50th Anniversary Collectors Edition

This Newly Released Book is Now Available for the

So don't delay, order your copy of UFO Prophecy

today for only $17 plus $5.00 for shipping -  A GREAT PRICE!

TREASURE hunters who unleashed a storm of speculation last year after claiming they had found a lost Nazi armoured train buried in the mountains of Poland will begin their dig this week.

Amateur enthusiasts Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter lodged a claim with the Wroclaw district government in August 2015, seeking to guarantee a 10 per cent cut of any find.

After initially attempting to remain anonymous, the pair went public amid a storm of international speculation that they may have located a Nazi loot train laden with treasures as diverse as Jewish gold and Russia’s lost, dismantled ‘Amber Room’.

“We do not know what is inside the train. Probably military equipment but also possibly jewellery, works of art and archive documents,” Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski said. “The fact that it is armoured indicates it has a special cargo.” He didn’t say how he knew it was armoured.

Little is known about Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter. One is said to be German, the other Polish. They say they have been scouring railway sidings in the area after being told of the burial of the loot train by a dying former German soldier. He even handed them a 70-year-old hand-drawn map.

Lawyer Chmielewski told media his clients “are not treasure hunters, attention seekers” but “people who have significant experience in this (area).”

But months of investigations attempting to verify their discovery has so far come up trumps.

There are even allegations that the subsurface radar scans the pair produced as evidence of their find are forgeries.

Despite this, Koper and Richter have obtained government permission to excavate a railway siding that was filled-in during the closing days of World War II.

Rumours have circulated for decades that the Nazis, facing collapse in Poland ahead of an onrushing Russian army, had filled up to three trains with documents, experimental equipment, rare ores and treasure.

Some argue they were destined for a mysterious network of tunnels carved out of the mountains near Walbrzych by thousands of Soviet slave labourers working for the Nazis.

Dubbed Projekt Riese (Project Giant), it has since been associated with everything from a secret attempt to build a nuclear bomb to housing alien spacecraft. What little evidence there is suggests it may have been intended to be a secret hideaway for Adolf Hitler himself.

The dig, scheduled to begin August 16, is set to put the mystery for rest once and for all. A team of some 35 diggers will converge on the embankment between Wroclaw and Walbrzych in Poland’s southwest.

“There will be a live stream,” a spokeswoman for the two men told the German news agency DPA.

He added that updates would also be posted on the project’s website and Facebook page.

Source: News Australia
http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/archaeology/dig-set-to-solve-polands-
nazi-gold-train-mystery/news-story/9f316f73139d796438fe25cbf5770c09

---

Traditional cases involving “close encounters of the third kind” are as rare as hens’ teeth these days. These occurrences – involving contact between alleged non-human entities and ordinary humans – filled magazine articles and news columns in the ‘60s and ‘70s, petering out in the 1980s as UFO research went into a deep sleep, or into a cocoon from which an entirely new thing emerged. A media-savvy ufology, front-loaded with images and situations drawn from television series (“V”) and conspiracy literature. Roadside encounters in the night were replaced by the more convenient non-humans visiting witnesses (now “experiencers”) in their homes. These too would slow down to a trickle, and other pursuits would fill the agendas of a new generation of researchers.

The old-fashioned, quaint encounters did not go away, however. A careful search will show that human lives are still affected by contact with the unknown in remote corners of our planet, and while they may lack the impact of a Travis Walton or Pascagoula-type case, they are compelling in their own right.

One such incident comes to us from Costa Rica’s Exploración OVNI website (www.exploracionovni.com), which presents us with a case that reportedly occurred on May 7, 2012 in the small hours of the morning – 1:30 a.m. to be exact – at a small community known as Bagatzi near Guanacaste in the smallest but loveliest of Central American countries. No names are given, but webmaster Fernando Távara provides a transcript of the report as it was received. It reads thus:

“A friend and I were involved in tourist service business in a community known as Bagatzi, in Bagaces, Guanacaste, Costa Rica. The town of Bagatzi is one kilometer distant from the Palo Verde National Park, and we chose this location because I had visited it with my family for 15 years and its vegetation and natural attractions are incredible. I moved to the community and rented somewhat rustic lodgings. There was no glass on the windows, there was a screen to keep bugs from coming in, and some bars [around the window] but from within I could see the surroundings and distant landmarks from the room. Only a few people make up the community, fifty at most, and the school only has two classrooms. There’s a soccer pitch and one store from which essentials can be purchased.”

The author of the report goes on to provide additional details on the area, concerning agricultural production, the vast amount of wildlife, and the fact that the Guanacaste area received the most amount of sunlight during the day while being the darkest location in the country at night. Light pollution is non-existent.

One night, described as excessively hot and dark – so dark that he was unable to see his outstretched hands before him – the witness saw what he believed was the light of a motorcycle headlight reflected against the wall of his room, but was unable to hear the sound of a distant engine. Local dogs started to bark as the light grew nearer, no longer white or light yellow, but orange. “[The light] came through the screen mesh, a tube of powerful orange non-halogen light whose brightness appeared to dim as entered the room.”

Far from being frightened, the witness marveled at the tube of orange light, realizing it had nothing whatsoever to do with a motorcycle headlight. “It measured some fifty centimeters wide and made a fluid, watery motion which I compared to gelatin. It had a life of its own, and it stopped a meter and a half from my head, since I was lying in bed with head to the west and my feet to the east. The thing came in through the window, and I was able to see that the tube of light contained an object in its rounded tip.”

What follows is the most astonishing description. The object contained in the orange shaft of light appeared to protect a small entity standing some forty centimeters tall (15 inches), described by the witness as reptilian, “similar to a manta ray, except it was contained within this substance, its hands and feet outstretched, as if floating within the gelatinous tube, giving it sustenance and protection.” The diminutive creature’s head was described as rhomboidal, with small eyes and mouth, a featureless nose, and no tail.

“I saw my entire room illuminated,” goes on the witness, “and could not take my eyes off this animal, as it considered it to be such. I felt no fear, and thought that I could easily catch it in my hands, since it was level with my chest. I had the feeling that this creature was a watchman, a monitor of the area, and entered my room out of curiosity in a relaxed, very natural manner.”

Upon realizing that the room was occupied, and its occupant awake and alert, the light became “solid and rigid”, according to the eyewitness’s testimony, contracted and left the room in a split second. “I jumped on my bed and managed to see it turn to the northeast, as if terrified at having been seen. It left the way it came, through the trees and where the dogs had been barking – a 300 meter stretch – in two seconds.” He adds that he was accustomed to making use of Stellarium (software that creates a planetarium effect) to study the stars and follow man-made satellites and one of the lights in the sky was brighter than normal. Despite the absolutely clear night sky, the unusual “star” stopped being visible after a few minutes.

Cases involving diminutive non-humans are nothing new, and the Costa Rican case shares characteristics with others in Latin America and elsewhere around the planet. Although the witness makes a connection between the tiny reptilian creature and the elusive “star”, there is nothing to suggest that it is a craft from another planet.

In May 2008, an Argentinean news wire reported that the citizens of San Carlos in the northwestern part of the country had witnessed a small creature standing no more than 40 centimeters tall – again, 15 inches -- with the uncanny trait of being able to generate a kind of “force field” that kept people from getting to close to it.

The witnesses to the high-strangeness event, whose names are given as Walter Lopez and Omar Ferlatti, reported their sighting to officials, describing the entity as “small, glowing and wearing pants”, and apparently shielded by “a magnetic field”. This apparent close encounter of the third kind took place as the entire valley region (the Valles Chalchaquíes of Salta) was in commotion over a large UFO reported in the area.

“Kids aren’t going out at night out of fear of the strange creature and the UFO,” claimed a resident of San Carlos in a statement to the COPENOA news agency. Ferlatti and Lopez’s account dovetails with the one given by a shepherdess on the hills, who was startled by the strange visitor. Police have stated that both stories coincide and that local residents are indeed frightened. “It hasn’t been seen again. It would be good for it to return, to ascertain that the events were indeed as described,” said deputy sheriff Luis Comenares.

Not all locals were as agitated about the diminutive visitor. Andean peoples have an extensive tradition of small creatures usually lumped under the classification of imps or goblins, and they are purportedly the spirits of children who died unchristened or attacked their parents. Pablo Villarubia, a tireless journalist of the occult, visited the Cafayate Museum in the city of Salta to speak to curator Elga Brabo, who was very forthright in their discussion on the subject of these half-magical, half-real sub-humans.

When asked if imps had ever been reported in Cachi, she replied affirmatively, adding that the creature was even known as “el duende de Toma Colorado” (the Toma Colorado Imp) – an entity that was more playful than perverse, but which hadn’t been seen for years.

One wonders whether these entities could be related to elemental forces of the Earth, nature spirits of a kind. Not the slightest hint of technology is evident. The orange tube of light in the Costa Rican case did not seem to have a generator or controls; the personal force-field used by the Argentinean imp did not appear to be related to a device worn on its body, at least not one that the witnesses were able to see.

Since the early days of ufology, and going even farther back in history, accounts of diminutive intelligent beings have played a crucial role is shaping our perception of the phenomenon. The sizes of these creatures range from a scant twelve inches to a not-so-small four feet in height. They occupy a special position within the study of the unknown, since they straddle the divide that separates folklore from contemporary approaches to enigmatic creatures: every culture on earth has a tradition which involves small beings that can be good or malicious, intelligent or brutish. That accounts of such creatures occur in our highly technological twentieth century, and in relation to the UFO phenomenon, constitutes an enigma in itself.

The brownies, pixies, gnomes and dwarves have their equivalents in the Mexican ikhals, chaneques and aluches. It is extremely odd to find such a variety of names to describe creatures that supposedly do not exist.

Batteries Not Included

For those bent upon an ETH-centered approach, the thought of a civilization sending miniaturized explorers to look over the galaxy isn't far-fetched. Small crewmen would consume fewer resources, and these tiny explorers would more than likely be biological robots (biots, in the parlance of Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama) as opposed to shrunken members of the spacefaring society, a concept that brings to mind Gordon Williams' The Micronauts (1979) in which a future society beset by environmental collapse and famine decides that the only way forward lies in Project Arcadia, an initiative at miniaturizing human beings to a size far smaller than the fifteen to twenty inches reported in these cases.

Ufology provides us with a fair number of cases that should remind us of Batteries Not Included, the Matthew Robbins film in which small mechanical life forms render assistance to beleaguered humans. One of these events – a particularly charming one – was researched by Antonio Ribera, the dean of Spanish ufology, and translated by Gordon Creighton, editor of Flying Saucer Review. The case involves a tiny flying saucer that disgorged a crew of uniformed ufonauts in the Spanish town of Villares del Saz, Province of Cuenca (Central Spain) in July 1953. Máximo Herraiz, 14, was tending to the family flock when he heard a “faint, muted, intermittent whistling” sound that caused him to turn around. He was surprised to see what he took for “a big balloon”, in his own words, which glowed with brightness that he was not accustomed to seeing.

Herraiz tried to grab the object, whose diameter he estimated at a meter thirty (four and a quarter feet), but “a door opened and little guys started coming out of it”. The object’s three diminutive occupants had an estimated height of 65 centimeters (25 inches) and addressed him in an unknown language. When the young man was unable to reply, one of the mini-ufonauts slapped him and all three returned to their object. “They went off very fast, like a rocket.”

Corroboration for this unlikely tale came from the boy’s father, who found landing marks on the ground, measuring thirty-six centimeters on either side. The local police chief, Crecencio Atienza, added his own testimony: “When the affair at Villares del Saz occurred, we saw what appeared to be a greyish white object which was stationary in the air, and then vanished shortly afterward. Its shape was very much like a ball. It left no trail, and when it disappeared it went toward the east.”

Riberas’s extraordinary report appears in the anthology The Humanoids (Chicago: Regnery, 1969) and is one of several events involving diminutive occupants from that period in history.

Source: Inexplicata
https://inexplicata.blogspot.com/2016/08/diminutive-ufo-occupants-or-elementals.html

---

His patience was rewarded.

When we talked to physicist Daniel Caton last month, the Appalachian State University professor was frustrated. He’d spent years looking into the mysterious phenomenon of the Brown Mountain Lights, those oddball apparitions reported for at least a century in the North Carolina highlands.

He’d mounted an electronic expedition to keep an eye on the rugged Brown Mountain ridge every night. And every day when he spun through the video harvest there was nothing of note.

There were plane lights, campfires, the well-worn tracks of planets and stars trudging across the heavens and the glow of far-off Lenoir. But nothing out of the ordinary.

“I was getting down about it. We haven’t seen anything in all these months.”

Caton’s team decided they’d keep up surveillance for one more summer, then probably call it quits. Research is expensive and getting grants to stalk ghost lights isn’t as easy as you might think.

Then, on July 17, Caton was reviewing the mountain’s slumber from the night before. He was a few minutes before midnight, and bam!

High over the ridge, the Brown Mountain Lights did their stuff. A bright orb suddenly appeared and then vanished. Then it came back, same spot. And then an encore.

Caton, a serious scientist, does not shout “Eureka!” at such times.

“I said, ‘What is that? That’s interesting.’”

He keeps two cameras pointed at the ridge. They’re mounted on a remote $100,000 house with a million-dollar view. He borrows the owners’ internet account to send back the images.

If something shows up on one camera but not the other, then he assumes he’s seeing a lens flare or some other electronic gremlin. He checked the second camera. It caught the same show at the same time. See Video Here.

Then Caton and his colleagues dissected the images and could come up with no earthy reason for the light to be there.

It was the first time the lights had been captured on video by the App State scientific team and it ended a long, dry run. They’d had two cameras working together since February.

“It seemed to be fixed high over the ridge,” Caton says. “That’s the first anomaly I’ve seen. I’m sort of back in the game.”

Each frame on the video lasts 30 seconds, so Caton estimates the lights lasted less than a minute. He doesn’t know what the phenomenon is. He likes a theory that they may be ball lightning, a rare and little-understood miasma known since ancient times.

But he’s a scientist and is more interested in making repeated, measured observations of the lights and perhaps finding a pattern.

“There’s a huge range of atmospheric phenomenon,” Caton says. Some of it is still unfolding.

For decades, pilots reported seeing lights flickering upward from thunderstorms. Nobody paid much attention until 1989 when University of Minnesota researchers captured the waves on a low-light camera by accident.

Now they’re routinely photographed from space and the subject of extensive study. We still don’t know exactly what they are, but we know what they look like. Same thing up on Brown Mountain.

Caton estimates about 95 percent of the observations from people who claim to see the lights are bogus. They’re maybe seeing campfires, meteors, distant towers, aircraft. Maybe 5 percent, he thinks, could be the real thing.

After months of no-shows, he’d wondered whether the lights had petered out.

Welcome home, Brown Mountain Lights. We missed you rascals, whatever you are.

Source: The Charlotte Observer
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article94050802.html

---

Once described as a being the spawn of an earwig and a whale, the mystery of Okanagan Lake's Ogopogo is still being debated to this day.

Originally called M-ha-a-i-tk by local First Nations, Ogopogo's home is said to be near Squally Point (also known as Rattlesnake Island).

According to city councillor and local historian Randy Manuel, the natives, out of fear of death by drowning, would sacrifice an animal like a dog when passing Squally Point.

"It's a spot where wind and weather can bring waves up to six or seven feet there. It's a spot where you don't want to get caught in a boat," said Manuel. "It (sacrificing animals) was common practice when they were travelling the length of the lake in canoes."

The local natives weren't the only ones that believed in Ogopogo either.

In 1914 one man found what may have been an Ogopogo carcass.

Author F.M. Buckland of Kelowna described the story of what happened to a group of campers near Greata Ranch in one of his books.

"One of the party who had gone to the lake edge for water was attracted by a strong smell of rotted fish. On investigation he found the badly decomposed body of a strange animal lying at the water's edge ... The body was between five and six feet in length and would weigh about 400 pounds. It had a short, broad, flat tail and a head that stuck out from between shoulders without any sign of a neck. The nose was stubby, sticking out of rounded head with no ears visible. The thick hide was sparsely covered with a silky hair four or five inches in length and of a bluish-grey colour while the teeth resembled those of a dog. It had two ivory-like tusks and claws resembling those of a great bird, on flipper-like arms; claws that showed no signs of wear or use, such as those of a cougar or other land animal."

It is alleged that the shoulder blade, tusks and claws were displayed in private homes by interested parties, but their current whereabouts are unknown.

Attracting more than just interested campers, Ogopogo even has fans in the movie industry.

A movie about Ogopogo is in the planning stages.

Provost Pictures, out of Vancouver, is working on its first film, The Beast of the Bottomless Lake.

"The company was really formed around the idea of making this film," said production director and co-owner of the company Kennedy Goodkey. Goodkey's friend Keith Provost, who grew up in Kelowna, wanted to create a film about Ogopogo.

Provost felt he'd seen Ogopogo in the water as a child and was what Goodkey called a "minutiae of information about Ogopogo."

Tragically, Provost was killed in an accident and the project was put on hold because its emotional impact on those involved was too hard to deal with.

"Last year around this time ... I dusted it off and said 'Let's see if we can't do this now,'" said Goodkey.

Goodkey and his business partner Craig March created a script from memories of Provost's stories and after some research, made what they felt was a relatively accurate script.

The Beast of the Bottomless Lake crew went to Kelowna recently to scout filming locations and are planning on conducting their main casting in the Okanagan.

The movie will be a modern-day Moby Dick as a group of UBC academics go to the Okanagan to prove the existence of Ogopogo, but their individual agendas get in the way.

Goodkey is not completely sure if Ogopogo really exists and he will continue to wait for evidence.

"As long as there's an element of doubt I am one to extend the possibility to hold out my belief," he said. "I have to admit I think there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that doesn't make it look good."

And Goodkey isn't the only one questioning the reality of Ogopogo.

Local fisherman and owner of Lakestream Flies and Supplies Chris Cousins said he believes the lake monster is really just a big fish.

"I believe that people have seen something out there but I don't believe it is a prehistoric monster," said Cousins. "I do believe that what they've seen is a sturgeon or a group of sturgeons."

B.C. Fisheries describes sturgeons as a long and cylindrical fish that can grow up to six metres long and weigh 1,323 pounds. They range in colour from greenish-grey on their backs to light grey on their bellies and they're covered in bony plates instead of scales.

The sturgeon is a bottom feeder and its mouth is on the underside of its body, that way it can swim along the bottom of the lake and suck up prey.

But every once in a while they make an appearance, said Cousins.

"They definitely come to the surface, it's called breaching - it means they roll on the surface ... They jump and leap out of the water at times," he said.

It's thought that sturgeons, which can be found in the Columbia and Fraser rivers, made it to Okanagan Lake through the Columbia River system before it was dammed up in 1953.

In 1958 divers working the Okanagan floating bridge reported seeing the sturgeon, which frightened them.

Since then there have been hundreds of sightings of Ogopogo - most often during the summer months when tourists and locals are hitting the beach and the lake.

Kelowna author Arlene Gaal, who is considered an Ogopogo expert by some, said she has recorded sightings from the 1800s to today.

"I basically have the best records of Ogopogo of anyone in the world," said Gaal adding she has 99.9 per cent of all photos ever taken of the beast as well as about 90 per cent of recorded sightings in her library of information.

In addition to keeping records, Gaal has had her own Ogopogo experiences.

While investigating a sighting in 1978 she felt she saw him for the first time.

"I had no intent of seeing anything but a beautiful mirror-calm lake," she recalled. "I was going back to my car and I suddenly saw a shadow moving in two parts toward the bridge ... Something broke the water and waves rolled off the back of this thing."

Gaal took five sequential shots and took the film back to the Kelowna Daily Courier office where she worked to have it developed. She had captured pictures of something she said was large enough to create a backlash of waves on the shoreline.

Since then Gaal has had more sightings but none as memorable as her first.

In response to the sturgeon theory, Gaal said the Okanagan Mainline Basin Water Board and the fisheries department both have reported no sturgeons in Okanagan Lake.

While Cousins does believe the giant fish is in the lake, he admitted he found it a little disconcerting that he's never seen a picture of someone catching a sturgeon in Okanagan Lake.

While Cousins may be assured there is no lake monster, it will be a mystery to the rest of us.

Source: Penticton Western News
http://www.pentictonwesternnews.com/portals-code/list.cgi?
paper=102&cat=23&id=681670&more=

---