1. Watch For Sliding Bulk - For some reason, Bill Wright was fishing along the banks of Loch Ness at three o'clock one morning in 1978. He was startled to see "a large, arch-shaped body" rise up out of the water, about 30 yards from him. He told a reporter, "It was black in color, and seconds later the creature's round brown head and long brown neck appeared. It was absolutely fantastic." He tried to move in for a closer look, but when he did, the creature "suddenly slid its bulk under the water and disappeared."
2. Our Universe Is Only An Experiment:
That's the extraordinary theory proposed by British physicist Edward Harrison, who tells Independent News that, "Our universe could easily be the outcome of an experiment carried out by a superior intelligence in another universe." According to Harrison, these supremely smart beings are just like us, but much further advanced, and in creating our universe, gave birth to one much like their own. Got that?
3. Killer Beast
A bizarre dog-like creature called a catoblepas lived in the area of Africa now known as Ethiopia thousands of years before Christ. Historians of the time report that the monster's head was so heavy it was forced to face the ground. However, if it raised its head and gazed at a person, this individual would drop down dead on the spot!
4. A book that's 'out of this world' which explores the possibility that giant flying lizards and dragons from outer space founded the ancient civilizations of China, Mesopotamia, Egypt and India! According to the publisher, "Flying Serpents And Dragons" is "a highly original work that deals a shattering blow to all our preconceived notions about our past and human origins."
You can order your copy of 'Flying Serpents and Dragons' at amazon.com.
5. UFOs Invade Outback
UFOs have been spotted over the Australian outback almost every night for the past several weeks, leaving even veteran desert-dwellers searching for answers. Triangular, cigar-shaped and saucer-like objects hover in the evening sky, then disappear rapidly. However, according to web site news.co.au, a woman from Alice Springs was driving home one midnight when she saw a triangular-shaped craft land in the desert. Amazingly, three silvery beings emerged and started
walking towards her, after which she panicked and sped safely away.
6. Horny Souvenir -
In 1754, a ship bound for Edinburgh, Scotland from the West Indies was attacked by an unknown creature. The ship's log characterizes it as a "sea unicorn (or swordfish)." The creature rammed the ship on its starboard side, and its horn pierced through 14 inches of solid oak. The horn broke off, and the attacking creature retreated, leaving the sailors with an unusual souvenir.
7. Flying Ointments
Can witches fly? Medieval witches believed flight was possible with the aid of ointments rubbed on their skin. Practitioners rubbed their bodies with creams made from nightshade and mandrake, which, when absorbed through the skin, created a hallucinogenic effect. This produced the desired sensation of riding on a broomstick across the night sky, helping foster the legend that witches can, indeed, fly.
8. Mysterious Strangers -
In the summer of 1692, residents of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, became convinced that an army of mysterious strangers had them under siege. They suspected that this "army" was French-Canadians allied with hostile Indians, and gunfire was exchanged. When the colonists went to view the bodies, there was not evidence of them. The strangers were accused of beating on barns and throwing stones, among other things. After the episode had run its course, a clergyman/witch hunter by the name of Cotton Mather speculated that the invaders had been demons.
9. Even The Police Saw It -
John Rosa recalled a sighting he had experienced as a newsboy in 1897. He detailed it in a letter to the "Detroit News," and the letter was published on July 15, 1961. The object he saw over the city at 4 o'clock one morning "looked to be about 3 feet in diameter...1,000 feet in the air. It was a silvery color and had a tail about 3 blocks long." It looked like a giant "sea serpent" making a "low hissing noise." He claimed that his father and a police officer also saw it.
10. Deny, Doubt, Debunk -
Professor Marcello Truzzi of Eastern Michigan University, a sociologist of science, is interested in controversies at the fringes of science. He thinks that the term "skeptic" is often misused in debates about anomalies and the paranormal. A skeptic is not a committed disbeliever, he insists, but a doubter who is willing to question even his own assumptions. Persons usually called
"skeptics" are really debunkers - deniers as opposed to doubters.
11. Not Nessie -
In June of 1933, the Scottish newspaper, "Argus," reported that "while flying over [Loch Ness] last week in the vicinity of Urquhart Castle we beheld in the depths a shape resembling a large alligator, the size of which would be about 25 feet long by 4 feet wide." This is only one of a number of sightings of unknown but un-Nessie-like animals in the loch, including giant "alligators" and
"crocodiles."
12. A Painful Sight(ing) -
At 1:30a.m. in 1947 Waterloo, Iowa, a man had just stepped into his yard when he noticed a bright, circular, moving object 25 feet away. The object was flat, and roughly fifteen feet in diameter. It was making a swishing sound, and a "ray" from the UFO hit the man, numbing his entire body. "I could hardly get into the house," he said. He suffered bodily pains all through the next day.
13. THE BLUE PEOPLE OF TROUBLESOME CREEK
The story of an Appalachian malady, an inquisitive doctor, and a paradoxical cure.
Six generations after a French orphan named Martin Fugate settled on
the banks of eastern Kentucky's Troublesome Creek with his redheaded
American bride, his great-great-great great grandson was born in a modern
hospital not far from where the creek still runs.
The boy inherited his father's lankiness and his mother's slightly
nasal way of speaking.
What he got from Martin Fugate was dark blue skin. "It was almost
purple," his father recalls.
Doctors were so astonished by the color of Benjy Stacy's skin that they
raced him by ambulance from the maternity ward in the hospital near
Hazard to a medical clinic in Lexington. Two days of tests produced no
explanation for skin the color of a bruised plum.
A transfusion was being prepared when Benjy's grandmother spoke up.
"Have you ever heard of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek?" she asked the doctors.
"My grandmother Luna on my dad's side was a blue Fugate. It was real
bad in her," Alva Stacy, the boy's father, explained. "The doctors finally
came to the conclusion that Benjy's color was due to blood inherited from
generations back."
Benjy lost his blue tint within a few weeks, and now he is about as
normal looking a seven-year-old boy as you could hope to find. His lips and
fingernails still turn a shade of purple-blue when he gets cold or angry a quirk that so intrigued medical students after Benjy's birth that they would crowd around the baby and try to make him cry. "Benjy was a pretty big item in the hospital," his mother says with a grin.
Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only traces of Martin Fugate's
legacy left in the boy; that, and the recessive gene that has shaded many of
the Fugates and their kin blue for the past 162 years.
They're known simply as the "blue people" in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without
serious illness associated with the skin discoloration. For some, though, there
was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being blue in a
world that is mostly shades of white to black.
There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue
people blue: heart disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one
old-timer that "their blood is just a little closer to their skin." But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote creekside settlements where most of the "blue Fugates" lived until well into the 1950s. By the time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate's descendants had multiplied their recessive genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.
Madison Cawein began hearing rumors about the blue people when he went
to work at the University of Kentucky's Lexington medical clinic in 1960.
"I'm a hematologist, so something like that perks up my ears," Cawein says,
sipping on whiskey sours and letting his mind slip back to the summer
he spent "tromping around the hills looking for blue people."
Cawein is no stranger to eccentricities of the body. He helped isolate
an antidote for cholera, and he did some of the early work on L-dopa, the
drug for Parkinson's disease. But his first love, which he developed as an
Army medical technician in World War II, was hematology. "Blood cells always
looked so beautiful to me," he says.
Cawein would drive back and forth between Lexington and Hazard an
eight-hour ordeal before the tollway was built and scour the hills looking for the
blue people he'd heard rumors about. The American Heart Association had a
clinic in Hazard, and it was there that Cawein met "a great big nurse" who
offered to help.
Her name was Ruth Pendergrass, and she had been trying to stir up
medical interest in the blue people ever since a dark blue woman walked into
the county health department one bitterly cold afternoon and asked for a
blood test.
"She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and retired from nursing. "Her face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue. It like to scared me to death! She looked like she was having a heart attack. I just knew that patient was going to die right there in the health department, but she wasn't a'tall alarmed. She told me that her family was the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women." About this same time, another of the blue Combses, named Luke, had taken his sick wife up to the clinic at Lexington. One look at Luke was enough to "get those doctors down here in a hurry," says Pendergrass, who joined Cawein to look for more blue people.
Trudging up and down the hollows, fending off "the two mean dogs that
everyone had in their front yard," the doctor and the nurse would spot
someone at the top of a hill who looked blue and take off in wild
pursuit. By the time they'd get to the top, the person would be gone. Finally,
one day when the frustrated doctor was idling inside the Hazard clinic,
Patrick and Rachel Ritchie walked in.
"They were bluer'n hell," Cawein says. "Well, as you can imagine, I
really examined them. After concluding that there was no evidence of heart
disease, I said 'Aha!' I started asking them questions: 'Do you have any
relatives who are blue?' then I sat down and we began to chart the family."
Cawein remembers the pain that showed on the Ritchie brother's and
sister's faces. "They were really embarrassed about being blue," he said.
"Patrick was all hunched down in the hall. Rachel was leaning against the wall.
They wouldn't come into the waiting room. You could tell how much it
bothered them to be blue."
After ruling out heart and lung diseases, the doctor suspected
methemoglobinemia, a rare hereditary blood disorder that results from
excess levels of methemoglobin in the blood. Methemoglobin which is blue, is a
nonfunctional form of the red hemoglobin that carries oxygen. It is the
color of oxygen-depleted blood seen in the blue veins just below the
skin.
If the blue people did have methemoglobinemia, the next step was to find out the cause. It can be brought on by several things: abnormal hemoglobin formation, an enzyme deficiency, and taking too much of certain drugs, including vitamin K, which is essential for blood clotting and is abundant in pork liver and vegetable oil.
Cawein drew "lots of blood" from the Ritchies and hurried back to his
lab. He tested first for abnormal hemoglobin, but the results were negative.
Stumped, the doctor turned to the medical literature for a clue. He
found references to methemoglobinemia dating to the turn of the century, but
it wasn't until he came across E. M. Scott's 1960 report in the Journal of
Clinical Investigation (vol. 39, 1960) that the answer began to emerge.
Scott was a Public Health Service doctor at the Arctic Health Research
Center in Anchorage who had discovered hereditary methemoglobinemia
among Alaskan Eskimos and Indians. It was caused, Scott speculated, by an
absence of the enzyme diaphorase from their red blood cells. In normal people
hemoglobin is converted to methemoglobin at a very slow rate. If this
conversion continued, all the body's hemoglobin would eventually be
rendered useless. Normally diaphorase converts methemoglobin back to hemoglobin.
Scott also concluded that the condition was inherited as a simple
recessive trait. In other words, to get the disorder, a person would have to
inherit two genes for it, one from each parent. Somebody with only one gene
would not have the condition but could pass the gene to a child.
Scott's Alaskans seemed to match Cawein's blue people. If the condition
were inherited as a recessive trait, it would appear most often in an inbred
line.
Cawein needed fresh blood to do an enzyme assay. He had to drive eight
hours back to Hazard to search out the Ritchies, who lived in a tapped-out
mining town called Hardburly. They took the doctor to see their uncle, who was blue, too. While in the hills, Cawein drove over to see Zach (Big Man)
Fugate, the 76-year-old patriarch of the clan on Troublesome Creek. His
car gave out on the dirt road to Zach's house, and the doctor had to borrow
a Jeep from a filling station.
Zach took the doctor even farther up Copperhead Hollow to see his Aunt
Bessie Fugate, who was blue. Bessie had an iron pot of clothes boiling
in her front yard, but she graciously allowed the doctor to draw some of
her blood.
"So I brought back the new blood and set up my enzyme assay," Cawein
continued. "And by God, they didn't have the enzyme diaphorase. I
looked at other enzymes and nothing was wrong with them. So I knew we had the defect defined.''
Just like the Alaskans, their blood had accumulated so much of the blue
molecule that it over- whelmed the red of normal hcmoglobin that shows
through as pink in the skin of most Caucasians.
Once he had the enzyme deficiency isolated, methylene blue sprang to
Cawein's mind as the "perfectly obvious" antidote. Some of the blue
people thought the doctor was slightly addled for suggesting that a blue dye
could turn them pink. But Cawein knew from earlier studies that the body has
an alternative method of converting methemoglobin back to normal.
Activating it requires adding to the blood a substance that acts as an "electron
donor." Many substances do this, but Cawein chose methylene blue because it had been used successfully and safely in other cases and because it acts quickly.
Cawein packed his black bag and rounded up Nurse Pendergrass for the
big event. They went over to Patrick and Rachel Ritchie's house and
injected each of them with 100 milligrams of methylene blue.
''Within a few minutes. the blue color was gone from their skin," the
doctor said. "For the first time in their lives, they were pink. They were
delighted."
"They changed colors!" remembered Pendergrass. "It was really something
exciting to see."
The doctor gave each blue family a supply of methylene blue tablets to
take as a daily pill. The drug's effects are temporary, as methylene blue is
normally excreted in the urine. One day, one of the older mountain men
cornered the doctor. "I can see that old blue running out of my skin,"
he confided.
Before Cawein ended his study of the blue people, he returned to the
mountains to patch together the long and twisted journey of Martin
Fugate's recessive gene. From a history of Perry County and some Fugate
family Bibles listing ancestors, Cawein has constructed a fairly complete story.
Martin Fugate was a French orphan who emigrated to Kentucky in 1820 to
claim a land grant on the wilderness banks of Troublesome Creek. No mention
of his skin color is made in the early histories of the area, but family lore
has it that Martin himself was blue.
The odds against it were incalculable, but Martin Fugate managed to
find and marry a woman who carried the same recessive gene. Elizabeth Smith,
apparently, was as pale-skinned as the mountain laurel that blooms
every spring around the creek hollows.
Martin and Elizabeth set up housekeeping on the banks of Troublesome
and began a family. Of their seven children, four were reported to be blue.
The clan kept multiplying. Fugates married other Fugates. Sometimes
they married first cousins. And they married the people who lived closest to
them, the Combses, Smiths, Ritchies, and Stacys. All lived in isolation
from the world, bunched in log cabins up and down the hollows, and so it was
only natural that a boy married the girl next door, even if she had the same
last name.
"When they settled this country back then, there was no roads. It was
hard to get out, so they intermarried," says Dennis Stacy, a 51-year-old
coal miner and amateur genealogist who has filled a loose-leaf notebook with
the laboriously traced blood lines of several local families.
Stacy counts Fugate blood in his own veins. "If you'll notice," he
observes, tracing lines on his family's chart, which lists his mother's and his
father's great grandfather as Henley Fugate, "I'm kin to myself."
The railroad didn't come through eastern Kentucky until the coal mines
were developed around 1912, and it took another 30 or 40 years to lay down
roads along the local creeks.
Martin and Elizabeth Fugate's blue children multiplied in this natural
isolation tank. The marriage of one of their blue boys, Zachariah, to
his mother's sister triggered the line of succession that would result in
the birth, more than 100 years later, of Benjy Stacy.
When Benjy was born with purple skin, his relatives told the perplexed
doctors about his great grandmother Luna Fugate. One relative describes
her as "blue all over," and another calls Luna "the bluest woman I ever
saw."
Luna's father, Levy Fugate, was one of Zachariah Fugate's sons. Levy
married a Ritchie girl and bought 200 acres of rolling land along Ball Creek.
The couple had eight children, including Luna.
A fellow by the name of John E. Stacy spotted Luna at Sunday services
of the Old Regular Baptist Church back before the century turned. Stacy
courted her, married her, and moved over from Troublesome Creek to make a
living in timber on her daddy's land.
Luna has been dead nearly 20 years now, but her widower survives. John
Stacy still lives on Lick Branch of Ball Creek. His two room log cabin sits
in the middle of Laurel Fork Hollow. Luna is buried at the top of the hollow.
Stacy's son has built a modern house next door, but the old logger
won't hear of leaving the cabin he built with timber he personally cut and
hewed for Luna and their 13 children.
Stacy recalls that his father-inlaw, Levy Fugate, was "part of the family that showed blue. All them old fellers way back then was blue. One of
'em I remember seeing him when I was just a boy Blue Anze, they called him.
Most of them old people went by that name the blue Fugates. It run in that
generation who lived up and down Ball [Creek]."
"They looked like anybody else, 'cept they had the blue color," Stacy
says, sitting in a chair in his plaid flannel shirt and suspenders, next to a
cardboard box where a small black piglet, kept as a pet, is squealing
for his bottle. "I couldn't tell you what caused it."
The only thing Stacy can't or won't remember is that his wife Luna was
blue. When asked ahout it, he shakes his head and stares steadfastly ahead.
It would be hard to doubt this gracious man except that you can't find
another person who knew Luna who doesn't remember her as being blue.
"The bluest Fugates I ever saw was Luna and her kin," says Carrie Lee
Kilburn, a nurse who works at the rural medical center called Homeplace
Clinic. "Luna was bluish all over. Her lips were as dark as a bruise.
She was as blue a woman as I ever saw."
Luna Stacy possessed the good health common to the blue people, bearing
at least 13 children before she died at 84. The clinic doctors only saw
her a few times in her life and never for anything serious.
As coal mining and the railroads brought progress to Kentucky, the blue
Fugates started moving out of their communities and marrying other
people. The strain of inherited blue began to disappear as the recessive gene
spread to families where it was unlikely to be paired with a similar gene.
Benjy Stacy is one of the last of the blue Fugates. With Fugate blood
on both his mother's and his father's side, the boy could have received
genes for the enzyme deficiency from either direction. Because the boy was
intensely blue at birth but then recovered his normal skin tones, Benjy
is assumed to have inherlted only one gene for the condition. Such people
tend to be very blue only at birth, probably because newborns normally have
smaller amounts of diaphorase. The enzyme eventually builds to normal
levels in most children and to almost normal levels in those like Benjy, who
carry one gene.
Hilda Stacy (nee Godsey) is fiercely protective of her son. She gets upset at all the talk of inbreeding among the Fugates. One of the supermarket tabloids once sent a reporter to find out about the blue people, and she was distressed with his preoccupation with intermarriages.
She and her husband Alva have a strong sense of family. They sing in
the Stacy Family Gospel Band and have provided their children with a
beautiful home and a menagerie of pets, including horses.
"Everyone around here knows about the blue Fugates," says Hilda Stacy
who, at 26, looks more like a sister than a mother to her children. "It's
common. It's nothing.''
Cawein and his colleagues published their research on hereditary diaphorase deficiency in the Archives of Internal Medicine (April, 1964) in 1964. He hasn't studied the condition for years. Even so, Cawein still gets calls for advice. One came from a blue Flugate who'd joined the Army and been sent to Panama, where his son was born bright blue. Cawein advised giving the child methylene blue and not worrying about it. Note: In this instance the reason for cyanosis was not methemoglobinemia but Rh incompatibility. This information supplied by John Graves whose uncle was the father of the child.
The doctor was recently approached by the producers of the television
show "That's Incredible." They wanted to parade the blue people across the
screen in their weekly display of human oddities. Cawein would have no part of
it, and he related with glee the news that a film crew sent to Kentucky
from Hollywood fled the "two mean dogs in every front yard" without any
film. Cawein cheers their bad luck not out of malice but out of a deep
respect for the blue people of Troublesome Creek.
"They were poor people," concurs Nurse Pendergrass, "but they were
good."
References:
Cawein, Madison, et. al. "Hereditary diaphorase deficiency and
methemoglobinemia". Archives of Internal Medicine, April, 1964.
Scott, E.M. "The relation of diaphorase of human erythrocytes to
inheritance of methemolglobinemia", Journal of Clinical Investigation, 39, 1960.
Cawein, Madison and E.J. Lappat, "Hereditary Methemoglobinemia" in
Hemoglobin, Its Precursors and Metabolites, ed. by F. William
Sunderman, J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia PA, 1964.
This document maintained by Robert J. Huskey Last updated on April 5,
14. Is it true that a town in Pennsylvania has had a fire burning
underneath it for forty years?
Yes. Centralia, Pennsylvania, located in the anthracite mining region of Pennsylvania, has been burning underground since May 1962. Attempts over the years to douse the fire in the coal mine under the town have been unsuccessful and the population of 1,100 residents has dwindled to fifteen.
It's uncertain. One theory is that the fire was started in a trash dump, possibly by someone burning to clean up the area. The fire went underground and ignited an abandoned strip mine. The fire currently affects 450 surface acres, but government officials estimate it could spread to 3,000. Most of the people
in the town have accepted government buy-outs and voluntarily relocated.
---
Does the fire make the land hot?
State officials say the surface temperature of the land in some areas is 1,000 degrees (more than hot enough to melt your shoes!). Visitors to the site have been able to pop popcorn just by sitting it on the ground. Most of the vegetation in the immediate are has died and rocks are warm or hot to the touch. Snow tends not to accumulate in Centralia.
15. In Greek mythology, the laurel was a tree with magical properties. According to myth, Athena transformed herself into a laurel, which made the tree sacred to Apollo. The leaves of the laurel were chewed by the Delphic Oracle to induce visionary powers of prophecy. Sprigs of laurel were
also hung over doorways to chase ghosts away from Greek homes. In addition, the smoke of burning laurel leaves was considered a health benefit. The unwell inhaled the fumes with the hope that their illness would vanish.
16. Slow-Motion Mystery
Two Pennsylvania sisters have reported that, when they were on a car ride, other vehicles--and people--began moving in slowmotion! Said one of the women in an interview, "We were on a two-lane road in our car when all of a sudden everything began moving in slow motion, including pedestrians, other automobiles and their drivers. Then, after a few minutes, life returned to normal speed." Paranormal investigators don't know what to make of the
report, although it has apparently been determined that the sisters aren't pranksters--and weren't under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
*Note: If you have experienced this phenomena, you can write us and we'd be happy to have your story published, and with that, other's who have experienced the same phenomena can relate, and maybe give more insight into this.
17. I Do Believe In Fairies I Do Believe In Fairies -
In late seventeenth-century England, belief in fairies was still widespread.
So much so, in fact, that one Mrs. Parish persuaded Goodwin Wharton,
for a decent sum of money, that she had arranged a marriage between
him and the Queen of Fairies. For some reason, though, every time Mr.
Wharton was supposed to meet his bride-to-be, the meeting was put off.
One time, for example, he was "asleep" when he was supposed to meet
the Queen. Mrs. Parish's swindle went on for a decade.
18. You Thought A Teenager's Room Smelled Bad -
Hunters in South America's rain forest call it the "beast with the breath
of hell." Residents of Brazil's Matto Grosso know it as the "mapinguary,"
and it is a giantbiped that emits a stench so foul, those who encounter
it are rendered helpless. Actually, zoologists who have studied the reports
take them seriously. Some believe the creature to be an unknown type of ape.
Zoologist David Oren theorizes that it is a surviving giant ground
sloth-necked sauropod dinosaur, thought extinct for 2,000 years.
19. Meow! -
Around 5:30 in the morning one day in 1948, two young brothers
on a farm near Richmond, Indiana, saw two large, catlike animals not
far from them. They said that one looked like an African lion, and
the other like a black panther. Neither of these animals exist in the
North American wild, but the boys weren't the only ones to see them.
In the days and weeks that followed, other area residents saw them,
too. Numerous feline tracks were found, but of course, as in other
"alien big cat" scares, the animals eluded game wardens and hunters.
20. A 39-year-old woman now living in Virginia claims that the same two ghosts have been following her for nineteen years--and now even her husband is beginning to see them! The woman, an accountant, says, "Since I was a teenager, these ghostly entities seem to follow no matter where I move to, even to Virginia from New York. Their visits have gotten louder and more obvious as my husband and I had our children. The past several days have been quiet, but I have a feeling that the ghosts are just waiting to pop out and let us know they're still around." The couple has hired a $75-an-hour ghost hunter to root out the entities.
21. According to researchers, family pets often turn to psychic abilities for their basic needs as well as for communication with humans. In fact, lost animals often utilize ESP skills to return to their home base. A recent case involves a cat who found his way from the Wisconsin Dells to his family in Hibbing, Minnesota--a journey of 350 miles which took more than nine months to complete. Animal experts insist the cat's psychic connection to his humans helped him locate his home.
22. Mysterious Strangers - In the summer of 1692, residents of Cape Ann,
Massachusetts, became convinced that an army of mysterious strangers
had them under siege. They suspected that this "army" was French-Canadians
allied with hostile Indians, and gunfire was exchanged. When the
colonists went to view the bodies, there was not evidence of them. The
strangers were accused of beating on barns and throwing stones, among
other things. After the episode had run its course, a clergyman/witch
hunter by the name of Cotton Mather speculated that the invaders had
been demons.
23. Even The Police Saw It - John Rosa recalled a sighting he had
experienced as a newsboy in 1897. He detailed it in a letter to the
"Detroit News," and the letter was published on July 15, 1961.
The object he saw over the city at 4 o'clock one morning "looked
to be about 3 feet in diameter...1,000 feet in the air. It was a silvery
color and had a tail about 3 blocks long." It looked like a giant "sea serpent"
making a "low hissing noise." He claimed that his father and a
police officer also saw it.
24. Why Are Animals Psychic?
It's necessary for their survival, says British pet psychic Craig Hamilton-Parker. Animals have telepathic skills which allow them to hunt successfully, know how their pack is faring at a distance, and find love and companionship. Animals even use "remote viewing" to locate water and food
or to assess dangerous situations. Psychic skills, says Hamilton-Parker, are built into their survival instincts.
25. Pets In Heaven
The human-animal connection exists even after death, says certified animal chiropractor Julie Kaufman. Apparently, animals send very clear messages about the afterlife to their humans, she says. Not only that, many owners believe their animals are reincarnated in the new pets they bring into the home. Sometimes people learn about their deceased pets' afterlife--and their desire to return in another form--through dreams and flash images.
26. Official State Monster - While camping near Lake Atsion in Burling
county New Jersey in the summer of 1960, five students found "four
large tracks...in the underbrush near our camp." The tracks were
nearly eleven inches long, and one of the students testified, "they
looked something like a large bird print with the feet dug in and the
toes spread out." Later, they heard "unearthly screams" of unknown
origin. Reports like these help fuel the longstanding legend of the
"Jersey Devil," the Garden State's legendary monster.
27. Easily Distracted By Shiny Objects - In the early evening, one day in
1947, two groups of shiny, disc-shaped objects were spotted sailing
over Longview Washington. The discs were 12 to 15 to a group, and
while they changed position within each formation, the two groups kept
apart from one another. Several witnesses, among them a college
professor, observed this appearance of the (then) still novel "flying
saucers."
28. Take Me To Your Leader - One evening in 1977, a Puerto Rican
businessman observed a humanoid figure with a metallic helmet from
which an antenna "with a bright light or flame at its tip" extended.
When a house light was turned on, the intruder fled under a fence,
then stopped. A "knapsack" on its back lit up, and the figure floated
through the trees. The witness and his family watched the light,
which was soon joined by another, in the gathering darkness.
29. When a beloved pet dies, it's not uncommon to sense its presence in a variety of ways. "There's no death for them anymore than there is for us," says TV's famed pet psychic Sonya Fitzpatrick. For example, you may "feel" your cat settle into your lap or "hear" your dog whine in his sleep. Since the pet's spirit lives on, Fitzpatrick says to expect a psychic connection to your animal friend after your immediate grief has passed.
30. Although famed paranormal writer Jess Stearn died of heart failure last month in Malibu, no funeral was held. That's because Stern, who claimed to have lived before, was certain that he would return again. Stern wrote 30 books on the occult, including a best-selling biography of the late clairvoyant Edgar Cayce, who also believed in reincarnation, or what he called "serial lives."
31. Lollipop, Lollipop - One evening in 1998, a couple in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania were admiring a sunset. They got the chance to admire more than Mother Nature, however. They first noticed a motionless, dark, cigar-shaped object above the clouds. When they observed it through their binoculars, they saw what looked like "giant lollipops" poppoing out of the bottom, top, and sides of the object. The original UFO began rocking from side to side before assuming what the witnesses believed to be a triangular shape. Then, it picked up speed and shot away to the north.
32. 1440, 1441, Whatever It Takes - In 1947, an Air Force crew was flying out of San Antonio, Texas, bound for Austin. While they were flying, the witnessed the swift passage of an object that, one witness recalled, "was about 18 feet in diameter and looked as though it was made of glass." This UFO was round, and moving at a slightly tilted angle. It was estimated to be moving at 1,440 miles per hour. As the craft sailed past the plane, the plane's radio reception mysteriously "blurred."
33. Will North Become South?
French researchers say that there are early indications that the north and south magnetic poles might change places! According to Gauthier Hulot of the Institute of Earth Sciences in Paris, the last such reversal took place 780,000 years ago. Now, data from an orbiting satellite indicates that a similar shift may be happening. If the rate of change continues at the present pace, the north and
south magnetic poles will flip-flop in 2,000 years. Will North Become South?
34. Ring Around The UFO - In 1884, a luminous structure looking like a
globe with a ring surrounding its circumference passed slowly through
the sky over Norwood, New York. Other such "Saturn-shaped" UFOs were reported with great frequency during the latter half of the following
century. Such an object was photographed over Trinidade Island, off
the coast of Brazil, in January of 1958.
35. It's Rai-ning Bugs, Hallelujah! Sing it with me, now! In a letter published in a 1932 issue of "Science," John Zeleny remembered a "clear summer night a Hutchinson, Minnesota, some 35 years ago," when a single, brightly luminous cloud rose up from the east and passed over the town. "When the cloud was overhead, a great shower of insects descended to earth covering the ground all around to the number of about 50 to 100 per square foot."
36. Shiver Me Timbers - In 1976, one day in July, a man saw a huge, strange animal in the waters off Nova Scotia's Cape Sable Island. At first, no one believed him, but over the next few days, other people saw it, too. One person described the animal as "about 40 or 50 feet long with grayish, snakelike skin, full of lumps and bumps and barnacles." Residents of Canada's marine provinces have been reporting sea serpents for centuries.
37. Projecting Your Personality:
According to occult belief, an etheric projection is a white, cloud-like replica of an individual's physical body, similar to a ghost or apparition. This etheric projection can be sent a great distance, allowing the psychic to visit absent friends or loved ones. When the etheric body is absent, the physical body lapses into a deep trance state, resembling death. Yet, while the psychic's body retains a heartbeat and a pulse, her "personality" is many miles away, observing the people who are dear to her heart.
38. Chem Trails Over Los Angeles Cause Insects to Fall From Sky on
Mother's Day! (sent off an e-mail list}
It's usually customary to shower the mothers of the world with flowers on Mother's Day, but this past Sunday, May 12th at around 8:00pm, it wasn't flowers that were falling into their arms, but insects! Millions and possibly even billions of small, winged, ant-like insects fell from the sky over Pasadena California and nearby Arcadia California like ash from a volcano and no one except for the residents of those communities seemed to notice.
It was surprisingly warm earlier in the day, perfect for an outing honoring Mothers everywhere, but after a host of normally cool and partly cloudy days preceding, it was cause for some notice that the weather had turned in such a dramatic fashion so quickly. Prior to this phenomenon, Mother's Day had been very pleasant and without incident, as my Wife and I had enjoyed a special noontime all-you-can-eat champagne brunch at a nice hotel restaurant with her wonderful family, while everyone took turns holding, feeding and showing off our brand new two month old baby boy.
Later that evening, after the presents, cake and a few covert belt loosenings, my Wife and I, along with our energetic and entertaining four year old decided to run a quick errand while Grandma watched our youngest. It was around 8:00pm when we left, but not before running into a swarm of small, winged, ant-like insects as we tried to climb into our car. The little critters were even making their way into our car as we tried to escape the flying nuisances, but after sweeping a few dozen off of the seats, we were soon safe inside the car with the doors shut and the windows rolled up.
As we sat there looking out the windshield at the bugs falling from the night sky, then to each other out of pure amazement over the spectacle, we both mentioned that it was a little strange to have that many insects just falling from above. The thing that caught our attention more than the sheer number of them though, was that they weren't flyingthey were falling, as if they couldn't fly. Of courseour four year old was a bit yuked out at encountering the bugs, as insects are not her favorite of god's little creatures, so under her command, we drove out of the driveway in an attempt to escape them.
For the next few blocks, we watched as the bugs bounced off the windshield, reminiscent of some Midwest snowfall, only brown in color, but once we had left the area, we nearly forgot the incident, focusing instead on the comedic antics of our funny little girl. A few minutes later as we drove, my Wife spotted something else in the sky as she occasionally looked around for more bugs, but this time it wasn't insects that painted the sky, but a collection of funny-looking smoky trails that crisscrossed the cloudless evening. She asked me if it was a jet trail, but as I glanced up to see what she was looking at, I knew exactly what it was.
Without hesitation, I informed her that what she was seeing was not just an ordinary vapor trail from a jet, but a chemically-laced cloud, called a Chemtrail, deliberately and for the most part, covertly seeded into the atmosphere by aircraft at high altitudes in order to conduct secret experiments in an attempt to effect such things as the weather, global and geographical changes, natural disasters, human and animal behavior and insect control and population. As the words left my mouth, we both looked at each other with a knowing glance, wondering to ourselves if the swarm of falling bugs a few miles back could have been related in some way to the chemtrails. It wasn't but a minute later that we both saw what we would consider the possible answer to our question.
As we entered the parking lot of a local store in the next city that we were planning to do some shopping at, I noticed that the store employees were scurrying in and out of the front doors, carrying large lit candles and placing them around the perimeter of the entrance to the store. We thought that in itself was a bit strange, not even entertaining the idea that they might be trying to create a relaxing mood for the customers, but a closer look once we exited the car and headed for the front doors revealed that what the employees were so feverishly planting around the front of the store, were those bug repellant candles you put around your patio when barbequing.
Then, with the help from our little girl who was closer to the ground and noticed that the surface of the parking lot was moving, we suddenly realized why they were pulling the candles right off of the store shelves from the garden section. All of the other customers were figuring it out as well as they ducked in and out of the doors, shielding their faces and hair from the downpour of the same small, winged ant-like insects that we had encountered at our home, fifteen miles away, only a thousand fold. Neither my Wife nor I had ever seen anything like what we were experiencing and would've stood there in awe with our mouths open, but I don't have to tell you why that would not have been a very smart thing to do at the time.
With my four year old jumping into my arms, we made our way through
the blanket of falling bugs and into the store, but the little creatures were crawling around inside the store as wellnot flying, but crawling. It was blaringly obvious that these insects were just as confused while crawling around, as we were watching them. They were obviously not behaving in a normal fashion and even appearing stunned as they fell, not even trying to use their wings. And what was really suspicious, was that only an hour later when we were leaving the store, most of the delirious bugs were no where to be found, having gotten their senses back and flown off once again.
Now some could chalk it up to a sudden weather change, or an atmospheric phenomenon, or even some strange and natural insect mating ritual that occurs only once in a decade or something. But for me, I don't think it is any coincidence that we noticed what we believe was a chemtrail at the same time that a billion insects began falling from the sky, unable to use their wings, appearing too stunned or drugged to function normally for a short time, then
getting back up and flying away like nothing ever happened. Of course, no one in any of the usual suspect organizations were talking or even hinting at the incident when asked, but you can't tell me that the two were not related in some way. Since then, no further incidents of an unusual number of bugs, either flying nor falling have been reported.
Happy Mother's Day anyway, Mom
____________________________
To read more about Chemtrails, check out the following link:
A new and terrifying ailment is killing healthy young Filipino men in their sleep. Called "bangungot," or the nightmare syndrome, victims are heard moaning just before they die. In fact, medical experts in the Philippines are quickly gathering as much information about the syndrome as they can. Apparently, victims are young, healthy males between the ages of 30 and 40. The only thing they have in common, say doctors, is that they've eaten or drunk alcohol heavily before going to bed. Experts speculate that heart rhythms suddenly go awry, causing instant death in the otherwise healthy young men.
-A man hit by a car in New York in 1977 got up uninjured, but lay back down in front of the car when a bystander told him to pretend he was hurt so he could collect insurance money. The car rolled forward and crushed him to death.
-In 1983, a Mrs. Carson of Lake Kushaqua, N.Y., was laid out in her coffin, presumed dead of heart disease. As mourners watched, she suddenly sat up. Her daughter dropped dead of fright.
-A fierce gust of wind blew 45-year-old
Vittorio Luise's car into a river near Naples, Italy, in 1983. He managed to break a window, climb out and swim to shore -- where a tree blew over and killed him.
-Mike Stewart, 31, of Dallas was filming a movie in 1983 on the dangers of low-level bridges when the truck he was standing on passed under a low-level bridge -- killing him.
-Walter Hallas, a 26-year-old store clerk in Leeds, England, was so afraid
of dentists that in 1979 he asked a fellow worker to try to cure his toothache by punching him in the jaw. The punch caused Hallas to fall down, hitting his head, and he died of a fractured skull.
-Depressed since he could not find a job, 42-year-old Romolo Ribolla sat in his kitchen near Pisa, Italy, with a gun in his hand threatening to kill himself in 1981. His wife pleaded for him not to do it, and after about an hour he burst into tears and threw the gun to the floor. It went off and killed his wife.
-Surprised while burgling a house in Antwerp, Belgium, a thief fled out the back door, clambered over a nine-foot wall, dropped down and found himself in the city prison.
-Two West German motorists had an all-too-literal head-on collision in heavy fog near the small town of Guetersloh. Each was guiding his car at a snail's pace near the center of the road. At the moment of impact their heads were both out of the windows when they smacked together. Both men were hospitalized with severe head injuries. Their cars weren't scratched.
-Hitting on the novel idea that he could end his wife's incessant nagging by giving her a good scare, Hungarian Jake Fen built an elaborate harness to make it look as if he had hanged himself. When his wife came home and saw him she fainted. Hearing a disturbance a neighbor came over and, finding what she thought were two corpses, seized the opportunity to loot the place. As she was leaving the room, her arms laden, the outraged and suspended Mr. Fen kicked her stoutly in the backside. This so surprised the lady that she dropped dead of a heart attack. Happily, Mr. Fen was acquitted of manslaughter and he and his wife were reconciled.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction!
40. Haunted Region
Novia Scotia's most haunted locale is the Sackville-Beaver Bank region, says Darryll Walsh, an expert on ghostly happenings in Canada. Reported sightings include the Cobequid railway ghost, considered to be the wife of a man killed more than a century ago, as well as a friendly ghost who haunts the basement of a school in Waverley. In addition, there are several new reports of mysterious glowing lights at an abandoned military base in the area and frequent observations of a ghost wandering lonely Beaver Bank Road.
41. Do The Aliens Speak French? - In July of 1910, off the coast of
Normandy, the crew of a French fishing smack noticed an object in the
sky that looked something like a giant blackbird. All of a sudden, it
plummeted into the sea, rose up just as suddenly, and descended once
more, lost to sight. No aircraft were reported to have crashed.
42. Maybe They Use Telephones - One night in 1965, around 11:30p.m, a woman in Lake Forest, Illinois was talking on the telephone in her
second-floor bedroom. Mid-conversation, she observed a flash of light
and heard some unusual sounds. She glanced out her window, only to
witness a bizarre sight - a transparent bubble of light floating just
above a neighbor's lawn. Several human-like figures with tanned skin
were lying inside it making "rowing motions" with their arms. Shortly
thereafter, the light went out, and the bubble and its creatures were gone.
43. The Headed Out West - In 1924, on one summer night, five miners were in for a big surprise. In the Mount St. Helens and Lewis River region of southwestern Washington, apelike creatures besieged the miners, pelting rocks at their cabin, jumping on the roof, and attempting to smash the door open. The men fired on the creatures repeatedly, finally driving them off by morning. Reporters who had come to the scene found big footprints, and years later, when Bigfoot investigators interviewed one of the witnesses, Fred Beck, he stood by the story.
44. Soccer Magic
In east Africa, soccer teams hire witchdoctors to ensure their success. Known as "jujumen," these soothsaying specialists use a variety of magical rituals to create successful outcomes for their teams. In fact, witchcraft is considered part of the team's mental preparation for a game; just knowing that a jujuman is using divine powers helps team members relax. Typical witchcraft prescriptions include avoiding females first thing in the morning and leaving soccer balls on a grave during the night before a big game.
45. Magical Reality
How does a witchdoctor, or shaman, perform magic? Traditionally, shamans enter an altered state of consciousness to exercise their supernatural skills. Called "magical reality," this special dimension allows the shaman full access to his powers. To enter this realm, the shaman may consume hallucinogenic agents and/or use drumming and chanting rituals. Once immersed in this state, he uses invocations, spells and magical prayers to bring about a specific outcome.
46. Eyeing Evil
Can certain people inflict harm by simply glancing at their victims? This widely held belief goes back to ancient times, noted by many classical writers such as Ovid and Virgil. Traditionally, individuals with a natural squint as well as dwarfs and hunchbacks are considered to have the evil-eye. Curiously, in Mediterranean lands, blue-eyed folks are more likely to be accused of possessing an evil stare, while in northern Europe dark-eyed people are more suspect.
47. Hooked On A Monster - Ogopogo is said to be the monster or monsters
that inhabit British Columbia's Lake Okanagan. Perhaps the closest encounter with the monster occurred one morning in the summer of 1974, when a girl swimming towards a raft felt something bump against her legs. From the raft, she was able to observe an enormous, snakelike animal, just under the surface of the clear water. She said that the creature was more than 20 feet long, and that it "looked more like a whale than a fish, but I have never seen a whale that skinny and snakey-looking before."
48. Funny, It Always Had The Nicest Things To Say About THEM - A couple was heading south on the east side of Loch Ness in 1933, when they saw an immense beast shooting "across the road in jerks." Although they couldn't see it's lower parts, they said it was about 30 feet long, elephant grey in color, and had a long neck and a bulky body. It disappeared into the bracken around the loch. According to the couple, the experience was deeply upsetting, and the creature was "an abomination" and "a loathsome sight."
49. Some Enchanted Universe - Historian David D. Hall, in his "Worlds of
Wonder, Days of Judgment," had this to say: "The people of
seventeenth-century New England lived in an enchanted universe." As
an example, he quoted a contemporary document that recorded on one
"clear day" that the sky was "suddenly filled with many companies of
armed men in the air, clothed in light-colored garments," watched over
Throughout the centuries, powerful antidotes have been tried to ward off the evil-eye. Various protections included colorful ornaments designed to divert attention from potential victims and charms, which counteract negative influences. Other devices have been church bells, horseshoes, crescent symbols, silver rings and knotted cords, all believed to guard against the impact of devilish
doings.
51. Naughty Comets - From ancient times, almost up until the modern age,
people viewed comets with dread, seeing them as harbingers of
catastrophe. One poet summed up the belief as such: "There, with
long bloody Hair, a Blazing Star Threatens the World with Famine,
Plague & War: To Princes, death; to Kingdomes many crosses: To all
Estates, Inevitable Losses."
52. The Face Of Heaven - In 1575, Pierre Boaistuau complained: "The face
of heaven has been so often disfigured by bearded, hairy comets, torches, flames, columns, spears, shields, dragons, duplicate moons, suns, and other similar things, that if one wanted to tell in an orderly fashion those that have happened since the birth of Jesus Christ only, and inquire about the causes of their origin, the lifetime of a single man would not be enough."
53. Life On Mars? - Some astronomers of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries were sure that they were on the verge of making a
cosmic breakthrough. Astronomer Samuel Phelps Leland, in 1898, wrote
that telescopes were so powerful that soon, the would be able to "see
cities on Mars, to detect navies in its harbors and the smoke of great
manufacturing cities and towns. . . Is Mars inhabited? There can be
little doubt of it."
54. The Real-Life Time Machine
A University of Connecticut physicist is planning to build a time machine that he thinks will be able to transport everything from small objects to people from one era to another. According to the Boston Globe, the time machine planned by Ronald Mallet will feature a rotating laser beam that will distort time and space, making travel to the past or future possible. Mallet himself hopes to visit the past to warn his father, a heavy smoker who died at the age of 33, about the dangers of cigarettes. However, the time machine will be tested on subatomic-sized neutrons before an attempt is made to transport humans.
55.What Is Serialism?
Serialism is a theory proposed by Irish spiritualist J.W. Dunne, according to which an infinite series of dimensions exists within Time so that elements of the past, the present and the future can coexist at any given moment. Dunne believed that people with ESP could travel through time, although he must not have possessed the gift because nothing has been heard of Dunne since his death in 1949.
56. Underwater Unknown - In 1883, the Plattsburg, New York "Morning
Telegram" told of Clinton County Sheriff Nathan H. Mooney's sighting
of an "enormous snake or water serpent . . . 25 to 30 feet in length"
in the waters of Lake Champlain. For over one hundred years, reports
have alleged that large, unknown animals, which have been given the
collective name, "Champ," live in the deep, 109-mile-long lake
bordering New York, Vermont, and Quebec.
57. Argentine Air - In 1995, as an airliner approached the San Carlos de
Bariloche Airport in Argentina, its crew noticed that a UFO was
accompanying it. All of a sudden, an electrical blackout shut down
the airport, and the pilot of the airliner had to abort his landing.
The UFO ascended and disappeared, and once it was gone, power was
restored, allowing for a safe touchdown for the jet's shaken up crew
and passengers.
58. Who Was John William Dunne? { see fact #56 }
You may remember J.W. Dunne from yesterday's tip. If not, travel back in time to read it--after all, Dunne believed time travel was possible. But before Dunne immersed himself in paranormal inquiry, he designed and built the first British military aircraft in 1906, at the age of 31. He also kept an extensive log of his dreams, which he believed could tell the future. Astonishingly, one dream correctly predicted a volcanic disaster on the island of Martinique in which forty thousand people were killed.
59. The Real Foo Fighters
Rock fans know Foo Fighters as the name of a band headed by former Nirvana member Dave Grohl. However, paranormal fans are far more intrigued by the history of the strange name. During World War II, British, American and even German fighter pilots were plagued by weird balls of light that flew in circles around their planes. Although their true origin has never been determined, both the Allies and the Nazis believed the lights were a secret weapon possessed by
the other side. Why "Foo Fighters?" Well, the catch phrase of a cartoon character named Smokey Stover was "Where there's foo, there's fire." The phrase was applied to the balls of light.
What happens when someone is hypnotized? There are two schools of thought. One school believes that the hypnotic subject attains a sleeplike state totally different than waking consciousness. The other side maintains that the hypnotized subject merely acts upon the hypnotist's suggestion, like an actor does when the director gives him guidance in how to play a role. Which side do you support?
*Note: Some say it's both. If a person who is hypnotizing another, places suggestion, that person being suggested may wake up to believe exacly what was suggested to them, and loose memory of what was real. An example of this type of 'hypnotic suggestion' is if said person being hypnotized hasn't eaten/slept for a considerable ammount of time, is in shock/afraid/nervous, etc. They are easily 'suggestable' in this state of being.
A real hypnotist doesn't suggest, just asks questions and listens, never placing any sort of suggestions into their subects.*
-Nina
61. Cousin Bigfoot - Is it possible that Bigfoot has a cousin in the Philippines? Persistent reports from the islands of Luzon and Samar lead one to believe that he does. Witness claim that the "kapre" is said to stand eight feet tall and be covered with hair. Its face, hands, and feet are human-like, and it eats fruits, crabs, fish, and the occasional rat.
62. This Is No Flock Of Seagulls - One night in 1937, the crew of a schooner that was cruising along the eastern end of Deer Island, off Penobscot Bay, Maine, was startled by an approaching flock, but it wasn't seagulls. It looked like a "flock of big electric bulbs." Two got particularly close before one sailed off, and the UFO that remained hovered near the ship for three minutes, then took off.
63. The Sky Is Falling - One Monday evening in the summer of 1849, the "Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal" reported that "a curious phenomenon occurred at the farm of Balvullich." There was a loud clap of thunder, after which "a large and irregularly shaped mass of ice" twenty feet around crashed to earth near the farmhouse. "It had a beautiful crystalline appearance, being nearly all quite transparent...composed of small squares, diamond-shaped . . .all
firmly congealed together."
64. Is Magic Contagious?
Some people believe that objects that have been in contact with each other still have a psychic link, and that, for example, their fingernail clippings and possessions can be used in a rite of magic to harm them. That's why an
occultist is extra-anxious when a personal belonging goes missing; she's fearful that the pendant or clothing item that once touched her body will be used in a magical ritual against her. However, there is no scientific evidence to back up this claim.
65. What A Nut
In ancient Egypt, the goddess of the sky was named--Nut. She and her brother Geb were the parents of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys. Nut was often represented as a woman with an elongated body that arched across the sky so that only her fingertips and toes touched the earth. Cultists who believed in the reality of Nut numbered in the hundreds of thousands and many of them engaged in stretching rituals in an attempt to imitate her extreme posture. Whether followers of Nut were called Nuts is unknown by this writer, although I have my suspicions.
66. Ghostly Apparitions - Near Chimney Rock, North Carolina, in 1806,
several people swore that they had seen beings dressed in dazzling
white robes hovering around the mountain. This same area hosted an
equally unusual sight in 1811, when two ghostly cavalries fought a
fierce aerial battle.
67. Stalled Cars - Just east of Medford Oregon, in 1996, three
oblong-shaped UFOs flew over a highway. It occurred at Table Rock,
and the UFOs were estimated to be nearly two hundred feet long each.
Several cars stalled when the objects passed over them, but they
resumed normal operation after the UFOs were gone.
68. Girl Cries Tears Of Acid
Michelle Jessett of Glynneath, Wales is suffering from a mysterious malady that has doctors perplexed. Incredibly, when Michelle cries, she claims that acid-like tears burn her face and blister her skin. According to her parents, Michelle, 15, breathed in noxious fumes when a truck carrying chemicals overturned and burned. Since then, the teen has dropped out of school and has been in the hospital 30 times, complaining that her tears leave a fiery trail down her cheeks. Thus far, no one else who inhaled the chemicals has experienced a similar fate.
69. I Heard That!
Among psychics, clairaudience is known as the ability to hear voices and sounds from the dead. The most famous example in history is perhaps that of Joan of Arc, the French heroine who claimed to have heard supernatural voices urging her to aid her countrymen in the fight against the English army. For this she was burned at the stake, which is something to consider next time you hear a deceased ancestor ordering you to lead a rabble army to victory.
70. Shower Of Shellfish - One day in 1892, residents of Paderborn, Germany witnessed the appearance of an odd-looking, yellow cloud. From it fell not only a fierce rain, but mussels.
71. Cloud Cigar - Throughout the summer of 1908, Denmark was host to
numerous sightings of cigar-shaped UFOs, usually described as "airships." The UFOs had wings and were often observed flying against the wind. Some of the witnesses reported that they also saw odd-shaped clouds from which bright lights emanated and swept the ground.
72. Japan's Ghost Culture-
Not many societies pay as much attention to ghosts as the Japanese do. So in their honor, the next several tips will focus on the country's remarkable preoccupation with all things ghostly. For example, Japanese spirits generally
divide into two distinct categories. The first group, called yurei, resemble humans and are considered emotionally complicated and often angry. Yokai, the second category, consist of bizarre animal creatures or quasi-human forms.
73. Samurai Spirit
Incredibly, the ghost of famed Japanese samurai Masakado Taira has his own bank account -- worth more than $190,000! Although Taira died 1,000 years ago, Tokyo residents still leave food, artifacts and money at his stone monument located in the heart of the city's financial district. Managing Taira's funds, and everything else related to the spirit, is Tatsuzo Endo, chairman of the Masakado Preservation Society, who admits, "I'm not really sure ghosts need money."
