When experts and persons of authority say, “We’re just looking around – nothing to worry about,” it’s probably time to worry … at least a little. When what they’re looking for is linked to one of the most destructive meteor impacts in recorded history, it’s probably time to worry a little more. June 30, 2019, is the 111th anniversary of the Tunguska event when what was believed to be a meteor exploded over a remote part of Siberia and destroyed 2,000 square km (770 square miles) of forest, making it the most destructive event of its kind in recorded history. June 2019 is also the month when the Taurids annual meteor shower returns. In a recent presentation, two well-respected physicists said that the Earth will be passing through a dense patch of space rocks during the June 2019 Taurids and their model shows it matches the Taurids shower of June 1908. As a result, they plan to look through it for Tunguska-sized objects. NOW are you worried?

Tunguska event aftermath

“If the Tunguska object was a member of a Beta Taurid stream … then the last week of June 2019 will be the next occasion with a high probability for Tunguska-like collisions or near misses. While we are not predicting another Tunguska airburst, an enhanced population of small NEOs [near-Earth objects] in the Beta Taurids would increase the probability of another such event on or near next year’s Tunguska anniversary”

In a presentation at the American Geophysical Union 2018 fall meeting, physicists Mark Boslough from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Peter Brown of Western University in London, Ontario, showed their evidence that the 2019 summer or Beta Taurids (they also occur every October) look strongly similar to their 1908 version and called for a special observation campaign to search for Tunguska-class or larger objects embedded in the Beta Taurids. That swarm will be the densest since 1975 when seismometers placed on the moon by Apollo astronauts recorded a spike in impacts on the lunar surface.

“This is not something that should be keeping you up at night.”

Mark Brown’s comment would be more comforting if it weren’t for the fact the Beta Taurids only occur during the daylight hours. Boslough sounds more like someone who has a reason to watch the skies in June 2019.

“It’s one of those very low-probability but potentially high-consequence-type risks, which is hard to quantify and hard to talk about. The probability of a lot of people dying from an asteroid impact is super, super low, but it’s not zero. There are so many other hazards that are greater risk.”

If we really paid attention to probabilities, there would be no Powerball lottery. The space object that caused the Tunguska event was estimated to be about 40 meters 130 feet) in diameter – which makes it a small-to-medium-sized rock that could exist in the Taurids. To spot one, Boslough and Brown say the best time to watch is when the Beta Taurids are heading away from the Earth into the night sky when they’re more visible. That’s right – they won’t be able to identify the killer space objects before they hit … only after they miss.

Worried yet? Go buy a lottery ticket and, if you win, spend it all by May 2019 … just in case.

On November 21, 2008, UFO researcher-author Greg Bishop wrote the following words: “The Reverend Frank Stranges, author of such contactee classics as Stranger at the Pentagonand Flying Saucerama, has returned to his permanent home with the space brothers, according to an email today from Tim ‘Mr. UFO’ Beckley. Stranges founded the National Investigations Committee on Unidentified Flying Objects (NICUFO) in 1967.” Stranges’ organization was very much inspired by the much bigger, and far more visible, NICAP, the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, which was created in 1956. NICAP focused, for the most part, on studying reports involving sightings of UFOs in the skies above, analyzing photographs, and collecting flying saucer-themed data from military personnel and the public. Stranges, however, had a far more controversial claim to fame.

Stranges maintained that, from 1959 onward, he had extensive – and secret – contact with an extremely human-looking extraterrestrial. The “man” in question claimed his name was Valiant Thor. He was a strange and mysterious figure who, reportedly, had an untold number of clandestine meetings with several U.S. presidents, and numerous, high-ranking military personnel. The result of all this? Thor had the ability to effortlessly move throughout the inner circle of nothing less than the Pentagon itself. Thor’s message was – like so many of the messages of the 1950s-era Space Brothers – one of a warning nature. Namely, a warning that our warlike ways just might lead to the end of our civilization. That, in Stranges’ story, Valiant Thor both sounds and looks like actor Michael Rennie’s alien character, Klaatu, in the 1951 sci-fi movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, has quite naturally led many to believe that Stranges made up the whole, controversial saga. A case, maybe, of Hollywood inspiration. As I noted in an earlier article, Stranges was indeed a controversial character, and that’s putting it mildly. Very mildly, in fact.

In relation to that alleged meeting with Thor in the Pentagon in 1959, Stranges, himself, offered the following: “Being a minister of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as well as a student of the Bible for many years, coupled with my experience as an special investigator, I felt as though my senses were functioning properly and that I knew exactly what I was about to do. I was on my guard for fakes and frauds. In walked a man, about six feet tall, perhaps 185 pounds, brown wavy hair, brown eyes. His complexion appeared normal and slightly tanned. As I approached him and he looked at me it was as though he looked straight through me. With a warm smile and extending his hand, he greeted me by name. His genuineness astonished me, but quickly I understood. As I gripped his hand, I was somewhat surprised to feel the soft texture of his skin, like that of a baby but with the strength of a man that silently testified to his power and intensity.”

Strange World state: “Thor had been working with the government since 1937. His physical traits included six fingers, an oversized heart, one huge lung, copper oxide blood like that of an octopus, and possessed an incredibly high IQ measuring around 1200, and a lifespan of approximately 490 years.” There’s no doubt that the story of Valiant Thor and Frank Stranges peaked – in terms of both popularity and visibility – in the 1960s. Undeniably, for the vast majority of figures within the field of Ufology, the issues of Contactees, Space Brothers, and human-looking aliens are perceived as being very much historical in nature, rather than contemporary, which, to a high degree, is true. Like so many cases such as that of Valiant Thor and Frank Stranges, there really are just two possibilities: that the story was true or it was complete bullshit. A part of me would like to go with the former, but I’m totally, 100 percent fine going with the latter.

Within the world of the paranormal there are often very strange things that people claim to see. Ghosts, angels, aliens, and others, these things have long served to elude understanding and leave us to wonder just what is going on. Among these anomalous reports there are often true oddities, which stand out as the bizarre of the bizarre, and which don’t seem to fit into any sort of known category, their pure oddness propelling them right out past the fringe and into some new territory of the weird. These reports seem to be of things beyond aliens, ghosts, or anything else that populates the paranormal world, and indeed perhaps come from whole other universe entirely.

A really quite bizarre encounter that is hard to classify allegedly occurred in 1973, at the coastal town of Sandown, on the Isle of Wight, in the south east region of England. In May of that year, a 7-year-old girl and another child were exploring the wild areas around a place called the Shanklin & Sandown Golf Club, when they began to hear a shrill piercing, wailing sound off in the distance, reminiscent of an ambulance siren — only off kilter and eerier. Curiosity would get the better of them, and the two kids excitedly ventured off to find the source of the odd noise, a trek that would bring them through brush and trees to a clearing abutting the nearby Sandown Airport, where the sound just suddenly stopped to send silence crashing down upon them.

The two bewildered youngsters took a look around, still trying to figure out where that haunting sound had come from, and as they crossed a footbridge over a creek they soon found it. From the shadows beneath the rickety old wooden bridge under their feet there emerged an outlandish being the likes of neither of them had ever seen before, which crawled out from the dark to stand before them. In an article on the encounter published in a 1978 edition of the British UFO Research Association’s Journal author Norman Oliver described what they saw as follows:

He was nearly 7 feet tall and had no neck, for his head appeared to be wedged straight onto his shoulders. He wore a yellow pointed hat, which interlocked with the red collar of a tattered green tunic. A round, black knob was affixed to the top of his hat, and wooden antennae were attached to either side. The face had triangular markings for eyes, a brown square of a nose, and motionless yellow lips. Other round markings were on his paper-white face, and a fringe of red hair fell down onto his forehead. Wooden slats protruded from his sleeves and from below his white trousers.

Also rather oddly, this clown-like entity was reportedly holding what appeared to holding what looked like just a regular paper book, which he proceeded to thumb through clumsily before losing his grip on it and dropping it into the creek below. The being then jumped into the water, found his book, and crawled up sopping wet back out of the water to go bounding off in a series of leaps that seemed to defy gravity. The bewildered children watched as it bounded towards what appeared to be a small metallic hut and disappear within, after which it emerged once again with what looked like some sort of microphone in its hand that was attached to a black box with a button or knob on it. It was from this odd device that the wailing siren they had heard began to pour out once again, and at this distance it was so incredibly loud that the terrified children began to run away as the monotonous drone reverberated through the forest and their very bones.

As they started their retreat into the woods, the blaring roar of noise abruptly stopped again, followed a few moments later by a voice that tentatively asked “Are you still there?” The kids were scared, but still very much curious, and they warily made their way back to the clearing to see what the surreal entity was up to. When they did he seemed to be almost happy to see them, and excitedly produced his wet book to write within it a message, which it held up for them to read and which said in childishly scrawled letters, “Hello and I am all colors Sam.” He then began speaking with them, although eerily without ever moving his mouth, and since his voice seemed calm and nonthreatening the children drew closer to talk with him.

A sketch of the strange entity

During the conversation the being calling itself Sam claimed that he was not human, and when asked whether he was a ghost he merely replied “Not really, but I am in an odd sort of way.” When pressed on what he was he simply and cryptically said “You know.” He went on to explain how there were others of his kind, and that they were mostly shy and scared of humans, usually staying away from them, and this all culminated with the entity inviting the children into his metal hut, which was completely windowless and seemed to have some sort of flapped opening. Inside there were seemingly two floors, and the place had a metal floor, some sort of dials and knobs on the wall, and simple ratty wooden furniture scattered about. It was more or less a dump. Perhaps seeing the look on the children’s faces he was apparently quick to point out that this was just a temporary dwelling, and that he had a much bigger, more luxurious permanent place in mainland England.

It was here in this strange little hovel where Sam would finally remove his odd hat and produced a berry, which he stuck into a rounded white ear, only to have it suddenly appear in his eye socket and then appear within his mouth with a couple of flicks of his head, like some kind of magic trick. This delighted the children, and now they were fully calmed down, eventually staying in the hut for around an hour before saying goodbye and heading back home. When the girl told her father, rather than outright dismiss it he would actually go to the area to investigate, partly out of concern that there was perhaps some weirdo dressed as a clown lurking out there. Unfortunately, there was no trace of Sam or his weird hut, and no one else in the area had seen anything like what was described, although the children were adamant that the metal dwelling had been right there and that their story was completely true. The so-called “Sandown Clown” has not been seen since. Was Sam an alien, a ghost, a sicko in a freaky clown outfit, or what? We will probably never know.

It is interesting to note that this was a one-off sighting, with the creature not seen by anyone else, and this can also be said about some other equally bizarre accounts, such as one from the site The Crypto Crew. In 1983, a woman known only as Patty was driving along in broad daylight on a rural part of Highway 94, about 11 miles from the town of Murray, Kentucky, in the United States, when she too saw something that defies classification. It made its appearance by leaping out into the road from an adjacent field and then loping across, its movements described as being “like a gorilla,” but this was no gorilla.

Perhaps foolishly, Patty stopped her car and got out to yell after it, which caused the thing to stop and turn around to give her a better look at it and make her sorry she had ever left the car. It was described as standing at least 7 feet tall, and totally devoid of any hair, instead covered with rough pink skin and possessing a long neck, a smallish head, pointy ears, and a snout like that of a pig, with the witness saying, “I would describe it as a cross between a primate, a pig, and a human.” The face of the thing was what made the most impact on her, as she said it stared at her with intelligent, remarkably human eyes. Patty was so unsettled by this sight and its piercing gaze that she backed back into her vehicle and locked the doors as it loomed out on the road in front of her, just staring with inscrutable intent. She got out of there and soon told her husband about it but he wouldn’t believe her.

Another intriguing account was related to Lon Stickler of the site Phantoms and Monsters, and was told by a witness calling herself “Jeni.” The encounter apparently happened at in Hampton Bays, New York in 2006, where one evening she had driven out with her fiancée to show him the majestic spectacle of phosphorescent shrimp glittering in the dark water and upon the beach like stars in the sky. The area was described as rather remote, and they had been alone at the beach at the time, the moon full and bright in the sky. It would have normally been a romantic place to be, but the couple were about to have the shock of their lives, and Jeni would say of what happened next:

As soon as we stepped onto the beach I had a feeling of general unease; that instinctive fear that one would experience in the presence of a predator. I chose to ignore it; occasionally peeking over my shoulder at the long, empty stretch of beach behind me but mostly focusing on the tiny glowing shrimp beneath our feet. At one point I felt a presence and again, chose to ignore it as I’ve dealt with that quite a bit in my 30 years. I had not voiced my unease to my fiancee, so he was completely unaware. About 5 – 10 minutes into our short walk we were both hunched over, his back facing the jetty, mine facing the stretch of empty beach when he started peering over my shoulder, up into the sky. Perplexed, he’d look for a second, then look away – at this point I was still trying to retain my composure and not look. Finally, after a few minutes, he looked over my head and yelled “oh my god! What *is* that?!” – I turned to look and ‘flying’ directly over my head was this huge creature I’d never seen!

It appeared translucent/transparent; no color whatsoever – no visible structure outside of the motion which indicated what it looked like; now, I myself am a visual artist, so this left a very distinct impression on me. This ‘creature’ was shaped and moving in the way a Manta Ray would; yet completely transparent! No color at all; I could see the stars through this thing; the only thing to allow the structure any appearance was the moonlight shining somehow on its’ exterior!

It was larger than a standard sedan. It’s wingspan was at least, from what I could estimate, 10′ in width; while it was ‘flying’, its wings moving up and down. The movement seemed familiar, like that of a gull swooping down and hovering over the shoreline. It was approximately 10 – 15′ over my head; it had no visible ‘head’ or ‘tail’; no discernible limbs or appendages of any kind. It appeared and moved exactly as a Manta Ray without the ‘Cephalic Lobes’ or tail. I was completely awe-struck, but that fear took over and after about 30 seconds of staring at this thing we both turned and bolted toward the car. While running, we both simultaneously jerked our heads to the right in response to a glowing green light which seemed to flash twice (it was not the light from the tower on the jetty, nor was it from any boat; that water was clear).

I never looked behind me. We started heading back on Dune Road when we saw what I could only describe as two, smaller ‘rays’ which moved more like a bat would, flying together from right to left overhead past the car. These two were translucent and had a grayish color to them… strange. They were flying in the direction of the beach, where the larger, more transparent creature was. It was so beautiful and strange! It reminded me of a sea creature more than anything else, maybe our air is like water to them.

What in the world was this thing? Who is to say? If weird clown phantoms, pig-men, and glowing sky mantas aren’t strange enough for you yet, then how about a humanoid apparently made of jelly? That is what was purportedly seen at the mountainous region of Cáceres, Spain in the summer of 1965. In August of that year, a Juan Dominguez and his sister Isabel were out one afternoon walking along in the countryside near the farming village of Fragosa on an errand to bring some bundles of peaches back to their home. As they approached a low wall to a garden they allegedly noticed a dark humanoid figure pacing about in front of it.

Curious, the two siblings approached, and as they drew nearer could hear that there was some sort of humming sound coming from it, which was odd, but not nearly as weird as what they saw as they got closer still. It soon became apparent that the pacing figure was exceptionally tall, nearly 7 feet in height, and that the arms were inhumanly long and thin, but even more bizarre it seemed to be somewhat opaque, and made up of what appeared to be some sort of gelatinous material that pulsated and glistened. Unsettlingly, the thing did not have any discernable face on what should have been its head, yet they still sensed that it was intently watching them. As the two startled witnesses looked on, the strange jelly-man stopped to stand for a moment, before striding right towards them, its intent unknown but not something they wished to find out. The two dropped their peaches and ran away as fast as they could, and the otherworldly gelatinous entity was never seen again.

Joining the ranks of all of this bizarreness is an encounter originally published in the October 8, 2017 edition of Strange Magazine, that supposedly occurred back in 1948 at the shipbuilding port city of Bremerton, in the U.S. state of Washington. One day, a young woman named Virginia Staples was just going about her usual daily household chores, carrying a load of laundry down to the washing machines in the basement of her run-down apartment building. It was a mindless chore she had done countless times before, and there would have been no reason for this time to be any different, but it was to prove to lead to a shocking experience, indeed.

The dim basement was described as enormous, its volumous floor constantly covered with a sheen of water that leaked from the walls and was rumored to come from passageways leading to the nearby sea, but although it all had a rather creepy foreboding atmosphere, Virginia was used to working in this dark and dank place. Yet on this day something was not quite right, as she felt an undefinable sense of unease and dread, as if she were being watched from the ample shadows clinging to everything in there. She tried to cast the odd feeling out of her head, chalking it up to nerves, but it would not abate, indeed becoming stronger the longer she lingered there, graduating to sheer terror for no discernable reason. She would say of what happened next:

It was such a creepy feeling I finally turned around and looked toward the back of the basement and froze. I was so scared I can still feel it. I couldn’t move. In one of the huge holes in the basement there stood this thing. It was horrible! I stand five feet tall and this creature was as tall as I was. It had a bright orange colored body and little spidery thin legs and antennae on its head that kept moving back and in and out. That thing started towards me. I backed out of the basement and got up to my apartment and packed up all my things and moved. I was so scared. I moved over to Seattle to my cousin’s. Really no one would really believe this, but as God is my witness it really happened.

She would say that it looked to her almost like a humanoid shrimp, and that for years afterwards she says she had potent, chronic nightmares. The interesting part of this tale, other than the sheer outlandishness of the entity described, is that this was in the basement of an apartment complex, and not even a remote one out in the boondocks. At the time Bremerton was a bustling Naval port city home to around 80,000 people, so it makes no sense at all that there should be this thing, even if there were passageways to the sea. Where did it come from and why didn’t anyone else see it? The strange abomination was only seen this one time and we are left to wonder just what it could have possibly been or whether it ever really happened at all.

It is difficult to know just how to categorize accounts such as we have looked at here. Are we looking at aliens, ghosts, demons, spirits or something else entirely? They dwell in such a fringe realm of surreal oddness that no clear explanation seems to really stick, and since they were witnessed by so few people one is left scratching their head in bafflement. Obviously these could have been tall tales spun by the witnesses, but what if they aren’t? If they by any chance did indeed see what they claim, then what could these things be? Could they perhaps be visitors from beyond reality as we know it?

One possible answer could be that these fleeting, isolated encounters with the truly bizarre could be the result of some form of interdimensional interlopers from another reality or parallel dimension, who have for whatever reasons managed to phase through the veil that typically separates us to materialize in our world, be it intentionally or otherwise. Such theoretical entities are often referred to as “ultraterrestrials,” and are theorized as being behind sightings of all manner of paranormal phenomena, but they especially seem pertinent to these particular absurdly odd encounters. If they were from some parallel reality then they would possibly be freakishly strange in appearance and beyond what normally exists in our world, and their tenuous hold on existence on our plane of existence could explain why they are only encountered briefly and go on to never be seen again, blinking away. It is easy to imagine an entity from another reality falling through the cracks into ours, only to fall back out again to leave nothing behind but puzzlement, wonder, and fear.

Is that what has happened here? Are these perhaps glimpses of something beyond the curtain between realities somehow bleeding through into our own? It is uncertain to be sure, of course firmly in the realm of pure speculation, but if there is any chance at all that these witnesses really did observe and even interact with these creatures we are left with no other solid clues or connection to anything we know of, and this is certainly an interesting avenue of thought within which might lie the key. In the end there is no way to really know, and when reading these truly weird accounts we are each left to make up our own minds on just how this all fits into our reality, or whether it is even from our reality at all.

Travelers in the UK encountered one of the worst holiday occurrences imaginable last week: a completely closed airport just days before Christmas. All flights in and out of Gatwick Airport in southeast England were halted on December 20 and again on December 22 due to what was initially described as “mysterious drones” flying dangerously nearby.

Multiple unidentified small aircraft were seen in the skies above the airport, and they seemed to reappear each time the airport attempted to open. While dangerous drone activity near airports is nothing new, the investigation following these incidents has only led to more questions which make me suspect something stranger may be in the skies over England.

While drone sightings at airports are increasing dramatically, there are too many loose ends in this case to write it off as another errant civilian-level drone.

The UK Ministry of Defence immediately began searching for the aircraft after the airport closures, bringing in specialized equipment to help defend the airport and identify what the drones may be. Soon after, Sussex Police issued a statementclaiming the drones witnesses described seemed to be “of an industrial specification.” In other words, these aren’t some kid accidentally losing control of a $30 quadcopter – these drones appeared to be large, sophisticated aircraft.

On December 23, Sussex Police arrested a couple they believed were related to the drone sightings, but those individuals were shortly after released and exonerated, leaving no other suspects to be found. Perhaps most curiously of all, the lead investigator on the case then publicly questionedwhether there has been any drone incursions into the airport’s airspace at all. If they weren’t drones, then what exactly was seen in the skies near Gatwick Airport?

Or, what type of unknown drone might these objects have been?

While it might be easy to write this off as a case of amateur drone operators flying unintentionally near an airport – and it very well may be – there have been several other curious cases of unidentified flying objects in the skies over the UK lately. The Royal Air Force scrambled fighters just a few weeks ago to intercept an unidentified aircraft above eastern England, and multiple pilots reported strange objects in the skies over Ireland just a few months back. Could they be related to this airport closure?

Whether they are or not, this incident highlights the growing security threat drones pose. Gatwick Airport’s chief executive Chris Woodroofe called the incident an “unprecedented issue,” adding that “this isn’t a Gatwick Airport issue. It’s not even a UK issue. It’s an international issue.” Anti-drone systems have become a chief priority for both civilian and military airports, and even government installations and buildings aren’t safefrom the inexpensive, tiny aircraft. How can we keep the skies safe from these minuscule nuisances?

Maybe it’s best we all just start shooting indiscriminately at anything flying overhead.

More importantly, what exactly happened in England this week? With no answers to go on, it makes me think something fishier than just a few wayward quadcopters was responsible for this airport closure.