Saturday, August 27, 2011

Mars "Cricket"

"I have recently taken an interest in the anomalies and such like from the Mars Rover photos," says Rob Clay. "I decided to play a game of "spot the difference" with photos taken at the same location, my theory being simple: if something was present in one photo and not in another taken at the same location [at around the same time], then it must have 'moved'.

"I have found something very interesting and shows that there is life on Mars; not a big creature by any means, but it does appear to have legs and look like an insect. I have called it a 'cricket'.

"In this photo, in the lower right-hand quarter, is a small area of sand, and perched on this is my 'cricket'. In this photo the cricket is missing!

"At first I thought that the upright pipe might be obscuring it, but if you relate [the 'cricket's'] position to the rock above it (shaped a bit like the Star Trek emblem), it is definitely missing, therefore it has moved. The address for the raw photos is http://marsrover.nasa.gov/gallery/all/spirit_n1861.html

"Can we name the cricket Robert after me, please?"

Rob, if we could prove it was a cricket and I was in charge of naming such things, I would certainly name it after you. So what do you think, readers? Has Rob spotted a critter on Mars? Other possibilities include something light (and not alive) that was blown away by the wind before the second picture was taken. Or the dark spot could be a photographic flaw or speck of dust on the camera lens. Then again, perhaps it is Marscricketitus Robertus.


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Paranormal News and Views

Up-to-the-minute reports of paranormal activity and news from around the world

August 23, 2011

GHOSTS, HAUNTED PLACES AND POLTERGEISTS:

Southside Saloon has long, possibly haunted history
Chattanooga business owner Shane Hendrix recently purchased the restaurant formerly known as The Red Lantern and found out the building has a long, unique history. "My understanding was that it was originally built as a saloon and bordello," Southside Saloon owner Hendrix said. Hendrix said there are supposedly three ghosts, one of whom employee Darlene Wallace has named George...
(Also read: Another Haunted Restaurant)

Haunted History Tour brothers report "extreme paranormal activity"
They did their homework before entering into the possibly haunted building in Old Town Pocatello last Monday, knowing that years ago someone had overdosed on drugs, never to step foot onto Main Street again...

Thought to be possessed by ghost, man gets more earthly diagnosis
A 65-year-old man in Tainan who shouted, yelled, punched and kicked his way to sleep every night scared his family to the point it thought he was possessed by a ghost. But after repeated consultations with gods at local temples were unable to cure the man, his family decided to bring him to Tainan Municipal Hospital...
(Also read: Exorcism in Russia)

CREATURES:

Reindeer herder finds remains of baby mammoth in Russia's Arctic
A reindeer herder in Russia's Arctic has stumbled on the prehistoric remains of a baby woolly mammoth poking out of the permafrost, local officials said Friday. The herder said the carcass was as perfectly preserved as the 40,000-year-old mammoth calf Lyuba discovered in the same remote region four years ago, authorities said, adding that an expedition had set off hoping to confirm the "sensational" find...

Idaho - Bear Lake Hot Springs
Utah Bigfoot: Last week I met a man at Dave's Bigfoot Show who related an experience he had up near Bear Lake several years ago. I asked him to write down his experience so that I could go and make a photograph later this fall. Here is his account...
(Also read: Bear Lake Cryptid)

Alternative info on the orang pendek
While browsing the internet and looking for folk art of Indonesian Nagas, I came across an art dealer's site which displayed this little woodcarving of a "Dwarf" (Pygmy)from the Banyuwangi region of Java: and the Banyuwangis claim to have been the ancestors of Balinese art...


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Paranormal News and Views

CREATURES:

Paranormal investigation: From Bigfoot to aliens
If legends and even many eyewitness accounts are to be believed, since ancient times we have shared our planet with various "man-beasts" - monsters that are more or less in our image. While monsters are often consigned to ancient legend and literary fiction, many are held to be in some sense real. Such paranormal beings (those beyond the normal range of science and human experience) include supernatural ones, such as the werewolf, as well as others (like the Yowie, Australia's version of Bigfoot) that, if they indeed exist, could be perfectly natural creatures...

Possible twist revealed in the 'Sierra Kills' Bigfoot incident
Mike Rugg of the Bigfoot Discovery Museum is discussing the Sierra Kills episode and reveals a tale told to him by a customer not long after the news broke on the incident. Supposedly it involves hunters who killed two black bear (an adult and a juvenile) on the same day and in the approximate area where the 'Sierra Kills' incident occurred...

Long-necked sea serpents in the Viking age
In his 1555 work History of the Northern Peoples, Olaus Magnus gives the premier description of the Norwegian sea serpent: Those who sail up along the coast of Norway to trade or to fish, all tell the remarkable story of how a serpent of fearsome size, 200 feet long and 20 feet wide, resides in rifts and caves outside Bergen...

TIME AND SPACE:

Comet Elenin won't kill us, says NASA
You may have seen the scary headlines. You may have read those alarming emails. But do you believe it? Just in case, NASA has issued the facts about a comet called Elenin. And no, these aren't the "facts" doomsayers will tell you...

EARTH MYSTERIES:

Mel Waters and the Devil's Holes
Somewhere in the wilds of Washington State is a bizarre geographic anomaly that locals believe may well be a gateway into another dimension. While the legend of the Devil's Hole allegedly goes back for decades… if not centuries… the public at large did not become aware of the phenomenon until 1997, when legendary radio host and paranormal enthusiast, Art Bell, invited a man named Mel Waters to be interviewed on his globally syndicated radio program Coast to Coast AM...
(Also read: Mysterious Tunnels)

PARANORMAL MEDIA:

Spirit Voices
Spirit Voices is most certainly not your average book about chain-rattling spooks, shrieking specters and things that go bump in the night. Rather, it's a very readable, highly engaging, and thoughtful study of one man's quest to seek out the truth about life-after-death, the nature and heart of the phenomenon, and its reported interactions with our plane of reality...

Review: The Bigfoot Hunter: Still Searching
Paranormal documentaries are just about a dime a dozen in todays world and finding a good one can be quite difficult. Luckily I had the opportunity recently to check out an early screening of the excellent film The Bigfoot Hunter: Still Searching. The documentary tells the story of Timothy Holmes founder of Southern Tier Bigfoot Watch and the Who Forted? Gang, in an earlier incarnation known as GHI or Ghost Hunters Incorporated, who joined him in the woods of southern New York in order to hunt the elusive cryptid...


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Best Ghost Video: Colonial Park Cemetery Ghost

This video was shot on December 31, 2008 in Colonial Park Cemetery, Savannah Georgia by 17-year-old Jesse Greathouse. It shows what appears to be a small child running in the distance in the cemetery. He appears gray, either due to the lighting or his clothing. He then appears to leap into a tree, then drop down and vanish. Jesse says he did not manipulate the tape in any way, and a special-effects expert says that it doesn't look like the video was faked.

Read a review.


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Freaky Phone Calls

Telephones are little more than plastic, wiring and electronic circuitry... but do they sometimes connect with other worlds, other dimensions in a way we cannot explain?

Cell phones, cordless phones, telephones.... These communication tools have become indispensable parts of our daily lives. With them we can connect with just about anyone anywhere from virtually anywhere. Voices, conversations and the business of every day moving at the speed of light on microwaves, along wires, through fiber optics, across the sky, under the ocean and sometimes into space and back. Is it possible, however, that these electronic gadgets that we've come to take for granted sometimes make connections beyond what can be logically explained?

Consider these true stories from people who have had unexplained, puzzling and sometimes downright unnerving experiences with their phones.

THE IMPOSSIBLY CLONED CALL

Many years ago, when married to my first husband, I received a telephone call at about 4:20 a.m. It was my elder brother telling me he had just gotten married. The call woke up my husband and I spoke with my brother for about five minutes. I hung up and went back to sleep. About a week or so later, I was visiting at my mother's home and this same brother was there with his wife. I thanked him for calling me... and I got this odd stare and his mouth fell open. He told me he had called our mother, but he had never called me at all. I turned to my mother and she related the entire conversation she had had with him, and then I related the entire conversation I had had with him - and these conversations were literally identical and at the exact same time. - Barbara

THE PHONES THAT CALLED EACH OTHER

This strange incident happened in our home at Christmas. My husband had his cell phone on our dining room table and it was turned off for the evening. My purse was in our library, where my husband was playing a computer game with our daughter. In my purse I had my cell phone turned on. As my husband and daughter were playing, my cell phone rang. My husband picked it up and it said the incoming call was coming in from his cell phone! He thought our son was playing a prank on him and ran into the room we were in and told our son to stop messing around with his cell phone.

We laughed at him and asked him what he was talking about. He said, "Your phone just rang and it said the call was coming in from my phone!"

This is where things get weird! My son and I were both in the same room together talking and neither one of us had left the room. We weren't even in the same room as my husband's cell phone at all. My husband checked his phone and sure enough it was off just as he had left it. We can't figure out how a call came into my phone from his phone when his phone was off and there was certainly no one in the room with his phone! Strange indeed. We were all pretty mystified over the whole incident for sure! - Janine T.

THE PHONE CALL THAT NEVER WAS

My mum usually picks me up from work and she doesn't work far from me. One Tuesday night, we were driving home when I asked her how my dad's computer classes were going. My dad usually attended the computer classes every Tuesday night. She said she didn't know as she hadn't spoken to him about it. She asked me why. I replied, "Well, when I was speaking to him he said he was having some trouble. They had been given three assignments to complete, but he couldn't finish assignment number two as the computer wouldn't 'save as.' I think he eventually managed to do them all though."

"Oh, right." she said. That night, with the conversation with my mum forgotten, I was sitting watching TV, when my dad knocked on my door. He said, "I was speaking to mum earlier about the conversation you had about my computer class. How did you know we had three assignments and I had trouble with the second one?"

Confused, I said, "You told me that on the phone."

"No, I didn't. There is no way you could have known that because I have just come from my computer class. You had the conversation with mum before I went, and what you told mum happened tonight. I couldn't have known we had three assignments as I missed last week's class."

We both just sat there looking at each other trying to figure out how I knew what was going to happen before it did. I was sure we had spoken on the phone about it, but how could we if it hadn't happened? The strange thing is, I can remember my dad telling me what happened on the phone, but I can't recall how, where and when. - Cian B.

Next page: Phone calls from the dead - and more


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Friday, August 26, 2011

The Curious Creature

The most terrifying event to happen in my life yet happened just five years ago sometime in June in 2005 when I was 13. I guess it was one of everyone's worst nightmares: Someone or something living with you unnoticed in your own home.

The place I lived in in suburban Maryland was a condo, and if you turned a corner in the living room you would see a small hallway. At the end of it was my bedroom door, and to the side my bathroom. One late evening right before summer break I was watching a movie in the living room with my parents. I recall that I needed to get something from my bathroom, so I left for a second. The only light on in my house was the one in my room, on my desk.

As I passed by my room, I realized the door was open and the light was on, but what really intrigued me was that I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I approached the door to get a closer look, thinking it was some animal in my room. It was a million times worse! Sitting on my desk, going through my camera case, was this creature. It didn't seem to be looking for anything, but it was pulling things out forcefully, throwing them on the floor. The thing was about the size of a two year old, hunched over, hairless, bald and wrinkled. Its skin was pitch black, like it was burned, and was very thin. I could see how bony it was. It appeared to be shaped like a person and looked like a small human mummy until it turned around.

I gasped and turned to the bathroom, but peered back in to get a brief look because I was feeling bold. It had turned its head to face me, and I could make out long, tear-drop shaped eyes like the ones little green Martians have in cartoons, pitch black. I chickened out and fled into the bathroom, trying to act natural, like I hadn't seen it so it wouldn't come and try to get a closer look at me. I flipped the light switch on in the bathroom and locked the door.

I remember sitting on the floor on the other side of the room, feeling stranded. I did not want to go past my room again. I resorted to calling my mom over. I told my mom that she would promise to do what I asked, no matter how weird it was. I asked her to go into my room, look around, put my camera case on my bed, and report to me. She was gone for five whole minutes. Then she slowly walked to the bathroom. "Have you been keeping birds in your room?" she asked.

I said no. "Well, for a week or so, there's been a weird smell in your room. I didn't say anything about it, though." The past week I had been on a trip to Chicago with some friends. My Mom continued. "Well, when I walked in, your camera case was on the ground and I saw something moving the curtains, something big. But I didn't see it well. It's gone now. It flew out the window. It was probably a bird that got in."

I thanked my mom and went to bed early. I knew it couldn't have been a bird because birds can't open zippers like the one I found open on the camera case. I've never seen it again, but I remember that one night two weeks later I heard some strange noises and felt something moving on my legs while I was going to sleep, and the window was open when I got up. Another day I heard a loud thump coming from my room when I was watching TV and when I came in a book from my bookshelf lay in the middle of the room. I also found an assortment of string and bouncy balls and doodads in a corner of the laundry room, and no one in my family had done it. I still wonder what I saw, and whether anyone else has had an encounter with it. None of my friends have, and I would really like anyone who has seen it to know this - you're not alone!

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Pareidolia, Matrixing, or Simulacrum

Oh, my God -- it's a demon! Oh, wait... no it isn't... it's a rock. The phenomenon of seeing a familiar shape or form in random combinations of shadows and light is known as pareidolia or matrixing, and the thing itself is called a simulacrum. It's very common to see what looks like a face in jagged rocks (like this photo), grass, dirt, water, clouds, flames, clouds of dust, visible gas -- even a pile of crumpled clothing on the couch. (Haven't you put that away yet?)

The human brain seems to be wired to recognize faces. That's why it's so startling to sometimes see them in pictures like this. Although the rock formation is completely random in nature, gosh darn it that looks like a face! It must be a spirit! It's especially disconcerting to some people when the face, again like this one, resembles the traditional depiction of the Devil. It freaks them out.

In fact, look closely at all of the rock in this picture and you'll see several faces. So either we're just seeing things or this wall of rock is seriously haunted. Which do you think is more likely?


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