Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Spotted in Reno: Rover from The Prisoner? A UFO?

You might have noticed an unuusal sight if you passed by the Reno-Stead Airport recently. The giant white sphere has generated quite a few calls to our newsroom. So what is it ?

It turns out its a prototype airship being developed by a private company called Sierra Nevada Corporation. They're testing out in hopes of marketing it one day to businesses and government agencies.

Jim McGinley at SNC says the round airship could be used to monitor crowds or border crossings. Right now FAA regulations require that it be manned but in the future it may be operated by remote control.

McGinley says the airship could be valuable to anyone who desires a persistent surveillance presence in a remote location.

The company says it will continue testing in Stead for the next two or three weeks.

[MyNews4.com via BoingBoing.net]

Taiwanese Ghost Hunters

K2 Meter - False Evidence Revealed

Arthur Conan Doyle's other lost world

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of über-rationalist Sherlock Holmes, was a man who combined cool logic, medicine and detection with unswerving faith in the existence of fairies and the reality of the spirit world.

His interest in other dimensions began in the 1880's. He attended séances, investigated supposed hauntings, experimented with table tipping and automatic writing for around 30 years. Doyle's faith in spiritualism was cemented by a medium who told him not to read a book by Leigh Hunt he'd been contemplating. What turned him from believer to crusader was "the war to end all wars".

The first world war hit Europe with an unprecedented wave of bereavement. Doyle, who visited the front lines and saw the carnage for himself, lost his brothers-in-law, his nephew and countless friends. His son Kingsley and his brother Innes both died from post-war influenza.

Conan Doyle wasn't the only prominent person to be convinced of a spirit world. The Society for Psychical Research, which he joined in 1893, counted scientists, philosophers and MPs, including future prime minister Stanley Baldwin amongst its members. But he was unique in his role as crusader. He felt an obligation to visit the good news on other bereaved families. The attraction of his message is obvious: your dead sons survive, they're happy and you can talk to them.

Read More

New Jack The Ripper suspect's ritual killings obeyed occult decree


Jack the Ripper was not a serial sexual killer but an occultist called Robert Donston Stephenson who terrorised London's East End while indulging in a sadistic form of Satanic worship.

According to a new book that claims to prove conclusively the identity of the mass murderer, the Ripper's true motive was to kill four prostitutes as the occult decreed and, in so doing, profane the Christian cross.

Public fascination with Jack the Ripper has barely faltered since the first murder, on 31 August 1888, when 45-year-old Mary Ann Nichols was murdered and mutilated at a spot patrolled every 30 minutes by policemen

Patricia Cornwell, one of the world's most successful crime novelists, is working on a BBC Omnibus documentary that will conclude the killer was artist Walter Sickert. Her belief is based on his obsession with the subject - his depiction of what was believed to be the last murder led to speculation that he was the Ripper.

But in Jack the Ripper's Black Magic Rituals, author Ivor Edwards claims that despite being repeatedly overlooked by Ripperologists, Stephenson, alias Roslyn D'Onston, was the killer.

Read More

Folkish Odinists Mistaken for Nazis, Kicked Out of Park

A group of Pagans were kicked out of public park in Bakersfield, California, after complaints were made to local park officials. While at first it seemed like it was going to be a simple misunderstanding that would be cleared up, it soon escalated to them being ejected by park rangers and told they could never come back.

“Collin Bentley, an Odinist, said, “Our arms are raised (in the air). So it’s easy to see how a bunch of white guys, in a park, with tattoos, could be mistaken.” With all of the complaints from the nearby community, a park ranger and two Kern County sheriff’s deputies were called out to investigate these rituals.Don Parkins, an Odinist said, “We paused, answered their questions, pointed out our artifacts, the altar, the flag, what we were doing, laid it out for them in basic. And they said, ‘OK, you’re not breaking any laws, you’re not being disruptive, so you folks have a good day now.’” But the group said the ranger came back with five more deputies, and wanted them to leave.Parkins said, “(The ranger) said, “I won’t have that (expletive) in my park ever again.’ And I said, ‘Well let’s go back to north of the river’, and he said, ‘You won’t have it in any of my parks.’”" He stepped over the line at that point. He’s gone beyond what his call of duty is,” Parkins said.”

After this story hit the news-wires Wren’s Nest picked it up, and soon it spread through various social networking sites and message boards. It is certainly obvious that the group shouldn’t have been kicked off the park, they didn’t seem to be harming or threatening anyone, and they’ll no doubt have recourse for a lawsuit should they choose to pursue it. But why the strange about-face from the park ranger? Why did he go from “have a good day” to “you won’t have it in any of my parks”? Now it is true that Bakersfield, California is no wonderland for occult and Pagan religions, they were the infamous home of a major Satanic (panic) ritual abuse case in the 1990s, and an occult shop there was harassed back in 2007, but this seems a bit different. Why the turn-around? If the ranger was a Pagan-hater I doubt he would have given them a pass the first time around.

Unicorn Spotted In New York?

Incredible UFO Video taken near Mexico City


2nd INCREDIBLE UFO VIDEO TAKEN of WORLD FAMOUS SPINNING UFO! Another witness come foward regarding a spinning UFO on MAY 22, 2009. This was near MEXICO CITY and both videos where taken within miles away! One video is facing the sun and the other is behind the UFO http://pindz.blogspot.com/2009/08/2nd...

[via Phantoms & Monsters]

SyFy's Warehouse 13 confirmed for second season

NEW YORK – May 28, 2009 – SCI FI's new one-hour dramedy adventure series Warehouse 13 has confirmed an all-star lineup set to make guest appearances throughout the first season including Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer, Michael Hogan and Mark Sheppard; Gossip Girl's James Naughton; Roger Rees of Cheers; Eureka's Joe Morton, Erica Cerra and Niall Matter; Stargate Atlantis' Joe Flanigan and Ivan Sergei from Crossing Jordan.

The new original one-hour series stars Eddie McClintock, Joanne Kelly, Saul Rubinek, Allison Scagliotti and previously announced guest star CCH Pounder. Produced by Universal Cable Productions, the series is currently in production in Toronto. Warehouse 13 will premiere Tuesday, July 7 with the 2-hour pilot from 9 - 11PM ET/PT.

Warehouse 13 follows two Secret Service agents who find themselves abruptly transferred to a massive, top-secret storage facility in windswept South Dakota which houses every strange artifact, mysterious relic, fantastical object and supernatural souvenir ever collected by the U.S. government. The Warehouse's caretaker Artie (Rubinek) charges Pete (McClintock) and Myka (Kelly) with chasing down reports of supernatural and paranormal activity in search of new objects to cache at the Warehouse, as well as helping him to control the warehouse itself.

[Read More at Warehouse13.info]

Bigfoot Researcher gets candid (Part 1)


Bigfoot researcher George Lutz is interviewed. In part 1, George discusses his early training as an Air Force pilot. Apologies for the outdoor interview and nearby traffic noise. George worked with ufologist Stan Gordon beginning in 1972 researching reports of UFOs and Bigfoot in Pennsylvania. Full story at InCahoots.TV.

More Bigfoot Sightings in Uniontown, PA

The proverbial things that go bump in the night can be frightening enough, but for one motorist driving north of Uniontown in broad daylight, an encounter with a strange creature was equally, if not more, chilling.

Researcher Stan Gordon, and field investigators for the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society, Eric Altman and Dave and Cindy Dragosin, went to the site of the alleged encounter on July 15, five days after the incident. There, the motorist, in the presence of her husband, related the story of her encounter with a "figure coming down the left side" approaching her car.

Gordon is perhaps best known for his investigation into a reported 1965 UFO crash in Kecksburg, Westmoreland County.

[Read More via Phantoms & Monsters]

Milla Jovovich's The Fourth Kind, Alien Abductions


1n 1972, a scale of measurement was established for alien encounters. When a UFO is sighted, it is called an encounter of the first kind. When evidence is collected, it is known as an encounter of the second kind. When contact is made with extraterrestrials, it is the third kind. The next level, abduction, is the fourth kind. This encounter has been the most difficult to document ... until now.

Structured unlike any film before it, The Fourth Kind is a provocative thriller set in modern-day Nome, Alaska, where-mysteriously since the 1960s-a disproportionate number of the population has been reported missing every year. Despite multiple FBI investigations of the region, the truth has never been discovered.

Here in this remote region, psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich) began videotaping sessions with traumatized patients and unwittingly discovered some of the most disturbing evidence of alien abduction ever documented.

Using never-before-seen archival footage that is integrated into the film, The Fourth Kind exposes the terrified revelations of multiple witnesses. Their accounts of being visited by alien figures all share disturbingly identical details, the validity of which is investigated throughout the film.

Paranormal 101: what are those shadows in the night?

Every unexplained sound, sight or dream is not necessarily something of a paranormal nature. Can a ghostly apparition be distinguished from an eerie shadow made more ominous by the dark of night?

Let’s take a look, from my own experience, at the logical side of a couple things that go bump in the night.

Shadow Play – You wake abruptly at 2 A.M. and groggy from sleep, see something swiftly pass by your bedroom doorway. You have no clue what it was, but shaken, you instantly feel it is something disturbing and you hunker down under the safety of the blankets.

I did this off and on for a month recently. I thought someone unseen was paying a visit to the old family homestead, which could be any number of family members who have passed over and who have indeed visited on occasion.

I was uneasy and tried to stay calm, but it was quite unnerving. After this situation happened the last time, I realized I was extremely thirsty. I waited what I thought was a “safe” amount of time (not feeling up to a ghostly visit that night) and crept out of bed to head down the hallway to the kitchen.

Just as I turned into the hall from my bedroom, a swish of a shadow passed over me and I stood frozen in my tracks. Within a second or two, the swish of shadow appeared again.

At the same moment, though, looking down the hallway to the next room, I saw my cat pass by the night light, which is located under an aquarium in that room. I also saw the same swish of shadow, caused by the cat, as she played with a dust ball under the fish tank. Mystery solved!

Unexplained Scratching Noise – There are so many explanations you can come up with to identify a scratching noise heard in the hours of darkness. Some of them are obvious; branches scraping the house on a windy night, mice in the attic or the antics of the cat prowling the house in the dark.

I was wigged out over a particular scratching sound I was hearing for a couple weeks at the start of an extremely cold winter. It only happened around 1 A.M. and I was very bothered by it. My husband investigated everything and could not come up with a reasonable explanation to suit me.

When I hear a strange noise in my house, I will hunt it down like a person obsessed. I will not relax until I can find the source of my anxiety. With this in mind, rest assured, I scoured the room I thought the strange sound was coming from, but I made the mistake of doing it during the day.

After hearing this scratching noise at night for weeks and finding nothing that explained it away, I got brave and decided to investigate the sound in the still of the night, which is when I would hear it.

I will make a long story short here. We had a new heating system installed that September, which included, in the middle part of my old home, a nifty wall heater that blew wonderful hot air into the coldest part of the house.

The wall heater was located directly across the room from a wall of closets, which were back to back with the wall behind the headboard of my bed. I discovered that every time that heater kicked on, it was around 1 A.M., the coldest part of the night.

The awesome new heater blew a pretty forceful airflow across the room, which went under the doors of the old closets, which in turn, made a silly cardboard tag inside the closet, flap in the airflow and scrape back and forth on the back of the closet.

That cardboard tag, while scarping the wall behind my headboard, left me terrified that my mother (passed over) was not getting enough attention and was doing whatever she had to do to get me to notice. Another mystery solved!

[Examiner.com]

Lights in the sky: Ball Lightning


Debunkers are fond of "explaining" ufos as ball lightning, swamp gas, etc., but, inasmuch as we have next to no understanding of such phenomena, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that, for example, ball lightning is a ufo. After all, the term"ufo" doesn't mean Pleiadian beam ship or Sirian mother ship; it means "unidentified flying object," and is an admission of the fact that there are objects or phenomena flying around in the sky that we don't even begin to understand. In fact, there are a multitude of luminous phenomena in and beyond our atmosphere that we don't even begin to understand, and they all seem to be interrelated in some fashion; indeed, they may be different forms of the same thing.

For centuries, people have reported seeing moving balls of light, usually in swampy areas; these have been called swamp lights, will-o-the-wisp, or jack-o-lanterns. Debunkers claim that these are nothing more than glowing or burning methane gas released by rotting vegetation in swamps. While there is no doubt that methane is produced this way, there is no known chemical process that would cause methane to coldly luminesce. And for it to burn, there would have to be something to ignite the gas, and most swamps don't come equipped with spark plugs. If bubbles of methane were somehow ignited, they would simply produce a brief flame just above the water level. Yet scores of witnesses have reported discrete balls of light moving through the air, and holding themselves together for many seconds. Burning gas expands, rises, and cools. Ever turn on the gas range in your kitchen and have to chase a fireball around the room? I think not. In addition, many observers have reported a seeming awareness on the part of the lights; they seem to react to a human presence.

[Read More @ Unexplained Mysteries]

Upwards lightning caught on film

Scientists have photographed "upwards lightning", a rarely-seen phenomenon where electricity from storms flows into the upper atmosphere.

During last year's Tropical Storm Cristobal, lightning reached more than 60km (40 miles) up.

Also known as "gigantic jets", these events are just as powerful as cloud-to-ground lightning bolts.

The US team of researchers also took radio measurements of the electrical charge.

The phenomenon was photographed from a field site near Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Their work, published in Nature Geoscience, gives scientists a better understanding of this form of lightning.

Gigantic jets do not occur during every storm and scientists do not yet know what types of storm are conducive to their formation.

[Read More @ BBC News]

Venezuela's "continuous" lightning storm


There's something strange in the air where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela...

For 140 to 160 nights out of the year, for 10 hours at a time, the sky above the river is pierced by almost constant lightning, producing as many as 280 strikes per hour. Known as the "Relampago del Catatumbo," this lightning storm has been raging, on and off, for as long a people can remember.

It was first written about in the 1597 poem "The Dragontea" by Lope de Vega. De Vega tells of Sir Francis Drake's 1595 attempt to take the city of Maracaibo by night, only to have his plans foiled when the lightning storm's flashes gave away his position to the city's defenders.

This happened again on July 24, 1823, when, during the Venezuelan War of Independence, Spanish ships were revealed by the lightning and defeated by the Simón Bolívar's upstart navy.

In fact, the lighting, visible from 40 kilometers away, is so regular that it's been used as a navigation aid by ships and is known among sailors as the "Maracaibo Beacon."

[Read More]