suitable location for terrified Brits to hide or set up a fortification during a zombie apocalypse and Gemini was not a fan of the idea, giving some good reason such as the stores being located in high-traffic areas where they would be easy for zombies to find and enter, the stores having limited escape routes for humans to exit from when the zombies arrive, a food supply that would be plentiful at first but run out quickly, and, as anyone who tries to find a restroom in a grocery store knows, they have few sanitation areas; to fix the problems, Gemini told Tesla to “develop emergency protocols, asses and fortify the premises, train staff on basic survival skills, first aid, and zombie defense tactics, and to consider stockpiling food”, which are all good suggestions for any grocery stores in high zombie areas. The worst place to hide would be in the prepared foods department near servings of cervelle de veau.

Fresno, California, is over 200 miles from Los Angeles so fires or firefighters can’t be blamed for a number of recent UFO sightings over that city; one was recorded by a tower camera belonging to a Fresno television station which showed the video to a local MUFON investigator who said, “Where you see that object move at the clip it moves and it's hovering again. That one I would probably actually give an unknown classification to which is a UFO"; another journalist at the same station recorded another object which a MUFON investigator called a “confirmed UFO” and an “interesting find”; a few days later, two private pilots and a police helicopter reported unidentified objects to Fresno air traffic control which did not see or confirm the objects as drones or something else. If anyone sees what looks like a pair of pants walking around, the Fresno Nightcrawlers have returned!

The year 2025 is quickly becoming the Year of the Egg with the revelations of Jacob Barber, a former U.S. Air Force aerospace mechanic, member of the Air Force Special Operations, and a nonofficial worker for the Defense Department and the intelligence community, who revealed to UFO investigator Ross Coulthart videos and details of his alleged encounters with non-human intelligence and objects while retrieving crashed aircraft at a secret testing facility called ‘The Range’ in the 2000s; Barber told Coulthart of one experience where “I saw an egg, a white egg. There was no engine. There was no thermal signature. I was operating at night when I finally came in to pick it up” and claimed “Over the last couple of years, it’s been confirmed to me by ranking members of the UAP Task Force that what we were working with that night was, in fact, NHI (nonhuman intelligence), and it was not a unique experience”; he also claimed he saw specialized psychics called psionics in August 2024 to summon UFOs which engaged in a dogfight with what he assumed was a rogue UFO sent to disrupt the encounter; Barber had much more to say and wants a congressional hearing and a meeting with UFO enthusiast and new Secretary of State Marco Rubio; while Barber’s career checks out, skeptics see a video easily hoaxed and want more proof and testimonies. An egg-shaped UFO makes one wish Robin Williams was still alive to reprise Mork arriving from Ork in one to say, “I told you so”.

The Plas Teg mansion near the village of Pontblyddyn in Flintshire, Wales, is on the lists of best examples of Jacobean architecture and most haunted mansions, so the news that its contents are up for sale is of interest to the paranormal world; antiques dealer Cornelia Bayley bought Plas Teg, built in 1610 by in a state of complete disrepair in 1986 by Sir John Trevor, in 1986 and spent hundreds of thousands of pounds in an attempt to restore it to its former glory; some of that money came from paranormal tours to encounter the 15 ghosts said to haunt it, including Sir John Trevor I’s daughter, Dorothy, who died in the mansion’s well; John Trevor V, who died after possibly murdering his cheating wife; and 16-year-old  Elizabeth Trevor-Roper, who also died in the well, possibly after a fight with a jilted lover; Cornelia Bayley has willed the house to the National Trust and the Landmark Trust and the sale of its contents, which include valuable antique furniture and ceramics, will go to her care and more repairs to the mansion; the ghosts will stay with the mansion and paranormal enthusiasts hope it will continue to be open for investigations. Let’s hope they closed the well or at least posted a dog near it to go and get help.

Colossal Biosciences released an update on its quest to de-extinct the Tasmanian tiger, also known as the Thylacine, revealing that the company has developed a prototype for an artificial uterus, eliminating the need for a live surrogate, and has tested it by culturing fertilized single-cell marsupial embryos to over halfway through pregnancy; Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm says “The system is much more sophisticated than any existing device, with modulated precision microfluidics and gas control that enables us to control the environment the embryo is growing in, in a very precise way” and “image the embryo as it develops to make sure all developmental milestones are on track” while eliminating any non-thylacine influence that would come from gestating in a non-thylacine surrogate; moreover, the marsupial had a very short gestation before the embryo moved to the pouch and needed only a superficial placenta during pregnancy, so the artificial uterus has a high chance of success. What kind of card do you send a machine on Mother’s Day?

Fans of roller coasters may want to avoid any inspired by Lithuanian artist Julijonas Urbonas who designed a euthanasia coaster to give people a death “with elegance and euphoria” as well as twists, turns and death-not-defying drops; that design has been brought to life in the film ”H POSITIVE” by director Glen Patron which shows exactly how it would look and work, with a 500-meter drop, seven loops, a 223mph ‘terminal’ velocity, and a force of 10 G’s which would cause prolonged cerebral hypoxia that would give passengers tunnel vision, grey-out, convulsions and blackouts before ending in death;  before resulting in death; the passenger in the film has his life’s memories flash before his eyes before becoming unconscious; Urbonas says the film and the roller coaster of death explore the idea of euthanasia, the ethics of assisted death, the role of technology in life and death; the real coaster would help “control populations” and die in a rush of excitement. Ahhhhhhhh!

Scientists agree that the giant stone heads (Moai)  on Easter Island were carved and erected by Polynesians 900 years ago, but ancient civilizations proponent Graham Hancock disagrees, saying recently that there is evidence of banana plants, shrubs and herbs growing there between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago which could have fed an ancient civilization that carved the statues around 12,000 years ago and passed them on to the Polynesians when they arrived around the year 1200; these Rapa Nui then built the crude platforms or Ahu Vinapu which many of the statues are placed on; scientists point out that similar statues are found on many other remote islands and were created by builders in the later timeframe, possibly from the same culture. Whoever created them, we’re lucky these islands are remote and the statues didn’t get carried off to museums, collections and resale shops.

Most people who wonder how the world will end consult science or religion, but another unexpected source of information is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), at least according to 'The Adam and Eve Story,' which was written by former US Air Force employee, UFO researcher and self-proclaimed psychic Chan Thomas in 1966 when it was deemed ‘classified’ and hidden by the CIA until it was quietly declassified in 2013; it remained unknown until it was recently made public; the book is somewhat biblical in that Thomas claims the world suffers a major cataclysm every 6,400 years and uses as examples “Like Noah's 6,500 years ago... Like Adam and Eve's 11,500 years ago”; he ties these events to the shifting and eventual geographic reversal of Earth’s magnetic poles and says the next one in about 1,000 years will create earthquakes, tsunamis and severe weather that will wipe out life on the planet like it did (according to him) 780,000 years ago and result in “The Bay of Bengal basin, just east of India, is now at the North Pole. The Pacific Ocean, just west of Peru, is at the South Pole"; NASA scientists say there is no historical evidence of a cataclysm every 6,500 years and disagree with ‘The Adam and Eve Story’; it is not known why the CIA blocked its publication. Get worried when the CIA moves its headquarters to the Bay of Bengal basin.

University of Otago (New Zealand) geneticist Professor Neil Gemmell took 250 samples from all over and under Loch Ness in 2019 and spent two years categorizing every DNA sample in the water; he announced in 2021 that he found no non-identifiable DNA and no evidence of plesiosaurs or any other dinosaurs; he did find a lot of eel DNA and that inspired his new search, announced this week, to search for evidence of giant eels which could explain many of the Loch Ness monster sightings; the 'Loch Ness 2.0' project will put passive collectors on Loch Ness boats and in locks on the River Ness; Gemmell is currently looking for sponsors for the new search. Good luck getting any money from all of the businesses that depend on the existence of a real monster.

UFO researcher and filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee made a controversial statement recently when he said, “God is possibly just another word for extra-terrestrial" in an interview where he talks about human DNA being “tampered with” by an ancient alien race as an explanation for why we a different that all other life forms on Earth, and that this theory could fit in with the idea of panspermia, where life was sent to Earth on a comet by another species, saying “Whether that was deliberate or by accident, we may be the extraterrestrials ourselves". Let’s hope these aliens don’t look at us like a school project and decide to crumple up the paper and start over.

People living around Nompehuen Lake in the town of Ñorquinco, Argentina, were looking for explanations for a mysterious disturbance in its waters creating ripples and bubbles – native Mapuches quickly blamed it on the legendary ‘wefuke’ or ‘cuero wekufe’, which means "living leather" or “devil's blanket” and refers to a mythological lake creature or demon which assumes the look of a cows skin floating on the water but turns into a scary creature with bulging eyes like a manta ray and teeth on the sides of its body which it uses to attack unsuspecting swimmers and boaters; geologists blame the ripples and bubbles on a limnic eruption, which is an equally scary rare but natural event where dissolved carbon dioxide suddenly erupts from deep lake waters in a large gas bubble capable of asphyxiating wildlife, livestock, and humans’ limnic eruptions are triggered by earthquakes, volcanic activity, and other underwater explosive events; they have also been observed in Cameroon on Lake Monoun, in Camarron on Lake Nyos (this happened in 1986 and killed 1,700 people and 3,000 livestock by asphyxiation) and Lake Kivu on the border between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. With those kinds of casualties, a demon creature sounds preferable.

While NASA, other space agencies and private space programs want to tear up the Moon to mine for minerals and resources, the World Monuments Fund wants to declare previous human landing sites like Apollo 11’s Trinity Base as cultural landmarks; to do this, it wants to put the Moon on its list of culturally endangered sites to preserve and protect artifacts like "Neil Armstrong's iconic boot print" and "over 90 historic landing and impact sites that mark humankind's presence on the moon's surface". If there are rare minerals in that boot print or if it has a view that would be perfect for a hotel or fast food restaurant, good luck saving it.

Mysterious booms are back in the news in Utah as residents of Salt Lake City suburbs West Valley City, Taylorsville and Murray called police to report a loud boom just before 3 a.m. recently, with some saying they also witnessed large flashes of light and many saying the sound was picked up on their security cameras; these types of multi-city booms are usually meteors but police investigated them anyway and found nothing unusual, although one cop reportedly called the incident "very bizarre" and some of the callers said they suspected it was aliens. These mysterious incidents won’t be resolved until everyone has security cameras and we’re all under surveillance according to someone’s big brother.

Cryptids have truly gone mainstream when the government gets involved and that is the case in Utah where the state’s new hockey team was stopped in its plan to name it the Yetis by the United States Patent and Trademark Office told team owners that ‘Yeti’ is already registered to a cooler (as in beer coolers) company and putting the name of the famous Bigfoot cousin would cause confusion in the vast T-shirt and other branded clothing marketplace; that includes the phrase 'Utah Yeti’, but team management assured fans of both the team and the cryptid that it will continue to fight to use the name in some form. Lawyers for a large white fur-covered client in Tibet had no comment … yet.

Those who call for the US military, especially the Air Force and Space Force,  to intercept all UFOs will be interested in the response of the military in Turkey recently where a UFO was detected on radar shortly after midnight and quickly vanished in the forested Kirisoglu region of the Kastamonu's central district in northern Turkey; the Turkish military immediately sent thermal drones to scan the area, accompanied by commandos and other ground forces searching there on foot as well as in the Ilgaz Mountain region on the border between Kastamonu and Cankiri provinces; in addition, the Turkish Air Force was placed on high alert; as of this writing, the UFO has not been found and the search and the investigation continues. Does our military already know what the UFOs are and see no need to waste time distracting/pacifying the public with pursuit?  

Cryptozoologists, especially those interested in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, got some bad news from Oxford University biology professor Tim Coulson when he proclaimed recently that those two cryptids and their cousins like the Yeti are "pure fantasy" and a "scientific impossibility", citing evolution as his scientific proof; according to Coulson, Bigfoot's only possible ancestors are humans and humans didn’t come to North America until 16,000 years ago, which is not enough time for a separate descendent species to split off and evolve; similarly, assuming that the Loch Ness monsters is a plesiosaur or a similar dinosaur, Coulson deems it impossible for a breeding population of several hundred of them to live for at least 66 million years and still remain completely hidden; he tells cryptozoologists to "find another hobby" and suggests looking for aliens as an alternative, saying “Because we have only explored a fraction of even our local neighborhood, it is much too early to rule out the existence of aliens, be they simple bacteria-like organisms or little green beasts with long necks and oversized heads”. Bad news, Professor Coulson – Bigfoot and Nessie don’t believe in you either.