Today’s article is focused on two things that most people probably wouldn’t think have a connection to each other: (a) Crop Circles; and (b) “missing time” (similar to the type that occurs in the “alien abduction” phenomenon). Very early on in his Crop Circle research, Matthew Williams (both a creator and a researcher of Crop Circles) came to realize something deeply strange and highly intriguing. Namely, that many people who make the formations experiencing unusual phenomena in the fields – and on numerous occasions in the formations of their very own making. For example, Matt has experienced (as have a number of other, well-known Circle-makers, more than a few of who are reluctant to speak on the record) a wealth of weird phenomena in Crop Circles that he himself created. That included seeing small, aerial balls of light zipping around, detecting unexplained animal-like presences, and even experiencing significant periods of missing time. Matt explained to me what he believes lies at the heart of all this. It involves, he concludes, a belief system suggesting that crop circles are somewhat akin to 21^st Century versions of Stonehenge or the Avebury Stones. They are rather like modern-day – but highly alternative – temples that, via ritual magic, can be instilled with extraordinary properties that, in turn, lead to the sometimes unusual effects experienced within such formations.This brings me to a fascinating story of missing time in a Crop Circle.

This incident I’m about to share with you occurred in 1989 and involved a man named Paul Farrant and a Woman in Black. Paul is someone who I met in the U.K. back in the summer of 1997. At the time, Paul spent ten days checking out the Crop Circles that had appeared during that summer in the county of Wiltshire, England – which is where most of the formations are made on a yearly basis. I was there for two weeks, with Irene Bott of the Staffordshire UFO Group, and gave a few lectures in the area at the same time, which is how I got to know Paul. He had a story to tell that involved missing time, but not at all of the type associated with alien abductions. Paul told me that he had been walking around one of the formations just as the sun was starting to rise when a woman appeared – seemingly out of nowhere. She was dressed in a long black cape that had a black hood. Paul said her skin was extremely pale and her face was very thin. She engaged him in what seemed to be a very short conversation about time travel and then, oddly, warning him not to dig too deep into the subject. So, why did she bring up the matter in the first place? I have no idea. Neither did Paul.

The Woman in Black then turned away and exited the huge and intricate formation. For reasons that he was unable to understand, Paul felt both nauseous and frightened. Here’s the strangest part of the story: Paul found himself quite confused, due to the fact that although it seemed to have been a brief encounter, when he checked he realized there was far more to it. According to his watch, close to three-quarters-of-an-hour were missing from Paul’s memory. And, although the woman had something to say to Paul of a warning nature, he couldn’t remember exactly what he said in response to her. It puzzled, and worried, him for weeks. One final thing: not only had Paul lost around forty-five minutes of his life, but his watch had gone forward three hours. There’s no doubt this is a very strange story, but it demonstrates that when one is in Crop Circles, time-based anomalies are not unknown. Paul’s case is a perfect, but mystifying, example.

Modern analysis of an ancient painting found on the walls of an Egyptian prince’s tomb has revealed very interesting and surprising results. The artwork, which was discovered back in 1871 at an Egyptian archaeological site called Meidum, depicted a never-before-seen species of goose.

New analysis was conducted last year by Anthony Romilio from the University of Queensland in Australia who studied in greater detail the six birds that were depicted in a 4,600-year-old painting known as the “Meidum Geese” that was found in the burial chambers of Prince Nefermaat I and his wife Itet (the painting is now in the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo). It has been described by historians as being “one of the great masterpieces of the Egyptian animal genre.” And it wasn’t just geese that were represented in the paintings inside of the tomb as dogs, leopards, cattle, and white antelope (called addax) were also depicted in great detail.

The geese, however, were incredibly unique as two of them belonged to a completely unknown species. “Artistic licence could account for the differences with modern geese, but artworks from this site have extremely realistic depictions of other birds and mammals,” Romilio explained.

White-fronted goose

It is believed that two of the three birds that were looking towards the left were white-fronted geese (also called Anser albifrons). These birds are medium-sized and are still present in the Northern Hemisphere and North America. The first and last birds could have either been greylag geese or bean geese.

As for the two birds facing to the right, they looked similar to red-breasted geese (Branta ruficollis) that live in the western part of Europe; however, there is doubt as that species has never been found in Egypt. With so much uncertainty surrounding that species, Romilio compared thirteen visible characteristics from the pictures of the two right-facing birds in the painting to the red-breasted goose species. “

Red-breasted goose

His analysis revealed that there were too many differences so the birds in the painting couldn’t have been red-breasted geese. “This is a highly effective method in identifying species – using quantitative measurements of key bird features – and greatly strengthens the value of the information to zoological and ecological science,” he noted.

So, what species of bird was it? Based on their extended flank plumes, they would have stood out compared to other geese – a feature that hasn’t been identified in modern species, indicating that it is probably extinct. “From a zoological perspective, the Egyptian artwork is the only documentation of this distinctively patterned goose, which appears now to be globally extinct,” Romilio stated. The reasoning behind that specific species going extinct is currently unknown. (Pictures of the painting can be seen here.)

(Romilio, J of Arch Sci: Reports, 2021)

The research was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports where it can be read in full.

According to new research, there is finally solid proof that an asteroid did in fact kill the dinosaurs around 66 million years ago. While the most talked about theory was that an asteroid killed them, there have been other hypotheses such as volcanic eruptions or other global catastrophes.

Back in the 1980s, researchers discovered asteroid dust in the geological layer from the time of the dinosaur extinction. Then in the 1990s, experts confirmed that the Chicxulub impact crater was the same age as the geological rock layer. And now, it has been confirmed that asteroid dust has been found inside of the impact crater. “The circle is now finally complete,” stated Steven Goderis, who is a geochemistry professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and who led the study.

Researchers involved with the International Ocean Discovery Program mission took almost 3,000 feet of rock core samples from the impact crater that was buried beneath the seafloor. (A picture of a piece of the rock core can be seen here.)

The crater left by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs is located in the Yucatán Peninsula and is called Chicxulub after a nearby town. Part of the crater is offshore and part of it is on land. The crater is buried beneath many layers of rock and sediment. A 2016 mission led by the International Ocean Discovery Program extracted rock cores from the offshore portion of the crater.

Credit: The University of Texas at Austin/Jackson School of Geosciences/ Google Maps

Dust from the asteroid impact was blown into the atmosphere where it blocked out the sun and led to the extinction of 75% of life, including all non-avian dinosaurs.

Credit: Willgard Krause/ Pixabay

A section of rock core pulled from the crater left by the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. Researchers found high concentrations of theelement iridium –a marker for asteroid material –in the middle section of the core that contains a mixture of ash from the impact and ocean sediment deposited over decades. The iridium is measured in parts per billion.

Credit: International Ocean Discovery Program

They were able to confirm that the dust did come from an asteroid because it contained several elements associated with space rocks – specifically iridium which is found in some asteroids but uncommon in the crust of our planet. The largest amounts of iridium were discovered in a piece of the rock core that measured just 5 centimeters and was located at the top of the peak ring of the crater. The sediment layer found in the crater from the impact was so thick that the researchers were able to date it all the way back to two decades following the strike.

To make sure that they were correct in their study, additional analysis was conducted in several different labs around the world – Belgium, Austria, the United States, and Japan. Goderis reiterated this by stating, “We combined the results from four independent laboratories around the world to make sure we got this right.”

Immediately after the impact, dust would have flown into the atmosphere but researchers believe it only lasted for a couple of decades at the most, which is approximately how long it would have taken many of the species to completely die out.

Additional studies are being planned for the summer with the focus being in the center of the crater where experts are hoping to find additional materials from the asteroid.

The study was published in Science Advances where it can be read in full.

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The small town of Wytheville, Virginia, sits up against the Blue Ridge Mountains and is at first glance a peaceful, somewhat rural slice of small town America. Not much typically happens here, and it is mostly a quiet place with historical buildings and quaint streets. Yet back in 1987 this normally placid town would be beset with a series of strange sightings of things in the sky that have remained unexplained to this day, peppered with bizarre accounts, tales of cover-ups, and very sinister goings on.

It all seems to have begun with a man named Danny Gordon, who at the time was a local radio reporter and news director for the station WYVE. On October 7, 1987, Wythe County Sheriff Wayne Pike called in his usual police report, but this time it was a bit more bizarre than usual, in that he told Gordon that four police officers had seen a UFO. At the time, Gordon thought it was a sort of tongue in cheek news story that he could share for laughs, so he reported it on the air as almost like a big joke, but it would soon turn out that this was very serious, indeed. As soon as the report went out, the station was deluged with people calling in the give their own UFO reports from the area, which shocked Gordon because it had been merely meant to be a sort of light, throwaway report. He would later say of his astonishment:

It was a filler piece that came on at the end of the news which I usually relegate to something that’s may be unusual, like we had one police officer who killed five chickens at once with two shots, and that was a story that ran as kind of a ‘ha ha’ piece, and this was another ‘ha ha’ piece and being a very skeptical newsman, it was definitely not in my lead part of my news.

Wytheville, Virginia

Despite the phones ringing off the hook and people talking about alien spaceships, Gordon was skeptical. For one, the descriptions of the objects people were seeing were varied, with some reporting an egg-shaped object, while others were saying it was cigar-shaped or more like a huge, cylindrical object. Gordon believed that people were probably just seeing things after his initial news report, or that they were misidentifying airplanes refueling or maybe an experimental aircraft, but his calls to the nearby air base showed that nothing of that sort was going on in the area at the time. In the meantime, over the following days the reports continued to flood in, and one reporter Paul Dellinger, with The Roanoke Times, would say, “All of a sudden, everybody started seeing things.”

Gordon was still skeptical, thinking there must be some rational explanation for this wave of sightings, so out of curiosity he decided to go check things out for himself. On October 21, Danny and a friend, Roger Hall, went out to the area where most of the reports were originating from, in the southern part of Wythe County, to see if they could see a UFO themselves, bringing along a 35-millimeter still camera and a video camera for good measure. At first it was a bust, they saw nothing, but as they were leaving they noticed an anomalous light in the sky, which caused them to stop the car and get out. When the object approached them, they could see it was some sort of dome-shaped craft with a flashing light on top, and the right side of the object adorned with multi-colored strobing lights. As they stared in disbelief trying to figure out what it was, a smaller red light apparently approached it to merge with the domed object as if docking, before the whole of it flew off to leave the two witnesses spellbound. Gordon would say of what they saw:

We were headed home, after two hours of fruitless searching… And I just happened to look to my left and saw a very unusual object coming across the horizon. I pulled off to the side of the road in a hurry, jumped out, he got out of the right side, and as he got out I noticed the craft coming at me was very large, it had a dome shape to the top of it, and no wings, and had what appeared to be a strobe putting out multi-colored lights on the right side of the craft. As I watched the sky, from the left came the red ball. As the big mothership went into a small skiff of clouds, the red ball docked with the craft. We looked at each other and realized, no pictures. The camera was not in my hand, the camera was not in his hand, and we both knew we blew it.

Frustrated that they had dropped the ball on taking any photographic evidence, the two ventured out to the same spot the following evening, this time mentally prepared to take photos. Much to their astonishment, they were able to witness the UFO once again, this time taking a series of photographs, and that evening Gordon would claim that he had received a call from an anonymous man who told him that the federal government was interested in the UFO flap, and warned him not to report on what he had seen as it was a matter of national security. Gordon would receive several more calls along these lines that night, with his wife becoming increasingly worried. Despite these menacing calls, the next day Gordon excitedly held a press conference that propelled the story into national news, but things would get very intense from there, as that very evening he would return to find his home ransacked. It would appear that nothing had been stolen, leading Gordon to believe that someone had been looking for the photos he had taken.

Danny Gordon

Even in the face of these ominous new developments, Gordon continued his crusade to get to the bottom of what was going on, and reports continued to come in from all over the area unabated. Some witnesses reported seeing something that looked like “a spinning carousel,” another said they had sighted what appeared to be “a cross between a helicopter and an airplane,” and many others. Gordon would also get a chance to photograph the objects again, when he and his wife and daughter all saw a huge object that broke into four smaller objects above the parking lot of a mall, a sighting which was made by over 100 other witnesses at the scene, including a whole school bus full of children. Once again, Gordon was able to take some photographs before the objects sped off into the night. The reports continued on well into 1988, by which time there had been at least 3,000 confirmed sightings of the UFOs, from people of all walks of life including numerous police officers, pilots, and others. Gordon followed it all with great interest, personally collecting many of the reports himself, but things were about to get even weirder.

On March 19, 1988, Gordon had been invited to a broadcasters’ conference in Virginia Beach in order to discuss the amazing photographs he had taken of the mysterious objects. Up until then, the menacing anonymous phone calls had ceased, and he was daring to think that whoever had been threatening him had perhaps backed off and resigned themselves to the fact that the story had been blown wide open. He was wrong. That evening as he packed for his trip the phone rang, and on the other end was a man claiming to be a retired military intelligence officer, who had a rather ominous message for Gordon. He would say of the mysterious call:

I received a phone call at home from a retired military intelligence officer, and first he told me to make sure that I taped the conversation so he could put the date, and everyone to be aware, and I said, why do you want to tape this? And he said, I want your friends to know, that if something happens to you, that I forewarned you. He told me that because of his investigations into the UFO field that they had hit his son and caused his son to die with some kind of virus connected to leukemia. He said that he had information that the federal government was not very happy with my UFO investigations. He said, ‘they want to quiet you…’

Unsettling indeed, and it would only get stranger. Possibly unconnected but still rather odd is the fact that during that same period while Gordon was in Virginia Beach the area was gripped by an epidemic of hepatitis. Coincidence or not? Then, one month later, two men arrived at Gordon’s home, well-dressed and identifying themselves as newspaper reporters who wanted to interview him for an article. At first Gordon believed them, allowing them inside, but somewhat suspicious when one of the reporters wandered around the house taking photos as the other questioned him about the strange events in town and his photographs. It sent up a red flag for Gordon, so when they were gone he called the newspaper they claimed to have been from to ask about it, but the paper denied having any knowledge of the article in question or the two men who had gone to his house. Curious. Even more curious was that the following month when he was looking through the photos he had taken he noticed that four of the original negatives were mysteriously missing. Why those four? No one knows, and Gordon has said of it:

When I got to the canister which had the UFO negatives, I quickly opened it up and found some UFO negatives, but the one negative with the shots from the shopping mall was missing. Now I felt like maybe there was something in those photographs that I was not seeing, so I took the photographs to some other people to look at. We used magnifying glasses and we measured angles trying to find out why these photographs were so important. And we’ve yet to discover why anyone would want to steal that… a set of four in a series of photographs of the UFOs.

One of Gordon’s photographs

Less than a month after this, the stress this was putting Gordon through took its toll, and he collapsed from a heart attack. Although he survived, he decided that it was in both his and his family’s best interests to back off from the story. There had been too many spooky calls, intruders in his house, and that sense of constant foreboding in the background, that he was being watched all the time, and so he dropped his pursuit of the sightings and indeed UFOs in general, warning others who would do the same, “Don’t look up. Because once you look up and you tell somebody what you saw, your life is changed forever.” Danny Gordon’s story and the mass wave of sightings in Wytheville in 1987 and 1988 have been made into the book Don’t Look Up: The Real Story Behind the Virginia UFO Sightings and feature in the documentary Strange Country: A Different Kind of UFO Documentary, directed by Sean Kotz and Chris Valluzzo. Co-director and producer of the doc, Valluzzo, has said of the his film and the remarkable case it covers:

Most of the time, UFO documentaries focus on the most outlandish aspects and are often marked by wild speculations or unfounded assumptions. Instead, we are interested in the human story which is typically forgotten in these cases. What happened to the town and in particular, Danny Gordon, whose life was turned upside down by the ensuing attention and excitement? It is a compelling case because there were hundreds, if not thousands, of individual witnesses and a variety of craft over the course of several months. The witnesses were reliable people. In fact, the National Enquirer sent a reporter who decided not to run a story because the people were just not weird enough!

The UFO wave came and went, it has largely been swept under the carpet, Gordon kept his head low to hide from the perceived parties stalking him, and we are left to wonder what was going on here. What were all of these people seeing during that time period? Was this aliens, atmospheric phenomena, experimental aircraft, or what? Who were the creepy people threatening Gordon, what did they know, and what did they really want? It is all quite the intriguing sequence of events, and whether we ever get answers or not, it certainly ranks high among some of the more compelling mass UFO sightings out there.

The recent report that two American Airlines pilots described to air traffic control a cylindrical unidentified object fly over their plane while crossing New Mexico is getting updated as fast as the UFO was apparently flying. Just days after the incident hit the media and went viral, American Airlines confirmed that the report had indeed been made by the pilots. Not long after that, the Federal Aviation Administration issued its own statement. Is this the Tic Tac of 2021?

“Do you have any targets up here? We just had something go right over the top of us – I hate to say this but it looked like a long cylindrical object that almost looked like a cruise missile type of thing – moving really fast right over the top of us.”

Tomahawk submarine-launched cruise missile

That’s a transcript from the recording of the pilots on February 21 as American Airlines Flight 2292 flew at 36,000 feet over northeastern New Mexico. It had been recorded by Steve Douglass, a photographer for Amarillo television station KVII whose hobby is listening to air traffic control conversations. Douglass posted the recording on his blog, Deep Black Horizon, and commented that the reply from the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center was garbled by conversations from other planes. The story was picked up by the Albuquerque Journal, other local and national mainstream media providers, and the military investigative website The Drive/War Zone.

The Albuquerque Journal reached out to American Airlines for a statement and received this email and followup:

“Following a debrief with our Flight Crew and additional information received, we can confirm this radio transmission was from American Airlines Flight 2292 on Feb. 21.”

“The FBI is aware of the reported incident. While our policy is to neither confirm nor deny investigations, the FBI works continuously with our federal, state, local and tribal partners to share intelligence and protect the public.”

A request to White Sands Missile Range was unanswered, but Lally Laksbergs, a spokesperson for Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque said they heard nothing.

“We have no knowledge of this. We’re not aware of anything.”

The Journal article did not say if the FBI was contacted. The Drive contacted the FAA and received this statement:

“A pilot reported seeing an object over New Mexico shortly after noon local time on Sunday, Feb. 21, 2021. FAA air traffic controllers did not see any object in the area on their radarscopes.”

That non-response is typical, so The Drive’s Tyler Rogoway says he “executed a full FOIA request on this case with the FAA” for basic radio recordings between the AAL 2292 and Albuquerque Center (air traffic control). Rogoway also investigated a report that a Lear jet had been in the vicinity of AAL 2292 at about the time of the incident, and found the “timing was off” and the pilots would not have made such a puzzled report to the tower. He seems to be leaning towards “misidentification” but is waiting/hoping for more from the FAA.

Learjet

Will this be the Tic Tac UFO of 2021? It has been picked up across the mainstream media spectrum and made it to the late night talk show monologues. While there’s no video or air traffic control radar recording, that could change if they exist and enough pressure is put on the FAA, as seen after The New York Times picked up the Tic Tac/Nimitz UFO incident.

This long, cylindrical UFO won’t be going away anytime soon.

Well, that didn’t take long. NASA’s Perseverance rover has been on Mars for about a week and its panoramic camera is already picking up strange, unidentified objects among its surroundings in the Jezero Crater. While some may have logical explanations, that hasn’t stopped folks from seeing flying saucer parts, skulls and other odd pareidolia-generated objects … or are they?

Credit: NASA

This first photo, as is the case with many photos taken by various rovers and satellites, lacks anything identifiable that could lend perspective and size to the image. That frees the imagination to, as some commenters suggest, see these objects as ants, perhaps giant alien ants. After all, that does seem to be a hill in the background. However, most agree that these are just rocks – although it seems a bit sacrilegious to refer to Martian rocks as “just rocks.”

Credit: NASA

The next photo needs less imagination but more pareidolia-tion (new word coined just for you, Perseverance). With just a little magnification, this odd-shaped object has most observers thinking “skull.” Human? Who knows, although the wide-open mouth looks alien or at least Edvard Munch-ish. (Can Perseverance zoom in to see if there’s a Screamish “Could only have been painted by a madman!” message nearby?) Or is this a miniature recreation of the famous “Face on Mars” which dates back to the Viking missions and has lost its luster — not to mention eyes, nose and mouth — as better satellites zoomed in on this Martian hill?

Credit: NASA

The best and most fun image from this first batch has to be the shiny objects on a hill. Once it was determined that they’re not debris from the rest of the mission – both the sky crane and the part with the heat shield crashed much farther away – the pareidoliacs (another new word – thanks, Perseverance!) decided this is definitely pieces of a metallic spacecraft, either belonging to aliens or long-ago (or perhaps secret) human missions to the Red Planet. As this video shows (watch it here), zooming doesn’t help (anyone working from home and attending virtual meetings could tell you that).

The good news is that the objects have not yet been identified so they’re still open for pareidoliussions and pareidoliarguments (OK, those might be a bit a stretch, Perseverance). The better news is that more are coming as Perseverance flexes its wheels and later launches its helicopter. That could be Perseverance’s greatest gift to homebound pareidoliacs tired of seeing pictures of famous people in their burnt toast (get a new toaster already!).

Thanks, Perseverance!