Thanks to the phenomenally successful Men in Black movie franchise, there can be very people who have not heard of the sinister MIB. In the movies, the MIB are employed by a secret government body that is dedicated to wiping out hostile aliens on the Earth. The reality of the Men in Black, however, is very different. Unlike their movie counterparts, the real MIB are described as looking definitely non-human: their skin is extremely pale, they sometimes have large, bulging eyes; they are extremely skinny and often very tall. In other words, they don’t even look like regular people. This has given rise to the theory that the MIB may be alien-human hybrids. Possibly, even supernatural entities. Not only that, there is strong evidence which suggests that the U.S. Government has secretly investigated the MIB phenomenon, to try and figure out who, or what, the Men in Black really are. Thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, we have in our possession several examples of official, secret, U.S. government documents that confirm those secret investigations went ahead.

John Keel was not only the author of the acclaimed book, The Mothman Prophecies. He was also someone who dug very deeply into the matter of the MIB, who they were, and where they came from. In February 1967, Keel had the opportunity to speak with Colonel George P. Freeman. Colonel Freeman, of the U.S. Air Force, made the following, written statement about the MIB. Keel took careful note of it: “Mysterious men dressed in Air Force uniforms or bearing impressive credentials from government agencies have been silencing UFO witnesses. We have checked a number of these cases, and these men are not connected to the Air Force in any way. We haven’t been able to find out anything about these men. By posing as Air Force officers and government agents, they are committing a Federal offense. We would sure like to catch one – unfortunately the trail is always too cold by the time we hear about these cases, but we are still trying.”

Less than one month later, specifically on March 1, 1967, Lieutenant General Hewitt T. Wheless, USAF, penned the following memo. It was widely circulated within the military: “Information, not verifiable, has reached Hq USAF that persons claiming to represent the Air Force or other Defense establishments have contacted citizens who have sighted unidentified flying objects. In one reported case, an individual in civilian clothes, who represented himself as a member of NORAD, demanded and received photos belonging to a private citizen.” The document continues: “In another, a person in an Air Force uniform approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO, assembled them in a school room and told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting. All military and civilian personnel and particularly information officers and UFO investigating officers who hear of such reports should immediately notify their local OSI offices.”

Clearly, not only does the above-documentation demonstrate that the Men in Black were nothing to do with the government; it also shows that the government had no more understanding of who the MIB were than did the average UFO researcher. Moving on to the FBI: In 1956, paranormal/UFO investigator Gray Barker wrote and published a book titled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. A significant percentage of the book was focused on the MIB-themed experiences of Albert Bender, who, in the early 1950s, established the International Flying Saucer Bureau (in Bridgeport, Connecticut). It wasn’t long before the IFSB was no more. Bender supposedly closed it down after receiving repeated, menacing visits from the Men in Black. Bender’s MIB were far less like 1950s-era G-Men or agents of the CIA. They were far more like something from the pages of a Bram Stoker novel, mixed in with a greater than liberal sprinkling of H.P Lovecraft. As a result of the publication of Barker’s book, a number of people contacted the FBI, demanding to know who the dark-suited silencers really were – and particularly because certain ufologists, such as Barker, were claiming the MIB were from “the government.”

The FBI has declassified some of its documents on Bender and Barker, and which demonstrate something notable. Namely, that just like the U.S. military, the FBI too had no real understanding of who the MIB were. On January 22, 1959, none other than J. Edgar Hoover instructed the Chicago office of the FBI: “The Bureau desires to obtain a copy of the book written by Gray Barker entitled ‘They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers.’” Records demonstrate that, behind closed doors and after reading Barker’s book, the FBI was as baffled in the fifties as the Air Force was, almost a decade later.

Now, some ufologists will likely claim that the USAF and the FBI were both out of the loop – due to the MIB originating with a deeply buried, “black budget”-type group that even Hoover and the Air Force couldn’t uncover. But, I disagree. Every bit of data that has surfaced from government agencies suggests they are as utterly mystified as the field of Ufology is, when it comes to the nature and origin of the Men in Black. Yes, the MIB phenomenon is real, but it has practically nothing to do with agencies of government, of the military, or of the intelligence community. The Men in Black are…something else.

A video of a worm-like UFO that appeared over a California desert at night is worming its way around the Internet and generating plenty of speculation as to what it is. What it isn’t is the first instance of a worm-shaped UFO, although the fact that this one appeared at night makes it unusual and more difficult to identify, classify or debunk.

“At around 9:17pm while driving on highway 62 we saw a long strip of light in the sky. We were able to drive up to it and get under it. It appeared to be about 6 feet long and did not seem to make any noise. We witness it for over 30 minutes and multiple other cars stopped and came over to watch. At times it was very still even though it was windy and would climb straight up in the sky.”

Cody Kennedy says he was searching the ground for rattlesnakes to record on video for his YouTube channel (Crazy Cody’s Creatures) when he and his friends accidentally looked up and saw a long, illuminated worm-like object in the sky over Twentynine Palms. If that name sounds familiar to you paranormal and UFO buffs, it’s the home of the main entrance and headquarters of the Joshua Tree National Park (a place that has had many UFO sightings and paranormal encounters) and a gateway to the Mojave Desert. Skeptics will also point out it’s home to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center (MCAGCC), the largest United States Marine Corps base. Now that we’ve planted those seeds, what does Cody think he and his friends saw? (You can watch the video for yourself here.)

“I am not sure if this was a light bar on a kite or a drone. There are power lines around where it was in the sky so if it was a kite it would seem dangerous to fly it at night in that area. It started to move away from us and climb quickly so we tried to get a better shot of it from another street and it appeared to come straight down in the middle of open desert and turn off. Other people that stopped to look and myself went out into the desert to try and find it but were unsuccessful.”

Was it a kite?

The UFO looks most like a lighted air sock or balloon twisting in the wind as it’s dragged by a drone, but the darkness hides any more details and no one seems to have found its remains. In daylight, there have been many sightings of worm-like UFOs. Robert Bingham of Los Angeles, who has reported many UFOs, saw a 20-foot-tall “worm-shaped ship” in 2000. 7While he had no photo or video evidence, a video of a “UFO worm and orb” over Mexico in 2009 (see the video here) show the more classic balloon-like or floating garbage baggish object of many similar UFO sightings. That’s even more clear in photos of a worm UFO over Washington DC in 2009 (see them here).

Witness image 1. (Credit: MUFON)

Witness image 2. (Credit: MUFON)

Witness image 3. (Credit: MUFON)

Cropped and enlarged version of the witness image 3. (Credit: MUFON)

Was it an air sock pulled by a drone?

Balloons? Bags? Kites? Secret Marine tests? Alien ships? Something else? The discussions and heated debates about worm-like UFO sightings shows the importance of video and photographic evidence. Cody Kennedy was already out looking to make videos of animals so he had his phone or camera ready. He also kept recording for 10 minutes – an usually long period of time in the UFO witnessing world. That gives time to possibly determine size, altitude, speed, location, perspective and other details that help move the needle from “unidentified” to “identified.”

Sure, it looks like a balloon or an air sock, making it easy to laugh about. But think for a moment … it wasn’t that long ago many people laughed at the idea of flying Tic Tacs.

Keep an open mind, keep a phone handy and keep looking!

In a paper published in the journal Ecology, integrative biologist Alex Smith described the finding as an “unexpected and fascinating case of plants eating vertebrates in our backyard, in Algonquin Park.”

Pitcher Plant

Even though the plants at the provincial park have been observed for hundreds of years, nobody – until fairly recently – has reported seeing a salamander species being trapped by a pitcher plant anywhere in North America. In fact, it was in the summer of 2017 when Teskey Baldwin, who was an undergraduate student at that time and on a University of Guelph field ecology course, discovered a salamander trapped inside of a pitcher plant.

In the fall of 2018, a team of researchers studied pitcher plants that were located around a single pond and they noticed that approximately one in five of them contained tiny salamanders that were around the same size as a human finger. Even more surprising is that numerous plants held more than one salamander.

Since there are a limited number of fish in the bog ponds, it is believed that the young salamanders could have fallen into the plants because they were looking for insects. Another possibility is that they crawled into the plants in order to escape from predators. While some of the salamanders that were trapped inside of the plants died within just three days, others lived up to 19 days.

Smith stated that the pitcher plants could have turned carnivorous in order to get nutrients, such as nitrogen which is lacking in the soil of the bogs. In other parts of the world, flesh-eating plants – such as the sundews and the Venus flytrap – have also been found in environments that lack important nutrients.

Pitcher Plant

Other meat-eating pitcher plants have been discovered in other parts of the world since the eighteenth century, but it is believed that this is the first time such a plant has been found in North America. One example was a pitcher plant that was found in Asia a decade ago and it ate spiders and insects, but also mice and small birds.

Let’s hope that the pitcher plants stick with small vertebrates, as it would be quite concerning to see a large sign near the bog that reads, “Stay on the boardwalk and watch your children. Here be plants that eat vertebrates,” as Smith said.

A picture of a salamander caught inside of a pitcher plant, as well as a photo of the bog where the plants were found can be seen here.