3/11/11  #612
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The next time secret government intelligent agents, aliens from UFOs, the Men-In-Black, or anyone else from the New World Order, come knocking on your door asking personal questions and wanting to bug your mail, phone and computer...You tell them that you are protected by the good folks at Conspiracy Journal!  Yes, that's right! Watch as they flee in fear from our intrepid reporters and field investigators, striving everyday to bring you the latest in weird, suppressed news and information that you won't see on your local six o'clock news.

This week, Conspiracy Journal takes a look at such icy tales as:

- NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite -
-
Spirits in the Sky: Aviation and the Unknown-
- Was 'Supermoon' the Cause of Japan Earthquake? -
AND: 'Two Suns' Spotted Over China Defy Explanation

All these exciting stories and MORE in this week's issue of
CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!

~ And Now, On With The Show! ~


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It's the dirty little secret of UFOlogy -- something that only a few insiders dare discuss amongst themselves. For example, Lord Hill-Norton, the late five-star Admiral and the former head of the British Ministry of Defence, believed strongly in the existence of UFOs. But he did not see them in a positive light, professing instead in his privately printed UFO Concern Report: "UFOs are essentially a religious matter rather than a military threat and furthermore there is certainly a degree of psychic involvement in almost every case. Quite often, however, such experiences are definitely antithetical to orthodox Christian beliefs."

Journalist and author of "The Mothman Prophecies" (made into a film starring Richard Gere) John A. Keel was adamant when he stated: ". . ..The UFOs do not seem to exist as tangible manufactured objects. They do not conform to the accepted natural laws of our environment. . .The UFO manifestations seem to be, by and large, merely minor variations of the age-old demonological phenomenon."

Other researchers of supernatural phenomena have noted that. . .The casting of magical spells, the performance of occult rituals and a ceremony to conjure up spirits are sometimes attempted by witnesses prior to a UFO appearing in their proximity.

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- LIFE HERE STARTED OUT THERE DEPARTMENT -

NASA Scientist Claims Evidence of Alien Life on Meteorite

We are not alone in the universe -- and alien life forms may have a lot more in common with life on Earth than we had previously thought.

That's the stunning conclusion one NASA scientist has come to, releasing his groundbreaking revelations in a new study in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology.

Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, has traveled to remote areas in Antarctica, Siberia, and Alaska, amongst others, for over ten years now, collecting and studying meteorites. He gave FoxNews.com early access to the out-of-this-world research, published late Friday evening in the March edition of the Journal of Cosmology. In it, Hoover describes the latest findings in his study of an extremely rare class of meteorites, called CI1 carbonaceous chondrites -- only nine such meteorites are known to exist on Earth.

Though it may be hard to swallow, Hoover is convinced that his findings reveal fossil evidence of bacterial life within such meteorites, the remains of living organisms from their parent bodies -- comets, moons and other astral bodies. By extension, the findings suggest we are not alone in the universe, he said.

“I interpret it as indicating that life is more broadly distributed than restricted strictly to the planet earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. “This field of study has just barely been touched -- because quite frankly, a great many scientist would say that this is impossible.”

In what he calls “a very simple process,” Dr. Hoover fractured the meteorite stones under a sterile environment before examining the freshly broken surface with the standard tools of the scientist: a scanning-electron microscope and a field emission electron-scanning microscope, which allowed him to search the stone’s surface for evidence of fossilized remains.

He found the fossilized remains of micro-organisms not so different from ordinary ones found underfoot -- here on earth, that is.

“The exciting thing is that they are in many cases recognizable and can be associated very closely with the generic species here on earth,” Hoover told FoxNews.com. But not all of them. “There are some that are just very strange and don’t look like anything that I’ve been able to identify, and I’ve shown them to many other experts that have also come up stumped.”

Other scientists tell FoxNews.com the implications of this research are shocking, describing the findings variously as profound, very important and extraordinary. But Dr. David Marais, an astrobiologist with NASA’s AMES Research Center, says he’s very cautious about jumping onto the bandwagon.

These kinds of claims have been made before, he noted -- and found to be false.

“It’s an extraordinary claim, and thus I’ll need extraordinary evidence,” Marais said.

Knowing that the study will be controversial, the journal invited members of the scientific community to analyze the results and to write critical commentaries ahead of time. Though none are online yet, those comments will be posted alongside the article, said Dr. Rudy Schild, a scientist with the Harvard-Smithsonian's Center for Astrophysics and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cosmology.

"Given the controversial nature of his discovery, we have invited 100 experts and have issued a general invitation to over 5,000 scientists from the scientific community to review the paper and to offer their critical analysis," Schild wrote in an editor's note along with the article. "No other paper in the history of science has undergone such a thorough vetting, and never before in the history of science has the scientific community been given the opportunity to critically analyze an important research paper before it is published, he wrote."

Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, said there is a lot of hesitancy to believe such proclamations. If true, the implications would be far-reaching throughout the fields of science and astronomy, the suggestions and possibilities stunning.

“Maybe life was seeded on earth -- it developed on comets for example, and just landed here when these things were hitting the very early Earth,” Shostak speculated. “It would suggest, well, life didn’t really begin on the Earth, it began as the solar system was forming.”

Hesitancy to believe new claims is something common and necessary to the field of science, Hoover said.

“A lot of times it takes a long time before scientists start changing their mind as to what is valid and what is not. I’m sure there will be many many scientists that will be very skeptical and that’s OK.”

Until Hoover’s research can be independently verified, Marais said, the findings should be considered “a potential signature of life.” Scientists, he said, will now take the research to the next level of scrutiny, which includes an independent confirmation of the results by another lab, before the findings can be classified “a confirmed signature of life.”

Hoover says he isn’t worried about the process and is open to any other explanations.

“If someone can explain how it is possible to have a biological remain that has no nitrogen, or nitrogen below the detect ability limits that I have, in a time period as short as 150 years, then I would be very interested in hearing that."

"I’ve talked with many scientists about this and no one has been able to explain,” he said.

Source: Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/03/05/exclusive-nasa-scientists-claims-evidence-
alien-life-meteorite/


- THE BIZARRE UP ABOVE DEPARTMENT -

Spirits in the Sky: Aviation and the Unknown
By Scott Corrales

Much is made this day of the declassification of UFO material by some of the world’s air forces and civil aviation boards, but much of this openness surely mirrors the greater receptiveness toward the UFO subject in society at large. Pilots and workers in the aviation industry who stepped forward years ago with claims of the abnormal could find their flight status revoked or their employment terminated.

We can only imagine the fate of pilot Ricardo France of the LAN carrier, who spoke openly to Chile’s REVISTA VEA in January 1972 about being pursued by a flotilla of UFOs over a considerable length of Chilean territory for nearly 90 minutes. It is likely that he underwent rigorous investigation and medical checkups, even when four days after his experience, five hundred cars in the city of Tandil “were paralyzed by a flashing flying saucer” according to the same publication. These unbelievable cases form part of the collection of ufologist Liliana Núñez.

Pilots in Peril

“The altimeter started to climb and the artificial horizon spun like a top. The gauges all became whirlygig and the readouts on three inertial navigation computers turned to frantic numbers and coordinates. The airliner flew along the indicated parameters, but if the autopilot had obeyed the instruments, we would’ve been killed.”

It sounds at first blush like a line of dialogue from LOST or some television show in which square-jawed protagonists take on the unknown. But this is the testimony of a Mexican commercial pilot whose crew actually had a brush with the bizarre in February 1979 at an eleven thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean. The three man crew – who steadfastly refused to allow their names to be used – spoke to researcher Alberto Montemayor under a promise of anonymity. Had the cause of the confusion on flight deck been ascribed to faulty software, defective hardware or some other mundane reason, they would surely have been less reticent. But as the airliner captain – known only as “F.T.” – told the researcher, the cause for the confusion anguish among the crew was an powerful source of light that appared to fly over the aircraft for an endless, maddening three minutes.

“F.T.” had no illusions about the experience. “If someone was trying to send us a special message,” he told Montemayor, “all they managed to do was show us that the thing had such power and control over our aircraft that it could have seized the airliner and spirited us away.”

This harrowing experience is among several collected by our friend and colleague Bruno Cardeñosa, host of Spain’s ever-popular La Rosa de los Vientos radio show. Cardeñosa, an acclaimed UFO writer and researcher, mentions another mid-air incident involving a another Mexican pilot on an international flight between Europe and the Americas. The pilot – only known by his initials – said that the flight was going along as planned and that stepped out of the flight deck to inspect the cabin and see how the passenger service was going. He chatted for a few minutes with the cabin crew and some passengers when a flight attendant made a curious observation: the sun’s light was streaming through the wrong side of the aircraft. “I returned to the flight deck for an urgent confirmation. It turned out we were flying toward the O navigation point,” said the pilot, “that is to say, we were heading toward Africa instead of the Americas. We made the appropriate corrections, but the fuel wasted in the inexplicable turn forced us to land in Bermuda. Upon making the corrective turn, I could see a dot of light pulling away from us and throbbing brightly.”

But Mexican pilots have hardly been the only ones with tales to tell. An electrifying brush with unknown aerial “competitors” tested the mettle of pilot Carlos García Bermúdez and his co-pilot Antonio Nieto at the controls of Aviaco Flight 502 between Valencia and Bilbao in early 1978.

Captain García’s flight plan would take him from Valencia’s airport to the Sondika Airport outside Bilbao, a challenging destination at the best of times due to uncertain weather conditions. Dense cloud cover forced Aviaco 502 to be redirected to Santander, from which passengers could reach their destinations by ground transportation. As the airliner made its final descent through the clouds, it penetrated “a particularly dense, lens-shaped and extremely bright cloud formation.” The brightness was such that the pilot and co-pilot put on their sunglasses without giving the situation a second thought.

As with the Mexican flight described earlier, the airliner’s equipment went haywire. Compasses, weather radar, VHF channels fluctuated wildly as the flight odometer started counting kilometers backward. According to Captain García: “We could neither receive nor transmit over the VHF band, and we later learned that both Bilbao and Santander were constantly trying to reach us. This situation lasted seven minutes.

Flight 502 eventually emerged from the anomalous cloud and communications were restored. To their shock, they were in the same position as they had been before entering the cloud – twenty-two miles from Bilbao. The forty miles they covered while in the cloud had apparently never existed and the aircraft had made no forward progress for seven minutes. Cardeñosa remarks that “it was as if the cloud had pulled them out of space-time.”

Weirder things have happened: according to the March 13, 1992 issue of Mexico's reputable El Universal newspaper, a sudden encounter with a UFO on March 6 of that year caused an airliner to become invisible.

The Aeromexico airliner allegedly departed from Mexico City at 11:30 p.m. enroute to Monterrey. The pilot dimmed the cabin lights and passenger began falling asleep for the short flight, until they suddenly found themselves staring into the night sky and the bright stars in the heavens above...as if the entire fuselage had been lifted away. "We were flying in space, seeing the skies and stars without the barrier of cabin walls, which were still there and detectable to the touch, but completely invisible," said a witness to this sudden phenomenon. "We could even see the pilots in the cabin, at the controls of an aircraft that none of us could see, only touch."

One would expect to see passengers gripped by panic, but this was not the case: the startled passengers tried to make sense of the phenomenon until they suddenly became aware of a glowing object shaped like two "inverted bowls" stuck together flying alongside the aircraft.

The newspaper account states that the broadcast media reported the disappearance of the Aeromexico airliner from radar screens in both Monterrey and Mexico City for ten minutes, along with the corresponding gap in communications.

Strange Encounters in the Southern Cone

Ever since the days of the "Stendek" affair in the 1960's (solved in recent years when the wreckage of the aircraft was found in an Andean valley), the UFO phenomenon has shown an interest in commercial aviation and has even interfered with routine flights, as has occurred elsewhere in the world.

The February 17, 2001 issue of Chile's "El Mercurio" newspaper ran an interesting story which demonstrated that this disturbing attraction to airliners wasn't a thing of the past: at 11:30 a.m., the crew of LAN Chile Flight 560 established visual contact with a shining ovoid object "of considerable size" which prompted the pilot to report it to the National Air Traffic Control Center in Santiago de Chile. Although civilian radars reported that the contact was not on their screens, the 5th Air Brigade in Cerro Moreno (Antofagasta) and the regional airport of Calama in nothern Chile managed to track it.

Confirmation for the event was received five minutes after an Avant airliner had taken off from the Calama airfield--its crew corroborated the LAN Chile information, adding that the object was stationary and remained visible 10 minutes after the initial sighting.

The military air station at Cerro Moreno placed the object 40 miles over the town of Mejillones and at an altitude of 60,000 feet, thus ruling out the possibility that the strange object could have been a weather balloon -- the usual "culprit" in these cases--due to the fact that said meteorological artifacts were launched from Cerro Moreno on a daily basis early in the morning.

Across the Andes, Argentinean pilots have had a long history of facing the unknown.

Researcher and author Carlos Iurchuk takes note of two early incidents from the early days of the UFO phenomenon: In August 1958, private pilot Raul N. López took to the skies in his Piper PA (LV-XJW) on what he described as “a glorious day” marred only by the smoke arising from agricultural burning. Flying from Machagay to Resistencia in the Chaco, López became aware at 11:16 hours of a glowing “something” at 2400 feet, when his small aircraft was 180 degrees from La Verde. Within seconds, the unknown light had ascended to an estimated thirty six hundred feet and at twenty kilometers’ distance. Intrigued, López changed course to get a better look, only to find that the light had exactly the same intentions.

When interviewed, the pilot noted that the intruder hac come within seven kilometers of his position and was shaped “like a flat dish with a dome in its middle, and it was golden-yellow in color. Its external section was thirty meters in diameter and spun quickly, shooting off greenish-red sparks.”

The physical proximity of the unknown object soon began exerting physical effects on the Piper PA: López noted a rapid increase in the engine’s RPMs as the golden disk rose into the air, losing itself in the blue sky. López remarked that he was startled to see that without having touched the controls, the tachometer indicated a return to cruising speed after the intruder had taken its leave. The Raul López case was featured in Hector Anganuzzi’s “Historia de los Platos Voladores en la Argentina”

A year later, an Aerolineas Argentinas DC-3 piloted by Nestor del Blanco also ran into unknown traffic over the Chaco.

Flight 757, scheduled service to Buenos Aires, departed on time from Roque Sáenz Peña in the Chaco on 16 October 1959 on a 205-degree heading and at altitude of 7,900 feet. The DC-3 was well on its way toward a refueling stop in Sauce Viejo (Santa Fe Province) when Captain del Blanco noticed an unusual cloud formation on the horizon. Upon closer inspection, he noticed to his surprise that the cloud formation was actually “a spindle-shaped object” that was soon joined by three similar ones.

In subsequent statements, the pilot noted that the strange objects “had the color of lead” and were not self-luminous. They changed intensity according to the sun’s brightness. At this point, the captain alerted Officer Manso, his co-pilot, and both men witnessed the curious intruders as they engaged in horizontal maneuvers. One of the objects – described as “voluminous” – disgorged three saucer-shaped objects that flew off, becoming mere specks in the horizon.

The DC-3’s radio operator, Miguel Villafañe, was a third witness to the uncanny spectacle: he contacted the tower at Resistencia Airport to see if the objects could be seen from the ground, but all efforts were negative.

A Pilot Goes Public

A memorable scene in Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind shows the moment when an air traffic controller asks two airliner captains who have just reported a UFO encounter if they wish to file a formal report--both men refuse, one of them saying unequivocally, "I don't want to report one of those!"

One can well imagine the penalties that a professional responsible for safety of hundreds of passengers and a multi-million dollar aircraft might face if he or she admit to seeing "flying saucers". Fortunately the silence imposed on airliner crews is now being broken as many pilots retire and no longer face being grounded for good. Juan Lorenzo Torres is one of them.

Torres, who retired from the Spanish carrier Iberia at the age of 65, had an illustrious career that included forty years of flying military and civilian aircraft. Born in Madrid and the son of an Air Force general, Torres served in the military with Spain's King Juan Carlos and is presently the director of an aviation academy. "The day I saw a UFO from my aircraft," he told interviewer Pedro Madueño, "I wasn't able to sleep, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it all this time."

But why would a man with such an illustrious background and career wish to enter the UFO fray? "I think many people would like to know that my crew and I saw something that no one has been able to explain to this very day."

On the fourth of November, 1968, at 18:23 hours, Torres was flying a Caravelle 6-R along the London to Alicante route (Iberia Flight 249). This routine flight proceeded normally until the Barcelona tower ordered the aircraft to descend from an altitude of thirty one thousand feet to twenty eight thousand feet, ostensibly to compensate for the transit of another aircraft on the same corridor. "Well, I had already ordered dinner and the trays were in the cabin," reminisces Captain Torres, "but a that altitude we were shaving the clouds, which produce a slight though uncomfortable turbulence. Having one's dinner that way was thoroughly disagreeable. I asked my co?pilot to visually monitor if the opposing traffic could be seen, in order that we could return to our proper level to have a peaceful dinner."

Within seconds, the pilot said that the incoming aircraft was in sight, but it wasn't another airliner: instead, the Caravelle's crew saw a flash of light heading toward them at full speed and on a collision course.

"We dumped the trays and our jaws dropped, since that blinding light was nothing we'd seen before." he explained. "We called the stewardess to witness the thing. None of us knew what it could be."

The petrified crew witnessed how the object stayed some ten meters away from the Caravelle's nose cone, moving up and down and sideways, but always returning to its position in front of the aircraft. Torres made an effort to contact the object in English and Spanish with no success; contacting the Barcelona tower was fruitless, since area was beyond its radar coverage. The next thing he did was to initiate an emergency broadcast "on the 121.5 channel, so that all nearby aircraft could communicate with us."

Torres recalls turning on all of the aircraft's lights in an effort to begin a rudimentary form of communication with the object. "I told it in Spanish: "On and off twice means no, on and
off once means yes." When asked by the interviewer if there had been any success, he replied that "there had been logic" in the intruder's movements.

"That night we all slept poorly, as my crew told me the next day. We all made a pact of silence, but lieutenant colonel Abreu of the Barcelona tower, called me when I landed at El Prat and told me that the radar coverage for eastern Spain had recorded those "UFOs". I asked for a copy of these records and he gave me one." This valuable bit of evidence would be lost later on in a series of events.

"Four months later, another Caravelle piloted by commander Ordovas had another sighting in the area, flying with the same flight engineer, Jose Cuenca! The news made it into the media because one of the flight attendants had a boyfriend who was a journalist. Journalists began calling and four months later Lt. Col Ugarte and a lawyer showed up and the copy was confiscated. After reporting the sighting, Lt. Col Ugarte concluded that what the co?pilot, engineer, flight attendant and I had seen was in fact Venus! Venus was stuck to my plane's nose, and I never realized it!"

Captain Torres' remarks go to show that unidentified flying objects have always shown an interest for our passenger airliners, and some have humorously suggested that the smaller unidentified objects may be attracted to jumbo jets like baby whales to surface ships in a misguided imprinting event

Few cases in Spanish ufology have achieved the level of angry pro-and-con discourse that characterizes the so-called Manises Incident, in which a Mirage F-1 fighter pursued a UFO for an extended period of time with full authorization from ground control. The military component of the case often overshadows the civilian aspect, which is hair-raising enough, as we shall see.

On November 11, 1979, Captain Javier Lerdo de Tejada, a senior pilot with eight thousand hours of flight time under his belt, was flying a Super Caravelle belonging to the TAE airline on a flight between the Austrian city of Saltzburg and the Canary Islands, where over a hundred passengers hoped to spend a sunny vacation. After having been aloft for less than half an hour, the Super Caravelle began to pick up an odd distress call on the emergency band, being informed by ground control that it emanated from a point 40 miles northwest of the coastal city of Valencia. Captain Tejada remarked that it was as if the party sending out the distress signal had no knowledge whatsoever of Morse code.

At 23:47 hours, flight engineer Francisco Rodriguez reported the presence of a pair of red lights at a lower elevation and to the left of the airliner. The Barcelona control tower insisted that their flight was alone in the night sky and that no other traffic was in the area.

The object began closing in on the Super Caravelle, causing consternation among the crew, since it was flying within less than the 10 mile safety range. The lights, spanning a diameter of two hundred meters, practically made a bee line for the airliner, coming within half a mile of its wing. Certain that a collision was imminent at this point, Tejada broke his flight plan and began an emergency descent to the Manises airport outside of Valencia; the pursuit ended only when the approach maneuvers were initiated. “This was the first time,” writes Spanish ufologist Javier García Blanco, “that a passenger airliner was forced to change it flight plan in order to avoid a collision.”

Conclusion

Ufology has always set a high bar for witnesses, preferring the testimony of "trained observers" over reports from the average citizen. Airline pilots, entrusted with the care of human lives and very expensive equipment, surely occupy the highest tiers of reliability. The cases in this article suggest that regardless of the hypothesis one may favor to explain the phenomenon, unidentified flying objects have interacted closely us "up in the wild blue yonder" all over the planet...an interaction that shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

Source: Scott Corrales
Inexplicata: The Journal of Hispanic Ufology

- ATTACK OF THE GILLMAN DEPARTMENT -

Aquatic Humanoids: Progeny of the Black Lagoon or
Alternate Evolution?


Since the dawn of time legends have sprung up across the globe regarding strange, fish-tailed, half-human hybrids which were said to dwell in the briny depths of the world’s oceans, but there is a lesser known phenomenon regarding a unique breed of bizarre, bipedal beasts, which eyewitnesses claim to have encountered near the freshwater lakes and rivers of North America. Creatures which some insist owe more to fertile imaginations of Hollywood effects artists than to Darwin’s Natural Selection.

On March 5, 1954, filmmaker Jack Arnold unleashed what would become the last of the great Universal monsters onto the world with the release of the seminal “Creature from the Black Lagoon.” This scaly, fish lipped atrocity exploded across American screens in glorious 3-Dimensions and would soon after carve itself a niche not only in pop culture, but the psyches of theatergoers worldwide as the image of the archetypal “gill man.”

While there is no question that this iconoclastic image has indelibly impressed itself on generations of cinephiles, there is a small, yet vocal, contingent who believe that this fright flick’s popularity spawned not only a plethora of models, a pair of sequels and a recent musical adaptation, but also a rash of alleged encounters over the next two decades with “real life” aquatic humanoids.

While several reports of these ostensibly amphibious beings hailed from the backwaters of the U.S. and Canada in the latter half of the 20th century, they never did manage to make quite the same splash as their fish bottomed, ocean dwelling cousins. Nevertheless, these moist monstrosities remain some of the most intriguing enigmas in contemporary crypto-lore.

Arguably the first post-Black Lagoon account of bipedal, amphibious beings comes to us from May of 1955. At approximately 3:30 in the morning, a businessman was traveling down a lonely stretch of road near the Miami River — located on the outskirts of the town of Loveland, Ohio — when he claimed to have come across three, quasi-reptilian entities standing upright by the side of the road.

The man pulled his car to the curb and observed these creatures for about three minutes. During this time he noticed that these odd beings stood between 3 and 4-feet tall, were covered with leathery skin and had webbed hands and feet. Their most distinguishing characteristics, however, were their wrinkly, “frog-like” heads — hence their designation as the “Loveland Frogmen.”

The second, and perhaps the most harrowing, account of what many believe to be an aquatic humanoid hails Evansville, Indiana. On August 21, 1955, one Mrs. Darwin Johnson claimed to have had a horrifying — and potentially life threatening — run-in with an unknown creature beneath the muddy surface of the Ohio River.

While enjoying a relaxing swim with a friend, Johnson reported that she was suddenly clenched around the knee by a large, claw-like hand. She struggled to disengage herself as she was yanked beneath the churning surface of the river multiple times. Finally Johnson managed to break free and make it back to shore where she was treated for multiple contusions on her leg. Most intriguingly she and her friend claimed that her leg was marked with a green, palm-print shape that stained her skin and could not be removed for days.

While Johnson never actually laid eyes on the creature, it was generally assumed that this must be an aquatic entity due to the fact that it never surfaced. This “Green Clawed Beast” has apparently never been encountered again or — perhaps more frighteningly — no one else has survived to tell the tale of their encounter with it.

Cryptozoologist Loren Coleman has the distinction of chronicling one of the most bizarre aquatic humanoid cases ever reported in his 1985 book “Curious Encounters.” The beast in question — which was spotted near Charles Mill Lake in Mansfield, Ohio — was so strange that it seemed more like a terrifying early design for Sid and Marty Krofft’s “Sigmund the Sea Monster,” than a genuine biological entity. Coleman described the being thusly:

“A green-eyed, seven-foot-tall, seemingly armless humanoid, seen late in March 1959 by Michael Lane, Wayne Armstrong, and Dennis Patterson, came out of the lake and left behind ‘tracks that resembled the footgear worn by skin divers.’ The thing was seen again in 1963 and described as ‘luminous and green-eyed.’ I examined the site of these encounters and can testify to the Charles Mill Lake’s swampy affinities — certainly a good home for a Black Lagoon beast…”

This description is uncannily similar to a mysterious humanoid which was reported emerging from the underbrush near the Santa Ana River in California on November 8, 1958. This entity was described as being a fluorescent-eyed “thing” with a protuberant mouth and a body covered with scales that resembled “leaves.” While the Charles Mill Lake Monster — and its California kin — are arguably the weirdest of their ilk, indisputably the most aggressive of these amphibious fiends is Canada’s notorious “Thetis Lake Monster.”

On August 19, 1972, a pair of teens — Robin Flewellyn and Gordon Pike — claimed to have been attacked by a silvery scaled, bulbous eyed, spiky headed, fish-faced humanoid, which emerged from Canada’s Thetis Lake and charged at them. The brute even managed to lacerate one of the boy’s hands with its skull spikes before he could slam his car door shut on it. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were so impressed by the sincerity of the teens’ tale that they immediately launched an investigation into this phenomenon, but, not surprisingly, very little evidence was found at the scene to support their bizarre tale.

Just four days later Mike Gold and Russell Van Nice were fishing on the opposite side of Thetis Lake when they claimed that the same (or identical) creature rose from the murky depths, looked around and then submerged. The twosome did not wait around long enough to see if it would attack them as well.

No one can debate that all of these cases took place following the release of Arnold’s classic creature feature, and it is understandable how — at first glance — skeptics might be inclined to dismiss these encounters as nothing more than pop culture induced hysteria or outright hoaxes, but if one inspects the situation a little more thoroughly a very different picture begins to emerge.

First off — be they stout and frog-like or tall, leafy, green-eyed and armless — not one of the cryptids described by eyewitnesses overtly resembles the classic image of the “creature.” Even the infamous Thetis beast with its silver scales and spiky head shares only the superficial characteristics in common with its alleged cinematic counterpart.

Secondly, accounts of these and similar creatures pre-date the gill man by decades or more. In fact, one of the earliest reports of these bizarre beings comes to us from the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States and Southwestern Canada.

According to native legend a race of vicious, razor-toothed, fish-like humanoids known as Pugwis were known to terrorize anyone foolish enough to traipse too close the their watery abode. This, of course, is the same region said to be inhabited by the Thetis Lake creature.

Another pre-Black Lagoon account comes from the October 24, 1878, issue of the Louisville, Kentucky Courier-Journal. The article states that a “Wild Man of the Woods” was captured in Tennessee and placed on exhibit in Louisville. This beast was described as being nearly 7-feet tall, but — unlike the prototypical Bigfoot sighting — it was also sad to have eyes twice the normal size and a body that was “covered in scales.” Sadly, any additional information regarding this beast or its remains has not come to light.

Yet another strange case of a presumably marine humanoid emerges from Saginaw, Michigan. In 1937, a fisherman claimed that a man-like monster scrambled up a river bank, leaned against a tree and then plunged back into the river. The fisherman allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown following this astounding encounter.

While it is difficult to contest the fact that some of these creatures may have been, at least in part, inspired by the cinematic exploits of the Black Lagoon’s deadliest denizen, it seems dubious — if not downright implausible — that the majority of them are merely the byproduct of the hype surrounding this famous fish man. One would be remiss not to consider the — admittedly slim — chance that mammals were not the only class of animals to adopt bipedal, primate like attributes, and that at least some of these creatures might represent an alternate, marine based humanoid evolution… a genuine aquatic ape perhaps?

Whether these critters are the product of misidentification, man-made myths or genuine evolutionary offshoots remains to be discovered, but for those who claim to have had a brush with one of them in the gloomy depths of some backwater slough, theses beasts are all too real.

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/03/aquatic-humanoids-progeny-of-the-black-lagoon-
or-alternate-evolution/

- STILL A WEEK AWAY DEPARTMENT -

Was 'Supermoon' the Cause of Japan Earthquake?


The powerful tsunami that slammed into Japan's eastern coast comes just days after warnings that the movement of the moon could trigger unpredictable events on Earth.

Astrologers predicted that on March 19, 2011, the so-called 'supermoon' will be closer to Earth than at any time since 1992, just 221,567 miles away, and that its gravitational pull will bring chaos to Earth. Others have predicted it will cause catastrophes such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes.

Coming just three weeks after the quake which devastated Christchurch in New Zealand killing hundreds, this latest disaster in Japan will only add fuel to their fire.

However the 'supermoon' date is still days away. But those that adhere to this particular belief could claim that this was still close enough for there to be some kind of effect.

In a recent interview with ABC radio discussing the potential impact of the March 19 supermoon, astrologer Richard Nolle, who first coined the term in 1979, said he was convinced that lunar perigees cause natural disasters on Earth.

'Supermoons have a historical association with strong storms, very high tides, extreme tides and also earthquakes,' he said.

On March 19, the moon will swing around Earth more closely than it has in the past 18 years, lighting up the night sky from just 221,567 miles (356,577 kilometers) away. On top of that, it will be full.

Nolle, who runs the website astropro.com, has termed the upcoming full moon at lunar perigee (the closest approach during its orbit) an "extreme supermoon."

When the moon goes super-extreme, Nolle says, chaos will ensue: Huge storms, earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters can be expected to wreak havoc on Earth. (It should be noted that astrology is not a real science, but merely makes connections between astronomical and mystical events.)

But do we really need to start stocking survival shelters in preparation for the supermoon?

The question is not actually so crazy. In fact scientists have studied related scenarios for decades. Even under normal conditions, the moon is close enough to Earth to make its weighty presence felt: It causes the ebb and flow of the ocean tides.

The moon's gravity can even cause small but measureable ebbs and flows in the continents, called "land tides" or "solid Earth tides," too. The tides are greatest during full and new moons, when the sun and moon are aligned either on the same or opposite sides of the Earth.

According to John Vidale, a seismologist at the University of Washington in Seattle and director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network, particularly dramatic land and ocean tides do trigger earthquakes. "Both the moon and sun do stress the Earth a tiny bit, and when we look hard we can see a very small increase in tectonic activity when they're aligned," Vidale told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.

At times of full and new moons, "you see a less-than-1-percent increase in earthquake activity, and a slightly higher response in volcanoes."

The effect of tides on seismic activity is greatest in subduction zones such as the Pacific Northwest, where one tectonic plate is sliding under another. William Wilcock, another seismologist at the University of Washington, explained: "When you have a low tide, there's less water, so the pressure on the seafloor is smaller. That pressure is clamping the fault together, so when it's not there, it makes it easier for the fault to slip."

According to Wilcock, earthquake activity in subduction zones at low tides is 10 percent higher than at other times of the day, but he hasn't observed any correlations between earthquake activity and especially low tides at new and full moons. Vidale has observed only a very small correlation.

What about during a lunar perigee? Can we expect more earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on March 19, when the full moon will be so close?

The moon's gravitational pull at lunarperigee, the scientists say, is not different enough from its pull at other times to significantly change the height of the tides and thus the likelihood of natural disasters. [Infographic:  Phases of the Moon Explained]

"A lot of studies have been done on this kind of thing by USGS scientists and others," John Bellini, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told Life's Little Mysteries. "They haven't found anything significant at all."

Vidale concurred. "Practically speaking, you'll never see any effect of lunar perigee," he said. "It's somewhere between 'It has no effect' and 'It's so small you don't see any effect.'"

The bottom line is, the upcoming supermoon won't cause a preponderance of earthquakes, although the idea isn't a crazy one.

"Earthquakes don't respond as much to the tides as you'd think they would. There should actually be more of an effect," said Vidale.

Most natural disasters have nothing to do with the moon at all. The Earth has a lot of pent up energy, and it releases it anytime the buildup gets too great. The supermoon probably won't push it past the tipping point, but we'll know for sure, one way or the other, by March 20.

Source: Yahoo News
http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20110310/sc_space/willmarch19supermoontriggernaturaldisasters

- NO LONGER A MYTH DEPARTMENT -

Rescuers Work to Net Vietnam’s Mysterious ‘Sacred’ Turtle

Thousands of Vietnamese jostled and climbed trees around a lake in the capital hoping to see a rare giant turtle considered sacred by many but in desperate need of medical attention.

Dozens of workers waded chest-deep through the chilly green water in Hanoi’s Hoan Kiem Lake to try to capture the giant freshwater creature for the first time, so it could be pulled to an island and treated. It is one of the world’s most endangered turtles – one of only four Rafetus swinhoei believed to be alive today – but its value to the nation transcends the natural world.

The turtle, once considered to be merely a myth, traces its roots back through hundreds of years of local folklore, and some even believe the animal that lives in the lake today is the same mythical creature said to have helped a Vietnamese king fend off the Chinese nearly six centuries ago.

In recent days, photos of it surfacing with open pink sores on its wrinkled neck and legs have sparked near panic among the public, with newspapers carrying front-page stories and online chat rooms buzzing. Lesions were also visible on its shell, which stretches 1.8 meters long and 1.2 meters wide.

Some experts fear the water in the sewage-filled and trash-strewn lake is slowly killing the turtle, which is thought to weigh about 200 kilograms and is affectionately called “great-grandfather.” Hundreds of Vietnamese have been working around the clock removing chunks of debris from the lake and pumping in fresh water.

Last week, a small island in the lake was expanded with sandbags to form a platform large enough for the turtle to rest, complete with a little pond. Rescuers were hoping to coax it ashore, but, when it did not emerge on its own, dozens of men carrying a large net waded into the water Tuesday to ring it and drag it to the island.

But even with the military involved in the rescue, the turtle managed to slip through the nets and escape, ending efforts. Officials planned to meet to decide the next steps.

“I’m really glad that I’m part of the rescue operation and, hopefully, it will bring luck to my family,” said Nguyen Thanh Liem, 65, a retired army captain who had helped pull the net along. “I wish that he would be immortal to bless our nation.”

Mr. Liem, like many Vietnamese, believes the turtle is the same one described in the legend of King Le Loi, who is said to have defeated Chinese invaders with a magic sword given to him by the gods. After the victory, the king was said to be boating on the lake when a giant golden turtle rose to the surface and snatched the sword in its mouth before plunging deep into the water to return it to its divine owners.

Experts, however, say the Hoan Kiem turtle is more likely 80 to 100 years old. Only three others of its kind are known to be alive: one in another lake in Vietnam and two in a Chinese zoo.

Some gathered at Hoan Kiem Lake, which translates as “Lake of the Returned Sword,” worried that trying to wrangle the creature could do more harm than good.

“It’s not safe to use the net to try to catch the turtle. It could worsen his wounds,” said Nguyen Hung Cuong, a 19-year-old student.

Source: The Globe and Mail
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/rescuers-work-to-net-vietnams-sacred-turtle/article1934537/

- LET'S SING A SONG OF TWO DEPARTMENT -

'Two Suns' Spotted Over China Defy Explanation

An amazing optical illusion of two suns were caught on camera recently over China. The suns — one fuzzy and orange, the other a crisp yellow orb — appeared side-by-side, one slightly higher than the other.

Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to Space.com, asked Jim Kaler, an astronomer at the  University of Illinois, who has written books on the day and night sky.

The double sun image is an effect of optical refraction, Kaler said, but it's a "pretty darn rare" one, and one not fully explained by science.

"I doubt it's been computer modeled," he said. "There must have been some blob of atmosphere somewhere that caused this truly spectacular phenomenon, which in a sense is a mirage." 

Mirages appear when particles in the atmosphere refract, or bend, light. This typically happens near the horizon, where air is thicker, though, and mirages are usually aligned vertically above or below the original source of the light — not beside it, like in the video. It's possible, Kaler said, that an unusually thick patch of atmosphere wandered in front of the sun to create the unusual effect.

Previous sightings of horizontally-aligned double images of the sun and moon are recorded in a book called "Light and Color in the Outdoors" (English edition: Springer 1993) by the famous Flemish astronomer Marcel Minnaert, which remains the most complete reference on double suns. "So many other instances have been reported that there is no longer any doubt about ... observations of sun and mock sun(s) being at exactly the same altitude," Minnaert wrote.

"The case of a mock sun 3 degrees and 25 arc-seconds to the left of the nearly set sun sounds incredible but has been recorded photographically." Indeed, Minnaert's description sounds nearly identical to the scene in question.

He goes on to state that the double or multiple image phenomena are produced by abnormal refraction, but that "it remains extraordinary that the images of the sun and moon were sharp and of the same size as the real sun and moon."

To check whether more has been learned about the double sun effect since the time of Minnaert's writing, Life's Little Mysteries consulted several atmospheric optics experts. None of them had ever seen anything quite like the effect shown in the video.

"This is not a common optical phenomenon that we're seeing here," said Grant Perry, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Satellite and Meteorological Studies. "I'm asking myself if this is an artifact of the lens, but if that were the case — if it's reflections of the lens elements — then the images would move in relation to each other as the camera moves," Perry said. "But that doesn't happen."

In terms of an optical explanation, he said, "You would have to assume it is particles of ice or something in the atmosphere aligned in such a way that they would refract the sunlight at that very small angle, but only in one direction. It would require some fairly peculiar characteristics."

Several related atmospheric optical effects are fully explained by science. Sun dogs, sunset mirages, sun pillars and sun halos are all relatively common and well understood. But not this effect.

"It's very intriguing," said Kaler.

Source: MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41927089/ns/technology_and_science-space/

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