Vatican UFO Files, Nessie Mating Season, Alien Abduction Symptoms, Headbanging Musical Ghosts and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

With the passing of Pope Francis at the age of 88, psychic predictions of his not-so-unexpected demise have been popping up, starting with one from Nostradamus, who wrote: “Through the death of a very old Pontiff / A Roman of good age will be elected / Of him it will be said that he weakens his seat / But long will he sit and in mordant activity” and that “A young man of dark skin with the help of the great king will deliver the purse to another of red color” which suggest the Catholic Church may take a new direction in picking a successor and that person’s long reign means that Francis will be the last pope will be proven wrong. If only we had a movie to explain what’s going to happen AFTER the conclave.

The death of Pope Francis has renewed the call for a new pope who will open the Vatican vaults and share the UFO and alien secrets many believe are stored there, starting with British filmmaker and UFO researcher Mark Christopher Lee, who has claimed the Lee believes the Fatima ‘miracle’ was not a religious vision but a UFO encounter and says, “If the Church is truly committed to spiritual truth and human enlightenment, then it must no longer suppress information that could fundamentally reshape our understanding of our place in the cosmos”. Is there a cardinal from Area 51 who might get elected?

The fine folks at the Black Vault received a response to one of their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (case number 0034F-25) and revealed heavily redacted documents from the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) concerning findings of the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) such as recent drone incursions over restricted military airspace and surveillance activity potentially linked to UAP near sensitive installations; sites with restricted airspace area with much activity included R-5107B at White Sands and WVA near Albany International Airport where drones are prohibited yet there have been many encounters with self-piloted drones operating without GPS-based software; there were also reports of a significant increase in UAP activity over Lake Erie near the Detroit Arsenal. The only thing not “droning on and on” is mainstream media concerning continued sightings and incursions of these mysterious drones in restricted spaces – it’s a good thing we have sites like The Black Vault to keep digging.

If you accept the possibility of panspermia (the idea that a comet or asteroid could bring life to a planet) and the idea of terraforming a planet to make it livable for humans, then you’ll like the abstract presented by Dr. Leszek Czechowski of the Polish Academy of Sciences at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference where he proposes directing certain asteroids from the Kuiper Belt – large icy rocks – using a fusion reactor powering an ion engine to crash them into selected spots on the surface of the Red Planet designated as the best locations for enough icy water, nitrogen and other materials to dramatically increase Mars's atmospheric pressure to a point where it is tolerable for humans to withstand without the constant need for a spacesuit; there are better asteroid candidates in the Oort Cloud but they’re too far away; however, Czechowski believes suitable asteroids can be found, although he doesn’t say how the ion engine can be developed to drive them to Mars. Sometimes the ideas that would make the most boring movies are the ones that make the best practical solutions.

The wispy woman in white walking down a lonely road is a popular ghost story that actually happened to Tex Marshalsey, a taxi driver in Livingston, Scotland, who posted on social media a photograph he took of a "white lady" that he and his passenger witnessed twice walking down Alderstone Road; he described the figure as “wearing a long white dress. Some kind of cloak and a wooden staff and what looked like black and white face paint. I had to go back round again to get a better look and I'm still none the wiser"; fortunately, the ghost reads social media and reveals that she is Louise McBeath, a living local resident who works in Edinburgh as a theatrical ghost tour guide and often walks home on that road in full costume; she says there’s a good reason for it: “It means creeps, ironic I know, will also be more likely to stay away from me as it’s not the safest walking home alone at night. Apologies for scaring anyone!” The only thing scarier than a ‘Lady in White’ is a lady in white who is tired and carrying pepper spray.

An unusually clear UFO photograph making the rounds was purportedly taken in 2023 in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, by professional photographer Sammy Robles during a photo shoot of a sports complex; he admitted the camera was not the kind he would have used for a sky shoot and he didn’t even notice the saucer-shaped UFO until a model pointed to it, saying “It was completely still and very large. It was very strange. We were a little scared, but we decided not to pay any more attention to it at that moment"’; local media outlets used artificial intelligence to analyze the photo, with one saying, “The lighting on the object seems a bit incongruous, which raised suspicions”; an AI-generated image detector showed a 47.83 percent probability that the image was created using artificial intelligence or digital editing, which put a 52.17 percent probability on it being real. If we’re relying on AI instead of our eyes, common sense and science to identify UFOs, we’re truly in big trouble.

The Antikythera mechanism, a rusty artifact found in a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island Antikythera in 1901, is considered by many to be an analog calculator that may be the first computer in history and may have been used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses and track other cyclical events, but a new study by researchers from the National University of Mar del Plata in Argentina proposes that the damaged mechanism never actually worked and the assumptions made about its broken gears were wrong, hiding the fact that it may have been nothing more than a toy or a decoration, not a computer. For real proof, they need to find instructions that say, ”If the mechanism is not working, turn it off and turn it back on again”.

U.S. Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a member of the House Oversight Committee and Chair of its Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets, announced that Oversight Committee members will receive a UAP briefing while sequestered in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) so that they can share classified information with UAP witnesses and members of Congress; this will be followed by a roundtable discussion hosted by the UAP Disclosure Fund; finally, beginning on May 12, 2025, yet another Congressional public hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena will take place; Lue Elizondo, the former head of the pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, is optimistic, saying that “Luna and her colleagues are taking the UAP topic extremely seriously. This should be considered a BIG WIN for disclosure advocates.  I am confident more information will be provided by her team after the meetings”. There is a fine line between revelation and distraction, and we sure could use someone to help us find it.

If you are in the market for a haunted mansion, head to Gardner, Massachusetts, where the 7,000-square-foot estate built in 1875 by furniture magnate Sylvester K. Pierce is up for sale for $1.2 million; that price includes the ghost of Pierce’s wife, Susan, who died just a few weeks after moving in, and the spirits of others who died there under unusual circumstances, including murder victims and Eino Saar, who was an alleged victim of spontaneous human combustion; the S. K. Pierce mansion is considered by many to be one of the most haunted in the U.S. – a boast maintained by the current owners, Rob and Allison Conti, who opened it to the public and allowed a number of paranormal shows to feature it; it’s even furnished so that price is a bargain for the right buyer. Who cares about furniture – let’s hope it has plenty of smoke alarms and fire extinguishers.

If you’re feeling strange but none of your symptoms seem to match up to diseases and maladies on the popular medical websites, The Mirror recently provided a handy list of things that may indicate your problem is that you were abducted by aliens; the six signs on their list, originally supplied by British clairvoyant Philip Kinsella, are: bumps under the skin from alien implants, severe nosebleeds, strange but very real memories, unaccountable periods of time, and unexpected psychic powers. Before jumping to any conclusions, make sure you didn’t eat anything funny at the party last night.

The late Harald Malmgren, a former advisor to presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford, revealed in an interview shortly before his death in February 2025 that he had received fragments of a non-human object directly from Lawrence Gise, director of the Atomic Energy Commission after the secret Bluegill Triple Prime nuclear test conducted at Johnston Atoll during the Cuban Missile Crisis; he said, “It didn't weigh as it should, it didn't feel like anything. It was... strange. It didn't emit heat or cold. It was just there, alien to everything we knew"; he also claimed he had been briefed on “otherworld technologies” like the wreckage retrieval from the Magenta crash in Lombardy, Italy in 1933; he told his daughter Pippa (who worked from President Ford and was a part of the interview) that there had been UFO crash survivors and he was shown a video of the “sole surviving extraterrestrial being” from the Roswell crash; he claimed that JFK knew about UFOs long before becoming president and his desire to collaborate with the Soviet Union on UFOs, space exploration and denuclearization were some of the reasons why he was assassinated. Deathbed confessions are the most frustrating of all – let’s hope Pippa Malmgren has more to reveal. 

Ronald James Kray and Reginald Kray were identical twin gangsters from Haggerston, England, who terrorized the public by committing murder, armed robbery, arson, protection rackets, gambling and assaults from the late 1950s until their arrest in 1968; while they died in 1995 and 2000, singer and psychic Brocarde claims she saw them while shooting a music video at the haunted Gloucester Prison where both had been incarcerated; she claims they were banging their heads against the wall to her new metal song, “Identity Theft”; she says she and her band saw the ghostly apparitions of multiple prisoners during the song and captured them on film, but “it wasn’t until I was back home and lying in bed. I suddenly woke up at 3 am and realized that the familiar faces resembled The Kray Twins”; looking back at the encounter, she mused that "I had an eerie feeling of dread as they are not the kind of spirits that you want to get on the wrong side of, the fact that they were enjoying my music puts me at ease slightly”. Next time she should bring Keith Richards and scare the ghosts back.

We report the passing of Joseph ‘Joe’ Nickell, who called himself “the world’s only full-time professional paranormal investigator” after decades of investigating ghosts and apparitions, the Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot, crop circles, alleged religious miracles and other events; Nickell worked for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, wrote for the Skeptical Inquirer and penned many books on a wide range of paranormal subjects; he honed his interest in the unusual and his investigative skills as a magician and a private investigator for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency; his thorough yet skeptical procedures prompted many to compare Nickell to Dana Scully on ‘The X-Files’; Nickell was 80.

There are studies about how songs bury themselves into one’s head to become an annoying ‘earworm’ and there are so-called ‘earworm erasers’ to help get said songs out of your head, but Hollywood psychic Patti Negri says nothing can prevent Elvis Presley songs from becoming earworms because the King of Rock and Roll told her in a séance that he plants them himself to keep his music ‘alive’ in the memories of people everywhere decades after his death; she says Elvis is happy that he left the building permanently because he no longer has his weight problem since “on the other side you can kind of morph into things” and “he kind of likes not having time and space. He could be here, there and everywhere all at the same time“. Does that mean he can morph into a hound dog? (There’s your earworm for today.)

Armchair Loch Ness monster hunter Eoin O'Faodhagain captured footage from the Visit Inverness Loch Ness (VILN) at Shoreland Lodges near Fort Augustus at the loch's southern end which he believes shows not one but two Nessies, measuring 10 to 12 feet long and 15 to 18 feet long, causing a disturbance that Eoin thinks is a mating dance that might have ended in a baby Nessie but they submerged before he could see anything else; his images are of the standard blurred  kind and not even the red circle helps convince one that these are two Nessies mating; however, that wouldn’t bother Nagina Ishaq, general manager of the Loch Ness Centre, who is tired of seeing AI-generated photos and videos and warns that “Those pictures won’t be entertained” because “It’s our duty to ensure we keep some integrity, instead of promoting anything that’s AI generated to get attention”; she sends all questionable images to the Loch Ness Exploration and the Loch Ness Project where researchers Adrian Shine and Alan MacKenna analyze them and report back; she notes that “We have not seen anyone coming to us with a picture of an actual monster or a plesiosaur”. If you’re looking for a new conspiracy theory, maybe AI was created by cryptids who feared we were getting too close to discovering them.

Jeanne Dixon was one of the most popular American psychics during the 20th century due to her predictions of President John F Kennedy's assassination and President Nixon leaving office before the end of his term, plus her regular newspaper column, and, although she died in 1997, she’s back in the news with some prognostications for 2025 from her 1969 book, “My Life And Prophecies” where she predicted that a war would erupt between China and Russia between 2025 and 2037n because “In the year 2025, Red China will have reached an economic and political stability sufficient to forge ahead and become the Great Conqueror” while “Russia will also have expanded her direct sphere of influence. It will no longer be limited to the countries of Eastern Europe, but will now include Libya, Ethiopia, Iran and much of Africa”. She’d get more coverage these days if her nickname was Baba Jeannie or Nostradixon.

Warren Fink told the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) were driving home in an off-road vehicle on March 24, 2025, near Hoyt, Kansas, when they saw a large figure walking upright along a fence; Fink told BFRO: “As we were proceeding east, I noticed the arm movement and thought maybe it was mechanical. We stopped when we reached the fence line and saw it was an actual Bigfoot. It was very tall, maybe 7 ½ to 8 ½ feet, coned head, covered in black hair, and long swinging arms. It continued over the hill and turned in mid-walk and looked back at us. As it proceeded over the hill, I hollered at it to try to make it stop, but it just kept walking at the same pace”; BFRO investigators went to the location with Fink and called it a “very credible Class A dusk sighting”, although Fink and his friend had no photos of the creature. For some good depictions of Bigfoot, head to Seattle, Washington, where local muralist ‘Henry’ is on a mission to paint 1,000 Sasquatch heads on public surfaces all around the city; Henry says, "I am going to paint a thousand Sasquatch heads on people's garage doors, sides of their houses, sides of businesses, any public facing surface. I will pretty much go anywhere. I think anyone should sign up. It's a big number. It's a lot. I'm doing it for free or a suggested donation. I just want to include everybody"; he thinks he can paint 10 Sasquatch heads a day, so he’ll be done by the end of 2025. You can register at Henry’s website, although any Bigfoot wanting a personal portrait might want to contact him directly.