In 1966 and 1967 there was a sudden flurry of UFO activity around the United States, especially within the Ohio River Valley, and from here a great many weird cases have sprung up, including the Mothman phenomenon and countless UFO reports. A curious report from the era appeared in the book The Mothman Prophecies, by John Keel, and revolves around a usually nondescript man by the name of Tad Jones, of Dunbar, a suburb of Charleston, West Virginia. He was by all accounts a God-fearing man who did not drink or do drugs, and to was known as an honest, hard-working man not prone to fights of fancy or tall tales. Yet, on one January morning in 1966, Jones was driving to work, an appliance store he managed about 10 miles outside of Charleston. It was a route he took every day, and the rive started just like any other, but things were about to take a turn into the surreal, and it would become  a case that blends all manner of strangeness, odd clues, and inexplicable events that have never really been solved.

As he drove along, at around 9 AM Jones came to something blocking the road up ahead. Since the road he was on, Route 64, was a fairly new multi-lane highway he at first assumed that this must be a road construction crew, and so he dutifully slowed down, yet as he crawled closer, he realized that this was far stranger than that. It appeared to be a large sphere with a luster like dull aluminum, but what was even weirder was that it was not sitting upon the road, as he had first thought, but rather hovering several feet over it. The sphere was described as being around 20 feet in diameter, with two antennae-like protrusions jutting out from the top, and four legs and what looked like a propeller attached at the bottom. Jones would say of the sphere:

There were four legs attached to it, with casterlike wheels on the bottom of each one. And there was a small window about nine inches in diameter on the side facing me, but I couldn’t see anything inside the sphere. On the underside there was something like a propeller. It was idling when I first drove up, then it started spinning faster and the whole object began to rise upward. It disappeared into the sky and I drove to my store. I believe what I saw. It was there. I never saw anything like it before, and I haven’t seen anything like it since, but it was there that morning on I-64.

The incident had left him shaken and afraid, and after some time pondering what he had seen, he decided to contact the police, and before long his bizarre experience was being featured all over the local papers. At around this time, Jones woke one morning to find that a slip of paper had been deposited under his front door. Not really thinking much of it at first, he picked up the paper and a glance at it caused his heart to drop. There scrawled upon it in handwriting was a note that read; “We know what you have seen and we know that you have talked. You better keep your mouth shut.” It was all very sinister, indeed, and there was no indication of who had written the note or where it had come from. Jones became paranoid, and began constantly looking over his shoulder.

A local UFO expert by the name of Ralph Jarett soon became aware of Jones story right after having his own strange experience, when a mysterious unidentified phone call had turned out to be just a few minutes of a low beeping, as if in code. Jarett would reach out to Jones and uncover many extra details about the sighting, including the fact that the UFO appeared to have been hovering directly over a major gas line. During his extensive investigation of Jones’ case, Jones would once again receive an ominous note slipped under his door. This time it was written on a piece of torn cardboard with burnt edges, and simply read: “There won’t be another warning.” All of this attracted the attention of the imminent researcher John Keel, who happened to be in the area investigating a UFO flap in the Ohio River Valley and the infamous Mothman sightings that were going on at the time. When Keel began questioning Jones and looking into the case, he would unearth even more strangeness.

Jones would mention to Keel an incident that he hadn’t really thought much of at the time, but which he had become convinced was somehow connected to his sighting. He said that one week after his UFO incident, he had been driving along the same road at around the same time when he had passed a lone man on the side of the road. He pulled over to see if the man needed help, but got no response, merely a wave. The next day, Jones passed the same man again at the same spot at the same time, and he would tell Keel that there had been something unsettling and “off” about him. Jones would describe the mysterious stranger:

He was very tanned or his face was very flushed. He looked normal and was wearing a blue coat and a blue cap with a visor… something like a uniform, I guess. I noticed he was holding a box in his hand. Some kind of instrument. It had a large dial on it, like a clock, and a wire ran from it to his other hand.

Thinking that it may have been a utilities worker, Keel checked with the gas company, but it would turn out that not only had they not had any personnel out there at the time, but that they did not wear the uniform described by Jones and also did not use such an instrument. What mysterious connection does any of this have with Jones’ experience? No one really knows. It would only get even more curious still when Keel went out to the site himself and found a strange series of footprints that looked like the tracks of a huge dog that he estimated must have weighed upwards of 200 pounds. In addition to the “dog tracks” found at the site of the Jones encounter, Keel turned up among them a human print that in some ways struck him as unusual, as well as some other weird things. He describes this as follows:

Aside from the dog tracks, we found a single footprint of what appeared to be a large, naked human foot. This was planted in the center of a muddy section with no other footprints of any kind around it. But a short distance away I came across some old friends… a type of footprint that has appeared at many UFO sites around the country. They look like the type of prints made by ripple-soled shoes, but their spacing is always peculiar. They don’t start anywhere and they don’t lead anywhere. Ripple soles had been in fashion since the early 1960s and had then faded out. But these phantom prints had a ridge around the edges. Years later, when the first men walked on the moon, I realized that the photos of the prints left by their moon-walking shoes were identical to the footprints I had seen over and over again in my travels.

Plaster casts taken of the dog tracks were sent to be analyzed and were found to not be dog tracks at all, and indeed no local wildlife experts could identify them as any animal known to the area. Oddly, Keel claims that the imminent cryptozoologist Ivan Sanderson had told him that very similar dog-like tracks often appeared in places where paranormal activity had occurred, and also said that he would later encounter similar tracks around the country in completely separate cases. What did all of this footprint weirdness have to do with Jones’ encounter, if anything? No one really knows, but Keel was certain that it was all connected somehow. In the end we are left to wonder, what did Tad Jones encounter out there on that road? What is the meaning of the strange tracks, the mysterious stranger on the road, and the sinister notes he received? It is unclear, and it continues to be a weird case surrounded by oddness that we may never fully understand.

If you are wondering what the “Australian tektite field” is, its formal title is the “Australasian strewn field.” What it demonstrates is that in ancient times certain portions of our world were effectively torched. Meteoritics and Planetary Science said: “Early workers, including such astute observers as Charles Fenner, George Baker, and Edward Gill, who picked up pristine tektites on the arid and ancient surface of Australia, became convinced that this shower of glass had arrived very recently. Ages around 10,000-20,000 years were usually quoted. As some early radiometric age determinations of tektites gave spuriously old ages, these data fueled the notion that the age of the fall was disconnected to the time of formation of tektites.” And what – you may very well ask – are tektites? This is where things get really interesting. Tektites are small, glassy bodies that are near-identical to the equally glassy trinitite that was found at the detonation site of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in July 1945, just a few weeks before the destruction of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

The Los Alamos National Laboratory state the following on all of this: “Trinitite has also been referred to as atomsite or Alamogordo glass (after a nearby city). Ultimately, it is a glasslike substance that was created from the sand and other materials at the Site during the intense heat of that first atomic test. Relatively recent research (2005) indicates that, upon explosion, the ground was likely pushed down initially, then rebounded, forcing material into the fireball. As indicated in the display, the ground was vaporized before eventually raining down in the form of trinitite droplets. While most trinitite is light green (due to the iron that was present in the sand), other samples contain some of the iron from the tower on which the ‘Gadget’ was detonated, and those look black. Yet other slightly red samples contain copper from the electrical wire used in the experiment.”

Forbes say the following: “It’s often hard to appreciate how quickly energy gets released in something like a nuclear explosion. The shockwave from the initial blast was so powerful it was felt from over 100 miles (160 km) away, with the mushroom cloud reaching 7.5 miles (12 km) in height. The above photo, taken just 16 milliseconds (0.016 seconds) after detonation, shows a blast explosion about 660 feet (200 meters) high, but it’s what happened below, on the ground, that really was surprising. Beneath the explosion location, an enormous crater formed. The landscape was incredibly scarred, and in many place, melted by the nuclear explosion.”

The Smithsonian Magazine provides these words: “No one commented on the glass at the time—its creation was the least of the Gadget’s spectacular effects—but visitors to the site after the war noticed the unusual scattering of glassy mineral that surrounded the shallow bomb crater and began collecting pieces as souvenirs. ‘A lake of green jade,’ Time magazine described it in September 1945. ‘The glass takes strange shapes—lopsided marbles, knobbly sheets a quarter-inch thick, broken, thin-walled bubbles, green, wormlike forms.'”

Perhaps like this?

In 2001, Science Frontiers stated the following: “The extent of the immense Australasian-tektite strewn field implies a hard-to-miss crater about 100 kilometers in diameter. Yet, despite the geological recency of the event and despite much geological surveying, no convincing crater has been discovered…The mystery deepens when one realizes that whatever cataclysm sent the Australian tektites aloft may have been comparable in magnitude to the impact that extinguished the dinosaurs (and other fauna) some 65 million years ago. This much older event has its crater buried below the Yucatan and is further marked by widespread biological extinctions. In contrast, the Australasian-tektite event is not only minus an obvious crater but seems to have had scant effect on the earth’s cargo of sensitive life forms. It was a strangely ‘gentle’ event despite the rocky deluge of tektites. What really happened?”

What, indeed?

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Math may be hard, but it sure is handy – even in the world of fairies. Looking for an explanation for the so-called fairy circles – mysterious circles of grass found in Namibia and Western Australia — researchers turned to one of the greatest mathematical minds of modern times, and Alan Turing, speaking from beyond the grave, gave them the answer. Was there any secret Turing couldn’t decode?

“Turing’s concept was that in certain systems, due to random disturbances and a “reaction-diffusion” mechanism, interaction between just two diffusible substances was enough to allow strongly patterned structures to spontaneously emerge.”

Patterns like these

What? Fortunately, most of the press release on a new paper published in the Journal of Ecology is written at a more understandable level. In 1952 (he died in 1954 at the age of 41), Turing published a paper on mathematical biology considered by many to be his masterpiece: “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis.” Morphogenesis is the development of patterns and shapes in biological organisms and Turing used a set of partial differential equations to model catalytic chemical reactions that could create regular patterns in nature. While Turing couldn’t take it any further, many other scientists did, using his work to explain spots and stripes on animals and the growth patterns of feathers and hair follicles. While it was thought that Turing’s pattern theory might help explain the patterns fairy circles formed, no one had accomplished it … until now.

“The data show that the unique gap pattern of the Australian fairy circles, which occur only in a small area east of the town of Newman, emerges from ecohydrological biomass-water feedbacks from the grasses. In fact, the fairy circles – with their large diameters of 4m, clay crusts from weathering and resultant water run-off – are a critical extra source of water for the dryland vegetation. Clumps of grasses increased shading and water infiltration around the nearby roots.”

An international research team led by Göttingen University scientists converged on Newman with a tool that had never been used to study these fairy circles before – one that Turing could only have imagined … drones. Using a drone equipped with a multispectral camera, the researchers mapped Triodia grasses over time in five one-hectare plots and classified them according to how well they grew. (Photos here.)

They found that the areas doing well did so by cooperating to ring a small section in order to capture and hold moisture that normally would have run off. The mounded circle of grass also provided shade for new seedlings. However, the best part was that the photos showed that the grasses knew exactly how big to build the circles for irrigation and growth efficiency, and all of them did it the same way.

Patterns like these

“The intriguing thing is that the grasses are actively engineering their own environment by forming symmetrically spaced gap patterns. The vegetation benefits from the additional runoff water provided by the large fairy circles, and so keeps the arid ecosystem functional even in very harsh, dry conditions.”

The circles of grass reacted with each other, just as Turing’s pattern theory had predicted. No fairies, gods, spirits, dragons or any other mythical beings formerly used to explain the fairy circles were needed – just the mathematical mind of Alan Turing.

Still think math is hard? Turing had an answer for that too.

“Those who can imagine anything, can create the impossible.”
― Alan Turing

This week I have a new book out from Red Wheel/Weiser’s New Page Books. Its title: The Martians: Evidence of Life on the Red Planet. The story dates back into the distant past and right up until the present day. And, it’s a highly controversial story, too. For example, the book addresses such issues as the “Face on Mars,” unusual pyramid-like structures on the planet, additional so-called faces, and even what appear to be strange creatures on the surface of Mars. On top of that there are certain, curious monoliths – on Mars and on one of its moons: Phobos. And what about the CIA’s secret remote-viewing of Mars back in 1984? The most important aspect of the latter issue is not just what the CIA found, but why the agency felt there was such a pressing need to uncover the secrets of the Red Planet. Add to the planet’s “Banyan Trees,” and Mars’ own equivalent of Stonehenge (“Marshenge,” of course!), and you begin to see how incredibly weird Mars really is. What about the sensational possibility that an advanced Martian civilization might still exist – albeit in a very precarious situation? All of these questions and issues are guaranteed to provoke debate – and a great deal of controversy.

Many will tell you that Mars is an utterly dead world. No animal life, no plant life. Nothing. That is not the case, though. As I demonstrate, Mars is absolutely teeming with life; both flora and fauna, no less. Some of that life is highly advanced and incredibly old. There’s no denying that the planet guards its incredible and disturbing secrets both diligently and carefully. It has done so for a long time; an amazingly long time. None of that, however, has stopped us from uncovering a wealth of what can only be described as “anomalies” on Mars. The Martians: Evidence of Life on the Red Planet is an in-depth study of the theory that Mars was once a world which teemed with life. Perhaps, even, life that is not at all too dissimilar to ours. Incredibly, the Martians may still be there. Alive. Hiding deep below the surface of a ruined world.

There can be absolutely no doubt whatsoever that it was the discovery of the “Face on Mars” back in the 1970s that energized the interest and controversy that surrounded (and that still continues to surround) the possibility that Mars may once have been a world not too dissimilar to ours – even a world inhabited by beings who resembled us to a staggering degree. Some would put all of that down to nothing stranger than pareidolia. I don’t. Although I don’t see NASA engaged in a huge cover-up of the Martian structures, what I do see is a mistake on its part. That mistake has been to ignore and summarily dismiss the many undeniable oddities away as the results of nothing but pareidolia. The purpose behind all of this lack of interest or involvement by the space agency? Probably NASA’s fear of its reputation being besmirched, and the risk of its staff presented by an over-sensational media as “alien hunters.”

Mars’ “Banyan Trees”

(NASA)

I should stress that while I don’t think NASA is sitting on some sensational secrets on Mars, that certainly cannot be the same for a number of other agencies. I mentioned the CIA earlier. They were not alone, however. During the course of my investigations I found evidence showing that other agencies and shadowy departments have certainly taken a very deep interest in what might have occurred on Mars – and what might still be going on there. Moving on: when it comes to the scientific community, it is almost exclusively unwilling to address the mysteries of Mars in a fashion that just might have a potentially adverse bearing on their lofty, much-cherished reputations. Some, I suspect, are fearful of what they might find if they dare to go looking too closely: what we might call a skewed case of deliberate self-censorship. As a species, we are woefully unaware, and largely ignorant, of a series of incredibly ancient events that revolved around a nightmarish, irreversibly-collapsing Mars. And, of death on an almost incomprehensible scale for the Martians, most of them killed before they could flee their world for ours. But, not all of them. When? Without doubt millennia ago – probably even way back further than that. The secrets of Mars are about to be revealed…

“Marshenge”

(NASA)

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Just recently, experts have revealed their findings of phosphine in the upper atmosphere of Venus. And scientists are baffled as they can’t figure out how the chemical could appear in Venus without the help of living organisms. This may be the best sign yet of life on Venus. There are, however, several other places that may contain life, so let’s take a look at four of the most favorable locations in our Solar System that are the best candidates for supporting alien life.

1. Mars

In addition to Venus, Mars is also an excellent candidate for alien life. It’s actually very similar to Earth as it has 24.5 hour days, polar ice caps, and even a lake underneath a polar ice cap in the southern part of the planet as well as methane in the atmosphere. While the Red Planet is now dry and full of cosmic radiation, back around 3.7 billion years ago, it had an atmosphere that supported large amounts of liquid water and maybe even life that perhaps still exists today.

2. Enceladus

Two of Saturn’s moons have been listed as being promising places for alien life. The first one is Enceladus which is covered with ice and has a subsurface ocean of liquid water as well as over a hundred gigantic geysers located close to the south pole. Scientists found that the small grains of rocky silicate particles that spray out of the geysers could have only come from water touching the ocean floor at 90 degree Celsius temperatures (194 degrees Fahrenheit). Additionally, it has been reported that fresh ice has resurfaced the northern hemisphere, indicating recent geologic activity.

3. Titan

Saturn’s largest moon is another location that’s favorable to host alien life. It is the only moon in our Solar System that has a dense mostly-nitrogen atmosphere along with an orange haze and seasons where it rains. According to a map that NASA released last year of the moon, there are dunes, plains, large methane lakes, hummocky terrain (small mountains), labyrinth terrain, and craters. And since experts are currently working on a concept where a submarine may eventually be sent to Titan, we may finally get an answer to the question of whether there is life on Saturn’s largest moon.

4. Europa

Jupiter’s moon Europa is thought to be geologically active with possible liquid water hiding underneath the frozen surface. In fact, it is believed that there is so much water that it could be more than 100 kilometers deep (62 miles) and the reason why it is there is because the heat from the tidal flexing of the moon keeps it from freezing. Since the moon has geysers, tumultuous terrain, and a weak magnetic field, it is believed that those are caused by a subsurface liquid ocean. And NASA reported that they found evidence of sodium chloride on the surface of the moon which suggests that the subsurface liquid water on Europa would be very similar to the oceans here on Earth.

These are just four locations, but there are many other spots in our Solar System and beyond that may very well have alien life. We’ll just have to wait and see what scientists may uncover.