Saturday, March 31, 2007

Mountain Lion Spotted Near Piney Run Reservoir, Maryland

March 31, 2007 - Eldersburg, Maryland - A local resident has reported witnessing a large cat like animal crossing White Rock, Rd near Piney Run Reservoir on the evening of Friday, March 30, 2007.

Martin Ridgeley of nearby Eldersburg described the animal as a large feline with a long thick tail and dark gray in color. It was crossing the road approximately 50 feet in front of the Ridgeley's vehicle around 7:15 PM local time. He states he got an excellent look at the "cat" and estimates the body size "at least 5 feet long and very muscular, similar to a cougar". He stated he made a report with the DNR and local authorities soon after the incident.

This is not the first report of large cats or mountain lions in central Maryland. There have been at least 3 similar investigated reports since the mid-1980's. As well, the influx of coyotes from the western states has also occurred in Maryland since the early-mid 1980's. The central piedmont and urbanized (Baltimore metro) areas of Maryland still have an abundant wildlife population, in particular white-tailed deer with some of the largest area concentrations east of the Mississippi River.

There have been no reports of pet or livestock deaths so far, though there is plenty of wildlife available to feed an animal of this size.


'Ghost Figure' Seen Flying Over Pope

Cambridgeshire, UK - When retired policeman Andy Key went on a trip to Rome, he was struck by the beauty of sunlight streaming through a window in the Vatican. As the Pope made an address nearby, he decided to capture the stunning image on his camera.

But it was only when Key, 48, and his wife Susan, 44, returned home and downloaded the photographs that they noticed a strange apparition in the picture.

They were amazed to see what looked like the image of a guardian angel above the heads of other visitors to St Peter's Basilica.

"It looks like an angel hovering on the people's heads. No-one can explain it - there's nothing on their heads for the light to bounce off," Key told The Daily Mail on Saturday.

Key and his wife, a medical secretary, were looking around the famous church when they noticed a large group of people and realised the Pope was making an address nearby.

"I was taking pictures of all the things around us and saw this huge window with the light streaming through and thought it looked beautiful," he explained. "I snapped the picture and didn't noticed anything until I got home. It looks almost like a hologram. I thought it was really spooky."

Professional photographers have studied Key's photo and are at a loss to explain what may have caused the image. It was only revealed when he got home, plugged his digital Kodak camera into his computer and downloaded the images.

Key, who now works as a student mentor at the Neale-Wade Community College in March, said: "It wasn't as if we had visited Rome for any particularly religious reason. We were simply sight-seeing as you do.

"I had not really thought about angels and stuff before. I don't know if I believe in it all but it does look like an angel. Several people have looked at it including a professional photographer and they can't work out what it might be - maybe it is a guardian angel."

It is by no means the first time holy images have unexpectedly appeared.

Two years ago, church organist Rita Clayson found a picture of Jesus Christ in an ancient tree in a small Northamptonshire village.

Twisted ivy roots helped to form his face on a tree trunk in a small spinney on the edge of Little Houghton. Earlier this month, pregnant Amanda Skelding, 23, from Glasgow, saw what appeared to be a traditional image of Jesus in the grainy black and white picture she was handed after her ultrasound scan.

Friday, March 30, 2007

UFO Photos From Russia Submitted

ALTAI, REPUBLIC OF RUSSIA - The photographer was just taking photos of a beautiful place and only later discovered the strange object in the photo. He was alone when taking photos.

The Altai Republic is situated in the very center of Asia and has a picturesque landscape of green highlands, large lakes and rivers and high mountains peaks. The mountain range in Altai is home to Belukha (4506m), the highest mountain peak in Siberia.

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Mysterious Rock Growing 'Hair' Put on Display in Beijing

BEIJING, CHINA — On March 16, 2007, an unusual rock went on display in Beijing. This rock has "hair," almost identical to human hair, growing out of its "head."

The rock is iron gray in color, naturally smooth and rounded, and is similar to a cobblestone. There is also a very thin layer of scalp tissue connecting the "hair" to the rock. The hair is grey in color and similar to the color of the rock itself. The hair grows quite naturally from the top with the longest strands being about 15 centimeters (6 inches) long. The hair is slightly coarser than human hair.

The rock was found on a beach, and according to Fashion Rock Café's executive Miss Yong, this kind of rock is named a "hair-growing rock". As long as conditions are right, the hair on this rare rock will continue to grow. Only two other hair-growing rocks have been reported in the world; and both are in a Taiwan Museum.

This "hair-growing rock" is in a glass display case at the Fashion Rock Café, located in the Digital Building in Beijing's Zhongguan Village. The rock measures approximately 30 centimeters (11.8 inches) long, 20 centimeters (7.8 inches) wide, and about 15 centimeters (6 inches) high.

The value of the rock is estimated to be around 10 million Yuan (approximately USD 1.3 million).


Monday, March 26, 2007

Two B.C. Men Claim to Encounter a Sasquatch

VANCOUVER, B.C., CANADA - March 25, 2007 -- Was it a bear? Or was it a sasquatch, the legendary primate long rumoured to inhabit Vancouver Island?

A B.C. man is reporting he may have spotted the mythical ape-like creature in the Enchanted Forest near Tofino, on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

"My brother and I had a strange encounter with a large, dark humanoid in the forests of Tofino,'' the unidentified man says in the introduction to a video posted recently on Youtube.

`Strange Humanoid Encounter' has been viewed more than 15,000 times.

The pair -- who say they live five hours from Tofino -- were on a walk in the forest, using a camera to shoot wildlife.

What they saw caught them off guard.

"Look, quick . . . stay back'' says one, as the camera begins to roll.

''My hypothesis is that this was a bear although my memory deceives me,'' the man writes in the video introduction. "The animal was about seven feet tall, give or take one foot. It hunched over quite a bit.

"When it first encountered us, it stared. By the time I got the camera out, it stated fleeing.

"It had no smell that overpowered the wet forest smell, and made no sound, except for rushing through the bush,'' he writes in online discussions after the video was posted.

After the creature fled, the pair run forward and look for footprints. What they find stamped in the earth seems more human than bearlike.

While the tape is blurry and the camera work shaky, there seems to be something resembling a human shape when it rears up.

When crouched, it looks like a bear.

So far, the video has provoked pages of discussion on YouTube.

Some respond saying it's a hoax; others believe it's the real thing.

"This is NOT a hoax. The quality is bad, but my original copy is quite clear,'' writes the man who claims to have posted the video.

The man, who did not respond to email requests for an interview, says he's sending the tape to the B.C. Cryptozoology Society "for an expert's advice.''

The videotape does receive mention on the cryptozoology.com website. The website's glossary includes such creatures as the Mongolian Death Worm, the Loch Ness Monster, Blobs, Globsters, the Beast of Gevaudan, the Coelacanth and Goatman.

Wildlife biologist Dr. John Bindernagel says postings of sasquatch videos on Youtube are not uncommon, but many appear to be spoofs.

"This video, it's very good of the fellow to at least entertain the option that it could have been a sasquatch -- not just an upright bear or not someone in a fur suit,'' Bindernagel says.

''But it's not very good and it's not something that a scientist would bring to attention of his colleagues as evidence because it isn't very good.

"It could well have been a sasquatch but it's neither persuasive or convincing.''

Bindernagel, who has written extensively about the subject, says the internet videos can both help and hinder efforts to do genuine scientific research into the Big Foot phenomenon.

"Because we have been unable to attract informed scientific comment, the media has proceeded with this very attractive, simplistic hoax hypothesis and that's been really quite problematic,'' he says.

But Bindernagel is convinced sasquatch exist.

He says there have been more than 100 sightings of the legendary creature on Vancouver Island and thousands of sighting throughout North America since the mid-1800s.

Friday, March 23, 2007

French Get a Look at Nation's UFO Files

PARIS, March 22 -- On an August day in 1967, two children tending a herd of cows outside a village in central France reported seeing "four small black beings" fly from the ground and slip headfirst into a sphere that shot skyward in a flash of light and trail of sulfuric odors.

The alleged extraterrestrial sighting, described by the French government as "one of the most astonishing observed in France," is among 1,600 UFO case files spanning the last half-century that the country's space agency opened to the public for the first time Thursday.

The voluntary decision by France's National Center for Space Studies to dump more than 100,000 pages of witness testimony, photographs, film footage and audiotapes from its secret UFO archives onto its Internet site, http://www.cnes.fr, for worldwide viewing is an unprecedented move among Western countries. Most of them, the United States included, consider such records classified matters of national security.

Within three hours of posting the first cases Thursday morning, the French space agency's Web server crashed, overwhelmed by the flood of viewers seeking the first glimpses of official government evidence on a subject long a target of both fascination and ridicule.

The material dates as far back as 1954. Over the next several months, the space agency will post it to enhance scientific research seeking to explain what the French government calls "unexplained aerospace phenomena."

"The data that we are releasing doesn't demonstrate the presence of extraterrestrial beings," said Jacques Patenet, who heads the Group for the Study and Information on Unidentified Aerospace Phenomena, the space agency's UFO investigative team. "But it doesn't demonstrate the impossibility of such presence either. The questions remain open."

Patenet said that among the 1,600 cases to be opened to the public, "a few dozen are very intriguing and can be called UFOs."

Most of the cases were determined to be caused by atmospheric anomalies or mistaken perception of such things as airplane lights, or to be hoaxes. One case file described how investigators proved a man was lying about being abducted by aliens when blood tests failed to show he had recently experienced the weightlessness of space travel.

In one of the cases investigators consider most credible, a 13-year-old boy and his 9-year-old sister were watching over their family's cows near the village of Cussac on Aug. 29, 1967, when the boy spotted "four small black beings" about 47 inches tall, according to documents released Thursday. Thinking they were other youngsters, he shouted to his sister, "Oh, there are black children!"

But as they watched, the four beings became agitated and rose into the air, entering the top of what appeared to be a round spaceship, about 15 feet in diameter, which hovered over the field. Just as the sphere rose up, one of the passengers emerged from the top, returned to the ground to grab something, then flew back to the sphere.

The sphere rose silently in a spiral pattern, then "became increasingly brilliant" before disappearing with a loud whistling sound. It left "a strong sulfur odor after departure," the report said.

The children raced home in tears and their father summoned the local police, who "noted the sulfur odor and the dried grass at the reported place where the sphere took off," the report continued. Investigators said they were impressed by the uniformity of detail provided by the children and other witnesses.

"No rational explanation has been given to date of this exceptional meeting," the investigation concluded.

One of the most detailed inquiries involved the report of an Air France crew flying near Paris on Jan. 28, 1994. Three crew members spotted a large reddish brown disk "whose form is constantly changing and which seems very big in size." As the passenger plane crossed its trajectory, the object "disappeared on the spot," the report said.

Radar signatures confirmed an object of the same size and location described by the crew and led investigators to conclude that "the phenomenon is not explained to date and leaves the door open to all the assumptions."

Patenet, the leader of the space agency's investigative team, said his group receives about 100 new cases a year and usually opens investigations on about 10 percent of them. "In 99 percent of the cases, the witnesses are perfectly sincere," he said. "They saw something. Most of the time what they saw is a perfectly natural phenomenon that has been perceived in an erroneous way."

Patenet said he has never seen a UFO. "I would personally find it abnormal to think that we're the only civilization in the universe, but the probability of various civilizations coming across each other is also very slim."

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Former Arizona Gov. Admits UFO Sighting On Night of Phoenix Lights

Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington ridiculed an unexplained event that took place in the skies over Phoenix ten years ago. An event now commonly known as 'the Phoenix Lights' is actually a compilation of events and unexplained sightings that took place on March 13, 1997 from the Hoover Dam on the Nevada/Arizona border all the way to Tucson, Arizona and at several points in between. The most publicized of the sightings that night came at around 10:00pm. Many witnesses saw and videotaped an array of lights that appeared over the desert southwest of Metropolitan Phoenix including CK Rairden who contributes to this report. Some believe those lights were flares, others are not quite so sure. Those bright orbs, and the other unexplained events of that evening are now commonly known as 'The Phoenix Lights.'

On Thursday June 19, 1997, Symington said he would order the Arizona Department of Public Safety to look into the mysterious lights that were spotted over Phoenix two months earlier. He called a press conference and television viewers tuned in. Instead of anything serious Symington introduced a handcuffed member of his staff in an alien costume as the culprit responsible for the Phoenix Lights. He pulled off the 'alien mask' and it was an aide named Jay Heiler.

Many were laughing, others were a bit miffed that the governor found it necessary to waste everyone's time with such a stunt. Now in a stunning interview with the Daily Courier in Prescott, the former governor admits that he was a witness to a UFO on that night in March. "It was enormous and inexplicable," he said in an exclusive interview from Phoenix printed in the Courier. What he saw was a V-shaped craft that witnesses reported seeing that night throughout the state. "Who knows where it came from? A lot of people saw it, and I saw it too," Symington said.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Rotorua a 'Hive of UFO Activity'


A surgeon hailed a pioneer in the removal of devices implanted into humans by aliens is headed for Rotorua.

Dr Roger Leir won't be performing surgery when he visits in September but will speak at a conference, hosted by Ufocus New Zealand, which will focus on UFO sightings and other extraterrestrial-related phenomena.

Although Rotorua was chosen to host the conference for practical reasons, it is coincidentally part of a triangular section of the Bay of Plenty - between Waihi Beach, Whakatane and Rotorua - which is a particular hotspot of UFO activity, according to Ufocus founder Suzanne Hansen.
"There is also a pattern of increased sightings whenever there is seismic activity. It may be that the UFOs are tracking what is happening with the tectonic plates."

Ufocus treasurer and conference facilitator Graeme Opie, who is also the senior air traffic controller at Hamilton Airport, said in the past year there had been about 12 "credible" UFO sightings in the skies over New Zealand.

"A lot of people don't report them because they are scared of being labelled kooks ... or they report them directly to the police or the defence force and we never get to hear about them."

Between 150 and 250 people are expected at the conference in Rotorua with Dr Leir as a keynote speaker.

While his resume sounds like part of a script from an episode of The X Files, the organisers of the Future Perspectives conference, at the Rotorua Convention Centre in September, insist the American is the real deal and they want to be taken seriously.

Dr Leir, who holds qualifications as a foot surgeon, is touted as a world pioneer in the surgical removal of devices planted into people, supposedly following alien abductions.

According to the biography posted on the Ufocus website, Dr Leir has performed 12 separate operations to remove implanted objects from people, the most recent in September. As with the other 11 cases, the patient was an abductee who had "a lifetime of close encounter experiences".

The website claims the objects he removed, some of which look similar to small metal pins, had been tested in some of the world's most prestigious laboratories and baffled scientists, in part because "some of the tests show [radioactive] isotopic ratios not of this world ... comparisons have been made to meteorite samples".

Ms Hansen, who lives in Tauranga, said she was certain Dr Leir was "on the level ... he has spoken at hundreds of conferences and is very credible".

"He began as a non-believer [in extraterrestrials] but he became fascinated with these objects that showed up on x-rays with no point of entry or exit on the body.

"I can only surmise that they might be some kind of tracking device or something that monitors aspects of a person's health."

Ms Hansen said she expected the conference to generate a lot of interest.

"People have a great fear of being ridiculed if they come forward [with stories of UFO sightings]."


Thursday, March 8, 2007

Mothman, Garuda and Indonesian Air Crash

When discussing the strange episodes of interactions between humans and that winged weirdie seen in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in 1966-1967, John A. Keel didn’t carry around in his head the psychological icon of Mothman, which, of course, didn’t exist yet. No, his concept of what was the source of the foreboding and tragedy was much more ancient.

A detail often forgotten is that John A. Keel’s The Mothman Prophecies was initially to be entitled The Year of the Garuda. The title Keel wanted was his way to connect the ancient Indian legends of the Garuda, an unknown flying cryptid, with the modern Mothman events.

For Keel, his sense of the underlying weirdness, subtle spookiness, dramatic danger, covert sightings, plus the sinister Fortean reality of the collapse of the Silver Bridge, were linked in his mind to the image and idea of Garuda, more so than any realization of what Mothman was or was becoming. To Keel, Garuda was the key.

Now comes a startling reminder of that name for it is being noted in the news that the tragic crash in Indonesia was of a Boeing 757, an aircraft of the Garuda Airlines:

Indonesia jet explodes on landing

An Indonesian jet has crashed and burst into flames on landing at Yogyakarta airport in Java, killing 22 people. The state-owned Garuda Airline, which operated the Boeing 737-400, confirmed that 118 people had survived. Indonesia’s president immediately announced an investigation into the crash in Yogyakarta, 440km (270 miles) south-east of Jakarta….

Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said there were nine Australians on board, four of whom were missing. They included officials and journalists covering his planned visit to Java for a counter-terrorism conference. Prime Minister John Howard said the country should be “prepared for bad news” as there could well be Australian fatalities….

BBC News, March 7, 2007


What is the Garuda? The Garuda is a large legendary bird or bird-like creature that appears in both Hindu and Buddhist mythology, a cryptid to many. Garuda is usually described as having a golden body, white face, red wings, and an eagle’s beak and wings but a man’s body. The Garuda is the national symbol of both Indonesia and Thailand.

For those that own the rare Saturday Review Press first edition (1975) of The Mothman Prophecies, the creature depicted on the white dust jacket is a Garuda, not a Mothman.

Source: Cryptomundo


Thursday, March 1, 2007

German Tourist Vows to Film an Australian Tiger


CANBERRA, March 2 (Reuters) - A German tourist who claims to have photographed a Tasmanian tiger, solving one of Australia's enduring wildlife myths, said on Friday he had returned to the country to video the animal and end doubts over his find.

The Tasmanian Tiger, or Thylacine, was a striped, wolf-like native mammal which was hunted to extinction by European settlers. The last one died in a zoo in 1936.

But stories of surviving animals persist and yearly unconfirmed sightings have turned the tiger, whose scientific name means pouched dog with a wolf's head, into a holy grail for mystery hunters from across the globe.

In February 2005, German tourists Klaus Emmerichs and Birgit Jansen said they had captured two digital photos of the animal in Tasmania's rugged forests while on holiday.

"I came from high, and he can't see me. He had his nose down and was snuffing," Emmerichs said on Friday.

"I want to prove that it is not extinct, like the people think and the world thinks," Emmerichs told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

The couple, he said, had no idea the tiger drinking at a creek was extinct and the animal just loped away.

Experts initially believed the night photos showed portions of a Thylacine obscured by foliage, but later examinations led to accusations of a set-up, ending a bid to sell the pictures for A$25,000 ($19,600).

Emmerichs said he had returned to Tasmania, joining up with long-time tiger believer Paul Bailey, to capture the elusive animal on video. Bailey said he saw a tiger in 1967.

"I'm convinced that they are still here," Bailey said.