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12/29/06 #397

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This week we bring you such year-of-the-pig stories as:

- Rising Seas Claims Tropical Island -
- Ex-Agent Reveals KGB Mind Control Techniques -

- Did Jesus Have A Secret Family? -
- The Chupacabras: A Psychological Test Come To Life? -
AND: The Other Mystery of Easter Island

All these exciting stories and MORE in this week's issue of
CONSPIRACY JOURNAL!

~ And Now, On With The Show! ~

NEW FROM CONSPIRACY JOURNAL FILMS

FIND OUT WHAT MYSTERIES AND CONSPIRACIES
THE VATICAN HAS BEEN HIDING FOR CENTURIES!

New on DVD - SECRETS OF THE VATICAN

SHOT WITHIN THE WALLS OF THE HOLY CITY WITH HIDDEN CAMERAS The Vatican has been shrouded in mystery and intrigue for centuries. Except for the highest Cardinals and Bishops, the public and even members of the priesthood are not privy to the inner workings of the Church. It is rumored that there are in the secret archives centuries-old artifacts that, if exposed, could embarrass the standard-bearers of the faith. Searching for truth has always been the Conspiracy Journal's main goal. With this in mind, we recently "invaded" the walls of the Vatican with our hidden cameras on a fact finding mission. On our return, we followed up our investigation by interviewing such astute researchers as: Jordan Maxwell - Brad Steiger - Patricia Ress - Penny Melis - and Diane Tessman.

SOME OF THE EXCITING CONTENTS IN THIS DVD VIDEO INCLUDE:

* Does the Vatican conceal knowledge that the crucifixion was a fraud?
* Is there a secret cabal of Satanists within the Vatican to further the evil conspiracy of the New World Order?
* Learn about the UFO sighting that occurred over the Vatican the morning of the funeral of Pope John Paul.
* Can exorcism be a futile effort that often results in the death of the possessed?
* What secrets is the Vatican keeping about the perilous future of our world?
* Is the Vatican link to the Hubble Telescope evidence that they are aware that Planet X is headed toward Earth?

SPECIAL BONUS OFFER - If you act right now, you will also get the FREE unedited audio interviews with Brad Steiger, Jordan Maxwell, Patricia Ress, and noted psychic Penny Melis. These interviews were conducted by Sean Casteel for use in the documentary. However, as with every documentary, only a small portion of each interview ever makes it to the screen. Now you can hear the complete, unedited interviews as each researcher reveals what they know concerning the secrets of the Vatican.

This controversial documentary is now available
for the incredible price of only $15.00 plus $5.00 shipping

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- IT'S TOO LATE TO TURN BACK NOW DEPARTMENT -

Rising Seas Claims Tropical Island

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

As the seas continue to swell, they will swallow whole island nations, from the Maldives to the Marshall Islands, inundate vast areas of countries from Bangladesh to Egypt, and submerge parts of scores of coastal cities.

Eight years ago, as exclusively reported in The Independent on Sunday, the first uninhabited islands - in the Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati - vanished beneath the waves. The people of low-lying islands in Vanuatu, also in the Pacific, have been evacuated as a precaution, but the land still juts above the sea. The disappearance of Lohachara, once home to 10,000 people, is unprecedented.

It has been officially recorded in a six-year study of the Sunderbans by researchers at Calcutta's Jadavpur University. So remote is the island that the researchers first learned of its submergence, and that of an uninhabited neighbouring island, Suparibhanga, when they saw they had vanished from satellite pictures.

Satellite imagery shows that the sea level in the Sundarbans has risen at an average rate of 3.14 centimetres a year over the past two decades - much higher than the global average of two millimetres a year. Scientists believe that in the next 50 years, a rise of even one metre in sea level would inundate 1,000 sq.km of the Sundarbans.

Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic Studies, says "it is only a matter of some years" before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen "vanishing islands" in India's part of the delta. The area's 400 tigers are also in danger.

In the past two decades, three islands - Bedford, Kabasgadi and Suparibhanga - have sunk into the sea and 6,000 families have been made homeless.

Two other islands - Ghoramara and Mousuni - are fast going under.

Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years' time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.

Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless

Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.

Source: The Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2099971.ece

- LOOK DEEPLY INTO MY EYES DEPARTMENT -

Ex-Agent Reveals KGB Mind Control Techniques

A former KGB officer has divulged secrets of special mind control techniques that security services in developed nations used during and after the Cold War, a Russian government daily said Friday.

General Boris Ratnikov, who served in the KGB department for Moscow and the Moscow Region, told Rossiiskaya Gazeta that people in power had resorted to various methods of manipulating individuals' thoughts since ancient times, and that it was hardly surprising that secret services adopted the practice when it acquired a scientific foundation in the 20th century.

"You can hardly imagine the warfare that broke out in this area in the first half of the last century. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that sometimes real 'astral battles' took place," Ratnikov told the daily.

In the mid-1980s, about 50 research institutes in the Soviet Union studied remote mind control techniques backed by substantial government funding. But all such research efforts were halted with the demise of the Soviet empire in the early 1990s.

Ratnikov, who subsequently served as deputy head and then senior consultant at the Federal Guard Service from 1991 to 1997, said his department was in charge of safeguarding top officials in post-Soviet Russia against any external influence on their sub-conscious.

The general stated emphatically that he and his colleagues had never manipulated the minds of the then president, Boris Yeltsin, or of economic reformer Yegor Gaidar but claimed to have used mind-reading to save Russia's first president and the country from a war with China.

Yeltsin had planned to visit Japan in 1992 but Ratnikov's department detected attempts to 'program' the president's mind to make him give the Kuril Islands back to Japan. The move would have led to demands from China that it regain its disputed territories from Russia as well, a conflict that could have sparked a war between the neighbors. Yeltsin therefore had to cancel the trip.

Another of the general's revelations is that senior officials in Western Europe and the United States unwittingly provided information to his department, which was able to read their minds thanks to Soviet-era scientific achievements.

In the early 1990s, Ratnikov and his colleagues "scanned" the mind of new U.S. Ambassador Robert Strauss to see that the embassy building contained equipment to exert psychotronic influence on Moscow residents but it had been deactivated, the general told the paper.

In further comments on the psychotronic weapon, Ratnikov said that although Russia, the United States and other countries had the necessary technology, it was dangerous to use it because the operator of the weapon and even the person who gave the orders could suddenly fall gravely ill or even die.

Source: Post Chronicle
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/original/article_21255960.shtml

- THREE-CORNERED MYSTERY DEPARTMENT -

The Triangles - The One UFO Story that Really Gets Me

By now, readers of this blog should be able to guess that I find the Spooky Paradigm interesting for a couple of reasons, but that I definitely put it in a cultural frame. In other words, I find it most interesting as a culture, a community, a movement, a worldview, something along those lines. I write about it here from that perspective.

But I can't say I don't have opinions and ideas about the ideas in the Paradigm. And the one mystery associated with UFOs, the one that I simply cannot explain to my own satisfaction, is that of the Triangles. These are also called the Black Triangles, though given that many sightings are at night, this may be a difficult call.

Anyway, UFOs have come in a lot of different shapes through the years, and still continue to do so. Trends in the appearance of reported UFOs can be interesting, but simple statements do mask the diversity, and the persistence of supposedly "out-dated" reports of disc or cigar-shaped UFOs. But one trend that has been remarked on from time to time is the growing popularity of triangle-shaped UFOs. I don't know if more Triangles are reported than in the past, but they do seem to be involved in more multiple or even mass witness cases.

There are numerous cases, but the four famous Triangle cases that define the others are the Hudson Valley sightings (1983 - 1985, see the book Night Siege in the sidebar for details, put back in print in 2002 after being difficult to obtain), the Belgian sightings (March 30, 1990), the Phoenix Lights (March 13, 1997), and the Illinois "Cop" Case (January 5, 2000 documented at a great page at the UFO Evidence website). In these cases, black triangles (sometimes smaller, but usually much larger and typically described with "football fields" as a unit of measure) are sighted moving low and slow. They have lights, often with a red light in the center of the ventral side of the triangle, and then brighter lights near the corners. But in a number of cases a rainbow of lights is described along one of the narrow edges of the triangle.

These sightings have attracted a great deal of attention for many reasons. Again, there are individual sightings of the Triangles. But the cases listed above were all multiple witness sightings (including mass witness sightings by hundreds of people) over populated areas. In the case of the Belgian sightings and the Illinois case, government officials were involved (Belgian fighter jets were scrambled, most of the Illinois witnesses were police officers from several departments) and photographs were taken (here is an example on Lieve Peten's site). Someone looking for a nuts-and-bolts UFO report couldn't do much better than the Triangles, except perhaps to get a piece of one or some clear and sustained daytime imagery of one, preferably from multiple sources to discount Photoshopping.

One problem immediately rears its head: the sightings are so good, they are too good. Yes the cases are famous spawning television documentaries and books and mainstream news reporting. But as I quoted in a previous entry in this blog " if a conspiracy theory turns out to be correct, it is quickly re-labeled as investigative journalism"and this applies to the Triangles. Because they do have many of the characteristics of actual objects sighted by many people, including "credible" authorities, the reaction outside of the Spooky Paradigm is to admit the sightings may be of something real, but that it must be something exotic, but not too exotic.

Like experimental US military aircraft. This makes sense. The US was experimenting in the 1970s and on with black triangular aircraft as part of its stealth program. While none of the known US aircraft fly like the Triangles (in particular, slow or hovering low-altitude flight), perhaps the Triangles are something that hasn't been released to the public yet. Perhaps a stealth long-range transport ship. Perhaps using lighter-than-air, or even exotic antigravity technology. Perhaps the witnesses didn't understand exactly what they were seeing. This is the conclusion from a detailed study of the triangles by the National Institute for Discovery Science. (see also this page for various articles, maps, etc.). As with animal mutilations, they got interested in the Triangles as they seem to have more data to handle. Their conclusion was that the triangles may be experimental transport aircraft, and that they appear to cluster around airbases for transport and logistics (pdf here, jpg map here).

There are two problems with the experimental aircraft idea. The first is that ufologists can point to older cases of triangular sightings. Ok, but there does seem to be an upswing in sightings, and especially the impressive multi-witness sightings, starting around the time the Americans began building stealth craft and flying them out in Nevada at Groom Lake and other facilities (though these French sightings date to 1975-1976, when the F-117 was still a concept being worked out). Perhaps the earlier Triangles are not related to the post-1983 Triangles. There are only so many basic shapes that one could use to describe an unfamiliar object in the sky, and triangle is likely to come up. A rise in sightings of black triangular UFOs just at the time that the USAF starts flying secret black triangular planes is just a coincidence? Somewhat difficult to believe. So this I can live with.

What bothers me when I think about these reports is the time depth if this were a secret plane. It is a truism that secret planes typically stay secret for no more than a decade, and perhaps significantly less. This issue comes up with reports of the supposed Aurora, another mystery UFO of the stealth era. As discussed on the website of the Federation of American Scientists, Aurora is the label given to reports of a high-altitude, high-speed, sonic-boom generating triangular (hence why it is sometimes conflated with the low-altitude Black Triangles) aircraft. In both cases, sightings continued for a substantial period of time, but there is one major difference. Aurora sightings (and recording of sonic booms) are largely confined to the late 1980s and the early to mid 1990s. One could conceivably argue that Aurora was what so many think: a replacement for the SR-71 in the niche of the high-altitude high-speed reconnaissance and potentially strike aircraft. Perhaps some prototypes were created and flown, but ultimately the project was canceled, and the entire thing kept secret perhaps due to extravagant costs, spectacular failure, or scandalous corruption. Who knows, but this is a believable excuse for why the plane could have been in operation for half a decade and then disappeared behind National Security/Cover-Your-Ass.

But this explanation simply doesn't work for the Triangles. They have been sighted for more than two decades (here is a multi-witness sightings in Venezuela from last month) so far with no end in sight. And if they are advanced transport aircraft, there have been enough American wars and military actions that one would imagine they would have been used. And if they are so secret for decades, why fly them over populated areas, in some cases multiple times over the course of a year or more as in the Hudson Valley case?

Historian Richard Dolan wrote a good and more detailed essay similar to this one for the National Institute for Discovery Science, back in 2003. While I am sure I must have read this essay, I forgot about it until tonight. Yes, we agree on a number of points, and reach some similar conclusions. But where Dolan suggests a possible ET origin for some of the Triangles due to lack of disclosure as a military craft, I take his other suggestion as more likely. That the reports are indeed of structured non-ET craft, perhaps stealthy, perhaps for transport. But the continued secrecy points to a very different kind of relationship between whoever flies the craft, the federal government, and the American people. Or as Dolan puts it, a "shadow government." Such a craft would clearly have value in a war, say by rapidly deploying troops and equipment in difficult to reach places (such as Afghanistan in 2001, or Northern Iraq in 2003). But no such craft has emerged, nor have stories by soldiers of having ridden in or unloaded such craft.

If these obvious cases for using the Triangles didn't unveil them, then what are they being saved for? This is where, as Dolan notes, things start to get dark. Quiet craft able to deploy military or police forces, and being tested and flown around urban areas? Developed by someone in the US government but not used to fight its wars? This starts to lead to disturbing ideas to say the least.

And hence this post. The Triangles confound easy explanation as hoaxes or folklore. They seem to exist. They certainly sound like something a military would, and possibly could, create. And in fact they look at least something like recent creations for the US Air Force, though with major differences. Yet for decades they haven't been revealed as such, even when their use could have won wars or saved lives (imagine a black triangle descending on the Convention Center in New Orleans in September 2005, rescuing hundreds of the trapped and dehydrated people, continuously ferrying everyone out in the course of some hours). This might lead some to suggest a non-human explanation for what appear to be structured mechanical air craft, while it would lead others to think about a military or intelligence organization that has such aircraft, but is not beholden to the will of the people and their elected representatives.

Either option disturbs me.

Source: Spooky Paradigm
http://spookyparadigm.blogspot.com/2006/12/triangles-one-ufo-story-that-really.html

- NEVER INVITED TO FAMILY REUNIONS DEPARTMENT -

Did Jesus Have A Secret Family?

Deep in the wilderness of the Judean desert, in a remote part of the Holy Land which has changed little since Biblical times, there stands an ancient Greek Orthodox monastery with a highly unusual portrait of the Holy Family hidden in its chapel.

Showing the young Jesus being carried on the shoulder of Joseph, while his mother Mary rides behind them, it appears similar at first to the thousands of other such images painted over the centuries.

This is a picture you are unlikely to see on any Christmas card, however, for next to Jesus, Mary and Joseph there is a mysterious fourth figure - a young man with a golden halo who is wearing a simple dark robe and carrying his belongings on a stick.

His name is James and, according to a controversial Channel 4 documentary screened on Christmas Day, his inclusion in this picture is a clue to a real-life church conspiracy as disturbing as anything dreamed up by Dan Brown in his bestselling religious thriller, The Da Vinci Code.

In that novel, Brown speculates that Christ was married to his loyal follower Mary Magdalene and that they had a daughter together. However, it seems the novelist may have missed the point.

According to Monday's programme, Jesus did have a hidden family, but they were not a wife and daughter - rather his brothers and sisters: James, Joses, Simon, Jude ( sometimes referred to as Judas), Salome and young Mary.

These secret siblings apparently played a crucial role in the founding of Christianity, but their teachings proved too dangerous for the official church.

Taking over their movement, it tried to eradicate them from history by rewriting Christ's life story, fabricating his place of birth, falsely crediting him with creating the Lord's Prayer and even inventing the idea that his mother Mary remained a virgin throughout her life.

Presented by Dr Robert Beckford, a committed Christian and reader in theology at Oxford Brookes University, the claims will outrage many Christians and particularly Roman Catholics, for whom the idea that Mary was a perpetual virgin is a key part of their faith.

However, Dr Beckford says the Bible supports his arguments.

For evidence that Mary had other children besides Jesus, he points to the Gospel of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament.

This describes Christ preaching at the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth where the citizens question his claim to be the new Messiah.

"Is not this the carpenter's son? Isn't his mother called Mary, and his brothers James, Joses, Simon and Judas?" they demand. "And are not his sisters here with us?"

Christ's family are also mentioned in the next gospel, in which St Mark relates how they go searching for him one day when he is preaching.

"A multitude was sitting around him and they told him: 'Behold your Mother, your brothers and your sisters are outside looking for you.' "

Over the centuries, theologians have concocted various theories to explain away these references. The most common is the view accepted by the monks of the St Gerasimos monastery which houses that intriguing painting of the Holy Family.

They do not know who painted the picture or when, only that it dates back many hundreds of years, but they are clear about the relationship of James to Jesus.

They believe Joseph was a widower who had children from his first marriage when he met Mary and that James and his siblings are only Jesus's half-brothers and sisters.

If true, this could explain why there are so few pictures of these shadowy half-siblings who, as relatively minor figures, would not have merited inclusion in those pictures which illustrated the most important people and events in Jesus's life.

However, Dr Beckford has a more sinister theory as to why the glimpse of James in the St Gerasimos picture is so rare. He believes that the early clerics suppressed such portraits because they knew these were Jesus's full-blood brothers and sisters.

The same censorship is apparent in the Gospels, he argues. As we have seen, both Matthew and Mark mention Jesus's family briefly, but although the Gospel of Luke drew heavily on these earlier works, it does not mention any other children of Mary and Joseph.

Dr Beckford maintains that the reasons for this censorship can be found in a vicious power struggle among the early Christians in the years after Christ's death in approximately 33AD.

The Gospel of John suggests that Jesus asked his disciple Peter to take care of his flock and, indeed, it is Peter who is traditionally regarded as the first leader of the Christian church.

Yet at least four different documents written by reputable historians of the time, but not included in the Bible, suggest that Christ wanted his eldest brother James, and not Peter, to lead his church.

This is clear from the writings of Hegesippus, a respected early chronicler of the Christian faith, who is believed to have lived between 110AD and 180AD.

"The succession of the church passed to James, the brother of the Lord," he said.

As the first Bishop of Jerusalem, James had an arch-rival in the apostle Paul, whose teachings differed from his in one key respect: the issue of whether Jesus really was the son of God.

Like Jesus, James was a Jew and, in line with Old Testament prophecies, he believed that Jesus was an ordinary man chosen by God to lead his people. This was very different to the idea championed by Paul that Jesus was a divine being, born of God himself.

Although Paul never met Jesus and based his beliefs on a series of mystical visions, his ideas quickly gained popularity as more and more Gentiles joined the movement and the Jewish-Christians led by James soon found themselves outnumbered.

Then the Jewish-Christians suffered two very serious setbacks.

In the year 62AD, James was stoned to death on the orders of the Jewish High Priest of the temple in Jerusalem, who was jealous of his influence.

Just five years later, the Romans captured Jerusalem and destroyed the great temple itself, robbing James's followers of their headquarters and the focus of their faith.

Parading the temple's sacred treasures through the streets of Rome, the marauders sold off the looted gold to pay for the building of their city's most famous landmark - the Coliseum.

The downfall of James's Jewish Christianity was complete, and when the Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Holy Roman Empire in the 4th century AD and the church fathers began to compile the New Testament, they set about obscuring the existence of James and Jesus's other brothers and sisters.

At the same time, many of Paul's teachings became enshrined in official church doctrine, including the belief that salvation could be achieved through faith in Jesus Christ as the son of God.

According to Dr Beckford, this idea was perhaps more palatable to the establishment because it could be interpreted, wrongly, to mean that the rich and powerful could redeem themselves through this belief alone, without any need to change their lifestyle.

Having settled on this doctrine, Dr Beckford believes that the church then began altering the details of Christ's life to support the idea that he was a divine being.

He says there is virtually no evidence in the Bible for the assertion that Mary was a perpetual virgin, but the early church elevated her to this status since it seemed more fitting for the mother of God.

They also set about changing the circumstances of the Nativity itself.

For 2,000 years, the traditional Christmas story has related how Jesus was born in Bethlehem near Jerusalem, after Mary and Joseph travelled there from Nazareth to register for a Roman census.

However, Bethlehem is 90 miles away from Nazareth, and Dr Beckford questions whether a woman who was nine months pregnant could really have undertaken this arduous four-day journey on a donkey.

He points out that there is another town called Bethlehem which is in Galilee. In 1992, building works there revealed the ruins of a 6th-century church - built on top of the kind of natural cave in which many scholars believe Christ was born.

Since this Bethlehem is only four miles from Nazareth, Dr Beckford believes this cave is more likely to have been the genuine site of the Nativity, but that the church fathers had good reason to suggest that Christ's birth took place in its now celebrated namesake instead.

In this, they were fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy which stated that the new Messiah would be a descendant of King David, and this meant he had to be born in the same town as David - in the Bethlehem near Jerusalem.

In their attempts to establish Christ's divinity, Dr Beckford claims that the early church fathers also played down the role of one of the most important figures in the Christian movement, the prophet John the Baptist.

He cites the passage in the Gospel of Luke which introduces the Lord's Prayer. "He was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him: 'Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.' "

This translation from the Greek suggests that the disciples are referring to the act of praying in general but it could equally be interpreted to mean: "Teach us the prayer that John taught his disciples."

The idea that John was the creator of the Lord's Prayer raises a possibility which was unacceptable to the early church and which remains unacceptable for many Christians today: that John was Jesus's teacher rather than Jesus being John's teacher.

According to Dr Beckford, the Bible editors did all they could to reject this notion, as is apparent in the Biblical accounts of Jesus's baptism.

The fact that John baptised Jesus is clear from the Gospel of Mark, the first to be written. But Matthew, the second oldest gospel, introduces a line in which John protests that he is unworthy of this task, while the other gospel writers, Luke and John, make no mention of John the Baptist's role at all.

Like Dr Beckford's other ideas, this will no doubt be the subject of scholarly debate for many centuries to come. However, he insists that, away from the ivory towers of academia, his arguments have a very real significance for how Christians live their lives today.

In emphasising the belief that Jesus was God's son, he warns that Christianity risks losing sight of its original message, as preached by James.

This focused on the need to serve God not only through abstract worship and prayer, but also in our everyday actions, and this is perhaps something we should remind ourselves of as we prepare to celebrate Christ's birth once again this Christmas.

In that way, although it is difficult to imagine a time when James and Jesus's other brothers and sisters will be depicted on Christmas cards or portrayed in Nativity plays, we can perhaps acknowledge their legacy and restore to them the place in history which, it seems, they have been denied for so long.

Source: The Daily Mail
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=424435&in_
page_id=1770

- THE EVOLUTION OF A MYTH DEPARTMENT -

The Chupacabras: A Psychological Test Come To Life?

Reading Greg�s post about what, exactly, the U.S. Government knows or doesn�t know about UFOs, reminded me of something else tangentially related: namely, the issue of whether or not some UFO-related stories are actually the creation of Government agencies themselves.

I delved into this area deeply in my Body Snatchers in the Desert book, and there�s little doubt that the military - in the late 40s and 50s - actively encouraged the spreading of bogus crashed UFO accounts. But it�s the Chupacabras that I want to discuss today.

The Chupacabras - Puerto Rico�s most famous, blood-sucking, killing-machine - is one of those cross-over mysteries that seems to have as much relevance to cryptozoology as it does to ufology. In other words, some see the beast as an unknown animal; while others suggest it has its origins with �them� - the �aliens.� But what if it was neither? What if the Chupacabras originated with the U.S. Government?

Now, before we go any further, I am not proposing that the Chupacabras is - as some have suggested - the product of some bizarre, government-sponsored �genetic experiment.� I think such possibilities are complete rubbish, and would be more at home within the pages of a bad sci-fi novel. But here is something that I do think is worth exploring further:

I have made a number of trips to Puerto Rico looking for the Chupacabras - most recently in late 2005 with Paul Kimball and his film crew. On every occasion, I have heard tales and rumors that there is no Chupacabras - at all. But, rather, that the original, first-wave of stories were spread and perpetuated by U.S. military psychological warfare planners who had an interest in determining the psychological effects of superstitions on localized populations - in the event that such effects needed to be exploited in regional, third-world warfare. And, so the stories go, Puerto Rico - as a self-contained island that could be easily watched - offered the best target-location for the creation of a modern day myth, and to monitor the effects of that same modern day myth on the populace, determine how rumors spread, and gauge how superstitious locals could be manipulated, if such circumstances were deemed necessary.

Now, I know people will say: �Well, people have seen the Chupacabras.� Granted, that�s true. But bear with me. Consider the facts: the Chupacabras is known predominantly for killing animals and draining them of blood. They don�t call it the Goat-Sucker for nothing. Indeed, many believe that monster-borne vampirism is wildly on the loose in Puerto Rico.

It transpires, however, that vampirism and the U.S. Government are not exactly strangers. Take the case of Major General Edward G. Lansdale. Born in 1908, Lansdale served with the Office of Strategic Services in WW2; in 1945 he was transferred to HQ Air Forces Western Pacific in the Philippines; and, in 1957, he received a posting to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, working as Deputy Assistant to the SoD for �Special Operations.� And that is merely the tip of the iceberg - Lansdale had a truly extraordinary career.

But, it�s something that occurred in the 1950s that I want to discuss with you: at the specific request of President Elpidio Quirino, Lansdale was assigned to the Joint United States Military Assistance Group to provide assistance and guidance in the field of Intelligence to the Philippine Army, as the latter sought to squash an uprising by Communist �Huk� rebels.

And it was while lending assistance to President Quirino that Lansdale had the bright idea of exploiting a local legend for psychological warfare purposes - namely that of the deadly Asuang Vampire.

In his own words, Lansdale woud later say: �To the superstitious, the Huk battleground was a haunted place filled with ghosts and eerie creatures. A combat psywar squad was brought in. It planted stories among town residents of an Asuang living on the hill where the Huks were based. Two nights later, after giving the stories time to make their way up to the hill camp, the psywar squad set up an ambush along the trail used by the Huks. When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man of the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed that the Asuang had got him and that one of them would be next if they remained on that hill. When daylight came, the whole Huk squadron moved out of the vicinity.�

And, as a result, key, strategic ground was taken out of the hands of the Huk rebels.

Now, one doesn�t have to be a genius to see the similarities between the events on the Philippines in the 1950s and the stories that have circulated about the predatory activities of the Chupacabras on Puerto Rico. But, what about those people who claim to have seen the Chupacabras? �Surely,� you might be saying to yourself, �Nick isn�t seriously suggesting that the U.S. Government has Navy Seals running around the island in Chupacabras-stye special-effects-suits to scare the locals?�

Nope, I�m not. But what I am suggesting as a possibility is this: that when the Chupacabras craze really kicked off on Puerto Rico in the mid-1990s and gripped the minds of the population, what may well originally have been some form of U.S. psychological warfare operation mutated into something else; something far stranger.

What if the intense, collective belief in, and fear of, the Chupacabras that certainly existed in the mind�s of the Puerto Rican population at the height of the controversy, actually gave birth to a Tulpa-style �Mind-Monster�? Is it possible that what began as an ingenious psychological warfare operation inadvertently led to the creation of a �semi-real� entity of killing-machine proportions, and that has come to be known - and seen - as the Chupacabras? I think it is.

Source: UFO Mystic/Nick Redfern
http://www.ufomystic.com/the-redfern-files/
the-chupacabras-a-psychological-test-come-to-life/

- MESSAGES FROM THE BIRD PEOPLE DEPARTMENT -

The Other Mystery of Easter Island

Easter Island is branded into popular consciousness as the home of the mysterious and towering moai statues, but these are not the only curiosity the South Pacific island holds. Where the moai are fascinating for their unknown purpose and mysterious craftsmen, the island's lost language of Rongorongo is equally perplexing. The unique written language seems to have appeared suddenly in the 1700s, but within just two centuries it was exiled to obscurity.

Known as Rapa Nui to the island's inhabitants, Rongorongo is a writing system comprised of pictographs. It has been found carved into many oblong wooden tablets and other artifacts from the island's history. The art of writing was not known in any nearby islands and the script�s mere existence is sufficient to confound anthropologists. The most plausible explanation so far has been that the Easter Islanders were inspired by the writing they observed in 1770 when the Spanish claimed the island. However, despite its recency, no linguist or archaeologist has been able to successfully decipher the Rongorongo language.

When early Europeans discovered Easter Island, its somewhat isolated ecosystem was suffering from the effects of limited natural resources, deforestation, and overpopulation. Over the following years the island's population of four thousand or so was slowly eroded by Western disease and deportation by slave traders. By 1877, only about one hundred and ten inhabitants remained. Rongorongo was one victim of these circumstances. The colonizers of Easter Island had decided that the strange language was too closely tied to the inhabitants' pagan past, and forbade it as a form of communication. Missionaries forced the inhabitants to destroy the tablets with Rongorongo inscriptions.

In 1864, Father Joseph Eyraud became the first non-islander to record Rongorongo. Writing before the ultimate decline of the Eastern Island society, he noted that "one finds in all the houses wooden tables or staffs covered with sorts of hieroglyphs." Despite his interest in the subject, he was not able to find an Islander willing to translate the texts. The islanders were understandably reluctant to help, given that the Europeans forcefully suppressed the use of their native writing.

Some time later, Bishop Florentin Jaussen of Tahiti attempted to translate the texts. A young Easter Islander named Metero claimed to be able to read Rongorongo, and for fifteen days the bishop kept a record while the boy dictated from the inscriptions. Bishop Jaussen gave up the effort when he realized that Metero was a fraud; the boy had assigned several meanings to the same symbol.

In 1886 Paymaster William Thompson of the ship USS Mohican became interested in the pictographic system during a journey to collect artifacts for the National Museum in Washington. He had obtained two rare tablets engraved with the script and was curious about their meaning. He asked eighty-three-year-old islander Ure Va�e Iko for assistance in translation because his age made him more likely to have knowledge of the language. The man reluctantly admitted to knowing what the tablets said, but did not wish to break the orders of the missionaries. As a result, Ure Va�e Iko refused to touch the tablets, let alone decipher them.

Thompson was determined, however, and decided that Ure Va'e Iko might be more forthcoming under the influence of alcohol. After having a few drinks kindly provided by Thompson, the Easter Islander looked at the tablets once again. The old man burst into song, singing a fertility chant which described the mating of gods and goddesses. William Thompson and his companions quickly took down his words. This was potentially a big breakthrough, but Thomson struggled with assigning words to the pictographs. Furthermore, he couldn't find another Islander who was willing to confirm the accuracy of this translation. While Thompson was ultimately unable to read Rongorongo, the translation that Iko provided has remained one of the most valuable clues on how to decipher the tablets.

In the following decades, many scholars have attempted to make sense of this mystery. In 1932, Wilhelm de Hevesy tried to link Rongorongo to the Indus script of the Indus Valley Civilization in India, claiming that as many as forty Rongorongo symbols had a correlating symbol in the script from India. Further examination found this link to be much more superficial than originally believed. In the 1950s, Thomas Barthel became one of the first linguists of the modern era to make a study of Rongorongo. He stated that system contained 120 basic elements that, when combined, formed 1500 different signs. Furthermore, he asserted that the symbols represented both objects and ideas. This made it more difficult to produce a translation because an individual symbol could potentially represent an entire phrase. Barthel was successful, however, in identifying an artifact known as the Mamri tablet as a lunar calendar.

Some of the most recent research has been conducted by a linguist named Steven Fischer. Having studied nearly every surviving example of Rongorongo, he took particular interest in a four-foot-long scepter that had once been the property of an Easter Island Chief. The artifact is covered in pictographs, and Fischer noticed that every third symbol on this staff has an additional "phallus-like" symbol attached to it. This led Fischer to believe that all Rongorongo texts have a structure steeped in counts of three, or triads. He has also studied Ure Va�e Iko's fertility chant, which lent additional support to the concept. Iko had always named a god first, his goddess mate second, and their offspring third. Fischer has also tried to make the claim that all Rongorongo texts relate creation myths. Looking at another text, he has suggested that a sentence with a symbol of a bird, a fish, and a sun reads "All the birds copulated with fish: there issued forth the sun." While this could be the translation, it bears little resemblance to Ure Va'e Iko's chant about the matings of gods and goddesses.

Rongorongo naturally commands a great deal of interest from linguists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. Only twenty-five texts are know to have survived. Should anyone find a workable translation for Rongorongo, the knowledge stored on the remaining tablets might explain the mysterious statues of Easter Island, the sudden appearance of the written language, and the island's history and customs as whole. However, much like the statues which have so captivated popular imagination, Rongorongo has so far defied all attempts at explanation.

Source: Damn Interesting
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=710#more-710