Just when you think you haven’t heard of a mysterious cattle mutilation in a while, a mysterious case of cattle mutilations pops up in the current mutilation capitol of the U.S. – Oregon — and in Argentina, South America’s cattle mutilation hotspot. Are they related? Has anyone checked if their latitudes match?

Let’s start in Oregon, where the Thomas Angus Ranch reported finding a prize purebred Black Angus bull, valued at $4,500, dead and mutilated on Aug. 14 at the Greenbar Ranch in Wheeler County. As in most mutilation cases, the owner found the bull missing its nose, tongue, left cheek, ear, eye, reproductive organs and part of its tail – all removed with what appeared to be precise surgical cuts. A necropsy could not be performed because the bull was decomposed, having been dead for more than 24 hours.

Capital Press reports this is the fifth case of a cattle mutilation in Wheeler County in the past 20 months, while nearby Harney County has had five cases in the past four years, two this year in May and July, and adjoining Crook County had some in early 2021. The sheriff departments in all counties are sharing information, but Deputy Jeremiah Holmes of the Wheeler County Sheriff’s Office, who has investigated a number of them, says all ten cases in Wheeler and Harney counties are still open, and all ten are “eerily similar.” Before you ask, they’ve notified the FBI but have been disappointed in its prior responses.

This is making me very angry.

“In recent weeks, unusual occurrences of mutilated animals have appeared in the province. In Hasenkamp a producer found a heifer of about 400 kilos with strange mutilations, it was missing the udder, genitals, part of the jaw, tongue and eyes. Meanwhile in Isletas, Diamante department, a cattle family found one of their mutilated goats, only missing the complete tongue, two eyes, one ear and the jawbone. The teeth were bare, down to the bone.” (Google translation)

While Oregon is the Northern Hemisphere’s cattle mutilation hotspot, Argentina holds that dubious honor south of the equator. El Once reports on two recent occurrences in Entre Ríos Province in north-eastern Argentina with the same types of mutilations as seen in Oregon. While the Chupacabra is sometimes blamed for mutilations in Argentina, El Once contacted UFO investigator Andrea Pérez Simondini, who says mysterious lights are often seen around the time of these mutations and thinks they have a “direct relationship” to each other.

“50% of the complaints are accompanied by sightings of lights and physical alterations in the animal, lack of large volumes of water in the area, such as in Australian tanks, power outages and when we measure the time and shape, a kind of alteration in the ground with electrical conductivity. We are very interested in these types of cases, because we recognized a type of cut and it is called ‘sawn’; which is a kind of saw and thanks to the photos we were able to identify it in the goat’s jaw.” (Google translation)

Pérez Simondini says that type of saw is used in genetic research and has been trying to get authorities to look at these mutilations as possible alien genetic samplings for years.

As with cattle and livestock mutilations in general, it’s difficult to fathom why extraterrestrials would only sample cows, goats and other field animals, and not humans or other livestock or wildlife. There are many who believe this is secret genetic research done by humans, either in the massive and competitive cattle business or in government, where they might be doing undercover disease research.

How about teaching all cattle to do this?

On the latitude question, the Argentine mutilations were in the southern 32nd parallel while those in Oregon were in the northern 44th parallel. Some researchers in the U.S. plotted UFO sightings and cattle mutilations on a map and found a high concentration along the northern 37th parallel, which runs from California through Nevada, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and across to Virginia, and includes Area 51 in Nevada, the alleged secret underground alien base at Dulce, New Mexico, as Taos, New Mexico, home of many mysteries including its famous hum. Is the UFO highway expanding beyond the 37th parallel and opening a southern corridor? Can it be blamed on climate change?

Cattle and livestock mutilations around the world look like a crime that should be easily solved. Why haven’t they been? The mystery continues.

Over the decades there have been all manner of reports of encounters with beings and entities from beyond our understanding. These have taken many forms, including the familiar “grey aliens,” more reptilian creatures, and even insectoids. Yet some reports get even weirder than these, way weirder in fact, completely evading all reason and classification. Here we will look at a selection of various encounters with alien entities that are just about the most bizarre and bonkers there have ever been.

Starting in the 1950s, we have a really weird account from 1954, at an unspecified location in the country of Canada. On July 2 of that year, a 23-year-old Canadian miner named Ennio La Sarza was out in the wilds when he saw a spherical object about 25-feet in diameter, and with a set of portholes around the edge and “pieces of landing gear and something like a retractable antenna on top of it” land in a nearby clearing to disgorge three completely bizarre entities. They were described as being 13 feet tall, with bluish-green skin and glowing bodies. Their heads held antennae on top and a single eye set within them, and had six evenly distributed sets of arms tipped with crab-like pincers that clattered open and shut. The leader of the group apparently rushed La Sarza and hit him with a “psychic blow” that knocked him to the ground, before they all got back into their craft and headed off at great speed.

From 1957 we have the strange case of a retired teacher Mrs. Mary M. Starr. She claims that on December 16, 1957, she was in her home near Old Saybrook, Connecticut, when she was woken at around 3 a.m. by a very bright light outside of her room. When she looked outside, she could see a large hovering craft with big square windows hovering over her clothesline, and as she looked on, she could see entities moving about within. These truly bizarre creatures were about 4 feet tall, with arms but no hands and transparent cubes for heads with some sort of red core ensconced within and rubbery bodies that surrounded them like skirts. The creatures ran about in front of the windows for a time waving about their handless arms, before the windows suddenly vanished as if never there and whole craft began to glow brightly and they silently shot off into the night to leave her standing there in awe.

The late author Brad Steiger covered in his book Strangers from the Skies the case of Hans Gustafsson and 30-year-old Stig Rydberg, who on December 20, 1958 were were on their way along Route 45 from Höganäs to Heisenberg in Sweden in the early morning hours along a foggy road that had such poor visibility that the two friends decided to pull over near the rural village of Domsten. As they walked about outside the vehicle, they soon noticed through the haze that there was some sort of glow emanating from the surrounding forest nearby. The two decided to hike off into the darkened, glow frosted trees to try and see where the light was coming from, and after penetrating around 150 feet into the woods they allegedly came across the source of the glow, which proved to be far more bizarre than they had anticipated. There before them was a disc-like object resting on two legs around two feet long, the whole of which cast a scintillating glow of ever-changing colors. Even odder than the sight of this apparent flying saucer was what could be seen cavorting about the vicinity, which were 3-foot-long amorphous blobs that Rydberg would describe as follows:

They were like protozoa, just a bit darker than most, sort of a bluish color, hopping and jumping around the saucer like globs of animated jelly.

Nowhere on the bodies were any visible limbs or sensory organs, nor any other discernible features, and it was as if they were just pulsating gobs of gelatinous goo that could somehow levitate over the ground. Things got rather tense very quickly when these unusual entities suddenly surrounded the two puzzled men and purportedly began to engulf their limbs within their throbbing masses, described as feeling like “magnetic dough,” while at the same time exuding a terrible stench like “ether and burnt sausage.” No matter how much the men kicked and lashed out at these mysterious entities, they were able to either dodge or absorb the blows to little effect, as if they were made of jelly. It seemed as if the blob-like creatures were trying to drag the increasingly terrified witnesses towards the glimmering disc, and no matter how hard the two witnesses fought back and struggled it did little good.

By chance, Rydberg finally managed to tear himself free and run back towards their car with the alien blobs in hot pursuit. When he reached the vehicle he leaned heavily on the car’s horn, piercing the night with a wall of noise in an effort to draw anyone’s attention to their plight, but which also seemed to have the effect of startling the creatures enough to let go of Gustafsson. The blobs then huddled under their craft, filed inside it, and shot off away into the night sky, leaving behind a screeching whistling blare, that nauseating stink, and two very shaken men who found that they were covered in strange bruises and cuts.

Gustafsson and Rydberg perhaps understandably kept the story to themselves for some time, but when it finally came out it became a minor sensation in Sweden. The two witnesses were also interviewed by police, and although the story was without a doubt off-the-wall, they could find no sign of any hoaxing going on, and even when the two were secretly monitored when they thought they were alone, they did not let on that there was any lying or trickery going on. Gustafsson and Rydberg were also found to be in fine physical and psychological health, and in the end, police concluded that the men really seemed to have been traumatized by what they at least truly believed they had seen, whatever that was. It is difficult to ascertain just what it was that these two men saw, or at least thought they saw, and with no other accounts anywhere near it we will probably never know.

Moving into the next decade, we have the extremely weird encounter of an unidentified business man in France, who in November of 1962 was purportedly driving along a lonely rural road in the region of Var, France, when he had an amazing encounter that would change his life. At the tome it was allegedly raining profusely, when he saw something rather odd in the gloom ahead. There through the slashing rain he saw huddled in the road a group of figures that he at first took to be people, but which would soon prove to be far stranger. He would say of the encounter:

Rounding the bend, I saw, 80-meters [just over 260-feet] ahead, a group of figures clustered in the middle of the road. I slowed down to avoid the group, and at the same moment it split into two parts, suddenly and jerkily. My window was down and I leaned my head out slightly to see what was the matter; it was then that I saw beasts, some kind of bizarre animals, with the heads of birds, and covered with some sort of plumage, which were hurling themselves from two sides towards my car. Terrified, I wound up my window, accelerated like a mad man, and the stopped 150-meters [approximately 500-feet] further on. I turned round and saw these things, these beasts, these nightmarish sort of beings, which were heading, with a sort of flapping of wings, towards a luminous dark-blue object, which hung in the air over a field on the other side of the road.

As if all of this wasn’t odd enough, he would claim that as the menacing humanoids flew up towards the object they were literally “sucked up” into it “as if by a whirlwind,” after which the craft shot off at breathtaking speed. What was going on here? In 1965 we have the rather odd experience of 25 year-old Geoffrey Maskey, Mavis Fordyce and Michael Johnson, who on the evening of September 20, 1965 were driving along a remote road near Felixstowe, England when things would get truly weird, indeed. They apparently pulled over to the side of the road to have a chat, when Johnson suddenly and inexplicably got out of the car to go wandering off into the gloom. The others assumed he had just gone off to do nature’s business, but the two young men then heard a “high-pitched humming sound” coming from the surrounding wilderness. As they looked around for the source of the unsettling noise, they saw an oval-shaped UFO hovering about 90 feet over their car, surrounded by a creepy orange glow.

It would not be until the next day that Johnson would arrive and tell them of how the evening had gone. He would claim that he had been commanded by some unknown force to get out of the vehicle and go into those woods, and that when he had ventured out into the trees, he had encountered a strange creature that had large eyes and was “Engulfed by orange flames.” As soon as he had seen this flaming beast, he had blacked out completely.  He would say that he had no memories of what had happened next, and had woken up the next day in a hospital bed, only to make his way back to his friends with his incredible story.

Perhaps even weirder than all of this is a story form the winter of 1967, when a farmer in Missouri had a rather harrowing and otherworldly experience with what he would call “Green Space Penguins.” 64-year-old Claude Edwards would claim that he had gotten up to do his farm work like any other day, when he walked across one of his fields and saw sitting there a “massive, grayish-green, mushroom- like object which was perched atop a circular tube.” As he stared on in awe, he noticed a group of diminutive figures waddling about below the object, and he noticed that all of this was seriously spooking his cows. For some reason, perhaps out of curiosity, Edwards started to approach the strange creatures, and he could see that they were 3 feet high, with grayish-green skin and no hands, tiny feet, and no necks. On their beaked heads they wore goggles of some type, and the whole of it caused him to describe them as little green penguins, which he said swarmed about the bottom of the UFO and seemed to ignore the farmer at first.

As he drew closer, Edwards claimed that he had picked up some rocks in a plan to lob them in their direction, but when he got within 15 feet, he was abruptly stopped by some sort of force field that prevented him from going any further. He even threw a rock at it, only to see it bounce off of some unseen barrier and drop uselessly to the ground. However, he could now see the mysterious flying object in more detail, describing it as having a smooth metallic texture like “shiny silk,” with no seams and with some oval portholes of some type with a surreal display of multi-colored lights playing out beyond them. He would say of this bizarre craft:

The object just looked like a big shell, grayish-green looking outfit. And underneath there were oblong holes where the lights were coming out. They were so bright you couldn’t see when you got up there… as if a color wheel was turning inside the thing. The whole thing took over five minutes, maybe ten. I have never seen anything like it. It looked like shiny silk or something. I couldn’t tell. I was going to tell though if I could have hit it with that rock.

Perhaps foolishly, Edwards threw another rock at it even harder than the first, and although this stone also bounced off, it managed to capture the attention of the “Space Penguins.” The creatures all looked to him in unison, before scurrying behind the craft and then enter the craft through a portal. The object then began to ascend into the air, shooting off at an amazing speed to vanish.

Another downright bizarre cases comes to us from the U.S. state of West Virginia, where in July of 1968 a local man by the name of Jennings Frederick was out bowhunting in the rural backwoods just outside outside of Fairmont, West Virginia. At some point he allegedly heard a high pitched, unearthly sound that he would describe as sounding like “a recording running at exaggerated speed.” Curious, Jennings searched about for the origin of this surreal noise, and this was when he would come across a very strange sight indeed. There in the brush stood a 7-foot tall, semi-humanoid entity, with an exceedingly thin, almost skeletal frame, long ears, and stalk-like arms that were almost like tendrils and which ended in slender, 7-inch long fingers tipped with some sort of needles or thorns, as well as suction cups. The whole of the anomalous creature was described as green and very plant-like in nature, as if it were part animal and part plant. The whole time Frederick watched it that incessant chattering sound reverberated around him, and he suddenly realized that he could make out words within the alien noise, like glimpses of meaning from white noise, which he took to say:

You need not fear me. I wish to communicate. I come as a friend. We know of you all. I come in peace. I wish medical assistance. I need your help.

As Frederick stood there wide-mouthed in bewilderment, the mysterious being purportedly suddenly lashed out with one of its stalk-like arms with blinding speed to wrap him in an iron grip. The needles or thorns on its fingers then apparently pierced the startled man’s skin and began to draw blood, but rather than the pain he found himself drawn to the thing’s eyes, which seemed to rapidly switch back and forth from red to yellow in a hypnotizing, oscillating cycle that held him in thrall and dulled his senses. After about two minutes of this, the otherworldly plant-monster reportedly let him go and took off in a sprint up a nearby embankment in great 25-foot long bounds, followed shortly after by a deep thrumming noise that Frederick would later speculate to have been the sound of the creature’s space ship. For years Frederick kept this undoubtedly absurd-sounding story to himself out of fear of ridicule, but in 1976 he would relate it to the paranormal researcher Gray Barker, who would then include it in his newsletter. The story would be brought to even greater attention when it was mentioned in the late Brad Steiger’s 1978 book Alien Meetings. Was this an alien, some sort of cryptid, or what? Whatever it was, the “Vegetable Man” of West Virginia is certainly one of the more bizarre encounters on record.

From 1974 we have the very weird story from Bald Mountain, in Washington state, in the United States, just about reportedly 20 miles east of Chehalis, Washington. On November 14th, 1974, a fiery object was witnessed to fall from the sky in the area, and after that several motorists started reporting seeing a very strange entity prowling about the region. Witnesses reported seeing a horse-sized beast with tentacles and an antenna and emanating a neon green glow, which would shamble about the wilderness and would be sighted on more than one occasion. One witness would say of it:

It was horse-sized, covered with scales and standing on four rubbery legs with suckers like octopus tentacles. Its head was football-shaped with an antenna sticking up…The thing gave off this green, iridescent light.

As reports like this came in and began to make the rounds in the news, Lewis County Sheriff William H. Wiester began an investigation to try to get to the bottom of it, but was allegedly stopped by shadowy individuals claiming to represent both NASA and the United States Air Force. These people, often dressed in dark suits, told the sheriff in no uncertain terms that he was to drop the investigation and that they had it under control. His own investigation team was then replaced by what he describes as “a special NASA team, including a heavily armed military unit wearing uniforms with no insignia.” After that, the case of what has been referred to as the Bald Mountain “Crazy Critter” just sort of faded away into obscurity. What was going on here and what was this thing? Had it somehow crashed in its ship and was now wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what to do? There are no answers.

Moving along to yet another whacky case, we have a report from September 15, 1977, in the town of Paciencia, Brazil. On this day a bus driver by the name of Antonio La Rubia was allegedly walking to work when he spied a rather strange object shaped like an “enormous wide hat” sitting in a field, measuring an impressive 250 feet across. Soon after he noticed the giant mysterious craft, it lashed out with a thin, bright beam of light, which caught La Rubia and whisked him away to a room of pure white. Within this room were various mechanical-looking beings with bright scales and arms like tentacles, as well as egg-shaped bodies and heads adorned with what appeared to be antenna. Instead of legs, the strange creatures reportedly sat upon rigid pedestals of some sort.

After this initial meeting, the frightened La Rubia claims that he shouted at the creatures, which seemed to have the effect of making them cower in fear. He lost consciousness again, and when he awoke, he says that he was now subjected to a series of images projected onto the wall, including various surreal scenes such as a dog being melted and a train entering a tunnel, the meaning of which could not be discerned. At one point during this screening of oddities and grotesqueries one of the robot beings apparently reached out to draw blood from one of La Rubia’s fingers, after which it splashed it across a wall to form a pattern of three circles and an “L” shape. At this point, La Rubia claims he lost consciousness once more, and when he awoke, he was purportedly back in his car, vomiting and dizzy from the whole puzzling ordeal. He would later remember fighting back and actually knocking one of the creatures to the ground, allowing him to escape.

Finally, and perhaps the weirdest of all, we come to a case from the year 2002, with a witness named Jean F. and Nelson C, of Villa San Rafael in Calama, Chile. This particular case starts out weird enough, and then goes off the deep end into the completely bonkers. On January 12, 2002, Nelson apparently lost his pet snake, a boa constrictor, and so he went out with a friend to go try and find it. As they looked around, the man’s two dogs started getting very agitated, barking and snarling uncontrollably. As the two men tried to figure out what was spooking the dogs, they then saw what they at first thought to be a stray dog on the trail before them. They shouted and threw some stones at it to scare it off, but the animal just stood there and did not react, its features still unclear. It then began to walk towards them even as they screamed at it, and as it did they could see that it was an otherworldly creature that resembled a “rugby football with legs,” and then it suddenly stood up to walk on two legs. The two men then felt an “energy” like “like an electrical shock in the stomach.” One of the witnesses would describe the completely outlandish creature:

Its head was like the one of a large dog and it had a flat nose like a bulldog. Its eyes were slanted and pale-red in color, which could only be seen when the creature turned its head from side to side like small lizards do. Its ears were flat, round and large. Its arms were short, they had elbows and the hands had three fingers. It had hair like the one on a wild pig. Its legs were like the ones from a goat. The feet had also three fingers and a membrane like ducks, but somewhat shorter.

The back of the beast was also covered with a mane of thick hair, and it had a short tail tipped in white. Most bizarrely of all, the thing suddenly stopped its advance, stared at them for a moment, and then gave them a powerful telepathic message that boomed through their minds and said, “don’t stare, just run away.” The two young men did exactly that, and the thing was never seen again. It is just one more case among many that really doesn’t seem to make sense, and defies normal categorization. Was it a cryptid, alien, a figment of the imagination? Who knows? These have been just a few cases among many others that really cause us to scratch our heads and wonder just what could possibly be going on here. These are all completely weird and one-off encounters, meaning these various monstrosities have only been witnessed in one specific time-frame and then never again. They exist as completely unique accounts, and that makes it hard to figure out how they fit into the world of UFOs or cryptozoology as a whole. What were these utterly bizarre entities? Were they aliens, some sort of interdimensional interlopers bleeding through some veil between realities, or something else? For now it is hard to say, and these baffling reports rank among the strangest of the strange,

Scientists have long sought a specific location in the human brain responsible for spirituality – a concept that eventually became known as the God Spot. Brian scientists have found regions responsible for human feelings of love, fear, compassion and criminality, but spirituality remained elusive, despite many humans spending more time in religious activities and spirituality than other experiences. In 1989, neuroscientist Michael Persinger developed a “God Helmet” to control communication between the right and left temporal lobes in hopes of finding the God Spot, but it eluded him. Now, a group of researchers using “lesion network mapping” think they’ve finally hit the God Spot. Will this finally bring science and spirituality together … or will it put an end to religion?

“Over 80% of the global population consider themselves religious with even more identifying as spiritual, but the neural substrates of spirituality and religiosity remain unresolved. In two independent brain lesion datasets (N1=88; N2=105), we apply lesion network mapping to test whether lesion locations associated with spiritual and religious belief map to a specific human brain circuit.”

In a study published in Biological Psychiatry, researchers Michael A. Ferguson from the Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and others explain how previous studies used brain scans and functional neuroimaging to see what areas of the brain light up when a person experiences spirituality. Results have been mixed and inconclusive, so Ferguson and his team switched to lesion network mapping which links complex human behaviors to specific brain circuits based on the locations of brain lesions in patients. Their datasets consisted of 88 neurosurgical patients who were undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor and had lesions throughout their brains, and 105 patients with lesions caused by penetrating head trauma from combat during the Vietnam War.

Of the 88 neurosurgical patients questioned before and after surgery, 30 showed a decrease in self-reported spiritual belief, 29 showed an increase, and 29 showed no change. Using lesion network mapping, the team found that self-reported spirituality mapped to a specific brain circuit centered on the periaqueductal gray (PAG), a brainstem region that has been linked to feelings of fear, pain, altruism and love. As noted in the study press release, results on religiosity from the second dataset aligned with these findings.

Some aspects of the study may not sit well with religious leaders. Lesion locations associated with other neurological and psychiatric symptoms – including parkinsonism (movement abnormalities seen in Parkinson’s disease), delusions and alien limb syndrome intersected with areas of the PAG circuit. More importantly, the two datasets were predominantly Christians but did not give any information on the patient’s upbringing or spiritual training. Ferguson wants to do more research in these areas.

“Only recently have medicine and spirituality been fractionated from one another. There seems to be this perennial union between healing and spirituality across cultures and civilizations. I’m interested in the degree to which our understanding of brain circuits could help craft scientifically grounded, clinically-translatable questions about how healing and spirituality can co-inform each other.”

One doesn’t need to dig too deeply into any religion’s holy books to find references to healing. Perhaps there really is a God Spot in the human brain that both science and religion can agree upon.

We’ll know for certain when medical insurance companies begin offering coverage.

Planet Earth is host to a remarkably diverse range of organisms. The variety that exists between different life forms, while very real, may at times be superficial in that some scientists argue whether the differences between humans and other mammals are really so great.

Nonetheless, the uniqueness of at least a few traits that set humans aside from other organisms cannot be so easily debated. Even while certain other species display the use of tools, as well as the rudiments of what were once considered cultural concepts exclusive to humans, no other species on Earth has developed such capabilities to the advanced degree that we have.

Herein lies a great mystery. How is it that humans could have developed so differently–and so much–from other species, enough so that we eventually emerged as the dominant force on this planet?

In 1980, one study carried out at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in England took its analysis of this question to the microscopic level, looking at what clues might be found in human genetic material.

Appearing in Nature, the paper, titled “Distinctive sequence of human mitochondrial ribosomal RNA genes” by I. C. Eperon, S. Anderson and D. P. Nierlich, called human mitochondria a “radical departure” from that of other organisms,” a conclusion with rather novel implications in terms of the mysterious origins of humanity.

“The nucleotide sequence spanning the ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes of cloned human mitochondrial DNA reveals an extremely compact genome organization,” the study’s authors wrote in the paper’s abstract, “wherein the putative tRNA genes are probably ‘butt-jointed’ around the two rRNA genes.”

“The sequences of the rRNA genes are significantly homologous in some regions to eukaryotic and prokaryotic sequences, but distinctive” they added, noting that “the tRNA genes also have unusual nucleotide sequences.”

For those among us who aren’t molecular biologists, what the study’s authors present here may seem convoluted. However, the final line of the study’s abstract brought into rather stark focus what the authors interpreted this all to mean.

“It seems that human mitochondria did not originate from recognizable relatives of present-day organisms,” they concluded. But if not “recognizable” ancestors to the kinds of organisms present on Earth today, then what kinds of organisms had they been talking about?

Inherent to the structure of all living cells in higher organisms are mitochondria. These organelles are the areas within cells where functions like respiration and generation of energy take place. Since mitochondria possess their own unique genetic material, scientists have suggested that they might represent the aftermath of an invasion that occurred in the ancient world, in which bacteria stormed the cells of ancient organisms and took up residence within them. The question is, what kind of bacteria might have caused the “radically different” mitochondria found today in modern humans?

The study by Eperon, et al, raises several questions. One has to do with the undeniably unique traits that humans appear to possess when compared with other species on our planet; might it be the case that mitochondria is actually at the root of these distinctions? Another question has to do with whether mitochondrial changes occurring in ancient organisms might have spearheaded the evolutionary trends that eventually led to our ancient hominid ancestors and, eventually, resulted in Homo sapiens.

Other theories exist as well, which give consideration to speculative ideas about the appearance of novel kinds of bacteria from unusual places—possibly even from space—which might have arrived on Earth after being carried over great distances on cosmic debris. This theory that novel kinds of bacteria or viruses could arrive from space, while challenged by most in the scientific community, formed the basis of astronomer Fred Hoyle and his colleague Chandra Wickramasinghe’s theory of panspermia or “Cosmic Ancestry,” which entails that all life on Earth may actually have origins in outer space.

Even if ready-made bacteria had not been brought to Earth on cosmic debris, many astrobiologists have entertained the notion that the building blocks of life might have been brought to Earth from elsewhere long ago, having eventually formed into complex proteins over time, and eventually giving rise to simple life forms that evolved over the eons into the biodiversity we see on our planet today.

Is it also possible that some of the evolutionary mysteries about human origins could have been influenced by such cosmic sources at some point in the distant past? Such questions raise a number of possibilities about the likelihood of life existing elsewhere in the cosmos, and whether or not it might differ entirely from what we have come to expect of life on Earth.

In fact, if Earth organisms actually do have their roots in outer space, any prospective aliens out there might not only resemble us, but they might actually be cousins of ours, in a sense. In other words, we Earthlings might be far more “alien” than we even realize.

It’s difficult to tell how large the starship Enterprise is in the original Star Trek series, so seeing the shuttlecraft exiting it helped put its massive size into perspective. That fictional USS Enterprise (XCV 330) was 300 meters (980 feet) in length, which seemed immense at the time, but would be dwarfed by the mega-starship China is currently planning. Is it possible? How soon?

“The National Natural Science Foundation of China has called on scientists to join a five-year project to study the mechanics of an “ultra-large spacecraft spanning kilometers”.”

The South China Morning Post revealed the project announced by the National Natural Science Foundation of China as part of its 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25). To show how serious China’s space program is about assembling a megaship in space and flying it around the Earth, this is first major space project announced. To put its size in perspective, even at one kilometer (3281 feet) in length, it would be 10 times the length of the International Space Station and a little over three times the length of the USS Enterprise.

“It took the ISS 12 years – from 1998 to 2010 – to finally complete the construction. And by the time of completion, the first module that was launched more than a decade prior had almost reached its lifespan. So it can be speculated that the kilometer-level spacecraft will take even longer to build, and will have much higher requirements for the lifespan of its core components, and the ability to replace components flexibly.”

Speaking of the ISS, Pang Zhihao, a Beijing space expert and retired researcher from the China Academy of Space Technology, told the Global Times that even if the plans were approved today, it would take a while for this ultra-large spacecraft to be built. A comparison to the ISS might be unfair based on current technology – China’s Tiangong space station’s core module was launched in 2021 and two more modules are scheduled for 2022. Also, the ISS assembly managers didn’t have the benefit of the super-heavy rockets being tested today for Moon and Mars launches so its modules were much smaller. Size is still a concern, so one of the hurdles facing the ultra-spacecraft’s builders is weight.

Another concern is overall budget – even China is concerned about spending on space projects when there’s so much needed on Earth. There’s also safety issues – not just protecting this huge target from collisions with satellites and space debris but also protecting Earth from space construction fallout.

The magnitude of this project could be compared to the development of the Hoover Dam or the Three Gorges Dam – major and expensive long-term projects but with major benefits in power generation. A possible beneficial use of this ultra-large spaceship could be as a space factory or a space generator beaming power down to Earth. While it’s not discussed in the announcement articles, its use as a space weapon or space military base cannot be ignored either.

China is already spending money ($2.3 Million) on plans for a kilometers-long ultra-large spaceship. What’s your country building?

A Long March-2F carrier rocket, carrying the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft for the first Chinese crewed mission to its new space station, sits behind the characters for China at a satellite launch centre in the Gobi Desert on June 16.

Photo: AFP

In a surprising new discovery, astronomers found that the closest neighbor to the sun is not Mercury but instead a fast-moving asteroid. This newly identified asteroid, which has been named 2021 PH27, zips around our sun at such an incredible speed that it completes a full orbit of the star in just 113 Earth days. In fact, it is by far the fastest orbiting asteroid that has ever been discovered in our Solar System and the second shortest orbital period among all space bodies as Mercury completes a full orbit in 88 days.

But unlike Mercury, 2021 PH27 orbits the sun in an elliptical path which brings it much closer to the star at an estimated distance of just 12.4 million miles (20 million kilometers) during its closest approach. To put this into better perspective, Mercury’s closest approach to the sun is at a distance of 29 million miles (47 million kilometers). When 2021 PH27 gets close to the sun, the surface temperature on the asteroid heats up to a whopping 900 degrees Fahrenheit (482 degrees Celsius) – hot enough to melt lead.

2021 PH27 orbits the sun closer than Mercury.

With that being said, the asteroid will not continue on this orbit as it will probably crash into the sun, Mercury, or Venus in approximately a few million years. On the other hand, it could be thrown out of orbit by gravitational interaction. But as of right now, it is zipping around our sun at exceptional speeds.

The asteroid was discovered on August 13^th by astronomers who were using the Dark Energy Camera (DEC) on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Based on their observations, the researchers believe that 2021 PH27 measures approximately 0.6 miles in width (1 kilometer).

As for how it ended up so close to the sun, it might have gotten thrown inwards out of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Another observation they made was that it has a 32 degree tilt in its orbit which may indicate that it is an extinct comet that was once located in the far areas of our Solar System and was pulled inwards when it traveled by one of the rocky planets.

(Not 2021 PH27)

For now, 2021 PH27 is moving behind the sun and won’t be visible again from Earth until the early part of next year. At that point, researchers will be able to study the asteroid in further detail.

An artist’s illustration of 2021 PH27 can be seen here.

Using the powerful 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) in Chile, astronomers just ten days ago discovered an asteroid with the shortest orbital period of any known asteroid in the Solar System. The orbit of the approximately 1-kilometer-diameter asteroid takes it as close as 20 million kilometers (12 million miles or 0.13 au), from the Sun every 113 days. Asteroid 2021 PH27, revealed in images acquired during twilight, also has the smallest mean distance (semi-major axis) of any known asteroid in our Solar System — only Mercury has a shorter period and smaller semi-major axis. The asteroid is so close to the Sun’s massive gravitational field, it experiences the largest general relativistic effects of any known Solar System object.

If one of the items on your bucket list is “Traveling through a wormhole and exiting alive,” your chance to check it off may be sooner than you think. A researcher in Portugal claims he’s found the secret to building a stable, traversable one which would also allow the wormhole to check off “no longer theoretical” from ITS bucket list. Ready for the ride of a lifetime?

“Any traveler trying to cross a wormhole that does not satisfy this will be crushed inside as the tunnel collapses.”

In his preprint paper, “Double gravitational layer traversable wormholes in hybrid metric-Palatini gravity,” João Luís Rosa, a physicist at Aveiro University in Portugal, dives right into Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which has been the bible on gravity and spacetime for over 100 years. As Live Science points out in its interview with Rosa, theoretical wormholes are possible under general relativity but they’re not traversable because they’re behind one-way event horizons, and they’re unstable, collapsing as soon as even a photon enters one. One solution is to build the wormhole using matter with negative mass, which is possible but has never been found in the universe, or with negative energy, which to date has only been achieved at quantum scale. Rosa has a solution that solves all of these challenges.

“What happens is that these gravitational effects needed to guarantee the traversability of the wormhole happen naturally if one modifies gravity, and exotic matter [matter with negative mass] is no longer needed to serve this purpose.”

There you go. Modify gravity and you can safely travel through a wormhole to whatever lies at the other end. High five!

Wait a minute, you say. How does Rosa plan to modify gravity?

“We start by showing that for a particular quadratic-linear form of the action, the junction conditions on the continuity of the Ricci scalar R and the Palatini Ricci scalar R of the theory can be discarded without the appearance of undefined distribution terms in the field equations. As a consequence, a double gravitational layer thin-shell arises at the separation hypersurface. We then outline a general method to find traversable wormhole solutions satisfying the NEC at the throat and provide an example. Finally, we use the previously derived junction conditions to match the interior wormhole solution to an exterior vacuum and asymptotic flat solution, thus obtaining a full traversable wormhole solution supported by a double gravitational layer thin-shell and satisfying the NEC.”

Rosa satisfies the NEC (Null Energy Condition), which causes wormholes to collapse, by using a modification of general relativity called generalized hybrid metric-Palatini gravity, which allows more flexibility between matter and energy, and space and time. He found this theory gets around the negative energy problem with a simple very thin double layer of regular matter in front of the wormhole’s ends, which can be passed through safely while preventing negative energy collapsing the wormhole while you’re in it hoping to exit the other side and meet yourself in the past so you can give yourself the good news.

Are you sure about this?

Wait a minute, you say. This is all still theoretical and still requires a tweak in the old reliable general relativity theory, right?

That’s true. Rosa now plans to search the Milky Way for stars near its supermassive black hole center in hopes of finding examples of this modified gravity. Since we still haven’t found negative mass or negative energy yet, his chances are not high – but not impossible.

Don’t go checking off Traveling through a wormhole and exiting alive” just yet, but keep your pencil handy.

There are plenty of reports of UFOs to go around, and they are mostly described as mechanical craft of some sort, whether that be alien, manmade, or something else. But there is a subspecies of UFO reports that doesn’t get nearly as much attention, and that is of strange things in the sky that seem to almost be living, bioluminescent creatures of some sort. Such creatures have appeared sporadically throughout the history of UFO sightings, and typically appear as glowing, translucent jellyfish, squid, or other creatures that seem to belong in the domain of the deep rather than the air, and here we will look at a selection of such completely bizarre sightings.

Sightings like these have supposedly gone back for years. In the 1950s a police man in England claimed to have had a run in with a low flying “sky jellyfish” as he was riding his bicycle on patrol. He claimed that it drifted right down in front of him and that he actually bumped up against it, describing the sensation as similar to brushing up against a soft blanket, and that it had a slightly unpleasant smell of mildew. In 1958 there was also report from Florida, where a policeman named Faustin Galegos found a translucent purple blob about the size of a soccer ball outside of his house. He claimed that when he had approached it seemed to be some sort of dying creature, and when he picked it up the thing just sort of evaporated in his hands.

From the same era, a very odd claim was posted on the site Norcalblogs, from a commenter calling himself Pie Guevara, who claims that his uncle, an Oscar Guevera, had taken part in a scientific survey of these sorts of creatures in the 1950s and 60s. The remote areas north of San Fransisco had apparently experienced a spate of sightings for over a decade of what were usually referred to as “Space Jellies,” which would congregate in the upper atmosphere along the coast, after which they would soar up into the upper atmosphere out of sight. Pie provides a letter that he allegedly received from his uncle, which outlines the phenomenon and his study of it, and reads:

This coalescence of “space jellies”, as we called them, was assumed to be part of a seasonal migration pattern in and about the western Pacific. With a small joint grant fund from several philanthropic scientific organizations (which shall remain unnamed), I developed a small, high altitude, long distance ultralight aircraft (the first of its kind) assisted by an in-flight deployable and detachable ovoid helium balloon. This platform was developed as it had become evident through observation and experimentation that the behavior of these creatures was disturbed by the approach of larger aircraft. It was not by coincidence that the craft bore a distinct resemblance to the large, presumably mature form, of “space jelly” creatures themselves.

Working within a shoe-string budget, I deployed a modified aqualung attached to a motorcycle helmet and a small forge bellows that was fashioned into a crude but effective and light weight re-breathing system for high altitudes. For warmth I wore a gorilla suit (procured from a costumer’s auction in Emeryville) and had it fitted with a lining of goose down. From below the aircraft was lowered a fair sized grappling hook with several large mackerels tied to it with bailing wire. Inside of six weeks in the fall of 1973 I had snagged most of these diaphanous jelly fish like buggers. None of the captured survived the experience and within minutes dissolved into an odd steamy smoke. On my final expedition, as per standard operating procedure, I reached the specified location at an altitude of 9500 feet, deployed the balloon, and floated up into the remaining few of these creatures which, apparently, died of fright on the spot, dissolving into threadlike wisps before me.

Besides the regrettable loss of the subjects under study there was one more unfortunate circumstance. On the last mission, after jettisoning the balloon, I was flying in from the Pacific over the Farallons at about 5000 feet towards my hidden base of operations in a remote area of [redacted]. I was spotted by a US Navy crew on a practice and shakedown cruise flying a restored antique Consolidated Vultee PB2Y Coronado that was to be displayed in a few days at a Fleet Week exposition near Fisherman’s wharf. They veered off course, followed me, and executed a close and slow pass-by over San Francisco Bay. So close I could see the faces of the pilot and crew. The flying boat then abruptly dropped altitude and beached near the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in what, for all intents and purposes, appeared to be an emergency landing. Weeks later I learned, through some Navy sources in Vallejo who hung out Fridays at the [redacted] Bar and Grill, that the pilot and crew recovered from the plane had babbled incoherently and for days all they could get out of them was, “Flying fish bear … flying fish bear …” Needless to say this story has never been declassified and likely never will be. The only reason I relate it now is lay to rest any fears that may still exist about these creatures and confident in the knowledge that no one in their right mind would ever actually believe it.

This is truly a far-out and spectacular account, and one can’t help but wonder how much veracity any of it holds. A guy in a gorilla suit collecting flying jellyfish from the upper atmosphere? Flying Fish Bears? It is all quite beyond bizarre. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. One quite strange sighting from later years that is really hard to classify but seems to be a type of sky squid allegedly occurred on December 24, 1999, in the country of Belarus. On this day, two witnesses in the remote Vitebsk region saw in the sky an enormous cigar-shaped object that was blue and red in color like “the color of a clouds at sunset,” with a slightly angular quality to it and with a round and asymmetric front and a rear section that was described as blurry. It appeared as brighter than the early evening sky and looked to be slightly fluorescent, semi-transparent, and seemed to pulsate as it moved along, as if swimming rather than flying, completely silent the whole time. The sky was otherwise completely clear, and the witnesses both described having the feeling that they were not looking at any type of aircraft, but rather a living creature of some sort. Rather oddly, after observing the object for a short time, one of the witnesses would say that it had suddenly seemed to “disintegrate into dots” before vanishing. In an interesting twist, there would be another report by an Aeroflot pilot who claimed to have seen the same thing while flying over the area in 1985.

From the area of Groningen, Netherlands, we have the case of a similarly bizarre object seen by a witness by the name of Harry Perton, who was outside of his home taking pictures of the sky at the time. It was apparently just after a storm, and the clouds and sky had been beautiful, but something stood out as very odd. Moving across the sky was a pulsing, flashing green light that appeared for a short time and vanished. At first he thought it must have been just a weird-looking lightning strike, some remnant from the retreating storm, but when he got home and checked his photos he saw that one of them had actually picked up a strange object in the sky that looked like a jellyfish with an eerie green luminosity around it. The picture was soon doing the rounds online, sparking much speculation as to what it could be, including that it is a camera artifact, lens flare, a small meteorite, space debris, some meteorological phenomenon, or even a hoax, although the photographer himself has stated that he thinks there is a rational explanation for it and has made no effort to play it up as some sort of UFO. It hasn’t been explained.

Harry Perton’s Sky Squid

Another mysterious photo was captured in Andenesm, Norway by witness and amateur photographer named Per-Arne Milkalsen. As he was going through photographs he had taken of the Northern Lights, he noticed in one of the images a strange green glowing jelly-fish shaped object hovering over the landscape, and it did not seem to be a lens artifact or trick of light, but rather a solid floating object in the sky. It was so strange that he posted the photograph online, and a deluge of responses came in, with many suggesting that it was the Northern Lights reflecting off of something such as a satellite or cloud, but it was also pointed out that such a reflection was unlikely to be green. It still hasn’t completely been solved, and Mikalsen himself has said “I have never seen an object like this before, and I am eager to find an explanation to the phenomenon.”

In 1998 there was a mass sighting of some sort of sky jellyfish in China. On October 19 of that year, four military radar stations in Hebei province picked up a strange radar signature hovering near a military flight training school in Changzhou, about 90 miles northwest of Shanghai. When no other known civilian or military aircraft were shown to be in the area, it was alarming enough that a Jianjiao 6 jet fighter was scrambled and sent to investigate, and when they approached both the pilot and radar officer on the jet would claim they saw a mushroom or jellyfish shaped object with a bottom section “covered with bright, dangling lights.” Whatever it was proved to be very evasive, suddenly beginning to ascend as the fighter approached, with the pilot even at one point requesting permission to fire on it, which was denied. The object seemed to toy with the jet before suddenly ascending at a rapid pace, and the jet then chased it to an altitude of 39,600 feet before being forced to return to base due to lack of fuel. Two more jets were sent out, but by the time they arrived on the scene the object was gone. It would later turn out that 140 witnesses on the ground had seen the object as well, including many cadets and officers at the flight school, all of who described the exact same thing. Considering that the original report ran in a respected newspaper, the Hebei Daily, it is considered to be credible due to the fact that mainstream Chinese newspapers hardly ever mention anything to do with UFOs or the supernatural.

A very weird report comes to us from December 3, 2004, from two witnesses who were driving from Point Pleasant to Huntington, West Virginia, along the Ohio River, when they saw something that is really hard to categorize. As they drove along in the early evening, they noticed a movement over the road in front of them, before out of the gloom came a “greyish, smooth-winged shape” that they described as looking like a “flying manta ray,” with grey translucent skin and a wingspan “wider than a 2 lane road.” The outlandish beast sort of glided towards them and then performed a figure eight maneuver and swooped right over their car to disappear. Not long after this sighting there would be a separate report from a woman and her daughter near Blackwater River, who also saw what they called a “manta ray -shaped creature” glide over their car on a lonely rural road. What could this have possibly been? Who knows? A more recent account was given on the site Phantoms and Monsters, and comes from a witness in Perth, Australia, who is referred to merely as “BD.” The witness claims that in 2012 he was out in front of his house one evening having a cigarette when his attention was drawn to the curious sight of the light patterns of the stars being disrupted by something passing over them. At first he thought it might be a plane, but it soon became apparent that this was no aircraft. The witness explains:

As it got closer, the way it moved resembled the way a jellyfish would swim if it was horizontal. It was hard to describe, but it looked to be expanding at the front like a balloon, then using that air to propel itself along. It was roughly 100 meters above me and I watched it for 10 minutes. After that it was out of sight. This was during a clear night sky in Australia. I am very familiar with aircraft as I live relatively close to Jandakot airport and we see/hear them all the time. It was certainly not a machine of any kind. I yelled out to my Mother-in-Law who was staying at the time to come out and look. She also saw it. I filmed it on my smartphone, but being 8pm at night it was pitch black and you couldn’t see anything. If I had to guess, I would say the feeling I was left with is that it was some kind of creature. It moved gracefully and gradually in large deliberate movements. Like a large bird would do with a large flap of its wings, then gliding for a bit, although this was unlike anything I could describe. It appeared to be translucent in parts and remained at the same altitude and speed but just completely silent.

Amazingly, there was a follow up report from a different witness, who claims that he and a friend saw what appears to have been the same or a similar creature around Perth at around the same time as this sighting. The witness says of the creature:

I would like to confirm the story of the flying jellyfish like creature as described on your forum by “BD,” There were two of us actually not just myself. We were in Perth CBD actually having a glass of wine on a quite loud jazz music playing balcony about 10 meters from the ground. I am so thrilled to find out there is another person who has seen this. The creature was behaving exactly as described by “BD” so basically like jellyfish but without any long tentacles – about a size of a balloon. It was kind of changing according to the different colored lighting attached to the balcony and it was flying upwards so effortlessly. It is really precious I have finally found this. I have been searching for so long. I have to be honest I don’t recall the exact day but it must have been the same night as “BD” mentioned. We had seen it around 9-10pm either friday or saturday. The creature wasn’t too shy either meaning it didn’t fly in a hurry. Would gladly put my hand on my heart on this one and now may actually try to find it again, but who knows how often do they appear.

What could such creatures be? One idea is that they are a type of theoretical organism known as an “atmospheric beast.” Atmospheric beasts, or atmospheric life-forms, as they are often called, are said to be organisms that live their entire lives floating high in the atmosphere, undetected by humans. These creatures are most often described as having bodies that are semi-solid, or almost insubstantial, with some reports even claiming that they are able to adjust their density from almost immaterial and invisible to more solid, depending on as yet unknown factors. Numerous theories have been posited as to how such seemingly fantastical organisms could manage to stay adrift in the air, such as air bladders or very low body densities.

The appearance of these atmospheric beasts varies wildly. Accounts have variously described them as amorphous and cloud-like behemoths, finned squid-like creatures, floating jellyfish, translucent, vaporous blobs, flitting rods, amoeba-like organisms, gelatinous oddities, and even dragons. The sizes of atmospheric beasts likewise run the gamut from tiny and bird-like, to gargantuan monsters hundreds of feet long. Although these enigmatic creatures are said to typically lurk too high in the atmosphere or to be too insubstantial to see with the naked eye, there are instances when one might become observable for some reason. Indeed, there has been a substantial amount of sightings reports over the years from all over the world describing unusual flying monsters that do not fit into the typical mold of UFOs, thunderbirds, or other flying cryptids. Are these anomalies some type of lifeform? Or are these some sort of rare type of alien craft, an atmospheric phenomenon, or something else altogether? It is hard to say, and such cases remain lodged into the very fringes of the world of the weird.

From the “This can’t be good news” file comes a new study which found that there are more supermassive black holes wandering the universe that once thought – perhaps even outnumbering the number of supermassive lacks holes found in their usual place in the center of a galaxy. This increases the chances of them colliding with each other as well as consuming stars and planets in their way. The good news is, there are less of these wandering black holes now that at the birth of the universe. The bad news is, they’re difficult to detect. Should we be worried?

“Romulus predicts that many supermassive black hole binaries form after several billions of years of orbital evolution, while some SMBHs will never make it to the center. As a result, Milky Way-mass galaxies in Romulus are found to host an average of 12 supermassive black holes, which typically wander the halo far from the galactic center.”

Romulus in this case is not the legendary first emperor of Rome or the home of Star Trek’s Romulans but a modeling tool developed by Michael Tremmel of Yale to help astronomers simulate the evolution of different regions of the universe from just after the Big Bang until the present day. Tremmel was one of the co-authors of the study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which found that in today’s universe about 10% of the mass in black holes might be in wanderers. With Milky Way-mass galaxies having an average of 12 supermassive black holes, that means their 11 wanderers aren’t as massive as the big one in the center. However, some with higher redshifts (the displacement of spectral lines toward longer wavelengths) both outweigh and outshine their central supermassive counterparts.

“Most wandering black holes, we find, remain close to the seed mass and originate from the centers of previously disrupted satellite galaxies. While most do not retain a resolved stellar counterpart, those that do are situated farther out at larger fractions of the virial radius. Wanderers with higher luminosities are preferentially at lower radius, more massive, and either closer to their host’s mid-planes or associated with a stellar overdensity.”

While these black holes wander, the bigger ones tend to stay close to the center of their galaxy. They also grow at about the same rate as their galaxies, so they stay the same size in relative terms. Finally, many of the wandering supermassive black holes are not active, which is good news for stars and planets in their paths, which makes them very difficult to spot, which is bad news for astronomers trying to discover and track them in order to learn more about their development and the development of the universe in general.

Should we be worried? Well, astronomers in 2018 detected a Jupiter-sized black hole with 30,000 times the mass of the Sun wandering through the Milky Way. That makes it a medium-sized black hole and it’s no danger to us. In fact, even though we can’t see them and are just now learning how to detect them, wandering supermassive black holes are no danger to Earth now or for probably a few billion years.

It’s safe to go back to your other worries.