Via WhoForted? – one of a handful of a new generation of bloggers (Mysterious Universe, Ghost Theory, The Secret Sun and Hidden Experience spring to mind) that do justice to the impish spirit of Charles Fort.

Some strange-lights:

• Paranormal polarisation
• The Mass Exodus of the Cynical Believers
• Bigfoot Overload
• The Biggest, Weirdest, and Best of 2011 – books, podcasts, paranormal reality series’

Make the jump and start making your preparations for this year’s Mayan-tinged weirdness …

Betsy Bell

An alternate reading of M.V. Ingram’s history of the infamous Bell Witch haunting suggests a sinister secret at the heart of the mystery. This from Victorian Gothic:

The visitations began with sightings of strange animals about the Bell homestead, and of a unknown girl in green swinging to the limb of a tall oak. Soon there came an unaccountable knocking about the door and exterior walls of the house, followed by scratching and gnawing sounds that searched from room to room. It assaulted the boys in the night, ripping the sheets from their beds and pulling their hair as they tried to sleep. Whenever candles were lit to investigate, they would soon hear screams coming from their sister’s room.

Betsy Bell was 12 years old in 1818 when she became the thrall of an unseen tormentor who, for some three years, relentlessly beat her, mangled her hair, pinched and pricked her skin, and once caused her to vomit pins and needles. Her family, early, well-respected settlers of Robertson County, TN, at first tried removing her from the home, but to no avail—the disturbances followed her wherever she went. It was intelligent and, moreover, able to communicate.

At first the communication was mediated through conventional spirit rapping techniques, but soon it achieved a faltering whisper that grew into a disembodied voice, able to be heard distinctly by everyone in the room. The so-called Bell Witch—or “Kate,” as she came to be known—went on to grant many interviews, over the course of which she sang, gossiped, played tricks, and aped the sermons of local ministers, all the while heaping violent torments on Betsy, her family, and visiting skeptics.

Above all, “Kate” hated Betsy’s father—John Bell, or “Old Jack,” as she addressed him—and swore that she would torture him to death. Coincident with her arrival, he had begun suffering from facial seizures that limited his ability to speak and consume food, and when he ultimately died in 1820, the witch pointed out a vial of poison that she had used to do him in. It was only after John Bell was thus dead that the witch began to release her grip on Betsy, the manifestations more or less coming to an end by 1821.

This is the narrative laid out in Martin Van Buren Ingram’s 1894 book An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch; the only 19th century study of the haunting to have surfaced…

[More at Victorian Gothic]

Imagine that you wake up one morning, sit at your computer, and you are bombarded with links to a developing story from a major news outlet: Stephen Hawking, by making novel use of Cambridge University’s new quantum supercomputer to analyze data from SETI’s telescope array, has discerned that the universe is awash with signals from intelligent life. It reads like a regular science story, at first, but soon it is revealed that Hawking and his colleagues have tapped into an extra-terrestrial television transmission, and are even now watching, breathless, as the first, dream-like images of alien civilizations display themselves on the Q-computer’s tiny monitor.

You and your friends refresh your browsers compulsively, talking over each new description that emerges of strange alien races and the exotic landscapes they inhabit, as gleaned from upon the wacky sitcoms and low-budget reality shows that they are indiscriminately beaming into space. Then, questions are raised, skepticism emerges. You begin to have doubts. Eventually, you realize that you have been taken in by a clever hoax—you ought to have known better than to trust Fox News, after all—but despite the deception, you find that you cannot help but appreciate how, for one shining moment, people everywhere had set aside their petty rivalries and believed in marvels from above.

Such is how the people of New York City must have felt during the summer of 1835 when the New York Sun published a series of articles describing the startling lunar discoveries that had recently been made by the famous astronomer John Herschel from his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope. Using cutting-edge “hydro-oxygen magnifiers,” Herschel had developed a powerful new telescope that could achieve an astounding magnification of 42,000x—enough to resolve objects on the lunar surface as small as 18 inches in diameter—and project the images onto the wall of his observatory. Purporting to be a reprint from a supplement to the (non-existent) Edinburgh Journal of Science penned by Herschel’s assistant, Dr. Andrew Grant, it contained just the right mixture popular science buzzwords and technical minutia to render itself plausible.

The first images to resolve themselves onto the wall of Herschel’s observatory were of basaltic rock, and then, tellingly enough, a poppy field. The telescope next swept over lunar forests, populated by what looked like massive yew trees, by beaches of “brilliant white sand, girt with wild castellated rocks, apparently of green marble,”and clusters of resplendent crystalline spires and pyramids, lilac in hue. Finally, it came to rest on an oval valley, surrounded by crystallized hills of “purest vermilion,” with cascading waterfalls pouring from their cliffs, where they discovered, nestled in among its lush trees and vegetation, a herd of diminutive lunar bison…

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

Elizabeth d’Espérance grew up in a tired old house on the East End of London, filled with dark, oak-paneled halls and desolate, forbidden rooms that compelled her to explore. “I was very fond of wandering about from one empty room to another,” she wrote,

“and of sitting with my dolls on the broad low window seats, whence I would be fetched with an exclamation of horror and wonder by our servant, who considered my liking for the haunted rooms as “uncanny” and unnatural, threatening me with the ghosts and their vengeance if I persisted in invading their domains by myself.

“I could never quite understand nurse’s remarks about the lonelines of the rooms, though her threats about the ghosts frightened me. To me the rooms were never empty nor lonely;—strangers were constantly passing to and fro, from one room to another; some took no notice of me, some nodded and smiled as I held up my doll for their inspection. I did not know who the strangers were, but I grew to know them by sight…”

On this note, d’Espérance sets the tone for Shadow Land, her 1897 memoir of life as a medium during the heyday of Victorian spiritualism.

Her career began, naturally enough, in experiments with table rapping and automatic writing, but before long she was performing full-form manifestations in the manner of Florence Cook, Annie Fairlamb, and other star mediums of the era. Her usual controls were “Walter,” a light-hearted American soldier, and the professorial “Humnur Stafford,” but she is best remembered for manifesting female spirits like the “Yolande:” a playful Arab girl whose favorite trick was to materialize (“apport”) exotic flowers into the room.

Accounts of purported spectral phenomena like these are familiar to any student of spiritualism. What sets Shadow Land apart is that d’Espérance weaves them into a powerful, first-personal narrative that delves into the subjective experience of giving over one’s body as a conduit to the spirit world, together with its attendant doubts, fears and anxieties. Enough has been written about whether it is possible for a medium to lend her substance to strange, otherworldly entities—Shadow Land gives us a basis to imagine what it might actually feel like to do so.

[More at Victorian Gothic]

ENGINEERING: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin and Diane Gendron for developing a method to collect whale snot using a remote control helicopter.

TRANSPORTATION PLANNING: Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero, Seiji Takagi, Tetsu Saigusa, Kentaro Ito, Kenji Yumiki, Ryo Kobayashi, Dan Bebber, Mark Fricker for using slime mold to determine the optimal routes for railroad tracks.

PHYSICS: Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams and Patricia Priest for demonstrating that wearing socks on the outside of your shoes helps prevent slipping on ice.

PEACE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston for confirming that swearing helps relieve pain.

PUBLIC HEALTH: Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews and Larry Taylor for determining that microbes cling to bearded scientists.

MANAGEMENT: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda and Cesare Garofalo for demonstrating mathematically that organizations would become more efficient if promotions were made at random.

BIOLOGY: Libiao Zhang, Min Tan, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang of China and Gareth Jones for scientifically documenting fruit bat fellatio.

From Egyptian mythology to Jewish mysticism, Rome and Greece to the Druids and the Gnostics, Tim Wallace-Murphy exposes a fascinating lineage of hidden mysteries and secret societies, continuing through the Templars, Rosicrucians and Freemasons to our modern visionaries. This hidden stream of spirituality and that of sacred knowledge are inseparably entwined to form the single most important continuous strand in the entire Western esoteric tradition.

This tradition exerted a seminal influence on the thinking of the builders of the great cathedrals, leading teachers in ecclesiastical schools, on philosophers, playwrights and poets such as Shakespeare, Goethe, Blake and W. B. Yeats, on artists and renaissance giants such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. It is also the root from which sprang alchemy and modern science.

Now, as more people than ever are looking to find alternatives to the dominant religions and dogmas that have told us what to think and how to behave, as faith has been questioned by religious scandals, economic meltdowns and environmental catastrophes, Wallace-Murphy reveals the secrets of the masters, including invaluable spiritual insights to everyday life that have been hidden throughout the ages. He shows us who kept this spiritual tradition alive despite appalling persecution, so that we in the 21st century might benefit from its accumulated fruits and ennoble our lives by emulating their example.

More info at www.hidden-wisdom.com.

Thursday, May 6, 2010: East West Living Bookstore and Cafe

Saturday, May 8, 2010: New York Theosophical Society

Monday, May 10, 2010: Livingston Masonic Library

Whether you can make it or not, here’s the first five chapters of Hidden Wisdom available on Scribd:

From Egyptian mythology to Jewish mysticism, Rome and Greece to the Druids and the Gnostics, Tim Wallace-Murphy exposes in Hidden Wisdom a fascinating lineage of hidden mysteries and secret societies, continuing through the Templars, Rosicrucians, and Freemasons to our modern visionaries. This hidden stream of spirituality and that of sacred knowledge are inseparably entwined to form the single most important continuous strand in the entire Western esoteric tradition.

More info at www.hidden-wisdom.com.

Website • iTunes • Direct Download • RSS

That’s right, the guys from Austrailia’s Mysterious Universe drop in to talk shop, UFO’s, the Paranormal, and all things Mysterious.

We had a wonderful time talking to those guys, and look forward to chatting again in the future! We hope you all enjoy the show.

You can learn more about Mysterious Universe at: www. mysteriousuniverse.org.

Indian doctors are studying a remarkable 83-year-old holy man who claims to have spent the last seven decades without food and water. Military medics hope the experiments on Prahlad Jani can help soldiers develop their survival strategies.

The long-haired and bearded yogi is under 24-hour observation by a team of 30 doctors during three weeks of tests at a hospital in the western city of Ahmedabad. Two cameras have been set up in his room, while a mobile camera films him when he goes outside, guaranteeing round-the-clock observation. His body will be scanned and his brain and heart activity measured with electrodes.

“The observation from this study may throw light on human survival without food and water,” said Dr G. Ilavazahagan, who is directing the research. “This may help in working out strategies for survival during natural calamities, extreme stressful conditions and extra-terrestrial explorations like future missions to the Moon and Mars by the human race.”

Since the experiment began on April 22, Jani has neither eaten nor drunk and has not been to the toilet…

[continues at Sky News/Yahoo]

A brazen prankster claimed he was raped by a whale and gave his name as Ben Dover during one of many hoax calls to the emergency services.

Daniel Hammond made nuisance calls for eight months, telling busy emergency operators he lived in Doctor Who’s TARDIS.

On one occasion, he reported that his manhood fell off because he smoked too much weed and was struggling to have sex.

Another time, the lanky 21-year-old impersonated Saddam Hussein and claimed he hid a bomb on a train, a court in Sevenoaks, England, was told.

Prosecutor James Nichols said Hammond enjoyed the thrill of wasting the emergency services’ time with his bizarre and persistent tales.

The court was told that Hammond was caught when he called to report threats he claimed he was receiving, and police recognised his mobile phone number.

[Read more at News.com.au]

Croatian doctors are baffled after a teenage girl who fell into a mysterious coma woke up speaking fluent German.

The parents of the 13-year-old from the southern town of Knin said their daughter had only just started studying German at school and had been trying to read German books and watch German television  -  but had never been that good in German.

But since waking up the teenager has been unable to speak Croatian and even refused it, but communicates only in perfect German far superior to her mastery of the language she had when she was taken ill.

Split’s KB Hospital director Dujomir Marasovic said they were still trying to find out what caused the mysterious coma and why the girl has apparently forgotten how to speak Croatian.

Marasovic added: ‘You never know when recovering from such a trauma how the brain will react. Obviously we have some theories although at the moment we are limited in what we can say because we have to respect the privacy of the patient.’

He said the condition was so unusual that numerous doctors have examined the 13-year-old including German-speaking doctors to try and get to the bottom of the mystery.

[Read more at the Mail Online]

With great costumes comes great responsibility.

“Kick-Ass,” an action movie opening this week, spins a tale of average Joes becoming masked crime fighters, but New York has been home to real-life caped crusaders for years.

Gotham’s legion of real-life superheroes includes a leather-clad martial-arts expert who battles drug dealers, a masked religious hipster who feeds the homeless and an engaged pair of relationship counselors, Arjuna Ladino, 42, and Shanti Owen, 50, who don star-spangled spandex as the “Transformational Warriors” to spread the power of love.

“We are just people who really care and try to go out and make a difference,” says Chris Pollak, 25, whose alter ego, “Dark Guardian,” strikes fear in the hearts of drug peddlers in Washington Square Park. “The idea is to be this drastic example of making change in your community.”

The Staten Islander has been patrolling city streets for the last seven years, frequently putting himself in harm’s way. A drug dealer flashed a gun at Pollak once, and he has almost come to blows with thugs.

“My fiancée is very supportive, but she gets worried if I’m doing anything that involves danger,” Dark Guardian said. “When I met my fiancée, I told her I liked to do this thing where I go out and help the homeless and patrol the streets. I didn’t get into the whole costume thing — I waited until a little bit into the relationship.”

[Read more at the New York Post]

From Searle’s point of view, renown also brought the useful perk of short-lived young female assistants — he called them “Girl Fridays” — willing to share his watching duties and his bed.

There were several of these girls, one an Australian, another a Brit. A third, a Belgian named Lieve Peten, reminisced: “There was no romantic involvement, not for him, not for me, but there was a physical involvement. It sounds harsh, perhaps, but that was the Seventies, people experimented. And there was no AIDS back then.”

It seems reasonable to assume that she, and perhaps some of the other assistants recruited from small ads placed (the Glasgow Herald noted) in “parts of the country where the unemployment was high,” were more attracted to the romance of monster hunting than they were to the short, baked bean munching, prosthetic-footed (he was wounded in the war) Frank Searle.

Read More on the Mike Dash writes on the Charles Fort Institute

Website • Direct Download • RSS

In this episode, Panopticon speaks with our esteemed guest, Raymond Wiley of Disinformation, about the Georgia Guidestones: a mysterious, granite monument in northeastern Georgia.

Some think the Georgia Guidestones are a sort of ten commandments of the New World Order, and some think they’re a means of navigating a post apocalyptic world.

What do you think? Super fun and super informative!

Photo: Fir0002, flagstaffotos.com.au, GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2

Farmers near Shrewsbury claim to have witnessed sheep being “lasered” by unidentified light from UFOs.

They have linked the unexplained incidents, where sheep’s brains and eyes were removed, to the mysterious orange lights in the sky.

They have found sheep with “neat holes” while their brains and other internal organs were removed. Other animals have lost eyes or had their flesh “carefully stripped away”, usually on the left side.

Phil Hoyle, 53, who has spent almost a decade investigating how the livestock have died, said the UFOs were found to have roamed a 50-mile “corridor” between Shrewsbury and Powys.

Mr Hoyle and 15 members of the Animal Pathology Field Unit, claimed they witnessed UFOs at work last month while working during the night at a Welsh hill farm near Radnor Forest.

“The technology involved in these attacks is frightening,” he told The Sun. “These lights and spheres are clearly not ours. They are built by technology and intelligence that’s not from here.”

He added: “For a short while it looked more like a Star Wars battle.”…

[continues in the Daily Telegraph] ]]> http://www.disinfo.com/2010/04/unexplained-sheep-attacks-caused-by-aliens-in-ufos/feed/ 7 http://www.disinfo.com/2010/03/the-georgia-guidestones-waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world/ http://www.disinfo.com/2010/03/the-georgia-guidestones-waiting-for-the-end-of-the-world/#comments Tue, 23 Mar 2010 23:48:25 +0000 Raymond http://www.disinfo.com/?p=25547

Co-Hosts of the Disinformation Podcasts, Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall, at the Georgia Guidestones

R. C. Christian is dead! The Georgia Guidestones are one of the most interesting mysteries I have ever come across. After all my interest in conspiracy theories and the occult side of things, I do not believe that there is anything wrong with this monument.

It is sad to hear that R. C. Christian has died and that people want to limit his free speech by defacing this work of great craftsmanship. From CNN:

In the beginning, there was the stone.The blue-gray vein of granite that courses through northeastern Georgia spawned jobs in the quarries and finishing sheds of Elberton, where generations of stonecutters have turned slabs of rock the size of refrigerators into statues, tombstones and tile.

And one day, it brought a visitor who gifted the town with a landmark that leaves visitors scratching their heads decades later.

The nearly…

Co-Hosts of the Disinformation Podcasts, Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall, at the Georgia Guidestones

R. C. Christian is dead! The Georgia Guidestones are one of the most interesting mysteries I have ever come across. After all my interest in conspiracy theories and the occult side of things, I do not believe that there is anything wrong with this monument.

It is sad to hear that R. C. Christian has died and that people want to limit his free speech by defacing this work of great craftsmanship. From CNN:

In the beginning, there was the stone.The blue-gray vein of granite that courses through northeastern Georgia spawned jobs in the quarries and finishing sheds of Elberton, where generations of stonecutters have turned slabs of rock the size of refrigerators into statues, tombstones and tile.

And one day, it brought a visitor who gifted the town with a landmark that leaves visitors scratching their heads decades later.

The nearly 20-foot high series of granite slabs known as the Georgia Guidestones are inscribed with a series of admonitions for a future “Age of Reason.” Billed as “America’s Stonehenge,” it’s an astronomically complex, 120-ton relic of Cold War fears, built to instruct survivors of an Armageddon that the mystery man feared was all too near.

The identity of the man who called himself “R.C. Christian” is a secret that Wyatt Martin, the banker who acted as his agent in Elberton, vows to take to his grave.

“He told me, ‘If you were to tell who put the money up for this, it wouldn’t be a mystery any more, and no one would come and read it.’ That had to be part of the attraction, to get people to come and read his 10 rules that he came up with,” Martin said.

[Read more at CNN]

]]>

Hitting your screens this May

So we finally took the plunge — after a year of planning and debate and — and announced our new Sitting Now TV show. The show will initially be available on the site, and via online distros like iTunes, YouTube, and Vimeo, and then later will appear on a channel to be announced later in the year (confusing I know).

Anyway, check out this ‘teaser’ intro, and let us know what you think!

From NME.com:

James Brown’s body has been stolen, according to his reported love child LaRhonda Pettit.

The soul legend’s body was put in a crypt after his death on Christmas Day in 2006. Since then it has been kept at his daughter Deanna’s house in South Carolina while a public mausoleum was being prepared.

Pettit has now claimed the body has gone missing. Consequently, she says she is being denied the opportunity to carry out an autopsy to determine Brown’s true cause of death, reports the Daily Mirror.

“My daddy’s body has disappeared. I have no clue where it was taken, but I need to know where,” Pettit explained.

She added: “I’m convinced his death was suspicious and I want the people responsible brought to justice. The only way to do that is to exhume his body and have an autopsy. I cannot understand why one was never conducted.”

[Read more at NME.com]

From the Examiner:

The year is 1918 and some thing is stalking the woods around Knoxville, Tennessee.

The mysterious beast is killing farm animals – hogs and calves and the occasional hunting dog – and residents are afraid to leave the house at night. Children are kept home from school. Local efforts to stop the beast have failed so desperate residents make a plea to America’s foremost outdoorsman and big game hunter to come to their aid.

President Theodore Roosevelt.

The former president’s glory days were behind him at this point in his life. His health was poor. He was sixty and suffered from severe rheumatism and carried a bullet in his chest from a failed assassination attempt in 1912. He also had flare-ups of malaria, contracted during a 1913 expedition to the Brazilian jungle, and a leg injury from the same trip that sapped much of his legendary energy. But he remained a prominent figure in American affairs. Surely this old warhorse could be called upon for one last hunt.

And Roosevelt was indeed the man to call. A respected naturalist, he had hunted game as far afield as Africa.

And he had at least a passing interest in monsters.

In Roosevelt’s 1890 book The Wilderness Hunter, he recounts a terrifying tale related to him by an old trapper name Bauman. Bauman and his partner had gone deep into the wilds of Idaho looking for beaver pelts when they decided to hunt a remote pass where a man was rumored to have been killed and half-eaten by a mysterious beast. Despite the area’s evil reputation, the men pressed on.

It was a mistake.

[Read more at the Examiner]

Two glass phials said to contain the ghosts of an old man and a young girl have sold for NZ $2,000 (U.S. $1,395 / £935) in an online auction in New Zealand. The auction attracted more than 200,000 page views on the Trade Me website.

Avie Woodbury said the ghosts had been captured in her Christchurch house by an exorcist and stored in holy water. The top bidder, an electronic cigarette company, said it was looking for ideas on what to do with the ghosts.

Ms Woodbury told bidders she had experienced “bizarre activity” in her home.

“I would get things like the jug boiling itself, touching on the back of my neck, voices from other rooms, and items going missing then turning up in weird places,” she said.

Read More: BBC News

MSN

A woman has alarmed her small village in China after growing a 6cm horn on her forehead in less than a year.

Zhang Ruifang, 101, says she is also concerned about the appearance of a second mark on the other side of her forehead.

“We didn’t pay too much attention to it [at first] … but as time went on a horn grew out of her head,” said Mrs Zhang’s son Zhang Guozheng.

It is not every ballot initiative that has its own hip-hop song.

But then, how many times are voters asked to approve formation of a commission to study visitors from outer space?

Jeff Peckman, director of the extraterrestrial affairs commission ballot initiative, will launch a campaign to educate voters about his proposal this evening at 7 P.M. at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds.

Peckman collected signatures to have the measure placed on Denver’s Aug. 10 ballot. If it passes, the City of Denver will be required to create a seven-member commission tasked with collecting evidence that extraterrestrials and UFOs have been visiting Earth.

“Pink UFO,” a song by Chris Steele, of the hip-hop duo Calm, wrote and performs “Pink UFO,” which will be replayed at tonight’s event. The song, which is dedicated to the campaign, includes the refrain: “Pink UFO, Pink UFO, What truth do you know? What do you know?”

Peckman believes that the government is hiding evidence that technology found on an alien space craft that landed in Roswell, N.M., can cure cancer, among other things.

[Read more at the Denver Post]

For residents of a small Australian town, their usually mundane conversations about the weather have just become a whole lot more interesting.

That’s because in the outback town of Lajamanu it’s started raining fish. Yes, fish. Hundreds of them, falling from the sky. Over the past two days the town’s 660 residents have been bombarded with small white fish which have been falling like rain.

Locals say the fish, mostly spangled perch, have even been alive as they hit the floor. Lucky it wasn’t crocodiles then. Meteorologists believe the fish where sucked up by a tornado — which passed over a river some 300 miles away — before being carried through the sky at 40,000 to 50,000 feet.

Image: 1555 Engraving by Olaus Magnus (via Wikipedia)

Read More in Asylum

According to the New Catholic Dictionary the Holy Grail is “a legendary sacred vessel, identified with the chalice of the Eucharist or the dish of the Paschal Lamb, and the theme of a medieval cycle of romance”. It “is said to have been the dish… used by Joseph of Arimathea to gather the Precious Blood of Christ.” And, according to author, historian and folklorist Mark Oxbrow, the Grail has actually been found.

Of course, the Grail was once in the hands of Indiana Jones, but even he ultimately lost it; so what makes Oxbrow’s claims special? Why should we believe him when we already have several Grails, including the Nantios Cup, the “Holy Bloodline” of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and the Stone Tablets of the Ark of the Covenant in Graham Hancock’s The Sign and The Seal? And the foregoing is a non-exclusive list; a full tally of all claimants to being the Holy Grail would take considerably more room than space permits.

Before we examine Oxbrow’s claim, it might be worth establishing exactly what it is we’re actually talking about.

Traditionally, the Grail is said to be the plate used for the Last Supper, or a cup used to catch the blood of Christ on the cross. Where do these ideas come from? Three of the four Gospels of the New Testament specifically mention a cup or platter at the Last Supper – perhaps not all that surprising, as it was a meal, after all. None mention a vessel used by Joseph of Arimathea, or anyone else, to collect the Blood of Christ while on the Cross.The closest we have to a biblical mention of blood and a vessel is when Christ pours wine into a cup and urges the assembled Disciples to drink of his blood. So that’s pretty much all we can glean from the Bible.

For the next mention of the Grail we have to wait for an event which supposedly happened in AD 717 but was not recorded in writing until about 1200. In 717, according to the Cistercian chronicler Helinandus, a hermit was shown a vision of the dish of the Last Supper. This learned hermit then wrote a book in Latin, entitled Gradale. Gradale is the mediæval Latin for ‘dish’, and the Old French for dish was Gradalis, whence we get graal, greal and greel. One short leap across the English Channel and we end up with ‘grail’.

[Read more at Fortean Times]

The scientific evidence behind this growing set of suspicions — that the Spiral somehow caused the Russian missile to fail — lies in the extraordinary geometric structure that Enterprise has discovered within the too-perfect, too-concentric “shell-like rings” … making up the Spiral — A key part of this “impossible” geometry consisted of four, exactly 90-degree darkened “reticle-like” divisions of the Spiral … precisely separating it into four radiating quadrants ….

Geometric behavior simply inconceivable for any “randomly rotating … fuel-spewing third-stage rocket ….” This “too-too-regular-geometry …” can only be explained by the presence of —

Some kind of energy-induced, standing-wave-pattern in the Spiral …. Creating — Narrow, uniform-width concentric striations … ordered in an underlying medium (the leaking third-stage fuel?) by an external “forcing 3-D energy pattern” —

Then, it hit me: “Chladni Figures!”

Read More of Richard C. Hoagland on Enterprise Mission

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Friday that he doesn’t know what people in southern Newfoundland saw recently but he promised the federal government does have plans to help them.

“We will provide money to build a landing strip for UFOs at Harbour Mille,” said MacKay, speaking in St. John’s to announce federal funding for road construction in the province.

“No, I’m only kidding. I’m joking. That’s a joke.” Jokes aside, MacKay said there’s no need to worry about the unidentified flying object. “We’ve checked with other countries and we’ll continue to do so but I don’t think it is any cause for panic,” said MacKay.

A model plane flier said an earlier a comment from the Prime Minister’s Office about a mysterious object spotted near Harbour Mille is laughable. Thursday, a federal government spokesperson suggested people in Newfoundland and Labrador like to launch model rockets.

[Read more at CBC News]

You’re six miles up, alone and falling without a parachute. Though the odds are long, a small number of people have found themselves in similar situations — and lived to tell the tale.

6:59:00 AM, 35,000 Feet: You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?

You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.

Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.

Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extra­ordinarily slim, but at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page — an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet…

Read More: Popular Mechanics

From UPI:

A meteorite that dropped into a Virginia doctors’ office is now at the center of an ownership battle between the doctors and their landlords.Dr. Marc Gallini and Dr. Frank Ciampi said they were in the process of donating the small meteorite that crashed into their Lorton office Jan. 18 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History when their landlords, brothers Deniz and Erol Mutlu, claimed ownership of the rock, The Washington Post reported Friday.

The meteorite that dropped into a Virginia doctors’ office is now at the center of an ownership battle between the doctors and their landlords.Dr. Marc Gallini and Dr. Frank Ciampi said they were in the process of donating the small meteorite that crashed into their Lorton office Jan. 18 to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History when their landlords, brothers Deniz and Erol Mutlu, claimed ownership of the rock, The Washington Post reported Friday.

[Read more at UPI]

For nearly 20 years Sony in Japan has been plagued by the myth of the “Sony Timer” – but is there really a kill-switch that destroys your device just after its warranty runs out? Many Japanese genuinely believe that there is.

It was the recall of more than 4.1 million Dell laptops containing faulty Sony batteries in 2006 that jump-started a rumour that has been around for decades. From 1980 to 2006 geeks and tech-obsessed Japanese had joked about the existence of the timer, creating sarcastic manga and venting anger through online forums. But the Dell recall launched the urban legend into the public eye and angry Sony sufferers jumped at the chance to denounce the company.

The mass spontaneous combustion of those batteries damaged Sony’s reputation in Japan enormously. For a nation proud of their technological innovations, burning laptops and the biggest product recall in history were not exactly easy to deal with. Since then rumours have continued to fly across the internet about the existence of the timers. Sony itself is well aware of the urban legend – its current Vice Chairman Ryoji Chubachi mentioned it in public back in 2007.

But a Sony executive in 2006 had already stirred rumours when he mentioned the timers in a talk at a major technology event. He insisted that it was totally absurd and explained that the company was making every effort to dispel the myth.

[Read more at The Telegraph]