Of course, as advancements progress, we might, at some point in the near future, see humans set foot on Mars – and if that were to happen, then it would be a safe bet that further conspiracies would surface and swirl around such missions, and the planet itself. What might they find, for example? Would it be confirmed that many of the anomalies of Mars are indeed the leftover ruins of an ancient Martian civilization? Might they even find signs of life existing on the red planet today? We will return to these questions a little later, but we will begin our exploration of some of the most bizarre and thought-provoking conspiracies that swirl around our cosmic planetary neighbor with claims that human beings have already been to Mars – and, in some cases, have traveled there in a most peculiar and mind-bending way.  

Undoubtedly, one of the most intriguing and outlandish claims concerning Mars surfaced in 2011 courtesy of Italian UFO researcher Luca Scantamburlo, who claimed to have uncovered several secret NASA missions to Mars dating back to the early 1970s. He claimed the information had arrived with him courtesy of a whistleblower, who happened to be a pilot on one of the missions, William Rutledge.

Rutledge claimed there had been several joint “information gathering” missions featuring American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts to the red planet between 1970 and 1972, each launching from highly secret locations in South America. In 1973, though, the mission was to land its crew – Rutledge, Commander Elliot See, and Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Ilyushin - on the Martian surface. Not long after, a video surfaced on the Internet claiming to be leaked footage of the mission taken from aboard the ISV Columbus. While the footage is almost certainly a hoax, it captivated many, with some suggesting it had been recreated from the actual mission. Whatever the truth, the claims of a previous human presence on Mars are not the only ones.

Several years later, in 2014, a woman identifying herself only as “Jackie” called into Coast To Coast radio and made some equally remarkable claims. She stated in no uncertain terms that she had witnessed “humans on Mars in 1979” with her own eyes while she had worked for NASA. She claimed she was part of NASA’s “downstairs team” and that her job was to download and process streaming data. It was as she was doing this one evening that she witnessed several men in “space suits” walking on the Martian surface via a live video feed. Moreover, she insisted she wasn’t alone and that at least six other NASA employees witnessed the same feed (although none have since come forward to corroborate her claims).

While claims of secret missions to Mars in the 1970s are outrageous enough, claims of secret missions to Mars in the future are even more so. And while these should clearly be taken with a large helping of salt, they are intriguing nonetheless and certainly worth contemplating, if only temporarily.

Without a doubt, one of the most controversial figures to claim to have taken part in these time-travel missions to Mars in the future is Randy Cramer, who began speaking of his alleged experiences in the 2000s. He claimed that one evening in 1987 when he was only 17 years old, he was awoken suddenly when a bright light suddenly appeared out of nowhere in his bedroom. As his eyesight adjusted, he could see that the light was in the shape of a doorway. More than that, it appeared as if some kind of portal had opened right in the middle of his bedroom. It was at this point that he noticed two men standing in front of the glowing doorway. One of them gestured that he should join them, and not quite sure why he was doing so, he left his bed and walked toward the pair.

The next memory he had was of standing in a large, hangar-type room. Moreover, he wasn’t alone, seeing around 50 other young men of a similar age, each of them looking, almost transfixed, at a large, black, triangular craft in the middle of the room. A command came for them to get on board, which they did obediently. The craft then presumably took off, as the next thing Cramer could remember was one of the military men telling the group of young men to “look upwards!” They did, almost in unison. There above them was a large, glass window through which they could see Earth. The more they looked at it, the more it became apparent they were moving away from it. Then, one of the military men spoke up once more, telling them that everything they were about to do was “defend” their home planet. Cramer’s account would get even stranger.

He claimed that they landed on the surface of the Moon, describing huge, glass, dome-like buildings all around. Following this, they were transferred to a different spacecraft, and from there, they set off to Mars. Ultimately, Cramer stated that he spent the next 20 years in a “specialized off-planet military unit!” He claimed that he, like the others, had been specifically “selected,” elaborating that this was due to them having “very specific genetic makeup!”

Following the two decades of active service on Mars, Cramer was returned to Earth. Not only that, he was then age-reversed to 17 years of age and, through the portal that he had stepped into from his bedroom, was returned to his bed “within 15 minutes” of his “abduction!” As such, no one had even been aware that he had been missing. Cramer himself had no memory of the 20-year service due to mind-control procedures that essentially wiped his memory. However, over the coming years, he would suffer from strange, intense dreams – and these dreams eventually progressed into recovered memories. Eventually, he began to recall the events in full and began speaking of them publicly shortly after. We should note that many people – even those who are open to such suggestions – have been highly critical of Cramer, with some even having body language experts analyze some of his interviews and public talks to highlight the fact that he is, essentially, not being truthful.  

As bizarre and even preposterous to some as Randy Cramer’s claims are, however, he is not the only person to have offered such revelations. Dr. Andrew Basiago, for example, made remarkably similar claims around the same time. He claimed that in the late 1960s, he was one of a select group of specially “selected gifted children” from right across the United States by the CIA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) who would receive advanced training in preparation for a highly secretive time travel mission (almost identical to the claims made by Cramer, incidentally). Basiago offered that children and young adults made ideal candidates for time-travel projects, largely due to their lack of preconceived view of reality, adding that many adults had “gone insane” following their involvement with such missions.

Basiago continued that the missions operated under Project Pegasus and that he was not only sent into the future but also into the past to witness and research some of the most famous incidents in history. He claimed, for example, to have gone back in time to the Ford’s Theatre in Washington on the evening of April 14th, 1865, witnessing the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. He also claimed to have been sent to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19th, 1863, to witness the Gettysburg Address, a mission that he further claimed resulted in a photograph being taken in which he was captured by pure chance. The picture – which has been widely circulated online – does appear to show a strange figure standing alone from the crowd with President Lincoln speaking in the background. The figure appears to be wearing oversized clothing, apparently the result of an attempt to make the young man appear more adult-like. Of course, the exact reasons for these time travel missions to the past remain a mystery.

He went on so many of these time travel missions, Basiago claimed, that he began to be in danger of meeting himself. Moreover, he suggested that he, on occasion, went back in time and visited alternative timelines of past events, a result, he elaborated, of previous time travel missions.

Basiago also claimed to have been privy to future events long before they happened. He claimed, for example, that as far back as 1971, he witnessed pictures – brought back from the future – of the 9/11 attacks, adding that these pictures had been brought back from the (then) future for “research purposes” – make of that what you will. These time travel missions to the future, at least according to Basiago, also provided those in charge of the project with information on future Presidents of the United States, with certain individuals even being briefed of these future events before their presidencies. In fact, Basiago claimed to have been sat at a table along with George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. when they were informed of their future presidencies. Basiago also claimed that Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were both told beforehand what the future held for them.

Without a doubt, one of the most outlandish claims from Basiago was that former United States President Barack Obama was also involved in the program in the same capacity that he was, adding that he had even met the future president in the early 1980s when he was only 19 years old. What is interesting to note here is that many people who attended UCLA with Barack Obama have since attested that he would often return to campus from “parties” where he would state his absolute certainty that he would be President of the United States in the future. And it is around this meeting that some of Basiago’s wildest claims surface, and ones that are of particular interest to us here.

He claimed that this meeting with the future president took place when both were part of a selected group for a branch-off mission from the Pegasus project. This time, though, rather than being transported elsewhere in time, they would be teleported to another planet altogether, specifically, Mars. He claimed that the pair were part of a reconnaissance team on the red planet, with one of their main tasks being to build a relationship with the locals – essentially, Martian entities. Basiago insists that intelligent life exists on Mars, and, like human beings, some of them are friendly while others are anything but. Perhaps even more amazing, his “whistleblowing” and Obama’s alleged connection to the ultra-secret mission is an attempt, he claims, by the authorities to lay the groundwork for the eventual revelation of such projects and intelligent Martian life to the public.

Of course, whether we should treat Basiago’s claims with a pinch of salt or not is open to debate. However, Basiago also claims that in 2028, having already run for President of the United States in 2016, he would be elected either President or Vice President of America, something he claims that he has been given prior notice of. And when he does, he insists he will release all the files of such secretive projects to the public.

Yet another person who has claimed to have been involved in teleportation missions to Mars is Michael Relfe, a former member of the United States military, who claimed that he was recruited in 1976 while serving in the military and then going on a 20-year mission at one of the two United States colonies on Mars. Furthermore, much the same as Cramer and Basiago, Relfe claims that following his 20 years of service, he was “age-reversed and cast back in time!” He elaborated that this was “usual procedure,” adding that some people involved in the project “have some memories blocked or erased before being discharged!”

Interestingly, Relfe claimed that he was transported to Mars via some kind of portal and that the missions, which were research-gathering operations, took place in the future to ensure absolute secrecy. Interestingly, and also tying in with the claims of Basiago, the United States government activated their time travel technology as early as 1967 (around the same time that “recruits” were being sought), which had been built on quantum physics researched by Nikola Tesla (it is worth noting that Tesla’s files and research papers went missing from the New York hotel room where he died, with many suspecting the intelligence agencies being behind the theft, and perhaps even more). This technology has been utilized for several reasons, not least to “provide political and economic advantages by way of knowing what the future holds!”

Perhaps some of the most thought-provoking claims regarding secret missions to Mars came from a leading physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Arthur Neumann, known to many people as “Henry Deacon.” He stated that members of “the elite” were not only aware of “free energy” but that they were actively suppressing such knowledge. What’s more, it was almost certain that civilizations of antiquity were aware of and utilized free energy thousands of years ago. Of interest to us here, though, were top-secret projects – overseen by the same elites – that used portals to transport people to Mars to work at human-controlled bases on the red planet.

To begin with, “Henry Deacon” spoke to small audiences from the UFO community, maintaining his anonymity. However, after several years, he decided to speak as Arthur Neumann at an exopolitics conference in Barcelona, Spain. During this talk, he spoke not only of bases on the Martian surface but that there was a thriving human colony there. Moreover, members of these human colonies had already made contact with representatives of an alien race there. His speech was well received, with many pointing to his background as a sign of his credibility. Indeed, it appeared Neumann made bigger waves than he could have imagined, as not long after the speech in Barcelona, he simply vanished into thin air and has not been heard from or seen since.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons to entertain the possibility that there is more to Mars than our collective understanding of it suggests, with, as we mentioned earlier, many anomalies have been spotted and highlighted over the years.

Arguably one of the first anomalies of the modern era is the so-called Face on Mars, which was first seen by the world in 1976 following the first Viking mission, one of many photographs taken from above the Martian surface. Almost as soon as it was viewed by the general public, theories began to swirl that the face was an artificially created structure and was proof of an ancient civilization on the red planet. However, subsequent flybys in 1998 and 2001 also photographed the same region and, at least according to the photographs offered by NASA, show that the initial picture was nothing more than a trick of the light. However, as we might imagine, not everyone subscribes to such an explanation, and, at least in theory, there is good reason to remain open to the fact that the Face on Mars could very well be an artificial structure, not least because of the seemingly ultra-precise angles in it, something rarely, if ever, created by nature.

It isn’t just the Face on Mars, though, that has led many people to conclude that there are genuine remains of an ancient civilization on the red planet. The entire region of Cydonia, particularly the immediate vicinity around the face, appears, to some, to be the remains of an ancient city. Researchers have pointed out that the sheer number of precise anomalous “structures” in this region is too many to be coincidence or naturally forming, and instead suggest the remains of a purposely and intricately designed city, one that now lies in ruins, whether through the ravages of time or due to some other catastrophic or deadly event (something we will return to shortly). There have even been suggestions that before the last pole shift on Mars, the face and the city complex would have resided on the Martian equator, something which, once more, is suggestive of purposeful planning. It is also worth mentioning that respected researchers, investigators, and authors Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and John Grigsby also examined suggestions of the remains of a Martian city in the Cydonia region in their book The Mars Mystery – A Tale of the End of Two Worlds, concluding that there is at least reason to support the suggestion.  

As well as the Face on Mars, there are other particularly intriguing anomalies on the Martian surface, not least a rocky object, albeit in ruins, that looks identical to the Sphinx of Giza in Egypt. Moreover, behind this alleged sphinx sits pyramids, exactly in the same location to the sphinx as they are on the Giza Plateau. Clearly, if there were such ruins on the Martian surface, then it would mean that at some point during its history, intelligent life existed on the red planet. We should note that the suggestion that the structures could be nothing more than volcanoes is also unlikely, given that the only volcanic region of Mars is over 2000 miles away in the Tharsis region. Moreover, at least according to some eagle-eyed viewers of the region, there appears to be an excessive amount of rocks and stones in the area in front of the pyramid structures, perhaps suggesting rubble, either left by the builders of the artificial structures, are the leftovers of their destruction.

What is perhaps even more thought-provoking is that the layout and dimensions of the apparent Martian Sphinx and the Pyramids of Giza are an identical match. What is further interesting, is that we can find further apparent connections between Mars and the civilization of ancient Egypt. While it is important to note it is open to interpretation, some writings and research regarding the Sphinx of Giza, for example, are of particular interest to us here. It is said that the Sphinx – of which there remains intense debate as to its real age – once glowed a shining red color, just like the red of Mars as seen from Earth. Even more remarkable, Cairo – the modern capital just a stone’s throw away from the Giza plateau – translates to The Place of Mars when using its Arabic name, Al Qahirah. And we might also note that many people who have had close encounters with UFOs (including cases of alien abduction) have claimed to have seen strange ancient Egyptian-style symbols and signs onboard these futuristic vehicles.

Could there really be some kind of connection between the civilization of ancient Egypt and an ancient civilization on Mars? We will return to this suggestion shortly.

Before we do, though, it is worth mentioning just some of the many other anomalies that have been spotted on Mars. In September 2015, for example, claims surfaced from several researchers who claimed to have spotted an anomaly that became dubbed the Martian Stargate. The apparent structure appeared to be half-buried in the ground and had seemingly straight and precise angles and lines. Although the structure appeared to be damaged, there was what appeared to be a circular opening visible, very similar to how we might imagine a portal-like entrance.

In the same year, another photograph surfaced online claiming to show the ruins of what looked like a huge stone pillar. What’s more, this pillar appeared to have ancient Egyptian-type symbols and petroglyphs carved into it. There have been many similar pictures showing similar stone ruins with similar ancient Egyptian-type symbols. Even stranger, and perhaps more unsettling, are pictures that seem to show humanoid figures on the Martian surface, with a particularly well-known picture appearing once more in 2015 showing what looked like a woman standing on one of the Martian mountains. There have also been pictures that seem to show human bones and even skulls on the surface of Mars, as well as strange lizard-like animals.

With the idea that human beings may have migrated to Earth from Mars many thousands, perhaps even millions, of years ago in mind, it is worth our time to turn our attention to a declassified CIA document that detailed a remarkable remote viewing experiment in the early 1980s. The files were part of a huge data dump in 2017, with one particularly interesting remote viewing mission taking place in 1984 with a viewer known only as “The Subject,” although it is widely believed that this “subject” was the renowned remote viewer, Joe McMoneagle. The manuscript of the remote viewing mission contained some of the most intriguing, if disturbing, details ever recorded.  

The cover letter for the transcript made for fascinating reading in itself. It stated:

“Method of site acquisition: Sealed envelope with geographic coordinates. The sealed envelope was given to the subject immediately prior to the interview. The envelope was not opened until after the interview. In the envelope was a 3x5 card with the following information: The Planet Mars. Time of interest approximately 1 million years B.C. Selected geographic coordinates, provided by the parties requesting the information, were verbally given to the subject during the interview.”

Once we delve into the manuscript, the account takes an even more amazing turn.

The Subject was given the coordinates, 40.89 north, and 9.55 west, and he was completely unaware of his destination upon receiving them. He soon found himself in a desolate, red world. He stated that he could see “a pyramid, or pyramid form. It’s very high. It’s kind of sitting in a large, depressed area!” He continued that he could see signs of civilization on the planet, and an advanced one at that, with evidence of advanced technology. He saw cities that were comprised of “large, flat surfaces” with “very smooth angles” which were “megalithic!” He also described some kind of destabilization of the planet, offering he was “tracking severe, severe clouds, more like (a) dust storm – it’s a geological problem!”

The Subject was then given a series of different coordinates and was asked each time to describe what he saw. He described huge structures that made up equally huge cities that were hidden away inside canyons that were “like rabbit warrens (with) very high walls!” He further described “strange intersecting roads that are dug into the valleys” and even something that appeared like the obelisk in Washington DC.

This mind-bending remote viewing session continued for a considerable time. However, the longer it progressed, the Subject found it increasingly difficult to focus on the coordinates given to him. Those running the session decided to allow him to go to whatever interested him as long as he reported what he saw. Some of his descriptions are truly fascinating. He described seeing huge pyramid structures that were designed to provide “shelter from storms!” He went inside one of these pyramids, stating he could see many different chambers, most of which had been “almost stripped of any kinds of furnishings” and that was not a “strictly functional place for sleeping or some form of hibernation!”

He was then asked who was using the pyramids for shelter, to which he responded, “Very large people, but they’re thin! They look thin because of their height, and they dress in real light silk, but it’s not a flowing type of clothing, it’s like cutting to fit! They’re ancient people. They’re dying, it’s past their time or age!” He continued that they were “waiting for something to return, or (on) something coming with an answer!” The Subject was asked what exactly these ancient people were waiting for. He replied, “A group or party of them went to find a new place to live” due to “the corruption of their environment! It’s failing rapidly, and this group went somewhere a long way to find another place to live!” In response to being asked how this group left, he replied they left in a vehicle that “looks like the inside of a large boat (with) very rounded walls and shiny metal!”

The most remarkable revelations, though, were still to come.      

He began describing a journey through space and then entering the atmosphere of another planet. He stated, “…(I get the) impression of a really crazy place, with volcanoes and gas pockets and strange plants, (a) very volatile place!” He continued that although this place was similar to the planet they had just left, there were differences, mainly “there seems to be a lot of vegetation where the other place did not have it, and (a) different kind of storm!”

The session was then brought to a close. While it doesn’t state as such in the report, we might imagine that the place The Subject was describing was Earth 1.5 million years ago.

It is also interesting to note that the coordinates initially given to The Subject fall into the Cydonia region of Mars – an intriguing and possibly controversial location on the red planet, as we have already seen. We might ask, then, if there was a civilization on Mars, one that quite possibly embarked on a cosmic migration to Earth over a million years ago, then what caused this necessary transplantation? Was it something naturally occurring, such as a meteor strike? Or could it have been the result of something much more ominous?

Here, it is worth exploring the research and theories of propulsion scientist John Brandenburg, who in 2014 claimed that Mars had very likely suffered a catastrophic nuclear incident at some point in the distant past. Interestingly, the location of this nuclear fallout was in the Cydonia and Utopia regions of the planet. Brandenburg, who made the claims in his book Death on Mars: The Discovery of a Planetary Nuclear Massacre, was already alert to the possibility that the remains of an ancient, advanced civilization existed in these regions, suggesting that this nuclear event was not a naturally occurring one, elaborating that, “If the reactions weren’t natural, the implication is that intelligent beings artificially caused them!” In short, Brandenburg put forward that an alien race, possibly indigenous to Mars, possibly from elsewhere, launched a blistering attack on the civilization of the Cydonia and Utopia regions.

Brandenburg put forward that there were greatly enhanced levels of uranium and thorium in the Martian soil, as well as increased amounts of Xenon 129 in the atmosphere, all indicators of some kind of nuclear incident. Moreover, the two sites affected, Brandenburg offered, showed clear signs of an ancient civilization, with alleged remains of artificial structures – remains, incidentally, he was certain would be discovered if ever a manned mission to the red planet went ahead.

Of course, we detailed earlier some of the claims of pyramid-like structures and an apparent sphinx on Mars. There have, though, been many claims of anomalies on the Martian surface over the years, not least since the rollout of Google Mars, which allows a person to view the surface of the red planet from the comfort of their living room. What is also of interest is that other legends, creation stories, and ancient writings all appear to tell of a civilization arriving on Earth in the distant past and, essentially, ruling over humanity as “the gods.”

What if these creation stories have some partial truths to them, and what if they all come from the same source? Given that many people, even those who believe in the authenticity of UFOs and the genuine probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere in the universe, insist that the distance to travel between solar systems and galaxies would be almost certainly too great for any space-faring civilization, we might consider that if an alien race did arrive on Earth in antiquity, they might have arrived from a nearby planet – perhaps Mars. And maybe that alien race was, ultimately, human in nature – they are essentially our ancestors. Could these transplanted Martians have been responsible not only for the human race but also for legends such as Atlantis, as well as the great civilizations of the past, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley?

As crazy as his ideas might be to many, there are other reasons to believe that human beings might not have originated on Earth but might have arrived here from another planet. While he didn’t specifically state Mars as the origin, Dr. Ellis Silver put together a compelling argument that human beings – or something very close before they interbred with Neanderthals - were not indigenous to Earth and had, in fact, been brought here from elsewhere in deep antiquity in his book Humans Are Not from Earth: A Scientific Evaluation of the Evidence.

The thrust of Silver’s argument revolves around the notion that while Earth is certainly an adequate home for human beings and offers it all it needs and more, it is not as “ideal as whoever brought us here initially thought!” As Silver argues, we might assume that if we had evolved here, then our environment would suit us perfectly, or more to the point, we would suit our environment.

Silver compares human beings to other Indigenous animals and how we seem to suffer multiple ill effects of living on Earth. He highlights, for example, how human beings are, generally and relatively speaking, chronically ill, particularly with chronic back pain, something that genuinely inhabits the lives of millions, if not billions of people around the world as just one detail that suggests human beings are out of sync with Earth. He elaborates that this could indicate that the gravity on our “home planet” – wherever that might be – is likely much lower than on Earth. Due to the relative tallness of humans, this higher gravity results in strain on the back and ultimately, chronic back pain. Even our tallness compared to most animals’ low center of gravity, as well as the fact we have flat feet yet hands with opposable thumbs and a lack of body hair (or fur) despite requiring clothes for warmth, are all details that put humanity at odds with the environment on Earth.

Silver also highlights human childbirth, which, in part because of the oversized nature of a baby’s head, is a great cause of pain and distress for the mother. We might keep in mind that before the era of modern medicine, the number of women and children who died during childbirth was horrifically high compared to our contemporary era. As Silver writes, “No other truly native species on this planet has this problem!” Even the fact that human offspring are “completely helpless” for years after birth is at odds with almost every other species on the planet, with maturity still being years away following muscle development and basic learned skills. Does this suggest that the human gestation period is much shorter than it should be, and if so, is that the result of some kind of genetic alteration? It is certainly an interesting notion, but Silver has more ammunition for his argument.

He points out that even how human beings react to sunlight – the very thing we need to remain alive – is unlike almost all other animals on the planet. While most humans will suffer from sunburn or heatstroke if they remain out in the sun for long periods, most other animals on the planet are unaffected by sustained exposure to sunlight. Even the fact that we squint our eyes to see the face of the sun is something unique only to human beings. Perhaps what is of most interest to us here, though, is the fact that the human body clock is more in synch with a 25-hour day than a 24-hour day – much more in sympathy with a Martian day (approximately 24 hours and 39 minutes) than one on Earth.

Of course, whether life exists or once existed on Mars has been a question that has been asked for generations. The fact is, though, at least according to the person behind one of the tests for life on Mars that was part of the 1976 Viking landing, that question has already been answered, and what’s more, at least according to some, NASA covered up that answer. Gilbert Levin designed the test that would look for signs of organic life in soil samples. This experiment, including the methods and testing devices, had all been preapproved by NASA and was a huge part of the mission.

Following the landing, Levin’s test was carried out, and much to his shock, the data showed organic molecules in the Martian soil. However, rather than being joyous about such a momentous discovery, NASA essentially dismissed the findings as nothing more than an anomaly, putting forward that two other devices had also tested for organic molecules and had failed to find anything out of the ordinary. Many were critical of NASA’s approach, not least Levin himself. One NASA employee, though, has publicly backed Levin’s device and experiment. Chris McKay from NASA’s Ames Research Center claimed that not only was Levin’s test likely accurate but that the other two models used by NASA were flawed. To prove his point, he conducted experiments with NASA’s other two models in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Once more, they suggested there were no organic molecules in the soil, even though it was clear such molecules were present.

It is also worth quickly noting conspiracies connected to the Mars’ moons, particularly Phobos, and the claims of Russian astrophysicist Dr. Iosif Shklovsky that not only is it hollow, but that it very well could be an artificial structure, highlighting its highly unusual and uneven orbit. While many dismissed Shklovsky’s claims, which he made as far back as the late 1960s, in more recent years, studies from the European Space Agency came to similar conclusions, at least about its potentially hollow nature, perhaps the result of trapped water or another liquid inside the cosmic satellite, they offered.

As we might imagine, over the years since Shklovsky’s claims, many researchers have put forward their own suggestions, with one of the most interesting if outlandish being that the Martian moon was placed into an intentional orbit and was, in fact, an ancient space station, perhaps once used as an early warning of sorts for incoming asteroids or comets, or even as a jumping off point for missions into deeper space. What perhaps makes the suggestion that Phobos is an unnatural, artificial structure even more compelling are the many missions to send probes to explore it, all of which have encountered strange and largely unexplained system failures. While there could be many explanations for this, those who subscribe to the artificial Martian moon theories suggest that these failures are not coincidence and are some kind of defense mechanism to prevent closer approaches.

The fact is, Mars will continue to fascinate humanity for years to come, at least until traveling, there is something open to everybody in the same way a person can jump on a plane and travel abroad here on Earth. Until then, conspiracies – both reasonable and outrageous – will continue to swirl. And, as time goes by and humanity does manage to establish a presence on the red planet, we just might find that at least some of these conspiracies and wild claims have more truth to them than many of us might think. Moreover, potential discoveries on Mars could very well alter not only how we view our own history, but also our collective origins, perhaps even altering how we view the universe and how we collectively fit into it. For now, we must continue to watch the red planet from here on Earth, contemplating what secrets it might hold.

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Flying humanoids with jetpacks or some sort of advanced winged suit go way back. In as early as 1880 there are a couple of reports along these lines. The first comes from John Keel’s book The Mothman Prophecies and describes a bizarre scene that played out on July 28 of that year in the area of Louisville Kentucky, in the United States. On this day, two witnesses named C. A. Youngman and Ben Flexner were out taking a leisurely stroll on a clear, calm afternoon when they saw something quite odd in the sky above. They at first took it to be a toy balloon, but as it approached they could see that it was in fact what appeared to be “a man surrounded by machinery which he seemed to be working with his hands,” with some kind of wings and fans perched upon his back. This enigmatic flying man worked his machinery to have him dip and rise several times until he passed out of view. This sighting would be followed by a UFO sighting the same evening, in which a bright object was seen “hopping” over Madisonville, Kentucky before disappearing, its connection to the flying man unknown.

In September of that same year, there is another report mentioned in a 1972 article in Fate Magazine by authors Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark, which seems to fit into the theme of flying suits. On September 11, 1880, a strange flying humanoid was seen over Coney Island, New York, which seems to have been perhaps using a flying contraption of some sort. The original news article in the New York Times says of it:

“One day last week a marvelous apparition was seen near Coney Island. At the height of at least 1000 feet in the air a strange object was in the act of flying toward the New Jersey coast. It was apparently a man in bat’s wings and improved frog’s legs. The face of the man could be distinctly seen, and he wore a cruel and determined expression. The movements made by the object closely resembled those of a frog in the act of swimming with his hind legs and flying with his front legs….When we add that this monster waved his wings in answer to the whistle of a locomotive and was of a deep black color, the alarming nature of the apparition can be imagined. The object was seen by many reputable persons and they all agree that it was a man engaged in flying toward New Jersey.”

In 1936 a 15-year-old girl named E.E. Loznaya was on her way to school in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan on a cold winter morning. As she wound along the rural path lost in her thoughts, her attention was drawn to something in the sky, and when she looked carefully she would claim that she had seen it was a a medium-sized man in black clothes and a matching helmet that hid his face, and who was wearing an oval-shaped backpack. She also noticed that there was a deep, mechanical rumbling noise coming from this bizarre man. She was snapped out of her astonishment when the flying man suddenly made a quick course change to come hovering directly towards her, sending her into a mad dash to find a place to hide. As she tried to bury herself in a nearby snowbank, she looked up to find that the mysterious flying figure had vanished. 

Moving on in years we come to 1948, which has a few such reports. In the years after World War II, there were some strange encounters with what seems to have been a person or people in some sort of flying mechanized suit. In early January of 1948, a 61-year-old witness named Bernice Zaikowski claimed that she had been out in the yard of her home in Chehalis, Washington at around 3:00 PM when some neighborhood children began looking up at the sky and chattering away about a “flying man” up in the sky. It was at this point that Zaikowski allegedly heard an odd noise from above that sounded like “a sizzling and whizzing,” and when she looked up she could see something very odd indeed hovering up over a nearby barn around 20 feet in the air.

The witness insisted that what she saw looked like a man wearing a pair of long silver wings fastened to his shoulders with some sort of strap rig, which he seemed to control with some sort of high-tech panel attached to his chest. The mysterious man with his bizarre flying suit apparently then performed some aerial acrobatics, ascended into the air, and flew off into the distance in an upright posture. At no point could the witness discern any obvious source of propulsion such as a jet pack or propeller, and the contraption the man wore seemed to be mostly silent except for that odd whizzing sound. The whole sight was seen by Zaikowski and several other witnesses, all of whom were dumbfounded. Was this some sort of flying gadget crafted by a mad genius or something more otherworldly? Later that same year, in April of 1948 the mysterious figure was purportedly seen again in the same general vicinity, and this time he was apparently with friends. The two witnesses, laundry workers Viola Johnson and James Pittman, claimed that they saw “three men in flying suits” making circles over the city at a height of around 250 feet. Johnson would say of the spectacle:

“They looked like three men in flying suits flying through the air. They wore dark drab flying suits and as far as I can judge – I’m not very good at judging distance – they were 250 feet high, circling the city. They were going at about the same speed as a freight train and had some kind of apparatus on their sides which looked like guns but I know it couldn’t have been guns. I couldn’t see any propellers or any motors tied on them but I could hear motors which sounded like airplane motors, only not so loud. When they first came into sight I thought they looked like gulls but as they got closed I could see plainly that they were men. I couldn’t make out their arms but I could see their feet dangling down and they kept moving their heads, like they were looking around. I couldn’t tell if they had goggles on but their heads look like they had helmets on. I couldn’t see their faces.”

The two frightened witnesses’ story was somewhat corroborated when several local people later recalled hearing strange sounds in the sky at around the time of the sighting. Who were these flying men and where did they get those amazing suits? Were these some eccentric inventors who had come up with a new way of flight? If so, whatever happened to this incredible invention? Or was it something else, perhaps time travelers or visitors from another parallel dimension? Could it have all just been a hoax or a tall tale? It’s hard to say.

Moving on to the 1950s, in the winter of 1956 a witness by the name of John Hanks was walking home from work when there appeared a “demonic entity” from the darkness above him. The creature was described as humanoid in basic form but measuring about 9 feet tall, with brown leathery skin and clad in some kind of a mechanical winged harness that allowed it to fly through the air. The wings on the otherworldly apparatus looked metallic and allegedly were covered with scintillating multicolored lights along the bottom. On the center of the entity’s chest was what looked like some sort of square control panel that it seemed to manipulate in order to control its flight, and the whole of it emanated a ghastly hissing noise. Before Hanks could really process what he was seeing, the creature gazed at him with “large, watery eyes” and sped off into the night. 

Perhaps even more bizarre than this is a report from 1968, in the Bolivian village of Potosí. In the spring of that year, a shepherdess named Valentina Flores was herd herding her sheep and llamas back into the stables when she had a most incredibly surreal encounter, indeed. As she approached one of the sheep pens, she caught fleeting movement that she knew was not one of her animals but rather seemed like a human intruder. As she turned the corner of the stable, she saw not a person, but rather a diminutive humanoid creature in a dark jumpsuit with a net floating over it, a metallic pack on its back, and a sharp instrument in its hand with which it was in the process of using to disembowel a sheep. 

Now most people would have probably run away screaming at this point, but not Valentina. Rather than try and get out of there as fast as possible, she began throwing stones at the odd entity, which caused it to stand up and face her, blood and viscera dripping down off the hooked blade it held in its hand. It was described as standing just about 4 feet in height and wearing a helmet that covered its face. After a couple more stones bounced off of it, the entity then wielded the curved blade like a boomerang, throwing it at Valentina to cut her, after which the blade flew back to its hand. It did this several times, causing minor lacerations to the stunned witness. It then went to a box-like apparatus, and after pushing some buttons the floating net retreated into it and the creature secured the box to its backpack. It then picked up a bag of sheep entrails and rose into the air as a buzzing sound exuded from its backpack, which now seemed more like a jetpack. The unknown assailant then disappeared over the horizon, and it was later found that dozens of sheep had been left dead and dismembered by the humanoid intruder. What was going on here?

In 1978 there was a series of bizarre sightings in the USSR, the first supposedly happening in February of that year. Late one evening a militia captain by the name of Avtandil Bukhrashvili woke at his home in Tbilisi, Georgia to see a bright light, followed by the strange sight of two objects that looked like giant black birds, but which upon closer inspection did not seem to have any actual wings, but rather jetpacks of some sort. The two objects descended lower until they were close enough to see that they were indeed two humanoid beings in tight-fitting suits and helmets, through which it could be seen that they had frog-like faces. The entities then produced a tablet and forced him to swallow it, after which they took off and flew off into the distance while emitting a whirring sound. The witness then lost all memory and the next thing he knew he was in bed with a case of lost time.

In April of that same year, 14-year-old Valentine Valentinovich Gubsky was on vacation with his family and some friends in the Ryazan region of Russia. One foggy evening he was out walking with his friend when the two boys allegedly saw a series of bright, multi-colored flashes, after which they heard a mechanical drone that seemed to be approaching their position from a nearby hill. Through the mist, they could then see a shadowy figure coming towards them about 20 meters up in the air, and it continued until it had passed overhead, visible enough for them to make out that it looked like a flying man with his arms outstretched. The witnesses would describe the figure as wearing some sort of metallic silvery suit with metal rings along its limbs and torso, as well as a belt-like contraption with what looked to be a control panel embedded within it.

Whatever it was also seemed to be wearing a backpack of some sort, with what looked like oxygen tanks, upon which could be seen some sort of jet tubes or air inlets. There were no straps visible on what looked to be a jetpack of some sort, and the being also seemed to have some sort of membrane attached from its fingers to the belt, which the boys guessed served as wings. Upon the strange creature’s head was purportedly a helmet with what looked like a respirator. Whatever it was seemed to be heading towards the light seen previous to its arrival, leading the witnesses to believe there had been some connection.

In more recent years we come to 1989, when in October of that year shop owner Yannis Clonaris and his wife were driving home one evening in Lardos, Rhodes Island Greece. The wife looked out the window to notice a low-flying form that looked like a man dressed all in white and covered with hair, possessing wings where its arms should be. This would have been startling enough as it was, but mounted upon its back was some sort of device that seemed to be enabling it to fly, as it was not moving its wings at all. The bizarre apparition apparently looked directly at the witnesses before accelerating in the direction of Tsambika Mountain.

In 1998 we have another report from near Athens, Greece, this time on September 14 of that year, when two women were sitting out on a balcony at around sunset. They would spy an object in the sky headed towards them, which they at first took to be a helicopter but which was odd in that it emanated no sound. As it got closer, they could see that it was a humanoid being in an upright position, wearing what was described as an “astronaut suit.” This odd humanoid figure then descended to land at a nearby park and then sort of did a massive hop toward the forest on Ardittos Hill not far away. The creature then seemed to hover about and then transform into a bright spot and vanish.

A few years later, in July of 2000, there was a strange report in which the witness, Gerardo Valenzuela, filmed a tall dark humanoid object descending from the sky to disappear behind a hill in a valley near the active volcano in a place called Tepoztlan, in the Mexican state of Morelos, located between the Nevado de Toluca and Popocatépetl volcanoes. The strange flying man was filmed and again the video has been picked apart and debated as to its veracity. Then in October, there was a sighting made by an airline pilot and co-pilot while preparing to land in Mexico City. The figure was described as a “little flying man” wearing what appeared to be a backpack and who matched the altitude and speed of the aircraft for some time before flying off. This is a notable sighting in that these were trained pilots who would have been familiar with aerial phenomena and not prone to making up wild tales.

A particularly bizarre report from Mexico occurred on February 14, 2004, when Ana Luisa Cid and two others witnessed a decidedly unearthly sight above Mexico City. They saw in the sky a rather strange object that at first looked to be some sort of mechanical, vibrating machine on top, under which dangled what looked like a large black humanoid shape, the whole of which seemed to be hovering in the same position. To make matters more bizarre, a smaller object was allegedly seen to drift up from below to merge with the larger figure, after which it detached from the upper structure and revealed itself to be what appeared to be some sort of humanoid wearing a cloak or cape of some sort, while the thing above it now, in fact, looked like a living winged beast of some kind. It is then reported that the smaller object broke off from the cloaked creature to fly off, after which the cloaked one reattached to the winged monster and the whole surreal thing took off out of sight. What in the world was this thing? Whatever it is, what has come to be known as “The Entity Reunion in the Sky” remains one of the strangest sightings ever to take place in Mexican skies.

In 2004 yet another video of these things emerged from near Cerro de la Silla, also in Mexico, which showed a dark object with a humanoid form floating through the air at great speed while hunched over. The video of course has generated a whole bunch of debate as to what it could be, with many saying that it is merely a cluster of balloons or some garbage blowing through the air. The next year, on June 17, 2005, witness Horacio Roquett would also film a flying humanoid in a seated position atop some type of device over Mexico City. Roquet was out with his sister at Unidad Habitacional Lomas de Platero in the middle of the afternoon on a clear day when they both saw a tall humanoid figure cruising through the air and leering at them menacingly. In this case, the figure seemed to be perched atop some sort of gravity-defying vehicle that emitted a strange red glow, with its legs dangling underneath. The video they took has become one of the most famous pieces of footage ever taken of one of Mexico’s flying humanoids.

Even more recently headlines were made when a mysterious figure in a jetpack was reportedly seen on numerous occasions over Los Angeles, California between the years of 2020 and 2022. It all began on August 30, 2020, when two different airline pilots reported seeing a "guy in a jetpack" hovering near Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) at 3,000 feet (910 m), and dangerously close to the flightpath of incoming and outgoing planes. Over coming months, other pilots also reported a man in a jetpack zipping around LAX airspace, at altitudes of up to 5,000 feet (1,500 m), to the point that some flights were even diverted or canceled due to the intruder’s antics. Before long the figure was being called the “Jetpack Man” and “Iron Man” in the media, and authorities were scrambling to figure out who or what it was, with theories including humanoid balloons, drones, or even yes, unauthorized advanced jetpack tech. Despite a massive investigation, no definitive answers have ever been found and the Jetpack Man remains a perplexing mystery. 

Even more recently still is a series of encounters in rural Peru in 2023, with what were described as “7-foot-tall aliens” wearing jet propulsion boots and jetpacks. Witnesses reported that these flying humanoids had tried on numerous occasions to kidnap people, leaving some of them with injuries. Some villagers also claimed that the mystery figures were impervious to arrows and bullets. As to their appearance, one village official from the local Indigenous Ikuta group would say:

“These gentlemen are aliens. They are using state of the art technology, like thrusters that allow people to fly. They seem armored like the green goblin from Spider Man. I have shot one twice and it didn’t fall. Instead, it elevated and disappeared. We’re frightened by what is happening in the community. Their color is silver, their shoes are round in shape and with those, they rise up. They float one meter high and have a red light on their heel. Their heads are long, their mask is long, and their eyes are sort of yellowish.”

Peruvian law enforcement officials launched an investigation and concluded that they were, umm, illegal gold miners and drug cartel members, wearing, er, high-tech jetpacks. This was the serious official consensus, with the rationale being that these miners were using this advanced technology and scary suits to terrorize the locals into staying away from the lucrative gold mines and drug stashes. This sophisticated jetpack technology could also be used to make drug runs, it was surmised. Using Tony Stark-level high-tech suits to scare humble villagers and deal drugs. Right, then. As of yet, there have been no arrests made and no suspects questioned in the jetpack aliens phenomenon. 

What are we looking at in these cases? From jetpack sightings well before such technology existed to mysterious humanoids using such technology far beyond what it known to be available now, how do we explain such encounters? Surely jetpacks do exist in modern times, but they are mostly seen as a novelty item too impractical for serious pursuit and lacking the technology to reach the lengths of being airborne, the maneuverability, and the altitudes described in some cases. Is there perhaps someone who has perfected such technology, perhaps even decades ago? Could these be aliens or even interdimensional intruders? Just what is going on here? It remains to be seen. 

A bizarre vanishing related by missing persons researcher David Paulides, author of the Missing 411 series of books concerning people who have disappeared under bizarre circumstances, happened in the summer of 1938, when 4-year-old Alfred Beilhartz was on a fishing and camping trip with his family at Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. As the boy and his parents were taking a hike along a river, little Alfred suddenly disappeared without explanation. One moment he had been there walking in a line behind them, and the next the parents had turned around to find he was gone without a trace. There had been no shout or sign of distress, and all calls to him went unanswered. He had seemingly just ceased to exist.

Although the parents claimed that the boy had gone nowhere near the water, authorities were nevertheless convinced that he had fallen into the river, and immediately went about blocking off the river so that it could be thoroughly searched and so that his body would not float too far away. A 6-mile stretch of the river where Alfred had vanished was searched and dredged for 5 full days without turning up any sign of the boy, and when bloodhounds were brought in they oddly tracked his scent to around 500 feet uphill from where his parents had been when he had disappeared, which was odd considering he had supposedly gone missing as he was walking behind them. Also strange was that, allegedly, the bloodhounds followed the trail for some time before reaching a fork and suddenly stopping and simply lying down, an odd behavior for trained scent dogs to display, and also strange because it seemed that the trail had just abruptly stopped to vanish just as surely as the boy had.

Even more bizarre than this was an odd report that came in from some hikers in the area in the early stages of the search, the very day after Alfred had vanished. The hikers, who were a couple, had been on Old Fall River Road about 6 miles away over rugged terrain and around 3,000 feet higher from where Alfred had disappeared, and at the time had had no idea that there was a missing boy in the area, yet they reported seeing a rather worrying sight. They claimed that they had seen a young boy perched up upon a high ridge in an area ominously called “The Devil’s Nest,” near the top of Mt. Chaplin. The hikers reported that the boy had been forlornly sitting alone up there and had then suddenly moved out of sight, which the hikers mysteriously allegedly said looked as if he were being “jerked back.” At the time, they could not figure out how such a young boy would be out there in the remote wilderness by himself or how he could have possibly climbed up onto that formidably high ridge. According to the hikers, as soon as they had gotten home and seen the news, they had realized that the boy they had seen was the missing Alfred Beilhartz.

Authorities acted on the tip and made the journey out to the Devil’s Nest, a perilous hike through thick, unforgiving forested terrain littered with rough brush and dense trees, and there at the top of the looming ridge, they could find no trace of the boy. Considering the difficulty of the terrain, the elevation, and the steep, treacherous climb up to the ridge on which the hikers had claimed to have seen the boy, park rangers came to the conclusion that it would have been impossible for the boy to have made the hike out there in the timeframe involved on his own, and that he could not have possibly climbed the ridge alone without specialized climbing equipment and experience. There are several weird details about this case. How did Alfred manage to just vanish right under his parents’ noses without making a sound? What happened to his scent trail, and why did the bloodhounds following him act so oddly? How could Alfred hike all the way up Mt. Chaplin, trudging 6 miles and 3,000 feet through unforgiving, perilous terrain in such a short time, and then climb up onto that high ridge by himself? What did the hikers mean that he was “jerked back”? We may never know, and Alfred Beilhartz has never been found.

In the summer of 1952, 10-year-old Constance Christine “Connie” Smith, of Sundance, Wyoming, was excited about staying at the summer camp called Camp Sloane, in Salisbury, Connecticut. It was her first time away from home on her own, and by all accounts, she could not stop talking about it in the days leading up to the camp. Things started out great, and the typically shy Connie came out of her shell a bit to make new friends and try new things. She seemed to have been enjoying herself, which is why it is rather odd that on July 16, she suddenly walked off on her own away from camp and seems to have kept walking right off the face of the earth.

On that morning, Connie told her tentmates that she was going to skip breakfast and return an ice pack to the camp infirmary. She had apparently used the pack to nurse a bloody nose and cut lip she had allegedly gotten by roughhousing with some other campers, and she told everyone that she was just going to return the pack and be right back to join them. She made no mention of going off anywhere, and seemed to be in good spirits despite her injured nose. She then got dressed in a bright red windbreaker and blue shorts and headed off towards the infirmary, but she would never arrive there. The next time anyone saw her was a camp counselor who saw her walking towards Indian Mountain Road, and others saw her picking daisies in the area. One daughter of a private homeowner would later claim that the girl had knocked on their door and asked how to get to Lakeville, Connecticut, with tears in her eyes, and this seems to be the last confirmed sighting of Connie Smith.

When it was clear that Connie had wandered off and gone missing, camp counselors were quick to find that the girl had never arrived at the infirmary, and indeed she had left the ice pack behind in her tent, along with her money and most of her belongings. The only thing missing was a black zippered purse in which she had kept photos of her friends. The area was searched, but no sign of the girl could be found, and calls out to her were answered with silence, after which she was officially reported missing to police. The area was searched more extensively, but again, no trace of the girl could be found, and in the meantime, police began questioning other campers, camp counselors, and motorists who had been passing by the road she had been on.

Questioning people at the camp immediately turned up some sinister clues, as there were some campers who claimed that, although Connie had told counselors she had bloodied her hose just roughhousing, it had actually been from bullying and getting in a fistfight. Other campers also claimed that Connie had been miserable there and had expressed wanting to go home, so this led to the idea that she had perhaps run away, but why do that without her money and belongings? Also, when Connie’s mother was questioned, she claimed that she had visited her daughter just two days before the vanishing and that Connie had been in good spirits and told her she was having so much fun she wanted to stay longer, so it seems strange that she should want to run away when she was so dead-set on staying. Another ominous clue that police were able to dig up was a trucker who claimed that he had seen a girl matching Connie’s description get into a vehicle on Route 44 near Belgo Road at about 8:45 a.m. on the day of her disappearance, leading police to think she might have been kidnapped. As all of this was going on there was a massive search for the girl taking place, with fliers distributed all over the country. This managed to bring in sightings of Connie from all over the place, but none of these led anywhere, and indeed it would not be until April of 1953 that they would get their first real lead.

It started with a traveling jewelry salesman by the name of Frederick Pope, who came to the police in Ohio claiming he knew what had happened to Connie Smith. He told them that he and his partner, Jack Walker, along with a woman named Wilma Sames, had picked up Connie hitchhiking up on Route 44, and they had promised to take her as far as Wyoming. He then told a shocking story of Walker attacking them in Arizona and killing Connie, after which Pope had attacked him and killed him with a tire iron in self-defense. However, no bodies could be found, and no woman named Sames, nor a Jack Walker, could be proven to have ever even existed at all. Pope would later admit it was all a demented hoax.

Rather eerily, the investigation into this false lead managed to turn up the skeletal remains of a girl in 1958 at a place called Skinner Ridge, in the Grand Canyon National Park, which have never been identified but were eventually found to not belong to Connie Smith. These remains have been nicknamed “Little Miss X,” have never been identified, and are just as mysterious as Connie’s vanishing. In later years, there would be some other leads and even suspects in connection with Connie’s disappearance. One of these was a man named George Davies, who in 1957 was doing time and awaiting execution for the brutal murders of two girls named Gaetane Boivin and Brenda Doucette in Connecticut. While languishing in prison, he came forward to admit that he had also killed Connie Smith and had buried her body on the bank of the Naugatuck River. However, police could not find the body, and Davies would toy with them by claiming he had made the whole story up. Considering that he was executed shortly after, any secrets he may have had he took to the grave with him.

Another promising suspect was a man named William Henry Redmond, who was charged in 1988 with strangling a Pennsylvania girl a year before Connie’s disappearance and was thought to have been in the Lakeville area at the time, but police could never prove this or find any hard evidence to pin him to the vanishing. Considering he died in prison in 1992, we will never know. There would be no further suspects found, but over the years, sightings of Connie Smith alive came in from all over the country, and there was even a woman who claimed that she was Connie Smith, but a DNA test refuted this. Connie’s family would continue to doggedly search for clues, but tragically her mother and father would die without ever finding the answers they sought, leaving it up to Connie’s brother, Nels J. Smith, to carry on, but the case has gone very cold. However, it is still open, and current investigator Detective Michael Downs has said of it all:

“There were some leads that were dead ends. My thoughts are that it’s a good case. It all happened so long ago. In 1952 things were done differently, and technology was very old-school. If you think back to childhood, one could walk anywhere. Times change. A 10-year-old walking down an old dirt road crying would be remarkable today. Back then, it was nothing. No one knows what actually occurred. It’s been 66 years, and no one has found her. With the Internet and technology, you would think something would have come up, but no. If a child were missing today, it would be found. With this case, there is hope for the family’s sake. I tend to be hopelessly optimistic that something will come.”

What happened to Connie Smith? How did she just wander off with so many other people around, only to vanish off the face of the earth? Did she run away, was it foul play or what? It is frustrating to know that all of these decades later, there have been few clues and no answers, and her ultimate fate remains unknown. All we know is that she walked away from that camp and has never been seen again, leaving us to merely wonder and speculate.

In 1971, 8-year-old Douglas Legg went on a family trip to a place called the Santanoni Estate, now called the Santanoni Preserve, near the town of Newcomb, in the Adirondack Mountains of Essex, New York. Also commonly called the "Great Camps," the sprawling, 12,500-acre estate was a popular summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers at the time and featured forty buildings and a 24-room main lodge. The owners of the estate, the wealthy Melvin Family, were relatives of the Leggs, and so they often made family trips there to enjoy the remote wilderness and serene vistas of forests and lakes. On this particular occasion, it was to be the extended family’s last trip there before the estate was due to be sold, but it would also be the last time anyone would ever see little Douglas again.

On July 10, 1971, Douglas went on a hike with his uncle on a clear summer day for what was meant to be an easy, short hike. As they walked along, at around 3:30 p.m., Douglas’ uncle realized that they were probably going to encounter some poison ivy along the way. In fact, he had spotted patches of it as they walked, and noticing that Douglas was wearing short pants, his uncle told him to run back to camp and change into long pants. Although he was only 8 years old, the camp was just a short distance away, just a stone’s throw, in fact, only around a half a mile along a straight path, and despite his young age he was very experienced being in the outdoors and had been to the camp many times before. As he ran off to go change his clothes, it would not have seemed like a particularly abnormal thing, so it was with some surprise that the uncle waited and waited, but Douglas never came back.

After some time waiting, Douglas’ uncle went back to camp, where he learned that the boy’s older brother had seen him near the main lodge building but had thought nothing of it. One of the boy’s cousins also claimed that he had seen Douglas near a nearby ridge, but again, it hadn’t seemed particularly strange. Indeed, everyone seemed to think that the boy was still with the uncle. When the uncle told them what had happened, they immediately fanned out to look for Douglas, calling out his name and sweeping the entire area, but there was no sign of him. As the evening approached and the temperature dropped, authorities were notified, and an official search was launched.

The ensuing search would be one of the largest the state of New York had ever seen, using helicopters, planes equipped with heat-detecting infrared FLIR, search dogs, rangers, a mountain rescue team who flew in from Sierra Madre, California, and 1,000 volunteers, although it was described as not being particularly well-organized and hampered by bad weather and treacherous terrain. Even psychics were brought in. At one point a bloodhound picked up the boy’s scent and followed it for around 30 miles over difficult terrain choked with brush and trees, which would have been nearly impossible for such a young child to have navigated on their own, where the trail ended at a pond, which was subsequently dragged and even drained but no body was found. After that, the scent trail ended, as if he had just evaporated from the face of the earth. The search would go on for 6 weeks, searching every bush and crevice, even in areas that no 8-year-old would have been able to pass through, and dragging streams and lakes, but no further traces of the boy were found, not a single clue as to where he had gone or what had happened to him. He had seemingly just ceased to exist. It was at the time assumed that the boy had simply gotten lost in the wilderness and succumbed to the many bogs and swamps in the area, but in later years, some eerie clues would seem to refute this.

In 1993, a woman came forward claiming that a relative of hers had killed Douglas Legg and dumped his body in a lake in Lewis County. She even showed authorities which specific lake it was, but there was no sign of any body found, and it was discovered that the woman was a psychiatric patient with false memory syndrome. That very same year a Montana man would come forward to claim that he had been hunting in the area back in 1973 and had stumbled across some skeletal remains that could have been those of a child, but he had shied away from coming forward with the discovery at the time because he had been on Navy leave and not supposed to be hunting there at the time. Despite all of the time that had passed, the area was thoroughly searched to no avail. It is unknown just what he actually found or what connection it has to Douglas Legg’s disappearance. Even more recently was a lead that came in 2020, when members of the New York State Police Troop B Underwater Recovery Team were doing training at a lake in front of the Santanoni Estate and came across an unidentified skull fragment. It was seen as an exciting new lead until it was analyzed and determined to be non-human.

In the end, there have been no other possible leads, no new clues, and although the case is officially still open, there has been no sign of the missing Douglas Legg, the tragic vanishing still frustratingly unsolved. What happened to him out there? How could he go so completely missing in such a short amount of time practically right under everyone's noses? Did he just get lost, despite the fact that he was within eyeshot of camp? Did he get distracted and roam off into the unknown? Was this all foul play? Or was it something else? It seems like only the trees know the answers to these various questions, and the mysterious vanishing of Douglas Legg remains unsolved, perhaps forevermore.

Sunday, March 24, 1991, started out as a great day out for four-year-old Michael Dunahee and his mother, Crystal Dunahee, and father, Bruce. It was a clear, sunny day, and the family was out at Blanshard Park Elementary School in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada to watch Crystal play in a playful practice game of flag football. Shortly after arriving at the field around 12:30 PM, little Michael asked his mother if he could go to the playground right nearby. Seeing as how there were many parents and families out playing on that fine day and the playground was just a few yards away, she said it was OK, on the condition that he wait for his father when he got there. Little did anyone know that as he walked off towards the playground, this would be the last time she would see him.

Michael walked off, and his mother bent down for just a moment to put on her cleats as she called to her husband to go watch their son. However, when she looked up moments later, the boy was nowhere to be seen. She literally looked down, tied her shoes, and looked up to find him nowhere. Bruce Dunahee was at the park in moments, but couldn’t see Michael anywhere. A look around showed happy families playing and children laughing, but no Michael, who should have stuck out considering he was wearing a bright blue hooded jacket with red lining and red cuffs, as well as multi-colored rugby pants and blue canvas shoes with bright red and orange trim. It had been less than a minute since the boy had ventured towards the park just right there, just feet away from his parents, in broad daylight in a public, crowded park, so it didn’t make any sense. It was as if he had just vanished into thin air.

At this point, it was still thought that he couldn’t be far, so Crystal and Bruce searched the whole park and its surroundings but saw no sign of Michael. They managed to recruit several dozen other people from the practice game to help look, but they had no luck at all, and asking around to other people in the park proved that no one even remembered seeing the boy at all. This was enough to cause the increasingly panicked parents to call the police. The entire area was thoroughly searched, but Michael could not be found, and the search efforts would quickly escalate into one of the largest Canada had ever seen. Yet despite this massive search, wide circulation of fliers, and a reward that would reach $100,000, initially there were no leads at all. How is it that this boy could have so thoroughly disappeared within moments, mere feet from his parents in a public place, and no one had even seen anything? There were no witnesses, no clues, nothing. It was as if Michael Dunahee had just evaporated.

There would eventually be hundreds of tips that would be called in as the case gained national and then worldwide attention, but none of these led anywhere at all. One promising tip was that someone had seen a man in his 50s loitering about by the park near a brown van on that day, but there is no way at all to know if this was connected to the disappearance, and the reported brown van could not be located. Also rather chilling was a call that Crystal and Bruce Dunahee received from a man demanding a $10,000 ransom for the return of their son, but whoever it was never followed up on it, and police believe it was just a sick prank. In June of that year, there was another rather chilling lead, when a girl claimed a man had tried to abduct her and she had seen a boy tied up in the back of the van who she thought resembled Michael Dunahee, but this could not be confirmed. There were various other alleged sightings of the missing boy from all over British Columbia, but none of these panned out, and with no clear answer, there are only theories.

The best thing authorities could come up with was that it must have been an abduction that was carried out by an opportunistic perpetrator, probably a stranger, but it is unclear how they could have done it in such a short time in such a public place without anyone seeing anything suspicious at all. Police interviewed every known sex offender and criminal who had been anywhere near that park, but came up empty, with no suspects whatsoever, and since no one had witnessed anything strange, they didn’t even have a description of the kind of person they should be looking for. The case had hit a wall.

It would not be until 2006, over a decade later, that a truly promising lead would come in when it was reported that there was a young man who had been living in a small town in British Columbia who bore a striking resemblance to posters that had been released showing an age-enhanced Michael Dunahee. In fact, the resemblance was so uncanny that even Michael’s distressed parents believed it to be him, yet when authorities tracked the man down and performed a DNA test, it was found not to be Michael. There would be more cases of people looking like Michael popping up in the coming years, but in every instance, DNA testing proved otherwise. Perhaps one of the spookiest new leads came in 2009, when a 62-year-old man in Milwaukee named Vernon Seitz confessed on his deathbed that he had killed two children in 1958, and this spurred a search of his home. Police would chillingly find reams of child pornography and missing children posters, one of them eerily featuring the missing Michael Dunahee. Police could find no link between Seitz and Michael and no evidence that he had been in British Columbia in 1991, leaving it uncertain if he had anything to do with the case. If he did, then there is no proof, and he took any secrets he had to the grave with him.

The tragic and mysterious case of Michael Dunahee’s vanishing has gone on to become one of the darkest and most perplexing unsolved mysteries Canada has ever seen, and it even led to changes in the way such disappearances are handled, through the introduction of an Amber Alert system in the province. Although the case remains officially open, there has been very little progress made on it and there have never been any suspects found. Indeed, what happened to Michael Dunahee remains largely just as baffling today as it ever was, and Deputy Chief John Ducker has lamented: “I've never seen an effort like that in my history in policing. That was a very frustrating part of it. We didn't get that one piece of information we needed to." We are left to merely wonder and speculate as to what happened to this little boy and how he managed to so fully vanish in such a short time in full view of so many, and hope it doesn't happen to any of us.

In August of 2004, 12-year-old Garret Bardsley was in high spirits. He and his father, brother, and a group of Boy Scouts had just arrived at Cuberant Lake, in Utah’s majestic Uinta Mountains, for a camping and fishing trip, which he had been looking forward to for months. The trip was meant to be a fun late summer excursion before the start of the coming school year, and as they happily set up camp, no one would have had the slightest clue of the strange circumstances that were about to unfold.

On the morning of August 20, 2004, Garrett, his father, and some of the other Boy Scouts got up in the early morning hours to head off to the lake for some fishing. Things went well until the boy managed to soak his shoes, pants, and socks after accidentally falling into the water, and began complaining that the wet clothes were bothering him. According to varying reports, the campsite was just 150-300 yards away along a straight, well-marked trail he was very familiar with, so the father thought nothing of letting him go back to camp to change clothes. Some reports say the camp was a mere “150 paces” away. In fact, most of the trail back was within eyeshot, so it seemed like no big deal. The boy then trudged off up a hill toward the campsite, and as his father watched him go, he would not have been aware that this was the last time he would ever see his son again.

After around 20 minutes, everyone thought it was odd that Garrett had not yet returned to do some more fishing. Thinking that the boy had maybe decided to stay back at camp, the father hiked over there to find that the boy was not there, and no one had seen him arrive. A quick search of the area turned up no signs of the boy, and shouts out into the wilderness produced nothing but silence and the wind rustling through the trees. It was then that everyone realized that something was very amiss.

Authorities were contacted, and a massive search was launched for the missing Garrett. A huge search of the area with hundreds of official and volunteer searchers scoured the vicinity of a three-mile radius but were unable to uncover anything except a lone white sock belonging to the boy about a half a mile from where he had disappeared. Other than that, there was no sign whatsoever of the boy or his fishing pole. The official search for Bardsley was called after nine days, leaving many unanswered questions and theories on what had happened to him swirling.

Authorities believed that the location of the found sock seemed to suggest that the boy may have tried to seek shelter from the coming cold of night in a nearby boulder field, but there could be found no evidence that he had gone into the boulders. He might have also succumbed to the freezing temperatures or starvation, as he had not been carrying any warm clothing and had not had any provisions on him. A wild animal attack was not ruled out either, but there had been no screams for help, and there was no sign of the torn clothing and blood that an animal attack would have inevitably left behind. One Reddit user called “dt_diego” claims he participated in the search and believes Garrett may have fallen into a nearby stream. He says of this;

“I participated in the search for Garrett. I remember our search team met up in a meadow after we finished our assigned route. One side our our line got ahead of the other, and we ended up waiting for a bit. There was a gentle stream that passed through the meadow. The stream was unremarkable, small--perhaps two or three feet across; very easy to hop over. For no real reason other than passing time, a member of our search team picked up a big log, I remember it being several feet in length (4 feet or so), and threw it in the stream vertically. It went completely into the water, deep enough you couldn't see it all, and never came back up; apparently stuck in the muck at the bottom. We were all shocked because the stream was so small, and we all thought the log was taller than the stream was deep. The fact that the stream was so much deeper than we thought, and the muck at the bottom was thick enough to prevent a rather large log from floating back up was shocking. We also discussed the possibility the stream was wider under the top soil.

I remember everyone in my search party looking at each other as we realized Garrett could be in the water, and we'd never be able to find him. I was a volunteer, and am not a search and rescue professional. I am not suggesting that this is necessarily what happened, but I thought the story worth recording. Between all the water in the area, and the mine shafts mentioned by another poster, it saddens me, but does not surprise me, that he still has not been found.”

An even more ominous claim comes from Reddit user “Detail3347,: whose father was apparently a part of the search and would find some menacing clues pointing to perhaps an abduction. He explains;

“When this happened my dad was one of the people who went up to search, while he was up there he talked to some other volunteers who said they ran into some people acting weird when they asked questions about Garrett, they asked if they could check their tent and see who was in it but the people said their wife was in the tent and didn’t want to wake her up, the volunteers not wanting to be annoying left but after just a few minutes felt like they should go back, when they went back the tent was gone along with any trace of people, I think they kidnapped him and that’s why theirs no trace of him, and that the claims of seeing him at a grocery store years later are true.”

None of these ideas has turned up any evidence of what really happened to Garrett, and the only possible leads ever found are that sock and one report that the boy had been sighted with two men at a grocery store in Nevada at the end of July, but this has led nowhere. In the end, it is unclear just how Garrett Bardsley managed to completely vanish without a trace so close to camp and without leaving any trace, and the answers may elude us forever. 

Also, from 2004, on July 31 of that year, 9-year-old David Gonzales was camping with his family at the Hanna Flat campground campsite in the Big Bear area of Northern California’s San Bernardino National Forest. At one point, at approximately 8 a.m., David asked his mother for the car keys so that he could go get a box of cookies that he wanted to eat. The mother gave him the keys and watched as he made his way towards the car, which was only 50 yards away. At this point, the mother claims that she turned to look away just for a moment and that when she looked back, David was gone. When a cursory search of the area turned up no sign of the boy, the authorities were contacted. His mother would lament, “A second is an eternity. Witnesses will tell you, I take good care of my children ... This was a tragedy.” And so would unfurl a bizarre vanishing of an innocent child in the wilderness, surrounded by strange clues and no closer to being solved now than it was then.

It was soon found that the box of cookies that David had wanted was still in the car, meaning that he had never reached his destination, but the keys were gone. This had all happened within the space of minutes, and his parents were left baffled. A team of over 200 people in San Bernardino County meticulously scoured the woods for Gonzales, finding no trace of the boy, no signs of a struggle, nothing at all to show that he had ever even been there at all. Nothing. Even after nine days of intensive searches, there was nothing, no one at the campsite had seen him or could offer any further information, and no one had a clue as to what was going on. David’s mother remembered hearing a car speeding off at around the time of the disappearance, but there was considered to be no strong evidence that the boy had been kidnapped. An intensive, 9-day search of the area failed to find any trace of the boy, no blood or any other sign of struggle or foul play, no scraps of clothing, and he had seemingly blinked out of existence. The only clue that was turned up was some witnesses who claimed to have seen the boy walking along a road near the campsite not long after he disappeared, but that was about it. Police also questioned dozens of known sex offenders in the region, but found nothing to link them to the increasingly mysterious disappearance.

One year later, some hikers came across the decomposed remains of what were believed to be David, a mere mile away from the campsite from which he had disappeared, in an area that had already been well searched. The remains would, through dental records, prove that they were of the missing boy. They showed no obvious signs of severe trauma or injury, yet despite this, the prevailing theory at the time was that he had been attacked and dragged off by a mountain lion. There was no reason to think that it was any sort of foul play pulled off by another human being, and Sgt. Frank Bell of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s homicide unit said this:

"Everything we’re finding is pointing toward a natural death, and nothing that we’re finding is leading us to believe anything criminal occurred. The location would be too difficult for a murder suspect to carry a boy to. It would’ve taken hiking down a steep ravine and carrying the boy nearly a mile to get back there. A murder suspect is not going to do that."

The main idea continued to be that he had been attacked by a mountain lion, with the scattering of the bones and a reported mountain lion sighting in the area seeming to support this, but this seems to be a rather odd conclusion considering that the mother had been right there not far away when David had gone missing, yet had heard no scream or sound of struggle, and there had been no blood or any evidence that such a violent attack had taken place. Authorities were not entirely sure of what had happened here, but one thing that did seem apparent is that the location of the remains on the surface of the ground out in the open in such a remote area with no attempt to hide them tended to discredit the idea that the body had been dumped by a kidnapper or murderer. When pressed about why the mountain lion scenario was being entertained, San Bernardino County sheriff’s spokesman, Chip Patterson, was rather evasive, saying:

"Explanations can be found in the lack of evidence. It was such a thorough search, and there were so many resources used, you wonder why we couldn’t find him there. We searched that exact area…. Why couldn’t he hear or see the people looking for him? Why couldn’t we find him? This theory fits with what we don’t know. We were told the big cats can drag their prey one to three miles away, that they like to take it to a secluded area. There had to be a reason he wasn’t being seen."

However, others were not so sure of the mountain lion theory, with other forensics experts questioning this line of inquiry. One such expert is California Department of Fish and Game wildlife biologist Douglas Updike, who, while initially also suspecting a mountain lion attack, changed his mind as the forensic evidence came in, notably the lack of any tooth holes or damage to the bones consistent with such an attack. He would explain:

"There are many aspects consistent with the possibility that a mountain lion attacked this young boy: where he was found, the animal’s swift ability to take prey quietly and take it away from the site of an attack. However, I didn’t see anything that implicated a mountain lion. I didn’t see any evidence today that amounts to a smoking tooth hole. The animal typically jumps on the prey’s back and holds on with its claws while biting at the base of the skull. These are full-strength bites that typically leave marks or punctures through the skull or crush part of the vertebrae. In most lion attacks that we’ve seen, there would have been punctures or crushing. And that is not the case here. If they can find some clothing that belonged to the young boy, maybe we can find some hair on the clothing that shows a wild animal attacked the boy. But at this point, we have found nothing to indicate that it was a wild animal."

Although there were some light scratches on some of the remains, he insists that these were likely from scavengers after death and not the result of a lethal attack. Another oddity that seemed to discredit an animal attack was that the area where the body had been found had been thoroughly searched with sniffer dogs, so how had it managed to completely evade detection if this was just a random animal attack? There have been few concrete answers, and all we know for sure is that a young boy was there one second, gone the next, and ended up dead under mysterious circumstances. Debate has continued on what actually happened here, and at the moment, it remains an inexplicable mystery.

More recently, on July 10th of 2015, Jessica Mitchell and her fiancé Vernal DeOrr Kunz Sr., of Idaho Falls, Idaho, suddenly decided to throw everything in the car and take a spontaneous camping trip along with Mitchell’s grandfather Robert Walton and his friend Issac Reinwand, and Vernal’s 2-year old son DeOrr Jay Kunz Jr. It was seen as an exciting little spur of the moment adventure at the time, and as they headed towards the Timber Creek Campground, in the Salmon-Challis National Forest, in Lemhi County, Idaho, they were all in generally good spirits, especially little DeOrr Jr. However, things were soon about to take a detour into a dark and sinister mystery that has yet to be solved.

After their 2-hour drive, the group arrived at the remote and mountainous campground and set up their camper trailer, after which they made a fire and sat around it while Walton retreated to rest in the trailer and Reinwand went off to do some fishing. After a while, Mitchell and Vernal decided to take a walk to explore the campground and shouted to Walton that they were leaving the boy there with him. They were then gone for about 10 minutes, but when they came back their son was nowhere to be seen. Walton, who had had the camper door open, would claim that he had not heard them call out that they were leaving, and so had not been keeping an eye on the boy, although he had seen him out playing when he looked outside. It was thought that he had just wandered away, but a look around showed no sign of him, even though such a young boy should not have been able to get far through that terrain in such a short amount of time. However, calls to the child remained unanswered, and the father would later say, “He just vanished.” Oddly, he had left behind his blanket, cup, and toy monkey, items his parents claimed he never went anywhere without.

After looking all around the campground for 20 minutes, the parents called 911 at approximately 2:30 PM, and soon the hunt was on. Searchers on horseback, foot, and ATVs fanned out throughout the area, meticulously combing every inch with no sign of the missing boy. The Stone Reservoir and Creek was repeatedly searched by divers, and the search team grew to over 200 people. As the days grew into weeks, it was increasingly suspected that they were not dealing with a lost kid, but rather a possible abduction, but this seemed odd as there was no one else in the area, there was no sign of a struggle, and it was such a remote area.

As the news of the strange disappearance hit the news and investigators looked more deeply into the case, some odd details emerged that seemed to point the finger at something ominous happening with DeOrr Kunz Jr.’s parents. One oddity was the 911 call that the boy’s mother made at the time of the vanishing. It has been pointed out that during the entire 4-minute call, Mitchell seems incredibly calm and devoid of emotion, although this might not mean anything. Another suspicious detail is that police were unable to find an outside, reliable witness who could definitively place the boy at the campground at all, and this was compounded when a convenience store worker would claim that she had seen the missing boy with his parent at her store at around 8 PM on the day he disappeared. The parents have insisted that this must be a mistake, and the lead has not gone anywhere.

Not helping their case was that several inconsistencies were found in the parents’ reports, and they both failed lie-detector tests to boot. As a result of all of this, police and even their own private investigator, Phillip Klein, began to see them as persons of interest. The idea was that DeOrr had been killed, either intentionally or by accident, and that the whole vanishing story was just a cover-up, which of course the parents and the rest of the group vehemently denied. Despite these suspicions, with a lack of any physical evidence to connect them to a crime and no arrest records, none of those who were on that camping trip have ever been formally charged with anything related to the case. In 2019, there was a possible break in the case when cadaver dogs had a “hit” near the campsite where DeOrr disappeared, and bone fragments were found, yet a DNA test showed that they were not from a human being. The parents have long since broken up, and Walton died in 2019, leaving a lot of unanswered questions that will probably never be answered.

What happened to this boy? Where did he go? How could he just evaporate within minutes in such a remote place with no sign of what happened? Was this foul play, perhaps even from his own parents? Or is there something more sinister and mysterious going on here? National Parks have become a hotbed of such mysterious disappearances, so it does make one wonder. Until there is more information, the strange vanishing of DeOrr Kunz Jr. is likely to remain an unsolved mystery, and a reminder of the disturbing trend of people just stepping off the face of the earth in national parks.

There are many more cases of bizarre missing children, and I have merely selected some of the more intriguing and mysterious here. What happened to these kids? How is it that they have so completely managed to vanish right in front of people, and what is going on with those who are found in circumstances orbited by such inexplicable weirdness? Are we dealing with animal attacks, kidnappings, lost children who have wandered off, murders, or something even weirder? Why are they able to elude discovery, ultimately turn up in well-searched areas, and in many cases baffle trained bloodhounds and search crews? Vanishings of children tend to attract to them not only tragedy and sadness, but also mysteries we have yet to fully solve or understand. What has happened to these children and how they have managed to end up where they are may remain an enigma, a shadowy secret lurking along the periphery of our perceptions, and one can only hope that it will not happen again. However, we all know that it is likely just a matter of time.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }