If it looks like a volcanic eruption and acts like a volcanic eruption, is it a volcanic eruption … even if it’s on Mars, which hasn’t had an eruption at this particular volcano in at least 50 million years and hasn’t had a lava flow anywhere in at least 2 million years? That question is currently being hotly debated by astronomers and conspiracy theorists after many people looking at recent pictures from the European Space Agency’s Mars webcam on board its Mars Express orbiter spotted what looks like a volcanic plume over Arsia Mons, a volcano on the Tharsis bulge near the Martian equator. Is it a volcano or is it something else? Is it being covered up or is it something else?

Let’s start by saying that no one questions that something DID happen on Mars over the Arsia Mons volcano and it WAS photographed by the webcam on the ESA’s Mars Express orbiter. The pictures being referenced appear to be from 9-5-2018 to 10-20-2018. Further investigation by Forbes found that NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey mission also picked up clouds over Arsia Mons in September 2018. Those photos didn’t cause the same controversy in the conspiracy community since the looked more like fog than a volcanic plume.

Photo of plume

(ESA)

Speaking of the conspiracy community, multiple sites picked up the photographs, called it a volcanic eruption and speculated it was being covered up with their evidence being the recent shutdown of the solar observatory in New Mexico, shutdowns of other observatories and the conspiracy theorists’ inherent distrust of NASA. Those shutdowns have been explained (the one in New Mexico  was due to a criminal investigation and possible threats) and one wonders why a ‘solar’ observatory would be shut down over a Martian eruption. The answer is point three – they don’t trust NASA.

For those who do trust NASA, at least occasionally, it sent Tanya Harrison, Director of Research for Arizona State University’s Space Technology and Science Initiative and a Science Team Collaborator on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) Opportunity, to Twitter to explain the plume.

“It’s not a plume of smoke, but rather water ice clouds condensing out over the summit of the Arsia Mons volcano. We see them quite often over this particular volcano.”

She also showed another view of the Arsia Mons from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in October showing ice clouds and explained further:

“We see these clouds hang out over the summit of Arsia for weeks at a time during this time of year, every year. It’s a combination of its high elevation and the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere at this time of year causing the clouds to form.”

Another view of Arsia Mons couds 

(NASA)

A report about the plume in Forbes agrees with Harrison, referencing similar plumes in 2015 and a 2005 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research about “persistent water ice clouds on the flanks of Arsia Mons Volcano.” Jacob Richardson, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, gives the accepted volcanic history of Arsia Mons in a 2017 study:

“We estimate that the peak activity for the volcanic field at the summit of Arsia Mons probably occurred approximately 150 million years ago—the late Jurassic period on Earth—and then died out around the same time as Earth’s dinosaurs. It’s possible, though, that the last volcanic vent or two might have been active in the past 50 million years, which is very recent in geological terms.”

And yet … the distrust of all things NASA leads to the current questioning of all things Arsia Mons. Perhaps the real question we should be asking is this: if this truly is the first recorded volcanic eruption on Mars in 50 million years, wouldn’t NASA and the ESA be shouting just as loudly … not to mention fighting over whose discovery it was?

One of the strangest cases in my files comes from a woman who, back in the 1990s, had a series of experiences that left her seriously ill, and which took her several months to fully recover from. Alison, of Texas was seventeen when, in late 1998, she began to feel ill. The first symptom was a rapid loss of weight: around ten pounds in less than a month – which is definitely not a good thing. Given her age at the time, it’s perhaps not unreasonable that Alison’s mother tactfully asked if all was okay with her. When her mother brought up the issue of her weight loss, Alison became noticeably defensive, but denied that she had anorexia or bulimia.

Nothing more was said: Alison continued to have a healthy appetite, despite continuing to steadily lose weight. It was around ten days later, however, that Alison’s mother became deeply worried: early on a Sunday morning Alison screamed for her mother, who quickly came running to her bedroom. To her horror, she saw Alison laying on the bed, her face deathly pale. When her mother tried to help Alison to sit upright, Alison’s eyes rolled into her head and she fainted. Luckily, the pair lived only a few minutes’ from the local hospital and so Alison’s mother got her into the car and raced to the emergency room. In no time, she was being examined.

As Alison – who regained consciousness in the car, but who felt weak and dizzy – rested, a doctor asked her mother about Alison’s general health. She explained that Alison had lost a lot of weight in the last few weeks. Maybe not surprisingly, the doctor too asked questions about anorexia and bulimia. When Alison recovered, the pair left the hospital, with the doctor suggesting to Alison’s mother that she keep a very close eye on her daughter, and – if she had any more fainting spells – to take her to their regular doctor. They were wise words: Alison fell sick on three more occasions, and as her weight began to plummet: a final total of approximately twenty pounds in around six weeks. She was admitted to hospital and watched very carefully.

Tests showed that, physically, Alison was exhibiting all the physical signs associated with early anorexia. But, there was always someone with her when she ate her meals in her hospital room – and at home, too. In fact, she was eating eagerly. On top of that, Alison’s mother sat with her for hours after eating each meal – on the suggestion of one of the doctors, to make sure she didn’t make herself ill, bulimia-style, by vomiting up her meals. Further tests were run but no answers were to be found. At least, not by conventional medicine.

At the height of her illness, when Alison even started to take on a jaundiced look, she confided in her mother that there was something she had not told her – or the doctors. Alison’s mother feared, initially, that her daughter was going to say she had been using and abusing hard drugs. But, no. Alison said that four or five days before she began losing weight, she woke in the dead of night to see a pale-faced woman, attired in a long and black, hooded robe, standing next to the bed. The woman was very tall – around six-foot-three or –four. Her skin was white, and her eyes were staring and bulging. Alison found herself unable to move as the woman closed in on her, looming over the bed as Alison struggled to move. The woman gave a loud, satisfying groan at the very same time that Alison suddenly felt ill and cold. The woman retreated into the darkness of the bedroom and vanished.

As luck, or fate, would have it, Alison’s mother had a friend, Jennifer, who worked in the field of alternative medicine and who also had deep knowledge of the world of the supernatural. Jennifer agreed to perform a cleansing of not just the family home, but also of Alison herself. Since the pale, supernatural woman only ever appeared at night, Jennifer said it would be a good idea for her to sit in the bedroom while Alison slept – to ensure that if the woman did appear she would be ready to deal with her.

Jennifer arrived the following evening, armed to the teeth with just about everything she needed to ensure that the evil entity in the home would be banished for good. Jennifer’s weapons included sea salt – which is said to have the ability to prevent supernatural creatures from crossing certain thresholds, including doorways to rooms. So, Jennifer scattered more than liberal amounts of sea salt at the front- and back-doors of the home, in front of Alison’s bedroom, and across the window-sill in her room. That was followed by the use of sage. Traditionally, and for centuries, sage has been seen as both a powerful protector and a cleanser. So, Jennifer did what she does best: she performed a lengthy cleansing program that went on for several hours, and ensuring that the smoke reached all corners of the home. Then, it was a case of watching and waiting.

Alison’s mother stayed in the living-room, at the suggestion of Jennifer – who sat by Alison’s bed, ready for just about anything. The black-garbed woman did not put in an appearance, but there were two inexplicable things that did happen that night: Alison’s bedroom was briefly filled with an odor like rotting meat, and, for a few moments, rapid scratching noises were heard on the walls of the bedroom. Alison and Jennifer held hands tightly, and prayed that the hideous thing would leave – and leave now. By all accounts, the rituals worked. The eerie woman was never seen again and over the course of five or six weeks Alison’s health returned to normal. Today, and now in her late thirties, Alison is convinced that whatever the woman was, she was feeding on her, something which led to the weight loss and anorexia-like side-effects and symptoms. To this day, Alison keeps both sea salt and sage in her home – which, today, is in Arizona.

If you’ve seen the movie “Titanic,” you know that icebergs are not ice cubes. Apparently, Netflix isn’t available in Antarctica because a plane operated by NASA to scan the ice photographed a berg that looks more like a tombstone or a sheet cake or a frozen Christmas present … in other words, it’s nothing like a chunk of the Larsen C ice shelf it broke off of. Is it real or are the scientists stationed in Antarctica killing time with picks, chainsaws and tape measures?

The iceberg suspected of sinking the Titanic

“What makes this one a bit unusual is that it looks almost like a square.”

In an interview with LiveScience, Kelly Brunt, an ice scientist with NASA and at the University of Maryland, described the block of ice spotted by a plane belonging to NASA’s Operation IceBridge fleet – a project whose purpose is to measure annual changes in the thickness of Antarctica’s ice and glaciers in order to predict future break-offs and meltings caused by climate change. The planes give a closer and quicker look at these occurrences than the IceSat satellites. Should we be worried that the ice is suddenly breaking off in such neat and precise rectangular cuboid bergs?

“We get two types of icebergs: We get the type that everyone can envision in their head that sank the Titanic, and they look like prisms or triangles at the surface and you know they have a crazy subsurface. And then you have what are called ‘tabular icebergs.'”

Despite the predictable Internet panic when NASA posted photos on its NASA ICE #IceBridge Twitter feed, Kelly assures the masses that this mass is rare but normal. For the non-scientists (much appreciated, Kelly), she likens the cuboid iceberg calving process to a long fingernail that cracks off with a clean, straight edge on at least three sides. Also like a fingernail, the tabular iceberg is much wider than it is thick. This one is a mile across and, while it probably looks like a fun place for Antarctic scientists to blow off frozen steam playing mobile hockey, she warns that it’s unstable and moving away from the Larsen C ice shelf into the Weddell Sea.

Drawing of a NASA IceBridge plane

(NASA)

That explanation sounds believable despite the dubious comments on various websites that it’s was actually caused by aliens, secret experiments or bored scientists. Whatever the case, let’s hope funding continues for cryospheric (ice-related) research projects like NASA ICE and Operation IceBridge. It may not be disaster movie-worthy but it’s critical to predicting how many of us will be underwater in a few years.

Last week, I was on Dave Schrader’s Darkness Radio show. Although the show was on alien abductions, we also touched on the matter of the Black Eyed Children. Dave asked me about some of the stranger and creepier BEC accounts I have in my files – which amount to quite a few. We discussed several such cases, but there’s one which I didn’t touch on, and that is one of the weirdest of all.. It’s the account of a man named Martin, who lives just outside of Tecumseh, Oklahoma. Martin’s encounter with a pair of Black Eyed Children went down in March 2011. Fortunately, I was able to interview Martin personally just a few weeks after his experience. Martin was at home alone when he had just about the worst encounter was possible.

In terms of Martin’s encounter, it occurred two days after he returned home. As a truck-driver, he had been on the road for two weeks and was looking forward to a few days of relaxation and fun. He got neither. On his first night back, Martin planned on watching a bunch of shows he had recorded while he was away on the road.  The evening began in completely normal fashion: he made himself a big sandwich, cracked open a cold beer and watched his shows. Normality was about to go out of the window. Around 8:30 p.m., there was that knock on the door, the kind of which so many witnesses to the BEC have now experienced, but surely wished they hadn’t. Martin didn’t even bother looking through the spy-hole: he assumed it was his immediate neighbor, Rex, who would take in any packages from the likes of UPS, Amazon and FedEx that might have been left on Martin’s doorstep while he was away. Sadly for Martin, as he opened the door, he instantly realized it was not Rex.

Martin got the shock of his life when he was confronted by a boy and a girl – both around eleven or twelve years of age and with large, black, eerie-looking eyes. The girl was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved black top, while the boy had the almost-ubiquitous black hoodie. Both looked sickly and scrawny and is if they needed a hearty meal in them. Little did Martin know that this was exactly what they were there for. Hardly a fan of the supernatural, Martin had never heard of the BEC phenomenon and could only stand and stare at their curious faces, assuming at first that this was some kind of joke. But, the Black-Eyed Children were certainly not laughing. They stood together, hand in hand, looking at Martin with expressions on their faces that were, paradoxically, lacking in emotion but which also gave off airs of highly charged malevolence.

Echoing Brian Bethel’s encounter back in the 1990s (which largely began the BEC phenomenon and debate) , Martin said that when the girl said they were homeless and needed something to eat, it all seemed very much like a ruse – as if they had spoken the words time and time again. It was like a carefully-crafted scheme on their part. Most disturbing of all, for a few moments Martin felt transfixed – almost hypnotized – by those large, black eyes. Indeed, he told me that he could not understand why he did not quickly shut the door at the sight of those terrible eyes. Martin could only say that it was if he was somehow being prevented from shutting the door on the pair. One might be justified in saying Martin had been placed in a state of full-blown mind-control.

The girl repeated: “We need to eat. May we come in?” Martin said that he recalls her words accurately, and he felt that the girl’s use of the term “may we?” (instead of “can we?”) sounded like “how people talked way back.” There is one missing portion from Martin’s story: he cannot recall how the pair got into his house. He recalls inviting them in – “it felt like I said it in a dream” – but, the next thing he remembers is seeing the pair standing in front of him, while he was sat on his living-room couch. The girl said just one word: “eat.”

At that point, Martin suddenly felt deathly ill. It was, he said, as if he “hadn’t eaten in days.” He explained that it was as if he himself was suddenly starving, but it was the children who needed to eat. The pair stared intently at Martin, who found himself getting weaker and weaker. And weaker still. “Crashing” might be a more ideal term to use: Martin found himself barely able to move. Not because he was being prevented from moving, but because physically-speaking he simply did not have the energy to even stand up. It was, Martin said, as if he was himself being eaten alive by the paranormal pair of ghoulish things in his midst.

After a few minutes, both the girl and the boy turned and left, still holding hands. Martin finally managed to crawl to his bedroom, where he lapsed into a deep sleep. He did not wake until well into the following afternoon. For the next three four or days, the overwhelming weakness – made worse by bouts of dizziness and a bad taste in his mouth – kept him in his bed. It was almost a week later before he finally felt fully back to normal. While Martin has no idea as to what the BEC were or are, he believes they were not human and, somehow, had drained him of energy.