Welcome to The Strange Report, your weekly roundup of paranormal news and oddities. This week’s paranormal news lineup includes strange lights over Cold War test sites, a very busy Devon inn, and psychologists trying to pin down what it means when someone says they are psychic.
UFOs, Nuclear Tests, and Old Sky Plates
A new study of 1950s photographic plates from California’s Palomar Observatory reports thousands of brief, star like flashes that show up more often on days when nuclear weapons were tested. The researchers compared these “transients” to a historical UFO sighting database and found a small but statistically significant bump in both the flashes and reported sightings within about a day of major tests, hinting that whatever is in those images seems to be paying attention when we light off nukes.
Skeptics are still busy with the usual suspects such as plate defects, cosmic rays, and other high energy phenomena, but even the cautious write ups admit the pattern is odd enough to keep digging into. For anyone already convinced that “something” is interested in our nuclear toys, this moves the idea a tiny step away from campfire story and a tiny step toward “we have data, even if we are not sure what the data is saying yet.”
A Very Busy Coaching Inn in Devon
In Exeter, England, a two night investigation at the centuries old White Hart Inn turned into exactly the kind of case haunted pub folklore lives on. A team from Paranormal Hunters UK set up in its Tudor and Georgian rooms with full spectrum cameras, EVP recorders, and environmental sensors, and came away with disembodied voices, structured light anomalies, and enough oddities to recommend going back for more.
The inn has been a coaching stop for generations, which means travelers, clergy, soldiers, and everyday crises have all passed through the same doors and stairwells. Investigators describe different parts of the building as carrying distinct emotional imprints, and even management leans into the idea that more than one resident spirit is sharing the space with modern guests, generally on good terms. This is haunted infrastructure in action, a working building that has quietly become an accidental archive of feelings rather than just a backdrop for jump scares.
Academic woo: Studying Self-Described Psychics
On the quieter, fluorescent lit end of the paranormal spectrum, psychologists and parapsychologists have been publishing a run of papers on people who say they have paranormal abilities, including psychics, mediums, energy workers, and others who treat these experiences as part of who they are. Instead of asking whether the abilities are “real,” this line of work asks what these people are like, how they process experience, and what role those beliefs play in their lives.
Across multiple studies, self described psychics tend to report more anomalous perceptions, higher absorption, and more openness to unusual experiences, and their beliefs often function as coping tools that help them make sense of loss, chance, and crisis. Researchers also connect these experiences to altered states such as certain drug experiences or trance, which circle around themes of death, ego loss, and transcendence, so that “woo” starts to look less like a modern quirk and more like one contemporary way of doing something humans have always done when they brush up against the unknown.
If you like this kind of paranormal news, you can get The Strange Report delivered straight to your inbox each week! Click here.
Sources
– Transients in the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS‑I) – [Scientific Reports, 10/20/25]
– “UFO clues emerge in decades‑old images…” – Fox News, 12/03/25
– “Ghosts in Devon? Major paranormal activity reported at historic pub…” – the moorlander, 12/10/25
– “Emerging research: self‑ascribed parapsychological abilities” – Frontiers in Psychology / Frontiers Media, 2025
