Lower Hudson Residents Stand by UFO Sightings of 1980s
One generation ago, a
boomerang-shaped sight as bright as a city street and as big as a
football field spooked the night skies of the Lower Hudson Valley,
dissipating into such mixed reactions for some 7,200 people who saw it
that it never really congealed into the cosmic public event that it was.
Instead, it settled deeper into the realm of legend.
Now, 25 years after the well-documented but not necessarily well-remembered UFO phenomenon put Putnam and Westchester counties on the map as paranormal hot spots, the massive case study that the sightings have become is elevating the Lower Hudson Valley as one of the three major UFO vortexes in the world. The other two are Stonehenge and Sedona, Ariz.
In a land with a heritage that celebrates Washington Irving's iconic Headless Horseman every Halloween, the sightings are also yielding new theories about why these quiet suburbs apparently are so haunted.
The most fantastic theory is developed in four books by one high-profile UFO investigator who teaches middle school science in White Plains. He believes the stone chambers in Putnam were built by ancient European explorers to mark anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field that may open windows into the fourth dimension, thereby giving the supernatural universe a portal into suburban life.
Teacher and author Phil Imbrogno also was among the first on the Lower Hudson scene with national UFO experts in 1983 to record eyewitness accounts. At the time, hundreds of people in northern Westchester and Putnam were calling police to report a huge but silent lighted ship the witnesses were certain they had never seen before.
The Federal Aviation Administration explained the strange sights as light-plane formations - a possibility that many eyewitnesses said they rejected when they spoke to Imbrogno and the other investigators.
"At that time it was my experience that when UFOs appeared in front of large groups of people over a period of time, there was usually a logical explanation for it," Imbrogno said. "But in this case there was none."
Witnesses told investigators that the government explanation of conventional aircraft was cursory, although perhaps to be expected; the Air Force studied 12,600 UFO reports from 1947 until 1969 and then stopped, in part because it said it was a waste of taxpayer money and in part because the sightings did not represent new technology or a national security threat.
As a result, the government turned all investigations over to private groups. And the Lower Hudson UFO legend only grew.
People came out in groups to watch the night skies for UFOs. New-age seekers came to tour the stone chambers in the woods of Kent for the chance to see a spook light or perhaps a druid ghost. More than 1,500 people packed a one-day UFO conference at the Henry H. Wells Middle School in Southeast.
Support groups started for people certain they were contacted by extraterrestrial beings, including a monthly gathering called the UFO Roundtable in Yonkers. Cable networks sent production crews to dramatize an already remarkable story with special effects.
In March, the History Channel aired a program that called the Lower Hudson sightings the biggest UFO vortex mystery of all time.
And why not?
The Lower Hudson Valley has always been a place, as Irving writes in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," where "stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country" and where people are "given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs, subject to trances and visions."
Patterson-based real estate broker Freddy Vicente found that out while driving April 27 on the Taconic State Parkway, when, he said, a circle of 12 or more clearly oversized lights glided past his windshield and out of sight into the night.
For musician Gary Adamson of Rye, a witness of UFOs in the late 1980s in Carmel, there is no conventional explanation for what he saw. So he embraces the mystery of not knowing and tries not to presume what manner of intelligence was behind the UFOs.
Still, the idea that there might be such a thing in his backyard as windows to an undiscovered dimension allows for the possibility of interstellar intelligence.
"If these things are interdimensional, then they are right here with us," he says.
The burden of handling the UFO sightings - which came in the hundreds on the same night across town and county lines on at least three dates during the peak - fell somewhat unfairly on local police departments, whose officers also sometimes witnessed the same unidentified object as the public they were protecting.
"We are sworn to uphold the law and help citizens, but that night we didn't know what we had," said Lt. Kevin Soravilla of the Yorktown police. He was a patrolman on duty the night of March 24, 1983, when he twice saw a silent and massive delta-shaped lighted ship. "It was mind-boggling, but how do you impart that feeling to other people out there?"
The day after a mass sighting police had the task, in Washington Irving's words, of "collecting and collating the floating facts." Departments often had little recourse beyond calling airport control towers to find a conventional explanation.
Yet too many people saw the same surreal sight for the FAA suggestion to fly that light aircraft in formation alone was the culprit. The best pilots invariably break formation, and their engines are always audible from the ground, Soravilla said.
It was not just police, of course, but hundreds and hundreds of parents and professionals who saw the same extraordinary sight while going through ordinary life.
For many witnesses, the desire to conceal what they saw for fear of ridicule was matched only by the urge to reveal it in order to connect with a larger shared experience. The only people who seemed to understand what the witnesses were going through were a handful of UFO investigators, who took the reports seriously, recording every detail the witness could recall.
But the lights in the sky were only the beginning, even if for the majority of those who saw them, that was all there was.
Once people stopped asking who was seeing what and where it was being seen, the focus turned to more existential questions of how the northern suburbs had become such a UFO hot spot and why alien sights were suddenly in the air.
To the first question of how, Imbrogno broached the idea of interdimensional windows in the Lower Hudson Valley, opened by the Earth's energy at points marked by ancient stone chambers.
To the second question of why, the UFO abduction expert Budd Hopkins answered as one would expect from a UFO abduction expert.
"He said to me 'You want to know what all the UFOs are all doing in the Hudson Valley? They're looking for people,' " Imbrogno recalled.
Here, of course, on the subject of extraterrestrial life, is where folks often draw the line. For many without the benefit of a supernatural experience, it is one step to call an object unidentified but quite a leap to call an unidentified object occupied.
As Imbrogno noted in the book "Night Siege" about the early Lower Hudson sightings that he co-authored with UFO pioneer Allen Hynek, few witnesses wanted to label the strange lights they saw as evidence of extraterrestrials. And Hynek was not going to print it even if they did.
Hynek, an astrophysicist who advised the Air Force during its 22-year investigation of UFOs and went on to found his own UFO center, believed the UFO reports coming out of Westchester and Putnam were controversial enough without including stories of contact with extraterrestrials.
"Those cases were purposely left out of 'Night Siege' to make the book respectable because of Dr. Hynek's association with it," Imbrogno said. "If you can call UFO sightings respectable."
In this instance, the investigators shared something in common with the government and the media that are so routinely accused in the UFO lexicon of covering up the truth about extraterrestrials.
It would take follow-up interviews and the death of Hynek in 1986 for Imbrogno to publish in "Contact of the Fifth Kind" that some 340 of the 7,200 sightings from 1982 to 1985 were contact cases, where people said they heard telepathic messages or were scanned by light or had vivid dreams of being taken aboard ships and tested by aliens. Some said they actually saw little gray beings with the quintessential oversized eyes, small mouth, large head and skin-tight body suit.
The witness accounts may not seem so different from the blockbuster movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." But while acknowledging that UFO sightings could be colored in some cases by a universal bias propagated in popular culture about what UFOs and aliens are supposed to look like, Imbrogno said the opposite is the case. Hynek's 1972 book, "The UFO Experience," and the phrase he coined - "close encounters of the third kind" - was the inspiration for Stephen Spielberg's movie by the same name, not the other way around, Imbrogno said.
Spiritual healer Francine Vale of Yonkers speaks of seeing UFOs in Florida and Manhattan and receiving telepathic messages that she associates with building oneness on Earth.
"My feeling is that most of these sightings are positive," said Vale, who opens the monthly UFO Roundtable in Yonkers with a guided meditation. "Of course there are laws of the universe of noninterference, so the ETs have to reach us through inspiration and dreams."
The paranormal becomes normal
As much as the Lower Hudson sightings are part of the global UFO story - which can suddenly gain prominence as it did last week, when Britain released UFO files revealing an American fighter pilot's plan to shoot down a UFO over the North Sea in 1957 - their legacy continues to be one that lives beneath the cultural radar.
This is the case not only because of the stigma attached to UFO sightings, although it is not always clear who is enforcing it: In a recent CIA report, agency historian Gerald Haines said 95 percent of Americans have heard about UFOs and 57 percent believe they are real. The Lower Hudson UFO story is more legend than popular history because the witness experience is so personal and varied.
Some people screamed out in fear at the sight while others felt awe and even an attraction to it - especially those who sensed a wordless communication from the object not to be afraid.
Fellow witnesses could report variations of the same object. While some people sought out logical explanations for what they saw, it appears to be a much more common case that witnesses found ways to move on with life, work and love without answers.
Imbrogno's grand answer - that the stone chambers interlock with the full spectrum of paranormal phenomenon - gets no credence from Mahopac archaeologist Eugene Boesch, who holds the mainstream view that the structures were built for cold storage by Colonial pioneers.
Imbrogno, who has an advanced science degree, concedes that some of his work is more literary than literal and more spiritual than scientific. That is not unlike a certain schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, also from Connecticut, by the way.
"Absolutely," Imbrogno said. "Maybe years from now the Hudson Valley UFOs will be looked at like 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'"
Source: The Journal News
http://www.lohud.com/article/20081031/NEWS01/810310331/1018/NEWS02
Instead, it settled deeper into the realm of legend.
Now, 25 years after the well-documented but not necessarily well-remembered UFO phenomenon put Putnam and Westchester counties on the map as paranormal hot spots, the massive case study that the sightings have become is elevating the Lower Hudson Valley as one of the three major UFO vortexes in the world. The other two are Stonehenge and Sedona, Ariz.
In a land with a heritage that celebrates Washington Irving's iconic Headless Horseman every Halloween, the sightings are also yielding new theories about why these quiet suburbs apparently are so haunted.
The most fantastic theory is developed in four books by one high-profile UFO investigator who teaches middle school science in White Plains. He believes the stone chambers in Putnam were built by ancient European explorers to mark anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field that may open windows into the fourth dimension, thereby giving the supernatural universe a portal into suburban life.
Teacher and author Phil Imbrogno also was among the first on the Lower Hudson scene with national UFO experts in 1983 to record eyewitness accounts. At the time, hundreds of people in northern Westchester and Putnam were calling police to report a huge but silent lighted ship the witnesses were certain they had never seen before.
The Federal Aviation Administration explained the strange sights as light-plane formations - a possibility that many eyewitnesses said they rejected when they spoke to Imbrogno and the other investigators.
"At that time it was my experience that when UFOs appeared in front of large groups of people over a period of time, there was usually a logical explanation for it," Imbrogno said. "But in this case there was none."
Witnesses told investigators that the government explanation of conventional aircraft was cursory, although perhaps to be expected; the Air Force studied 12,600 UFO reports from 1947 until 1969 and then stopped, in part because it said it was a waste of taxpayer money and in part because the sightings did not represent new technology or a national security threat.
As a result, the government turned all investigations over to private groups. And the Lower Hudson UFO legend only grew.
People came out in groups to watch the night skies for UFOs. New-age seekers came to tour the stone chambers in the woods of Kent for the chance to see a spook light or perhaps a druid ghost. More than 1,500 people packed a one-day UFO conference at the Henry H. Wells Middle School in Southeast.
Support groups started for people certain they were contacted by extraterrestrial beings, including a monthly gathering called the UFO Roundtable in Yonkers. Cable networks sent production crews to dramatize an already remarkable story with special effects.
In March, the History Channel aired a program that called the Lower Hudson sightings the biggest UFO vortex mystery of all time.
And why not?
The Lower Hudson Valley has always been a place, as Irving writes in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," where "stars shoot and meteors glare oftener across the valley than in any other part of the country" and where people are "given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs, subject to trances and visions."
Patterson-based real estate broker Freddy Vicente found that out while driving April 27 on the Taconic State Parkway, when, he said, a circle of 12 or more clearly oversized lights glided past his windshield and out of sight into the night.
For musician Gary Adamson of Rye, a witness of UFOs in the late 1980s in Carmel, there is no conventional explanation for what he saw. So he embraces the mystery of not knowing and tries not to presume what manner of intelligence was behind the UFOs.
Still, the idea that there might be such a thing in his backyard as windows to an undiscovered dimension allows for the possibility of interstellar intelligence.
"If these things are interdimensional, then they are right here with us," he says.
The burden of handling the UFO sightings - which came in the hundreds on the same night across town and county lines on at least three dates during the peak - fell somewhat unfairly on local police departments, whose officers also sometimes witnessed the same unidentified object as the public they were protecting.
"We are sworn to uphold the law and help citizens, but that night we didn't know what we had," said Lt. Kevin Soravilla of the Yorktown police. He was a patrolman on duty the night of March 24, 1983, when he twice saw a silent and massive delta-shaped lighted ship. "It was mind-boggling, but how do you impart that feeling to other people out there?"
The day after a mass sighting police had the task, in Washington Irving's words, of "collecting and collating the floating facts." Departments often had little recourse beyond calling airport control towers to find a conventional explanation.
Yet too many people saw the same surreal sight for the FAA suggestion to fly that light aircraft in formation alone was the culprit. The best pilots invariably break formation, and their engines are always audible from the ground, Soravilla said.
It was not just police, of course, but hundreds and hundreds of parents and professionals who saw the same extraordinary sight while going through ordinary life.
For many witnesses, the desire to conceal what they saw for fear of ridicule was matched only by the urge to reveal it in order to connect with a larger shared experience. The only people who seemed to understand what the witnesses were going through were a handful of UFO investigators, who took the reports seriously, recording every detail the witness could recall.
But the lights in the sky were only the beginning, even if for the majority of those who saw them, that was all there was.
Once people stopped asking who was seeing what and where it was being seen, the focus turned to more existential questions of how the northern suburbs had become such a UFO hot spot and why alien sights were suddenly in the air.
To the first question of how, Imbrogno broached the idea of interdimensional windows in the Lower Hudson Valley, opened by the Earth's energy at points marked by ancient stone chambers.
To the second question of why, the UFO abduction expert Budd Hopkins answered as one would expect from a UFO abduction expert.
"He said to me 'You want to know what all the UFOs are all doing in the Hudson Valley? They're looking for people,' " Imbrogno recalled.
Here, of course, on the subject of extraterrestrial life, is where folks often draw the line. For many without the benefit of a supernatural experience, it is one step to call an object unidentified but quite a leap to call an unidentified object occupied.
As Imbrogno noted in the book "Night Siege" about the early Lower Hudson sightings that he co-authored with UFO pioneer Allen Hynek, few witnesses wanted to label the strange lights they saw as evidence of extraterrestrials. And Hynek was not going to print it even if they did.
Hynek, an astrophysicist who advised the Air Force during its 22-year investigation of UFOs and went on to found his own UFO center, believed the UFO reports coming out of Westchester and Putnam were controversial enough without including stories of contact with extraterrestrials.
"Those cases were purposely left out of 'Night Siege' to make the book respectable because of Dr. Hynek's association with it," Imbrogno said. "If you can call UFO sightings respectable."
In this instance, the investigators shared something in common with the government and the media that are so routinely accused in the UFO lexicon of covering up the truth about extraterrestrials.
It would take follow-up interviews and the death of Hynek in 1986 for Imbrogno to publish in "Contact of the Fifth Kind" that some 340 of the 7,200 sightings from 1982 to 1985 were contact cases, where people said they heard telepathic messages or were scanned by light or had vivid dreams of being taken aboard ships and tested by aliens. Some said they actually saw little gray beings with the quintessential oversized eyes, small mouth, large head and skin-tight body suit.
The witness accounts may not seem so different from the blockbuster movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." But while acknowledging that UFO sightings could be colored in some cases by a universal bias propagated in popular culture about what UFOs and aliens are supposed to look like, Imbrogno said the opposite is the case. Hynek's 1972 book, "The UFO Experience," and the phrase he coined - "close encounters of the third kind" - was the inspiration for Stephen Spielberg's movie by the same name, not the other way around, Imbrogno said.
Spiritual healer Francine Vale of Yonkers speaks of seeing UFOs in Florida and Manhattan and receiving telepathic messages that she associates with building oneness on Earth.
"My feeling is that most of these sightings are positive," said Vale, who opens the monthly UFO Roundtable in Yonkers with a guided meditation. "Of course there are laws of the universe of noninterference, so the ETs have to reach us through inspiration and dreams."
The paranormal becomes normal
As much as the Lower Hudson sightings are part of the global UFO story - which can suddenly gain prominence as it did last week, when Britain released UFO files revealing an American fighter pilot's plan to shoot down a UFO over the North Sea in 1957 - their legacy continues to be one that lives beneath the cultural radar.
This is the case not only because of the stigma attached to UFO sightings, although it is not always clear who is enforcing it: In a recent CIA report, agency historian Gerald Haines said 95 percent of Americans have heard about UFOs and 57 percent believe they are real. The Lower Hudson UFO story is more legend than popular history because the witness experience is so personal and varied.
Some people screamed out in fear at the sight while others felt awe and even an attraction to it - especially those who sensed a wordless communication from the object not to be afraid.
Fellow witnesses could report variations of the same object. While some people sought out logical explanations for what they saw, it appears to be a much more common case that witnesses found ways to move on with life, work and love without answers.
Imbrogno's grand answer - that the stone chambers interlock with the full spectrum of paranormal phenomenon - gets no credence from Mahopac archaeologist Eugene Boesch, who holds the mainstream view that the structures were built for cold storage by Colonial pioneers.
Imbrogno, who has an advanced science degree, concedes that some of his work is more literary than literal and more spiritual than scientific. That is not unlike a certain schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane, also from Connecticut, by the way.
"Absolutely," Imbrogno said. "Maybe years from now the Hudson Valley UFOs will be looked at like 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.'"
Source: The Journal News
http://www.lohud.com/article/20081031/NEWS01/810310331/1018/NEWS02
- WHY ARE JUST HEARING THIS NOW DEPARTMENT -
Financial Psychic Predicted Global Meltdown
This woman knows
nothing about finance yet claims she can predict turmoil in the markets
months before it happens. Don't believe her? Many blue-chip companies
do – and pay handsomely for her 'intuition'.
A few blocks from Wall Street lives a woman who is not in the least bit surprised at the recent economic upheaval on her doorstep. In fact, she predicted it years ago and is rather enjoying it.
'I love crisis,' says Laura Day, a psychic who advises major corporations on how to direct their business dealings. 'I love turning it around. I'm going to brag – in the last few weeks I've become a hero. My clients were all prepared for this. They were out of the market a year ago and now they're ringing me saying, "The whole world is freaking out and I'm just sitting here calm."'
The 49-year-old mother has earned more than $10 million (£6.4 million) in the past 15 years advising corporations and individuals including Demi Moore, Jennifer Aniston and Rosanna Arquette. Day's otherwordly expertise doesn't simply encompass the financial; Arquette credits her with saving her daughter's life by sensing a potentially fatal medical condition.
While there is nothing very surprising about the Hollywood A-list embracing the help of a psychic, it is harder to imagine mainstream businesses enlisting her services. She takes on five businesses at a time, each of which pays her $10,000 (£6,400) a month for 24-hour access to her. She will not name her clients, although some have gone on the record extolling her work. Gabriel Lawson, the executive director of the American technology giant Seagate, hired her two years ago as a consultant and told Newsweek, 'She was amazing. Anybody who can afford her will get 100 times their money's worth.'
'In early July, right before the oil market dived, I said, "I wouldn't be buying oil futures now," and I predicted China's current troubles eight months ago,' Day says. Thanks to those and many other good calls, a prospective client can be on Day's waiting-list for years.
Not that she swans into board meetings wearing a gypsy dress and bejewelled headscarf. Quite the opposite. 'When I visit a company I make an effort to learn what their rules are,' she says. 'I don't want to look like a freak so I go in wearing a blue suit, I take my notes and I only say something when I know it will sound appropriate. If the CEO hires me, I go in as a consultant. Most of the time the rest of the company doesn't have a single idea of what I really do.'
So what does she really do? 'What I do actually works best if I know nothing, so I don't look at the market,' Day says. 'I'm a complete information desert. I just get a sense of the right thing to do. I'll say, "I understand that you're buying everything in China, but gosh I would hold off," and then they figure out why. Or a medical research client will come and say, "We're having trouble with the poly-whatever morph unit." My intuition will target exactly what their issue is and I'll say, "The seamed area needs something else to stick it together," and they will know they need a different polymer. Or whatever. I let the words come out of my mouth even though I may have no idea what I am talking about; my client will know what to do.'
Does she believe she is channelling spirits? 'I do not have an "in" with spirits,' Day offers. 'That's a scary concept. I don't want to be Guru Maharaja Day.' Indeed, she prefers to be known as an intuitive.
'I hate the word psychic,' she says, through gritted teeth as she settles into her sofa and tucks her feet underneath her. 'Because it means tea leaves and crystal balls and a six-floor walk up to a place that smells like cat's piss.'
Day does indeed live on the sixth floor, but there is a lift up to her flat. And she does have a cat, as well as white pigeons and fish, but her flat smells of freshly brewed coffee. No tea leaves either. 'I do not do tea, particularly not for English people because they're always so snotty and critical of the way I make it.' The flat is eccentrically furnished, but the nearest thing to a crystal ball is the disco mirror-ball hanging in the room where her 16-year-old son, Samson, plays his drums. She lives with Samson and her long-term boyfriend, Adam Robinson, and says the flat is divided into 'girl zone' and 'boy zone'. We are in the girl zone, which incorporates the sitting-room with its brightly coloured armchairs, countless plants, coloured-glass candle-holders and, bizarrely, a table of rubber ducks.
Leading off the sitting-room is her bedroom with a bed covered in a lime-green bedspread and dotted with stuffed animals. Her bathroom, which has no door, is so crammed with lotions and bags and clothes that you can no longer see the walls. It seems safe to say that her style is anti-minimalist.
Hanging in the sitting-room, opposite the black and white photos of Demi Moore embracing Day, is a card that reads, 'Laura, because of you I see the world anew. I celebrate the day you were born. Much love, Jennifer.' I imagine this is from Jennifer Aniston, who, along with Moore, threw a surprise party for Day last year. 'They tricked me and told me they needed me and I should come out to LA. Jennifer had my hair done, Demi had my make-up done. It was a group effort just to get me to a party where I had to be the centre of attention.'
Usually she prefers to be in the background. 'I'm an introvert,' she says, 'and a neurotic worrier.' Blonde and pretty, Day is easy company, although prone to off-kilter statements: 'Is it hot in here or is it just my perimenopause?' she asks at one point.
She wears little make-up and no nail varnish, which is unusual in New York. 'I don't like to put on lipstick and a bra that makes your boobs look like they don't hang to your waist.'
Day believes that her troubled childhood, growing up in New York, helped her develop her psychic abilities. 'I had a suicidal mother and I needed to learn to call the police in time to save her.' When Day was 12 years old her mother fell into a coma from which she was not expected to recover. Day 'knew' she would survive. 'I could see exactly what was going on in her body.'
Nevertheless, three years later, her mother finally succeeded in killing herself.
Her career as a psychic began in her early thirties, shortly after her marriage ended ('I knew when I was walking down the aisle that I would get a divorce') and she found herself in straitened circumstances. She had been casually advising a friend, a hedge-fund manager, on stock investments and asked if he would mind paying for her tips. He obliged and a career was born. Now she gives seminars on how to use the sixth sense and has written five books teaching people how to harness their own 'practical intuition'. 'Anyone can do what I do,' she says. 'It is an idiot's gift.'
Day knows that some people scoff at what she does, but doesn't care.
'The nice thing about growing up in a household where the police come and knock down doors to take your mother to hospital is that you really don't worry about what other people think.'
She comes from three generations of doctors, and her father, David Globus, has little truck with his daughter's line of work. Does she ever discuss her abilities with him? 'Are you kidding? My father just got convinced vitamins are useful.' Nevertheless, he has been known to ring her for help. 'He'll call me up at seven in the morning and say, "Where are my damned keys?" I'll say, "They're in the maid's bathroom in your grey jacket." We don't talk about how I know it; it would disturb him too much. It's the same with my son. He'll ask me things that don't register as weird, like, "I lost my backpack at school, can you tell me where it is?"'
I t must be very alarming to see what is happening in her own future. Does she foresee health problems or know how long she will live? 'I get a sense of that, but everybody does. I repress less than most people, but the truth is you never read well in your areas of neurotic preoccupation. When you're reading for yourself, your wishes and fears get in the way. I find when my intuition needs to tell me something it wakes me up from a dead sleep.'
Sometimes, she says, she finds her intuition predicting something that she does not want to hear about. 'When that happens I just put my hands over my ears and go, "No, no, no, no."'
Day tells me that she can see into a person, even someone she has never met before. 'I know them before they walk in the door.' Somewhat nervously, I ask her what she intuits about me. 'I don't do it in interviews. If you come over another time and give me a glass of wine – because I'm a cheap drunk – you won't be able to get away from me doing it.'
I ask her if she had anticipated that the current financial crisis would be as big as this. 'I thought it would be bigger, actually, and I think it's not over yet. These symptoms were cooking for years. I could feel this six years ago.' She thinks it will be decades before the market truly recovers. 'I wouldn't expect to sell my apartment for the same price I could have sold it for a year ago – not until my grandchildren sell it.'
She says that she never underestimates the 'weirdness' of her profession. When I suggest to her that it has gained in credibility over the past 20 years, she shoots back. 'Well, so has S&M, but people still don't talk about it.'
But what makes Day so much more engaging and less odd than one might think is that she happily admits her fallibility. 'I screw up all the time. My intuition is rarely wrong, but sometimes I interpret it wrong. Recently, a dear friend lost her job and was in a panic. I told her I saw her getting her job back [the following] Tuesday. She didn't get her job back, but her mother died on Tuesday and left her a lot of money. What I had been looking at was not her job, but whether she was going to have money to pay her bills. So I screwed up.'
She shrugs. 'As I always say, if I were God I would be paid more.'
Source: The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/3400109/Meet-Laura-Day-
The-financial-psychic-of-Wall-Street-who-predicted-global-meltdown.html
A few blocks from Wall Street lives a woman who is not in the least bit surprised at the recent economic upheaval on her doorstep. In fact, she predicted it years ago and is rather enjoying it.
'I love crisis,' says Laura Day, a psychic who advises major corporations on how to direct their business dealings. 'I love turning it around. I'm going to brag – in the last few weeks I've become a hero. My clients were all prepared for this. They were out of the market a year ago and now they're ringing me saying, "The whole world is freaking out and I'm just sitting here calm."'
The 49-year-old mother has earned more than $10 million (£6.4 million) in the past 15 years advising corporations and individuals including Demi Moore, Jennifer Aniston and Rosanna Arquette. Day's otherwordly expertise doesn't simply encompass the financial; Arquette credits her with saving her daughter's life by sensing a potentially fatal medical condition.
While there is nothing very surprising about the Hollywood A-list embracing the help of a psychic, it is harder to imagine mainstream businesses enlisting her services. She takes on five businesses at a time, each of which pays her $10,000 (£6,400) a month for 24-hour access to her. She will not name her clients, although some have gone on the record extolling her work. Gabriel Lawson, the executive director of the American technology giant Seagate, hired her two years ago as a consultant and told Newsweek, 'She was amazing. Anybody who can afford her will get 100 times their money's worth.'
'In early July, right before the oil market dived, I said, "I wouldn't be buying oil futures now," and I predicted China's current troubles eight months ago,' Day says. Thanks to those and many other good calls, a prospective client can be on Day's waiting-list for years.
Not that she swans into board meetings wearing a gypsy dress and bejewelled headscarf. Quite the opposite. 'When I visit a company I make an effort to learn what their rules are,' she says. 'I don't want to look like a freak so I go in wearing a blue suit, I take my notes and I only say something when I know it will sound appropriate. If the CEO hires me, I go in as a consultant. Most of the time the rest of the company doesn't have a single idea of what I really do.'
So what does she really do? 'What I do actually works best if I know nothing, so I don't look at the market,' Day says. 'I'm a complete information desert. I just get a sense of the right thing to do. I'll say, "I understand that you're buying everything in China, but gosh I would hold off," and then they figure out why. Or a medical research client will come and say, "We're having trouble with the poly-whatever morph unit." My intuition will target exactly what their issue is and I'll say, "The seamed area needs something else to stick it together," and they will know they need a different polymer. Or whatever. I let the words come out of my mouth even though I may have no idea what I am talking about; my client will know what to do.'
Does she believe she is channelling spirits? 'I do not have an "in" with spirits,' Day offers. 'That's a scary concept. I don't want to be Guru Maharaja Day.' Indeed, she prefers to be known as an intuitive.
'I hate the word psychic,' she says, through gritted teeth as she settles into her sofa and tucks her feet underneath her. 'Because it means tea leaves and crystal balls and a six-floor walk up to a place that smells like cat's piss.'
Day does indeed live on the sixth floor, but there is a lift up to her flat. And she does have a cat, as well as white pigeons and fish, but her flat smells of freshly brewed coffee. No tea leaves either. 'I do not do tea, particularly not for English people because they're always so snotty and critical of the way I make it.' The flat is eccentrically furnished, but the nearest thing to a crystal ball is the disco mirror-ball hanging in the room where her 16-year-old son, Samson, plays his drums. She lives with Samson and her long-term boyfriend, Adam Robinson, and says the flat is divided into 'girl zone' and 'boy zone'. We are in the girl zone, which incorporates the sitting-room with its brightly coloured armchairs, countless plants, coloured-glass candle-holders and, bizarrely, a table of rubber ducks.
Leading off the sitting-room is her bedroom with a bed covered in a lime-green bedspread and dotted with stuffed animals. Her bathroom, which has no door, is so crammed with lotions and bags and clothes that you can no longer see the walls. It seems safe to say that her style is anti-minimalist.
Hanging in the sitting-room, opposite the black and white photos of Demi Moore embracing Day, is a card that reads, 'Laura, because of you I see the world anew. I celebrate the day you were born. Much love, Jennifer.' I imagine this is from Jennifer Aniston, who, along with Moore, threw a surprise party for Day last year. 'They tricked me and told me they needed me and I should come out to LA. Jennifer had my hair done, Demi had my make-up done. It was a group effort just to get me to a party where I had to be the centre of attention.'
Usually she prefers to be in the background. 'I'm an introvert,' she says, 'and a neurotic worrier.' Blonde and pretty, Day is easy company, although prone to off-kilter statements: 'Is it hot in here or is it just my perimenopause?' she asks at one point.
She wears little make-up and no nail varnish, which is unusual in New York. 'I don't like to put on lipstick and a bra that makes your boobs look like they don't hang to your waist.'
Day believes that her troubled childhood, growing up in New York, helped her develop her psychic abilities. 'I had a suicidal mother and I needed to learn to call the police in time to save her.' When Day was 12 years old her mother fell into a coma from which she was not expected to recover. Day 'knew' she would survive. 'I could see exactly what was going on in her body.'
Nevertheless, three years later, her mother finally succeeded in killing herself.
Her career as a psychic began in her early thirties, shortly after her marriage ended ('I knew when I was walking down the aisle that I would get a divorce') and she found herself in straitened circumstances. She had been casually advising a friend, a hedge-fund manager, on stock investments and asked if he would mind paying for her tips. He obliged and a career was born. Now she gives seminars on how to use the sixth sense and has written five books teaching people how to harness their own 'practical intuition'. 'Anyone can do what I do,' she says. 'It is an idiot's gift.'
Day knows that some people scoff at what she does, but doesn't care.
'The nice thing about growing up in a household where the police come and knock down doors to take your mother to hospital is that you really don't worry about what other people think.'
She comes from three generations of doctors, and her father, David Globus, has little truck with his daughter's line of work. Does she ever discuss her abilities with him? 'Are you kidding? My father just got convinced vitamins are useful.' Nevertheless, he has been known to ring her for help. 'He'll call me up at seven in the morning and say, "Where are my damned keys?" I'll say, "They're in the maid's bathroom in your grey jacket." We don't talk about how I know it; it would disturb him too much. It's the same with my son. He'll ask me things that don't register as weird, like, "I lost my backpack at school, can you tell me where it is?"'
I t must be very alarming to see what is happening in her own future. Does she foresee health problems or know how long she will live? 'I get a sense of that, but everybody does. I repress less than most people, but the truth is you never read well in your areas of neurotic preoccupation. When you're reading for yourself, your wishes and fears get in the way. I find when my intuition needs to tell me something it wakes me up from a dead sleep.'
Sometimes, she says, she finds her intuition predicting something that she does not want to hear about. 'When that happens I just put my hands over my ears and go, "No, no, no, no."'
Day tells me that she can see into a person, even someone she has never met before. 'I know them before they walk in the door.' Somewhat nervously, I ask her what she intuits about me. 'I don't do it in interviews. If you come over another time and give me a glass of wine – because I'm a cheap drunk – you won't be able to get away from me doing it.'
I ask her if she had anticipated that the current financial crisis would be as big as this. 'I thought it would be bigger, actually, and I think it's not over yet. These symptoms were cooking for years. I could feel this six years ago.' She thinks it will be decades before the market truly recovers. 'I wouldn't expect to sell my apartment for the same price I could have sold it for a year ago – not until my grandchildren sell it.'
She says that she never underestimates the 'weirdness' of her profession. When I suggest to her that it has gained in credibility over the past 20 years, she shoots back. 'Well, so has S&M, but people still don't talk about it.'
But what makes Day so much more engaging and less odd than one might think is that she happily admits her fallibility. 'I screw up all the time. My intuition is rarely wrong, but sometimes I interpret it wrong. Recently, a dear friend lost her job and was in a panic. I told her I saw her getting her job back [the following] Tuesday. She didn't get her job back, but her mother died on Tuesday and left her a lot of money. What I had been looking at was not her job, but whether she was going to have money to pay her bills. So I screwed up.'
She shrugs. 'As I always say, if I were God I would be paid more.'
Source: The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/3400109/Meet-Laura-Day-
The-financial-psychic-of-Wall-Street-who-predicted-global-meltdown.html
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ARE UFOS IRRADIATING ARGENTINA DEPARTMENT -
Argentina: A 2003 Exposure to Radiation?
Argentina: A 2003 Exposure to Radiation?
The year was 2003. The location: a farmhouse located in Santa Rosa, La Pampa, where somewhat strange manifestations were taking place, among them the dehydration of plants (acacia bolla, damasca, parras) over a surface area with an approximate diameter of one meter.
Subsequently, water was found to be missing from the swimming pool, which measures 4 x 6 x 1.50 meters. The missing amount was estimated at some 4800 liters. Simultaneous to this event was
the appearance of a light-green frog, along with second one of a local variety of the kind found in this area. At this time the pool had only 20 cm of water left in it. The unusual, out-of-place frog vanished only days later; it was determined that it was a poisonous tree-frog of a tropical variety (not native to the area).
Also at that time, a whitish pattern began to appear in the grass, measuring some 5 cm wide and forming an oval. Over the next few days, it wound up forming a "horseshoe" measuring some 2.30 meters wide by 4.30 meters long. The grass had the proper shape and volume but looked dehydrated, possibly due to exposure to very high temperatures or radiation. When attempting to dig it up with a shovel, the underlying soil presented an exceedingly high degree of consistency or compacting. A brown and red hornet, a species proper to the region, was found dead on the grass along with a sparrow. Were these deaths due to radiation exposure?
At that time the house contained two Doberman Pinschers that suddenly displayed signs of rapid and visible weight loss. Both animals were physically unstable and it was necessary to force-feed them for many days until they recovered. Not long after this, a Cocker Spaniel betrayed signs of neurological damage as indicated by a dropping of its jaw and hip in a systematic manner. Eight veterinarians were consulted and none of them was able to explain the source of the malady or problem, and suggested that the dog be put down. This suggestion was
rejected outright (another victim or radiation?).
After the backyard was reseeded in February, grass began to grow with a dark green coloration toward the end of September that year. When inspected, it was attested that chlorophyll levels in the area were affected, as well as the microfauna.
Soon after this, designs measuring 5 cm wide by 50 cm tall began to appear, transforming into characters or "letters" in a faded yellow color against the grass (temperature/radiation?). The strange letters vanished after the grass was mowed. I would like to make clear that these events (the marks/letters) were recorded on photographs and videos which were subsequently circulated in various Lists).
The current opinion is that these phenomena are closely related to the UFO phenomenon, while the object themselves were not visible due to the fact that human eye is "contained" within a bandwith of 10 to 6 meters and a frequency of 1014/1015 Hz, which is to say, the human eye is formatted in such a manner.
Source: Inexplicata
http://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2008/11/2003-exposure-to-unknown-radiation-in.html
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TALES OF THE SUPERNATURAL DEPARTMENT -
Iowa’s Mysterious Black Angels
Iowa’s Mysterious Black Angels
Behind the Legends of these Legendary Grave Monuments
Just about anyone familiar with strange ghost tales from cemeteries, or with stories of "haunted" cemetery artwork, has heard a tales of cursed graveyard statues. In the state of Iowa, perhaps the most notorious of these cursed monuments dwells in the haunted Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City. Or Does it? That’s the real question for our purposes here because in truth, the stories behind two very different “black angels” in Iowa have become mixed together over the years, creating a hodge-podge of supernatural tales that it’s taken years to unravel.
You see, the state of Iowa does not boast just one black angel with mysterious ties to the unknown --- there are actually two of them, located in two different cemeteries, in two completely different cities!
The Black Angel of Oakland Cemetery
The strange black angel in Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery has long been connected to the supernatural. It’s a part of the local lore in Iowa City and has been mentioned in books and on websites for many years. As mentioned though, it’s history has long been confused with another black angel, which is located in Council Bluffs. The following is the true history --- and mystery --- of Oakland Cemetery’s black angel.
The black angel of Oakland Cemetery is an eight and a half foot tall burial monument for the Feldevert family, erected in the cemetery in 1912. Since that time, it has been the source of many stories and legends in Iowa City --- most connected to the mysterious change in color that the angel took, turning from a golden bronze to an eerie black.
The statue was erected by Teresa Dolezal Feldevert, a physician who had immigrated to America from Strmilov, Bohemia, Teresa and her son, Eddie Dolezal, came to Iowa City, where she worked as a midwife. They lived in Iowa City until 1891, when Eddie died of meningitis at the age of 18. He was buried in Oakland Cemetery and Teresa had a tree stump monument erected over his grave. It can still be seen today.
After Eddie’s death, Teresa moved to Eugene, Oregon where she married Nicholas Feldevert, who died tragically just a few years later in 1911. In the wake of this loss, Teresa returned to Iowa City and she hired Mario Korbel, a Bohemian artist in Chicago, to design the angel that would hover over the body of her son and the ashes of her husband. The angel arrived on a railroad flatcar in Iowa City on November 21, 1912.
There have been many stories spread about even the most mundane aspects of the angel’s existence, starting with the date that it was erected in the cemetery. According to local history, provided by people who lived in the city at the time, the angel was installed at the cemetery at the time of its arrival in 1912. Other sources claim that it was actually stored in a barn for six years and was not erected until after a court case that Teresa brought against the artist, Mario Korbel. The story states that she refused to pay the $5,000 cost of the statue because it did not meet her specification to include a replica of her son’s tree stump monument in the angel monument. She eventually lost the case.
Whatever the truth of this story, at some point after the installation of the angel, Eddie’s monument was moved from its original location to its present site alongside the angel. His remains, along with the ashes of Nicholas Feldevert, were placed in a repository under the angel’s base. Teresa died of cancer on November 18, 1924, her ashes were also placed beneath the angel and soon after, the strange stories began.
Within a few years of its installation in Oakland Cemetery, the glorious bronze angel strangely began to turn black. Most have explained this as the natural oxidation of the metal but not surprisingly, other explanations have surfaced, blaming evil acts, freak storms, infidelity and even murder.
One legend has it that Teresa Feldevert was a very mysterious woman and that her evil caused the angel to turn black. This strange shadowing was to serve as a constant reminder of the sins of her family – and as a warning for people to stay away from her grave. Some claimed that Teresa’s wicked ways were evident in the design of the angel. Unlike most graveyard angels, which are usually positioned with their head and wings uplifted as a symbol of aiding in the ascent to heaven, the Feldevert angel is looked down to the ground and her wings are not uplifted. And strangely, there is no death date on the monument for Teresa Feldevert.
One legend created another and a variety of stories sprang up, stating that any girl who was kissed at the angel’s feet in the moonlight would die with six months. Others said that touching the angel on Halloween night would lead to death in seven years and, worse yet, kissing the angel itself would cause a person’s heart to stop beating.
Others claimed the angel turned black after a freak thunderstorm on the night of Teresa’s funeral. According to this, the angel was struck my lightning and this is what caused it to turn black.
There are also stories that blame the black color of the angel on infidelity. In this version of the angel story, Teresa allegedly vowed over her husband’s grave that she would remain faithful to him until the day that she died –-swearing that his death angel would turn black if she ever cheated on his memory. The color of the angel, these stories claim, answer the question as to whether or not Teresa remained faithful!
Perhaps the harshest explanation for the angel’s color claims that Teresa’s son did not die from an illness, as the records stated, but rather because she murdered him. These stories claim that she fled to Oregon soon after and only her guilt brought her back to Iowa City. In shame, she moved his body to rest beneath the wings of the angel and soon after, it began to turn back as a reminder of her shame.
And while such stories may bear little resemblance to the truth, they do remain an essential part of the lore and legend of Iowa. For generations, local residents and University of Iowa students have come to Oakland Cemetery, often under the light of the moon, to ponder the mysteries of the angel. She is regarded as one of the region’s most haunted sites, likely based on the odd stories, curses and enigmas attached to her past and present.
The Black Angel of Council Bluffs
Far across the state from Iowa City is Council Bluffs, a place steeped in history. Here, at the edge of Fairview Cemetery, is another black angel with connections to the supernatural.
This angel rests at the Ruth Ann Dodge Memorial, which is located just outside of the entrance to Fairview Cemetery. This graveyard, one called the “Old Burying Grounds”, is one of the oldest in the region. It began as a Native American burial ground and then it was taken over by the Mormons for a time. Around 1919, the angel was erected here to mark the grave of Ruth Ann Dodge, the wife of General Grenville M. Doge, a Civil War veteran and the chief engineer of the Transcontinental Railroad.
Ruth Ann Dodge died in September 1916 at her home in New York but her body was brought to Council Bluffs, where she was buried. Soon after, her daughters, Anne Dodge and Eleanor Pusey, commissioned Daniel Chester French to sculpt the black angel. French is best known for the statue of Abraham Lincoln that he created for the Lincoln Monument in Washington. The young woman had strict criteria for French as to how the angel was supposed to look. They wanted it to be a likeness of an angel that had appeared to their mother during a series of visions that she had before her death.
These supernatural “visitations” were no mere dreams. According to Mrs. Dodge, they were realistic and overwhelming visions about which her daughter Anne stated: “We realized this was no dream, no ordinary occurrence, but an apparition such as appeared to those saints of olden times, who were spiritual seers, holy enough to penetrate the fleshly veil and view spiritual things hidden from the worldly minded.”
Ruth described the visions to her daughters. She stated that she did not close her eyes but was simply transported to the rocks of a seashore that she had never seen before. She had as feeling that she was looking and waiting for something, but she did not know what it was. But she did know that something tremendous was about to occur. Out of the mist, she saw an ancient boat appear that was covered with roses and rare and fragrant flowers. As it approached, she saw that a beautiful young woman was standing in the bow of the ship. As soon as Ruth saw her, she knew that she was a spiritual being and “not of this earth.”
The young woman was clad in a glistening white garment that fell in long folds from her shoulders to her feet. Her hair, which reached to her shoulders, looked like spun gold, forming a halo around her head. Her eyes were bright and seemed to look at Ruth, and yet through her, and were filled with an expression that was beyond description.
The young woman came to her carrying a deep vessel, like a Grecian urn, under her arm. It was filled with water that Ruth described by saying that “it glistened, glittered and sparkled like millions of diamonds.” The woman offered it to her and urged her to drink from it, telling her that it contained a blessing. But as much as Ruth craved the water, she told her daughters, she was not ready to drink it just yet. A few moments later, she “awoke” and the vision was gone.
Ruth had the same vision three times and on the third time, she drank from the water that the angel offered her. A few days later, she died. On her deathbed, she told her daughters that the angel offered her the “wonderful water of life. I drank from it and it gave me immortality.”
Ruth and Eleanor commissioned French to create the black angel to their specifications and he succeeded. The sculpture shows a beautiful angel that holds a vessel of water. While not a deep urn, the statue held a vessel that poured water into a fountain, continually offering the “water of life”. Over time, the fountain had declined and has also been restored to its glory. The water in the fountain was shut off in 1960 but restored to life again in 1985. It continues to draw visitors to the cemetery today.
While the story of Council Bluff’s black angel is not filled with the doom and dark portents of the angel of Iowa City, it stands today as a the connections between one woman and the afterlife --- between this world and the next.
Source: Prairie Ghosts
http://www.prairieghosts.com/oakland.html
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MYSTERY OF THE LAKE DEPARTMENT -
Has A Baby Ogopogo Been Found in Lake Okanagan?
Has A Baby Ogopogo Been Found in Lake Okanagan?
VANCOUVER - A TV documentary crew has added to the mystery surrounding Ogopogo by finding an unknown biological specimen in the depths of Okanagan Lake.
"I told a radio station tongue-in-cheek I thought it was the baby Ogopogo," monster-watcher Bill Steciuk of Kelowna said Monday after the History Channel completed a nine-day shoot.
"It was all curled up. The features were really hard to see. You could see a little head tucked in and a straight tail with no fins.
"It's a huge mystery. We have no idea what it is," said Steciuk, who helped organize the shooting locations.
The unidentified specimen has been shipped to the University of Guelph in Ontario for DNA tests, but Ogopogo buffs will have to wait until February to find out more, when the Monster Quest program weighs in on the legendary mega-serpent.
Ogopogo, first sighted in the 1870s, is reputed to be 12 metres long with multiple humps and a small head.
The History Channel, which had a bigger budget than previous expeditions, mounted a thermal infrared imaging camera on a helicopter for the first time. It picked up an unidentified shadow on the lake, while sonar spotted something over three metres long moving in the water.
"That's pretty big for a fish," said Steciuk.
But divers made the most interesting find in an underwater cave on the west side of Rattlesnake Island.
"I couldn't recognize it," said Steciuk. "Nor could anyone else. Maybe a new species has been found."
Photographs of the specimen were shown to local expert Arlene Gaal, who has earned the title of Ogopogo-ologist after writing three books on the subject. She is not sure that the son of Ogopogo has been found.
"The Ogopogo is real, but I don't know what this is," she said.
"I had my doubts when the crew presented me with their findings. It looked to me like a decomposing ling cod."
She said the crew's best efforts were wasted on choppy waters.
"It was not the time for sightings," she said. "The Ogopogo likes warm weather and sunshine."
Producers departed with dramatic re-enactments of past sightings - but no catch of the century.
Steciuk said the program may have been defeated by the primitive snake's reserve.
"The Ogopogo is a shy animal," he said. "There is no question we have an aquatic animal on our lake. Okanagan residents are starting to come to grips with it."
Source: Canada.com
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=
5680c1d8-fa74-42fe-98b8-5a48872a713f
