My previous article was on the subjects of (A) how the UFO phenomenon might be a threat to our physical and mental health; and (B) why the Men in  Black might not be bad guys, after all. Rather, they just might actually be good guys trying to warn us of the hazards that the same phenomenon might pose. I thought I would follow-up that article with a two-part one which graphically demonstrates the dangers that UFO entities and their powers might pose. We have to go way back to November 25, 1991. On that date, Ray Boeche – a priest and a former State-Director with MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) – had a very strange meeting at Lincoln, Nebraska’s Cornhusker Hotel. It was a meeting with a couple of guys who were working on a highly classified program within the U.S. Department of Defense. Now, with that said, I’ll hand the story over to Ray himself, who I extensively interviewed for my Final Events book. Ray told me:

“I found it interesting because they had contacted me at work, and I have no idea how they tracked me down there. But, they wanted to know if we could get together and have lunch to discuss something important. I met them for a brief period of time on that first meeting, and then they said: ‘We’d like to get together and have a longer conversation.’ I arranged a time and it was quite a lengthy discussion: probably three and a half hours. And that’s how it all came about. After the meetings, when I was able to verify that the men held the degrees they claimed to hold, and were, apparently, who they claimed to be, I was intrigued and excited at the possibility of having stumbled on a more or less untouched area which could be researched. But I was also cautious in terms of ‘why me?’

“Initially, I suppose I was apprehensive and curious. I had no way of knowing before our face-to-face meeting if there was any legitimacy to this at all. I wasn’t given any information at all before our meeting, just the indication that they were involved in areas of research I would find interesting, and that they had some concerns they wished to discuss with me. Both men were physicists; I’d guess they were probably in their early-to-mid fifties, and they were in a real moral dilemma. Both of them were Christians, and were working on a Department of Defense project that involved trying to contact the NHE’s [“Non-Human Entities,” as the pair called what most people refer to as “aliens”]. In fact, this was described to me as an ‘obsessive effort.’ And part of this effort was to try and control the NHE’s and use their powers in military weapons applications and in intelligence areas, such as remote-viewing and psychotronic weapons.

“They believed that the NHE’s were not extraterrestrial; but were some sort of demonic entities. And that regardless of how benevolent or beneficial any of the contact they had with these entities seemed to be, it always ended up being tainted, for lack of a better term, with something that ultimately turned out to be bad. There was ultimately nothing positive from the interaction with the NHE entities. They felt it really fell more under the category of some vast spiritual deception instead of UFOs and aliens. In the course of the whole discussion, it was clear that they really viewed this as having a demonic origin that was there to simply try and confuse the issue in terms of who they were, what they wanted, and what the source of the ultimate truth is. If you extrapolate from their take that these are demons in the biblical sense of the word, then what they would be doing here is trying to create a spiritual deception to fool as many people as possible. From what they told me, it seemed like someone had invoked something and it opened a doorway to let these things in. That’s certainly the impression they gave me.”

Ray told me that his informants said the “doorway” was opened by none other than Jack Parsons, a brilliant figure in 1930s-early 1950s rocketry. He was a man with a Top Secret clearance with the military, and a devotee of Aleister Crowley. Ray expanded on this: “They said that was the genesis of this. Was this a doorway that was opened by Parsons to allow these demonic entities in? Or did Parsons give someone else the idea that maybe someone in the government should look into this? That was one of their big concerns: that in order to try and accomplish some sort of military advantage, demonic things – masquerading as aliens – had been contacted and forces had been unleashed that were not going to be able to be controlled for very long; or, at least, were not going to be able to be bent to the will of whoever started this project. Satanic rituals, ritual magic and even human sacrifice were all mentioned as being linked with the project. They were convinced the work had to stop.

“They never revealed how it was all initiated in the beginning; but the situation today did, they said, go back to Parsons. I was never able to get an exact point of origin of these sorts of experiments, or of their involvement, and when they got started. But I did get the impression that because of what they knew and the information that they presented, they had been involved for at least several years; even if the project had gone on much longer. They were concerned that they had undertook this initially with the best of intentions; but then as things developed they saw a very negative side to it that wasn’t apparent earlier. So, that’s what leads me to think they had a relatively lengthy involvement.

“They didn’t just think that this was a spiritual deception; but that it was possibly something leading to a final deception. In their view – which, theologically, I don’t particularly hold – they viewed things much more like that of [Tim] LaHaye and [Jerry B.] Jenkins in the Left Behind book-series: the anti-Christ will appear, then we are fooled, and Armageddon will then be triggered. That seemed to be their personal feeling about the whole scenario.”

Ray added: “I tend to take the view that a lot of those prophecies in the Book of Revelations were fulfilled with Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem. I don’t think there is any way to deny that orthodox Christianity teaches a physical return of Christ; but that is always considered to be the church’s great hope: Christ’s returning, a triumphant return. So, from that point of view, the Left Behind mentality – that Armageddon is a terrible thing – and that you want to push off as long as possible, to me doesn’t really hold; at least in the historical sense. Christ’s eventual return is the culmination of this age and this world; so it’s not something to fear. It’s something to be welcomed. But it was viewed by the DoD like that, and as a final-battle scenario. Their other big fear in the whole thing was: if you have these types of entities who will present themselves as extraterrestrial beings, how is that going to affect the spiritual outlook of the people? Will it sway people from a belief in Christ? Would it have that sort of a spiritual effect?

“Their position was that these entities are the origin of a lot of the UFO reports; a lot of the abduction phenomena, and the cattle mutilations; and that they are able to interact physically with us in our world. I was never told how they knew, but the guys knew that there was wreckage of non-earthly origin at Roswell. And I remember asking them specifically in a later conversation: ‘How do you know this? And how does it happen that a demonic force can also interact physically?’ Their response was to me was: ‘You’re a pastor; you’ve studied theology. Go back to the Bible and look.’

“Well, that set me on months trying to piece this together in my own mind. Scripture refers to Satan as the prince of this world and the prince of the powers of the air. I deduced that there could be a precedent: a logical precedent based on scripture that demonic forces can in some way influence the physical world. So, given that that’s the case, could they create something? Could they somehow pluck matter from somewhere else – a different planet, a different galaxy that was so different from Earth that it’s going to be something recognized as not coming from here? Could they manufacture or create a physical object or wreckage – deliberately – to make us fall into the trap of believing that something extraterrestrial had fallen from outer space? A staged crash: to make us fall into the deception that they are extraterrestrials. That was the scientists’ conclusion. One of the things that made me believe there could be some sort of physical interaction is the mention of the Nephilim in Genesis in The Bible. Whatever these other worldly beings were – angels, fallen angels – they were able to interact physically and create some sort of progeny here on earth.

“Most of it was related to psychotronic weaponry and remote viewing; and even deaths by what were supposed to be psychic methods. They said that these entities are really the ones who were behind whatever actions the people working on the project thought they were able to perform themselves. It seemed that the project was allowed to assume that it had somehow technologically mastered the ability to do what the NHE’s could do: remote-viewing and psychotronics. But in actuality it was these entities doing it all the time, or allowing it to happen, for something that suited their deception. With both psychotronic weapons and remote-viewing, I was told that the DoD had not really mastered a technology to do that; they were allowed by the NHE’s to think that this is what they had done. But the NHE’s were always the causal factor.”

Part-2 of “More On The Deadly Dangers of UFOs” to follow…

The search for dark matter has been a quest of physicists for decades. While some evidence suggests that the universe could be made up of up to 85% of this invisible and undetectable form of matter, scientists have yet to conclusively identify it in the wild; most of the evidence is gleaned from the unexplained gravitational effects that something is exerting on the matter we can see. Does dark matter actually exist, or is the theory a modern-day four humours?

Time will tell. In the meantime, scientists in a different discipline are uncovering evidence that other types of dark matter may be all around us: living matter. According to recent discoveries in microbiology, there could be an entire branch of the tree of life composed of unknown forms of “dark life.” It’s only been a few hundred years since Hooke and Van Leeuwenhoek discovered microorganisms – just imagine what we’ll know about in a few hundred more. The really weird stuff.

Microbes Under the Miscroscope

Mark Miller, a biochemist at the University of California San Diego, was recently awarded close to $3 by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health to study these mysterious forms of dark life. According to Miller, advances in computing power has produced evidence of unknown forms of life which resist being cultured in petri dishes the way other microbes can. Part of the reason these life forms have evaded discovery is the fact that they live in exotic or near-unreachable environments like within deep sea vents or the inside of dolphins’ mouths. Yuck.

If you ever drop your sandwich in a dolphin’s mouth, just consider it gone forever. Trust me.

Soon, Miller says, we may be able to conclusively prove the existence of these organisms through massive data collection performed by supercomputers:

Dark life is those organisms that are not visible to the human eye and cannot be successfully cultured. It’s kind of mind-blowing. There are whole metabolic pathways that I, as a classically-trained biochemist, think are essential for life that seem to be missing from these new organisms. And until we had these very sophisticated DNA techniques available to us, we also could not detect it.

“This is an interesting time,” Miller adds, “because DNA sequencing is cheap: you can get all the data you want. But you get so much data you choke on it.” Sure beats choking to death on croissants on live TV.

Could we be on the verge of discovering entire new ecosystems of unknown organisms? Given that the search for alien life has taken to focusing on microbes, this type of research will be essential for providing space agencies with the tools they need to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before. Could first contact happen in our lifetime? Even it if it’s with a microbe, I’ll take it as a win.

Things just disappear sometimes: car keys, jewelry, whole entire islands. It’s just the way things are. Sometimes those things are pretty hard to let go of. If your car keys disappeared, it’s a fair bet that you’d tear your house apart trying to find them. Well, in 2014, Japan named 158 uninhabited islands off its coast to delineate the nation’s territorial waters, boundaries that have become increasingly contentious in recent decades. One of those 158 islands has up and vanished. The Japanese government has responded by initiating a search and rescue mission to locate the island that was seriously just there a second ago.

The island, Esanbehanakitakojima, is—was—located in the cold north ocean off the coast of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the major Japanese islands. It’s not a particularly impressive island. At only 4.6 feet above sea level, Esanbehanakitakojimaonly barely qualified as a real island. Still, it’s important. The area where the island is located is contentious. Japan and Russia both lay claim to the area, and China is a close and aggressive neighbor. For China’s part, they have been constructing artificial islands off their coast in an effort to inflate their claims on the surrounding sea.

With this island gone, Japan stands to lose about 500 meters of territory. That might not sound like a lot, but it’s concerning enough for the Japanese government to dispatch the coast guard and avoid ceding any territory to their unfriendly neighbors.

Going, going….

The island is unlikely to be found, however. The first report of the vanishing island came in September, when the author of a book on Japan’s smaller islands went to photograph Esanbehanakitakojim. No photographs were taken because the island was not there. When the author said that he couldn’t find the island, a group of fishermen set off on their boats to locate the darned thing. No such luck. Now the coast guard is looking for it, but they do not suspect that their luck will be any different.

The thing is, no one has recorded any data on this now-nonexistent island since 1988, so not only does no one know where it is, no one knows when it disappeared either. Any number of things may have caused its disappearance. Wind erosion, ice bergs, or rising sea levels may all have played a part in the vanishing, but no one knows for sure.

And it’s gone.

The oceanic boundaries of Japan are constantly changing, however, and when one island disappears, it seems another pops into existence to take its place. In 2013, an undersea volcanic eruption caused an island to spontaneously appear south of Tokyo. That brand new island now has its own ecosystem, as plant and animal life moves in to colonize it. The Japanese government has taken measures to preserve this virgin island, but who knows how long it will be before someone steals this one too.

It’s official: Earth has more than just one moon out there in its orbit.

Well, sort of. National Geographic reports that a pair of particulate clouds–“dustballs,” in essence–have been located in Earth’s orbit at a distance roughly equal to that of the moon itself. The unusual formations were suspected to have existed for decades already, although this was only recently confirmed by a team of Hungarian astronomers and physicists with Eötvös Loránd University.

Located around 250,000 miles from Earth, these outer space dustballs, known as “Kordylewski clouds,” are roughly the same distance from Earth as the moon, although they are much wider–as much as nine times–than the Earth.

Despite their size, they are apparently extremely difficult to find, too.

The clouds were first spotted as far back as 1961 by Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski, and are among a variety of other supposed natural objects or formations hypothesized to accompany the moon in orbit around the Earth. Since Kordylewski’s initial observation, the unusual clouds had remained unconfirmed by other observers; some even doubted whether they existed at all.

“It is intriguing to confirm that our planet has dusty pseudo-satellites in orbit alongside our lunar neighbor,” study co-author Judit Slíz-Balogh told National Geographic.

In past articles here at MU, I’ve chronicled the odd history of past searches for a hypothetical “second moon” in orbit around the Earth. Although there has never been convincing evidence that such a feature–generally referred to as a “moonlet”–has ever existed, there have been some notable cases where scientists thought they might be on the verge of such a discovery.

In fact, going all the way back to the 1840s, Frederic Petit, then director of the observatory of Toulouse, claimed to have spotted a second moon in orbit around Earth; a few decades later, Canadian weather reporter E. Stone Wiggins made similar claims, which were widely publicized in periodicals at that time (you can read more about these early searches for Earth’s second moon in my article here).

Clyde Tombaugh, the astronomer renowned for his discovery of Pluto, was tasked with searching for a secondary moon-like object orbiting the Earth beginning in 1954, and concluded after a three-year search that no such objects could be found. Prior to Tombaugh’s search for Earth’s mystery moonlet, notable sightings of objects in orbit around Earth had also been made by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, who claimed to have seen such a satellite prior to the launch of Sputnik 1 by Russia on October 4, 1957.

Alleged sightings by LaPaz and others of mysterious orbital objects were the likely inspiration behind later claims made by Major Donald Keyhoe, arguably one of the most popular UFO advocates of his era. Keyhoe later described in his book Aliens From Space what appeared to be a reference to LaPaz’s sighting:

“During 1953, the AF began experiments with new long range radar equipment. While making the initial tests, AF operators were astonished to pick up a gigantic object orbiting near the equator. Its speed was almost 18,000 miles an hour. Repeated checks showed that the tracking was correct. Some huge unknown object was circling Earth, six hundred miles out.”

Keyhoe and others who wrote about the U.S. Government’s apparent interest in finding moonlets in the 1950s helped spawn theories of an alleged “alien satellite” popularly known as the “Black Knight” satellite. Theories appearing online propose a number of wild theories about this alleged object, which include the claim that this “alien” satellite has orbited Earth since around the end of the last Ice Age (I give a complete breakdown of the history of the “Black Knight” in my article here, covering how a number of separate claims from over the decades became interwoven into a single UFO conspiracy theory over time).

In light of the latest discovery of these Kordylewski dustballs (I wouldn’t necessarily call them “moons”, seeing as how they are merely particulate clouds… and certainly not genuine “moonlets”), it is nonetheless interesting that additional orbital features have finally been confirmed alongside Earth’s moon.

With any luck, they won’t prove to be problematic: as National Geographic notes, these clouds form naturally around areas that result from the centripetal forces between objects like Earth and the sun “balancing out” their gravitational pulls, which are known as “Lagrange points.” NASA has used these areas in the past as fuel-efficient parking lots for satellites, whose performance might end up being hindered if tossed into the mix with concentrated clouds of space dust.

• The Hungarian team’s research was featured in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.