In 1883, an astronomer observed hundreds of UFOs near the Sun

In August 1883, Mexican astronomer José Bonilla photographed an armada of unidentified objects filing across the solar disk. Ridiculed by Paris, ignored for a century, he would finally be vindicated by modern science — which revealed that the Earth may have narrowly escaped total annihilation that very day.

An ordinary morning at the desert observatory

On August 12, 1883, José Árbol y Bonilla, director of the Astronomical Observatory of the State of Zacatecas, was preparing his instrument for a session of solar sunspot observations. Nothing foretold the extraordinary. The sky was clear over the high plateaus of Zacatecas, at an altitude of 2,400 metres, and the morning light was sharp. The observatory itself was a young institution: inaugurated on December 6, 1882 — barely nine months earlier — it was the first major Mexican observatory founded outside the capital. Bonilla was its founding director, a man of scientific rigour who had trained in celestial photography during a stay at the Paris Observatory.

Then the objects appeared.

Dark, hazy, silhouetted against the white disk of the sun, they crossed the field of the telescope in successive groups. Bonilla observed them, counted them, sketched them, noted the precise time of their entry into and exit from the solar background. Some passed alone; others came in clusters of fifteen to twenty at a time. Their speed was variable — a fraction of a second to a full second to traverse the disk — their shapes, elongated and blurred, resisted all classification. The astronomer made a decision: he would photograph them.

Using the wet collodion plate process — the cutting-edge photographic technique of the era, which he had mastered in Paris — Bonilla exposed his plates at one hundredth of a second, keeping pace with the relentless appearance of the bodies. This work extended over two days: on August 12 he counted 283 distinct objects; on August 13, 164 more followed. In total, 447 entities crossed the sun over less than three and a half days of observation. Not a single other observatory in the world — neither Mexico City, nor Puebla, nor any European post — reported anything comparable.

Bonilla's silence, Paris's condescension

Bonilla's conduct in the aftermath of the observation is itself worthy of note. The astronomer did not yield to the temptation of sensationalism. He scrupulously recorded what he had seen, filed his plates, copied out his notes — and said nothing. He proposed no explanatory hypothesis. He invoked neither meteors, nor atmospheric phenomena, nor any pre-established category that might have allowed him to neatly close this inconvenient dossier.

It was not until two and a half years after the events that Bonilla resolved to submit his report to Camille Flammarion, founder and editor of the journalL'Astronomie, published in Paris since 1882. Flammarion was at the time one of the most influential figures in European scientific popularisation — author ofAstronomie populaire, published in 1880, founder in 1887 of the Société astronomique de France, an unclassifiable personality hovering between rationalism and mysticism. It was he who received the document from Zacatecas.

Paris's response was published on January 1, 1886, in the first issue ofL'Astronomiefor the new year. It was withering. The editorial staff proposed that the objects photographed by Bonilla were, in all likelihood, migratory birds flying at high altitude, or insects resting on the objective lens of the telescope. The argument was clever in its way: if the bodies had been a few centimetres from the lens — rather than out in space — their presence would have been detectable only at Zacatecas, which would account for the absence of any simultaneous observation elsewhere. Bonilla rejected this interpretation. But he did not press the matter. He had no counter-hypothesis to offer, and the Parisian journal had moved on.

For one hundred and twenty-eight years, the Zacatecas observation remained what astronomers call acuriosity without explanation— a documented fact, orphaned of meaning.

Vindication from UNAM: a cometary close pass

In 2011, three astronomers from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México reopened the case. Héctor Javier Durand Manterola, of the Geophysical Institute, María de la Paz Ramos Lara, and Guadalupe Cordero published on arXiv, the open preprint platform, a paper entitled:Interpretation of the observations made in 1883 in Zacatecas (Mexico): A fragmented Comet that nearly hits the Earth.

Their method was geometrical. By exploiting a simple fact — the objects had been observed only at Zacatecas, and not from Mexico City or Puebla, both situated a few hundred kilometres away — the researchers calculated the maximum distance at which the bodies could have been located and still remained invisible from those two other points. The result was vertiginous. The objects Bonilla photographed were not in the upper atmosphere. Nor were they halfway to the Sun. They were skimming the surface of the Earth.

According to the calculations of Durand Manterola and his colleagues, the fragments passed at a distance of between 538 and 8,062 kilometres from the Earth's surface. To appreciate this proximity: the International Space Station orbits at approximately 400 kilometres altitude. These objects grazed the Earth in the most literal sense of the term — within the low orbital belt, at an altitude humanity itself would not reach for another seventy-eight years.

The estimated dimensions of the fragments are equally unsettling: between 46 and 795 metres in width, between 68 and 1,022 metres in length. The individual mass of the bodies would have ranged from several hundred million to several trillion kilograms. The total mass of the parent object — before fragmentation — would have been comparable to that of Halley's Comet, perhaps several times greater.

The Shoemaker-Levy analogy and the comet that did not strike

The most illuminating scientific precedent is that of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Discovered in March 1993 by astronomers Carolyn and Eugene Shoemaker and David Levy at the Palomar Observatory, it had already been captured by Jupiter and had fragmented during a passage too close to the gas giant in July 1992. In July 1994, its twenty-odd debris fragments struck Jupiter in succession, leaving scars in its atmosphere the size of the Earth, visible through amateur telescopes worldwide. The energy released was estimated at several million megatons of TNT.

What the UNAM astronomers suggest is that on August 12, 1883, a comet comparable in scale to Shoemaker-Levy — perhaps more massive — grazed the Earth without a single human being, save for José Bonilla, bearing witness. Had the trajectory differed by a few thousand kilometres, had even one fragment struck the atmosphere rather than grazing it, the impacts could have triggered planetary tsunamis, dust clouds blotting out the sun for years, a mass extinction event. The industrial civilisation of the era — at the very dawn of the Belle Époque, a decade before the Berlin Conference and the scramble for Africa — might have been annihilated without ever understanding what struck it.

In his original notes, as reproduced inL'Astronomieof 1886, Bonilla himself described the behaviour of the bodies with a precision that strikes with retrospective force:"Their time intervals were variable, a body passing through would not take more than one third, half a second, or at most one second to cross the disc, and a minute or two passed before others appeared — some passed as 15 or 20 at once, so that it was difficult to count them. I drew the trajectory of many of these bodies on the solar disc, marking their 'entrances' and 'exits' on the paper."

The photographs: the first images of a UFO?

Bonilla's photographic plates, preserved in the archives of the Zacatecas Observatory, occupy a singular place in the history of astronomical imagery. They constitute one of the very first photographs of unidentified flying objects ever made. This fact, long seized upon by the ufological literature of the latter half of the twentieth century — Jimmy Guieu, Frank Edwards, and Henry Durrant each referenced them in works of widely varying interpretive licence — acquires an entirely different significance in the light of the 2011 research: the photographed objects were real, solid, of colossal dimensions, and situated at near-orbital range from the Earth.

Popular ufology embroidered these images with enthusiasm: extraterrestrial vessels, secret military formations, unknown airships. All such interpretations founder on a single observation: in 1883, no earthly power possessed a fleet of 447 aerial craft capable of orbiting at less than 8,000 kilometres altitude. The truth, as reconstructed by the Mexican astronomers of the twenty-first century, is more dizzying still: these were cometary debris in a grazing transit, a string of celestial boulders of which the smallest exceeded the height of a multi-storey building, and the largest rivalled the largest asteroids of the main belt.

Bonilla, a man of measure before the unnameable

Perhaps the most arresting aspect of this affair remains the intellectual posture of Bonilla himself. Trained in Paris in the tradition of observational rigour, director of a peripheral observatory in a nation still seeking international scientific recognition, this man confronted the inexplicable and chose the only truly scientific attitude: to record without concluding. He did not seek to impose an explanation. He did not inflate his figures. He noted 283 objects on the first day, 164 on the second, described their trajectories, photographed their blurred silhouettes, and submitted his report without embellishment.

The international community treated him with condescension. Paris found birds where Bonilla had seen solid bodies crossing space at prodigious speeds. History proved Paris wrong.

In 2011, a century and a quarter after the events, Mexican astronomers — working in the same country, in the same national tradition that had formed Bonilla — reread his notes, reworked his geometry, and established that on that August morning in 1883, on the high plateaus of Zacatecas, the Earth had narrowly escaped an extinction-level catastrophe without ever knowing it. The solitary observer who had watched the Sun that day and faithfully recorded what he saw was the only human being on Earth to have been, in utter unknowing, witness to one of the greatest close calls in the history of our planet.

---

Archival Document — Extract from José Bonilla's report, published inL'Astronomie, January 1, 1886

"On August 12, 1883, at the Observatory of Zacatecas, I observed a great number of dark, opaque bodies crossing the solar disk in various directions. Their intervals were irregular, the duration of their transit varying between one third and one full second. Some moved in isolation; others appeared in groups of fifteen to twenty units, making their enumeration difficult. I traced on paper the trajectories of several of them, noting their points of entry and exit on the disk. Their nature remains, to my mind, unexplained."

— José Árbol y Bonilla, Director of the Astronomical Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico

Légende - Photo
, Domaine public,

Sources

Tags

U.F.O.

Egypt – A papyrus recounts the appearance of a UFO in ancient times

A thirty-five-century-old Egyptian papyrus records what may be the earliest written account of unidentified objects ever set down in writing. But did this crucial — and untraceable — document ever truly exist?

Year 22 of the Reign: A Morning Like No Other

In the twenty-second year of the reign of Thutmose III, during the third month of winter, at the sixth hour of the day — roughly noon by the solar reckoning of ancient Egypt — the scribes of the "House of Life" noticed something unusual in the sky. What they saw brought them to their knees. They prostrated themselves, then ran to warn the Pharaoh.

The House of Life — thePer Ankh— was no mere scriptorium. It was the highest intellectual institution in Egypt, a place where astronomers, physicians, and theologians worked side by side under the protection of Thoth, god of knowledge. By the standards of their time, the men who witnessed this phenomenon were the most qualified observers imaginable.

Here is the translation of the text as established by Prince Boris de Rachewiltz in the 1950s:

"In the year 22, in the third month of winter, at the sixth hour of the day, the scribes of the House of Life perceived a circle of fire coming from the sky. It had no head; from its mouth came a foul breath. Its body was one rod long and one rod wide. It had no voice. The hearts of the scribes were troubled and they threw themselves upon their bellies. They went to report it to Pharaoh. His Majesty ordered that the scrolls kept in the House of Life be consulted."

Several days later, according to the same text, the phenomena multiplied until they outshone the sun itself and filled "the four corners of the sky." The Pharaoh's army watched them in formation. Fish and birds fell from the sky. The Pharaoh ordered incense to be burned, commanded that the event be recorded for all eternity in the Annals of the House of Life, and declared the day worthy of remembrance.

Thutmose III, the Napoleon of the Pharaohs

To grasp the weight of this testimony, one must understand its context. Thutmose III — also spelled Tuthmosis or Thothmes — is regarded by Egyptologists as one of the greatest rulers ancient Egypt ever produced. His official reign stretches from approximately 1479 to 1425 BCE, though he first served as co-regent under his stepmother Hatshepsut for nearly twenty-two years.

Nicknamed the "Napoleon of Ancient Egypt," he led seventeen major military campaigns, pushing the empire of the Nile north to the Euphrates and south to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile. His victory at the Battle of Megiddo in 1457 BCE — whose account was engraved on the walls of the temple of Karnak by his personal secretary Tjaneni — remains one of the earliest documented battles in human history.

It was a man accustomed to military marvels, to grandeur and the close observation of the world, who found himself facing the blazing sky of that mysterious winter. That this pharaoh, who had erected stelae from the Euphrates to Sudan, judged this aerial phenomenon remarkable enough to immortalise it in his official annals speaks volumes about what his scribes reported.

Alberto Tulli and the Cairo Bazaar

The papyrus would never have entered modern consciousness without an incident that took place in 1933 in a Cairo bazaar. Alberto Tulli, then director of the Egyptian section of the Vatican Museums, was browsing among antique dealers when he reportedly came across a papyrus fragment bearing, he believed, a passage from the Annals of Thutmose III. The asking price exceeded his means. He therefore had the text copied by hand, replacing the original hieratic script with hieroglyphics — a procedure then common in scholarly circles.

Tulli returned to Rome with his transcription. The original papyrus remained in Cairo in the hands of a dealer known as "Tano" — most likely Phokion J. Tanos, a well-regarded Cairo antiquarian. What became of the original document thereafter is unknown.

Upon Alberto Tulli's death, his papers were bequeathed to his brother, a priest at the Lateran Palace. When that brother died in turn, his possessions were dispersed among various heirs. The papyrus transcription vanished in the process.

Prince de Rachewiltz Steps onto the Stage

The affair resurfaced in 1953. Prince Boris de Rachewiltz — an Italo-Russian scholar, self-taught Egyptologist, and, by marriage, son-in-law of the poet Ezra Pound — claimed to have found the famous transcription among the late Tulli's papers. He published a translation inDoubt, the journal of the Fortean Society, and declared that the text formed an integral part of the Annals of Thutmose III.

Rachewiltz noted that the retranscription from hieratic into hieroglyphics had been carried out not by Tulli himself, but by Dr. Étienne Drioton, a celebrated Egyptologist and then director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Drioton's name lent the enterprise considerable scholarly credibility.

A second, independent translation was produced by American anthropologist R. Cedric Leonard, who described "burning disks" where Rachewiltz had written "circles of fire" — a minor divergence reflecting less a contradiction than the inherent complexity of hieroglyphic language, whose signs may carry several interpretations depending on ritual or astronomical context.

A Chain of Doubts

The story of the Tulli Papyrus is also the story of a chain of intermediaries that no one can verify today. In 1968, investigator Samuel Rosenberg, tasked with writing a section of the Condon Report on UFOs, cabled the Vatican seeking clarification. The reply from Gianfranco Nolli, then inspector of the Vatican Museums' Egyptian section, was terse:"Papyrus Tulli not property of Vatican Museum. Now it is dispersed and no more traceable."

Worse still, Rachewiltz later admitted that he had never held the papyrus in his hands, acknowledging that his translation was based on notes taken by Tulli during a brief consultation of the document at "Tano's" home in Cairo in 1934. What existed, then, was not a papyrus — not even a complete copy — but a translation of a transcription of notes from a viewing of an original document now lost. Ufologists Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck, in their landmark reference workWonders in the Sky(2010), described the affair plainly as a hoax.

Rosenberg went further, suggesting that the text might be a disguised borrowing from the Book of Ezekiel — the "wheels of fire" of that prophetic vision bearing a troubling resemblance to the Tulli Papyrus's "circles of fire." Other researchers, less categorical, advanced natural explanations: a grazing comet, a bolide meteor, a St. Elmo's fire-type electrical phenomenon amplified by the atmosphere of the Nile Delta.

What the Text Says — and Does Not Say

Setting aside the authenticity debate, the text itself rewards careful reading. Several details stand out for the analyst. First, the absence of a head: in hieroglyphics, describing an object without a head means it has no visible leading part — a formulation that sits awkwardly with a comet or meteor, both of which present an identifiable trajectory. Second, the foul odour: this unexpected sensory detail appears nowhere in the standard astronomical descriptions left by Egyptian sky-watchers, who concerned themselves with shapes, colours, and movements — never smells. Third, the duration: the phenomenon lasted several days, ruling out most instantaneous meteoritic events.

The unit of measure — one "rod" — equalled approximately 52 centimetres by the Egyptian standard of the era, suggesting an object of relatively modest apparent size, perhaps observed at low altitude from the ground. Several researchers have noted that describing an object as having "no voice" reflects genuine surprise: the scribes expected a sound, and heard none.

A Ghost in the History of Ufology

Whatever the truth of its origins, the Tulli Papyrus has taken on a life of its own in the mythology of the unexplained. It is cited in dozens of works devoted to historical UFO sightings, often presented as the centrepiece of an ancient extraterrestrial contact file. Zecharia Sitchin, author of the controversialEarth Chroniclesseries, even claimed — without ever producing evidence — that Thutmose III had been taken aboard one of these celestial craft.

Yet the document illuminates a broader truth: since antiquity, human beings have looked up at the sky with wonder edged with dread, and even the most learned scribes have sometimes been unable to name what they saw. Whether in Nuremberg in 1561, New Zealand in 1909, or the skies over Boston in 1639, the heavens have always kept their secrets — and they keep them well.

The Tulli Papyrus, authentic or not, embodies a fundamental truth: humanity has been searching for answers up above far longer than it is ready to admit.

---

Archival Document: Translation of the Tulli Papyrus

Translation by Prince Boris de Rachewiltz, published in Doubt, No. 41, 1953

"In the year 22, in the third month of winter, at the sixth hour of the day, the scribes of the House of Life perceived a circle of fire coming from the sky. It had no head; from its mouth came a foul breath. Its body was one rod long and one rod wide. It had no voice. The hearts of the scribes were troubled and they threw themselves upon their bellies. They went to report it to Pharaoh. His Majesty ordered that the scrolls kept in the House of Life be consulted. After some days had passed, these things became more numerous in the sky. Their splendour exceeded that of the sun and extended to the four corners of the sky. The army of Pharaoh watched with him in their midst. It was after the evening meal. Then these circles of fire ascended higher in the sky and moved toward the south. Fish and birds rained down from the sky. A marvel never witnessed since the founding of their land [...] And Pharaoh caused incense to be burned to make peace with the Earth [...] and what had happened was ordered to be written in the Annals of the House of Life so that it be remembered for all time."

Légende - Photo
Gemini, CC0,

Sources

Tags

U.F.O.

Psychic Predicts Alien Invasion During Scotland-Brazil Match

The friendly match between Scotland and Brazil, scheduled for tonight in Miami, is drawing media attention that goes far beyond the purely sporting context. While the fixture offers an interesting clash on the pitch, it has found itself at the center of a wave of bizarre speculation on social media, blending UFO theories with viral belief trends.

A Viral Rumor with Millions of Followers

The origin of this buzz comes from Vó Bahiana, an influential figure in the Brazilian digital landscape. Followed by a community of 23 million people on Instagram, the psychic published a series of statements claiming to have had a premonition of a major incident during the match.

"I dreamed that aliens invaded a football pitch and that players were taken away by the first ship that arrived."

According to her predictions, the match will be brutally interrupted by a large-scale extraterrestrial manifestation. The post describes a crisis scenario involving panic in the stadium stands and the appearance of spacecraft flying over the pitch.

Football Stars Targeted by the "Prediction"

Beyond the spectacular nature of these claims, the psychic explicitly named high-profile figures from the Brazilian national team.

• An Abduction Scenario: The claims evoke the disappearance of spectators as well as the abduction of several professional players.

• The Mentioned Players: Star forwards Neymar and Vinícius Jr. were explicitly cited as the primary targets of this alleged intergalactic event.

While these claims clearly stem from digital folklore or a calculated audience strategy, they illustrate how quickly alternative theories can capture the public's attention ahead of major sporting events. Observers will ultimately focus on the very real security and logistical challenges of this fixture in Miami, far removed from science fiction theories.

Légende - Photo
Grok, CC0,

Sources

Tags

Alien

In 1639, a UFO was observed over Boston, Massachusetts

On March 1, 1639, three men drift on a river near Boston, facing a light that changes shape, darts like an arrow, then vanishes — leaving them inexplicably carried back a mile upstream, against the tide, with no memory of having rowed.

Boston, Massachusetts — Nearly four centuries before the acronyms UAP and UFO entered everyday speech, a text of thoroughly Puritan sobriety already recorded an encounter that posterity would, not without irony, come to regard as the first reported unidentified flying object on North American soil. The author was neither a drunken sailor nor a sensation-seeking pamphleteer: it was John Winthrop himself, first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founder of Boston, and author of the celebrated "city upon a hill" sermon. His journal, a cornerstone of American colonial historiography, devotes an entry to an episode that stands in sharp contrast to his usual notations on harvests, conflicts with Algonquian tribes, or the theological disputes then roiling the young colony.

An ordinary night on the Muddy River

The affair begins modestly. James Everell, described by Winthrop as "a sober, discreet man," boards a lighter — a flat-bottomed barge used for transporting goods — with two companions, to make their way down the Muddy River, a tributary of the Charles River that in 1639 wound through the marshes of what is now Back Bay, before that neighborhood was filled in during the nineteenth century. The area, today absorbed into the urban fabric of Boston and Brookline near present-day Fenway Park, was at the time little more than a stretch of mudflats and brackish water bordered by pastures where livestock grazed during the summer months.

It is in this setting that, according to the account Winthrop recorded, an unusually intense light appeared.

The governor's account

The journal entry, dated March 1, 1639, deserves to be examined in full, so sharply does its precision contrast with Winthrop's usually terse style. When the light stood still, it flamed up and measured, by the witnesses' estimate, about three yards square — roughly nine feet, or just under three meters. When it moved, it contracted and took on the shape of a swine, racing then with the speed of an arrow toward Charlestown on the opposite bank, repeating this pattern for two to three hours.

But it is the rest of the account that has, more than anything else, fed the legend. The three men, who had drifted nearly a mile downstream on the current while watching the phenomenon, found that once the light vanished, their boat had been carried back to its starting point — against the tide — with none of them recalling having rowed. Winthrop adds, finally, that "divers other credible persons" reportedly saw the same light afterward, in the same place.

A man whose word carried weight

The identity of the principal witness is no small detail in a Puritan society where the credibility of any account rested entirely on the reputation of the person reporting it. Winthrop takes care to note that Everell enjoyed "good reputation, activity and estate" in Boston — a way, in the language of the time, of certifying that he was neither a drunkard nor a teller of tall tales. For a governor concerned with the moral order of his colony, recording such an episode without disputing it amounted to lending it considerable credit.

Nick Pope, a former investigator for the British Ministry of Defence on unidentified aerial phenomena, has recently pointed out that the rigor of the testimony fits a pattern observed in many contemporary reports: the most frequently cited witnesses today — pilots, police officers, military personnel, radar operators — are likewise chosen for their presumed seriousness and sobriety.

The will-o'-the-wisp hypothesis, and its limits

The explanation most commonly advanced by later commentators points to ignis fatuus, the "will-o'-the-wisp" phenomenon resulting from the spontaneous combustion of gases released by decomposing organic matter in marshy ground — and the Muddy River, whose very name evokes mud, offered fertile terrain for such an effect. James Savage, who republished Winthrop's journal in 1825, already advanced this explanation in a footnote, suggesting that the prevailing fear and the imagination of the age, quick to see the hand of the devil in any unexplained event, had likely amplified what was at bottom a natural occurrence.

The hypothesis, however, runs into several details of the account. A will-o'-the-wisp is a phenomenon that rises from the ground and generally stays close to the marsh surface; it does not cross, in a matter of seconds, the more than two-mile distance separating the Muddy River from Charlestown, nor does it dart "as swift as an arrow" across the night sky. The meteor hypothesis, for its part, runs up against the duration of the observation — two to three hours — far longer than the few seconds a fireball remains visible. As for the aurora borealis, its presence at Boston's latitude remains possible but rare, and explains neither the erratic movement nor the shape attributed to the light.

The detail of the swine, or the memory of daily life

There remains the more troubling question of the animal shape described by the witnesses. Some researchers see in it a purely psychological clue: the Muddy River and its surroundings then served as summer pasture for swine destined for slaughter, the hamlet itself later taking the name Brookline. It is not implausible that the three men, having encountered or heard pigs earlier that day, unconsciously projected this familiar image onto a luminous mass of indefinite shape — a hypothesis that takes nothing away from the sincerity of the testimony, but that raises questions about how the human mind shapes the inexplicable out of the familiar.

A colony under theological strain

The episode occurs in a context worth bearing in mind for anyone seeking to understand the colony's state of mind in 1639. Only months earlier, in 1638, Winthrop had presided over the banishment of Anne Hutchinson, the central figure of the Antinomian Controversy that had deeply divided the Puritan community over questions of divine grace and religious authority. In a society that had just lived through this major theological crisis, and that interpreted the slightest natural event as a possible sign of divine will — or of diabolical interference — the appearance of an elusive light above the water could only fuel the widest range of speculation.

Winthrop himself offers no interpretation of the episode in his journal, unlike other entries where he does not hesitate to invoke the workings of "the evil one." This interpretive silence, from a man otherwise quick to comment on signs of Providence, has often been noted by researchers who have studied the text.

"When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton, and so up and down about two or three hours."

— John Winthrop, personal journal, March 1, 1639

Archival document

Excerpt from John Winthrop's journal, "The History of New England from 1630 to 1649," entry of March 1, 1639:

"In this year one James Everell, a sober, discreet man, and two others, saw a great light in the night at Muddy River. When it stood still, it flamed up, and was about three yards square; when it ran, it was contracted into the figure of a swine: it ran as swift as an arrow towards Charlton [Charlestown], and so up and down about two or three hours. They were come down in their lighter about a mile, and, when it was over, they found themselves carried quite back against the tide to the place they came from. Divers other credible persons saw the same light, after, about the same place."

A precedent that did not stand alone

Winthrop's journal does not end there. Five years later, on January 18, 1644, the governor recorded a further troubling episode: three men returning to Boston by boat reportedly saw two lights rise from the water near the town's north point, take on a human form, approach the town, then disappear near the south point. A week later, another account describes a mysterious voice rising from the harbor waters, which Winthrop linked to a ship explosion and to the memory of a missing sailor suspected during his lifetime of practicing necromancy. These repeated occurrences, all recorded by the same careful hand, suggest that the 1639 episode was no isolated anecdote in the governor's mind, but part of a series of observations he considered serious enough to archive.

The memory of the place, today

The episode has not faded into obscurity. In 2019, artists Ann Hirsch and Jeremy Angier installed an artwork titled "Winthrop's UFO" along the Muddy River, in the landscaped park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted in Brookline — a luminous structure evoking the swine-like silhouette described nearly four centuries earlier. The site, today wedged between sports infrastructure and the landscaped grounds of the Emerald Necklace, thus preserves a tangible trace of a mystery born in the darkness of the colonial marshes.

What remains of the mystery

Nearly four centuries after the fact, the Muddy River episode remains in that gray zone where the historian runs up against the limits of the discipline. The source text suffers from no ambiguity of transmission: it comes from a firsthand document, written by one of the most influential and best-documented figures of colonial America, and corroborated, by his own account, by several independent witnesses. None of the natural explanations advanced — will-o'-the-wisp, meteor, aurora borealis — accounts for every element reported: the duration of the sighting, the erratic trajectory, and above all that lost hour the three men could never explain. What remains, as is so often the case with these old archives, is the impossibility of choosing between a misperception, a tale amplified through repeated retellings, and the slender but never quite dismissible possibility that something genuinely unexplained occurred that night above the marshes of Boston.

Légende - Photo
Gemini, CC0,

Sources

Tags

U.F.O.

A flying saucer motionless in the sky over West Richland, Washington

On May 31, a witness observed a disk-shaped craft above the hills overlooking Vantage Highway, just a few miles from the Hanford nuclear site. The object, whose lower half reflected sunlight "like a mirror," vanished within seconds — a pattern echoed by dozens of other accounts recorded along this corridor over the past eight decades.

It was 10:04 a.m. on Sunday, May 31, 2026, when a driver traveling along Vantage Highway, north of West Richland, Washington, looked up toward the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain. According to the report he filed that same evening with the National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC), headquartered nearby outside Spokane, he spotted a shape he initially compared to a blimp hanging motionless in the air.

"It was a disk, the upper half a dark color, the lower half a blinding chrome, with the sun reflecting off it," he wrote in his statement. He placed the object roughly four to five miles away, to the southeast, at an elevation angle of about 45 degrees. It showed no movement whatsoever. "It was stationary, huge. I saw it for three to six seconds. Then it disappeared instantly, like a cloak had been thrown over it."

The witness, alone in his vehicle at the time, stressed the intensity of the metallic glare: "I can't express enough how much the bottom half of the craft shined." No trajectory, no acceleration, no sound is mentioned in the report. Rather than fleeing, the object seems to have simply switched off — a pattern ufologists sometimes call "instantaneous occultation," documented in several hundred cases worldwide without any optical or atmospheric explanation reaching consensus.

Hanford, the most fertile ground in the country for unidentified craft

Taken alone, this single account could be dismissed as an optical illusion or the glint of a conventional aircraft. But its location places it squarely within a landscape steeped in history. West Richland borders the Hanford Site, the former plutonium production complex built in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, which supplied the fissile material for the first atomic test at Trinity and for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

Researchers who study the Hanford file trace the earliest sightings back to the very period of the site's construction. By late 1942, the location had been chosen to host the world's first plutonium production facility, with no prior interactions with unidentified craft recorded anywhere in Washington State. But within months of the completion of the first production unit, "B Reactor," in September 1944, unexplained radar "blips" began appearing over the installation.

Correspondence later retrieved by researchers at the Project 1947 archive documents the account of Commander R. W. Hendershot, tasked with investigating these unidentified radar returns detected in late 1944 and early 1945. The matter grew serious enough that local military command became formally involved. Colonel Franklin Matthias, the officer in charge of the Hanford Engineer Works during the war and the man responsible for the press briefing held after the bombing of Hiroshima, later confirmed that radar had been installed "when we saw, or thought we saw, unidentified aircraft operating." He noted that an arrangement had been struck between Hanford and the Navy under which fighter pilots from the 9th Service Command would defend the site against aircraft of any kind.

Those pilots were called into action on several more unsettling occasions in January 1945, when unidentified objects were reported on at least three separate instances over Hanford's plutonium production plant. One of the fighter pilots involved, Clarence R. Clem, described them as "bright, reddish-orange fireballs… with no form, no substance."

A corridor that has never stopped drawing eyes skyward

Far from fading after the war, the phenomenon persisted across the following decades. One account gathered more recently recalls a night in the summer of 1965 when an entire family reportedly watched roughly a hundred glowing, capsule-shaped objects scattered across several hundred acres of Hanford's shrub-steppe land, remaining lit for hours without any change in intensity — a scene the witness still counts among the most vivid memories of his childhood.

According to Dan Nims, a Walla Walla-based representative of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), sightings at Hanford actually predate the famous 1947 wave, going back to 1944 and 1945, when the site, in the midst of wartime, was an extremely sensitive and closely guarded area. More recently, a worker at the nuclear reservation driving north across the site at night was startled by a vertical, cigar-shaped object outfitted with lights, hovering more than 500 feet in the air. "As I was looking at it, it disappeared," he reported to MUFON, before the same object reappeared, this time "much closer and directly on top of me," measuring an estimated 100 to 300 feet in length.

Nims, who spends part of his time collecting such accounts on MUFON's behalf, points to a hypothesis frequently debated in ufological circles: nuclear installations — whether power plants, nuclear-equipped naval vessels, or weapons sites like Hanford — appear to draw a disproportionate number of sightings. Some researchers argue that the trigger may have been the detonation of the first atomic weapons themselves, marking, in the eyes of hypothetical observers, a major technological leap for the human species.

The area encompassing Hanford and Benton and Franklin counties remains, according to figures cited by both MUFON and NUFORC, one of the hottest spots in Washington State for sightings, with the two organizations together logging between ten and twelve thousand reports nationwide every year.

West Richland, already no stranger to the phenomenon

The May 31 sighting is not the first to come specifically out of West Richland. One witness previously reported, from Keene Road facing Rattlesnake Mountain, a metallic flash observed in broad daylight, with no visible object and no clouds in the sky aside from the glare itself — a flash that repeated four times before fading away in the direction of Hanford, in a description strikingly similar to the one gathered this spring.

"It was stationary, huge. I saw it for three to six seconds. Then it disappeared instantly, like a cloak had been thrown over it."

— Excerpt from NUFORC report no. 198204, filed May 31, 2026

The shadow of Maury Island and the birth of the modern era

It is hard to discuss the skies over Washington State without circling back to the founding event of modern ufology. The dawn of the modern UFO age is generally traced to 1947, when Bill Bequette, then a young reporter at the East Oregonian in Pendleton, wrote a short story about the extraordinary sighting reported by pilot Kenneth Arnold. Arnold was flying between Chehalis and Yakima when he spotted a string of nine objects speeding in formation past Mount Rainier, at a speed he estimated at roughly 1,200 miles per hour.

Just days after that now-legendary sighting came the so-called Maury Island incident in Puget Sound, where a harbor patrolman reported seeing six circular, doughnut-shaped objects. Some theorists have tried to link the episode, without credible evidence, to radioactive waste from Hanford — a claim historians of the case now consider unsupported by any documentation, since Hanford's waste has always been kept under strict containment on-site.

What to make of this latest report

Taken on its own, the May 31 account amounts to a brief sighting, uncorroborated by other witnesses and unsupported by radar or photographic evidence. Still, the profile described — a motionless, reflective disk followed by an instantaneous disappearance with no transition — remains consistent with a significant number of earlier reports gathered from this specific stretch of American territory, which has drawn disproportionate attention from witnesses and researchers alike for more than eight decades.

One question remains that even partially declassified military archives have never settled: why does this stretch of arid land along the Columbia River — birthplace of America's plutonium program — continue, generation after generation, to draw these silent apparitions?

Légende - Photo
Grok, CC0,

Sources

• nuforc.org

Tags

U.F.O.

According to a CIA report, a UFO landed in Armenia on August 4, 1991

A telegram from the Interfax news agency, unearthed from the CIA's declassified reading room, reports the landing of an unidentified object in a mountain pass near Yerevan on August 4, 1991 — two weeks before the putsch that hastened the collapse of the USSR. The craft remained for nearly six hours, constantly changing shape, watched by a village that never dared to approach.

It was around half past nine in the evening on Sunday, August 4, 1991, when the sky above the village of Atsavan — a handful of houses clinging to the foothills overlooking Yerevan, some twelve kilometers to the south — lit up with a glow that nothing had foretold. The object, according to witnesses interviewed the following day by the Interfax news agency, came down in the pass overlooking the village and did not leave until three o'clock in the morning. For nearly six hours its lights flickered and its outline kept shifting — and not a single soul in the village found the courage to draw near.

A Telegram Slipped Out of the Silence of the Archives

The document carries a dry, anonymous file number: DOC_0005517731. Today it sits in the digital shelves of the CIA's electronic reading room, among thousands of other now-declassified telegrams — the agency's well-known "UFO files," gradually made public since the 1990s. The format is the austere one typical of the era's cables: the marking "UNCLAS" (unclassified), a serial number — OW0508195491 — a country code ("USSR"), and the terse subject line: "UFO Reportedly Lands In Mountain Pass Near Yerevan."

The source, however, is more puzzling. The telegram attributes the report to an agency called the "Norutium Service News Agency" — a name that matches no known Soviet or Armenian press agency. Everything points to a scanning corruption: perhaps a garbling of "Noyan Tapan," the Armenian agency founded that very same year, 1991, or a distorted transcription of "Novosti." Whatever the case, the error — or the mystery — has sat frozen in the archives for more than three decades, with no correction ever appearing.

Stranger still: the document closes, after the final notation "(ENDALL) BT," with four characters in the Hebrew alphabet that serve no apparent function in the body of the text. A scanning artifact, the residue of an archival stamp, or simply the technical noise of a 1990s scanner? No source consulted by The Strange Courier offers any explanation for this phantom signature, which closes the document on a note as enigmatic as its contents.

Atsavan: A Pass in the Shadow of Sacred Mountains

Atsavan appears on no tourist map. The telegram places it twelve to fifteen kilometers from Yerevan — a distance that, given Armenia's rugged topography, can mean an hour's drive along switchback roads through volcanic foothills. The region as a whole, shaped by several hundred now-extinct volcanic formations, is one of the most geologically restless in Eurasia: the Anatolian and Arabian tectonic plates still grind against each other here, producing steep ridges, narrow passes, and nights of an almost total darkness, far from any light pollution.

A few dozen kilometers to the west rises Aragats, Armenia's highest peak since Mount Ararat passed under Turkish sovereignty in 1915. Its name, according to the tradition recorded by the medieval historian Movses Khorenatsi, is said to mean "the throne of Ara" — Ara the Beautiful, a legendary hero whose exploits still haunt the mountain's trails. It was on its slopes that the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory was founded in 1946, one of the great centers of Soviet cosmic research. A region, then, where eyes have turned skyward for centuries — for reasons sometimes scientific, sometimes sacred.

A Shape That Refused to Settle

The telegram's description is brief, but it contains the two elements that, in UFO literature, mark out the most unsettling encounters: unstable luminosity and a shifting morphology.

"The object remained in place until three o'clock in the morning, its lights flickering and its shape changing — yet no one dared to approach it."

This kind of behavior — a stationary object whose brightness varies and whose contours seem to rearrange themselves in the darkness — recurs in numerous reports compiled since by databases such as NUFORC's, or by researchers studying unidentified anomalous phenomena. Several hypotheses compete: a cluster of separate lights flying in formation, perceived from a distance as a single moving object; a plasma-like phenomenon, whose luminous envelope pulses with electromagnetic fluctuations; or, more prosaically, a nighttime optical effect amplified by fatigue and apprehension. The telegram itself takes no position — it simply records the observation, raw, without comment or hypothesis.

Five and a Half Hours of Shared Stillness

What stands out in this brief report is less the apparition itself than its duration. Five and a half hours — from 9:30 p.m. to 3 a.m. — is a remarkably long exposure for an unidentified aerial phenomenon. Most sightings logged in specialized databases last minutes, occasionally tens of minutes in the most notable cases. A presence of this length implies either a genuinely stationary object on the ground, as suggested by the dispatch's use of the word "landed," or a collective scene in which different witnesses kept watch in shifts from dusk until dawn.

And yet, over six hours, no one in Atsavan crossed the distance separating the village from the pass. Reports of prolonged sightings are often accompanied, in the specialized literature, by a form of collective stupor — a reluctance that goes beyond ordinary caution, which some witnesses later describe as a physical inability to move rather than a conscious choice to keep their distance. The telegram does not say whether the people of Atsavan experienced any such effect, or whether they simply preferred, on a moonless Caucasian night, not to walk toward a light they did not understand.

The Shadow of Voronezh, Two Years Earlier

The Atsavan report is not an isolated case in the Soviet skies of the late 1980s. Less than two years earlier, on September 27, 1989, the official TASS agency had distributed one of the most extraordinary accounts in the entire history of ufology: in a park in Voronezh, an industrial city roughly 500 kilometers south of Moscow, a group of children claimed to have seen a spherical object land, from which emerged a towering being with three eyes, accompanied by a robot. The story circled the globe, to the point — according to several commentators at the time — of turning Voronezh into a pilgrimage site for foreign correspondents based in Moscow.

The aftermath was, as so often, more mundane: the "extraterrestrial rocks" collected at the scene turned out to be hematite, a mineral common in Russia, and an official at the local geophysical laboratory suggested that TASS had considerably embellished the original testimonies. But the context itself was never seriously questioned: a Soviet Union deep in perestroika, where the press had suddenly discovered the freedom to relay — even to stir up — sensations that, a few years earlier, would have been instantly suppressed.

The Atsavan telegram belongs to that same current: a brief dispatch, with no apparent in-depth investigation, relayed by a news agency at a moment when Soviet control over information, already badly weakened, was about to undergo an upheaval of an altogether different magnitude.

Two Weeks Before the End of a World

The date matters. On August 4, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev's USSR was living out its final weeks of existence without quite knowing it yet. The Soviet president was preparing to leave for a holiday in Crimea — a holiday that would be brutally interrupted on August 19 by a coup attempt mounted by part of his own government. For three days, tanks stood before the Russian parliament in Moscow, before the putsch collapsed, hastening the dissolution of the Soviet Union a few months later, in December 1991.

Seen in this light, the Atsavan telegram reads like a cosmic footnote to the collapse of an empire — one of those curiosities relayed by a press in the midst of transformation, at a moment when the attention of Western chancelleries was fixed on matters of an entirely different order. It is easy to imagine analysts receiving this dispatch amid a flood of far more urgent reports on Soviet political instability, and filing it away — without further thought — among the curiosities.

Sidebar — The Mountain That Defies Gravity

Some forty kilometers northwest of Yerevan, the Aragats massif has long carried a reputation that goes beyond simple geological curiosity. Along the winding road leading up to the medieval fortress of Amberd, several stretches are said to display apparent gravity anomalies: trickles of water that seem to run uphill, vehicles left in neutral that appear to roll upward on their own. The explanations offered — optical illusions tied to the terrain, peculiar configurations of the slope — have not stopped these spots from becoming, since the 2010s, an attraction featured on several regional television channels.

In Armenian tradition, the mountain bears the name of Ara the Beautiful, whose "throne" (gah) is said to have stood at its summit. According to legend, Gregory the Illuminator, after converting Armenia to Christianity in the 4th century, prayed there — and a light is said to have appeared on the summit ever since, visible only to the "worthy." Whether or not one credits these tales, they testify to one thing: in this corner of the Caucasus, the night sky above the peaks has never stopped being an object of fascination — long before a 1991 telegram came to add its own riddle to the list.

From the Archive

Reconstructed from the original text held by the CIA, here is the content of the dispatch as it traveled across Western teleprinters on August 5, 1991:

Declassified Telegram — Reconstructed Text

UNCLASSIFIED
SERIAL: OW0508195491 — COUNTRY: USSR
SUBJECT: UFO REPORTEDLY LANDS IN MOUNTAIN PASS NEAR YEREVAN
SOURCE: MOSCOW INTERFAX (ENGLISH), 5 AUG 91, 1610 GMT
 
A UFO landed in a mountain pass in the vicinity of the
village of Atsavan, 12-15 km from Yerevan, on August 4
at approximately 21:30 local time, a local news agency
reports. According to eyewitness accounts, the object
remained at the site until 3 a.m., its lights twinkling
and its shape changing. However, no one dared to
approach it.
 
(ENDALL) BT

The four Hebrew characters appearing at the very end of the original document have not been reproduced here, as their function could not be identified.

What the File Leaves Unsaid

Like so many other telegrams in this collection, file 0005517731 simply stops. No follow-up, no supplementary report, no mention of any field investigation appears anywhere in the accessible archives. The witnesses are not named — perhaps no one ever asked. The object's fate, its origin, its nature: all of it remains, more than three decades on, exactly as the Interfax agency left it on a Sunday evening in August, hours before the history of the Soviet Union turned on its axis.

What remains is this almost cinematic image: a mountain pass, a light changing shape for six hours, and an entire village watching — without moving — until, at three in the morning, there was nothing left to watch.

Légende - Photo
Grok, CC0,

Sources

• www.cia.gov

Tags

U.F.O.

An Alleged Exorcism at Brown University: The Strange Account Involving Bobby Jindal

Among the most unusual stories linked to American political figures, the one involving Bobby Jindal, former governor of Louisiana, continues to attract curiosity and controversy. According to an account published in the 1990s in the New Oxford Review, the politician allegedly took part in what was described as an exorcism during his time as a student at Brown University.

A Prayer Meeting That Took a Strange Turn

According to the reported testimony, Bobby Jindal attended a campus prayer meeting accompanied by a friend named Susan. She was going through an extremely difficult period: she had recently learned she was suffering from cancer and had also lost a close friend to suicide. Her emotional state was described as highly fragile.

During the prayer meeting, the situation allegedly took an unexpected turn. Susan suddenly collapsed to the ground, entering a violent episode that participants interpreted as a form of demonic possession. Her sister, who was present, reportedly claimed that she was under the influence of an evil entity.

An Improvised Exorcism on Campus

According to the account, around a dozen students present, including Bobby Jindal, placed their hands on the young woman while praying intensely. They reportedly called for “Satan to leave her.” The scene, described as chaotic and emotionally charged, lasted several minutes.

After the episode of convulsions, Susan allegedly regained consciousness. She stood up and appeared calm, with no immediate signs of distress. For those involved, the event was interpreted as a spiritual deliverance.

Between Paranormal Phenomenon and Medical Explanation

Such events raise numerous questions among skeptical and paranormal communities alike. Convulsive episodes can in fact be linked to various medical causes, including epileptic seizures, dissociative episodes, or extreme psychological stress reactions.

However, from a more spiritual perspective, some interpret such cases as possible manifestations of possession or negative spiritual influence. Exorcism practices, although controversial, still exist in several religious traditions around the world.

An Episode That Still Fuels Debate

Bobby Jindal’s alleged involvement in this episode continues to spark discussion, especially due to his later political career. The former governor has rarely commented in detail on this event, leaving room for multiple interpretations.

Between a spiritual narrative, an extreme psychological episode, and a paranormal interpretation, this story remains a fascinating example of the blurred line between the mystical and the rational.

Légende - Photo
Grok, CC0,

Sources

Tags

Exorcism, Sect / Religion