Malta – the three-island archipelago in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea — has been ruled by many groups since it was first inhabited around 5200 BCE, including Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Sicilians. However, long before these cultures, it was inhabited by a mysterious prehistoric group that built the world’s only known prehistoric subterranean temple — Hal Saflieni Hypogeum – which was used as a necropolis and where archeologists found a number of elongated skulls … skulls whose origin has never been determined, leaving them open to speculation that their owners were extraterrestrials. Now, for the first time, those elongated skulls will be subjected to intense scientific study with the intention of determining their true origin.

Photograph of the Hypogeum of Ħal-Saflieni made before 1910

“From an examination of the skeletons of the polished-stone age, it appears that the early inhabitants of Malta were a race of long-skulled people of lower medium height, akin to the early people of Egypt, who spread westward along the north coast of Africa, whence some went to Malta and Sicily and others to Sardinia and Spain.”
— NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE January to June, 1920 VOLUME XXXVII

Malta Today announced that the project – called The Sentinels of Ħal Saflieni, Malta: Science Facts versus Science Fiction — will be carried out by Heritage Malta, the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage and Macquarie University of Sydney, Australia. The Hal Saflieni Hypogeum was accidentally discovered in 1902 by construction workers who initially attempted to hide it. Determined to have been used from about 4000 BCE to 2500 BCE, it was excavated by a number of archeologists, including Sir Themistocles “Temi” Zammit, a noted Maltese archeologist, who documented the discovery of around 7,000 skeletons, including many with skulls that were elongated and one that was mysteriously missing a Fossa median – the join that runs along the top of the skull. Unfortunately, the remains crumbled at the touch and only about 20 skulls survived intact.

That’s where the mystery and myth surrounding these remaining elongated skulls deepens. National Geographic was able to examine some and concluded that they were from an entire long-skulled culture. A number of them were put on display in the Archaeological Museum in Valletta, the capital of Malta. In 1985, they were removed from the display by Heritage Malta, the authority responsible for Malta’s prehistoric heritage, and have never been seen in public again. While some say they’ve disappeared, Heritage Malta insists they have been available for scientific research. However, only a handful of people have actually been granted permission. Two were Dr. Anton Mifsud and Dr. Charles Savona Ventura, who published books and articles detailing the skulls’ elongation, abnormally developed temporal partitions, and drilled and swollen occiputs (back of the skull). These are apparently the skulls that will be used in the new analysis.

A physical examination of the skulls will not necessarily resolve other mysteries about their discovery. For example, the papers of the man who first found the site – Emmanuel Magri – have never been published and appear to have disappeared. The original reports of the discovery said there were 33,000 skeletons, not 7,000 – and the latter number was eventually reduced to a mere 100. Of the 20 skulls said to have survived, only six are left. What happened to the others?

Then there are the stories of giant humanoids living in hidden caverns below the already-subterranean Hal Saflieni Hypogeum and the unconfirmed disappearance of 30 children and a teacher on a school tour of the catacombs – whose cries were said to have been heard all over the island.

Let’s hope the new study can solve the origin of the elongated skulls of Malta. As for the other mysteries? Malta obviously knows how to guard its secrets.

In my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, I wrote the following, which will demonstrate how I personally became so embroiled in the matter of the Tim Cooper-era Majestic 12 papers: “It’s a little known fact that in late 2001 Tim Cooper sold all of his voluminous UFO files to Dr. Robert M. Wood. Bob is the father of Ryan Wood, who has spent years researching alleged crashed UFO incidents – all detailed in his book, Majic Eyes Only. It is even less well-known that in the early days of 2002, Bob hired me to spend a week in an Orange County, California-based motel-room, surrounded by all of the thousands upon thousands of pages of Cooper’s voluminous collection of the cosmic sort. The plan was for me to catalog all of the material, to compile each and every piece of it into chronological order, and to summarize the content of each document, every letter, and every Freedom of Information request that Cooper had submitted to government agencies – which is precisely what I did. It was a week in which I most definitely earned my loot. It was also a week that paralleled the infamous story told by Hunter S. Thompson in his classic gonzo saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Whereas Thompson was hunkered down with his whisky, margaritas and shrimp cocktails, for me it was cases of cold beer and club sandwiches.”

Contained in the Cooper files was a document titled UFO Reports and Classified Projects, and which I saw for the first time in that aforementioned Orange County motel-room. It offers a very controversial, non-UFO-themed, explanation for what occurred at Roswell back in July 1947. I doubt that anyone in Ufology – aside from myself, Bob Wood and Tim Cooper – has ever seen the document in its original form. And I do mean “original.” It’s not a photocopy. The relevant extract reads as follows, in relation to 1947-era classified U.S. military programs:

“One of the projects underway at that time incorporated re-entry vehicles containing radium and other radioactive materials combined with biological warfare agents developed by IG Farben for use against allied assault forces in Normandy in 1944. When a V-2 warhead impacted near the town of Corona, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, the warhead did not explode and it and the deadly cargo lay exposed to the elements which forced the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to close off the crash site and a cover story was immediately put out that what was discovered was the remains of a radar tracking target suspended by balloons.”

Of IG Farben, the Holocaust Research Project states: “IG Farben was a German Limited Company that was a conglomerate of eight leading German chemical manufacturers, including Bayer, Hoechst and BASF, which at the time were the largest chemical firms in existence. Prior to the First World War these firms had established a community of interests – Interessengemeinschaft – hence the initials IG which merged into a single company on the 25 December 1925, thus constituting the largest chemical enterprise, in the whole world.”

Britannica.com gets to the heart of the absolute worst part of IG Farben’s “work.” They note: “During World War II, IG Farben established a synthetic oil and rubber plant at Auschwitz in order to take advantage of slave labor; the company also conducted drug experiments on live inmates. After the war several company officials were convicted of war crimes (nine being found guilty of plunder and spoliation of property in occupied territory and four being found guilty of imposing slave labor and inhumane treatment on civilians and prisoners of war).”

Scum? Yep.

It appears – within the pages of the UFO Reports and Classified Projects document that Cooper acquired – that someone wanted to make a connection between the Roswell affair of 1947 and IG Farben. It’s important to note, though, that Timothy Cooper specifically chose not to release this particular document into the public domain. In fact, it may well have been the only allegedly leaked document that he never made public. Why did Cooper choose to keep this report out of the hands of Ufology? I don’t know. Perhaps it was too controversial for even Cooper, which is certainly saying something. What I can state for sure, however, is that had I not found the relevant papers in the voluminous files of Cooper back in 2002, it’s highly doubtful that they would ever have surfaced. Most probably, had Cooper chosen to reveal the document, then it would have likely created a firestorm within Ufology. After all, linking the world’s most famous UFO case with Holocaust-connected IG Farben would have provoked a huge controversy and created even more distrust about the actions of the U.S. Government. If the Russians were behind the UFO Reports and Classified Projects document, as I suspect, then that may well have been the goal.

It seemed for a while as we forged bravely into the 21st century that we were pretty smart. We thought we were figuring out the mysteries of the universe, one after another. Recently, however, there’s been a series of reports that all challenge our model of the universe, which we thought was pretty well figured out. First we find out that the sun is a lot stranger than we think it is, then we find out that the universe is more than a billion years younger than it should be. These both suggest the same thing: we’re not nearly as smart as we think we are.  This is nothing new, of course. The story of humanity is in essence the surfing of the constant realization that we’re pretty dumb all the way to the stars. Which is a neat little trick.

Now there’s a third in the series of assumption defying realizations. The Hubble constant is an astrophysical value that represents the expansion rate of the universe. It was named for Edwin Hubble who, in 1924, discovered that the farther away from Earth a galaxy was, the faster it appeared to be continuing its outward trajectory. In the early 1990’s, a team led by astrophysicist Wendy Freedman calculated the Hubble Constant within 10% of it’s true value, and scientists have been trying to refine that calculation ever since.

The Hubble Space Telescope, also named for Edwin Hubble, was used to calculate the Hubble constant.

And there seems to be a pretty big problem. Wendy Freedman recently recalculated the Hubble Constant using red giant stars as mileposts—red giants are useful because they reach the same brightness late in their evolution and thus make pretty good distance markers. With her new calculation, rently accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal, Wendy Freedman came to an entirely different result than she and her team calculated in the 1990’s. What might this mean? Well, this is just the latest in a series of discoveries related to the age and expansion of the universe that have found serious discrepancies, discrepancies that open up the possibility that something is well and truly broken with physics.

“Alright, I admit it. I don’t understand!”

Wendy Freedman’s red giant method of calculating the Hubble constant was supposed to be a “tie-breaker” between two other competing calculation. Instead it’s a different result entirely. According to Freedman:

“The Hubble constant is the cosmological parameter that sets the absolute scale, size and age of the universe; it is one of the most direct ways we have of quantifying how the universe evolves. The discrepancy that we saw before has not gone away, but this new evidence suggests that the jury is still out on whether there is an immediate and compelling reason to believe that there is something fundamentally flawed in our current model of the universe.”

“Naturally, questions arise as to whether the discrepancy is coming from some aspect that astronomers don’t yet understand about the stars we’re measuring, or whether our cosmological model of the universe is still incomplete. Or maybe both need to be improved upon.”

NASA is launching a brand-new telescope at some point in the mid-2020’s called the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST). This telescope will provide the same resolution as the now-defunct Hubble Space Telescope with 100 times the field of view. Astronomers hope that this new super telescope will show them where the discrepancy lies without making us re-do physics. More likely, it will probably keep showing us just how dumb we are.

Imagine a world where magic existed. In such a world, one might be able to wear a cloak that, once it covered our bodies, rendered us invisible; the likes of things we read about or see in films that include Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Such things will never really exist, at least not from magical means. However, that’s not to say that science won’t eventually be able to achieve similar things. One day, with the use of unique and, at times, almost unearthly composite materials–the likes of which are never found in nature–humans may indeed be able to bring such things as invisibility cloaks into real existence.

In 2018, PhysOrg reported on computer algorithms that were being used to help with the creation of metamaterials; synthetic composite substances that are engineered artificially, and in ways that aren’t typically found in nature. One of the examples they used at that time was already familiar to us:

To achieve invisibility, a metamaterial needs to possess certain optical properties. Specifically, scientists would have to design the material so that they could control how light moves around an object without being reflected or absorbed. This design is possible, but it would take just the right material with just the right structure.

The aforementioned algorithm, created by Yongmin Liu, a professor at Northeastern University, and his team found that using a computer algorithm to create such unnatural composite materials was “much faster and more accurate than previous approaches, paving the way for engineers to design next-generation materials.”

By introducing the algorithm to some 30,000 different sample data sets, it was able to not only learn those relationships, but to expand on them and predict new varieties based on the data.

Fast forward to 2019, where new developments in this burgeoning field are pushing boundaries even further into tomorrow: a multidisciplinary team with the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) have now formalized a system “that allows researchers to choose materials and design photonic structures arbitrarily by using deep learning.”

In layman’s terms, this means they are using artificial intelligence to aid in the creation of new kinds of metamaterials, capable of functions that include invisibility.

“The resulting metamaterials can be utilized in display, security, and military technologies. In this regard, introduction of AI to the design method is expected to make important contributions to the technological development of metamaterials,” PhysOrgreported.

Of the three areas listed above, perhaps the mention of “military technologies” is the most interesting and impactful. It also reminds us of the kinds of “innovations of tomorrow” that were being foreshadowed decades ago, albeit in relation to more speculative lines of thought.

A good example might include an article that appeared in Britain’s Sunday Dispatch in October 1954. In it, a quote from a spokesman with the British War Office stated that “(UFOs) are invisible to the human eye,” and that radar operators frequently detected “fleets” of unidentified—and invisible—objects passing overhead in the mid-afternoon. Any attempts at establishing visible line-of-sight confirmation proved unsuccessful.

“Every time, they have followed the same pattern, always around mid-day. All our radar sets in the area have picked them up,” the article stated. 

This may sound like a description of some rather exotic technology; however, early camouflage techniques were already being developed by around the time of World War I that would allow aircraft to become functionally “invisible” when viewed against the sky at a distance. One 1917 patent application attributed to Mary “Mitty” Taylor Brush proposed a pattern that would be “able to produce a machine which is practically invisible when in the air.” Such techniques, later put into use during wartime, were derived from techniques used in fine art already for centuries.

Modern stealth technology is, of course, far more advanced than this, and although these modern aircraft are generally only “invisible” to radar systems, their incredible speed, sophistication, and maneuverability allows them to often function in ways that almost exceeds any necessity for possessing actual invisibility. 

Nonetheless, if current innovations in metamaterials (helped along by artificial intelligence) are any indication, the aircraft of tomorrow may indeed take such technologies into new and unforeseen places… or for that matter, perhaps into the unseen, period.

The strange story of the alleged UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 – and the recovery of a number of dead “little men” at the site – is a real hotbed of lies, disinformation, and shady characters. Most of those same characters were best avoided by those with dollars to spare. The tale was made infamous in the pages of Frank Scully’s 1950 blockbuster, Behind the Flying Saucers; it was a book which turned out to be a huge seller. Today, the Aztec affair is seen by some ufologists as Roswell’s “little brother.” As its “skeleton in the cupboard” might be a far more apt description, however. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon dismiss the Aztec incident as nothing but a hoax; one which was perpetrated by a shady businessman/conman named Silas Newton. His less-than-shining FBI file can be accessed at the FBI’s website, The Vault.

When it came to stories of aliens from faraway worlds, making money was always the goal for Newton. And the only goal. Along for the ride with Newton was Leo Gebauer. He was the Igor to Newton’s ego-driven Dr. Frankenstein. There is, though, a very interesting and extremely odd aspect to the Newton/Aztec story. It serves to demonstrate how the UFO phenomenon was becoming the tool of manipulative disinformation specialists in the intelligence community. And not just of the Soviet Union. The United States was getting into the strange game, too.

Back in 1998, the late Karl Pflock, ufologist and CIA employee (sometimes at the same time…), was approached by a still-anonymous source who had something very interesting to say about the Aztec caper, and about Newton too. It was a decidedly weird series of revelations that Pflock surely never anticipated receiving. To his dying day, Pflock refused to reveal the name of his informant in the shadows – rumors, however, were that the person may have been a nephew of Silas Newton – but, Pflock did say that all of the lunchtime meetings with his source occurred between July 11 and September 24, 1998 and took place in a restaurant in Bernalillo, New Mexico.

So the story goes, Pflock’s informant had in their hands twenty-seven pages taken, or rather torn, from an old and faded, lined journal. No prizes for guessing who that journal had belonged to. That’s right, sly, old Silas Newton. Pflock was told that Newton had kept multiple journals and diaries not just for years, but for decades. They were jammed with entertaining tales of sexual conquests, of Hollywood starlets, of the fleecing of the rich and the gullible, and of wild adventures across the United States. The outcome of all this? Newton decided, around the turn of the 1970s, that it was right about time for him to write-up his version of the Aztec controversy. It would surely have been a definitive page-turner. Death, however, inconveniently intervened in 1972, when Newton passed away in his mid-eighties. What happened to all of those journals is anyone’s guess.

As for those few pages that Pflock was allowed to see – and to transcribe word for word – they tell a tale of undeniable weirdness. By his own admittance, and a couple of years after the Aztec story surfaced in Frank Scully’s book, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as Pflock carefully and tactfully described it. Those same representatives of the government told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was a complete and bald-faced lie. Utter bullshit, in fact. Incredibly, though, they wanted Newton to keep telling the taleto just about anyone and everyone who would listen. This caused Pflock to ponder on an amazing possibility: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?”

Far more intriguing, though, , is the next question that Pflock posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?” With the Newton revelations in hand, Pflock, no later than 1999, came to believe that back in the early fifties someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military of the United States – and maybe even a swirling combination of all three – wanted the Aztec story further circulated. The purpose: as a means to try and convince the Russians that the U.S. military had acquired, or captured, alien technology. When, in reality, it had no such thing in its possession at all.

For the record, in 2002, when Pflock and I were corresponding regularly on the matter of these particularly curious revelations, he told me that he had been able to confirm who the two men that approached Newton worked for and specifically when their meeting with Newton occurred. The time-frame was late March 1950 and the pair of spooks came from a small group within the CIA. Slightly more than a year later, Pflock learned, that very same group was absorbed into the Psychological Strategy Board. The PSB was…”established by Presidential Directive on April 4, 1951 ‘to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations.’ An abbreviated version of the Presidential Directive was released to the public on June 20, 1951.”

CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia

Having digested the words above, it can be said with a high degree of certainty that those predecessors to the PSB, which Newton was confronted by, would have been the perfect people to have enlisted Newton into their operation mind-fuck. Not only that, in November 1998 Pflock secured a copy of Newton’s will. Having earlier seen Newton’s “scrawling, sprawling” writing up close at that Bernalillo restaurant, Pflock said: “The will unquestionably is in Newton’s hand, and while I’m certainly not a handwriting expert, the comparison left no doubt in my mind that he wrote the journal, too.”

I know just how fascinated Pflock was when it came to the Aztec crash and the claims of Newton and that “highly secret U.S. Government entity.” Pflock and I had been corresponding as far back as the late 1990s, but, I didn’t meet him in person until 2003 – at a UFO gig in the city of Aztec itself. For a number of years, the conference was an annual event. But, no more. When Pflock and I finally met, he near-immediately suggested that we should write an Aztec-themed book. Pflock’s reasoning was that he knew the story very well, and, via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, I had uncovered hundreds upon hundreds of pages of material – chiefly from the FBI – on the Aztec controversy and the players within it. He thought that we would make a good team. Particularly so now that I lived in the U.S. – and specifically in Dallas, Texas, which (in terms of the road-trips that I regularly undertake) is not at all far from New Mexico, where Pflock resided and where the 1948 crash supposedly happened.

As I listened, Pflock told me that his idea was, essentially, to make the book a biography on Newton, but with the Aztec affair being the main thrust of it all. I thought it was a very good idea. Pflock suggested that he prepare a synopsis for his literary agent (this was around a year before I first met my longstanding agent, Lisa Hagan), which is exactly what he did. The book was going to be called Silas the Magnificent: A True Tale of Greed, Credulity, and (Maybe) Government Chicanery and Cover-up in 1950s America. Sadly, the idea collapsed when Pflock fell seriously ill with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He unfortunately died from the effects of ALS on June 5, 2006, at the age of just sixty-three.

Pflock is gone, but the printed synopsis still exists, as do several printed chapters, including one on the matter of the Psychological Strategy Board aspect of all this. It would have made a good book. And, very possibly, it just might have revealed more of the fabricated story of how – and with the help of Silas Newton – American intelligence led the Russians on a wild goose chase and had them believing that U.S. scientists were secretly studying a recovered UFO and its advanced technologies and weapons-systems. If such a plot successfully terrified Soviet intelligence, for the U.S. government it was a job well done.

There’s one more thing that needs to be highlighted on this controversy-saturated saga of a crashed UFO and Silas Newton. On June 24, 1964, Frank Scully, whose 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers, placed the alleged incident firmly under the spotlight, passed away. As the New York Times noted in its obituary on Scully, one day later: “Mr. Scully was labeled a Communist by Congressman Martin Dies, head of the House Un-American Activities Committee. After a stormy two-hour session with the Committee, Mr. Scully was cleared of the charge.”

Yes, Scully was exonerated. It is a fact, though, that sometimes – to use a U.K. term – “mud sticks.” For at least some, including those in the intelligence community, Scully was still seen as a closet communist, regardless of the fact that he had been completely absolved of any kind of guilt. Maybe, those spooks and spies who paid Silas Newton a visit in 1950 were concerned by the possibility that Scully was in cahoots with the Russians. This is, admittedly, speculation and nothing more. But, as I note in my new book, Flying Saucers from the Kremlin, we see flying saucer enthusiasts, communism, and secret government activity rolled into one.