“The Amityville Horror” house may still be “haunted” 50 years after the real-life massacre that inspired the book and movies, neighbors and a paranormal expert close to the case claim.

The Long Island home could still have “dormant” demonic entities inside, waiting to be reawoken and conjured anew years after the infamous 1974 murder of six family members there.

“Absolutely. I believe there are more things in this world that we don’t understand, and I don’t discount the possibility at all,” said Fran Walters, who has lived next door for the last 28 years.

...

The house has long attracted curiosity seekers over its claims that it is haunted, but the legends began with a real-life crime on Nov. 13, 1974.

DeFeo rose from bed with a .35 caliber rifle in his hands and executed his parents and four siblings as they slept.

He then got dressed, and went to work. It wasn’t until hours later that DeFeo burst into a neighborhood bar and claimed somebody had attacked his family.

The next year DeFeo was sentenced to life in prison, but he spent his life blaming a long list of others — at one point reportedly claiming “voices” coming from the house urged him to do it.

Though DeFeo was believed to be a heavy drug user, famous paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren — who have since been fictionalized in “The Conjuring” series of movies — came to believe he was performing satanic rituals, and those voices may have been demonic forces he unleashed on the house.

...

As DeFeo was being sentenced, George and Kathy Lutz moved into the Amityville house with their three kids at a bargain price of $80,000.

Over the next 28 days, the family claimed they were harassed by a host of terrifying happenings — including levitations and visions of hags, the children sleeping face-down just as the DeFeos bodies were found, freezing temperatures while fireplaces raged, and slime oozing from walls and doors.

...

Months later the Lutzes inked a book deal to tell their story, with “The Amityville Horror: A Story,” which came out in 1977 and was an immediate success, sparking an even more successful film and sequels.

Though many wrote it off as a hoax — DeFeo’s own attorney, William Weber, later claimed he and the family concocted the story over several bottles of wine — the Lutz parents stood by their story for life.

And while the house has changed hands numerous times since the Lutzes left, none of the owners have ever reported any hauntings over those five decades — something Spera thinks doesn’t necessarily mean the Lutzes were lying, or that whatever haunted them is really gone.

“Ed used to not want to talk very much about it, because he said the more recognition you give to it, the more likely something would happen. It depends on the entity, too, that might be at that house. It may lay dormant for years,” Spera said.

“There could possibly — and I’m emphasizing the word possibly — still be something dormant in that structure that could reignite with either recognition, or somebody doing rituals in the house, incantations, or a family that is susceptible to hauntings — in other words, a family that’s weak-willed, or someone in the house that’s weak-willed.

Over time, Fort’s readings expanded from what was known to what was not, from the lawed to the lawless. He kept uncovering anomalies, reports of raining frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky. These fascinated him, and he started taking notes on them too, worrying over their meaning. Setting aside fiction, Fort now concerned himself with the nature of existence. “I see this all as a travail”, he said, “of emerging more or less a metaphysician from a story writer.”13 He arranged the tens of thousands of notes hoarded about his apartment according to some thirteen hundred categories. Compelled “orthogenetically”, he turned in November 1915 to synthesizing his notes, his thoughts on the anomalous.

...

In December 1916, he decided on his next project, “a study of—occult things you know—things that have been called souls or spirits.”21 Its composition, though, proved difficult. At the end of each day, after hours at the library, he could not bring himself to write. He wasn’t sure how to apply “the kind of brains I have” to the subject. “Mine is a coarse and more cynical mind than those that have heretofore examined such phenomena, also it has some other qualities and a different attitude toward what is called the scientific method.”22 He thought of this book as “Z”.

Over the next several years, Fort transformed the manuscript into The Book of the Damned. Beyond breaking the alphabetic naming convention, he presented his material in a new fashion. The bulk of the book comprises the strange reports he’d gathered, particularly stories of things that fell from the sky, interwoven with attacks on Euclidean geometry, Darwinian evolution, Newtonian mechanics, geology. Though superficially confusing, a mass of disparate mysteries, there is an underlying argument, Fort’s eccentric theorizing not absent, just less prominent. The Book of the Damned advanced Fort’s monism. His quarrel with science centers on its failure to recognize the universe’s wholeness. Scientists mutilate reality, cut it into pieces, some called truth, others damned as false. Christianity, in days past, had used the same process to create its own regime of Truth — a Religious Dominant now superseded by an equally incomplete Scientific Dominant. “Demons and angels and inertias and reactions are all mythological characters; But that, in their eras of dominance, they were almost as firmly believed in as if they had been proved.”23 In rescuing the excluded, damned facts, Fort aimed to demonstrate the continuity of existence, to complete the puzzle by providing the missing pieces. He hoped to initiate a new Dominant, one that recognized the universal continuum.

A Buddhist monastery in Thailand is under investigation after authorities discovered more than 40 bodies on site which were allegedly used for meditation practices, police said Sunday.

Forty-one cadavers were found at Pa Nakhon Chaibovorn monastery in Thailand's Phichit province on Saturday, a senior police officer told AFP.

"The bodies were accompanied with death and body donation certificates," he said, adding that so far no charges have been filed.

He said police were reaching out to relatives of the deceased to confirm that the bodies were donated willingly.

...

The search came days after police discovered 12 bodies at another monastery in neighboring Kamphaeng Phet province on Wednesday, according to Thai local media.

The head of the Phichit province monastery, Phra Ajarn Saifon Phandito, told Thai PBS television channel that the use of corpses was part of a "meditation technique" he developed.

"Many of the people who come to learn are abbots and all these monks... pass on the knowledge," he said. "I don't know how many have adopted my technique."

He also told another local TV station that "practitioners meditate in pavilions that hold coffins with the human remains."

Kom Pattarakulprasert, director of the Phichit Office of Buddhism, told the Bangkok Post that the inclusion of bodies in meditation was unusual.

"I asked Phra Ajarn Saifon Phandito if there were any cadavers and was told that there were none," Kom told the outlet. "But when journalists discovered the 41 bodies, I was taken aback by the conflicting stories. I will discuss whether this practice is appropriate with the local head of the clergy."

The Pentagon's latest report on UFOs has revealed hundreds of new reports of unidentified and unexplained aerial phenomena but no indications suggesting an extraterrestrial origin.

The review includes hundreds of cases of misidentified balloons, birds and satellites as well as some that defy easy explanation, such as a near-miss between a commercial airliner and a mysterious object off the coast of New York.

While it isn't likely to settle any debates over the existence of alien life, the report reflects heightened public interest in the topic and the government's efforts to provide some answers. Its publication comes a day after House lawmakers called for greater government transparency during a hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — the government's term for UFOs.

Federal efforts to study and identify UAPs have focused on potential threats to national security or air safety and not their science fiction aspects. Officials at the Pentagon office created in 2022 to track UAPs, known as the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, have said there's no indication any of the cases they looked into have unearthly origins

A woman accused of being a vampire has been brought ‘back from the dead’.

Using DNA, 3D printing and modelling clay, a team of scientists has reconstructed Zosia’s 400-year-old face, revealing the human story buried by supernatural beliefs.

Buried with a padlock on her foot and an iron sickle across her neck, “Zosia” was never supposed to be able to come back.

Entombed in an unmarked cemetery in Pien, northern Poland, the young woman was one of dozens feared by her neighbours to have been a “vampire”.

“It’s really ironic, in a way,” said Swedish archaeologist Oscar Nilsson. “These people burying her, they did everything they could in order to prevent her from coming back from the dead... we have done everything we can in order to bring her back to life.”

...

Aged 18-20 when she died, analysis of Zosia’s skull suggests she suffered from a health condition which would have caused fainting and severe headaches, as well as possible mental health issues, Nilsson said.

The sickle, the padlock and certain types of wood found at the grave site were all believed at the time to hold magical properties protecting against vampires, according to the Nicolaus Copernicus team.

Zosia’s was Grave No. 75 at the unmarked cemetery in Pien, outside the northern city of Bydgoszcz. Among the other bodies found at the site was a “vampire” child, buried face down and similarly padlocked at the foot.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/19815449

President Javier Milei’s drastic austerity measures aimed at improving Argentina’s flailing economy have shown better results in recent months.

The libertarian president’s ambition to eliminate bureaucracy and red tape have become one of the main focuses of his cabinet, including cutting public works budgets, and slashing education spending.

...

After passing a major reform package, the Ley Bases (Bases Law) in July, Sturzenegger is now preparing another project, called Ley Hojarasca (Fallen Leaves Law). The project, presented to Congress on October 10, aims to void legislation created by previous governments that no longer serve a purpose, or were replaced by other laws.

One peculiar law at risk of the chopping block is an Argentine tradition that allows the president to become the godparent of the seventh consecutive son or daughter of Argentine couples, in order to prevent them from becoming werewolves.

Indeed, Law 20.843 was passed in 1974 during the presidency of María Estela Martínez de Perón, but the tradition is actually over a century old.

The law allows a couple with seven sons or seven daughters to request that the president become the godfather/godmother to the seventh same-gender sibling. According to the law, the president then can send a representative to the child’s baptism, usually with a commemorative gold medal, and concede a scholarship towards his or her education, a token fee ranging from $150 to $300 dollars a year.

Where does this tradition come from? “The myth arrived in Argentina through Brazil, with the Portuguese werewolf or lobis-homen, which later evolved into the lobizón. Thus, most cases of alleged werewolves are reported in northeastern Argentina,” historian and journalist Alejandro Galliano explained to Argentina Reports.

The myth, which has deep roots in Argentina’s countryside, is that the seventh son becomes a werewolf during nights when a full moon takes place.

The idea to make the president the godfather of a family’s seventh son was introduced by German immigrants from the Volga region, who came to Argentina in the early 19th century and established rural communities in the northeastern Mesopotamia region, comprised of the provinces Misiones, Entre Ríos, and Corrientes.

“The tradition comes from Catherine the Great,” added Galliano, referring to the Russian leader of the 18th century who believed in becoming the godmother to the seventh son to prevent him from becoming a werewolf. “Both traditions ended up mixing here.”

The first case occurred in October 1907 in Coronel Pringles, a city in the south of the Buenos Aires province. Russian farmer Enrique Brest and his wife, Apolonia Holmann, requested then President José Figueroa Alcorta to become godfather to their seventh son. The president agreed and birthed a tradition that lasted for over a century and became a law in 1974, when benefit was extended to include daughters. That year, the scholarship was established to finance the child’s education.

“It was a way to compensate for the discrimination reportedly suffered by the seventh sibling, because of the legend of the lobizón,” commented Galliano.

More than 12,000 children are estimated to have become godsons or goddaughters to an Argentine president in the past 117 years. Former President Alberto Fernández, who left office in 2023, became a godfather to 66 children, while his predecessor, Mauricio Macri, godfathered 159. Before them, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, a strong Peronist, granted the benefit to 1,152 children during her term.

...

Noah Portillo, born September 10 in Río Gallegos, could become the first seventh son recognized by the current president.

However, his fate as a future werewolf may be at stake if Sturzenegger’s bill is passed. “It is a medieval figure that has no place in a modern democracy,” argued the minister in an X post, upon announcing the Fallen Leaves Bill.

Indeed, Galliano explained, the tradition is no longer followed in Russia, where it originated, nor in any other country.

A father was astounded to catch a glimpse of what he describes as a substantial 1.5m "lynx or jaguar" while on the school run with his daughter in Orpington. Leandro Santos, 37, was accompanying his seven year old near some woodland on Tuesday October 15, when an unusual yowling sound and the agitated behaviour of birds caught his attention.

The finance manager from Swanley claimed he saw the large, spotted feline lurking in the trees close to the school. After swiftly ensuring his daughter reached school safely, he returned to observe the imposing creature for about five minutes around 8.45am, noting its predatory movements among the birds.

Leandro shared his astonishment and apprehension, remarking: "I was so surprised. It was beautiful but also very scary." He went into further detail, describing its size and appearance: "It was massive - I'd say 80 centimetres off the ground. It was yellowish with black spots."

Drawing from his background, the Brazilian expat said: "I'm originally from Brazil and if I saw this there I'd say it was a jaguar. At one point it looked directly at me - that was very frightening," as reported by Kent Live. Expanding upon his encounter, he mentioned: "It was trying to get into a birds nest but they were flying at it to keep it off. Some other birds joined in and I thought it would be safest to leave," reports The Mirror.

... very credible sources have reported seeing UFOs — unidentified flying objects. Now they’re called Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAP. But whatever you call them, the U.S. government has lately begun taking these mystery objects seriously. Very seriously. And it’s recruited a lot of scientists to investigate what’s behind them (albeit quietly).

We still don’t know what the pilots and others have seen. But here’s what’s motivated the new and growing scientific interest in them...

A brand new case for Halloween. Helen, her husband and baby son move into a 200 year-old house in the Lake District. At first all is fine, but one October morning they open their front door to find a pile of small stones on their doorstep.

The odd incident sets into motion a series of terrifying events that lasts for the next 18 years…

That's part 1 and part 2 is also available:

For the last of our chilling Halloween episodes, we return to Meadow Cottage for the gripping second half of this brand new investigation into a terrifying haunting in the Lake District that spanned two decades.

As Helen’s young son Jake grows up, events take an even more sinister turn. What is going on in that house?

Every country has its ghost stories, its mythical monsters and its ghoulish urban legends. But the United Kingdom – the home of the Gothic novel and the birthplace of paranormal investigation – may stake a claim to being the most haunted country on Earth.

With one of the world's highest concentrations of castles and no shortage of centuries-old pubs and coaching inns, there are plenty of reputedly haunted places to enjoy a drink or a meal, or even lay your head for the night – if you're feeling brave.

In addition, the country's relatively small size means it's possible to combine several of these places into one ghost-heavy itinerary. Here's where travellers with a penchant for the paranormal should head to get spooked this Halloween...

• Skirrid Inn, Abergavenny, Wales
• Chillingham Castle, Northumberland
• Whitby, North Yorkshire
• Ancient Ram Inn, Gloucestershire
• Edinburgh Castle, Scotland

A special Halloween episode full of new cases to investigate. Danny is joined by Evelyn Hollow and guest expert, celebrated writer and comedian Stewart Lee, a lover of ghost stories and weird folklore. Can they explain these strange real-life stories of the paranormal?

It’s witching hour deep in the Nevada desert. The time of night when ghosts and demons are most likely to appear. I’m standing with a torch in an eerie, dark bedroom of the self-proclaimed “most haunted motel in America” to try and glimpse the paranormal in action.

“Can you feel that cold air?” says Christopher Alefeld, my ghost hunting guide for the night. “You can feel it in some of the rooms, it just feels different. More tense”.

Our ghost-detecting equipment (an “EMF Meter”) bleeps and lights up with activity, indicating it has picked up on changes in a nearby electromagnetic field. It feels like I’m a member of the Ghostbusters when I’m told a sudden unexplained spike in the EMF reading is considered evidence of the paranormal.

But here at the Clown Motel it’s a regular occurrence. They even have a disclaimer on their site about the potential risks involved with a supernatural encounter. And, yes, you heard correctly – because your run-of-the-mill regular haunted motel just ain’t scary enough, this is a clown-themed haunted motel...

A mysterious radio station that has broadcasted a monotone buzzing sound and the occasional odd voice for decades has left scientists baffled.

The shortwave radio station, found on frequency 4625 kHz, has been running for at least 50 years. It has been appropriately nicknamed 'The Buzzer'.

But rumors as to its origins continue to swirl online today.

One alarming theory is that the sound is a signal which, if ceases, indicates a nuclear attack is imminent. Others say the buzzing sound is a foreign government's attempts to communicate with visiting alien species.

However, the most common theory among experts is that the radio waves come out of Russia, which may be reserving the frequency for an impending emergency...

... The belief in ghosts is a funny thing. Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive...

Since the shocking revelation about the US Government's UFO research programme in 2017, the topic of extraterrestrial visitors has gradually shifted from conspiracy theories to mainstream discussion.

In recent times, military experts have sworn before the US Congress that the Pentagon ran a "multi-decade" programme which collected and attempted to reverse-engineer crashed alien crafts.

However, the official government "disclosure" of contact with aliens, whether through interstellar craft landings or the recently reported "non-human technological signature" allegedly detected by an Australian radio telescope, seems as distant as ever.

Nick Pope, who was once in charge of analysing UFO reports for the Ministry of Defence, shared his unsettling theory about why that might be with Simon Holland in a leaked email...

Activist Leo Igwe is at the forefront of efforts to help people accused of witchcraft in Nigeria, as it can destroy their lives - and even lead to them being lynched.

“I could no longer take it. You know, just staying around and seeing people being killed randomly,” Dr Igwe tells the BBC.

After completing his doctorate in religious studies in 2017 he was restless. He had written extensively about witchcraft and was frustrated that academia did not allow him to challenge the practice head on.

...

So Dr Igwe set up Advocacy For Alleged Witches, an organisation focussed on “using compassion, reason, and science to save lives of those affected by superstition”.

Dr Igwe’s prevention work also extends to Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe and beyond.

One of the people the organisation has helped in Nigeria is 33-year-old Jude. In August, it intervened when he was accused and beaten in Benue State.

Jude, a glazier, who also works part-time in a bank, says he was on his way to work one morning, when he met a boy carrying two heavy jars of water which prompted him to comment on the boy’s physical agility.

The boy did not take the comments kindly, but he went on his way.

Later, Jude was followed by a mob of about 15 people throwing stones at him. Among them was the boy he had greeted earlier.

“Young men started fighting me as well, trying to set me ablaze,” Jude says.

He was accused of causing the disappearance of the boy’s penis through witchcraft, an accusation that shocked him and is untrue.

Claims of manhood disappearances are not uncommon in some parts of West Africa.

It is a claim that has been linked to Koro syndrome, a mental illness otherwise known as missing or genital retraction hysteria.

It is a psychiatric disorder characterised by an intense and irrational fear of the genital organs going missing or retracting into the body of the victim.

Most people imagine philosophers as rational thinkers who spend their time developing abstract logical theories and strongly reject superstitious beliefs. But several 20th-century philosophers actively investigated spooky topics such as clairvoyance, telepathy – even ghosts.

Many of these philosophers, including Henri Bergson and William James, were interested in what was called “psychical research”. This was the academic study of paranormal phenomena including telepathy, telekinesis and other-worldly spirits.

These thinkers attended seances and were attempting to develop theories about ghosts, life after death and the powers exhibited by mediums in trances. My recent archival research has been looking at how these topics shaped 20th-century philosophy...

Halloween’s roots lie in the ancient festival Samhain. Celebrated on the evening of 31 October and into 1 November, Celts believed this was when the boundary between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. They would make offerings to their gods around a bonfire, and dress in costumes to confuse the malevolent spirits that might wander the earth.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that today we gather in the darkened evenings of autumn to share a ghost story or two – a tradition that has lasted centuries.

From medieval hauntings to Victorian messages from the dead, explore ten ghost stories from history…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20962941

Paranormal researcher Brian J. Cano has been investigating ghosts for 22 years now, visiting locations all across the globe.

Brian started out as a skeptic but now he says he’s a skeptical believer, which means he thinks there’s something out there but is skeptical on how it’s reported. Saying not everything that happens during the night is paranormal activity.

One of those stories talks about Brian’s demonic experience with the circle of fire at the Grand Midway Hotel. Brian says, “When I say off the chart, I mean literally you go down the list: Chris was getting touched, I was hearing things audibly, Lisa Ann was communing directly with spirits… it was the most poignant encounter I ever had.”

The childhood home of the late Queen Mother, Glamis Castle, has been declared one of the most haunted places to visit in the UK this Halloween.

Located in Angus, Scotland, Glamis Castle has royal connections that go back over a thousand years, and grisly spot where Malcolm II of Scotland was murdered in 1034.

Even before the castle was built, there were warnings that the land was cursed, and its original location was changed from a nearby hill after workers claimed to hear a voice say: “Build not on this enchanted spot, where man hath neither part nor lot, but build down in yonder bog, where it will neither shake nor shog!”

Ghosts claimed to haunt the walls of Glamis Castle include the Tongueless Woman – a maid said to have been murdered after discovering a secret of the Earl. She is rumoured to appear with blood spilling from her mouth...

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18915016

In 1964, two young academics clambered into a red Mini and, armed with a mountain of printed slips, set out to conduct what would become the definitive survey of English folklore and traditions for the next 60 years.

John Widdowson and Paul Smith went to town centres, ­community halls, Women’s Institute meetings. They handed the simple forms out to anyone who visited Sheffield University, where they were based. And they wanted to know the answer to one simple question: what do you know to be true?

Now held in the university’s archives, the thousands of replies make for illuminating reading, creating a patchwork of observances, superstitions and local legends, passed down through families and communities.

“Don’t bring hawthorn blossom into the house. It’s bad luck,” wrote David Smith of London, who had learned this from his mother, Molly, then living in Scarborough.

The story related by Florence Swaby of Hertfordshire was perhaps a little more dramatic: “Just outside the village, part of the road is called the white highway, and at that point there are two large open fields and the devil haunts there. This is the story handed down from my great grandmother and really happened …”

Exactly six decades on, the Survey of Language and Folklore is finally being updated, with a more scientific method than two men in a Mini handing out questionnaires almost at random. The Centre for Contemporary Legend, based at Sheffield Hallam University, is to conduct the National Folklore Survey, financed with £271,000 of government money from the UK Research and Innovation body.

The project will be led by David Clarke along with Diane Rodgers, also of Sheffield Hallam, and Ceri Houlbrook and Owen Davies who founded the MA Folklore Studies course at Hertfordshire University. It will be conducted by Ipsos-UK, ­polling almost 3,000 people in the first phase to create a clearer picture of what folklore means today.

The new survey aims to address “the lack of robust research evidence into the cultural value of folklore in post-Brexit, post-pandemic, multicultural England. It aims to create new data to answer two research questions: ‘How have folkloric beliefs and practices shaped England’s social, cultural and spiritual identity?’ and ‘To what extent are ideas of nationalism and colonial attitudes informed by contemporary notions of English folklore?’”

...

“You might think that in an increasingly technological world we have no place for folklore, but it seems to be the opposite. Technology and mobile phones create a kind of disenchantment in people’s lives, and I think they’ve started to realise that. The revival of interest in folklore is a wonderful thing, and long may it continue.”

Have you ever heard of the Hexham Heads or Wolf of Allendale?

Now that Halloween is approaching you might want to clue yourself up because, well there's no easy way of saying this, a werewolf may be out there.

On 10 December 1904, we, the Hexham Courant, published a story with the title "Wolf at Large in Allendale".

The wolf committed a "great slaughter of sheep" on the moors above Hexham in the winter of 1904 and was believed to be an escapee from the private zoo of Captain Bain in County Durham.

A hunt quickly ensued among petrified locals thinking the wolf may move on from sheep and start attacking children.

After many weeks the drama soon came to a grisly end when the wolf was cut in twain by a Midland Railway express near Cumwhinton station on the Settle-Carlisle railway.

Too badly mutilated to be preserved, the wolf was beheaded and sent to the Midland Railway's headquarters at Derby.

For a week, the head of the Allendale wolf was displayed in the window of a taxidermist's shop in Derby before being mounted outside the Midland Railway's boardroom.

In 1936, the head was still there, but it has now vanished, and subsequent searches for it have been unsuccessful.

Now let's fast forward to the 1970s, when things start to get even creepier...

In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick up a strange frequency. At first he thought it was just tuning in to a local channel, but then voices came through discussing some kind of nuclear war – and issuing bomb reports.

Recalling the incident decades later, the driver described the simultaneous appearance of a star overhead followed by the sudden realisation that he could see through the floor of his car.

‘I hadn’t done any dope, I wasn’t doing any beer,’ he adds so casually that you feel inclined to believe him. And yet his body felt like jelly. The episode only lasted what seemed like five or ten minutes, but on arriving at the dance, the man realised that the half-hour journey had actually taken nearly two hours. He never found a logical explanation for what had happened.

Between 1980 and 1992, a Cornell graduate from Ohio named John P. Timmerman travelled across America with a recorder and case of cassette tapes. Diversifying from his day job as the owner of an air-conditioning business, he spent his weekends conducting interviews in shopping malls as a volunteer for the Center for UFO Studies. In each mall he visited, he asked shoppers whether they had ever experienced anything inexplicable. The jellified driver was just one of nearly 1,200 people he spoke to across the course of his peculiar career.

We Are Not Alone, which airs on BBC Radio 4 this Sunday evening, replays a selection of these interviews in one continuous stream. There is no introduction – and no explanation – and the only interruptions during the programme are the clicks of a tape ending, the ‘this is side two, cassette one’, type markers made by Timmerman himself and, in the final three minutes, some appreciative reflections from Timmerman’s son. I became quickly hooked.

What struck me, in particular, was how many of the close encounters described took place when people were travelling. Aliens, it would seem, are fascinated by human transport. One woman spoke of a saucer-like object with multi-coloured lights zooming towards her car and disappearing only when another car came into sight. A man with 40 years’ experience in the aviation industry assessed that the sophisticated flying object he saw had no jet engine and was manifestly ‘not from this Earth’.

Many reports released in recent years offer more comprehensive descriptions of sightings than those gathered by Timmerman. But the raw beauty of some of the latter nevertheless astounds.

The captain of a commercial jet summoned the most striking image of the glow he observed while flying north of the Grand Canyon. It was ‘something like the light of the Aurora Borealis’, he recalled, ‘only it was encompassing most of the western sky’. Within it appeared a sphere ‘about the size of a moon when it comes over the horizon’. The moon itself was half-full and directly overhead.

On his journey, Timmerman inevitably encountered some cranks. Top marks go to the woman who informed him that UFOs live inside mountains and only come out at night. ‘How did you know this?’ Timmerman asked her. ‘A lady told me on the bus,’ she replied.

But for the most part, the people recorded were characterised by their wonder and yearning for something beyond what the eye usually sees. The fascination you hear in their voices is as captivating as the stories themselves. The programme will leave you gazing skywards.

You can listen on Radio 4.

We live in times where Mark Robinson and the Nude Africa porn forums are threatening to become one of the most consequential stories in American history, so you’ll excuse me if I roll my eyes at the folks who believe our reality is not absurd enough to accommodate the potential notion of visitors from another realm. If you want to know why I feel this way, I wrote 6,500 words across two articles explaining why both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and I think there’s something to UFOs (Here is part 1 and part 2).

UFOs are news worth covering simply because so many credible government actors have lent their own credibility to it, and if a fraction of any of this is true, it is world-changing. If it’s all a lie, then why this lie was perpetrated on the entire globe is a question that demands an answer. There’s no route out of this mess that isn’t newsworthy and worth exploring, and there is enough physical evidence of unexplained things in the sky at this point that dismissing it all as mankind’s overactive imagination requires a bigger conspiracy theory than the legend that Lockheed Martin is housing UFOs.

Last summer’s UFO hearing starred David Grusch telling explosive tales of UFO crash retrievals, and while most were quick to dismiss this as the rantings of a lunatic or a huckster, I refuse to go that far. I, like most others, am unqualified to assess Grusch’s credibility and lack the appropriate security clearances. All I can say is that he is not a James Clapper-type who is at the top of an agency and can just lie to Congress all willy nilly and go to fancy D.C. cocktail parties like nothing happened. Grusch is blowing the whistle from the great middle of the Defense Department organizational chart, where the rules still do theoretically apply to normal people.

I don’t know if David Grusch’s testimony was true (The Intelligence Community Inspector General found his complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022, which should be noted is not an assessment of whether it is true), but I do know that if he did lie, he is in extremely deep shit because he accused some immensely powerful entities of some very serious crimes under oath. That guillotine hovering over his neck is convincing enough to me to at least hear him and any others out who are willing to put themselves on the line to take a leap of faith in our democratic institutions. You can listen to people tell their stories with an open mind without having to make an instantaneous judgement about their veracity, and if they are lying, time will bear that out. If someone wants to go in front of Congress and tell us something they think is important, we owe it to them to listen...

An aristocrat 'fainted' after being visited by the ghost of his dead mother, according to an unearthed 239-year-old manuscript.

The ‘haunting’, which was said to have taken place in a stately home in 1785, has been discovered by auctioneers going through an old box of legal deeds and papers. The official papers described how aristocrat Francis Eld was visited by the spirit of his dead mother Catherine around the time she died - unbeknownst to him - 150 miles away.

The manuscript told how Mr Eld was in his infant daughter’s bedroom in the early hours of March 29, 1785, when the apparition appeared. He experienced a “puff of air” across his face and saw “a sort of cloud or vapour”, which took on the appearance and voice of his mother.

The ghost said: “My child, be not grieved, I am dead, but happy.” The spooky visitation is said to have taken place at Seighford Hall, near Stafford, Staffordshire.

Jim Spencer, Director at Rare Book Auctions, in Lichfield, came across the papers while carrying out a valuation.

He said: “It was quite eerie discovering these papers during the run-up to Halloween. I found it in a box full of old indentures relating to the Whitby family of Shugborough and Haywood.

“It’s the sort of thing I see all the time but the word 'visitation' just caught my eye. As soon as I realised they were talking about a ghost, I genuinely couldn't read quickly enough, my eyes were racing ahead of my brain”...