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- OMENS OF THINGS TO COME DEPARTMENT -

Ancient UFOs On A Deadly Mission

UFO sightings are the stuff of science fiction and as such it would be a reasonable assumption that they are modern phenomena. But this is not necessarily the case.

In Welsh folklore, for example, there are examples of "tan-we", strange lights which would come down from the heavens and land near houses where people were doomed to die.

Once strongly believed in Wales were Corpse Candles (Cannwyllau Corff), supernatural lights said to appear in the homes of the dying or be seen floating down country lanes at night, making their way to the parish burial ground along the same route subsequently taken by a funeral.

One year the area around Barmouth became famous for mysterious lights in the sky - what today we might call UFOs, but which the inhabitants back then considered death omens. The Barmouth lights achieved a lot more attention than the usual stories because they coincided with a major religious revival.

In 1905 national newspaper reporters descended on the seaside town - cynically, no doubt, expecting to write about a bunch of superstitious peasants in the back of beyond. But many returned to London impressed with the UFO-like phenomena described by reliable witnesses.

Of these, there are two well-attested accounts of sightings of mysterious lights which, in both cases, appeared to predict a death.

In the first a party of people walking on the south side of the Mawddach estuary saw a strange light at the ferry house of Penrhyn. One description has it that the light appeared to be inside the cottage and shining through the windows; the other that it shone outside the house and was similar in appearance to the glow of a bonfire. At any rate, the light had vanished by the time they reached the ferry house.

When they returned to Barmouth, they learnt people there had seen the light, too. A few nights afterwards, the man who lived at the cottage fell into the estuary at high tide while stepping off a boat, and drowned.

The second incident took place that same winter. Lights were seen dancing in the air by people on both banks of the estuary. At Borthwyn or Borthwnog - depending on which account you read - many people gathered to watch the lights.

After a while all but one of them disappeared. This one descended to a little bay where some boats were moored, and some men in a sloop which was anchored there also saw it. The light hovered over one particular boat and then vanished. Days later the man to whom that boat belonged drowned in Barmouth harbour.

Source: ICNorthWales
http://icnorthwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/regionalnews/tm_objectid=
15709602&method=full&siteid=50142&headline=ancient-ufos-on-a-deadly
-mission--name_page.html

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- LOOK, UP IN THE SKY DEPARTMENT -

Fake UFOs to Illuminate North Carolina Countryside at Free Event

Asheville, N.C. -- Joshua P. Warren, host of the paranormal show "Speaking of Strange" on AM 570 WWNC, is producing the "Speaking of Strange UFO Experience." It's a cookout, free to the public, where paranormal experts will socialize then, after dark, release fake UFOs into the sky.

The creator of the best craft, created from helium and light sources like glow sticks, will win a prize pack, including access to a private ghost hunt with L.E.M.U.R., Warren's paranormal research team. Warren invites observers who simply want to enjoy the spectacle, as well as participants in the contest.

The event starts at 5pm on Saturday, August 13, 2005, at the Community Center in Barnardsville, North Carolina, 15-20 minutes north of Asheville. Though a grill is available, attendees must bring their own food, beverages, and accessories, and those who construct a UFO must supply all their own materials, including helium-filled balloons. The contest is open to everyone. Though free, donations are appreciated to help pay for the location.

"This event serves two purposes," says Warren, whose show airs Saturday nights, 7-9pm, on the no-1 rated talk station in the region. "Seeing creative fake UFOs will help us rule out fakes when analyzing UFO pictures and footage. Secondly, it's just going to be downright fun; a chance to meet with new people who share an interest in the unknown and see a fascinating light-show. If you haven't seen an actual UFO, this should at least give you the experience to some degree."

Warren has seen and videotaped genuine UFOs during L.E.M.U.R. investigations. His work has been featured on the History Channel, Discovery, and Travel Channel. His last book, "How to Hunt Ghosts" was published by Simon and Schuster, his book "Haunted Asheville" is a regional best-seller, and L.E.M.U.R. made the cover of a science journal, "Electric Space Craft," last year due to their groundbreaking research on the mysterious Brown Mountain Lights near Morganton, North Carolina.

For more information on the "Speaking of Strange UFO Experience" visit:
http://www.SpeakingOfStrange.com

- CLASSIC UFO CASE DEPARTMENT -

Charles Hickson Says He Will Never Get Over UFO Experience

GAUTIER -- UFOs. Real or imaginary?

There's the Hollywood version and then there's Charles Hickson of Gautier.

Hickson and fishing partner, Calvin Parker, were near a pier at Shaupeter Shipyard in Pascagoula on the evening of Oct. 11, 1973, when they reported being abducted by robot-like aliens and taken aboard an egg-shaped, glowing spacecraft.

Their account of that night is the type stuff movies should be made of.

They spoke of floating creatures and being examined by an electronic eye, within an approximate 20-minute time frame. Hickson remained conscious but could only move his eyes. Parker fainted.

Hickson was recently interviewed at his Gautier home following the release of "War of the Worlds," a present-day retelling of H.G. Wells' classic, sci-fi adventure thriller that reveals the extraordinary battle for the future of humankind through the eyes of one American family fighting to survive it.

"Some of the movies they make now I watch, some I don't. They're not what Calvin and I went through with. They are make-believe. What happened to us is a natural fact," Hickson said. "I notice here lately, they've been having a lot of UFO programs on the History Channel."

Hollywood touts several variations of alien-life. Hickson, at 74, has not deviated from accounts he has given to local police, government investigators, television commentators such as Dick Cavett and Johnny Carson, or anyone else who has asked.

Under hypnosis, he recalled seeing human-like beings aboard the craft.

"Evidently they couldn't live in our atmosphere and had the robots come out and handle us," he said. Hickson believes the aliens will return.

"They are still having UFO sightings around the world," he said. "I still get letters from people all over the whole world who tell me things they went through. Some of them won't talk to anybody else about it."

The fear, sleepless nights, inability to eat, afraid of the outdoors -- emanating from that night -- are long gone and in some ways, so has the close relationship shared with Parker.

"They didn't do me any physical harm. They give me a bad fright. They gave Calvin a heck of a fright. In fact, I don't think he will ever get over it," Hickson said. Parker, then 19, left Jackson County.

"I don't know what the answer is. I may never find an answer during my lifetime. Everybody has to have their own beliefs. I think some day in the near future, people will know there are other worlds with life on them because we are going farther and farther with space exploration. We've got probes around Mars and Jupiter," he said.

Over the years, Hickson has received letters from others who said they, too, saw the craft that night.

"They didn't want to be ridiculed," he said.

Mike Cataldo, a retired Navy chief petty officer now living in Florida, contacted The Mississippi Press a couple of years ago.

"We saw it, no question about it. We talked about it. Was it a shooting star, a meteorite? This was very different," he said. "As quickly as we saw it, it just vanished."

Hickson has since published a book of the account, "UFO: Contact at Pascagoula." The $15 hardback can be purchased by calling Hickson at (228) 497-4753.

"Everywhere I go and I've been to many big colleges and universities all over the country and they've never ridiculed me at all. They've been very interested. They want to ask questions. They are eager to learn. I think they realize some day they will have to cope with that. It's something I will never get over," he said.

A year ago, Hickson lost his wife, Blanche. They celebrated 50 years of marriage prior to her death. Back surgery keeps him from traveling a lot but he still keeps in touch through e-mail, television, phone and postal service.

"I think there are many, many worlds out there. Some with life on it. God didn't only create this little earth. He created this universe and I don't know how many beyond this. They say that it's still expanding so I guess there's no end to it out there, I suppose," he said.

Source: The Mississippi Press
http://www.gulflive.com/news/mississippipress/index.ssf?/base/news/
112038576037120.xml

- WHO WAS HERE FIRST DEPARTMENT -

Footprints of 'first Americans'

Human settlers made it to the Americas 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to new evidence.

A team of scientists came to this controversial conclusion by dating human footprints preserved by volcanic ash in an abandoned quarry in Mexico.

They say the first Americans may have arrived by sea, rather than by foot.

The traditional view is that the continent's early settlers arrived around 11,000 years ago, by crossing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska.

Details of the latest findings were unveiled at the UK Royal Society's Summer Science Exhibition.

Dr Silvia Gonzalez of Liverpool's John Moores University and her colleagues found the footprints in the quarry, some 130km (80 miles) south-east of Mexico City, in 2003. But they have only finished dating them this year.

The footprints were preserved as trace fossils in volcanic ash along what was the shoreline of an ancient volcanic lake. They were soon covered in more ash and lake sediments and, when water levels rose, became as solid as concrete.

Dr Gonzalez was under no illusions that the finding would be controversial: "It's going to be an archaeological bomb," she told the BBC News website, "and we're up for a fight."

The team used several methods to date a variety of material from the site near Puebla, Mexico, in order to be sure they were right about the age.

"We have materials that have been dated below the footprint layer, the footprint layer itself and on top of the footprint layer. Everything is making sense," said Dr Gonzalez.

The researchers used radiocarbon dating on shells and animal bones in the sequences and dated mammoth teeth by a technique called electron spin resonance. The sediments themselves were dated by optically stimulated luminescence.

"Some lake sediments were incorporated into the ash and were baked. They look like small fragments of brick and these were the ones we dated in the footprint layer. They gave us a result of 38,000 years," Dr Gonzalez.

Under the traditional view, humans trekked from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge that linked these land masses at the end of the last ice age (between about 10,000 and 12,500 years ago).

Central to the theory, called the Clovis First model, are Clovis points - the tools these settlers used to hunt large beasts, or megafauna, such as mammoths and mastodons.

"The existence of 40,000-year-old human footprints in Mexico means that the Clovis First model of human occupation can no longer be accepted as the first evidence of human presence in the Americas," said co-investigator David Huddart, of Liverpool John Moores.

Dr Michael Faught, an expert in early American archaeology, was reserving judgment until evidence was published: "It would be significant if it were demonstrated, but usually those (early) sites don't hold up well," he told the BBC News website.

But, he added: "There's more and more evidence that Alaska was not the only place people came into the continent."

Dr Gonzalez is a proponent of the Coastal Migration Theory. This proposes that people arrived on the west coast in boats, hugging the coastline from North to South.

But where these settlers came from is still a mystery, she says. Some have proposed that the earliest humans to reach the continent could have come from south-east Asia or even Australia.

Genetic studies of present-day Native American populations support a recent arrival from north-east Asia, which agrees well with an entry through the Beringian land bridge at the end of the last Ice Age.

Dr Gonzalez suggests that the earliest settlers may have become extinct, leaving no genetic legacy today. She thinks these hunters may have been highly mobile, living in small groups, perhaps explaining why they left scant trace of their presence.

Dr Gonzalez and ancient DNA expert Alan Cooper, of the University of Adelaide in Australia, have managed to extract genetic material from three molars belonging to Peñon Woman III, a 13,000-year-old partial skeleton from Mexico. The analysis is still underway.

Source: BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4650307.stm

At approximately 11pm the night of October 5, 1967, an object was sighted in the dark sky above the roadway leading to Shag Harbour. RCMP received their first report from Laurie Wicken, who had been driving along the road with four friends when the object appeared above and in front of his car. They could see four flashing lights and determined the object was descending, likely to land in the harbour. Wicken followed the lights, eventually ending up at the shore of the Sound, a body of water adjacent to Shag Harbour.

As the five occupants left the car and approached the water, they noticed that the flashing lights had stopped and that the object was on the water, or just above it with a single pale yellow light. They estimated that the object was about 800 feet away.

It was a short drive to Woods Harbour where there was a pay phone. Wicken drove there to call RCMP and report a downed aircraft. The Corporal on duty treated the call with suspicion but after Wicken's call, more reports came in confirming the first report. The Corporal rang the phone booth, telling Wicken to meet officers on their way to investigate.

Thus began the tale of Shag Harbour and the subsequent investigation.

With the arrival of the RCMP officers, rescue efforts were of prime concern as they assumed the object was an aircraft. While one officer went to contact the Rescue Center in Halifax, the Corporal tried to round up local fishermen and head out by boat. In the short time since they arrived, the object was beginning to go under.

The first boats out would find nothing but a slick of foam in the area where the object had been seen. The slick stretched half a mile, was about 80 feet wide and three to four inches thick. It was reported that the foam smelled like sulphur, and that bubbles boiled up from below the surface of the water. After an hour of searching, the Coast Guard arrived only to inform the RCMP that they had learned all military and civilian aircraft were accounted for. No planes were missing! The search continued until 3am and then resumed the following morning with still no sign of the craft.

Maritime Command ordered out seven divers to investigate from HMCS Granby. They investigated the site for two days before calling the search off and announcing that, "nothing was recovered or found."

The RCAF, and the RCMP both classed the case as a crashed Unidentified Flying Object and assumed that was it over.

Shag Harbour was not about to be forgotten.

There was no answer as to what happened that night in 1967 or how so many people saw the object. One thing for certain, is the documentation and paper trail that exists. The witness list includes three RCMP officers, an Air Canada Captain, local residents and fishermen along the Nova Scotia coast. They are considered, pretty reliable witnesses. None of the original reports by citizens termed the object a UFO. It was the Air Force and the RCMP who used the term. CFS Barrington was not far from Shag Harbour and was an important military base, part of the NORAD Defense System. This may account for an unusual occurrence such as the one witnessed, and have a military explanation.

Rumours and stories abound, as some residents claim a second search under the waters near Shag Harbour, was carried out. One version has items retrieved from the crash site, while another says the craft was observed, and following repairs seen leaving on the 11th of October.

Your guess is as good as anyone's, but one thing is for sure, the government is not likely to tell us anytime soon if they found something or where it came from.

TALLINN - It??�s kind of an unwritten rule in Estonia - if you want to see something weird, go to the islands. Chalk it up to geographic isolation or the celebrated beer brewing traditions of some islanders, but it??�s on these outlying patches of land that the nation keeps all the assorted bits that don??�t fit anywhere else - emu farms, mysterious clusters of stones, allegedly haunted manor houses and villages that appear stuck in time.

One of the most famous of these curiosities is the Kaali meteor crater site on Estonia??�s largest island, Saaremaa, 18km from its capital Kuressaare.

Now resembling a small, round lake, the main crater was formed sometime between 7,500 and 4,000 years ago when a 20-80 ton iron meteorite slammed into the Earth, carving out a hole 110m across. Pieces also broke off the meteor as it entered the atmosphere, spraying the land like a shotgun blast and creating eight smaller craters nearby.

By itself this cluster of meteorite craters is already interesting enough to attract thousands of curious visitors each summer, but let??�s remember that this is an Estonian island phenomenon, so the X-Files factor gets cranked up a few notches. To the site??�s resume we can also add pagan worship, ritual animal sacrifice, appearances in the Finnish national epic, the possible origin of Jaanipaev traditions and connections to a former Estonian president.

With a track record like this, it??�s no wonder the site??�s popularity as a tourist destination shows no sign of waning. On June 17, a brand new, 9 million kroon (575,000 euro) visitor center was inaugurated in Kaali to help provide for the hoards of visitors who flock here during the high season.

Tuuli Partel, Project Leader of the non-profit organization that runs the center, isn??�t surprised that she and other employees in Kaali find themselves working 12 to 16-hour shifts.

???Scientists say that this is the most attractive crater in Eurasia. Here you can see the main crater and little craters all together, and see how the meteorite came down,??? she said.

Apart from its museum of meteoritics and limestone, the 700 square-meter wood and dolomite facility features a souvenir shop, a food shop, a 60-person conference hall, a 10-room guesthouse and that most vital of Estonian creature comforts: wireless internet access.

Despite all this public attention, the new high-tech facility and nearly a century of intense scientific scrutiny, there are many secrets that Kaali still isn??�t giving up, and it??�s those unknowns that make this place truly mysterious.

Scientists are fairly sure they know how this story began: a meteor initially weighing some 400 - 10,000 tons sped in from the northeast moving 15 - 45 kilometers per second and entered the Earth??�s atmosphere at a 45-degree angle. After turning into a fireball and losing most of its mass, the meteor broke apart about 5 - 10 kilometers from the surface, then hit Saaremaa with a force that has been compared to that of a small atomic blast.

What they still can??�t tell us is when this all happened. The evidence, at least for now, points in two different directions.

???We usually give two dates - ???4,000 years??� and ???older??�,??? said Reet Tiirmaa, a geologist with Tallinn Technological University who specializes in meteors.

???The age of the sediments of the lake in the main crater tell us that the [impact] was almost 4,000 years ago. But now we??�ve studied the peat of the [nearby] swamp and in one layer we found very small impact spheres from the explosion. This layer was 7,500 years old, which says that the impact was 7,500 years ago,??? she said.

Research continues, but the age contradiction shows no sign of being resolved. Scientists from France, Poland and Hungary have brought in more advanced testing equipment, but they??�re having the same problems, according to Tiirmaa.

Nor is this the first headache that Kaali has caused for investigators. In 1927, the site??�s pioneer researcher, Ivan Reinwald, found evidence that the craters were meteoric in origin, but it took him an entire decade to find the first fragments of the actual meteor to prove it.

While geologists are working on the question of when the meteor hit, archaeologists are trying to interpret the oddities they??�ve dug up at the site. Excavations begun in the 1970s have uncovered many interesting things: remains of a 470 meter wall that surrounded the crater during the early iron age (600 BC to AD 100), evidence of a fortified settlement inhabited from the 5th to 7th century BC, a small hoard of silver jewelry from the 3rd to 5th centuries AD, and piles of domestic animal bones, some dating to as late as the 17th century.

The wall, the silver and the bones have led to speculation that centuries after the catastrophic explosion took place, the crater took on the role of a pagan worship site. The practice of sacrificing animals to ensure a good harvest was known to have continued on Saaremaa well into Christian times, despite condemnation from the church.

The local geographical labels add fuel to this pagan worship argument. Lake Kaali, the small lake formed by the crater, is said to have been originally called ???Holy Lake??? in Estonian, and the nearby forest is still called Puhamets, which means ???Sacred Forest.??? It??�s, therefore, no stretch of logic to assume that Kaali was a place of spiritual significance, whether or not it was connected with ancient tales of a fireball in the sky.

It was precisely this kind of connection to ancient tales that interested Lennart Meri. Long before he became president of Estonia (1992 - 2000), the ethnographer found what he considered to be echoes of the Kaali meteorite event in the Baltic region??�s oral folk tradition, in particular, the Finnish national epic, Kalevala.

???Rune 47??? contains numerous accounts of the child of the sun falling from the sky that could easily double as poetic accounts of a large meteor impact. ???Downward quick the red-ball rushes, / Shoots across the arch of heaven, / Hisses through the startled cloudlets, / Flashes through the troubled welkin, / Through nine starry vaults of ether??�,??? goes one such passage.

In his book ???Hobevalge??? (Silver White, 1976), Meri not only puts forth the theory that the Kaali impact appears in the Kalevala but also suggests that the Baltic Jaanipaev (Midsummer) bonfire traditions are a re-enactment of the event.

Other, more far-fetched theories have cropped up connecting just about every European national epic to the event. Speculation even goes so far as to suggest that the Golden Fleece of the Argonauts was actually in Lake Kaali, pointing out that 3,000 years ago the land on Saaremaa was 10 meters lower, hence it would have been possible to navigate a ship here from the Black Sea.

It??�s unlikely that any of these theories will ever be proven one way or the other. Still, it??�s amusing to think that as we sit around our bonfires each June grilling shashlyk and drinking beer that we might actually be worshiping an ancient hunk of space rock.

That particular pleasure will have to wait another year. In the meantime, visitors can drop by the Kaali Visitor Center every day from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m.. Admission to the museum costs 25 kroons (1.60 euros). Visiting the crater itself, and speculating on its impact on ancient Baltic culture, is absolutely free.

- E-MAIL OF THE GODS DEPARTMENT -

Serpent Cult Circulates Message of Strange Savior< 54356/85804_tsuchinoko.jpg ext-align: justify;">

"Lord Tsuchinoko? Ah, right. I've got one. Isn't this what you mean?"

The attractive woman, who operates one of the tiny bars in a corner of Shinjuku called the "Golden Gai," produced a cell phone and called up the picture to its display.

The photo she showed was a man named after a "tsuchinoko." For those unfamiliar with Japanese legends, a tsuchinoko resembles a snakelike creature, but one unlike any snake you've ever seen, with a big head, narrow neck and wide flat body. The existence -- or non-existence of this mythological creature whose existence has never been fully established. It's sort of like a land-based version of the Loch Ness monster.

Shukan Taishu (7/11) raises the issue because "tsuchinoko" has been making the rounds among people who toil in the water trade in the Golden Gai and its adjacent, much larger district, Kabukicho.

"It was last April," recalls Anna, 20, a hostess at one of the area's cabaret clubs. "Business had been way off, since the new ordinance went into effect banning touts from soliciting customers on the street. We girls were just sitting around in the foyer, with nothing to do, and one of the older gals got the picture of a man via e-mail. It was pasted in upside down, and he was labeled 'tsuchinoko.' We looked at it and it sort of gave us the creeps.

"Then one by one, we began receiving the same picture via our own cell phones."

Since then, so widely have the pictures become propagated, the denizens of Tokyo's largest drinking area have come to refer to the phenomenon as the "Tsuchinoko-kyo," as if it were a form of propagation by some religious sect.

"The picture has been forwarded to people in the manner similar to chain letters," says Yukio Murakami, a journalist who covers the pink trade. "That means the recipient is under an impetus to forward the mail to a specified number of friends or suffer some kind of bad luck.

Because nearly everyone who works in the water trade has a cell phone, when an incident occurs, it's common for rumors and stories to circulate rapidly. For instance, when a Shinjuku hooker was murdered by her john in a love hotel, a message went out to track down her killer, with the warning that if the recipient didn't forward the mail to at least 15 people, she would catch a sexually transmitted disease.

"But a lot of the messages are just scams, charging you money for services you never requested, or inviting you to apply for a loan," says a veteran cabaret club hostess. "Girls in this business tend to be easygoing and are often taken advantage of by crooks."

The mysterious tsuchinoko cult, however, seems to be rooted less in some sort of mystical beliefs than the dream of becoming wealthy.

"Having the picture has become a sort of good-luck symbol," the hostess says. "Naturally I'd never send it to anyone if I thought it would bring bad luck. But we girls pass it amongst ourselves and forward it to customers too. Who knows, maybe it's even working."

Shukan Taishu speculates that tsuchinoko became symbolic of a potential financial windfall when a local government in West Japan several years ago offered a bounty of 200 million yen to anyone who could produce a living specimen of the mythological creature. So far, the offer has found no takers.

The man in the photograph, the story goes, had been working in one of the area's host clubs but had fallen upon hard times. Then he got the idea of associating himself with the image of the snake that never was, and his luck changed for the better. One possible suggestion for this improvement in his, uh, bottom line was that the shape of the snakelike creature bears a marked resemblance to a robust male reproductive organ -- something likely to endear him to his female customers. And thanks to the wonders of modern electronics, the image began spreading among the gals of Shinjuku like wildfire.

So who knows? Perhaps some day in the future, devout worshippers will congregate to offer their prayers at the miraculous Church of the Mythological Phallus.