It’s not often that you find government documents on crashed UFOs. Certainly, there have been reports that have debunked the UFO angle of such crashes (such as the U.S. Air Force’s 1994 and 1997 reports on the notorious Roswell affair of July 1947). But, when it comes to the matter of potentially real crashed UFOs, the paperwork is scant – to say the least. There is, however, a document from the CIA which addresses a controversial (some might say “notorious”) Russian case from January 29, 1986. In a document of November 22, 1989, we have the following from the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (which, as Wikipedia correctly states, was “…an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States…”).

Fireball Craft

The CIA document reveals the following: “Setting the tone for this media coverage was an article in the 9 July 1989 SOTSIALISTICHESKAYA INDUSTRIYA, which referred to many recent reports of UFO sightings in the USSR. Interviewed by the paper, P. Prokopenko, director of a laboratory for the study of ‘anomalous phenomena,’ stated that a ‘permanent center’ for the study of UFOs is being established in the Soviet Union. In addition to conducting research and presenting lectures on UFOs, the center will support the investigation of reported sightings. In referring to an issue of the paper published in July 1988 that included a report on an ‘amazing event that took place on Hill 611 near the village of Dalnegorsk in Primorskiy Kray,’ the article noted that the event is still under investigation. Many observers saw a flying sphere crash into one of the hill’s twin peaks, and physicists and other scientists from the Siberian Division of the USSR Academy of Sciences are still studying the ‘fine mesh,’ ‘small spherical objects,’ and ‘pieces of glass’ that are considered to be small remnants left behind by the sphere. According to the article, the alleged spacecraft was nearly obliterated in the crash, but there appears to be enough material at the site for the scientists––a mixture of UFO ‘enthusiasts’ and skeptics––to eventually ‘penetrate this mystery.'”

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

The CIA had much more to say of this case: “In studying the site, scientist A. Makayev reported finding gold, silver, nickel, alpha-titanium, molybdenum, and compounds of beryllium. One of the ‘skeptical’ physicists from Tomsk has hypothesized that the so-called sphere could have been some kind of a  ‘plasmoid,’ formed by the ‘interaction of geophysical force fields,’ which captured the elements found by Makeyev from the atmosphere on its trajectory toward disintegration on the hilltop. Other researchers have generally rejected this explanation since the amounts of various types of metals found at the site would imply, according to this ‘plasmoid’ theory, that “the concentration of metals in the atmosphere should exceed the present level by a factor of 4,000.”

And there was more to come, as the documentation demonstrates: “Some of the scientists have concluded that the object that crashed into Hill 611 was an ‘extraterrestrial’ space vehicle constructed by highly intelligent beings. Doctor of Chemical Sciences V. Vysotskiy stated that ‘without doubt, this is evidence of a high technology, and it is not anything of a natural or terrestrial origin.’ He cited the fact that the remnants of fine mesh included bits of thin threads with a diameter of only 17 microns and that these threads, in turn, were composed of even thinner strands twisted into braids. Extremely thin gold wires were discovered intertwined in the finest threads – evidence of an intricate technology beyond the present capabilities of terrestrial science, according to Vysotskiy.”

As the CIA noted, however, there was a down to earth theory for all of this, too. Again, let’s take a look at what the CIA recorded: “Physicist Yuriy Platov of the Terrestrial Magnetism Institute does not believe the claims of scientists who maintain they have found remnants in Dalnegorsk of a UFO constructed by extraterrestrials, and he is convinced that the materials found at the site are really only the remnants of the unsuccessful launch of a Soviet rocket in that region. He believes that many of the other reports of UFOs can be explained by the inability of the observers to recognize the phenomenon known as ‘ball lightning.'”

The CIA document concludes: The [19-25 October 1989 edition of the POISK journal] article contrasted Platov’s view with that of another physical scientist, Vladimir Azhazha, who was recently elected chairman of the All-Union Commission for the Study of Unidentified Flying Objects of the Union of Scientific and Engineering Societies. Azhazha compared reports of a UFO crash in the USSR with a claim by UFO enthusiasts in the United States that a UFO had crashed in the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. He believes there is sufficient evidence to support the claims of UFO crashed in both cases––in Dalnegorsk and in Roswell. In the latter case, he cited the testimony of eyewitnesses who maintained that they had seen the bodies of four extraterrestrials lying near the smashed spacecraft. According to Platov, however, the eyewitnesses in the Roswell case were mistaken. He believes that the object that crashed was a USAF experimental rocket with four Rhesus monkeys aboard and that the accident was the result of an unsuccessful launch attempt at the dawn of the space era.”

Interest in the UFO subject continues to mount in Washington, as several senators on Capitol Hill have reportedly received briefings on the subject. The news arrives on the heels of a recent statement by President Donald Trump, where he made passing reference to a “brief meeting” he had on UFOs.

Politico’s Bryan Bender reports that Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was among those who received the classified briefings.

Bender also appears on History’s new Unidentified series, which chronicles the efforts of Luis Elizondo, a former DoD employee who says he headed a Pentagon UFO study during his time with the agency.

It’s not surprising that members of Congress are showing interest in the subject, after news that the Navy would be “updating” its reporting procedures with regard to incidents where pilots encountered unidentified flying objects was received with much fanfare several weeks ago.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

And yet, while the fact that members of Congress are receiving classified briefings on the subject is making news, the question remains as to what, precisely, our current Commander in Chief’s “brief meeting” on the subject actually entailed.

Reports by a number of news agencies at that time noted that a “briefing” had occurred, but it should be pointed out that Trump himself never called it this, and actually had very little to say about the subject. When asked if he believed the reports given by Navy pilots, which were featured in a New York Times article several weeks ago, he said “not particularly,” expressing to George Stephanopolous that if any additional information was forthcoming he’d be “the first to know.”

In terms of party lines, political interest in the UFO subject is mostly favored by Democrats, which includes the aforementioned Mark Warner, and former U.S. Senator Harry Reid, who spoke recently with KNPR Radio out of Las Vegas. Reid was asked during the 45-minute interview about Luis Elizondo, who was referred to by the New York Times in November 2017 as former head of the Pentagon’s UFO program, and whether contradictory statements by Pentagon spokespeople had relevance to his former position with the DoD.

According to Reid:

“I’ve talked to Luis, met him several times. Met him here in Las Vegas recently… Here’s one thing that we have to understand with this. First of all, I believe in science. That’s what we should be dealing with. But there are some people that have wanted for many years to have… kind of conspiratorial issues… and when they are challenged with real science, they don’t like it. So that’s the problem we have with this. Then you have people that are just coming on board, and they want to also report ‘I saw a flying saucer’ and all this, some of which is true, most of it, of course, isn’t.”

“Elizondo is a real guy,” Reid concluded. “A few people [are] out there trying to punch holes in what he is saying and what he does, but he was part of the Defense Department, no question about it, and a man, I think, of veracity.”

Former Senator Harry Reid

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

While Reid stated that Elizondo held a former position with the DoD, what remains unaccounted for to date is any clear statement that outlines the exact role served by Mr. Elizondo with regard to the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).  Elizondo says he was the head of the program up until his resignation in late 2017.

According to Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood, in correspondence with journalist Kieth Kloor who wrote about this for The Intercept, “Mr. Elizondo had no responsibilities with regard to the AATIP program while he worked in OUSDI [the Office of Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence], up until the time he resigned effective 10/4/2017.”

Elizondo and the To the Stars Academy have not issued any official response to the statement. However, it is not inconceivable that there may be circumstances that could have led to confusion on the matter, which may have to do with the nature and scope of Elizondo’s prior work with the government.

While information continues to slowly become available about official government interest in unexplained aerial phenomenon, one thing remains very clear: interest in the subject–both on the civilian and governmental levels–is at an unprecedented high, the likes of which have not been seen since the early 1950s, when official USAF studies into the phenomenon began. It’s anybody’s guess which direction this may take in weeks and months to follow, and whether we will learn anything new of substance in relation to this enduring mystery of the skies.

If you’re looking for a place to vacation, you probably go for a location with better weather than you have back home. On the other hand, people looking for a place to move to generally choose a spot that’s just like home. If that’s the way humans think, perhaps extraterrestrials do the same. If the exoplanets currently being discovered are colder than Earth, then it would make sense that travelers from these worlds would settle someplace cold, like Antarctica or Siberia. That may explain why 5,000-year-old art found on never-touched stone-walled graves in Siberia depicts beings that look nothing like humans and were painted using techniques and colors uncommon for that time. Aliens making the place look like home?

“The results of the analysis of the composition of paints used in the funeral rite of Karakol people testify to the ability of the ancient inhabitants of Altai to distinguish pigments by colour and properties.”

That ability is not what Alexander Pakhunov of the Institute of Archeology at the Russian Academy of Sciences was expecting when he was given the opportunity to chemically test the paints used by early and middle Bronze Age artists to paint eleven strange-looking humanoid beings on stone slabs which formed the walls of ancient graves in the Karakol village of the Altai Republic in West Siberia. (View the paintings here.)  They were discovered in 1985 and appear to have been untouched since the Bronze Age. The remains looked normal – no elongated skulls – and were painted with what the researchers say was the first usage of polychrome colors (white, red and black) ever found in Siberia. However, what intrigued the researchers was that fact that the paints weren’t made with simple ingredients.

“Some structures are not typical for natural samples, but are the product of heat treatment. Simply put, the primitive artist heated the mineral to a certain temperature in order to get the colour he needed.”

In an interview with The Siberian Times, Roman Senin, head of the synchrotron research department at Kurchatov Institute, explained that these ancient artists used scientific techniques that were unheard of for those times to create the vivid colors in these paintings. How did they learn these methods?

“We find depictions of elks, mountain goats, but also humanoid figurines that were drawn running around with round horns and halos on their heads. The eleven human-like figures make a single composition, finished with a continuous red line drawn over the images.”

You sent us all this way to teach them how to draw?

If this was a depiction of a funeral ritual, who – or what – was presiding over it? The remains are human, but the beings in the pictures have long arms and those strange heads with stranger headgear. Were the humanoids ETs giving their shivering Siberian friends new techniques from their home planet in return for welcoming them with open arms and warm yak blankets? For the answer to this and more burning questions, we have to wait for more leaks (yes, archeology has joined politics in leaking secret documents) of the study by Senin, Pakhunov and others scheduled to be presented at the 43rd International Symposium on Archeometry in May 2020 in Lisbon.

None of us may have any idea what the hell is going on with the Navy and UFOs anymore, but I’ll tell you one thing: the Ferrero candy corporation must be loving all of the free publicity this whole Navy UFO saga has given to one of their flagship candies: the Tic Tac. Could all of this be some genius and far-reaching viral marketing for the diminutive candies? It’s perhaps as good as any other theory.

I wonder how all of this has affected Tic Tac sales.

The now-infamous Tic Tac UFO incidents have shaken the ufological world like few other accounts have, and the ensuing media frenzy seems to have even prompted the Navy itself to revise its protocols for how personnel document sightings of anomalous objects. Over the last two years, everyone with an interest in UFOs or the unexplained has speculated about who or what might be controlling the objects, with theories spanning the entire plausibility gamut: aliens, interdimensional beings, an underwater race of intelligent humans, mother nature herself, private aerospace firms, the U.S. military itself, or perhaps some other superpower. I’m sure I left some out. The point is, nobody has any clue.

While we’re no closer to understanding these incidents or the recent media blitz surrounding them, strange rumblings have been happening lately which seem to suggest that someoneknows who or what may be flying Tic Tacs around America’s airspace. Many have speculated that the entire Navy UFO saga may somehow be a misinformation campaign or psychological operation based on curious coincidences that keep adding up and strange statements made by U.S. government or military personnel. Could the Tic Tacs be ours?

An alleged image of the Tic Tac UFO.

The latest strange statement came this week via Quora, an online question-and-answer site that sometimes draws input from experts in various fields. In a Quora post from this month, Lockheed Martin staff physicist Ibteesam Reaz replied to the question “What are the most plausible explanations of Navy pilots seeing hypersonic objects at 30K feet, objects with no visible engine and sometimes described as a cube within a sphere?” In his response, Raez says that after all the reported circumstances are taken into account, there’s only one likely answer: the Tic Tac UFOs are American.

It’s important to point out that just because Reaz is a physicist at Lockheed Martin, he doesn’t necessarily have any insider information we’re not privy to concerning this truly confounding and still-unfolding saga of the Navy and weird objects bouncing around the sky, ignoring the laws of physics. The truly spooky top secret research projects are so tightly compartmentalized that few souls are ever made aware of them. Still, in his Quora response, Reaz says that based on the circumstantial evidence surrounding these sightings – the conspicuous location and timing of the sightings, the plainclothes personnel who confiscated recordings of the incidents – he feels we are “left with a stronger impetus to speculate that the US government does indeed have something to do with the Tic Tac.” 

Now I can’t stop salivating thinking about those sweet, sweet Tic Tacs.

Reaz is quick to note though, that if the U.S. government or American private aerospace firms are indeed flying these beyond-next-generation aircraft, “the aerospace engineers who are not privy to the details of how the craft works are being played for fools” and wonders “why are we wasting so much sweat, hard work, money when some select group of people literally have technology that is beyond the reach of modern physics?” 

Does that question really need to be answered? Think of the billions of dollars of wealth that would be redistributed once the next truly paradigm-exploding scientific breakthrough changes everything about human transportation and energy generation as we know it, not to mention the far-reaching geopolitical ramifications such a breakthrough would have. Could the Tic Tac indeed be a secret U.S. aerospace project that is too dangerous to reveal as many have speculated?

Tune in this week to Unidentified for a whole lot of goatees, tacticool backpacks, and not a lot of answers.

Ancient artificial islands in Scotland are much older than previously thought. In fact, the islands are thousands of years older which was determined by pottery that was found in Scottish lochs.

All across Scotland, there are hundreds of small man-made islands (or crannogs), specifically in the islands of the Outer Hebrides which are located off the north-west coast of the country. Previously, archaeologists thought that the oldest man-made island dated back to 800 B.C. during the Iron Age and that it was used for approximately 2,500 years.

Crannog

However, a crannog located on the Outer Hebridean island of North Uist has been determined to date back to around 3700 B.C. during the Neolithic Period. This suggested that numerous other islands could also date back to that time period – thousands of years older than previously thought. And now it has been confirmed.

Well-preserved pots from the Neolithic Period located near a different crannog on the Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis were discovered in 2012 by Chris Murray who was a former Navy diver. With the help from Murray, several other crannogs in the Outer Hebrides were then examined by Duncan Garrow from the University of Reading, UK, as well as one of his colleagues.

They used radiocarbon dating to determine how old the structural timbers and residue from the pots were and they concluded that they were from 3640 to 3360 B.C. Stones and wood were used to create the small islands. In fact, one of the islands that measured 26 by 22 meters was constructed with stones that each weighed up to 250 kilograms. It is believed that these crannogs were used for social gatherings, funerals, or ritualized feasting.

Crannog

Of the hundreds of Neolithic pots that were discovered – some were found on the small islands, while the majority of them were discovered in the water – several of the pieces were surprisingly well preserved. Garrow wrote that the ceramics were intentionally put in the water based on how they were positioned and how many of them were discovered. Additionally, he mentioned that the ceramics pretty much remained in the same spots where they were left since the waters were so calm and stable – just waiting to be discovered over 5,000 years after they were put there.

To put this into an even better perspective, Stonehenge first started being built around 3100 B.C., several hundred years after the man-made islands of Scotland were created.

Strange coincidences surrounding recent To the Stars Academy (TTSA) and Navy disclosures keep adding up – although coincidences are often just that: a remarkable concurrence of events without any causal connection. Or at least any obviousconnection.

For those of us who have been watching the long-awaited History Channel and TTSA series Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation know that the show has mainly rehashed and repackaged accounts that have been in circulation for some time. Still, it’s been interesting to see these individuals on screen after reading about them endlessly for the past two years. While the show’s contributions to ufology are still being debated, one of the more interesting revelations the series has presented so far has been its focus on a pair of islands just off the west coast of California and Baja California: Guadalupe Island and Catalina Island.

Santa Catalina Island, more commonly referred to as simply Catalina Island.

Guadalupe Island is home to a tiny Mexican military installation called Campamento Militar Isla Guadalupe featuring a 1,200-metre-long (3,900 ft) runway. Other than that, the island boasts less than 150 permanent residents, most of whom only live on the island during fishing season.

Catalina Island, meanwhile, has for years been considered somewhat of a UFO (and USO) hot spot due to the numerous sightings that have occurred on or around the island throughout its history. The waters surrounding the island are also the site of unusually large craters and several gravitational and magnetic anomalies believed to be the result of volcanic and seismic activity along fault lines. During World War Two, the U.S. Maritime Service U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Army Signal Corp, the Office of Strategic Services, and the U.S. Navy all either conducted training or operated facilities on the island. Today, Catalina Island boasts UFO tour companies to capitalize on the tiny island’s somewhat storied history. 

According to the testimony of USS Nimitz radar operator Gary Voorhis, the infamous Tic-Tac UFOs were first detected in the vicinity of Catalina Island and later disappeared while heading south near Guadalupe Island. The significance of these islands to the developing Navy UFO story, if any, remains unknown. Now, just two weeks after Unidentified aired episodes featuring Luis Elizondo traveling to and around the island, a strange and unsolved aircraft crash has been reported on Catalina Island.

The resort town of Avalon on the island has long been a popular getaway for residents of Southern California.

According to local news reports, a helicopter that had been missing for over 20 hours was suddenly discovered on the island by Coast Guard and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department personnel. Footage taken from nearby waters shows the wreckage of the helicopter lying atop a hill still smoldering. The pilot was found dead at the scene. How could a helicopter go missing for 20 hours on a populated island?

Details are still scarce, and both the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board are conducting an investigation. The pilot was known to take recreational flights around the island, so it’s likely this was just an unfortunate accident. Still, it’s strange to see Catalina Island pop up in the news for an unexplained aircraft crash so shortly after the island was featured by To the Stars Academy as a UFO hot spot. Was this crash due to a mechanical failure or pilot error, and is the timing pure coincidence? Most likely, if not almost certainly. Or, perhaps far at the other end of the plausibility spectrum, could the unidentified aerial phenomena reported on the island for decades have anything to do with the crash? What about those magnetic anomalies? 

Let’s see what the FAA and NTSB say.