Ghost Box Introduction

Ghost Hunting Tools of the Trade

Television shows about ghost hunting have been popular for over 50 years, and though the basic concept is the same, recent decades have seen the hunt become less about psychics and séances and more about electronic detection gear. Just about every TV show about ghost hunting sends a crew of investigators into a building, armed to the teeth with all sorts of equipment.
The use of any kind of measuring equipment to detect ghosts is fundamentally, and completely, bogus. How can I make a blanket statement like that? Measuring equipment detects what it is designed to detect, whether that's light, heat, electromagnetism, or whatever. Thus it will only detect things that emit measurable amounts of those energies. For us as viewers to accept that some piece of handheld measuring equipment has a useful function in detecting a ghost, we must base our acceptance on the premise that ghosts are known to emit those types of energies in measurable amounts. If there were any truth to this, science would have discovered it long ago. Hospital operating rooms would have ghost detection equipment built in. Mortuaries and crematoriums would have ghost detection equipment at the top of their list. Search and rescue crews would use ghost detection equipment. If ghosts did exist and were detectable, you can bet that there would be huge industries behind it. I can't think of anything that would attract more venture capital dollars from Silicon Valley. However, no rigorous research has ever shown that ghosts can be reliably detected with hardware. It's easy to disbelieve me, but it's much harder to disbelieve the lack of interest from greedy corporate America.
So now let's look at the popular tools of the trade of ghost hunting. The important takeaway is to understand what these devices are actually detecting when the ghost hunters point them around the room, and why their crazily jumping needles and indicators are perfectly consistent with, and explained by, the absence of ghosts.

The 10 Best Asian Horror Movies of All Time!

Or, actually, my ten favorites, but it seems much more controversial to proclaim them the ten best of all time. And this way encourages people to call me an idiot in the comments.

Non-linear narratives. Nightmarish visuals. Continuity errors out the wazoo. Alternating between a prudish approach to sex and gore and a no-holds-barred style. These are the things which leap to my mind when I think about Asian horror movies. I was a little late to the party, but once I discovered them, I began to watch a lot of the Asian output of terror flicks. My consumption has slowed of late – there’s only so many times you can watched a ghostly pale child with dark hair crawl down the wall – but I discovered some real gems. The usual caveats apply: These are my opinions, there are movies I’ve completely missed so they got left off, you may feel differently, etc.

1. R-Point – This ghost story about a Korean army unit investigating an SOS from another unit long since disappeared is truly creepy, with an unnerving ending.

2. A Tale of Two Sisters – This re-telling of a traditional Korean folk tale is not for the impatient or those with short attention spans. Only near the end, when (and if) you catch on to the central twist of the movie will any of the scenes prior make sense, but for those who stick it out to the end, it is worth the trip.

3. Kansen (Infection) – A nearly deserted hospital suffers an outbreak of a virus that causes the afflicted to undergo horrible changes. Or does it? It features three consecutive endings, who is to say which is real?

4. Audition – Miike Takashi’s masterpiece of violent obsession shifts gears twice. It starts out a drama, becomes almost a romantic comedy, and then turns into grisly horror in the third act. Owing a lot to Misery, this movie makes Annie Wilkes seem like a creampuff.

5. Ringu – Re-made as The Ring, at times it doesn’t make much sense, but a very effective fright flick.

6. Koma – Closer to a mystery than horror, this is a very well acted story of organ theft.

7. Ju-On – Remade as The Grudge, its influence has been blunted by an army of re-makes, sequels, and imitators.

8. The Eye – I liked this Pang Brothers’ movie a lot better before it was remade 100 times.

9. Eko Eko Azaraku – The Japanese version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer spawned two sequels and a television series. The original is a dark story which uses Christianity as myth in the same way western countries use Eastern religions.

10. The Host- I’m not as big on this Korean monsterfest as some. Many of the characters are too annoying to believe. But it is always nice to see an Asian monster that doesn’t want to stomp on Tokyo.

Nazi Mystery: Twins from Brazil

Joseph Mengele, the escaped Nazi war criminal and SS physician, known as the Angel of Death, spent years doing bizarre medical experiments on twins at Auschwitz working to determine if twins held the key to building a blond-haired, blue-eyed master race for Adolf Hitler. Now a historian says he has evidence that Mengele's attempts may not have ended at Auschwitz, and that his obsession to engineer an Aryan master race continued, and that succeeded while he was on the run in South America. Deep in the Brazilian outback in a tiny town among the 80 households in a one-square-mile area are reportedly some 38 pairs of twins. Blond, blue-eyed twins. Bizarre and inexplicable, could they be the product of Mengele's machinations? Now, with exclusive access, EXPLORER goes inside the investigation; From the secret agents who trailed him, to the scientists now uncovering the facts behind the fantastical phenomenon, no stone is left unturned.

(National Geographic)

BBC Footage: UFO On Israeli Military Training

Life On Mars Debate—Again!

The UFO Chronicles--  The meteorite discovered at Alan Hills, Antarctica on December 27, 1984, tagged ALH 84001, which was later determined to be from the planet Mars became the focus of a heated debate over ten years later; in 1996, (after sitting on a shelf for a decade) a press conference took place where a group of NASA scientists, supported by three universities and lead by Dr. David S. McKay announced to the world, that “evidence of primitive life once lived on the red planet.”

To no one’s surprise, this caused ripples throughout the scientific community, and a rift quickly emerged. In lay terms what McKay & company put forward, was that certain hydrocarbons present in the rock could only be formed by “bacterial decomposition”; the opposition said the result could be caused by other means.

The Wild Center Of Our Galaxy Could Support A Mega-Civilization

IO.9.com-- Could a super-advanced civilization live inside the acretion disk, the super-dense area around the black hole at the center of a galaxy? Author Mike Brotherton has played with this idea, and a couple of scientific papers say it's possible.

Brotherton, whose book Spider Star has creatures living in an accretion disk, points to a couple papers from the 1990s which say that it's possible that civilizations really could develop in that environment. One paper, "Accretion disk civilization 1: Habitable zone around accretion disks at galactic nuclei" by J. Fukue et al., notes that the density of stars and planets in the accretion disk is expected to be high, and wonders what sort of planets might develop there. Fukue's second paper, "Accretion disk civilization 2: From sunhook to photon floater," gets even more speculative, talking about civilizations that could harness the energy of an accretion disk using a "photon floater":

An accretion disk surrounding a supermassive black hole at the active galactic nuclei radiates tremendous energy. In order to utilize energy of the accretion disk system, the author investigates the configuration and stability of a floating platform - photon floater - above the accretion disk, which is supported by the radiation pressure of the disk radiation. In the case of the far-floater, which is located far from the disk, there exists a critical floating angle, where the gravitational force of the central black hole is balanced with radiation pressure. In the case of the near-floater, which is located very close to the disk, there exists a critical floating height, where the gravity is balanced with radiation. It is demonstrated that this floating height is dynamical stable. Finally, in the case of the axis-floater, which is located on the axis of the disk, the photon floater is unstable.

UFO Crashes and Blackouts in Northern Argentina

Google Earth is one of those Internet-age novelties that have made the world smaller and more accessible for the armchair explorer, relegating the old atlas and travel guide to the bookcase. Typing in a few words will take you to places that you're unlikely to see in a lifetime, or even in many lifetimes (ninety per cent of us are tied to our jobs!). This surely applies to the vast spaces of Northern Argentina, where satellite images present the viewer with lonely roads, the odd farmstead, endless cultivated fields or wilderness areas bordering the vast and unforgiving Andean Cordillera and its tributary mountain chains. These brown, black, grey and sometimes green spaces are relegated by human cartography as brightly colored provinces with names that do not quite connect to the barren landscape - Jujuy, Salta, Tucumán - and towns whose nomenclature ranges from native toponyms to those of brave settlers who gambled their lives in colonizing the area.

This strange land is made stranger by the disquieting presence of the unexplained.

In August 1957, less than twenty kilometers from the town of Quilino, Province of Cordoba, a serviceman with the Argentinean Air Force heard a very loud and acute buzzing sound. He got out of his tent to take a look and was startled to see a disk-shaped object coming in for a landing, causing a whirlwind that shook surrounding trees and grass. Frightened, the airman reached for his sidearm but was unable to draw it. "It appeared to be welded to its holster," he would later say. A voice issued from the unknown craft, assuaging his fear and informing him "interplanetary visitors already had a base in the region of Salta" and would soon make their presence known all over the world.

Murdering Palestinians for their organs

GlobalResearcher.ca-- Former Palestinian detainee, researcher Abdul-Nasser Farwana, stated that all facts on the ground, since decades, prove that the Israeli occupation executed Palestinian detainees after they surrendered and refused to hand their bodies to their families. Hundreds of bodies were transferred to the families days, months or even years after the fact, and when the bodies were sent back, they were missing vital internal organs.

Link for the Aftonbladet report by Swedish journalist Donald Boström:
http://www.aftonbladet.se/kultur/article5652583.ab

Farwana added that the Swedish report, written by Donald Boström and published by Aftonbladet, Stockholm daily paper, regarding illegal trafficking of body parts of Palestinians is directly connected to the execution of Palestinians after they surrendered to the army, and is connected with the arrest of 40 well-known figures, including Rabbis in New Jersey for money laundering and corruption, in a scheme that involved sales of Israeli kidneys in the US and other corruption rackets.

Farwana added that one of the illegal acts carried out by Israel is having secret detention facilities in which dozens of detainees were imprisoned and never heard of anymore. This is in addition to the “Numbers Graveyard” in which “unknown” Palestinian and Arab fighters are buried.

He said that Israel still denies it is holding hundreds of Palestinian and Arab fighter, and refuses to cooperate with the Red Cross on the issue.

The researcher added that Israel is the only state that had a policy of detaining the bodies of slain Arab and Palestinian fighters, and that some 300 fighters are buried in the numbers graveyard.

Hundreds of bodies were returned during prisoner-swap deals, including the latest swap-deal between Hezbollah and Israel in which some 200 bodies were moved to Lebanon.

Farwana further said that dozens of detainees died in Israeli prisons, some due to torture, and their bodies were not immediately sent to their families, but instead were moved to forensic center, and some of their body parts were removed before bodies were sent back to the Palestinians.

He said the Swedish paper said in its report that Palestinians youth were abducted by the Israeli army from their homes, were killed later on, and when their bodies were return, they were cut open and vital organs were missing.

Rabbi Levi Yitzhak Rosenberg, who was recently arrested in New York, is believed to be involved in illegal trade of organs, and that he sold Kidney to patients in the United States for 160.000 USD.

The Aftonbladet report placed the Israeli-Swedish relations at odds, and some Israel officials demanded Sweden to officially apologize, while other officials said that this report in part of the efforts to demonize Israel and the Jews.