“In January of 1978, I was stationed at McGuire AFB, N.J. One evening, during the time frame of 0300 hrs. and 0500 hrs., there were a number of UFO sightings in the area over the air field and Ft. Dix MP’s were running code in the direction of Brownsville, N.J. A state trooper then entered Gate #5 at the rear of the base requesting assistance and permission to enter. I was dispatched and the trooper wanted access to the runway area which led to the very back of the air field and connected with a heavily wooded area which is part of the Dix training area. He informed me that a Ft. Dix MP was pursuing a low flying object which then hovered over his car. He described it as oval shaped, with no details, and glowing with a bluish-green color. His radio transmission was cut off. At that time in front of his police car, appeared a thing, about 4 feet tall, grayish, brown, fat head, long arms, and slender body. The MP panicked and fired five rounds from his .45 cal. into the thing, and one round into the object above. The object then fled straight up and joined with eleven others high in the sky. This we all saw but didn’t know the details at the time. Anyway, the thing ran into the woods towards our fenceline and they went to look for it. By this time several patrols were involved.

“We found the body of the thing near the runway. It had apparently climbed the fence and died while running. It was all of a sudden hush-hush and no one was allowed near the area. We roped off the area and AFOSI came out and took over. That was the last I saw of it. There was a bad stench coming from it too. Like ammonia smelling but wasn’t constant [in] the air. That day, a team from Wright-Patterson AFB came in a C141 and went to the area. They crated it in a wooden box, sprayed something over it, and then put it into a bigger metal container. They loaded it in the plane and took off. That was it, nothing more said, no report made and we were all told not to have anything to say about it or we would be court-martialed.

“I will be getting out of the Air Force in about two months. Do not disclose my name as I could get into trouble. I am interested in pursuing this and other matters if you need help. Forgive me for not signing this but I can’t take any chances. Please reply to the above address and my parents will forward it to me or I will be home already. Don’t send it here because they monitor all mail closely and I again don’t want to take any chances.”

Stringfield dug deep into the story, checking things out for himself and enlisting the help of the late UFO investigator, Richard Hall. Stringfield was able to chat with “Morse” on the phone just a few weeks before Christmas 1983. Hall met with “Morse,” in January 1985, in Washington, D.C. Hall told Stringfield shortly afterwards that he, Hall, “…detected nothing in his manner, or story, to cause skepticism.” In addition, “Morse” provided a military document (DD Form 1569) that detailed the shooting of the alien. Unfortunately, the document was a photocopy – which made it worthless, since anyone could have concocted it. It would have been far more impressive had it been an original.

There is very little doubt that this case is bogus, even though there is a degree of data suggesting “Morse” really was employed at McGuire AFB. Indeed, he provided a name of one person connected to the base – and allegedly connected to the affair, too – at the time of the alleged incident, and which did prove to be accurate. But, I’m still not impressed.

I refer you to a lengthy report prepared by NIDS, the National Institute of Discovery Science. Its title: “Preliminary Investigation Into The Alleged Shooting Of A Non-Human Entity At Ft. Dix/McGuire Air Force Base On January 18, 1978.” The report states (after a great deal of in-depth digging was over): “NIDS’ working hypothesis (which is subject to change based on further emerging evidence) is that the 1978 McGuire AFB incident did not happen. Further, the putative fabrication of the DD form 1569 suggests that the Fort Dix/McGuire incident may be a hoax.”

Due to the near-unfathomable distances between most of the objects in the known universe, it may take millions of years for attempts at extraterrestrial communication to succeed. That hasn’t stopped us from trying, though. Numerous messages intended to break the ice between humankind and potential alien civilizations have been sent into space, from the rather crude Arecibo message beamed into the cosmos via radio waves in 1974 to the slightly more advanced “Golden Record” sent along on NASA’s Voyager spacecraft.

While experts from a wide variety of fields weigh in on the content of these messages, we have no Earthly idea whatsoever how any potential alien races might interpret these messages. Communication in all of its forms is culturally or biologically bound, and we don’t have any precedent for how interstellar communication might function out in the universe.

What if the Golden Record is found by a species which eats gold? That’s an expensive interstellar snack.

For that reason, our attempts to send messages into space have consisted mostly of basic mathematical and scientific knowledge and brief snapshots of what life here on Earth is like for humans and animals. I mean, we wouldn’t want to offend our cosmic neighbors with any culturally-specific information which might be potentially misinterpreted as a threat or act of intergalactic war, would we?

No, we wouldn’t, which is why the idea to blast a distant planet with electronic dance music is horribly misguided. Throughout May 2018, electronic dance music (EDM) was beamed into deep space in the direction of GJ 273, otherwise known as Luyten’s Star, as part of a project being led by the Sónar Music Festival, the Catalonia Institute of Space Studies, and METI International (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence). Luyten’s Star is in the Canis Minor constellation only about 12 light-years away and is orbited by two planets, one of which is believed to be a “Super Earth” in the Goldilocks zone which can hypothetically support life.

Luyten’s Star is a red dwarf star with a mass of about a quarter of the Sun’s.

Last year, the same festival beamed two messages at Luyten’s Star, but they consisted of two brief pulses of radio signalsmeant to symbolize a musical interval and the human perception of time. This year, 35 different EDM songs were sent along with the typical mathematical and physics tidbits meant to display our intelligence. Although given that we also included music, I’m not sure that will go over well.

How will any potential intelligent aliens there feel about EDM from the likes of Daedelus and other electronic musicians? Music, like all art forms and communication media, is a cultural activity which might not have the same meaning for a completely different species. Could this percussive, bass-heavy music be interpreted as a threat or some kind of interstellar weapon? Or will any aliens orbiting Luyten’s Star go on believing that EDM is the dominant form of communication on Earth? What would they think of us?

They’d probably think we need to stop twiddling knobs and pick up some real instruments for a change. Yeah, I said it.

Unfortunately, all of these questions are impossible to answer due to the socially constructed nature of music. Ultimately, any message we send into space could be interpreted or misinterpreted in ways we can’t even imagine. Is it wise to send music into space?

Most hypotheses about a giant yet unseen Planet 9 orbiting the Sun are based on the need to explain why many space objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune have orbits that are so contrary to those of the planets and closer objects that they border on impossible … unless something with a massive gravitational pull is messing with them. While one big Planet 9 would explain the odd orbits, some astronomers now say it’s not the only one and have come up with a different theory that replaces Planet 9 with a large number of smaller objects that together are cooperatively creating the curiously curving orbits. Will Planet 9 be replaced by Planets 9 through 99 or more?

A press release from the University of Colorado describes the announcement at the 232nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society this week of this controversial new theory on the orbits of so-called detached objects or Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) in the far reaches of the solar system which behave as if they’re not affected by the gravity of the Sun. Assistant Professor Ann-Marie Madigan and a team of researchers were studying the detached objects and astrophysics student Jacob Fleisig noticed that the objects moved like the hands of a clock, with smaller objects orbiting fast and in tandem like a minute hand, while larger objects (like the dwarf planet Sedna) move slower like an hour hand. As those familiar with non-digital clocks know, (If you’re not, ask Grandpa), the two hands meet every hour and would crash into each other if they weren’t on slightly different planes. Fleisig realized that wouldn’t be the case with detached objects.

“You see a pileup of the orbits of smaller objects to one side of the sun. These orbits crash into the bigger body, and what happens is those interactions will change its orbit from an oval shape to a more circular shape.”

Eventually, these collisions would send the more massive objects, like Sedna, into extreme and unusual orbits father away from the Sun. While they only modeled a small number of detached objects (about 400), the results were as they expected. This new theory of a large amount of small objects messing up the TNO orbits would explain the biggest mystery of Planet 9 … where is it?

On the other hand (to continue the clock analogy), Madigan points out that the ‘collective gravity of small objects’ theory does not explain why all of the objects are tilted in the same direction – something that, at least for now, only a big Planet 9 could cause.

On the other other hand, Fleisig’s collision theory may explain something closer to home – the extinction of the dinosaurs. All of that banging and crashing may have whacked some debris in the direction of Earth, creating a catastrophic comet calamity that killed the cold-blooded creatures. While not proven, it’s a possibility.

If you wonder why anyone today would consider a career in astronomy, the study of these objects in the Kuiper Belt should be an enticement, says Madigan.

“The picture we draw of the outer solar system in textbooks may have to change. There’s a lot more stuff out there than we once thought, which is really cool.”

Sounds like something to put on a T-shirt.

On the other hand …

Today, I’m sharing with you three intriguing stories from the U.K., all of which are focused on strange “things” which fell from the skies and that were never resolved. Could they have been objects from other worlds? I guess so. But, I’m far more inclined to think that we’re probably dealing with, in the first case, unusual but natural phenomena. And, in the second and third cases, almost certainly domestic technology, quite likely of the U.K. military. They may not have had anything to do with extraterrestrial visitations, but they are still highly intriguing.

The first case dates back to the final days of 1965. It was December 17 of that year when a man named Kenneth William Reece encountered  – late at night – what he told both the U.K. Ministry of Defense and the Royal Air Force was a bright, circular “white light” which he watched descend into a valley between Mold and Ruthin, in North Wales, U.K. Interestingly, the RAF’s files state that the bright light descended extremely slowly, to the extent that Reece was able to watch its descent for close to a couple of minutes. After which, it “exploded and disintegrated,” as the Ministry of Defense noted. The matter was never resolved, despite the fact that an aerial search by the military was undertaken the next day.

Moving on, we have a story that was given to English UFO researcher, Jenny Randles, in 1991, and which was published in the No. 152 issue of her Northern UFO News. Randles withheld the name of the witness, only referring to him as “M.L.,” of the county of Staffordshire, which is where I grew up as a kid. It was while driving to meet friends in an area called Churnet Valley (yes, another valley, intriguingly) that the witness saw a strange-looking object/craft/device (take your pick) falling from the sky and hurtling to the ground. It was described as being around three meters in length, silver in color, and missile-like in shape. M.L. soon contacted the police. A police-helicopter crew scoured the area of woodland the next day, but nothing was found. At least, nothing physical was found. But, a noticeable depression was discovered in the ground, suggesting that something had slammed into the ground. That it seemingly didn’t hang around only added to the mystery.

Three years later, it was time for the people of the village of Church Lench (near the U.K.’s Cotswolds) to encounter something which fell from the skies. It was described by the people close enough to see it as a large barrel-shaped object. The Army was soon on the scene, keeping people away from the impact site, and creating cordons. The Royal Navy had a presence too. Indeed, the rumor-mill in and around Church Lench was that the object was taken away on a Navy truck. Despite the fact that the story got a lot of local media coverage, the military stayed silent.

One of those who was willing to chat with the media was a man named Paul Brooke. He said: “There were several fire engines and lots of police here. The area was cordoned off and people were stopped from entering the field. Then at about eight that night it was taken away by a Royal Navy vehicle with a police escort at the front and back.”

A spokesperson for the Eversham Police said: “I can’t categorically say that it did not happen, but my investigations have revealed that it was a bale of straw that was on fire and which was put out by the fire brigade. The reports of something falling from the sky may either be hoaxes or somebody may have seen something and come to the wrong conclusion.”

It was a statement that impressed precisely no one who lived locally. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if something had fallen from a military aircraft, hence the reason why the authorities were on the scene so quickly. In light of all the above, keep your eyes looking upward!