Alternative History

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In January 1996, three young witnesses between the ages of 14 and 22 claimed they had seen something strange in Varginha, Brazil. They said they had encountered a small, hairless creature with oily brown skin, a large head, and red eyes—and they referred to it as a "devil."

In the days that followed, several other residents came forward claiming that they, too, had seen something that was not of this world. These eerie events soon became known as the Varginha UFO Incident.

As the rumors spread, the details became increasingly unclear and more sensational. Some people claimed to have seen UFOs flying through the sky, while others alleged that extraterrestrials had been captured by the military and taken to a local hospital for examination.

The government denied all of these reports. The strange "creature" that the three young witnesses had seen? According to an official investigation, it was simply a homeless man nicknamed "Mudinho." The extraterrestrials reportedly seen at the hospital? Nothing more than an expectant couple with dwarfism.

Today, much like Roswell, the city of Varginha has embraced the story of its infamous UFO incident, selling Varginha alien dolls and even decorating one of its water towers with a UFO-shaped flying saucer.

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Beneath the waves off Japan's Ryukyu Islands, a series of mysterious pyramid-like formations has fascinated divers and geologists ever since the site was discovered in 1987.

In 1987, a local diver exploring the coast of Japan's southern Ryukyu Islands stumbled upon an astonishing discovery. Twenty-five meters below the surface, he saw a series of almost perfectly carved steps with straight edges. Today known as the Yonaguni Monument, this enormous behemoth, measuring 50 meters long and 20 meters wide, is one of the world's most unusual underwater sites.

Nicknamed "Japan's Atlantis," the rectangular, stacked, pyramid-like monument is believed to be more than 10,000 years old. Some believe it is all that remains of a long-lost Pacific civilization, possibly built by Japan's prehistoric Jōmon people, who inhabited these islands as early as 12,000 BC. Others argue that the site resembles natural formations found elsewhere in the world with distinctly defined edges and flat surfaces, such as Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, whose thousands of interlocking basalt columns were formed by a volcanic eruption millions of years ago.

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The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book written in the early 15th century in an unknown language or an encrypted cipher.

The manuscript was named after the Polish book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who discovered it in 1912 and emigrated to the United States two years later. It is currently housed in the library at Yale University.

No one had successfully deciphered a single word of the 234-page manuscript until 2018. Many suspected that the manuscript was simply a nonsensical text created by a medieval fraudster who wanted to impress patients or sell it as a magical medical book.

In May 2019, a researcher from the University of Bristol published a partial decipherment and claimed that the text was written by nuns in an extinct Romance language.

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The Thunderbird is a divine being in Native American mythology that creates thunder by beating its wings and lightning by blinking its eyes. The Thunderbird was regarded as an immensely powerful force and, in some traditions, was considered synonymous with the supreme deity.

The association between thunder and birds is, however, widespread. It has also appeared in Asia and South America, but it is rarely as central to mythology as it is among the aforementioned cultures.

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Alien abduction claimants (also known as abductees and experiencers) are people who have claimed that they have been abducted by extraterrestrials. The term “abduction phenomenon” describes claims that non-human beings have kidnapped individuals and temporarily removed them from familiar terrestrial surroundings. The abductors, usually interpreted as extraterrestrial life forms, are said to subject experiencers to forced medical examinations that focus on the alleged experiencer’s reproductive system.

The first alien abduction account to receive widespread publicity was the abduction of Barney and Betty Hill in 1961. Since then, the credibility and mental health of alleged experiencers have become important considerations for those attempting to determine the truthfulness of abduction claims. Mainstream academics and members of the skeptical movement generally doubt that the phenomenon occurs literally as reported and have proposed a variety of alternative explanations.

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