Spontaneous Combustion with Cash, Dire Wolves Return, Colorado Chupacabra, Recent Tic Tac UFO Videos and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

Game of Thrones may be old news but dire wolves are back and not just in the news but possibly back from extinction, with the announcement from the biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences, known for its attempts to de-extinct the wooly mammoth and other long-gone animals, that it has brought back the dire wolf (aenocyon dirus), which went extinct in North America thousands of years ago, with the birth of three ‘dire wolf’ pups made using CRISPR technology to edit the genes of grey wolves using the genome mapped from a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 74,000-year-old skull of dire wolves; the embryos were then implanted in surrogate mothers and resulted in the births of pups named Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi which the company calls examples of “the world’s first successfully de-extincted animal”; skeptics point out that these pups are edited grey wolves, not 100% dire wolves. Whatever they are, they’re still really cute and probably already have millionaire buyers bidding for them.

In Pueblo, Colorado, the local media broadcast a video of what one reporter suggested was a “chupacabra” that was recorded by a woman who claimed she has seen the creature before in the daylight but still can’t determine what it might be; the glowing eyes could be due to the low light, which also makes it difficult to see if the creature is eating with hands or paws, which might help identify it as a monkey, raccoon, wolverine, or possum, which were both suggested by social media commenters; the reports and the witness are hoping for more sightings to positively identify it and possibly capture if for treatment or fame and fortune if it is really a Chupacabra. The best part is that so many reporters in the U.S. know what Chupacabras, Bigfoot and other cryptids are.

The Tic Tac UFOs are back as investigative reporters Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp released video footage on their podcast of what a witness claims was taken while onboard the USS Jackson on the night of February 15, 2023; according to the testimony, the crew was using a thermal camera, when four unknown objects were seen emerging from the ocean and flying away, making them transmedium UAPs; the objects were observed “jetting off into the abyss” in formation as they disappeared from the radar screen; the encounter occurred in the Pacific off the coast of Southern California between San Clemente Island and San Diego; Liberation Times says this is in the same area where Senior Chief Operations Specialist Kevin Day aboard the USS Princeton tracked a 'tic tac' UAP in 2004, and is in the W-291 Warning Area where the US Navy conducts naval warfare exercises; Knapp and Corbell call this “A turning point towards the rational and transparent approach of investigating and exploring the mystery of the UFO Phenomenon, reducing stigma, and encouraging transparency on this enigmatic puzzle”. The people who make Tic Tac mints are undoubtedly happy and hoping the mystery isn’t solved for a while

The “ancient civilization on Mars wiped out by a nuclear attack from another alien race” theory proposed by Harvard scientist Dr John Brandenburg is back in the news as Jason Reza Jorjani, a philosophy PhD and science fiction writer, brought it up on a recent podcast and cited as evidence that 'Every planet has a certain amount of isotopes of different materials on it, and apparently the isotopic ratio of Xenon 129 is consistent across the entire solar system, except for on Mars”, where there is a “high concentration” of Xenon-129 in the Martian atmosphere and uranium and thorium on the surface, along with an unusual amount of broken rocks; put all of that together and Jorjani says it ads up to a nuclear event taking place “maybe a hundred million years ago”; Jorjani also throws in the alleged CIA remote viewing experiments which claimed an ancient civilization once lived on Mars but died out. If there are any Martians left, do they really want visitors from another nuke-possessing planet?

In a new study by Cairo University's Faculty of Medicine and two German DNA specialists at the National Research Centre, tissue samples from the mummified remains of King Tutankhamun underwent DNA analysis and showed evidence that Tut died young most likely after suffering multiple bouts with malaria, which severely compromised the pharaoh’s immune system and either killed him or left him more susceptible to the many genetic diseases and birth defects he could have inherited as a result of family inbreeding; it could also have also exacerbated the Köhler disease which caused necrosis which weakened his leg and left him susceptible to infection from a broken bone e suffered shortly before his death. It may have been good to be king, but pharaoh was a tough job.

Cattle mutilations are more gruesome, but cattle abductions are also common and mysterious in the ranch country of Colorado, where they began around Thanksgiving 2024 when a rancher reported 29 head of cattle missing; that was followed by other ranchers reporting abductions of 46, 38, 31 and 43 animals; all reports shared common elements, such as no carcasses, no signs of rustlers and most of the cattle taken were calves; the ongoing investigation has involved the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the federal Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, state police, local law enforcement and Colorado Parks and Wildlife, with no clues being found and no resolution in sight. Mutilations usually include theories on aliens, but no one has reported any UFOs big enough to hold hundreds of cattle – yet.

The world gets another extraterrestrial museum with the opening of the Outpost 51 Alien Museum in Boulder City, Nevada (where else?) under the ownership of special effects artist Tom Devlin; the museum has exhibits on the Roswell incident, the Kingman, Arizona crash of 1953, Area 51, UFO movies and more; befitting its founder, the museum is filled with life-size models of aliens, both real and fictional; the Outpost 51 Alien Museum is easy to find since it’s next door to Devlin’s Monster Museum dedicated to preserving and displaying the history of special makeup effects. Do aliens call our natural history museums their alien museums?

The second Loch Ness Monster sighting of 2025 occurred on March 2 but was not reported until recently when the witness presented a photograph to the Loch Ness Centre along with details on the sighting – the witness was using binoculars when they spotted a dark grey shape beneath the surface of the loch that appeared to be blowing bubbles and causing disturbances; it then surfaced briefly above the water before submerging seconds later. And never showing up again; this is the first sighting of 2025 by a witness on the shore of the loch rather than watching the 24/7 Nessie cams, which are proliferating around the body of water. A monster blowing bubbles is probably embarrassing to other monsters. 

The recent international economic problems caused by U.S. tariffs is even affecting the paranormal world as famous Loch Ness Monster hunter Steve Feltham, who has spent over three decades hunting for the elusive cryptid, says his quest may be in jeopardy because he funds it with sales of clay figures of the monster he makes himself and, because of his political views, now refuses to sell them to American tourists; his friends suggest adding a tariff of his own for those customers but he says his political viewpoint is more important to him than his profits. If these tariffs go intergalactic, those museums in Nevada could be in big trouble.

A Colorado woman who identified herself as J.H. notified the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) of her sighting in mid-March of what she believed to be an 8-foot-tall Sasquatch walking on the road in front of her house about 11 miles from Boulder; she described it as an "ape-like creature walking very briskly" and “It had very large arms and legs; it was around 10 pm and the creature “was walking in dark shadow but in moonlight, looking straight forward” but she could see no other details because the street has no lights; BFRO Investigator Matthew Moneymaker said her location “was the sort of place in Colorado where we would expect sightings in the cold months, when animals come down out the high mountains to avoid the snows”. Big feet make for good footing but poor skiing.

Elmo, Cookie Monster and Big Bird may be friendly Muppets but urban explorer José Flores, who spent the night at a vacated Sesame Street theme park in Monterrey, Mexico, says he encountered “some figures that looked like humans, and there were strange cries from all over the place as if there were people inside, but there was nobody”; former employees had warned him that they had experienced supernatural encounters in the park and his friends who accompanied him on the overnighter said they “felt as though they were being watched the moment they stepped foot inside” and all heard mysterious noises. It’s not easy being green, but that’s no reason to scare people, Kermit.

Professionals from the deep-sea mapping company Magellan Ltd have been studying digital scans of the wrecked luxury liner Titanic from new angles and were recently able to recreate what happened in Boiler Room 2 where, according to Titanic analyst Parks Stephenson, “the engineers stood as they were trying to keep the power going, keep the lights on, keep the Marconi transmitter sending its distress signals until the hull literally tore apart around them and basically killed them all"; Stephenson was using a 3-D life-size digital view of the wrecked Titanic which allowed him to “feel like I'm... on the ocean floor looking at the wreck with nothing to stop me from looking anywhere I want to look"; the new research also contradicts the 1997 movie which claimed that First Officer William Murdoch committed suicide – Stephenson says, “We have direct evidence from the wreck from this digital scan that supports the account of one of his brother officers who saw him, instead of shooting himself as some accounts have had... that he was actually loading one last lifeboat to be launched when the water overtook him and all the other men at that station to their deaths"; Stephenson’s remarks are from a new National Geographic documentary "Titanic: The Digital Resurrection", and the digital 3-D imagery will eventually be made available to the public. When it comes to the Titanic, research, like the heart, will go on.

Skywatcher, an aerospace research group which includes researchers such as Dr. Garry Nolan, security analyst Matt Pines, and HUMAN founder Alex Klokus, recently used a combination of advanced technology and neuromeditative interaction methods to document and analyze nine different types of UFOs; they are the Tetra (a tetrahedron-shaped UFO that rotates on multiple axes while maintaining a stable flight path), the Tic Tac (a cylindrical UFO that hovers in a suspended position, elongates during steady flight and creates an area-of-effect on electronic devices and aircraft), the Amorphous orb (an o Orb-shaped UFO exhibiting pulsating internal light, horizontal oscillation, and erratic point-to-point motion), the Infrared Orb (an orb-shaped UFO visible only in infrared (IR), which vibrates while maintaining a stable flight path), the Manta ray (a manta ray-shaped UFO that rotates on multiple axes., the Bright star (a reflective tetrahedron-shaped UFO that oscillates horizontally and emits flashes of light), the Medusa (a jellyfish-shaped UFO with a "homing" motion on its front and tentacles extending downward), the Wasp (a double-body UFO with dangling tendrils and asynchronous rotation between its parts), and the Egg (an opaque white, metallic, egg-shaped UFO. No corroborated motion, structure, or spectral data); the YouTube video released by Skywatcher has both real images and recreations of these UFOs. Are Egg UFOs more expensive these days? (Asking for an alien friend with an old Wasp.)

As if right on cue, a video of an orb UFO was uploaded recently showing what appears to be an unidentified metallic sphere crossing the sky before landing in a field in an unnamed area in Colombia; the witness followed it to the field before ending the video, to the consternation of social media viewers who were intrigued by the clarity of the orb video and the speed at which it traveled, indicating to some that it was more than a balloon; a drone was also suggested, especially since the orb resembled one seen in a video allegedly recorded in 2016 by a US military spy plane in Iraq. It’s easy to criticize witnesses from your easy chair, but there are many stories of what happened to people who approached UFOs, and they rarely have pleasant endings.

In biblical archeology news, a team of Israeli archaeologists digging at Tel Megiddo found pottery fragments and other artifacts which may prove the existence of the Battle of Megiddo, described in the Second Book of Kings in the Old Testament, where Josiah, the king of Judah, was said to have fought the Battle of Megiddo and was defeated and killed by the army of Egyptian Pharaoh Necho II; the site is also mentioned in the Book of Revelation as "Armageddon", which is similar to the Hebrew phrase "Har Megiddo" or "mountain of Megiddo", which is where the biblical Battle of Armageddon will be fought; the researchers found "significant quantities" of Egyptian-produced broken vessels dating back to the late 7th century BCE, about the time when the Battle of Megiddo was said to have been fought; while some suggest the pottery could have been brought there by traders, the researchers say the  "crude production technique, functional mixture, and the lack of similar evidence in nearby settlements" are signs that the artifacts were brought in by an army. There’s still no proof that the movie ‘Armageddon’ was based on a real trip to blow up an asteroid.

In spontaneous combustion news, Methuseli Moyo, an experienced journalist and educator at Zimbabwe's National University of Science and Technology, says he’s been seeing objects in his home suddenly and mysteriously bursting into flames; he claims the frequency and intensity of the fires increased, but what really scared him was when he felt like he was on fire himself, but the flames were not visible to his family despite his screaming in pain; however, he says “"they pour water on me, and only later do the blisters appear. It's like something invisible is attacking me"; taking inventory, Moyo thinks he’s lost all of his business suits, two leather couches, $20,000 in cash and many legal documents to the mysterious fires; physicist Dr. Thabani Ndlovu was asked to comment and he said that “Spontaneous human combustion is a disputed phenomenon, but targeted fires like this? With no heat damage to surroundings? That defies known science.”; Moyo’s neighbors and social media commentators suggest witchcraft, “avenging spirits” or “government energy weapons”, but he just wants the fires to end. Setting money on fire sounds like the work of a ghost embezzler or bank robber.

While most space aficionados were excited about the recent SpaceX CFram2 mission which became the first ever crewed flight, civilian or government, to orbit over the Earth’s poles for five days, but it was a big disappointment for Flat Earth believers; the Fram2 spacecraft commander was Norwegian film director Jannicke Mikkelsen who recorded images out of the window of the Dragon spacecraft which clearly showed the curvature of the Earth; while some fringe believers were convinced, deep believers blamed the images on CGI or curved lenses. Many people think Flat Earthers would be convinced if they themselves were sent into space, but Flat Earthers are afraid we might not let them come back.