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UFOs

An unidentified flying object, or UFO, is any real or apparent flying object which cannot be identified by the observer and which remains unidentified after investigation.

Sightings of unusual aerial phenomena date back to ancient times, but reports of UFO sightings started becoming more common after the first widely publicized U.S. sighting in 1947. Many tens of thousands of such claimed observations have since been reported worldwide, and it is very likely many more go unreported due to fear of public ridicule because of the  social stigma created around the UFO topic.

In popular culture throughout the world, UFO is commonly used to refer to any hypothetical alien spacecraft but the term flying saucer is also regularly used. Once a UFO is identified as a known object (for example an aircraft or weather balloon), it ceases to be a UFO and becomes an identified object. In such cases, it is inaccurate to continue to use the acronym UFO to describe the object.

Loch Ness Monster

The Loch Ness Monster is an unidentified animal purported to inhabit Scotland's Loch Ness, the most voluminous freshwater lake in Great Britain. Along with Bigfoot and the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster is one of the best-known mysteries of cryptozoology. Local Scottish highlanders, and many people around the world, have affectionately referred to the animal by the feminine name of Nessie.

Most scientists and other experts find current evidence supporting the creature's existence unpersuasive, and regard the occasional sightings as hoaxes or misidentification of known creatures or natural phenomena. However, belief in the legend persists around the world, with the most popular theory posing that the creature is actually a plesiosaur.

Bigfoot

Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is an alleged apelike animal said to inhabit remote forests in North America, with many of the sightings occurring in the Pacific northwest of the United States and British Columbia, Canada. Bigfoot is sometimes described as a large, hairy bipedal hominoid, and many believe that this animal, or its close relatives, may be found around the world under different regional names, such as the Yeti of Tibet and Nepal. Bigfoot is one of the more famous examples of cryptozoology, a subject that tends to be dismissed as pseudoscience by mainstream researchers, because of unreliable eyewitness accounts and a lack of solid physical evidence. Most theorists consider the Bigfoot legend to be a combination of unsubstantiated folklore and hoaxes.

Bermuda Triangle

The Triangle marks a corridor of the north Atlantic stretching
northward from the West Indies along the North American seaboard as
far as the Carolinas. To take advantage of prevailing winds, ships
returning to Europe during the Age of Sail would sail north to the
Carolinas before turning east to cross the north Atlantic. This
pattern continued after the development of steam and internal
combustion engines, meaning that much of the north Atlantic shipping
traffic crossed (and still crosses) through the Triangle's area.
The Gulf Stream, an area of volatile weather, also passes through the
Triangle as it leaves the West Indies. The combination of heavy
maritime traffic and tempestuous weather made it inevitable that
vessels would founder in storms and be lost without trace, especially
before the telecommunications, radar and satellite technology of the
late twentieth century. The occasional vessel still sinks, but rarely
without a trace.

Brown Mountain Lights

Although the mysterious lights have been observed by local Native American tribes for hundreds of years, the earliest sighting by a European seems to be from a surveyor of the area, Gerard Will de Brahm, in 1771. He tried to explain the phenomenon as a "nitrous vapor" which "inflames, sulphurates and deteriorates." One early account dates from September 13, 1913, as reported in the Charlotte Daily Observer. A fisherman claimed to have seen "mysterious lights seen just above the horizon every night" red in color, with a pronounced circular shape. Rather soon after this account, a US Geological Survey employee, D.B. Stewart, studied the area in question and determined the witnesses had mistaken train lights for something more mysterious reports of odd lights continued, and a more formal USGS survey began in 1922, under the direction of George Rogers Mansfield. He determined witnesses had misidentified automobile or train lights, fires, or mundane stationary lights. However, this does not explain the fact that the lights had been observed long before the advent of automobiles, trains or electricity in general. In later decades, reports of the Brown Mountain Lights continued. An experiment conducted in 1977 shone a 50,000 candela floodlight 22 miles (35 km) towards Brown Mountain. Experimenters saw a red, circular light floating above the horizon, and thus concluded that refraction of ordinary lights were likely to blame for the Brown Mountain Lights.

Research on the phenomenon has been conducted by paranormal researcher Joshua P. Warren and the League of Energy Materialization and Unexplained phenomena Research based in Asheville, NC. They say that after fifteen years of field research working with a wide variety of scientists, they concluded that the lights are caused by natural plasmas produced by special geologic and atmospheric conditions of the mountain. According to their interpretation, conductive and non-conductive layers of the mountain (such as magnetite and quartz) store electric charge when water runs through tunnels in the ridge. At night, when the rocks cool and contract, these layers squeeze together causing massive discharges. Sometimes multiple discharges intersect and spin fast enough to be observed in the visible electromagnetic spectrum, causing the illusion of a self-contained sphere of light at the point of intersection.