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Scientists have discovered the cause of a strange sleeping sickness affecting residents of two villages in northern Kazakhstan, the government has said.

Since March 2013, the mysterious illness has affected more than 140 people in Kalachi and Krasnogorsk, dusty settlements in the huge Kazakh steppe, with a total population of 810 people, mostly ethnic Russians and Germans. Villagers would fall asleep suddenly, even while walking, and wake up with memory loss, grogginess, weakness and headaches. Some fell victim more than half a dozen times, with sufferers sleeping for up to six days at a time.

“The sick person appears to be conscious and can even walk. But all the same he then falls into a deep sleep and snores, and when they wake him up … the person remembers absolutely nothing,” the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda reported after a 2014 investigation.

The sickness would affect both old and young, with children dropping off at school. Some reported nightmarish hallucinations: local children Rudolf Boyarinos and Misha Plyukhin told Komsomolskaya Pravda they had seen winged horses, snakes in their beds and worms eating their hands.

Even pets were not immune. Kalachi resident Yelena Zhavoronkova told the newspaper Vremya that her cat Marquis suddenly “went stupid” on a Friday night and began meowing and attacking walls, furniture and the family dog.

“He fell asleep toward morning and snored like a human until lunchtime on Saturday. He didn’t react to anything, not even cat food,” Zhavoronkova said.

Doctors tested Marquis and other sufferers, but the mysterious illness defied all explanation. At first they thought the patients were suffering the after-effects of counterfeit vodka, but as the epidemic grew they began diagnosing people with “encephalopathy of an unknown origin”, a generic term for brain illnesses, Interfax reported.

Many suspected the nearby uranium mines that were closed after the fall of the Soviet Union, leaving Krasnogorsk a ghost town with only 130 of its former 6,500 residents. Kazakhstan’s health ministry tested more than 7,000 nearby homes but didn’t find significantly high levels of radiation or of heavy metals and their salts. It detected raised radium levels in some homes, but it was not enough to explain the phenomenon.

Even sleep disorder experts could not find a cause. One somnologist told Komsomolskaya Pravda in 2014 that the two isolated villages were most likely suffering from a case of mass psychosis similar to the “Bin Laden itch”, a psychosomatic rash that afflicted children in the US as fears of terrorist attacks peaked in 2002.

After analysing the results of medical examinations of all the residents, researchers concluded that it was caused by heightened levels of carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons in the air.

“The uranium mines were closed at some point, and at times a concentration of carbon monoxide occurs there,” Saparbaev said. “The oxygen in the air is reduced accordingly, which is the real reason for the sleeping sickness in these villages.”

Mystery solved? Not exactly. While it’s possible that carbon monoxide is the culprit of this weird phenomenon, some researchers aren’t entirely convinced. 

Claude Piantadosi, a pulmonologist at Duke University Medical Center, told Wired that while “the symptoms fit,” they “are not specific and that’s the problem.” He explains that while carbon monoxide is able to make someone unconscious, it’s a byproduct of combustion. So, why would the uranium mine – that is inactive – be releasing carbon monoxide? Not to mention, authorities previously tested for elevated carbon monoxide and later ruled it out. 

Piantadosi suggests other gasses, like carbon dioxide, may have contributed to the sleeping sickness.

Authorities in the regions are now opting for a radical, and controversial, solution: moving the villagers out of Kalachi to prevent further exposure. In January, regional governor Sergey Kulagin said he hoped the relocation would be complete by the end of summer.

“Some measures must be taken,” the mayor, who has herself suffered a bout of the sickness, said. “This is a good chance for the residents of our village to find a new home and a new job.”

Working with local administrations and employers, authorities have already resettled around 100 residents across the Akmola Region – a 56,500-square-mile administrative area of northern Kazakhstan. But there are 425 residents still living in the village.

It is a “voluntary resettlement” Sadvokasova insists – but some villagers are resistant.

 “I’m not going anywhere,” says Kazachenko. “Why should I go? I’ve been here for 40 years. I’m going to die here.”

His wife Raisa, who nursed him through two bouts of sleeping sickness is also defiant: “I’ve lived in this house for 20 years. I’ve lived on this street for 60 years,” she said , between hauling water from a standpipe through the icy streets on a sledge. “Now where will they send me? What’s awaiting me there?”

Mayor Sadvokasova acknowledges that some families don’t want to move: “For now we’re working with the families that want to resettle. It’s all on a voluntary basis.”

Evacuation of the two villages has begun, with authorities reportedly relocating 68 of 223 families so far.

Source: The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/17/mystery-kazakhstan-sleeping-sickness-solved

---

A Cambridge Professor has made the astonishing claim that three scientists investigating the melting of Arctic ice may have been assassinated within the space of a few months.

Professor Peter Wadhams said he feared being labelled a “looney” over his suspicion that the deaths of the scientists were more than just an ‘extraordinary’ coincidence.

But he insisted the trio could have been murdered and hinted that the oil industry or else sinister government forces might be implicated.

The three scientists he identified - Seymour Laxon and Katherine Giles, both climate change scientists at University College London, and Tim Boyd of the Scottish Association for marine Science - all died within the space of a few months in early 2013.

Professor laxon fell down a flight of stairs at a New Year’s Eve party at a house in Essex while Dr Giles died when she was in collision with a lorry when cycling to work in London. Dr Boyd is thought to have been struck by lightning while walking in Scotland.

Prof Wadhams said that in the weeks after Prof Laxon’s death he believed he was targeted by a lorry which tried to force him off the road. He reported the incident to the police.

Asked if he thought hitmen might have been behind the deaths, Prof Wadhams, who is Professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, told The Telegraph: “Yes. I do believe assassins possibly murdered them but I can see that I would be thought of as a looney for believing this.

"But it’s just very odd coincidence that something like that should happen in such a brief period of time.”

He added: “They [the deaths] were accidents as far as anybody was able to tell but the fact they were clustered like that looked so weird.”

Asked who might have wanted them out the way, he replied: “I can only think of the oil lobby but I don’t think the oil lobby goes around killing people.”

He admitted it would have been "stupid" to go to the police with his concerns over the three deaths, not least because he was "suspicious" of the authorities - he cited the example of the death of the government’s weapons expert Dr David Kelly.

Prof Wadhams added: “I thought if it was somebody assassinating them could it be one of our people doing it and that would be even more frightening. I thought it would be better not to touch this with a barge pole.”

His suspicions drew outrage on Saturday from Prof Laxon’s partner, who was also a close friend of Dr Giles. When told what Prof Wadhams had said, Fiona Strawbridge, head of e-Learning at UCL, replied: “Good god. All of this is completely outrageous and very distressing.”

The couple had been staying in a friends’ converted mill in the Essex countryside when her partner fell down the stairs in the early hours of New Year’s Day. He died the next day from head injuries.

“It was very steep stairs and I heard Seymour fall,” said Ms Strawbridge, “It is just completely bonkers [to suggest murder].

"I am sure there are some climate scientists who do get trolled and pursued but Seymour wasn’t one of them. I would have known if anybody had been pursuing him.

“Sometimes there are tragic coincidences and you have to accept that.”

Source: The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11762680/Three-
scientists-investigating-melting-Arctic-ice-may-have-been-assassinated-professor-claims.html

When most people hear the word “gremlins,” the first image that may pop into their heads is that of the strange reptilian creatures from the 1984 Joe Dante film of the same name, where the titular little monsters run amok and cause chaos within a small town. However, what some people may not realize is that these were actually based upon allegedly real entities which, during the Second World War and even before, plagued pilots and aircraft crew with all manner of mischief as they battled in the skies during one of the bloodiest eras of human history. Here in the bloody skies of WWII, among the seemingly never-ending smoke, bomb blasts, strafing antiaircraft fire, buzzing enemy aircraft, and death, the crews of various aircraft from all sides were faced with a new enemy; bizarre impish beasts that were said to infest aircraft and seemed to want nothing more but to create havoc and bring them down from the clouds.

The origin of the modern term “gremlin” is disputed, but is often said to derive from the Old English word greme, which means to vex or annoy. It refers to a type of mischievous gnome-like imp or demon, typically said to be around a foot tall, which probably has its roots in the old folklore of goblins and fairies. The original early representation of these creatures was that of skilled craftsmen with a superhuman proficiency with machinery of all types, and they were once credited by some with helping mankind along with our technology, such as in the creation of the steam engine and even claims that they helped with Benjamin Franklin’s work with electricity. Yet for all of the benevolent early folklore associated with the impish creatures, it was their penchant for mischief and mayhem that they would become most known for.

The modern version of the gremlin as a malicious, trouble making hell raiser has its origins with British airmen, some of whom believed that there were miniature imps, gnomes, or fairies which seemed to show an intense interest in aviation and caused aircraft or navigational malfunctions. One of the first mentions of the creatures can be traced back to an early reference to them in the early 1900s in a British newspaper called the Spectator, in which it was written:

    "The old Royal Naval Air Service in 1917 and the newly constituted Royal Air Force in 1918 appear to have detected the existence of a horde of mysterious and malicious sprites whose whole purpose in life was…to bring about as many as possible of the inexplicable mishaps which, in those days as now, trouble an airman’s life."

The existence of such weird entities became truly popularized starting in 1923, when a British pilot crashed his plane into the sea and later reported that the accident had been caused by tiny creatures which had followed him aboard his plane and proceeded to create havoc aboard the aircraft, sabotaging the engine, messing around with the flight controls, and ultimately causing it to crash. The story spread, and it wasn’t long before other British pilots also began to complain of being harassed by similar miniature troll-like creatures with a mastery of technology and machinery, which caused engine failures, electrical malfunctions, communications shutdowns, bad landings, freak accidents, and pretty much anything else that could possibly ever go wrong with an aircraft.

Gremlins were said to engage in such a myriad of bad behavior as sucking the gas out of tanks through hoses, jamming radio frequencies, mucking up landing gear, blowing dust or sand into fuel pipes or sensitive electrical equipment, cutting wires, removing bolts or screws, tinkering with dials, knobs or switches, jostling controls, slashing wings or tires, poking or pinching gunners or pilots, banging incessantly on the fuselage, breaking windows, and a wide variety of other prankish acts. There were even pilots who claimed that the creatures had telepathic powers and could create realistic illusions in a victim’s mind, such as the appearance of the ground or a mountain emerging suddenly from the clouds. They were also sometimes reported to be seen sitting out upon the nose of the plane or the wings of aircraft in midflight tampering with the wings or even the engines. On occasion the gremlins were said to shout, giggle, whisper, growl, or otherwise make noise so as to distract aircraft crews, in particular gunners as they were lining up their sights on an enemy and pilots when performing maneuvers for which total concentration was a necessity. Such reports spread quickly through the ranks and by the end of the 1920s it seemed like any pilot who had ever had an aircraft problem of any kind had seen the things, and they were commonly reported throughout the Royal Air Force by pilots stationed in such far flung places as Malta, the Middle East, and India.

One of the most famous alleged gremlin accounts from this period was made by none other than the renowned American aviator, author, inventor, military officer, explorer, and social activist Charles Lindbergh as he was engaged in his historic nonstop solo flight over the Atlantic from New York to Paris in May of 1927. Lindbergh had been flying his single-engine single-seat plane Spirit of St. Louis from the Roosevelt Field in Garden City, NY to Le Bourget Field in Paris, France, which was to be an epic 3,600 mile (5,800 km), 33 and a half hour flight and the first ever of its kind. In the 9th hour of being airborne, Lindbergh reported that he had suddenly felt somewhat detached from reality and found himself surrounded by several vaporous, strange looking beings within the cramped confines of his tiny cabin, which spoke to him and demonstrated incredibly complex knowledge of navigation and flight equipment. Interestingly, in this case rather than cause mischief, Lindbergh said that the gremlins actually kept him alert and reassured him that he would remain safe on his journey. Lindbergh kept this bizarre experience to himself for years until the account was finally published in his 1953 book The Spirit of St. Louis. Interestingly, this would not be the only report of benevolent gremlin activity, as there were other accounts from time to time that told of the typically mischievous monsters helping pilots avert disasters or alerting them when to turn or change course or altitude, which showed there was more than one facet to whatever the things were.

The actual physical descriptions of gremlins varied rather wildly. In some cases they were described as being little elfish beings similar to humans, wearing bright red or green double-breasted frock coats, old fashioned hats with feathers, and pointed shoes. The skin color could be green, gold, pink, or red. Others gave the entities a more sinister appearance, saying that they looked animalistic, with hairy bodies, large, pointed ears, deep red or even glowing eyes, and horns. Still other reports speak of gremlins as having hairless grey skin, being vaguely reptilian in appearance, and having enormous mouths filled with pointy teeth. There were cases that said they looked like jackrabbits, bull terriers, or some combination of both. In some cases they were merely wispy entities seemingly composed of mist or smoke. Some accounts mention webbed hands and feet, fins, or bat-like wings. Size descriptions also varied considerably, with gremlins said to be anywhere between a mere 6 inches tall all the way up to three feet in height. In some cases, they were said to have large feet with suction cups or even leather shoes with hooks, both of which enabled them to walk about on the outside of aircraft or to hang upside down. One common trait in all reports is that through whatever means, gremlins were known to be able to adhere to the outer fuselage of planes and to withstand incredible temperature extremes, high altitudes, and violent winds.

Gremlins and their bothersome antics were reported throughout the 1920s and 30s, but perhaps the period of the most intense alleged gremlin activity was during the fierce fighting of World War II. Reports of gremlins were especially prolific among the UK’s RAF (Royal Air Force) units, especially the high-altitude Photographic Reconnaissance Units (PRU), which flew perilous missions in unarmed, unarmored Spitfires and Mosquitoes at great heights on photographic missions over enemy territory. It was during these harrowing missions, when pilots operated in bitter, biting cold as heat was redirected to the cameras to keep them warm, that the little monster tricksters were regularly seen and blamed for all manner of otherwise inexplicable technical troubles and woes. In some cases, mechanical problems would arise only to mysteriously right themselves again as soon as the planes landed or the gremlins were gone.

The Battle of Britain, an enormous air campaign waged against the United Kingdom by the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) during the summer and autumn of 1940 in particular saw many cases of reported gremlin activity, so much so in fact that the British Air Ministry even acknowledged the problem and made serious attempts to investigate the phenomenon. The Ministry even went as far as to have a service manual written up by a “Gremlorist,” Pilot Officer Percy Prune, which was an official document consisting of a list of the creatures’ exploits, how to placate or distract them, and various ways to avoid accidents due to their presence, such as not displaying bravado, arrogance or over confidence, which was thought to attract the creatures. There were also posters that warned of the malicious little monsters, as well as bulletins which often included the following ditty:

    This is the tale of the Gremlins

    As told by the PRU

    At Benson and Wick and St Eval-

    And believe me, you slobs, it’s true.

    When you’re seven miles up in the heavens,

    (That’s a hell of a lonely spot)

    And it’s fifty degrees below zero,

    Which isn’t exactly hot.

    When you’re frozen blue like your Spitfire,

    And you’re scared a Mosquito pink.

    When you’re thousands of miles from nowhere,

    And there’s nothing below but the drink.

    It’s then that you’ll see the Gremlins,

    Green and gamboge and gold,

    Male and female and neuter,

    Gremlins both young and old.

    It’s no good trying to dodge them,

    The lessons you learnt on the Link

    Won’t help you evade a Gremlin,

    Though you boost and you dive and you jink.

    White one’s will wiggle your wing tips,

    Male one’s will muddle your maps,

    Green one’s will guzzle your glycol,

    Females will flutter your flaps.

    Pink one’s will perch on your perspex,

    And dance pirouettes on your prop,

    There’s a spherical middle-aged Gremlin,

    Who’ll spin on your stick like a top.

    They’ll freeze up your camera shutters,

    They’ll bite through your aileron wires,

    They’ll bend and they’ll break and they’ll batter,

    They’ll insert toasting forks into your tyres.

    And that is the tale of the Gremlins,

    As told by the PRU,

    (P)retty (R)uddy (U)nlikely to many,

    But a fact, none the less, to the few.

At first this seemed to be a phenomenon completely unique to the Royal Air Force and it was often whispered among airmen that the gremlins were in league with the enemy, but it later became apparent that enemy aircraft were also suffering from the creatures’ tomfoolery and that they took no sides, taking equal glee in harassing both British and enemy aircraft alike. When the American Allies came to British shores, they too began to experience the strange phenomenon. American pilots and airmen typically described seeing strange creatures out on the wings of the aircraft, where they would fiddle around with the aileron, which is the hinged flight control surface on the wing that allows it to roll or bank. So persistent were the stories of gremlins fiddling and tampering with the aileron of American aircraft that the Americans often referred to the creatures as Yehudis, after a famous violinist of the time, because they were always fiddling.

One American Boeing B17 pilot during WWII known only as L.W. had a rather bizarre and harrowing experience with gremlins typical of these encounters while engaged in a combat mission. The man reported that as he was taking the enormous plane higher he could hear a strange sound coming from the engine and instruments on the panel in front of him started going haywire. When the confused pilot looked outside to his right he saw an freakish “entity” outside of the plane’s window latched onto the plane that was described as 3 feet tall, with abnormally long arms, grey hairless skin, deep red eyes, a gaping mouth full of teeth, and pointed ears with tufts of black hair at the ends like “owl ears,” just staring in at him from the wind and bitter cold beyond the glass. When the frightened pilot looked to the nose of the aircraft he was astonished to see yet another one of the creatures apparently dancing about out there and pounding away haphazardly at the fuselage. The pilot thought at first that he was perhaps hallucinating or experiencing disorientation, but he reported that he felt sharp and in control of his senses. The pilot said that the strange creatures appeared to be laughing maniacally, and that they gleefully cavorted about outside of his plane pulling on whatever they could get their clawed hands on, banging on the aircraft with all of their might, and obviously trying their best to bring the plane down. After a bit of maneuvering the pilot managed to shake the critters off of his plane, although he would later say he had no idea if they had fallen to their deaths or merely jumped to another plane. L.W. was apprehensive about telling anyone about the frightening ordeal, but when he told a gunner friend of his about it, the gunner reported having had a similar experience on a training mission just a few days before.

Interestingly, there is a rather bizarre incident pertaining to an American aircraft from 1939, before America’s participation in the war, which may or may not be related to gremlins but seems worth mentioning. Allegedly, a transport plane left the Marine naval Air Force Base in San Diego, California at around 3:30 in the afternoon in the late summer of 1939 on a routine flight to Honolulu with a crew of 13. Somewhere around three hours into the flight, it was reported that the aircraft made a sudden distress call, after which communications went dead. Despite the fact that its radio had gone completely silent, the plane managed to arrive back at its base, yet the way it limped in for a bumpy, sloppy emergency landing and the heavy damage on its exterior that almost looked like missile damage immediately worried the ground crew. As soon as the damaged plane had skidded to a halt on the runway, crews moved in to investigate. What they found would horrify them. An inspection of the craft’s interior uncovered the bodies of 12 of the plane’s crew, all of them displaying gruesome, gaping wounds of unknown origins. Further adding to the strangeness was the fact that the whole cabin reeked of a wretched sulfuric stench, and there were empty bullet shells strewn about the floor of the cockpit as well as the pilot and co-pilot’s empty firearms, indicating that the dead men had frantically fired at something. The only survivor was the co-pilot, who had managed to land the plane despite being severely wounded himself. He would die later at a hospital before having any chance to give an account of what had exactly happened aboard the doomed flight.

Reports of gremlins and their knack for hiding aboard planes to sabotage them persisted throughout WWII, from all sides and nations involved in the conflict, more often than not by experienced pilots and aircraft crew that were sober, level-headed and rational. What could have been at the heart of these accounts? What were all of these people seeing or experiencing? It is often pointed out that the lack of adequate pressurization of aircraft back in those days most likely led to hallucinations, which were then shaped by the stories of little trickster, prankish imps with a tendency to sabotage or damage machinery. There could also have been some element of “passing the buck” so to speak, or deflecting blame for human error by blaming accidents on these fantastical creatures. This could have helped build morale among the men, as it would have been more constructive to blame the gremlins for aircraft mishaps rather than accuse members of their own squadron.

Yet those who claim to have seen gremlins or to have been the victims of their attacks insist that they were no figment of the imagination and were in fact very real. Survivors of the war who have lived to tell the tale have no doubt in their minds that gremlins were a very real threat and that they were no mere folklore or spooky legend, adamantly refusing that all cases can be explained away by mere hallucinations or human error. Nevertheless, these sorts of reports largely fizzled out in the wake of the war’s end, and by the 1950s there was very little talk of gremlins among airmen, perhaps largely due to the fact that the military began to strictly discourage rumors or talk of the creatures, calling it unprofessional and morale inhibiting behavior. Most mention of gremlins nowadays in made half-jokingly, when an aircraft experiences trouble or if machinery breaks down or malfunctions for no apparent reason.

So was the gremlin phenomenon all just hallucinations, folklore, overactive imaginations, and tall tales that managed to spread out across aircraft crews of various nationalities to lodge itself squarely into contemporary myth? Or could there have been something else behind the phenomena? Could these have been somehow real creatures that gave air crews a new enemy to face in the heat of battle? If these gremlins were indeed real entities then what could they have been? Could these have been faeries, ghosts, demons, a real animal of some sort, aliens, or something from beyond our dimension? Whether they were real or not, gremlins were indeed very real to many of the brave men who served to risk their lives for their countries high in the treacherous skies of the Second World War. Perhaps next time you are flying in a plane that experiences a sudden technical difficulty or uncommon turbulence, you may just want to look under your seat or peer out of the window just to be sure. You just may see some gremlins peering right back.

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/07/the-real-gremlins-of-wwii/

LINDSAY, Calif. — Vern Tassey doesn’t advertise. He’s never even had a business card. But here in California’s Central Valley, word has gotten around that he’s a man with “the gift,” and Tassey, a plainspoken, 76-year-old grandfather, has never been busier.

Farmers call him day and night — some from as far away as the outskirts of San Francisco and even across the state line in Nevada. They ask, sometimes even beg, him to come to their land. “Name your price,” one told him. But Tassey has so far declined. What he does has never been about money, he says, and he prefers to work closer to home.

And that’s where he was on a recent Wednesday morning, quietly marching along the edge of a bushy orange grove here in the heart of California’s citrus belt, where he’s lived nearly his entire life. Dressed in faded Wranglers, dusty work boots and an old cap, Tassey held in his hands a slender metal rod, which he clutched close to his chest and positioned outward like a sword as he slowly walked along the trees. Suddenly, the rod began to bounce up and down, as if it were possessed, and he quickly paused and scratched a spot in the dirt with his foot before continuing on.

A few feet away stood the Wollenmans — Guy, his brother Jody and their cousin Tommy — third-generation citrus farmers whose family maintains some of the oldest orange groves in the region. Like so many Central Valley farmers, their legacy is in danger — put at risk by California’s worst drought in decades. The lack of rain and snow runoff from the nearby Sierra Nevada has caused many of their wells to go dry. To save their hundreds of acres of trees, they’ll need to find new, deeper sources of water — and that’s where Tassey comes in.

Tassey is what is known as a “water witch,” or a dowser — someone who uses little more than intuition and a rod or a stick to locate underground sources of water. It’s an ancient art that dates back at least to the 1500s — though some dowsers have argued the origins are even earlier, pointing to what they say is Biblical evidence of Moses using a rod to summon water. In California, farmers have been “witching the land” for decades — though the practitioners of this obscure ritual have never been as high profile or as in demand as during the last year.

With nearly 50 percent of the state in “exceptional drought” — the highest intensity on the scale — and no immediate relief in sight, Californians are increasingly turning to spiritual methods and even magic in their desperation to bring an end to the dry spell. At greatest risk is the state’s central farming valley, a region that provides fully half the nation’s fruit and vegetables. Already, hundreds of thousands of acres have been fallowed, and farmers say if they can’t find water to sustain their remaining crops, the drought could destroy their livelihoods, cause mass unemployment and damage the land in ways that could take decades to recover.

Across the Central Valley, churches are admonishing their parishioners to pray for rain. Native American tribal leaders have been called in to say blessings on the land in hopes that water will come. But perhaps nothing is more unorthodox or popular than the water witches — even though the practice has been scorned by scientists and government officials who say there’s no evidence that water divining, as it is also known, actually works. They’ve dismissed the dowsers’ occasional success as the equivalent of a fortunate roll of the dice — nothing but pure, simple luck. But as the drought is expected to only get worse in coming months, it’s a gamble that many California farmers seem increasingly willing to take.

With many farms limited or even cut off from government-allocated irrigation water this year, growers like the Wollenmans have been forced to rely on their groundwater wells — most of which were built more than 50 years ago and are less than 200 feet deep. In a normal year of regular rainfall, that would usually suffice, but with so many straws in the cup, wells across the Central Valley are quickly going dry. Farmers are being forced to drill deeper to tap into the aquifer below — an expensive proposition that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not more. It’s a desperate attempt to survive what many describe as a slow-moving natural disaster on par with the Dust Bowl.

State officials recommend that farmers who are planning to dig should hire a hydrogeologist to survey their land to find a spot for a productive well. But the first call many farmers make is to a water witch — who charges a fraction of the price and, some insist, is often just as accurate.

On this Wednesday, Tassey was charging the Wollenmans just $100 — his usual fee — to look for water in one of their orange groves. They’d been working with him for years — and before that, they’d used another witch to help them find water, just as their parents had when they first came here in the 1940s as one of the first citrus growers in Lindsay.

“We’ve always used someone,” Guy Wollenman said as he watched Tassey work. “Most farmers do. They don’t drill a hole without someone like Vern to help them find the best spots.”

The severity of the latest drought has raised the ante even higher. With landowners across the valley desperate to tap into water, it costs thousands of dollars just to get on a waitlist for drilling that is often several months long. Desperate farmers have little margin for error. If they drill a hole and find nothing, it’s money that’s gone, and they are back on the waitlist again. They are betting on witches to help them find the magic mark.

A few feet away, Tassey continued to pace back and forth along the line of orange trees, and as he worked, a strange hush settled over the scene. Soon, the only sound was Tassey’s footsteps crunching dead leaves on the sandy ground as a nearby dog began to bark. The farmers quietly followed at a distance, careful not to disrupt Tassey’s concentration.

“It will start bouncing,” Jody Wollenman explained in a low voice, pointing to the metal rod in Tassey’s hands. “When he hits the aquifer, it will start moving. It tells you the width of the aquifer by the strength of the bounce.”

An Oklahoma native who moved to the Central Valley with his family in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl when he was just 7, Tassey discovered he had the “gift” during California’s last devastating drought in the late 1970s. A colleague at a drilling company often witched the land before they dug wells, and intrigued, Tassey asked if he could give it a try. The rest, he said, is history.

It’s never bothered Tassey that people call him a witch — though lately it’s gotten him into a little trouble with folks at church. A few weeks earlier, a local television station out of Fresno came down to interview him after hearing of his skill. He’d never been on television before. “The reporter asked me if I dabbled in witchcraft. Do I worship the devil?” he laughed.

As Tassey paced down the line of trees, the farmers followed quietly. After a moment, Tommy Wollenman, who is also a general manager at LoBue Citrus, a grower and distributor in town, tried to lighten the mood. “Ommmm,” he jokingly began to chant. A few feet away, the metal rod in Tassey’s hands suddenly began to move feverishly up and down. Wollenman paused. “That’s amazing,” he said.

As the farmers walked closer, Tassey scratched a mark in the ground and grabbed another tool — this one a metal rod crafted into a Y shape, almost like a wishbone. He backed up along the path and walked forward again, retracing his steps. He was, he explained, using this tool to “fine-tune” his discovery. With this, he’d be able to more accurately guess the route of the aquifer below and suggest where drillers should dig to capture the best volume. In his hands, his guiding rod seemed to bounce again, and Tassey stopped, marking another spot.

Moving in, Tommy Wollenman reached down and quickly planted a tiny metal stake with an orange flag in the spot. “Oh!” he cried, a teasing smile on his face. “I think there’s water coming up already!”

No one knows how many water witches there are. They don’t exactly advertise in the phone book or the newspaper. There is an organization — the American Society of Dowsers, which has hundreds of members scattered across local chapters throughout the country. But many water witches like Tassey seem to work on their own. The U.S. Geological Survey, which issued a brochure discrediting the practice of dowsers, estimates there may be thousands roaming the nation’s agricultural lands in search of water — though the agency admits even it isn’t sure.

Water witches have been a fixture in California agriculture for about as long as people here can remember. Everyone knows of someone who’s used one or a person who had “the gift” — or at least thought they did. Even John Steinbeck immortalized the role of the dowser in his seminal novel “East of Eden,” set in California’s Salinas Valley.

In the book, Adam Trask hires Samuel Hamilton to find water on land he hopes to transform into his own personal Eden. When Trask asks Hamilton how his divining stick works, the fictional witch confesses that he’s not really sure and suggests it’s perhaps his own instinct, not an instrument, driving the magic. “Maybe I know where the water is, feel it in my skin,” Hamilton explains.

Ask a witch in real life how the magic works or why they were blessed with “the gift,” and most confess they don’t know. In Napa Valley, Marc Mondavi, a vintner whose family is part of the state’s wine aristocracy, discovered his ability decades ago when a high school girlfriend’s father who was a dowser took him out into the vineyard to see if he had any skills. Mondavi was only 17. “He used these willow forks, and he handed them to me and said, ‘Go,’” he recalled. “And sure enough, they bent down.”

At the time, Mondavi didn’t know if he really believed he had the skill. But years later, while in college, he summoned his ability again when his family planned to drill a new well on their property. They had called on the expertise of the most popular dowser in wine country, a vineyard manager named Frank Wood, who at the time was witching almost all the land around Napa. When Mondavi mentioned to him that he believed he had the gift, Wood became his mentor and taught him everything he knew.

“It’s an energy of some sort. ... Like how some people can run a Ouija board. You either have it or you don’t. You can’t learn how to get it, but if you do have it, you have to learn how to use it,” he said. “It took me years to get my confidence. ... At first, you are a bit leery of telling someone they are going to have to go dig a $50,000 hole. What if nothing is there? But over time, I learned to trust.”

Now at 61, Mondavi is the go-to water witch for Napa — servicing some of the top wine producers in the country. Among his clients is Bronco Wine Company, the nation’s fourth-largest winemaker, which makes Charles Shaw’s “Two Buck Chuck” and dozens of other brands. He knows what geologists say about witches like him, and he relishes the idea of proving them wrong. “They think we’re ridiculous, that it’s all luck,” he said. “I get it. There’s no science that explains any of it.”

Pausing, Mondavi can’t help but smile. “I’m good,” he says, a sly grin on his face. “I’m not afraid to blow my own horn. I’m good at this.”

Scientists roll their eyes at the phenomenon. Graham Fogg, a hydrologist at the University of California, Davis, called it “folklore” and said there is no scientific proof that dowsers have any special skill at finding water. The reason dowsers often appear successful, he argued, is because “groundwater is ubiquitous.” Anybody with a basic knowledge of an aquifer is likely to be able to tap into something.

“Groundwater occurs virtually everywhere at some depth beneath the surface of the earth, so regardless of where you drill, you will virtually always hit the water table at some depth,” Fogg said.

The vibrating or movement of the diving rods or sticks, scientists argue, is nothing more than show.

In spite of the skepticism, some high-profile figures seem unwilling to miss a chance at finding water. Last year, at the suggestion of a cousin, California Gov. Jerry Brown had a pair of water witches go over land he owns in Williams, Calif., about an hour north of Sacramento, where he plans to build a home and settle when he retires. A spokesman for the governor confirmed Brown had used dowsers, but he declined to say if they found water.

Down in the Central Valley, Tassey says he would like to retire. Three times, he’s tried, but the farmers won’t let him. He’s too good at witching the wells, apparently. Farmers talk him up to each other, and even drillers have started to recommend him. He estimates he’s witched at least 100 wells so far this year — the busiest year he can recall in the four decades since he learned he had the gift.

Tassey can’t explain what makes him special, why he apparently has this ability that others do not. He had hoped that one of his four kids might have the gift, but none did. Only him. Some have speculated it has something to do with the magnetic core of the earth. He doesn’t know. He just has something, a gift that God has given him to use, and he’ll likely use it until the day he dies.

“The farmers here have been good to me all these years, to all of us here,” Tassey says. “Now it’s my turn.”

Source: Yahoo News
http://news.yahoo.com/water-witch-dowsing-california-drought-145325572.html

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A former state trooper from Washington said on Wednesday that he is currently in contact with several Bigfoot creatures and that he feeds them food regularly.

The man, who provided a full name but chose to remain anonymous, told Cryptozoology News that the encounters have been happening since 2009 in a remote area in the North Cascades.

“Sometimes it is just 5 to 10 minutes, other times they stay for hours,” he said. “I leave them food and they visit,” he continued.

From apples to carrots, to beef jerky, cookies and candy bars, the ex-law enforcement officer claims the creatures eat it all and leave him alone.

The man says he was looking for an old mine in the mountains the first time he came across the alleged beings in 2009.

After leaving the food out there for them, he says, they seem to have started following him and getting closer.

“I have been as close as 20 feet to some of them.”

He reports he was so close to them that he was able to catch some of their “language” in two different occasions.

“They sounded similar to Native American and Asian mix,” he explained, adding that he speaks “some Asian and Native American Salish” himself.

The creatures reportedly stand between 6 and 7 feet tall and probably weight around 500 pounds, females being a little lighter.

“They have a human-like face, some with dark hair, others red or brown, probably about 3 to 4 inches long. The females had small breasts,” the man, also a former Army Special Forces soldier, explained.

And he says he is not the only one to have seen the creatures in the area. Numerous people have also purportedly seen them while accompanying the man.

“When I am alone, they are close. When others are with me, they stay 75 to 100 feet away. Females come the closest to me. They like some people and some they do not?”

The former state trooper says the creatures have never presented a threat to him and that he leaves them alone and is not interested in hunting them or gathering physical evidence.

“I am not in the forest to seek them, I look for something else. However, they appear to be getting closer to me each time,” he said. “I do not try and take their
picture or bother them in anyway.”

As to what these beings really are, the man believes he has a theory.

“I think they may be a primitive human species that we know very little about. They appear to me very intelligent.”

Florida resident John Bird last year claimed to feed Bigfoot potatoes and plantains on a regular basis.

In the spring of 1982, a soldier training at Fort Leonard Wood Army Base in Missouri claimed to have spotted a 7-feet-tall creature with brown hair that resembles the former state trooper’s alleged sighting.

The North Cascades, also known as the Cascade Mountains, lay between British Columbia and Washington state. Portions on the United States side of the range are part of the North Cascades National Park.

Earlier this week, there were reports revealing the intentions of the U.S. Army to annex part of the region as a helicopter training area, drawing criticism from the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics.

Update: Shortly after the publication of this article, another man claiming to be a law enforcement officer working in the “isolated areas of Washington state” contacted Cryptozoology News hoping to get in contact with the original eyewitness of this story. The man provided his full name and maintained to have had Bigfoot encounters that he says “wishes to keep” to himself. He did not elaborate on the purported encounters.

Source: Cryptozoology News
http://cryptozoologynews.com/state-trooper-i-feed-bigfoots-and-they-have-a-language/

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The mystery around a Los Angeles man whose decomposing body was found in an SUV near a home filled with 1,200 guns, tons of ammunition and $230,000 in cash has only deepened.

Identified by an attorney for his fiancée as Jeffrey Alan Lash, 60, the man apparently acted secretively for years, never explaining to those around him exactly what he did for a living.

When he died in early July after collapsing in a Santa Monica grocery store parking lot, Lash refused to go to a hospital or let anyone call 911, celebrity defense attorney Harlan Braun said in an interview with KTLA Wednesday evening.

Braun represents Lash’s fiancée, Catherine Nebron, who fled to Oregon with an employee after leaving Lash’s body parked in an SUV outside her home in the Palisades Highlands development of upscale Pacific Palisades. The disappearance of that employee, 39-year-old Dawn VadBunker, in turn prompted a missing person investigation from Oxnard police. VadBunker was found safe in Oregon, but has not contacted her family, her mother said.

VadBunker believes that Lash is an alien-human hybrid who was sent to Earth to protect the world, her mother told KTLA.

“It’s worse than a ‘Twilight Zone’ movie, and we’ve lived through hell,” Laura VadBunker said.

Meanwhile, Nebron returned to her home and was horrified to find the body of a man she had been with for 17 years still in the parked vehicle, Braun said. She contacted Braun with her story, asking him to call police on her behalf.

Lash had told Nebron that the “undercover government agencies” he worked for would take care of his body after he died, according to Braun.

“It’s a very strange situation. She still believes it, to her core, that he was working for some government agency,” Braun said. “These stories sound so crazy, and every time we turn around, we get corroboration for it.”

Braun called police, who found the body. Then, in Nebron’s home, they found a weapons cache she had described: more than 1,200 firearms and about 6 1/2 tons of ammunition, according to Braun.

The guns were worth $5 million, Braun said. Some $230,000 in cash was also found in the home, according to the attorney.

The Los Angeles Police Department has confirmed finding the body, weapons and ammunition on July 17. The county coroner’s office was still not able to provide the identity of the deceased man as of Thursday.

Lash’s father’s domestic partner, 93-year-old Shirley Anderson, told KTLA that she and her partner never knew where Lash lived or had any way to get in touch with him. When Lash’s father was dying, Anderson said she was unable to contact Lash, who never came to the funeral.

Lash’s father and Anderson only saw Lash when he randomly appeared at their home. They last saw him in 2010, Anderson said.

Anderson told the Los Angeles Times that Lash had grown up in a modest neighborhood in Westchester with a pianist mother and microbiologist father who owned a medical laboratory. Lash dropped out of UCLA in the mid-1980s and had was a “loner,” Anderson told the newspaper.

Anderson said she was unaware of any independent wealth that would allow Lash to purchase millions of dollars in weaponry.

An attorney who represented Lash in 2009 also called his client’s behavior strange. Lash was charged with misdemeanor possession of a concealed weapon after being stopped by Culver City police, according to court documents. Because Lash had the ammunition and firearms in his vehicle properly stowed, the case was dropped, the attorney said.

Lash refused to give any contact information to the law firm, and would call once per day to get an update on the case, according to the lawyer.

A third lawyer, Robert Rentzer, told KTLA he had represented Lash for nearly 20 years, often in connection with his client’s firearms. Lash was simply a gun collector and very private man, Rentzer said.

“A lot of people would call him odd because of his overwhelming desire for privacy,” Rentzer said at his Tarzana office. “Some people considered him a little weird.”

But Rentzer called the belief that Lash was a secret agent or an alien “laughable.”

Nonetheless, he said he didn’t know what Lash did for a living or how he afforded his extensive gun collection.

“I knew him to have this … fetish for guns, to an excess. I don’t know anybody who would have that inordinate number of weapons,” Rentzer said. “And the collection only increased and increased.”

Rentzer was surprised by the cash that was found in the home, as well as by the massive amount of ammunition.

“I do not know that he ever, ever, ever fired any of his guns. Never,” Rentzer said. “He took pride in how they were maintained.”

The attorney showed a note Lash had hand-written listing many of his guns and provided a grainy, black-and-white photo of Lash that he said was from a driver’s license issued in 1996.

He would have been 42 when the license was issued, and Lash looks rather young in the photo. Nonetheless, the image “looks very much like I remember Jeff to look like,” Rentzer said.

Braun said he too didn’t know who Lash actually worked for. He said there was no evidence the man was selling guns or drugs.

“He could have been working for anyone,” Braun said. “It’s hard to imagine, however, that it’s a total figment of his imagination because there is so much money involved. There’s almost $5 million worth of guns that were taken by the police.”

Photos from the scene of the police search show dozens and dozens of boxes of ammunition, a cash counter with thousands of dollars stacked nearby, and many piles of rifles and specialized firearms.

Several storage units remained to be searched, Braun said. He had heard that there were at least four heavily modified Toyota SUVs ready for combat and able to operate in various types of terrain, including in the desert and even underwater.

“If we find a car designed to go underwater, that’s really bizarre,” Braun said. “The real problem is if he was working for a government agency, American or foreign, they would never corroborate it.”

Source: KTLA
http://ktla.com/2015/07/23/jeffrey-alan-lash-pacific-palisades-mystery-man-weapons-cache/