"A sculptor has commemorated a popular Isle of Wight myth with a statue of an alien.

David Jones, from Goldsmith's University in London, spent nine months creating a full size figure of an alien alleged to have visited the Isle of Wight.

The Sandown Clown is alleged to have been sighted on the footpaths around Sandown Airport and on Lake Common in 1973.

The sighted alien was encountered by two holidaying children, who described the being to be part alien, part robot and part clown..."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17405609

Prince Philip was meant to meet an alien called ‘Janus’ at a flat in Chelsea, a new documentary has rather casually claimed.

The King of UFOs, which will be streaming on Amazon and Tubi on September 20, described how the late Duke of Edinburgh’s engineering background made him passionate about all things extraterrestrial.

So meeting an alien was an offer that the husband of Queen Elizabeth struggled to refuse, apparently.

The film’s director, Mark Christopher Lee, told Metro.co.uk that the meeting was arranged by the Prince’s top aide at the time, Sir Peter Horsley.

‘Horsley actually met this Janus entity in a flat in Chelsea in 1954 – he claimed that it had an ethereal otherworldly quality and it could read his mind and extract information about flying saucers,’ Lee said.

The pair were pencilled in to meet at a flat along Smith Street, a small residential road about a 10-minute walk away from what is now Sloane Square Tube station, on a ‘winter’s evening’.

‘Horsley wanted Phillip to meet with this Janus as Janus had a message to give him that the world needed saving as Philip was a man of great vision,’ Lee added.

‘Philip didn’t go to the meeting – and it’s most likely that Janus could have been a Russian spy – but Horsley stuck to his belief that Janus was not of this world.’

...

Horsley did mention this possible close encounter in his memoir, Sounds From Another Room, in which he described a serious ‘Mr Janus’ with an intimate knowledge of aliens that UFO experts have widely interpreted as being extraterrial.

"A UFO researcher claims to have solved one of the UK's most intriguing UFO mysteries 34 years after it was spectacularly captured on film.

Dubbed the "Calvine UFO" it was snapped in the Scottish area of the same name by two hikers on August 4, 1990. Six staggering photographs they took are said to show an odd diamond-shaped object in the sky, seemingly tailed by one or two Harrier jets.

The images were reportedly handed to the the Scottish Daily Record by the witnesses for publication.

The newspaper handed the prints and negatives to the Ministry of Defence (MOD) for comment, which is said to have returned them, but the story was never published.

The images and negatives also disappeared..."

"Belief in aliens is nothing new – reports of UFOs can be found in fourth-century Chinese texts – but over the last few years, there has been a sharp increase in the numbers who truly think the truth is out there.

In fact, reported Newsweek, the idea is gaining "unprecedented traction" in the US and elsewhere, leading to concerns about the impact it could have.

In the late 1990s, only 20% of people in the US believed UFO sightings were proof of alien life, said the magazine. That had risen to 34% by 2022, at which time 24% of 1,000 Americans polled also said they had seen a flying saucer.

Tony Milligan, a senior research fellow at King's College London, told Newsweek the rise was a "political tsunami" that had even caught the attention of US politicians.

"You don't worry about this stuff when it's 2% of the population... but you don't expect it to be reaching the floor of Congress," he said.

Depending on the results of November's presidential elections, the topic could go even further, as Donald Trump has vowed to declassify videos of alleged UFOs if he wins. The Republican nominee has had a "decade-long fascination" with the topic, said The Sun.

The UK is not immune to the growth, Milligan wrote in The Conversation, with around 20% of citizens believing extraterrestrials have visited and an estimated 7% saying they have seen a UFO..."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19604532

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 2, from 1990.

There have been numerous reports recently concerning sightings of UFOs in the Soviet Union. The most dramatic have involved aliens perambulating in parks, or even dumping (presumably) unwanted debris from their craft. The bulk of these articles have originated from the official news agency, TASS, which one usually associates with announcements of industrial achievements, or synopses of leadership speeches. As well as fulfilling this prosaic function, it has become a kind of Russian Guardian, chronicling the adventures of aliens, psychic healers and abominable snowmen. This article will examine the Russian UFO stories which have been circulating in recent months.

...

So from apparently sketchy articles in local newspapers, these alien stories spread until they reached international prominence, and just as suddenly disappeared. Commentators outside explained the UFO fever in the Soviet Union variously as the effects of glasnost or to a deep need in the Russian psyche for mystery. Whatever the reason, it is true that Russian UFOs are part of a much livelier paranormal movement than exists in the West.

Despite being the homeland of dialectical materialism, these phenomena have always been taken seriously. The difference is that now we can hear about it more easily. The episode still leaves one wondering about TASS, though. During the Voronezh incident especially, people seemed inclined to give the agency the benefit of the doubt, simply because it was TASS. Later, however, an Associated Press article carried a quotation which casts this view into question. Complaining that he had been misquoted, Silanov said: ‘Don’t believe all you hear from TASS‘.

"Another high-ranking government official who investigated UFOs/UAPs is ready to tell their story.

Jay Stratton, the former director of the U.S. government’s secretive Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, has struck a memoir deal with HarperCollins. Stratton represents the most senior former U.S government official yet to go public about their direct involvement in the investigation of UAP and non-human intelligence.

For over 16 years, Stratton worked as a senior intelligence official, leading countless U.S. government investigations of UAP and non-human intelligence, including the “Tic Tac” UAP encountered by Navy fighter pilots and the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group in 2004. While much of Stratton’s work is classified, the memoir promises to reveal “all that can be lawfully disclosed, providing a first-hand account of the shocking discoveries, challenges and breakthroughs that have marked the U.S. government’s investigation and understanding of UAP and non-human intelligence, as well as the effects on Stratton and his family.”

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, Stratton said, “We are at the beginning of a new chapter for humanity. The process of disclosure is complex but it has begun"...

"A man in small-town Montana has captured footage of an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) and shared the shocking video that made his wife 'cry' on Reddit.

The video was recorded on Friday between 10:10 and 10:15 pm, and showed what appears to be a blinking craft streaking across the clear night sky.

Said to have been spinning and adorned with a series of rotating lights, the apparent object flew over tiny Choteau, home to a population of just over 1,700 people.

The videos, along with the original poster's in-depth account of the sighting, reveals how the man and his wife first mistook the unknown object for a meteor.

It comes after Montana was singled out as a hotspot for UFO sightings, with visitors recording some of the most significant and well-documented footage..."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19522344

Published :February 2006

Most mainstream scientists believe that few species of large mammal remain to be discovered. Nevertheless, there are countless unverified reports of a large, non-human, bipedal primate from Asia (the ‘Yeti’) and North America (‘Sasquatch’ or ‘Bigfoot’). Thus far, none of these reports has been convincingly verified by modern scientific methods .

However, new species inhabiting remote areas are occasionally described that were previously known only from local and traditional knowledge. The most recently described large mammal could be the sao la Pseudoryx nghetinhensis, which became known to science in 1992 from three sets of horns found in the possession of hunters in the Vu Quang Nature Reserve in Vietnam . Subsequent surveys and the morphometric and DNA analysis of >20 specimens revealed that the sao la was a previously undescribed 100-kg bovid distinct from all described genera.

More recently, in 2003 a new species of African monkey (Lophocebus kipunji) was discovered in southern Tanzania, based on sightings, photographs and recorded distinctive vocalizations.

Discoveries such as these fuel hope in the cryptozoology community for the existence of more enigmatic creatures, such as the Sasquatch.

"Observers were left puzzled after spotting a strange unidentified object floating above Whernside, one of Yorkshire's Three Peaks mountains.

The object was reportedly spotted on Saturday afternoon, with photographs taken by at least two people on the ground who were left scratching their heads about what it might be. The area in the Yorkshire Dales is often swarming with Three Peaks walkers heading up or off Whernside which stands at 736m (2,415ft).

The images were shared on the North Yorkshire Weather Updates page on Facebook, prompting a number of fanciful explanations, and a few plausible ones.

Someone said it looked a bit like the Starship Enterprise from Star Trek. Other explanations included a puff of smoke from a steam train, an afterburn trail from a jet, and a weather balloon.

Several people suggested it was possibly a swarm of bees, flying ants or midges, or maybe even starlings. One man said it resembled a 'mosquito ball' as he'd seen similar sights before.

Quite a number of people posted gifs of various spaceships, aliens, Martians, extra terrestrials, or references to War of the Worlds. Some suggested it was a 'dirty lens' on the camera but two separate photos emerged which suggested this was unlikely.

One man wrote: "The tent from Leeds Festival a couple of weeks ago, still flying...."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/17179490

A photo from 1941 has left some people questioning whether time travel could be real. The historic snap, taken by Edward Rosskam on Chicago's South Side, shows a lineup of smartly-dressed children and teenagers standing outside a cinema.

But one boy towards the edge of the photograph has left people scratching their heads. Some social media users are now convinced the young man is holding an Apple iPad.

Taking to Reddit's timetravelerscaught forum, one person captioned the snap: "iPad carrying movie goer, all the way to the right." But not everyone's on board with the time-travel theory – and some people think it could be something much more mundane.

Elaborating on historical cinema etiquette, another chimed in: "Back in the day of early film, ushers scanned the audience for pens and notepads as to prevent bootleg recreations of the film."

Another user added: "If I can time travel, have an iPad and I'm black why in God's name would I go to the South Side of Chicago in 1941 to watch a matinee of 'The Aldrich Family'?!"

Here is the relevant bit of the photo:

"Police chiefs of America's largest cities have published the first guide about UAPs, which details chilling encounters and how officers can report such incidents.

The 11-page document warned that unidentified flying objects 'pose significant safety risks to law enforcement air support units,' urging teams to be vigilant when in helicopters.

The report also highlights stories from officers who claimed to confront UFOs, specifically one in 2023 where a law employee saw a 'triangle craft with green lights gliding through the sky' before a local resident said something 'ran' nearby.

The police executives created the reference because 'it's in the interest of law enforcement to be aware of trends and reporting on UAP due to the unknown threat they may pose.'

The organization, called the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), includes nearly 80 executives from major US cities who work together to advance public safety through a range of initiatives, including community outreach, research and policy development and now, UFO investigations..."

"Key Takeaways

For as long as humans have been looking up, we’ve seen objects or phenomena that have defied our conventional explanations for what we’ve known is scientifically possible.

Many have attributed these sightings to extraterrestrial or even supernatural activity, although no conclusive proof or incontrovertible evidence supporting these claims has ever survived scrutiny.

What scientific steps could we take to evaluate the activity of an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) or an unidentified flying object (UFO) to determine if they’re actually “beyond” present Earthly knowledge? Here’s how to do it..."

"Robert Smith is convinced the aliens have won. "The invasion has happened—it's all over," says the University of Alberta space historian who teaches a course on the history of extraterrestrials.

It's not so much that Smith believes in their literal existence, only that aliens have staked their claim in the human imagination..."

"Area 51 isn’t the only weird thing in the Nevada desert, as our writer discovered when he drove the Extraterrestrial Highway to see if the truth really is out there.

‘That’s where they probe you,” the shop assistant said when I asked her what really goes on at Area 51. She followed this up with a raising of the eyebrows and a waggle of her extended finger. I got the message.

I was at the Alien Center, my first stop on a 600-mile road trip in rural southern Nevada, making a loop around the huge slab of desert that’s home to a US air force base shrouded in mystery. Built in the Fifties, the base has become a beacon for conspiracy theorists who believe the government uses it to store broken-down spaceships and little green men (with their apparently invasive interrogation techniques). The official line is that Area 51 is a training facility for military aircraft … but they would say that, wouldn’t they.

The Alien Center is really just a petrol station with your standard diner, gift shop and brothel attached. But since I’d been on Route 95 for a couple of hours after leaving Las Vegas, it seemed a good place to take a breather..."

"A British urban explorer claims he has captured an image of a ghost lurking in the hallway of an abandoned school in Japan.

Ben, who goes by the username @places_forgotten on social media, is a content creator with 1.4 million followers on TikTok. He mainly shares videos and photos of abandoned places around the world.

It was while he was on a work trip to Japan that Ben decided to pay the derelict building that used to house the school a visit.

While photographing the abandoned school, which still had homework pinned up on its walls, bags perched on the desks and pictures of the students, Ben claimed to have captured the photographs of a ghost lurking in the hallway.

Chilling images, shared by the content creator who said he was certain was the only person there, show the figure at the far-end of the corridor..."

"The royal residences are no strangers to eerie tales, with Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Kensington Palace all having their share of ghostly rumours. But it's Sandringham House that takes the crown for one of the most bizarre incidents, as disclosed in the diaries of the late high-society columnist Kenneth Rose, which came to light posthumously.

He wrote about a peculiar "little service" held in a downstairs bedroom of the grand 18th Century mansion back in 2000, after staff reported supernatural encounters. A pastor was brought in to conduct the ceremony, attended by none other than the late Queen Mother and her Lady-in-Waiting, Prue Penn, with the late Queen herself present.

Nestled within a sprawling 20,000-acre estate in the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sandringham House is the traditional festive retreat for the Royal Family. Its storied past is peppered with spectral sightings and unexplained occurrences, but there's one particular tale that's bound to send shivers down your spine..."

"The idea that aliens may have visited the Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of UK citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7% believe that they have seen a UFO.

The figures are even higher in the US – and rising. The number of people who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life increased from 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022. Some 24% of Americans say they’ve seen a UFO.

This belief is slightly paradoxical as we have zero evidence that aliens even exist. What’s more, given the vast distances between star systems, it seems odd we’d only learn about them from a visit. Evidence for aliens is more likely to come from signals from faraway planets.

In a paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, I argue that the belief in alien visitors is no longer a quirk, but a widespread societal problem..."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19227931

As a result, ghost hunters reinvent the wheel in an attempt to be scientific, only to find it’s a wheel that never worked in the first place, and now they’ve made it even worse.

The latest trend sweeping through ghost-hunting groups is an excellent example of this issue. A modern twist on traditional spirit communication, the Estes Method (invented by American ghost tour operators), offers a new take on the Spirit Box, which ghost hunters have used to attempt communication with ghosts for decades.

The Spirit Box rapidly sweeps through radio frequencies, creating a stream of white noise and audio snippets from different broadcast sources. Advocates claim that spirits can manipulate these audio fragments to form words or sentences to communicate with the living.

The method is simple; the ghost hunter asks a question, and the ghost uses the audio from the Spirit Box to answer them.

In reality, the messages of ghostly origin result from listener bias, suggestion, and audio illusions. Sentences from the broadcasts are often incomplete, meaning that the phonemes (human speech sounds) can be misheard and, more importantly, misinterpreted as relevant to whatever ghost a ghost hunter is trying to communicate with.

"A UFO expert has levelled accusations at the Pope, alleging that he is concealing "extraordinary" alien secrets within the Vatican.

Steve Bassett, a UFO lobbyist in Washington, insists that it's evident the Catholic Church is aware of the existence of alien life and has concealed evidence in their archives.

As the executive director of the Paradigm Research Group, Bassett pointed out that the church has subtly suggested the existence of UFOs in religious artwork.

He told The Sun: "The Catholic Church, we have always known, has been aware of this subject going back perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years.

"It's gone so far as to say whoever these beings are, the Church would be happy to baptise them if they wanted to be baptised."

Bassett alleges that the Vatican library houses centuries of knowledge about aliens, with experts attempting to gain access to the Vatican Apostolic Archives.

However, they require permission from the Holy See, the supreme governing body of the Catholic Church. They will then need to sift through thousands of years of records, spanning 50 miles, to substantiate their claims.

This follows last year's statement by former intelligence officer David Grusch at a US congressional hearing, where he claimed the government was concealing evidence of "non-human intelligence".

Grusch suggested that the US has likely been aware of "non-human" activity since the 1930s and possesses fully intact pieces of "craft" of a "non-human origin".

He also mentioned that Italy discovered one of the UFOs in 1933, and Pope Pius XII at the time relayed the findings to President Franklin Roosevelt..."

"A group of Midlothian childhood friends have revisited a terrifying ‘alien encounter’ that left them traumatised for decades.

Anne Calder, 54, Pamela Pollok, 53 and May Brown, 55, were part of a group of five friends, all aged between eight and 10, who believe they encountered a ‘creature not of this world’ when walking together in 1978.

The alleged incident took place on an old railway line which runs underneath the bridge on Suttieslea Road, Newtongrange.

Frozen in fear, they all give matching descriptions of a three foot tall ‘alien’ perched in a tree on a route they had walked hundreds of times before.

All three remember the alien as having bright luminous yellow eyes with greenish brown skin and a synthesised sounding voice but strangely no mouth.

Looking back at the event, they feel the alien may have been communicating with them telepathically.

After the creature ‘spoke’ with the group, they all claim to have blacked out and said they only remember standing in a field around five minutes away - but not how they got there.

Anne, who has suffered from night terrors relating to the incident, believes they may have blacked out as they were taken aboard a UFO..."

"A man has been left stunned after snapping a UFO in Scotland. The picture, which shows what appears to be strange lights, was taken on Friday night.

Gearóid, who often photographs the Aurora Borealis, had gone in search of the northern lights and headed to Coatbridge's St. Ambrose High School.

At around 9.30pm, he went to the football pitch at the North Lanarkshire school with his tripod and dog and took more than 100 images of the night sky.

He then returned home to see if he was successful. On closer inspection, Gearóid spotted what appeared to be a cluster of red and white lights streaking across the sky in several images, Glasgow Live reports.

He immediately posted on social media about the mystery. He said: "I go out most nights with my Canon Camera and tripod with my dog about 9.30pm down the park from my house when I think the Aurora Borealis can be seen.

"That night I took over 100 photos of the sky. When I got home I looked at them on my PC and saw this photo. I said to myself I don't remember seeing that when I took the photo..."

"... allegations have now been made by Elizondo in a shocking new book, Imminent – Inside The Pentagon’s Hunt For UFOs. It’s a book that has been hailed by some as all the more significant because Elizondo isn’t some crackpot amateur UFO sleuth but the former military intelligence officer who actually led that hunt.

The 52-year-old claims to be the former head of the US Defence Department’s shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

And he would like us to know that he didn’t start seeing those small green luminous balls until after he went to work for the AATIP and recognised them for one of the most common types of UFO – or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – that are reported.

In his mind, it could hardly have been a coincidence. Some of his colleagues had reported similar sightings where they lived. Was some ‘more advanced intelligence’ checking out the humans who were investigating them, Elizondo wondered. Inevitably, his book has sent ructions through a UFO world that has spent decades fighting desperately to be taken seriously. He ticks all the boxes in terms of being a ‘credible witness’.

He had top security clearance and worked for a secret US government UFO investigation unit for seven years. Elizondo claims the evidence for extraterrestrials is hiding in plain sight, here on Earth.

But he says it is being withheld from us by obstructive Pentagon officials who fear disclosure will cause mass panic. He alleges that clear footage – unveiled a few years ago – of UFOs captured by US fighter pilots, proves that highly advanced spacecraft have been buzzing us for decades. And even worse, our relatively feeble defences are powerless to stop them.

‘These craft are not made by humans,’ Elizondo boldly and bluntly states.

‘Humanity is in fact not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species.’

These UFO ‘craft’ have been operating with ‘complete impunity all over the world since at least the Second World War’, he insists, and have the ability ‘to move in ways that defy our knowledge of physics... within air, water and space’.

UFOs, he intones, present ‘at best, a very serious national security issue, and at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity’. To put it mildly, it sounds like the sort of issue someone should have mentioned some time ago. No one has, he says, because a secret cabal of US government officials and major defence contractors have been retrieving the UFOs and their alien occupants since 1947 and hiding them away..."

Jeffrey J Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of 10 books on the history of mysticism, psychology and the paranormal. His latest, How to Think Impossibly, draws on a range of sources including gnosticism, quantum physics and English romantic philosophy, to attempt a new theory of mind and the imagination.

At the root of some of your understanding of imagination, and your argument that current theories of mind leave too much “off the table”, seems to be an experience that happened to you in Kolkata in November 1989. Can you describe what that involved?

I was working on my first book, Kali’s Child, and I was very sick; I had some kind of flu or food poisoning. I went to bed and I woke up, but my body didn’t wake up. And some kind of strange energy came out of the room or more probably came out of my body. I thought that the electrical circuits in the walls had somehow malfunctioned and I was being electrocuted. I had a classic out-of-body experience, and when I eventually got back into my body and woke up it felt like something had been downloaded into me. Massive amounts of information, and I had no context for any of it.

...

Throughout history, as you write, all cultures have tried to explain individuals who have had these experiences of what you call “impossible thinking”. I suppose, for example, Lives of the Saints is one record of them?

You need impossible things to happen to become a saint, but they have got to be the right [Roman Catholic] things. But why take things off the table that don’t fit into your worldview?

...

I’m probably being dumb, but I didn’t get the relation between your updating of Coleridge’s model of the imagination – what you call dual-aspect monism, the sense that imagination can take us beyond the false division of mental and material realities – and these experiences like the sighting of ghosts or of giant praying mantises appearing at the end of people’s beds. How do those relate?

What I’m trying to say in the book is that a lot of people have these strange experiences, but nobody really has a model of the imagination that can explain them. I’m trying to develop one. I’m pushing back against this idea that the imagination is just about imaginary mental states. The example I give a lot is precognitive states: dream-like states, where people see the future as a set of physical events.

You have recorded and collected many examples in your Archives of the Impossible at Rice University.

Yes. To me they’re the most stunning because sometimes they’re precise down to very banal details.

...

Let me ask about, for example, your thoughts on UFO sightings. You suggest they happen more frequently to people who’ve had near-death experiences, because, I think you argue, those people’s hold on “normal” reality is weaker?

I think the normal way of thinking about a UFO as some kind of extraterrestrial spaceship is naive. I think something’s going on that is much more related to our spiritual histories in ways that we don’t understand. We interpret it in this technological way: it’s a spaceship. It can’t be, you know, the world of the dead. God forbid.

Tyler Paul, organizer of Saturday’s conference, said he began the New Brunswick Bigfoot Organization two years ago and held its first gathering last year in Sackville.

The goal, he said, is to encourage more people to talk about their personal experiences.

Paul believes his first brush with Bigfoot came last June as he hiked a woodland trail with his family in Elgin, N.B.

“We started hearing this knocking … just this constant, whack, whack, whack, whack,” he said, adding the sounds continued for four or five minutes.

“And I was kind of getting a little freaked out because I had the kids there and everything, and gave my wife a little look like, ‘is it really what I’m hearing?’ We believe that we found an imprint on the ground.”

Suzanne Leger of Shediac, N.B., has reported two encounters. She said the first came when she was about seven or eight and playing with a friend in her backyard when they heard “really, really loud screams.”

“It’s not like an animal, not like a man. And they’re very, very loud and very strong, powerful.”

The second came this February, she said, during a lunchtime stroll down a trail in Grande-Bigue, N.B.’s Cocagne Park. She heard nothing this time, but said she saw three different sets of footprints, some of which featured indentations that looked like claw marks. Leger said they bore no resemblance to imprints made by animals and is convinced a Bigfoot clan was on the move.

“It looked like a family,” she said, noting one set of footprints was larger than the others.

Folklore is filled with centuries worth of suspected Bigfoot sightings, which Leger cites as reason enough to believe her encounters were genuine.

“People aren’t making this stuff up for hundreds of years. There’s something there that we just haven’t seen,” she said.