stv - Ron Halliday has spent the last 30 years of his life trying to explain the unexplained. The author, whose books include UFO Scotland and Edinburgh After Dark, believes Scotland is now a haven of UFO activity.In an exclusive interview with STV, Ron - a 60-year-old retired assistant registrar at Stirling University - said: "I think Scotland is like a world hot spot. All the UFO sightings. All the ghost sightings. All the monster sightings. Poltergeists.
"There is just so much that goes on in Scotland, it is absolutely incredible. It is very hard to explain why Scotland has all these reported incidents."
Ron became interested in UFOs from a young age and started to research it seriously when he was 30. But what is it about the unexplained which interests him and millions of others around the world?
"The whole mystery of it. People claim all these strange experiences which are at odds with our everyday reality. You don’t walk down the street and expect to see an alien. The whole thing just seems completely bizarre.
"Things like Independence Day and The X-Files have stimulated people’s interest in the whole subject. It the media show interest in UFOs then it definitely generates more UFO reports because people come forward and say they have seen things.
"There are so many people taking photos these days, but there is also greater scepticism. It is very easy to fabricate a UFO picture. The thing that people interested in UFOs find hard to accept is why aliens don’t just land in George Square in Glasgow so TV crews can come and film them?
"I am sceptical too. But when you speak to people who have had these experiences, get their perspective on the thing - there is no particular reason why they would make this up."
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Horrific Incidents in India
Tribal girl stripped over 'affair', molested by hundreds in Bengal
timesofindia - A 17-year-old tribalgirl was stripped, beaten and forced to walk nude for 8km across three villages with hundreds of men molesting her all the way and taking videos on their mobiles. It was a shocking reminder of the Guwahati incident in November 2007 when a teenager was stripped and molested by a mob during an ethnic clash. An MMS clipping of the Birbhum girls ordeal is now doing the rounds under the name 'Adibasi girl'. And it is this footage that is finally getting the victim some justice.
According to sources, the girls fault was that she loved a boy from another community. Police were shocked to learn that the panchayats and other local bodies knew of the incident but hadn't bothered to inform the administration. The incident happened four months ago but the girl was too traumatized to go to the authorities. It is only when the administration came to know of the MMS that police swung into action on their own and arrested five of the culprits on Sunday.
Some frames in the video are, too, horrific to watch. The girl has a dazed, dead look on her face as she staggers along dusty dirt tracks. A jeering crowd of tribals follows her, beating drums and thrashing her with sticks whenever she stops. Little boys throw stones at her. She takes the blows, defenceless, as she uses her arms in a futile attempt to protect her honour. Men pounce on her, pull her arms apart and molest her amid laughter as the drums beat up a frenzy.
This torture went on for hours in broad daylight, in the scorching heat of April. The footage shows just 11 minutes of it. On Saturday, some journalists showed the clipping to SP Humayun Kabir and DM Saumitra Mohan demanding why they were not taking any action.
Honour killing: Farmer hacks daughter to death in Tamil Nadu
timesofindiaIn an incident of honour killing, a farmer allegedly on Saturday hacked his daughter, who attempted to run away with her lover, to death and then killed his wife who tried to intervene at Nattarpatti village in Tirunelveli district of Tamil Nadu.
Police, who described the incident as honour killing, said the farmer Vinaitheerthan (63) had a heated exchange with his 21-year-old daughter Arunadevi when she was leaving home early this morning for eloping with her lover Devarajan, a mechanic, of the same area.
The farmer objected to their affair for the past two years and had warned his daughter against meeting Devarajan who reportedly belonged to another community.
Arunadevi got up at around 0400 hrs to run away with her lover but her father stopped her, leading to an altercation, police said.
Police said he then hacked her to death. When her mother tried to intervene, he attacked her with a pestle. Both the women died on the spot. The farmer later surrendered to the police who arrested him.
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Doctor Finds Plant Growing Inside Man's Lung
whdh - There was a problem sprouting in a local man's lung. Doctors originally thought the new growth was a tumor, but when they looked closer, they got a big surprise.
“I was told I had a pea seed in my lung that had split and had sprouted,” said Ron Sveden.
It was not the diagnosis Ron Sveden was expecting. He had prepared himself to hear the words cancer and tumor, but a plant growing in his lung?
“Probably about a half-an-inch, which is a pretty big thing of course,” said Sveden.
Ron had been sick for months. He was already fighting emphysema when his health took a turn for the worse.
“I was not doing too well, a lot of coughing, I was very listless,” said Sveden.
On Memorial Day Sveden’s wife called 911, and he was rushed to the hospital where doctors took x-rays and found his left lung collapsed.
For two weeks they ran tests but they all came back negative for cancer, until one doctor found the plant growing in his lung.
“Whether this would have gone full-term and I’d be working for the jolly green giant, I don’t know. I think the thing that finally dawned on me is that it wasn’t the cancer,” said Sveden.
Ron said he never felt anything growing in his chest, just a lot of coughing.
Doctors suspect he had eaten a pea at some point in the last couple of months and it went down the wrong way, and then began to grow.
“One of the first meals I had in the hospital after the surgery had peas for the vegetable. I laughed to myself and ate them,” said Sveden.
His wife Nancy was beyond happy with this strange twist of fate.
“God has such a sense of humor. It could have been just nothing, but it had to be a pea, and it had to be sprouting,” said Nancy Sveden, Ron’s wife.
Sveden continues to recover at home. In fact, friends and neighbors have had fun with this; they sent him pea seeds and canned peas all in good fun.
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Brazil Air Force Regulates How To Deal With UFOs
laht - The Brazilian air force has decided to regulate the way its members should proceed in case they see a UFO or hear of one being sighted, the daily Diario Oficial said Tuesday.
Under the regulations published Tuesday, when an unidentified flying object appears or a sighting is reported, officers must register it in the books of the Aviation Command, which in turn must draw up a document to be sent to the National Archive.
In Brazil there are no official records of UFOs, but it is known that during the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, intelligence services investigated supposed sightings.
Last year in the old files of the dictatorship were found accounts of Operation Plato, which between the years 1977-1978 unsuccessfully attempted to determine the truth of several reports of UFOs sighted over the states of Maranhão and Para.
Other more recent accounts, also unconfirmed, say that on Jan. 20, 1996, a flying saucer fell in a rural area near Varguinhas, Minas Gerais, and that its occupants alighted from the spacecraft.
Residents of Varguinhas, which has an extraterrestrial being as a symbol, say that aliens were captured by the army, which took them to a military base and then turned them over to a scientific research institute amid the utmost secrecy.
And while there are no records of landings nor direct contacts with creatures from other worlds, Chapada dos Viadeiros National Park, near Brasilia, is said to be home to an “open door to space” through which flying saucers customarily enter and overfly the region.
In this park believers in UFOs tend to meet, passing the daylight hours asleep and at night watching the skies in hopes of observing some spacecraft from another planet.
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Solar Storm Caused Black Outs
I had lost power on Tuesday evening, as well, many areas in the Baltimore metro were also affected. I contacted BGE and was told that they knew that the power would be back on by 11pm EDT. Honestly, this raised suspicion because I have never heard the local power company state that they knew when any power outage would be resolved so quickly and at a specific time.
So, I contacted a local atmospheric center this morning to find out if there was a wide spread 'blackout' on August 10th between 9pm-10pm EDT. I was told that a 'solar storm' knocked out power to 'numerous areas' worldwide and that affected satellites most likely were 'stunned' and booted back up quickly. So much for warning the public about the possibility of new 'solar anomalies'...Lon
Fortean / Oddball News - 8/11/2010
