Mind-Reading Apes, Zuckerberg's Alien Coverup, FBI UFO Group Revealed, Croatian Vampire Grave and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Dr. José Zalce, the former director of the Mexican Navy Medical Department, says he has analyzed 21 of the famous 1200-year-old three-fingered mummies of Peru and claims that they have “fingerprints, bone wear, dental formations, muscular features and internal organs - proving they're 100 percent real biological organisms”; Zalce has been studying the mummies for six years using X-rays, CT scans with 3D reconstruction, fluoroscopy, DNA analysis, forensic fingerprinting and tissue sample examinations and says one body appears to be pregnant with a fetus that has the same physical characteristics as the adult mummies, which he says makes them “impossible to fake or replicate fraudulently”. These mummies get better health care now than when (or if) they were alive, but proof they are aliens rather than hoaxes is still elusive.

U.S. congressperson Anna Paulina Luna posted on social media the cryptic message: “I have an announcement next week that will impact the entire nation. Press conference date will be announced soon.”; that plus a comment by U.S. congressperson Jared Moskowitz saying “I know” has the UFO community buzzing because both Luna and Moskowitz were part of a secret UFO briefing on claims by former high-ranking intelligence official David Grusch that the U.S. government has recovered non-human bodies from UFO crash sites; many comments echoed the sentiment that they were tired of announcements of announcements and were ready for real UFO disclosure. Well said, commenter – the ‘announcement' had not been made as of this writing but we will cover it when (if) it is released.

UFO witness and whistleblower Ryan Graves, the executive director of Americans for Safe Aerospace and a former Navy pilot, revealed for the first time that the FBI has a UAP Working Group made up of a national program manager and more than a dozen employees across the country who follow up on  UAP reports; at the same time he expressed concern over its future with the Trump administration revamping the FBI, saying that “I am concerned that the FBI’s UAP Working Group could be affected by transition changes, and these leaders might not be aware of the incredible work these agents are doing and how their investigation could be empowered as part of a formalized intergovernmental effort”; other officials confirmed the existence of the UAP Working Group and are equally concerned about its future, with Caison Best, a former Army special forces intelligence officer who said in an interview that he had spoken to members of the FBI Working Group after witnessing a UAP in Colorado and fears the agents will be fired even though “they’re doing unbelievably critical work”. Politicians haven’t given us much on UAPs, but they’re always taking things away.

The ever-vigilant armchair Loch Ness monster watcher Eoin O'Faodhagain reported another one while watching the live webcam feed from the Clansman Hotel on the loch; he claimed it was 20 feet long and rose out of the water and submerged four times in the same area, which convinced him it was not a log but quite possibly the first sighting of Nessie in 2025, giving Nessie fans hope that this year will surpass 2024’s poor total which didn’t start until April; O'Faodhagain has other sightings on the Clansman webcam and it makes one wonder why on-sight spotters and boaters aren’t congregating there to see the 20-foot Nessie up close and personal. That is, unless they know it’s just a log or a conga line of giant eels.

No week is complete without a prediction or three from a Nostradamus wannabe, so here’s what Brazilian psychic Athos Salomé, the self-proclaimed Living Nostradamus, has to say: the Japanese government will this year release news of the creation of genetically modified human-animal hybrids that will cause an "extraordinary worldwide moral crisis" because they will have " undeniable powerful traits that included intelligent and degenerative disease resistance” and give Japan and the companies involved an unfair advantage over the rest of the world; in addition, they will change the definition of ‘human’ and potentially give it to “a shapeless entity with unknown categorization". ‘A shapeless entity with unknown categorization’ sounds like the villain of half the episodes of the original ‘Star Trek’.

TikTok time traveler from 2671 @radianttimetraveler, who claims he predicted that the social media platform would be banned, warns that 2025 will be loaded with natural disasters, starting with a mile-wide asteroid hitting Central America on March 30 and making Mexico and the southern United States uninhabitable; on April 20, the sky will turn bright pink and this will somehow cause Yellowstone, Fuji and Mauna Loa to erupt in the largest volcanic explosions in known history; temperatures during the week of July 7-13 will reach 114 degrees Fahrenheit in the U.S. and this “Heat Week” will cause massive wildfires nationwide; if anyone is left on September 21, they can see Karen (an ironic name), the first ever category 6 hurricane hit Florida and Georgia with wind speeds of 400 miles per hour as it reaches  over 1,500 miles across. Why don’t these TikTok time travelers ever go back a few more years and give us some time to prepare?

If you don’t yet fear the Planet of the Apes movies becoming a reality, scientists at an ape research center in Iowa have been studying three bonobos - Kanzi, aged 43, Nyota, aged 25, and 13-year-old Teco – and found that they can read human minds and use the knowledge to communicate with us; the bonobos watched one person hide a treat, then watched a second one look for the treat – they ‘read’ his mind that he couldn’t find it, so they helpfully pointed out the hiding spot; Dr. Chris Krupenye, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University, said: “This work demonstrates the rich mental foundations that humans and other apes share-and suggests that these abilities evolved millions of years ago in our common ancestors”. To paraphrase George Taylor/Charlton Heston: "Get your mind out of my head, you dirty ape!"

Forestry worker Robert ‘Bob’ Taylor was part of Scotland’s most famous UFO encounter in 1979 when he allegedly saw multiple dome-shaped objects land in Dechmont Woods, West Lothian; when he got too close, metal spikes came out of the saucers, grabbed his trousers and pulled him inside before he blacked out; Taylor claimed he woke up to find himself on the ground, the saucers gone, and his pants torn by the spikes; he told his tale to the police and showed them the pants and it became "only example of an alien sighting becoming the subject of a criminal investigation" and Scotland’s Roswell, but paranormal investigator Malcolm Robinson, the current owner of the late Taylor’s trousers, says that’s not enough for the National Museums of Scotland to put them on display, saying it already has similar objects; the disappointed Robinson says he has been “offered thousands of pounds by an American businessman” and may have to take the offer, even though he wants the pants in a proper museum. Torn trousers might be more appropriate at the Ripley’s museum. (See what we did there?)

NASA’s Mars Orbiter Camera on the Mars Global Surveyor satellite captured a photo of a mysterious square-shaped structure on the surface of the Red Planet that has planetary experts and the public baffled; the photo was taken in 2001 and rediscovered recently by a person perusing the files; after posting them on social media, commenters pointed out that the square is not spacecraft debris, so it’s open to speculative theories like it’s the remnants of an advanced but extinct Martian civilization, or that it appears to cover 13 acres, which is the size of the base of the Great Pyramid, or that it’s a stargate portal; podcaster Joe Rogan shared photos of the structure on social media and Elon Musk responded with “We should send astronauts to Mars to investigate!” At that size, Musk might be interested in using it as the foundation of a Martian battery plant.

On a recent podcast, Chris Bledsoe Sr., who has appeared on Ancient Aliens and Beyond Skinwalker Ranch, tells a previously unshared story of how NASA heard about his contacts with orbs, which he has seen since his first contact with them in 2007 and believes they are extraterrestrial beings, and told him similar orbs or plasmoids were appearing to many space shuttle astronauts; NASA officials told him astronauts saw them “Stand up over the shuttle bay, or the space station, glowing. Sometimes there's a report of a half dozen of them, 125ft tall with wings, standing there and smiling at them"; according to Bledsoe, they are energy beings and can “mimic anything, they can mimic a flying saucer, they can mimic a drone, they can split in two or 100". It’s nice to know NASA isn’t just getting advice from billionaires.

UFO researcher and filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee claims that  Facebook and Meta CEO Mark Zukerberg has found evidence of intelligent life in our galaxy but has withheld it from the public due to concerns about how people and the media would react; Zukerberg is funding the Breakthrough Listen SETI program and it is believed Lee is referring to reports the program picked up a signal two years ago coming from Proxima Centauri 4.2 light years from Earth; former BBC Science editor Professor Simon Holland told Lee that he believes the signal is a sign of extraterrestrial life in the Proxima Centauri system and that researchers at Cambridge University did a spectral analysis of an Earth-like exo-planet and found evidence of biological life that has also been suppressed; he fears researchers in China and Russia found the same information and may go public first. If they do, it won’t be on Facebook.

An unusual video was posted recently that was purportedly taken on January 6, 2025, by an airline pilot flying in daylight hours over Antioquia In Colombia; as he was climbing to an altitude of 22,000 feet, he saw and recorded a triangular UFO at 14,000 feet that appears to be traveling at a high rate of speed; speculation runs from the UFO being a stealth fighter to the long-rumored TR-3B black triangle spy plane to a balloon which appears to be moving but is actually stationary in relation to the moving plane to an advanced experimental drone; unfortunately, the data on the sighting is limited and no one else seems to have witnessed it. Just when you think you have them connected, those aliens come back with a new dot.

The story of the mysterious Summerville Light in Summerville, North Carolina, begins with an urban legend of a woman waiting for her railroad worker husband, only to hear he was decapitated in a train accident, so she searched every night with a lantern for his missing head, even after her own death; the legend has locals seeing glowing orbs and hearing eerie noise on what is now called Light Road, and the tale attracted Susan Hough, a seismologist at the U. S. Geological Survey, who studied the area’s seismology along with historical accounts, newspaper articles, letters and diaries for mentions of earthquakes and found a report of a big one in 1886 and smaller ones in the late 1950s; Hough thinks the same fault that caused them is now generating so-called shallow earthquakes that can shake the ground, cause strange noises and possible create earthquake lights; the data was convincing enough that Hough published it in the journal  Seismological Research Letters. Sometimes, the best debunker is science plus history.

Yet another medieval vampire grave has been discovered in Croatia at the archaeological site of Rašaška southeast of Zagreb where archeologists uncovered the skeleton of a male with some unusual features – the skull had been removed and set apart from the skeleton, the rest of the body was contorted after death so that half of the torso faced down while the other half faced up, one leg was dislocated, a brick was between the legs and a stone was holding down the skull; an anthropological analysis was conducted by Dr. Nataša Šarkić, who published the conclusion that the man was possibly a soldier or a knight with a violent and troubled past that resulted in a disfigured face and a bad reputation, which caused the locals to believe he was a vampire or an "unclean spirit" so his corpse was buried in these ways to prevent him from rising from the dead; Šarkić concluded that he was not a vampire but died from injuries to his skull. Nosferatu made a better movie.

Drones are back in the news but far from New Jersey as Cowboy State Daily reports that at least eight Wyoming sheriffs say they have received reports of mysterious drone sightings recently over power plants, oil and gas fields, and other energy infrastructures; the recent statement from President Trump that the New Jersey drones were not from enemy sources but were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration did not stick well with the sheriffs, who said “we still don't have a conclusive explanation for these flights" of drones the size of small cars flying in grid-like formations, straight-line patterns, and spoke-like formations with multiple drones branching off from one large central drone over critical facilities; they’ve asked locals to report sightings on a central tip site. If the drones think they’re safer over Wyoming instead of New Jersey, they’ve never dealt with Wyoming sheriffs with shotguns.

In Fortean news, Alfredo Cardinas Jr, a farmer in Tanjay, located south of Manila in the Philippines, posted photos on social media of a pig born with a “human-like face” that he said cried “like a child” and had people on the Internet calling it a hybrid of a pig and another animal or even a human; local veterinarian Dr. Ma Christine Hope Dejadena ruled those out and blamed the malformation on a rare birth defect known as holoprosencephaly where the forebrain fails to develop into two hemispheres; the vet was surprised no other piglets in the multiple births had the defect and the piglet lived for only a few hours; Cardinas was hoping the human-faced pig would bring him luck like a previous piglet born with what looked like wings – after that one, he came into some money and bought a cow and a phone. Which is rarer – when pigs cry or when pigs fly?

Many pilots using Istanbul's Sabiha Gokcen Airport in Turkey reported to air traffic controllers they were receiving automatic collision warnings from UFOs flying dangerously close to their planes; one pilot said "We see descending traffic 500 feet below us. It appears as an unidentified traffic on our system" and noted that "we also received this warning on our previous flight"; Turkish officials had the military conduct searches of the nearby air, land, and sea, but found nothing; a UFO was also detected by aircraft radar in Kastamonu, Turkey, the week before, prompting another search involving the Turkish Air Force, Kastamonu Provincial Gendarmerie Command, the Provincial Disaster and Emergency Directorate (AFAD), Gendarmerie Search and Rescue (JAK) and commando units, but again nothing was found. We hate to drone on and on about these drones, but this is getting serious.

The legend of Australia’s Blue Mountain Panther has been around ever since World War II, when U.S. soldiers allegedly released panthers used as military mascots before heading home, and they are back in the news again as New South Wales media sites report on suspiciously-big-cat-sized paw prints that were found by landscaper Dan Studders in Kenthurst, a suburb of Sydney; Studders took photos of his hand next tot he prints for a size comparison and felt they were too big to be a house cat or pet dog, not to mention the prints were 2 meters (6.5 feet) apart, a stride far too wide for a domestic pet; taken together with reported sightings and the few faraway and blurred photos of alleged big cats, many consider this to be good evidence that descendants of the military cats or escaped circus cats are still roaming the Blue Mountains from Lithgow to the Great Dividing Range. Blue Mountain Panthers are a great way to distract Australians from all the snakes and other real dangerous animals.