A well known, and very unique quality of certain ocean life is its propensity to produce eerie illumination, which can light up the deep in what range from faint glows, to colorful light shows. Such bioluminescence ranges from plankton and other maritime minutiae that flash in quick, propulsive little blasts of light barely visible to the naked eye, to random–and remarkable–kaleidoscopic light shows rippling across the ocean surface.

Such phenomena include, but are not limited to stories like those of colorful “spinning wheels” of light observed in various regions of the ocean, as I’ve detailed previously here at Mysterious Universe. 

An account given of one such display described that a colorful show of spinning wheels of light, which was later discussed by N.J. Greig in an issue of the journal Marine Observer in 1996. “They were all about 3 meters in diameter and changed both size and shape while flashing intensely,” the report stated.

However, “by (6 PM local time) the effect had completely stopped on the starboard side, and only the pulsating rings were left on the port side and, with these, the intensity of the light reduced until (6:22) when there was nothing more to observe.”

Such light shows are uncommon, but not particularly unique in maritime literature from over the years. In fact, they are not even unique to the Strait of Hormuz, where the report outlined above occurred in May of 1996. In fact, just months earlier on the date of October 3, 1995, a similar strange “light show” was observed by the crew aboard the M.V. Chilham Castle, which was sailing from Karachi to Kuwait when it observed a series of perplexing illuminations emanating from below the surface.

The crew aboard the vessel gave the following report of the incident, which was subsequently published, as with previous similar oceanic anomalies, in the Marine Observer in 1996:

“At about 2240 UTC, the observers saw a strange effect in the sea stretching for approximately 100 m from the parallel body. It was a soft white light, almost strobe-like in character that pulsed irregularly. The light was bright enough to illuminate the wheelhouse deckhead and seemed to emanate from below the water, almost as if something was shining a spotlight upwards, shimmering and twirling: psychedelic projections of the 1960s were brought to mind. Curiously, the wash from the bow was not illuminated and appeared normal, likewise the wake.”

The phenomenon lasted for 6 or 7 minutes, faded, and then reappeared briefly. The night was clear and the visibility excellent.

On a rather eerie note, the description of the light seeming “to emanate from below the water, almost as if something was shining a spotlight upwards” is worth noting in the description, whether or not the display in question had some kind of technological origin.

It is certainly not impossible that such phenomena may have a natural origin. Around the same time, Discover Magazine reported on the discovery of novel forms of aquatic life that congregate around volcanic vents deep within the ocean. “At midocean ridges,” they reported, “where new ocean floor rises up as molten rock from Earth’s interior, where cold seawater mixes with the rising magma and, heated to 650 degrees, spews back up through chimney-shaped hydrothermal vents, researchers stumbled across bustling ecosystems.”

Odd lights photographed over the North Pacific in 2014 by Dutch pilot JPC van Heijst

(Credit: JPC van Heijst).

However, such molten meetings between lava vents and seawater would be an awkward explanation for the kinds of luminous curiosities that appear below the surface of various regions of our oceans, as seen from the surface by nighttime crews in the right place and right time.  Still, lava has been offered as an explanation in the past when unusual illuminations have appeared on the ocean surface, as with an incident in 2014 where a Dutch pilot photographed an unusual light display on the North Pacific ocean.

It may be that we’re a long way off from determining what, precisely, the source of all of the ocean’s many strange and colorful “light shows” could be. Whether some natural phenomenon already well known to science, or something else altogether, such illuminations provide just another example of the many beautiful little oddities planet Earth still has to offer.

In early March 1997, an eyeopening feature appeared in the pages of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper. The title of the feature was “Secret US spyplane crash may be kept under wraps.” The feature included the following words: “A top-secret United States spyplane which flies on the edge of space at five times the speed of sound crashed at the British experimental airbase at Boscombe Down, Hampshire, in September 1994, according to a report in a leading military aviation journal. The SAS [Special Air Service], the report said, was scrambled to throw a cordon round the wreckage, which was flown back to the U.S. two days later. The hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, called Astra or Aurora, is believed to have been developed in the 1980s as a secret U.S. government ‘black programme.’”

Attempts were made to try and diffuse the controversy that surrounded this curious affair, with claims from the military that nothing but a malfunctioning Tornado airplane was the culprit. The U.K.’s National Archives prepared this statement: “…the only flying that took place that night was the launch of two Royal navy Sea King helicopters in support of an exercise. Claims that members of the public were turned away by police roadblocks may have arisen from some confusion over dates. On August 12, 1994 a Tornado participating in a trial made an emergency landing there after the decoy target under trial failed to jettison. The Tornado landed with a trailing 375 ft steel cable and, for safety reasons, roads close to Boscombe Down were closed while the aircraft passed overhead. We are aware of press reports regarding an aircraft known as ‘Aurora’. The Ministry of Defense has no knowledge of any US aircraft with this designation operating in UK airspace. The existence of such a programme would, in any case, be a matter for the US Government to confirm.”

Note that the incident occurred in September 1994 (its 25th anniversary looms, as per the title of this article…), but the National Archives claimed it had occurred in August 1994. Maybe it really was all down to a Tornado. Perhaps it was something much weirder. Possibly , something that may actually have been flying around the U.K. countryside for a long time. Since the 1980s, sightings of large, triangular-shaped UFOs, usually described as being black in color, making a low humming noise, and very often with rounded rather than angled corners, have been reported throughout the world. The sheer proliferation of such reports has led some ufological commentators to strongly suspect that the Flying Triangles (as they have come to be known) are prime examples of still-classified aircraft, namely, the Aurora. It was one single wave of encounters in the U.K., in early 1993, which ultimately led senior military and defense personnel to liaise with their American counterparts to try and determine, once and for all, if the FTs are the Aurora or if they have extraterrestrial origins. The story comes from one of those at the forefront of the study into the aforementioned sightings: Nick Pope, who, for three years (1991-1994), investigated UFO incidents for the Ministry of Defense.

I’ll share with you the words Pope made to me in a 1997 interview: “I arrived at the office at about 8:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. on the morning of March 31, 1993, and my telephone was ringing. I picked it up and there was a police officer on the other end making a UFO report. Now, he was based in Devon [England] and told me an account of an incident that had taken place in the early hours of that particular day when he and a colleague who had been on night patrol saw a triangular-shaped UFO at fairly-high altitude. He said that the motion was fairly steady and that there were lights at the edges with a fainter light in the middle. To me, this was already a description that was becoming quite familiar both from one or two reports that I’d received at the Ministry of Defense over the years and from my own study and research into the UFO literature. In other words, I was aware that this was a commonly reported shape for a UFO.”

“I was also quite pleased to get a report from a police officer. I won’t say that it was rare, but it was slightly unusual to have reports from trained observers like police and military. I would say that, of the reports I received in my time at the UFO desk, less than five per cent came from, collectively, pilots, military officers and the police. I had spoken, socially, to numerous Royal Air Force pilots who’d had personal sightings, but who had never reported them for fear of ridicule. But that police report was very much the first of many that came in that day and over the next week or so. When taken together, the sightings described took place in a range of times – the earliest was about 11-11.30 p.m. on the evening of the 30^th and the latest was about 1.45 a.m. in the early hours of the 31^st. What was it precisely that made the police officer’s report stand out?  He said to me: ‘I’ve been on night patrols for years, but I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.’ Well, reports such as this came through thick and fast over the course of the next week or so; more and more reports came in from police stations, the public and local RAF stations. In fact, I would say that the total number of reports easily exceeded one hundred.”

It is clear from what Pope has to say that there were three reports in particular that stood out more than any other – the first of which concerned a family based in Rugeley, Staffordshire, England, who had viewed a remarkable aerial vehicle near the sprawling forest that is Cannock Chase. Pope reveals the facts: “This report was brought to my attention by the Community Relations Office at RAF Cosford [Shropshire]. The report had come direct from the family and sounded particularly interesting because, unlike some of the other sightings, this one was of an object flying at very low level. There had been a family gathering and several members of the family were out on the drive – really just saying goodbye to their relatives who were about to drive off. Suddenly, this large, triangular-shaped craft flew over them very, very slowly. This was a flat triangle, with a light in each corner and a larger light in the direct centre of the underside of the craft.

“But there was something else that I’d come across in my investigations that was also present in the Rugeley case,” says Pope. “This was a low-frequency humming sound coming from the UFO; a humming that they actually described as being quite unpleasant. Imagine standing in front of the speakers at a pop concert and almost feeling the sound as well as hearing it – that was the effect that they reported. Well, they were so excited and overwhelmed that two of them leapt into the car to give chase! As they did so, they came to a point where they thought the UFO was so low that it must have come down in a nearby field. Well, they parked the car, jumped out and looked around. But there was absolutely nothing there; the UFO had gone.

“The two most significant reports began at RAF Cosford shortly after the encounter at Rugeley. This was definitely the highlight and was one of the best sighting reports I received in my entire posting. The report itself came from a guard patrol at Cosford. They were on duty manning entrance points, checking the perimeter fence and such like. All the members of the patrol saw the UFO and, again, the description was pretty much the same as most of the others. In this case, though, the UFO was at medium-to-high altitude. Remember that these witnesses were people who see in a normal course of business all sorts of aircraft activity, meteorites, fireballs and so on, and they considered it absolutely out of the ordinary.

“They didn’t make a standard report: what they did was to submit an actual 2-3 page report which went up their chain of command and then the report was forwarded on to me. In that report, they stated that the UFO passed directly over the base and that this was of particular concern to them. They made immediate checks with various Air Traffic Control radar centres but nothing appeared on the screens. It was this factor that made them particularly keen to make an official report. This was at around 1.00 a.m. They noticed that this Flying Triangle was heading on a direct line for RAF Shawbury, which is some twelve to fifteen miles on. Now, the main concern of the Cosford patrol was to alert Shawbury that the UFO was coming their way; but they also wanted confirmation that they weren’t having a mass hallucination. They took a decision to call Shawbury and this was answered by the Meteorological Officer. You have to realize that at that time there was literally just a skeleton staff operating, so the Met. Officer was, essentially, on his own. So, he took a decision to go outside, look in the direction of RAF Cosford and see what he could see.

“Sure enough, he could see this light coming towards him and it got closer and closer and lower and lower. Next thing, he was looking at this massive, triangular-shaped craft flying at what was a height of no more than two hundred feet, just to the side of the base and only about two hundred feet from the perimeter fence. His quote to me was that the UFO’s size was midway between that of a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Now, he had eight years’ worth of experience with the Royal Air Force, and a Met. Officer is generally much better qualified than most for looking at things in the night sky. And there were other factors too: like the family in Rugeley, he heard this most unpleasant low-frequency hum; but unlike their experience, he saw the craft fire a beam of light down to the ground. He felt that it was something like a laser beam or a searchlight. The light was tracking very rapidly back and forth and sweeping one of the fields adjacent to the base.

“He also said – and he admitted this was speculation – that it was as if the UFO was looking for something. Now, the speed of the UFO was extremely slow – no more than twenty or thirty miles per hour, which in itself is quite extraordinary. As far as the description is concerned, he said that it was fairly featureless – a sort of flat, triangular-shaped craft, or possibly a bit more diamond-shaped. But if all the descriptions had been identical I would have been surprised. He said that the beam of light retracted into the craft, which then seemed to gain a little bit of height. But then, in an absolute instant, the UFO moved from a speed of about twenty or thirty miles per hour to a speed of several hundreds of miles per hour – if not thousands! It just suddenly moved off to the horizon and then out of sight in no more than a second or so – and there was no sonic boom.”

The mystery of what came down in 1994 lives on. And the anniversary will soon be right around the corner.

A recent spate of black helicopter sightings over Washington D.C. has had people in the nation’s capital talking; however, there’s no cause for alarm according to the Pentagon, who says the increased presence of military aircraft is part of a secret U.S. Army mission.

The classified program was partly revealed after funding requests by the Pentagon appeared in the Defense Department’s annual reprogram request to Congress.

The program, first reported by Bloomberg, is described as a mission involving the use of several Black Hawk helicopters to be used in missions over Washington. Both active-duty servicemen and women, as well as reserve units, are participating.

“The Army needs $1.55 million shifted for maintenance of 10 UH-60 Black Hawks, for aircrews and for travel in a mission that includes active-duty and reserve troops,” The Hill also reported.

According to a summary from the Congressional Research Service, “In the United States Code and annual authorization and appropriations acts, Congress provides the Department of Defense (DOD) limited authority to obligate funds for purposes other than originally approved.”

“These authorities allow the department to transfer or reprogram funds,” the CRS summary states. “A transfer involves shifting funds from one appropriations account to another, while a reprogramming involves shifting funds within the same account.”

Falling under Title 10, Section 2214, of the United States Code, the DOD is allowed “to transfer amounts in working capital funds or to transfer amounts provided in appropriation Acts for military functions of the Department of Defense (other than military construction).” 

This is all fairly commonplace in defense spending circles, where changes in circumstances that have relevance to financial or operational conditions can cause a flux in the budgetary plans for the DOD. Frequent issues that can account for these budgetary changes might include costs associated with combat training, weapons systems, medical facilities, or other similar situations. In addition to costs, there are occasionally savings that can result from such things as canceled programs or other unexpected events where budget allocation does not end up being used.

In either case, the Department of Defense has the ability to transfer or “reprogram” funding, under the authority provided by Congress, in order to adjust to these changes in their annual budget, and in response to necessities presented out of concern for national security.

In the case of the current mission being represented by the UH-60 Black Hawk flights over Washington, “the Army will not be able to perform this classified mission” without additional funding the DOD has requested, as reported in the Pentagon’s recent funding requests.

Some commenters online expressed amusement over the new details about the Army’s “secret” program. “My brother lives there and I sent him this article and he was laughing when he called me because he said they do this every summer,” one user noted.

“I’ve actually noticed a ramp-up since late 2016 / early 2017,” another commenter wrote. “I walk along the river in Georgetown frequently with the dog, and it’s become annoyingly common to spot helicopters running up/down the Potomac or their other favorite – veering off and heading up Rock Creek at a low altitude… no idea where they’re headed from there, though I assume either the Naval Observatory or maybe cut over towards the White House?”

Apart from an acknowledgment of the program, the Pentagon has had very little to say. In a statement provided to Bloomberg, the operation began sometime after last October–the beginning of the current fiscal year–and that the ultimate duration of the mission is still undetermined. There was no additional information provided about the scope of the mission, or what in the nation’s capital it might pertain to.

Can’t nobody tell me nothin’
You can’t tell me nothin’
Can’t nobody tell me nothin’
You can’t tell me nothin’

Most people not living in a cave will recognize these lyrics from the hugely popular country rap song ‘Old Town Road’ by rapper Lil Nas X, but they could just as easily be the words of people planning to participate in the ‘Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us’ event in defiance of warnings by the US Air Force ,Area 51 guru Bob Lazar and many others who think it’s a bad idea. Lil Nas X seems to be with the stormers as he’s released an animated video set to the music of his hit song that shows him and some other country singers storming to Area 51 on their horses. Not only that, Lil Nas X has offered to perform at the event. Will this give the movement some much-needed legitimacy in the wake of the admission by its ‘organizer’ that it was all a joke?

“i got y’all for free! let’s do this shit.”

That was the rapper’s response on Twitter when he heard about a GoFundMe set up to raise money to bring him to the September 20th event. The fundraiser was inspired by the animated video (watch it here) of Lil Nas X, Billy Ray Cyrus, Young Thug and Mason Ramsey on horseback heading to Area 51. The video shows them dealing with soldiers and encountering green aliens inside. Watch carefully and you’ll see actor Keanu Reeves, also a fan of the event, making his trip to the base in the ‘recommended’ way.

This isn’t the recommended way to storm Area 51

“We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.”

The original ‘Storm Area 51’ Facebook page has its own animation connection – ‘Naruto’ Uzumaki is a fictional character in the Japanese anime and manga series Naruto who apparently can outrun bullets by sprinting in the arms-flailing -backwards style Reeves’ animated character imitates.

I been in the valley
You ain’t been up off that porch, now

Is Lil Nas X issuing a call to Storm Area 51? If he inspires you to get off your porch and go, experts advise you to bring along bug spray, snake repellent, proper clothing, water, bail money and the number of a good lawyer. Is he really planning to perform there? Time will tell. If Lil Nas X is just trying to promote the song and keep in on the charts so it can become the longest-running #1 song ever, he’s doing a good job of that too.

No matter what you think he’s doing, you already know his response:

Can’t nobody tell me nothin’
You can’t tell me nothin’

Hey Storm the Bermuda Triangle and Storm Loch Ness — do YOU have your own rapper and animated video?

“Crop circles” are the popular name for a variety of artful assault on agricultural properties, which take the form of large-scale, complex patterns that appear mostly in wheat fields.

Occasionally cropping up (no pun intended) from time to time, the proponents of a paranormal theory behind their occurrence argue that large, intricate patterns like these couldn’t be made by humans; at least not in the short amount of time between sundown and sunrise during which they appear. It is an argument that has caused the circles to remain one of the more controversial sub-items in the broader UFO debate over the years. 

It is often claimed that crop circles have been reported for centuries, owing to a 1678 woodcut illustration depicting a “mowing devil,” which has been borrowed and appropriated into the modern mythos. Historians argue, however, that the mowing devil of the 17th century has nothing to do with modern crop circles, nor ideas about the supernatural forces behind their creation.

The Dreaded “Mowing Devil”: Why would anyone protest a devil appearing and offering to mow their yard for them?

Other accounts say that crop circles didn’t appear until the last few decades, the earliest report involving a witness who claimed to have seen a flying saucer rising over a field where the circle was later found (early reports of similar UFO landing sites were given the rather humorous nickname of “saucer nests”).

The true origins of crop circles might be a perplexing mystery indeed, if not for the fact that it is widely known today just how easily they can be produced by small—but highly coordinated—groups of individuals. Each year, a number of professional “crop circlers” that take to the fields, particularly in various parts of the United Kingdom, producing these dazzling displays under cover of darkness.

I recall mentioning the subject to a friend in South London a number of years ago (and one, I will note, with an appreciation for the more “mystical” aspects of life). When I asked his opinion on the crop circle mystery, he chuckled knowingly, advising me that he had actually met many of the makers of these circles.

“It’s fairly well known,” he told me at the time. “Although nobody really talks about it.” They’re a lot like graffiti, in other words, or any other kind of public art that is made quietly, in the dark, and below the radar.

And many residents—farmers in particular—consider them a menace.

The problem reached critical mass in the summer of 2017, when Wiltshire police issued a warning to future crop circlers, advising that it was destruction of property to depress any portions of crops grown in area fields, which is punishable under the law.

“A spokesman said creating a crop circle was criminal damage and an offence,” the BBC reported in 2017. “Damage caused means a loss in revenue to the farmer and landowner.”

One farmer, Tim Carson, said crop circles had caused £120,000 in damages to wheat, which could not be harvested after being flattened under the circles.

Close up of flattened area in crop-circle

(credit: Wikimedia Commons).

While the mechanism behind these elaborate, and often destructive displays in the United Kingdom is pretty well understood, that isn’t to say there haven’t been circumstanced that involved genuinely strange alterations to vegetation similar to the “crop circle” effect.

An unusual incident was described in 1992 by Y-H. Ohtsuki, a Tokyo-based physicist at Waseda University, Tokyo, who wrote for the British Journal of Meteorology about a large circular depression that appeared in a field on the property of a Radio Nippon transmitting station in Tokyo. However, this wasn’t your everyday kind of crop circle report: in this case, the circle appeared within a doubly-fenced compound, and reportedly occurred coinciding with instrumental anomalies that were logged at the station at the time of its apparent creation.

According to Ohtsuki’s account:

“It was the night of 31 August 1991 when the survey protection equipment (electromagnetic-noise warning detector) of the transmitting system of the Radio Nippon station in Kisarazu, Chiba prefecture, worked seventeen times during 40 minutes from 2.00 a.m. (that is, on 1 September). This is a wholly abnormal occurrence because the survey protection goes off only once a week on average.

“Next morning one of the staff discovered a 10-metre circle in the doubly-fenced ground of the Radio Nippon station. The grass in the ground was pushed down, but without leaving a clear spiral mark. The ground area is approximately 20,000 m2 , and three antenna towers are located in the ground. The fences are formed by 2.5-m-high wire netting and the station was watching for 24 hours. There were only two men in the station, and they were in a watching room for eight hours from 10.00 p.m. to 6.00 a.m.”

“Moreover,” Ohtsuki added, “I can add that neither of the men had ever heard of the circles effect at that time, so that after the discovery of the grass circle the next day they did not report it for 40 days. By the way, there are no roads or railway which a hoaxer could have used to approach by car or train.”

“This shows that the circles effect is not simply a matter of hoaxing,” Ohtsuki concluded.

What Ohtsuki describes seems far less elaborate than the annual displays that appear in Wiltshire fields every year. Is it possible that there are indeed other mechanisms—natural or otherwise—that might account for the appearances of flattened areas in fields in such a way, and further, that such natural formations could have even served as the inspiration behind the modern, and far more intricate crop circles that are made today?