In 1984, and behind closed doors, the Central Intelligence Agency embarked on a project to try and “remote-view” the planet Mars, specifically to find evidence of life on the planet. Not today, but in the distant past. For those who may not know, remote-viewing is a process by which a psychic individual may focus his or her mind on a particular location and describe its appearance, whether it exists now, or existed in years, centuries and even millennia long gone. It was on May 22, 1984 that the operation went ahead. In a March 2017 article for Slate, Jacob Brogan wrote: “The transcript appeared on the CIA’s site as part of a large dump of documents related to the U.S. government’s experimentation with paranormal phenomenon—projects that have been variously attributed with helping resolve the Iran hostage crisis and simply derided for wasting taxpayer money. As I soon learned, this particular document was a product of the Star Gate (sometimes spelled as one word, sometimes two) program, an initiative made most famous by Jon Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

CIA headquarters

The time-frame that the CIA had in mind was approximately one million years B.C. Why? The CIA isn’t telling. The remote-viewer – whose name is deleted from the files – stated that, “I kind of got an oblique view of a, ah, pyramid or pyramid form. It’s very high, it’s kind of sitting in a large depressed area. I’m tracking severe, severe clouds, more like dust storm[s]. I’m looking at an after-effect of a major geologic problem. I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they’re very large, wearing some kind of clothes.” The remote-viewer then focused on certain, massive structures on Mars that appeared to have been built by intelligent beings:

“Deep inside of a cavern, not of a cavern, more like [a] canyon. I’m looking up, the sides of a steep wall that seem to go on forever. And there’s like a structure…it’s like the wall of the canyon has been carved. Again, I’m getting a very large structures [sic]…huge sections of smooth stone…it’s like a rabbit warren, corners of rooms, they’re really huge. Perception is that the ceiling is very high, walls very wide. They have a…ah…appears to be the very end of a very large road and there’s a marker thing that’s very large. Keep getting Washington Monument overlay, it’s like an obelisk…see pyramids…they’re huge. It’s filtered from storms or something…They’re like shelters from storms.

“Different chambers…but they’re almost stripped of any kind of furnishings or anything, it’s like ah…strictly [a] functional place for sleeping or that’s not a good word, hibernations, some form, I can’t, I get real raw inputs, storms, savage storm, and sleeping through storms. They’re ancient people. They’re dying. It’s past their time or age. They’re very philosophic about it. They’re just looking for a way to survive and they just can’t. They’re…ah…evidently was a…a group or party of them that went to find…ah…new place to live. It’s like I’m getting all kinds of overwhelming input of the corruption of their environment. It’s failing very rapidly and this group went somewhere, like a long way to find another place to live.”

Does this specific piece of almost unique CIA documentation tell of an ancient Martian civilization, one whose world spiraled into ecological collapse, and which forced them to a new world to live on? Maybe our Earth? Of course, such a scenario is outlandish in the extreme. But, should we entirely dismiss the theory? That’s a big question…

The villages of Longyou County, in Zhejiang province, China, have long been renowned for their scatted ponds of extraordinary depth, which have become over the centuries wellsprings of myth and folklore and which are often collectively called the “Bottomless Ponds,” said to stretch infinitely down into the bowels of the earth. It was at one such pond that in 1992 a local farmer by the name of Wu Anai, from the village of Shiyan Beicun, got it into his head to see how true the legends were, and how deep the pond near his own village really was. To this end he went about gathering up a powerful water pump to actually begin emptying the pond. What he found in the “Bottomless Pond” would astound everyone who saw it, become known as the “‘the ninth wonder of the ancient world,” and launch an intriguing historical mystery that has never been solved.

As the water was laboriously siphoned out, a process that took days, it became apparent that this was no normal, naturally made pond, but rather an immense, underground cavern system that seemed to be manmade, carved right into the sandstone beneath them and inundated with water. The cave sprawled out beneath them was fully equipped with stone rooms, pillars, all decorated with cryptic lines and symbols that have been meticulously etched into the stone and with meanings unknown. This discovery soon had other nearby villages draining their own ponds, until over the years 36 similar grottoes were unearthed, all within an area of just one square kilometer. They penetrate down into the earth for 100 feet or more, each an average of 11,000 sq. ft. in area, and although not connected they are often separated only by very thin walls, and were obviously made by the same builders. Despite being examined by numerous experts and scientists, no one has any more understanding of them they did back when that first cave was discovered, and their mysteries are deep.

One of the Bottomless Ponds

Perhaps the biggest mystery of what have come to be called the Longyou Caves is that no one really knows who built them, why, or how. They have been estated as dating back to perhaps 200 BC, but there is absolutely no record of their construction in any of the historical records, nor even any reference to their existence, and so that is about all we know. The purpose of the caves is equally evasive, with no artifacts to show that they were used as tombs, no signs of any mining having been done, and there are no traces of anyone ever having inhabited them. They are just there, their meaning for existing just as inscrutable as the identity of their creators. All that can be known is that these caves took an enormous amount of manpower and time to create, so they must have been important for something to justify such a massive and ambitious project.

Just as perplexing is the mystery of how they were built. In total, it is estimated that around 1,000,000 cubic meters of rock and dirt would have had to be removed, which would have taken around 1,000 workers working 6 years straight, laboring day and night to accomplish, and yet there is no mention of any such project underway in the historic records, nor any clue as to where all of that rock went. Then there is the remarkable precision in the workmanship and the way the caves are so incredibly symmetrical and accurately laid out. Interestingly, the caves are all very similarly designed and laid out, with indeed some of the caves almost identical to each other, so how did they do that without any modern equipment? One Yang Hongxun, an expert at the Archaeological Institute of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has said of this:

At the bottom of each cave, the ancient builders wouldn’t be able to see what the others were doing in the next grotto. But the inside of each cave had to be parallel with that of the other, or else the wall would be holed through. Thus the measure apparatus should have been very advanced. There must have been some layout about the sizes, locations, and the distances between the caves beforehand.

The Longyou Caves

This is not to mention that it is uncertain even what tools the builders used, with no signs of any tools and no hints as to how these caves were dug. Also odd is the strange presence of numerous tiny chisel marks along the walls that are so symmetrical and uniform to look almost as if they were produced by some sort of machine, and which would have taken a mind-boggling amount of work to meticulously etch by hand. Their significance, of course, is just as enigmatic as anything else about this place. Adding to all of this is that the builders would have had to have done this down in the dark, yet there is no evidence of torches having been used, nor any other source of light, so how could they see down there in the eternal gloom? However they did all of this, it is a remarkable feat of engineering and made even more so by how incredibly well-preserved the caves are. Considering that they are thousands of years old, one would expect that there would be some collapses or signs of wear or damage, yet there are none and the caves are remarkably pristine.

Although they have been studied by scientists and a few are even open to tourism, no one has ever been able to figure out all of the pieces to the mystery of the Longyou Caves. We don’t know who built them, how they did it, or why. They are a complete enigma, buried down there underwater for millennia with their secrets long gone with those who crafted them. In the void of any new findings on the mysterious complexes it is quite likely that we will never get the answers we seek, and that these caves will continue to remain curious anomalies flitting out past our understanding.

Something has changed. For some reason, reports of mysterious or otherwise unexplained booms seem to be far less frequent than they have been in recent memory. Over the past two years, I’ve had plenty of weeks where I’ve had four or five mystery boom reports to share. Throughout the end of April and May, however, reports of these anomalous acoustic disturbances seemed to have slowed a bit. What’s with the sudden slowdown in mystery booms?

On Thursday, April 24, residents of two villages in county Suffolk in eastern England reported being shocked a “mystery bang” some initially feared was an automobile crash or industrial explosion. While the case remains unsolved, aircraft scrambled from nearby Royal Air Force bases have been known to cause similar booms in the past over the same area.

A Royal Air Force Typhoon at RAF Honington.

On the evening of Monday, April 29, residents of Hampton Roads, Virginia felt and heard a powerful boom. The National Weather Service in nearby Wakefield issued a statement shortly after claiming that with no meteorological explanations, the boom was likely caused by a supersonic aircraft breaking the sound barrier. Shortly after, the U.S. Navy issued a statementclaiming one of its F/A-18 Super Hornets had indeed caused the boom:

Based on analysis of data by fleet area control, surveillance facility and strike fighter wing Atlantic, we can conclusively state the loud noise heard across Hampton Roads around 6:30 p.m. Monday was a sonic boom generated by a U.S. F18 super hornet from Oceana.

Naval Air Station Oceana is located just east of where the boom was reported. The base is the east coast home of seventeen Navy strike fighter squadrons and Strike Fighter Weapons School Atlantic.

An F/A-18E Super Hornet.

That same night on April 29, houses in suburban Queensland, Australia were rattled by an “unexplained big boom” which witnesses say caused the earth to shudder. “My wife and I were inside when we experienced the house shuddering – it was so loud I could not image any handheld device could possibly create that amount of noise,” said Cornubia resident Shaun Pask. “It was not a small object hitting a small part of the roof – it was like something fell from the sky and it landed on our whole roof at the one time. It was like a sonic boom hammered down on the entire roof and neighbours said they had the same experience.”

A week later, people in Kingman, Arizona were terrified by a “loud boom” that echoed throughout the town on the evening of Wednesday, May 8. Some residents even reported finding debris strewn throughout city roads. Nevertheless, Mohave County Sheriff’s Office Public Information Specialist Anita Mortensen told local news reporters that there is nothing to worry about. “We found nothing that would point to any specific type of occurrence,” Mortensen said. “Nothing is confirmed at this time, and the investigation is ongoing.”

On Monday, May 13, shocked residents of Sidney, Nebraska reported a “mysterious loud ‘boom’ sound” which several residents described as similar to a cannon being discharged. Sidney Police Chief Joe Aikens said that while police received several calls about the noise, they have no idea where it came from or what caused it. The Sidney police have asked residents to share any information they have pertaining to the noise.

On May 16, hundreds of people throughout the Otago coastline in southeast New Zealand reported hearing a massive boom. The New Zealand Herald reports that most witnesses thought the noise could have been a meteorite or an earthquake, but shortly thereafter local meteorological services reported that a single powerful lightning strike was detected 50km (31 miles) out at sea which could have caused the boom. Apparently, the strike was caused by a particularly low-altitude type of thunderstorm called a squat thunderstorm which can cause thunder much louder than typical storms. Do you buy that explanation?

While there may have been fewer incidents to report on this month, six reports in four weeks still isn’t anything to shake a stick at. Interestingly, sonic booms seem to be increasingly cited or suspected as a cause of these booms now that winter is over and “frostquakes” are no longer a standby scapegoat. Could more of these reports be explained by sonic booms? I’ve suspected sonic booms from the start but with little to no evidence left in the wake of these unexplained sonic phenomena, there’s no telling what could be splitting the skies with such regularity.

Keep your eyes and ears upward.

“[The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)] did pursue research and investigation into unidentified aerial phenomena.”

The New York Post is reporting that it received an exclusive admission from a Department of Defense (DoD) spokesperson that the Pentagon not only has investigated but still does investigate unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) or unidentified flying objects (UFOs for you traditionalists).

Wait a minute … didn’t we already know this?

“Presented here is the first official evidence released by the US government that can be rightfully designated as credible, authentic confirmation that unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) are real.”

That’s from the well-publicized (and rightly so) announcement in late 2017 revealing both the one-time existence of the top-secret Pentagon program known as AATIP and three videos taken by US military planes in 2004 of unidentified aerial phenomenon. The announcement confirmed that AATIP was defunded in 2012 but The New York Times discovered was still in operation. What this latest exclusive by the New York Post is is apparently the first public admission by the DoD that this is true.

“The Department of Defense is always concerned about maintaining positive identification of all aircraft in our operating environment, as well as identifying any foreign capability that may be a threat to the homeland. The department will continue to investigate, through normal procedures, reports of unidentified aircraft encountered by US military aviators in order to ensure defense of the homeland and protection against strategic surprise by our nation’s adversaries.”

The Post quotes DoD spokesperson Christopher Sherwood in the article, but does not give any further information than the above admissions. For that, it turned to Nick Pope, the well-known former member of the British Ministry of Defence (MoD) who secretly investigated UFO sightings. Pope called The Post revelation a “bombshell” and makes sure he gets a little indirect credit for it.

“This new admission makes it clear that they really did study what the public would call ‘UFOs’. It also shows the British influence, because UAP was the term we used in the Ministry of Defence to get away from the pop culture baggage that came with the term ‘UFO’.”

Pop culture baggage? That’s a different hot debate going on in U.S. UFO/UAP circles. This “exclusive” by The Post should add to the current hot debate about UFO/UAP disclosure. Will it happen? Is there really anything to disclose? Are they aliens, foreign aircraft, our own secret tests or something else? Unfortunately, the Post article ends after quoting investigator John Greenewald Jr. of The Black Vault, who calls it “official evidence — that said, ‘Yes, AATIP did deal with UAP cases, phenomena, videos, photos, whatever.’” The Post says it reached out to former Nevada senator and AATIP approver Harry Reid – who isn’t running for anything and should be open to questions about announcements like this – but received no response.

Greenwald hopes more from the DoD is forthcoming, but he’s still excited about The Post’s exclusive because:

“… at least we’re one step closer to the truth.”

Now, back to the debate about the “pop culture baggage” of the term “UFO.”