This animated data viz reveals that aliens don't shy away from cities.

If only this data viz were around when Mulder and Scully were searching for little green men and women. It shows UFO sightings since 1933 in sequence—fittingly, as little blinking lights over a map of the world:

The intergalactic graphic was created by MBA candidate Christian Pearson using web-based software and data from the National UFO reporting center. It's a part of QuantBait, a visualization initiative through which Pearson wants to tell stories about economic, political, and social issues.

This UFO sighting map "was a fun way of conveying the point that beautiful data visualization can provide deep insights," Pearson writes via email.

Several neighbors living off Alderpointe Street near Panama and Gosford in southwest Bakersfield say they first witnessed a mysterious blue light in the sky back in February, and again in March. Both times they saw it on the 14th.

"I was taking the recycling out to the trash can, and I saw this blue light in the sky, and I thought, that's kinda bright to be a star, I've never seen a blue star be that bright," said Kelly Castruita. "Watched it for about 10 minutes, just doing weird stuff, it would turn on and off and it would disappear," added Kelly's husband Jeff.

Neighbors said the blue light was about the size of a dime, and started off just above the skyline, and then migrated northwest. "It pretty much flew, stopped, then started doing some upward motion and downward motion, so I've never seen anything like it," said neighbor Randy Gabriel.

I understand the title alone about a UFO on video is an attention grabber and may spark the conspiracy theorists. But I hope that my reputation stands up here and what I am sharing has been scrutinized: A UFO appears out of a storm! My purpose is not to sensationalize but rather simply get an explanation of what was captured on video.

I even watched this with my father over the holiday weekend, who is a long time scientist that does not jump to conclusions. We agreed this unexplained description justifies what was seen on video during a lightning storm in Nebraska on April 2, 2015. KeriLeigh Shriver was riding (in the passenger seat) between Alma and Republican City and used her phone to try and get some of the lightning on video. The strange object that appears in the upper right corner seems to be at a low altitude and traveling very fast. It is cylindrical, spiraling, and appears out of nowhere with disappearing trail. The resolution is grainy, but this seems legit- NOT a hoax. In fact this fits with objects that many have captured on video for over a decade.

A documentary video about Rods, or the Extra Dimentional Skyfish mystery seems to fit this. That video is at the bottom of this post. Before you laugh or snort in derision, the start of that documentary includes weather video from a local TV station in Albany, NY in 2002, and another from tornado coverage across Oklahoma City in 1999 both showing something similar.

A strange black circle was spotted in the sky above a village in northern Kazakhstan. Baffled residents captured the mysterious spectacle on video as it hovered in the air for fifteen minutes before dissipating.

Villagers living in Shortandy, some 70 kilometers north of the Kazakh capital Astana, witnessed the spooky event on Friday afternoon.

"It was like a black cloud. We saw it at around 4 pm on April 3. It dissipated like smoke, but it was completely odorless," Oleg Menshikov, a village resident, told Today.kz.

Kamloops, B.C. woman Heather Arlene Carr, who died after setting a fire in a local park, was participating in a pagan ritual that went wrong, according to her husband.

Carr, 40, got trapped in a rock structure which was on fire in Riverside Park in the early morning hours of March 31.

Initially it was believed Carr had attempted suicide. Coroner Barb McClintock said in a statement that Kamloops firefighters were able to rescue her from the fire alive.

"Preliminary indications are that Ms. Carr had set the blaze and then ended up in it accidentally," she said.

Carr was transported to Royal Inland Hospital in Kamloops but succumbed to her injuries several hours later.

Screams of "My God," metallic banging and the cabin jolting to one side - the final moments of the doomed jet were said to have been captured on video, which several newspapers said they watched. However, French prosecutors say it's a hoax.

German Das Bild newspaper and French Paris Match magazine say they managed to watch the video, found among the wreckage, of the final moments of flight 4U9525 before the tragedy.

However, the outlets didn't post the actual video on their websites.

The phone memory card managed to survive the collision with the mountain, say the outlets, claiming it was found at the site by the investigators.

Das Bild claim the authenticity of the footage is "unquestionable," though the scene on board was "chaotic, totally blurred and no individuals can be identified."

A military aviation technology expert has written to the Australian government to debunk its theory that missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is lying in the southern Indian Ocean.

In a letter exclusively obtained by IBTimes UK addressed to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop and Defence Minister David Johnston, Andre Milne, alleges the country's claims surrounding MH370 crashed into the southern Indian Ocean are false and amount to a "criminal act of fabrication of evidence".

The official Malaysia report released earlier in March said the latest satellite data via British firm Inmarsat proved the plane flew for several hours before it crashed into the Indian Ocean on 8 March 2014. The airliner had mysteriously veered off its course from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing for reasons still not known. No distress signal was sent.

Malaysia Prime Minister Najib Razak at the time said it was believed the aeroplane's transponder, which emits an identifying signal was "deliberately disabled" before the plane changed direction and continued flying for a further seven hours.

Former self-described alien abductee Leah Haley has revised her perspectives about her experiences of high strangeness to conclude that no alien abductions ever took place in her life. She now completely attributes her remarkable perceptions to having been an involuntary research subject. Commenting on literal alien abduction from her home in Pensacola, Florida, Haley stated, "It doesn't happen."

Haley attracted widespread attention within the UFO community in 1993 with the publication of her book, Lost Was the Key, in which she described her extraordinary experiences consisting of fragmented memories of UFOs and apparent non-human beings. She became a well known speaker and was commonly sought for interviews. Ten years later she published Unlocking Alien Closets: Abductions, Mind Control and Spirituality, further documenting her descent into an increasingly complex web of deceit, disinformation and character assassination within ufology. Sales of her books climbed well into the thousands although word of mouth was virtually the only means of marketing.

Haley initially thought aliens were responsible for her experiences but that changed following years of investigation. She long acknowledged military personnel were involved in her experiences to some extent, but she fully re-evaluated circumstances after viewing select Freedom of Information Act and U.S. Patent Office documents. Haley further based her revised conclusions on hundreds of interactions with abductees and researchers, as well as having mysterious individuals enter and later abruptly vanish from her life. She is now thoroughly convinced mind control experiments are responsible for what became known as the alien abduction phenomenon.

People in Philadelphia heard some strange sounds earlier this month. Several have uploaded recordings onto YouTube. Here's one from YT user 'buttadee':


Here's what he or she wrote about the experience:

This is the strange noise I've been hearing periodically over the past couple of years. Occurrences have been frequent lately, and I notice it tends to happen before and/or during rain and other impending weather warnings like snow storms. This video was taken outside my front door after 2am on March 4th. I starting hearing it tonight around 6 or 7pm and thought it was just helicopters, but the sound never faded. It's hard to pinpoint where the noise is coming from. No aircraft in sight. Doesn't help that it was overcast.

The possible correlation with extreme weather fronts is interesting. We wonder if this is related to changes in the way weather systems (specifically, the cycle of water, from evaporation to precipitation) are generally becoming more 'extreme'? Rather than being spread evenly in space and time, increased precipitation (from warming oceans and a cooling atmosphere) is coming down in torrents as increased comet/volcanic dust in the atmosphere accentuates electric charge build-up, which is then released as 'sheets of rain' and 'stories-deep thundersnow'.

Of course, that's not the only thing to consider. The fact that observers can never identify the general direction in which such sounds are coming from - above or below - suggests an electrophonic EM effect (literally, electromagnetic waves that would not normally be audible) resulting from unusual seismic activity. And then we need to consider that the seismic activity (below) and the changing composition of the atmosphere (above) may be contemporaneous - both have a strong electrical component, and so both are probably working in tandem.

Interesting times...

A couple that made headlines around the world when their baby son allegedly spontaneously burst into flames four times are back in the news after their second newborn baby son also caught fire.

In the first incident in 2013 the couple's first baby, Rahul, ended up in the intensive care ward at a hospital in south-eastern India's Viluppuram District, in the Tamil Nadu State, after neighbours had heard him screaming, and rushed into the house from outside to discover the child on fire in his cot.

His mother, who was working in the fields, took him to hospital and since then he has caught fire another three times, she claimed.

Does spontaneous human combustion really exist?

One of the first serious accounts of it appeared in the august journal Philosophical Transactions Of The Royal Society in 1745, which recorded how a 62-year-old Italian countess had gone to bed one night feeling 'dull and heavy'. The next morning, all that was found in her bedroom was a pile of ash and her legs.

Many other cases followed, and by 1806, one scientist thought he had the answer. In An Essay On The Combustion Of Humans, Pierre Lair suggested that the problem was the demon drink, and he subtitled his article, Products Of The Abuse Of Spirituous Liquors.

The explanation that alcohol was to blame quickly caught on, especially among moralists who were against the hard stuff. In 1832, a popular Victorian magazine claimed all those who suddenly burst into flames were 'habitually drunken'.

The notion was so widespread that when Charles Dickens included an episode of spontaneous human combustion in his 1852 novel Bleak House, the victim — the villainous Mr Krook — was said to be 'continual in liquor'.

British research biologist Brian J. Ford argued in two articles, one of which appeared in the New Scientist, that spontaneous human combustion may be caused by a chemical called acetone that is produced naturally in the body, the chemical often used as a solvent in nail-varnish removers.

In healthy humans, acetone is normally disposed of through urine, but when people suffer from certain illnesses, acetone levels can build up in the body, and can even be smelled on the breath.

On the website Mumsnet, one poster wrote that her young daughter had 'acetone breath', and that 'apparently children have higher than normal acetone levels'.

Professor Ford has noted that many of the people who have combusted spontaneously were unwell at the time, and as a result, may have developed a condition called ketosis, in which acetone in the body increases.

Ketosis can have a range of causes, including alcoholism, diabetes, a high-fat diet, and even, in babies, teething.

Furthermore, acetone infuses itself well into human fat. And it is also extremely flammable.

Unable to find a human volunteer to test his theory that a build-up of acetone causes spontaneous human combustion, Professor Ford made a model from pieces of pork - the animal flesh that most closely approximates ours.

The 'pork puppet' was marinated in acetone, dressed in clothes, and placed in a chair. Professor Ford then held up a gas lighter, and the result was dramatic. The 'body' burst into a fireball, and in under an hour, it had been completely consumed by flames.

In fact, the acetone was so volatile, that even just a static spark from synthetic fabrics could have caused the conflagration.

All that was left - as is so often the case with spontaneous human combustion - were the legs, which Professor Ford suggests remain unburned because there is not enough fat in that part of the body to store the flammable acetone.