It looks like the space shuttle’s more diminutive cousin – but experts say it was created with technology from a generation beyond.

The U.S. military launched the mysterious X-37B unmanned winged spacecraft last night – but what America plans to do with it there is anyone’s guess.

The mission has been wrapped in secrecy from the get-go. The Air Force said the launch was a success but would give no details of the mission’s progress.

‘Well, you can’t hide a space launch, so at some point extra security doesn’t do you any good,’ said Gary Payton, Air Force deputy under secretary for space systems, in a Tuesday teleconference with reporters.

But he remained cagey about what exactly the X-37B is to do.

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Archeologists from St. Petersburg have unearthed a mysterious disc, dating back to the Bronze age.

The sandstone disc was discovered near the town of Tuapse (Krasnodar territory) during archeaological excavations of a dolmen. The dolmen was covered by a 3-meter thick soil layer. The dolmen and the treasures have been undisturbed for about 4 thousand years.

The disk is 27 cm in diameter, and at its centre it has several symbols, the meaning of which is still unclear. Scientists suggest that some of the signs could symbolise the Sun and Moon, and the mysterious disc could have served as an astrological device for the ancient inhabitants of the region.

The disk is reminiscent of the Phaistos disk from the Minoan palace of Phaistos. It is about 15 cm in diameter and covered on both sides with a spiral of stamped symbols. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture, remain disputed, making it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology. It is currently housed in the archaeological museum of Heraklion in Crete, Greece.

Another set of mysterious disk are the Dropa stones. According to Erich von Däniken, one Chi Pu Tei, a professor of archeology at Beijing University, in 1938 was on an expedition with his students to explore a series of caves in the Bayan Kara Ula range of the Himalayan mountains, near Qinghai region.

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His team supposedly hundreds of 30 cm wide stone discs – referred to as Dropa Stones – each with a 20 mm hole in their centers. Each stone disk was said to be inscribed with two fine grooves spiraling from the edge to a hole in the disk’s center, resembling the Phaistos Disk. The disks were labeled along with other finds of the expedition and stored away at Beijing University for 20 years, during which deciphering attempts were unsuccessful.

Some reports state that a Dr. Tsum somehow deciphered the symbols and they told the story of the crash-landing of the Dropa spaceship and the killing of most of the survivors by local people.

Taken from Russian language website NJK: Mysterious disk found

In the early hours of March 3, 1972, a policeman was cruising on Riverside Avenue which runs alongside the Miami River in Loveland, Ohio. His job was to look for anything out of place or anything unusual at that time of the early morning which may warrant police intervention.

On the side of the road he noticed a strange shape. Could it be the body of a dead dog? He slowed down his vehicle on the icy road in case it got up and ran in front of him. As he got near to the shape, he stopped his car to investigate. Suddenly the creature stood up on two legs. It looks crouched over. Quickly the officer switched on his headlights. What he saw was clearly no dog but something entirely different!

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The creature was around 3-4 feet tall and about 50-75 pounds. Its skin was leathery and its body was covered in what looked like wet, matted hair. The head and face looked something like a frog or lizard and he saw what could possibly be a short tail.

The creature stared into the headlights for a few seconds and then bounded over the guard rail and disappeared into the darkness in the direction of the river.
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