Our Weird World

Poppa Smurf??!!!

2007-12-20T14:10:00.000-05:00

Paul Karason puts a whole new spin on "feeling blue.” For more than a decade, the 57-year-old has been living with a blue face.

Fourteen years ago, Karason developed a bad case of dermatitis, which results in swollen, reddened and itchy skin. He started self-medicating, using a treatment called colloidal silver, which is made by extracting silver from metal.

Often touted by manufacturers as a cure-all, colloidal silver usually is found in a liquid form. Looking for relief, Karason drank the concoction and rubbed it on his skin — something the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not recommend.

His skin slowly turned blue.

"The change was so gradual that I didn't perceive it and other people around me likewise," said Karason. "It wasn't until a friend I hadn't seen in several months came by my parent's place to see me and he asked me 'what did you do?.'"

The FDA does not consider colloidal silver safe or effective to treat any disease or condition. In fact, taking it could have serious side effects, such as:

— Argyria — which is an irreversible blue-gray discoloration of your skin, nails and gums

— Seizures and other neurological problems

— Kidney damage

— Indigestion

— Headaches

— Fatigue

— Skin irritation

Karason, who recently moved from Oregon to Madera, Calif., said it hasn't been easy living with blue skin.

"I do tend to avoid public places as much as I can," he said.

Karason made the move in hopes of fitting in a little better.

"I hope that they just accept me," he said, "And I think that will happen here. Where I was, I rather doubt it would have. This is different kind of community here."

Karason's girlfriend, Jackie Northrup, said she doesn't even notice his skin color any more.

"The only time now I really think about it or notice it is if we're out in public and people start staring," she said.

So far, Karason hasn't sought any medical attention for his condition. When he was asked if he's still drinking the colloidal silver, he said yes, but much less.

You can watch a youtube video here: http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa2OpNTX9Ck

I guess this just proves that you really have to watch what you drink! Weird!

-I'm Average Joe

Daddy, The Mummified Man

2007-02-15T12:52:00.000-05:00

The Japanese are renowned the world over for their longevity, but a recent event in Itami, Hyogo Prefecture, casts some doubt upon the validity of such a widely held belief. As a man celebrated for being the oldest male in the city had actually been dead for as long as a decade.

Kyujiro Kanaoka, who lived with his three elderly children (all in their 70’s), had been known as Itami’s oldest man since 1999. Yet an autopsy conducted on Tuesday revealed that he had died from natural causes or illness between five to ten years ago.

Mr. Kanaoka’s body was finally recovered from the family home after a relative alerted the police following a conversation with his son. Local government officials, who had believed the deceased was 107, found his kimono clad body mummified in the house. With the futon the body was resting on surrounded by religious amulets, charms, and notes. It turns out the children also delivered meals to their dead father on a daily basis.

When the city mayor went to visit the house on Respect For The Aged Day several years ago, he was turned away and told that Mr. Kanaoka was bedridden and unable to meet visitors. As crazy as it seems this episode aroused little or no suspicion. But a shocked neighbor did say that, “I thought something was a little strange, because you’d see all these pamphlets talking about him as being the oldest person, but you never actually saw him.”

And now we know why…

How weird are these folks????!!!!

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Weird but True Warning Labels from Our Weird but True World

2007-02-13T13:38:00.000-05:00

Man, I really love this kind of things...

      1.    On a blanket from Taiwan -

      NOT TO BE USED AS PROTECTION FROM A TORNADO.

       2.    On a helmet mounted mirror used by US cyclists -

      REMEMBER, OBJECTS IN THE MIRROR ARE ACTUALLY BEHIND YOU.

       3.    On a Taiwanese shampoo -

      USE REPEATEDLY FOR SEVERE DAMAGE.

       4.    On the bottle-top of a (UK) flavoured milk drink -

      AFTER OPENING, KEEP UPRIGHT.

       5.    On a New Zealand insect spray -

      THIS PRODUCT NOT TESTED ON ANIMALS.

       6.    In a US guide to setting up a new computer -

      TO AVOID CONDENSATION FORMING, ALLOW THE BOXES TO

      WARM UP TO ROOM TEMPERATURE BEFORE OPENING.

      (The instruction was INSIDE the box.)

       7.    On a Japanese product used to relieve painful haemorrhoids

      LIE DOWN ON BED AND INSERT POSCOOL SLOWLY UP TO THE

      PROJECTED PORTION LIKE A SWORD-GUARD INTO ANAL DUCT. WHILE

      INSERTING POSCOOL FOR APPROXIMATELY 5 MINUTES, KEEP QUIET.

       8.    In some countries, on the bottom of Coke bottles -

      OPEN OTHER END.

       9.    On a packet of Sunmaid raisins -

      WHY NOT TRY TOSSING OVER YOUR FAVOURITE BREAKFAST CEREAL?

       10.    On a Sears hairdryer -

      DO NOT USE WHILE SLEEPING.

       11.    On a bag of Fritos -

      YOU COULD BE A WINNER! NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. DETAILS INSIDE.

       12.    On a bar of Dial soap -

      DIRECTIONS - USE LIKE REGULAR SOAP.

       13.    On Tesco's Tiramisu dessert (printed on bottom of the box)             DO NOT TURN UPSIDE DOWN.

       14.    On Marks & Spencer Bread Pudding -

      PRODUCT WILL BE HOT AFTER HEATING.

       15.    On a Korean kitchen knife -

      WARNING KEEP OUT OF CHILDREN.

       16.    On a string of Chinese-made Christmas lights -

      FOR INDOOR OR OUTDOOR USE ONLY.

       17.    On a Japanese food processor -

      NOT TO BE USED FOR THE OTHER USE.

       18.    On Sainsbury's peanuts -

      WARNING - CONTAINS NUTS.

       19.    On an American Airlines packet of nuts

      INSTRUCTIONS - OPEN PACKET, EAT NUTS.

       20.    On a Swedish chainsaw -

      DO NOT ATTEMPT TO STOP CHAIN WITH YOUR HANDS OR GENITALS.

       21.    On a child's superman costume -

      WEARING OF THIS GARMENT DOES NOT ENABLE YOU TO FLY.

       22.    On some frozen dinners

      SERVING SUGGESTION: DEFROST.

       23.    On a hotel provided shower cap in a box

      FITS ONE HEAD.

       24.    On packaging for a Rowenta iron

      DO NOT IRON CLOTHES ON BODY.

       25.    On Boot's "Children's" cough medicine

      DO NOT DRIVE CAR OR OPERATE MACHINERY.

       26.    On Nytol sleep aid

WARNING MAY CAUSE DROWSINESS.

Weird World even in printed lables.!

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

The Romeo and Juliet of 5,000 Years Ago?

2007-02-09T12:02:00.000-05:00

The exiled Romeo dreamed he died and Juliet's kisses breathed life back into his body. But tragically, the lifeless bodies of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers would soon lie side by side. Is it possible that this could have happened for real? Over 5,000 Years ago? Read on…

Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua, just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of Romeo and Juliet.

Buried between 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric lovers are believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died young, as their teeth were found intact.

One theory being examined is that the man was killed and the woman was then sacrificed so that his soul would be accompanied in the after life by his true love.

Elena Menotti, who is leading the dig at Valdaro near Mantua in northern Italy, said: 'I am so excited about this discovery.

"We have never found a man and a woman embraced before and this is a unique find.

"We have found plenty of women embracing children but never a couple. Much less a couple hugging -- and they really are hugging. It's possible that the man died first and then the woman was killed in sacrifice to accompany his soul.”

The burial site was located Monday, February 5^th, 2007 during construction work for a factory building in the outskirts of Mantua. Alongside the couple, archaeologists found flint tools, including arrowheads and a knife, Menotti said.

Experts now will study the artifacts and the skeletons to determine the burial site's age and how old the two were when they died, she said.

Looks like we had a Weird World even 5,000 years ago!

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

The OTHER Mystery of Easter Island

2007-02-07T12:38:00.000-05:00

Everyone who is interested in the Weird World in which we live has heard about the Moai Statues of Easter Island. These huge ‘heads’ have been branded into popular consciousness, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacific island holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknown purpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island's lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity. Let's take a look....

Known as Rapa Nui to the island's inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island's history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script’s mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so far has been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writing they observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island. However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist has been able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.

When early Europeans discovered Easter Island, its somewhat isolated ecosystem was suffering from the effects of limited natural resources, deforestation, and overpopulation. Over the following years the island's population of four thousand or so was slowly eroded by Western disease and deportation by slave traders. By 1877, only about one hundred and ten inhabitants remained. Rongorongo was one victim of these circumstances. The colonizers of Easter Island had decided that the strange language was too closely tied to the inhabitants' pagan past, and forbade it as a form of communication. Missionaries forced the inhabitants to destroy the tablets with Rongorongo inscriptions.

In 1864, Father Joseph Eyraud became the first non-islander to record Rongorongo. Writing before the ultimate decline of the Eastern Island society, he noted that "one finds in all the houses wooden tables or staffs covered with sorts of hieroglyphs." Despite his interest in the subject, he was not able to find an Islander willing to translate the texts. The islanders were understandably reluctant to help, given that the Europeans forcefully suppressed the use of their native writing.

Rongorongo TabletsSome time later, Bishop Florentin Jaussen of Tahiti attempted to translate the texts. A young Easter Islander named Metero claimed to be able to read Rongorongo, and for fifteen days the bishop kept a record while the boy dictated from the inscriptions. Bishop Jaussen gave up the effort when he realized that Metero was a fraud; the boy had assigned several meanings to the same symbol.

In 1886 Paymaster William Thompson of the ship USS Mohican became interested in the pictographic system during a journey to collect artifacts for the National Museum in Washington. He had obtained two rare tablets engraved with the script and was curious about their meaning. He asked eighty-three-year-old islander Ure Va’e Iko for assistance in translation because his age made him more likely to have knowledge of the language. The man reluctantly admitted to knowing what the tablets said, but did not wish to break the orders of the missionaries. As a result, Ure Va’e Iko refused to touch the tablets, let alone decipher them.

Thompson was determined, however, and decided that Ure Va'e Iko might be more forthcoming under the influence of alcohol. After having a few drinks kindly provided by Thompson, the Easter Islander looked at the tablets once again. The old man burst into song, singing a fertility chant which described the mating of gods and goddesses. William Thompson and his companions quickly took down his words. This was potentially a big breakthrough, but Thomson struggled with assigning words to the pictographs. Furthermore, he couldn't find another Islander who was willing to confirm the accuracy of this translation. While Thompson was ultimately unable to read Rongorongo, the translation that Iko provided has remained one of the most valuable clues on how to decipher the tablets.

An Indus valley connection?In the following decades, many scholars have attempted to make sense of this mystery. In 1932, Wilhelm de Hevesy tried to link Rongorongo to the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization in India, claiming that as many as forty Rongorongo symbols had a correlating symbol in the script from India. Further examination found this link to be much more superficial than originally believed. In the 1950s, Thomas Barthel became one of the first linguists of the modern era to make a study of Rongorongo. He stated that system contained 120 basic elements that, when combined, formed 1500 different signs. Furthermore, he asserted that the symbols represented both objects and ideas. This made it more difficult to produce a translation because an individual symbol could potentially represent an entire phrase. Barthel was successful, however, in identifying an artifact known as the Mamri tablet as a lunar calendar.

Some of the most recent research has been conducted by a linguist named Steven Fischer. Having studied nearly every surviving example of Rongorongo, he took particular interest in a four-foot-long scepter that had once been the property of an Easter Island Chief. The artifact is covered in pictographs, and Fischer noticed that every third symbol on this staff has an additional "phallus-like" symbol attached to it. This led Fischer to believe that all Rongorongo texts have a structure steeped in counts of three, or triads. He has also studied Ure Va’e Iko's fertility chant, which lent additional support to the concept. Iko had always named a god first, his goddess mate second, and their offspring third. Fischer has also tried to make the claim that all Rongorongo texts relate creation myths. Looking at another text, he has suggested that a sentence with a symbol of a bird, a fish, and a sun reads "All the birds copulated with fish: there issued forth the sun." While this could be the translation, it bears little resemblance to Ure Va'e Iko's chant about the matings of gods and goddesses.

Rongorongo naturally commands a great deal of interest from linguists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Only twenty-five texts are know to have survived. Should anyone find a workable translation for Rongorongo, the knowledge stored on the remaining tablets might explain the mysterious statues of Easter Island, the sudden appearance of the written language, and the island's history and customs as whole. However, much like the statues which have so captivated popular imagination, Rongorongo has so far defied all attempts at explanation. Easter Island is just another stop for us on our journey around this Weird World of ours.

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

One Man, One Island and One Unjust and Shameful Policy

2007-02-01T14:42:00.000-05:00

One man can change the course of history, take a look at this…

December 7^th, 1941. The Empire of Japan launched its massive attack on Pearl Harbor, Shigenori Nishikaichi, a Japanese fighter pilot, must have had no idea that later that same day he would set into motion events that would eventually lead to United States interning more than one-hundred thousand people of Japanese heritage-despite their U.S. citizenship-in concentration camps for the remainder World War II.

Airman 1st Class Shigenori Nishikaichi, piloting his Mitsubishi Zero Fighter and escorting a group of bombers, had completed two successful runs. The bombers began seeking further targets when, suddenly, nine U.S. fighters attacked them. The U.S. Army Air Corps forces were flying P-36As, and were tremendously outclassed by the Zeros. Despite the advantage of surprise, the U.S. planes were quickly dispatched.

Nevertheless, one round had punctured the fuel tank of Shigenori Nishikaichi's fighter, and he began losing fuel. That single bullet set into motion events that would eventually lead to U. S. interning more than one-hundred thousand people of Japanese heritage–despite their citizenship–in concentration camps for the remainder World War II.

As the Japanese pilot made his way back to the aircraft carrier, his injured plane fell behind. It soon became apparent that he would not be able to reach the carrier as it steamed away from Hawaii and back toward Japan. Instead he fell back on his emergency orders: he was to land on the uninhabited island of Niihau and wait on the north beach for an Imperial submarine to make rescue. On his first flyby however, he noticed a severe flaw in the plan. Contrary to Japan's pre-attack intelligence, the tiny island was inhabited.

The Island of NiihauChoice of landing locations was sparse. On his second pass over Niihau, Nishukaichi located an area he considered suitable, and attempted landing near an isolated house. As he began to touch down, his plane became entangled in a wire fence which had gone unnoticed during his surveys from the air. The Zero went nose-first into the ground.

The island of Niihau had been sold by King Kamehameha V to the Robinson family, who retained control even in 1941. It was closed off to outsiders, but the native Niihauans and members of the Robinsons did live on the island raising cattle, sheep, and honey. One of the island residents, Hawaiian Howard Kaleohano, watched the plane crash, and being unaware of the nearby attack on the neighboring island, rushed out to help. The pilot emerged rather beaten and groggy. Kaleohano took the pilot's papers and sidearm, and hefted him away from the wreck. Kaleohano was one of the few island residents to speak English, but Nishikaichi's English was very rudimentary. A neighbor who'd been born in Japan was summoned to help. This first translator traded only a few words with the pilot before his face was cast in a pallor–like he'd received a terrible shock–and he refused to be part of the strange events.

Next called was Yoshio Harada. He'd been born in the Hawaiian Islands, and was thus a United States citizen. He and his wife, Irene, spoke both Japanese and English. Nichikaichi told the couple about the attack on Oahu, and demanded the return of his weapon and papers. His demands were refused. The Haradas didn't share the news of the newly started war with the other islanders.

The islanders treated their guest to a luau. He ate well and even sang for his rescuers, unaware that his rescue sub had already been ordered to head back into the Pacific to intercept any incoming US ships.

By nightfall, however, the radio news informed the residents of Niihau about the day's tragic events, and they took Nishikaichi into custody. For lack of proper jailing facilities, he was kept in the house of the luau host the first night. The next day Yoshio Harada escorted the captured pilot to Kii Landing to await the authorities.

Unbeknownst to them, the Navy had curtailed maritime traffic, preventing the Robinson family's representative from reaching the island to pick up the prisoner. Over the next few days Nishikaichi played with Harada's loyalties, pitting his citizenship against his heritage. Harada's allegiance swayed, and over the course of the day the Japaneese-American Harada stole a pistol and a shotgun. That night the two men armed themselves and escaped the other guards. They returned to the house where the crashed Zero was located, but they didn't find the house's owner there–Kaleohano had been in the outhouse, and hid there when he saw them coming. The two fugitives tried to use the radio in the crashed plane, but after an unsuccessful attempt they walked back to the nearby house. As they returned, Kaleohano sprang from his hiding place and dashed away to make his escape. Nishikaichi fired at the fleeing Hawaiian, and missed.

Battle lines were drawn, with Nishikaichi and the Haradas on one side, and Kaleohano rallying residents to the other. In search of help, Kaleohano and a group of others started to row toward Kauai. Other islanders lit a signal fire atop Niihau's highest point, Mount Paniau, which was visible from Kauai. Finally, the Robinson family representative received permission to make for Niihau.

On the night of 12 December, Nishikaichi and Harada stormed the town, and captured a small group of residents. The Japanese pilot demanded that Kaleohano be turned over to him. Though the islanders knew that the man had set off for a Kauai, they made a show of looking as a stalling tactic. When the moment presented itself, one of the captive islanders named Ben Kanahele spoke in Hawaiian, urging Harada to ask his Japanese cohort for a weapon. Harada did so, and once Nishikaichi handed over the shotgun, Kanahele rushed him.

Tule Interment CampNishikaichi pulled his pistol from his boot and shot Ben Kanahele thrice– chest, hip, and groin– but it wasn't enough to stop the enraged Hawaiian. He lifted Nishikaichi and threw him against a stone wall. Kanahele's wife took up a stone, and began to stove in the pilot's skull until her husband could get a knife and finish the man off. With defeat inevitable, Yoshio Harada turned the shotgun into his own gut, and fired.

Ben Kanahele recovered from his wounds. In August 1945 he was awarded two presidential citations, the Medal of Merit and the Purple Heart.

The incident spawned the Navy's report that indicated a "likelihood that Japanese residents previously believed loyal to the United States may aid Japan.". Irene Harada was imprisoned for her part in helping the pilot escape. President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the incident and subsequent naval report to rationalize Executive Order 9066, which was meant to allow local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." It wasn't two weeks before it was interpreted to allow the segregating of all people of Japanese descent from the west coast into concentration camps in the interior US. The actions of one man in a unique situation ultimately led the US government to imprison over 120,000 Japanese Americans, a shameful and unjust measure intended to protect the country from future betrayals.

Times have changed, I could never imagine this kind of thing happening today but then just look at how horribly many Americans of Arab decent were treated following the attacks of 9-11. It is indeed a Weird World in which we live. See you next time.

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

DON’T DRINK THE WATER IN D.C.

2007-01-30T11:03:00.000-05:00

Here is a story that falls into the category of ‘Man’s inhumanity to Man’ check it out…

Chemicals known to change the sexual characteristics of fish and other animals have been found in West Virginia tributaries of the Potomac River, which runs through Washington, D.C. and surrounding areas, the U.S. Geological Survey has announced. It seems that Male fish that are growing eggs have been found in the Potomac River near Sharpsburg, a sign that a little-understood type of pollution is spreading downstream from West Virginia.

An investigation into fish that had both male and female characteristics turned up a range of chemicals including pesticides, flame retardants, and personal-care products, the USGS said. The Potomac is fed by rivers and streams in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia. So this issue affects a large area of people.

Nine male smallmouth bass taken from the Potomac near Sharpsburg, about 60 miles upstream from Washington, were found to have developed eggs inside their sex organs, said Vicki S. Blazer, a scientist overseeing the research for the U.S. Geological Survey.

Authorities say the problems are likely related to a class of pollutants called endocrine disruptors, which short-circuit animals' natural systems of hormone chemical messages.

Officials are awaiting the results of water-quality testing that might point to a specific chemical behind the fish problems, Blazer said.

"It certainly indicates something's going on,'' Blazer said of the new findings in Maryland. "But what, we don't know.''

The Potomac River is the main source of drinking water for the Washington metropolitan area and many upstream communities. It provides about 75 percent of the water supply to the 3.6 million residents of Washington and its Maryland and Virginia suburbs.

Blazer, who works at a federal fish lab in Leetown, W.Va., said she found the latest abnormalities last week while examining tissues from fish taken from the river near Sharpsburg.

The same symptoms had previously been found about 170 miles upstream, in the South Branch of the Potomac in Hardy County, W.Va. Blazer and other scientists discovered the problem there last year while investigating a rash of mass fish deaths.

"We also analyzed samples of 30 smallmouth bass from six sites, including male and female fish without intersex and male fish with intersex," said Douglas Chambers, a USGS scientist who led the study.

"All samples contained detectable levels of at least one known endocrine-disrupting compound, including samples from fish without intersex."

Endocrine disrupters affect the animals' hormone systems. They can cause birth defects and sexual abnormalities called intersex in species ranging from frogs to alligators and perhaps humans as well.

"Antibiotics were detected in municipal wastewater, aquaculture, and poultry-processing effluent, with the highest number of antibiotics and the greatest concentrations found in municipal effluent," the USGS wrote in the report, published at http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2006/1393/.

The USGS said the sexual changes in the fish were discovered by accident in 2003, when scientists were investigating massive fish kills.

Many scientists are concerned that people, as well as other animals, might be affected. "It's not good news that there's something that feminizes male fish in your water,'' said Gina Solomon, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But the Environmental Protection Agency has not set standards for many of these pollutants. Because of this, many drinking-water plants make no special efforts to remove them.

"Many potential sources of contaminants discharge to the South Branch of the Potomac and Cacapon Rivers. Chief among these are runoff from agricultural activities, municipal and domestic wastewater effluent (both treated and untreated), industrial wastewater, and gypsy moth control programs using dimilin (diflubenzuron)," the report reads.

So there you go, just another example of the weird and terrible things we do to ourselves and our children! See ya next time.

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Head Lice A.K.A. The Grade School Parasite

2007-01-29T17:22:00.000-05:00

We had an infection of Head Lice in my House many years ago when my kids were still of the grade school ages and although I was never infected my self (Thank you Jesus for that one!) I can tell you that the process of getting rid of the little things was not pleasant.

The truth is that as parasites go, head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis)are pretty low-key. They don’t have complicated multi-host life cycles, and they don’t seem to carry any diseases (they leave that to their close relative the body louse, called pediculosis,. All head lice really do is scurry over human heads, drink blood, and lay eggs. But they can spread through a class of little kids like wildfire. Head lice are tiny insects that spend their entire lives on human heads. Females glue eggs to the base of hairs. After about a week, nymphs hatch out and start biting the scalp to get blood meals. They molt three times over a week or two, becoming sexually mature adults at the last molt. Adults can live about a month, and the females lay over 100 eggs during that time. But lice can’t survive very long away from their human hosts. If a louse falls off a person, it generally dies within a day or two. Their bodies are adapted to hanging on to hairs – their legs even have specialized curved claws that fit around hair shafts. And they don’t have wings. So they can only get from person to person by crawling. For that they need direct head-to-head contact.

Little kids are all about big hugs, leaning close, and sharing things (like hats) with their buddies. While this is all great we must remember that in this Weird World of ours our lovable little ones may sometimes they bring home more from school than just good feelings.

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Parasite and Fungus Odd Couple

2007-01-26T12:13:00.000-05:00

You already know that a parasite takes advantage of its host. But today I’m going to talk about a parasite that goes a step further and takes advantage of a fellow traveller...

Meet the cow lungworm (Dictyocaulus viviparous). As its name suggests, adult lungworms live and breed inside of cow lungs. Like a lot of other roundworms, lungworms have a life cycle that involves a torturous grand tour of their host’s tissues. Larval lungworms live in pastures, where they climb up blades of grass and wait for a cow to eat them. If a young worm manages to get swallowed, it digs through the cow’s intestinal wall, migrates to its lymph nodes, takes a quick break to molt, then dives into the cow’s bloodstream and gets swept to its lungs. The worm then molts one last time to become an adult, and joins the lungworm orgy rocking on in the bronchi. There’s plenty of lungworm baby-making and egg-laying going on in an infected cow. But if the young worms are going to infect new hosts, they have to get back out into the grass. So the worms (somehow) make the cows cough. Their eggs are coughed up out of the lungs and get swallowed. They hatch in the cow’s intestines, and wind up in the inevitable final product of that particular place: a cow pattie.

So they’re outside. But compared to some other parasites, lungworm larvae aren’t very mobile. And cows don’t graze near their own poop. So if a young lungworm is going to grab a new host, it needs to move away from the cow chip. It can sit in the dung and wait for a good rainstorm to wash it further out into the grass. But if it’s lucky, it’s sharing the cow poop with another organism taking a trip through the cow ecosystem: the fungus Pilobolus.

Pilobolus essentially eats dung. And it uses the most expedient method possible to find fresh food: its spores only grow after they’ve passed through an animal’s digestive system. Spores stick to grass, get eaten, and ride through the gut undigested until they get deposited in their own private restaurant. But Pilobolus has the same problem as the lungworm – cows don’t graze where there are lots of cow patties. If its spores are going to get into a cow, they have to leave their natal pattie. Fungi don’t have muscles, so they can’t crawl away. But Pilobolus has evolved another, more remarkable solution: its spore packet grows on top of a stalk that fills with pressurized water until it explodes and shoots the spores up to 4 feet away. What does this have to do with worms? If a larval lungworm happens to be in a cow pattie that’s growing some Pilobolus, the worm crawls up the fungal stalk, curls up on top of the spores, and waits for the explosion.

It is indeed weird but also amazing, this in which we live, isn't it!

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Careful What You Breath!

2007-01-24T11:50:00.000-05:00

When I was a little kid, I had a case of pinworms. Naturally, I was mortified at the time – for one thing, I knew that if anyone in my class ever found out the teasing would probably last longer than the universe. My mother blamed my fingernail-biting habit, claiming that I’d probably gotten them from having dirty hands after playing with the neighbor’s cats or dogs. Sorry Mom, that was not the way I got it…

Enterobius vermicularis is a nematode worm. It only lives inside human guts (and here's a movie from The New England Journal of Medicine, if you have ‘the guts’ to watch and the curiosity to see what it looks like), so the cats and dogs were innocent. They may have given me Toxoplamois, (which is is a parasitic disease caused by the protozoan Toxoplasma gondii. The parasite infects most warm-blooded animals, including humans, but the primary host is the felid (cat) family) but never pinworms.

In fact, the culprit was probably one of my Torquemada-like classmates. And I might not even have gotten it off their hands. Pinworm females lay their eggs around their host’s anus, but the eggs are sticky and get transferred to clothing easily. Once they're there, the eggs are so tiny that they can become airborne. If they’re floating, anyone can come along and inhale them. Disgusting as it sounds that’s how it goes.

WEIRD, WEIRD, WEIRD!!

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

The Eyes Have It

2007-01-23T10:47:00.000-05:00

One thing about my job is that I really don’t travel much. I run a small retail business and therefore I am not often able to leave town, much less the State or Country. But there are times I’m reminded of exactly how much I missed…

One of my best customers, who we will call Mike, is a really nice fellow with a wonderful collection of carnival glass. Mike is a professional systematist, who works for an international fisheries company. A few years ago he came back from one of his field seasons in Africa with an unwanted passenger.

Loa loa is also known as the African eye worm. It’s a filarial nematode. Fundamentally, that means it’s a long, thin worm that molts periodically as it grows. There are lots of parasitic nematodes, but Loa loa is the only one where the adults occasionally swim across your eye.

As Mike said, “I thought I had flicked something into my left eye. There was something in there that was bothersome, but not sharply painful. So I went to the bathroom mirror and pulled down my lower eyelid. There I saw (with both my eyes, I suppose) a semi-transparent worm, about 1 cm in length and no thicker than a silk thread, making its way across the white (sclera) of my eye, below the iris and beneath the conjunctiva…”

Of course, by the time that adult was having a swim somewhere visible; Mike had turned into a worm habitat. Humans are the only known host of adult Loa loa. They typically live in subcutaneous tissue. But they also breed like bunnies, pumping out thousands of tiny threadlike larvae that ride through the bloodstream on a daily basis. At night, they collect inside lung tissue. During the day, they move out to the veins under the skin and wait on the off chance that they’ll get sucked out by their second host – a biting fly. Once the larvae are inside the fly, they bore through its gut tissue, migrate to its muscles, molt a couple of times, and then finally move into the fly’s proboscis. They wait for the fly to bite someone else, and crawl into the wound. New host! It takes the larvae about 6 months to become adults. But they can live inside human tissues for 15 to 17 years. So it’s not entirely clear when Mike was infected. He’s been studying fish in central Africa for nearly a decade. He does know that it had been two years since his last research visit, so the worms had him for at least that long. So, what was it like to have a more-active-than usual adult swimming around?

Again as Mike himself said, “When it was active, it was quite annoying and my eye teared profusely. I remember hoping it would just go back to wherever it had come from and leave my eye alone. It did, eventually. My eye was a little red where it had broken some of those blood vessels. It never made reappearance.”

Hey Mike, I hope that ivermectin works. Remember to always keep your eyes open while you walk around in this big Weird World of ours.

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Wasp The Zombie Master

2007-01-22T16:35:00.000-05:00

Last time we took a look at a parasite that turned crabs into zombies, and we will continue to look at more parasites, but while researching the last post I came across a wasp that turns roaches into zombies and thought it was weird enough that it deserved a closer examination…

The weird little thing in question is Ampulex compressa, a wasp that has the ability to tackle roaches, insert a stinger into their brains and disable their escape reflexes. This lets the wasp use the roach's antennae to steer the roach to its lair, and oh, what happens next.

The wasp slips her stinger through the roach's exoskeleton and directly into its brain. She apparently use ssensors along the sides of the stinger to guide it through the brain, a bit like a surgeon snaking his way to an appendix with a laparoscope. She continues to probe the roach's brain until she reaches one particular spot that appears to control the escape reflex. She injects a second venom that influences these neurons in such a way that the escape reflex disappears.

From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it--in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex--like a dog on a leash.

The zombie roach crawls where its master leads, which turns out to be the wasp's burrow. The roach creeps obediently into the burrow and sits there quietly, while the wasp plugs up the burrow with pebbles. Now the wasp turns to the roach once more and lays an egg on its underside. The roach does not resist. The egg hatches, and the larva chews a hole in the side of the roach. In it goes.

The larva grows inside the roach, devouring the organs of its host, for about eight days. It is then ready to weave itself a cocoon--which it makes within the roach as well. After four more weeks, the wasp grows to an adult. It breaks out of its cocoon, and out of the roach as well.

It seems to me that seeing a full-grown wasp crawl out of a roach suddenly makes those Alien movies look pretty derivative. Anyway just you remember that it is a big weird world out there so enjoy every bit of it!

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Body-Snatching Parasite makes Zombie Crabs!

2007-01-20T12:05:00.000-05:00

Let’s look at another Weird parasite today, the one that can turn normal crabs into its own mindless slaves…

There is no small number of unsettling parasites crawling, flying, and swimming about the Earth, the lucky ones hitching rides on hapless host organisms. And while many parasites are harmless, or even beneficial in their way, others can wreak havoc with their hosts' existence. The worst of these offenders can actually force their host to do their will.

A tiny barnacle called Sacculina is one such parasite. Upon finding a host crab, a female Sacculina will crawl over the crab's surface until she finds a chink in the armor: a joint. She then ejects her protective shell, reducing herself to a gelatinous blob, and invades.

Inside the host, the parasite grows long, root-like tendrils throughout the crab's body, eventually emerging as a bump on its underside. During this process she renders the crab infertile, and creates a small opening in the crab's back that will allow a male Sacculina to make residence there. Soon the crab is filled with millions of Sacculina eggs and larvae, and like a zombie, the crab cares for these eggs and larvae as though they were its own, losing all interest in mating. When a male crab is infected, the parasite alters its physiology and behavior to be female, to better care for the Sacculina's young.

The parasite basically rewires the crab for its own ends, and the crab becomes a helpless vehicle, expending its energy caring for the young organisms that will move on to inflict themselves upon other crabs.

Do you still need more evidence that we truly do live in a Weird World?

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Tongue Snatcher of the Deep!

2007-01-19T17:25:00.000-05:00

Parasites, you know I read tons of stuff and every so often something just gets stuck in my head and I can’t shake it out, right now it is parasites. OK, that doesn’t sound exactly right, what I mean is that the subject of parasites takes us on a brief journey into some really freaky weirdness. I’ll spend the next several days posting on the subject so you may want to get your gag reflex ready, you may just need it!

The Spotted Rose Snapper Fish, which lives off the coast of California, is plagued by what must be one of the most disturbing parasites in all of nature. The crustacean parasite, called Cymothoa exigua, enters the fish's mouth and locates tongue an then attaches itself with the claws on its front three pairs of legs. Then it leeches blood from the fish's tongue until the muscle atrophies and dies. The parasite then attaches itself to the withered tongue-stump, and acts as a working replacement for the organ, spending the rest of its life living off bits of food that enter the fish's mouth.

The Cymothoa exigua is the only parasite known to effectively replace a body organ.

See, it really is a Weird, Weird, World in which we live. Keep an open mind and open eyes while you keep walking our weird and wonderful world. See you tomorrow for more weird parasites!

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

The Lone Tree of Ténéré

2007-01-18T13:56:00.000-05:00

Well, we are back!! Rather than getting into all of the reasons for the delays lets just jump right into things...

Because trees are so abundant, it is rare for a single one to become well-known. Some trees become distinguished due to their historical significance. The Bodhi Tree in India, for example, is where Buddha is thought to have gained enlightenment; and the Liberty Tree in 18th-century Boston was a gathering place for American colonists who objected to British rule.

A few trees are also worthy of note due to being record-holders. The state of California is home to several such trees: the tallest one known, a 155.5 meter redwood called Hyperion; the largest, the 1,450 cubic meter giant sequoia named General Sherman; and the oldest, a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine known as Methuselah. It's difficult to be certain of which individual tree is the most remote. For several decades that distinction belonged to the Tree of Ténéré, an acacia tree standing alone in the vast, hostile expanse of the Sahara Desert. However, in 1973 this tree met an exceedingly improbable end.

Also referred to by the French 'arbre du Ténéré', millennia ago the tree was part of a sizable forest. Gradually, climate change reduced the area to a desert as the trees perished. The Ténéré region became one of the most inhospitable areas, with little vegetation and an average annual rainfall of only 2.5 cm. Water ended up being scarce even underground. By sometime around the early 20th century, a small group of the thorned, yellow-flowered acacias were all that remained of the trees of the Ténéré. Over time, all but one died, leaving it as the only surviving tree in a 400 kilometer radius.

As a result, the three-meter-tall tree was one of the few interruptions in the landscape of sand. Visible from a considerable distance, it became a landmark for desert travelers. Its ability to survive on an unforgiving patch of sand was a mystery at first, but passers-by reasoned that there must be a water source. During the winter of 1938-1939, the French military coordinated the digging of a nearby well to increase the utility of the site. Workers discovered that the tree's root system was drawing water from a source 35 meters underground. Meanwhile, sometime during or after the construction of the well, a truck at the site backed into the tree and broke off one of its main branches. The tree managed to survive the impact, though its previously distinct 'Y' shape was lost.

In the decades that followed, caravans shipping grain, salt, and dates across the Sahara often stopped to take water from this well. The tree was so essential to locals' navigation of the large, barren desert that damaging it was inconceivable. As Michel Lesourd of the Central Service of Saharan Affairs wrote after seeing the tree in 1939, "[t]he Acacia has become a living lighthouse." It appeared on large-scale maps of the desert as one of the sole reference points.

By the 1970s many of the passing caravans were trucks rather than camels. In 1973, one such truck was being driven by a Libyan - allegedly drunk - and despite the flat, wide-open expanse he lost control of his vehicle. The truck veered off the road and slammed into the only tree in the entire region. This second impact with an automobile was more than the solitary Tree of Ténéré could bear, and it snapped from its trunk. It was estimated to have been 300 years old.

In November of that year the remains of the legendary tree were retrieved and transported by another truck to the Niger National Museum in the capital of Niamey, where it still resides today. At the Tree of Ténéré's original location, an anonymous artist constructed a metal monument made up of recycled pipes, fuel barrels and discarded auto parts.

Thus the location still stands as a landmark - at least until the next drunken truck driver comes by.

I’m Average Joe

email: OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Comming soon.....................

2006-12-15T16:05:00.000-05:00

I've been out of it for some time now but will be bringing the blog back again very soon.....

CHECK BACK!!!

Polar Bear-Grizzly Hybrid Shot in Canadian Arctic

2006-05-11T16:32:00.000-04:00

Here is proof that we live in a weird and wonderful world. It comes right out of the days headlines. Check it out…

Northern hunters, scientists and people with vivid imaginations have discussed the possibility of a cross-bread Polar Bear and Grizzly Bear for years.

But Roger Kuptana, an Inuvialuit guide from Sachs Harbor, Northwest Territories, was the first to suspect it had actually happened when he proposed that a strange-looking bear shot last month by American sports hunter Jim Martell, might actually be half polar bear, half grizzly.

Territorial officials seized the creature after noticing it had white fur that was scattered with brown patches and that it had the long claws and humped back of a grizzly. Now a DNA test has confirmed that it is indeed a hybrid — possibly the first documented in the wild.

"We've known it's possible, but actually most of us never thought it would happen," said Ian Stirling, a polar bear biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton.

Polar bears and grizzlies have been successfully paired in zoos before — Stirling could not speculate why — and their offspring are fertile.

Breeding seasons for the two species overlap, though polar bear gets started slightly earlier.

Hunter Jim Martell, in white, with unidentified men and the hybrid bear he shot in April 2006 on Banks Island, Nunavut, Canada.

Very Cool…

I’m Average Joe

Knights Templar part 2

2006-05-08T12:16:00.000-04:00

As we began looking at the issue of the Knights Templar last time I wrote: “Many of you have no doubt heard of the Knights Templar. But what do we really know about them? Were they gallant Knights sworn to serve Jesus Christ or Heretics? They have been called both and bee called better and worse.” I guess I knew of what I spoke because this first part of the piece has really generated the email. Both pro Templar and con Templar people have written. I hope you will all enjoy the remainder of this small post and will join us as we take a closer look at the Knights Templar...

What the Vatican Really Knew

Since the time of the Templars’ private audience with Pope Clement V a body of evidence has been forming to prove that although Pope Clement was blind to the Knights heretical activities, other informed Church officials within the Vatican did indeed know about their heretical propensities. For example, according to testimony given during the Templar trails from one Father Antonio Sicci, some of the Knights’ gnostic activities had been witnessed by Vatican spies in Palestine well before 1307.

It also became clear during the Templar trials that both the Vatican and King Philip of France had had their spies overseeing the Knights’ activities in Europe before 1307 because some of them were later chosen as witnesses for the prosecution. It was because of the evidence uncovered by these early spies that months before the Templars’ mass arrest King Philip knew exactly what heretical activities to instruct his 12 specially selected spies to look for when he had them infiltrate certain Templar preceptories. The monarch may have also known what heresies to look for from studying information contained within a secret Templar document. This document, entitled Baptism of Fire of the Brothers-Consulate and often referred to by Templar historians as the “Secret Rule of the Templars,” was later discovered in 1780 in the Vatican Library by a Danish Bishop. Said to have been written in 1240 A.D. by a French Templar Master named Roncelinus, it appears to give a green light to all the heretical offenses that the Knights were accused of in the 14th century. Permission to indulge in all manner of Templar heresy can be found in this document, including defilement of the Cross, denial of Christ as the Savior, sexual liaison, and the worship of the idolic head known as Baphomet. There is even a passage within the document that gives the Knights permission to initiate other gnostics into their order, including Cathars, Bogomils and even Assassins. If the Baptism of Fire of the Brothers-Consulate was indeed in circulation beginning in 1240 A.D. it would have been an easy task for a Church or Royal spy to procure a copy for their employers.

The Knights of St. John

A more substantial bit of evidence in support of the notion that the Vatican was aware of the Templars’ heretical Johannite affiliations came in the mid 1800s when Pope Pius IX gave his famous “Allocution of Pio Nono against the Free Masons.” In fact, this address implies that the Vatican may have known all along about a heretical Templar-Johannite relationship.

At the time of his momentous address the Pope was receiving immense pressure to take a stand against the uprising of numerous heretical gnostic sects forming in France, one of which was The Johannite Church of Primitive Christians. This sect claimed to be a direct descendant of the early Knights Templar, and the chief of the sect, Bernard Fabre-Palaprat, claimed to be a Templar Grand Master in line from both Hughes de Payen and John the Apostle. Pope Pius’ subsequent denigration of the sect during his address proved that the Church had ostensibly known for hundreds of years about an intimate Templar-Johannite association:

“The Johannites ascribed to Saint John [the Baptist] the foundation of their Secret Church, and the Grand Pontiffs of their Sect assumed the title of Christos, Anointed, or Consecrated, and claimed to have succeeded one another from Saint John by an uninterrupted succession of pontifical powers. He, who, at the period of the foundation of the Order of the Temple, claimed these imaginary prerogatives, was named THEOCLET; he knew HUGUES DE PAYENS, he installed him into the Mysteries and hopes of his pretended church, he seduced him by the notions of Sovereign Priesthood and Supreme royalty, and finally designated him as his successor."

Pope Pius’ address was soon corroborated by some highly respected esoteric historians of the 19th Century. In Isis Unveiled Madame Blavatsky revealed: “They (the Knights Templar) were at first the true Knights of John the Baptist, crying in the wilderness and living on wild honey and locusts,” while her contemporary, the selfstyled Templar descendant and Kabbalist, Eliphas Levi, volunteered in The History of Magic:

“The Templars had two doctrines; one was concealed and reserved to the leaders, being that of Johannism; the other was public, being Roman Catholic doctrine…The Chiefs alone knew the aim of the Order; the Subalterns followed without distrust.”

Thus, Levi confirmed the Templars’ affiliation with the gnostic Johannites but he went one step further in pointing out that it was principally the Grand Masters and chiefs of the Order who were aware of the Knights’ heretical activities. This notion has been corroborated by transcripts compiled by the Papal Council during the Templar trails that show that when the Knights were questioned regarding one of their most important Johannite rites, that of worshipping an idolic head called Baphomet, only the chiefs of the Order knew anything about it. The caretaker of the head was, at the time, Hughes de Peraud, the second in command under Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who secretly carried the head from one preceptory to the next whenever an initiation or ceremony called for its presence.

What or who was Baphomet?

Who or what was Baphomet and how did it connect the Templars to the Johannites? The contemporary Johannites, who became separated from mainstream Templarism in the mid 19^th century, claim to know. Supposedly their church, the Apostolic Johannite Church, is in possession of secret wisdom descended directly from the chiefs of the Knights Templar.

According to James Foster, former Primate of the Johannite Church, Baphomet of the Templars was the decapitated head of John the Baptist, the “Messiah” of the Johannite tradition. This would explain the extreme sanctity the

Templars ascribed to the head and why it was in the sole possession of the Orders’ second in command. According to the Templars at their trial the head possessed special power and could make “trees blossom and the land to produce.” Legend has

it that when John’s head was found by the Templars in the Boukoleon Palace in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade the head had been used to keep an Eleventh Century emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire vibrant and alive through daily passes near his body. This power, known as the Holy Spirit in the West and Kundalini in the East, is the same power John was saturated with during his lifetime in the Holy Land. It is this power that can awaken itself as a normally dormant evolutionary energy at the base of the spine and culminate in gnostic awareness.

Templar Kisses

Like the veneration of Baphomet, many of the other heretical rites that the Templars were accused of, such as kissing each other on the mouth as well as various other parts of the body, can only be understood in light of a perceived Johannite or gnostic-Templar association. The Templar kisses are said to have been planted at the base of the spine and below the navel, areas of the body that are associated with the evolutionary Kundalini power. A third initiatory kiss, placed upon

the mouth, could also have been used to awaken this inner power by moving the Kundalini-saturated breath of a Templar initiator into a new Knight. This practice and similar ones have been known about and observed by the gnostic sects of the East for thousands of years. As to the homosexual activity alleged to have occurred between the Templar brethren, this may have also had Kundalini-activating implications. Throughout the ensuing centuries following the Templar trails certain European sects using tantric and homosexual activity for spiritual purposes and Kundalini activation, such as the OTO, have maintained that their sexual rites have descended directly from the Knights Templar.

So there it is, make up your own mind as to the Templars. I think that weather you are pro or con you must admit that the Templars are just another bit of proof that we truly do inhabit a weird, weird world!

I’m Average Joe

The Weirdness of The Knights Templar

2006-05-01T16:12:00.000-04:00

Many of you have no doubt heard of the Knights Templar. But what do we really know about them? Were they gallant Knights sworn to serve Jesus Christ or Heretics? They have been called both and bee called better and worse. Let's take a closer look at them in this first installment of a two part piece on the Knights Templar...

According to one esoteric tradition, after excavating the foundations of Solomon’s Temple for nine years the Templar Knights left the Middle East with five “caskets” or cases that were full of treasures they had collected in the Holy Land.

These cases were eventually deposited in Kilwinning, the Mother Lodge of Scottish Freemasonry, before being transported to Roslin Castle, ancient home of the Sinclair Barons of Roslin, where they were kept safe until a fire broke out in the building. The cases were then quickly removed from the castle and very soon afterwards the construction of Rosslyn Chapel officially began. Thus, it appears that the chapel may well have been built specifically to hold the five cases.

This notion was ostensibly corroborated in the 1990s by Andrew Sinclair, who conducted ground scans at Rosslyn and discovered five rectangular objects or boxes in the crypt underneath the Chapel. Sinclair’s discovery has fueled speculation about what might be in the cases. Many suggest the treasure consists of silver and gold trinkets including artifacts associated with Solomon’s Temple or Herod’s Temple, others suggest that there many also be the possibility of finding some ancient scrolls. It has been conjectured that some of the imagined artifacts in the cases were discovered by the Knights via clues they found while studying obscure Essene texts, a theory recently corroborated by the discovery of the Copper Scroll, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Clues found in the Copper Scroll have led archeologists to empty pits in close proximity to Templar symbols and weapons, thus apparently revealing that the Knights had overseen the secret excavations and then absconded with whatever treasure they found. The hypothetical scrolls that may exist within the five cases have been theorized to include genealogical information regarding a family spawned by the marriage union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Or, assert authors Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas in their fine book, The Hiram Key, possibly Essene information regarding the origins of Freemasonry. But at the present time all that can be said for certain about the scrolls is that one of them contains a diagram with symbols recalling the mysterious Johannite Heresy, a gnostic belief system that the Templars may have been initiated into in the Holy Land. This diagram was copied by Lambert de St. Omer, a retired schoolmaster, when the Templar Knights passed through Flanders as they moved through northern Europe. This diagram, which today is entitled as the Heavenly Jerusalem and hangs on a wall within a museum in Ghent, Belgium, is a map of the New Jerusalem described in the biblical Book of Revelations.

Johannite heretical wisdom is evident in the diagram via the identification of a Messiah – the figure prophesied to found the holy city of the future – as being not Jesus but John the Baptist. Such a designation is consistent with the ancient Johannite heresy, which stated that John was both Messiah and founder of the gnostic Johannite path that leads to the intuitive vision of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

According to this heretical tradition, there were two Messiahs or Chosen Ones, with John, the Priest Messiah, one rung above Jesus, the incarnated King Messiah. If the Johannite Heresy is truly the key to understanding the Templar scroll now in Belgium it must be allowed that the Knights were Johannites and embraced a greater veneration for John the Baptist than Jesus. Furthermore, if they were Johannites then they practiced a gnostic path comprised of heretical rites that culminated in an inner revelation regarding the nature of the universe and the goal of human existence. The truth of this notion would explain why the five cases with their Johannite scrolls ended up in Rosslyn Chapel. The Sinclair builder of the Chapel considered himself to be a caretaker and preserver of the Templars’ gnostic wisdom.

Earl William Sinclair was a Grand Master Freemason of the developing Scottish Rite, an order that had descended directly from the Templars who had fled France and later made their home in Scotland. According to Niven Sinclair, a contemporary patriarch of Clan Sinclair, rather than risk death by exposing the gnostic secrets in his possession Earl William imbedded them within his stone edifice. Perhaps he knew at the time that the secrets he was hiding were for posterity, and that these secrets would prove that the Templars were Johannite gnostics and heretics and so were indeed the Templars’ Biggest Secret.

The Disbelief of Pope Clement V

According to conventional history, the first intimation that the Vatican had regarding the Templars’ gnostic and Johannite predilections came to the surface during the Knights’ depositions for allegations of heresy in 1307. Then, in 1308, Pope

Clement V disbanded the ruthless Inquisition so that he could privately interview the Templar Knights himself. At stake was his own private bodyguard of knights, which since the time of Pope Honorius II and the Council of Troyes in 1128 had been the

Holy Sea’s personal militia. The Knights had been accused of a litany of heretical offenses, any one of which could have been reason enough to cast them straight into the holy fires of the Inquisition, but since many of the Knights’ confessions had been

extracted under extreme torture their credibility had been severely compromised.

Therefore, having himself never fully believed the damning allegations against his beloved Templars, Clement V confidently called for 72 Knights to be transported from Paris to his villa in Poitiers in southern

France

where he was sure they would recant their previous testimonies. Imagine his surprise when, after insuring the Knights that they were safe in his home no matter how damning their confessions might be, the Templars refused to discredit the confessions previously extracted from them in the dark and dank torture chambers of Paris. Pope Clement, who was essentially a pawn put into office by King Philip, could only scratch his head in disbelief and lament that his Knights had somehow strayed from the straight and narrow. To his dismay he had found out conclusively that all the vile allegations against the Templars, such as kissing each other on the buttocks, and urinating upon the Cross and renouncing Jesus as their Savior in favor of a grizzled, mummified head, were indeed true. The Pope was finally forced to accept the fact that he had lost his knights. Later, within the silence of his quarters the distraught Pope must have wondered whether the Templars had ever truly been a Christian army of the Church.

Truely some weird wild stuff. Join us again Tomorrow for the second part of our piece on the Knights Templar.
I'm Average Joe

Oakland County Child Killer Mystery

2006-04-26T14:11:00.000-04:00

A vicious child-killer stalked Oakland County in Michigan during 1976-1977. Authorities are certain of a connection in the deaths of four victims, the first being Mark Stebbins, 12, who was abducted in Ferndale while walking to his home on February 13^th, 1976. His body was found in a parking lot six days afterwards, his corpse meticulously cleaned. Stebbins had been sexually assaulted and smothered to death. On December 12^th, twelve-year-old Jill Robinson was abducted in Royal Oak and her body found in Troy. Though no sexual assault was evident and the girl had been killed by a shotgun blast, she had also been scrubbed clean before her disposal.

The next certain victim was Kristine Mihelich, 10, who vanished in Berkely on January 2^nd, 1977, and her corpse located nineteen days later in Franklin Village. Like the others, her body had been cleaned after her killer suffocated her death. The last of the series seems to be Timothy King, 11, who went missing on March 11^th in Birmingham and found dead in a ditch near Livonia with his body scoured clean, his nails manicured, and his clothes freshly washed and ironed. King was also sexually assaulted before his sad death. By this point the press had picked up on the odd signature of the killings, dubbing the unknown perpetrator "The Babysitter" due to his apparent post-mortem care of the victims.

Other killings that occurred in the area at the same time have been tentatively linked to the series. Cynthia Cadieux, 16, was abducted and bludgeoned to death on January 15^th, 1976. Missing from Roseville she was discovered nude in Bloomfield Township the next day. Just five days after Cadieux's disappearance Sheila Shrock was raped and shot dead at her home in Birmingham. Jane Allen, 13, was murdered by carbon monoxide poisoning after accepting a ride in Royal Oak and was found in Miamisburg, Ohio, on August 11^th, 1976. The 1972 slaying of teenager Donna Serra in Ray Township has also been mentioned as possibly being connected to the string of murders.

Though the body count is disputable, there is one thing for certain. At least one serial killer plied his trade in the normally quiet communities of Oakland County, never to be identified. A long-standing suspect who was killed in a 1981 auto accident has since been cleared of involvement by DNA testing, leaving investigators with little hope of solving this baffling case.

The Oakland County Child Killer terrorized families in the mid 1970s, abducting and murdering at least 4 children.

Now, some 30 years later, investigators have learned that the Oakland County Child Killer Task Force plans to interview a 65-year-old prison inmate named Michael Dean Grant.

Grant is currently locked up in the Indiana Department of Correction Westville Correctional Center which is located in northwest Indiana, for killing a child. Detectives want to know if he had other victims.

Chip St. Clair is Michael Dean Grant’s son, and he believes there’s a chance that his father is the killer that police have been looking for.

"He was a child murderer on the run, during the exact time, in the exact area, that these crimes happened," St. Clair explained.

Some investigators have learned that in 1968, Grant was the prime suspect in the mysterious death of his ex-wife’s 18-month-old son, but he was never charged with that crime.

Grant was arrested 2 years later, in his home town of Elkhart, Indiana, for killing a 3-year-old boy.

According to the police report, Michael Dean Grant had been babysitting his girlfriend’s 2 young sons. Police say during the boys’ evening bath, Grant savagely beat the children, ultimately killing the 3-year-olds.

Chip St. Clair told investigators, "I spoke to one of the officers, he was the first to arrive at the scene of the crime. 30-years-later, he remembers it as if it had happened yesterday. He said it was the most brutal crime he had seen in his life."

Grant was sent to prison, but his new girlfriend, Chip’s mother, helped him escape. Chip says his mother and Michael Grant changed their identities, and moved to Southfield, Michigan, around the time of the child killings.

Chip says he had to endure years of abuse at the hands of his convicted child killing father.

"He would grab me and slam me up against the wall. He would choke me," Chip said. "He’d get violent if you put too many ice cubes in his glass of diet coke, or too few ice cubes, or if the vacuum lines weren’t exactly straight, or if the pillows weren’t fluffed."

In 1998, Chip learned the truth about his father, and sent him back to prison. Since then, Chip has come across some strange information that might provide clues in the child killings.

"I’ve had somebody come forward since I’ve been on national media, who expressed their anguish with seeing my father’s face on TV. They said, ‘That was the man who tried to abduct me back in the winter of ’76-’77. I am positive.’"

Chip says shortly after that alleged abduction attempt in Warren, the 3rd victim of the Oakland County Child Killer was found.

Chip also says bizarre items found inside a trunk in his parents’ home raised questions, including baby teeth, locks of hair, and photographs of other children that Chip doesn’t recognize.

"Was there another child that they had in their care, at some point?" Chip wondered. Chip doesn’t know how it all ads up, he just wants to help detectives find out if Michael Dean Grant is the Oakland County Child Killer.

"It’d be foolish not to at least rule him out as a suspect," Chip reasoned.

While Grant was living in Michigan, he used the name David St. Clair.

Detectives are hoping to get a DNA sample from Grant. They would like to compare his DNA with a strand of hair that might have belonged to the Oakland County Child Killer.

I'm Average Joe

Marilyn Monroe’s Weird Death

2006-04-24T11:56:00.000-04:00

Marilyn Monroe was the blonde bombshell to end all bombshells. She drove men wild with her sex appeal. She remains an enduring figure, imitated by actresses and adored by the public. To this day she is usually the first name mentioned when you ask either men or women to name a famous sex symbol. She died at the height of her fame and beauty and so will forever be remembered as the young and sexy women she was at the time of her death. Her death remains one of the strangest events in all of her short life. Let’s take a closer look…

Marilyn Monroe’s most defining role was in the movie "The Seven Year Itch", which contained the famous scene involving her skirt being blown up by an air blast from a subway vent. Marilyn Monroe's notable films include: "All About Eve", "Bus Stop", "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes", "Some Like it Hot", and "The Misfits" (this was her last film, and interestingly, it was Clark Gable's last as well).

Marilyn Monroe who was much more intelligent than she was given credit for, enjoyed politics and political conversation and intrigue, was romantically linked to both President John F. Kennedy and some suggest to Bobby Kennedy as well. Marilyn Monroe was married to playwright Arthur Miller and later to baseball great Joe Dimagio, who continued to profess his undying love for her until many, many years after her death.

The sex symbol died on the evening of Saturday, August 4^th, 1962. According to witnesses, she had been planning to hold a news conference on Monday, August 6^th, wherer in she was going to "tell all," about her relationships with John and Bobby Kennedy. This prompted Bobby and younger brother Ted Kennedy to fly to California, where they arrived on August 4^th.

According to testimony at the inquest, the officially accepted timeline is as follows: At about midnight on the 4^th of August 1962, Marilyn went to her room, taking her personal telephone with her. She said goodnight to her housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, and closed her door. When Marylin's lawyer called at about 1 a.m. he was told that Marilyn was in her bedroom but the light was still on, he decided he would call back in the morning. Mrs. Murray says that at about 2 a.m., she noticed that the light was still on in Maylin’s room and she became concerned. She knocked on the door but could get no response. Worried, she finally called the ambulance service to effect a forced entry. At 3:30 in the morning of the 5^th of August, Marilyn was found dead, lying spread out on her bed, naked with one arm out stretched holding her telephone. The first coroner's report declared that her death was due to "presumed suicide caused by an overdose of barbiturates."

Controversy today still surrounds the unexplained timeframe of events on the night of Monroe's passing. Interestingly, Monroe's housekeeper, Eunice Murray, attempted to cash a $200.00 check made out to her by Monroe several days after Monroe's death. City National Bank of Beverly Hills declined to pay Murray and marked the check "deceased." The check is today on display in the Monroe exhibit at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. It later came out that Murray had been fired by Monroe two days before her death - so why was she even there?

A few interesting facts about some of Monroe’s staff follow: Shortly after Monroe's death, Murray, a widow with no assets and no income, left the country for an extended and expensive European cruise on the Queen Mary. Some suggest that she absconded with several thousand dollars worth of Monroe jewelry and cash that was known to be in the house. Pat Newcomb, Monroe's personal publicist from Hollywood, was later hired by the Kennedy administration soon after Monroe died, and was reportedly given a big fat salary with no substantive work to do.

The death of Marilyn Monroe never resulted in a court case, so much of the "evidence" has never been subjected to a judge or jury. Many significant questions linger about the death of the famous actress. Here are some of the most glaring:

~ Why did Robert Kennedy deny being in Los Angeles on the night Monroe died? Monroe's neighbors said they saw a helicopter land, and Kennedy get out with two other men. A Los Angeles patrol officer said he stopped a car carrying the Kennedy brothers and actor Peter Lawford shortly after midnight near Brentwood, where Monroe lived. Years later, Marilyn's maid admitted Bobby Kennedy had in fact been at the house that night. So why did Kennedy lie?

~ If Marilyn died from an overdose of pills, why were none found in her stomach? Dr. Thomas Naguchi, who performed the autopsy for LA County, found not a trace in her stomach.

~ Who wiretapped Marilyn's house, and why? It wasn't until new owners purchased the home in 1972 that this was discovered. The new owners hired a contractor to replace the roof, and the contractor discovered a sophisticated eavesdropping and telephone tapping system that covered every room in the house. The components were not commercially available in 1962, but were, in the words of a retired Justice Department official, "standard FBI issue".

~ What happened to the tapes made from this surveillance?

~ What happened to Marilyn's red diary, which reportedly contained intimate details of her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, and her dealings with Frank Sinatra? The book was present at the death scene, but vanished mysteriously from the coroner's office. It has never resurfaced.

~ Why are the neighbors so sure that they saw an ambulance arrive at 11pm, when the official report says the ambulance arrived at 2:30 am?

~ Why was the bedroom door locked from the outside, which Marilyn could not have done herself? Who locked that door?

~ Why did Jack Clemmons, the first policeman to arrive at the scene, find Murray, the housekeeper, washing Marilyn's sheets at 3:30 am?

~Why did his report state that rigor mortis had fully set in by the time he arrived?

~Why did his report describe the scene as a "homicide"?

~ Why did Marilyn's housekeeper and her doctor wait several hours after Marilyn was dead to notify police and summon an ambulance?

If the actress truly did commit suicide, she did not do so by swallowing pills, as the autopsy fully shows. Therefore, the official conclusion is disproved by the coroner's report. Suicide is not even a possibility, leaving only two solutions: Her death was an accident - or it was a murder.
Evidence tampering and deliberate lies by everyone from the US Attorney General to the housekeeper, along with the likelihood of government surveillance, seem to indicate that Monroe may have been killed to silence her.

In those pre-Clinton days, the Presidency was above all reproach - and a sex scandal would have had disastrous consequences. Hot-headed Bobby Kennedy was likely sent to Los Angeles to silence Monroe. Many investigators theorize she was killed by an injection.

Based on what evidence remains, we will never know what really happened the night Marilyn Monroe died, but it is safe to say that the suggestion that she killed herself is pretty much disproved, so if she did not kill herself then who did?

Ours is a truly weird and sometimes horrible world. Join us again next time, won’t you?

I’m Average Joe

Aleshenka the Alien

2006-04-10T13:56:00.000-04:00

“Research of the clothes alien Aleshenka (found in the Ural region) was wrapped in, revealed that this creature has nothing in common with human beings, it is an alien”, Moscow expert on UFOs Vadim Chernobrov said in interview to Chelyabinsk media. Feel like you just walked into the middle of a story? I do and mamybe we have because what we are going to cover today began back in 1996. Read on…

This sensation goes back to 1996 to the village of Kaolinovy near the provincial town of Kyshtym in the Chelyabinsk region of the former Soviet Union.

On August 13, 1996 pensioner Tamara Vasilievna Prosvirina went to the village cemetery. The old woman suffered from psychiatric disease, and her perception of the surrounding world was weird. She used to gather flowers from the graves and decorated her room with these flowers almost every day. In the evening the woman had supper and went to bed. Suddenly strange “voices” spoke to her inside her head. The voice requested Tamara Vasilievna to go to the cemetery again. She dressed, took her flashlight and went out.

Huge eyes were staring at her out of the closest grave mound. The old woman approached the grave and saw a strange creature about 25 centimeters {just over 1 foot} in height. This was not a human being.

Its tiny onion-shaped head looked like it was composed of five petals. The little creature had no ears, huge slanting catlike eyes that occupied the biggest part of its face. The creature could not talk, but it started whistling quietly to attract the lady’s attention.

The poorly clad old woman took the creature to her place. At home she started examining the alien. The body of Aleshenka (the diminutive name she gave to the creature) was plump and was swaying like jelly. The skin on the body was gray with dark spots in brown on the head. No hair, small holes instead of ears. A Small flat nose enabled the creature to breath.

The most striking feature of the alien were the dark-gray eyes with no eye-lids. The vertical pupils of the eyes were constantly narrowing and expanding, as if the creature were constantly looking at different things and its eyes were always changing focus. It possessed long fingers had small sharp claws. No genitals revealing creature’s sex were evident. The creature had no navel.

The woman could not figure out how to feed Aleshenka. Its mouth resembled a tiny hole and had no lips, but it could stretch itself widely. The alien had a complete set of teeth, but a too small lower jaw and a huge scarlet tongue which occupied almost all of the mouth cavity disturbed the chewing process. Tamara Vasilievna put a caramel candy into the creature’s mouth, and the alien started sucking the candy. After that she offer Aleshenka some milk and water, which she spoon fed the creature using a small a tea-spoon.

Moist sweat appeared on the alien’s body after eating. Aleshenka began to broadcast a sweet smell which soaked into clothes and furniture. Tamara Vasilieva wiped Aleshenka with a rag from time to time. The creature was lying down and did not move most of the time. From time to time it started moving and stretching its legs.

The next day all the villagers heard of the news; the woman was telling everybody that she got a child and his name was Aleshenka. At first many people thought the child was just a product of her dementia and therefore was visible only to Tamara Vasilievna. However, one day the old woman’s daughter-in-law (also named Tamara) came to her place. After sitting and talking in the kitchen for a while, the old lady said it was time to feed her child. Her daughter-in-law followed the lady into another room and saw the weird creature wrapped in swaddling cloth.

Both the daughter-in-law and her mother saw the creature, but they did not report to the police about it. They said that if Aleshenka had been a human child, they would report to the police, but that this was different altogether. But they figured that since the creature was not a human being, it must be an animal, and there is no reason to report anywhere about it. “Let it be Tamara Vasilievna’s pet. She will take care of it, and she will have something to do”, the women decided.

However, a neighbor reported about Tamara Vasilievna to psychiatrists, and one day an ambulance came and took the woman to the psychiatric hospital. Tamara Vasilievna tried to explain that she left a child in the house, but the doctors did not take her words seriously. The lady’s relatives were not aware of her being taken to hospital, and therefore there was nobody to feed the creature. Soon it died of thirst and hunger. After the alien’s death, its body started drying out and becoming mummified.

Only one person, Vladimir Nurdinov remembered about the creature. He used to come to Tamara Vasilievna’s place, and saw Aleshenka. After hearing that the lady was taken to hospital, the man came to her apartment to take Aleshenka to his house. He was too late, Aleshenka was dead. All he found was a dry mummy lying in the bed. Nurdinov took the mummy to his place. He did not know what to do with it. Soon the police came to the man’s apartment – he was suspected of stealing power cable from a Novogorny village. The policemen decided this was the mummy of a child and took it for expert examination to determine if a crime had been committed.

The doctors claimed that the mummified creature has a minimum of 20 features distinguishing it from a human being. So the medical experts rejected the idea that Aleshenka could have been a mutant child.

After taking the body from the experts, the police investigator in his own separate and unofficial investigation, started researching the version of the story that suggested that the creature was an extraterrestrial visitor – his bosses prohibited him from “doing such nonsense work ‘officially’ that is.”

The lead investigator decided to ask the UFO experts organization called “Star Academy UFO-Contact in Zolotov Method” for assistance. The Academy was 200 kilometers away, in the town of Kamensk-Uralsky of the Sverdlovsk region.

The organizations head, Galina Semenkova, took the mummified body to conduct their own astral examination. After that the investigator was no longer able to contact her. Repeated attempts only returned that the she “was out” or “went shopping” or “went for a walk” or “is away on a trip”.

Only recently has Galina Semenkova, while speaking at s seminar on UFOs in Tokyo, revealed what had happened to Aleshenka’s remains:

According to Semenkova, when she was carrying the mummy from Kyshtym to her town, a flying saucer appeared in the sky. Her vehicle engine stopped working and suddenly Aliens from the flying saucer demanded the return of the body of their dead fellow, and being in no position to argue Galina gave them the body immediately.

The investion of the little alien continued when a Japanese TV crew phoned Tamara Vasilievna’s relatives. The Japanese had heard about the alien creature and were working on a documentary about Aleshenka. They were extremely Interested in interviewing the lady the old woman but attempts to contact the government to get permission had not been fruitful and so they called with out any permission. The family of Tamara Vasilievna passed on word that just several days before tragedy struck. It was late at night on August 5, 1999 and Tamara Vasilievna somehow showed up on the highway. The poor old psychiatric hospital patient was absolutely naked, the only garment the woman was wearing were her green socks. Eye-witnesses say it looked like the woman was reacting to somebody calling to her. People wanted to take the woman off the highway, but were too late; two vehicles ran into her, she was thrown over 40 feet in the air and fell back onto the road where the impact must have caused her instant death.

In 1997 the announcement was posted on the Internet for the sale of the mummified remains of an extraterrestrial visitor found in Russia. One must ask, What is this? Is somebody selling a fake mummy of the well-known alien? Or perhaps it is the real remains being sold, if Galina Semenkova was lying in her account of what had happened and no aliens took the mummy back to their planet? Or perhaps both the statements are correct. Perhaps there are those out there trying to make a fast buck by selling Fake mummies and perhaps Galina Semenkova was lying in her statements (there is evidence to that effect). If she was lying it may just be that the mummy is under research in some Russian special services laboratory, or just destroyed because of careless treatment. Aleshenka’s remains may also be in the collection of some wealthy western UFO collector.

Aleshenka’s story is not over yet, many Japanese decided to sponsor erecting a monument to the alien. Ordinary Japanese donated tons of Yen for the monument after viewing the documentary “Traces of alien Aleshenka” which was produced by the Asahi TV company and aired on Japanese television. Boy this whole story is weird from beginning to end!! My biggest question is what happened to the clothes mentioned in the beginning of this report and has there been any further study of them?

I’m Average Joe

Convicted Nevada slayer says ghost made him kill

2006-04-08T14:37:00.000-04:00

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - A Nevada Supreme Court panel has voted 2-1 to reject an appeal from an inmate who claimed his murder conviction should be tossed because a ghost made him kill.

Justices ruled Wednesday that Samuel Marquez wasn't insane when he hit bartender Richard Adamicki over the head with a baseball bat in 2001, and that he should continue to serve the 100-year sentence he received for his first-degree murder conviction.

Adamicki never regained consciousness after the attack at a Las Vegas-area tavern, and died two months later.

Marquez stole the victim's wallet and $2,700 from a cash register. The incident was caught on videotape and a few hours later police arrested Marquez, who confessed to the killing.

During the trial, forensic psychologist Mark Chambers testified Marquez saw an apparition during the night of the beating and robbery. He said Marquez claimed he had seen the ghost of a dead woman many times since he was a child in El Salvador.

Chambers testified that Marquez feared the ghost, believing she was responsible for his sister's death and wanted to take him to the afterlife.

While he was in the bar, Marquez again saw the ghost and she demanded he take the money, according to Chambers. The psychologist added the fearful Marquez didn't know right from wrong at that point.

In the decision, Justices Mark Gibbons and Jim Hardesty ruled a lower court properly rejected defense arguments that an instruction should have been given on insanity.

Despite saying Marquez acted because of fear of a ghost, the two justices noted that Chambers also stated Marquez wasn't delusional. A delusional state is one of the conditions for a finding of legal insanity in Nevada.

Justice Bill Maupin dissented, saying a jury instruction on the legal definition of insanity should have been given.

Serial Killer - Tsutomu Miyazaki

2006-03-30T14:04:00.000-05:00

Japanese serial killer, Tsutomu Miyazaki was born August 21, 1962, he is also known as, The Little Girl Murderer, Dracula and The Otaku Murderer. In English, Otaku are a variety of geeks or nerds or overly obsessed fanboy/fangirl types focused on anime and manga.

While in Japanese the term otaku has negative connotations, in English the term is more flexible; some fans believe it has positive connotations, while other fans believe it has negative connotations. But back to our Serial Killer…

Tsutomu’s pre-mature birth left him with deformed hands, which were permanently gnarled and fused directly to the wrists, necessitating him to move his entire forearm in order to rotate the hand. Due to his deformity, he was ostracized in elementary school, and consequently kept to himself and began to read manga almost obsessively.

Although he was originally a star student, his grades in high school dropped dramatically. Instead of studying English and becoming a teacher as he originally intended, he attended a local junior college, studying to become a photo-technician.

Between 1988 and 1989, Miyazaki mutilated and killed four girls, ages four to seven; he then raped their corpses and ate portions of his third and fourth victims. The crimes — which, prior to Miyazaki's apprehension and trial were classified "The Little Girl Murders" — shocked Saitama Prefecture, which had a long-standing record of low occurrences of crimes against children.

During the day, Miyazaki was a mild-mannered, quiet, obedient employee — who randomly selected children to kill. He terrorized the families of his victims, sending them letters recalling in graphic, yet mechanical, detail what he had done to their children. To the family of victim Erika Namba, Miyazaki sent a morbid postcard assembled using words cut out of magazines, spelling out: "Erika. Cold. Cough. Throat. Rest. Death."

He allowed the corpse of his first victim, Mari Konno, to skeletonize in the hills near his home, then chopped off the hands and feet, which he kept in his closet, and which were recovered upon his arrest. He charred the remaining bones in his furnace, ground them into powder, and sent them to her family in a box, along with several of her teeth, photos of her clothes, and a postcard reading: "Mari. Cremated. Bones. Investigate. Prove."

In 1989, Miyazaki, while attempting to insert a zoom-lens into the vagina of a grade school-aged girl in a park near her home, was attacked by the girl's father. Miyazaki fled on foot, but returned to the park to retrieve his car, whereupon he was promptly arrested. A police search of his two-room bungalow turned up a collection of over six thousand pornographic anime and slasher videotapes in his apartment, along with videos and pictures of his victims. The centerpieces of his collection were the first five Guinea Pig films; The Guinea pig films were a series of 1980s Japanese horror films with extremely detailed special effects. They later became infamous when the actor Charlie Sheen mistook one for a snuff film and contacted the FBI to report it. They have since been reissued on DVD in the United States and in the Netherlands. Miyazaki used the second film in the series as a template for one of his killings, thus the films were catapaulted to a new level of infamy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Miyazaki's crimes fueled a moral panic against otaku and anime in Japan; Miyazaki, who retained a perpetually calm and collected demeanor during his trial, was indifferent to his apprehension. In 1989, he was convicted of what became known as "The Otaku Murders."

Following his son's conviction, Miyazaki's father, who had refused to provide his son money to pay for his legal defense, committed suicide.

Throughout the 1990s, Miyazaki remained incarcerated while Saitama Prefecture put him through a battery of psychiatric evaluations, ending with the 1997 conclusion by a team of psychiatrists from Tokyo University that Miyazaki, though suffering from multiple personality disorder and extreme schizophrenia, was still aware of the gravity and consequences of his crimes, and was therefore accountable for them.

Shortly thereafter, Miyazaki was sentenced to death by hanging.

He has remained on death row for many years, appealing to have his sentence reduced to life imprisonment. His life is essentially the same as when he committed his murders, spending his days reading manga and comic books and watching anime on a small television in his cell.

On January 17, 2006, the Supreme Court of Justice upheld the original death sentence. The date of his execution has not been decided yet.

In an interesting cultural shift from the time the murders were originally committed, the news reports of the court decisions upholding Miyazaki's sentence refer to him only as a child murderer, omitting all references to his hobbies. This can be seen as reflecting the changing attitudes in

Japan

towards otaku in general.

Andrei Chikatilo -- Russian Serial Killer

2006-03-28T14:01:00.000-05:00

Because you asked us to we are going to cover afew more serial killers just as we did a few months back. First on our list of maggots is a Russian killer of at least 52…

Andrei Romanovich Chikatilo (Андре́й Рома́нович Чикати́ло) (October 16, 1936–February 14, 1994) was a Soviet serial killer. Although at the time the Soviet government never admitted he existed. He was convicted of the murder of fifty-two women and children between 1978 and 1990.

Chikatilo was born in the Ukrainian village of Yablochnoye in 1936. His childhood was quite traumatic, particularly as the USSR was soon at war with Germany and also Stalin's plans for total and complete agricultural collectivisation caused a devastating famine. Chikatilo later heard rumours that he'd had an older brother who died in the famine and had been cannibalised by starving neighbors. Although it is not known if this story was true, there certainly were many documented cases of cannibalism during the famine. In World War II, Chikatilo witnessed some of the devastating and bloody effects of German bombing raids. Chikatilo had many fantasies of leading German captives into the woods and executing them, a fantasy that—although common of Soviet children at the time—had parallels with his murders.

Chikatilo's mother was a brutal woman. With his father at war, the young Andrei had to share a bed with his mother. He frequently wet the bed, for which he was badly beaten and humiliated. He did well at school but failed the entrance exam for Moscow State University. After finishing national service in 1960, he moved to Rodionovo-Nesvetayevsky and worked as a telephone engineer. Chikatilo's only sexual experience in adolescence by his own account was when he was 15, he leapt on a young girl and wrestled her to the ground, ejaculating as the girl struggled in his grip. It fostered in him a lifelong association between sex and violently overpowering someone.

He married in 1963, the marriage virtually arranged by Andrei's younger sister who set him up with one of her friends when she took pity on her brother's inability to obtain a girlfriend. Although he suffered from impotence, and had a barely existent sex-life, Chikatilo did father a son and daughter. In 1971, he completed a degree in Russian literature by a correspondence course and tried a career as a teacher in Novoshakhtinsk. He was a poor teacher, unable to command any respect from his pupils, but he remained in that profession, moving from school to school as complaints of indecent assaults dogged him. He eventually took a job as a clerk for a factory, and he used the many business trips around the Soviet Union to carry out his crimes.

In 1978, he moved to Shakhty and committed his first documented murder. On December 22, 1978, he lured a nine-year-old girl to an old shed and attempted to rape her. When the girl struggled, Chikatilo stabbed her to death. He ejaculated in the process of knifing the child and from then on he was only able to achieve sexual arousal and orgasm through stabbing and slashing women and children to death. Despite evidence linking Chikatilo to this first killing, a young man, Alexsandr Kravchenko, was arrested and later tried and executed for the crime. Chikatilo lost his teaching job in 1981 and became a clerk at a local firm.

He did not murder again until 1982, but in that year he killed seven times. He established a pattern of approaching runaways and young vagrants at bus or railway stations and enticing them to leave. A quick trip into a nearby forest was the scene for the victim's death. In 1983, he did not kill until June, but then he murdered four victims before September. The victims were all women and children. In the case of adult females, they were often prostitutes or homeless tramps who could be lured away with promises of alcohol or money. Chikatilo would usually attempt (consensual) intercourse with these victims, but would usually be unable to perform which would send him into a murderous fury, especially if the woman mocked his inability to achieve orgasm. This he would only do when he stabbed the victim to death. The child victims were of both genders, and Chikatilo would lure them away with his friendly, talkative manner and promising them treats, such as toys or candy. In the USSR at the time, reports of crimes like child rape and serial murder were often suppressed by the state-controlled media, as these crimes were regarded as only being common in "hedonistic capitalist nations" like the United States. Consequently, with little knowledge of the increasing body count, parents failed to warn their children to be wary of strangers. As news of the savage killings leaked out, during the 1980s, and even though there was little official information about the details, wild rumors spread amongst the communities in Ukraine, such as the idea that foreigners were killing Soviet boys in preparation for an invasion, and even talk of werewolves.

Six bodies (out of fourteen) had been uncovered. This brought a response from the oscow police. A team headed by Major Mikhail Fetisov was sent to Rostov to direct the investigation. Fetisov centred the investigations around Shakhty and assigned a specialist forensic analyst, Victor Burakov, to head the investigation in that area. The investigation concentrated on the mentally disturbed and known sexual criminals, slowly working through all that were known and eliminating them from the inquiry. A number of young men confessed to the murders, although they were usually mentally handicapped youths who had only admitted to the crimes under prolonged and often brutal interrogation. At least one suspect hanged himself in his cell while under arrest.

When boys began to make up a majority of the later victims, a frequent (and ineffective) ploy was to round up and interrogate homosexuals, the gay community being particularly clandestine in the USSR with homosexuality being illegal at the time. The police spread their search wider and wider. Over 150,000 people were interviewed and filed before this approach was abandoned. In 1984 another fifteen murders took place. The police took to additional patrols and sited plain-clothes men at many public transport stops.

Chikatilo was identified behaving suspiciously at a Rostov bus station. He was arrested and held. It was found he was under suspicion for other crimes, which gave the investigators the legal right to hold him indefinitely. Chikatilo's dubious background was uncovered but provided insufficient evidence to convict him of the murders. He was found guilty on other matters and sentenced to one year in prison. He was freed in December 1984 after serving three months.

It was later revealed that Chikatilo had been originally ruled out as a suspect in the murders because his blood group was tested as different from semen samples left by the killer. The forensic scientists later claimed that Chikatilo must be a unique individual whose blood group showed up as different when it was taken from a blood sample than when it was taken by a semen sample. No other scientists take this theory seriously and it is generally regarded that the samples were mixed up or the tests simply botched.

Chikatilo found new work in Novocherkassk and kept a low profile. He did not kill again until August 1985, when he murdered two women in separate incidents. He is not known to have killed again until May 1987 when, on a business trip to Revda in Ukraine, he killed a young boy. He killed again in Zaporozhye in July and in Leningrad in September.

The faltering police investigation was revived in mid-1985 when Issa Kostoyev was appointed to take over the case. The known murders around Rostov were carefully re-investigated and there was another round of questioning of known sexual criminals. In December 1985, the police renewed the patrolling of railway stations around Rostov. Chikatilo followed the investigation carefully, and for over two years he kept his desires under control. The police also took the step of consulting a psychiatrist, the first such consultation in a serial killer investigation in that country.

In 1988 Chikatilo resumed his killing, generally keeping his activities far from the Rostov area. He murdered a woman in Krasny-Sulin in April and went on to kill another eight people that year, including two victims in Shakhty. Again there was a long lapse before Chikatilo resumed killing, murdering seven boys and two women between January and November of 1990.

The discovery of one of the bodies near Leskhoz station led to increased police patrols. On November 6 Chikatilo killed and mutilated Sveta Korostik. He was stopped by police returning from the woodland crime but allowed to go. But the report of the suspicious character returned Chikatilo's name to the investigation. On November 20, 1990, after police further observed his suspicious behavior, he was arrested. Between November 30 and December 5, Chikatilo confessed to and described fifty-six murders. Three of the victims had been buried and could not be found or identified, so Chikatilo was not charged with these crimes. The number of crimes Chikatilo confessed to shocked the police, who had listed only 36 killings in their investigation. A number of victims had not been linked to others because they were murdered far from Chikatilo's other hunting grounds, while others were not linked because they were buried and not found until Chikatilo led the police to their shallow graves.

He went to trial on April 14, 1992. Despite his odd and disruptive behavior in court, where he was kept in a cage in the center of the courtroom, he was judged fit to stand trial. The trial ended in July and sentencing was postponed until October 15 when he was found guilty of 52 of the 53 murders and sentenced to death for each offence. Chikatilo defended himself by pointing to his childhood experiences of the notorious famine which took place in Ukraine in the 1930's.

He was executed by a shot in the back of the head on February 14, 1994. Check back again next time for more weirdness.

I'm Average Joe

Crashed Saucer At China/Nepal Border

2006-03-22T10:35:00.000-05:00

In Darbhanga district of Bihar that borders Nepal, tourists returning from Nepal are talking about a possible UFO crash in Nepal. The rumor is also rampant in Kathmandu, capital of Nepal and other Nepali cities. The crash site is in deep Himalayan border of Nepal and China.

According to sources, the crash site may be close to Mount Everest and is totally inaccessible from either side. The rumor world is speculating that the Chinese military is actively looking at the crash site.

It is also rumored that the Extra-terrestrials are not allowing any one to go close to the site.

Unusual activities and some tremors were felt all over the Himalayan regions from India-Nepal side. This was not the effect of the possible UFO crash.

UFO activities have gone up very heavily in recent days in that area. And no one knows why that is happening.

It is possible that the crash was nothing but a Chinese spacecraft. China has some secret military projects in that area.

The time of the year is so bad that no one can really go to the site and investigate. Everything is just frozen out there.

Nepal military is busy fighting the Maoists who are creating a lot of insurgency problems in that part of the world.

According to UFO scientists, it is possible that the underground UFO bases in the regions was damaged by the tremor last week and some strange aftershock is being felt since the large 9.0 Richter earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia causing the huge Tsunami.

Well, I have no comment on this one, take it, accept it or dismiss it is up to you.

I’ Average Joe

Extraterrestrial Space Probe Flies Past Earth

2006-03-21T11:28:00.000-05:00

“In late 1991, astronomers detected what may in fact be an extraterrestrial space probe in near-Earth space.” This is definitely something we need to take a closer look at…

First off we need to look at just who it is who makes such a startling statement? Is he some wild-eyed UFO believer type freako? Or maybe he is just your average renegade scientist wanting to get his 15 minutes of fame? The answer is a resounding No, not at all. His name is Steel, not Remington but rather Duncan Steel.
Who is this Mr. Steel, you wonder? Lets just take a quote from the jacket of his book, Rogue Asteroids and Doomsday Comets (Wiley, 1995): "Duncan Steel, Ph.D. is a research astronomer at the Anglo-Australian Observatory and a research fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia. A world renowned authority on the comet hazard, he has served on both the Detection Committee and the Intercept Committee created by NASA to assess the threat of comet and asteroid collisions and investigate technologies to avert such impacts." Not only that, but Steel is thought of as a "longtime skeptic" and "as someone who almost invariably has his facts right," according a reviewer in an Australian magazine (Colin Keay in The Skeptic, Vol 15, No.3, 1995).
So how did Steel come to his startling conclusion? Here's the scoop. On Nov. 6, 1991 Jim Scotti using the Spacewatch telescope at Kitt Peak in Arizona discovered a body which he initially described as a "fast moving asteroidal object," a month before its closest approach to the Earth. The object was classified as 1991 VG. Later, the object's heliocentric orbital elements suggested instead that "the object might be a returning spacecraft." As the approximately 30-foot object, now labeled 1991 VG, neared the Earth, astronomers at the European Southern Observatory tracked it and found strong, rapid brightness variations suggestive of reflections from a rotating spacecraft.
His curiosity piqued, Steel decided to investigate the different probabilities for the nature of this object, according to his account "SETA and 1991 VG," published in The Observatory (Vol. 115, pp. 78-83, 1995). "SETA," by the way, stands for "Search for Extra-Terrestrial Artifacts" within our Solar System. Steel first wondered whether the object could be a returning spacecraft, given those brightness variations and its very Earth-like orbit. But he found that none of the handful of man-made rocket bodies left in heliocentric orbits during the space age have purely gravitational orbits returning them to the Earth at that time. Besides, if 1991 VG was a man-made rocket body, then its return to our vicinity and its accidental detection by Spacewatch was, Steel calculated, a very unlikely event, on the order of one in 100,000 per year.
So could it be a natural body, Steel then asked himself? One factor that strongly argued against this interpretation was the light variation the object exhibited, which resembled those of rotating artificial satellite trails seen in wide field astronomical photographs. The second factor is that the object's pre-encounter orbit of 1991 would have made it unstable in close approaches to the Earth on a time scale measured in millennia. This means, that if it is an asteroid, it would have recently arrived in that orbit, which is, Steel states, very unlikely.
Therefore, concludes Steel, we have to seriously consider the possibility that this object has "an alien genesis." Given our meager surveillance of near-Earth objects, there is little chance that objects of this kind would have been spotted in the past. There is nothing here, in other words, that would contradict the alien probe hypothesis, says Steel.
Steel's probability analysis does not end here. He goes on to tackle an issue that not doubt made his colleagues pale. Was 1991 VG under control or making a random passage by the Earth, he asks? Since only "about one in 50 objects passing randomly within 0.022 AU have perigee heights as low as 0.0031 AU," Steel thinks there is a "possibility that it was a singular alien space probe on a controlled reconnaissance mission."
Steel ends his surprising analysis on a cautious note, however. His personal bias, he states, is that 1991 VG is really a man-made artificial object. But if it was, he concludes, then it's observation was really an incredible fluke. So much so, in fact, that scientists, he says, should "consider the possibility of some other origin for it."

All in all, it's quite an amazing piece of work. Steel is not the kind of scientist who pulls his punches. In his new book about the threat that asteroids and comets pose to life on Earth, he speculates that Stonehenge was originally erected during a period of intense celestial bombardment--some perhaps of Tunguska-like force--about 5,000 years ago. Stonehenge's purpose, he ventures, was "to monitor meteor rates in order to predict when storms were due." Steel doesn't expect this hypothesis to be warmly welcomed by anthropologists and antiquarians. Nor will SETI and SETA astronomers take kindly to the notion that an alien probe may have performed a reconnaissance mission of Earth in 1991. Of course, human-built space probes have done just that in our solar system for the past quarter century. Why couldn't someone out there be taking a peek at us? WEIRD!

I’m Average Joe

Are the Ice Sheets really melting away?

2006-03-20T15:10:00.000-05:00

We have all heard the cries of global warming. We have all heard that green house gasses are causing the Earth’s temperature to rise and this is in turn melting the polar ice caps and that this could be devastating. We have all heard it but is it true? Lets take a closer look…

“Polar ice sheets show net loss,” says the headline. However, if you take timeto read the full article, you may come away with a totally different conclusion.
According to an article published on BBC online (9 Mar 06), melting glaciers areadding 20 billion tons of water to the oceans each year. The discovery came after a team headed by Dr H. Jay Zwally of NASA analyzed satellite and aircraft data. “The survey documents extensive thinning of the West Antarctic ice shelves,” the article says, “but a thickening in the East of the continent, though not by as much as some other studies have shown.”

NOTE: What the article fails to mention is that West Antarctica is only one tenth the size of East Antarctica . In other words, the ice is growing thicker across 90% of Antarctica .

The study also shows, the article continues, that the interior of Greenland is gaining mass due to increased snowfall, but the edges are getting thinner. NOTE: Read that again. The interior of the Greenland Ice Sheet is gainingmass, not losing mass.

But rising temperatures could have the opposite effect at the edges of bothlandmasses, the story says, causing rates of melting to increase.

NOTE: It doesn’t say that it is having the opposite effect, just that it could. That is a Big – Big difference.

"A race is going on in Greenland between these competing forces of snowbuild-up in the interior and ice loss on the edges," explained Dr Zwally.
"But we don't know how long they will be approximately in balance with eachother, or if that balance has already tipped in favor of the recently accelerating outflow from glaciers."

NOTE: "We don’t know,” says Zwally. Come on, that is hardly a definitive statement.

"The study indicates that the contribution of the ice sheets to sea-level rise during the decade studied was much smaller than expected,” said Zwally, “just two percent of the recent increase of nearly three millimeters a year."

NOTE: Dr Zwally confirms that sea levels are rising by less than three millimeters per year. That's about 1/10th of an inch. At that rate, it would take 100 years for sea levels to rise 10 inches. But remember, Zwally says that only two percent of that increase comes from melting glaciers. (Apparently 20 billion tons is not all that much when you look at the size of the world’s oceans.) According to simple calculations, two percent of 10 inches works out to be two inches of sea level rise every one thousand years. I don’t think I’ll stay awake nights worrying about this. Actually, considering that sea levels have risen some 370 feet (121 meters) since the end of the last ice age ( 3.7 feet per 100 years), it would appear that the trend is reversing. In fact, with the ice build-up in East Antarctica, I think sea levels are already beginning to fall. And I’m not alone in this. A group of scientists under the leadership of Professor Nils Axel Morner has found that sea levels in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean have been falling for the past 30 years.

Well there you have it. I think that the Earth is just going thru a normal cycle and nothing more. I think that the planet is far better to adapt to what we mere humans can do to it that we give it credit for. But it is still weird and part of our weird world that’s for sure!

I’m Average Joe

The Leprechaun Sighting of Mobile Alabama

2006-03-16T11:01:00.000-05:00

A dead end street in Mobile, Alabama has become very busy the last couple of days because of people flocking to look at a tree, and the little mythical figure that some say they have seen sitting there. Let’s take a closer look at Leprechauns…

In Irish mythology, a leprechaun (Modern Irish: leipreachán) is a type of male elf said to inhabit the island of Ireland. They are a class of "faerie folk" associated in Irish mythology and folklore with the Tuatha Dé Danann and other quasi-historical races said to have inhabited Ireland before the arrival of the Celts.
Leprechauns and other creatures of Irish mythology are often associated with "faerie forts" or "faerie rings" — often the sites of ancient (Celtic or pre-Celtic) earthworks.
The name leprechaun may have derived from the Irish leath bhrogan (a shoemaker), although its origins may lie in luacharma'n (Irish for pygmy). These apparently aged, diminutive men are frequently to be found in an intoxicated state, caused by some home-brewed “poteen”.
Leprechauns have also become self-appointed guardians of ancient treasure (left by the Danes when they marauded through Ireland), burying it in crocks or pots. This may be one reason why leprechauns tend to avoid contact with humans whom they regard as foolish, flighty and greedy creatures. One interesting fact is that even when the creatures are standing in front of a group of people not everyone will be able to see them. But while anyone keeps his eye fixed upon them, they cannot escape, but the moment the eye is withdrawn they may vanish without a trace.
The leprechaun 'family' appears split into two distinct groups - leprechaun and cluricaun. Cluricauns may steal or borrow almost anything, creating mayhem in houses during the hours of darkness, raiding wine cellars and larders. They will also harness sheep, goats, dogs and even domestic fowl and ride them throughout the country at night.
In Mobile Alabama there is a street called Lecren Street, which lies off of Bayshore Avenue. Lately crowds start gathering around sunset. As you approach You hear many people talking, excitedly and all at the same time.
One said, "It's sitting ,uh, its sitting right up there, its right there. It's a face, a face, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the frowning mouth."
Another says, "A leprechaun, it looked like, last night it looked just like a little leprecaun. Its still up there."
The people who see the "leprechaun" say you can see it better at night. And that's when the crowds really start coming out. One bystander says, "Now step back so you all can see it. If you just look right there in the middle you see it, right there, you see it, do you see it? Y'all see it?"
Another person says, "Looks like he's smiling right now."
Still another says, "I wanna see it. If its here, I wanna see it. When's it supposed to pop up?"
Ricardo Thomas lives across the street from the tree. He says, "Actually, my brother came in from Atlanta last Sunday night and we were standing outside having a beer, just standing around, and he said, 'you're not going to believe this, but it looks like a man is up in that tree."
The crowds got so heavy, there were traffic jams. Another person said, "I thought he tipped his hat."
Describing the crowds, Thomas said, "Looked like Mardi Gras. All we need is some floats."
According to Irish folklore, if a leprechaun is caught by a mortal, the leprechaun will promise great wealth if he's allowed to go free. It is said that he carries two leather pouches on him at all times. In one there is a silver shilling, a magical coin that returns to the purse each time it is paid out. In the other he carries a gold coin which he uses to try and bribe his way out of difficult situations. This coin usually turns to leaves or ashes once the leprechaun has parted with it.

Now, some people say they've seen the Mobile Leprechaun and some people say they haven't, but the one thing that is certain is that nobody's found a pot of gold -- yet, or if they have they are not talking about it!
So I guess it’s just another snapshot of a weird moment from our weird world!

I’m Average Joe

Crop Circles

2006-03-15T15:35:00.000-05:00

Everyone has heard of crop circles but what are they? The most striking features of these depressions in the crop are the neat swirling and flattening of the crop, and the sharp cut-off point between the flattened crop and the standing crop. Not only have these events appeared in arable crops but in fields of potatoes and sugar cane, also in heather, sunflowers, rice paddies, snow, ice and sand. So it seems these weird things are here to stay! Perhaps we should take a closer look at some of the most common questions asked about these mysterious agroglyphs…

Are they a recent phenomenon?
Despite what network TV News programs report, the answer is No. There are reports going back to 800 AD and the famous woodcut depicting the `Mowing Devil` dated 1687 tells the story of a Hertfordshire farmer who had a field of oats. When they were ready to be reaped he approached a mower who clearly charged such an exorbitant price that the farmer was heard to say that he `would rather the Devil took his oats` and with that he stomped away. We are told that during the night strange sounds were heard and strange lights were seen (this is particularly relevant as it coincides with the numerous reports of `luminosities` and reports of animals being disturbed by noises on the nights formations appear), and the following morning when the farmer went into his field, he found part of the crop lying in round circles. He was very frightened and took to his heels and fled.
Clearly it was considered such a strange and unusual happening that it was recorded and that record has been passed down to us through the ages.
In more recent times I have come across numerous cases of people still living who played in crop circles as children in the 1920's and 1930's.
The circles were often looked upon with suspicion by farmers who either feared that they might not get the full price for their crop if the grain merchants heard about it or in other cases they were thought to appear only `when bad times were about`. To-day many farmers are concerned by the damage inflicted by thoughtless visitors who instead of walking down the tramlines, march straight across the field.

Could these events have been with us forever?
The simple answer seems to be yes. Our ancestors some 2/3000 years BC lived very close to nature and understood the sequential fall of the seasons and its implications. If anything strange or unusual had happened would they not also have recorded it, not only for their own survival but also for the survival of future generations? How would they have done this? They would have used whatever means or tools they had to hand such as stones or wood. Is it not possible that the complex stone structures such as Stonehenge could have been constructed as markers of commemoration?
Indeed not only are there complex stone structures all over the world, not just in Great Britain alone, nor is this phenomenon based in the British Isles alone; it is now a universal occurrence.

How widespread is this phenomenon?
It is not unusual to see these things in every corner of our wide, weird world. There are eye witness reports of crop formations from over 40 different countries including Russia, Japan, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Norway, Finland, South Africa and Israel. It is a worldwide enigma with Britain playing the leading role.

How many have been recorded?
Since serious records began in the late 1970's, it is estimated that between 4/5000 have been noted. However many escape notice as farmers are reluctant to report them.
Over the years not only have the numbers increased but also the complexity. Scholars of the arcane liken the shapes to Celtic, astrological and astronomical symbols, whilst others see pure examples of medical, musical, engineering or biological forms. Each year has produced its own masterpieces.
There is no doubt the mathematical and geometric precision is huge and awesome. The shapes have progressed from five, six and sevenfold geometry to elevenfold in 2000 and thirteenfold in 2001; we have now moved from elementary to university standard math. Latterly the completely unambiguous "Face" and the "Arecibo message" formations at Chilbolton, Hampshire were a totally new departure, having no mathematical basis and the images depicted in standing instead of fallen crop.

How are they made?
Are they miracles or works of the Devil? Are they all man made or is there an unknown intelligence working behind the scenes? Could they be made by atmospheric conditions such as plasma vortices or could the spinning blades of hovering helicopters be held responsible? Could they be the result of whirling dervishes, rutting hedgehogs or imprints left by UFO's?
The fact that these forms simultaneously represent perfect aspects of many disciplines could lend credence to the participation of an external intelligence. Alternatively could they be manifestations of our own subconscious?

Where is research leading us?
Whereas we have no definitive answer to this enigma as yet, there is increasing scientific evidence that when the `force` hits the target there is a huge electrical discharge measuring hundreds of thousands of volts per meter lasting a nanosecond, which in the case of crops, softens the plants at the base allowing them to fall: this `force` then traveling upwards breaks down the molecular structure inside the stems. When the `force` is too great it escapes through expulsion cavities in the nodes along the stems. The effect is similar to a baked potato exploding in a microwave oven when the energy is excessive.
It has also been found repeatedly that the seeds collected from inside a formation germinate faster and need less water than those gathered from outside the formation.
From some findings to date it would appear that research should be based in the infrared, microwave area of the electromagnetic spectrum and the latest results indicate that the endocrine system and the pineal gland are being affected whilst tests on brain activity have consistently shown Alpha blocking whilst inside the formations. More research is needed to evaluate the link between these subtle energies and living systems. Close to 600 personal reports have been amassed from people describing the effects of electromagnetic fields on living matter such humans, plants and animals. Furthermore, the malfunction of electrical and mechanical instruments, after visiting crop formations or being in their vicinity.

In the end the real questions is do we know anymore about these things then we did at the beginning of this posting? The answer here is up to each of you to find for yourselves. Suffice it to say that crop circles are indeed another bit of proof pointing toward ours being a weird, weird world. it is evident that there is a progression taking us into advanced areas of physics, mathematics, and medicine. These majestic shapes touch the heart as well as the mind as they lead us into new realms of mystery, along paths of fresh understanding, engrossing and delighting us.
That the crop circles have acted a catalyst in bringing together people of all disciplines, races and creeds, could be deemed testament enough of their purpose. In this alone they have brought happiness to many.
Not everything can be explained within the existing tried and tested laws and parameters of science. As Einstein so aptly puts it “There comes a time when the mind touches a higher plane of knowledge but can never prove how it got there”.

I’m Average Joe

The Mysterious Marfa Lights

2006-03-14T15:12:00.000-05:00

It has been said that storytelling in Texas is really nothing more than one tall tale after another with each participant trying to out-best the other. While this may be true for the majority of the State, it is not true for the citizens of the tiny town of Marfa. They know their tall tale cannot be outdone. Their mysterious night orbs have been investigated by so many reputable authorities and written into so many scientific journals that they are guaranteed their own place in history. Let’s take a closer look at this interesting bit of weirdness…

Along the Rio Bravo del Norte, which Americans call the Rio Grande, near the Big Bend in the river, lies the crown jewels of the Southern Rockies. The majestic Chisos, or "Ghost Spirit" Mountains, are famous as the backdrop of the Big Bend National Park. To the northwest about one hundred miles, in another part of the mountain chain at the gateway of the Park, is the quiet little town of Marfa...home of the infamous "Marfa Lights," lights which have become the longest running, hardest to explain mystery in the history of the Lone Star State.
No one knows the exact sequence of events for the lights. That part of Texas has such a unique history that the lights could have been there since the beginning of Time, and probably were. But it is also just as possible that they winked into existence in the past couple of centuries or so. There is really no way of knowing, as Marfa lies on the high desert, or caprock escarpment, of the Trans-Pecos area of the Tex-Mex border, a situation which contributes to spectacular viewing of the night time sky all by itself. The Southern Rocky Mountains form the backbone of this area, and the tiny town is the second highest in the state---the highest is Fort Davis---with an elevation of 4,688 feet. Like all high deserts, Marfa’s air is crystal clear and incredibly clean. It is also unbearably hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter, a weather phenomena which helps build legends. Folks around Marfa claim that on moonless nights, the stars are so close that one can pluck them from the heavens and use them as torch lights.
Each cluster of peaks in this area bears its own name. Within the Big Bend National Park, there are the Chisos and Dead Horse Mountains, also called the Sierra Del Carmen. Outside the Park to the north, the range becomes the Christmas and Rosillos Mountains. To the west they are the Chinatis. They are all part of the same system, a system known as the Chihuahuan Desert, which teems with distinctive plant and animal wildlife unique only to itself. Yet for all its majesty, mystery, and haunting beauty, it is the most remote and sparsely populated region in Texas. More legends are associated with this country than anywhere else in the State.
Marfa is the county seat of sprawling Presidio County, but it was not always that way. Back in 1850, when the County was first created by combining a Land District with a chunk of land from Bexar County, Marfa did not exist. In fact, only one or two small pockets of adobe buildings scattered along the Rio Grande constituted the only real towns for miles in any direction. Since the newly created county became the largest in Texas, it had to contend with government from neighboring El Paso County, which had all the population.
All that changed in 1854 with the United States and Mexican Boundary Survey, which established the International Boundary at the Rio Grande. That year, the U. S. Army built Fort Davis to protect the supply trains freighting between San Antonio and El Paso from the marauding Comanche and Apache Indians. It soon grew into the first real town in the whole County, and in 1875, because of its military and commercial connections, it became Presidio County’s official county seat.
Six years later, Marfa sprang into existence as a water stop on the old Southern Pacific Railroad line between San Antonio and El Paso. Legend says that it was named after an exotic Russian heroine in the dime novel a railroad magnate’s wife was reading as they passed through the area. Within two years, it had a population of about two hundred people---and six times as many cattle, horses, and sheep.
By the mid-1880’s, the Indian Wars were winding down, and folks became suspicious that the military would abandon Fort Davis, which eventually did happen in 1891. They held an election in 1885 to move the county seat from Fort Davis, tucked away in the Davis Mountains, to the new town of Marfa, out on the prairie, some twenty-five miles south, only many of the residents of Presidio County cried fraud. They believed Alpine, forty miles east of Marfa, had just as much right to be the new county seat. The civilian population of Fort Davis was not very pleased with the election decision, either.
Back then, when most Texans were still wild and untamed, land feuds usually culminated in some kind of war. The county seat argument flared for two years---until the Alpine hierarchy snatched a huge chunk out of Presidio County for themselves. They called their new County, Brewster. A year later, Fort Davis mimicked Alpine and became the county seat of Jeff Davis County. The once giant, sparsely populated Presidio County thus became the fourth largest county by area---and possibly the smallest by population. Even today, it has just a little more than 6,500 residents. Marfa, the largest city in the County, boasts a whopping population of 2,500.
No one knows for sure just when the legendary lights were first seen flickering in the area. As early as 1840, wagon trains on the Chihuahua Trail reported seeing unexplained lights along the flats. But no one ever dared to investigate. The Trail ran eight hundred miles over the roughest country in North America, beginning at Ojinaga, Mexico, and culminating at Indianola on the Texas Gulf Coast. Apache Indians were everywhere, and to stray off the Trail meant flirting with death. There may be even older accounts still hidden in Mexican archives.
The first recorded Texan history occurred in 1883, when Robert Ellison off-loaded his cattle in Alpine and drove them west through the Paisano Pass toward his ranch forty miles away near Marfa. Camped at the base of the Pass, at a place now known as Mitchell Flats, he saw strange lights in the distance. He was looking southwest toward the Chinati Mountains, and he and his fellow cowhands thought they were looking at the flickering flames of Apache campfires. The lights appeared to be a few miles away and hovered just above the ground.
The unexpected lights alarmed the cowboys, who thought the Apaches were on the move, and they quickly doused their own campfires. But they determined to investigate the area in the daylight. After spending an uncomfortable night huddled under blankets for warmth on the cold desert floor, dawn found them on horseback, combing the area for any signs of an Indian encampment. They found none.
All day, the men searched along the base of the Chinati Mountains and the mesa between their camp and where the lights had been. They found no evidence that Indians had been anywhere in the area. No tracks, no doused campfires, no nothing. But the next night and the next after that, they again saw the strange lights. Cowboys kept seeing the lights night after night, week after week, and year after year. All attempts at identifying them went fruitless. Full of superstition, the cowboys finally decided the lights were not man-made and began calling them "ghost lights."
The lights really do defy all attempts at explanation. Attempts to locate their source always fail because they usually vanish when anyone tries to approach them. People hike, ride horseback, drive jeeps, and even fly helicopters and airplanes to follow the lights. Some have followed them as far as thirty-five miles. The lights always win. Searchers have never found campfires, buildings, tire tracks, footprints, or any other evidence that could explain the lights’ sources. Some people even claim that the lights would reappear, after they had abandoned the search and were miles away looking back over their shoulders.
The lights can be seen in the southwest, across the Mitchell Flats near Chinati Mountain, from an official viewing point on Highway 90 between Alpine and Marfa. This viewing point was erected at the request of area ranchers, who became tired of curiosity seekers disturbing their cattle, and they had a right to complain. Just about every night, right before dusk, the parking lot fills up with spectators equipped with everything from binoculars, cameras, and camcorders to high-powered telescopes. And they are seldom disappointed. As the sun sets, the lights appear, coming in all sorts of sizes, which climb in the sky, then merge, split, or float back down. They change color, appearing green, yellow, blue, and sometimes orange. One minute they will be bright, then fade and disappear. They have even been reported between Paso Lajitas and San Carlos, Mexico, and the Federales, who patrol the road for smugglers, have been fooled into spotting what they thought were approaching headlights, only to have no vehicle ever appear.
One long-time resident of the area, Hallie Stillwell, reported she first saw the phenomenon when she was eighteen-years-old in 1916. Her home was in Alpine, but she taught school in Presidio. That small town of sun-baked adobe buildings squats in the shade of giant cottonwood trees lying along the Rio Grande about twenty miles south of Marfa. What was current events to Hallie turned out to be old stuff to the residents of Presidio. The town is more than three hundred years old, having been founded along with Ojinaga across the river in Mexico by the Spanish in the 1600’s. Everyone knew of the lights. They had seen them in the winter, as well as the other seasons of the year, and nearly every night. The lights always appeared to be moving erratically around the Flats, winking and twinkling like fireflies in the night. This is one reason why most believers rule out car headlights as the cause. For one thing, there were not many cars in 1916 and none in the 1880’s, when the first official recording was made.
Describing Marfa’s mysterious lights is all but impossible. They appear as distant bright lights on the Mitchell Flats and are distinguishable from ranch lights and automobile headlights on nearby Highway 67, between Marfa and Presidio, by their aberrant movements and behavior. They appear and disappear, veering and cavorting suddenly in odd directions. One moment there might be one, and just as suddenly, it might split into two or three or more, dividing and merging at whim. They hover in mid-air and sometimes flicker like balls of fire. They might shoot straight up into the sky, or race madly to the left and right. The color is predominately greenish-yellow, but they also are white and shades of pastel. "I do not know how anyone could mistake them for car lights," reported one eyewitness in 1984.
The only thing certain about the Marfa Lights is that nothing is certain. As the town grew, the locals became accustomed to seeing the strange lights flickering in the distance and ignored them, but newcomers to the area remained intrigued. During the period of Pancho Villa, and also later in World War I, Army observers saw the lights and immediately jumped to the conclusion that they were some sort of spotlights set up to guide an invasion force into the United States from the south. The Army’s recorded observations brought the lights to the attention of people outside the immediate area, but not enough to garner any real public interest. The legend just continued as "ghost lights."
It was 1943 when the mysterious lights were given a real boost in publicity. That year, the Army established a pilot training base in Marfa. Fritz Kahl, an airman at the base, who later stayed to run the Marfa airport, reported that when the airmen saw the lights for the first time, there was absolutely no vehicular traffic at night. In fact, fuel was rationed, and lights themselves were a phenomenon because there were no lights of any kind, not even on the local ranches. Kahl described seeing something that was totally foreign to anything in and around the air base. He said finding the lights’ origins was like trying to catch a rainbow. When officials inquired of the phenomenon with the area residents, the locals simply said, "Yeah, we got ghost lights. So what?"
Over the years, explanations for the mysterious lights have ranged from ball lightning to St. Elmo’s fire to dead Indians, ghosts, tricks, static electricity, combustible dust, bat guano, solar activity, electromagnetic energy, volcanic activity, biological luminescence, and UFO’s. There’s even the glowing jackrabbit explanation. Under that theory, the jackrabbits race across the desert with a coating of phosphorescent dust or glow worms clinging to their hides. In the absence of a more definitive explanation, legend and folklore have been known to sprout like tumbleweeds.
Fortunately, several of these theories can be discounted because they don’t apply to the West Texas region. For instance, while jackrabbits are abundant, phosphorous is not, and volcanic activity in the area ceased about 30 million years ago. Also, although jackrabbits are known for their speed, they are not known to fly or outrun cars, and both pilots and motorists have reported being chased by the lights.
Still, the locals are convinced that there is more to the Marfa Lights than first meets the eye. Native superstition seems to confirm it. The Indians saw the lights long before any white man did. Their legends tell of the Great Spirit, who made the mountains in the area by throwing all the jumbled rocks left over from the creation of the stars, the birds and fishes, and the earth itself, into a huge pile in the middle of the leftover wasteland. The Devil then promptly claimed the rock pile and wasteland and turned it into hell, adding things that bite, sting, or prick. When anyone died in that hell, the lights became the spirits of the dead ones, who were thwarted in real life and forced to wander the desolate world in search of kith and kin. The locals who like this explanation also say that ‘it is a hell of a place that the Devil has for hell.’
Other Native stories tell of the phosphorescent souls of brave warriors, betrayed by treachery or killed in battle, and doomed to roam the lunar-like landscape in search of justice or revenge. This has the classical advantage of perpetuating myth into legend. Still another ancient Indian tale came from the journal of O.W. Williams, grandfather of former Texas governor Clayton Williams. According to the elder Williams, the lights are the ghosts of the Apache war chief, Alsate.
Williams, who was a surveyor in Terlingua and other parts of the Big Bend in the 1880’s, worked with a mostly Mexican crew from San Carlos, Mexico, located across the Rio Grande from the ghost town of Lajitas, Texas. One member of the surveying crew, Natividad Lujan, always told stories around the campfires, and Williams patiently recorded them in his journal. One morning, Williams called attention to the beautiful sunrise. Lujan promptly called it "the great spirit of Alsate" and regaled his rapt listeners with the story of the last Apache leader in the Big Bend. It seems that in the 1850’s and 1860’s, the Kiowas, Comanches, and Apaches maintained friendly relations with the townsfolk of San Carlos and Presidio, while at the same time raiding back and forth across the border into Mexico. Alsate, like most Apaches, grew up believing this way of life to be normal. He was of the Mescalero Apaches, also known in the Big Bend area as the Chinati or Rio Grande Apaches.
As Alsate grew into manhood, he became a great warrior and leader of his people. But, his depredations into Mexico made him hotly sought after by the Mexican Rurales. He and his tribe were finally caught and taken to Mexico City to stand trial. Throughout the trial, and no doubt also through the help of the earnest plea-bargaining from a close relative, he managed to talk himself free. He then led his tribe back to the Big Bend country, where he once again took up his thieving ways. He was caught again, only this time, he was taken to Presidio and executed. His tribe was taken into Mexico and scattered into slavery, by one’s and two’s, and the whole tribe was thus destroyed.
After a time, a sinister rumor began to creep across the old frontier of the Chisos Mountains and the Chinatis. Ranchers and cowboys talked of seeing the ghost of Alsate. It came in the form of flickering lights, and was seen in the old haunts of the Chinati Apaches. One man saw it rolling up a rocky slope, another saw it stationary on a promontory of the Rio Grande. It appeared often in the Chinati Mountains and could be seen as far south as the Chisos. The rumor finally became part of the folklore of the area---that the "lights that some people see" is the spirit of the dead Alsate.
Although mysterious lights can be seen all along the mountain range from the Chinatis to the Chisos, they are most constantly seen on the high desert plateau of Marfa. This has prompted many serious searches for the lights’ source. The first such attempt appears to have been made by Walter T. Harris just before the turn of the century. He was an employee of the railroad, and with the help of several other employees, he used surveyor’s methods of triangulation to plot the exact location of the night beacons. By his calculations, the lights were behind the Chinatis, "deep in Mexico, and impossible to be seen from the spot where we had taken our readings!"
An unscientific method was tried in the 1980’s by Dallas journalist, Kirby Warnock. Warnock’s family had settled in the Trans-Pecos region just north of Big Bend country more than one hundred years ago, and he first saw the lights in 1963, when he was eleven-years-old and his brother was eight. He and his brother decided that the reason no one ever got close to the lights was because they used motor vehicles, such as airplanes, jeeps, and cars. The two men thought that if they headed out on foot across the desert, they just might be able to sneak up on the lights.
One summer, they assembled their gear and a camera, and at dusk, started walking. They tried for four hours to get close to the lights, but it was like walking up to a mirage. The more they walked, the further the lights moved away. Warnock reported that he thought the lights were "trying to frustrate and thwart us. It was like they knew what we were doing and were teasing us by staying just a little ahead of us." It is a fact that distances are deceiving in the desert. The Warnocks could not tell if they were looking at a light as big as a tire or one as big as a cantaloupe. They just could not get close enough to get a good idea of how big the lights actually were.
Local lore also has a way of turning into local legend. Supposedly, during World War II, pilots training at the old air base dropped sacks of flour to mark the lights’ location. It is a story that has been told so many times and in so many variations, that it long ago achieved the semblance of fact. But, Fritz Kahl disclaims it. He has been either instructing at or running the airport for the past forty years. If someone had flown out and dropped flour sacks, he would have known about it.
It was in March 1973 that the legendary lights got a big boost of publicity. Two visiting geologists appeared in the area to assess the likelihood of uranium deposits for a big corporation. While parked in their car on the Flats, they were startled by the sudden appearance of two similar balls of light. The lights were about one-half the size of a basketball, and they darted behind some bushes and in front of others, always hovering a few hundred feet away before they blinked out. Coming from the scientific community as it did, all sorts of people sat up and took notice. Theories begin to multiply tenfold.
It is a known fact that triboluminescence is light resulting from friction at the surface of certain crystalline materials, such as quartz, and quartz is abundant in the area. Under pressure, it creates an electric current called piezoelectricity. The current is capable of ionizing the air into visible luminosities. Piezoelectricity also might ignite gases escaping from sedimentary rock along fractures lines. The gas explanation is reinforced by the history of the Cienaga Mountains. Cienaga is Spanish for "marsh" or "swamp." In the past, the area was wetter and may have produced natural gas. Gas has been found in the Casa Piedra area, south of Marfa, near the Cienaga Mountains. One pilot even reported a patch of phosphorescence the size of a football field, as he flew over the Mitchell Flats at night, and phosphorescent gases can produce luminescence without ignition. So, scientists argue, with the severe heating and cooling of the Earth’s surface in the area, as well as seismic activity, might not there be all sorts of friction along the fault lines?
Locals really do laugh about all the scientific theories that crop up, especially since the lights appear to have minds of their own and do all sorts of crazy things which defy explanation. For instance, believers argue, cannot science be described in terms of either black or white…either it is or it isn’t? How then does science explain all the shades of gray that the locals experience? There is absolutely nothing cut and dried about the lights. Some of the bizarre stories involve lights chasing or scorching cars, jeeps, and trucks. Some claim cars melt and their occupants disappear, go into shock, or turn into babbling idiots who are put away in sanitariums. There is even the tale that the lights are a government laser weapon project that went awry. Several years ago, the operator of a Marfa gas station had to make a delivery to Presidio late at night. It was close to midnight, as he drove through the Chinatis. "Suddenly there was this big blue ball of light a few feet off the road right in front of me," Hector Escobedo said. "I slammed on my brakes, but it did not move. I decided to keep driving, but it was so bright, I had to shade my eyes to see the road." The light stayed right in front of him for several miles, miles where the highway never once formed a straight line, as it twisted and turned around the rocks and peaks of the mountain pass. As suddenly as it came, it disappeared. "I was never so scared in my life. I do not drive through there at night anymore."
The case file contains thousands of reports from ordinary citizens just like Hector, who have seen the legendary lights. Even celebrities have gotten into the spirit. In 1955, when film crews were in Marfa making the movie Giant, which starred Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, and Rock Hudson, James Dean mounted a small telescope on a fence post to better spy on the lights, should they suddenly pop up.
Because the phenomena is so well-recorded and remains yet unsolved, there have been many serious investigations by individuals and small groups attempting to explain the lights. One of the best known and recorded came in March 1975. Don Witt, then a physics professor at Sul Ross University in Alpine, coordinated a monumental effort to locate the lights’ source. Using the Sul Ross Society of Physics Students, the Big Bend Outdoor Club comprised of community members, and local pilots, short-wave radio amateurs, and a few outside professionals, Witt’s group was positively unable to form any sort of solid conclusion. They did say, however, that sometimes the lights that people claimed were "Marfa Lights," were really artificial lights from area ranches or automobile headlights merely passing behind unseen obstructions along distant Highway 67, which winds through the Chinati Mountains between Marfa and Presidio.
The findings created an uproar in the otherwise sleepy little town of Marfa. Highway 67 was twenty-four miles away and well below the horizon, eyewitnesses pointed out. And even if the lights were headlights, it had to be traffic from Presidio to Marfa, or traffic moving left to right, since anyone going from Marfa to Presidio would show only taillights. Furthermore, they maintained, the lights also move from right to left which, if the scientists’ theory were to be accepted, indicated a crazy person backing up on Highway 67 at a high rate of speed on a dark night on a treacherous mountain road in order to make the right-to-left kind of movements that the mystery orbs have been known to make. It was preposterous.
The eyewitnesses also ruled out the scientists’ artificial "ranch lights" theory. With only one ranch in the area with only one spotlight---a spotlight easily recognizable to the naked eye and, therefore, discounted as a legitimate sighting---there was no way ranches played any role in the matter.
Then, a sighting occurred in 1985 which appeared to succeed in wiping out the car headlight theory...at least, that’s the claim. Robert Black, a graduate student in geology at Sul Ross University, decided to climb Goat Mountain south of Alpine for rock samples. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, he and a friend drove out a county road east of Marfa, parked their truck, and hiked in. It was early in the morning on an exceptionally warm day for the mountains at that time of year, and both men were dressed in light-weight clothing.
After collecting rock samples, Black’s friend, who loved sunsets, commented, "This is going to be a beautiful sunset, isn’t it. Look, the sun’s going down." At that moment, Black realized that they had stayed longer on the climb than he had intended. They would have to really hurry to make it out before dark.
Breaking into a run, they spied the truck way off on the Flats, but distances are deceiving in the desert, and before they could reach the truck, the sun was down. They were on the west side of Goat Mountain, in the middle of the Mitchell Flats. Black says it best, "Anyone who knows the Marfa flats, knows that it is flat, featureless, and boring---no geological marker out in the sea of desert and really no way to find your way around, especially in the dark." The men wisely decided to spend the night where they were. To keep warm, they gathered creosote bushes for fires.
A little before midnight, as they huddled around the fires looking toward the north and northwest in the direction of Highway 90, their talk turned to the Marfa Lights. The men were right in the Flats, where the lights were normally seen, and they began to hope the lights would make an appearance. They didn’t have long to wait. Shortly after midnight, they saw a "horizontal length of light that had a sort of dancing vibration movement." As the men watched in fascination, the "little beams of light danced up and down in a kind of wave formation, moved across, jumped straight up vertically, came back down, danced horizontally, then disappeared." They saw the lights four or five times that night.
Black’s account was unusual because it was the first reported sighting of the lights from a location several miles south of Highway 90 and looking north toward Highway 90. The Chinati Mountains were to their backs. It ruled out any supposition of car headlights in the mountains as being the cause of the mystery lights. Since Black and his companion were between the Chinati Mountains and Highway 90, and the lights appeared between the men and the highway, skeptics were forced to rethink their previous positions.
There is even another recorded incident of the brilliant orbs communicating with one of the local ranchers. Mrs. W.T. Giddens of Sundown, Texas, reported that her father actually lived the adventure. According to her story, her father was up in the Chinati Mountains, looking for stray cattle, when a sudden blizzard struck. Darkness, accompanied by howling wind and blowing snow, reduced visibility to near zero. He was unable to see his way home and had to feel his way along what he hoped was the right trail, fearing he would soon freeze to death if he did not find shelter.
Rounding an outcropping of rocks, the panicked rancher stopped dead in his tracks when some of the mystery lights suddenly appeared. Although he never explained how they did it, the rancher claimed the lights "spoke" to him, telling him he was three miles south of Chinati Peak, off course, headed in the wrong direction, and dangerously close to a steep precipice. He was advised to follow the lights---or die.
The lights led him to a cave that provided shelter from the raging storm. The smaller lights left, but the larger light remained with him until morning. According to the rancher, the light claimed they were "spirits from elsewhere and long ago."
When the rancher awoke the next morning, both the light and the storm were gone. As he headed toward home, he passed the outcropping of rocks and discovered that when the lights had intercepted him, he had been on the edge of a sheer cliff several hundred feet high. He had no doubts---the lights had saved his life.
In July 1989, scientists from McDonald Observatory on Mount Locke outside Fort Davis, and from Sul Ross University, decided to conduct another investigation into the lights. Included in the group were a professor of chemistry, Dr. Avinash Rangra, and an astronomer, Dr. Edwin Barker. With them were eleven other technicians and observers. Since the lights are most frequently seen near the Chinati Mountains from Highway 90, which runs east and west between Marfa and Alpine, the scientists decided they had best rule out any misidentification of headlights on Highway 67, which winds through the Chinati Mountains north and south between Marfa and Presidio.
A radio beacon resembling a red spotlight, visible in front of the peaks, was used as a guide. In order to prevent the misidentification of headlights, two marker lights were placed at the borders of Highway 67, where it enters and leaves the mountain range. These marker locations were manned by two technicians with radio equipment. Any lights spotted outside the markers, which the scientists could not explain, would be identified as the ghostly phenomena.
The investigators used special cameras and night-viewing equipment. At midnight, an unknown light appeared past the right marker light in the middle of the empty Mitchell Flats. Contacting the technician at the marker by radio indicated there was no traffic on Highway 67. The ghostly globe was recorded on a video camera. Observers were certain the light did not come from a man-made source. It disappeared and came back and faded again.
Doctor Rangra confirmed that something of natural origin was occurring over Mitchell Flats outside Marfa, but he did not know what. All he could say for certain was that it was not man-made. Doctor Edwin Barker agreed. People were seeing real activity in the atmosphere, but how to explain it? One scientist thought the lights might be refracted starlight. Another believed them to be illuminous gases produced by small earthquakes. But the fact is, every one of the scientists in the investigation were not sure and could only say for certain that it is a natural phenomena as yet unexplained by science. "Ha," the locals snorted, "we already knew that."
So, what are the mysterious Marfa Lights? Who knows? Theories are as prolific as the skeptics are to the theories. There are some who think the lights are caused by swamp gas escaping from underground pockets and igniting. Well...maybe. Only there has not been a swamp in that part of Texas for thousands, perhaps millions of years. What about St. Elmo’s Fire? Possibly, but not very likely. Saint Elmo’s Fire only occurs when conditions are absolutely perfect. The Marfa Lights, on the other hand, are seen year-round in all kinds of weather and under all sorts of different atmospheric conditions. This seems to also rule out ball lightning.
According to another theory, the lights might be a by-product of what is referred to as the Novaya Zemlya effect, which was first noted by the explorer Willem Barrents in 1597. Unlike the normal temperature inversion layer, which forms a distinct reflective boundary between warm and cold layers of air, the Novaya Zemlya effect may involve several different layers or slices of atmosphere. This means that a locomotive headlight between Ojinaga and Chihuahua, Mexico, could bounce back and forth between varying layers of air and be seen as far away as Texas’ official "Marfa Lights" viewing site, located ten miles east of Marfa on Highway 90. In a strange sort of way, this seems to corroborate the Walter T. Harris surveying party’s conclusion conducted at the turn of the century, as well as adding credence to the refracted starlight theory. The only real problem with the Novaya Zemlya effect is that the lights appear even on cloudy nights, which cannot possibly be considered atmospheric reflections.
The real truth is that no one really knows for sure what causes the Marfa Lights. The legends surrounding them just continue to expand, as more and more research proves nothing. For the people of Marfa, who have grown up with the lights, no explanation is necessary. They have them, and they mean to keep them.

So there you have it. Truly a bit of weirdness in the truly weird world we inhabit. An interesting anecdote was recorded by researcher Dennis Stacy in 1989. It seems that Dr. Ray Hauser of Hauser Laboratories in Boulder, Colorado, wrote The Marfa Independent with an unusual request. He offered one dollar for each used car air filter (up to ten) used in the area south of Marfa. The filters had to have at least a thousand miles of wear and tear. Hauser wanted to analyze the dust in the filters to see if there might be a connection between the lights and the chemical composition and behavior of certain dust-clouds. According to Stacy, "the idea sounds completely cock-eyed, until one remembers that accumulated dust in grain elevators is capable of tremendous explosive ignition." Who knows!!?

I’m Average Joe

The Famous Indian Rope Trick

2006-03-09T12:06:00.000-05:00

The Indian rope trick, some say it is just a myth, others say it is nothing more than mass hypnosis, still others profess a belief that it was really magic. The trick, involving a coil of rope extended skyward, has yet to be replicated by modern day magicians despite centuries of exhaustive study by scholars and expert magicians. Is it real magic or something else…

In the classic account a fakir tosses a rope skyward and it proceeds to stand straight up. The fakir's assistant, always a young boy, begins to climb the rope. In one early account from India in the 14th century, tells of a magician using a coil of rope with a large wooden ball tied to one end. The magician tossed the wooden ball high into the air. Instead of returning to the ground, it rose higher and higher until the rope disappeared into the clouds. A small boy (the magician's assistant) jumped to the rope and began climbing hand over hand until he too disappeared into the clouds. After a few minutes the magician called the boy - no reply. The frustrated mystic grasped a scimitar or similar weapon, and began climbing skyward. Moments later the crowd began hearing screams of pain and a small object fell to the ground. The boy's apparently severed limbs are what dropped to the ground, covered with blood. After a few seconds the fakir descends and tosses the limbs into a basket. The man strikes the basket with his stick an the boy, now miraculously restored, jumped to his feet with glee.
The trick continued to astound onlookers well into the early 1930's. Many of the world's greatest magicians traveled to India in hopes of tracing the origin of the effect but to no avail. For a time it seemed that the trick was destined to remain eternally out of reach.

In 1955, a Indian guru named Sadju Vadramakrishna came forward and announced he had performed the trick himself. He claimed that the trick, when performed at night, owed much of its success to the blinding torches placed around the perimeter of the audience. The torches he explained, allowed the crowd to see no more than 15 feet into the sky. Beforehand, he had placed a thin wire, tied between 2 strong trees about 20 feet off of the ground. The wooden ball, fitted with a large hook, grappled the wire making the rope appear to be suspended in mid air. He and his assistant were both skilled acrobats who could easily remain perched atop the wire. The body parts? Concealed in his cloak were the remains of a dead monkey which he slowly tossed to the ground. Upon returning to the ground, his assistant, also hidden under his cloak, would magically appear culminating this remarkable act of deception.
Although Vadramakrishna's vague explanation served to satisfy most casual listeners, others had their doubts. What he failed to explain and what thousands of eyewitnesses reported, was how the trick was performed from the 14th century onward in broad daylight.
An early account of the rope trick appeared in the Chicago Tribune in 1890 under the byline Fred S. Ellmore. The story gained worldwide notoriety, and numerous similar accounts appeared over the years. But no one could ever come up with a convincing eyewitness account, photographs, etc. Nor was there a satisfactory response to the reward offered by a British magicians' association for an actual performance. Then a few years ago University of Edinburgh researcher Peter Lamont took a closer look at that 1890 Tribune article. Four months later, he found, the editors had confessed in print that the whole thing was a hoax to sell more newspapers--Fred S. Ellmore, get it? This may not be the last word on the subject--when last heard from, Lamont was traveling to India to see what more he could learn.

So, magic or a total fake? I am not really sure, just file this one away in the ‘we need more info’ file!

I’m Average Joe

EXPLORATIONS IN THE GRAND CANYON ~ THE CONCLUSIONS ~

2006-03-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

Last time we took a look at a newspaper article from 1909 about some amazing findings in the Grand Canyon.Today we will take a closer look and see what we know about this today. On April 5, 1909, a front page story in the Arizona Gazette reported on an archaeological expedition in the heart of the Grand Canyon funded by the Smithsonian Institute, which had resulted in the discovery of Egyptian artifacts. April 5 is close to April 1 – but then not quite… so perhaps the story could be true?

Nothing since has been heard of this discovery. Today, over five million tourists visit the Grand Canyon each year. You would thus expect that if anything was hidden in the canyons, it would thus since long have been uncovered. However, most tourists only spend around 3 hours of time at the canyon, usually visiting the legendary South Rim view around mile 89, where most of the best and oldest tourist facilities are located. Furthermore, some have said that the entire discovery has since become the center of a major cover-up, apparently in an effort to maintain the old status quo, which is that the ancient Egyptians never ventured outside of the tranquil waters of the river Nile.
The original story goes that the team found an underground network of tunnels, high above the Colorado River, containing various ancient artifacts, statues and even mummies. A major discovery, no doubt about it. Impossible to slip off the archaeological radar. Still, the Smithsonian Institute will report it has no records on the subject. So what happened? To find out, there is only one guide: the article itself. Though the article was anonymous, it did identify some of the archaeologists involved: “under the direction of Prof. S. A. Jordan", with Smithsonian-backed adventurer G. E. Kinkaid, who then relates his findings.
But the story gets weirder when the Smithsonian stated that it had no Kinkaid or Jordan on record. In one enquiry from 2000, the institution replied: “The Smithsonian Institution has received many questions about an article in the April 5, 1909 Phoenix Gazette about G. E. Kincaid and his discovery of a 'great underground citadel' in the Grand Canyon, hewn by an ancient race 'of oriental origin, possibly from Egypt.' The Smithsonian's Department of Anthropology, has searched its files without finding any mention of a Professor Jordan, Kincaid, or a lost Egyptian civilization in Arizona. Nevertheless, the story continues to be repeated in books and articles.” There is room for a cover-up, of course, as some have argued. The files do not necessarily have to set within that department’s and the reference to the Phoenix Gazette rather than Arizona Gazette could be a simple error, or an escape valve that is so often present in official replies engineered to debunk. Stories like “the CIA Division X has no record” often means that Division Y is the one who has that record.
So, there is no Professor Jordan, and Kinkaid himself was more than difficult to pin down. However, on March 12 of the same year, the Gazette had reported on an earlier phase of Kincaid's adventure: “G. E. Kincaid Reaches Yuma.” Here, Kinkaid is identified as being from “Lewiston, Idaho”; he “arrived in Yuma after a trip from Green River, Wyoming, down the entire course of the Colorado River. He is the second man to make this journey and came alone in a small skiff, stopping at his pleasure to investigate the surrounding country. He left Green River in October having a small covered boat with oars, and carrying a fine camera, with which he secured over 700 views of the river and canyons which were unsurpassed. Mr. Kincaid says one of the most interesting features of the trip was passing through the sluiceways at Laguna dam. He made this perilous passage with only the loss of an oar." The account is factual enough and seems to be just that: fact. The article concludes: "Some interesting archaeological discoveries were unearthed and altogether the trip was of such interest that he will repeat it next winter in the company of friends." Less than a month later, the same newspaper seemed to continue their story where they had left it off: Kinkaid was now talking about his “interesting archaeological discoveries”, which consisted of a series of tunnels and passages with a cross chamber near the entrance, containing a statue: "The idol almost resembles Buddha, though the scientists are not certain as to what religious worship it represents. Taking into consideration everything found thus far, it is possible that this worship most resembles the ancient people of Tibet." He also stated that he had found an unknown gray metal, resembling platinum, as well as tiny carved heads, scattered on the floor. Urns bore "mysterious hieroglyphics, the key to which the Smithsonian Institute hopes yet to discover." In another room he found mummies: "Some of the mummies are covered with clay, and all are wrapped in a bark fabric."
Again, the account is quite factual. Idols “resemble” Buddha, rather than “are” Buddha. The worship “resembles” that of Tibet, not “is”… Kinkaid is trying to use analogies to explain his discovery. It is the anonymous author of the article who makes the connection with ancient Egypt and lets his mind float to one of the biggest discoveries of all time. Still, the newspaper apparently never followed up the story.
Though the Smithsonian involvement is therefore either proof of a cover-up (as some have claimed) or they are telling the truth, this does not mean that the entire story is a hoax, or that the newspaper fabricated the story. “Kinkaid” may have existed, and may have inflated his credentials. Alternatively, he may have made the entire thing up. It may be a hoax, but by whom? The newspaper reported rather factually about it. It may have been their hoax, in an effort to sell more papers, but if so, you would expect to hear more about it, including announcements like “more to come in the following edition”, whetting the public’s appetite.
The anonymous author may have fabricated the story, as he perhaps could not fill the entire newspaper. Perhaps… Which leaves Kinkaid. In his first account, we read how he stated that he has made archaeological discoveries, but these seem to have occurred all on his own. Furthermore, it is clear that he has made numerous photographs. We need to stress that the discovery of the underground network occurred before the first story was written. In fact, it appears that the discovery was made roughly four to six months prior the article. But in the second story, we learn Kinkaid apparently did not travel alone, but was helped by a professor from the Smithsonian. Also, it seems he did not make any photograph of his discovery. Though he claims that the access was very difficult, you would expect Kinkaid to have made some photographs of the general area.
In the Phoenix (Arizona) Gazette article of April 5, 1909 it is stated that Kinkaid "brought the story" of the "underground citadel" "to the city" (Phoenix and the Gazette) "yesterday" (April 4, 1909) after having "discovered" the site "several months ago". It is clear that as far as the newspaper was involved, they were reporting on recent information. But why Kinkaid had not included his discovery in his original account, back in March, is more enigmatic. Even though the newspaper may have wanted to wait to run it, it is clear that the delay is entirely Kinkaid’s.
With no traces of Kinkaid, though, did he actually exist? Jack Andrews has underlined that Kinkaid may have been a real person. In the newspaper report, Kinkaid mentions that he was “looking for mineral”: "I was journeying down the Colorado river in a boat, alone, looking for mineral." The Canyon was a known source of minerals, including copper. But, in 1908, the year of Kinkaid’s expedition, President Theodore Roosevelt had made the Canyon in a National Forest, closing it for any mining or prospecting activity. Andrews has furthermore shown that the area in which he had allegedly found the cave was a well-known area for prospecting. So he could be real… even though perhaps the newspaper got his name wrong… A spelling mistake could send any researcher off the right track, resulting in the conclusion that a person did not exist.
So, what about the cave? It is a fact that the Canyon has many holes and caves, most of which are discovered by hikers. A clear favourite for an Egyptian connection is the area around Ninety-four Mile Creek and Trinity Creek has sites with names like Isis Temple, Tower of Set, Tower of Ra, Horus Temple, Osiris Temple, etc. In the Haunted Canyon area are such names as the Cheops Pyramid, the Buddha Cloister, Buddha Temple, Manu Temple and Shiva Temple. One book, Ancient Secret of The Flower of Life (Vol. II, page 302), claims that two backpackers, on their way to Isis Temple, found a pyramid, made from the native rock. Once at Isis Temple, they claimed to have seen several cave entrances. They stated that the cave entrances were at a height of 800 feet, and the two climbed up, hoping to get into what looked like the most promising cave. But instead they found it had been sealed off with rocks. They felt the entrance was man made and that there was a 6 foot circular pattern hewn into the ceiling.It is unknown whether this is an actual discovery, or more “talk”. Irrelevant, Isis Temple is more than 40 miles from the location given in the newspaper article. Furthermore, it is but one of numerous buttes in the Grand Canyon named after ancient Egyptian, Greek, Hindu, Chinese and Nordic gods and goddesses. The origin of the rather esoteric naming is nearly as mysterious as the canyon itself, and has given rise to more than a little speculation as to what early explorers may have found there. But it may also be a perfect memory of its time, when there was a major fascination with all things Egyptian-Indian.
Jack Andrews claims that he has known “of this [Kinkaid’s] location since 1972. I have held the secret since then.” In June 2001, he felt it was “the proper time to reveal the location.” But he later adds that he has never discovered the “physical location” of this claim. From his argument, it seems as if he has “seen” the site in a dream or vision, but has never set foot inside it. However, using Kinkaid’s scant information about the site, “forty-two miles up the river from the El Tovar Crystal canyon...” This is not very precise. Andrews believes that the cave is in a deep river gorge, known as Marble Canyon, which is accessible “by either arriving there in a boat or float trip, or on foot from the rim of the Little Colorado river gorge, on the Navajo reservation.” Andrews spells out some other options, all which seem quite manageable to get there… but not necessarily inside the cave. Kinkaid wrote that "the entrance is 1,486 feet down the sheer canyon wall." Definitely not for the faint-hearted, and the question is how Kinkaid himself succeeded in the task.
Andrews concludes: “I think the "cave" described in the headline story of the Arizona Gazette, April 5, 1909 and its fantastic underground installation was, and still may be, located above an approximate six mile stretch of the Colorado River in Marble Canyon, at the border of Marble Canyon and the Navajo Nation above an area near Kwagunt Rapids.” Is it possible that it remains to be discovered? One ranger said that "that area of the park is very remote and to this day [2000], our knowledge of the area is rather slim, and quite frankly, it is not an area we patrol regularly […] the area is seldom visited."
Though sceptics have given Andrews a lot of slack, others have just run wildly with the story. It is one thing to interpret the Smithsonian’s denial as evidence of a cover-up, what David Icke made of the story is quite another thing. In The Biggest Secret, he writes – verbatim: "In 1909 a subterranean city which was built with the presicion of the Great Pyramid was found by G. E. Hincaid near the Grand Canyon in Arizona. It was big enough to accomidate 50,000 people and mumified bodies found were of oriental or possibly Egyptian origin, according to the expedition leader Professor S. A. Jordan. My own resaerch suggests that it is from another dimension, the lower fourth dimension, that the reptilian control and manipulation is primarily orchestrated."The story continues to grow and grow, now harbouring a sizeable population. But Icke then adds his own “research”, using the story as “evidence” for his reptilian control claims.
So, where does this leave us? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle of this controversy. With so many caves, some must contain something. Kinkaid never said it was Egyptian – he just made comparisons. It could simply have been native… The first culture to occupy the valley were the Anasazi, who entered the region around 500 AD, hunting small game as well as raising corn and squash for their livelihood. By 1000 AD, their culture had advanced to the point where they had begun to develop their own distinctive pottery style, advanced agricultural methods, and a unique form of dwelling known as the "pueblo".
From Mankind’s most ancient past, we have favoured burials in caves. Furthermore, many cultures have made caves in sheer cliff faces, specifically if they are facing towards the setting sun, into highly sacred sites, often cemeteries. Examples of this exist in the French Pyrenees, but whether it is the Cretan canyon known as the Valley of the Dead or the African Dogon, it is a common denominator that caves in cliffs were favoured, since remote antiquity. Why should the Grand Canyon be any different? And if not, then it is entirely possible that human remains were found… and perhaps continue to be found.
But rather than Egyptian or Tibetan in origin, I would argue that they are most likely remnants of the Anasazi. Anasazi groups, widely scattered across the southern Colorado Plateau and the upper Rio Grande drainage, defined their similarities – and their differences – largely in terms of their multi-storied, multi-room pueblo "Great Houses" or "cliff dwellings". It is what tied them together, even though the individual groups themselves often bore more differences than similarities. The site is indeed close to a Navajo centre, which are one of the living descendants of the Anasazi, which means “ancient ones” in Navajo. In the Canyon de Chelly is the so-called Mummy Cave, the last known occupied Anasazi site in the area. Situated in a large, protected alcove about 300 feet above the canyon floor, the two adjacent caves harbour the remnants of a multi-storied dwelling consisting of around 55 rooms and four ceremonial circular structures, or kivas, possibly dating back to 1050.
It was for the two ancient bodies found entombed at this site that an early Smithsonian expedition named the canyon, "del Muerto" — "of the Dead" in Spanish. Here, we therefore have something that is virtually identical to what Kinkaid alleges: a cave, in a cliff, with a complex series of rooms, containing mummies… even the Smithsonian is involved. The one major difference is that this site is known, whereas Kinkaid’s isn’t. But what Mummy Cave equally proves, is that there is no need for Tibetans or Egyptians, but that the local Anasazi are most likely its occupants… if it existed… and why not ? Mummy Cave may look very different from what we imagine Kinkaid was describing… But with so little known about Kinkaid…

Though this story may or may not be reality, examples such as Mummy Cave have since proven that Kinkaid’s story may not be as important as many believe it is. Even if Kinkaid and Jordan were real people, the sensationalist flavorings of the report are all due to the anonymous author. And even if he was reporting truthfully, within the current climate, we can imagine why people could have easily mistaken an ancient culture with a local Indian culture. It is merely because the Indians were believed to have no level of sophistication whatsoever that almost de facto, the site had to be “Old World”… In the 21st century, we know better. Of course all of this could just be so much crud. Who knows, not me but it does prove that we live in a really WEIRD world!

I’m Average Joe

EXPLORATIONS IN THE GRAND CANYON

2006-03-07T15:46:00.000-05:00

As many of you know I spent most of my school-age years growing up in the great state of Arizona. I love the desert state and have fond memories of visiting many of the great tourist attractions and sites, none more so than the Grand Canyon. If you have never been I suggest you take the time to visit this most amazing spectacle of nature. It is a beautiful sight to see but information surfaced in a 1909 Arizona Gazette article suggesting that there is more than meets the eye to the Grand Canyon. We are going to take a closer look at all of this, below is the 1909 article and next time we will look more closely into what we know today…

EXPLORATIONS IN GRAND CANYON
Mysteries of Immense Rich Cavern being brought to light
Jordan is enthused Remarkable finds indicate ancient people migrated from Orient
The latest news of the progress of the explorations of what is now regarded by scientists as not only the oldest archaeological discovery in the United States, but one of the most valuable in the world, which was mentioned some time ago in the Gazette, was brought to the city yesterday by G.E. Kinkaid, the explorer who found the great underground citadel of the Grand Canyon during a trip from Green River, Wyoming, down the Colorado, in a wooden boat, to Yuma, several months ago.
According to the story related to the Gazette by Mr. Kinkaid, the archaeologists of the Smithsonian Institute, which is financing the expeditions, have made discoveries which almost conclusively prove that the race which inhabited this mysterious cavern, hewn in solid rock by human hands, was of oriental origin, possibly from Egypt, tracing back to Ramses. If their theories are borne out by the translation of the tablets engraved with hieroglyphics, the mystery of the prehistoric peoples of North America, their ancient arts, who they were and whence they came, will be solved. Egypt and the Nile, and Arizona and the Colorado will be linked by a historical chain running back to ages which staggers the wildest fancy of the fictionist.

A Thorough Examination
Under the direction of Prof. S. A. Jordan, the Smithsonian Institute is now prosecuting the most thorough explorations, which will be continued until the last link in the chain is forged. Nearly a mile underground, about 1480 feet below the surface, the long main passage has been delved into, to find another mammoth chamber from which radiates scores of passageways, like the spokes of a wheel.
Several hundred rooms have been discovered, reached by passageways running from the main passage, one of them having been explored for 854 feet and another 634 feet. The recent finds include articles which have never been known as native to this country, and doubtless they had their origin in the orient. War weapons, copper instruments, sharp-edged and hard as steel, indicate the high state of civilization reached by these strange people. So interested have the scientists become that preparations are being made to equip the camp for extensive studies, and the force will be increased to thirty or forty persons.

Mr. Kinkaid's Report
Mr. Kinkaid was the first white child born in Idaho and has been an explorer and hunter all his life, thirty years having been in the service of the Smithsonian Institute. Even briefly recounted, his history sounds fabulous, almost grotesque.
"First, I would impress that the cavern is nearly inaccessible. The entrance is 1,486 feet down the sheer canyon wall. It is located on government land and no visitor will be allowed there under penalty of trespass. The scientists wish to work unmolested, without fear of archaeological discoveries being disturbed by curio or relic hunters. A trip there would be fruitless, and the visitor would be sent on his way. The story of how I found the cavern has been related, but in a paragraph: I was journeying down the Colorado river in a boat, alone, looking for mineral. Some forty-two miles up the river from the El Tovar Crystal canyon, I saw on the east wall, stains in the sedimentary formation about 2,000 feet above the river bed. There was no trail to this point, but I finally reached it with great difficulty.
Above a shelf which hid it from view from the river, was the mouth of the cave. There are steps leading from this entrance some thirty yards to what was, at the time the cavern was inhabited, the level of the river. When I saw the chisel marks on the wall inside the entrance, I became interested, securing my gun and went in. During that trip I went back several hundred feet along the main passage till I came to the crypt in which I discovered the mummies. One of these I stood up and photographed by flashlight. I gathered a number of relics, which I carried down the Colorado to Yuma, from whence I shipped them to Washington with details of the discovery. Following this, the explorations were undertaken.

The Passages
"The main passageway is about 12 feet wide, narrowing to nine feet toward the farther end. About 57 feet from the entrance, the first side-passages branch off to the right and left, along which, on both sides, are a number of rooms about the size of ordinary living rooms of today, though some are 30 by 40 feet square. These are entered by oval-shaped doors and are ventilated by round air spaces through the walls into the passages. The walls are about three feet six inches in thickness.
The passages are chiselled or hewn as straight as could be laid out by an engineer. The ceilings of many of the rooms converge to a center. The side-passages near the entrance run at a sharp angle from the main hall, but toward the rear they gradually reach a right angle in direction.

The Shrine
"Over a hundred feet from the entrance is the cross-hall, several hundred feet long, in which are found the idol, or image, of the people's god, sitting cross-legged, with a lotus flower or lily in each hand. The cast of the face is oriental, and the carving this cavern. The idol almost resembles Buddha, though the scientists are not certain as to what religious worship it represents. Taking into consideration everything found thus far, it is possible that this worship most resembles the ancient people of Tibet.
Surrounding this idol are smaller images, some very beautiful in form; others crooked-necked and distorted shapes, symbolical, probably, of good and evil. There are two large cactus with protruding arms, one on each side of the dais on which the god squats. All this is carved out of hard rock resembling marble. In the opposite corner of this cross-hall were found tools of all descriptions, made of copper. These people undoubtedly knew the lost art of hardening this metal, which has been sought by chemicals for centuries without result. On a bench running around the workroom was some charcoal and other material probably used in the process. There is also slag and stuff similar to matte, showing that these ancients smelted ores, but so far no trace of where or how this was done has been discovered, nor the origin of the ore.
"Among the other finds are vases or urns and cups of copper and gold, made very artistic in design. The pottery work includes enamelled ware and glazed vessels. Another passageway leads to granaries such as are found in the oriental temples. They contain seeds of various kinds. One very large storehouse has not yet been entered, as it is twelve feet high and can be reached only from above. Two copper hooks extend on the edge, which indicates that some sort of ladder was attached. These granaries are rounded, as the materials of which they are constructed, I think, is a very hard cement. A gray metal is also found in this cavern, which puzzles the scientists, for its identity has not been established. It resembles platinum. Strewn promiscuously over the floor everywhere are what people call "cats eyes”, a yellow stone of no great value. Each one is engraved with the head of the Malay type.

The Hieroglyphics
"On all the urns, or walls over doorways, and tablets of stone which were found by the image are the mysterious hieroglyphics, the key to which the Smithsonian Institute hopes yet to discover. The engraving on the tables probably has something to do with the religion of the people. Similar hieroglyphics have been found in southern Arizona. Among the pictorial writings, only two animals are found. One is of prehistoric type.

The Crypt
"The tomb or crypt in which the mummies were found is one of the largest of the chambers, the walls slanting back at an angle of about 35 degrees. On these are tiers of mummies, each one occupying a separate hewn shelf. At the head of each is a small bench, on which is found copper cups and pieces of broken swords. Some of the mummies are covered with clay, and all are wrapped in a bark fabric.
The urns or cups on the lower tiers are crude, while as the higher shelves are reached, the urns are finer in design, showing a later stage of civilization. It is worthy of note that all the mummies examined so far have proved to be male, no children or females being buried here. This leads to the belief that this exterior section was the warriors' barracks.
"Among the discoveries no bones of animals have been found, no skins, no clothing, no bedding. Many of the rooms are bare but for water vessels. One room, about 40 by 700 feet, was probably the main dining hall, for cooking utensils are found here. What these people lived on is a problem, though it is presumed that they came south in the winter and farmed in the valleys, going back north in the summer.
Upwards of 50,000 people could have lived in the caverns comfortably. One theory is that the present Indian tribes found in Arizona are descendants of the serfs or slaves of the people which inhabited the cave. Undoubtedly a good many thousands of years before the Christian era, a people lived here which reached a high stage of civilization. The chronology of human history is full of gaps. Professor Jordan is much enthused over the discoveries and believes that the find will prove of incalculable value in archaeological work.

"One thing I have not spoken of, may be of interest. There is one chamber of the passageway to which is not ventilated, and when we approached it a deadly, snaky smell struck us. Our light would not penetrate the gloom, and until stronger ones are available we will not know what the chamber contains. Some say snakes, but other boo-hoo this idea and think it may contain a deadly gas or chemicals used by the ancients. No sounds are heard, but it smells snaky just the same. The whole underground installation gives one of shaky nerves the creeps. The gloom is like a weight on one's shoulders, and our flashlights and candles only make the darkness blacker. Imagination can revel in conjectures and ungodly daydreams back through the ages that have elapsed till the mind reels dizzily in space.”

So that is indeed interesting and truly a bit weird. Next time we will take a closer look at what we know about all of this today.

I’m Average Joe

The Levelland, Texas UFO/Car-Stalling Incident

2006-02-24T12:15:00.000-05:00

As any fan of the X-Files can tell you; one of the signs that you might be in the presence of an alien spacecraft is that your car engine shuts off and you can not get it restarted. Recall if you will the scene from Steven Spielberg’s classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Dark night, lonely stretch of road meeting a railroad crossing when suddenly your truck engine shuts off and bingo a UFO appears. Classic. One of the earliest examples of this to be reported was in 1957 and occurred in the town of Levelland, Texas. Let’s take a closer look…

Between the hours of 10:50pm on November 2nd 1957 until 1:15am of the 3rd seven separate witnesses near Levelland, Texas saw, what most described as “an oval shaped ball of light” approach their vehicles. As the light neared the cars it seemed to have the effect of causing their engines to sputter and stop and their headlights to shut off all by themselves. The events lasted from a few seconds to no more than 5 minutes in duration. Once the ball of light left the scene, all witnesses were able to start their automobile engines and their headlights went back to normal operation. It is interesting to note that each of these seven sightings was within 500 feet of the witness’ vehicle and in every case led to engine and headlight failure.
Most witnesses were scared about the incident and eventually called the Levelland Police Department to make a report. While descriptions of the sighting varied amongst all witnesses, there was a general consensus that some lighted object was stopping car and truck motors around Levelland. On the early morning of November 3rd, there were other witnesses who saw lights in the night sky as well as flashes of multicolored light.

On November 3rd the CBS TV news reported:
"Folks in Levelland, Texas are worried about strange objects in their neighborhood. Sheriff Weir Clem says he has received several reports of a strange, egg-shaped object, about 200 feet long, landing on farms and highways last night in the vicinity of Levelland. Sheriff Clem said he even got a glimpse of this thing, which somehow switched off lights and auto engines when it came near. The Sheriff said lights and engines worked fine again after the thing went away. This is Bob Pierpont in Washington."

On November 4th, the incident was reported in most U.S. newspapers who were all dumbfounded as to the nature of the mysterious ball of light and gave it different names such as: mysterious object/thing, flying egg, whatnick, and eggnick. Many newspapers quoted Representative J.T. Rutherford from Odessa, Texas who wanted to know whether the sightings were the result of an American experiment and sent a telegram to Air Force officials in Washington asking for answers. It was not until November 5th, that the idea that it was actually an extraterrestrial craft and not just a ball of light that caused the Levelland sightings gained publicity in the newspapers. Most of the newspaper quoted James A. Lee (a NICAP member from Abilene, TX) as the key proponent of this idea. On November 15th, the Air Force issued a summary report concluding that the incident was the rare form of lighting called ball lightning and that the engines shutting down was due to wet ignition systems. The Air Force solution to this puzzling case was so controversial that on July 15th, 1960, they had to discuss the case in a U.S. Congressional briefing on the UFO program.
While the case was solved as far as the Air Force Project Blue Book was concerned, many UFO organizations such as NICAP, APRO, and CSI keep the case opened as unsolved and point out that this case represents one of the best-documented multi-witness, engine failure cases of a UFO contact/sighting.

Now we will probably never really know just what happened in Levelland back in 1957, but one thing is sure; we live in a truly weird world!
I’m Average Joe

The House of Mystery

2006-02-15T17:26:00.000-05:00

The other day my youngest son, Sawyer, gave me some suggestions for my blog. He had been watching television and had heard reference to what is known as the OREGON VORTEX. As he explained it to me “the OREGON VORTEX is a mysterious area in the southern part of the state of Oregon that American Indians called "the forbidden ground." Strange things happen to you in that place. It can make you feel real peculiar.” I figured I needed to take a closer look…

The OREGON VORTEX, a spherical area encompassing about 3/4-acre, dates back before recorded history of the area. American Indians avoided the area; so did birds and other wildlife, they continue to avoid the area still today.
In spite of rumored inexplicable occurrences, the Grey Eagle Mining Co. built a gold assay office on the site in the 1890's. The building promptly slid from its foundation, coming to rest at an odd angle. The area hasn't changed much since the building was first constructed, except for the boundary fence and the various platforms and tools installed to demonstrate the exceptional things that happen there. The old assay office is now known as the HOUSE OF MYSTERY.
When the mining company erected the building, it was plumb and level. Sometime in 1910, during a particularly heavy rainy season, the building rode a mudslide down the hill, coming to rest against the side of a maple tree. Which is where it still sits. No longer plumb or level, the house is awkwardly skewed. Oddly a strong feeling of uneasiness or disorientation will grow in you and will increase the longer you stay inside the house.
The VORTEX opened as a tourist attraction around 1930, with guides explaining the unusual conditions as they escorted groups through the area. Visitors are still awed by the phenomena.
Take the "North-South perspective." The tour guide directs a group to two poles rising vertically from either side of a narrow wooden platform. Though the tour guide claims the poles are of the same length, the pole to the right (north) appears several inches shorter. The tour guide Guide measures a metal rod to show the group it's exactly 7 feet long. She holds the rod up against the right (north) pole. Same height. As the guide drags the rod across the platform (which she has already proven level with a carpenter's bubble level), the rod appears to lengthen until it seems to be the same height as the left (south) pole. The poles are of identical height, although the south one appears much taller.
Next, the guide asks two people to step onto the platform, stand facing each other at the poles for a moment, then exchange places. As they move towards each other, pass and continue to the opposite pole, they appear to either grow or shrink in height, depending on which way they are walking (north or south).
Scottish scientist John Lister visited the VORTEX area in 1913. After performing more than 14,000 experiments, Lister concluded the VORTEX acts like a giant refracting lens, bending the light in a circular, or vertical motion. He thought of the effect was an optical illusion. The VORTEX staff disagrees.
Use your camera. You can prove it's no illusion. Stand at one pole and take a picture of someone at the other pole. Then trade places and take a second photo from exactly the same distance. After developing your pictures, place the photos side by side and measure the height and shoulder width on both. In the photo taken at the South Pole, the person will actually measure taller and broader in the shoulders. If it were an optical illusion and not a physical change, there would be no change on your photographs.
Next a visitor 5'8" tall stands in the center of the platform facing the group. The tour guide stands 5'10" tall. When the taller tour guide stands on the left (north) side of the visitor--they seem of a height shoulder to shoulder. The guide then moves to the right side (south) of the visitor. Though the visitor has not moved, the tour guide now towers over the visitor and has to reach up to touch the guides shoulder.
Albert Einstein developed the second theory about the VORTEX. He thought the phenomenon was more than just optical, that it was something we could also feel. Because the VORTEX actually expands and contracts as much as 19 inches several times daily, Einstein thought a person’s molecular structure also expands or contracts as they walk through the area, keeping the same proportions as before.

Well, that’s what we know about the OREGON VORTEX. I admit it isn’t much but one cool thing is that you can still visit the site. As far as the two possible reasons for the oddness of the location, neither theory explains all of the strange phenomena. Such as why anyone inside the VORTEX feels compelled to lean as much as 7 degrees towards north instead of standing straight up. Or why camera light meters tend to read darker inside the area then in surrounding areas. My only explanation is that we truly live in a weird, WEIRD world!

I’m Average Joe

Expert Says East Texas Is Hotbed For UFO Sightings

2006-02-10T13:51:00.000-05:00

Every so often a rash of UFO sightings springs up, Phoenix Arizona, Mexico City, Utah Desert, Gulf Breeze Florida all have experienced these rashes. It may be time to add to that list. What is this in the East Texas sky? Let’s take a closer look…

For as long as there have been cameras, folks have captured on film what they say might be from another world. Or, they say the UFOs might be a secret aircraft the government doesn't want us to know about.
Despite the true answer, the fascination with the strange objects in the sky is stronger than ever, mainly because of the internet.
B.J. Booth, who runs a great website at http://www.ufocasebook.com/ says it's just a great mystery, "We know there are many objects that are seen, photographed, and videotaped by reputable individuals." Booth speaks for a man in Kaufman County -- a man named Larry who doesn't want the spotlight. He just took these pictures, and he has also gotten some video of the strange craft he has spotted in the sky over his ranch.
"To be honest, I don't even know his name. Just Larry," Booth says.
Over the past few years, Booth says his video shows objects that defy explanation. Like a strange white object moving toward a low flying plane.
"He was picking up some objects in his camera that he wasn't really seeing or didn't notice when he was taking his film."
Some of the video and pictures are just of strange lights in the night sky -- moving quickly. But some of the pictures Larry has sent to Booth's website are jaw-dropping.
"We haven't been able to supply a lot of answers, and no one has because these objects have not been able to be identified," Booth says.
Take for instance a bronze colored shape. It doesn't look to be a plane. Neither does a spectacular beacon of light moving within the clouds in the daytime. "They cannot be explained by anything that we know of, or anything that's flying today in our skies," Booth proclaims.
He says he's never seen a UFO himself, but believes the photos and video from Kaufman County are authentic. “There was something up there.” He assures us, and he wants an answer from someone.
"There are so many of them that there aren't really the resources or personnel to actually go out and further investigate these things," he says.
There's no shortage of people who might say this activity is military.
Strange reddish lights in a triangular pattern might be some experimental aircraft. Some others might say they're spacecraft.
Booth says the government is mum about these pictures, that his source, Larry doesn't have a clue, and that he hopes someone has an idea.
"What is it?” Larry asks any who see the pictures and video, "What is it?”

Personally I don't have an answer for Larry. Every day studying these pictures and others from East Texas skies just deepens the mystery and proves that we inhabit a truly WEIRD WORLD!! What might be looking on us from above?

I’m Average Joe

The Best “Suited” Satellite Ever

2006-02-01T14:27:00.000-05:00

This just has t fall into the Funny/Weird catagory. Check out this story from NASA...

One of the most bizarre satellites in the history of the space age will be launched into a low-Earth orbit on the 3rd of February 2006. At about noon on that day, astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS) will toss an empty spacesuit overboard. The spacesuit is the satellite. Called "SuitSat" for short.
"SuitSat is a Russian brainstorm," clarifies Frank Bauer of the Goddard Space Flight Center which is part of NASA. "Some of our Russian partners in the ISS program, mainly a group led by Sergey Samburov, had an idea: Maybe we can turn old spacesuits into useful satellites." SuitSat is the first test of that crazy idea.
"We've equipped a Russian Orlan spacesuit with three batteries, a radio transmitter, and internal sensors to measure temperature and battery power," says Bauer. "As SuitSat circles Earth, it will transmit its condition to the ground."
Unlike a normal spacewalk, when a human being is inside the suit, SuitSat will contain no life so its temperature controls will be turned off to conserve power. The suit, with its arms and legs flailing about as if they have a mind of their own, possibly spinning or stretching and retracting, will be exposed to the intense rays of the sun with no way to normalize its internal temperature.
"Will the suit overheat? How long will the batteries last? Can we get a clear transmission if the suit tumbles?" wonders Bauer. These are some of the questions the test of SuitSat will attempt to answer, laying the groundwork for possible SuitSats of the future.
SuitSat can be heard by anyone on the ground. "All you need is an antenna (the bigger the better) and a radio receiver that you can tune to 145.990 MHz FM," says Bauer. "A police band scanner or a hand-talkie ham radio would work just fine." He encourages students, scouts, teachers and ham radio operators to tune in.
For years, Bauer and colleagues at Goddard have been connecting kids on Earth with astronauts on the ISS through the ARISS program (Amateur Radio on International Space Station). "There's a ham rig on the ISS, and the astronauts love talking to students when they pass over schools," Bauer explains. ARISS is co-sponsoring SuitSat along with the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation (AMSAT), the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), the Russian Space Agency and NASA.
By now you may be wondering just when will SuitSat orbit over your home town? Use Science@NASA's J-Pass utility to find out. The online program will ask for your zip code—that's all. Then it will tell you when the ISS is going to orbit over your area. (Be sure to click the "options" button and select "all passes.") Because the ISS and SuitSat share similar orbits, predictions for one will serve for the other. Observers in the United States will find that SuitSat passes overhead once or twice a day—usually between midnight and 4 o'clock in the morning. At that time of day, SuitSat and the ISS will be in Earth's shadow and, thus, too dark to see with the naked eye. You'll need a radio to detect them.
"Point your antenna to the sky during the 5-to-10 minute flyby," advises Bauer, and this is what you'll hear:
SuitSat transmits for 30 seconds, pauses for 30 seconds, and then repeats. "This is SuitSat-1, RS0RS," the transmission begins, followed by a prerecorded greeting in five languages. The greeting contains "special words" in English, French, Japanese, Russian, German and Spanish for students to record and decipher. Awards will be given to students who do this.
Next comes telemetry: temperature, battery power, mission elapsed time. "The telemetry is stated in plain language—in English," says Bauer. Everyone will be privy to SuitSat's condition. Bauer adds, "Suitsat 'talks' using a voice synthesizer. It's pretty amazing."
The transmission ends with a Slow Scan TV picture. Of what? "We're not telling," laughs Bauer. "It's a mystery picture." More awards will be given to students who figure out what it is.

The things we humans think of…. Crazy Ruskies! Maybe we are what is weird about our world!
Students and teachers who want to try this, but have no clue how to begin, should contact their local ham radio club. There are thousands of them around the country. Click here to find a club near you. "Hams are notoriously outgoing; most would be delighted to help students tune in to SuitSat," believes Bauer.
Bauer expects SuitSat's batteries to last 2 to 4 days. "Although longer is possible," he allows. After that, SuitSat will begin a slow silent spiral into Earth's atmosphere. Weeks or months later, no one knows exactly when, it will become a brilliant fireball over some part of Earth—a fitting end for a trailblazer. Visit SuitSat.org for launch updates and sighting reports.

See you next time.

I'm Average Joe

mailto:OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Government Hunts for Bigfoot in Malaysia

2006-01-30T13:45:00.000-05:00

Amid reports of Bigfoot sightings in the jungles of southern Malaysia, the Malaysian government is trying to track down the legendary monster. Headlines in Kuala Lumpur have been filled in recent weeks with news of the sightings. The local government is taking the reports so seriously that it's launching what may be the world's first government-sponsored effort to track down the mysterious creature. Read on…

Johor Chief Minister Abdul Ghani Othman said the state will form an official Bigfoot-tracking team in a serious bid to find evidence of such a beast following the reported sightings late last year in the Endau Rompin National Park forest.
"The mystery of Bigfoot's existence has attracted a lot of interest," Othman was quoted as saying by the Bernama national news agency. "We hope the expedition will be able to prove its existence."
Ghani's aide confirmed the report Thursday, saying state administrators decided to set up the team after a council meeting late Wednesday.
"Bigfoot" is a popular name given in the United States to giant hairy creatures walking on two legs. Sightings of such beasts have been reported in many parts of the world but their existence has never been proven.
Some Canadians say the giant is real. They call him Sasquatch. Just six months ago residents of the small town of Teslin reported seeing a big shaggy creature that left behind a stinky tuft of hair and huge footprints.
In the Himalayas he's an "abominable snowman" called a Yeti.
Australian aboriginals call him a Yowie.
To many people, Bigfoot is the stuff of nightmarish folklore. He's been described by hundreds of alleged eyewitnesses as an ape-like creature that stands nearly eight feet tall and weighs more than 500 pounds. His name comes from the 17-inch-long footprints he leaves behind.
Malaysian media have been gripped by Bigfoot fever since November 2005, when fish farm workers reported seeing three giant human-like hairy beasts at the edge of the Endau Rompin reserve. They also claimed to have seen a gigantic footprint which they photographed.
The photo was later printed by local newspapers.
Park officials have combed the site where the men claimed they saw the creatures, but found no physical evidence of their existence. However, they recorded more reports of sightings from Aborigine villagers who live on the park's fringes.

Part of what makes this an entry into our blog of all things Weird is of course that it involves Bigfoot but also because of the following: Tourism authorities are planning to capitalize on the sightings to attract visitors to Johor and the park. Wildlife officials said they may set up camera traps in the jungle to capture images of the creature. Park officials are offering Bigfoot sighting tours for those of you who may be interested. I love it! See you next time.

I’m Average Joe
mailto:OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

The weirdness of Kokomo: The Kokomo Hum

2006-01-25T13:59:00.000-05:00

It started as a low hum, barely noticeable. But within months, the endless throbbing was like a corkscrew twisting into Diane Anton's temple.
The walls of her home vibrated. Her bed shook. Bouts of nausea, short-term memory loss and hand tremors followed.
"The noise was so penetrating and invasive," she said. "It was just not getting better."
So Anton quit her job, abandoned her $180,000 house and fled. She was the first person driven out of the city by what's come to be known as "the Kokomo hum." But she may not be the last. Let’s take a closer look into this odd case…

As many as 90 people in this industrial, central Indiana city of about 47,000 have complained about a low-frequency hum over the past three years, City Attorney Ken Ferries said. While most residents don't hear a thing, beyond the typical sounds of the city's factories and busy roads, the City Council approved a $100,000 study of the mysterious noise, often described as the constant idle of tractor trailer's diesel engine.
"We decided, rather than sit on or duffs and talk about it, let's try to do something," Ferries said. The city intends to request proposals for the study by the end of the month. Those who suffer the hum, and have had years to educate themselves about low-frequency sound, say it's about time. Many who can hear it complain that it has made the physically ill, not to mention that it has nearly driven them crazy.
They point to evidence, grounded in science, that exposure to consistent low-frequency noise can cause vibroacoustic disease. It has symptoms that mirror the ailments those in Kokomo are complaining about -- nausea, headaches and dizziness, just to name a few.
Unidentified sounds that bother a handful of people have popped up in communities around the world, but because so few are affected, the issue hasn't received much attention. Some examples include; Taos, N.M., a small town in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, some residents were bothered by a mysterious noise in the early 1990s. They, too, described the sound as a diesel truck idling in the distance, and said it caused sleeplessness, dizziness and a host of other symptoms. Also On the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, people have long complained of health problems caused by low-frequency sound coming from a U.S. Navy bombing range. The Navy has discounted those claims, and continues bombing in the area.
Some in Kokomo claim the city government knows the noise comes from an industrial source but believe officials are in cahoots with local industry and refuse to make companies fix the problem.
Others view a wider conspiracy, that the federal government is well aware of low-frequency sound problems but ignores them to appease large corporations.
"It's just like every other major environmental issue. It all comes down to money," Anton said.
Ferries, the city attorney, said such claims are ridiculous. Kokomo's investment in research shows officials are taking it seriously, he said.
Kathie Sickles, who lives near Kokomo, spends most of her free time trying to educate people about the hum. She packages research papers and other sound studies in bright-colored plastic folders and hands them out to City Council members. She makes flyers for the public, "SOUND POLLUTION CAN HURT YOU," filled with Internet addresses and lists of symptoms associated with exposure to low-frequency sound.
"People need to know this is going on," said Sickles, who formed a group called Our Environment. "People are getting sick and nothing's being done."
Angelo Campanella, an acoustical engineer hired by Anton, detected low frequency sound in her neighborhood, but said further research would be needed to clearly determine a source.
Campanella said he was not able to hear the sound Anton described, but believed "others may be more sensitive to it."
Most Kokomo residents aren't, however. Jeff Smith, owner of Jeff's Barber Shop, said aside from some coverage of the issue in the Kokomo Tribune, which urged an investigation in a front-page editorial, he doesn't hear much about the hum.
"As far as I know, I don't think it exists," Smith said. "I can't say I've ever heard it."

UPDATE: The source of the highly annoying Kokomo, Indiana hum, that has been making some people sick since 1999, has now been identified. An acoustics consulting firm says two industrial fans are sources of a mysterious sound.
Jim Cowan of Acentech, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was hired by the town to make a 10-month study of the hum. He finally traced it to low-frequency and infrasonic tones coming from local industries, and narrowed it down to a cooling tower fan on the roof of Kokomo's DaimlerChrysler Casting Plant and an air compressor fan at Haynes International.
Both companies have agreed to silence their fans. Haynes International has installed a muffler, and DaimlerChrysler is working on the problem.
The hum did not exceed 60 decibels, and sound researchers say negative health effects from low-frequency sounds start at 90 decibels. But residents who reported sleeplessness, chronic fatigue, headaches and nausea blamed it on the hum. Cowan says, "None of these people are crazy. Nothing is being made up."

Well there you have it. The weirdness of Kokomo now has been traced to some old fans. It is interesting that these low frequency sounds were able to cause illness at disable folks, I guess it is no wonder the US (and probably other) military want this phenomenon made into useful weapons. What a weird world we live in.

I'm Average Joe
mailto:OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Hawaiian Statehood is not legal! Part 2

2006-01-24T13:07:00.000-05:00

As you may recall from yesterday in part one of this post…
Most people know that Hawaii is a state, the 50th state of the United States of America. Most people, including those who live in Hawaii, accept that statement as a fact. But the reality is that our world is bound by the rule of law, and legally speaking, the truth may be quite different!
The truth is that each and every step along Hawaii's path from sovereign and independent nation, to annexed territory, to statehood, was accomplished in violation of laws and treaties then in effect, without regard to the wishes of the Hawaiian people. At the time President Grover Cleveland sent to Honolulu special commissioner James H. Blount, former chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Blount's job was to investigate the circumstances of the revolution, the role Minister Stevens and American troops played in it, and to determine the feelings of the people of Hawaii toward the provisional government. Blount immediately ordered the troops back to their ship and the American flag taken down and replaced by the Hawaiian flag. And now to conclude our post…

Blount's final report charged that Minister Stevens illegally conspired in the overthrow of the monarchy, which would not have taken place without the landing of U.S. troops. Blount recommended restoring the queen, saying... “The undoubted sentiment of the people is for the queen, against the provisional government and against annexation." He noted, "There is not an annexationist in the Islands, so far as I have been able to observe, who would be willing to submit the question of annexation to a popular vote."
Based on Blount's findings, President Cleveland decided that, in the name of justice, he would do everything in his power to reinstate the queen. Minister Stevens was recalled from Hawaii in disgrace, and replaced with Albert Willis, who expressed to the queen the president's regret that the unauthorized intervention of the United States had caused her to surrender her sovereignty
Willis next went to Sanford Dole and the provisional government, acknowledging the wrong committed by the United States in the revolution and requested them to resign power and restore the queen.
The answer, of course, was no. They repudiated the right of the American president to interfere in their domestic affairs and said that if the American forces illegally assisted the revolution, the provisional government was not responsible.
On Dec. 18, 1893, President Cleveland made an eloquent speech to Congress on the Hawaiian situation. He had harsh words for the landing of American troops at the revolutionaries' request: "This military demonstration upon the soil of Honolulu was of itself an act of war; unless made either with the consent of the government of Hawaii or for the bona fide purpose of protecting the imperiled lives and property of citizens of the United States. But there is no pretense of any such consent on the part of the government of the queen ... the existing government, instead of requesting the presence of an armed force, protested against it. There is as little basis for the pretense that forces were landed for the security of American life and property. If so, they would have been stationed in the vicinity of such property and so as to protect it, instead of at a distance and so as to command the Hawaiian Government Building and palace. ... When these armed men were landed, the city of Honolulu was in its customary orderly and peaceful condition. ... "
The president continues:
"But for the notorious predilections of the United States minister for annexation, the Committee of Safety, which should have been called the Committee of Annexation, would never have existed.
"But for the landing of the United States forces upon false pretexts respecting the danger to life and property, the committee would never have exposed themselves to the plans and penalties of treason by undertaking the subversion of the queen's government.
"But for the presence of the United States forces in the immediate vicinity and in position to accord all needed protection and support, the committee would not have proclaimed the provisional government from the steps of the Government Building.
"And, finally, but for the lawless occupation of Honolulu under false pretexts by the United States forces, and but for Minister Stevens' recognition of the provisional government when the United States forces were its sole support and constituted its only military strength, the queen and her government would never have yielded to the provisional government, even for a time and for the sole purpose of submitting her case to the enlightened justice of the United States. ... "
He further stated,
"...if a feeble but friendly state is in danger of being robbed of its independence and its sovereignty by a misuse of the name and power of the United States, the United States cannot fail to vindicate its honor and its sense of justice by an earnest effort to make all possible reparation."
President Cleveland concluded by placing the matter in the hands of Congress.
The Senate hearings were conducted by the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, John Tyler Morgan, an annexationist, whose final report managed to find everyone blameless for the revolution except the queen. Many in the Senate disagreed, and the House censured Stevens and passed a resolution opposing annexation.
With their goal of annexation stalled, the leaders of the provisional government decided to form a republic, while waiting for a more opportune political climate. Meanwhile, vast tracks of Hawaiian land (including Pearl Harbor) were taken from their rightful owners without compensation by the new government and traded to the United States in exchange for a reduction of the sugar tariff. The United States Navy began to study how they would use the "Unsinkable Battleship Hawaii" in its Pacific commanding location.
The new provisional government drafted a constitution and declared it law by proclamation -- the very act for which they had forced Lili`uokalani from her throne. The new constitution required voters to swear allegiance to the republic, and thousands of Native Hawaiians refused, out of loyalty to queen and country. Foreigners who had sided with the revolution were allowed to vote. Property requirements and other qualifications were so strict that relatively few Hawaiians and absolutely no Asians could vote.
On July 4, 1894, (again pandering to the United States in the hopes of eventual annexation) Sanford Dole announced the inauguration of the Republic of Hawaii, and declared himself president.
Unwilling to give up, many Hawaiians and other royalists accumulated arms for a counterrevolution to restore the monarchy. In the January 1895 uprising, led again by Robert Wilcox, the royalists were forced by government troops to retreat into the valleys behind Honolulu, and after 10 days of fighting, most of them, including Wilcox, were captured.
The republic's prize catch was Queen Lili`uokalani. A search revealed a cache of arms buried in the flower garden of her home at Washington Place (now the state Governor's mansion). She was arrested Jan. 16, 1895, exactly two years from the date the American troops landed in support of the revolution. Imprisoned in a corner room on the second story of `Iolani Palace, she was guarded day and night, allowed only one attendant and no visitors. The windows of her room were painted over to prevent her from seeing out, and her supporters from seeing in. The paint remains on those windows to this very day. Lili`uokalani passed the long hours writing music (Lili`uokalani wrote many of Hawaii's most popular traditional tunes) and quilting.
Lili`uokalani was given a document of abdication to sign and was led to believe that, if she refused, several of her followers were to be shot for treason. She wrote, "For myself, I would have chosen death rather than to have signed it; but it was represented to me that by my signing this paper all the persons who had been arrested, all my people now in trouble by reason of their love and loyalty toward me, would be immediately released ... the stream of blood ready to flow unless it was stayed by my pen." It is worth noting that the Hawaiian Constitution did not provide a legal process for the Monarch's abdication and without the approval of the legislature, the document had no legal validity.
Despite Lili`uokalani's signing of the abdication document, Wilcox and four others were sentenced to death. Many other royalists received long prison sentences and heavy fines. Lili`uokalani noted, ''Their sentences were passed the same as though my signature had not been obtained. That they were not executed is due solely to a consideration which has been officially stated: 'Word came from the United States that the execution of captive rebels would militate against annexation.'" In other words, the Americans who had stolen the government were still lying to the queen to get what they wanted, stayed from killing Wilcox and the others only by intercession from the United States, which was still trying to figure out what its own role was in the fiasco.
The queen was charged with misprision of treason and was given the maximum sentence of five years imprisonment at hard labor and a $5,000 fine. Out of fear that seeing their Queen at hard labor would trigger yet another armed revolt among the populace, Lili`uokalani remained a prisoner in the palace for eight months, then under house arrest until 1896.
Upon gaining her freedom, Lili`uokalani went to Washington, armed with documents signed by many Hawaiians asking President Cleveland to reinstate their queen. But it was now too late for him to be of further help. His term was over and he could do no more. Grover Cleveland wrote: "I am ashamed of the whole affair."
His successor, President William McKinley, sent the annexation treaty to the Senate.
Hawaiians submitted a petition to Congress with 29,000 signatures opposing annexation, and petitions to the Republic of Hawaii, asking that annexation be put to a public vote. They were never permitted to vote on the issue.
In all, three separate Treaties of Annexation were sent to congress. All three failed. In the end, Hawaii was annexed by a joint resolution of Congress. But Congress did not have the legal authority to do so. A joint resolution of Congress has no legal standing in a foreign country, which is what Hawaii remained, even under the provisional government.
Sovereignty of Hawaii was formally transferred to the United States at ceremonies at `Iolani Palace on Aug. 12, 1898. Sanford Dole spoke as the newly appointed governor of the Territory of Hawaii. The Hawaiian anthem, ''Hawaii Pono `I" -- with words written by King Kalakaua -- was played at the Hawaiian flag was lowered, and replaced by the American flag and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The Hawaiian people had lost their land, their monarchy and now their independence. The American plantation owners were now free of the import tariffs; small matter that the Hawaiian people had lost their independence along the way.
Even this act of transfer was illegal under international, law. Beginning with Dewey's attack at Manila, the international rules of war went into effect, with Spain and the United States as belligerents and Hawaii as a neutral nation. Under the Hague convention of 1907, the United States government was required to enforce Hawaiian law rather than its own, but failed to do so.
By annexing Hawaii without a treaty, then stationing military forces on the islands, the US, while a belligerent nation in wartime, committed an unprovoked incursion into a neutral nation and established military forces there. This is what Hitler did across Europe and Japan did in China. This is an act of war under anyone's laws.
The following year saw the death of the beautiful young Princess. Ka'iulani, heir to the Hawaiian throne, at age 23. With her died the last hopes for a restoration of the Hawaiian monarchy. To this day, questions still linger as to exactly how and why such a young and healthy woman died. Lili`uokalani remained an indomitable spirit, honored and revered by her people as a queen to the end. She died in 1917, at the age of 79, still waiting for justice.
Hawaii remained a territorial possession of the United States for many years. The military presence illegally begun during the Spanish American war continued to grow, including the Naval base at Pearl Harbor. The plantation families grew richer and richer, while the original Hawaiian people were marginalized, often homeless in their own homelands. The animosity between Hawaiians and the Americans exploded into public view during the celebrated Ala Moana Rape case, in which famed lawyer Clarence Darrow argued for the defense. The thin veneer of a tropic paradise, crafted for the emerging tourist industry was shattered in moments by the anger shown on both sides.
In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt decided that the best way to get a reluctant America into a war with Hitler was to "back door" a war by luring Japan into an attack against the United States. By cutting off oil exports to Japan, Roosevelt forced Japan to invade the Dutch East Indies, and by placing the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl, Roosevelt made an attack at Pearl the mandatory first move in any military move by Japan in any direction.
Following WW2, Hawaii was placed on the list of non self-governing territories by the United Nations, with the United States as trustee, under Article 73. Under Article 73 of the UN charter, the status of a territory can only be changed by a special vote, (called a plebiscite) held among the inhabitants of the territory. That plebiscite is required to have three choices on the ballot. The first choice is to become a part of the trustee nation. In Hawaii's case that meant to become a state. The second choice was to remain a territory. And the third choice, required by article 73 of the UN Charter, was the option for independence. For Hawaii, that meant no longer being a territory of the United States and returning to being an independent sovereign nation.
In 1959 Hawaii's plebiscite vote was held, and again, the United States government bent the rules. The plebiscite ballot only had the choice between statehood and remaining a territory. No option for independence appeared on the ballot as was required under the UN charter. Cheated out of their independence yet again, Hawaiians voted for the lesser of two evils and became the 50th state.
The history of Hawaii's transition from sovereign nation to a state of the United States is a history of crime after crime after crime, of policy put forward by proclamation and reinforced by American weapons of war, of military incursion, of violations of international law and treaties then in effect. None of the events which turned Hawaii from a sovereign nation into a part of the US were legal and above board. It was robbery, by anyone's definition of the word, with the justifications and excuses made up after the fact to make the affair palatable to an American public that still wanted to view its government as fair, just, and honorable.
In 1988, a study by the United States Justice Department concluded that Congress did not have the authority to annex Hawaii by joint resolution. The ersatz annexation was a cover for the military occupation of the Hawaiian islands for purposes related to the Spanish American war.
On November 23, 1993, President Clinton signed United States Public Law 103-150, which not only acknowledged the illegal actions committed by the United States in the overthrow of the legitimate government of Hawaii, but also that the Hawaiian people never surrendered their sovereignty. The latter is the most important part of United States Public Law 103-150 for it makes it quite clear that the Hawaiian people never legally ceased to be a sovereign separate independent nation. There is no argument that can change that fact.
United States Public Law 103-150, despite its polite language, is an official admission that the government of the United States illegally occupies the territory of the Hawaiian people.
In 1999, the United Nations confirmed that the plebiscite vote that led to Hawaii's statehood was in violation of article 73 of the United Nations' charter. The Hawaii statehood vote, under treaty then in effect, was illegal and non-binding. (The same, by the way, is true of the Alaska plebiscite).
In a world where nations are as governed by laws as are men, Hawaii is not and has never legally been a part of the United States. Hawaii was stolen from the Hawaiian people, and many of them want it back.
Unable to argue against these legal issues calling into question the legitimacy of the United States presence in Hawaii, supporters of the Status Quo have put forward various arguments to justify why, even if the Hawaiian people were deprived of their government and lands illegally, that things should stay just the way they are today. Most of these excuses are questionable at best.
One of the oddest excuses is that Hawaiian independence would cause the society in the islands to fall apart. But the truth is that a new government of an independent Hawaii is well motivated to NOT change anything; to keep the industry, tourism, hi-tech, indeed all of Hawaiian life pretty much as it is now, and to displace or disrupt as little as possible. Extremists and obvious fear-mongers aside, a transition of Hawaii from a state to an independent nation would change to whom rent checks and taxes are sent, and little else. Even the flag of Hawaii would likely remain the same. Hawaii would lose the massive and complex bureaucracy that connects Hawaii to the mainland, and Hawaii's citizens would be free of their shares of the $7 trillion dollar federal debt and its ruinous interest, but who would mourn that loss?
The US military bases would still be there. The United States would want that. So would the government of an independent Hawaii. People would want to continue running their businesses. The government of an independent Hawaii would want exactly the same thing. Confusion and discord harm tourism. A new government of an independent Hawaii is well motivated to keep the islands serene.

All of this having been said, I think that what it really comes down to is whether one believes in justice or not. It's easy to support justice that works to your own favor, but the true test of moral citizenship is when you uphold justice even when it is a personal inconvenience.
If one holds that the government of the United States is obliged to obey the laws and the UN charter it freely signed, then the status of the Hawaiian people as a distinct and sovereign nation is beyond debate. This makes the United States in Hawaii, as Gandhi described the British in India, acting as the masters in someone else's home.

I'm Average Joe
mailto:OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Hawaii is not legally a state! Part ONE

2006-01-23T17:39:00.000-05:00

It is easy to find the courage necessary to support a moral position if that position benefits oneself. True moral courage, however, is proven when one chooses to support that which is morally and ethically right even when such a position is to one's one detriment. The people of the United States may just find themselves in such a position right now, forced to choose between a moral and ethical position that carries with it the potential for "inconvenience", or supporting the status quo and having to admit to themselves that they are not the champions of justice they imagine themselves to be. By the end of this posting, you will know for yourself which one you are…

Most people know that Hawaii is a state, the 50th state of the United States of America. Most people, including those who live in Hawaii, accept that statement as a fact. But the reality is that our world is bound by the rule of law, and legally speaking, the truth may be quite different!
The truth is that each and every step along Hawaii's path from sovereign and independent nation, to annexed territory, to statehood, was accomplished in violation of laws and treaties then in effect, without regard to the wishes of the Hawaiian people. Many people, including President Grover Cleveland, opposed the annexation of Hawaii.
But in the end, simple greed and military interest overrode any concerns or moral right and legality. Hawaii's legitimate government was toppled using threat of American military force. Hawaii was stolen from her people for the benefit of wealthy American plantation owners and military interests, and the justifications for the crime were invented after-the-fact.
Hawaii's government was overthrown on Jan. 17, 1893, by a relatively small group of men, most of them American by birth or heritage, who seized control of the Islands with the backing of American troops sent ashore from a warship in Honolulu Harbor. To this "superior force of the United States of America," Queen Lili`uokalani yielded her throne, under protest, in order to avoid bloodshed, trusting that the United States government would right the wrong that had been done to her and the Hawaiian people.
Who were this group of American men? Why did they overthrow the government? The answers are businessmen and Sugar!
Sugar was by far the principal support of the islands, profits and prosperity hinged on favorable treaties with the United States, Hawaiian sugar's chief market, creating powerful economic ties. The plantation owners were, for the most part, the descendents of the original missionary families who had brought religion to the islands in the wake of the whaling ships. As ownership of private property came to the islands, the missionary families wound up owning a great deal of it!
Hawaii has little in the way of mineral wealth, so the land was useful only for agriculture. In a day when unrefridgerated sailing ships were the only means to ship produce to the US Mainland, sugar, and to a lesser extent coconuts, were the only produce which could survive the duration of the sea voyage.
But the United States had, in 1826, recognized Hawaii as a sovereign nation in its own right, and imposed the usual import tariffs on sugar coming from the islands. This cut into the profits of the sugar plantations. Indeed, being American citizens themselves, the plantation owners were rankled by the fact that the US government actually made more profit from their sugar then the plantation owners themselves did! To evade the tariff, it became necessary to the plantation owners that Hawaii cease being a separate and sovereign nation.
In 1887, during the reign of Lili`uokalani' s brother, King Kalakaua, a group of planters and businessmen, seeking to control the kingdom politically as well as economically, formed a secret organization, the Hawaiian League. Membership (probably never over 400, compared to the 40,000 Native Hawaiians in the kingdom) was predominantly American, led by Lorrin A. Thurston, a lawyer and missionary grandson.
Their goal, was to "reform" the monarchy. But what was "reform" to the Americans was treason to the people of Hawaii, who loved and respected their monarchs.
It is important to recall that, unlike the hereditary rulers of Europe, Hawaii's last two Kings were actually elected to that office by democratic vote. Kalakaua and his sister Lili`uokalani were well-educated, intelligent, skilled in social graces, and equally at home with Hawaiian traditions and court ceremony. Above all, they were deeply concerned about the well-being of the Hawaiian people and maintaining the independence of the kingdom. They saw no reason to relinquish their independence solely to make already rich Americans richer still. Another interesting note is that the Hawaiian Royal Palace (see Photo) Iolani Palace, which was the home of the Hawaiian monarchs had electricity and telephones ten years before the American White House did.
The Hawaiian League's more radical members favored the king's abdication, and one even proposed assassination. But they decided that the king would remain on the throne but with his power sharply limited by a new constitution of their making. Killing him would be a last resort if he refused to agree. Many Hawaiian League members belonged to a volunteer militia, the Honolulu Rifles, which was officially in service to the Hawaiian government, but was secretly the Hawaiian League's military arm.
Kalakaua was compelled to accept a new Cabinet composed of league members, who presented their constitution to him for his signature at `Iolani Palace. The reluctant king argued and protested, but finally signed the document, which became known as the Bayonet Constitution, as in "signed at the point of". As one Cabinet member noted, "Little was left to the imagination of the hesitating and unwilling sovereign, as to what he might expect in the event of his refusal to comply with the demands made upon him."
The Bayonet Constitution greatly curtailed the king's power, making him a mere figurehead. It placed the actual executive power in the hands of the Cabinet, whose members could no longer be dismissed by the king, only by the Legislature. Amending this constitution was also the exclusive prerogative of the Legislature. The Bayonet Constitution's other purpose was to remove the Native Hawaiian majority's dominance at the polls and in the Legislature. The righteous reformers were determined to save the Hawaiians from self-government.
The privilege of voting was no longer limited to citizens of the kingdom, but was extended to foreign residents -- provided they were American or European. Asians were excluded -- even those who had become naturalized citizens. The House of Nobles, formerly appointed by the king, would now be elected, and voters and candidates for it had to meet a high property ownership or income requirement -- which excluded most of the Native Hawaiians. While they could still vote for the House of Representatives, to do so they had to swear to uphold the Bayonet Constitution.
The Hawaiians strenuously opposed the diminution of their voice in governing their own country and resented the reduction of the monarch's powers and the manner in which the Bayonet Constitution had been forced on him. Hawaiians, Chinese and Japanese petitioned the king to revoke the constitution. The self-styled Reform Cabinet responded that only an act of the Legislature could do this - though their new constitution had never been put to a vote.
In 1889 a young part-Hawaiian named Robert W. Wilcox staged an uprising to overthrow the Bayonet Constitution. He led some 80 men, Hawaiians and Europeans, with arms purchased by the Chinese, in a predawn march to `Iolani Palace with a new constitution for Kalakaua to sign. The king was away from the palace, and the Cabinet called out troops who forcibly put down the insurrection. Tried for conspiracy, Wilcox was found not guilty by a jury of Native Hawaiians, who considered him a folk hero.
On Jan. 20, 1891, King Kalakaua died of kidney disease at age 54, leaving his sister, Lili`uokalani' as Queen of Hawaii, who childless herself, declared the young Princess Ka`iulani her successor to the throne. Just 7 months later, Lili`uokalani' s husband, John Dominis, an American sea captain's son, also died, a mysterious death due to an odd stomach ailment.
The next year, Lorrin Thurston and a group of like-minded men, mostly of American blood, formed an Annexation Club, plotting the overthrow of the queen and annexation to the United States. Thurston went to Washington to promote annexation, and received an encouraging message from President Benjamin Harrison: "You will find an exceedingly sympathetic administration here."
On Jan. 14, 1893 the queen attempted to proclaim a new constitution restoring power to the throne and rights to the Native Hawaiian people.
Alerted earlier of the queen's intention by two of her Cabinet members, the Annexation Club sprang into action. A 13-member Committee of Safety was chosen to plan the overthrow of the queen and the establishment of a provisional government. As they plotted revolution, they claimed that the queen, by proposing to alter the constitution, had committed ''a revolutionary act."
The American warship USS Boston was in port at Honolulu Harbor. With an eye toward landing troops, Lorrin Thurston and two others called upon the American minister in Hawaii, John L. Stevens, an avowed annexationist. Stevens assured them he would not protect the queen, and that he would land troops from the Boston if necessary "to protect American lives and property." He also said that if the revolutionaries were in possession of government buildings and actually in control of the city, he would recognize their provisional government. It is important to note that Stevens lacked any legal standing to recognize a new government on behalf of the United States.
The next day, Jan. 15, Thurston told the queen's Cabinet that the Committee of Safety would challenge her, he also delivered a letter to Minister Stevens requesting him to land troops from the Boston, stating that "the public safety is menaced and life and property are in peril." This was a critical point. The "public safety" was threatened only by the Committee of Safety itself. Stevens had no legal basis to send American troops ashore in force. It was, by any definition of the word, an invasion using American troops, in order to overthrow a foreign government.
The Committee of Safety offered the presidency of the provisional government to Sanford B. Dole, another of the "mission boys," as Thurston called them. Rather than abolishing the monarchy, Dole favored replacing the queen with a regency holding the throne in trust until Princess Ka'iulani came of age. He accepted the presidency and submitted his resignation as a justice in Hawaii's Supreme Court.
On the morning of Jan. 17, Dole gave Stevens a letter from Thurston, asking for his recognition of the provisional government, which they planned to proclaim at 3 that afternoon. The American minister told Dole, "I think you have a great opportunity."
On Jan. 17, 1893, at dusk, Queen Lili`uokalani yielded her throne under protest, with these words:
"I, Lili`uokalani, by the grace of God and under the constitution of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Queen, do hereby solemnly protest against any and all acts done against myself and the constitutional government of the Hawaiian Kingdom by certain persons claiming to have established a Provisional Government of and for this Kingdom.
"That I yield to the superior force of the United States of America, whose Minister Plenipotentiary, His Excellency John L. Stevens, has caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu and declared that he would support the said Provisional Government.
"Now, to avoid any collision of armed forces and perhaps loss of life, I do, under this protest, and impelled by said forces, yield my authority until such time as the Government of the United States shall, upon the facts being presented to it, undo the action of its representative and reinstate me in the authority which I claim as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands."
Note that the queen surrendered Hawaii's sovereignty not to the revolutionaries but to the "superior force of the United States of America". This firmly put the United States in the legal position of having invaded and overthrown the government of a foreign nation without provocation.
The provisional government took over the palace and declared martial law. Later, at its request, Minister Stevens proclaimed Hawaii a temporary protectorate and raised the American flag over government buildings. He wrote the State Department urging annexation, saying, "The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it."
The provisional government had chartered a steamer, and Thurston and four others hastened to Washington with a treaty of annexation in hand. The queen's envoys were refused permission to sail on the same ship, and by the time they reached Washington, President Harrison had already sent the annexation treaty to the Senate.
But Harrison was in his last days in power, and Grover Cleveland, who replaced him, withdrew the treaty, alarmed by the legal ramifications of what had happened.
President Cleveland sent to Honolulu special commissioner James H. Blount, former chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Blount's job was to investigate the circumstances of the revolution, the role Minister Stevens and American troops played in it, and to determine the feelings of the people of Hawaii toward the provisional government. Blount immediately ordered the troops back to their ship and the American flag taken down and replaced by the Hawaiian flag.

Please join us tomorrow for the rest of this interesting tale.

I'm Average Joe
mailto:OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Communicating with the Dead

2006-01-20T11:04:00.000-05:00

If Cyndi Wallace is a psychic, as she claims to be, why does she include this on her voice-mail greeting: "Leave me your name, area code and phone number and I will return your call as soon as..." Shouldn't she know that information, I mean, if she IS psychic???
Miss Wallace, a $95-an-hour medium who says she can read the future and channel the dead, knows she is an easy mark for the cheap shot and is good humored about it and often laughs right along with the jokes. It is tempting, perhaps comforting, to dismiss psychics as a sideshow, as the gypsy cousins to the three-card-monte. To do so may maintain our tactile boundaries and some sense of control, yet if we do dismiss this outright, what might we be missing out on? Let’s look at this a bit more closely…

Twenty-eight percent of Americans (up 10% from 1990) believe that people can hear from or communicate mentally with the dead, a new Gallup poll reports. Another 26% aren't sure, but won't rule it out. Half of all Americans believe in extrasensory perception. And everyone from Hillary Clinton to Nancy Reagan to Adolf Hitler are known to have consulted with psychics, famous and obscure.
"These are not the Shirley MacLaines of the world channeling 3,000-year-old Assyrian warriors," says Tom Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, which reports that roughly one in three Americans believe that they have personally communicated with the dead. "Clearly this is a phenomenon that is fairly common, and particularly common to those who have lost someone very significant to them."
"People not only want it to be true, in many cases they need it to be true. It's the feel-good syndrome," says longtime skeptic and magician James Randi, 72, whose standing offer of $1 million to psychics who can independently verify their "magic" has gone unclaimed for years. "Everyone wants to be reassured about loved ones who have passed. Just once I want to find a spiritualist who says, 'Oh, well, sorry. She went to hell and I can't reach her.' "
TV psychic John Edward tells viewers of his popular cable show Crossing Over with John Edward that the "love bonds" created on Earth "stay with us after we cross over."
But is going to a psychic medium the only contact we hear about with the dead? Certainly not, some communication is very subtle other is often not believed accept by those for whom “it was intended.”
For example take these three cases. At 34, Michael Owen, was a recovering alcoholic. His mother Donna was grateful he was attending AA meetings and holding down a steady job as a boat mechanic. But after six months of sobriety Michael gave in to temptation and was killed in a car accident. Two months later in a gift shop Donna believes she felt an emotional connection to Michael. She says she was standing next to a rack of porcelain cups with imprinted names from A-Z. Off to one side were two cups. Imprinted on one was "I love you mom" and the other one said "Michael." Donna felt as if Michael was letting her know that it was okay. There were several other signs of communicating--one of which was somewhat unsettling. Exactly one year after Michael's death, Donna says she heard his voice on her answering machine. The message was supposedly recorded at 6:33. The tag-voice on the machine said "Saturday, 6:33" – This was the exact time that Michael had died one year earlier. She then heard Michael's voice. He said only two words "follow me." She’s not sure what it means but does believe it was her son talking to her. Donna's experience resonates with thousands of other parents who believe their deceased children are in contact with them.
Then there is the case of Sharon Throop, who believes her daughter Wendy has appeared to her several times. Wendy was a freshman in college when she became a victim of a date rape. Shortly thereafter, Wendy became depressed and tragically committed suicide. Wendy was only 19 years old. Sharon, Wendy's mother, was devastated and spent the days after her daughter's death in an emotional fog. It was then that Sharon believes Wendy came to her in several visions. Later that year at a neighbor's holiday Christmas party, one of the neighbors told Bill that a friend claimed to have had a sighting of Wendy just weeks after she died.
Finally, let’s look at the case of Judge Kilty. Judge and Georgia Kilty were married for eleven years and had two daughters, Beth 7 and Jessi 4. On the night of May14, 2002 Georgia was driving the girls home from dance class when their car was struck by another and the three died. Judge was a basket case for weeks after the accident, he even purchased a gun and planned to kill himself. The pistol loaded he seated himself on the couch and placed the gun in his mouth when he heard the voices of children coming from his kitchen. Carefully he placed the gun down on the coffee table and went to the kitchen and there found nothing. Returning to the couch he picked up the gun and again heard voices. This time he clearly made out the voice of his youngest daughter saying, “Daddy, no. Please don’t.” This was followed by the voice of his eldest daughter who said. “Don’t be sad, Daddy. It’s OK, we’re all OK. Mommy is here and Grammy and Pop Pop and lots of family. It’s not your time yet, Daddy. We will wait here for you. We love you.” Judge broke down in tears and within days was doing much better. He destroyed the gun, reopened his video store and although he misses his family he knows that when it is his time he will be with them again.

Judge, Sharon and Donna will continue to find solace in the messages they believe are from their children. But regardless of whether spirits are attempting to communicate with us, we are trying to communicate with them: parents to deceased children; children to deceased parents; spouses to deceased spouses. Skeptics and believers alike say it is this love - and love lost - that drives our undying desire to talk to the dead. Whatever is the reason one thing is sure, we truly do live in a weird world!
I’m Average Joe
mailto:OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com

Mysterious Beast of East Texas

2006-01-19T15:09:00.000-05:00

A man in Harrison County snapped the picture shown below just a few months ago. It was shown on a local news program in Taylor Texas and hundreds of views logged online to express their opinion of just what the creature was. The answers varied, everything from a Peruvian hairless dog, to a naked fox, to an Australian dingo.
"Looks like a hyena or a greyhound, a messed up dog, or a horrible dog," says Taylor JC Student Lyndon Gilford.
"I would say it is a cross between a jackal and a grey hound, if that is possible" said one animal expert upon viewing the photo.
"It is certainly an ugly animal, I don't want to be mean and I don’t know what kind of creature it is, maybe some type of a horse," says another.
"It looks kind of messed up," said yet another.
Some viewers e-mailed claiming that he photo was that of the famed mythic (?) animal called "a Chupacabra". James Wright, a zoonosis vet with the Texas Department of State Health Services doubts the photo of this animal is a Chupacabra.
"Yep. You see, if I spot this out in the country side I’d feel it is a canine and not something from outer space," says Wright. He thinks the animal is a type of dog or coyote suffering from severe mange. "Most probably from demodectic mange," says James Wright, “it looks like it’s having a real bad hair day”. He says demodectic mange causes the hair of dogs to fall out very badly.
Wright says this creature closely resembles one found in near Lufkin in Angelina County a few months ago. Experts believe it was a canine with severe mange. So for Wright the mystery has been solved, he says, the animal from Harrison county is a canine, but you have to decide for yourself. But before you make any decisions take a look at this next item:

Over the last few years I have heard stories like the one above and seen photos like that small one above. They all purport to be of a mysterious dog-like creature. I am now able to report that this weekend, one of these animals was killed in the East Texas town of Tyler.
It seems that two brothers were out hunting squirrels when they were surprised by a very similar animal to that mentioned above. The brothers, good hunters both, shot and killed it. On closer examination it appears to have heavy leathery skin, long sharp teeth and fangs, and hind legs longer by a good deal than its front legs. One of the brothers, Kolby Russell, said this isn't his first run in with the creature.
"I chased it a couple times earlier, about a month ago, and my friends didn't believe me. After we shot it, I finally showed them and now they do believe me." The question still remains, is it just a mangy dog?
Plain folks and experts both can’t seem to agree on that, some suggest it is only a stray dog with mange, others that it is a dog/coyote mix with mange while still others say that it is something new and never seen before."I've seen mange before, this don’t look like it to me. And besides, he ain’t no dog, no normal dog, just you look at him. He has a body kind of built like a coyote, but he's real skinny", says the other brother, Coty Russell. In the past, East Texans have often seen this and perhaps similar creatures and reported them to police and news outlets. Most thought the animals that they spotted were just wild dogs with mange or a coyote crossbreed. Now, after viewing the remains of the animal, some are beginning to agree with Marge Higgle who says, “I’m no scientist or vet or nothing but I believe what them boys done killed was a Chupacabra.”
What exactly is this mythical (?) Mexican creature, the Chupacabra?. Mike Whatts of the CWC (The Chupacabra Watch Company), who has himself been on numerous expidetions trying to capture the creature, tells us that, “the Chupacabra is a creature said to inhabit parts of the Americas. It is associated particularly with Puerto Rico, where it was first reported, Mexico, and the United States, especially in the latter's Latin American communities. The name, which translates literally from Spanish as ‘goat-sucker’, comes from its reported habit of attacking and drinking the blood of livestock. Physical descriptions of the creature vary. Sightings began in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s, and have since been reported as far north as the Carolinas and as far south as Chile.”

So what have we got here, a mangy dog or a mythical beast? I really don’t know myself but it sure is more proof that ours is a truly weird world! Some argue that the chupacabra may be a real creature, mainstream scientists and experts generally contend that the chupacabra is only a legendary creature, or at best a type of urban legend based on some miss identified animal.
The creature the Russell boys shot has been handed over to Angelina County authorities who are going run a series of test to determine what it is and what to do with it next. I hope you will join us next time.

I’m Average Joe

mailto:OurWeirdWorld@gmail.com