Everything that happens in space is generally considered to be a “first.” While we’ve no confirmed verification of it, there’s probably even been a first sex act in space. What we haven’t had is the first crime in space … until now. The spouse of an astronaut is accusing her of stealing her identity while serving on the International Space Station and using it to illegally access her bank account while the couple is in the process of getting divorced. Who is responsible for policing space? NASA? The FBI? Interpol? The Space Force? Robocop? And who is responsible for handling the ensuing personal scandal that the accusation brought to light? NASA? Dr. Phil? Oprah?

“Just because it’s in space doesn’t mean it’s not subject to law.”

Mark Sundahl, director of the Global Space Law Center at Cleveland State University, told The New York Times he believes this crime in space is unprecedented. The accused is astronaut Anne McClain, who was onboard the ISS from December 3, 2018, to June 24, 2019, and achieved a bit of space notoriety when the first all-female spacewalk she was scheduled to be part of had to be scrapped due to a lack of two spacesuits small enough for women.

Astronaut Anne McClain

The accuser is Summer Worden, a former Air Force intelligence officer, who married McClain in 2014, filed for divorce in 2018 and complained to NASA in 2019 that McClain had sent her threatening emails and accessed her files illegally from space. The complaint was reported last week in The New York Times, effectively outing McClain and making her the first known gay astronaut of either sex. Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, was also gay but that was not revealed until after her death.

“The more we go out there and spend time out there, all the things we do here are going to happen in space.”

Sundahl certainly is right about that, although it appears NASA isn’t too happy about either the alleged identity theft nor the outing. McClain’s attorney says his client did nothing wrong, and the astronaut was interviewed under oath by the inspector general, where she explained that accessing Worden’s bank accounts was something she’s always done while away in order to make sure Worden had the finances available to care for their six-year-old child – a child they’re now fighting for custody of. McClain is a decorated Army pilot who flew over 800 combat hours in Operation Iraqi Freedom and is on a list of candidates NASA is considering to be the first woman on the moon. Worden is a former Air Force intelligence officer, so she should know about breaking into accounts and crimes. This sounds like an epic space crime battle the likes of which has never been fought before. Where will it take place and who will be the judge?

According to a 2014 interview with NASA engineer and instructor Robert Frost, the question first goes to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. In Article VIII of the treaty states that:

“A State Party to the Treaty on whose registry an object launched into outer space is carried shall retain jurisdiction and control over such object, and over any personnel thereof, while in outer space or on a celestial body.”

International Space Station

That governs a spacecraft where all of the crew members are from the nation that launched it. However, the ISS has its own rule because its crew members come from so many different countries. For a crime committed there, we turn to an Intergovernmental Agreement signed by all parties in 1998. With regard to criminal conduct, it states:

“Canada, the European Partner States, Japan, Russia, and the United States may exercise criminal jurisdiction over personnel in or on any flight element who are their respective nationals.”

So the nation of the accused has jurisdiction over him or her. But which court would handle it? Worden filed her complaint with the Federal Trade Commission while McClain works for NASA. Based on how things have been going lately in lower courts, should this case go right to the Supremes?

Or higher? Oprah?

The universe is waiting to find out.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s yet another group of mysterious lights in the sky. Shortly after a group of claimed UFOs were filmed by residents of Cincinnati, and a baffling string of sightings were reported over Wyoming, another group of UFOs has recently been spotted over the Crimean peninsula, which is either in Ukraine or Russia depending on whether you ask Ukraine or Russia, respectively.

Three separate videos of the incident were collected and uploaded to YouTube by the UFO channel The Hidden Underbelly 2.0—check the video out for yourself here. In all three videos, which all look to be shot around dusk, you can see six strange orange lights hanging in the sky, in what looks like a deliberate formation. The three videos all show very different views of the group of lights, but it’s still clear that they are all showing the same thing. This tells us two things: first, that this is an actual group of objects in the sky (seeing as how they’re subject to perspective and all that); and two, that the mysterious lights are fairly low in the sky.

The “UFOs” look to be in an intentional sort of formation. The third video in the group shows this the clearest, as if there are three groups of two lights all circled around a central point.  It’s fairly certain, in fact, that whatever these lights are, there is an intention behind them.

So what are they? Folks in the comments on YouTube videos are usually pretty sure of themselves, so against my better judgement I entertained what they had to say for a minute or two. If it wasn’t definitely aliens, it was definitely flares from the Russian navy. So I looked up some videos of naval flares, including some from Russia, and nothing I could find looked like what was in the video. The color was right, for sure, but the thing about flares is they fall really fast. Flares don’t just hang out in the sky. These lights hang hovered around for a decent amount of time. So they’re probably not flares, and all we’ve learned is that shot-from-the-hip YouTube comments are hot garbage. Which is to say we’ve learned nothing at all.

Don’t worry it’s not aliens. World War III is just going to look really, really cool.

Although, to be fair, it probably does have something to do with the Russian military. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, they have kept a military presence on the peninsula; and according to an article published today by TASS, a Russian news site, the Russian air force just finished up combat exercises in Crimea involving air-to-air combat training against simulated airborne targets. Considering the videos were posted three days ago, there’s a distinct probability that these lights may be those simulated airborne targets.

But, you know, that could be Russia covering up that they’re absolutely lousy with aliens.

Pareidolia: the tendency to interpret a vague stimulus as something known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music.

72°00′ 36.00” S , 168° 34′ 40.00” E: location of what many pareidoliacs see on Google Earth as a gigantic “grey alien face” bulging out of the ice in Antarctica.

Credit: Google Earth

Pity the poor person who finds an amazing likeness of Jesus burnt into their tortilla or toast. They can’t get anyone to pay attention to them now that Google is making satellite images available of the surfaces of the Earth, the Moon and Mars where anyone can piece together enough rocks, shadows and wind-blown sand or snow to see aliens, space ships, giant faces or any number of out-of-place images that put the burnt toast back in the toaster where it can get 15 minutes of flame instead of fame.

The latest example comes from the craggy white surface of Antarctica, where the anonymous owner of the ufo _scandinavia account posted a Google Earth image of what they describe as an “grey alien face.” While one can certainly find evidence of each of those things individually, is it that collectively? And if so, what if anything does it mean?

Credit: Google Earth

“GIGANTICA! Ancient Alien [NEW] Discovery “THE FACE” Antarctica? 2019-2020”

The YouTube channel thirdpahseofmoon managed to fill a 10-minute video (see it here) with as much as they could possibly come up with on the Google Earth image. The comments on the video and on the image posted by ufo_scandanavia are proof that imagination is not dead. On the other hand, if that’s a giant grey alien trying to chew its way to the surface of Antarctica, it definitely is dead. Is it a giant statue? If it is, it puts Mount Rushmore to shame. Or is it a message to future extraterrestrials visiting Earth, like “Kilroy was here”? Maybe the mouth opens and reveals an alien base?

Makes about as much sense as leaving messages with circles in a cornfield or lines in a desert, doesn’t it?

What do YOU think it is?

When the water levels began lowering outside Peraleda de la Mata in Cáceres, Spain, large standing stones revealed themselves in the reservoir. Nicknamed the “Spanish Stonehenge”, the location may have once been the site of ritual worship.

Of the 144 standing stones, several of them are as a tall as two meters high and have serpents engraved on them. The stones were arranged in a circular shape (just like Stonehenge), but nobody knows why they were put there in the first place or by whom.

Just like England’s Stonehenge (pictured here), some of the stones from the Spanish Stonehenge are two meters tall

It is believed that the site was created in the second and third millennia BC and was used as a sun temple on the banks of the River Tagus as well as a burial ground. “The site would have been created over thousands of years, using granite transported from kilometers away,” local official Angel Castaño stated to The Local. As for its purpose, Castaño explained, “They seemed to have a religious but also economic purpose, being at one of the few points of the river where it was possible to cross,” adding, “So it was sort of a trading hub.”

Nobody has seen the site for nearly six decades since it was submerged under water in 1963 after the construction of a dam made a reservoir. But with no rain, warm weather, and water extraction creating a drought in the area, the water levels lowered so much that the “Spanish Stonehenge” has re-emerged after hiding under water for many years. “We grew up hearing about the legend of the treasure hidden beneath the lake and now we finally get to view them” Castaño said. He also mentioned that while there may possibly be treasures hidden underneath the stones, just witnessing the stones themselves is enough of a treasure.

(Not an illustration of the Spanish Stonehenge)

Castaño and a group of locals are currently trying to preserve the site before it gets submerged under water again by campaigning to have the stones moved to another location on dry land. “If we miss this chance it could be years before they are revealed again,” Castaño insisted, adding, “And the stones, which are granite and therefore porous, are already showing signs of erosion and cracking, so if we don’t act now it could be too late.” They certainly have a valid point, as the last time the site was witnessed (until now) was 56 years ago. You can see pictures here of the “Spanish Stonehenge”.

With the pace of everyday life in the modern world, it can become easy to forget the more fundamental questions we have about who we are, and what it means to be a part of the great enigma that is humankind.

To borrow the words of historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, “As evolution slowly grinds out species, who’s human? Who’s to say? It is tempting to reserve the term human for ourselves—members of the species we call Homo sapiens.” Along similar lines, the late Philip Adler of East Carolina University acknowledged that “Paleoanthropologists continue to dig up specimens that challenge believers in human uniqueness,” and cause us to have to consider what, precisely, it means to be “human.” 

Indeed, with time we may have to drastically rethink the uniqueness of humans in relation to the long line of ongoing hominin discoveries. A more remote possibility—but one which may nonetheless prove to be true—is the discovery of new hominin types that may have existed far more recently, or which might even still exist in small numbers today; a tantalizing, though increasingly unlikely prospect as time goes on. Technologies that are ever-steadily mapping remote corners of the world, in addition to issues like climate change, deforestation, population growth, and other environmental issues would no doubt present considerations in terms of the discovery of any new species, let alone those that might be large mammals resembling humans.

Nonetheless, several archaeological discoveries in recent years do suggest that unique kinds of early humans probably did, at very least, exist more recently than once believed.

As far back as 1979, a discovery was made in a cave in the Guanxi region of China that, decades later, would prove to be of remarkable significance in our broader understanding of human ancestry and the curious persistence of hominid types into recent times. Found at Longlin Cave a similar discovery was made one decade later at the Red Deer Cave site in Yunnan Province, China.

Charcoal remnants extracted from the same areas the fossils were tested in 2012, and found to be of remarkably recent ages: the fossils from Red Deer Cave yielded dates of between 14,300 and 12,600 years, while the earlier Longlin Cave discovery dated to even more recently at around 11,500 years ago.

Partial skull (reconstructed) found in Longlin cave in 1979

(Credit: PLOS One, Wikimedia Commons).

Named after the Red Deer Cave, which became the type site for the discoveries, this mysterious group of hominins bore a number of unique features that seem to place them in between modern humans and those of an earlier archaic variety. With the prevalence of Denisovan DNA remnants that exist among human populations in Southeast Asia, it has been proposed that the Red Deer Cave people might have been human-Denisovan hybrids.

The remains bear remarkable similarities to early archaic human types such as Homo erectus; however, since attempts at extracting DNA from the Red Deer Cave fossils have proven unsuccessful thus far, anthropologists have been at odds over whether to classify these as a new species.

Mandibles recovered from Red Deer Cave in Yunnan Province, China in 1989.

(Credit: PLOS One, Wikimedia Commons).

Opinions on the matter are wide and varied. Darren Curnoe, and evolutionary biologist with the University of New South Wales, Australia, gave an enthusiastic statement on the discovery to National Geographic in 2012.

“We have discovered a new population of prehistoric humans whose skulls are an unusual mosaic of primitive features, like those seen in our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago… In short, they’re anatomically unique among all members of the human evolutionary tree.”

Alternatively, some critics have argued that the fossils may simply be modern humans with an odd appearance.

Erik Trinkaus, Professor Emeritus of Physical Anthropology at Washington University in Saint Louis, called the discovery “an unfortunate over-interpretation and misinterpretation of robust early modern humans, probably with affinities to modern Melanesians,” stating that the finds were “nothing extraordinary.”

While attempts at gathering genetic information about the Red Deer Cave people have proven unsuccessful so far, could there actually be evidence for similar human relatives in our own DNA?

Recent genomic studies also seem to point to mysterious archaic human types that can also be traced in modern human DNA, but which remain unknown in the archaeological record. In other words, we can prove that in addition to Neanderthals and Denisovans, there are at least two other unknown archaic human types that anatomically modern humans met, lived alongside, and even interbred with within the last several tens of thousands of years.

Homo habilis skull reconstruction, which has been compared to certain features present with the Red Deer Cave specimens

(Public Domain).

Recently, I reported on a study published in the journal PNASwhich detailed genetic evidence for two unrecognized hominin species that existed in Asia. According to the study’s authors:

“At least 3 different hominin groups appear to have been involved in Asia, of which only the Denisovans are currently known. Several interbreeding events are inferred to have taken place east of Wallace’s Line, consistent with archaeological evidence of widespread and early hominin presence in the area.”

In other words, if this recent DNA evidence is any indication, we’re already certain there are indeed “missing links” in our evolutionary past, waiting to be corroborated in the fossil record.

Whether those fossils will be found or not, and later corroborated with evidence found in DNA remains to be seen. However, it is clear enough already from the data discussed here that there are plenty of mysteries about humanity’s past to keep us busy for some time to come.