Former Nevada Senator Harry Reid thinks it might be time to hold congressional hearings into the mystery surrounding UFOs.

In his only television interview, Reid told the I-Team about the pivotal role he played authorizing a secret Pentagon study of UFOs that ended five years ago.

The project was based in Nevada, carried out by Las Vegas businessman who is no stranger to paranormal investigations. In fact, Robert Bigelow's mysterious Skinwalker ranch played a role in the Pentagon investigation.

A picturesque ranch in northeastern Utah, shunned by its Native American neighbors and long considered a hotbed of UFO sightings and other unexplained phenomena, played a pivotal role in the creation of the once-secret Pentagon study of unknown aerial objects.

In the mid 90s, Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow bought the property and sent in his research team, the National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, to study the ranch and the larger Uintah Basin.

Over the next 10 years, NIDS scientists had dramatic encounters with the unknown, including daylight mutilations of livestock, mysterious aircraft, and discarnate entities.

"The ranch is not just UFOs. Performances of anomalies go back many years," said Robert Bigelow.

The I-Team's 2007 conversation with Bigelow, his first on camera interview on any subject, never aired but he told us that his NIDS team experienced more than 100 baffling encounters, though they had no idea what was behind it.

"And that we don't have to worry about aliens coming and taking us away. That's for somebody else to talk about," said former U.S. Senator Harry Reid.

When Senator Reid and colleagues authorized funding for a Pentagon study, they made a point of saying it was not a search for little green men. The primary aim was to identify, analyze, and eventually duplicate the other worldly technology that had been demonstrated in multiple dramatic encounters involving the U.S. military.

"The phenomenon is real," said Luis Elizondo, former Pentagon official.

The man who ran the Pentagon's study, Luis Elizondo, resigned in October and has since said the technology of these craft is beyond anything known on earth, but he declines to guess where it originates. No one involved wants to mention space aliens, for obvious reasons.

"I'm not into that," Reid said. "I'm interested in science, what's going on in our world."

Investigating the source of the UFOs is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. Although Bob Bigelow dissolved his NIDS team and ended the study of the Utah ranch, in 2007, a book written about the property caught the attention of the DIA and Senator Reid.

Bigelow's previous experience in putting together a team to investigate weird phenomena was likely a factor in the decision to award him the contract to study UFOs. And sources familiar with the study say, Pentagon investigators returned to the Utah ranch several times during a three-year period.

When the New York Times broke its story, it reported that Bigelow built a special secure facility at his aerospace plant to store unknown materials supposedly obtained during the UFO study.

"I don't know. I don't know anything about exotic materials, but a lot of talk about it," Reid said.

What he does know is that the explosion of news coverage about the UFO issue has caught the attention of Congress. Reid's phone started ringing immediately, he says, people from Congress and the business community who've always been interested in the subject but were afraid to admit it. Reid thinks the time may be right to re-launch a formal inquiry.

"Now that it's out, why shouldn't they do this? Reid said. "You take an airplane, the cost of one military airplane. The cheapest one we have. Give that money to this research. It's more important than one airplane. We have enough bombs and bullets to take care of us for a long time, but not enough to understand the future?"

In all, about $22 million was spent from 2007 through 2012 before the study formally ended.

Robert Bigelow no longer owns the Skinwalker Ranch. He sold it to another party last year.

Source: Las Vegas Now
http://www.lasvegasnow.com/news/i-team-pentagon-ufo-study-catches-attention
-of-congress/885843051

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For the last hundred years, Americans have kept ghosts in their place, letting them out only in October, in the run-up to our only real haunted holiday, Halloween. But it wasn’t always this way, and it’s no coincidence that the most famous ghost story is a Christmas story—or, put another way, that the most famous Christmas story is a ghost story. Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol was first published in 1843, and its story about a man tormented by a series of ghosts the night before Christmas belonged to a once-rich, now mostly forgotten tradition of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. Dickens’ supernatural yuletide terror was no outlier, since for much of the 19th century, was the holiday indisputably associated with ghosts and the specters.

“Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories,” humorist Jerome K. Jerome wrote in his 1891 collection, Told After Supper. “Nothing satisfies us on Christmas Eve but to hear each other tell authentic anecdotes about spectres. It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”

Telling ghost stories during winter is a hallowed tradition, a folk custom stretches back centuries, when families would wile away the winter nights with tales of spooks and monsters. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” Mamillius proclaims in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: “I have one. Of sprites and goblins.” And the titular Jew of Malta in Christopher Marlowe’s play at one point muses, “Now I remember those old women’s words, Who in my wealth would tell me winter’s tales, And speak of spirits and ghosts by night.”

Based in folklore and the supernatural, it was a tradition the Puritans frowned on, so it never gained much traction in America. Washington Irving helped resurrect a number of forgotten Christmas traditions in the early 19th century, but it really was Dickens who popularized the notion of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. The Christmas issues of the magazines he edited, Household Words and (after 1859) All the Year Round, regularly included ghost stories—not just A Christmas Carol but also works like The Chimes and The Haunted Man, both of which also feature an unhappy man who changes his ways after visitation by a ghost. Dickens’ publications, which were not just winter-themed but explicitly linked to Christmas, helped forge a bond between the holiday and ghost stories; Christmas Eve, he would claim in “The Seven Poor Travellers” (1854), is the “witching time for Story-telling.”

Dickens discontinued the Christmas publications in 1868, complaining to his friend Charles Fechter that he felt “as if I had murdered a Christmas number years ago (perhaps I did!) and its ghost perpetually haunted me.” But by then the ghost of Christmas ghost stories had taken on an afterlife of its own, and other writers rushed to fill the void that Dickens had left. By the time of Jerome’s 1891 Told After Supper, he could casually joke about a tradition long ensconced in Victorian culture.

If some of these later ghost stories haven’t entered the Christmas canon as Dickens’ work did, there’s perhaps a reason. As William Dean Howells would lament in a Harper’s editorial in 1886, the Christmas ghost tradition suffered from the gradual loss of Dickens’ sentimental morality: “the ethical intention which gave dignity to Dickens’ Christmas stories of still earlier date has almost wholly disappeared.”

While readers could suspend their disbelief for the supernatural, believing that such terrors could turn a man like Scrooge good overnight was a harder sell. “People always knew that character is not changed by a dream in a series of tableaux; that a ghost cannot do much towards reforming an inordinately selfish person; that a life cannot be turned white, like a head of hair, in a single night, but the most allegorical apparition; …. and gradually they ceased to make believe that there was virtue in these devices and appliances.”

Dickens’ genius was to wed the gothic with the sentimental, using stories of ghosts and goblins to reaffirm basic bourgeois values; as the tradition evolved, however, other writers were less wedded to this social vision, preferring the simply scary. In Henry James’s famous gothic novella, The Turn of the Screw, the frame story involves a group of men sitting around the fire telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve—setting off a story of pure terror, without any pretension to charity or sentimentality.


At the same time that the tradition of Christmas ghosts had begun to ossify, losing the initial spiritual charge that drove its popularity, a new tradition was being imported from across the Atlantic, carried by the huge wave of Scottish and Irish immigrants coming to America: Halloween.

The holiday as we now know it is an odd hybrid of Celtic and Catholic traditions. It borrows heavily from the ancient pagan holiday Samhain, which celebrates the end of the harvest season and the onset of winter. As with numerous other pagan holidays, Samhain was in time merged with the Catholic festival of All Souls’ Day, which could also be tinged towards obsessions with the dead, into Halloween—a time when the dead were revered, the boundaries between this life and the afterlife were thinnest, and when ghosts and goblins ruled the night.

Carried by Scottish and Irish immigrants to America, Halloween did not immediately displace Christmas as the preeminent holiday for ghosts—partly because for several decades it was a holiday for Scots. Scottish immigrants (and to a lesser extent Irish immigrants as well) tried to dissociate Halloween from its ghostly implications, trying unsuccessfully to make it about Scottish heritage, as Nicholas Rogers notes in his Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night: “There were efforts, in fact, to recast Halloween as a day of decorous ethnic celebration.” Organizations such as the Caledonian Society in Canada observed Halloween with Scottish dances and music and the poetry of Robbie Burns, while in New York the Gaelic Society commemorated Halloween with a seannches: an evening of Irish poetry and music.

Americans’ hunger for ghosts and nightmares, however, outweighed their hunger for Irish and Scottish culture, and Americans seized on Halloween’s supernatural, rather than cultural, aspects—we all know now how this turned out.


The transition from Christmas to Halloween as the preeminent holiday for ghosts was an uneven one. Even as late as 1915, Christmas annuals of magazines were still dominated by ghost stories, and Florence Kingsland’s 1904 Book of Indoor and Outdoor Games still lists ghost stories as fine fare for a Christmas celebration: “The realm of spirits was always thought to be nearer to that of mortals on Christmas than at any other time,” she writes.

For decades, these two celebrations of the oncoming winter bookended a time when ghosts were in the air, and we kept the dead close to us. My own family has for years invited friends over around the holidays to tell ghost stories. Instead of exchanging gifts, we exchange stories—true or invented, it doesn’t matter. People are inevitably sheepish at first, but once the stories start flowing, it isn’t long before everyone has something to offer. It’s a refreshing alternative to the oft-forced yuletide joy and commercialization; resurrecting the dead tradition of ghost stories as another way to celebrate Christmas.

In his Harper’s editorial, Howells laments the loss of the Dickensian ghost story, waxing nostalgic for a return to scary stories with a firm set of morals:

    “It was well once a year, if not oftener, to remind men by parable of the old, simple truths; to teach them that forgiveness, and charity, and the endeavor for life better and purer than each has lived, are the principles upon which alone the world holds together and gets forward. It was well for the comfortable and the refined to be put in mind of the savagery and suffering all round them, and to be taught, as Dickens was always teaching, that certain feelings which grace human nature, as tenderness for the sick and helpless, self-sacrifice and generosity, self-respect and manliness and womanliness, are the common heritage of the race, the direct gift of Heaven, shared equally by the rich and poor.”

As the nights darken and we head towards the new year, filled with anxiety and hope, what better emissaries are there to bring such a message than the dead?

Source: Smithsonian Magazine
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/plea-resurrect-christmas-tradition-
telling-ghost-stories-180967553/

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Christmas and ghost stories may not immediately seem like two great tastes that taste great together, but they're actually a perfectly natural fit. Although it's largely forgotten now, the practice of gathering around the fire to tell spooky stories was a popular Victorian Christmas tradition for years, as evidenced in this line from “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year": There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago ...

The Dickens classic "A Christmas Carol" is probably the only remaining tale of a haunting that most of us associate with the holidays. But why let the ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come have all the fun? Here for your festively creepy pleasure are five Christmas ghost stories that may send chills down your spine -- or even, oddly enough, warm your heart.

The Bright Light and the Calm Watchdog:

    I had an unusual visitor on Christmas Day, 2008 and I'm pretty sure it wasn't Santa Claus passing by my house in Bloomington, Indiana. The day started in typical fashion with the opening of gifts around the Christmas tree. I served an early Christmas dinner for family and friends, and everybody departed by 5 p.m., except my sister and brother-in-law who live with me. They were sleeping in a bedroom at the end of the hall with the door open.

    I went into my bedroom with my dog, Toby, and shut the door securely. I was just dozing off when I heard the latch on my bedroom door open. I waited several seconds for my sister or brother-in-law to ask me whatever they came to say, but there was no other sound. It was almost 7 p.m., so my bedroom was pitch black. I had left lights on in the kitchen and the bathroom, and there were lots of Christmas lights in the living room, so the hallway would have been well lit. I would be able to see whoever was at the door just by lifting my head.

    I pushed the blankets down and lifted my head from the pillow, but just as I would have been able to see who was in the doorway, an extremely bright light hit me right in the eyes. I shielded my eyes and yelled, "Turn out that @#%$ light! You're blinding me!" The light immediately disappeared and I heard the bedroom door latch closed. My bedside light is a touch lamp, so I tapped it on and looked around the bedroom. There was no one in the bedroom except me and Toby. Toby jumped off the bed and went to the door without showing any signs of alarm. At first I wasn't frightened because Toby is a Dutch shepherd -- well trained to be an excellent watchdog and proven personal protection dog.

    Since Toby was already up, I decided to go let him outside and see what Sis or brother-in-law needed. When I went into the hallway, I could see both of them still in bed. I took Toby to the living room to let him outside, and there was nobody there either.

    So who opened my bedroom door and turned a spotlight on my face?

    Like most people, the thoughts of loved ones are always close at hand during the holiday season. When I first went to lie down, I was thinking how happy I was that my small family had enjoyed a pleasant Christmas, but it would have been so much better if my mother and brother had still been alive to share it with us. I would like to think it was my brother's spirit stopping by to say "Merry Christmas. I still think of you, too."

    I haven't been able to debunk this strange event or find any kind of rational explanation. I'm half afraid that my heart stopped during my sleep and the light I saw was the bright light people report after near-death experiences. Leave it to me to see the Stairway to Heaven and ruin my chance at eternal paradise by saying "Turn out that #$%@ light!" I've made a mental note that if I ever see another bright light to clean up my language ... just in case. - Scarlet

The Returned Relative:

    It was Christmas time of 1995 or '96 at my aunt's house on a reservation in North Dakota. Some of my family was in the living room watching television, the kids were playing in the rooms or sleeping, and my uncle, aunt, and I were sitting at the table putting a puzzle together. My cousin, who worked at a casino, would come home around midnight or 1 a.m.

    This night, as she pulled up and was walking toward the house, she looked in the window and saw me sitting at the table, my uncle sitting across from me, and someone standing to the left of me and someone standing in the corner, so she continued to walk in the house thinking nothing of it. As we were sitting there talking, she looked at me and asked who was standing next to me a few minutes ago and who was in the corner. I told her no one and she said, "Yeah, there was someone standing next to you. It looked like your mom and she was playing with your hair." (I have long hair, which I used to wear down all the time.) She said this person was running her hand on my hair, like a mother does to a child.

    It kinda freaked me out, being I was probably only 12 or 13 at the time. My cousin swears up and down that someone was standing over me rubbing my head and watching me put the puzzle together with my aunt and uncle, and that there was another person standing behind this person. We got around to thinking it was probably her mom she saw. (She passed away on her birthday a week before Christmas back in 1992.)

    In my family we consider our aunts and uncles to be just like our moms and dads. After thinking that it could have been her, it didn't scare me so much. However, we couldn't figure out who the person was standing in the corner. And always around Christmas time something strange always happens ... and we just think it's her visiting us. - V. Page

The Haunted Tree:

    My parents and I lived in a small home that was around 90 years old. The year would have been 1996. We lived there from the time I was seven years old to the time I was 19. From the very day that we moved in, I felt that I was not alone. One year around Christmas time, I was having a friend spend the night. The heat had just shut off briefly and she and I were sitting in the living room watching television when the temperature dropped substantially. As I rose to turn up the heat, the Christmas tree began to shake violently. Ornaments were falling off right and left and she and I were terrified! We ran upstairs and lay down on my bed. My white cat curled up with us and my door was open slightly. When I gazed out at the dark hallway, I was horrified to see a tall white figure run down the hall. I turned to my friend and she acknowledged that she had seen the exact same thing. She never spent the night ever again. - Caitlin Williams

The Figure in the Recliner:

    My mother, to whom I was very close, passed away in 1964 when I was 17 years old. I left home that year and moved to Ontario from Nova Scotia. In 1969 I met a girl whom I will call Karen and we got married in March of 1970. In December of 1971 we were expecting our first child. We were living in a small 1-1/2 bedroom bungalow. There was a fireplace in the living room. My wife and I loved the fireplace and we had it lit every night.

    It was Christmas Eve, 1971, and we had just finished putting the gifts under the tree and a nice fire gave off a beautiful glow. On the tree, one string of lights, which was supposed to flash, had stopped several days before. It was five minutes to midnight when the fireplace suddenly just about went out, and the string of lights started to flash -- and the other lights stopped flashing! My wife and I were sitting on the floor and it had become very chilly in the room.

    I looked over to my Lazyboy chair ... and a figure was sitting there -- my mother with a big beautiful smile on her face! My wife, who had never met my mother, said she could see the same thing. This "ghost" never spoke, but just kept looking at me and my wife and smiling.

    At 12 midnight, the fire in the fireplace started up again and the lights on the tree stopped flashing and the others started flashing again. I looked over in the chair and the ghost was gone. No matter what I did to those Christmas lights, they never flashed again. - Arthur H.

The Ghostly Christmas Choir:

    On Christmas Eve night, 1978 at about 3:00 a.m. in Klamath Falls, Oregon, I was suddenly awakened by a choir singing. The house was new construction, miles from the nearest church. I strained to hear any words that I could understand or a tune that I could identify, but I could not understand the language or tune. I did get a feeling of "angelic" exaltation, reverence, and gladness of heart. This was truly a heavenly choir lifting their voices on high, singing hosanna in the highest, in an unknown tongue, without accompaniment of instruments.

    I examined the television, but it was turned off, as was the radio. I explored outside, but the singing was not heard outdoors. The way the countless male, female and children's voices entwined together, the tonals going from operatic highs to the deepest bass voices in perfect harmony. It must have lasted about 10 minutes, but it was touching for an eternity. - Mel

Source: Cafe Mom
http://thestir.cafemom.com/celebrities/165955/5_true_christmas_ghost_stories

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Fairies have become an intrinsic part of the Christmas spirit. Many families place a fairy on top of the Christmas tree. Fairy lights are everywhere in December. Then, there are Santa’s elves, the stars of so many Christmas films and stories on our televisions and in our children’s books.

But is it really safe to invite British fairies into your home? This is the question I found myself asking, upon recently while writing Magical Folk, a history of fairy sightings in Britain from Roman times to the present.

While some are benevolent, many of the magical folk Brits have encountered over the centuries are nothing like Hollywood’s tutu-clad, butterfly-winged miniature Marilyn Monroes meet J.M. Barrie’s Tinker Bells we commonly associate with them. As Shakespeare has Falstaff say centuries ago: ‘They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die.’


For one, let’s start with the wings. The first British fairies with wings turn up only at the end of the 18th century in paintings. It was artists who imagined them rather than ordinary folk who saw them.

More importantly, many of those who over the past centuries have encountered British fairies report that they are a scary lot. British fairies have a particularly long history of pilfering food from the natives. If they were to get into your home they would likely feast on your Christmas goodies. They are also known to be accomplished thieves, mainly of cattle. But I still wouldn’t count on them leaving any gifts left under the tree as they will have ransacked them.

In fact, a British fairy would probably take a very dim view of your Christmas tree in any case. Fairies have for centuries, been associated with trees in the UK, particularly oaks, which fairies loved to dance around.


But they did not stand on top of them to pirouette. They guarded them against humans and walloped those who damaged their charges. Some farmers who sawed branches off a fairy oak near London in the 1600s had their limbs by the oak’s irate fairy. It doesn’t bear thinking what they might do when they find not just a branch but a whole tree in your living room.

If you heard all these goings in the middle of the night and were to come downstairs and protest as they revel around your Christmas tree, they might shoot you with an elf bolt. There are many reports of humans being punished harshly by them for interrupting or even watching fairy knees-ups. They don’t like to be seen by humans.


Can it get any scarier? Yes it can. British fairies very possibly would kidnap your children as historical sightings regularly report they flew off with the souls of the young and replaced them with changelings. The history of British fairies reads like a thriller.

Nor would your spouse necessarily be safe. In 1894 in Tipperary, a 26-year-old wife was replaced by a fairy changeling. At least, that is what her husband and his family claimed. Before I forget, did I mention their habit of bed-hopping?

You may well wonder, how did this lively lot become part of our Christmas traditions?


The answer is from the theatre and through the arts. British fairy madness kicked off the best part of two centuries ago on the stage when the grand urban houses ran pantomimes with large numbers of “fairies”: troupes of dancing and sometimes flying girls.

These actresses and dancers were winged, dressed in white and occasionally had portable battery-powered electric bulbs attached to their heads or skirts.

The theatre had picked up on the millennium-old association of fairies with glowing lights. Though these fairy lights, as opposed to their electric cousins, mislead humans at night. The fairies sometimes tricked their terrified victims into mires and swamps around Britain’s moors and wetlands.

In the theatre the electric lights illuminated thighs rather than trickery. With an unusual amount of innocent Christmas flesh showing theatre-goers took increasing pleasure in watching human perform as fairies. And this branded the fairy image into the minds of future generations of excitable theatre-goers. So much so that there was much concern in the press about fairy immorality.


Santa’s elves are another set of wolves in sheeps’ clothes. They are the perfumed, jollified version of the terrifying soul-stealing trolls the Vikings talked about. Needless to say, the Viking originals were more likely to eat children, than spend their time wrapping presents “for good boys and girls”.

Writers started bowdlerizing this rowdy lot of Scandinavian tourists around the same time as electrical lights turned up. Santa and his elves began to appear tapping away with hammer in poems, stories. Then, later they turned up in paintings and, by 1932, in cartoons and performances with fairy ballerinas.

So yes, why not put a harmless Hollywood fairy on your tree; drape those electric lights around the house. But if you do see a British fairy near your home close the shutters, stay inside and avoid a nightmare.

Source: INews
https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/christmas/scary-fairies-elf-warnings-spooky
-history-festive-folklore/