Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain – he may be trying to control your mind with microwave beams.  Or he could be hiding the truth about aliens and UFOs.  Or he could be selling drugs to finance some government priority that the public need not know about.  Or he could be reading the latest issue of the number one, weekly conspiracy newsletter of strange stuff and high weirdness - Conspiracy Journal!

Nikola Tesla was a man of science. Books written after his death speculate that Tesla's extraordinary scientific abilities were the result of psychic powers and the paranormal. Tesla no doubt would be chagrined to hear these fantastic theories as he had no time for the idea that the paranormal was something beyond scientific understanding.

"Physics, extends beyond what is scientifically known today. The future will show that what we now call occult or the supernatural is based on a science not yet developed, but whose first infant steps are being taken as we speak!"

Unlike many scientists, Tesla was not afraid to conduct research on something considered outlandish.  If his interest was roused, Tesla would devote a tremendous amount of time in the attempt to figure it out. This is how Tesla became may have become involved in what is now known as Electronic Voice Phenomena...something unheard of at the time.

In 1898, Nikola Tesla had built a laboratory near Pike's Peak Colorado, conducting research on thunderstorms and lightning.  In his lab, Tesla had constructed receivers in order to use radio frequencies to indicate approaching storms. Along with the static created by lightning, Tesla became aware that his receivers were also picking up signals that were entirely unknown to him.

In an article written for Collier's Weekly (February 9, 1901), Tesla detailed the amazement he felt when it dawned on him that he was hearing something "possibly of incalculable consequences to mankind."

"My first observations positively terrified me, as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night; but at that time the idea of these disturbances being intelligently controlled signals did not yet present itself to me."

Tesla noted that he was already familiar with such electrical disturbances produced by the sun, Aurora Borealis and earth currents. However, the electromagnetic pulses that he was hearing were something completely unknown to him.

"The thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another."

Afterwards, other work consumed Tesla's time.  But his interest in the unknown signals persisted and he strived to perfect his receivers so that they could be tuned to any electromagnetic frequency. His diligence finally paid off when Tesla began to receive human voices, at a time when radio transmitters were still practically non-existent.

Unfortunately there is little else known about Tesla's research along these lines. His interests took him into other directions and no other notes have been found. It would be interesting to know what Tesla's ideas were concerning the strange voices. Did he feel they were interplanetary, or something else?
 
It wasn't long after that other people started hearing unknown voices over various electronic devices, voices that claimed to be the spirits of the dead. It will never be known for certain, but was Nikola Tesla the first to open the door to what later became known as Electronic Voice Phenomena?

Tune in this Wednesday night May 9/10 (Thursday morning for those of you on Eastern Time) when author Tim R. Swartz talks with George Noory about the incredible life and the weird things that happened after the death of Nikola Tesla on Coast to Coast AM.

Read more about Nikola Tesla in The Lost Journals of Nikola Tesla and Men of Mystery.

The afterlife story I want to tell is singular, first, because of the sheer oddness and rarity of the circumstances.  But also because, if true as reported, it’s remarkable 1) as proof of postmortem survival; 2) as showing human personality is multiple; 3) that we can be possessed by other minds; and finally, 4), it’s a story about a very unconventional healing of mental illness.

Two girls, Mary Roff (1846-1865) and Lurancy Vennum, (1864—1952) lived in Watseka, Illinois, a prosperous, middle class farming town.  As you might infer from their dates, Mary and Lurancy never knew each other in the flesh, and in fact Mary had been dead for 12 years when “she,” in 1878, reportedly took possession of Lurancy’s body.  

The “Mary persona’ (I’ll use this expression)—using the body of Lurancy--begs to be taken to her parents’ home.  So the girl known as Lurancy enters the Roff household and soon convinces the mother, father, brother and sister that Mary Roff was the thinking, feeling presence acting through Lurancy’s body. At first it was a shocking and strange adjustment the family had to make, but they did it out of kindness toward the suffering girl. But in the end, the family became convinced they had spent three months with the dead but still vivacious Mary, albeit in a surrogate body.  That’s the essence of this story, a tale that Edgar Allan Poe might have invented.

But is it true?  Or have a lot of people been deceived? To begin with, we have a careful compiler of all the evidence, Dr. E. Winchester Stevens, who was also an eyewitness and participant in the affair.  His role in the story is important.  Stevens saved Lurancy from being prematurely sent to the State Insane Asylum in Peoria.  His report, The Watseka Wonder, was first published in the Religio-Philosophical Journal in 1887.

The story begins in July, 1877, with Lurancy having seizures—“fits” Stevens calls them—hysterically induced blindness, catalepsy, and insensibility. In this state, she slides in and out of normal self-awareness, seeming to be possessed by different personalities, at first assaulted by two low-order spirits, one a known recent suicide, Willie Canning; the other a foul-talking old woman, Katrina Hogan.  But she also claimed to see her sister and brother and spoke of “angels” and being in “heaven.”

Amid all this, Mary Roff’s spirit comes into focus. Thanks to a certain mutual rapport, and guided by the suggestions of Dr. Stevens, it was agreed that the congenial Mary persona would remain in Lurancy’s body for three months and one week.  This was for therapeutic purposes, and indeed Lurancy’s condition would radically improve.

However, most relatives, clergy, strangers, and eminent physicians believed she was insane, and should be incarcerated.  Her parents, the Roffs, and a few sympathetic observers such as Dr. Stevens thought that she needed psycho-therapy, and were opposed to handing her over to “ignorant and bigoted strangers,” as Dr. Stevens put it.

The Roffs had been forced to place their daughter, Mary, age 19, under the care of the State Asylum, after she was found in a pool of blood from cutting her arm. Mary lasted little more than a night in the State Asylum before she died. The Roffs were not recommending that the Vennums abandon their child to the Asylum. They all agreed to the experiment, in which Lurancy would live with the Roff family, lending her body to the Mary persona.  The hope was that this would benefit Lurancy.   

The crucial event occurred when the mind of the dead Mary Roff seemed to take full and steady possession of Lurancy’s body.  By Feb. 1, 1878, it was obvious to witnesses that an intelligence calling itself Mary Roff was in continuous control of the body of Lurancy Vennum.  About a week later, the Roffs heard about this and Mrs. Roff and her daughter, Mrs. Minerva Alter, decided to investigate.  

As they approached the Vennum house, Lurancy, from the window, cried out, “there comes my Ma and sister Nervie!“ a nickname Lurancy could not have known.  Nor was she familiar with the two women and didn’t know they were Mary’s family.  But she embraced them warmly with kisses and joyous recognition—exactly as if they were her family, and she had not seen them for twelve years.

The main witnesses to support the strange claim were her family and family friends, all of whom were quickly convinced by the detailed knowledge the Lurancy-body displayed of countless facts and details appropriate to Mary Roff’s lived life.  This was no small thing to digest, and once the story got out, it caused a sensation.

“Watseka, Illinois, has been swept up by a tidal wave of excitement, on account of the presumed insanity of one Lurancy Vennum . . . .”,  begins Dr. Stevens narrative concerning this alleged case of possession.  The story gained a great deal of public attention, all over the state and even the country.  It also garnered a fair share of venom and irrational outrage. The bastions of proper normality thought Lurancy’s behavior was insane and/or diabolically inspired, and was best treated by locking her up. That was the initial consensus about her in Watseka in the 1870s.

Dr. Stevens was credited with “opening the gate for Lurancy”--saving her from an insane asylum that might well have killed her.  He did this by appealing to her reason.  He invited her to ally herself with the higher spirits around her and reject the lower. The higher, helpful spirit she found (or that found her) was believed to be Mary Roff who, like Lurancy, also had seizures and psychic powers when she was a child. The mutual attraction seems plausible enough.

So the spirit of Mary was allowed to occupy the body of Lurancy and live with Mary’s family. During the visit, “Mary” was happy, “knowing every person and everything that Mary knew when in her original body, twelve years to twenty-five years ago, recognizing and calling by name those who were friends and neighbors of the family from 1852 to 1865, when Mary died, calling attention to scores, yes, hundreds of incidents that transpired during her natural life,” wrote Stevens.

Stevens, in fact, gives many specific examples meant to prove that the vocal chords and muscular apparatus of Lurancy Vennum behaved as if controlled by the mind of the deceased Mary Roff. Mary’s father wrote: “Mary . . . recognizes everybody and everything that she knew when in her body . . . she knows nobody nor anything whatsoever that is known by Lurancy.” It looks as if Lurancy’s mind is out of commission so Mary can use her body.

One thing I would underscore, in the Watseka story, Dr. Stevens helped a patient suffering from what today some might call a “spiritual emergency.” Moreover, the drug and shock free spiritual treatment actually worked—granting the weirdly singular form it assumed. The three-month experiment and the healed life of Lurancy were proof of healing. When, as promised, “Mary” finally departed and Lurancy regained her normal self, she grew up, healthy and sane enough to survive mothering eleven children.

This result took the wind from the sails of naysayers. The screaming maniac with all the queer personas disappeared for three months, but then returned in full possession of herself.  Stevens quotes various newspaper reports. The Watseka Republican wrote, noting the perfect healing, “This is a remarkable case, and the fact that we cannot understand such things does not do away with the existence of the unaccountable manifestations.”  The “Danville Times” wrote that the phenomena  “are hard to explain upon any natural hypothesis, but is attributable to spirits’ aid.”  The Iroquois County “Times” flatly asked: “If she was not prompted by the spirit of Mary Roff, how could she know so much about the family, people with whom she was not acquainted, and whom she had never visited?”  The article concludes that there is a good deal in Lurancy’s story that seems at present “beyond human comprehension.”   

Lurancy had a genius for creative dissociation, a facility for occupying—or being occupied by—alternate “spirits” and personas. She once “became” the grandmother of one of her observers, named her, showed knowledge of her relatives, “never for a moment showing any sign of deception, but a veritable, honest experienced domestic old lady.”  One can only imagine what kind of actress Lurancy might have become, if she ever had the chance. She had a kind of greatness of imagination that Keats called “negative capability,” and that Shakespeare had in spades.

We are told of an experiment initiated by the Mary Roff persona, in which she vacates the body of Lurancy, leaving it limply leaning aside, and then takes control (without asking) of a Dr. Steel sitting opposite the unconscious Lurancy.  Dr. Stevens describes the “manly form” of Dr. Steel assuming the manner of and speaking like Mary Roff!  According to Stevens, she performed this little marvel with a certain childish glee.

Stevens witnessed Lurancy assume identities of numerous dead people, talking and behaving like them with frightening realism.  However, regardless of the flux, the Mary-persona was always in control.  The end result of the planned three-month long experiment was twofold.  “Mary” was able to enjoy a postmortem family reunion and Lurancy would emerge as a responsible, sane, and healthy human being.  She survived her illness and ended by providing us a singular case for afterlife consciousness..

What happened to Lurancy after she recaptured her personal identity?  Were the symptoms all gone? Was she still into mediumship? In response to queries, on December 4, 1886, Asa B. Roff wrote an account that updates her story. He reported that Lurancy matured into a normal woman, met a farmer who became her husband and promptly had a large family.

However—and this I find interesting--when the Roffs visited with the Vennums, which was at least yearly, and the all-important “necessary conditions” were provided, Lurancy went into trances and the Mary-persona returned and took over the medium’s body.  For brief, thrilling but tantalizing times, Mary would again reincarnate in the body of Lurancy Vennum. These were private parties, unchronicled; no way to find out what went on there.   

Mr. Roff was clear that Lurancy’s talents as a medium were being squelched out of existence. Her husband had no interest in his wife’s extraordinary psyche; his interest lay in her body, which succeeded eleven times in producing his progeny.

A society suspicious, hostile, and ignorant had no interest in Lurancy’s rare talents. Crushed by huge family cares, they remained fallow.  As Asa Roff liked to say, the “necessary conditions” were lacking, the right group dynamic. If the science of all this ever evolves, it may one day be normal to travel back and forth between this and the “next” world, with the aid of talented mediums.

Not surprisingly, attempts have been made to explain away the Watseka wonder.  There are two ways it could be done.  Either we’ve been tricked by a brilliant con and many complicit with her or we’ve been misled by the unconscious powers of a thirteen year old with super-paranormal and super-histrionic talents.

It has been said that the Roff family were Spiritualists and therefore not trustworthy, which is a fallacy that argues ad hominem. But William James’s monumental Principles of Psychology reviews Dr. Stevens’ Watseka Wonder, concluding that the evidence points toward a genuine case of possession.  Richard Hodgson went to Watseka in Illinois--a break from working with the medium, Eleanora Piper--and interviewed many of the parties directly acquainted with the Vennum case.  He found their accounts cogent and coherent.

The long chapter in which James covers the Watseka story is titled “The Consciousness of the Self.” The case of Lurancy reminds us in a dramatic way that our usual self-awareness is a more fragile entity than we think.  We can be replaced anytime, as it were, whether from our own psychic depths or an agent external to me.  In this case, it seems to have been a consciousness whose body died twelve years ago, the ill-fated Mary Ross.

The question remains, however, whether a living agent using her psychic talents might be able to create the appearance of a deceased person.  So, entering the house of the Roffs, it is possible to argue that Lurancy retrocognized the earthly life of Mary and assumed her identity, living the life of Mary for three months, convincing everybody that she was the Mary who died. If this is what happened, we have super ESP and a super theatric talent packed in one thirteen year old girl, but nothing about an afterlife.   

But when I try to imagine how this could happen in detail, it doesn’t seem credible: the idea that the girl’s psychic talents were the secret engineer of all the compelling effects that convinced everybody it was Mary Roff.  Walter Leaf and Rodger Anderson both argue this in some detail and try to show that everything that Lurancy did that seemed like it came from the dead Mary could be explained by the living Lurancy’s paranormal potential. Both Leaf and Anderson accept the basic facts of the case as true; they just don’t think the facts entail the survival of Mary.

Neither James nor Hodgson say this living agent hypothesis can be logically ruled out.  However, all sorts of things are logically possible that we would not for a moment believe.  Second, mediums usually perform greatly in short bursts, but a continuous three month performance without once slipping up and giving the game away seems highly improbable, and is as far as I know unprecedented. Third, there is the question of motivation.  We have to assume that all the parties involved in this performance were unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) willing, without missing a beat, to maintain the pretence and embrace the lie they were acting out for three months.

Finally, there is the undoubted fact that Lurancy emerged completely healed of her mental illness as a result of Dr. Steven’s experiment. This is at least consistent with the survival story.  Otherwise, we might see the story as the product of the will to believe and a shocking incapacity to expose the lie.  

However you decide, the story belongs in a taxonomy of human singularities.  Whether it be a case of possession and postmortem survival or a superb three-month psychic con job, thanks to super-psi—on either horn of this dilemma, it forces us to expand our concept of mind.

Source: Consciousness Unbound
https://consciousnessunbound.blogspot.com/2018/05/an-afterlife-singularity.html

Psychics never made much sense to me. How can someone pluck personal information out of the air without the use of Facebook data miners? A 2017 Chapman University study (Survey of American Fears Wave 4) showed I’m not alone; only 19 percent of the American population believes psychic talents are real.

Nineteen percent might not sound like much, but that’s more than 62 million people, which is greater than the entire population of Italy.

This number is down from a Gallup News poll which showed in 1990 26 percent of Americans believed people could have psychic powers. In 2001, that percentage rose to 32. A similar poll by the British government revealed 23 percent of Britons have gone to a psychic for guidance, although only 14 percent said they thought psychic powers were “genuine,” per YouGov UK.

So, where does that leave psychics?

Back when it was on, I’d watch an occasional episode of the TV show “Crossing Over With John Edward” (1999-2004), and was amazed at the gullibility of people. “I feel there’s someone here,” Edwards would tell his studio audience, “who wants to contact a loved one whose name starts with the letter ‘J.’” Considering the statistical probability of a woman in the United States whose name that starts with “J” is 8.178 percent, and a man’s chance is15.882 percent (per the U.S. Census), I’d say your odds of finding that loved one were pretty good, John.

With this disbelief firmly in place, I once covered a Spiritualist convention for a newspaper (pre-internet); my idea of what was real and what was not was shattered in about a half hour.

Spiritualism, the belief spirits of the dead want and can to talk to the living, was popular from the mid-1800s to the 1920s. It’s still around. I sought out a Spiritualist minister, a smartly-dressed woman from Kentucky, and conducted a short interview (quotes from my interview notes).

Me: How does someone become a Spiritualist?

Minister: There are two ways. You’re born into it, just like you were born into the United Methodist Church.

I was slightly taken aback. She was right, even though being from the Midwest, Baptist would have been a better guess. But she couldn’t know where I was from, could she?

Minister: The second way is to choose to become a Spiritualist. Like your mother. She was Catholic and converted to Methodism when she married your father.

Now, I was completely dumbfounded. She was right again. I finished the interview shortly after and went to get a drink.

How did this happen? How did someone in town for a couple of days get highly-specific personal information for a person she didn’t know existed?

I still wasn’t ready to put stock in psychic abilities. I had a secular education, as people who don’t believe in psychic powers usually do. In the same Chapman University study, respondents who believe in the paranormal are lower income, religious (although they typically have the Easter/Christmas/funeral/wedding church service attendance pattern), single, rural and have conservative political leanings.

However, the universe wasn’t finished with me.

While researching my first book in the early 2000s, I cold-called psychic Joyce Morgan, whom I had never met. At that point, Joyce was investigating haunted houses and appearing on “Court TV.” I was a newspaper reporter without an internet presence.

After our interview, she told me as a child I’d seen the ghost of a little boy in my house, although I had told her no such thing. (Quotes from my interview notes).

Joyce: The little boy’s name was John. His last name was like Petry or Petty. The little boy died in 1912. They either rented the house or were landowners there.

I didn’t want to hear any of this. The paranormal is fun as long as it happens to someone else.

Joyce: He had light brown hair. He had on a pail blue shirt with puckers on the sleeves. His britches were those kind of blooming-out britches.

I was speechless. She’d described the full-bodied apparition I’d seen perfectly. She went on to tell me his father’s name was George, and he had two sisters named Catherine and Nelly (or Nell). Then she said (out of the blue) my wife had experienced something in our house. She was right again. My wife kept seeing a fairy light over our newborn’s crib around 2 or 3 a.m. I’d seen it too, on one occasion.

Joyce: Oh, it’s just your grandfather (she gave his correct name) looking over his namesake.

I’d never mentioned the baby’s gender, the baby’s name, or my grandfather in our conversation – but she was right. Joyce was the real deal. Sadly, Joyce died 29 October 2007.

My experiences don’t change the fact that 81 percent of the American population doesn’t believe in psychics, but they do change the fact that I once didn’t believe in psychic powers and now I do. I still mostly agree with that 81 percent who don’t think people can just know things, but I also know there are a few people – just a few – who can.

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/05/in-defence-of-psychic-powers/

- CRASH GO THE SAUCERS DEPARTMENT -

Saucer Recovery

Most people have heard of the crashed flying saucer at Roswell, New Mexico. But this was not the only supposed crash of an alien craft.

One of the earliest recorded UFO crashes is said to have happened on 6 June 1884 when a blazing object crashed in Dundy County, Nebraska. Local farmhands rushed to the scene and found sand fused to a glass-like substance, and a large pile of hot debris. One person who got too close suffered blisters similar to radiation exposure today. It took several days for the debris to cool down, whereupon the local paper reported it was extremely light metal but incredibly strong. It could have been aluminium, except it had not yet been invented. Local papers of the time even speculated the object could have come from outer space.

THEY KEEP COMING DOWN

Researcher Todd Zechel learnt from witnesses about a possible UFO retrieval when a saucer crashed in Laredo, Texas, on 7 July 1948. Prior to the crash, the 90 foot disc was seen by pilots, and said to be travelling at 2,000mph. Witnesses at the crash site spoke of a craft being taken away by US forces, and that a hairless, four foot alien had died there.

At the time it was dismissed as a hoax, and government papers since released show that Nazi V2 rockets were being modified in the area at the time.

Researcher Ivan Sanderson collected sighting reports of an object that flew over the Great Lakes on 9 December 1965. Towards early evening there was a boom in the sky, followed by a trail of smoke and a tremor shook the ground in a wood near Kecksburg, Pennsylvania. A Soviet rocket, Cosmos 96, had re-entered that day, but 13 hours earlier.

In 1980, the fire chief who attended the incident finally told that he saw a conical craft 12 feet high embedded in the ground, but they were cleared away by the military. Later that night, a truck left the site, the military claiming nothing was found.

TOLD AFTER THE FACT

In 1973, US scientist Fritz Werner contacted UFOlogist Ray Fowler, telling him of an event at Kingman, Arizona, on 20 May 1953. Picked up by a blacked-out bus, he and over a dozen other scientists were taken out into the wilderness to do tests on a 30 foot diameter disc embedded in the soil.

Taking a quick peek into nearby tents, Werner observed the body of a four foot alien in a silver suit. Four years after Werner had told his story, confirmation came from a pilot, then at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. He knew of crates being received one night in mid-1953 containing wreckage with strange writing on it, and the bodies of three aliens packed in dry ice.

THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL

One of the latest episodes comes from Brazil. In the early hours of the morning of 20 January 1996, a farmer outside the city of Varginha saw a bus-sized object hovering above the ground spewing smoke.

By 08.30, the fire department received an anonymous call about a bizarre creature in the Jardim Abdere neighbourhood. When they arrived at the scene they found a group of adults chasing the creature which was bald, brown-skinned, had bulging, blood-red eyes and strange limbs. Capturing it, it was driven away in an army truck.

Rumours circulated that there had been more than one creature, and platoons of soldiers were seen throughout the day, with sporadic machine gun fire. At 15.30 hrs the Da Silva sisters were walking across a field when they saw a creature hiding fearfully behind a brick wall.

Within 24 hours of the first sighting of the craft, three extraterrestrials are said to have been taken to a Hospital, where medical tests killed at least one of them. The following day, bodies of the aliens were said to have been transferred to the University of Campinas, never to be heard of again as a military cover-up attempted to deny anything had occurred.

MILITARY MIS-IDENTIFICATION

Could the above have been real extraterrestrial events, or could something else be going on? There seem to be several factors identical to most of these episodes. First of all, something appeared to crash. And second, in many cases, it isn’t until many years later that people come forward to talk about it.

As these incidences usually revolve around military personnel, it is taken for granted that aerial phenomena that led to the ‘crash’ could not have been mis-identified. Yet how valid is this assumption?

As an ex-military man myself, I can testify to numerous exercises where personnel have ended up chasing shadows. A report comes in of an incident in the dead of night and it is soon blown up out of all proportion, with personnel regularly ‘seeing’ things that are not there.

The process can lead to a form of induced, and communal, self-hypnosis. You know that what is going on cannot be real, but your senses conflict with what you’re seeing. The Angels of Mons is not the only time such incidences have occurred, usually fuelled by fatigue followed by a rush of adrenalin.

A RECURRING THEME

After the event – a form of communal hallucination – the personnel involved feel rather stupid, and the authorities conspire to keep the event quiet. After all, it is inadvisable to let it be known that the military can occasionally seem to go insane.

Over the years, the personnel put the experience to the back of the mind, but as a culture forms out of research by non-military investigators, ‘false memories’ begin to form of what actually happened. And in no time at all, you’re sure that, as the books say, such events really did happen.

Hence, the result is a continuing culture of saucer crashes, almost identical in every case, because they are more a product of the researcher’s mind than the actual experiencers.
Indeed, this is a theme that can be found again and again in all manner of ‘paranormal’ experience, from exact mechanisms behind past-life regression through hypnosis, to the archetypal alien abduction event.

Of course, I am not saying that saucer crashes are not exactly what they seem. I am merely saying the possibility of other cultural and psychological processes should not be discounted.

Source: Beyond the Blog © Anthony North
http://beyondtheblog.wordpress.com/2007/08/15/saucer-recovery/

Trails of dust and gas in the night sky recorded by Anglo-Saxon astronomers may provide evidence of the mysterious Planet Nine, academics at Queen's University claim.

Experts believe depictions of comets spotted in the Dark Ages will provide further clues on the whereabouts of the hypothetical celestial body.

Scientists have long debated whether or not a rogue planet, dubbed Planet Nine, lurks at the edge of our solar system.

Some astronomers think the existence of the alleged planet - which they claim is ten times the size of Earth - explains the strange way distant objects in space move.

Researchers believe Anglo Saxon accounts, combined with modern scientific techniques, could be used to investigate the effects of Planet Nine.

Experts, including a medieval historian and an astronomer, at Queen's University, Belfast, make the claims as part of an exhibition exploring Anglo-Saxon understanding of the cosmos.

As part of their study, they are combining records of comets from Anglo-Saxon sources with contemporary images of the icy space objects, including from Nasa and The Northern Ireland Amateur Astronomy Society.

By marrying historical and scientific approaches, researchers hope to reveal new findings on Planet Nine.

Those hoping for theoretical Earth-sized doomsday planets proposed by astrologers and science fiction writers may have to keep searching, however.

Experts do not believe that Planet Nine is the bizarre Nibiru, also referred to as Planet Nine, which conspiracy theorists say may lead to the end of life on Earth.

'This research project renegotiates the meaning and importance of medieval science and demonstrates how medieval records of comets can help test the theory of the existence of the elusive 'Planet Nine'.

WHAT IS MYSTERIOUS PLANET 9?

Astronomers believe that the orbits of a number of bodies in the distant reaches of the solar system have been disrupted by the pull of an as yet unidentified planet.

First proposed by a group at CalTech in the US, this alien world was theorised to explain the distorted paths seen in distant icy bodies.

In order to fit in with the data they have, this alien world - popularly called Planet Nine - would need to be roughly four time the size of Earth and ten times the mass.

Researchers say a body of this size and mass would explain the clustered paths of a number of icy minor planets beyond Neptune.

Its huge orbit would mean it takes between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make a single pass around the sun.

The theoretical Planet Nine is based on the gravitational pull it exerts on these bodies, with astronomers confident it will be found in the coming years.

Those hoping for theoretical Earth-sized planets proposed by astrologers or science fiction writers - which are 'hiding behind the sun' and linked with Doomsday scenarios - may have to keep searching.

Source: The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5691005/Anglo-Saxons-spotted-
mysterious-Planet-X-Dark-Ages.html