A new photo of a mysterious flying object over Kansas has been revealed. It appears to be the same aircraft as one that was snapped soaring over Texas recently.

The exact identify of the aircraft remains a mystery, but rumours abound that it could be a secret jet.

'The photo is grainy because it was taken with a hand-held maxed-out 400mm telephoto lens through a cloud layer and then it was severely cropped to bring it up even close,' says Jeff Templin, who took the photo on 16 April.

'There is no way to know the altitude and no way to judge its size as there is no point of reference.

'My sense of it with the naked eye was that it was quite high, at least the altitude passenger jets cruise over but if it were smaller like a "drone" it could conceivably have been lower and smaller.'
 
The Aviationist speculates that the plane could be a RQ-180 stealth drone or a prototype of America's next generation long range strike bomber (LSRB).

They, too, are unsure if it is the same plane as the one spotted previously

A retired Marine with nearly two decades of aviation experience stepped forward with a compelling theory about the mysterious plane that was spotted flying over Texas last month.

On March 10, photographers Steve Douglass and Dean Muskett took pictures of three puzzling aircraft flying over Amarillo, and posted them online in hopes of identifying the planes.

Retired-Marine James Vineyard submitted one of the more interesting explanations, telling the Houston Chronicle he believed they were SR-72 Blackbirds - a spy plane that can cross the U.S. in less than an hour, unmanned.

Vineyard spent 17 years as a Marine and also worked with a jet squadron in Arizona.

He says the Pentagon may have dispatched the planes to the Indian Ocean to aide in the search for missing Malaysian Airlines flight 370.

But Douglass, who saw the planes himself, doesn't agree.

'The SR-72 is still in development,' he said Tuesday. 'Plus it's a high-speed, high-Mach plane. These were going airliner speed. They were not in a hurry to get anywhere.'

The SR-72 is currently being developed by Lockheed Martin in California, and according to the company's website they say the plane could be operational as early as 2030.

It is the predecessor of the SR-71 which broke speed records when it flew from New York to Lonton in less than two hours in 1976.

Lockheed Martin's Hypersonics program manager Brad Leland wrote that the plane is designed to 'strike at nearly any location across a continent in less than an hour.'

'Speed is the next aviation advancement to counter emerging threats in the next several decades. The technology would be a game-changer in theater, similar to how stealth is changing the battlespace today,' Leland said.

Another reader, who wished not to be identified, told the Chronicle with confidence that 'It's a B-2 stealth bomber flying out of Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.'

That's what the photographers thought when they first saw the group of aircraft, but they say they checked with the base and no B-2s were flying anywhere in the U.S. that day.

Instead, Douglass believes that the planes are a no type of spy plane - a stealth transport plane that could sneak troops into a another country unseen.

Source: The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2607840/Is-THIS-SR-72-spy-plane-Mystery-aircraft-spotted-flying-Kansas-just-weeks-seen-Texas.html

State of the art sonar equipment, a yellow submarine and even a white witch have all been used to try to find the elusive Loch Ness Monster.

But it seems all you really need to track Nessie down is an IPHONE.

Mysterious images taken from space are making waves with Nessie fans – as they appear to show a creature swimming in the world’s most famous loch.

The pictures were captured separately by two amateur hunters, Peter Thain and Andy Dixon, as they used an iPhone satellite map app.

It had been feared the 1,500-year legend was over after 18 months without a recognised sighting, but now enthusiasts’ hopes have been raised again.

Andy, of County Durham, said: “It was by accident I came across it. I could see something big under the water and I saved it to my phone. My first thought was that it was the monster.”

It could only be seen on Apple products but has been probed by the Official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club. President Gary Campbell said: “It cannot be a boat as there is no hull. It’s just below the surface – the size would make it likely to be Nessie.”

William Hill offers a £1,000 annual prize for the best sighting of Nessie – which has been spotted 1,036 times since 565AD. The award is worth double this year as it went unclaimed in 2013.

Gary said: “After Nessie ‘going missing’ for 18 months, it’s great to see her back.”

Due to the lack of sightings last year, bookmakers William Hill who offers a £1000 annual prize for the best Nessie sighting is doubling this year incentive because it went unclaimed last year.

Nessie was first spotted in 565AD and has been seen 1036 times in the last 1500 years.

All the sightings are listed at www.lochnesssightings.com

Three sightings were reported in 2013 but they were discounted as fakes.

One was a wave, another a duck and the third a picture not even taken on Loch Ness.

It was the first time since 1925 that there had been no confirmed reports of the monster.

White Witch Kevin Carlyon, who believes Nessie is a ghost, frequently casts spells on the loch and will return this summer.

Actor Charlie Sheen also plans a return visit with American TV host Jay Leno after revealing last year that he went hunting for Nessie – with a bottle of whisky.

Source: Mirror
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/loch-ness-monster-spotted-satellite-3428130

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Tim R. Swartz has had a long career in the field of paranormal journalism. One might call him a “journeyman” of sorts, covering diverse topics such as UFOs, Nikola Tesla, ghosts and hauntings – the list goes on – and chipping away at those imposing boulders of mystery without much fanfare. It is in some ways a lonely struggle, but it has always had its rewards.

Swartz is the author of the book “The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla,” for instance, which has become a bestseller for his publisher, Global Communications. He has been on the scene for a poltergeist haunting that also included a verifiable teleportation event. He has edited the online publication “The Conspiracy Journal” for many years, helping to inform interested readers of the latest machinations of the “shadow government,” which, Swartz believes, has already taken control of the world in the name of a small elite group who continue to remain ominously concealed.

It all began for Swartz, as with most people in this field, in childhood. As Swartz recalls, it was sometime around 1968 and he was in the third grade. Studying a publication called “My Weekly Reader,” distributed by Scholastic Book Services, was part of the curriculum at Swartz’s school. “My Weekly Reader” was a small newspaper-type publication, written for children, which kept up with current events in the U.S. and throughout the world. Swartz and his fellow students were required to make a written and oral report on one of the news articles in the newspaper.

There was a UFO flap taking place in the U.S. at the time, and Swartz was asked to do a report on “My Weekly Reader’s” coverage of the sightings wave.

“Up until that point, I had never really even heard or thought too much about UFOs or the paranormal,” Swartz said. “I did my report as best I could at that age, and from that day on in school I was dubbed ‘the flying saucer guy,’ the guy who believed in little green men. I really wasn’t interested in that kind of stuff, but you know how things get thrust upon you as a kid.”

While many of the kids made fun of Swartz to his face about it, some of them would approach him later with personal stories of UFO sightings or ghosts in their homes, stories they asked Swartz not to share with other people.

“That’s what really got me interested in it,” Swartz explained. “Not so much the media reports and things like that about UFOs. But it was the personal angle that got me going. It was the fact that these people would just come to me. They weren’t interested in telling anybody else or contacting the newspaper or anything like that. They wanted a sympathetic ear to hear their story. They wanted confirmation that they really did see something and that they weren’t crazy.”

They also wanted confidentiality, Swartz said, because even then there was a forbidding “giggle factor” attached to such subjects, which continues to prevail, making experiencers throughout the world loathe to talk about what has happened to them.

Swartz said he has had only one possible sighting experience himself. One night, as an adult, he saw a bright, red, stationary light to the southwest that was visible from the back door of his home in Jasper, Indiana. There was an airport about 70 miles away in that same direction, but he was familiar with jets and their landing and maneuvering lights, and he was confident that this was something different. The red light he was observing went out suddenly, and he remained watching too see if a plane would fly overhead from that direction but never saw anything.

“So take it as you will,” he said. “I can’t really say it was a UFO. I didn’t know what it was. Unfortunately, when it comes to UFOs, that’s been my only experience.”

While earning a bachelor’s degree in broadcast technology with a minor in journalism at Vincennes University in his native Indiana, Swartz was already working at a television station in Terra Haute. He would go on to win several Emmy Awards, mostly in the technical field, for editing and producing various news segments. For example, while employed at the PBS station in Indianapolis, he worked on a Halloween episode for a program called “Across Indiana.” Swartz’s segment on local ghost stories was singled out by the judges when the entire program won an Emmy. 

The first time Swartz heard the name “Nikola Tesla,” he was working for a television station in Dayton, Ohio. The legendary Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which according to UFO lore houses the dead alien bodies recovered from the Roswell crash, among other things, is close to Dayton.

“One of the weekly assignments my producer and I had,” Swartz recalled, “was to go to Wright-Patterson and talk to the press liaison there just to see if there were any interesting stories we could do. The press liaison would go through his files to see what was available for the local press. I remember one day he was going through his files looking for some stories and he just made an offhand comment that they were doing some work there about which they couldn’t release any information to the press at that time, but maybe later. And he said, ‘work based on that mad scientist, Nikola Tesla.’ And then that was it. He went on to other stuff.”

In spite of how the press liaison had only casually mentioned Tesla, the name stuck with Swartz. He found the mere sound of Tesla’s name to be “exotic,” and he was further intrigued that Tesla had been labeled a “mad scientist.” Swartz would eventually be employed by Timothy Green Beckley, the CEO of Global Communications and the editor of several paranormal-related publications. Beckley and Swartz were kicking around some ideas for possible books one day, and Swartz suggested he try to write something about Tesla.

“Here’s somebody you don’t hear very much about,” Swartz told Beckley, “yet allegedly he contributed so much to modern technology. I’d like to do some research and see if there’s anything that would be worth writing a book about.”

Beckley gave the book proposal his blessing, and Swartz began his research into Tesla, though at the time, around 1998, there was scant material available. But then something serendipitous happened. Beckley received a letter from the late Jim Keith, another paranormal journalist who had written a number of conspiracy-based books. Keith wrote that he had been approached by a book buyer in New Jersey named Dale Alfrey, who had unknowingly purchased some of Tesla’s old papers and notes. Keith had little interest in the material and had passed the information on to Beckley, who then forwarded it to Swartz.

“It was fortuitous,” Swartz said, “that at the time I had only started doing the research on a possible book about Tesla.”

Swartz contacted Alfrey and began to learn further details of the book buyer’s story.

“He had bought a couple of boxes of old books from an estate sale,” Swartz recounted, “and in one of these boxes, underneath these books, he found a lot of old paperwork and journals that were from Tesla. Like a lot of people at the time, he had no idea who Tesla was. Nevertheless, he started reading it and got interested in what he was reading. So he started compiling what he was reading onto old floppy disks. More and more, he came to realize this was pretty unique material.”

Swartz said it is now known that Tesla was not much of a journal-keeper. Tesla had the rather unique ability to visualize his inventions and experiments in his head completely and without needing to put those ideas down on paper. He would convey his ideas to his assistants, whose job would then be to construct whatever device or set up any experiment that was asked of them as well as to write down certain details when necessary. 

In any case, Alfrey posted on an Internet forum that he had found this material by Tesla, whom he knew nothing about, and inquired whether anyone out there knew who Tesla was and if the material was worth anything. That was Alfrey’s primary interest: were the papers valuable and was there any money to be made by selling them? Shortly thereafter, he received a rather unsettling visit at his front door by two men, similar, according to Swartz, to the familiar Men-In-Black of UFO legend.

“I don’t think they were dressed in black,” Swartz said, “but they looked almost like federal agents. They were very clean cut, wearing suits and ties, sunglasses, the whole nine yards. They started inquiring about this material. Whether or not he still had it. Whether or not it was there. If he knew who Tesla was, all of that. He didn’t suspect anything. He just talked to them like he would anybody else.”

After a while, the two men thanked him for his help and left. Alfery reported to Swartz that he had felt comfortable throughout the interrogation, oddly enough, and was unaware that anything nefarious was going on. Alfrey next went into the office in another room of his house and found that all of his floppy disks had been stolen and his back door was unlocked. Someone had obviously come in through the back door while he was talking to the two men. Not only were the floppy disks gone, but the relevant material had also been erased from the hard drive in his computer. Nothing else was taken, and none of his stuff had been rifled through.

“It was as though these guys knew exactly where to go,” Swartz said, “what to take, and what to remove from his hard drive. Alfrey told me he wasn’t a computer genius, but he knew enough to check if his deleted files could be recovered. He couldn’t find any evidence that those deleted files had ever been on his computer at all. Whoever had deleted them had done an expert job. That’s when he started looking more into the subject and ran across Jim Keith’s name and wrote to him, which is how the story eventually came to me.”

Alfrey had had no prior experience with any of this, of course, and knew nothing about the dark side where the Men-In-Black and disinformation agents lurk. He asked Swartz, “Have you ever heard about anything like this before? Do government agents come and steal from American citizens? Why are they interested in this?” Swartz said he could not offer much to Alfrey in the way of helpful information in that regard.

However, as he continued researching Tesla, Swartz did learn that something similar had happened shortly after Tesla died in 1943. The United States government swooped in and took everything its agents could get their hands on from Tesla’s apartment and from his former residences as well.

“You have to understand,” Swartz explained, “that at the time Tesla passed away he was basically broke. The only way he was surviving was through monetary gifts from his friends. And when he would get low on funds, he would have to move to another place. He always lived in hotels there in Manhattan. Several times, when he had to leave these places, he also had to leave behind his possessions, which the hotels would use as collateral in lieu of him not being able to pay his bills. If he came back and paid his bills, he could get his possessions back.”

Swartz said that he suspects that a lot of Tesla’s material was sold by these hotels years later. They would run across the papers while cleaning out their basements, for example, and, not knowing what it was, would sell it to paper buyers or other merchants. Thus the material would end up in the hands of others.

“I think the military was most likely monitoring any kind of media outlet,” Swartz said, “the early Internet, things like that, for any Tesla material, in order to swoop in and grab whatever they had missed. I do know that a lot of the material they took directly from Tesla’s estate after he died ended up at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.”

Which is, of course, where Swartz first heard Tesla’s name while still a young television station employee. The pattern of coincidences and lucky happenstance that led to Swartz’s “The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla” is readily apparent. As was mentioned, earlier, the book is still a bestseller for publisher Global Communications, well worth buying and reading for those who have not previously done so. Swartz’s book’s continued impressive sales testify eloquently to the fact that Tesla’s hold on the collective imagination shows no signs of weakening, and Swartz also marvels that, as much time as he has devoted to the study of the legendary inventor, new information on Tesla still emerges all the time.

“I think Tesla still holds a fascination for people,” Swartz said, “because he was such a genius in his day. He went from being a publicly honored figure to being an eccentric hermit, desolate, broke, and referred to as a ‘mad scientist.’ Here we have a guy who created the AC motor, the thing that really helped propel our world into the 20th and 21st century and was part of creating our electronic age. Not just the AC motor, but all kinds of things: radio, remote control, robotics. Tesla even had his own Unified Field Theory on how the universe works. To go from somebody like that to somebody who was considered a crank, a nut job – that alone fascinates people.

“But then you also have a scientist,” Swartz continued, “who was so advanced, so ahead of his time in his thinking. We still haven’t caught up in understanding a lot of the things that he was experimenting with and conceiving. This was a guy that up until the day he died was still coming up with new ideas and theories. He may not have had the money to have a laboratory to conduct experiments any longer, but he was still coming up with things and registering new patents. His last patent was for a helicopter-like device.”

As far back as the late 19th century, according to Swartz, Tesla was looking for a method to transmit electrical energy wirelessly, and by the early 20th century was very close to reaching his goal.

“This is a technology we still don’t have today,” Swartz said, “at least in the public arena. I daresay there are military or government scientists who have a better understanding of what Tesla was trying to do and maybe are well aware of this technology and how it’s used. But it’s not available to the public because that would have devastating consequences on the way our whole economic system operates.”

On the issue of the UFO presence, Swartz has no doubts that the phenomenon is real and utterly amazing.

“It seems to almost have an intelligence of its own,” Swartz said, “in the sense of being able to detect when people are interested in it. It’s almost like the old saying, ‘When you look at it, it looks back at you.’ But the ET hypothesis, is probably too simplistic. It could very well be that at some aspects of the UFO phenomenon do represent physical nuts-and-bolts spaceships from other planets. But I think the overall UFO phenomenon is a lot more complex and may represent a lot of things at once.”

Among the many possibilities, Swartz explained, is the idea that UFOs may be a kind of time machine, or contain inter-dimensional travelers, or be a device operated by a race indigenous to Planet Earth but who live underground or exist at a higher or lower vibration and are thus normally invisible to the human eye. Perhaps one comparison would be to the “jinn,” the Islamic word for “demon,” though, as Swartz points out, a jinn has free will comparable to that of a human being and is a more morally complex creature than our usual understanding of what “demon” means. One must include the word “paranormal” when attempting to classify even some of the more common UFO phenomena, and allow for things outside our usual sense of the material world to be part of our investigation. Swartz says the aliens may simply be mimicking the belief structures already present in our collective consciousness.

“Back in the day, people believed in gods, angels and demons,” Swartz said. “I think there may be an intelligent force that exists on or off our planet that is able to conform itself to our state of reality, to correspond, so to speak, with these pre-existing belief structures. If you have people who believe in gods and angels or leprechauns or fairies, or what have you, then this phenomenon reshapes itself to correspond to these belief systems, for whatever reason. It may be perfectly natural to them to find themselves being manipulated by our collective consciousness. There may be no control over it; it just happens.”

Swartz also briefly mentioned the idea that this alien race may put itself through the machinations involved in interacting with us either for its own amusement or for the sake of “dinner,” referring to speculation on the part of some researchers that these intelligences use our emotions as their food source. The African shaman Credo Mutwa, for example, once said that the aliens exist as a form of energy and require emotional “energy” from us as an essential nourishment.

Time travel is another of Swartz’s favorite subjects, and he again does not question that it is a reality.

“And I think that Mother Nature,” he said, “is showing us that at least some form of time travel is available through what are called ‘time slips.’ We hear accounts of people who are walking down the street and suddenly find that their environment around them has changed. They actually experience, both physically and with all their senses, a different time period. Their surroundings will change to an older time. The asphalt will suddenly turn to bricks; the skyscrapers will disappear and be replaced by houses; the cars are replaced by horse-drawn carriages. They’ll hear, they’ll smell, what’s going on around them, and then, just as quickly, they’ll find themselves back in their own time. So I think that there could very well be ‘eddies’ in time. You may consider time to be a river that flows from the past to the future, but it’s not just smooth-flowing. You have whirlpools and eddies and little diversions that I think people can get caught up in and experience, albeit briefly, the past and sometimes the future.”

It is through a conscious, mechanical manipulation of time that UFOs traverse such vast distances in outer space so quickly, Swartz went on. One would describe their propulsion system as a kind “time machine” as opposed to one that utilized a form of fuel that would somehow propel them through space in more conventional ways, even if such a device could somehow operate at slightly less than the speed of light.

It is the UFOs’ ability to fold and bend time that permits them to exit their time in their solar system and emerge almost instantaneously at their destination untold light years away. Similar disruptions in the normal passage of time are also experienced by many abductees, who may believe they have been aboard a ship for several hours but upon returning discover they have been away only for a few minutes.

In addition to this kind of fascinating speculation, Swartz also has some interesting personal experiences of his own to offer. He has, on at least two occasions, witnessed apparent teleportation events that continue to defy conventional explanation. The first time teleportation happened was when he was working at a television station in Dayton, Ohio, and received a report from an older couple in nearby Springfield, who claimed there was a poltergeist presence in their home.

“They were grandparents,” Swartz recounted, “and their grandchildren had come to live with them due to bad circumstances. Their parents were no longer able to take care of them. It was a boy and a girl, and they were not quite teenagers. It was shortly after these children had come to live with their grandparents that what you would call classic poltergeist happenings started to occur – knocks on the wall, things being moved around, whispering voices, stuff like that.”

  When Swartz visited the family’s home, he took his television camera, lights, batteries and other accessories with him to record the interview for the sake of his personal investigative records while assuring the family that none of what transpired would ever be put on the air.

“That was the only way they would talk to me, naturally,” he said. “I’ve run across this time and time again. People want to talk about their experiences, but they don’t want to reveal them to the whole wide world.”

He sat down in the family’s living room, and the children were in their bedroom, adjacent to the adults and visible from where Swartz was seated. Suddenly, and without warning, small rocks started to fall from the living room ceiling. The rocks were similar to pieces of gravel, “like driveway rocks,” little white pieces of limestone.

“Just clunk, clunk, clunk,” Swartz said.

Above the living room was an attic of sorts, but it was just filled with insulation. It was a ranch-style home, and it would have been very difficult for someone to have hidden in the attic. Swartz checked that later and also determined there were no holes in the ceiling through which the small rocks could have fallen. Nevertheless, the rocks had appeared just below the ceiling and fallen to the floor in front of Swartz and the elderly couple. Five or six rocks had dropped, one right after the other, and were clearly visible.

Part II of this article continues next week.

To read more by Sean Casteel, please visit his website at www.seancasteel.com

The dream of time traveling, to the past or future, is probably as old as the human imagination. When H.G. Wells published The Time Machine in 1895, he called it a "scientific romance" because no one knew whether time travel was possible.

A mere 10 years later, Albert Einstein would put forth his theory of special relativity, and part of the question would be answered--to the astonishment of many--in the affirmative.

One of Einstein's predictions, now verified by countless experiments, is best illustrated by the parable of the twins. One twin stays home while the other makes a round-trip voyage into outer space, traveling at nearly the speed of light for 10 years, as measured by the stay at home twin. When the traveled twin returns, she finds her sister has aged 10 years, while she has hardly aged at all. The traveled twin has jumped 10 years into the future.

This is the "time-dilation" effect of special relativity, and although it is most noticeable when extreme velocities are involved, it is happening around us all the time. As we move relative to each other we are--all of us--traveling into the future at different rates. The differences in these rates are very small, sure, but they are real. Time travel into the future is inescapable, a consequence of the structure of the universe.

Time traveling to the past, or returning back from a trip to the future, is a somewhat more challenging proposition. Until a few decades ago, the subject was consigned to science fiction. In fact, a query from a first-time science-fiction author provoked the beginnings of the first serious and sustained study.

In 1985, astronomer Carl Sagan was working on the manuscript for his novel Contact. The book's heroine required some means of rapid interstellar transit, and since Sagan wanted to get the physics right, he solicited advice from his friend Kip Thorne, a Caltech theoretical physicist. Thorne recommended the use of a "wormhole," a tunnel-like shortcut through space and time predicted by Einstein and well known among science fiction aficionados. Sagan dutifully incorporated the suggestion.

That same year, Thorne realized that if you treated the two mouths of a wormhole as you treated the twins--keeping one mouth fixed, moving the other at a velocity near the speed of light and then returning it to the vicinity of the fixed mouth--you could create a time machine. If the traveling mouth had been moving for 10 years as measured by the fixed mouth, then Thorne could jump into the traveling mouth and emerge from the fixed mouth 10 years into the past.

Physicists had been skittish on the subject of time travel, considering it science fiction. But Thorne's work was license to take it seriously, and suddenly there appeared a torrent of papers, many of which were published in the most prestigious journals. By the mid-1990s there were at least half a dozen ideas for other ways to twist and fold space-time like origami.

All this thinking was decidedly theoretical--no one was building a time machine in his basement. One reason was that in most cases, the plans required a kind of anti-gravity called negative energy to sustain the warping of space and time. Negative energy is difficult, if not impossible, to produce in the quantities necessary. Still, the idea of time travel was getting serious attention.

Naturally, not all that attention was enthusiastic. Stephen Hawking, for one, suspected that by some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism, nature prohibited traveling back in time. One sticking point was the "grandfather paradox": If I traveled back in time and killed my grandfather, I could not have been born. But if I have not been born, I cannot live to travel back and kill my grandfather.

The Russian-born physicist Igor Novikov, an enthusiastic investigator into the subject of time travel, has suggested that the paradox doesn't apply because space-time is probably self-consistent. That is, I may be able to travel back in time and somehow become interwoven into a past of which I was already a part, but I will not be able to kill my grandfather, quite simply because I have not killed him already.

Novikov has also thought a good deal about the other time travel conundrum--the "bootstrap paradox." Suppose I travel to 2009, find a design for a zero-emission automobile engine and return with it to 2008 and patent it. Suppose further that the patent is developed into the design that I find in 2009.

The obvious question: Who would have invented the zero-emission engine? The answer is, no one would have invented it. The design would have been generated quite literally from nothing, courtesy of a time machine and (perhaps) a skirting of some yet-to-be-written intellectual property laws.

British physicist David Deutsch, invoking the "many-universe" interpretation of quantum mechanics, believes that "pastward" time travel would require travel to another, parallel universe--one in which I could kill my grandfather and in which I (therefore) would never be born. Via a time machine, I would have removed myself from this universe to take up residence in that one.

The idea has some interesting implications. Deutsch has suggested that one reason we have detected no extraterrestrial civilizations may be that, using time machines, they have left this universe, preferring to live in another.

Metaphysical and philosophical questions aside, exactly how realistic is the physics of pastward time travel? Each of the several schemes for making a time machine creates a region in which pastward time travel is possible and separates it from a region in which time travel is impossible. The boundary between these regions, the "chronology horizon," has remained a mystery, in part because its nature depends upon the characteristics of space-time on the smallest possible scales.

We have at best a dim understanding of these scales, and we will not have a real understanding until we have developed a full theory of quantum gravity. This is the holy grail of theoretical physics: the so-called "theory of everything" that would eliminate disparities between relativity (which explains nature on very large scales, where gravity becomes important) and quantum mechanics (which explains nature on very small scales, where quantum effects become important).

Some physicists think the theory of everything is 10 years away; others suspect it is a good deal further off. For the moment, then, the question of whether time travel is possible has been put on hold.

The recent (and, no doubt, temporary) decline of interest in traveling to the past is welcomed by physicists who argue that work in less fanciful areas might yield a greater intellectual profit. New Zealand physicist Matt Visser, himself the architect of a number of theoretical time machines, calls that attitude overly cautious and "boring."

More than two decades after Thorne's seminal work, we still don't know whether time travel is possible. But one thing is certain: Even as an idea, it's anything but boring.

Source: Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/02/28/time-travel-machine-oped-time08
-cx_dt_0229travel.html

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Did it really happen? Did Brett Favre retire? What if winter lasts until July? What was that lurking near the abandoned barn last night?

Rest easy, Northeastern Wisconsin. Except for the fact that Favre really did blow out of Titletown, we haven't totally lost our marbles. But if anyone is snapping cell-phone shots of a Bigfoot-type beast roaming the northwoods or a Nessy look-a-like breaking the surface of Lake Michigan, they're not sharing those secrets too close to home.

But there are stories. Stories that a shadowy wolf-like, bear-like creature seen foraging in the woods wasn't the average Wisconsin carnivore.

Those with enough nerve to share the sightings — or more accurately, what they think they saw — contact people like Linda Godfrey, an author from Elkhorn, who has written several books on weird goings-on in the state.

Godfrey spends a majority of her time traveling the highways and byways, compiling notes on long lost tales of pig men in Brussels or one-eyed horse tormentors in Green Bay-area stables. Some areas have richer and more well-traveled tales than others. That the stories exist speaks volumes about the human imagination and that people want to believe the unbelievable.

"People definitely want to believe that there are other things out there," said Godfrey, author of "Weird Wisconsin" and "Strange Wisconsin: More Badger State Weirdness."

"I've seen enough from the little bit that I've been able to explore to know that there are things you can't explain. That's why I think you're seeing a huge interest in ghost hunter shows, paranormal shows, monster shows. People really want to believe beyond what our senses tell us."

Do 'bear-wolves' live among us?

Godfrey, a former reporter who also has authored several books on werewolves — not the man-to-wolf transformational kind — says there's enough consistency in statewide sightings to believe a creature in the wilderness has some 'splainin to do.

"I don't think we're talking about Lon Chaney-style werewolves. I don't believe these are humans changing into wolf form," said Godfrey. "It does make for a sexier book title.

"It's strange, though, because I've received probably close to 200 reports just in Wisconsin and Michigan that have been consistent over years … and the way people describe its strength and speed, how it seems interested in staying out of sight, yet it stares people down, sometimes chases them before hiding in cover, it's a lot of the same.

"Sometimes, it's on two legs, runs away on four. Or sometimes, its starts on four and gets up and runs away on two. Either way, it's enough for people to say, 'I know what a wolf looks like. I know a dog or a bear. That wasn't it.' "

When conducting research, Godfrey said she's a skeptic. She does interviews to sniff out hoaxes, while information that passes the smell test is used to track patterns of consistency.

And wouldn't you know it? The Wisconsin werewolf in question has been to our neck of the woods.

"Green Bay is in a different area, in a sort of circle that extends to Wausau back to Green Bay and down to the West Bend area, the northern reaches of Milwaukee," she said. "It walks upright, and while it has a wolf-like head and ears, the body is bulkier. It's kind of been dubbed the 'bear-wolf.'"

"Bear-wolf." Check.

Now what about the legend of the little one-eyed man?

According to Godfrey's "Strange Wisconsin" book, the early settlers of Green Bay included French immigrants who shared stories about Les Lutins, tiny one-eyed men who loved to terrorize horse stables. Equivalent to goblins, whenever something was wrong with a horse, Les Lutins was blamed by owners.

That led Jacques, a Green Bay stableman, to sleep with his horses one night, eventually leading to noises and movements under a plank in the barn floor, the book said. A tiny cap poked through a hole, but went back under when the Cycloptic troublemaker realized a trap had been set.

"Geez, I've been in this job for 30 years and I've never heard that one before," said Mary Jane Herber, historian at the Brown County Library.

Herber had a meeting of the minds with two longtime residents and together they couldn't pin down any pervasive myths or legends tied to the area. Locations like Scray's (or Ghost) Hill, have history in terms of how they got their names — it stems from an illusion where cars were thought to be moving backwards by themselves up the hill — but she wasn't aware of anything that had stood the test of time.

"We all thought the same thing, that because of the strength of the churches in this area, both Lutherans and Catholics, that it probably wasn't something that was in the norm," Herber said. "People probably dismissed (those kinds of stories) right away."

The same might hold true in Door County.

Jon Jarosh said his area has several ghost tales, with tours capitalizing on the paranormal interest. But no deep woods or lake creatures to speak of. Just oversized fish.

"There's been a lot said about big fish over the years, because obviously there are some decent sized sturgeon that can swim around here," said Jarosh, marketing director with the Door County Chamber of Commerce. "But no lake creatures. And no Bigfoot around here. But we'd love to have him. Or her!"

Abnormalities also exist in Native American culture, though for the Oneida Tribe of Indians, it's intrinsic to its culture, which places the conversation at a different level.

Stories about the Goat Man, Deer Woman or shape shifting have persisted, often as scare tactics, among various tribes. But they aren't a matter of myth or legend to many who grew up with them, said Brian Doxtator of Oneida.

"For those of us who have been here for years, it's not something that brings raised eyebrows," he said.

What they haven't been able to control is how outside influences have taken the cultural concepts of Mother Earth and medicine and presented them as matters of black magic or witchcraft, Doxtator said. So maintaining who they are as tribal members — and passing that identity to the younger generation -- is something he'd like to see persevere.

"For my own self, it's something I try to practice. Storytelling," Doxtator said. "And occasionally I'll get teased, 'Oh, there's Brian telling a story again.' But we're all storytellers. Every one of us.

"But I'm also careful not to feed into the romanticized version of who we are as (supernatural) people. It's integrated in our community, but it's a small piece of the whole."

Then there's the Hodag.

Perhaps the most well-known Wisconsin-bred mythical monster, the Hodag has infused itself with all of Rhinelander.

The green dragon-like beast is used in city logos and advertising. It's Rhinelander High School's mascot. A smiling statue sits out front at the Chamber of Commerce. It even has its own Wikipedia page.

"Oh, we embrace it wholeheartedly, all the businesses, everything," said Trisha Gaffron, executive director at the chamber. "If you ask locals, you will not get one of them to tell you the Hodag is not real."

The Hodag story is credited to a logger named Gene Shepard who had the community eating out of his hand with the tall tale of a seven-foot-long creature roving the desolate pine forests in the late 1800s. The creation gave him a reputation for P.T. Barnum levels of showmanship, and by time he was found out, the story had cemented itself as local legend, Gaffron said.

"More than likely he's not around anymore … but you know, he was very real back in the day," Gaffron said with a laugh.

Source: Green-Bay Press-Gazette
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