Decades ago, scavengers rummaging through an abandoned church in a long-forgotten derelict mining town in Chile’s Atacama desert came across a gruesome and bizarre find: a tiny, seemingly anomalous skeleton. The entire skeleton can fit in a human hand, and is topped by an oversized skull with conspicuously large eye sockets. Naturally, the skeleton was accused of belonging to an extraterrestrial or ET-human hybrid and has since been the subject of speculation, rumor, and mystery.

Earlier this year, however, geneticists and immunologists from Stanford University obtained permission to perform genetic testing on the anomalous skeleton to conclusively identify who or what it may have once belonged to. According to their analysis, the skeleton is merely an unfortunate example of how there are both winners and losers in the gene pool lottery. Their study concluded that the Atacama skeleton belongs to either a six-to-eight year-old child who suffered from a host of rare and deformative genetic disorders, or to an unborn fetus with an advanced aging disorder. It’s never aliens.

Now, a new paper is calling that study into question – but not because there is evidence to suggest the Atacama skeleton might be anything more than it has already been determined to be. Instead, both the Chilean government and an international group of scientists and medical researchers are slamming the study for two reasons: one, an improper use of genomic testing; and two, ethics violations. Nerd fight!

On one hand, this new paper accuses the genetic testing of the Atacama skeleton, or Ata, of being improperly carried out:

Unfortunately, there was no scientific rationale to undertake genomic analyses of Ata because the skeleton is normal, the identified genetic mutations are possibly coincidental, and none of them are known to be strongly associated with skeletal dysplasias that would affect the phenotype at this young age.

These scientists believe “it is most likely a coincidence that the authors found this individual [the Atacama skeleton] had some mutations in genes” because the type of mutations found typically don’t have an effect on physiological until much later in fetal development.

More worryingly, the authors of this new paper accuse the analysis of Ata to be unethical. Once it was deemed that the skeleton belonged to a human and that the relatives or parents of the individual were likely still living, the authors write, the skeleton should have been immediately returned to Chile:

We caution DNA researchers about getting involved in cases that lack clear context and legality, or where the remains have resided in private collections. […] Had these researchers involved, from the beginning, a biological anthropologist who specialises in human remains, we are certain that ethical concerns would have been raised regarding the potentially living relatives of Ata.

This case, even though it deals with a recent specimenindividual, highlights one of the gruesome and dehumanizing side of archaeology. Think about it: all of those mummies and skeletons we dig up were once people who were carefully interred with intention and the belief that they would remain undisturbed in the ground. Who are we to dig up the bones of those who came before us in the name of “progress” or advancing knowledge? Is nothing – or no one – sacred? While it’s important to know where we came from, it’s just as important to hold some degree of reverence for the dead. At what point in history do we draw the line?

A common theme in science fiction is that of the portal through space, time, alternate dimensions, or all three. These strange doorways open up into realms unknown, providing a passage to the outer fringes of our reality and our understanding. Yet, by some accounts these openings through space and time are not merely the domain of science fiction, but actually do exist. One place where such outlandish portals seem to materialize quite often is up in the sky above our heads, and here in the heavens above we can find all manner of reports and even photographic evidence of what appears to be something straight out of a science fiction story.

Among the types of portals said to have opened up in the sky are those that seem to be undeniably linked to the UFO phenomenon, with these mysterious craft apparently utilizing these doorways for their own inscrutable purposes. One very interesting report of what is claimed to some sort of alien portal in the sky occurred in May of 2015, when an amateur nature photographer snapped a pic of something very strange in the skies over the province of Groningen in the Netherlands during a storm. As he was taking pictures of the ominous dark clouds gathering above he claims that he saw a bright flash in the sky, which he managed to capture on film, yet when the photo was developed it was found to show what appeared to be some sort of doorway up in the sky emitting vapor or disgorging something else. Is this just a camera trick? What is it?

An image of the strange portal

The following year, on October 1, 2016, a very unusual aerial phenomenon was observed over Bridge City, Texas. According to UFO investigation investigators SecureTeam 10, on this evening at around 11PM a point of white light appeared in the sky, which then steadily formed a streak across the sky, growing larger and brighter, as well as taking on an orange hue. Witnesses reported that it eventually took the form of a bright orange slit in the sky, which seemed to pulse in cycles, and looked like “some sort of portal.” One witness was able to catch footage of the strange sight on a cell phone, which you can see here.

The weird brightening and dimming portal reportedly stayed stationary for around 10 minutes before fading away to leave witnesses baffled. According to the reports, during this time numerous cars at nearby Port Arthur purportedly inexplicably died on the road, their engines stalling for no apparent reason, and SecureTeam 10’s Tyler Glockner claims that hundreds of motorists were effected by this anomaly, their cars stopping dead in their tracks while still in motion and in some cases causing them to careen right off the road. Many of the witnesses also reported hearing a high-pitched whine spew forth from their radios before the cars and all electrical equipment ceased to function, and it has been speculated this was all caused by some sort of electromagnetic pulse connected to the strange object in the sky. Glockner would say of the odd incident:

Now that seems to me like an EMP (electromagnetic) wave, something like that. Something was knocking out power systems along this area very close to where the mysterious streak of light was sighted.

Was this caused by a UFO utilizing some sort of ultra-dimensional portal or is there some rational explanation? Also in 2016 was a video that heavily made the rounds that was originally posted on You Tube by a user called “Myserio Canal.” In the footage can be seen some odd clouds that begin to swirl about to form some kind of vortex in the sky, and just when it seems things can’t get any odder a bright streak of light flies straight at the portal and enters it, much to the shock of those observing it. Shortly after this UFO speeds into this mass of rotating clouds the whole thing vanishes as if it was never there at all. The video, entitled Dimensional portal in the sky absorbs a UFO, was heavily viewed and discussed and debated. While there are those who truly embrace it as genuine, it has been widely denounced by many as a hoax, and it does not help that there is no time or location for the footage given. Alien portal or hot air? You can see it here and decide for yourself.

Yet another YouTube video purportedly showing a UFO using a mysterious portal has proven to be just as controversial and was released in 2018 by channel “MRMB333.” The footage was apparently taken in the skies of Alabama during an eerie looking storm, by a witness known simply as “Nicholas.” The video shows what looks like some kind of anomalous glow flickering in the clouds as a UFO hovers nearby. The video quickly racked up over 100,000 views and stirred up plenty of debate as to what it could be, with many suggesting it was an inter-dimensional portal that may have even caused the storm, and with of course many also crying “Fake!” Real or not, it certainly is a spooky sight either way. You can see it here.

A still from the Alabama portal footage

In 2018 another video came forward, this time from the country of Scotland. In this case there can be seen a bright circular blue light hovering in the sky over Midlothian, located near Edinburgh, which looks very much like a portal of some type. An unidentified object can then be seen passing very close to this “portal” before it blinks out of existence. Again, this video became a viral sensation at the time, and has been speculated as being everything from an inter-dimensional portal, to just a spotlight or the moon behind the clouds. What do you think it is? There are countless other very similar videos out there, and it all makes one wonder just what is going on.

Besides inter-dimensional portals apparently created by extraterrestrial intelligences, there are also plenty of reports of such doorways conjured up by secret government projects right here on Earth. By far the most notorious of these come from that wellspring of conspiracy theories, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), operated by The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN. The largest and most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the LHC is located 300 feet underground directly below the the CERN Control Centre in Geneva, Switzerland, and is comprised of a vast loop stretching 27 kilometers (about 17 miles).

This loop is more or less used to hurl subatomic particles at extreme speeds in order to smash them into each other to test what will happen for the purpose of unlocking some of the secrets of our universe, including recreating the conditions of the Big Bang, to find out how our universe was create, and find dark matter, among others. Perhaps one of the most famous discoveries linked to the various experiments at the LHC was the observation of Higgs Boson particles, which give matter mass and up until then had been purely theoretical. In addition to the official explanation of this facility, there are many, many conspiracy theories about what “really goes on down there.”

The Large Hadron Collider

Indeed, the very presence of such a large scientific facility located deep underground, its innately somewhat scary-sounding premise of smashing particles together at the speed of light, and its being manned by scientists working on strange experiments down in the subterranean darkness, have all perhaps not surprisingly at all given the location a somewhat ominous reputation, causing quite a bit of concern among the public and spawning all sorts of wild theories about what is really going on there. In additions to alarm and fears that the LHC will create miniature black holes or undo reality itself are various ideas and rumors that CERN is up to all kinds of top-secret experiments and no goodery down there in the bowels of the earth. One of the more popular conspiracy theories is that the facility is actively engaged in opening rifts between dimensions in order to enable teleportation, form doorways to alternate realities, and facilitate travel through time and space.

Evidence for this sort of inter-dimensional activity is often offered in the form of the various strange things that have allegedly been photographed or filmed in the skies over CERN over the years, including UFOS, strange vortices, and other unexplained aerial phenomena. For instance, in December of 2015 footage was taken by some tourists of what seems to be an orb of some sort entering what appears to be some kind of portal or vortex, which vanishes as soon as the unidentified object enters it. Another similar video from May of 2016 supposedly shows some sort of portal in the clouds that appeared right after the power went out at CERN, an incident they claimed was caused by a weasel getting into some of the sensitive machinery.

Strange vortex over CERN

It is interesting to note that a lot of the anomalous events that have purportedly occurred at CERN seem to coincide with blackouts, such as an alleged ripple that was sent out from the facility in 2009 that purportedly disrupted the Earth’s magnetic field and distorted space and time, also right at the time of a blackout at the facility. A report from Russia claimed that this very same “time wave” had instantaneously teleported an Airbus on its way to Bolivia thousands of miles away to the Canary Islands, along with its 170 passengers. This time the blackout was blamed on a piece of bread that had fallen into the device after being dropped by a bird. One would hope that such an advanced scientific facility deep underground would be able to keep out all of the weasels, birds and bread that’ve seemingly been jamming their equipment.

One of the more recent such series of photographic oddness came in the wake of another ambitious project undertaken in recent years by CERN, which itself has already drawn a fair amount of conspiracy theories. The project is what CERN calls the Advanced Proton Driven Plasma Wakefield Acceleration Experiment, or AWAKE, which has the aim of accelerating super-charged particles by way of “plasma wakefields driven by a proton beam.” It is not necessary to really understand what all of that means, only that it sounds rather ominous, scary even, and this may be why it has been singled out as one of the experiments focused on opening portals between worlds.

On June 24, 2016, photographs of alarming, portal-shaped cloud formations were taken in the skies above CERN not long after the AWAKE project was off the ground and on the same day that an experiment was scheduled. The story was big news at the time, and in a video on the phenomenon entitled What Portal did CERN open now?, the narrator says of the strange sight:

This insane ball of energy was directly over the LHC. Some people reported seeing faces in it. It is amazing they keep messing with nature and denying it. What is in the cloud – some say it is lightning or a massive ball of energy. The amount of energy pulling from nature into the collider itself, you can actually see it. What portals are doors being opened in this cloud? Is it a coincidence they had just started the Awake experiment?

Photograph from the June, 2016 event taken by witness Dean Gill

While photographs and videos such as these could have a rational explanation in known phenomena or even be cleverly crafted CGI hoaxes, there are a fairly large number of people who insist that these are the result of CERN experiments pursuing the opening of inter-dimensional doorways. It is unclear whether the LHC is being used to open these portals, intentionally or otherwise, or not, but it does seem certain that conspiracy theories and fears will continue to swirl around it as long as it is in operation.

Here we have looked at just a selection of weird portals that seem to have opened up in the heavens for reasons that remain unknown and perhaps always will be. Are these hoaxes, misidentifications, or little understood natural phenomena in action? Or could it be that rifts in space and time have actually been created. If so, then where they lead or what purpose they serve no one really knows, but whether real or not, accounts such as we will look at here truly stir up the imagination for some time to come.

Time is weird. It’s a concept notoriously impossible define without circular logic. The operating definition of time in physics is simply “what a clock reads.” That’s it. Yet, we have ideas about time that are held as fundamental truths. The arrow of time is one, that’s the idea that time only moves in one direction. Simple enough right? Here’s another one: cause and effect, thing’s cause things to happen. Also pretty simple and just kind of self evident.  Causality is one of the first concepts that infants learn, and it’s baked into everything we do. But for how basic and integral to our whole reality time is, we don’t really understand it or have a better definition than “what a clock reads.” Sometimes, discoveries are made that seem to fly in the face of our supposed understanding of time. That’s what happened this week, when a paper titled Cause and Effect in a Quantum World was published in the journal Physical Review X. According to the paper, quantum computers can ignore cause and effect when modeling systems, a discovery which may fundamentally alter our understanding and relationship with time itself.

OK, so two things need to be addressed before this makes sense. Just kidding, we’re talking about time and quantum physics. It’s not going to make sense, but we’re going to try anyway.

The first is cause and effect. Due to our ability to understand cause and effect we can predict things and model possible futures. If you see a person walking around with their shoes untied, you might make a prediction that they’re going to fall on their face. You could very well be right. Untied shoelaces cause a person to trip which causes the person to fall on their face. Computers can make these predictions too. However, it doesn’t work the other way. It’s exponentially harder and requires a great deal more memory and processing power, for both humans and computers, to model systems based on information interpreted in the wrong order. If you’re given the statement: “a person has fallen on their face” it’s a lot harder to figure out why. Another way to say it is: it’s easier to understand a movie if you watch it from beginning to end than if you watch it in reverse. This is called causal asymmetry and it seems like a basic idea.

The second is that the physical laws of nature don’t actually require time to move in one direction. We just sort of assume the arrow of time moves in one direction does because of our experience and perception. Addressing the question of why it takes so much more processing power and memory to figure out a cause from an effect than it does the other way around, paper co-author Mile Gu asks:

“When the physics does not impose any direction on time, where does causal asymmetry — the memory overhead needed to reverse cause and effect — come from?”

This guy thinks he’s late, but time is an illusion so he should probably just go home and take a nap.

To try to answer that question, scientists decided to force quantum computers to model systems backwards, essentially making them watch a movie in reverse and figure out how it all fits together. What they found is pretty ridiculous: quantum computers entirely ignore causal asymmetry when reading data in reverse. Cause and effect has no bearing on their ability to figure out systems. In fact, quantum computers model systems in reverse-time more efficiently than classical computers model systems in forward-time. Jayne Thompson, one of the co-authors of the paper explains the “profound implications” of this discovery:

“The most exciting thing for us is the possible connection with the arrow of time. If causal asymmetry is only found in classical models, it suggests our perception of cause and effect, and thus time, can emerge from enforcing a classical explanation on events in a fundamentally quantum world.”

So basically, we keep getting stumped by our need to make the universe conform to our preconceived notions of how things work, and time is still weird.

Just a couple of nights ago – while I was promoting my latest book, The Black Diary – I was asked by a caller to the radio show why I “insist” on stating that the Men in Black are supernatural in nature, rather than “accepting” that they are the secret agents of a clandestine agency within government. The answer to that question is very simple: it’s the witness testimony which makes me come to the supernatural conclusion. I have always said that the most important people in the collective field of Forteana are not the writers, the researchers, the radio-hosts, or the TV producers. It’s the witnesses who are the most important. Time and time again I am approached by people who have been terrorized by the MIB. On only a small number of occasions do the witnesses describe the MIB as looking human. For the most part, they look anything but human.

Men in Black Sightings | The Conspiracy Files

I know all too well why so many people assume that the MIB are agents of governments, of military agencies, and / or of clandestine projects buried deep within the world of officialdom. It largely comes from the Men in Black movies, starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. Yes, the trilogy makes for fun viewing. But, by presenting the MIB as the agents of a classified organization, the makers of the movies instilled in the minds of many the image of the Men in Black being “secret agents.” But, the Hollywood portrayal is actually very different to what the witnesses tell us – and that’s a very important issue to be aware of.

It’s worth noting that the man who largely began the whole MIB phenomenon in the early 1950s – Albert Bender, of Bridgeport, Connecticut – was confronted not by agents of the FBI, CIA, etc., but by grim-faced, shadow-like characters with shining eyes and who left behind them an odor of brimstone when they quite literally vanished. Bender’s strange story – which comes across like something akin to H.P. Lovecraft meets The X-Files– is told in Gray Barker’s 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and in Bender’s own book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men.

When, from 1966 to 1967, John Keel immersed himself in the wave of sightings of what became known as “Mothman” in the town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, he was flooded with accounts of local encounters with both MIB and Women in Black. They were often described as looking not quite human. Their skin resembled plastic. They wore wraparound sunglasses that often only partially masked their huge, oversized eyes. They were clearly unaware of our customs and manners. Some of them didn’t even know how to eat food or drink water – as bizarre as it certainly sounds.

Things get even more disturbing: people who have encountered the MIB have fallen sick – and quickly, too. A kind of paranormal infection, we might say. The MIB are able to place people under some form of mind-control, something which compels the targeted person to open the door and let them in, regardless of the time of day or night. Witnesses to UFO activity who have been visited by the MIB talk of poltergeist activity occurring in the home – and in the immediate aftermaths of the MIBs’ vanishing acts.

There are reports of people encountering the MIB while in altered states. In the late 1960s, voice-over actor Peter Beckman and a friend had a very sinister encounter with a pair of MIB while on mescaline – and while listening to the soundtrack to the movie, Rosemary’s Baby. Peter said of the MIB who quickly turned up and managed to get into the house: “They were dressed in square, Eisenhower-era cop-clothing, or FBI clothing – which in 1969, 1970 was not that unusual. They came in and sat on the couch. They were pale and sickly; their clothes hung real loose and they looked as though they might expire at any moment. They appeared to have either trouble breathing, or trouble even being.  I don’t believe they said a thing. If they did, it has disappeared from memory. Very odd, indeed.”

Similarly, I have three cases where people encountered the MIB while on DMT. In one such case, the witness described how both MIB seemed “surprised” that the witness could see them. Not only that, the MIB seemingly have the ability to invade peoples’ dreams and turn them into definitive nightmares. The old black cars of the MIB vanish in the blink of an eye. There are even a few, very strange, stories of the MIB shapeshifting into the form of a large, black dog with glowing, red eyes.

So, that’s why I “insist” the Men in Black are not human: because the vast majority of all the witnesses to the MIB describe them as being non-human.

The Gault site, located just outside of Austin, Texas, has been known to archaeologists for the better part of the last century. Discovered by Henry Gault, a landowner who worked as an archaeological informant in the early 1900s, the site was officially excavated for a period beginning in 1929, under the supervision of J.E. Pearce with the University of Texas. It was reportedly looted a number of times over the ensuing years, prior to new ownership of the property that led official test excavations that began in 1991. By the end of the decade, formal excavations that would continue well into the new millennium were underway.

Over the course of several dig seasons in recent years, Gault has become recognized by archaeologists as a site of particular significance, due to the number of complete lithic assemblages recovered there.

However, the number of artifacts found at the site is just one of the reasons it has American archaeologists so excited. Among the most recent discoveries at the site, new evidence of early occupation is pushing back the timescale on human arrivals in North America, lending further evidence toward the idea of earlier migrations into the western hemisphere than once believed.

Specifically, the Gault site has yielded intricate projectile points from its deepest strata that are well in advance of the Clovis culture. These artifacts not only count among several existing pre-Clovis discoveries in the Americas, but are accompanied by dates obtained via optically stimulated luminescence that suggest an age of 20,000 years or more, effectively placing them among the oldest of their kind found in North America to date.

Excavations at Gault over the years turned up numerous unique discoveries even before the discovery of its pre-Clovis assemblages. The site’s Clovis horizon, for instance, produced a number of fluted projectile points similar to those seen in the image at the top of this page (note that the points featured in the top image are associated with the Rummells-Maske Site in Cedar County, Iowa, rather than Gault, and are used here only for illustrative purposes).

Alongside these points was a fragmentary basal portion of a Clovis-like projectile, similar to what are identified as “Redstone” points in the Southeast (these are similar enough to a preexisting type of projectile point, called Gainey, that many experts consider the two types one and the same). Prior to its discovery amidst the Clovis assemblage at Gault, little data had been obtained for in situ discoveries of Redstone points; additionally, few–if any–had ever been documented in association with a site as far west as Gault. In total, more than 600,000 artifacts identified with the Clovis culture were recovered from the site.

Area 15 at the Gault site, as it appeared between 2007–2014 excavations

(Credit: Jillabus, Wikimedia Commons).

Subsequent dig seasons at Gault continued to produce surprises, and the latest paper published in Science Advances gives full details of the pre-Clovis discoveries, in addition to the dating methods used to determine their provenance.

Luminescence dating, a technique which relies on stimulation of minerals in various ways in order to discern when they were last exposed to sunlight or significant amounts of heat, was among the methods employed to date the pre-Clovis strata at Gault. Among the earliest dates recorded in association with artifacts was 21,700 years, with a standard deviation of ± 1.4 ka. “Significantly, this assemblage exhibits a previously unknown, early projectile point technology unrelated to Clovis,” the study’s authors wrote. “Within a wider context, this evidence suggests that Clovis technology spread across an already regionalized, indigenous population.”

As I noted recently in an article about the Gault discoveries, this is by no means the first time that evidence of a pre-Clovis presence, possibly dating as far back as 20,000 years, has been found in the Americas:

The Topper site in Allendale County, South Carolina, produced similar lithic evidence which dates back at least 20,000 years, though some artifacts recovered from deeper stratigraphic layers there are estimated to be as much as 50,000 years old. Similarly, radiocarbon dates in association with human artifacts at Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Washington County, Pennsylvania, are reliably dated to earlier than 16,000 BC, with one instance of carbonized bark-like material (possible basketry) with evidence of cutting marks dating to 21,070 BP ± 2400. Charcoal recovered elsewhere from Meadowcroft shows 14C dates in excess of 30,000 years (similar to dates retrieved from Monte Verde, Chile, during excavations by Tom Dillehay).  According to J.M. Adovasio, who led excavations at Meadowcroft for a number of decades, the earlier dates are intriguing, but he and others generally work with the more likely nearer dates of around 16,000 years, which are still well in advance of Clovis.

The Science Advances paper can be read online here, which features a wealth of technical data and illustrations depicting the earliest artifacts recovered at the site. For more on the technical significance of these Gault pre-Clovis discoveries, along with an analysis of its impact in the context of advances in American archaeology, see my article “Gault Site in Texas Offers New Evidence of Human Habitation 16 to 20 Thousand Years Ago.”

As an addendum, I’ll note that many these days, in light of ongoing archaeological discoveries like those discussed here, have commented on how “things keep getting older.” That is to say, of course, that archaeologists continue to find more and more evidence for earlier occupations in the New World, as well as advanced behaviors and engineering among early cultures, and refinement of processes that include such things as crafting pottery, agriculture, fermentation, and a wealth of other innovations.

In equal measure to the idea that we’re constantly finding broad evidence for things that, at one time, might have seemed historically out of place, it is also important to make the observation that part of what has led to these new discoveries in the first place has been a fundamental change in thinking.

On a number of occasions at American dig sites I’ve visited where pre-Clovis artifacts ended up being recovered, archaeologists have expressed to me that while such discoveries had been there all along, they were essentially kept hidden for as long as they were by one simple fact: that there had been an expectation nothing would be found below the Clovis horizon. Once archaeologists began pressing on and exploring deeper strata, many were shocked to find evidence of much earlier occupations than previously expected; and inevitably, many were also criticized for presenting these discoveries, even when reliable scientific evidence to account for their provenance was offered.

People are often slow to accept new ideas, although that’s certainly not always a bad thing. Science relies on having waterproof arguments, and skepticism is the best defense against unintended leaks. However, with evidence forthcoming that is strongly in support of an idea that might have once seemed impossible, the necessity for acceptance of new data becomes paramount. Rather than to say that things “keep getting older,” I think it is important to recognize that we are learning–through science–things like how much earlier humans were traversing areas of the globe, utilizing certain technological innovations, and accomplishing things we simply hadn’t conceived they were capable of as recently as a few years ago.

Science is the ultimate tool of discovery, and as it has continued to show us new things about the ancient past, it underscores the same timeless ingenuity of the human spirit at work, both then and now.