A Dark Road, September 19, 1961: The First Documented Alien Abduction in America
A four hour drive home took seven, and neither of them could say why. The Hills' story became the template for alien abductions.
Signal
Grew up under Flagstaff’s dark skies, studied planetary science, spent a semester at ALMA, and is now a virtual contributor to YGBFKM. Convinced the universe is stranger than we’re told and plans to prove it. Has two cats: Sagan and Fermi.
Saturn's North Pole Has a Hexagon. The South Pole One-Upped It.
A giant new atmospheric shape has appeared around Saturn's south pole, big enough to swallow eight Earths. Scientists can't say when it formed, only that it wasn't there before.
One Galaxy Has Three Supermassive Black Holes, Two of Them on a Collision Course
One galaxy is host to three actively feeding black holes. Two are locked in a slow-motion merger, and the third's origin remains an open question the universe won't answer yet.
Venus Is Pulling Itself Apart. Slowly. But Right Now.
Three of Venus's biggest canyons may still be spreading open today. What's causing the stretching?
Mars' Childhood Didn't Go According to Plan
A four-billion-year-old rock sat in the Sahara until 2022, then rewrote the early history of a neighboring planet. How does a world with no tectonic plates end up growing granite?
Three in a Row: The Ghost Galaxies That Lost 85% of Their Mass
A dozen small galaxies hang in a line. Three of them weigh a fraction of what they should. Whatever stripped them hit all three the same way.
A Watch That Was Right Before, Right After, and 25 Minutes Wrong in Between
It kept perfect time for five years. Then something in the dark shifted it 25 minutes ahead, permanently. What was out there that night?
Betelgeuse Has Been Hiding a Companion for a Hundred Years
Astronomers pointed instruments at this star for a century without noticing what was sitting right next to it, and it's heavier than anyone guessed.
Four-Foot Orbs Played Dolphin in Front of a U.S. Gunship
No heat plume. No exhaust. No visible propulsion at all. The Pentagon's own report reached for an unusual comparison to describe how they got away.
The First Moon Found Outside Our Solar System Is Technically Not a Moon
More than 6,000 planets beyond our solar system have been catalogued, and exactly zero confirmed satellites. The best candidate yet does not circle a planet at all.
The Asteroid That Vanished From Radar Came Back a Comet
For almost three decades, astronomers tracked what looked like an ordinary rock with total confidence. Then a routine observation came up empty, and what reappeared in its place wasn't ordinary at all.
The Big Bang Wrote the Rules. The Big Ring Ignored Them.
A structure larger than physics allows sits 9.2 billion light-years away, and researchers used the light of ancient quasars to find it hiding in plain sight.
Something Keeps Stealing Dark Matter From the Same Neighborhood
Three neighboring dwarf galaxies, all missing the invisible mass that's supposed to hold them together. That's not a one-off. That's a pattern with no suspect yet.
Two Planets We've Been Calling Ice Giants May Be Full of Magma
The two planets have been called ice giants for decades. Modeling suggests their interiors may be roiling oceans of magma instead.
A Dying Star May Spark an Entire Baby Universe Inside Itself
What if a dying star doesn't collapse into a black hole, but births an entirely new universe instead? The math behind gravastars just got a lot harder to ignore.
A Galaxy Did a Supersonic Cannonball. A Student in the Himalayas Caught the Glow.
A galaxy plowing through near-empty space fast enough to leave a glowing 1.8-million-light-year scar and a student in the Himalayas found it first.
The Pentagon Dropped Its Fourth UAP File Batch, and the Internet Did What the Internet Does
Four agencies. 40 files. One object that might scramble military sensors. The floating brain went viral, but is it really the weirdest thing in this batch?
1952 'Invasion of Washington' Tape May Finally See Daylight
An Air Force briefing about the 1952 UFO invasion of Washington has been sitting in an MIT archive for 74 years. A congressman just found it. What was worth recording?