I've said it before and I'll say it again - some of the best stories I've ever published in this column have been supplied by taxi drivers.

Ghosts, UFOs, mystery animals ... I've been privileged to pen some fascinating columns on these subjects and more, thanks to these knights of the road, and I love 'em all.

Recently, a driver for one local company spilled the paranormal beans about an experience he had last year.

One night he'd picked up a passenger from Corbridge and was making his way to Newcastle upon Tyne.

The weather was fine, the sky was clear and even though it was dark, visibility was good on the road ahead.

Several minutes passed by and the driver found himself cruising down a lonely road flanked by bushes, trees and shrubbery on both sides.

Suddenly, he noticed something strange ahead; on the road was what looked like a localised area of mist.

"It was odd," the driver told me. "It was about 5ft or 6ft in height and just hung there. I'd never seen anything like it."

As the car approached the mist the driver slowed down, but as he did so the mist changed and took on a roughly human shape.

Instinctively the man swerved to miss the strange mist, and as the taxi sped forward once again, he said to his passenger, "Did you see that?" "Yes, I did," she answered.

Now it turns out that another driver had exactly the same experience at the same spot.

Morganton - No one knows the answer to the mountain's mystery, including C.W. Smith, who has probably spent as much time around fabled Brown Mountain as anyone alive.

Smith, 67, spent 33 years with the U.S. Forest Service, patrolling the Pisgah National Forest as a federal law enforcement agent beginning in 1966.

He knows every fold of the ridge and is familiar with its marquee mystery, the so-called Brown Mountain Lights.

He grew up in nearby McDowell County in western North Carolina and never much believed the stories about nocturnal flickerings. Then while working one night, he caught sight of what looked like a bonfire on the mountain, but in a place where there were no trails.

"It started going up the mountain, too fast for someone to be using mountain-climbing equipment. It went up to the ridge line and disappeared."

With that, Smith became a believer, he told a symposium on the phenomenon held Saturday at Morganton Municipal Auditorium.

"If you ever see them, you'll never forget it because you've never seen anything like it before."

A live webcam from Mount Teide Volcano Observatory captured a disk-shaped unidentified flying object flying across Mount Teide, Tenerife province, Spain on 27 October 2012.


Although Mount Teide has been a UFO hotspot over the years, this record is a completely unexpected result of Mount Teide Volcano Observatory researchers, as this webcam is set up to monitor the Mount Teide volcanic activities.

The video, posted in UFO Sightings Daily on 30 October 2012, captured a very clear image of the UFO flying across the mountain. The video recording was started on October 26, 2012 at 8 am and ended on October 27 around 8 am.

People who've seen the Bearilla say it's a beast with wolf-like features. sounds like something found only in fairy tales. But some researchers say people have seen the creature and even been attacked by it for decades right here in Kentucky. In LEX 18's Mystery Monday, Courtney Fischer goes in search of evidence of its existence.

Kentucky's back woods keeps quite a few secrets, secrets that if you're lucky will reveal themselves. But some, no matter how patient you are, stay hidden.

Bearilla lurks in the woods, so the experts say, with the last known sighting occurring in 1989.

The broad-shouldered beast has the body of a bear, and a long, pointed muzzle like a wolf, hands with dagger-like claws and canine teeth. It's allegedly been seen through parts of Kentucky, Wisconsin, Michigan, Canada and Pennsylvania, with dozens of sightings reported.

"Course, the first case in the 1940s," said researcher Ron Coffey. "A young boy claimed to be attacked on a creek bank by the creature. I do not discount that many eyewitnesses. Everybody's just not imagining things and making it up."

Units of the Indian Army and the Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force (ITBP) have reported Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOS) in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir. An ITBP unit based in Thakung, close to the Pangong Tso Lake, reported over 100 sightings of luminous objects between August 1 and October 15 this year. In reports sent to their Delhi headquarters in September, and to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), they described sighting "Unidentified Luminous Objects" at day and by night.

The yellowish spheres appear to lift off from the horizon on the Chinese side and slowly traverse the sky for three to five hours before disappearing. These were not unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS), drones or even low earth-orbiting satellites, say Army officials who have studied the hazy photographs taken by ITBP.

Drone sightings are verified and logged separately. The Army has reported 99 sightings of Chinese drones between January and August this year: 62 sightings were reported in the western sector, the Ladakh region, and 37 in the eastern sector in Arunachal Pradesh. Three of these drones intruded into territory claimed by India along the 365-km-long border with China in Ladakh, manned by ITBP. Such mysterious lights have been sighted before in Ladakh, a barren, 86,000 sq km heavily militarised zone wedged between Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and Chinese-occupied Aksai Chin. The persistent sightings by the ITBP this year, however, worried the Army's Leh-based 14 Corps. The ITBP, did not respond to a detailed India Today questionnaire.

In September, the Army moved a mobile ground-based radar unit and a spectrum analyser-that picks up frequencies emitted from any object-to a mountaintop near the 160-km-long, ribbon-shaped Pangong Lake that lies between India and China. The radar could not detect the object that was being tracked visually, in dicating it was non-metallic. The spectrum analyser could not detect any signals being emitted from them. The Army also flew a reconnaissance drone in the direction of the floating object, but it proved a futile exercise. The drone reached its maximum altitude but lost sight of the floating object.

Provo Canyon, Utah - A Utah man camping in Provo Canyon caught sight of - what he claims - was a black creature in the woods.

The video's description, named "Provo Canyon Bigfood Encounter?" on YouTube (above), says the man was camping near Squaw Peak and Little Rock Canyon Overlook when they saw deer up on the hill.

On their way up, the spotted what appeared to be a bear. But when "the monster stood up and looked right at us," they fled.

Columbia, Missouri -- It could take up to six months before conservation agents figure out what a Missouri hunter shot when the thought he was bagging an unusually large coyote.

The man -- who asked officials not to disclose his identity -- was hunting for deer Tuesday at Franklin Island Conservation Area when the animal came into range.

The Columbia Daily Tribune reports coyotes are in season and the man had a permit, so he shot what he thought was a state-record coyote.

But when it weighed 81 pounds -- seven pounds more than the national record -- a Cooper County conservation agent ordered it taken to a regional office for testing.

Experts say the animal could be a wolf, a large coyote or a hybrid animal with characteristics of both.

Houston -- Big Foot, the Chupacabra and the Loch Ness Monster -- they're all creatures of lore that have captivated mankind for centuries. But did you know that Houston has a legend of its own? We go back in time for a closer look at the case of the Houston Batman.

While most people are heading home, others gather for a different purpose -- to catch a glimpse of something hidden in the shadows.

"You can kind of see the awe on their faces when the bats come out en masse," said Suzanne Jurek, a zookeeper at the Houston Zoo and bat specialist.

The bats of the Waugh Street bridge are just getting up. It's a colony of 250,000 and every one of them is a nocturnal hunter.

"They fly for miles and they eat. It's all about the food," Jurek said.

"The most notorious reports of a flying humanoid is that of the Houston Batman," professional cryptozoologist Ken Gerhard said.

This tale takes us to Houston back in the 1950s, when it was a boomtown bursting at the seams.

It was 2:30am on June 18, 1953 in the Houston Heights. Three neighbors claimed they saw something extraordinary just a few feet from their home.

Hours later, the unearthly encounter was front-page news in the Houston Chronicle.

"There's really only one account that I'm aware of and it's a very chilling encounter," Gerhard said. "Subsequently, they were so horrified by their experience that they contacted the local police."

DNA 'tests' of hair supposedly from a Yeti in a Siberian cave show it comes from an unknown mammal closely related to man, it was claimed last night.

The alleged findings were revealed on the official website of a regional government in Russia.

It claimed that two tests were carried out in Russia and one in the US. These had agreed the hair came from a human-like creature which is not a Homo sapien yet is more closely related to man than a monkey, it was reported.

'We had ten samples of hair to study, and have concluded that they belong to mammal, but not a human, and not the animals known to the area where they were found, like a bear, or wolf, or goat, or any other animal,' Professor Valentin Sapunov was quoted as saying.

'It was a branch of our university in St Petersburg that carried out a DNA test, and the Zoological Institute of Russian Academy of Sciences. The tests were performed by laboratory of electronic microscopy and laboratory of molecular genealogical classification.'

A recent rash a triangular UFO's has US residents on edge, from Michigan to Texas.

There are startling similarities with the following three reports.

Lets take a few moments to review three recent reports.

The Examiner reported from Michigan;

A Michigan couple at Marshall reported they were shocked after watching a triangle-shaped object with four rows of bright lights that was hovering at tree top level about 4:20 a.m. on October 24, 2012, as they were traveling east on Michigan Avenue, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

The couple was returning from a casino at the time when they first noticed the lights and thought they were part of a tower.

"I happened to notice a bright light just over the trees on the north side of Michigan Avenue," the reporting witness stated. "I asked my husband if the city put up some kind of tower. He looked at it and said he did not think so."

But then they got closer to the object.

"The closer we got to it you could see it was a triangle with rows of bright lights and the object was silver in color. There were three lights on the first row, four on the next row of lights and maybe four lights on the next row. The lights were very bright, but a funny looking light. The light didn't seem to shine down like it was a spotlight. It was just so bright."

They watched the object hovering over the trees for about 40 seconds.

"I told my husband to turn around and he told me to get a picture. We turned south on Mulberry Street and turned in the first driveway. We could see it had started to move very slowly and as we got closer to it, it started to move faster and then it was gone. I looked at my husband just stunned. We traveled east about a mile and could not find it again. My husband asked me where did it go? We were both in shock. We had never seen anything like it before."