ET's Phone Number, 3-Fingered Mummy Teeth, Woody Harrelson's UFOs, Bigfoot Football and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

A little over a week after he played a UFO abductee in a sketch on the 50th anniversary show for Saturday Night Live, actor Woody Harrelson appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and told of an actual UFO encounter he had in 1974 in Lebanon, Ohio, where he had moved with his mother and was about to enter high school; according to Harrelson: “I noticed everybody’s out on the street so I went out and we look up - it was nighttime - and there were these lights that were just kind of blinking, and then they would just whoosh all the way across the sky. There would be one [light] over there, and it would shoot over there. There were several. And they just kept going across the sky and we watched it for a while; it took a few minutes and then it just went somewhere else... some other world, and nobody talked about it. Everybody just literally went inside and said nothing.” After seeing that sketch, aliens may want to abduct Harrelson just to give him some better material for the next time he hosts SNL.

While the current talk about traveling to Mars focuses on getting there and setting up a permanent base, China's Zhurong Mars rover has been using ground-penetrating radar to search for signs of ancient water or ice in an area known as Utopia Planitia and has uncovered evidence of ‘foreshore’ deposits’ resembling ocean beaches on Earth; a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal reveals that Mars had a much warmer and wetter climate that today; in an interview, co-author Benjamin Cardenas from Penn State University reveals that “We’re finding places on Mars that used to look like ancient beaches and ancient river deltas. We found evidence for wind, waves, no shortage of sand — a proper, vacation-style beach”; with the right terraforming, Mars could potentially be restored to the solar system’s resort area it once was. Let’s hope it’s soon while there are still a few Beach Boys left to write songs about Surfin’ M-A-R-S and having fun-fun-fun till her daddy took her rover away.

Deborah Hatswell says she saw a Bigfoot in Salford, England, in 1982 and it inspired a lifelong interest in the British version of the creature and led her to embark on a career as a paranormal and cryptid investigator and form Being Believed Research (BBR) Investigations; the organization has become “a way to bring a spotlight to the hundreds of people left out there in society believing they are alone” in their sightings of Bigfoot so far away from its North American homeland; because of Salford being the epicenter of British Bigfoot, many residents wonder which football (soccer) club it would support, so the Daily Star asked an AI chatbot and the answer came back the Manchester United Red Devils; an AI-generated picture of Bigfoot in a Red Devils jersey shows he’s not too happy with the recent play of the team. In the U.S., Sasquatch is known for its knocking, so it might favor a baseball team instead – probably the Giants.

The Cerro del Cubilete (Dice Cup Hill) in Silao, Guanajuato, is said to be the geographical center of Mexico and the top of the hill is home to the 25 meters (82 feet) high Cristo Rey (Christ the King) statue – either of which could be the reason why a “Saturn-shaped” UFO was seen by many witnesses in the clear sky above it recently; the top-shaped UFO drew a crowd and caused some alarm since it resembled another UFO seen 275 miles away recently in Cuernavaca; skeptics thought it looked more like a balloon or a drone, and there were no announcements from government or military officials. Are aliens looking for a church with a bingo game?

The three-fingered Peruvian mummies discovered in the Nazca desert by journalist and UFO researcher Jaime Maussan underwent oral examinations by Dr. José Zalce, the former director of the Mexican Navy Medical Department, and his team via a miniature camera and one mummy, nicknamed Antonio, had between 28 and 32 teeth, with “'cavity fillings and clear evidence of dental work”; they also found “desiccated tissue corresponding to the intrinsic eye muscles and what appears to be the residue of the completely desiccated optic nerve” when examining Antonio’s eye socket; all of this indicates to Dr. Zalce that “This is yet another piece of clear and irrefutable evidence that these bodies are 100% genuine, real, and organic, having once been alive”. Would four out of five dentists recommend aliens do more flossing?

Researchers from the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio) now believe a 50,000-year-old cave painting found in Brazil's Serra da Capivara National Park depicts two people touching heads and that makes it the earliest known depiction of humans kissing; the park has approximately 35,000 cave drawings in more than 1,300 archaeological sites, and they depict everything in prehistoric daily life, from hunting and rituals to “affective and social interactions, such as records of sexual acts, kisses and hugs”; the paintings lasted so long because they were made with iron oxides and coal in a dry climate on durable sandstone rocks. And you thought sexting was a recent invention.

The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) recently posted the account of a woman in Cattaraugus, New York, who said she dreamt about seeing her dead nephew in what she described as a “happy reunion” which suddenly turned strange when “gray aliens” appeared; she said “One was very close and I woke up afraid to open my eyes as I thought he may be there looking at me”; although she thought at first it was a dream, she spent the morning suffering from heavy vaginal bleeding which wasn’t from her menstrual period – instead, she fears she was impregnated previously by the aliens and the dream was a cover for them returning to retrieve the embryo. Is it time for the government to set up a separate organization within its UFO research department to provide researchers to investigate and interpret these types of stories?

In the midst of the egg shortage and bird flu epidemic comes some good news for chickens in the form of research at New York University Langone where scientists led by Dr. Anna Berenson are working to bring the dodo bird back from extinction by taking sperm and egg cells from domestic chickens, then inserting large sections of DNA from wild red junglefowl to replace the DNA of the chicken; those genetically edited reproductive cells are then inserted into the embryos as they are developing in an egg and will hopefully hatch into “some sort of wild-looking chicken”; Berenson said in a recent lecture that the researchers plan to use this technique to help chickens, California condors and other birds to develop resistance to diseases and then someday bring back the dodo and the passenger pigeon using genetic data from preserved samples of the birds. Chickens are also the descendants of T. rex – what could possibly go wrong?

Recent reports on Asteroid 2024 YR4 raised alarms when astronomers raised the probability of it hitting Earth in 2032 from 1.2 percent to a scary 3.1 percent, but scientists at NASA announced that new calculations show 2024 YR4 is no longer a threat because the probability of collision actually near zero; that’s really good news for all of us because Dr. Andrew Rivkin, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, announced that an asteroid the size of 2024 YR4 or larger would be so bad that “don’t want to say humanity would throw in the towel, but you’re going to need a lot of nukes”; using data from NASA’s double asteroid redirection test mission named Dart, Rivkin determined that an asteroid the size of the 10 km-wide Chicxulub that killed off the dinosaurs “would take all of the world’s nuclear arsenal fired at it to stop it hitting us”. Let’s hope someone survives and works on a way to de-extinct us.

If you’re looking for a chance to own a piece of paranormal history, even if the original story has since been proven to be a hoax, $1 million will get you the three-bedroom apartment in Hampstead Garden Suburb that was once home to Gary Shoefield, a UFO researcher and filmmaker whom, with his partner  Ray Santilli, produced the 1995 film that convinced many people it showed a real alien autopsy on an extraterrestrial body recovered from the 1947 Roswell UFO crash; it was later revealed that Shoefield created hollow plaster casts filled with sheep brains, offal and raspberry jam and filmed the realistic footage in the living room of the flat now for sale; the 1995 hoax pseudo-documentary “Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction” story of the hoax was retold in a comedy film, “Alien Autopsy”. Let the buyer beware.

In a leaked audio recording, a US Air Force pilot on a secret flight of a Beechcraft 350 C through controlled airspace on Sept. 17, 2024, can be heard reporting to air traffic control of a “football-sized,” cylindrical UFO closely passing under his wing at about 2:30 pm; the pilot, identified only as ‘Troy 21’, said on a TV show that he was on a secret mission for the Department of Homeland Security and told air traffic control that the object he encountered at 20,000 feet was not a drone because its speed exceeded Mach 2; Ben Hansen, host of the Discovery+ show “UFO Witness” who obtained the audio, Ben Hansen, host of the Discovery+ show “UFO Witness,” said the Beechcraft 350 C is equipped with a “very sensitive and complex radar array” used to track drug traffickers; an air traffic controllers later reported the sighting to the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC). It’s pretty brave for that kind of UFO to be flying during football season.

Lawyer, UFO researcher, and president of the New Paradigm Institute, Daniel Sheehan, appeared on a recent podcast and revealed that the US Congress has “information from extremely credible, first-hand witnesses from inside the United States intelligence agencies and the United States military, confirming that the United States is in possession of one or more non-human origin spacecraft and the bodies of the occupants of these craft, which they've now confirmed are non-human"; he said private companies are working with the government “back engineer some of the technology of these UFO craft to make weapons, special weapons system and propulsion systems for weapons for the United States’; rather than be excited about this, Sheehan says “this is extraordinarily troubling to a lot of the people inside the military and inside the intelligence agencies”. Have you been in a UFO crash? Call Danny Sheehan – he’ll make them pay.

Politics continues to corrupt the quest for UFO disclosure and no one knows it better than filmmaker Jeremy Corbell, who appeared on Chris Cuomo’s podcast to discuss his frustration with the Trump administration, which Corbell had high hopes of disrupting the “deep state” walls protecting UFO files and cited Trumps promises to do so once he took office, only to see that "we're in a situation where it's possible the institutionalized secrecy on this issue and others is so powerful that people just fall in line"; he describes it as an entrenched  "legacy architecture" of secrecy which is used to “keep people in power"; he also cites " a CIA document that made it clear there is an attempt to shape the narrative for personal benefit - maybe even for financial benefit’; Corbell predicts that "People are going to leak videos, people are going to leak memos, people are going to come forward by face and tell you what they were involved in" and this will release a logjam, promising "If we can crack the code on the UAP thing - just get ground truth - it's going to open up a flow of information in other areas". Maybe it’s time to stop blowing whistles and switch to trumpets, tubas and vuvuzelas.

The latest search for the wreckage of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared in March of 2014 with 227 passengers and 12 crew members while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, has begun as Ocean Infinity’s deep-water support vessel Armada 7806 arrived at a 15,000 sq km arc in the southern Indian Ocean where new data, including satellite signals and disrupted radio transmissions,  suggests the plane went down; Armada 7806 has deployed autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to the ocean floor and will spend as many as six weeks at “hotspots” identified by researchers – those include the arc in the southern Indian Ocean, a zone further south in case the jet may have traveled further than the previously estimated distance after running out of fuel, and an area identified using data from ham radio operators. It’s hard to believe there was a time when there was just one plane crash to grab the media’s attention.

The movie “ET: The Extraterrestrial” introduced the public to the idea of an alien trying to “phone home” with an improvised communications device, but the details of that connection were never really explained - a new article suggests that the ‘number’ ET may have used was not ‘867-5309’ (sorry Jenny) but ‘21 cm’ or more specifically, 21 cm radiation; atomic scientists will recognize this as the amount of radiation emitted by a hydrogen spin flip, which occurs when the one proton and one electron of a hydrogen atom flip their spin; this is a constant all over the universe, so all intelligent civilizations should know about it – this is valuable because 21 cm waves can cut through cosmic debris and carry a message across vast distances; NASA's Pioneer spacecraft has a plaque containing a diagram of the hydrogen spin flip so aliens know we’re intelligent (ish) and would recognize a 21 cm radiation wave as a message to answer and respond to. Now we need to know the size of the radiation waves to make smiley faces and poop emojis.

The Psychedelic Church of Colorado Springs is getting attention for doing what its name says: handing out magic mushrooms to members of its congregation for free; that congregation has grown to 300 since the church opened one year ago after Colorado decriminalized free distribution and consumption of psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelic medicines like DMT (Dimethyltryptamine); church founder Benji Dezaval says he abides by the law, keeps the local sheriff informed and does not sell any psychedelics – what the church distributes is free, comes with instructions and starts in microdoses; he also notes that some people come just for the religion and do not partake in the mushrooms; unfortunately, the IRS recently ruled that the Psychedelic Church of Colorado Springs is not a church but a social club and does not qualify for tax breaks, federal loans and grants. Do they pass the basket before or after everyone starts tripping?

The Pompeii Archaeological Park announced the discovery of a frescoed banquet hall inside the newly-excavated House of Thiasos with life-size wall paintings of the secretive rituals of Dionysus, the god of wine and festivity; these show women belonging to a cult devoted to Dionysus known as Maenads, which means “to rave, to be mad”; the intoxicated women are depicted in long, flowing skins of animals they’ve killed, dancing with slaughtered goats on their shoulders, holding swords and the innards of an animal, eating raw meat and doing other things that only women who leave their husbands and children would do. If the volcano had not erupted, these would have been The Real Housewives of Pompeii.