'Dinner platter' size UFO hovers 4 feet off ground in Fairbury, Nebraska

A couple in Fairbury, Nebraska, witnessed "a self illuminating light about the size of a dinner platter hovering motionless about 4 feet off the ground of the city street outside their apartment building" on July 23, 2009, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) database.

Don and Yvonne Aken watched a silent and pulsating object in the street from a window in their apartment - approximately 30 to 40 feet from the object.

Don Aken had gotten out of bed at 2:30 a.m. to use the bathroom, and as he left the bathroom, "he noticed a light shining through the window curtain. He woke up his wife, who also watched the object through the window.

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Creativity: muses, faeries, and geniues, oh my!

Elizabeth Gilbert, American Artist, gives a great talk about creativity at TED. She talks about anguished artists getting creativity from external sources; artists performing personal magic; and invokes a who batch of things such as transcendence, faeries, muses, and geniuses.

Humans and Hobbits existed together

They were just one metre tall with very long arms, no chins, wrist bones like gorillas and extremely long feet.

In 2003, archaeologists excavating in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores made a discovery that forced scientists to completely rethink conventional theories of human evolution.

They reported the discovery of a new species of human, one that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, at the same time as modern humans.

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Photo of a Strange Orb in Adelaide, South Australia

Phantoms and Monsters has a great set of pictures of this strange orb. Will o' wips, ball of lighting, ghost light, or maybe a camera glitch? You be the judge.

'UFO' photographed 'tracking' RAF Hercules

John Powell, 56, claims an unusual silver orb was following the military craft as it came in to land at the base.

The retired school teacher was gardening at his home in nearby Westbury when he noticed the sun glinting off the circular surface.

"I don't believe in things from outer space but that thing was definitely tracking the plane," he said.

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Where yoga and indie rock meet

The Wanderlust Festival is a new kind of festival bringing together the world's top yoga teachers and the best performers in rock and roll, all in a setting of breathtaking natural beauty. Music. Yoga. Nature.

Unfortunately it ended a week ago. Maybe next year?

Chinese Factory Workers Fall Ill: Is It Pollution or "Hysteria"?

Treehugger.com reports on a pollution sickness hysteria that has struck Chinese factory workers. Could dancing plagues be next?

In a story nearly worthy of the Onion, officials in China have sought to reassure 1,200 factory workers in the city of Jilin that their symptoms of nausea, numbness, dizziness, convulsions, breathing difficulties, vomiting and temporary paralysis were not the result of chemical poisoning from a nearby factory, but rather of "hysteria."

After a chemical plant began production in the spring, workers from a nearby yarn factory began piling up in the city's hospital beds. The factory happens to produce aniline, a highly toxic chemical used in the manufacture of polyurethane, rubber, herbicides and dyes.

The Amazing Unseen Hitler Films

It seems that Hitler's legacy will never die, even when his waxy visage is decapitated. Jason Torchinsky of BoingBoing.net reports on watching the unseen films of Hitler.

The films started our innocently enough: vacation films from a well-to-do Chapel Hill family, at the beach, some interesting aerial shots of Chapel Hill, lots of people in fussy clothes and hats looking at the camera and waving. Some were even color, which was a bit surprising.

The next reels got more interesting. The family apparently took a trip to Europe in the early '30s. Shots of snowy alps, quaint chalets, ski lifts, and then, rows of Nazi flags. Handheld camera shots walking down a street, until a brown-shirted Nazi covers the camera lens with his hand. Cut to a Nazi rally, with the camera in the crowd, as the cinematographer raises their hand, along with everyone else in the massive arena, in a Nazi salute. Pan to the stage, small from the distance and central, as a small, familiar figure walks up to the podium, the part of his hair the hypotenuse of his facial triangle, a square cursor of a mustache under his nose, as he then starts to harangue the cheering crowd, silently.

Harry Potter's Emma Watson to Launch Sustainable Clothing Line

As a follow up to Emma Watson being related to 'a real-life witch', it seems that she is starting up a clothing line of her own.

Then there's the actress's own admission that sustainable fashion is lacking a certain, well, magic. “I’m really interested in fair-trade fashion and organic cotton, but it’s hard because, to be honest, the stuff’s kind of ugly or really plain”, she told British Elle in June.

Strange New Air Force Facility Energizes Ionosphere, Fans Conspiracy Flames

Wired.com has a great article about the US goverment's HAARP project (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program), which gives the ability to communicate to submerged submarines.

That last app caught the military's attention. Communicating with subs thousands of miles away, under thousands of feet of ocean, requires ultralow frequencies, and that requires whomping-big antennas. To do it, the Navy had built an array in the upper Midwest that transmits its signal through bedrock, but its construction required razing 84 miles' worth of hundred-foot-wide path through wilderness, including a national forest. It drove local environmentalists crazy. But who would protest an ephemeral antenna in the sky?
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Yet Haarp's future is unclear. Defense budgets are shrinking, and the facility costs $10 million a year to operate. Haarp's patron at Darpa, Tony Tether, has left his job. The project's godfather, Ted Stevens, was defeated in the 2008 Senate election by the mayor of Anchorage: Mark Begich, Nick's little brother. "I'll have his ear," Nick promises.
....
So the radio scientists may have to look for funding again, which probably means a whole new set of rationales. You can imagine how the conspiracy crowd will react. And the scientists, in their eagerness, can end up feeding the paranoia. Papadopoulos, for example, says he wants to do another round of subterranean surveillance experiments. "Personally, I believe it can reach 1,000 kilometers. It can't reach Iran, if that's your question," he laughs. "But if I put Haarp on a ship, or on an oil platform, who knows?" Not that he has concrete plans for such tests in Alaska, let alone in the Persian Gulf—though he does mention a facility in Puerto Rico as a possibility.