Throughout science fiction books, comics, and movies we have been treated to a never ending menagerie of alien beings taking a vast number of forms. In the old days budget constraints for TV and films meant that usually aliens looked at least a little, well, human. In more modern times computer effects have made things a little more bizarre, but still mostly aliens are portrayed as at least something we can understand or relate to at least on a basic level. It is all indicative of our intense curiosity as to what alien life, and in this case intelligent spacefaring life, would actually look like. If a spaceship came down tomorrow and opened up a door, what would step out? Would it be something like us, or something beyond anything we have ever imagined? It is a question we have no way to answer, but there has been quite a lot of speculation on the appearance of aliens, and here we will take a look.

So, if we were to meet aliens what could we realistically expect them to physically look like? What form would they take and how would they interact with the world around them? The answers to this seem to be as varied as the people who ponder the question, and there are several ways that the discussion can head. On one side we have the idea that since they have evolved from a different lifeform and on a completely different alien world, they would look nothing like us, and could be beyond what we can even imagine. There have been all manner of ideas on this, ranging from that they might not be even carbon based to that they don’t have DNA, live in an invisible wavelength we can’t see, or that we might not even recognize them as life within our own definition of the term at all. One science fiction author by the name of Aaron Rosenberg explains of this idea:

Living beings evolve in response to their environment. We grew opposable thumbs so we could better grasp objects. Monkeys developed prehensile tails for the same reason. We have eyes because light breaks down into the visible end of the electromagnetic spectrum here. But if we had occurred on a completely different world, with different temperatures and topography and flora and fauna, we would have evolved differently. And if that other world had a completely different chemical composition, so would we. All life on Earth is carbon-based, but that wouldn’t be the case elsewhere. Life forms could be silicon-based or iron-based or anything else at all. They could have any number of arms and legs—or none at all.

Perhaps life on other planets evolved without physical form or with no fixed form—perhaps there are aliens who are nothing more than sentient clouds, or who have mutable bodies that can alter to suit the needs of the moment. Maybe they can sail through space unaided, and use stellar radiation for a food source and a sensory array, detecting changes in the radiation the same way bats detect sound waves. Who needs eyes and ears when your entire being resonates? Who needs a distinct brain when your consciousness is spread throughout just like our nerve endings are with us? Why have skin when your form is held together by electrostatic shock and mental control, and can condense or expand at will?

There are plenty of creatures here on Earth that are so astoundingly different from us that we can barely comprehend them. Try watching an octopus pull itself through a tiny crack in a glass tank sometime, or examine a tobacco hornworm, or look at a praying mantis up close. Then think about how small our planet is compared with the universe as a whole—it’s like finding the weirdest shaped M&M in the bag, and then realizing that you’re in an entire candy store filled with literally thousands of other kinds of candy, most of which you’ve never even heard of before. A real alien would be so far from anything we’ve ever imagined that we would barely be able to comprehend its existence. And we would seem just as completely, bafflingly bizarre to it.

The thrust of the idea here is that aliens would be, well, completely alien to us, perhaps even incomprehensibly so, and that all bets are off when trying to expect how they would appear to us. One only needs to look at some of the incredibly different and even seemingly alien forms of life on our own planet to know that something from another world could be vastly different from us. However, we are talking about intelligent life here that has created a civilization and reached out across the stars to meet us, and so the opposite side of this argument is that, although they would certainly be quite different from us, there are certain constants that we could expect that would match up with us as well, and we can perhaps make an educated guess as to what they might be like.

There have been many suggestions for certain criteria that any intelligent, space-faring race would likely conform to, boxes to tick, so to speak. For one, although they would be coming from far, far away, they would nevertheless follow the same laws of physics and chemistry as us, as that is a constant across the universe, at least this one. Prof Peter Ward, a paleontologist at the University of Washington, explains of this, “On any planet in the Universe the laws of physics and chemistry will still be the same as here. There’s only a limited number of ways to beat physics.” One of the other very basic things we could expect from an alien being is that it would likely be bilaterally symmetrical, that is with one half mirroring the other to at least some extent. Every form of life on Earth is this way, and even inanimate objects such as crystals, and even whole galaxies, so following this seemingly universal constant they would probably be at least symmetrical to a degree.

Because of the universal physics involved, there would also probably be some broad rules of ecology in place that they would have to have overcome in specific ways. For instance, they would need a way of gaining energy, of hunting and eating, as well as sensory organs to perceive the world around them, and they would have to obey the rules of gravity, ambient density, and having a source of energy. They would need some way to reproduce and propagate their species and they would have to out compete other species in the same environment to last long. In other words, no matter where the aliens are from, they would basically have to overcome the same basic physical and evolutionary constraints as us. There are only so many ways to move around or get food, look at how similar some swimming or flying species are on Earth, no matter how genetically different, think bats and birds or sharks and dolphins. Some ways just work better, and evolution would have weeded out the inefficient ones in the face of competition from other species. In many opinions, these hypothetical aliens also would have probably evolved from predators, meaning they would probably have stereoscopic vision, which allows the judgement of distance, meaning more than one eye on the front of the head, and they would likely be mobile rather than a sedentary plant-like species. They would have also likely would have had to become the dominant lifeform on their world, so probably not microscopic or unduly frail. The renowned theoretical physicist Michio Kaku has said of this:

In all likelihood, intelligent aliens in space will have descended from predators that hunted for their food. This does not necessarily mean that they will be aggressive, but it does mean that their ancestors long ago might have been predators. We may be well served to be cautious.

Another constant they would probably exhibit is that they would have something that passes for a brain, and that it would be encased in some sort of protective shell, be that a skull, exoskeleton, or whatever, and this brain would also probably be held high off the ground. The aliens would need some way to breathe, and some form of locomotion that would have to have at least been fast enough to have allowed them to hunt and survive on their own planet to become an evolved species. These would probably come in the form of some sort of legs if the alien is land-based, and there would be some sort of covering over the body that we could recognize as “skin” of a sort. Harry E. Keller, a chemistry professor at Northeastern University has spoken of these two points with Popular Mechanics, saying:

Legs? Most certainly. Other means of locomotion will be relatively slow and be relegated to armored animals and of those living in holes. Neither of these lifestyles will lead naturally to greater intelligence. How many legs? In our case, we adapted the forelegs for manipulation from animals with four legs. No land animals with endoskeletons have more legs. The implication is that aliens with two legs are more likely than those with four.

Fur? Hair? Feathers? Scales? Something else truly alien? The skin covering could be anything that makes sense. Real feathers are not so likely. Because feathers are used for flight, brains will be small. Scales are unlikely because they are particularly well-adapted for ectotherms, although a scaly sort of skin might be possible. Fur versus hair is hard to sort out because of my inherent bias. Fur has good reasons for being that are not related to intelligence. If furry, our aliens probably have short fur.

In order to make tools and manipulate their technology, they would have to have evolved some sort of appendages with fine movement control. This doesn’t necessarily have to be fingers and a thumb like we have, but some grasping appendages of some sort, something akin to what we would recognize as their version of digits. These appendages would also likely be freed up for use, meaning they might be recognizably bipedal. They would also need some sort of analog of sensory organs to perceive their surroundings, such as eyes, nose, and ears, as well as some way to procure energy, in short, a mouth, probably near the eyes where they can see what they are trying to eat. As for these eyes, there would probably be at least two eyes facing forward, for that stereoscopic vision we talked about earlier, and there aren’t a whole lot of other viable ways to achieve that. The eyes would likely be recessed, and there would likely be some way to cover and protect them. These eyes would also probably be close to the brain, so as to minimize the time of signal transmission. They would be attuned to the spectrum of their own sun, and may look very different from our own eyes, but they would likely be at least recognizable as such. In addition to all of this, they would need a way to produce sounds or signals for some form of communication and crucially, language, as any spacefaring society would need a way to convey complex information to each other, although that potentially holds therein its own problems. Some other theories of what intelligent civilizations of aliens would need even go so far as to say that they would likely not have evolved underwater because they would need to have developed a mastery of fireto progress to that stage.

To sum it all up, when faced with the same physics, physical requirements for survival, evolutionary constraints, and criteria for developing tools and technology, in this idea, with any aliens who flew starcraft to Earth we could probably expect to see land based, symmetrical beings with recognizable sensory organs, limbs, and other features with some analog to what we know of, and so would not be as completely, absurdly outlandish as others would have us believe. They would most certainly not look like humans, and of course depending on the gravity and specifics of their atmosphere and world at large they would look very different in various ways, but the point here is that they perhaps they would not be so mind-bogglingly, impossibly and vastly different from life as we know it and understand it to be. However, this is all assuming they are even from this dimension at all, because if they were from a completely different universe, possibly even with different laws of physics, then we can probably throw all of this out the window.

Of course, this is all assuming that the aliens are even organic lifeforms at all. There has in recent years been increasing speculation that space-going aliens that make it to Earth might not be biological organisms at all, but rather very advanced robots. These machines might have been sent here by their creators or might even be a self-replicating race of robots that usurped their biological makers, with their originators perhaps even distant, long gone prehistoric faded memories for them. It makes sense, as it would be the next step up in evolution from the confines of biology, and robots would be perfect for the rigors of space and the vast distances involved with travelling to other worlds. However, if they were robotic, then all bets would probably be off as far as appearances go, and they might display design choices that truly are beyond comprehension, although they would still have to follow our same laws of physics. Professor Susan Schneider from the University of Connecticut and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton thinks that such robotic alien civilizations could feasibly be billions of years old, and has said:

I do not believe that most advanced alien civilizations will be biological. The most sophisticated civilizations will be post-biological, forms of artificial intelligence or alien superintelligence. Other civilizations may be vastly older than us – earthlings are galactic babies. All lines of evidence converge on the conclusion that the maximum age of extraterrestrial intelligence would be billions of years, specifically ranges from 1.7 billion to 8 billion years.

In the end, it is hard to really get a handle on how intelligent spacefaring aliens would look, as we really only have one example to compare them to- us. All of our ideas on extraterrestrial life and how to find it revolves around our basic presumption that they would meet the criteria for life as we know it, but there is of course the possibility that this is not true at all. Indeed, there is a vocal contingent that thinks the reason we have not found alien life out in the universe despite all of our efforts is that we are looking in the wrong places and in the wrong way. Maybe our own definition of life is the rarity rather than the norm, and perhaps we have to change our perceptions. Only time will tell.

In the meantime, we are left to speculate. What will intelligent alien life from another planet look like if we ever make that first contact? Would they look in some way like us and life as we know it, or would it be incomprehensibly and unfathomably alien? Would we even be able to recognize it as life at all? We can guess, extrapolate, speculate, and debate it all we want, but the only way it seems we are ever going to get the real answer is when that ship lands and they step, slither, or float out into the light.

Experts discovered the remains of a 100-million-year-old “river monster” that proves dinosaurs once lived underwater. In fact, it’s the first time that they have found conclusive evidence that proves some dinosaurs lived, swam, and hunted beneath the water.

The remains were found in the now-barren wilderness of the Saharan desert but it was not always this way as 100 million years ago it contained waterways and rivers. Researchers began excavating the area in southern Morocco back in 2015 and by 2018 they had uncovered a nearly-complete well-preserved skeleton of the dinosaur’s tail. The species belongs to the theropod group which the Tyrannosaurus rex is a part of.

Skeleton of a Spinosaurus.

The dinosaur, which has been named Spinosaurus aegyptiacus, had razor-sharp six-inch long cone-shaped teeth that it used to capture and hold onto its prey. The nostrils were located on the back portion of the head and its snout was quite similar to a crocodile’s. It had very dense bones as well as large flat feet that were more than likely webbed.

Even though it was only a juvenile when it died, it still measured 35 feet long and weighed approximately 4 tonnes. Fully grown adults could have measured as long as 50 feet and weighed up to 20 tonnes. While the adults had no known predators, the juveniles could have been attacked by giant prehistoric crocodiles and fish. In fact, the location in which the skeleton was found has been nicknamed the “river of death” by the researchers. Numerous groups of reptiles inhabited the waters (such as the ichthyosaurs), but this is the first ever evidence of a dinosaur living underwater.

And based on the evidence the researchers found, the Spinosaurus aegyptiacus thrived in the ancient Saharan waters. As for its unique tail, the species had two-foot long struts located on the main vertebrae which made its tail into the shape of a paddle that moved from side to side. This is quite interesting as other therapods that lived on land had a stiff tail that tapered off at the end.

Dr. David Unwin, who is a Reader in Palaeobiology at the University of Leicester and was also involved with the research (their study can be read here), explained this further, “The Spinosaurus’ fin-like tail is a game changing discovery for us that fundamentally alters our understanding of how this dinosaur lived and hunted – it was actually a ‘river-monster’”. “As well as its tail, many other features of this dinosaur, such as the high position of the nostrils, heavy bones, short legs, and paddle-like feet point to a life spent in the water rather than on land,” he said, adding, “Not only did dinosaurs dominate the land and take to the air as birds, they even went back into the water and became the top predators there as well.” A picture of the excavation site can be seen here.

One of the greatest achievements that mankind has ever made is the historic Apollo 11 manned mission to the moon. When on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin touched down on that remote, alien landscape in their Apollo Lunar Module Eagle, it was a momentous step forward for humankind’s quest towards the stars. They spent 21 hours on that lunar surface that had only until then been viewed from afar, and they lifted off from Tranquility Base back towards Earth with new dreams in their hands. The whole world watched and cheered in celebration, patting ourselves on the back for our technological accomplishment, and we did it again with subsequent Apollo missions, but according to some accounts, there were others watching as well.

Ever since that fateful mission there has been a rather vocal group out on the fringe that has argued that those astronauts and others since were not alone out there in that void of space, and that those men might have actually witnessed something very strange out there. Such speculation really runs the range of weirdness, from alien moon bases, to ancient pyramids, to spaceships and more, and it is all overlaid by the ominous fact that we haven’t been back there in decades. It mostly sounds like the rantings of tinfoil hat-wearing conspiracists, but some of the people who have made these claims seem to be more, in a sense, “legit.” One of these is a retired U.S. Army Command Sergeant by the name of Bob Dean, who has 28 years of experience in the military and also some very strange, yet intriguing things to say about the Apollo program and its relation to aliens. He has lectured all over the place on such things, and some particularly memorable things were to come from his appearance at the Exopolitics Summit on July 25, 2009, in Barcelona, Spain. What he had to say and show was eyebrow raising, indeed.

Apllo 11 moon landing

In amongst his presentation among talk of aliens almost starting World War III in 1961, cities on Mars, the fact that by 1964 we were being visited by at least four types of alien races all with differing agendas, that we were as a species engineered by extraterrestrials, and other various revelations, he gets to Apollo, and it is a doozy. He gets especially excited when he talks about our trips to the moon, and says that NASA was onto the strangeness there as early as Apollo 11. He goes on to say that NASA has been very dishonest about what went on with the Apollo missions, and that that they have reams of data and photographs of bizarre things from the missions that prove aliens were there, but which have conveniently disappeared or been flat out destroyed. He explained of this at the conference as follows:

Something happened in my country over the last few years that I am very, very troubled by. Just last week the United States celebrated the 40th anniversary of putting a man on the moon. They went through this whole whoop-dee-do of patting ourselves on the back. Gee, wasn’t that neat. Armstrong, Aldrin, you know, Collins up there in orbit, on the moon. Aren’t we great people, aren’t we magnificent? Look what we did. Well let me tell you about a couple of things they did that you may not have ever have heard about before. They took the few pictures they had; they had it all televised. Everybody — Rock, Walter Cronkite and all of them were looking up. Golly, gee, isn’t this great, isn’t this neat? We’ve got a couple of guys on the moon.

Ladies and gentlemen, my government, NASA, which many of us in the United States say stands for Never A Straight Answer, proceeded to erase 40 rolls of film of the Apollo Program — the flight to the Moon, the flight around the Moon, the landings on the Moon, the walking of guys here and there. They erased, for Christ’s sake, 40 rolls of film of those events. Now we’re talking about several thousand individual frames that were taken that the so-called authorities determined that you did not have a right to see. Oh, they were disruptive, socially unacceptable, politically unacceptable. I’ve become furious. I’m a retired Command Sergeant Major. I was never famous for having a lot of patience.

It is a shocking claim, indeed, but fortunately, Dean claims to have had contacts in the know, who were able to secure some of the photos that hadn’t been destroyed, and he was more than happy to share them with the spellbound audience. Here are some excerpts from the photo presentations with links to the photos he is talking about. He says as follows (taken from the transcript of the talk):

Well, thanks to the idea that there were a few employees in NASA 40 years ago – even today there are some good people working there, decent people, honest people – I have some film that they preserved, that was not destroyed. Gentlemen, put up the next picture for me. [applause] This is a NASA photo. This is Apollo 12, Apollo Systems 12, roll number 50, negative number 7348. They were flying over the Moon before they landed. They went into orbit around the moon, as many of you know. I’m sure this is no secret. They went into orbit around the Moon and, while they were there in orbit around the Moon, a number of anomalous artifacts began showing up showing interest in them. Next picture, please.

Ah, this picture was taken by Neil Armstrong. While looking out of their window of their little craft, this object flew by. There is the moon in the background, of course, below the object that flew by the window of that little craft that they were riding in. Neil took the Hasselblad camera that he had, put it up to the window and snapped this picture. Next picture, please. Ah, NASA Apollo 12, roll 51, negative 8653, something like that. Now this is a good-sized object. This is several hundred feet in diameter that came up next to the Lander and flew along beside them for a time. The guys in the Apollo craft put their camera to the window and snapped the thing, and I’ve always jokingly said there were guys inside of this, taking pictures of the NASA craft. We were photographing them; they were photographing us.

One area of the moon that Dean claims was of very much interest to NASA is an area known as the Lansberg crater, located in a region of the moon called the Mare Insularum, about 60 kilometers from the landing site of the 1969 Apollo 12 mission. The crater is notable for its high rim, inner terraces, and mountain in the center, but according to Dean there was all manner of strange stuff going on here at the time. He says (along with links to the photos he mentions):

This is the Lansberg crater on the moon. The astronauts in orbit above the Moon were particularly fascinated by the Lansberg crater. They had been given a special designation to take pictures of Lansberg, because the crater, which they named as the Lansberg, had things going on that were very anomalous. There was construction going on. There were gigantic facilities in the crater up there. So, they were specifically delegated and assigned to photograph Lansberg to see if they could figure out what the hell was going on down there. While they were looking at Lansberg, this object happened to express interest in them and flew by. Now this line is an artificial line that was drawn to show you the … it gave the direction that this object was going. This is a good-size object flying past the Apollo Lander. God, I’m so glad that some of these were saved. I still get angry, 40 rolls of film, for Christ’s sake, and they erased them. Anyhow, next picture, please. This is the same photo of Lansberg, but the next negative, 9838 of this object here flying by.

The Lansberg crater

Besides NASA, Dean also claimed during his talk to have telling photographs left from the Apollo mission by what he calls the “Japanese NASA,” which is actually called the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). He claims that JAXA years ago signed an agreement with NASA to buy copies of all of the photographs taken during the Apollo moon missions for a handsome price, and because of this he says a good many of the photos originally destroyed by NASA are still in Japan’s possession. Indeed, he showed a few of these during his presentation, along with some truly spectacular, as well as ominous and sinister commentary throughout, saying:

So this photograph was released by the Japanese space agency; you can see the Japanese writing here. This was taken by Apollo 13. Now, you’re all familiar, I’m sure, with Apollo 13. That was the aborted mission that was going to the moon to land and they had an accident on the way. They couldn’t land. They damned well barely got back. While they were on the way to the moon – here’s the moon – a number of things began happening. Some strange objects were appearing outside the windows of the spacecraft so the guys grabbed their Hasselblad cameras and start taking pictures. This photograph shows three different objects. This looks like a circular object with an enlarged dome on top. This is a smaller object with a circular kind of disc-shaped craft, but coming in from the right margin of this picture is this. Next picture, please.

Here we are. This is a blowup of the positive in the photograph and here is a blowup of the negative of this object here. Ladies and gentlemen, this particular object is five miles long. I’m tempted to use the term big mother. No pun intended because it appears to be a mother ship. It’s gigantic, five miles long and here are these NASA guys are up there in this little cramped Apollo capsule, and they look out their window and they see something that is five miles long. It shakes them up a little bit. And when it got back to NASA, these pictures shook them up a hell of a lot. Next picture, please.

Ah, this is the next sequence. Here this large mother has moved into the middle of the frame and something else has come up over here, which has been estimated to be two miles long. But this really upset the guys. I have never been able to find out which one of the three Apollo members of the Apollo 13 group would admit to ever having taken these pictures. So, as you know, the Apollo astronauts were threatened with their lives, I kid you not. They were threatened seriously. They even threatened their families if they ever divulged any of the information that they knew. Next photo, please. Here we are. Here’s the big mother; here’s the other one two miles long. Here’s a picture of the positive; this is the negative. This mother is five miles long. Up here you can see what appear to be two circular objects, either arriving or departing from that particular big ship.

Is it two miles long, or five miles long, Dean? Who knows? After this, his talk veers off the rails into still other anomalous photos taken by the Voyager missions of Saturn as well as those of facilities and alien bases on Mars, and thoughts about alien agendas, which is beyond the scope of this article, but you can read the transcript of the entire talk here, if you like. It can get a little rambling at times, but it is well worth checking out, and entertaining at the very least, no matter what you may think of it in the end. However, what are we to make of these mysterious photos and revelations from the Apollo missions? Is this all for real, and if so what do these entities want and why have they been watching us? Indeed, why is NASA so dead set against releasing such images and why would they have them destroyed. Dean thinks he has the answer, and it will be a familiar one to any of you who have wondered about the lack of disclosure shown by the government. He says:

I can almost understand why the authorities in NASA, why the authorities in the space program didn’t want this information to come out. They were frightened; they were stumped; they couldn’t deal with it themselves and they figured, if they couldn’t handle it, you couldn’t handle it. There would be social disruption; I believe is one of the terms they used. They would disturb the body politic; I believe the term they used. So they clamped the lid down on this and it is still down and it is going to stay down, I’m afraid, for some time yet, until people like yourselves and me and the rest of the people here on this stage, by pushing and prodding and chipping away at this lie and the secrecy, until, eventually, we will succeed. And, don’t you doubt that for a minute.

Dean ends the lecture on a bit of a spooky note, pointing out that aliens are all around us, intermingling with us, and that they have been watching us for a long time. He even goes so far as to say that every conference he has ever done has been attended by a few of these entities in the audience, and implores those in attendance to take a look around them and see if they can spot any. Although he has already claimed that the aliens are not out to harm us, it is still all a very conspiratorial and sinister vibe, which led one audience member to comment on the site Above Top Secret:

Bob Dean is clearly a fraud, at the end, after Henry Deacon gives a wonderful message of love, Bob comes back and doesn’t like the idea of such a message being given out and letting it end there. He then turn the audiences attention on the fact that “they” have members in the audience and to “look around you and think about that”, completely wiping out any remnants of Henry’s love message and replacing it with paranoia.

So what are we dealing with in the man called Bob Dean? He certainly seems to have the credentials to make him look like a respectable and knowledgeable whistleblower, but with such spectacular claims what are we to think? Is he a fraud as many have claimed, or is he on to something? Is NASA really embroiled in a conspiracy to keep this all from us? Is this man a crackpot, hoaxer, delusional weirdo, or the real deal? Opinions seem to be starkly divided, but he certainly at least seems to really believe what he is saying. Whatever that means, perhaps only time will tell, and whatever the case may be, it seems to definitely put a new spin on humankind’s missions to the moon and perhaps beyond.

Many UFO encounters leave the witnesses in profound states of wonder and amazement. Others provoke terror and paranoia. Just occasionally, however, the UFO phenomenon becomes downright deadly. Take, for example, the encounter of a Brazilian man named Joao Prestes Filho, a farmer from the village of Aracariguama. On the night in question, and quite out of the blue, Filho found himself bathed in a powerful glowing light, which emanated from something unknown in the skies directly above. Whatever it was, it ensured a horrific death for Filho. The heat coming from the object was so hot that Filho fell to his knees. Worse was to come: his skin suddenly began to heat up. Then, it began to bubble. In mere minutes, he was exhibiting the physical effects of someone suffering from severe burns. Filho’s family, utterly terrified, raced him to a nearby hospital. It was all to no avail. During the journey, Folho grew progressively, and quickly, worse. His skin began to fall off his bones. One of the medics at the hospital – Aracy Gomide – confirmed poor Filho literally melted before the horrified eyes of the medical staff. Proof that not all close encounters are positive ones.

The so-called “Kinross Case” focuses upon the strange – and still-unresolved – disappearance of a US Air Force F-89C jet fighter that was scrambled late on the night of November 23, 1953, on an “active air defense mission” to intercept an “unknown aircraft” over Lake Superior. Kinross Air Force Base, which was closest to the scene where the “unknown” was initially tracked, quickly alerted the 433^rd Fighter Interception Squadron at Truax Field, Madison, Wisconsin, and the F-89C gave immediate chase. Available USAF records demonstrate that the F-89 was vectored west-northwest, then west, climbing to 30,000 feet. While on its westerly course, the crew received permission to descend to 7,000 feet, turning east-northeast and coming steeply down on the target from above. Alarmingly, as the aircraft closed-in on the “unknown” it subsequently vanished into oblivion, along with its two crew-members. The last radar contact placed the interceptor at 8,000 feet, 70 miles from Keeweenaw Point, and about 150 miles northwest of Kinross AFB, which, today, is called Kincheloe AFB.

An extract from the official USAF Aircraft Accident Report outlines further details of the story: “Aircraft took off at 2322 Zebra 23 Nov 53 on an active Air Defense Mission to intercept an unknown aircraft approximately 160 miles Northwest of Kinross Air Force Base. The aircraft was under radar control throughout the interception. At approximately 2352 Zebra the last radio contact was made by the radar station controlling the interception. At approximately 2355 Zebra the unknown aircraft and the F-89 merged together on the radar scope. Shortly thereafter the IFF signal disappeared from the radar scope. No further contact was established with the F-89. An extensive aerial search has revealed no trace of the aircraft. The aircraft and its crew are still missing.” For both ufologists and the Air Force the matter of the Kinross affair remains wide open.

All was normal – on November 28, 1954 – for Jose Ponce and Gustavo Gonzalez, as they traveled along a small road on the fringes of Caracas, Venezuela. Or, to be absolutely correct, all was normal for a while. The dark road was suddenly lit up by what the astonished pair could only describe as a bright ball of light, with a circumference of around three feet. It swayed slightly in the air, not unlike a small boat bobbing along on the water.

The two slowed down their vehicle as they approached it, eventually coming to a complete halt. It was then, suddenly, that astonishment was replaced by outright terror. While Ponce stayed inside the van, Gonzalez cautiously exited the vehicle; he began to slowly and tentatively walk towards the hovering globe. Suddenly, Gonzalez found himself thrown to the ground by an unseen force. The reason why the attacker was unseen – for a few seconds, at least – was because of its size. Or, rather, its profound lack of size. Gonzalez, to his shock and fear, was finally able to see what had assaulted him: a small, hair-covered creature that was built like a man, but which was only around three feet in height. Acting on impulse and adrenaline, Gonzalez attempted to plunge his knife into the body of the creature, only for the knife to bounce off it.

In mere seconds, another hairy dwarf was on the scene, and temporarily blinded Gonzalez with a bright light that emitted from a powerful, flashlight-type device. Shocked to the core, Ponce gathered his wits together and jumped out of the van to help his friend, who was stumbling around, his eyesight still affected by the powerful beam that hit him with full force. To Ponce’s growing concern, two more of the hairy creatures surfaced out of the shadows, and both making their way towards the men – and armed, no less, with large rocks. Although the presence of the rocks suggested to the men that the hairy things were ready to kill them, with hindsight it seems they were only a defensive measure, in the event a last resort-style situation developed. Fortunately, it did not. The small things raced to the ball of light and, somehow, launched themselves inside it, despite its equally small size and vanished in the blink of an eye!

As the cases above demonstrate, it may be wise to be very careful if you have an encounter of the close type.

With UFOs whizzing about, doing physics-defying aerial acrobatics, and hovering close to the ground, one might get the impression that it is all rather dangerous and an accident waiting to happen. Indeed, this seems to be the case, as there have been numerous reports of near-misses with UFOs and various aircraft over the decades. Yet sometimes these UFOs truly learned the hard way, and actually collide with other objects. From trains, to planes, to automobiles, to even other UFOs, here are some of the strangest cases of UFOs crashing into other vehicles.

One of the last things one might expect to crash into a UFO is a train, yet on January 14, 2002, that is exactly what allegedly happened in the area of Paintsville, Kentucky, in the United States. At approximately 2:50 AM in the early morning hours, a coal train was lumbering along its course when the electronic systems on the train starting going haywire. As the crew tried to figure out just what was going on, they turned a bend at a stretch called “milepost 42” and that was when they noticed lights headed in their direction. It was assumed that this was an oncoming train, and so they killed their own lights so as not to blind the incoming conductor. However, this was no train. The witness describes what happens next in his official report with the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) as follows:

As we rounded the corner our onboard computer began to flash in and out, speed recorder went nuts, and both locomotives died. Alarm bells began to ring and thats when we saw the objects. Apparently scanning the river for something, the objects, (at least 3) had several “search” lights trained there, the first object hovered about 10 to 12 feet above the track. Metallic silver in color with multiple colored lights near the bottom and in the middle, no windows or openings of any kind that we could see. Approximately 18 to 20 feet in length and probably ten feet high. With both engines dead as we rounded the corner we made little noise and the first object did not respond in time, I estimate that we hit the object at 30 mph with 16,000 trailing tons behind us. It clipped the top of our lead unit then skipped back slicing a chunk out of our trailing unit and first two coal cars. The other objects vanished into thin air.

After this, the train came to a stop around 2 miles after the impact, screeching slowly to a grinding halt after the emergency brakes had kicked in, and the power to their systems jumped back to life. They notified their dispatcher and then surveyed the damage, finding the cab of the rear locomotive to be “demolished and smoking” and the second two cars looking as if they “had been hit with a giant hammer.” Despite the extensive damage, the train was deemed track worthy, and was able to limp along the rail back to the yard, and this is where things would get perhaps even stranger than they already were. The witness explains:

We pulled into Paintsville yard at approximately 5:15 am. The huge overhead lights lining the yard were noticeably dark and the only lights came from what we assumed were railroad officials’ vehicles parked near the end of the track. We pulled to a stop and began unloading our grips off the wounded train. We could hear what sounded like an army of workers immediately tending to our train. Vehicle doors slamming, guys running by in weird outfits and lights glaring from all directions, the one thing missing was railroad officials. A guy named Ferguson shook my hand and asked me to follow him into the old yard office. We did, once inside they, and by they I mean I have no idea who these people were, began to ask us hundreds of questions, they then told us for our own protection we’d be medically tested before we could leave.

I asked repeatedly to talk to my road foreman or trainmaster and not only were these requests denied but they confiscated my conductors’ cellular phone. Hours later we were led outside the old yard office and the strange things continued to happen, the 2 locomotives and two cars were removed from the rest of the train we had brought in and my only guess was parked 4 tracks over under a huge tent like structure buzzing with activity. We were led off property and told due to national security our silence on this matter would be appreciated. We were then put in a Railroad vehicle and taken to Martin Kentucky were we went through questioning again with railroad officials and were then drug tested.

What exactly happened here? Was this an actual collision with a UFO and how did a slow-moving coal train manage to hit it? Who were those officials they were interrogated by? or is this all some sort of hoax? It is hard to say, but a train crashing into a UFO is not something you see every day. Our next tale is almost as unlikely, and was reported by a Deputy Sheriff Val Johnson, of Marshall County, Minnesota. On August 27, 1979, Johnson was on patrol near the North Dakota border when he saw a strange light apparently off in the wilderness. As he took a side road to get closer, the light apparently began to approach his car at an amazing rate of speed. It seemed to almost be on a collision course, and Johnson lost consciousness after being blinded by a bright flash to the sound of breaking glass. When he came to he was still sitting in his stalled car, happy to be alive but alarmed that he could not see anything. Oddly, his car had travelled some distance from where the object had engaged him, and he would say of his bizarre experience:

I noticed a very bright, brilliant light, 8 to 12 inches in diameter, 3 to 4 feet off the ground. The edges were very defined. I thought perhaps at first that it could be an aircraft in trouble, as it appeared to be a landing light from an aircraft. I proceeded south on #220. I proceeded about a mile and three tenths or a mile and four tenths when the light intercepted my vehicle causing damage to a headlight, putting a dent in the hood, breaking the windshield and bending antennas on top of the vehicle.

At this point, at the interception of the light, I was rendered either unconscious, neutralized or unknowing for a period of approximately 39 minutes. From the point of intersection, my Police vehicle proceeded south in a straight line 854 feet, at which point the brakes were engaged by forces unknown to myself, as I do not remember doing this, and I left about approximately 99 feet of black marks on the highway before coming to rest sideways in the road with the grille of my hood facing in an easterly direction. At 2:19 a.m., I radioed a 10-88 (Officer Needs Assistance) to my dispatcher in Warren.

The officer called on his radio for help, and he was rushed to the hospital with what looked like burns on his face and irritation of the eyes. Meanwhile, the patrol car he had been in was found to have a smashed in right side headlight, a crack in the windshield on the driver’s side, an unusual circular dent on the hood, also on the driver’s side, and a roof antenna that was bent over at a 60-degree angle. The windshield was particularly weird, as it seemed to have sustained “inward and outward forces acting almost simultaneously.” All of the damage was on the driver’s side of the vehicle. The interior clock was also found to be 14 minutes slow, and oddly Johnson’s wristwatch had the same anomaly. Experts who examined the vehicle would be unable to explain the peculiar damage it had incurred, and it did not seem to be any normal collision, with the official explanation being “mechanical forces of unknown origin.” Luckily his eyes would heal and he would regain his eyesight.

A place where one would perhaps more expect to see some sort of UFO collision is with aircraft in the sky, and while there have been many reports of near-misses with UFOs over the years, there was in 2013 an account of a plane possibly actually crashing into one. The Air China Boeing 757 passenger plane was allegedly flying at around 26,000 feet on a course from Chengdu to Guangzhou, when about 20 minutes into the flight things got bizarre. The crew would report that out of nowhere the plane was rocked by a very strong impact and a loud thud reverberated through the aircraft, frightening the passengers and causing the pilot to enact evasive maneuvers. The plane was given permission to make an emergency landing, and although amazingly no one had been hurt, it was found that the front of the plane had an enormous dent in it. At no point was there any radar signature of anything else in the vicinity of the plane that could have hit it, and this has led to speculation that the plane actually hit everything from a flock of birds to an unmanned drone, to of course a UFO. Unfortunately, Air China would refuse to give any further details, and Chinese authorities have allegedly just sort of swept it all under the carpet. The former U.S. government UFO investigator Nick Pope would say of the outlandish incident:

Whatever struck the aircraft will have left evidence. Analysis of the damaged nose cone should reveal microscopic traces of whatever struck the aircraft, or possibly even larger pieces of debris. So this is a solvable mystery. The only question is, will the notoriously secretive Chinese authorities reveal the truth about what happened? Cases like this show that whatever people believe about UFOs, there are serious air safety issues here. MoD and CAA files contain dozens of reports of near misses between UFOs and commercial aircraft. It’s only a matter of time before there’s a catastrophe. From the look of the photos, this disturbing incident came very close to blowing this aircraft out of the sky.

The damaged Chinese plane

There does not appear to have been any further information released by the Chinese government or the airline, leaving this purely in the realm of speculation, but it is intriguing nevertheless. What is probably more spectacular than a plane colliding with a UFO is a UFO smashing into another UFO, and that is what reportedly happened in a report given to the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). It began with a sighting made in Rosh Haayin, in Israel, on September 28, 1995, by a man called Spasso Maximovitch. He purportedly saw in the sky a silvery glowing object that apparently separated into several other smaller objects as he watched in amazement, even managing to capture the event on videotape. He then went about watching the skies constantly after that, becoming obsessed with witnessing the objects again, and on June 24, 1996 it seems his patience paid off.

On this occasion he saw what looked to be the same object he had observed before, or at least one very similar to it, and he began to film it. At the same time, he noticed another object just like it streaking through the sky from the west, and headed straight towards the first object. According to Spasso, the second object approached at a very fast speed and collided with the first one, causing an explosion, all of which was captured on film. Spasso then turned the video evidence over to a journalist named David Ronen, with the local UFO magazine called “Maariv,” and a copy of it managed to find its way to UFO researcher Barry Chamish. The tapes were sent by Chamish to London for examination, even as other analysts pored over the footage trying to figure out what it shows. According to MUFON, one of these was a professional photo and video analyst by the name of Jeff Sainio, who said of the footage:

When the 2 objects apparently collide and explode, the apparent size of the light expands by a factor of roughly 2.5; this does not appear to be due to overexposure, but is the real size of the object. The last 2 frames of the video are NOT overexposed, but diffuse; since overexposure is not involved, this indicates he actual size of the explosion is shown. The real increase in size of the bright area is certainly much larger than 2.5.

In the video the explosion moves downward; this is probably due to camera motion of the startled videographer; the reference tower is too smeared to verify this conclusion. The explosion is not due to any conventional method I am familiar with; conventional, large explosions require much more than 1/4 second to disappear, and usually generate flaming debris that falls from the explosion. Neither characteristic is seen here. The acceleration, light size, and explosion are not explainable in any convention way that I know of, and this case remains unidentified.

A still from the Israeli footage

Strangely, shortly after the footage was made public, Spasso Maximovitch seems to have dropped off the grid and vanished. According to Chamish no one has been able to locate him, and besides being rather ominous, it also leaves us with not much more to go on. We are left with a compelling piece of footage of an alleged UFO collision, but little else, and so far it has remained inconclusive. You can read Sainio’s full analysis and see the video here. Is this hoaxed footage, and if not, what are we looking at here? If it was really UFOs, then how in the world did this collision happen? Was it pilot error, a malfunction, or maybe even intentional? There is no way to know.

It certainly seems that UFOs are not totally above making mistakes, and that sometimes their antics can lead to accidents. With aircraft this seems to be a particular area of worry, and there have been those who have seriously considered the threat that this may cause to airspace. But is any of this real at all, or is it just sensationalized stories, perhaps born from mundane reasons? Is there truly anything to worry about at all? Who really knows, but it all makes for some fascinating cases.