Anne Ross woke to find a tall, fur-covered figure in her bedroom doorway. Its upper body reminded her of a wolf, while the lower half had the shape of a man. When it moved away, she got out of bed and followed it downstairs. Elsewhere in the house, two small carved heads sat in a box. Unearthed by two brothers in a Hexham garden in 1971, the faces had already become associated with broken household objects and an animal-like visitor in the home next door.

Ross had spent years studying beliefs in which carved heads could guard a home or hold a power beyond death. Her daughter later described a dark figure on the same staircase, despite having been told nothing about her mother’s encounter. Both recalled feeling compelled to follow it. As researchers examined the objects, questions about their origins became entangled with experiments and an increasingly uncertain trail of handovers. The heads eventually disappeared, leaving open the possibility that someone still possesses them without knowing the history of the two faces brought into their home.

In 1931, the Irving family began hearing strange animal noises behind the wooden walls of their isolated farmhouse on the Isle of Man. According to the family, those sounds developed into speech. The voice called itself Gef, said it was a mongoose, and began taking an interest in everything happening around him. From an opening in the ceiling, he could read James Irving’s newspaper and offer comments on the news.

The Irvings left him food and learned which records he liked on the gramophone. They described glimpses of a small, yellow-furred creature, brief encounters close enough to feel his fingers and teeth. But Gef also threatened them, watched from places they could not see, and called himself an earthbound spirit. Margaret considered whether a human intelligence inhabited the animal they had come to live with.

As word spread beyond Cashen’s Gap, visitors climbed the track to the farmhouse. Some described hearing a voice while every member of the family was in view. Others waited through silence. Gef could interrupt the household for hours, then refuse to speak when someone came looking for him. Decades after leaving the island, Voirrey Irving still stood by her account. She remembered the creature and the conversations behind the woodwork. She wished he had left her family alone.

Late on the night of February 24, 1942, Los Angeles went dark. Air raid sirens wailed across the city, searchlights swept the sky, and anti-aircraft batteries opened fire on something officials could not clearly identify. More than 1,400 rounds were fired as witnesses watched a strange object appear to hang in the beams and move through the barrage. By morning, nothing had been brought down. No wreckage was recovered, and no enemy aircraft were ever confirmed.

The confusion only deepened after the guns fell silent. Military officials issued conflicting accounts, civilian witnesses described an object caught in converging searchlights, and a now-famous photograph preserved the strange scene over the city. Some blamed a weather balloon and wartime panic. Others believed the batteries had targeted something genuinely unknown. More than eight decades later, one question remains: what was above Los Angeles while the Army fired everything it had into the sky?