Monster Merry-Go-Round, Mexican Chupacabras, Proof of Souls, Jelly Bean UFOs and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Where there are dead goats, there are reports of chupacabras and that was the case in Zaragoza in Coahuila State, Mexico, where a farmer found 12 dead goats and some barely alive with strange marks on their bodies that were unlike those of dogs, coyotes or other predators; less than a week later, a farmer at the nearby El Italiano Ranch found 12 dead sheep, some with mangled bodies but others simply frozen as if they died from shock; the remaining sheep were terrified and the farmer was puzzled as to why his dogs never barked; put all of that together and it spells ‘chupacabra’ to those who see no other explanation but attacks by the legendary violent goat-sucking creatures; the farmers don’t expect the authorities to find a cause and that just adds to the chupacabra lore.

With talk of UFO and alien disclosure heating up in the U.S., a document making the rounds is an interview given by Jesuit priest and astronomer Father Jose Funes, who when he was director of the Vatican Observatory (2006-2015) stunned the religious world by not openly discussing the possibility of aliens coming to Earth but stating that extraterrestrials may not need “redemption” because “they might have remained in full friendship with their creator”; supporters of disclosure hope that religious acceptance of aliens will help U.S. and world leaders get over their fear that it will cause panic among many religious people. If that’s the case, why didn’t he open the Vatican vaults on UFOs and aliens when he was in office?

One of the most often reported ‘miracles’ in Catholic Churches and occasionally homes is the weeping or bleeding statue, which is usually Mary, the mother of Jesus; church officials usually investigate these alleged miracles even though nearly all are deemed hoaxes; in 2014, a mystic named Cardia bought a ceramic statue of Mary from a religious site in Medjugorje, Bosnia, and took it back to Trevignano Romano, Italy, where she claimed it began crying tears of blood; the official investigation took until 2024 when the Diocese of Civita Castellana announced that church officials, a psychologist, theologians, and "outside experts"; for those who still wanted to believe, DNA tests were run on the ‘blood’ and those shocking results were announced recently - the blood samples fit the genetic profile of Gisella Cardia; her lawyers said this was still inconclusive because their client had kissed and handled the statue and were waiting for another analysis to see if the DNA is single-profile or mixed. It will be a miracle if any of the witnesses are still alive by the time this case is resolved.

In Oklahoma City, Chris Frederick uploaded a video of a UFO he described as a “jelly bean” that he, his wife and many of their neighbors witnessed recently; Chris told reporters: “I happened to look up—and there it was: a UFO. It looked like a jellybean with plasma moving around inside it”; adding to the mystery, Frederick attempted to launch a drone to get a closer look, but was stymied: "When I tried to take off, I got a 'Can't take off due to electromagnetic interference' message" and gave up after multiple attempts during the four hours the plasma jelly bean UFO was overhead; the witnesses said it had no standard aviation lights or transponder signals, so it was not a plane from the nearby Will Rogers World Airport. Do UFOs suddenly take on the shape of candy near Valentine’s Day, Easter and Halloween?

There was a time when there were more scary rides at the amusement park than just the roller coasters, as exemplified this week by the return of a rare hand-carved carousel animal known as the Lake Quassapaug sea monster or hippocampus to the from Quassy Amusement Park in Middlebury, Connecticut, nearly 40 years after it was stolen; it was one of three sea monsters on the carousel and was patterned after the hippocampus from Ancient Greek mythology which had a horse’s head, a serpent's body, and wings; a collector recognized it in a Florida warehouse filled with old circus and carnival castoffs and arranged to purchase it and return it to Quassy, where it will be restored and put on display as proof that “what goes around, comes around”. It’s also proof that, unlike today, kids in the old days weren’t little snowflakes.

It’s usually easy to ignore asteroid warnings because their probabilities are so slim and their expected date of crashing to Earth is so far in the future, but NASA has succeeded in terrifying a lot of people with its predictions about the asteroid 2024 YR4 which could collide with our planet on December 22, 2032; NASA’s first forecast gave it a 1.3 percent chance of hitting the Earth, and that number was expected to go down with more data; instead, the next prediction raised the probability to 2.3 percent, and just two weeks later the same science journalist, Robin George Andrews, upped the probability to 3.1 percent and described 2024 YR4 as “the most likely sizable space rock ever forecast to impact planet Earth"; while it could land in the ocean, it could just as easily hit the planet or explode in the atmosphere like the Tunguska asteroid that exploded over Siberia with a blast wave of roughly 12 megatons that destroyed a forest more than twice the size of New York City. How much confidence do you have that NASA can deflect this asteroid in just 7 years when it still has two astronauts stranded on the International Space Station?

If you need more ‘evidence’ that the danger of asteroid 2024 YR4 hitting Earth in 2032 is real, look no further than the prophecies of Nostradamus, who said: “The great mountain encompasses seven stadia. After peace, war, famine, flooding. Shall spread far, sinking many countries. Even the ancient landscapes to their foundations”; experts believe the Noz-man’s mountain means a space rock that will destroy a large swath of the planet, although ‘seven stradia’ is about 4800 feet, which is much bigger than asteroid 2024 YR4. Nostradamus would be more believable to more people if he had made his prophesies on TikTok.

For those who believe that humans have a soul that leaves the body after death but need proof for their disbelieving friends, Dr. Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and professor at the University of Arizona, claims to have it; in his new study he describes how EEGs hooked up to patients showing no blood pressure or heart rates suddenly show a burst of activity called gamma synchrony lasting “30 to 90 seconds” after the patient is deemed clinically dead; he believes this burst of wave activity is indicative of a “near-death experience, or it could be the soul leaving the body, perhaps; to skeptics, he explains that consciousness may such minimal energy and exists at such a deep level that it could be “the last thing to go” during the dying process. If you’re worried about someone pulling your plug, bribe an intern to glue it into the wall.

Flights in Turkey were grounded once again by a glowing, radar-invisible UFO reported at an altitude of 10,000 feet by two pilots at Gaziantep Airport; while officials suspect it was a drone, these incidents have been occurring frequently over Turkey’s major airports with no explanations and no means of preventing them; social media comments from around the world reported similar encounters with mysterious objects seen at varying altitudes, displaying a range of glowing colors and traveling at differing speeds. The excuse that “it’s just drones, they’re ours and we know they’re there” isn’t going to cut it when they start grounding more flights than mechanical issues do.

If you are rooting for the seemingly extinct Tasmanian tiger to still exist in the wild, you’ll be encouraged by the discovery of three no longer extinct South American tapirs running around in Brazil; hidden game cameras in the Cunhambebe State Park recorded the three South American tapirs (Tapirus terrestris), the largest terrestrial mammals (weighing up to 700 pounds) in South America, which were believed to be extinct, having not been seen since the last one was spotted in the Serra dos Órgãos National Park in 1914; there is probably at least one more since the photos showed a female and her calves. If something weighing 700 pounds can stay hidden for so long, there’s not much hope you’re going to find your keys or that lost sock.

In California, state assemblyman Chris Rogers presented Congress with AB 666, a bill to designate Bigfoot as the “official state cryptid”, adding it to California’s list of 42 other official state symbols; while it doesn’t have the most sightings, California is where the famous California Patterson-Gimlin film was made in 1967, making Bigfoot at least as deserving of a state honor as the Dungeness crab (state crustacean), the banana slug (state slug), and the black abalone (state seashell); the bill must go to the floor and receive a majority of the votes to pass. Bigfoot may be a myth, but in California, it’s still seen more often than Jack Nicholson.

Journalist and UFO investigator Ross Coulthart interviewed Dr. Andrew Morgan, a scientist researching unexplained orbs hovering close to a major U.S. military base in a part of the desert known as Australia’s Skinwalker Ranch; Morgan is convinced that the "orb-like" objects he and others have seen and recorded are non-human intelligence because their behavior is inconsistent with natural or environmental causes, and that they are closely related to other orbs seen at military installations around the world. Of course, we’re not going to believe it until they get their own cable TV series.

From the queasy file (you’ve been warned) comes a report from doctors at the Plastic Surgery Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing of a patient who came in for surgery on the left side of her face which was atrophied and her left eyeball was slightly sunken; while grafting fat into an empty space behind her left eyeball to restore some facial symmetry, they were shocked to discover five contact lenses; the woman admitted that she had lost several contact lenses in the past few months but she never suspected they were stuck behind her eye; the doctors said she was lucky they were only there for a few months before they could cause serious side effects such as corneal wounds and microbial infections. Sadly to say, her keys and socks are still missing.

Those involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) collect a lot of mysterious, unexplained signals from space and attempt to identify them in hopes that one will be proof that we are not alone; while most of these efforts are futile, astronomers digging through data from the Murchison Widefield Array in Western Australia were baffled when the 4,096 spider-like antennas began picking up local television broadcasts in this remote designated radio quiet zone where there is normally no interference from TV transmitters, Bluetooth devices, mobile phones and other electronic devices; no, it wasn’t aliens watching their favorite Earth sitcoms for the past five years - they finally determined the signals were reflecting off of airplanes, which is funny but also tragic to the astronomers who see this kind of interference as “an existential crisis" that will soon make it nearly impossible for them to carry out high-quality radio observations, especially when added to the every-growing number of satellites orbiting the planet. This sounds like the opening chapter of an alien invasion novel.

The ‘doomsday fish’ stories went viral recently with the appearance of a rare shimmering oarfish swimming in the waters near the Baja California Sur beach; sightings of live oarfish are extremely rare – most of these deep sea dwellers are found dead and folklore from Japan and other Pacific countries see this as a message from the sea god Neptune that something bad is about to happen; that could be any day in these times, but people on the beach still implored those going out to take selfies with the fish to leave it alone, less they trigger an earthquake, a tsunami or some other natural disaster. We shouldn’t laugh at these ancient folk tales when so many people still believe hurricanes are caused by bad people.

With the number of plane crashes recently in the U.S., this does not seem like the time to get excited about air travel, but an announcement from NASA is cause for hope for the future – the space agency and Lockheed Martin released engine performance test results on the X-59 supersonic research aircraft and these ground tests revealed that the single modified F414-GE-100 engine that will power the aircraft and its subsystems provided “smooth and steady airflow “ with no structural or excessive vibration issues; the futuristic needle-shaped jet housed in Palmdale, California, is designed to reduce sonic booms to the point that one NASA engineer compared the X-59’s expected boom to that of a car door being shut. The X-59 is being designed with commercial supersonic flight over land in mind, so the next step is to make it big enough for a load of rich celebrities.

Those who spend countless hours scouring Google Maps for anomalies (you know who you are) found what looks like a crashed flying saucer in a mountainous region of New Mexico near the Sevilleta National Refuge in the Sierra Ladrones at an elevation of 7,400 feet at the coordinates 34°24'21.6"N 107°05'44.5"W; with its disc shape and no roads leading up to it or other structures nearby, the crashed UFO or “ceiling hatch of a subterranean hanger for a UAP” theories were popular on social media, especially since an image from 1996 showed nothing there; skeptics thought it was more like a rainwater catchment which has since been removed and replaced. If you zoom in real close and squint, you can almost make out the words, “Get a life”.

From the ‘Weird Jobs’ file comes a new study of mummies in storage or on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo that utilized human ‘mummy sniffers’ to non-invasively determine whether smells were coming from the waxes, oil and perfumes used to preserve the mummies or from pesticides used to keep the bugs away or from deterioration due to mold, bacteria or microorganisms; the human noses described the mummy scents as “woody,” “spicy” and “sweet” with floral notes that could have come from pine and juniper resins used in embalming; technical sniffing instruments were used to measure and quantify air molecules emitted from the sarcophagi to determine the state of preservation without touching the mummies. We saw Sniff the Mummies open for Here Come the Mummies.

A new study led by Professor Jennifer Macalady at Penn State proposes a controversial theory that life is not hard to form and that evolutionary singularities required for human origins can be explained via mechanisms outside of intrinsic improbability, concluding that the probability of aliens resembling humans is much higher than expected; according to Macalady, "the evolution of complex life may be less about luck and more about the interplay between life and its environment, opening up exciting new avenues of research in our quest to understand our origins and our place in the universe"; lead author of the study Dr. Dan Mills, a postdoctoral researcher at The University of Munich, says: "We're arguing that intelligent life may not require a series of lucky breaks to exist" and "Perhaps it's only a matter of time, and maybe other planets are able to achieve these conditions more rapidly than Earth did, while other planets might take even longer". Once again, Star Trek was right.

We have paintings from 1000 years ago that show that humans haven’t really changed that much in their looks since 1025, but Google's ImageFX AI image generator sees some bigger changes over the next 1000 years; humans in 3025 will be shorter, darker, have more common features and less genetic diversity; have lower rates of mood disorders, be better looking, but have smaller brains; if we don’t like these predictions, scientists say we can use targeted gene editing with CRISPR-Cas9 to get the looks we prefer. Is the future a world of Jason Mamoa Mini-Mes?