Illinois County UFO Hotspot

O'FALLON, Ill., July 13 (UPI) -- St. Clair County in Illinois has become a UFO hot spot since a large triangular object was sighted in the area seven years ago.

The most recent report in the county east of St. Louis was in June.

Peter Davenport of the National UFO Reporting Center in Washington State told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the 2000 unidentified flying object was significant because many of the witnesses were police officers.

"The events that occurred constitute one of the most interesting and well-documented incidents our center has ever seen," Davenport said.

Mark Lopinot, a police detective in O'Fallon said the sight of the large object floating over his city in January 2000 was "shocking" and he still can't explain it. He receives a lot of telephone calls from people reporting mysterious objects in the sky and recently talked to a Japanese film crew making a documentary about UFOs.

Police officers from at least five towns reported seeing the object, which they said was completely silent. One described it as looking like a "floating house with bright red and white lights."

Illinois UFO Hotspot

The Many Faces of the Paranormal

On August 23, 1971 the first of many images appeared on the kitchen floor of Maria Gomez Pereira's home in Belmez, Spain. This first image was of a man and was so disturbing in its grimacing appearance that it prompted Maria to have the cement floor torn out and replaced. A week later, the second of what would be many unique portraits made its ghostly impression on the floor, which the family also - understandably - wanted destroyed. Hearing about the faces, the Mayor of Belmez had part of the floor removed and saved to try to determine what was causing the ghostly faces.

Under the slab, human remains from a medieval cemetery were found and properly reburied off the site, however two weeks later yet another face appeared on the new floor. More and more faces in increasingly elaborate arrangements came and went on the floor until the family finally sealed the kitchen, however this simply resulted in more faces appearing elsewhere in the house. By now well publicized and attracting the attention of investigators, the phenomena was intensively studied, including the placement of microphones which reportedly picked up sounds inaudible to the human ear that seemed to be muttering strange languages and agonizing moans seemingly choreographed to the grimaces and painful contortions of the faces on the kitchen floor.

Maria died in 2004, however the faces have continued, calling into question theories that the old woman had been faking the whole affair. Further, chemical studies of the cement have been somewhat unsatisfying, with multiple potential explanations being advanced, from acids to paint but none of them really seem to cover all aspects of the phenomena.

The annals of the paranormal are replete with images of people on inanimate objects. From Christ himself to Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, we recognize faces in patterns and often attribute these images to a wide variety of people. Most of these can easily be explained by wishful thinking and recognizing patterns among the chaos, but sometimes a story can be attached to the phenomena that might suggest that the spirit of a disembodied human may be able to manifest a picture of themselves that the living can see.

Recently, the phenomena of ghostly images appearing on objects has had a resurgence in an unlikely place. Rosemont is a busy Chicago suburb, most famous for being home to O'Hare International Airport and a dizzying array of hotels. The city has also recently been the focus of an uncharacteristic burst of paranormal phenomena. Of course there was the infamous O'Hare UFO, which continues to gain interest worldwide. But there is another incident, one presumably of a very different nature.

Located outside the Willow Creek Club on Higgins Road is a sycamore tree that some claim bears the face of Donald E. Stephens, the Mayor of Rosemont for 51 years, who died last April of stomach cancer. Is it the image of the former mayor, or just a product of the human mind's ability to recognize a face among random patterns in the bark of a sycamore? Perhaps Mark Stephens, son and acting Mayor of Rosemont after the death of Donald Stephens, said it best. "He told me, you screw things up, I'm gonna haunt you". Let's hope Donald Stephens is simply saying hello, rather than making a political statement from the grave.

Paranormal Face Apparitions

Bili Ape: Giant Chimps of the Congo

Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according to local legend, kill lions, catch fish and even howl at the moon. Local hunters speak of massive creatures that seem to be some sort of hybrid between a chimp and a gorilla.

Their location at the centre of one of the bloodiest conflicts on the planet, the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, has meant that the mystery apes have been little studied by western scientists. Reaching the region means negotiating the shifting fortunes of warring rebel factions, and the heart of the animals' range is deep in impenetrable forest.

But despite the difficulties, a handful of scientists have succeeded in studying the animals. Early speculation that the apes may be some yeti-like new species or a chimp/gorilla hybrid proved unfounded, but the truth has turned out to be in many ways even more fascinating. They are actually a population of super-sized chimps with a unique culture - and it seems, a taste for big cat flesh.
The most detailed and recent data comes from Cleve Hicks, at the University of Amsterdam, who has spent 18 months in the field watching the Bili apes - named after a local town - since 2004. His team's most striking find came after one of his trackers heard chimps calling for several days from the same spot.

When he investigated he came across a chimp feasting on the carcass of a leopard. Mr Hicks cannot be sure the animal was killed by the chimp, but the find lends credence to the apes' lion-eating reputation.

"What we have found is this completely new chimpanzee culture," said Mr Hicks. Previously, researchers had only managed to snatch glimpses of the animals or take photos of them using camera traps. But Mr Hicks used local knowledge to get closer to them and photograph them.

"We were told of this sort of fabled land out west by one of our trackers who goes out there to fish," said Mr Hicks whose project is supported by the Wasmoeth Wildlife Foundation. "I call it the magic forest. It is a very special place."

Getting there means a gruelling 40km (25-mile) trek through the jungle, from the nearest road, not to mention navigating croc-infested rivers. But when he arrived he found apes without their normal fear of humans. Chimps near the road flee immediately at the sight of people because they know the consequences of a hunter's rifle, but these animals were happy to approach him. "The further away from the road the more fearless the chimps got," he added.

Mr Hicks reports that he found a unique chimp culture. For example, unlike their cousins in other parts of Africa the chimps regularly bed down for the night in nests on the ground. Around a fifth of the nests he found were there rather than in the trees.

"How can they get away with sleeping on the ground when there are lions, leopards, golden cats around as well as other dangerous animals like elephants and buffalo?" said Mr Hicks.

"I don't like to paint them as being more aggressive, but maybe they prey on some of these predators and the predators kind of leave them alone." He is keen to point out though that they don't howl at the moon.

"The ground nests were very big and there was obviously something very unusual going on there. They are not unknown elsewhere but very unusual," said Colin Groves, an expert on primate morphology at the Australian National University in Canberra who has observed the nests in the field.

Prof Groves believes that the Bili apes should prompt a radical rethink of the family tree of chimp sub-species. He has proposed that primatologists should now recognise five different sub-divisions instead of the current four.

Mr Hicks said the animals also have what he calls a "smashing culture" - a blunt but effective way of solving problems. He has found hundreds of snails and hard-shelled fruits smashed for food, seen chimps carrying termite mounds to rocks to break them open and also found a turtle that was almost certainly smashed apart by chimps.

Like chimp populations in other parts of Africa, the Bili chimps use sticks to fish for ants, but here the tools are up to 2.5 metres long.

The most exciting thing about this population of chimps though is that it is much bigger than anyone realised and may be one of the largest remaining continuous populations of the species left in Africa. Mr Hicks and his colleague Jeroen Swinkels surveyed an area of 7,000 square kilometres and found chimps everywhere. Their unique culture was uniform throughout.

However, the future for the Bili apes is far from secure. "Things are not promising," said Karl Ammann, an independent wildlife photographer who began investigating the apes 1996. "The absence of a strong central government has resulted in most of the region becoming more independent and lawless. In conservation terms this is a disaster."

Giant Chimps Congo
Bili Ape

Group Tapes Bigfoot's Cry in Michigan U.P.

MARQUETTE COUNTY, MICHIGAN -- Bulletin No. 1: Bigfoot is frolicking in the forest east of this Upper Peninsula community, a California-based group of researchers says.

Bulletin No. 2: The group searching for the legendary mannish ape here this week captured evidence of its existence, they claim.

The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization recorded the creature's trademark howl during an expedition late Thursday night.

Group leader Matt Moneymaker quickly ruled out the possibility that the noise came from a human or another animal. He said it was similar to the sounds made by primates.

"We know it wasn't an owl or coyote," he said.

The group heard the noise in response to a howl by one of the searchers. The group also made other noises, including banging on wood with a stick, to pique the interest of the wooly bully.

The big ape is a big draw.

About 50 people from the Midwest forked over $300 to join the four-day Michigan search that ends Sunday. It was sold out as are similar searches planned for Utah and New Mexico later this summer.

The paying investigators say the fee is small compared to the chance of seeing Bigfoot.

They're among the legion of true-believers whose views are bolstered by a growing number of Internet sites reporting sightings and some prominent academics who won't rule out the possibility that the beast exists.

The Michigan attendees are resolute in their beliefs.

Lack of evidence doesn't stop them. Neither do sketchy claims and confessed hoaxes.

To them, Bigfoot isn't some type of fuzzy-headed myth or scam or case of mistaken identity. It's real.

And that's why they're trampling through dense brush in the rain, wearing camouflage and scent-blocking lotion, swatting away mosquitoes and fright.

Bigfoot Cry Taped
BFRO Michigan

Dowsing: Paranormal Investigation Tool

One supposition of paranormality often ignored is its relationship to the environment. The paranormal is thought of as a human practice, involving interactions with humans, sometimes alive and sometimes dead. Yet there is a wealth of evidence that paranormal talents extend beyond the mere human and also have a close relationship with the environment. And nowhere is this better expressed than in Dowsing.

OLD OR NEW?

Dowsing - the supposed ability to find water or minerals by mind power – can be an eccentric pastime. Using a forked twig, pendulum, in one case even a German sausage, the dowser walks an area of land and when successful the twig twitches or the pendulum spins.
Dowsing is often thought of as a recent paranormal innovation, but this is not the case. In the 17th century the French Baroness de Beausoleil first adapted the dowsing rod. But in the Bible, Moses is portrayed finding water with his staff.
In Medieval times the practice was used for finding coal, and Agricola’s treatise on mining, ’De re metallica’ of 1556, discusses dowsing. Hence, it has been practiced way back in history.

SCEPTICS AND BELIEVERS

As usual, James Randi was successful in showing up a group of dowsers in Australia in 1980. Hiding boxes and pipes in a field, some containing objects, others not, he tested a group of dowsers, and predictably they failed to perform adequately. Whether this disproves the ability to dowse, or simply proves those dowsers were not very good on that particular day is open to question.
To 19th century dowser John Mullins such arguments were an irrelevance. He set up a dowsing company to find water and thrived. In 1938, dowser L L Latham adapted dowsing to archaeology, successfully mapping out some dig sites.
During the Vietnam War, US Marines adapted dowsing to finding mines with a high degree of success. But if proof were needed of its ability, oil companies provide it. They employ dowsers to find oil.
The fact that they continue to do so, and pay huge amounts for skilled dowsers, shows there is something to it. If something doesn’t work, big business soon drops it.

THEORIES

Several theories have been offered to explain dowsing. In the 1640s German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher put forward the well accepted idea that it was unconscious muscular activity that caused the rod to twitch.
In 1906 the French Abbe Alexis Mermet blamed radiations for dowsing. Man, having his own radiation, intuited the radiation of other bodies by walking into their field. This was taken up by modern mathematician John Taylor who thought the answer was in the electromagnetic spectrum. Predictably, when he could find no such influence, he denied dowsing existed.

MAP DOWSING

The problem with such ‘physical’ theories is that it does not cover the whole subject of dowsing. For instance, Abbe Mermet popularised map dowsing, where a pendulum is held over a map in order to find, not only water and minerals, but people too. The Abbe claimed that twenty times he had successfully located murderers or missing people and animals.
Even in the late 20th century such abilities continued, as seen in the Priddy Project, and the antics of five dowsers in the Mendip Hills, Somerset. Told to dowse the course of pot holes through dowsing, as a final test, they also had to locate a group of cavers, somewhere in the underground labyrinth. One dowser, Bill Lewis, positioned his flag directly above them.

WIDER MIND

The problem with dowsing is here exposed. It seems to have nothing to do with any intuition into the geology of the Earth. Rather, it is best understood as a wider form of extra-sensory perception.
This brings us back to the point raised in the beginning, and a kind of symbiosis, if you like, between man and his environment. Dowsing demands the question: just how far does a paranormal mind extend? If, of course, it exists at all.
The occult enshrines the notion of the ‘anima mundi’, or ‘soul of the world.’ Theosophy proposed the Akashic Records – records, on a psychic plane, that record everything that has ever occurred since the beginning of the universe. Is this intuition of a wider mind, interacting with everything?

IT’S A GAIA THING

In the 1970s James Lovelock offered his view of the planet as a co-ordinated mechanism, where all elements work together to produce the whole, including life. In his Gaia Hypothesis he encapsulated the idea of a fundamental relationship between man and planet.
This relationship has been pursued by other theorists and philosophers, but no ‘mechanism’ has ever been found to support a way things interact without physical contact.
But the fact that they do is incontrovertible. From man’s effect upon the planet, to the reality that cells co-ordinate into living organisms without apparent physical connection, life and the universe can only exist because of this unknown interaction.
Knowing that such an influence must exist, isn’t it about time science seriously considered how it might work? And I can think of no better area of study than dowsing – a practice that not only shows interaction between man and environment, but discloses otherwise unknown information thereof.

-Anthony North, July 2007

Dowsing Paranormal Investigation

Giant Squid Washed Up in Tasmania

Strahan, Tasmania, Australia - July 12, 2007 - A giant squid has washed up near Strahan on Tasmania's west coast.

The squid, measuring about six metres long, was found last night on Ocean Beach by a member of the public.

Zoology experts from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are hoping to examine the squid to find how old it was and how it died.

The museum's senior curator of Antarctic and Southern Oceans, David Pemberton, says it is known that squid live off the west coast and feed on blue grenadier.

"The only strandings on beaches we ever had were in the east and south-east of Tassie and to me this one's intriguing because it's turned up on our west coast," he said.

"We must bear in mind that all of this is to do with the Southern Ocean and perhaps to a giant squid, there's not much difference.

"It's the first record that I know of one on a beach off the west coast."

Giant Squid Tasmania

Cornwall Jail: A Haunting Experience

Cornwall, Ontario, Canada - July 11, 2007 - Candy Pollard isn't convinced the Cornwall Jail is haunted, but a few hair-raising occurrences have given her reason to wonder.

The first episode came shortly before the 174-year-old jail re-opened as a tourist attraction in 2004. Pollard was in the midst of locking up some of the cell areas at day's end when she suddenly heard someone humming. It was the voice of a male, Pollard vividly recalls.

"It was like an old '70s tune, like Sly and the Family Stone, 'I Want to Take You Higher'," she said.

Pollard immediately pointed the finger at Mike Lalonde - a colleague who also works in the jail - but he wasn't around. In fact, no one was. "At that point, I just high-tailed it out of there," Pollard said.

Pollard's next episode came courtesy of the Ottawa Haunting and Paranormal Group (OHPG) while they conducted an overnight paranormal investigation of the jail in 2005. She looked through a night-vision camera in one of the cells and saw tiny orbs, believed by some to be a sure-fire sign of paranormal activity.

"It was two in the morning and I was standing outside (the jail) because I felt safer out there," she recalls. "That was when I said 'wait a minute.'"

The orbs were just the tip of the iceberg for the OHPG. During their overnight investigation, group members reportedly saw a "dark figure" in the basement and heard the sounds of footsteps, slamming doors and chairs being dragged across the floor. The use of electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) - a process of recording sounds in search of paranormal activity - in the jail uncovered the sound of a child and woman.

"There is no doubt some sort of paranormal entity exists in the Cornwall jail," reads the group's report on the investigation. "It is certain that there is at least one child and one female spirit or ghost whom still resides in the jail. It is also relatively certain that there is more than one entity residing in the jail. In addition, it is almost, but not completely certain, that these spirits or ghosts are that of past inmates."

The group believes the spirits and ghosts that occupy the jail are harmless because none of its members felt any danger.

"If these are spirits, they most likely just want their presence to be known and respected. If it is a ghost, well, then we only know of their presence because of their habitual nature, and they are completely oblivious to our presence," reads the report.

Lalonde remains a non-believer. However, he can see why others might be a bit skeptical. The jail has been the site of numerous suicides, murders and hangings.

"If there are ghosts, they've got to be here," Lalonde said.

Interest in the jail's darker side doesn't seem to be dying. The OHPG is looking at returning just before Halloween, and jail officials are looking at hosting some type of event where members of the public could join the group in the jail and use some of their ghost-hunting equipment first-hand. A paranormal group from New York City has also expressed an interest.

Haunted Cornwall Jail