In the world of the paranormal there are a variety of different types of encounters with seemingly humanoid entities. Some of these are of course of ghosts, while others can be of lesser defined phenomena, and some of these truly leave us scratching our heads. Among such reports are scattered accounts of encounters with what seem to be pitch black entities of some sort, which seem to appear anywhere and which have origins and machinations that are inscrutable to us. Here is a selection of such strange encounters with black humanoid entities from beyond our understanding.

Some of these strange encounters happen out in the wilds where things are already dark and scary enough as it is without having to worry about pitch black, possibly demonic entities. One such story comes to us from Reddit user “Justinf10000,” who says he had his spooky experience in the woods of Camp Tommy, in Fishkill, New York. He says he had been working as a camp counselor at the time of the incident, and that on this evening he was sneaking out to go meet up with his girlfriend in one of the other cabins. He wasn’t supposed to be out, as the cabins were supposed to be locked down after 10PM, but he had done this often and there was no reason to think anything strange would happen this time, but it did anyway. He explains of what happened as he cut through the forest:

Suddenly I heard rustling in the woods, and stopped to investigate it. There are bears/other animals so I was expecting something like that. This 3 foot humanoid type thing suddenly jumps out of the bushes spooked and looks at me. It’s too dark for me to make out any of its features, other than it was standing on 2 feet, had 2 arms, and basically looked just like a miniature person without any features (just looked solid black, if it had clothes on, I would have been able to notice that).

I was really curious what it was so I started walking towards it, and it must have got more spooked because it bolted back into the woods. I’ll never forget how mechanical it looked as it took off running too. It’s whole body basically shifted 90 degrees (like if someone was doing the robot dance) and it just took off. I have never seen anything on 2 legs run that quickly so I was pretty confused about what it was. I’m a pretty fast runner and fit person in general, but this thing was on another level of fast. As much as I try to make sense of it, I still to this day have no idea wtf it was. It was very human, but too short to be a human (3 feet tall is about accurate) and i really don’t know how a human could run that fast anyways. I have no freakin idea but it’s always bugged me! Maybe one day I will go back to try and find this creature again!

Strange, indeed. Another such account comes to us from the wilds of the state of Alabama, where Reddit user “AMpwrs” says she had a rather bizarre experience just after an evening riding around in his 4×4 truck through a wooded area. On their way back they apparently ran out of gas and were forced to push the truck to a secluded parking area, where they decided to sit and take a rest before deciding what to do next. It was as they sat there that the witness looked up and saw something strange in the solitary security light of the parking lot. He says of what happened next:

Standing there no more than 10 ft in front us and directly in clear view under the security light was a horrible creature. I froze up and just remained as silent as I could, then my buddy screams out loudly. That’s when this thing noticed us and jumped, turning in our direction. It immediately ran off in an awkward lanky fashion and ducked behind a tree. It then peeked around the tree back toward us then sprinted off towards the woods where it disappeared. That’s when I said, “did you see that”?

 My friend immediately described exactly what it was that I had just witnessed down to detail. A solid black bipedal creature with shiny tight skin. It had an elongated head and no face. It did have facial bone structure but no orifices. No mouth, no nostrils and no eyes. You could see every bone in its body and it was slightly hunched. It had long dangling pointy fingers.

The creature apparently then ran off into the night and was not seen again. What was this thing? Who knows? Not all of these encounters happen out in the middle of nowhere. Another tale comes to us from a soldier in the U.S. Army, who at the time was at the sprawling, 94,000-acre Fort Sill, in Lawton, Oklahoma, for training exercises. He says that on this evening he was on firewatch duty, which was basically a pretty boring detail according to him. However, on this evening it would prove to be anything but boring. The witness says:

One Saturday I had firewatch. Not a big deal i decided I’d chill in my room for most of it and make myself been seen every now and then. We had a gym below the main floor. We would spend a lot of time in that gym. Firewatch was sometimes tasked with cleaning it up. There was a small walled off section though. It used to contain an electric chair. I’m still unsure on the history of the building we we’re at but it was next to a large cemetery. We would hear the occasional creepy story about the building and the electric chair.

Anyway, I digress. That night I was asked to clean the gym and then to mop 3rd deck. At the time no one lived on 3rd deck. My buddy and I cleaned the gym then walked up the stairs to mop. He mopped from the end to the middle and I proceeded to mop the rest of the way to the stairs. We finished mopping my friend went to go skate in his room while I told duty we we’re done. I walked back up the stairs to grab the mop bucket. I got up there and I realized someone had walked all over the floor that we just mopped. So I looked down the hallway.

When I did I saw a human like figure. Except it was black. The blackest black I have ever seen. I felt this wave of uncertainty and fear wash over me. Something I have never felt before. I sprinted down the stairs ran to my room waking my roommate up. He thought I was messing with him when I told him what happened. After that I never saw the figure again while I was there. It was honestly one of the most disturbing experiences of my life.

What in the world was going on here? Was this a ghost, his imagination, or something else altogether? On occasion, such entities are seen around more residential areas or even more creepily within homes. One account from Your Ghost Stories supposedly happened in 2008 in the U.S. state of Connecticut, with the witness saying that the strangeness began when he woke up one evening to find a strange presence in his room. He explains of what happened next:

A few seconds after awaking I felt the sensation of something gripping my heart and squeezing it to the point where it was painful. For me to admit pain, actual pain, with what I’ve gone through in terms of getting hurt playing sports, means that it was really something bad. Also, I don’t wake up at those hours of the morning anymore without a reason I’m aware of, a dream, having to go to the bathroom, or something along those lines. When I woke up for this, there was no immediate cause that I can remember that forced me to wake up… All I remember is waking up.

In the corner of my bed room, there was a black shadow, darker than my room that appeared to be humanoid, but somehow didn’t really have a shape. I never looked directly at it, but only looked at it out of the corner of my eye, which is unusual because I ALWAYS look at unusual objects/things. I do remember it seeming to reach out toward me at one point. All I did was curl up into a ball and started praying. A minute or 2 after I started praying, I felt the pressure in my chest release, and with it came a profound calmness I’ve never had before, and I’ve managed to maintain a piece of that calmness ever since. My house is not haunted, nobody has ever died in it, and there’s no ancient Indian Graveyard underneath it. I have no explanation for what happened.

This sounds like it could almost be a case of the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, wherein the witnesses will find themselves in a sort of limbo state between sleep and wakefulness and experience extremely vivid dream-like hallucinations, but it is hard to say. Another witness, Reddit user “Hhandholmes,” says that he and several acquaintances were plagued by a string of sightings of these types of black entities in the vicinity of where he lived, at an undisclosed location within the United States. He says that within a month he and several others spotted petite black humanoids standing only around 4 feet tall lurking about the area, and he explains:

In most of the cases we all witnessed the same style of humanoid, around 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall and pitch black, meaning that no features were even seen on the things. They would walk/run extremely fast and were only seem at night time, sometimes even passing through street lights yet their bodies got no lighter than what they were in the dark, they were always a pitch black.

They were spotted all in the same two blocks of each other, mostly standing in the alleys, once sitting in a tree, on someones front porch and even in a bedroom. The most seen together was only two, meaning that they mostly traveled alone? Most of them seemed to simply be watching, there was one incident where the being was slightly different. it was probably a foot and half taller but hunched over and could drop on all fours and sprint away faster than any animal or person I have ever seen.

There are cases along these lines reported from countries other than the United states as well. One comes to us from a Reddit User “is_no_good,” who says he had this experience while living in a small rural village in Germany in 2003. At the time he was on his way back from a church service when he saw something very outlandish standing in a side alley. He says of his encounter:

In a sidestreet under a lighted street lamp stood this thing, it was completely black had no face and no clothes, was very tall, like about 2m and the creature’s arms reached below its knees. It just stood there in silence and as I saw it and realized that it can’t be a human, I was frozen to fear and couldn’t stop looking at it, till it made a step in my direction. In this moment I ran like hell to the house of my parents without turning around. It didn’t get me or something but I was in extreme fear. I never talked to anyone about this because I feared that people would laugh about me. But I saw it and it still haunts my thoughts now and then. Fortunately, I never saw it again. In Summary: The thing was completely black it had no details. There was no face, no colors, no nose shape, no eyes. It had normal proportions except the knee long arms. It was very thin and approximately 2m tall. It made no sound. And I have the feeling that it was a ‘he.’

Another account is from a witness on Your Ghost Stories who lives in the Philippines. She explains that this happened when she was in college living with 4 housemates at an apartment near the university. It was here where they would all be menaced by a very strange entity indeed. The witness says:

One afternoon at around 4 or 5, one of our housemates (which was also my classmate and batchmate) was eating her dinner while I was sitting in the middle of the living room facing the mirror and my sister was in the living room watching TV. So as the area is an open space and is just divided by some sort of study table or chairs (I can’t remember the divider we used), all 3 of us are basically within the same room and can clearly see each other. After a while, I saw a tall dark figure sort of peeping at us from the kitchen sink area. There is a thick supporting foundation just before the sink (L-shaped area) and there was this tall dark thing hiding by it. I can see its face, hair, one arm and left leg and foot but the other parts are not visible as it seems to be hiding (like when a kid is shy but is still curious to see something kind of pose). So it took me a few seconds before I was able to talk because my mind can’t comprehend what I was seeing so my immediate question was, “is there anyone at the sink”? Which I know is quite odd and impossible as I know there are only 3 of us.

My housemate, being a scaredy cat suddenly stood up looking at me in disbelief asking me to stop teasing her but I told her that there is something by the column going to the sink looking at us. My sister then said there are only 3 of us in the house right now and it can be a burglar as we are just on the 2nd floor of the entire apartment building. But I told them that is not possible as the exit staircase is no longer there due to weather and rusting. I also told them that it is not person based from what I see.

They then asked me what I see and I told them that aside from the white of the eyeballs, everything was just black. I told them it was black as a charcoal and the hair is like that of an afro and the it is almost as tall as the ceiling. It stayed there for a good 2 to 3 minutes as if it was observing someone or something from the house (my guess is that it was looking at the TV as it was the direction of its gaze) before it disappeared. I think all the hairs on my body were standing up during the entire time I was seeing this thing and then everything went back to normal as soon as it disappeared. The funny thing is I think my sister and our housemate were even more afraid of the thing than I was even though I was the only one that can see it. I didn’t feel any scary aura coming from it. I guess my goosebumps were just due to the fact that I don’t know what I was seeing and I can’t believe what I was seeing. And more than ten years from that event, I still don’t know what that tall dark thing was.

With such an eclectic mix of truly bizarre reports we are left to wonder what it is we might be dealing with in such encounters. Are these examples of ghosts, demons, or even aliens or interdimensional interlopers of some sort bleeding over into our reality? Are they just fanciful fictionalized accounts or the product of the imagination? There is no way to really know for sure, and such cases as these serve to really fuel speculation and wonder as to what might be going on.

Everybody loves a murder mystery – including the space scientists at NASA. Spoiler alert: they already figured out the murderer in this whodunit and they’re calling it officially a “cosmic homicide.” If you know anything about space and astronomy, you won’t be surprised to learn that the culprit is a black hole. However, this one is a type that has been theorized to exist but has eluded detection and proof … until now. Is this really a murder mystery or more of a Stephen King horror thriller?

“Astronomers have found the best evidence for the perpetrator of a cosmic homicide: a black hole of an elusive class known as “intermediate-mass,” which betrayed its existence by tearing apart a wayward star that passed too close.”

NASA’s press release on the discovery of the first known intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH) opens like a murder case, but quickly switches to sounding like an archeological study.

“These so-called intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) are a long-sought “missing link” in black hole evolution.”

And then it becomes a horror monster thriller.

“It took the combined power of two X-ray observatories and the keen vision of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to nail down the cosmic beast.”

This is getting interesting.

While the movie doesn’t have a title yet, the plot opens with the Hubble telescope, that workhorse responsible for so many stellar discoveries. According to the NASA press release for the study published in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters, astronomer Dacheng Lin of the University of New Hampshire pointed the Hubble telescope at a strange X-ray flare detected but not identified previously by other space telescopes. The first clue this was something completely different was the startling discovery that it wasn’t coming from our galaxy nor from the center of another galaxy – which meant it wasn’t a supermassive black hole. Being on the edge of a galaxy made 3XMM J215022.4−055108 and its strange galactic home something new yet familiar.

“The star cluster that is home to 3XMM J215022.4−055108 may be the stripped-down core of a lower-mass dwarf galaxy that has been gravitationally and tidally disrupted by its close interactions with its current larger galaxy host.”

The cause of the X-ray flare was the cosmic homicide of a star by this strange black hole in a strange location in a strange galaxy. Using the glow, the astronomers estimated the size of the black hole at 50,000 solar masses – the perfect size to be an intermediate-mass black hole. That proves it’s both the murderer in the cosmic homicide tale and the missing link between small and supermassive black holes.

The black hole, named 3XMM J215022.4−055108, is indicated by the white circle. © NASA, ESA and D. Lin

(University of New Hampshire)

Like good homicide detectives, the astronomers will use this new knowledge to look for other cosmic killer IMBHs. They’ll also keep their eye on 3XMM J215022.4−055108 – there’s no way to bring it in and lock it up for life, so it’s still lurking in a dark corner of a mysterious galaxy … waiting for an unsuspecting star to sashay by. Yes, it’s a true “cosmic beast.”

Killer Cosmic Beast. Homicide: Life on the Galactic Edge. Law & Order: Intermediate Black Hole Unit. The movie and TV series possibilities are intriguing. Maybe it’s time for a channel that caters to astronomers. Andromeda Prime? Netflux? Starz Encore Murders?

Film-making has got to be among the most difficult careers in the world. More so if the topic of your film is something as mercurial and controversial as the UFO phenomenon. If you’re going to make a movie about tigers then you know that if you travel to the jungles of Southeast Asia (or Oklahoma) chances are you’ll be able to film some tigers. If your movie is about mount Everest you can book your plane ticket to Nepal with full confidence that the mountain isn’t going anywhere. But with UFOs, you will always be two steps behind them, so filmmakers need to follow a ‘cold case’ approach: visit the ‘crime scene’, interview the witnesses and the experts, perhaps even analyze trace evidence, if any; but the chances of capturing with your camera a bonafide flying saucer –or at the very least a fuzzy orange orb– are close to nil.

Yet that does not exclude the possibility of really weird things happening during the production of a UFO film. Nietzche’s famous quote, “If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you” is often invoked in paranormal circles, to illustrate how showing an active interest in these mysteries can often carry some unforeseen circumstances…

Take for instance the documentary Witness of Another World (Testigo de Otro Mundo) released originally in 2018 (last year with English subtitles) by Argentinian filmmaker Alan Stivelman. The film focuses on the story of Juan Pérez, who in 1978 was a very young ‘gaucho’ (a South American cowboy) who had an incredible close encounter of the third kind; a case so remarkable it merited the personal investigation by none other than Dr. Jacques Vallee. WoAW shows, among other things, how Juan’s experience forced him to isolate himself from society and even from his own family; living as a recluse in a small cabin with no electricity or even running water, with no other company than his animals with whom he claims to be able to communicate. For you see, like many other UFO experiencers, Juan developed what can only be described as psychic abilities, including the gift –or is that a curse?– of prophetic dreams.

[Minor Spoilers Ahead] In the film there’s a scene in which Dr. Néstor Berlanda –a professional psychiatrist who’s been treating Juan for many years– is shown conducting a sort of hypnotic regression therapy on him, in order to reveal more information of what happened on that fateful morning of September 6th, 1978, when the (then) 12-year-old boy who was sent by his father to fetch their herd of horses, found himself instead face to face with a shiny object which his juvenile mind first mistook for a ‘tractor’ or a ‘barn’, and inside the ‘barn’ he encountered two non-human entities (a very tall humanoid, and a smaller being which looked like a robot). On a podcast interview that my friend Greg Bishop and I recorded with Alan, among our many questions for him we asked about that scene in particular, because we’re both keenly aware of the backlash generated by the use of hypnosis in abduction research due to the potential risk of implanting false memories in the witness.

Berlanda and Juan

Alan explained to us the procedure Dr. Berlanda had applied on Juan carried no such risk, because was different from the typical hypnosis performed by therapists, and that it was more a method of ‘relaxation’ than an actual trance-like state –of course, critics could argue that relaxation is the whole point of hypnosis, so I guess Dr. Berlanda could be the only one able to explain the difference in detail. Another aspect of the therapy scene Greg had found very interesting was how, at one point in the session, Berlanda suggests Juan to ‘ask’ questions to the tall humanoid –like “why are they here?” or “why did you choose me?”– to which he apparently received some surprising answers. 

Illustration depicting the tall being encountered by Juan

“What would be the point of asking such questions,” Greg asked Alan, “if they hadn’t really taken place during the original event of 1978?” Was Berlanda trying to help Juan attain some sort of closure by way of filling the gaps of his encounter using his own imagination?

“No,” Alan said to us. In what would seem as a total departure from causality and logic, Berlanda had discovered that by taking Juan in the proper state of mind, he was apparently not only able to remember what had taken place to him in the past, but also he was able to communicate with ‘them’ as if they were there during the session in the present time!

As incredible as this may sound, there is at least another example in the UFO literature in which similar interactions with alleged alien intelligences while in the presence of independent researchers have been documented: I’m talking here of course of the hypnotic sessions with Betty Andreasson Luca, as described by author Raymond E. Fowler in his classic book The Andreasson Affair. 

Betty Andreasson and her husband, Bob Luca

According to Fowler, during the 12th regression session which was conducted on July 16, 1977, the MUFON investigators were attempting to extract more details about the event that happened to Betty and her family on January of 1967 –when she was taken from her home and led by a group of ‘gray aliens’ to a circular craft, and from there to another realm in which she received visions of a mystical nature– when suddenly Betty’s mind spontaneously ‘shifted’ from her past memories to the present, and she found herself unable to move her arms and legs. She also felt as if someone or something was controlling her words, and suddenly, to the amazement of everyone present, she began to talk with a mechanical tone in an unknown language –this “star language” was later determined to be very similar to ancient Gaelic. 

At one point it seemed as the hypnosis with Andreasson had turned into a mediumship session, and the investigators were trying to ask direct questions to the intelligence or intelligences controlling Betty, who was answering them in plain English –although the meaning of the replies still remained too cryptic. At other times, the flow of the communication and the messages in the “star language” were interrupted by meaningless bursts like “Base 32 — Base 32 — Signal Base 32,” and it was later suggested messages from a truck driver using a CB radio was messing with the ‘alien transmission’ hijacking Betty’s mind. 

Could it be that electromagnetic signals generated by human technology could actually interfere with the ‘superior technology’ of UFOs? Although no one is able to answer that question, basically every UFOlogist accepts that the opposite is true –based for example on the many cases in which automobile engines have been shut down by the close proximity of a UFO, which is attributed to the tremendous magnetic field surrounding these objects affecting the car’s alternator. 

Which brings us back to Witness of Another World, and two other fascinating incidents occurring during the filming of that intriguing hypnotic session between Dr. Berlanda and Juan, which Alan shared with Greg and I during our interview (despite the fact that they were not mentioned in his documentary): During the shooting of that scene –which took place inside’s Juan humble house in the middle of the Argentinian pampa– all the lights in the camera crew’s equipment began to flicker all at once; an inexplicable phenomenon, given how they were being powered with independent batteries.

Alan Stivelman

Even more fantastic still, is that every single member of Alan’s team –with the exception of himself and Dr. Berlanda– fell asleep at the exact moment when Berlanda told Juan to ask the questions to the tall humanoid, and they didn’t wake up until the session ended.

Both Greg and I were totally dumbfounded when Alan told us these things via Skype, in October of 2019. It goes without saying that to this day he doesn’t have an explanation to why these things happened while he was making his movie, and neither have I. Perhaps part of the answer lies in what Betty Andreasson told to the MUFON investigators while she was in hypnotic trance in 1977: That, to these beings –whatever they are wherever they come from– “the future and the past are the same as today.”

For the last forty years or thereabouts, Roswell has been Ufology’s number-one case. It’s a field of research that is always looking for proof that UFOs exist. And, by proof, I mean hard, solid evidence that can be examined and studied – if, of course, “they” would only “tell us the truth.” As I write this, more than seventy years have gone by since Kenneth Arnold kicked off the flying saucer controversy – after encountering a squadron of unidentified aerial vehicles near Mt. Rainier, Washington State. And, although we have masses of material, eye-witness testimony, photos, declassified files, etc., the fact is that we still don’t have hard evidence of – or definitive answers for – what UFOs actually are. Roswell, however, UFO researchers say, theoretically offers us those answers. If only, that is, we could uncover the bodies, the wreckage, the old files, and so on. And presuming, of course, that Roswell was an alien event and not something else. Such as something down-to-earth and which still has to remain hidden at all costs.

The fact is that Ufology is not just looking for hard, undeniable proof that UFOs exist. Much of Ufology is desperate to find pro-E.T. evidence for Roswell, chiefly so that all those decades of research won’t be seen as a waste of time. Those UFO researchers now in their sixties, seventies and eighties are faced with meeting the Grim Reaper before they get to see the doors to the “secret Roswell hangar” opened wide.  For those researchers, the answers have to come, before it’s all too late. And they have to come soon. Roswell is to them what Moby Dick was to Captain Ahab. So, for those who conclude that aliens crashed back in July 1947, the Roswell affair – with its large number of first-, second-, and third-hand witnesses, and with the government having changed its stance on what happened more than a couple of times – is the one that could really tip the scales. And, with the scales tipped, the world would know that the UFO community was right all along and it was all worth it. All thanks to Roswell.

There is very little doubt in my mind that when Ufologists see the word “Roswell” prominently referenced in a new online article, there’s an immediate sense of “Maybe, this time, we really have it nailed.” I saw just such a thing happen when the fiasco known as “the Roswell Slides” surfaced a few years back. For those who don’t know the pathetic saga, it revolves around a photograph of a mummified child which was, for a while, touted as one of the bodies from the Roswell crash. The whole thing was a shitty embarrassment, one that is best forgotten. There’s another reason why Roswell is so important, but from a very different perspective. If, one day, Roswell is conclusively proven not to have been an extraterrestrial event – maybe, instead, some dark and murky experiment of the kinds I have suggested – then I firmly believe that the UFO community will have a collective breakdown / meltdown of epic proportions and from which it will never recover. Shaking knees, breathing slowly into paper bags, stomach ulcers, antidepressants, and uncontrollable bladders will be commonplace. Don’t even get me started on out-of-control bowel movements.

In that sense, Ufology is desperate to see Roswell confirmed as an extraterrestrial event. Ufology can barely consider Roswell as anything else. For many, such a situation is utterly unthinkable. So, again, whenever Roswell pops up – and particularly so amid rumors that “something big” is coming – there is a dire and pressing need, and a desperate yearning, for something tangible. And, everyone clicks on the link, praying for the definitive breakthrough that has consistently failed to surface; the breakthrough that only “Saint Roswell” can (maybe) deliver into Ufology’s eager hands. Roswell has been elevated and championed as an E.T. event to such an incredible degree that it can – in single-handed fashion – completely make or break Ufology. Forever. However you look at the case – and whatever your personal opinion on what happened in ’47 on the Foster Ranch – that’s why the incident remains so incredibly important.

It has been seen time and time again that UFO encounters and alien abductions seem to happen to people from all walks of life, and are far from confined to just weirdos out in the middle of nowhere. On occasion there have been such reports from very famous people or those in high standing, and these are the ones that tend to really resonate and catch people’s attention to get them talking. One of these is the chess-playing Russian Federation president who not only claims to have been abducted by aliens, but that they invented the game he loves most.

Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov is not a name many people will probably be familiar with, but he has had a rather impressive and colorful career. He burst onto the political scene from the private sector, where he was the president of SAN Corporation in Moscow, to be elected as the first president of the Russian Federation’s Republic of Kalmykia in 1993, a position in which he would serve until 2010, constantly re-elected unopposed. His stint as president is mostly notable for allegations of corruption, misappropriation of funds, and his wild and unorthodox ideas while in office, such as offering a free mobile phone to every shepherd, paying $100 dollars out to everyone who voted for him, and an almost obsessive compulsion to build religious buildings, such as a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic church, 22 Orthodox churches, and 30 Buddhist temples, as well as his assertion that he was able to psychically subconsciously influence and mind control people, once saying:

Irrespective of what I tell people, I give them instructions on a subconscious level, a code. I do the same thing when I communicate with Russian citizens from other regions. I am creating around the republic a kind of extra-sensory field and it helps us a lot in our projects.

He was also a completely hopeless chess geek. A lifelong avid chess player, after winning the regional championship as a child, he went on to become a master player, defeating former world chess champion Garry Kasparov to go on to become the head of the International Chess Foundation (FIDE), which he would remain until 2018 and which was every bit as colored by scandal as his presidency. He has played chess against some of the best, and has also had bizarre matches against an ecclectic mix of celebrities and other politicians such as the former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in the process pouring millions of government dollars and from his own personal fortune into chess related projects and promoting chess in schools all over the world. Make no mistake about it, Ilyumzhinov really, really likes chess. He also has been abducted by a UFO and thinks chess was created by aliens from outer space. Wait, what?

Kirsan Nikolayevich Ilyumzhinov

The whole bizarre tale begins in September 1997, when one evening Ilyumzhinov claims he was at home at his flat in Moscow when a UFO swept down, piloted by beings in “yellow spacesuits” of some sort, and whisked him away. As soon as he was aboard their ship he says he was provided with a spacesuit similar to theirs in order to help him breathe, and that they spoke to him telepathically. Ilyumzhinov would describe being the abduction and being aboard their ship thusly:

It was from my apartment. They flew in and picked me up. They were wearing yellow spacesuits. I remember this moment exactly. We went off to their interplanetary ship, and I started to feel a lack of air, a lack of oxygen. They gave me a spacesuit as well. One of the aliens pointed to his chest and indicated that the oxygen supply could be regulated by turning a dial. So this is what I did.

The ship was absolutely enormous. One of its chambers was the size of a large football pitch. We landed on one of the planets and picked up some piece of equipment. They told me everything in detail. I asked them to take me back to Earth as quickly as possible, because in two days I had to conduct Youth Government Week. And then they brought me back and everything was normal again. A few days later I was walking along thinking: ‘Why did they take me?’ And I was cursing myself for not asking them any questions. But it is possible that it is still not the time for us to meet these extraterrestrial civilizations.

He describes coming back to find that he had an hour of missing time, and he would soon discover that while he had been gone members of his staff had been searching his apartment for him but had found no trace of where he had gone. He describes these entities as being very similar to us, with the same ways of thinking and same visions for the future. He believes that they were also responsible for many inventions here on Earth, and of course since this is Ilyumzhinov we are talking about here this includes chess. He says of this:

My theory is that chess comes from space. Because it’s the same rules — 64 squares, black and white, and the same rules in Japan, in China, in Qatar, in Mongolia, in Africa — the rules are the same. Why? I think maybe it is from space.

Considering his high political position and reputation at the time, and that he was well into his presidency, it seems as if this might have been a bizarre experience he’d want to keep to himself, but in interviews and with the media he was very open and candid about what had happened to him, and this led to many of his fellow countrymen wondering if he was fit to lead. In particular, one Russian parliament member by the name of Andre Lebedev was very outspoken about his concerns that Ilyumzhinov was perhaps not in his right mind and fit to govern, and not necessarily because he admitted being taken up on a spaceship or claiming that they had invented chess, mind you, but rather because he was worried that the leader had given the aliens state secrets. Others just flat-out thought he had lost his mind, and others still commended him for his willingness to openly disclose his experience. For his part Ilyumzhinov thinks he did the right thing to bring people’s attention to the presence of UFOs and aliens, and has said of all of this:

I’m not a crazy man, but after I gave the first interview to Radio Freedom in Russia … thousands — not hundreds — thousands of people wrote me letters and called on the phone, saying, ‘Oh, Kirsan, you are a politician and you are not afraid to talk about it?’

Whether he was crazy or not, he still managed to stay in office for many years after this story hit, and it is either a good example of a politician coming clean about UFOs or more eccentric ramblings from a decidedly eccentric man. It goes to show that not all of those who claim such encounters are nutjob nobodies, and sometimes people in high places have them as well. This one was just perhaps a bit stranger than most.