The mystery illness now producing Tourette’s-like symptoms in a more than a dozen girls from upstate New York is also affecting a 36-year-old who is experiencing the same tics as the teens. Some neurologists have suggested the illness could be “conversion disorder,” or mass hysteria.

High school student Thera Sanchez, 17, and 14 others started experiencing the odd symptoms last fall: stammering, verbal outbursts and limb spasms.

The teens’ plight captured the attention of environmental activist Erin Brockovich, who began speaking out about a 1970 train accident that spilled cyanide and industrial solvent four miles from the teens’ school, LeRoy Junior-Senior High School. According to a 1999 Environmental Protection Agency report, approximately 35,000 gallons of TCE (trichloroethene) contaminated the area near the derailment.

A man in Dorset has been left mystified after tiny blue spheres fell from the sky into his garden. Steve Hornsby said [they] came raining down late on Thursday afternoon during a hail storm.

He found about a dozen of the balls in his garden. He said: “[They're] difficult to pick up, I had to get a spoon and flick them into a jam jar.” The Met Office said the jelly-like substance was “not meteorological”.

Mr Hornsby, a former aircraft engineer, said: “The sky went a really dark yellow colour…As I walked outside to go to the garage there was an instant hail storm for a few seconds and I thought, ‘what’s that in the grass’?”

Walking around his garden he found many more blue spheres were scattered across the grass. He said: “The have an exterior shell with a softer inner but have no smell, aren’t sticky and do not melt.”

Josie Pegg, an applied science research assistant at Bournemouth University, speculated that the apparently strange phenomena might be “marine invertebrate eggs”.

A boy has stunned medics with his ability to see in pitch black with eyes that glow in the dark. Doctors have studied Nong Youhui’s amazing eyesight since his dad took him to hospital in Dahua, southern China, concerned over his bright blue eyes.

Dad Ling said: “They told me he would grow out of it and that his eyes would stop glowing and turn black like most Chinese people but they never did.” Medical tests conducted in complete darkness show Youhui can read perfectly without any light and sees as clearly as most people do during the day.

Speculation is rife as to their cause and nature and the story has been quickly spotted by the usual suspects:

• i09 asks what are these bizarre sounds coming from the sky in countries from Hungary to Canada?
• via h/t from paranormal newsfeed Truth Behind the Scenes
• Ghost Theory have been following this since last August, and was one of the first to notice that many occurred on the same day: 1 January 2012

A dedicated blog (strangesoundsinthesky.com) of some months standing has even sprung up to cater for the phenomenon.

More Fortean sceptical write-ups include:

• Doubtful News, takes the long historical view, referencing the great unsung Fortean researcher William R. Corliss’ Earthquakes, Tides, Unidentified Sounds and Other Related Phenomena, and mass copycat behaviour
• Reddit provides a technical analysis of the videos and gives us cause for suspicion

So what is it? The evolution of The Hum? The Last Trump? HAARP? Solar flares?

Or have we all been punked by J.J. Abram’s keen sense of mass hysteria and his latest world-wide PR campaign for Cloverfield 2?

Or is the truth some crazy combination of all the above and more? Post your opinions and rants below.

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 …

A mysterious fungus is killing off thousands of bats around the country. Scientists are calling it white-nose syndrome, because of the distinctive white smudges on the noses and wings of infected bats.

White-nose itself doesn’t kill bats, but it disturbs their sleep so that they end their hibernation early. During the winter there are no insects to eat, so the bats literally starve to death.

Bats may be one of Mother Nature’s least cuddly creatures, but they are ecologically important, keeping mosquitos and insects that attack crops in check.

Researchers say the syndrome has killed upward of half a million bats from New England to Virginia.

Read More: ABC NEWS

Now the Virgin Mary’s likeness has popped up on a stainless steel wall inside Hamburger Mary’s, an Ybor City restaurant with customers more likely to show up for gay karaoke nights and celebrity drag-queen shows than religious revelations.

“These two ladies in one of the booths saw the image during Sunday brunch,” said day manager Melanie Todd, who goes by the name Melanie Minyon (pronounced like mignon) when performing in blue wigs and over-the-top sexy gowns at the restaurant’s nighttime drag shows. “One of them was in tears she was so moved, and they were both carrying on and taking pictures.

“Now, we serve all-you-can-drink Bloody Marys for Sunday brunch,” Todd said, “so I think it’s safe to say there are lots of visions being seen around here then. Let’s just call it a tequila afternoon.”

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]

New sighting of two fast moving UFOs caught on video in Scotland. Recorded on a dashboard mounted camera from one of the Scottish mountain rescue teams.

Savannah River Site scientists are working to identify a strange growth found on racks of spent nuclear fuel collected from foreign governments.

The “white, string-like” material was found among thousands of spent fuel assemblies submerged in deep pools within the site’s L Area, according to a report filed by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal oversight panel.

“The growth, which resembles a spider web, has yet to be characterized, but may be biological in nature,” the report said. Savannah River National Laboratory collected a small sample in hopes of identifying the mystery lint — and determining whether it is alive …

Read More: Augusta Chronicle

A group of daring people took the opportunity to be part of a ‘Hell Tour’ in Penang. The trip was organised by Master Kek Eng Seng of the Tze Bei Guan Yin Dhamma Centre, who claims that he can travel through the realms of Earth, Heaven and Hell. For the first time in Malaysia, he offered people the opportunity to visit the ‘Afterworld’.

The number of Hell travelers was brought down to slightly more than 50, including a dozen reporters from the Chinese dailies and yours truly.

As night fell, the group, all clad in white shirts symbolising purity and sincerity, gathered at Padang Brown in Georgetown for the “tour”.

After some prayers and rituals, we were all set to start our journey at around 10.15pm. My eyes were covered with a paper talisman wrapped in a yellow cloth. Then, the lights were switched off.

As I listened to the chants by Master Kek, my head became very hot, as though there was a stream of warm air trying to get out of my body through the top. (Master Kek later explained this by saying that my soul was trying to get out of my body.) The feeling came three to four times but was gone within minutes.

I tried hard to concentrate but my mind was distracted by the sounds from a Chinese opera show nearby and noises from the watching crowd.

About 45 minutes after the “tour” began, I saw lights and followed their direction but I soon fell into darkness again with some circles flying towards me.

It was like watching a science fiction movie with a spacecraft traveling through a stream of meteoroids. (Master Kek later explained that I was passing through a whirlpool while on my way to “Hell”.) But, I was again distracted by the noises and failed to enter “Hell”.

Unfortunately, only about a dozen people in the group claimed to have managed to break the barrier and enter the realm.

Chiang Kee Chuan from China Press was the only ‘lucky’ one from among the media participants. “I saw a rainbow hanging on a beautiful sky, and a monk advised me to become a vegetarian,” he said.

Another woman, who declined to be named, said she saw many ‘people’ at a pasar malam (night market). Before she could tell more, Master Kek asked if the street’s name is Ba Jiao Jie (Octogon Street) and she gave him a Yes.

Another female participant said she saw her departed mother from a distance, but she could not go near and speak to her.
On seeing the disappointed faces of the reporters later, the master promised to take us on a second trip on Monday.

Rumors are flying about a December 13 update on the search for the long-sought Higgs boson at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider.

The physics buzz reached a frenzy in the past few days over the announcement that the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva is planning to release what is widely expected to be tantalizing — although not conclusive — evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson, the elementary particle hypothesized to be the origin of the mass of all matter.

Many physicists have already swung into action, swapping rumors about the contents of the announcement and proposing grand ideas about what those rumors would mean, if true. “It’s impossible to be excited enough,” says Gordon Kane, a theoretical physicist at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Read More: Scientific American

Photo: Matthew McPherson (CC)

Via the Herald Sun:

A man suffered severe burns after he seemingly burst into flames outside a Swedish railway station, the Goteborgs-Posten newspaper reported.

A streetcar driver returning from his break yesterday evening saw the man suddenly covered in fire while he was standing outside a vinyl record store at the station. After a while the man, believed to be in his early 40s, started to yell, but shocked passersby just stood and stared, the report said.

The streetcar driver then ran up, ripped his coat off and managed to put the fire out with the help of another man. An ambulance arrived within minutes and took the man to the hospital.

“All we know is that it is a man. We have no knowledge of his identity, his age, any motive or even the circumstances of the incident,” police officer Asa Andersson said. “He is sedated and will probably remain under for another couple of weeks,” he added, saying there was no indication of any foul play.

Read More: Herald Sun

An Ohio grandmother and her 4-year-old granddaughter say they have caught ghosts having sex inside their house.

Speaking to CBS Cleveland, Diane Carlisle said this visitation was the latest in a series that goes back to when she first moved to her Euclid home 12 years ago. Her photos prove it, she said.

This time, her granddaughter Kimora saw a man’s bare backside and a woman’s legs with high heels still on. At other times, they’ve seen men, women and children in various rooms and in her backyard.

Even her dog had an experience better to forget than remember. Walking up the stairs from the basement, something caught its hind legs and held them. Now, the dog avoids the basement.

The rest of the family has learned to live with them, Carlisle said.

“[My granddaughter, daughter and I] have grown with them around,” she said. “At times you get scared, like when you’re home alone and hear footsteps around and doors slam.”

The abandoned iron mine at Mine Hill in Roxbury used to provide a winter home for 3,000 bats — the largest bat hibernaculum in the state. The last time Jennie Dickson, a wildlife biologist with the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, counted, there were about 100 bats there.

“That’s not good,” she said. For the past five years, the bats of the eastern United States have been dying in like numbers — one of the worst environmental catastrophes in recent years.

What biologists like Dickson knew was that the dying bats could be found with an off-white fungus on their nose and wings. What was causing the die-off was uncertain …

More: New Times

The large-scale structure of the Universe appears to be dominated by vast “hyperclusters” of galaxies, according to the new the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, compiled with a telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico. The survey plots the 2D positions of galaxies across a quarter of the sky. The science team has concluded that it could mean that gravity or dark energy — or something completely unknown — is behaving very strangely.

We know that the universe was smooth just after its birth. Measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the light emitted 370,000 light years after the big bang, reveal only very slight variations in density from place to place. Gravity then took hold and amplified these variations into today’s galaxies and galaxy clusters, which in turn are arranged into big strings and knots called superclusters, with relatively empty voids in between.

On even larger scales, though, cosmological models say that the expansion of the universe should trump the clumping effect of gravity. That means there should be very little structure on scales larger than a few hundred million light years across.

More in the Daily Galaxy

Thousands of dead birds will be collected from an Ontario shoreline on Monday as the province’s Ministry of Natural Resources tries to determine what killed the waterfowl. Officials estimate as many as 6,000 dead birds have washed up on the Georgian Bay’s shoreline.

The carcasses are scattered along a nearly three-kilometre stretch near Wasaga Beach. “You just want to cry,” resident Faye Ego told CTV Toronto on Saturday.

Authorities speculate that the birds may have been killed by a form of botulism after eating dead fish. Locals said they noticed some dead fish on the beach a few weeks ago and a few dead birds earlier in September. During Monday’s cleanup, crews will be trying to tally up the total number of dead birds on the shoreline …

More: CTV

Vietnamese woman Nguyen Thi Phuong now looks like a septugenarian after the rapid aging affliction took hold following an allergic reaction to seafood.

Her sad story began in 2008, when her youthful beauty began to fade over the course of just a few days, leaving her with sagging, wrinkled skin all over her face and body. Until now she has been forced to wear a mask in public to hide her appearance from prying eyes, but now doctors are attempting to establish what caused her sudden and horrifying aging.

Some have argued that the condition is lipodystrophy – a rare syndrome that causes a layer of fatty tissue beneath the surface of the skin to disintegrate while the skin itself continues to grow at a startling pace.

The syndrome with no cure leaves its victims with loose folds of skin all over their bodies, wrinkled faces and the gaunt features of people decades their senior. The condition is extremely rare and out of around seven billion people on the planet, only 2,000 are thought to have lipodystrophy.

Phuong explained she has long been allergic to seafood and that she had suffered a particularly bad reaction in 2008. Phuong said she took some medicine bought at a local pharmacy instead of going to the hospital because her and her husband Tuyen, now 33, were too poor to afford it.

She said: “After one month of taking the drugs, I became less itchy but hives remained on my skin. Then I switched to traditional medicine and all the hives disappeared, together with my itching. However, my skin began to sag and fold.” Phuong then took another kind of traditional medicine to treat her rapid-aging skin problem – but to no avail.

[She does] not remember what the medicine was or which pharmacy they got it from.

Meanwhile, stories about Phuong in the local media have prompted a variety of diagnoses from local doctors. Many of them do not believe that Phuong has lipodystrophy, saying instead that Phuong may be suffering the side effects of too much steroid medication.

A simple atomic nucleus could reveal properties associated with the mysterious phenomenon known as time reversal and lead to an explanation for one of the greatest mysteries of physics: the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe.

The physics world was rocked recently by the news that a class of subatomic particles known as neutrinos may have broken the speed of light.

Adding to the rash of new ideas, University of Arizona theoretical physicist Bira van Kolck recently proposed that experiments with another small particle called a deuteron could lead to an explanation for one of the most daunting puzzles physicists face: the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the universe. A deuteron is a simple atomic nucleus, or the core of an atom. Its simplicity makes it one of the best objects for experiments in nuclear physics …

More on Space Daily

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]

A man in Galway, Ireland apparently died of spontaneous combustion last year in December. At least, according to a court ruling this week. Michael Faherty’s death had been a mystery because coroners and police couldn’t explain how the fire that killed him only seemed to have burned the man and his immediate surroundings.

Spontaneous combustion occurs when a person suddenly catches on fire without any external source of fire causing the blaze. There have been only a few hundred cases recorded throughout the world. The Irish Times reports: West Galway corner Dr Ciarán McLoughlin said he had never encountered such a case in the 25 years that he had been investigating deaths in the region …

More from Annalee Newitz of io9.com

Dozens of Americans who claim to have been made ill by wi-fi and mobile phones have flocked to the town of Green Bank, West Virginia.

Diane Schou is unable to hold back the tears as she describes how she once lived in a shielded cage to protect her from the electromagnetic radiation caused by waves from wireless communication. “It’s a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner,” she says. “You become a technological leper because you can’t be around people.

Ms Schou is one of an estimated 5% of Americans who believe they suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), which they say is caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields typically created by mobile phones, wi-fi and other electronic equipment.

Symptoms range from acute headaches, skin burning, muscle twitching and chronic pain. “My face turns red, I get a headache, my vision changes, and it hurts to think. Last time [I was exposed] I started getting chest pains – and to me that’s becoming life-threatening,” Ms Schou says.

Her symptoms were so severe that she abandoned her family farm in the state of Iowa and moved to Green Bank, West Virginia – a tiny village of 143 residents in the heart of the Allegheny Mountains.

Green Bank is part of the US Radio Quiet Zone, where wireless is banned across 13,000 sq miles (33,000 sq km) to prevent transmissions interfering with a number of radio telescopes in the area.

The largest is owned by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and enables scientists to listen to low-level signals from different places in the universe. Others are operated by the US military and are a critical part of the government’s spy network.

As a result of the radio blackout, the Quiet Zone has become a haven for people like Diane, desperate to get away from wireless technology.

The wireless association, CTIA, says that scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that wireless devices, with the limits established by government regulators, do not pose a public health risk or cause any adverse health effects.

And the World Health Organization, while acknowledging that the symptoms are genuine and can be severe, says: “EHS has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no scientific basis to link EHS symptoms to EMF (electromagnetic field) exposure. Further, EHS is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.”

However, new research by scientists at Louisiana State University and published by the International Journal of Neuroscience, claims to show that EHS can be caused by low frequency electromagnetic fields found in the environment.

“The study provides direct evidence that linking human symptoms with environmental factors, in this case EMF,” says Dr Andrew Marino, a neurology professor who led the study. “It’s a watershed in that regard. There have been no previous studies that scientifically assess whether electromagnetic fields in the environment could produce human symptoms.

Televangelist and self-professed prophetess Juanita Bynum has sparked curiosity among internet users and the Christian community for several comments on the minister’s Facebook page where she appears to type “in tongues.”

Bynum’s prayer posts soon caught the attention of the media, with one reporter at a spirituality website speculating that the minister was communicating “in tongues.” On one prayer post, visitor Cindy McCraw commented, expressing her agreement. “I believe it’s tongues (holy spirit). It’s called praying in the Spirit,” McCraw wrote.

“One important and often overlooked aspect of Victorian mediumship is that it could be enormous fun,” says Alex Owen in The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. This is the picture that emerges when one looks particularly at the “star mediums” of the 1870′s, who were known for performing theatrical, full-body materializations for eager audiences.

In a dim seance room, the medium would enter a closed cabinet wherein she would tap the mysterious psychical forces that would allow her to manifest one of her spirit familiars. This familiar would then emerge to from behind the curtain to entertain the assembled sitters. Each medium had her own repertoire of otherworldly entitles at her command, each with his or her own distinct personality, speech patterns, favored tricks and antics. They could be gallant, flirtatious, aggressive, or playful, as suited them.

Florence Cook’s child spirit Pocha “stole money and trinkets from the sitters, climbed on the laps of gentlemen, stroked their whiskers, and allowed herself to be kissed and cuddled.” Annie Fairlamb’s male familiar Sam repeatedly boxed a sitter on the side of the head until the man guessed his name right. Elizabeth d’Esperance manifested Yolande, a sensual, oriental girl who kissed and caressed her sitters, and made gifts of exotic flowers that she materialized into the room.

These encounters often took on highly sexual overtones. Clad in loose-fitting garments, liberated from extraneous corsets and underwear, spirits sometimes invited sitters to explore their corporeal forms and prove to themselves just how very real they were. Florence Cook was famously purported to have carried on an affair with one of her investigators, whom she allowed to enter the materialization cabinet with her. The seance room was a liminal space where participants were afford greater license to transgress the ordinary norms of Victorian society.

[More at Victorian Gothic]

The meeting was chaired by Henry Gee. Henry explained how the discovery of Homo floresiensis led him to take seriously the idea that “perhaps stories of other human-like creatures might be founded on grains of truth” (Gee 2004).

Dr. Michael Woodley showed how species discovery curves for large marine animals generally seem to match the numbers of undiscovered species purported to exist on the basis of circumstantial accounts. In discussing several key ‘Cadborosaurus’ and long-necked seal accounts, Michael also explained how – since most cryptozoological claims are published in the ‘grey literature’ – they escape evaluation, even when this is deserved or even required.

If cryptozoology is imagined as the investigation of ‘target’ animals whose existence is supported by circumstantial and/or anecdotal evidence (eyewitness accounts forming the bulk of such evidence), then one might argue (as I have) that cryptozoology is practised far and wide by ‘ordinary’, technically qualified biologists. A list of species have been discovered following the investigation of either local tales and legends, or fleeting observations of what were (at the time) mystery animals.

One idea is that the strong negative stigma attached to cryptozoology is a recent phenomenon, that the field has fallen into disrepute since the collapse of the International Society of Cryptozoology during the 1990s, and that it needs rescue and invigoration.

Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbiz reporter who was the first named journalist to allege Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead, the Guardian has learned.

Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems, is said to have been found dead at his Watford home.

Hertfordshire police would not confirm his identity, but the force said in a statement: “At 10.40am today [Monday 18 July] police were called to Langley Road, Watford, following the concerns for the welfare of a man who lives at an address on the street. Upon police and ambulance arrival at a property, the body of a man was found. The man was pronounced dead at the scene shortly after.

“The death is currently being treated as unexplained, but not thought to be suspicious. Police investigations into this incident are ongoing.”

Read More in the Guardian