Fast radio bursts have been getting all of the “mysterious signals” publicity lately, so it’s easy to see why other mysterious signals have been overlooked. That’s no longer the case with one in particular, despite the new paper announcing them with the unwieldy description of “Excess Electronic Recoil Events.” What should make everyone recoil is that these signals are coming from experiments attempting to find dark matter and the 163 scientists conducting them can’t explain the messages.

“This is really a rather surprising result. The excess measurements do not show up in our main analysis, but rather in our background events. It’s really curious in many ways. Unexpected for sure. Unclear as to what causes this. It’s certainly some new effect that we hadn’t considered before.”

In a press release by Purdue University, Rafael Lang, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the school and one of the 163 scientists, uses some words you don’t want to hear from people playing with particle accelerators looking for dark matter. Lang is part of the Xenon Collaboration working at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, an underground particle physics facility in the Abruzzo Mountains of Italy north of Rome.

“The XENON1T experiment, employing a liquid-xenon time projection chamber (LXe TPC), was primarily designed to detect Weakly Interacting Massive Particle (WIMP) dark matter. Due to its unprecedentedly low background rate, large target mass, and low energy threshold, XENON1T is also sensitive to interactions from alternative dark matter candidates and to other physics beyond the Standard Model (SM).”

Xenon is also used in car headlights

Xenon (Xe) is used as propellant for ion thrusters in spacecraft, so it’s not a element to be fooled with lightly. In this case, it’s being used to detect WIMP dark matter hitting a xenon nucleus and causing a signal or ‘recoil’ – a search that has been going on there for 14 years without success. To pass the time, bored particle physicists began using the XENON1T to search for other hypothetical particles banging into things besides xenon nuclei. That’s when they found 53 additional recoils they couldn’t account for. They’ve spent the last year secretly trying to figure out what they are.

“The question is: Is this some known physics, such as a tiny contamination with tritium, or is this the tip of the iceberg pointing to truly new physics, beyond what we know from textbooks? We simply don’t know at this point.”

That’s not very comforting, Professor Lang. What the large team has settled on is three theoretical possibilities: a solar axion (a hypothetical particle found in the sun similar to a photon but with a tiny amount of mass), a new kind of neutrino (known subatomic particles that pass through all matter – except when collide with something) or tritium, a rare hydrogen isotope whose presence would indicate an error in the data). Obviously, they’re hoping it’s a solar axiom, which would make it a component of dark matter.

Particle accelerator

So which one is it? The answer is a good news/bad news one. The bad news is, the Xenon1T detector was shut down in December 2018 for an upgrade. The good news is, the upgrade – which will be finished soon — increases the amount of liquid xenon while decreasing the amount of background noise. Will that give these 163 frustrated researchers the answer?

“It’s like a puzzle with no missing pieces. Except that we still have a bunch of questions that this model doesn’t address. For example, what is dark matter? Why is there matter in the universe at all? So, we expect that there is this entirely other puzzle that we can play with. These questions need answers, but we don’t have our foot in the door of that one. The discovery of any new particle, such as axions, would be that foot in the door.”

For those who have been stuck at home due to the coronavirus shutdown and passing the time by assembling jigsaws, “a puzzle with no missing pieces” but still unsolved sounds like a nightmare. So does messing with dark matter. Let’s hope it’s not.

In the realms of UFO and alien encounters there are many strange tales and reports. Many of these can really stand out as particularly odd, with some people experiencing multiple encounters throughout their lives. One such witness claims to have had myriad brushes with the strange over the years, and also brings us a tale of a very odd incident that supposedly involved a mass abduction of soldiers by aliens and top secret cover-ups.

The strange tale here is one of just many told by alien contactee Bill Brooks, in England, who claims that he has had multiple encounters with aliens all of his life. In regular life, 66-year-old Brooks is a professional musician, and for many years he was blissfully unaware of the bizarre experiences he had been having all of his life, as these memories had been long dormant and locked away within the confines of his mind. It was not until when he was 44 years of age that he was going home one night from a gig and had a strange encounter that would forever change his life. He claims that he had an encounter with a UFO, during which he experienced an intense “memory download” and all of his past brushes with the otherworldly came rushing back to him, as if they had been wiped and were only now emerging to hit him all at once.

He would recall that his first encounter with aliens had happened when he was just 10 years old, when he saw a family of four humanoid Nordic-looking aliens making crop circles in a field. These aliens then apparently took him aboard their ship and taught him how to use psychic powers to move small metallic spheres. It would only get weirder from there, as he then was frequently contacted by aliens, including the Nordic aliens, reptilian humanoids, and the iconic Greys that more people are familiar with. Over the course of his life he claims that he was experimented on many times by these various entities, and at some point had several implants removed, and it is all very weird, but some of his strangest stories revolve his time spent in the military.

During his time with the British army, Brooks claims to have had many very surreal experiences. One was a secret mind control experiment he claims to have been a part of at Porton Down, UK, during which he was given psychedelic drugs and forced to watch a spinning black spiral on a white walls as strange commands were barked at him. He says these experiments were designed to make soldiers more aggressive and easily controlled by their handlers. Another weird experience was in 1968, when he was stationed at Dempsey Barracks, Sennelager, Germany. While there he says he had a paranormal  encounter with some sort of supernatural entity, of which he has said:

My barrack room was on the second floor of a huge old four story building that dated back to before WWII. I shared this room with three other young soldiers, we each had a corner with a military issue metal bed and a large dark green locker. It was long gone midnight and all of the occupants of my room were in bed sound asleep as I was too until something disturbed me. I woke on hearing the sound of footsteps walking across the bare wooden floor and can recall thinking to myself that it was the drunken Welshman that had the bed in the far corner by the window. Sitting up slightly I looked forward to see who it was, it was not Taffy. Standing at the foot of my bed was a horrible looking apparition that seemed to be lit from within it looked like an injured soldier as its head was half missing. I remember trying to scream but could not make a sound nor could I move, I was literally transfixed with terror.

Bill Brooks

These are already quite strange, but his most harrowing and spectacular claimed experience was when he claims that there was a mass alien at the base that seemed to be held with the cooperation of what appeared to be American military officials. The whole bizarre story begins with what he and the others at first thought was a simulated gas attack for training purposes, and he says of this:

It was a late autumnal evening, around eight or nine when we noticed an orange-coloured mist coming towards our position which definitely got our attention. The soldier I was with Joe said he believed it was a simulated gas attack. We went back to the base camp to warn our section to put on their gas masks. When we arrived we were surprised to find everyone asleep in their vehicles. We woke an NCO and reported to him what we had seen and that we thought this was a simulated gas attack. He said it was not possible as the training exercise had been cancelled and the section was on stand down. Joe and I then found somewhere to rest and as we lay back on some camouflage nets I saw an incredible scene. I saw a light and what looked like smoke coming towards us. As I looked away from the light my field of vision rested on a further site that I could make no sense of. I watched with incredulity a scene that I knew should not be possible and strained my eyes to make sure that what I was seeing was not a figment of my imagination.

He claims that after this, the soldiers began to get up and walk towards a bright light sitting in a nearby field, all of them shambling along like zombies as if in a trance. It would only get more bizarre and sinister from there. He continues:

The men, as if under orders began leaving the vehicles they been sleeping soundly in which were parked a little closer to the field than we were. They seemed to be in a trance and looked for all the world as if they were floating towards some object with very bright lights in the field. Obscured by the brightness of the light, I struggled to make out any details of what I was seeing though it looked like some kind of vehicle. The guys had been on exercise during the day and were exhausted, yet here they were all moving in unison, but in an apparent state of sleep. Joe and I had a panoramic view because we were on top of a vehicle on the camouflage nets and very much awake. I decided to investigate and see where the men had gone and started down from the vehicle, but Jo said no, stay put. Don’t go. I didn’t know then that he could see armed men coming out of the woods, walking in our direction. Our vehicle was parked about 100 yards in front of the woods and to the right was the field where I now believe a UFO had landed. As I looked up and saw Joe staring towards the wood I quickly stared in that direction and was suddenly confronted by a man dressed in black coveralls with some kind of small blue square shaped badge at the top of the right sleeve. It soon became apparent that there were several of these men similarly dressed all with guns and as far as I could tell they were all blonde. This guy in front of me had a gun that he was pointing in my direction. He spoke and said walk towards the light. I hesitated because I could still hear Joe telling me not to go.

The next thing Brooks would remember was standing on parade in the field with high-ranking officers standing in front of them. Oddly, some of the other men were dressed in what he calls “the old battle dress uniform from years before.” He couldn’t remember anything that had happened since he had been held at gunpoint, indeed he didn’t even know why he was standing out on that field, and he soon found that none of the other men did either. The military officers then told them all very sternly to never speak of anything that had happened the night before, they were all forced to sign non-disclosure documents, and that was that. Brooks would go on to have more strange experiences throughout his life, such as being harassed by the Freemasons and having a vision of a serial killer’s murders before they happened, and he wrote of all of this and more in a book entitled 44: Based on an Ex-Soldier’s True Story of Life-Long Encounters Involving Alien Abduction, co-authored by alien abductee expert Joanne Summerscales. It is all a very intense and otherworldly read, and it leaves us to wonder just how much any of this is true. Is any of this real, or is it just a fabricated fiction? There is no way to really be sure, and the story of Bill Brooks remains an intriguing conundrum.

Sitting within the Pyrenees, in France, and looming over the landscape around it is a peak called Pic de Bugarach or Pech de Bugarach. At 1,230 meters (4,040 ft) high, it is the tallest mountain of the Corbières Massif range, and it unique in that its top layer is an uplift from the Iberian plate and is oddly older than the bottom ones, giving it its nickname of “The Upside Down Mountain.” This is a land of breathtaking vistas, steep cliffs, snowy peaks, deep valleys, and sheer rocky faces, a place seemingly in a world unto itself. Tucked within the foothills of this majestic peak is a tiny little village of no more than 200 hundred people, by the name of Bugarach. It is a remote place, only accessible through treacherous winding roads surrounded by deep ravines, and most people would not even bother to brave coming here at all. It is a mostly forgotten place in a remote corner of the world, and there was a time when most people had never even heard of it. Yet, in the new millennium the village quickly became a famous destination and surrounded by talk of secret tunnels, UFO bases, and the end of the world.

Pic de Bugarach

The Pic de Bugarach has long had spooky lore attached to it. Rumors that there are networks of secret underground tunnels have long orbited the mountain, and for decades it has been a hotspot of UFO sightings. Due to this, some New Age groups came to believe that there were actual aliens living deep within the mountain, and that it serves as a sort of UFO base. This was enough to draw people interested in UFOs and aliens, and it was enough to allegedly warrant an investigation into the claims by the former French president François Mitterrand. The mountain began attracting New Agers, who the locals call “esoterics,” and who believe that the mountain had all manner of mystical powers. Various misfits, hippies, and UFO fanatics began to move into the village in droves, and bought up property there and the surrounding areas, but what really caused the Pic de Bugarach to hit the public consciousness was the time it became known as the only place that would survive the end of the world.

In the 2000s, the world began drawing nearer to the ominous date of December 21, 2012, which was when the Mayan calendar was supposed to end and thus herald in the end of the world. On this date it was all meant to end, the end of times predicted centuries ago, the final destination. Although it is unclear how Bugarach first came to be involved with ancient apocalyptic prophecies from half a world away, the village began to gather rumors that it was to be the only place on Earth that would be spared during the coming Armageddon. New Agers said it was the aliens living within the mountain that would save everyone by taking them off planet, while others claimed that it was because of the deep tunnels in its bowels, which would serve as a giant bunker, but whatever one believed, once the word got out that Bugarach was the place to be in 2012 the news hit like wildfire and a torrent of people began pouring in to this rural backwater speck on the map, to the tune of an estimated 20,000 pilgrims, survivalists, New Agers, and macabre curiosity seekers a year.

This sudden influx of visitors in the tiny village caused a whole slew of problems. Not only was it just too many people for small commune to handle, but there was pollution, vandalism, people trying to dig into the mountain to find the tunnels or build bunkers, and there was supposedly cult-like behavior and strange rituals that frightened the locals, and which even convinced some to move away altogether. The place became a circus, with all manner of weirdos and doomsday preachers wandering about, which only intensified as the December 21st and the perceived end of the world loomed inexorably closer, all fueled by Internet and news reports that were calling Bugarach the “the village at the end of the world”, the “chosen village”, and “the doomsday destination.” The media were having a field day with it all, and it got so bad that the French government’s dedicated watchdog on cults, known as Miviludes, was soon monitoring the situation, predicting that there would be cults looking to exploit the gullible, and even mass suicides when the day came and went without the world ending or the aliens making themselves known. The head of the Miviludes, Serge Blisko, would say of this possibility:

After these moments, there can be a danger of psychological collapse. If fragile, vulnerable people expect an event like the end of the world and it doesn’t happen, they can feel let down and in anguish.

Parts of the mountain would be closed down and some trouble makers sent away, but the people kept coming in, and there was even talk of the government possibly sending in actual military troops to quell the chaos, but then December 21st came and… well nothing really. When the predicted doomsdays date came and went, interest in the mountain waned, but this is not to say that it is over. More current predictions for the Mayan calendar end of the world place it in 2020, so perhaps this mystery mountain will gain more followers once again, looking to escape the incoming apocalypse.