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THROWING LIGHT ON A MYSTERY DEPARTMENT -
Strange Balls of Light Seen In UK
Strange Balls of Light Seen In UK
Strange lights are being seen across Liverpool, from Crosby to Kirkby, from Speke to Seaforth, and several readers have even provided me with photographic proof of these mysterious luminous entities.
On Monday 6 August at around 7.30pm, a woman visiting a relative at Broadgreen Hospital was astounded to see a ball of light hovering less than 100 yards from the hospital main entrance.
‘I thought it was a flare at first,’ says the witness, ‘but could plainly see no parachute. I took two pictures of the light with my phone camera, but it only came out on one. I didn’t see it move off or vanish, I just looked back and saw it had gone.’
My first thought was that the glowing orb had been ‘ball lightning’ – a poorly understood meteorological phenomenon in which a luminous sphere of energy manifests itself in mid-air, sometimes during thunderstorms, but also on clear sunny days.
These balls of what seem to be super-heated plasma have drifted into houses through open windows and exploded, and in one local case in the 1970s, a housewife tried to swat a globe of ball lightning away with her hand, and her wedding ring melted instantly and dripped onto her kitchen floor, yet she never sustained a burn.
Instead, the ball exploded and she was left with mild concussion. If the lights being seen across this region are ball lightning, the weather may be to blame, as we have had alternating days of rainy and sunny weather recently, but the reports of the Liverpool Lights seem to defy such a rational explanation.
In West Derby Village on 1st August at 8pm, a small golf-ball-sized light was seen whizzing along Meadow Lane.
The light followed the curvature of the lane, flying about 6 feet from the ground, and flew upwards over Muirhead Avenue East.
A 16-year-old girl named Chloe saw this mini-UFO heading straight towards her as she walked onto Meadow Lane from Parkside Drive, and thought it was a firework rocket coming in her direction.
An identical ball of light was seen on the following night at rooftop level in Bootle, flying over Selwyn Street at 10.20pm, and later that same night, two unidentified lights which left a greenish trail behind them were seen flying over Queens Drive, Walton.
A 53-year-old man named Steven Garrett saw a bright light hovering outside his cousin’s window on Park Road, Toxteth, on 5 August, and he initially assumed it was one of Merseyside Police’s remote-controlled CCTV helicopter ‘spy drones’ but when Steven got a close look at the light he could see it not only had nothing attached to it, it was ‘silent as the grave’ and it suddenly flitted off at an incredible speed towards the Brunswick Dock.
Source: icseftonandwestlancs
http://icseftonandwestlancs.icnetwork.co.uk/icmaghull/news/tm_headline=
throwing-light-on-a-mystery&method=full&objectid=19631256&siteid=60252-
name_page.html#story_continue
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STRANGE CREATURES FROM TIME AND SPACE DEPARTMENT -
Mysterious Water Creatures Inhabit Siberian Lakes
Mysterious Water Creatures Inhabit Siberian Lakes
The Russian media has recently reported on a huge monster with the head of a serpent and the body of a crocodile lurking at the bottom of a lake near the village of Somin in Western Ukraine.
The lake is 56 meters deep. A number of underwater karst caves stretch its bottom. That is where the mysterious monster lies in wait, according to locals. As a rule, locals steer clear of the lake because they are said to have been terrified by the hideous creature hiding underwater. It reportedly attacked domestic animals in the past. Some 30 years ago a local groom fell prey to the monster, according to one of the stories circulating through the village. The groom got drunk and fell fast asleep in the grass near the shore. The monster reportedly crept out of the water and had the groom for lunch. Another creepy story features a disobedient boy who decided to take a swim in the lake. Needless to say, the boy has never come back home or so the story goes.
The news from Ukraine caused quite a stir in the Russian media. One of the Russian TV stations was even planning to make a film about a “new Nessie.” A naïve person might have expected hordes of zoologists heading for Ukraine from all over the world. However, nothing of the kind happened. Scientists are well-aware of the laws of genetics, which say that a population of large vertebrates must comprise a minimum of 300-500 species in order to survive. Would they have had enough room in Lake Somin, whose total area is about 6 hectares? Besides, they would have long eaten up all the fish in the lake. Plenty of fish still occur in the lake. Several cat fishes caught in the lake reportedly measured up to two meters in length. The legend of the lake monsters seems to stem from one of the local fish stories.
Several dozen similar lakes scattered around the former Soviet Union are claimed to have monsters, which scientists still have to identify. Some of the cases on record are made up of pure mystification and rumors; others may contain some grains of truth.
Lake Khainyr is located in Yakutia, outside the Polar Circle. The lake is very small, measuring 500 by 600 meters, and quite shallow, about 7 meters deep. The lake is of termokarst origin; it is actually a thawed patch in the permafrost. In 1964, Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article featuring an interview by G. Rukosuyev, head of the Northeastern Expedition of the Moscow State University. The scientist cited an account by one N. Gladkikh, a migrant worker hired by the expedition. Gladkikh claimed to have run into a lake monster on a misty early morning. The worker was about to draw some water from the lake when he spotted an unusual water creature lying on the shore. He provided Rukosuyev with the following description of the animal:
“It had a long gleaming neck with a small head. Its body was huge, covered with black-blue skin. There was a big dorsal fin on the back of its body. All of sudden, the animal slid back into the water. Some time later I saw it standing out the water in the middle of the lake. The animal started swinging its long tail to whip the water. The waves were rippling the surface of the lake.”
Aside from citing the “eyewitness account,” Rukosuyev also threw in a few other pieces of information to add color to the story. For instance, he claimed that there was no fish in the lake and birds had never landed on its surface. He also referred to some “muffled sounds and splashes of water” frequently heard by locals.
An expedition was dispatched to the location to investigate the case. As a result, the whole story proved to be a fake. Researchers found out that birds did land on the surface of the lake, which had a lot of fish swimming in its waters. None of the locals had ever seen any strange animals in the lake. Scuba divers combed the bottom of the lake but found nothing strange.
Researchers also had a heart-to-heart talk with Gladkikh, the so-called eyewitness. Gladkikh admitted that he had made up his story for reasons he could not clearly explain. He concocted it either to entertain himself and his friends or as an excuse for shirking his duties at work.
Karelia is well-known for its numerous lakes, which are amazingly blue in color and rich in fish. Lake Vedlozero looks like a typical Karelian lake. It is 15 km long and about 7 km wide. The lake is of glacial origin. A large village sits on its left banks. The first reports of the Vedlozero appeared in the mid-1990s. One of the reports quoted the late P. F. Yegorov, a local old-timer who claimed he had seen a large shining object fall into the lake from the sky. However, nothing was found at the bottom of the lake by members of several expeditions. However, Viktor Sapunov, a cryptozoologist who took part in one of the missions, later published a report based on accounts provided by local residents who claimed to have seen “water goblins” in the lake. The mysterious midget men with rounded heads were somehow associated with the fall of the “heavenly body” in the lake.
Our team arrived in the location last fall. We asked around several old residents of the village. None of them saw any “water goblins” in or near the lake. Some people recalled spotting seals in the lake on several occasions. “I go fishing on a regular basis. I have never seen any ‘water goblins’ in our lake. I have never heard about them. As for the seals, they drop by the lake now and then. One of the locals even caught a seal several years ago. He carried a camera on that day so he took a picture of the animal. There is nothing strange about seals coming down the lake. Lake Ladoga is not so far away from here. They just travel to and fro through the tributaries,” said Vasily Efremov, head of the village council.
Efremov’s explanation seems quite logical. City guys who went fishing in Lake Vedlozero may have spread the rumors about the “water goblins” after noticing seals in the lake. Any diver will agree that that seals in the water can be easily taken for humans. Besides, Lake Ladoga is located in close proximity to Lake Vedlozero. Perhaps the territory populated by seals or other species of freshwater pinniped animals in Russia was much wider in the past. The assertion could explain quite a few Russian legends of mermaids and water goblins.
A large number of lakes scattered around the vast territory of Northwest Siberia are the lakes that vary greatly in size and shape. They lie in the swampy taiga and forest tundra. Many of them are connected to one another via tributaries.
Professor N. Vereshchagin, a zoologist and self-proclaimed “fighter against “the snowman buffs,” recently published an article, in which he ironically quoted one of the letters addressed the Institute of Zoology. Prof. Vereshchagin poked fun at the letter’s author who maintained that either seals or hippopotamuses lived in some of the lakes in the Irtysh basin. However, some enthusiasts of cryptozoology refrain from making a mockery of similar reports. They opt to check them first. The late Maya Bykova, one of the first “snowman buffs” in this country, made several trips to the area. She put down a number of eyewitness accounts; most of them read more or less like this:
“I was rowing my boat across the lake when I heard that splash. The sound of it made me stop. I was wondering what kind of a fish could have splashed like that. I lifted the oars and peered in that direction.
The next moment I saw something big emerge from the water, it looked like a haystack rising to the surface. I looked on and saw that the creature was covered with fleecy dark-brown skin resembling that of a seal. It made a hissing sound and dived back into the water.”
Other eyewitness accounts recorded by Bykova contain a similar description of the “monster:” creatures covered with fleecy dark-brown skin quickly rise to the surface, force air violently out through their noses and go back into hiding.
We are quite pleased to emphasize a few important things with regard to the above case as we look at it with the laws of nature in mind. First, the incidents did not take place in a single lake shut away from the rest of the world. On the contrary, the monsters have been seen in several bodies of water, which are frequently connected by means of tributaries. And those lakes are scattered over the vast and sparsely populated area. There is enough room for thousands of species to live virtually unnoticed by anybody. Second, animals can get enough food to survive and multiply. And, last but not least, any visual contact is most likely to involve local villagers who are very few in numbers, hence a sharp decrease in the possibility of a chance meeting. Besides, locals are not used to reporting their observances to the Academy of Sciences. Given a rather skeptical stance on the phenomenon among members of science community, such a letter would be either ignored or laughed at.
The question is: What are those mysterious creatures? Their fleecy skins indicate that they are warm-blooded mammals… In my opinion, they could belong to some unidentified species of penniped animals, freshwater seals. If some seals can live in Lake Ladoga and Lake Baikal, what is so strange about other seals populating in other freshwater bodies of water?
Other theories look pretty weird, to say the least. One of them has gained lots of popularity recently. According to the theory, the lake monsters are mammoths which turned into aquatic animals for reasons unknown. The theory is simply preposterous because mammoths had very few sebaceous glands under the skin, and therefore their long hair could get easily wet. A similar theory put forward by N. Avdeyev, a cryptozoologist from the city of Perm, features relic wooly rhinoceroses which somehow managed to survive. The latter theory does not seem so foolish, compared to the “water mammoths” of the former one. Still, it can hardly hold any water either.
Source: Pravda
http://english.pravda.ru/science/mysteries/06-08-2007/95690-strange_monsters-0
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THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT DEPARTMENT -
Ghostly Happenings in Murfreesboro
Ghostly Happenings in Murfreesboro
The happy sounds of children laughing and playing sometimes can be heard in the hallways but no one is there. Knickknacks are unexplainably moved out of their place on office desks.
These kinds of tales are being told by some of those who work or have worked in the former Rutherford County Health Department building at 303 N. Church St. for the past 10 months or so.
They say spirits of some sort, most of which seem to be children, are causing some minor disturbances in the building.
“It is not scary,” said Linda Wilson, who works on the first floor of the building in the Rutherford County Drug Court offices. “Apparently they are good spirits. They have not hurt us or done anything.”
The Rutherford County Health Department is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its significance in the development of health care and public medicine in Murfreesboro and Rutherford County. Until the building opened to the public in 1931, Rutherford County had no permanent public health care.
The facility played an important role in the promotion of public health care programs and training of health care professionals in the South. The health department was one of four Commonwealth Fund of New York health projects that sought to bring modern health care to rural communities.
It’s unknown who if anyone could be haunting the 76-year-old building. Some suspect the impressions of children, thousands of which must have come through the doors of the building over the years to receive some form of medical treatment, remain in the building.
The building recently underwent a massive renovation now houses the Rutherford County drug court, human resources and archives.
Wilson said she hasn’t felt the presence of spirits, but she has seen some things that can’t otherwise be explained.
She mentioned a rag doll that sits on a shelf in a co-workers office.
Several times since she and her co-workers moved into the building in mid-June, she and others have seen the doll’s left arm up in the air pointing towards the wall.
A former co-worker who had small toys around her computer would often come into her office in the morning and find that they had be knocked over or rearranged.
The presence of spirits was perhaps felt most by members of the construction crew.
Charles Gilmore, a member of the crew, doesn’t know if he really believes in ghosts or spirits, but he had some encounters that he also couldn’t explain any other way.
One day he was on a ladder on the second floor of the building when he heard a young girl exclaim, “No mama no, no mama no.”
Gilmore immediately went to the nearest windows see where the noise was coming from. No one was outside.
“I didn’t believe anything could manifest like that,” he said.
While alone in the building one evening, another member of the crew apparently saw shadowy figures walking through the building and heard heavy footsteps on the slate stairs.
Most of all the spirits seemed to make the process of renovating the building much more difficult.
“It was just a nightmare job,” Gilmore said. “Nothing would work.”
He said it almost seemed like the building didn’t want to have its face lifted.
One thing after another would go wrong.
“I call it the ghosts in the machine,” Gilmore said. “Nothing went right the whole time.”
If there was a list of a 1,000 things to do, then only three of them would work out properly.
Everything went wrong from materials not being delivered to the site or having materials mixed improperly and machinery failing to work.
He said for the massive amount of hours the crew spent working on the renovation two new facilities of similar size could have been built with less headaches.
Despite the problems, Gilmore said he never felt uncomfortable working in the building or being there by himself.
Gilmore would often work in the basement in the pitch dark.
“I never felt uncomfortable being in the building,” he said. “It is not a bad energy. Things are not being destroyed. It just didn’t want to be bothered.”
But even now as Gilmore has moved on to other projects, he is having dreams about the renovation. He said it has weighed on his minds like no other project.
Source: Murfreesboro Post
http://www.murfreesboropost.com/news.php?viewStory=5810