High Strangeness
It is the stuff of internet conspiracy theorists' dreams. A top secret, hypersonic, cold war spy plane that was allegedly flown by the Americans in UK airspace without the government's permission.
Publicly, the UK government played down newspaper stories about people who reported seeing UFO-like phenomena. But documents released under the Freedom of Information Act suggest the Ministry of Defence took the rumours much more seriously. Its investigations even threatened to strain the special relationship. "It does show that they were concerned that this thing did exist and the Americans were flying it around willy-nilly over the UK," said David Clarke, a social scientist at Sheffield Hallam University, who obtained the documents. "It certainly suggests that the British government suspected that they were being kept in the dark."
The United States has never confirmed the existence of the mysterious aircraft, called Aurora, which was supposedly designed to sneak at very high speed over the Soviet Union and take covert snaps of what the enemy was up to. It was rumoured to be capable of flying at up to mach 8 and so could reach anywhere on the planet in less than three hours. In the early 1990s there were a string of supposed sightings and strange sounds over Scotland which some bewildered locals attributed to UFOs. Rumours in the press that Aurora was operating secretly out of RAF Machrihanish on the tip of Kintyre prompted Scottish MPs to ask questions in parliament.
Almost thirty years ago, I received my first formal training in hypnosis. Over the years, I not only sought out additional training, I employed this skill on behalf of many troubled individuals. Until 1994, I had never encountered what is popularly known as an "abductee" - that is, an individual claiming to have been abducted by alleged aliens. I have to admit that when I did, it presented certain problems both in terms of having a well-established technique to deal with it, as well as my own categories of what is or is not possible.
I often tell people in a sort of joking way: of all the people who never wanted to know anything about aliens and UFOs, I deserve a place at the head of the line. Very few people really understand how deeply serious this remark is. When I opened the door to consider the possibility - quite remote as I thought - of the possibility of "other worldly" visitors, life as I knew it ended. That was eleven years ago. But then, a completely new life was born from the ashes. And so, here I am producing a book about UFOs and aliens. The road from there to here has been difficult, to understate the matter, and complicated by all the High Strangeness that seems to surround the subject.
Then it happened.
Dan Ciechanowski heard a noise that he described as the sound a missile makes and saw something moving across the sky at a 45-degree angle.
It smashed into a vacant lot next to his property with a crash that shook the foundation of his house.
"Numerous" eye-witnesses reported an unidentified flying object crashing into the sea on Saturday.
NSRI Shelley Beach station commander, Eddie Noyons, said eye-witnesses had reported an unidentified object - possibly an aircraft - crashing into the sea behind the breaker line off-shore of the Port Shepstone High School.
Police, rescue craft and a fixed wing aircraft were alerted to the scene to investigate.
Noyons said: "Following a full-scale search of the area covering 12 square nautical miles nothing has been found.
No one was injured when the ice hit sometime between 8:55 and 9:15 a.m. The ice broke into pieces in the lattice work above the floor of the unoccupied Opsahl Gymnasium.
Maintenance workers retrieved a chunk about twice the size of a man's head, double-bagged it and stuck it in a freezer to save for Federal Aviation Administration officials.
Jokes were flying Saturday morning after a block of solid ice, measuring more than two feet on a side, crashed to earth with a tremendous bang, digging a three-foot hole in the grass at Bushrod Park, 5800 Shattuck Ave.
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Comment: More information from this account of the ice slab incident:
"It was totally amazing. ... I saw this flash, like a streak. Then I saw this explosion, like a big boom! I came over and it (the field) was all covered with ice. Some were this big," Purat said, making a head-size circle with his two hands.
"El Chupacabra," they say, "is back."
Parents are cautious, warning their children to stay inside at night or risk a face-to-fang encounter with the chupacabra - a red-eyed, spiky-haired, blood-sucking creature with a green-blue tint to its hide.
The chupacabra haunts the minds of the residents in La Frontera, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Here, an amalgamation of cultures blend, represented by Gulf shrimp tacos, polka-inspired Tejano music, and young, white girls who also hold quinceneras, the Mexican teen rite-of-passage celebration.
Comment: Comment: The most dangerous blood sucking monster to come out of Texas is George W. Bush. He's worse than ten-thousand Chupacabras!
In January 2004, a retired policewoman and her husband reported seeing what looked like a Lancaster bomber flying impossibly low over the Rolls-Royce site at Bankfield.
Eerily, the craft made no noise and the two witnesses were so shocked by what they saw that they almost crashed their car.
Soon after, a Skipton aerial phenomena expert was inundated with phone calls from people all over Craven who reported similar sightings.
Most described what they saw as a low-flying Second World War bomber, grey in colour and with no markings. Several said they had seen it on the same day.
Comment: Another possible explanation: a meteorite.