Ark of the Covenant Location, Revenge of Cursed Bees, African Dinosaur Sightings, Mexican Werewolf and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

While U.S. congressional hearings about the existence of UFOs and aliens showcase both experts and politicians who dance around the subjects, a recent hearing in the National Congress of Chile regarding the environmental impact of the planned mega-industrial project in the Antofagasta region where the Paranal Observatory is located prompted an off-the-subject question by Representative Cristóbal Martínez, who asked renowned Chilean astronomer José Maza about the existence of UFOs and whether he had ever seen "a flying saucer" – Maza quickly responded that “We've never seen anything. And no, actually, that's a joke. The nearest planets are 30, 40, or 50 light-years away. We could go now; Alpha Centauri is four light-years away; it would take us forty thousand years. If anyone offers, we'll go, but that's the way there; we still have to go back forty thousand more years”, and then compared the subject to Peter Pan and “Santa Claus with the reindeer flying”. Nothing gets you in more trouble than upsetting both the UFO supporters and the Santa Claus believers.

Chile is home to many UFO sightings, including one recorded by many people hovering over waters off the coast of the port city if Antofagasta; the evening sighting looked like a line of motionless but flickering lights which indicated UFO to many of the witnesses; some commenters thought it was lights from the nearby Andrés Sabella Airport, but others said it was not visible from the location of the recording; commenters also pointed out that if this was a known object like an airport, why were so many people baffled enough to photograph it and post it on social media. This was late March, so it wasn’t Santa and his reindeer.

This week’s psychic news comes from the Nostradamus of the Balkans, Baba Vanga, who is getting credit with predicting the terrible earthquake in Myanmar and Thailand (“2025 would bring shattering earthquakes”); that has some of her followers worried because Vanga’s other forecasts for this year include a war breaking out in Europe that will devastate its population, a worldwide economic disaster, and the beginnings of the downfall of humanity – all distinct possibilities but vague enough to apply to many events in 2025 and in other years as well. The best we can say is at least Baba Vanga isn’t bothering us with TikTok videos.

The remains of a creature found in the rural area of El Túnel in the municipality of Ixhuatlán del Sureste southeast of Mexico City were described in local media as a werewolf with human hands or a nachual; the report said, “When the locals went to see it, they found an animal the size of a lamb. With a rare jaw fur, with hands resembling a human, but instead of fingers, it has claws. Locals say it's a nachual”; local mythology tells tales of a shapeshifter that changes from a sorcerer to a jaguar or other animal and many people still believe in these naguals; others suggested the remains belonged to a Chupacabra, but a social media poster thinks he recognized it: “It is an endangered creature its scientific name is mastuche pollenis of the family of monkeys and orangutans this creature is given when there is a cross between the two creatures His common name is Marcuache”; mustached monkeys are endangered but they’re not native to Mexico, so this creature’s identity is still a mystery. If something looks like a werewolf, a Chupacabra, a nagual or a monkey, it’s probably none of them.

A discovery in Loch Ness sounded like an April Fool’s Day joke, especially since it surfaced in late March, but it was a real find of a camera sealed in a clear container that was rigged to take pictures of the Loch Ness monster 55 years ago, but was lost until the UK’s National Oceanography Centre (NOC) yellow robotic underwater vehicle (aka submarine) known as Boaty McBoatface snagged it in its propellers and dragged the rig to the surface, where scientists found the 1970 vintage Instamatic camera with a 4-bulb flash dry and in great shape; photographic engineers removed the film and developed it – only to find that, while the images were clear, they saw no Loch Ness monster in the waters; two more of the cameras may still be in the area, so this sounds like a project for divers and other Nessie seekers. The 55-year-old film photos are clearer than digital camera images – time to dig out your Brownies and Polaroid Swingers.

Despite looking nothing like a spaceship, a smoke ring over Seattle, Washington, quickly appeared on social and mainstream media with people calling it a UFO, aliens, a swarm of insects, a bizarre weather phenomena – everything but what it actually was: the smoke from fireworks at Lumen Field for a  Supercross dirt bike racing championship event. If we could educate the public on identifying all natural and human-made sky phenomena, maybe we could finally spot a real extraterrestrial spaceship.

When nothing else works, some people blame a curse and that’s what happened in the village of  Asuofuo-Achiase in the Atwima Nwabiagya North District of Ghana recently when dozens of people were attacked by bees for no apparent reason over a three day period; residents were ordered to stay inside by the Chief of Achiase, Nana Antwi Adjei III, who was at a loss to explain the attacks, let alone stop them, so the chief blamed a resident who burned down an ancient Sycamore tree which many believed protected the village; rituals were performed to appease local gods in the hopes that the bees would leave, any other curses would end and the lockdown would be over. A movie of the incident will need a better ending, like a magical beekeeper who holds the village hostage.

Ghost hunting is dangerous for many reasons – angry spirits, old mansions on the verge of collapse, and, in Amigo, West Virgina -  gunshots; Fred Shrewsbury claimed he was ghost hunting on Eagle Lane in Amigo when an argument with homeowner Corde Sargent ended with Sargent allegedly fired a warning shot; Shrewsbury did not take the hint and returned a few days later with three juveniles in his car; seeing them, Sargent again fired at the car and Shrewsbury stopped and fired back; the case is still unresolved. You know things are bad when the ghosts need to call an exorcist to get rid of ghost hunters.

You can’t throw a stone in England without it landing in a circle that’s thousands of years old and ‘mysterious’, which is proven once again with the discovery of a ‘mysterious’ stone circle at Farley Moor in the Peak District (which should get its name from the fact that there are 25 such circles in the Peak District) by archaeologists who put its origin at about 1,700 BCE; Dr. Lawrence Shaw, lead historian and environmental advisor for the Forestry Commission, says the circle adds to the theory that the Farley Forest is “a far more intricate ritual landscape, with the standing stone playing a central role" than once thought; he says the raised stone platform at the site predates the standing stone, which indicates the location had been used for rituals for centuries; Dr. Derek Pitman, Associate Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University, calls this a site of “immense prehistoric significance" which holds untapped archaeological wealth of information on “ritualistic life during the Bronze Age. Take that, Stonehenge!

Last week it was an ancient city buried 2,000 feet beneath the Great Pyramid of Giza, this week it’s a hidden tomb that archeologists claim they found 600 feet beneath the Giza pyramid complex; the alleged tomb contains what looks like a sarcophagus and appears to be under the Tomb of Osiris, which is the symbolic burial site of the Egyptian god of the afterlife; scientists, led by Corrado Malanga of the University of Pisa, used synthetic aperture radar (SAR) analysis to find the tomb and the sarcophagus, which appears to be surrounded by water; other Egyptian researchers say this technology can’t see beyond 40 feet and Dr. Zahi Hawass, the former Egyptian minister of antiquities, says it is "not scientifically approved or validated". Ground penetrating radar will never beat ground penetrating tunneling equipment, which will never be allowed in the Giza pyramid complex.

Those of you who fear the coming of artificial intelligence might want to turn your heads from the news of a new preprint study which reports that in a three-party version of a Turing test (where participants chat with a human and an AI at the same time and then evaluate which is which), OpenAI's GPT-4.5 model was picked to be a human 73 percent of the time, which is much higher than the random 50 percent; Meta's LLama 3.1-405B model also finished a bit higher than chance in eight rounds against nearly 300 participants; the study notes that GPT-4.5 did better when instructed to adopt a persona (like a teen who is Internet savvy) than with no persona. How would it do if it were told to adopt the persona of Alan Turing?

Following up on recently released classified documents describing the Stargate project, a secret CIA program which ran from 1977 to 1995 with the purpose of using remote viewers as spies, Major Ed Dames, who claims he was part of the program in the 1980s, revealed in an interview that he still uses those skills and recently went looking for the Ark of the Covenant, the gold chest many believe is the repository of the actual Ten Commandments, and claims he found it inside the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, West Bank; he claims he was “inside some type of a stone tunnel, and there’s an object, and the object is boxy and it’s heavy and dense” and he sensed it was “historic” and “biblical”; Dames says he looked for the Ark when he was with the CIA but claims he can now pinpoint its exact location “within meters”. What are you waiting for, Indiana Jones – a challenge from some Nazis to see who can get there first?

Many domiciles in the UK claim to be “Britain's most haunted house”, so many that it is sometimes a selling point, as typified by Amy Waine and Jarrad Cutting, a ghost-hunting couple who recently purchased a two-bedroom home popularly known as the Cage in St Osyth in Essex, because of its history of being haunted by the ghosts of women imprisoned and eventually executed there for witchcraft; they bought it to own “an important piece of paranormal history” and to use it as “a home base for investigating and experimenting”; while repairing the rundown house, Amy says "I've definitely had some experiences within The Cage that I couldn't explain. These have ranged from noises, smells and even an object moving on its own” they now have cameras set up to capture the events for the public. A rundown haunted house should be called a ‘ghoster-upper’.

Earth’s rainforests have many rumored monsters and mythical creatures and few of them have actually been found, although they may not look quite as large or as fearsome as their myths; one whose sightings are on the rise in Central Africa’s Congo Basin is the Mokèlé-mbèmbé (which means ‘one who stops the flow of rivers’), a legendary sauropod-like dinosaur claimed to have been seen by European explorers in the early 20th century, and elevated to cryptid status in the 1950s by Bernard Heuvelmans; The National Geographic reports that the most likely place for a real one to hide is in Lake Tele located in a remote and pristine area surrounded by jungle and swamps where surveys in 2006 and 2007 unexpectedly uncovered 125,000 gorillas; while some people suspect the shrinking rainforest is causing elephants to move to populated areas and be misidentified as the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, others are not so sure and are not giving up on the legend. Sadly, logging and development rarely lose, even to crypto-tourism, so Mokèlé-mbèmbé may want to move to Loch Ness.

We take a moment to remember Robert E. Ginna Jr., who passed away on March 4 at the age of 99; remembered in the media as a founding editor of People magazine, Ginna is remembered in the paranormal world for a 1952 article he wrote, with H.B. Darrach Jr., for the April 7, 1952, issue of Life magazine titled “There Is a Case for Interplanetary Saucers - Have We Visitors From Space?”; the article it examined 10 UFO reports and quoted German rocket expert Walther Riedel saying: “I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis”; while the article offered no proof, it was one of the first in the mainstream media to address the possibility of visitors from other planets and, much to his dismay, put Ginna’s name in the discussion to this day. It’s too bad he couldn’t live to see the day when we have a magazine called ‘Aliens’.

Dr. Frankenstein is about to come alive just like his monster according to a new article in the MIT Technology Review where scientists Carsten T Charlesworth, Henry T Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi describe using pluripotent stem cells to grow human fetuses entirely outside a body in artificial uteruses using "genetic techniques" to stunt brain production so the body lacks sentience; the bodies could then supply parts (hello Dr. Frankenstein) to use for transplants and research, allowing experiments without killing animals; they refer to these creations as “bodyoids” and say this science is “at least plausible - and possibly revolutionary” and the time to use it is now. We’ll start to worry when bookstores move Mary Shelley from ‘fiction’ to ‘science’.

It is Alien Big Cat season in the UK as reports of large black felines are popping up all over, starting with Janice Wonnacott, who says her train had just left Charlbury station in Oxfordshire when she saw a muscular large cat that appeared to be squatting to spray before standing with its long tail in the air; unfortunately, she may have seen a statue in a backyard and imagined it moving; meanwhile, Harlem Karma  has set up trail cams at Grizedale Forest to record the legendary 'Beast of Cumbria' for his documentary on the big cat called 'Fells, Forests, and Fangs: Mystery Behind The Beast Of Cumbria'; he’s already found a fresh sheep carcass and has left out pork pieces in hopes of getting some clear photos of the beast; then there is the report from David Lawrence who lives in a village near High Wycombe, home of the legendary Beast of Bucks, who saw something “bigger than a normal cat” with “larger paws and a long thick tail and slightly smaller ears than a domestic cat” Lawrence’s doorbell camera managed to snap a few photos of the cat climbing onto a skip (garbage bin), which gives a better perspective on the size of the cat, although it’s still hard to determine of this is the giant Beast of Buck. If it is, get ready to paint that skip with the words, “The Buck stops here!”

From the ‘The Planet of the Apes is Closer Than You Think’ file comes a study published in the Journal of Mammalogy about research on gelada monkeys, a type pf baboon, in eastern Africa which have been observed living with their known enemies add predators, Ethiopian wolves; while these wolves eat lambs and baby goats, they ignore baby monkeys and even hunt for rats with the adults, a sign to the study’s authors that the gelada monkeys have somehow domesticated the wolves – making them the second ‘ape’ known to domesticate canines. We’ll get worried when the monkeys have learned how to throw sticks and tennis balls and carry plastic bags of wolf poop.