Mary and James Mast. (Benton County Sheriff's Department)
On Tuesday, The Daily Beast reported that a Missouri couple who allegedly watched their neighbors kill their daughter in a brutal exorcism ritual have been barred from attending her funeral.
The parents -- Mary Mast and James Mast of Lincoln, Missouri -- have been charged with felony child endangerment resulting in death. Their neighbors, Ethan Mast (unrelated) and Kourtney Aumen, are charged with second-degree murder, three counts of first-degree assault, and sexual abuse. All four individuals have been jailed without bond.
According to The Daily Beast, the neighbors, who attend the same church as the parents, allegedly "used a leather belt and a wooden spoon to beat the child and her toddler brother in order to remove 'the demon' before taking her to a nearby pond on a day that temperatures were barely above freezing" and dunking her in.
Additionally, the father, James Mast told police that "the beatings had gone on for around two weeks and that they had been forced to perform 'sexual acts' on their 4-year-old with a 'foreign object' or they would be beaten or 'go to hell,'" — while the neighbors monitored them on surveillance cameras. And the mother, Mary Mast, "said she also dunked her daughter in the icy pond in an attempt to get rid of her supposed demons after she had been convinced that she, too, was possessed and that her 4-year-old had essentially inherited the devil from her."
The parents further told authorities that their neighbors threatened to shoot them if they intervened in the ritual.
The neighbors deny all charges and claim that video footage will prove their innocence. Their church condemns the incident, and authorities say there is no evidence of a pattern of cult behavior.
Unless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-California) and members of the far-right House Freedom Caucus can work out a funding agreement, the United States will likely suffer a federal government shutdown in less than two weeks.
On Tuesday night, September 19, Freedom Caucus members held budget talks. And the location, according to Daily Beast reporters Roger Sollenberger and Zachary Petrizzo, was a Washington, D.C. townhouse that is within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol Building — and is "owned by a convicted tax cheat."
The Freedom Caucus members, Sollenberger and Petrizzo report, "appear to" be using that townhouse as "an off-campus headquarters to stage their government shutdown meetings."
According to the Beast reporters, these Freedom Caucus meetings "on a sleepy corner of a Capitol Hill block aren't just rattling Speaker Kevin McCarthy's cage."
"The group has also disrupted its new neighbors, many of them elderly, who often cross paths with politicians and powerbrokers living blocks away from Congress," Sollenberger and Petrizzo explain. "Some of the residents have complained to District of Columbia housing officials that the setup has caused a nuisance and is in violation of residential rules, arguing that the building — zoned as a home — functions exclusively as an office for business meetings and lobbying activity."
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough and guest George Conway lambasted House Republicans for their inability to pass a bill to fund the government.
The "Morning Joe" host echoed the criticism of Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), who bashed the hardliners in his caucus as "lunatics" and a "clown show," and Scarborough said today's Republicans were a far cry from those he served with more than two decades ago.
"I'll tell you when I was in Congress, we were blessed to actually have people who wanted to balance the budget, so we balanced the budget four years in a row, only time it's happened in a century," Scarborough said. "Here, though, George Conway, this is -- unlike that group that balanced the budget, paid down the debt, did a lot of other things, this group doesn't really care about balancing budget. They don't really care about policy, they have shown us that time and time again. It's all gesturing."
"So we're going to try to shut down the government -- why?" Scarborough added. "Just because we want to gesture, we want to gesture to somebody. We really don't care about policy, we don't care about balancing the budgets. We don't care about the troops, we don't care about military readiness. So we're going to shut down the government. We're not going to even bring, we're not even going to bring the bill up, the funding bill up for a vote. We won't let it go to the floor. Meanwhile in the Senate, you have Tommy Tubervillle and the senators doing everything they can to gut military readiness, too. What a long, long distance there is between the Republicans we were and what we have now in the age of Trump."
Conway agreed, saying most House Republicans were only concerned with raising money and garnering attention, and not with performing the duties of their job.
"These guys don't care about anything other than just getting on TV and being able to perform," Conway said, "and you know, have people send them money and contributions and to get air time, and they clearly don't have any policy positions that matter to them because if they were trying to do that, they would try to work towards some compromise where they would get some of what they want, even though it's not possible to get all of it. It's all about performance, it's all about -- they don't even care about having a majority."
"They're willing to sacrifice those moderate Republicans that you just showed on air here, that they're willing to basically jettison them because who needs them?" Conway added. "They don't need a majority anyway because they're not governing. All they want to do is throw sand in the gears."
Scarborough discounted GOP claims about reining in spending, because he said Donald Trump added $8.2 trillion to the national debt in just four years, compared to $8.34 trillion by Barack Obama over eight years and $1.84 trillion so far for President Joe Biden two and a half years.
"It's important that we all just stop for one second here and remind each other this is a clown show, and these clowns, along with Donald Trump, over Donald Trump's four years in the White House, spent more money over four years than any Congress ever spent in the history of this country or any other country," Scarborough said. They accumulated $8 trillion -- these people who are now saying we're going to go to the barricades and shut down the government because he won't cut spending, these are the people that were part of Donald Trump adding $8.2 trillion to the national debt over four years."
"It's not like we didn't warn them," he continued. "It's not like I wasn't tweeting something out every other day. It's not like I wasn't going to the Hill talking to them. It's not like we weren't saying, here, they need to stop being reckless. They can't be conservative only when a Democrat is in the White House. But a Democrat is in the White House, so suddenly they've remembered that they like balanced budgets. It's just an absolute, an absolute joke, and the fact is Kevin McCarthy doesn't need these clowns. He can just work with the Democrats because that's what the Republican moderate said yesterday in the Republican caucus meeting."
"They don't give a damn if they have a majority next year or not," Scarborough added. "In fact, if they don't have a majority, they can be even crazier on social media, even crazier on the House floor and raise more money. You look at the craziest people in the House Republican caucus that are destroying their chances of a majority right now, they're the people who make more money in the minority because they can say crazier things on the House floor and on social media. That's all this is about, gesturing for money."
In part to move beyond the stigma often attached to UFOs, where military pilots fear ridicule or job sanctions if they report them, UFOs are now characterized by the U.S. government as UAPs, or unidentified anomalous phenomena.
Bottom line: The study team found no evidence that reported UAP observations are extraterrestrial.
During a press briefing, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson noted that NASA has scientific programs to search for traces of life on Mars and the imprints of biology in the atmospheres of exoplanets. He said he wanted to shift the UAP conversation from sensationalism to one of science.
With this statement, Nelson was alluding to some of the more outlandish claims about UAPs and UFOs. At a congressional hearing in July, former Pentagon intelligence officer David Grusch testified that the American government has been hiding evidence of crashed UAPs and alien biological specimens. Sean Kirkpatrick, head of the Pentagon office charged with investigating UAPs, has denied these claims.
And the same week NASA’s report came out, Mexican lawmakers were shown by journalist Jaime Maussan two tiny, 1,000-year-old bodies that he claimed were the remains of “non-human” beings. Scientists have called this claim fraudulent and say the mummies may have been looted from gravesites in Peru.
A controversial journalist presented the Mexican government with 1,000-year-old bodies that he claimed were aliens.
Conclusions from the report
The NASA study team report sheds little light on whether some UAPs are extraterrestrial. In his comments, the chair of the study team, astronomer David Spergel stated that the team had seen “no evidence to suggest that UAPs are extraterrestrial in origin.”
Of the more than 800 unclassified sightings collected by the Department of Defense’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and reported at the NASA panel’s first public meeting back in May 2023, only “a small handful cannot be immediately identified as known human-made or natural phenomena,” according to the report.
The report does offer recommendations to NASA on how to move these investigations forward.
Most of the UAP data considered by the study team comes from U.S. military aircraft. Analysis of this data is “hampered by poor sensor calibration, the lack of multiple measurements, the lack of sensor metadata, and the lack of baseline data.” The ideal set of measurements would include optical imaging, infrared imaging, and radar data, but very few reports have all these.
The NASA study team described in the report the types of data that can shed more light on UAPs. The authors note the importance of reducing the stigma that can cause both military and commercial pilots to feel that they cannot freely report sightings. The stigma stems from decades of conspiracy theories tied to UFOs.
The NASA study team suggests gathering sightings by commercial pilots using the Federal Aviation Administration and combining these with classified sightings not included in the report. Team members did not have security clearance, so they could look only at the subset of military sightings that were unclassified. At the moment, there is no anonymous nationwide UAP reporting mechanism for commercial pilots.
With access to these classified sightings and a structured mechanism for commercial pilots to report sightings, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office – the military office charged with leading the analysis effort – could have the most data.
NASA also announced the appointment of a new director of research on UAPs. This position will oversee the creation of a database with resources to evaluate UAP sightings.
Looking for a needle in a haystack
Parts of the briefing resembled a primer on the scientific method. Using analogies, officials described the analysis process as looking for a needle in a haystack, or separating the wheat from the chaff. The officials said they needed a consistent and rigorous methodology for characterizing sightings, as a way of homing in on something truly anomalous.
Spergel said the study team’s goal was to characterize the hay – or the mundane phenomena – and subtract it to find the needle, or the potentially exciting discovery. He noted that artificial intelligence can help researchers comb through massive datasets to find rare, anomalous phenomena. AI is already being used this way in many areas of astronomy research.
The speakers noted the importance of transparency. Transparency is important because UFOs have long been associated with conspiracy theories and government cover-ups. Similarly, much of the discussion during the congressional UAP hearing in July focused on a need for transparency. All scientific data that NASA gathers is made public on various websites, and officials said they intend to do the same with the nonclassified UAP data.
At the beginning of the briefing, Nelson gave his opinion that there were perhaps a trillion instances of life beyond Earth. So, it’s plausible that there is intelligent life out there. But the report says that when it comes to UAPs, extraterrestrial life must be the hypothesis of last resort. It quotes Thomas Jefferson: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” That evidence does not yet exist.
