Female Bigfoot Evidence, Slender Man Returns, Space Mission Conspiracy, Strange Cattle Mutilations and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

The sex of Bigfoot is often difficult to determine from blurred photos or eyewitness testimonies, so they are generally referred to as males, but Dr. Jeff Meldrum, a professor at Idaho State University and a Bigfoot researchers, revealed recently that "Lots of reports suggest maybe they're females. (They have) a maternal instinct — a particular interest in children"; Meldrum bases his conclusion on the preponderance of reports that Bigfoot is often seen by or near children playing, with the kids telling their mom later than “the big monkey is watching this over the fence”; besides their maternal instincts drawing the female to human children, Amy Bue, a Bigfoot researcher and the founder of Project Zoobook, says a group of small nests found on the ground by a logging company surveyor may have been the result of a female Sasquatch running a kind of nursery for younger members of the species; Meldrum saw them and suggested that one looked like a bassinet or a little nest for a newborn, concluding that these female Bigfoot are nothing to be afraid of. That is, unless the male doesn’t chip in and help with the chores.

It appears NASA is giving credence to the possibility of life existing on Mars right now with the release of an aerial photo of what it describes as an unusual 100 meters wide hole that “seems to punch through to a lower level”; it calls holes like this  “of interest” because “they might be portals to lower levels that extend into expansive underground caves”, making them “relatively good candidates to contain Martian life” and “prime targets for possible future spacecraft, robots, and even human interplanetary explorers”. Sounds exciting and distinctly possible, although humans traveling to Mars only to live in caves again doesn’t sound like progress.   

Just in time for Easter, British anthropologist Dr. Paul Warner claims a decade of research has convinced him that the body of Jesus Christ and the Ark of the Covenant are located in a hidden double-cave under a giant stone block which seals the southern passageway of the subterranean chamber beneath the Great Pyramid in Giza; Warner says he used a "scientific method" but based his research on texts from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, along with written records from the ancient cuneiform clay tablets of Mesopotamia; he claims this showed him that 'Mount Sinai', the 'Mountain of Israel', the 'Mount of Olives', 'Mount Zion' and the Quran's 'Mountain of Light' are references to the Great Pyramid of Egypt, meaning that Jesus gave his 'Sermon on the Mount' at the Great Pyramid; he is now pushing for the stone block to be removed to reveal the Ark of the Covenant and possibly the body of Jesus. Good luck convincing candy makers and churches to cancel Easter.

If you don’t buy the ‘Ark under the Pyramid’ theory, Dr. Konstantin Borisov, a computer engineer, claims he has evidence that the biblical Garden of Eden, thought by biblical scholars to have been located in what is now Iraq, was actually in Egypt and is now beneath – you guessed it -- the Great Pyramid of Giza; in a study published in the journal Archaeological Discovery, Borisov claims that the four biblical rivers of Eden described in Genesis misnamed the Gihon and it was actually the Nile, which would connect the Garden of Eden to the pyramid and potentially putting the Tree of Life, with its famous apple, at the same location. There aren’t enough olive branches in the world to settle the disputes this could cause.

Most structures at Area 51 are secret U.S. military buildings but that doesn’t mean they’re alien or hide extraterrestrial aircraft, although that never stops some media sites from referring to new towers, like the triangular one spotted recently on Google Maps at coordinates  37°14'46.5"N 115°49'24.0"W,  as a sign of extraterrestrial activity or alien technology; since it appears to be near a runway, it could be a control tower, but that can’t be proven without closer inspection and one would be foolish to risk that at this highly guarded test site, so it is open for extraterrestrial speculation. It is about time for another ‘Storm Area 51’ event to remind everyone that we really don’t know much about it and probably never will.

Another secret site is the location of UVB-76, a shortwave radio station that broadcasts in Upper Side Band mode on the frequency of 4625 kHz; the main broadcast since 1975 is a short buzz tone repeating at a rate of approximately 25 tones per minute, 24 hours per day – hence the station’s nickname “The Buzzer" – but it occasionally switches to words, as it did recently when regular listeners heard four cryptic messages in a 24-hour period: Neptune, Thymus, Foxcloak, and Nootabu; non-buzzing sounds usually signal that something big is about to happen in Russia, possibly nuclear related, so those keeping tabs on The Buzzer are on edge. Could it just be a broadcast of white noise to help stressed Russians with snoring spouses fall asleep?

Not even an 11-minute space mission is safe from conspiracy theories calling it “staged” as many social media posts after the successful trip on a Jeff Bezos New Shepard rocket by the all-female crew of Katy Perry, Gayle King, Jeff Bezos's fiancée Lauren Sanchez, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, former rocket scientist Aisha Bowe and filmmaker Kerianne Flynn accused the whole thing of being a “Hollywood fake” with “the worst CGI any of these fake space agencies has produced” that was filmed entirely inside a film studio equipped with tanks of water to make the weightless crew look like they were “floating”. One ‘suspicious’ sign was that the door of the capsule was opened from the inside before Jeff Bezos could arrive with a special tool to open the pressurized capsule from the outside; another ‘suspicious’ sign was that the capsule didn’t appear to be dirty from its 11-minute flight and hard thump upon landing; then there were the ‘satanic signs’ like the uniform patch, Perry’s hand signs and the ringing of a bell before entering the capsule. If it was faked, that might explain why Katy Perry didn’t sing one of her own songs.

Proving once again that it’s all about the money and the tourism, the makers of Irn-Bru, the carbonated soft drink Scots prefer when they[‘re not drinking Scotch, has come out with Nessie Nectar, inspired by the Loch Ness Monster, and Unicorn Tears, inspired by Scotland’s national ‘animal’; the drinks will be available for a limited time only and the company refuses to reveal what they taste like; meanwhile, a family in Bariloche, Argentina, on the shore of Lake Nahuel Huapi, has erected a 6 meter (19.6 feet) long, 4 meters (13 feet) high statue of the lake's resident cryptid, the Nahuelito, a serpentine creature that gets less publicity than Nessie, even though the Argentine Navy in 1960 allegedly chased an unidentified underwater object in the lake for 18 days before giving up. We’ll all be in big trouble if the cryptids form a union and demand royalties and a cut of tourism profits.

Unsolved cattle mutilations continue to be reported in Montana, but a recent case may indicate a change in techniques by whoever or whatever is conducting them, as the Chouteau County Sheriff's Office in Montana responded to a call near the town of Big Sandy and found a dead animal with its tongue removed, its jaw skinned and, strangely, a gunshot wound as the cause of death; the Sheriff's Office said it had heard of two similar incidents outside of Chouteau County and suspect the killer is a person or persons. Why not aliens getting lazy and using shotguns instead of surgical instruments or laser blasters?

An old alien encounter story from the Soviet Union popped back into the news with the release of declassified Cold War-era CIA files that allegedly contained a 250-page KGB report recounting events in 1989 or 1990 when Soviet soldiers in Ukraine claimed to have seen a “low-flying spaceship in the shape of a saucer” fly over their heads; they responded with a surface-to-air missile which they claimed brought down the UFO and “five short humanoids with ‘large heads and large black eyes’ emerged from it”; the beings then “merged into a single object that acquired a spherical shape” which quickly grew bigger and exploded; unbelievably, 23 soldiers watching it were  turned into “stone poles”; the KGB was said to have taken the “petrified soldiers” and crashed UFO to a secret base near Moscow; this story has been retold a number of times since then, but the document in the CIA files was not from the agency but from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service which obtained it from the Canadian Weekly World News magazine and the Ukrainian paper Holos Ukrayiny. That’s too bad because this kind of technology sure could come in handy these days.

The Mexican legend of the Black Charro (El Charro Negro) was retold by the media in Tetecala, Mexico, after a security camera picked up the sight and sound of what looked like the ghost of a man on a horse riding down a street at about 1 AM; if it was El Charro Negro, the dark sprit was looking for people to punish for the evils brought down upon indigenous people or greedy money-grubbers who he can trick into selling their souls. Or, he could be that evil spirit who fools people with camera tricks: “El Exposición Doble (The Double Exposure).

From the ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ file comes news that a team of evolutionary biologists at Macquarie University in Australia have created “Peter Pan” cane toad tadpoles by removing a gene that controls the production of thyroxine, a hormone that regulates the amphibians’ metamorphosis, keeping them from ever growing into adults, so that they can cannibalize cane toad eggs, a natural behavior, thus cutting down on the population of the evasive species which was brought in to control cane beetles but instead poisoned native animals that wat the poisonous toads; according Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist on the project,  “They also don’t eat the eggs of native frogs much at all and have almost no poison until they metamorphose”. Those who ignore cane toad history are doomed to repeat it.

‘Slender Man’ owes much of his fame to Morgan Geyser, now 22, who in 2017 pleaded guilty to attempted first-degree intentional homicide for stabbing 12-year-old classmate Payton Leutner nearly to death to please Slender Man, the fictional creepy pasta meme and horror movie character whose alleged existence and power to influence young people to commit violent crimes caused a nationwide panic then and possibly now, as Geyser is up for conditional release from a Wisconsin mental health institute where she has lived, despite a last-minute request from the State Department of Health Services to keep her in custody; her attorney and some doctors are lobbying for her release, but others say Geyser is still violent and in need of constant care and surveillance. Is Slender Man trying to redeem himself by becoming a spokesperson for one of those weight-loss drugs?

A classic example of the contradictory figure of speech known as the oxymoron is ‘jumbo shrimp’, but a new aquatic oxymoron is moving up fast after researchers using a remotely operated vehicle during the recent Schmidt Ocean Institute and Ocean Census expedition recorded the first ever live footage of a ‘small colossal’ squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) in its natural habitat at a depth of 600 meters (1968 feet) near the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean; the juvenile colossal squid was 30 cm (one foot) long. In keeping with the oxymoron theme, the video of the small colossal squid was awfully good, showing that it was pretty ugly.

‘ʻOumuamua, the first confirmed interstellar object detected passing through the Solar System, was shaped like a giant cigar that influenced some to suggest it was a spaceship, so one can imagine what they thought when a team of astronomers using the Gemini South Observatory in Chile to observe asteroid 2024 YR4 in multiple wavelengths as it passed Earth in February 2025 and created a 3D image of it which looked like a flat disk or an almost round hockey puck that rotated about once every 20 minutes; the nearly 200 foot wide flying puck asteroid comes back every four years and was once thought to have a 3% chance of hitting Earth, but new calculations suggest it has a 3.8% chance of striking the moon instead. Should the astronauts exploring the moon by then build a habitat shaped like a hockey mask?

The Denisovans, the mysterious group of early human ancestors who interacted more than once thought with Neanderthals and homo sapiens before gong extinct, have had their range extended from Siberia, Tibet and possibly Laos to Taiwan with the discovery of a partial jawbone on the seafloor of the Penghu Channel near the Taiwan Strait; the jawbone ended up in an antique shop before being donated to Taiwan's National Museum of Natural Science, but it was only recently that scientists were able to extract some protein sequences from the dental enamel of the bone showing it to be from a male Denisovan who lived either 10,000 to 70,000 years old or 130,000 to 190,000 years old, which means it could be the youngest-known fossil of a Denisovan individual. With a range from Tibet to Taiwan, the Denisovans could build a case for being the first roamin’ empire.

If you are skilled in the art of scooping the poop of your pup as you walk, NASA may want your advice on how to pick up and clear out the 96 bags of human waste left behind by U.S. astronauts on the Moon – and is offering $3 million under the LunaRecycle Challenge to the person or persons who develop the perfect plan to manage astronaut feces, urine and vomit during upcoming lunar missions and long-duration space flights; NASA is currently reviewing LunaRecycle Challenge Phase 1 submissions and developing the next phase timelines for announcing winners. Picking up poop bags sounds gross, but NASA can’t afford to send a plumber to the Moon.

The tank-like 25-foot-long, club-tailed body of the Ankylosaurus makes it a popular dinosaur among young boys, but adult scientists got excited about them too recently when the first footprints of the herbivorous 8-ton dinos were discovered 100 million years after they roamed across the Canadian Rocky Mountains; the 3-toed tracks a a new species of ankylosaurid dinosaur known as the Ruopodosaurus clava, meaning “the tumbled-down lizard with a club/mace”, were found at Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia (BC) and in northwestern Alberta and redate the oldest known ankylosaurid fossils found in North America. The armored plating was probably hot, but having a clubbed tail made up for it.

There is much evidence – handprints and finger paintings -- showing that ancient humans brought very young children, some only two years old, deep into underground caves through dark and dangerous passages where the adults painted on the walls, but scientists were unsure why the toddlers were brought along until recently when a team of prehistoric archaeology researchers from Tel Aviv University proposed that the children were believed to have special abilities which allowed them to communicate with entities from the spiritual world and the underworld who then helped inspire the paintings; the research explains that “Many of these societies regarded caves as gateways to the underworld – where, through shamanic rituals, they could communicate with cosmic entities and inhabitants of the underworld, to resolve existential problems. In this context, young children were perceived as liminal beings — belonging to both the realm they had left just recently (before birth) and the world they currently inhabit. Thus, small children were considered particularly suited to bridging the gap between the worlds and delivering messages to non-human entities”. Good luck getting kids today to help paint the walls in your house.

If you support the idea that chemical fingerprints can signal the existence of life on other planets, then you’ll be excited with the news that Professor Nikku Madhusudhan from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy led a team of astronomers who used data from the James Webb Space Telescope to detect the chemical fingerprints of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) and/or dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in the atmosphere of the exoplanet K2-18b, which is double the size of Earth and located 700 trillion miles away; the team states that this evidence indicates a 99.7% chance of life on K2-18b; while the odds are high, they can’t say for certain that the DMS molecules are of a biological origin or the product of an unknown geological activity. If we wave, can they see our fingerprints too?