The anomalous sights and sounds in Americas skies continue this week as a strange light appeared in the air over California, prompting the Air Force to cancel a rocket launch and thoroughly freaking out Californians. According to local news reports, the light appeared at around 5:30 p.m. local time and persisted for several seconds. Dozens of motorists and residents caught the strange streak on camera, blowing up social media with posts of the curious apparition.

NORAD immediately announced they were investigating the event, while the National Weather Service released a statementproposing that the light was a unique atmospheric phenomenon known as a noctilucent cloud. These cloudlike formations are caused by ice crystals and dust particles left behind by rocket launches, aircraft activity, or meteor explosions in the upper atmosphere. At dusk, the low angle of the sun can illuminate these streaks and create the breathtaking phenomena similar to what was seen above California.

Noctilucent clouds left behind by a SpaceX launch.

While the streak was certainly similar in appearance to a meteor impact or space debris burning up in the atmosphere, the coincidental timing with a nearby rocket launch is somewhat odd. The U.S. Air Force and United Launch Alliance were set to launch a Delta IV rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base at the exact same time the lights appeared over California. That rocket was supposed to carry an undisclosed spy satellite into orbit – a spy satellite that has been delayed on three previous launch attempts.

A SpaceX Falcon launching from Vandenberg AFB in 2017.

ULA says the launch was scrubbed due to a hydrogen leak in one of the fuel tanks, but something about the timing of these two events is just a bit too coincidental. With all of the intrigue and chest-thumping going on in space right now, there’s no telling if the lights were part of some sort of sabotage or surveillance attempt by a rival state or non-state actor. On the other hand, could the Air Force have tried to say this launch was cancelled when it in fact put another eye in the sky?

Of course, it very likely could have been exactly what the National Weather Service said it was. Several other events suggesting meteor impacts have occurred in California lately, although the verdict is still out on some of those too. I’ve been saying for a while now that all of the mysterious booms and recent suspicious satellite activity are likely related; could this incident be another hint that a shadow space war is already being waged?

There are some stories that just scream “Wait, what?” This is one of them. A high school biohacker in France claims he created a DNA sequence out of passages from the Bible and the Koran, converted them into previously unknown proteins and injected himself with them. Did he break any commandments?

A biohacker injected himself with DNA sequence made from Bible and Koran verses

GETTY – CONTRIBUTOR

“Since it is possible to convert digital information into DNA, I wondered whether it would be possible to convert a religious text into DNA and to inject it in a living being. It is the first time that someone injects himself [with] macromolecules developed from a text. It is very symbolic even if it does not have much interest.”

Not much interest? Adrien Locatelli of Grenoble, France, has the Internet’s attention with his self-published paper on what has to be the most creative, if not dangerous, experiment of the year. DNA code is represented by a linear, non-overlapping sequence of the nitrogenous bases Adenine (A), Guanine (G), Cytosine (C) and Thymine (T). The four letters are used to create three-letter words strung together to represent a single amino acid in a polypeptide chain. Locatelli claims he created a new DNA sequence using letters he got from the Bible and the Koran.

How? He started at the beginning – Genesis. Locatelli claims he replaced every character in the Hebrew Book of Genesis with a word using the characters AGCT (there are 64 possible combinations). He says he left out Genesis 2:10-14, 5, and 7:1-5 because they were “controversial.” (Genesis 2:10-14 mentions the unknown rivers Pishon and Gihon; Genesis 5 is the family tree from Adam to Noah; and Genesis 7:1-5 is the story of Noah building an ark.) Locatelli then did the same thing with the Arabic letters from the 13th chapter from the Koran, the Surah Ar-Ra’d.

With this new DNA sequence, Locatelli says he used a home gene engineering kit (possibly like this one) to edit the DNA provided into the new proteins (it’s not clear if he created two or one), then inject the proteins into his legs. And the results? Did he see God? Adam? Noah?

“The subcutaneous injection of the vector VB180513-1026kbp in my left thigh only caused at the injection site a minorinflammation which persisted a few day and the subcutaneous injection of the peptide RS27 12-16 in my right thigh provoked nothing.”

Despite that, even with the religious overtones, experts and Internet commenters give Locatelli’s strange experiment a big “Kids – for God’s sake — DON’T try this at home.” Did he take a huge risk? Definitely. Did he break any commandments by taking God’s name in vein? Probably not. (Hopefully that pun doesn’t either.) Did he break any laws of nature? Well, he’s still here.

Will he win the award for the Dumbest Thing Anybody Did in 2018? He’s definitely in the running.

China and Russia are working together to create something similar to the officially-released purpose of the American High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP). Five experiments launched in June with the purpose of modifying the ionosphere above the Earth for both communication and military purposes. They were able to modify a zone more than 310 mile above a small Russian town in Eastern Europe called Vasilsursk, according to Chinese media. During the modification, the small town experienced an electric spike, which carried 10 times more negatively-charged subatomic particles than other regions.

A second experiment heated that portion of the atmosphere – a portion roughly half the size of Great Britain – more than 200 degrees Fahrenheit, due to particle flux. Those particles were shot into the ionosphere from a Soviet-Era atmospheric heating station in the small town called Sura. It was also utilized during the Cold War. This was done by an array of high-power antennae designed to spike the higher levels of the atmosphere with a large amount of microwave radiation. According to the Chinese report, the peak power of these waves was 260 megawatts, which is enough juice to light a small city.

China, which does not make a habit of working on new technology and military projects with other foreign powers, declared the results of the experiment were “satisfactory.” Measurements of it were taken by an orbiting Chinese electromagnetic surveillance satellite called Zhangheng-1. It was able to switch to a “burst mode” to collect data samples every half-second. This was to ensure the data had a high resolution.

While this experiment has raised a lot of controversy, the facility from which it was launched was built in 1981 for this expressed purpose. Control of the ionosphere and  for clandestine communications and detection of things ranging from submarines to natural resources, according to a Popular Mechanics article, which called the Chinese chase for a HAARP of their own a chase for weapons instead of science.

High-energy microwaves, such as those recently discharged by Russia and China in Russia allow the controller to manipulate communications. The Soviets used it to enhance submarine communication, the Americans were accused of using it for everything from manufactured earthquakes and tsunamis to weather manipulation – but these claims have been heavily disputed by official sources as “conspiracy theories.” In reality, they can penetrate ground or water as deep as 328 feet and even disrupt satellite communication.

HAARP was likely built by the Americans for the purpose of submarine and satellite communications when it was constructed in the 1990s in Alaska. It was able to produce about one gigawatt of power, which is four times more than the Sura experiment in June.

Not to be outdone, however, China is building its own – and much bigger – facility in Sanya inside the Hainan Province. Critics of this believe such a facility will be disruptive to international air travel from China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and other nations flying over that city.

Tales of what have become known as the Black Eyed Children have now been circulating for a couple of decades. The witnesses are many. The cases are creepy and bizarre. But, it’s fair to say that we still don’t have a solid answer as to what they are or what they want. So, today I’m focusing on the extraterrestrial/UFO theory. It’s worth noting an intriguing UFO connection to the very strange saga of the Black Eyed Children: they have deep parallels to the notorious Men in Black, who have, for decades, terrorized and intimidated into silence numerous witnesses to UFOs. Just like the BECs, the Men in Black have a propensity for knocking on doors late at night. The two mirror each other in other fashions, too: like their child counterparts, the MIB will not enter a home until they are specifically invited to do so (shades of vampire lore, legend and very often movies). Both the MIB and the BEC wear black. Both wear head-gear: hoodies for the Black Eyed Children, and 1950s-era fedoras for the MIB. And there is another intriguing issue: very often the Men in Black wear thick, wraparound, black sunglasses.

I have to wonder if this MIB/sunglasses angle is done not just to provoke a menacing atmosphere, but to mask a pair of emotion-free, solid, black eyes of the type that the Black Eyed Children are described as having. In that sense, and just perhaps, the Men in Black and the Black Eyed Children are one and the same: one in adult form and the other in child form, but both following the same secret agenda – whatever that may really be. So, where does that all leave us? Well, it admittedly leaves us with a lot of questions and not a great deal else. But they are questions that a certain, acclaimed and dedicated researcher of the Black Eyed has done his very best to resolve.

Undoubtedly the leading investigator in this field, and the author of the book, The Black Eyed Children, David Weatherlyhas collected and studied dozens of such cases, demonstrating the sheer scale of these weird and unsettling events. David’s work has addressed a variety of theories for the origins and presence of the BECs: that they might be demonic in nature, or predatory spirits, or possibly even products of the human mind, given some semblance of physical life in the real world. Notably, David has also spent much time researching the theory that the Black Eyed Children have nothing less than an alien lineage. David cites the case of two women, Ann and Marcia, who have both had alien abduction experiences and who have also both encountered the BECs – and, in Marcia’s case, in the now-typical “knocking on the door and demanding to be let in” situation.

Of strange cases such as these, David says: “Why would an alien race want, or need, to create hybrid beings? There are a number of proposed theories to explain why such an experiment may be taking place. These theories range from a dying race that needs an injection of fresh DNA in order to survive, to time travelers attempting to correct a mistake made in their past (which is our present).”

I will leave the final words on this issue UFO-Black Eyed Children controversy to David. They are words that fit comfortably with what we have seen so far: “An even more sinister theory that has followers, postulates that the grays are actually attempting to take over our world by slowly breeding us out and phasing in beings with alien DNA. Over time the human race will fade away to be replaced by the ‘superior’ DNA of the gray aliens, adherents say.”