Flat Earth Expedition, Shapeshifting Santa, Exorcist Faces Demons, D.B. Cooper and Bigfoot, and More Mysterious News Briefly

A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week. 

A car-sized ball-shaped UFO seen and recorded on and above a runway at the Manchester Airport in England was thought by many to be a non-Earth alien object, including UFO researcher Mark Christopher Lee,  who reviewed the recordings and decided it was definitely a UFO and could be alien or a mysterious drone like so many being seen lately; however, after further analysis, Lee did the unusual and backed down from his initial assertion, stating in a correction that he had identified the unidentified object and revealed its true source: “I have previously investigated this case and thought it was linked to the orbs and drones that people are seeing around the world (US and UK especially) but after analyzing various photos and videos posted I'm pretty confident that what we are actually seeing in Blue Chinese Lantern that has gone astray’. It’s nice to see that Lee has not gone astray and stuck to the principles of his profession, admitting his mistake.

The citizens of many cities celebrate local UFO and cryptid sightings with festivals, proclamations and statues, but not Father Andrei Vasyakin, the Dean of the Dalnegorsk Deanery, who objects to a statue of a spacecraft and an alien commemorating the date January 29, 86, when a reddish sphere flew over the small Russian mining town of Dalnegorsk from the far east before crashing into the nearby Izvestkovaya Mountain, becoming an incident recognized as the Russian Roswell and “the best documented” UFO crash ever; witnesses said the sphere "jerked" before falling like a rock, crashing and disappearing; Father Vasyakin thinks the small statue, erected on December 6, 2024, “looks like a “demonic creature” and offends local Orthodox Christians who hold “a religious procession and prayer service” annually are held in this place every year, which means that aliens have no place here”. Has Father Andrei ever looked at some of the scary statues in old Russian churches?

If you’re not ready to tell your kids (or yourself) the truth about Santa Claus, you might want to consider this paranormal tale from Brocarde, a psychic who claims she once married and divorced a ghost; Brocarde says her spirit ex, an ancient soldier named Edwardo, “came alive” during the Christmas season and would dress up – in a ghostly way – as Santa Claus and float down the chimney; she thinks other ghosts may do the same, speculating in an interview that “It’s important to understand that ghosts can often sense the energy of the holidays, and some get as excited as we do! If you consider that some ghosts don’t even realize that they are dead, they sometimes start to celebrate the holidays as they did when they were living”; once they start celebrating, she says, ''During the holidays, when emotions are high, spirits are attracted to these emotions and some can present themselves as Father Christmas’; this means “When some people are adamant that they’ve seen Santa Claus what they could have actually encountered is a shape-shifting ghost. I understand that Father Christmas is largely accepted as being fictional, but in spirit form, he can be more real than any of us could imagine”. Does a shapeshifting Santa ghost want milk and cookies or your soul on a plate?

Drones have replaced weather balloons as the leading mistaken UFOs but residents of eight counties in New Jersey who have been seeing mysterious drones since November say theirs are nothing like the drones also being reported in New York, Florida and Pennsylvania because these car-sized UFOs are affecting their car-shaped cars – changing the time on their car clocks and then setting them back to normal when they leave; software experts suspect the drones are controlled by foreign actors using GPS jamming or spoofing to test electronic warfare devices on the vehicles; while the FAA agrees, it cannot determine the source of the drones, whether it be Russia or another foreign country, local amateur drone pilots, extraterrestrials or something else; while the governor of New Jersey and other officials are telling their constituents to “remain calm”, the sightings and reports just keep on coming. New Jersey Congressman Jeff Van Drew thinks they are from an Iranian “mothership” located “off the East Coast of the United States of America” while Clint Emerson, a retired Navy SEAL and owner of security company Escape the Wolf, speculates that “these are potentially government programs kept within what’s known as a ‘Special Access Program,’ which is purposely put together to keep even the most cleared people out — it truly is to keep it secret”. Has there ever been a more challenging year to be a UFO researcher?Has there ever been a more challenging year to be a UFO researcher?

It’s hard enough being stuck on the International Space Station during the holidays, but astronauts there and those who will spend the holidays on future missions to the Moon and Mars must give up some traditional holiday foods, including sprouts, because, according to TV scientist Maddie Moate, “Sprouts have a tendency to make us quite gassy. And you wouldn't want a crew of astronauts sealed inside the space station feeling uncomfortable because farts are flammable. So the astronauts are forbidden from eating sprouts”; Mary Roach, the author of ‘Packing For Mars’, estimates that an astronaut "during the peak flatulence period" six hours after eating sprouts will "pass anywhere from one to almost three cups of flatus per hour" and “At the high end of the range, that's about two Coke cans full of fart”. In space, no one can hear you scream “Someone open a window!”

Longtime Loch Ness Monster researcher Adrian Shine, has written a new book titled ‘A Natural History of Sea Serpents’ that is filled with centuries of stories of sea serpents and monsters that have terrified sailors and other witnesses while baffling marine biologists and other scientists who can’t explain many of them but refuse to consider them as cryptids; Shine calls himself a “sympathetic skeptic” and offers drawings and photos of real creatures that have been mistaken for monsters; he shows how the stories have evolved over time, especially those involving the Loch Ness Monster; while remaining a “sympathetic skeptic”, Shine can’t explain all serpent and monster sightings and uses the book as a plea to conserve our bodies of water until all of these tales are resolved. Nessie may be a monster, but it still likes a clean tank.

Archeologists digging on the grounds of the Church of St. Nicholas in Demre, Antalya, Turkey, discovered a limestone sarcophagus they believe to be the coffin of Saint Nicholas, the Greek bishop whose life in the fourth century CE inspired our modern Santa Claus; archeologist and associate professor Ebru Fatma Findik of Hatay Mustafa Kemal University hopes to find an inscription confirming the identity of the owner of the sarcophagus; the remains of Nicholas were buried on the grounds after his death, but were believed to have been taken to Venice during the First Crusade; his legendary secret gift-giving inspired the story of Santa Claus, but St. Nicholas is also the patron of sailors, merchants, archers, repentant thieves, children, brewers, pawnbrokers, toymakers, unmarried people, and students. If he’s the patron saint of brewers, that might explain how he eventually became jolly, stout and red-cheeked.

The Rocky Mountain Sasquatch Organization reports a strange recent report from a man who claimed he encountered Bigfoot while looking for the mysterious hijacker D.B. Cooper; the incident happened in 1972 when the unnamed person had returned from Vietnam and was serving in Washington state when he was sent out to assist the FBI in the hunt for Cooper in "the mountains in southern Washington state along the Columbia River"; it was there the witness said he saw through a thick fog "strange structures" of logs and branches and "a dark section on the vegetation in front of me"; as he retched from a strange stench that could mean a dead body, the lump suddenly stood up; he said, "This thing was about 11 to 12 ft tall and had a human face. I froze in place and tried to call for my companions but I could not utter a sound. This thing suddenly moved with such speed forward and hit me with one arm and send me stumbling about 10 or 12 ft to the left, I try to get control of my body but I was too close to the cliff and fall down some 30 or 40 meters. I scream as I fell and was lucky that the rest of my squad heard me"; the witness was taken to a hospital for treatment of his injuries sustained in the fall; in questioning by RMSO, he remembered the Bigfoot had a scar on its face and that its smell was horrible and its size and muscular build were unbelievable. No matter how scary it was, he probably preferred dealing with Bigfoot and Cooper to Vietnam.

A secret Pentagon report on reincarnation has come back like reincarnation itself on social media where it is getting new scrutiny; the study was conducted by US Army Intelligence and the report, released in 1983 but not declassified until 2003, titled “Analysis and Assessment of The Gateway Process” and written by US Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M McDonnell, states that consciousness is energy and it exists outside of our understanding of reality and energy never dies, thus leading to the conclusion that consciousness never dies; the 'Gateway' project had a goal of person’s consciousness 'outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space' and be used in applications like psychic spying; one page (25) was suspiciously missing from the 29-page report and a new request was sent to the CIA, which claims it never had the page to begin with. Nothing, not even consciousness itself, seems to be safe from social media.

In his new book, “The Exorcist Files: True Stories About the Reality of Evil and How to Defeat It”, famous exorcist Father Carlos Martins says he’s faced the devil many times in his 20 years as an exorcist and has seen everything depicted in the q21973 movie, “The Exorcist” except for one phenomenon — “the three hundred sixty–degree head turn by the possessed”; he has needed surgery to repair injuries the possessed person gave him during exorcisms; the book gives details on his most horrifying exorcisms, including a haunted music box and a possessed firefighter whose possession began as a child using an Ouija board; while doctors and scientists attribute possession to brain abnormalities, genetic or environmental factors, mental illness, psychological problems or a combination of causes, that doesn’t stop Fr. Martin from fighting the devil through exorcisms. Does the devil ever offer the good Father an increase in possession in return for a cut of the royalties?

Pastor Will Duffy of Colorado is so frustrated that members of his flock do not believe the Earth is round that he has arranged to take four Flat Earthers and four Round Earthers on a trip to Antarctica he is calling ‘The Final Experiment’; they will travel this month (December) with Antarctic Logistics & Expeditions to Union Glacier, Antarctica, where they will spend 24 hours filming the sun; since this is summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the sun should be in the sky for the full 24 hours if the Earth is round; if it is flat and Antarctica is an ice wall encircling the rest of the world as Flat Earthers believe, the sun will rise and set during that 24-hour period and prove the Earth is flat. Pastor Duffy is convinced that “I created The Final Experiment to end this debate, once and for all. After we go to Antarctica, no one has to waste any more time debating the shape of the Earth". Just in case, he needs to pray that the Flat Earthers will change their minds.

Just in time for the new year, self-proclaimed TikTok ‘time traveler’ @thetimetraveler2582 has come back with “100% proof” he is a real time traveler from the year 2582; as usual with TikTok time travelers, the ‘proof’ is a list of events which will ‘happen’ soon; on @thetimetraveler2582’s list, he has world peace arriving on January 30, 2025; on February 2, 2025, it will be revealed that aliens are living among us and working with the US government on advanced technology; on April 5, 2025, two scientists “find the greatest cure to have ever been discovered” but then disappear and are never seen again. One more prediction:  @thetimetraveler2582 will not come back in three months and explain why he was wrong.

Two different sets of pilots, flying for American Airlines and Spirit Airlines, reportedly observed two similar bright and fast-moving UFOs near DFW (Dallas-Fort Worth) Airport; the pilot of the American flight enroute from Louisville, Kentucky, to Dallas-Fort Worth told air traffic controllers that the objects were much higher above their cruising altitude of 34,000 feet; the Spirit Airlines crew told the controllers that they had observed the UFO s for between one to two hours northwest of the airport; air traffic control with the US Air Force about activity in the two nearby military operations areas used by the USAF’s 138th Fighter Group and the Arkansas Air National Guard's 188th Fighter Wing and was told neither had aircraft in the sky; in addition, TikTok user @laurenallison45 posted a video of the objects which confirmed the pilots' accounts; the lights were said to be "about 100 miles out in space" and got “super bright and then go completely dim". Could it be aliens looking for the best barbecue in the galaxy?

Aliens seeing an unidentified flying object leaving our galaxy may be observing Voyager 1, the little spacecraft that keeps on going more than 47 years after leaving Earth and traveling nearly 15.4 billion miles; NASA scientists got some good news from Voyager 1 that its X-band radio transmitter is working properly again after it switched to the weaker S-band radio transmitter which was unable to send back information about the status of the spacecraft and scientific data collected by its instruments; after fixing the power issue that caused the swap, the X-band transmitter came back on and Voyager 1 is back in business. Voyager 1 has been flying nearly as long as Saturday Night Live has been on television and it probably likes the original cast the best.

For news of mind control of another kind, we turn to the Austin, Texas, startup Phantom Neuro which is building a thin, flexible muscle implant that allows amputees to maneuver a robot arm through a full range of natural movements just by thinking about the gestures they want to make; the company already has a wearable version on the market but the new device uses implantable sensors inserted through a small incision under the skin that will pick up the electrical activity directly from the surface of the muscle and use the neural pathways still intact in the brains of amputees to tell the robotic muscles to contract thus removing the need for brain surgery; clinical trials for the implants on upper limb amputees begin in 2025. Now we need an implant to help pay for it.

Paul Simon sang of ’50 Ways to Leave Your Lover’ and that number could apply to fast radio busts leaving their home planets as University of Toronto scientist Dang Pham says there are “over 50 potential hypotheses of where they come from”, including the one he discovered – his new study found that fast radio bursts (FRBs) may be created when asteroids slam into extreme ultradense dead stars called neutron stars with some of the strongest gravitational and magnetic fields in the universe that release a huge amount of energy when an asteroid or comet slams into it, creating a flash of radio waves “bright enough to be seen across the universe"; while collisions between one neutron star and an interstellar object are rare, estimated to be about one collision every 10 million years in the Milky Way, the study extrapolated to the entire universe and found “that the neutron star-interstellar objects collision-rate in the universe is comparable with currently observed FRB rates". Paul Simon missed the announcement because he and Julio were down by the schoolyard.