In the nights before the promised Mayan Apocalypse, mysterious configurations of bright lights hovered over Brooklyn and San Francisco's Mission District. The first commenter here made the reasonable assumption that it was all some kind of viral marketing aimed at overpaid young urbanites.

But the product of such clever, vague and expensive advertising has yet to appear. And the silent, terrifying craft are now being seen over far less desirable urban areas including Detroit, Indianapolis and the Gulf Coast of Florida. What could it mean? Is Detroit poised for a comeback? And why are they also appearing in Poughkeepsie?

"Suggestions that aliens from Sirius had imparted astronomical knowledge to the Dogon, created a modern myth and raised the tribe to cult status among UFO/ancient astronaut enthusiasts. Also, whites who rejected the African origins of mankind, could now claim their ancestors were from Sirius! As I have opined previously in this column, the whole Dogon business is hokum-perpetrated, perhaps, to help sustain the market for esoteric genre of books and film." —J.K. Obatala of Nigeria's The Guardian addresses the modern mythology of Mali's amazing Dogon people and their supposed ties to a race of fish-headed space monsters from a planetary system around Sirius B.

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"The BBC's star science presenter Brian Cox thought he might have a scoop on his hands when he trained his telescope at a newly discovered planet in search of alien life. But the professor said his hopes for an exclusive were brought back down to earth after he was told by the BBC that impromptu extraterrestrial contact would break health and safety guidelines." —Best check with the Department of Live Radio Broadcasts With Space Aliens before doing anything hasty.

Photo by Karen Roe via Flickr.

"Russia's weather and emergency officials soothed fears of Moscow residents Thursday with statements that green-tinged clouds over the capital were not an alien invasion, but tree pollen."

"It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim. Watching from afar, extraterrestrial beings might view changes in Earth's atmosphere as symptomatic of a civilisation growing out of control – and take drastic action to keep us from becoming a more serious threat, the researchers explain."

After several days of hoo-ha brought on by a vague NASA press release about mysterious life forms that will change how we see alien life, the story finally was published in Science and announced by NASA and so, okay, I'll bite. It turns out that a geomicrobiologist found a bacterium in a California lake full of arsenic, and the bacterium was full of arsenic too. The arsenic atoms were being used by the bug in place of phosphate atoms; and if you'd paid attention back when you were supposed to, you'd know that phosphate atoms are crucial to 1) DNA which is the molecule that makes up [...]

Kool Keith is looking fly in his new video, boasting about sponsorship deals with Tampax and Coca-Cola. In related news, Anthony Bragalia shares interesting thoughts at The UFO Iconoclast(s) website about "How The Roswell Crash Happened."

In its 1990s prime, the late-night radio show "Coast To Coast AM" was an unscripted audio mix of "Twin Peaks" and "The X-Files." It was corny, uncomfortable, laughable, utterly paranoid, completely of its time, and occasionally terrifying. Because it was broadcast in the middle of the night, if you listened it was generally because you were alone: driving a deserted highway, fighting insomnia, cramming for a test, finishing some code, working a graveyard shift.

A parade of crazies appeared every night, people with no apparent sense of humor, explaining the most obscure and ridiculous theories and conspiracies. And then, because this was also the golden age of weird [...]

Guess what people on the Internet have discovered? Life on Mars! But it is not, according to current theories, Martian. It's a … ground squirrel, or perhaps a regular Martian rock that looks a little like a ground squirrel from a certain angle and a certain light. The very large NASA image from the rover Curiosity is here, so you can spend the next hour or so looking for Waldo the Martian Ground Squirrel, or you can just accept the conclusion of this UFO blog:

A lot of people are emailing me saying that this squirrel was part of a NASA experiment to test how long it [...]

Part of a series about monsters and other scary things happening here through Halloween.

I fed myself a steady diet of the paranormal growing up, in between all the comic books and all the television. The enthusiasm does tend to wane the further away from childhood you get, but it never really goes away. I grew up hoping, believing, that the world was weirder than the grown-ups would tell you. And I liked it that way. It helped that I grew up in West Virginia, where you're never too far from the woods or a mountain or a swamp, places for mysterious things to hide and then jump out [...]

"If it moves like water, it may very well be water." —Oregon State planetary science professor Joe Levy discusses the "recurring slope linneae" visible on the surface of Mars in recent high-resolution photographs. Some people think the lines, which run downhill into ravines, offer proof that water exists in frozen form on the red planet's crust, and melts into flowing liquid during warmer months. Of course, with James Cameron fresh back from his trip seven miles deep into the Mariana Trench, other possibilities come to mind.

Were you ever at, I don't know, a Rite Aid or Penn Station or a Grateful Dead concert or a family gathering where you looked around and got to feeling like everyone else there was an alien from outer space? Well, you were probably right, according to Science.

"A few weeks later, Mr. Halt was told by his boss that the lights were back and so he went back out into the forest with a couple of policeman, a camera and a cassette recorder. At the site he saw 'indentations of around six to eight feet wide' and increased levels of radiation as well as broken branches on the trees. Mr. Halt said: 'Milling around, one of the individuals saw a bright glowing object like an eye. It would appear to be winking and was shedding molten metal and silently moving through the trees and at one point it actually approached us.' He said that the object [...]

What sinister creatures float above Knifecrime Island, and why do they have such animosity for its sheep? Well, according to the Sun, the answers are a) aliens and b) it's more along the lines of "research." But read more of this harrowing tale!

Having trouble with iCloud? Confused by CrashPlan? Today's smart tech consumers are getting ready to purchase the sturdiest backup media of all: human DNA. The mad scientists behind a weird new study say that the double helix of genetic code has been successfully used to store all kinds of documents, including audio files and text of Shakespeare's sonnets and "a picture of their office," because most of what we digitally save is silly garbage. (Future archeologists will likely be baffled by the discovery of, say, a flash drive holding nothing but hundreds of weirdly filtered pictures of somebody's entrée with a glass of wine in the background. "These [...]

"The experiment we're doing is very similar to an experiment one might do to see whether there is life on Europa. We know Europa has an icy crust and an ocean beneath it. If there's life on Europa it'll be living in a very similar way to life in Lake Ellsworth with total darkness, lots of pressure and using chemical processes rather than sunlight to power biological processes." —University of Bristol professor of geosciences Martin Siegert tells the BBC that the life forms that he and his colleagues are hoping to find by drilling through the two miles of ice that have kept the waters of Antarctica's Lake [...]