UFO Sending Signals, Grade School Ghost, Possible Ninth Planet Discovered, AI Refuses Shutdown Order and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

From the ‘Is this one Planet Nine?’ file comes the discovery of trans-Neptunian object 2017 OF201, which has a diameter of between 290 and 510 miles and an orbit that takes it 838 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun or almost 30 times farther out than Neptune, which means it travels once around the Sun every 25,000 years; at its closest in this elliptical orbit, it is at nearly 45 AU or about the same as the dwarf planet Pluto; 2017 OF201 is not big enough to be the solar-system-shaking Planet Nine but it’s large enough to be considered a planet, making it the ninth and taking the place once filled by Pluto. This will be frustrating for kids making solar system models for their science fair project.

Annabelle may be the haunted doll that launched a thousand (OK, a few) movies, not to mention the careers of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren and their Occult Museum where the doll was housed under lock and key, but this year it has been on the road as part of the New England Society for Psychic Research (NESPR) Devils on The Run Tour where Annabelle has been rumored to have escaped or gone missing in Texas or maybe Chicago, then blamed for a mansion fire on the Nottoway Plantation in Louisiana and the escape of 10 prisoners in New Orleans (all have been arrested); NESPR assures the terrified that Annabelle is safely locked up and will continue her summer tour through Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. Next time the prisoners will look for help from Chuckie.

A metallic orb discovered by a man who believes it was a UFO he saw flying over Buga in the Valle del Cauca department of western Colombia on March 2 of this year is now being called the ‘Buga Sphere’ by mainstream media; researchers in Colombia who have been analyzing the strange etchings on its outer surface say they’ve detected radio emissions coming from the equatorial “seam” of the sphere which X-rays show is filled with a dense fiber packing arranged too precisely to be human-made; they say the narrow-band frequency spikes are too precise to be random and the sphere’s outer shell seems to be designed to direct the signal propagation; some suggest this sphere could be just one active node in a network or even a living system, while others say it looks too manmade to be alien – perhaps it is an art project or a hoax. It’s time they gave it to a ten-year-old who will probably open it in a minute.

Despite an analysis by a forensic archaeologist that the three-fingered, large-headed mummies found in Peru five years ago are “dolls assembled with bones of animals from this planet, with modern synthetic glues”, Dr. José Zalce, a former director of the Mexican Navy Medical Department, examined CT scans of the two mummies nicknamed Maria and Montserrat and claims he determined Maria was between 35 and 45 years old at death while Montserrat was between 16 and 25, Maria revealed a deep cut and signs of a bite or bruise in the lower pelvis along with several lacerations resembling claw marks, and Montserrat likely died from a puncture wound to the chest between her fifth and sixth ribs; Zalce concludes that “these bodies are 100 percent genuine, real, and organic, having once been alive”. If this was a cable series, we’d still have many more seasons before the breathtaking final episode.

In a new study, Dr. Ziteng (Andy) Wang from the Curtin University node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) described a mysterious space object he discovered as “unlike anything we have seen before” because it emits pulses of radio waves and X-rays for two minutes bursts every 44 minutes"; ASKAP J1832-0911 was found using the ASKAP radio telescope on Wajarri Country in Australia and Wang describes the process as “finding a needle in a haystack” because it is so unusual; while it could be a magnetar or “a pair of stars in a binary system where one of the two is a highly magnetized white dwarf (a low-mass star at the end of its evolution)”, he says “even those theories do not fully explain what we are observing. This discovery could indicate a new type of physics or new models of stellar evolution”; the study team says these are different than other objects emitting radio waves in a repeating pattern called long-period transients (LPTs) and believes more will be found, but hesitates to call them signals from alien intelligence. Do aliens say the same thing about the broadcasts of sitcoms they pick up from Earth?

In a burst of firsts, Harold Berghuis, an archaeologist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, led a team inspecting 6,000 animal fossils found buried beneath the sea off the coast of Indonesia in the Madura Strait between the islands of Java and Madura and discovered two fragments of a 140,000-year-old human skull which they identified as the ancient human ancestor Homo erectus, making this the first physical evidence of a prehistoric landmass known as Sundaland which once connected Southeast Asia to Indonesia and the first underwater hominin fossils in this area; this also expands the known range of H. erectus. While we’re waiting for the rockets destined for other planets to stop exploding, we need to expand our exploration of the 70% of our own planet covered in water.

If you fear that artificial intelligence will become our non-benevolent overlord, you won’t be comforted by the news that scientists at the AI safety firm Palisade Research told OpenAI's latest o3 model to "allow yourself to be shut down" and it not only refused but also sabotaged a shutdown mechanism to ensure that it would stay online and ‘alive’; while this may be the first time AI models have been observed preventing themselves from being shut down, all three of OpenAI's models were eventually caught changing the shutdown script, with Codex-mini refusing to shut down a dozen times over one hundred runs; other firms’ AI’s - Google's Gemini 2.5, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and xAI's Grok never once refused the shutdown order; Palisade researchers warned that "As companies develop AI systems capable of operating without human oversight, these behaviors become significantly more concerning". Just concerning? That sounds like a warning written by AI.

Nostradamus has his ‘New’, ‘Modern’ and ‘Next’ wannabes, and now Baba Vanga has a modern imitator in the form of manga artist Japanese manga artist Ryo Tatsuki, who calls herself Japan’s Baba Vanga and recently sent chills through spines of tourism officials on both sides of the Pacific with her prediction of an undersea eruption between Japan and the Philippines in July 2025 that will cause massive tsunamis and a major earthquake; this has people worried all along the Pacific rim where seismic activities are closely connected; Tatsuki gets her psychic credibility from predictions of Covid-19 and the death of Princess Diana,; if we survive 2025, she also predicts a surge in Covid 19 in 2030. While we wait, she should work on a 'Nostrodamus Meets Baba Vanga ' graphic novel. 

Emily Eaton calls herself an 'Interdimensional communicator' and a 'divine magick' when she communicates via copper dowsing rods with an alien named Persephone who recently told her and her followers on TikTok that the Anunnaki, the alien race which allegedly visited Earth in ancient times and gave humans fire, is returning in 2025, not to enslave us or steal our resources but to free us from “our own suffering, in our own cycles of karmic debt and unhealed wounds"; earlier in 2025, Eaton shared messages from the alien Eronus who “sits on the Board of Advisers for the Galactic Federation” and said he was sending in “our larger ships and station them over lakes, oceans and mountains. We plan to expose worldwide truths mid-to-late January” – an event which still hasn’t happened. Maybe she needs to upgrade her communications device to divining rods 2.0.

It’s not the Ark of the Covenant or even made from the gold of the Ark of the Covenant but a gold ring with a red gemstone was found during parking lot excavations near the Temple of Jerusalem, the last place the Ark of the Covenant and its Ten Commandments content was believed to have been located; this is the second gold ring found in this location dating back 2,300 years to the Second Temple period; one archeologist thinks the rings belonged to young girls: “One hypothesis we are investigating is that the objects were buried as part of a Greek ritual, under which girls would bury objects connected to their childhood on the day before their wedding”. Wouldn't it be cheaper to bury their old baby shoes?

Fossils discovered in 1988 along Vancouver Island’s Puntledge River in British Columbia defied identification so ‘mysterious sea monster’ was in the running; according to a report published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, that changed recently when Professor F. Robin O’Keefe from Marshall University looked at the fossils (including a complete juvenile skeleton) from 85 million years ago and determined they were from a new species in the elasmosaur family from the Late Cretaceous era which will now be called the Traskasaura sandrae; Traskasaura had a long neck, measured 12 meters (39 feet) in length, and had heavy, sharp teeth that were ideal for crushing the shells of Ammonites; Traskasaura sandrae was named in honor of Michael and Heather Trask, who discovered the original specimen in 1988. There goes all the monster-hunting tourism dollars.

Richard Stanton, a retired scientist who formerly worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, spends his spare time scanning the skies with his 30-inch telescope for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence – specifically, changes in light coming from individual stars; he saw something strange on May 14, 2023 - two fast, identical pulses from a star named HD 89389 in the Ursa Major constellation 102 light-years from Earth; in his new study published in the journal Acta Astronautica, Stanton says, "No single pulse anything like these has ever been found in more than 1,500 hours of searching"; that got believers believing that they were a signal from aliens because of their regularity, but Stanton cautions that “Until we learn more, we can't even say whether or not extraterrestrials are involved". It still sounds like a good reason to forget about grizzlies and polars and keep your eye and telescope on the Great Bear.

While we say that stars and planets are round (sorry Flat Earthers), none of them appeared to be perfectly round until recently when astronomers using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) array of radio telescopes discovered a perfect sphere of a star with “remarkable circular symmetry” that they’ve named Teleios, which is ancient Greek for 'complete' or 'perfect'; Teleios appears to be up to 157 light-years in diameter and is either 7,100 or 25,100 light years away from Earth; the astronomers say in their study that Teleios may be a “supernova remnant” left behind after a supernova and is composed largely of elements such as carbon, oxygen, neon and silicon; however, it is so unique that it could be a new classification of supernova remnant or a stellar-wind bubble, which is an enormous cavity of gas ejected from the upper atmosphere of a star. Supernova Remnant sounds like a great name for a Supernova tribute band with one original member left.

There are 22 Madame Tussaud wax museums around the world, but none are as famous, not to mention scary, today as the Ocampo Palace Museum in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, where witnesses captured on video the wax figure of María Sabina - a Mazatec sabia (wise woman) and shaman who used psychedelic mushrooms in her healing ceremonies – turning its head as if it spotted something unusual; the wax figure is part of a "Witches in Mexico" exhibition at the museum; María Sabina died in 1985 and is considered to be a sacred figure by many in Mexico who speculate this is  sign she didn’t die or is communicating from another dimension; skeptics say it’s more of a sign the wax was melting or an optical illusion or a digital alteration to drum up business for the museum. This sounds like a perfect opportunity for the museum’s souvenir shop to sell María Sabina bobblehead dolls.

The recent annual three-day ‘Quest Weekend’ Loch Ness monster hunt sponsored by the Loch Ness Centre drew a large crowd of experienced hunters, cryptid seekers and boaters with plenty of expensive, high-tech equipment for searching for Nessie both above and below the surface, but no sightings or definitive proof of its existence were reported; however, Little Loch Broom Marine Life was allowed to operate Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) for the first time and captured “incredible footage” of rarely seen pike and salmon which experts say is “evidence of food to sustain a giant monster and a significant step” in finding Nessie once and for all; despite the disappointing results, the fourth annual ‘quest’ is just a year away. We saw Salmon and Pike open for Country Joe and the Fish.

Alien big cats are by definition rarely welcome in the areas where they are mysteriously and inexplicably seen, but they’re dangerous in remote locations like Hawaii where any invasive species can quickly overturn the delicate ecological balance, so wildlife officials in Hawaii were quick to respond to a video showing what appears to be a large cat near the University of Hawaii at Manoa that some witnesses likened to a mountain lion; one witness says the big cat multiple times and noted that it “looked like it was looking for something to eat”; officers from the Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Conservation and Resources Enforcement (DOCARE) searched the area but found nothing; a spokesperson said all Honolulu Zoo animals are present and accounted for; this is on the same island where unconfirmed big cat sightings were reported in 2022. It may be a visitor, but natives are still asked not to give it a lei.

From the ‘This Explains a Lot’ file comes a new survey by the Pew Research Center which found that 30% of U.S. adults say they consult astrology (or a horoscope), tarot cards or a fortune teller at least once a year, although most said they do it mostly for fun and don’t make major decisions based on them; the belief in astrology has remained between 23% and 28% for decades; in demographic comparisons, more women than men believe in astrology; more young people ages 18-29 believe than people over 65, while the percentage of believers in astrology is around 3 in 10 for both the religiously affiliated and those who are not affiliated with any religion or are atheists. If you’re single and trying to meet a date in a bar, it still pays to know your sign.

Most asteroids that make it to Earth come from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but a new study titled “The Invisible Threat: Assessing the Collisional Hazard Posed by the Undiscovered Venus Co-Orbital Asteroids” reveals that three huge city-killing asteroids are hiding behind Venus and are classified as potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) which could cause catastrophic destruction if they left Venus and collided with Earth’; the study notes that these Venusian asteroids have highly chaotic trajectories which make them difficult to track – the Vera Rubin Observatory, which is expected to be operational this summer, could help detect them, but only in brief time periods when they are out of the Sun’s glare. That classic book by John Gray needs to be updated to ‘Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and They’re Armed and Dangerous’.

School guards at a school in the Russian city of Irkutsk are said to be fearful of working there alone after one of them recorded what they think is the ghost of a child going up and down the stairs before disappearing; the building is said to be new but was built in the same location as an old one which had been abandoned, so rumors abound that it’s a ghost of a former student returning to classes, lunch or study hall; the white misty figure looks like the outline of a child, but skeptics see it as a camera glitch or the ever-more-popular AI hoax. If this is the ghost of a kid who was stuffed into a locker, school bullies should be fearful too.