Something that we talk a lot about at Mysterious Universe is the technological singularity. An amazing time in our near future where technology has reached such heights that our lives are changed forever. Advanced AI will take control of much of our day to day, limbs and organs will be replaced in various ways, computers will have power so great, they will be able to predict the future.

Ship of the Sky by YongSub Noh

Medi Droid by Jeremy Love

Ambulance Mech by Vitaly Bulgarov

Praetorian P-1 by Vitaly Bulgarov

Legendary Lemur by Darren Bartley

Head by Long Ou Yang

Cannon by Ishutani

Unseen Moon by Shimmering Sword

U-R Obsolete by Dangercook

NASA Aircraft by Oscar Cafaro

Katzenjammer by Goro Fujita

Android Legacy 4 by Oliver Wetter

The Scout by Brian Sum

Arrival by Zethrix

Ghost stories and campfire tales have captured the imagination of youth for generations, be it Ichabod Crane’s encounter with the Headless Horseman in Sleepy Hollow or the Hook-Handed Man interrupting the amorous young lovers in the classic urban legend. Over time these stories may take on new forms, whether passed down from older siblings in the dead of night, shared among friends in the schoolyard or collected in books (for example the often-banned Alvin Schwartz’s ‘Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark’) or comics (such as the similarly parent-baiting EC comics of the 40′s and 50′s) the goal always remains the same – for the storyteller to scare the snot out of his audience.

In the excellent 2010 documentary ‘Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy’ cast and crew members from the classic film series frequently allude to Freddy Krueger as a modern day bogeyman. In my own experience, this observation is certainly true. As a kid who was too young to see the original movies when they were first released, I had to rely on the often embellished accounts of my older sisters, who would ramp up the gruesome details of the Springwood Slasher’s crimes before grimly reminding me that ‘he could come for me in my dreams’. I became familiar with the legend of Freddy Krueger long before I’d ever seen so much as a frame of one of his movies.

A few years later, I recall video tapes of the films changing hands at school and being hastily shoved into backpacks before they could be confiscated by eagle-eyed teachers. Sadly Freddy’s legacy as the man of our nightmare’s would be diluted as he became a more comedic, ridiculous and altogether less shadowy figure as the series wore on. It is, after all, hard to find true terror in a man you’ve just seen in a rap video with The Fat Boys! A truly worthless remake in 2010 failed to revive interest in either Freddy or the franchise. His horrror movie brethren Michael Myers, Leatherface and Jason Vorhees have all suffered similar fates.

Where then, does the internet age turn to for it’s vicarious scares? The answer arrived on the popular forum SomethingAwful in 2009 in the imposing form of Slender Man. The site was running a contest in which participants were instructed to photoshop images to contain supernatural entities. User Victor Surge entered two photos of distressed children to contain an unusually tall, thin man with a pale featureless face and added text describing purported eyewitness accounts to the man’s strange powers over those around him and linking him to the disappearance of 14 children. The second of these two texts referred to the eerie figure as ‘The Slender Man’. The posts quickly caught the attention and imaginations of other members, who began to supplement the story with their own words and images. What had begun as a contest entry was to become a worldwide phenomenon.

It is strange, in a way, to consider that these are the roots of the Slender Man mythos.  Elements of these early incarnations call to mind the kind of viral marketing that was first used to great success for 1999′s ‘The Blair Witch Project’ – grainy, stark imagery and chilling, seemingly all too real accounts that leave out just enough of the key details to leave us scrambling to fill in the blanks in our own mind. The marked difference is that Slender Man was never originally presented as being ‘real’ – indeed, the admission that the photos had been doctored and therefore the words were fictitious was explicitly confirmed by the very nature of the contest. Also, ‘The Blair Witch Project”s marketing had a very clear aim – to generate interest in a low budget horror film. In the beginning there was no budget, no product and no profit tied to Slender Man. The interest, the frights and the enjoyment were solely found in the exchanging of creative stories, pictures and ideas about who this spectral monster was – where he had been, what he had done and where he might strike next. In this way Slender is a truly organic villain, grown entirely out of shared fears – chiefly man’s greatest, the fear of the unknown. One of the great sins of the later Elm Street movies was to bring the monster out in to the light. With The Slender Man, it isn’t what you know about him, but rather what you don’t know that will keep you awake at night.

The internet is a hive of creativity and free expression, so it’s not surprising that Slender’s fans have ensured his crossover into various other media, such as found-footage horror. The ‘Marble Hornets’ series is perhaps the most popular of these, having racked up more than 55 million views on YouTube. Presented in disjointed snippets, the series largely revolves around recovered behind the scenes footage of a student movie, ‘Marble Hornets’ that was never completed as it’s director slowly lost his grip on reality, finding himself stalked by you-know-who. A full length movie version of ‘Marble Hornets’, geared towards cinematic release, is currently in the works. Another film, simply titled ‘The Slender Man’ has also recently seen a free online release following a successful $10,000 Kickstarter program.

Two very well-received games (and a slew of clone versions) have also offered players the chance to experience the horror of Slender first hand. Heavy on atmosphere, 2012′s ‘Slender: The Eight Pages’ is a first person survival game for PC in which the player finds his/herself in the middle of a dark forest tasked with collecting pages and avoiding Slender Man. While it’s premise is simple, it is a thoroughly absorbing experience that demands to be played with the lights out. If you find yourself wanting more, it’s much more elaborate sequel ‘Slender: The Arrival’ was released in March of this year.

It’s true that the online community is a fickle one and today’s meme can often be tomorrow’s target for ridicule, but for now (and for the last four years) this particular legend has continued to grow. In the words of Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Where there is no horror, there is no imagination’. The glow of a campfire may have been replaced by that of a computer screen, but Slender Man is proof positive that we continue to have both horror and imagination in abundance.

If Maury Povich could expand his you-are-the-father-based media empire into an interplanetary spectacle, one of his greatest reveals of all-time could possibly conclude with the talk show host saying, “When it comes to life on 4 billion-year-old Earth; Mars, you are the father.”

Clay extracted from a meteorite of martian origin collected in Antarctica has proven to contain high concentrations of boron. Oxidized boron, or borates, are thought to be among the stuff that led to the formation of RNA.

This discovery was published June 6, in the peer-reviewed scientific journal of the Public Library of Science, PLOS One, and was presented by researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI).

Here is an excerpt from the abstract of the research:

We have detected a concentration of boron in martian clay far in excess of that in any previously reported extra-terrestrial object. This enrichment indicates that the chemistry necessary for the formation of ribose, a key component of RNA, could have existed on Mars since the formation of early clay deposits, contemporary to the emergence of life on Earth. Given the greater similarity of Earth and Mars early in their geological history, and the extensive disruption of Earth’s earliest mineralogy by plate tectonics, we suggest that the conditions for prebiotic ribose synthesis may be better understood by further Mars exploration.

In Povich terms, Mars has some explaining to do when it comes to life on Earth, because these tests are an indication mother Earth might have been pollenated with martian seed.

The meteorite studied by the Hawaiian University researchers was plucked from the Miller Range of Antarctica during explorations from 2009 and 2010. The clay in this particular meteorite is believed to be at least 700 million years old, which makes it older than any similar samples found on Earth. It was inside this clay they discovered the boron deposits like nothing ever before seen in an extra-terrestrial source.

The red dot indicates the approximate location the martian meteorite was recovered by researchers.

While this doesn’t necessarily mean martian meteorites provided the borate which led to the rise of RNA on Earth, it doesn’t rule it out either.

RNA is thought to be the first terrestrial molecule to pass along information from one generation to the next, and was an evolutionary stepping stone to the DNA Maury uses to out fathers trying to shirk responsibilities on his show.

Secondary electron images showing
the veins of clay in the
martian meteorite.

The story of Earth and Mars is one fitting for sleazy talk shows like Povich’s.

The two neighboring planets were very similar geologically at one point, however, it could be said Mars lost its job as a potentially life-rich planet and its atmosphere fell apart destroying vital surface water.

The meteorite protected elements from these wetter, better days in Mars’ past. These remnants of better days might have been the hook-up Earth needed for ribose to flourish and become the building blocks for life.

“Maury, he lost his job as a living planet right after we hooked up. We were neighbors, I trusted that he would always be able to support a life,” Mother Earth might tell Maury while waiting for the test results to come back during the panel segment of the show.

Instead, Mars turned out to be a deadbeat and Earth flourished into a thriving, living planet.

This new evidence indicating Mars had the boron to create the right environment for RNA to evolve more than 700 million years ago even though no samples that old have been found on Earth, will have to be researched more thoroughly before the red planet can truly be credited with passing along life-building elements to the planet that remained blue.

If only proving every one of life’s great questions were as simple as Maury Povich opening an envelope and reading the results, we could be at the precipice of another clue to the mystery of how we got here. Instead, we’ll have to wait while the scientific community mulls these results over just a little bit longer before their real impact can be understood.

It was late one night in the early summer of 2005 when good mate and Canadian filmmaker Paul Kimball, of Red Star Films, with who I had worked on a number of earlier projects, phoned me with a proposition.  His company, Paul explained, had just been commissioned by Canada’s Space Channel to make a documentary titled Fields of Fear, the subject of which would be animal/cattle mutilations. Part of the filming was to take place on the Chupacabras-infested island of Puerto Rico.

Paul knew that I had been to Puerto Rico previously, that I had established good contacts and leads there, and that I had written about official, FBI files on animal mutilations in my 2003 book, Strange Secrets: Real Government Files on the Unknown.  As a result, Paul hired me as both a consultant to, and a participant in, the show. And so, I was soon airborne for the island of mystery, and my second excursion in search of the Chupacabras.

As I sat on the tarmac, waiting for the Puerto Rico-bound plane to take off from Chicago’s airport, I got chatting with the guy who was sitting next to me. It transpired that he served with the U.S. Army, and had a fiancé who lived on the island, who he was going to visit.  They were due to marry in 2006.

Bob was his name and, after I told him of my reasons for traveling to Puerto Rico, we got into a brief, but deep and entertaining, discussion about all things paranormal and mysterious. Bob told me that he had heard all sorts of odd stories on the island about the Chupacabras, about aliens, and about underground bases. He then asked me about my opinions on Roswell.

I told him that, in my view, Roswell may have had more to do with classified ball0on-based operations than it did with aliens, and he listened intently. The always slightly paranoid part of me wondered if he was, perhaps, listening too intently. And, perhaps, the reason why he, a military man, was conveniently sat next to me was to pump me for information.

We were still sat on the runway when Bob asked me something like: “Wasn’t there a secret group that supposedly hid the Roswell story? And didn’t some files supposedly surface from them a few years back?”

“Yeah,” I replied, and added words along the lines of these: “It was called MJ12, which was supposed to be this group of high-fliers in the Government and the military who were keeping it all under wraps. But I think that the files were disinformation to hide the human experiment angle.”  I added: “The MJ12 researchers have got it all back to front.”

At the exact moment that I uttered those words, an aircraft passed us slowly on an adjoining runway; and, out of the window, I could see that its tail-numbers ended: 12MJ. I stared, utterly startled.  MJ12 back-to-front.  The gods of synchronicity were certainly playing strange mind-games with me that day. And they weren’t over. My trip to Puerto Rico revealed yet another startling synchronicity, too.

Host of Proof Positive, Amanda Tapping.

A few days into our trek around Puerto Rico, me, Paul Kimball, and his Red Star Films crew – his brother, Jim, Findlay Muir and John Rosborough – headed out to the El Yunque rain-forest. It was a trip that subsequently resulted in another classic case of synchronicity. We turned off the highway and onto a steep and winding road that led deep into the heart of the hills and the immense forest. I realized that we were on one of the roads that I had taken with British monster-hunter Jon Downes the previous year when we were filmed for Proof Positive, a short-lived series for the SyFy Channel.

We headed for a large, stone tower, similar to what you would expect to see affixed to an old English castle, that was situated high in the forest, and that required a walk up a flight of what seemed like 1,000 steps to reach its summit. John and Findlay set up the cameras, following which I was interviewed by our guide for the week – a local, and very knowledgeable researcher named Orlando Pla – about the Chupacabras attacks that had occurred within the rain-forest.

Findlay was securing some stunning panoramic shots of a type that could only be obtained from the top of the immense tower when something odd happened. There were several people milling around quietly at the top of the tower as we filmed. And when the shoot was over, one of them – a young woman – asked me, having heard my accent: “Are you from Wolverhampton?” This was a reference to a bustling town about six miles from where I used to live in England.

Amazed to hear a local accent, I said that, no, I wasn’t from the town, but the picturesque English village I had lived in as a kid, Pelsall, was only a stone’s throw away. “Oh, yes, I know Pelsall,” she replied, matter-of-fact, adding: “My cousin and her husband live there.” It would later transpire that my dad, who still lives in Pelsall, actually knew the husband of the woman’s cousin, who lived only a few streets away from my dad’s house.

Paul and Findlay looked on with incredulity as this coincidence of epic proportions played out. What were the chances, I wondered, of me bumping into someone – atop a remote tower deep in the heart of Puerto Rico’s El Yunque rain-forest on a November morning – whose cousin lived in the very same, far away English village I had grown up in?

I know some readers will conclude that this was all due to some weird coincidence of the type that do happen from time to time. But, they seem to happen so often to me that, writing them off as coincidences, rather than labelling them as synchronicities, is something I find it harder and harder to do. Of course, none of this explains why such synchronicities occur. If I knew the answer to that puzzle, there would be no need for this post!

While the woods are full of things that go bump in the night, forested areas hardly have a monopoly on the supernatural. If the stories from medical professionals are accurate, hospitals, nursing homes, and other medical facilities also play host to spirits, particularly those of the demonic variety.

A Patient Possessed

Nurses deal with death on a daily basis, so it’s hardly surprising that many turn to religion as a source of wisdom and comfort. However, encounters with demonic forces may also influence nurses’ views on the battle between good and evil. In a chilling tale on AllNurses.com, one nurse shares her experience with a dying patient who was more than he seemed.

According to the nurse, the patient suffered from a variety of ailments that could end his life at any time. However, the man was terrified of death and raged at the nurses to keep him alive.

“Every time his heart monitor beeped, he would go into a rage screaming, ‘Don’t let me die! Don’t let me die,’” the nurse writes. “We soon found out why he didn’t want to die.”

One night, the patient took a turn for the worse, and the nurse rushed into his room with emergency supplies. However, she wasn’t prepared for what she found.

“This man was sitting about two inches above the bed and was laughing,” the nurse writes. “His whole look completely changed. His eyes had a look of pure evil and he had this evil smile on his face. He laughed at us and said, ‘You stupid bitches aren’t going to let me die are you?’”.

After this frightening outburst, the man went into cardiac arrest and died 20 minutes later. However, the terror was far from over. Five minutes after a doctor pronounced the patient dead, the newly-deceased man sat up in bed and started to laugh, saying “You let him die. Too bad.” What happened next sounds like something from a horror movie.

“We heard a horrible, agonizing scream and then you could hear ‘don’t let me die’ whispered throughout the unit,” the nurse reports. “Every one of the nurses that night was pale and scared. Nobody went anywhere by themselves. By morning, the whispers of ‘don’t let me die’ were gone.”

A Terrifying Vision

Another tale, also from AllNurses.com, describes a patient’s terrifying vision just minutes before her death.

“She was given a patient who was passing away and had been unconscious for several days,” a nurse writes of her friend who worked in an oncology unit. “At one point during the night, the nurse went into the room and the patient was at the top of the bed and looked at her and said, ‘Don’t let them take me.’ The nurse was freaked out and asked the patient who was going to take her, and she said ‘that black thing up there’ and pointed up in the air. This patient died within minutes.”

The Mark of the Beast

Nurses aren’t the only medical professionals to encounter sinister forces on the job. A paramedic on EMTCity.com shares his experience with a dying patient and a number many call the mark of the beast.

Like the dying man in the hospital, the paramedic’s patient was highly agitated, and he seemed to dread his impending death.

“We get there and it’s this poor guy in his early 40′s who is bald from chemo and sitting on his brother’s couch,” the paramedic writes. “He just kept saying, ‘Ooh. No. No. Oooh.’ and looking around the room, flinching every now and then like he was waving away flies. We got him to sit on the stretcher, and he said, ‘No, not now.’”

The man sadly crumpled to the ground a few minutes later and died with tears on his cheeks. As the paramedic drove the man’s body to the emergency room, he wondered about the patient’s post-death fate. That’s when things started to get weird.

“As I wondered if the man would go to heaven, I got a bad feeling, like darkness was creeping all around us,” the medic writes. “I happened to look down at the volt-meter and I saw the number 666 flashing. This panel normally doesn’t flash at all, it just reads voltage. It went 666, then .1, then 666, then .1, then 666, then .1, and then it went back up to 1200 or so and stayed that way. The uneasy feeling went away, but I still prayed the whole way to the hospital.”

For those unfamiliar with the significance of 666, many Christians associate the number with evil due to a passage in Revelation. In the New International Version of the Bible, Revelation 13:15-18 reads:

“The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.

This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.”

Do demonic entities prey on the souls of humans? Let’s hope not. However, many religions teach that evil spirits are a real risk to both the faithful and disbelievers. What do you think?

If you’re anything like me, then at times you may have been willing to dive fairly deeply into the rabbit hole in search of “the truth”… whatever that may actually constitute. Granted, anymore that can be a difficult thing to find, not so much because there are wicked and vile forces aimed at suppressing it, but because with the proliferation of technology that facilitates instantaneous, unrestrained communication, we are in a position in modern times where there may, in fact, be several varieties of “truth” which we must wade through, in order to find what agrees with our consensus reality and those things deemed provable. 

Granted, if some aspect of our reality cannot actually be proven with ease, then we must accept that it may simply not be true. So what, then, leads people to believe certain truly bizarre things when they remain unprovable, like government conspiracies where world leaders are working in collusion with wicked alien beings, who seek to control our minds and, eventually, our entire planet?

For all you or I know, maybe this really is what’s going on. Others would argue that this kind of attitude toward life is the work of a delusional mind… and in many cases, I would agree. However, I also feel that, at times, we must take into consideration the fact that there may be ordinary rudiments of the way our minds work that can actually lead (or mislead, as it were) individuals into thinking very strange things… such as the notion that aliens are controlling humanity in a battle for our minds.

Much the same way that a series of still images will give the impression of movement (and hence the magic of cinema), when gaps between instances of reality begin to occur, the human mind seems to have evolved to cope with these by filling in the spaces. In cinema, our mind subconsciously connects the motion between still images being fired rapidly, and connects them as a continuous story. Much the same, when gaps occur in any given narrative, perhaps our minds work to fill in those gaps yet again… but what is the result in this instance?

A recent example was brought to my attention after a friend shared a discussion with me that had been taking place in a forum online, and to my surprise, I had been “called out” for possibly giving misleading information regarding a secretive meeting of ufologists that allegedly took place late last year. The story went like this: a shady meeting of the world’s greatest UFO researchers, hosted by a mysterious unnamed individual, was held over a weekend in the Northeastern United States. All those in attendance expressed how much they enjoyed the event and the company, but strangely, the attendees could remember little more about the event that the fact that it had been enjoyable… which seemed odd, considering the buzz this gathering managed to generate among those in the world outside.

Before long, it had become apparent that what was actually occurring had been a secret government operation, in which these otherwise respectable UFO researchers had been compromised using advanced mind-control technology. One woman, for instance, had allegedly claimed her husband returned from the event acting slightly “out of it,” and that he hadn’t been quite the same for days afterward. Had he been drugged, or something else?

The entire sordid affair can read about in this article, which I too decided to take a look at. Much to my surprise, it turns out that I did know precisely what this event was, and as indicated in the article, I was one of the people in attendance! However, rather than being some secretive meeting of UFO researchers, the event was, in truth, a weekend retreat featuring a number of individuals from all walks of life, ranging from businessmen and their families, to alien abductees. Granted, there was a focus on unexplained phenomena, and of course, the host and his family expressed a sincere, if not profound interest in all of it. I would argue that anyone who had been in attendance would have felt the same: that it had been a dining experience, if anything, geared primarily toward the hopeful endeavor of facilitating conversation about unexplained phenomenon in a constructive way, which mainstream news agencies and academic institutions don’t seem to favor.

To be fair, for a moment I had to assume that I knew what it was like to be a Bilderberger: here I had attended a private event which, rather than being conducted in secret, simply hadn’t been a promotional event that was posted on the websites, Facebook, and Twitter accounts of every Tom, Dick and Harry in the blogsphere. Why was this the case? I would argue that, while having dinner at my parent’s house may not be a secret endeavor, it is also not an event that is open to the public!

But for those who knew about the like-minded researchers attending this little shindig, from an outside perspective it must have seemed at least slightly odd. For one, if I had heard about it second hand, I might have even thought about it for a moment, and left it at that… but quite the contrary, it seems that others in the blogsphere have taken the idea and run with it, alleging everything from government mind control, to an alien base located beneath the venue where we had dinner that weekend! In all likelihood, there is probably an alien refuge beneath my parent’s home just as well, and both of them are contactees… hence my own innate interest in the subject (and all kidding aside, this was actually suggested to me by one highly visible exopolitical activist in this field, who for the time being shall remain unnamed. Seriously, I couldn’t make this stuff up).

For whatever reason, it does seem that people will fill in the proverbial “gaps” in a story when the entire narrative isn’t made available… and for whatever reason, in some of those cases, maybe the seeker runs the risk of diving so far down the rabbit hole that diminished oxygen levels prevent the proper transmission of oxygen to the brain! But in all seriousness, instances like these only further clarify, in my mind, that perhaps a majority of the “mythos” surrounding ufology today is less the influence of actual mysterious forces, or even manipulation of data to give us that impression… it may very well be more akin to a sociological phenomenon that causes us to gravitate toward the extremities when information is lacking. And unfortunately, when it comes to a subject like UFO research, we very well may have more questions–and hence more speculation–than answers.

The Old Alton Bridge is situated in the Texas town of Denton. It is roughly about an hour’s drive from where I live and has a very strange and monstrous legend attached to it. It concerns nothing less than a terror-inducing Goat Man, of the very type that have been reported from a whole variety of other locations across the United States for many a year. Probably the most infamous of all the Goat Men is that which allegedly surfaced in and around the town of Lake Worth, Texas back in the summer months of 1969. But, what of its nearby cousin of the supernatural kind in Denton?

Well, on several occasions now I have paid visits to the bridge at Denton that the Goat Man is said to haunt by both night and day. The weird tale is known all across town, too, not surprisingly. For example, on my second trip there back in 2009, I parked my car around noon, on the open piece of land that sits right next to the bridge – and where a police officer also happened to be parked, taking a break, and munching on his lunch.

I couldn’t fail to see that he was watching me. As I got my digital camera, voice-recorder, and camcorder off the back-seat of the car, he shouted in my direction something like: “Hey, what are you doing?” I replied, in matter of fact style: “Looking for the Goat Man.” His brief and much welcome response, after a few seconds in which he carefully considered my words, was something along the lines of: “Okay, well, good luck.”

As for the stories that revolve around the creature’s presence, one legend says that, many years ago, wannabe devil worshippers in the area inadvertently opened up a portal to some hellish realm that allowed the vile beast open access to our world. And now, today, and as a direct result of this reckless action, the Goat Man has no intention – at all – of returning to the twilight zone from which he first strode forth. Hence his deep desire to forever haunt the old steel-and-wood bridge at Denton.

An even weirder story maintains that the Denton Goat Man’s origins can be traced back to a resident of the town who, decades ago, slaughtered his entire family, and was quickly hanged as a punishment for his terrible crime.

As the local legend tells it, at the moment he was hung, the man’s head was torn from his body by the weight of his blubbery form. And, for months afterwards, his spectral body returned to the world of the living with only one goal in mind: to find itself a brand new head. It supposedly did exactly that by violently wrenching off the head of an innocent goat that had the great misfortune to be in the area at the time.

And so, the Goat Man of Denton was well and truly born. But was this latter story merely a tall tale? Well, yes, of course, it was! But that does not take away the fact that local folk, on many an occasion now, have reported seeing the nightmarish, hoofed one roaming around the woods and the land behind the bridge. In other words, whatever the real origins of Denton’s Goat Man, there does appear to be a significant amount of substance to what many merely perceive as nothing more than an entertaining piece of local hokum.

Bridges, as anyone with even the most basic knowledge of Forteana will be aware, have been directly linked with paranormal phenomena for years; in fact, for centuries, no less. There is the Man-Monkey of England’s Shropshire Union Canal, which I have written about previously at Mysterious Universe. And, of course, there is the world’s most famous winged humanoid, Mothman, and the tragic events of December 1967, involving the huge Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, West Virginia that collapsed into the dark depths of the Ohio River, drowning dozens.

Is it simply a mere coincidence that old bridges and bizarre entities go together, in definitive hand in glove style? No, just maybe it is not. In her 2006 book, Mystery Big Cats, author Merrily Harpur wrote of certain mysterious locales that she specifically refers to as Liminal Zones: “These are the transitional zones between one area and another – the kind of no-man’s-land traditionally regarded as magical,” says Harpur. She notes that such strange zones include streams, gates, churchyards and…yes…bridges.

Coincidence or strange portals to other, equally strange, realms? Whatever the answer to that controversy-filled question, take very great care the next time that you decide to cross an old and mysterious bridge on the proverbial dark and stormy night. You never know what might be lurking on it, around it, above it, or below it. Just perhaps, it will be none other than old “Goaty” himself. If it looks like he is in need of a brand new head, I suggest you run!

New technological advances help reveal lost cities in Cambodia while medical breakthroughs see a future of growable limbs and banks for our cloned organs.

We also feature an all you can eat buffet of light with the latest breatharian stunt and time slips with bizarre neurological conditions.

Want to access this show? Sign up for Plus+ or try our free podcast today!

• Jungle surrenders its lost city
• Lost City Found in Cambodian Jungle
• HIDDEN LANDSCAPES: LIDAR SURVEY ALLOWS PUBLIC TO DISCOVER NEW SITES
• Bank Your Stem Cells for Future Use
• Stem Cell Discovery Could Help Regrow Fingers
• This LSD-Inspired Oculus Game Is The Most Intense Thing I Saw At E3
• SOUNDSELF
• Seattle Woman Trying To Live On Sunlight Alone Is Probably Going to Die
• Jasmuheen (Doesn’t Need to Eat and Lives on Love)
• Living on Light An Experiment 5

• Pre-Birth Memories
• Sojourns of a Winnebago Shaman

Music

• CATCHING FLIES – The Long Journey Home via YMR
• incise – garden via Indie Shuffle
• Dead Horse Beats – All I Know Is You via Hilly Dilly
• Movement – Feel Real (Shadow Child remix) via Stoney Roads

When it comes to unusual phenomena, one of the skeptic’s favorite devices for dismissing events is declaring it mass hysteria, or collective obsessive disorder, minimizing what is often the only evidence available — eyewitness accounts.

The concept of mass hysteria is based on anxiety, fear, and the community dynamic. If Bill, Joe, and Greg, see something unusual and potentially threatening, the people who know and trust Bill, Joe, and Greg, buy into the anxiety shown when they hear the men explain what they experienced. The anxiety then often spreads throughout the community.

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 is one of the most famous instances of mass hysteria sweeping through a community. There are countless other examples of situations in history, even modern history, labeled as just hysteria.

It’s among the favorite explanations used by the US military when investigating UFO sightings by multiple citizens. One such example is an incident that occurred in West Virginia more than 50 years ago.

The Flatwoods Monster ignites frenzy in West Virginia

In 1952 a fireball fell from the sky and crashed into the woods of Braxton County, West Virginia, and a handful of local residents who went to investigate the crash encountered a 10-feet-tall, alien-like creature birthing a legend that is still debated to this day.

Kathleen May photographed with a drawing
of the Flatwoods Monster.

Braxton County, West Virginia, is a rural area in the central part of the Mountain State with only 15,000 inhabitants, and lies at the heart of the Appalachian Mountains. Today, it is a picturesque area is heavily wooded with rolling hills and great slabs of mountain jutting from the Earth.

The hotspot of Braxton County is a town called Flatwoods, which has the distinction of being a location viewed as being centrally located via Interstate travel in the state making it a popular meeting place for statewide organizations.

On September 12, 1952, Flatwoods became the meeting place for an encounter of the Third Kind for a handful of the area’s sparse population. It was an incident that involved sightings more than once on the same day.

On that afternoon, multiple witnesses saw a fiery object crash between Flatwoods and the nearby town of Gassaway. The local police were notified, and immediately presumed an airplane had crashed, but that was not the case. Police found no evidence to support the sightings or their own hypothesis.

Later that evening, four boys, all under the age of 12, were playing football at a school, and saw another fiery object crash into the nearby woods. The kids rounded up an adult and the crew of seven and a dog trekked into the woods to investigate.

May reported the evening was somewhat foggy, and got even foggier as they neared the site where they believed the object crashed. As they got closer, they encountered a metallic smell and experienced burning eyes and difficulty breathing.

The dog went ahead of the group, as dogs often do, but reportedly quickly returned running quickly with its tail tucked between its legs. The closer the group got to the site, the darker the night became, requiring the group to explore by the narrow beam of a flashlight.

Soon they found a “glowing, hissing” craft about 10 feet in diameter, then they saw two lights about 12 inches apart less than 100 yards away. When one of the group shined a flashlight in the direction of the lights they saw what would become known as the Flatwoods Monster, or the Phantom of Flatwoods.

The being was described as being 10-feet tall with a bright red face, green clothing, and had a head resembling the ace of spades in a deck of cards.

The group immediately fled and contacted the local police, who would visit the site that night but find no evidence supporting the group’s claims. Authorities dismissed the crash sighting as a meteorite. The next day, however, stories from other area residents began to surface.

One woman reported experiencing a similar event a week before, where she encountered a being matching the Flatwoods Monster’s description and subsequently sought medical treatment due to fear.

A few others reported seeing the same crash that spurred the group to investigate the wooded area. A man who lived at nearby Birch River, reported seeing a glowing orange ball floating in the sky for several minutes before it zipped away toward a small local airport where others reported seeing the glowing ball in the sky. Years later another couple came forward with a story claiming the Flatwoods Monster approached their vehicle while they were stalled along a local roadway that evening. Even a local politician reported seeing a glowing object fly away early in the morning of Sept. 13.

The stories of the small group who went into the woods, and the corroborating stories by others nearby, remain the only evidence pertaining to the case.

After the incident, several of the group who saw the Flatwoods Monster experienced illnesses including swollen throats and irritated eyes.

For more than 50 years, ufologists and other investigators, have tried to prove, or disprove, the reports from that night in 1952, but no real investigative progress has been made regarding the incident.

The incident was allegedly investigated by the US Air Force and dismissed as a case of mass hysteria, according to May when she was interviewed in the 1990s.

Other investigators have dismissed the incident as being a possible meteorite crash, combined with the group who investigated the crash encountering an animal in the woods, for example an owl.

That hasn’t stopped the incident from becoming legend.

Books have been written about the topic, including the incredibly detailed, “The Braxton County Monster: The Cover-Up of the Flatwoods Monster Revealed” by Frank Feschino, Jr. The Monster was even investigated by the cable television series Monsterquest on the History Channel.

While the incident hasn’t gained the notoriety of another West Virginia occurrence featuring a moth-like creature in Point Pleasant known as the Mothman, it has continued to be culturally significant to West Virginians in the area. There are often tributes to the event at county fairs and festivals.

The Flatwoods Monster might never be officially confirmed as a legitimate happening, but the legend of the Flatwoods Monster will continue to excite the imagination.

Is Mass Hysteria a Legitimate Answer for the Unexplained?

Community-wide anxiety and fear based in the unknown can in fact alter the perception of its members. As an intelligent species, we don’t deal well with threats we can’t see or understand, creating an environment ripe for the spread of panic and potentially faulty logic.

When it comes to investigating out-of-the-ordinary occurrences witnessed by a small group of people who are respected in the community, mass hysteria is an easy conclusion to derive. It is a phenomenon researched by psychologists and sociologists that is considered to be concrete and real.

So when leaving the investigating to those in the science community, there is potential for a closed-minded approach to out-of-the-ordinary occurrences. When an incident reported by many can’t be explained by any other scientifically established means, calling the witnesses delusional and hysterical closes the issue with an understandable label.

Just as people in the communities where explanation-defying situations occur often experience anxiety from the fear of the unknown, there is reason to believe the same kind of thing couldn’t affect the scientific community as well.

Rather than admitting something cannot be explained by science and creating a wave of anxiety with the splash-down of a potential threat not fully understood, applying a blanket answer used for hundreds of years immediately makes the incident something understandable.

In the case of the Flatwoods Monster, the after-the-fact reports from residents outside of the seven people who went into the woods to investigate something they saw, combined with the lack of physical evidence found at the location, made it easy to dismiss it as a collective hysteria.

Stories like the one in Flatwoods, however, do live on in local culture and in the community of those who have an open mind to things that cannot be explained. The stories become the subject of books, documentaries, films, and more. These independent investigations often come up with evidence not considered by the official investigators who determined it was a case of hysteria.

Where does the real truth lie?

The answer seems to lie in the perspective of those doing the investigating.

The skeptic leans more toward established scientific principles and viewing each incident up-close as an isolated event. While the open-minded investigator views the event from 10,000 feet and takes into consideration similar stories from elsewhere in the world.

Those with the 10,000-feet perspective have not ruled out the possibility that seven Flatwoods residents encountered a being that might be extra-terrestrial in September of 1952. The up-close investigator doesn’t take into consideration things outside the realm of science. Our mysterious universe needs on open-mindedness toward things unknown, otherwise new discoveries within it might remain forever hidden.

This approach is anti-scientific.

If scientists didn’t strive to understand the unknown, we wouldn’t understand anything in our physical world. Without this basic desire, things like gravity, weather, and our blue sky, would still be explained through mythology.

It is time we begin considering the criteria for mass hysteria being more specific, and open the door for simply declaring situations where more than one person experiences something out of the ordinary to simply be described as, “Not scientifically provable at this time.”

It is time we stop closing the doors to our minds, and open the gate to the mysteries of the universe.

One of the things that fascinates me about the world of Ufology is the way in which it – and its attendant reports of alien-human contact – has influenced movie-makers. Take a look at, for example, Close Encounters of the Third Kind; E.T.: The Extraterrestrial; Men in Black; and Independence Day. But, I’m also intrigued by the exact opposite: namely, how fictional, UFO-themed films may have influenced the field of flying saucer-based research and reports. Sometimes it’s very difficult to determine who took inspiration and ideas from who first. A perfect example of this is a certain Devil Girl From Mars.

An old (1954) British, black and white science-fiction film, Devil Girl From Mars starred Patricia Laffan as the Devil Girl of the movie’s title. It also starred Hazel Court (who appeared in a number of the classic Hammer horror films of the late 1950s and 1960s), and John Laurie, a Scottish character-actor best known in Britain for his role as Fraser in the BBC comedy of the late 1960s and 1970s, Dad’s Army.

Basically, the film tells the story of a hot alien babe from Mars named Nyah, who spends the whole time clad in a tight-fitting black outfit, black cloak and long black-boots – most certainly not something to complain about!

She comes to our world to seek out males to help boost the waning Martian population. As Nyah reveals to those she encounters, Mars has been decimated as a result of a war on the red planet between males and females, in which the women won. Of course, with the Martian men now utterly gone, this makes breeding more than a significant problem.

Well, personally speaking, having to repopulate a whole planet full of numerous Nyah’s doesn’t sound such a bad job to me at all – but I digress! The plan is for Nyah to land her flying saucer in the very heart of London and announce to the people of the UK – and, soon thereafter, to the entire world – that a program of alien-human breeding is to quickly begin in earnest.

Unfortunately for Nyah, things go deeply awry and her spacecraft comes down near an old inn in the dark wilds of Scotland. It’s an inn that is populated by just the owner, a couple of employees and a handful of guests. And, yes, as you might have quickly guessed, they become the small, heroic band that has to try and thwart Nyah’s dastardly plans to enslave the entire Human Race.

I won’t spoil the outcome for those who may now want to watch the film, but I will say the following: Devil Girl From Mars certainly isn’t a classic of the genre. But it is entertaining and thought-provoking. Not only that: it also contains a number of Contactee-based parallels, too.

For example, Nyah can speak all Earth-based languages, as, reportedly, could a number of the so-called Space-Brothers. She warns of the perils of war and destruction, as did pretty much all of the long-haired and alien ones that absolutely dominated 1950s-era Ufology.

She provides a wealth of obscure scientific data about her craft to those of the group she invites on-board, which is a curious theme present in many Contactee accounts. And she is strangely and noticeably detached and even slightly ethereal – which reminds me very much of Truman Bethurum’s very own alien hotty, Captain Aura Rhanes of Clarion.

On top of that there is the matter of Nyah’s race visiting the Earth as a means to try and save the waning Martian population. Of course, today, we hear a great deal about the so-called Grays and the theories that they are on an evolutionary decline. The result: they come to the Earth to abduct people. They then steal DNA, sperm and eggs, which they use as part of a bizarre and nightmarish program to create a hybrid species that is part-human and part-E.T.

Back in the 1950s, when Devil Girl From Mars was made, many people within Ufology were focusing on the idea that extraterrestrials were here to “save” us from the perils of atomic destruction. For the most part, the idea that inter-species cross-breeding was at the very heart of the alleged alien mission didn’t surface until years later. So, for that reason, it’s interesting that Devil Girl From Mars is so heavily focused around the specific angle of alien-human cross-breeds that dominates so much of alien abduction research today.

I suspect not many people will be aware of Devil Girl From Mars, but for anyone with an affection for the early years of the flying saucer culture (both in the real world and in the domain of on-screen fiction), it’s most definitely worth a watch. Whether Devil Girl From Mars took its inspiration from Ufology, or provided certain characters in the field with a few ideas, themes and memes that then became integral parts of its lore, very much remains to be seen.

Greetings, fellow Coppertops! Our weekly exploration of the Fortean Matrix has in store for us psychic spies, mirage men & rubber aliens. We’ll also take a look at a projection on how the human face might evolve in the centuries to come, along with current judicial decisions which could have a great impact in the future of our species. And finally, we’ll penetrate the mystery of an ancient underground network discovered in Europe; so let’s get ready since we have no time to waste & Zion waits for no-one!

10 Before we proceed to news of a more Fortean flavor, we can’t escape revisiting the revelations of last week, concerning the programs launched by the NSA to gather massive amounts of data from cell phones & on-line communications. We now know that the whistle-blower behind this new scandal is a 29-year-old programmer named Edward Snowden, who is currently staying in Hong Kong hoping to receive political asylum in some sympathetic nation, while the US State Department is quickly moving to demand his extradition.

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding this bespectacled man of shy expression. Some people wonder how such a young contractor with no credentials could have gotten access to such sensitive material. Others were all too happy to turn him into a new scapegoat & accusing him of treason.

“I’m neither traitor nor hero. I’m an American.” ~Edward Snowden

Meanwhile Google, Yahoo! & Facebook denied any direct involvement with PRISM, in a vain effort to ensure their customers that they are committed to the protection of their privacy, and if the NSA is gathering any data from their servers, it’s being done without their explicit consent.

The agency keeps insisting everything they’ve done has been according to the law. You know what else was performed according to the law? Apartheid & the Holocaust.

9 Spying is a very old game. In the times of John Dee, the original 007, it was done with encrypted letters written on parchment & sent through carrier pigeons; whereas now cutting-edge computational technology & powerful encryption algorithms, to send or receive messages through the electronic ether are the norm.

But as anyone who has either read the book The Men who Stare at Goats, or saw the film starring Clooney, McGregor & Bridges know, there was a time when more alternative methods of espionage were proposed, which relied not on expensive satellite systems but merely the minds of a few talented individuals. According to a recently released documentary filmed by Vikram Jayanti, Uri Geller of spoon-bending fame (or infamy, if you’re a fan of Randi) was one of those individuals, offering his services to both the Mossad & the CIA –even after 9/11 when he was allegedly ‘reactivated.’

“Uri has a controversial reputation. A lot of people think he is a fraud, a lot of people think he is a trickster and makes things up but at the same time he has a huge following and a history of doing things that nobody can explain,” Jayanti says of his Zelig-like subject.

Speaking to The Independent, Geller acknowledged alarm when he first saw Jayanti’s documentary.

“I was worried and I am still concerned,” Geller said of the way the documentary outs him as a spy. “I didn’t realise that Vikram was going to do such a thorough job of tying all the loose ends…making that the little hints I dropped throughout my career were real.

The documentary seems to portray Uri in a rather grandiose fashion, yet since it does not rely solely on his testimony, we can’t accuse the film-maker of putting together a PR stunt for the Israeli psychic. Personally, I don’t know what to think of Geller; I don’t consider him a complete fraud, like Randi & his minions keep insisting, nor do I believe in the image of himself Geller likes to present to the world. Perhaps he does have genuine special abilities, but doesn’t shy away from pulling deceptive stunts once in a while, when said powers do not manifest as regularly as he would like them to.

Or maybe the shams were part of a front Geller intentionally pulled off, in order to remain conveniently ambiguous?

8 At the beginning of his public career, Uri Geller was not shy of claiming that the secret to his psychic abilities was an early close encounter with aliens –nowadays though he never mentions the subject. Interestingly enough, psychokinesis & precognition are some of the alleged rewards Scientologists believe they’ll obtain if they manage to achieve the state of Operative Thetan. The 1996 movie Phenomenon starring John Travolta –one of the most famous Scientologists– explores these ideas by telling the story of George Malley, a simple-minded individual whose life changes overnight after witnessing a weird celestial phenomenon: for all intents & purposes, a UFO.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yet the church of Scientology has never been comfortable involving itself with UFOlogical controversies –the Xenu elephant in the room?– so when the British tabloid The Sun reported that 3 passenger jets had close encounters with ‘flat silver discs’ as the airliners were flying just above the church of Scientology HQ in East Grinstead, West Sussex last Dec. 30th, the all-mighty legal arm of the church was put into motion. After all, according to our friends of Open Minds the sightings took place a few miles away from the premises of the Scientology’s facility.

The Sun was thus forced to issue a public apology… to the aliens.

In an article on Saturday headlined ‘Flying saucers over British Scientology HQ’, we stated “two flat silver discs” were seen “above the Church of Scientology HQ”.

Following a letter from lawyers for the Church, we apologise to any alien lifeforms for linking them to Scientologists.

Nations of the world, take note: the best weapon against an alien invasion, is a legal threat.

7 Nick Pope, the former MoD investigator on UFOs, claims the West Sussex sightings remain unexplained, even though the British Ministry of Defense has officially stopped researching UFO cases since they are concluded not to be a threat to the UK. In fact there are some who think our current UFO paranoia was specifically engineered by the US government, in order to protect their ultra-secret black weapons projects by using UFOlogists as useful idiots.

Such is the case of Mark Pilkington, who has finally released his much anticipated documentary Mirage Men:

Click here to view the embedded video.

So far the overall reviews have been fairly positive, and after the film makes its rounds on the festival circuit, I hope it’s eventually released for livestream viewing since I’m really looking forward to seeing it –even though I don’t happen to agree with EVERYTHING Pilkington postulates –if Richard Doty admits to have fed disinformation to people in the UFO community, then why take anything he says at face value?

…And if you don’t know who Richard Doty is, then I highly recommend you get yourself a copy of Greg Bishop’s Project Beta.

6 But whether you agree with Pilkington or not, there’s no denying the UFO community is filled to the brim with useful idiots, who will unwittingly help perpetuate the giggle factor surrounding the topic.

Last Thursday, as I was doing my DIY version of monitoring on the Fortean blogosphere, I noticed that around 4 in the afternoon the hashtag #alienabductee had become a worldwide trending topic on Twitter. Puzzled, I started to do some digging, and found out the source of this hashtag was a British TV documentary titled Confessions of an Alien Abductee, which featured Chantelle, who “has been taken by ETs on thousands of occasions, often while chowing down on a KFC meal.”

First thoughts when looking this photo: “Coneheads are getting sloppy.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Well of course these are the characters who are going to be shown on TV for the amusement of an audience craving for novelty. Heaven forbids someone was actually going to make a documentary showing highly intelligent, well-adjusted individuals who also happened to claim direct interaction with non-human entities! Better to label them all as loonies craving for attention –after all, “they are not hurting anyone” right?

5 On Britain claiming to be an abductee might just get you a couple of chuckles & witty Tweets –”Rumour has it the aliens are hiding in her hair”– but on China such claims might have much dire consequences, especially if you’re being sloppy. A lesson a Chinese farmer learned the hard way, after being accused of hoaxing a close encounter with a crude (& somewhat revolting) rubber doll of an alien corpse.

Shortly after he proudly posted photographs of his alien on the internet, he was arrested by the police for five days for “fabrications” that “disturbed the public order”.

Mr Li was forced to admit that he had indeed sought to use his model, held together with chicken wire and glue, to mislead his fellow Chinese about the existence of celestial creatures.

Nice try China, but this seasoned blogger knows a conspiracy when he finds it. And I for one welcome our elastomeric overlords.

4 As any UFO buff worth its tinfoil hat is well aware, orthodox Science flat out dismisses any & all claims of extraterrestrial contact, while at the same time taking for granted the existence of thousands of advanced technological civilizations inhabiting our galaxy alone. Seth Shostak & his friends remain hopeful that in 25 years or so humanity will have detected its 1st bonafide radio signal from ET.

But what if we were to take a more direct approach? That is what proponents of what is known as ‘active SETI’ –also called METI– propose by way of transmitting signals to outer space, in hope that somewhere in the vast reaches of the Cosmos might detect & make sense of our unsolicited spamming.

As commented by our friends Aaron & Elliot on the last episode of MU, George Dvorsky at io9 wrote about Lone Signal: the first continuous message beacon to communicate with extraterrestrial civilizations, which would allow anyone willing & able to pay a certain fee the chance to transmit their words across the vastness of space –an endeavor Dvorsky considers either wasteful or particularly dangerous.

Lone Signal will be sending two signals: one is a continuous wave (CW) signal, a hailing message that sends a slow binary broadcast to provide basic information about Earth and our Solar System using an encoding system created by astrophysicist and planetary scientist Michael W. Busch. The binary code is based on mathematical “first principles” which reflect established laws that, theoretically, are relatively constant throughout the universe; things like gravity and the structure of the hydrogen atom, etc.

“This hailing message is a language we think could be used to instigate communication,” said Haqq-Misra, “and is the most advanced binary coding currently in use.”

The second signal, embedded in the first signal, will be messages from the people of Earth.

My personal reaction is not that antagonistic, since I think that cat has been out of the bag a loooooong time ago. Also, after all these decades learning about the UFO phenomenon, my general impression is that the intelligence(s) behind it seem to be interested in a grassroots type of contact from the bottom up, instead of the top-down assumptions we all imagine –i.e. the hypothetical landing on the White House lawn.

So my suspicion is that this weird anonymous e-mail sent on 2010 might just be a more effective approach to open contact than any type of official or commercial project.

3 If Seth Shostak’s scenario came into fruition, Humanity would pick up a signal from some distant civilization, and after some deliberation we might decide to reply back. Given the constrains of radio-based communications, the ‘hi there!’ message sent by us might receive a ‘whuzzup’ reply in 50, 100 or even 100,000 years in the future –which means Galaxy Twitter sucks donkey balls!

So Kawaii desu!

How much would have our descendants changed in that time span? In trying to answer that question, Artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm has partnered with a computational geneticist in ordered to imagine a plausible future evolution of the human race; and even though such exercises always turn out to be more indicative of the culture doing the prospection itself –to wit, how an article magazine of 1950 imagined life in the year 2000– the results are rather entertaining nonetheless –unless you happen to hate Japanese anime, in which case you’d feel revolted at the sight of Lamm’s digital rendition of future Adam & Eve, with their elongated foreheads & astonishingly large eyes.

All jokes aside though, I wonder if the authors of this study were influenced by the accounts of people who claim the alien abduction experience, as their manga-nesque men & women look eerily similar to the pop-culture renditions of human-alien hybrids.

2 All these modern prospective studies on human evolution, seem to give for granted the idea that in the future our species will take full control on the artificial manipulation of our genome, taking our original template & reshaping it to whatever configuration we see fit.

But what of the legal implications? When Sci-Fi utopia meets the hardcopy reality of our legal system, the end result is hardly worthy of a Spielberg ending. This week the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that human genes can neither be patented nor held for profit, a decision so patently obvious it’s depressingly telling on the way our laws can often twist even the most self-evident tenets.

The decision invalidates a Utah company’s patents on two genes that are linked to breast and ovarian cancer, and is likely to lead to several thousand other gene patents being tossed as well.

“This is a landmark decision,” said Dr. Stanley Robboy, president of the College of American Pathologists. “Genomic medicine has the potential to be a cornerstone of medical testing, treatment and clinical integration, but the question of who owns your genes needed a definitive answer. Now we have it.”

Given the past ruling of the Supreme court to uphold the warrantless collection of DNA samples, I’d say their score now is 50/50.

1 To a Stone Age caveman, our current discussions on genetic manipulation would either seem utterly incomprehensible, or he would think our race had acquired god-like attributes. Ironically enough, a recent discovery of an intricate grid of Neolithic cave systems spanning from Scotland to Turkey (!) is a humbling reminder that we still have a lot of things to understand about our ancient origins.

Some experts believe the network was a way of protecting man from predators while others believe that some of the linked tunnels were used like motorways are today, for people to travel safely regardless of wars or violence or even weather above ground.

Cute hypothesis. Unfortunately, the fact that most of these passages are just 70 cm wide seems to throw the motorway idea by the wayside. The fact of the matter is that this massive tunnel system is a big WTF thrown at our quaint preconceptions about antiquity. Perhaps the caves are somehow connected to the concept of Ley Lines, and the caves are in fact underground water channels? I’ll just say that the first time I read of them, they made me think of ancient Teotihuacan, and how underneath the ancient pyramid there’s a natural volcanic grotto where magic ceremonies are thought to have been practiced.

What’s more tantalizing about the Mail article is the paragraph stating that “[i]n some cases writings have been discovered referring to the tunnels seen as a gateway to the underworld.”

As always, we’ve just barely scratched the surface at the mystery of who we are.

Until next time, this is RPJ jacking out, hoping all you Fortean fathers had a wonderful day.

Since my first, and most recent article about emerging technologies was published, it has received a substantial amount of excellent feedback and generated a great deal of interest and intrigue regarding its content. It also seemed to reaffirm the supposition that not enough people are aware of these technologies, and that needs to change, so I am writing a follow up article to try and continue raising  such awareness.

The NSA’s Multi-billion Dollar Utah Data Center

Trilaterization

It has recently come to public light that the NSA has been working with major mobile phone companies to gather phone records and metadata (a set of data that describes and gives information about other data) of Americans, such as who someone has called and for how long.  In consideration of just how much data that is, one thing stands out in the technological side of things: how is it even feasible that an agency can not only collect the estimated 2.5 quintillion, or 2,500,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of data that are created everyday single day (according to IBM), but sift through what is and is not relevant? Thanks to a recently published New York Times article, certain revelations have given insight, albeit very slight, into this overwhelming data-mining system.

The actual technical process of how this nearly unfathomable amount of data is sifted and sorted remains unclear, but the current opinion, according to the NY Times,  is that it probably uses supercomputing technology similar to that of IBM’s Watson, famous for winning Jeopardy! against human opponents. A computing system with as much power as Watson would be able to rapidly process incredible amounts of information and simultaneously identify patterns of behavior. Such supercomputing technology is believed to be the most practical and efficient means by which the NSA and other intelligence agencies could analyze the ever-increasing amount of communication data. But perhaps the most fascinating, albeit unsettling aspects of this new wave of data-collecting technology is trilaterization, which obtains data from cell phone towers to allow for nearly exact location of a person’s cell phone at any given time. Furthermore, it is alleged to have software that attempts to predict a person’s route based on previously acquired cell phone data. Trilaterization is said by industrial experts to be used by various government and law enforcement agencies, surely fueling  any and all paranoia. Regardless of how the story develops, it still is amazing to realize objectively that a single government agency has the capability to locate millions of users and their approximate locations, predicted daily routes, and individual call logs, all from cell phone data.

Invisbility Cloak

A simplified version of invisibility cloaking technology now exists, and its implications are literally out of this world. The MIT Technology Review recently published an article explaining how researchers, John and Benjamin Howell, have developed and demonstrated a functioning invisibility cloaking device.

The ultimate, current goal in the science of invisibility cloaks is to basically create a cloak like the one from Harry Potter, but the mechanics of it are currently impossible. Despite recent advances in the creation of metamaterials and transformation optics, the science of invisibility cloaks is plagued by issues which have prevented it from becoming a reality, such as failure to cloak an object across the entire optical spectrum and failure to cloak larger objects such as a person. However researchers John and Benjamin Howell have bypassed that issue with a much simpler method that circumvents currently developing cutting edge science: ”They simply create an array of lenses or mirrors that steer light around the region of space they want to hide.”

The Howells’ Functioning Invisibility Cloak

Since mirrors can be made in a vast variety of sizes, their design can function to cloak a wide array of different-sized objects, including a person. Of course, there is one serious drawback to their design: it only cloaks an object from one direction so if someone were to walk around the cloaked object, or view it from another vantage point, they would see the cloaking device. However, the Howells successfully diminish this caveat by revealing their idea for the cloaking devices real value, which is truly terrifying: “The devices may have value, for example, in cloaking satellites in mid- to high-earth orbit.”So yes, invisible satellites. On the flip side, it seems to follow that these cloaks could hide structures, or virtually anything on the ground from aerial surveillance, such as aircraft or satellites. Regardless of the latter stalemate, the revelation of this technology means it will only begin to rapidly improve as interested parties begin to fund more research. All that is to say: don’t expect your own personal invisibility cloak any time soon.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality Concept

The next monumental technological revolution to transform the world is said to be that of augmented reality (AR). The basic idea behind AR is to create and superimpose a digital overlay upon the world’s  physical environment, creating an interactive virtual display that can be viewed and controlled through 3D platform-compatible devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, and eventually wearable electronic devices such as Google Glass). It will incorporate voice and gesture control (sort of like a 3D touch screen) to manipulate and control the AR interface.

The initial appeal of AR is believed to be the incorporation of nearly all personal electronic devices (phones, ipods, cameras, etc.) into one wearable, aesthetically pleasing device, most likely beginning with glasses. Even though critics have lashed out at the idea of having to wear goofy-looking glasses, they must remember this is only the beginning. The leap from glasses to contact lenses, for example, will likely be within reach soon after AR hits the mainstream, when huge tech companies begin competing for top spot in the market.

Atheer Labs is one of the many companies currently pioneering AR platforms, but theirs is not hardware specific (meaning their AR-capable products are not limited to glasses) and is designed to run on the same low-power computer chip technology as current  smartphones, but with greater power efficiency. Sulieman Itani, CEO and founder of Atheer Labs, had this to say about his company’s design:

“We are the first mobile 3D platform delivering the human interface. We are taking the touch experience on smart devices, getting the internet out of these monitors and putting it everywhere in the physical world around you. In 3D, you can paint in the physical world. For example, you could leave a note to a friend in the air at restaurant, and when the friend walks into the restaurant, only they can see it. We want to create a portable device you can put in your pocket and the interface is as big as possible.”

Sure, a paint app might not be the most awe-inspiring example of AR application, but keep in mind this is really just the beginning and its future implications are incredibly exciting. Despite how new this technology is, improvements are already being made and at least one major company, Intel, is pouring millions of dollars into “perceptual computing” over the next few years.

Bottom line: The world will be perceived in a radically different way within the next decade.

Printable Electronic Components

Printed electronic temperature sensors from PARC and Thinfilm Electronics

The infamous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has turned heads yet again with the announcement of a new technology currently in development that, according to a  Cnet article: ”makes it possible to print electronic components like sensors, transistors, light-emitters, smart tags, flexible batteries, memory, smart labels, and more.” Applications for this technology have already been seen in 3D printing (see the ‘Printable Bionic Upgrades section‘ of the last Emerging Technologies article), but also include health tracking for patient care or emergency situations, or temperature sensing components that will eventually be integrated into food packaging. But the applications are already so vast that PARC is actually looking for any partners, from private companies to academic institutions, with ideas on how to integrate printable electronics into functioning products.

The actual printing method of the electronic components is very interesting. Similar to 3D printers, PARC’s printer uses an additive method of printing, generating electronics from inks made up of nano-scale materials like molecules and tiny computer chips. The inks are specially made before each job in order to accommodate the necessary materials for whatever components are being printed; each printing job requires its own specific inks.

What really adds to the practicality and feasibility of this technology is that it can be printed using the same massive and efficient printers that are currently used to print newspapers; they just need to be upgraded with PARC’s nifty inks. And although it is in its very early days, PARC’s printable electronics program is already hard at work with other private companies, such as Thinfilm Electronics, creating and expanding a library of functional printed electronics. The idea is to keep expanding that library so that ideas of how to integrate these printed electronics becomes more frequent, drawing in more partners.

Looking Ahead

Any interested person can keep track of such developments through tech websites like cnet, but only the most significant, often consumer-related technologies seem to make it into the main stream news. Despite the degree in coverage, one thing seems to remain consistent among the ever-changing world of technology: it will only keep improving and changing the world.

Situated near to the picturesque, ancient hamlet of Milford, Staffordshire,  England, Shugborough Hall is both a large and renowned country house that serves as the ancestral home of the Earls of the city of Lichfield. And its spacious grounds are connected to the nearby village of Great Haywood by the Essex Bridge, which was built during the Middle-Ages. Around 1750, the hall was greatly enlarged, and then yet again at the beginning of the 1800s. Today, Shugborough Hall is open to the general public and boasts a working farm museum that dates back to 1805, and which is complete with a watermill, kitchens and a dairy.

Interestingly, the grounds of Shugborough Hall are also home to something known as the Shepherd’s Monument, upon which can be found a very strange and baffling inscription, and one which, many students of the puzzle believe, contains a secret code that identifies the alleged resting place of none other than the legendary Holy Grail.

The Shepherd’s Monument is not the only such construction of note on the grounds of the sprawling old hall: The Tower of Winds, the Cat’s Monument, and the Doric Temple also have pride of place. But, get this: The thick and mysterious woods that surround Shugborough Hall are said to be the domain of nothing less than a diabolical, hairy wild man, or perhaps even several…

So the controversial story goes, at some point in the early to mid part of 1981, distinctly strange events took place late at night in the finely landscaped grounds of Shugborough Hall. On no less than five occasions – and specifically between February and June of that year – an undisclosed number of the many geese and ducks that frequented the pleasant waters that surround the hall were found brutally decapitated.

Their lifeless bodies laid out in what one employee of the Shugborough estate described concisely and notably as resembling “a witchcraft ceremony.” Precisely how the man knew what “a witchcraft ceremony” involving decapitated water-fowl might look like, however, is pretty much anybody’s guess. And far more was to come. All of it was much, much worse.

On at least two occasions strange, loud, guttural noises were heard coming from one particular tree-shrouded area of the spacious grounds, and a large, hairy, man-like thing was observed by a shocked employee bounding at very high speed across the lawns long after the sun had gone down – and specifically heading in the direction of the winding waters that continue to run throughout the Shugborough Hall estate to this very day.

Somewhat significantly, the very same employee recalled hearing a loud splashing noise in the immediate aftermath of the sighting, which suggested strongly that the creature had actually propelled itself deep into the heart of those very same, darkened waters.

One of those willing to discuss certain, salient aspects of the above – albeit from the promised safety and camouflage of a thick veil of secrecy and anonymity – is a now-elderly man who was employed to look after the lawns at Shugborough Hall from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. To this day he alludes to semi-veiled warnings made by senior staff at the hall at the time in question that went something very much along these lines: “Do not to talk about the killings, the beheadings, the rites and the rituals. And most certainly do not discuss with anyone the sightings of the wild, hairy man-beast.”

Nevertheless, despite the ominous order of complete silence, the man does, at least, confirm that a decision was taken at the very highest level “not to report anything to the police,” and he further asserts that “everything” was dealt with strictly in-house; aside, that is, from a visit by a local veterinarian whose services were occasionally used to treat the pet animals that lived at the hall, and who reportedly made a detailed examination of the dead water-fowl.

Precisely what the results of that examination were, we unfortunately do not know, and probably never will. The same source has been able to fill in the blanks relative to several other aspects of the story, however.

Namely, (A) that the man-beast seen running wildly in the grounds exuded a foul smell that was somewhat akin to that of rotting vegetation; (B) that not a single one of the dead birds appeared to have put up a fight before decapitation (for example, there were no large piles of feathers laying around, no blood, and the birds looked to have been cleanly-cut and not torn open); and (C) that he had heard, from a colleague and friend, of “something like this happening here once before, in the 1960s, with a big monkey running around.”

Some fifteen years ago or more now, I paid a visit to Shugborough Hall and had a brief opportunity to chat with a handful of the employees about the legend of the hairy wild man said to have been in their very midst, all those years earlier. Although none of them had any personal awareness of the story (which is not at all surprising, given that the chief events took place a decade and a half before I even thought about engaging them in conversation), they did admit to finding the whole thing very intriguing.

They eventually related to me a series of entertainingly paranormal tales of various unknown entities said to haunt Shugborough Hall. Although, it must be said that these were all of a distinctly ghostly and spectral nature – of the typical “grey lady” and “hooded monk” variety – and most certainly not of a hairy and Bigfoot-like style.

While a direct connection to the presence of the Shugborough man-beast could never be firmly proved, one of the employees did recall a weird event that had supposedly occurred around four years previous to my visit. In this case, a horse had apparently been violently slashed on its back legs in a fashion that looked suspiciously like the work of a wild animal, such as a “big cat.”

Unfortunately, there were no more relevant details available; and so, therefore, I could do very little more than merely log the story for posterity, and in the event that further corroborating data might ultimately one day surface. To my lasting regret, it never has. The mysteries of Shugborough Hall remain.

Conundrums and confrontations are abound on this episode of Mysterious Universe! An incredible network of neolithic tunnels has been discovered under Europe and scientists are baffled to explain their purpose. Hunters become the hunted when cryptids attack and the Singularity could trigger the destruction of mankind.

• Extensive Ancient Underground Network Discovered From Scotland to Turkey
• UFO suspected in Chinese plane nose cone damage
• Pilots report UFOs over British Scientology headquarters
• Shandong man claims he electrocuted an alien and stored it in his freezer…
• Chinese farmer jailed for making a rubber alien
• Russian meteor blast was the largest ever recorded by CTBTO
• New Project to Message Aliens is Both Useless and Potentially Reckless
• The 15 Dumbest Tweets Ever Tweeted
• Creepy Woods: Unknown Beasts and Hauntings in the Forest
• Tree Line Predator
• Neanderthals in Queensland?
• The Bright Man

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• What Will Human Faces Look Like In 100,000 Years?
• 7 Totally Unexpected Outcomes That Could Follow the Singularity
• Ghosts in Iceland
• Jim the “Hunter” and the Farmhouse
• Japan Creates 3D Dolls That Look Exactly Like You

Music

• Dead Can Dance – The Host Of Seraphim (ENiGMA Dubz Mix) via Dancingastronaut
• Boards of Canada – Reach For The Dead via Beepbeepbeep
• Solar Year – Seeing The Same via Silentshout
• Hourglass Sea – Another World via Poluedor
• xxyyxx – Pay Attention via Spreadtheword96
• Winona Hyper – Fallin’ via Chromekids