Unsolved Mysteries In The World

The Lost Dialogues of Aristotle

2012-02-01T11:11:00.002+07:00

Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher who lived from 384 BCE to 322 BCE. He studied under Plato, tutored and advised Alexander the Great and founded the Lyceum (a sort of ancient university). Along with Plato, he is today regarded as one of the two colossi of ancient Greek thought, and is seen by many as the single most important influence on the intellectual history of the West. Yet his surviving writings constitute only a fraction of his original output (as little as one-fifth according to traditional sources), and those that we possess are often fragmentary, cobbled together by later editors from what were effectively Aristotle’s lecture notes.Which of his writings are missing, how were they lost, and might they still be recovered?

Many works of antiquity are known to us today only via passing mentions and odd quotes. Aristotle was one of the most important thinkers of antiquity, so his missing body of work is correspondingly significant, but it also stands as an exemplar of all the other blank spots in the history of classical Western literature, from Homer’s lost epics and the missing verses of Sappho to the absent plays of Aeschylus.

Aristotle was a prolific writer who remains famous for the breadth of his intellectual scope (he has been described as one of the first polymaths). He covered subjects from metaphysics, logic, poetry and ethics to zoology, meteorology and economics. His work can be divided into two main groups. His acroatic writings, meaning those taught orally, by word of mouth, and now known as treatises, were mainly composed as study and lecture notes for use in his school (the Lyceum) and as such were not written as ‘books’ per se and not intended for publication. They were not in a polished literary style and can be difficult to read, self-contradictory and obscure,much as a modern lecturer’s course notes for him/herself might be. Some may even be notes taken by Aristotle’s students rather than his own work. Ironically, these are the only writings that survive. In classical times they were collected into some 30 works (or ‘books’), known as the Corpus Aristotelicum.

The traditional story of what happened to Aristotle’s literary estate after his death is derived from the ancient writers Strabo and Plutarch. According to their accounts, Aristotle left his writings to his successor at the Lyceum, and when he died they passed into the hands of Neleus of Scepsis.Neleus’ family later consigned the material to a cellar or pit to avoid the attentions of the royal book collectors, where it languished for decades in less than perfect conditions. In the 1st century BCE the writings were sold to a scholar who took them to Athens, where, in 86 BCE, they were snaffled up by the conquering Roman General Sulla, dispatched back to Rome and sold to Tyrannion the grammarian. Not until 70 BCE, some 250 years after the great man’s death, did they come into the possession of Andronicus of Rhodes, who compiled the scattered acroatic material into systematically organised books for the first time. It is these versions we know today. This is almost certainly not the whole story. Some of Aristotle’s works would have been available during this time –particularly his Dialogues, which had been published as books during his lifetime – and the account does not explain what happened to the majority of them subsequently.

Presumably the fate that befell the majority of Aristotle’s oeuvre was similar to that which afflicted so much other ancient literature. Although we speak of ‘books’ being ‘published’, ancient literature was handwritten on expensive papyrus (from reeds) or parchment or vellum (made from animal skin). Few copies would have been produced, and the lending and copying process was fraught with problems, including the still familiar issue of borrowers failing to return material. Since copying was difficult and expensive, only popular/in-demand books would have multiplied.

Many parchment and vellum documents were reused as palimpsests, which involved scraping off the top layer so that the new material could be written on the same surface – early medieval Christian scribes were particularly guilty of destroying antique literature in this fashion.

From the 3rd century CE the fragile, vulnerable scroll form preferred by the ancient Greeks and Romans was superseded by the sturdier codex form, which more closely resembles today’s book. Not all works successfully made this transition, again due to expense. Hungarian scientist Béla Lukács theorises that the teachers at the Lyceum, who were the main guardians of Aristotle’s literary inheritance, might have spent their scant budget on transcribing to codex form only those works they used most in their day-to-day teaching – namely the acroatic texts of the Corpus Aristotelicum.

The more widely held theory, first proposed by German classicist Werner Jaeger, is that Aristotle’s Dialogues are part of his early, less mature work – his juvenilia, which were effectively superseded by his later writings. This could explain why they were not copied as much. More recently, a historian A.P Bos has argued that it was more a matter of the changing philosophical-literary fashions of antiquity. In his reconstruction of the lost works, the themes and arguments Aristotle uses are mature but the way heillustrates them is through the use of myths and mythical narratives, a mode that went out of style from the 3rd century BCE.

Accordingly, later scholars only concerned themselves with Aristotle’s later writings. Whatever the reasons, the consensus appears to be that the rule for ancient literature was ‘multiply or die’, and Aristotle’s early works fell foul of this rule. By the time the Roman Empire collapsed and the Dark Ages swept over Europe, there were simply too few copies of the Dialogues, and of his other lost works, to survive the long roll of book-destroying calamities.

In the late 19th century, the discovery of ancient papyri in Egypt gave fresh hope to Aristotelian scholars. In 1880 fragments of a copy of a lost work of Aristotle, The Constitution of Athens, the most important of a series of 158 treatises on the constitutions of Greek states written by the great man and some of his pupils, were discovered in Egypt and purchased by the Egyptian Museum at Berlin. Then, in 1890, a group of four papyri with a complete copy of the same work was discovered by an American missionary in Egypt and purchased by the British Museum.

Inspired by this discovery, two young archaeologists from Oxford University, Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt, began to excavate rubbish mounds at Oxyrhynchus, to the south-west of Cairo in Egypt. Oxyrhynchus, which derives its name from the ‘sharp-nosed fish’ of Egyptian myth that was venerated by the inhabitants, was the capital of a province of Ptolemaic (Greek), and later Roman, Egypt. For over a thousand years it was a centre of administration and bureaucracy, as well as a typical, bustling market town with all the comings and goings of daily life. The inhabitants, and particularly the bureaucrats, made liberal use of papyrus to record everything from tax returns and accounts to school work and love letters. When a papyrus was finished with, it was dumped with the rest of the garbage on mounds outside town. Fortunately for posterity, conditions combined to preserve this material to the present day – the location is far enough from the Nile to have escaped the annual inundations, while the mounds themselves were above the water table, and were eventually covered up by hot, dry sand.

Grenfell and Hunt employed teams of labourers to unearth thousands and thousands of papyri from the rubbish mounds, more or less inventing a new discipline known as papyrology in their efforts to decipher the ancient texts. Keen students of classicism, they nurtured the hope that they would find all the lost works of antiquity. Although they were disappointed to discover mainly tax records, accounts and suchlike, they and their successors (for the project continues to this day) did uncover a wide range of previously unknown ancient literature, including poems of Pindar and Sappho, most of the works of Menander, some Sophocles and some early Christian gospels, including fragments of the ‘Sayings of Jesus’ (aka the ‘Gospel of Thomas’).

Lost works of Aristotle do not seem to have been among the treasures, but recent advances in imaging techniques are now revolutionising the science of papyrology, so new discoveries may yet be made from the Oxyrhynchus scrolls or from other finds. At present there seems to be no specific prospect of uncovering the lost Dialogues of Aristotle, but the hope remains that somewhere in the world there may exist an as-yet untapped cache of ancient scrolls or codices that has somehow survived millennia of neglect and strife. The most obvious candidates in Europe and the Near East are ancient monasteries, where books were collected from late antiquity onwards, and where the flame of scholarship continued to burn during the Dark Ages. The hope of discovering a lost Aristotle in some hidden library forms the plot of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, in which a Franciscan monk discovers Aristotle’s lost work On Comedy in the concealed library of a Benedictine Abbey in Italy in 1327. Eco’s plot echoes the widespread belief in conspiracy circles that the Catholic Church is concealing a huge cache of material in the Secret Vatican Archives, a real library of material deemed too controversial, sensitive or heretical to be made widely available.

It seems unlikely that there could be a European monastery with hitherto undiscovered chambers, and even if there were the climate is unlikely to have favoured the survival of delicate manuscripts. But perhaps there are monasteries yet to be properly explored/surveyed by modern methods in the Islamic world, which may also have a more conducive climate – for instance, where Egypt, Libya and the Levant were major centres of early Christianity and early monasticism.

Sources:
Lost Histories: “Exploring the World’s Most Famous Mysteries” by Joel Levy;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Aristoteles_Louvre.jpg

Dead Man's Island

2012-01-27T05:38:00.000+07:00

On the North side of Vancouver’s downtown core, there is a scenic location known as Stanley Park, and deep in cedar trees with the Pacific Ocean as a background is the HMCS Discovery’s base. This Canadian naval base has been in the island since 1943, but the island where it stands has been occupied by a series of First Nations people since prehistory. The island has a spooky, and chilling history of human sacrifice and slaughter. A lot of rumors about strange lights, weird moaning, and spectral figures roaming around and they were whispered at night when the settlers went to bed. And now the small, pretty island where the HMCS Discovery is anchored is named “Dead Man’s Island.”

According to local legend that in the year of 1700s, the two tribes, the Northern and the Southern Salish tribe, were at war, and during one fierce battle, the Southern Salish tribe took women, children, and elders as hostage. These hostages were marked for certain death. To make sure that the Northern tribes surrendered, and the Northern tribe hoping for a peaceful exchange, however they were cruelly slaughtered and more than 200 Northern warriors has been killed. Through time, because of the horrific acts of the Southern tribe, the island became known as a land of enchantment, and then eventually these stories were forgotten. It then became a burial place, first for the Salish First Nations and then for the new European settlers. John Morton was one of Vancouver first settlers who visited the island in 1862. He found hundreds of red cedar boxes tied to the upper branches of the trees and one accidentally fallen and broken to reveal a piles of bones and a tassel of black hair.

HMCS Discovery on Dead Man's Island

The Salish people were eventually pushed away from this mysterious island. The Europeans moved in and used the grounds for their own cemetery purposes, often disturbing the native cemetery. Among the dead buried on the island, aside from God-fearing pioneers, were the scoundrels and dregs of Vancouver’s earlier community. Seamen suicides, Canadian Pacific Railway construction casualties, Chinese lepers, prostitutes, bandits, and other ruffians who fought each other in the grills and saloons of Gastown were also buried there. Victims of the Great Vancouver Fire and smallpox epidemic all ended up in the wet, mossy, and muddy soil of Dead Man’s Island.

The Mountain View Cemetery was finally built in 1887, and the burials on the island came to a stop. However when it got dark, the haunted stories began. Strange tales of eerie screams have been reported coming from the island. The sounds are described as inhuman screams that make the blood turn cold. Others witnesses have reported seeing a fluorescent glow on the island, twisting and writhing as though in great agony and then changing into a human form. There have been spectral shapes seen moving in the fog, with red, glowing eyes and voices like broken glass, hissing out names of those who would disturb their sleep. And in this forest graveyard with vines covered in deep jade-colored moss, where souls lie in broken rest and reportedly still walk in the night.

Source:
Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: “Ghostly Locales from Around The World” compiled and edited by Jeff Belanger;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadman%27s_Island_%28Vancouver%29

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Deadmans_Island.jpg

Map of the Creator

2012-01-24T04:13:00.000+07:00

In 2002 the scientists of Bashkir State University in Russia claim that they found an undeniable proof of the existence of a highly advanced civilization in the distant past. Their evidence is a stone slab with weight more than a ton, (with dimension approximately five feet long by three-and-a-half feet wide, and six inches thick) its age estimated, probably millions of years. The stone slab was found beneath the house of one of the community leader in the city of Ufa, the surface of the slab showed an amazing accuracy of 3D relief map of the Ural Mountain. The discoverer eventually called it "Map of the Creator."

Alexander Chuvyrov, professor of physics and mathematics, the discoverer, said that during his research of the traces of ancient Chinese influence in the region and had heard the stories of the 20th century researchers from various ancient slabs. Even though he's very interested, he barely couldn't find any single stone slab, until one day when a head of the local agricultural committee told him that there is one stone slab beneath his house.

After recover it, Chuvyrov being shocked because he found a map that most accurately described many existing natural features, and many no longer exist, including the discovery of a system of canals, dams and reservoirs, and the inscriptions in an unknown language.

It was first discovered in July 1999, and has been subjected to numerous test by the scientist of Russia. The results are surprising, to say the least. The age determinations have been based on radio-carbon dating test, however the origin of the stone is still questionable. The technical difficulties in creating such an accurate map of this discovery is much more than any ancient culture that previously believes by orthodox scientists which have occupied the region, or elsewhere, anywhere on Earth.

This map is still very difficult to reproduce. Some researchers believe that this slab is a fragment of a complete map of the earth.

Source:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 35 "Ancient 3D Map Found In Russia"

Pic Source:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 35 page 10

Hindenburg Disaster

2012-01-20T06:12:00.001+07:00

LZ 129 Hindenburg was the largest airship ever built, 804 feet long, capable of ferrying 158 crew members and passengers across the Atlantic from Germany to North or South America. Supported by huge bags of hydrogen gas, the dirigible Hindenburg was the pride of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime until May 6, 1937, when it exploded and burned during docking maneuvers at Lakehurst, New Jersey. In the space of 37 seconds, 35 of the 97 persons aboard perished in flames while onlookers watched in horror and newsreel cameras captured the disaster for posterity. Investigators on both sides of the Atlantic concluded that the fire was a simple accident, leaking hydrogen ignited by a charge of static electricity—but was it true? As with most disasters of modern times, conspiracy theories surfaced within hours of the Hindenburg explosion. Some theorists believed (and still maintain today) that saboteurs destroyed the blimp in a homicidal bid to embarrass Nazi Germany.

For half a century, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s (1838–1917) inventions had embodied Germany’s aeronautical aspirations. Zeppelin drew on the work of several forerunners for his designs, most notably Henry Cavendish, who discovered hydrogen in 1766, and the brothers Montgolfier, who presented a first hot-air balloon to the French public in 1783.

Later engineers failed to safely combine the flammable gas with the blimp design but suggested that an elongated envelope would be conducive to a vessel’s stability in strong winds. Zeppelin designed a rigid frame that further improved controllability of the luftschiff, or airship, and separate gas cells to be filled with hydrogen. He had the first dirigible patented in 1898. For the building of Luftschiff Zeppelin (LZ) 1, however, the count’s company lacked government funding and had to turn to private shareholders.

In 1908, donors had to save the project a second time when LZ 4 crashed in the German city of Echterdingen. Following models proved more dependable, and airships would soon be used for Arctic exploration, German air raids on London in World War I, and commercial travel.

On May 3, 1937, the Luftschiff Zeppelin 129 Hindenburg climbed from Rhein-Main airport into the air above Frankfurt, Germany. Its namesake was the recently deceased Paul von Hindenburg, World War I field marshal, president of the Weimar Republic (1925–34), and national idol. The LZ 129 was 804 feet long, 135 feet in diameter, and weighed approximately 250 tons. To provide the necessary lift, the Hindenburg’s 16 gas cells still had to be filled with combustible hydrogen, as the United States remained the only country to produce the nonflammable helium.

Since its maiden flight in 1936, the LZ 129 had completed 20 flights across the Atlantic Ocean and broken the previous models’ speed records. Under normal conditions, its four 1,050-horsepower Daimler-Benz DB 602 diesel engines accelerated the dirigible to a maximum of 84 miles per hour, but favorable winds had allowed for top speeds of up to 188 miles per hour. A westward trip from Germany to the United States took an average of 63 hours 42 minutes, which was 17.5 hours faster than its predecessor’s best time of 81 hours 14 minutes. Although the Hindenburg had been built to accommodate 50 to 70 passengers, it carried only 36 travelers in addition to 61 crew members when it embarked on its fatal final flight. The control gondola was the only element to protrude from the body, the passengers resided in 20 heated cabins at the center of the hull’s lower decks. Amenities on board included a 528- square-foot dining room, a reading and writing as well as a smoking room, and centrally located sanitary installations with showers. Panoramic windows embedded in the concave hull provided spectacular views for strollers on the promenade deck.

From the outset of the trip, Captains Max Pruss and Ernst Lehmann had to confront numerous adversities, all of them due to bad weather conditions. Storms first kept the airship from crossing the English Channel and then delayed its journey across the Atlantic. Blown off course to Newfoundland, it passed Manhattan behind schedule at 3 P.M. on May 6 and finally reached the U.S. Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey, at 6 P.M. Heavy rains kept the airship from initiating landing procedures right away, and it was only an hour later that the storm calmed and the Hindenburg approached the mooring mast.

Suddenly the spontaneous combustion occurred at 7:25 P.M. As a ball of flames consumed the paneling and the exposed frame crashed on the landing field, the American ground-crews fled in panic. Once the ship hit the ground, those crewmen spun around to pull survivors from the blazing wreckage. The injured were rushed to hospitals, where more succumbed to their wounds, including Zeppelin captain Ernst Lehmann. A column of black smoke rose from the site as the heavy oil engine fuel continued to burn for three hours. A total of 13 passengers, 22 crewmen, and 1 Lakehurst-based navy soldier died in the crash. There were 62 survivors.

Contemporaries suspected sabotage or a lightning strike, while more recent hypotheses state that maneuvering in the storm might have led to a build-up of static energy in the ship’s envelope. An electric discharge may have ignited the hydrogen.

Captain Pruss, commander of the Hindenburg, was one of those who blamed the disaster on sabotage, but Hitler’s regime and the U.S. administration of President Franklin Roosevelt seemed equally eager to close the investigation without pointing fingers. One suspect often named in conspiracy theories is Joseph Spah, a surviving passenger who frequently visited his dog in the Hindenburg’s baggage compartment (and thus had ample opportunity to plant a bomb). Another suspect, crewman Eric Spehl, died in the fire and was posthumously credited with anti-Nazi attitudes. No solid evidence indicts either suspect (or anyone else), but speculation on causes of the fire still continues.

In 1998 spokespeople for the National Hydrogen Association blamed weather conditions and an “unorthodox” landing for the explosion. As explained in the NHA’s publication:

Observations of the incident show evidence inconsistent with a hydrogen fire:
(1) the Hindenburg did not explode, but burned very rapidly in omnidirectional
patterns,
(2) the 240-ton airship remained aloft and upright many seconds after the fire began,
(3) falling pieces of fabric were aflame and not self-extinguishing, and
(4) the very bright color of the flames was characteristic of a forest fire, not a hydrogen fire (hydrogen makes no visible flame).

Also, no one smelled garlic, the scent of which had been added to the hydrogen to help detect a leak. Conspiracists remain unpersuaded as they have for the past seven decades, noting that a bomb blast would preclude any lingering aroma from a slow leak, with or without garlic.

Sources:
Disasters, Accidents and Crises In American History by Ballard C. Campbell;
The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories by Michael Newton

Pic Source:
Disasters, Accidents and Crises In American History by Ballard C. Campbell page 267

Route 666 The Devil's Highway

2012-01-17T06:38:00.004+07:00

Even though since May 2003 the US Route 666 is officially known as US Route 393 or 491, the legend of "the Devil's Road" or "the Devil's Highway" (Camino del Diablo), will always be remembered. According to local statistics, the highway has bad reputation because of a very high percentage of road accidents, and they know that some of the reasons why this is happening. The original name of the highway had absolutely nothing to do with Antichrist or the number of the beast (666), as mentioned in Revelation, the last book of the Bible. The road was the sixth branch of an interstate route that was known as US 60. The section which connects Chicago to Los Angeles eventually became the legendary highway of Route 66. Four Corners and the detour from the Route 66 became 666 in August 1926. However some say that naming the highway with 666 only bring bad luck. The 190 miles of former US Route 666 begins in Gallup, New Mexico, stretch it's way through 70 miles of Colorado, and ends in Monticello, Utah.

Based on several witnesses, one night of full moon, there was a black, vintage 1930 Pierce-Arrow Roadster has appeared and suddenly disappeared and dozens of cars, trucks, motorcycles will have an accident after the phantom car sighting and so far the phantom car is connected to at least five deaths.

Dr. Avery Teicher from Phoenix over the past ten years documenting the reports of the phantom car and researching the relationship between the Phantom Pierce-Arrow and the Hellhounds that materialize to scare anyone who stop their vehicles at Route 666. According to Dr. Teicher, two members of a motorcycle gang, had their two arms eaten by phantom dogs, while the third gang member, had 90% of his face chewed off. Also several eyewitnesses reporting from the US Route 666 there is a phantom women hitchhiker which disappears immediately when someone give a ride to her.

On January 21, 2003, with support from the New Mexico governor, Bill Richardson stated that he will change the name of the US Route 666. And finally it became official in May 2003.

Sources:
Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places by Brad Steiger;
Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from The Darkside by Brad Steiger

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gallup_NM.jpg

Ancient Pyramid of Bosnia

2012-01-13T05:10:00.000+07:00

In October 2005 the Ancient Pyramid of Bosnia which is located in Visoko, a northwest town of Sarajevo, Visocica Hill received worldwide publication when Semir Osmanagic a Bosnian-American explorer announced sensational news that the hill was actually a huge man-made pyramid, dating back around 12,000 years to the last ice age. Osmanagic says the hill's excavations have revealed a narrow entrance (thought to be 2.4 miles (3.8km) long) to what could be an underground network of tunnels. The satellite photographs and thermal imaging showed two other, smaller pyramid-shaped hills in the Visocica Hill, which archaeologists believe the tunnels could lead to. Based on anthropologists research data, they also found evidence of 7,000 year old settlements. Other archaeologists from German found around 24,000 Neolithics artifacts one meter below surface ground.

During excavations on the site, Osmanagic's team found huge blocks of stone, probably from the tunnels or outer layer of the pyramid. The archaeologists team speculated it could be a ventilation shafts of the structure. Osmanagic believes the hill is man-made, one-third much taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt,and has named it “the Pyramid of the Sun” due to it’s similarity with the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan city, Mexico. Osmanagic says there is a complex of ancient structures on the excavation site, including the Temple of Earth, the Bosnian Pyramid of Love, the Bosnian Pyramid of the Dragon, and the Bosnian Pyramid of the Moon.

A tourist industry has booming around the magnificent discoveries in Visocica Hill, with souvenir models of the pyramid already available shortly after the worldwide publication. However, there is growing unease among archaeologists throughout the world about the genuineness of the discovery. Many archaeologists believe that Osmanagic's findings are actually the remains of Roman and medieval structures on the hill. Professor Anthony Harding, president of the European Association of Archaeologists, who visited the site, believes the hill to be a natural formation. Harding has expressed his disbelief at the idea that the Upper Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers who roamed the area at the end of the last ice age would have had the time, resources, or inclination to construct such a vast edifice.

Bosnian Pyramid, Visocica Hill in 1973

Some of Osmanagic's claims certainly demonstrate a lack of knowledge of European prehistory. For example, his statement that Visocica Hill "is actually Europe's first pyramid in the heart of Bosnia" is untrue. There are at least 16 examples of pyramids in Greece, the oldest being the pyramid of Hellinikon, located southwest of Athens in the Argolid. Although this pyramid has been dated to 2720 B.C., some archaeologists dispute these results, and believe a date at the end of the fourth century B.C. more likely. In appearance, the Greek pyramids resemble those at Giza in Egypt, though they are much smaller in size.

A report by the Egyptologist named Nabil Mohamed Abdel Swelim was published by the Archaeological Park in 2007, which claimed that the Pyramid of the Sun in Bosnia, was the largest pyramid in the wolrd. After a couple visits to Visoko, he finally released a report in 2007, which was concluded: "Arguments in favour or in disfavour have no effect on the fact that the pyramid concept and the properties are there for everyone to see". However in 2010 he reported that he doesn't said that the pyramid is man-made, but he was use the term natural or artificial, which is a geometrical-shaped pyramid. He does not exclude the possibility it's man-made.

Sources:
Hidden History: “Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries” by Brian Haughton;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_pyramids;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4912040.stm

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1973_Visoko.jpg

The Mysterious Mad Gasser

2012-01-10T06:01:00.000+07:00

The Mad Gasser is said to have been a mysterious being, described as a woman disguised as a man, who supposedly gassed residents in the town of Mattoon, Illinois (population 15,827, according to the 1940 census) for two long weeks, in late August and early September 1944. Interestingly, similar stories had been reported in the winter of 1933 through 1934 in Botetourt County, Virginia. These stories featured a gasser, a sweet odor, a strange paralysis, a mysterious stranger, panicked residents, and even a woman’s footprints under a bedroom window. In both cases, public officials eventually decided that mass hysteria was the source of the stories rather than any real gasser. However, the Virginia stories were never reported in Illinois, leading some to wonder how hysteria in one town could cause mass sightings of the mysterious Mad Gasser in another.

The first Mad Gasser attacks supposedly took place on August 31, 1944 when four people living in two different houses awoke in the night feeling so ill that they were unable to get out of bed. That night a resident woke up feeling ill. He managed to get to the bathroom before he threw up. On returning the bedroom, he asked his wife if she had left the gas on. She said she hadn’t, but when she tried to get up to check, she found she could not move. Elsewhere in town a young mother who heard her daughter coughing in another room also tried to leave her bed, with similar lack of success.

At 11 p.m. on September 1 a “sickening sweet odor in the bedroom” roused another young mother, Mrs. Bert Kearney, from sleep. As the odor quickly grew stronger, she “began to feel a paralysis of my legs and lower body,” she reported. “I got frightened and screamed.” An hour and a half later her husband, who was coming home from work, observed a strange man standing at the bedroom window. Kearney described him as “tall, dressed in dark clothing and wearing a tight-fitting cap.” Kearney gave chase, but the prowler escaped.

After these stories were reported in the local newspaper, several other attacks were reported on subsequent nights, all of them involving a mysterious stranger, sudden paralysis, and an odd, sweet-smelling gas. One of them claimed to see a woman dressed in men’s clothing lurking under a bedroom window, apparently spraying gas near the glass. The next morning a woman’s footprints were found in the same spot.

These events took place before anyone had heard of a “mad gasser” or “phantom anesthetist,” and whatever inspired the stories, it cannot have been mass hysteria. Unfortunately, at this stage the Mattoon Journal-Gazette picked up the story, calling Mrs. Kearney the “first victim,” which not only was untrue but which also implied that more “victims” would join her. As it happened, other alleged attacks did follow, all reported in the kind of overwrought prose that frightened more than informed.

A doctor called to the scene of one of these incidents smelled the gas, too, adding credibility to the reports. Police who investigated could find no evidence of gassing or of the mysterious stranger, however. No one else had seen the gasser, but late on the evening of September 5, as one couple returned home, the wife noticed a white cloth by the front door. When she picked it up, she happened to sniff it. “I had sensations similar to coming in contact with an electric current,” she recounted. “The feeling raced down my body to my feet and then seemed to settle in my knees. It was a feeling of paralysis.” Soon her lips and face were burning and swelling, her mouth was bleeding, and she was throwing up.

These dramatic symptoms had subsided by the time police got there, but their visit produced what seemed to be the first physical evidence: a skeleton key and an empty lipstick tube near the spot where the cloth had lain. Even as officers were interviewing the couple, however, a woman elsewhere in town was hearing a prowler outside her bedroom window. Before she could sit up, a gas seeped into the room rendering her immobile for several minutes.

As the days passed and the attacks continued, the community was outraged that the local police had not been able to catch the perpetrator. Meanwhile armed citizens prowled the streets at night, in defiance of the police commissioner’s plea for them to get a grip on themselves. He said that a “gas maniac exists” but “many of the attacks are nothing more than hysteria. Fear of the gas man is entirely out of proportion to the menace of the relatively harmless gas he is spraying.” Rumors were flying: the gasser was a lunatic, an “eccentric inventor” (the commissioner’s pet theory, soon to be abandoned), or even an “apeman.” The reasons for this curious last notion are lost to history.

The scare climaxed on September 10, a Sunday night, with two attacks that felled a total of five persons. By the next morning police were talking more and more skeptically, pointing to the absence of solid evidence and stipulating that all further complainants undergo examination at Mattoon Memorial Institution. A chemical analysis of the cloth came to no particular conclusions. The next evening,when the police got calls from persons reporting attacks, the calls were dismissed as false alarms, even though in one case a physician who went to a victim’s house smelled the gas himself.

At a press conference on the morning of September 12, the chief of police told reporters, “Local police, in cooperation with state officers, have checked and rechecked all reported cases, and we find absolutely no evidence to support stories that have been told. Hysteria must be blamed for such seemingly accurate accounts of supposed victims.” Beyond that, he theorized, the odor of carbon tetrachloride from a nearby chemical plant may have been carried on the wind.He did not explain why this had not been a problem for Mattoon residents prior to August 31.

Even in the face of this official denial of his existence, the gasser made one last house call. On the evening of the September 13 a witness saw a “woman dressed in man’s clothing” spray gas through a window into Bertha Burch’s bedroom. The next morning Mrs. Burch and her adult son found footprints of high-heeled shoes under the window. For reasons that will be apparent shortly, this may be the single most interesting case to come out of Mattoon.

Similar series of events took place about a decade earlier in Botetourt County, Virginia, in December 1933 and January 1934. Except for a brief item in the January 22, 1934, edition of the New York Times, the scare got only local (Virginia) coverage. It is highly unlikely that Mattoon residents were aware of it.

The first recorded attack in Virginia occurred at a farm near Haymakertown late on the evening of December 22, 1933 when three separate infusions of gas into the house sickened eight members of a family and a visitor. Some of the victims thought they saw a man fleeing in the darkness. The gas caused nausea, headaches, facial swelling, and constriction of mouth and throat muscles. One victim, a nineteen-year-old woman, suffered convulsions for weeks afterwards. A police officer who arrived between the second and third attacks — after staying an hour, he left, and soon afterwards gas wafted through both floors of the house — found only one clue: the print of a woman’s heel under the window the gas was believed to have passed through.

Over the next two weeks other persons reported similar nocturnal attacks. In one case witnesses saw a 1933 Chevrolet, with a man and woman inside, passing back and forth in front of a house around the time its occupants experienced the mysterious gas. In another instance a young mother attending to her baby said she heard a rattling window shade and mumbling voices outside. Suddenly the room filled with gas, and her body felt numb.While on his way to summon police after a gassing at his farm, F. B. Duval saw a man run toward a car parked on a rural road and drive away quickly.Duval and an officer examined the site soon afterwards and found prints of a woman’s shoes.

Amid growing panic, residents of the county armed themselves and prowled back roads in search of suspicious strangers. On one occasion a searcher fired on a fleeing figure. On another, moments after a gas attack, one of the victims dashed outside in time to glimpse four men running in the direction of the nearby Blue Ridge Mountains. By the time the witness returned with a gun, he could no longer see them, but he could hear their voices. Despite skepticism in some quarters concerning the gasser’s (or gassers’) existence, physicians who had called on victims were certain he was (or they were) real. County Sheriff C. E. Williamson was likewise convinced.

One of the last gassings was reported near Lithia in nearby Roanoke County. Afterwards the victim found discolored snow with a sweet-smelling, oily substance in it. When analyzed, it turned out to consist of sulfur, arsenic, and mineral oil — something like the components, authorities thought, of insecticides. A trail of footprints led from the house to the barn, but none away from the barn. They were, according to press accounts, a “woman’s tracks.”

Michael T. Shoemaker, who investigated the episode in the 1980s, noted its many similarities to the later scare at Mattoon. “In both Mattoon and Botetourt,” he wrote, “the principal physical effects were the same: a sickeningly sweet odor, nausea, paralysis, facial swelling and unconsciousness. These effects were confirmed by doctors and, moreover, in both cases doctors smelled the gas. Both gassers made repeat attacks on one family,multiple attacks in one night and assaults on unoccupied houses. The pattern of explanation was also similar, progressing from pranksters to lunatics to hysteria. Tantalizing but useless clues were found,” including (Shoemaker’s emphasis) “a woman’s print beneath a window.”

Those who believe these incidents were real attacks have suggested that one individual was responsible for the gassings—and that the Mad Gasser was not a human but an extraterrestrial. Some of these believers say they do not know why an extraterrestrial would attack humans in this way, but others suggest that the extraterrestrial was performing some kind of experiment on the humans. (Supporters of this theory also believe in alien abductions, whereby aliens are said to hold humans captive in order to perform experiments on them.) Skeptics, on the other hand, accept the official explanation: that the supposed gassings are examples of mass hysteria. This hysteria, they argue, caused fearful people to imagine that they smelled, felt, or saw things that were not really there.

Sources:
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena by Patricia D. Netzley;
Unexplained: “Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena” by Jerome Clark

Pic Source:
Unexplained: “Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena” by Jerome Clark page 447

Book of Enoch

2012-01-06T05:48:00.001+07:00

The book of Enoch is an Apochryphal book of the Old Testament, written in Hebrew about a century before Christ. The original version was lost about the end of the fourth century, and only fragments remained, but Bruce the traveller brought back a copy from Abyssinia, in 1773 in Ethiopia, probably made from the version known to the early Greek fathers. The book told of the order of angels called “Watchers,” or “The Sleepless Ones.” The leader was the chief of the giant (Nephilim) called Semjaza or Samyasa (also known as Azazel, one of the Hebrews’ principal demons), is equivalent to Ahriman, Satan or Lucifer who led 200 Watchers down to Earth to take wives from among the daughters of men and their offspring called the Anakim. It was from such a union that the Nephilim, the heroes of old, as well as the ancient practitioners of sorcery, were born. The fallen angels taught their wives to cast various spells and to practice the arts of enchantment.

The book says: " that there were angels who consented to fall from, heaven that they might have intercourse with the daughters of earth. For in those days the sons of men having multiplied, there were born to them daughters of great beauty. And when the angels, or sons of heaven, beheld them, they were filled with desire; wherefore they said to one another: Come let us choose wives from among the race of man, and let us beget children'. Their leader Samyasa, answered thereupon and said: ' Perchance you will be wanting in the courage needed to fulfill this resolution, and then I alone shall be answerable for your fall.' But they swore that they would in no wise repent and that they would achieve their whole design. Now there were 200 who descended on Mount Hermon (or Armon), and it was from this time that the mountain received its designation, which signifies Mount of the Oath.

Hereinafter follow the names of those angelic leaders who descended with this object: Samyasa, chief among all, Urakabarameel, Azibeel, Tamiel, Ramuel, Danel, Azkeel, Sprakuyal, Asael, Armers, Batraal, Ananc, Zavebe, Sameveel, Ertrael, Turel, Jomiael, Arizial. They took wives with whom they had intercourse, to whom also they taught Magic, the art of enchantment and the diverse properties of roots and trees. Just as Prometheus presented man with fire, Samyasa did not neglect human men, so they teach them how to create weapons and tools of destruction. He released to humankind the secrets of metallurgy, the manufacture of weapons and jewelry, and the use of antimony in art and medicine. He also taught women the art of cosmetics to seduce men. For these transgressions, the archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel appeal to God to punish the offspring of the Nephilim and the fallen angels on earth. God sent Uriel to instruct Noah to build a large ship and tell him of the coming Great Flood (cataclysm) to cleanse the world from evil and then God condemned Azazel to remain forever bound in the desert of Dûdâêl.

A page from Greek Manuscript of the Book of Enoch

Based on ancient texts and manuscripts, Mount Hermon is where it all happened. Ancient legends attribute a sacred character to Mount Hermon. Hermon is also the mountain of God, called Bashan. Modern surveys have located more than twenty temples on Mount Hermon, an unprecedented number in comparison with other regions of the Phoenician coast. The Mount abounds with shrines to the Canaanite goddess Asherah or Astarte. This led the Church father Jerome to write that Hermon was an anathema, by which he meant a forbidden place.

The name Hermon derives from the Laconian dialect for stone heap. Archeologists discovered such a heap of hewn stone within the ruins of a circular wall on one of the three secondary peaks. In fact, all monumental walls and buildings built of ashlars, or cut stones, represent Hermon. He is also equivalent to Hermes, or Thoth-Hermes, the biblical Ham.

A translation of the Book of Enoch was published by Archbishop Lawrence in 1821, the Etheopic text in 1838, and there is a good edition by Dillman (1851). Philippi and Ewald have also written special works on the subject and the only known statute of the leader of the Watchers is in the choir of Rosslyn Chapel, in Scotland.

Sources:
Encyclopedia of Ancient and Forbidden Secrets by Nye;
The Alchemy Key: “Unravelling the Single Tangible Secret in All Mysteries” by Stuart Nettleton;
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_enoch

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:P._Chester_Beatty_XII,_leaf_3,_verso.jpg

Mysterious Pyramid of Mount Kasagi

2012-01-03T05:11:00.003+07:00

As we already know that Atlantis was the first global civilization. There has not been one since, including our own which, for all of its attempts at internationalism, is fractured everywhere. The early Classical Greek historian, Hesiod, wrote of an oicumene, or a world-power (from which our word, “ecumenical,” derives) that dominated a Golden Age of universal magnificence and sun-worship. Its movers and shakers were pyramid-builders, who erected their singular structures from the Atlantic isles eastward to Egypt and Sumer, and westward to the Americas. But far less well-known are the pyramids of Mount Kasagi in Japan. They are possibly surviving testimony to the same Atlantean civilizers who roamed the planet. Standing about seven feet tall and some fourteen feet across at the base, it is a powerful work of art, starkly commanding. Who sculpted it, when, and for what purpose, no one knows.

The hilly, thickly forested and surprisingly under-populated countryside outside the big city of Nagoya, in north-central Japan, is little known to outsiders, even to many Japanese. Practically concealed amid the abundant plant-life of the forest floor is an almost perfectly symmetrical stone pyramid on the slope of Mount Kasagi. It has been precisely crafted from a single massive block of solid granite weighing an estimated nine tons, although the surface is unadorned by markings of any kind. No equivalent stone may be found in the immediate vicinity, so moving the heavy block to its location on the slope of a mountain required transportation skills on a par with its carving. Not only the surrounding heavy vegetation, but the structure’s position in a valley demonstrate it was never intended for astronomical purposes.

No burials have been associated with this “trigonon,” as it is referred to by Professor Nobuhiro Yoshida, President of the Japan Petroglyph Society (Kitakyushu). He is one among many Japanese scholars who have studied the structure, although its existence is virtually unknown in the West. Folk tradition among the local peasantry, however, describes a white snake that dwells under and within the Mount Kasagi pyramid.

One of the pyramid of mount Kasagi

In a prehistoric ritual still annually performed by pious residents, they leave an offering of eggs as a ceremonial feast for the serpentine genius loci, or “spirit of the place.” Mythic relationship between a sacred snake and egg symbolism does not occur elsewhere in Japan, or the rest of Asia. But it is known on the other side of the world from Japan in the Nile Valley as Kneph, the serpent manifestation of Khnemu. His serpent power (Kneph) appears to be the Egyptian version of Benten, the goddess of Mount Kasagi’s “trigonon,” because her myth describes her as the Lady of the White Serpents, and tells of her ancient arrival in Japan from over the sea. Interestingly, displayed at her Tokyo shrine at Shirorama are stone and bronze images of a pyramid, her emblem.

More than phonetically, Benten appears related to the Benben, an Egyptian phoenix-like bird of immortality, likewise associated with a sacred egg. Benben was the name and personification of the pyramidian, incorrectly referred to as a pyramid “capstone” of the Great Pyramid. A Benten-Benben relationship seems too close to be circumstantial.

Japanese-Egyptian comparisons grow even closer when we learn that the apex angle of the “trigonon”—76 degrees—is identical to that of the Great Pyramid. The obscure pyramidian is not alone. Four other similarly cut stone structures are spaced every 100 meters, three of them forming a triangular pattern along Mount Kasagi’s ridge. Their immediate vicinity is uncommonly rich in prehistoric rock art, indicating that this remote and almost inaccessible area was important to the pyramid-builders.

While no other “trigonons” have been found, a scene reminiscent of Atlantis itself may be found at Atami-san. Mount Atami, on the northeastern coast of Japan’s Izuhanto, the Izu Peninsula (Shizuoka Prefecture ken, Honshu), facing Sagami-nada (the Gulf of Sagami), is an enormous but extinct volcano, the ancient source from which the city of Atami, built within the crater, derives its name. Almost half-sunk into the sea, Atami-san presents a discernably Atlantean appearance. Atami was an important resort as early as the 5th century, A.D., although Neolithic finds in the crater prove the site has been occupied from more deeply prehistoric times, when the name originated. “Atami,” a possible Atlantean linguistic survivor, has no meaning in the Japanese language.

Sources:

Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 46: “Asia’s Forbidden Pyramids” by Frank Joseph;
The Atlantis Encyclopedia by Frank Joseph

Pic Source:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 46: “Asia’s Forbidden Pyramids” by Frank Joseph page 26

Greece UFO Sightings

2011-12-30T05:27:00.003+07:00

The Greek government finally revealed a case of UFO sightings that occurred on November 11, 2007. The incident started when the pilot of Olympic Airways 266 departed from Athens to London reported an unidentified flying object (UFO). Other pilots of flight 730 and 770 confirm the same unidentified object. The sightings also detected by the radar of Athen Airport and the object seemed headed to Karystos, a small town on the island of Euboea, Greece. Unfortunately, the mysterious object has disappeared before two F-16 fighter planes that assigned to intercepted it arrive at the destination. On February 2009, document on this subject disclosed to the public, including records of communication between the pilot and the airport officials.

Eyewitnesses describe that the UFO was similar with a big star moves erratically and the shape always changes. Beside the pilot, there was two passengers that also saw the mysterious object.

A spokesman for Olympic Airlines confirm the incident and the Greece authorized officials said it was not detected on any radar. They concluded that the object is probably Planet Venus on the autumn night.

However, later the Greek military confirm that their radar station at the top of Parintha mountains near Athens detected an object moving with extraordinary speed and does not matched with description of any other plane on earth. The staff at the radar station also said that the UFO is very large, it has unusual shape and very bright.

Actually the incident on 2007 was not the first UFO sightings reported by the pilot and aircraft passenger in Greece. A documents issued by the Ministry of Defence last year mentioned that a plane of Alitalia Airlines almost failed to land at Heathrow airport on 1991.

UFO with cylindrical shape

At that time Achille Zaghetti, the pilot reported an unidentified flying object with cylindrical shape crossed with a distance of about 300 meters to the right side of the plane.

Source:
Beta UFO Magazine Vol. 16

Pic Source:
Beta UFO Magazine Vol. 16 page 5

Sirens

2011-12-27T05:47:00.000+07:00

The Sirens depicted in various classical literature as the mythical creature with two forms: the appearance of half-woman half-bird, other sources said half-woman half-fish (mermaid), and with their magical song, they enchant the seafarer and fishermen. Every person who hears them singing will forgot everything and died of hunger. In the Age of Alexander (300 B.C.), it began to lose its bird shape, and by the Middle Ages, it was described as having a fish’s tail. By the end of the twelfth century, the Siren was considered synonymous with the mermaid. The myth of the sirens is one of the most enduring myths, among the sailors and seafarer it still exists even into the present day. Sources of classical literature about the Sirens can be found in Aristotle, Pliny, Ovid, Hyginus, Physiologus (2nd century A.D.) and medieval bestiaries.

In Greek mythology, the Sirens (the mermaid form) were the daughters of Phorcys, a Greek god of the sea. While the bird form, they were supposed to be daughters of the river Achelous by the nymph Calliope; and Ceres turned them into birds.

According to Homer (9th century B.C.), they were lived on an island between Aeaea, the Circe's home and the Scylla’s lair. Sirens, who once lived in a forest, near a rivebank, issued a challenge to the Muses in a singing duel, but sirens lost the challenge, whereupon they leaving their forest habitat, and took refuge on the rocky coast in southern Italy. Here they spent days so they could entice the wayfarer, only to devour them. This is where Odysseus encounter the Sirens.Several days before his encounter, Circe magical powers turned Odysseus' men into swine when they landed on Aeaea on their way home from Troy. Aided by Hermes, the messenger god, Odysseus was immune to Circe's magic and restored his crew to human form, and also gained the witch's aid for the next part of his joumey For a year he stayed as her lover, before she told him how to navigate through the waters of the Sirens and between Scylla, a monster, and Charybdis, a whirlpool. Scylla had been a rival of Circe, who had turned her into a monster when one of her many lovers had shown an interest in the unfortunate girl.

Circe had warned of the dangers caused by these creatures, urging Odysseus to close his men ears with wax after ordered him to bind his body with the strong rope to the mast of his ship. These men are allowed concentrate on rowing at the same time makes them immune to their magical song.

Odysseus and the Sirens (bird form), eponymous vase of the Siren Painter, ca. 480-470 BC

On the tympanum of the chapel of St. Michael d’Aiguilhe at Le Puy, the statue of the two-tailed sirens are dating from before the 10th century, and the siren-birds statue can be seen at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire.

The two-tailed sirens

They may well be representations of the inferior forces in woman; or they could also be symbolic of the corrupt imagination enticed towards base ends or towards the primitive strata of life; or of the torment of desire leading to self-destruction, for their abnormal bodies cannot satisfy the passions that are aroused by their enchanting music and by their beauty of face and bosom. It seems that they are largely symbols of the ‘temptations’ scattered along the path of life (or of symbolic navigation) impeding the evolution of the spirit by bewitchment, beguiling it into remaining on the magic island; or, in other words, causing its premature death.

Sources:
A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E. Cirlot;
Mysterious Creatures: “A Guide to Cryptozoology” by George M. Eberhart;
Seafaring, Lore & Legend: “A Miscellany of Maritime Myth, Superstition, Fable, and Fact by Peter D. Jeans;
The Encyclopedia of Mythology by Arthur Cotterell

Pic Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Odysseus_Sirens_BM_E440_n2.jpg;
A Dictionary of Symbols by J. E. Cirlot page 297

Falcon Lake Incident

2011-12-23T04:50:00.001+07:00

One of the most famous UFO landings in Canada occurred on May 20, 1967. On that day, Stephen (Stefan) Michalak was exploring the wilderness near Falcon Lake, Manitoba in Canada when he saw two red cigar-shaped objects glowing in the sky. One of them suddenly descended 160 feet away. It was about 35 feet in diameter and he could see strange colored lights flashing inside when a door opened. The UFO appears to be hot stainless steel, whirring, hissing, and emitting purplish light from horizontal slits. He crept closer until he heard weird voices coming from inside. Thinking maybe it was an experimental Russian craft, he asked in Russian, “Do you speak Russian?” When he got no response, he tried five different languages and still there was no response.

Michalak then decided to get closer. He walked right up to the craft and looked through the opening. He saw a bright “maze” of lights on a panel, all flashing in different sequences. Michalak accidentally touches the walls, causing the UFO to take off, blasting Michalak with hot gas that burns his shirt, undershirt, and chest. Almost immediately he started to feel very sick. He was rushed to the hospital where he began to suffer a number of alarming symptoms including a headache, diarrhea, weakness, dizziness, vomiting, hives, numbness, swelling of joints, eye irritation, and burns. He was unable to keep any food down and lost 22 pounds. His blood lymphocyte level decreased from a normal 25 percent to a dangerous 16 percent. More than 27 doctors examined Michalak, and the only explanation that seemed to fit was exposure to radiation.

The RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) had an interest in Michalak's case and since they could not identify the landing site alone, on June 1, they asked Michalak to accompany them. But, Michalak could not find the exact location of the sighting, which also cast doubt on his claim. The RCMP also confirmed that he consumed several bottles of beer on the night before the incident. On June 26 Michalak was able to memorize the landing site and he found his personal stuffs that he had left in a hurry. However after the RCMP tested the soil for radioactivity, the result were negative.

Falcon Lake Map

A month later, the RCMP officers and Michalak recovered a semicircle on the landing site, with diameter of 15 feet on July 28. There were radiation traces in a crack in the rock at site. However no traces of radiation were found outside the circle or the grass below the rock. The radioactive material that found in the rock was identified as radium 226, an isotope found in world wide for commercial use, and waste from nuclear power plants. They concluded that the radiation level is not harmful to humans in the landing site.

In 1999, Michalak died at the age of 83. The Canadian government stated that the Falcon Lake incident remain unsolved.

Sources:

Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena: “UFOs and Aliens” by Preston Dennett;

UFOs and Popular Culture: “An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Myth” by James R. Lewis;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Lake_incident

Pic Source:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Falcon+Lake,+Division+No.++1,+Unorganized,+MB+R0E,+Canada+@49.702994,-95.243251

Archimedes' Burning Mirror

2011-12-20T06:36:00.000+07:00

In the third century B.C. the Greek mathematician Archimedes laid down many of the principles which still guide engineering science today and created, perhaps, highly advanced and innovative military technologies which have been lost to history. There are several famous stories from ancient literature that speak of giant lenses or mirrors that were used in battle. The most interesting of these stories is that of the Greeks using a fearsome ‘Solar Mirror’ or also known as 'Burning Mirror,' which Archimedes had cooked up in Syracuse in 212-215 B.C., to incinerate the invading Roman naval fleet. He allegedly focused this giant solar mirror on the ships of the Roman fleet and set them on fire. Archimedes was credited with the naval victory, though the Romans eventually got the better of the Greeks in the long run.

In the words of Polybius, ‘the Romans … had every hope of capturing the city immediately if only one old man out of all the Syracusans could have been removed; but so long as he was present they did not dare even to attempt an attack …’ Beaten back with heavy losses, the Romans were forced to abandon their assault. Instead they opted to starve the city into submission, and launched an eight-month siege.

Bronze Statue of Archimedes at the Archenhold Observatory in Berlin

Finally, in 212 BCE, Marcellus was able to take advantage of a Greek festival in the city to sneak past the defences and breach the inland walls. Thus the immediate consequences of Archimedes’ genius may have been slight, merely delaying the fall of Syracuse for a year. But his legacy to science has been considerable; even that of his perhaps-mythical Burning Mirror, which helped to inspire the research into parabolic dishes that has led to today’s radio telescopes and satellite TV antennae.

Archimedes himself had little regard for the concrete but transitory products of his fertile genius.He preferred the realm of mathematics, where truth is eternal. Accounts of his death relate that, as the Romans poured into Syracuse and sacked the city, a soldier broke into Archimedes’ house and ordered him to report to Marcellus, but that he was too preoccupied with a mathematical problem and refused to come until it was completed, whereupon the soldier ran him through.

According to the 12th-century Byzantine historian John Tzetzes, supposedly paraphrasing the Roman historian Dio Cassius (155–235 CE), it was a hexagonal mirror (probably of polished bronze), surrounded by smaller square mirrors, the whole assemblage fixed to an armature. The mirrors gathered the rays of the sun and concentrated them into a laser-like beam, which ignited the Roman galleys from a distance, reducing them to ashes. Today Archimedes’ Burning Mirror is generally considered to be a myth, but early European scientists had mixed feelings about the tale.

In the 17th century Descartes dismissed the story as fantasy, but in 1747 George Louis LeClerc, comte de Buffon, claimed to have ignited a pine plank from 150 feet (45 metres), using an array of 128 mirrors. In 1975, Greek scientist Dr Ioannis Sakkas claimed to have used 60 mirrors held up by sailors to ignite a wooden ship from 160 feet (48 metres), while in 2002 a German experiment using 500 people with mirrors supposedly had similar success. In 2005 a group of MIT students conducted experiments using 30 cm square mirror tiles which is focused on a wooden ship at a range of 30 m. The flame burned small area of the ship. More recently, in 2010, the Mythbuster, carried out an experiment using 500 mirror which is aimed by school childrens at the Roman wooden ship as the target 120 m away, however the heat failed to reach 300 °C which is required for combustion to occur because of bad weather condition and it was concluded that the 'mirror' was a feasible weapon as long as the sky is cloudless, and the ship remained in stationary condition for around 10 minutes.

Even if the technology is feasible, this does not mean the story of Archimedes’ Burning Mirror is true, but perhaps it should not be dismissed out of hand. With or without the Burning Mirror, the genius of Archimedes was too much for Marcellus and the Roman army.

Sources:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 24: “The Ancient Electricians” by David Hatcher Childress”;
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 60: “Document Reveals Archimedes’ Genius”;
Secret History: “Hidden Forces that Shaped the Past” by Joel Levy;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes#The_Archimedes_Heat_Ray

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gerhard_Thieme_Archimedes.jpg

Mystery of the Pendle Witches Cottage

2011-12-16T05:07:00.003+07:00

On December 2011, water engineers of the United Utilities were amazed as they unearth an old cottage from the 17th century in Pendle, Lancashire during a construction project, because they found a cat’s skeleton and bones on one of the room’s wall. Few days later archaeologists were asked to investigated the cottage which is located in the village of Barley near the Lower Black Moss reservoir. The local historian already speculated that the cottage could be the lost Malkin Tower, where the infamous Pendle Witches held a meeting on April 1612. In the early 16th century, when the Protestant Reformation began to restructure nearly all of Europe politically as well as religiously, witches were largely overlooked by the rulers of church and state who now struggled with the larger issues of the great division within Christianity. Then, after a time of relatively little persecution, the period of the great witchcraft craze or hysteria that many practicing witches and students of witchcraft today refer to as the “Burning Times,” occurred from about 1550 to 1650.

During the 17th century entire districts in several parts of Lancashire seemed disturbed by the presence of witches. If men and beasts were act strangely and suddenly ill, most likely they were under the witches charmed. The local justice court in one of the Lancashire’s district named Roger Nowell and Nicholas Bannister, having learned that Malkin Tower, the residence of Old Demdike and her daughter, was the witches meeting place, they want to arrest Old Demdike and her followers, and then to commit them to Lancaster Castle. On April 2nd 1612, Old Demdike, Chattox and her daughter Anne Redferne, were summoned to confess their witchcraft practices.

When Old Demdike had been sent to Lancaster, a grand meeting, was held by 17 witches and 3 wizards on April 6th 1612 the Good Friday at Malkin Tower, they were planning to kill Mr. M'Covell, the governor of the castle, and blow up the building, to enable the witches to escape from the castle easily. Friends and others sympathetic to the family attended, and when word of the meeting reached Roger Nowell, he decided to investigate. They were brought to trial on April 27th 1612 before they executed their plan and questioned them the real purpose of the meeting. Before the assizes, Old Demdike, worn out by age and died in prison.

The Pendle witch trials in 1612 are one of the famous witch trials case in the 17th century. There were twelve accused person related with witchcraft practice lived in Pendle Hill, Lancashire, and they all charged with the murder of ten people. The following names were known as the Witches of Pendle Forests:
• Alice Nutter
• Alison Device daughter of Elizabeth Device
• Anne Redferne daughter of Chattox
• Anne Whittle a.k.a. Chattox
• Elizabeth Device daughter of Demdike
• Elizabeth Southerns, a.k.a Demdike
• Isabel Robey
• James Device son of Elizabeth Device
• Jane Bulcock
• John Bulcock son of Jane Bulcock
• Katherine Hewitt a.k.a. Mould-heels
• Margaret Pearson

Ten of the accused were tried on August 18th to August 19th, 1612 along with the witches of Samlesbury. Their names were:
• Alice Gray
• Elizabeth Astley
• Ellen Bierley Daughter of Jennet Bierley
• Isabel Sidegraves
• Jane Southworth
• Jennet Bierley
• John Ramsden
• Lawrence Haye

And others that became known as the Lancashire witch trials in the Lancaster Assizes. One of the Pendle Witches was tried on July 27th, 1612 in York Assizes, while another one (Demdike) was died in prison. From eleven people in the trial of 9 women and 2 men were convicted guilty and hanged, the other one was found innocent and released by the court.

The ruins of the cottage that have been unearthed by the United Utilities workers

When the engineers were found the building on December 2011, it was contained a sealed room with a mummified cat hidden inside the brick wall. They also found a 19th century kitchen range in its original position. Many artifacts were discovered, such as crockery, a tin bath and a bedstead from Victorian era. Historians speculated the cat was probably placed in the walls at the beginning of the 19th century, and the room's with two doorways sealed up creating some kind of mausoleum. They still figure out what is the real purpose of the buried cat. Indeed, cat is always associated with witchcraft especially the black cat. However local people believed that if a cat was buried alive there it will protect the cottage's residents from evil spirits. Until the archaeologists fully investigate the site, the Pendle Witches Cottage is still a mystery.

Sources:
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained Vol.2 by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendle_witches;
http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/;
http://www.unitedutilities.com/9126.aspx

Pic Sources:
http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/57197000/jpg/_57197557_pendle.jpg

Treasure Galleons of 1715 Fleet

2011-12-13T05:32:00.002+07:00

On July 24 the 1715 fleet set sail from Havana Harbor at sunrise, their hulls and sterncatles packed full of treasure. Unfortunately, on the sixth day of their voyage, luck ran out when a violent hurricane sank the eleven ships. The entire fleet was gone, three in deep water and the rest closer to shore up and down the wild and untamed eastern coast of Florida, from St. Augustine south to what is now Cape Canaveral. The stretch of the Florida coastline where the 1715 fleet met its end is known as the Treasure Coast because of the number of wrecks offshore, and the tendency for some of the scattered cargo to periodically wash ashore. The fleet lay untouched and unknown until 1955, when a building contractor named Kip Wagner took a walk along the beach of Sebastian, Florida. He stopped to look at some objects that had washed ashore and thought they were seashells, but quite unusual shells. He decided to scrape off the coating of one of the darkened objects and discovered that what he had were not seashells, but silver pieces of eight. Wagner did some research and realized he had found treasure from one of the sunken galleons of the ill-fated 1715 fleet.

The plate fleet of 1715 (this is because this fleet was carrying silver or plata in Spanish word) was one of the richest ever, owing to a unique set of circumstances. From 1701 until 1714 the War of the Spanish Succession had pitted Spain against other European powers – a state of war that extended to the high seas and made it dangerous for the fleet to attempt the crossing for fear of interception by an entire enemy fleet. For the previous two years the plate fleets had been kept in port, so that vast quantities of treasure had ‘backed up’ in the New World. The usual practice was for two treasure fleets to be sent to different parts of the Caribbean. The Nueva España flota would sail to Veracruz in Mexico (aka Nueva España), while the Tierra Firme flota would visit South American ports, of which Cartagena was the main stop. The two would load up and then rendezvous at Havana to sail back across the Atlantic in one armada, in good time to miss the hurricanes.

The 1715 fleet was supposed to be no different. Captain General Don Antonio de Echeverz y Zubiza, in command of the Cartagena fleet, arrived in Havana on schedule, his ships groaning with an amazing fortune of Bolivian silver and gold coins, chests of Colombian emeralds and sacks of finely worked Peruvian jewellery. By mid-March he was ready to sail, but his superior, Captain General Don Juan Esteban de Ubilla, was late. The Nueva España flota was still moored at Veracruz, awaiting tardy mule-train shipments from the Pacific coast, bearing the booty delivered by two years of Manila galleon traffic. In the meantime Ubilla lined his holds with staggering quantities of gold bullion and silver ingots and coins. Finally the mule-train arrived and disgorged its bounty of silk, spices, ivory, hardwoods, indigo dye and precious porcelain. Ubilla finally arrived in Havana in mid-May. To his dismay he was delayed still further. Every merchant in the New World had been waiting to ship cargo to Europe and the plate fleet represented their first chance for three years. All 11 ships in the combined fleet were stuffed to the gunwales with every bale and crate of merchandise possible. The Governor of Havana attempted to convince the two admirals to allow another ship – the Grifon, a French ship he had chartered himself – to join the convoy, a request that occasioned yet more wrangling before they assented.

The real delay, however, was caused by the remarkable saga of the queen’s dowry. King Philip V of Spain had recently lost his first wife, Marie Louise of Savoy, and his new bride, Isabella Farnese, Duchess of Parma, had reluctantly agreed to marry Philip before receiving a dowry, but refused to consummate the marriage until the full amount was delivered to her. So King Philip insisted that the plate fleet would not leave the Caribbean until the queen’s dowry – all eight chests of it – was loaded aboard and stored in Ubilla’s personal cabin.

Finally the great fleet weigh anchors and leave Havana on July 24. It was carrying over 14 million pesos in declared treasure (plus a substantial quantity of undeclared, smuggled loot – perhaps even more than the declared amount), worth, according to one estimate, £220 million ($418 million) in today’s money based on weight alone.

The plan was to strike north and ride the Gulf Current along Florida’s Atlantic coast until they reached the trade winds that would carry them across the Atlantic. At first they made good progress, but on 29 July they were becalmed and by the next morning the sea and sky took on an ominous cast. The sun struggled to break through a pervasive haze, while the sea rose in threatening swells despite the absence of any wind. The usual flocks of sea birds had vanished, and as the afternoon drew on the clouds gathered. Unbeknownst to the hapless sailors of the plate fleet, their northwards progress had shadowed the course of a huge cyclone brewing further out to sea. Now it changed course and swept westwards towards them – a full-blown hurricane, driving them towards the jagged reefs and shoals off the Florida coast.

Coins and jewelry recovered from the 1715 fleet

In the early morning of 31 July all 11 of the Spanish ships met their end. Ubilla’s flagship was the first to strike the reef. According to eyewitness accounts from survivors, it was picked up by a vast, 50-foot high wave and smashed onto the reef with such violence that the top half of the deck sheared off instantly. Soon the whole ship was smashed to splinters and the admiral and 223 of his crew were killed. The rest of the fleet soon followed, with the exception of the Grifon, whose captain had wisely sailed a more easterly course and left himself with enough weather room to ride out the storm. More than 700 men – possibly more than 1,000 – were drowned or smashed, and most of the precious cargo was scattered across the sea floor or plunged to the bottom amidst the wreckage. The only exception was the Urca de Lima, which was jammed fast against the bottom but survived relatively intact thanks to its sturdy hull. The survivors dragged themselves ashore and huddled together until the hurricane died down and the morning light revealed the full extent of the devastation. The wreckage and corpses littered 50 kilometres (30 miles) of Florida shoreline, between modern-day Fort Pierce and Sebastian Inlet.

In 1955 Kip Wagner was a local resident who had become interested in the tales of sunken treasure after finding coins on the beach near his home. He had first tried his hand at treasure hunting in 1949 but without success and then he formed the group of treasure hunters called the Real Eight Company. Among the members were his nephew Rex Stocker, and a group of divers who were officers and civilians stationed at nearby Patrick Air Force Base: Del Long, Colonel Dan Thompson, Lou Ullian, and Colonel Harry Cannon.

Around 1960, Wagner contacted Bob Marx. Who was living in Spain at the time and already had quite a reputation as a treasure hunter and marine archaeologist. Wagner asked Mrax to do research on the fleet at the Archive of the Indies in Seville, where the records of all treasure ships were kept. This was Marx’s first involvement with the 1715 fleet. He gathered a great deal of information on it and learned that there had been some survivors from the ships that were close to shore. Their firsthand accounts of the disaster helped the salvors find some of the wrecks. At this time, Marx only provided research on the 1715 fleet because he was pursuing other sunken ships.

Then, in 1963 Mel Fisher became involved when Wagner asked him to join, and Real Eight Company began operating as a full-time salvage company. Fisher also brought to the group Mo Molinar, an exceptional treasure hunter he had met in panama. By 1967, Bob Marx joined the crew to run four salvage boats for the company and three others for Mel Fisher. However, on 1972, Mel Fisher was pursuing the Atocha and Bob Marx, the Maravilla. The Real Eight Company experienced financial problems and they decided to sell to a group headed by former race car driver and Indianapolis winner Jim Rathman. Other members of the company, which became known as Circle Bar Salvage of Louisiana.

Marx remained involved with that group and then in 1981 he bought it from them. He then divided the wrecks with Mel Fisher, and the six wrecks that have been found are actively being salvaged by a number of subcontractors who are professional treasure hunters. John Brandon, one of the subcontractors, has been working on the 1715 fleet for more than 28 years and has recovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in gold, silver and jewels. Harold Holden has also been successfully salvaging treasure from the 1715 fleet’s wrecks for many years. Among his finds have been a gold locket at the end of a 10-foot-long braided gold chain valued at $850,000 and a gold box or picture holder with filigree doors valued at $1.5 million. In 1987, Holden, Brandon and Molinar found eight hundred gold coins worth $2.5 million. Many of these unusual and valuable items are now kept in Mel Fisher’s museums.

Marx says that one of the wrecks near Frederick Douglas Beach has produced the most coins. He estimates that from the time the first coins were found by Kip Wagner in 1955 to the present, at least $100 million in treasure has been salvaged and some of the gold coins are worth more each year.

Sources:
Lost Histories: “Exploring the World’s Most Famous Mysteries” by Joel Levy;
The Hunt for Amazing Treasures by Sondra Farrell Bazrod;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1715_Treasure_Fleet

Pic Sources:
The Hunt for Amazing Treasures by Sondra Farrell Bazrod page 150

Wendigo the Winter Cannibal Giant

2011-12-09T05:21:00.002+07:00

Wendigo is a Native American name for a Winter Cannibal Giant in northern North America. The name derives from the Ojibwa language for “Wiindigoo”, originally used by the Algonquian Indians tribe of the northern forests, they believed that Wendigo were cannibalistic giants with supernatural powers, one of which was the ability to possess people and turn them into Wendigo. The creature has various name such as Weetekow, Weetigo (Cree/Algonquian), Wendego, Wetiko, Windegoag, Witigo, Witiko. Reported sightings came from Eastern and Central Canada; northeastern United States. Based on witnesses descriptions, they’re typically larger than a human but not too much, with height around 6–9 feet, sometimes they’re covered in matted white fur, and other descriptions characterize them as practically hairless. Often, especially in the north country, they are missing some of the body parts that are most vulnerable to frostbite: toes and parts of the ears and nose. The creature has red or black and staring eyes also has large fangs and claws. Seen most often in winter, and it can swim in cold rivers. Runs swiftly. Has a strident voice. Sometimes rubs its body with tree resin and sand. Eats people, especially children.

There’s plenty of lore claiming that the Wendigo can possess the spirits of hunters, jumping bodies, perhaps, when its own has started to break down. According to Algernon Blackwood’s story “The Wendigo”, originally published in 1910, a pair of hunters encounter a creature in the Canadian woods that they had hoped was only a legend. Blackwood’s Wendigo is a mystical creature, representing the lure of the wilderness. Its voice resembles the sounds of the wild – falling water, wind, the call of birds and beasts. Grasping its victim, the Wendigo runs at such speed that the poor victim’s eyes bleed and his feet burn. It can take great leaps or run along the tops of trees. It will fly, repeatedly dropping its prey, as a hawk drops a fish, over and over again until it is dead. If the victim of the Wendigo does return to civilization, it is as a shattered shell of the individual, his mind crushed by the terror of the dark woods.

As with many of the creatures brought to life in the pages of gothic horror fiction, Blackwood’s Wendigo is inspired by a beast already present in folk mythology. In this case, Blackwood draws upon the folk tales of the Algonquian tribe of Native Americans. In some versions of these tales, the Wendigo is an evil spirit that influences weak and susceptible individuals to engage in horrific behavior. Specifically, when facing extreme conditions and starvation, the Algonquians believed that the spirit of the Wendigo may transform an individual into a cannibal. The victim then becomes a Wendigo.

Steve Pitt describes the creature this way:
"It is something like a werewolf on steroids. It stands more than six metres tall in its bare feet, looks like a walking corpse and smells like rotting meat. It has long, stringy hair and a heart of ice. Sometimes a Wendigo breathes fire. It can talk, but mostly it hisses and howls. Wendigos can fly on the winds of a blizzard or walk across water without sinking. They are stronger than a grizzly bear and run faster than any human being, which is bad news because human flesh happens to be a Wendigo’s favourite food. A Wendigo’s appetite is insatiable. Indeed, the more it eats, the hungrier it gets." (Legion Magazine January/February 2003)

Loren Coleman suggests that Native American folklore has a layer of truth that should not be dismissed. Stories of Wendigo, he claims, may contain information about actual encounters between native peoples and a group of large, hairy hominids. He writes:
"In eastern North America, a specific variety of manlike hairy hominid allegedly exists which exhibit aggressive behavior, hair covering the face in a mask like fashion, occasionally piebald coloring, an infrequent protruding stomach, and distinctive curved, five-toed splayed footprints. They are inhabitants of the northern forests." (Coleman, Crypto, ‘Hominology Special Number 1,’ April 7, 2001)

Though these creatures were called by many different names by the various tribes, they are, according to Coleman, the beings described by the Algonquians as Wendigo. In Coleman’s examination of native folk tales a picture of the Wendigo begins to develop that looks more like a flesh-and-blood primate than like the mystical otherworldly being of Blackwood’s tale. The Wendigo that Coleman describes are large, hairy creatures with big hands and bear-like faces. They wear no clothes and do not employ the bow, instead using stones for weapons – hence the origin of the term ‘Stone Giants.’ They are cannibals, though it is unclear whether this means that they eat members of their own group or that they eat human prey.

Coleman suggests that accounts of human encounters with Wendigo can be found not only in native folk tales but also in stories told by early European settlers to North America. One such European encounter even comes from the pre-Columbian period:

"Leif Erickson wrote in 986 A.D. of encountering monsters that were ugly, hairy, and swarthy with great black eyes. In 1603, on Samuel de Champlain’s first voyage to eastern Canada, the local natives informed the explorer of the Gougou, a giant hairy beast that lived in the northern forests and was much feared by the Micmac. A London Times article of 1784 records the capture of hair-covered hominids by local natives, near Lake of the Woods, in south-central Canada. In the Boston Gazette of July 1793, a dispatch appeared from Charleston, South Carolina, May 17, 1793, concerning a creature seen in North Carolina. The account centers on Bald Mountain, where the local residents call it Yahoo, while the Indians give it the name of Chickly Cudly." (Coleman, Crypto, April 7, 2001)

Coleman, then, not only brings the Wendigo out of fiction and folklore to stalk the forests of eastern Canada, he also sees the creature as a biological creature, an undiscovered primate.

Sources:
Mysterious Creatures: “A Guide to Cryptozoology” by George M. Eberhart;
The Supernatural Book of Monsters, Demons, Spirits and Ghouls by Alex Irvine;
Unexplained! Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena” by Jerome Clark;
Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs: “Mysterious Creatures, Lost Worlds, and Amazing Inventions” by Gregory L. Reece

Pic Source:
The Supernatural Book of Monsters, Demons, Spirits and Ghouls by Alex Irvine page 56

Doppelganger Phenomenon

2011-12-06T06:45:00.000+07:00

A doppelganger also known as bilocation is an exact duplicate of a living person in whose company it appears. “Doppelganger” is a German term for “double-goer.” The doppelganger’s movements are a mirror of its companion’s; it is seemingly oblivious to eyewitnesses and does not utter a word. One theory is that a doppelgänger is the product of some kind of psychic phenomenon, such as telepathy or hallucination, existing in the mind of the person it is duplicating. The ability to be seen in two different places at the same time, was a talent shared by many saints in 17th century. In some cases, the doppelganger appears to be several years older than the person viewing it. To believers, this suggests that a doppelganger might be an image from the future. In Celtic folklore this phenomenon is known as the Fetch and there is belief that should you see your double, your death is imminent.

On rare occasion a person who is about to die sees his own wraith. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was said to have seen his own double in Italy shortly before he drowned a few days later during a storm in the Bay of Spezia.

John Aubrey, the 17th century antiquary and author, recorded a number of cases. An undated case from England tells of a Sir William Napier who while on a journey to Berkshire, stopped at an inn for the night and he was shocked to see a corpse on the bed in his room, and even more shocked to see that the corpse was himself! The vision vanished, but Napier died soon thereafter. Queen Elizabeth I was also believed to have viewed her own corpse just before her death.

In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected as the President of the United States and entered the White House. One night, shortly after his election, he looked into his bedroom mirror and saw a most alarming sight. He recalled: ‘My face had two separate and distinct images one of which was a little paler than the other one.’ After a while both images vanished without a trace and reappeared later the same night. And then he share his experience with his wife. After hearing about her husband’s experience, her wife, Mary Todd Lincoln told him she believed the paleness one was a bad omen and that Lincoln would serve his first presidential term but would not live to complete his second. The prediction proved to be true, on April 14th 1865, during his second term election as President, he was shot by John Wilkes Booth during a performance at Ford’s Theatre in Washington and died shortly afterwards.

However, not all appearances of doubles are death omens, many also believed that should you encounter such a spectre in the early morning you are assured of a long life. They may also be out-of-body projections.

One of the most prominent exponents was St. Martin de Porres, a 17th century priest who spent all his religious life in a monastery of the Holy Rosary in Lima. Although he never left Peru his figure was seen in Mexico, China, Japan, the Philippine Islands and France. A merchant, who had business to conclude in Mexico, visited the priest and asked for his blessing before he set off on his journey. But when the merchant reached Mexico City he fell ill. Lying in his bed he prayed for help and that night St. Martin appeared at his bedside and prescribed a medicine, after which he disappeared. On being restored to full health, the merchant returned to Lima and discovered that St. Martin had never left his monastery.

In May 1905 Sir Frederic Carne Rasch, the member of Parliament for the Chelmsford division of Mid-Essex, was suffering from an attack of influenza and unable to attend an important debate in the House of Commons. His colleague Sir Gilbert Parker, who knew his illness, was surprised when on looking around the chamber he saw Sir Frederic. He described his face as being ‘remarkably pallid’ and his expression as ‘steely’. Three other politicians, including the future Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, claimed to have also seen their colleague, who vanished before the vote was taken. When Sir Frederic finally returned to full health and resumed his parliamentary duties, he apologized to his fellow members for his ghostly appearance and said that he had been totally unaware of the incident.

“How They Met Themselves” painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This painting is inspired by the doppelganger or fetch phenomenon

The author John Cowper Powys also seems to have acquired the ability to bilocate. When he was living in America during the early part of the last century he would occasionally travel some 30 miles away from his home to visit his fellow writer Theodore Dreiser in New York. One night as he was leaving to catch his train to return home, he told Dreiser that he would appear to him later in the evening. A couple hours later Dreiser looked up from a book he was reading to see the form of Powys surrounded by a pale white glow standing in front of him. As Dreiser rose to greet him, the apparition vanished. Astonished by what he had seen, Dreiser immediately phoned Powys to discover that his friend was indeed back at his home in the Hudson valley.

The poet and author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was returning from Strasbourg when he saw coming towards him his own figure dressed in a grey suit. The apparition vanished before reaching him. Although Goethe was worried that this could be an omen of his imminent death, he went on to enjoy a long and eventful life. Few years later he was riding down the same road but this time in the direction of Strasbourg when he suddenly realized that he was attired in exactly the same suit of clothes that he had seen his ghostly double wearing. Is it possible that he have witnessed a vision from the future?

In Latvia, Emilie Sagee, a teacher who working at a finishing school for young ladies often seen by her pupils in two places in the school at the same time. On one occasion, while she was writing on the blackboard her class was astonished to see her double looking over her shoulder. At first neither the staff nor the headmistress believed any of these stories but when the sightings increased, they began to worry. One day the girls in Miss Sagee’s class were waiting for another teacher. Some of them looked outside the window and saw Miss Sagee picking flowers in the garden, then turned around to see her double standing in front of the class. Three of the girls approached the phantom and one of them even walked through the ghostly image which after a few minutes began to fade away.

There are number of theories which attempt to explain for the appearance of this phenomena. Many believe telepathy provide the answer, while other expert believe that astral projection could be another explanation. However none of the theories could provide satisfied explanation.

Sources:
Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena: “Ghosts and Haunted Places” by Rosemary Ellen Guiley;
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena by Patricia D. Netzley;
Paranormal Magazine Issue 54 December 2010: “Double Trouble” by John Stoker

Pic Source:
Paranormal Magazine Issue 54 December 2010 page 18

Mystery of the Bog Bodies

2011-12-02T14:11:00.000+07:00

Bog bodies are often found in the peat bogs of Northern Europe, from Ireland and the United Kingdom to the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany over the past 300 years. The first recorded specimen was uncovered in 1791 in the Netherlands, and hundreds more have been discovered since then as peat in the ancient sphagnum bogs has been mined over the years. As diggers work their way through a level of peat, a shovel will hit something that feels different, or perhaps a hand will come tumbling out of the ragged mass of plant material. Further investigation in the surrounding peat can bring a whole body into view. Most of the corpses are those of ancient Europeans—Celts and Germanic tribesmen who lived in the northern forests while the Romans lived in the lands to the south. The majority of these bog mummies or bog bodies date to between the first century B.c. and the fourth century A.D., though the oldest dates from the Mesolithic period (about 10,000 years ago). They are commonly given names related to the locale where they are discovered.

There are also some medieval and modern examples. The astonishing preservative powers of the bogs have prevented the decay of these ancient remains so effectively that, although the skeleton does not usually survive, we have the skin, internal organs, stomach (sometimes including the remains of the last meal), eyes, brains, and hair. Bog waters are suffused with tannins (organic acids) and even aldehydes, which act to kill microorganisms, inhibit bacterial decomposition, and promote the preservation of soft tissues. So rich are bog waters in dissolved tannins from the plants within the bog that the waters are often stained brown by the tannin. This same brown appears in the skins of bog bodies. The ambient chemicals in a bog can act much like the tannin derived from bark that leather workers use to tan hides. The bog bodies are essentially tanned into leather by their immersion, which accounts for their leathery appearance as modern specimens. But how and why did these people meet their death in remote bogs thousands of years ago? One thing we do know is that a large amount of the bodies recovered show signs of extreme violence, including signs of torture and murder.

More than 80 bodies have been recovered from the bogs of Ireland in the past two centuries, seven of which have been radiocarbon dated. Unlike the rest of Northern Europe, the majority of these bodies belong to the late medieval or post-medieval period, though there are some from the Iron Age.

The earliest recorded find of a bog bodies in Europe is the Kibbelgaarn body in the Netherlands, unearthed in 1791. In the 19th and 20th centuries there were hundreds of discoveries made in Holland. Gallagh Man is one Iron Age example, radiocarbon dated to between 470 and 120 B.C., found by the O'Kelly family in 1821 at Gallagh, near Castleblakeney, County Galway. Gallagh Man was naked but a deerskin cloak tied at the throat with a band of willow rods, which may have been used as a strangling device. As with many other bog bodies that suffered violence, his hair had been cropped short. He may have been a criminal and suffered public execution, as the body had been staked to the ground with pointed wooden sticks, possibly to prevent his soul from escaping, a practice known from some Danish bog bodies.

In 1879 Huldremose Woman, found in a bog near Ramten, Jutland, Denmark, was discovered with two skin capes, a woollen skirt, a scarf, and a hair band. Examination of the body revealed the gruesome details that her arms and legs had been repeatedly hacked, one arm being cut completely off, before she was deposited in the peat. The woman met this brutal death sometime between 160 B.c. and A.D. 340.

Perhaps the most famous of these bog bodies is Tollund Man, found in May 1950, near the village of Tollund in Denmark, by two brothers cutting peat. When the men first glimpsed the face staring up at them, they thought it was a recent murder victim and immediately contacted the local police. But subsequent radiocarbon dating of Tollund Man's hair showed that he had died around 350 B.c. During the operation to remove the body from his resting place, one of the helpers collapsed and died of a heart attack. Perhaps, as the late Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob suggested, this was a case of the bog claiming a life for a life. Tollund Man's body had been arranged in a fetal position at the time of death, and was naked apart from a pointed skin cap and a hide belt. His hair had been cropped extremely short and there was stubble clearly visible on his chin and upper lip. A rope consisting of two leather thongs twisted together was pulled tightly around his neck, and it is believed that he was probably hanged or garroted using this rope.

Tollund Man

Tests on the contents of his stomach reveal that Tollund Man's last meal had been a kind of vegetable and seed soup. An interesting fact about the soup is that its ingredients were a mixture of various kinds of wild and cultivated seeds, which included such an unusual quantity of knotweed that it must have been gathered especially for the purpose. One possibility is that the knotweed was an important ingredient in a ritual last meal that was somehow part of a sacred execution rite. This possibility is also suggested by the careful arrangement of the body and the fact that his eyes and mouth had been closed.

In 1952, near Windeby in Schleswig-Holstein, northern Germany, two bodies were found in a small bog. The first turned out to be male who had been strangled and then placed in the bog, the body held down by sharpened branches stuck firmly into the peat around him. The second body was that of a young girl of about 14 years of age, dating to the first century A.D. The girl had been blindfolded with a strip of cloth before being drowned in the bog, her body secured by a large stone and branches from a birch tree.

In 1978, the body of a girl aged between 25 and 30 was discovered in Meenybradden Bog, near Ardara, County Donegal, Ireland. The girl, with short cropped hair and eyelashes and eyelids still intact, had been wrapped in a woollen cloak and carefully placed in the grave. There was no evidence of violence on the body, which was radiocarbon dated to A.D. 1570. The cause of death, and why she was buried in the bog, is still a mystery.

Around 1980s, Lindow Man was unearthed. The body is naked but with an arm band made of fox fur and a thin rope around his neck. Lindow Man had been in his 20s when he died between A.D. 50 and A.D. 100. Examination of the body revealed that he had been hit twice on the crown of his head, probably with an axe, with sufficient force to detach chips of his skull into his brain. He had also been strangled using the leather garrote still remaining around his neck, and there was a gash on the throat, which may indicate that his throat had been cut. His hair had been trimmed (using scissors) two or three days before he met his death. The contents of his stomach included burned bread and traces of pollen from mistletoe, a plant sacred to the Celts. Celtic scholar and archaeologist Dr. Anne Ross believes that the threefold death suffered by Lindow Man, along with the blackened crust in his stomach, and the traces of mistletoe, suggest that the man was the victim of a Druidic sacrifice.

Two Irish bog bodies were found in 2003. The first was discovered in Clonycavan, County Meath, north of Dublin called the Clonycavan Man and the second in Croghan, County Offaly, just 25 miles away. Old Croghan Man, as he has become known, was in his mid-20s, a giant at around 6-feet 6-inches tall. He has been dated between 362 B.C. and 175 B.C.

Clonycavan Man, a young male around 5-feet 2-inches tall, dates from between 392 B.c. and 201 B.C. In common with other bog bodies, they appear to have been brutally tortured before their deaths, probably as ritual sacrifices. While Old Croghan Man's nipples had been cut and he had been stabbed in the ribs. A cut on his arm indicates that he had tried to defend himself during the attack. There were also holes in both his upper arms, where a hazel rope withy had been passed through to bind him. He was later decapitated and dismembered before being buried in the bog. In contrast to his violent end, Croghan Man's body revealed that he had well-manicured nails and relatively smooth hands, which indicate somebody who had probably never performed any manual work; perhaps he was a priest or a member of the aristocracy. Clonycavan Man suffered a massive wound to the head, caused by a heavy axe that shattered his skull, and also several other injuries on his body. One particularly distinctive feature was his unusual raised hairstyle, for which he had used a kind of Iron Age hair gel, actually a form of resin that had probably come from south-western France or Spain.

A more recent find from northern Germany, from Uchte, Lower Saxony, was at first thought to be the body of a teenage murder victim. But when scientists reexamined the body in January of 2005 it was identified as a young girl aged between 16 and 20, who had been deposited in the bog in about 650 B.C. She subsequently became known as the Girl of the Uchter Moor. Even her hair had been preserved, though archaeologists weren't sure whether it was originally blonde or black, as the peat turns all hair reddish.

Ned Kelly, keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, has developed a theory to explain why 40 bodies discovered in Irish bogland were made along tribal, political, and royal boundaries. His belief is that the burials are offerings to fertility gods by kings to guarantee a successful reign. This is certainly a possible explanation for many of the Irish bog bodies, but what of the rest of Northern Europe? The variety of different ways in which many of these people were killed would suggest something more than murder, probably some kind of ritual sacrifice.

The ancient Roman historian Tacitus wrote Germania, a contemporary account of the German tribes in the first century A.D., in which he described the Germans' capital punishment of criminals and outcasts by staking them in the bogs. He mentions some interesting customs connected with crime and punishment in their culture, including how "cowards, shirkers, and those guilty of unnatural vices" were forced down into the bog under a wicker hurdle. He also states that adulterous wives were stripped naked, had their heads shaved, and were turned out of the house and flogged through the village. There are certainly indications from Tacitus that suggest that many of the victims in the bogs had broken some law or taboo of the society for which they were executed. It is obvious that there can never be one single explanation for the gruesome but compelling mystery of the bog bodies, considering the vast array of possible theories.

Sources:
Grave Secrets of Dinosaurs: “Soft Tissues, and Hard Sciences” by Phillip Manning;
Hidden History: “Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries” by Brian Haughton

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tollundmannen.jpg

Assassins of Persia

2011-11-29T06:03:00.001+07:00

Among the world’s most famous secret societies, the Assassins also known as the Hashshashin emerged out in the late eleventh century CE, were a secret brotherhood based in the impenetrable mountain fortress of Alamut and led by a charismatic Svengali-figure, Sheikh Hasan-i Sabbah. The name ‘Assassins’, believed to derive either from the name of their leader or from their alleged drug use (called the Hashish), was a derogatory one given the sect by its enemies. They called themselves the ad-dawa al-jadida, ‘the new doctrine’. They were told if they wished to return to paradise, they must swear absolute obedience to Hasan and carry out assassinations at his command. Under the influence of more hashish, the brainwashed acolytes became deadly killing machines, who could be directed at the sect’s enemies. They feared no danger when they were dispatched to kill targets chosen by their leader and they did play a major role in shaping the politics and power balance of the medieval world through terror and assassination. During their sinister reign they destabilised Persia, governed parts of Syria and performed contract killings for the crusaders.

Hasan i-Sabbah

Their origins lie in the turbulent and complex history of Islamic schisms, since they were a branch of the Isma’ili Shiite Fatimids. The Fatimids were a dynasty of Shiite Muslims who claimed descent from Fatima, daughter of the Prophet, and therefore considered themselves to be rightful rulers of the Islamic Empire, rather than the Sunni Abbasid caliphate. The Fatimids started off in Yemen, but were constituted as a kind of secret society themselves. Their modus operandi was to send missionaries to lands outside their rule, where they would practise their faith in secret and seek to convert leading citizens, such as generals and rulers, and so take control (although they also made free use of armies, invasion and other more usual forms of conquest). By the 11th century their influence had spread as far afield as Spain, Sicily and Sardinia, and a Fatimid dynasty ruled large parts of North Africa and the Near East from Cairo.

The Assassins were a particularly fervent group of Fatimid missionaries, their founder, Hassan-i-Sabah, came from a Persian Shiite family but converted to the Ismaili sect after a long period of spiritual doubt. In 1078 he went to Cairo, then the center of Ismaili activity, and sought permission from the Caliph to spread the Ismaili faith in Persia. The Caliph agreed, but required that Hassan pledge to support the claim of the Caliph’s eldest son Nizar to the Caliphate. From this pledge came the formal name of Hassan’s order, the Nizaris.

In the years that followed, Hassan wandered Persia, teaching the Ismaili faith and winning converts. In 1090 he seized control of the fortress at Alamut, high in the northern mountains of Iran, and made it his center of operations. (According to Marco Polo, who visited Alamut in 1271, the stronghold included fabulous gardens, occupied by lovely women whom the reigning cult leaders used to good advantage.) From this impregnable base they developed their ideology and their power, becoming the Assassins of legend. For the Assassins, targeted murder of high-ranking members of inimical branches of Islam became a religious duty and a means of spreading their political and religious influence. There is no real evidence that they used drugs or brainwashing techniques, but they are believed to have gone about their sinister business with grim efficiency. Individuals or small cells of Assassins would infiltrate the hometown of the target and live there quietly for some time, disguised as tradesmen or religious ascetics. Observing the target carefully over time they would build up a picture of his movements and choose the right moment to strike. Usually they would carry out the assassination in public, often in the mosque during Friday prayers. The Assassins preferred to use a dagger, at close range, to minimise the chances of escape for the target. However, they took care not to injure anyone else and did not allow suicide, preferring to be killed by the victim’s guards.

Hassan imposed a strict hierarchy on his followers. Members of the lowest rank of the order, who carried out assassinations, had the title of fidai or devotee. According to medieval accounts, Hassan reinforced the loyalty of his followers with a clever trick. After completing a course of martial arts training, each fidai was given wine drugged with hashish, and taken into a hidden garden full of fruit trees, modeled on the paradise described in the Quran, where wine flowed in streams among gilded pavilions and lovely women provided every sensual delight. The fidai stayed there for a few days, until another dose of drugged wine returned him to his ordinary life. Convinced that Hassan had literally transported them to Paradise and back, the fidais readily risked their lives for him in the belief that death simply meant a one-way trip back to the garden.

In 1092 the Assassins claimed their first victim, Nizam al- Mulk, vizier for one of the Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad. In 1094, two years after the Caliph died and Nizar’s claim to the succession failed, Hassan was strong enough to become an independent force, seizing additional mountain strongholds as far west as Syria and using these to extend his reach through the Middle East. Soon afterwards they made alliance with Ridwan, the ruler of Aleppo, in Syria, and for two decades became de facto rulers of the area. After Ridwan’s death, however, his successor Ibn al-Khashab drove them out of the area and thus made their list, meeting a sticky end at the point of an Assassin’s dagger in 1123.

The following year Hasan-i Sabbah died, but the sect continued to grow in strength through the early 12th century. His first two successors pursued his policies and made the Assassins a name to be feared throughout the Muslim world. The fourth head of the order, Hassan II, pursued a different course. After becoming Sheik of the order in 1162, he proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the prophet whose arrival marked the coming of the millennium, and abandoned Islam for a religion of his own invention centered on the teaching that “nothing is true, and everything is permissible.” After four years, he was murdered by his brother-in-law, but Hassan II’s troubled rule allowed the head of the Syrian branch of the Assassins, Rashid ad-Din Sinan known by his legendary title, ‘the Old Man of the Mountains’, to break free of Alamut’s control.

Syria at that time was divided between the Crusader kingdoms to the south and a Sunni Muslim kingdom centered on Aleppo in the north, and Sinan played these off against each other to maintain his own independence. By the late 12th century the Assassins in Syria had established

good relations with the Christian crusaders in the Levant, and in 1173 they briefly considered converting to Christianity, probably in order to benefit from favourable tax laws. However, Christians in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, jealous of their taxexempt status, objected, and negotiators sent by the Assassins were murdered. Relations were nevertheless maintained, and

in the Assassins the crusaders found a valuable ally against the Saracen king, Saladin. When the great Arab general Saladin (Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, 1138–93) took power in Aleppo, Sinan responded by ordering his death, but by this time Arab rulers had begun to learn Assassin ways and in 1175 Sinan’s agents failed twice.

In 1192 the Assassins became embroiled in the complex politics of the crusader kingdoms. Someone – historical speculation points to Richard I (the Lionheart) of England – hired them to polish off Conrad of Montferrat, king of Jerusalem. Conrad was a rival of Richard’s vassal Guy of Lusignan for the throne of Jerusalem.With support from Philip II of France and Leopold of Austria, Conrad replaced Guy as king in April 1192. His reign was short. On 28April he was returning from dinner at the house of a friend when he was set upon by two Assassins and stabbed to death. The sect continued to exert its sinister influence over Middle and Near Eastern politics until the mid-13th century.

After Sinan’s time, the Assassins moved away from their sectarian roots and became an organization of hired knives who killed for money. Like the rest of the Arab world, they were fatally unprepared for the arrival of the Mongol armies in the middle of the thirteenth century. Weakened in part by the depredations of the Assassins, the Abbasid caliphate was in no position to resist the marauding Mongol hordes. Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis and brother of Kublai, was dispatched to conquer Persia and crush the Assassins. In 1256 he arrived at the gates of Alamut with the largest Mongol army ever assembled, but was not called upon to test the fortress’s supposedly impregnable defences because the Assassin sheikh promptly surrendered in the misguided hope of receiving mercy. Hulagu razed the fortress to the ground, and by 1265 the last remaining Assassin strongholds in Syria fell to another invading army under the Mameluke sultan, Baybars I.

After nearly 200 years of secret influence the Assassins were finished as a power in the region, but the Nizari Isma’ilis lived on, eventually breaking up into several groups, some of which still exist today. The most prominent of these are the Qäsim-Shâhîs, or Khojas, best known through their leader, the Aga Khan, last descendent of the fearsome Assassin sheikhs.

Sources:
Secret History by Joel Levy;
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies by John Michael Greer;
The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories by Michael Newton

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Asabah2.jpg

Temple of Angkor

2011-11-25T04:18:00.005+07:00

In 1860, Henri Mouhot, a French naturalist had gone to Indo-China in search of rare birds and insects. He didn't find rare birds or insects but found monumental highways, artificial waterways and magnificently constructed towers. These he realized were not ordinary buildings but were the remnants of a splendid civilization. Unfortunately Mouhot fell sick and died of tropical fever. His reports were passed on to others. And all the details arrived at one conclusion - that there occurred a brilliant civilization. The minute details were later on discovered by the French government who set up an Exploration Commission. By 1885 they had worked up a chronology of the rulers and developed the outlines of a description of the civilization that had produced the wondrous city. They could document that Angkor had been constructed by a south-east Asian people, called Khmers. They developed militarily and technologically for 500 years. But the question which historians could not answer was that why these ancient peoples suddenly chose to abandon settlements that they labored so hard to build?

Angkor Wat was built for King Suryavarman II in the early 12th century

The civilization began with the trade and other contracts between India and South East Asia. It took spiritual inspiration from India. And after a few years modern Kampuchea was formed. It was called Phnom or Funan which meant 'mountain'. The founder of the Funan, according to the Khmer tales was Kaundinya, a Brahman. He came to the shore where a young woman paddled out in her canoe to greet him. She was Queen Willow Leaf, ruler of the country and daughter of a serpent deity. She was against Kaundinya, so she seized his ship. But Kaundinya proved to be more powerful. He shot a magic arrow into her craft. The queen realized that she was no match for him. So she made peace with him and shortly afterwards the two married. And from their union were born the ancestors of Funan rulers and generations of Khmer rulers.

The kingdom progressed for five centuries and then around 550 A.D. the Funan Kingdom was overthrown by Jayavarman II. With him started the brilliant Khmer empire and a royal dynasty. This dynasty flourished for more than 600 years. Jayavarman, meaning 'protector of victory', was a military genius. He ruled for 48 years and unified the state and kept the state militarily strong. He set up a new capital on the mountain of Kulen. There he brought an Indian 'skilled in magic science' to exorcise all foreign demons and to establish the protection of his empire by Lord Siva. And to make his position all powerful, he declared himself as the God-king - the incarnation of Siva. The concept provided the mantle of legitimacy for 30 Khmer kings. It also became the inspirating force behind the feverish buildings which created the urban complex on and above the plain of Angkor. The civilization of Angkor was unique as it was a mixture of two influences—Indian and Javanese. It was built with sandstone and laterite, the rectangular structure (2,800 by 3,800 feet) faces west, in Hindu belief the direction taken by the dead when going to their next life.

Jayavarman created a hereditary office of high priest to assist in the task of administration. With him Jayavarman established a religious hierarchy to supervise every aspect of national life. Jayavarman was followed by his nephew Indravarman I. He ruled for 11 years and solidified his empire by building barrages and raised water storage lakes. With the facility of storage water, the condition of peasants improved. They could irrigate their land throughout the year. Indravarman's son and successor, Yasovarman I, also did much for the good of the kingdom. He constructed a funerary temple in the middle of a lake. He also created a stone pyramid and a barrage to the east of the royal city nearly 5 square miles in size.

Thus the construction work continued from generation to generation and the empire continued to prosper. Yasovarman was followed by Suryavarman who kept the torch of progress burning. Between 900 and 1200 Angkor achieved great prominence because of the rise of impressive temples in Angkor, including the famous temple that became known as Angkor Wat. It was built in the 12th century during the reign of Suryavarman II who ordered it to be built. Suryavarman II, dubbed one of the greatest Khmer kings, was a warrior-king and launched many attacks on the Dai Viet, which was highly resilient and resisted subjugation. Suryavarman had gained the throne through the violent means of killing his great uncle, King Dharanindravarman.

The architecture of Angkor Wat is in classical Khmer style. It was also a temple-mountain surrounded by a wide moat, crossed by a causeway on the east side. The state temple was dedicated to Vishnu, whom Suryavarman II considered the Protector of the Khmer empire, a departure from earlier rulers, who regarded Shiva as the protector of their kingdom. Five huge beehive-like towers dominate the skyline at Angkor Wat, while the long causeways and wide pools give a sense of freedom in space. This temple is considered the best example of Khmer architecture at its most refined state. Composing a half-square mile (200 hectares), Angkor Wat uses its massive proportions to astonish any visitor. Similar to large-scale monuments in Egypt, there is a long approach to the temple, an imposing entry foyer, followed by a center temple rising pyramid-like on three superimposed terraces. The external appearance resembles descriptions of Mount Vaikuntha, home of Vishnu.

But after his death, the Khmer empire entered a period of decline, primarily because there was no direct heir. The struggle for throne began. Jayavarman VII, (brother of the dead king) who was in exile came and took the reigns of the state into his hands. He gave new light to the kingdom—architecturally and politically. He built temples in memory of his parents—To Prohm and Preadh Khan. He also polished and completed the Earlier unfinished temples. He dedicated a temple to himself and the Buddha, called the Bayon.

The Bayon represented changes in architectural construction. Compared with earlier temples, this temple is cluttered and its 51 towers make the profile difficult to understand. More unique and unusual is the sculpture with huge smiling faces, which is a representation of Jayavarman VII in the aspects of Buddha. He died in 1219 and from the 13 th century onward, no Khmer king undertook the construction something like that of Jayavarman VII. In addition to weak kings, many social and economic factors contributed in weakening the empire. With the weakening process already started in the 13th century, darkness finally engulfed the whole civilization in the 15th century. The city fell to the Siamese. The end came about in seven months and Siamese returned with much loot and plunder. Siamese returned next year. But by that time the entire city was deserted. There was no trace that a civilization ever flourished in the jungles of Angkor. Where did the people disappear? Why didn't the people with such a splendid civilization and culture fight back? These are some of the questions which are still inviting attention of the archaeologists and historians to carry out more research.

Sources:
Encyclopedia of World History Volume II: “The Expanding World 600 C.E. to 1450” Edited by Marsha E. Ackerman, Michael J. Schroeder, Janice J. Terry, Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur, and Mark F. Whitters;
Sacred Places Around The World: “108 Destinations” by Brad Olsen;
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained Volume 2 by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger;
World Famous Unsolved Mysteries by Abhay Kumar Dubcy

Pic Source:
Encyclopedia of World History Volume II: “The Expanding World 600 C.E. to 1450” Edited by Marsha E. Ackerman, Michael J. Schroeder, Janice J. Terry, Jiu-Hwa Lo Upshur, and Mark F. Whitters page 234

St. Valentine's Day Massacre

2011-11-22T04:49:00.006+07:00

In 1920s, the city of Chicago, Illinois, became a hotbed of organized crime activity to the extent that underworld violence and corruption have become indelibly associated with the city’s image around the world. Even Charles “Lucky” Luciano, boss of New York’s Mafia, described Chicago in the 1920s as “a goddamn crazy place.” The heart of the problem was Alphonse "Scarface" Capone and his endless war to suppress rival bootleggers. Funded by the enormous profits from bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, the Chicago gangs employed bribery and coercion of police, politicians, and the judiciary to operate with virtual impunity throughout the city and outlying suburbs. As their dominance of the city progressed throughout the decade, personal rivalry and competition led to increasingly brazen acts of violence, culminating in America’s most infamous gangland killing called the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which seven affiliates of George “Bugs” Moran’s Northside gang were gunned down in the garage of a Clark Street trucking company.

St. Valentine's Day Massacre

In 1919 following the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing the manufacture, transport, and sale of alcoholic, criminals across the nation set up operations for producing, smuggling, and distributing liquor. In Chicago, career criminal Johnny Torrio, taking a lesson from the oil, railroad, and steel industries, established a trust to control the illicit liquor trade. After arranging the murder of his boss and taking over his Southside gang, Torrio successfully divided the city into territories and fostered an uneasy cooperation among the gangs on mutually beneficial issues such as price fixing and bribery of officials. He discouraged the use of violence except as a last resort, but squabbles over territory and personal affronts led to an average of 30 gangland killings per year in Chicago during the early 1920s. Many of these were high-profile attacks in public places such as restaurants, flower shops, and street corners that drew considerable attention from the press and public but rarely resulted in convictions. Chicago recorded 703 gangland murders during Prohibition, while countless other victims disappeared on “one-way rides” or were slain in Chicago’s suburbs.

Torrio retired in 1925 after surviving an attempt on his life and left the operation to his protégé, Al Capone. With Torrio gone, several rivals attempted to increase their territories and profits, and the city saw a sharp escalation in violence, with the annual number of gang killings doubling to 60 in 1925–26. Al Capone proved to be at least Torrio’s equal in both business sense and brutality, and by 1927, he had established himself as the undisputed ruler of Chicago’s Southside underworld. Still, the killings continued at a high rate as a way to deal with witnesses, disloyal members within gangs, and hijackings of alcohol shipments by rivals. The latter infraction became a particularly contentious issue between Capone and the Northside gang headed by Bugs Moran.

Throughout 1928, Moran intercepted so many of the Southsiders’ deliveries that Capone allegedly brought in killers from out of town to end the problem. Their elaborate plan began with a neutral party selling Moran a shipment of premium Canadian whiskey at a bargain price and arranging for a second transaction at a trucking company owned by Moran. An intermediary offered the load to Moran, and delivery was scheduled for the morning of February 14, 1929— St. Valentine’s Day—at Moran’s primary warehouse on North Clark Street. Capone imported two members of Detroit’s Purple Gang to watch the garage and telephone a waiting strike team when Moran arrived. Unfortunately, the spotters had Moran’s description but no photograph. Around 10:30 A.M. on D-Day, they marked the arrival of a man resembling Moran and made the fatal call.

In fact, the visitor was actually Dr. Reinhard Schwimmer, a Chicago optometrist and “gangster groupie” who enjoyed spending time with the North Side crowd whenever possible. Also present were brothers Frank and Pete Gusenberg (Moran’s frontline enforcers), Adam Meyer (a bookkeeper and also Moran’s business manager), Albert Kachellek a.k.a. James Clark (Moran’s second in command), Albert Weinshank (Moran’s operation cleaner), and John May (Moran’s car mechanic). Moran had overslept and was running late to the meeting. As he approached on foot, shortly before 11:00 A.M., Moran saw a police car stop in front of his garage and fled the scene, thus saving his own life. Inside the garage, two men in police uniforms brandished weapons and ordered all present to stand against a brick wall. Next, two or three other men dressed in civilian garb entered the warehouse. Before the victims recognized their peril, a storm of fire from .45- caliber Thompson submachine guns cut them down. Two of the dead or dying men were also blasted in the face at close range with a sawed-off shotgun.

While Chicago had long suffered a reputation for vice and corruption even before the start of Prohibition, the cold and calculated nature of this mass murder drew the shocked attention of the nation. In any case, the massacre effectively destroyed the North Side gang. Commentators and politicians pointed to it as an indicator of everything from the failure of Prohibition to the dehumanization associated with modern urban living. Chicago officials responded by temporarily closing most speakeasies and gambling dens and by launching several independent investigations. They brought in Calvin H. Goddard, one of the leading experts in the little-known field of forensic ballistics, who tested several machine guns—some owned by criminals and some by the police—and finally matched two of the weapons to bullets from the murders.

One of the Tommy guns used on St. Valentine’s Day was found in December 1929 after police arrested hitman Fred “Killer” Burke in Michigan. Burke denied any part in the slaughter and was never charged with the crime, instead receiving a life sentence for the murder of a Michigan police officer. Police were able to partially untangle the weapons’ trail of ownership through several gangsters and gun dealers but could not definitively connect any of them to the massacre.

Goddard’s efforts ended lingering suspicions that the killers were actually corrupt Chicago officers, and the attention his methods received during the high-profile investigation helped establish ballistics as a reliable investigative tool. Several arrests were made, but in the end no one was ever tried or convicted for the St. Valentine’s murders, and the case remains officially unsolved.

Sources:
Disasters, Accidents, and Crises In American History: “A Reference Guide to the Nation’s Most Catastrophic Events” by Ballard C. Campbell;
The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories by Michael Newton;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Valentine%27s_Day_massacre

Pic Source:
http://bookclubs.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Mystery/Libby-Hellmann-on-The-St-Valentine-s-Day-Massacre/td-p/862368

Moodus Noises

2011-11-18T05:56:00.005+07:00

Moodus noises are underground rumbling sounds and tremors that have occurred for centuries near the Moodus River in Connecticut. In fact, the river’s name comes from Native Americans who inhabited the region and attributed these sounds and tremors to evil gods. They called the area Matchitmoodus, a Wangunk Indian name meaning “Place of Bad Noises.” The noises can be heard most strongly from Cave Hill, located next to Mt. Tom and owned by the Cave Hill Resort. The Puritans who settled in the region during the 1670s also heard the noises, but they attributed the phenomena to the devil. The swarms of tremors at Moodus, which recur periodically and whose cause is unknown, often compared to distant thunder or cannon fire, and the noises have long occurred there. While scientists have offered various theories as to what causes the quakes, no one is sure why they are so noisy and why they occur in that particular place and depth: about a mile deep in an area a few hundred yards wide.

According to local legend, the Wangunk created a religion around the noises, and they believe that the area was the dwelling place of a vengeful god called Hobbamock. They said the god is very angry because the Europeans had come to Connecticut. The Colonial settlers speculate that the noises is the fights between the white magic witches of Moodus and the black magic witches of Haddam. Usually the fights took place in a cavern lighted by a great carbuncle under Mount Tom. When the evil witches tired of the fights, he would blow the white witches out of the cavern, extinguishing light of the carbuncle and creating the great peals of thunder.

In 1760s the Moodus noises had caused so much concern. Even King George III of England sent an alchemist, Dr. Steel, to investigate and to find the source. Local people say that Dr. Steel attempted to solve the problem by removing a giant pearl blocking the mouth of a cave near the river. It is uncertain if Steel actually removed anything at the cave, but interestingly the noises and tremors became reduced and less frequent. However in 1816 and 1817 the tremors turned from little tremors into large quakes.

At that time the scientists and researchers concluded that the noises were caused by underground gases or chemical explosions. While scholars of the 20th century concluded that seismic forces were to blame as the source of the noises. But in 1980s, when scientists declared that the Moodus noises were nothing more than the micro earthquakes, the phenomena were still a matter of controversy.

Sources:
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena by Patricia D. Netzley;
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/08/06/nyregion/a-steady-observer-for-trembling-moodus.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodus,_Connecticut

Pic Source:
http://www.city-data.com/city/Moodus-Connecticut.html#

Cursed Stone of Glavendrup

2011-11-15T04:42:00.007+07:00

Denmark is well supplied with runic inscriptions, in the village of Glavendrup on the central island Funen there is a huge rune stone with the longest inscription, and it has a curse on it. The Glavendrup Stone Ship and runestone are dates from the early 10th century, the middle of the Viking age. It has 60 meters or 67 yards long, and has a runic stone at its Western end. The runestone forms the end of a stone ship. There are other megaliths in the vicinity, including memorial stones with Latin characters from the early 20th century. In the stone ship, nine graves have been found, but they were all empty. The stone was found in 1794, narrowly missed being turned into building material in 1808, and finally placed where we can see it today in 1906. Glavendrup runestone is located a 15 minute drive Northwest of Odense Airport on Funen.

The Glavendrup Runestone

The inscription tells a story that the stone is dedicated to the memory of a man named Alle (Ali), and was placed there by his wife (Ragnhild) and sons, and blessed by the god Thor. It has been noted that Thor is the only Norse god who is invoked on any Viking Age runestones. And then it ends with a curse threatening to turn anyone who tampers with the stone or drags it away, into a “raete” (rita). Strangely enough present day rune experts have no idea what a “raete” is, but it is used as a threat in several other connections. However Ragnhild, wasn't just married to Alle, Ragnhild also had another runic stone made for another husband named Gunulf, known as the Tryggevaelde Runic Stone, carved by the same rune carver, Sote (Soti). The Tryggevaelde Runic Stone was originally placed near the East coast of Zealand but has been moved to the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen.

Here is the Old Norse translation from the inscription that carved on the Glavendrup stone:
A: Ragnhildr setti stein þessa eptir Ála sölva, véaliðs heiðverðan þegn.
B: Ála synir gerðu kumbl þessa eptir föður sinn ok hans kona eptir ver sinn, en Sóti reist rúnar þessa eptir dróttin sinn. Þórr vígi þessa rúnar.
C: At rita sá verði er stein þenna elti eða eptir annan dragi.

English translation:
A: ‘Ragnhildr placed this stone in memory of Áli the pale (?), the worthy thane of the véalið (‘army of the shrines’).
B: Áli’s sons made this monument in memory of their father, and his wife for her husband, but Sóti carved these runes in memory of his lord. May Thor consecrate these runes.
C: May he become a rita who removes (lit. ‘puts to flight’) this stone or distorts it after (i.e. for) someone else.’

According to McKinnell, Simek & Dwell (2004) this inscription is carved on the three sides of a very large reddish granite boulder (height 1.88 m, width of side A 1.42 m, of side B 1.59 m, of side C 55cm) that serves as the ‘prow-post’ of a ship-setting made of large stones. It is the longest surviving runic inscription in Denmark. The Ragnhildr who is named here also commissioned the Tryggevælde stone, Zealand, in memory of her (previous?) husband; it ends with a very similar curse, but does not include the dedication to Thor.

In C, rita (rata, ræta) may be interpreted as ‘sorcerer?’, and ‘to become a rita’ must mean something shameful along similar lines; this is at least implied by a connection with the term ergi ‘passive sexual perversion’ on the Saleby rune-stone. The definition of rita as a ‘pejorative term for an evil-doer’, a sorcerer (warlock) or ‘fiend’ is perhaps too mild a euphemism for what is meant. This kind of formula is found on a total of seven Danish runestones and although three of them are from Northern Jutland, there are also examples from Fyn, Zealand, Scania and Västergötland. The verbal form ailti (here 3rd pers. subj.) should probably be interpreted as ‘who damages’ or ‘who destroys’. It might possibly refer to removal and re-use of the stone for another similar monument.

In view of this, the end of the Glavendrup inscription might also be translated literally ‘or drags it away to commemorate someone else’; however this boulder is so massive that it would be very difficult to remove it physically.

Sources:
Gods and Mythological Beings in the Younger Futhark in Runes, Magic and Religion : A Sourcebook by McKinnell, J. and Simek, R. and Dwel, K. (2004);
Paranormal: Exploring the World of the Unexplained Issue 56 “Dane-lore: 10 of the Weirdest Sites in Denmark” by: Dr. Lars Thomas;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glavendrup_stone;
http://www.vikingdenmark.com/glavendrup-stone-ship-runic-stone-funen-denmark.html

Pic Source:
Paranormal: Exploring the World of the Unexplained Issue 56 page 23

Sunken Treasure of Admiral Nakhimov

2011-11-11T05:19:00.015+07:00

On 14 October 1980, a press conference held by 83 year old Ryoichi Sasakawa, the Chairman of the Japanese Shipbuilding Industry Foundation at the Tokyo Press Club. Next to him was a small grey ingot, made of platinum. It was stated that the ingot had been salvaged from the Russian armed cruiser, Admiral Nakhimov. The cruiser sunk on 28 May 1905 by the Japanese fleet during the Russo-Japanese war. It was reported to be only a tiny part of treasure worth £1,000 million, however the total value of the sunken treasure to be expected to exceed £1,700 million. There was mention of 5,500 boxes, each containing 5,000 British gold sovereigns, together with 30 platinum bars and 48 gold bars. The Admiral Nakhimov immediately became the richest treasure ship of all time, however Sasakawa offered to turn it over to the Russia, in return for the Kurile Islands to Japan, which they had seized at the end of the Second World War.

The Admiral Nakhimov

Admiral Nakhimov, an armed cruiser of 8,524 gross tons, 333 feet long, with a crew of 567. Built in 1885 and then largely reconstructed in a British shipyard in 1899, the Admiral Nakhimov was one of the more interesting naval ships in the late 19th century. She was modeled after the British Royal Navy Imperieuse class cruisers. The Nakhimov was considered a more successful design and equipped with 203 mm guns, which were lighter and their number could be doubled.

The story of the Admiral Nakhimov treasure began in February 1904 when, provoked by recent Russian territorial expansionism in the east, Japan carried out a surprise torpedo attack on the Russian Far Eastern Fleet in Port Arthur. On October a Russian reinforcement fleet that included four new Borodino-class battleships was ready to depart from the Baltic Sea. Tsar Nicholas II hoped that deploying a strengthened navy would reassert Russian control over the eastern seas. One of the older ships was the Admiral Nakhimov. Her main armament consisted of eight 6-inch guns and ten 4.7-inch guns, but it did have a top speed of 17.5 knots, and it was for this reason that it had been selected for a special mission.

On 20 October 1904, under Admiral Rozhdestvensky command, the Russian fleet entered the North Sea. The competence of its command quickly came into question when, on 22 October, Russian guns opened fire on the hull fishing fleet in the mistaken belief that they had run into Japanese torpedo boats. The result was the sinking of four innocent trawlers. In the general confusion the Russians even managed to fire on their own ships. It was not a good omen. However the fleet passed through the English Channel without further incident.

On 27 May 1905, the Russian fleet was in the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan, en route to Vladivostok, when it sailed within range of the guns of the Japanese Imperial fleet, lying in wait for them under the command of Admiral Heihachiro Togo. The Japanese fleet was smaller than the Russians but it had better design, equipment and superior maneuverability thanks to British technical assistance. Within twenty-four hours the Russians had lost all eight of their battleships and four cruiser, the Admiral Nakhimov was among those ships damaged during the battle. She began sinking, gradually but inexorably. At daybreak, the remaining crew abandoned ship in the less badly damaged boats; they were soon picked up and made prisoner by the auxiliary cruiser Sado Maru. They were able to watch from the deck of their captors' ship as their old ironclad was swallowed by the sea, just east of Tsushima Island. The wreck site has been confirmed at 34° 34'N, 129° 32'E. Although their ship was lost in action, 626 of the crew were rescued; only 25 were lost.

Stories of fabulous sunken treasure aboard the Admiral Nakhimov began to surface soon after the battle, but salvage was not technically feasible at that time.Almost twenty years later, an ambitious teacher in the Japanese Naval School, by the name of Suzuki, began to interested about the Admiral Nakhimov treasure. In 1932 he met Hishida, his old friend in a Tokyo restaurant. That meeting was to change Suzuki’s life. Over thirty years he would spend the rest of his days, in an unending quest for the Admiral Nakhimov treasure. He never give up because his belief was based on the information provided by his friend Hishida. Hishida told Suzuki that another friend, Tanaka, had recently been approached by two Russian survivors of the battle, the 2nd Paymaster of the Admiral Nakhimov, Suzanov, and Rear-Admiral Natralof from the Russian flagship Suvovov, with a proposal for salvaging the gold and platinum on board the Admiral Nakhimov. There were various further items of supporting evidence. The Japanese government had received reports on 25 October and 19 November, from their embassies in Paris and Berlin respectively, that the Russians had succeeded in selling foreign bonds for 700 million French francs and 800 million German marks, all of which had apparently been converted into pound sterling and placed on board the Admiral Nakhimov.

Suzuki convinced that he knew exactly where the gold has been stowed. He had made the acquaintance of a tortoiseshell merchant called Eiso Ezaki, from Nagasaki City. Ezaki moved extensively in Russians circles, had friends in high places and had even constructed a model of the Admiral Nakhimov out of tortoiseshell for the Tsar. According to Ezaki the gold was stowed in the aft section of the third deck.

In August 1932 a team of 100 men began the search for the Admiral Nakhimov, deploying eight boats and dragging wires between them. On 16 January 1933 their efforts were finally rewarded. A large iron and steel vessel, fitting the dimensions of the Admiral Nakhimov, was discovered six miles east of Kami Tsushima on Tsushima Island. Salvaged operations began almost immediately and continued until September. It became clear that the Admiral Nakhimov was not going to be an easy ship to penetrate. The team did not have the necessary financial resources, nor did it have adequately trained divers. When japan entered the Second World war, operations were suspended and all the divers and crew were conscripted into the Japanese navy. All work on the Admiral Nakhimov was stopped.

In February 1944 the Japanese government itself ordered Suzuki to recommence operations for salvaging the gold on the Admiral Nakhimov and financed the operation to the tune of $500,000. However after the war Suzuki was advised not to restart operations until peace treaty with the United States had been signed. This meant a further delay until 1953. Then, Suzuki started again on his quest for the Admiral Nakhimov treasure, this time in a joint venture with an American corporation, the Pacific Far East Salvage company Inc. The American investors, like most of the others who met him, found Suzuki a thoroughly convincing and impressive character. They soon agreed to participate. However they found no treasure at all, sadly in june 1954 the superintendent of the divers, Mr. Yoichiro Oshii, lost his life during the project.

By 1955 the Americans were beginning to lose confidence in the project. Doubt centered not so much on the original existence of the gold on board the ship as on question on stowage. New theories beginning to proliferate. Perhaps the gold was not stowed at the aft of the third deck. Perhaps it was in the magazine room beneath the aft gun turret. The Admiral Nakhimov project was once again suspended, and although Suzuki continued to resurrect the project to his dying day, he had run out of willing financiers.

The question remains, did Sasakawa genuinely recover the enormous quantities of gold that he claimed, suggesting that Suzuki had been correct all along, or was the press conference nothing more than a massive publicity stunt as some have suggested? As always with treasure ships, the truth is difficult to get at. Interestingly, a book by Sidney Tyler entitled “The Japan Russia War “ and published in the US in 1905, long before treasure stories about the Admiral Nakhimov began to circulate, mentions Russia losing $75 million in gold. Unfortunately, he does not state which ship the gold was supposed to have been on.

Sources:
Lost Treasure Ships of the Twentieth Century by Nigel Pickford;
http://www.bbcknowledge.com/nz/liberating/21st-century-treasure-hunters/;
http://www.cityofart.net/bship/ru_nakhimov.html;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_armoured_cruiser_Admiral_Nakhimov

Pic Source:
Lost Treasure Ships of the Twentieth Century by Nigel Pickford page 36

Leanan Shee The Irish Fairies

2011-11-08T04:43:00.007+07:00

Stories of blood-drinking or energy-sapping fairies had existed in both Scotland and Ireland since the earliest times. According to those who speak the Gaelic tongue of Scotland and Ireland, the creature prefer to be known as “sidhe” (also spelled sidh, sith, sithche) and pronounced “shee.” In Ireland one such being was known as the Leanan Shee (the fairy mistress), a creature with a special affinity for humans The name comes from the Gaelic words for a sweetheart, lover, or concubine and the term for a barrow or fairy-mound. The Leanan Shee are said to be able to enchant humans, to take advantage of them in numerous ways, and even cast a spell on likely young men or women and marry them. She seeks the love of mortals. If they refuse, she must be their slave. The fairy lives on their life, and they waste away. Death is no escape from her. She was drawn to warriors and poets and often magically provided prowess for the former and inspiration for the latter. But her attentions came at a price. As she made love to the warrior or poet whose mistress she inevitably became, she drew both the strength and life from them in the manner of the ancient Roman succubus. In the end, they were little more than an empty husk, which the fairy then discarded in favour of another lover.

Although the Leanan Shee did not actually drink blood, there were other Irish fairies that were said to do so. Some were said to dwell in the Magillycuddy Reeks in County Kerry in the very south of Ireland. In a lecture given at Trinity College in Dublin in 1963, the former Archivist of the Irish Folklore Commission (a Government-sponsored body set up to preserve Irish tradition), Sean O’Sullivan, (himself a Kerryman) stated that he’d heard of a castle guarding a mountain pass, high in the Reeks, that was inhabited by blood-drinking fairy creatures. The name of this place was Dun Dreachfhoula, significantly pronounced Drac-ola or Dracula, and meaning “the fort of evil blood,” sometimes translated as “the fort of the blood visage.” Unfortunately, O’Sullivan did not make any further reference to the location of the place either in his lectures or books. For instance, it does not appear in his most famous book, Irish Wake Amusements—and he died without ever revealing where it might be.

Several academics have tried to locate it but even the most minute examination of the sites of the Barony of Kilkerron in which the Reeks lie reveals nothing. And yet tales of blood drinking and flesh eating persisted in the region well into the 20th century.

In the 1930s, a collector for the Irish Folklore Commission, Tim Murphy, detailed a story from the remote mountain parish of Sneem in County Kerry that contained vampiric fairies references. A farmer in the area had married a woman who was said to have fairy connections, who refused to eat any food that was cooked in the house but at night, would rise from her bed and go to the local cemetery where she dug up the bodies, drank the blood, and consumed the flesh. The husband followed her to the churchyard where he confronted her as a vampire. “You would not eat the good meat or drink the good beer at your own table but you would come here at night to eat this foul dinner,” he told her. However at this point, Murphy’s story became confusing and mixed with another tale and the fate of this vampiric fairies was unclear.

Sources:

Encyclopedia of the Undead: “A Field Guide to the Creatures that Cannot Rest in Peace by DR. Bob Curran;
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leanan_s%C3%ADdhe

Pic Source:
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger page 102

Sun Temple of Abu Ghurob

2011-11-04T04:07:00.007+07:00

Abu Ghurob (also known as Abu Gurab, or Abu Jirab) is a sun temple, a ‘burial center’ or ‘funerary complex’ for a new cult of Ra (because the actual function of a place is unclear) dating to around 2400 B.C. built by the Khemitians, who were indigenous ancient Africans, employed advanced forms of engineering and manufacturing to produce the artifacts in stone—and to cut, shape and lift the thousands of tons of stone that we see remnants of today. Many of these structures exhibit evidence of advanced machining. Perfectly round holes appear to be drilled right into and through the alabaster structures. It was excavated by Egyptologists between 1898 and 1901 by Ludwig Borchardt on behalf of the Berlin Museum and is located near the city of Memphis.

Abu Ghurob, means “Father of Crow’s Nests,” because of the great sight line from a small hill at the site, features many structures carved out of alabaster, a highly crystalline igneous (volcanic) rock. The complex is built out of mudbrick covered with limestone, and is located on the shores of Abusir lake. Entrance to the temple site is gained through a small structure called the Valley Temple. Archeologists have been unable to study the Valley Temple in detail. It is partially submerged and has suffered extensive damage. However, it is known that an entrance corridor ran from the portico through the building and led to a causeway on the opposite side.

The massive alabaster (Egyptian crystal) platform at Abu Ghurob

Based on Ancient American oral tradition from Tennessee, retold by Cherokee wisdom keeper Dhyani Yahoo in her book 'Voices of Our Ancestors' describes formless “thought beings” called TLA beings who rode a sound wave from the Pleiades star cluster through a hole in space in East Tennessee and created the Cherokee. All humans are dream children of these angels or elemental forces of Nature (the Egyptian Neter) who came from the stars. This legend obviously resonates with Khemetian belief concerning Abu Ghurob. Curiously Dr. Eve Reymond, a scholar who had explored the ancient Egyptian Building Texts from Edfu, Egypt in her book 'The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple' also tell of formless beings who came from the stars and created an island civilization in Egypt. These sages, as they were called, constructed an original mound where the creation of humankind took place. This island was called the Island of the Egg and was surrounded by the primeval water. The Edfu tale matches the Atlantis story as told by Plato of a civilization founded by the gods who created a hybrid race of humans.

Alternative researchers uphold the use of megalithic red granite blocks as a trademark of ‘Atlantean’ temple building. At Abu Ghurob one sees colossal red granite blocks weighing several tons that were precision products of this power plant. Egyptologists guess that the massive basins were used to hold sacrificial animal blood, which ran through perfectly round channels cut into the paving. To support this hypothesis, they point to evidence of grooves cut into the stone floor of the courtyard that may have been used to drain away the blood. However there is not a single drop of DNA or other evidence to support this misconception. Other researchers, think that the basins were probably only symbolic, or decorative, since no knives or other equipment related to sacrifice have been discovered in the area. While Stephen S. Mehler theorized that the ancient stone masonry pyramids were never originally designed and built to be tombs for kings, or anyone, but as energy devices that utilized flowing water and solar power from sunlight to produce varied forms of energy for the use of all people. Interestingly, the inner surface of the basins are smooth to the touch and show signs of circular tool marks, suggesting that whoever crafted them did so with a technology we would admire today.

Sources:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 59: “The Lost World of Egypt’s Abu Ghurob” by William Henry;
http://www.gizapyramid.com/Mehler%20New%20Article.htm;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Gorab

Pic Source:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 59: “The Lost World of Egypt’s Abu Ghurob” by William Henry page 40

RMS Queen Mary The Gray Ghost

2011-11-01T05:49:00.011+07:00

The RMS Queen Mary is the world's best-documented haunted ship, and the ship having more ghosts than other ships her size had crew. When she was christened at her Scottish shipyard in 1934 by Britain's King George V and Queen Mary, the RMS Queen Mary was the largest ship in the world and the jewel of the Cunard Line. During the years that the 1,019-foot luxury liner the Queen Mary was in service (1936–1967), there were 41 passengers and at least 16 crew members who died on the high seas of various illnesses and accidents. In addition to the deaths that occurred directly in her cabins or on her decks, the Queen Mary was responsible for the deaths of over 300 seamen during World War II. Today, the ship is permanently moored in Long Beach, California, as a hotel and tourist attraction. There have been literally hundreds of sightings of various ghosts throughout the ship, and they continue to the present day. Many of the ship's staff, tour guides, and visitors to the ship, as well as overnight guests at the hotel, have reported seeing them.

The RMS Queen Mary, now moored in Long Beach, California

The RMS Queen Mary is 1,019.5 feet long, weighs 81,237 gross tons, is 181 feet tall from its keel to the top of its smokestack, has a 160,000 horsepower engine capacity, and was built to accommodate approximately 3,000 passengers and crew comfortably. In all aspects, the Queen Mary is significantly bigger than the Titanic was, built 20 years earlier. The ship made her maiden voyage on May 27, 1936. The Queen Mary was one of the last of the great transatlantic ocean liners, and her civilian service would be short-lived. In March 1940, she was painted grey and given the ominous name of the “Gray Ghost.” The Queen Mary was pressed into service for World War II and was transporting around 15,000 troops at a time, mainly for the United States.

Although she escaped harm from enemy vessels, on October 2, 1942, the Queen Mary had a tragic collision with one of her escort cruisers, the HMS Curaçao. In 1942, the Queen Mary was being escorted through hostile waters by a much smaller vessel called the Curaçao. The Queen Mary had strict orders not to stop or even slow down for any reason, as Hitler’s U-boats were all around the area. The Queen Mary was running in a zig-zag submarine evasion pattern, and the Curaçao inadvertently got into the way of the great ship. The Curaçao was literally sliced in half, killing 338 of the sailors aboard—though a few crew members were pulled from the water by other escort ships, most were lost.

On July 31, 1947, the Queen Mary returned to its peacetime mission of being a transatlantic vessel. But the days of transatlantic vessels were numbered. On September 19, 1967 the RMS Queen Mary was retired from service after completing 1,001 Atlantic crossings. The city of Long Beach, California, successfully bid to acquire the Queen Mary and have her permanently docked as a tourist attraction for the city of Long Beach. On December 11, 1967, she pulled in to Long Beach and has remained there ever since.

Since the Queen Mary was permanently docked in Long Beach in 1967, hundreds of visitors have claimed to have seen materialized ghosts, moving objects, and eerie lights floating through its hallways. Disembodied voices are frequently reported, and many individuals say that they have heard screams and the harsh sound of ripping metal in the bow area, terrible echoes of the night the Gray Ghost tore the Curacao in half. In addition to the many ghosts sighted on the Queen Mary, there have been traditional haunting phenomena, such as unexplained voices and moving objects.

Several séances have been held on the ship, at which mediums claim to have contacted resident spirits. The spirit most often mentioned is that of Lieutenant Carlo Giovetti, an Italian fighter pilot who was shot down by the British over North Africa. Giovetti died onboard the Queen Mary while being transported as a prisoner of war. He died primarily due to complications from injuries he suffered during the plane crash, and, like many others who died onboard during the War years, was most probably buried at sea.

Peter James, a psychic medium has been investigating the history and ghosts of the Queen Mary since 1991. James said, “The Queen Mary is the most haunted place that I have ever investigated. And I’ve literally been around the globe with hauntings. This is number one as the most haunted place in the world. There are at least 600 active resident ghosts on the Queen Mary.” Why so many deaths on a luxury ocean liner? Certainly the military service has a lot to do with the fatalities. James said, “While transporting over 10,000 of our troops during World War II, it was quite hot in the Indian Ocean and the Queen Mary was not equipped with airconditioning. Fact has it that troops were dying at a rate of one every 7 minutes for hours. That’s how bad it was, because they were packed like sardines.” In addition to U.S. and allied troops, the “Gray Ghost” also picked up some German and Italian prisoners of war. The prisoners were as young as 17 years old. They were housed in the isolation ward on B deck. They chose to commit suicide rather than face the consequences of becoming prisoners of war.

James said, “To this day, you can hear the collision—the residual sound effects and also the water splashing and many screams for help.” Military service doesn’t account for all of the fatalities on the ship. There were medical conditions of passengers, some drownings in the pool, and even a few accidents. The ship’s door number 13 features a watertight seal and can be closed, in order to section off the ship in case of a hull breach. He says at least two men throughout the ship’s history were crushed to death in this doorway, and James suspects it could have been foul play. One ghost who is regularly seen is that of 18-year-old John Pedder, who was crushed to death deep among the pipes and girders of the engine room by hydraulic door no. 13 during one of the luxury liner’s final voyages on July 10, 1966. Because of the area he haunts, he has earned the nickname "the Shaft Alley Spectre." Other visitors have met him in narrow walkways and have even stepped aside to let him pass, only to see the young man disappear after a few steps. The ghost of Senior Second Officer W.E. Stark has been spotted in his former sleeping quarters as well as on deck. He, too, died in an accident. On September 18, 1949, he drank a mixture of carbon tetrachloride and lime juice: The deadly cleaning fluid had been stored without proper warning in an old gin bottle. He treated the mistake lightly, but the next day he fell into a coma and died three days later. The phantom of a man in a mechanic's white boiler suit has also been seen and heard near the engine room. Likewise, a man in blue-gray overalls, with black hair and a long beard, has been spotted below deck.

Peter James has visited the Queen Mary well more than 1,000 times since 1991. His first supernatural experience onboard happened during his first tour on the ship’s old “Ghosts, Myths, and Legends” tour with his friend. He said to his companion, “This captain just came up to me and said he was Captain Stark, and this is where they found his body. Ten seconds later, the tour guide turns around and says, ‘And this is where the body of Captain Stark was found.’”

As a psychic, James certainly has an advantage in experiencing the supernatural aboard the ship, but he said there are many phenomena that have materialized for witnesses who are not psychically sensitive. He believes the first-class swimming pool is the heart of the ship, and James has encountered a significant amount of supernatural occurrences there. One such event involved the disembodied voice of a young girl named Jackie, and more than 100 witnesses experienced it at a single time. James said, “Jackie is about 4 or maybe 5 years old. After I had an interactive conversation with her, she said she would meet up with me in the other pool area. I was a bit confused, because I was only aware of one pool—the first-class swimming pool. However, in her consciousness of about 60 or more years ago, the Royal Theater used to be the second-class swimming pool, where, sadly, she drowned. Jackie speaks as clearly as we do.”

Robin Wachner the marketing communications director for the Queen Mary, explained that, since 1967, the Queen Mary has operated as a hotel and has featured restaurants, catering halls, and special event tours. There are more than 365 guest rooms that are preserved exactly as they were when the ship sailed. Even some of the fixtures in the rooms are original. Today, the ship receives more than 1.4 million visitors per year. Wachner said she’s never personally experienced any ghosts onboard, but many of her colleagues have. She said, “In the marketing office, a lot of people have experienced seeing, out of the corner of their eye, a man in black. He appears almost as fast as he disappears. People have walked over to see if they can help this man, and he’s just gone. We also have a lot of instances within our offices of doors just mysteriously opening and closing when there’s no wind and no windows open. There have been some strange happenstances aboard the Queen Mary among the employees—people see disembodied heads, legs, and images, and people dressed in vintage clothing disappear into thin air.”

Sources:
Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places by Brad Steiger;
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ghosts and Hauntings by Tom Ogden;
The World’s Most Haunted Places by Jeff Belanger.

Pic Source:
The World’s Most Haunted Places by Jeff Belanger page 21

Nomoli Statues

2011-10-28T03:59:00.007+07:00

The Nomoli Statues is the small figure of stone that has been found by local people when searching for diamonds in Sierra Leone, West Africa. This statues is the most unusual, outstanding and oldest Nomoli artifact. The age is estimated of 17.000 years. When it was found a certain noise was recognized when it was moved. A sculptor cut out one piece of the object. He discovered a hole and also a very small ball of metal. So where do those mysterious stone figures come from? Are they relics of a foreign and sunken culture? Did the unknown creator have had a profound purpose? Scientists, especially ethnologists, developed numerous theories about those figures. They do not have the same opinion because the origin and the purpose of the sculptures are unexplained.

Strange Nomoli Figures

Myth and legend of Western Africa says that in ancient times a people of angels lived in heaven. As a cause of bad behaviour God banned them from the divine empire. To punish the angels he transformed them into men and sends them to Earth. The Nomoli Statues are said to be a reminder of those once divine creatures. The faces of the Nomoli figures show typical characteristics: The statues are made of different sorts of stone, soft materials as well as hard granite. They have a very big nose like an eagle with nostrils, a big mouth, sometimes showing teeth and significant eyes. Their skulls are flat. The objects were about 40cm tall; their origin is unknown. The dating of the Nomoli still is a problem. According to the geological stratums in which they were found, they must be 2.500 to 17.000 years old. The figures that laid in deeper stratums were raw and simple made. The sculptures have various poses and expression. The majority are human figures, some riding on horses, most of them sitting with crossed legs or on their knees. Some put their faces in their hands. Sometimes the figures have weapons or a shield.

The natives often call the figures “men in stone”. But some see them as guardian god and god who brings luck and they put them on their fields to guard and increase the harvest. Some native tribes like the Mande and Kissi in Guinea put such statues of Nomolis on their fields. So a “vegetation cult” developed that is seen in connection with death. They put the stones on their fields and made them sacrifices if the harvest was rich. If harvest was bad the Nomoli have been punished ritually and whipped.

Angelo Pitoni, an Italian geologist, deals with the Nomoli statues. He took some organic samples from the places the figures where found. To define the age different materials have been taken, e.g. founds made of wood (a stick that was found in a depth of 10 meters). Prof. Giorgio Belluomini from University of Rome also examined the artifact and estimated its age of 400 to 500 years. In 1992 the object was analysed three times and the C-14-dating showed an age of 2470 years, +/- 50 years. Until that day one thought that the only civilization in Western Africa was the so-called Afro-Portuguese civilization, about 400 years old. But the Nomoli objects do not fit this conception.

Also there is some mysterious stones that are connected with the strange Nomoli figures called the “Sky Stones”. They were also found in Sierra Leone in a great quantity. Based on local legend, it says that the part of the sky the Nomoli lived in, turned into stone. Then it split and fell down on earth in huge pieces of rock. The stars that were in this part of the sky have also been destroyed and rests came to earth. Sparkling rests of those stars are the diamonds.

Natives showed excavation-places where in a depth of 40 m to 40 cm numerous blue stones were found. They had different sizes. Their colour, similar to Cobalt, some pieces have been analysed in different laboratories in the whole world. The results based on analysis made by the Institute for Precious Stones of the Museum of Natural History have been astonishing: It showed that the stones were made artificially, the pulverised samples consist of 77% oxygen, 20% carbon and lime, silicon and traces of iridium. However, there is no iridium on Earth, unless it was brought in from space by a meteorite.

Sources:
Unsolved Mysteries: “An Exhibition of Unsolved Mysteries and Enigmatic Findings in the History of Humanity” by Reinhard Habeck, Dr. Willibald Katzinger and listed authors;
http://unsolved-mysteries.info/rundgang2eng/rg2eng.htm

Pic Source:
http://unsolved-mysteries.info/rundgang2eng/e0201.htm

Warminster UFO Mystery

2011-10-25T03:46:00.006+07:00

Among the numerous ‘UFO phenomena’ or ‘poltergeist-type phenomena’ reported from Warminster on Christmas Day after 6 a.m., when a young married couple claim that they were awakened by the frantic barking and whimpering of their dog in the garden outside. Josie, their daughter, went to investigate, and found the dog lying in a corner of the woodshed, trembling and whimpering. Just as Josie was about to re-enter the house she experienced, as it were from the air right overhead, the terrifying ‘whining, crackling, rasping, droning, shattering phenomenon’ which later became known throughout the world as ‘the Warminster Thing’ or 'The Thing'.

Map of Warminster

At around the same period there also occurred a case in which a flock of pigeons allegedly fell dead near Warminster, struck down by this mysterious force, “rigor mortis” supervening in the bodies almost at once. The same informant claimed that on yet another occasion large numbers of dead field mice had been found on the ground just after the passage overhead of ‘The Thing’, their bodies riddled with tiny holes.

Other such "sonic attacks" which occurred at around the same time in different locations around the town were later reported. Perhaps the strangest was that witnessed at 6.12am that morning by Mrs Marjorie Bye, who was walking to the Holy Communion service at Christ Church in Warminster. As she approached the church the air about her filled with strange sounds that she found disturbing, and made her feel weak and unable to move. These unidentified noises continued on an ad-hoc basis until at least June 1966. Roughly nine cases are described in The Warminster Mystery in which the only unusual phenomena are noises. Over the course of time this "noise" phenomenon receded and the visual phenomenon took its place to become the most important element of the Warminster phenomenon; the Warminster Thing became a UFO.

Arthur Shuttlewood at the time was the features editor on the local weekly newspaper, The Warminster Journal. He reported in his book The Warminster Mystery: "The air was brazenly filled with a menacing sound. Sudden vibrations came overhead, chilling in intensity. They tore the quiet atmosphere to raucous rags and descended upon her savagely. Shockwaves pounded at her head, neck and shoulders." By June 1965, strange objects were being seen in the skies around the town. Shuttlewood soon became the voice and champion of The Warminster mystery. Sightings of "The thing" continued, but, by the early 1970s, they were beginning to decline. Cradle Hill became the centre of skywatching activities, but Starr Hill and Cley Hill were also popular with skywatchers.

Warminster's reputation as a UFO hotspot diminished towards the end of the 1970s, although UFOs do continue to be reported in the area. However in the 1980s the growth of the crop circle phenomena in Wiltshire rekindled interest in Warminster's UFO connection.

Sources:
Mysterious Visitors: “The UFO Story” by Brinsley Le Poer Trench;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warminster;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/wiltshire/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8694000/8694729.stm

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wiltshire_UK_location_map.svg

The Dropa Stones

2011-10-21T03:57:00.006+07:00

There have been many unusual and puzzling artifacts that have been unearthed, or otherwise discovered, that do not fit into conventional theories of our geologic and historical past, one of them is the Dropa Stones. The “stones” were found buried beneath millennia of dust in 1938 on an archeological expedition led by Dr. Chi Pu Tei in caves in the Baian-Kara-Ula mountains on the border that divides China and Tibet. Chi Pu Tei, a professor of archaeology at Beijing University, was leading some his students on an expedition to survey a series of interlinking caves in the Himalayan mountains. According to one account, the caves may have been artificially carved, and were more like a complex system of tunnels and underground storerooms. The walls were squared and glazed, as if cut into the mountain with a source of extreme heat.

Dropa Stones

Inside the caves they found several ancient, and neatly arranged burial sites, and in them the skeletal remains of a strange creatures. The skeletons had abnormally big heads, with small, thin, fragile bodies. A member of the team suggested that these might be the remains of an unknown species of mountain gorilla.

There were no epitaphs at the graves, but instead numbering several hundred stones in all were found, each disk measured about nine inches in diameter having 3/4 inch wide holes in their centers, and spiral grooves etched into the surface, like an ancient phonograph record. On the walls were carved pictures of the rising sun, moon, stars, the land, mountains, and lines of pea-sized dots connecting the earth with the sky. The cave drawings had been determined to be about 12,000 years old and the artifacts found with the stone disks have been dated to about 10,000 to 12,000 years old.

Small hieroglyphics were found in the grooves that, when translated, tell of an extraordinary story of extraterrestrials, who called themselves the Dropa, who had crash-landed in the mountains of China. Reports indicate that, in some of the caves, along with the disks, were discovered the remains of the Dropa, or their descendents, and that they may have, in fact, been Chinese.

Sources:
Mystery of America: Book 1 “Enigmatic Mysteries and Anomalous Artifacts of North America – A Connection to The Ancient Past” by Tédd St. Rain;
http://www.crystalinks.com/dropa.html;
http://paranormal.about.com/od/ancientanomalies/a/aa060198.htm

Pic Source:
Mystery of America: Book 1 “Enigmatic Mysteries and Anomalous Artifacts of North America – A Connection to The Ancient Past” by Tédd St. Rain page 72

Uyghur Civilization

2011-10-18T04:42:00.009+07:00

At the time of Rama and Atlantis many ancient cities are said to have existed in the Uyghur civilization of the Gobi Desert. Though the Gobi is now a parched land-licked desert, these cities were ocean ports thousands of years ago. Advanced flying devices are said to have been in use in the Uyghur area, and perhaps the craft was an ancient Vimana coming from a still active city using Uyghur technology that exists in Northern Tibet or the Gobi Desert. In the 1930’s the famous Russian explorer Nicholas Roerich reported seeing a flying disc over northern Tibet. Significantly, it is claimed that the Elders of Lemuria or the “Ancient Ones”, also known as the “Thirteenth School,” moved their headquarters prior to the cataclysm from the Gobi Desert to the uninhabited plateau of Central Asia that we now call Tibet.

The great Chinese Philosopher Lao Tzu, (604 B.C.), talked frequently of “Ancient Masters” and their profound wisdom. When he finally left China, near the close of his very long life, he journeyed to the west to the legendary land of Hsi Wang Mu. According to the ancient chinese, this was the headquarters of the Ancient Ones. Hsi Wang Mu is a member of an extra-dimensional race of beings known as the Xian, who were once worshipped as gods in Ancient China. Not much is known about the Xian, but it believed they once lived on Earth as human beings and were ancestors of the ruling families of China, Korea and Indochina. Hsi Wang Mu is also adept in tapping and manipulating mystical energies, but to an unknown extent. She can cast spells, creating and altering spells regarding the longevity spells of the peaches of immortality. In ancient times, she was capable of creating disease and plague and conjuring illness in mortals. However the full range of Hsi Wang Mu's mystical power is unrevealed.

Very early Tibetan legend speaks of a former glorious civilization on earth when all people had telepathic abilities. People in this age, before the so-called “Fall of Man,” were people with an amazing ability to utilize their “light bodies” at will. Here they supposedly established a library and school known as “The Great White Brotherhood.” Regardless of local language, this highly advanced race of humans could convey their thoughts telepathically, travel in the astral, see by clairvoyance and levitate themselves or heavy objects. One version of the Fall of Man describing people abusing these occult powers and using them for self-interest, rather than the development of humankind as a whole. The universal capacity of telepathy was lost (represented in the Bible as the Tower of Babel), and humans were thrust back into dense third-dimensional bodies. While Tibetan Lamas never forgot these ancient human abilities, they kept to themselves in isolated development throughout the ages. It was not until the recent Chinese occupancy that these remarkable human abilities became known to the Western world, and then only gradually.

Potala Palace in Tibet

Although no one is allowed entry, it is reported that deep inside the Potala mountain there is a labyrinth of hidden caves and corridors. This subterranean system of passageways is dominated by a huge cave with several passages radiating from it, including one that ends at a sacred lake. The lake contains several islands that were once used for initiating lamas. The lake flows into an underground river, which empties into the River Tsang-po some 40 miles (65 km) away. The subterranean chambers under the Potala are said to contain all the jewels and treasures of Tibet, along with a gigantic golden statue of the Buddha.

One of the most curious underground rooms is the Temple of Secret Wisdom, containing bodies of a giant race of people unknown to modern archaeologists. The mountain and caves are believed to have originated before the planet’s last polar shift, a time when Tibet was a country at sea level. The plates shifted, new continents formed and Tibet rose as the Himalayas thrust the northern land skyward. Successive monasteries were built and rebuilt upon the same mountain, that very same mountain which is a treasure-trove of secret passageways and ancient esoteric knowledge from the very early days. Could this mysterious giant race is the Ancient Ones or Hsi Wang Mu?

Sources:
Atlantis Rising Magazine Vol. 01 Nov/Dec 1994: “Top 10 Ancient Civilizations With Advanced Technology” by David Hatcher Childress;
Sacred Places Around the World: 108 Destinations by Brad Olsen;
http://www.angelfire.com/planet/mythguide/hsiwangmu.html;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_people

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Potala_Palace_PD.jpg

Kilstuitheen The Phantom Island

2011-10-14T04:10:00.006+07:00

For several centuries, mysterious islands were reportedly appearing and disappearing along the west and north of Ireland. The witnesses claimed, these were more than just mirages. According to the Irish folklore of County Clare, beside Hy Brasil, there is another mysterious island called Kilstiffin, Kilstapheen, or Kilstuitheen with a city of great riches, sank beneath the waves after the defeat of its king in battle. It now reportedly that the sunken church and city, of which the golden dome appears off the Clare coast once every seven years. County Clare is located in the province of Munster, Ireland. There was a Neolithic civilization in the Clare area — the name of the peoples is unknown, but the Prehistoric peoples left evidence behind in the form of ancient dolmen; single-chamber megalithic tombs, usually consisting of three or more upright stones. The remains of the people inside the tomb have been excavated and dated to 3800 BC.

The purported resting place of Conan Maol

Based on the Kilstuitheen legend, there is a key, hidden somewhere in Ireland, which will raise the island from its grave. Those who have witnessed the island’s appearances have described seeing churches, towers, a monastery, and on one occasion horsemen.

One of the purported location for the key was beneath a megalithic monument on Mount Callan in County Clare. Widely believed to the tomb of the ancient warrior Conan Maol, the monument’s cryptic ogham inscriptions had caused great debate amongst academics at the turn of the 18th century; and many travelled to Clare to study the tomb and its markings first hand. But the arrival of Mr. Burton in 1765 aroused great suspicion amongst the local people: they believed he was searching for the key to Kilstuitheen. If that was Burton’s goal there is no record of his find, and when the monument was removed in 1850, an excavation uncovered only bone and iron.

Sources:
Paranormal Magazine Issue 53, November 2010: “The Vanising Islands” written by Shane Cochrane page 34
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_Clare;
http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/coclare/folklore/folklore_survey/chapter1.htm

Pic Source:
Paranormal Magazine Issue 53, November 2010: “The Vanising Islands” written by Shane Cochrane page 36

Mysterious Cattle Mutilations

2011-10-11T03:42:00.007+07:00

Cattle and animal mutilations have been reported since ancient times, when Roman farmers spoke of demons that attacked their livestock. In more recent times, there have been sporadic outbreaks of strange attacks. Their alleged link to UFOs have been one of the more surreal aspects of ufology for over 130 years. In 1874 mysterious sheep slaughters were reported in Ireland and in England from 1904 through 1906 and in 1910; another rash of cattle mutilations took place in Kansas and in Pennsylvania in 1967, and from 1975 through 1976 yet another outbreak of cattle mutilations occurred in fourteen states in the Midwest and the West: Montana, Colorado, Texas, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, Mississippi, Iowa, Arkansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Utah, South Dakota, and North Dakota. In the 1980s a third outbreak occurred in Colorado, and in the early 1990s some southern states were affected; strange attacks on livestock and domestic animals occurred in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and El Salvador from 1995 through 1996; from april to july 2002 cattle mutilations also reported in Argentina.

Explanations offered for the strange slaughters vary. In Latin American cultures, the killings are blamed on an unidentiﬁed creature called a Chupacabra, Spanish for “goat sucker.” In the United States, however, the dominant view has been that intelligent beings are behind animal mutilations. This idea gained prominence in the late 1960s and the 1970s. During this period, by some estimates, more than ten thousand oddly butchered carcasses were discovered across the western half of the country.

The famous case occured in September 1967, a woman in Alamosa County, Colorado, found her pony dead in a ﬁeld with pieces of its ﬂesh sliced away, its internal organs removed, and its body drained of blood. The Associated Press carried an item that told of the possible role of UFOs in the killing of Snippy, a three-year-old gelding. There was no blood on the ground and no footprints nearby, even the pony’s. (Its tracks ended approximately 100 feet [30.5m] away.) The carcass was discovered about a quarter of a mile from the ranch house of Harry King in the desolate mountain country near Alamosa, Colorado. King notified the horse’s owners, Mr. and Mrs. Burl Lewis, who were disturbed by the condition of the carcass, which suggested that something out of the ordinary had been responsible for their horse’s demise.

A pathologist admitted bewilderment when he found the horse’s abdominal, brain, and spinal cavities to be empty. All flesh had been stripped from the horse’s head and neck, but the rest of the animal was untouched except for the openings left by the mysterious surgery. Because of the sharpness of the incision, the medical examiner thought that it had been cauterized by a laser beam, even though no laser technology existed in 1967 that could have made the cut. Although the carcass had lain exposed for several days, it was not unduly decomposed, nor had it begun to smell. Even more unusual is the fact that no predators, vultures, or buzzards had approached the carcass. However, on the ground nearby were ﬁfteen circular marks, as though something had scorched the brush. King’s mother claimed that a “large object” had passed over the ranch on the night of the mutilation.

UFO investigators stated that they had noted a high radiation count around Snippy’s remains and reported finding areas where the chico brush had been squashed to within 10 inches of the ground. Fifteen circular exhaust marks were found 100 yards from the carcass of the horse. Six identical holes, each two inches wide and four inches deep, were found in a nearby area. In addition, the investigators said that they found the imprint of a circle 75 feet in diameter, and a number of smaller areas where the chico brush had been flattened in circles 15 feet in diameter.

Since UFOs had recently been reported in the area, many people assumed that the scorch marks had been caused by the landing of an alien spaceship. A few weeks later, eight more animals, both horses and cows, were found mutilated in the same area in much the same way, sometimes only a few hours after ranchers had checked on them. Journalist Linda Howe produced a documentary and a book linking cattle mutilations to UFOs. According to Howe’s research, mutilations have been reported dating back to the 1700s, implying that this is not a new phenomenon. Howe’s evidence for extraterrestrial involvement seemed to keep mounting.

New Mexico State Police Officer Gabe Valdez, who coordinated an interstate investigation of livestock mutilations in the 1970s, examines a mutilated cow carcass.

In late 1973 farmers in Kansas and Minnesota began reporting deaths of cattle under apparently mysterious circumstances. Certain factors were found common to all mutilations: There seemed to be no visible cause of death; soft body parts had, it was claimed, been removed with surgical precision; the cattle were systematically drained of blood, often through small holes punched in their jugular vein; internal organs— especially sex organs—seemed to have been cut away; evidence of residual radiation or tranquilizing chemicals (it was claimed) were discovered; some animals were found with broken legs and backs pushed into the ground, as if they had been dropped from above; there were no footprints near the carcasses; and, ﬁnally, UFO sightings were common in the areas where the mutilations occurred. Various earthly interpretations have been put forward to explain the phenomena. A veterinary lab at Colorado State University insisted the deaths were the work of animal predators.

In December 1973 a group of sheriffs met and decided, from essentially no evidence, that the deaths were probably the work of “cultists.” Other law-enforcement officials were more skeptical, and the Kansas State University Veterinary Hospital proved that the animals had died of blackleg, a bacterial disease. Nevertheless, many rural people had come to believe that “Satanists” had sacriﬁced the cattle, and this rumor persisted.

In 1975 Donald Flickinger, an agent for the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, was assigned to investigate reports of a nationwide Satanist network engaged in animal and human sacriﬁce. He could ﬁnd no supporting evidence. Furthermore, because of the large number of mutilation reports—1,500 cattle in 22 states —it was physically impossible for cultists to have accomplished the feat.

Few years later another case occured in Texas, a rancher in Waco, claimed that he saw two four-foot-high creatures while searching for his missing cow. The creatures were described as having egg-shaped heads, no hair or nose, with eyes angled upward. He asserted they carried the cow between them. Other “evidence” came from a woman named Judy Doraty, who, under hypnosis, reported memories of an abduction. While driving with family members, she saw a craft beaming down a light. After pulling over and exiting the car, she saw a calf being drawn toward the light. Then she was pulled into the craft. The occupants then asserted she wasn’t supposed to be there. They told her that they were trying to ﬁx a pollution problem caused by humans, in which nuclear testing or wastes caused a chemical composition change. This pollution had gone from the water to plants and animals, and people would die if nothing was done. So the aliens were studying the reproduction system of the animals to determine the extent of the contamination. After they were done examining the cow, they dropped it to the ground. Then the aliens abducted her daughter and examined her, taking tissue scrapings from her mouth before putting her and her mother back in the car. No one else in the car remembered the encounter. Ufologists have speculated that the aliens, since humans eat cows, were studying them to ﬁgure out how manmade radiation is affecting humans.

In 1981 a high-school biology teacher, Iona Hoeppner, came across the carcass of a mutilated calf in Weld County, Colorado. Hoeppner took several samples from the carcass, as well as of the ground around it. Shortly thereafter, most of these samples were stolen from her laboratory, and since by this time government ofﬁcials were aware of the carcass, some people suspected that the U.S. government was responsible for the theft. However, the thieves had missed two samples: a piece of hide that included an area of incision and a bit of ﬂuid collected from the ground. When Hoeppner examined the ﬂuid, she discovered that it had chemical properties she could not identify, though she could tell that it had the ability to kill germs (and therefore to sterilize wounds and surgical instruments). Hoeppner then considered the incision on the hide and found that, unlike an incision made with a knife, scalpel, or laser, the incision did not cut through the animal’s cells but instead separated the tissue in between each cell, as though pulling them apart. Hoeppner concluded that only someone with access to highly advanced technology could have accomplished this.

Reports from Argentina in July 2002 stated that beginning with the first detected mutilation in April, more than 200 cattle had been found with their blood drained, their tongues, organs, flesh, and skin removed by angular, nearly curved, cuts. Although the official explanation centered on a carnivorous mouse, no one, from ranchers and veterinarians to biologists specializing in rodents have ever seen mice feed upon cow carcasses. Crews from UFOs were most often named by ranchers as the most likely mutilators of their cattle herds.

In some of these cases, as with the Colorado pony mutilation, some people had reported spotting UFOs in areas where mutilated cattle were later found. In other cases, however, particularly when the carcasses appeared near military bases and installations, people said they had seen mysterious black helicopters hovering nearby. These helicopters had no identifying markings, but after one such sighting in Colorado, a rancher found a bag with surgical tools that he felt resembled bags issued by government agencies. Though this was never proven, his discovery fueled suspicions that the U.S. government was somehow involved in cattle mutilations.

Speculations concerning secret intelligence operations came out of Vietnam-and Watergate-era fears that the U.S. government could be counted on to be up to no good — which was not the logical conclusion from an abundance of evidence. In fact, the only arguably suggestive physical evidence consisted of a curious, if ultimately inconclusive, discovery made in Lincoln County, Colorado, in 1975. A rancher found a blue satchel — assumed to be government issue — near his mailbox. Inside the satchel he discovered plastic artificial insemination gloves, a bloody scalpel, a cow’s ear, and part of a tongue. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation unsuccessfully checked for fingerprints, and area law-enforcement officers were unable to connect the animal parts with any cattle-mutilation reports known to them.

By the late 1980s this idea had merged with the notion that aliens were mutilating cattle, creating two new theories: that the government and the aliens were working together on experiments involving cattle, or that the aliens were being allowed to remove the animals’ organs in exchange for providing the government with certain goods, medicines, or technologies. By this time, the media had reported on several instances in which people claimed to have been abducted by aliens who then subjected them to odd medical tests. For believers in alien abductions, it was not too far-fetched to imagine aliens conducting experiments on animals as well. Popularizing this theory was a 1980 “documentary” called Strange Harvest, which laid the blame for cattle mutilations squarely on alien invaders.

However skeptics argue that there would be no need for aliens and/or the U.S. government to mutilate privately owned cattle since the government has the ability to buy all of the cattle it wants. Skeptics reject the notion that a mysterious government agency has been conducting biological and chemical tests on the animals in any case. Instead, skeptics insist that there are only two possible explanations for cattle mutilations: some of the cattle, they say, were killed by Satanists and/or cultist as part of some religious ritual; the rest died of disease or were killed by predators. Indeed, this was the ﬁnding of a 1979–1980 investigation into cattle mutilations that was launched by the state of New Mexico (with the help of federal funding and with the cooperation of nearby states) into cattle mutilations throughout the American West. Investigators concluded that, except for a few instances in which evidence pointed to Satanists and/or cultists, the majority of the mutilations could be attributed to predators, insects, and/or birds.

As to the sudden death of seemingly healthy cattle, the surgical precision of the animals’ wounds, and the fact that only certain organs were removed, skeptics say that natural processes can cause all of these phenomena. A cow with a disease known as lactic acidosis, for example, often shows no symptoms before it dies, and blowﬂies and other insects, as well as scavengers and predators, usually target the softest parts of a carcass (the very organs missing from mutilated cattle) and any blood left in the dead animal. Skeptics also contend that the teeth of scavengers and predators can produce cuts that seem as precise as those of a surgical instrument. Believers passionately disagree with such explanations, and arguments over the cause of cattle mutilations continue, as do the mutilations themselves.

Sources:
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained Volume 3 by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger;
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena by Patricia D. Netzley;
UFOs and Popular Culture: “An Encyclopedia of Contemporary Myth” by James R. Lewis;
Unexplained: "Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena" by Jerome Clark

Pic Source:
Unexplained: "Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena" by Jerome Clark page 141

James Dean's Cursed Car

2011-10-07T04:06:00.006+07:00

If houses are haunted by their occupants, can dead drivers haunt the cars they died in? Maybe as we’ll see in this case of the seemingly cursed. The car in question belonged to James Dean – who is still a hollywood icon more than forty years after his untimely death. Even though he starred in only three movies, Dean has become the object of cult worship. James Dean (1931-1955), the legendary Hollywood movie star, died in a fatal car crash in September 1955. For most of the summer preceding his death, he was on the set of the movie Giant just outside Marfa, Texas. After returning to Los Angeles, Dean bought a silver-gray 1955 Porsche Spyder. Dean loved the car and nicknamed it "Little Bastard," but many of his friends were leery of it. For some reason, it made them feel uneasy. Driving the car on the way to the races at Salinas, California, Dean collided head-on with another car, which had paused while making a left-hand turn. Dean was killed instantly. Soon, a legend grew that the mangled remains of Dean's car were cursed.

James Dean was born on February 8, 1931, at the Seven Gables apartment house in Marion, Indiana, to Winton Dean and Mildred Wilson. Six years after his father had left farming to become a dental technician, James and his family moved to Santa Monica, California. The family spent several years there, and by all accounts young Dean was very close to his mother. According to Michael DeAngelis, she was "the only person capable of understanding him".

When Dean got the part in East of Eden, he bought himself a red race-prepared MG TD and, shortly afterwards, a white Ford Country Squire Woodie station wagon. Dean upgraded his MG to a 1954 Porsche 356 Speedster, which he raced. Dean came in second in the Palm Springs Road Races in March 1955 after a driver was disqualified; he came in third in May 1955 at Bakersfield and was running fourth at the Santa Monica Road Races later that month until he retired with an engine failure.

During filming of ‘Rebel Without a Cause”, Dean traded in the 356 Speedster for one of only 90 Porsche 550 Spyders. He was contractually barred from racing during the filming of “Giant”, but with that out of the way, he was free to compete again. The Porsche was in fact a stopgap for Dean, as delivery of a superior Lotus Mk. X was delayed and he needed a car to compete at the races in Salinas, California. After that Dean asked custom car painter and pin striper Dean Jeffries to paint “Little Bastard” word on the car. When Dean introduced himself to actor Alec Guinness outside the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood, he asked him to take a look at the Spyder. Guinness thought the car appeared 'sinister' and told Dean: "If you get in that car, you will be found dead in it by this time next week." This encounter took place on September 23, 1955, seven days before Dean's death.

While still on the set of his last movie “Giant”, Dean filmed a cautionary public service announcement, he was said: “You know, i used to fly around quite a bit on the highways. I took unnecessary chances, but now when i drive, i’m extra cautious. I don’t have the urge to speed so take it easy when you drive. The life you save might be mine.” Shortly after speaking these words of wisdom, on September 1955. Dean jumped into his New Porsche 550 Spyder and hit the highway at 85 mph en route to the Salinas Car Races, Dean was stopped for a speeding citation, then sped on – and at 5:50 PM, he crashed into a Ford driven by one Donald Turnupseed. Donald was only slightly hurt; Dean's passenger, Rolf Wuetherich, was thrown from the vehicle and badly injured. The 24-year-old Dean fulfilled the many premonitions of early death he had voiced to friends. Not only had Dean predicted his death in real life, but in “Rebel Without a Cause”, he spoke these immortal words: “You know something? I never figured i’d live to see eighteen.”

Meanwhile, the vehicle of his death was carying its own doom laden legend. When car buff George Barris purchased the crumpled wreck, it promptly slipped from its tow truck and broke a mechanic’s leg. Barris then sold the Porsche’s engine to Troy McHenry, a physician, for his race car, and William F. Eschrid, another doctor, bought the drive shaft. Both raced with cars using the parts from Dean's car for the first time at Pomona, California, on October 1, 1956. McHenry spun out of control, hit a tree, and was killed. Eschrid flipped his car on a curve and was seriously hurt.

The jinx continued when another race car got two of the porsche’s tires. This driver actually did die when the tires blew out simultaneously. And when the cursed car’s crumpled frame was sent on display to promote highway safety, it broke its mountings and injured a teen’s hip. Another fatality occured in a multi-car pile up while the derelict Porsche was being loaded onto its tour truck. The same truck then suffered unexplained brake loss, swerved out of control, and slammed into a storefront.

Subsequently, two young would-be thieves were injured while attempting to steal parts from the car. When one tried to steal the steering wheel from the Porsche, his arm was ripped open on a piece of jagged metal. Later, another man was injured while trying to steal the bloodstained front seat. This would be the final straw for Barris, who decided to store "Little Bastard" away, but he was quickly persuaded by the California Highway Patrol (CHP) to lend the wrecked car to a highway safety exhibit. Nearly a million tickets were sold when the wreck was put on ghoulish exhibit in a carnival. Pieces of the twisted, bloodstained hulk were pried off as macabre souvenirs, until the remains abruptly fell apart into eleven pieces. Then, somehow during the return train trip to Hollywood, the eleven pieces of James Dean’s death car mysteriously vanished. The cursed car and dead driver were both gone now.

Some people believe that certain objects can become cursed if they're involved in tragedy or violence. Was the wreckage of Little Bastard, an inanimate object, haunting others with just such a curse? Until it's found, we'll never know.

Sources:
The Big Book of The Unexplained by Dough Moench;
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ghosts and Hauntings by Tom Ogden;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dean

Pic Source:
http://www.geocities.ws/mmv99/little_bastard_10.jpg

La Llorona The Crying Woman

2011-10-04T04:25:00.007+07:00

The timeless legend of La Llorona (the Crying Woman or the Weeping Woman), originated in South America and traveled to the American southwest via Mexico. La Llorona is always said to be tall and thin, with long dark hair and a flowing white gown. There are numerous stories of La Llorona, the ghost of a weeping woman who searches each night for her children, usually near a river. According to some of these stories, she drowned her children after her lover told her he did not want a family, then became horriﬁed over what she had done and killed herself and now eternally sobs as she searches for them along creeks and rivers. La Llorona is also a prominent figure in Taos and Taos Pueblo, Guadalupta, and Colfax, a ghost town near Cimarron, New Mexico. In fact, the California Milk Advisory Board sometimes runs a “got milk?”ad that features La Llorona.

The most famous version is probably the Mexican one: Long ago, a beautiful Indian princess, Doña Luisa de Loveros, fell in love with a handsome Mexican nobleman named Don Nuno de Montesclaros. The princess loved the nobleman deeply and had two children by him, but Montesclaros refused to marry her and married another woman, Doña Luisa went mad with rage and stabbed her two children. Authorities found her wandering the street, sobbing, her clothes covered in blood. They charged her with infanticide and sent her to the gallows. She then dies and becomes a spirit. Ever since, it is said, the ghost of La Llorona walks the country at night in her bloody dress, crying out for her murdered children. If she ﬁnds any child, she’s likely to carry it away with her to the nether regions, where her own spirit dwells.Sometimes she is said to be hitchhiking along a road, and after an unsuspecting driver picks up the weeping woman, she suddenly disappears from the car.

In Santa Fe, the skeletally thin wailing woman has been repeatedly sighted in and around the Public Employees Retirement Association (PERA) building. The five-story structure, near a tributary of the Rio Grande, is built over an old Spanish graveyard. The two bottom floors are underground, deep in the graveyard. Employees report hearing sobbing echoes through the corridors and sometimes feel unseen hands push them on the stairs. Many locals refuse to go anywhere near the building.

The finer details vary, but while the Weeping Woman is most often thought of as a tragic figure, she is also portrayed by parents of disobedient children who will come for them if they don’t behave. Some believe that those who hear the wails of La Llorona are marked for death, similar to the Gaelic banshee legend. She is said to cry "Ay, mis hijos!" which translates to "Oh, my children!"

Sources:
Encyclopedia of Haunted Places: “Ghostly Locales from Around The World” compiled and edited by Jeff Belanger;
The Greenhaven Encyclopedia of Paranormal Phenomena by Patricia D. Netzley;
The Supernatural Book of Monsters, Demons, Spirits and Ghouls by Alex Irvine;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona

Pic Source:
The Supernatural Book of Monsters, Demons, Spirits and Ghouls by Alex Irvine page 11

The Ringing Rocks

2011-09-30T04:50:00.007+07:00

The ringing rocks are the rocks that ring like bells when struck with a hammer. The rocks located in various places all over the world, but the most famous sites located in Southeastern Pennsylvania, these include the Stony Garden (Haycock, Bucks County), the Devil’s Race Course (Franklin County), others in the South Mountain region and at Pottsdown, and the Bell Rock Range of Western Australia. Set in a forested area, the ringing rocks appear in a field that has no vegetation except lichens. Ten feet thick and seven acres around, the rocks are composed of diabase, in other words part of the Earth’s basic crustal structure. Though this is undoubtedly a natural phenomenon, it is an odd one for which no fully satisfactory explanation has ever been proposed.

By far the most studied, is in Upper Black Eddy in Bucks County. It is located a mile west of the Delaware River near the New Jersey state line. While in Australia the ringing rocks located in Bell Rock Range, it is a large ultramafic gabbro-peridotite intrusion in the Musgrave Block of Western Australia and composed of massive, heavily indurated intrusive rocks and forms a prominent 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) long range of mountains and hills. The intrusion is called the Bell Rock Range because, when struck, the rocks ring like a bell.

In June 1890 Dr. J. J. Ott, backed by a brass band, played a few selections on the rocks for an appreciative Buckwampum Historical Society gathering. Ott, in short, had learned what other investigators have since confirmed: that the rocks don’t have to be in their natural location to ring. They do not even have to be intact. Curiously, though made up of the same materials, not all of the Ringing Rocks ring — only about 30 percent of them, according to those who have experimented with them.

In 1965 geologist Richard Faas of Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, conducted laboratory experiments using sensitive equipment.He learned that when he struck a ringing rock, a series of subaudible frequencies were produced, and these added up to a tone that could be heard by the human ear. However, he could not determine a specific physical cause. Some writers have made remarkable — almost occult — claims for the ringing rocks, asserting that something about the rock field spooks animals, even insects,which make a point of keeping their distance. According to investigator Michael A. Frizzell, since the area is barren, open, and hotter than the surrounding forest during the summer, thus generally inhospitable to living creatures.

More interesting is a claim made by the late Ivan T. Sanderson, though since then there has been no published replication: “[T]here are some larger rocks which, when hit appropriately, give rise to a whole scale; . . . two different ringers when knocked together while suspended on wires produce (invariably, it seems) but one tone, however many different combinations are used.” Curiously the kinds of rock possessing such talents vary. The absence of clear patterns in the creation of such odd geological phenomena continues to frustrate theorists. Ringing rocks have been noted all over the world and it also can be found on: Musical Stones of Skiddaw - Cumbria, England; Ringing Rocks Point of Interest - Ringing Rocks, Montana, United States; The Hill of the Bells (Cerro de las Campanas) - Querétaro, Mexico; The Ringing Stone - Tiree, Scotland.

Sources:
Unexplained!: “Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurences & Puzzling Physical Phenomena” by Jerome Clark;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_rocks

Pics source:
http://www.davidhanauer.com/buckscounty/ringingrocks/

Athanasius Kircher's Map of Atlantis

2011-09-27T04:44:00.010+07:00

Kircher was a German polymath of the 17th century and also one of the scholars to seriously investigate the Atlantis legend. Initially skeptical, he cautiously began reconsidering its credibility while assembling mythic traditions of numerous cultures in various parts of the world about a great flood. His research led him to the immense collection of source materials at the Vatican Library, where, as Europe’s foremost scholar, its formidable resources were at his disposal. It was here that he discovered a single piece of evidence which proved to him that the legend of Atlantis was actually fact.

Athanasius Kircher, was born on 2 May in either 1601 or 1602 in Geisa, Buchonia, near Fulda, currently Hesse, Germany, this Jesuit priest was also a pioneering mathematician, physicist, chemist, linguist, and archaeologist; the first to study phosphorescence; inventor of, among numerous futuristic innovations, the slide projector and a prototype of the microscope. The founding father of scientific Egyptology, he was the first serious investigation of temple hieroglyphs.

In 1665 Kircher found a well-preserved, treated-leather map purporting to show the configuration and location of Atlantis among the relatively few surviving documents from Imperial Rome in Vatican Library. The map was not Roman, but brought in the first century A.D. to Italy from Egypt, where it had been executed. It survived the demise of Classical Times, and found its way into the Vatican Library. Kircher copied it precisely, adding only a visual reference to the New World, and published it in his book, Mundus Subterraneus: The Subterranean World, in 1665. His caption states it is “a map of the island of Atlantis originally made in Egypt after Plato’s description,” which suggests it was created sometime following the 4th century B.C., perhaps by a Greek mapmaker attached to the Ptolemies. More probably, the map’s first home was the Great Library of Alexandria, where numerous books and references to Atlantis were lost, along with another millionplus volumes, when the institution was burned by religious fanatics. In relocating to Rome, the map escaped that destruction.

Athanasius Kircher's map of Atlantis. The map is oriented with south at the top.

Similar to modern conclusions forced by current understanding of geology in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Kircher’s map depicts Atlantis, not as a continent, but an island about the size of Spain and France combined. It shows a large, centrally located volcano, most likely meant to represent Mount Atlas, together with six major rivers, something Plato does not mention. Kritias describes large rivers on the island of Atlantis, but does not indicate how many.

Although the map vanished after Kircher’s death in 1680, it was the only known representation of Atlantis to have survived the Ancient World. Thanks to his research and book, it survives today in a close copy. Kircher was the first to publish a map of Atlantis, probably the most accurate of its kind to date. Curiously, it is depicted upside down, contrary to maps in both his day and ours. Yet, this apparent anomaly is proof of the map’s authenticity, because Egyptian mapmakers, even as late as Ptolemaic times, designed their maps with the Upper Nile Valley located in the south (“Upper” refers to its higher elevation) at the top, because the river’s headwaters are located in the Sudan.

Sources:
Atlantis Encyclopedia by Frank Joseph;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athanasius_Kircher

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Athanasius_Kircher%27s_Atlantis.gif

Winged Cat Sightings

2011-09-23T05:39:00.000+07:00

In 2008 a cat sprouted a pair of fur-covered wings on his back during a hot-weather spell in Sichuan province, China. The cat owner said, “At first they were just two bumps, but they started to grow quickly and after a month there were two wings.” Winged cats do seem to exist, but what are they? Based on reports, out of about 138 sightings of winged cats, over 30 of them have been scientifically documented. Genetic experts claim there is nothing angelic or magical about the condition, which doesn't hinder the cat's quality of life. They say the wings can form through poor grooming, a genetic defect or a hereditary skin condition.

Here are several sightings of winged cat throughout the world:

In India in the 1860s, Alexander Gibson shot a Winged cat whose dried skin was exhibited at a meeting of the Bombay Asiatic Society.

In 1894 as reported in the Independent Press, a winged cat was being displayed to those who paid two pennies. David Badcock, who owned the Ship Inn in Cambridge, England, also took the cat to nearby villages.

In 1899, Strand Magazine carried a photograph of a cat belonging to a woman in Wiveliscombe, Somerset, England, that had two furcovered growths coming out of its back. They flapped about whenever the cat moved.

In 1934 Mrs. Hughes Griffiths, of Oxford, England, found a winged black and white cat in her stables. The Oxford Zoo soon arrived on scene, captured the cat with a net, and took it back to the zoo. The cat had six-inch wings protruding from its back.

Winged cat that lived in a builder’s yard in Trafford Park, Manchester, England.

In 1936 On a farm near Portpatrick, Wigtownshire, Scotland, a winged cat was found that had white hair and wings on its back. As the cat would run about, the wings flapped up and down.

In June 1949, a cat with a wingspan of 23 inches was shot and killed in northern Sweden after it rushed at a child.

In 1950s Madrid newspapers reported that one resident’s grey Angora cat had grown a pair of large, fluffy wings.

In May 1959, 15-year-old Douglas Shelton captured a cat while he was hunting near Pinesville, West Virginia. The cat was not feral but acted friendly. And . . . it had wings! The only time the cat got angry was when the wings were pulled.

On June 24, 1966, Jean-Jacque Revers shot a cat with a wingspan of 14 inches that was attacking other animals near Alfred, Ontario. It was said to be able to make gliding jumps of 50–60 feet with wings extended. A veterinarian determined that the wings were long growths of thick, matted, black fur. An autopsy confirmed that it had been rabid.

In 2004 near Kursk, Central Russia, the local newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, resident Nadezhda Medvedeva found a rather strange cat on her property. The cat was a ginger Tomcat, twice as large as a normal cat, and the cat had wings.

In 2008 according to the Huashang newspaper, in the Sichuan province, in China a one-year-old Tomcat grew wings after being sexually harassed by other cats.

During the early 1990s, British zoologist and cryptozoologist Dr Karl Shuker, who has a longstanding interest in the winged cat phenomenon, became the first person to make the link between winged cat reports in the popular media and reports of FCA in the veterinary literature. According to Shuker, domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) with a rare condition have abnormally loose skin that stretches easily along the shoulders or back known as feline cutaneous asthenia (FCA). This can result in the creation of furry outgrowths like wings. Although the first cases of winged cats were reported in the 1800s, FCA was not discovered until the 1970s.

Sources :
Mysterious Creatures: “A Guide to Cryptozoology” by George M. Eberhart;
Paranormal Underground Magazine Vol. 3, Issue 10: “Do Winged Cats Exist? Mutants, Cryptids, Hoaxes, or Real?” by Jill Stefko, Ph.D.;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1049610/Ready-Tiddles-Meet-cats-sprouted-wings.html;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_cat

Pic Source:
Mysterious Creatures: “A Guide to Cryptozoology” by George M. Eberhart page 590

Cuba's Sunken City

2011-09-20T05:03:00.009+07:00

On December 6, 2001 a Canadian exploration company announced they had made a startling discovery off the west coast of Cuba and within 75 miles of the Yucatan. Using side-scan sonar equipment they identified a large underwater plateau “with clear images of symmetrically organized stone structures that looked like an urban development partly covered by sand,” the researchers told reporters. Published reports from Havana quoted Russian-born Canadian Paulina Zelitsky and her associates with the British Columbia- based Advanced Digital Communications (ADC) that new explorations with a miniature submarine have reaffirmed the existence of large stone structures apparently created by an unknown civilization thousands of years ago.

Zelitsky and her company first gained widespread attention several years ago with discovery of the sunken U.S. battleship Maine at 3700 feet near Havana harbor. The curiosity of the world was again captured in Spring of 2001 when the group reported finding an underwater city in the depths of the Caribbean. The “lost city” is submerged under 2,100 feet of water off the Guanahacabibes Peninsula on the Caribbean island’s western tip. It is the team estimated that the mysterious structures were built at least 6,000 years ago. This would make the site the oldest urban center in the world.

The Research Vessel "Ulises"

According to Reuters, on July 2001 ADC and its Cuban partners, operating from their research ship “Ulises”, deployed a remotely operated underwater vehicle. A robot called a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) was sent down to film the structures that lay over a 7.7 square mile area. The images produced by the ROV at that time were cited in December as revealing huge smooth granite-like blocks in “perpendicular and circular formations, some in pyramid shapes.” According to researchers most of the blocks, measuring from 6.5 to 16 feet in length, were exposed and stacked one on top of the other. Some were covered in a fine white sand found throughout the area. In the previous report the area had been described as looking like an urban development with the shapes resembled pyramids, roads, bridges and buildings from above.

Who built this ancient city?
In Paulina's opinion the complex belongs to 'the pre-classic period' of Central American history, and was populated by 'an advanced civilization similar to the early Teotihuacán culture of Yucatán'.

In his report on the formations, a geologist and director of research at Cuba's Natural History Museum, Manuel Iturralde noted that conclusive proof of man-made structures on the site could reinforce some oral traditions of the Maya and native Yucatan. These people still retell ancient stories of an island inhabited by their ancestors that vanished beneath the waves similar with the legendary lost continent of Atlantis.

Andrew Collins the author of "Gateway to Atlantis" proposed that the mechanism behind Atlantis' destruction was a comet impact which devastated the eastern Atlantic coast of America, causing literally 500,000 elliptical craters, known today as the Carolina Bays, sometime around 8500 BC (+/- 500 years). Fragments of the comet falling in the Western Atlantic basin, north of the Bahamas, would have created tsunami tidal-waves perhaps hundreds of metres high. These would have drowned, temporarily at least, large parts of the Bahamas and Caribbean, as well as many low-lying regions of the eastern United States.

Myths and legends told by the indigenous peoples of the Bahaman and Caribbean archipelagos, when the Spanish first reached the New World, spoke of just such a cataclysm. They said that the waters suddenly rushed in and drowned the great landmass, breaking it up into the individual islands seen today. Yet in the thousands of years which it took for the ice fields to melt in full, the sea-level rose only 300 metres (some estimates place it as much as 400 metres). “If the 'city' does lie in 600-700 metres of water, we will need to propose a suitable geological mechanism in order to justify its submergence to this depth post 9000 BC. Either that, or we will have to define a geological time-frame in which the land plateau, with its volcano, fault lines and river was above sea-level,” said Andrew.

While no one knows how to place the Cuba discovery within a familiar geological context, it seems clear that, the site is indeed artificial, its age is more likely to comport with Plato’s dates for the sinking of Atlantis, 9500 BC, than with any orthodox geology. If so, the find could be the most important of our time.

Sources:
Atlantis Rising Magazine vol. 32;
http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/lostcity.htm;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1697038.stm;
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/05/0528_020528_sunkencities.html

Pic Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1697038.stm;
Atlantis Rising Magazine vol. 32 page 10

The Franklin's Expedition

2011-09-16T05:41:00.001+07:00

Sir John Franklin set off in charge of a British Navy expedition in 1845 to chart the North American Arctic and the route of the fabled Northwest Passage. In July of that year the two ships of the expedition were seen by whalers in Baffin Bay, at the gateway to the Northwest Passage. After that they were never seen by Europeans again. In the years that followed, the fate of Franklin’s expedition became one of the great mass-media stories of its day, with a rapt public breathlessly following every new development and a stream of search expeditions flooding the Arctic in search of the missing men and ships. At least 40 expeditions have been launched over the 160 years since Franklin disappeared.

Sir John Franklin

Franklin’s expedition was conceived as part of a programme of journeys of exploration undertaken by the Royal Navy, partly as a means of occupying their men and officers during peacetime and partly as a reflection of Victorian hubris, which saw the British Empire attempting to project the might of its technology, derring-do and pure British spunk to the farthest recesses of the globe. In particular, Franklin’s expedition was part of an ongoing quest to open up the Northwest Passage, the fabled route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans across the top of the North American continent, which, it was hoped, would dramatically reduce transit times between Europe and the Far East by obviating the need to navigate the Cape of Good Hope (at the southern tip of Africa) or Cape Horn (at the southern tip of South America). Even today, with the Suez and Panama canals, the Northwest Passage would be the preferred route for much of the world’s maritime traffic.

The two ships were named Erebus and Terror, and, with a combined crew of 129, they sailed on 19 May 1845. The hulls of the ships were strengthened and armoured and they were fitted with central heating, screw propulsion and other cutting edge technology. In preparation for a long trip, the ships were supplied with everything from an extensive library and personalised tableware for the officers to three years of supplies, including quantities of tinned food (at this time still something of an untried novelty).

On July 26 they encountered the two whalers in Baffin Bay, and then sailed into the channels and straits of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. It was later discovered that they spent the winter of 1845–46 camped on Beechey Island, and were then able to make it as far as the north-western tip of King William Island, which is just off the Canadian mainland in what is now the Nunavut Territory. But the weather was against them and by September 1846 they were again trapped by sea ice in a gelid grip that would not relent for almost two years. What followed was only pieced together from the clues and rumours brought back by the search expeditions.

The first search party set off in 1848 and searches involving teams from Canada, the UK, and the US have continued ever since. When two years had gone by without word from the Franklin expedition, the Navy and the government launched the first of a series of what were, initially, rescue missions, but later were sent simply to solve the mystery of the utter disappearance of the two ships and 129 men. Despite mapping much of the convoluted coastline of the region, the first 14 expeditions discovered only one trace of the Franklin party – their overwinter camp on Beechey Island, about a third of the way into the Northwest Passage, together with the graves of three crew members who had died of tuberculosis.

Not until 1854 did the first clues to the expedition’s fate become clear. Dr John Rae, a surveyor for the Hudson’s Bay Company, spoke to the Inuit, who reported encounters near King William Island four years previously, between Inuit and a party of 40 white men who were in a desperate state. There was no translator and the white men could only signal their intention to head south. Suffering a time of famine themselves, the Inuit were not able to offer any help and the two groups went their separate ways. Later the bodies of another group of white men were found by the Inuit near the mouth of a large river,with signs that they had been reduced to cannibalism.When Rae let it be known he was offering a reward for any material evidence to back up these tales he was able to obtain many artifacts that were obviously from the ships and crew, which the Inuit had salvaged.

Lady Jane Franklin (Franklin's wife), raised enough money to finance a new expedition to follow up this new information from Rae and in 1859, Leopold McClintock in command of the Fox had managed to reach King William Island. The McClintock expedition uncovered the evidence that, for the Victorian public, appeared to solve the mystery. On King William Island they found a cairn containing a brief note. Scribbled on a standard-issue Navy form, it had two parts:

The first, dated 28 May 1847, recorded the ships’ movements from 1845, including the winter camp at Beechey Island, their current location and some subsequent land explorations, and insisted, ‘ALL WELL’.
The second part, dated 25 April 1848, was far grimmer. It recorded that the two ships had been abandoned after again ‘having been beset’ with ice, that nine officers and 15 other men had died, including Franklin himself, who had passed away on 11 June 1847, and that the surviving men were now striking out for Back’s Fish River to the south (presumably with the intention of making their way up the river to outposts of the Hudson’s Bay Company).

Investigating further, McClintock came across a trail of death – corpses, scattered equipment and one of the ship’s boats, converted into a sled but then abandoned. It was laden with a bizarre range of equipment, including silver teaspoons, carpet slippers, a copy of the novel The Vicar of Wakefield, and unopened tins of meat.

In 1981, a team of scientists led by Owen Beattie, a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, began a series of scientific studies of the graves, bodies, and other physical evidence left by Franklin crew members on Beechey Island and King William Island. They concluded that the crew members whose graves had been found on Beechey Island most likely died of pneumonia and perhaps tuberculosis and that lead poisoning may have worsened their health, owing to badly soldered cans held in the ships' food stores.

However, it was later suggested that the source of this lead may not have been tinned food, but the distilled water systems fitted to the expedition’s ships. Cut marks on human bones found on King William Island were seen as signs of cannibalism. The combined evidence of all studies suggested that hypothermia, starvation, lead poisoning and disease including scurvy, along with general exposure to a hostile environment whilst lacking adequate clothing and nutrition, killed everyone on the expedition in the years following its last sighting by Europeans in 1845.

The expedition to the Utjulik area, in 2004, concluded that only direct sonar scanning of the seabed could identify the possible wreck, and only a small percentage of the target areas identified from the Inuit accounts has yet been imaged in this time-consuming and labour-intensive fashion.

Last week (BBC, September 2011), representatives from Parks Canada announced the results from their search this summer, which proved unsuccessful. "The extraordinary thing is that despite all this effort, after 160 years and by thousands of people, we still don't know where the ships are, and what happened on the expedition, or what happened to most of the men," says William Battersby, who wrote the biography of James Fitzjames, the captain of the Erebus.

The expedition has become one of the most important episodes in Canadian and Arctic history, with the allure of a historical mystery and the drama of personal tragedy. The ships themselves would have genuine archaeological significance, as there are no extant bomb ships, let alone ones with special adaptations representing the height of mid-19th-century technology. As for the missing records, they are the Holy Grail of Franklin enthusiasts. Indeed, according to Franklin-scholar Russell Potter, ‘Of all the dreamed-for documents in all the unsolved mysteries of modern times, none matches the drawing power of these elusive Franklin papers.’ It is hoped that they may be aboard the sunken ships, so that finding one will lead to the other.

To the Victorians the story now seemed relatively clear and solved. Trapped by unrelenting ice and with provisions running low and men dying, the crew had bravely decided to try their chances on land. However, many mysteries remained. Why had the men abandoned their ships to attempt the suicidal overland trip via Back’s Fish River, which would have meant a 1,200-kilometre (746-mile) trek over falls and rapids? Why had they filled their makeshift sled with useless and heavy equipment?

The community of Franklin scholars continues to hope that the wreck of the Erebus or Terror will be located and explored, perhaps to reveal one of the expedition logs that could finally explain the full story of the various abandonments, reoccupations, desperate land treks and tragic deaths. Perhaps it would even reveal where Franklin himself was buried. But finding it will not be easy.

Sources:
Lost Histories: “Exploring the World’s Most Famous Mysteries” by Joel Levy;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14847091;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_expedition

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Franklin.jpg

The Disappearance of William Morgan

2011-09-13T05:49:00.000+07:00

On the evening of September 12, 1826, William Morgan (1774–1826?) disappeared outside the city jail in Canandaigua, New York State, three months before the publication of his book revealing the secrets of the first three degrees of Freemasonry. Witnesses heard Morgan shout “Murder!” as he was forced into a carriage by four men. The carriage drove off into the night, and Morgan was never seen again. Reports of Morgan’s disappearance raised questions about the extent of Masonic involvement in the incident and launched one of the great conspiracy panics in American history and created a national anti-Masonic movement.

Morgan had a checkered past and a dubious reputation. Born in Virginia in 1774, he worked as a stonemason, brewer, merchant, farmer, and clerk, and contemporary accounts describe him as a quarrelsome alcoholic, in and out of jail for unpaid debts. In the early 1820s, he moved from Ontario, Canada, to upstate New York, settling in Rochester and then in Batavia. At some point in his life he had either become a Mason or learned enough from published exposures of Masonic ritual to pass as a Mason. No record of his initiation into the three degrees of Craft Masonry survives, though he certainly attended Masonic lodges in upstate New York in the early 1820s.

Soon afterward, he sought admission to a Masonic lodge in nearby LeRoy, and received the Royal Arch degree in 1825. Morgan was initiated into the lodge, but when he supported the formation of a new lodge in Batavia, other members of the proposed lodge took his name off the petition, thus denying his membership. Morgan, infuriated, quit the Batavia lodge and decided to avenge himself on Masonry by writing a book that revealed its secrets. The hope of making money may also have played a significant part in his plans.

In March 1826 Morgan retaliated by entering into a contract with local printer David C. Miller and two investors to publish an exposé of the “secrets” of Freemasonry. When word got out about his plan, local Masons tried to prevent the book’s publication. Miller, Morgan, and other backers of the project were harassed and threatened, but went forward with the project.

On 10 September 1826, some three weeks after Morgan had received a copyright for his book, Illustrations of Masonry, Miller’s print shop was set on fire in an apparent attempt to stop the book’s publication. The same day, a member of the Canandaigua Masonic lodge obtained a warrant for Morgan’s arrest on charges of petty theft. The next evening he was released for lack of evidence, but was immediately rearrested on debt charges and imprisoned in the Canandaigua jail.

The following night, Morgan was abducted from the jail and forced into a carriage by four men; he was never seen again. The jailer’s wife heard a shrill whistle, went to the window, and witnessed Morgan struggling and shouting as he was forced into a carriage and taken away. Exactly what happened to Morgan after that remains a mystery. He was apparently held prisoner for several days at the abandoned Fort Niagara, and his captors tried to convince him to accept a large cash sum, withdraw the book, and emigrate to Canada. Rumors for years thereafter claimed that he had been seen in Canada, or British Honduras, or the Turkish city of Smyrna; one account claimed that he had run away to the West and become an Indian chief, another that he had turned pirate and been hanged in Cuba.

The most popular accounts of a conspiracy, which was said to involve nearly seventy Masonic brethren, held that Morgan had initially been taken to Canada, where plans to pay him in exchange for staying out of the United States had fallen through. After a few days, according to these charges, he was bound with weights and thrown into the Niagara River just below the falls. When a decomposed male corpse was found near Lake Ontario more than a year after Morgan’s disappearance, the corpse was initially identified and buried as Morgan, though many charged that the local coroner, hoping to please the anti-Masonic movement, had deliberately ignored signs that called its identity into question. The body was later exhumed and identified as one Timothy Munroe. Morgan’s body was never recovered.

The Morgan affair also fed public alarm about the amount of influence the Freemasons had on government. Half of all officials in the county where Morgan disappeared, and as many as two-thirds of officeholders across New York State, including the governor DeWitt Clinton, belonged to Masonic lodges.

Morgan’s book, Illustrations of Masonry, nonetheless appeared in December 1826 (other source said it was released in 1827) was an instant bestseller, and filled with blood-curdling descriptions of supposed Masonic rituals and vengeance oaths, which prompted an investigation of the order by New York State legislators in 1829. By that time the governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton, had offered rewards of $300 (a large sum by early nineteenth-century standards) for information leading to the arrest of Morgan’s abductors, and a grand jury in Canandaigua had indicted four Masons for conspiracy to kidnap. Three of them pled guilty but claimed they had no idea where Morgan was. Conspiracy to kidnap was then a misdemeanor in New York, and the defendants served jail terms of between two years and three months. The resulting investigation went on for five years; a total of 54 Masons were indicted and thirty-nine were tried, but only 10 were convicted of crimes, and no definitive resolution of the case was found, while 13 other Masons fled the state to avoid trial.

The third and last special counsel, who had the remarkable name of Victory Birdseye, finished his inquiry in 1831. Years later, a Mason named Henry Vance confessed on his deathbed that he and two other lodge members had murdered Morgan and dumped his body in the Niagara River. However none of these provided any conclusive evidence. Whatever the facts of the matter, charges of a Masonic “cover-up” in the Morgan affair fueled the first national mass anti-Masonic movement, which spawned dozens of newspapers and other publications and created a political party.

Sources:
Conspiracy Theories in American History: “An Encyclopedia” Vol.1 edited by Peter Knight;
The Element Encyclopedia of Secret Societies: “The Ultimate A-Z of Ancient Mysteries, Lost Civilizations and Forgotten Wisdom” by John Michael Greer;
The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories by Michael Newton

Pic Source:
The Encyclopedia of Conspiracies and Conspiracy Theories by Michael Newton page 133

Abracadabra

2011-09-09T06:42:00.004+07:00

Abracadabra is one of the magic words relating to rituals, talismans and Pentacles. The word have a symbolic meaning, either in themselves or in the way they are used, which is expressed either phonetically or, more frequently, graphically. This magic word was in frequent use during the Middle Ages as a magic formula and historically was believed to have healing powers when inscribed on an amulet. It is derived from the Hebrew phrase abreq ad hâbra, meaning ‘hurl your thunderbolt even unto death’. The first known mention of the word was in the second century AD in a book called Liber Medicinalis (sometimes known as De Medicina Praecepta Saluberrima) by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla, who prescribed that malaria sufferers wear an amulet containing the word written in the form of a triangle:

The mystical word “Abracadabra,” was also used in medieval Europe as a chant to reduce fever. Each time the word was spoken in the chant, a letter was dropped. As the chant reduced, the fever was dispelled. Such talismans were especially popular during the Great Plague that swept through London during the mid-1660s.

By applying such magic words as “abracadabra,” Abramelin magicians claim they can gain the love of anyone they desire, discover hidden treasures, become invisible, invoke spirits to appear, fly through the air and travel great distances in a matter of minutes, and animate corpses to create zombies to serve them. Abramelin magicians believe they can heal illnesses or cause diseases, bring about peace or war, create prosperity or poverty. The essence of Abramelin magick can be found in The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, which was translated by MacGregor Mathers from a manuscript written in French in the eighteenth century. The work purports to be much older, however. It was dated 1458 and claims to be translated originally from Hebrew.

This magic word has also been related to the Abracax (Abraxas, Abrasax) of the Gnostics. In Persian mythology Abracax denotes the Supreme Being and presides over 365 impersonated virtues, one of which is supposed to prevail on each day of the year. In the second century the word was employed by the Basilidians for the deity; it was also the principle of the Gnostic hierarchy.

It is also in reality one of the names of the sun-god, Mithras. The origin of the cult of Mithras dates from the time that the Hindus and Persians still formed one people, for the god Mithras occurs in the religion and the sacred books of both races, i.e. in the Vedas and in the Avesta.

In the "Harry Potter" novel series, Abracadabra is modified by the author (J.K. Rowling) as "Avada Kedavra" which is known as the Killing Curse.

Source:
A Dictionary of Symbols by J.E. Cirlot;
The Gale Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained Vol.2 by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abracadabra;
http://www.infoplease.com/dictionary/brewers/abracax.html#ixzz1X3cOVkjT;
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10402a.htm

Pic Source:
A Dictionary of Symbols by J.E. Cirlot page 2

The Mysterious Mummies of Cladh Hallan

2011-09-08T16:33:00.000+07:00

In 2001 an archaeological excavations at Cladh Hallan on the island of South Uist have uncovered the remains of what are believed to be a mummified Bronze Age bodies, buried under the floor of a prehistoric house. The skeletons looked very unusual, like Peruvian mummies. DNA tests on British prehistoric mummies revealed they were made of body parts from several different people, arranged to look like one person. And after being radiocarbon dated, all were found to have died between 300 and 500 years before the houses were built, meaning they had been kept above ground for some time by their descendants. The four bodies discovered on South Uist, in Scotland's Outer Hebrides were the first evidence of deliberate mummification carried out in ancient times ever found in Britain - and is without doubt one of the most important archaeological discoveries made in recent years.

The house in which the mummy skeletons were buried was part of a unique Bronze Age complex (c. 1100-200 BC), which is as mysterious as the preserved corpses that were buried there. The prehistoric settlement's main feature is a row of four or more roundhouses, all built as a single structure with party walls.

The excavation team led by Dr. Mike parker Pearson of Sheffield University first uncovered the remains of two adults within the north house, then in the central house they found the burial of a three-month-old-child child and two dogs, and in the southern house the burial of one child. Four of these burials, the two adults (a female in her 40s and a male) in the north house and the children in the central and southern houses, were placed in the ground before the first floors of peaty sand were laid down. It is these burials, construed as pre-construction offerings, which also gave evidence for the prior mummification and curation of the bodies.

The adult skeletons were tightly folded, in the same way that Peruvian mummies were bundled up, hands and knees tucked tightly under the chin. The female skeleton had a full set of teeth except for her two upper lateral incisors which had been removed from her jaw and placed in her hands. The left tooth was placed in her left hand by her head and the right tooth was in her right hand below her knee. Absence of trauma on the two teeth or their sockets suggests that they were removed at some time after death.

Through carbon dating, the adult bodies; one individual (a male) had died in around 1,600 BC - but had been buried a full six centuries later, in around 1,000 BC. What is more, a second individual (a female) had died in around 1,300 BC - and had to wait 300 years before being interred. The archaeologists thought this strange. They had never encountered anything like it before. If the skeletons had been left unburied for 600 or 300 years they would have ended up as just a pile of bones. It seemed that perhaps in some way the sinews and skin had been deliberately preserved, to permanently hold the skeletons together.

According to recent DNA tests on the remains carried out by the University of Manchester, show that the "female burial", previously identified as such because of the pelvis of the skeleton, was in fact a composite. The male skeleton was also composed of bones from three different individuals--the post-cranial skeleton belonged to one man, the head and cervical vertebrae to another and the mandible came from a third. There is no evidence that later material was inserted into an earlier grave; on excavation all skeletal elements appeared in fact to be articulated. Prof Parker Pearson said, "These could be kinship components, they are putting lineages together, the mixing up of different people's body parts seems to be a deliberate act."

Further tests showed that the bones had become demineralised, a process caused by placing a body in an acidic environment like a peat bog. The test suggested very strongly that the corpses had not been allowed to decompose for long. It indicated that the process of decomposition had been halted at an early stage - presumably when the body was placed in the peat bog, or perhaps if it had been eviscerated prior to immersion in the bog. The fact that these ancient remains were preserved with their skeletons intact shows that Bronze Age Britons knew exactly how long to leave their dead suspended in the peat bog's murky depths - long enough to preserve them well enough to survive above ground for hundreds of years but not so long that they lost form.

Sources:
http://archaeology.about.com/od/mummies/a/parkerpearson.htm;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2003/03_march/17/mummies.shtml;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14575729;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/archaeology/mummies_cladhhallan_01.shtml;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2028873/Britains-oldest-mummies-individuals-gruesome-jigsaw-human-body-parts.html;
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-137718808.html

Pic Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/archaeology/images/mummies_cladh_skeleton.jpg

The Mystery of Duffy's Cut

2011-08-30T05:15:00.006+07:00

Many years ago twin brothers Frank and William “Bill” Watson were told a ghost story by their grandfather. He said that according to a file kept by the Pennsylvania Railroad company, 57 Irish laborers who had been constructing a particularly difficult stretch of the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad between Malvern and Frazer died suddenly in that rural valley, two months after many of them had arrived in Philadelphia on a ship from Derry. Their bodies were buried hastily in the dirt and gravel fill that would soon support railroad tracks. One night a man walking home from a tavern reported seeing blue and green ghosts dancing in the mist at Duffy’s Cut. Grandfather Watson, a railroad worker, repeated the ghost story every family Thanksgiving dinner, so it became imprinted on his grandsons’memories. They never forgot and it led to the discovery of a previously unknown mass grave and possible evidence of murder.

No one alive knows exactly what happened during that searing August of 1832 in the rough slice of southeastern Pennsylvania known as Duffy’s Cut. Duffy’s Cut is the name given to a stand of thick woodland on the outskirt of Malvern, an affluent town in Pennsylvania. For more than 170 years, on the rare occasions that the deaths were mentioned at all, they were attributed to the outbreak of Asiatic cholera that had swept through the region, killing thousands. Now, after several years of poking around and several more of focused digging, it’s become increasingly clear that something more sinister happened as well.

Official record of the deaths at Duffy’s Cut remained locked in the vaults of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) until Joseph Tripican, a secretary to a former PRR president, removed them and keep the file after the company’s bankruptcy in 1970. Joseph Tripician ( Bill and Frank Watson’s grandfather), a talented Sicilian immigrant, had spent five decades working for the company, including a number of years as assistant to President Clement. In the 1990s, one of Tripican’s grandsons, Reverend Dr. Frank Watson inherited the file when his grandfather died, he decided to began to research the history and investigate it along with his brother William Watson and professors Earl Schandelmeier and John Ahtes of Immaculata University in Pennsylvania. Their quest, called The Duffy's Cut Project, is named for Philip Duffy, who hired the Irishmen to build a section of railroad known as a cut.

“It was PRR file # 004.01 C, I took one look at it and realized it was a hidden history connected to the very area where I had gotten a job” at Immaculata, says Bill. “I knew I had to find that spot.” Then something in the file caught his eye. It was the newspaper story from June 1889 by Julian Sachse titled “The Legend About Duffy’s Cut On the Pennsylvania Railroad Between Malvern and Frazer.” Transcribed on PRR letterhead as part of the official file, the story included a lengthy interview with an elderly area resident.

On a “warm murky night” in September 1832, just weeks after the Irishmen had been buried, the man recounted, he had been returning from the Green Tree Inn and was walking along the railroad. When he came to Duffy’s Fill, he told his interviewer: “… the night was hot and foggy, so I trudged up between the stone blocks (the railroad sills, on which the tracks were laid) until I got on the fill, and there...I saw with my own eyes, the ghosts of the Irishmen who died with the cholera, a-dancing around the big trench where they were buried; it’s true mister, it was awful. Why, they looked as if they were a kind of green and blue fire and they were a-hopping and bobbing on their graves... I had heard the Irishmen were haunting the place because they were buried without the benefit of clergy.”

Sachse gently challenged the elderly resident, but the man insisted that “what he had seen were the disembodied spirits of the laborers who were buried in the trench.” And, he added: “I hadn’t been drinking no whiskey either that night.”

"One of the pieces of correspondence in this file told us 'X marks the spot,'" said Frank. He added that the document suggested that the men "were buried where they were making the fill, which is the original railroad bridge."

In 2002, the brothers began digging and searching. Their research led to the finding of a mass grave where they believe 57 Irish immigrants met violent deaths after cholera epidemic struck in 1832. For over five years, Dr Frank Watson, his brother William, and a team from Immaculata University have been searching for the men's remains and one day, they made the breakthrough they were waiting for. Among the bones was a pipe with an Irish flag on it. However, the brothers aren’t satisfied that cholera was necessarily the cause of the immigrants death. They suspect foul play.

On March 20, 2009, the first human skulls were unearthed, consisting of two skulls, six teeth and eighty other bones."We discovered the first two skulls," said Dr Watson. And the next day they even found more human skeletons.

Janet Monge, a forensic sientists at the University of Pennsylvania who examined the remains discovered that several skulls showed signs of trauma said: “When we started to take out skeletons 6 and 7, the trauma became even more dramatic. In the case of skeleton 6, the trauma is thin, long, and narrow—this person was clunked on the head at around the time of death. One skulls shows a perforation suspiciously like a bullet hole." Monge said of the bodies: "If they had cholera, it didn’t kill them. I would say something else killed them, but they might have had cholera, too."

"This is a murder mystery from over 170 years ago, and it’s finally coming to the light of day, no wonder the spirits do not lie easy in their unmarked graves," Frank Watson said.

Sources:
Paranormal Magazine Issue. 53, November 2010 : ”Ghosts point way to their mass grave.”;
The Pennsylvania Gazette Vol. Nov – Dec. 2010: “Bones Beneath the Tracks” by Samuel Hughes;
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-08-24/justice/pennsylvania.graves.mystery_1_ghost-story-brothers-tim-bechtel?_s=PM:CRIME;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffy%27s_Cut;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/foyle_and_west/7961564.stm;
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/16/national/main6777992.shtml

Pic Source:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45596000/jpg/_45596823_duffyscutsign226.jpg

Alexander the Great

2011-08-26T05:11:00.013+07:00

Alexander the Great also known as Alexander III of Macedon, had became a near-mythical figure in his own lifetime, stories about his journey went on to form a staple of regional literature and fable from Europe to the borders of China. Alexander, leader of the Greeks, overlord of Asia Minor and pharaoh of Egypt became 'great king' of Persia at the age of 20's, and by the age of 33 he had conquered most of the known world and created an empire that would shape the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East for centuries to come. The most crucial moment of his legendary journey was his visit to the Oracle of Ammon at the Siwa Oasis, deep in the North African desert. Although the story of this visit has become a legend, it remains shrouded in mystery.

Alexander was born on 20 (or 21) July 356 BC, in Pella, the capital of the Ancient Greek Kingdom of Macedon. He was the son of Philip II, the King of Macedon. His mother was Philip's fourth wife Olympias, the daughter of Neoptolemus I, the king of Epirus. Alexander the Great owed a great deal to his father. Philip extended the reign south into Greece, west to the Adriatic Sea, east to the Black Sea, and north to the Danube River. When Alexander need a tutor, Philip hired Aristotle to teach him about philosophy and literature and politics. When he was sixteen, his tutorship under Aristotle came to an end. Philip gave him command over the Macedonian cavalry and his first taste of military victory. In 340 BC, as Philip prepared to invade Persia, he appointed Alexander regent.

Alexander and his tutor, Aristotle

Once he ascended on the Macedonian throne, Alexander quickly disposed of all of his domestic enemies by ordering their execution. But soon he had to act outside Macedonia. Philip’s death caused series of rebellions among the conquered nations and the Illyrians, Thracians, and Greeks saw a chance for independence. Alexander acted swiftly. He forced his way into Greece despite the roads leading to the country being blocked by the Thessalians. The Greek commander Memnon and his men considerably slow down the advance of Alexander and many Macedonians died during the long and difficult sieges of the Greek cities of Halicarnassus, Miletus, Mylasa. But at the end the Macedonian army defeated the enemy and conquered the coast of Asia Minor. As soon as he restored Macedonian rule in northern Greece, he marched into southern Greece. His speed surprised the Greeks and by the end of the summer 336 BC they had no other choice but to acknowledge his authority.

In 332 BCE Alexander ‘invaded’ Egypt. In practice he had already defeated the forces of Darius III, king of Persia, in the Near East, and Darius had fled back to Persia. Egypt, which had never been a willing subject of the Persian king, was left essentially unguarded and welcomed the arrival of Alexander as a redeemer and liberator. Alexander was undefeated in battle and is considered one of the most successful commanders of all time. His line traced their ancestry back to Hercules, a demi-god and the son of Zeus. Perhaps Alexander already believed the connection might be more direct. The Egyptians had proclaimed him to be a son of the gods and the greatest of the Egyptian gods, AmunRa, was considered to be simply another name for Zeus.

Alexander the Great founded Alexandria in 331 BCE after he left Memphis and travelled back north to the coast, but hung around just long enough to lay out the basic street plan and get construction underway. And then strategically placing it to become a great trading centre. He then travelled east along the coast of what the ancients called Libya, receiving tributes, before turning south and, accompanied only by a small escort and some guides, striking deep into the hostile desert. His target was the Oasis of Siwa, home of the oracle of the god Ammon. The journey was difficult and dangerous. Two centuries earlier the Persian king Cambyses had sent an army to conquer Siwa, but it vanished into the desert and was never heard of again. No pharaoh had ever been. Alexander’s companions tried to persuade him not to risk the journey, but he would not listen.

As they struggled through the desert Alexander’s party were assailed by near disaster on more than one occasion. First they ran out of water, but were saved by a sudden rainstorm. Then they became lost in a massive sandstorm, but were apparently led out of trouble by a pair of ravens. Finally the party reached the Oasis at Siwa. Alexander did not wait to rest or recuperate, but immediately made his way to the temple of Ammon, the Ammoneion, home of the oracle. Alexander was then accorded the rare honour of being invited into the adyton, the inner sanctum or holy-of-holies, to question the oracle. Exactly what was asked, and how it was answered, will never be known.

On re-emerging into the temple forecourt Alexander would only tell his companions that he had received the answer he sought, and that he would only tell the ‘secret prophecies’ to his mother, and only face to face on his return to Macedon. However, it is generally assumed that Alexander asked about his paternity – specifically, whether or not he was of divine paternity. According to various ancient historians, Alexander first asked whether any of the assassins who had murdered his father, Philip, were still alive.

Philip’s assassination was very much a public event. It took place at Aegae in 336 BC at a festival celebrating the marriage of his daughter (and Alexander’s sister) Cleopatra to another Alexander, the king of Epirus. As the king’s entourage moved toward a theater, Philip lagged behind the procession so that he could enter more dramatically. His bodyguards fanned out around him. One of them, Pausanias, stepped forward, stabbed the king, and fled. Three others chased Pausanias and killed him. Alexander moved quickly to secure the throne. At Philip’s funeral, he put to death several potential rivals. He seized command of the army, subdued rebellions to the south and north, and led his troops into Persia. Clearly, therefore, Philip’s death advanced Alexander’s ambitions. But just because Alexander benefited from the murder doesn’t mean he had a part in it. Indeed, according to Aristotle, Pausanias’s actions were the result not of a conspiracy but a personal grudge. “Philip...was attacked by Pausanias,” Aristotle wrote in his 'Politics', “because he permitted him to be insulted by Attalus and his friends.” Aristotle’s brief mention is the only extant account of the assassination by a contemporary Of Philip and Alexander. Others who were alive then wrote about it, among them Callisthenes, Ptolemy, Nearchus, and Cleitarchus. But none of their works survived.

Over the next eight years he was to drive his army across deep into uncharted territory, conquering nations to the borders of China and into India, crossing huge mountain ranges and ‘impassable’ deserts, overcoming all odds to become the richest man in the world and the greatest conqueror in history. The conquests of Alexander created a vast Hellenic empire.

However, in the years following Alexander's death a series of civil wars tore his empire apart which resulted in the formation of a number of states ruled by the Diadochi – Alexander's surviving generals. It broke up into smaller kingdoms shortly after his death, profoundly influenced the history and culture of the Near and Middle East for centuries to come. Few years later, one of his generals, Ptolemy Soter, took control of Egypt and made Alexandria his capital, building great palaces and temples, including a temple to the Muses (or Museum). Alexander once asked to be buried at the home of the oracle, Ammoneion. His body was brought back to Egypt, but his tomb has never been found. Most scholars expect to find it in Alexandria, but some believe it was located near Siwa.

Sources :
Mysteries In History: “From Prehistory to the Present” by Paul D. Aron;
Secret Histories: “Hidden Forces that Shaped the Past” by Joel Levy;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/alexander_the_great.shtml;
http://www.historyofmacedonia.org/AncientMacedonia/AlexandertheGreat.html

Pic Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_and_Aristotle.jpg

Blue Stonehenge

2011-08-23T03:52:00.009+07:00

On 2008, thirty-three-foot-wide (ten-meter-wide) "Blue Stonehenge" was discovered just over a mile (1.6 kilometers) from the original Stonehenge near Salisbury, United Kingdom. The new archaeological find on the west bank of the river Avon has been called "Blue Stonehenge", after the colour of the 25 Welsh stones of which it was once made up. These blue stones are also found in Stonehenge and consist of a wide range of rock types originally from Pembrokeshire West Wales, some 150 miles (240 km) away. However unlike Stonehenge, which aligns with the sun at the summer and winter solstices, Blue Stonehenge shows no sign of a particular orientation, or even an entrance, the excavation team reported. Nor is there any evidence that people lived at the site.

"It was a complete surprise for the circle to be there," says Julian Thomas, a project codirector and University of Manchester archaeologist. Blue Stonehenge was put up 5,000 years ago and appears to have been a miniature version of it. The circle of an estimated 25 blue stones was surrounded by a henge—an earthwork with a ditch and bank. Professor Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist from the University of Sheffield, suspects that any bluestones in the circle may been removed around 2500 BC and incorporated into Stonehenge, which underwent major rebuilding work at about this time. The holes, arranged in a circle, are inside a huge ditch (or henge), similar to Stonehenge and other British prehistoric monuments. The henge has been tentatively dated to 2400 B.C. But flint arrowheads found at the stone circle site are of a type that suggests the rocks were erected as early as 3000 B.C.

Pearson said: "The big, big question is when were our stones erected and when were they removed?” He added: "We speculated in the past that there might have been something at the end of the avenue near the river. But we were completely unprepared to discover that there was an entire stone circle. I think we have found incontrovertible proof that the river was very important to the people who used Stonehenge. I believe that the river formed a conduit between the living and the dead and this is the point where you leave the realm of the living at the river and enter the one of the dead at Stonehenge."

From the material that was excavated from the filled holes, that this was not a site of domestic life. There are no food remains or ceramics, but there is a lot of charcoal. This has led some archaeologists to the theory that Blue stonehenge could have been a cremation site, with the ashes being buried at Stonehenge. The team also found evidence that the builders of the stone circle used deer antlers as pickaxes.

Dr Josh Pollard, project co-director from the University of Bristol, described the discovery as "incredible". "The newly discovered circle and henge should be considered an integral part of Stonehenge rather than a separate monument and it offers tremendous insight into the history of its famous neighbour. Its landscape location demonstrates once again the importance of the river Avon in Neolithic funerary rites and ceremonies." There have been many theories about the use of Stonehenge, including that it was believed to have healing properties and was a giant astronomical observatory. The new discovery supports the theory that Stonehenge was the center of a Neolithic ritual mortuary complex and Blue Stonehenge may represents a vital part of the jigsaw as researchers slowly piece together the meaning of Stonehenge.

Sources :
http://www.archaeology.org/1001/trenches/bluestonehenge.html;
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1217752/Henge-stones-Unearthed-site-monuments-little-sister.html;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluestonehenge;
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/oct/06/second-stonehenge-discovered?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487;
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091005-mini-stonehenge-bluestonehenge-bluehenge.html;
http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201005032438/features/out-blue-another-stonehenge

Pic Source :
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/10/02/article-1217752-06AD7FAC000005DC-790_634x672.jpg

The Mysterious Disappearance of the Ninth Legion

2011-08-18T07:07:00.008+07:00

The disappearance of the Ninth Legion or Legio IX Hispana (The “Spanish Legion”) is one of the most enduring legends of Roman Britain and has long baffled the historians. No one knows for sure why, but sometime after 108 or 109 AD, the legion all but disappeared mysteriously from the records. The last concrete information of its whereabouts is in 107-108 AD, where they are mentioned being stationed to help rebuild the legionary fortress at York (Eboracum). The popular version of events is that the Ninth, at the time numbering some over 4,000 men, was sent to vanquish the Picts of modern day Scotland, and never returned.

The historians have dissented, theorising that the Ninth did not disappear in Britain at all. Their theory has been far more mundane - the legion was, in fact, a victim of strategic transfer, swapping the cold expanse of northern England, for arid wastes in the Middle East. Sometime before AD 160, they were wiped out in a war against the Persians. But, contrary to this view, there is not one shred of evidence that the Ninth were ever taken out of Britain. Three stamped tiles bearing the unit number of the Ninth found at Nijmegen, Netherlands which had been evacuated by X Gemina have been used to support the idea of transfer from Britain. But these evidence seem to date to the 80s AD, when detachments of the Ninth were indeed on the Rhine fighting Germanic tribes. And they do not prove that the Ninth left Britain for good.

In fact, the last certain piece of evidence relating to the existence of the Legion from anywhere in the Roman Empire comes from York where an inscription, dating to AD 108, credits the Ninth with rebuilding the fortress in stone. Some time between then and the mid-2nd Century, when a record of all Legions was compiled, the unit had ceased to exist.

The Ninth Legion was raised, along with the 6th, 7th and 8th, by Pompey in Hispania in 65 BCE. Julius Caesar first commanded them as Governor of Further Spain in 61 BCE. From 58-51 BC it served in Gaul throughout the Gallic Wars, and during Caesar’s Civil War against Pompey and the Senate from 49-48 BC. Victory at Pharsalus was decisive in ensuring Caesar’s ultimate grip on the Republic, and the Ninth played a key role. He repaid its service by – after his African campaign of 46 BC, and ultimate triumph at the Battle of Thapsus – disbanding the legion, and settling its veterans at Picenum.

After Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC, Octavian (Caesar’s adopted son) recalled the Ninth to fight against the rebellion of Sextus Pompeius in Sicily. The legion was then stationed in Macedonia after defeating Sextus in 36 BC. The Ninth remained with Octavian in his war against Mark Antony and Cleopatra, and fought by his side in the battle of Actium in 31 BC. After that, the legion was sent to Hispania to take part in the large scale campaign against the Cantabrians (25–13 BCE) with Octavian as sole ruler of the Roman world. The campaign eventually ensured Roman dominance in the region and this was probably the reason why the Ninth earned its title “Hispana”.

After the campaign, the Ninth Legion was likely pitched into the imperial army stationed in the Rhine area, against Germanic tribes, then relocated to Pannonia following the abandonment of the Eastern Rhine area for a relatively long period sometime after 9 AD. It wasn’t until 43 AD that the legion was on the move again, joining with other Roman forces, under Emperor Claudius and general Aulus Plautius, in invading Britain. Under the command of Caesius Nasica they put down the first revolt of Venutius between 52 and 57 AD.

Under Quintus Petillius Cerialis the Ninth suffered a serious defeat in battle against the rebellion of Boudicca (61) and was later reinforced with legionaries from the Germania provinces. Around AD 71 they constructed a new fortress at York (Eboracum), in its last recorded and datable action on the basis of legionary stamps. Legend has it that the Ninth later embarked on its fateful march against the Picts, a confederation of tribes located in modern day eastern and northern Scotland, and was annihilated, prompting Emperor Hadrian to cut his losses in the north of Britain and build his famous wall from coast to coast. This appears to be the point where myth overtakes reality however – numerous scraps of evidence suggest the Legio IX Hispana met a different fate.

It is often said that the legion disappeared in Britain about 117 CE. However, the names of several high ranking officers of the Ninth Legion are known who probably served with the legion after ca. 120 (e.g., Lucius Aemilius Karus, governor of Arabia in 142/143), which suggests that the legion continued in existence after this date. It has been suggested that the legion may have been destroyed during the Bar Kochba Revolt in Iudaea Province, or possibly in the ongoing conflict with the Parthian Empire but there is no firm evidence for this.

The legend of the Ninth gained form thanks to acclaimed novelist Rosemary Sutcliff, whose masterpiece, The Eagle of the Ninth, became an instant bestseller when published in 1954. Sutcliff wrote in a foreword that she created the story from two elements: the disappearance of the Legio IX Hispana (Ninth Legion) from the historical record, following an expedition north to deal with Caledonian tribes in 117; and the discovery of a wingless Roman eagle in excavations at Silchester. She also assumed that the legion's title of "Hispana" meant that it was raised in modern Spain, but it was probably awarded this title for victories there. At the time Sutcliff wrote, it was a widely accepted theory that the unit had been wiped out in Britain during a period of unrest early in the reign of the emperor Hadrian (AD 117-138). Scholarly opinion now disputes this, for there are extant records that have been interpreted as indicating that detachments of the Ninth Legion were serving on the Rhine frontier later than 117, and it has been suggested that it was probably annihilated in the east of the Roman Empire. This in turn is disputed by historians who assert that it was indeed destroyed north of Hadrian's wall.

Sources :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legio_IX_Hispana;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_of_the_Ninth;
http://heritage-key.com/rome/what-really-happened-roman-ninth-legion;
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12752497

Pic Source :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eagle_of_the_Ninth_cover.jpg