Ready to feel a bit useless? A boy from Memphis, Tennessee has apparently become the youngest person to ever build a fusion reactor after successfully building one in the spare room in his home using parts sourced from eBay. Jackson Oswalt, now 14, began construction on the machine when he was 12 and completed his working fusion reactor just before his 13th birthday.

Jackson Oswalt says that after reading a story of another boy, Taylor Wilson, who grabbed headlines when he built a working reactor at age 14, he wanted to beat his record. So he did. With his parents’ financial backing and a self-taught course in nuclear engineering, Jackson Oswalt built a small, working, fusion reactor that has apparently been verified by nuclear engineers. The machine works by running 50,000 volts of electricity through deuterium gas to force the deuterium atoms together, similar to the process that powers the sun.

Despite their admittedly limited understanding of what their son was working on,  his parents provided financial support to the tune of $8,000-$10,000 dollars for parts that Jackson bought off of eBay. According to Jackson, finding the components was fairly straight-forward:

“The start of the process was just learning about what other people had done with their fusion reactors. After that, I assembled a list of parts I needed. [I] got those parts off eBay primarily and then often times the parts that I managed to scrounge off of eBay weren’t exactly what I needed. So, I’d have to modify them to be able to do what I needed to do for my project.”

Jackson Oswalt’s nuclear fusion reactor.

Credit: (CC BY-SA 4.0) James Smith39

The process of building the reactor was, unsurprisingly, a bit more complicated. There isn’t a “Nuclear Fusion For Young Engineers” guidebook just yet, so according to Jackson, the process involved a lot of trial and error and consulting the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, a forum for amateur amateur physicists and budding mad scientists trying to construct reactors of their own. Jackson Oswalt says that once he began tinkering, the pieces began to fall into place:

“After a while, it became pretty simple to realize how it all worked together, but at the start it was definitely figuring out one aspect of it, memorizing what that actually meant and then moving on to a different aspect of it. Eventually all those pieces of the puzzle came together to make a good project.”

His father, Chris Oswalt,  says that although he doesn’t know anything about how a fusion reactor works, he knew it was likely a pretty dangerous project and made sure his son consulted with experts to avoid electrocution, radiation poisoning, or any other the other potential hazards involved in nuclear reactors.

Jackson Oswalt’s resulted were verified by Richard Hull, a retired engineer and administrator of the Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, who says his machine works and that Jackson Oswalt is the youngest person in America, and likely the youngest person in the world to build a working fusion reactor.

Biologists in Brazil are baffled this week after one of the world’s largest mammals has been found in an anomalous location. Wildlife experts were alerted this week to the presence of a humpback whale carcass on the island of Marajo, which sits at the mouth of the Amazon River. Locals discovered the out-of-place whale after first noticing carrion birds circling above a remote part of the island’s dense mangrove swamp. In fact, the area is so remote that wildlife officials struggled to even reach the carcass in the first place. The whale measures around 11 meters (36 feet) in length and is estimated to weigh around 10 tons (9,100 kg).

Scientists are baffled by the find. It is speculated that the whale was already dead before being washed upon the island by a massive storm surge, but that much so far remains merely an educated hunch. Even more mysterious is the fact that a humpback whale was off the coast of Brazil in the first place.

Out of place animals are a classic Fortean phenomenon.

Renata Emin, leader of Brazilian conservation project Bicho D’agua Institute, told The Independent the discovery of the whale carcass is a rare and somewhat unexplained anomaly. “We’re still not sure how it landed here, but we’re guessing that the creature was floating close to the shore and the tide, which has been pretty considerable over the past few days, picked it up and threw it inland, into the mangrove. Along with this astonishing feat, we are baffled as to what a humpback whale is doing on the north coast of Brazil during February because this is a very unusual occurrence.”

Humpback whales are known to migrate close to the southern coasts of Brazil in warmer months, but discovering one so far north and at this time of year is quite unusual. Interestingly, marine biologists in Hawaii have been baffled by a mysterious drop in the number of whales visiting the islands in recent years, and “researchers aren’t sure if there has been a reduction in the overall humpback population or if the mammals are simply going somewhere else.” Are these whale populations in the midst of a massive and mysterious migration, or might something more catastrophic be afoot?

Whales are believed to be among the most intelligent animals on Earth.

As we continue to discover anomalous animal deaths, one thing is clear: the natural world is under stress like never before. Is humanity destined for a future alone on the Earth as so many science fiction tales have foretold? Will we be able to develop the technological means needed to live on an Earth devoid of plants and animals before it’s too late? Is such a thing even possible?

Mourn for the whales. 

There’s probably no bigger stereotype in the modern Sci-Fi genre than the concept of the ‘alien invasion’. Since Hollywood found it to be such a gold mine (something my friend and colleague Robbie Graham has explored at length) popular culture has flooded our heads with visions of ginormous vessels blackening the skies of New York, London or other major metropoles, and ill-intentioned intruders from outer space so highly advanced and powerful they are almost unstoppable  –‘almost’ being always the operative word, since a story in which the aliens couldn’t be defeated by some unexpected weakness by indomitable Earthlings would make for a pretty depressing blockbuster… Or at least, boring AF.

But what if aliens turned out to be not that highly advanced and unstoppable, as we would like to imagine them? What if the only thing needed to stop them was not a secret weapon or a computer virus coded by Jeff Goldblum, but just a bit of bravery –and a good whack in the head?

The bizarre tale I’m about to share with you, dear Coppertops, has its roots during the crazy years of the UMMO affair we revisited on my last article, yet it concluded decades later under very serendipitous circumstances. Its high-strangeness nature is a perfect example of how the UFO phenomenon –whatever its origin and true nature it may be– always seems to confound our preconceived expectations.

It all started around the time when a group of people in Spain began to receive the first of those long, typewritten letters allegedly sent by extraterrestrials from planet UMMO. The landing of a disk-shaped object in the neighborhood of Aluche had already been published by the press –for more info about that, please go to my previous post– and a small group of flying saucer enthusiasts were having regular gatherings at the basement of the Café Lion in Madrid, which was known around bohemian and literary groups of the Spaniard capital as “La Ballena Alegre” (The Happy Whale) due to the whimsical murals adorning its walls.

“La Ballena Alegra” at the basement of Café Lion (which is now an Irish pub)

It was in one of those UFOlogical salons, on the night of May 30th, 1967 and with around 30 people present, when the lecture of a new UMMO letter took place. The document announced the coming of three of their scout ships to planet Earth, which would take place in the coming days. The specified coordinates for the arrival of the Ummite vessels were:

“BOLIVIA (Oruro Zone): The descent will be verified on a point located within a circular area which, having the city of Oruro at its center, has a radius of 208 kilometers with a margin of error of ± 4 kilometers.

SPAIN (Madrid Zone): The descent is foreseen within a circular area which has the following coordinates at its center: Longitude (3° 45′ 20,6″ W). Latitude (40° 28′ 2,2″ N)

BRAZIL (Río Grande Do Sul Zone): Proximity of Santo Angelo. The elevated margin of error prevents further specification.”

The whole assembly signed on the document as witnesses of what they had heard. If the announcement came true it would prove the extraterrestrial origin of the letter –or so they thought. Nobody seemed to find it funny that the only precise coordinates provided by the extraterrestrials were the ones from their own country, Spain (why couldn’t these space visitors be more accurate with the Bolivia and Brazil landings?). José Luis Jordán Peña, the man who decades later would claim the authorship of the UMMO deception, even had the gall to put his own signature on the paper.

On June the 2nd the newspaper Informaciones published the UFO photographs taken near San José de Valderas, that would end up to be known worldwide thanks to Antonio Ribera and Rafael Farriols’s book “Un Caso Perfecto” (A Perfect Case), which didn’t turn out to be so ‘perfect’ after all (as I already explained on my previous article) but such controversy was still years in the horizon, and the nitid images of the white disk with the black H-like emblem was all the true believers needed to deem the UMMO information worthy of credit.

But what about the two other landing sites? On June 5th Enrique Villagrasa –one of the earliest recipients of UMMO letters– took the initiative of writing to the biggest newspapers in the Bolivian city of Oruro and the Brazilian city of Santo Angelo, to inquire whether any UFO-related news had been reported between the dates of the reading of the UMMO letter at La Ballena Alegre, and the Valderas sighting. Although he never got a reply back from Brazil, two weeks later Villagrasa obtained a written response from the director of the Bolivian newspaper La Patria, telling him that something strange actually did take place around that time, which had been reported by one of the newspaper’s correspondents who had traveled to the town of Uyunu (approximately 300 kilometers south of Oruro) to cover a story pertaining to a robbery of dynamite –remember that at the time, the Bolivian army was fighting guerrilla insurgents and in that same year (1967) Ernesto “Che” Guevara was captured and executed.

“Che” Guevara, about to be executed by Bolivian forces (1967)

According to Enrique Miralles, director of La Patria, the story the correspondent had brought back from that remote location was so fantastic, “I refused to print it until I could count with convincing proof [of its authenticity] –adequate identification of the persons and authorities that intervened in the event, evidence and photographs, etc. It was in such circumstances that your letter arrived to my hands.”

What was this ‘fantastic’ story obtained by the La Patria reporter? Why and how were the authorities involved? The director’s letter didn’t offer any details, and it was the last time Villagrasa would ever hear from Miralles. And thus for almost 30 years the cryptic words from the South American journalist sat as an unassuming thread in the larger yarn of the UMMO affair, until UFO investigator Juan José Benítez decided to do what no one else thought of: travel to South America to try and discover what –if anything– had taken place on that small corner of the Bolivian Altiplano on June of 1967.

As Benítez’s explains in his book “El Hombre que Susurraba a los Ummitas” (The Man who Whispered to the Ummites) the quest took 5 years, several trips to Bolivia, a lot of tenacity (Benítez’s wife, who accompanied him, would probably say “stubbornness”) and more than a few synchronicities, but he eventually managed to track down most of the participants involved in what certainly constitutes one of the strangest cases in the annals of UFOlogy. The first one was the by-then retired newspaper director Enrique Miralles in 1996, who confirmed to him that one of their correspondents –an Argentinian by the name of Lucho Amarayo– was the one who brought back a report concerning a remote village in the Uyuni region where “little men” were said to have slaughtered the sheep of the native farmers, and then fled the scene riding some ‘flying chairs'(!). The peasants had complained to the nearest local authorities who –despite the fantastic narrative– decided to deploy a small regiment of soldiers to investigate anyway, for fear it could be the work of rebel forces; but Miralles never learned what came of that, and as explained in the letter he wrote to Villagrasa in 1967, he never bothered to print the story for lack of evidence.

Benítez tried to obtain more information by looking at the old records of the La Patria newspaper during his stay at Oruro, but the only thing he found was the date when the robbery of the explosives took place (June 11, 1967) –which didn’t coincide with the UMMO announcement received by the Madrilenian contactees, but by now the story of the ‘little flying men’ was enough to pique his curiosity. His next clue of the case came rather unexpectedly, when he was forced to stop the investigation and travel to the Bolivian capital (La Paz) to attend a book fair. There, while signing books, he managed to meet two fans of his who turned out to be related to colonel Rogelio Ayala, the officer in charge of the regiment that had been sent to investigate the what had upset the indigenous villagers. Such incredible coincidences have become a regular feature in Benítez’s adventures and have further convinced him that, when it comes to UFOs, nothing happens by chance.

Through the testimony of colonel Ayala, Benítez’s managed to gather more pieces of the puzzle, and interviewed other members of the regiment who accompanied the Bolivian officer to the remote native village  –Pablo Ayala (the colonel’s son and the youngest in the group), lieutenants Caso and Ampuero, and doctor Jesús Pereyra, who joined the soldiers in the expedition to respond to the plea of the three men sent by the village, who had made the long trek to the military station at Uyuni to denounce the loss of their precious animals.

“We left at dawn and the trip felt endless to me,” Pablo told Benítez. “The site was just composed by 2 or 3 adobe huts in the middle of nowhere and far away from the nearest town. Close to the houses were the stone corrals where they keep their sheep, and on the ground they had placed all the dead animals. We counted more than 30. We were perplexed: the carcasses showed numerous mutilations, with a series of near-perfect circular orifices. The death of the beasts didn’t make any sense –it was the only source of sustenance for these people.”

Bolivian stone corral. In a similar enclosure, Valentina found the ‘dwarf’ butchering her sheep

Aside from the surgical incisions in the bodies, the members of the regiment also noticed that several organs (the eyes, ears, tongues, kidneys and livers) were missing. If this had been the work of guerrilla forces, they thought, it was most peculiar –if the rebels were looking for food, why take only the entrails and leave all the meat behind? The soldiers also observed another peculiar thing: most of the animals appeared to be completely exsanguinated (devoid of blood), a typical hallmark in anomalous mutilation cases.

The manner by which those poor sheep had been slaughtered was told to the military men by one of the village’s women, who had been the main witness of the incredible event. Through all sorts of inquiries and synchronicities that involved further trips to Bolivia, Benítez was miraculously able to track down that same native woman in 2001 –an illiterate peasant that only spoke in quechua by the name of Valentina Flores, who was around 60 years old when Benítez interviewed her, yet still clearly remembered that ominous encounter with “los hombrecitos” (the little men), which had brought an irreparable calamity to her family:

“That day I was alone, with only my youngest daughter beside me; I was carrying her on my back with a blanket. My husband was a commissioner and –like the rest of the other men– he was at the pampa, working. It was around four in the afternoon when it happened. I secured the sheep and lambs at some place, and then went out to look for a llama and its calf which had gone missing.”

Valentina explained to Benítez the search for the missing llama had taken her about 90 minutes, but by the time she returned the sheep were gone.

“I followed the tracks of the herd and arrived to the corrals at the nearby hill. Inside the pen was a small man on his knees, with a sheep between his legs. The top of the corral  –an open, circular enclosure with stone walls around 5′ high– was covered with something that looked like a net. I got scared. That man had killed all my animals.”

Drawing of the ‘flying humanoids’ by Pablo Ayala, part of the regiment sent to investigate

—“What did he look like?” asked Benítez.

—“He was like a child, this high (raising her hand to a height of about 4 feet). He wore a strange one-piece suit, like a scuba diver, dark in color from the feet to his neck. His boots were brown. On the head he was wearing something that reminded me of a helmet, leaving his face uncovered. His skin was very white; he had blond hair, blue eyes, and a red and bushy mustache.” Valentina also added that the short being looked young and ‘plump’, and was carrying a strange apparatus on his back that looked like a ‘chair with legs’, as well as other gadgets on the sides held together with suspenders. Not too far away from the enclosure Valentina observed a second individual similar to the one that was busy butchering her herd–who apparently hadn’t noticed her presence yet, because he had his back turned toward the entrance. Next to this pale-faced ‘dwarf’ was another weird contraption, which seemed to control the net covering the pen.

“I took up a rock from the ground and threw it at the one inside the corral, who got frightened when he saw me and got up. I kept throwing stones at him. He then touched the machine next to him and the net ‘disappeared'” –Benítez interpreted Valentina’s words as meaning that the net had contracted inside the radio-like contraption, after the small humanoid had touched one of its buttons.

Native Bolivian woman, herding sheep.

Valentina, who despite their strange appearance still thought she was facing two common thieves, kept coming closer and stoning the mysterious murdering midget. But by then the second intruder had taken flight and fled the scene! According to the crude description provided by the indigenous woman, on top of their helmet the beings had some sort of ‘propeller’, which combined with two long ‘tubes’ that dangled from the sides of their bodies allowed them to float in the air. Meanwhile the being inside the corral had hastily gathered all his things –including a bag full of the sheep’s freshly removed entrails– and ran out of the enclosure.

“He talked to me, but I couldn’t understand his words, which weren’t Quechua nor Spanish. He looked as upset as I was. Dear God, he had killed all my herd! I went crazy, grabbed a stick and went after him. When I was some 6 feet away from him I struck him with all my strength. The stick, which had iron on the tip, hit him straight in the face and he started to bleed.”The little man kept yelling at Valentina with that unintelligible language, and then he proceeded to attack her with some sort of “knife” that had a small hook on its end, the same weapon he had used to kill and butcher the sheep. “It had a chain on the other end,” Valentina explained, “and it always came back to his hand every time he threw it.” No disintegrator gun or phaser set to stun for this alien invader, as Hollywould would demand, but instead something more suitable for a cheesy kung-fu movie.

Bolivian woman carrying her child with a ‘rebozo’

The ‘boomerang knife’ made several deep cuts in the chest and arms of Valentina, but the thick knot of the blanket with which she was carrying her child protected her neck and probably saved her life, according to the brave woman, who kept on beating on her attacker with the stick until she managed to break his arm and wrist. “Then, very nervously and manipulating his devices with the left hand, he ran to the top of a little hill nearby and took flight like the other one,” she said, leaving only a trail of blood –red, just like ours, according to Valentina– as the fleeting testament of the amazing battle. According to the military men’s testimony to Benítez, although some samples of the blood were taken, they never bothered to sent it for analysis to one of the few labs operating in Bolivia at the time.

The other remnants of the encounter –the 63 sheep and lambs killed and mutilated by the flying little fiends– were later inspected by the regiment of soldiers who came to the village a few days later, as was already explained in the previous paragraphs. They took Valentina’s testimony, but since it was clear the slaughtering had not been the work of rebel forces it was no longer a matter for their official concern, so they returned to their station to give their report, and no reparation of the damage was ever given to the native farmers. Unlike Jacob, who had been blessed by the angel he had wrestled with, Valentina’s encounter with the flying humanoids was a curse: Financially ruined, the Flores family had no choice but to leave their home and seek work in the mines of Oruro. From there they migrated to the south of the country, never to set foot in their old village again.

After so many years, miles traversed and thousands of dollars spent, Benítez had finally closed the book on this UFOlogical case. Although satisfied, he now had more questions than when he began his personal quest: why would ‘superior beings from another world’ –supposedly more evolved than us, both technically and morally– have the necessity to rob indigenous peasants (the poorest of the poor in this world) of their livelihood by butchering the herd of livestock they depended on to survive? What could possibly be the connection between the Bolivian humanoids and the bigger UMMO affair? Valentina never observed the famous )+( emblem in the clothes of the aerial assailants, and yet it’s clear that the chain of events that led the Spanish investigator to this close encounter was triggered by the infamous letter received by the Madrilenian contactees in 1967. I already explained on my previous article why the UMMO case is filled with hoaxes and deception and how the letters were forged by José Luis Jordán Peña; yet without the letters, this case –like so many others– would have fallen through the cracks of history and be lost forever.

Or would it? Although I was forced to skip many details for the sake of brevity, the manner by which Juan José Benítez managed to be face to face with Valentina Flores is almost as incredible as the story itself. It’s almost as if some UFO cases take place not for the sake of the original witnesses, but instead are intended to be discovered and studied by someone else, years or even decades later. If that’s the case, it would not only be further proof of the ‘theatrical’ nature of the phenomenon, but also that *you*, dear Coppertop, were meant to read this post on Mysterious Universe, just as much as *I* was meant to write it…

As for me, one of the reasons I love this case so much is not only the fact that it’s level of absurdity makes me suspect it actually did take place, but also that it kind of goes counter to some of the more recent ideas proposed in the field of UFOlogy. Take my friend and mentor Greg Bishop, who coined the term ‘co-creation’ to depict how paranormal events are somehow influenced by the witness’s expectations and cultural circumstances; although I find Greg’s ideas provocative and going on the right track, Valentina Flores’s encounter with levitating leprechauns showing gear straight out of a Jetsons cartoon would make more sense if it had happened in 19th-century Ireland or to someone of Celtic ascendancy, instead of a South American indigenous woman deep in the heart of the Bolivian Altiplano –BTW, isn’t it interesting how her weapon against the intruder had IRON, which is known to be a substance fairy folk are notoriously averse to?

And yet encounters with pale-skinned dwarves are not that uncommon in South America, as stated by Jacques Vallee in his book The Invisible College, where he narrates the case of a Brazilian soldier who in 1969, while fishing on a boat at a lagoon North of Belo Horizonte, was abducted by two 4-feet-tall beings who took him inside a machine that looked like an upright cylinder. The poor man was dragged blindfolded until he was sat inside a large, windowless stone chamber in front of an assembly of robust dwarves with long reddish hair and bushy beards. The leader of the dwarves forced him to drink from a cubical glass made of stone, then proceeded to communicate through sign language and drawings their intentions of making the soldier their ‘envoy’ with the people of Earth. The man refused and started to frantically pray the rosary until the irritated dwarves took him out of the room and transported him back two hundred miles –and four days later– from the lake where he was kidnapped.

The Brazilian soldier recounted that in one of the walls of the stone chamber was a low shelf with the corpses of four human beings. Had they been killed by his diminutive captors? That was the soldier’s assumption. Maybe the whole event was some sort of ‘conditioning treatment” using a similar level of absurdity, shock and theatricality than in the Bolivia case of 1967, elaborately conducted for purposes that escape our reasoning. Or maybe there really are beings out there who –like the stereotypical alien invaders of Hollywood blockbusters– make no distinctions between the butchering of livestock and the slaughtering of people. In which case the name of Valentina Flores needs to be remembered and praised for all posterity, for giving ZERO FUCKS during a mano-a-mano with a being from another world, and showing advanced anti-gravity technology is not match against a feisty woman defending her property.

Move over, Will Smith!  Here’s the *real* defender of planet Earth.

Charles Fort – wherever you are – this one is for you. The past week gave us a festival of classic Fortean phenomena: fish rained from the sky in Malta, green snow covered the ground in Siberia, and a biblical plague of locusts is heading to Egypt. What’s happening? Is the apocalypse now?

Let’s start in Malta, where one of the best pictures of the event was taken from inside a car and shows a plate-sized fish on the windshield. (See it and other pictures and video of the fish rain here.) Another has a man reaching up to catch another fish with his bare hand before it reaches the ground – a feat worthy of a tryout with the Yankees. Most of the media reports from Xemxija, a Maltese suburb on the western coast of St. Paul’s Bay on the Mediterranean island show the cause of the flying soon-to-be-frying fish – huge waves and gale-force winds blowing at a record-breaking 101 kph (63 mph or almost Force 11) that punished the area with falling trees and flooded streets and then asked for forgiveness with a gift of free fish dinners. Weather is typically the cause of fish rains but the sheer size of those falling on Xemxija made it a Fortean event.

There are many places around the world where locals will say, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute, it will change”. But colors? Welcome to Siberia, where just last week a deadly black snow fell on three cities (coal generator accidents and pollution were blamed). This week, a prettier but equally mysterious and toxic green snow (pictures here) covered parts of the Russian city of Pervouralsk on the Chusovaya River in the Ural Mountains. When there’s non-white snow, a first inclination is to see if it tastes like fruit – lime in this case – but that’s usually a mistake as kids at a pre-school in Pervouralsk found out when instead of a mouthful of candy they ended up with “a cough and their skin turned red, with rashes on their faces” according to one eyewitness report. A better idea is to look for a nearby manufacturing facility and sure enough, the snow gets greener as you get closer to the JSC “Russian Chrome 1915” plant. Plant officials deny any responsibility, saying there’s been no recent accidents, but it was deemed responsible for a similar green stream event in 2016 which was caused by waste in a storage well that dated back at least 30 years to the Soviet era. It’s happened often enough that Pervouralsk kids don’t need a copy of Fort’s “The Book of the Damned” or a Zappa song to remind them not to eat the green snow.

Onward to Egypt, where any strange event is first checked against the biblical story of Moses before becoming Fortean. In Egypt, the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is warning that massive swarms of desert locusts – “the world’s most dangerous migratory pest” – have finished their decimative dining in Sudan and Eritrea and are moving up the Red Sea to Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Heavy fall rains in those areas have allowed the locusts to breed twice and two generations of them are looking to be fed before taking time off for summer breeding. Eat, sex, repeat. Sound like any other bothersome creatures you know? The desert locusts are worse.

“But following a large rainfall they can quickly multiply, eventually forming hopper bands or swarms of adults, composed of billions of individual locusts. A desert locust adult can consume its own weight (roughly 2 grams) in food in a day. The added difficulty is they’re normally in the desert, so they’re eating the vegetation there. Once they get into rain-fed crops on the edge of the desert, grown by poor farmers, they’re eating an entire livelihood, and then they move into the country and affect national food supplies.”

It’s effectively a total annihilation of crops, says the UN’s locust expert, Keith Cressman. Would that constitute a biblical plague or a Fortean event? While there are many who would look at this as godly punishment for evil governments and religious oppression, even Charles Fort would agree that the real cause is the damned climate change. You can spend billions to kill the locusts and poison the environment, but that won’t stop the real plague.

Fish rain … green snow … locust plague. Tired of the Armageddon? Wait a minute … it’ll change.

The late Brad Steiger had a specific interest in the issue of alchemy. He wrote the following:  “Helvetius, the grandfather of the celebrated philosopher of the same name, was an alchemist who labored ceaselessly to fathom the mystery of the ‘philosopher’s stone,’ the legendary catalyst that would transmute base metals into gold. One day in 1666 when he was working in his laboratory at the Hague, a stranger attired all in black, as befitted a respectable burgher of North Holland, appeared and informed him that he would remove all the alchemist’s doubts about the existence of the philosopher’s stone, for he himself possessed such an object.”

In 1852, Charles Mackay said of this that the mysterious man “…asked Helvetius if he thought he should know that rare gem if he saw it. To which Helvetius replied, that he certainly should not. The burgher immediately drew from his pocket a small ivory box, containing three pieces of metal, of the color of brimstone, and extremely heavy; and assured Helvetius, that of them he could make as much as twenty tons of gold. Helvetius informs us, that he examined them very attentively; and seeing that they were very brittle, he took the opportunity to scrape off a small portion with his thumb-nail. He then returned to the stranger, with an entreaty that he would perform the process of transmutation before him. The stranger replied, that he was not allowed to do so, and went away.”

Mackay continued that several weeks later the mysterious character was back. Helvetius implored the man to share with him the secrets of alchemy, which, apparently, he did: “Helvetius repeated the experiment alone, and converted six ounces of lead into very pure gold.” Such was the fame that surrounded this event, said Mackay, “all of the notable persons of the town flocked to the study of Helvetius to convince themselves of the fact. Helvetius performed the experiment again, in the presence of the Prince of Orange, and several times afterwards, until he exhausted the whole of the powder he had received from the stranger, from whom it is necessary to state, he never received another visit; nor did he ever discover his name or condition.”

In 1677, Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Austria, suffered something terrible: his precious supply of gold finally became exhausted. This was utterly disastrous, as it was gold, specifically, that Leopold relied upon to pay his troops, as they sought to keep at bay the marauding attacks of the Turks. Help, however, was soon at hand, and in a decidedly curious fashion. Late one night, in November 1672, Leopold was visited by a monk of the Order of St. Augustine, one Johann Wenzel Seiler. Interestingly, it has been suggested that “Johann Wenzel Seiler” was actually a pseudonym that the dark-garbed, cloaked, and hooded character had adopted. Whatever the truth, Seiler confidently said he could banish all of the king’s problems in an instant. The king, who already had an interest in all things alchemical, listened carefully to what Seiler had to say.

The monk motioned Leopold to follow him to the steps of the palace, which he did. It was on the steps that Seiler did something remarkable. He took a silver medallion, placed into a cauldron of magical liquid, and then extracted it. Lo and behold, it had been transformed into gold. The king was delighted, Austria’s gold problem (or, rather, the sudden lack of it) was solved. In 1880, Dr. Franz Hartmann, who carefully and deeply studied the controversy surrounding alchemy, said: “…it is stated that this medal, consisting originally of silver, has been partly transformed into gold, by alchemical means, by the same Wenzel Seiler who was afterwards made a knight by the Emperor Leopold I. and given the title Wenzeslaus Ritter von Reinburg.”

Interestingly, Hartmann pointed out that many came to believe Seiler was not who he claimed to be, and was soon “regarded as an impostor.” Specifically, this was with regard to claims that Seiler had merely coated the medallion with a gold-colored substance, rather than having literally transformed it into gold. Nevertheless, and despite exiling Seiler shortly afterwards, Leopold – seemingly entranced by Seiler – continued to eagerly employ the skills of this mysterious character, time and again.

An astronomer was enjoying a snow day when he made a huge discovery in our solar system. After the city was shut down because of a snow storm last week, Scott Sheppard, who is an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., decided to look through some telescopic views of the solar system that his team took last month while they were searching for a presumed – but not yet confirmed – ninth giant planet named “Planet X”.

And that’s when he noticed a very faint object at a distance of 3.5 times more further than Pluto and 140 times farther than the Earth is to the sun. If this object is confirmed, it would be the most distant object ever observed in our solar system, beating out their previous discovery in December of 2018 when they announced that they had located a dwarf planet named “Farout” which is 120 times further from the sun than the Earth is. This new discovery has been comically nicknamed “FarFarOut”.

For nearly a decade, Mr. Sheppard, along with Chad Trujillo from the Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and Dave Tholen from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, have been using some of the most powerful and wide-angled telescopes to observe the night sky and their research has paid off as they have netted four-fifths of the objects found that are over 9 billion kilometers past the sun.

FarFarOut’s orbit, just like Farout’s, is currently unknown which means that it’s unclear whether it will stay far enough away from the gravitation tug of our solar system’s giant planets. If both of them do manage to stay far enough away, they could potentially join “The Goblin” which is another one of Mr. Sheppard’s recent discoveries. These findings could also provide more information regarding the possible existence of Planet X and if it has anything to do with these three bodies’ orbits.

An artist’s interpretation of the hypothetical Planet X

Astronomers who have been studying the Kuiper Belt observed that small icy objects as well as some dwarf planets appear to follow orbits that are clustered together. The pattern in which they orbit indicate that there could potentially be a large planet there. Therefore, the gravity from this possible planet (the hypothetical Planet X) could explain why the Kuiper objects orbit in such an unusual way.

Although it may take years to figure out the orbits of Farout and FarFarOut, Mr. Sheppard will continue his research of the solar system using his favorite telescopes, the Blanco 4-meter located in Chile, and the Subaru 8-meter that’s in Hawaii.

A very common trope of science fiction literature and film is that of the alien invasion. In books and on screen we have spanning epics in which human beings bravely do battle against these mysterious intruders with their wits and whatever weapons they have at hand. In the end, they send the alien invaders back to from whence they came or destroy them outright. Go humans, right? This is all good fun and very entertaining, but have you ever thought of whether aliens might actually invade for real, or what would happen to us if they did? Here we will delve into the possibility of a real alien invasion, why they would come, what they would do, and what it would mean for us all.

The first thing to consider is why aliens would even want to attack or invade us in the first place, and this can be a bit tricky, with numerous theories on why they would even bother, and different possible outcomes to an invasion based on what they are after. One idea that has been thrown around is that they would be after our water or other resources, and that seems to make sense on the surface, but looking into this possibility more deeply brings about some problems. First of all is that it is believed that there are vast amounts of water frozen and locked away within asteroids, comets, and uninhabited planets, moons, and planetoids, so it seems a bit odd that they would want to use so many resources to travel all of that way just to pry the water from our cold, dead hands. Wouldn’t it make more sense for them to just mine nearby systems for all of that unused water floating about in space without any objection? And say they really do need us for our water, even if they did, there are numerous logistical problems involved with stealing it from us, and the same can be said of other resources as well. This is very well explained by astronomer Phil Plait, host of the Discovery Channel’s science show Phil Plait’s Bad Universe, who says of all of this:

In movie after movie, aliens come here for our precious resources, usually water. At first glance that makes sense; after all, 70 percent of Earth is covered in water. But on second glance that logic falls apart. For one thing, water is pretty inconvenient for packaging and shipping. It doesn’t compress, it’s heavy, and it’s hard to pump quickly from one place to another.

Worse, it’s sitting way down deep in our gravity well! Plunging into the inner solar system to Earth is hard enough, but then landing, grabbing all that water, and then taking off again? That’s a huge amount of energy wasted just to wet your whistle (or whatever mouth parts aliens have). And it’s worse when you look at the solar system as a whole. Orbiting the sun out past Neptune are gigantic repositories of water, essentially comets hundreds of kilometers across, in the convenient form of solid ice. Why would aliens blow right past all that prepackaged water to get to us way down here? The same is true for a lot of other natural resources; asteroids have minerals and metals that can be used for all manner of things, and you can mine them to your circulatory organ’s delight, again with no pesky humans to rise up and kill you.

OK, well then maybe they want something else? Another idea is that they might want to use us as a food source or as slaves, which also doesn’t make sense considering that even evolving on the same planet we are actually pretty limited with what is edible for us or available for us to eat. With aliens with totally different evolutionary histories and physiologies it seems highly unlikely that they would find us edible are all that good-tasting, especially not enough to come all of that way, and we could actually even be poisonous for them. There is also the same problem with water and other resources. How would they ship and store us all, then drag us back to their home world? Is prime grade A human steak really worth all of that effort? The same thing goes for if they came here to use us as slave labor, and why would they need slave labor anyway? With all of that technology at their disposal couldn’t they just make machines to do the work for them? They came here from light years away in order to get cheap manual labor? Really? It just seems like it would be way more trouble than its worth.

There is also the idea that these aliens might want to colonize this planet because it is similar to their home world and they have exploited their own to the point where it has become uninhabitable. This might make a bit of sense, but the odds of this planet being similar or compatible enough for their particular physiologies in this universe of billions of planets seems infinitesimally small. It would likely require some sort of terraforming, and if they can do that then why Earth?

Getting into more sinister territory is that they just might want to wipe us out. That’s it. End of story. This could be for a variety of reasons. Maybe they were passing by and do it for kicks, just as a kid might check out a weird bug before squashing it. Maybe they have been monitoring us and our violent past, watching our rampant destruction of our environment and either want to put us out of our misery or see us as an actual threat in some capacity, a scourge to be ended. Whatever the reason is, in this scenario they don’t need anything from us and don’t even need our world in any capacity, they just want to destroy us. This is quite an ominous concept to ponder, but it is a distinct possibility, and would likely be the easiest option for them.

For argument’s sake, let’s assume that the aliens really are coming, and have decided to invade our world, for whatever reasons. If they merely wanted to destroy us, as in that last option, then let’s face it there is very little we would realistically be likely be able to do against them. Indeed, if they really do want to just wipe us all out they would not even have to come down to us, they could just sit up in their spaceships and pull down asteroids to crash into our planet, causing tsunamis and mass destruction on a scale never before seen, or use some other type of weapon of mass destruction from orbit. Why would they have to come down and fight in the streets or even see us if they have all of that technology and their only desire is to obliterate us?

Well, maybe they do need something from our planet. If we assume that there is some resource they need or that they really do want to move in and evict us, then they would be more likely to need our planet at least somewhat intact. Maybe they do need to engage us in a military way, and let’s just put aside the fact that they could probably easily engineer a virus that would just kill all humans and assume that a fight is going to go down. But would it really be a fight in any appreciable sense? With their mind-boggling technology beyond the likes of anything we’ve ever seen, would it be a war between humans and aliens any more than a sadistic child with a magnifying glass burning anthills is a war between kids and ants? One very interesting comment left on the site Quora pretty well explains what would probably go down:

The late, great Iain M. Banks gave us the term in his book Excession. An Outside Context Problem works like this: You’re the king of the most powerful tribe in the history of your land, which, as far as you know, is the most important place in the world. Your people have a better standard of living than any before, your palaces and temples are bedecked in gold and precious gems, and your armies of warriors have destroyed any who stood up to you. You are worshiped as the physical incarnation of God on Earth, and it is well known that your people cannot be defeated.

Until a small group of large, completely unknown sea vessels appear on the horizon. They have what look like sheets suspended by tree trunks, and are so large that they can’t land on the beach but have to send small boats to the shore. The people on these boats are clad in drab metal chestplates and strange helmets, and speak a language unlike any ever encountered. They carry strange metal tubes and some of them are waving around a book with a cross on it that they seem to think is very important. Worst of all, they don’t seem to recognise your godhead.

A small scuffle ensues, and some of your warriors are killed as if by magic. You decide that you should make an example of these impertinent, outlandish savages, and you muster your army to crush them utterly. But it all goes wrong. Their dull metal clothing is impenetrable to even the finest obsidian blades, they carry tubes that contain the very fire and thunder of the gods, and, worst of all, from out of nowhere spring these half-man, half-beast creatures, that race through your lines, slashing with metal blades and blasting with smaller magic tubes.

This small group of heathens goes on to rout your army, capture you as king and plunder your cities. With the diseases that now ravage the land, they are unstoppable and your eternal kingdom is reduced to rubble and your people slaughtered or enslaved. This, more or less, is what happened when the Aztec Empire encountered Hernan Cortés and his relatively small group of conquistadores. It’s pretty much the textbook example of an Outside Context Problem.

The Aztecs simply had no conception of the Spanish, no idea how to deal with their massive technological advantage, no context with which to even consider these invaders. And they lost. Really, really badly. That’s what would happen, realistically, if Earth were invaded by hostile aliens. We wouldn’t stand a chance.

The simple fact is, if aliens don’t want us alive, the overwhelming possibility is that we won’t be. These would be beings far beyond us in terms of technology and intellect to have been able to come here in the first place, and if they came here for a fight, they’d be ready and would likely know far more about us than we do about them. The technology difference would be substantial, and would be akin to throwing rocks versus nuclear weapons. Nick Pope, who used to run the Ministry of Defense’s UFO project in the United Kingdom, has said of this:

In a universe nearly 14 billion years old, the chances of invading aliens happening to be only a hundred years or so more advanced than us is vanishingly small. The likelihood is that we’d be dealing with a civilization thousands or millions of years ahead of us, and as sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once said: ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ If they are hostile, it would be like Bambi meeting Godzilla if we ever had to fight them…we would present no military challenge to such an advanced civilization…We would be a pushover for them. Forget all the Hollywood movies.

If we were to have any chance at all, we’d have to hope that the attack was not completely obliterating, with them wanting to keep us mostly alive for some reason. This would allow Earth governments to try to put aside their differences, gather intelligence, and assess the threat, find a weakness, and hopefully reverse engineer alien technology, although this would be akin to a medieval scientist trying to reverse engineer an iPad, probably impossible. We could try nukes, but this is a sloppy, poor strategy, and would cause almost as much damage to our own planet as anything the aliens would dish out.

With all of this talk of alien invasions, you might be thinking right about now that the government must have thought about this at some point. I mean, surely they have some sort of plan in effect if it ever comes down to this. Right? Guys? Well, yes and no. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has a plan in effect for what to do when alien signals are received, although these are more guidelines than anything else, and NASA has protocols in place for preventing the contamination of other worlds by us, but as to actual government contingency plans, especially against hostiles, not really. There have been sort of mental exercises and thought experiments drawn up for everything from alien invasions to zombie outbreaks drawn up by the government, but nothing really official or taken very seriously. Other countries are no different, as the The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) and their Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (CUPUOS) is apparently not geared for such possibilities, with UNOOSA director Simonetta Di Pippo saying:

UNOOSA and COPUOS Member States consider a range of space science and space exploration topics, fields in which the topic of astrobiology sits. However, the Office for Outer Space Affairs has been given no mandate by Member States to consider the question of potential advanced or intelligent extraterrestrial life. For this reason there is no protocol or process for any contact by extraterrestrial life.

Even the set SETI guidelines for assessing and dealing with possible alien communications are flimsy at best, and not particularly official. As astronomer Seth Shostak has said:

There are some protocols, but I think that’s an unfortunate name, and it makes them sound more important than they are. They say, ‘If you pick up a signal, check it out … tell everybody … and don’t broadcast any replies without international consultation,’ whatever that means. But that’s all that the protocols say, and they have no force of law. The United Nations took a copy of the early protocols and put them in a file drawer somewhere, and that’s as official as they ever got. Some people asked me at a conference last week, ‘What plan does the military have to deal with aliens should they land?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know … but to the best of my knowledge, they don’t have a plan.’

So there seem to be very few official concrete plans in effect for meeting alien life, period, let alone if they come roaring down out of the sky with guns blazing and malicious intent. We’d probably be left in a state of complete chaos, on top of our woefully inadequate technological weaponry, although many are convinced that there actually are secret contingency plans kept by world governments that we simply don’t know about. As the founder of UFO and paranormal hunters Strange Phenomena Investigations, Malcolm Robinson, says:

They won’t publicly admit it but I believe that they have a program up their sleeves for the lukewarm possibility of an alien invasion – and I completely believe they have something planned for the event.

Does that make you feel any better about our chances in the event of an alien invasion? Yeah, me neither. The main problem is that it is a lot of money and effort to spend on something that the vast majority of people sees as a very faint possibility at best. Part of the problem also lies in the fact that we have no way at all to know what to even expect if aliens came, no way to know at all what context to perceive them within, and thus virtually limitless possibilities that can’t all possibly be planned for, and their capabilities would be far beyond what we can comprehend anyway, making it an impossible venture. As Shostek explains, “It would be like the Neanderthals having a plan in case the U.S. Air Force showed up.”

In the end, we have good news and bad news. The good news is that there are few rational reasons for why aliens would expend the resources necessary to come here en masse for the purpose of wiping us out, and if they are here already, as many suspect, then they probably would have done it by now. The bad news is that if they do come, and want us to be dead, then our chances don’t look too good at all, and there isn’t even any plan in effect for it if they do. It’s basically see what happens and hope for the best. So while an alien invasion scenario on par with anything in the movies probably has a slim chance of happening, if it does it also will likely not play out like the films in that we won’t have any chance at all. Let’s hope that if they are out there, or are already here, then they are benevolent or indifferent. Sleep tight.