Nostradamus on 2026, Another Possible Atlantis, Merlin's Grave, Noah's Ark Evidence and More Mysterious News Briefly

A roundup of mysterious, paranormal and strange news stories from the past week.

NASA released the best photos yet of the 3I/ATLAS space object – they were taken in early October 2025 by the Mars Perseverance rover, which is the closest camera NASA has to the object – and NASA's Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya says the photos confirm what most people who are not followers of Harvard professor Avi Loeb believed: “This object is a comet. It looks and behaves like a comet, and all evidence points towards it being a comet”; photos were also taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (MRO) HiRISE (the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera, and the MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) orbiter captured ultraviolet images; Dr. Tom Statler, the lead scientist for solar system small bodies with NASA, said 3I/ATLAS possibly “came from a solar system older than our own solar system itself, which gives me goosebumps to think about frankly, because that means that 3I/ATLAS is not just a window into another solar system, it’s a window into the deep past – and so deep into the past that it predates even the formation of our earth and the sun". 3I/ATLAS comet fans will not rest until the day Professor Loeb says, “Never mind.”

Like the spirits that have allegedly haunted it, the so-called Conjuring House – a principle element of the many ‘Conjuring ‘ movies and their spinoffs – refuses to be sold without mysterious problems, albeit not of the demonic kind; instead, the Rhode Island domicile has been tormented by failed sales, with the latest being an auction to be held on (appropriately) Halloween 2025, which was cancelled when the bank holding the mortgage abruptly sold it to an unnamed buyer; now that the transaction has been completed and filed, the buyer was revealed to be a real estate company headed by popular YouTuber Elton Castee, who is also the co-owner (with comedian Matt Rife) of Ed and Lorraine Warren’s (the Conjuring investigators) Connecticut home; however, current owner Jacqueline Nuñez refuses to hand over the deed to the property, which would send it into foreclosure and back to the auction house, where “Ghost Hunters” star Jason Hawes plans to try and buy the property he lost in the failed Pre-Halloween auction and surprise transaction. Although the bar is pretty low, this is the most boring Conjuring plot yet.

The history and legends of King Arthur get mythical with the tales of Merlin the Magician, but Merlin’s legacy may get closer to reality with the announcement that England’s Wiltshire Council has granted approval for plans to demolish a carpentry workshop, toilets, plant room and water meter and pump at the Marlborough Mound, also known as Merlin's Mound, where many believe the magician’s remains were buried; with the removal of these old structures, Marlborough College, where the 4,000-year-old mound is located, suggests there is "good potential" for traces of medieval and post-medieval waterways to be encountered and while they say it is unlikely anything archaeologically significant would be found under the buildings, removing them will let archeologists open up a cross-section of the second-largest Neolithic mound in Europe and potentially resolve some myths and add to the history of the Arthurian legends surrounding Merlin and the mound, whose hometown’s motto is "ubi nunc sapientis ossa Merlini" or "where now are the bones of the wise Merlin". Legends say the Lady of the Lake couldn’t get to his bones, so maybe the ladies and gents of archeology can.

The year 2025 is approaching its end so Nostradamus interpreters are digging through the psychic’s quatrains for clues to what’s in store for the new year and how 2025 will end, which could severely impact 2026 if his prediction comes true that England (of all places!) will be the site of a catastophowar; Nostradamus wrote: "When those from the lands of Europe, see England set up her throne behind. Her flanks, there will be cruel wars. The kingdom will be marked by wars so cruel, foes from within and without will arise”; if that’s not scary enough, the French astrologer also predicted another pandemic before the end of 2025: “ A great pestilence from the past returns, no enemy more deadly under the skies";  should at least parts of humanity survive, 2026 will be worse: "From the cosmos, a fireball will rise, A harbinger of fate, the world pleads. Science and fate in a cosmic dance, The fate of the Earth, a second chance”, the “great powers will clash” again and there will be “a decrease in the influence of established Western countries and the emergence of new world powers”; skeptics point out that Nostradamus has been wrong many times before. Does he have anything to say about Bitcoin or the Super Bowl?

Alex Ramage and Andrei Volk say they were on a break from their jobs at a factory in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on November 4 when a plane with contrails flew overhead and they decided to record it – what they saw later when watching the video was what looked like a long disk-shaped UFO zipping across the sky; they can’t come up with a non-alien-UFO explanation, with Ramage recounting in an interview that “We thought it was pretty wild and we were freaking out about it. We were filming the plane to check out the zoom on a Samsung phone camera, then we happened to replay the video and see the little dish-shaped thing. To me, it looks like you can make out a dome shape in the middle of the disk, like a traditional UFO people imagine. It looked way different than the movement of a plane. It was gliding, so I don’t think it was anything like that. We were in shock and awe because I’ve always believed in UFOs, but to experience it for myself is amazing”; other explanations for similar sightings are CGI, camera anomalies, bugs or birds, but they seem convinced it was a UFO. With no other witnesses, toss this one on the giant pile of stuff to sort through if we ever get government disclosure.

The warnings about comets and asteroids hitting Earth just got a little scarier with the announcement that researchers from Shanghai and Guangzhou, China, have discovered a previously hidden impact crater in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, China, that was formed very recently (about 12,000 years ago) during the early-to-mid Holocene and, with a diameter of 900 meters and depth of 90 meters, it is the largest known impact crater from this era, which is our current post-Ice-Age one; the researchers believe this was from a meteorite rather than a come, which would have left a much larger crater; study author Ming Chen, writing in the journal Matter and Radiation at Extremes, said: “This discovery shows that the scale of impacts of small extraterrestrial objects on the Earth in the Holocene is far greater than previously recorded”. Has anyone said it’s an alien spaceship yet?

The Baltic Sea Anomaly – an unexplained structure on the floor of the Baltic Sea that resembles a spaceship to some and the remains of an ancient city to others – just got more anomalous with the revelation by Swedish wreck diver Dennis Åsberg, co-founder of the Ocean X team that the circular structure is actually detached from the seabed, which would lend credence to the spaceship theory; Åsberg also said in a podcast interview that the structure has straight walls, 90° corridors, and a hard, uniform surface which would not be formed naturally; Åsberg claims temperatures around the anomaly are a near-freezing zero degrees Celsius and one spot appears to be pulsing sediment in a way that a biological organism might breath. Has anyone said "it’s just a comet" yet?

While the UFO files and other secret government documents are still locked up, files concerning the 1937 disappearance of aviator Amelia Earhart on her round-the-world flight have finally been released and they show that after the last full radio transmission from Earhart on July 2, 1937, she continued to transmit fragments of calls for help that were said to sound “desperate”; she asked for aid from the Itasca, a boat stationed near Howland Island and the newly released records show that the crew of the Itasca tried to help but may have taken too long to tune their equipment to the right frequency (7500 kHz) to send a signal to guide Earhart; the files also reveal classified information that the US listening posts in Hawaii picked up a faint “echo” of her voice at the same moment, and debunks the conspiracy theory that Earhart and her navigator were captured by Japanese forces and executed - the records show there was a massive naval search for them  aviator, the most extensive ever conducted. Earhart’s remains and the wreckage of her plane are still not found, but they’ll probably turn up long before some other secret government files are released.  

Life on other planets with extreme weather and temperature conditions got a boost in probabilities from the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, the deepest known spot on Earth, where mysterious “blue goo” samples from mud volcanoes at a depth of 9,833 feet were found to contain fats from unknown living organisms; these ‘extremophiles’ would have to have endured a skin-searing pH kevel of 12 – close to the highest recorded in a natural ecosystem; University of Bremen geoscientists analyzing the blue goo say this evidence confirms that extremophile microbes once live there: “It is simply exciting to obtain insights into such a microbial habitat because we suspect that primordial life could have originated at precisely such sites”; similar microbes at lesser depths make their own energy from methane by consuming sulfate and producing skin-eating corrosive hydrogen sulfide, so it is possible that life could have formed in a similar way one other planets with conditions like the Mariana Trench or worse. Aliens must be disappointed when they flee their own planets, and their USOs end up in the same conditions.

An alien big cat sighting where the woods are filled with wild boars sounds plausible, so residents of the German town of Altenahr in the border region between Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia are understandably worried after a hunter using a night vision camera captured video of what appears to be a large wild cat; previous sightings in the area turned out to be a wild boar, but this one moves more like a big cat; however, as the video was spread across social media sites, a woman contacted the Altenahr Municipal Association to say she had moved from the area from northern Germany with her Maine Coon cat, an extremely large breed of house cats, and it escaped, causing her to suspect (and hope) this is her cat; the government also received an unidentified fecal sample from the area which was picked up by the same hunter and sent it to a lab for analysis – the results were not in at the time of this writing. Do wild boars eat Maine Coon cats? (Asking for a cat-loving friend.)

Those fearing meteorite crashes are getting to close for comfort remember the recent story of a man whose moving Tesla was hit by a meteorite – while that was only the second time for a car hit, a homeowner in the Novgorod Region of Russia became the latest to have their house roof pierced by a falling space rock; others in the area saw a fireball with a long greenish tail flying through the morning sky and hear explosions but assumed it was debris from a satellite or rocket launch; however, researchers from the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Organic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences (GEOKHI) went to the home, picked up the rock and analyzed it – confirming it was indeed an extraterrestrial rock – most likely an LL6 type of ordinary stony meteorites known as chondrites; the meteorite sample will now go on display at the Museum of the History of the Universe in Dedovsk, along with the damaged section of the roof and other meteorite fragments. Hopefully, after the homeowner files his insurance claim.

Truck driver Francisco Sedas was driving in Vera Cruz, Mexico, on a highway stretch from Orizaba to Nogales when he photographed what looks like a flying saucer going over the hills in front of him; quite a few social media commenters noted that they or others have seen similar UFOs in this area as well as in areas of Mexico with active volcanoes, but skeptics see an optical illusion, camera glitch or hoax. Shouldn’t truck drivers, who are on the road more than any other drivers, be as trusted on UFO sightings as pilots?

It’s not Plato’s Atlantis (no sunken city has been so far) but underwater ruins discovered beneath Lake Issyk Kul in Kyrgyzstan are drawing comparisons to the legendary sunken city; while the salt lake Issyk Kul has a maximum depth of 2,192 feet, the ruins are only 13 feet (4 meters) deep and the necropolis, fired-brick structures, ceramic containers, wooden beams and what looks like a public building that could have been a mosque, bathhouse, or madrassa (school) date back to medieval times.; the necropolis is from the 13th or 14th century and the structures show the area was expanding, but a major earthquake during the 15th century probably caused it to sink enough that residents had to be evacuated, leaving the town to be abandoned and covered with water and sediment; while not yet identified, archeologists believe the city was a major stop on the Silk Road trade route until the earthquake; after that, the area around the lake was used by nomads and now contains small villages. The legend of Atlantis ruined what are really interesting real stories of lost, sunken cities.

The biblical tale of Noah’s Ark continues to creep towards historical reality as archeologists are now able to carefully begin excavations on Turkey’s on Mount Ararat, one of the locations that could be the final resting place of the boat that allegedly saved the animals and a few humans of the world from a catastrophic flood; recently, Dr. Faruk Kaya led research by three universites to extract rock and soil samples taken from deep beneath the area where ground-penetrating radar has shown images of the general shape of a boat – those samples were found to conatin evidence of human activity in the region between 5500 and 3000 BCE; according to Kaya, “Based on initial findings, it is thought that human activity has existed in the region since the Chalcolithic period, between 5500 and 3000 BC. Noah's Flood is also known to date back 5,000 years”; however, “Based on the dating, it is impossible to say that the Ark is here. We need a long-term study to reveal this”. In other words, close but no Noah’s cigar or pairs of lion, penguin and dinosaur remains.

Proponents of the biblical version of the creation of the universe may have some new evidence to combat Big Bang fans in the form of a 4,300-year-old silver goblet discovered in 1970 in the tomb of a high-ranking individual in the Judean Hills of the West Bank – new analysis has determined that the three-inch goblet known as the Ain Samiya goblet is etched with mythological carvings of snakes, chimeras, gods, celestial symbols and a mysterious “boat of light” which researchers believe are a depiction of the universe changing from pre-creation chaos to a new cosmic order in a way that is similar to the story in the biblical book of Genesis; a study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society “Ex Oriente Lux,” claims this makes the goblet the oldest known visual record of the universe being born and predates the stone-inscribed Babylonian “Enuma Elish” by more than 1,000 years; the images depict a peaceful process of light ending the chaos, rather than a battle between gods. There’s an image of a snake, but no people or fig leaves, so this may just be one of a set.

The quest to de-extinct the woolly mammoth may have gotten another tool when paleogeneticists at Stockholm University extracted RNA from the frozen carcass of a juvenile female mammoth that lived during the last Ice Age 39,000 years ago and was found in Siberia in 2012; Professor Love Dalén and his team extracted the mammoth’s RNA, which translates genes into proteins and is extremely rare to find because it degrades rapidly, and will now be able to use the ancient RNA with the mammoth’s DNA to learn more about why the species went extinct as well as how to turn genes on and off to make them into different cells – key for bringing the species back from extinction and keeping it alive and healthy. If given a choice, woolly mammoths would probably vote to wait until there are more vegetarians before coming back.

The power of the paranormal world made its presence known in Texas recently when the Curious Twins Paranormal Tours & Events organization led a successful fight to prevent the Yorktown City Council from demolishing the Yorktown Memorial Hospital, a long-abandoned building that is considered to be one of the most haunted locations in Texas; the nearly 75-year-old building has been ruled unsafe by inspectors and the city closed it off to visitors in July, which surprised co-owner Fred Garza-Guzman, who hopes when the city council meets again after Thanksgiving break, it will allow his group to keep the building, schedule the necessary repairs, bring it up to code, designate it as a historical site and open it again for paranormal tours and investigations. There was no word on how the ghosts feel, but most spirits hate remodeling as much as moving to another abandoned building.