While the quest to perform the world’s first successful human head transplant seems to have stalled, a man with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease (MND) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is set to become the world’s first ‘full cyborg’, saving him from a life of full paralysis. Will it work?

“I’m about to be turned into Peter 2.0. And when I say ‘Peter 2.0’, I mean ‘a Cyborg’. And when I say ‘Cyborg’, I don’t just mean any old cyborg, you understand, but by far the most advanced human cybernetic organism ever created in 13.8 billion years. I’m scheduled to become the world’s very first full Cyborg. Almost everything about me is going to be irreversibly changed – body and brain.”

Dr Peter Scott-Morgan 

(Image: @DrScottMorgan /Twitter)

Dr Peter Scott-Morgan might also be called Stephen Hawking 2.0. Hawking also had ALS and lived far longer than most people with the disease. His genius, celebrity status and profits from books allowed him to test and use advanced tools such as a speech-generating device. Sixty-one-year-old Dr. Scott-Morgan learned of his disease much later in life than Hawking (just two years ago) and his knowledge and status as a world-renowned roboticist gave him the ideas and connections to conceive and begin to implement a radical combination of flesh and metal that will turn him into cyborg that is “part hardware, part wetware, part digital, part analogue.” All that will be left of the physical Scott-Morgan is part of his brain — the wetware.

Morgan’s website details his life and what happened after his ALS diagnosis. While he has already been using a state-of-the-art wheelchair that allows him to stand, lie flat and hit high speeds, the first alteration of his body was to have a colostomy for his bowels, a catheter for his bladder and a feeding tube directly into his stomach that eliminate his need to eat or go to the toilet. The first real cyborg operation occurred on October 10th when he solved the breathing problem that kills most people with ALS.

“So he did some more research and found that people with throat cancer sometimes undergo a laryngectomy, in which the oesophagus and trachea are separated. The good news? Nothing that’s not meant to be in his lungs will get into his lungs. The bad news? He will no longer be able to speak.”

He created a remarkably life-like avatar of his face before he lost any muscle 

(Image: Embody Digital/Youtube)

Well, bad news for a little while. Scott-Morgan designed an avatar of his face that will duplicate a full range of facial expressions. Next, he teamed with tech companies to replace Hawking’s eye-controlled speech-generator with an AI generator that will learn a variety of responses connected to appropriate facial expressions and vocal inflections that will give emotion to the voice that was revolutionary yet robotic for Hawking.

“When somebody walks into the room, the AI will listen to what they say to me and suggest different options. ‘Wonderful to see you!’ ‘How was your trip?’ ‘You’re looking good!’ And within two seconds I can carry on a spontaneous conversation.”

The avatar also knows what you’re thinking … how is Scott-Morgan paying for all of this leading-edge technology? He says many of the companies are working with him for free and will open-source the technology when it’s completed.

If Peter Scott-Morgan reaches his goal of becoming the first real human cyborg, freed from a body destroyed by a debilitating disease, his story will undoubtedly be made into a feel-good high-tech movie, complete with a romance – Scott-Morgan is supported by his longtime gay partner, Francis. In fact, in an interview with TIME, Scott-Morgan has already written the movie’s ending.

“Here I am, trapped only because of the physical limitations of my body. You imagine how liberating it will be to spend maybe most of my time in virtual reality. Really, really good virtual reality. And suddenly I can walk again. I can fly. I can be anywhere I want to be. And so can you. You can join me. We can explore universes that don’t exist. This is for all of us. I just get the chance to go to some of the places first. But one day, you’ll be there, too.”

Bring plenty of tissues.

When looking at accounts of supposed alien encounters, it is hard not imagine that one is about to take a dive into some pretty strange stuff. By its very nature this phenomenon is beyond the norm, and of course about as weird as it gets. Yet, among the many reports of people coming into contact with supposed extraterrestrial beings there are some that stand out as even stranger than the rest, and such cases are not particularly rare, it seems. Here we will look at a selection of some of the most off-the-wall, bonkers cases of purported alien contact there are, and see just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

One incredibly odd and not a little gross account of a bizarre alien encounter supposedly occurred in 1960 in the region of Yssandon, France. On this evening a Mr. and Mrs. Plumauzille were driving along a rural road at around 11 PM when they noticed a fuzzy red light floating above the tree tops only about 100 yards away from them. It was a most unusual sight, and they stopped the car to stare at it for a few moments before some movement caught their attention near the vehicle off to the side of the road. Thinking it was maybe some sort of wild animal they looked to the source of the movement, but this would prove to be no ordinary wildlife.

There to the right of the road and frosted with the glow of the headlights they could see an eery grey-brown, slimy blob-like thing about the size of a sack of potatoes throbbing and pulsating as if alive. It then proved that it indeed was animate, as it proceeded to sort of contract and expand to move itself along across the road, with rippling and movement under its slimy exterior giving the impression of “an animal trapped in a transparent plastic bag,” a nightmarish approximation of life, and it was described as generally looking almost like a giant maggot. As this outlandish creature flopped its way across the road they then noticed several other similar entities, smaller than the first, writhing and whipping around in the grass by the side of the road. This was unsettling enough that the couple decided to get out of there, and it is unclear just what they saw or if it had any connection to the weird UFO in the sky that had originally caught their attention. The case of the “Maggots of Yssandon” has become a rather popular one in French UFOlogy and has made the rounds in many collections of alien encounters over the years, and it remains a baffling head-scratcher.

From the 1950s we have another very weird encounter reported by the renowned UFOlogist and author Albert K. Bender, which he related in his 1962 book Flying Saucers and the Three Men. He claims that it all started in March of 1953 with what appeared to be more of a haunting than anything else, with objects moving on their own, lights and electronics turning on and off by themselves, and various poltergeist-like activity all over his home over the course of a few days, often accompanied by a strange smell like burning Sulphur. He would claim that he investigated the activity and he had then made actual telepathic contact with an entity that ominously warned him, “Please be advised to discontinue delving into the mysteries of the universe. We will make an appearance if you disobey.” As odd as this was, things would get absolutely bonkers from there.

He says that he recorded this all in a notebook, but that this notebook would mysteriously vanish from a locked box, shortly after which things would escalate. One evening he says he awoke to find three humanoid figures standing in his bedroom, wearing robes “like clergymen,” and possessing bright glowing eyes. He says that they concealed themselves under their garments, but that in fact they looked like “hideous monsters” underneath, and these creatures apparently teleported him away to some sort of facility, which they claimed was under Antarctica. The entities then supposedly explained to Bender that they were trying to extract a crucial chemical that they needed from seawater, and that they wished to keep their activities secret. Only when they left this planet was he to come forward with the report. Several more visits to the secret base and massages from aliens in the form of beautiful women (?) later, they left and he then wrote about it all in a book that was largely ignored when it came out. What in the world was going on here?

From the 1960s we have a few accounts that also stand out with their extreme oddness. In November of 1963 a series of strange events unfolded in the area of Kent, England, when two local boys, a 17-year-old John Flaxton and 18-year-old Mervyn Hutchinson, claimed that they one evening saw a glowing orb of light hovering over a rural field. After watching the scintillating orb for a few minutes it allegedly flew off into the woods, and shortly after this a nightmarish entity would emerge from the tangled brush. It was described as having a humanoid body covered in black, shaggy hair and possessing expansive bat-like wings and webbed feet. What made it especially otherworldly is that it seemed to have no head where one should be, and the boys fled in terror. What makes this whole case interesting is that at least two other witnesses also reported seeing the creature and the encounter, and in the coming days there would be some disparate reports describing the same freakish beast.

In 1965 we have a weird report given by radio announcer James Towsley, of station KEYL, in Long Prairie, Minnesota. The witness says that on October 23, 1965 he was driving along a remote stretch of Highway 27 at approximately 7 PM when he came around a bend and noticed a “rocket ship” planted right in the middle of the road, measuring around 30-feet tall and about 10 feet in diameter and resting upon a set of fins. Under this ship were several objects he described as looking like “tin cans,” around 6 inches high and with little tripod like legs upon which they moved about. Towsley would describe his surreal encounter thusly:

They were standing in a big circle of light under the ship. I jumped out of my car and was going to knock one over but then they came at me. They came right up to the car. There were three of them. They had no eyes or anything. Just those tripod legs and the matchstick arms. They were like tin cans. The size of a beer can. I was going to grab one but then I figured that if they could stop my car and put out my lights they could do something awful to me. 

So we just stood there looking at each other and then they turned around and scooted back under the ship. The light was so bright I didn’t see where they went. Then there was a high-pitched humming sound and the ship took off straight up. It went up about a quarter of a mile, stopped for a moment and then disappeared. When the lights on the bottom went out after it was up in the air, my car radio and lights came on – and my engine started without having to touch the starter. I drove 90 miles an hour back to Long Prairie to report what I saw, but I wondered if people would believe me. I was sure of two things – the rocket (it towered above the trees along the road) was a spaceship of some kind and the three objects that came out of it were creatures like nothing else in the animal world I’ve ever seen. They definitely were not people as I know them.

The report prompted police to investigate the area, where they found strips of an unexplained oil-like substance smeared across the road, but nothing else. What were these things and did they ever really exist at all? Moving on into the 1970s we have a trove of bizarre encounters. A somewhat well-known such report supposedly happened on the evening of October 25, 1974, in the U.S. state of Wyoming. Local hunter Carl Higdon was hunting deer at a remote place called Medicine Bow National Forest, when he says he suddenly felt as if time had slowed down. It was a very unnerving sensation, and he had a strange experience when he shot at a deer only to witness the bullet stop in midair and drop to the ground. That was when he noticed a damn strange entity lurking in the shadows nearby.

The creature was described as a humanoid figure wearing what looked almost like a skintight scuba diving suit, with some sort of harness and a belt prominently featuring a star-shaped symbol of some sort. Its face was a bizarre combination of tiny eyes, a slit-like mouth, antennae, and hair that looked like a mass of straw, but what was really odd was that it had no ears, eyebrows, or neck. Also odd was that one of its abnormally long arms was tipped with what looked like a drill, while the other seemed to have no appendage at all. The creature then took things to the next level of strange when it spoke to Higdon in perfect English.

The entity introduced itself as “Ausso One,” and it would purportedly whisk Higdon off to its home planet, which the creature explained as being “163,000 light miles” from Earth. Higdon would describe it as a world dominated by massive umbrella shaped structures covered with lights, into one of which the frightened man was taken for some sort of medical examination before being returned to Earth. In the aftermath of this experience his truck would be found mired in a bog several miles away from where he had left it, and his doctor would be surprised to find that he no longer had some scarring of the lungs that had been plaguing him, a remnant of a case of tuberculosis, as well as several vanished kidney stones. Who was Ausso One? Was any of this true at all or was it an elaborate hoax and tall tale? Who knows?

On the evening of November 12, 1976, night watchmen José Maria Trejo and Juan Carrizosa Luján were on a shift at Talavera la Real air force base, Badajoz, Spain, when they saw an intensely bright UFO pass over while emitting an ear-splitting whistling noise akin to static interference. Not long after, another night watchmen named José Hidalgo excitedly came over with his guard dog to say he had seen the same thing. As they talked about what they had seen the sound of breaking twigs and crunching gravel came out from the darkness, and fearing that there was a trespasser on the base the dog was released, only to come back whimpering and cowering in fear.

At that point, out of the night came an almost ghost-like entity that seemed to be formed of green glowing fog and which stood 9 feet high and lacked any hands or feet. Upon its head it wore some sort of helmet, through which could be seen a deformed humanoid face peering back at them. The sight of this massive monstrosity caused Trejo to actually faint, and the remaining two men allegedly opened fire on it, the bullets seeming to pass right through it to hit the wall beyond, while at the same time making it glow more and more brightly before it suddenly vanished, and the same whistling sound they had originally heard pierced the night once again. The creature and its ship were gone. Rather bizarrely, they could find no bullet casings from the rounds they had fired. The case of what is known as the Badajoz Alien has gone on to become one of Spain’s stranger alien encounter reports, and who knows what this thing could have been.

In later years we have an account from the summer of 1975, in which a junior high school science teacher in New York by the name of Tom D’Ercole allegedly had a rather violent encounter with a nebulous, wraith-like entity like no other. D’Ercole purportedly woke up one clear, sunny morning to look outside his Long Island home and see what he at first took to be a small, uncommonly dark cloud that seemed to be hovering towards his house. Things got stranger still when he noticed that it was actually going against the wind to approach his residence, and that it was actually growing in size and changing shape, and as it drew closer he could see that this was in fact no cloud at all. He would say of the strange sight:

This basketball-sized cloud floated back and forth across the peak of the roof, changing in shape from a small globular mass to a larger ovoid and finally becoming an abstract, multi-curved, dark, vaporous ‘something.’ It finally measured about six feet in height and one and a half feet in width.

This is perhaps already alarming and bizarre enough as it is, but things got even weirder still when it further metamorphosed to form a “mouth” complete with “lips,” and began to seemingly inhale, after which it spewed forth a deluge of liquid that covered the teacher and his home and then evaporated into nothingness as if it had never been there at all. D’Ercole went through great efforts to try and preserve some evidence of his odd encounter by placing his wet clothes in a sealed bag, but when analyzed it was found to be nothing but plain water. Although it is unclear what the teacher could have possibly seen, it is an intriguing account in that it comes from a reliable witness in the form of a well-respected science teacher who seems to have no reason at all to have made up such an absurd-sounding story.

Finally, we have a case from Quebradillas, Puerto Rico, where in July of 1977 witness Adrián Olmos saw a 4-foot tall dwarf flying about with a jetpack, which was weird enough as it is, but would get even more so in the coming months. Then on October 20, 1977, Olmos was making a delivery of veterinarian medical products in the small coastal town of Camuy when his head was besieged with a sound he would describe as “reminiscent of the shrieking of monkeys,” only growing in intensity as he tried to continue going about making his deliveries. It got so bad that he felt physically ill, and pulled his vehicle over to the side of the road as that shrieking pounded in his head. It was then that he allegedly saw in front of him an immense ball of light about 13 feet across, which descended to hover above the road before him. From this main light there broke of several smaller lights, and he would say of what happened next:

The lights gave off a sort of gas which coalesced into two small creatures, becoming more and more clearly defined. I realized that the pair were the source of the shrieks, and they appeared to be talking to one another. The creatures had apple-colored faces and were dressed in platinum-white outfits, with diamond-like structures on the foreheads, held in place by black headbands. They resembled lizards, and long red tongues could be seen inside their mouths when they spoke.

He claimed that these lizard monsters wore some sort of boots, and that one of them had in its hands a small, box-like device which it aimed at the terrified man as if it were using it to scan him. One of them then shrieked at him in a probable attempt to communicate, before they all stepped back to meld into the large light, which then ascended into the sky to go flying off, the whole ordeal leaving Olmos feeling weakened and exhausted. In the years after this frightening encounter, Olmos would move away from the area and for years after complain of constant panic attacks and headaches. The rather outlandish case became quite popular among UFO researchers and journalists, and remains much discussed to this day.

This is by far not the extent of the many, many truly outlandish alien encounters on record, merely a selection. In a realm where aliens and interdimensional interlopers are presumed real, I suppose it is par for the course. There is no way something from another world or dimension is exactly going to fit it with our take on reality, and we are bound to get truly off the wall reports like these along with the standard humanoids and “greys.” Of course we have to assess whether any of these cases really happened as described or not, and that is a tricky problem to tackle at the best of times, especially with reports that seem to be one off encounters with outlandish entities that are never seen again. If it this is all real, then we are left to wonder just what is going on here. Are they aliens? Visitors from some other dimension? Pure imagination? Something else? There is no way to know, and such cases serve to add some very strange and very entertaining flavor to the landscape of truly odd encounters.

The U.S. Navy has been in the news for some weird stuff over the last few years. As the only branch of the military which has acknowledged the UFO (or UAP as they insist on referring to it) phenomenon, it’s quite curious that they have recently filed patents for technology that seems a perfect fit if they were attempting to build their own flying saucers. The problem is that a lot of these patents describe things that just simply shouldn’t exist within our known technological capacities.  The latest in a series of filed U.S. Navy patents that seem to be beyond the realm of modern physics is a compact nuclear fusion reactor that could potentially fit inside a small craft. Yet nuclear fusion is a “Holy Grail” of energy production which we supposedly can’t figure out how to do at all, let alone create a compact fusion reactor that could fit inside a small vehicle.

Mysterious Universe alumnus Brett Tingley and Tyler Rogoway at The War Zone did a fantastic deep dive into this mysterious Navy patent and why it’s so confusing. The patent comes from Salvatore Cezar Pais, the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division engineer behind other recent mysterious and hard-to-believe patents including room temperature superconductors and a propulsion system that looks eerily similar to classic UFOs.

The nuclear power reactors we use today are fission reactors. Fusion reactors, by contrast, would be much more efficient, produce less radioactive waste, and don’t require enriched nuclear material that could be used to produce weapons. They would be a dramatic and game-changing improvement in every aspect of energy production. The problem is that we can only generate fusion for minutes or seconds in the experimental fusion reactors currently operational, and they’re the size of buildings.

Despite this, people are actively working on compact fusion reactors including Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works, the Chinese Government, and now, apparently, the U.S. Navy.

The patent claims that the reactor can produce power in the gigawatt to terrawatt range (1 billion and 1 trillion watts, respectively). By contrast, as Tingley and Rogoway point out, America’s largest nuclear power plant is capable of generating 4 gigawatts of power.

The biggest impediment to nuclear fusion reactors is the containment of the plasma core. In the patent, it states that the plasma core is contained by a signature feature of all Pais’ bizarre inventions, a “controlled motion of electrically charged matter via accelerated vibration and/or accelerated spin subjected to smooth yet rapid acceleration transients, in order to generate extremely high energy/high intensity electromagnetic fields.”

The circular saucer shape probably isn’t an aesthetic choice when you really think about it. There’s gotta be some functionality inherent to such a silly looking thing.

But like Pais’ other UFO patents, it is not clear at all whether this device actually exists or if it is merely theoretical. The Navy has vouched for some of these patents in the past, claiming that a few do indeed already physically exist. If this fusion reactor does exist though, it should be stressed that this would be a game-changer for so many facets society. This is straight up Star Trek prequel future-tech. Of course, it’s also unknown what the Navy plans on doing with it, as well as unknown, and perhaps even doubtful, if we’ll ever see it in action.

In today’s edition of “As the Paranormal Turns Normal,” CNN and Vice – two reputable (send your negative comments to them) mainstream media sources – recently promoted Thailand’s Area 51 as a popular and fun tourist attraction. And there’s no need to storm it because its aliens and UFOs are openly discussed and often encountered. Should you start checking the flight schedule to Bangkok? Let’s find out.

“A hilltop in central Thailand is attracting UFO seekers who believe extraterrestrials hover above a huge Buddha statue, send telepathic communiques, walk across nearby sugarcane fields and use a crocodile-infested lake as a portal from their planets — Pluto and Loku.

It’s all happening three hours by road or rail north from Bangkok in Nakhon Sawan — which translates to “City of Heaven.””

If CNN’s description of Khao Kala hill, the alien-attracting base of the giant Buddha statue near Nakhon Sawan sounds familiar, it’s because that was the site of Thailand’s own Area 51 ‘storming’ in August 2019 … only this one involved the local police storming two meetings of the UFO Kao Kala group who discuss their sightings and encounters with each other and interested parties. While the authorities said they were just making sure the capacity of the room wasn’t exceeded and the visitors didn’t trample the park grounds. That seems reasonable … except there are a lot of people in the area who object to these UFO and alien believers, especially since they link their sightings to Buddhist meditations and philosophies.

“The aliens are described as slender, little, silvery humanoids. Illustrations depict them standing upright on two legs with two arms and a bulbous bald head with a pointy face topped with a single antenna. Huge, glossy, almond-shaped black eyes gaze above a thin nose and miniature mouth. Believers say silvery spaceships appear festooned with colorful lights or resemble the domed, circular, retro-UFOs seen in low-budget 1950s movies.”

If we can get along, why can’t they?

Since CNN Travel is promoting Khao Kala hill as a vacation spot for UFO enthusiasts, it deemphasized the controversies and instead described the aliens, who witnesses say are from Pluto and Loku, a planet orbiting another star in the Milky Way galaxy. Wassana Chuensamnaun, daughter of the first person to encounter the aliens, says both groups can take on physical forms but there’s no guarantee visitors will meet them. However, they may hear from them telepathically – Wassana claims that the Plutonians are looking for a few humans who will survive an upcoming nuclear holocaust and can contact the aliens to come help with the cleanup. (Why not help prevent it? Asking for a friend.)

This might be a good place for Buddhists to visit, since Wassana says the Plutonians think he was “the greatest human mind” and often talk to her about karma, reincarnation and other Buddhist interests. This connection to the religion may also save the UFO Kao Kala group from future raids and complaints by suspicious locals.

Welcome aliens!

The Vice article points out that there are weekend bus tours to the site and plenty of baggy t-shirts plastered with garish alien designs” and other souvenirs and alien-themed food items for sale there. Now THAT sounds more like the other Area 51, especially during the recent storming events. However, that site still doesn’t have alien and UFO encounters – real or telepathic – while Khao Kala hill claims to have them, plus a group that will help visitors attempt to contact the Plutonians and Lokucians (Lokunatics?) themselves.

Which one sounds like a trip worthy of your hard-earned vacation days? Whichever you choose, it’s just another of the growing signs that the paranormal is becoming the normal.

Photoreportage of CNN-travel: peter2011