... very credible sources have reported seeing UFOs — unidentified flying objects. Now they’re called Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAP. But whatever you call them, the U.S. government has lately begun taking these mystery objects seriously. Very seriously. And it’s recruited a lot of scientists to investigate what’s behind them (albeit quietly).

We still don’t know what the pilots and others have seen. But here’s what’s motivated the new and growing scientific interest in them...

Every country has its ghost stories, its mythical monsters and its ghoulish urban legends. But the United Kingdom – the home of the Gothic novel and the birthplace of paranormal investigation – may stake a claim to being the most haunted country on Earth.

With one of the world's highest concentrations of castles and no shortage of centuries-old pubs and coaching inns, there are plenty of reputedly haunted places to enjoy a drink or a meal, or even lay your head for the night – if you're feeling brave.

In addition, the country's relatively small size means it's possible to combine several of these places into one ghost-heavy itinerary. Here's where travellers with a penchant for the paranormal should head to get spooked this Halloween...

• Skirrid Inn, Abergavenny, Wales
• Chillingham Castle, Northumberland
• Whitby, North Yorkshire
• Ancient Ram Inn, Gloucestershire
• Edinburgh Castle, Scotland

It’s witching hour deep in the Nevada desert. The time of night when ghosts and demons are most likely to appear. I’m standing with a torch in an eerie, dark bedroom of the self-proclaimed “most haunted motel in America” to try and glimpse the paranormal in action.

“Can you feel that cold air?” says Christopher Alefeld, my ghost hunting guide for the night. “You can feel it in some of the rooms, it just feels different. More tense”.

Our ghost-detecting equipment (an “EMF Meter”) bleeps and lights up with activity, indicating it has picked up on changes in a nearby electromagnetic field. It feels like I’m a member of the Ghostbusters when I’m told a sudden unexplained spike in the EMF reading is considered evidence of the paranormal.

But here at the Clown Motel it’s a regular occurrence. They even have a disclaimer on their site about the potential risks involved with a supernatural encounter. And, yes, you heard correctly – because your run-of-the-mill regular haunted motel just ain’t scary enough, this is a clown-themed haunted motel...

... The belief in ghosts is a funny thing. Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive...

Most people imagine philosophers as rational thinkers who spend their time developing abstract logical theories and strongly reject superstitious beliefs. But several 20th-century philosophers actively investigated spooky topics such as clairvoyance, telepathy – even ghosts.

Many of these philosophers, including Henri Bergson and William James, were interested in what was called “psychical research”. This was the academic study of paranormal phenomena including telepathy, telekinesis and other-worldly spirits.

These thinkers attended seances and were attempting to develop theories about ghosts, life after death and the powers exhibited by mediums in trances. My recent archival research has been looking at how these topics shaped 20th-century philosophy...

Halloween’s roots lie in the ancient festival Samhain. Celebrated on the evening of 31 October and into 1 November, Celts believed this was when the boundary between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. They would make offerings to their gods around a bonfire, and dress in costumes to confuse the malevolent spirits that might wander the earth.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that today we gather in the darkened evenings of autumn to share a ghost story or two – a tradition that has lasted centuries.

From medieval hauntings to Victorian messages from the dead, explore ten ghost stories from history…

The childhood home of the late Queen Mother, Glamis Castle, has been declared one of the most haunted places to visit in the UK this Halloween.

Located in Angus, Scotland, Glamis Castle has royal connections that go back over a thousand years, and grisly spot where Malcolm II of Scotland was murdered in 1034.

Even before the castle was built, there were warnings that the land was cursed, and its original location was changed from a nearby hill after workers claimed to hear a voice say: “Build not on this enchanted spot, where man hath neither part nor lot, but build down in yonder bog, where it will neither shake nor shog!”

Ghosts claimed to haunt the walls of Glamis Castle include the Tongueless Woman – a maid said to have been murdered after discovering a secret of the Earl. She is rumoured to appear with blood spilling from her mouth...

Have you ever heard of the Hexham Heads or Wolf of Allendale?

Now that Halloween is approaching you might want to clue yourself up because, well there's no easy way of saying this, a werewolf may be out there.

On 10 December 1904, we, the Hexham Courant, published a story with the title "Wolf at Large in Allendale".

The wolf committed a "great slaughter of sheep" on the moors above Hexham in the winter of 1904 and was believed to be an escapee from the private zoo of Captain Bain in County Durham.

A hunt quickly ensued among petrified locals thinking the wolf may move on from sheep and start attacking children.

After many weeks the drama soon came to a grisly end when the wolf was cut in twain by a Midland Railway express near Cumwhinton station on the Settle-Carlisle railway.

Too badly mutilated to be preserved, the wolf was beheaded and sent to the Midland Railway's headquarters at Derby.

For a week, the head of the Allendale wolf was displayed in the window of a taxidermist's shop in Derby before being mounted outside the Midland Railway's boardroom.

In 1936, the head was still there, but it has now vanished, and subsequent searches for it have been unsuccessful.

Now let's fast forward to the 1970s, when things start to get even creepier...

We live in times where Mark Robinson and the Nude Africa porn forums are threatening to become one of the most consequential stories in American history, so you’ll excuse me if I roll my eyes at the folks who believe our reality is not absurd enough to accommodate the potential notion of visitors from another realm. If you want to know why I feel this way, I wrote 6,500 words across two articles explaining why both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and I think there’s something to UFOs (Here is part 1 and part 2).

UFOs are news worth covering simply because so many credible government actors have lent their own credibility to it, and if a fraction of any of this is true, it is world-changing. If it’s all a lie, then why this lie was perpetrated on the entire globe is a question that demands an answer. There’s no route out of this mess that isn’t newsworthy and worth exploring, and there is enough physical evidence of unexplained things in the sky at this point that dismissing it all as mankind’s overactive imagination requires a bigger conspiracy theory than the legend that Lockheed Martin is housing UFOs.

Last summer’s UFO hearing starred David Grusch telling explosive tales of UFO crash retrievals, and while most were quick to dismiss this as the rantings of a lunatic or a huckster, I refuse to go that far. I, like most others, am unqualified to assess Grusch’s credibility and lack the appropriate security clearances. All I can say is that he is not a James Clapper-type who is at the top of an agency and can just lie to Congress all willy nilly and go to fancy D.C. cocktail parties like nothing happened. Grusch is blowing the whistle from the great middle of the Defense Department organizational chart, where the rules still do theoretically apply to normal people.

I don’t know if David Grusch’s testimony was true (The Intelligence Community Inspector General found his complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022, which should be noted is not an assessment of whether it is true), but I do know that if he did lie, he is in extremely deep shit because he accused some immensely powerful entities of some very serious crimes under oath. That guillotine hovering over his neck is convincing enough to me to at least hear him and any others out who are willing to put themselves on the line to take a leap of faith in our democratic institutions. You can listen to people tell their stories with an open mind without having to make an instantaneous judgement about their veracity, and if they are lying, time will bear that out. If someone wants to go in front of Congress and tell us something they think is important, we owe it to them to listen...

When the author Thomas Hardy was writing Tess of the D’Urbervilles in 1891, he chose to set the novel’s dramatic conclusion at Stonehenge, where Tess sleeps on one of the stones the night before she is arrested for murder.

What the author did not know, as he wrote in the study of his home, Max Gate in Dorchester, was that he was sitting right in the heart of a large henge-like enclosure that was even older than the famous monument on Salisbury Plain.

Though invisible at ground level after millennia of ploughing, the enclosure still survives under Hardy’s garden. It has now been given protection by the government as a scheduled monument, recognising its status as a nationally important site...

"French director Alexandre Aja has been known as a member of the horror helming fraternity called the “Splat Pack,” named for the extreme violence in their films. Certainly, many of his pictures, from the 2003 breakthrough Haute Tension and the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, to his exceptional, and most successful film to date, 2019’s Crawl — in which a family is trapped in the crawl space of their home as alligators surround them during a Category 5 hurricane in Florida (a personal favorite of Quentin Tarantino) — have proved his chops as a genre filmmaker. Now, he steps up to another level with a less gory and more psychological thriller style of film, Never Let Go, in which Halle Berry stars as a mother of twin boys who is traumatically haunted by her own lifelong demons, which she passes on to them in their remote house deep in the woods...

... At every turn Aja keeps us on the edge of our seats with an exceptional skill to create bone-chilling scares out of almost nothing. The emphasis here is not on piling up the bodies or following the usual tropes of the horror genre, or his own bloody cinematic past, but rather keeping it for the most part (yes, there are a couple of gross-outs) in the psychological realm. Fear is a very strong weapon. Clearly, Momma has issues and it is driving her family apart and diminishing the control she wields.

Both Daggs and Jenkins are outstanding in their film debuts, as natural as kid actors can get, and they really have to carry this film throughout.

Cinematography by Maxime Alexandre and editing by Elliot Greenberg really add to the lush remote look of this film set in the middle of nowhere. It all grabs you by the throat — the best horror film I have seen this year..."

"Horror fans are in for a treat as a sneak peek of the upcoming slasher thriller Last Straw. The film, set to hit select theaters and digital platforms on September 20, 2024, looks to be a night of heart-pounding suspense and terror.

Produced by Shout! Studios, Last Straw is a rural, small-town horror that blends classic slasher thrills with a gripping, tension-filled narrative. Directed by Alan Scott Neal in his directorial debut, the film stars Jessica Belkin (American Horror Story: Hotel), Taylor Kowalski (Snowfall), and Jeremy Sisto (Thirteen, Clueless).

The story centers around a young waitress working the overnight shift at a desolate roadside diner. When a group of masked assailants begins to terrorize her, the quiet night quickly turns into a brutal fight for survival. With no help in sight, she must outwit her attackers and fight back if she hopes to make it through the night alive..."