UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

When looking at sightings reports of strange creatures and mysterious entities every so once in a while one comes across something that just seems to exist out in its own sphere of bizarreness, something so incredibly odd that it falls outside of any known category and which leave us utterly baffled. I have covered extremely bizarre cryptids of all shapes and sizes here at Mysterious Universe before, on more than one occasion in fact, as well as very unusual entities that are thought to be aliens, but at other times there is just no real classification to put some reports in, and it is not immediately clear if we are supposed to be dealing with a mystery animal, a ghost, a demon, and inter dimensional being, or what. These cases swirl about there on the outer edges of strangeness, seeming to defy us and challenge us to try and make sense of them. Here I bring you a selection of out there reports concerning humanoid creatures that lie squarely entrenched in the realm of the truly unexplained. From deer-headed men, to bizarre stick figures, to other less definable things and more, here are some of the weirdest.

One very odd humanoid creature of some sort that has been reported is what appears to be some sort of deer men, with various truly bizarre sightings of such creatures from all over the United States. One account was made in northeast Ohio by a witness who claims that he was at his cousin’s house playing hide and seek outside on day when he was 14 years old. It was reportedly around dusk, and they were playing near a wooded creek when it was the witnesses turn to search, and as he did he claims that he heard the sound of leaves crackling under foot. He turned to look expecting to see his cousin, but instead saw a deer through the brush that appeared to be oddly standing up on its hind legs, unusual for a deer but which would prove to be even stranger than that. The report reads:

It was getting dark and I was the one searching. I heard leaves crumpling, and when I turned to look, I saw what looked like a deer on its hind legs. I clearly remember seeing “dog legs” running, but the rest of the body was straight up. And it ran with incredible speed, and I knew it wasn’t either of my cousins hiding. I ran as fast as I could back to the house, and my one of my cousins was running in too, he saw the same thing. It still creeps me out to this day, because my uncle always told us how he saw weird things on that property.

A sighting of a similar creature that appears to have also had the ability of shapeshifting was made in the state of Delaware in 1993. The witness claims that he was around 8 years old at the time and he had been staying with his family at his grandparents’ house in a rural, forested area near the town of Hockessin. One morning he says he woke to a clear day with the sun shining in through the window and also the surreal sight of the silhouette of a deer with a huge rack of antlers standing just outside. Things would get bizarre rapidly, and the witness says of what happened next thus:

It was RIGHT there, like almost pressed against the window in profile. I stared in awe.
And that is when it changed. In one smooth movement, it reared up on its hind legs and it was no longer a deer, but a man. There were only two men in the area, my grandfather and my dad, and it was clearly neither (not sure if that made it better or worse). Grandfather was very built for his age, dad had a gut. This silhouette was clearly younger, muscular but not in the “like a brick” way my grandfather was. It exuded strength. And scared the hell out of me. It stared to the side for a moment, and then strode off with purpose. Looking back, I want to tell myself it was just the imagination of a half-awake child, but I remember the awe and the utter fear I felt when the “deer” changed.

Yet another Deer Man sighting was made as recently as 2012, in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma. In this account, a Kyle Heying claims that he was out at the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge in order to take photographs of the night sky there with a friend. On this evening at around 10 PM, the usual sounds of the forest suddenly became muted and the local wildlife started to display some decidedly bizarre and uncharecteristic behavior. First some elk came running by and then a herd of bison, which all came uncomfortably close before hurrying off, and it seemed almost as if these animals were trying to get away from something scaring them out in the dark forest beyond.

This was enough to spook the men into packing up their stuff and calling it a night, and as they did they allegedly felt a strange change in air pressure and all of the sounds of the woods just stopped to send a profound silence crashing down upon them. The two unsettled men then heard something rustling about out in some tall grass nearby, jarring in the otherwise void of silence that had blanketed the area, and it seemed like whatever it was was coming towards them. Haying claims that he and his friends had then picked up some rifles they had with them, wary of what was apparently approaching. They started the car and began to drive off when they saw something step out in front of the vehicle that they would never forget, a creature which Heying described as having a head like an elk but which stood upright on two human legs and which had two human arms and “dark red” eyes. As they passed it, the nightmarish creature lurched forward to hit the car, and Heying floored it away as fast as the vehicle would go until they were about 3 miles away, where they stopped their flight to regain their wits. Heying would say of what happened next thus:

We were scared shitless. Things got even quieter when we stayed there. While there we heard one ear-piercing screech or scream, almost a hunting screech of some sort that made my hair stand on end and gave me goose bumps even worse. With that we left the mountains completely, we felt as though we were not wanted there that night. The way the wildlife acted, the figure that we came across that the animals had to have ran from, and then the scream of which I can only find references to happens to be the Banshee. I cannot forget that figure we saw, as well as the scream. It was not human but it was not of any wildlife I am familiar with from out there.

What in the world could possibly account for what these witnesses saw? Just what kind of creature could these things possibly be and are any of these accounts connected in any way? No one knows. Deer men are not even the strangest of humanoid creatures to have been reported, and we’re just getting started. In summer of 2012 there was a head-scratching sighting near Washington Park, near Michigan City, Indiana, that is really hard to classify.

The witness claims that she had been staying at the beach house of a friend by Lake Michigan and that there had been a lightning storm at the time. At around 2 AM some of them went outside to smoke and watch the lightning, and that was when they noticed the beam of a flashlight scanning the tall grass by the shore nearby as if searching for something. Thinking this to be a bit odd, the group of friends watched on and saw that the beam had captured an elongated, grayish humanoid looking creature stretched out on the beach, and the witness would say:

The light sweeps by something in the grass, then it shines back onto it. What was illuminated was very strange. It appeared to be a naked guy crawling around on the grass. Although, it had elongated arms and legs. It was moving kinda fast crunched over. It only lasted a few seconds, long enough for all of us to see it. Then, after the thing ran off, the flashlight shines directly at us. It stayed pointing at us until it went out after a few seconds. Creepy.
So, were all like WTF was that, we ask asked what each other saw. We all seen a weird stretched out naked guy. The only explainable thing it could have possibly been was a drunk gangly naked guy. But, I don’t think so because it looked abnormally stretched, the light pointed at us, and it freaked everyone out. It was something strange. I can’t say what the height of it was accurately, maybe around 7ft tall. My husband said it looked like something from a Marilyn Manson music video.I wanted to go down there. I wanted to see if we could find it. But, no one would go and they were creeped out and wanted to go back inside.

What on earth was the outlandish thing they saw? What was with that flashlight and why did it train itself on the observers of this surreal scene? Who knows? In August of 2017 there was a series of sightings of a very strange humanoid figure on a farm near Boca Raton, Florida. The witness, who originally posted his experience on Reddit, says that on the 14th he saw something very unusual one evening at dusk as he was eating dinner and staring out over the property. He said that a very tall, grey colored humanoid that looked like the character “Gumby” lurched out of the tree line, took a few steps, and then went back into the forest lining the property. The witness says:

It was flat but its legs bended in a way that looked like a plank bending. Like how a piece of wood bows when weight is put on it but springs back up when the weight is taken off. Its body, from where I could see it, was rigid. It didn’t look flexible aside from the legs and the limbs were fairly wide
The next night, at the same time, the same exact thing happened except my parents were with me. It walked on two legs but it was more like lunges or arching steps than human walking. I asked them if they saw that and they just said “saw what?”
Then it happened AGAIN the third night. So either my body is giving me random hallucinations in sync with my body’s time clock or there’s some weird Slendergumby demon living on the farm behind my house. I haven’t been home much recently so I haven’t been able to look for it again but if I’m able to. I haven’t seen whatever it was since those three times and was unable to get a photo of it due to how far away it was. This was in the middle of a very populated city so seeing something this outlandish in a human heavy area was quite strange.

If none of these are weird enough for you, then how about the disturbing number of reports of stick figures seen lurking in rural and deserted areas of the world? When I say stick figure I don’t mean simply something that is elongated and thin, but rather literally a stick figure, as if something a child might draw. This is what some people have apparently been sighting since at least 2008, and they are deeply bizarre to say the least. The Stick Figures are typically described as just that, tall and extremely thin dark beings with no discernible facial features and which move smoothly and fluidly, with some reports saying that they do not change dimensions no matter what angle they are observed from, as if they are actually 2D constructs, and others mentioning air pressure changes, static electricity, and a feeling of malevolence in their presence.

The tales of these creatures certainly have an urban legend vibe to them, but are nevertheless numerous enough across the Internet to deserve mention. One early account from a man named Simon Howes seems to originate from all the way back in 1982, when a witness says he was studying to be a nurse at Warley Hospital, Brentwood in Essex, England, where he saw what can only be described as a stick figure while he was walking home one night. The witness says:

I encountered a ‘stick person’ in the grounds of the Hospital as I was walking home one night. It lopped across the roadway having been, seemingly, pressed up against a wall. It stopped when it saw me and raised it’s arms in fright and quickly walked off into the undergrowth. It was very tall with very thin, extremely long arms and legs and a very small oval head. Totally black and no obvious clothing. I saw no face even though it emerged very near a street lamp and so was well illuminated. I was terrified and to this day, no-one believes me.

Another such report comes from a witness named Damien Castellione, who claims that his sister and cousin saw one of the creatures when she was a kid at their aunt’s funeral. The witness says:

You know my sister told me that she saw a stick man too when she was a kid. back then it was our aunt’s funeral and she was sitting outside the funeral when she noticed a strange “stick like person” walking back and forth above the electric wiring of the pole in front of the funeral that is (she is more or less 10 walking distance away from the pole). She got really frightened and she told our cousin to look at it, at first our cousin didn’t believe her but after a few minutes she saw the stick man too and both of them got terrified they told our cousin’s mom if she saw the stickman and she said no. it took several hours, it was noon – until dawn before it faded away. she told the story to me and I had doubts but when I saw this article I was like.. wow I never thought a lot of people saw a stickmen too from around the world.

Some of these unearthly creatures have even been apparently photographed, although the quality of this evidence leaves much to be desired. Such reports have actually pored in from all corners of the globe, and it seems to be a phenomenon for which there is no clear answer. Is this just an urban legend in the making? If these stick-like figures are actually real then what could they possibly be? Aliens? Inter-dimensional beings or ghosts? What? Whatever they are or aren’t, actual literal stick figures prowling darkened roads and woods at night have to rank right up there as among the oddest, most bizarre things anyone could expect to come across.

It seems that the world of strange sightings can often truly veer off into completely uncharted territory and things that seem unable to truly be classified, existing in their own fringe world of sheer, utter insanity. There they lurk in the dim confines of a realm we have no understanding of and of which many do not even know is there at all. These are things for which there is no easy way to classify, things which seem to have lurched out of some sort of horror story. What are these creatures, if anything? How can we explain these oddities and anomalies? If we can glean anything from this it is that these are some truly strange bizarre sightings out there that defy conventions, and which may never cease to puzzle.

IN BRIEF

A German theoretical physicist has proposed a modification to the first-ever interstellar spacecraft that would allow it to decelerate enough to orbit an exoplanet and potentially seed a second Earth. However, the 12,000-year-long transit time could make garnering support for the mission difficult.

Egocentric Enterprise

For the past 30 years, popular opinion about where in space humans should go next has swayed between a new mission to the Red Planet and a return to the Moon. Considering the smorgasbord of problems we’ve made for ourselves on planet Earth, from ecological to economic, such goals of exploration and colonization can have an egoistic, even selfish, root — we may need to find a new home due to the aforementioned problems and a litany of unmentioned ones.

However, even the most optimistic colonization estimates are measured in decades, and there’s no guarantee that we’ll survive the rest of this century, let alone long enough to effectively expand humanity throughout the galaxy. But what if, right now, we could start the process of seeding life on other worlds? Humanity may not survive, but some form of life could.

Claudius Gros, theoretical physicist at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, thinks we should consider it. He believes seeding life throughout the cosmos takes precedence over human colonization, and he also believes this process of intentionally seeding other planets in the universe with life, more succinctly known as deliberate panspermia, is within our technological capability.

Breakthrough Starshot is an ambitious plan to send the first probe ever to Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighboring star after the Sun, using a laser propulsion system.

That trip is expected to take about 20 years and will require that a probe weighing just one gram be accelerated to a speed of 160 million kmh (100 million mph), or one-fifth the speed of light. The probe won’t have a braking system and is expected to whiz by the star hours after reaching it, just enough time to take pictures to transmit back to Earth.

In a recent study published in Journal of Physics Communications, Gros proposes that we use the same laser propulsion system to send a 1.5-ton spacecraft at slower speeds so we can do more than just take pictures. He wants to achieve a stable exoplanet orbit and seed other worlds with life via onboard “mini labs” that would grow genes and cells. The stated objective is TRAPPIST-1, but other exoplanets, such as the recently discovered Ross 128b, are also under consideration.

The Long Haul

Gros’ hypothetical 1.5-ton spacecraft for seeding life would launch from Earth, and huge, Earth-based lasers directed at the probe’s 50-kilometer-wide (31-mile-wide) light sail would propel it to roughly 30 percent of the speed of light for part of its journey.

Unlike the tiny probe used for the Alpha Centauri mission, Gros’ spacecraft would need to be able to stop once it reached its destination, though, so he devised a way to do so using a magnetic sail that would generate friction with protons. This will allow the craft to decelerate en route, much like letting a car coast to full stop on the highway.

“The reason for the magnetic sail is to create a magnetic field without loss of energy,” Gros told Futurism. “You don’t want to expend energy, so you generate the field once, and then with a superconducting loop, the current stays forever, and the magnetic field stays forever.”

seeding life

The above depicts an ionized proton (blue) undergoing deflection via magnetic field (magenta).

Image credit: Journal of Physics Communications

According to Gros, the magnetic sail would have a radius of roughly 50 kilometers (31 miles), and each of its loops would generate a magnetic field. These fields would shift the momentum of the probe to whatever particles it encountered. Essentially, the protons between the Earth and the probe’s destination would create the friction it needed to decelerate.

It may seem strange to imagine a giant probe being slowed down by something as small and insignificant as protons. Further complicating the situation is the fact that scientists suspect that remnants of ancient supernovae may have swept gasses out of the space surrounding our solar system and those near it, thereby lowering the density of matter.

However, Gros explained that even with that lower concentration of matter, his design could provide the necessary friction to slow the hypothetical spacecraft enough to orbit, and not flyby, an exoplanet. “You can brake via friction from the interstellar medium,” he said.

The catch is that the added mass needed to provide deceleration puts a 12,000-year timeframe on his proposed journey to TRAPPIST-1. On a cosmic scale, that isn’t even a blink of an eye, but since humans rarely live past 100, no one alive now would survive to see our probe for seeding life reach its destination.

A New Kind of Earth

Recently, scientists have begun to theorize that the growing number of exoplanets discovered orbiting red dwarfs could have water and oxygen. These planets hadmuch longer periods of atmospheric cooling than the Earth had, which could have prevented life from forming on them back when it first emerged on Earth.

“It took the Sun 10 million years to cool to about today’s temperature, but small stars, like TRAPPIST-1, remained hot for hundreds of millions of years,” Gros said.

Consequently, he explained, the water vapor within the stratosphere of the TRAPPIST-1 planets was dissociated by the ultraviolet radiation of the host star into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen escapes into space, as it is too light to be retained by an Earth-like planet, and the oxygen left behind accumulates.

“If some of the seven TRAPPIST-1 planets still have an ocean, they would also have a massive oxygen atmosphere. Earth’s oxygen pressure is 0.2 bars, but on TRAPPIST-1-like planets, it could be 100 bar or more,” said Gros.

This excess oxygen “eats up” biotic life, preventing protocell formation. Complex eukaryotes, which form the basis for present-day multi-cellular life, would never have had a chance to develop on an “oxygen planet.”

“We could have millions or billions of habitable exoplanets, but sterilized by oxygen from the beginning,” said Gros. Consequently, the common objection that we should avoid interfering with the natural evolution of alien life would fall away — we wouldn’t be interfering with anything.

The cosmic garden may await us, but the long transit time proposed by Gros may dissuade some from taking his seeding life project seriously. Even after the probe reached its destination, any life would take many billions of years to mature, Gros said.

An artist rendering that conveys rapid-flyby of exoplanets.

Image credit: Hubble ESA

Gros’ initiative for seeding life throughout the cosmos, dubbed the Genesis Project, forces us to step back and take a look at what we’re doing on Earth.

“If you are rational, you cannot argue a longterm project will have use on Earth, because no one will be around,” Gros said.

To Gros, his hypothetical mission ultimately forces humanity to consider a metaethical question. The most natural ethical system for our species is one that places us in the center, and that’s largely how we live. But do we need to follow this imperative 100 percent of the time? Gros doesn’t think so.

“An ethical system which is 99 percent humanity-centered is enough to build a thriving civilization, with the remaining 1 percent allowing us to pursue ‘non-rational’ projects like the Genesis project,” he told Futurism.