Unlike U.S. political party members, Chupacabra fans seem to break down into three groups: those who believe in the traditional Puerto Rican, upright, lizardish kind of bloodsucker; those who believe in the hairless coyote-like Texas kind; and those who put the moniker on any unidentifiable dead creature with fangs in any country. (Actually, U.S. political party members break down too, but it’s a breakdown of the other kind.) A mysterious creature discovered and photographed by a boy in Colombia seems to fall into the third category … but maybe not.

“I arrived and I looked out and then there was something all weird like a dog, so I came and told her aunt see that, and my aunt handed me the cell phone to take pictures.”

Thus begins the strange tale of Joan Sebastian Arboleda Lombana, a boy living in La Sierra, a village in the Magdalena River valley region of the mountainous Department of Antioquia in central northwestern Colombia. The rough googly translation comes from Noticias Caracol TV (see the video report here), which sent a reporter to interview Joan, his aunt and La Sierra locals who were said to be “dismayed” at the appearance of the corpse of such a strange creature. The pictures (way to go, Joan!) support the boy’s description that the beast looked like a cross between an opossum and a bush dog. While opossums are common in the area, bush dogs (Speothos venaticus) – a remote relative of the South American maned wolf and the African wild dog – are an extremely rare canid found mostly in Suriname, Guyana and Peru. Is the bush dog making a comeback in La Sierra?

Bush dog at the Prague Zoo (Wikipedia)

“We came to see and we found an animal that was more or less, 70 centimeters long, had a face or a fox head, and hands that were like a kind of gorilla, like a miquito, then it has us. This strange species is quite impacted.”

La Sierra resident Martin Prada, one of many locals concerned about the mysterious creature, thought (again, a rough Google translation) it looked more like a gorilla or a monkey (miquito). At 70 cm (27.5 inches) in length, gorilla seems unlikely. Why did some residents, as reported by HDB Noticias, think it was a Chupacabra?

“According to versions of some locals, the creepy creature had been hanging around the homes in the area for several days; especially at night … Several barnyard animals disappeared from the homes of this hot Magdalena Medio population, as a victim of this four-legged ‘monster’ and an unpleasant aspect.”

Ah-ha! What other creature sneaks around at night and pilfers pets and barnyard animals? OK, a lot of them do, but this corpse didn’t look like any of the more common ones. It’s also 50% larger than the largest opossums. That was enough to call in Corantioquia, the environmental protection organization that is part of integrated urban water management in Medellín, the largest city in Antioquia. Adriana Molina, deputy director of ecosystems of Corantioquia, looked at the creature and had this to say:

“The corporation has already begun the verification process for the identity of this individual, the invitation is for the entire community to report any anomalous or conflictive situation that may occur with wildlife and to maintain calm in these situations.”

Yep – they took away the corpse and are verifying its identity. Preliminary observations suggest the creature was suffering from advanced dermatitis – a skin condition related to poor diet, bacteria and fungi. That, in addition to the decay, make it look more like the Texas mangy coyote version of the alleged Chupacabra.

Possum or opossum — depending on your political persuasion.

If it’s anything other than an opossum, will they tell the public? It would be nice in a way if it were a bush dog, since that species was just placed on the Near Threatened Species list and this might be a sign it’s surviving and spreading its habitat.

The best part of this story is that Joan got some pictures before the authorities took the creature away. Keep those phones handy and shutter fingers ready and steady — that thing you spot in your garden could be a Chupacabra!

America’s favorite secret military base somehow manages to stay in the headlines year after year. Earlier this month, the world’s largest aerospace company Boeing quietly released a series of concept art images which appear to depict some type of unknown, high-altitude “mothership” capable of launching smaller craft while in flight. Even stranger, the images appear to depict the large triangular aircraft sitting on a tarmac at the infamous Area 51. Does this revelation confirm any of the triangle UFO theories that have been floating around for years?

Not yet, anyway. The Boeing concept art images appear to have been discovered and published by aviation blog The Drive. As The Drive’s Tyler Rogoway and Joseph Trevithick note, the mountain ranges and landscape in the images seem eerily similar to the landscape at Groom Lake, Nevada where Area 51 is located:

What makes these renderings even more interesting is that they seem to show this combination of exotic aircraft being flown out of Area 51. The hills in the background and the general details shown match up near perfectly with the clandestine flight test location. It’s interesting to think that concept art would include such specific details, especially in an age long before Area 51 was as known as it is today or tools like Google Earth existed. The chances of this being some coincidence seem low. Considering the tech being shown and the fact that these renderings remained unreleased for decades, it does make sense that they would show the system operating at its intended base of operations.

In the images, a massive triangular ‘mothership’ is depicted both in flight and sitting on a landing strip surrounded by desert.  The ‘mothership’ in the images appears to be a high-altitude aircraft capable of launching a separate, smaller spacecraft or aircraft from a special hollow section of its fuselage. Strangest of all, the triangular ‘parasite’ spacecraft in the images should be familiar to anyone who keeps up aerospace and UFO developments: it’s a dead ringer for the long-rumored TR-3B.

If the ship had navigation lights at its corners, it would match the craft described in hundreds of reports of triangular black UFOs around the world.

The TR-3B is an alleged black budget surveillance aircraft built by the US Air Force, believed to exist thanks to dozens of sightings of black, triangular aircraft reported throughout the 20th and 21st centuries and a few grainy photographs. Our own Micah Hanks recently published a terrific look at the triangle UFO phenomenon and the many documented sightings which took place throughout the 1980s – which just so happens the exact same time these Boeing Area 51 ‘mothership’ images were created.

Are these concept images proof of anything? Not exactly. It’s unknown if this project ever came to fruition, although several similar platforms have in recent years been developed which can launch spacecraft from high-altitude ‘mothership’ aircraft. Still, these Boeing images may help further reinforce some people’s suspicions (like my own) that Area 51 isn’t as strange as some make it out to be. If the ‘truth’ about Area 51 is ever disclosed to the public, it will likely be a lot less sensational and strange than we all hope. While many of us hold on to the hope that de-engineered alien spacecraft or grey aliens in massive formaldehyde tanks might be stored away in hangars at the secretive military base, the truth is likely far more banal. Or maybe that’s just what They want us to believe.

Why would Boeing release the images now?

The U.S. military tests all manners of new aircraft and weapons at the highly off-limits base at the Nevada Test and Training Range, and the secrecy is likely in place to keep new defensive capabilities out of the hands of America’s adversaries. It has even been alleged that the alien rumors surrounding Area 51 are a form of counterintelligence designed to muddy the waters and discredit any leaks that do manage to slip out of the top secret facility. Where do these ‘mothership’ images fit in with larger Area 51 narratives? Are they more misinformation, or a hint that the TR-3B might indeed be overhead?

Saturn’s rings are arguably one of the most widely recognized features of our solar system. While Saturn isn’t the only planet that has a ring system (Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus also have rings), the sixth planet from the sun does have the most prominent and spectacular rings, visible from Earth on clear nights with the aid of a bit of telescopic magnification.

Back in December, we also learned something interesting about Saturn’s ring system: that it may be much younger than we once thought, having appeared more recently than the dinosaurs.

Luciano Iess of the Sapienza University of Rome told Astronomy.com that “A catastrophic event like a collision looks to me the most obvious explanation, but there may be problems with that too… The origin of the rings has to be put in the broader context of the dynamics of the Saturnian system.” Iess went on to cite colleagues of his “that even [think] the inner moons of Saturn are young, and they are migrating inward.”

Recent astronomical studies helped us determine the youth of Saturn’s rings. Since the physical matter which composes them constitutes fairly low mass, astronomers guess that the rings are between 10 and 100 million years old (Saturn, on the other hand, is believed to be almost 4.5 billion years old). Iess told Astronomy.com that measurements going all the way back to Voyager and Cassini were highly suggestive that the planet’s rings came much later.

Knowing that the most prominent planetary ring system in our celestial neighborhood was a recent addition, it has caused some to ask whether Earth itself might have at one time had rings, too.

This was precisely the idea proposed by Danish astronomer Kaare Rasmussen of the National Museum in Copenhagen in the early 1990s, who argued that in the past 2800 years Earth may have had rings on as many as 16 separate occasions.

According to am April 1991 article in New Scientist by John Gribben, Rasmussen “carried out a survey of all reports of meteorite falls, fireballs and showers of shooting stars from 800 BC to 1750 AD. He then carried out a statistical analysis of the data. He discovered that there were many distinct periods of intense activity.” Based on this, Rasmussen noted that these active periods peaked coinciding with high meteoritic activity, during which time he believed that rings formed as a result of a comet or asteroid being caught in Earth’s orbit. Subsequent decreases in meteoritic activity might have indicated periods of ring stability, followed by a return to activity as particles from the particulate ring were decelerated by Earth’s upper atmosphere and began to shower down upon the Earth.

Some interesting observational data exists from the last couple of centuries that suggests Earth could have had asteroids trapped in its orbit even more recently. In 1907, the June 12 edition of the Edmonton Bulletin featured an article on a colorful character by the name of E. Stone Wiggins, a Canadian astronomer who claimed to have spotted a second moon in orbit around the Earth:

“In 1882,” says Prof. Wiggins, “I discovered another moon. It is now at that point of its orbit nearest the earth… I knew this moon existed because our visible moon showed a disturbing force in her revolutions around the earth, for which astronomers could not account.

“In 1884 I published a letter in the New York Tribune claiming the discovery, giving the evidence of trustworthy persons in Michigan who declared to me that the sun was eclipsed on May 16 of that year, the sky being perfectly cloudless and when our visible moon was in another quarter of the heavens and therefore could not possibly eclipse the sun. This dark moon has an immense carbon atmosphere in which the dun develops little or no light; but it has often been seen by persons who happened to be in the range of incidence of its reflected light.”

It’s not impossible that a fairly large object could enter Earth’s orbit for a period of time, thus resulting in what astronomers have called a “moonlet” (see my article here for more on this), or as Kaare Rassmussen suggested in the 1990s, maybe even a ring system around Earth for a period of time.

At his Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait addressed the question of whether a ring system might ever form around Earth, to which he said, “could Earth have rings? Sure!” Plait continues:

“It’s unclear exactly how Saturn (or the other four outer giant planets) got their rings, but there is more than one mechanism to create them. A small moon could get hit by an asteroid or comet, shattering it. An impact on the Earth itself, if it were big enough, could create rings (the impact that formed the Moon billions of years ago may have done just that). That would kinda suck for us, though. Saturn’s moon Enceladus has geysers which may resupply the planet’s A and E rings.”

As Plait points out, at some point in Earth’s past the impact that led to the formation of our Moon might have actually caused Earth to have a ring system, as Rassmussen suggests (although these rings would have existed much earlier than Rassmussen’s estimate of the last 2800 years). So if this is the case, why doesn’t Earth have a ring system now?

The problem with ring systems is that much of their composition is formed from ice particulates. As Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today and co-host of Astronomy Cast explains, “The problem with icy rings is that the Earth orbits too closely to the Sun. There’s a specific point in the Solar System known as the ‘frost line’ or ‘snow line’. This is the point in the Solar System where deposits of ice could have survived for long periods of time. Any closer and the radiation from the Sun sublimates the ice away.”

So Earth’s proximity to the Sun, in other words, makes it physically difficult for icy rings to remain for long periods, as with more distant planets in our solar system.

It’s not impossible that Earth may have had rings at some point in the past, or in the unfortunate event of an asteroid impacting the moon, or even the Earth, that our planet could have rings again someday. In the event that it ever does, let’s just hope it’s not the result of an armageddon-inducing space rock smashing us to bits in the process. In the meantime, if you’ve ever wondered what a ring system around our planet might look like from here on Earth, check out Ron Miller’s conceptual artwork that illustrates this idea.

According to newly conducted research, one of Earth’s oldest rocks may have been discovered on the Moon. The chunk of rock was initially brought back to Earth in 1971 from Apollo 14 astronauts who landed on the Moon.

The Earth rock ended up on the Moon more than likely because of a very powerful impact on our planet that happened approximately 4 billion years ago.

In a statement, David Kring, who is the co-author of the rock study, as well as a Universities Space Research Association (USRA) scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, explained, “It is an extraordinary find that helps paint a better picture of early Earth and the bombardment that modified our planet during the dawn of life.”

Astronauts from the Apollo 14 mission explored the surface of the Moon for a few days in February of 1971 and that’s when they collected rock samples to bring back to our planet. The lunar samples were then studied by a research team which was led by Jeremy Bellucci from the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and Alexander Nemchin who is from the Swedish Museum and Curtin University in Australia.

Upon analysis, scientists discovered a small 0.08-ounce (or 2 grams) fragment on a rock that contained quartz, zircon, and feldspar, which are all rarely found on the moon but very common here on Earth. When they conducted chemical analysis on the fragment, they were able to find that it was crystallized in an environment which was oxidized and at a temperature that would have been the same as it was near the subsurface of the Earth in its very early days.

According to the evidence found in the study, the fragment was crystallized here on Earth between 4.1 billion and 4 billion years ago and at around 12 miles below the surface of our planet. It was then thrown into space by a strong impact and ended up on the Moon which was around three times closer to Earth than it is now.

Click here to see a picture of the lunar rock the astronauts brought back in 1971.

Researchers said that after the Earth rock landed on the Moon, some of it melted and was probably buried by an impact which happened around 3.9 billion years ago. It was then uncovered by another impact on the Moon about 26 million years ago which created the 1,115-foot-wide Cone Crater. That’s where two of the Apollo 14 astronauts (Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell) took some rock samples.

The mystery of unexplained, earth-rattling booms continues around the country. Whereas mystery booms were once a rare anomaly, they seem to be happening with unsettling regularity lately. What’s behind this mysterious phenomenon? Sonic booms caused by supersonic or hypersonic weapons and aircraft? Unknown atmospheric activity? Meteorite explosions? Earthquakes, frostquakes, or frack-quakes?  

Anyone’s guess is as good as any. This week’s mystery booms come to us from the American south, where residents of four separate counties in Kentucky reported hearing “an earth-shaking sound” on January 23. Emergency dispatchers in Jackson, Madison, Estill, and Rockcastle counties were called when residents heard and felt a mysterious boom loud enough to shake their homes’ foundations.

“At about 6:19 pm yesterday evening a couple of people called in and said they heard this loud boom in the county. We went to check on it in the area, and we never found anything,” Jackson County Sheriff Paul Hays told local news station WKYT. While the cause of the Kentucky mystery boom is still unknown, locals have speculated it could have been anything from an electrical transformer exploding, a rock quarry blast, a sonic boom, or outgassing caused by hydraulic fracking.

A few states to the west in Arkansas, residents of Little Rock took to social media to ask if anyone might know what caused a deafening mystery boom a few hours later on the same night. According to local news station FOX 16, several residents thought it may have been an F/A-18 breaking the sound barrieroverhead – or worse. North Little Rock local Collette Young says the sounds were eerily reminiscent of battle:

My family has served and have been to war – at one point I thought we might be under attack. I just want to know what it is so the next time I hear the sound I am not so startled.

Spokespersons for nearby Little Rock Air Force Base and the Clinton National Airport had no information about the mysterious boom. I just hope that more of these mystery booms can’t be explained by the same causes as those determined the case of recurring booms heard in Pennsylvania last year; in that incident, it turns out that a would-be domestic terrorist was testing improvised explosives in remote areas. Could more of these mystery booms be of a similar origin, or is something stranger going on?

From almost the days of the actual trip, rumors have flown about possible UFO sightings during the Apollo 11 mission and first manned landing on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin still insists that his comments about a light he saw were taken out of context and what he saw was simply a reflection of the sun off of panels jettisoned from the rocket that had carried them into orbit. The same was said to be true of comments made by Armstrong that were misconstrued over the years to be about something other than space junk. However, a newly released letter written by someone back in the news claims that the first man on the moon had more than just a passing-by-while-in-the-sky interest in UFOs.

“This letter could be somewhat historic because it might actually confirm that Armstrong did have an interest in UFOs.”

Neil Armstrong

Sun Online says the letter (see it here) was discovered by Dr. Irena Scott, a former Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer and author of a new book about UFO encounters, “Sacred Corridors.” Dr. Scott is well-known in UFOolgy circles, having served on the MUFON Board of Directors and as a MUFON consultant in physiology and astronomy and a field investigator. The author of the letter is Professor J. Allen Hynek, who has posthumously received 15 more minutes of fame as the focal point of the History Channel’s new series on Project Blue Book.The recipient of the handwritten letter (remember those?) was Jennie Zeidman, a close friend of Hynek who also worked with him at Wright Patterson Air Force Base on Project Blue Book.

“Dear Jennie. A week from today we sail … I got called up by the cruise director asking if the Hyneks would mind sharing a table with the Armstrongs! So – tell Barry I should be able to get the autograph for him! Did I tell you I’m going?”

Hynek was referring to an upcoming two-week cruise from New York to the west coast of Africa in 1973 on which 2,000 teachers, artists, authors, scientists and celebrities would observe a total solar eclipse and listen to lectures and discussions, including a panel with Hynek and Armstrong called “Life in the Universe.” To Scott, this is proof that, while Armstrong never publicly discussed his UFO interests, he intentionally sought on the cruise to have such discussions with a recognized expert in the field.

Sun Online also reveals Scott found evidence that Neil Armstrong and J. Allen Hynek also contacted ufologist and author Leonard Stringfield, who was at one time the director of Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO).

“Stringfield said that a number of years ago when Armstrong was on the board of directors of a Cincinnati bank, Armstrong and Hynek approached him with a proposal to protect the names of the government-connected informants. Armstrong said Stringfield could put his list of names in a safety deposit box at Armstrong’s bank, to which it was assumed Armstrong would also have access. The intention was that in the event of Stringfield’s death, the names wouldn’t be lost, but Stringfield rejected the idea.”

Scott implies that Armstrong was trying to help Stringfield protect the identities of 50 UFO informants. She is sketchy on this – Stringfield died in 1994 and Scott admits in the Sun article that she has no proof it actually occurred but uses it as proof that that Armstrong and Hynek had ongoing contacts, implying Armstrong had lifelong interest in UFOs and in discussing – and perhaps even covering up – their existence with a leader in the field.

So, what does this letter show? Armstrong and Hynek were already going to be on the ship together and sharing at least one panel, but it could be a sign that Armstrong had more to discuss in private – although a cruise ship dining room isn’t exactly private or secure, especially when many onboard were interested in the same subject matter and wanted to be close to the famed astronaut. Being before the fact, the letter doesn’t tell us what was actually discussed and there seems to be no published followup. Nor is there any for the the alleged but unproven meeting with Stringfield. The strongest point there is that Armstrong and Hynek had contact long after the cruise.

For now, it’s an interesting footnote – just in need of a little more foot.

We just have to accept it. We’ve been dragged into the future, despite however hard we kicked and screamed. Robots are real, and they’re basically indistinguishable from the robots of our fictions. If you’re worried about these metal abominations coming to take everything you love, and would like nothing more than to go all John Connors and reduce the lot of them to slag, you’re very much not alone, and researchers are quite concerned.

In a January 19th New York Times article titled “Why Do We Hurt Robots?,” Jonah Bromwich cites a number of cases where people “brutally assaulted” robots. Poor, innocent “security robots” battered and beaten. Gangs of filthy meatbags attacking driverless cars. Three teenagers in Japan beating a robot “with all their might.” A Moscow man bludgeoning a “teaching robot” with a baseball bat as it pleaded for help. People, hilariously and ill-advisedly, crashing their own driverless cars on purpose (I respect the commitment to the fight, but those things are expensive). Another security robot was—just fight back the tears; tears can come later—wrapped in a tarp and covered in barbecue sauce.  Humans are such horrible creatures that we manage to hurt things that don’t even have consciousness, let alone pain receptors.

Don’t look at me like that.

And thus, in keeping with the new cultural norm of using words without any consideration for what they mean, the term “robot abuse” was born.

Destroying robots is wrong. For the same reason that destroying someone else’s car, toaster, musical instrument, house, or computer is wrong. It’s property destruction. However hilarious covering a security robot in barbecue sauce is, a lot of money and time went into creating that machine. But that’s all it is, a machine. Yet we all anthropomorphize robots, both those scared of a robot takeover and those so deeply entrenched in robotics that they see property destruction as abuse.

Cognitive neuroscientist Agnieszka Wykowska, a researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and the editor in chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics thinks that our violence towards robots stems from the atavistic demons responsible for our tribalism and ostracization of the other. She says:

“You have an agent, the robot, that is in a different category than humans. So you probably very easily engage in this psychological mechanism of social ostracism because it’s an out-group member. That’s something to discuss: the dehumanization of robots even though they’re not humans.”

There’s a lot wrong with this statement. One: you can’t dehumanize something that isn’t human. Two: robots are not agents. They can only do what they are programmed to do. They literally have no agency.

Asked about potential solutions to this “disturbing” problem, Ms. Wykowska offers a story about the savagery a colleague witnessed a  kindergarten class express towards a robot:

“Kids have this tendency of being very brutal to the robot, they would kick the robot, they would be cruel to it, they would be really not nice.

“That went on until the point that the caregiver started giving names to the robots. So the robots suddenly were not just robots but Andy, Joe and Sally. At that moment, the brutal behavior stopped. So, its very interesting because again its sort of like giving a name to the robot immediately puts it a little closer to the in-group.”

So the solution is to teach kids that machines are people? Fantastic. What if, and I know this might sound simple, ignorant, or possibly even on-the-wrong-side-of-history, but what if we don’t want machines as part of the in-group? What if assigning humanity to a tool cheapens and debases our own self-awareness and understanding of what it means to be conscious?

I’m not going.

Let me just step up on this here soapbox for a minute. The whole problem is this shoving the future on us whether we want it or not. The Times article cites a Brown University and M.I.T.  study that showed adding a robot to a workforce reduced the number of employed humans by six. In the very near future we will have armed security robots. We know these machines are coming, we know they’re changing the world, and we know it’s unavoidable. We need to treat them like the tools they are, not like people. We need, more than anything, to learn to celebrate humanity and all conscious non-humans (if I ever see a robot messing with an elephant, that’s going to be one broken robot), not blur the lines between conscious creatures and machines. Forcing people to deny a basic truth—that machines aren’t people—will only make people angrier in the short term, and in the long term will only further the mechanization and dehumanization of the world at large.

But stop breaking other people’s robots.