According to stopabductions.com, one need fear no alien abduction when wearing a special, home-made helmet:
The very large brain of this alien gives it enormous telepathic/mind control powers. It comes to earth with no protection or weapons, relying solely on its telepathic ability to control and abduct humans. When humans wear a thought screen helmet the alien's telepathic ability is neutralized and it withdraws.
On November 7th, 2006, numerous witnesses claim to have seen a UFO over O'Hare airport in Chicago. According to eyewitness accounts, the dark grey object hovered over the airport before flying away, punching a hole in the low clouds. The above image comes from ufosightings.ca, though reliable pictures of the object itself prove elusive.
Dan Aykroyd, SNL alum and UFO enthusiast, claims to have come into possession of compelling video of the incident, but we'll have to wait until he releases his documentary to see the exclusive footage.
Salon's Machinist blog notes an interesting mnemonic device for remembering the planets of our solar system, including the dwarf planets Ceres, Pluto, and Eris.
Driving.ca, a Canadian website dedicated to all things automotive, has a relatively informative and even-handed article about drivers' UFO experiences. The piece quotes generously from Bufo Calvin, education director for the Organization for Paranormal Understanding and Support (OPUS).
This image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day is an artist's illustration of what BLG-109 - a planetary system recently discovered using the technique of gravitational microlensing - might look like:
Recently a detailed analysis of microlensing system OGLE-2006-BLG-109 has related brightness variations to two planets that are similar to Jupiter and Saturn of our own Solar System. This discovery carries the tantalizing implication that interior planets, possibly including Earth-like planets, might also be common.
icseftonandwestlancs/Wales - Some old Welsh villagers recall the sighting of a giant, cigar-shaped UFO in 1977. It seems that no one took any photographs. Was it from another dimension? Wild speculation is important in any investigation.
Billy Meier has been communicating with aliens since he was a little, Swiss farm boy in 1942. He has produced thousands of photographs of his humanoid, extraterrestrial friends and their ships. These photos include the breathtaking example above, as well as the absolutely ludicrous image below.
Meier's American media representative, Michael Horn, appeared on Coast to Coast AM in January to speak with George Noory and someone (seemingly a true believer) has kindly posted this appearance on YouTube. The Coast to Coast AM website posted a number of photographs related to this case, including the chrome-plated IKEA birthday cake pictured above.
Via Russia InfoCentre, which appears to be a website to encourage Russian tourism.
The Russian city of Togliatty has all chances to turn into the country’s main
centre of paranormal tourism. In the nearest future it is planned to open an UFO
museum here and to construct special tourist settlements where travellers could
spend nights awaiting for aliens.
Today's Overcompensating comic strip is about all that good ol' Roswell hullabaloo.
From the Grantham Journal:
A UFO spotter is certain alien crafts are in the skies above Grantham- and fears they have sinister plans.
Allan Spick, 69, of Great Gonerby, has seen five UFO's in the past five years from the window of his home in Belvoir Gardens.
The most recent was in the early hours of Saturday, February 8.
Raw video from WFTV/Orlando - A camera crew spotted this UFO over Tampa on January 20th. The original WFTV story mentioned that the "fireballs" seemed to defy the laws of physics. The network now notes on their website that this has been identified as part of an air show during Tampa's annual Gasparilla Pirate Festival. I guess no one consulted a physicist (or a scientist of any sort, or a calendar) before the original story was reported.
In a noble attempt to catch up on the backlog of Scientific American magazines building up on my house, I came across an article from the December issue about searching for "alien" life here on Earth. The SciAm website has a slideshow with some beautiful and weird artist's conceptions of how these unusual microbes might look.
The idea is that if life is likely to come into existence given certain conditions, then it's possible it could have happened more than once on Earth. SciAm explores how there could be life that functions in biochemically different ways from our own:
Researchers have hypothesized that in alien organisms arsenic could successfully fill the biochemical role that phosphorus plays for known life-forms. Arsenic is poisonous to us because it mimics phosphorus so well; similarly, phosphorus would be poisonous to an arsenic-based organism.
Also interesting to consider is that if scientists were to discover a form of life on Earth that emerged independently from the rest of life as we know it, this would be a good indication in favor of the possibility of extraterrestrial life, as it would seem to be almost inevitable under certain circumstances.
KDFW/Dallas-Fort Worth continues coverage of the Stephensville UFO sightings. The number of witnesses coming forward, as well as the credibility of some of the individuals involved, have really kept this story going. Above is a still image of one of the purported UFOs. The link goes to a video that provides a pretty good summary of the situation so far in about five minutes.
I hope none of the witnesses takes the "dubious" tag on this post the wrong way. In UFO Clearinghouse parlance, dubious simply refers to the likelihood of the involvement of alien intelligence, not whether or not someone is honestly describing something mysterious they saw in the sky.
I think one of the most interesting things in this clip is when a representative of MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) says that they've proven that there are UFOs and now they just need to find out what they are. This sounds a bit spooky at first until you think about the fact that what he's saying they've proven is that there are things in the sky that can't be identified. This doesn't sound all that weird, considering the cool puzzling stuff going on in the universe all the time. Though I think it still comes across that he really hopes it's aliens.
Mysterious Universe links to this story from Inexplicata, describing an encounter in which a UFO landed in Mexico and then remained where it was for 30 hours while countless witnesses looked on. Despite the amount of time involved, this is the only picture accompanying this story:
Perhaps an inauspicious start for this blog.
