Ever since humankind became aware that other planets exist, we have pondered the question of whether there is anyone else out there or if we are alone in this cold universe. Likewise, since as long as this question has stirred within our consciousness, we have sought ways to send messages to anyone who may be listening and somehow detect if there are other intelligent beings out there in the far reaches of space, perhaps just as lonely as we are. One of the most prominent ways of doing this has been to monitor space for any sort of transmission that might be directed our way just as surely as we have sent out our own, the most famous example being the famous SETI program (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). So far we have remained alone as far as we can tell, but there have been many times over the years when it has seemed like our efforts might have paid off, and which have served to further stoke the imagination. From the explained to the still mysterious, here we will look at some of the most promising possible communications from aliens received over the decades.

The earliest case we will look at here is not as mysterious as it once was, but is nevertheless rather intriguing and of historical significance when looking for messages from alien civilizations. In November of 1967, a graduate student at Cambridge University in England by the name of Jocelyn Bell Burnell picked up an anomalous and very curious signal on the Interplanetary Scintillation Array of the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge, UK, which was used to study quasars. The signal was notable for its almost perfect regularity, that it operated on a very specific frequency, and it was so fast, constant, and consistent that it didn’t seem possible that it was just chaotic cosmic background noise. Bell’s advisor, Antony Hewish, was equally perplexed by the odd signal, and thought it might be artificial, although not by someone on Earth, causing them to name the signal LGM-1, for “Little Green Men.”

At first this moniker was sort of a joke, as they weren’t really looking seriously at the extraterrestrial angle just yet, but it was definitely mysterious. They analyzed the data and the only thing they could be sure of at first was that it was not from a quasar, a phenomenon for which the array had indeed originally been built to detect and study. It didn’t seem to be from any known cosmic phenomenon, and in the end they were forced to at least entertain the possibility that they had picked up some sort of beacon from an extraterrestrial intelligence, which left them with the added problem of how they would present this news, if it were true, to the world at large. Hewish would explain:

We did not really believe that we had picked up signals from another civilization, but obviously the idea had crossed our minds and we had no proof that it was an entirely natural radio emission. It is an interesting problem – if one thinks one may have detected life elsewhere in the universe, how does one announce the results responsibly? Who does one tell first?

It is an interesting conundrum which still doesn’t really have an official answer, but in the end, there was no need to worry. After this initial discovery they found a very similar signal in another part of the sky, and this led them to believe that rather than aliens, they had found some previously unknown cosmic phenomenon. Burnell would say of this second signal:

It finally scotched the little green men hypothesis. Because it’s highly unlikely there’s two lots of little green men, on opposite sides of the universe, both deciding to signal to a rather inconspicuous planet, Earth, at the same time, using a daft technique and a rather commonplace frequency. It had to be some new kind of star, not seen before. And that then cleared the way for us publishing, going public.

They were right. What they had actually stumbled across was the first official detection of what is called a pulsar, which is basically a fast-spinning, incredibly dense mass of matter left behind when a dying star collapses in on itself. In this case, the first signal was coming from a pulsar that is now labelled PSR B1919+21. Alas it was not extraterrestrials, but it was no less an exciting discovery, as pulsars would go on to provide vast amounts of data and knowledge of the life cycle of stars, as well as shedding light on other cosmic mysteries and also adding to the physical evidence of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Although it was not proof of aliens, in the end LGM-1 was still an incredible, revolutionary discovery that will go down in history as one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of our time.

A more recent and perhaps far more well-known case is that of a signal that was first picked up on the night of Aug. 15, 1977, at the Big Ear radio telescope at The Ohio State University, in the United States. When SETI astronomer Jerry R. Ehman was looking at the data from the telescope, his attention was caught by a very strange radio burst that had come from the direction of the constellation Sagittarius, lasted 72 seconds, and was incredibly loud, far more pronounced and intense than any of the other cosmic noise. Making it even more bizarre was that it was on a narrow bandwidth at a protected frequency, meaning that no one on Earth could have sent it out, and it was curiously at a frequency range of about 1,420 megahertz (MHz), the same as the signal which is naturally emitted by the common element hydrogen, and which is a relatively quiet range on which nothing much usually happens. Indeed, this frequency had been chosen as a promising place to look for signals from extraterrestrials, because it would be a frequency that was non ambiguous and easy to listen in on. Ehman famously circled the burst in red pen and wrote “Wow!” next to it, and the mysteries would continue.

There was an immediate scramble to lock back onto and find a repeat of what was officially signal 6EQUJ5, but which is better known as the “Wow! Signal,” as the signal had peaked after 36 seconds and then faded back out as the telescopes range had passed it, meaning it theoretically was still transmitting, but it could not be relocated and it never repeated. Without a second sampling, it is hard to know exactly what to make of it, but the signal was definitely strange, and has created all manner of speculation as to its origins. Natural and human-made sources on Earth or on artificial satellites have pretty much been ruled out, but nothing in space really matches all of its unique characteristics either. One main candidate is that the signal emanated from two comets called “266P/Christensen” and “335P/Gibbs,” but there are quite a few scientists who disagree with this, saying that the fact that the signal was short lived and didn’t repeat, as well as that no similar signal from a comet has ever been found, and furthermore that these comets were not in the telescope’s beam at the correct time, argue against it. Other ideas are that it was an unidentified cosmic phenomenon, a malfunction with the telescope itself, and of course an actual signal from an alien civilization. The mystery of the Wow! Signal has never really been satisfactorily explained, and it remains one of the best candidates for a possible actual alien transmission from extraterrestrial intelligences. Whatever it was, it hasn’t been seen since, indeed nothing anything like it has, and it leaves us to look up at the stars and wonder.

The Wow Signal

Even more recent still was picked up in 2015, when a signal was detected coming from the vicinity of a star called HD 164595, which lies in the constellation of Hercules. The signal in question comes from a star very much like our own Sun, located around 92.2 light years away, and although it has only one known planet that is thought to be unsuitable for supporting life, there could be more that we don’t know about. It is from this star that on 15 May 2015, a very brief, 2-second burst of radio waves was picked up by the RATAN-600 radio telescope in Zelenchukskaya, Russia. Although the signal was very anomalous and showed all of the hallmarks of a signal possibly sent by extra-terrestrials, the problem here is that it was only picked up by a single team on one telescope, and it was only recorded once. Because of this, until we can be more sure and have corroborating evidence, SETI astronomers have leaned towards the theory that it perhaps came from an Earth satellite, although the exact origin remains mysterious.

Besides single radio signal events like we have looked at here, there have been other phenomena picked up on telescopes around the world that have at one point or another been attributed to aliens. One of these are what are called “fast radio bursts,” which were officially discovered in 2007 and have been picked up on numerous telescopes, but which have remained largely unexplained. These bursts are radio pulses that only last about a fraction of a millisecond to a few milliseconds, and have never been adequately explained by astronomers, pointing to some as yet mysterious cosmic phenomena. While there could be any number of reasons for these bursts, of course aliens have made an appearance in the discussion. One very strange, but compelling idea is that they might be indicative of alien space travel. Astrophysicists Manasvi Lingam and Abraham Loeb have proposed that they could be used to propel starships, where they might be beamed into an enormous sail to push a ship forward, and they have explained of this in the abstract of their paper “Fast Radio Bursts From Extragalactic Light Sails”:

Our analysis shows that beams used for powering large light sails could yield parameters that are consistent with FRBs. The characteristic diameter of the beam emitter is estimated through a combination of energetic and engineering constraints, and both approaches intriguingly yield a similar result which is on the scale of a large rocky planet. Moreover, the optimal frequency for powering the light sail is shown to be similar to the detected FRB frequencies. These `coincidences’ lend some credence to the possibility that FRBs might be artificial in origin. Other relevant quantities, such as the characteristic mass of the light sail, and the angular velocity of the beam, are also derived. By using the FRB occurrence rate, we infer upper bounds on the rate of FRBs from extragalactic civilizations in a typical galaxy. The possibility of detecting fainter signals is briefly discussed, and the wait time for an exceptionally bright FRB event in the Milky Way is estimated.

Of course there is also the idea that these bursts are caused by some other galactic phenomenon such as neutron stars or black holes, but giant light sails on alien starships are more fun. Other unidentified radio signal phenomena have proven to be less mysterious, such as the once very enigmatic bursts called “perytons.” Named after the mythological creature of the same name, perytons are similar to fast radio bursts in that they are only a few milliseconds long, and they usually appear in clusters. First discovered at the Bleien Radio Observatory in Switzerland and the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, their origins were long shrouded in mystery, with extra-terrestrial intelligences a major theory. For years the perytons were a complete mystery, until in 2015 it was determined that they probably originate from a rather underwhelming source. It was found that a microwave oven at the Parkes facility was leaking, and that when its door was opened prematurely and the telescope happened to be pointing in its general direction it would create the peryton phenomenon. Oh well, better luck next time.

It seems that we still have not sought the true answers we seek yet, and for now we are still for all we know the only intelligent life in the universe. It has even been suggested that we are going about our search the wrong way, and that these intelligences might be far beyond using radio technology to send signals. They could feasibly be blaring messages right into our ears and we simply don’t know because we lack the technology to detect them. Yet we still use our telescopes and scour the skies for strange transmissions as we have done for years. Listening and hoping that someone out there is listening back.

One pervasive feature of the UFO phenomenon is that of what are called alien contactees. These are the people who have supposedly had first hand encounters with alien beings, which can take the form of meetings with the entities or more invasive alien abductions. The contactee phenomenon really runs the range. Some people come back with prophetic insights or messages from beyond our world. Others tell of humiliating, painful and terrifying medical procedures, which often scar them mentally and physically for life. Others still are entirely more bizarre in nature, and one of these is the alien contactee who claimed that he was part of an experiment to give him potent, nearly limitless psychic powers.

The man known as Ted Owens had a rather colorful life even before he gained notoriety within the paranormal and UFOlogy worlds. Born in the United States in 1920, he lived with his grandparents to escape his father’s abuse, and this is where he would learn that both of his grandparents were powerful psychics. After this he claimed that he had begun to exhibit various psychic powers as well, such as moving objects with his mind and levitating around the room on several occasions as a child. He also said that he was taught new information by an “imaginary friend,” and in later years he became a gifted hypnotist who wowed people wherever he went.

These psychic abilities would become more powerful in his adult years, when he says that he gained the ability to read minds while serving in the U.S. Navy. He would end up further honing his powers throughout his years at Duke University, and later started to claim that he had the ability to control the weather as well. He said that he could invoke storms, make it rain, conjure up tornados, and direct lightning strikes. Several high-profile people, such as Philadelphia lawyer Sidney Margulies, attested that they had witnessed Owens make lightning come down from the sky on command, and his wife claimed that he routinely made rain fall on command, even during droughts. Other powers he claimed to have were the ability to predict catastrophes and to even cause them, as well as control minds and other assorted abilities. In the meantime, he was a member of Mensa with a genius IQ of 150, and in 1965 it got even weirder.

Ted Owens

It was in 1965 that Owens, who called himself the “PK Man,” began to come forward with why his intelligence was so high and why his powers were getting so vast. According to him, he had been abducted by hyperdimensional entities, which he called “Super Intelligences” (SIs), described as looking like “small grasshoppers standing on two legs,” who had performed a sort of “psychic surgery” upon him in an experiment to “find out just how much of the PK power a human being can absorb and stand.” In other words, according to Owens they had taken his already considerable psychic abilities and magnified them exponentially, essentially turning them up to 11, and making him more or less a real-life superhero. He even had “proof” of this operation, in the form of an odd crease along the base of his skull. He was not humble about any of this either, calling himself a “UFO Prophet” and even comparing himself to the biblical Moses. In 1969 Owens would finally write a book on all of this, entitled How to Contact Space People, and then in the 1970s he began to engage in a series of ominous displays of his supposed power, which range from the odd to the absurd, and he would simultaneously sort of fly off the rails, in a way becoming more of a super villain than a super hero.

Owens had made a lot of predictions that no one really took seriously, and it did not help that in general he was largely ignored by the scientific community, who did nothing to try and test his powers and mostly just blew him off. In response to this, he began to make sinister claims that was going to create destruction on a wide scale, on many occasions having people sign affidavits of what he said in order to prove that he was right, and some of which spookily seemed to have come true. In May of 1972, he told people that he was going to cause mass lightning storms, blackouts, and accidents in the city of Cleveland, Illinois, and sure enough on that summer there was a massive freak storm that caused a city-wide blackout, numerous accidents, and three deaths by lightning strike. In October of that same year he said he was going to create an unusually warm winter in Virginia, and this came to pass. He also claimed to be behind highly bizarre weather that caused vast damage to crops in Texas in 1974, as well as myriad other droughts, floods, hurricanes, freak storms, earthquakes, fires, plane crashes and other myriad calamities all over the world throughout the 70s, many of which eerily went down as predicted. Owens was also known to accurately predict waves of UFO sightings, and claimed that he could make UFOs appear wherever and wherever he wanted.

Owens often used his supposed powers to try and earn some sort of financial gain. On several occasions he offered to make disasters go away in return for cash, such as several times when he even used his supposed powers to try and sabotage sports games, threatening disasters or team losses if he wasn’t paid. He would claim, “The SIs have increased my metal power to the point that I could watch a TV game at home and I can take tacklers and with my mind power actually fling them, with two or three times their actual weight, at the quarterback.” He on many occasions tried to blackmail teams for large amounts of money, although no one ever actually seems to have ever paid. He even used this tactic during a spell of homelessness he suffered, threatening that there would be a major war in the U.S. if he wasn’t taken off the streets and given money. This war never materialized.

Throughout all of this Owens was still mostly seen as a loon, and he was known to seek attention by relentlessly contacting publishers, newspapers, scientists, and government agencies, whoever would listen, trying to get them to take him seriously. In 1979 he began to constantly badger a military historian and news correspondent with the National Enquirer by the name of Wayne Grover, saying that he was going to spend the year providing a hardcore demonstration of his abilities on the state of Florida. It got off to a pretty rock start, to say the least, and Grover writes of this all:

My experience with Ted Owens started in 1979, when Owens contacted me at the Enquirer. He portrayed himself as “PK Man” and said he could predict events and control the world’s weather. Owens claims were met with skepticism by both myself and my editor, Don Horine, and I told Owens so.

Angered, Owens responded by saying that he could prove his abilities. He also said he could produce UFOs on demand. Horine gave Owens a chance to produce UFO sightings on demand and we arranged to have him and several witnesses including a scientist meet for an all-night vigil. The bottom line was that Owens said UFOs were seen. One witness agreed, but two others said they did not see them. We did not run a story. Owens, who had wanted a forum for his predictions, was very angry and felt betrayed by the Enquirer and particularly by Don Horine, the editor. 

Owens called me and made the following predictions for the year: “I will bring three June hurricanes to life and bring one right over the Enquirer. Furthermore, I will use my PK powers to destroy Don Horine’s life for crossing me. He will lose his job, and his wife and he will regret the day he laughed at me.”

However, according to Grover, a lot of what Owens had threatened began to actually come true. Southern Florida really suffered the worst drought it had had in 40 years, there indeed was a series of freak hurricanes, and Horine’s life was plagued by misfortune and personal problems, eventually getting fired and also having his wife leave him. Through this all, Owens continued to regularly contact Grover to make various predictions and threats, and it was soon noticed that many of these things came true beyond coincidence. Grover would say of this correspondence and its bizarreness:

Owens and I then spoke several times and he liked me enough to take me into his confidence. Over a more than five year period, Owens phoned me several times a week, usually after midnight and predicted dire events about to happen including earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados and violent events worldwide. Within two days or so, I always received the same prediction via letter, often accompanied with some strange drawing of unknown symbols and signed “PK Man.” The predictions usually were about five to ten days before actual events took place. When they did, I very often heard them on the news and dozens of times told my wife, “Another coincidence for Owens.” When the event took place, he copied the news stories and sent me copies. The pattern was: (1) Predict by phone, (2) Send written backup. (3) Send news clips of the event predicted. As much as I didn’t want to believe Owens, the long string of coincidences went on. At one time, I estimated that – with some flexibility on the matter of timing – Owens’ predictions were about 80% accurate.

It was enough to make Grover take notice and start to think that maybe there was something to it all, even going so far as to beg Owens to stop the drought and call off a hurricane that was heading towards the state. Amazingly, after this the hurricane weakened considerably. Grover says that Owens seemed to have taken a liking to him, and diverted catastrophes for him because he was the only one who believed him. Grover explains:

In September 1979, when Hurricane David was heading for West Palm Beach, I spoke to Owens about 2 a.m. the night of the approach. I told him thousands of people would be made homeless because the “manufactured” hurricane was bearing down on us. In an unusual softening, he said something like, “I don’t want to hurt you or your family or others needlessly. I’ll ask my SIs to turn the cane away from you. Keep watching the TV to see what happens.”

By five in the morning, the local TV weatherman had the National Hurricane Center on the air with new coordinates for the storm. It had suddenly stopped moving toward West Palm and was veering northward away from us. We got fringe winds but nothing more. Owens called about seven and said, “That was for you Wayne.” I didn’t believe it was possible but the series of events went as Owens said they would.

I logged that information into the delusional category and didn’t worry about it. In the next hurricane season, Florida was again threatened by a large storm bearing down on us and Owens called and warned me to get to high ground. I informed him them was no high ground here. “I’ll move it away from you Wayne because you are the only one to believe in me,” That hurricane devastated Charleston, SC the next day. During the last storm season I had contact with Owens, he told me he would keep Florida clear of “killer canes,” True to his word, the hurricanes went north of us, south, turned into the open Atlantic and dissipated with sheer winds blowing their tops off.

This correspondence with Grover, which was the most contact Owens ever had with anyone directly, ended just as bizarrely as it started. After a period of going silent, in 1987 Owens suddenly contacted Grover again to inform him that he had moved to upstate New York in order for him and his family to be picked up by a UFO. After that there would be no further contact from him. Grover says of this last mysterious call:

Suddenly Owens went silent for months, then in 1987 he called me from upstate NY and said he had moved his family there to be picked up by the UFOs. He sent me several drawing his son Beau had made of vertically long, non-saucerlike UFO that were hovering over his rural home – as well as newspaper clippings reporting local UFO sightings and an affidavit to the same effect from a neighbor. There was a flurry of calls and then one last one whose contents were very strange and I choose to kept private. Suffice it to say, the predictions of that last conversation changed my life and caused me to wonder where science leaves off and the unknown begins. My wife was witness to the events that followed and shares with me the wonderment of it.

Apparently, he never made that final UFO trip, because according to official records Owens died in 1987 of sclerosis of the liver, leaving many mysteries behind. Besides Grover, there was a handful of others who believed in his abilities to some extent. Perhaps the most well-known of these was the parapsychologist Jeffrey Mishlove, who carefully studied all of Owens’ claims and predictions throughout his life, including the 1979 Florida predictions he had made and even the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Michlove came to the conclusion that Owens was correct more often than could be accounted for by blind chance, and said of the Florida predictions:

It certainly looks as though Florida’s 1979 weather was somehow manipulated by Ted Owens. The coincidences between the psychic’s pronouncements and the resultant changes in Florida’s weather are too numerous and exact to be dismissed.

Mishlove would write a whole book on Ted Owens, entitled The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter, which is the most complete record of the man’s life. Mishlove came to the conclusion that Owens really did have incredibly potent psychic powers, which he attributed to some sort of “intelligent energy” that he was able to harness. Mishlove says there are too many things in Owens’ life that cannot be coincidence, and in the end admits that, while he cannot fully explain the phenomena, that “Science is ill-equipped to explain the phenomena reported herein.” He does temper it all with a bit of skepticism, saying that Owens was often wrong and stating, “the newspapers are full of unusual events. Every day something unusual occurs, and it is not always the result of psychokinesis.” However, for the most part Mishlove thought there was more to this, and also expressed that he was very afraid of Owens, a sentiment that is reflected by the few others who chose to actually listen to his wild stories.

In the end, there doesn’t seem to be a large contingent of people who actually bought all of this, and Owens has been mostly relegated to the fringe. There are certainly skeptics who have painted him as a delusional weirdo who sought to promote himself and instill terror in his own demented way. We are left to ask, was Ted Owens a charlatan, scam artist, or mentally unstable individual? Or was there perhaps anything more to this all? Whatever the ultimate answer might be, he remains one of the most bonkers alien contactee accounts out there, for better or worse.

If you’ve ever been caught in a heavy downpour without an umbrella, hood or awning to duck under, you know that the force of heavy, sometimes wind-driven drops can be painful … especially when the showers last for a long time. But can they carry enough power to trigger a volcano? That’s the premise of a new study which proposes that an extreme and extended heavy rain period triggered the 2018 extreme eruption of Kīlauea in Hawaii, burying a portion of the Big Island with a four-month-long flow of lava. Is it time for weather reporters to start giving “chance of volcano” forecasts?

“The May 2018 rift intrusion and eruption of Kīlauea Volcano, Hawai‘i, represented one of its most extraordinary eruptive sequences in at least 200 years, yet the trigger mechanism remains elusive.”

Kīlauea

Kīlauea is one of Hawaii’s most active volcanoes and has actually been in a period the eruption on , entered an extraordinary new phase on May 3, 2018, throwing incandescent lava nearly two hundred feet in the air and spewing lava over 13 square miles across the well-populated east coast of Hawaii’s Big Island. The unprecedented eruption, which destroyed hundreds of homes, involved the collapse of the summit caldera before it ceased four months later in September 2018. Kīlauea is heavily monitored and has been under especially close scrutiny since 1983 when the latest activities began.

“An eruption happens when the pressure in the magma chamber is high enough to break the surrounding rock and the magma travels to the surface. This pressurization causes inflation of the ground by tens of centimeters. As we did not see any significant inflation in the year prior to the eruption we started to think about alternative explanations.”

In their new study, published in the journal Nature, UM Rosenstiel School scientists Jamie Farquharson and Falk Amelung describe how they were surprised by the extreme May 2018 eruption which launched lava two hundred feet in the air, covering over 13 square miles and destroying hundreds of homes, before the summit caldera collapsed and it quit erupting in September 2018. With the usual warning signs missing, Farquharson and Amelung went looking for others and noticed a sustained period of rain right before it. Could the rain have penetrated the volcano’s edifice and changed the pressure, causing the ground to crack enough to allow an eruption?

“Here we show that immediately before and during the eruption, infiltration of rainfall into Kīlauea Volcano’s subsurface increased pore pressure at depths of 1 to 3 kilometres by 0.1 to 1 kilopascals, to its highest pressure in almost 50 years. We propose that weakening and mechanical failure of the edifice was driven by changes in pore pressure within the rift zone, prompting opportunistic dyke intrusion and ultimately facilitating the eruption.”

Kīlauea

Going back through meteorological records in the Kilauea area, they found that “magmatic intrusions and recorded eruptions are almost twice as likely to occur during the wettest parts of the year. Based on that, the team plans to investigate other volcanoes and their rainfall patterns, giving people living in the area another thing to worry about during heavy downpours – something an umbrella won’t help. And it gets worse, as Farquharson describes in a press release.

“It has been shown that the melting of ice caps in Iceland led to changes of volcanic productivity. As ongoing climate change is predicted to bring about changes in rainfall patterns, we expect that this may similarly influence patterns of volcanic activity.”

Climate change contributing to volcanic activity? Is it time to do something about it or move farther away from Yellowstone?

There can be very few people reading this who have not at least heard of the monstrous Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. It terrorized the people of the town and the surrounding area between late 1966 and Christmas 1967. Its diabolical exploits were chronicled in the 2002 Hollywood movie, so named after the 1975 book of the same title written by Mothman authority John Keel. A winged monster with red eyes, Mothman’s appearance came quite literally out of nowhere and, some say, culminated in high tragedy and death. It should be noted, though, that there are a number of intriguing tales of lesser-known flying humanoids, as they have become known. And, that’s what I’m going to highlight today. Certainly, one of the most bizarre of all the many and varied strange beings that haunts the lore and legend of Texas is that which became known, albeit very briefly, as the Houston Batman. The most famous encounter with the beast took place during the early morning hours of June 18, 1953. Given the fact that it was a hot and restless night, twenty three year old housewife Hilda Walker, and her neighbors, fourteen year old Judy Meyer and thirty three year old tool plant inspector Howard Phillips, were sitting on the porch of Walker’s home, located at 118 East Third Street in the city of Houston.

Walker stated of what happened next: “…twenty five feet away I saw a huge shadow across the lawn. I thought at first it was the magnified reflection of a big moth caught in the nearby street light. Then the shadow seemed to bounce upward into a pecan tree. We all looked up. That’s when we saw it.” She went on to describe the entity as being essentially man like in shape, sporting a pair of bat style wings, dressed in a black, tight-fitting outfit, and surrounded by an eerie, glowing haze. The trio all confirmed that the monstrous form stood about six and a half feet tall and also agreed that the strange glow engulfing him was yellow in color. The Batman vanished when the light slowly faded out and right about the time that Meyer issued an ear-splitting scream. Mrs. Walker also recalled the following: “Immediately afterwards, we heard a loud swoosh over the house tops across the street. It was like the white flash of a torpedo-shaped object… I’ve heard so much about flying saucer stories and I thought all those people telling the stories were crazy, but now I don’t know what to believe. I may be nuts, but I saw it, whatever it was… I sat there stupefied. I was amazed.” Meyer added to the newspaper that: “I saw it, and nobody can say I didn’t.” Phillips, meanwhile, was candid in stating the following: “I can hardly believe it. But I saw it…we looked across the street and saw a flash of light rise from another tree and take off like a jet.” Now, let’s take a trip to the U.K., so to speak.

Midway through November 1963, one of the most chilling and eerie of all monster encounters on record occurred in the dark and shadowy environment of Sandling Park, Hythe, Kent, England. It was an encounter that, in terms of the description of the creature, provokes Mothman-style imagery – even though the latter, famous creature did not hit the headlines in and around Point Pleasant, West Virginia until the mid-1960s onwards. Although Sandling Park was certainly shrouded in overwhelming darkness at the time of the beastly event, it was hardly the sort of place where one would expect to encounter nothing less than a fully-fledged monster. Amazingly, however, and according to a group of terrified witnesses, that is exactly what happened.

John Flaxton, aged seventeen on the night that all hell broke loose, was accompanied by three friends, including eighteen-year old Mervyn Hutchinson. As they walked along a lane running by the park – after returning from a local Friday night dance – the group of friends became aware of a bright object moving overhead, which they at first took to be nothing stranger than a star. How very wrong they turned out to be. The teenagers were amazed, and more than a bit scared, by the object’s presence, as they watched it hover and then drop out of sight behind a group of trees. The boys decided to leave the area with haste, but the light soon loomed into view again. It hovered around ten feet from the ground, and at an approximate distance of two hundred feet, then once again went out of sight.

Suddenly, the boys heard the snapping of twigs from a nearby thicket, and out from the wooded area shuffled a creature of horrendous appearance. “It was the size of a human,” reported Mervyn Hutchinson. “But it didn’t seem to have any head. There were wings on its back, like bat wings.” The group fled, perhaps understandably not wanting to hang around and see what developed next. Matters didn’t end there, however. Five night later, Keith Croucher saw an unusual object float across a nearby soccer field. Forty-eight-hours after that, one John McGoldrick, accompanied by a friend, checked out the location and stumbled upon unusual impressions in the ground, which gave every indication that something solid and significant had landed there. Moving on…

Without doubt, one of the strangest aspects of cryptozoology is it’s tie-in with the Crop Circle mystery. Although it’s a little-known aspect of both phenomena, more than a few accounts exist of strange creatures seen in and around Crop Circles. From Matthew Williams – the first man ever arrested, charged and convicted for making a Crop Circle – came a fascinating, relevant account. It transpires that, unsurprisingly for someone who has spent years deeply immersed within the Crop Circle controversy, Matthew is a veritable fountain of knowledge with respect to tales of weird creatures either having been seen in, or at least in the direct vicinity of, complex Crop Circle formations. One such case is truly strange. Matthew advised me that the story in question concerned a man who had felt curiously compelled to drive late at night to a certain field in Wiltshire many years ago. On doing so, he parked his car and duly, and carefully, began his walk into the depths of the crop. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a large, black, human-like figure appeared in the air over the field.

“It reminded me a little bit of the Mothman sightings when I heard this story,” said Matthew, not without a high degree of justification. Matthew continued that the source of the story could only stand and stare in awe, while suddenly gaining the distinct impression that the hovering entity was the source of at least some of the Crop Circle formations that were appearing in Wiltshire. At that precise moment, a simple Crop Circle suddenly appeared on the ground immediately below the black figure – after which it vanished from the skies and the man was left utterly alone in the field, and with no real option other than to make his shocked way back to his vehicle and drive home, baffled and bewildered by both the weird, aerial entity and what it was that had directed him to the field. Once again, and like so many similar cases, the beast was not seen again.

Since the dawn of humankind we have sought to explain our origins and answer the fundamental, basic question: where do we come from? In every far-flung culture across every corner of the globe one can find origin myths and legends, each as different as the culture it spawns from. In more recent times we have science and the theory of evolution, a more scientific effort to explain the same age-old question that has haunted us since the first flickers of self awareness sparked in our brains, but for some this has still not been enough, and there are some decidedly more fringe ideas still floating around out there. For at least one scientist, the answer to this question is that we did not come from Earth at all, but were rather dropped off or exiled here long ago. Welcome to the bizarre world of the Prison Planet.

The main thrust behind one of the most bonkers theories on the history of human beings on this planet is an American ecologist by the name of Dr. Ellis Silver. His main idea is that our origins on this planet are not what they seem, and that perhaps we are not the product of evolution on this world, but rather visitors that, for whatever reasons, ended up here relatively recently in the geographical timescale, perhaps hundreds of thousands or even as recently as tens of thousands of years ago, after which we bred with earlier species such as Neanderthals in order to become the hybrid creatures we are today. It sounds completely outlandish, the ravings of a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist, but Silver is no usual crackpot, but rather a respected scientist, and he has his evidence to try and back up this on-the-surface crazy notion.

Forgetting for the moment of how we might have wound up here in the first place, Silver is more than ready to present his arguments on why, as a species, we just don’t seem to belong here. The first and foremost reason for this is that we humans are unlike anything else on this planet in terms of intelligence and mental capacity. There is no other animal that even comes close to our ability to think, philosophize, create politics, artwork and poetry, or advance in technology so incredibly rapidly. This is the most obvious argument in his case, but it is certainly not the only one, and in his opinion human beings exhibit many characteristics and physiological features that prove we are not as acclimated or suitable for this planet as our original originators might have thought, and indeed he cites a long list of differences between us and pretty much every other lifeform on this planet, which he says mark us as hilariously ill-equipped to deal with this environment and world.

According to Silver, these anomalous differences can be seen as early as the beginning of our lives. Human women have enormous complications and pain during childbirth, which he claims are not seen any where else in the animal kingdom, with births among animals natural and smooth, whereas human beings need much support and can even die in childbirth, something which still happens occasionally even to this day. Of course, this is due to the largeness of the head of human babies, but why, Silver argues, should this be if it is a normal process of evolution? After being born after an unusually short gestation period we than undergo an extremely comparatively long process of slow development, with human babies completely and utterly helpless for years after birth, which Silver argues is far from the norm in the animal kingdom. This might be raising some eyebrows already, but this is only the beginning.

Upon eventually maturing, humans display many anomalous traits not really shared by other creatures on this planet. Silver says that we are unnaturally prone to chronic illnesses and conditions such as hay fever, allergies, and others, which doesn’t seem to make sense. He also brings up our unusual weakness to the sun, saying that we are one of the only creatures that suffers from sunburn to the extent that we do, despite the fact that we “evolved” to have no body hair, and that we are additionally one of the only creatures that needs to squint the eyes when the sunlight is bright. The range of frequencies that we can audibly hear is also woefully low compared to most animals, as is our range of smell, which is argued as all being the result of being in tune on a biological level with another entirely different environment. Human beings also tend to have chronic back problems, which he says is a result of the differing gravity between our home world and Earth, and he continues with the notion that our bodies actually seem to be more in tune with a 25-hour day rather than 24, and that many of us have sleeping disorders and a general sense of anxiety because of this. Furthermore, we tend to dislike raw and uncooked foods as a rule, unlike other animals, have evolved with little body hair, are upright rather than with a lower center of gravity, unlike other animals, and he even points out our large amount of extra “junk DNA” as being evidence that we are, in fact, aliens. In his opinion we are just too different in too many ways from every other animal on the planet. Generally it is of Silver’s opinion that our bodies are just not suitable for this environment if we have actually evolved here over millions of years, and he has said of this:

My thesis proposes that mankind did not evolve from that particular strain of life (native earth organisms), but evolved elsewhere and was transported to Earth between 60,000 and 200,000 years ago. Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth’s environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more. This suggests (to me at least) that mankind may have evolved on a different planet, and we may have been brought here as a highly developed species. The Earth approximately meets our needs as a species, but perhaps not as strongly as whoever brought us here initially thought.

However, if any of this at all is really true, then why would we have ended up here in the first place? Well, according to Silver one possibility is that Earth might be a planet for stowing away prisoners who were unable to integrate into their normal society. Our ancestors might have been exiled here, after which they were forgotten about and interbred with native species, to form what we are now, albeit with certain quirks indicative of our extraterrestrial origins. After all, humans have had had far away penal colonies before, so who is to say aliens don’t as well? Indeed, Silver calls it all “The Prison Planet Theory,” and he says of why we are here, “One reason for this, discussed in the book, is that the Earth might be a prison planet – since we seem to be a naturally violent species – and we’re here until we learn to behave ourselves.”

He has even suggested that at one time there may very well have been some sort of overseers, and that these became the gods in the minds of our ancestors. Indeed, the UFOs that many people see today could be our real ancestors keeping an eye on our progress. Other ideas are that an asteroid destroyed our home planet long ago and we fled here, over the centuries forgetting our true origins, or that we are even refuges from the dying planet Mars. We also might have been planted here for some sort of a long-running experiment, essentially making us intergalactic guinea pigs. One could speculate on an on. Whatever the ultimate reason is, the end result is we did not come from here.

While there have certainly been ideas and theories that life on Earth might have actually begun with bacteria or other biological material arriving her on a meteor, Silver is one of the first to seriously suggest that we in fact came here more or less fully formed, with perhaps some hybridization along the way. Silver has written an entire book on the subject, entitled Humans are not from Earth: a scientific evaluation of the evidence, and it is controversial to say the least. What are we to think of these ideas that human beings did not originate from what we have long thought to be our native home world? Of course there has been a lot of criticism aimed at the theory and it all remains highly speculative, but it is nevertheless another intriguing example of our kind trying to delve into our history and extract some meaning from where we came from, who we are, and where we are headed.