For most of us around the world, our way of life has significantly changed in the last few weeks. Although America is only recently being confronted with the global reality that is the current coronavirus pandemic, with more than 82,000 U.S. citizens infected it now has more confirmed cases than Italy, and even China, where the outbreak first emerged.

“As the number of known cases reached into the hundreds, then the thousands, then the tens of thousands, life across the country has changed in swift, profound ways,” the New York Times reports alongside an updated map with numbers of infections per county across the country.

As the evolving coronavirus situation continues to keep us on edge, many industry leaders in virology, health care, technology, and the intelligence community say they were aware that such a pandemic was not only possible but that it was just a matter of time.

Business magnate and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been talking about the threat of future pandemics for years. Back in 2015, as concerns about the possible outbreak of Ebola were still fresh on our minds, he was looking ahead at the possibility that a future outbreak could indeed be far worse.

Bill Gates meeting U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis

(public domain).

“As awful as this epidemic has been, the next one could be much worse,” Gates wrote about a TEDx talk he gave in 2015. “The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic.”

It was recently reported that Gates also advised President Trump on pandemic preparedness two years ago, saying that “The president was kind enough to spend time with me, and one of the issues I brought up is this opportunity to build new tools that would help us deal with a pandemic.”

Gates isn’t the only person who had been expressing such concerns.

In his recent book Flu Hunter: Unlocking the secrets of a virus, Virologist Robert G. Webster, an authority on avian flu, said in December that the next pandemic was “just a matter of time.”

Webster’s thoughts on such an imminent threat are prescient, to say the least:

“It is sobering to realise that, after nearly 100 years of studying the 1918 influenza, we still do not know precisely why the virus was such a killer; nor are we significantly better prepared to deal with a repeat event.

“Nature will eventually again challenge mankind with an equivalent of the 1918 influenza virus. We need to be prepared.”

A particularly sobering view was offered by Jeremy Konyndyk, former director of the Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance under USAID, in a Politico article from 2017, where he noted that every U.S. President since Ronald Reagan has faced a similar health crisis:

“A major new global health crisis is a question of when, not if. Every president dating back at least to Ronald Reagan has dealt with major and unexpected outbreaks—HIV/AIDS, SARS, bird flu, Ebola, Zika. In recent years the world has been fortunate that these outbreaks have been either highly contagious (the 2009 H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic infected up to 200 million people), or highly fatal (the H5N1 “bird flu” strain had a fatality rate of up to 60 percent)—but not both at once.”

However, it was what Konyndyk had to say about a future pandemic that was particularly sobering.

“At some point a highly fatal, highly contagious virus will emerge,” Konyndyk said, “like the 1918 ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic, which infected one third of the world’s population and killed between 50 and 100 million people.”

The present coronavirus pandemic was also no surprise to the U.S. intelligence community.

“We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease,” a 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment stated, “that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

The potential threat of such a virus has been an item of speculation and future forecasts for far longer than just the last decade, as other recent MU articles have suggested. Many have even pointed out that in a 2008 book, the late psychic Sylvia Browne wrote that “In around 2020 a severe pneumonia-like illness will spread throughout the globe, attacking the lungs and the bronchial tubes and resisting all known treatments.”

It cannot be denied that Browne made such a prediction, although some take issue with the accuracy of the forecast, as Benjamin Radford recently noted:

Covid-19 is not “a severe pneumonia-like illness” (though it can in some cases lead to pneumonia)… Browne also says the disease she’s describing “resists all known treatments.” This does not describe Covid-19; in fact, doctors know how to treat the disease—it’s essentially the same for influenza or other similar respiratory infections.

However, the more fundamental takeaway here is that it didn’t require any psychic powers to see the threat potential of a future virus outbreak the likes of COVID-19. Experts from multiple areas of government and industry had warned us about it. Now that these concerns have become a reality, it is time to take action, and realize that things could certainly get worse before they get better.

Nonetheless, as with past pandemics like the 1918 Spanish Flu, it is also important to know that we, as humans, will get through this. We always do, and we should never underestimate human resilience in the face of a threat, no matter how bad things may be capable of getting. That, too, is important to remember in trying times like these.

There is probably no book of the Bible that annoys NASA more than the Book of Ezekiel. That’s the one with the flying chariot with a “wheel within a wheel” that has come to be known as Ezekiel’s wheel. This is the book which is stuck like glue to Erich von Däniken and the theory of ancient aliens – both of which inspired NASA engineer Josef F. Blumrich to write “The Spaceships of Ezekiel” while still employed by the agency, thus linking NASA to Ezekiel and his wheel – which Blumrich attempted to duplicate with his patented “Omnidirectional wheel.” Fans of ufology know that it’s a rare occasion when NASA acknowledges, let a lone addresses, a UFO sighting, yet that was the case this week when it gave an official explanation for a UFO which was being described as a – you guessed it – Ezekiel’s wheel. Was NASA just annoyed … or is it trying to hide something about this particular UFO?

Huge “Ezekiel’s Wheel” Type UFO Spotted In Our Solar System By STEREO A Camera. February 29, 2020

That’s the headline describing a video uploaded to YouTube by The Hidden Underbelly 2.0, who credits a “Vasco Fernandes” for spotting it on a video from the A camera of the STEREO Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) pair. (Watch the video here.)

These satellite were launched in 2006 and positioned ahead of and behind Earth in the same orbit to give stereoscopic images of the Sun and solar phenomena … and UFOs? Contact was lost with STEREO B in 2014 but STEREO A continues to broadcast … except when it’s interrupted by … NASA? That’s the assumption in the video’s narration, which highlights the appearance of the so-called “Ezekiel’s wheel” for a few seconds before the video cuts out. When it returns, the anomaly is gone and the narrator says:

“NASA’s gonna have to have some explaining for this.”

Amazingly enough, NASA does! In a post on the agency’s STEREO website, it says this:

“Some people have noticed an odd shape, sort of a cross inside a circle, entering the field-of-view of the HI2 telescope on STEREO Ahead around February 20,2020. Eventually there is a cone shape that appears next to it. You can see the feature in question in this movie moving from right-to-left, just below the trapezoidal occulter on the right side of the image.

The answer lies on the exact opposite side of the image. At the same time as this strange-looking feature starts being visible, the very bright planet Venus enters the HI2-A field-of-view from the left. Notice that Venus and the feature stay in step almost exactly opposite each other across the middle of the detector. This is not a coincidence. The strange looking geometrical “object” is actually an internal reflection of the planet Venus within the telescope optics. This effect has been seen many times before.”

The “UFO” with NASA’s captions

Well, that explains it for everyone except the true believers in Ezekiel’s wheel – it’s Venus being reflected inside the telescope. It should make sense to anyone who knows a little about cameras (remember those?), lenses and optics. However, rather than leaving it at that, NASA sees it necessary to bring up something else.

“We have also gotten some questions about why the images from the most recent few days are of lower quality and are sometimes incomplete. This is because our data comes in two streams – highly compressed and lower quality but fast space weather beacon data, which are replaced after a few days with better science-quality images.”
(– is NASA’s weird character stream.)

Hmm. Why would NASA, so historically unwilling to address any sort of unusual space anomalies, bring one up on its own? For those who watch these video feeds for such anomalies or just out of scientific curiosity, the fact that NASA actually has two visual feeds of the same area must be puzzling. And why has it suddenly switched to what it admits is a lower quality feed right after the so-called “Ezekiel’s wheel” appeared? Is there something to hide?

Sorry, NASA, that annoying Ezekiel’s wheel is not going away and neither are the dedicated watchers who wonder what you’re up to.

Send this to NASA

Since the modern concept of UFOs first appeared on the cultural landscape in the late 1940s, a number of civilian and government studies have been conducted in order to try to study the phenomenon and assess what elements may characterize it.

Opinions remain divided more than 70 years later, and many researchers and theorists continue to argue about the nature of UFOs, and whether they represent a unified, unexplained phenomenon, or if there are many elements that contribute to a cultural idea that we collectively refer to as “UFOs”.

There are merits to both positions, and many people that take the UFO idea serious enough to study it acknowledge this. Within the broader body of UFO reports are undoubtedly countless claims of sightings of unusual things that can likely be ruled out as misperceptions, hoaxes, and other similar sources.

A NOAA weather balloon (public domain).

Here, the UFO advocate will assert that a distinction must be made: when we discuss truly unexplained aerial phenomena or, as longtime researcher Bruce Maccabee has called them, “TRUFOs”, we mean aircraft or objects that are not the result of hoaxes or misperceptions, and which bear genuinely anomalous characteristics.

Although making this distinction helps, it brings us to one of the most fundamental questions in all of UFO study and research: even if we can agree that there are “unknowns”, what are they, and what are their origins?  

Many who take interest in the subject—both believers and skeptics—operate under a fundamental bias that discussion of UFOs is equivalent to speculations about extraterrestrial visitors. Critics may confidently proclaim things like, “a good UFO sighting or report still does nothing to prove that aliens are visiting,” while advocates may similarly argue that, “some areas of UFO research, while of merit, don’t help us prove that UFOs are spaceships.”

Such arguments illustrate the problem on both sides: whether they do or don’t believe the UFO reports in question, the extraterrestrial bias is fundamentally the same.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

“The ETH is a strong claim,” wrote Allan Hendry in his 1979 book The UFO Handbook. During the 1970s, Hendry worked for a period at J. Allen Hynek’s Center for UFO Studies, and used the data he compiled during that period to author one of the most important, and yet often overlooked and underrated books on the subject.

“[S]trong claims require strong evidence,” Hendry wrote, “evidence of a kind that has not manifested itself in thirty years. The burden of proof is on the shoulders of the ETH claimants and the strain is starting to show. More and more UFOloglsts are seeking alternative (but equally extraordinary) explanations to the ETH for the high-strangeness UFOs.”

As an illustration of this, Hendry described a 1976 conference in Chicago where 53 participants were handed a questionnaire asking them to what they thought the UFO phenomenon was attributable. Hendry gave the results as follows:

• An extraterrestrial source: 28
• Other: 28
• No Answer: 2
• A civilization on earth: 1

“Just what does ‘Other’ include?” Hendry asked, noting the appearance of theories about UFOs ranging from inhabitants of parallel realities to interdimensionals, the “ultraterrestrials” favored by the late John Keel, “metaterrestrials,” hollow-earth inhabitants (with a nod back to the 1940s “Shaver Mystery” stories), and even remnants of the long-lost continent of Atlantis.

“None of these has made much impact,” Hendry noted, “since they constitute nothing more than wild speculation, but they do all reflect one common feature: the need to find an extraordinary solution for the UFO reports. This is necessary to account for the extraordinary observations… providing the observations are accepted at face value.”

Hendry, although too skeptical to the liking of many of his contemporaries, had a firm grasp on the problems that “UFO theorizing” often presented. Attempting to find commonality between UFO reports and then reducing them down to a single overarching theory about their origins may actually counterproductive.

Allan Hendry (Credit: Center for UFO Studies)

In Hendry’s view, “this leads to a blanket explanation for them all and strikes me as an error in judgment, as the different UFO subtypes all suggest different natures.”

“I do not believe that thee is a single UFO phenomenon,” Hendry argued, warning that the propensity among some researchers to toss seemingly unrelated anomalous occurrences into the mix of UFO studies was “directionless,” and may do more harm than good.

What Hendry illustrates here is that in our need to “know” what UFOs are, and where they come from, we may be setting ourselves up for failure as researchers. In other words, just like the believers (and skeptics) who presume that talk of UFOs and extraterrestrials are mutually exclusive, attributing UFO studies broadly to any single, overarching “theory” could be misleading.

However we look at it, there is a genuine phenomenon present with UFOs. Even if we could presume that all such observations are misperceptions, delusions, and the like, that alone would still constitute a social and psychological phenomenon worthy of study. For my own part, I feel that there is more than this to a number of the better UFO reports collected over the years, pointing to a physical reality behind many of them… whatever that reality may be.

Hence, there is something here worthy of studying, and doing so might even be beneficial for humankind. However, as we proceed with the study of all the things we call “UFOs,” it will actually help us in the long run not to leap to conclusions about what they might be, and instead keep an open, but discerning mindset as we proceed.

A former Wales football player captured a very interesting video of a mysterious glowing orb in the night sky. Simon Church was outside enjoying the starry night when he noticed a bright round object floating through the sky before completely disappearing.

He posted the video to his Twitter account with the caption, “Just seen the craziest thing whilst having a look at Venus tonight. It was way [too] high to be a drone and then just disappeared,” and with the hashtags #ufo, #ufosighting, #crazy, and #whatdoyouthink. He tried to make light of the situation, joking that he may have been going crazy after going into a national Coronavirus lockdown, “It was moving quickly then just disappeared surely can’t be going mad after day 2 of isolation…,” he wrote.

Simon Church

So far, more than 20,000 people have viewed the footage with several people giving their opinions on what Church captured on video. One user wrote, “That’s the real deal. Congratulations amazing capture,” while another posted, “Deffo ufo. If [you’re] in Wales near St Athan it is UK Area 51.”

Others weren’t so convinced that it was of extraterrestrial origin as some suggested that it was a Chinese lantern, the International Space Station, or satellites. Church even admitted that it was more than likely the ISS, “After watching it there it must [have] been the space station cool to watch but gutted it’s not Mars Attacks,” he wrote.

The footballer attempted to get a better view of the object by zooming in on it but unfortunately it just made the footage grainier. So, did Church actually capture a UFO on video or was it the ISS? You can decide for yourself as the video can be seen on his Twitter account as well as here.

This isn’t the first time in recent months that a professional football player has been linked with UFOs and aliens. Just a few months ago, Diego Maradona claimed that he had been abducted by aliens. In an interview with Argentine sports channel TyC Sports, he was asked if he believed in UFOs and that’s when he made the surprising claim. “Why make things up? Once, after a few too many drinks, I was missing from home for three days,” he stated, adding, “I got home and said that UFOs had taken me. I said, ‘They took me, I can’t tell you about it’.” While it’s not certain whether he just had a drunken three-day blackout or if he really was abducted by extraterrestrials, it’s definitely an interesting claim to say the least.

This bizarre object stunned footballer Simon Church 

(Image: Twitter/@churchy18)

Mention the notorious MIB and most people will instantly think of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones – such is the incredible success of the Men in Black movie franchise, which began back in the 1990s. Of course, those with an interest in the paranormal mysteries of our world will know that the movies were based upon real reports of encounters with mysterious, dangerous men dressed in black, ones who were intent on silencing people who had encountered UFOs, aliens, and even the likes of Bigfoot and the Mothman. There is, however, one big difference between Hollywood’s MIB and those of the real world. Smith and Jones characters – J and K – are the employees of a secret agency that oversees the alien presence on our planet. In other words, they are what we might accurately term ufological 007s. In reality, however, the Men in Black are clearly not government agents: they don’t even look human. That’s because they’re not.

“Pauline,” who I interviewed in 2013, had a very strange encounter with a Man in Black back in October 1973, when she was living in Pasadena, California. It’s notable, and probably relevant, for me to reveal that a major UFO wave was going on at that time, and all across the United States. While hiking in the California hills one Sunday morning, Pauline encountered a classic, silver-colored flying saucer-style UFO which, at first, at least, was high in the sky. Suddenly, it dropped to around fifty or sixty above her, hanging there in an odd, wobbling fashion. Amazed, Pauline could only stare as the silent craft bobbed around – like a boat on churning waters – and then shot away at high speed.

Pauline raced home and excitedly told her family of what had just taken place. They, apparently, weren’t the only ones who knew what had occurred on the fateful morning in 1973. Three days later, and after sunset, Pauline had a visitor. Not a welcome one, I should stress. It was a Man in Black, a skinny – almost emaciated – old man, dressed in a shabby black suit, looking pale and ill, and wearing an old, 1950s-style fedora hat. Pauline said that she felt her mind was briefly enslaved, as the MIB near-hypnotically asked her to invite him into her home. In a slight daze, and to her eternal cost, she did exactly that. She retreated to the couch, stumbling slightly and feeling ice-cold. The old man followed her, and stood in the living-room, looming over her, as he warned her – in no uncertain terms – never to discuss her close encounter again. Ever.

The MIB then turned around and headed to the door. At that exact same moment, Pauline felt her mental faculties return to normal and she raced after him, just as he exited the door and closed it behind him. Pauline threw the door open wide, only to find the old Man in Black gone. In his place, however, was something else: it was a large, black dog with bright red eyes. It snapped and snarled in Pauline’s direction and in what was clearly a deeply malevolent, dangerous fashion. She stared in horror as the glowing-eyed monster prowled around the yard, clearly intent on adding to the malevolent atmosphere that was already firmly in place. Suddenly, and as if out of nowhere, a black Cadillac – that looked decades-old in design – appeared and screeched to a halt outside of Pauline’s home. It should be noted, here, that the MIB almost always drive such cars of that particular type, age and color.

Pauline watched, shocked and scared, as the back door on the driver’s-side opened and the fiendish black hound bounded across the front yard and leapt into the back of the Cadillac, which shot away at high speed! Today, Pauline – now a grandmother and someone who is fairly comfortable about sharing her bizarre experience – is of a firm opinion that the aged MIB and the red-eyed beast were one and the same. As Pauline sees it, something unexplained, but also something which could take on “different disguises” as it saw fit. As controversial as that might sound, let’s not forget that we saw in a previous chapter how, in England of centuries ago, so-called phantom black dogs were said to possess the ability to shapeshift into human form and vice-versa.

Moving on, but still focused on Pasadena, California – interestingly enough – there is the very strange story of the “Maxwell” family, who I met and spoke with in 2014. In the summer of 1987, they spent a week vacationing in and around San Francisco, staying with friends in Menlo Park. On their way back home, they traveled along California’s famous Highway 101, which provides a panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean, and for mile upon mile. They chose to drive through the night, when the highway would be at its least busy; thinking that it would be to their benefit. How completely and utterly wrong they were. As fate would destine to have it, after a couple of hours of driving, the family of four spotted a strange light in the sky. It was described as a bright green ball of light, about the size of a beach-ball, one which paced their car and that stayed with them for a couple of miles, at a height of around sixty feet. There was nothing frightening about the encounter. Rather, they were all amazed and excited. It wasn’t long, however, before things got very disturbing.

The day after the Maxwell’s got home was a Sunday, meaning they had an extra day before returning to work and school. It was while one of the teenage children was sat on the porch and playing music on an old Walkman that she caught sight of a man on the other side of the road. He was dressed completely in black, aside from a white shirt. He even wore black gloves, on what was a bright, summery day. The girl was particularly disturbed by the fact that the man sported a weird grin and was staring right at her. So unsettled was she that she went back into the home and told her father of what had just happened. He quickly went to the door but – no surprise – the MIB was gone.

Later that same night, the girl had a frightening and graphic dream – if that is all it was – of the very same Man in Black standing next to her bed and staring at her in malevolent style. She woke suddenly, around 3:00 a.m., soaked in sweat. On the following night, the girl’s younger brother had a similar dream. And, two days later the husband and wife saw a pair of creepy, pale MIB clearly watching, and following, them in a local supermarket. Oddly, as the husband, angry and confused by what was going on, decided to confront them, they headed quickly to another aisle and vanished – as in literally. They were nowhere to be seen.

Matters reached their conclusion on the next night, when Mr. Maxwell was woken up by the sounds of loud scratching at the front-door; scratching which strongly suggested some form of wild animal was trying to get in the home. He decided to try and catch the beast off-guard and raced into the backyard and to a gate that gave access to a small alley between his and the house next door. He crept along, reached the front of the house, and peered at the front-door. To his horror, there was no monster, but a man – in black, it scarcely needs saying – crouched down and pawing at the door in deranged style.

Mr. Maxwell shouted in his direction, at which point the MIB stopped what it was doing, stood up to a height of around seven-feet, and stared directly at him. Then, in an instant, the figure dropped to the floor, took on a wolf-like appearance, and bounded off into the darkness, leaving a shell-shocked and trauma-filled witness behind it. The MIB that became a wolf was not seen again and the Maxwell’s did not experience anything else untoward. The strange series of events was finally at its end.

Many people may not realize it, but far above our heads, out in space in orbit around our planet away from where the eye can see is a giant junkyard. There, clogging our orbit is all manner of debris, including nonfunctional spacecraft, abandoned launch vehicle stages, mission-related debris, spent rocket stages, derelict satellites, and a hodgepodge of millions and millions of pieces of miscellaneous junk we have discarded into space. It spreads out in a vast sea of garbage which, although luckily invisible to us on the ground, creates a hazard for spacecraft and satellites. Yet, according to some wild stories, there is more than just garbage up there spinning about our planet past where the eye can see, and one of the strangest of these is a supposed broken alien spaceship complete with entombed alien bodies orbiting the earth.

In 1979, the Soviet astrophysicist Sergei Boshich came forward with the spectacular claim that he had found evidence of what he called a crippled alien spacecraft that had broken up into pieces and was hovering in orbit. By his estimates, he had thus far managed to track 10 pieces of wreckage from the spacecraft, several of which he estimated as being around 100 feet in length. Boshich said he had calculated the trajectories of the debris and come to the conclusion that they had scattered from some sort of space explosion on December 18, 1955, and even more bizarre was that it was his assertion that this mysterious derelict craft was likely now a tomb containing the bodies of the ship’s occupants. It sounds like the rantings of a conspiracy nutcase, but there were allegedly others who backed up these findings, including one Soviet astrophysicist and science fiction writer Aleksandr Kazantsev, who would say “Its size would suggest several floors, possibly five. We believe that alien bodies will still be on board.”

The scientists were quick to rule out the possibility that it could be space junk originating from Earth, as the purported explosion predated the first human object in space, which would have been the Sputnik 1 launched in 1957. They also denied that it could be a meteor, as it was maintaining a steady orbit rather than the falling of a meteor. According to Boshich and his team of scientists, all evidence pointed to an alien craft that had blown up in space, and one Moscow physicist, Dr Vladimir Azhazha, would say:

Meteors do not have orbits. They plummet aimlessly, hurtling erratically through space. And they do not explode spontaneously. All the evidence we have gathered over the past decade points to one thing — a crippled alien craft. It must hold secrets we have not even dreamed of. A rescue mission should be launched. The vessel, or what is left of it, should be reassembled here on Earth. The benefits to mankind could be stupendous.

Apparently the discovery generated interest from the Americans as well, and according to the story there was some degree of cooperation among them to come up with a plan to salvage the crippled spacecraft and possibly even board it. One problem was that the Soviets were being very secretive with the information they had, which generated skepticism from British scientists. One British scientist would say:

There are more than 4,000 pieces of wreckage orbiting the Earth. Each has a catalogue number to identify it. We would like to know the catalogue number of this wreck. It is possible to date wreckage after a considerable number of observations. Like the Americans, we would be interested to look at this if the Russians make the information available.

Quite interesting is what was pointed out in a 1969 article in the magazine Icarus, in which astronomer John Bagby claimed to have found 10 moonlets in orbit around the earth, which he had calculated had spread from a single source on the date December 18, 1955, the same day as was claimed by Boshich 10 years later. The story of what had gone on to be called “The Boshich Wreckage” was printed in various news sources at the time, and generated a fair amount of speculation and conspiracies. One was that, although there was no official confirmation that an actual salvage mission had actually been launched, the Americans and Soviets had secretly gone and done it. Another theory was that this was all a smokescreen put out by the Soviets to cause misinformation in the Cold War of the period, a total fabrication quite possibly based on the article in Icarus.

Of course there is also the possibility that the whole story is a big sham to begin with. Although the discovery was printed in a wide variety of publications, it all originated with an article in the British tabloid newspaper Reveille, which is in many ways sort of like The National Enquirer and not known for being a particularly trustworthy news source. It furthermore seems that there is no real confirmation that any of this ever happened at all, and so rather than some conspiracy maybe it was all just made up by some bored newspaper writer. What is going on with this all? Was it ever really real in any sense, and if so, how? Was this some conspiracy launched by the Russians to mess with the United States, a real crashed UFO floating around in space, a cover-up, or just an entertaining yarn? Whatever it may be, it is certainly a curious little account, and one wonders just what became of this all in the end.

A special thanks to Steve Baxter for the cover artwork on this article.