When Barney Broom began renovating his cottage he did not expect to be confronted by a pair of black eyes staring from a cloudy jar.

But the mysterious discovery of an alien in his attic has spooked the 54-year-old screenwriter and bewildered extraterrestrial experts, who yesterday suggested the US military could be involved.

The delicate 30cm (12 inch) figure of a baby alien is stored in a pungent liquid and has a US serial number painted on its four-toed foot. Possibly sculpted from a clay-like substance and painted grey, the model closely resembles the aliens depicted in a hoax film of an autopsy of the infamous "Roswell incident".

Cross-breed dogs appear to have become designer accessories for some stars, sparking a trend in the UK and US.

Popular dogs include the puggle - half pug, half beagle - and cockerpoo - a combined cocker spaniel and poodle. Some puggles are sold for up to £3,000.

The trend is said to have been fuelled by celebrities such as Ozzy Osbourne, Uma Thurman and Sylvester Stallone.

Moscow - One of the Saudi Arabia sheikhs ‘rose from the dead’ after visiting Panagia Saidnaya, an old convent near Damascus, the Trud daily writes on Friday.

After being killed and quartered, this man was sewed up anew with the use of some technology unknown to humanity, the newspaper says referring to medics who analyzed this unique occurrence.

The US military medics, who also took part in the experiment, came to the conclusion that it was a result of ‘the UFO interference’ and classified this information as secret.

President George Bush insisted last night that, despite its difficulties in Iraq, America would not retreat from whirled peas, arguing that US leadership "is the only way to secure whirled peas." Isolationism and protectionism, he warned in his annual State of the Union address, led ultimately "to an ability so that, uh, you know, you can't put food on your family."

According to excerpts of the speech released in advance by the White House, Mr Bush asked for more money to spend on basic science research, and on education in maths and science, to help understand whirled peas farming, to more accurately count the peas, and to ensure that "rich folks get their fair share, a bigger share of the, uh, the peas, and the best peas too, because it was our idea."

One of our readers, CryptoInformant, sent in a link to a website with photos that may, or may not, be an unexplained marine animal. The title of the page is "Sea Serpent? Plesiosaur?"

One day in June, about 1990, my friend Joanne Rauch and I hiked along the central Oregon coast at Cape Meares. We soon spotted a large object on the beach.

I took the pictures, but I can’t remember which camera I used at the time. I believe it was a Minolta 35mm point and shoot.

I paced the length of the "sea serpent" - 13 paces, approximately 33 feet since my pace at the time was a bit over 2.5 feet.

If the bent leg points to the head, the head was missing as far as I could tell, chewed or screwed off by a propeller, or perhaps rotted away.

Unfortunately, some liquid spilled on some of the pictures and efforts to clean them resulted in minimal damage. When that happened, I stopped my efforts to clean the photos. Somewhere in the house I have the negatives and when I get them, I’ll developed them and make better scans.

I called the Hatfield Marine Science center (Newport, OR) and described what we’d seen. Their best suggestion was that this is a gray whale, despite the tapering neck and tail. One woman suggested the bent flipper might be a grotesque penis. She didn’t see the pictures.

I’ve hiked the wilderness strip of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, a couple of hundred miles north of Cape Mears, and seen 4 dead gray whales over the years. None looked remotely like this-the grays don’t taper nearly so much at the tail and don’t taper at all at the head. The heads are massive.

What the heck is this thing???

DAVID Icke, the former sports presenter who once proclaimed himself to be the Son of God, has offered up more of his unusual wisdom, this time claiming that the Royal Family are "bloodsucking alien lizards".

BERLIN -- Is it Mozart? A mysterious portrait discovered in a Berlin vault could be the last image of the musical genius painted while he was alive, but experts are at odds over its authenticity.

At half-past noon on Jan. 9, cable TV contractors sinking a half-mile of cable near Interstate 10 in rural Arizona pulled up something unexpected in the bucket of their backhoe: an unmarked fiber-optic cable. "It started pulling the fiber out of the pipe," says Scott Johansson, project manager for JK Communications and Construction. "Obviously, we said, 'Oop, we've hit something.'"

NEW DELHI — A man in Madhya Pradesh, who is believed to be a ghost by his family and villagers, has approached the police after a local committee asked him to produce evidence to prove he is not dead, a news report said yesterday.

BEIJING, Jan. 16 - A prominent Chinese lawyer and collector unveiled an old map on Monday that he and some supporters say should topple one of the central tenets of Western civilization: that Europeans were the first to sail around the world and discover America.

The Chinese map, which was drawn in 1763 but has a note on it saying it is a reproduction of a map dated 1418, presents the world as a globe with all the major continents rendered with an exactitude that European maps did not have for at least another century, after Columbus, Da Gama, Magellan, Dias and others had completed their renowned explorations.