In 1953, the most famous UFO Contactee, George Adamski, gave a number of lectures in the Los Angeles area, stating that his data on UFOs and aliens had “all been cleared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Air Force Intelligence.” It most definitely had not been cleared. Personnel from both the FBI and the Air Force heard of this and descended on Adamski, warning him to quit his crap. For a while, Adamski did exactly what he was told to do: Stop! Unfortunately for Adamski, he was a magnet for publicity and praise. So, yet again he told his foaming fans he had supporters in the FBI and the Air Force. That the FBI had agents sitting in every lecture Adamski ever gave in California in the fifties, meant that Hoover’s finest were getting more and more frustrated and angrier by the day. They made a decision: they paid Adamski another visit. Whereas on the first occasion Adamski was “warned” to stop, on the next occasion, as the now-declassified reports show, the FBI “severely admonished” him for all of his extra-terrestrial idiocy. The FBI demanded that Adamski would never, ever again make such claims about the military and the FBI. To ensure that, one of the FBI agents whipped out an official document they demanded Adamski sign. He did. One of the agents signed it too, as did a somewhat bemused Air Force officer who thought the whole thing was a farce of epic proportions. Surely that would have made Adamski get the message. It didn’t. The man who claimed to have met 1960s-era hippy-looking aliens was about to find himself in a bucketful of serious shit with a band of unsmiling G-Men.

Declassified into the public domain by the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (and free for anyone to read and use) is just one page of Adamski’s 300-pages-plus FBI file.

It was roughly nine months further down the line when the FBI’s Los Angeles office received a visit from a representative of the L.A. Better Business Bureau. Staff of the BBB were concerned that Adamski’s 1953 book Flying Saucers Have Landed (co-written with Desmond Leslie) was one big scam. One way or another, their staff was determined to get the answers. One of the BBB went knocking on Adamski’s door. The whole story of alien encounters was true, Adamski said earnestly to the man. It’s hardly surprising that the BBB was having none of this book of lies and exaggerations. Adamski hit back by saying his book was endorsed by the U.S. government. To prove this, Adamski pulled out of his pocket a document that had a “blue seal in the lower left corner, at the top of which appeared the names of three Government agents,” as the FBI described things. One of those names was attached to an Air Force officer. Two were of FBI agents. Incredibly, and recklessly, what Adamski had shown to the BBB employee was actually that document Adamski had been ordered to sign some nine months earlier, at the order of the FBI. Worse still for Adamski, he had altered the document. He’d taken real FBI paperwork, fiddled around with it, and changed it for his benefit. This was the last straw for the men in black suits. An FBI summary of this run-around, of December 16, 1953 reads:

“[Deleted] instructed Willis to call on Adamski at the Palomar Gardens Café, Valley Center, California. (This is located five miles east of Rincon, California, near the Mount Palomar Observatory.) Willis was told to have the San Diego agents, accompanied by representatives of OSI if they care to go along, call on Adamski and read the riot act in no uncertain terms pointing out he has used this document in a fraudulent, improper manner, that this Bureau has not endorsed, approved, or cleared his speeches or book, that he knows it, and the Bureau will simply not tolerate any further foolishness, misrepresentations, and falsity on his part. Willis was told to instruct the Agents to diplomatically retrieve, if possible, the document in issue from Adamski. Willis said he would do this and send in a report at once.” Adamski was very lucky he didn’t end up with some degree of jail-time. Maybe, that would have given him even more publicity, something both the FBI and the Air Force were extremely keen and careful to avoid. That Adamski had the wrath of God put into him finally ensured that his document-doctoring days were over. And, by the late-1950s, Adamski’s “career” as a ufological guru began to tail off. He lived until 1965, by which time many people in Ufology had dismissed the man and his wacky, “I flew to Venus”-style pseudo-science.

A couple of days ago I wrote here at Mysterious Universe on why, in my opinion, the 1950s-era “Space Brothers” should not have been trusted. Not only that, I briefly highlighted the work of the late writer Mac Tonnies, who suspected that the Space Brothers may not have been aliens at all, but were possibly from right here on our planet. In other words, Tonnies pondered on the possibility that the Space Brothers were, collectively, an ancient human society that has the power to move among us in stealth. In terms of his theorizing, Tonnies said to me: “After devouring countless books on the UFO controversy and the paranormal, I began to acknowledge that the extraterrestrial hypothesis suffered some tantalizing flaws. In short, the ‘aliens’ seemed more like surreal caricatures of ourselves than beings possessing the god-like technology one might plausibly expect from interstellar visitors. Like Jacques Vallee, I came to the realization that the extraterrestrial hypothesis isn’t strange enough to encompass the entirety of occupant cases. But if we’re dealing with humanoid beings that evolved here on earth, some of the problems vanish. My hypothesis works too when we apply it to Martians stranded [on Earth] and who, I sometimes wonder, are waiting for the day when our world becomes theirs.”

(Nick Redfern)

Just before he died, Mac Tonnies gave me this piece of artwork as a gift. A Cryptoterrestrial and not an Extraterrestrial?

Tonnies continued: “I envision the Cryptoterrestrials engaged in a process of subterfuge, bending our belief systems to their own ends. And I suggest that this has been occurring, in form or another, for an extraordinarily long time. I think there’s a good deal of folkloric and mythological evidence pointing in this direction, and I find it most interesting that so many descriptions of ostensible ‘aliens’ seem to reflect staged events designed to misdirect witnesses and muddle their perceptions.” Tonnies also acknowledged that at least some of the Cryptoterrestrials looked somewhat different to us. Yes, they could move among us, but if you looked at them too close you would see there was something very strange about them. With that said, let’s look at these “slightly different ones,” as I put it. It occurs to me that the Men in Black and the Women in Black just might be Cryptoterrestrials. Consider this: they look like us, but take a nearer look and you’ll see their skin often has a plastic-like appearance to it. Their eyes bulge. And you’ll see them wearing wigs and wraparound sunglasses. All of that suggests that the MIB and the WIB just might be examples of what at least some of the Cryptoterrestrials look like.

(Nick Redfern)

They’re just not quite right

Author and UFO researcher Denise Stoner told me of a very strange experience she had some years ago: “My Mom and I had gone to the mall on Christmas Eve for a couple of last minute stocking stuffer type gifts.  We actually knew what we wanted so parked outside J.C. Penney’s on the side where those goods were. We went in and immediately noticed that in late afternoon, there were only a few shoppers. We picked out our gifts and got in line at the cashier in back of two other people. We could easily see the exit door and the sun in the parking lot, we were facing that way. The glass doors opened and two very tall, thin women entered. They had long almost waist length blond hair parted in the middle on top and it was thin in texture. Their skin was also pale and I did not notice any make up but each had huge piercing blue eyes.” Over the years, Denise has had run-in with these not-quite-normal characters.

Now, onto a strange saga that went down in early 1967. The location: Melville, New York. It involved a rancher whose farm was located in a rural, isolated part of town. Only days before he received a most unwelcome visit, the man saw a definitive flying saucer hovering over one of his fields, and which – somewhat amazingly – had what was described as a “ladder” hanging from its underside. At least, until the ladder was hastily retracted and the saucer shot away, high into the sky, and vanished from view. That was hardly the end of the matter, however. Just a few days later, the man heard a knock at the door. Given that his home was in the middle of pretty much nowhere, he opened the door both slowly and cautiously. Stood before him was a “Gypsy lady” who was dressed in a gray dress that reached her ankles and who wore sandals. Just like so many of the Men in Black, her skin was noted for its deep, olive complexion, and her eyes were described as “Oriental.” The rancher added that she stood around five-feet and four inches tall, and had long hair that was “so black” it “looked dyed.” And, finally…

(Nick Redfern)

Hats and Darkness: perfect camouflage for a Cryptoterrestrial

It was a wintry, freezing, and dark Saturday afternoon in the latter part of January 1987 and a man named Bruce Lee – who worked as a senior editor at a New York publishing house, William Morrow & Co. – walked into a bookstore on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was the now- closed-down Womrath’s, on Lexington Avenue. Also with Lee was his wife. It turns out that William Morrow & Co. had then very recently published Whitley Strieber’s New York Times’ bestseller, Communion – a book that told of Strieber’s very own and deeply personal encounters of the so-called “alien abduction” variety. Womrath’s had a large display set up for Communion and they also stocked a couple of Lee’s own books. Quite naturally, Lee, who had also worked for Reader’s Digest and Newsweek, was curious to see how both of the displays looked. At this point, Lee and his wife parted and she headed off to the fiction section.

Lee’s attention was suddenly drawn to a strange couple that entered the store. In his own words, the pair headed “directly for Communion.” He explained: “I mean, it was just, you could see them come in – they didn’t know where the book was, you couldn’t see it from the street – and they came in and headed right back for where that rack was. Most unusual, if you see what I mean.” Yes, we do.  That was not the only unusual thing about that fateful, Saturday afternoon. Both the man and the woman were barely five feet in height – maybe even slightly smaller. They had scarves that covered their chins, hats pulled tightly down, and huge, black sunglasses. They also appeared to begin speed-reading the book, noting out loud – one might even suggest for Lee’s benefit – where Strieber had “got this wrong” and “got that wrong.” They also giggled in a strange, unsettling fashion. We’ve seen that before, too. Quite naturally, given that he worked for the very publisher that had just released Communion, Lee walked over and asked the pair what was wrong with the book. The woman suddenly looked up, at which point Lee was able to see through her sunglasses that her eyes were not just large, but huge, and shaped like almonds. Lee, by his own admission, felt the hackles on the back of his neck rise, and got a “mad dog”” feeling emanating from the woman. He was likely not wrong when he observed: “I got to feeling that I was in eyeball contact with somebody who did not like me at all.”

Could all of these slightly strange characters be prime examples of Mac Tonnies’ Cryptoterrestrials? Perhaps, that’s exactly what they were.

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If you get an organ transplant from a pig, is it covered by medical or veterinary insurance? That may sound absurd, but the potential for this kind of question is real and it’s here. Barely a week after a genetically modified (to prevent rejection) pig’s heart was successfully transplanted into a living human who is still living with his beating porcine organ, doctors successfully transplanted two genetically modified pig kidneys into the donated body of a brain-dead human and they functioned normally until the experiment was terminated 77 hours later – a record set in just the second attempt at a pig-to-human kidney transplant. Let the ethical, medical, insurance and animal rights debates begin!

Do I get a say?

“Our study demonstrates that major barriers to human xenotransplantation have been surmounted, identifies where new knowledge is needed to optimize xenotransplantation outcomes in humans, and lays the foundation for the establishment of a novel preclinical human model for further study.”

Yes, this is a big deal — according to Jayme Locke, M.D., director of the Comprehensive Transplant Institute in the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) Department of Surgery and lead surgeon for the study published in the American Journal of Transplantation. The FDA defines xenotransplantation as “any procedure that involves the transplantation, implantation or infusion into a human recipient of either (a) live cells, tissues, or organs from a nonhuman animal source, or (b) human body fluids, cells, tissues or organs that have had ex vivo contact with live nonhuman animal cells, tissues or organs.” In this case, the “clinical-grade” genetically modified pig kidneys (called UKidney™) came from the biotechnology company United Therapeutics Corporation’s subsidiary Revivicor, Inc.

The human recipient was Jim Parsons, a registered organ donor whose organs were not suitable for donation when he died at age 57, so his family agreed to allow his brain-dead body be kept functioning on a ventilator during the study.

“Jim would have wanted to save as many people as he could with his death, and if he knew he could potentially save thousands and thousands of people by doing this, he would have had no hesitation.”

Jim Parson’s family discussed his participation in a press release, which also stated that the wait for a donated kidney can be as long as 10 years in some states, and almost 5,000 people per year die waiting on a kidney transplant. This experiment showed that the modified genes in the pig kidneys prevented blood clots and other known immune reactions, and demonstrated that the pig kidney could have lasted even longer while withstanding the higher blood pressure of a human body.

While both this and the recent pig heart transplant are medically revolutionary and potentially lifesaving, that doesn’t preclude the ethical concerns. It was revealed a few days ago that the pig heart recipient was convicted in 1988 of stabbing a man seven times – the victim was paralyzed for life and died in 2007, while the organ recipient spent six years in prison. The religious concerns of creating potential hybrids or chimeras vary, while animal rights activists have long fought the idea of setting up animal organ farms. And, while we continue to suffer from and search for the cause of the COVID pandemic, the fear of viruses jumping from animals to humans via organ transplants is real – despite the meticulous preventative measures taken in this experiment.

The debate is a long way from over.

Are we ready for pig organ transplants? If not, can we stop it? Whose decision is it — science, the public or the profit-making hospitals and insurance companies?

Is it too late?

Thanks to data collected by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists were able to study a mysterious world known as XO-3b. But their analysis has left them with even more questions, such as whether XO-3b is even a planet or something else.

XO-3b is a gas giant that orbits an F-type star. It has a mass that is 7.29 times that of Jupiter, but has a radius that is only 1.41 times larger than our Solar System’s Gas Giant. It orbits its host star at an exceptionally close range of 0.04529 AU (one AU is the distance that Earth is to the sun).

A year on XO-3b lasts just three Earth days and during that time, it goes through two different seasons – a one-day summer and a two-day winter. In a recent news conference that was held by the American Astronomical Society, Lisa Dang, who is a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at McGill University in Canada, stated, “We saw seasonal temperature variations hundreds of times stronger than what we experience on Earth.”

(Not XO-3b)

Furthermore, the seasons on XO-3b are due to its oval orbit around its host star and the amount of radiation it gets. Since the planet and the star are so close to each other, the furthest part of XO-3b’s orbit continues to be brought closer to the star because of their gravitational interactions which causes the unusual orbit.

With that being said, it is believed that the planet has only been orbiting the star for a relatively short amount of time as Dang noted, “The oval shape that we see here on this very short-period planet suggests that we’re catching it in the middle of migrating.”

Another odd fact about the planet is that based on the detection of infrared light, it is much hotter than initially thought, which can’t be explained by the rapid and extreme seasons. Dang explained this further, “This extra heating that we saw with Spitzer isn’t seasonal, it’s seen throughout the year,” adding, “Our investigation of this hot Jupiter finds that it’s heated not only by the nearby planet star, but it’s also heated from the interior of the planet.” Additionally, it is “puffier” than expected.

(Not XO-3b)

As for why the planet has so much extra heat, it could be caused by tidal heating caused by the star’s gravity pulling at the planet, causing it to become deformed and stretched. Another option is that it might not even be a planet after all. It could be a brown dwarf (also known as a “failed star”) or “…it might be not necessarily a failed star yet, but at the peak of its lifetime as a star.” Whatever it is, it’s definitely unusual. (An artist’s impression of XO-3b can be seen here.)

An artist's depiction of the planet XO-3b on an eccentric orbit around its star. Planet XO-3b has an internal source of heat, possibly from tidal heating, which is caused by the squeezing of the planet’s interior by the gravity of its parent star. This could be increased by the planet’s slightly elliptical orbit (shown on the right), meaning it’s more oval-shaped than circular.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))

The study was published in The Astronomical Journal where it can be read in full.