News Briefs 08-02-2012

Are you sitting comfortably?

• Kenneth Arnold's daughter talks about her father's belief that UFOs are organic entities, synchronicity, & his encounter with a great grey owl.
• Witnesses of morphing donut-shaped UFO interviewed on Russian TV.
• How will future starships communicate across space? Project Icarus.
• Planet GJ 667C is the Holy Grail of the search for Earth-like worlds.
• The Mystery of the Octave: chess & sacred codes in Lincoln Cathedral.
• The Code explores mathematical patterns in life, the universe, & everything.
• Latest Skeptiko podcast: Is consciousness created by the brain?
• Many Near Death Experiencers recall hearing beautiful floating music.
• 10 misconceptions & misinformation about meditation.
• Zombie musician rises from the dead in South Africa. No, not Keith Richards.
• Wade Davis talks about Haitian voodoo (Amazon US & UK).
• Love, Magic, & the Vine of the Soul: interview with Amazonian shaman Javier Arevalo.
• According to some, Merlin was more than a wizard... he was a space brother.
• Madame Blavatsy had an occult nose.
• There were great expectations for the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.
• Quoth the raven, "Bah, humbug!" Dickens' pet raven inspired Edgar Allan Poe.
• Flying monkeys could be Australia's smartest export.
• Video of crow ping-pong & other examples of corvids being smarter than most of us.
• The world's smallest (and cutest!) primate communicates in ultrasonic frequencies.
• Video proof of Britain's big cats! Or Perceval's cats got loose again.
• Icelandic lake monster caught on camera, or Bjork with a snorkel?
• What the Inuit taught scientists about killer whales.
• Woolly Mammoth filmed in Siberia? Or is this what bears do in the woods?

Thanks RPJ.

Quote of the Day:

And once out walking at night
I stumbled across the speckled body
of a small hawk,
the hasp of its wings closed.

One note, one note.

It sings in the rills between words,
between hopes.
It sleeps between leaves in a book,
gathers like dust on the piano.

I heard it once on a green hill
in Aberdeen in short puffs of wind
stirring the new grass among stones.
Prayer could not alter it

nor clods breaking upon bronze.

Henry Carlile, Merlin