1. Searching for the Chupacabra

I was recently asked what I considered to be the top ten of my investigations, cases, road-trips (the list goes on) of the UFO and paranormal kind. Well, that’s very difficult to say! I have to say it changes from time to time. And, it’s definitely hard to keep it just to ten. I’ll give it a try though. Most people, I’m sure, have heard of the exploits of the Chupacabra of Puerto Rico. For years reports have surfaced of a strange creature: part-monkey, part-giant bat, and part-gargoyle roaming the island’s lowlands and rain-forest, and slaughtering animals on a massive scale. I have now been on many expeditions to Puerto Rico in search of the beasts; and each occasion has been a truly memorable one. Collectively, I have spoken with dozens of people who have been able to shed much-welcome light on the Chupacabra puzzle: farmers whose animals have been killed by the beast; civil-defense employees that have investigated such attacks, police officers, journalists, and members of the public.

Without doubt the most fascinating story was that of an elderly lady named Norka, who told me and Jon Downes, on our 2004 trip to the island, that she had seen a bat-winged, glowing-eyed Chupacabra up close and personal way back in 1975 as she drove to her home high in the hills of the El Yunque rain-forest. Then there was Noel, a chicken-breeder who woke up one morning to find all his animals killed, their bodies drained of blood, and the only calling-card being two ominous puncture marks on the necks of each and every one of the bodies. In addition, there have been numerous sightings of UFO on Puerto Rico (along with a couple of crashed UFO tales – one from the 1950s and one from the 1980s), which has led many to conclude that the blood-sucking monster is itself an extraterrestrial. Others suggest the creature has supernatural origins, while some see it as the result of bizarre, genetic experimentation. But, whatever the Chupacabra ultimately may be, I am in doubt that it exists. And, as long as questions need answering, my investigations will continue.

2. The Roswell Ghosts

Any mention of Roswell, New Mexico inevitably conjures up imagery of high-level conspiracies and X-Files type secrets of a distinctly out-of-this-world nature. Not surprising, given its status as the UFO capital of the world. Numerous books have been written on the still-mysterious events of July 1947, but the answers still elude us. In late 2005, I was offered the opportunity to seek out the answers to Roswell via distinctly alternative means. According to the story, alien bodies found deep in the heart of the New Mexico back in 1947 were secretly transferred to the hospital of what was then the Roswell Army Air Field. By the 1950s, the RAAF had become Walker Field, and the old wooden hospital was replaced by a new brick building. In 1967, however, Walker Field was closed down, and the hospital remained empty until it became the New Mexico Rehabilitation Center.

Interestingly, employees of the NMRC have reported seeing apparition-type figures walking through the corridors and walls of the hospital; figures that some believe are the spirits of the bodies that were allegedly brought to the original hospital all those years ago. So, in October 2005, along with a team of paranormal investigators – and a TV crew – I headed out to Roswell for a week to seek out the truth. And, indeed, staff at the NMRC confirmed the stories and related their own remarkable experiences of the alien-ghost kind. Our investigation culminated in a midnight séance in the old hangar at the former Roswell Army Air Field, as we tried to contact the dead of Roswell. The wind howled, the ceiling creaked, and the psychics were sure that alien messages came through from the other side that night. It was definitely one of the strangest of the many investigations I’ve been on!

3. Gateway to the Goat-Man

In January 2008, I headed off into the unknown with paranormal researcher Lance Oliver. The purpose of our quest: to find the Goat-Man of the town of Denton, Texas – a cloven-hoofed, demonic-like beast said to haunt an 1884-vintage steel and wood structure in town known as the Old Alton Bridge. As we arrived at the site and got out of our respective cars, Lance proceeded to tell me the story behind the legend. Decades ago, occultists in the area had apparently been recklessly dabbling in matters of a distinctly negative nature and had inadvertently opened up a doorway or portal that provided the hell-spawned horned and hoofed nightmarish beast access to our world – which was not a good thing at all, Lance rightly commented. That occult and paranormal activity was afoot at the bridge was not a matter of any doubt at all: Lance had a personal awareness that people had been out there, late at night, with Ouija boards; there were stories of satanic cult activity; and sightings of unusual phenomena – such as eerie, localized mists, and floating balls of light, better known in the ghost-hunting community as ‘orbs’ – were strikingly commonplace. Lance also told me, intriguingly, how on one occasion while he was walking the bridge he announced loudly that he did not believe in the existence of the Goat-Man. Then as if from nowhere, but certainly right on time, came the eerie ringing of an invisible bell. Lance, realizing there was not another earthly soul around, wisely elected to reassess his stance on the matter of the Goat-Man’s reality or otherwise. As for me, I kept a careful watch, just in case something hoofed came looming out of the dark trees.

4. An English Roswell?

In 1991, the now-deceased collector of “Crashed UFO” tales, Leonard Stringfield, revealed that he had been told – by a former U.S. military source – of the crash in 1964 of a UFO on the fringes of one of England’s most notoriously weird areas of woodland: the Cannock Chase. A craft and alien bodies were said to have been recovered, and a high-level cover-up was put into place to hide the out-of-this-world truth. For a couple of years I delved into the tale, but didn’t make any significant headway. That is, until 1996. One year earlier, local UFO investigator, Irene Bott, had established the Staffordshire UFO Group, and promptly began digging into what some soon called a definitive “English Roswell.” And it was after a year or so of digging that Irene hit pay dirt. She had been contacted by a man named Harold South who then lived only a few miles away and who claimed to have witnessed the recovery by elements of the military of a small, triangular-shaped craft from the woods in question – which was promptly loaded aboard a large vehicle and headed for destinations-unknown. Not only that: South said that after photographing the mysterious object, his camera-film was confiscated by the local police.

On a dark and cold December 1996 morning, Irene and I headed to South’s home for an in-person interview. When we arrived, a highly shaken South told us the military had phoned him earlier; and, as a result, he was not sure if he should speak to us at all. We were able to confirm that a call had indeed been made to him that very morning: we traced it back to the U.K. Ministry of Defense’s Guards Service. Was this evidence that South was still under surveillance as late as 1996 because of his close encounter on the Cannock Chase all those years before? Or was it me and Irene who were being secretly watched? We never really got to the bottom of the puzzle, but it was certainly one of the strangest situations in which I have found myself.

5. A Creepy Man in Black

I have a keen interest in the mystery of the Men in Black – who have been an integral part of the UFO mystery for decades – and have been fortunate enough to speak with many people who have encountered these creepy characters. One such case, related to me in 1994, by a British woman named Sarah who lives in central England, went as follows: “The door banged really slowly, and when I opened it there was this horrible little man about five feet [tall]. He was dressed in a black suit and tie, and he had a funny little black hat on. His face was really strange: like someone with anorexia. His eyes were dark and his skin was almost white. All he said was: ‘We would ask you cease your studies.’ I said: ‘What?’  Then he repeated it. I had to ask what he meant. He said:’The sky lights; always the sky lights.’ Then it dawned on me: I’d seen a UFO late at night about a week before when me and my husband had been driving home and we both had a really weird dream after – about some little men standing around our car on the edge of the wood. He gave me a really long stare, like he was going to attack me. But he just walked away. I started to feel dizzy and slammed the door. I just crawled to the bed and fell asleep for about three hours. But when I woke up there was this horrible smell, like burning rubber all through the house. It really shook me up.”

6. Texan Gargoyles

Not longer after I moved to the United States to live, in 2001, I was on the receiving end of a strange story of a distinctly gargoyle-like nature from the west Texas city of Littlefield. According to the account – provided by a couple living in the town – matters kicked-off in the early months of 1946 at an old, large house that until the early 1960s had existed on the edge of town, and where two aged and eccentric sisters lived in absolute seclusion. Supposedly, on one occasion in the dead of night (when else?), a group of local kids playing in the area and scaring themselves stupid by walking around the old, dark building had seen two, eight-foot-tall, humanoid creatures climb stealthily out of the building’s cellar. Not only were the creatures eight-foot-tall, they were also grey of skin, had large, leathery wings, and glowing red eyes. In other words, they weren’t local folk. I think. The monstrous pair apparently turned sharply as they surfaced from their underground lair and stared intently at the kids, then broke into a hopping-style run, opened their immense wings and soared majestically into the starlit sky. One interesting observation was that the limbs of the creatures looked almost hollow against the background of the full moon that loomed overhead.

Perhaps even weirder was the fact that as the kids exited the area at what was an unsurprisingly high speed, two of them caught sight of the elderly sisters, grinning maniacally at them out of a downstairs window of the house. The couple also informed me that a similar creature, if not one of the original two, was seen several months later standing in the middle of the local highway by a terrified motorist in the early hours of the morning while issuing a woeful moan. That, in essence, was the account. I had no idea if it was genuine; and, as the couple told me, the key witnesses in the tale had all gone to their graves at surprisingly young ages – all supposedly killed in a variety of seemingly unlikely accidents. A tall-tale designed to see how gullible I was or something stranger? To this day, I’m still not sure what I think about it all.

7. Big Cats in the Tunnels

England’s London Underground railway system serves Greater London and parts of the counties of Essex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. It’s also the world’s oldest underground network of its type: services began on January 10, 1863 on the Metropolitan Railway; and today, the London Underground has no less than 268 stations and approximately 250 miles of track, making it the longest sub-surface railway in the world. In addition, in 2007, over one billion passengers were recorded as having used the Underground since its creation. According to some, however, the London Underground is home to much more than just tracks, trains and commuters: deep within the maze of dark and old tunnels, distinctly strange and diabolical things are said to lurk.

For the last forty years or so, tales have abounded (and are now at almost epidemic levels) of sightings of so-called big-cats on the loose in the British countryside. Precisely what they are, where they come from, and why no-one is seemingly able to capture a specimen, is a matter of heated and on-going debate – and a debate, it would appear, with no end in sight. Long before the present day controversy reared its head, however, the London Underground may very well have been home to one of these elusive beasts. Several years ago, Maureen Abbott told me of her sighting of what she described as a “big black panther” that was “bounding along the track” as she stood awaiting a train on one of the lines, late one Winter evening in either 1954 or 1955. Describing the animal as ‘running very fast’, she said that as it passed her it quickly looked in her direction, and with a “frown on his face,” before vanishing into the darkness of the tunnels. Although Abbott did not see the creature again, she never forgot her terrifying encounter with the unknown, deep below the city of London – and I have certainly never forgotten the interview!

8. Close Encounters of the 1950s Kind

During the early 1950s, my father, Frank Redfern, served with the Royal Air Force as a radar mechanic. He had been involved in several UFO incidents that occurred during September 1952 at the height of a NATO exercise called Mainbrace, when a number of fast-moving and unidentified targets were tracked over-flying the North Sea by radar operators at RAF Neatishead, Norfolk. When he related this to me in 1978, it was a key turning point in my life and ultimately led me on a still-continuing quest to determine the truth that lies behind the UFO puzzle. I made mention of my father’s experience in my first book: A Covert Agenda. Following the publication of the book, a number of important sources came forward to corroborate the remarkable events of September1952 – including Ken Dayman, a radar operator who was stationed at RAF Langton, Lincolnshire at the time. “We would do shifts,” Ken told me, “and I would read out the plots and the girls would then plot them on a big map. Well, over the course of two days in 1952, something strange happened. On the first day, somebody said: ‘Look, there’s something happening on the screen!’ There were about three or four of us watching as something was speeding across the screen; and this was fast, very fast. “It looked like there were actually two objects and they were approaching from the North Sea and flew across Lincolnshire, Peterborough and then up the country at about 2,000 miles per hour. Well, an officer was called and he made some comment. But then our commanding officer arrived and reminded us not to talk about this as we’d signed the Official Secrets Act. But this happened over a couple of days and the UFOs were tracked by several shifts – not just ours.” When I interviewed Ken, in 1999, he was still as mystified by the incident as he was back in 1952.

9. The Taos Monster

Salvador was a man I interviewed in 2002. Having inherited a considerable sum of money in his youth, he was retired by his forties, and lived in the city of Taos, New Mexico. But it was a strange experience that occurred in 1997 he wanted to discuss when we met. A keen astronomer, he had taken his truck out to a spot north of Taos that was free of light, and where he could set up his telescope and scan the sky. Around 1:00 a.m., Salvador recalled, he heard a sound that “was like a high-pitched whistle,” but that had a human feel to it. Tthe source of the growling, he suspected, was within thirty feet of him; and he got the impression that a hostile entity was circling him. He sat tight in his truck as the growling continued, when suddenly he could hear the sound of a helicopter. The noise got louder; and finally a large spotlight bathed the area, and the dark form of a black helicopter could be seen. Concerned by the unknown life-form circling his truck, Salvador stood up, and waved frantically in the direction of the helicopter. Suddenly, the helicopter rose into the air and its spotlight was focused upon an area no more than fifty feet from Salvador’s truck. He could now see what had been causing all the commotion: a seven-foot-tall-creature that “looked just like what people say Bigfoot is.” The beast, Salvador said, vanished “at a real speed,”with the helicopter in pursuit. Both disappeared as the helicopter’s light grew fainter and darkness returned. A shocked Salvador jumped into his truck and quickly headed home. The encounter was over.

10. Don’t Shoot!

In 1999, I had the opportunity to interview a man who had a curious and somewhat disconcerting UFO encounter in the Staffordshire town of Penkridge, England in the summer of 1985. In this particular case, the witness had previously served in Egypt as a military policeman with the British Army. At approximately 5:00 a.m. on a weekend morning and along with a friend, the man in question had driven to Penkridge to take part in a “duck-shoot” at a river that was situated on nearby farmland. All was normal until around 5:.30 a.m. Suddenly, the man caught sight of a light in the sky that appeared to be moving in his direction and across the fields on the opposite side of the river at a height of what he estimated to be approximately three hundred feet. He watched carefully and with mounting concern as the light came to a complete halt above one particular field and proceeded to fire a beam of light down to the ground. As it did so, the man was able to see illuminated in the beam of the object a herd of cows that were blissfully munching away on their breakfast of grass. Astonished by what he was seeing, the man leapt to his feet; as he did so, however, three smaller lights came out of the larger one – two “swept off” and one, to his horror, headed straight for him. “Don’t point your gun, whatever you do!” the man told me he said to himself. And so what course of action did he take? He made a run for it. Clearing a fence of not inconsiderable height, he ran to his friend and blurted out what he had seen. Both decided to head back to the scene, but the lights had vanished. As for the cows, they were still eating breakfast, seemingly oblivious to the drama that had taken place.

“Na-Nu Na-Nu”

If that phrase is familiar, it may be reminding you of Mork from Ork, the character played by the late great Robin Williams on “Mork & Mindy.” Mork was sent to Earth from Ork, a planet which banned humor, to monitor human behavior. That Ork, despite its hatred of laughter, doesn’t sound as mysterious as the four ‘ORC’ objects discovered recently by astronomers who are struggling to figure out what they are. Perhaps the Fonz might know.

“Here we report the discovery of a class of circular feature in radio images that do not seem to correspond to any of these known types of object or artefact, but rather appear to be a new class of astronomical object. For brevity, and lacking an explanation for their origins, we dub these objects “Odd Radio Circles or ORCs.”

Astronomers from around the world have been pouring over the Evolutionary Map of the Universe (EMU), a collection of data from a wide-angle view of the sky taken by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) – a group of 36 identical parabolic antennas working in tandem as one astronomical interferometer — from July to November in 2019. Three strange objects jumped out at the astronomers – near-perfect circles of radio waves that are bright (in a radio-wave way – they’re invisible to normal, infrared and X-ray telescopes) around their edges.

According to their study submitted to Nature Astronomy, the baffled researchers checked their findings against archival data taken with the Giant MetreWave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India (which was formerly the world’s largest interferometric array) and found one more. Still not sure what they were observing, they compared them to known phenomena.

“Circular features are well-known in radio astronomical images, and usually represent a spherical object such as a supernova remnant, a planetary nebula, a circumstellar shell, or a face-on disc such as a protoplanetary disc or a star-forming galaxy. They may also arise from imaging artefacts around bright sources caused by calibration errors or inadequate deconvolution.”

Eliminating the known, that gave them the opening to declare these to be a new class of astronomical objects — which they called Odd Radio Circles or ORCs – and commence speculations on what they might actually be.

“We speculate that they may represent a spherical shock wave from an extragalactic transient event, or the outflow, or a remnant, from a radio galaxy viewed end-on. 

It is also possible that the ORCs represent a new category of a known phenomenon, such as the jets of a radio galaxy or blazar when seen end-on, down the “barrel” of the jet. Alternatively, they may represent some remnant of a previous outflow from a radio galaxy. However, no existing observations of this phenomenon closely resemble the ORCs in features such as the edge-brightening or the absence of a visual blazar or radio galaxy at the centre. 

We also acknowledge the possibility that the ORCs may represent more than one phenomenon, and that they have been discovered simultaneously because they match the spatial frequency characteristics of the ASKAP observations, which occupy a part of the observational parameter space which has hitherto been poorly studied.”

In other words, they have no idea what these mysterious Odd Radio Circles are and the proverbial ‘more research is necessary’ is in effect. Meanwhile, these wheels in the sky keep on turning.

Na-na Na-nu!

“Axisymmetric disks of high-eccentricity, low-mass bodies on near-Keplerian orbits are unstable to an out-of-plane buckling. This “inclination instability” exponentially grows the orbital inclinations, raises perihelion distances, and clusters in the argument of perihelion.”

Wait … what? Let’s decode that to something most of us can understand.

“The outermost reaches of our solar system are a strange place—filled with dark and icy bodies with nicknames like Sedna, Biden and The Goblin, each of which span several hundred miles across.

The orbits of these planetary oddities, which scientists call “detached objects,” tilt and buckle out of the plane of the solar system, among other unusual behaviors.”

Is that better? You’re welcome. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have been studying the mysterious area of our solar system beyond Neptune and the Kuiper Belt where small icy objects and possibly one big Planet Nine reside in orbits completely out of whack from the rest of the solar system. Ann-Marie Madigan, an assistant professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences and graduate student Alexander Zderic decided to test whether a Planet Nine is needed to gravitationally influence the tiny icy bodies scattered about the area or if they obtained their crazy non-solar-planar orbits (see-saws and clusters, for instance) on their own. In the process, they came up with a new concept in planetary movement described in a press release and papers in two different journals. Who cares … did they find Planet Nine?

“In this Letter, we present N-body simulations of the long-term behavior of such a system, finding apsidal clustering of the orbits in the disk plane. The timescale over which the clustering is maintained increases with number of particles, suggesting that lopsided configurations are stable at large N. This discovery may explain the observed apsidal (ϖ) clustering of extreme trans-Neptunian Objects in the outer solar system.”

Wait … what again?

“In the process, they discovered something unusual: the icy objects in their simulations started off orbiting the sun like normal. But then, over time, they began to pull and push on each other. As a result, their orbits grew wonkier until they started to resemble the real thing.”

Yes, the findings are based on simulations – albeit using supercomputers and the largest collection of input data ever. What they found is that the tiny icy planets started off in the same orbital plane as their larger siblings closer to the Sun, but then began to influence each other – pushing and pulling themselves into strange orbits. However, a simulated Planet Nine was never able to accomplish this. Instead, the models showed that there are a lot more tiny planetoids out there than we suspected (a long-held assumption based on the fact that we can’t see them with current telescopes) and those large numbers allow them to join forces and exert what Madigan and Zderic dubbed “collective gravity.”

“You needed objects that added up to something on the order of 20 Earth masses. That’s theoretically possible, but it’s definitely going to be bumping up against people’s beliefs.”

Not to mention bumping into each other. “Theoretically possible” means there’s still hope for a Planet Nine, which is also theoretically possible and never seen with current telescopes. While the idea of Planet Nine being thousands of little Planet Nines has been proposed before, Madigan and Zderic have added the theory of collective gravity to the equation. They’re hoping the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scheduled to be operational in Chile in 2022, will finally be able to see some of these “detached objects” and confirm their theory.

Meanwhile, trying to understand these scientific papers sometimes makes my brain feel like a detached object.

Archaeologists made an interesting discovery at the Qafzeh Cave which is located close to the city of Nazareth, Israel. In addition to the dozens of human skeletons who lived in that area during the Mediterranean Paleolithic time period, they also unearthed several perforated shells.

What’s so interesting about these shells – many of which were painted with ochre – is that they were strung together with string to connect them into a necklace sometime between 160,000 and 120,000 years ago.

In an article I wrote back in April of this year (which can be read here), I discussed how the world’s oldest string was created by Neanderthals in Abri du Maras, France, about 50,000 years ago, so the fact that these Israeli shells were connected with string strongly contradicts previous reports that it was first created tens of thousands of years later – and in a completely different country nevertheless.

Glycymeris nummaria shell

Daniella Bar-Yosef Mayer, who is from Tel Aviv University and an author of the study, explained this further, “Modern humans collected unperforated cockle shells for symbolic purposes at 160,000 years ago or earlier, and around 120,000 they started collecting perforated shells and wearing them on a string. We conclude that strings, which had many more applications, were invented within this time frame.”

The shells belonged to the Glycymeris nummaria species of bivalve mollusks that are quite common in the Mediterranean as well as the northeastern part of the Atlantic. Researchers found that the Qafzeh people brought the perforated shells back to their cave which was located 40 kilometres (25 miles) away from the sea. Interestingly, researchers analyzed shells that were unearthed at Misliya Cave (on the northern coast of Israel) and found that the ancient inhabitants of the location (between 240,000 and 160,000 years ago) collected Glycymeris shells that weren’t perforated – or that didn’t have holes in them.

And since only about 40 percent of the Glycymeris shells found on the beach are naturally perforated, that would indicate that in ancient times, the shells with the holes in them were deliberately collected and then put on a string to make jewelry.

More Glycymeris nummaria shells

In order to test her hypothesis, Bar-Yosef Mayer conducted an experiment where she strung up shells using string that was made from wild flax and exposed it to different conditions that would cause it to eventually wear down, such as simulated sweat. The results were very interesting as she found that the use-wear patterns were consistent with those found on the Qafzeh shells, such as scratch marks that would have been created by the string and other scrapes that could have been caused by the beads banging against each other (like on a necklace or bracelet).

This is an incredible discovery as it appears that string was created tens of thousands of years earlier than previously thought and used for stylish jewelry during that time. A picture of the shells can be seen here.

Texas’ huge Big Thicket certainly lives up to its name: an 83,000-acre area, it is a sprawling mass of rivers, swampland, and incredibly dense woods where, according to legend: “You’ll find every critter in there from crickets to elephants.” Well, that’s not quite true, but it is home to something far stranger: the Ghost Lights; football-sized glowing orbs that float among the trees and zip along the tree-shrouded lanes late at night. Although sightings of the strange Ghost Lights have persisted since at least the 1940s, explanations for their presence are both varied and descriptive. Some people believe them to be merely the reflections of car headlamps; while, for the most part, the scientific community considers them to be something akin to swamp-gas. UFO proponents, however, note that legends tell of a UFO crash deep in the Big Thicket in 1964 – and which, some believe, may be indicative of an on-going alien presence in the area. Whatever the truth, late at night when the whole area is blanketed in darkness, the Big Thicket’s famous ‘Ghost Light Road’ affords the UFO-spotter a great chance to see the famous lights for his or herself.

They’re not headlights.

Somewhat similar in nature to the infamous Ghost Lights of the Big Thicket, the so-called Marfa Lights can be seen in the vicinity of the Texas town after which they are named. Reports describe brightly-lit, basketball-sizes spheres that float either just above the ground or sometimes high in the air. Colors are generally described as being yellow, orange, white or red – with green and blue lights occasionally reported, too. Sometimes traveling at high speeds, and at other times at a very slow pace, the Marfa Lights often appear in groups, to divide into pairs, and even merge together – disappearing and re-appearing in the blink of an eye. Eye-witness testimony suggests the Marfa Lights can persist from a mere second to possibly even several hours; and although predominantly a nocturnal phenomenon, are sometimes spied during sunset and sunrise, when the landscape is dimly illuminated. And for those who may want to check out the lights for themselves, the most profitable place to head for is south of U.S. Route 90 and U.S. Route 67, five-to-fifteen miles east of Marfa itself. Good hunting!

Like the Marfa Lights and the Ghost Lights of the Big Thicket, the Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina are unidentified aerial phenomena that have regularly haunted the area for decades. For example, one of the earliest accounts on record dates from September 13, 1913, and was reported in the Charlotte Daily Observer newspaper. According to the story: a fisherman claimed to have seen ‘mysterious lights just above the horizon every night’, red in colour, and with a pronounced circular shape. Soon after this account surfaced, however, a United States Geological Survey employee, D.B. Stewart, studied the area in question and concluded the witnesses were simply mistaking train-lights for something stranger.

A more formal U.S. Geological Survey study was begun in 1922 and concluded, again, that witnesses were misidentifying train-lights, as well as lights from cars and camp-fires. However, according to a marker that can still be seen on the Blue Ridge Parkway to this day, a huge flood struck the area soon after the completion of the study. All electrical power was lost and trains were inoperable for a significant period of time. The Brown Mountain lights, however, continued to be seen. Paranormal expert and author Joshua P. Warren has extensively investigated the lights – and, in 2000, succeeded in capturing several on film – and is convinced that even though a definitive answer still eludes us, they are not merely the result of mistaken identity. For those keen to check out the area for themselves, one of the best vantage points is Wiseman’s View, which is situated approximately 4 miles from Linville Falls, North Carolina; while the best time of year to see the Brown Mountain Lights is reportedly from September to early November.

Can you tell the difference?

Official investigations within the U.K. of unusual aerial phenomena started during the First World War. One of the most notable reports can be found within the archives of the British Admiralty and dates from, rather incredibly, 1915. Prepared by a Lieutenant Colonel W.P. Drury, the Garrison Intelligence Officer at Plymouth Garrison, Devon, England, a four-page document tells the story. It concerns a series of strange events that occurred on the wilds of Dartmoor (the setting for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles). Lt. Col. Drury advised his superiors at the Admiralty that on 28 June 1915 he and a colleague, one Lt. C. Brownlow of Naval Intelligence, had interviewed a Miss Cecilia Peel Yates at Dolbeare Cottage, Ashburton, about an unusual experience: “She informed us that a few mornings previously, just before dawn, having been awakened by the barking of dogs, she saw from her bedroom window a bright light in the sky, bearing N., and apparently suspended a short distance above the earth. It was too large and bright for a planet, and, as she watched, it swung to the N.E., and disappeared. Haytor is due North of Ashburton and 4 miles distant as the crow files.”

Lt. Col. Drury and Lt. Brownlow were more than skeptical of Miss Peel Yates’s UFO-like encounter: “Although we had entirely failed to shake the lady’s evidence by cross-examination, we deemed her story so wildly improbable that we excluded it from our official report. But shortly afterwards reports of a similar phenomenon were received from the neighbourhood of Hexworthy Mine, which is 5 miles to the N.W., across Dartmoor. On July 12th, Lieutenant Brownlow and I proceeded to Sherril, near Hexworthy, and interviewed Mrs. Cave-Penny and her daughter, from whom the report emanated. Their house, an isolated form on the moor, commands a clear view of the mine, which is two-and-a-half miles distant. They stated that on several occasions they had watched a bright white light rise from a point a few hundred yards to the Eastward of the mine, swing across the valley to about the same from Totnes, and a paddock some distance West of it, and disappear.”

Sometimes it seems that weird stuff just sort of falls down from the sky. There are numerous cases of weird things coming down from above throughout history, often without solid answers. In recent years this has continued with a surprising amount of cases in which strange metallic orbs have come down out of nowhere to leave people scratching their heads and wondering what to make of it all. Here we will look at some bizarre instances of falling metallic orbs or spheres which have managed to evade any real concrete understanding.

In 2012, villagers in northern Brazil were startled when a metallic sphere dropped from the sky to crash down at the village of Riacho dos Poços, in Brazilian Maranhão state, obliterating a cashew tree in the process. The villager who first discovered it said that it had come down after a loud crack reverberated across the sky, and would say, “I heard the noise and I went out to see what caused it. I thought it was a plane that had fallen, or an earthquake.” What he found was a strange, otherworldly object in a ditch still hot to the touch, and described as being perfectly spherical and about 1 meter in diameter and weighing 50 kilograms. When other villagers arrived and dug it out, they found that the sphere seemed to be hollow, except for what seemed to be a bit of liquid swishing about within. Around 2,000 people from all over the area flocked in to see the “UFO,” and it created a panic among some of the more superstitious of the locals. Rather ominously, military police soon arrived and took the sphere away, saying that it was just a part of a downed satellite.

The Brazillian sphere

The state of Texas in the United States had a similar incident in 2013, when an electrician by the name of Dean Gentz spotted a weird object near a cow pasture on his land, near the town of Buna, in east Texas. Upon inspection, it could be seen that the object was a brown metallic orb around 35 centimeters in diameter and bearing signs that it had undergone extreme heat exposure. Gentz would say if it:

What I noticed when I first saw the object got my attention. The way one side of the sphere was melted – I didn’t think someone could have done that with a torch, plasma arc, arc gouge, or any other means I knew about. Also, when you heat metal, it will cool and have a different look. As in this case, the melted metal spalling was blown back over the sphere, I knew that it had been done in an ‘event,’ not by humans. I am not sure how many people would have noticed these things. Several people said they would have thrown it away.

Another mystery sphere would be found in a pasture in the same general area not long after, and despite Gentz’s efforts to figure out where it came from, he has gotten no answers from NASA or any other agency he has gone to for more information. In 2014, residents in Mengchang village in the province of Heilongjiang, China, were woken by a booming noise, after which three “fireballs” were spotted descending from the heavens. These fireballs proceeded to land in some farming areas, and when the locals went to investigate they purportedly found three separate “metallic balls half-covered by a layer of jagged edge,” weighing around 90 pounds and with a diameter of about 30 inches. Once again, officials reportedly were quick to move in to confiscate the strange objects, and offered the explanation that they were debris from Proton-M Russian rocket carrying a satellite, which had plummeted to earth somewhere in Kazakhstan after a failed launch. Is that what this was or is it something more mysterious? The Chinese officials aren’t saying.

The following year would see several other instances of mystery spheres falling from the sky. In 2015, three “strange black orbs” appeared within impact craters in fields in the area in and around the town of Villavieja, Spain. Each of the weird black objects was estimated to be 80 centimeters in diameter with a hole at one end and appeared to built around wire frames. One news outlet El Vardad, would report that it was a “pressure vessel for gas (COPV), possibly from a space station or flying saucer. These objects are made of an unknown material – and appear strong enough to survive reentry into the earth and even catastrophic explosions.” Interestingly, the civil guard soon moved in to guard the area and keep the press from getting close. The mayor of Villavieja would say:

Where are these objects coming from? Why are they falling here precisely? Will more fall, and what would happen if any of these balls fall into a highly populated area? Citizens have real concerns about what is happening and deserve an explanation. These objects are made of a material so strong it survives almost intact upon falling to earth and can cause catastrophic explosions.

That same year, a goat farmer in the town of Calasparra, Spain, reported that a cylindrical, semi-spherical metallic object had crashed down right before his eyes. Officials in biohazard suits reportedly retrieved the object and drove it off in a truck. Bizarrely, at around the same time on the same day and even at the same latitude, a similar object fell on a beach near the city of Sakarya Karasu, Turkey. Once again, military officials immediately moved in, took the object away, and didn’t even bother to offer an explanation.

Biohazard suited official examining the orb in Turkey

In January of 2016, news began making the rounds that “giant metal space balls” were falling from the sky in Vietnam. On different occasions, a “thunder-like noise” was heard, and three orbs of varying size ranging from 6 to 50 kg in weight appeared out of clear skies to crash into the ground below in close proximity to each other. The first reportedly came down at a garden in Yen Bai Province, the second crashed into the roof of a house around 2 miles away, and third and largest of the spheres came down at a stream in the neighboring province of Tuyen Quang. One of the spheres was found to be hollow, while another had Russian letters written upon it, leading to speculation that they were from a Russian satellite or weather balloon, or the compressed air tanks of a rocket or an aircraft.  At least that is the official prognosis, but others have disagreed, for instance UFOlogist and conspiracy nut Scott Waring of UFO Sightings Daily, who called them “alien drones or parts of damaged alien structures in space,” and he has said:

I believe these are cloud orbs otherwise known as alien drones that were struck by lightning or shot down. Alien tech does not usually have wires and loose circuits like our tech has. Alien tech is on a micro scale and is built into the metal of the craft itself. Much like a 3d printer printing the wires inside of a toy robot so when it’s finished, all you do is add the batteries. Alien tech has it all built in, except for their propulsion system.

One of the Vietnamese spheres

Such conspiracies have only further been fueled by reports that military officials were quick to come whisk the spheres away, and claims that they were made of an unknown “special alloy.” The orbs remain unidentified and have been confiscated by the government for testing. What is going on here? Finally, in 2018 three metallic spherical objects were found in Peru’s southeastern Andean community, shortly after reports had come in of blazing objects in the sky. Officials who retrieved the objects claimed that they were pieces of a rocket or satellite that had burned up and melted on re-entry, although others claimed they were meteorites. So which is it?

In the end it is all rather puzzling. These things keep falling from the sky and there doesn’t seem to be a real, agreed upon answer to it all. Are these just instances of meteorites or pieces of space debris? Why is it that in almost every case officials swoop in to take it all away and give vague answers, if any? What is going on here? It is hard to say, but such reports keep coming in and stirring discussion and debate.

All videos, selected by peter2011