The pandemic shutdown has taught us that it’s difficult to stay inside one’s home for an extended period with one’s immediate family. It was more difficult for those living with extended family and/or friends. Now, think of how challenging, frustrating and even murder-enticing it might be to have to live with people of other species – and the offspring of mixed-species marriages. That’s the new story of the famous Denisova cave in southern Siberia, where researchers previously discovered a new archaic hominin species, the Denisovans, living with another archaic hominin species, the Neanderthals, and now have found both shared the cave with a third hominin species – humans. All at the same time! How did they get along? Was the evidence discovered an archaic boxing ring?

“Denisova Cave in southern Siberia is the type locality of the Denisovans, an archaic hominin group who were related to Neanderthals. The dozen hominin remains recovered from the deposits also include Neanderthals, and the child of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan, which suggests that Denisova Cave was a contact zone between these archaic hominins.”

You can stay but you have to contribute.

The determination that Denisovans and Neanderthals occupied the Denisova cave at the same time came from the discovery of just eight fossils – including a Denisovan pinkie, three bones from Neanderthals and one from a child with one Neanderthal and one Denisovan parent. That’s the frustratingly tiny total after archeologists have combed through piles of animal bones and fossils mixed with stone tools and artifacts. As Science Magazine explains, researchers like Elena Zavala, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, turned to analyzing the layers of sediment in the three-chamber cave and looking for DNA. What they found, as explained in a new study in the journal Nature co-authored by Zavala, has added crucial data to the history of humans.

“We detect a turnover in the mtDNA of Denisovans that coincides with changes in the composition of faunal mtDNA, and evidence that Denisovans and Neanderthals occupied the site repeatedly—possibly until, or after, the onset of the Initial Upper Palaeolithic at least 45,000 years ago, when modern human mtDNA is first recorded in the sediments.”

After 2 years of analyzing 728 sediment samples dating to the Pleistocene epoch, they found ancient hominin mitochondrial DNA in 175 of them. Human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is the DNA located in cellular organelles that convert chemical energy from food into a form that cells can use. It’s part of the human genome and recognized by anthropologists as the next best thing to bone samples, and in this case the mtDNA samples far exceed the fossilized bone fragments found.

Yes, this discovery affects human history in a big way. It confirms that a first group of Denisovans occupied the cave about 300,000 to 130,000 years ago. A second came in about 30,000 years later. Neanderthals moved in around 170,000 years ago – again with different groups occupying and leaving the cave. What the newly discovered mtDNA shows is modern humans living there about 45,000 years ago and the soil layer from that period contains DNA from all three human groups. Katerina Douka, an archaeological scientist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History who was not involved with the research, puts it best:

“I cannot think of another site where three human species lived through time.”

Not only that, the existence of Denisovans was not known until 2010! The ability to identify mtDNA is the game-changer. The study concludes with that acknowledgement.

“High-resolution profiling of sediment DNA can therefore provide an effective means of filling gaps in our knowledge of human evolutionary history and palaeoecology, independent of the discovery of skeletal remains.”

It doesn’t matter what species you are.

Does this change our history? Of course not – our history already happened and there’s nothing we can do to change it. (Keep that in mind during your next political discussion.) All we can do is acknowledge that our records of it have huge gaps of reliable data and we must continue our search for more. Our history books should be looked at as constantly-updated, ever-growing chronicles, not stone tablets.

How long before our ancestry DNA tests go back to the Denisovan cave? It may be sooner than you think.

There are many strange tales that have made the rounds among UFO lore. Some are credible and have good evidence to support them, others are more nebulous, and others still lie somewhere in between. Back when the found footage style of filmmaking was pretty much non-existent,  a curious video began to make the rounds, which would launch itself into the lore of UFOs and would manage to remain held up as real even as those who made it actively tried to debunk it.

Back in 1989 a rather unique VHS video began making the rounds. Called simply UFO Abduction, it was presented as a home video taken at the home of the McPherson family, who were celebrating the 5^th birthday of their young daughter Michelle at their remote country house in the mountains of Northwoods, Connecticut, in the United States. The video, which is stated to have been taken on the evening of October 8, 1983, and was filmed by Michelle’s uncle, starts out normally, and just shows a mundane, very normal birthday party, with banter and bickering among the family members. It is actually almost rather boring until things start to get strange when the power suddenly cuts out. After a brief bit of panic and chatter, the men go out to check the breaker and it is then that they see a UFO sitting out in the field, complete with grey-type aliens milling about it. The camera goes shaky as the one filming tries to fight off his panic while filming, and when the aliens turn to them, they run inside and tell everyone what has happened in a chaotic exchange of panic and fear.

Once indoors they lock the door and things get intense very quickly. There can be heard movement outside, and what sounds like someone walking up on the roof, causing the men to grab shotguns to protect themselves. At one point one of them fires upon one of the aliens through the roof and they can hear it fall off to the ground below. One of the men dares to go outside to retrieve the body, despite the pleading from his family to not go outside, and he then puts the body into another room, from which it is later found to have disappeared. The rest of the film then follows the family trying to get through the alien siege upon their home, and the video ends with the rather ominous shot of the videographer, Michael, putting down the camera, which is still running, in the corner of the room, after which three aliens can be seen to stealthily file into the room. As the picture begins to shake with static and interference, one of the aliens turns to look right at the camera. Cut to black. After this there are no credits, just a title card that says the family all vanished without a trace and contains a number to call if anyone has any information on the family’s whereabouts.

At the time this undoubtedly creepy video made the rounds, found footage films weren’t really a thing. This was a full decade before the Blair Witch Project, so to people seeing it for the first time it was all very convincing. The natural unscripted banter between the family members, amateurish framing, overlapping voices, the shaky camera, the low lighting and genuine sense of palpable fear and utter confusion when the alien menace makes itself known, the number for people to call at the end, and the fact that the 60-minute film is largely shot in one take, all had not been done in film before, and served to be extremely realistic and give the impression that this was an actual video. There is even a title card in the beginning of the film announcing that the footage is authentic, and at no point is there any disclaimer that what is being seen is fiction. Considering that found footage films were not a thing at the time, the film had not been officially distributed on a wide scale, showing up mostly as bootlegs, and the sheer, uncompromising realism of the footage, people had no reason to not believe it was a real home video, and so soon what was being called “The McPherson Tape” was soon making the rounds within the UFO community as an actual film of a family being abducted by aliens. Many were convinced of the tape’s authenticity, with much discussion and debate devoted to picking apart the movie frame by frame looking for clues.

The film would even show up on an episode of the paranormal TV show Encounters, during which various experts came forward to vouch for the credibility of the film, including an Air Force Colonel who was convinced it was not faked. In reality, the film was a no-budget project put together by director and film school dropout Dean Alioto, after having read Whitley Strieber’s book Communion. He had scrounged together $6,500 to make it, and says of this:

All my favorite directors had made their debuts by that age and I didn’t want to be left behind. By that point, I had dropped out of film school and was just eager to make films. I made a producer who said he wanted to invest $6,500 and I kind of laughed it off and said the only thing I could do for that money is a home video. At the time I had been reading this memoir called Communion by Whitley Strieber, who described his own abduction by aliens. So, I decided to take the abduction storyline and embed it into a home video. I wrote out a 10-page beat sheet with the description of every scene. Everything outside of that was improvised. I gave the actors short backstories, but they filled in the blanks themselves. I thought I could just cue people by screaming ‘Oh my God, what is that?’ and pan the camera over and everyone would know to go to the next scene.

A still from the footage

Alioto then basically got a bunch of friends together to act in his movie, with even himself playing a role, and with children playing the aliens. Ironically, it was this shoestring budget that contributes to the convincingly realistic feel of the film, with the shifty dark lighting and shaky camera lending it a certain macabre credibility. Other factors also helped to launch the video into talk of being real. Shortly after the film was completed, the warehouse holding all of the copies had a fire, destroying almost all of them, as well as the master print, to ensure that the video only got a very limited release, mostly just a handful of advance copies sent out to a few mom-and-pop video shops, and largely appearing as bootleg copies. On top of this, the video contains absolutely no credits, meaning that no one linked it to Alioto. All of this made sure that the McPherson Tape was achieving a status akin to the The War of the Worlds  broadcast, being taken as real, and Alioto was doing nothing to stop it. Indeed, he had no idea that rumors about his film were flying, and was just as surprised as anyone else when he learned that it was being taken as real within the UFO field. He would say of this:

I got a phone call for a guy saying that he just found this footage. I kid you not, he actually said that. Then he says that my name came up and describes the movie. I tell him that I didn’t find the movie, I made it. He tells me that he saw it at the International UFO Congress Convention, which is the biggest UFO convention in the world, and that the movie was presented with no credits. It gets better. The guy that told me all this then said that there are some TV shows that want to do a story on the movie, including Unsolved Mysteries, Hard Copy, and a FOX show called Encounters. I told him the first one was out because this mystery was pretty much solved. But we went with Encounters and they did this seven-minute segment that they did on ‘The world’s greatest UFO hoax’ for their program in the early ‘90s. I went on national TV and debunked my own movie.

He would essentially appear on Encounters again to debunk the original segment they did saying it was all real, and it is all rather bizarre. After his appearance on the show, he became an overnight celebrity, being given a larger budget to remake the original as a 1998 made-for-TV movie titled Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County, which changes names and location, as well as certain beats and adds a lot of new elements such as alien ray guns and cattle mutilation, and which is additionally often mistaken with the original. Unbelievably, all of this only served to make the original more popular and mysterious, and for conspiracy theorists to double down on their belief that the McPherson Tape was actually real. For instance, it was pointed out that the aliens shown are too thin and willowy even for children, and that the actors’ reactions are too authentic to be faked. Not only were people insisting it was real, but that Alioto was being used as a puppet to discredit it. Alioto would say of this:

Things got blown out of proportion. News channels did exposés on the movie, and people started believing that the original VHS footage was real, and that the government had hired me to make the TV remake as part of a disinformation campaign to discredit the original.

Indeed, Alioto has spent much of his time raiding forums on the film that are still debating the footage to this day, in order to debunk his own film, mostly in vain. Indeed, to this day there is a large number of people who are convinced that the McPherson footage is real, and that Ariolo’s debunking is part of a misinformation campaign to cover it all up. Whether real or not, the film has become a sort of cultural phenomenon within the field of Ufology, only furthered when the remake’s Blu-ray released in 2019 lined up with famous alleged Area 51 insider Bob Lazar’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. Unfortunately, the original film has no surviving master copy, is extremely hard to find, and has been over the years tinkered with and interspersed with CGI clips. It has all gone on to take a life of its own, and it is at the very least the earliest found footage film to be taken as possibly real, cementing its place within the realm of weird stories within the UFO field.

A melting glacier in Tibet has revealed over two dozen previously unknown viruses. The researchers found the viruses in 15,000-year-old ice from the Guliya ice cap of the Tibetan Plateau. They found a total of 33 viruses with 28 of them being completely new to science.

Zhi-Ping Zhong, who is a microbiologist from Ohio State University, went into further details, “These glaciers were formed gradually, and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice.” The same microbes could have possibly been in the atmosphere during that time. “Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future.”

The viruses incredibly would have been thriving in that type of environment with “signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments – just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions,” as explained by Matthew Sullivan who is a microbiologist at Ohio State University.

The researchers then found that the most common viruses found in the ice were bacteriophages that infect Methylobacterium. They were closely related to viruses in Methylobacterium strains that have been found in soil and plants. In other words, the team thinks that the viruses originated in soil and plants.

There are still many questions that need to be answered, such as “How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?” asked Earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, adding, “We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there.”

The study was published in Microbiome.

In other ancient virus news, analysis of 31,600-year-old baby teeth has indicated that the common cold has been around much longer than modern humans. The three baby teeth were found at an archaeological site called Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS) in Siberia and belonged to two different children who lost them between the ages of 10 and 12.

The DNA analysis of the teeth suggests that human adenovirus C (or HAdV-C), which is a virus that causes a mild cold, could have possibly originated hundreds of thousands of years ago (viruses can enter teeth from the bloodstream). Specifically, they believe that the HAdV-C split from other adenoviruses at least 700,000 years ago. The team noticed that the genomes found in the ancient teeth were similar to adenoviruses that were around between the 1950s and 2010s. That is one long-lasting virus.

The study was published in bioRxiv.

A melting glacier in Tibet has revealed over two dozen previously unknown viruses. The researchers found the viruses in 15,000-year-old ice from the Guliya ice cap of the Tibetan Plateau. They found a total of 33 viruses with 28 of them being completely new to science.

Zhi-Ping Zhong, who is a microbiologist from Ohio State University, went into further details, “These glaciers were formed gradually, and along with dust and gases, many, many viruses were also deposited in that ice.” The same microbes could have possibly been in the atmosphere during that time. “Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes and viruses, but also release them to the environments in the future.”

The viruses incredibly would have been thriving in that type of environment with “signatures of genes that help them infect cells in cold environments – just surreal genetic signatures for how a virus is able to survive in extreme conditions,” as explained by Matthew Sullivan who is a microbiologist at Ohio State University.

The researchers then found that the most common viruses found in the ice were bacteriophages that infect Methylobacterium. They were closely related to viruses in Methylobacterium strains that have been found in soil and plants. In other words, the team thinks that the viruses originated in soil and plants.

There are still many questions that need to be answered, such as “How do bacteria and viruses respond to climate change? What happens when we go from an ice age to a warm period like we’re in now?” asked Earth scientist Lonnie Thompson, adding, “We know very little about viruses and microbes in these extreme environments, and what is actually there.”

The study was published in Microbiome.

In other ancient virus news, analysis of 31,600-year-old baby teeth has indicated that the common cold has been around much longer than modern humans. The three baby teeth were found at an archaeological site called Yana “Rhinoceros Horn Site” (RHS) in Siberia and belonged to two different children who lost them between the ages of 10 and 12.

The DNA analysis of the teeth suggests that human adenovirus C (or HAdV-C), which is a virus that causes a mild cold, could have possibly originated hundreds of thousands of years ago (viruses can enter teeth from the bloodstream). Specifically, they believe that the HAdV-C split from other adenoviruses at least 700,000 years ago. The team noticed that the genomes found in the ancient teeth were similar to adenoviruses that were around between the 1950s and 2010s. That is one long-lasting virus.

The study was published in bioRxiv.

Are extraterrestrials selective about who on Earth they choose to have sex with? Not the usual ‘probing’ so often reported by abductees but close encounters of the twosome, threesome or moresome kind … that may or may not result in human-alien hybrids? If you’re British and this is on your bucket list, you may be in luck. A new poll found that hundreds of UK residents claim to have had sex with space aliens and identify the places it’s most likely to happen. In Buckingham Palace? Top of the Tower of London? Smack in the middle of Stonehenge?

Did someone say threesome?

“We were astonished to see how many people claim to have had intimate relations with aliens, particularly in the cities of Norwich and Bristol. There must be something about those spots which makes these experiences more common than in the rest of the UK.”

The recent survey was conducted by BuzzBingo.com (a bingo gambling site) and spokesperson David Abrams admitted to The Daily Star that they were astounded by the results. Nearly 300 people responding to the survey claimed to have had intimate (and, we assume, consensual) relations with an extraterrestrial. Of those, over 25% were from Norwich, which in another Buzzbingo.com survey was named the UFO capital of the UK, with 31% of the people living there claiming to have seen a UFO. Second in the ET sex survey was Bristol at 23%, with Liverpool coming in third at 22%. What (if the respondees are serious) is attracting ETs to these UK cities like guys on expense accounts to a Vegas strip club? What is causing ETs to fly in just to do the Norwich One Night Stand or the Bristol Stomp?

“It’s instinctive to fear the unknown but why shouldn’t aliens be friendly?”

Esteemed British ufologist Nick Pope points out that aliens could be friendly. Perhaps they’ve prepared for their Earth trip by reading some other recent polls which found that Americans have no plans made in the event of an ET encounter (other than be armed) while Brits say they’ll stock up on essentials and welcome them with a pot of tea and a freshly-baked cake. When receiving such a warm, open-armed greeting, it’s no wonder aliens would respond in kind by showing Earthlings what the “extra” in extraterrestrial really means.

“Maybe they really are out there and this is their way of communicating.”

David Abrams of Buzzbingo.com seems to be imagining space aliens as some sort of creatures who speak with their bodies rather than their mouths or minds. While that sounds like a sailor’s dream (and we know how those encounters with sirens and mermaids turned out) or the plot of a porn movie (when porn movies had plots), he may be on to something. Should NASA set up a special investigative committee to research this possibility? Or maybe it should just send a delegation to Norwich and Bristol?

She’ll be waiting for them.

Speaking of the alien sex recipients, are they telling the truth? Did they really have sex with ETs or are their subconscious desires manifesting into lucid dreams of close encounters of the ET kind?

Finally, the real question is: What would YOU do if an ET propositioned you?

Excuse me while on I put the kettle on.

RELATED VIDEOS, selected and posted by peter2011

My previous article was on the subject of cattle mutilations in the United States – largely in the 1970s – and why they actually had nothing to do with aliens and UFOs. The fact is, though, that many people in the UFO field are absolutely sure the phenomenon is tied to extraterrestrials. As I noted, the entire scenario of tales of alien-driven mutilations was carefully and quietly created to investigate and hide something else: (a) levels of radiation getting into the U.S. food-chain; and (b) the existence of a secret program keeping careful watch on the whole situation. With that said, now let’s get to today’s article, as it has its connections to the previous one. It’s focused on mutilations of another kind. Namely, human mutilations. But, mutilations that – just like with the cattle controversy – were part of an ingenious, grisly, piece of camouflage. And, it all revolved around vampires. To be specific, one particular type of vampire: the ferocious and deadly Aswang. Here’s a bit of background on this monstrous thing. Culture Trip say: “According to Philippine folklore, an aswang is an evil, shapeshifting creature that shares the grotesque characteristics of werewolves, vampires and ghouls. It has no consistent image or description because its appearance varies per region. People have often characterised them based on hearsay, which is why the term aswang has commonly been used as a catch-all description for most evil creatures that lurk in the night.” Culture Trip add: “What can be agreed on is how they kill. During daylight hours aswangs go incognito, taking on a human form to blend in with regular townspeople – all the while consciously observing who to target next.

Beware of the Aswang

Now, let’s see what Cryptid Wiki states: “An Aswang is a cryptid in Filipino folklore. The aswang is an inherently evil werewolf and vampire-like creature and is the subject of a wide variety of myths and stories. Spanish colonists noted that the Aswang was the most feared among the mythical creatures of the Philippines, even in the 16^th century. The myth of the aswang is well known throughout the Philippines, except in the Ilocos region, which is the only region that does not have an equivalent myth. It is especially popular in the Western Visayan regions such as Capiz, Iloilo, Negros, Bohol, Masbate, Aklan, Antique. Other regional names for the aswang include ‘tik-tik’, ‘wak-wak’ and ‘soc-soc’, which is the noise it makes when chasing prey.” Whether you believe in the existence of the Aswang or not, the fact is that – in a very strange way – in the 1950s it certainly did exist And it all revolved around one Major General Edward G. Lansdale. Let’s learn a bit about him. As the U.S. Air Force shows us: “Major General Edward G. Lansdale was born in Detroit, Mich., in 1908, the second of the four sons of Sarah Frances Philips of California and Henry Lansdale of Virginia. After schooling in Michigan, New York and California, he attended the University of California at Los Angeles where he earned his way largely by writing for newspapers and magazines. He soon found his way into the better paying field of advertising in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Major General Edward Lansdale

“In World War II, he served with the Office of Strategic Services and later was commissioned as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army in 1943, serving in various military intelligence assignments throughout the war. After several wartime promotions, he was transferred to Headquarters Air Forces Western Pacific as a major in 1945, where he became chief of the Intelligence Division. He extended his tour to remain in the Philippines…During this period, he helped the Philippine Army rebuild its intelligence services, was responsible for the disposition of unresolved cases of large numbers of prisoners of war involving many nationalities, conducted numerous studies to assist the U.S. and Philippines Governments in learning the effects of World War II on the Philippines, and later served as public information officer…”

One of the first things that Lansdale noted when he got to the Philippines was that the rebels there were deathly afraid of the Aswangs and their nocturnal, blood-drinking rampages. So, Lansdale came up with a very strange brainwave. It was a brainwave kept secret for decades, until Lansdale, himself, finally went public, long after his prestigious military career was finally over. As the major general recalled: “To the superstitious, the Huk battleground was a haunted place filled with ghosts and eerie creatures. A combat psy-war squad was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of an Aswang living on the hill where the Huks were based. Two nights later, after giving the stories time to make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along the trail used by the Huks.” There was far more than that to the story, however.

That same psywar squad then did something that was very alternative, but that proved to be extremely effective. They silently grabbed one of the Hukbalahap rebels, snapped his neck, and then – using a specially created, metallic device – left two, deep, vicious-looking puncture marks on the neck of the man. But that was barely the start of things: they then quietly tied a rope around the man’s ankles, hung his body from a nearby tree, and let just about as much blood as possible drain out of the body. After several hours, the corpse was lowered to the ground and left close to the Hukbalahap camp, specifically to ensure it was found by his comrades. They did find it. The result, as Lansdale noted, was overwhelmingly positive, from the perspective of the Philippine government, at least. He said “When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the Aswang had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on that hill. When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.” This went on time after time.

This is a fascinating story: blood was drained from the bodies of the rebels who were targeted for death. The necks of the men were mutilated to make it look like they’d been attacked and killed by Aswangs. And, it was all achieved by the careful use of ancient folklore on the Philippines – and all at night. Now, consider the situation with cattle mutilations in the United States: cattle drained of blood. Usually late at night. And, the project worked for this reason: it required the manipulation of mysterious tales of supernatural beings. In one case, aliens. Aswangs in another. There’s no doubt there are parallels here. There were no Aswangs. And there were no aliens killing cows and sucking them dry. But, there was a need for certain people, at certain times, and under certain circumstances, to believe every bit of the cattle mutilation/UFO lore. That’s why, on so many occasions, mutilated cattle are left behind to be found on the ground: the cattle need to be seen to ensure the cattle mutilation/extraterrestrial legend continues on. Meanwhile, the real work – of trying to determine the extent to which the food-chain has been affected by God knows what – quietly goes on under a fabricated UFO banner.

One area of the greater UFO phenomenon that doesn’t seem to get as much attention as others is that of what are called USOs, which stands for “Unidentified Submersible Objects” or also “Unidentified Submarine Objects.” In such cases we have strange craft traveling beneath the waves through the water, and at other times seen to spectacularly enter the water or erupt from beneath, suggesting that these things are just as at home in the sea as they are in the skies above us. Here we will look at a collection of such exceptionally weird cases, pointing at an underseas dimension to the UFO phenomenon that has largely been ignored, but which has been gaining greater attention in recent years.

Our first odd report comes from 1947, off the coast of Malta. In June of that year, a fishing vessel was about 20 miles off the southern coast, engaged in the routine business of pulling in their nets. As the nets came up, one of the crew alerted the others to something strange bobbing about out on the water’s surface, which appeared to be what they described as a “black submarine” floating about in the waves. It was an unsettling enough sight that the crew finished hauling in their nets and went about starting up the engines to get out of there, and at that moment there was a bright flash of light from the anomalous black shape. This light was bright enough to illuminate the object and the surrounding vicinity, showing it to be smooth, black, and metallic, and there were also small figures now visible upon it, which seemed to be wearing some type of apparatus around their waists and were described as “little men.” As the frightened fishermen looked on, these diminutive figures, described as about the size of 10-year-old children, seemed to scramble into the craft, after which it began to glow so brightly that they could barely look directly at it. The object then quickly submerged and disappeared under the waves to not be seen again.

There are several similarly strange cases of UFOs entering or exiting the ocean from the 1970s. One of these comes from a reader submitted report to the site UFO Casebook, and apparently transpired in January of 1971 off the coast of Puerto Rico. The witness claimed that he frequently surfed, and that he and other surfers would often see strange things beneath the waves, glowing objects that would shoot about through the water at high speeds. One particularly interesting account would happen one morning, of which he says:

On one occasion, around 6.30. A.M. that is the best time to surf by the way, several silver-colored objects came out of the water about half a mile from where we were waiting to catch a wave. These objects were round and hovered in one position, then they took off straight up at a speed that I cannot explain, but they disappeared so fast it was incredible. About a half hour later, the objects came back, I think it was around 6 or 7 of them, and went into the ocean. We never reported it to anybody, we just thought it was a military practice or other things that we did not know about. This all happened in the year of 1971, January, I do not remember the exact date. I am only reporting this one event but we had many more sightings of this kind since we surfed in the west coast of Puerto Rico. By the way, this event happened in Rincon in a beach known to surfers as Tres Palmas, and there were about 8 to 10 surfers that day.

In 1973, we have the case of a UFO that seems to have come down to enter Rainbow Lake, in New Hampshire, in the United States. According to The Derry News, on October 4, 1973, several local residents saw multiple bright objects in the sky over the lake, “yellowish in color,” which hovered over the water. The size of the objects was given as several feet in diameter, and then one suddenly came down to crash into the waves while the other one shot straight up into the sky. The East Derry Fire Rescue Squad was notified, and actually sent a boat to search the lake, but nothing could be found. Whatever the objects were, they were apparently seen by numerous witnesses throughout the area, as the police department would receive a deluge of over 40 calls about them, which were persistent enough in insisting that something had come down into the lake that a team of divers was subsequently sent in. A follow-up report would read:

At the request of Chief (redacted), two divers descended into Rainbow Lake Friday afternoon in an attempt to resolve reports of an unidentified flying object that three witnesses claim splashed into the lake on Oct. 2. The divers swept the silty lake water with powerful searchlights, but their vision was impaired by the murky water, and they could not see more than a few inches ahead at any time. Said one of the divers, “The only way they’re going to get anything out of that lake is if they drag it. Chief (redacted) said he has no plans to drag the bottom and considers the matter closed.

A very weird series of events would play out in 1977 in the vicinity of Mayaquez, Puerto Rico, the country’s third largest city, where there was much talk of two massive glowing objects that would on many occasions enter and exit the ocean. It happened in September of that year, with a report of the two UFOs passing over the city to head out about a half a mile off shore and drop down into the water in a controlled manner. These two objects would on several occasions exit and then enter the water again, all while an estimated one thousand people looked on in astonishment. Many of them were superstitious, and were overcome by an intense terror that the world was coming to an end. One fisherman named Rafael Lopez and his half-brother, Arturo Rivera, were out in their boat that day and got a good look at the object coming down into the ocean, and he would explain:

It just appeared close to us. We didn’t see where it came from. We just all of a sudden noticed it close to us in the water, and when we first saw it, it looked small, and then it seemed to grow very large. In the beginning we weren’t afraid. We were glad because we thought there was another boat coming close to us. Then we realized it wasn’t a boat and we started to get frightened. We were hearing a sound like a cricket screeching. I had the impression it was a cricket inside the boat. I’ve had crickets in the boat before and all you have to do is pound on the sides of the boat and they usually shut up. But as much as we pounded, it didn’t quiet. It kept on making sounds.

As long as we didn’t move, the object stayed steady in the water and seemed to get smaller and then larger. And when it got larger, it got much brighter and then it would change colors. When it would grow brighter, it would get from like yellow to an orange color. Then we got frightened and decided to leave. But the boat had run out of gasoline. We had a little bit of gas in a bottle but we were really nervous by that time. We were trying to get the cap off the motor to put the gasoline in and we couldn’t because we were real nervous. And all this time the object kept getting closer and closer to us and we were getting more and more nervous. We finally got the cap off, and it finally started and we were able to start toward the beach. Once I got to the beach, I wasn’t even able to stand up at first because I was trembling. My whole body was trembling. I was pretty shook up. When I got back to my house, which is very close to the beach, I started to watch the object again. This time it was moving around real fast. It would seem to disappear and reappear again at a great distance from where it had disappeared from, darting back and forth. I’ve been a fisherman for a long time and I’ve been out on that water for a long time and I’ve never seen anything like what I saw that night. In my opinion, it was a UFO, a flying saucer.

Other witnesses were reporting the same thing, with one of the mystery objects coming down into the water. One local by the name of Luis Baez would say of what he saw:

I was playing pool and someone said, ‘Look!’ I came outside with my pool stick and I see this thing. It was something nice to see. It was round looking, like an apple. Nice, round, beautiful. It went toward the beach. I put my pool stick away and went down to the beach and looked. A friend said, ‘That thing that’s waiting over there is not a fishing boat.’ I said, ‘Sure it’s a boat’ and he said, ‘It’s not!’ So then the one that came by overhead was coming down near the other one. They stayed like that for three or four minutes maybe a thousand yards apart. The bigger one, the one that was waiting, tipped on its side and BLOOM! Into the water! The small one stayed for a while. After half an hour or so I went up to the roof of this garage and laid down and watched. I wanted to make sure if it moved or not. And I could see this thing goes up… down… this way to the right, back again and a few times it went this way into the water. You could see the water flashing. It never went all the way down in the water. It did that a few times, it goes up, comes down, moved toward the beach but not too close and it goes back. At one o’clock in the morning I went home to sleep. I have to be up early in the morning. So I slept, went to work and when I come back I asked a few friends of mine what happened to the one that was up there. Well at three o’clock in the morning it disappeared. There were about a thousand people at the beach where he was.

As all of this was going on, police were making sure that no one else headed out onto the water, prohibiting any vessels from going out to investigate. While they were doing this, there would be sightings made by police officers as well, and one of these was Mayagüez Police Lieutenant Cesar Grácia, who would say of his own sighting:

I saw something in the sky that I didn’t know what it was. It was over Highway Two about fifteen hundred feet, a large, lighted ball about six feet in diameter. It was going toward the beach very slowly. I was in the parking lot of the Hilton when they called me from the police department. They told me to go to the beach because a great many people were watching this object. When I got there, the object was already hovering over the water about two or three miles off the beach. There were about five hundred people watching. There are about four public housing areas right there and all the people from the housing areas were there. I saw one light coming down but when I got to the beach I noticed there were two objects in the water, not together but about a mile away from each other. They were hovering over the water, right about at the water level.

Because of the distance I couldn’t tell if it was a few feet over the water or if they were actually touching the water. The first object stayed about an hour but the second one lasted at least four hours. I wasn’t able to stay because I had other obligations, but I was there for quite some time. Later I returned again and it was still going on. And I left once more. When the first one disappeared, I saw it go. When the second one disappeared, I was no longer there. I stopped more than one time that evening for maybe five minutes at a time to watch. I couldn’t say exactly that it hadn’t moved but it was more or less in the same area. There were maybe five hundred people in the area where I was watching and all along the whole coast there were other people watching. A group of officers on duty that night also saw it, between five and ten. We called the Coast Guard but the Coast Guard didn’t come. The answer they gave us was that the police had to verify it first, that if there was a real emergency then the Coast Guard would be dispatched.

Other police officers would see the UFOs as well, and the whole area was experiencing a bit of a mass hysteria at the time. One Police Sergeant Ramirez would describe what he saw as follows:

I saw people gathering along the beach so I stopped my car. I was very curious, not only because there were people there but also because they were looking up. So I stopped and saw the light, which was very bright. When I got out of the car, I saw the object fall into the water, very bright and it like divided. It was pretty high, like an orange-yellow light. I don’t know exactly the size. As it came down it got larger. It was pretty good sized. First one sank into the water. About twenty seconds after, the other one went into the water also. It zigzagged a little before it went down and turned off. That was about nine thirty. I stayed around to keep traffic moving and see what the people were doing in case there was an accident or anything. Word got around and there were over a thousand people watching these things. People came out of their houses to see the view and people came in cars, parked on the side of the street and went to the beach to see what was happening. I stayed until midnight, mostly keeping an eye on the group so there wouldn’t be any problems. The police got many, many phone calls, all night. We called the Coast Guard but they didn’t come. They said it wasn’t an emergency.

There were numerous other reports along these lines, yet oddly the Coast Guard did little to act, and it seems like it was all mostly swept under the carpet. What was going on here and why were these objects repeatedly entering and leaving the ocean? We may never know. In 1990 another strange incident occurred in Turkey on the coast of the Aegean Sea. The encounter was reported by a Mr. Erol Erkmen, who was wreck diving with a friend at a site at 57 meters deep in the Saros Bay at approximately 2 PM. At one point they looked ahead to see a greenish glow in the water, which seemed to be emanating from an orb of light that appeared to be circling them and maneuvering around them. They observed it for around 3 minutes, during which time Erkmen took a photo with an underwater Kodak camera, which the object seemed to realize because it then went dark. Shortly after this, low oxygen forced the two divers to head to the surface. Upon examination, Erkmen would say that his photo had managed to capture a greenish glowing disc-shaped object, although what it is he cannot say.

Finally, we have a recent case from 2012, from Panama Beach Florida in a report filed with MUFON. On July 15 of that year, the witness says she was sitting out on the patio of her beachside residence where she was throwing a party, watching the sunset when she observed something very strange out in the water near the horizon. She explains:

I was sitting on my patio watching the sunset. On the horizon I saw this object that looked like it was coming out of the ocean. I made a comment to my customer to look. No one could figure out what it was. By now there are about 30 people outside looking. It came straight up out over the water very slowly, and made no sound. It was round looking and like it had windows with red lights in the middle and one solid white light under the bottom; they did not blink, but they were bright. When it got over the land it continued for another 7 to 10 minutes. It was almost dark. We wanted to get a picture but no one had a camera. One of my workers did take a picture with his cell phone but it just looked like a light and we could not make it out. Then the object took a right turn and flew for another 3 or 4 minutes, then in matter of seconds it was gone.

The phenomenon of these reports of UFOs entering and exiting the water are far rarer than those of the more conventional type, yet they add a layer of mystique to the lore of UFOs that is very intriguing to say the least. It hints at the possibility that these mysterious objects are not only using our skies, but also beneath the surface of our lakes and seas for inscrutable purposes we may never understand, and it all only furthers the mystery of UFOs in general, pushing it out into the far realms of the odd.

Today’s article is on a subject that has been around for decades and that peaked in the 1970s. It caught the attention of the FBI, the media, and the UFO research community. And, there are more than a few theories as to who, or what, is behind all of this. I’m talking about cattle mutilations. Since at least 1967, reports have surfaced throughout the United States of animals – but, chiefly, cattle – killed in bizarre fashion. Organs are taken and significant amounts of blood are found to be missing. In some cases, the limbs of the cattle are broken, suggesting they have been dropped to the ground from a significant height. Evidence of extreme heat, to slice into the skin of the animals, has been found at mutilation sites. Eyes are removed, tongues are sliced off, and, typically, the sexual organs are gone. As the FBI states at its website, The Vault: “Animal/Cattle Mutilation, In the mid-1970s, reports of scattered animal mutilations in western and mid-western states concerned many people. The FBI was asked to investigate, but was unable to do so because of a lack of jurisdiction (except when such mutilations were found on Indian lands). These files consist mainly of press clippings and correspondence concerning the issues between 1974 and 1978.” Now, let’s get to aliens.

A newly-published edition of Keith Wolverton’s book, Mystery Stalks the Prairie

It was 1967 when the UFO-mutes issue took off. There’s no doubt in my mind, at all, that the extraterrestrial angle was (and still is, now and again) carefully and secretly put into place by agencies to keep researchers and sleuths away from far more disturbing issues of a terrestrial nature. Consider these words: “On September 7, 1967, near the town of Alamosa in the San Luis Valley, Snippy, a 3-year-old Appaloosa, failed to return to the Harry King Ranch where she was stabled. Two days later, Mr. King (the ranch owner) discovered Snippy’s remains roughly a quarter-mile from the ranch house. According to his account, the neck and head had been completely stripped of flesh, leaving nothing but bare, seemingly sun-bleached, white bone, while the remainder of the mare remained unscathed.” Aliens and mutilations were now fused together – and to the careful plans of certain agencies that wanted things just like that.

When, at conferences, I bring up the issue of cattle mutilations not being the work of aliens, something happens time and again: arms quickly become folded in the audience, and in defensive fashion. I point in the direction of the true-believers and demonstrate to them that mutilations and cattle have had a long, secret history – and with not a single alien in sight. Sadly, so many people don’t want to hear that. Why? Because it’s not so exciting as UFO conspiracies, that’s why. Let me show you how and why the U.S. cattle herd has been secretly watched since the early part of the 1940s. Yes, that far back. Bacteriological Warfare in the United States is a fascinating FBI document – declassified into the public domain via the terms of the Freedom of Information Act – that covers the years 1941 to 1950. Notably, of the file’s original 1,783 pages, no less than 1,074 have been firmly withheld from declassification by the FBI. The file reveals a wealth of illuminating and disturbing data on cattle disease and death in the U.S., and their links to bacteriological warfare and sabotage by enemy nations and individuals.

The FBI documentation continues: “It has been brought to the attention of this division the possibility in the immediate future of an attempt on the part of the enemy to plant bombs containing germs or to endeavor to create an epidemic, such as hoof and mouth disease, among cattle and other livestock. It is requested that should any information concerning the above come to the attention of the Directors of Intelligence of the Service Commands or the A.C. of S. [Assistant Chief of Staff], G-2 [Army Intelligence], Western Defense Command, that the same be transmitted by the most expeditious means to the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2 War Department.” And what did the government do? I’ll tell you: they very carefully began to take a look at the cattle herd to determine who those “enemy nations and individuals” might be. And the secret investigations were undertaken whenever and wherever it seemed the cattle were being subjected to viruses by our enemies. In the 1940s it was the Nazis. And in the Fifties onward, during the Cold War, it was the Russians.

Now, let’s leap forward a couple of decades: In 1967, a contingent from the Atomic Energy Commission headed into Dulce, New Mexico and put into place what was called Project Gasbuggy. It was a sub-project of a much bigger program called Plowshare. The plan was to detonate – way below the surface – a small nuclear device, as a means to try and extract natural gas. The operation went ahead on December 10, 1967 – and it worked well. The bomb was detonated at a depth of more than 4,000 feet. Years later, certain paranoid figures in the UFO field suggested that the natural gas scenario was a cover for something else: to destroy a huge, underground “alien base” at Dulce with an atomic bomb. That, of course, is total garbage. There was no underground alien facility. Government agencies were, however, very concerned by the extent to which the radiation from Gasbuggy might have affected the cattle in the area – something that could have had significant repercussions. Not only that, a lot of beef from northern New Mexico got its way into the food-chain. Our food-chain. And, something had to be done about it. See what I mean?

So, from the late 1960s onward, a secret operation was put together to monitor the potential damage done to the herds in the area – and further areas, too. The result of the secret studies (much of it done by black helicopters, late at night on huge, darkened ranches) was the birth of the phenomenon of what became known as “cattle mutilations.” And, not just in New Mexico, but also in Colorado, Arizona and Utah. Hence the reason why the UFO issue was secretly inserted into the story: to keep people away from a terrifying, down-to-earth situation that had to be hidden. Tales of UFOs, aliens and extraterrestrial underground facilities proved to be the perfect, collective camouflage.

Approximately two months from now we’ll hit the 60th anniversary of the famous Betty and Barney Hill “alien abduction.” They were a husband and wife who, on the night of September 19, 1961, and while driving home from Canada to New Hampshire after completing a fun vacation, had a significant number of hours erased from their minds. It all happened near Indian Head, New Hampshire. It was there they saw a strange light in the sky that appeared to be carefully shadowing them from above. Concern and anxiety set in, which is no surprise. Finally, they made it home. Something very strange and disturbing happened to the Hills, but such was the state of their minds, they weren’t sure what it was. But, they certainly wanted to know. There’s no doubt that the case, itself, remains – to this day – the definitive alien abduction. But, was it really what it seemed to be? There’s a reason why I put that question forward. I suggest that with the sixty-year mark now looming large, someone ought to focus on one of the most controversial, alternative scenarios for the case: namely, that yes, Betty and Barney  were abducted. But, maybe, not by extraterrestrials. The fact is this: a case can be made that something of a very “down to earth” nature occurred, rather than something from outer space.

Someone who recognized this alternative possibility was the late Philip Coppens. Had Philip not died at such a young age, there’s no doubt in my mind that he would have continued to pursue this angle and to try and find out what really happened to Betty and Barney – and to Delsey the dog, too. Let’s see what Philip had to say about all of this: “It is clear that the Hills were being monitored by USAF [U.S. Air Force] Intelligence before the encounter took place, through Major James MacDonald, who had befriended them some time earlier. Betty Hill wrote to [UFO researcher / author] Donald Keyhoe who, despite the fact that he received over a hundred letters a day, homed in on this initially unremarkable case. Within twenty-four hours, Keyhoe had arranged for the Hills to be visited by top-level scientists, including C.D. Jackson, who had previously (definitely not coincidentally) worked on psychological warfare techniques for President Eisenhower.. Stretching coincidence far beyond breaking point, Jackson already knew Major MacDonald, with whom he next interviewed the Hills.” Philip continued on: “It seems that Betty and Barney Hill were at the center of a web that involved USAF Intelligence and top military experts in psychological warfare. The evidence suggests that the Hills were the subjects – victims – of a psychological experiment [italics mine].”

Too extreme to believe? Nope, not at all. Check out the “alien abduction” story of Antonio Villas Boas in Brazil in 1957, and the very strange saga of Gerry Irwin (of 1959), the latter told in the pages of David Booher’s book, No Return. Strong cases can be made that both incidents were staged. And, all three cases were relatively close to each other in terms of the time-frames: 1957, 1959 and 1961. Although Betty and Barney didn’t look for professional help for what happened until sixty-three, just a handful days after the incident they shared the details they could remember with a man who was a good friend of Barney. His name was James MacDonald. More correctly, Major James MacDonald, USAF, Retired. It turns out that MacDonald did clandestine work with none other than the CIA. Betty Hill’s niece, Kathleen Marden, says of this curious affair: “[MacDonald’s] tie to the intelligence community has led to speculation among researchers that his presence at the meeting was more than social.” Betty rejected this theory, but it is, without doubt, worth noting.

Now, we come to the matter of John G. Fuller, the man who wrote the classic book on the Hill case: The Interrupted Journey, that was published in 1966. As for Fuller, he was an intriguing character. When he died in 1990, at the age of seventy-six, the New York Times ran an obituary on him. It was written by a Times journalist, Edwin McDowell, who stated: “Mr. Fuller was sometimes criticized by reviewers for not using footnotes in his books and for what they judged was the implausibility of his topics. But as Jeff Greenfield wrote in The New York Times Book Review in reviewing ‘The Poison That Fell From the Sky,’ Mr. Fuller ‘keeps raising the most unsettling of questions.’ Moreover, even before passage of the Freedom of Information Act, he had a facility for somehow obtaining Government documents, which he incorporated in some of his books.”

Back in 1957, Fuller had a decidedly clandestine meeting with a Dr. Karlis Osis. As now-declassified CIA documents on Osis show, he was deep into a wide range of fringe sciences and technologies, including out-of-body experiences, how to alter brain wave frequencies, the means to affect “various biophysical changes,” and mind manipulation. It’s no wonder that Osis was also secretly consulted by the CIA’s MK-ULTRA teams. Days after their first meeting, Osis introduced Fuller to a CIA man named Robert Lashbrook. It turns out that Lashbrook was the very last person to see scientist Frank Olson alive before he took a deadly, violent shove out of the Hotel Statler in Manhattan in November 1953.  Osis also made Fuller an unforeseen, amazing offer: how would he, Fuller, like to be the very first investigative journalist to break at least a part of the MK-ULTRA story to the Unites States’ media? Clearly, Osis was recklessly playing both sides at the same time – the government and the media – for reasons that, today, are lost and not at all clear. Osis also made a way for Fuller to speak with one Andrija Puharich. He was an American of Yugoslavian extraction, someone who was deeply interested in the mysteries of the human mind, and who, in the 1950s, just happened to work at the Edgewood, Maryland-based U.S. Army Chemical Center. The Edgewood Arsenal being a place where controversial mind-manipulation-based experiments were undertaken on military personnel during the Cold War.

I should stress, there is no hard evidence to show that Betty and Barney were victims of a high-tech “MK-ULTRA“-type test. But, with the 60th anniversary of the case looming large, maybe someone will decide to get to the heart of all this and put the pieces together. And, maybe, surprises will be found. Big and shocking surprises.

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