On February 25, 2009, a legendary figure within the Contactee field – Howard Menger – passed away at his Vero Beach, Florida home, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven. As Contactee authority Greg Bishop notes, Menger was quite a character, and someone who had a particular thing for women of the allegedly E.T. kind: “At the age of 19, Menger enlisted in the Army and saw service in the Pacific during WWII in a flamethrower unit flushing the Japanese out of caves and other hideouts,” says Greg. “He was wounded and received the Purple Heart. Returning to his native New Jersey in 1946, Menger started a sign painting business and a family.” Greg adds:

“This changed in 1956, when he appeared on the Long John Nebel radio show, along with Contactee George Van Tassel. He talked about contacts with space brothers – and, more specifically, sisters – who appeared to him, beginning when he was ten years old. Some of his later published descriptions sounded distinctly sexual in nature, although he carefully couched them in language that could be construed as platonic. He also started taking pictures of the space people and their ships; although most who saw the photos say that they are quite indistinct. On August 4th of 1956, Menger said he was invited on board one of the flying saucers. The next month he said that the space people took him for a joyride where he saw alien civilizations on other planets and structures on the Moon.”

It was not long before there was a major development in Menger’s life, says Greg. In 1956, Menger met Connie Weber, a woman who turned up at one of Menger’s events. According to Menger, he suspected – and finally came to believe – that Connie was nothing less than a reincarnated alien; an alien that Menger had met in another life, no less. It wasn’t long at all before Menger and his then-wife went their different ways and Connie became his new love. They were together for more than fifty years. Things changed radically for the pair as their lives in Ufology progressed: in 1959, Menger’s Contactee-driven book, From Outer Space to You, was published. It cemented his place in the domains of the Space Brothers and Menger’s fellow contactees. He was soon lecturing up and down the west coast. Connie was very much a part of all this too: she wrote her own book, My Saturnian Lover. It was focused on Howard’s and  Connie’s fun-filled escapades in their previous lives.

At the dawning of a new decade, something else happened; something unforeseen and weird. It was in 1960, while on a prime-time television program, that Menger came out with an amazing confession. He said that much of his story was not what it seemed to be. Menger elaborated and claimed that a clandestine branch of the U.S. Army had secretly approached him some years earlier. That same branch could not have cared less if Menger’s tales were true, partially true, or complete garbage. All they wanted from Menger was his help in determining how the public might react to the presence of extraterrestrials in their midst. So, they wanted him to keep on doing what he was doing: spreading the words of the aliens among us. It must be said that very few of the many contactees of the 1950s-1970s ever backed off from their original claims. In fact, quite the opposite: they made sure that their stories remained fully intact. Not so Menger. Interestingly, as Greg also notes: “Fortean writer Ivan Sanderson arrived at the Menger residence in the late 1950s and claimed that Menger got very angry with him when Sanderson discovered some equipment and crates in a storage area with ‘U. S. Army’ stenciled on them.”

There can be no doubt at all that the stories (or, rather, the yarns) of Howard and Connie stretch credibility to the absolute limit. They still stretch matters to that very same limit! The tales of new lives in new bodies, and of a home on a new world (ours), are highly entertaining. But, in terms of being the literal truth? Well, I just don’t buy it. What I do buy, however (well, sometimes I buy it…) are Howard’s claims that he was approached by the military, who wanted him to play psychological games with the American public – and to do so by using the UFO phenomenon as a means to an end. Such a thing may not be so far-fetched as it might initially seem to be. Read on…

Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we know that the CIA’s Robertson Panel of 1953 was deeply concerned about the UFO phenomenon. Not because it believed that real aliens were visiting us, but because they – the panel members – were worried that the Russians might use the lore of the UFO to create fear, hysteria and paranoia in the minds of Americans. We’re talking about psychological warfare. Perhaps, there were still similar concerns a few years later; something which promoted someone on the inside to enlist Menger into the program. There is an earlier case that reinforces this theory: Silas Newton, a millionaire business man and a conman too, was significantly responsible for creating the infamous “UFO crash” story of Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. There’s very little doubt that the tale was bogus. What we know now, however, is that while the Aztec story was still riding high, representatives of a secret group within the U.S. Government clandestinely approached Newton and asked him to keep spreading his UFO tale – even though they knew there was no truth to the story. This all sounds very much like Menger’s claims.

When it came to Menger’s stories of alien contact, some might say that he was telling the literal truth. Others, like me, conclude that his overall tale was simply that: a tale. But, just maybe, Menger was being absolutely truthful when he said that he was pressed by some arm of the U.S. Army to assist them in a program designed to see how the population was reacting to the UFO phenomenon – and how it could be manipulated, too. If you want to find more about the complex lives and claims of Howard and Connie, you can do so in Greg Bishop’s book, It Defies Language!

In the southeast region of the country of Brazil lies Guanabara Bay, off the coast of the major metropolis of Rio de Janeiro. It is the second largest bay in Brazil, but other than that there is nothing particularly special about it other than perhaps the large amount of pollution here. However, lying approximately 15 miles offshore, buried down in 100 feet of water across an area around the size of three tennis courts is a rather strange oddity. Here scattered along the bottom are various relics from ancient Rome, far from where they have any business being, and which have remained a baffling historical anomaly and conundrum that remains unsolved.

The unusual spot was originally first discovered in 1976, when some lobster divers reported having come across what appeared to be ancient, barnacle encrusted jars at the bottom of the bay. It wasn’t long before a diver named Jose Roberto Teixeira actually produced two of the strange artifacts, which were found to be a type of tall, tapered ceramic jars with two handles called amphorae, typically used by the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Phoenicians to carry around all manner of things such as wine, oil, water or grain during long sea voyages. This was certainly a rather odd thing to be pulled up from Guanabara Bay, as the first known European presence in Brazil is thought to date back to 1500, when Portuguese navigator Pedro Alvares Cabral reached these shores.

Guanabara Bay

The unusual find caught the attention of author, underwater archeologist, and treasure hunter Robert Marx, who in 1982 decided to try and locate more of the objects, along with the help of Dr. Harold Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Marx was able to get permission for his expedition from the Brazilian government and then went about combing the bottom of the bay with sophisticated sonar technology, peering down there through the waves to try and catch a glimpse of anomalous history. At first he was actually rather skeptical of the whole thing, thinking that the jars that had been found were hoaxes, but what he found was beyond anything even he could have expected.

After finding a promising spot, Marx dove down to find an accumulation of 200 amphorae found down there in the murky, heavily polluted water, where they had been for thousands of years, some on the surface and others buried deep, covered with muck, barnacles or even ensconced in coral and some of them entirely intact even after so many centuries lying there on the sludge of the bottom. It was a remarkable find to say the least, and it was thought by the team that these jars could not have been planted there in modern times, but were rather from some unknown, hidden past. It was Marx’s speculation that the mysterious jars had come from an ancient Roman ship, and he even claimed that there had been evidence of a possible wooden wreck buried down there, but if this was the case then how did such an ancient voyage manage to make it to Brazil many centuries before the first known European presence here, when the Romans were never known to have made it any farther than India in an era when South America might as well have been another planet across a sea of stars? These were things that Marx wanted to find out, and he went about trying to organize a further expedition to the area to uncover more information and look for any wreck that might be there or any other artifacts such as hull fragments, coins, or weapons, for as he has said, “If authentic, it would be one of the most important discoveries in the field of marine archaeology.”

Amphorae

In the meantime, Marx had the jars studied by experts, claiming that everyone who looked at them confirmed that they were from the 2nd or 3rd century and of Roman origin. One of these experts was a professor of classics and specialist in ancient Roman amphoras at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst a specialist by the name of Elizabeth Will, who has said of them:

The highly publicized amphoras Robert Marx found in the ship are in fact similar in shape to jars produced in kilns at Kouass, on the west coast of Morocco. The Rio jars look to be late versions of those jars, perhaps datable to the third century A.D. I have a large piece of one of the Rio jars, but no labs I have consulted have any clay similar in composition. So the edges of the earth for Rome, beyond India and Scotland and eastern Europe, remain shrouded in mystery.

According to Marx, the jars likely came from a Roman ship that had made it to Brazil, and that it could not have been merely a wandering derelict that had blown away across the ocean unmanned because it had managed to navigate all the way up the bay without crashing on the rocks or reefs along the way. His theory was that it had likely made it to Brazil under human control and then perhaps been blown off course to end up where it had. It was an incredible mystery, and one which Marx had hoped to solve before a series of setbacks kept him from it.

Roman ship

In 1983, the Brazilian government, which had been cooperative up to that point, suddenly and without any real explanation denied Marx’s request for permission to further explore the area. In fact, they even went as far as to ban him from entering the country at all, citing the allegations that he had stolen numerous historical objects from shipwrecks all over the country, and with Guanabara Bay this would extend into a full ban on any underwater exploration by anyone whatsoever. The frustrated Marx then accused the Brazilian government of a cover-up, saying that they were trying to wipe out anything that would clash with the established known history of the country, and this was why no effort had ever been made to investigate the fishermen’s claims in the past. He even went as far as to accuse the Brazilian Navy of burying the jars and possible shipwreck in silt in order to keep them hidden, which they denied.

So what is going on here? How did ancient Roman jars get all the way over in Brazil? Were these from a derelict ship blow out across the sea? Were they from some Roman voyage overseas that actually managed to cross the Atlantic? Is the Brazilian government trying to cover it up and subdue any further research on the matter? Or is it all a hoax perpetrated by Marx? Are the jars really even ancient at all? It is still undetermined, and considering that the area has been closed off to any more expeditions, it seems likely that if there is anything there, then it will remain down there in its watery final resting place for many millennia more, forever eluding answers.

The more we learn about this weird universe of ours, the more we realize just how little we know. Soon after scientists realized that they don’t actually know how the sun works, it seems that another thing we thought was totally settled might be completely wrong as well. A new study seems to show that the universe could be a billion years younger than previously thought. Which is a big deal, as it means that something, somewhere in our model of how the universe works, is broken.

The age of the universe was determined by the European Planck telescope’s measurements of cosmic background radiation in 2013. By measuring the background radiation, astrophysicists could determine the rate that the universe was expanding, and by extension, how long it’s been since the universe was a single point, what we call the “big bang.” The number the Planck telescope came up with was 13.8 billion years.  It was a solid answer, and was believed to be almost certainly correct. It only needed to be confirmed by other independent telescopes, pointed at neighboring galaxies. Six years and a whole bunch of data later, it turns out we might not be as smart as we think we are. The data did not confirm the Planck telescope measurements, but instead throws a billion year wrench into the whole thing.

The new data showed that the universe was expanding 9% faster than the Planck telescope showed. That 9% difference in the expansion rate adds up to an age discrepancy of a billion years. According to Nobel prize-winner Adam Riess, who co-authored the new study, they were completely unprepared to deal with such a discrepancy:

“It was getting to the point where we say, ‘Wait a second, we’re not passing this test — we’re failing the test!'”

Alone, Riess’ data would suggest that the universe is only 12.5 to 13 billion years old. So there’s a problem somewhere, but no one knows where it is. Further observation by Riess’ team only confirmed their results, while reanalysis of the Planck data showed there was no problem there either. If the numbers are correct, it means that the problem is in how we’re interpreting them. Riess says:

“This is not just two experiments disagreeing. We are measuring something fundamentally different. One is a measurement of how fast the universe is expanding today, as we see it. The other is a prediction based on the physics of the early universe and on measurements of how fast it ought to be expanding. If these values don’t agree, there becomes a very strong likelihood that we’re missing something in the cosmological model that connects the two eras.”

It’s starting to look like there’s a fundamental problem with our model of the universe. As the competing data is checked and re-checked and neither seem to have any errors, it becomes more and more likely that the problem lies with the underlying theories. According to astrophysicist Jo Dunkley, we don’t have any models of the universe that can account for everything:

“There’s currently no consistent story that works for all our cosmological data. That means there is fascinating work to be done, to see if there is something out there that can explain all of it.”

Maybe there is a “theory of everything,” but it’s safe to say we haven’t found it yet, and it’s a good bet that we’ll be wrong a whole bunch of times before we get it right.

In late 2017, the alleged disclosure of a black budget government research project known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) changed the contemporary conversation surrounding UFOs and what the U.S. government may know about them. As it turns out, the Department of Defense is quite aware of many anomalous or otherwise unidentified aerial phenomena which regularly enter U.S. airspace and easily outrun the very best aircraft we have. Who knew?

Naturally, there are those within the government who encourage the study of these phenomena and those who want to ignore them. However, there are voices within the intelligence and defense agencies which argue United States government has an obligation to study these phenomena to determine if they pose a threat to American air superiority, the American people, or humanity itself.

That’s according to Chris Mellon, who served for two decades in various intelligence advisory roles within the U.S. government including Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary for Intelligence from 1999 to 2002. Mellon currently serves as “national security affairs adviser” for Tom DeLonge’s To the Stars Academy of Arts and Science and as a consultant on its upcoming History channel series Unidentified.  In a new essay published by The Hill, Mellon pulls no punches in declaring prior attempts to study the UFO phenomenon to be failures:

Most Americans would no doubt agree that our inability to identify scores of mysterious aircraft repeatedly violating restricted U.S. military airspace in recent years is a shocking failure.

Mellon argues that given the overwhelming evidence, the United States Congress must act to mandate a report on UAPs, unidentified aerial phenomena. The evidence is clear that these phenomena exist and are much more frequent than we know, Mellon writes, meaning it’s time the government for the government to finally get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon once and for all:

If UAPs turn out to be toys of Elon Musk’s making, we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief. If they are Russian, we’ll be glad we took action now rather than kicking the can down the road. If we learn that someone else’s more advanced version of our Voyager spacecraft has reached Earth, then this humble measure will forever transform our understanding of the universe and man’s place within it.  

Let’s hope they are Elon Musk’s toys. Mellon doesn’t outright call for full disclosure, instead merely arguing that Congress must “require the secretary of Defense and the director of national intelligence to review the UAP issue and deliver a report providing a comprehensive assessment.” It’s unknown if Congressional committees would make such a report public even if it’s ever produced, and Mellon himself argues that the Trump administration “should be free to provide the report at whatever level of classification it deems appropriate,” but come on: why would the government want citizens to know there are freaky outer space gizmos whizzing around overhead that make the F/A-18 look like a failed Wright Brothers model? That’s bad for Boeing  sales.

Still, it’s reassuring to see major political publications taking the UAP phenomenon seriously enough to publish such an opinion piece. The timing makes me wonder, though: is all of this merely part of the publicity campaign for the History channel’s upcoming series? History is owned by Hearst and Disney, huge media conglomerates with extensive reach within the media. It’s not too far-fetched to wonder if some strings have been pulled to get this piece published.

Then again, this could be a sign that more voices are joining the chorus calling for disclosure of the government’s UFO research. Are the AATIP revelations a smokescreen or the first taste of public disclosure?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }