Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Even simple questions are hard to answer these days. Here a tougher one, courtesy of the strange year we’re barely halfway through. Did 2020 cause the Earth’s magnetic poles to shift ten times faster than experts were predicting … or is the shifting of the poles causing the problems of 2020? Whichever ever it is, it’s probably not good. Want to go back to the chicken and the egg and try again?

“We have incomplete knowledge of our magnetic field before 400 years ago. Since these rapid changes represent some of the more extreme behavior of the liquid core, they could give important information about the behavior of Earth’s deep interior.”

In a press release from Leeds University, Dr Chris Davies, an Associate Professor from the School of Earth and Environment, and Professor Catherine Constable, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, in California, explain the technique they used in their new study, published this week in Nature Communications, to both fill in the gaps of the last 400 years and attempt to figure out what’s been going on with the Earth’s magnetic field over the past 100,000 years. Unlike past researchers, they had the benefit of new historical data on time variations in the Earth’s magnetic field and the most sophisticated software ever for modeling the planet’s field generation process.

“Since these rapid changes represent some of the more extreme behavior of the liquid core they could give important information about the behavior of Earth’s deep interior.”

If Sir Ringo Starr were part of this team, at this point he would join in with a chorus of “It Don’t Come Easy.” The direction and movements of the Earth’s magnetic field start in the planet’s liquid core. Just as the liquid core sloshes and swirls, so does the surface magnetic field – with areas moving independently rather than in unison like a hard outer shell. While satellites can show this movement today, historical movements were seen using geological records of actions like lava flows and sedimentary changes. Davies and Constable felt modeling based on time variations would be more accurate. To prove it, they took field shifts shown in the models and tried to match them up to known anomalies.

“The clearest example of this in their study is a sharp change in the geomagnetic field direction of roughly 2.5 degrees per year 39,000 years ago. This shift was associated with a locally weak field strength, in a confined spatial region just off the west coast of Central America, and followed the global Laschamp excursion – a short reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field.”

It was here last week!

Armed with correlations like this, they felt confident in their statement that the magnetic field is changing much faster than the accepted one degree per year. In fact, it’s shifting up to 10 times faster. We already know that the magnetic poles are moving, with the magnetic north pole now somewhere in Siberia, while the magnetic south pole is off the coast of Antarctica somewhere outside of the Antarctic Circle. What is the end result of all of this magnetic pole and field shifting at such a fast rate? A common word in the study is “flux.”

“Flux” is also a good word to describe the year 2020. Are these fluxes related? As expected, the model doesn’t look at this. Should it? Would it make any difference if we knew the answer?

One thing we can agree on … 2020 has been one fluxed up year.

“The Answer to the Great Question… Of Life, the Universe and Everything… Is… Forty-two,’ said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.”

That quote from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” has pacified the inquisitive for a long time, even though it’s fiction. However, scientists kept looking and this week announced they had found the source of all life in the universe. Is it 42? A number close to 42? Something from another book? Will it change everything?

“The initial–final mass relation (IFMR) links the birth mass of a star to the mass of the compact remnant left at its death.”

OK, the conclusions by Paola Marigo, an astronomer at the University of Padua in Italy, and his team of authors of a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, won’t take seven and a half million years to explain like Deep Thought’s answer in the book. On the other hand, they may require the connection of some pretty remote dots – namely, one from the birth of a star and the other from its death. As recounted in the study’s press release, the team started with the idea that all life needs carbon, so following carbon back to its source is the same as following life on the same path. Every carbon atom in the universe came from stars that successfully fused three helium nuclei. Those atoms were then dispersed throughout the universe – a scattering of the seeds of life. What kind of star has this capability? Find that and you find the source of life.

It’s not 42?

“From the analysis of the observed Keck spectra, it was possible to measure the masses of the white dwarfs. Using the theory of stellar evolution, we were able to trace back to the progenitor stars and derive their masses at birth.”

The “Keck spectra” refers to the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii used by the astronomers. The two generally held hypotheses were that carbon either came from low-mass stars that became white dwarfs at the end of their lives, or those that became massive supernovas. While expecting the “initial-final mass relation” between a star’s mass at birth and at death to be constant, the team was shocked to find that white dwarfs were much larger at the end. That gave them the answer.

“Now we know that the carbon came from stars with a birth mass of not less than roughly 1.5 solar masses.”

Computer models showed that stars at least 1.5 times the mass of our own Sun had cores which grew slow enough to achieve massive proportions before dying in a transformation into a white dwarf, exploding their carbon into space. That stellar death becomes a birth of life … eventually.

White dwarf

“These findings place stringent constraints on how and when carbon, the element essential to life on Earth, was produced by the stars of our galaxy, eventually ending up trapped in the raw material from which the Sun and its planetary system were formed 4.6 billion years ago.”

Which explanation makes more sense – that one or “42”? Would it help if it was said with infinity majesty and calm?

As the title of this article makes clear, it deals with some very strange extraterrestrial entities. The weirdest account I have on file – and that falls into this particular category – comes from Houston, Texas. The witness (or “victim” might be a more accurate description) was a woman named Marilyn. She told me of her encounter with a “Gray”-type alien back in the winter of 1977. Her account of alien abduction was very much like so many others that have become staple parts of Ufology: she was subjected to medical experiments and blood was removed from her. What sets Marilyn’s story apart from many others, however, is the fact that while Marilyn was on a cold, metal table on-board a UFO, one of the Grays took out of a box and placed onto her stomach. To her horror it was something that looked like a large spider, but with far more more legs than normal for a spider. It was like something out of a horror movie: the thing crawled up her body, onto her face, and inserted one its spindly legs into her right nostril. For a moment there was a flash of pain. Then, nothing, except that Marilyn suddenly found herself back in her car that she had been abducted from, hours earlier. Now, let’s move onto another creature.

Over at Gaia.com, there is the following: “By far the most striking aspect of the Mantis alien is its physical kinship with the praying mantis, the carnivorous and bipedal insect of its namesake. Many report these beings as 6-7 feet tall, with long, thin torsos. Their necks, arms and hands have additional joints. Their heads are insect-like and triangular, with large, slanted eyes of deep brown to black….By far the most striking aspect of the Mantis alien is its physical kinship with the praying mantis, the carnivorous and bipedal insect of its namesake. Many report these beings as 6-7 feet tall, with long, thin torsos. Their necks, arms and hands have additional joints. Their heads are insect-like and triangular, with large, slanted eyes of deep brown to black.” Now, it’s time to make a trip to New Mexico.

Is it possible that the southwest region of the United States is home to giant-sized insects – living deep underground – that feed upon us, the human race? Such a thing sounds not just unlikely and incredible, but just like the kind of scenario presented in the classic 1954, sci-fi move, Them! It’s a movie in which massive, radioactive ants terrorize and slaughter the people of a small New Mexico town, and threaten to do likewise to not just the rest of the country, but to the entire planet, too. Which brings us to an important question: might truth be stranger than fiction? Yes, just possibly.

Danielle B. is a woman who, for a number of years, lived in the New Mexican town of Aztec – which, just like the far more famous New Mexican town of Roswell, has a crashed UFO legend attached to it. It’s a legend which dates back to March 1948, when, reportedly, a near-intact flying saucer and its crew of diminutive dead pilots were found. But, according to Danielle, she encountered something far stranger at Aztec than deceased extraterrestrial dwarfs and a wrecked flying saucer. It was on one particular day in May 2004 that Danielle decided to spend a few hours hanging out in Aztec’s Hart Canyon – which, curiously enough, is exactly where the alleged UFO is said to have fallen to earth, back in the 1940s. It was also where Danielle had an encounter with something far worse than aliens. On what was a warm and sunny day, Danielle found a place to sit, where she could read a book, and have her snacks and drinks at hand. It was a perfect way to spend a day off work. Or, for a while it was, at least.

All was normal for a couple of hours. That is, until Danielle noticed a small, black helicopter approaching her in the distance. Far more correctly, she assumed that it was a helicopter. Certainly, at a distance that’s what it appeared to be. But it was no normal helicopter: there was no “thud-thud” sound that one associates with the fast-moving blades of a helicopter. And, on top of that, it appeared to be carrying below it a small calf, held tightly in place by thick ropes! Most definitely not the kind of thing you see every day. When the helicopter got close to Hart Canyon, however, Danielle could see that the helicopter was actually nothing of the sort. It was a large, obscene-looking insect of around four meters in length. The presumed rotor-blades of the helicopter were actually the fast-beating wings of the monster-creature. As for those ropes, they were nothing less than powerful-looking black limbs. Danielle could only stare – in a mixture of awe, fascination, fear, and horror – as the huge creature flew overhead, dropped the poor calf on a nearby peak, and then swooped to the ground with frightening speed, pounced on the animal, and viciously tore into it. In less than half an hour the giant insect was done with its feasting and took to the skies. Now, we come to the final, creepy tale.

For twelve years Denise Stoner did back ground investigations for the U.S. military on recruits seeking highly classified clearances for work on nuclear submarines. Prior to retirement, Denise moved to the Naval Air Warfare Center, Training Systems Division, military research facility where she was the training coordinator for several hundred military and civilian employees. In 2018, Denise told me of how one day she was shopping in a Florida store when something very strange happened. In Denise’s own words: “[We] were in the back of the store in a center aisle. There were some areas to my right with stands of items for sale with small aisles between. I looked up the aisle and spotted an elderly man in one of those electric chairs, moving slowly toward me on the other side of the sale case. In front of him was a woman about six- feet tall, wearing shorts just above her knees that were a bright shiny material and pink.”

This is where it gets really strange, as Denise explains: “I looked up to see that her head was very abnormal – shaped just like that of an insectoid [italics mine] and she had placed a white wig on top of it, but the skull was sticking out. I could not believe what I was seeing. Her eyes were huge and black and tipped at an angle, more so than a Gray. ” Denise continued that the woman had “…what appeared to be black eyeliner and drew huge squares above and below the enormous eyes. This did no good at all in hiding what [her eyes] were and made her more than freakish. She had two lines for a nose and from there the whole face dropped down like skin falling to just above the collarbone. There were bright red mandibles at the lower portion. She was staring at me. Between us stood a lady with brown hair to her shoulders. She observed my face and turned to her right to see what I was looking at. [She] immediately looked totally shocked. The very strange thing here was, my husband did not see this at all…”

OK, before there is any confusion like the last time (you know who you are), ‘ochre’ is a natural clay earth pigment which contains ferric oxide, while ‘okra’ is the seed pod you put in your gumbo. Now that we’ve cleared that up (again), it will make more sense when you learn that 12,000-year-old ochre mines have been discovered in submerged caves on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, dating them back thousands of years before the preclassic Maya period – making this the earliest discovery of industry in a Mesoamerican period of nomads and agriculture. Whose mines were these?

“Here, we announce the discovery of the first subterranean ochre mine of Paleoindian age found in the Americas, offering compelling evidence for mining in three cave systems on the eastern Yucatán over a ~2000-year period between ~12 and 10 ka. The cave passages exhibit preserved evidence for ochre extraction pits, speleothem digging tools, shattered and piled flowstone debris, cairn navigational markers, and hearths yielding charcoal from highly resinous wood species. The sophistication and extent of the activities demonstrate a readiness to venture into the dark zones of the caves to prospect and collect what was evidently a highly valued mineral resource.”

“… what was evidently a highly valued mineral resource.” Ochre? Yes, ochre. Its colors range from yellow to red to brown and variations in between. Its usage dates back 200,000 years to prehistory, with evidence of it being used in burial ceremonies in Australia and Europe, as a body or leather paint and even as a medicine (to stop bleeding) or a sunblock. So it seems natural that the first people in the Americas would be excited to find it, but to make and effort to search in caves and mine it?

Not all ochre is easy to get to

“You have to be very, very careful about not getting lost,” he said. “You’ve got passages that kind of loop around and interconnect and then branch off and then connect into other systems.”

CBC.com proudly reported on native son Eduard Reinhardt, a McMaster University geo-archaeologist and expert cave diver who helped discover the mines and co-author the recent study about them in Science Advances.. While there weren’t submerged 12,000 year ago (that happened around 8,000 years ago, 2,000 years after they had been abandoned), these caves were small in many places and have numerous long tunnels and offshoots. Reinhardt found passages that would have been 2,130 feet (650 meters) from an opening. Because they were so long, it’s no surprise that he also found them strewn with cairns (mounds of stones) which may have been markers, and broken stalagmites and stalactites that could have been tools for digging. They also found ashes, possibly used for light – not a good thing, as any canary will tell you.

“It is pretty electrifying to be the first people to enter into an area that has not seen humans for thousands of years and to see what they left behind.”

Study co-author Sam Meacham, founder of El Centro Investigador del Sistema Acuífero de Quintana Roo AC (CINDAQ) and co-discoverer of the mines, indirectly points out what they didn’t find – human remains. While other caves in the area contained remains – including the skeleton of a woman who died 10,000 years ago at age 30 – these ochre mines held no miners. While mining could have drawn early natives to the caves, it seems more likely that most of them arrived later, when the miners had abandoned them, and used to tunnels for ceremonies, or perhaps even for burials.

Ochre was popular for cave art

“Ochre is such a universal material in terms of human history.”

That may be the most interesting part of this discovery – that this one colorful clay could have been used independently by early humans around the world for both common and unique purposes. While this discovery doesn’t change everything, it proves once again how much we don’t know – and that’s the real purpose of studying archeology and history … not to change but to learn more and learn from it.

The city of Levelland, in Hockley County, Texas, in the United States, is a mostly quiet place with nothing on the surface all that exceptionable about it. With plenty of cotton fields and a cozy, small-town atmosphere, it seems remarkably rural despite its present population of around 13,542, and it is a place many people could drive right on past without giving much thought to it. Yet, in 1957 this sleepy little corner of Texas became ground zero for a series of intense UFO sightings that captured the imagination of the nation, put Levelland on the map, and has gone on to become held up as one of the most remarkable UFO events in history.

It began on November 2, 1957, when police officer A.J. Fowler was at his desk spacing out on a typical quiet evening at the Levelland police department, but the night was about to get very bizarre indeed. A phone call came in from two scared and panicked sounding men who turned out to be immigrant farm workers by the names of Pedro Saucedo and Joe Salaz, and who claimed to have just witnessed a UFO. His attention piqued and the sleepiness banished from his head, Fowler asked what had happened and was told that the two had been driving in a pickup truck about 6 miles outside of town when a very bright, cigar-shaped object measuring an estimated 200 feet in length had come speeding towards them as the vehicle suddenly stalled and the headlights cut out to leave them bathed in an otherworldly blue light. As the thing barreled towards them they were so afraid that it was going to hit them that they had apparently leapt from the truck to take refuge in a ditch. The witnesses said the strange craft had passed over them, creating a disturbance that actually caused the vehicle to tremble and shake, as well as a blast of heat like an oven door open, and then continued on into the night, after which their truck had abruptly started up once again.

Fowler didn’t take this report very seriously at first, and just assumed it was a prank or that the men had maybe had a bit too much to drink, but he made a note of it. He probably would have forgotten all about it if there wasn’t another call just about 45 minutes later, this time from a man named Jim Wheeler, who claimed to have seen a “brilliantly lit, egg-shaped object, about 200 feet long” actually sitting on the pavement just 4 miles outside of Levelland. Like in the first call, Wheeler claimed that his vehicle had sputtered out and rolled to a stop as he approached, and he stated that when he got out of his car to investigate the object shot straight up into the sky with great speed and a blast of heat. As soon as the UFO was gone, his car had started back up and worked normally.

This second report was enough to make Fowler take notice, but this was not even the end of it. Over the next 2 hours, between approximately 11:30 PM and 1:30 AM, a total of 15 additional reports would come in all describing the same thing. In every case the witnesses were either buzzed by the object or saw it perched on the road, and in every instance the vehicle had stopped and lost power, only to turn back on when the craft was gone. The object seen was also described in the same way, egg or cigar-shaped, a brilliant blue, and measuring between 100 and 200 feet long. This was enough that the police were already going out to see what was going on, and it was then that even some of them would see something strange in the sky, such as a Sheriff Weir Clem, who saw a bright red object, and Levelland’s Fire Chief, Ray Jones, who claimed that the object had made his vehicle stall and had caused his headlights to flicker as it drew near, and by some accounts even Fowler himself saw the thing.

By now the sightings and UFO wave hitting Levelland had hit the media and it was all over the news, which also drew the attention of the government. The U.S. Air Force sent investigators to the scene from their UFO unit called Project Blue Book, and the whole affair was quickly dismissed as having all been caused by severe electrical storms, possibly combined with the phenomena called ball lightning and St. Elmo’s Fire. As far as the Air Force was concerned, that was that, but this was far from satisfactory for many. Many other researchers, including physicist Dr. James E. McDonald and astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who was even one of project Blue Book’s top investigators, disputed the official findings, immediately pointing out that the Blue Book investigator at the scene had only spent 7 hours casually interviewing witnesses and not really taking any of it seriously. It was also seen as unlikely that ball lightning or an electrical storm could cause vehicles to just stop and turn on again, and even more damning was that it seemed that there had been no such storm in the area at the time in the first place. Hynek would say:

As the person responsible for the tracking of the new Soviet satellite Sputnik, I was on a virtual around-the-clock duty and was unable to give it any attention whatever. I am not proud today that I hastily concurred in [the Air Force’s] evaluation as ‘ball lightning’ on the basis of information that an electrical storm had been in progress in the Levelland area at the time. This was shown not to be the case. Observers reported overcast and mist but no lightning. Had I given it any thought whatsoever, I would soon have recognized the absence of any evidence that ball lightning can stop cars and put out headlights.

The Levelland UFO flap is exceptional in that the town only had a population of 10,000 people at the time, and yet produced an intense wave of over a dozen sightings within a 2-hour period, including police officers and the fire marshal. What was going on here? Was the government trying to cover it up by sweeping it all under the carpet with a curt, easily digestible answer? There had been much debate about this case, and no one can really say what is going on, but it certainly stand out as one of the most spectacular UFO waves in recent memory.

What do you do if you live in an area where there are no crops for making crop circles? If you’re near a beach, you make sand circles. And by “you” I mean either humans or aliens, since a case can be made for either with this story out of southern Brazil about mysterious circles appearing after a couple of UFO sightings. Are they related?

“They moved in the South-North direction, at low altitude. I didn’t have a cell phone to film. It was not an airplane or a shooting star. It was fast and amazing! It lit up everything around, even the thin clouds. Then they disappeared.”

GaúchaZH (Gaucho) media talked to Silvio Scienza who claimed to have seen two colored spheres changing colors between gold and orange in the sky over the North Coast beach around Tramandai and Cidreira between Magisterium and Torres, coastal cities in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state. The sightings occurred on June 23 at around 7:30 pm. GaúchaZH also located Mana Bosquetti, who claimed she and her boyfriend saw similar spheres while on the nearby Salina beach, although they appeared separately. Like Scienza, Bosquetti also claimed the spheres created an explosion of light before disappearing, but she also said the each broke in half.

Who’s watching the sky?

“When I saw it, I showed it to my boyfriend. Initially, we thought it was a drone. They were on the sea and were not very big, as they moved. The flash was very strong. Soon after, another similar light appeared, but it came from the sea towards Lagoa da Fortaleza.”

The sightings were initially reported on the Cidreira RS Facebook page, where many more residents reported similar unconfirmed sightings. Skeptics suggested the lights were meteors, but GaúchaZH contacted Professor Carlos Jung from the Heller & Jung Observatory and the Brazilian Meteor Monitoring Network (BRAMON) who said he had no record of meteors from June 23. Since no one recorded their sighting on camera or video, it’s hard to offer any other ideas, like fireworks or strange planes.

GaúchaZH (let’s take a moment to commend the site for such a thorough and detailed investigation) then contacted Carlos Odone, founder of the Gaucho Ufology Movement, who said he had received other reports of sightings in the Cidreira region during the same week. Ufologist and editor of a UFO magazine, Ademar José Gevaerd, had no reports but confirmed that the coastal area from Tramandai north to Araranguá in the state of Santa Catarina has a lot of UFO sightings. Without any other information, he said this:

“Everything indicates that it is due to the time, because it was on the coast and in good weather. But there is nothing to fear. These phenomena are harmless. There must be more advanced life forms in the universe and because they would not be exploring other planets, as we will do when we have the technology for that.”

Because this is a Google translation, it’s tough to determine if that’s an “It’s aliens!” or something else. However, GaúchaZH makes reference to an alleged portal between dimensions near Cabras beach between Cidreira and Tramandaí. There are stories of other UFO sightings, alleged abductions, mechanical disruptions (cars stopping, etc.) and alien sightings.

None of that seems to have occurred on June 23rd. But, on June 24th …

“It’s as if they had dropped a gourd of chimarrão on top of the sand, forming a perfect circle. In our case, it was more than a circle and they were symmetrical and aligned, at an equally perfect distance. I don’t even know if someone did it.”

Photos on the Cidreira RS Facebook page, taken by witness Luis Ricardo da Silveira, showed a number of these mysterious circles in the sand, including one much larger than the others. Since it’s sand it’s difficult to tell if the footprints around them are by human makers. It’s not reported how long there were there, but GaúchaZH note that this occurred during UFO Week, a time of ufology meetings and visitors in the area. However, Gevaerd thinks they’re nothing but human artwork.

This is harder than it looks.

No other reports of subsequent UFO sightings or sand circles in the area were found, and no one else seemed to connect the UFOs with the circles. Kudos again to GaúchaZH for its thorough coverage, even though they reached no conclusions.

Did you?