A mysterious malady that has been killing honeybees en masse for several years appears to have expanded drastically in the last year, commercial beekeepers say, wiping out 40 percent or even 50 percent of the hives needed to pollinate many of the nation’s fruits and vegetables.

 A conclusive explanation so far has escaped scientists studying the ailment, colony collapse disorder, since it first surfaced around 2005. But beekeepers and some researchers say there is growing evidence that a powerful new class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids, incorporated into the plants themselves, could be an important factor.

The pesticide industry disputes that. But its representatives also say they are open to further studies to clarify what, if anything, is happening.

“They looked so healthy last spring,” said Bill Dahle, 50, who owns Big Sky Honey in Fairview, Mont. “We were so proud of them. Then, about the first of September, they started to fall on their face, to die like crazy. We’ve been doing this 30 years, and we’ve never experienced this kind of loss before.”

In a show of concern, the Environmental Protection Agency recently sent its acting assistant administrator for chemical safety and two top chemical experts here, to the San Joaquin Valley of California, for discussions.

In the valley, where 1.6 million hives of bees just finished pollinating an endless expanse of almond groves, commercial beekeepers who only recently were losing a third of their bees to the disorder say the past year has brought far greater losses.

The federal Agriculture Department is to issue its own assessment in May. But in an interview, the research leader at its Beltsville, Md., bee research laboratory, Jeff Pettis, said he was confident that the death rate would be “much higher than it’s ever been.”

Following a now-familiar pattern, bee deaths rose swiftly last autumn and dwindled as operators moved colonies to faraway farms for the pollination season. Beekeepers say the latest string of deaths has dealt them a heavy blow.

Bret Adee, who is an owner, with his father and brother, of Adee Honey Farms of South Dakota, the nation’s largest beekeeper, described mounting losses.

“We lost 42 percent over the winter. But by the time we came around to pollinate almonds, it was a 55 percent loss,” he said in an interview here this week.

“They looked beautiful in October,” Mr. Adee said, “and in December, they started falling apart, when it got cold.”

Mr. Dahle said he had planned to bring 13,000 beehives from Montana — 31 tractor-trailers full — to work the California almond groves. But by the start of pollination last month, only 3,000 healthy hives remained.

Annual bee losses of 5 percent to 10 percent once were the norm for beekeepers. But after colony collapse disorder surfaced around 2005, the losses approached one-third of all bees, despite beekeepers’ best efforts to ensure their health.

Nor is the impact limited to beekeepers. The Agriculture Department says a quarter of the American diet, from apples to cherries to watermelons to onions, depends on pollination by honeybees. Fewer bees means smaller harvests and higher food prices.

Almonds are a bellwether. Eighty percent of the nation’s almonds grow here, and 80 percent of those are exported, a multibillion-dollar crop crucial to California agriculture. Pollinating up to 800,000 acres, with at least two hives per acre, takes as many as two-thirds of all commercial hives.

This past winter’s die-off sent growers scrambling for enough hives to guarantee a harvest. Chris Moore, a beekeeper in Kountze, Tex., said he had planned to skip the groves after sickness killed 40 percent of his bees and left survivors weakened.

“But California was short, and I got a call in the middle of February that they were desperate for just about anything,” he said. So he sent two truckloads of hives that he normally would not have put to work.

Bee shortages pushed the cost to farmers of renting bees to $200 per hive at times, 20 percent above normal. That, too, may translate into higher prices for food.

Precisely why last year’s deaths were so great is unclear. Some blame drought in the Midwest, though Mr. Dahle lost nearly 80 percent of his bees despite excellent summer conditions. Others cite bee mites that have become increasingly resistant to pesticides. Still others blame viruses.

 But many beekeepers suspect the biggest culprit is the growing soup of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides that are used to control pests.

While each substance has been certified, there has been less study of their combined effects. Nor, many critics say, have scientists sufficiently studied the impact of neonicotinoids, the nicotine-derived pesticide that European regulators implicate in bee deaths.

The explosive growth of neonicotinoids since 2005 has roughly tracked rising bee deaths.

Neonics, as farmers call them, are applied in smaller doses than older pesticides. They are systemic pesticides, often embedded in seeds so that the plant itself carries the chemical that kills insects that feed on it.

Older pesticides could kill bees and other beneficial insects. But while they quickly degraded — often in a matter of days — neonicotinoids persist for weeks and even months. Beekeepers worry that bees carry a summer’s worth of contaminated pollen to hives, where ensuing generations dine on a steady dose of pesticide that, eaten once or twice, might not be dangerous.

“Soybean fields or canola fields or sunflower fields, they all have this systemic insecticide,” Mr. Adee said. “If you have one shot of whiskey on Thanksgiving and one on the Fourth of July, it’s not going to make any difference. But if you have whiskey every night, 365 days a year, your liver’s gone. It’s the same thing.”

Research to date on neonicotinoids “supports the notion that the products are safe and are not contributing in any measurable way to pollinator health concerns,” the president of CropLife America, Jay Vroom, said Wednesday. The group represents more than 90 pesticide producers.

He said the group nevertheless supported further research. “We stand with science and will let science take the regulation of our products in whatever direction science will guide it,” Mr. Vroom said.

A coalition of beekeepers and environmental and consumer groups sued the E.P.A. last week, saying it exceeded its authority by conditionally approving some neonicotinoids. The agency has begun an accelerated review of their impact on bees and other wildlife.

The European Union has proposed to ban their use on crops frequented by bees. Some researchers have concluded that neonicotinoids caused extensive die-offs in Germany and France.

Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.

Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.

“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”

Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.

Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”

Source: NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/29/science/earth/soaring-bee-deaths-in-2012-sound-alarm-on-malady.html?hp&utm_source=buffer&buffer_share=7418a&_r=2&

The "old guard" of UFOlogy is quickly passing away before our very eyes. First there was John Keel, then Richard Hall, Ingo Swann, George Fawcett and most recently a  man who remained for many years one of the most controversial and influential figures in all of UFO-dom, a personality who many loved and others equally despised.
    
When James W. Moseley passed away on November 16, 2012, at a hospital in Key West, Florida, he left behind a great many friends to mourn him. Though his name may be unfamiliar to the younger members of the UFO community today, he was for many years a most provocative voice in the field of UFOlogy, known for being a comic trickster as well as a serious researcher of flying saucer and paranormal phenomena who broke new ground in coverage of the subjects with his publications "Saucer News" and "Saucer Smear."
    
In memory of his departed friend, Timothy Green Beckley of Global Communications has recently published "The Astounding UFO Secrets of James W. Moseley, A Special Tribute To The Editor Of 'Saucer Smear' And The Court Jester Of UFOlogy." The book includes the full text of "UFO Crash Secrets At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base," a first-person account by Moseley of his investigations into numerous UFO-related incidents that also highlights his feisty attitude toward his fellow researchers and their continual disagreements over what to believe in a field where concrete evidence is almost impossible to find.
    
But Beckley, who is listed as the editor on the cover of the tribute book, begins things with a series of memories from those who knew and admired Moseley, all of whom have their own unique stories to tell about the jokester and his long history in UFOlogy. Beckley's lifelong relationship with Moseley began in the early to mid-1960s when Beckley was still in his teens and an avid listener to the all night radio talk show hosted by Long John Nebel. Nebel often covered UFOs and other strange subjects, and Moseley was a frequent guest on the program. Moseley used the show to promote his monthly UFO meetings in the rather seamy Times Square area of Manhattan, and Beckley was a regular attendee. Beckley was so young at the time that he needed his brother-in-law to accompany him in the journey from New Jersey to the Port Authority in New York and on to the meetings.
    
"Little by little," Beckley says, "I got to know Jim very well. He was pretty gracious about sharing his information and data with people who were serious about the subject, and that included me."
    
Beckley had already started his own publication, called "The Interplanetary News Service Report," which grew to have a circulation of around 1,500. Moseley bought Beckley out and absorbed his readers into Moseley's own "Saucer News," which would reach a circulation of around 12,000 subscribers. Moseley also hired Beckley to serve as managing editor of "Saucer News," and their business-inspired relationship/partnership began in earnest.
    
In 1967, Moseley and Beckley shared a memorable adventure together. There had been a UFO flap along the East Coast that included frequent sightings of humanoid occupants and other creatures. An assistant editor at "Saucer News," Jack Robinson, spoke with a group of teenagers who had recently had a sighting which involved creatures in New Jersey where he, himself, lived. As he spoke to the teenage boys, Robinson saw a black car parked across the street, the kind of car the infamous Men-In-Black are known to drive around in while attempting to silence UFO witnesses.
    
Soon after, Robinson began to complain of problems with his phone and said his files were broken into. His wife, Mary, said that whenever she left in the morning to run her daily errands, she would see an individual dressed in black standing in the entranceway to a building a couple of doors down from the couple's apartment and observing everyone who came and went. Mary called Moseley and Beckley several times and was clearly perturbed by the stranger's presence, fearing either a prankster or someone intending Jack and her real harm.
    
Not knowing whether to believe her or not, Moseley and Beckley decided to see for themselves. They left early one morning and took the Lincoln Tunnel over to Jersey City and the Robinsons' apartment. When they arrived, sure enough, there was a black car parked at the curb, and someone was lurking in the doorway that fit the general description of a Man-In-Black. The pair decided to circle the block and find a parking place, intending to confront whoever this was standing there. After going around the block, they had no luck in finding a place to park, but Moseley handed his young protégé a camera and Beckley took photos of the car and one of the black-clad stranger in the doorway. Again, they circled the block looking for a parking place, and when they got back, the gentleman and the car were gone.
    
"I always told Jim," Beckley said, "that I think this is the only case where UFO investigators actually scared off the Men-In-Black instead of the Men-In-Black scaring off the UFO investigators. He got a chuckle from that. Of course, I've told this story over the years and I've published the photographs and been on the television program 'UFO Hunters' to discuss this. Now Jim, being his usual skeptical self, said he was not certain that this was an actual Man-In-Black. He thought perhaps it might be a pall bearer, but there was no funeral home around there. Then he figured it might have been a member of the mob or a gangster or something. Well, that's not even plausible. What would he be doing out there at that time of the morning? So I've always believed there was a good possibility that in fact he was some sort of Man-In-Black, a UFO Silencer, whatever you want to call it."
    
Beckley says that Moseley was often skeptical about many things in UFOlogy, or "Ufoology," as Moseley quipped. Moseley published a special expose issue of "Saucer News" in which he called the famous contactee George Adamski a fraud, risking the ire of Adamski's many followers.
    
Moseley was rumored by some to be a member of the Silence Group or even the CIA because he didn't appear to have a regular job or visible means of supporting himself. The thing was, Beckley said, Moseley had inherited quite a bit of money when he turned 21, from stocks his family had owned in the Barber Steamship line. Moseley certainly went through the money over the course of his life, and was never really what one would call wealthy, but the idea that he was getting a regular paycheck from the CIA was clearly preposterous.
    
Beckley's chapter in "The Astounding UFO Secrets Of James W. Moseley"   continues with other anecdotes on Moseley, including a hoax Moseley cooked up with the late UFO researcher Gray Barker that again targeted contactee George Adamski and was intended for the pair's amusement. Meanwhile, there was also an incident involving a UFO witness, a large public party in a New Jersey park, and the late alien abduction researcher Budd Hopkins, who remained furious at Moseley for the rest of his life. But maybe those stories are better saved for readers of the book.
    
Another old friend of Moseley's who contributes a tribute chapter to the book is Antonio Huneeus, a longtime veteran of UFO and paranormal journalism now associated with the prestigious "Open Minds" magazine. Huneeus opens his chapter with learning the news of his friend's death just after returning from a two-week trip to Chile.
    
"Fortunately," Huneeus writes, "I spoke on the phone with Jim right before my trip; he was alert and interested in all sorts of UFOlogical gossip, even as he was getting ready to go to the hospital for a complicated cancer surgery."
    
The memory of that final parting phone call is still a comfort to Huneeus, who also provided some biographical background on Moseley.  
    
"Jim Moseley was born in 1931," Huneeus writes, "the third son of Major General George Van Horn Moseley, who was a prominent U.S. Army officer but also a notorious right wing and anti-Semitic figure during the FDR era. Jim didn't get along with his father and so became a rebel, quitting Princeton University after a couple of years and pursuing a number of independent activities, which included real estate deals, antiquarian pursuits in South America and of course UFOlogy.
    
"Until the last few years," Huneeus continues, "when his age and health slowed him down, Jim was a permanent fixture at all major UFO conferences. You could always find him at the bar drinking martinis and collecting gossip, which would then appear in his longstanding newsletter, 'Saucer Smear.' This was the only American UFO publication devoted not to UFO cases per se but to the discussion of the personalities of UFOlogists. It was technically 'non-scheduled' and free, although Jim was glad to receive donations, which he called 'love offerings.' In the last few years it became his main intellectual activity since he always had a lot of fun editing it and making fun of people."
    
According to Huneeus, Moseley was often thought to be a skeptic by other UFOlogists because he didn't buy into some of the more popular beliefs in the field, like the Roswell Incident and the abduction cases researched by Budd Hopkins and some others. But Moseley poked just as much fun at the debunkers - like the late Philip Klass and the magician James the Amazing Randi - and was critical and sarcastic regarding just about everything and everybody in UFOlogy.
    
In the new book on Moseley, George P. Hansen contributes a chapter comparing the court jester of UFOlogy to the Trickster entities who appear throughout the folklore of nearly every culture ancient and modern and that are often compared to the shifting realities experienced during UFO encounters.

Tim Brigham, a longtime friend of Moseley, writes fondly, "Jim was the first person I met who maintained a non-dogmatic yet genuinely curious view of this strange UFO enigma, and thus I was immediately drawn to him. Perhaps just as amazing to me at the time, Jim was BOLD about it. He said and wrote what he thought, with no fear of giving his opinion on a topic or person if asked, and even if not! Jim didn't know all the answers and he was not afraid to tell you that neither did anyone else. He could laugh with anyone over a drink, whether he thought they were genuine or, as he often did, thought they were full of s***. As many can attest, Jim was also an amazing story teller and he had many stories to tell. He knew all the original guys; he mentioned names like Hynek and Adamski as if they were sitting in the room next door."

Phyllis Galde, the editor of "FATE Magazine," also has pleasant recollections of Moseley. In a chapter called "Jim Moseley, The Lucid Partier," she recalls making a visit to Moseley's apartment in Key West, Florida, sharing a scotch and water with the elder statesman of UFOlogy as he chain-smoked and held court. Galde also met Moseley at the National UFO Conference in Hollywood in 2005, where he was a speaker.

"I had to smile to myself," Galde writes, "because all weekend it looked like he had the same light blue shirt on, same sport jacket, and the back of the shirt was always hanging out over his pants. Even though he was partying, his talk was coherent and lucid. Most impressive, even if you don't agree with his conclusions. He had a fine mind, a great wit, and we will miss him. I am sure he will find out the Truth in the spirit world."

Galde pledged to post some of the articles Moseley wrote for "FATE" and to reprint some of the recent issues of "Saucer Smear" on the magazine's website at www.fatemag.com

Also included in the new tribute book from Global Communications is the transcript of a 2010 radio interview with Moseley conducted by talk show hosts SMiles Lewis and Mack White. In the interview, Moseley speaks of the early years of UFOlogy and affectionately recalls stories and people from times past. Those interested in following along with the transcript of the interview are invited to copy and paste this link to the original broadcast and hear the Moseley interrogation firsthand at: 

http://www.psiopradio.com/2012/11/farewell-to-supreme-commander-jim-moseley-1931-2012/   

Meanwhile, chapters by Adam Gorightly and Greg Bishop wax poetic for readers not easily offended or faint of heart.

It should be pointed out that Moseley had a second career as a "grave robber," or dealer in South American antiquities.

Antonio Huneeus writes in his chapter: "We had a common interest in all things  South American as one of Jim's most cherished periods was the few years in the late 1950s when he went back and forth to Peru and to a lesser extent Ecuador and northern Chile, purchasing and digging up pre-Columbian antiquities. Moseley was unabashed about his grave-robbing activities, his adventurous days as a huaquero (from the Quecha word 'huaco,' for pottery found frequently in tombs) as they are called in the Andean countries."

The black market antiquities trade is now strictly enforced in South America, according to Huneeus, but at the time Moseley was able to avoid legal prosecution by bribing the Peruvian ambassador to the United Nations. Beckley recalls that as he understood it, it was illegal to rob the graves in order to obtain the loot, but once it was in hand, it was legal to bring it into the U.S. The grave robbing never made Moseley wealthy, but it did provide some great stories along with some supplemental cash. Huneeus' chapter includes a photo of Moseley leading a donkey through Peru in what has come to be called his "Indiana Jones period."

Additionally, while in Peru, Moseley was the first investigator to gain access to the Nazca Lines, realizing that the mysterious lines could best be seen not from the ground but from an aerial view, thus beating out Van Daniken and others by a decade or more.   

When Moseley moved from New Jersey to Key West, sometime in the 1980s, he opened a pre-Columbian art gallery with whatever items remained unsold. The collection was eventually donated to a museum of archeology and natural history in Dante, Florida, near Fort Lauderdale. Moseley's dealing in antiquities provides the subtitle for the book he coauthored with Karl T. Pflock, called "Shockingly Close To The Truth! Confessions Of A Grave-Robbing UFOlogist," which was published in 2002.  

All of this serves as prologue to Beckley's reprinting of Moseley's book "UFO Crash Secrets At Wright-Patterson Air Force Base," in which one can read Moseley's first-person account of his many adventures in search of the truth of the UFO phenomenon, whether that truth involved a military cover-up or run-ins with his friend and fellow jokester the late Gray Barker, who is another legendary name of the early years of UFOlogy. The complete package offered by Beckley with "The Astounding UFO Secrets Of James W. Moseley," which combines heartfelt personal tributes and the complete text of one of Moseley's books, is a must-have for your UFO book collection. It is both a sad but smiling farewell to a true legend, the man some have called "the Hunter S. Thompson of UFOlogy," and a vital document of what the study of flying saucers was like in the beginning among its most early practitioners/jokesters, who never hesitated to add a dose of laughter to their sober assessments of the phenomenon.

RECOMMENDED READING
The Astounding UFO Secrets Of James W. Moseley: Includes The Full Text Of UFO Crash Secrets At Wright Patterson Air Force Base

http://www.amazon.com/The-Astounding-Secrets-James-Moseley/dp/1606111442/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363747875&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=MOSELEY+TRIBUTE++TIMOTHY+BECKLEY

The Trickster and the Paranormal

http://www.amazon.com/Trickster-Paranormal-George-P-Hansen/dp/1401000827/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1363747990&sr=1-1&keywords=GEORGE+HANSEN+TRICKSTER

If you enjoyed this article, please visit Sean Casteel's "UFO Journalist" website at www.seancasteel.com

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Marcus still wakes screaming in the night, the nightmare as fresh in his newly conscious mind as it was in sleep. However, the dreams aren’t as frequent as they were when he was younger, like the one he had at eight years old. “In the dream I was at my family reunion and there was a little boy maybe twelve years old, and he was chasing us around with a butcher knife,” Marcus said.

Marcus and his brother ran through this dream reunion, past relatives chatting and eating chicken and potato salad off paper plates, but no one else seemed to see this boy who chased them, this boy with pitch black eyes. Then the boy caught them. “He killed my brother and he came after me,” Marcus said. The knife-wielding, black-eyed twelve-year-old pounced on top of Marcus and raised the knife, still wet with his brother’s blood. “Right before he killed me I woke up.”

The dream fear clung to him like wet clothing, and Marcus realized he wasn’t alone. “Right on top of me sat the black-eyed boy from my dream,” Marcus said. “He was holding me down and I tried so hard to get away from him but I couldn’t move.”

The boy from the nightmare raised his hand and slapped Marcus’s left cheek. As the sting shot through him, Marcus sat up and the boy vanished. But Marcus knew the boy was real. “My cheek stung and I was crying so hard, and I was so afraid of what had happened.”

He tried wake his big sister, but she wouldn’t move, so he crawled in bed next to her and cried the rest of the night; he was too afraid to go back to sleep; years later, he’s still afraid. “I remember exactly what the boy looked like,” Marcus said. “He had auburn hair, was wearing a red, black and green-stripped sweater, and of course had completely black eyes.”

Lucid dreams, in which people seem to be awake during the dream state, sometimes bleed into consciousness. During sleep, our bodies become paralyzed so involuntary muscle movements don’t shake us awake. Sometimes in a deep REM sleep, when our dreams are the most vivid, we wake, and our dreams momentarily become reality. Then, sometimes, they actually are reality.
The darker side of dreams

The darker side of dreams – Sleep paralysis

Lauren was sixteen years old when she met the dark man in a dream. “I was driving home from work and there was this other car that crossed the lane and made me wreck my car,” she said. “I heard sirens and looked over and saw him standing over me.” A tall, black shadow of a man loomed over her in the dream, his eyes red burned into hers. “Then I saw this really, really bright light then woke up.” That wasn’t the last time she saw the black shadow man.

She woke one night to find her bedroom bathed in darkness. Lauren usually slept with her television and a nightlight on because she always felt as if she were being watched. But that night her TV and night light were off. “I had one window and a little light was coming through so I could kinda see the shoulder and half the head of a tall shadow man with red glowing eyes just staring at me,” she said. “I laid there staring at his eyes not able to think or move or feel anything. It was like it had a trance on me or something.”

During this trance she couldn’t close her eyes. “I had a fan blowing right on my face and I never once blinked,” she said. “When I felt like I could move again I sat up never taking my eyes off of him, and when I sat up my eyes started to burn really bad and started to water, so I blinked.” When she opened her eyes again, the dark figure was gone, and she lay down and went back to sleep.

Lauren has seen it since, fleetingly. The shadow man occasionally flitters across the street only to disappear as she focuses on it. “When I see him its like time stops,” she said. “I can’t move, I can’t blink, I can’t do anything till he is gone.”

But her initial death dream brought on by this dark, sinister figure haunts her still. “I still don’t drive to this day,” she said. “In fear that I will die the way I did in my dream.”

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2013/03/something-deadly-in-their-nightmares/

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