Tom DeLonge has spoiled UFOs for his peers. It’s no longer enough for celebrities to see unidentified flying objects – not hey have to see something that’s better that anything Tom and his friends in the government and at the To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science have released on video. Need proof? Film director Guillermo del Toro, who is riding a popularity wave after the recent success of The Shape of Water, claims he saw a UFO when he was younger and hated its looks. Only in Hollywood do you hear things like this:

“You sound like a complete lunatic, but I saw a UFO. I didn’t want to see a UFO. It was horribly designed. And it went from there to here—like 1,000 meters away—in less than a second and it was so crappy.”

Guillermo del Toro

Poor Guillermo. He told the Hollywood Reporter he and a friend were looking at the stars and drinking beer (what a shock) while parked on the side of a freeway outside of Guadalajara in a place called Cerro del Cuatro (Mountain of the Four) when he saw a light on the horizon traveling “super-fast.” So the quick-thinking Guillermo put down his beer and gave his friend instructions.

“And I said, ‘Honk and flash the lights.’ And we started honking.”

No wonder they attracted an ugly UFO and not a starship.

“It was a flying saucer. So clichéd, with lights going like this. It’s so sad.”

No, Guillermo. What’s sad is that you tapped into your inner critic rather than your inner filmmaker and didn’t have a camera or a cell phone to record it. What would Peter Jackson have done? What would Steven Spielberg have done? Those aliens could have been coming to open a whole new market for you and you knock their ride. It gets worse.

“We jumped in the car, drove really fast. I kept looking. It was following us. And then I looked back and it was gone. So, you know, judge me. I have no implant.”

Or maybe you do? How else can you explain how one goes from drinking beer and honking your horn at flying saucers to making movies like The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade II, Hellboy and Pacific Rim?

Crappy? Weren’t you driving a rusty Hyundai?

Then he tries to cover it up by saying he panicked.

“Seriously, like I have never been that scared ever in my life. I wish I could reveal they’re not what you think they are. They are what you think they are. And the fear we felt was so primal.”

What a cop-out, Guillermo. You get no sympathy here. That “crappy” flying saucer scared the crap out of you?

What would Ton DeLonge say?

UFO watchers and truth-seekers everywhere got an early Xmas present this year when The New York Times reported on a secret $22 million Pentagon program known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. This program, the NYT article claims, investigated reports of unidentified flying objects and analyzed artifacts and debris allegedly gathered from crashed alien craft. Many of the article’s claims should sound familiar to the world of UFO research – black money, reverse-engineered alien technology, classified military reports, etc. – but one detail jumped out: according the report, the Department of Defense has a collection of “alien alloys” and other materials stored in a hangar in Las Vegas which defy scientific explanation.

One of the authors of the NYT article, Ralph Blumenthal, told an MSNBC interviewer that these materials are unlike anything found on Earth:

They have, as we reported in the paper, some material from these objects that is being studied so that scientists can find what accounts for their amazing properties, this technology of these objects, whatever they are. They’re studying it, but it’s some kind of compound that they don’t recognize.

Claims of strange and amazing alien metals are nothing new, found in other UFO cases such as in the mysterious “memory metal” found after the Roswell incident – and throughout science fiction, of course. After these most recent claims received such widespread coverage, scientists around the world weighed in to share their thoughts on these so-called “alien alloys.” According to several chemists, the existence of such an unknown material is impossible. Oregon State University chemist May Nyman, told LiveScience that thanks to X-ray diffraction, the crystalline structure of any metal alloy can quickly be identified:

These are all very standard techniques in research labs, so if we had such mysterious metals, you could take it to any university where research is done, and they could tell you what are the elements and something about the crystalline phase within a few hours.

Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society, says it’s “quite impossible” that there are alloys we can’t identify:

There’s not as many mysteries in science as people like to think. It’s not like we know everything — we don’t know everything. But most things we know enough about to know what we don’t know.

While I’m sure thats true enough of everything we’ve found on our planet, I just have to wonder: given the vastness of the universe, is it actually impossible for unknown elements or alloys to exist? Seven new elements have been discovered here on Earth in the last thirty years, while the majority have been discovered in the last four hundred. On a long enough timeline, who knows what tomorrow’s science will uncover?

Furthermore, if (and that’s a big IF) an alien civilization does have the capability to construct spacecraft which can reach Earth, who knows what type of materials engineering capabilities they might have? Sure, these claims of alien alloys might not be entirely true according to our known science, but let’s point out the real issue here: what more is it going to take to get a serious conversation going about government disclosure of alien life? If a New York Times report with significant admissions from on-the-record officials isn’t enough, I don’t know what is.

In a recent article here at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer addressed the issue of the Men in Black caught on film – whether in photographs or footage. Brent states in his article: “Nick Redfern has covered in far more detail than I intend to go into here. However, what has always intrigued me are the times when these frightening and creepy specters have actually been allegedly photographed or even filmed, and there are actually a few cases where this has allegedly happened. This is what I plan to delve into here, so let’s take a look.”

You can find Brent’s article at this link.

Reading Brent’s article brought to mind something that ties in with what he was saying, but from the exact opposite angle. I’ll explain what I mean by that. Brent focused on cases when and where the MIB were captured on film. There are, however, certain incidents in which the MIB should have appeared on photos but didn’t. A perfect example is that of Graham Elliott, a man I met in 1998, at the annual, Leeds, England-based conference of the now-defunct UFO Magazine. Elliott was a postman who had a strange story to tell. In late November 1996, and in the early hours of the morning, he had a very strange dream. According to Elliott, he underwent what can only be termed a classic “alien abduction” experience. Elliott was significantly traumatized by the whole thing, particularly the graphic and realistic nature of what he hoped was a nightmare but which may have been something more.

Elliott told me that two days after the encounter something strange happened: he had the day off work and was planning on sweeping the front yard clear of leaves. He opened the front-door and was confronted by the sight of an old 1960s-era Jaguar car, totally black in color. It was parked outside his house with no sign of its driver. Elliott didn’t think much of it, aside from the fact that it was a cool-looking car. He went inside the house to tell his wife to come and have a look at the car. When they got to the window, however, the “Car in Black” was gone. The next night, around 7:00 p.m. Elliott felt compelled to go to the window and look outside. There was the car; the very same one. There was one big difference: this time there was someone sitting in the car, although they couldn’t make out much more than that, due to the darkness and the small amount of illumination from the streetlights. This time, Elliott found the whole thing very odd. In seconds, the driver hit the road.

On the following Sunday afternoon, the car was back again. By now concerned rather than puzzled, Elliott grabbed his camera, opened the front-door and took a photo of the car “just to let [the driver] know.” In seconds, the man behind the wheel turned on the engine and drove off. The man was not seen again, and neither was the car. But, there was one very odd thing: when Elliott finally finished the 35mm roll of film and had it developed at a local store, the car was completely absent from the photo. It was, Elliott said to me, as if he had “just taken a picture of the street.” Tales of strange cars and the MIB abound, as this link shows. Moving on…

Denise Stoner is a woman with a notable background: she is the Director of the Florida Research Group affiliation of UFORCOP, a Mutual UFO Network National Abduction Research Team (ART) member, a Florida MUFON Field Investigator, a Star Team Member, and a former Florida MUFON, State Section Director, and Chief Investigator. She co-authored with Kathleen Marden The Alien Abduction Files, in 2013. Denise has an odd tale to tell that falls into this particular category of weirdness. In 2014, Denise had several eerie experiences that involved not just the MIB, but also the Women in Black.

She told me how it all went down: “Three feet from the front door to the right we have a monitor with microphone that shows us in color what/who may be at the door and what cars are parked directly in front of our home and the home to our left. A huge double wide window is next further right with wooden blinds closed most of the time. We live on one end of a T-shaped court – ours being the top of the T on the left side, once you turn the T upside down.

“Our dog sleeps in bed with us and this particular morning he did not wake up or move; my husband and I did not wake up. The doorbell was ringing and ringing and ringing like someone was playing a trick – a child, perhaps, and was going to run away when the door was answered. The strange thing was the fact that our dog did not bark and he should have at the first ring to warn us. I never heard it, my husband, who is a Vietnam Vet, never heard it. Our master- bedroom is just left of the front door and we hear everything. Our daughter called to us and said ‘Mom, you better come out here, there are two ladies with black clothes ringing the door bell and won’t stop.’ I jumped out of bed, now hearing the incessant ding-dong and beginning to figure one of our neighbors had an emergency. We all know each other and each one is willing to help out.

“I was no more than three or four seconds getting to the front door, my eyes already focusing on the monitor. There stood a woman who, to me resembled a person of Native American ethnic group, if I were to guess. She had shoulder length black hair with bangs, slightly tanned yet doughy looking skin, and dark, large black eyes looking straight into the camera. I could see that she had on a black jumper style dress with thinner than normal straps running over her shoulders to the bib portion of the dress – almost suspenders minus the clips. She had on a long sleeved under blouse in a dark shade of grey.

“Standing next to her was another woman identical to her in description only shorter in stature by a head. The height was difficult to judge due to the monitor, but she was not as tall as the lower portion of the camera, so I would say one was just over five-feet and the other just over four. I unlocked the door and swung it open only to discover there was no one there. Not a soul. I glanced down only seconds, just long enough to check the lock. My eyes were no longer on the monitor but the door and then the porch. Again, a matter of seconds. I am now looking at an empty porch, the house next door, an empty parking lot (I can identify all my neighbors’ cars), grass walk-through on the left and right, and a sidewalk to the street straight ahead between two homes. There is no way possible these two women could get to any of these described places in the time I opened my front door.”

Denise’s case is somewhat different to that of Graham Elliott, in the sense that Denise could see the two Women in Black on the camera’s monitor, but they couldn’t be seen in-person.

And, finally, there’s the case of a young man named Jordan, who lives in Edinburg, Texas. He contacted me in January 2017, after reading my Women in Black book. Jordan claimed to have photographed two MIB lurking on his family’s property in the summer of 2016, a few days after he saw a strange green light – roughly around the size of a basketball – hovering over the front-yard on what was a warm, clear and bright early evening. The “ball of energy” was only in sight for a few seconds, after which it simply vanished.

As for the pair of MIB that Jordan photographed, well, here’s the problem: Jordan sent me the photo and, yes, it does show the driveway and the front-yard, but the MIB are absent. Of course, trying to prove that the photo is of some significance is extremely difficult. Impossible, in fact. Of course, the skeptic would likely say that Jordan had taken a shot of the front-yard at night and then conjured up a story to support his claims. But, I had the chance to meet Jordan a couple of months later, when I spoke at Edinburg’s annual “Out Of This World Festival.” He came across genuinely puzzled and certainly not someone looking for anything at all in the way of publicity.

I have several other cases along these lines in my files, but by now you get the picture. Add them to the photo angle described by Brent Swancer in his article, and what we have is evidence of something very strange when it comes to the MIB and cameras. Something very strange, indeed.

Now that everyone is talking out in the open about UFOs, including the US government and military, it will only be a matter of time before outer-space hotels start opening up to cater to tourist who want to see the unidentified objects from a better vantage point than their backyards. How much time? Try right now. The Russian space agency Roscosmos announced it is planning to install a luxury hotel module on the International Space Station to cater to space tourists. Will the Russian ISS hotel minibar be stocked with vodka and Tang?

The news about this planned Red Roof-of-the-Atmosphere Inn comes from Popular Mechanics magazine (motto: Grease is our favorite scent), which revealed this week that it somehow obtained access to a proposal by Roscosmos State Corporation, the government body overseeing the country’s space program, to add a 20-ton, 15.5-meter (51 feet)-long module to the ISS whose sole purpose would be to cater to space travelers. The 92 cubic meter (3249 cubic feet) will be designed to give four visitors their own 2 cubic meter (70 cubic foot) bedroom and one-half of a 2 cubic meter “hygiene and medical” station (bathroom). This orbiting B&B will also have a common area for lounging with fellow tourists, WiFi and exercise equipment (zero-gravity weightlifting anyone?).

What about UFO spotting opportunities? For those on the standard package, each sleeping room will have a 9-inch (228 mm) porthole (think airplane window) while the communal lounge will have a 16-inch (426 mm) window (think small manhole cover) for four people to push and shove their way in front of for a better view. However, those who upgrade to the luxury package will get guided spacewalks accompanied by their own personal cosmonaut, who will point out the sights and say, “Look, there’s your house!” when the tourist starts to ask too many questions about strange objects whizzing by.

How much would you pay for a luxurious one-week-to-one-month stay at the ISS? If you have to ask the price, you probably can’t afford the $40 million minimum and the $4 million down payment so RKK Energia, Russia’s primary space contractor, can begin working on the space hotel. This is the same group that ran Russia’s original space tourism program which sent 7 space tourists to the ISS between 2001 and 2009, starting with American multimillionaire Dennis Tito, who paid $20 million for an 8-day stay. RKK Energia estimates it will take 5 years and 16.4 to 26.2 billion rubles ($279-$446 million) to complete its new outer-space place, so it’s looking to sign up as many people as it can for this out-of-this-world timeshare deal. They will probably be pushing the luxury package — which includes spacewalks but requires a month-long stay, for just $20 million more.

Worth $20 million?

Five years to build means the Motel ISS won’t be ready until 2022. It also means that reservations will be limited, since the US and Russia have agreed to retire the ISS in 2028. there’s no guarantee RKK Energia will be able to raise the funds or meet the deadlines without delays, cost run-ups or problems, so it might be wise to cover your space travel bets by placing a another deposit (if you can afford $40 million, you can afford a few million more) with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin program, which launched a space dummy on December 12th in a test of its planned suborbital tourism program, or with Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic,  }is projecting suborbital launches in 2018.

However, your chances of seeing a UFO are much better on a month-long trip orbiting 250 miles in space without worrying about NASA cutting the video feed on your window.

All it takes is money and patience.

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