On the surface of it all, it wouldn’t seem that the job of UFO researcher should be too dangerous. They read up on the lore and cases, perhaps go check things out, and they are investigating a phenomenon that many people don’t believe in to begin with. However, judging by some of the cases, it seems that there is a very big risk to be had indeed, as many researchers seem to have the habit of turning up dead. From conspiracies and strange “suicides,” to mysterious illnesses and more, UFO researchers seem to have more occupational hazards that one might initially suspect.

People who investigate UFOs have been turning up dead for decades. In 1959, we have the case of a very well-known astronomer, archeologist, and UFO researcher by the name of Morris K. Jessup. He was known in the UFO community mostly for his unorthodox theories, early postulation on the ancient astronaut theory and alternative history, and for his books The Case for the UFO (1955), UFOs and the Bible, The UFO Annual (both 1956), and The Expanding Case for the UFO. (1957). Jessup is known for having influenced the growing field of ancient astronauts, with his work forming the basis of other books that would follow in this vein, including the classic Chariots of the Gods, by Erich von Däniken, and others. He is also well-known for his involvement with the notorious Philadelphia Experiment, which purportedly sought to render a US Navy vessel invisible, and also for his mysterious death.

1958 was a rough year for Jessup. His books hadn’t been selling well, his wife left him, and he was involved in a car accident in Florida that left him seriously injured. On April 19, 1959, Jessup made arrangements to meet with a researcher named Manson Valentine, allegedly because he wanted to give some classified information on the Philadelphia Experiment. He never got the chance, because on April 20 he was found dead in his car in Dade County, Florida, a hose running from the exhaust pipe to the window. Although it was ruled a suicide, there has long been talk of conspiracies and things that don’t add up.

Morris K. Jessup

One is that a police detective who investigated the case would claim that it seemed a bit too professional. There is also the fact that it would turn out that Jessup had been plagued with strange calls in the days leading up to his death, and that he had just met with the mysterious Carlos Allende, who had written the letter that was instrumental to bringing the Philadelphia Experiment to public knowledge. More ominous still was that no autopsy was ever performed on the body, which is not only strange, but also apparently against Florida law. The idea here is that this was no mere suicide at all, but rather an orchestrated hit designed to keep him quiet about the secrets he knew about the Philadelphia Experiment. It must be added that no one is sure that the Philadelphia Experiment was ever even real or not, as well as the fact that friends and family have said that his troubles in the year leading up to his death had caused him to sometimes mention suicide. What happened here? Was this just a simple suicide or a nefarious assassination? Who knows?

Similarly, we have the case of the American writer, broadcaster, and radio pioneer Frank Allyn Edwards, who also happens to have become very well-known for his various books, articles, and research on UFOs and other unexplained phenomena, which he also frequently discussed on his popular syndicated radio program, Stranger Than Science. On June 24, 1967, Frank Edwards succumbed to a sudden heart attack, which has been orbited by strange mysteries ever since. One unusual coincidence, or not depending on your angle, was that his death fell exactly on the 20th anniversary of once of the most famous UFO sightings ever, the Kenneth Arnold sighting, in which pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed to have seen a string of nine, shiny unidentified flying objects flying past Washington’s Mount Rainier at high speeds, in one of the first of the modern era of UFO sightings. Making things even more ominous is that the death coincided with the “World UFO Conference,” which was being held in New York City and chaired by UFO researcher and author Gray Barker. Eerily, Barker would claim that he had received threats by phone and mail that had promised that Edwards would not see the end of the conference alive. They were right. Again, what are we dealing with here? Insidious plots or just a plain heart attack?

Kenneth Arnold

Moving into the 70s we have a few high-profile deaths of UFO researchers. In 1971, a physicist at the University of Arizona and advocate of more serious studies into UFOs by the name of Dr. James McDonald was in the process of trying to convince U.S. Congress that UFOs were a phenomenon that deserved a closer look and more investigation. He was never successful, because he came down with a bad case of a gunshot to the head in an apparent suicide. Two years later, in 1973, beloved cryptozoologist and UFO afficionado Ivan T. Sanderson was taken out by an unusually fast-spreading cancer. This is curious, because strangely aggressive cancers and tumors are a common theme in the deaths of these doomed researchers, which we can see from a string of mysterious deaths in the 80s.

The astronomer Dr. Allen J. Hynek is a famous fixture of UFO history, having once been a major consultant and investigator for Project Blue Book, the U.S. Air Force’s official investigation into the UFO phenomenon. In 1986, Hynek was admitted to the hospital for prostrate surgery, but would never leave, as he was soon found to have an incredibly vicious brain tumor that ended him. According to those who knew him, in the days leading up to his death he had allegedly spoken of and seemed unsettled by some newly acquired information he had received on UFOs. Could this have had something to do with his death? Two years later, in 1988 notable investigative radio host Mae Brussell died of a fast-acting cancer in California. She was known as a major conspiracy theorist and for her no holds barred radio program on these topics called Dialogue: Conspiracy, later renamed World Watchers International.

Mae Brussel

The 1990s continued these shady deaths, with 1993 seeing astronaut Deke Slayton die of cancer conveniently right before he was expected to come forward with his inside knowledge and experiences of UFOs. In 1994, an investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), Ann Livingston, died of an extremely aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Rather spookily, this happened just 2 years after she claimed to have been harassed by ghoulish faceless, pale, and sinister Men in Black. Also in 1994 was the death of another MUFON investigator, Ron Johnson, who was actually the deputy director of investigations for the organization. He would die under very strange circumstances when after a slide presentation at a conference in Austin Texas, the lights came on and he was found unresponsive in his seat, with blood coming out of his nose and a weird purple coloration to his face. 1996 saw the death of UFO author Karla Turner, who died of breast cancer. Turner was known for constantly attributing her cancer to actions taken by aliens due to some of the things she had written in her books Masquerade of Angels, Taken, and Into the Fringe. In 1999, author of numerous UFO and conspiracy books, Jim Keith, also died when a blood clot stopped his heart as he was receiving routine surgery for a broken leg.

Moving into the 2000s we have several more strange cases. In April of 2001, prolific author of unexplained phenomena, Ron Bonds, mysteriously died of a common food poisoning bacterium that rarely leads to death, but for some reason turned deadly for him. More sinister still was the death of prominent UFO researcher Paul Vigay in 2009. In February of that year, the 44-year-old was found bobbing about in the churning sea off the coast of Portsmouth, Hants, leaving a series of strange cryptic passwords behind on his phone that no one could figure out. Although authorities were quick to label it as a suicide, Vigay’s friends and family are adamant that he was not suicidal, and the coroner was also not able to verify whether it was suicide or not, saying “I cannot say beyond reasonable doubt that yes Paul has taken his own life. The only person who could tell us what was going on in his mind and what happened that night is sadly not here to tell us.”

Perhaps one of the weirdest cases of all is also the most recent. Conspiracy theorist and UFO expert Max Spiers was well-known for delving into government cover-ups, and in July of 2016 he was in Warsaw, Poland, visiting a friend and also planning on attending a conference on conspiracy theories and UFOs. On July 16, Spiers’ friend found him on the sofa, unresponsive and apparently having vomited up a viscous “black liquid.” It would turn out that there were some pretty suspicious details surrounding the death, one being a text message he had written to his mother just before his death, which reads, “Your boy’s in trouble. If anything happens to me, investigate.” Also odd is that there was never any actual official autopsy done on the body, and adding to this was that Spiers was a healthy young man with no history of physical issues, making it odd that he should just drop dead on that sofa. There would be very little word on the state of the investigation until 2019, when authorities would rule the death as being caused by drug use and pneumonia. Max’s mother would say of it all:

Max was a very fit man who was in good health and yet he apparently just died suddenly on a sofa. All I have is a death certificate from the Polish authorities that it was from natural causes, but no post-mortem was done so how can they tell that? They are also refusing to release any paperwork about it to me because, absurdly, I don’t have his written permission. Apparently, he had not suffered any obvious physical injuries but he could have been slowly poisoned, which is why the results of toxicology tests from his post-mortem are so important.

Again, we are left to wonder, if this really was an accident, or did some nefarious agency deem him to be a threat and have him erased? The main conspiracy idea behind all of these deaths is that these people were removed from the equation by nefarious parties, with government agencies and even the Men in Black coming into play. Skeptics would point out that people die, it is a fact of life, and that of course UFO researchers are going to fall victim to this as well. Yet, with the strange circumstances and details surrounding some of these cases it really makes one wonder what is really going on. Is this all just coincidence and reading things into it all, or is there something more sinister going on? The question remains, and if you are one of those who delves into UFOs it might be best to keep a set of eyes on the back of your head. You just never know.

Exodus: a mass departure

The word “exodus” comes from the Greek ‘exodos’ which means ‘the road out’. However, when it’s time to get out of town, most people will take any way possible – by land, by air and by sea. Most animals too, as researchers have recently discovered. A new study of world habitat shifts among more than 12,000 different species of animals, plants, fungi and bacteria found that a large majority of them are heading for the North and South Poles at rates never before seen, with marine animals making a veritable underwater sprint for colder waters. Why? Do we really need to ask?

“There is mounting evidence of species redistribution as climate warms.”

When that’s the opening line of a new scientific study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, you know it’s not going to be good news. (Then again, is there ANY good news these days?) Researchers led by Jonathan Lenoir and Romain Bertrand of the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France, compiled a database of over 30,000 species range shifts — permanent moves of an entire group of animals from one location to another. They then linked these range shifts to isotherm shifts — an isotherm is a line connecting points on a map that have the same temperature.

Isotherm of the Arctic Circle (red line)

“In the review, amphibians were found to be moving up slope at over 12 metres a year, while reptiles seem to be headed towards the equator at 6.5 metres a year. Insects, which incidentally carry many diseases, were found to be moving poleward at 18.5 kilometres per year. Relatively, that’s a lot, but in the bigger picture, marine species were moving towards the poles at an average pace of nearly 6 kilometres per year, while land animals were only shifting upslope at a mean pace of nearly 1.8 metres per year (slightly faster than previous estimates for land species, but still comparatively slow).”

It’s no surprise that animals, like humans, have a temperature range preference that they will move to stay within. It’s also no surprise that climate change is a major driving for in temperature ranges moving north or south. What surprised the researchers was the rapid movement by marine animals in comparison to land creatures, since the temperature shift should conceivably be moving at the same rate across land and sea. (The fast movement of the insects didn’t seem to bother them.) According to ScienceAlert, they speculated that marine animals are cold-blooded, making it harder to adapt to temperature changes, and water has less physical impediments than land (mountains, lakes, buildings, humans), allowing them to complete the move quickly.

“These complex interactions need to be accounted for to improve scenarios of biodiversity redistribution and its consequences on human well-being under future climate change.”

Climate change is moving the warm bands of isotherms towards the poles, causing the melting of ice as well as the movement of animals. The shift in marine animals is already affecting the fishing industry, but that’s not the most dire consequence humans need to deal with. The Permian-Triassic Extinction was the most calamitous event in Earth’s history – causing the extinction of 96% of all marine species, 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species and over three-quarters of all insects. While the cause of that global climate change event is still unknown, the effect is not, and the evidence shows that species tried but were unable to shift habitats fast enough. The researchers admit their sampling is small, not the entire collection of species, but they expect the same results when it’s expanded.

The most famous exodus ended well enough to get a biblical book named after it. The current exodus to the poles may not – for animal nor for humans.

Can we change it before another Book of Exodus has to be written?

You’ve probably heard of the Bermuda Triangle, the area of the North Atlantic where ships have disappeared and paranormal theories are born. You may have heard of the Devil’s Triangle, the Pacific counterpart off the southern coast of Japan. Until this week, this writer had never heard of areas in the South China Sea and off the west coast of South Africa where groups of ships have suddenly been forced into traveling in tight circles, sometimes in scary ever-decreasing spirals. More underwater alien bases? Ghosts? Climate change? Something else? Place your bets now.

“Ships appearing to sail in circles have become an increasingly common and mysterious phenomenon near a number of ports on the coast of China, especially near oil terminals and government facilities – but nothing had been seen where the Willowy was.”

Yes, that’s a ship in a circle, but not the kind were talking about

Let’s start with incidents in the South China Sea. (The Willowy related to the South African anomaly.) They were first detected not by ships but by groups tracking ship traffic via their AIS (automated identification system) which broadcast a ship’s unique identifier and its GPS location, course and speed to nearby ships. One such group is SkyTruth, an environmental group monitoring offshore drilling, oil spills and tanker traffic. AIS is dictated by international law but ship owners don’t like it for a variety of reasons – including the fact that they’re often manipulated by smugglers, illegal fishing boats and illegal oil traders. According to Sky News, Phil Diacon, the chief executive of the marine intelligence firm Dryad Global, agrees that the Chinese circles are anomalies caused by signal jammers.

“But according to a global analysis of this data by environmental groups SkyTruth and Global Fishing Watch, a number of circling incidents have also occurred quite a distance away from Chinese ports, with some impossibly appearing miles inland near San Francisco. SkyTruth found the real locations of these ships often thousands of miles away from the circular sailing tracks. The ships were again were often actually near oil terminals or in locations where GPS disruption had been reported before.”

SkyTruth points out there was once a major U.S. Coast Guard communication station at nearby Point Reyes, but that doesn’t explain this or other GPS disruptions over major shipping locations. That includes an incident off the coast of South Africa on May 31.

“At approximately 1am on Sunday morning, the Liberian-flagged crude oil tanker, operated by Singaporean business Executive Ship, suddenly swung starboard and began actually sailing in circles. The ship was unable to steer and the crew reported that four other vessels in its vicinity were caught in a similar spiral, slowly converging on each other for an unknown reason.”

As you can see, something forced the Willowy and four other ships into a circle. While they could have been on auto-tracking and made the moves themselves (until human pilots took over), that doesn’t explain what caused it. Sky News says the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps has used a similar GPS manipulation on vessels entering their waters, but the Willowy is a long way from Iran. Sky News suggests something else – a different anomaly that has also been in the news recently.

“Nobody knows why, but the Earth’s magnetic field – which has lost almost 10% of its strength over the last two centuries – is growing particularly weak in a large region stretching from Africa to South America, impacting satellites and spacecraft. Known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, the field strength in this area has rapidly shrunk over the past 50 years just as the area itself has grown and moved westward. And over the past five years a second centre of minimum intensity has developed southwest of Africa, very near to where the Willowy was sailing.”

It was reported recently that the South Atlantic Anomaly is breaking apart, with a second anomaly forming near Africa. Could the breakup or the new junior anomaly have caused the forced circling of these ships? As expected, the owners of the Willowy were quick to provide an ‘alternate’ explanation to Sky News.

“The crew, alongside the company’s shore-based marine superintendents, investigated and identified that the ship’s primary gyrocompass was indeed malfunctioning. The ship resumed its course safely when it switched to using the secondary gyrocompass, along with an old-fashioned magnetic compass for good measure. Asked what caused the failure, the company described it as “an incidental breakdown” and added “repair will be done at the next port where the cause will be identified by shore technicians”.”

OK, that may explain the Willowy’s strange behavior, but what about the other ships, which were not owned by Executive Ship?

“The initial presumptive cause of circling for the Willowy was considered to be strong currents which also led the crew to perceive that other ships were circling too.”

A look at the AIS for those vessels would be helpful, but neither Sky News nor SkyTruth seemed to have checked those. Also, it seems fishy that the Willowy crew switched to “an old-fashioned magnetic compass” since those don’t work in the area of the South Atlantic Anomaly – an area of disruption of the electromagnetic kind.

This is worth keeping an eye on. One of these days, you can say you were there when the Circle joined the Triangles.

Mars has two moons – the larger one called Phobos and the smaller one named Deimos. Scientists believe that Deimos holds clues regarding Mars’ ancient past which includes a ring around the planet.

The moons were discovered by American astronomer Asaph Hall in August of 1877. They are two of the smallest moons in our solar system with Phobos measuring 14 miles across and Deimos being just 8 miles across. Phobos orbits Mars extremely close at just 3,700 miles away. In fact, it is so close that it orbits the Red Planet three times a day. Deimos, on the other hand, orbits at a distance of 12,470 miles and it takes approximately 30 hours to make a full trip around the planet.

Phobos and Deimos

Matija Cuk, who is a research scientist at the SETI Institute as well as the lead author of the study (which can be read here), described the significance of this new analysis in a statement, “The fact that Deimos’ orbit is not exactly in plane with Mars’ equator was considered unimportant, and nobody cared to try to explain it,” adding, “But once we had a big new idea and we looked at it with new eyes, Deimos’ orbital tilt revealed its big secret.”

They first looked at Phobos which is slowly moving towards Mars and will eventually get so close that it will be pulled apart, causing a ring to form around the planet. In fact, the researchers said that after it is pulled apart, it will eventually form into another moon. And what’s even more incredible is that they claimed that this has already happened several times and it explains the reason why Deimos has a slight orbital tilt.

According to a statement released by the SETI Institute, “This cyclic Martian moon theory has one crucial element that makes Deimos’ tilt possible: a newborn moon would move away from the ring and Mars … in the opposite direction from the inward spiral Phobos is experiencing due to gravitational interactions with Mars.”

The statement went on to read, “An outward-migrating moon just outside the rings can encounter a so-called orbital resonance, in which Deimos’ orbital period is three times that of the other moon.” “We can tell that only an outward-moving moon could have strongly affected Deimos, which means that Mars must have had a ring pushing the inner moon outward.”

If true, this would be exciting news as there are currently four planets in our solar system that have rings around them – Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune.

The outward-moving moon would have been around 20 times larger than Phobos and would have broken up and came back together on two occasions with the second time creating Phobos. And while Deimos is billions of years old, Phobos is only about 200 million years old.

More research needs to be conducted to know for sure, but the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is planning a mission to Phobos in the year 2024 to hopefully collect samples from the moon Then they will hopefully get a better understanding of the moons as well as Mars’ potentially ringed past.

Videos, selected by peter2011

Supposed alien abductions come in all flavors. Some are scary and involve malevolent or indifferent entities that treat us like little more than cattle. Others seem to be more benevolent in nature, with these beings bringing a message of peace or a warning to help us along. Still others are hard to fully categorize, and go off the rails into the truly bonkers, including romantic liaisons with the alien captors. One of these must be the time a Chinese lumberjack was sexually accosted by a 10 foot tall space alien that is due to have his child in a few decades. In a country where the UFO phenomenon is still mostly nascent, it is a truly spectacular account that really puts China up there with other countries with similarly far out encounter reports. Let’s take a look.

The setting of this bizarre tale takes place against the backdrop of the mist shrouded Dragon Mountains, in the northwest portion of Wuchang, in the part of China historically known as Manchuria. Nestled in amongst the sprawling forests of the area is a place called the Red Flag Logging Commune, a modest settlement populated by loggers and lumberjacks, mostly migrant workers and drifters trying to escape something. It is a Spartan existence, life here is simple, the days filled with backbreaking work, and there are few luxuries in this remote community, with only a single road running through it and no cell phone reception. One of these lumberjacks was a man named Meng Zhaoguo, who lived in a basic two-room timber frame house that he built himself, and he had a simple but content life. Here at the commune every day was pretty much the same, and not much ever happened out of the routine, but one evening Meng would allegedly have a truly bizarre experience that would change his life forever.

In June of 1994, Meng was out at around dusk taking a walk he noticed something glimmering in the distance over the trees, as if a metallic object were reflecting the dying light of the day. As he drew closer, he claims that he could see a white glowing orb descend into the darkened forest, and at first he thought that a helicopter or weather balloon had come down and possibly crashed. He went to investigate, and managed to reach what appeared to be something glinting through the trees, but he was unable to get a glimpse of what it was because something suddenly hit him in the forehead and knocked him out. When he awoke several hours later he says that he was back in his home, with no memory of how he had gotten there, and that felt confused and partially paralyzed and unable to speak. It would only get weirder from there.

That very same evening, he was startled to wake up to find a bizarre alien being floating over his bed. He describes it as female, about 10 feet tall, and mostly human looking except for having 6 fingers and legs strangely covered with braided hair. Meng claims that he tried to cry out, but found that he couldn’t, and that’s when he realized he was floating up off his bed towards the entity, screaming in silence the entire way. According to Meng, the female alien raped him, forcing him to have intercourse with her as they levitated in the air, after which she floated up to phase through the ceiling and he dropped back down onto his bed, where his own wife had slept through the whole thing. In shock, Meng would also find that he now had a zig-zag shaped scar on his upper thigh as well, presumably inflicted by the randy alien.

For the next month Meng was plagued by potent nightmares about what had happened, as well as a curious aversion to anything made of iron, and it seems as if his ordeal was not even over yet. On this occasion he again woke up in his bed to find himself levitating up towards the ceiling, but this time there was no alien there. He simply kept going up, and as he cringed in anticipation of smashing into the ceiling he instead phased right through it to be ejected into the night sky above. Eventually, he reached a spaceship, where several of the same species of giant aliens as the woman he had met were waiting for him. When Meng spoke to them to ask where the one he had met was, he claims they responded in heavily accented Chinese that she was far away back on their home world. They then explained some more things to the lumberjack, and Meng says:

They said in Chinese, but with a heavy accent so it was hard for me to understand at first, that they were refugees. Like me, they wanted to escape their former lives, so they left their dying home. The aliens showed me a piece of crystal, through which I saw forests, icebergs and fossil fuels on the Earth. They told me about the current situation facing Earth’s resources and warned me about the importance of environmental protection. They also said that 60 years from then, there will be an alien born with the genes of an earthling farmer, and I can meet him or her.

This child, of course, would be the one supposedly conceived by him and the alien woman on that night, and the 60 years were explained to him as the length of their pregnancy and gestation period. When Meng’s story came out it hit the news all over, and generated a chaotic mix of ridicule, support, skepticism, and belief, generating a fair bit of notoriety for him. The case was looked into by several organizations in the still relatively underdeveloped Chinese UFO field, such as the China UFO Research Center, the UFO Enthusiasts Club at Wuhan University, the Beijing UFO Research Organization (BURO), and the state-sponsored UFO Research Society with varying results. Mostly this is seen as a fantasy, perhaps the result of him hitting his head and having hallucinations. Others think it was a way to reinvent himself and get the attention he needed to get out of the logging commune and have a better life for his family, in which that case it worked because after appearing in the news and on TV shows he was offered another job in the city. Still other believe he really did experience something strange, but has perhaps exaggerated it and added certain elements. For his part, Meng has subjected himself to lie detector tests, which he has passed, and still insists it is all true. He has said:

Once, humans believed that the earth was flat. Even a decade ago, people would not believe that a cell phone could work. Humans, if we have never seen something with our own eyes, naturally doubt that it exists, or that life could be that way. I was the first to be brave enough to say: ‘I saw that.’ I didn’t believe in aliens before I actually met them. Seeing is believing. We cannot explain UFOs and aliens because our technology isn’t advanced enough. But that doesn’t mean such things don’t exist.

Was this man crazy, delusional, or looking to play a scam? Was there anything to this incredibly odd tale at all? It adds to a growing list of cases involving sexual relations with aliens, and really seems to be too absurd to be true. Yet, Meng had stood by his tale, and with no evidence whatsoever except his scar, which could have been caused by a lo of things, we can only sit back with raised eyebrows and wonder. We can maybe wait for his star child to make itself known, but that may take some time. Is this real? Unlikely. Is it delusions or a hoax? Probably. Is it entertaining? Most definitely. In the end, it is just more weirdness to throw on the pile, another of the surprisingly large number of alien sex reports, and I leave it for you to decide what to make of it all.

One aspect of the UFO phenomenon that has been going on for quite sometime is that of alien abductions. These are the times when people are taken willingly or not, and whisked off to the unknown, often coming back with some very strange stories to tell. Such accounts can fall many places on the range of the weird, but one of the weirdest is that of a South African woman who claims to not only have been spirited away to an alien planet, but also to have had an alien lover and a child. Hers is a story of abductions, aliens motherships, exotic new worlds, star-crossed lovers, and all of the utter bizarreness that all implies.

Looking at her life before all of the strangeness started, one would never accuse Elizabeth Klarer of being particularly unusual, crazy or unhinged. She was actually very respectable. Born in South Africa in 1910, Klarer studied music and meteorology in England, before serving as an accomplished pilot for the Royal Air Force and working for the South African Air Force Intelligence decoding secret German transmissions. It would not be until after the war when in 1950 she read a book on UFOs and began to have long buried memories come floating back to the surface from her childhood. She recalled that when she was 7 years old she and her sister had seen a luminous silver disk fly over their farm, as well as a bright orange-red and cratered planetoid that flew past high in the sky. She would remember having several other sightings of the disk over the years, and claimed that her sister and their Zulu farmhand has also seen it. This is all strange enough as it is, but it would get utterly bizarre in the mid-1950s, when she had an experience that would kick off one of the weirdest cases of alien abduction on record.

These early memories coming back to her caused Klarer to develop a deep interest in UFOs, and this would get even stranger when a series of UFO sightings in 1954 brought her to investigate a remote, rural hill outside of Johannesburg. According to the native Zulu people of the area, the UFO was actually a mythical lightning bird from their lore, but when Klarer arrived she would have an encounter with what was most definitely a spacecraft, appearing as a spinning disc with a stationary dome in its center. The craft emitted a humming noise and she claimed to have seen one of the craft’s occupants through a porthole. She tried to get a closer look, but claimed that she had been pushed away by a wave of heat pouring off of it. Klarer would claim that she then began having telepathic communications with an entity calling itself “Akon,” who said he was from the planet Meton, in the galactic region of Alpha Centauri, and also that he was a crew member and scientist aboard the spacecraft, as well as that he was in fact the being she had seen through the porthole.

Elizabeth Klarer

Klarer would become obsessed with it all, going back to the hill several times in the hopes of seeing that ship and Akon again. In 1956, she would get her chance, when she once again saw the craft descend at the hill. This time was very different, as Akon revealed himself to Klarer, and introduced her to his companion, described as the ship’s botanist and astrophysicist. The aliens then invited her aboard their ship, which they described as merely a scout ship, and brought her up to a much larger, cigar-shaped mothership that was reportedly f miles in length and included cities, parks, trees,  flowers, and even lakes within it. According to Klarer, she spent some time on this vast mothership meeting the inhabitants of this “city ship,” which she said looked just like humans, but “taller, better looking, more considerate and gentle; not aggressive and violent.” She also learned were actually originally from the planet Venus, and had relocated to Meton eons ago, after Venus had become uninhabitable. According to them, Venus had long ago been alive with vegetation and was very much like Earth, but had gradually become a hostile environment, forcing them into an exodus that brought them to their new faraway home of Meton. She would say of all of this:

The Venusian scientists recognized the Sun was a visible star, with maximum and minimum periods of sunspot cycles, which happens to this day, but at certain epochs in time it expands. Now the Sun is expanding and contracting all the time. It is pulsating like a heart, but at certain epochs it expands out more, in intensified radiation. Now this is what happened to Venus, and being closer to the Sun her seas had dried out, and what little fauna remained (and all the flora) were destroyed. And then of course the dinosaurs, which had dominated the Earth, were also destroyed through the intensified radiation. Thus the great civilization from Venus, which we call the mother planet, was able to get away from Venus, and landed on earth and the moon, as way-stations. 

They moved to Meton which is now the home planet because it is very similar to the mother planet, Venus, in atmospheric conditions, distance from the star and also, the more important of all, the higher vibratory rates, which is more compatible to an advanced civilization and consciousness. They had bases on the Moon, Mars and Earth which they still visit. The Venus people left a section of their civilization here on Earth to look after the planet and advance the mentality and consciousness of the indigenous people of this planet, which they are in the process of doing.

Klarer was then returned to Earth. She had several meetings with Akon, usually at the same hill, and she found herself becoming attracted to him. During their rendezvous Akon purportedly gave her a silver ring that enhanced their telepathic connection, and told Klarer that she was in fact a reincarnated Venusian with whom he had been romantically involved when Venus was still alive and before they had fled to Meton, and that they were in fact soulmates. One thing led to another, and according to Klarer they consummated their relationship, leading her to become pregnant with Akon’s child. It was then that she decided to run off with her alien lover in 1958, and he agreed to take her up to their mothership once again, after which she was taken to Meton itself, which she would learn was one of seven planets their civilization claimed as their own.

Klarer would allegedly stay on Meton for a full four months, and give birth to their son there, which they named Ayling. As for the planet itself, Klarer would describe it in meticulous detail, including their government, educational system, way of life, and even the flora and fauna. According to her, Meton was a Utopian society, with no war, crime, or poverty, and where everyone had equal access to plentiful food and energy, with no monetary system and a method for creating unlimited renewable energy. The people wore luxurious clothes fashioned of silk, and lived in expansive parks, and since there were no tall buildings or factories there was no pollution. She explained that all education was done through telepathy, eliminating the need for school books or physical school buildings. In an interview with researcher Stuart Bush, she would say of Meton:

It is similar in size to Earth, a little larger, covered with vast seas, and the lands are islands, not continents. Climate is beautiful, under control, and in fact, is really a utopia. They have everything they want. They are not only thousands of years ahead technologically from us, but are also spiritually very advanced. There are no politics, law, or monetary system. Medicine is a scientific activity and not required for health since they are all in perfect health. Their way of thinking is quite different from what most people over here would understand. They are a loving, gentle and constructive people.

Everyone industriously does their work which they like doing most. There is no need for law; there is no crime or police. Everyone is free and has a code of ethics. They constantly create beauty around them and in general there is complete harmony. Their homes are lovely. You can see from the inside out; the material is transparent one way. They don’t have schools or universities. Their education is completely visual ~ all done by what is called an electric mirage. They have a little phial about three inches long and they insert it into a niche in their home or the wall of a spaceship. A 3D scene fills the room ~ an advanced form of a holograph. There are no books. They travel a great deal. The young children are taken around the galaxy so they can learn from experience. They can use the electric mirage to go back to a former time in their history. They could, for instance, view our planet at the time of the dinosaurs. They have beautiful paintings and create lovely music ~ harmonic music and very uplifting spiritually, which relate to the harmonic music of the galaxy. They communicate by means of telepathy and educational concepts can get transferred this way. They are capable of thinking in terms of the basic concepts not dependent on language ~ they perceive the feelingness behind words. There is no problem in the learning of languages such as any of those on Earth.

All in all, it seems like a pretty great place to live, and Klarer would have liked to have stayed there forever. However, the conditions of Meton proved to be too much for her physically. She would explain that “the vibrations of the magnetic field” were too different on Meton compared to earth, which weakened her heart and forced her to return to her homeworld. After a tearful goodbye to Akon and Meton, even leaving her son behind as well in order to complete his education, Klarer returned to Earth. There she would sometimes meet with Akon and Ayling and frequently speak with them through holographic calls. According to her Akon and her son would later embark on a journey across the universe together. She used her experience to preach for a society of peace, love, and environmental understanding, trying to raise awareness of these things and bring the people of Earth to a higher level like her beloved Venusians.

Sketch of Akon

In the meantime, when her story came out she was a sort of celebrity in the UFO community, being interviewed by some of the top researchers in the field at the time, she became extremely popular on the convention circuit, and she was a guest of honor at the 11th International Congress of UFO Research Groups at Weisbaden in 1975, which was attended by scientists of twenty-two nations and where she was given a standing ovation. Her story also made news headlines worldwide, where she was unfortunately often the butt of jokes and ridicule, yet she adamantly stuck to and defended her surreal story. In addition, Klarer went about writing a book about her experiences, which would eventually be published in 1980 under the title Beyond the Light Barrier. It was this book that she later claimed had drawn the attention of nefarious government parties who intimidated her and tried to silence her. She began work on a second book called The Gravity File but her death in 1994 saw it left unfinished.

We are left with quite a tale, indeed. What do we make of this wild story of a woman who was whisked away to another world and had a child fathered by an alien? In her defense, Klarer was often described as having total conviction in what she was saying, which she kept up until her death, never once giving the impression that she was lying and never deviating from the facts as she saw them, even in the face of scathing criticism. She seems to have at least really believed what she was saying. Her story is also incredibly tight. Various interviewers tried to get her to trip up or contradict herself but this rarely happened, meaning that if it was a fiction then it was very well thought out, if highly improbable and sometimes nonsensical. Also impressive is just how incredibly elaborate her bizarre story is. Klarer describes every aspect of the planet Meton, its people, and its society in rich, meticulous detail, and looking at interviews such as the very in-depth one given by researcher Stuart Bush, it can be seen that she seems to have an answer for everything without ever really missing a beat. If this is all some concocted mythology or delusion, then it is an incredibly complex one, and a master class of world building.

Of course, with a story this wild there are skeptics. Besides the fact that, well, she is claiming that an alien fathered her child and that she lived on another planet, there just isn’t a shred of evidence for any of it, no matter how convincing she may seem when telling the tale. There are no witnesses to corroborate what she claimed, no proof of her supposed pregnancy, and no one seems to recall any unusually long absence during the time Klarer was supposedly having her 4-month-long space adventure. The only evidence that Klarer ever produced were the ring that Akon gave her, which she never let anyone examine and has disappeared, and some photographs that are supposedly of Akon’s flying saucer but which are woefully fake looking, looking more like someone threw a hubcap in the air. This lack of any evidence and the sheer fancifulness of her story in general has caused even some of the most hardcore and outspoken proponents of alien abduction to doubt her.

What happened to Elizabeth Klarer? Is she pulling everyone’s chain and this is all just a big hoax? If so, why would she cling to it to her dying day? Is this all a delusion or the product of a warped mind? Perhaps, but she had a lot of credentials that did not paint her as a nut job. This seems to be one of those outlandish cases that just seems to pop up in UFO lore every once in a while, and considering that there is no way to prove or disprove any of it, we will probably only have this quite frankly bonkers tale to go on, and wonder how much, if any, is actually true.

The already strange ‘Oumuamua just got a lot more bizarre as a new study has suggested that the interstellar visitor contained a large amount of hydrogen ice. Ever since it was first detected back in October of 2017, it has been surrounded by much mystery and confusion.

Where do we even begin with ‘Oumuamua’s bizarre characteristics? Well, first of all, it looks incredibly odd as it’s shaped like a cigar which is definitely unusual for space rocks. Additionally, it showed non-gravitation acceleration that was not the result of being pulled in by the sun or other large space objects. In fact, when comets accelerate, they usually spit out debris behind them when they heat up, but ‘Oumuamua never developed a tail. Not to mention the theory that it is an alien spacecraft.

Another recent hypothesis has suggested that it is just a piece of a planet that was ripped apart when it flew too close to its host star.

‘Oumuamua’s route through our Solar System.

The latest theory, however, is just as fascinating as scientists believe that it was probably made of hydrogen ice. Greg Laughlin, who is a professor of astronomy at Yale University as well as the co-author of the study (which can be read here), said in a statement, “This is a new type of object, but it looks like there may be many more of them showing up going forward.”

Laughlin and Daryl Seligman, who is the lead author of the study and works at the University of Chicago, both said, “Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, but we don’t often see it in solid form; that requires extremely cold temperatures. But such temperatures exist in the coldest cores of giant molecular clouds, nurseries that give rise to stars and their associated planetary systems.”

Laughlin explained that as ‘Oumuamua traveled closer to our sun, it became warmer which caused its hydrogen to melt and quickly boil off of its surface. That would have also caused it to accelerate in addition to getting thinner resulting in its odd elongated shape. He compared this process to when we use a bar of soap and it thins out.

‘Oumuamua

If their theory is correct, it would mean that there are many “hydrogen comets” travelling around space. “Their presence would be an accurate probe of the conditions in the dark recesses of star-forming clouds and provide a critical new clue for understanding the earliest phases of the still-mysterious processes that generate the birth of stars and their accompanying planets,” Laughlin noted.

While ‘Oumuamua has traveled well past Earth, astronomers are hoping to use what they’ve learned in order to find other similar space objects in the future.

Back in 2016, I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe titled “UFOs: Don’t Let Them Rule Your Life.” To a significant degree, the article was focused on the controversial “11:11 phenomenon” and a guy who was immersed in it to such a degree that he was practically controlled by it. You can find the article at this link. That same article provoked a fair amount of comments, something that didn’t surprise me at all. Today, I thought I would expand on this issue of how people really do become affected by the UFO subject – and not in a positive way. I don’t know why, but on more than a few occasions I have seen people enter Ufology sane, rational and normal, only to eventually plunge into states of paranoia, fear, isolation and eccentricity. So, in that sense, today’s article is very much a warning to one and all. I should stress that this radical change of character doesn’t happen to a huge degree (as far as I can tell). On more than a few occasions, however, I have seen something close to madness set in – and sometimes set in quickly. With that all said, let us now take a look at the first of three examples of how the UFO subject – at times – doesn’t just alter lives, but can come close to destroying lives, too.

Albert Bender

Part 1 of this 3-part feature is focused on the the guy who began the Men in Black phenomenon almost on his own: Albert Bender. Indeed, had Bender not had the bad luck to get into the field of  Ufology, the chances are we would not have known of the MIB. Or, at the very least, the creepy phenomenon would not have reached the levels of interest that it did in the 1960s and 1970s. But, it’s not the MIB that we need to focus on in this article. Rather, it’s what the UFO subject did to Bender. It plunged him into a dangerous situation that he was lucky to get out of. Like a lot of people, Bender developed an interest in UFOs in the immediate wake of the Kenneth Arnold affair of June 24, 1947. At the time, Bender was in his mid-twenties. As the 1950s came around, Bender created the International Flying Saucer Bureau. He also published his own newsletter, Space Review. Neither were destined to last for very long. What began as an exciting hobby for Bender turned into an absolute nightmare. After being visited by a trio of strange characters with shining eyes,  and with the ability to read minds and walk through walls (yes, the MIB), Bender’s life changed quickly. He didn’t have that many friends to begin with, but after his MIB encounters, Bender spent just about all of his free time in the attic of his stepfather’s home, digging ever deeper into the UFO phenomenon. And into the world of the occult, too. When Bender did go out (his day job aside), it was usually to go to the local cinema in Bridgeport, Connecticut. On his own.

For reasons that were never really explained, but also in the wake of his MIB encounters, Bender developed a weird fear that he had developed cancer. He wrote about it on several occasions – making it very clear that that he was in a deep state of hypochondria. History has shown that Bender, thankfully, did not have cancer. In fact, when he passed away in 2016, Bender was just six years short of 100! Moving on: a careful reading of Bender’s 1962 book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, reveals that he clearly had a dose of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Everything in his attic had to be in its place. If it wasn’t, he would get frustrated – even angry, at times.  And if it looked like something had been moved, Bender suspected that it was due to the MIB, government agents or…well…you get the picture. Spending your time in an attic room, with a fear of a deadly disease, with a significant dose of OCD, and while you’re worrying that someone is creeping around that same attic when you’re out of the house, surely cannot be healthy. For Bender it definitely wasn’t.

Here’s the part when the story becomes uplifting. Yes, the story does end in a happy fashion. It was something that, in the early 1950s, changed Bender’s life for the better and that led him to finally quit Ufology. An English woman named Betty – a flight attendant at the time – became a friend to Bender. Betty very soon became far more than that: Albert and Betty got married and they moved to California. Their first home was in Bakersfield. They later settled, in what turned out to be permanently, in Los Angeles. And, guess what? Bender’s fears of having cancer went away. As did the Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As did the deep fear that people were skulking around his home. Apart from a very few and brief forays into Ufology in the 1960s, Bender was done with it all. And that was a very good thing.

I’m not saying that Ufology is always a dangerous field to get into. I am saying, however, that sometimes – whether due to a person’s character, to the intrusion of certain aspects of the UFO phenomenon itself, or most probably to a bit of both – lives begin to change. “Mutate” might be a good term to use. On occasions, those changes are subtle. But, very often, they are not destined to stay like that. Albert Bender did the right thing: at first he balanced his interest in UFOs with his life with Betty. That is, until the time came when Bender knew he had to quit Ufology – as in completely. I should stress that not everyone, of course, needs to totally quit the Saucer scene to remain sane. For some, however, like Bender, it’s just not a good place to hang out. I’ve seen the signs in more than a few people in Ufology and it’s not a positive situation. For the most part, balance is the key to all of this. Enjoy your UFO research. But, enjoy having fun in the world outside of Ufology, too.  And don’t spend most of your time alone in an attic.

In Part 2 I’ll share with you an even weirder – and equally disturbing – saga from New Zealand.