You can order online via our secure order page:  
CLICK HERE TO ORDER
(https://www.anadynesystems.com/client/fhtml20050304164122187002.htm)

- YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT DEPARTMENT -

When Bad Things Come From ‘Good’ Food

It sounds like a tired joke--but a group of airline employees insist they are in earnest, and they are upset that neither their bosses nor the government will take them seriously.

A flying saucerlike object hovered low over O'Hare International Airport for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon.

Was it an alien spaceship? A weather balloon lost in the airspace over the world's second-busiest airport? A top-secret military craft? Or simply a reflection from lights that played a trick on the eyes?

Officials at United professed no knowledge of the Nov. 7 event--which was reported to the airline by as many as a dozen of its own workers--when the Tribune started asking questions recently. But the Federal Aviation Administration said its air traffic control tower at O'Hare did receive a call from a United supervisor asking if controllers had spotted a mysterious elliptical-shaped craft sitting motionless over Concourse C of the United terminal.

No controllers saw the object, and a preliminary check of radar found nothing out of the ordinary, FAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Isham Cory said.

The FAA is not conducting a further investigation, Cory said. The theory is the sighting was caused by a "weather phenomenon," she said.

The UFO report has sparked some chuckles among controllers in O'Hare tower.

"To fly 7 million light years to O'Hare and then have to turn around and go home because your gate was occupied is simply unacceptable," said O'Hare controller and union official Craig Burzych.

Some of the witnesses, interviewed by the Tribune, said they are upset that neither the government nor the airline is probing the incident.

Whatever the object was, it could have interfered with O'Hare's radar and other equipment, and even created a collision risk, they said.

The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the term that extraterrestrial-watchers nowadays prefer over Unidentified Flying Object) was first seen by a United ramp worker who was directing back a United plane at Gate C17, according to an account the worker provided to the National UFO Reporting Center.

The sighting occurred during daylight, about 4:30 p.m., just before sunset.

All the witnesses said the object was dark gray and well defined in the overcast skies. They said the craft, estimated by different accounts to be 6 feet to 24 feet in diameter, did not display any lights.

Some said it looked like a rotating Frisbee, while others said it did not appear to be spinning. All agreed the object made no noise and it was at a fixed position in the sky, just below the 1,900-foot cloud deck, until shooting off into the clouds.

Witnesses shaken by sighting

"I tend to be scientific by nature, and I don't understand why aliens would hover over a busy airport," said a United mechanic who was in the cockpit of a Boeing 777 that he was taxiing to a maintenance hangar when he observed the metallic-looking object above Gate C17.

"But I know that what I saw and what a lot of other people saw stood out very clearly, and it definitely was not an [Earth] aircraft," the mechanic said.

One United employee appeared emotionally shaken by the sighting and "experienced some religious issues" over it, one co-worker said.

A United manager said he ran outside his office in Concourse B after hearing the report about the sighting on an internal airline radio frequency.

"I stood outside in the gate area not knowing what to think, just trying to figure out what it was," he said. "I knew no one would make a false call like that. But if somebody was bouncing a weather balloon or something else over O'Hare, we had to stop it because it was in very close proximity to our flight operations."

 Some joke, others research

The databases of various UFO-watching groups are full of accounts filed by pilots about sightings of unknown aircraft and anomalies that affected navigational equipment onboard planes.

Whether any of the UFO incidents are real or merely the result of individual perceptions, some experts say the events pose a potential safety risk to pilots and their passengers.

"There have been documented cases where safety appears to have been implicated, and more and more we are coming to the point of view that we are dealing with an intelligent phenomenon," said Richard Haines, science director at the National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena, a private agency.

"We must be proactive before an aircraft goes down," said Haines, a former chief of the Space Human Factors Office at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Haines is investigating the O'Hare incident. He said he has determined that no weather balloons were launched in the vicinity of O'Hare on Nov. 7.

"It's absurd that the military would be conducting aerial test flights" near the airport, Haines said.

All the witnesses to the O'Hare event, who included at least several pilots, said they are certain based on the disc's appearance and flight characteristics that it was not an airplane, helicopter, weather balloon or any other craft known to man.

United denies UFO report

They're not sure what was hanging out for several minutes in the restricted airspace, but they are upset that no one in power has taken the matter seriously.

A United spokeswoman said there is no record of the UFO report. She said United officials do not recall discussion of any such incident.

"There's nothing in the duty manager log, which is used to report unusual incidents," said United spokeswoman Megan McCarthy. "I checked around. There's no record of anything."

The pilots of the United plane being directed back from Gate C17 also were notified by United personnel of the sighting, and one of the pilots reportedly opened a windscreen in the cockpit to get a better view of the object estimated to be hovering 1,500 feet above the ground.

The object was seen to suddenly accelerate straight up through the solid overcast skies, which the FAA reported had 1,900-foot cloud ceilings at the time.

"It was like somebody punched a hole in the sky," said one United employee.

Witnesses said they had a hard time visually tracking the object as it streaked through the dense clouds.

It left behind an open hole of clear air in the cloud layer, the witnesses said, adding that the hole disappeared within a few minutes.

The United employees interviewed by the Tribune spoke on condition of anonymity.

Some said they were interviewed by United officials and instructed to write reports and draw pictures of what they observed, and that they were advised by United officials to refrain from speaking about what they saw.

Federal agency backtracks

Like United, the FAA originally told the Tribune that it had no information on the alleged UFO sighting. But the federal agency quickly reversed its position after the newspaper filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

An internal FAA review of air-traffic communications tapes, a step toward complying with the Tribune request, turned up the call by the United supervisor to an FAA manager in the airport tower, Cory said.

Cory said the weather might have factored into what the witnesses thought they saw.

"Our theory on this is that it was a weather phenomenon," she said. "That night was a perfect atmospheric condition in terms of low [cloud] ceiling and a lot of airport lights. When the lights shine up into the clouds, sometimes you can see funny things. That's our take on it."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The National UFO Reporting Center has posted on their website (http://www.nuforc.org/webreports/053/S53541.html) an interview with one of the witnesses. As stated on their site: "This individual was interviewed, at length, by one of the investigators involved in the follow-up investigation. The investigators were highly impressed with the witness's credentials, and with the accurate description of the event. We deem this witness to be extremely highly credible.

We express our sincere gratitude to this witness for his having shared the information about his sighting with NUFORC, and with his fellow American Citizens. PD))"

"Ok I have been hesitant about talking about this, but after hearing the report on Coast to Coast AM with Mr. Norey I can not be silent. I work for a major airline at OHare, I am a taxi mechanic. I have the job responsibility of moving aircraft under there own power from gate to gate or the hangar complex for maintenance. We also accomplish the engine run-up testing needed. So I hope that does something for establishing a little of credibility for my report. I am still in absolute wonder and amazement at what I saw that afternoon.

"Around 1630 a pilot made a comment on the radio about a circle or disc shaped object hovering over gate C-17 at the C concourse in Chicago. At first we laughed to each other and then the same pilot said again on the radio that is was about 700feet agl (above ground level). The day was overcast with the ceiling being reported at 1600 feet if I remember correctly. I was taxing a Boeing 777 from the Intl Terminal to the Company Hanger on the North side of the Airport. As we passed the C Terminal on the Alpha taxiway we observed a dark gray hazy round object hovering over OHare Intl Airport. Is was definitely over the C Terminal. It was holding very steady and appeared to be trying to stay close to the cloud cover. The radio erupted with chatter about the object and the ATC controller that was handling ground traffic made a few smart comments about the alleged UFO siting above the C terminal.

"We had to continue moving the aircraft to the hangar. After parking I noticed the craft of no longer there but there was an almost perfect circle in the cloud layer were the craft had been. The hole disappeared a few minutes later.

"For the rest of the night there were jokes made on the radio about the sighting."


Special Thanks to Peter Davenport and  the National UFO Reporting Center for taking the time and effort to do follow up investigations and interviews concerning this fascinating UFO sighting. http://www.nuforc.org/

Source: Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-0701010141jan01,1,3957154.
column?track=rss

---

I spent a significant portion of my reading time the past year researching the latest ideas about earthquake prediction. I’ve always been fascinated by reports of earthquake lights and animal behavior foreshadowing a quake. One of my favorite books is “When the Snakes Awake” by Helmut Tributsch. I recently reread it and it prompted me to look into the recent state of earthquake prediction.

My journey took me back to the oldest ideas about earthquake prediction. In the face of the failure to develop a reliable prediction strategy in the U.S., (with a corresponding emphasis on preparedness, instead) other countries have taken a different path – a path nearer to the fringes of science. Lately, those fundamental earthquake prediction ideas are back in the news out of China with a technological twist.

Reuters news article

Snake behavior is now being used as an indicator of a coming quake in southern China. Video cameras transmitting across a broadband Internet connection film captive snakes while experts watch for unusual behavior, such as frenzied attempts to escape.

The more I looked into these “primitive” forms of earthquake sensing, the more reasonable it seemed. Animals are not the only environmental channels we have available to tune in to oncoming quakes. Here are some of my findings over multiple posts.

Scientists have struggled to understand how earthquakes occur. Precisely where? Exactly when? How strong? We know that an earthquake is a movement of the earth’s surface caused by the dislocation of the plates that make up the crust or a release of energy from underground stresses. Today, seismologists know far more about earthquake processes than ever before but still they fail to predict earthquakes with certainty in workable time frames and thousand of people die.

In the 1970’s, scientists were optimistic that earthquake prediction was possible through the warnings from precursors. They thought that foreshocks occurred in a predictable way to be able to tell when the main shock was close. They observed some earthquakes occur when there was a gap in time or space along a fault. Measurements of how fast certain vibration waves passed through the ground seemed to suggest a predictable change occurs prior to an earthquake. When research showed that these techniques only worked sometimes, not nearly all the time, the attitude of seismologists soured on earthquake prediction especially in the U.S.

An article from the journal Science in 1996 was titled “Earthquakes Cannot Be Predicted”. This punctured the balloon of any who thought that earth movements were knowable. The expert consensus was that the faulted areas were so different, with individual stresses and physical conditions, and reacted so uniquely, it was not possible to be successful at wholesale prediction.

Perhaps that conclusion was correct for that moment in time. But, should they have given up? New and innovative ideas about earthquake prediction were developing in other countries like China, Japan and Russia. We can look back to ancient times for the root of these new ideas. Long ago, farmers, peasants and early naturalists noticed the clues the earth was revealing that meant the stress was building deep underground, about to give way.

Animals Gone Crazy

Of all the scientific anomalies that are related to earthquakes and earthquake prediction, none is more curious or mystifying than the heaps of reports on strange animal behavior prior to earthquakes.

From the time ancient people recorded their thoughts about the shaking earth, they have remarked upon the behavior of their animals. The best known story comes from Japan, where a huge catfish living under the ground was thought to cause the earth to heave whenever it wiggled. Catfish have been observed to jump and twist violently right before a quake. It is very likely that the observations helped craft the myth.

Along with fish, both domestic and wild, a wide variety of animals have been described in anecdotal reports as sensing a coming earthquake. Their actions greatly differ.

Some animals eat more.

Birds change their songs or sounds; they refuse to land or preen their feathers constantly.

Underground animals come to the surface.

Caged or penned animals become highly agitated, aggressive, fearful or try to escape.

Wild animals will leave an area.

Domestic animals, such as cats, will remove their young from buildings, clean themselves frequently or be especially attentive to their owner, crying or acting nervous.

Dogs notoriously howl or bark and become preoccupied with sniffing the ground.

Insects may suddenly disappear or appear in swarms.

Aquatic animals leave the water or head far out to sea.

Animals may act confused and appear in unlikely areas.

The strange behavior may be exhibited seconds before a quake or up to a month before.

Recently, minutes before Hawaii’s 6.7 magnitude quake this past October, a local television reporter noticed fish jumping out of a lagoon. Even for a small tremor, estimated at 2.4 magnitude in mid-December in Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania, locals reported that their dogs were subdued or nervous in the hours before the quake. Also in mid-December, the obituary for Max the pig, beloved pet of actor George Clooney, gives the animal credit for waking George minutes prior to the onset of a California quake years ago.

In China, changes in animal behavior is so accepted as a precursor to a quake that they printed informational booklets to give to the public. In 1974-5, in Haicheng, a strong earthquake was preceded by a long list of animal anomalies that were recorded by the population with the data fed back to scientists. Along with other precursors, the animal behaviors were credited with helping to predict the quake and save many lives.

With the huge variety of animals reacting to some signals from the earth, they can’t all be responding to the same signs. Different animals are sensitive to different things.

People are probably the least sensitive animals since we see, hear, smell and perceive far less of the natural environment than animals do. However, even people occasionally react to earth signs. Data collected before the Kobe, China quake in 1995 revealed that children in the fault area awoke before the quake and people reported unusual feelings of fatigue, dizziness or illness.

The American seismology community flatly denies any suggestion of animals as earthquake predictors. Their valid reasons include the range of behaviors as mentioned above, the inability to measure animal behavior, and the frequent lack of animal anomalies before quakes. What do animals react to? Can we ever measure what they feel?

To add more weirdness to this picture, we must include plants as potentially being responsive to earth signals. Some species grow vigorously, other bloom early, rebloom or wilt. Others close their leaves or tremble in still air. With roots reaching into the ground, do they detect signals that we miss?

Earth Sounds

Does the earth moan and groan before a rupture? How about howl and whistle?

Howling and whistling noises have been described associated with tremors. Explosive, echoing, or rumbling sounds (earthquake sounds or EQSs) were heard by local people in earthquake prone areas around the world minutes, hours or days before quakes. These sounds are rare but where they do occur, they are reported again in quakes that follow. Sounds like these have not been recorded by scientists who have no explanation for what causes them.

Paranormal effects

A ghostly new phenomena, not mentioned in the ancient reports, is the response of electronic devices to unseen signals before a quake.

Clocks stop or the hands rotate quickly. Appliances suddenly turn on. Cell phones ring without callers. TVs flicker and display distortion. Intercoms buzz. Florescent lamps dim.

In the days of telegraph wires, signals and static were transmitted out of nowhere.

Magnets holding nails suddenly lose the attraction and the nails drop.

Candle flames bend and distort without a breeze. Fires do not get hot enough to cook food.

There are also reports of corked wine turning cloudy or milk spoiling overnight.

Water

It is common to note water levels in wells and on the surface suddenly drop prior to a quake. Groundwater becomes cloudy or muddy and may change in taste or odor. The sea may become still as glass. Ponds may become murky. Incidentally, groundwater levels in Pennsylvania were affected subtly, but noticeably, by the Alaska earthquakes of 1964 and 2002 and Virginia water levels jumped then dropped in response to the 2005 giant Asian quake (that spawned the deadly tsunami) so we know that the mechanisms are widespread as a result of the quake.

What other clues can be found if we only pay attention? Not only are they on the ground but they are in the air.

Of all the natural disasters we experience regularly here on Earth, the most violent and destructive are earthquakes. Thousands are killed each year, especially in poorer countries where buildings are not designed to withstand the violent shaking and rolling of the ground.

I’ll continue my discussion of currently unexplainable or poorly explained phenomena that have been consistently, reliably reported (and now even recorded) prior to strong earthquakes.

Earthquake Weather

    “Something’s coming, sky is purple
    Dogs are howling to themselves
    Days are changing with the weather
    Like a rip tide could rip us away” - Beck Hansen, “Earthquake Weather” from the album Guero (2005)

If you live in an area prone to earthquakes, you might know the stories about earthquake weather. Earthquake weather is said to be a dry, hot, oppressive calmness. It leaves one with the miserable feeling that something bad is about to occur. People feel weak, nauseous and uneasy. There are also reports of the atmosphere being thick with smoke, dust, fog or vapors. Thunderstorms were associated with earthquakes. The moon or sun were red, were surrounded by a halo or elongated in shape. The stars appeared closer. Short-arc vertical or horizontal rainbows have been seen. Early observers, like Aristotle, noted these unusual weather characteristics.

There are numerous instances of bizarre-shaped clouds (earthquake clouds or EQCs) appearing in the sky days before an earthquake. Prior to the 1995 quake in Kobe, Japan, several were captured in photographs. Proverbs tell of dragon or snake-like clouds foretelling the coming of the earthquake. A large cloud also appeared suddenly in a blue sky moments before a quake in Tokyo, Japan in 1923.

EQCs are stationary and do not drift away like normal clouds. Diffuse, low clouds settle into a fog. Earthquake fogs (EQFs) are commonly associated with a coming quake and were described in historic documents. Fogs and clouds were so connected with the strong tremors that it was once thought that they were the cause of the quakes that followed soon after. Aristotle called it “pneuma” meaning breath of the earth. There are historic and current reports of this “breath” having a sulfur odor or a smell of decay. Mainstream science does not correlate these atmospheric changes with seismic activity and does not consider these as precursors that can predict a coming quake.

Glows, balls and curtains of lights

Gaining more credibility as an earthquake precursor are luminous phenomena that occur before or during a strong quake. The high quality evidence for these events comes from historical writings especially from Japan where earthquakes are very common.

Earthquake lights (EQLs) come in a great variety of shapes and colors and can appear out of the ground or from the sky. They can be seen moments before a quake as a glowing dome or as flashes, curtains, sheets, funnels, arcs or balls that may even travel along the fault line in blue, red, green, yellow, orange, purple or white. Link to USGS page.

EQLThe dozens of good EQL photographs helped bring EQLs out of folklore and into the realm of scientific investigation. However, there is still no good explanation available mainly because a way to objectively measure these lights does not exist.

There is an even stranger account of balls of lights that comes from fishermen in Turkey before a 1999 quake. They described fire balls (ball lightning?) in the sky and undersea explosions with bright balloons of light ascending through the water. Their fishing nets were burned. What does one make of this?

Modern science rejects reports such as this. As in the other prequake anomalous occurrences, without data - collected in an objective way - the idea of EQLs cannot be seriously evaluated.

What in the world is happening?

Unusual animal behavior, anomalous atmospherics, light displays, sounds, spooky happenings around the house. Is the earth sending signals to which we fail to listen? It all sounds bizarre. How can all these things seemingly occur before earthquakes and we can’t explain it?

The first question that must be asked is: “Are these things really happening as people have described?” Can this be a case of mistake observations, observations after the fact (where we attribute every little thing as associated with the quake), or hoaxes?

As noted above, precursors of earthquakes have been reported in ancient times. They described phenomenon that is generally the same as that experienced today. Now, there are instances where many, many reliable observers have documented these events, even by camera, videotape and sensors.

The reports have entered the field of mainstream science. Though few scientists are willing to study them, there has been some advancement towards understanding. For example, Ikeya has determined that there is sufficient correlation between time and location of phenomena that shows the events are definitively related to the subsequent quake.

But how does one study these events? We can’t predict earthquakes so how can we be prepared to study precursors? More importantly, how do governmental and university scientists obtain funding to study phenomena that many discount? Those scientists that do go against the grain have suffered some professional discredit, even when their experiments produced results. But, there results have promise.

Several theories have been mentioned with respect to the above ground phenomena that occur in conjunction with below ground activity. Newer theories are being formed that suggest the earth often tells us well in advance that she is about to heave.

A theory must account for an invisible source that causes these observations. There are scads of invisible sources that may account for these observations. Gases, charged particles (ions), electrical fields, magnetic fields, infra- or ultrasound, infrared or ultraviolet light – sources that people can rarely detect without assistance of equipment. An invisible source may be detectable to animals or everyday electronic devices or may interact with the environment in such a way as to become noticeable to people.

What happens prior to the quake? Rock is being strained, compressed, heated and bent, down to the very crystals, before it finally breaks en masse. Before the rock mass breaks and unzips, it cracks. Tiny cracks form in the rock structure. The stress and strain placed on rock in an active fault zone changes the properties of the rock. If it changed, can we measure it? If we can measure it, can we use it to predict when the quake will occur?

Coming up (when I manage to pull it together in a cohesive explanation that I can understand), cutting edge science and research on earth signals before a quake. They really are out there.

Source: Doubtful
http://idoubtit.wordpress.com/2007/01/02/whispers-from-the-earth/