Hovering high overhead, the UFO and its otherworldly occupants scan the Earths communications -- silently awaiting word that they have finally intercepted the secret information that has eluded them all week. Yes that's right! They are waiting for this weeks exciting issue of the newsletter of conspiracies, secrets, the paranormal and MORE - Conspiracy Journal is here once again to inflame your senses and question your beliefs.

REVEALED FOR THE FIRST TIME THE MANY SECRETS OF
ROSSLYN CHAPEL

DOES THIS FAMOUS SCOTTISH SACRED SITE REALLY EXIST
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS?                           

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- MINDS BEYOND TIME AND SPACE DEPARTMENT -

Can Psychics Help to Solve Crime?

ROME - A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus. Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.

Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, says in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the cloth.

She asserts that the words include the name "(J)esu(s) Nazarene" — or Jesus of Nazareth — in Greek. That, she said, proves the text could not be of medieval origin because no Christian at the time, even a forger, would have mentioned Jesus without referring to his divinity. Failing to do so would risk being branded a heretic.

"Even someone intent on forging a relic would have had all the reasons to place the signs of divinity on this object," Frale said Friday. "Had we found 'Christ' or the 'Son of God' we could have considered it a hoax, or a devotional inscription."

The shroud bears the figure of a crucified man, complete with blood seeping from his hands and feet, and believers say Christ's image was recorded on the linen's fibers at the time of his resurrection.

The fragile artifact, owned by the Vatican, is kept locked in a protective chamber in a Turin cathedral and is rarely shown. Measuring 13 feet (four meters) long and three feet (one meter) wide, the shroud has suffered severe damage through the centuries, including from fire.

The Catholic Church makes no claims about the cloth's authenticity, but says it is a powerful symbol of Christ's suffering.

There has been strong debate about it in the scientific community.

Skeptics point out that radiocarbon dating conducted on the cloth in 1988 determined it was made in the 13th or 14th century.

But Raymond Rogers of Los Alamos National Laboratory said in 2005 that the tested threads came from patches used to repair the shroud after a fire. Rogers, who died shortly after publishing his findings, calculated it is 1,300 to 3,000 years old and could easily date from Jesus' era.

Another study, by the Hebrew University, concluded that pollen and plant images on the shroud showed it originated in the area around Jerusalem sometime before the eighth century.

While faint letters scattered around the face on the shroud were seen decades ago, serious researchers dismissed them, due to the results of the radiocarbon dating test, Frale told The Associated Press.

But when she cut out the words from enhanced photos of the shroud and showed them to experts, they concurred the writing style was typical of the Middle East in the first century — Jesus' time.

She believes the text was written on a document by a clerk and glued to the shroud over the face so the body could be identified by relatives and buried properly. Metals in the ink used at the time may have allowed the writing to transfer to the linen, Frale said.

She said she counted at least 11 words in her study of enhanced images produced by French scientists in a 1994 study. The words are fragmented and scattered on and around the image's head, crisscrossing the cloth vertically and horizontally.

One short sequence of Aramaic letters has not been fully translated. Another fragment in Greek — "iber" — may refer to Emperor Tiberius, who reigned at the time of Jesus' crucifixion, Frale said.

She said the text also partially confirms the Gospels' account of Jesus' final moments. A fragment in Greek that can be read as "removed at the ninth hour" may refer to Christ's time of death reported in the holy texts, she said.

In her book "The Shroud of Jesus Nazarene," published in Italian, Frale reconstructs from the lettering on the shroud what she believes Jesus' death certificate said: "Jesus Nazarene. Found (guilty of inciting the people to revolt). Put to death in the year 16 of Tiberius. Taken down at the ninth hour."

She said the text then stipulates the body will returned to relatives after a year.

Frale said her research was done without the support of the Vatican.

"I tried to be objective and leave religious issues aside," Frale told the AP. "What I studied was an ancient document that certifies the execution of a man, in a specific time and place."

Frale's work usually focuses on medieval documents. She is noted for research on the order of the Knights Templar and her discovery of unpublished documents on the group in the Vatican's archives.

Earlier this year, she published a study saying the Templars once had the shroud in their possession. That raised eyebrows because the order was abolished in the early 14th century and the shroud is first recorded in history around 1360 in the hands of a French knight.

Her latest book on the shroud raised even more doubts among some experts.

On one hand, it is true that a medieval forger would label the object with Christ's name, as were all relics produced at the time, said Antonio Lombatti, a church historian who has written about the shroud. The problem is that there are no inscriptions to be seen in the first place.

"People work on grainy photos and think they see things," Lombatti told the AP. "It's all the result of imagination and computer software. ... If you look at a photo of the shroud, there's a lot of contrast between light and dark, but there are no letters."

Further criticizing Frale's work, Lombatti said that artifacts bearing Greek and Aramaic texts were found in Jewish burials from the first century, but the use of Latin is unheard of.

He also rejected the idea that authorities would officially return the body of a crucified man to relatives after filling out some paperwork. Victims of that form of execution used by the Romans would usually be left on the cross or were disposed of in a dump to add to its deterrent.

Lombatti said "the message was that you won't even have a tomb to cry over."

Another shroud expert, Gian Marco Rinaldi, said that even scientists who believe in the relic's authenticity have dismissed as unreliable the images on which Frale's study was based.

Source: The Star-Tribune/Minneapolis-St.Paul
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/faith/70609312.html

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Two brothers hunting for turkeys in the Monongahela National Forest split up and head out in different directions, one of them venturing into a small opening that leads within a few feet inside the woods to a massive ravine.

Suddenly comes the sound of something huge thrashing at the bottom of that deep ravine, too loud for a bear or a fellow hunter, but unmistakably walking on two feet, snapping limbs and crushing branches underfoot.

What follows next almost defies description — a blood-curdling scream that seems to reverberate off the sides of the ravine.

The hunter looks up at his brother, who inquires, “Did you get a shot at Bigfoot?”

To them, it’s a big joke, another hunting story that survives well beyond that season.

But to rock musician Kris Allen, the idea of Bigfoot running around in West Virginia’s rugged terrain is no laughing matter. Rather, it is a serious issue that has thrust him into a major investigation that entails two films.

Once the lead singer for the Marshall Tucker Band, and now the head of his new group, Southern Thunder, the veteran musician says he has seen three of the creatures in the Monongahela National Forest alone.

Actually, his first sighting came at age 8 when Allen, his parents, a sister and some neighbors spotted the curious creature in a tree in Chelyan, not far from his Marmet home, and watched it until darkness set in.

“It was almost as if you went to a zoo and had seen a spider monkey sitting in top of a tree,” he recalled.

“It just stood there. It was a young one, a juvenile, about 6 feet tall. My father suggested someone call a newspaper, but Mom said by the time the newspaper got there, it would be dark. Back then, few people had video cameras. It acted like a monkey would do. I never even thought of it being a Bigfoot at the time.”

To the uninitiated, Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, as he sometimes is known, is an ape-like creature and the object of serious research by man, and of scorn by some in the scientific community.

Years later, Allen would run into another one, this time with a girlfriend in tow at Kanawha State Forest.

“It was just sitting on the ground, on his butt, behind a big tree,” Allen said.

“It was leaning around, looking at me eye to eye. Apparently, it had heard a noise walking up the hollow.”

As soon as he made a move to get a closer look, Bigfoot had vanished.

By his own count, Allen says he has spied half a dozen of the mystical creatures, all of them in West Virginia.

“They have been seen in every state and every foreign country,” he said.

Allen is hooking up with Animal Planet for some filming in Flagstaff, Ariz., and also plays an integral role in a 3-D documentary produced by Goldenleaf and Pixar, this one due for release next spring.

“We’re going across the United States and getting the best of the best in there, the very best footage,” Allen said.

While many in the world of science scoff at the concept of such a creature surviving all these years, Allen is convinced Bigfoot is real.

“I know exactly what it is,” he said. “I have seen two species. The one in the Monongahela National Forest is called ‘gigantopithicus blacky.’ It was the largest of the large primates. Scientists at one point thought they became extinct 10,000 years ago.

“Anyone knows that it is impossible to predict the future of something becoming extinct without actually knowing this, and how can you absolutely know of something that is a nocturnal animal is extinct?”

Bolstering his personal research, Allen has engaged in a number of talks with anthropologist and animal welfare activist Jane Goodall.

Allen conducted more research this fall at Sherwood Lake in the Monongahela National Forest during what some scientists believe was the migration route.

“Some say they try to go down to warmer weather,” Allen said.

“I disagree with that. I have camped up there in two blizzards since 1993. I camped there once when it was 20 below, the other time at 30 below. I won’t ever go through that again.

“That was too much torture on the human body.”

If Bigfoot is real, is he human or animal?

“From all the DNA samples we get back, every time we send something in, it comes back 98 to 99 percent human and 1 to 2 percent unknown primate,” Allen says.

“It’s very human. It’s very intelligent. I’ve heard them speaking. It’s very hard to do. I’m a vocalist and it’s hard for me to do. If you can imagine, it’s like breathing in, then making tunnel sounds. It’s a communications noise.”

Allen recalled a camping trip when he and his family, inside a tent, heard a peculiar noise in the forest.

“We heard something that almost was like it was one talking to another outside my tent,” he said.

“It stood there for a good 10 to 15 minutes.”

Even his loyal Rottweiler and pit bull, which had never displayed a fear of anything, were “totally freaking out.”

“And the time we were up there camping in a blizzard, we heard the beating sound at the trees around us,” he said.

“It was so loud that if you took a drummer in dead silent woods and amplify that drummer with huge amplifiers, it would be the loudest noise you could imagine. An hour before this happened, the dogs jumped in a tool box in the back of the pickup truck. They would not come out. It was the weirdest thing. I’ve never in my life seen a dog do this. I was trying to get them out of the tool box. But they wouldn’t come out.”

An hour later, the beating sound returned, and this time it sounded as if it were originating inside the tent.

“A few minutes later, we heard the same beating signal from across the lake,” Allen said. “We felt like we were being hunted. They are tremendous hunters.”

Allen says he has taken numerous photographs of nests that Bigfoot fashions from twisting sapling trees together, not unlike the way birds do, except on a bigger scale.

“They’re almost like a bird nest, but upside down with a bunch of leaves inside for bedding,” he said.

“And most of these nesting areas are right off a trail. I’ve encountered dozens of them. They’re usually closer to you than what you think they are. There’s a reason for this. Deer will follow a trail. It’s quiet. They’re not going to walk through the woods and make as much noise when they’re on a trail. Usually, those trails follow creeks or river beds. Those are prime drinking and hunting areas for the Bigfoots.”

Another tell-tale sign of Bigfoots are stacks of rocks in bizarre places inside a forest, he says, affording the creatures a good vantage point from which to stage an ambush.

Bigfoot is known to have attacked humans, Allen says.

“I’ve personally had rocks thrown at me. I’ve got a lot of witnesses on this. All of a sudden, a rock will be hurled at you. You’re out in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter, and when they go by your head, it sounds almost like the same velocity as someone slinging a rock with a slingshot right past your head.”

Once, in the company of his son, Allen says, he spotted two of them ripping trees apart, either for the bark or the grubs.

“We stopped behind a rock, stood there for 20 minutes,” he recalled. “We couldn’t move. We just stood there in awe. As soon as they stepped into the darkness of a tree line, they were gone. They had vanished into the darkness of it. You could be looking into the woods directly at one and it almost looks like a shadow standing in the woods. You would never know it until it moves. This large one stepped out, about 12 to 13 feet tall, and as soon as that one came out, I told my son we had better run back to the camper as fast as we could about three quarters of a mile. We ran nonstop.”

Explaining Bigfoot is another matter.

And in this realm, Allen has been given some ideas from Bible readers, citing the passage in Genesis 6:4, “there were giants in the earth in those days ...”

“There are several locations in the Bible where there were large men that once existed that became extinct,” Allen said.

“They were considered to be giants on the earth. I’m not saying David fought one of these Bigfoots or whatever. There are a lot of humans out there that have a gene problem where their face is covered with hair. I’m not saying they’re Bigfoots or descendants of Bigfoot at all. But I’m saying that thousands of DNA samples came back and they were 98 to 99 percent human and 1 percent unknown primate. You’d think that’s too close, but it’s not. That 1 percent makes a huge difference, especially if you look at the genes scale. But they’re close enough to be human. They have a lot of human traits. They walk upright.”

One major distinction is the foot.

“How you can bend your hand is how their feet are,” he explained. “Their feet actually bend in the center. You can tell a fake footprint when you see one.

“People have actually come out and tried to fake people with hoaxes,” he added. “If it doesn’t have the midtarsal break in the foot, it’s a fake.”

Perhaps, he theorized, Bigfoot’s descendants have learned over generations to avoid human contact, explaining his shy ways in the forests until he feels threatened.

A hunter in 1785 captured one with help from Native American friends and promptly named it the “hideous creature,” wrapping it in binds and parading it through the streets of a town.

If he ever catches up with another Bigfoot, the musician says, he would attempt to communicate, but, taking Goodall’s advice, won’t look him directly in the eyes. He tested her on this at a zoo and found that a baboon was perfectly calm as long as he was watched from an angle, but the moment eye contact was made, the animal went ballistic.

“It’s a form of territorial gesture,” he said of eye contact.

“You could be some sort of a threat. I looked at that baboon eye to eye. He was behind a cage. I wiggled my eyes as he looked at me. He stretched his arm as far as he could and flashed his incisors at me.”

And Bigfoot, so all the accounts go, is much, much bigger than a baboon.

Source: The Register-Herald/Beckley, WV
http://www.register-herald.com/local/local_story_326191907.html

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Some months ago, Richard Freeman in his blog was perplexed about the location of a certain Tibetan lake said to house monsters, which I was able to resolve by revealing that for reasons still unknown to me it has been referred to by a variety of different names, of which Lake Wembo is just one.

As it happens, moreover, there is another Chinese 'monster' lake that is mystifying me for a similar reason - over the years, its name has inexplicably changed, causing some confusion at first as to whether the two names did indeed refer to the same body of water. I refer to what was originally called Lake Hanas, but which in more recent years is now repeatedly called Lake Kanasi, or Kanas. Has the name officially changed, or it is merely a question of a different transliteration from Chinese to English being adopted (as with Peking to Beijing, for instance)? If anyone has any info, I'd love to receive it.

Meanwhile, for anyone who may not know about the fascinating monsters of Lake Hanas/Kanasi, here is what I wrote about them in 2002 within my book The New Zoo: New and Rediscovered Animals of the Twentieth Century (which will be republished next year in a new, expanded, updated edition):

The Monster Fishes of China's Lake Hanas

Officially, the largest specimen of freshwater fish on record is a 15 ft European catfish Silurus glanis, caught in Russia's Dniepper River sometime prior to the mid-1800s (though this species as a whole is generally shorter than the pa beuk, officially deemed to be the world's largest freshwater fish). As a consequence, the lake-dwelling fishes reported in July 1985 by no less an authority than China's eminent biologist Prof. Xiang Lihao, from Xinjiang University, attracted appreciable scientific interest.

In July, the professor and a party of students arrived at a large but remote body of water called Lake Hanas, situated in northwestern China's Xinjiang Autonomous Region, in order to examine its potential as the site of a future nature reserve. On 24 July, one of the students observing the lake from a watchtower built two years earlier noticed several huge reddish-coloured objects moving at the water's surface. When the professor and students scrutinised them closely through binoculars, they discovered to their astonishment that they were enormous salmon-like fishes, whose heads, tails, and spiny dorsal rays could all be clearly discerned. Just how enormous they were, however, was not revealed until the next day.

That morning, while again being observed through binoculars by Xiang Lihao, one of the fishes very obligingly aligned itself in parallel with a stretch of the bank extending between two trees. Armed not only with binoculars this time but also with a camera, the professor took some photos, then measured the distance between the trees. Using this measurement, he was able to calculate from the photos that the fish was at least 33 ft long!

A large salmon known as the taimen Hucho taimen is indeed known from several rivers in northern China, but this species' maximum recorded length is a mere 6.5 ft - far short of the Lake Hanas monsters. Worth noting is that giant red fishes in this lake have been reported for decades by local villagers, but as the lake had not previously attracted scientific attention such reports had not been widely circulated. Now, with an eyewitness of Prof. Xiang Lihao's scientific standing, there should be no question concerning their existence or authenticity as giant fishes. So unless they are abnormally huge taimen, the Lake Hanas fishes must surely comprise a spectacular new species, requiring formal description and study.

Source: ShukerNature
http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2009/11/lake-is-lake-is-lakeisnt-it.html

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The New York Times rather casually and without fanfare has confirmed a significant event in alligator-in-the-sewers history. The actual teenager who had the confrontation with the over seven-foot-long sewer alligator in 1935 was tracked down, interviewed last week, and verifies it wasn’t just an elaborate newspaper tale.

As you will recall…noted in A. G. Sulzberger’s breaking New York Times article…in an era when several news items told of out-of-place gators being found…

The most widely cited of these was an article in The Times on Feb. 10, 1935, headlined “Alligator Found in Uptown Sewer.”

That article described several people — led by a teenager named Salvatore Condoluci — who had caught and ultimately killed a seven- to eight-foot-long alligator they discovered beneath an open manhole on 123rd Street near the Harlem River.

The occasion of this reexamination of these stories is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Robert Daley’s 1959 The World Beneath the City. The reporter interviewed Daley and others last week for this new article. I was one of those people he interviewed, for his background work on his piece.

I conducted a great deal of research on this topic in the beginning years of the 1970s. (Of course, it continues today, as well.) I made a unique discovery that alligators-in-the-sewers were not all just legendary, not from the 1960s as folklorists thought, but had a firm newspaper history three decades earlier.

I tracked down articles that noted real alligators were found and killed in New York City, specifically in that city’s sewers in the 1930s. My formal published contribution on this appeared as “Alligators-in-the-Sewers: A Journalistic Vehicle,” in the Journal of American Folklore, September-October 1979. No one had before then, found, linked it to the “urban legend,” and re-published anew the The New York Times, February 10, 1935, article.

I put a chapter in my book, Mysterious America, and kept updating it (1983, 2001, 2007), about these specific gators. The reports also are heard from elsewhere too.

Here’s how the New York Times puts it:

“These tales had a journalistic background,” said Loren Coleman, director and curator of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Me., who has researched and written about the topic for decades. “Daley’s book came along, and it was almost like independent confirmation.”

A. G. Sulzberger interviewed Daly last week, and then wrote:

When discussing the book with James A. Lundy, a former Queens borough president, Mr. Daley said he was told to speak with Edward P. May, known as Teddy. “Ask him about the alligators,” Mr. Lundy commanded.

So Mr. Daley sat on a stoop with Mr. May, who described his story of disbelief and discovery and detailed his efforts to rid the sewers of the alligators: poisoning some, chasing others into the fast-moving main tunnels where they were swept out to sea, and permitting his inspectors to hunt down the rest with rifles and pistols for sport.

“He started telling me about the alligators in the sewer,” Mr. Daley remembered. “He wasn’t joking. He told me a lot of good stuff, and I accepted it as the truth.”

“He convinced me it was a true story without even trying,” he added. “He wasn’t trying to win me over or convince me — the stuff just kept coming out.”

He said he still believed that Mr. May was telling the truth, even if the numbers could have been exaggerated. “And besides,” Mr. Daley added, “it made a terrific story. How could you turn that down?”

The tale spread rapidly.

When Mr. May died in 1960, after the publication of the book, his obituary in The Times said, “Once Mr. May led a squad in cleaning the sewers of a number of live alligators that, discarded in the sewers as tiny pets, and survived and grown large.”

Sulzberger’s crowning achievement in the background work he put into this new take on the alligator events, however, was his tracking down of the actual teenager who had the 1935 experience. A. G. Sulzberger penned these words in his concluding remarks:

Salvatore Condoluci, the teenager who roped that alligator, is now 92.

Though he has forgotten some of the details, he still remembers hearing the thrashing in the icy water beneath the manhole, first seeing the creature’s head, and using a rope to lasso and haul it to the surface.

But Mr. Condoluci isn’t sure whether he believes that other alligators lurk below. “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”

The historical record regarding the actual hunts conducted in the 1930s, by rifle-toting city sewer workers who located and shot the gators, along with the eyewitness accounts by Salvatore Condoluci and others, have been confirmed anew. This is a fact, despite the continuing modern denials of the acting director of the City of New York Department of Environmental Protection, I must note.

A whimsical bronze sculpture by Tom Otterness in the 14th Street subway station on the A, C, E and L lines makes reference to the old legend of alligators in the sewers. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

For a comprehensive look at the entire topic, with updates, see Mysterious America from Simon and Schuster, 2007.

Source: Cryptomundo/Loren Coleman
http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/1935-sewer