There are billionaires – not many but the number is growing. Some inherited their wealth. Others created their wealth but their life stories have become more annoying than inspiring (we’re looking at you – Jeff and Elon). Then there’s Sir Richard Branson. The owner of the Virgin Group of over 400 assorted companies, he’s always been an adventurer who’s now in the process of preparing for his first space flight. However, Sir Richard also travels in the opposite direction and in December 2018 he joined up with Fabien Cousteau to dive to the bottom of the mysterious Great Blue Hole in the Belize Barrier Reef. The submarine dive was broadcast live on the Discovery Channel and vessels remained at the hole for a few more weeks collecting data. Much of that data was made available this week and what Branson observed on the bottom of the Great Blue Hole sheds new light on the deepest, darkest sinkhole on the planet. What did he see?

“One of the top five scuba diving sites in the world.”

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

While the Great Blue Hole in the Caribbean off the coast of Belize has long been known about by local fishermen, it was exposed to the world in 1971 by Calypso Captain Jacques Cousteau on his famous television show. (You can watch the episode here.)

While divers agree with Cousteau’s description, at 410 feet (125 meters), the sinkhole is too deep for scuba divers to see the bottom. In December 2018, Richard Branson joined Cousteau’s grandson Fabien and a team of scientists in two submarines and descended to the bottom of the hole with cameras, sonar and 3D mapping equipment. Erika Bergman was the chief pilot, oceanographer and operations manager. (See pictures from the expedition here.)

While that descent was broadcast on the Discovery Channel, it has taken until now to create the map, which Bergman revealed to CNN Travel.

“We did our complete 360 sonar map and that map is now almost complete. It looks really cool, it’s this mesh-layered, sonar scan of the entire thousand-foot diameter hole.”

Bergman gave new details on the expedition. The team encountered never-before-seen stalactites at 407 feet near the bottom – which makes sense because it’s believed the Great Blue Hole was once a great big cave on dry land before the area became the Caribbean. Passing through the hydrogen sulfide layer at 300 feet, all surface light is gone, along with any oxygen that could support fish or other life forms. However, they found remains of dead sea creatures on the bottom. Unfortunately, they also found evidence of humans.

“There were basically two or three little pieces of plastic — and other than that, it was really, really clear.”

And something else. On the bottom of the Great Blue Hole, Bergman reveals that the team found some tracks. Of what?

“(That remains) open to interpretation.”

Tracks! That alone should generate enough interest to fund another expedition, right?

“It’s neat that there are spaces on our planet — and most of them in the oceans — that are exactly the way they were thousands of years ago and will remain exactly the way they are thousands of years in the future.”

Richard Branson

It sounds like Sir Richard has already moved on in the opposite direction to infinity and beyond while Captain Bergman says she’s already planning for a similar expedition to the depths around the Virgin Islands. That leaves Fabien Cousteau to go back and look at the tracks.

What would Grandpa Jacques do, Fabien?

The mystery boom phenomenon continues worldwide without any official explanation. While these incidents are spread out around the globe, the similarities among all of these unexplained ground-shaking booms are too striking to ignore. Even more striking is the deafening silence of law enforcement and governmental agencies. Are these all merely unconnected natural events? Why the sudden and sharp increase in frequency, then?

February has seen (heard?) cities all throughout North America rattled by powerful and mysterious explosion-like sounds. The phenomenon continued this week as cities in South Carolina, Arkansas, Kentucky, and England were rattled by unknown booms. It all began on February 18 when residents of the Charleston, South Carolina area felt the ground shake and heard a powerful boom. Geologists with the College of Charleston said that while they’re investigating the reports, it appears the noise was likely a sonic boom. The area is home to Joint Base Charleston, a military complex which houses units from every branch of the military.

The next day, residents of Nottingham, England reported a late night “explosion” heard for miles. Concerned residents described the sound as “like a bomb going off,” and have suspected either a meteorite or explosive device. Louise Hunt of St. Ann’s said the noise was too powerful to have been terrestrial in origin and believes its perpetrator originated from space:

It was like a big explosion, I put a status on Facebook and a few of my friends replied all saying they heard it too. It was really strange as we heard no sirens afterwards my partner then suggested it could if been a meteorite that exploded in mid-air somewhere.

When asked for comment from Nottinghamshire Live, Nottinghamshire Police merely shrugged, said they’ve “received no reports,” and presumably went back to their crosswords.

Nottingham, England.

Back in the US, another terrifyingly loud set of booms rattled Fort Knox, Kentucky on February 22 – although these seem to have an explanation. The U.S. Army’s Marine Detachment has been conducting live fire tank training this week, creating booms loud enough to be heard 30 miles away. While residents of Fort Knox are used to the loud noises generated by military exercises, residents in surrounding areas say the noises usually don’t travel so far. Why the sudden change?

The month in mystery booms ended in the cities of Ward and Beebe, Arkansas, where residents heard a loud, unexplained explosion on February 24. Local police forces acknowledged the booms but asked residents not to call them in unless there was a “real” emergency.

Every week I write a round-up of the week’s mystery booms, and every week I’m left to wonder what’s behind the phenomenon. There are far too many identical incidents occurring each week for this to be merely a coincidence. Someone out there knows something the public doesn’t. 

“Shhh. The Masked Singer is on. Keep shopping. OBEY.”

Or maybe not. Maybe these are merely unconnected and insignificant natural phenomena. Is my obsession with these booms all a case of the Baader-Meinhof effect in which individuals first notice a phenomenon or occurrence only to then see the same phenomenon everywhere? If it were only me hearing these noises I might think so, but the fact that they’re receiving the attention of at least local news outlets shows that the phenomenon has been heard and felt by thousands if not tens of thousands of individuals around the world. What is causing these mystery booms?

No TV show has so effectively blurred the boundaries between UFO fact and fantasy as NBC’s Dark Skies, which ran from September 1996 to May 1997. Created by Bryce Zabel and Brent Friedman, the series presented an alternate history of 20^th Century America. Its tagline read: “History as we know it is a lie.” In this case, it was a lie sprung from and built around a covert extraterrestrial presence on Earth and the US government’s quiet efforts to understand and control the alien threat.

J.T. Walsh as Agent Frank Bach in ‘Dark Skies.’

The narrative begins with the Roswell Incident (here a deliberate military downing of an alien craft) and the establishment of the top secret working group, Majestic, which, as in the UFO literature, is tasked with overseeing the rapidly escalating flying saucer problem in the United States.

We then jump forward to 1961 when the show’s protagonists, John Loengard (Eric Close) and Kim Sayers (Megan Ward), a young couple with political aspirations, find themselves drawn into the shadowy world of Majestic 12, headed by the imposing Frank Bach (J.T. Walsh). Whereas in The X-Files’ Fox Mulder was forever on the outside of the cover-up attempting to look in, in Dark Skies, John Loengard was on the inside looking out.

Each episode saw John and Kim attempting to understand and combat not only the Gray aliens, known in the series as “The Hive,” but Majestic themselves, whose motives and actions are morally dubious at best. All of this plays out against the backdrop of real historical events of the 20^th Century, including the Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of JFK, the death of Marilyn Monroe, the Watts riots of 1965, and the north-east black out of that same year. Numerous cultural icons show up throughout the series, including The Beatles, Jim Morrison, Ed Sullivan, and Timothy Leary, as well as real-life figures from politics, science, and UFOlogy, such as Harry Truman, Allen Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller, J. Edgar Hoover, J. Allen Hynek, and Carl Sagan.

So, how did such an ambitious UFO show come to be? While researching my book, Silver Screen Saucers, Dark Skies co-creator Bryce Zabel shared with me the intriguing and, at times, creepy production history of his show.

Zabel and Friedman pitched their series to networks in the form of a faux “Top Secret” briefing file, modeled on the MJ-12 documents. The thick, ring-bound file, which they referred to as the “Dark Skies Bible,” contained enough rich UFO lore intertwined with official history to comfortably fuel five full series of the prospective show, which had been the original plan. The file was fronted by a one-page letter “written by” the show’s fictional hero, John Loengard. It was dated 2 January 1995 and was addressed to his real-world creators. It read:

Bryce and Brent,

The truth must be told. You have been chosen as instruments to achieve this objective.

The truth, however, must not be represented as truth. Too many people who are needed in the struggle will die.

The cover of fiction must be used to present this truth. Those who fear the light will not want to bring attention to you by allowing your death.

This is the only way.

Do not be afraid.

The fight for humanity demands your courage.

[SIGNED]

John Loengard.

The Dark Skies Bible, and the Loengard letter in particular, exemplified the now complete inseparability and symbiosis of UFOlogical “fact” and Hollywood fantasy. Loengard’s statement to his creators that they had been chosen as instruments to tell the truth about UFOs under the cover of fiction, would later ring disturbingly true for Zabel and Friedman, as we shall see.

Official Denial

Before we delve into the weirdness that went on behind the scenes of Dark Skies, we first need to mention Brcye’s previous production. A made-for-TV movie, Official Denial was an ambitious exploration of modern UFO mythology, featuring MJ-12, UFO crash-retrievals, and aliens in the custody of the US government. It even anticipated reports to follow of military abductions of UFO experiencers (known in UFOlogy as “MILABs”). Indeed, it seems fair to say that Official Denial was perhaps the most explicitly UFOlogical movie ever produced at that point. Unfortunately, its ambitions greatly exceeded its limited budget, and its special effects were severely dated even at the time of its broadcast. It was not widely seen and has yet to receive a DVD release.

Official Denial was a passion project for Bryce, and so its less-than-perfect onscreen realization disappointed him greatly:

The sadness of my life is that I didn’t sell the script to a large film studio who would have spent 30 or 40 million dollars making the perfect version of it. Instead it got sold to a small company, which sold it to the Sci-Fi Channel [now The SyFy Channel], which made it for around $2 million. The result was that I couldn’t even watch the finished product. The alien was a twelve-year-old ballerina in a plastic costume, and the effects were bad, and the acting was bad. It just wasn’t on film what it was in my mind.

It was the partial failure of Official Denial that prompted Bryce to embark on his next UFO-themed project. “I just felt I needed to sell something to somebody who had more money so that we can do these aliens right,” he recalled. The development of Dark Skies began in late-1994 while Bryce was working at Universal as a writer on M.A.N.T.I.S, Sam Raimi’s short-lived TV show about an African-American super hero. “My assistant on that show introduced me to her husband, who was Brent Friedman. Brent and I started talking UFOs and it turned out he had been told certain things by a government insider.”

‘Dark Skies’ co-creator, Brent Friedman.

Friedman has described this incident as follows:

A good family friend of ours when I was just getting out of high school was working at a very high level in the Reagan administration. One night he took me aside and told me some of the things he was doing in the government, and he ended up telling me some pretty shattering stories. He knew that I’d always been into science-fiction, fantasy, and comic books, and he very casually just threw out there that ‘aliens are real, they’re here, and I’ve seen them.’ At the time I was just absolutely shocked. This was a person that I grew up with and absolutely trusted, and it just rocked my world.

With their mutual interest established, Bryce and Brent set about developing what would become their Dark Skies Bible. “Our show was really about blending the UFO phenomenon into documented, accepted world history,” Bryce told me. “Everything I had read in UFO literature ended up in Dark Skies, from Betty and Barney Hill to Majestic-12, you name it. I tried to weave it all in there.”

Here come the Men in Black

The inclusion of such intricate UFOlogical detail in Dark Skies apparently attracted the attention of real government UFO spooks. The series pilot premiered on NBC on 21 September 1996. That same night, Bryce threw a wrap party at his Los Angeles home for his cast and crew—some 200 people in total. They would watch the pilot live together. It was a private party, invitation only. All invited guests were issued in advance with a faux Majestic-12 ID badge (loosely modeled on Bob Lazar’s Area 51 ID badge) which they were required to wear throughout the evening. One man at the party that evening wore no ID badge.

“A guy showed up here,” Bryce recalled. “Nicely dressed, young. Nobody recognized him. He approached Brent and myself and he told us, “We’ve seen your pilot.” This was strange, because at that point in evening the pilot had yet to air. “Nobody else had seen it, other than a few people in Hollywood,” said Bryce. The man stated again, “We’ve seen your pilot and we think you get a lot right, but we want to help you with the rest.”

The mystery man suggested to the producers that their show could benefit from inside information on UFOs, and that he could provide them with this information. Here, then, was John Loengard sprung to life from Bryce and Brent’s fictional letter, choosing them as conduits to share the truth disguised as fiction. The producers initially suspected a prank, but their Dark Skies pitch had been private. No one had seen their Loengard letter but for a handful of network executives in Hollywood. What’s more, based on his detailed knowledge of its plot, the mystery man seemed to have really seen the unaired Dark Skies pilot, as he claimed. He even knew details about episodes that hadn’t been filmed yet.

“Who are you?” the producers asked. “That’s really not important right now,” came the reply. “But I work with people who have an interest in what you’re doing and what you’re putting out.” The mystery man then proceeded to grab a napkin and scrawl something on it. “It was a bunch of symbols and stuff,” said Bryce. The man handed the napkin to Brent, who naturally inquired as to its meaning. “The secrets of the universe,” said the man, enigmatically. “Sound, light, and frequency.” I asked Bryce where the napkin is now. “I haven’t seen it in years,” he told me. “Brent has it locked in a safe some place.”

The man and his napkin were undeniably intriguing, but this was bad timing. Bryce was playing host to 200 people: “I didn’t really have time to stand around talking to this guy. But Brent invited him to our office at NBC to come and talk to us some more at a later date.”

That meeting happened a few days later, and it would prove both confusing and unsettling.

Bryce described the meeting to me:

The guy from the party shows up with two other people, older men, who he said were his bosses in Naval Intelligence. They sat around a table with us and they spoke for around two hours. They certainly had a well-constructed alternate world. They had lots of details, and they weren’t shy. Actually they were a little condescending to us, saying things like, “You guys think you’re such hotshots because you’re in Hollywood, but the truth is that you don’t even know what you’re playing with. Yes, you’ve stumbled into getting most of it right, but there are some things that you haven’t got right.”

Cemetery at midnight

Things were about to get even stranger: “At one point the guy puts a little vile on the table and says ‘you don’t have this in your show.’ And we’re looking at it and we say ‘what is this?’, and he says ‘this is what this is all about.’ It was a vile of gold, or fool’s gold, I’m not sure which.” Were Bryce and Brent meant to infer that aliens were after our gold, like the Anunnaki of Ancient Astronaut lore? Or were they supposed to think the vile contained some alien element, perhaps used to fuel a flying saucer? It is impossible to know, but certainly the mystery men were intent on confusing and provoking the producers. “Their whole tone was like, ‘You fucking idiots! This is what it’s about! You don’t even have the truth!’ It was just weird.”

Bryce asked again precisely who these men were. “So one of them said, ‘look. we’re with Naval Intelligence and if you really want us to read you in you’re going to have to meet the big guy. There’s a ship down in Long Beach right now and we can arrange for you to meet him. But you can’t meet him on the ship.”

One of the men then provided Bryce and Brent with the location of a cemetery in Long Beach, where they could meet the big guy at midnight on a given date. Bryce was now thoroughly perturbed. He’d heard enough. “That’s when I pushed back from the table and said “Okay, I’m done. I have a show to run, and I have three children, and I am not meeting you or anyone else in a cemetery at midnight. Good day.’” That was the last Bryce heard from them.

What can we make of these events? Certainly they would appear to be neatly in line with disinformative strategies employed previously against UFO researchers and through entertainment media. Did intelligence operatives get wind of a new X-Files-style TV show utilizing factual UFOlogical detail and see it as great new opportunity to sow its content with self-serving UFO conspiracy mythology, or even simply to manage and guide the show’s existing mythology? “It was very intricate,” said Bryce of the whole affair. “It felt like it was staged for us. Like it was all built around us. It seems to be that we had been targeted for some elaborate disinformation job.”

I asked Bryce if he felt the men were the real deal, and if there is any chance it was all just a prank by some amateur tricksters:

Do I think they were really going to read us into a secret UFO program? No. But it did seem like they really were part of some official organization. One of the guys said he was a SEAL, and, I have to say, all of these guys looked like veryhardcore military guys. They didn’t look like soft fanboys pulling a prank on us. They didn’t look like guys you’d see at Comic Con. They looked and spoke like military guys.

I asked Bryce if he believed in UFOs at the time of Dark Skies’development and if his intention with the show was to educate and inform the public about the subject. He replied:

Did I intend to inform? No. I intended to entertain. But did I believe in UFOs and alien visitation? Yes. I believed strongly at the time of Dark Skies that Roswell was a real event and that it was probably unearthly in nature. I still believe that today. Whether or not I believed the Majestic 12 documents were real or faked was irrelevant. I just used the name because it was on people’s minds. But I did feel that if MJ-12 didn’t exist, then another group like it by another name probably did. Somebody had to be working on the UFO problem.

Dark Skies arrived on TV in 1996, and comparisons to a certain other UFO conspiracy show were inevitable.  Bryce said:

People accused us at the time of ripping off The X-Files. But actually we didn’t like what The X-Files was doing, which was teasing everybody. We wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to say ‘we’re not going to tease you about the cover-up. We’re going to take you inside the cover-up and let our character be your tour guide through these events of history.’ It was more direct than The X-Files.

A 1996 issue of ‘Starlog’ magazine.

Dark Skies was cancelled before the end of its first season due to low ratings, which may have been a result of its inopportune weekly scheduling. The show was dark in name, dark in themes, and dark in visual content, with violent and intense scenes in most episodes. Despite this, Dark Skies was broadcast at 8pm on Saturday evenings—peak viewing time for families (for whom the show was not entirely suitable), and peak going-out time for teens and young adults. Today Dark Skies retains a cult fanbase, and Bryce is proud of what he and Brent achieved with the show. “It’s about 90 percent faithful to what I set out to do back in 1994, and it certainly succeeds in twisting UFOlogy and history and tying them into this knot. It’s one of the most subversive TV shows ever produced.”

If you’re a fan of science fiction, and of UFO conspiracy shows in particular, you owe it to yourself to check out Dark Skies… the real Men in Black did.

Earlier this month, a massive and mysterious fireball was seen above West Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Some witnesses described the fireball as green, while others say it was red, but all described it as moving unusually slow and leaving a trail of flame in its wake. While a meteor was suspected, many eyewitnesses said the fireball did not look anything like other shooting stars or meteors they’ve seen in the past.

Now, another strangely slow-moving fireball has been spotted, this time over Canada. Bruce and Melody Hamilton, amateur astronomers based in Nova Scotia spotted the fireball on February 23rd while skygazing from their home. The similarities in the descriptions of this fireball and the one seen in England are striking. The Hamiltons described this Canadian fireball as orange with fiery debris trailing behind it, and like the Cornwall fireball, this one appeared to move incredibly slowly across the sky.

“I saw a light travelling west to east, quite a bright ball cutting a trail,” Melody told the CBC. “But it wasn’t as fast as any meteor that we’ve ever seen. We’ve seen some fairly slow ones, but this was slower. But it wasn’t as slow as an airplane. It was this unusual speed … it looked like it was on fire.”

The fireball was spotted by other witnesses who likewise said the light was different from other shooting stars. “It was quite amazing, actually,” said Jonathan Pettigrew of New Brunswick. “It seemed so close. You could even see it looked like sparks on the tail of it. It was getting brighter. It was quite interesting.”

Charles White of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada told the CBC that without further evidence, it is difficult if not impossible to determine exactly what eyewitnesses saw. White suspects the object was either a ferrous meteorite or a piece of space debris. Given the slow speed and the unusual fiery trail the fireball left behind, I’m more inclined to suspect it was the latter. With all of the talk of satellite warfare going on lately, there’s no telling what may soon be falling out of the skies. For now, these two satellites remain a mystery.

After much debate over the last 150 years, paleontologists have finally identified the mysterious creature that lived hundreds of millions of years ago. The oddly shaped creature, which is flat-looking with a long arm coming out of its side, is known as a stylophoran which is an ancient relative of starfish, sea urchins, sea lilies, brittle stars, sea cucumbers, and feather stars.

Sea Urchins

The fossils – which included around 450 specimens of the stylophoran – were discovered during a 2014 excavation at the Fezouata Formation which is along the edge of the Sahara Desert in the southern part of Morocco. These fossils date back approximately 478 million years.

Researchers were able to find out exactly what type of creature it was because their fossils had “unequivocal evidence for exceptionally preserved soft parts, both in the appendage and in the body of stylophorans,” explained Bertrand Lefebvre, who is a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) at the Laboratory of Geology of Lyon which is located in France.

After analyzing the fossils using a binocular microscope, they noticed that there were also soft parts. Since soft tissues hardly ever fossilize, the stylophorans were only recognized for their hard skeletal parts and not for their soft insides. According to Lefebvre, “Their internal anatomy was not only entirely unknown, but also – and mostly – highly controversial.”

Stylophoran fossils have been discovered around the world since the 1850s which led researchers to confirm that they lived from the middle Cambrian to the late Carboniferous periods, which date back from around 510 million to 310 million years ago.

These creatures had two main parts: a core body and an appendage that were both around 1.2 inches long. From the 1850s to the 1950s, it was believed that stylophorans were “normal” echinoderms with its appendage being compared to the stem of sea lilies. However, in the early 1960s, Georges Ubaghs, who was a Belgian paleontologist, discovered that the creature’s appendage was quite a bit different than a stem and more like an arm for feeding – similar to a starfish.

Starfish

A few years later, in the late 1960s, Richard Jefferies, who was a British paleontologist, suggested that the main body of the stylophoran was instead a head containing a brain and a pharynx, while its appendage consisted of muscles and a notochord which is a type of primitive backbone. He also believed that stylophorans were the missing link between echinoderms (invertebrates) and chordates (vertebrates).

Much later, in the 2000s, another British paleontologist named Andrew Smith gave his own interpretation of the creature. He believed that stylophorans were not the missing link between echinoderms and chordates and instead they were primitive deuterostomes which put them right in the middle of the gap between acorn worms and echinoderms.

With this new discovery, researchers can perform testing on the creature’s soft tissue and find out which of the theories best explains the creature. Ubaghs’ theory, however, does seem to be the most plausible. The creature’s flat body consisted of intestines and its appendage was more like an arm since it had a water vascular system which would have aided the creature to eat and move the same way that the arms of starfish do.

With their new study (which can be read here), we finally know the origins of the mysterious creature that has baffled scientists for over a hundred years. Lefebvre explained it best when he said, “This discovery is of particular importance, because it brings to an end a 150-year-old debate about the position of these bizarre-looking fossils in the tree of life.”

• Click here to see pictures and a video of the stylophoran.

Credit: Emmanuel Robert

Credit: Copyright Rich Mooi/California Academy of Science

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.