If you’ve discovered four galaxy clusters being merged together into one giant galaxy that may be the largest of all time, who would you call to verify that claim? Is there a Guinness Book of Universe Records? There should be, because discoveries like this one may become more common as space agencies plan more Great Observatories like the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra gets to claim this record with the news that NASA astronomers used it to find Abell 1758, a space village contains two pairs of galaxy clusters made up of hundreds of small galaxies that are on a collision-course towards a record-setting cosmic collision.

“The Chandra data revealed for the first time a shock wave — similar to the sonic boom from a supersonic aircraft — in hot gas visible with Chandra in the northern pair’s collision. From this shock wave, researchers estimate two clusters are moving about 2 million to 3 million miles per hour (3 million to 5 million kilometers per hour), relative to each other.”

In a recent press release, NASA scientists reveal that the quadruple galaxy cluster system Abell 1758, first discovered in 2004 and located about three billion light-years from Earth, is not just four clusters moving around each other — they’re speeding towards each other like desperate soaked sink spiders circling a cosmic drain. While the newly-detected shock wave of hot gas helped determine their speed, Chandra’s view of how so-called heavy elements – those heavier than helium – are re-distributed during the collision process shows how close the galaxies in each pair are to becoming one, and how close those are to one massive merger.

Labeled image of Abell 1758 system.

Credit: Chandra X-ray Center

NASA released an excellent highlighted image of the northern and southern pairs of the colliding galaxies and a video recreation of the impending crash.

And the expected date for the explosion guaranteed to light up the universe … or at least the phones at the Guinness Universe Records office is? For that, one needs to dig into “Forming One of the Most Massive Objects in the Universe: The Quadruple Merger in Abell 1758,” the paper describing the discovery published recently in The Astrophysical Journal and written by Gerrit Schellenberger, Larry David, Ewan O’Sullivan, Jan Vrtilek (all from Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian) and Christopher Haines (Universidad de Atacama, Chile). Needless to say, it won’t be anytime soon.

The James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched in 2021, will join the Great Observatories until the Hubble is retired. In the meantime, astronomers will continue to use the Chandra X-ray Observatory to search for the telltale shock waves of hot gas that indicate crashing galaxy clusters.

Crashing Galaxy Clusters would make a great name for a band, and Shock Waves of Hot Gas sounds like their first heavy metal hit. Opening act? The Desperate Soaking Sink Spiders, of course.

Do you think the US Space Command and the proposed US Space Force have secret ‘black’ budgets that are designated for advanced technologies which could already be flying and are being spotted by civilians as UFOs? There’s a good chance that you do. Do you think those mysterious triangular crafts and snake-like UFOs might be some of them? Probably. Are you worried about these secret flying weapons and their potential to take us into (or even start) a space war? At this point, you most likely believe that too. Are you doing anything about it? While you’re still pondering your answer, Bruce Gagnon already is. He’s the co-founder of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, a group promoting an annual Keep Space for Peace Week International Week of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space. While a shorter name would help, it hasn’t stopped Gagnon from spreading the fears that the space wars may have already begun.

“I’m sure they’re testing technologies for space warfare that we can’t even imagine, that I know for sure.”

In an exclusive interview with Daily Star Online shortly after the latest Keep Space for Peace Week (events were held across the U.S. October 5-12), Gagnon described seeing a photo of one such technology – the Northrop Grumman B-21 Raider, a very long-range, stealth strategic bomber capable of delivering conventional and thermonuclear weapons. Northrup allegedly made the rumored TR-3A Black Manta triangular or flying wing spy plane using funds from a so-called black budget. Photos of the B-21 are not yet known to exist, so whatever Gagnon saw was unauthorized by the Pentagon. Gagnon is a unique combination of war and peace – he served in the Air Force in Vietnam and that’s where he became a peace and anti-nuclear activist.

Artist rendering of the rumored B-21 Stealth Bomber

“But most importantly, the question of the kind of seed we carry from earth into the heavens must be considered by the people of our planet. Are we to allow the U.S., and other nations, to carry the bad seed of warfare, greed, exploitation and environmental contamination into space?”

The noble cause of Gagnon’s Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space is to keep space clean of nuclear power and contamination, keep it free of weapons and stop its exploitation by governments and businesses. One week of protests every year is obviously not enough, so Gagnon is stirring up interests and fears by connecting the recent spate of unexplained UFO sightings – Tic Tacs, snakes, triangles, etc. – with the secretive Space Command and proposed Space Force.

“They’re now training people, young people, they have space camps around the United States. They bring them in and get them excited they then move them into the Air Force Academy and are given a heavy indoctrination on warfare and space.”

Gagnon also looks at space and military camps for youths as scary and not-so-secretive indoctrination programs recruiting future space warriors under the guise of much-needed science and space education and career guidance.

Far-fetched? Do you trust a peace warrior’s warnings about your own government or that government’s warnings about space warriors being the only way to stop other government from dominating space? Do you trust billionaire rocket builders? Do you trust those who still haven’t figured out nuclear power on Earth to manage it safely in space? Do we really own space? Does anyone? Or does everyone? If it’s everyone, how do we get our voices heard over the fight songs of the space warriors?

Do we really know what is taking off or landing at our bases?

Bruce Gagnon reminds us of another time when similar questions were asked.

“The Columbus mythology is often invoked to describe our “manifest destiny” as it relates to space exploration and colonization. The noble explorer theme is used to cover the more practical notion of profits to be made in regards to space. The Columbus mythology does indeed fit. Only it reminds us that the single mindedness that pursues profits and power in the “New World” will also carry grave implications for centuries to come.”

Grave implications. Again.

It’s easy to poke fun at the Space Force because of the times and manner in which it was announced. But while we’re asked to pay for it, our demands for information and explanations of the Tic Tacs, triangles and secret aircraft go unheeded … and are sometimes poked fun at as well.

Should Space Force parades go the way of Columbus Day parades before they have a chance to get started?

Going back to just about as long as encounters with strange alien entities have been around there have been many types of beings that are most commonly described by witnesses who have seen them and people who claim to have been abducted. There are the “Greys” perhaps most well-known in popular culture and which are probably the first image that springs to mind for most in the mainstream, but there are also commonly reported encounters with reptilian beings, and even odder still are those describing something insectoid in nature. Here we will look at a selection of such encounters in recent years, but these are really just the tip of the iceberg, and it seems to be a phenomenon that is firmly entrenched in the world of the paranormal and UFOlogy. These reports are the strange of the strange, so get on your tin foil hats, because we are going for a ride into the furthest reaches of the utterly bizarre.

What have often been called “Mantis Men” or “Mantis aliens” typically are said to look very much as their name would suggest. They are usually described as standing 6-7 feet tall, with long, thin torsos, skinny, multi-jointed limbs, triangular, insect-like heads with large, slanted eyes and small or non-existent mouths, and the whole of the creatures covered with what appears to be some sort of segmented exoskeleton. One good description is given by UFO BC, and reads:

These Beings have long, narrow faces, with long, narrow, large eyes, sharply slanted upward and outward in an almost narrow-V position, giving an almost insect-like appearance. This comparison is heightened by the Praying-Mantis types’ extremely thin, long torsos, long, extremely thin arms which are usually crooked into a sharp bend at the mid-joint, with the hand and fingers sloping almost vertically downward from the wrist, and legs also bent at an almost right-angle at the mid-joint, creating a crouched pose. The overall effect is the characteristic ‘Praying Mantis’ look. It should be noted that experiencers feel that this type is no insect, but rather an intelligent, gentle spirited… and jerky moving, human-like life form. There are both males and females.

It may sound completely absurd, like something out of a bad science fiction movie, but there are actually numerous reports of encounters with such entities, running throughout a range of ages and walks of life. Such encounters can come in conjunction with UFO sightings and abductions, but just as often are reported by witnesses who see these creatures just roaming about, and the reports are so varied and weird that it is hard to know what to make of them at times. While most commonly associated with the UFO phenomenon and lumped together as aliens, Mantis Man sightings often happen out in the wilderness with no mention of UFOs, as if a particularly freakish Bigfoot report, and a few of these occurred as recently as the early 2000s in the state of New Jersey. The first in this series of encounters allegedly happened in 2002 at Stephens State Park, north of Hackettstown, New Jersey, where two men had been fishing at dusk along the Musconetcong River when they saw something very odd indeed. A friend of one of the witnesses would tell Lon Strickler, of Phantoms and Monsters of the surreal events that would transpire:

Apparently about a year ago my friend and his brother were down at Stephen’s State Park fishing right around dusk. During this time, while his brother was roughly 50 yards downstream fishing, he said he felt this strange vibration in his right ear and from that he turned and looked to the right. When he turned and looked to the right he said he saw this 6 to 7 foot praying-mantis-looking-man… just standing there and unable to believe that he could see him. He said the creature was black and gray and to be quite honest, the way my buddy was telling me this story, I was having a tough time. I know he saw this thing… because I could see it in his face.

Strickler would end up digging up another sighting of what seems to be a very similar creature in the same vicinity, which was seen by another fisherman as well. The witness claims that he had been out fishing in at the river with his boss in 2004, and they had both been waist high in the water when he says he just suddenly noticed a very outlandish entity making its way up the opposite bank. He explains:

I just “Caught it”. Movement out of the corner of my eye to my left and there it was—Humanoid. Tall. 6 foot at least –no reference points– but I sense 6’6″ – 7′. Moving away from me back up the bank. (I am chest-high in the river) The first thing I see was the ‘grasshopper’ thigh, but bending forward like a human. Then the whole form. He is looking at me over his shoulder, moving up the bank, astonished, amazed. What, that I am in the water in a strong current, that I can see him? But yes we lock eyes and this creature is astonished– I get the sense that he can’t believe I am in the water, that he can’t believe I have seen him, that I am not perturbed at all– something of all three, I still don’t know– just astonishment and he is actually trying to get away from me and the water! Triangular Head. Huge, slanted black eyes. Just like a Praying Mantis. It’s whole body was gangly, nobby, ((Nobby!) but you could still sense it was powerful, and no– I would not say it was a “Big Bug”– it was definitely humanoid despite the mantis/insect qualities.

Again, I stress the strong impression that The Mantis Man was cloaked and I “caught it” just right; it abruptly found itself against a “new”/blank background and was adjusting quickly. No, I do not believe it “slipped” into another dimension/plane. I detected movement and first saw that strong left thigh, (and strong right calf) then the whole thing and immediately those eyes/face. The whole encounter was only a couple of seconds. I can not tell you with any strong certainty what its feet or hands looked like –I wasn’t looking there– but I can tell you that its arms were “normal”, and not the literal Mantis forelegs I have recently seen in drawings of these “Aliens”.

The detail that it seemed so surprised to be seen is interesting, although it is hard to know what to make of that. Yet another sighting featured on Phantoms and Monsters happened in the same area, this time in July of 2014 by a witness who claims he had been driving along the Musconetcong River and just sort of taking in the scenery when he noticed something very tall standing out in the water. At first he took it to be a fisherman, but it seemed too strange looking and somehow not human, so he slowed down to get a closer look. This is when he would realize that it was definitely no fisherman, and he says of his encounter:

I saw something strange a few weeks ago on the Musconetcong River near my home here in Hackettstown, New Jersey. I was driving home from the drug store on Newburgh Rd. As I drove near the bridge over the river, I noticed to my left something (I thought a fisherman) standing in the river just off the south bank. I slowed the car and looked closer. It wasn’t a person and it was transparent-like with a weird shape. It moved slowly towards the bank and into the trees. I drove further so I could see it coming out of the trees. That’s the last I saw of it. It was tall, 8 ft. or so and had long thin arms hanging off of it. The color was a pale brown, but I could see through it! The head was small compared to the body. It was sunny that day so I thought it may be glare from the water, but after I thought back I realized I wasn’t seeing a mirage or glare.

This one almost seems to have been trying to cloak itself somehow, perhaps why the enitiy in the previous encounter was so baffled that it was seen. Another seemingly similar creature, although much smaller than these previous accounts, was also reported, this time in 2011 along the Thames River, in Connecticut. The woman claims she had been driving home from work at around midnight when she saw something she cannot explain. She says:

I saw a small 1 1/2 to 2-foot-tall Praying Mantis humanoid running on the side of Pequot Avenue in New London, CT. The avenue runs alongside the Thames River and I was driving southbound on Pequot when I saw it on the side of the road directly on my left. It was a mahogany brown color and it looked exactly like the CGI version on the show. I stopped my car and watched it and it was looking right at me the whole while as it ran towards a storm drain. It never took its eyes off me then it jumped down the storm drain.

Interestingly, another of these creatures was spotted in 2015 in the vicinity of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California, which was related to the show Coast to Coast AM and involved the witness seeing an 8-foot-tall “Mantis Man” that apparently had the ability to turn invisible or vanish at will. While these reports are certainly very bizarre, there are other Mantis Man reports that are even more outlandish, and with these we truly take a trip into a realm deeply lodged in high strangeness. One very odd report that has made the rounds was given on UFO BC, by a witness calling himself “Jim G,” who lives in London, England. He claims that one evening in August of 2001 he woke to find two of these entities looming over his bed, apparently watching him as he slept, and they looked very much like some sort of insectoid humanoids. One entity was cloaked in a robe, but had what seemed to be a shiny black exoskeleton like that of a beetle, while the other was more of the classic description of a Mantis Alien, standing 7 feet tall and all segmented limbs and mantis head, with no noticeable clothing. Jim explains the mantis creature and the weird events that would play out thusly:

All I recall was that it was tall. At least 7 foot, it had to bend its neck because of the height of the ceiling. Its head was pointed with large eyes. Its for-arms were extremely long and moved in a jerky fashion. The cloaked figure was closer, crouching by my bed, so I couldn’t tell how tall it was, but I could clearly see that it was wearing some kind of overlapping ridged amour? Including a metallic looking breastplate that had a series of circles on it. Its head was dome-like with emotionless facial features. Its eyes were large and surrounded again by detailed ridges. It acted in a way that reminded me of a robot or insect.

I remember thinking to myself, nobody’s going to believe this! A bloody giant sized mantis and medieval-style dressed alien, what the hell is this? Before this incident, although I hadn’t see one, I was familiar with the gray (alien) types but I had never heard of the praying-mantis types. At this point, the mantis bent its upper body, over my bed and directly above me. In its hand it was holding a long metal object that looked like a needle. A green light shot directly from the needle and into my right eye. Maybe it’s a laser, I am not sure, but I do know it felt very painful. I could see all the veins from my eye, the same effect you get when an Optician checks your eyes. I screamed but no noise came out. I then felt something stick into my skull! I’m not sure what because by that time I had my eyes closed. I pretended to sleep and went into deep panic! My mind was racing at a million miles per hour. I heard a great whooshing sound and when I next reopened my eyes thankfully they had gone.

Another one of the weirder of these reports is an account chronicled by UFO researcher Linda Moulton Howe in her book Glimpses of Other Realities, Vol. II: High Strangeness. She tells the tale of a witness named Linda Porter, who claimed to have had an incredibly odd encounter with a telepathic mantis-like humanoid in a hallway in 1961 and that it had whisked her off to another dimension via what she called an “interdimensional tunnel.” The next thing she knew, Porter was with a “Praying mantis being in a light-filled room,” and she said:

I remember the being slowly coming around the corner and facing me. He stood very still and simply waited as if he knew how frightening he appeared to me. Eventually he began to talk to me (telepathically). He seemed to possess a great deal of dignity and gave the impression of being quite old. He walked me to this room (filled with dense light). The memory ends with me about to enter the room and the thought ‘Translated Into the Light’ has to do with what happened.

Adding to the utter strangeness of this case, Porter, who had been born with a heart defect, claimed that she had had her soul transferred by the creature into a cloned body of herself that was healthy, and that the creature had explained to her in depth about other dimensions and travel between them. Very weird stuff, indeed. In another peculiar account from UFO BC, there is a witness who says that her and her friend had been captured by tall, insectoid humanoids and then been subjected to some sort of violent, gruesome medical procedure. She would say:

I stood there helpless for the longest time, not knowing what to do but feeling a real sense of panic. Something had to be done quickly. All of a sudden there were two Beings that appeared next to my friend. They seemed to push me right aside and silently went right to work on her, like skilled surgeons. They stood to her left, standing together and working furiously on my friend. I had no idea who they were, what they were doing, but the first thing I thought of was ‘are they aliens’??? I stood there and watched…I thought they looked like Praying Mantises. Alien Praying Mantises…

Then I focused on my friend and saw her head was split wide open, like these aliens sliced it perfectly open. I saw freshly sliced raw flesh and these Aliens/Praying Mantis were busily removing pieces of bone, rock or whatever from her brain. This did not look anything like what I would imagine the inside of a brain to look but it was just such a clean cut. These two Alien/Praying Mantis worked quickly, without speaking one word. I seemed to black out and don’t remember any more of it.

What was going on here? What were they doing? What happened to the friend? Was this all a hallucination or is there anything more to it? Who knows? From the same site is a bizarre report from a witness who claims the Mantis Men were rather more benevolent towards him, and even gifted him with advanced technology. He explains:

My Praying Mantis figure was very kind to me. He urged me to stay calm and telepathically reassured me everything would be alright. My right eye was removed by a device that came down from the white ceiling. I started to really panic but the Mantis kept me from really freaking out. Then it was replaced. The Mantis also told me telepathically that I was a special person who would really make a difference here on earth. I am now 44 years old and have made no real significant differences to the human race. I think he may have just wanted to reassure a child at the time. I have retained 1 thing from my encounter. I still have the power to see major global disasters before they happen. I only report them to either my fiancé or my close family members because I know anyone else would just call me crazy. But now they believe me for the most part. Because when I see something clearly and tell them, it always happens.

Here we have looked at merely a selection from the files of truly otherworldly encounters with insectiod humanoids, and it is all really quite a lot to take in. What could possibly lie at the root of such reports? Are these things aliens or undiscovered creatures of some sort? With regards to Mantis Men the theory that these are interdimensional travelers is often brought up, so could that possibly be what is going on here, these beings coming across the veil between realities rather than across the sea of stars? Are these just hallucinations, delusions, or lies? As it is we are left pretty baffled by such reports, and it has come to the point where these accounts are largely even shunned by those within cryptozoology, UFOlogy, and the paranormal world in general. Yet, still these sightings and reports come in, and it sure does make one wonder just what is going on here.

While the Navy ‘Tic Tac’ UFOs and the Storm Area 51 fiasco get all of the mainstream media attention, what has been memorialized by government officials as the “only historically documented UFO sighting in the United States” continues to be the Rodney Dangerfield of UFO sightings, getting no respect from the media nor local community government officials and business leaders who want the monument dedicated to the 1969 event moved out of sight and the park established around it repurposed to something less … popular with everybody but them?

That explains why Thom Reed, who as a 9-year-old was “taken aboard a tarnished circular looking vessel where an image of a willow tree was displayed” and returned hours later with his family. Reed fought to have the event memorialized, fought again when local officials claimed it was on public property and is now fighting again – this time in court. Before you ask, he has the support documents, the letter from the governor and the polygraph test (verified by the police) to prove it. Why did the aliens accept Thom Reed but not his own people?

Thom Reed has retained a prominent law firm and has begun the process of suing the town of Sheffield, Massachusetts, and others for blatant malice and slander regarding their involvement in the selection of the site for the monument, which they later said was on public property and that it was all Thom Reed’s doing. He’s also filing a class action lawsuit with the many local television personalities and businesses who sponsor the UFO Monument Park and has other suits and complaints under consideration. Needless to say, Thom Reed is upset – not just about the monument and the park but about his good name as well.

Local radio station WSBS verified that it broadcast news of a UFO sighting on September 1, 1969, which was witnessed by many people besides Thom Reed who called in to report it. It was the subject of numerous documentaries (the History Channel filmed an episode of “Ancient Aliens” at the park) and the dedication of the monument in 2015 received coverage outside of the local news. Thom Reed is now working on his own documentary and book that will no doubt include more details of his fight for the monument and park memorializing his abduction and experiences because it’s still the “only historically documented UFO sighting in the United States.”

“The incident was factually upheld, founded, and deemed historically significant and true by means of Massachusetts historians. The records highlighting the historic event are now officially part of the Great Barrington, Ma. Historical Society’s Collection and your recent induction into Massachusetts history.”

Thom Reed has stated that he saw UFOs twice on his family’s property prior to 1969. Has he somehow been selected to fight for the rights of UFO witnesses and contactees to have their stories told accurately? Do UFO accounts have to be military-related or potential moneymakers before they’re accepted? As this quote from the Berkshire Eagle implies, there’s plenty of people who believe in lake monsters and how many of them have letters from the governor?

You can believe in Thom Reed’s UFO encounter or not, but even those who don’t should believe in his right to protect his name and reputation. This is still America.

Even the aliens would support that.

Mysterious vanishings and what I like to call “almost vanishings,” wherein a person has disappeared only to reappear again with a strange story suggesting they could have very well have been gone forever, are surely enigmatic enough as it is. Yet, in some cases there are details that suggest there are odd and very dark forces possibly at work behind the scenes. Such are those of these cases that involve some sort of entities, the nature of which we cannot understand, which according to these reports might have stepped out of the fringe to claim these people.

One very strange recent case of mysterious entities and a what seems to be a near vanishing comes from the Monsters Among Us podcast, Season 8, Episode 5, and which revolves around the case of a witness known only as Mark, who worked on his parents’ dairy farm in the state of California. In August of 2019, Mark was working late, when at around 3:15 AM the silence was broken by what sounded like muffled voices wafting through the air from behind a nearby hay barn. The startled man could not figure out why anyone would be out there at that hour, and a patrol of the farm turned up no intruders or trespassers, indeed no sign of where the anomalous sounds had come from. He tried to forget about it and chalk it up to tiredness, but the voices would start up again on several occasions, with the source never identifiable.

He decided to sit in a feed loader within the barn and wait until the voices started again, after which his plan was to flick on the lights and catch whoever it was, but he must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew he was waking up in an unfamiliar room with a door in front of him. He sat up and peered at this door, which had not been there before, and as he did it apparently flew open to disgorge a knife wielding man, who ran at him without a sound or expression on his face. Somehow Mark was able to side step the attack and send the would be attacker sprawling to the floor, after which the stranger would lie still as if dead, and the night would become even more surreal yet.

As Mark prodded the fallen assailant with his foot, two other doors apparently appeared out of thin air, and from each of these stepped another strange entity. One was an extremely tall, lanky man with the head of a crow, and the other was a man in a business suit who had a contorted face that was “smiling and twisted.” This man with the contorted face allegedly grabbed Mark by the wrists, and as it did its shirt fell open to reveal a buzzing circular saw-blade embedded within its chest that it seemed to be pulling him towards. The panicked Mark knocked the entity to the ground, where it lie still and apparently dead just as the knife wielding man had done. That crow-faced entity then stepped forward to loom over Mark and stare at him before backing away back to the door it had come through, stepping through it and then vanishing, whereupon the horrified and baffled witness jolted awake in that feed loader, with no sign of any of the entities and the doors gone.

He would have blamed it all on a very bad and trippy dream, but looking at his wrists he could see red hand marks left behind from where he had been grabbed, which burned as if hot, and a peek at his watch showed that just 5 minutes had passed since he had sat within that loader. What happened to this witness? Did Mark encounter extra-dimensional entities who sought to abduct him for inscrutable purposes, or was this simply all a hallucination? Who knows, but it is a very outlandish a and surreal report, and we are left to wonder what these entities were, if anything.

An attempted abduction by possible aliens or inter-dimensional interlopers fits in well with our next case, which was related by David Palides, this time in a Coast 2 Coast AM interview with George Knapp. In this weird account, a 3-year-old boy known only as John Doe went missing on Oct 1 2010 at around 6:30 PM along a popular fly fishing river near Mt. Shasta, in California. Shortly after his reported disappearance, authorities conducted a search of the area and found the boy 5 hours later sitting in a stand of trees and seemingly dazed and confused. He would later come forth with quite the odd story to tell.

According to the boy, he had been taken into a cave deep within the mountain by a woman who he had thought was his grandmother. Once they had reached their destination, the boy claimed that he had found himself in a cold, dark room full of human-looking robots that sat or stood around in various positions, apparently motionless, as well as some form of guns or weapons scattered about accruing dust, not to mention giant spiders skittering about in the gloom. It was then that the boy allegedly realized that there was a strange light emanating from his grandmother’s head and that she too was some sort of robot. The “grandmother” apparently ordered him to defecate upon a sheet of paper and got agitated when he refused. The grandmother also told him that he was from outer space and had been planted in his mother’s womb. The boy was then taken back outside and told to wait in a thicket until he was found.

When the whole incredibly bizarre tale came to light, the grandmother confessed that a year before the incident she had been camping in the area and had been inexplicably pulled from her tent and deposited a short distance away. When she had woken up, she claimed to have felt a pain in the base of her neck, and had discovered two puncture marks surrounded by red skin. The grandmother had no idea if this had anything to do with the boy’s far-out tale, but it does seem rather odd. Paulides has claimed that this is one of the more bizarre disappearances he has come across, and the whole tale seems rather absurd if not for the fact that everyone involved has continued to maintain that it is true.

A perhaps even more terrifying encounter allegedly occurred in April of 1992, and while it did not result in a vanishing it certainly seems like it was headed in that direction. On the evening of April 12, the anonymous witness was driving through the desolate desert wasteland of US 180 near Deming, New Mexico, at approximately 11:20 PM when he noticed a white light shining in the dark off to the left side of the road. Thinking this to be odd he continued on his way, only to suddenly notice that a grayish-white, luminous cloud of smoke had stretched across the road ahead almost like a wall.

The witness then drove right on into this eerie fog, and claimed to have driven through it for around an hour but soon found that it was so thick he could barely see the road right in front of his truck. It was all extremely odd considering that such dense fogs are exceedingly rare in such desert locales. Perplexed, the witness exited the vehicle to take a look around, but as he did he claims that he abruptly lost control of his limbs and sprawled to the ground, dizzy and numb and unable to move. As he lie there on the parched earth surrounded by this clinging vapor, two shadowy figures approached out of the murk to grab him by each arm and begin hauling him through the smoke towards a shiny metallic object situated nearby.

According to the witness, these beings brought him through a rectangular opening in the side of the craft and placed him in a chair-like device. It was now that he could see that the two figures were not human, but rather slender, bony entities around 5 feet in height, with oval faces and large black eyes. The chair was put into a reclining position and the witness claims that something was inserted into his nose, some type of tube or device, which caused a distinct buzzing and stinging sensation that caused him to shout out. The two beings were apparently startled, reportedly then throwing him back outside, after which he levitated to his vehicle and the thick fog melted away to leave him there shaking and sobbing in the desert night. What would have happened to him if he had not managed to escape?

A possible such abduction in which the person never did come back to tell the tale is the very weird case of the vanishing of Granger Taylor, who disappeared in 1980 from his parent’s home in the rural town of Duncan, on Vancouver Island in Canada. A high school dropout, Taylor had nevertheless been a remarkably talented mechanic all of his life, he had always had the urge to build and tinker with things, including rebuilding a junked bulldozer, renovating and restoring an abandoned old locomotive he had found out in the forest as well as a vintage World War II P-40 Kitty Hawk airplane, which he fixed up good as new. His skill with building things was undeniable.

Granger Taylor

Granger was not without his own eccentricities, as such geniuses are won’t to be, and at one point he painstakingly constructed an actual life sized UFO in his yard over the course of a year, tirelessly cobbled together from some old satellite dishes and other assorted spare parts and junk. It was around this time when Granger had expressed intense interest in the subject of UFOs and aliens, and he began to make increasingly bizarre claims to his friends that he was in regular telepathic contact with actual extraterrestrials. By all accounts he had become hopelessly and deeply obsessed with UFOs, constantly reading about them and theorizing about how they worked, and it was practically the only thing he would ever talk about. He would spend hours locked away within his UFO replica, which was equipped with a stove and a bed, feverishly reading about UFOs and doing who knows what else out there. Things got weirder still when Granger began to tell his friends that not only had aliens been contacting him, but that they had actually invited him on a journey aboard one of their craft.

On November 29, 1980, the night he vanished without a trace, Granger had dinner at a diner he regularly frequented, despite the fact that a severe storm was ominously brewing outside. On that night, gale force winds were beginning to come roaring through the area, eventually knocking out large swaths of electricity and causing mass panic. Granger returned home through the storm and left an incredibly weird letter behind for his parents in the barn, which had served for his workstation where he tinkered with and built all manner of curious things. The deeply weird letter read:

Dear Mother and Father,
I have gone away to walk aboard an alien spaceship, as recurring dreams assured a 42-month interstellar voyage to explore the vast universe, then return. I am leaving behind all my possessions to you as I will no longer require the use of any. Please use the instructions in my will as a guide to help.

On the back of the letter was inexplicably scrawled a map of Waterloo Mountain, around 20 miles away, the significance of which has never been ascertained. After writing this letter, Granger got into his 1972 Datsun pick-up truck and drove out into the roiling storm outside, his final destination unknown. True to his word, he had indeed left behind everything he owned, including a sizable chunk of cash to the tune of $10,000, although his secretly penned last will held few clues at all. He has never been seen again. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) immediately organized a massive search for the missing man, but no sign of neither him nor his vehicle could ever be located. The only possible clue ever found was a few bits of human bone that were found 4 miles away from the Taylor property at a dynamite blast site, with the main theory being that Granger had had some dynamite in his truck that had accidentally gone off, but it has never been conclusively determined whether these remains really belonged to Granger or not.

In the years since, the bizarre vanishing has of course produced many theories as to what happened to him. One is that he had simply had enough of his life and either went off to start a new one or ended it, or that he accidentally exploded himself with dynamite, as the evidence seems to suggest. Another is that he was the victim of foul play of some sort, but there is no evidence to support this. There is also the idea that he had some sort of psychotic break from reality and fled off into the unknown, which is supported by claims from friends and family that Granger had been heavily smoking a lot of pot and frequently dropping acid in the months leading up to his inexplicable vanishing. Then of course in light of his final letter there is the notion that he actually did make contact with his beloved aliens, and that they had spirited him away to destinations unknown. Whether Granger was the victim of suicide, a demented, troubled mind, or he was truly whisked away to the stars by otherworldly beings, his odd case has never been solved, and it remains one of the strangest, surreal disappearances there is.

One such case that is rather completely off the wall concerns a man who was whisked away to be held prisoner by a strange race of people for years before being spat back into our reality once again. The tale concerns a pilot only known as Eddy, who was out on a mission and approached Howland Island, eerily in the vicinity where Amelia Earhart notoriously vanished, where he claims to have seen a vast expanse of green fog, which upon entering caused his aircraft to malfunction and his communications with the outside world to cease. As he emerged from the fog, Eddy reported that he had come into visual sight of an island that was not supposed to be there, and which did not show up on any charts.

Eddy was able to land the jet, and was supposedly approached by a young woman of seemingly Polynesian descent, who apologized and stated that the island had a habit of pulling in planes such as his. Eddy would purportedly end up living on the mysterious uncharted island for around 6 months, where he claimed the inhabitants lived a simple lifestyle, all while intensive search efforts were being made to find him. None of the island residents seemed to have the slightest awareness of nor concern for the outside world which Eddy had left behind, and they seemed to be perfectly content with their reclusive existence.

Yearning for home, Eddy became despondent, after which he was told he could finally return to from whence he came. As he put distance between himself and the strange island which had been his home for months, he allegedly suddenly regained radio communications and was found by a passing fishing vessel. It was at that point that the entire island reportedly became veiled by a green mist and blinked out of existence in a flash of brilliant white light. Did this pilot manage to punch through some barrier between dimensions and make contact with a parallel universe of some sort? Would he have remained forever vanished like so many other aircraft if he hadn’t been allowed to leave? Was this aliens, a lost civilization, or what? Could it be that numerous other pilots who have seemed to have flown off the edge of the earth have wound up in realms like these, perhaps some sort of pocket dimensions? It is unclear just what the answers to these questions are.

One of the most bizarre mysterious disappearances and reappearances involving strange entities is one that I have covered before but which seems worth mentioning here again all the same. The case was told by David Paulides in an interview for Paranormal Central, and comes from the year 1868, when 3-year-old girl suddenly went missing in Northern Michigan as she was at a lumber camp run by her father. According to the father, she had been there one second and then simply gone the next, as if she had simply blinked from existence. A search was launched, during which the panicked father enlisted the help of two hunters to try and find his young daughter lost out alone in the woods. The girl’s name was called over and over again into the thick forest as night and shadows slowly crept up on them, yet no answer came back. It was as she had vanished into thin air. With the onset of darkness, the search was called off until the next morning, with no trace of where the young girl had gone off to.

The next day the search continued and the hunters were hard at work scouring the woods for any sign of the missing girl. As they trudged through rugged, dense wilderness, they allegedly heard the shouts of a young girl from nearby, which sounded muffled and muted somehow, like sounds coming from farther away than they were, as if through some veil or blanket. The hunters claimed that they followed the source of the shouts to a river, and that as they fought through brush to approach they could hear a large splash after which they saw an enormous black shape that they took to be perhaps a bear entering the water and swimming towards the opposite shore. As they stared in shock at the retreating beast, they noticed the girl standing upon a nearby log, minus some articles of clothing.

When the girl was recovered, she seemed to be rather shaken up, and claimed that the creature they had seen was named Mr. Wolf and that he had been holding her prisoner there. She claimed that this Mr. Wolf had eaten her hat, taken her shoes, and had refused to let her leave under any circumstances, although he had also provided her with berries to eat. It is unclear whether this was a bear, a wolf, or something else, and the story certainly seems rather bizarre. What was this “Mr. Wolf” and what did it want? Just what is going on here?

There has been some doubt as to the veracity of this particular story, with skepticism cast on Paulides’ reporting of the events. According to paranormal investigator Theo Paijmans, Paulides may have exaggerated some elements of the story and even confused the case with the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood, as there is very little corroborating evidence in the news of the time to suggest that there was ever this mysterious “Mr. Wolf.” Paijmans told me:

In regards to Paulides’ retelling of the 1868 missing girl case, his version is not supported by any of the original sources. The story was widely reported in various US newspapers. Not in the timeframes Paulides claims, but in 1868, 1882 and again in 1903. Each time the retellings of the story consistently remain the same. None of the many articles that appeared in the American newspapers from 1868 to 1903 mention a “Mr. Wolf”. A bear is mentioned though – but that’s it, plain and simple. Paulides may have been confused by the old German-Dutch European fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood (the girl Little Red Riding Hood visits her grandmother in the forest and meets with a wolf in disguise who wants to eat her) in this account.

It is hard to say what is going on here, but it is a wild story all the same. We are left to ask, are there things out there that seek to whisk us away to other realms for nefarious purposes? Do certain entities stalk about in the periphery waiting for their chance to strike, with only those who have managed to escape bringing back glimpses into the possibilities of what has happened to those who have stepped off the face of the earth? Whatever the case may be, these are very odd and disturbing accounts that serve to stoke the fires of the imagination and make us wonder just what forces lie out there beyond our understanding.

Scientists claim to know the location of where the first modern humans walked the Earth 200,000 years ago. Although it was originally believed that the first modern humans arose in the eastern part of Africa, new evidence has pinpointed the location to the southern part of the continent.

A team of researchers used geology, physics and genetics to determine that the Makgadikgadi wetlands located to the south of the Zambezi River in northern Botswana was the original hometown of our Homo sapien ancestors.

Vanessa Hayes, who is from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Australia, said, “It has been clear for some time that anatomically modern humans appeared in Africa roughly 200,000 years ago.” She went on to say, “What has been long debated is the exact location of this emergence and subsequent dispersal of our earliest ancestors,” adding, “This is the first time the exact location has been identified.” The findings have been published in the journal Nature and can be read in full here.

Kalahari Desert in Botswana

Despite the Makgadikgadi wetlands area being home to mostly salt pans and a large desert today, back 200,000 years ago it had a huge lake that was approximately twice the size of Lake Victoria (Africa’s largest lake) which measures 26,828 square miles. The wetland also had a lush green landscape which would have allowed our ancestors to “thrive” according to Hayes. She went into further detail by explaining, “It was an extremely large area, it would have been very wet, it would have been very lush. It would have actually provided a suitable habitat for modern humans and wildlife to have lived.”

Homo sapiens remained there for approximately 70,000 years until most of them spread out to other locations due to climate change. That was when our ancestors moved to different areas in Africa before eventually migrating to other parts of the world.

Between 130,000 and 110,000 years ago, the first group of migrants traveled north, followed by a second group that went south west. A third group remained at the wetlands. They migrated because of two climate shifts called “green corridors”.

Axel Timmerman, who co-authored the study, said that 130,000 years ago was the same time period as the end of the Penultimate Glacial Period that caused a “major change in Earth’s orbit.” He explained, “In particular, the Southern Hemisphere summer is moving closer to the Sun,” adding, “It receives more sunlight and it’s also having more moisture. There is clearly a shift in climate and vegetation that allowed greater rainfall around 130,000 years ago.”

The additional amounts of rainfall created the first “green corridor” and that’s why some of our ancestors moved to the north east. Several thousand years later, around 110,000 years ago, after another “green corridor”, more of them decided to migrate to the south west. And eventually they ended up in different locations all around the world.

Hygiea may soon be getting a classification promotion from asteroid to dwarf planet. High-resolution pictures were studied by astronomers who discovered that Hygiea actually has a spherical shape which is an extremely important qualification for being labelled a dwarf planet.

Prior to finding out that it has a spherical shape, Hygiea already met three of the four requirements in order to be classified as a dwarf planet – it orbits the sun; it isn’t a moon that orbits another planet; and it hasn’t pushed other objects out of its orbit. And now astronomers have confirmed that it has a round shape, meaning that it had enough mass for its gravity to mold it into that shape. Robert Massey, who is from the U.K.’s Royal Astronomical Society, told Newsweek, “It’s an unusual situation, as Hygiea appears to be smaller than the minor planets Vesta and Pallas, but is more spherical.”

Hygiea is the fourth biggest rock in the Asteroid Belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. According to the team of astronomers that was led by Pierre Vernazza from the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Marseille in France, Hygiea has a diameter of a little more than 267 miles, making it less than one-fifth of the width of Pluto (approximately 1,491 miles in diameter).

The team was surprised to have found only two impact craters on its surface. “This result came as a real surprise as we were expecting the presence of a large impact basin, as is the case on Vesta,” Vernazza said. The asteroid’s parent body was thought to have been between 46 and 93 miles wide before a huge impact broke it apart into thousands of pieces, ultimately causing the creation of Hygiea.

If Hygiea moves up from asteroid to dwarf planet status, it would officially be our Solar System’s smallest dwarf planet, stealing the title from Ceres that has a diameter of nearly 590 miles.

Asteroid Belt

But for now, Hygiea is still officially classified as an asteroid, as the International Astronomical Union (the same group that demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet) has to review all of the evidence and take a vote on whether or not it will be promoted to dwarf planet status. (Pictures of Hygiea can be seen here.)

In a statement from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) that manages the SPHERE instrument that captured the high-resolution photos, Vernazza stated, “Thanks to these images, Hygiea may be reclassified as a dwarf planet, so far the smallest in the solar system,” adding, “Thanks to the VLT and the new generation adaptive-optics instrument SPHERE, we are now imaging main belt asteroids with unprecedented resolution, closing the gap between Earth-based and interplanetary mission observations.” Their study was published in Nature Astronomy and can be read in full here.