Paging Enrico Fermi and Frank Drake. The Breakthrough Listen search for intelligent life has completed its latest analysis of one petabyte of data collected on over 1,300 stars within 160 light-years of Earth and has found … nothing. Or, as Russian billionaire Yuri Milner who put up $100 million for the project might say … bupkes. Did he save his receipt? Did they include Earth in this search?

“Anyone who thinks the team might have missed something can go over their results and see for themselves.”

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope

After reviewing the article published in The Astrophysical Journal about the study and the actual data available to the public on Breakthrough Initiative’s Open Data Archive, Jason Wright, an astrophysicist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the work, gave billionaire Milner the correct answer in an interview with LiveScience. The team led by Danny Price, an astrophysicist at the University of California Berkeley, used the 328-foot-diameter (100 meters) Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, and the 210-foot-diameter (64 m) Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, to collect the 1 million gigabytes (1 petabyte) of radio and optical wavelengths from Earth’s closest neighbors and then searched for the technosignatures of life. You know, communication signals like radio waves or laser lights. After eliminating all of the knowns (signals from Earth satellites, for example), they were left with the list of unknowns. It wasn’t a very long list, according to Price.

“There’s certainly nothing out there glaringly obvious. There’s no amazingly advanced civilizations trying to contact us with incredibly powerful transmitters.”

Missed me!

Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke once said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” which means that we shouldn’t be searching for known unknowns, but for unknown unknowns – things we have no idea of what they might look like. Price somewhat agrees, saying that his team is limited by human knowledge, but he also holds out hope that they‘re just looking for the wrong frequencies or the signals are being blocked by our own global blanket of radio interference. Besides, he still has plenty of Yuri Milner’s left to spend, which he plans to do by adding the massive MeerKAT telescope array in South Africa to the mix and expand the study to a million stars.

He’d better hope Milner has never heard of Drake and Fermi.

There can be very few – if, indeed, any – people with an interest in paranormal phenomena that have not heard of the infamous “Roswell UFO crash” of July 1947. According to the story, it was on the massive Foster Ranch (situated in Lincoln County, and an hour or so from Roswell) that in early July the U.S. military secretly scooped up the remains of a wrecked craft from another world and its dead crew of large-headed, dwarfish pilots. While staff at the Roswell Army Air Field busied themselves by assuring the press that it was all a big mistake, and that nothing stranger than a weather-balloon had fallen to earth, the legend goes that the mangled bodies and the debris were secretly flown to a military base in Dayton, Ohio. Its name was Wright Field. Today, it’s known as Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Wright-Pat’s reputation as the number-one resting place for alien entities with distinctly bad flying skills is legendary. Insiders and whistle-blowers talk about Hangar 18, Building 18, and The Blue Room. All three are supposedly distinctly off-limits rooms, buildings, and underground bunkers where the carefully preserved remains of who knows how many dead extraterrestrials can be found – if one has the correct, high-level security.

It turns out that Puerto Rico had its equivalent: the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. For many years, it acted as the island’s very own Blue Room – allegedly, it’s important to stress! But, so the story went, it wasn’t alien bodies that were cryogenically housed at Roosevelt Roads. Nope: it was a bunch of dead chupacabras. There just might even have been a couple of living ones there, too. So I was told. On one of my trips to Puerto Rico I was not surprised to find that sifting fact from fiction, and legend from rumor, proved to be no easy job when it came to trying to unravel the controversial truth about Roosevelt Roads’ chupacabra stash. It was, however, a job that had to be done. The origins of Roosevelt Roads date back to just one year after the end of the First World War. It was 1919 when the then Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy visited Puerto Rico. That man was none other than a future American president: Franklin D. Roosevelt. The visit was no vacation, however. Roosevelt was there on a secret mission. He was focused on finding a suitable location where a military facility could be constructed, one that could act as a strategic outpost for Uncle Sam in the Caribbean. Roosevelt toured the island, finally pinpointing a northeast town called Ceiba, which was founded back in the 1830s, and that, today, has a population of around 13,000.

At the time, while the creation of such a base – with an airfield – could have been beneficial, it was not perceived as absolutely crucial. Things changed dramatically, however, when a certain Adolf Hitler came to power in 1930s-era Germany. The world was soon to face complete and utter carnage, the likes of which it had never before seen, or since. Steps had to be taken to combat the Nazi threat. One of those steps was the creation of Roosevelt Roads, which began in 1940, one year before the terrible events at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii occurred. Roosevelt Roads ultimately became the biggest U.S. Navy base on the planet and the headquarters of the U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command (NAVSO). It remained so for decades. All that changed, however, in March 2004, when NAVSO was given a new home: the Jacksonville, Florida-based Naval Station Mayport.

Now, with that said, it’s time to take a look at the story of Roosevelt Roads’ role as a top secret storage area for chupacabras. Or, more correctly: an alleged top secret storage area. On our visit to Puerto Rico in July 2004, Jon Downes (the Director of the Center for Fortean Zoology) and I heard a story of a UFO crash in the hills of Canovanas in 1957, one which reportedly, and quickly, led to gross mutations in the local populace. It was not a stand-alone story, however. On his first trek around the island, in 1998, Jon was able to dig into this 1957 event. One of Jon’s sources was a man named Reuben, a Puerto Rican brought up in New York, but who returned to the island as an adult. Arguably, Reuben was Jon’s most significant source, since he personally took Jon and a U.K.-based Channel 4 TV crew to the very spot in Canovanas where, he claimed, the craft from another world slammed into the ground, back in 1957. Jon told me that they came to a big clearing where the path became narrow, and, on one side, disappeared altogether, into a huge saucer-shaped arena. This, according to what Reuben had to say, at least, was where the UFO had crashed. Admittedly, there was a huge indent in the side of the mountain, said Jon. No trees grew there, and it did look as if some huge object had crashed into the mountain, scooping out trees and vegetation and leaving a bare area intermittently covered with patchy grass.

Jon and I had to remember that although the crash report had been around for decades, the chupacabra aspect of the story surfaced specifically post-1995, when the goat-sucking phenomenon began. The chupacabra link to the 1957 crash was fascinating, but it would have been even more fascinating had it surfaced prior to the 1995 outbreak. That it specifically didn’t kept me and Jon mindful of the possibility that this was an elaboration, a new twist, on an old tale – albeit not necessarily a deliberate and deceitful one. There is also a story of a UFO crashing in the heart of the El Yunque rain-forest in February 1984. I know that, because the basics of the account have reached me on three occasions over the past decade. It was early one morning when a large, circular-shaped object slammed into the ground, immediately after flying over the rain forest in a decidedly erratic fashion. To prevent people from learning the truth of the matter, a diversionary tactic was put into place that the UFO was a meteorite. Personnel from NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the CIA were soon on the scene – in part, to scoop up the pummeled body parts of a couple of dead chupacabras, whose lives came to sudden and bloody ends when the alien craft hurtled violently into the forest at high speed. That’s how the story goes, anyway. I mention these cases because there are claims that the bodies recovered from both the 1957 and 1984 incidents were secretly transported to Roosevelt Roads, for study and autopsy, by senior U.S. Navy medical personnel – in a deeply buried, fortified bunker, no less. Reportedly, at least some of the bodies were later taken to an unidentified military base in Florida.

Also of relevance, while I was on Puerto Rico in 2005, with Red Star Films, our guide was filmed talking about a 1990s-era event in which U.S. military forces reportedly captured several extremely vicious Chupacabra in El Yunque. What happened to them, beyond first being held at Roosevelt Roads and then flown on to the United States – in secure cages, aboard a military aircraft – is unknown. Was this all nothing stranger than modern day folklore in the making? Or, could it have been the cold, stark truth? Was Roosevelt Roads really a Puerto Rican equivalent of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s Blue Room? Those questions have yet to be answered. I have to say that in my opinion we’re probably looking at the rumor-mill run wild. I’ll be very pleased to be proved wrong, though!

In April of this year, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) noticed a new impact crater on Mars and it is unlike anything astronomers have ever seen. On a planet with a dusty red surface, the black and blue colors of the new crater definitely stand out, as well as its size and impact waves. In fact, during the thirteen years that the MRO has been observing Mars, they haven’t seen anything as remarkable as this new crater.

NASA’s High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera took the pictures of the crater while it was orbiting the planet at a distance of 158 miles away. While the exact date of the impact is unknown, astronomers believe that it happened between September 2016 and February 2019.

Crater on Mars (not the one recently discovered)

While it’s not uncommon for the Red Planet to get struck by asteroids and comets (more than 200 each year), this one is quite peculiar. Veronica Bray, who is a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Space.com that the newly discovered crater is one of the most impressive that she’s ever seen.

Although the space rock that hit the planet was only around 5 feet wide, it created a crater of around 49 to 53 feet wide. If the five-foot-wide space rock would have come towards Earth, it would have burned up in our atmosphere. It is believed that the rock was probably more solid than normal, as the entire thing hit in one location close to the Martin equator called the Valles Marineris region. Normally, other small space rocks that come into Mars’ atmosphere shatter into much smaller pieces and create a bunch of little craters.

The announcement on the HiRISE website states “What makes this stand out is the darker material exposed beneath the reddish dust.” The darker area in the middle of the crater is where the dust had been pushed to the side and what is exposed is Mars’ rocky surface. Bray explained that the surface below the dust is more than likely basaltic rock and that the blue color in the image could be exposed ice that was hiding underneath. Even though the impact happened near the Martian equator, Bray said that it’s still possible that there could be some ice underneath the dust.

Crater on Mars (not the one recently discovered)

You can see the stunning picture of the black and blue crater here.

We are still learning so much about Mars and this new crater is just one of the many fascinating discoveries on the Red Planet.

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.