The mysterious disappearance of a scientist has been thrust back into the spotlight as cases involving missing and dead researchers tied to America's nuclear, aerospace and defense sectors continue to mount.

Ingrid Coleen Lane, 37, vanished in October 2023 after leaving a meditation retreat in the remote mountains of New Mexico, where investigators later discovered her smashed Subaru abandoned near a volcanic hiking trail with no trace of where she went.

Inside the vehicle, authorities reportedly found three laptops, an unactivated burner phone and Lane's keys still sitting in the ignition, while a massive boulder had mysteriously shattered the rear hatch window.

Search dogs reportedly failed to locate any scent trail leading away from the scene despite forensic evidence indicating Lane had been near or outside the vehicle.

As lawmakers continue to pursue transparency regarding alleged secret UFO programs operated by the Pentagon, one member of Congress is now pursuing private contractors.

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., announced on social media he has sent a letter to MIT Lincoln Labs regarding a "flying saucer talk" from 1952.

"I sent a letter to MIT Lincoln Labs asking for a classified 1952 briefing video referenced as a 'flying saucer talk.' Their attorneys wrote back fast. They'll comply within 30 days. Congressional letters carry weight. We're going to keep sending them," he said.

Whistleblower David Grusch, whose testimony regarding alleged secret UFO-retrieval programs kicked off a series of congressional hearings, has stated private contractors are being used to make it more difficult for lawmakers to obtain information on certain programs.

A bizarre new theory suggests there may be countless alternate versions of your life playing out at the same time across parallel universes.

According to Oxford physicist Vlatko Vedral, every tiny event in the universe could create a different version of reality, sending another 'you' down a completely separate life path.

In one reality, you took a different job. In another, you married someone else. Somewhere else, you moved across the country or made one small choice that changed your entire future.

The unsettling idea comes from a real branch of quantum physics known as the Many-Worlds interpretation, which suggests reality may constantly split into parallel worlds instead of following one fixed timeline.

Vedral recently argued in Popular Mechanics that humans do not magically create reality simply by observing it, a belief that has spread online through manifestation culture and misunderstood interpretations of quantum physics.

Instead, reality changes naturally through ordinary interactions happening every second, whether humans notice them or not.

A popular UFO-reporting app has been making waves after reportedly recording tens of thousands of mysterious underwater objects up and down the United States' coastlines, raising eyebrows and leaving experts with more questions than answers regarding their origin.

Enigma, a non-partisan organization that boasts its "largest queryable historical sighting database for global UFO sightings," has recorded roughly 30,000 UFO sightings since its launch in 2022, according to the company's website.

However, users have turned their attention away from the skies in the hunt for proof that life may exist elsewhere.

Since August, Enigma has documented more than 9,000 sightings of mysterious objects within 10 miles of United States shorelines or other major bodies of water, Marine Technology News reported.

The Trump administration on Friday released a batch of "never-before-seen" files and videos on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon (UAP) as part of an effort to increase transparency on government knowledge of extraterrestrial phenomena.

"The latest UAP videos, photos, and original source documents from across the entire United States government are all in one place - no clearance required. While past administrations sought to discredit or dissuade the American people, President Trump is focused on providing maximum transparency to the public, who can ultimately make up their own minds about the information contained in these files," the White House said in a statement to Fox News.

The release is a function of President Donald Trump's Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) program.

Photos from the initial disclosure, which a White House official told Fox News is the first of a series of releases, show strangely shaped objects captured on film during the Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 space missions.

Why the Cassiopaean synthesis rattles materialists, religionists, and New Agers alike — and why it looks more rational than the "UFOs are demons, return to church" narrative

In my last article, I announced that it was the finale in my "Fun With AI" series. I think I spoke too soon.

There's probably no end to the fun a person can have with AI even if the topics discussed in that little series were rather serious and possibly depression inducing. Today, I'm going to make it worse. If you think those subjects were depressing, hold my beer!

There's a little backstory to the fun we are going to have with AI today. A month or more ago I noticed that there was a significant uptick in the number of people searching my name and work on google. I know this because I have an academia.edu account and they notify me when someone is searching my name on google and lands on their site. The uptick wasn't like overwhelming, just significant enough to get my attention. Instead of a few searches every week, there were tens and dozens per day. And, this is still ongoing. I thought about it for a while and I suspect it is just because of the heightened interest in UFO/UAP disclosure as well as some of the things coming out from gov whistleblowers on the topic.

Anyway, I then started to get a few requests from academia.edu for any text from my book High Strangeness.
Well, cool, I thought. And then I thought some more. I finally decided that, with all the confusion about the topic due to the many crazies coming out of the woodwork, maybe I should just upload the whole darn book to academia.edu. I do plan to talk about the issue in some depth in an upcoming podcast, but can't say definitely when that will be just yet. Stay tuned.

I had to ask my crew/publisher for a PDF since it's been so long I have no idea where the file is. I received a copy almost instantly! I uploaded it to academia.edu and then, I was scanning through it a bit and wondering what else I could do with this handy text and the lightbulb went on!

Yup! You guessed it! I can use this text to play with Grok!

Not with a bang but a whimper.
Friday was a big day for aliens. The night before, the US Department of War (I think I liked it as Defense better) released a highly anticipated trove of documents related to UFOs and extraterrestrials. The "disclosure" came in the wake of President Trump reacting to former President Obama making waves with a misinterpreted comment about "aliens being real"

So the documents get released and I get up early and starting pouring through them. I click. I read. I watch videos. I click again. And then I realize...

There's nothing here.

This highly touted disclosure amounts to just an endless parade of fuzzy images (or videos) and unverifiable personal testimony. Some of the documents go back 70 years but it's all basically the same. Taken as a whole, it's the kind of thing we've seen for decades: fuzzy images; unverifiable personal testimony; no hard evidence. There's even a laughable image of flashing "orb' in a wheat field made by photoshopping a bad cartoon onto to a photo. It was an FBI technician's attempt to illustrate someone's account of a sighting.

Given the explosive congressional hearings we seen where witness claim the government has lots in crashed alien spaceships and dead alien bodies, I was kinda hoping for a whole lot more. It was all just so... boring.

If you want to see my arguments about why, if people are going to keep making these incredible claims, we should be expecting much more you can read this piece I did for The Atlantic (it's paywalled but you can usually get a couple of free articles).

A look at newly surfaced lunar surface images and the declassified transcripts that go with them.
The word "UFO" tends to trigger one of two responses: credulous excitement or immediate eye-rolling. But when the source material is NASA mission photography and declassified crew debriefing documents — some originally stamped Confidential — it becomes harder to dismiss out of hand.

A set of recently surfaced images from the Apollo 12 (1969) and Apollo 17 (1972) lunar surface missions has been circulating alongside newly released government UAP files. The photographs show the grey lunar terrain, astronaut shadows stretching across the regolith, and — annotated with yellow zoom boxes — small, anomalous luminous objects in the black sky above the lunar horizon. The objects vary across the frames: a vertical blue streak in one, a tight cluster of white-blue points in another, a solitary bright orb in a third, and in one striking image, what appears to be a larger rectangular luminous form.

The truth has always been out there. Americans are now closer than ever before to grasping it.

On Friday, the Department of War, acting under President Donald Trump's direction, released more than 150 government files - many previously classified and some dating back 80 years - revealing information about unidentified flying objects and other unexplained phenomena.

One NASA image from the Apollo 17 moon mission in 1972 appears to show three lights arranged in a triangular formation above the lunar terrain. A transcript of the astronauts' communications reveals one crew member describing the light as 'very bright particles or fragments,' another compared the scene to 'the Fourth of July'.

It's only the beginning.

Newly released FBI files have revealed shocking details of mysterious four-foot-tall crewmen exiting a UFO in the 1960s.

The documents, released Friday as part of the Trump administration's UFO disclosure, detailed how investigators reviewed reports that 1965 marked 'the year of the greatest number of UFO sightings' observed by multiple witnesses across the world.

The FBI summarized reports of metallic craft capable of hovering silently, reaching 'fantastic speeds' and interfering with electromagnetic equipment.

The files also referenced that wreckage from crashed saucers had been recovered on multiple occasions, including materials described as unknown metals containing microscopic spheres.

But one of the most startling sections involved testimonies of encounters with apparent occupants of the craft.

'A few witnesses have reported seeing crewmen who had landed from the objects,' the document stated, describing the beings as 'three and a half to four feet tall, wearing what appear to be space suits and helmets.'

The FBI records were among hundreds of newly released files, photographs and videos published Friday under President Donald Trump's long-awaited UFO transparency initiative.