The UFO Contactees of the 1950s were a varied bunch. They all claimed amazing encounters with human-looking aliens. Those same aliens demanded we lay down our nuclear weapons and live in peace with one another. Some chance of that happening – then or now! They included George Adamski, Truman Bethurum, Dana Howard, Arthur Bryant, Daniel Fry, and George Hunt Williamson. While many of their claims differed in varying ways, there’s one thing that links just about all of them. Namely, that nearly all of the Contactees had files opened on them by the FBI. Not only that, some of those files were lengthy. Very lengthy. To give you an idea, the number of pages that the FBI has now declassified on Adamski is in excess of 400 pages. Then, there is George Van Tasssel, who is mostly remembered for his annual flying saucer events held out at Giant Rock, California from the 1950s to the 1970s. At their height (the fifties) the outdoor gigs attracted audiences in their thousands. Van Tassel gained more attention when he created the near-legendary Integratron – supposedly designed to extent the human lifespan. The FBI’s file on Van Tassel makes it very clear that the Bureau took a great deal of interest in the man. Much of it revolved around concerns that Van Tassel was using the UFO subject as a means to spread communism. There is, however, another aspect to all of this.

In the most recent and relevant batch of material that the FBI has declassified there is an interesting Q&A between the FBI and Mrs. Van Tassel. Much has been said and written about George Van Tassel, but far less about his wife, Eva. Until now. The three-pages-long document provides us with some interesting data on Eva and her husband. Dated November 13, 1954 the FBI document begins as follows: “Mrs. Eva Van Tassel, wife of captioned subject [George, of course] was interviewed by SA [Special Agent, name deleted]and the reporting agent in the absence of her husband. Mrs. Van Tassel advised that her husband was in Los Angeles contacting a printer who prints a magazine named ‘Proceeding’ of the College of Universal Wisdom. She declared while in Los Angeles Mr. Van Tassel sleeps in a truck. Mrs. Van Tassel could not furnish the name or location of the printer.”

Giant Rock

The FBI documentation continues: “Relative to her husband and herself, Mrs. Van Tassel claims that she and her husband practice a metaphysical religion. She declared this religion is based on an occult principle in that she and her husband sit in a room in dead silence and receive thought transfers from one another and from other individuals who are not psychically present in the room. She declared that it was through this type of practice that her husband has learned or prophesied the coming of World War III and a gigantic explosion on the East Coast. She mentioned that at the present time she and her husband have undertaken a special project. This project is the founding and organizing of the College of Universal Wisdom.”

The FBI agents made notes concerning what Eva told them: “The purpose of the college is to promote and carry out interplanetary communication and the dissemination of Universal Wisdom gained through the median of space beings. She advised that her husband has contacted many individuals concerning his plans for the college. She mentioned that he has contacted professors and students and various colleges throughout the United States. Mrs. Van Tassel could not furnish the identities of any of these individuals that her husband has corresponded with. She also advised that this college would operate under the state laws of California as a place of learning pertaining to religion. She advised that her husband through his periodical mentioned above has solicited donations for the advancement of this college. She further advised that the college is to be located adjacent to the Giant Rock Airport at Yucca Valley.”

The FBI had much more to say: “Mrs. Van Tassel declared that on August 24, 1953, at approximately 2:00 A.M. while she and her husband were sleeping out of doors adjacent to the Giant Rock air strip, her husband was awakened by a person from outer space in a flying saucer which had landed on the air strip. Mrs. Van Tassel was quick to point out she was not awakened and did not see the spacemen or his means of transportation. Mrs. Van Tassel declared that her husband related that the spaceman took her husband aboard the flying saucer which was occupied by three additional spacemen. Mrs. Van Tassel declared that her husband failed to mention the color or the size of this space craft. She stated that the spacemen were similar in every description to earth men. She advised that the spacemen did not carry weapons nor was there any armament noticed on the flying saucer. She declared that according to her husband, the saucer and spacemen spent approximately twenty minutes on earth after which time they departed into outer space. The spaceman who woke up her husband was the leader or spokesman for the group. He spoke in English and informed her husband that earth men should give up using metal as they are ruining radio frequencies with the over-use of metal.”

There was this, too, regarding Eva and George: “Relative to her husband, she stated he was born in Ohio, city unknown, March 12, 1910. She mentioned that it is possible her husband was born in Ashtabula. He failed to receive a high school diploma as he lacked three months schooling. He left Ohio in 1929 for California. Mrs. Van Tassel declared she married her husband on January 31, 1932, in Yuma, Arizona; her maiden name being Eva Meek. She declared that her husband, prior to 1947, worked as a Flight Test Engineer at Lockheed Aircraft, Burbank, California, and lived on [illegible] Street in Los Angeles. She declared that in 1947 she, her husband, and her daughter, Darlene, moved to Yucca Valley. She stated her daughter is Secretary-Treasurer of the College of Universal Wisdom. She also pointed out that her husband presently operates the Giant Rock Airport under CAA regulations. She advised her husband is not a pilot, but does hold a mechanics certificate with CAA.”

It all got a bit surreal and amusing as the FBI concluded: “It was noted by the reporting agent that the air strip known as Giant Rock is a flat, dry, lake bed. The area surrounding being noted. The writer and [Special Agent deleted] interviewed Mrs. Van Tassel in an underground cave like room which was excavated from the base of the Giant Rock. Mrs. Van Tassel advised that this room is presently the headquarters of the College of Universal Wisdom. The area surrounding the air strip was in every respect very primitive.”

The story of the running female Bigfoot captured on video and broadcast on Russian media recently just took another bizarre twist. The longtime Russian Bigfoot and cryptid investigator Igor Burtsev, head of the Moscow office of the International Center for Homology, went to the Birsky District in northern Bashkortostan in southwestern Russia to check out the location himself and has now released an updated report (watch it here) on his findings, starting with why the female Bigfoot was running.

“It jumped out of the thicket and ran right into the car, as it were, you know? They hit him.”

That’s right … Burtsev interviewed one or more of the three girls and one man who recorded the video of the running Bigfoot in 2016 (watch it here) and was told that the car – a Soviet-era Zhiguli or Lada, ran into the creature. And then …

“They drove another 200 meters, it found itself there and chased after them.”

Burtev explains to GTRK TV why the creature was running – it was chasing after the people who ran into it with their car. As followers of Bigfoot sightings know, it’s rare to see one of the cryptids running. It’s more rare to hit one with a car. In fact, a collision like that might leave some evidence in the hood. Burtev is way ahead of you on that one.

“We even have some biological materials that we will examine for DNA.”

DNA! If you followed the first report, you may remember one other thing Burstev said about the running Bigfoot.

“She has a breast, this is a female!”

In the update, he refers to the Bigfoot or Yeti as a “him,” which is also how the witnesses described it. It’s difficult to determine from the GTRK article whether Burstev has changed his mind and if so, why. The news report video is in Russian.

“Well, is there a shurale in Bashkiria? Do we have a lot of them? Yes, yes! And meetings with them are not completely excluded.”

Statue of a Shurale

Being the Russian cryptid expert that he is, Burtev points out in the update what he also alluded to in his original interview – that the creature could have been a shapeshifting shurale of Russian folklore. The video is not clear enough to show a forehead horn (which the shurale is said to have) or shoes on the wrong feet (which they’re known to do).

The GRTK article again quotes skeptic Anatoly Yakovlev, an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and General Biology at Bashkir State University, who says “there is no evidence.” However, that was before Burtev revealed he has biological materials, which could have come from the car or from his investigative expedition into the nearby forest where the Bigfoot ran.

Burtev says he’ll be going back to Bashkortostan to continue his hunt for Bigfoot. We’ll continue to follow his story.

2I/Borisov, the second observed interstellar visitor (after ʻOumuamua) and first known interstellar comet, is about to reach its closest approach to the sun on December 8, 2019. While astronomers know it’s from another solar system, they don’t know which star exactly. However, a new study has uncovered how 2I/Borisov may have arrived and, in the process, identified two comets in our solar system’s Oort cloud that were highly likely to have been affected or perturbed by nearby stars, which they also identified. Is this fair? Can our Sun perturb some of THEIR comets?

“Since 1950 when Oort published his paper on the structure of the cloud of comets it is believed that stars passing near this hypothetical cometary reservoir play an important role in the dynamical evolution of long period comets and injecting them into the observability region of the Solar System.”

Oort cloud

In a new paper accepted for publication in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Rita Wysoczańska, an astronomer at the Institute Astronomical Observatory at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland, and fellow Polish astronomers Piotr A. Dybczyński, Małgorzata Królikowska, refute the generally-accepted idea that the Oort Cloud – a shell of space debris around the solar system that is also generally accepted even though it’s still hypothetical – is made up of space rocks flung out there from the birth and early days of our Sun. Instead, they explore the idea that some rocks in the Oort cloud were picked up by the Sun’s gravity – as weak as it is at that distance (about 100,000 astronomical units) – as other stars pass nearby.

An artist’s concept of the Gaia spacecraft.

Credit: ESA

Using data from the ESA’s Gaia astronomy spacecraft, which has collected info on over 1.7 billion astronomical objects, they found about 650 that came close enough to perturb a comet into Oort. They compared this to the orbits of 270 long-period comets which can take from 200 years to as long as 30 million years to complete one trip around the Sun. (Hale-Bopp, which passed by Earth in 1997, takes 2,500 years.) Using models to pair stars to comets, they looked for pairs where the star appeared to affect the comet. They found two.

“Anyway we found our results to be the first confirmation of the Oort concept using real stars that make close approaches and significantly change the cometary orbits.”

The pairs were star HD 7977 (constellation Cassiopeia) and comet C/2002 A3, and star Gaia DR2
57002737233036464 (shortened in the paper to Star B) and comet C/2012 F3. Factoring in uncertainties, the team still concluded that these “two comets might have their orbits fundamentally changed due to a close stellar encounter.”

Hale-Bopp

Could this be how 2I/Borisov came to visit our solar system? The report doesn’t answer that question, but …

“We are determined to continue our research on close stellar passages and their influence on LPCs’ dynamical history, still waiting for more numerous and better quality stellar data.”

Once again, astronomy and astrology cross as science confirms that certain nearby stars can affect our Sun and us.

Throughout the history of war there have been many strange cases of the bizarre that have managed to slip through the cracks of time and be lost among the countless tales of valor and fighting. These are the accounts that have sort of been brushed aside and forgotten, yet remain lodged there in the records for anyone who cares to dig for them. There are plenty of these reports that involve UFOs, and among these are the striking accounts that involve these mysterious craft actually becoming active combat participants and engaging the men on the ground. It is a topic I have covered in relation to the Vietnam War, and it is all puzzling, indeed. Here we will go back to the Korean War, to a case that has largely remained confined to the shadows of history, and which involved a whole regiment of men who seem to have come under attack by forces from beyond this world.

A very bizarre account from the Korean War emerged in January of 1987, when John Timmerman, of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), sat down for an interview with a former U.S. Army private first class (PFC) by the name of Mr. Francis P. Wall, who had a most unusual tale to tell. Wall had been deployed with the Army infantry, 25th Division, 27th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, ‘Easy’ Company, and in May of 1951 they were operating outside of Chorwon, in an area known by the military as the Iron Triangle, on a mission to reach a small village in the mountains. The village in question was in an area marked to be bombarded with artillery fire, wiped off the face of the earth, and Wall and his men were there to make sure that any innocent civilians were properly warned of the impending rain of fire. Indeed, the air was already reverberating with the thumps and booms of shells hitting, the dark of night occasionally lit up with flashes in the distance. Wall and company had made their way to a steep slope overlooking the village and the fiery flowers of artillery airbursts painting the scene with fire, and that was when they saw something they could not explain up there in the air in the middle of this war ravaged scene. Wall would say of this:

We suddenly noticed on our right-hand side what appeared to be a jack-o-lantern come wafting down across the mountain. And at first no one thought anything about it. So we noticed that this thing continued on down to the village to where, indeed, the artillery air bursts were exploding. It had an orange glow in the beginning. We further noticed that this object was [so] quick that it could get into the center of an airburst of artillery and yet remain unharmed. But then this object approached us. And it turned a blue-green brilliant light. It’s hard to distinguish the size of it; there’s no way to compare it. The light was pulsating. This object approached us.

The men were understandably very unsettled by this point, as the object was obviously not one of theirs, nor any known aircraft any of them had ever seen before, and they radioed the situation in to their superiors, requesting permission to open fire on it. Why they would think that their rifles would do any good when they had just witnessed it casually make its way through artillery explosions is anyone’s guess, but the permission was granted and Wall claims that he would then open fire on it with his M-1 rifle loaded with armor piercing bullets. He claims that he hit the object several times, hearing the pings of the bullets against what sounded like metal, and the bullets seemed to have an effect on it where the artillery had not, apparently damaging it and causing it to exhibit some strange behavior. Wall would say:

Now why would that bullet damage this craft if the artillery rounds didn’t? I don’t know, unless they had dropped their protective field around them, or whatever. But the object went wild, and the light was going on and off. It went off completely once, briefly. And it was moving erratically from side to side as though it might crash to the ground. Then, a sound — we had heard no sound previous to this — the sound of, like, diesel locomotives revving up. That’s the way this thing sounded.

This was where things would get pretty harrowing, as according to Wall the craft unleashed some sort of a retaliatory attack on them. The craft allegedly emitted a kind of ray or beam that came in pulses, and which they could see aiming at them “like a searchlight.” When the ray swept over them the men found themselves overcome with a tingling, burning sensation, and while it didn’t seem to be causing any visible damage they could feel it penetrating through their skin and the pain was enough to make them scramble for cover, scurrying in a panic into their bunkers, where the attack seemed to continue. Wall describes the terrifying and otherworldly scene thusly:

So the company commander, Lt. Evans, hauled us into our bunkers. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We were scared. These are underground dugouts where you have peep holes to look out to fire at the enemy. So, I’m in my bunker with another man. We’re peeping out at this thing. It hovered over us for a while, lit up the whole area with its light, and then I saw it shoot off at a 45-degree angle, that quick, just there and gone. That quick. And it was as though that was the end of it.

Unfortunately for Wall and the others, this seemed to be far from the end of it, as over the next few days they would begin to develop an array of debilitating physical symptoms, including disorientation, memory loss, headaches, stomachaches, nausea, and extreme weakness that was potent enough that some of them had trouble even walking. Doctors who examined them could find no reason or cause for these symptoms, the only evidence that anything was wrong being an unusually high white blood cell count that could not be explained. Despite nothing really officially wrong with them, the men were nevertheless all physically ill and suffering from something, and it was widely assumed by them that this was the doing of the beam that UFO had fired at them. According to Wall, many of them continued to suffer from ill health for years after the encounter, with him saying that even to that day he had frequent bouts of disorientation, memory loss, weakness, and difficulty putting on weight.

In later years it has been speculated that the men were probably suffering from radiation sickness, but there have been plenty of other ideas by those who have heard of this rather obscure case. One idea is that the Soviets or even the Chinese had been carrying out covert military experiments in the remote region testing anti-gravity technology and sonic weaponry, and indeed this has been used as an explanation for many of the dozens of other UFO sightings made during the Korean War. Of course there is also the notion that this encounter was exactly what it looks like, being an attack by an actual UFO, perhaps having been present in the region observing the combat for inscrutable reasons, and it has even been suggested that the craft did not mean to launch a fatal attack, but to merely disorient and immobilize them, hence the fact that that they did not suffer any severe injury or death.

Then again, maybe this is all hallucinations and the result of trauma, tiredness, and stress in the war-torn environment. It could even just be a tall tale conjured up by Wall himself, as he is the only official witness, and although he claims that 25 other men witnessed this event none of these others seem to have ever been tracked down and independently interviewed. Just about the only thing known for sure is tht he was indeed a soldier in the Korean War in the area specified on the date specified, but after that no one knows. Although he swore an oath that his story is true, in the end we are really left to take the word of one witness. So was this just war time hallucinations, Soviet or Chinese experiments, or an actual attack by an otherworldly UFO? It is quite likely we will never have a concrete answer, and that this will just remain another curious account lost int the fog and history of warfare.