For three years Richard Freeman worked as Head of Reptiles at Twycross Zoo, England and, today, is the Zoological Director of one of the world’s premier cryptozoological investigation groups: namely, the Center for Fortean Zoology. And while Freeman has a passion for all aspects of cryptozoolgy, it is the dragon that fascinates him most of all. “I started my career as a zoologist – so I had a grounded training,” says Freeman. “But cryptozoology was my passion. Now, I have had a particular passion – an obsession, I suppose – for years with dragons. But there was something that always puzzled me: no-one had ever thought, for more than a hundred years, to publish a definitive, non-fiction book on the subject. And as I am a qualified zoologist, I thought: why not me?”

Why not, indeed? In fact, that is precisely what Freeman did in his book, Dragons: More Than A Myth? I asked Freeman about his theories and discoveries with regard to dragons. He replied: “Well, that’s a bit difficult to answer because there are several things going on. It’s important to note that I’ve traveled the world pursuing these creatures – the Gambia, Mongolia, Thailand, and right here in England with some of the old legends from past centuries. And of one thing I can be certain: there isn’t just one answer to the question of what dragons are or what they may be.” Freeman continued: “There are many creatures that have become linked to the lore and legend of what today we perceive and view as dragons, and some of these creatures are distinctly different to each other. But that should not take away from the fact that dragons are a real phenomenon.”

On this latter point, Freeman elaborates: “I am absolutely certain, having reviewed many ancient reports of dragon activity, that many sightings – perhaps two or three hundred years ago and probably further back – were genuine encounters, but where the witnesses were seeing what I believe to have been huge snakes, giant crocodiles, and the Australian ‘monster lizard’ Megalania.”  Freeman makes a noteworthy, and thought-provoking, point: “Any mention of dragons always conjures up images of fire-breathing monsters, and there are definitely reports that fall into that group. But, when you look into many of the earliest, ancient legends, you find that the dragon is more often associated with water. So, I have a theory that some of the better lake monster accounts from centuries ago may well have influenced dragon tales.”

On this point, he adds: “Personally, I also believe that some classic tales of dragons in England in Medieval times, and tales of beasts such as the Lambton Worm, probably have their origins in lake monster accounts, giant eels, etc., that have then mutated into tales of dragons on the loose. But the important point is that this shouldn’t detract from the fact that people did see something.”

I asked him: “You mean that the ancients were seeing lake monsters and, having been exposed to dragon legends, believed them to be – or interpreted them as – dragons, too?”

“Exactly,” Freeman replied.

Of course, the biggest question of all was: are there creatures still living today that Freeman believes have helped perpetuate the image of the dragon? He is certain there are: “I would pretty much stake my life on the fact that Megalania still exists – or did until very recently – in the large forests of Australia, and that also roamed New Guinea. This was a huge, killer-beast; a massive monitor lizard that exceeded thirty feet in length. In literal terms, this was a classic dragon-type animal.”

I questioned Freeman about his research into an animal known as the Naga of Thailand that he believes is responsible for some dragon tales. He told me: “There is no excuse for not getting out into the field and doing firsthand investigations; none at all. In fact, it’s vital. I have no time for the armchair theorist. And one of the experiences that I will remember for the rest of my life was traveling to Thailand with the Discovery Channel in 2000, where we chased giant snakes – the Naga – in the caves and tunnels that exist deep below Thailand.

“It’s very easy to see why the inhabitants in times past considered them to be dragons. The Naga is apparently a large snake, a very large one – maybe in the order of literally tens of feet in length, oil-drum-sized bodies, and definitely big enough to take a whole man.” And similar accounts abound elsewhere, too: “There have come reports from the Congo of an animal known as Mokele-mbembe. Again, it has cross-over qualities with dragon legends, but I’m sure that it will be shown in time to be some sort of giant monitor lizard, too.”

But what of the definitive, fire-breathing dragons of legend: does, or did, such a creature exist? Freeman makes a very intriguing observation: “Back in 1979 Peter Dickinson wrote a book that was titled The Flight of Dragons. Dickinson had come up with this idea – an excellent theory, in fact – that real-life dragons did exist and that they were the descendants of dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Dickinson suggested that these animals developed large, expanded stomachs that would fill with hydrogen gas, which would come from a combination of hydrochloric acid found in the juices of the digestive system that would then mix with calcium found in the bones of their prey.

“Then, from there, the hydrogen – a lighter-than-air gas – allowed these creatures to take to the skies and then control their flight by burning off the excess gas in the form of flame. Anyone seeing this would be seeing the closest thing to the image of the dragon that we all know and love. Dickinson’s theory is an excellent one, and may well be a perfect explanation for sightings of real dragons – in times past, and perhaps today, I believe.”

I leave the final word to Freeman: “The dragon has its teeth and claws deep into the collective psyche of mankind, and it’s not about to let go. Our most ancient fear still stalks the earth today. Beware: this is no fairy-tale. When your parents told you that there were no such things as dragons, they lied!”

I said in a June 16, 2017 article for Mysterious Universe – titled The Majestic 12 Documents Are Back – that just like an over-the-hill, bloated rock band that doesn’t know when it’s time to retire and go away forever, the notorious saga of Majestic 12 hit the road and briefly toured again in 2017. Yes, those pesky documents were back once more. Or, rather, an entirely new and controversial set of papers were among us. Thoughts on the documentation were mixed: some researchers suggested the whole thing was someone’s idea of a hoax. Or a satire. Or a psychological experiment. Others concluded that they were the real thing. Me? I went down the path marked “Disinformation.” It’s accurate to say that I still do. That batch of Majestic 12 files, which ran to 47-pages, were provided to Heather Wade. At the time, she was the host of the popular Midnight in the Desertshow. I was on Heather’s show several times and I like her. When she says that she got the documents from what was described as “a trusted source,” I believe her. But, as two years of time have shown, we never learned who Heather’s source  was. And we were never told how that same source got the documents to her, or from where they came. There is no doubt, however, that these papers are not the real thing. They’re from right in the heart of Russia. Let’s get it right: Russia is not our friend.

Let’s expand on the theory that – just perhaps – the Russians were behind all of this. It’s important to note that just because Heather Wade publicized the papers in 2017, it doesn’t mean they were intended for use in a psy-op in that same year. After all, the document purports to be more than thirty years old. That being so, its pages may well have been originally planned for an operation back in the 1980s. Or, in the nineties. Are there any good reasons why the Russians may have been behind all of this? Yes. In the document, the highly talkative survivor from the Aztec, New Mexico UFO crash of 1948 tells us a great deal about matters relative to aliens, to extraterrestrial technology, and to all kinds of matters of a UFO nature. But, the interviewee from the stars does something else, too: it proves to be quite critical of American politics and history.

At one point, the military interviewer tells the alien sitting before him that “we [the human race] have changed,” as a society, and that “Western civilization is now the leader in this world; for freedom and humanity.” The extraterrestrial, is far from being impressed by those words. It hits back hard and directly to the point: “…tell that to the millions of Hebrews your western civilization has destroyed in the past decade, or the millions of Negro families whose sons died to stop the madman Hitler, but who do not have plumbing in their homes.”

It is a terrible fact that black men who fought in the Second World War were, in some cases, treated like second-class citizens. The Smithsonian website says: “There is a historical relationship between Nazism and white supremacy in the United States. Yet the recent resurgence of explicit racism, including the attack in Charlottesville, has been greeted by many with surprise. But collective amnesia has consequences. When Americans celebrate the country’s victory in WWII, but forget that the U.S. armed forces were segregated, that the Red Cross segregated blood donors or that many black WWII veterans returned to the country only to be denied jobs or housing, it becomes all the more difficult to talk honestly about racism today.”

Military Times says: “…90 percent of black troops were forced to serve in labor and supply units, rather than the more prestigious combat units. Except for a few short weeks during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944 when commanders were desperate for manpower, all U.S. soldiers served in strictly segregated units.”

The alien also has something to say about the United States’ approach to Native Americans. It offers these words, from the Majestic 12 documents: “Not surprising, your history shows that the conqueror seldom preserves any history of their victims. I speak of the natives in this land mass; those called Indians; mostly on your eastern and southern borders and in the ribbon of land that connects yours to the southern continent. Navahos? Aztecs? Incas? The Olmec’s and Toltec’s cultures? These were all greater than your own civilization at a time when you were burning witches and killing their cats, which brought a plague that killed millions of your ancestors. Of course, you drove them mad and destroyed them with venereal diseases and smallpox; those you didn’t slaughter for their gold.”

Clearly, whoever put together this particular Majestic 12 document wished to make a point. Moving on, the alien tells the interviewer that “…in a remote part of the nation you call Yugoslavia, we visited and helped the people there to build a very advanced culture over seven thousand years ago.” Just muse upon that: of all the locations on the planet that the aliens could possibly have chosen to land and help humankind, they selected what became a significant communist land: Yugoslavia. The alien also goes on to say that back in 1895 creatures of its kind made contact with none other than the brilliant maverick scientist, Nikola Tesla.

It’s a fact that Tesla – born in Croatia in 1856, and way ahead of his time – did indeed believe he was in contact with extraterrestrials. The Richmond Times, on January 13, 1901, stated: “There are thousands of people living in the world today who do not believe that the planet of Mars is inhabited. There are many others who do, and some of the leaders in science and foremost men in thought and invention are members of this last-named class. Nikola Tesla, the inventor of the wireless telegraphy, is one of these. Astronomers tell us that the planet Mars is several millions of years older than the earth and H. G. Wells, novelist, in one of his fantastic creations, has peopled this planet with a race of strange creatures. One thing, however, stands to reason, and that is this: If Mars is inhabited those inhabitants are far in advance of us as regards sciences, both theoretical and applied. This is what Tesla thinks, and why he is of the opinion has just recently been made known. He is convinced that the Martians are trying to communicate with us.”

The alien in the Majestic 12 document advises the U.S. military that the United States had utterly failed to embrace the incredible technology which Tesla had perfected and that just might have enriched the world for each and every one of us. But, the creature was careful to add that the Russians had, for a number of years, been running a “strong program of research” that was going ahead “inside the Soviet Union.” In other words, the Russians were forging ahead, while we were fucking up.

The words of an alien or the carefully created statements of a Russian operative? I’ll go with the latter. Well into the 21^stcentury, the meddling has clearly not gone away.

With the “Storm Area 51” craze, local businesses near the base are profiting from the extra publicity. One business in particular, the Little A’Le’Inn motel is definitely cashing in on the “storm”. According to their booking calendar (which can be seen here), all thirteen rooms at the UFO-themed motel are booked solid on September 19^th and 20^th when millions of people plan to storm the secretive military base.

The motel is located in the small village of Rachel which is the nearest residential area to Area 51, and it’s a popular spot for tourists interested in aliens and UFOs. The “Storm Area 51” event is scheduled to take place on September 20^th with millions of people planning on attending the event – almost 2 million people claim to be going and 1.4 million people are interested in attending according to the event’s Facebook page.

Little A’Le’Inn

The motel’s website reads, “Come and sit back and watch the fun”. And it will certain be something to see with millions of people pledging to storm the highly secured military base in order to hopefully find evidence of aliens and UFOs.

And it’s not just the Little A’Le’Inn that’s seeing a boost in business as other local motels are also getting busier. One of those businesses is the Sunset View Inn, located 45 minutes from Area 51, and it’s completely booked solid on the dates of the “storm”. “It’s really booming some small little towns in this area,” Pamela Broxson, who is the general manager of the inn, told CTV News.

Area 51 has long been associated with extraterrestrials as many people believe that the US military is hiding evidence of alien technology and maybe even extraterrestrials themselves. The military did, however, issue a very stern warning for those planning on storming the base. They indicated that they are authorized to use deadly force against anyone who attempts to get into the highly secured area.

And even though Broxson is welcoming the guests into the inn, she doesn’t believe that they’ll be successful in getting into the base. “I’ve had guests try to go out there and they’ve come back looking like ghosts because they’ve been drawed upon,” she said, adding, “Guns pulled on them for going past the barrier.”

With the “storm” a little less than two months away, we’ll have to wait and see what exactly will happen on September 20^thand if anyone will actually get past the gates. For those who still plan to go despite the stern warnings – storm with caution.

The jungles of the Amazon are one of the last great wildernesses of the world, and have served as the siren’s call for explorer’s since time unremembered. Many have come here to never return, and just as many have come back with amazing tales of adventure and discovery, and it is a place steeped in legends, intrigue, and the unknown. It is a realm of lost tribes, strange mysteries, and weird beasts that roam the gloom, a place perpetually in a sort of shadow and existing unto itself. One very odd account that comes from these wilds is that of an intrepid explorer who came here looking for mysteries, and would soon get more than he bargained for, embarking on a quest that would include lost, uncontacted tribes and strange powers of the mind.

Loren McIntyre was a seasoned explorer, photojournalist, and writer for such esteemed publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, Smithsonian, GEO, Audubon, and South American Explorer, and was in many ways a sort of real-life Indiana Jones figure, spending much of his life doggedly exploring the forbidding, uncharted, and most impenetrable reaches of the Amazon rainforest of South America. Indeed, it was he who would be the first one to discover the source of the mighty Amazon River, when he made an expedition in search of it in 1971. He would make history when he found that the largest, longest, and most powerful river in the world began with a runoff of snow at a mountain in the Andes called Mismi, some 6,400 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, which trickled down to pond now called Laguna McIntyre, which in turn emptied into a brook named Carhuasanta, in Peru, after which it began its inexorable growth and meandering journey through some of the most remote wilds on earth. Yet, although this is McIntyre’s most famous discovery it certainly wasn’t his only one, and he would have a very mysterious encounter out in those jungles that he would keep to himself for years.

In 1969, McIntyre embarked on an excursion into the unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle of Brazil. His target was the little-known Mayoruna tribe, also called the Matsés, who were so elusive that they had never been successfully contacted by outsiders and were known as “The Cat People,” due to the arrays of imposing spikes that they wore implanted into their faces. Next to nothing was known about this enigmatic tribe, and they were only ever fleetingly glimpsed. They were like ghosts, and McIntyre had little to go on when he was basically dumped off on the shores of the Amazon River in a place called the Javari valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, and left to continue on his own, penetrating into dense jungle that no outsider had ever set eyes on in an attempt to find these mysterious people. Little did he know that it would be they who found him.

Loren McIntyre

As the brave, seasoned explorer made his way through mosquito infested jungle he got perhaps too focused on finding the lost tribe, and soon realized that he was hopelessly lost. His journey then turned into aimlessly wandering through the perilous wilderness, and it became obvious that he was not going to be in time for his scheduled pick up at the point where he had been dropped off. He began to resign himself to the fact that he just might end up another mysterious lost explorer, like his childhood idol Percy Fawcett before him, a fellow explorer who had mysteriously vanished while looking for a mythical city he called “Z.” Making this trek more ominous was when at some point McIntyre would stumble across a clearing littered with the bodies of what appeared to be four lumberjacks, half devoured by ants and with arrows sticking from their silent corpses.

This grim discovery had the explorer watching the trees carefully as he aimlessly wandered around half expecting death to come for him at any moment through the shadows, and more sure than ever that he would not see civilization again. It was as he was in this fog of panic and fear that some figures crept out of the forest before him, spikes embedded into their faces, necklaces made of bones, possibly human, around their necks, and looking upon him with a mixture of apprehension and surprise, but not aggressiveness. These were the Mayoruna, and this was the closest any outsider had ever gotten to them. At least any who were still alive.

The frightened explorer immediately and very slowly pulled out some gifts that he had brought in the event that he actually made contact. From his bag he produced some cloth and mirrors, which he dropped before the tribesmen as they looked on with inscrutable expressions on their pierced faces. They stepped closer to accept the gifts, and then seemed to beckon for him to follow them as they began to melt back into the forest. The weary McIntyre stumbled after them, barely able to keep up with their nimble navigation of the jungle, and so would begin the next chapter of his strange adventure.

They arrived at what seemed to be a makeshift camp full of other members of the tribe, and they seemed to show a strange mixture of curiosity and aggression towards him. Upon examining his tennis shoes they went about burning them to ashes, and his watch they found fascinating, but they destroyed that too. Indeed, most of his possessions would be either stolen from him or destroyed, and even his camera, which they oddly showed no interest in, was broken when a monkey descended from the trees to take it from him. Although there was no outright aggression against him, there were some grim reminders that he was very much in danger. He would claim that they possessed trinkets made of human bone and that they drank out of hollowed out skulls. They were also very well armed and never far from their bows, and one tribesman with red face paint, who he called “Red Cheeks,” took to menacing him and scowling at him.

McIntyre would end up staying with this lost tribe for two months, and during this time made many observations. He noticed that they were constantly on the move, perpetually moving to a new camp, sometimes suddenly and without warning, and they clearly had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They also seemed to have no concept of individual possessions, freely sharing everything with each other and taking or using whatever they liked without repercussions. Even odder still, he noticed that these people often moved quite bizarrely in sync, knowing what the others would do or acting in precise tandem without speaking to each other. For some time, he pondered this anomaly, but he would soon learn that the explanation was far odder than anything that he had ever guessed at.

One day he was approached by the one he took to be the chief of the tribe, an ancient looking, sinewy and grizzled tree trunk of a man, covered in warty growths that would earn him McIntyre’s nickname “Barnacle.” When the chief approached he spoke to McIntyre, and the explorer found that bizarrely, after weeks of being unable to understand anything any of them had said, he clearly comprehended what Barnacle had to say. This utterly perplexed him, but he soon realized that this chief was not moving his mouth when he spoke, and that he was talking directly into his mind, using a sort of telepathy that McIntyre would later call “beaming,” and which Barnacle called “the other language.”

Barnacle explained that the tribe existed as a sort of hive mind consciousness, and that their thoughts were all linked to each other, although only the tribal elders were proficient at focusing this telepathic power and truly using it to its full potential. Here he learned that there was no real “self” as Westerners would think of it, and that to them the concept of an individual “self” made little sense. The chief also telepathically explained that they were under constant threat from loggers and other outsiders, and that the reason the tribe moved so often was that they were on a spiritual journey to what he called “The Beginning,” or the literal beginning of time, where they hoped to be beyond the reach of the intruding outside world. Indeed, the tribe seemed to have a very strange grasp of how time worked that was rather alien to anything the explorer was familiar with. A 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times about McIntyre’s bizarre experience explains the tribe’s philosophy on time as follows:

The main feature of time, by western definition, is its passage. But for the Mayoruna, time is at once mobile and static. It moved with man, stopped with him, advanced and retreated with him. It is not the implacable judge, condemning man to a tragically brief life. Time is a shelter, an escape into safety and regeneration, a repository whose chief function is not piling up the past, intact yet dead, but rather keeping it alive and available. And, in the face of violent encroachment on their land by white settlers, that past assisted them with an alternative to a menacing present.

The chief invited McIntyre to come along with them on their journey to “The Beginning,” and for the next few weeks he followed them on their mystical quest and engaged in their rituals, often taking psychoactive jungle concoctions that warped his perceptions. He found that if he concentrated he could pick up on a sort of static fuzz that contained the interlinked thoughts of all of the tribe members, through processes he could never hope to fathom. However, he knew at some point he would have to part ways with them and try to leave this land of jungle, telepathy, and time travel behind him to get back to the civilization that was no doubt convinced he had vanished. The only problem was that he had no idea where he was, and on top of this, although he had been invited and was not physically threatened by the Mayoruna in any way, he had no illusions that he was anything other than their prisoner, and wondered what they would do if he tried to flee. However, in the end the decision was made for him, a flood swept through during a torrential rain, and McIntyre would be whisked away as he clung to a balsa raft, emptied into the river and incredibly found the next day by a pilot flying over.

Upon getting back to civilization, McIntyre would keep what had happened to him a secret for years, and it is quite likely that the whole fantastical tale would have died with him in 2003 if it hadn’t been for a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, by the name of Petru Popescu. In 1987 Popescu met McIntyre by chance while on a river boat trip up the Amazon River. The two men hit it off, and for some reason McIntyre confided to him about what had happened all of those years ago with the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. It was all rather amazing, and when Popescu asked why he had never told anyone about it, McIntyre said that he didn’t think any one would ever believe him, and he had been worried about maintaining his reputation as a respected explorer, writer, and photographer. He would say of this:

I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’

Popescu would finally manage to convince McIntyre to let him write a book on his adventures, and in 1991 released The Encounter: Amazon Beaming. The explorer would claim that in his dealings with dozens of other tribes in the same region he had never before or since experienced anything like he did during his time with the Mayoruna, and he did not know what became of them. We are left to wonder just how much of this account is true, and if it is just what was going on with these elusive people of the jungle. The tribe itself has sort of disappeared, they have never been formally studied, and since McIntyre passed away in 2003, we are left only with Popescu’s book as a window into this strange tribe and their world and ways. One wonders if they are still out there, or if they managed to make that journey to “The Beginning,” finally at peace and forevermore out of our reach.

A well known, and very unique quality of certain ocean life is its propensity to produce eerie illumination, which can light up the deep in what range from faint glows, to colorful light shows. Such bioluminescence ranges from plankton and other maritime minutiae that flash in quick, propulsive little blasts of light barely visible to the naked eye, to random–and remarkable–kaleidoscopic light shows rippling across the ocean surface.

Such phenomena include, but are not limited to stories like those of colorful “spinning wheels” of light observed in various regions of the ocean, as I’ve detailed previously here at Mysterious Universe. 

An account given of one such display described that a colorful show of spinning wheels of light, which was later discussed by N.J. Greig in an issue of the journal Marine Observer in 1996. “They were all about 3 meters in diameter and changed both size and shape while flashing intensely,” the report stated.

However, “by (6 PM local time) the effect had completely stopped on the starboard side, and only the pulsating rings were left on the port side and, with these, the intensity of the light reduced until (6:22) when there was nothing more to observe.”

Such light shows are uncommon, but not particularly unique in maritime literature from over the years. In fact, they are not even unique to the Strait of Hormuz, where the report outlined above occurred in May of 1996. In fact, just months earlier on the date of October 3, 1995, a similar strange “light show” was observed by the crew aboard the M.V. Chilham Castle, which was sailing from Karachi to Kuwait when it observed a series of perplexing illuminations emanating from below the surface.

The crew aboard the vessel gave the following report of the incident, which was subsequently published, as with previous similar oceanic anomalies, in the Marine Observer in 1996:

“At about 2240 UTC, the observers saw a strange effect in the sea stretching for approximately 100 m from the parallel body. It was a soft white light, almost strobe-like in character that pulsed irregularly. The light was bright enough to illuminate the wheelhouse deckhead and seemed to emanate from below the water, almost as if something was shining a spotlight upwards, shimmering and twirling: psychedelic projections of the 1960s were brought to mind. Curiously, the wash from the bow was not illuminated and appeared normal, likewise the wake.”

The phenomenon lasted for 6 or 7 minutes, faded, and then reappeared briefly. The night was clear and the visibility excellent.

On a rather eerie note, the description of the light seeming “to emanate from below the water, almost as if something was shining a spotlight upwards” is worth noting in the description, whether or not the display in question had some kind of technological origin.

It is certainly not impossible that such phenomena may have a natural origin. Around the same time, Discover Magazine reported on the discovery of novel forms of aquatic life that congregate around volcanic vents deep within the ocean. “At midocean ridges,” they reported, “where new ocean floor rises up as molten rock from Earth’s interior, where cold seawater mixes with the rising magma and, heated to 650 degrees, spews back up through chimney-shaped hydrothermal vents, researchers stumbled across bustling ecosystems.”

Odd lights photographed over the North Pacific in 2014 by Dutch pilot JPC van Heijst

(Credit: JPC van Heijst).

However, such molten meetings between lava vents and seawater would be an awkward explanation for the kinds of luminous curiosities that appear below the surface of various regions of our oceans, as seen from the surface by nighttime crews in the right place and right time.  Still, lava has been offered as an explanation in the past when unusual illuminations have appeared on the ocean surface, as with an incident in 2014 where a Dutch pilot photographed an unusual light display on the North Pacific ocean.

It may be that we’re a long way off from determining what, precisely, the source of all of the ocean’s many strange and colorful “light shows” could be. Whether some natural phenomenon already well known to science, or something else altogether, such illuminations provide just another example of the many beautiful little oddities planet Earth still has to offer.

In early March 1997, an eyeopening feature appeared in the pages of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper. The title of the feature was “Secret US spyplane crash may be kept under wraps.” The feature included the following words: “A top-secret United States spyplane which flies on the edge of space at five times the speed of sound crashed at the British experimental airbase at Boscombe Down, Hampshire, in September 1994, according to a report in a leading military aviation journal. The SAS [Special Air Service], the report said, was scrambled to throw a cordon round the wreckage, which was flown back to the U.S. two days later. The hypersonic reconnaissance aircraft, called Astra or Aurora, is believed to have been developed in the 1980s as a secret U.S. government ‘black programme.’”

Attempts were made to try and diffuse the controversy that surrounded this curious affair, with claims from the military that nothing but a malfunctioning Tornado airplane was the culprit. The U.K.’s National Archives prepared this statement: “…the only flying that took place that night was the launch of two Royal navy Sea King helicopters in support of an exercise. Claims that members of the public were turned away by police roadblocks may have arisen from some confusion over dates. On August 12, 1994 a Tornado participating in a trial made an emergency landing there after the decoy target under trial failed to jettison. The Tornado landed with a trailing 375 ft steel cable and, for safety reasons, roads close to Boscombe Down were closed while the aircraft passed overhead. We are aware of press reports regarding an aircraft known as ‘Aurora’. The Ministry of Defense has no knowledge of any US aircraft with this designation operating in UK airspace. The existence of such a programme would, in any case, be a matter for the US Government to confirm.”

Note that the incident occurred in September 1994 (its 25th anniversary looms, as per the title of this article…), but the National Archives claimed it had occurred in August 1994. Maybe it really was all down to a Tornado. Perhaps it was something much weirder. Possibly , something that may actually have been flying around the U.K. countryside for a long time. Since the 1980s, sightings of large, triangular-shaped UFOs, usually described as being black in color, making a low humming noise, and very often with rounded rather than angled corners, have been reported throughout the world. The sheer proliferation of such reports has led some ufological commentators to strongly suspect that the Flying Triangles (as they have come to be known) are prime examples of still-classified aircraft, namely, the Aurora. It was one single wave of encounters in the U.K., in early 1993, which ultimately led senior military and defense personnel to liaise with their American counterparts to try and determine, once and for all, if the FTs are the Aurora or if they have extraterrestrial origins. The story comes from one of those at the forefront of the study into the aforementioned sightings: Nick Pope, who, for three years (1991-1994), investigated UFO incidents for the Ministry of Defense.

I’ll share with you the words Pope made to me in a 1997 interview: “I arrived at the office at about 8:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. on the morning of March 31, 1993, and my telephone was ringing. I picked it up and there was a police officer on the other end making a UFO report. Now, he was based in Devon [England] and told me an account of an incident that had taken place in the early hours of that particular day when he and a colleague who had been on night patrol saw a triangular-shaped UFO at fairly-high altitude. He said that the motion was fairly steady and that there were lights at the edges with a fainter light in the middle. To me, this was already a description that was becoming quite familiar both from one or two reports that I’d received at the Ministry of Defense over the years and from my own study and research into the UFO literature. In other words, I was aware that this was a commonly reported shape for a UFO.”

“I was also quite pleased to get a report from a police officer. I won’t say that it was rare, but it was slightly unusual to have reports from trained observers like police and military. I would say that, of the reports I received in my time at the UFO desk, less than five per cent came from, collectively, pilots, military officers and the police. I had spoken, socially, to numerous Royal Air Force pilots who’d had personal sightings, but who had never reported them for fear of ridicule. But that police report was very much the first of many that came in that day and over the next week or so. When taken together, the sightings described took place in a range of times – the earliest was about 11-11.30 p.m. on the evening of the 30^th and the latest was about 1.45 a.m. in the early hours of the 31^st. What was it precisely that made the police officer’s report stand out?  He said to me: ‘I’ve been on night patrols for years, but I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.’ Well, reports such as this came through thick and fast over the course of the next week or so; more and more reports came in from police stations, the public and local RAF stations. In fact, I would say that the total number of reports easily exceeded one hundred.”

It is clear from what Pope has to say that there were three reports in particular that stood out more than any other – the first of which concerned a family based in Rugeley, Staffordshire, England, who had viewed a remarkable aerial vehicle near the sprawling forest that is Cannock Chase. Pope reveals the facts: “This report was brought to my attention by the Community Relations Office at RAF Cosford [Shropshire]. The report had come direct from the family and sounded particularly interesting because, unlike some of the other sightings, this one was of an object flying at very low level. There had been a family gathering and several members of the family were out on the drive – really just saying goodbye to their relatives who were about to drive off. Suddenly, this large, triangular-shaped craft flew over them very, very slowly. This was a flat triangle, with a light in each corner and a larger light in the direct centre of the underside of the craft.

“But there was something else that I’d come across in my investigations that was also present in the Rugeley case,” says Pope. “This was a low-frequency humming sound coming from the UFO; a humming that they actually described as being quite unpleasant. Imagine standing in front of the speakers at a pop concert and almost feeling the sound as well as hearing it – that was the effect that they reported. Well, they were so excited and overwhelmed that two of them leapt into the car to give chase! As they did so, they came to a point where they thought the UFO was so low that it must have come down in a nearby field. Well, they parked the car, jumped out and looked around. But there was absolutely nothing there; the UFO had gone.

“The two most significant reports began at RAF Cosford shortly after the encounter at Rugeley. This was definitely the highlight and was one of the best sighting reports I received in my entire posting. The report itself came from a guard patrol at Cosford. They were on duty manning entrance points, checking the perimeter fence and such like. All the members of the patrol saw the UFO and, again, the description was pretty much the same as most of the others. In this case, though, the UFO was at medium-to-high altitude. Remember that these witnesses were people who see in a normal course of business all sorts of aircraft activity, meteorites, fireballs and so on, and they considered it absolutely out of the ordinary.

“They didn’t make a standard report: what they did was to submit an actual 2-3 page report which went up their chain of command and then the report was forwarded on to me. In that report, they stated that the UFO passed directly over the base and that this was of particular concern to them. They made immediate checks with various Air Traffic Control radar centres but nothing appeared on the screens. It was this factor that made them particularly keen to make an official report. This was at around 1.00 a.m. They noticed that this Flying Triangle was heading on a direct line for RAF Shawbury, which is some twelve to fifteen miles on. Now, the main concern of the Cosford patrol was to alert Shawbury that the UFO was coming their way; but they also wanted confirmation that they weren’t having a mass hallucination. They took a decision to call Shawbury and this was answered by the Meteorological Officer. You have to realize that at that time there was literally just a skeleton staff operating, so the Met. Officer was, essentially, on his own. So, he took a decision to go outside, look in the direction of RAF Cosford and see what he could see.

“Sure enough, he could see this light coming towards him and it got closer and closer and lower and lower. Next thing, he was looking at this massive, triangular-shaped craft flying at what was a height of no more than two hundred feet, just to the side of the base and only about two hundred feet from the perimeter fence. His quote to me was that the UFO’s size was midway between that of a C-130 Hercules and a Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet. Now, he had eight years’ worth of experience with the Royal Air Force, and a Met. Officer is generally much better qualified than most for looking at things in the night sky. And there were other factors too: like the family in Rugeley, he heard this most unpleasant low-frequency hum; but unlike their experience, he saw the craft fire a beam of light down to the ground. He felt that it was something like a laser beam or a searchlight. The light was tracking very rapidly back and forth and sweeping one of the fields adjacent to the base.

“He also said – and he admitted this was speculation – that it was as if the UFO was looking for something. Now, the speed of the UFO was extremely slow – no more than twenty or thirty miles per hour, which in itself is quite extraordinary. As far as the description is concerned, he said that it was fairly featureless – a sort of flat, triangular-shaped craft, or possibly a bit more diamond-shaped. But if all the descriptions had been identical I would have been surprised. He said that the beam of light retracted into the craft, which then seemed to gain a little bit of height. But then, in an absolute instant, the UFO moved from a speed of about twenty or thirty miles per hour to a speed of several hundreds of miles per hour – if not thousands! It just suddenly moved off to the horizon and then out of sight in no more than a second or so – and there was no sonic boom.”

The mystery of what came down in 1994 lives on. And the anniversary will soon be right around the corner.

A recent spate of black helicopter sightings over Washington D.C. has had people in the nation’s capital talking; however, there’s no cause for alarm according to the Pentagon, who says the increased presence of military aircraft is part of a secret U.S. Army mission.

The classified program was partly revealed after funding requests by the Pentagon appeared in the Defense Department’s annual reprogram request to Congress.

The program, first reported by Bloomberg, is described as a mission involving the use of several Black Hawk helicopters to be used in missions over Washington. Both active-duty servicemen and women, as well as reserve units, are participating.

“The Army needs $1.55 million shifted for maintenance of 10 UH-60 Black Hawks, for aircrews and for travel in a mission that includes active-duty and reserve troops,” The Hill also reported.

According to a summary from the Congressional Research Service, “In the United States Code and annual authorization and appropriations acts, Congress provides the Department of Defense (DOD) limited authority to obligate funds for purposes other than originally approved.”

“These authorities allow the department to transfer or reprogram funds,” the CRS summary states. “A transfer involves shifting funds from one appropriations account to another, while a reprogramming involves shifting funds within the same account.”

Falling under Title 10, Section 2214, of the United States Code, the DOD is allowed “to transfer amounts in working capital funds or to transfer amounts provided in appropriation Acts for military functions of the Department of Defense (other than military construction).” 

This is all fairly commonplace in defense spending circles, where changes in circumstances that have relevance to financial or operational conditions can cause a flux in the budgetary plans for the DOD. Frequent issues that can account for these budgetary changes might include costs associated with combat training, weapons systems, medical facilities, or other similar situations. In addition to costs, there are occasionally savings that can result from such things as canceled programs or other unexpected events where budget allocation does not end up being used.

In either case, the Department of Defense has the ability to transfer or “reprogram” funding, under the authority provided by Congress, in order to adjust to these changes in their annual budget, and in response to necessities presented out of concern for national security.

In the case of the current mission being represented by the UH-60 Black Hawk flights over Washington, “the Army will not be able to perform this classified mission” without additional funding the DOD has requested, as reported in the Pentagon’s recent funding requests.

Some commenters online expressed amusement over the new details about the Army’s “secret” program. “My brother lives there and I sent him this article and he was laughing when he called me because he said they do this every summer,” one user noted.

“I’ve actually noticed a ramp-up since late 2016 / early 2017,” another commenter wrote. “I walk along the river in Georgetown frequently with the dog, and it’s become annoyingly common to spot helicopters running up/down the Potomac or their other favorite – veering off and heading up Rock Creek at a low altitude… no idea where they’re headed from there, though I assume either the Naval Observatory or maybe cut over towards the White House?”

Apart from an acknowledgment of the program, the Pentagon has had very little to say. In a statement provided to Bloomberg, the operation began sometime after last October–the beginning of the current fiscal year–and that the ultimate duration of the mission is still undetermined. There was no additional information provided about the scope of the mission, or what in the nation’s capital it might pertain to.