Forteana

"Police chiefs of America's largest cities have published the first guide about UAPs, which details chilling encounters and how officers can report such incidents.

The 11-page document warned that unidentified flying objects 'pose significant safety risks to law enforcement air support units,' urging teams to be vigilant when in helicopters.

The report also highlights stories from officers who claimed to confront UFOs, specifically one in 2023 where a law employee saw a 'triangle craft with green lights gliding through the sky' before a local resident said something 'ran' nearby.

The police executives created the reference because 'it's in the interest of law enforcement to be aware of trends and reporting on UAP due to the unknown threat they may pose.'

The organization, called the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), includes nearly 80 executives from major US cities who work together to advance public safety through a range of initiatives, including community outreach, research and policy development and now, UFO investigations..."

"Robert Smith is convinced the aliens have won. "The invasion has happened—it's all over," says the University of Alberta space historian who teaches a course on the history of extraterrestrials.

It's not so much that Smith believes in their literal existence, only that aliens have staked their claim in the human imagination..."

"Area 51 isn’t the only weird thing in the Nevada desert, as our writer discovered when he drove the Extraterrestrial Highway to see if the truth really is out there.

‘That’s where they probe you,” the shop assistant said when I asked her what really goes on at Area 51. She followed this up with a raising of the eyebrows and a waggle of her extended finger. I got the message.

I was at the Alien Center, my first stop on a 600-mile road trip in rural southern Nevada, making a loop around the huge slab of desert that’s home to a US air force base shrouded in mystery. Built in the Fifties, the base has become a beacon for conspiracy theorists who believe the government uses it to store broken-down spaceships and little green men (with their apparently invasive interrogation techniques). The official line is that Area 51 is a training facility for military aircraft … but they would say that, wouldn’t they.

The Alien Center is really just a petrol station with your standard diner, gift shop and brothel attached. But since I’d been on Route 95 for a couple of hours after leaving Las Vegas, it seemed a good place to take a breather..."

"Key Takeaways

For as long as humans have been looking up, we’ve seen objects or phenomena that have defied our conventional explanations for what we’ve known is scientifically possible.

Many have attributed these sightings to extraterrestrial or even supernatural activity, although no conclusive proof or incontrovertible evidence supporting these claims has ever survived scrutiny.

What scientific steps could we take to evaluate the activity of an unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) or an unidentified flying object (UFO) to determine if they’re actually “beyond” present Earthly knowledge? Here’s how to do it..."

"The idea that aliens may have visited the Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of UK citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7% believe that they have seen a UFO.

The figures are even higher in the US – and rising. The number of people who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life increased from 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022. Some 24% of Americans say they’ve seen a UFO.

This belief is slightly paradoxical as we have zero evidence that aliens even exist. What’s more, given the vast distances between star systems, it seems odd we’d only learn about them from a visit. Evidence for aliens is more likely to come from signals from faraway planets.

In a paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, I argue that the belief in alien visitors is no longer a quirk, but a widespread societal problem..."

"The royal residences are no strangers to eerie tales, with Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and Kensington Palace all having their share of ghostly rumours. But it's Sandringham House that takes the crown for one of the most bizarre incidents, as disclosed in the diaries of the late high-society columnist Kenneth Rose, which came to light posthumously.

He wrote about a peculiar "little service" held in a downstairs bedroom of the grand 18th Century mansion back in 2000, after staff reported supernatural encounters. A pastor was brought in to conduct the ceremony, attended by none other than the late Queen Mother and her Lady-in-Waiting, Prue Penn, with the late Queen herself present.

Nestled within a sprawling 20,000-acre estate in the Norfolk Coast Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sandringham House is the traditional festive retreat for the Royal Family. Its storied past is peppered with spectral sightings and unexplained occurrences, but there's one particular tale that's bound to send shivers down your spine..."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19227931

As a result, ghost hunters reinvent the wheel in an attempt to be scientific, only to find it’s a wheel that never worked in the first place, and now they’ve made it even worse.

The latest trend sweeping through ghost-hunting groups is an excellent example of this issue. A modern twist on traditional spirit communication, the Estes Method (invented by American ghost tour operators), offers a new take on the Spirit Box, which ghost hunters have used to attempt communication with ghosts for decades.

The Spirit Box rapidly sweeps through radio frequencies, creating a stream of white noise and audio snippets from different broadcast sources. Advocates claim that spirits can manipulate these audio fragments to form words or sentences to communicate with the living.

The method is simple; the ghost hunter asks a question, and the ghost uses the audio from the Spirit Box to answer them.

In reality, the messages of ghostly origin result from listener bias, suggestion, and audio illusions. Sentences from the broadcasts are often incomplete, meaning that the phonemes (human speech sounds) can be misheard and, more importantly, misinterpreted as relevant to whatever ghost a ghost hunter is trying to communicate with.

"A British urban explorer claims he has captured an image of a ghost lurking in the hallway of an abandoned school in Japan.

Ben, who goes by the username @places_forgotten on social media, is a content creator with 1.4 million followers on TikTok. He mainly shares videos and photos of abandoned places around the world.

It was while he was on a work trip to Japan that Ben decided to pay the derelict building that used to house the school a visit.

While photographing the abandoned school, which still had homework pinned up on its walls, bags perched on the desks and pictures of the students, Ben claimed to have captured the photographs of a ghost lurking in the hallway.

Chilling images, shared by the content creator who said he was certain was the only person there, show the figure at the far-end of the corridor..."

"A group of Midlothian childhood friends have revisited a terrifying ‘alien encounter’ that left them traumatised for decades.

Anne Calder, 54, Pamela Pollok, 53 and May Brown, 55, were part of a group of five friends, all aged between eight and 10, who believe they encountered a ‘creature not of this world’ when walking together in 1978.

The alleged incident took place on an old railway line which runs underneath the bridge on Suttieslea Road, Newtongrange.

Frozen in fear, they all give matching descriptions of a three foot tall ‘alien’ perched in a tree on a route they had walked hundreds of times before.

All three remember the alien as having bright luminous yellow eyes with greenish brown skin and a synthesised sounding voice but strangely no mouth.

Looking back at the event, they feel the alien may have been communicating with them telepathically.

After the creature ‘spoke’ with the group, they all claim to have blacked out and said they only remember standing in a field around five minutes away - but not how they got there.

Anne, who has suffered from night terrors relating to the incident, believes they may have blacked out as they were taken aboard a UFO..."

Jeffrey J Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of 10 books on the history of mysticism, psychology and the paranormal. His latest, How to Think Impossibly, draws on a range of sources including gnosticism, quantum physics and English romantic philosophy, to attempt a new theory of mind and the imagination.

At the root of some of your understanding of imagination, and your argument that current theories of mind leave too much “off the table”, seems to be an experience that happened to you in Kolkata in November 1989. Can you describe what that involved?

I was working on my first book, Kali’s Child, and I was very sick; I had some kind of flu or food poisoning. I went to bed and I woke up, but my body didn’t wake up. And some kind of strange energy came out of the room or more probably came out of my body. I thought that the electrical circuits in the walls had somehow malfunctioned and I was being electrocuted. I had a classic out-of-body experience, and when I eventually got back into my body and woke up it felt like something had been downloaded into me. Massive amounts of information, and I had no context for any of it.

...

Throughout history, as you write, all cultures have tried to explain individuals who have had these experiences of what you call “impossible thinking”. I suppose, for example, Lives of the Saints is one record of them?

You need impossible things to happen to become a saint, but they have got to be the right [Roman Catholic] things. But why take things off the table that don’t fit into your worldview?

...

I’m probably being dumb, but I didn’t get the relation between your updating of Coleridge’s model of the imagination – what you call dual-aspect monism, the sense that imagination can take us beyond the false division of mental and material realities – and these experiences like the sighting of ghosts or of giant praying mantises appearing at the end of people’s beds. How do those relate?

What I’m trying to say in the book is that a lot of people have these strange experiences, but nobody really has a model of the imagination that can explain them. I’m trying to develop one. I’m pushing back against this idea that the imagination is just about imaginary mental states. The example I give a lot is precognitive states: dream-like states, where people see the future as a set of physical events.

You have recorded and collected many examples in your Archives of the Impossible at Rice University.

Yes. To me they’re the most stunning because sometimes they’re precise down to very banal details.

...

Let me ask about, for example, your thoughts on UFO sightings. You suggest they happen more frequently to people who’ve had near-death experiences, because, I think you argue, those people’s hold on “normal” reality is weaker?

I think the normal way of thinking about a UFO as some kind of extraterrestrial spaceship is naive. I think something’s going on that is much more related to our spiritual histories in ways that we don’t understand. We interpret it in this technological way: it’s a spaceship. It can’t be, you know, the world of the dead. God forbid.

"A UFO expert has levelled accusations at the Pope, alleging that he is concealing "extraordinary" alien secrets within the Vatican.

Steve Bassett, a UFO lobbyist in Washington, insists that it's evident the Catholic Church is aware of the existence of alien life and has concealed evidence in their archives.

As the executive director of the Paradigm Research Group, Bassett pointed out that the church has subtly suggested the existence of UFOs in religious artwork.

He told The Sun: "The Catholic Church, we have always known, has been aware of this subject going back perhaps hundreds and hundreds of years.

"It's gone so far as to say whoever these beings are, the Church would be happy to baptise them if they wanted to be baptised."

Bassett alleges that the Vatican library houses centuries of knowledge about aliens, with experts attempting to gain access to the Vatican Apostolic Archives.

However, they require permission from the Holy See, the supreme governing body of the Catholic Church. They will then need to sift through thousands of years of records, spanning 50 miles, to substantiate their claims.

This follows last year's statement by former intelligence officer David Grusch at a US congressional hearing, where he claimed the government was concealing evidence of "non-human intelligence".

Grusch suggested that the US has likely been aware of "non-human" activity since the 1930s and possesses fully intact pieces of "craft" of a "non-human origin".

He also mentioned that Italy discovered one of the UFOs in 1933, and Pope Pius XII at the time relayed the findings to President Franklin Roosevelt..."

"... allegations have now been made by Elizondo in a shocking new book, Imminent – Inside The Pentagon’s Hunt For UFOs. It’s a book that has been hailed by some as all the more significant because Elizondo isn’t some crackpot amateur UFO sleuth but the former military intelligence officer who actually led that hunt.

The 52-year-old claims to be the former head of the US Defence Department’s shadowy Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

And he would like us to know that he didn’t start seeing those small green luminous balls until after he went to work for the AATIP and recognised them for one of the most common types of UFO – or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) – that are reported.

In his mind, it could hardly have been a coincidence. Some of his colleagues had reported similar sightings where they lived. Was some ‘more advanced intelligence’ checking out the humans who were investigating them, Elizondo wondered. Inevitably, his book has sent ructions through a UFO world that has spent decades fighting desperately to be taken seriously. He ticks all the boxes in terms of being a ‘credible witness’.

He had top security clearance and worked for a secret US government UFO investigation unit for seven years. Elizondo claims the evidence for extraterrestrials is hiding in plain sight, here on Earth.

But he says it is being withheld from us by obstructive Pentagon officials who fear disclosure will cause mass panic. He alleges that clear footage – unveiled a few years ago – of UFOs captured by US fighter pilots, proves that highly advanced spacecraft have been buzzing us for decades. And even worse, our relatively feeble defences are powerless to stop them.

‘These craft are not made by humans,’ Elizondo boldly and bluntly states.

‘Humanity is in fact not the only intelligent life in the universe, and not the alpha species.’

These UFO ‘craft’ have been operating with ‘complete impunity all over the world since at least the Second World War’, he insists, and have the ability ‘to move in ways that defy our knowledge of physics... within air, water and space’.

UFOs, he intones, present ‘at best, a very serious national security issue, and at worst, the possibility of an existential threat to humanity’. To put it mildly, it sounds like the sort of issue someone should have mentioned some time ago. No one has, he says, because a secret cabal of US government officials and major defence contractors have been retrieving the UFOs and their alien occupants since 1947 and hiding them away..."

"A man has been left stunned after snapping a UFO in Scotland. The picture, which shows what appears to be strange lights, was taken on Friday night.

Gearóid, who often photographs the Aurora Borealis, had gone in search of the northern lights and headed to Coatbridge's St. Ambrose High School.

At around 9.30pm, he went to the football pitch at the North Lanarkshire school with his tripod and dog and took more than 100 images of the night sky.

He then returned home to see if he was successful. On closer inspection, Gearóid spotted what appeared to be a cluster of red and white lights streaking across the sky in several images, Glasgow Live reports.

He immediately posted on social media about the mystery. He said: "I go out most nights with my Canon Camera and tripod with my dog about 9.30pm down the park from my house when I think the Aurora Borealis can be seen.

"That night I took over 100 photos of the sky. When I got home I looked at them on my PC and saw this photo. I said to myself I don't remember seeing that when I took the photo..."

Tyler Paul, organizer of Saturday’s conference, said he began the New Brunswick Bigfoot Organization two years ago and held its first gathering last year in Sackville.

The goal, he said, is to encourage more people to talk about their personal experiences.

Paul believes his first brush with Bigfoot came last June as he hiked a woodland trail with his family in Elgin, N.B.

“We started hearing this knocking … just this constant, whack, whack, whack, whack,” he said, adding the sounds continued for four or five minutes.

“And I was kind of getting a little freaked out because I had the kids there and everything, and gave my wife a little look like, ‘is it really what I’m hearing?’ We believe that we found an imprint on the ground.”

Suzanne Leger of Shediac, N.B., has reported two encounters. She said the first came when she was about seven or eight and playing with a friend in her backyard when they heard “really, really loud screams.”

“It’s not like an animal, not like a man. And they’re very, very loud and very strong, powerful.”

The second came this February, she said, during a lunchtime stroll down a trail in Grande-Bigue, N.B.’s Cocagne Park. She heard nothing this time, but said she saw three different sets of footprints, some of which featured indentations that looked like claw marks. Leger said they bore no resemblance to imprints made by animals and is convinced a Bigfoot clan was on the move.

“It looked like a family,” she said, noting one set of footprints was larger than the others.

Folklore is filled with centuries worth of suspected Bigfoot sightings, which Leger cites as reason enough to believe her encounters were genuine.

“People aren’t making this stuff up for hundreds of years. There’s something there that we just haven’t seen,” she said.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16646845

According to the Times Reporter, the documentary “Vampires in Gem City” was set to expose Dayton as having the second largest vampire coven in the United States and featured the missing person’s case of 26-year-old George Phillip Gall.

It is reported that Gall went missing on October 13, 1994 after getting off a bus near the goth-themed Asylum nightclub.

The bus driver told investigators that Gall walked toward the Asylum nightclub and was never seen again. He was declared dead by the state of Ohio in 2002.

According to Times Reporter, it wasn’t until 2008 that rumors of vampires started after a retired Dayton police officer told The Dayton Daily News that a bartender at the nightclub told him Gall was killed and beheaded for an occult ritual.

It is reported that after Gall’s disappearance in 1994, Williams went to the nightclub undercover and noticed it attracted a large “gothic, vampire-like” crowd. It was while he was undercover that a bartender confided in Williams that Gall’s head was sold inside the club.

Williams told the Dayton Daily News that the bartender gave enough intricate details to make the story believable. Williams also says that Gall’s body was placed in a storm sewer tunnel accessible inside the nightclub. Officers searched for the body but did not find any evidence of the crime, but they did find “occult markings.”

According to Times Reporter, the mystery behind Gall’s disappearance has led to the birth of an urban legend, with many Dayton residents claiming to have seen a headless man approaching them in tunnels to ask where his head was.

The world’s most studied archaeological artefact has been subject to scrutiny since it first emerged in 1350s, bearing the faint image of a man that some believe to be an imprint of Jesus.

A few decades after the shroud’s apppearance, Bishop Pierre d’Arcis of Troyes wrote a memorandum in 1389 denouncing it as a forgery.

But the cloth, housed in the Cathedral of St John the Baptist in Turin, continued to be studied and scrutinised.

A controversial study carried out in the 1980s dated the shroud to between 1260AD and 1390AD, branding it as a medieval forgery.

...

The new study, using X-rays to inspect linen threads from the shroud, traces its origin all the way back to the time of Jesus.

Though the study, published in the journal Heritage, falls short of concluding whether the shroud was actually Jesus’s burial cloth, it dates its origin to 2,000 years ago.

“The experimental results are compatible with the hypothesis that the Turin Shroud is a 2000-year-old relic,” it says, claiming previous analysis might have been flawed due to contamination.

Researchers say cellulose contained in the shroud’s fibres has aged slowly since the 14th century due to lower room temperatures in Europe.

This means that most of the cloth’s natural ageing, about 90 per cent, ocurred before the 1300s.

There is a catch, however.

Scientists say that the shroud can conclusively be said to be 20 centuries old only if there is further evidence showing the relic was kept safely at an average temperature of about 22C and relative humidity of around 55 per cent for 13 centuries before it emerged.

The Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro has reported being disturbed by a supernatural presence while staying in a hotel in Scotland.

Del Toro, who is renowned for his films delving into the weird, spooky and occasionally horrific, posted a series of messages on social media saying that the room he had chosen in a hotel in Aberdeen has an “oppressive” atmosphere and that “something is in that room with me”.

The Mexican director said that he opted to stay in the room after it was vacated by one of his producers: “Odd electrical and physical occurrences scared her into leaving.” Welcoming the opportunity to experience a notoriously “haunted” room, Del Toro later reported: “Nothing has happened yet, but the atmosphere in the room is oppressive and I am not gonna spend much more time there.” He added that he had chosen to not to sleep in it: “I kept [the room] but am sleeping in another room – I need six hours of sleep to have a good shooting day … something is in that room with me.”

Del Toro is in Scotland to shoot a new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel Frankenstein, featuring Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as the Monster.

He added: “I always stay in ‘the most haunted room’ but only once did I experience anything supernatural. The rest of the time: nothing. I have high hopes.”

Former Pentagon insider Luis Elizondo says the Department of Defense has a spacecraft crash retrieval program and has recovered nonhuman specimens.

In a NewsNation special, Elizondo reveals more than any Pentagon official has done before, naming the government agencies and aerospace companies he says possess these alleged spacecraft.

...

Elizondo told NewsNation’s Ross Coulthart that the U.S. government recovered one of two unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) during Roswell 1947.

...

“The United States has been involved in the recovery of objects, vehicles of unknown origin that are neither from our country or any other foreign country that we’re aware of,” Elizondo said.

“We as a nation have been interested in not only the vehicles themselves but the occupants of these vehicles; to include biological specimens… We’re not alone. We are not alone in this universe and it is a simple fact. The U.S. government has been aware of that fact for decades.”

The Department of Defense has rebuked Elizondo’s comments in a statement to NewsNation, denying the existence of any “credible evidence of extraterrestrial activity.”

“As we have stated previously, Luis Elizondo had no assigned responsibilities for the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) while assigned to the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security,” Sue Gough, Department of Defense spokesperson told NewsNation.

King Charles has an ongoing fascination with UFOs and the possibility of alien life, a new documentary has sensationally claimed.

The documentary 'The King of UFOs' also explores reports of the monarch's inherited secret library of books and files on the phenomena plus other subjects such as crop circles and the paranormal.

It also suggests the late Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II communicated with UFO believers several times.

And now King Charles is exploring his own interest in the fascinating topic, according to the documentary.

One of the most bizarre claims made in the new production is that the then Prince Charles was seen piloting an experimental "UFO-style craft" in Canada in 1975.

Ufologist and filmmaker Mark Christopher Lee said: "Retired Police CID detective, and now owner of The Great British UFO Learning Centre, John Hanson had regular correspondence with Prince Phillip and The Queen and states that they had their own library of UFO and paranormal books."

He told Express.co.uk: "Letters between Hanson and the Queen and Prince Phillip, shown in the film, say they will 'add the book that John sent to them to their own collection/library'."

Nick Pope, who investigated UFOs for the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) until 2009, said: "The Royal Family has been interested in UFOs for decades, but this was also a matter of extreme sensitivity as in some ways, the situation was almost counter to the government's position on this, or it was difficult to gel with it.

...

"Prince Philip was very much at the forefront of royal interest in this, although arguably, he was introduced to this by Earl Mountbatten, his uncle.

"(Prince Philip) had a large collection of UFO books. He subscribed to Flying Saucer Review and a number of other publications, but it was all done carefully, so not to take a subscription and say 'please send to Buckingham Palace.'

...

"As well as looking at an alleged UFO landing and alien visitation on Lord Louis Mountbatten’s estate in England (allegedly witnessed by one of his own employees), the film investigates the late Queen and Prince Phillip’s interest in UFOs and crop circles.

"The film has exclusive access to unreleased archives and interviews with witnesses and also explores the extraordinary claims that the then Prince Charles piloted an experimental UFO craft in Canada in 1975.

Archive

Previously: Wild claims King Charles 'flew UFO to save lives' in secret military mission

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18733084

Filmmakers Richard Rossi and Kelly Tabor may have unintentionally captured drone footage of 'Champ,' the lake monster said to inhabit Lake Champlain, while shooting their film, 'Lucy and the Lake Monster'.

The press release stated that longtime friends Rossi and Tabor were reviewing footage when they noticed a “large, unknown creature gliding beneath the water's surface” near a boat used in the film.

A ten-second clip featuring the mysterious object was published to Rossi’s YouTube channel over a week prior to the press release.

In that footage, the object can be seen below the water’s surface in the lower righthand corner of the frame.

According to a second press release from August 14th:

The present document delineates the preliminary scientific evaluation of the Tabor-Rossi Champ footage, juxtaposing it with the renowned 1977 Mansi photograph. A comprehensive and exhaustive analysis is scheduled for dissemination in the following year.

The Tabor-Rossi footage constitutes the most compelling extant evidence to date supporting the potential survival of a plesiosaur-like species. It incorporates numerous elements that the 1977 Mansi photograph of "Champ" does not possess:

1. The inclusion of a boat in the footage, occupied by two individuals, provides a critical reference for scale, thereby facilitating an assessment of the dimensions of the observed organism. The boat's measurements are documented at 11.8333 feet in length and 4.28333 feet in width, with the subject appearing to exceed the size of the vessel. Notably, large sturgeon are documented to reach lengths of up to 7 feet, with the recorded maximum being 8 feet. Conversely, the Mansi photograph lacks any objects for scale reference.

2. The original Mansi Polaroid depicts the Champ entity in relatively shallow waters, not exceeding depths of 14 feet, in proximity to the shoreline. In contrast, the Tabor-Rossi footage was captured via drone technology in the deepest section of Bulwagga Bay within Lake Champlain, effectively eliminating the likelihood of misidentification as a rock formation or sand mounds, which are prevalent in shallower aquatic regions.

3. An additional caveat regarding the Mansi photograph pertains to the inability of Sandra Mansi to determine the precise location where the image was acquired. In contrast, the Tabor-Rossi footage benefits from the corroborative accounts of multiple eyewitnesses, including cast and crew members, who have unequivocally identified the exact geographic coordinates of their filming location.

4. Importantly, Sandra Mansi did not retain the original negative of her photograph. The Tabor-Rossi footage is distinguished by its production in high resolution using a quality drone camera. The five seconds of footage available on YouTube represent only a diminutive sample of the entirety encompassing a broader five-minute segment that includes the subject in question. This raw footage was retained, allowing for enhanced scientific scrutiny through subsequent review. Initial morphological assessments, conducted through pixel and color threshold adjustments, as well as zoom enhancements, reveal concordance with established plesiosaur anatomical features, while presenting proportions inconsistent with sturgeon or alternative explanations. Noteworthy characteristics include, but are not limited to:

a. A flattened plesiosaur head

b. Locomotion via reptilian-like fins

c. A slender, serpentine neck in conjunction with a more robust body structure

A series of rigorous tests is slated for execution and will be submitted for scientific peer review as part of a scholarly article in the upcoming year, thereby inviting formal academic scrutiny of these findings.

The six-tonne Altar Stone at the heart of Stonehenge came from the far north of Scotland rather than south-west Wales as previously thought, new analysis has found.

Trail cams have been set up in the Cumbria countryside following a reported sighting of a big cat and her cub.

A report came into a dedicated Big Cats Facebook group that a couple spotted the feline, described as a 'large black cat', alongside her cub.

The myth of the elusive 'Beast of Cumbria' is believed to have started when big cats kept as pets in the 1970s were released due to licensing changes.

Big cat expert Sharon Larkin-Snowden, who discovered Panthera DNA on a sheep's carcass in Cumbria in May of this year, posted the latest sighting reported to be by a couple in the group.

The post read: "Exciting news! We have had a few reports of a large black cat and her cub. Both look well and healthy. We now know her whereabouts (lair) and are setting up many trail cams in the vicinity in hope of capturing footage of mum and cub.

A couple believe they've captured footage of a "big cat" roaming the grounds of a well-known West Country manor house and gardens. They say that it was no ordinary 'house cat'.

The video, taken last Sunday (August 4) around 7.20pm, shows a black figure moving across the grass at Lanhydrock House, near Bodmin St Neot in Cornwall. The woman who filmed the incident, from St Austell, said it even startled the local deer causing them to "bolt".

Gemma Smith, who was with her partner Jamie Williamson and their children at the time, said: "Doesn't look like your average house cat.... could it be? ! " She added: "We were halfway up from the manor house and even from that distance you could see it was a big cat.

"Funnily we did spot a pair of deer down from the manor house on our way up and the female kept looking in that direction and then bolted and her partner followed." She said her phone let her down though and the images came out of poor quality.

Footage - which you can see at the top of this page - shows what they believe was a bigger-than-average black cat stalking about the National Trust property, seeming to fit the description of the Beast of Bodmin Moor.

Vasile Gorgos was 63 years old when he left his home in eastern Romania to go on a short business trip.

As a cattle farmer and trader, Vasile often made such excursions and, this time, had bought his train ticket in advance.

The difference here was that on this fateful day in 1991, he didn’t return home.

Knowing that he was due to come back the same day, his family immediately called the police who launched a search effort.

But after days turned into weeks, then months, then years, with neither sight or sign of Vasile, his loved ones were forced to assume the worst.

With no leads or traces to follow, they suspected foul play, but endless questions were left unanswered.

But then, on 29 August, 2021, three decades after Vasile’s disappearance, his family was faced with the ultimate plot twist.

A car stopped in front of their home – the same one they’d had for the past 30 years – and out stepped an old man, looking confused.

That man was none other than 93-year-old Vasile, wearing the same clothes he left in all those years ago. His pocket even contained the same train ticket he was due to travel with.

The car allegedly raced off before anyone had a chance to question the driver, but when asked where he’d been, a baffled Vasile replied that he’d been “at home”, Medium reports.

He subsequently underwent a thorough medical examination but doctors concluded that he was in remarkably good health.