Is there a new space race in progress – besides the ones to put humans on Mars and big weapons in orbit? Just days after one group of astronomers reveals they have found phosphine gas in Venus’s atmosphere that is a strong indicator of the presence of life floating around up there, a group of Russian astronomers announce they have clear images of fossils from living microorganisms in a meteorite that came from an exoplanet outside of our solar system – life that existed even before the solar system came into existence. Race over? Or is this just an early lap before the first pit stop?

“The images we have obtained are unambiguous and easy to interpret. However, there will be many debates about it. People who have never worked in this field are the ones who argue the most.”

Aleksey Rozanov, the chief research officer at the JINR Astrobiology Center, told the news agency RIA Novosti that he and a research team from the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research are about to release a collection of high-quality electron microscope images of fossils from “micro-aliens” found inside the Orgueil meteorite which fell in Orgueil, France, on May 14, 1864. Those in the meteorite world know that the 20 stones which were collected are perhaps the most studied meteorite in the world. In fact, stories of organic matter similar to peat being found on it emerged almost immediately after its discovery, along with its unusual composition indicating it was probably not from our solar system. And yet, Rozanov is touting this as a ‘new’ discovery. Why?

“This is not a discovery, but the establishment of a solid fact that panspermia is a real phenomenon.”

Mikhail Kapralov, Junior Researcher of the Laboratory of Radiation Biology of the Astrobiology Section of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, explains that the team used the electron microscope to look inside the meteorite – in its crevices and inner cleavages where evidence would exist that was not picked up when the meteorite landed in France. They found fossilized magnetotactics – bacteria that align along a magnetic field – and fossils similar to coccoid, the rod-shaped forms of prokaryotes, acritarchs, protists, alveolates and armored amoebae. If all of this is real, this is truly a game-changing discovery.

Original painting of an individual fragment from the Orgueil meteorite

Is it real?

Meteorite experts may remember the infamous Orgueil hoax. In 1965, a fragment of the meteorite, which had been kept in a sealed glass jar since it was recovered, suddenly appeared to have a seed embedded in it. An investigation found it was from a European rush (a grass-like plant), that was glued into it and covered with coal dust. The hoaxer was never found. The researchers also reference the works of “American academician Richard Hoover.” Hoover, a former NASA scientist, was the author of the so-called “Hoover Paper” published on the Journal of Cosmology in 2011 which claimed he had found evidence of fossils in numerous meteorites. The controversial (in the scientific world) journal was criticized for publishing it and NASA disassociated itself from him.

Aleksey Rozanov released a few images of the alleged fossils (see them here) and promises that all will be published in November. Will they prove we’re not alone in the universe? That remains to be seen. Will they end the controversies? Probably not. Is there a race on to find any kind of evidence of life other than us?

Roxanov has the best answer:

“Much was found already then, but out of fear it was not so interpreted so as not to frighten people.”

We’ll see.

How do you feel about military presence in space? Do you think it should be (a) blocked, (b) implied, (c) clandestine, or (d) open, funded and growing? If you picked (d), the Space Force may be interested in hiring you for its PR department.

“NASA’s partnerships are vital to ensuring America continues to lead the world in the peaceful uses of outer space.” (Jim Bridenstine)

On September 21, 2020, Gen. John “Jay” Raymond, U.S. Space Force (USSF) Chief of Space Operations, signed a “memorandum of understanding” with NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine that brings the two organizations together in a way Bridenstine says “continues our rich legacy of collaboration with the Defense Department” and Raymond says will provide “a secure, stable, and accessible space domain.”

“NASA and the military share a long history dating back to the late 1950s; there is power in our partnership.” (Gen. John “Jay” Raymond)

Well, that depends on how you look at it. While it’s true that the space program was born out of the Cold War with the USSR and the first astronauts were military pilots, that’s primarily because the vast majority of pilots and test pilots in the U.S. (and the world) were current or former military personnel. However, while some missions bore a flag-waving and flag-planting air, the majority quickly gravitated to scientific purposes, especially in the eras of the space stations and the Space Shuttle. That was obvious with the significant amount of sharing between NASA and the Russian space program, which continues today on the ISS but has become a financial arrangement on the transport end, with that ‘business’ going quickly to private U.S. firms.

“We are an instrument of national power. It is soft power, it is diplomatic power, information power, economic power. This is really a tool of diplomacy for the nation, but we can’t do any of those things if space is not secure. And that’s why it was important to create the Space Force, that’s why it’s important for NASA to partner with the Space Force.”

At a forum announcing the agreement, Bridenstine described the justification for the new agreement, which replaces the one signed 14 years ago by NASA and the Air Force Space Command. It’s telling that the new one with the Space Force is described as a “tool of diplomacy” – that’s not far from Orwell’s “War is peace” in “1984.” Why is this first step in “diplomacy” an agreement to be heavily armed?

“Freedom of action in space provides NASA and allied-nation space agencies the ability to explore and discover, and will enable America’s return to the Moon and subsequent exploration of Mars.”

This sentence in the press release contains another revealing phrase: “allied-nation space agencies.” That’s not “NASA and all of humanity.” Does anyone really know today who the allies of the U.S. truly are … in space or on Earth?

We have already made space the same kind of unable-to-clean-up junkyard that the planet has become. Must we make it another battleground as well?

When the armed guards arrive at the ISS, it will already be too late.

Within the world of the paranormal there are many strange phenomena for which we have no concrete answers, and which serve to merely baffle and confuse. Yet among these there can often be those very surreal and odd things that lurk out on the periphery of the odd, evading any attempts to even really classify. This is surely an apt description of the increasing number of reports making the rounds of eerie, tall pale humanoids that go way off into the realm of the truly bizarre, and which defy any real efforts to understand. Here we will look at some reports of truly otherworldly tall and pale entities and beings that are in a league of weirdness all their own.

One spooky account comes from the Reddit user “Saskguy85,” who had his encounter while driving through the remote wilderness somewhere near the Canadian border. At the time he was on his way home from a friend’s house at around 4 AM, and it is described as a 45-minute drive, around 10 minutes of which is through a dense patch of rugged, black forest. On this evening he took the drive slow after almost hitting a deer, moving along carefully as he peered into the gloom ahead. As he did, it seems something beyond his comprehension bloomed up out of the dark, and he says of what happened:

As I approached the exit of the forest there is a left curve in the road and an adjacent dirt road with a white wooden fence lining it going up a hill to what I would imagine would lead to someone’s property/home. As I was making the turn I seen something in my headlights (Brights) at the edge of the fence. It was a tall pale milky white creature with a bald head. Its eyes reflected back. Clothes-less . It’s arms and legs just as white as its bald head. I seen it for a second or two as it made a move to dive behind the fence. I braked and backed up slowly and pointed my lights at the fence looking for any kind of movement. I was parked on the highway which was abandoned at 5 am. My heart was racing and I didn’t know why. I must have sat there for a minute before I calmed down, didn’t see any movement and decided I better not go and investigate or maybe I’d become a missing person and continued my journey home. To this day I still wouldn’t have gotten out to investigate unless I had a weapon or someone with me. So the only description I have of this “thing” is tall, pale, bald, and human like features, but no noticeable hair or eyebrows.

A perhaps even more frightening similar account is given by Reddit user “DistinctEarthling,” who had his strange experience while driving along a rural back road in Upstate NY on Christmas night, 2007 on his way to visit a friend in a rural gated community. As he approached the community he came to an area where he would encounter something from out of a nightmare. He says:

I reached a section of road that had barren fields on either side and woods set back. Houses were probably nestled back into the trees. As I drove, I noticed what looked like someone walking up ahead on the opposite side of the road, coming in my direction. Mind you, I was still going about 20 mph the whole time, so it was probably less than a minute by the time the “walker” came into clear view. I got a quick scan of it from my windshield before my car and it were exactly parallel. This is what I saw: It was not a person. It stood on two long legs, with long arms hanging down from its shoulders. It was strong looking. Lean, muscular, but not beefy in stature. It looked thin at the same time. It stood at least 7 foot tall. It was light coloured: not sure whether it was white, tan, yellow or greyish. It didn’t appear to have fur but there was some texture to the skin- it wasn’t smooth. There appeared to be something coming down off its back. I don’t know what this was. All I can recall about it’s face is the small features it had but the mouth and jaw were notably large. And it had pointed things atop its head- 2 things going straight upward with something mingled between the two things. That’s what I got from a quick scan and from my observation of it as it neared my car and my car neared it.

As my car became parallel to it within a split second, I went from looking out my windshield to looking at it from my driver’s side window. In that moment, it’s face quickly peered down at me and all I remember was the mouth opened wide. Out came a remarkable scream that I’ll never forget. Gives me the chills just thinking about it. It consisted of a high-pitched shrill/shriek, enveloped by a deep guttural growl. Both sounds happened simultaneously in that scream. I kept driving all the while. This was all happening so fast that I didn’t even have a chance to be scared or shocked or anything. I continued driving and went past my friend’s house and drove home. Called him to tell him what happened and that I just needed to get back. I was probably running on adrenaline to get back home. Later on, I was in total shock after it sunk in. Had my driver’s side window been opened fully, it would have touched me, or worse, taken me. I’m certain of it. To this day, I still haven’t worked out what this was.

In a case on the site Phantoms and Monsters we have a report from all the way over in Scotland. The witness says he was walking home with some friends through a park when they observed something beyond their reality. The witness claims:

Me and my friend were walking around a massive park in my town and it was around 11pm. We were just walking around having a smoke and a laugh, being teenagers and stuff. By this point it was pitch black. There’s no lights in the park and I’m a bit on edge because I’m not keen on the dark and I was kind of paranoid from the weed, but I’m gonna just cut to the interesting part. So me and my friend, let’s call him Sam, walk towards the actual swing park within the park and we’re like 10 feet from the park. There’s this unexplainable rancid smell that physically caused me to gag. We joke and say something about it being this girl from school we don’t like and head into the park. The smell is only getting stronger and I glance over at the small wall surrounding the park. There’s a bench and squatting behind the bench, at least 5 ft tall squatting, was what looked like a freakishly tall guy. He appeared to be naked and hairless. We both kinda stared for a minute before looking at each other as if to say “Yo, you can see that right” and the thing started laughing like a 4-year-old girl. We got the f**k out of there and ran like our lives depended on it and went home. We just laughed it off and kind of forgot about it, at least Sam forgot about it. But it was weeks ago and I’m still spooked and refuse to go near that park after dark.

Sometimes such sightings happen very close to home. Reddit user “Keanu” has a perhaps even creepier account, which apparently played out on evening as he was hanging out with some friends in his own home. He says that throughout the evening they kept hearing strange noises outside, but that every time they went to look there was nothing there. They ended up chalking it up to some animal prowling about and tried to ignore it, but it would soon prove to be no normal animal. The witness says that he stepped outside to have a cigarette and that’s when things got very weird very fast. He explains:

My friend began moaning in what I can only describe as pure primal fear so I began asking him what and suddenly my dog started barking. I looked to the right off the small porch and saw a tall, extremely thin, ghostly pale creature. It was a horrid humanoid figure. I only saw it for a moment before I heard the rocks under it scatter moving like someone was moving inhumanly fast over them. It was gone over the fence into the green belt behind my house in a split second. I’d say it perhaps 7 feet tall and humanoid in how it looks. I theorize that the creature was on top of my roof before as there’s no other way to describe the sounds we heard or how the creature appeared so suddenly and silently.

The same witness thinks it might be connected with a frightening encounter a friend of his had had in a nearby tunnel with a rusted metal gate. The tunnel is apparently a place where teenagers like to go to spook themselves, but there was typically no one there because it was out in a very rural wooded area and not easy to get to. On this occasion the friends decided to go exploring there, and the poster says of the outlandish events that would allegedly play out:

A couple of my friends decided to investigate further into the tunnel out of curiosity. You must also take note that they claim this happened awhile before my initial experience occurred. They walked deep into the tunnel probably 10-15 minutes. At a certain point later in the tunnel once flashlights are completely necessary it stoops down. They said there were noticeable amounts of feces that had questionable explanation to how it got there. With signs that the tunnel could be inhabited, but by something that couldn’t simply be an animal. This is also in a suburban area where homeless people or addicts are extremely uncommon. This tunnel in particular I know for a fact no man would want to take up residence, especially with the small amount of water running through it. They reached a part in the tunnel where it got even lower and above where it drops down is painted “Welcome to Hell” coincidentally. There they say they saw a tall pale figure hunched in a way so that it took up most of the height of the tunnel but was noticeably gaunt and thin. And at that point they claim to have saw it move and they turned tail and frantically sprinted down the tunnel with no regard for the water or darkness. Given the description of what witnessed I would say that these two incidents are likely connected and the creature in question is likely to be the same one in each story, especially given the vicinity in which they occurred. We now theorize that the creature witnessed at my house dwells in the tunnel during the day and prowls at night. We don’t go near the tunnel anymore. I don’t think there’s a way this could be a coincidence.

What was this thing? Another report from the site Phantoms and Monsters similarly happened right in the witness’s yard, out in rural Durham, in the state of North Carolina. On this evening his family had gone off to visit a relative who had recently given birth, so he had the quiet house to himself. He decided to bring his dog out for a walk before bedtime at around 12 AM, and he says of what happened next:

I took her out the back-garage door with her long leash (I was wearing socks and didn’t feel like getting them soaked). She usually does her “business” in that little clearing between the kennel and garage, so I let her walk down through it. Our garage has a single light on the back wall (not LED or really bright) so I can see her somewhat well while she does it. She’s facing me when suddenly her backside lifts almost one or two feet into the air. (Paranormal or not I f**king screamed at this) I assumed some wild dog or something had tried to drag her. She runs back to me and I hear rustling among the rocks and this figure stops right as it enters visible view in the light. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. “It” was tall. I’m 6’2 and I had to look slightly up to see where I thought its head was. It was pale but not white or grey, just normal pale flesh-color (like someone who spends a week or two indoors). It was lanky, not really anorexic or anything but definitely disproportionate. It looked at me for a good 1-2 seconds before it backtracked in the quickest manner I could never replicate. As soon as it went I booked it back inside.

I was torn about calling the police if neighbors who had heard my scream hadn’t. Behold almost half an hour later the police arrive in my driveway (I told them that I had seen a man in the back yard, leaving out the whole tall demon-sh*t going on.) I have been contemplating whether it was some creature or some NBA-bound nude meth-head. Once again, I don’t count myself as a “believer” in the bigfoot or mothman but I really don’t know what the f**k happened. I’m most definitely not taking the dog out alone anytime soon.

There is also a report from The UFO Reporting Center that is eerily similar, in that once again we have one of these strange entities encountered in someone’s backyard, this time in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in the Fall of 2004. The witness describes herself as a housewife and mother, and explains that it was at around sunset and that her two daughters were in their respective rooms as she watched TV in the living room. At some point her two dogs suddenly were agitated and on edge, which she claims was very unusual for them. The dogs gathered at the dining room window, which overlooks the backyard, growling and barking at something outside. Considering how odd their behavior was, the witness decided to investigate, and as soon as she opened the door things escalated into the weird very quickly. She says of what happened:

As I opened the door the dogs barged past me as they usually do when they are excited (i.e. to chase a bunny through the fence). On this occasion, they hooked around the door to cross the back of house. I took a step out keeping my hand on the door knob of storm door. They had stopped between my two patios shoulder to shoulder and barking hysterically. Defensive and afraid at the same time. I saw in front of them standing inside my privacy fence what looked like a bald headed teenager. I was thinking to myself, ‘hey, what’s this tall, skinny, pale white, bald teenager doing in my backyard’ and just then it turned to look at us just enough to show it’s right eye. It had a big black elongated upslanting eye. It then turned to its left and vanished on the spot. The dogs then ran to the spot where it stood sniffing the ground. Now, I didn’t get any supportive reactions from family or friends so for the last two years I’ve just put it out of my mind as best I could. I would raise the issue now and then, but when I hear reports on the news like a sighting over Chicago O’hare airport etc. I am reminded of my ‘encounter’. The surprise scared me so bad, I had to do lamaze breathing to slow my heartrate down.

I did not imagine this. I recall feeling I should look fast as it had no earlobes, no visible nose from my vantage point (it stood right shoulder to us) long arms, long fingers but did not count them. I don’t recall it’s feet, but it either wore a skin tight jump suit similar to skin color. I saw a shiny object on it’s upper left chest. All I could think was, I’m going to die of a heart attack and no one will know what I just saw. I witnessed some paranormal activity in years past, and I have to wonder if the incidents are related. It is a mystery! I am certain that we are not alone in the universe, but the public seems to be desensitized to this subject, as though a disinformation program has been at work since Roswell. People just think a person isn’t well if we’ve had this experience and won’t believe it until they see it for themselves. I had always said, the universe is so vast, we can’t be the only life there is, but I’m left wondering why ‘I’ was visited.

Another case concerning dogs was reported on Phantoms and Monsters, from a man who says this happened to a friend of his in May 2015 in Dufferin County, in Ontario, Canada. The friend supposedly lives on a farm on a few hundred acres of land, in a very rural area with not many people around at all. At the time the witness was living in a trailer as his farmhouse was renovated, and one evening he woke to the sounds of his dogs going nuts and scratching at the trailer door. Once again the strangeness started when he opened the door. The man says of what happened to his friend:

When he went to let them out he was surprised to see bright yellow lights behind and inside the nearby barn. Thinking it was trespassers he let his dogs loose and went to grab his rifle. He said as he was loading it he heard his dogs go from barking, to yelping and whining. They came barreling back into the trailer and proceeded to hide under the table. Thinking these people hurt his dogs he stepped out of the trailer and fired five rounds into the air and began yelling as he readied another magazine. He got a response when the lights around the barn grew incredibly bright. He admits that at that point he was pretty freaked out. He said that he stood there for a bit staring at the lights when he noticed two beings casually walking across the field towards the barn

Apparently when he saw them he was hit with a mixture of confusion and fear. He describes them as humanoid, pale white, tall and thin. Having very small heads in comparison to their bodies, he also notes that they must have been 6’5 with most of that height being leg length. He stated that they moved very strangely. Their upper body seemed stiff and locked, but their legs moved very fluidly. Almost bringing their knees to their chest. Understandably fear took over him, he took aim and fired three rounds at the beings. Which just made them completely stop moving. Then he noticed a third one to his left very close, but walking away from his trailer. He turned around, went back inside and went for his handguns when the light outside vanished. He sat inside his trailer with silent dogs until morning. He didn’t check out the barn until two days later. He found nothing strange there. No burn marks, no holes, all was normal. When checking the fields, he also found absolutely nothing. He told me that he was freaked out for a while afterwards, but nothing strange has ever happened on his property since then.

When looking at reports such as these it is hard to know what to think. What kind of phenomena could these truly bizarre accounts actually represent? Are these mere hoaxes, tall tales, and urban legends? Are these aliens, ghosts, demons, some sort if interdimensional phenomena? Or are they perhaps something else altogether, maybe even something we were never meant to understand? We will likely never know, and such reports flitter and dance out on the very fringes of the surreal and strange.

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I’m stepping through the door
And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

— Space Oddity (David Bowie)

Hey, Ground Control, you’re not going to believe this, but I think I see a comet with a strange aurora around it. That’s not right, is it? And over there is a weird-looking asteroid, but what’s really weird is that the rocks on the surface don’t match the other ones … like maybe they came from another asteroid. Weird, right? Planet Earth still looks blue … that’s a relief. Is there anything I can do? Yes, I took my protein pills. There’s nothing I can do? Maybe I’ll write a song.

David Bowie told us that space is full of oddities and he was certainly right about that. This week, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft spotted some strange rocks on the surface of asteroid Bennu that appear to have come from someplace else, while a new analysis of data collected by the Rosetta spacecraft while it orbited Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) shows the comet glowing with a far-ultraviolet auroral radiation. Did THEY take their protein pills?

Comet 67P/C-G

“We found six boulders ranging in size from 5 to 14 feet (about 1.5 to 4.3 meters) scattered across Bennu’s southern hemisphere and near the equator. These boulders are much brighter than the rest of Bennu and match material from Vesta.” (Daniella DellaGiustina of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, Tucson)

“Our leading hypothesis is that Bennu inherited this material from its parent asteroid after a vestoid (a fragment from Vesta) struck the parent. Then, when the parent asteroid was catastrophically disrupted, a portion of its debris accumulated under its own gravity into Bennu, including some of the pyroxene from Vesta.” (Hannah Kaplan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland)

Bennu

It’s hard out there for an asteroid (2005 non-Bowie song reference), as these two space scientists explain in a NASA press release announcing the discovery of extremely bright boulders on Bennu. Using the OSIRIS-REx Visible and Infrared Spectrometer (OVIRS) instrument, they matched the repflected light to that coming from the mineral pyroxene, which is similar to what is seen on Vesta and the Vestoids – not an early all-girl band but fragments blasted by an impact off of an earlier, larger Vesta. In the tightly-packed asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars, these impacts are not unusual, or as NASA more musically puts it:

“This indicates many asteroids are participating in a complex orbital dance that sometimes results in cosmic mashups.”

Meanwhile, on Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko (a Jupiter-family comet originally from the Kuiper belt that was orbited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission, which dropped a lander on its surface before crashing into it two years later), researchers taking a fresh look at the glow around the comet have come to a new conclusion about its cause.

“Initially, we thought the ultraviolet emissions at comet 67P were phenomena known as ‘dayglow,’ a process caused by solar photons interacting with cometary gas. We were amazed to discover that the UV emissions are aurora, driven not by photons, but by electrons in the solar wind that break apart water and other molecules in the coma and have been accelerated in the comet’s nearby environment. The resulting excited atoms make this distinctive light.”

In fact, Dr. Joel Parker of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) says the glow is an aurora – something never seen around a comet until now. While they have been visible around planets and moons, they weren’t expected around comets because they lack a magnetic field to interact with the charged particles in solar wind, causing them to glow in auroras. In the case of 67P/C-G, it was the comet’s coma – the envelope of gas surrounding it – which was excited by the solar particles and made to glow in an ultraviolet light.

Both of these discoveries are further proof that the universe is full of space oddities and the study of data from space missions should never end, just like the playing of David Bowie’s music.

There’s something we all can do.

There was not really anything to make people think that the night of October 9, 1973 would be anything other than a normal evening in the sleepy residential area of Delaware County, Indiana. It started out as usual, people went about their business, but this was to be far from a normal night, and it would quickly spiral into one of the most curious and intense UFO waves on record.

The area was not known for its crime or for anything much really happening much of the time at all, but at around 10 p.m. emergency services switchboards began lighting up with numerous calls from scared residents reporting mysterious UFOs in the night skies, and this wasn’t just a few people here and there. Before long police had received 700 calls like this, and officers sent out to investigate also reported seeing the object, described as “blinking a red-white-blue revolving light and often hovering near the ground.” Meanwhile, an airfield in Fort Wayne picked up an anomalous radar signature, and the incident left officials in the area in a state of panic, wondering what to make of it all. Making it all even more mysterious was that this was only the beginning, and the UFO sightings would go on to spread like wildfire throughout the region.

Later that same month, people in the area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and its surrounding communities began to flood emergency services with reports of UFOs as well, with a flurry of hundreds of callers from the region reporting bright lights in the sky. Such reports continued on throughout October, and some encounters really are quite dramatic. In one incident, terrified witnesses described how one of the UFOs even came down to land in the middle of main street in Trenton, and another witness claimed that a UFO had landed on her farm and killed two of her cows, and yet another claimed that a diamond-shaped glowing blue craft had tried to abduct her baby. There is also the account of an off-duty Air National Guard flight controller, who saw a “pulsating blue-ish-white object” fly out over and descend into a soybean field. There were so many reports that it was causing a mass hysteria, and fueling it all was that there were many reported power outages going on in the same areas where the UFOs were being seen.

While some of these might sound a little too bizarre, many of these witnesses to these UFO events were what one would call traditionally reliable, such as police officers, and officials. One policeman, a Sgt. Hugh, claimed to have chased a glowing, humming circular object for a few miles near the town of Greenfield, and sheriffs near Zanesville witnessed three pulsating globes over a local graveyard. Even the Governor of Ohio himself, John J. Gilligan, said he had seen a UFO shoot a “vertical beam of light.” The governor was so shaken that he would say in a press conference, “I saw one (UFO) the other night, so help me. I’m absolutely serious. I saw this. It was not a plane. It was not a bird. It didn’t wear a cape. And I really don’t know what it was.”

Perhaps the most well-known and oft-discussed encounter from the October 1973 “UFO Invasion” of the Midwest is that of a Capt. Lawrence J. Coyne, who on Oct. 18 was flying a U.S. Army Reserve Super Huey helicopter near Mansfield, Ohio, along with a crew of three others. As they flew, they say they saw an unidentified red light approaching directly towards them. The light was coming in so fast, that Coyne made evasive maneuvers, but the mysterious craft matched every movement. When the crew got a good look at the object, they could see that it was a cigar-shaped, windowless metallic craft with a bright red light perched upon its nose. This mysterious object then proceeded to hover in front of the helicopter and then without warning zapped them with a piercing green light like a searchlight, which lit up the entire interior of their aircraft. After a few moments had passed the light stopped and the UFO flew off as their helicopter lost its controls to send them in a spiral towards the ground, and their radio had gone dead as well. They were able to get the aircraft under control again, and were left with an experience none of them would ever forget.

All of these reports over the same general region at the same time was enough to cause a sort of mass panic, and it was splashed all over the papers at the time. It was feared that it would cause a nationwide panic if something wasn’t done, but then by Halloween the UFO reports just suddenly stopped, and the skies were quiet again. The story of the Midwest Invasion has gone on to be much discussed, and is even said to have been the inspiration for Steven Spielberg’s classic Close Encounter of the Third Kind. Many of the reports were compiled and collected by local UFOlogist Kenny Young, who says of the 1973 wave of UFOs:

The unusual aerial events happening during the October 1973 time-period remains one of the most fascinating of all UFO happenings, an intense and disturbing siege that no dismissive hypothesis or explanatory venture will easily rob of its strangeness.

There have been a few theories on what happened back in October of 1973. One of the most prominent is that this was all misidentifications of military aircraft involved with a military operation called “Operation Nickel Grass,” which saw the U.S. Air Force launching numerous large transport planes for the purpose of supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The war began on October 6, when Egypt, Suria, and other Middle Eastern countries attempted to invade Israel, and Operation Nickel Grass was the U.S. response, beginning on October 13 and seeing numerous aircraft taking off for several weeks nearly around the clock. The idea here is that civilians may have mistaken all of these planes for UFOs, but it seems unlikely considering that the planes, mostly C-141 StarLifters and C-5 Galaxy cargo planes, looked and acted like planes, not the various other weird craft reported, and many of the witnesses were professionals who would have been unlikely to mistake a cargo plane for a maneuverable UFO. The Coyne incident was also definitely not a cargo plane. Other ideas are that there was some sort of meteor shower or that this was all simply a mass hysteria, but of course there is the possibility that this region was visited en masse by forces we cannot comprehend. If is were the case, then what were they and what did they want? We may never know the true answers, and the 1973 “UFO Invasion” remains a compelling piece of UFO lore.

Nikola Tesla is a very well-known scientist who made numerous inventions and discoveries, such as the Tesla coil, alternating-current (AC) electricity, neon lights, artificial lightning, X-rays, and the rotating magnetic field, just to name a few. His radio technology is actually used in today’s computers, smartphones, navigation systems, satellites, missiles, and spaceships. Incredibly, in 1926, he predicted that people would eventually be able to stay connected by seeing and hearing each other no matter where they were across the planet by a small device that could fit in a pocket – decades before the smartphone was even created.

He had over 1,000 invention patents on record that included his 1905 patent called “The art of transmitting electrical energy through the natural medium” which was based on his thoughts that the Earth was an electrical generator that could supply an unlimited amount of electricity.

Tesla Coil

It was obvious that Tesla was an incredibly intelligent man who was ahead of his time in regards to his work. In fact, it has been said that his inventions were between 300 and 1,000 years ahead of time and that the world would be about half a century behind where we are today if it wasn’t for Tesla. This, however, led to some people believing that he was such a unique individual that he didn’t even come from our planet.

A declassified FBI document called “Interplanetary Sessions Newsletter” was written on June 14, 1957 and contained some unbelievable claims that Tesla was originally from the planet Venus. It read in part, “The Space People have visited the Tesla engineers many times, and have told us that Tesla was a Venusian, brought to this planet as a baby, in 1856, and left with Mr. and Mrs. Tesla in a remote mountain province in what is now Yugoslavia.”

Additionally, a woman named Margaret Storm, who was writing a book on Tesla’s life, was given information through a device that the scientist created in 1938 in order to conduct “interplanetary communication”. She allegedly even had contact with the “Space People”.

Nikola Tesla

The theory that Nikola Tesla originally came from Venus and was brought to Earth as a baby is certainly far-fetched even though many people do believe that there are aliens living right here on Earth (Area 51 for example). But what’s even stranger is that the FBI had that information in one of their files which ultimately raises even more questions such as why did the “Space People” reveal Tesla’s identity to the FBI and perhaps an even better question is did the FBI actually have close contact with extraterrestrials?

The entire 64-page document can be read here.