Tag: unanswered questions

Mystery plane flies over six NATO states

An anonymous aircraft spotted flying out of Lithuania was allowed to cross the airspace of several other NATO members unimpeded before landing in Bulgaria, in an illegal flight still baffling aviation officials across the continent.

Though fighter jets were scrambled to escort the fugitive plane, its crew was able to flee the scene and they remain unidentified.

After departing from a yet to be officially disclosed location in Lithuania on Wednesday, the craft traveled across Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, Serbia, and Romania – all NATO states besides Belgrade – ultimately winding up at an abandoned airfield in Bulgaria, according to European officials and media reports. The plane was later found abandoned with no sign of its crew, though its engine was reportedly still warm when it was discovered.

While officials in several countries closely monitored the phantom flight, with the US, Hungarian, and Romanian air forces sending military jets to follow the plane at various points, the escorts broke off when it entered Bulgarian airspace. The small propeller craft did not have its transponder on and declined to respond to radio calls, but Bulgarian officials nonetheless decided it did not pose a threat, despite the apparent alarm triggered in some neighboring states.

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We Tried to Solve the Mystery of the QAnon Postcards Flooding American Mailboxes

In the last week of March and the first week of April, residents in and around Boston and across New Hampshire received a strange postcard in the mail. 

The postcard featured a grid of images of famous figures, including Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, Barack Obama, Mel Gibson, Dave Chappelle, and Elon Musk.

At the center of the grid was the phrase “The True Story of QAnon” alongside a QR code that linked to a website containing an unhinged conspiratorial diatribe filled with references to hundreds of Hollywood celebrities, lawmakers, and figures from Silicon Valley.

On the other side of the card, the sender claimed they were “a child victim of the Cabal spoken of in QAnon.”

“They invented the whole saga of QAnon and planned all news and entertainment events 20 years ago,” the postcard read. “They planned 9/11, the 7/7 bombing, the Ukraine war, and Covid-19 and they told me that Luvox cures Covid-19.” The message ends by telling recipients that ”on Good Friday this world will end, possibly by nukes, or MY world will end.” 

The postcard was not signed and contained no identifying information beyond an anonymous email address and a return address of a post office box in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

Several reports covered the phenomenon, and many posted about it on social media. The United States Postal Service even issued a statement to say that while the contents of the postcards might be controversial, there was nothing illegal about them.

Soon after, however, online chatter slowed down and the trail went cold, with no one knowing where the postcards came from, who sent them, or why.

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Uvalde Gunman Threatened to Shoot up a School Four Years Ago, Rep. Claims

U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) claimed that Uvalde gunman Salvador Ramos had previously threatened to shoot up a school when he was 14. The now deceased gunman allegedly threatened to carry out a school massacre when he turned 18 and was arrested for it, placing him on law enforcement’s radar.

“The shooter was arrested years ago, four years ago, for having this plan for basically saying, you know, when I’m a senior in 2022, I am going to shoot up a school,” Gonzales claimed on Fox News.

“Something fell between the cracks between then and now to allow this to happen. We need to shake out all the facts. We need to figure out what happened,” he continued.

“Where the holes and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But if law enforcement, you know, identified him four years ago as a threat, we need to figure out why he wasn’t – you know, how he got removed from that,” Gonzales added.

Bill Melugin of Fox News later reported that Uvalde police officials are denying the claim. Two teens were arrested for threatening to carry out a massacre in 2014, but the department says the Uvalde gunman was not one of them. “There were two juveniles arrested on conspiracy charges for a shooting plot several years back, but the Uvalde shooter was not involved in that incident and was not arrested,” Melugin was reportedly told by Uvalde law enforcement.

Uvalde law enforcement officials have previously claimed that Ramos had no criminal record and was not on their radar. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has said he isn’t sure whether he had a juvenile record, which are often sealed.

“He may have had a juvenile record, but that is yet to be determined,” Abbott said at a press conference earlier this week.

Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez reported that a 14-year-old Morales Junior High School student and a 13-year-old former Morales student planned to perform a “mass casualty event against the school,” according to KENS 5 in 2018.

The two students were reportedly inspired by the 1999 Columbine massacre while one described himself as feeling “god-like.”

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Authorities investigating if retired federal agent knew of Buffalo mass shooting plans in advance

Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist’s plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News. 

Authorities believe the former agent – believed to be from Texas – was one of at least six individuals who regularly communicated with accused gunman Payton Gendron in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed, the two officials said.

The two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the investigation stated these individuals were invited by Gendron to read about his mass shooting plans and the target location about 30 minutes before Gendron killed 10 people at Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue on May 14. 

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Slave descendants question Georgetown’s $1 billion reparations fund

A year after the Jesuit university announced the reparation fund, descendants of slaves owned by Georgetown have questions

Descendants of slaves owned by the Jesuit religious order and Georgetown University have questions about where the money raised for reparations has gone.

The Catholic university first announced in April 2021 the plans to raise $1 billion to make reparations, though not individual payments, to atone for the Jesuits’ past ownership and sale of slaves. The Jesuits had a goal to raise $100 million in the short-term, according to the initial announcement.

A year later, the descendants of some of the 272 slaves want to know how the money has been spent.

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Space Probe Launched in 1977 Begins Beaming Back ‘Impossible’ Data from Beyond the Solar System

You’re driving along and the “check engine” light flashes amber on your dashboard. Your engine is in no danger at the moment, but you have to get that examined before a real problem develops.

Imagine if your vehicle is nearly a half-century old. And is a spacecraft operating at the edge of the solar system.

Houston, we have a problem.

Or, more correctly, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has one.

It’s because the space probe Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is sending data that’s not possible for it to originate, the UK’s Independent reports.

“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” according to NASA project manager Suzanne Dodd.

Essentially, all is well on Voyager 1 — commands are being performed when received (after a two-day interstellar space delay) — and apparently, the radio antenna is still properly aimed at earth.

But the probe is sending weird messages about its control systems that could not possibly show what’s actually taking place on board.

It looks like Voyager is happy with it, not having set off any systems for fault protection. It’s just sending out telemetry that apparently has been randomly generated.

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Rare Congressional UFO Hearing Didn’t Provide ‘Real Answers to Serious Questions’: Lawmaker

Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.) said the Pentagon isn’t being transparent enough with the public on UFOs, offering few answers to long-existing unexplained phenomena at a historic hearing.

“We just got hosed, basically,” Burchett told reporters on May 17, saying that he thinks officials are withholding information from Americans on UFOs, also known as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) in official jargon.

The remarks came after the first open UFO hearing since 1969. Sightings of unexplained lights by aviators have occurred since the early days of flight yet the topic hasn’t had a mainstream discussion in the past half-century until this week.

Earlier on Tuesday, a House Intelligence subcommittee heard testimony from the Pentagon, including its top intelligence official Ronald Moultrie and the deputy director of Naval Intelligence, Scott Bray, who also showed lawmakers two videos of UAPs.

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Chinese Boeing plane was ‘intentionally’ death plunged into mountain, killing 132 says new report

Flight data recovered from the black boxes of the China Eastern Boeing 737-800 airliner crash on March 21 showed that the plane’s sudden vertical “death plunge” into a mountain was an intentional act carried out by someone in the cockpit, a new report revealed.

In an exclusive published Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal said people close to U.S. officials conducting a preliminary assessment of the accident determined from flight data that manual actions performed on the flight controls directed the plane into its sharp plunge into a mountain.

“The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit,” one of the sources told The Wall Street Journal. The preliminary assessment mirrors a Leeham News and Analysis trade publication report last month that said the flight data indicated the pilot deliberately inputted flight controls causing the crash.

The source noted that Chinese officials leading the investigation haven’t found any mechanical issues or flight control malfunctions that would support a different theory. If evidence of such issues were found, Boeing and airline safety regulatory agencies would typically issue industry-wide alerts, but that hasn’t happened in this case.

Officials involved in investigating the crash are now focusing on the actions taken by the pilot, though they’re also exploring the possibility that someone broke into the cockpit to intentionally cause the crash, the source said.

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UFOs: Few answers at rare US Congressional hearing

The first public congressional hearing into UFO sightings in the US in over 50 years ended with few answers about the unexplained phenomenon.

Two top military officials tasked with probing the sightings said that most can ultimately be identified.

But they said a number of events have defied all attempts at explanation.

The sightings recorded by the military include 11 “near-misses” with US aircraft.

Some Unexplained Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) – as the military terms UFOs – seem to have been moving without any discernible means of propulsion.

During the hearing at the House Intelligence Counterterrorism, Counterintelligence, and Counterproliferation Subcommittee, top Pentagon intelligence official Ronald Moultrie said that through “rigorous” analysis, most – but not all – UAPs can be identified.

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25 States Now Report Mysterious Hepatitis Cases in Children

Health officials in Hawaii confirmed they are investigating a case of acute hepatitis in a child, coming after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) stated there are more than 100 cases among children across the United States.

It’s now the 25th state to report a case of at least one case of unexplained hepatitis among children in recent days. The state’s Department of Health said Monday that the child, who is under the age of 10, was hospitalized with abdominal pain and fever in Maui in late April.

The child “was hospitalized for several days with abdominal pain and fever at the end of April. An extensive medical investigation was performed … At this time, no cause has been determined,” the agency told local media. It’s not clear if the child is still hospitalized.

The health department is now working with the CDC to identify the cause of the hepatitis case.

In a teleconference last week, a CDC official, Dr. Jay Butler, said that 109 cases have been reported along with five deaths. A significant number of liver transplants have also been needed, Butler said.

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