Huge hidden cave under castle with prehistoric hippo bones 'once in a lifetime' find
Rosie Mercer - BBC Wales
A cave hidden beneath an 11th Century castle in Pembrokeshire is a "truly remarkable site" which could rewrite Britain's prehistory, researchers say.
Pembroke Castle has long been an important archaelogical area
(Image: University of Aberdeen)
Small digs of the cave under Pembroke Castle, known as Wogan Cavern, have so far uncovered "extremely rare" evidence of early humans and animals - including the bones of a hippopotamus which roamed Wales 120,000 years ago.
The University of Aberdeen will now lead a larger five-year exploration of the site, which archaeologists hope could reveal "a great deal about our early prehistoric forebears".
"There is no other site like it in Britain – it is a once in a lifetime discovery," said Dr Rob Dinnis from the University of Aberdeen.
Wogan Cavern, thought to have been dug out by the Victorians, is accessed via a spiral staircase from the castle.
Measuring 23m (75ft) in length, with a height of up to 10m (32ft), the cave has been described as "enormous".
It was long assumed that there was little archaeological material left at the site, but small excavations between 2021 and 2024 uncovered evidence of both humans and animals over more than 100,000 years - including stone tools and mammoth, hippo and woolly rhinoceros bones.
Archaeologists say the site is a "once in a lifetime discovery"
(Image: University of Aberdeen)
The bones have been described as well preserved, and researchers said the cave was emerging as one of the most important prehistoric archives in Britain.
Dinnis, who directed the initial digs and will lead the new excavation project, said he was optimistic about what they would uncover.
"Despite the limited work done so far, we can already say that Wogan Cavern is a truly remarkable site," he said.
"Not only is there extremely rare evidence for early Homo sapiens, there are also hints at even earlier human occupation, probably by Neanderthals.
"There is no other site like it in Britain – it is a once in a lifetime discovery. With this new project we can learn a great deal about our early prehistoric forebears, about how they lived and what their worlds looked like.
"We are optimistic that the cave can chart a long sequence of human activity, from hunter-gatherers living there immediately after the last Ice Age around 11,500 years ago, back to Britain's earliest Homo sapiens between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago, and maybe also earlier traces likely left by Neanderthals.
"We have also found hippo bones, which probably date to the last interglacial period, around 120,000 years ago. The site could therefore tell us about how multiple changes in climate and environment affected people living there over 100,000 years or more."
The university will lead on the exploration supported by the Pembroke Castle Trust, which said the finds from Wogan Cavern would be curated and kept in Pembroke.
For Pembroke Castle – the birthplace of Henry Tudor and a popular tourist attraction – the project represents an exciting new chapter in its history.
"This is incredibly exciting news for everyone at the castle," said manager Jon Williams.
"We have watched with great interest as Wogan Cavern has started to reveal its secrets – it's very different from the medieval history we usually deal with at the castle."
The new excavations are scheduled to begin at the end of May.
Roswell Revisited 2026 (The Ultimate Historical Pictorial timeline)
Roswell Revisited 2026
(The Ultimate Historical Pictorial timeline)
In this presentation, Michael Schratt (Military Aerospace Historian) re-visits the Roswell case of July 1947. Using new technology along with the book Witness to Roswell (Don Schmitt and Tom Carey), every significant event/scene has finally been illustrated to make this famous UFO Crash/Retrieval case “come alive”.
In a newly released video, independent researcher Michael Schratt presents an illustrated chronology of the 1947 Roswell incident that expands on the earlier investigations of historians Paul Schmitt and Kevin Carey. The 30‑minute presentation, titled Roswell Revisited 2026, combines newly digitised photographs, declassified documents and a series of eyewitness testimonies to construct what Schratt describes as “the most complete timeline to date.” While the mainstream narrative continues to attribute the debris to the classified Project Mogul balloon, Schratt argues that the pattern of military actions, material descriptions and subsequent testimonies point to an “extraterrestrial or extradimensional” event that has been systematically concealed.
Schratt’s timeline begins on July 2, 1947 at 11:59 p.m., when a lightning strike allegedly caused an “egg‑shaped” craft to explode over the Foster Ranch near Corona, New Mexico, scattering debris that included a metallic “tin‑foil” material, a memory‑metal that re‑formed after being crushed, and I‑beams bearing what he calls “purple, Asian‑like hieroglyphics.” The following day, rancher Mac Brazel and a local boy, Timothy Dee Proctor, discovered the field. Between July 4 and July 6, Brazel showed fragments at a rodeo and a bar before reporting the find to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox on July 6.
On July 7, Major Jesse Marcel and CIC officer Sheridan Cavitt arrived, and an “archaeologist and students” reportedly located a 13‑foot escape pod 35 miles north of Roswell, containing two deceased entities and a survivor. The next day, Colonel William Blanchard issued the famous press release announcing the capture of a “flying saucer.” By July 9, General Roger Ramey publicly re‑characterised the debris as a weather balloon, and the alleged alien bodies and pod were moved to Hangar P‑3 (Building 84) at Roswell Army Airfield. Schratt notes that the military allegedly employed industrial‑vacuum equipment to remove all trace evidence from the site.
The video highlights several individuals whose statements have resurfaced in recent declassification efforts. Mac Brazel is portrayed as having been “quietly compensated” after his discovery, a claim supported by a 1952 purchase record for a new truck. Major Jesse Marcel, who handled the material, maintained that the alloys were “not of this world,” a sentiment echoed by his son, Jesse Marcel Jr., who recalled childhood memories of the hieroglyphic symbols. Former 509th Bomb Group sergeant William “Bud” Taylor described the interior of the pod as containing “fiber‑optic cables, flat‑screen monitors and humanoid corpses.”
Additional testimony cited includes pilot Oliver “Pappy” Henderson, whose wife Sappho Henderson later confirmed his private admissions of transporting the craft to Wright Field, and Colonel Philip Corso, who alleged that recovered technology was deliberately “seeded” into corporations such as IBM and Hughes Aircraft. While these accounts have not been independently verified, they form a core part of Schratt’s argument that the incident had long‑term technological ramifications.
Schratt confronts the official Project Mogul explanation by pointing to the “memory metal” and the hieroglyphic markings, which he argues lack any known terrestrial analogue. He also references the **full‑body cavity searches of
NASA’s Latest Rover Images Reveal Possible Winged Insect and Predator Life Forms on Mars
Ohio University entomologist examines NASA Curiosity rover images and claims they reveal insect and reptile forms on the Martian surface.
© NASA Rover Photos Show Objects Resembling Insects And Reptiles.
Image credit: CBSI/CNET
The bees appear to vary in size. Some show wings. Others display segmented bodies and what look like jointed legs frozen mid-stride across the rust-colored regolith of Gale Crater.
William Romoser, an entomologist who spent decades studying arthropods, has spent years examining publicly available imagery from NASA’s Curiosity rover. What he sees is unambiguous: insect-like creatures in flight, arthropod forms sheltering in burrows, and the fossilized remains of reptile-like organisms scattered across the Martian surface.
His analysis, presented at the 2019 National Meeting of the Entomological Society of America, has recently resurfaced in science media coverage, reviving a debate about what the rover’s cameras may have actually captured.
NASA rover captures possible insect-like life on Mars, showing wings and legs.
Credit: William Romoser
Romoser’s claims are not subtle. He identifies specific anatomical features across multiple rover images, including what he describes as compound eyes, wing venation patterns, and specialized appendages consistent with terrestrial arthropods.
“The ‘bees’ appear to vary in size and type,” Romoser stated during his presentation. “Several characteristic insect/arthropod anatomical features were identifiable, not all on the same individual, but as a mosaic among individuals.”
One image sequence, he contends, captures an organism performing an acrobatic flight maneuver that begins with a steep dive and ends with a level trajectory, a motion pattern familiar to anyone who has watched insects navigate open air. He further argues that the insect-like fauna he has catalogued appear to be sheltering in caves, nesting in burrows beneath the surface, and occupying specialized structures carved into the Martian terrain.
The Curiosity rover images that Romoser analyzed extend beyond winged forms. He points to additional photographs that he interprets as reptile-like fossils, including one specimen that bears what he describes as a distinct head structure with bilateral symmetry resembling an Eastern King Snake. The fossilized form, according to his presentation, shows evidence of a large mouth capable of gaping, a feature he associates with predatory behavior.
In some of the rover photographs he examined, Romoser suggests the reptile-like organisms appear to be preying upon the smaller insect-like forms. This interpretation implies a functioning ecosystem with trophic relationships, a claim that would require extraordinary evidence to substantiate.
The entomologist acknowledged that his findings could open new avenues of scientific inquiry. “Given evidence for the presence of insect/arthropod and reptile-like organisms beyond the confines of Earth, perhaps ‘astroentomology’ and ‘astroherpetology’ will emerge as important topics within the field of astrobiology,” he said.
The researcher behind the claims joined the Ohio University faculty in 1965 and built a career focused on medical entomology and tropical disease research. His documented expertise does not include planetary geology or remote sensing analysis. The Mars research represents a departure from the mosquito and arbovirus work that defined his academic career.
Curiosity landed in Gale Crater on August 6, 2012, carrying the most sophisticated suite of scientific instruments ever deployed to another planet. The rover’s 10 instruments include 17 cameras, a laser that vaporizes rock from a distance to analyze chemical composition, and a drill that has now collected 42 powdered rock samples from the Martian surface.
The mission’s core objective is straightforward: determine whether Gale Crater ever possessed environmental conditions suitable for microbial life. Curiosity has delivered definitive answers. It found ancient streambeds, identified long-lived lake systems, and detected organic molecules preserved in billion-year-old mudstone. In February 2026, researchers reported that non-biological processes could not fully explain the abundance of organic compounds detected in Martian samples.
NASA rover images show possible insect-like creatures on Mars, with labeled features such as wings, thorax, and abdomen.
Credit: William Romoser
Nowhere in Curiosity’s published scientific findings does the mission team report visual confirmation of macroscopic organisms. The rover continues its traverse across Gale Crater, recently spending six months examining boxwork formations, a type of fractured geologic structure that resembles spiderwebs when viewed from above. The rover’s cameras have captured thousands of images showing sedimentary layers, wind-sculpted rocks, and mineral veins left behind by ancient groundwater.
Scientists who evaluate claims of Martian life in rover imagery consistently point to pareidolia as the most plausible explanation. The phenomenon describes the brain’s tendency to impose familiar patterns on random visual information. It explains why people see faces in electrical outlets, animals in cloud formations, and, in this case, insects in wind-eroded rocks.
Mars possesses no shortage of oddly shaped geology. Billions of years of volcanic activity, impact cratering, ancient water flow, and relentless wind abrasion have sculpted the surface into forms that can trick the eye under certain lighting conditions. Features that appear organized or biological in one rover image often resolve into ordinary rock when photographed from a different angle or with higher-resolution instruments.
Readers responding to the resurfaced research noted the pattern recognition phenomenon at work. One observer remarked that seeing shapes in Martian rocks is “like seeing sheep in the clouds.” Others drew comparisons to blurry Bigfoot photographs, where ambiguous visual information invites the mind to fill in missing details.
There were 'audible screams of delight': Why Artemis II sightings of meteor flashes on the moon have scientists giddy
Meteorite strikes spotted on the moon by the Artemis II crew will help scientists assess dangers to future moon bases, infrastructure, and astronauts.
Artemis II pilot Victor Glover (right) looks at the moon during a close flyby (left). During the historic 7-hour flyby, the crew spotted at least four flashes from meteorites striking the lunar surface.
(Image credit: NASA)
While flying just a few thousand miles above the moon on April 6, Artemis II astronauts reported seeing a handful of bright, fleeting flashes of light on the lunar surface, leaving mission scientists on Earth buzzing with excitement.
The excitement comes with good reason for scientists planning future lunar missions: These brief flashes, caused by tiny meteorites striking the moon, help researchers track when and where impacts occur. Such data can improve scientists' understanding of the risks these impacts pose to long-term infrastructure and a sustained human presence on the moon.
The moon's heavily cratered surface is no stranger to such impacts, and smaller ones occur almost daily with minimal risk to future lunar bases. But with space rocks slamming into the moon at tens of thousands of miles per hour — and no atmosphere to slow them — larger impacts remain a concern for scientists monitoring potential threats to critical infrastructure and crew safety.
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"One has to plan for the less-frequent, more hazardous events," David Kring, a scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, told Live Science. Back in 2016, Kring proposed the idea that future moon explorers should try to detect such impact flashes on the lunar far side. "The lunar flashes the Artemis II astronauts observed remind us to plan for that contingency," Kring said.
The Artemis II crew spotted the flashes during their historic flyby around the lunar far side, when the moon briefly blocked the sun and created a total solar eclipse that lasted nearly an hour and left the far side in complete darkness. Against this stark backdrop, the crew observed at least four millisecond-long flashes on the lunar surface, and possibly as many as six, commander Reid Wiseman radioed to mission control in Houston.
"There was a little bit of giddiness," Wiseman said through the mission livestream, reporting a fresh flash spotted by crewmate Jeremy Hansen even as he relayed earlier observations. "It was definitely impact flashes on the moon."
"Incredible news, Reid," science officer Kelsey Young responded from mission control, raising her hand to her forehead in awe. There were "audible screams of delight" from scientists as the observations came in, Young told reporters at an April 7 news conference.
Scientists on Earth have already begun working to match the crew's observations with data from the moon-orbiting Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, with the goal of refining existing models of how frequently such impacts occur. To do so, researchers plan to combine astronaut reports with orbital data to extract key measurable details about the flashes, including their brightness, the meteorites' masses, and whether the events created fresh craters on the lunar surface.
A less-visible consequence of these impacts is the shock waves that ripple through the moon. Such "moonquakes," when recorded by seismometers, can reveal how energetic and potentially damaging each strike was.
Like the Artemis II crew, Apollo astronauts reported seeing a handful of impact flashes, but most occurred too far from the seismometers operating at the time to be detected, a recent analysis found. Even so, Apollo-era instruments recorded about 1,700 impact-related moonquakes. Some were powerful enough to "cause boulders to roll downslope," Kring said, while the largest could "cause crater and canyon walls to collapse," which would pose risks to future lunar habitats.
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Currently, however, no active seismometers are operating on the moon to support the Artemis era.
"Hopefully the first landed Artemis mission will change that," Nick Schmerr, a geophysicist at the University of Maryland who co-authored the analysis cross-referencing Apollo-era flashes with moonquakes, told Live Science.
Seismometers are among the instruments NASA plans to deploy through a fleet of early robotic missions ahead of crewed landings planned for 2028 and beyond. By combining astronaut observations with data from seismometers, telescopes and orbiters, scientists could precisely locate impact events and track their effects.
"We'd certainly want to know about any nearby impacts for a moon base, especially if they hit near crucial infrastructure," said Schmerr, who is also the deputy principal investigator for a planned seismometer known as the Lunar Environmental Monitoring Station for Artemis (LEMS). "The more observations of a particular flash from different observers, the better."
Over time, such observations could help scientists refine estimates of how much asteroid and comet debris is striking the moon, Kring said. Larger impacts can excavate material from deep beneath the surface to reveal lunar geology that would be inaccessible otherwise. If such events occur near the polar regions, Kring added, they may even expose ice that NASA and other space agencies suspect is present and could someday be harnessed for life support and rocket fuel.
Looking further ahead, analyzing moon samples ferried to Earth from Artemis landing sites could allow researchers to identify the types of meteorites striking the moon and track how their composition has shifted over roughly 4 billion years of solar system history, Kring said. Ultimately, though, these impacts matter "because they produce and modify the lunar soil that future Artemis astronauts will walk on," he added.
Pentagon slammed over secret UFO 'cover-up' as 46 clips of alien formations kept hidden
BY Liam Randall News Reporter
The Pentagon has been accused of a calculated "cover-up" after dodging a deadline to hand over 46 top-secret UFO videos.
Furious lawmakers are demanding answers after defence chiefs failed to produce the bombshell footage, which reportedly shows "Tic Tac" shaped objects and eerie formations over global hotspots, by the April 14 cut-off. The ultimatum was triggered by Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, who issued a direct order to US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the start of the month.
But as the deadline lapsed on Tuesday, the Florida congresswoman revealed she had been met by a wall of silence from military top brass.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna says she has been met by a wall of silence
(Image: AP)
Taking to X (formerly Twitter), she said: "No-one from the Pentagon had responded until we reached out and it appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities."
The snub is particularly explosive given that President Donald Trump has reportedly greenlit the declassification.
Luna added: "How convenient. The president has authorized the release, so whoever is trying to be cute at the Pentagon can take a hike."
The 46 missing clips are said to be a holy grail for UFO hunters, featuring "Tic Tac," cigar-shaped and spherical crafts, along with high-speed manoeuvres over the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and the East China Sea.
They are also said to show co-ordinated formations buzzing US warships and nuclear submarines, as well as the 2023 shootdown of a mystery object over Lake Huron. One specific file, dated November 23, 2020, allegedly shows a "massive disc" weaving through clouds over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
The footage was previously teased by investigative truth-seekers Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp. Lawmakers fear the alien formations pose a "national security threat" to restricted airspace and military zones.
In her letter, Luna, who chairs the House Federal Secrets Task Force, said: "The continued lack of transparency surrounding these anomalies and the potential national security threat they pose is troubling."
She noted that whistleblowers have confirmed the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) is sitting on even more recordings that the public has never seen.
The news has sparked anger online, with taxpayers accusing "rogue federal employees" of hiding the truth to protect their budgets.
One user wrote: "The American people want all this declassified. There's zero reason for any of it to be kept secret."
Another hit out at the stalling, saying: "Isn't it amazing, how our government won't listen to itself? Or the will of the people?"
Back in February, Trump took to Truth Social to promise a new era of transparency, vowing to release files on "alien and extraterrestrial life."
Rumours of a massive data dump have only grown louder following reports that the White House has officially registered the domain Aliens.gov. While the site currently remains a blank page, it has been flagged by federal domain trackers as an active government asset.
Despite the digital infrastructure being laid, officials have yet to confirm a release date, leaving the public in a frustrating state of limbo.
What Will the UFO Files Reveal? 3 Possibilities
With the U.S. government poised to release a tranche of UFO‑related files, experts are weighing what the documents might reveal.
Interest in otherworldly phenomena skyrocketed earlier this year following remarks made by both President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama.
Trump announced in February that he would be directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other relevant departments and agencies to start identifying and releasing UFO-related government files. The announcement came after Obama told political commentator Brian Tyler Cohen, “they’re real, but I haven't seen them,” when asked about the existence of alien life during a rapid-fire portion of an interview.
Obama soon after clarified his comments, however, writing on social media: “Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us.”
"President Trump directed the Department of War to begin the process of identifying and releasing government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena, and unidentified flying objects because he is the most transparent President in history. Stay tuned," White House press secretary Anna Kelly told Newsweek.
Hegseth told reporters in February he did not have a timeline for the file release requested by Trump.
“I don't want to oversell how much time it will take, right? We're digging in. We're going to be in full compliance with that executive order, eager to provide that for the president. So, there'll be more coming on that as far as the process of what we'll do,” he said.
Florida Republican Anna Paulina Luna hit out at the Pentagon on Tuesday after a deadline for handing over dozens of videos documenting apparent encounters with UFOs, also referred to as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs), passed.
A letter signed by Luna and dated March 31, had requested over 45 video files that reportedly include spherical, cigar-shaped and "Tic Tac"-like objects recorded by U.S. military platforms over war zones, oceans and restricted airspace, with incidents said to include activity near Iran, Syria, U.S. bases and airports and a 2023 incident over Lake Huron.
“No one from the Pentagon had responded until we reached out, and it appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities. How convenient,” Luna wrote on X on Tuesday. “Nonetheless, we will be getting the requested list. We are not waiting for a briefing at some unspecified future date.”
Harvard physicist Avi Loeb told Newsweek that the most anomalous data has thus far remained obscured to the public, “and may include high-resolution satellite imagery or materials from alleged crash sites.”
“Determining the nature of that evidence is extremely important for national security. It could indicate technological developments by adversarial nations. Even if that turns out not to be the case, studying the evidence is never a waste of time. It strengthens our ability to protect our nation.”
Loeb said he hopes lawmakers will have an opportunity to review evidence previously held in secrecy.
“The images and videos released publicly so far are not of high scientific quality. Without precise distance measurements, it is difficult to determine velocities or accelerations. However, the underlying data may contain clues that scientists can analyze rigorously," he said.
“For example, if materials were recovered from a crash site, it would be straightforward to test whether they originated beyond the solar system. Even a gram of material is sufficient for isotope analysis using a mass spectrometer. All materials in our solar system formed from the same reservoir. Material from another star would likely exhibit isotopic signatures shaped by a different stellar environment,” Loeb said.
“Science can help the government and Congress determine whether any evidence collected over the past century may be of interstellar origin.”
Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, told CBS News that astronomers are “very excited” at the possibility that the released documents could contain clues about life in the universe, which “still seems rare.”
Levin clarified that astronomers are interested in microbes—organisms responsible for the origin of life on Earth.
"If there is anything in them, it would be really thrilling," Levin said, but added, "If there are claims of actual technologies from other civilizations—I don't think anyone is actually expecting that, scientifically. I think if you're expecting that, you're going to be disappointed."
Like Levin, other experts have also indicated that those hoping for more shocking revelations may be in for disappointment.
Greg Eghigian, a historian of science and medicine and professor at Penn State University, told CNN that while the release may include military or civilian sighting reports, as well as information on how extensively agencies investigated reported sightings, it will likely include many documents considered “unbelievably boring” to most.
“It’s going to be a lot of administrative files: Who does what? How much did we spend on paper clips?” he said.
Former director of the Department of Defense's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), which investigates UFOs, Sean Kirkpatrick told CBS News that anyone hoping for evidence of alien life on Earth could be frustrated.
“There are going to be unsatisfied people," he said. “You're going to have a bunch of people who are going to continue to cry conspiracy, they're going to say there's a cover-up.”
Kirkpatrick said that during his tenure leading AARO, investigators found no evidence of extraterrestrial life or alien technology on Earth. While he indicated he would have welcomed discovering alien technology, Kirkpatrick concluded that the likelihood of intelligent extraterrestrials on Earth is “little to none,” though he believes life likely exists elsewhere in the universe.
What is dark matter? Elusive substance could be made of black holes from a different UNIVERSE, scientist claims
By WILIAM HUNTER, SENIOR SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY REPORTER
Dark matter could be even weirder than we thought, as a scientist claims the elusive substance could be made of black holes from a different universe.
Astronomers believe that dark matter makes up around 27 per cent of the universe's mass and holds galaxies together like gravitational glue.
Most scientists believe the strange material is made of an undiscovered particle that doesn't absorb or reflect normal light.
But a new theory suggests that dark matter might really be made of ancient black holes that existed before the Big Bang.
These 'relic' black holes from another universe are small, packed with mass, and would be totally invisible except for their gravitational tug.
According to Professor Enrique Gaztanaga, from the University of Portsmouth, this makes them the prime suspect in the search for dark matter.
The key to this bold suggestion is the suggestion that there was a universe before our current one, and the Big Bang was just the transition between the two.
Professor Gaztanaga says: 'The idea is that dark matter may not be a new particle, but instead a population of black holes formed in a previous collapsing phase and bounce of the Universe.'
The mysterious substance known as dark matter could really be made up of black holes from another universe, according to a scientist
According to the most common theory, the universe began as an infinitely dense point known as a 'singularity'.
This singularity then exploded out in a rapid phase of expansion known as inflation, the lingering energy from which we can still see as the Cosmic Microwave Background.
However, some scientists don't like the idea of a singularity because their infinitely dense interiors appear to break down the fundamental rules of physics as we know them.
To get around this issue, Professor Gaztanaga suggests we might live in a 'bouncing' universe.
According to this view, the universe collapsed in on itself at the end of its previous phase, falling inwards to an enormously, but not infinitely, dense point.
As the universe became more and more dense, it eventually hit a point where it 'bounced', rushing outwards in a period of inflation to form the universe we currently live in.
'The Big Bang corresponds to a bounce from a previous collapsing phase, rather than the absolute beginning of everything,' Professor Gaztanaga told the Daily Mail.
'So it is the start of the expansion we observe, but not necessarily the beginning of time itself.'
According to this theory, the Big Bang was not the start of the universe but simply a transition from a previous universe's collapse to our current one. Black holes from the earlier might have survived this transition and now make up dark matter
What makes this idea so important for dark matter is that Professor Gaztanaga says that black holes might have survived the collapse.
That means the black holes formed by the collapsing galaxies of the last universe could still be floating around our universe today.
Professor Gaztanaga says: 'These 'relic' black holes would survive into the expanding phase we observe today and behave exactly like dark matter: they interact gravitationally, but do not emit light.'
Although this sounds far–fetched, it actually helps avoid some thorny problems plaguing our current theory.
Scientists neither need to explain away the infinite density of the singularity nor add any mysterious extra particle to explain dark matter.
Likewise, the relic black hole theory could help explain some of the most puzzling discoveries made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
While peering back to capture some of the earliest light in the universe, the JWST found a group of very bright, red dots only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.
Scientists think that these are rapidly growing black holes, potentially even ones that would become supermassive black holes in the hearts of galaxies.
The existence of these 'relic' black holes could explain the mysterious 'little red dot' black hole discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang
Our current understanding of the universe can't explain how they would have gotten so big, so fast.
But if relic black holes were already there at the very start of the universe, they would have had a massive head start that allowed them to grow much larger than expected.
Professor Gaztanaga admits there is still a lot of work to be done before his idea can be confirmed.
Scientists will need to test this theory against the data from the gravitational wave backgrounds and precise measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background.
Professor Gaztanaga says: 'The key question is which idea matches observations — and that's something we can test.'
But if this theory could be proven, it would simultaneously solve two of the biggest puzzles facing scientists today.
Dark matter is a hypothetical substance said to make up roughly 27 per cent of the universe.
The enigmatic material is invisible because it does not reflect light, and has never been directly observed by scientists.
Astronomers know it to be out there because of its gravitational effects on known matter.
The European Space Agency says: 'Shine a torch in a completely dark room, and you will see only what the torch illuminates.
Dark matter is a hypothetical substance said to make up roughly 27 per cent of the universe. It is thought to be the gravitational 'glue' that holds the galaxies together (artist's impression)
'That does not mean that the room around you does not exist.
'Similarly we know dark matter exists but have never observed it directly.'
The material is thought to be the gravitational 'glue' that holds the galaxies together.
Calculations show that many galaxies would be torn apart instead of rotating if they weren't held together by a large amount of dark matter.
Just five per cent the observable universe consists of known matter such as atoms and subatomic particles.
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Pentagon accused of 'cover-up' after failing to release UFO videos by deadline
The US Pentagon has been slammed for missing a strict deadline to release Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) videos, with critics calling it a 'cover-up.'
Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna penned a letter to the US Secretary of Defense on April 1, ordering Pete Hegseth to deliver 46 specific clips no later than April 14, 2026.
Lawmakers said the videos could reveal patterns of activity near sensitive military sites and help determine whether the objects pose a potential national security threat.
The requested footage includes dozens of military-recorded encounters showing spherical, cigar-shaped and Tic Tac-like objects spotted over war zones, oceans and sensitive airspace around the world.
Some clips reportedly captured UAP formations near Iran and Syria, incidents near US bases and airports and even a 2023 shootdown over Lake Huron.
The threats extend beyond mysterious sightings, highlighting the danger unidentified objects pose when they appear near restricted airspace, military bases and active training zones.
Luna, however, said Tuesday afternoon on X that 'no one from the Pentagon had responded until we reached out, and it appears that someone did not pass the letter to the appropriate authorities.'
'How convenient,' the Florida representative added, noting that while she considers Hegseth a friend and supporter of President Donald Trump, 'the president has authorized the release, so whoever is trying to be cute at the Pentagon can take a hike.'
Some clips reportedly captured UAP formations near Iran and Syria, incidents near US bases and airports and even a 2023 shootdown over Lake Huron (stock)
The announcement has been met with fury online, with many saying the world deserves to know the truth.
'The American people want all this declassified. There's zero reason for any of it to be kept secret,' one user commented. 'Zero valid reason other than to justify spending money on an annual budget for a bunch of rogue federal employees.'
Another user shared: 'Yep, sounds like normal government protocol… “what letter? “'
Commenting on Luna's statement that Trump had ordered the release, one user said: 'Isn't it amazing, how our government won't listen to itself?
'Or the will of the people? I'm sorry, I must've been mistaken when I was taught that this was the entire point of government in the first place.'
In February, Trump directed federal agencies, including the Pentagon, to begin identifying and releasing files related to UFOs, also known as UAPs, and potential extraterrestrial activity.
'Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War... to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs),' Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 19.
Luna has taken a prominent role in advocating for transparency regarding UAPs.
One of the videos requested was 'Spherical UAP over AFG in and out of clouds' captured in 2020. The footage was leaked by Investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp last year
She chairs a House Federal Secrets Task Force focused on investigating UAPs, declassifying federal records and protecting whistleblowers.
In the early April letter, she wrote: 'The continued lack of transparency surrounding these anomalies and the potential national security threat they pose is troubling.'
She added that the Task Force held a hearing on September 9, 2025, to discuss those concerns.
'Whistleblowers informed the Task Force that AARO possesses additional video records of potential UAP sightings,' she wrote.
'To continue its investigation, the Task Force requests certain video files related to UAP sightings.'
Anna Paulina Luna chairs a House Federal Secrets Task Force focused on investigating UAP, declassifying federal records and protecting whistleblowers
The requested footage reportedly shows spherical objects weaving through clouds, hovering over open water and repeatedly appearing near US warships and submarines.
Several clips were captured by fighter jets, surveillance aircraft and drones operating in regions such as the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and the East China Sea.
In multiple cases, more than one object was tracked moving at high speeds at the same time, raising concerns about possible coordinated activity near sensitive military operations.
One of the requests: 'Spherical UAP over AFG in and out of clouds, 11/23/20,' is a video reportedly showing a massive disc weaving in and out of cloud cover.
Investigative journalists Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp, who leaked parts of the clip, said the footage was recorded by government personnel over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in November 2020.
The object was spotted during a reconnaissance mission by a high-altitude Air Force platform.
Jacques Vallée: Pursuing Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and ‘Impossible Futures’
ON APRIL 17, 2013, attendees at an independently organized TEDx event in Geneva, Switzerland, were offered a glimpse at a seemingly impossible future.
Presented under the theme of “eCulture 360° and Wikinomics”, the event offered something unique even to a gathering of some of the most renowned international speakers on science and technology: the organizers billed it as a “TEDx with the opportunity to meet Jacques Vallée, one of the founder[s] of ARPANET, the first version of the Internet.”
Vallée’s lecture at the event, titled “The Age of Impossible: Anticipating Discontinuous Futures,” dealt with how the speed at which modern technology accelerates has resulted in events that would have seemed impossible to many people only years before they transpired. With examples ranging from the collapse of General Motors in 2009 to Bernie Madoff’s role in the financial crisis of 2007-2008, Vallee presented what he called a “Typology of the Impossible” that hinged on four main kinds of scenarios: events that escalated too quickly, convergences of “low-p scenarios,” events that appear to violate current cultural norms, and finally, scenarios that involve the appearance of a “completely alien concept within a particular culture.”
“There are many things in our culture today that fit that model,” Vallée said at one point during the talk, as he described historical instances where things that seemed unimaginable at one time later became technological norms. Such things, Vallee said, “are possible, but we cannot imagine them. The public is not aware that they can be done. History provides many examples, and the internet itself is an example of something that was unimaginable.”
After discussing his own part in helping create ARPANET, Vallée went on to share several more examples from recent history where unforeseen scientific advancements occurred, seemingly out of the blue.
“And finally,” the scientist said, never evincing a change in his measured tone and demeanor, “the Pentagon could not imagine that fast, erratic, mobile, oval objects in the sky were anything other than mental illusions, and they…” After a brief pause, Vallée cryptically added, “and you can fill out the answers in the next few years.”
Despite his success as a venture capitalist and “co-creator of the Internet”, most of the attendees at the 2013 TEDx event in Geneva were likely aware of what Vallée is best known for: his decades of involvement with the study of unidentified aerial phenomena. As a young computer scientist and astronomer in the 1960s, Vallee not only worked alongside Northwestern University astronomer J. Allen Hynek, the official scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book but also authored Anatomy of a Phenomenon, one of the earliest popular books written on the UFO subject by a professional scientist. Though he never uttered any of the popular names or abbreviations for the phenomenon, it was obvious what Vallee had been alluding to during this brief, passing reference to “oval objects” during his talk.
At least at that time, what had not been so obvious had been why Vallée specifically referenced the Pentagon’s relationship to UAP, nor why a series of seemingly impossible future events might come to pass involving this subject “in the next few years.”
THE CALL FROM DR. VALLÉE came through earlier than I expected.
The scientist’s voice, softened by age yet still resonant with the French he learned as a youth in Pontoise before emigrating to America many decades ago, was unmistakable to me, having heard it in many interviews and documentaries over the years. Vallée, now 83, is a man whose work in the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is only one finger on the glove of his impressive resume, spanning decades of work in astronomy, physics, computer science, and venture capitalism.
As evidenced by his billing at the TEDx event in 2013, one could indeed argue that Vallée is partly responsible for the creation of the Internet, although the affable Frenchman is modest on this point, nearly to a fault. This much was evident almost immediately as we began our discussion, and I wasted no time in bringing up the talk in Geneva and some of the intriguing hints he had dropped at that time.
“I’ve seen the development and the unfolding of a number of technologies,” Vallée told me during our call. “Very often what happens is that a discovery is made, and everyone agrees that it is important, and people write papers, and so on. And then it disappears.”
Vallée with collaborator and fellow author Chris Aubeck
(Credit: Chris Aubeck).
“You know, the Arpanet was essentially dead for a while,” Vallée recalls from his years working on the project decades ago. “Until [the] National Science Foundation picked up the funding, thinking that there would be several internets.” Initially a simple matter of accounting, the NSF initially believed it would be easier to fund three separate projects that looked at using networks through which computers could connect for purposes of communication.
“And then they picked it up from the DOD, and it became the Internet, as we know it now.”
Vallée offered several similar examples of predecessors to the Internet—not all of them American innovations—a point which Vallée emphasized as he shifted back to our subject of greater mutual interest: UAP.
“When I watched the meetings in Congress recently, all they talk about is American cases,” Vallee said. “And among American cases, all they talk about is military cases.”
“I can tell you, having developed a lot of databases over the years, the U.S. is less than 2% of the habitable surface of the Earth,” Vallée said.
“So, if this is extraterrestrial, what about the other 98%?”
THE PATH THAT BROUGHT Vallée into the tempest that is the study of unidentified aerial phenomena is a long one, which stems back to his early years in Pontoise at an age when the world was still at war.
“There are things you don’t forget,” Vallée said during our call, describing his memories of seeing American aircraft being shot down over his town when he was five years old.
A modern view of Pontoise with the Cathédrale Saint-Maclou visible in the distance
(Credit: Rozinante/CC BY-SA 4.0).
The object reminded them of the parachutists the family had watched descending from the skies during the war. His mother, who continued watching it, recalled how it sped away, leaving only a few wisps of white vapor where the object had been. Vallée would later learn that a schoolmate nearby had also noticed the object, observing it through binoculars.
Despite his father’s disapproval, Vallée maintained his interest in these unusual aerial objects. “I realized,” he would later write in his journal, “that I would forever be ashamed of the human race if we simply ignored ‘their’ presence.” The young Frenchman began to educate himself on the topic by reading the works of Aimé Michel, one of the earliest serious French researchers to undertake the study of unusual aerial phenomena. It was an interest he maintained through his college years, completing his degree in mathematics at the University of Paris in 1959 and going on to receive his M.S. from the University of Lille Nord de France two years later. By 1961, Vallée was employed at the Paris Observatory as an astronomer with its artificial satellite service, tracking space objects through theodolites by night.
“Naively, I started work here with great enthusiasm, assuming that we would be engaged in genuine research,” Vallée would recall of his years at the observatory. “That is not what I found.” In July of 1961, he and the other astronomers recalled a few instances where they observed objects passing overhead that they could not identify. “The next morning,” he recalled of one incident, his superior “simply confiscated the tape and destroyed it.” Vallée inquired as to why they hadn’t sent this seemingly important information along with their normal Telex tape dispatches to U.S. Navy officials in Paris.
“The Americans would laugh at us,” his superior scoffed.
Having his fill of the prevailing attitudes in Paris, by 1962, Vallée had emigrated to the United States, first working at the University of Texas, Austin, as a research associate in astronomy, and thereafter for a short stint at the McDonald Observatory, where he helped to compile the first informational map of the planet Mars with fellow French astronomer Gérard de Vaucouleurs. However, by the summer of 1963, Vallée was looking ahead at new opportunities, one of which arrived following a meeting in September with astronomer J. Allen Hynek, chair of Northwestern University’s astronomy department, who helped the young scientist find work as a systems analyst on campus. Hynek, at the time the scientific advisor to the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book UFO investigation, was a natural ally; not only would he serve as a mentor to Vallée, who went on to receive his Ph.D. from the institution in 1967, but for years thereafter the two would remain close colleagues in the pursuit of their mutual interest.
An undated photo of astronomer J. Allen Hynek and Jacques Vallée
(public domain).
However, by the late 1960s, it seemed evident that scientific opinions on the UFO subject in the United States had finally begun to sour, despite the efforts of Hynek, Vallée, and a close network of like-minded scientists looking into the problem. By the end of 1968, the University of Colorado UFO Project, a U.S. Air Force-funded study headed by physicist Edward U. Condon, had delivered its findings; in an introductory summary to the lengthy report, Condon wrote that “nothing has come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that has added to scientific knowledge,” adding that “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby.”
Vallée, musing over the Condon study during our call, remembered his incredulity at the time he first heard about its conclusions.
“That’s an interesting chapter in science,” he said. “Or the failure of science.”
By then, Vallee had already returned to France. As he, his wife Janine, and their son, Oliver, were acclimating to life in Europe again, Vallée was quietly readjusting his approach to the UFO question.
“Once I was back in France, in a way, it served to give me the space to rethink what we had done,” Vallée told me. “I mean, I knew the Condon Committee was a joke… and that science was somewhere else. So it forced me to ask some fundamental questions that I would not have asked if I had stayed at Northwestern.”
“So I thought, where does all this come from, anyway?”
Vallée began haunting the old Paris bookshops, acquiring rare historical texts and early treatises on the sciences. An interesting question had begun to form in his mind, as he recorded in a journal entry on October 29, 1967: What about the forgotten accounts of Little People, of Elementals, of Leprechauns? If these beings are part of the same phenomenon we see now, what does that mean for their nature? Are we necessarily dealing with extraterrestrials?
“I found that the phenomenon has always been there,” Vallée says of his years spent mining observations of unusual aerial phenomena from texts that date back to classical antiquity. “Of course, they are describing it in the language of the time,” he notes, “but they are describing something that’s very, very much like what I get from witnesses today.”
The fruits of such musings culminated in Vallée’s seminal 1969 effort, Passport to Magonia, widely regarded as one of his most influential early works and, paradoxically, the effort that cast him as a pariah in the eyes of many of his ufological peers.
Mass market paperback edition of Passport to Magonia
(Credit: Archives for the Unexplained)
“At first, it was completely rejected.” he says, recalling one UFO magazine that featured his likeness shortly after Magonia was published, accompanied by the headline, “Vallée has gone off the deep end.” Today, Vallée laughs about the chiding he received from his peers, and I note a hint of nostalgia about those early works behind the dry chuckle that emerges.
“Maybe the truth was in the deep end.”
OVER THE COURSE OF the ensuing decades, Vallée would continue to challenge the extraterrestrial hypothesis favored particularly among American UFO researchers. Parallel to this effort, his professional career brought him into work with the Institute for the Future in the mid-1970s, where he worked as principal investigator on the National Science Foundation computer networking project that gave rise to one of the earliest iterations of the ARPANET conferencing system. In the following decade, Vallée would become involved in venture capitalism, first as a partner at Sofinnova, then moving on to become a general partner in multiple different Silicon Valley funds, including his involvement in private investments today.
As his professional career flourished, Vallée never lost sight of his fascination with strange aerial phenomena. He authored a string of follow-ups to Magonia on the topic of UFOs throughout the 1970s and 80s, each continuing to build on the premise that the phenomenon could be far more complex than conventional opinions on UFOs would offer. His pioneering work continued to garner attention along the way, even serving as the inspiration for Claude Lacombe, a French scientist portrayed by actor François Truffaut in Stephen Spielberg’s classic film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
In the 1990s, Vallée authored a trilogy of books that focused on the prospects of alien contact. However, he always maintained a healthy distance from drawing conclusions about what any exotic technologies behind UFOs might represent. It was also during this period that Vallée began working with real estate developer Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS), a privately funded scientific research effort that looked at UFOs and related phenomena.
In July 2014, Vallée presented a paper at the GEIPAN International Workshop in Paris, France, titled “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena: A Strategy for Research,” offering both a snapshot of what he had learned about the complexities of the phenomenon over several decades of study, as well as what he believed might be a path toward more fruitful future research.
“After years of ideological arguments based on anecdotal data the field of UAP research appears ready to emerge into a more mature phase of reliable study,” Vallée wrote in the paper’s abstract. Citing the mounting scientific interest in UAP around the world, based in part on documents conveying an official military interest in these phenomena, the scientist argued that the path forward would require the analysis of hard data, paired with intelligently informed theoretical studies.
“Without pre-judging the origin and nature of the phenomena, a range of opportunities arise for investigation,” Vallée wrote, warning that “such projects need to generate new hypotheses and test them in a rigorous way against the accumulated reports of thousands of observers.”
The problem was that in 2014, despite the existence of several notable independent catalogs containing information on historical incidents, there was no single collection of reliable UAP reports—a centralized database, in other words—upon which such studies could rely. This had been part of what prompted Vallée to assemble such a database for NIDS, work that would later carry over as Bigelow’s efforts moved out of the private sector and into the official world as part of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Advanced Aerospace Weapons Systems Application Program (AAWSAP).
(Credit: Jacques Vallée/fair use)
“In the United States the National Institute for Discovery Science (“NIDS”) and the Bigelow Aerospace Corporation have initiated a series of special catalogues to safeguard their own reports from public sources and from their staff,” Vallée wrote in his 2014 paper, adding that he had been asked to develop a UAP data warehouse containing 11 individual databases.
“The project is known as ‘Capella,’” it stated.
According to slides accompanying Vallée’s 2014 presentation, the Capella project focused on several areas that ranged from patterns emerging from UAP data to possible physics underlying the phenomenon and its impact on humans.
During our call, Vallée spoke candidly about the project and what he hopes it might still be used to achieve.
“There is such a database. It is the one we built as part of the AATIP/BAASS project in Las Vegas,” Vallée told me. Comprising roughly 260,000 cases from countries around the world, the scientist said during our call that the Capella database had been one of the major focal points of the program.
“Contrary to what people believe, [Capella] is the largest part of the budget that was spent on the classified project,” Vallée said. This included paying for translations of incident reports from Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and several other languages into English, and providing funding for teams that conducted additional research on-site.
“It was a large effort for two years, Vallée said, though he added that in reality, “probably close to fifty or sixty years of work went into the database.” Although Capella constitutes what is arguably the most extensive database containing information on UAP ever built, don’t expect to see it any time soon; it remains classified as a part of the data developed under the DIA’s AAWSAP program managed by James Lackatski between 2008 and 2010.
“The database is still classified, to my knowledge,” Vallée said during our call, prompting me to ask whether such a vast amount of historical information on the UAP subject shouldn’t be made publicly available.
Speaking with The Debrief in December 2021, Mark Rodeghier, Ph.D., director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies and a longtime colleague of Vallée, expressed frustration over previous statements made by Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., another of the scientists who worked on the AAWSAP program, who noted that much of the AAWSAP data will likely remain classified.
“I mean, isn’t that discouraging, disappointing, [and] ridiculous,” Rodeghier told The Debrief. “It’s not work on how we can get a hypersonic missile. It’s UFO investigations. How can that be classified at this point? And the answer, of course, is that it shouldn’t be classified now.”
During our call, Vallée expressed similar sentiments to Rodeghier’s, although he also defended Capella’s current classified status on account of some of the information it protects.
“You make a good point,” Vallée told me. “That’s the kind of thing that should be accessible to science,” although adding that “it will be accessible to very highly competent people who can continue to look at it under the proper classification.”
“I think it’s properly classified,” Vallée added, “because it contains a lot of medical data that should be private.” However, he said that he thinks that over time, perhaps portions can be “sanitized” for release to the public, “so that we don’t invade the privacy of individuals who have reported those things, especially their medical data.”
“It’s not classified for any military or intelligence reason as far as I know,” Vallée said. “But I’m not part of the project anymore.” Vallée noted that even he no longer has access to Capella, although several longtime colleagues of his who still work in government do.
“I’m very proud to have worked on that,” Vallée said. “It’s probably the high water mark in the computer study of UFOs so far.”
“But as we know, the high water mark is going to go even higher after this.”
DESPITE HIS OWN LEVEL of involvement with government UAP studies, as well as the level of interest generated by videos of unidentified objects collected by the U.S. military—the existence of which Vallée himself hinted at in Geneva as early as 2013—the 83-year-old scientist still doesn’t necessarily hold military UAP data in higher regard than that collected by civilians.
“The military cases in the databases I know of are less than ten percent in every country,” Vallee said during our call. “They are really good because the military has radar. They have, of course, planes that can chase the objects… pilots who are very well trained and very well positioned to give a description.”
“Those are excellent reports,” Vallée concedes. “But what about the farmer in the field, who sees [an object] close to him, and has traces, and has materials? Who has felt physiological reactions?”
“What about those cases?” he asks. “They are full of information.”
Vallée’s appreciation for UAP information collected from non-governmental sources is particularly evident in his latest book, Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, coauthored with Italian journalist Paola Leopizzi Harris. In it, they unravel the story of two men, Jose Padilla and Reme Baca, who claim to have witnessed the crash of an unusual aircraft near San Antonito, New Mexico, in August 1945. Padilla, who went on to become a State Trooper in Rowland Heights, California, maintained that as children, he and Baca had seen a large, dull-gray avocado-shaped object—along with its frantic occupants—where it had apparently crashed near his family’s ranch. The object, they say, was later recovered by the military.
Vallée while conducting field research in New Mexico in advance of the publication of Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret
(Credit: Jacques Vallée).
In a newly updated second edition of the book, Vallée and Harris present additional witness testimony they have gathered about the alleged incident, which includes an observation of the crash remembered by the family of Lt. Colonel William J. Brothy, who at the time had been piloting a B-25 on a training mission. According to Brothy, he and his crew had flown over the site and recalled, “There were a lot of pieces.”
In Trinity, Vallée emphasizes what he believes are undeniable similarities between descriptions of the 1945 incident and a UAP landing in New Mexico observed by police officer Lonnie Zamora in 1964. Then, the following year another strikingly similar incident occurred near Valensole, France, involving the close observation of a landed craft and its apparent pilot or occupant.
“There is a case in Valensole, in France, and the case in Socorro. The object is identical to the Trinity object,” Vallée said. “And the [occupants] are identical to the creatures that Mr. Padilla is describing to me at Trinity, that he saw.”
“I was involved in Socorro, and I was involved in Valensole. Those are cases I know very well,” Vallée said, adding that Trinity contains new information on the Socorro case, once referred to by Hector Quintanilla, director of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book at the time of the incident, as being “the best documented case on record.”
Today, much of Vallée’s research is focused on the collection and study of material samples believed to have been collected from UAP. Compared with his earlier work, which challenged popular notions about extraterrestrials being associated with UAP, this might surprise longtime followers of the scientist’s work. For Vallée, however, it is only the next phase in the many decades he has spent working toward resolving the mystery.
“It’s all one thing,” Vallée said during our call. “The first book I wrote was Anatomy of a Phenomenon, which… I took as a study of extraterrestrial intelligence in general, and how it was I thought UFOs illustrated the idea of life elsewhere and intelligence elsewhere… that’s definitely the place from which we started.”
“Then, when I started working with Dr. Hynek, and I started working with—in those days, it was just called ‘computer catalogs,’ it wasn’t dignified as databases or data warehouses—but those catalogs held thousands of cases. My first complete catalog was donated to the Condon Committee at the University of Colorado, when they did the study funded by the Air Force.”
“Which,” Vallée notes, “to my surprise, concluded the problem didn’t exist. So, we’ve come a long way from that.”
Given his level of involvement in working to resolve the UAP question—an effort now spanning more than six decades, including his involvement in official government UAP investigations in several countries and having authored some of the most popular books ever written on the subject—perhaps the most surprising thing expressed by Vallée during our discussion had been his predictions about how he thinks his own work will be remembered by future generations.
“I think everything I’ve done, and everything my contemporaries have done, is going to be forgotten,” he said, mirroring his observations of the invention, and subsequent reinvention, of so many other innovations in science over time, not least among them the World Wide Web.
“And then in a few years, it’s going to be reinvented by, you know, great people at Stanford and Harvard in a new way,” he tells me, accompanied by the distinctive chuckle I had by now come to expect after one of his witty responses.
“That’s always the way science works.”
Archaeologists Unearthed a 6,200-Year-Old Megastructure. Its Purpose Is Still a Mystery.
Archaeologists Found an Ancient Megastructure
Jakub Specjalski - Getty Images
Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
Archaeologists in Romania have uncovered portions of an ancient megastructure from around 6,200 years ago.
The oak-floor building was located at the entrance to a settlement that included roughly 45 houses.
The megastructure is only the sixth of its kind ever found, and experts are planning further research and excavation at the site.
Excavations in the hills of northeastern Romania have unearthed one of the world’s oldest known megastructures, a massive communal building dating to around 4000 B.C.E. that still holds plenty of secrets after only a quarter of the site has been excavated.
The building sits at the center of a settlement called Stăuceni-Holm in Romania’s Botoșani County, a site first identified in the 1960s but not excavated until 2023. It belongs to the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture, a network of farming communities that spread across modern-day Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine from roughly 4800 to 3000 B.C.E. According to a study published in PLOS ONE, the structure is only the sixth megastructure from this culture ever to be excavated, and radiocarbon dating makes it one of the earliest examples on record.
Romania dig reveals 6,200-year-old megastructure with unknown purpose
© Zehra Rekibe Başol/Pexels
At roughly 350 square meters, the building dwarfs the ordinary houses around it, and its prominent position near the settlement's entrance suggests that it played a special communal role. The Stăuceni-Holm settlement itself is relatively modest, home to an estimated 320 to 350 people, far smaller than some Cucuteni-Trypillia mega-sites in Ukraine that likely housed thousands. Yet even this smaller community built the same kind of oversized gathering place, a pattern that suggests megastructures were a standard organizational feature of the culture rather than a phenomenon limited to its largest towns. With three-quarters of the site still unexcavated, researchers expect the building has much more to reveal about how these early European communities lived and governed themselves.
The megastructure’s scale suggests that it held great significance for the people who built it. The rectangular building of over 3,700 square feet sat between defensive ditches and a palisade system at the entrance to the settlement. At three to five times larger than any of the homes, the structure offers a stark contrast to the rest of the settlement.
Inside, the oak wood floor covered in burnt clay contained a dense concentration of pottery pieces, including a “remarkable” example of a carved bull’s head attached to a bowl. Excavations also revealed a conical idol with an unknown purpose, although it’s a common find among Cucuteni sites. Three ladles were found, including one with painted patterns, along with a grooved pottery vessel painted in red ochre. Flint tools were found throughout the building.
Originally, the megastructure may have had an upper floor built like an open-air terrace. The inner portion had several rooms, likely for living, cooking, storage, and maybe even ritual purposes. Amid the remains of cereals and fruits, the team found henbane seeds, a psychotropic plant common in both medicinal and ritual use over 6,000 years ago.
While early geomagnetic surveys indicated the building featured hearths and storage pits, actual excavation proved that wrong. The authors wrote that at this stage of the research it’s “unrealistic to consider the function of the building as storage building or a communal place for consumption of food.” And there’s no real indication it was strictly a cult building. “Perhaps the megastructure was just a bigger house for a bigger family, a communal building for decision making, or a meeting place for special high-ranking inhabitants reflecting the change toward a more hierarchized organization of the community,” they wrote.
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