One of the strangest things that revolves around the mysteries of Mars is that some of the enigmas on the planet’s surface seem to have an eerie way of seeing the future. Or, rather, the other way around. You’ll soon see what I mean by that. Located on a specific area of Mars called Cydonia Mensae are two huge, battered and bruised structures that, for decades, have intrigued and amazed the public, NASA scientists and engineers, the media, the CIA, and psychics. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The most famous one of the two has become known as the “Face on Mars.” As for how NASA learned of the Face on Mars – something that directly led the rest of us to hear of it, and to finally see it, too – Mac Tonnies laid down the facts: “NASA itself discovered the Face, on July 25, 1976, and even showed it at a press conference, after it had been photographed by NASA’s Viking mission probe. Of course, it was written off as a curiosity. Scientific analysis would have to await independent researchers. The first two objects to attract attention were the Face and what has become known as the ‘D&M Pyramid.’ Both of them were unearthed by digital imaging specialists Vincent DiPietro and Gregory Molenaar [at the time, engineers at NASA’s Goddard Space Center at Greenbelt, Maryland]. Shortly after, Face researcher Richard Hoagland pointed out a collection of features near the Face which he termed the ‘City.’ The ‘Fort,’ too.”

(NASA)

The Face on Mars”

Now, we get to the weird part of this: the other Face on Mars; one that was “created” back in the 1950s. In one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” situations, it’s now time to turn our attentions to the connection between the Face on Mars and a legendary comic-book artist; a man who turned out to be one of the key figures in the “superhero” genre. It’s to 1958 that we now have to turn our attentions. It was in that year that Harvey Comics published a three-part production that went by the title of Race for the Moon. Although Kirby is primarily known for his distinct, and easily recognizable, style of drawing, he wasn’t just the artist on two issues of Race for the Moon. He was the writer of the story, too. Of the three stories, it’s the second comic-book in the trilogy that, for us, is the most important one of all. And, just why might that be? Because it revolves around nothing less than a giant, carved, stone head that is found on the surface of the planet Mars. It’s even referred to as “the Face on Mars” in the comic-book itself. A strange, but wholly coincidental precursor for what was to come to the fore a couple of decades later? Maybe so. There’s no doubt that there are undeniable parallels between the Face on Mars as we know it today, and the creation of Jack Kirby’s fictional Face on Mars, back in the late 1950s. Coincidence? Such a thing is certainly not impossible. Or, did Kirby have a brief glimpse at what would be seen, decades later, in the 1970s?

(NASA)

A real-life Face-Hugger?

Now, let’s turn to 1979. That was the year in which the highly successful movie, Alien – starring Sigourney Weaver – hit the cinemas. One of the creepiest critters in the movie were the Face-Huggers. Now, consider the next part of the story. Taken in July 2015 by NASA’s Curiosity Rover, one photo appears to show a strange creature that looks astonishingly like the monstrous face-invading creatures that appear in the phenomenally successful series of Alien movies. The story broke in early August 2015. The headlines were predictably sensational. The U.K.’s Metro newspaper ran with the story and titled their feature as follows: “Crab-like alien ‘facehugger’ is seen crawling out of a cave on Mars.” Coincidence? Finally, let’s get to one of the most famous of all sci-fi movies: 2001: A Space Odyssey.

How about a look at one of Mars’ moons? Namely, Phobos? There’s a good reason why we should discuss this tiny moon in this particular article. In 1968, the acclaimed sci-fi epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey – the work of producer and director, Stanley Kubrick – hit cinemas all around the world and raked in close to $200 Million. In the opening segment of the movie we see a tribe of primitive, early “ape-men” fighting for survival in the harsh landscape of what is now the continent of Africa – albeit in the film it plays out millions of years ago. One day the tribe awakes to find that overnight a strange, black-colored monolith has appeared in their very midst. In no time at all, the intelligence levels of the creatures are increased by, it appears, the monolith itself. The implication is that something of an extraterrestrial nature has kick-started human civilization into what will eventually be high gear. As amazing and as unbelievable as it may sound, a monolith has been photographed on the surface of Phobos. A case of fact eerily mirroring fiction? Well, that very much depends on one’s own opinion. It’s time now to address an issue as weird as those you’ve already seen.

(NASA)

Phobos: a moon of mysteries

We have a man named Efrain Palermo to thank for bringing the next incredible matter to light. As someone with a deep interest in Mars and its moons, he decided to make an extensive review of the many pictures that NASA had secured from its Mars Global Surveyor in 1998. Palermo was amazed by what he found. He said that while studying one particular image from Phobos “…my eye caught something sticking up out of the surface.” As to what that “something” was, Palermo added: “I downloaded it into Photoshop and zoomed into that area, and there it was, an apparent cylindrical shaped object casting a longish shadow and having a slanted roof.” Dr. Mark Carlotto, the author of The Martian Enigmas, and someone who has undertaken groundbreaking research into the controversies surrounding the Face on Mars and the Cydonia region, took an interest in the apparent monolith. Palermo explains that Carlotto “…referred me to Lan Fleming a NASA imaging specialist who has interest in Mars and other solar system anomalies. Lan looked at it and upon further examination and study concluded as did I, that this was a physical anomaly on the surface of Phobos.” Not only was this just an anomaly; it also strangely mirrored the opening parts of 2001: A Space Odyssey – namely, a mysterious monolith. Past and present blending together, and in a very strange – almost supernatural – fashion? Maybe, that’s exactly what it was.

• Note: NASA is an arm of the U.S. Government. Photos taken by NASA are considered to be in the public domain  

A couple of days ago, I shared with you a very eerie case – from the 1950s – of a Woman in Black and an Alien Big Cat. I thought that, today, I would expand on this eerie issue of the WIB and share with you what the Women in Black phenomenon is really like. Within the world of UFO research, the Men in Black are about as legendary as they are feared. These pale-faced, ghoulish entities have for decades terrorized into silence both witnesses to, and researchers of, UFO encounters. Theories for who or what the MIB might be are legion. They include: extraterrestrials, government agents, demonic creatures, vampires, time-travelers from the future, and inter-dimensional beings from realms that co-exist with ours. There may very well be more than one explanation for the unsettling phenomenon. While much has been written on the sinister and occasionally deadly actions of the MIB, very little has been penned on the subject of their equally bone-chilling companions: the Women in Black. Make no mistake: the WIB are all too real. And they are as ominous, predatory and dangerous as their male counterparts. In the same way that the Men in Black don’t always wear black, but sometimes wear military uniforms or specifically beige-colored outfits, so do the WIB, who are also quite partial to white costumes. In that sense, “WIB” is, just like “MIB,” a term that is somewhat flexible in terms of actual nature and description.

 (Nick Redfern)

The creepy companions of the Men in Black

The WIB may not have achieved the iconic status of the MIB – until now – but these fearsome females, and their collective role in silencing those that immerse themselves in the UFO puzzle, as well as in the domains of the occult and the world of the paranormal, are all too terrifyingly real. Not only that: the WIB have a long and twisted history.  Years before they plagued and tormented flying saucer seekers, the Women in Black roamed the landscape by night, stealing babies and young children, and plaguing the good folk of 19^th century United States and United Kingdom. They were also up to their infernal tricks in the 1920s. A definitive WIB surfaced in nothing less than a piece of publicity-based footage for a Charlie Chaplin movie, The Circus, which was made in 1928. The footage, undeniably genuine and shown not to have been tampered with, reveals what appears to be an old, short lady, wearing a long black coat and a black hat pulled low over her face, while walking through Los Angeles in west coast heat. If that was not strange enough, she is clearly holding to her ear what appears to be a cellphone and is talking into it as she walks. Weirder still, the Woman in Black sports an enormous pair of black shoes, which look most out of place, given her short stature. She also seems to be taking careful steps to avoid her face being seen clearly. Might she have been some kind of time-traveling Woman in Black, working hard – but spectacularly failing – to blend in with the people of Los Angeles, all those years ago?

Fifteen years later, a terrifying WIB haunted the Bender family of Bridgeport, Connecticut. It so happens that a certain Albert Bender, of that very clan began the Men in Black mystery. In the early 1950s, Bender, after establishing the International Flying Saucer Bureau, was visited and threatened with nothing less than death by a trio of pale, skinny, fedora-wearing MIB. They were visits which firmly set the scene for the decades of MIB-themed horror and mayhem that followed. Bender’s visitors were not secret-agents of government, however. He said they materialized in his bedroom – a converted attic in a creepy old house of Psycho proportions – amid an overpowering stench of sulfur. They were shadowy beings with demon-like, glowing eyes. We surely cannot blame the CIA, the FBI, or even the all-powerful NSA, for that! In 1956, UFO sleuth Gray Barker penned a book on Bender’s confrontations with the Men in Black. It was titled They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers and became a classic. Six years later, Bender penned his very own book on his encounters with the MIB: Flying Saucers and the Three Men. It was these two books that brought the MIB into the minds and homes of flying saucer enthusiasts across the world. After which, Bender dropped each and every one of his ties to Ufology. He was careful to avoid speaking about the subject ever again, and, thereon, focused his time on running the appreciation-society of composer Max Steiner.

Back in the 1930s, however, the Bender family had a black-garbed woman in its midst that tormented both young and old in the dead of night. Predating Albert Bender’s own experience with the MIB by years, the hideous silencer in black haunted the Benders near-endlessly. For the Bender family, long before the MIB there was a Woman in Black. In the 1960s, the emotionless, evil-eyed WIB turned up in the small, doom-filled town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. And right around the time that sightings of the legendary flying monster known as Mothman were at their height. Claiming to be “census-takers,” these pale-faced, staring-eyed WIB practically forced their way into the homes of frightened witnesses to Mothman. What began as seemingly normal questions about the number of people in the house, of the average income of the family, and of the number of rooms in the relevant property, soon mutated into something much stranger: persistent and intrusive questions about strange dreams, about unusual telephone interference, and about beliefs regarding the world of all-things of a paranormal nature soon followed.

(Nick Redfern)

Women in Black and Mothman, a strange connection

One of the WIB that put in an appearance at Point Pleasant claimed to have been the secretary of acclaimed author on all-things paranormal, John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies. Just like her male counterparts, she turned up on doorsteps late at night, waiting to be invited in, before grilling mystified and scared souls about their UFO and Mothman encounters. Then vanishing into the night after carefully instilling feelings of distinct fear in the interviewees. Only when dozens of such stories got back to Keel did he realize the sheer, incredible, scale of the dark ruse that was afoot. Keel had to break the unsettling news to each and every one of the frightened souls who contacted him: “I have no secretary.” In the 1970s, wig-wearing and anemic-looking WIB made life hell for more than a few people who were unfortunate enough to cross their paths. Something similar occurred in England, Scotland, and Ireland during the 1980s: a weird wave of encounters with “phantom social workers” hit the UK. They were out of the blue encounters that eerily paralleled the incidents involving WIB-based “census-takers” that manifested in West Virginia back in the 1960s.

In early 1987, Bruce Lee, a book-editor for Morrow, had an experience with a WIB-type character in an uptown New York bookstore. Lee’s attention to the curious woman – short, wrapped in a wool hat and a long scarf, and wearing large black sunglasses behind which could be seen huge, “mad dog” eyes – was prompted by something strange and synchronistic. She and her odd partner were speed-reading the pages of the then-newly-published UFO-themed book, Communion, by Whitley Strieber. It was a book published by the very company Lee was working for. Lee quickly exited the store, shaken to the core by the appearance and hostile air that the peculiar pair oozed in his presence. Both 2012 and 2014 saw incredible and frightening encounters with the Women in Black across the United States. And, as you will now learn, the above-accounts amount to the mere tip of what is a gigantic, much under-appreciated iceberg. When paranormal activity occurs, when UFOs intrude upon the lives of petrified people, and when researchers of all things paranormal get too close to the truth for their own good, the WIB are ready to strike. They dwell within darkness, they surface when the landscape is black and shadowy, and they spread terror and negativity wherever they walk. Or, on occasion, silently glide. They are the Women in Black. Fear them. Keep away from them. And never, ever, let them in the house.

 (Nick Redfern)

On October 11, 1973, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker claim they were fishing off a pier on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi when they saw a UFO, were abducted by aliens, taken on their ship, subjected to experiments, and then returned to the ground. The incident has become one of the best-known and most researched alien abduction cases. Recently, Calvin Parker, who was 19 in 1973, has revealed something new – he has been experiencing visions since the alleged abduction and he’s now fearful because some of the visions are coming true

“My time here on earth is almost over, having had a lot of health problems. I would not want to leave here knowing there could be something I could do to help someone. So I will tell what I was shown that day onboard the UFO and I will try to go into as much detail as I can remember. There is a plague going on now, of course there has always been some kind of plague since the beginning of time but from what I saw this on gets even worse.”

In an interview with The Mirror, Parker, now 68, says he had a near-death experience during the abduction which has affected his health ever since. Charles Hickson was always the more revealing witness (he died in 2011), while Parker never really opened up until his book, Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter: My Story, was published in 2018. Parker’s first revelation to The Mirror is about a massive plague – it’s easy to assume he’s equating it to the current COVID-19 pandemic with references to killing millions, “family against family, friend against friend” and not trusting anyone. Sound familiar?

“Then there is going to be a great war that one side blames the other. In my vision I have seen people’s skin melt off their body. I don’t know if it’s a nuclear war or not but it puts nation against nation. There will not be a nation on Earth that is not touched by this war.”

Parker’s second vision of a “great war” comes on the heels of the escalation of the border conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Coincidence? He predicts food shortages, crop failures and water supplies being cut off as a result of this war. Both of these were caused by humans and “God is going to teach us a lesson and stay out of it before he steps back in.” That last comment may be a sign of what might really be going on in Calvin Parker’s mind – his own mortality, due to cancer and the abduction event, and his frustration with current U.S. politics.

“My personal opinion is that they [politicians] are a bunch of idiots that overlook what is best for our planet and the entire human race.”

While he says these “visions” came from his abduction, Parker makes a U-turn and doesn’t call them inevitable events – instead, he says humanity will change for the better and begin to heal “slowly but surely.” What happened to the plague and the war? He then presents the visions either as a “curse” he was given that ruined his life or as a message he’s supposed to reveal “to help save our planet or mankind.”

Something happened in 1973 that changed the life of Calvin Parker. Was it an alien abduction or a manmade event? Is Calvin Parker trying to make things right for the world … or for himself?

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