UFOs – Everydave Life

November 26, 2025

“Bird Brain”? Thanks For The Compliment!

Regular readers here, and people who know me in general, know that I’m fascinated by UFOs (or UAPs as the government now likes to refer to them as) and the possibilities of alien life. So, you know I’m interested in a new documentary, The Age of Disclosure, which just came out and apparently once again suggests that governments and militaries have know they do exist for decades. What’s more, the U.S. and Russia at least (and possibly other countries like Germany and Britain) have recovered alien aircraft and are working hard to retro-engineer them to understand and copy the amazing technology. That’s almost old news by now. I’ve read that Secretary of State Marco Rubio not only confirms that but says he’s encountered extra-terrestrial intelligent life here. Sounds fascinating and I’ll be looking it up soon.

But to change gears, another thing that has long fascinated me is nature. Birds in particular are dear to me and seem fascinating in their variety and abilities, such as (to point out the obvious), flying. So I loved one of the books I read this fall, Gifts of the Crow, by Marzluff and Angell, two biologists who’ve studied “corvids” for decades.

Corvids is the scientific name for the Crow family, a range of birds that include familiar big, black birds like ravens, crows and their European cousins, the jackdaws, but also magpies and jays such as the Blue Jay. Yes, the familiar and colorful bird that became a baseball symbol is a corvid too; basically a small, colorful crow. I’ve long read that the Corvids are the smartest of birds, but this book confirms that and takes it to another level with its case studies. Anyone who reads it will not use the term “bird brain” as an insult again.

In a nutshell, among the things it highlights are their problem-solving abilities which, to be quite honest about it, surpass some humans; their incredible memories and apparent ability to pass along specific information to new generations; their love of playing; their learning capacity; their ability in some specific cases to seemingly understand a few words of human vocabulary (much like your family dog which learns commands like “stay” or “sit”) and even their very human-like ability to have emotions such as liking, disliking and feeling sorrow. Kinda makes you look at that crow flying by in a different light, doesn’t it?

Among the studies, crows have been able to figure out how to make and use tools. When some food they liked was put in a little basket deep inside a tall jar the bird couldn’t reach, when given some flexible wire strands, more than once the birds figured out they could bend the wire, make a hook and perch on top of the jar, lower the hook and pull upwards with their beak until the basket came out and fell out, giving them their food. Others quickly learned how to drop pebbles in a jar full of water that had food at the bottom, to cause enough water to spill out as to let them reach in and grab the food. Seems like we might have a slimmer but more intelligent class of kids if we made them get their school lunch in such fashion!

Jays given a cache of nuts or acorns to bury for winter have shown an almost infallible ability to recover them all weeks later, even when the ground is covered in snow, or items have been moved around in the scene to make it look different.

There are many records of crows and ravens seeming to just… play. Have fun. They’ve been observed picking up sticks, dropping them, to let the bird below catch it, then fly up and drop it for the other and so on. Some ravens learned how to peel big swaths of bark off trees and use it on windy days as a sort of sailboard; clinging to the bark with their talons as the wind pushes it along. Seeing the world like a bird but without having to expend energy flapping. You could charge people big money to do the same… oh, wait we do already!

There are many references to their ability to recognize and either bond with, or torment specific people for years. One scientist who climbed up to their nests and handled the babies (to band them, weigh them etc., not to harm them) found himself being chased … not only by the parent birds, but soon by other crows in the neighborhood. Astoundingly, this continued for years, even when the birds doing it were shown to be descendants of the originals. And, trying to change clothes or drive a different car didn’t help – the crows still knew!

On the reverse side, people who’ve been kind to them not only get a pass but frequently find the birds delivering them gifts! Many a person has seen a resident crow or raven they feed reliably fly in and drop something man-made, things like bottle caps or keys mostly, shiny and metal, by them. One can only assume the birds are trying to thank the people for their kindness and have the concept at least of natural vs man-made and figure we would like our own stuff better! Perhaps the ultimate example of that was a pair of magpies in Sweden who visited a house with a feeder kept well-stocked by the lady of the house. The man however, disliked them and would throw rocks at them. After awhile, the magpies learned to use the doorbell to get the woman’s attention! Apparently they saw people come and go and noted that when a human pushed that button, someone opened the door. But, they didn’t want to see that rock-throwing man, so yep, they waited until he went out and got in his car and drove before hitting the doorbell. They also gave her little gifts. The man though, was given a different “gift” – they routinely pooped on the window of his car. Not hers though. He tried changing parking places with her; the birds knew it right away and kept delivering to his windshield.

It’s a fascinating book, albeit one that’s quite boring and dry in places. A lot of pages are devoted to actual studies of the birds’ brains, even to the point of successfully giving them MRIs and talking at length about the synapses, thalamuses, hyper-palliums and so on. The short takeaway on all those sections is that the brains are structured similarly to human and monkey ones and occupy at least as much of their heads as do monkey and ape ones. One could almost say they are basically “flying monkeys” albeit a lot less intimidating that the ones in Oz. Unless you throw stones at them.

It got me thinking. Perhaps when the day arrives that a UFO flies down, lands on the White House lawn and opens its invisible door, it’s not going to be a little skinny “Gray” coming out. I think it might be a big, space-age raven.

November 13, 2024

Paging Fox Mulder : The Truth Is In Here, According To Elizondo

I read a lot of books that I enjoy and many that might me stop and think. Few make me stop in places and think “Wow! Mind blown!” but Imminent by Luis Elizondo is one those few.

And why wouldn’t it? The government having a top secret panel of psychics who’ve had their sixth sense enhanced and nurtured, used to the point of finding terrorists? That’s merely a side dish to what he tells of. Science having the ability to teleport things… but right now, only molecular, tiny things like single atoms? Still only a tiny tip of the iceberg. Admissions by highly trained, highly regarded governmental officials admitting that Brian Clarke seems correct? Turn that page!

You might remember that in the last book I reviewed here, But What If We’re Wrong, I noted that it included something of a debate between highly-regarded physicists (and oddly, Big Bang Theory guests) Neil Degrasse Tyson and Brian Clarke over how good our current scientific knowledge is. Tyson seemed to suggest we can understand everything right now, we’re mentally all-knowing. Clarke believes we still don’t understand many things. Even gravity might not exist as we think it does. Well, Imminent says many highly placed scientists are in his court, because we have evidence of our “laws” of physics being “broken” routinely. But not by us earthlings.

Craft that break the laws of physics… or else, a few minds he references suggest ones which conform to theories of physics, but in ways we can’t begin to fathom. Vehicles that would require approximately ten times the capacity of the entire power grid of the U.S. to run. Ones which can find and utilize wormholes to travel in time. Hydrogen fusion for energy. It’s beyond my understanding of science, but maybe I shouldn’t be upset with myself. It seems beyond the understanding of science of our most brilliant scientists.

Imminent is basically two books in one – one, the mind-blowing part, looking at things that we seem to have confirmation of regarding extraterrestrials and UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, or what used to be referred to as UFOs) and their extraordinary capabilities here on Earth. The other part, dull in places but informative, details some of the extraordinary bureaucratic red-tape in place trying to prevent the public… and even some U.S. presidents (sorry W, Barack)… from finding out the truth. About things like extraordinary capabilities we know are being demonstrated right here, like craft that can fly five times faster than our fastest fighter jets… and then stop on a dime. Or make a 90-degree turn without slowing at all or banking. Apparently it would take a “blackbird” jet 100 or more miles to arc from due north to due east. These things can do it in 100 feet or less. Or drop right into the ocean from upper levels of the atmosphere, not make any waves and continue “flying” at thousands of MPH under the water. Those types of maneuvers, if even possible, would cause any aircraft we constructed to disintegrate into a myriad of debris and kill any human, or other animal inside. But these aren’t human, are they? Decorated high-ranking military and Pentagon officials have testified before Congress about recovering “beyond next generation” craft and “non-human biologics inside.” Craft that can penetrate “no fly zones” with the greatest of ease, and disappear if confronted. And ones which are seemingly obsessed with our nuclear capabilities, and testing to see if they can activate or deactivate them from above. And yes, if you have the time and patience, Luis even gives you some links to government papers to find online and try to make sense of, but which say exactly that.

Such things sound like science fiction of the cheap pulp variety no less. But the claims are coming from people who should know. Elizondo himself was the head of a Pentagon study looking at the issue of UAPs and highly-placed within the Department of Defense. Those qualifications are verifiable. The Department of Defense verify his credentials. Equally believable, are people like Chris Mellon, a former Deputy Secretary of Defense and the late senator Harry Reid, and others with similar credentials who fully back Elizondo’s claims. Elizondo eventually quit the Pentagon in order to be able to speak more publicly about the issue and has been largely responsible for the military eventually allowing release of the now-famous “Tic Tac” and Gimbal videos the navy took of UAPs that were tailing and at times seemingly menacing their ships and jets off both coasts, verifying them to be authentic.

To say Elizondo is frustrated is an under-statement. He says what he can disclose in the book is only a fraction of what he’s come across in his Pentagon work and he’s scared… not of personal ramifcations to himself, even when UAPS have crashed his BBQ parties. But he is scared as hell of anything, known or unknown that can best us that easily scientifically and can come and go anywhere they please with impunity, including over our weapons facilities, pose a major national threat to security. He likens it to Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese planes were seen on radar, but the technicians thought it was nothing – either a bad “read” or maybe their own friendly planes up and out to see the sunrise that they weren’t aware of. He doesn’t want people to be caught unaware this time.

Not all seem to agree, not surprisingly. Ever since the famous “Roswell Incident” of 1947, the American military and government has done its best to downplay the various sightings and occurrences and discredit those who report them. The tide is slowly turning, but there are many within the walls of Congress and the Pentagon who are doing their best to hold back the tide, according to him. It’s fascinating yet dull at the same time reading about the hoops he and his colleagues have had to jump through to try and retrieve even the scantest of documents and bits of evidence of , as a certain TV show used to say, knowing “the truth is out there”… already. It’s just hidden in camouflage. It’s also a little confusing trying to keep track of so many acronyms and abbreviations. We know “CIA” and “FBI” for instance, but “OUSD”, “AATIP”, “NRO”, “SASC”… the list is endless.

Aliens, black-op style government programs… and Blink 182 to boot (you’ll have to read it to see how they fit in!).If you were a fan of The X-files or are remotely interested in what the chances are there is life – intelligent, advanced life at that – beyond our little blue ball in the galaxy, Imminent is a book you should check out. It’s going to change the way you view the universe and our place in it… imminent-ly.

December 31, 2021

2021…Strange Days

Strange days are coming… strange days are here. It might have been the Doors singing that about 50 years back, but it sure does seem like it applies more than ever now, doesn’t it? If you’re not convinced, take a look at a couple of news stories that you might have escaped your attention this week while you were making rather merry.

First, let’s go to Illinois. The heartland. The farm belt. Think Illinois and you might think of the Sears Tower, Wrigley Field and a lot of corn farms. Making it more surprising that a sasquatch was reported there recently. According to the Chicago Tribune, University of Illinois and others, an engineer recently reported one crossing the road not far from Springfield a few nights back. The man said he was driving out of Cass County, near the state capital, around 10:30 PM when “I saw a large animal jump into the road about 40 yards ahead. When it hit the road, I could see the large legs spread wide and …large swinging, hairy arms. The arms swung back and forth, close to the ground as its body was leaning forward. It leaped across the road in two jumps… I said to myself, out loud, ‘F***ing bigfoot!” . It was about two seconds before it disappeared into the darkness. He described it as a tall as his car windshield, even when hunched over and big enough to block out the lights of an oncoming car.

A photo published from Google Earth from the area he said it occurred looked… Midwestern. There is a woodlot, but the scene is dominated by a large farm field. However (there’s always a “however”), as one local radio station posted up there “if you know any engineers, you know it’s highly likely this is a highly educated guy.” And, a look at a satellite map does show an extensive band of forest only a couple of miles away. More surprising yet, a search shows that Illinois has sightings of Sasquatch almost annually, with another “good” visual sighting in a state forest near the Kentucky border this summer. There was even a report near Chicago in 2010, a daytime report which prompted a woman to stop her car on a busy road and follow the creature into the forest, noting its “musky wet dog odor.” Again, a large area of forest lay nearby.

When I think of “bigfoot”, I usually think the dense, huge rainforests of the Pacific northwest … Oregon, Washington, British Columbia. Not the land of wheat and Cubs hats. But, I know from personal contacts that stories of them abound from the southern Appalachians, with many locals claiming to have seen and heard them. As I’ve said before, it’s frustrating there isn’t any concrete evidence of the species…but where there’s smoke there’s usually fire. And there seems to be some smoke over Illinois even. Let’s hope some people got dash cams for Christmas there! Strange days…

Critters which we think probably exist but have no proof of. Which leads us to the second item. NASA, that great scientific division of the U.S. Government that explores space and puts men on the moon (“if you believe…”) has recently hired 24 noted theologians, including a British bishop, to “assess how the world’s major religions would react to the existence of life beyond earth,” or as other reports put it, “to prepare humanity for alien contact.” The team includes a noted rabbi and Islamic imam as well, and initial reports are “”Christian, Jewish and Islamic teaching would not be affected by the discovery of alien life.” NASA spokesman Carl Pilken went as far as to suggest the idea we were alone in the universe is “just inconceivable. When there are 100 billion stars in this galaxy, and over 100 billion galaxies…”. Quite a long way removed from the famous military Project Blue Book, which basically declared all UFOs were either swamp gas or hippies on acid trips seeing things and aliens only exist in bad Hollywood films, isn’t it? By the way, the Vatican has studied the topic itself and in 2008 declared “no conflict between believing in God and the possibility of extraterrestrial brothers” exists.

Strange days… Those two stories of hypothetical species makes the third one more of a head-scratcher. And actually sparks some conspiracy theories in the ornithology world. The US Fish & Wildlife Service recently declared over 20 species extinct, with little notice. Those included two American birds, the Bachman’s Warbler and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker.

Both species were known to inhabit the dense, flooded swamplands of the southeast. The warbler, a little yellow bird with an inconspicuous song, was last recorded in the 1960s. The woodpecker however, is a different story.

The Ivory-billed Woodpecker is perhaps the most fabled of all American birds. The largest woodpecker on the continent, bigger than a crow, and very showy. The cartoon Woody Woodpecker was apparently based on its look. But unlike Woody, the Ivory-billeds are also very shy, by all accounts. It eats beetles in dead trees, and occasionally wild fruit, and was hunted by the natives. It was hunted more by settlers. By the 1910s, it was declared extinct. Then in 1939, a respected scientist and his team found a family in Louisiana and studied them around a nest, taking the only good photos and movie footage existing of them. Unfortunately, Singer sewing machines owned the land, and when they found that rare birds lived on it, they doubled down on cutting down the forest in case the government tried to turn it into a wildlife preserve. It wasn’t long before they were declared extinct yet again.

But, that notwithstanding, almost annually, reports came in of them, from the dense swamps of the Florida panhandle, and southern Louisiana. Occasionally elsewhere from the South. Good photos were taken of one in 1971; scientists scoffed and suggested it might have been an antique specimen nailed to trees high up. Later computer study showed the bird was actually in different positions in the two photos, making that all the more unlikely, but illustrating the Catch 22 with the bird. Get a good photo of one, and people say it’s staged and fake, get a bad photo or video clip of one, as has happened recently, and people say “inconclusive.”

The bird lives in dense woods, where some say you can’t see more than 75 feet in any direction due to the vegetation. Poisonous Cottonmouth snakes abound, as do alligators frequently, and more bugs than you can shake a stick at. And the birds are notoriously shy after centuries of being hunted by humans. Not many people, even serious birders, go looking for them where they are likely to occur. Yet a few do, and from time to time, they find Ivory-billeds. A group found at least one in Arkansas in 2004; they got decent enough video to be accepted by the scientific community. The Ivory-billed lives!

Since then, there’ve been a number of other good sightings, in Louisiana, Florida and Mississippi, with a few photos to show for it. Rather pixelated ones, alas, distant shots from a trail cam in woods; video of one flying through a swamp in Florida taken from a kayak. I recently read the book Taunting Extinction, the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, in which the author goes to great lengths to analyze and prove a photo taken in 2009 was in fact one of the rare birds. It’s convincing, but not helped by things like his use of beer cans to visually demonstrate comparative neck lengths of different birds. It makes the point, but loses points among the professor crowd when you’re evidence is that the bird in the photo has a neck like a full tallboy beer can and the closest type of bird has a neck less than half a beer can long! (I do note, he offers more scientific data than just that and was a professional scientist himself).

So with apparent evidence of the bird still existing only 10 years or so back, and with a confirmed history of “coming back from extinction “ – an impossibility if one thinks about it – why is the government so quick to declare the bird gone? All the more odd – a species which is similarly rare, the Eskimo Curlew, has not been labeled extinct, despite not being seen since 1963, and not in the U.S. since one landed in Galveston in 1962. This was a bird which migrated right over the Great Plains from its arctic home and liked to spend time standing in grassy fields. How hard would it be to see one of them, a bird standing over a foot-tall with a long bill, if they landed…especially near a large city like Houston or Omaha which used to have them? But the government has yet to consider it extinct. It makes you wonder. But as Fox Mulder used to say, “the truth is out there.”

So to summarize, a big species we think exists keeps showing up and reports are being taken seriously; species from outer-space that until recently authorities refused to acknowledge as even being possible are being looked at by focus groups sponsored by the government, but a well-loved bird which is highly elusive but keeps showing up is suddenly declared officially gone. Strange days indeed!

May your 2022 be full of wonder and mystery and times as happy as a mosquito-bit kayaker taping an “extinct” bird!

January 6, 2021

Stimulus Cheques Aren’t The Only Thing That Will Be Out There

Fox Mulder must be grinning because, it seems, within six months the truth will be out there, to paraphrase The X-files skeptic.

Seems like it’s good not to tempt fate by suggesting “well 2021 can’t get any weirder than the one we just went through”. Because lost in the news static about the pandemic, the election passed and the one which was coming up (which is to say the Georgia senate) and all the other things, lost in almost 5600 pages of government snooze-talk was a little item which might just vindicate Mulder. And the real life champions of his TV cause. Because in those 5000+ pages of the Pandemic “Stimulus” bill designed to extend unemployment benefits and give taxpayers those beloved $600 cheques, there’s a directive to the Pentagon and “spy agencies” to spill the beans about aliens.

Nope, I’m not making that up. News agencies from Fox News to Yahoo all have confirmed there’s a bit in there telling the military and the “spy agencies” as well as the Director of National Intelligence to report within 180 days to Congress and the Armed Services. They are to basically tell them everything you wanted to know about UFOs but were afraid to ask. It should contain “detailed analysis of unidentified aerial phenomenon”, the current preferred term for “UFOs” or “little green men.” Apparently it managed to do what nothing else in the public forum these days did – namely have full “bipartisan support.” Wait – they can’t agree on the wording for relief payments to out of work people they both agree should happen, but they are all now A-OK with the story behind Roswell, the Phoenix lights and other things like that being revealed? 2021 can’t get any weirder? “Hold my beer,” the government says.

This perhaps should come as little surprise. In the past few years, the U.S. military has verified some videos taken by fighter pilots of UFOs deftly out-manueovring them, albeit still declaring them inexplicable. And already this year a senior Harvard professor put out a paper stating that our galaxy was visited by alien life recently when a large object at first thought to be a comet went for a fly-by and defied gravity by zooming at, then speeding away from the sun. The old “weather balloon” or “drunk hicks seeing swamp gas” explanations are wearing thin even for the types more like Mulder’s partner, Scully, denying anything’s out there to the moment she’s beamed into one of the spaceships.

Will it happen? Who knows? The government is great at few things, but stonewalling is one of them. And even if it does issue some sort of report, there’s no saying it will be made available for public consumption…. although its equally true that these days, if hundreds of politicians have access to the papers, one might expect at least one will leak them to a friendly media type.

Personally, I’ve been fascinated by the subject for a long time. I think a lot of “UFOs” are actually identifable – high altitude planes, military tests, shooting stars and what have you. I also think some are very impossible to explain any way other than mechanical devices controlled by intelligent life. Probably more intelligent than ours as humans. I figure when you go out in the country and look up at a clear night sky, and see those thousands of stars, each one might have planets circling around it, just like our sun, and for each one of those that we see, thousands more are beyond our eyesight or telescope range. It actually seems like some pretty big amount of hubris to think that we are the one and only lifeform out there.

Expect the unexpected. That might be the best bet if you are looking for a 2021 slogan. And, “the truth is out there.”