Human rights? Always worth fighting for. Animal rights? We’re far too cruel to the creatures we share this planet with, but some limits are needed. Robot rights? The debate has just begun and it will be a long and confusing one, as evidenced by a new discussion led by a machine ethics researcher who believes that reverse cyborgs – robots that are given human parts such as brains – deserve at least partial human rights as well. How many human parts does it take for a robot to become a person? Which parts? What about the vice versa? Will the brave new world be a litigious one as well?

These questions are prompted by, as many discussions about future technology often are, sex. Specifically, the sex robots or sexbots that in 2018 became the center of attention in Vancouver, Canada and Houston, Texas, where an organization called KinkySdolls wanted to open (and was already taking appointments for) sex robot brothels like the one it operates in Toronto. These “dolls” – both female and male — allegedly provide a realistic sexual experience and are said to contain the artificial intelligence needed to respond to cues and recognize both their client’s needs and what would be considered abusive behavior of the dolls were human. How could these sexbots be made even more realistic? Why not add real human parts – possibly grown in a lab or even right on the cyborg itself?

In an interesting discussion in, of all places, the Daily Star, Dr. Oliver Bendel, professor of information systems at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts and a consultant to the German Bundestag, says sex robots able to read “every wish from our eyes” will be among the most advanced androids within the next 20 years, but should only be considered as “electronic persons” with “moral rights” if they have can feel or suffer, if you have a consciousness or a will to live.” And then he describes the way that will happen.

“One could at best develop ‘reverse cyborgs’, i.e. let brain and nerve cells grow on technical structures or in a robot. Such reverse or inverted cyborgs might at some point feel something.”

And then? Computing philosopher and scientist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Dr. Jordi Vallverdú, joins the discussion.

“Under the current cultural western evolution, which has recognized rights to all kinds of men and women, it is feasible and normal to affirm that the robot’s rights will be someday into the agenda.”

“Feasible and normal.” Do you consider giving human rights to a robot feasible and normal? If you don’t, it may be too late to stop it. In early 2017, the European Parliament issued a reportwhich suggested that self-learning robots could be granted “electronic personalities” status, which would in a sense make them “legal persons” in a manner similar to corporations. Many see this move not so much as a way to give protective human rights to robots but to relieve manufacturers from legal responsibility should the AI robot commit crimes or kill someone. However, “legal persons” have the right to make campaign contributions and could conceivably “buy” politicians who would give them the rights they want. Buying politicians – how much more human can they be?

What am I?

Human are getting more robotic parts. At what point will these cyborgs lose their humanity? Robots can grow human cells that develop into human parts. At what point will these reverse cyborgs lose their robotity? Is the crossover line the same? Who should decide? Scientists? Politicians? Religious leaders? Philosophers? The cyborgs themselves?

Is everything now feasible and normal? Is anything? Are we?

The unusual practice of eating dirt, mud, clay and other soils is known as geophagy, which is considered by the medical community to be an abnormal, albeit fairly harmless and non-beneficial, compulsive behavior, while the folk medicine community touts benefits such as toxin-absorption and promoting gut health. Then there’s the soil found in the townland of Toneel North in Boho, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, which is said to heal toothaches, throat infections, neck problems and other ailments. That list of “other ailments” has just been expanded to include “four of the top six superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics” Is Boho dirt the next medical marijuana or just another fake ‘miracle cure’ product peddled by snake soil salesmen?

“In an effort to stem the rising tide of multi-resistant bacteria, researchers have turned to niche environments in the hope of discovering new varieties of antibiotics. We investigated an ethnopharmacological (cure) from an alkaline/radon soil in the area of Boho, in the Fermanagh Scarplands (N. Ireland) for the presence of Streptomyces, a well-known producer of antibiotics.”

Researchers from the UK’s Swansea University Medical School and the Ulster University School of Biomedical Sciences and Croatia’s Laboratory for Molecular Genetics at Ruđer Bošković Institute were searching for unusual “niche” ways to combat the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacteria like the “hospital superbug” MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and decided to look at the ancient soil found in Boho after hearing what seemed to be legitimate accounts of it’s healing powers. “Boho” comes from an ancient Irish word meaning hut or booth which befits its ancient history dating back to the Neolithic late Stone Age/early Bronze Age 4000 years ago. It was later home to the Druids and has a long spiritual history of both conventional religions and unconventional beliefs in faeries, faerie bushes, banshees and ancient monoliths like the Reyfad stones.

Those ancient tales might cause one to think the Boho soil stories are folklore as well, but the study, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, proved otherwise. The researchers found that it contains a previously unknown strain of Streptomyces, a bacteria that has already shown themselves to be effective against some of the superbugs. This new strain, named Streptomyces sp. Myrophorea, was proven effective in inhibiting growth of four of the top six multi-resistant pathogens (Vancomycin resistant Enterococcus faecium (VRE), methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), Klebsiella pneumonia, and Carbenepenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumanii), a list that includes the notorious MRSA.

“We will now coentrate on the purification and identification of these antibiotics. We have also discovered additional antibacterial organisms from the same soil cure which may cover a broader spectrum of multi-resistant pathogens.”

While the power of the Boho soil has been proven, the actual component of Streptomyces sp. Myrophorea which gives it this super-antimicrobial strength has not, so Dr. Gerry Quinn and the rest of the researchers are now working to identify, isolate and possibly replicate it as well as work on determining what else this magic mulch can treat or cure.

Does this mean it’s time to book a trip to Boho to eat dirt and wash it down with Irish stout? A better idea would be to definitely visit to enjoy the beauty and ancient history of the area while scientists figure out a more palatable way to partake of the protective soil. In the meantime, start working on a proper Irish toast for the occasion. Here’s one:

May your heart be light and happy,
May your smile be big and wide,
And may your pockets always have
Some Boho dirt inside!

We hear about mysterious trumpet blasts, mysterious hums and other mysterious sounds all of the time. Perhaps you’ve heard them yourself. What we rarely hear is what the causes of any them are. Leave it to an intrepid New Jersey police chief who had heard enough from angry citizens in his jurisdiction to do some real investigative work and find the cause of the recent mysterious Jersey sounds. Is it a pilot for “Law & Order: Noise Victims Unit”?

 “It was like a sickening pulsing heartbeat. We turned up our television, but could not overpower the throb. The thumping came straight through our front porch to the back of our home in the kitchen. It went on until the wee hours of the morning until around 3 a.m.”

Monica Morris Lind, who lives on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, told nj.com back in October about the strange sound keeping her and her neighbors up at night. At the time, Penns Grove, NJ, Police Chief John T. Stranahan Sr. was one of many police chiefs in New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania who were getting reports of the loud and annoying sounds who sent officers on patrol and were unable to find the source. While they suspected a massive moving stereo system, possibly on a river barge, the sound would stop by the time they got to the possible origin point. Residents began questioning the police commitment and even suggested paranormal causes, but Chief Stranahan is a Jersey cop and Jersey cops don’t take “It’s aliens” for an answer.

“On December 24, 2018, the Salem County Call Board received over 100 call concerning the phantom music. Calls were transferred to multiple agencies within the State of Delaware, as it was believed to be the origin of the music. Unfortunately, it appeared as though no action was taken by the respective agencies. For this reason, Chief John Stranahan took it upon himself to investigate.”

The Penns Grove police department Facebook page reported that Chief Stranahan had had enough – no one – human, alien or otherwise – was going to disrupt his precinct’s Christmas Eve. He jumped into his sleigh car and followed the sound over the river and through the woods to … Delaw.are! Stranahan entered the City of Wilmington and traveled down Seventh Street to a skatepark at the confluence of the Christiana River and Brandywine Creek where he found … aliens.

OK, they were alien to him because he’s from New Jersey. What he closely encountered was a big van with a massive set of speakers pointing across the Delaware River at his town. The four beings (apparently humans) near the van panicked when the saw the police car and took off in the van … but not before Chief Stranahan quickly took pictures and managed to get two numbers off of the license plate, which he dutifully turned over to the Wilmington Police Department. As loyal viewers of cop shows know, that’s more than enough evidence to find the perps, which Wilmington Police … didn’t.

That’s right. As of this writing, the boom-boomers are still on the loose. However, the long arm (and ear) of the law is closing in. they can run but they can’t hide … especially when they’re addicted to bass.

In the world of UFOs and the paranormal there are very often reports from witnesses that seem to traverse the line between the strange and the utterly bizarre, lodging themselves firmly into the domain of the downright absurd. Such accounts can be so completely surreal that they are hard to really fit into any clear category, and exist on a plane unto themselves. I have written much of such accounts in the past, and indeed quite recently here at Mysterious Universe, and here I delve once again into accounts of encounters with all manner of absurdly strange beings, that seem to elude and defy any easy classification.

The earliest of these completely bonkers accounts we will look at supposedly occurred back in the summer of 1955, in the normally quiet Casa Blanca neighborhood of Riverside County, California. On this day, a young boy named Kermit Douglas was playing with some other children on the lawn of his home when they noticed a large, glowing semi-transparent dome-like structure floating through the air over their heads before vanishing, only to reappear shortly after that with a musical chiming sound. This time the object was surrounded by myriad small orb-like things of different colors orbiting it, and all of them seemed to vanish and reappear in different places as if they were teleporting, each time emanating a distinctive “ping” sound.

At first it seemed to be a wondrous and almost playful display, as if these orbs of light were sentient and just playing around for their amusement, but things would quickly graduate to alarming, when a truly massive of of the orbs “about as large as three houses put together” came down into a nearby football field to land and a series of completely absurd events would begin to play out. As the children gazed in wonder at this sight a very outlandish being suddenly appeared near the Douglas home, hovering and translucent just as the mysterious spheres were. The creature was described as being around 4 feet in height, with “a big red mouth, big red eyes, and four round objects on his face which sparkled like diamonds where his nose should be.” Instead of legs it had merely a rounded, tapering bottom, and its belt cast a blinding glare that caused the children to become steadily more panicked, shouting and screaming, yet adults who came to investigate what was going on would later claim that they could not see any of the strange lights or the being that the children described.

In the meantime things went weird at an alarming rate, starting when one of the youngest of the group of kids purportedly became somewhat entranced and hypnotized by the pulsating, multicolored sphere that had come to rest in the football field, and started mindlessly shambling towards it like a zombie, to the point that he had to be restrained by two of the other boys. Things only got steadily trippier from there, as there were also other spheres starting to descend now to hover over or land on the ground or even trees and the roofs of houses, and at one point a metallic arm was seen to materialize out of thin air to beckon one of the children, just the arm, unattached to any body, floating there in the void. Still another one of the boys said he also saw a small man marching about clad all in silver and clenching in his hands two “ray guns.”

As all of this assorted and surreal weirdness was going down, the largest of the orbs, that one in the center of the football field, suddenly opened to disgorge another of those diamond-faced, red-eyed entities, this one with four legs, and two arms that each branched off at the forearms into separate appendages each with its own hand, for a total of four hands. This eight-limbed abomination then put two of the boys into a trance-like state and telepathically commanded them to climb a tree, which they did. Some 15 minutes later, the two tree-bound boys were approached by a “Saturn shaped” UFO and its crew of tiny beings, which tried to get the two entranced boys aboard the vessel but were thwarted by some of the other boys shooting a, I am not making this up, a garden hose at it. The water snapped one of the boys out of his daze, and the other simply remained in his trance and jumped off the roof. Both boys were uninjured, and would later claim to have no memory of what had happened while they were in their stupor.

Soon after the garden hose incident, the UFOs in all of their shapes and sizes suddenly just left, shooting up straight into the sky to vanish, leaving behind a group of very frightened and intensely confused children. Subsequent interviews with these witnesses have shown that they at least seem to truly believe that this is all true, but what exactly they saw remains unknown. Indeed, it is such a chaotic, varied, and incredibly, almost ridiculously odd and harrowing sequence events that it is hard to even know what to think of it or whether this really had anything to do with “aliens” at all. What were these creatures, where did they come from, and why did only the kids see them? Why is the case so insanely bizarre, almost dream-like? There is no way to know.

In the 1960s we have several very deeply strange encounters, some of them quite sinister even. A common phenomenon related to UFOs and alien encounters is the mutilation of cattle or other livestock, which are found minus organs or all of their blood, and often displaying strange punctures or precise surgical cuts. Often the actual perpetrators of these mutilations are not seen, but for our first bizarre account we have a case in which the entity responsible was actually encountered, and which has become one of the weirdest alien sightings there is.

In April of 1967, a young woman named Valentina Flores was out tending her flock of sheep and llamas out in a rugged mountainous region of Opoco province, Bolivia, near a small town called Potosi. On this day Valentina was out tending her modest shack out int the wilds, along with her husband Gumersindo and their baby daughter, Theodosia. The day started out like any other, but she noticed at some point that the llamas had wandered off. It was not really all that uncommon, as the creatures had a deep case of wanderlust, so she went about gathering all of her sheep into one place and going off to find the llamas, which she was fairly sure were not far and would be retrieved quickly.

Valentina headed out over the rough terrain, her baby strapped to her back with a traditional carrying blanket, not unusual for the people of the region, and she found the animals in a clearing not far away, as expected. What she did not expect was that when she returned to where she had started that all of her sheep would be nowhere to be seen, leaving a trail of tracks off into the wilderness. After undoubtedly letting out a frustrated sigh, Valentina dutifully followed the trail left by the animals through the mountains, eventually coming to a sort of stone corral used as a temporary holding area for sheep, and this was where things would begin to take a turn for the deeply odd.

The Bolivian mountains

The woman noticed that something was attached to the corral, which upon closer inspection seemed to be a meshed, sticky substance not unlike a giant spider web, which all seemed to splay forth from an inscrutable pole-like structure in the middle. This was all rather unsettling enough, but Valentina would be struck with terror when she looked past the weblike substance to see the ground below littered with the bodies of her sheep, which appeared to have been cut open and disemboweled. Before she even really had time to process this macabre sight, she noticed that she was not alone, and there standing not far away was a small, child-sized being who was wearing some kind of one-piece suit with red straps in an X-pattern across the chest, brown boots, a helmet with “a propellor” on it, and a backpack with knobs and dials. It was very pale, with a face that was described as having an ample red mustache, blonde hair atop the head, and bright blue eyes.

It seemed to be hunched over one of the sheep, in the process of inserting a siphon-like device with a hooked end into the still struggling and terrified animal. Beside the entity was a satchel of some sort that was covered with blood and seemed to be filled with organs and parts from the dead animals, which all angered Valentina enough to snap her out of her daze of fear. She began to shout at the being and throw rocks at it, and the odd little entity retreated to what was described as some box-like device like “a radio,” which had a crank on the side that the little creature began to furiously wind to reel in the webs that covered the corral. It then became apparent that there was another of the creatures standing nearby, and this one ran up a hill to sit within a chair-like device that let out a humming sound and hovered off. Valentina was left alone with the original creature that she had seen butchering her sheep, and she lurched towards it with a wooden club she always carried with her. The little man at this point was said to be the one who was terrified now, and Valentina would say of what happened next:

He spoke to me, but I did not understand it. It was not Quechua or Spanish. He was as upset as I was. Oh my God! My animals! He had killed them one by one. I became crazy. I hit him with all my strength. I hit him in the face and he started to bleed. The guy was still screaming but I did not understand it.

Unfortunately for Valentina, the being was not completely helpless, and he produced a strange tool similar to a curved, razor sharp boomerang to lash out at her, cutting her chest and arms. It must have been quite a sight to see, this shepherd woman with a club and a baby strapped to her back, locked in an apparent fight to the death with this alien sheep-killer and his otherworldly weapon, and after a few moments of combat the injured entity retreated with his device containing the webs and his bag of sheep entrails. Valentina chased the little man, but he soon sat atop another of those chair-like contraptions and shot off into the sky much as his companion had done, leaving the woman standing there with her unharmed baby, exhausted and bleeding.

According to the rather spectacular account, Bolivian military would later examine the scene to find 63 dead sheep missing various organs and swaths of fat, as well as every drop of blood. Other ranchers in the area would also tell of finding mutilated sheep carcasses devoid of blood, and of having seen miniature beings lurking about the animal pens at night. The account would come to public attention with an interview conducted with the witness in 2001 by Spanish UFO researcher J. J. Benítez, and what made it all the more interesting was that Valentina had never even heard of UFOs or aliens before and did not seem particularly interested in that line of questioning.

Also from the 1960s we have a curious account from the U.S. state of Oregon. In 1965, an unidentified witness says he was staying at his parents’ house near Madras, Oregon, when one evening his attention was drawn by loud noises coming from right outside the house. When he looked outside, the witness says that he saw strange lights outside and a “UFO coming down,” but what was even stranger than that was a very large, hulking form that suddenly appeared from the night to stand looking in the doorway of the house, of which he would say, “I saw an alien creature standing outside the front door looking at me. It had the face of an ape, and chain across the chest area.”

The massive creature then lumbered off and the lights disappeared, allegedly leaving a mark upon the ground where the UFO had landed but no other physical evidence at all such as tracks. Considering the strange chains and the proximity to the UFO sighting, it seems that this creature must have surely had some connection, but it is strange that except for the chain this thing’s appearance makes it seem like it could have been a Bigfoot. Interestingly, Bigfoot and UFOs are often sighted together, oddly enough, making an already weird phenomenon even weirder.

The 1960s seem to have been a rather odd time for extraterrestrial encounters, because our next case is every bit as bizarre and occurred in 1968 in the province of Tarragona in Spain, and concerns a humble farmer by the name of John Mateu. According to a report contained within the Barcelona Tele-Express, in the summer of that year, Mateu was out doing his usual farm work like any other day, when he caught sight of what appeared to be something glinting in the morning light some distance down the dirt road that went past the property. His first impression was that it was someone who might be lost or even worse broken down, and so he walked off down the dusty road with his dog in tow to see what was going on. It would soon become quite clear that this was no car, nor any sort of vehicle he recognized.

As he approached, Mateu could see that rather than a car the source of the glinting light was actually some sort of oval, metallic object that was glowing and hovering several feet off of the ground. As the dumbfounded farmer stared on in amazement, he noticed three small creatures that looked vaguely octopoid, moving along swiftly on tentacles towards the craft. When they reached it, the weird entities were described as piling into the spheroid object and shooting off into the sky and leaving Mateu there to faint and lose consciousness. Indeed, he’d go on to remain missing for a full day as friends and family searched for him, after which he wandered home, unable to account for his missing time. Mateu and his brother would go on to find several patches of scorched earth where it was surmised that the alien craft had landed, and oddly enough their watches were also reported as stopping when they entered the vicinity. Interestingly, Spain was subjected to a spate of sightings and encounters of strange, octopoid creatures all over the country, although what connection any of them have to this case or each other remains unclear.

Moving on to the 1970s we have the extraordinarily odd account of 9 year-old José Cantu, of the town of Harrah, in Washington state. On January 19, 1977, Cantu was up early in the morning making himself breakfast when he looked outside to see a strange, diminutive “little men” out in the yard. He tried to wake his mother, but she told him to leave her alone and that he was imagining things, so he went out to take a look for himself, soon coming face to face with a pair of 3-foot-tall beings with greenish skin and no legs, instead sitting atop rotating bases with various tubes and small wheel-like protuberances attached to them. The heads of the things were monstrous, with pig-like snouts, odd mushroom-shaped caps, and only a single eye placed within the center of their heads, as well as tiny, useless looking forearms jutting out from the middle.

Cantu immediately hid behind a shed, and it was here where he would notice two brightly lit metallic crafts parked nearby which had ramps leading to the ground and seemed to be piloted by more of the same cyclops beings. The two beings he had seen earlier then boarded these “spaceships” via the ramps, after which the crafts hovered into the air and vanished into puffs of smoke. The boy ran back inside, woke his sleeping mother, and told her all about what he had seen, but she would not believe him and sent him on his way to school. There he would tell anyone who would listen about what he had seen, and two classroom aides ended up being so enthralled by his sincerity that they went home with him after school to take a look at the scene themselves.

In the yard, the aides would find circular indentations within the earth, apparently caused by the bases that the two aliens had sat upon, and neighbors would say that they had also found enormous depressions in the ground where Cantu said the craft had been resting. An examination of these depressions showed that they had strange patterns of swirled grass within them, and this was all big enough news that the following day a a police officer for the Indian Reserve of Yakima by the name of Willard J. Vogel came to investigate, seeing the evidence and interviewing the boy, and he became convinced that the boy at least truly believed that he was telling the truth. What did he see, aliens, UFOs, or some kind of inter-dimensional interlopers? Who knows?

Here we hve looked at a selection of some of the oddest encounters with beings beyond our comprehension. Although it is easy to simply write these off as delusions or overactive imaginations, it is also intriguing to think about whether there is any chance at all that any of it was true, and if so, what these entities could have possibly been. If they are real, then what are the origins of such things? Are these creatures from another star that have travelled here upon nuts and bolts spacecraft? Or are they perhaps thigs from beyond our reality, interdimensional travellers not traversing space, but rather the space between spaces, punching through some curtain between dimensions? Whatever the answer may be, one thing is for sure, and that these accounts are pretty much as truly, spectacularly weird as they get.

If the September 1961 alien abduction incident reported by Barney and Betty Hill had been a one-off, singular event, then there might be at least some justification in suggesting that the whole event was born out of some strange, shared psychological event. The important thing to note, though, was that it was not a singular event. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was just the start of what eventually became a veritable deluge of reports that continues to this very day. Take, for example, the strange and thought-provoking case of a man named Herbert Schirmer. It was in the early hours of December 3, 1967, when Schirmer – who was, at the time, a policeman in Ashland, Nebraska – was driving around town, checking that all was normal. It turns out, however, that things were not normal; they were far from being normal. As he scoured the deserted, quiet streets, Schirmer was suddenly confronted by what, at first glance, he thought was a broken-down truck at the edge of one particular road. When his headlights hit the object with full force, however, it became instantly clear to Schirmer that this was no truck. It was much stranger, maybe even a vehicle from another world.

What Schirmer was confronted by was a fairly compact, egg-shaped craft, floating around eight to ten feet above the surface of the road. An amazed Schirmer could only stare  as the UFO – there really was no other way for Schirmer to describe it – rose further into the sky. Flashing, red lights could be seen and a wailing, banshee-like sound filled Schirmer’s ears. The UFO then exited the area by taking a course directly above Schirmer’s vehicle. He sat there, astounded, for a few moments and then quickly headed back to the police station. He even recorded the details of the affair in the logbook: “Saw a flying saucer at the junction of highways 6 and 63. Believe it or not!”

Just like Betty and Barney Hill back in 1961, Schirmer – six years later – very soon came to realize that certain portions of that extremely weird night were gone from his mind and his memory – specifically, an hour or so of time. Also paralleling the experience of the Hills, Schirmer elected to undergo hypnosis to try and figure out what on earth (or off of it) had happened to him on that dark night. The hypnotic sessions were carried out by a Boulder, Colorado-based Dr. Leo Sprinkle. While under hypnosis, Schirmer provided an incredible account of what happened during that absent period of time.

Hypnosis revealed that as he sat in his police car, and as he stared in awe at the hovering craft directly before him, Schirmer was confronted by three humanoid beings. All of them were wearing tight-fitting, one-piece outfits. They exited the craft and walked towards Schirmer. All were around four-and-a-half to five-feet in height. Approaching the driver’s side window, one – that Schirmer perceived to be the “leader” of the alien pack – leaned in, in a slightly menacing fashion, and asked: “Are you the watchman of this place?” Schirmer replied that, yes, he was. As the aliens stood around his squad-car, Schirmer couldn’t fail to notice that their uniforms displayed the image of a winged serpent. Schirmer was reportedly then taken aboard the craft, and given what we would call “a tour.”

In somewhat puzzling and enigmatic words, the alien who seemed to be in charge said to Schirmer: “We want you to believe in us, but not too much.” After which, Schirmer was returned to his vehicle, with his mind wiped clean of the events – until, that is, definitively bad dreams finally forced him to undergo hypnosis, and the startling saga came tumbling out in spectacular fashion. It should be stressed that the Schirmer incident seemed to straddle two camps: that of the abductee and that of the contactee. For example, there was the issue of missing time, which certainly is a staple part of just about all alien abduction incidents on record. But, the entities that Schirmer saw were most definitely not the Greys of abduction lore. Their short statures aside, they were not too dissimilar to us. And, we can hardly say that Schirmer was kidnapped. He was, after all, invited on-board the UFO for that fairly quick tour. While the Schirmer case was not unique, it certainly remains a definitive part of alien abduction/alien contact lore.