Evidence of serious, government concerns about the alien abduction phenomenon began in the 1950s. That was the year in which a young American soldier found himself caught up in a very strange saga that, to a degree, still disturbs him to this very day. It all went down on a chilly night in Utah’s expansive desert. Private Bernard Gerry Irwin was the man whose life took a turn of the decidedly unforeseen type. February 20, 1959 began as a regular day for Irwin, but, it most definitely didn’t end that way. At the time, Irwin was driving to Fort Bliss, Texas, from Idaho – the former being the facility at which Irwin was stationed, and the latter his home state. As night set in, something completely unforeseen and paradigm-shifting happened to Irwin. He was about to be confronted by the UFO phenomenon in spectacular and mysterious fashion.

The night was dark, silent and all but empty of vehicles. As desert highways so often are well after sunset. But, for Irwin this was a night he would never forget – which is somewhat ironic, as a result of the fact that certain portions of his memory were forever erased from his mind. As he drove along the winding, curving road, Irwin was suddenly distracted by a bright light in the night sky – but at a distinctly low level – which descended below a looming ridge. A meteorite? No. A flare, perhaps? Wrong again. Maybe an aircraft in trouble? That was Irwin’s first thought and, with that in mind, he brought his car to a stop at the side of the road, and turned on the blinkers. He quickly got out, and left a note for passing drivers. It read: Have gone to investigate what looks like a plane crash about one-quarter mile to my right. Notify state police immediately. Wearing his Army coat and armed with a flashlight, Irwin headed off into the unknown. Irwin headed for what he suspected – and feared – just might be the site of a plane crash, only to find himself in an even greater nightmare.

The next thing Irwin remembered was waking up in a hospital bed in Cedar City. Where and why, he didn’t know. A doctor and a nurse were standing around the bed, and were soon joined by a local county sheriff. Irwin was confused and scared, which is not surprising. The other three were far more interested in finding out what had gone on. Irwin kept muttering about “survivors,” asking the nurse and the doctor if there were any. Were they all killed? Who “they” might have been, it seems that no-one really knew. That included Irwin, whose mind was in complete turmoil. The doctor then broke the news: Irwin had been unconscious for a full day and night. It was only thanks to a passing warden with the Fish and Game Commission, who came across Irwin’s car, that Irwin was found. The police were soon on the scene, and Irwin was finally found, completely unresponsive, around a quarter of a mile from the road. It was in the early hours before Irwin was finally resting in an unfamiliar bed.

Irwin was kept under observation for several days, but remained unable to recall any of the events of that strange night. Military personnel soon appeared on the scene to fly Irwin back to Fort Bliss, where he was placed under additional observation by a medical team. After around a full week, Irwin was declared back to full health. But, try telling that to Irwin. Only a couple of days after he got the green-light to return to work, Irwin collapsed in a dead faint. He failed to remember the names and faces of the people who had taken care of him on his return to his base. Things got even weirder: in an almost hypnotic state he got a bus ticket to Utah and headed out to the scene of the incident which had caused so much puzzlement and concern. Not only that, in leaving his post, Irwin was officially AWOL – something which would come back to cause significant problems with his superior officers, which is hardly surprising. In somewhat of a daze, Irwin then walked back to Cedar City. While Irwin was certainly in big trouble with his commanding officers – he received a fine and a loss of rank – more intriguing was the response of the medical people who were required to continue to observe Irwin and try and figure out what had happened to him on that lonely, dark night.

Certainly, one of the most notable pieces of evidence that has surfaced via the Freedom of Information Act is a document prepared by a Captain Valentine, who was Irwin’s psychiatrist while he was undergoing treatment for his strange condition. On March 27, 1959, Irwin was injected with sodium amytal. It provoked a strange response from Irwin, which caught Captain Valentine’s deep attention. In his official report on this particular drug-induced session, the captain wrote: “[Irwin] stated there was a ‘special intelligence’ that he couldn’t explain to me, since it would be incomprehensible to me, which has directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah. He says that if he tells what was behind the incidents in Utah there will be a ‘big investigation’ that he does not want to be bothered with and also because it will harm many people and he doesn’t want that to happen. He states ‘it’ all began at the age of three years,’ although he will not reveal how or what began, stating that it would provide a clue to me as to what is behind all this. Also, he informed me that he could leave this hospital any time if he wanted to by invoking a special force. Following this interview the patient stated he could remember nothing of what he said during it.”

Notably, David Booher – a UFO researcher who has carefully investigated the Irwin saga – says of Irwin’s statement made to Captain Valentine: “It’s intriguing that Gerry speaks of an intelligence which ‘directed him not to remember or not to tell me about any of the events in Utah.’ As we know, in the decades that followed this would become a very common theme in the alien abduction literature, i.e. having memories blocked and/or being warned against telling others about the experience.” The Freedom of Information Act has also shown that the military, despite dosing Irwin with drugs to try and uncover the true story of that night in the desert in 1959, drew nothing but blanks. But, the words of Captain Valentine strongly suggest he suspected that there was much more to the story than met the eye – and particularly so considering that Irwin had alluded to the fact that something happened to him “at the age of three.” It should be noted that alien abduction phenomena very often begins in early childhood. The case of Private First Class Bernard G. Irwin is a most important one.

There’s no doubt that the Roswell “UFO crash” of July 1947 is the most visible and talked about incident of its type. It’s a case that is noted for two important things that are relevant to today’s article. Number One: the U.S. government has changed its views time and time again on what happened outside of the city of Roswell all those years ago. Number Two: numerous civilians caught up in the maelstrom were “treated” to death-threats. The story was that a “Flying Disk” had come down. There was, however, a sudden retraction: it was all a big mistake. Nothing but a weather-balloon hit the ground on the Foster Ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico. Sorry! Screw-Up! That explanation stayed firmly in place until the early 1990s. That’s when the U.S. Air Force changed its story. Apparently, the weather-balloon was not a weather-balloon, after all. It was a huge “Mogul” balloon designed to monitor for detonations of early atomic weapons of the Soviet Union. The Air Force, also in the 1990s, made it clear that because Mogul balloons didn’t carry people, there couldn’t have been any bodies (alien or human) at the crash-site. Ready for another explanation? Yeah, there is one. In 1997, the Air Force said there were bodies (of a sort, at least), after all. They were, the Air Force said, crash-test dummies. That’s a hell of a lot of different explanations for one, solitary case. No wonder the Roswell affair causes more than a few people to go “Hmm.” Even the U.S. media went “Hmm” when the government’s crash-test dummies report was reeled out for one and all to see. Particularly so, because it was quickly shown by journalists that the dummy tests didn’t even begin until the early 1950s, never mind what was going on in 1947. I think that deserves a third “Hmm.”

At the Roswell Crash Site

(Nick Redfern)

Now, let’s take a look at another angle of the Roswell mystery: the threats that were made to people involved in the immediate wake of the event. It’s a fact there are literally dozens of people who, back in 1947 – when everything went crazy for a few days and nights – were told not to talk about what they had seen. As in: ever. Fucking ever. We’re talking about debris, strange foil-like materials, and even small bodies scattered around and clearly damaged to a degree. There are claims that people had their lives threatened. Stay silent or else. And, we all know what “or else” means, right? Reportedly, those threats didn’t end when the materials and the bodies were scooped up. Some people were threatened for years. Decades, actually. There are reports of people in the Roswell area having had their phones “tapped” for ages. Right up until the 1990s, when they passed away, some of the key, military figures in the story – such as Sheridan Cavitt and Lewis Rickett – were extremely careful about what they said to UFO researchers. And what they didn’t say. Cavitt, particularly, was very concerned about being tied to the the matter of those bodies, whatever they may have been. And, we’re talking about decades after the whole thing was all over. Yet, even in the nineties, Cavitt and Rickett were still almost shitting bricks when the Roswell affair – and particularly word of the bodies – popped up.  But, is it all over? That’s where we get to the crux of today’s article.

If the government had the whole Roswell story carefully wrapped up (in a secure “Hangar 18”-type scenario), and there was not a single bit of solid evidence hidden away by people in the area, there would have been no need, at all, for the death-threats. There would have been no need for endless phone surveillance. Why? Because the locals, the witnesses, and the rancher, W.W. “Mac” Brazel, would have had no evidence to make a case that something strange really happened. And the government would have been safe, knowing that everything was in a never-ending state of total lock-down. But, just maybe, the government isn’t safe. Not a bit. Consider this: both the government and the Air Force, of today, may not have a collective handle on what happened back in 1947. Maybe, more than a bit of debris still resides in the homes of the relatives of the original witnesses. And, sitting there until someone decides to come forward and hand it over to the media. Perhaps, there’s much more than a bit of debris hidden away in some of the old ranches of Lincoln County. Pieces of advanced technology, too, whether ours or “theirs.” Consider the following as a working scenario: that with all of the chaotic activity going on at the Foster Ranch (and its immediate surroundings) far more than what we know could have been quickly scooped up by local folk. Indeed, there is evidence that much was seen, touched and quickly stuffed in pockets before the military even had the chance to reach the ranch. Never mind close it down for a week or so.

Where “something” was found on the ranch 

(Nick Redfern)

There’s also the fascinating story of the late “Dee” Proctor. In later years, and when his mother was elderly and in extremely ill-health, Proctor – who had seen just about everything there was to see on the legendary day something strange came down – chose to drive her to a part of the ranch about two miles from the primary site. When they arrived, Dee told his mom they were now at another site on the ranch where what was termed “something else” was found by rancher Brazel and Proctor himself. The inference was that a body (or more than one body) was stumbled upon at that location. And it was found before the military had the chance to get there first. In light of that, who really knows what went on in that period of chaos? There’s also the matter of a significant number of files from the Roswell base – dating from the 1940s to the 1950s – that cannot be found. Anywhere. Even the Government Accountability Office admitted that when they went looking after the truth of Roswell, the files were nowhere in sight. Maybe, some element of the government still has those voluminous files – hidden away, somewhere. What if, though, an Edward Snowden-type character carefully, and secretly, was able to get his or her hands on all of those potentially crucial 1940s-1950s-era Roswell files? And, in the process, handed them over to someone who, one day, just might choose to come forward with the answers to the mystery? Possibly, that’s exactly what has happened. We’re just waiting – patiently or not – for that person to reveal themself. But, we, the media, the Air Force and the government, just don’t know it. But, the government prays it never happens.

What all of this just might mean is that – in a situation that most people haven’t thought of – the government totally failed to secure all of the material and evidence found at the crash-site. The result? Crucial data was circulating all around the place. And the military – racing around like headless chickens – were trying to get the whole thing wrapped up; but, in the process, failing miserably. In a strange situation, kids at the time in the area, like Dee Proctor, probably knew way more back then than any of us do now. Even more than a lot of the military guys ordered to cordon the place, and begin the threats, knew less than Dee ever did. Many people might consider the finding of whatever-it-was that came down on the Foster Ranch as something amazing. But, with huge amounts of missing files, and debris quickly picked up and hidden by the ranchers and locals who were way ahead of the military, you can easily see how and why – for the Air Force – Roswell might become the U.S. government’s biggest nightmare. I can easily see a scenario in which those in government, today, who are still tasked with keeping the truth about Roswell hidden, are terrified not by what is hidden by them, but by what just might be held in someone’s old attic. Possibly, something in an old, rusty container buried two-feet-down on the fringes of the old ranch and that, one day, might come to the surface. Or, something amazing under someone’s floorboards. Something that might come tumbling out in a way that the government will be completely unable to foresee, control or confiscate. And, solely, because of one reason: the government wasn’t right on top of things when it happened.

Since the dawn of time human beings have moved forward through resourcefulness, invention and technology. It is what brought us up from mere apes cowering in the dark, to the advance being we are today, travelling to the stars and unravelling the secrets of the universe. Discovery and innovation have driven us to be the most advanced species the world has ever known, and all of this comes from the discoveries and inventions of those who have managed to unfurl the layers from what we do not understand. But discovery and invention are hard. It takes a lot of work and trial and error, and so for as long as amazing discoveries have been around there have been those who have just tried to fake it. Here are some of the boldest, cunning, and most baffling technological hoaxes from the annals of history.

A very early hoax involved a type of robot before robots were ever even really a thing. In 1769, a Hungarian nobleman by the name of Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen built what he claimed to be a fully-functioning, chess playing robot, which at the time were typically referred to as “automatons.” It appeared as a large wooden box filled with gears, cogs, wires, and other fancy looking technological stuff, and atop this box sat a wooden mannequin dressed in Turkish clothes for some reason, and with maneuverable arms and hands. There was a large handle on the side, which Kempelen would dramatically wind up to activate the automaton, after which it would creepily spring to life to play chess. It had dexterous hands, could pick up and move chess pieces on its own, and not only that, it was touted as having the ability to “think,” planning strategies and studying and reacting to its opponent’s moves.

When Kempelen first unveiled his creation it caused a major stir, as no one had ever seen any automaton that could do anything other than merely mimic humans and animals at the most rudimentary level. By all appearances, this was an actual thinking robot able to interact with an opponent, which was mind-blowing at the time. Kempelen then toured all over the place giving demonstrations of his wondrous machine. A typical show would be for him to crank up the robot, which was affectionately nicknamed “The Turk,” and then invite someone from the audience to come up and try to play chess with it, and they almost always lost to it. He was always very willing to show that it was not an illusion, opening the side of the machine to allow spectators to see that there was not a man hidden inside, and no one could quite figure out how it all worked. Before long, these demonstrations were immensely popular, bringing in nobles, aristocrats, and even Benjamin Franklin, who lost a chess match to it. Everyone was held in awe.

Kempelen’s chess-playing robot

These demonstrations would go on until 1790, when Kempelen would have his creation taken apart and put into storage. Upon his death in 1805, it was sold by his family to a German by the name of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, who put it back together and began touring it around America. As it began to gain more fame, speculation on how it worked began doing the rounds again, with many skeptics surmising that there had to somehow be a person, maybe even a dwarf, hidden within the box or even the wooden Turk itself. It would not be until 1837 that the secret would finally come out, when those involved with the scam came forward to tell how it was done. It would turn out that various chess masters had been hidden inside the box as many had suspected, and that a series of sliding panels, mirrors, and a rolling chair had been used to conceal them while audience members inspected the inside of the box. It was then just a matter of using magnetic pieces over the hidden player’s head to gage where the opponent had moved, and then use a system of levers to move his own pieces. In the end, it was quite a simple explanation for a device that had baffled and delighted audiences for the better part of a century, and it caused great disappointment. The Turk itself would be put back into storage, and its days were finally put to an end by a warehouse fire in 1854.

At the same time that Maelzel was touring the chess-playing robot, another inventor was widely promoting what he claimed to be an actual, fully functioning perpetual motion machine. The concept of what has become known as “perpetual motion” is simple at its core. It basically describes an object or body that remains in continuous motion forever without any external energy source. If a machine were to be built using some sort of perpetual motion technology, it would theoretically run forever without any need for fuel, batteries, or power of any kind. This means basically unlimited energy, freeing us from the tethers of finite sources of fuel and giving us devices that will never wind down or die out. It has become a sort of holy grail for certain individuals, who continue to plug away at this seemingly unobtainable dream, and it is just amazing how much the idea of perpetual motion has enthralled people over a large portion of history. One of these was first unveiled in 1812 by an until then rather unknown man named Charles Redheffer, who began exhibiting his invention in his home in Philadelphia, in the United States.

His fantastical machine featured a gravity-driven pendulum with a large horizontal gear on the bottom, and a smaller gear that interlocked with the larger one, with the large gear and the shaft able to rotate independently. On the gear were two ramps that held weights, and it all supposedly worked by these weights pushing the large gear away from the shaft, which would create friction that would cause the shaft and gear to spin. This spinning gear would then power the interlocked smaller gear, and on and on it would go, supposedly forever unless the weights were removed. The machine was put on display and immediately became a smash sensation, drawing in droves of amazed spectators and scientists alike, all of whom were charged a hefty admission fee by Redheffer and none of who could figure out how it all worked. It was largely whispered that he had finally cracked perpetual motion, that he had achieved the seemingly impossible dream. Before long Redhefer was getting quite rich off of his oddball machine, and there was much excited speculation that he had actually done it and achieved true perpetual motion, despite raised eyebrows from the scientific community.

Diagram of Redheffer’s machine

Redheffer, emboldened by the response to his device, actually requested funding from the state of Pennsylvania to build a much larger version, and on January 21, 1813, state inspectors were sent to take a look at the machine before any money would be paid. Unfortunately for Redheffer, he had never let anyone ever take a good, close look at his device, and it would soon become apparent why. The inspectors arrived and were immediately suspicious when it turned out they could only view it through a window into a locked room. Even so, there were cracks appearing in Redheffer’s claims when it was noticed that the gear cogs were worn down in such a way as to suggest that the weights, shaft, and large gear were not powering the smaller gear, as Redheffer claimed, but rather the other way around. To them this was an obvious hoax, but the way they dealt with it is rather amusing. Rather than call out Redheffer on his scam, inspector Nathan Sellers hired a local engineer by the name of Isaiah Lukens to build a replica that was more compact and set within a solid baseboard with a square piece of glass at the top. There was no discernible way as to why it could work, yet concealed within the machine was a wind able motor that was wound through the covert use of a wooden decorative finial. With a little sleight of hand, the illusion was nearly perfect, and when he saw it Redheffer himself was so incredibly surprised to see what he took to be a real perpetual motion machine that he allegedly secretly offered Lukens a large amount of money to know the secret. After this, the news did the rest of the work and Redheffer was undone and exposed through a taste of his own medicine.

Amazingly, this did not put a stop to Redheffer. Undeterred, he simply moved to New York to set up shop there where his reputation hadn’t been as tarnished, once again enjoying some amount a fame and drawing in droves of curiosity seekers. One of these was an engineer by the name of Robert Fulton, who noticed something fishy as he observed the mysterious device in action. He could see a slight wobble to it, and also noticed a very slight unevenness to its speed and the sounds it made, both things that should not be present in a real perpetual motion device. A real device of this type would need to be frictionless and perfectly silent because friction and sound would be a loss of energy, so these were glaring clues that something was off, especially to his trained eye. Realizing that it was obviously being somehow powered by crank motion, Fulton confronted Redheffer on the spot, but the inventor amazingly held his ground, insisting that the machine was real.

Fulton then challenged Redheffer to allow him to search for any possible source of outside power, to which Redheffer foolishly agreed. After this, Fulton simply tore out a section of wall in full view of a gathered audience to find a concealed cable that led to an upstairs room, where an old man was found operating a crank. The spectators, who had all paid good money to see the amazing “perpetual motion machine,” were less than thrilled. They reportedly immediately took out their frustrations on the machine itself, smashing it to pieces, and might have done the same to Redheffer if he hadn’t already hi-tailed it out of there to later skip town. Unbelievably, Redheffer would claim several years later that he had created another machine, and that it was totally, for sure real this time, and he even got a patent for it in 1920, but since it was never put on display or examined and the patent was lost in a fire who knows if there was any truth to it.

Such an invention would be groundbreaking, completely changing our world, and it is a fascinating thing to think about it, yet according to our current knowledge of physics it simply just isn’t possible, as such a machine would violate one or more of the laws of thermodynamics. To put it in simple terms, the First Law of Thermodynamics basically is about the conservation of energy, and says that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another, making the idea of a machine constantly creating its own energy without any outside influence impossible. There is also the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which in simple terms more or less says that an isolated system will always move toward a state of disorder, for instance heat will always dissipate and energy will be lost on any number of variables, including moving parts, friction, even sound, with the more energy formed meaning the more energy wasted. It is all much more complicated than this very basic explanation, but the gist is, a perpetual motion machine is impossible according to our current understanding of the universe and the laws of the conversation of energy. Alas, all of the many supposed perpetual motion machines have proven to be hoaxes.

In 1875 we have the strange story of John Worrell Keely, who founded the Keely Motor Company. Keely made the rather bold claim that he had invented what he called a “vibratory generator” that could purportedly wrest enough power out of a quart of water to pull a fully loaded train. He would give some seemingly successful demonstrations of this amazing device, and soon had investors throwing money at him to develop it. He would keep taking their money and stalling as he fine tuned his device, but after more than a decade of this suspicions began to arise. Nevertheless, it was such a potentially ground breaking marvel that there was still hope it might all be real. Sadly, when Keeley died in 1898 it was discovered that he had been pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes, with him having merely used a clever ruse of having a compressed air machine hidden away that would provide power to the engine. This would not be the last time someone would try to fool everyone into thinking they could turn power into fuel, and we will get to another case later.

John Worrell Keely

Not all bogus inventions were for benevolent purposes. In 1876 a self-proclaimed “Professor” by the name of James C. Wingard, of New Orleans, came forth with what he claimed to be a weapon that he had designed that could utterly destroy Naval vessels. It was supposedly essentially a death ray that he said projected a “nameless force,” and which could devastate any vessel “so as to leave no trace of them in their former shape” from a range of up to 5 miles. Wingard heavily promoted his device as the future of warfare, and promised that any one who had possession of it would rule the seas and be unstoppable, able to annihilate any enemy. This obviously had the attention of the military, and he went about arranging a demonstration on June 8, 1876 at Lake Pontchartrain. As a large crowd looked on, Wingard engaged his device, aiming it at a large wooden schooner. There was apparently a lag of around a minute before the schooner exploded into a rain of fire and smoke, after which the vessel rapidly sank.

It would soon be found that the schooner had been completely obliterated, with one statement saying “even the small timbers aft of the mainmast were broken all to pieces,” and the test seemed to have been a resounding success. Wingard then formed a stock company in Boston and continued his work on refining his groundbreaking weapon, attracting many investors. As with Keeley, they were soon demanding results, so he set up another demonstration in Boston Harbor. However, when he activated the device, there was an explosion far from the target vessel, and an investigation would find a disintegrated rowboat and two bodies in the water. Wingard cancelled the demonstration and that was all highly suspicious, with skeptics now suggesting that he was merely sending a crew out on a rowboat to secretly plant explosives on the target vessel and then using a triggering mechanism to ignite it. Wracked with guilt, Wingard would come clean and admit that this was the case, and that his team had died when the explosives had accidentally gone off. The death ray had been a sham all along.

Moving onto 1896 we have the bizarre story of Rev. Prescott Ford Jernegan, of Middletown, Connecticut, who claimed to have developed a way to extract gold from sea water with a device he called the “Gold Accumulator.” It was not a new idea at the time, but no one had ever even come close to accomplishing it. He first came to a jeweler named Arthur Ryan with this amazing invention, and offered to perform a demonstration. The machine itself looked like a simple wooden box with holes that water could pass through, with the inside containing mercury that would be electrically charged to activate a “secret ingredient.” The box was to be lowered into sea water, left overnight, and when it was pulled up the next day it would be filled with gold due to some mysterious chemical process. When Ryan agreed to see a demonstration, Jernegan simply gave him the box and told him he could do it on his own.

In February of 1897 Ryan went about testing the device on a wharf outside of Providence, Rhode Island, along with several colleagues. They used it as its inventor had instructed them to, lowered it into the water, and the next morning sure enough there were flecks of gold within it. It wasn’t as much as they had been expecting, but it was still over $100 dollars of gold in today’s money so it was seen as promising. If a collection of such machines could be set up running day and night, it could prove to be quite lucrative indeed. Jernagan said he could churn out a further 1,000 devices within the year, and there were dollar signs dancing through Ryan’s eyes. Jernegan, Ryan, and a team of investors founded the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company, and got to work on getting stinky filthy rich.

They set up an array of accumulators in Maine and Boston, and began pulling in more gold from them, “proving” it worked and attracting people wanting to buy stock in the company. Investors were pouring in money, interest was high, and it seemed to be too good to be true, and sadly, it was. In July of 1898, Jernegan suddenly vanished without a trace, later found to have hi-tailed it to Europe under a fake name. Not long after they were gone, the accumulators stopped producing gold, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out that they had all been scammed. It would turn out that Jernegan had an assistant named Charles Fisher, who also happened to have been a trained diver. It turned out that he had been secretly diving into the sea to load the accumulators with gold, a small price to pay considering how much they were pulling in from investors. As soon as the orders for their machines had gone up, they had taken all of the invested money and made a run for it, making a cool $200,000 each, about a bajillion dollars in today’s money. The two scam artists were never caught, but the idea of extracting gold from sea water remained for quite some time.

In 1909, we have the clever hoax of an inventor named Wallace Tillinghast, from Worcester, Massachusetts, who claimed that he had built an amazing new type of airplane. This was only a few years after the Wright Brothers had made their first flight, and aircraft were still in their infancy, slow and only capable of short stints with little extra weight. Indeed, the longest flight up to then was Louis Blériot’s solo flight across the English Channel, which had gone only 22 miles. In comparison, Tillinghast claimed that his own design could hold three passengers and fly over 300 miles at an average speed of 120 miles an hour, which might as well have been magic at the time. He further claimed that he had performed several test flights of his aircraft that confirmed these numbers, and excitement was high.

Through all of this, Tillinghast was very secretive as to how his airplane worked, claiming that he did not want the plans to get into the wring hands, but he assured the public that he would come forward with his amazing invention. In the meantime, there were alleged sightings of the new airplane all over New England, with thousands of witnesses and many claiming that it often shot a searchlight below it. However, there were many skeptics. Wilbur Wright himself dismissed Tillinghast’s claims as “too palpably absurd from the first to take seriously,” and reporters who had been following him and even staking out his home could find no evidence that he had any such plane or workshop where he claimed to be working on it.

As this was going on there were still numerous sightings of a mysterious airship the like of which no one had ever seen, and Tillinghast insisted that he was telling the truth. Eventually, a local man named C.D. Rawson admitted to causing the sightings with lights and reflectors attached to owls as a hoax, but Tillinghast did not budge from his adamant position that his invention was real. 1910 came and went with no further word on the amazing new airplane, and the public ended up merely shrugging their shoulders and moving on. It would largely be looked at as a huge hoax, with no evidence that Tillinghast had any such aircraft or had ever made a flight at all, and he would just sort of fade away into the background.

Moving on into more modern times, we have still more mysterious supposed inventions that could have had world changing implications. In the 1970s, a man named Thomas Ogle claimed to have developed a new type of car carburetor that supposedly could make gasoline into a pressurized vapor and utilize it on the engine’s firing chambers in an incredibly super efficient manner, allowing vehicles to allegedly run over 100 miles to the gallon. In addition, Ogle claimed that any car could be modified to use the new system easily and for not much additional cost, making the whole thing seem almost too good to be true. Ogle himself showed off a Ford Galaxie that had supposedly been fitted with the new miracle carburetor and was clocked at around 113 miles to the gallon.

Unfortunately we will never know. Ogle died in 1981 without ever having divulged just how the vapor carburetor worked, and even his death has sparked controversy, with some saying he was intentionally poisoned by someone within the big gasoline companies who stood to lose the most from such an innovative product. Considering that no one has ever been able to replicate the process, it has been speculated that the whole thing could have been a hoax, with Ogle simply showing an illusion utilizing hidden fuel tanks, but other have defended his invention as having been real, and in the end the fact is we simply don’t know. All we know is that it would have been a revolutionary development way ahead of its time.

Thomas Ogle

Getting back to perpetual motion machines, one was unveiled in 1979 by American inventor Joseph Newman. The machine was called the DC motor, and according to him worked by using “energy in a magnetic field consisting of matter in motion,” and which he claimed could produce more energy than was put into it. He even went about seeking a patent for his invention, but it was denied as the Patent Office could not see how it could feasibly work. When Newman appealed this decision, it was found in an investigation by the National Bureau of Standards that the device’s power output was never above 100% of the power supplied to it, which was not promising. Newman would continue to adamantly insist that his machine really worked, but he sort of fell into obscurity after making all manner of other crackpot claims over the years. Whether his supposed perpetual motion machine ever really worked or not remains unknown, but everything we know about science says probably not. For now, the notion of a real working perpetual motion machine really does sit in the realm of science fiction, and it has mostly been a pursuit abandoned by most real scientists. It has come to be relegated to mad inventors working in their garages against all odds to try and make the impossible possible.

Our species is always going to reach towards the horizon and penetrate into the mysteries that we don’t understand, further opening up new discoveries and propelling our progress. This is an innate feature of our kind, and to be sure there will be leaps and bounds made over the coming decades that will bring true progress. Yet looking back at cases such as these it seems that for as much progress as we make, there will always be those willing to fake it for fame or money.

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

Beware of the Aswang

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

Major General Edward Lansdale

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

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

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

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

For decades, there have been people in various locations around the world who claim to be able to perceive a strange, low-frequency throbbing noise of undetermined origin.

The debate over the cause of the sound—as well as whether it exists at all—had at one time been an item of frequent debate in the scientific community. One of the earliest instances involving the curious phenomenon had been reported in the English Sunday Mirror in 1977, which began with a single account of a UK resident who claimed to be annoyed almost constantly by such a low humming sound. After the account was published, hundreds of letters in response began to flood the offices of the Mirror, with additional accounts from people who said that they also could hear this maddening humming sound at all hours of the day.

The widespread public response resulted in doctors examining some of the individuals, which did lend to the possibility that some of the sounds people claimed to hear might have internal origins, which might involve afflictions like tinnitus. While tinnitus sufferers often hear an almost whining, high-pitched sound, several of the people that doctors spoke to described hearing something much different: this was described as a low-pitched droning hum, which many believed to have an external source. The doctors agreed, attributing the roughly 40 Hz hum, modulated at 1.6 kHz, to be the result of industrial noise; yet despite this, there was never any actual industrial source determined.

A variety of other possible sources that had been suggested ranged from jet stream noises to sounds emanating from the ocean. Another novel idea involved that small percentages of the population suffered from an unusually acute ability to perceive sounds at around 40 Hz! Soon, similar accounts from other places around the world that included the United States would also begin to surface, with descriptions of the anomalous low-frequency sound being popularly associated with areas like Taos, New Mexico, among other locations.

Welcome sign at Taos New Mexico, location of an unusual hum reported by residents for decades

(Billy Hawthorn / Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

The ongoing complaints about these unusual sounds resulted in an investigation into their possible causes in the 1990s, funded by the UK Department of Energy. “The move is seen as an acknowledgment that some sufferers at least are not imagining the noise which causes them so much misery,” New Scientist reported following the DoE’s announcement that it would fund the research.

Even prior to the DoE-funded studies in the 1990s, a physicist at Chelsea College in London had been investigating the similar phenomenon afflicting UK residents and found data on the phenomenon that dated all the way back to 1973, in which a university study had identified at least 50 individuals who had experienced similar problems with hearing ongoing humming noises.

As early as 1988, the DoE had already commissioned the University of Salford to begin collecting information about the hum that so many residents claimed to be troubled by. With an estimated 500 individuals complaining about the noise on an annual basis, in 1989 the Low-Frequency Noise Sufferers Association was formed, an organization of both the afflicted and those lobbying on their behalf, which began to place additional pressure on the DoE to take action and get to the bottom of whatever had been causing the unusual sounds.

Throughout the 1990s, a range of purported causes was explored, which ranged from the existing theories about industrial noise to vehicular noise emanating from highways, and even underground pipes used to pump gas from high power turbines, which it was suggested might be capable of causing pipe organ-like sounds (interestingly, unidentified sounds reported in a variety of locales over the years have been likened to almost “ethereal” organ music, which appears to arise from someplace underground).

Aerial view of Taos, New Mexico

( Billy Hawthorn / Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

Around the same time that UK studies were underway, similar investigations into the hum reported by residents near Taos, New Mexico were undertaken, which produced very similar results. Among the takeaways had been that around two percent of the population in either location claimed to be “hummers”, the name given to those in the UK who could hear the noise. Equal percentages of male and female sufferers were reported, and the phenomenon appeared to be most prevalent among middle-aged people. The noises appeared to occur at frequencies anywhere from 32 Hz to around 80 Hz, modulated from 0.5 to 2 Hz. In the case of the Taos hum, some residents claimed that they were able to move away from the source of the hum, stating that they could no longer hear it at a distance of more than 30 miles from Taos.

Since the studies that were undertaken in the 1990s, a few additional possible explanations for the strange humming sounds have been offered. One suggests that the movement of deep ocean currents may actually be the source of the noises, which are naturally “amplified” in certain regions, making these otherwise unnoticeable sounds evident at locations like Taos and in the UK.

However, to date, there is no single proposed solution that seems to fully account for the ongoing mystery of “hummers” around the world, or the unusual—and very annoying—audible plight they suffer from.

A new study on DNA has revealed that people living today are only between 1.5% and 7% modern humans. No, this doesn’t mean that we’re over 90% alien (or are we…?), but it does indicate that we have very old DNA belonging to our ancient ancestors.

According to the study, only a very small percentage of our genome is uniquely human. Researchers extracted DNA belonging to skeletal remains of Neanderthals and Denisovans as well as from 279 people living in different parts of the world today. Then the experts took that information regarding sequenced genomes and developed a family tree for Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

They found two important factors that really stood out: the first bombshell was that between 1.5 and 7% of our genome is unique to our species which means that at least 93% of our genome is a result of a mixture between Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and Denisovans. The second discovery was that in the past 600,000 years, there were numerous bursts of genetic adaptations regarding brain development and function of humans.

By creating the evolutionary trees, the team of researchers were able to find very important times in history when Homo sapiens adapted and separated from our ancient ancestors. In order to find out how closely related we actually are to Neanderthals and Denisovans, experts had to study both the genes as well as when the genes were turned into proteins.

In an interview with Inverse, Nathan Schaefer, who is a bioinformatician at the University of California, San Francisco, explained this in further detail, “When you ask that question, we are very similar to Neanderthals.” “We have, you know, around 20,000 genes, and somewhere around 40 of them have these actual coding differences that all humans have one version, and the Neanderthals have the other version.” “That’s already like, ‘Wow, we’re really, really close to them.”

Fernando Villanea, who is a population geneticist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, but wasn’t involved with the study, told Inverse, “Their results support the most exciting new views on the interactions between humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.” He went on to talk about the human brain development over the past several hundred thousand years, “These adaptation events which define our species possibly happened around [600,000] and [200,000] years ago in Africa.”

In other words, this new study seems to indicate that the most genetically unique difference between modern humans and Neanderthals and Denisovans is our cognitive development over the past several hundred thousand years as explained by University of California, Santa Cruz computational biologist Richard Green, “We can tell those regions of the genome are highly enriched for genes that have to do with neural development and brain function.”

As for the researchers’ next steps regarding their studies, Schaefer stated, “What I’m interested in doing now is trying to learn more about how genes work and what these genes do.” The study was published in the journal Science Advances.

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Throughout the long history of planet Earth, our world has undergone several cataclysmic events of varying magnitude. Arguably the most widely recognized of these, the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, involved an impact between Earth and a massive asteroid or comet estimated to have been as much as nine miles wide. The result of this impact had been the mass extinction of most life forms on the planet, with as much as three-fourths of all species on Earth at the time—both animals and plants—being wiped from existence.

Although the mass extinctions that occurred at the end of the Cretaceous period had long been recognized by scientists, confirmation of a large-scale impact event as its underlying cause did not begin to surface until the 1980s with the work of experimental physicist Luis Alvarez and his son Walter. The following decade, the discovery of the Chicxulub crater which forms much of the Gulf of Mexico, provided additional evidence that an asteroid impact had been responsible.

Smaller-scale impact events have also been proposed for other mass extinctions recognized throughout time, including the die-offs of megafauna that began to occur at the end of the last ice age. While some of these impact events remain disputed, the reality of cataclysms throughout time is something that many scientists have sought to understand, resulting in a variety of theories about what their various causes might be, and how often they occur.

Among the more unique theories in this regard had been first proposed by William Napier and Victor Clube in 1979, as detailed in their Nature paper titled “A Theory of Terrestrial Catastrophism.” The study took a novel approach, in that it looked at whether subtle gravitational disturbances in our Solar System might cause comets to occasionally become jostled from their positions in the Oort cloud, sending them hurtling toward the inner Solar System and thereby on a potential collision course with any number of our planetary neighbors, or even Earth itself.

In the 1979 paper, Napier and Clube theorized that galactic spiral arms containing small planets which our solar system passes through could account for the current locations of comets, as well as various transient objects in our solar system. They also noted that many apparent extinction events recognized in the fossil record appear to convey impacts with comets that collided with our planet. Napier and Clube concluded that such impacts likely occurred every 30 million years or so, sometimes resulting in large-scale impacts on par with the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event.

The authors found additional support for their theory in locations other than Earth, too. One example had been evidence of the long-term frequency in appearances of craters on the moon, as well as inner planets within our solar system. The authors identified what they believed to be “brief periods of enhanced bombardment,” as well as a nearly constant rate of craters appearing on the moon and inner planets within the last three billion years. This, they attributed “the decay of primordial bodies and the capture of [small planets] into the Oort cloud upon the sun’s passage through Gould’s belt of the Orion arm.”

The authors considered a wide range of theories about the effects such impact events might have had throughout time, citing evidence in stratigraphic records that seemed to convey “patterns indicating transitions between geological periods, catastrophic extinctions and ice ages.”

Things might have ended there in 1979 as far as Napier and Clube’s idea goes, had it not been for the continuing interest it generated among a few scientists. In the middle 1980s, their original idea began getting a makeover when researcher Michael R. Rampino began to expand on it, who during the following decade teamed up with Bruce Haggerty and gave Napier and Clube’s concept an all-new name: the Shiva hypothesis.

Named for the Hindu god of destruction, the Shiva hypothesis as it is known today essentially entails intervals at which cataclysms occur and, in theory, might even be predictable on account of changes in the position of the Sun in relation to the Milky Way. As recently as 2020, Rampino has continued publishing evidence that may support this idea, which analyzed the ages of ten recognized extinction events involving tetrapods throughout time. According to his research, Rampino found “a statistically significant (99% confidence) underlying periodicity” of such events occurring roughly every 27.5 million years.

As Rampino and his colleagues noted in 2020, “These findings suggest that global cataclysmal events with an underlying periodicity of ~27.5 [million years] were the cause of the coordinated periodic extinction episodes of non-marine tetrapods and marine organisms.”

The Shiva hypothesis also appears to share certain elements with (or may have even inspired) other emerging theories about the causes behind extinction events that occur over time. One notable example involves the so-called “Nemesis hypothesis,” which entails the hypothetical existence of a red or brown dwarf which is responsible for extinction events that occur every 26 million years. The idea was first presented in 1984 by paleontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski in a paper titled “Periodicity of Extinctions in the Geologic Past” that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Today, there is still much work to be done as far as determining whether a periodicity or “cycle” of cataclysms that led to extinction events on Earth truly exists. Nonetheless, if ever proven, it could possibly do more than just explain what led to widespread die-offs throughout time; it might even help prevent future deadly impact events that may eventually return to threaten life on our planet.

One of the things people who have alien and UFO encounters often hear is, “You must have been dreaming.” A team of Russian researchers decided to test if this could indeed be true in at least some cases and enlisted a group of proven lucid dreamers to conduct an experiment involving alien and UFO encounters (AUEs). The results were enlightening and thought-provoking, answering some questions while eliciting many more.

“Alien and UFO encounters (AUEs) have been a well-known part of human culture for centuries, but we are still unsure of their nature. Some studies suggest that in some such encounters, these phenomena could be related to dissociative REM sleep states, like lucid dreams (LDs), sleep paralysis (SP), and out-of-body experiences (OBEs). The present research focuses on the hypothesis that if some of AUEs are indeed the products of REM sleep, then they could be deliberately emulated by LD practitioners. Therefore, this experiment could help to explain the mystery of AUEs.”

Michael Raduga, Andrey Shashkov and Zhanna Zhunusova of the Phase Research Center in Moscow are experienced lucid dreaming researchers but this was their first attempt to link them to AUEs. They assembled a group of 152 proven lucid dreamers and instructed them to induce dreams about aliens and UFOs and report their results. Showing their amazing abilities, 114 managed to have alien dreams, with 70 (61%) dreaming of alien encounters. Breaking that down, 22 encountered humanlike aliens, 44 observed them talking, 22 saw them touching and 14 witnessed them doing both. In addition, 32 had UFO encounters, with 12 being inside one and 3 reporting flying.

The researchers next compared these lucid dream accounts to actual UFO and alien encounter reports to see how similar they were to ‘real’ experiences.

“Regarding the successful cases, 20% were close to reality in terms of the absence of paradoxical dreamlike events. AUEs can be emulated willfully and can be perceived as being very close to reality.”

How close? Lucid dreamers having alien encounters experienced fear and sleep paralysis – a common trait among people who report having alien encounters at night. Could this prove that nighttime abductions are actually dreams?

“The results of the present study show that bedtime AUEs can be deliberately emulated during REM sleep and can mimic reality. As such, ordinary people might spontaneously enter PSs, unintentionally have an AUE, and confuse it with reality. This might be the case every time an AUE starts during sleep or while in a state of relaxation.”

That seems to be the researchers’ conclusion. (More details and results of the study can read in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Dream Research.) Moreover, they propose that other unusual nighttime encounters — religious, paranormal, or mystical – could just be vivid dreams. They suggest as a follow-up training those with alien encounters to enter lucid dreams and attempt to recreate their experiences, thus allowing the researchers to compare ‘real’ and dream accounts from the same person.

This may be disappointing news to those believing their nighttime alien and UFO encounters were the real thing. On the other hand, it might be comforting to know they were just dreaming and not actually probed or chipped. What about daytime encounters? Can the experiments be done with lucid daydreamers? Can they prove they actually conducted this experiment and we didn’t just dream reading about it?

“Our findings aid the general understanding of the human brain, especially regarding the sleep process and its connection to consciousness. Therefore, our results help some irrational parts of our culture to become more reasonable and understandable.”

Anything that helps irrational parts of our culture become rational is most welcome. And THAT’S no dream.