Colorado River Bigfoot, Holy Grail in England, Argentine Cattle Mutilations, Alien Mothership in Mexico and More Mysterious News Briefly

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

A video showing what was described as a “Potential mothership between Villa Nueva and Milpas Altas” flying over the southern Valley of Guatemala City was submitted by witness Mynor Melgar to local media, which reported that the object was also seen in Bárcena and surrounding areas of Villa Nueva; Melgar sent the video to local “aerial phenomenon researcher” Paulo de León said the object did not display characteristics of a conventional aircraft and called it a “mothership” flying “on the Heart of Water Mountain” for several minutes before disappearing; in 2011, the minister of tourism for the Mexican state of Campeche talked about “landing pads in the jungle that are 3,000 years old” and contact “between the Mayans and extraterrestrials, supported by translations of certain codices, which the government has kept secure in underground vaults for some time”. Has anyone considered showing the video to the descendants of the Mayans?

British filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee claims he has evidence that the mythical Holy Grail cup is buried near St.  Albans in England where it arrived on a circuitous journey that began when Joseph of Arimathea received it after the burial of Jesus, then moved to the Crusades when the Knights Templar found it on Temple Mount, snuck it out and hid it until it ended up in the hands of Sir Francis Bacon, who is buried in St. Michael’s Church in St Albans but not with the Grail – Lee claims the relic is buried in a long-forgotten Templar grave in St. Albans which he discovered and is keeping secret until he has permission to exhume the knight and the Grail; coincidentally, Lee is also promoting his new fictional film, “The Last Grail Hunter”. Monty Python and Indiana Jones anxiously await the next news release from St. Albans.

A witness in Massillon, Ohio, (an hour south of Cleveland) sent a video to The National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) of a pulsating orb they saw “moving across the sky above me"; the witness zoomed in and saw it was “a solid ball and it’s changing colors rapidly", going "from red to yellow to blue to purple to white to teal" in a minute while keeping a "whitish/yellow haze around it; its estimated speed was "Slower than a plane would normally fly”; NUFORC notes that the International Space Station was visible for about six minutes on the same night at about the same time. The challenge to identify objects gets greater every time another satellite is launched – is it a cover for secret government aircraft or the aliens themselves?

The Colorado raft tour company Colorado River Expeditions uploaded a video from its "first river trip of the season" which it and the guides who took it claim it shows " real footage of Bigfoot on the Upper Colorado River"; they say it is “No CGI. No fakes. Just wilderness and raw footage” of something they heard rustling on a hillside before locating it with a camera and following what appears to be a bipedal creature appear to look back at them; the video got the usual comments from Bigfoot believers despite its blurred visage of the creature, but skeptics think it looks more like a marketing ploy by the raft company despite its claims to the contrary.  Someday the costumes will catch up with the cameras and then we’ll be in big trouble.

There have been unexplained cattle adductions and cattle mutilations, but a ranching couple in Fremont County, Colorado, experienced a new mystery – they found 15 of their cattle dead on the ground in a single day from what looked like some kind of seizure; their local veterinarian and county sheriff investigated noxious weeds and the possibility of brain swelling due to sulfate poisoning from a nearby oil well and found nothing; the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC) were called in by Kerri Higgs and her husband to test for gasses and soil contamination in the pasture since cows in other pastures were unaffected but have no results yet; the dead cattle included 13 first-time heifers, one steer and one yearling, leaving 15 calves (13 now motherless), two heifers with calves, two pregnant heifers, a bull and 7 yearlings.  No one is saying ‘aliens’ just yet, but these unsolved cattle mysteries are to western ranchers what unexplained drones are to concerned coastal residents.

Regular cattle mutilations are considered mysterious because of their similarities in cases around the world, as exemplified by a recent report from Nelson Billordo, a cattle rancher in  Santillán, Argentina, whose young ranch hand found a cow that looked “as if its face had been ripped off"; Billordo told local media he had never seen anything like this, saying: "They removed its tongue and eye; it was cauterized and wasn't bleeding anywhere"; he said there was no foul odor but no scavengers had touched the dead animal; he decided that “a normal person wouldn't do this", especially at such a remote ranch, so he’s considering the possibility of aliens, saying “It's either believe it or burst" because “there is talk of UFO cases, this is not something normal". No cattle mutilations, abductions or mysterious deaths are normal – is it time to combine the Departments of Agriculture and the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office?

For the first time, the scientific journal Progress in Aerospace Sciences has published a detailed academic study on Unidentified Underwater Aerospace Phenomena (UAPs) or UFOs titled “The New Science of Unidentified Aerospace and Undersea Phenomena”; the research was led by Dr. Kevin H. Knuth, a former NASA research physicist and current professor of physics at the University at Albany (SUNY), and investigates 20 historical studies by governments or private researchers between 1933 and 2025 in the U.S., Canada, France, Russia, and China; its objective is “to clarify the existing global and historical scientific narrative around UAP” in many countries besides the U.S., and to show that UAP have been  scientifically investigated; it concludes that “UAPs are not taken seriously because they are not studied seriously by trained academic scientists; but UAPs are not studied seriously by academic scientists because they are not considered a serious topic for study!” and says that “only well-funded, transgenerational university research can” change this. Amen!

In an effort to show to extraterrestrials that we are not only intelligent but also cultured, the European Space Agency (ESA) sent a recording of Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz to NASA’s Voyager 1 probe using the deep-space antenna in Cebreros, Spain; the 15-minute recording by the Vienna Symphony Orchestra was selected in honor of 200th birthday of Strauss, while the transmission celebrates the 50th anniversary of the birth of the ESA; ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz was also selected because of its iconic use in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey', and on an episode of ‘The Simpsons’ where Homer floats in the Space Shuttle; Voyager 1 is currently more than 15.4 billion miles (24.8 billion km) from Earth. Let’s hope the aliens respond with, “That was nice – now send some Bowie”.

The Nazca Lines – the estimated 700 geoglyphs in the Nazca Desert of southern Peru – are thought to be a national treasure of that country, but that may no longer be true with the news that the country no longer designates this zone as an archaeological heritage and Energy and Mines Minister Jorge Montero is opening up 42% of it to mining activities; Peruvian environmental lawyer Cesar Ipenza said “mining petitions have already started to appear” and will create huge environmental impacts, but Culture Minister Fabricio Valencia responded that the decision was based on “over 20 years of rigorous studies” but although the mining was taking place within the Nazca reserve, the UNESCO World Heritage site that contains the Nazca Lines themselves will not be affected. Once again, the desire for money is why we the public can’t have nice things.

While federal politicians, the Pentagon and UFO researchers continue to argue over the release of U.S. government records on UFO sightings, the government of Brazil released chronological documents on 893 sightings in that country from the years 1952 to 2023; the National Archives says this is an unevaluated case collection of UFO sighting reports and gives no information on what officials might think they are; the files were originally scheduled for release on June 13, 2025, and the early release surprised many; the files can be viewed at the SIAN (Sistema de Informação do Arquivo Nacional) website with a regular account or a new one; the documents are mostly in Portuguese but the site itself can be viewed in Brazilian, Portuguese or English, and can be viewed by non-Brazilians who must simply list themselves as “foreigners”; the site can be searched and new sightings can be added via email. What are you waiting for, Washington?

It is 2025 and it’s about time laws banning fortune-telling are repealed, so Pennsylvania State Rep. Greg Scott is working to repeal an 1860 (really!) law against tarot reading and other forms of fortune-telling in the Keystone State; the law prohibits charging money for predicting the future “by cards, tokens, the inspection of the head or hands of any person, or by the age of anyone, or by consulting the movements of the heavenly bodies, or in any other manner”; it also bans selling love potions, spells, or charms, prohibits astrology, palmistry, tarot, and other forms of soothsaying, and bans the sale of "love powders or potions" and lucky charms of the non-cereal kind; if it is repealed, Pennsylvania will join West Virginia, Virginia, and Michigan cities in legalizing the popular practices. Does anyone in another state have a legal prediction of the outcome?

The U.S. government is not lacking in conspiracy theory promoters, but former official Catherine Austin Fitts, who served as the US Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Housing in the George H.W. Bush administration, revealed her big one on a podcast recently when she said that world leaders “are over-influenced by the occult” and are puppets controlled by an “interdimensional intelligence, which is operating demonic intelligence”; she calls this group “Mr. Global” and claims it controls the public through mind control; she also believes it manipulates global financial systems with robotics, artificial intelligence, satellite systems and central bank digital currencies; Fitts referenced longtime Mysterious Universe writer Nick Redfern and his book, “Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife” to support her claims that “the whole UFO phenomenon is like this biblical thing, how it's angels and demons” and “I think we are dealing with demonic and angelic forces in our world. And that's interdimensional intelligence”. Where is Aleister Crowley when we need him?

For those who are losing faith in the benefits of college education, we present Corinne Hazel, an environmental microbiology major at West Virginia University in Morgantown, who recently discovered an unusual fungus growing on morning glories in the area; the morning glories contain chemicals called ergot alkaloids made by the fungi and are in the same class that Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann used to create LSD from the fungus Claviceps purpurea which is found on rye; Indigenous Mesoamerican cultures knew Ipomoea tricolor or Mexican morning glories have psychoactive properties; Hazel and her partner, Daniel Panaccione, collected a DNA sample from the fungus which was confirmed to be a new psychedelic species, which they named Periglandula clandestine; the results of their research are published in the journal Mycologia. Magic Morning Glories has a nice ring to it.

The Dead Sea Scrolls have long been believed to have been written between the third century BCE and the second century CE, but exact dates have been elusive until recently when researchers led by the University of Groningen developed an AI date-prediction model called Enoch which used radiocarbon dating to accurately date their origins, then combined the data with a previously-developed AI neural network called BiNet to study the handwriting styles of each document, including the ink-trace patterns; the carbon dating  showed that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls date back to the fourth century BCE, making them older than previously thought, and the handwriting AI determined that two scroll fragments come from the time of their presumed biblical authors; the study, published in the journal PLOS One, determined that fragments 4QDanielc (4Q114) and 4QQoheleta (4Q109) of the Book of Daniel date to the time of their presumed authors in the early 160s BCE; they also found that Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) was written by an anonymous author from the Hellenistic period (third century BCE) instead of the commonly believed view that it was by King Solomon from the tenth century BCE. Like the Scrolls, we have but a fragment of the real history of these and other religious books.

The Fermi Paradox questions why we haven’t encountered aliens when there are so many habitable planets in the universe, so a new study tries to answer it by taking a second look at something called the “Sustainability Solution” which was first proposed by Pennsylvania State University scientists Jacob Haqq-Misra and Seth Baum in 2009 and suggests that intelligent extraterrestrials have figured out that the economic growth needed to explore a galaxy is impossible to sustain so instead they create sustainable civilizations on their home planets or they die out; in the new study, New York University researcher and philosopher Lukáš Likavčan re-conceptualizes technology, history, and sustainability on a planetary scale and proposes that a civilization like ours will eventually “fold back into the biosphere” by creating biological technologies that will help it remain in balance with finite or diminishing resources; while we look on other planets for technological signatures of advanced civilizations, these biological signatures are dismissed as primitive – but the “Sustainability Solution” says they’re not. It makes for boring sci-fi movies, but it could be the solution we need.

There are no camels in Antarctica” is the starting point for a new search for intelligent extraterrestrial life by focusing on life forms on Earth like microorganisms that live and thrive in seemingly hostile environments (like Antarctica) where larger creatures (like camels) can’t exist; led by Daniel Apai, an astrophysicist and astrobiologist at the University of Arizona, they determined that once-celled methanogens, one of the oldest forms of life, had a 69% chance for ‘habitat sustainability’ on the exoplanet TRAPPIST-1e or one like it; methanogens had about a 50-50 chance of surviving just below the surface of Mars or in the oceans of Jupiter’s moon, while cyanobacteria, better known as blue-green algae, had a habitat suitability of between 13% and 80% on TRAPPIST-1e; Apai’s team is building a database of Earth creatures that live in extreme environments, including insects and other larger life forms, to develop new biological signatures to search for other planets. Again, it makes for boring sci-fi movies but are we interested in blockbusters or theory busters?

Trucks are beloved by drivers around the world for their power, versatility and image, but one in Thailand may have trouble finding a new owner after it began acting like it was haunted; the Mueang Kalasin Police Station received a call recently about a “haunted truck” driving around in circles with no human in control of it; the truck had been parked on the side of the road on a foggy night by a construction crew while they worked nearby when it was hit from behind by a car driven by Piyaratch Keopanya; witnesses told local media the truck suddenly fired up and drove around in circles for ten minutes, causing the workers to run away fear it was possessed; by the time the cops arrived the ruck had stopped and, if there was some sort of spirit driving it, it had also fled; the only other scary thing was the argument between the driver of the car and the owner of the truck over who was responsible and who would pay for damages. At least the construction workers were working at the time.

And finally, if you’ve ever wondered how big of a meatball you could make using all of the humans currently living on Earth (and who hasn’t), an unnamed mathematician posted on Reddit that the answer is: 7.88 billion people ground into human meat would make a meatball a mere 0.6 miles (one km) in diameter – that would make it about 2.5 times as tall as New York's Empire State Building or three times as tall as Paris' Eiffel Tower; if you want to check the figures, he assumed the average human body mass is 62 kg (136.6 pounds) with a density of 985 kilograms per cubic meter; then, “If you blended all 7.88 billion people on Earth into a fine goo (density of a human = 985 kg/m3, average human body mass = 62 kg), you would end up with a sphere of human goo just under 1 km wide”; the mathematician added an AI image of the meatball in New York’s Central Park. How much marinara sauce would you need to cover it? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?