‘Oumuamua, that Hawaiian-named, cigar-shaped comet / asteroid / spaceship / planet fragment / something else and the controversy surrounding what exactly it is keeps getting more heated … now with personal attacks, rebuttals and more. Less than a week after many media sites reported that Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard’s astronomy department, said in a letter in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that ‘Oumuamua could be a spaceship or a “lightsail of artificial origin “from an alien civilization, his and his co-author’s intelligence and opinions were called into question by scholars in numerous fields.

llightsail

“Like most scientists, I would love there to be convincing evidence of alien life, but this isn’t it. It has already been shown that its observed characteristics are consistent with a comet-like body ejected from another star system. “And some of the arguments in this study are based on numbers with large uncertainties.”
— Dr. Alan Fitzsimmons, Queens University Belfast.

And …

“The thing you have to understand is: scientists are perfectly happy to publish an outlandish idea if it has even the tiniest *sliver* of a chance of not being wrong. But until every other possibility has been exhausted dozen times over, even the authors probably don’t believe it.”
— Astrophysicist Dr. Katie Mack, North Carolina State

The Daily Galaxy contacted Dr. Loeb and he clarified the contents of the letter. Here are portions of his response:

“I was very surprised about the reaction of the media to our paper … It is exciting to live at a time when we have the scientific technology to search for evidence of alien civilizations. The evidence about `Oumuamua is not conclusive but interesting. I will be truly excited once we have conclusive evidence … The excess acceleration of `Oumuamua was detected at multiple times, ruling out an impulsive kick due to a break up of the object. The only other explanation that comes to mind is the extra force exerted on `Oumuamua by sunlight. In order for it to be effective, `Oumuamua needs to be less than a millimeter in thickness, like a sail. This led us to suggest that it may

be a light-sail produced by an alien civilization. I welcome other proposals, but I cannot think of another explanation for the peculiar acceleration of `Oumuamua.”

‘Oumuamua’s path through the solar system

Loeb’s co-author, Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, also responded. Here are portions of his answer/defense:

“It’s true that the Harvard paper suggesting that this object might be engineered, rather than simply the ten millionth rock from the Sun, has certainly provoked a lot of interest by the public. But one should keep in mind that the idea of alien company has perennially been interesting to the public … One-third of the public seems to think that we really are being visited by extraterrestrial tourists … It’s obviously far less interesting to suggest that Oumuamua might be no more than an insensible, random hunk of ice.”

Loeb is an adviser to Breakthrough Starshot, an initiative working to send a fleet of tiny laser-powered lightsails to the nearest star system. Is his study about ‘Oumuamua possibly just a justification for this project? Is his quest to find alien life blinding him to scientific principles? What does Harvard think about all of this attention from the UFO world?

One thing is for certain … the controversy circling ‘Oumuamua is far from over.

Oh, Area 51, don’t ever change. America’s spookiest Air Force facility has a firm hold on the world’s imagination and continues to spark speculation conspiracy theories about UFOs and secretive weapons and aircraft. The latest Area 51 weirdness was reported this week by Tyler Rogoway at aviation blog The Drive and seems to suggest the classified operations show no signs of stopping in the skies above Groom Lake.

What exactly goes on in the desert?

Despite the fact that nearly all of this testing is highly classified, there is only so much the Air Force can keep a secret due to the fact that much of the armed service’s flight data remains open to the public. Aviation watchdogs poring over this data noticed a strange flight which took place on September 20th earlier this year, flying with no callsign – the first suggestion that something strange was going down. Even stranger? The flight flew a repeated loop directly over the secretive Area 51 facility in the middle of the night. After four hours, the aircraft headed southwest before disappearing.

The aircraft has been identified as a Boeing NKC-135 Stratotanker, usually used for in-flight refueling operations. This particular aircraft, identified with the serial 61-0320, is a highly modified tanker which has been particularly busy in 2018 flying missions out of Area 51’s host facility, Edwards Air Force Base.

Edwards Air Force Base is home to the 412th Test Wing which conducts testing on new Air Force technologies.

The flight’s entire path can be seen here. Note that on this flight data website, a glitch caused two separate flights to be combined into one. That other flight, ten hours later, saw the same aircraft fly over desolate, unpopulated areas in the desert before making a similar loop over the ocean west of Vandenberg Air Force base. That second flight featured the appropriately spooky callsign “GHOST 57.”

In all likelihood, this tanker was refueling highly classified and experimental aircraft flying out of Edwards – but that makes it no less mysterious and fascinating. Then again, why spend so much time in the air directly above Area 51? That airspace is usually restricted and test flights rarely enter. What was being tested in the remote Nevada desert?

I was just a kid when I was introduced to the menacing and macabre world of the enigmatic Men in Black, those dark-suited ghouls that terrorize UFO witnesses and researchers alike. I eagerly began reading the disturbing-yet-compelling pages of John Keel’s now-classic title, The Mothman Prophecies, which told of distinctly strange goings-on at Point Pleasant, West Virginia in the mid-to-late 1960s. Come to think of it, “strange goings-on” may not be the correct terminology to use. Outright paranormal foulness and malignancy would be far more apt, methinks. A fiery-eyed winged-thing, surreal reports of contact with enigmatic alien entities on lonely, moonlit, tree-shrouded roads, occult phenomena plaguing the entire town by the dead of night, and lives manipulated and transformed in ways near-unimaginable were the order of the day. And then there was the brooding, predatory, and repeated manifestations of the dreaded MIB who, I got the distinct impression, were pulling the supernatural strings of just about all those myriad entities and unspeakable things that had chosen Point Pleasant as their targets.

For reasons I have never truly been able to fathom, from that very day onward I became particularly fascinated by the actions of the Men in Black, their silencing of UFO witnesses, their near-ethereal presence in our world, and, of course, their overwhelming and mysterious elusiveness. Who, or more likely what, were they? From where did they originate? What did they want of us? Why were they so deeply intent on silencing Flying Saucer-seekers? The further and deeper I dug into the subject, the more I found myself attempting to penetrate the veil of unsettling darkness and hostility that seemed to forever surround the MIB. In the immediate years that followed my reading of John Keel’s legendary study of Mothman, I sought out just about as many works on the MIB as was conceivably possible. And, at the absolute top of my list – in undeniably joint first-place – were Gray Barker’s 1956 title They Knew Too Much about Flying Saucers and a small and overwhelmingly bizarre book titled Flying Saucers and the Three Men. The latter was penned in 1962 by a curious and undeniably paranoid character named Albert Bender, without who there simply would be no MIB puzzle. Period.

Barker, who had a flair for all-things dramatic, was the perfect person to address the MIB mystery – even though a self-admitted combination of embellishment, parable and exaggeration was his typical and controversial style. But, Barker would never have been in a position to do much of an MIB nature had it not been for the eccentric and occult-obsessed Bender, who, in 1953, was allegedly silenced by a trio of black-garbed, blazing-eyed entities from some strange netherworld after getting too close to the truth about Flying Saucers.

As time went on I also learned, unfortunately, that Barker would tell a tale purely for for effect. He was also someone who was willing to hoax, to fabricate, and to outright lie in the name of the M.I.B. In other words, reading Barker’s works requires one to be on one’s guard all of the time. His writings do contain facts, but there is a hell of a lot of fiction and lying there, too. All of that just has to have a bearing on the early days of M.I.B. lore and legend. Far less Mulder and Scully, and far more H.P. Lovecraft meets Devil Girl from Mars meets Bram Stoker, Flying Saucers and the Three Men presented the MIB not as government agents of the Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones variety, but as harshly cold and emotionless aliens who seemed to be as familiar with matters occult and nightmarish as they were with UFOs and faraway, fantastic worlds.

Appearing as well-dressed, pale-faced corpses, the terrible trio intimidated and terrified the obsessive-compulsive Bender to the point of near physical and emotional collapse. No wonder he quit Ufology and moved onto other things, such as focusing on the works of Austrian composer, Max Steiner, who was responsible for the soundtracks to the original of King Kongand Gone with the Wind. Indeed, in 1965, Bender established the Max Steiner Music Society, and left his old life firmly in the past. As for Barker, in 1984 it was ill-health, rather than the black-garbed ones, that took him before he reached sixty. Keel continued on for a quarter of a century after Barker, still caught up in – yet never, ever quite resolving – the conundrum of the three shadowy men from beyond the veil.

Of course, as my teens became my twenties, and then my thirties, my views on the MIB phenomenon changed, in some ways subtly, but in other ways far less so. But there was one thing that never did alter: My earnest wish to solve the puzzle of the true nature, origin and intent of the Men in Black. Since those days of my childhood, I have pursued the MIB on a scale that has easily far exceeded my quests for the truth about Bigfoot, the Chupacabras, and Roswell combined. My first book, A Covert Agenda, which was published in 1997, detailed a number of curious MIB-style encounters in the U.K. from the 1950s onward. My 2003 title, Strange Secrets, included a chapter on the little-known issue of government files on the Men in Black. Three years later, I penned On the Trail of the Saucer Spies, which was a full-length study of the secret surveillance of certain elements of the UFO research community by MIB-type characters in government. Then, in 2011, The Real Men in Black hit the bookshelves. This latter title from me specifically addressed the paranormal side of the MIB phenomenon. And, in that same year, I wrote a new foreword to an updated and expanded edition of Gray Barker’s 1983 book: M.I.B.: The Secret Terror among Us. Since then, I’ve written Men in Black, Women in Black, and The Black Diary. As well as a book on the ultimate Man in Black, the Slenderman. It has been a curious journey, to say the least…

Ancient tombs found in Egypt? Old news. Mummies in the tombs? Old news. Mummified cats? Not as common, but still old news. Mummified scarab beetles? Now there’s something you don’t hear about very often. Throw in a sealed door that appears to never have been opened and you’ve got the makings of a great discovery in the Saqqara necropolis.

“The (mummified) scarab is something really unique. It is something really a bit rare. A couple of days ago, when we discovered those coffins, they were sealed coffins with drawings of scarabs. I never heard about them before.”

That explains the excited announcement last week by Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, of the discovery of seven tombs – three from the New Kingdom and four from the Old Kingdom – containing a wide variety of animal sarcophagi and wooden statues. The tombs were discovered in a partially excavated area on the edge of the pyramid complex dedicated to the mysterious King Userkaf, the founder of the Fifth Dynasty whose parents and queen are unknown. One of the tombs belonged to Khufu-Imhat, the overseer of the royal buildings in the royal palace. Another of the 4,500-year-old tombs has its door still sealed, meaning it may have escaped looting by grave-robbers. Mohamed Youssef, director of the Saqqara area says it will be opened soon.

Live (or at least it once was ) scarab beetle

However, the center of interest is the animal mummies, especially the scarabs – large dung beetles that were revered in ancient Egypt. (Large set of photos here.) Two of the mummified scarabs were found wrapped in linen and in very good condition inside a limestone sarcophagus with a decorated lid. More were found in a smaller sarcophagus. Mummified scarabs are extremely rare finds and these are not only the first in this area but the first anywhere that date back to the Fifth Dynasty.

Another tomb contained dozens of cat mummies, gold-covered statues of cats and a bronze statue dedicated to the cat goddess Bastet, who was apparently the world’s first cat lady. In addition to the feline collection, there were mummified crocodiles in crocodile sarcophagi, crocodile statues and painted wooden statues of cobras. And of course, the usual burial objects such as amulets, canopic jars and papyri baskets. The mummified cats could have been pets of the tomb owner but more likely they, the other animals and especially the scarabs were gifts for the gods.

Bastet

How many more tombs may have had unusual contents like these but were looted or destroyed? We’ll probably never know. However, it’s good that the Council of Antiquities has recognized their value – even if it’s just to attract tourists with money – and is doing its best to preserve these and future discoveries.