Why is NASA hunting for a meteorite in the Pacific Ocean with a submarine? Wait, let’s back up a minute. Why does NASA have a submarine? And why isn’t it looking for asteroids BEFORE they plunge through the Earth’s atmosphere? Inquiring minds in Siberia, Africa, Michigan and other areas recently hit by meteorites would like to know.

NASA Hunts for Mysterious Meteorite in the Pacific | Mysterious Universe

Back to the Pacific meteorite hunt. The story begins on March 7, 2018, when residents of Grays Harbor County on Washington’s Pacific coast reported a sonic boom. The boom was loud enough to register on the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network seismometers around 7 pm. The Seattle Times reported that eyewitnesses on the coast saw a flash and three National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather stations detected a meteorite 16 miles off the coast. After seeing the report, Marc Fries, the Cosmic Dust Curator at NASA Johnson Space Center (nice work if you can get it), called it “the largest meteorite fall I’ve seen in 20-plus years of radar data.”

Based on the amount and quality of the data, Fries estimated that about 4,400 lbs. (2,000 kg) of meteorite pieces, with the largest weighing 9.7 pounds (4.4 kg) and measuring 5 inches (12 cm) in diameter, survived the fall and are somewhere on the ocean floor. Well, not ‘somewhere’ — Fries was able to narrow the location down to one square km (.38 sq. miles) at a shallow depth of 100 meters (300 feet). If only NASA had a submarine …

Enter the Ocean Exploration Trust. Founded in 2008 by Dr. Robert Ballard to “engage in pure ocean exploration,” it provides its 64-meter Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus and its remote-controlled submarines to NASA for various projects. Nautilus just “happened” to be in the area and offered to be a part of what Fries called the “first intentional search for meteorites from the ocean.”

According to the Nautilus reports, the crew conducted a multibeam sonar survey on July 1 to identify possible locations, On July 2, two remote-controlled subs conducted a 7-hour survey of the seabed in the most likely spot and collected samples with a suction hose, magnet and scooper. The bucket of sand was then taken to Dr. Fries, who sifted through it and issued this report:

“NASA Cosmic Dust Curator Dr. Marc Fries conducted an initial visual analysis of the samples collected, and his preliminary findings include two small fragments of fusion crust–meteorite exterior that melted and flowed like glaze on pottery as it entered the atmosphere. Additional analysis will be conducted in the coming weeks to determine if these fragments indeed came from the massive meteorite fall seen entering the Pacific Ocean off Washington’s coast in March 2018.”

Sample meteorite fragments

So the answer is … yes and no. Yes, the fragments are definitely from a meteorite, and no, they don’t know if they’re from THE meteorite they were searching for. While Dr. Fries continues to sift sand, no one seems to be addressing the original question … why is NASA so interested in this particular meteorite?

Actually, NASA is taking a sudden interest in meteorites in general. It could be due to criticism of its early warning system which doesn’t seem to be giving much warning of recent really big asteroids which fortunately missed the Earth. NASA researchers were also in Botswana last week where they recovered a piece of asteroid 2018 LA, an asteroid that was actually detected by the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey at the University of Arizona eight whole hours before it pierced the Earth’s atmosphere, making it just the third one to be identified before impact.

Is that a good enough record to continue to justify the existence of asteroid warning systems?

Or is NASA using these meteorite-recovery exercises as a cover-up for something else? Are they really meteorites? Is NASA tracking something else? Whatever it is, is an eight-hour warning long enough to bend completely around and kiss your butt goodbye?

One of the more unsettling developing stories over the last few years as been the seemingly growing phenomenon of mysterious and unexplained booms being felt across America. From sea to shining sea, loud explosion noises have shaken homes and terrified homeowners, leaving no explanation in their wake. The FBI and some familiar sounding gentlemen-in-dark-clothing recently began investigating some of these booms in rural Pennsylvania, and it turns out that at least some of these booms have a mundane – yet terrifying explanation.

In late June 2018, the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office in Pennsylvania arrested the owner of a local chemical and solvent retailer who has been accused of detonating improvised explosives in the area. Law enforcement agencies found disturbing drawings and images at the man’s house, leading them to suspect that they might have foiled an attempted domestic terrorism plot. While this arrest solves a small set of these mystery booms, there have been dozens of other reports of unexplained explosion noises in 2018 alone from areas far from rural Pennsylvania. Could all of these have a similar origin, or might there be multiple mysteries afoot here?

Since I’ve started covering these anomalous booms, I’ve always felt that they likely do have a man made origin, but one more related to the clandestine testing of aircraft or weaponry. It’s no secret that the skies and now space have become the most contested front in our new Cold War, so it could be that these mysterious noises are merely sonic booms caused by aircraft or projectiles overhead. Supersonic flight over the United States has been illegal since 1973, so that explanation isn’t typically thrown around. However, a new prototype aircraft recently shown off by NASA might offer some credence to this theory.

NASA’s experimental X-59 QueSST aircraft is designed to break the sound barrier without creating the deafening sonic boom.

For years, NASA has been attempting to design aircraft capable of supersonic flight which do not create sonic booms when breaking through the sound barrier. As part of their current research, Space.com reports that NASA has been testing so-called “quieter sonic booms” to determine “how much sonic noise people on the ground deem acceptable in their everyday lives.” A specially outfitted F/A-18 Hornet will conduct tests this November over coastal towns in the Gulf of Mexico, collecting observations from volunteers on the ground about how loud and disruptive the sonic booms are. NASA’s ultimate goal is to develop aircraft which could fly at supersonic speeds while still meeting regulations concerning sonic booms, a development which could revolutionize commercial and military air travel.

Sonic booms are caused by the changes in air pressure caused by aircraft as they pass through the air.

Still, this story makes you wonder: could some of the anomalous mystery booms heard recently be caused by testing of similar aircraft? Hypersonic weapons and aircraft have become a hot topic of aerospace research – could tests of these aircraft be behind these booms? Could NASA or the military already be conducting private tests of these ‘quiet’ supersonic aircraft ahead of the public tests later this year?

Or, perhaps more worryingly, could these mystery booms still be something else entirely? Let’s hope they’re not all tests of improvised explosives.

Mystery Boom Update and NASA's New 'Quiet' Supersonic Aircraft | Mysterious Universe

If you want to see a UFO, where’s the best place in the world to go? If you want to not just see a UFO but be seen by one … perhaps even abducted by one … where should you stand and wave? According to the director of the Ovniological Research Group of Chile, the answer to the first question is Chile and to the second is Patagonia, the southern tip of South America shared by Chile and Argentina. If you answered “the U.S.” to either query, we have some nice parting gifts for you (a laurel and hearty handshake) because UFO trackers in the U.S. say sightings are down and they’re not sure why.

In an interview with the Spanish international news agency Agencia EFE, Rodrigo Fuenzalida, the director of the Agrupación de Investigaciones Ovniológicas de Chile (Ovniological Research Group of Chile or AION), declared that Chile has long been a good place to see UFOs, especially northern Chile, because of the country’s “clean” skies. UFOs have been reported in many places, including over Chilean copper mines, volcanoes and cows. However, if you want to step inside a UFO, Fuenzalida suggests heading south to Patagonia, where they have been occurring since 1997.

“The Patagonia, without a doubt, is the one that at the moment concentrates the greater amount of interesting cases that make that we as an organization are concentrating all our efforts in that region. Even in the UFO series, produced by National Television, we managed to record that 70% of the abductions that we had placed in the program had been registered in that place. “

Why Patagonia? Possibly because aliens are already there. In an interview in 2017 with TiempoSur, Patricio Frias. Regional Ufologo and director of the UFO organization Noise Patagonia, says the abundance of minerals and fresh water in Patagonia may have already attracted tall, intelligent extraterrestrials:

“Patagonia is visited by intelligence that we can not understand. They told me in that place that there is the phenomenon that occurs there, with a lot of energy. I have been reported presence of humanoid species in that place. A person from birth came scared in his truck. He told us that he had seen on the road, that people were walking with bright helmets and a light on their foreheads. They approached these people and realized that it was something out of the ordinary. The height of the beings was more than two and a half meters.”

Wait a minute. Doesn’t the U.S. have plenty of clean water (OK, water) and minerals? Yes, but multiple UFO tracking and recording organizations report that the number of sightings has been on the decline. In an interview with Gizmodo, MUFON statistician David C. Kort pinpoints when it started.

“There definitely has been a fall off of late. It hasn’t been a straight line. But in looking at those numbers, it was a peak in 2012 and it’s been a 30 to 40 percent drop from 2012 to 2017.”

Cheryl Costa, the International UFO Congress’s 2018 Researcher of the Year, reported in the Syracuse New Timesthat UFO sightings of the past 17 years rose from 2001 to 2012 but have been declining ever since. While Kort says the decline is “perplexing,” Costa has an interesting theory. She believes that 2012 was an artificial peak interest year based on the alleged end-of-the-Mayan-calendar brouhaha. The years 2013 through 2017 are lower that 2012 but still higher than the years before it. However, she had expected to see the number go back up again and they haven’t.

Sharon Hill, a science, pseudoscience and paranormal culture writer, thinks the attention of the U.S. is moving from looking for UFOs and aliens to looking for conspiracies and cover-ups about UFOs and aliens.

“Ideas about conspiracy have just infiltrated and warped the idea of investigating UFOs. You aren’t able to investigate those things. They’re conspiracies.”

Finally, the U.S. UFO organizations may be getting much better at eliminating the identifiable from the unidentified.

Is there a way to get the U.S. UFO numbers up? Costa says it’s complicated. Hill says to keep looking. Cleaing up our water supplies might help.

Perhaps the best solution is to make UFO spotting an Olympic sport. Are we going to let Chile win the UFO gold? U-S-A! U-S-A!

“On a summer’s afternoon, in either 1948 or 1949, my mother, Brenda, was walking with our dog and myself in the area we called simply ‘The Field’ at the back of our housing estate… in what was then the outskirts of Chippenham in Wiltshire [England]. Whilst there, she saw an unusual, occupied aircraft…”

So began a handwritten letter addressed to this author. Tidy and succinct, it documented a mother and daughter’s close encounter with a peculiar flying object, piloted by apparently non-human beings. Many years later, the daughter, Karen, a mere toddler at the time of the incident, solicited from her mother, Brenda, a detailed description of what they had both witnessed that day, making a written record of her response. Brenda had no trouble in recalling the details:

We were walking through ‘The Field’ when this aircraft came out of nowhere and stopped nearby. There were two beings inside, sat facing one another. The aircraft was like a boat with a see-though cover. The two beings inside were neat and compact; they were dressed in grey and had helmets with a sort of crest on top. They were looking towards us, then one of them raised a hand as if he were waving. Then the aircraft just went.

Through further conversation with her mother, Karen was able to establish that:

There was no accompanying sound or scent with the aircraft; that it was in view for no more than three minutes; it was about nine feet long and stopped approximately fifteen yards away at bungalow-roof height; there were no trains on the track nearby at the time; and the area was otherwise deserted.

Their dog, incidentally, “was interested in the aircraft, but was not alarmed.”

Regarding her nondescript recounting of the object’s departure, beyond stating that “it just went,” Brenda had difficulty expressing the character of its movement. “She said that it didn’t exactly vanish instantly, it just ‘went’ very rapidly,” Karen related.

Brenda’s sketch of the object and occupants.

Speaking with her by telephone, I found Karen to be charming and genuine, an intelligent and well-spoken woman whose bewilderment at the described event was evident nearly sixty years on. What, then, to make of her story?

It was clear to me that Karen had no prior interest in UFOs and no UFOlogical knowledge of which to speak, and at no time had she or her mother sought to publicize their experience. Indeed, the witnesses’ names as written here—”Brenda” and “Karen”—are pseudonyms, a reflection of Karen’s continuing desire for anonymity (their real names and backgrounds are known to me).

During our telephone conversation, Karen told me that her mother had always been a “no nonsense” sort of lady and had been reluctant to speculate about the precise nature of the “aircraft,” or about the possible origin of its occupants. Sadly, Brenda passed away a few years ago, but despite her apparent nonchalance at what she and her daughter had witnessed, she had always acknowledged the high-strangeness of the event. “She said that she realized that what she was seeing was ‘something very different,’” Karen wrote in her letter, “but she wasn’t alarmed or afraid. She felt the beings were friendly.”

A map drawn by Karen of the location of the UFO encounter.

Karen’s account is significant in that it documents a rare British Close Encounter of the Third Kind (in which a UFO is seen within 500 feet and occupants are visible) in the very early years of the flying saucer enigma—before descriptions of saucer occupants became commonplace in the literature with the dawning of the contactee movement just a few years later. It is cases like Karen’s that I find interesting—much more so than the now traditional contactee or abductee narratives.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, literally hundreds of accounts of interstellar or interdimensional interlopers began to surface all around the globe—cases that make a mockery of expectation; cases in which entities of all shapes and sizes (though typically humanoid) would show up, day or night, usually outdoors, in the vicinity of a low-hovering or landed “craft.” These entities would sometimes acknowledge their witnesses from afar or even face-to-face, engaging in communication that ranged from incomprehensible and absurd to profoundly philosophical. More often than not, though, the beings in in these “fleeting greeting” cases seemed to be hurrying about their business—making repairs, taking samples from their immediate environment, and occasionally engaging in acts of apparent absurdity (like waving at the witness or giving them pancakes, for example) before bustling back into their bizarre looking contraptions and exiting the scene in the blink of an eye, leaving the observer in a state of bewilderment. Some 300 cases along these lines are documented in the 1969 book The Humanoids, edited by Charles Bowen, which is an essential read for any self-respecting UFO buff.

The question is—and it’s a question that’s been asked many times over the years—why are there relatively few cases of this nature reported today? It’s a question I could spend a very long time trying to answer, citing the work of theorists from Jacques Vallée and Terrence McKenna, to George P. Hansen and Greg Bishop. Is the cause of close-encounter entity reports a result purely of the comings and goings of “alien” intelligences and technologies, or is it the result of something far closer to home—something in us, something intrinsic to the human experience that morphs across time and culture? Or does the truth lie somewhere in between; somewhere in the realm of co-creation, in which the perceptual apparatus of the human observer plays a fundamental role in the manifestation of the phenomena observed? It’s phenomenological food for thought, and it seems likely we’ll be chewing on it for a very long time to come.

The onscreen teaming of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost has produced some real gems over the years, from Spaced, to Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz—all co-written and dynamically directed by Edgar Wright. Their 2013 sci-fi, The World’s End, put a slightly disappointing cap on their “Cornetto Trilogy” (so-called for each of the instalments—Shaun, Fuzz, and End—featuring a different flavoured Cornetto ice cream). But before The World’s End, Pegg and Frost gave us another sci-fi outing, this time without their favored director, Edgar Wright.

Pegg and Frost.

2011 saw the release of Paul, a foul-mouthed, sweet-hearted story of geekdom and friendship set against the rich tapestry of American UFO lore. In the movie, directed by Greg Mottola, writers Pegg and Frost play Graeme and Clive, two British sci-fi enthusiasts who embark upon a UFO road trip across the United States with the goal of hitting all the key pilgrimage sites, including Roswell and Area 51. While in the Nevada desert en route to the famous Area 51 perimeter, Graeme and Clive stumble across a Gray alien named Paul (voiced by Seth Rogen) who has just escaped from the base, where he had been a “guest” (i.e. prisoner) since 1947. Graeme and Clive agree to help the benevolent but potty-mouthed Paul flee his Men in Black pursuers and eventually return to his home planet.

The idea for Paul traces back to the filming of Shaun of the Dead in 2003 when the crew had lost so many days to the torrential English rain that they started wondering how great it would be to shoot a movie where it never, ever rained. “We just spit-balled from there,” Frost told MTV. “No rain became the desert, the desert became Area 51 and then it was a short step to thinking about these two guys encountering an alien.” They proceeded to watch more than 50 movies about aliens and road trips. “Then we just sat opposite one another and banged it out, line by line,” recalled Frost.

Paul is a witty movie that utilizes almost every ingredient of modern UFO conspiracy lore to enrich its plot, from the Roswell Incident and Men in Black, to aliens in the custody of the US government inspiring human technological developments. It even draws our attention to the interplay between UFOs and Hollywood and makes light of the idea that pop-culture has been deliberately seeded with alien imagery in an effort to prepare the masses for open contact. At one point in the movie, Clive remarks of Paul’s archetypal appearance, “He looks too obvious!” Paul responds: “There’s a reason for that, Clive! Over the last 60 years, the human race has been drip-fed images of my face, on lunchboxes and T-shirts and shit. It’s in case our species do meet, you don’t have a fucking spaz attack!”

Rain-free shoot: Greg Mottola directs Nick Frost and Simon Pegg on location for ‘Paul’ (2011).

Later in the movie it is revealed that, while at Area 51, Paul worked closely with Hollywood filmmakers, inspiring iconic movie and TV characters, including Fox Mulder and Steven Spielberg’s E.T. In a flashback scene set in 1980, we see Paul at Area 51 on the phone to Spielberg (appearing as himself in vocal form only), who is seeking Paul’s advice on a future movie about a friendly little alien. The conversation plays out as follows:

Paul: Okay Steven, how about cellular revivification?
Spielberg: I don’t know what that is.
Paul: Oh. Restoration of damaged tissue through telepathic manipulation of intrinsic field memory.
Spielberg: What’s that mean?
Paul: It means healing, Mr. Spielberg.
Spielberg: Yeah right, healing. Like by touch or something like that. Like maybe his finger lights up on the end when he reaches out and touches?
Paul: Maybe… You know, sometimes I find less is more.
Spielberg: Hey, trust me.

Today, seven years after its original release, Paul stands up well. Change comes so slowly in the UFO subculture that none of its UFOlogical references have dated even a day. The special effects still look strong too. This is thanks to Mottola and his team spending a huge portion of their production budget on bringing the CGI Paul to life. The director recognized that, for the movie to work, Paul had to look absolutely real—no expense could be spared.

“To do the CGI of Paul was one-third of our budget,” Mottola told recalled. “The actual production budget was kind of small… so we gave up 10 days of shooting and a second unit for the action scenes, just to pour more money into getting Paul right.”

It may not be as sharp as some of Frost and Pegg’s earlier outings (the absence of Edgar Wright can be felt in both script and direction), but Paul is still bags more brains and fun than most Hollywood comedies today. If you’re a fan of toilet humor, there’s a shit load. If you’re a sci-fi or UFO enthusiast, you might just feel you’ve died and gone to geek heaven.

Uranus already has self-esteem issues due it its name and the off-color mispronunciation the rest of the solar system (OK, just us) use. Now it looks like it will have to deal with taunts that it can’t defend itself from galactic invaders. A new study says it’s highly likely that the planet’s strange axial tilt and misplaced magnetic field was caused by a large rogue planet slamming into it four billion years ago. What’s up, Uranus? (Sorry.)

“We perform a suite of smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations to investigate in detail the results of a giant impact on the young Uranus.”

Is this what it looked like?

In “Consequences of Giant Impacts on Early Uranus for Rotation, Internal Structure, Debris, and Atmospheric Erosion,” a study published in the Astrophysical Journal, author Jacob Kegerreis describes how he and fellow researchers at Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology tackled the perplexing questions about Uranus’ odd traits, such as its 98-degree axial angle to its orbital plane and its rings and moons which all seem to orbit in the same orderly direction. Then there’s the puzzling magnetic field which seems to open and close daily, allowing deadly solar winds through.

“We ran more than 50 different impact scenarios using a high-powered super computer to see if we could recreate the conditions that shaped the planet’s evolution. Our findings confirm that the most likely outcome was that the young Uranus was involved in a cataclysmic collision with an object twice the mass of Earth, if not larger, knocking it on to its side and setting in process the events that helped create the planet we see today.”

While simulations of objects hitting Uranus have been run before, this study uses the latest data and technology. These simulations showed that the rogue object most likely made a glancing impact rather than a direct hit, which explains why Uranus still has an atmosphere. That atmosphere is colder than expected because the simulations show debris from the impact could have formed a shell and trapped heat emanating from the planet’s core. The glancing hit could also explain why the debris spun off into rings and small moons that all travel in the same direction rather than in a helter-skelter multi-directional mess a direct hit would have caused.

The indirect blow would likely have made a less-visible shakeup inside Uranus, changing its shape and density in ways that would explain the funky, warped magnetic field and the axial tilt which is contrary to all other solar system planets.

NASA image of Uranus and its moons and rings

Unfortunately, while the simulation gives possible answers to the mysteries of Uranus and helps researchers better understand other ice giants being found in other solar systems, it leaves unanswered a bigger question … where did this rogue planet or giant object come from and will it come again? The model pictures its size at twice the size of Earth, which is smaller than speculations on the size of the rumored Planet X or Planet 9 or whatever you want to call it.

So many planetary mysteries … so little supercomputer time for running simulations. Perhaps these researchers need to focus more on rogue planets and get their heads out of Uranus. (Sorry.)

“Cataclysmic” collision shaped Uranus’ evolution