While the release of the Pentagon report on UAPs put a damper on finding new intelligent species from other planets, archeologists are busy finding new species of humans right here on Earth. Shortly after the blockbuster find of a jaw and partial skull of a Neanderthal ancestor named Nesher Ramla Homo in Israel, researchers in China rediscovered a massive skull lost for 90 years that appears to be the cranium of a new Homo species that is the closest relative of modern humans. Does this change everything that was just changed a few days ago?

“The Harbin fossil is one of the most complete human cranial fossils in the world. This fossil preserved many morphological details that are critical for understanding the evolution of the Homo genus and the origin of Homo sapiens.”

This discovery is so big, it prompted Qiang Ji, a professor of paleontology of Hebei GEO University, to co-author three separate papers about it in the journal The Innovation. In 1933 in Harbin, a city it north-east China’s Heilongjiang province, the skull was reportedly found by a construction worker working on a bridge on the Songhua river – Songhua means ‘Black Dragon’. Fearing that China’s Japanese occupiers at that time would confiscate it, the man was said to have hidden it in a family well, only telling his family about it right before he died in 2018. Fortunately, they did the right thing and contacted archeologists who recovered the well-preserved skull which, unlike Neanderthals and other ancient Homo species, was as large as modern human heads.

Where will it fit in the evolution of homo sapiens?

“While it shows typical archaic human features, the Harbin cranium presents a mosaic combination of primitive and derived characters setting itself apart from all the other previously-named Homo species.”

Ji explains in a press release that, while its hat size was the same as that of modern humans, the species had larger, almost square eye sockets, thick brow ridges, a wide mouth, and oversized teeth – enough to prompt him to call it a new species he named Homo longi or Dragon Man – ‘long’ means dragon. (Photos here.)

image captionThe Dragon Man's skull is huge, with a brain size about the same as the average for our species

image captionArtist's impression of what Dragon Man may have looked like. His skull suggests he was powerfully built and rugged

image captionThe researchers claim the form of ancient human on the far left may have evolved into the relatively modern Dragon Man on the far right over millions of years

His research team dated the skull to at least 146,000 years in the Middle Pleistocene, a time of migration for other Homo species, which means H. longi and H. sapiens could have been in the area at the same time. Co-author Xijun Ni, a professor of primatology and paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Hebei GEO University, thinks the relationship may have been even closer than just a chance meeting in Harbin.

“It is widely believed that the Neanderthal belongs to an extinct lineage that is the closest relative of our own species. However, our discovery suggests that the new lineage we identified that includes Homo longi is the actual sister group of H. sapiens.”

Would Dragon Man want to still be around today?

Ni thinks the divergence time between H. sapiens and the Neanderthals may have occurred over one million years ago, putting it 400,000 years earlier than scientists commonly believe. However, co-author Chris Stringer, research leader at the Natural History Museum in London, isn’t convinced just yet that Dragon Man is indeed a new species or simply a variation of another one found in Dali county in China in 1978.

“I prefer to call it Homo daliensis, but it’s not a big deal. The important thing is the third lineage of later humans that are separate from Neanderthals and separate from Homo sapiens.”

As with other ancient human species, it will be difficult to trace lineage because of all of the inbreeding that took place between them. While the discovery of Dragon Man is probably a “this changes everything” moment, it also reinforces the fact that, when it comes to humans and sex, some things never change.

It is hard to get a lock on the true beginning of the UFO craze in the United States, but there are some old standbys. The Kenneth Arnold sighting of 1947 often crops up, as of course does the supposed UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico that same year. These are the cases that launched the UFO phenomena into the mainstream consciousness And started the whole “flying saucer” fad, but there have been sightings and incidents going back well beyond these commonly held milestones. Indeed, the earlier UFO reports from America predate Arnold or Roswell by quite a good margin, and have served to carve out their own bizarre corner of the UFO landscape.

In 1628, the English Puritan settlers of the New World established the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was the second major settlement in New England following the Plymouth Colony. A very important figure at the time was a lawyer named John Winthrop, who was in charge of a huge wave of settlers coming to America, and he would serve as the governor of the colony for 12 years starting from 1629. Winthrop would also be the founder of various other communities along Massachusetts Bay and the Charles River, and was also known as an authoritarian and religiously conservative leader, known to be against pure democracy, once calling it “the meanest and worst of all forms of government.” Despite this, he was still a well-respected leader and politician who has made his mark upon the early history of the United States, with some of his writings serving to influence politicians to this day, but a lesser-known aspect of the man is that he also wrote some pretty weird stuff in his journals, including what is thought to be among the very first UFO accounts in the New World.

John Winthrop

Tucked away between the pages of various mundane accounts of colonial life is a very curious entry dated March 1, 1639, in which Winthrop writes of a very bizarre and outlandish  incident involving a man named James Everell, who he describes as a “discreet, sober man.” According to Winthrop, Everell had been rowing with two other men up a section of the Muddy River, about two miles from the village of Charlestown, when they saw a “great light in the sky,” which seemed to dart about back and forth.

When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down about two or three hours ran as swift as an arrow, darting back and forth between them and the village of Charlestown, about two miles away. They were come down in their lighter about a mile, and, when it was over, they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from. Diverse other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place.

The men claimed that after the sighting they had inexplicably found themselves transported about one mile upstream, with no idea or memory of how they had gotten there, nor any sense of the time that had passed. This is an odd detail, as it would mark this incident as not only the first report of a UFO in America, but also the first account of missing time and possibly even the first of alien abduction. One of the explanations at the time was that the men had merely seen illumination from a light phenomenon springing from swamp gas, called ignis fatuus, caused by the combustion of gas from decomposed organic matter. Others thought it was just a misidentified meteorite, and one skeptic was a man named James Savage, who added his own footnote to the sighting in a published version of Winthrop’s journal in 1839, saying:

This account of an ignis fatuus [pale light over marshy ground] may easily be believed on testimony less respectable than that which was adduced. Some operation of the devil, or other power beyond the customary agents of nature, was probably imagined by the relaters and hearers of that age, and the wonder of being carried a mile against the tide became important corroboration of the imagination. Perhaps they were wafted [carry lightly], during the two- or three-hours’ astonishment, for so moderate a distance, by the wind; but, if this suggestion be rejected, we might suppose, that the eddy, flowing always, in our rivers, contrary to the tide in the channel, rather than the meteor, carried their lighter back.

In the end, neither swamp gas nor meteorites really seem to adequately explain what the men reported as written in Winthrop’s journal, and considering that it is only mentioned in one entry and happened so long ago, we will probably never know for sure. Interestingly, this isn’t even the only weird such account to be found within Winthrop’s journal. Five years later there is another entry dated January 18, 1644, which makes mention of a light rising from the water that was witnessed by several boatmen near Boston. This light was apparently “in form like a man,” and “went at a small distance to the town, and so to the south point, and there vanished away.” A few weeks after this yet another journal entry mentions another strange report from Boston Harbor, in which Winthrop writes:

A light like the moon arose about the N.E. point in Boston, and met the former at Nottles Island, and there they closed in one, and then parted, and closed and parted diverse times, and so went over the hill in the island and vanished. Sometimes they shot out flames and sometimes sparkles. This was about eight of the clock in the evening, and was seen by many. About the same time, a voice was heard upon the water between Boston and Dorchester, calling out in a most dreadful manner, ‘Boy! Boy! Come away! Come away!’; and it suddenly shifted from one place to another a great distance, about 20 times. It was heard by diverse godly persons. About 14 days after, the same voice in the same dreadful manner was heard by others on the other side of the town towards Nottles Island.

Winthrop would muse that the voice heard was perhaps from the ghost of a sailor who had died several moths prior to the UFO sighting when his ship had exploded when gunpowder had accidentally been ignited. Whatever the case may be, it is a pretty bizarre report, and it is hard to know what might be going on here. Once again, it only appears in one entry and is never brought up again, leaving it firmly and forever in the realm of speculation. It is all quite the strange case and series of events, and we are left to try and make sense of it all. Was any of this real, and is so what was it? Or was this just a gag thrown into an important historical figure’s journal. And if so, why? It is all certainly a bizarre historical oddity, which has definite repercussions on the UFO discussion and which many are not aware even exist at all.

Mars, our nearest planetary neighbor in the Solar-System, is approximately forty million miles from the Earth and one hundred and forty two million miles from the Sun. Not particularly big in size, it is dwarfed by all of the planets except for Mercury. At the other end of the spectrum, however, Mars is home to the gigantic Olympus Mons, which is the biggest volcano in the entire Solar-System. The huge amount of iron oxide on Mars gives it a noticeable – famous, even – reddish color, hence its memorable nickname: the Red Planet. It has a blood-freezing average temperature of -81 degrees F, and its decidedly harsh atmosphere is comprised almost exclusively of carbon dioxide; aside, that is, from a small amount of water vapor. There is no denying the fact that dusty, rocky, desert-like Mars is a very interesting world: for one thing, it has polar ice-caps. And those ice-caps are comprised of water. Yes, good old water; just like ours. And, there’s no denying that mars has its mysteries. Let’s begin.

As NASA noted in 1997: “Launched November 7, 1996, Mars Global Surveyor became the first successful mission to the red planet in two decades. After a year and a half spent trimming its orbit from a looping ellipse to a circular track around the planet, the spacecraft began its prime mapping mission in March 1999. It has continued to observe the planet from a low-altitude, nearly polar orbit ever since.” Not only that, NASA added that Mars has “very repeatable weather patterns” and that a “panoply of high-resolution images from the Mars Global Surveyor has documented gullies and debris flows suggesting that occasional sources of liquid water, similar to an aquifer, were once present at or near the surface of the planet.”

That same panoply revealed something else; something amazing, if the data was not being misinterpreted. Tucked away among a wealth of less controversial images from the Mars Global Surveyor were a number of astounding images that appeared to show nothing less than vast areas of vegetation; trees, even. They looked eerily like what on Earth are termed Banyan Trees. They are, essentially, trees that grow and thrive by living on other trees. It wasn’t long before the media – and Arthur C. Clarke – caught wind of these extraordinary photographs and what they seemed to show. The debate still goes on. Some say trees. NASA says “no.”

Now, let’s address the matters of Mars’ giant-sized spiders. Yes, you did read that right.  But, no, we’re not talking about something like a wild plot from a 1950s sci-fi-driven Godzilla-type movie. We’re actually talking about something far more exciting. It’s a story that dates back to 1999, which was when the Mars Global Surveyor photographed some seriously strange “things” on the surface of Mars. “Spidery” is the best way to describe them. One person, more than any other, who took up the challenge to solve the mystery is Greg Orme. Someone who has a deep passion for the mysteries of Mars, Orme began his research into Martian anomalies in 1994. Since then, he has written a book, Why We Must Go to Mars: The King’s Valley, and a paper on those mysterious spiders for the journal of the British Interplanetary Society. Orme’s voluminous collection of photos of Martian anomalies is highly impressive. Mac Tonnies was excited by Orme’s work and went on to describe the “Black Spiders,” as they became known, as resembling “nerve ganglia” or “ground-hugging trees” within “a macabre forest.” Such descriptions are undeniably appropriate. NASA has a very different view on the spiders of Mars: “…these aren’t actual spiders. Called ‘araneiform terrain,’ they are spider-like radiating mounds that form when carbon dioxide ice below the surface heats up and releases.”

It was in 1998 that the Mars Global Surveyor photographed what looks very much a monolith on the surface of Mars’ moon Phobos. The controversy surrounding the eye-opening image continues to annoy NASA and to amaze seekers of Martians and those who conclude that Mars was once a world filled with life. It should be noted, though, that Phobos’ monolith is not alone. That’s right: Phobos has a rival in the weird stakes. Say”hello” to nothing less than the monolith of Mars. That’s right: both Phobos and its parent planet appear to have on their surfaces what seem to be obelisk-shaped stones. It’s no surprise that the controversy surrounding the ““object”” seen on the Red Planet reverberated all around the world when the story reached the eager ears and eyes of the media.

On September 24, 2015, the U.K.’s Express newspaper ran an article titled “Has Stonehenge been found on Mars? Ancient ‘alien’ stone circle discovered on Red Planet.” That’s quite a headline, to say the very least. “Mr. Enigma,” who highlighted the breaking story at his YouTube channel said that what appeared to be in evidence on the surface of Mars was “a perfectly circular platform with a strange cluster of stones emerging from it.” He added: “I know the formation is not an exact match, nor am I saying it is, indeed, a Stonehenge set up. I am just saying there is something strange about this area and it looks very much like the mysterious ancient stone circle of Stonehenge.

Mars: an enigma, to be sure!

Do you feel like you’re under surveillance? It’s not just Big Brother – astronomers have identified over 1,700 nearby stars close enough for alien civilizations to have seen Earth pass in front of the Sun at some point over the last 5,000 years. Even more disconcerting, 46 of them are in the right place to pick up our radio and TV signals, and over half have potentially habitable stars. Is Big ET watching us too?

“Among these stars are seven known exoplanet hosts, including Ross-128, which saw Earth transit the Sun in the past, and Teegarden’s Star and Trappist-1, which will start to see it in 29 and 1,642 years, respectively. We found that human-made radio waves have already swept over 75 of the closest stars on our list.”

As described in their new study published in the journal Nature, scientists at Cornell University and the American Museum of Natural History used positions and motions from the European Space Agency’s Gaia eDR3 catalog to determine which stars enter and exit the Earth Transit Zone -the region of the sky from which an ET observer could detect Earth as it moved in front of the Sun — and for how long. The map allows astronomers to look back in time as well as extrapolate which stars and exoplanets will enter the right position – in addition to looking back 5,000 years, they also looked ahead 5,000 years. Interestingly, being close to us does not necessarily make it easier to see us.

“The Trappist-1 system, at 45 light-years from Earth, hosts seven transiting Earth-size planets – four of them in the temperate, habitable zone of that star. While we have discovered the exoplanets around Trappist-1, they won’t be able to spot us until their motion takes them into the Earth Transit Zone in 1,642 years.”

The Ross 128 system is about 11 light-years away and has an Earth-size exoplanet which could have seen Earth for 2,158 years starting about 3,057 years ago. While that would give them a view, it was far too early for them to pick up our radio and television signals of the past 100 years. On the other hand, these ETs might have instruments that can detect changes in our atmosphere due to agriculture or industrialization, which they might interpret, as we do, as indicators of life.

As Enrico Fermi once asked, “So, where are they?” Good paradox, Enrico.

The alien abduction phenomenon is a truly weird corner of UFO lore. Here we have accounts of people being spirited away by otherworldly forces, to come back with myriad bizarre tales of their experiences at the hands of these entities, and it is always at the very least deeply odd. All manner of people, from all walks of life have claimed to have been taken away by aliens, yet some reports tend to carry perhaps a bit more weight than others, coming from traditionally “reliable” witnesses. One such case is that of a police officer who claims to have been taken away by aliens, and who stuck by his story even in the face of scathing ridicule.

In 1976, Herbert Schirmer was just a 23-year-old young man who had just served in the Navy in Vietnam and had just started working for the Ashland Police Department, in Nebraska, in the United States. On December 3 of that year, he had been with the force for 7 months, and on this evening, he went out on his regular patrol as usual, going out along Highway 63 for what was normally a pretty quiet beat. The rural area didn’t typically have much going on, with his patrol usually very uneventful, some might even say boring. There was no reason to think that this evening would be any different, and as he headed down that dark highway, the lane lines hypnotically flickering by, he would have had no idea of the extremely bizarre turn his life was about to take.

It was around 2:30 AM when Schirmer rounded a bend near the intersection of Highway 6 and 63, and saw before him what he at first took to be the lights of an oncoming vehicle, two blinking red lights atop what he took to be a large white truck. He soon realized that whatever it was, the vehicle wasn’t moving. Thinking it may have been someone who had broken down and was perhaps in a bit of trouble, he decided to stop his patrol car and shine his spotlight out towards what he still thought was a truck. When the spotlight hit the object, it soon was very apparent that this was no truck. The red lights seemed to be emanating from two portholes on the side of a silver, disc-shaped, metallic object that was like polished aluminum and hovering in mid air about 8 feet off of the surface of the road. Around the mysterious object he could see what looked like some sort of catwalk encircling it, and on its bottom was what looked like some sort of landing gear. As he stared in awe trying to process what he was seeing, the object then passed directly overhead and belched forth flames to shoot up into the sky at great speed, leaving Schirmer there alone in the dark, quiet night, wondering if he should call it in or not.

Image by Steve Baxter

Schirmer made his way back to the station, and he quickly realized that a whole hour had passed, even though it had felt like only around 10 minutes. He then soon had a red welt spring up on his neck as he was overcome with an excruciating headache, nausea, and a “weird buzzing” in his head. He made a note of his sighting in a report, and that was that, until when 3 months later that a UFO research group from a United States Air Force funded group of scientists at the University of Colorado called the Condon Commission came knocking. The organization was mostly all about looking into UFO sightings and trying to debunk, discredit, or explain them away, and they went about inviting Schirmer to come out to Boulder, Colorado for questioning, which he accepted. He would then undergo regressive hypnosis, administered by psychologist Dr. Leo Sprinkle of the University of Wyoming, and his story would get even stranger still.

Under hypnosis, Schirmer was able to have many hidden memories from that fateful night come floating up to the surface. He claimed that his car’s engine had cut out and the radio had died, after which inscrutable humanoid beings 4 1/2 to 5 feet tall had emerged from the enigmatic ship, dressed in silver-grey uniforms and helmets with antennae on them, and with slanted “catlike” eyes, white-grey skin, long, sharp heads, flat noses and slit-like mouths. On the front of their uniforms were emblems featuring a winged serpent of some sort. Schirmer recalled having tried to draw his pistol but found that he was somehow unable to do so, as if he had been paralyzed. These creatures revealed themselves to be friendly, speaking to him telepathically and asking him if he was “the watchman of this town” and bringing him aboard their ship. Once there, he would say that they had shown him around and explained various things about themselves, such as that they drew power for their ship from power lines and had a base in the planet Venus, and they also told him that they would visit him again and that he would “see the universe.” The whole report was rather detailed, with Schirmer describing each of what he said were three levels of the ship, but the Condon Committee was unimpressed, saying:

Evaluation of psychological assessment tests, the lack of any evidence, and interviews with the patrolman, left project staff with no confidence that the trooper’s reported UFO experience was physically real.

In the aftermath of all of this, Schirmer would return to Nebraska to scathing ridicule and personal attacks on his reputation. He was relentlessly taunted, made fun of, and there was even a bullet riddled effigy of him hung up at Ashland Cemetery. He would step down from his job at the Ashland Police Department, suffer from psychological problems and depression, and it was even reported that the whole thing had caused his marriage to disintegrate, his wife unable to handle it all and leaving him. Amazingly, throughout this all he would stick by his story, eventually moving to Omaha and keeping a low profile to disappear from the public eye. Despite all the ridicule aimed at him, Schirmer has had plenty of those who have believed him, and one of these is comic artist Michael Jasorka, who created a self-published 50-page graphic novel depicting the events. Jasotka has said of the account:

I’ve always been intrigued by UFOs. Herbert’s just spoke to me. It was so vivid. The facts that he brings across in this story telling are beyond a creative mind, they’re too, they’re too detailed let’s say. You could tell from his storytelling manner and his voice that he couldn’t have conjured this up. We believe in this case, we really think it occurred with him I think popular cultural media is looking for these kinds of things because not everybody knows about them.

The case has been picked apart by UFO researchers ever since, and it is hard to know what to make of it all. It is certainly notable that Schirmer has always stuck by his story even in the face of ridicule and his own life falling apart around him, so is this perhaps indicative of him maybe telling the truth, or at least what he truly believes to be the truth? Or is this just the ramblings of someone who has lost their grip on reality? It is difficult to say for sure, and the case of Herbert Schirmer remains unsolved.

Special thanks to my friend Steve Baxter for the use of his great artwork.

Among the most fascinating kinds of phenomena in the tool kit of various organisms is the unique quality of bioluminescence. From fireflies to deep ocean fish at sea, a wide range of different manifestations of natural luminescence in nature exist, which species use for everything from attracting mates, to luring in prey.

One of the most fascinating places where bioluminescent phenomena occur is in ocean environments, where a variety of different organisms deploy luminous capabilities in unique ways. At times, significant portions of ocean water may take on a glowing appearance, due to the presence of tiny luminescent organisms which produce luciferin, a compound that produces light once it becomes oxidized.

However, there are also a few instances involving peculiar phenomena that have accompanied the presence of bioluminescent phenomena at sea. Specifically, this involves the curious echoes on ship’s radars in the presence of light produced by these organisms.

A pair of notable incidents that appear to convey this phenomenon occurred beginning in March 1977. The sailing ship m.v. Ebani had been traversing the North Atlantic on this date when it began to encounter a number of false radar echoes which reoccurred throughout the day. These radar returns appeared to the crew like groups of fishing boats approximately five miles distance, which would have seemed to be a plausible explanation if not for the fact that the returns would disappear once the Ebani attempted to close its distance on the spurious targets.

At approximately 8 PM on the date in question, the crew observed the targets on radar at a distance of approximately 5.5 miles when, rather than vanishing, they appeared to move around the perimeter of the ship at this distance, encircling the Ebani within a large, 10-mile circle. Coinciding with the movement of the targets observed on radar, the crew had been able to observe a change in the appearance of the ocean water, which began to look milky and had been accompanied by a fishy odor.

At this point, the crew directed their Aldis lamp toward a region of the ocean ahead of them, which revealed the presence of luminescent organisms in the sea. The strange circle of bioluminescent organisms remained for close to 45 minutes, during which time the curious radar echoes also continued.

The following year on June 20, another sailing vessel, the Gambada, was en route between Santos and Buenos Aires when it also began to detect unusual radar echoes. Initially, the crew in this instance believed they were detecting a storm moving toward the vessel, although it appeared to be approaching against the prevailing wind. The crew noticed that the radar echo looked unlike a typical weather formation, and soon it became evident that once the ship was passing through the region producing the radar echo, there was no rain to be seen. What was plainly evident, however, was an illuminated region of the ocean surrounding the Gambada, illuminating the seawater in the same area that appeared to coincide with the peculiar false radar return.

Although there is little mystery behind the oceanic bioluminescence itself, the occurrence of odd radar returns associated with the presence of these organisms is something that is far less often reported. Explanations for it seem to be equally elusive, and it remains a curiosity as far as the many appearances of luminous phenomena at sea are concerned.

When it comes to proposing “what if” questions about UFOs and aliens, there is perhaps no bigger player on the scientific side than Harvard University astronomer Abrahma ‘Avi’ Loeb. Loeb was made famous to the general public with his proposals early on that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua was actually some for of extraterrestrial spacecraft that could have been crewed by living or robotic pilots. He’s back in the news this week with a new “what if” about ‘Oumuamua that fits right in with the upcoming Pentagon report on UAPs and the public’s wondering if any of them will be revealed as alien crafts. Loeb, as usual, has a different angle.

“A predecessor to ‘Oumuamua could have been a craft that deposited small probes into the Earth’s atmosphere without being noticed, because it visited before Pan-STARRS started its operations. Along this imaginative line of reasoning, ‘Oumuamua could have arranged to appear as coming from the neutral local standard of rest, which serves as the local “galactic parking lot,” so that its origin would remain unknown.”

In an op-ed in Scientific American, Loeb drops the idea that ‘Oumuamua may have been a spacecraft retrieving data from a previous visitor that dropped probes to Earth – one that stopped by before we had technology like Pan-STARRS (Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) telescope used to discover it. before you scoff, he justifies this theory with a proposal in the style of the Fermi paradox (If there a billions of stars in the galaxy and a high percentage that could support life, where are all the aliens?) observation about interstellar objects:

“In fact, there should be a quadrillion ‘Oumuamua-like objects within the solar system at any given time, if they are distributed on random trajectories with equal probability of moving in all directions.”

If there are that many interstellar objects, where are they? Loeb says the answer might be that “‘Oumuamua was an artificial object on a targeted mission towards the sun, aimed to collect data from the habitable region near Earth.” If that was the case, then “tumbling motion of ‘Oumuamua could potentially have been meant to scan signals from all viewing directions.” Furthermore, “‘Oumuamua could have arranged to appear as coming from the neutral local standard of rest, which serves as the local “galactic parking lot,” so that its origin would remain unknown.”

While “Galactic Parking Lot” would make a great name for a prog rock album, Loeb’s theory sounds plausible. However, he states that he’s not trying to prove ‘Oumuamua is an alien ship retrieving probes – he just wants the scientific community to devote more time, and be more openminded, to collecting and analyzing data on UAPs. To wit, he issued a second Scientific American op-ed this week addressing this.

“A fresh scientific study that offers reproducible evidence for UFO sightings and resolves their nature would demonstrate the power of science in answering a question that is clearly of great interest to the public. Finding a conclusive answer on the basis of open data will enhance the public’s confidence in evidence-based knowledge.”

Not only should we “learn something new and exciting from studying them scientifically,” we could also determine “the meaning behind its existence—the intent of those who manufactured it.” And, if even one is extraterrestrial, we’ll finally know if they’re malevolent or benevolent.

Who can argue with that? Thanks, Avi! (And thanks for the cool album name.)