Who was the Pied Piper?: The Lost Children of Hamelin

On 26 June, the German town of Hamelin celebrated Rat Catcher's Day. But what really happened there, and who was the mysterious Pied Piper?

By Maria J Pérez Cuervo

June 2010

FT264
Last year, the town of Hamelin in Germany celebrated the 725th anniversary of a macabre event still familiar through children’s fairytales more than seven centuries later. But beyond the musical Rats and the colourful souvenirs and tourist attractions, the town of the Pied Piper is full of references to a real tragedy – one recorded on the walls of the so-called Ratten­fängerhaus, or House of the Piper:

“In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 child­ren born in Hamelin were seduced by a piper, dressed in all kinds of colours, and lost at the calvary near the koppen.”

The town of Hamelin hasn’t forgotten this loss. The street where, supposedly, the children were last seen is called Bungelosen­strasse: street without drums”. Even so many years after the event, no one is allowed to play music or dance there. Oral tradition preserved and enriched the story until the Brothers Grimm included it in their compil­ation of German legends, Deutsche Sagen (1816–18).

Asteroid Mining Project Revealed by Planetary Resources, Inc.

Planetary Resources' mission is mine near-Earth asteroids for raw materials, ranging from water to precious metals. Through the development of cost-effective exploration technologies, the company is poised to initiate prospecting missions targeting resource-rich asteroids that are easily accessible.

Resource extraction from asteroids will deliver multiple benefits to humanity and could be valued at billions of dollars annually. The effort will tap into the high concentration of precious metals found on asteroids and provide a sustainable supply to the ever-growing population on Earth.

The company was founded by space visionary Peter H. Diamandis, M.D. and leading commercial space entrepreneur Eric Anderson, and is supported by an impressive investor and advisor group, including Google's Larry Page & Eric Schmidt, Ph.D.; film maker & explorer James Cameron; Chairman of Intentional Software Corporation and Microsoft's former Chief Software Architect Charles Simonyi, Ph.D.; Founder of Sherpalo and Google Board of Directors founding member K. Ram Shriram; and Chairman of Hillwood and The Perot Group Ross Perot, Jr.

Visit www.planetaryresources.com for more information.

Meet your new fear: Time-Traveling Nazis (trailer)

Engineer develops devices to detect dead daughter's ghost

In 2004, 17-year-old Melissa Galka, a senior at Granby Memorial High School, died after the car she was driving hit a tree in town.

Within days of her death, her father said, she begin communicating with her family.

"She started doing things like ringing the doorbell, changing TV channels, turning lights on and off," Gary Galka said Monday. "Then one time she came into my room and I felt her sit on the edge of the bed."

Now Galka has a thriving trade in paranormal detection devices, launched as a result of those eery events.

Galka, an electrical engineer who owns a firm that distributes test instruments, began developing hand-held devices that purportedly can detect unusual vibrations in a room, temperature variations — "hot and cold spots" — and other effects associated with the paranormal. Galka also created a voice recorder, the "spirit box," that he says can record responses from any "spirits" that might be present.

UFO's Over Russia: Massive sightings light up St. Petersburgh's skies

St. Petersburgh, Russia, and the city is still abuzz after a peaceful invasion of the skies on April 9, 10 and 11 was witnessed by multiple citizens. Numerous videos have surfaced, showing what appeared to be an enormous mothership, which could be seen floating above the city at night. Brightly lit orbs joined the ship, or were seen breaking off from it, and floating across the skies. This phenomenon continued for three days and three nights.

The event is destined to go down in history as one of the most important and significant sightings of the century, not only because of the clarity and duration of these sightings, but also because of the numerous witnesses and videotapes of the event.

Russian news media covered the story of these bright twinkling lights in the sky, reporting however that the army claimed that these lights were training exercises, a story which was immediately debunked.
Watch this amazing compilation of videos captured by residents of Russia's St. Petersburgh, a city that was treated to a very special kind of lightshow this month.

[allvoices.com]

Live Dinosaur Hunter Seeks Funds For African Expedition

How's this for using the Internet in an unusual way? Stephen McCullah needs funds to finance an expedition to remote areas of the African Congo in search of unknown species of animals -- including a possible living dinosaur.

McCullah, 21, is reaching out to potential sponsors on Kickstarter, the Internet's funding site for creative projects.

"I'll be launching one of the first expeditions in this century with the goal of categorizing plant and animal species in the vastly unexplored Republic of the Congo," Missouri native McCullah wrote on Kickstarter.

South Africa UFO Convention Theory: ETs Raid Earth For Gold

If humanity wants to understand the greed in a man or woman's heart, he might want to look to the stars . . . and the little green men who might be living on them.

Aliens -- much like humans -- have been plundering the planet for gold for thousands of years, according to the organizer of South Africa's first UFO Science and Consciousness Conference, held in Johannesburg last week.

"There's a battle for Earth by some interesting dark forces," conference organizer Michael Tellinger told News 24. "All the governments in the world are puppets and instruments to implement the will of a small group of individuals. The royal political bloodline goes back thousand of years."

Tellinger's statements about gold-hunting aliens were widely reported by the South African press, while comparisons between the gold-digging alien theory and the plot of the film "Cowboys & Aliens" were noted by the sci-fi blog io9.

Tellinger insists that extraterrestrials visited our planet in search of gold about 300,000 years ago, cloned their genetic make-up and gave rise to mankind. Ever since, they've been in contact with world leaders.

Rubber chicken launched into massive solar storm

It's been known for some time that solar storms represent a danger to the health of astronauts. But what about rubber chickens?

Last month, when the sun unleashed the most intense radiation storm since 2003, a group of high school students in Bishop, California, wanted to find out.

They inflated a helium balloon and used it to send the chicken, named Camilla, up 120,000 feet to expose her to high-energy solar protons at point-blank range.

"We equipped Camilla with sensors to measure the radiation," says Sam Johnson, 16, of Bishop Union High School's Earth to Sky student group. "At the apex of our flight, the payload was above 99 percent of Earth's atmosphere."

Very Rare White Killer Whale Spotted in Wild

Scientists have made what they believe to be the first sighting of an adult white orca, or killer whale.

The adult male, which they have nicknamed Iceberg, was spotted off the coast of Kamchatka in eastern Russia.

It appears to be healthy and leading a normal life in its pod.

White whales of various species are occasionally seen; but the only known white orcas have been young, including one with a rare genetic condition that died in a Canadian aquarium in 1972.