Fast radio bursts—or FRBs if you’re trying to sound like you’re in the know—are mysterious, bright bursts of radio waves coming from outside our galaxy. Bright is a bit of an understatement, actually. In just a fraction of a second, fast radio bursts emit as much energy as our sun does over the course of a century. But there are a lot of events and objects out in space whose magnitude or power is best shown by making our sun look like a tiny, weak, little nerd of a star.

There’s a rarer type of FRB that is still completely mysterious: repeating fast radio bursts. While most FRBs flash once and only once, repeating FRBs demonstrate a consistent pattern of the same signal, leading some to speculate that the source may be artificial or intelligent in nature. Only one repeating fast radio burst has so far been traced to its source, a dense dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away. Now researchers have traced a second repeating fast radio burst to a nearby galaxy similar in structure to our own. What they found, however, only deepens the mystery.

FRB 180916.J0158+65 is the memorable name of the object in question. It was discovered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) observatory in British Columbia, Canada. Astronomers at CHIME, alongside a network of observatories in Europe, were able to trace FRB 180916.J0158+65 to an arm of a medium-sized spiral galaxy only 500 million light-years away. Which is close for another entire galaxy, and makes this the closest FRB ever discovered. Their findings were published on January 6, 2020 in the journal Nature. 

Circled: the source of the mysterious fast radio burst.

(Image credit: Gemini Observatory/NSF’s Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/AURA)

Now that’s a story in and of itself: tracing a repeating fast radio burst to its source for only the second time and it happens to be the closest FRB (repeating or nonrepeating) ever discovered. There are tons of jokes about our neighbors being aliens that practically write themselves. But here’s the rub. The location they tracked this FRB to has no sources of radio waves that, to our knowledge, could produce a fast radio burst of any kind, let alone a repeating signal.

This finding also flies in the face of every other FRB astronomers have managed to track down. The only other repeating FRB researchers have localized came from a galaxy that has a definite persistent radio source—possibly a nebula, according to researchers—which was seen as a likely source of the FRB. This new one has nothing of the sort, meaning, at the very least, that researchers still don’t have a nice model to explain repeating fast radio bursts.

But it’s always fun to put on the old wild-and-baseless-speculation-hats. Actually, we don’t even need the wild-and-baseless-speculation-hats. Take that off. Researchers tracked a repeating radio signal to a galaxy that has no visible means of producing it. That’s kind of nuts.

“Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope” took place in 0 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin), making Luke Skywalker 19 years old when he left his home planet Tatooine and its binary stars, Tatoo I and Tatoo II. In 2019, Wolf Cukier was 17 years old and a high school junior when he left his home in Scarsdale, New York, to summer intern at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in Year 0 BDT – Before the Discovery of TOI 1338 b, the first exoplanet found to be orbiting two stars at once. Does this make him a Jedi or just really popular at school?

“There’s a whole bunch of things that also looked like planets when I was searching. It took some time to actually verify that this was a bonafide planet and not the telescope shaking or something. When I first found it, it was among 100 other things I flagged to start. I do think I put like 10 asterisks next to it. I thought it looked pretty good compared to the rest of the things I saw.”

Cukier described to The New York Post his work using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) to search images of the sky for changes in a star’s brightness over time, which would indicate the transit of a planet in front of it. Cukier knew that the smaller dwarf star of the TOI 1338 pair could be causing its dimming (obviously a smart kid), so he flagged (or asterisked) it and kept an eye on it. His hunch paid off when he observed a consistent transit in front of the large star that could definitely be a planet … one that is about 6.9 times larger than Earth. But how could he confirm it?

“Throughout all of its images, TESS is monitoring millions of stars. That’s why our team created eleanor. It’s an accessible way to download, analyze and visualize transit data. We designed it with planets in mind, but other members of the community use it to study stars, asteroids and even galaxies.”

In a NASA press release, Adina Feinstein, a graduate student at the University of Chicago and co-author with Cukier of the paper on the discovery which was discussed this week at the 235th American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, introduces us to eleanor, which Wolf probably had to explain to his girlfriend is not a female robotic co-worker but an open-source python framework for downloading, analyzing, and visualizing data from the TESS Full Frame Images. The program is named after another sci-fi character — Eleanor Arroway, the central character in Carl Sagan’s novel “Contact.” She confirmed TOI 1338 b was real and not an instrument anomaly. (Watch a NASA video on the discovery here — Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Smith)

TESS (NASA depiction)

Since he’s still a teen, will Wolf Cukier one day make a trip to his own circumbinary Tatooine planet … or at least see a probe visit there in his lifetime? Probably not, since TOI 1338 is 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. However, he does qualify to appear in a NASA press release and co-autor a scientific paper. In the world of astronomy, that’s the equivalent of a laurel and hearty handshake.

Let’s hope that in the world of senior year at high school, it means an A in astrophysics and a scholarship to a good college for Wolf. Not to mention a date with a real Eleanor.

We have a number of candidates running for president who claim they will investigate the existence of extraterrestrials and their spaceships once they’re elected, but these types of promises tend to get shoved aside when more pressing matters like foreign affairs, domestic disasters and welcoming championship sports teams to the White House interfere. Perhaps it’s because none of these candidates have any actual encounters with UFOs or ETs. Fortunately, there’s one candidate running for US Congress in California (of course) who has both, and his name is probably familiar to ufologists – retired U.S. Air Force Captain Robert Salas, who says the recent release of videos showing military encounters with UFOs are part of his motivation to run, and disclosure is part of his platform. Does he have a chance?

Robert Salas, a UFO witness (and researcher) who figured prominently in UFOs & Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites is running for Congress.

“And just as I [called my commander], our missiles began going into what’s called a no-go condition, or unlaunchable. Essentially, they were disabled while this object was still hovering over our site.”

In 1967, Robert Salas was told by personnel under his command at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana that a red, glowing object about 30 feet in diameter was hovering just above the front gate of the facility. As he was escalating this up the chain of command, the ten Minuteman One nuclear-tipped missiles (ICBMs) at the base shut down due to failures in their guidance and control systems. In a story he has now told many times, Salas asked about the status of the UFO and was told by a guard that it took off at a high speed. The ICBMs were eventually brought back online and an investigation was conducted, which found no viable/believable/non-ET cause for the mysterious shutdown. Salas and everyone else involved were told never to discuss the incident again.

So why do so many people know about it? Well, ex-soldiers talk, especially when there’s beer involved, and Salas discovered there was a similar UFO-related shutdown incident in 1966 at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. He decided to come forward with his story in 1994, co-authored a book, Faded Giant, about it in 2005, co-sponsored a press conference about it with other ex-military witnesses in 2010, participated in the Citizen’s Hearing on Disclosure at the National Press Club in Washington in 2013 and wrote another book about it and other similar cases in 2015 (Unidentified: The UFO Phenomenon). And yet, with all of that effort – including lectures and media appearances, Salas has not been able to influence disclosure about UFOs, ETs and their possible relationship to nuclear weapons and nuclear power, even though UFOs are often seen around power plants.

“So, how does this relate to my running for Congress? You may have already guessed? It will be one of my prime objectives to get Congress to take this phenomenon on as a serious matter. One that is directly related to excessive secrecy in many of our agencies and the issue of nuclear weapons.”

On his political website (salas4congress.org), Salas lists “The UFO Issue,” “Excessive Government Secrecy” and “Nuclear Weapons” as part of his platform. For greater details on his beliefs, he refers voters to his other website (spiralgalaxy.org). Unlike the current presidential candidates, Salas is upfront about them. He tells De Void why the recent UFO videos inspired him to run – he sees the military seizing on them as a funding vehicle to fight aliens, not work with them.

“The shutting down of our missiles was, to me, a message – that’s all. They did no damage to those missiles, by the way, they simply upset the inertial guidance system. All they had to do was go out there and reorient the missiles properly so that if they launched, they would be accurate on target. It was strictly an orientation thing.”

Does he have a chance? California’s primaries on March 3rd are bipartisan, which means the top two vote-getters will meet again in November, regardless of their party. So, he just needs to finish second against a strong incumbent. And if he doesn’t?

“I don’t know where this is gonna go. But if I don’t get laughed out of the place for this UFO stuff, if I can get the UFO community behind me even more in terms of donations, then hopefully I’ll have enough to compete, and stimulate more interest in this subject.”

Get out and vote!

The CIA recently declassified an intelligence report which reveals new information regarding a nearly 50-year-old UFO sighting. The sighting happened during the summer of 1973 at an experimental missile range located in Kazakhstan (Soviet Union’s Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range).

The heavily redacted report contains only one paragraph explaining the mysterious UFO encounter that happened at a spot called “Site 7”. It explains that the witness was watching a Canada vs. USSR sports game on television when the person “stepped outside for some air”. At that point, the witness reported seeing “an unidentified sharp (bright) green circular object or mass in the sky.” Even though the object was hovering in the sky, the witness was unable to give an approximate size.

According to the report, “Within 10 to 15 seconds of observation, the green circle widened and within a brief period of time several green concentric circles formed around the mass. Within minutes the coloring disappeared. There was no sound, such as an explosion, associated with the phenomenon.”

After researcher John Greenewald asked for a Mandatory Declassification Review and received the intelligence report, he made an interesting connection between numerous unexplained sightings during the Cold War and other similar UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) sightings reported by the U.S. Department of Defense. In fact, a military official told The Washington Post that UAPs can sometimes be seen in military airspace multiple times per month.

In a telephone interview, Greenewald told Newsweek, “This is very much similar to the context we see today, with threats on military facilities,” adding, “The U.S. Navy has gone on the record saying whatever this is, it’s a concern. They’re being encroached upon by this unidentified phenomena.”

The report also added that several weapons were being tested at the range, such as experimental missiles and warheads that contained cartridges that were loaded with hundreds of metal balls. “According to hearsay, experiments involving laser weapons were conducted at an unknown location at the range. Supposedly the tests involved powerful antennas,” the report read. The UFO sighting happened at Site 7 which was used as the headquarters for the “warhead checkout unit” with a number of Soviet Air Force personnel stationed there. The full report can be read here.

It’s quite interesting that the UFO encounter took place at an experimental missile range in 1973 because just a short time before that there were over 12,000 UFO sightings reported to Project Blue Book between the years 1947 and 1969 during the Cold War.

In the annals of airborne UFO encounters there are some that go beyond merely pilots or passengers aboard airliners seeing something strange or spooky out in the sky. In some cases the object in question is actually engaged or seems to have some intense interaction with the aircraft, to the point that in a way it can be considered a dogfight of sorts. Here we have brave pilots chasing things they cannot explain and in at least one case dying for their efforts, and two of these UFO dogfights happened in the same year and share some remarkable similarities.

One of the most famous, well-publicized, and allegedly deadliest UFO dogfights supposedly happened in January of 1948. It revolves around Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Captain Thomas F. Mantell, who was an experienced WWII ace pilot and a war hero, being the recipient of awards such as the Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal for his brave actions and heroism during the war. In other words, he was no rookie and no nut job, and on January 7, 1948 Mantell was piloting a F-51D Mustang along with three other pilots from the 165th Fighter Squadron of the Kentucky Air National Guard, in the area of Godman Field, at Fort Knox, Kentucky on a training exercise, when a strange series of events began to unfold.

It started with a report to Godman field from a Kentucky highway patrolman warning that he had seen a large circular object about 300 feet in diameter in the sky near Maysville, Kentucky, after which several other reports came in of people seeing the same thing in the vicinity of Owensboro and Irvington. Shortly after this, at approximately 1:45 PM, a Sgt Quinton Blackwell at Fort Knox made visual contact with the object along with two other personnel in the tower, and it was described as being “very white” with a red border at the bottom. It was also seen at Clinton County Army Air Field in Ohio, with the witnesses saying it had “the appearance of a flaming red cone trailing a gaseous green mist,” and an observer at Lockbourne Army Air Field in Ohio reported that it had dipped all the way down to the ground, only to suddenly soar to an altitude of 10,000 feet and speed off.

Seeing the object as a potential threat to air traffic in the area and looking to find out exactly what it was, Mantell and the other pilots in the air in the area at the time were ordered to go investigate. One of them had to return to base after he ran low on fuel, but the other three dutifully approached the mystery object, and Mantell would make visual confirmation, reportedly telling air traffic control that it was “metallic and of tremendous size.” The other pilots would give a slightly different description, saying that they could not exactly make out what it was as it was too indistinct at the time. They advised Mantell to hold off on pursuing it until they could more concretely identify what it was, but the WWII fighter ace ignored this and tore off after it in hot pursuit.

The other two pilots followed him as he gained altitude, but were then forced to abort because one of the pilots had a low oxygen supply and the other had no oxygen mask at all, so they were unable to climb too high. They were forced to break off and head back as Mantell continued to chase the anomalous object, which seemed to be retreating upwards, passing an altitude of 22,500 feet. As he passed this threshold, it seems that Mantell must have blacked out from a lack of oxygen, as his plane was seen to stop its ascent and then begin a spiraling, circular fall towards the earth. The out of control descent ended with Mantell’s aircraft careening down to crash into a farm south of Franklin, Kentucky at 3:18 PM, and emergency crews were immediately sent out to the site. The UFO itself then vanished from view and was not seen again.

It wasn’t thought that Mantell could have possibly survived the horrific crash, and this was indeed correct. The pilot was found dead and burned in the wreckage, and there were some odd clues found in that the seatbelt had been shredded and his watch had stopped at exactly the time that the plane had come down. It is uncertain what else was found there, but considering that a UFO had been involved and the story began getting splashed all over the media, rumors would soon begin to fly. Various rumors said such myriad mysterious things as that Mantell’s body had been found unburned and fully intact, that it had been full of bullet holes or alternately tiny burned holes indicative of some unknown laser weapon, or that there had been no body at all, as well as that the entire plane had actually been disintegrated in mid-air, or that the wreckage had been magnetized or radioactive. There was absolutely no evidence for any of this, but the public ate it up and it created an added mystique to it all.

Theories ran amok that he had been shot down by a top secret air craft or even a UFO. As far as the military was concerned, it was a classified issue, but many Air Force officials said that they believed that Mantell had died after misidentifying the planet Venus for an unidentified object and then losing oxygen as he got too high. However, this hypothesis seems odd, as according to astronomers Venus at the time was not bright enough to be seen, at most as a vague pinpoint of light, let alone mistaken for an enormous metallic craft like that described. The official stance would change when it was found that the Navy had been carrying out a top secret program called Project Skyhook at the time, which entailed testing the use of special high-altitude meteorological balloons for the purpose of intelligence gathering. The idea was that the balloon could have been mistaken for a mysterious craft, and then foolishly pursued by Mantell. Of course, considering that the official stance is rarely completely trusted by the public, there is of course the idea that he really did chase an alien UFO.

There are a few problems with the balloon theory, such as why such an experienced pilot would not recognize it for what it was, and the fact that the object was also tracked by numerous other trained sources who also did not recognize it as a balloon, and the fact that no one seems to be able to tell if there was even one of those balloons in the area at the time. It also seems to have displayed very non-weather balloon-like behavior with the report of the object dipping down to ground level and shooting up to the sky, as well as displaying amazing acceleration. Whatever it was that Mantell chased or thought he was chasing, it has never really been satisfactorily explained, and nothing really matches all of the details, the experience of the pilot, and the preceding sightings by numerous other observers before the incident. It has gone on to have the distinction of being the first known death of a pilot directly as a result of a UFO, in this case not necessarily an alien craft, but an unidentified object. In the end, it is a weird tale with many questions, and has become perhaps the most well-known case of a pilot engaging an unidentified flying object.

The year 1948 seems to have been the year for this sort of thing, because another very similar case allegedly occurred in October of that year, this time in the skies over Fargo, North Dakota, in the United States. On October 1, 1948, a veteran fighter pilot of the Second World War by the name of George Gorman was on a cross country flight as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard. On this day he was travelling as a part of a squadron of P-51 Mustangs on a training flight, and they made their scheduled destination of Fargo at 8 PM that evening. While the other pilots landed, Gorman went off to do some night flight practice in the clear weather.

After 1 hour of this, at 9 PM Gorman would report that he had seen a bright blinking light that did not seem to have a fuselage or to be a normal airplane in any sense that he could tell. He radioed in the strange object to Fargo’s Hector Airport, and it turned out that no other aircraft was in the area except him and a small Piper Cub that Gorman could see even as he witnessed the mysterious light. It soon became apparent that the Piper Club was also witnessing the anomalous object, and this was enough to make Gorman decide to approach it to see what it was, soon finding that it was moving very rapidly, and it seemed to be evading his attempts to close in on it even as it seemed to taunt him, at one point whizzing by a mere 500 feet away. However, because of this he was able to get a closer visual, and would explain that it was little more than an intensely bright light only perhaps around 8 inches in diameter, and that it got brighter whenever it slowed down.

Gorman would proceed to doggedly pursue the object, which climbed and dropped at a rapid pace, sometimes drawing the pilot to such an altitude that his plane stalled, moved with incredible dexterity, circled around him, and on several occasions buzzed by dangerously close. This “dogfight” brought them directly over the Fargo Airport, where it was also clearly witnessed by air traffic control and ground personnel, who also watched as Gorman’s plane chased it right past them to the southwest. Gorman would manage to get above the object and make a dive on it, after which he claims it made a sudden vertical maneuver to go shooting past and disappear up into higher altitudes. Unable to get another visual on the object, Gorman gave up and flew back to the airport to land, where he would go on to give a formal account of what happened, saying:

I am convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers. I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve. When I attempted to turn with the object I blacked out temporarily due to excessive speed. I am in fairly good physical condition and I do not believe that there are many if any pilots who could withstand the turn and speed effected by the object, and remain conscious. The object was not only able to out turn and out speed my aircraft … but was able to attain a far steeper climb and was able to maintain a constant rate of climb far in excess of my aircraft.

George Gorman on the left

Gorman, the pilot of the Piper Cub, and other witnesses to the incident would be intensively questioned by the Air Force and the aircraft involved extensively checked for radiation or magnetism, finding Gorman’s plane to be significantly more radioactive than it should have been. At first the Air Force were forced to concede that “something remarkable had occurred,” but perhaps not surprisingly to the conspiracy minded they soon changed their tune. Their new theory? It was a weather balloon. Not only that, but to make it more bizarre they claimed that not only had Gorman frantically chased this balloon, but that he had then mistaken the planet Venus for the object and chased that as well. Remember, this was a war hero ace pilot we are talking about, so does this really make sense? Whether it does or not, this would be the official explanation and still is. We are still left to ask, does a trained and experienced fighter pilot mistake a balloon and Venus for something zipping around doing circles around him and taunting him? It seems odd. Of course this has been picked apart within the UFO community, and probably will be a mystery for some time to come.

Here we have looked at two cases that are similar in a number of ways. Both occurred in the same year, and were experienced by seasoned World War II pilots flying with the National Guard in similar planes. Both had strange encounters with a maneuverable, inexplicable craft that they chased to no avail as the objects seemed to toy with them, and both stalled out in this pursuit, one fatally. In both of these strange cases the objects were seen by numerous other observers and noted by air traffic control, with no one able to explain what they were seeing, and both times the explanation from the government came down to weather balloons and Venus. While the cases may be totally unrelated, they are undeniably very similar, both harrowing, and show similar features that mark them as perhaps something beyond mere mundane explanations. What happened to these men and others like them, who have become engaged in a test of wits and skill with possible forces from beyond our understanding? Is there something to this all, or is it just misidentification and weather balloons? If these really were UFOs then what did they want and why were they toying with these pilots? Whatever the case may be, these are two of the most well-known cases of UFO dogfights that remain talked about to this day.

The United States Navy has admitted to having additional footage/information about the 2004 USS Nimitz Tic Tac UFO encounter, but won’t release it because it could jeopardize national security.

A researcher named Christian Lambright sent a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in October requesting information on the encounter. He recently received a response to his request and while the Navy didn’t offer him any new evidence, they did provide very important information regarding a secret video and documents. They said that they did have “top secret” documents and “secret” video footage but they weren’t allowed to release them as they could cause “grave damage” to national security.

USS Nimitz

The response from ONI read in part, “We have discovered certain briefing slides that are classified TOP SECRET. A review of these materials indicates that are currently and appropriate Marked and Classified TOP SECRET under Executive Order 13526, and the Original Classification Authority has determined that the release of these materials would cause exceptionally grave damage to the National Security of the United States,” and, “We have also determined that ONI possesses a video classified SECRET.” The entire letter can be read in full here.

This is a very interesting development as several of the USS Nimitz sailors have reported watching longer videos than those that were made public in 2017. However, when journalists questioned the Pentagon about these allegedly longer videos, spokesperson Susan Gough said that the three videos released to the public were the only ones.

So is there another video of the encounter or not? According to a Navy pilot who chased the tic tac shaped UFO, there are missing tapes of the encounter. In an interview with The Fighter Pilot Podcast last year, Commander David Fravor said that “All the radar tapes from the Princeton are missing and they can’t find [them].” Additionally, he mentioned that after the encounter, he made copies of the tapes which also went missing.

USS Princeton

Another U.S. Navy veteran (Lead Petty Officer Ryan Weigelt) claimed that secret officials boarded the USS Princeton and took “something” off the helicopters which made them unable to fly.

Are these missing tapes the ones that the Navy won’t release to the public? And what exactly did the secret officials take off the Princeton? What are they trying to hide and why would it cause “grave damage” to national security? With each new bit of information regarding the tic tac UFO encounter, there seems to be more questions than answers.