Strange Object May Be Nazi Anti-Sub Device

Sonar image of the underseas device.

A ‘UFO-shaped' object in the Baltic sea might be a Nazi anti-submarine device lost beneath the waves since the end of the Second World War. Sonar scans have shown that the device ~ measuring 200-by-25 feet ~ could be a weapon built of wire mesh to baffle submarine radar.

The huge steel-and-concrete structure could be one of the most important historical finds in years, experts say.

According to the Daily Mail:

Such a device could cause submarines to crash, much in the same way as turning out a lighthouse could be used as a weapon against shipping. Former Swedish naval officer and WWII expert Anders Autellus believes the structure may have blocked British and Russian submarine movements in the area.  

“The area was vital to the German war machine because most of the ball bearings for its tanks and trucks came from here. Without them the German army would have ground to a halt,” explained one expert. “This device dwarfs anything ever found before and is an important weapons discovery.”

While the Ocean Explorer team is understandably excited about their potentially earth-shattering find, others are slightly more skeptical and are questioning the accuracy of the sonar technology.

Click here for the complete article and more photos.

Mount Shasta Long Shrouded in Mystery

When John Muir, the noted explorer of the American West, first spotted Mt. Shasta in in 1874 in northern California, he wrote: "I was 50 miles away, afoot, alone and weary, yet all of my blood turned to wine and I have not been weary since."

The picturesque 14,162-foot peak has long elicited such awe. It has been touted as the site of an energy vortex that allows passage into the metaphysical dimension, called the birthplace of a spiritual foundation whose adherents believe they can ascend to the eternal realm, and is said to be a hot spot for UFOs that hide in the clouds and enter the mountain's core through mystery portals.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

A tale written a few years later (after Muir’s account) by a teenager from Yreka, just northwest of the mountain ~ a story of advanced beings living in a crystal city beneath the mountain ~ cemented Shasta's otherworldly reputation.  

Newer to the repertoire are sightings of Bigfoot (the word serves as both singular and plural, like fish and sheep), believed by some to conceal themselves by passing into a fifth dimension.  

In 2008, the Mount Shasta Herald reported that five people claimed to have witnessed a jellyfish-like craft that hovered noiselessly over neighboring McCloud, with what appeared to be a fire raging inside it. 

"Mt. Shasta has always had a spiritual drawing, but it's getting more and more popular," says, Karen Anderson, a supervisor in a local visitors bureau, who estimated that a fourth of the area's tourists are drawn by the mountain’s unusual reputation.

Click here for the complete article.

UFO Discovered on the Ocean Floor?

A Swedish ocean exploration team has identified a crashed object some think may be a UFO on the ocean floor between Finland and Sweden. The team, headed by Peter Lindberg, was employing sonar in its search for a century-old wreck when it discovered the mysterious object.

According to LiveScience.com:

Lindberg explained to local media that his crew discovered, on the 300-foot-deep ocean floor between Finland and Sweden, "a large circle, about 60 feet in diameter. You see a lot of weird stuff in this job, but during my 18 years as a professional I have never seen anything like this. The shape is completely round."  

Adding to the mystery at the bottom of the Gulf of Bothnia, Lindberg said he saw evidence of scars or marks disturbing the environment nearby, suggesting the object somehow moved across the ocean floor to where his team found it.  

. . . Some suggest the object is a flying saucer of extraterrestrial origin (and the seafloor scars were dug up when it crashed), though of all the things that might create a round sonar signature, that seems to be among the more outlandish. It might be a natural feature formation, or possibly a sunken, round man-made object.

Lindberg's claim that the object "is perfectly round" may or may not be accurate ~ the resolution of the sonar image was not high enough to verify that it is indeed round. Lindberg himself did not offer an extraterrestrial origin, though he did speculate it might be a "new Stonehenge."

Click here for the complete article and video.

UFO Sightings Recently Double in US

The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) says sightings in the US have increased over the past six weeks, with some states more than doubling their normal numbers. "It's pretty exciting," Clifford Clift, the international director of MUFON, told Life’s Little Mysteries. "When you average 500 a month [nationwide] and go to 1,013 in one month, that's an interesting spike in sighting reports."

It could be the start of a verifiable increase in actual sightings or it may mean we’re experiencing a "UFO flap," one of many periodic increases in sightings over the years, usually occurring in urban areas.

According to Life’s Little Mysteries:

Sightings are often fueled by the mass media; people read about mysterious things or see TV shows about them, and interest or concern about them spreads from person to person. It's not that anyone is hoaxing or making up sightings: Research has shown that if you tell people what to look for (a phenomenon called "priming"), people will often see what they are looking for ~ whether those things exist or not. … It may not be that UFOs are actually appearing more often, but instead we're noticing them more. An identical process can be found in the medical field, where an increase in reports of a disease may not represent an increase in the actual number of cases, but instead reflects more public awareness of the disease or better screening techniques.

Scientists are aware that just because more people report a phenomenon does not necessarily mean the phenomenon is occurring more often. However, MUFON and others are keeping track of the current increase in sightings for further analysis.

Click here for the complete article.

Australia's UFO Files Now Missing

Australian defense officials say the country’s files on UFO sightings are lost or destroyed. Two months ago, an Australian newspaper submitted a Freedom of Information request for files on UFO sightings across the country. Government officials have come back empty handed.

"The files could not be located,” Australia Department of Defense's FOI assistant director, Natalie Carpenter, told the Sydney Morning Herald, the newspaper that had made the request. Two months spent going through drawers turned up only one UFO-related file, Carpenter said. All other files had been lost or destroyed.

This isn't the first time in recent history that a government body has misplaced UFO files. Earlier this year, Britain's Ministry of Defense released thousands of reports related to UFO sightings in Britain over the past few decades. All files from 1980 to 1982, however, were missing, raising suspicion among conspiracy theorists.

Click here for the complete article.

Roswell a Soviet Scheme to Create Panic?

Was the 1947 flying saucer crash at Roswell actually a Soviet ruse to cause Americans to panic? That’s one of the conclusions journalist Annie Jacobsen reached in her new book Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base. Her findings throughout the book are based on interviews with 74 people with firsthand knowledge of Area 51.

The saucer that crashed at Roswell was the invention of two brothers who were former aerospace designers in the Third Reich ~ Walter and Reimar Horten. The craft contained several child-size beings ~ possibly the creation of Soviet human experimentation programs ~ who appeared alien.

“The plan, according to my source,” Jacobsen said in an NPR interview, “was to create panic in the United States with this belief that a UFO had landed with aliens inside of it. And one of the most interesting documents is the second CIA director, Walter Bedell Smith, memos back and forth to the National Security Council talking about how the fear is that the Soviets could make a hoax against America involving a UFO and overload our early air-defense warning system, making America vulnerable to an attack.”

The bodies were taken from Roswell to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton and then, in 1951, transferred to the new secret military installation in Nevada, which from then on would be called Area 51.

Click here for the NPR article.

Compilation of Recent UFO Sightings

Sightings of UFOs around the world are increasing, according to several sources. This video compilation of newscasts mostly from the past two years certainly supports that point. It contains some of the best footage yet on these mysterious objects. I'm not sure what to say about the audio clip at the end from the Art Bell radio show regarding the former Area 51 employee.

Extraterrestrials? What Would Jesus Do?

"Baptism of Christ," Aert de Gelder, 1710 (with saucer overhead)

In a far-reaching analysis of the potential impact on humans of learning that extraterrestrials exists, Christians likely would be scrambling to reconcile the idea of Jesus Christ with life on other planets.

“It's been argued for a couple of centuries now whether one incarnation of God as Jesus Christ for the entirety of creation is sufficient,” says theologian Ted Peters of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. For instance, aliens might lead religions to question whether a second genesis of life elsewhere belongs within the biblical understanding of creation. Might Jesus Christ have appeared more than once in the universe?

According to Space.com:

To see what effects the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might have on religion, Peters and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,300 individuals worldwide from multiple religious traditions ~ including Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists and non-religious groups. 

They found the vast majority of religious believers ~ regardless of religion ~ were overwhelmingly confident that they wouldn’t suffer a collapse in faith in the face of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In addition, roughly one-third of religious people thought that the faith of other religions would be threatened, while two-thirds of nonreligious people thought that aliens would sway the faith of the religious as a whole. 

There are many open questions as to how people on Earth might view beliefs from space. Could advances that alien civilizations could bring be perceived much like a secular form of salvation? Might advanced civilizations and their perhaps equally advanced philosophies make our religions feel primitive?

Alien religions could draw converts, and if there are many points of agreement between religions on Earth and from space, one might see communication of ideas across species as well, Peters believes. “Greek philosophers never met the God of Moses, but there were people who said, ‘Doggone, there seems to be much that coheres,’” he added.

Click here for the Space.com article.

UFOs from Middle Ages to Modern Times

I remember the thrill I felt from the 1960s well into the 1990s at the prospect of UFO sightings and alien abductions. To me they suggested something unknown, enchanting, and perhaps miraculous about the world we inhabit. They were proof that we couldn’t understand ~ couldn’t “prove” ~ everything that happened around us.

In contrast, this last decade has been a drought of UFO excitement. Most of the UFO information we encounter is recycled from past decades, and anyone who openly accepts the idea of UFOs or aliens is greeted with heaps of scorn and ridicule, except on the History Channel. That’s why I’m glad to see a new book by Jacques Vallee, a French astronomer and leading commenter on UFO phenomena. Vallee always has taken the broad view ~ including the possibilities of archetypal symbolism or other-dimensional activity ~ to better understand UFOs, and seems to be expanding his perspectives even more with Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times.

Here is a portion of his recent interview on Salon.com about the new book.

Why is the idea of ancient UFO sightings a controversial one?

Most UFO believers believe the phenomenon began in 1947, when a civilian pilot named Kenneth Arnold saw several objects that he described as behaving like saucers skipping on water. And he saw them from his plane flying over Mt. Rainier in the state of Washington. And that was the beginning of the flying saucer era in the media. I came to a point where I wondered when the phenomenon had begun, and I found a lot of material describing objects that seemed to behave the same way [as UFOs] and entities [resembling aliens] that dated back to the Middle Ages. At that time they were called angels or demons or leprechauns or elves or fairies and so on. So I published a book called "Passport to Magonia" that caused something of a scandal with the believers, because I was shaking that idea that UFOs were a recent phenomenon.

Stephen Hawking has discounted reports of UFOs by suggesting they only appear to "cranks and weirdos?" Why don't you think these ancient witnesses were just delusional?

Because delusions have their own pattern, and these don't seem to fit them. A delusion is usually single-witness and there are many multiple-witness cases in the book. You also have authority figures, astronomers and well-known people making claims. You have Michelangelo seeing a triangle with three lights of different colors in the sky and making a painting of it. It's staggering when you hear modern scientists saying only idiots and crazy people report UFOs. The consuls in ancient Rome made a law that they had to have an annual report on any unexplained aerial phenomena. They were not looking for UFOs, they were looking for astrological warnings of famines, or revolutions and wars and death of emperors and that type of thing. Many of them were copied by historians, and they have survived. 

Click here for the complete interview.

Russian Navy Reveals UFO Ocean Activity

The Russian Navy’s recent declassification of records related to UFOs has revealed a number of incidents involving the sea, with the mysterious craft exhibiting incredible underwater technology, according to a recent article in the Svobodnaya Pressa.

“Fifty percent of UFO encounters are connected with oceans,” according to Vladimir Azhazha, a former Russian naval officer and renowned UFO researcher. “Fifteen (percent) more with lakes. So UFOs tend to stick to the water."

Many mysterious events occurred in the Bermuda Triangle, recalled retired submarine commander Rear Admiral Yury Beketov. He said ships' instruments malfunctioned for no apparent reason and often were subject to strong interference, possibly a form of deliberate disruption perpetrated by UFOs.

“On several occasions the instruments gave reading of material objects moving at incredible speed. Calculations showed speeds of about 230 knots, of 400 kph. Speeding so fast is a challenge even on the surface, Beketov said. "But water resistance is much higher. It was like the objects defied the laws of physics. There’s only one explanation: the creatures who built them far surpass us in development.”

The Russian documents noted that UFOs are especially drawn to sites where NATO fleets are active, including the Bahamas, Bermuda and Puerto Rico. UFOs also are frequently detected in the deepest portions of the Atlantic Ocean as well as of the Caribbean Sea, the reports stated.

Click here for the complete Russia Today article.

Edgar Mitchell Reasserts Belief in UFO Cover-Up

Former NASA astronaut Edgar Mitchell asserted again yesterday at the National Press Club that the US and other governments are concealing the fact that extraterrestrial life exists.

Mitchell, of course, has long contended there is life on other planets and that earth has been visited. As part of the Apollo 14 mission, he was the sixth man to walk on the moon.

Asked if we’re alone in the universe, Mitchell told CNN, “No, we’re not alone.”

"Our destiny, in my opinion, and we might as well get started with it, is to become a part of the planetary community,” Mitchell said. “We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there."

According to today’s CNN article:

Mitchell grew up in Roswell, New Mexico, which some UFO believers maintain was the site of a UFO crash in 1947. He said residents of his hometown "had been hushed and told not to talk about their experience by military authorities." They had been warned of "dire consequences" if they did so.

But, he claimed, they "didn't want to go to the grave with their story. They wanted to tell somebody reliable. And being a local boy and having been to the moon, they considered me reliable enough to whisper in my ear their particular story."

Roughly 10 years ago, Mitchell claimed, he was finally given an appointment at the Pentagon to discuss what he had been told. An unnamed admiral working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff promised to uncover the truth behind the Roswell story, Mitchell said. The stories of a UFO crash "were confirmed," but the admiral was then denied access when he "tried to get into the inner workings of that process."

The same admiral, Mitchell claimed, now denies the story.

"I urge those who are doubtful to read the books, read the lore, start to understand what has really been going on. Because there really is no doubt we are being visited," Mitchell said yesterday. "The universe that we live in is much more wondrous, exciting, complex and far-reaching than we were ever able to know up to this point in time."

Click here for the CNN article.

Americans Hold Strong Religious & Supernatural Beliefs: Jesus, UFOs, Witches, Astrology

Over 70% of Americans believe Jesus is the son of God and that he rose from the dead, according to Harris Poll results released last week.

Religious, metaphysical and supernatural beliefs still dominate the American psyche, while hard science is less believable. "Overall, more people believe in the devil, hell and angels than believe in Darwin´s theory of evolution," said a Harris Poll released late last week.

Eighty percent of the more than 2,000 respondents said they believe in God, and among those who attend church weekly, the number is 98 percent, according to a Washington Times report.

• Over seventy percent believe in miracles, 73 percent believe in heaven, 71 percent say Jesus is the son of God and 71 percent believe in angels.
• Seven out of 10 say Jesus Christ rose from the dead and that the Bible is, all or in part, the "Word of God."
• More than two-thirds - 68 percent - believe in the "survival of the soul after death" and describe themselves as religious.
• About 62 percent think that hell exists, 61 percent believe in the virgin birth and 59 percent say the devil exists.

Ghosts, UFOs, Witches Also Score High

In contrast, the Washington Times said fewer than half - 47 percent - believe in Darwin's theory of evolution. A third said they did not believe in it while 22 percent were not sure. A full 40 percent said they believe in creationism, though the question did not elaborate on exactly what that term meant.

Supernatural phenomena of other kinds attract Americans' attention.

Overall, 44 percent of the respondents said they believe in ghosts, 36 percent say UFOs are real while 31 percent believe in both witches and astrology. About a quarter believe in reincarnation, or "that you were once another person," the survey found.

"I think these numbers show that Americans are both devout and rebellious at the same time," said Steve Waldman, co-founder and editor in chief of Beliefnet, an online spiritual source that also polls the public. "Americans embrace key parts of tradition and faith, but they add other sorts of stuff, the supplementary beliefs that might not be on the approved list."

Click here for the Washington Times article.