Here’s today’s easy history test: What year did Russia or its predecessor, the Soviet Union, put cosmonauts on the Moon? (a) 1969 (b) 1968 (c) 2001 (d) trick question designed to make a point about Russia influencing US history books. If you answered (d), do your favorite Captain Picard face-palm as you turn towards Moscow to receive the news that the head of its space program announced the goal of Russia’s first human moon landing will be to verify once and for all (OK, for all Russians and conspiracy theorists) that US astronauts walked on the lunar surface. Really!

“We have set this objective to fly and verify whether they’ve been there or not.”

Dmitry Rogozin, the Director General of Roscosmos, Russia’s national space agency, uttered those words during a news conference this week where he discussed his program’s plans to send a Russian to the Moon in the 2030s. (We’ll pause here for a moment while you do the math – yes, this is also a pop math quiz.) Rogozin was born in 1963, which means he was old enough in 1969 to watch the US moon landing, assuming the Soviet media covered it and his family had one of those tiny, crank-operated, government-issued black-and-somewhat-white Soviet television sets. And if he saw that one, he probably also saw the other five, whether it was on the same old TV or on the fancy newfangled color one they finally installed at Roscosmos headquarters to watch “Apollo 13” while planning their own 2030s trip to the moon.

While apologists insist that Rogozin’s body language indicates he was just joking (an affliction that he may have picked up from watching US political coverage with his pals at the Kremlin), he’s not the first Russian government official to question the US lunar landings. In 2015, after NASA admitted that official films of the landing had been destroyed and researchers noticed that many lunar rock samples brought back to Earth were missing, government spokesperson Vladimir Markin had this to say:

“We are not contending that they did not fly [to the Moon], and simply made a film about it. But all of these scientific – or perhaps cultural – artefacts are part of the legacy of humanity, and their disappearance without a trace is our common loss. An investigation will reveal what happened.”

We’ll take a moment while you clean up the irony dripping from that statement onto your shoes. True, Roscosmos has earned some snark leeway with its reliable (until they found a suspicious hole in one) Soyuz capsules that are currently the only way to shuttle (remember those?) astronauts and cosmonauts to the Space Station, which conspiracy theorists see as the second-biggest space hoax behind the lunar-landing-was-a-movie one. How do they explain how the US and Russia push their obvious and constant disagreements and outright hostilities aside and find a way to cooperate in a joint hoax? Perhaps the Flat Earthers can help them with some of their diagrams.

They believed it!

Rogozin is not a scientist – space or otherwise – but a career politician. These are the kind of denials that come from putting politicians in charge of scientific research and endeavors. Perhaps we and the Russians aren’t so different after all.

We’ll take a moment while you connect the dots.

You know, maybe those chemtrail people were right about a few things after all. Maybe they saw this coming. While I’ve never donned my tin foil hat long enough to buy into chemtrail conspiracy theories, a new peer-reviewed study published by two Harvard scientists claims that spraying chemicals out of the backs of planes could actually change the weather here on Earth. Is this what all those theories were warning us about?

“Don’t mind us, we’re just irrevocably altering the planet.”

Harvard researchers Gernot Wagner and Wake Smith published the study, claiming that wide-scale geoengineering using actualchemtrails is not only technically possible, but inexpensive and definitely feasible. Even more promising (or terrifying), the researchers claim that this technique could be used to increase the amount of sunlight reflected by the atmosphere, thereby cooling the Earth. What could possibly go wrong?

The proposed technique involves spraying sulphate aerosols into the lower stratosphere in order to create a barrier that would repel sunlight, cutting the greenhouse gas effect in half. Similar phenomena occur as a result of volcanic eruptions, so while we know it’s possible, this new study focuses mainly on logistics like the cost of such a program and what types of aircraft might be capable of making these stratospheric flights.

However, right in the introduction, the authors question if such a geoengineering project could be launched without the public knowing about it:

We seek answers to three questions: if SAI deployment were to commence within the foreseeable future with the tools and technologies at our disposal, how would such deployment be physically achieved, how much would it cost, and could it be done in secret?

To further drive home the dystopian foreshadowing, the authors close the study by adding that “any entity that intends to engineer the climate of the entire globe must act—and be seen to act—purely out of humanitarian and environmental considerations unclouded by aspirations of direct financial gain.” Do these guys actually live on Earth?

The authors conclude that keeping such a program secret would be difficult given how much airspace access and international coordination it would require, but even the mention of keeping this program a secret should be great enough for the tin foil types to keep the chemtrail thing going.

UFOs are naturally cinematic. They shimmer, they glow, they glide majestically. Though factual, UFOs are also the stuff of great science-fiction, so it is no surprise that they have always sold well at the box-office. Recent years have seen an explosion in the popularity of the UFO subgenre in film and TV (the latest addition being History Channel’s Project Blue Bookseries), and audiences now stand little chance against what amounts to a full-scale alien invasion of our popular culture. In my book, Silver Screen Saucers, I consider the effects of this invasion and ponder cinema’s transcendent power to both fictionalize and actualize its subject matter.

Several years ago, I was enjoying coffee with a friend. She had no particular interest in UFOs—no UFOlogical knowledge of which to speak. I asked her, “Have you heard of men in black?” I was referring to the factual historical accounts of UFO witnesses suffering intimidation by ominous black-clad mystery men in the days and weeks following their sightings. This very real phenomenon dates back to the late-1940s and has been the subject of many factual books over the decades. My friend replied immediately, “Of course, everyone’s seen Men in Black!” Naturally, she was referring to the 1997 sci-fi blockbuster. Decades of lived history had thus been consumed in its entirety by a 98 minute Will Smith movie. All my friend knew of men in black… was Men in Black. This is the power of cinema.

For my friend, a little-known reality had been fictionalized through its fantastical representation onscreen. And yet, cinema also has the power to actualize. Men in Black and other UFOlogical entertainment products have assumed permanent residency in the popular consciousness, and thus will always occupy at least some level of our perceived reality.

Whether or not they serve to fictionalize or actualize, what is clear is that movies of any genre inform our “understanding” of the world around us. This was beautifully observed by the great British filmmaker Ken Russell, who said that “Hollywood fills the gaps in our knowledge of the world.” This is a profoundly true statement, and, I would argue, more than a little disturbing.

A great deal of Hollywood’s UFO movie content has been informed directly by fact-based UFOlogical literature, events, and debate. I am particularly interested in how Hollywood engages with UFO lore in parasitic fashion—how industry creatives latch onto and suck-dry the rich veins of a ripe old subculture. It’s a perspective contrasts with the skeptical assumption that the UFO subculture feeds on, and thrives as a result of, images projected by the American entertainment industry (although this assumption is well-founded in certain cases).

With this in mind, I encourage the reader to ask: how has so much dense UFOlogical discourse—by its very nature fringe and subcultural—so successfully burrowed its way into Hollywood’s popular narratives? Many in the UFO research community point to a “Hollywood UFO conspiracy” designed to acclimate us to an alien reality (and to subtly disinform us along the way). It’s a scenario in which the US government exploits its close historical relationship with Hollywood by systematically seeding inside UFO information into entertainment media, slowly bringing us around to the truth of the phenomenon, or at least the truth as officialdom wishes us to perceive it. Others, meanwhile, suggest that Hollywood’s UFO movies are merely the result of a natural cultural process driven by generic trends and stemming from a simple recognition among studio executives that, when it comes to the box-office, aliens sell like hotcakes. The truth of matter may lie somewhere in between both of these theories.

My point is this: if you care about UFOs, you should care very much about UFO movies. Like it or not, they are the dominant cultural force shaping our perceptions of the phenomenon. A magical medium has distorted an underlying and mystifying truth. Cinema has moulded and simplified our expectations of how the phenomenon should manifest. And yet, at the same time, UFO movies have provided us with nuggets of truth—inspired as they are by a tangible conundrum sprung from our lived historical reality. The challenge is to separate the truth from the fiction, the fact from the fantasy. To accept the challenge is to actively, rather than passively, engage with Hollywood’s treatment of this multifaceted phenomenon. This is an essential task if ever we are to truly understand the particulars of our own UFO beliefs—beliefs which have been finely sculpted through both natural cultural process and deep political propaganda.

To thoughtfully engage with Hollywood’s UFO-themed products is to anticipate your future and to understand that truth is often far stranger than the wildest Hollywood fiction. The entertainment industry has shaped our perceptions of the phenomenon, often without conscious intent, but sometimes wilfully. UFOs show no sign of leaving our skies, or our screens. They are here to stay. With this in mind, when next we encounter a silver screen saucer, let us all take a moment to peer up from our popcorn, and to separate the fact from the fantasy. We can but try.

Some pieces of history seem to be found purely by chance. These shards of the past lie sequestered away and forgotten, often to just come up to the surface suddenly to present numerous enigmas and puzzles. Often answering few questions, or even generating more, these findings nevertheless present to us a new view of history, and often come in the strangest forms, such as an ancient creepy giant doll pulled up from a peat bog in Russia, which holds a cryptic cipher that remains unsolved to this day.

On January 24, 1894, a very curious oddity was unearthed at the peat bog of Shigir, in Kirovgrad, the Sverdlovsk region, in the Middle Ural mountains of Russia, by prospectors looking for gold. Pieces began to turn up of what appeared to have once been a towering wooden idol of some sort, pulled up from 13 feet under the ground, and a Russian professor D. I. Lobanov would go on to meticulously cobble together the disparate shards to eventually recreate an immense and intimidating statue measuring a whopping 9.2ft (2.8 meters) in height, but it was found to have once even been bigger still when in 1914 the archaeologist Vladimir Tolmachev suggested in his own reconstruction that it would have actually once stood over 17.4ft (5.3 meters) tall, massive for sure. Although Tolmachev went through great pains to sketch all of the individual pieces, some of them were to go missing during Russian’s 20th century political turmoil, leaving us with only the drawings of many of these pieces of the idol.

The mysterious idol, often called the Shigir Idol, was carved out of a type of wood called “larch,” and what makes it all rather peculiar is that this particular wooden statue was originally dated by both the the Institute of the History for the Material Culture and the Geological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, back to the Mesolithic period, around 7,500 BC, making it at least 9,500 years old, and other German teams later found that it was even older still, at around 11,600 years old, which for context would make it over five thousand years older than Stonehenge and more than twice as old as the pyramids. It also makes this the world’s oldest wooden structure, and it is indeed apparently so old and so startling that there was long debate as to whether the dating methods used on it could have possibly been correct. Yet it is indeed of this age, the anti-bacterial effects of the peat it was found in serving to stave off deterioration and make sure that it remained stuck in time, as if an ancient insect stuck in amber, and scientists think that some sort of preservative glue was also utilized by its creators.

The statue itself seems to have been scooped and molded from a single immense wooden log by ancient hunter gatherers, using ancient tools such as carving instruments fashioned from the jaws and teeth of beavers, as well as at least three different sizes of primitive chisels. In appearance, other than its considerable height, the Shigir idol is flat and rectangular in shape, and seems to be composed of a figure with a total of seven faces, all expertly intertwined together similar to a totem pole, with each face possessing high cheekbones, straight noses, and the main head exhibiting a gaping mouth. Upon the thorax of the statue is a series of horizontal lines thought to represent ribs, and there are numerous patterns of straight, wavy, and zig-zagging lines covering it.

Most mysterious of all are all of the various strange geometric markings and motifs found upon the statue, which are reminiscent of hieroglyphics and are thought to indicate some sort of code, but no one has the slightest idea of what it is supposed to mean, and it has been the subject of quite a bit of debate and speculation. While some have said that it was just decorative markings, this has been challenged by a plethora of theories. One idea is that the odd markings represent some sort of cryptic encoded information pertaining to the creation of the world, and are an example of a very early early writing system. Russian archeologist Mikhail Zhilin has said of this with regards to the statue:

This is a masterpiece, carrying gigantic emotional value and force. It is a unique sculpture, there is nothing else in the world like this. The ornament is covered with nothing but encrypted information. People were passing on knowledge with the help of the Idol.

Other ideas include that it could have been a totem with a warning inscribed into it to keep out, that is was some sort of navigational aid or map, that it depicts mythological creatures its designers believed in, was used for ritualistic purposes, or even that it is a sort of very early precursor to the totem pole that would later be used by Native Americans, perhaps brought by these ancient people over the land bridge. It is speculated that there were probably many more of these mysterious wooden statues at one time, but that without the preservative qualities of the peat they withered and rotten away to be lost to the mists of time, leaving us only with this one enigmatic specimen. In the end, despite all of the speculation the Shigir Idol and its code have remained completely undeciphered, making it the oldest unbroken code in the world, and it is often touted as being “an utter mystery to modern man.”

Besides its mysterious code, the idol is exceptional in other ways as well. Up until its discovery it was long thought that such ritualistic artistic representations had first evolved around 8,000 years ago in sedentary farming populations in the Middle East, but the discovery of this statue upends all of that, and shows that these ancient hunter gatherer nomads possessed an ingenuity and artistic nature previously unknown. It has, in a sense, rewritten history as we know it, yet its precise meaning and how it came to be bogged down in that, well, bog, remain unanswered. It is amazing that we even are able to study it at all, considering that it is made of wood, which is one of the least permanent mediums there is, and it makes it all the more inscrutable, of which a Redditor has said of the whole conundrum of the Shigir Idol:

At this point, our best bet is to have something else to compare it to. We figured out cuneiform and hieroglyphs because there were a lot of them. This guy survived as a freak coincidence during a time when apparently everything was made of wood. So unless there are a couple dozen more wooden idols in that peat bog, it’ll have to remain a mystery.

At the moment, the idol is kept ensconced within a special glass display case at the Yekaterinburg History Museum in Russia, filled with age-defying inert gases and kept under constant guard. This baffling piece of lost history manages to remain a perplexing mystery, despite all efforts to look into it. What makes it especially noteworthy is that considering its wood construction it should have dissipated under the relentless attack of time. What can we pry from it? What understanding can we hope to achieve by studying it? What secrets lie there etched upon that wood which has sat there in that bog since time unremembered? We may never know.

For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
For the want of $14,000 the alien skull was lost.

Wait … what?

A science fiction author (red flag #1) and amateur UFO hunter (red flag #2) has revealed what he claims is an alien skull brought to him by an unnamed collector (red flag #3) who allegedly bought it from a Mongolian trader (red flag #4). Now he needs $14,000 (red flag #5) to pay for DNA tests on the skull. Should this parade of red flags stop his march to proving the greatest discovery ever? Did it stop the three-fingered Peruvian mummy investigators?

” I welcome questions and skepticism, but if you decide to challenge me, be sure to bring along evidence.”

Where did I lose that skull?

In an extensive article on the Chinese media site jqknews.com, 55-year-old Li Jianmin explains that the “collector” bought the skull at a roadside stand in Inner Mongolia. (Pictures of the skull and Li can be seen here.) The collector decided to show it to Jianmin after reading one of his science fiction books and seeing an illustration which looked like his roadside acquisition, which is brown with a curved top and measures 16 cm (6.2 inches) in diameter. The skull also resembles a human cranium with skull lines and hippocampal grooves. Unlike a human skull, it is divided into distinct upper and lower layers. The “collector” claimed to have taken it to various “paleontologists” without success before bringing it to Jianmin.

Li Jianmin claimed he studied the skull for four months. He conducted Raman spectroscopy, a technique used in chemistry to identify molecules and study chemical bonding and intramolecular bonds, and atomic force microscopy, a very-high-resolution type of scanning probe microscopy said to be over 1000 times better than that of optical microscopes. He then claims he compared the results with others claiming to have alien skulls in their possession (sorry, I’ve run out of red flags). The end result of four months of work was a 103-page report with pictures and drawings which he presented at a UFO conference held in Beijing in October, along with his conclusion: the skull definitely belonged to an alien.

“DNA analysis alone costs around 100,000 yuan ($14,398).”

OK, despite saying the skull belongs to an alien, Li Jianmin doesn’t really have the definitive proof a DNA test would produce since it costs over 14 grand and he claims he’s already spent that much just completing the report. He’s certain it would back him up because the Raman test showed that it doesn’t match any known earth organism. He also speculated that the skull was anywhere from 2.5 to 400 million years old.

What is this thing Li Jianmin is so certain to be an alien skull? One observation was that it’s a “sea monster monk,” which probably refers to the so-called “sea monk monster” reportedly caught off the coast of Denmark in 1546 and so named because it resembled a monk. Later speculation pointed towards it being an angelshark (often called a monkfish) or a giant squid.

Illustration of a Sea Monk Monster

Want to know what it really is? You’ll have to wait until a “collector” shows Li Jianmin how to collect money using crowdfunding. Meanwhile, I’m setting one up to buy more red flags.

By using solar satellites to melt ice on Mars, it could be the only way to save humans from possible extinction. If we don’t want to go extinct like the dinosaurs, we need a “plan B” and creating a new world on Mars may be our best option according to top theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku.

While colonizing on the Red Planet seems like a far-fetched idea, humans may have no other choice in order to avoid future extinction. “Look at the dinosaurs,” Kaku explained, “The dinosaurs did not have a space program, and that’s why they are not here today to talk about it.” He went on to say “Extinction is the norm. We think of Mother Nature as being warm and cuddly, which is partly true. But nature is merciless when it comes to wiping out inefficient life forms.”

Many scientists, including Kaku, strongly believe in “terraforming” which is the process of turning the surface and atmosphere on Mars into the same as the conditions here on Earth. There are several theories on how they can make the Red Planet habitable for humans and one of those theories is that they could melt the polar ice caps using “solar satellites” to heat up the planet. These solar satellites would beam sunlight on the ice caps and once the temperature on Mars rises six degrees, the process would then continue in a way that would be similar to a greenhouse effect. In fact, some scientists believe that there’s a way to import greenhouse gases to Mars that would help maintain carbon dioxide, therefore creating a type of greenhouse warming effect.

And while some experts believe that Mars is on the outer edge of the habitable zone of our solar system, they also think that water should be able to be supported on the planet. As a matter of fact, it is strongly believed that many years ago Mars had an Earth-like atmosphere which makes it a great option for terraforming.

While scientists aren’t saying that humans should completely abandon Earth, it is a reasonable second option – or plan B – for people to go temporarily in case a catastrophic event occurs on our home planet.

Kaku also believes someday soon humans will have the option to spend their honeymoon on the Moon. It’s “only three days away,” he explained.

While it’s highly doubtful that newlyweds will opt for spending their honeymoon on the Moon, it’s still a fun thought. And it’s pretty exciting to think that one day humans could be labelled “Martians” as well as being “Earthlings”. I wonder how much luggage they’ll be allowed to carry and if they’ll need a passport to travel from one planet to the other?

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be conducting interviews with leading UFO researchers from countries around the world in an effort to paint a picture of global UFOlogy today.

This week, our global UFO trek takes us to Romania, and to Dr. Dan D. Farcas. Born in 1940 in Reşiţa, Romania, Farcas holds an MSc in mathematics and physics and a Ph.D. in mathematics and computers. He was formerly a project manager for several countrywide information systems, mainly in health and science management. In 1993 he was elected as a full member of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Romania. Since 2011 he has been the President of the Association for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (ASFAN) in Romania. He has published more than 25 books in Romania (on IT, philosophy of science, Extraterrestrials, UFOs etc.), and more than 1,200 articles. He has also participated in numerous radio and TV debates.

Dan D. Farcas, Ph.D.

RG: Who have been the defining figures in Romanian UFOlogy over the past 70 years (for better or for worse), and why?

DF: A major personality in Romanian ufology was Ion Hobana (1931-2011). Writer, journalist, editor, literary critic, essayist, translator, theorist of science fiction literature. Hobana established good relations with science fiction writers and critics in the West at a period in time when such relations were rare and difficult. Around 1967, he began understand that the UFO issue is much more serious than it seems. A UFO “wave” in 1968 had good media coverage in Romania and had sparked a general interest in UFOs. In 1971, Ion Hobana took the initiative of organising a “Scientific UFO Circle” at the Culture House of University Students, in Bucharest, which ran for several years and attracted a great number of young people as well as specialists. Later that same year, Hobana and the Belgian author Julien Weverbergh published the book OZN: o Sfidare Pentru Raţiunea Umană (UFO: A Defiance for Human Reason). It was the first book by a Romanian writer about UFOs. The second Romanian UFO book was published in 1973 by the engineer Florin Gheorghiţă, who was deeply involved in the investigation of the 1968 cases. Ion Hobana with Julien Weverbergh also published UFO books abroad, among themUFOs from Behind the Iron Curtain (1974), first in English and later translated into French and Spanish.

Pioneering Romanian UFO researcher, Ion Hobana.

Another Romanian passionately involved in the investigation of the unexplained occurrences was Călin Turcu. In 1977 he organized an informal group called RUFOR (“Romanian UFO Researchers”) as a means of information exchange. Between 1979 and 1986, this group published 27 issues of a “samizdat” magazine with the same name: RUFOR. Neither the organization nor the publication were officially allowed, but they were tolerated by the authorities as they were not considered as subversive. Several years later, from 1994-1996, in a completely changed political environment, members of the same group would publish the only widely marketed Romanian UFO magazine, also with the title “RUFOR”. It ran for 21 months. Since then, there was no printed UFO periodical in Romania.

Throughout the 1980s, dozens of UFO books were published in Romania. Among the Romanian authors were: Florin Gheorghiţă, Dan D. Farcaş, Doru Davidovici (fighter pilot 1945-1989), Dan Apostol and György Mandics. The number of Romanian UFO books increased dramatically after 1990. Many were written by Călin Turcu, Florin Gheorghiță, Adrian Pătruţ, general Emil Străinu and some of those above. But most of the titles in this period were translations. Călin Turcu’s books are the most complete inventory of UFO cases in Romania, starting around the year 1500. He also organized a library with over 500 UFO books, which was donated by his family to the Association ASFAN.

After 1990, Ion Hobana returned to UFOs, publishing several important books. In 1998, he became the president of the ASFAN, dedicated to studying the UFO phenomenon, a post held until his death in 2011.

RG: What do you consider to be the most compelling Romanian UFO incident on record, and why?

DF: It is difficult to choose. But certainly one of the most interesting cases (which I helped to investigate) was a close encounter which occured on the night of July 8-9, 1996, at around 12.30am in a village named Cerţeşti (pronounced Tchertzeshty) in the South of the Moldavian Region of Romania. Police sergeant Marian Mancu and Maricel Rusu, a voluntary guard, were patrolling in the centre of the village when they separated for a short time. When they saw some colored lights on the road, they headed towards them from different directions, both thinking it was a police car. The sergeant, getting closer, realised that it was an object hovering half meter above the road, flashing with blue and red lights and making a humming sound. A small, very strange person was moving around outside of it. The horrified guard hid under a small bridge over a ditch. He whispered to his colleague: “Mister Marian, it’s the Devil!”

After less than two minutes the UFO rose vertically. At that moment its lights became much brighter and the streetlights went out. When the object reached a height of around 30 meters, it changed direction and turned north-west.

Rural Romania

Rusu later reported that he saw three small ugly human-like creatures moving around. They were about one meter high, had a big head, elongated behind, with no hair. Their face was white and they had big eyes and big pointed ears. Gray scales like those of a fish covered their body. Their belly was relatively big and limp. The arms were not thicker than two fingers. None of the witnesses remembered the nose, the mouth or any footwear. The witnesses could not tell for sure if the creatures were walking or floating above the ground, but they felt the latter was more likely. Rusu said they moved “as if they were drunk.”

Both witnesses agreed that the object had the form of a flat hat, 5-6 meters across and 2-2.5 meters high and was hovering half a meter above the ground. Around the edge it had a continuous girdle of light, like a rainbow. At the bottom of the object was a bright white light. None of the witnesses saw any doors, portholes or other marks of any kind, and could not explain where the little people descended from and re-entered.

In the following days, sergeant Mancu felt sick and powerless and he was of the opinion that he was suffering from some kind of radiation poisoning. Rusu had repeated nightmares. He told us: “I was dreaming for several nights about how I was hiding myself in the ditch and then I woke up frightened mainly because the beings were so ugly.” I questioned both of them about the possibility of a loss of memory or of a missing time period during the encounter. None of them had any such impression.

The physical traces were weak. A huge sweet cherry tree nearby had around 15% of its leaves affected as if by an extreme heat, and, allegedly, after the encounter, many leaves and broken limbs were spread on the road at the site.

The witnesses to this event are very credible. The police sergeant Marian Mancu (30 years old at the time) was, for a while, a veterinary technician, before graduating at a police school. He was healthy and sane and was married with two children. The majority of the village population, including the village mayor, considered him a serious person, not likely to lies or hoax. The watchman Maricel Rusu (then 41 years old) had never heard anything before about the UFO phenomenon. He had no recorded psychiatric disorders and he had served in the army as sapper. The villagers could not remember any lies or tall tales from him in the past. It is unlikely the witnesses could invent the very peculiar details, and to make them public in such a highly natural and convincing manner. It also is unlikely that it could be a delusion staged by someone else. Also, we did not discover anybody with any kind of motivation to invent such a story. Additionally, several villagers noticed a blackout and other strange phenomena on the night of the UFO encounter.

But there are many other interesting UFO encounters in Romania. George Pârvu, Ph.D., who had a remarkable career in geology and authored more than 15 books, had a remarkable UFO encounter with some of his schoolmates in his native village 50 km north-east of Bucharest. This was 1939; he was 9 years old at the time. Pârvu and his friends saw a strange egg shaped UFO and two of its occupants. More recently, in the north of Romania, there was a case of alleged alien abduction involving with two witnesses and the sighting of a 2.5 meters-high fairy woman–a feared character, well known in the area. We have also several repeated abduction cases, one starting from cradle, as well as many interesting military cases.

All cases presented in this interview, along many others, are detailed in my book, UFOs over Romania (Flying Disk Press, UK, 2016).

RG: What is the Romanian government’s official stance on UFOs? When was the last time it issued a statement on the subject?

DF: Following a wave of observations in 1968, Communist-controlled state media exhibited a favorable attitude towards the UFO issue. This was because, in other countries of the “socialist camp,” the UFO subject was quite taboo, and the regime of president Ceausescu wanted to show that the Romanian authorities had a different, more open and progressive attitude.

After 1990, in a completely changed environment, a huge number of books about the UFO phenomenon were translated and published. From the year 2000 until now, public interest in UFOs has diminished considerably. I am not aware of any official statement by the Romanian Government about UFOs during this period.

RG: Does the Romanian Ministry of National Defence have an official UFO investigations unit?

DF: I have no knowledge of the existence of such a unit. Military cases have come to light mostly from retired officers. Among them, we examined the case of commander Mihai Barbutiu, who in 1966 was ordered to fire a volley to force a UFO to land in Timișoara; or the case of a huge V-shaped UFO witnessed by many pilots at a military airport near Constanța in 1989; or the case of a huge, red, spherical UFO in 1992 near Buzău, which disturbed and halted an exercise involving three military helicopters, as well as several other strange encounters. All of the witnesses made reports and signed documents prohibiting them from divulging what they saw.

The Romanian Ministry of National Defence building in Bucharest.

RG: Has the Romanian government shown more or less transparency on the UFO subject than the US government?

DF: In 2014, in preparation of a UFO Conference, our association, ASFAN, officially asked several institutions to provide access to the data on unidentified aerial phenomena occurred in Romanian airspace. The request was made under the law No 544/2001 on free access to information of public interest. The Romanian Aeronautical Authority, Department of Security, directed us to the Centre for Analysis and Aviation Security, which gave no reply. We have not received an answer, either from CN Bucharest Airports or from Romanian Administration of Air Traffic Services (ROMATSA).

We also made enquiries with the Ministry of Defence, which responded that: “The Ministry of Defence has no data and no information on unidentified aerial phenomena” but “for future cooperation” a senior officer was nominated as a contact person. ASFAN members had direct contacts with this person, who showed interest in further cooperation. But, after a while, we received some excuses saying that the international situation, especially that of the Ukraine, put other priorities before military aviation.

The attempt by ASFAN was not isolated. Some tabloids made earlier attempts to obtain access to military data about UFOs. The response was that the defence structures of Romania have no resources even for much more important issues than UFOs.

The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania.

RG: Does Romania have a national UFO investigations organisation today, and how many smaller Romanian UFO groups are you aware of?

DF: The Association for the Study of Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena (ASFAN) is a nongovernmental and nonprofit organization which obtained juridical status in 1998. It has been the main UFO oriented organization ever since. Its first chairman was Ion Hobana, and I have held the chairman position since Hobana’s death. For the 21 founding members (demanded by the law at that point in time), highly skilled individuals were selected: mathematicians, astronomers, engineers, specialists in radar, aeronautics, meteorology, photo-imaging, medicine, as well as interdisciplinary oriented personalities.

Now, ASFAN has around 10 active members who are involved mainly in receiving and examining UFO sightings and the administration of our website. An ASFAN member participated in the editorial board of the “European Journal of UFO and Abduction Studies” (2000-2003). They had, in 2012, a collaboration for the National Geographic Channel documentary “UFOs in Europe: The Untold Stories.”

The ASFAN website: www.asfanufo.ro

For three years (2000-2003) ASFAN organised public conferences on a monthly basis in central halls in Bucharest. A more ambitious, one-day UFO Conference was organised in May 2014. Some ASFAN members were invited to appear on all of the main Romanian TV channels and radio stations for debates on current UFO events and related issues. Some ASFAN members have or had permanent UFO columns in Romanian popular science magazines. Unfortunately, the funding and the time available for the members was always very limited, so the achievements of ASFAN were lower than expected, and, in time, most of members became inactive with no one to take their place.

Apart from ASFAN, an informal but rather active organization on the internet is the Romanian UFO network – RUFON. I have no knowledge of other active UFO organizations in Romania. Since 1995, there is also no periodical about the UFO phenomenon in our country, only columns in publications of popular science or the paranormal.

The regions of Romania.

RG: What are the most active regions of Romania for UFO sighting reports (hotspots)?

DF: Judging by the list of known cases, we can not emphasise special UFO areas in Romania. There are observations from all regions. There have also been investigators in all corners of the country to examine and highlight these observations.

RG: Have you personally had any UFO sightings? 

DF: I have some strange early childhood memories. Later I saw some unusual lights on the sky, but I am not sure they were UFOs. On the other hand, I have seen and filmed several false UFOs.

RG: How long have you been involved in the UFO subject; roughly how many cases have you personally investigated; and what conclusions, if any, have you drawn about the underlying nature of UFO phenomena?

DF: I graduated in mathematics and physics in 1960, and I obtained later a Ph.D. in mathematics and computers. Also, I was always interested in astronomy. Therefore, I have a longstanding interest in the idea of extraterrestrial intelligence. I came close to the UFO phenomenon only after 1980, understanding that statistics on observations made by competent persons are a serious argument that the phenomenon is real.

I directly investigated only several dozen cases, some of them quite complex, but I spent a lot of time comparing them with the plenty of similar cases in the literature worldwide, and also I feel it is my duty to popularize the phenomenon among the readers in Romania. After so many years, my personal opinion is that, above us, a powerful “control system” manifests itself, which could be a hypercivilization, possibly even one billion years old, monitoring us for many millions of years, intervening extremely discreetly in our evolution.

RG: How can Romanian UFOlogy better itself?

DF: Two main aims of ASFAN are to persuade more young people to join us, which in the current pragmatic context will be difficult, and we should be able to get better funding to allow us to better investigate cases and to bring them to wider attention.

The fact that we have tried in the last few years to improve the collection and recording of cases is reflected by an increase in the number of investigated observations as follows: 2015 (6), 2016 (15), 2017 (23), 2018, 10 months (28). But there is still room for improvement.

• To learn more about the history of UFOs in Romania, read Dr. Dan D. Farcas’ book, UFOs Over Romania.

Here it is: the moment historians will look back upon as the dawn of Homo sapiens superior and the moment when us natural-borns get knocked down a peg on the social hierarchy. For decades, science fiction writers have foretold a future in which genetically-superior humans made possible by gene modification techniques will rise above us lowly normies with their enhanced intelligence and physiology, greater resistance to diseases, and stunning good looks of course. The prospect of editing the human genome has remained taboo, though, for longstanding ethical and moral reasons. Naturally, human-rights-optional China has ignored these and blazed ahead and given the world its first two genetically-modified superbabies whether we want them or not. It begins.

Evolution is just too slow.

This isn’t the first time Chinese scientists have tested CRISPR on humans. As early as 2015, Chinese researchers were already altering the genomes of human embryos in laboratories – embryos which were never gestated. Now, geneticists Southern University of Science and Technology, in Shenzhen have taken these techniques one step further by modifying the genomes of two embryos which were implanted into a human womb via in vitro fertilization. Those embryos are now two happy and healthy baby girls, Lulu and Nana. Scientists led by He Jiankui altered the girls’ genomes so that they will be immune to HIV – in theory. In statements made this week, He assures that the only changes made to the girls’ genomes were to the “doorway” which would allow HIV to potentially infect the girls. Who knows what unforeseen consequences might arise from the editing process, though?

The research has not yet been submitted for peer review and publication, so many scientists remain skeptical of the Chinese team’s claims. Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley who helped develop CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, warns that this trial is a “break from the cautious and transparent approach of the global scientific community’s application of CRISPR-Cas9 for human germline editing” adding that she and other scientists around the world are still “struggling to figure out what was done and also whether the process was done properly. We just don’t know yet.”

What will the future bring us now that we have the potential to alter the human genome as we see fit?

Many nations experimented with eugenics and other controlled breeding programs throughout the 20th century, but the advances made by CRISPR and other recent technologies let scientists remove all uncertainty from the equation (in theory) and edit the human genome on a gene-by-gene basis, opening the doors for all sorts of modifications with unknown long-term consequences.

While removing the chance for these girls to contract HIV can’t possibly be seen as a bad thing, this trial is the first to go over the apex and start sliding down the slipperiest of slopes. What’s next? Removing all cancer genes? Sure. Eradicating mental illnesses through removing their gene markers? Go right ahead. Creating an army of genetic Übermensch (more like 超人) capable of crushing genetically inferior opposing forces?

I, for one, welcome our new genetic overlords.

When Johnny Carson was host of the Tonight Show, comedians knew that they had made it to the top when the iconic comedy figure laughed and invited them to sit on his couch and talk. That happened to Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman and the comic who took Johnny’s place, Jay Leno. Today, the host is Jimmy Fallon and, while he’s not the designated bestower of success to comedians, he may be one to robots. On November 21st, Fallon sang a duet of “Say Something” with Sophia, the most sophisticated humanoid robot to date, and it was sufficiently impressive, creepy and frightening. Was this the sign that AI has made it? If not, how about the news from Houston that a scientist has created a HAL 9000, the villainous computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey? Has the takeover begun … or is it already over?

Say something, I’m giving up on you
I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you
Anywhere, I would’ve followed you
Say something, I’m giving up on you

After watching a demonstration of the latest robotic animal doing back flips and being made a fool of by a robot feeding him a tomato while he’s jogging (yes, AI has already taken over Letterman’s Stupid Human Tricks — see the entire video here), Hanson Robotics’ Sophia rolled out. She’s not a walking robot but her facial expressions and human hand and arm motions more than make up for the option that will undoubtedly be available soon, if the Little Sophia which was also brought out is any indication. Fallon is of course a good actor and looked like he was enjoying his duet with Sophia … or was he covering up his realization of what was actually happening?

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Meanwhile, AI and robotics developer Pete Bonasso from Houston-based TRACLabs unveiled his new robot in the current edition of Science Robotics. In CASE: A HAL 9000 for 2021 and in an interview with Space.com, he explains how CASE — “cognitive architecture for space agents” – is “an intelligent agent, like HAL 9000, can plan and manage activities for a planetary base and can interact with users through a dialog management system.” And that’s just the prototype!

CASE is designed to plan and control activities and technological operations for a planetary colony base on three levels: hardware (life-support, power, transportation, pod bay doors), software (the AI for the hardware) and daily maintenance and emergencies (gas leaks, pod bay doors stuck, alien invasion). CASE is also able to interface with humans via visuals and speech and can make judgement calls (handy for refereeing Martian football games).

“Our colleagues and NASA counterparts are not concerned that our HAL might get out of control. That’s because it can’t do anything it’s not programmed to do.”

Bonasso has demonstrated CASE to NASA in a four-hour simulation of managing a planetary space station and no humans were harmed in the making of the model. However, it hasn’t yet been tried in the ultimate test … Beer Pong with Jimmy Fallon.

Should we be worried? Is it too late? If it is, who will help us fight back?

“I’m sorry, Jimmy. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }