A mysterious mummy with a giant, elongated skull has baffled anthropologists.

The mummy, with its strangely shaped head - almost as big as its 50cm (20in) body, was one of two sets of remains found in the city of Andahuaylillas in the southern province of Quispicanchi, Peru.

The skeletal sets were discovered by Renato Davila Riquelme, who works for the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco in south-eastern Peru.

He said that that the eye cavities are far larger than normally seen in humans.

There is a soft spot in the skull - called an open fontanelle - which is a characteristic of children in their first year of life, yet the skull also has two large molars, only found in much older humans.

Davila Riquelme said three anthropologists, from Spain and Russia, arrived at the museum last week to investigate the findings and agreed it was ‘not a human being’ and would conduct further studies.

He added: ‘Although the assessment was superficial, it is obvious that its features do not correspond to any ethnic group in the world.’

The remains of an eyeball in the right socket will help determine its genetic DNA - and clear up the controversy if it is human or not.

The second mummy is incomplete and is only 30cm (12in).

It lacks a face and seems to be wrapped in a layer as a placenta, fetal position.

The remains bear a striking resemblance to the triangular crystal skull in the 2008 Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - which turned out to be of alien origin and have supernatural powers.

Stephen Wagner, the editor of paranormal.about.com has listed a number of other strange human skeletons that appear to defy easy explanation.

In 2004, scientists were stunned by the discovery of skeletons of what are thought to be an ancient race of people that stood about 3½ feet tall - about the height of a modern three-year-old. Found on the remote island of Indonesia, these pygmies were named Homo floresiensis and nicknamed "hobbits" because of their small size (their heads were no bigger than a grapefruit). The scientists believe this diminutive race died out about 13,000 years ago, although modern natives reported knowledge of a tiny race of people currently or recently living in isolated areas of the jungle.

These are not the first or only strange skeletons unearthed around the world - including the U.S. Whether you believe humans are the descendents of Adam and Eve, the result of millions of years of evolution or the genetic creations of the Annunaki, there are many puzzling specimens of skeletons, skulls and other human (or human-like) remains that can truly make one wonder about mankind's past.

Here's a bare-bones look at some of the more intriguing cases:

Horny Devils
Within an ancient burial mound near the town of Sayre in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, skeletons measuring approximately 7 feet in length were discovered in the 1800s. But the most remarkable feature of these tall skeletons was not their height, but the strange horn-like protrusions above the brow region on their skulls. It was estimated that they were buried around 1200 AD. According to some sources, the skeletons were sent to the American Investigating Museum in Philadelphia, and vanished.

All the Better to Eat You With, My Dear
In 1888, seven skeletons, which had been placed in a sitting position, were uncovered from a burial mound near Clearwater, Minnesota. The highly unusual skulls of these beings had double rows of teeth in both the upper and lower jaws. It was also noted that the foreheads were low and sloping, compared to "normal" human skulls, and had distinctly prominent brows.

Copper Man
The December 17, 1891 issue of the respected journal Nature reported the discovery of a giant man buried 14 feet within the center of one of Ohio's mysterious burial mounds. The enormous man's arms, jaw, arms, chest and stomach were all clad in copper. Wooden antlers, also covered with copper, rested on either side of his head. His mouth was filled with large pearls, and a pearl-studded necklace of bear teeth hung around his neck. Who this man was, or to which race of people he belonged, is unknown.

The Mica Giant
In 1879, a burial mound in Brewersville, Indiana yielded another giant skeleton, according to the November, 1975 edition of The Indianapolis News. This one reached 9 feet 8 inches tall! It wore a necklace of mica stone, and a crude human effigy of clay was found standing at his feet. The giant skeleton was examined by scientists from Indiana and New York, and it remained in the possession of Mr. Robinson, who owned the land on which the mound stood. Unfortunately, the curious bones were washed away in a flood in 1937.

Coneheads
Researcher Robert Connolly photographed this strange elongated skull in 1995. It was found in South America and is estimated to be tens of thousands of years old. Apart from its obvious abnormalities, it also exhibits characteristics of both Neanderthal and human skulls - impossible in itself, according to anthropology texts, since Neanderthals did not exist in South America. Some believe that the unusual shape of the skulls might be the result of a primitive practice known as "skull binding" in which a person's head is tightly bound with cloth or leather straps throughout his lifetime, causing the skull to grow in this dramatic way. The skull-binding theory is contested, however, for this and other cone-shaped skulls, and you can read about them in more detail at Anomalous Skulls.

Small Wonders
Near Coshocton, Ohio in 1837, several fully developed adult skeletons were found buried in tiny wooden coffins. Why tiny coffins? Because these adult skeletons were only 3 to 4½ feet tall. No artifacts were found with the remains that might give clues as to who these small people were, but there were so many of them that researchers believed they could have been the residents of a small city.

Pedro Mountain Mummy
"Pedro," as he has been nicknamed, is one of the most famous enigmatic human remains ever found. He was discovered by gold prospectors in 1932 when they were dynamiting through the canyons of the Pedro Mountains, which rise about 60 miles southwest of Casper, Wyoming. There he was, sitting cross-legged on a ledge with his hands resting serenely in his lap. (See photo.) He was completely mummified. What's astonishing, however, is that this middle-aged-looking man appeared to be only 14 inches tall! But it might not have been an adult at all. Although the mummy has been lost, X-rays survive and one modern analysis concluded that Pedro was actually an infant, or even a fetus, that might have been afflicted with the disease anencephaly.

Red Giants
In 1911, miners were digging out layers of guano from a cave located about 22 miles southwest of Lovelock, Nevada when they happened upon the mummified remains of an individual who must have stood 6½ feet tall when alive. A tall Native American, perhaps? Probably not, since the mummy was still crowned with "distinctly red" hair. Amazingly, the ancient legends of the local Paiute Indians described a race of red-haired giants - called Si-te-cahs - who were the enemies of many Indian tribes of the region.

The Starchild Skull
Lloyd Pye, author of Everything You Know Is Wrong, has taken it upon himself to discover the identity of an unusual skull he has dubbed "The Starchild Skull." The skull, which was found in a mine shaft near Chihuahua, Mexico around 1930, is unusually wide at the back and exhibits larger than normal eye sockets. Although he says the origin of the skull is uncertain, Pye speculates on whether or not it could be of alien origin - or at least belonging to a human-alien hybrid. While some contend that the skull was merely that of a deformed human child, Pye wanted definitive proof and so, in late 1999, subjected the skull to DNA testing. The results of the test indicated that the skull was from a human being, but Pye points out that the lab could not extract sufficient strands of DNA to make a definitive conclusion, and therefore the question still remains open.

Fatheads
Robert Connolly has photographed a similar, more complete skulls. (See photos.) In most respects it appears to be that of a human, except that it has an extraordinarily large cranium and eye sockets. The eye sockets are about 15 percent larger than a modern human's. The age and date of the skull are unknown. Similar skulls appear in photos by Karen Scheidt of remains found in a Mexican cave. Could they all be genetic mutations, some unknown species of creature or something not of this world?

Source: Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2063486/Alien-skull-Peru-
Mystery-giant-headed-mummy-city-Andahuaylillas.html

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Doris Birch is having trouble getting a good night's sleep, but she doesn't need Ambien, she needs a ghost buster.

For the last four months, Birch, a 73-year-old grandmother living in the British town of Herne Bay, is reportedly being kept up nights by a ghost who keeps groping her when she is trying to rest.

"It's like an octopus," she told ThisIsKent.co.uk.. "It started four months ago. I was lying in bed when I felt this creepy pair of hands. I kicked frantically and it went away. Next time it came I hurled the duvet on to the floor!"

But the ghost keeps coming back and Birch has resorted to drastic measures to deal with the inappropiately amorous entity.

"I've tried sleeping without the duvet, but it started shaking my mattress," she reportedly said. "I even threw the mattress off the bed and bought a new one but it has made no difference. I told my 16-year-old granddaughter and she was gobsmacked. She said I must be joking."

Besides the terror of being mysteriously molested, the former nursing assistant fears that coming forward with her story might make people think she is unable to tend to herself.

Paranormal researcher and Huffington Post blogger Alexandra Holzer says it's hard to tell what is inspiring the spooky sexual assault without a full a proper investigation with a trained trans-medium and researcher as well as an examination of the history of Birch's home.

"However, based on her story and experience she seems like she has a rude, sexually inclined 'visitor' who in life may have acted this way with the woman," she told HuffPost Weird News. "Having said that, it isn't so much a 'poltergeist' entity as much as a 'devilish' sort of 'character' having their 'way' with granny. They don't care what age she would be as a female is a female to a pervert in life and in death."

Holzer says it is possble that the ghostly groper knew Birch in life, but, sadly, just as a zebra can't change its stripe, "people remain similar to what they were on earth as they do if becoming a ghost."

Paranormal journalist and Huffington Post blogger Alejandro Rojas says stories of people, especially women, being touched are fairly common as are tales of blankets being ripped off a bed. He suggests that a look at the home's recent history might explain why the grabby ghost suddenly appeared four months ago.

"Sometimes when there's construction or a major change, that's when the ghost appears," he told HuffPost Weird News. "That's one theory."

Birch's local paper, the Herne Bay Times, has offered to pay for husband-and-wife ghost-hunters Ray and Beryl Herne to send the poltergeists packing.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mail reports that the Canterbury City Council's Head of Housing will meet with her to discuss her concerns "even though we have received no similar reports from [other] residents."

Rojas thinks doing a ritual could be good even though there is no proven scientific method for ridding a house of spirits.

"It might ease the woman's mind and make her feel that something is being done," he told the paper.

Source: Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/21/british-grandmother-doris-
birch-groped-by-ghost_n_1105208.html

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There’s plenty of reason to be concerned Big Brother is watching.

We’re paranoid not because we have grandiose notions of our self-importance, but because the facts speak for themselves.

Here’s our short list of nine reasons that Wired readers ought to wear tinfoil hats, or at least, fight for their rights and consider ways to protect themselves with encryption and defensive digital technologies.

We know the list is incomplete, so if you have better reasons that we list here, put them in the comments and we’ll make a list based off them.

Until then, remember: Don’t suspect a friend; report him.

1. Warrantless Wiretapping

The government refuses to acknowledge whether the National Security Agency is secretly siphoning the nation’s electronic communications to the National Security Agency without warrants, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation alleges. The lawsuit was based on evidence provided by a former AT&T technician Mark Klein that showed that AT&T had installed a secret spying room in an internet hub in San Francisco. The spying got so bad that Attorney General Ashcroft threatened to resign over it.

When a federal judge said a lawsuit on that issue could go forward, Congress passed legislation stopping the case in its tracks. Two American lawyers for an Islamic charity did, however, prevail in their suit that they were wiretapped without warrants, but the Administration is appealing. Much of the program was legalized in 2008 by the FISA Amendments Act.

The FBI has also built a nationwide computer system called the Digital Collection System, connected by fiber optic cables, to collect and analyze wiretaps of all types, including ones used in ultra-secret terrorism investigations.

2. Warrantless GPS Tracking

The Obama administration claims Americans have no right to privacy in their public movements. The issue surfaced this month in a landmark case before the U.S. Supreme Court to determine if law enforcement agents should be required to obtain a probable-cause warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on a citizen’s car. The government admitted to the Supreme Court that it thinks it would have the power to track the justices’ cars without a warrant.

The invasive technology allows police, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to engage in covert round-the-clock surveillance over an extended period of time, collecting vast amounts of information about anyone who drives the vehicle that is being tracked. The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

3. Tracking Devices in Your Pocket

That mobile phone in your pocket chronicles almost everything. Once-secret software developed by a private company pretty much chronicles all you do on your smartphone and sends it to the carriers. The carriers themselves keep a wealth of information, such as text messages, call-location data, and PINs — though none of them disclose to their customers what data they store or how long they keep the data.

Law enforcement can get at much of that historical data — and often get real-time tracking information without proving probable cause to a judge.

4. Fake Cell Phone Towers

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.

So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.

The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower. While the technology sounds ultra-new, the feds have had this in their arsenal for at least 15 years, and used a stingray to bust the notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick in 1995.

5. The Border Exception

The Fourth Amendment doesn’t exist along the U.S. border. You know that if you’re a close supporter of WikiLeaks or a friend of alleged WikiLeaks leaker Bradley Manning. You’re no doubt very familiar with the U.S. government’s laptop border search policy, which allows Customs and Border Protection agents to seize and search a laptop belonging to anyone crossing a border into the U.S.

Agents can search through files on a traveler’s laptop, phone or other mobile device, read e-mail or view digital snapshots to uncover incriminating evidence, and they don’t need any reason to do so.

The government argues, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court agrees that searching through a person’s laptop for copyright violations is no different than looking through their suitcase for cocaine — and thus fits squarely with what is known as the ‘border exception’ to the Fourth Amendment. That means a border agent doesn’t need reasonable suspicion, probable cause or even a hunch to open your laptop, seize it and make copies of your data.

At least three supporters of WikiLeaks, including security researcher Jacob Appelbaum. have been subject to the policy and had devices seized and searched as they re-entered the U.S. from foreign trips. U.S. Customs and Border Patrol seem to particularly like searching Appeblaum’s devices and questioning him, despite the fact that Wikileaks has never been charged with a crime in the U.S..

6. The “6 Months and It’s the Government’s” Rule

If you’re already not wanting a dose of Prozac, consider that the law allows the government to obtain Americans’ e-mails, without a warrant, if it’s stored on some other company’s servers for more than six months. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act, adopted in 1986, turned 25 this year. When written, the law assumed e-mails left on a server for that long were abandoned.

In the age of Gmail, that’s simply ridiculous. A proposal to demand a court warrant for any and all e-mail never got a Senate hearing and was opposed by the Obama administration.

7. The Patriot Act

No paranoia list would be complete without including the Patriot Act, the now 10-year-old law adopted in the wake of September 11. The act, which has remained largely the same since former president George W. Bush signed the legislation six weeks after 9/11, gives the government, among other things, the power to acquire phone, banking and other records via the power of a so-called “national security letter,” which does not require a court warrant.

National security letters, perhaps the most invasive facet of the law, are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, bank records and arguably websites you have visited.

The FBI need merely assert, in writing, that the information is “relevant” to an ongoing terrorism or national security investigation. Nearly everyone who gets a national security letter is prohibited from even disclosing that they’ve received one. More than 200,000 letters have been issued by the FBI, despite a series of stinging reports from the Justice Department’s internal watchdog, who found FBI agents weren’t just routinely sloppy; they also violated the law.

Moreover, a decade after Bush’s signature, information is sketchy about how the law is being used in practice. For instance, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) claims the government applies a far broader, and classified, legal interpretation of the Patriot Act’s power to let the government seize most anything it deems relevant to an investigation (Section 215).

“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” the Senate Intelligence Committee member said in a recent interview with Wired. “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”

8. Government Malware

It’s little known, but governments have their own malware/spyware that it deploys against suspected lawbreakers. The FBI’s version, the last time we checked, was called CIPAV. Once an FBI agent convinced a target to install it (by clicking an e-mail attachment or link on the web), the spyware reports back everything that computer does online.

German states recently came under fire for misusing a similar program that reportedly could turn on a computer’s camera and take screenshots. And a recent Wall Street Journal story catalogs a surveillance software company which trumpeted its ability to infect users via a fake iTunes update. The company sells its wares to governments around the world.

9. Known Unknowns

Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld took an unfair amount of abuse for his deployment of the phrase “known unknowns.” And it’s these known unknowns that might be the most disturbing part of the list. For instance, does the government think the Patriot Act allows it to force Google to turn over information about anyone who has searched for certain keywords using orders that come with a gag order? Is the NSA sucking up everything we say on our phones and that we do online, under the theory it pushed in a court case that it’s not a search until a human actually looks at the data? How often do police investigating a crime ask wireless providers to give them a list of all the people whose phones were in use in the area when they think a crime was committed? What kind of sweeping surveillance orders have been issued under the 1998 law that Congress passed to legalize much of the warrantless wiretapping of Americans? And finally, how long is the government storing all this data, and how can we be sure that our future governments won’t start using this data to target Americans based on activities protected by the First Amendment?

And no — a tinfoil hat won’t help you at all.

Source: Wired
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/11/reasons-to-wear-tinfoil-hats/