adds her to during the podcast that are not in my voice or placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. If you mention the words Paranormal in 1960s, most enthusiasts of all things creepy will immediately think of the mothman of Point Pleasant that made his first appearance in 1966.  UFOs, humanoid creatures, big cats and even some events that could be interpreted as satanic in origin. And what's more, there appears to be little if no explanation as to why this is. Were these strange incidents from right across the paranormal spectrum all just some bizarre coincidence? Or might there really have been dark forces at work that were and are beyond our collective comprehension? Might an unknown event have opened a portal from our world to one unknown, unleashing all manner of manifestations and causing unequal abundance of strange encounters? I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, horror, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode. A gigantic cigar-shaped UFO is spotted over the Atlantic in 1963, but the witness is so terrified by her experiences that it takes her 20 years to come forward to tell her story. And in that same year, elsewhere in the United Kingdom, people were dealing with dark, paranormal, even satanic forces with numerous events that still remain unexplained. If you're new here, welcome to the show. And if you're already a member of this Weirdo family, please take a moment and invite someone else to listen. And please leave a rating and review in the podcast app you're listening from. Doing these things helps the show to keep growing. And while you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter to connect with me on social media and more.  An apparent incident involving a gigantic cigar-shaped UFO somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean in May 1963 would remain unreported for almost 20 years until the editorial team behind Flying Saucer Review magazine received a letter in late 1980 from the witness to the affair. Part of the reason the witness left the incident unreported for so long was simply that the witness had very little knowledge of UFO reports, as well as the fact that she found the entire episode terrifying. Only after reading about the subject purely by chance did she begin to realize just how extraordinary the incident was. Although the incident is not one of the most exciting on record, it is another incident that has a connection with such official organizations as NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who have a small plethora of UFO accounts attached to their name. If we assume these strange crafts are piloted by intelligent beings from another world, would it make sense that they would take an interest in such key organizations? The details of the witness have been withheld from the public domain. We know that she is female and from a country in Western Europe that are members of NATO and was married to an Englishman at the time that she gave the report. According to investigators at Flying Saucer Review, she is an incredibly credible witness, meaning in turn that the account is likely equally credible. They would eventually release details of the encounter in their November 1981 edition, Volume 27, Number 3. It is from that report that we base the following account on. Just what did the witnesses see that day somewhere in the North Atlantic and for what reason were these apparent visitors here in the first place? According to the witness, the following incident took place in the first or second week of May 1963. The witness was a NATO employee in the capacity of an English language secretary normally based in Paris, France. On the day in question, she was part of 50 NATO employees who were about to board a flight to take them to Ottawa in Canada for NATO ministerial meetings. It was around 10 am when the DC-8 left the runway at Orly Airport in Paris. The weather was perfect with clear visibility as the pilot took the plane to just over 35,000 feet. The witness recalled that there appeared to be a feeling of military control on the plane that day, although the fact there was only 50 NATO staff on board the plane made it appear decisively empty. Because of this, passengers had an array of seats to choose to settle down in for the majority of the journey. The witness chose to sit next to one of the windows, which she recalled was a lot larger than a standard commercial airliner window. It was as she was preparing to settle in to her seat with her book with the cold waves of the Atlantic Ocean below them that she noticed a strange object below them. She would describe it as something dark and absolutely tremendous. What's more, it stood out in vivid contrast to the brightness of the early afternoon sky. When she moved her face as close to the window as possible so as to get a closer look, she would see the object appear to be a gigantic dark grey torpedo. She would elaborate that the object appeared menacing and frightening as she continued to watch it. She continued to observe the strange object for several minutes. She was unable to see any wings, windows or any apparent propulsion systems or engines, although she would describe what she believed was the back of the object as cut off sharply and squarely. The witness would estimate the object was around 6,000 to 7,000 feet below them. She watched it for several more moments until it disappeared into the clouds. She suddenly looked around the plane. It appeared she was the only one who had noticed the strange object below. She would debate with herself whether to mention what she had seen. However, she feared that they would not believe her. As she sat back into her seat, she began to ponder whether the object had any connection to nuclear weapons. Although she would indeed remain quiet for the time being, she resolved that she would speak to a colleague in Paris with expertise in nuclear matters. However, as she would later reveal in her report, she would decide against mentioning the incident. It was while she was considering these things that the plane suddenly began to shudder and pitch up and down violently. Although she told herself that this was just normal turbulence, she knew that she had not experienced anything as intense or as prolonged as this disturbance appeared to be. And what's more, she couldn't shake the feeling that the disturbance to the flight was due to the object that very well might still be below them. She would begin researching what the object might have been. She would do this privately before finally issuing her report to the UFO magazine almost 20 years later in 1980. It's unfortunate that there were no other corroborating witnesses to an otherwise intriguing account. And while this is something that skeptics to such accounts will use to their advantage, aside from the apparent credibility of the witness as well as the credibility of those behind the one-time UFO publication, the fact that the account is not overblown or dramatic in any way would suggest that it is authentic. And it's certainly possible that there were other witnesses on the DC-8 that afternoon. It's also equally possible and plausible that they too opted to keep the sighting to themselves in the belief that they were the only person to have seen the strange object. As we've mentioned in the past, there are very likely a whole host of UFO sightings that go unreported simply because the respective witnesses fear being labeled as crazy or simply just as a liar. What perhaps makes this account credible is the details that show up in other similar UFO reports. Not least the shape of the object itself. While a great many UFOs are disc-shaped or even triangular, a great many sightings of cigar-shaped objects can also be found in the mountain of UFO reports. What's more, so can the detail that there appeared no obvious source of propulsion. What's also interesting and often overlooked is the fact that the incident occurred over the water. Many UFO sightings occur on or near water, and at least according to researcher Gordon Crichton, many of the objects witnessed over the seas and oceans of the planet are cigar-shaped craft. Might this be to do with their potentially aquatic environment, perhaps as such a shape would likely cut through the water all the easier? What the connection between such craft and water is, however, remains a mystery. Whatever the object was that the witness saw from her plane seat that afternoon over the Atlantic Ocean, we know the details offered are very much in line with other sightings, both before and since, and undoubtedly there will be other sightings both in the contemporary era or from years ago that have yet to surface which will also likely contain similar details. Should we take the incident as credible? Considering the people involved with the Flying Saucer Review magazine, we should perhaps state yes, and that such a mysterious craft, or more specifically the intelligence behind it, should take an interest in a NATO military plane is perhaps not too surprising to many in the UFO community. For example, during the latter months of the Belgian Wave, there was an increased NATO presence in the region, and there are multiple accounts on record of UFO sightings and incidents during NATO training exercises. Might we even consider that the strange craft was not of extraterrestrial origin at all, but a secret world military craft, one which discreetly made the journey under the cover of the NATO flight? Admittedly, this is pure speculation here on our part. With all of that said, all we can do with the account is leave it on our mental backburners, ready to bring it to the forefronts of our minds when we spot similarities with other incidents, or indeed if further witnesses suddenly step forward to tell their version of events. There are several other sightings of strange, cigar-shaped UFOs in the early 1960s, several of which are perhaps worthy of examination here. For example, according to a report in the January 1962 edition of The Honeywell World, and later reported on for NICAP in 1964 by Richard Hall, at a little after 7 p.m. on the 22nd of November 1961 near Grafton, Nebraska, a local married couple witnessed a distinctly cigar-shaped UFO while driving along US Highway 81. The main witness, Melvin Vagle Jr., noticed a strange red light in the starlit skies overhead. He alerted his wife to the strange glow and they both watched it for several moments. At first, they believed it was a conventional aircraft. However, as they continued onward, essentially heading toward the light, they could see that it was something more out of the ordinary. They would eventually pull the car to the side of the road so that they could get a better look. In front of them, each could clearly see a cigar-shaped object hovering at a sharp angle over a plowed field. They would continue in their report that a bright flashing white light was at the lower end of the craft, while a red light glowed at the other. Once more, Vagle would recall that there appeared to be square window-like ports along the side, each of which showed a white yellowish light. They continued to watch the bizarre object, which seemingly remained completely motionless and silent. When their son, who was also in the car with them, began to become somewhat distressed, however, they restarted their car and drove on, the object eventually disappearing in the distance behind them. Interestingly, a local farmer had reported seeing an almost identical object a short time earlier, which corroborated Vagle's version of events. The sighting remains unexplained. At some time in early 1960, another cigar-shaped UFO was spotted hovering over Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. At some point in the early evening, Ms. Footner was walking with her dog in a field near her home. As she was doing so, she happened to look upward and noticed a bright dot of light seemingly hovering over Sonnich Mountain. Due to the recent launch of a Soviet Sputnik satellite, Footner at first believed this is what she was witnessing. She would recall that she expected to see a flash from the object, but instead it appeared to be getting bigger. She soon realized whatever it was, it was coming toward her. When she reported the sighting to a UFO organizer a short time later, she would recall how she daren't take her eyes from the increasing object. In what seemed like no time at all, it was directly above her. What's more, it had now stopped moving and remained stationary. She described the object as silver and shining in the late sun with a number of twinkling lights along the side. Although she knew otherwise deep down, she asked herself once more if this strange object might be some kind of experimental wingless plane. However, not only did it not look like anything she had seen before, but the futuristic-looking craft didn't make a single sound. As she continued to look up at the cigar-shaped craft, it suddenly veered at a right angle and swiftly disappeared over the trees, heading towards the Sook Mountains. Once she was sure it had gone, she set out for home. She noted how the horses in the field appeared unaffected by the strange vehicle, and the same could be said for her dog. In fact, given the size of the object, she felt sure that other people must have witnessed it. However, as she approached her estate, she realized that there was no commotion as there surely would have been if others had witnessed it. In fact, she noticed how distinctly quiet the neighborhood was, without even a single dog barking, which was relatively unusual. She would later estimate that the object was approximately 100 feet in length, very similar to other reported sightings of such objects at the time, and was in view for no longer than a few moments. What is interesting is that several months later, on the other side of the world, a very similar object was witnessed. It is there that we will turn our attention next when Weird Darkness returns. Strange creatures, gruesome murders, oozing organisms, unfathomable abductions, enigmatic expeditions, an age-old malevolence, and much more. Author JC Moore delivers a collection of dark horror tales that are both chilling and poignant. Dark Intrigue's Book One is filled with horror fiction for fans of short story anthologies, horror collections, ghost fiction, suspense, possession, and more. Dark Intrigue's Book One by JC Moore, available on Kindle or as an audiobook narrated by Darren Marlar. Find Dark Intrigue's Book One on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash audiobooks. A particularly interesting sighting occurred over the small country town of Cressy in Tasmania, Australia several months later, on October 4, 1960. The incident is today regarded as one of Tasmania's most well-known UFO events, one later described as a cigar-shaped mothership along with several smaller disc-shaped craft and was reported on by the Launceston Examiner. The case was investigated by Keith Roberts of the Tasmanian UFO Investigation Center. On the evening in question, at a little after 6 p.m., Reverend Lionel Browning met his wife who were in their dining room looking out of the window where a rainbow had appeared. It was as they were doing so when Browning's wife pointed to a strange object in the skies overhead. They noticed how the object was a particularly dull gray color with several vertical dark bands running along it. There also appeared to be several antennae running along the top and bottom of the object. Browning was used to seeing Viscount aircraft going overhead and would estimate that the object was slightly larger than that, approximately 100 feet. The couple noticed how defined the object was in the sky and further estimated that it was around three to four miles away from their location. It was also their guess that the object was moving between 60 to 70 miles per hour and remained at an estimated altitude of 400 feet. After the couple had watched the strange craft for several minutes, the bizarre aerial vehicle came to a sudden stop. Then things turned even stranger. Appearing within seconds of the object halting its progress, several smaller disc-shaped objects appeared, traveling at high speed and seemingly emerging from the low-lying cloud. The smaller discs remained hovering around the apparent mothership cigar-shaped craft for several moments. Then in a bizarre, reverse manner, the cigar-shaped object and the smaller discs headed back into the clouds and promptly disappeared. Throughout the encounter, which lasted approximately two minutes, the couple didn't recall hearing any sounds whatsoever. They continued to watch the sky where the objects had been for several moments in case they reappeared before reporting the incident to the control tower at Western Junction Launceston Airport. Browning had also managed to capture a picture of the object through their dining room window, although it is not a clear copy. Five days after the sighting, the Reverend would speak to the Launceston examiner who would show a copy of the picture and report on the encounter to the wider public in their 10th of October edition. The account would take on an even stranger turn over the following weeks when Browning would receive several reports from members of the public of similarly shaped objects and even of hearing loud explosions. In fact, on the evening of October 27, three weeks after the sightings, at around 8.30 or 9.30 pm in the evening, he himself heard a sudden, loud explosion. Although he didn't know why or how to explain it, Browning was convinced that the strange explosions were somehow connected to the sightings of the strange and seemingly otherworldly craft. And what's more, while he and his wife had both dismissed reports of UFOs as nonsense previously, after what they had witnessed, they had both since changed their minds. Incidentally, the Civil Aviation Department would confirm that there was no known aircraft in the region on the day of the sighting. Furthermore, when the Royal Australian Air Force interviewed Mr. and Mrs. Browning, they would describe them as being mature, stable, and mentally alert. It would come to light that there were at least two further witnesses to the mothership encounter over Tasmania. In the book UFOs over the Southern Hemisphere, Michael Harvey would examine the case. He would mention a Mrs. Branstad who claimed that it was a fantastic sight, like a lot of little ships flocking around a bigger one. There are also reports that a young child also witnessed the object near the church. However, no further details are known about this witness. However, there were, as mentioned previously, several residents who reported further sightings and the strange explosions overhead. In fact, the first such explosion was heard only hours after the sighting by Reverend Browning. One resident who heard the sound was Mrs. Robson, who claimed that it felt as though someone was banging heavily on a wall and that she could hear the earth shake. Another witness to the bizarre explosions, Mr. Spencer, claimed that it shook the house and then caused rumbling vibrations. Like these explosions have been some kind of sonic boom, or perhaps the opening and closing of a portal allowing these strange crafts entry to our world. Perhaps interestingly, despite the apparent credibility of the Brownings, as well as the other corroborating witnesses, the RAAF would conclude that the explanation behind the sighting was likely astronomical, perhaps the moon rising in the eastern sky, something that Browning himself would reject. He would state that the sun was still setting at this stage and was in the opposite part of the sky to where the objects were viewed. Whether the RAAF were unaware of the strange explosions heard by several people around the area or whether they simply chose to leave them out of their report is unknown. While the previously mentioned sightings happened in the same time window as the incident over the Atlantic Ocean in early 1963, sightings that occurred in some cases decades later share very similar details and consequently are of interest to us here. A decade and a half after the 1963 encounter over the Atlantic, a similar cigar-shaped object was witnessed over Clarenville in Newfoundland, Canada. According to the research files of HBCC UFOs Brian Vike on the evening of November 26, 1978, local resident Chester Lethbridge made a call to the RCMP regarding a strange object they had spotted in the sky over Random Island. RCMP Constable James Blackwood would receive the call from the switchboard and immediately began in the direction of the Lethbridge's home to investigate. When he arrived he was amazed that the object the husband and wife had reported seeing was still visible. Overhead was a clear cigar-shaped object with blue, red and yellow lights, all of which were flashing, and a strange curved tail at the end. It was at an approximate altitude of 500 feet and was around the same size as a DC-9 aircraft. However, there were no wings of any kind and the object appeared to be absolutely silent. At the same time the Blackwood was viewing the object, it was being tracked by the Department of National Defense. The police officer, along with Chester Lethbridge, viewed the glowing cigar shape for several minutes before using a device called a ball scope which amplified light sources. It was clear to Blackwood that the object was most definitely not a terrestrial vehicle such as a plane. Then things turned even stranger. Blackwood, interested in what might happen, reached into his car and turned on the flashing lights. Almost immediately the lights on the hovering object mimicked the pattern and timing of them. Blackwood would watch the object for close to two hours before it suddenly took off like a shooting star and disappeared into the night sky. When Blackwood filed his report of the incident, the National Research Council, NRC, was also notified of the details of the incident, as was standard procedure. Much to Blackwood's disbelief and annoyance, a representative of the NRC would offer that the object was most likely Jupiter and several other bright stars. The fact that he had not even been interviewed or asked any questions by the NRC before they had arrived to such a conclusion only frustrated the police officer even more. When UFO researcher Lee Tisert examined the case in the late 1990s, Blackwood would stress to him that he and Mr. and Mrs. Lethbridge each saw a shadow from the object on the water around the island, something that a planet or star would not cast. Six years after the siding in Newfoundland, in the opposite hemisphere in Hexham, Australia, Mr. and Mrs. L were camping at Ponderosa Caravan Park near the Hexham Bridge over the Hunter River when they witnessed something strange in the skies overhead. The incident occurred in the early hours one morning in the last week of December between Christmas and New Year. On the night in question, at around 2.30 am, Mr. L would wake his wife, urging her to come out of the tent and see what you think of this lot. As she emerged from under the canvas, she could see her husband was clearly staring up at the sky. When she turned her attention that way, she could see a cigar-shaped object with a brilliant light at the front. And what's more, the object was clearly heading in their direction. As it got nearer to the Caravan Park, the light from the craft lit up everywhere underneath it. Mrs. L would estimate that the craft was around 80 feet in length, although it very well could have been bigger. She also recalled that the object had what appeared to be windows running along the side of it and that these looked to her to be closed as they were the same gray color as the rest of the vehicle. The couple continued to watch the object for several minutes. Then, they noticed that three more smaller vehicles around 10 feet across were approaching the much larger craft, moving like lightning. These smaller vehicles were disc-shaped, gray in color and with a distinct orange or rust-colored section toward what appeared to be the back. Within only seconds, the discs had positioned themselves with the larger cigar-shaped craft. Even more intriguing, Mrs. L believed she saw the outline of a helmeted figure inside one of the discs. After continuing to watch the object for several more moments, the couple began to worry they might end up being in the wrong place at the wrong time and so took sanctuary inside their tent. Mrs. L would state that she entered the tent wide awake from the bizarreness of the event, only to fall deep asleep almost as soon as she lay down.  A very similar incident unfolded over Sweden around six months later, in June 1985, when an anonymous woman witnessed something out of the ordinary while driving from Uppsala to Orsensbrough along Route 55. The account appeared in the public domain several weeks after it happened in the July 12 edition of the Enkopings Post-In. She had driven approximately one mile before she noticed what she believed were the blue lights of two police cars in the distance ahead of her. She continued along the road and a short time later noticed a similar blue light overhead, which she presumed was a police helicopter that was seemingly part of a police search. For reasons she could not explain, she began to feel a sudden nervousness about the situation. However, she continued along the road, trying to put such feelings from her mind. She continued to observe the helicopter overhead, only the more she looked at the dimensions behind the lights, it suddenly seemed to be much larger than a helicopter. In fact, it appeared decidedly cigar-shaped and unlike any helicopter she had seen before. Whether it had come closer or not, she wasn't sure, but as she looked up, there was now a blinding light coming from the object. She could though clearly make out three windows along the sides, each of which was lit up from the inside. It was at this point that she pulled her vehicle to the side of the road and stepped outside to view the object with more clarity. She watched it for just short of 10 minutes in total before it disappeared. Although she had not been threatened at any point during the encounter, the witness later claimed that she felt immediately frightened and rushed home. It is hard to get away from the reoccurring detail of these cigar-shaped objects of smaller discs emerging from or disappearing into them. Essentially, that these cigar-like craft are mother ships from which smaller disc-shaped scout-like craft are sent on various missions over any given location. If they are, what are these missions about? Are they merely reconnaissance missions? A way of keeping tabs on what we are doing on the surface? Or might there be a more ominous end result to these encounters? It is also perhaps worth noting that many of these accounts of cigar-shaped crafts are often over or near water. Is this perhaps further evidence that these apparent alien visitors are not coming from the vast reaches of space but from the hidden depths of the planet's oceans? And might we still have to consider the fact that these futuristic vehicles, despite the apparent admissions that they are not military crafts of the United States or other countries, be the result of top-secret advanced technology? Perhaps even such technology that has been recovered from alleged crashes of alien vehicles? Might it be that the much publicized disclosure is yet another cover for what is really taking place behind closed doors? Only time will tell, it would seem. While the Atlantic UFO incident took place in 1963, in that same year in the United Kingdom, people were dealing with dark, paranormal, even satanic forces, and the events still have no explanation. That is coming up next on Weird Darkness. Remember staying up late at night while growing up, watching your local TV station's horror host presenting a terrible B horror movie or so bad it's good sci-fi flick from the 1950s? That's what the Monster Channel at WeirdDarkness.tv has to offer, all day, every day. You can visit WeirdDarkness.tv and immediately be entertained by a horror host and horrible movie. You can even invite your friends to watch with you and use the chat feature to talk about what you're watching. And our monthly Weirdo Watch Party takes place there as well. Get your frights and funnies 24-7-365 at WeirdDarkness.tv. Before we examine some of the incidents from the small mountain of other 1963 encounters on record, we'll turn our attention to an incident at Sandaling Park towards the end of that year. The following is based on veteran researcher and author Nick Redfern's account, who himself relays it from the work of fellow researcher Neal Arnold. On the evening of November 16, 1963, four teenagers were walking home past Sandaling Park in the town of Hyth, near Kent in the United Kingdom. It was a Friday, and they were returning from a dance. Two of the friends, 17-year-old John Flaxden and 18-year-old Mervyn Hutchinson, the remaining two are not named, suddenly notice a bright light that appeared to be moving above them. To begin with, the teenagers thought the object was simply a star. However, as it moved and approached them, they began to realize it was something altogether stranger. They continued to watch as the strange glowing object descended toward the ground. It hovered for several moments and then disappeared behind the trees of the park. As soon as the object vanished, the four teenagers decided to up their pace somewhat. However, only moments later, the object appeared again. It was around 200 feet away from them and hovered around 10 feet above the ground. It didn't take the group long to realize the object was seemingly moving in sympathy with them, and likewise it would stop as they did. They would later describe it as a bright and gold oval. They continued to watch the strange object for several more moments. Then they heard something moving in the woodland around them.  Hutchinson would later describe the creature as being the size of a human with wings on its back and that it didn't seem to have a head. What's more, it had a general horrific and grotesque appearance, so much so that the four teenagers turned and ran from the scene as fast as they could. Flaxston would later recall how during the encounter a strange cold feeling overtook him. On the same evening, in the nearby town of Saltwood, four other teenagers were making their way to the railway station, one of whom was Tony Harrison. As they did so, they all witnessed a strange light that they described as like a shooting star, only it was heading toward the ground. Even stranger, they would soon notice a glowing oval object hovering several feet above the ground a short distance away. Even more bizarre is the strange figure wearing a scarlet cloak and holding a lantern which gave out a whitish irregular flickering light that they saw moving away from the object. By the time the four teenagers had made their way nearer to the scene, the strange figure had simply disappeared. Another incident occurred less than a week later in a nearby football field. On that evening, November 21st, Keith Croucher witnessed an extremely similar object moving overhead. However, it was when a local resident, John McGoldrick and an anonymous friend went to investigate the area where the sightings had occurred when possible evidence of the incident was discovered. They would find three giant footprints said to be at least two feet long. Perhaps even stranger, when several local journalists went with McGoldrick to where he had discovered the impressions, they would witness a strange glow coming from the woodlands around the park. Then, with no further investigation into the bizarre occurrences, the incidents just suddenly stopped as quickly as they had begun. As we shall now see though, the incidents were just one of many strange goings on throughout the United Kingdom during 1963, and they ranged from sightings of UFOs to strange and bizarre creatures. There were many UFO sightings throughout the UK in 1963. Perhaps one of the first was around 9pm on the evening of January 23rd when the Air Ministry received a report from a woman in the Kent region claiming that a flying saucer was hovering near Bluebell Hill. What's more, whatever the object was, it was causing interference with the lights of her car. Five nights later, in the town of Shilton, two women would report a strange yellow glowing object on the ground that appeared to have four windows from which the light was emanating. It would eventually rise upward and head in the direction of the town of Rugby. Without a doubt, one of the most intriguing incidents with a possible connection to UFO activity took place on the evening of March 28th in Norwich. At around 8pm, Mrs. Duffield claimed to see a van suddenly pull up near the Britannia barracks. Two men immediately exited the vehicle and quickly set up what appeared to be a tripod on the ground next to them. A second later, a yellow and red light emerged from the tripod and shot up into the sky, disappearing over the barracks. This was followed by a second light. It was at this point, fearing she might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the witness discreetly left the area. She would, though, read reports of sightings of strange lights on the night in question in the local newspaper several days later. Whatever was going on, and if these men had military connections or not, is not known. However, several months later, a similar incident involving tripods and connections to experimental gadgetry occurred. On the afternoon of September 16th in Castleton, a door-to-door market researcher known only as Joel was conducting research on a housing estate in the area. However, while doing so at one particular house, she was struck by all of the unfamiliar objects and gadgets that were seemingly strewn about the house. Noticing her interest, the woman who she was interviewing offered that her husband was a scientist and that many of the gadgets were part of his tests and experiments. However, later in the afternoon, while parked at the roadside in the Blue John Caves area of the town, she noticed a sudden strange light descending from the sky. What's more, a strange object with tripod legs landed nearby. Even stranger, a man then exited the mysterious object. He was wearing a strange cloth suit and cloth helmet. It was then she noticed another man sat in a parked car. The same car she had noticed parked outside the house which contained the strange gadgets. The man inside got out of the vehicle and walked toward the mysterious person who had arrived in the futuristic object. The two men spoke for several moments before the mysterious visitor followed the scientist back to his car. They then drove away, leaving Joelle extremely confused as to what she had just seen. The account would take an even stranger twist later that evening, when, out of curiosity, the market researcher would return to the house in question to speak with the man. Perhaps surprisingly, she would find the other man there also. They were, however, seemingly honest that they were in fact extraterrestrials. What's more, they were from a planet very similar to Earth and their civilization had bases on two of Jupiter's many moons. Of course, we should perhaps treat this account with a pinch of salt, however, it does suggest the possibility of a discrete presence of extraterrestrials here on Earth. And of more interest to us here, is there a connection to the account of Mrs. Duffield? If the two men were not military operatives, might they have been extraterrestrials of the same race and were the lights some kind of message? On the evening of May 7th, in Kirby, Margaret McCutcheon was sat watching television with a 13-year-old son when all the house lights suddenly went out. At the same time, they noticed a strange object outside their home. She would describe it in her report to the police as being around six meters wide with flashing red lights on top. There was also a low buzzing sound which she believed came from the object. It remained hovering several feet above the ground before moving away and disappearing into the distance. Several months later, over the town of Gardston in Hartfordshire, a witness with a background in aviation, he was a former RAF pilot, witnessed a triangle-shaped UFO. It appeared to remain stationary, simply hovering discreetly for a considerable amount of time before calmly climbing higher and out of sight. What is more, corroboration of the object's presence would come from a nearby air traffic control station. Another incident involving apparent extraterrestrial visitors occurred in Shesher in the summer of 1963. A schoolgirl, whose name is unknown, was walking home from school when she decided to take a shortcut through some fields. However, several minutes after doing so, she spotted a strange man who was stood and seemingly staring at her. The mysterious person wore a silver suit that stretched from the neck to the feet. It appeared to be made of something similar to aluminum. The two held each other's stare for a moment before the strange figure disappeared into the woodland around the field. By the time the young girl had reached the spot where the figure was stood, he had vanished completely. Several weeks after the incident was the discovery of a crater in Charlton in Wiltshire. We should recall that strange lights were seen by multiple people in the days leading up to this discovery. And at least one account claims there was a discovery of a cow that appeared to have suffered some type of burn as its skin was found to be peeling. Further sightings and discoveries of similar craters in Edinburgh and Cumbria surfaced on July 26th, with witnesses in Edinburgh claiming to see a flying saucer over the region that evening, and a farmer in Cumbria claiming that 40 of his sheep had suddenly disappeared. Incidentally, another bizarre outbreak of craters occurred in early December. This time in East Lothian, Duffton fell, Flamborough head, and Southampton. On the evening of July 27th, over at Flamborough, several Coast Guards witnessed a strange object hovering over the area for most of the evening. What's more, military aircraft in the middle of training exercises also witnessed the strange object. Exactly a month later, in the early hours of August 27th in Beckenham in Kent, a veteran of World War II with a background in anti-aircraft technology, Mr. Hooper, claimed that he and his wife were awoken just before 2 a.m. to see a strange light descending rapidly toward the ground. It then stopped dead and hovered motionless for several seconds before it vanished at lightning speed. He would report the incident to the Air Ministry, who was largely dismissive of the account. We should note it is remarkably similar to the descending and hovering lights that were witnessed in the Sandling Park incident that would occur several months later in November. Just before 10.30 p.m., on the evening of September 15th in County Durham, a young boy noticed a strange object moving in the sky from his bedroom window. He would quickly call out to his parents, one of whom was an experienced radar operator during the Second World War. They would then themselves witness the craft for almost 15 minutes. Each would later describe how it appeared to zigzag in the skies overhead. What's more, it would change color several different times. The family would make a report at the sightings to the Air Ministry. Another sighting of strange glowing lights this time would appear to be two separate objects were witnessed by multiple people in Peterborough on the evening of September 26th.  Perhaps one of the strangest incidents took place at RAF Cosford on the evening of December 10th. At around 11.30 p.m., at least according to most recollections of the account, two RAF apprentices witnessed a dome-shaped object come out of the night sky and descend towards the base. It proceeded to land within the facility, turning everywhere in sight green from the beam of light being emitted from it. The apprentices would immediately go to report the incident to their superiors. However, upon returning, it had seemingly vanished into thin air. According to some reports, a very large transport plane arrived at the base several days later. This, according to locals, is unusual in itself. Some claims suggest that the craft or parts of it were loaded onto the plane before it departed. In the aftermath of the incident, the military would offer several explanations for the increasing rumors circulating, all of which were contradictory to the others. It is an incident that despite these apparent explanations continues to cause debate within the UFO community. Incidentally, it certainly is not the only UFO incident to have taken place at the base. Almost 30 years later, in March 1993, multiple sightings of strange lights and objects were reported over and in the vicinity of the base. There were even reports from some corners of witnessing laser-beam-type search lights in the region. Whether those incidents share a connection to the apparent landing at the base in December 1963 remain open to question. Of course, there is always the consideration that the base itself might prove to be the common denominator. There were also, it would seem, several other strange creatures lurking through the UK during 1963. Many of these would be big cat sightings, which appear to hit the United Kingdom in waves. However, one of the strangest is, without a doubt, an account from researcher Tom Sleman. Sleman has researched strange events in and around the Liverpool area exhaustively. At some time in May or June of 1963, came reports of a strange centaur creature in Sefton Park. Furthermore, several different people claimed to have seen the half-man, half-horse creature one of whom was a police officer. The following month, in Loch Ness, two fishermen noticed a strange rocking of their boat. It appeared to come from something under the water. The next thing they knew, a huge monster-like head rose from beneath the surface. It stared at them for a moment or two before disappearing back beneath the water. The two men would later describe the creature as having black brown skin that appeared to be hairy. Even stranger, it had the head of a bulldog. Perhaps interesting, several apparent sea monsters from around the world describe a dog-like creature with a dark, hairy body. Later in the summer near Cardigan Bay, a man on holiday, Mr. Sherman, claimed to witness a dinosaur-like creature on the rocky coastline. Furthermore, many of the seals were quite obviously fleeing the scene in fright. Even more bizarre, several days later, the man discovered the half-eaten remains of a seal in the same area as he spotted the mysterious creature. Several big cat sightings are on record throughout 1963. One of the first occurred in the summer on the afternoon of July 18. On that day, several witnesses, each on separate occasions, saw a large, cat-like creature. All of the sightings occurred in the shooter's hill region of London. Many people referred to the creature as the Surrey Puma. Five days later, around dawn on the morning of July 23, also in London, Jim Green would wake to hear an intense, beastly, snarling noise. He would report the incident to police, describing it as sounding like a cat fighting, but much larger. The police, perhaps already spooked and alerted to the sightings in Shooters Hill, would send five police cars in response. There were several more sightings of these big, cat-like creatures throughout the year, many in and around the London areas. There was, it would appear, a rise in satanic or occult activity in the UK during 1963, many of which would take place in the southern regions of England. For example, there were regular burglaries of churches around the UK, as well as, quite often, the remains of mutilated animals and other grim finds, all of which we might, generally speaking, associate with Satanism. In fact, it is with the targeting of these churches that we will take our focus to next, when Weird Darkness returns. No matter the time of day or season, sometimes you need to find a way to rid yourself of those ghostly chills that bring raised hairs and goose bumps to your skin. Other times you're looking for those ghostly chills. Either way, it sounds like you need a mug of Weird Dark Roast coffee. Weird Dark Roast coffee has deep notes of cocoa, caramel, and a touch of sinister sweetness that'll send shivers down your taste buds. This is an exclusive coffee that I selected specifically for you, my Weirdo family. Weird Dark Roast is not available in stores, coffee houses, mad scientist labs, or even the dark web, but you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. Weird Dark Roast coffee. Fresh roasted to order so it's as fresh as it can be when it lands on your doorstep and knocks three times. Grab yours now at WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash coffee. Weird Dark Roast coffee does not actually knock on your door because it doesn't have arms or hands, so if you hear knocks at the door and no one answers when you ask who it is, it's probably paranormal and you should just leave the door shut and locked. Almost certainly connected to the alleged satanic activity were bizarre and unsettling incidents taking place at churches throughout the UK. For example, on March 16th, an unnamed local couple would witness two young children seemingly playing with a real human skull in the small village of Klopp Hill in Bedfordshire. When they asked them where they'd gotten this macabre item from, they revealed that they discovered it in St. Mary's Church, which had been abandoned and nothing more than ruins. The couple would examine the church for themselves and they would discover the tracings of two Maltese crosses as well as cockerel feathers. After reporting the incident, it was soon discovered that six of the graves all women had been tampered with. Needless to say, rumors of satanic rituals and other occult activity at the ruined church became rampant in the area. Interestingly or not, only weeks later in the nearby village of Garstyn, a little over 10 miles from Klopp Hill, a vicar, Father Albert Davy, would inform police of several satanic-style threats that he'd received, as well as the regular finds of twigs and red-stained rags on the church grounds. He further claimed a group had approached him to help with their black magic rituals. After he refused, the threats began. However, in early April came another grim and brutal discovery. According to the book, the Bluebell Wood Horror by Kevin Gates, a bloody and horrific discovery surfaced on the 9th of April. The find was in Bluebell Woods in Caddington, once more nearby from Klopp Hill. An employee of the RSPCA would find the decapitated heads of six horses and a cow. It appeared the bodies of the dead animals had been removed from the scene. In each of the cases, the jaws had been wrenched apart with four of them having the jawbones completely removed. There is perhaps a debate as to whether this was the work of satanists and their rituals. Some suggest there might be a connection to the cattle mutilation cases, although these would not spread through much of North and South America until the 70s and 80s. The explanation would appear to remain unknown. It is perhaps highly suspicious, though, that such finds would happen amid an apparent outbreak of satanic goings-on in and around the Bedfordshire area. Another example of devil worship surfaced on September 21st at Castle Rising in Norfolk. They would find clay effigies of a man and a woman nailed to a door, each with a thorn pushed where the heart would be. Even more disturbing was the discovery of a sheep's head, complete with 13 horns pushed into its head. Perhaps the most bizarre and alarming incident took place on the afternoon of December 7th in West Ham and Sussex. On that day, at a church that was not abandoned but still very much active with its own congregation in the community, several devil worshipers attempted to perform a satanic ritual on the grounds until they were stopped by several onlookers. 1963 also hosts some simply bizarre happenings which in themselves, in isolation, are not particularly remarkable. However, when examined against the backdrop of the other dark and mysterious goings-on of 1963, perhaps take on more significance. Whether it was a sign of things to come, for example, 1963 began with one of the worst winters on record, something which certainly made life a little more miserable for most. Less than a month into 1963, the leader of the Labour Party, Hugh Gateskill, would die suddenly on January 18th. Less than a month later, well-known author Sylvia Path took her own life in her flat in London. The Moors murders began in the summer of 1963. They remain arguably the most shocking and appalling killing spree in British history, and in part due to the drawn out discoveries of the bodies due to Ian Brady's and Myra Hindley's refusals to reveal their locations, it has remained in the psyche of the British public well into the 2000s. And while not taking place in the UK, the aftermath most certainly had consequences worldwide when President Kennedy was assassinated in November. An entire book could be written on how different the world might have been had Kennedy not been killed. Obviously, such things can be nothing more than speculation. An interesting argument could be made, however, that a more peaceful and less sinister world might exist now had Kennedy not been murdered. So what should we make of the plethora of strange accounts and bizarre reports from the year that was 1963? Was it unique for such happenings? Or might we find, in fact, that each year has an equal number of strange incidents?  Indeed, such a research project might one day be the subject of future case studies here. It was the excellent work of Sarah Hapgood that sparked our interest in the idea of increased dark energies. If then, for the sake of argument here, we assume that 1963 in the United Kingdom was particularly heavy with strange encounters and events, why might that be? What could possibly explain such an occurrence? Might there be powers unseen and bigger than we might be able to imagine that were at work? Perhaps responsible for this releasing of energies that manifested themselves as UFOs or beastly creatures? Or even the need to partake in satanic rituals? We should note that what we generally call Satanism collectively envelopes a whole host of practices, ones that we collectively view as dark and sinister. Many would argue the use of the word Satanic is ill-fitting, generally speaking. Indeed, the events that we've highlighted here might be beyond mere Satanism and something altogether darker. For now, though, the explanations to these events in 1963 remain a mystery. Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments through the website at WeirdDarkness.com. That's also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks, shop the Weird Darkness store, sign up for the newsletter to win monthly prizes, find my other podcast, Church of the Undead, and more. Plus, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The 1963 Atlantic UFO encounter and Dark Paranormal Forces in Bade United Kingdom were both written by Marcus Louth for UFO Insight. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions, copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. James 1, verse 22. Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. And a final thought from Brianna Weist.   I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. And subscribe to this channel and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week. And while you're at it, spread the darkness by sharing this video with someone you know who loves all things strange and macabre. If you want to listen to the podcast, you can find it at WeirdDarkness.com.


Grand Rapids at Superior, back and forth they go in the first hat. John Sutherland then knocks down the three for Rapids, then later Nate Sealy putting on the moves. Pulls up from 15th, so smooth. Mr. Reliable then finally, Stacey Washington. No pull up office screen, knocks down the triple. The Underhawks win a close one on the road. 61-56, the final. The Underhawks.


What's going on everybody? Today we are starting our Excel tutorial series. Now there are so many things that you can do in Excel, so I don't know how long the series is going to be. It could be 15 or even 20 videos. But what I do know is that I'm going to be covering just about every single thing that I've used since I became a data analyst, and I want to show you how to do it. So it won't just be the more concrete things, you know, like pivot tables, charts, need lookups, things like that. It'll also be some of the more nuanced things like how to deal with missing data or how to deal with dirty data and how to clean that up within Excel. And so those are things that you may not be able to do, you know, if somebody wasn't showing you how to do it. And so that's what I'm going to try to help you because I know that that is something that you will need to do or learn how to do in Excel. Now, before we get into it, I want to give a huge shout out to the sponsor of this Excel series. And that is Udemy. I took so many Excel courses on Udemy when I was first starting out as a data analyst. And there was this one course that I kept going back to over and over again, because as I got into it in my job, I realized that there were so many things that were in that course that I really needed to know, but I didn't realize I needed to know it. And so I'm going to put the links to those courses in the description in case you want to take those. Again, huge shout out to Udemy. Without further ado, let's jump out of my screen and get started with our very first Excel tutorial. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and get rid of myself. We are going to be looking at something absolutely pivotal in your data analytics career. And that is pivot tables. And I think that's really appropriate. It is probably one of the most commonly used things I think that data analysts use to convey information in Excel. It's super easy to group things together to display information in a very easily understandable way, especially for people who are not data analysts, right? I use this a lot for other managers or for higher ups who don't want to get into SQL or aren't super tech savvy in Python or Tableau. They just want it in Excel. And so I use it all the time for that reason. And so we're going to be using this data set right here, bike store sales in Europe. I will include this link in the description. We're not going to look at the columns just yet. We're going to download it. I've already downloaded it a few times. But we are going to go to our downloads. We're going to open it up. And we're going to open up this sales right here. And give it a second. All right, perfect. And so here's what it looks like, at least on my screen. I'm going to spread it out just a little bit. And really quickly, let's take a very quick glance at this. So we have a date, a day, a month, a year. So some date information. Then we have some customer age information. So how old was the customer? Again, this is bike sales. So what did, you know, what did they buy? And they have some demographic information. So this is their age group. We have the gender, country, state, the product category, the subcategory, the actual product that was purchased.  So we have order quantity, unit cost, unit price, then we have the profit, cost, and revenue. All things that we almost everything in here, we can in some way put into a pivot table. Now I'm not going to go through every single variation of that, but we are going to be looking at a lot of this revenue over here. Because I think it's pretty easy to show the value of a pivot table with, especially with, you know, currency or money. So what we're going to do to get started is we're going to go up to insert, and we're going to click on insert. And then we are going to click on pivot table. Now really quick, there is a recommended pivot tables. And if you click on that, what will come up is some recommendations that Excel gives based on the data that you have. And it can kind of give you some ideas of what you can do with pivot tables. It's going to generate it for you. We're not going to do that. We're going to build our own. But let's click on pivot table. And it's going to auto select basically everything. And that's fantastic. But what if it doesn't come like that? I just erased that. If it doesn't come like that, you can click right here. You can click, excuse me, you can click control, shift, and then the right arrow and then the down arrow. And that is going to select all of our data. And you have right here a new worksheet or an existing worksheet. We're going to create a new worksheet. Just tends to get too clogged up if we put it on the same worksheet that already has a lot of data in it. So right over here are pivot table fields. And these are all of our columns that we just looked at. And we're going to be able to select those and kind of drag and drop. Now, if you just took the Tableau tutorial series that I just finished doing last week, then this is going to be pretty familiar. You're going to start seeing a little bit of hopefully some patterns about how the data is kind of displayed. And so we have our filters down here. We have columns, rows, values, all of these things we will be using. I'll show you how to use today as well as some additional things. One thing that we want to start with for this demonstration is we're going to be looking at kind of the these bottom ones right here, profit, cost, and revenue. And we're going to be doing that per country, per country and state. And we'll kind of do some drill downs. And I'll show you how those work. So just to start out, we're going to take the country right here. And you'll see it populate right over here. In fact, let me zoom in maybe once. Yeah, that should be fine. I don't know if I want I might zoom in again in just a little bit. So we have our country and it's just like this. Very, very simple. Oops. Now I'm going to include the state. Now I'm going to drag this all the way and I'm going to put it under. You can put it above or you can put it below. I'm going to put it below. It definitely makes the most sense there. Now when you do that, it kind of populates it in an expanded way, but you can collapse this very easily. We're going to go right here. We're going to right click. We're going to go down to expand and collapse. And we're going to collapse the entire field. And so now here are all of our all of our countries as they were formed. But now each of them has this plus sign to the left. And if you click on it, now we can go and we see this state that we added to these rows. And what this is going to do is it kind of is like a roll up or it's like a grouping. And so if you have taken the sequel tutorial series and you've done things with group by, this is very similar to that. And if you've done the tab load tutorial series, it's kind of like a drill down. It's very, very similar. So you can drill into the information. So we can put some values in here. And what that's going to do is that's going to kind of create some context to what this, what we're grouping by. So just for visual purposes, let's add this revenue. So this is the revenue that bike, bike sales revenue, right? That's what we're looking at. So this is the sum of the revenue for these bike sales per country. Now, if we drop down right here, we can see that in Australia, New South Wales had 92, 9,203,495 dollars. Queensland had 5 million, you know, etc, etc. So now we can break it down. We can't, we don't just have to look at Australia, we can now drill down even further to the actual state is what they're calling it, the actual state within Australia. And so it's super, super useful and you can do that for every single one. And so we can look at Canada, we can look at France, and we can really drill down into the revenue for each of these countries as well as the states within them. Now over here, this is not the most pretty, it just says sum of revenue and then it has some numbers, not the most pretty thing I've ever seen. Really quick, we can go like, we can kind of highlight over these and go back to home, you can do it in a couple different ways, we can go to home and we'll type currency. Now it has these two dot zero zeros at the end, you can get rid of those really easily by going like that. Already, this looks quite a bit better just visually, especially if you're looking at it in, you know, dollars, you can change the currency to different currencies if you want to do that. Now we don't just have to do the sum of revenue, we can do a lot of different things. So let's go to the value field settings. So we can customize this name, so we can do revenue, oops, if I could spell revenue per country, that's fine that you know it's just a placeholder to try to show you, but we don't have to just do that. You know, we could do the count, the average, the max, the min, we can do just about anything we want, but let's keep it the sum right now. And if we want to, we can show this value as different things. So we percentage, percentage of column total, percentage of row total, let's do really quick just for demonstration purposes, the percentage of grand total. So when we do that, we can see that the United States, the per revenue per country, United States has 32% just between these countries and Australia has the next one. So it might be kind of hard to glance at this really quickly to know who has the highest, but what we can do is we can go right here, we can go to sort, and we can do largest to smallest. And there we have the United States on top. Now when you do it right here, it's not sorted largest to smallest, you'd have to go in again, like sort and do largest to smallest. And so now we can see that California has the, has the, you know, biggest percentage, they're pulling in 20% of that 32% of revenue. So I'm just going to click control Z a few times and get us back to where we just were. And what I want to do is I want to show you a few different things pretty quickly. So we want to pull in this profit and this cost. And so I'm going to pull in this cost next, and then I'm going to pull in this profit again. I'm going to change the currency on this. And I'm not going to change the names right now, but you absolutely can do that. Now the revenue is the, how much is actually being sold? So, you know, for the United States, it was 27 million. Now the cost is how much did it cost to manufacture or store or distribute all of these products? So that was 16 million. And the profit is actually how much money is being made at the end of the day after, you know, all their costs after all their employee costs after everything, they're still making the United States is still making $11 million. Now you might look at this and you might say, well, you know, I can kind of glance at it and say, know that this profit is correct based off these two numbers. But we can do a calculated field. If you remember what calculated fields are, that's something from Tableau, very basically the exact same thing. And so we can create an additional column right here that is a calculated field that can add and subtract these things to make sure that our numbers are adding up correctly. So let's do that really quickly. Let's go to Pivot Table Analyze. We're going to go over to Fields, Items and Sets and go to Calculated Field. Now we can name this anything. And I'm just going to, for demo purposes, I'm going to say, oops, Calculated Field Demo. I'm sure yours will be different. Now if you want to, you can go in here and this is the formula. It's almost like, you know, we haven't looked at formulas that this is our first tutorial. But you know, when we look at formulas, it's basically the same thing as writing it inside of a cell. But here it gives us kind of this open text to do how we do what we want with it. Now what we're going to do is we're going to do revenue. I'm going to insert that. I'm going to get rid of this. I'm going to do revenue. And so that's the very large number. And then we're going to subtract. And we're going to subtract our cost. I'm going to insert that. And let's do this and click OK. So this is our Calculated Field Demo column that we just created. And as you can see, it matches our sum of profit column exactly. And that's exactly what we want to see. We want to kind of check to make sure that this revenue and cost fields are generating the correct profit.  And so it's really good to kind of check those and have that additional column. You probably wouldn't have this if you were, you know, going to submit this to somebody. Just so you know, now that this is an actual column, you can't go here and do something like cut or and paste it over here.  What it is, is now an actual column. And so we can go and remove that. And we can add it back at any moment. So if we want to go back and add that, oops, add that down here, we can do that because we've created that column. It's now permanently there unless we go and delete all of that data. And so we can just click this check mark and it will get rid of it for us. All right. Now, the last thing that we have not used down here is the filters. Now, the filters is exactly what it sounds like.  But probably not things that you already have included in your pivot table. So if you add something like the country down here, it's going to kind of expand everything. And then if you then go and filter on it, it kind of breaks it down. That's really not what the filter is kind of used for or meant for. For example, right up here, we have customer gender. Okay. So let's take the customer gender and we'll put it in this filters. Now we can see all of the revenue, all of the cost, all of the profit, and we can do that based off of the gender. So we can filter by a gender, not really having to change anything about our pivot table. And so at a super quick glance, we can see that the males are the profit from the males is 16.487 million. And the profit from the females is 15.733 million. So at a super basic level, at a really quick glance, we can see that the men or the males are spending a little bit more than the females by about $700,000. Now let's go ahead and create one more pivot table. We're going to create a pivot table right over here. Let's go back to the sales right here. Again, control shift right down. It's going to select all of our data. And we're going to click OK. So one thing that we're going to look at is we're going to use some of this date information right here. So let's select our country just like we did before. And what we want to do is see, you know, what year were we performing our best? When were we doing our absolute best with oops, let me go back with our sales. So I'm going to select the year and put that in our columns. And so now we have 2011 through 2016. And we want to look at our revenue. Let's put our revenue right down here. And now we have all of our revenue knots. Again, make this into a currency just like that. And super quickly, now we can get a really quick glance at how Australia was doing each year. And we can see that there was a huge uptick in 2013 and a huge uptick in 2015. That didn't happen for every single country. It did go up for most countries very slightly for some. But we can see on a large scale from year to year what that's like. And so within just a few minutes, we're able to create some really useful pivot tables that anybody could look at and understand. And that's really the biggest use of these pivot tables is that you can kind of group these things together, show some information and data at kind of a broad larger scale, and make it to where anybody who's looking at it can understand it. That is why pivot tables are so useful. And so I hope that this video was helpful. I hope that I was able to walk through it and help you better understand how pivot tables work and how you can use them when you are working within Excel. Thank you guys so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you like this video, be sure to like and subscribe below. And I'll see you in the next video.


Hello, I'm Steve Nunn, President and CEO of the Open Group. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday, where we highlight the various components and leading experts of the Architects Toolkit, a collated portfolio of the most pertinent technology standards for enterprise architects. During the series, I'll be calling on a number of recognized experts who will bring their particular insights on how to most effectively use the various tools in the Architects Toolkit. We'll have a mix of interviews, panel sessions and pre-recorded presentations along the way. While all standards of the Open Group are designed so they can be adopted independently of one another, the greatest value for an organization can be derived when they're used in unison, for some of the parts should be greater than the whole. In the Architects Toolkit, we have collated a portfolio of the most pertinent ones for architects, together, all in one place. For most of these tools, certification from the Open Group is also available, so practitioners can demonstrate that they have the skills required and recruiters can take the guesswork out of the recruitment process, all backed up by our Open Badges program. Welcome everyone, welcome to episode three of Toolkit Tuesday. I'm glad, thank you for joining us, I'm glad you've taken the decision to take the time to do so and I'm sure you'll find today's episode instructive and useful. We have a number of things today, the main presentation will be from my colleague Chris Ford, who I'll introduce in just a moment. But we also have some other things, we have an expert segment and please just before we get going, to get the most out of your WebEx experience on today's broadcast. If you go to the, there's a button in the top right of your screen, or should be in the top right of your screen, it might be called layout, it might be called something else, it depends on your settings. But if you go on there and you make sure that you have clicked on the item that says automatically hide names when not speaking, you'll get more of a view of the speakers and you can also click on any of the speakers, for example me at the moment, if you click or hover over the image of me, you will see three dots and you can click the option to move to stage and that will mean that you'll get a bigger picture, not that you necessarily want a bigger picture of me of course, but with the speakers it might help. So just a couple of tips there to help your experience today. We've got people joining us from all over the world today, so the timings are here in California, it's 9am, but we have people all over the world, so thank you again for making the time. So without further ado, we're going to move on. And in today's episode of the Architects Toolkit Tuesday webinar series, we're going to discuss the skills and changes necessary for architects to participate and lead digital transformations. That's key and everyone's minds right now of course. The presentation today that we'll hear will relate those needs to current research and the toolkit of open standards from the open group that architects can use to enable that readiness, enable their readiness for the challenges involved and to lead us through a lot of that today, it's a great pleasure to introduce my colleague, Chris Ford, who is CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects since 2016 Chris is based in Shanghai, China, and he also holds the post of general manager Asia Pacific for the open group. He's responsible for business functions in that region and he's also vice president of enterprise architecture and has global responsibility for the enterprise architecture activities at the open group, including our TOGAFA and the Archimage standards. Chris has deep expertise in enterprise architecture and as a member representative and chair of the open group architecture forum, he was instrumental in driving the successful development and launch of TOGAFA 9 from 2007 to 2009. So we're in good hands today with a talk on the future of architects. A warm welcome, a virtual welcome of course, but warm welcome for Chris Ford and over to you Chris and I'll see you all afterwards. Hi, thanks Steve. Good morning everyone.  Why do I say that? Well, in 2018 someone messaged me via social media. They said that architecture frameworks and practices like TOGAFA and EA were not relevant in a world of AI and machine learning and I was surprised to hear that because literally at that moment I was sitting in one of our quarterly meetings listening to a presentation about a customer facing business driven EA activity based on TOGAFA and applied to developing and delivering a machine learning capability within one of the world's leading investor service organizations, Moody's. So the point here is that you don't see a TOGAFA for AI machine learning title in a TOGAFA series guide currently but that didn't stop Moody's innovating with open standards and that's what I'm going to try and talk to you about here today. The composition of our standards and the way we can be using them to innovate. This list of the characteristics of enterprise agility meaning the ability to operate in an agile manner and innovate rapidly. Your own list may differ but this list is pretty short and clear and it deals with alertness, accessibility, decisiveness, swiftness and flexibility and you should note that these characteristics apply to all aspects of your enterprise not just to software development pipelines or even the IT organization. So it's great to aspire to these agility characteristics but what's your macro situation? What's your enterprise? The digital practitioner body of knowledge standard identifies the different types and levels of process and structure that are needed for different stages of each organization's growth, maturity and complexity moving from founder to team, team of teams and enduring enterprise and as architects as digital practitioners we must navigate and provide guidance and information for decision making appropriate to those levels and also pay attention to helping our organization move between those levels. Some of us may be playing at the founder level that represents scaling problems as you grow and some of us may be in the enduring enterprise level that dark blue segment at the top of the model and in that case if you're undertaking digital transformation and agile practices you may have an inverse scaling problem for transformation and agility so what do I mean by that? Imagine that you're in that enduring enterprise and you have multi-disciplinary teams of up to nine people divide that into your employee population and do the calculation on the total number of teams of problems you'll be trying to organize around. As an individual architect the mindset and skills and practices you need to succeed at each scaling point and plateau of an organization's development may not be everything you need at the next plateau and level and that's true inversely also moving back. Just a corollary here the weight and culture of workforce, each strategy and organization or it enables it. So being a platform based enterprise is essential but your platform is not enough. You've got to consider your ecosystem and the market reality is that for some time customers and prospects have had real-time feedback mechanisms at their fingertips and a shift continues to accelerate in this way not only in B2C but to a certain extent in B2B. People today expect to readily engage with friends, acquaintances colleagues or business partners. They expect services integration, ordering delivery status transportation, food ordering and getting things done by getting themselves or something from A to B. They expect what they want when they want it, how they want it and where they want it. And typically it's impossible for one company to deliver on all of these needs and demands alone. And so in an increasingly composed environment these characteristics are delivered for the consumer prospect to the point of engagement. So we need to take in this ecosystem environment a supply chain oriented view of your digital product delivery. Now talking about digital transformation here's one definition and a framework for classifying the things that you and your enterprise need to consider to deal with an architect for. And this model is contained in the seven levers white paper published by the open group. And there are consequences for not addressing each of these levers, but the levers apply to every aspect of your business and operating capability. So the discussion about transformation beyond agile software delivery, beyond agile architecture and many of the transformation examples discussed are really typically the result of a shifting focus and implementation of new business and operating models over years of experimentation across that enterprise. So if the emphasis in discussions that you're undertaking remains solely on IT software practices or models if there's not a broader scope for transformation discussion it may not scale or replicate effectively without the less obvious transformation and cultural shifts needed in your own company. Now talking about transformation we should not only talk about it for the enterprise but also for us ourselves as architects continuous learning adjustment and adaptation applied to your own development and your enterprise culture. Organizations considered digital leaders have intensified expectations for their architects as digital practitioners to deliver on business and operating model changes with technology as an enabler at pace.  So the points here about professional skills and specializations is very important as are the partners you choose to engage with and those you can learn from. As is here an outline curriculum for learning relating to architecting. Building on basics and adding to your knowledge, skills and experience continually. Now the flip side of transformation is optimization in my view optimizing operating efficiency is valuable bread and butter stuff to shareholders to tax paying citizens and owners of private companies. Operating effectively on the right things holds your current business and potentially opens up funding paths to new investments and growth areas. Now of course delivering efficiencies in current operations and products cannot be done with blinders. Missing transformational cues can be fatal in certain circumstances like the listed examples here. The enterprise needs to be aware of external threats but the point here is about the value of an architected approach to optimization not only transformation. Your current business requires care and feeding. Previously I used to use the terms deliver new business capabilities and optimize which is certainly perhaps quite different. So what's changed? Transformation in the context of business and operating models is larger than capabilities. Now that doesn't mean that capabilities are irrelevant. They are extraordinarily relevant but building out or optimizing your capabilities for an existing business and operating model is not the same as stepping back enterprise-wide and asking and contributing to what new business are we building? Now here's an illustration of our ongoing professional journey past, present and potential futures. In each winter and spring from the 80s through the present day has led to growth in this profession both in the technology scope and in the reinforced value of an architected approach. So looking forward how do you think technology trends might impact or modify our practice if we think about VR and augmented reality design going mainstream, quantum computing coming into the floor, other topics like cloud platform scales changing even more, AI beginning to scale, serverless computing. So things are going to continue to change. The question is how we will build them. Now from a research perspective this survey on enterprise architecture and digital leaders from McKinsey Henry Business School and the AEA has been conducted additively over five years and most recently updated this year in 2021. And you can read it in the Journal of Enterprise Architecture published by the Association of Enterprise Architects. It reports on some interesting questions and data about digital leaders versus the rest. For example, digital leaders using a common language in this case the term capabilities and also that EAs in digital leaders organizations engage with stakeholders and have visibility of an engagement with the C-suite. Now not illustrated here but also in the survey what attracts exceptional talent in the EA practice? The third highest ranking incentive and the biggest gap is education of staff highlighting the importance of opportunities for professional development. And what are the critical areas of professional development? Interpersonal skills are the leading issue. How do I address this gap? Well, I recommend that you go to the AEA website and download the survey and dig into the meat of this. There's a lot of very valuable information there. Now, mindset and perceptions of EAs and for EAs need to shift from topics on the left to topics on the right of this slide. But I have a caveat here. Cut through the myths and the cliches and deal with the actual perceptions. Conduct stark assessments to get the reality of your architecture practice, your own knowledge skills and experience and competencies, and your enterprise specific situations. This is not an all done type of situation. How much of the front side reflects your current practice or your current aspirations? And how much of the two side reflects your current practice or your current aspirations? The architecture practice may be symptomatic of what ails the enterprise. Or it could be a beacon of light leading the way. Typically everyone's in the transformation both together. Some are rowing, some are passengers, some are navigating, and some are just hanging on. A central tenet of agile digital transformation is taking an outside in view, determining what a customer wants, how they want to do it, and mobilizing the business and technology to meet those needs. So here's a view on illustrating that perspective. Fundamentally here, there's a virtuous circle of value implicit in this customer focus viewpoint and a recognition of some market realities. This is a customer product aware, software enabled and data driven engine supported and enabled by the latest available technology. So from a customer perspective, listening examples, customer and retail shopping, trip planning, food delivery, social media, or research to commit on any given purchase. The employee view might be that of a mind manager, a drug research scientist, or an oil exploration or climate scientist. The citizen view may be around life events, daily services, registering marriages, births, deaths, or obtaining a business license or a small business loan or a passport. Now, the Open Agile Architecture Standard from the Open Group states that a digital transformation and agility for an enterprise are inseparable in organizations undertaking changes at scale. A dual transformation approach is required to deliver the related outcomes and value. And the relevance and applied use of this approach has been experimented with, compared, contrasted, and confirmed, and implemented in companies like Society General, Michelin Fidelity, ExxonMobil, Autodesk, Raytheon, and Comcast as examples. And additionally, its relevance has been confirmed by large and boutique consulting organizations. So looking at this dual transformation viewpoint, customer, product, and adaptive operating models is a place to go look at the latest thinking on these scalable digital transformations. Now, in exploring this material, we'll find paths and options enumerated, such as transformation dimensions like ways of working, management systems, organizational structure, enterprise culture, and meta questions that come up around pace, concurrency, and sequence. Transformational scenarios such as waterfall, incremental, and Big Bang, and use an architect in your organizational will need to assess and decide on these dimensions of things repeatedly, continually. Now, when we're viewing an architecture and architecting perspective for digital transformation, here's a view of competencies, tools, techniques related to architecture development in a dual agile and digital transformation. The experience perspective is in the problem space, the working systems perspective is in the solution space, and the technical systems perspective is in the solution space. The building blocks are positioned along the axis of what the enterprise is and what the enterprise does. And strategy, value, data, information, and AI span the axis, okay? The corporate brand identity and corporate culture building blocks influence what the enterprise does, and the organization and governance building blocks influence what the enterprise is. Now, it's worth pointing out here, as always, that the trap of typical entropy related one and done architecture and the product delivery where people move on, so the intent here is continual architecture and evolution. Now, continuing with our toolkit of open standards perspective, let me draw your attention to the lower center in this slide where there's an Archimate model diagram. You see an abstracted product value and capability construct related to business processes and shared knowledge and insights in the context of the business operations. All of these other topics, trends, and considerations press on this model and reshape it in its related detailed iteratively. And so you should be aware that you can look for clarity in identifying patterns and models that express your stakeholders' views and vision for their business operations and its execution through these modeling capabilities and expressing your architectures. Now, digital leaders have a focus on what is the context for their architecture, for their business operation and the technology, including IT. So how might a role of an architect fit into the agile product team or product backlog and sprint planning activity? The answer is situational. Any one of the people on the teams illustrated here may act in the role of an architect or it might be a specific job with the name professional architect in role, either as a staff member or consultant or both. Regardless, the truth is that architecting needs to be done. People in roles working on various delivery threads, such as covering scope domain design, concerns related to strategy, operations, customers, products, business processes, data, information, cybersecurity, supporting technologies, cross-functional services, APIs and microservices. There's a massive list of considerations. And the architect's role is involved in daily engagement with the team members and stakeholders. Again, to be clear, this is a role and expertise illustration, not a position illustration. People in this team may have and likely do have the capability to perform multiple roles when and if needed. So this is just a skim over slide, really. Here we're showing the architects and the architecture teams role in product backlog and sprint planning activities. And clearly the role is involved in timely, relevant engagement with stakeholders and team members. Now, this is the Togaf ADM related to delivering business outcomes in the context of agile business and agile solutioning and agile dev sec ops delivery. When setting up and leading operating and governing architecture-related activities and the integration with enterprise functions, you might end up with this context and transformation. But you also need to look beyond just the ADM. Look to the Togaf series guides, the leaders guide, the governor's guide and others, and the white papers that I referenced earlier in this document about digital transformation. Here, what we're trying to communicate that the ADM isn't waterfall, you choose how to implement it. And it's based on what your organization term is a strategic operational organization of cultural considerations are and how it's tailored for that purpose. So to rephrase this, you and your organization make choices to use waterfall, incremental, iterative, Big Bang, Lean, TQM, Kanban, other scenarios and techniques in developing and delivering architectures and engaging with other team styles in your enterprise. Those choices are strategic, technical, or situational, but they are not determined by Togaf, but they do impact how you deploy it. Those are tough choices to make, hopefully made well by you and your organizations. Now, when iterating on delivery, you partition and segment work in a manageable and prioritized pipeline for delivery. And so here we're showing the architecture pattern of partitioning and segmentation, which is present in Togaf, applied in sprints and scrum with the instrument's intent and potential artifacts. So wrapping up now with competency demands for architects, even when you are orienting your internal practice-based and value delivery, have exceptional talent in the team, you'll be facing significant external competition and pressure for that internal consultancy role, as well as opportunities around that for partnership and learning. There are management consultancy organizations providing services with highly trained top talent. Competition for talent is fierce and competition amongst those management consultants is also fierce when they're talking about getting clients. So as always, a choice has to be made about what capabilities your enterprise will keep internally and what it will externalize. How does your internal practice differentiate itself and deliver value and how do you? Now, the OAA standard identifies an updated range of skills that may be considered part of the enterprise architect's role today and moving forward. These include the disciplines needed by management consultants who help design business and operating models. This update borrows from concepts and methods such as strategic marketing and market research, user and customer experience, design thinking, lean product and process development, socio-technical systems, organizational sociology, operation strategy, software architecture, enterprise architecture. So here, the roles of EA and EA capabilities need to be adapted depending on organizational context and maturity level. Park back to the emergence model from the digital practitioner material in the very early slides. Well, that's a wrap on my presentation here. Back to you, Steve. Chris, wonderful, wonderful job. There's a lot of content in there and you've helpfully provided direct links on the last slide there so that the attendees can go there and dig a bit deeper and follow those links. So there's a lot of information there and some great stuff. So a thank you for what you've led us through. A quick question. One we hear quite a lot. At this point, it's fair to say the open group is probably best known for our TOGAP standard, but you've mentioned a few other of our standards along the way that maybe have a role in their part of the toolkit for digital transformation. Can you give your view on how you might go about those or your view of the utility of those other tools, not just TOGAP? Well, you know, the irony here is that with what I did cover, which was a lot and, you know, frankly, my colleagues in reviewing this material said you're probably covering way too much stuff. I left things out like the IT for IT reference architecture, right, dealing with how you run and operate the technology component of your operations. And not only that, though, it deals with strategy and architecture as well in a specific set of contexts. So the view that the architect is the center of the universe is not the open group's view, right? And so the digital practitioner viewpoint point is saying digital transformation is occurring and practitioners as a whole are in the enterprise that have to change. And architects are one of those practitioners. The others are the product managers, the business owners, and what skills do people need in order to accomplish those things? The OAA, as updated, as I just thought about at the end there, with a set of skills that are more related to management consultancy and internal consultancy. But these are the expectations that are being placed on architects by leaders of organizations that are undertaking digital transformation. And there's an interesting question in the Q&A here from Rick, or Rich, about, he agrees with the sentiment, what the hell does this have to do with architecture specifically? Well, that's my words, not his. And I would say that it's the scope of your architecting now may include organizational design, where it may not have included that before, right? But that, again, is situational. For one organization, they may not have that set of expectations on an architect. But if they do, you're going to have to increase your skill set and you're going to have to get into organizational design, and that may be one of the architect's roles. So in such a broad context, it's very difficult to go down into the Natsas detail on this stuff. But that's what I tried to do in terms of the ladder slides around here's where Togoff might fit, here's where Agile and Scrum might fit, those sorts of things. Right, right, Chris. Well, in the interest of respecting people's time, we'll leave it there. But thank you for your great presentation today. And as we said, there's a lot there to unpack. But there are some links to take you right there. And maybe one of the things I picked out for an audience that's mostly architects, I'm guessing, competition for your skills and experiences is fierce. And that should be good news for everyone. Very good news. Yeah, absolutely. Chris, one welcome again. Thank you very much. Thank you, Steve. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. So briefly now, folks, we're just going to have a Toolkit Tuesday tip from one of our experts on the series, Terry Blevins, who after, well, not after, but he's had a very long career as an enterprise architect in both public and private sectors. And today he's with EnterpriseWise LLC and is also a fellow of the Open Group. So we're going to have a quick Toolkit Tuesday tip from Mr. Terry Blevins. Hi, my name is Terry Blevins with the Toolkit Tuesday Tip. We have a lot to think about when supporting digital transformation and digital enterprises in general. It's a complicated scenario and yet a great opportunity for enterprise architects to demonstrate their support and value. There's a few key things I think we, as enterprise architects, need to consider when asked to support a digital effort. The first is to make sure we see our role as enablers for the digital effort. Our role in this scenario is not to just create architecture models and standards, but our role is to enable and support the digital effort going on in the business or mission. Keep in mind that the architect's role isn't to make the change, but to enable the change by supporting all those involved in making decisions associated with the changes. Secondly, we must think about enterprise architecture differently. One thing to rethink is how we view the Togaf ADM. Right now, some think of the Togaf ADM as a cycle, but especially in the case of digital enterprises, you should not think of the ADM as a cycle. Rather, we should think of the Togaf ADM more like a set of buckets of architectural capabilities to be delivered to those in need. And you should also think about delivering those capabilities through a service delivery model. Providing those architecture services to those that are making decisions by implementing the necessary changes at the time of need is key to your success as an enterprise architect and the success of the digital enterprise. So look at the ADM as a collection of capabilities that you will provide through a service delivery model and by doing this, you will be better equipped to support the digital enterprise. Keep architecting for enterprise value. Thanks for watching. Terry, thanks very much for that great tip. Very valuable and for our audience, as I said before, Terry has a long and distinguished career in enterprise architecture and so when he gives us some tips, we should listen and there's some great value in there. So thanks again, Terry. And that just about brings us to the end of this episode of Toolkit Tuesday. I'd like to thank you all for taking the time to join us and I hope you found it valuable and that you'll join us for the next one, which is in two weeks' time, where we will focus on the subject of enterprise architecture and enterprise agility using the Togov Standard. So a really key topic, EA and Agility and using one of the tools in the Toolkit, the Togov Standard. So I hope you'll join us in two weeks' time, where our main presenter will be Chris Frost of Fujitsu. In the meantime, wherever you are from anywhere in the world, I hope you remain safe and well and see you in two weeks. I'm Steve Nunn. This was Toolkit Tuesday. Thank you for joining. Bye-bye.