Among the Great Lakes of North America is the majestic Lake Ontario, which while having the smallest surface area among its four brethren is still a mighty large lake, sprawled out over 7,340 sq. miles and possessing 712 miles of shoreline. With such a large lake, one might wonder if there are any mysteries to be had here, and indeed there are. One of the most interesting of these is the lake monster that has long been reported from Lake Ontario’s depths, and while not nearly as well known as some other lake monsters of the world such as Champ or Nessie, it still has managed to capture the imagination.

Tales of something very large and mysterious in Lake Ontario’s waters go back centuries, all the way back to the original inhabitants of this land, the Seneca tribe, who told of a water dragon lurking here that they called the Gaasyendietha, and the area’s Algonquin and Iroquois people had very similar legends. Yet far from just Native myths, when European explorers and settlers began trickling into the region they too began to make sightings of some massive creature in the lake, with one of the first of these being noted in the journal of French explorer Jacques Cartier, describing a monstrous “finned snake” that moved “like a caterpillar” before diving down beneath the waves to disappear. The French explorer Pierre Radisson also made note of gigantic snakes living in the lake.

Lake Ontario

In the 1800s there were quite a few sightings of the creature in Lake Ontario, starting in 1805, when four fishermen near the area of Kingston, on the eastern shore, saw what they took to be an overturned rowboat bobbing about out on the lake. This “rowboat” then began ominously moving towards them, and as it grew closer they could see that this was just a part of a much larger, serpentine creature with huge eyes that they estimated as being an absurd 150 feet in length, as big around as a barrel, and with a mouth “frightfully large and aspect terrible.” Kingston would go on to become ground zero for all manner of other such reports, and gathered quite a reputation as being a favorite haunt for the mysterious monster.

In July of 1817, a ship was in the area when the crew spotted a dark-colored snake-like monster measuring 40 feet long and 1 foot in diameter about 3 miles offshore. In the August 14, 1829 edition of the Kingston Gazette and Religious Advocate there was also the account of a group of children playing by the waterside when they saw a serpent in the water around 30 feet in length, described in the article as “a hideous water snake, or serpent, of prodigious dimensions.” In 1833 the steamer Polyphemus also came across the beast in Kingston Harbor with the crew saying it was 175 feet in length. The captain, Abijah Kellogg, would claim that it looked almost like an earthworm, with no discernible face, and that it was making its way up the St. Lawrence River. The creature popped up again in 1842, at Gull Beach, in Kingston, where it startled two boys at the water’s edge. When they told their rather what they had seen he came running with a rifle, and even fired at the 40 foot long, brownish serpent. Sightings continued all around Lake Ontario at the time, and there was a curious account printed in the Galveston Daily News, September 5, 1867, the entirety of which reads:

Another report of the appearance of the great snake or water monster in Lake Ontario has reached us. We have it from reliable citizens who reside on the Lake shore in Parma [New York], ten miles or so west of the mouth of the Genesee, that on Thursday last [possibly August 29] , just as sunset, this monster was seen in the water close to shore. A drove of cattle went to drink, whereupon the huge monster raised his head above the water and approached the shore, intending no doubt to take an evening meal of fresh beef. The noise made by the animal as he came into shallow water frightened the cattle and they ran back from the beach in great fright. Half an hour later the same drove of cattle sought to drink at a place fifty rods west of the spot where they first went and were again driven away by the monster. The occurrence drew to the beach several persons residing not far distant and caused a sensation. It won’t answer for anybody to go into that neighborhood and say that there is not a monster in the lake. Too many have seen the animal to doubt its existence.

Sightings would continue on into later years. On June 25, 1872, witnesses in Olcott, New York, supposedly saw the monster actually spectacularly leap far out of the water while making a strange bellowing noise. Two fishermen also saw it in 1877 in Burlington Bay, described as looking like a log with a mouth like a crocodile. In 1881 the creature returned to Kingston, this time being seen by the passengers and crew of the steamship Gyspy, this time describing it as having a tail and small legs. In August of 1882 it was seen near Fort York, Toronto, and witnesses said it was bluish grey in color and covered in prominent bristles. On this occasion it was reportedly to be leisurely floating about basking in the sun, but when it realized it was being watched it apparently grunted and quickly slipped back down into the depths.

In 1888 some sailors saw the thing in the channel between Wolfe and Simcoe Islands, and in 1892 there was a harrowing report from a couple who claimed to have actually been attacked by “a huge serpent with eyes like balls of fire” during a fishing trip to Brackey’s Bay, only managing to escape by beating it over the head with their fishing poles. Perhaps one of the most dramatic reports was printed in the September 5, 1897 edition of the Buffalo Morning Express and Illustrated Buffalo Express, in which it was reported that the creature had actually been captured on hook and line after putting up a seven day battle just off from Tompkins Point. The paper describes the outlandish creature as follows:

Rope were pro cured and the monster was hauled upon the shore. The leviathan was the queerest thing ever teen’ along Lake Ontario. It measured from end of nose to tip of tail seventeen feet, four and a halt Inches, while In width it measured six feet, four Inches.The body was encased In a shell that was very soft and pliable. When hauled upon the platform scales upon which coal is weighed It tipped the beam at 443 pounds. By pulling upon the hook, which was securely fastened in the lower jaw of the monster, the head was drawn out about three feet, displaying a most wonderful sight .As the head was drawn out farther and farther, the jaws would open wider and wider and the eyes would protrude dots and more. When the bead was drawn- out U full length the eyes protruded sins inches and, being seven inches In diameter, made an extremely ugly sight, The tail was about four feet in length- and was feather shaped. About two thirds back on the body was a hump about 18 inches high, which when brushed off with an old broom, shone like polished brass. On either side of the body of the monster were six fins or flippers, each 32 inches long and armed with claws seven inches in length. Sightseers have driven from a distance of ten miles to see the monster. Dr. Dee Borough has had it skinned and will bare it mounted.

Whether this ever really happened or not, it is the last we here of this particular specimen, and no mention of any mounted specimen is made after that. Was this real, and if so what happened to that body? Who knows? Unfortunately, this could very well be just a hoax report from an era when newspaper reports were often exaggerated or even straight up made up, and there were certainly hoaxes of the Lake Ontario Monster that would pop up. Sightings nevertheless continued. In 1931 two doctors were out boating on the lake when they saw a 230-foot-long serpent with “one eye in the middle of his head as well two antler-like horns.” 1934 a group of boaters claimed to have collided with the monster at Cartwright Bay, near Kingston, and although they claimed that this had killed it the body was never found. Even more recently still is a sighting made in 1968 by a local in New York who said it was an eel-like creature 20 feet long and had a mane, and in 1970 it was spotted by an employee of the Ministry of Natural Resources at the shores of Prince Edward County. The most recent account I can find is from a Reddit commenter called “jvantorre,” who says he saw it in 2011 in Toronto Harbor, explaining:

Hi me and my friends were at a concert last night September 5th 2011 at the Toronto docks. Out I’n the water we seen a creature describing all of these descriptions. It was black maybe 2 ft wide and only slithered York the surface never jumped but came up enough to expose it’s large fin. I seen it three times I’n roughly 30 min and my friend seen it twice. Before we had to go into the concert. At first we thought there might be a possibility of fresh water dolphins but no sightings have been recorded.

It is hard to say exactly what the mysterious lake monster of Ontario could be. There are species of eel in the lake, but they get nowhere near the sizes reported. Lake sturgeon are also known in the lake, but they are very rare nowadays, and also don’t get as large as the accounts, although they do get pretty big. Could this be something else entirely? Perhaps something that long ago got trapped in the lake? There’s no way to really know, and sightings in more modern times have dropped of substantially, leaving the mystery of the Lake Ontario monster a strange oddity.

As we saw in my previous articles on Russia and Majestic 12, there is strong, available evidence that suggests the Russians were behind the notorious Majestic 12 documents of the 1980s and of 2017.  At the same time that ufologists were salivating over the Majestic 12 papers in the eighties, the Russians were working to convince Americans that the U.S. government had secretly created the AIDS virus, Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Or, HIV. The purpose? To use the virus as the definitive doomsday weapon. In reality, the whole thing was nothing but extremely tacky Russian propaganda and disinformation. It’s a strange and controversy-filled story that, in a very odd way, has a link to a second set of Majestic 12 documents; they surfaced in the 1990s. This second set would provoke even more controversy than the original ones ever could. The U.S. Department of State provides the following on the Russian AIDS plot:

“When the AIDS disease was first recognized in the early 1980s, its origins were a mystery. A deadly new disease had suddenly appeared, with no obvious explanation of what had caused it. In such a situation, false rumors and misinformation naturally arose, and Soviet disinformation specialists exploited this situation as well as the musings of conspiracy theorists to help shape their brief but highly effective disinformation campaign on this issue. In March 1992, then-Russian intelligence chief and later Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov admitted that the disinformation service of the Soviet KGB had concocted the false story that the AIDS virus had been created in a U.S. military laboratory as a biological weapon.”

All of which brings us to those 1990s-era Majestic 12 files. They too were almost certainly created by the Russians. They started as a trickle in the early 1990s and by the mid-1990s had turned into a veritable tidal wave. The number of Majestic 12 papers provided to Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera in the 1980s amounted to a handful or two. The ones revealed by Heather Wade in 2017 were not much more in number. The material that a man named Timothy Cooper – of Big Bear Lake, California – obtained from shady sources in the 1990s ran to not just dozens of pages, but hundreds of pages. Although Cooper quit Ufology years ago, the files sent to him are still talked about in Ufology. Cooper soon hooked up with the father-son UFO research team of Dr. Robert Wood and Ryan Wood. In the early 2000s, I was hired by the Woods to research the Cooper files, to the extent that in 2002 I spent a week going through all of Cooper’s files, which Cooper had then recently sold to Bob Wood. I have used the following quote before,  but it helps to explain how I came to know so much about not just Cooper’s Majestic 12 files, but also the means by which he got the documents, the circumstances, and much more – including certain things that are still not in the public domain. Okay, back to the quote; here it is:

“…in the early days of 2002, Bob [Wood] hired me to spend a week in an Orange County, California-based motel-room, surrounded by all of the thousands upon thousands of pages of Cooper’s voluminous collection of the cosmic sort. The plan was for me to catalog all of the material, to compile each and every piece of it into chronological order, and to summarize the content of each document, every letter, and every Freedom of Information request that Cooper had submitted to government agencies – which is precisely what I did. It was a week in which I most definitely earned my loot. It was also a week that paralleled the infamous story told by Hunter S. Thompson in his classic gonzo saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Whereas Thompson was hunkered down with his whisky, margaritas and shrimp cocktails, for me it was cases of cold beer and club sandwiches.”

According to Cooper, he had several old-timer sources who had spent their careers working in the fields of counter-intelligence, psychological warfare, and disinformation. The most prominent ones were Thomas Cantwheel and Cantwheel’s daughter, Salina. Allegedly, of course. The reality is that they may not even have been Americans. By now, you can surely guess where they really came from. It was as a result of having pretty much unique access to all (and I do mean all) of Cooper’s files during that week in 2002 that I began to make a Russian connection to all of this. Without a doubt, the most controversial of all of the documents that were fed to Cooper by Cantwheel and Salina, is one titled Majestic Twelve Project, 1^st Annual Report. Its subtitle makes the subject of the document clear: A Review of the President’s Special Panel to Investigate the Capture of Unidentified Planform Space Vehicles by U.S. Armed Forces and Agencies.

Oddly, the document lacks a date; however, it does not refer to any events or incidents that post-date 1951, which suggests it was written in that year. Or, it was written to make us think it was created in 1951. Cooper’s notes – the ones that I had access to in 2002 – show that he received the Report in three sections, rather than as one unified document. The cover-page turned up in Cooper’s Big Bear Lake mailbox on January 19, 1994. It was almost a year later – specifically on December 30, 1994 – when Cooper obtained the Table of Contents. And, the rest of the document was provided to him on February 22, 1995. The writer of the 1^st Annual Report stated:

“BW [Biological Warfare] programs in U.S. and U.K. are in field test stages. Discovery of new virus and bacteria agents so lethal, that serums derived by genetic research, can launch medical science into unheard of fields of biology. The samples extracted from bodies found in New Mexico, have yielded new strains of a retro-virus not totally understood, but, give promise of the ultimate BW weapon. The danger lies in the spread of airborne and bloodborne outbreaks of diseases in large populations, with no medical cures available. Current research in U.S. and U.K., can be accelerated when studies are complete. Understanding the human makeup through EBE [“Extraterrestrial Biological Entity,” allegedly a term used by MJ12 to describe aliens] research will bring a varied wealth of information in how cells replicate themselves and may help in developing new drugs and markets. Healthcare industries are considered the best source of R&D for DoD programs.”

In “Annex A” of the report there’s this, which is equally controversial: “The Panel was concerned over the contamination of several SED personnel upon coming in contact with debris near the power plant. One technician was overcome and collapsed when he attempted the removal of a body. Another medical technician went into a coma four hours after placing a body in a rubber body-bag. All four were rushed to Los Alamos for observation. All four later died of seizures and profuse bleeding. All four were wearing protective suits when they came into contact with body fluids from the occupants. Autopsies on the four dead SED technicians are not conclusive. It is believed that the four may have suffered from some form of toxin or a highly contagious disease. Tissue samples are currently being kept at Fort Detrick, Md. In the opinion of the senior AEC medical officer, current medical equipment and supplies are wholly inadequate in dealing with a large scale outbreak of the alien virus.”

Now, let us take another look at certain, important threads that are contained in the 1^st Annual Report. The Majestic 12 papers refer to a “new virus,” “a retro-virus not totally understood,” “bloodborne outbreaks of diseases,” “the ultimate BW [Biological Warfare] weapon,” “a highly contagious disease,” and the connection between “Healthcare industries” and “DoD [Department of Defense] programs.” Mirroring the above, it’s a fact that HIV is a retro-virus. It’s also a blood-borne virus. And, as the Department of State reported, the Russians were spreading a rumor that, “…the AIDS virus had been created in a U.S. military laboratory as a biological weapon.” The additional rumor was that shadowy elements of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry were in on the conspiracy. For those who hang onto this document as being real, it should be noted that (A) Fort Detrick was actually still named Camp Detrick when the document was supposedly written; and (B) the term “retro-virus” was not in use until the 1970s, which was decades after the report is alleged to have been put together.

In light of all these unsavory and undeniable parallels, it’s very easy to see how some people – of an extremely conspiratorial and deranged mind – might come to believe that the discovery of such a dangerous alien virus, in 1947, and the recovery of a crashed UFO in New Mexico, led to the creation of HIV. It’s a fact that of all the Majestic 12-themed papers that were provided to Cooper, it’s this one – more than any other – that provoked so much controversy. And, admittedly, the document is filled with suggestive threads that fit neatly within the parameters of the bogus AIDS conspiracy theory. I have concluded that this was the goal of the creators of the 1^stAnnual Report.

Now, we come to the matter of that curious name of Timothy Cooper’s primary informant, “Thomas Cantwheel.” It’s important to note that “Cantwheel” is not a real name. And it never has been a real name, either. It is, however, very similar to a genuine name. That of “Cantwell.” There may have been a very specific reason as to why “Cantwheel” chose that particular name when dealing with Cooper and with regards to a deadly virus with AIDS-like aspects attached to it. It might have been designed – as a less than subtle pointer – to have Cooper come to the conclusion that AIDS had been created by the U.S. Government. It just so happens that there is a Dr. AlanCantwell. His AIDS-themed books include Queer Blood and AIDS and the Doctors of Death.

So, what do we have here? Well, we have tales of a highly dangerous retrovirus, of a Cantwell vs. a Cantwheel, of tainted blood, of big business in cahoots with the Pentagon. And, of a mysterious couple of informants who were never really identified and who vanished into the ether (or who went back to Moscow…) after handing over controversial files to a UFO researcher – Cooper – who thought he was getting the real deal. Put all of that together and what we have is a heady brew of controversial proportions. Not only that, Dr. Alan Cantwell concluded that Fort Detrick played a role in all of this – a facility that appears in Timothy Cooper’s Majestic 12/Cantwheel papers, too, in relation to research into a deadly alien virus, as you will recall.

So, what do we have here? I suggest that we have a very strange and highly alternative attempt, in the 1990s, to resurrect Russia’s “America created AIDS” disinformation program of the previous decade. But, this time (when The X-Files was extremely popular and the adventures of Mulder and Scully were reigniting U.S. public interest in UFOs) by carefully using crashed UFOs, dead aliens, and an extraterrestrial virus as the key components to the plot. All fabricated and completely bogus. Indeed, no-one should believe or conclude there is a real connection between HIV and extraterrestrials. It’s as ridiculous as it is offensive. For those who created the document, the problem was that Cooper chose to quit Ufology and sold all of his files to Bob Wood. And, when it came to the “viral” angle of all this, Cooper chose not to bite anyway. At least, as far as I could tell from his files, that is. Cooper may not even have appreciated the significance of the various, glaring threads, as well as that Cantwheel-Cantwell issue, which was strategically placed right in front of his eyes. Also, most of the UFO research community didn’t buy into the Cooper material. Thus, the result was that the UFOs-Aliens-U.S. Government-AIDS operation stalled and finally died. Let’s hope that it stays that way.

As I see it, all of this provides us with even more clues that suggest Russia created Majestic 12 – both the fictional group and the equally fictional documents.

The number of crop circles is rising around the world, with France seeing a high volume of this in 2019. In addition, the complexity of these crop circles keeps improving as the aliens/pranksters get better at making them and keeping them concealed until they’re done despite the increasing prevalence of drones. One thing you don’t hear very often at these sites are chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” That’s mostly because the U.S. has so very few of them. Another reason might be that our alien/pranksters are just plain bad at plane geometry. That was proven once again this week in Alabama, where five people were arrested as they were creating what has to be the world’s worst crop circle. It shouldn’t even be called a “circle” but there’s no category in this field (pun intended) for crop blobs. Talk about embarrassing. (You can see the ‘circle’ here.)

“I think they may have actually made the pattern, came out of the field, and then re-entered the field, and made a second trip. So, it was a little bit of an adventure for them, it wasn’t just a quick thing.”

Wrong tool for the job

Sheriff Jonathon Horton of the Etowah County Sheriff’s Office told WSFA 12 News that a neighbor of the owner of the crumpled cornfield saw a suspicious vehicle on a security camera video (Big Brother even watches cornfields) and notified the authorities (after also posting it on social media) and it wasn’t long before Brandon Allen Whitlock, Noah Michael Brown, Rex Dakota Brown, Jeni Beth Vaughn, and Stephanie Marie Helm were arrested and charged with totally embarrassing everyone in Etowah County. Also, they were charged with 3rd degree criminal mischief, a felony. The estimated damage to the field was put at $7,500 – that’s a lot of corn.

5 arrested after damaging cornfield

(Source: Etowah County Sheriff’s Office)

What’s sad is that if you were going to pick a place in Alabama to fool the public or send a message to fellow aliens, Etowah County would be the perfect place. Located in northeast Alabama, it’s the state’s smallest county by area but one of the most densely populated. It also is home to Alabama’s most famous cryptid – the White Thang. Reported often in the dense woods of the county, the White Thang is a white Bigfoot-like humanoid creature, usually said to be over 7 feet tall and covered with white fur or hair. It reportedly has a unique howl, stands on two legs but moves extremely fast on all fours and has a foul odor.

Not a circle

Etowah County has also had its share of UFO sightings. While some may be attributed to the Goodyear blimp hangar at the local tire plant, there have been others with a few allegedly attracting military jets. The country also has legends of a river monster and giants, not to mention plenty of ghosts, according to Mark Goodson’s book Haunted Etowah Country, Alabama. But no crop circles.

Don’t look for Goodson to be revising his book for this one either. It’s an embarrassment to Alabama, White Thang and any aliens in the area.

We can’t be good at everything, but how hard are crop circles? After all … France!

For the past several months, I’ve been conducting interviews with leading UFO researchers from countries around the world in an effort to paint a clearer picture of global UFOlogy today.

This week, our global UFO trek takes us to South Africa, and to Gert Jordaan of UFORSA (UFO South Africa), an organisation specialising in data collection founded by Gert in September 2011 following an apparent increase in UFO sightings in his country and a heightened public interest in the phenomenon.

Gert Jordaan of UFO South Africa (UFORSA).

RG: Who have been the defining figures in South African UFOlogy over the past 70 years, and why?

GJ: One of the most notable figures concerning the UFO phenomena in South Africa is Elizabeth Klarer. She was a contactee and claimed to have been contacted by extraterrestrials between 1954 and 1963. She was also one of the first people on record to claim to have had a sexual encounter with an extraterrestrial. She also claimed to have visited a planet in the system of Alpha Centuri, where she believed she was impregnated and bore a son who remained on the alien planet. Klarer was even referenced in a 2008 song by South African singer Jim Neversink, called ‘Even Elizabeth Klarer.’

Photo of an alleged UFO taken by South African contactee Elizabeth Klarer in July 1956.

RG: What is the most compelling UFO case you have personally investigated?

GJ: A mass sighting on 12 December, 2012. We received numerous reports from different people that saw the same object in the Cape-Town area (between 11 and 12 December). It was seen as far as the Northern Cape and Namibia. We received approximately 100 reports of the same UFO.

RG: What is the South African government’s official stance on UFOs? When was the last time it issued a statement on the subject?

GJ: At this stage, we have no idea what the South African government’s stance is towards on UFOs. They have not indicated any interest in the UFO phenomenon.

The Union Buildings of the South African government.

RG: Does the South African Department of Defence have an official UFO investigations unit?

GJ: Not that we know of. And if the South African government does not have such a unit, we would gladly accept an invitation if they chose to work with us.

RG: Has the South African government shown more or less transparency on the UFO subject than the US government?

GJ: We believe the South African government would be more transparent with the UFO subject than the US government. At this time, we have not seen any indication from the South African government that implicates them with any UFO studies at all.

RG: Tell us a bit about your organisation, UFORSA. How many members do you have, and what kind of activities do you engage in? How many smaller South African UFO groups are you aware of, if any?

GJ: UFORSA began as a hobby for me. The official website came online sometime in 2011 to give people in South Africa a platform to submit sightings. Before UFORSA was SAUFOR, an independent person who operated a website. SAUFOR came to an end soon after we stepped in. We are only two people running the UFORSA website to this day. I am the founder of UFORSA and I have a website manager. We collect UFO data and provide commentary to the media if they enquire about a specific case. We manage the platform/website for people to engage socially and to submit sightings (which they can anonymously if they wish).

RG: What are the most active regions of South Africa for UFO sighting reports?

GJ: Three major areas in South Africa can be considered hotspots. First is the Western Cape. A huge open province scattered with small towns and great views of the stars. Secondly is Gauteng, a small province packed with towns and businesses and with many eyes on the skies. Lastly is KwaZulu-Natal, home to the famous Elizabeth Klarer, and a great place for a holiday for most South Africans (we receive a lot of sightings from this region during those holidays).

Drakensberg National Park in KwaZulu Natal Province, South Africa.

RG: Have you personally had any UFO sightings?

GJ: I have witnessed a few strange objects in the past, and one quite recently. It was just after the new year January 2019. It was almost midnight and I was watching some TV in the dark. I heard a noise outside and peeked through my sliding door (during the day, I can see the whole of False Bay from Table mountain to the Hottentots Holland mountains with an amazing sea view). I saw a flare-like object FAR in the distance. First I thought it could be a boat signalling for rescue. As the flare came down, it stopped just above the horizon and started moving towards the right and slowly disappeared.

RG: How long have you been involved in the UFO subject; roughly how many cases have you personally investigated; and what conclusions, if any, have you drawn about the underlying nature of UFO phenomena?

GJ: My interest in UFO phenomena started way before UFORSA in 2011. I had read so many books about astronomy, and I wanted to know what the UFO situation looked like in South Africa. So I founded UFORSA. I mainly collect UFO data. I cannot conduct many personal investigations due to funding issues. But it would be a dream come true to travel the country and the world to investigate the phenomena. The conclusion I have drawn through my personal experience and through my analysis of the data is that the rapid evolution in technology in our world can lead to fake reports and sightings. Not just by people playing pranks, but through misidentifications of top secret military craft that are being produced and tested. Most sightings can be explained. Almost all of them. But there are a microscopic amount that drive our curiosity. We cannot explain all things in the universe, but we often catch glimpses of the unexplained.

RG: How can South African UFOlogy, and UFOlogy in general, better itself?

GJ: The thing I want people to understand is that not every UFO sighting will be little green men in a saucer, visiting us from afar to enlighten us. UFOlogy needs to show people that any sighting can be diligently investigated and an acceptable conclusion can usually be reached. Many South Africans are still a bit close-minded. Although a small section of the populous do exhibit an interest in UFOs. I see UFOlogy as a base point from which branch out into different areas of scientific study, such as astrobiology or engineering, for example.

“A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. His height was six cubits and a span. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels; on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver’s rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels. His shield bearer went ahead of him.”
—  Samuel 17

For those not up on their biblical measurements, “six cubits and a span” is 9 feet 9 inches or 2.97 meters (some say this is was a transcription error because other texts list Goliath’s height as four cubits and a span – a still giant 6 feet 9 inches or 2.06 meters). For those not up on their biblical geography, Gath or Gat was a Philistine city-state mentioned often in the Hebrew bible and thought to be buried under the archaeological mound (tell) known as Tell es-Safi, a former Palestinian village located inside Tel Zafit National Park 35 kilometers (22 mi) northwest of Hebron. For those not up on their biblical history, you should still be familiar with the story of young David slaying the giant Goliath. An archeological team has recently discovered an ancient settlement under the remains of Gath with structures so large that they may be the reason behind the legendary giant stature of Goliath.

“The discovery suggests that Gath was at the peak of its power much earlier than previously thought, putting its heyday around the time when the city features heavily in the biblical narrative as a fierce rival of the early Israelites as well as the hometown of Goliath and other outsized biblical warriors.”

Bar-Ilan University professor and head of the Gath Archeological Project Aren Maeir tells Haaretz that recent digs just a meter below Gath have uncovered the older settlement that matches the time period of the biblical Gath. The differences between the older Gath and what was built over it are obvious.

“Over the summer’s digging campaign, which ended last week, archaeologists decided to investigate the foundations of large terraces located in Gath’s lower city, which was only inhabited during the Iron Age. The dig revealed that those terraces were resting on massive fortifications and larger buildings made of huge stone boulders and fired bricks – a method that makes them stronger than traditional sun-dried mud bricks. In some areas these walls are four meters thick or more, and the pottery associated with them dates to the early Iron Age, to the 11th century B.C.E. or possibly earlier. No comparably colossal structures are known in the rest of the Levant from this period – or even from the later incarnation of Philistine Gath.”

Gath has been destroyed and rebuilt a number of times, so the discovery of an older version is not much of a surprise. However, the size of the structures is a big one, and it may be why the Philistines were believed to have giant warriors.

“When people see remains of very impressive architecture and say, ‘Wow, how could someone have built that?’ one of the explanations they sometimes offer is ‘This must have been done by giants of the past’.”

Before you wonder how an experienced archeologist like Maeir could have missed doing the obvious, he says:

“There are no skeletons of people who are taller than NBA centers.”

It’s just a theory, but it’s the best we have in lieu of the actual skeleton of Goliath or the rest of his team. Maeir plans to continue digging in hopes of determining why there was such a difference in architectures between the two Gaths. He’s obviously excited about what he might find:

“But one thing is certain, we are slowly awakening a sleeping giant.”

I like this guy’s sense of humor.

A couple of days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe titled “The Russians were behind the Majestic 12 documents.” The article was focused on a very controversial set of Majestic 12 papers that surfaced in 2017 from Heather Wade. As I noted in my article, there are very good reasons for concluding that the Russians were behind these documents. In fact, there are several angles in the documents that are very much pro-Russian. Take a careful look and you’ll see. It should be noted though that the documents provided to Heather Wade were just the latest set of Majestic 12 papers. As many of you will know, there were two additional significant, and earlier, collections of  such Majestic 12 papers. One was the collection of papers that the team of Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera received in the early-to-mid-1980s and that appeared in 1987, in Timothy Good’s book, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up. For those who may not know, Majestic 12 is alleged to be a highly classified group created in the late 1940s and buried deeply within the U.S. Government. So the story goes, the Majestic 12 team sits on some of the most secret of all UFO cases – such as the notorious Roswell affair of July 1947.

As for those 1980s-era Majestic 12 documents, can we make a case that the Russians were behind them, too? Yes, we can. In 1999, Gerald K. Haines – in his position as the historian of the National Reconnaissance Office – wrote a paper titled “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90.” It is now in the public domain, thanks to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. It can be read at the CIA’s website. Haines’ paper detailed the history of how, and why, the CIA became interested and involved in the phenomenon of UFOs. Although Haines covered a period of more than forty years, I will bring your attention to one particular section of his paper, which is focused on the 1970s-1980s. Haines wrote: “During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Agency continued its low-key interest in UFOs and UFO sightings. While most scientists now dismissed flying saucers reports as a quaint part of the 1950s and 1960s, some in the Agency and in the Intelligence Community shifted their interest to studying parapsychology and psychic phenomena associated with UFO sightings. CIA officials also looked at the UFO problem to determine what UFO sightings might tell them about Soviet progress in rockets and missiles and reviewed its counterintelligence aspects.”

The Soviets, then, were camouflaging their secret rocket tests by spreading false and fantastic tales of UFOs. Haines also noted something that is absolutely key to the story that this article tells and particularly so with regard to the Majestic 12 papers: “Agency analysts from the Life Science Division of OSI and OSWR officially devoted a small amount of their time to issues relating to UFOs. These included counterintelligence concerns that the Soviets and the KGB were using U.S. citizens and UFO groups to obtain information on sensitive U.S. weapons development programs (such as the Stealth aircraft),the vulnerability of the U.S. air-defense network to penetration by foreign missiles mimicking UFOs, and evidence of Soviet advanced technology associated with UFO sightings [italics mine].”

This final point from Haines is the most important one of all. It is indeed a fact that in the late 1970s and early 1980s, “the Soviets and the KGB,” as Haines words it, approached a number of UFO researchers who also just happened to work on classified U.S. Department of Defense programs, including the Stealth projects. The goal of the Russians was to dangle sensational UFO-themed documentation in the faces of those same UFO researchers with U.S. government ties. And, in return – the Russians hoped – they would get something significant in return from the Americans they were secretly trying to “turn.” The reality of the situation, though, was that those Americans working in government and who might have been tempted to take up the Russian offer were fed nothing but faked UFO documents (guess which ones?). As for the Russians, we may never know to what extent they succeeded in getting their hands on highly classified materials of a Stealth-based nature. It’s important to note that Moore and Shandera were not caught up in this Russian plot in any way at all. Their copies of the documents – mailed to Shandera in December 1984 – came from a completely different source, one within U.S. intelligence and who was concerned about who had created the documents. There is, however, very little doubt that the Majestic 12 documents of the 1980s were Russian creations. You don’t think so? Well, keep the following in mind:

In 1988, the FBI launched an investigation into the Majestic 12 documents. Such were the twists and turns in the story, even the FBI came away baffled. If the FBI learned anything further about Majestic 12 in the post-1988 period, then that information has not surfaced under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence, Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, which is now in what is termed “closed status.” The title of the file is not something along the lines of “Potentially leaked documents” or “Questionable documents,” as one might imagine, given the strange story that is detailed in this article. Rather, the file title is nothing less than – wait for it – “Espionage.” While we’re admittedly forced to speculate, that one, eye-opening word alone strongly suggests that the Majestic 12 saga really did revolve around those very same components that appear in this article: spies, counterintelligence operations, the words of Gerald K. Haines, and the interference of the Russians. And espionage.

In the third installment of this series of “The Russians created Majestic 12” articles, we’ll take a look at another batch of “leaked” Majestic 12 documents. They surfaced in the 1990s and were provided – under clandestine circumstances – to a man named Timothy Cooper.

With the recent arrival of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landings, Americans and people all around the world were reminded of the remarkable achievements half a century ago that took humans to an alien world. It was, as astronaut Neil Armstrong famously said, “a giant leap for mankind.”

And yet it was also merely a small step, and not just for Armstrong, but also in terms of humanity’s future space missions. Current plans to return to the moon were reiterated by Vice President Mike Pence, who spoke at the recent “One Giant Leap” celebration, an event marking the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing.

Pence said to an audience that included astronaut Buzz Aldrin, “I am proud to report at the direction of the President of the United States of America, America will return to the moon within the next five years, and the next man and the first woman on the moon will be American astronauts.”

It only goes to show what exciting times these are to be living in, and there may be no field where that is more evident than in aerospace, with the current push by private companies like Blue Origin and others to take humankind to the stars. In addition to the many benefits for humankind that may result from our desire to push further out into the cosmos, there are other landmark discoveries that could be made as well.

Arguably, the greatest of these may be to finally learn the answer to the age-old question, “are we alone?”

As our earthly technology improves, many astronomers and astrobiologists feel that it’s only a matter of time before we find evidence of “life out there” too, whether through evidence of technosignatures (that is, evidence of life found through the detection of advanced technologies they may be using), or even the discovery of simpler forms of life during our eventual travel to other worlds, whether in manned trips, or with the help of robotic systems we send in our place.

Diagram displaying the basic orientation of a Dyson Sphere-like megastructure surrounding a habitable star

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons).

It is interesting, therefore, that with all the interest in the potential discovery of alien life, the American Space Agency NASA actually puts very little funding into technologies that may aid us in finding life out there.

At least that’s the case, according to Jason Wright, an astronomer with Pennsylvania State University, who recently spoke with The Conversation about the silly plan to “storm Area 51”, among other things (Wright said he hadn’t even heard about the latest Area 51 meme until AlterNet asked him about it).

However, far more interesting than the discussion about Area 51 and alien theories that have been raised about it over the years were Wright’s thoughts on the search for alien life.

“The search for life in the universe is a major priority for NASA and American science,” Wright told The Conversation. “Many of our missions to Mars and our space telescopes are designed with the detection of biosignatures in mind – ‘biosignatures’ being signs of life like microfossils or evidence of metabolism in the atmospheres of distant planets.”

However, Wright also said that despite all the interest there is in finding life, funding those programs continues to be a problem:

But despite the billions of dollars spent on these missions, I think many members of the public would be surprised to learn that NASA and the National Science Foundation spend next to nothing looking for intelligent life in the universe, including technological life that might, after all, be easier to find. I think the level of funding for the field should be determined the way the rest of science is, by competitive peer review of proposals for research. So, I don’t know what the “right” level is, but I know it’s not zero.

In a paper earlier this year titled “Searches for Technosignatures: The State of the Profession,” Wright called for greater interest by NASA and the National Science Foundation in the furtherance of searching for technosignatures of alien life.

“The search for life in the universe is a major theme of astronomy and astrophysics for the next decade,” wright argued. “Searches for technosignatures are complementary to searches for biosignatures, in that they offer an alternative path to discovery, and address the question of whether complex (i.e. technological) life exists elsewhere in the Galaxy.”

Wright argues that the space agency and other agencies and organizations capable of leading the charge in this field have not done so, in part due to stigmas that have become associated with the idea of alien life, and what avenues might lead to their eventual discovery. According to Wright, NASA has avoided the topic, “as a result of decades-past political grandstanding, conflation of the effort with non-scientific topics such as UFOs, and confusion regarding the scope of the term “SETI.”

SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, remains somewhat controversial today. Although having been endorsed by the likes of Carl Sagan and many other notable science advocates over the years, it has become a shadow of the once ambitious and coordinated effort that it was decades ago, and is largely independently funded today.

“The Astro2020 Decadal should address [NASA’s lack of involvement] by making developing the field an explicit priority for the next decade,” Wright says. “It should recommend that NASA and the NSF support training and curricular development in the field in a way that supports equity and diversity, and make explicit calls for proposals to fund searches for technosignatures.”

As Wright notes, discovering alien life may require little more than finding evidences of alien technology, a process that can begin right now, with technologies already at our disposal, and without ever having to leave Earth. The question that remains is whether we can we get past the highly stigmatized idea of “alien life” for long enough to see through with new and innovative plans for the future. These plans are every bit as important as any current plans for future space missions; and ultimately, they could provide answers about whether or not we are indeed all alone in this strange and mysterious universe.