Mary King's Ghost Fest has been running in Edinburgh for a number of years now, this is the sixth and it is a change of month, being a little bit earlier than usual. We went along to the press launch which is usually an action packed event as we get a wee taster of a few of the offerings.

This year we got an actual taste as two of the events are happening in the Malt Whisky Society in Leith. We tasted two amazing cask strength whiskies and were supplied with tasting notes. I was not able to detect “a Cathedral at Christmas” in the second (I'm not making that up) but I reckon I did get the blackcurrants in the first. This sensory delight was followed by a tale of terror from a bewigged and enthusiastic young man in period costume. The Whisky Society will host a “Spirited Storytelling Whisky Dinner” which from our preview promises to be a delicious and fun event. For the more sober minded, a “Spirited Paranormal Investigation” down in its vaults with Full Moon Investigations may be more your cup of tea.

After this we headed back to Mary King's close for a quick round of EVP with Mark Turner of Ghost Finders Scotland. We got some pretty scary “answers” to some pretty harmless questions. I could tell that quite a few members of the audience were freaked out by it, myself included! Ghost Finders Scotland will be doing “Electronic Voice Phenomena 50 years on” “A Close Encounter with medium Chris Conway” and “A close encounter with Ghost Finders Scotland”, all to take place in Mary King's Close.

A rather more relaxing time was spent in Annie's Room with medium Chris Conway of Most Haunted, when I say relaxing I mean nothing of note happened but of course, 20 minutes is nowhere near long enough to investigate anything. A better opportunity will be found in “A Close Encounter with Chris Conway” which is a three and a half hour investigation of Mary King's Close. This is likely to be a popular as it has the “Most Haunted” touch!

Other highlights of the programme will include “So You Want to be a Ghost Hunter” with Dr Ciaran O'Keeffe and Steve Parsons. This day of theory followed by practical work down in Mary King's Close will also feature a session on a history of hauntings by Gordon Rutter. You can also see Gordon do a talk on Paranormal Edinburgh
.
Because of the success of the Edinburgh event, there are now Oxford and Canterbury Ghost Fest's too.

The 2010 Mary King's Ghost Fest will run from Thursday 18th March to Tuesday 23rd March.

Apparently, this cutaneous horn growing from the forehead of Zang Ruifang, 101, only started taking form in the last year. Now her family say that there is a similar protusion growing from the opposite side of her forehead. China appears to have an abundance of horned people, see our previous entry on the subject - The Horniest Man in China - for more details.Source

Readers may remember that some time ago Uri Geller bought Lamb Island, a small island in the Firth of Forth. Well today is his first visit there and it was preceded by a talk at the Seabird Centre at North Berwick so of course we went along to join in the fun.



Much to his delight, he arrived in Edinburgh at platform 11 at 11.11.11 - and was obviously keen to explore since he immediately climbed Berwick Law on arrival in North Berwick. Around 70 people squished into a small room at the Seabird Centre plus about 12 press photographers, making it very cosy indeed. Flash bulbs were going off all over the place when Uri appeared and it was all rather exciting.

He talked about the legend of Scota and the possibility of Egyptian treasure being on the island. Check out Emps blog post about the Scottish Pyramids for more info. His plan is to dowse for the spot where he thinks the treasure is located and apply for permission to dig for it. He will have to do it without attracting the ire of his new tennants/flatmates of 100, 000 seagulls!

And yes, before anyone asks, he did bend a spoon! Two spoons in fact and also made a mustard seed sprout in his hand. Really he was a very lively and entertaining speaker. He has also made a sturdy donation to the seabird centre and proceedings from todays talk will also go to it. He was presented with some fantastic photographs taken by local people of the island and a cute cuddly puffin. He is going to need it to help keep him warm as he intends to spend the night on the island and is there right now.



You can keep up with proceedings as he is updating his website from his Blackberry.

Thanks to Jeff for tipping us off about this event.
Thanks to Gordon for photos.

I imagine some readers are probably sick of the sight of snow and ice but I thought you may find this interesting:

Wilson A Bentley, a farmer and amateur photographer, will more than likely be a name you've not heard of before. Obsessed with the complex and beautiful patterns of snow crystals, he became determined to capture the first photomicrographic images of snowflakes - which he did, as you can see below - and was for many years unrivalled in his pursuits (simply because his photographs were so good!).

Unfortunately, Bentley died of pneumonia in 1931, the same year his book was published, Snow Crystals.

In pictures: The first ever photographs of snowflakes - Wilson A Bentley

Photographs by 'Snowflake Bentley' go on sale in New York

You can also read an article of his, from the Popular Mechanics Magazine (1922),
on photographing snowflakes plus more info on Bentley over at Snowflake Bentley.com, curated by the Jericho Historical Society.

As in shockingly bad...

An absolutely unbelievable photo, reportedly taken via a mobile phone, showing a ghostly boy. Isn't it a tad early for April Foolery??

"Does this spooky image show ghost boy watching builders demolishing his old school?"

From a distance you might think this scene of the Crucifixion is a painting or perhaps a stained-glass panel. However, rather than a spontaneous appearance on some overdone toast (or a grilled cheese sandwich, or a sliced aubergine etc. etc.), this amazing six-foot by three-and-a-half feet artwork has actually been created from 153 slices of bread that have been burnt, scraped and blow-torched.Forget hot cross buns, artist creates six-foot replica of Christ on 153 slices of burnt bread

Since checking in on Santa Muerte the situation has just got worse:

To the dismay of the Catholic church and the disgust of the Mexican government, a bogus saint from popular folklore has become a crucial accessory for junkies, gang members and cartel kingpins alike.

The government has dubbed the skeleton a “narco-saint” and sent troops to destroy the garishly decorated roadside shrines erected in her honour. In drug-related trials or in raids on supposed cartel strongholds, Santa Muerte is repeatedly invoked as an indication of depravity and guilt.

At the trial of Gabriel Cardona, accused of kidnapping and murder on behalf of the Gulf cartel, investigators alleged that he collected his victims’ blood in a glass and drank a toast to Santa Muerte. When police smashed into a house allegedly occupied by a leader of the Sinaloa cartel, they found an entire room turned into a Santa Muerte chapel.

To residents of Ciudad Juarez, the fuss over a cartoon-like figurine who appears more of a grim tart than a grim reaper would be funny were it not so desperate. After two years of spiralling strife, a military surge financed in part by the US has not only failed to reduce the mayhem, but many here believe it has made it worse.

Source

The violence can be both shocking and macabre:

Mexico's drug war reached new levels of brutality at the weekend when a gang member was killed and cut into seven pieces as a warning to members of a cartel.

To drive home the point, the victim's face was sliced off and stitched on to a football.

...

His torso was found in a plastic container on the streets of Los Mochis; elsewhere another box contained his arms, legs and skull, said said Martin Robles, a spokesman for Sinaloa prosecutors.

Hernandez's face, sewn on to a football, was left in a plastic bag near city hall. A note read: 'Happy New Year, because this will be your last.'

It almost recalls the suggestion that human heads were used in Mesoamerican ballgames.

Source

Hat tip

Well witch hunting seems to be a topic that comes up here a lot but that doesn't mean it can't get odder, which is where the witch gun comes in:

The National President of Sierra Leone Indigenous Traditional Healers Union, Dr. Alhaji Suliaman Kabba, has stated that for one to operate witch gun, the person must know about witchcraft. He made the statement at his Calaba Town office in Freetown while explaining the dangers of witch gun and the number of witch gun confessions in late 2009. He said a person who operates witch gun would never be perceived by the ordinary eye adding that such people only carry out their evil acts when they are in an invisible state.

Dr. Kabba also said that formerly witch guns were used by members of secret societies to punish what he called law breakers. He opined that “today people have turned this gun into an instrument to make money. In fact some use as low as three or five thousand Leones to kill their brothers, friends and other family members.”

He further stated that “most witch gun killings are borne out of malicious jealousy, for positions in offices, for political reasons and a host of other related reasons.” The Traditional Healer President continued to categorize the different types of witch guns and their deadly effects. “The earliest and deadliest type of witch gun is made out of the husk from rice, but today's witch guns are made out of gun powder while others are made out of lead. In fact the type of witch gun bullet that is most frequently removed when people are shot is the lead.”

He maintained that it was impossible for a traditional healer to remove more than four witch gun bullets from someone's body. “A lot of healers use means to inject more witch gun bullets into people's body. This is normally done with the intention of making money.”

Is it like bone pointing, in that it is a means to direct a curse at an individual or is it weirder than that?

Source

Hat tip

Looking around I stumbled across another article on this:

There aren’t many medical mysteries in Sierra Leone.

If a medical doctor can’t diagnose an ailment or if a patient can’t afford to see a doctor, he or she usually comes to one conclusion about the cause of the pain and suffering: they must have been shot by a witch gun. The illness could be typhoid or schizophrenia, but the symptoms are often attributed to some form of black magic.

...

Strange behaviour or crippling illnesses, everyone tells me, usually means someone has been shot by a witch gun, which can’t be seen by the naked eye. Mental illness is most often attributed to witchcraft, because its symptoms are so difficult to understand. A traditional healer claims to be able cure people of their ailments and charges a hefty fee for his services. Patients pay with money, chickens or palm oil and are usually given herbs as treatment.

Source

Hat tip

Which puts it somewhere between a catch-all wastebin for everything they can't diagnose and also the key to a money making scheme for anyone claiming to be a witchdoctor. Still I can't imagine it'll be long before one appears in a video game, as it is a great name (as is Gun Witch, a name I pondered for a character before finding one already existed of that name, as well as it being the alias of a guy in the seduction community and his technique, which I won't link to - you'll have to Google it).

The songlines are fascinating part legend, part roadmap, part psychogeography and a whole lot more besides. This is perfectly demonstrated in the news that some of the events and locations mentioned in the Dreamiing stories might have lead scientists to make new discoveries of unknown impact craters:

An Australian Aboriginal 'Dreaming' story has helped experts uncover a meteorite impact crater in the outback of the Northern Territory.

Duane Hamacher, an astrophysicist studying Aboriginal astronomy at Sydney's Macquarie University, used Google Maps to search for the signs of impact craters in areas related to Aboriginal stories of stars or stones falling from the sky.

One story, from the folklore of the Arrernte people, is about a star falling to Earth at a site called Puka. This led to a search on Google Maps of Palm Valley, about 130 km southwest of Alice Springs. Here Hamacher discovered what looked like a crater, which he confirmed with surveys in the field in September 2009.

It gets interesting because the Aborigines couldn't possibly have seen this form:

Despite the link to the Dreaming story, weathering and the absence of meteorite fragments suggest that the crater is millions of years old and humans could not possibly have witnessed the event, Hamacher said.

Another crater at Gosse's Bluff, 170 km west of Alice Springs, is 140 million years old, and is also the subject of an Arrernte Dreaming story about a "cosmic baby" which fell to Earth.

Instead, Hamacher thinks Arrernte Aborigines may have learned to recognise craters from more recent impacts and then deduced the origin of the Palm Valley and Gosse's Bluff craters. One more recent example of craters created by an impact are the Henbury craters, 70 km from Palm Valley and just 4,000 years old.

Here it is:

View Larger Map

Could it all be coincidence?

Hamacher's comparison of known craters and Aboriginal stories about cosmic impacts have not yet uncovered conclusive evidence that meteorite impacts have been witnessed and incorporated into oral tradition.<br /><br />But he has found documented evidence of the Henbury craters being referred to as &quot;chindu china waru chingi yabu&quot; by Aboriginal elders, which he said roughly translates as &quot;Sun walk fire devil rock&quot;.</p></blockquote>
<p>There are some great comments, worth nosing through including:</p>
<blockquote><p>Hamacher's comment that the Arrernte people &quot;may have learned to recognise craters .... and then deduce the origin&quot; is another example of patronising whitefeller thinking. Why would Elders do that when they have an unbroken oral connection back through deep time to the Dawn of Creation? The Githabul Ngarakbul people - formerly and fraudulently known as Bandjalung - trace their lineage back &quot;to the intelligent water which fell from the tail of the great Serpent&quot; (a comet). Evidence that life was spawned from cometary debris is now verified by NASA and forms the basis of the Githabul claim of suveranty over their lands, reluctantly acknowledged now by government.<br /><br />...<br /><br />Let's keep alive our sense of wonder and excitement as science and mythology combine to unravel the great mysteries of who we are and whence we came.<br />An Adnyamthanha Elder, who adopted me as his niece, told me stories from his Grandfathers of &quot;walking with the flesh-eating lizards&quot;. The Adnymathanha have a name for that crittur, who is as alive now in their stories as he was in their lands.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course, that may raise more questions than it answers too.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3225/aboriginal-dreaming-story-leads-meteorite-crater" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Source</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.anomalist.com/" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Hat tip</a></p>
<p>It might only be the start of this type of investigation:</p>
<blockquote><p>Mr Hamacher said the discovery of a connection between dreamtime stories and reality was an exciting one.<br /><br />&quot;Lots of Aboriginal dreamtime stories are associated with craters, meteorites and cosmic impacts and although some craters are millions of years old and people would not have been able to witness the impact, it seems as if traditional dreaming stories know about the crater's origin.&quot;<br /><br />One of the stories - the one that local Arrernte people tell about a star that fell into a waterhole called Puka in the valley, where Kulaia, the serpent, lived - had led to the discovery of the ancient crater, which the team proposed to name Puka, but there were &quot;many, many more&quot;, Mr Hamacher said.<br /><br />&quot;We found stories with descriptions of cosmic impacts and meteorite falls related to places in Arnhem Land - we assume there are more meteorite craters out there and science doesn't even know about their existence yet.&quot;</p></blockquote>
<p>So this isn't the end of the story and we'll track further developments as they happen.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/google-earth-confirms-dreamtime-meteor-legend/story-e6frf7jx-1225814665715" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Source</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.dailygrail.com/News-Briefs/2010/1/News-Briefs-03-01-2010" target="_blank" title="Open in new window">Hat tip</a></p></body>
</html>

A letter in the current Fortean Times highlights an intriguing tale, suggesting suppression of a documentary linking Rennes-le-Chateau (which must be bordering on a cliché these days) with Girona and the swirl of connections in the city linking Kabbalah and Jean Cocteau. David V. Barrett (the writer of the letter) wrote and article in the Fortean Times 226 (pages 46-52) named after the book it was based on: City of Secrets an autobiography by Patrice Chaplin (yes Chaplin, she married Michael Charlie's son). The article got the attention of a filmmaker who produced a half hour documentary on the topic. It debuted in November 2008 was shown once on Controversy TV on October 2009 and then the producer Carrie Kirkpatrick got this email (worth noting that this might a conspiratorial first - the use of kisses to seal an email from "the people at the top," clearly a direct link to Judas himself!!):

Hi Carrie,

Hope you are well? Unfortunately after a few meetings with the people at the top we have been asked to pull your shows of the channel, and unfortunately are hands are tied Carrie. I know you have gone to alot of trouble to get these shows ready for us, and also promoting it to your friends and even going to the extent of paying for the music. But we have been told that Due to circumstances out of control we cannot show them anymore. I understand that you will not be happy with this decision, but i also hope you understand that we have to abide by the people above us and their decisions. I ‘m sorry to have to be the one to deliver the news, and i hope you understand the situation we are in.

Best wishes

------- xx

This could get the conspiratorially-minded excited and Barrett does wonder "whose sensitive esoteric toes has Carrie Kirkpatrick trodden on in her documentary? Has she inadvertently revealed secrets or connections beyond those in Patrice Chaplin's book and my article?" This does raise the problem that such people would be trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle and are only drawing attention to the film. When it could have been allowed to quietly die on a British TV channel I've never heard of (despite it sounding right up my alley) the film remained in the hands of the producer (no mysterious "break-ins" or "accidents" to hush it all up) and now they have put it online for everyone to watch, now with an extra shiny frisson as "the film they tried to ban." In fact you can watch it here:

At the next AGM of the Secret Rulers of the World (plus the Internet), I expect a lot of serious questions to be asked of whoever dropped the ball on letting this out into the wild.

Source

Causes for concern

There are a couple of things about the presentation of this case that have caused concern. Both times the problem was spotted by someone other than Chaplin and she did present reasonable explanations to account for these issues, but they are worth flagging anyway to highlight the complications that can arise in such investigations:

• There is a lack of photographic evidence but Chaplin did give her editor two photographs which would support her case, but the editor spotted pretty quickly they were crude fakes. It is something she has been quite open about in interviews (that interview contains most of the photographs and similar information to the article) and the Fortean Times reproduced them along with an overview from the editor David Sutton which ends: "It's obvious that the pictures are clumsy fakes, but the question, of course, remains: What was attempting to take whom for a ride here, and why?" Questions which seem to go to the heart of this story.
• A letter to the Fortean Times (FT229, page 73) pointed out that in one of the letters reproduced as evidence had a seven digit fax number on it which was only introduced in 1996, when the letter was said to have been found in 1968. Barrett passed this concern to Chaplin and she blames it on the various editors who have hacked the text around resulting in some evidence being presented in the wrong context. Barrett says: "She told me that she was appalled at the impression of deliberate deception that this gives, and deeply regrets that readers have been misled with the placing of the letter."

These suggest that it might be worth an independent and enthusiastic investigator (and expert on related topics) looking into the claims made and the evidence amassed, as someone us up to no good (with the faked photos) and a careful look might turn up the fingerprints of those involved.

I know Girona pretty well, along with other places in the story like the Canigou and Perpignan (Hell I've even dropped in at Rennes-le-Chateau when I was passing, it was... dusty), and will be sure to ask the Catalans I know about this when I next see them, it would be interesting to see what they have to say (as they don't live far from Girona).

A report ran on the BBC detailing harrowing cases of people being attacked for body parts destined for the muti trade, as well as witch doctors who had been involved in the practice:

A BBC investigation into human sacrifice in Uganda has heard first-hand accounts which suggest ritual killings of children may be more common than authorities have acknowledged.

One witch-doctor led us to his secret shrine and said he had clients who regularly captured children and brought their blood and body parts to be consumed by spirits.

Meanwhile, a former witch-doctor who now campaigns to end child sacrifice confessed for the first time to having murdered about 70 people, including his own son.

The Ugandan government told us that human sacrifice is on the increase, and according to the head of the country's Anti-Human Sacrifice Taskforce the crime is directly linked to rising levels of development and prosperity, and an increasing belief that witchcraft can help people get rich quickly.

This is interesting, as one might expect people to fall back on the occult in times of crisis but people are resorting to muti out of greed.

The whole thing was pretty horrific, from the admissions of a campaigner to get witchdoctors to repent:

Former witch-doctor turned anti-sacrifice campaigner Polino Angela says he has persuaded 2,400 other witch-doctors to give up the trade since he himself repented in 1990.

Mr Angela told us he had first been initiated as a witch-doctor at a ceremony in neighbouring Kenya, where a boy of about 13 was sacrificed.

"The child was cut with a knife on the neck and the entire length from the neck down was ripped open, and then the open part was put on me," he said.

When he returned to Uganda he says he was told by those who had initiated him to kill his own son, aged 10.

"I deceived my wife and made sure that everyone else had gone away and I was with my child alone. Once he was placed down on the ground, I used a big knife and brought it down like a guillotine."

Also a small boy had his penis stolen:

One such witness is a three-year-old boy called Mukisa, who was left for dead after his penis was hacked off by an assailant.

He survived thanks to quick work by surgeons, and later told police he had been mutilated by a neighbour who is known to keep a shrine.

Mukisa's mother told us: "Every time I look at him, I ask myself how his future is going to be - a man without a penis - and how the rest of the community will look at him, with private parts that can neither be attributed to a man or a woman. Every time I recall the normal birth that I had and the way Mukisa is now, it is like the end of the world."

The full video is on the BBC's site but for the moment you can see it here (if I can get this complicated code to work):

Source

Hat tip

there was a bit of a follow-up on the campaigner's confession in the local press:

Vincent Oling, who worked as a translator during Angela’s confession, said that his arrest would not solve the problem.

“I was so depressed by his confession but I think he will be resourceful in giving the nation clues and identifying the people behind this practice since he said there are others at large,” said Oling, who also works with the Justice and Peace Commission in Lira.

“I was shocked when I heard this story. But his conscience was clear, the fact that he has already managed to convert over 2,000 former murderers is good enough…,” added Ms Eunice Apio, the FAPAD executive director.

“Other than looking for skulls and detaining him, let us engage his willingness. The Police should use him to trace other murderers at large,” she added. Others, however, called for his prosecution.

“His preaching can’t take away the crimes he has committed against humanity, if there is evidence of the offences against him he may not escape the law,” said Anselm Wandega, the head of policy advocacy at ANPPCAN Uganda Chapter.

He, however, called on the government to put in place a law that regulates activities of traditional healers, saying the 1958 Witch Craft Act is outdated.
“The case shows the urgency that is required to have the law in place, it will differentiate the genuine healers from quacks,” he said.

Moses Binoga, head of the Police anti-Human Sacrifice Task Force, said they had on Friday opened a file for the accused in Amolatar District, were Angela is said to be living.“We want to first ascertain the allegations and establish the facts, whether there is or no complainant against him,” Binoga said.

Source

Hat tip

As we've seen many times here this is a genuine problem but so are witch-hunts which usually target the elderly or minorities. Thankfully, it sounds like everyone here is taking a measured approach to proceedings.

Other African witchcraft news

Other news:

• In one region of Tanzania last year there were 111 murders because of belief in witchcraft, mainly old women and albinos (i.e. they were killed as suspected witches or for their body parts). blank" href="http://thecitizen.co.tz/newe.php?id=16552">Source (hat tip)
• The Center for Inquiry has been organising lecturers in Kenya about "the dangers of superstitious beliefs." We wish them well and hope they aren't too scathing or dismissive as that can often get peoples' backs up. Source (hat tip)
• Brazilian missionaries have arrived in Nigeria to help address the witchchildren problem from a Biblical angle and it looks like they also be joining with other Churches and charities to highlight that this is at least aprtly driven by commerical concerns, rather than genuine religious beliefs.Source (hat tip)

Resurrections failing, possibly working and apparently working rather well, have been a topic we have looked at time and again and a couple more have cropped up.

The first is the most horrific scenario that underlies this kind of brush with death - walking up when your autopsy is just starting!!

Manas Deo was critically injured after a vehicle hit him Dec 25 near Baragadia village in Jajpur, Oriya daily Sambad quoted Manas's wife Tiki Deo as saying.

Police brought him to a local hospital where the doctor on duty declared him dead.

"It was a surprise for the hospital staff and family members after Manas woke up when the doctors began his autopsy," the report said.

Source

Hat tip

Of course, being killed, autopsied and buried makes it much harder to come back from the dead, but that doesn't mean you can't pull off such a return (apparently):

A youth who was believed to have been stabbed to death and buried in 2005 has resurfaced in yet another mysterious return of a man from the dead in the Transkei.

Siviwe Ntwalana, of Mthatha’s New Payne Location, turned up at one of the village’s homes, where he was given food last Thursday.

“They noticed his resemblance to our family,” said his father, Mbongolwana Ntwalana, yesterday.

His elder brother’s daughter went to check and recognised him, he said.

Ntwalana said Siviwe, born in 1983, was later taken to his home, but his mother could not believe her eyes.

“She was shocked because she knew that her son had been buried,” he said.

The village’s committee was approached and then police took him to the local hospital.

“At that time I was not at home, but when I woke up the following day family members came to ask about him,” Ntwalana said, adding that he and his family subsequently went to the hospital to look for Siviwe.

Other family members were convinced it was his son when they saw him, but Ntwalana only believed it after checking certain marks on his body.

“What made me believe was a mark where he was gored by a cow near the eye,” he said.

“We were very excited to see him again because we knew he died.”

He explained that Siviwe was stabbed by another man during a love triangle argument and reported to have been killed.

Ntwalana said his son has yet to explain where he had been.

“He has not told us where he was all along. He breaks down when he speaks.”

As this is connected with a murder case this will be investigated further and it will be interesting to see what happens.

Superintendent Mzukisi Fatyela said police were investigating.

He said his fingerprints would be matched with those in his ID application and those of the person who was buried in 2005.

“That process will cast light on what exactly is taking place,” Fatyela said.

He added that the police would investigate what happened to the murder docket that had been opened.

As the article mentions, this is the second such incident in the Transkei in just over a year, the previous case being one we also reported on at the time. It is possible that the dead body was misidentified, however, it is also possible someone has stepped into a dead persons shoes after a high profile case (there was a weird report I caught late night on cable about an American boy returning to his family after a kidnapping many years earlier, only for the boy to turn out to be a Spanish orphan, or something similar - I've never been able to track down the exact story but it was on one of those single name talk shows, like Maury, Montel, etc.).

Source

Hat tip

Near death as personal motivator?

Of course, it could be that coming close to the great beyond is the kick up the ass some people need and one person is trying to simulate it:

For Jung Joon, the moment of truth arrives for his clients as they slip into the casket and he pounds the lid in place with a wooden hammer.

Insights arise, he says, as they are confronted with total, claustrophobic darkness, left alone to weigh their regrets and ponder eternity.

Jung, a slight 39-year-old with an undertaker's blue suit and a preacher's demeanor, is a resolute counselor on the ever-after who welcomes clients with the invitation, "OK, today let's get close to death."

Jung runs a seminar called the Coffin Academy, where, for $25 each, South Koreans can get a glimpse into the abyss. Over four hours, groups of a dozen or more tearfully write their letters of goodbye and tombstone epitaphs. Finally, they attend their own funerals and try the coffin on for size.

...

Across South Korea, a few entrepreneurs are conducting controversial forums designed to teach clients how to better appreciate life by simulating death. Equal parts Vincent Price and Dale Carnegie, they use mortality as a personal motivator for a variety of behaviors, from a healthier attitude toward work to getting along with family members.

I think I'll pass on that.

Source

Hat tip

First it was Shangri-La at the end of last year and now we have the fabled City of Gold (or possibly more accurately the Lost City of Z if you prefer).

New satellite imagery and fly-overs have revealed more than 200 huge geometric earthworks carved in the upper Amazon basin near Brazil's border with Bolivia.

Spanning 155 miles, the circles, squares and other geometric shapes form a network of avenues, ditches and enclosures built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world. Some date to as early as 200 AD, others to 1283.

Scientists who have mapped the earthworks believe there may be another 2,000 structures beneath the jungle canopy, vestiges of vanished societies.

The structures, many of which have been revealed by the clearance of forest for agriculture, point to a "sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society", says the journal Antiquity, which has published the research.

The article adds: "This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. The 'geoglyph culture' stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands … we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it."

...

The findings follow separate discoveries further south, in the Xingu region, of interconnected villages known as "garden cities". Dating between 800 and 1600, they included houses, moats and palisades.

The unearthing of the Xingu urban network started back in 1993 and has uncovered impressive evidence, as the National Geographic reported in 2008.

One of the interesting aspects is that it undermines a lot of assumptions made about the ability of the area to support such populations:

"These revelations are exploding our perceptions of what the Americas really looked liked before the arrival of Christopher Columbus," said David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, a book about an attempt in the 1920s to find signs of Amazonian civilizations. "The discoveries are challenging long-held assumptions about the Amazon as a Hobbesian place where only small primitive tribes could ever have existed, and about the limits the environment placed on the rise of early civilisations."

...

The discoveries have demolished ideas that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support extensive agriculture, says Denise Schaan, a co-author of the study and anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará, in Belém, Brazil. She told National Geographic: "We found this picture is wrong. And there is a lot more to discover in these places, it's never-ending. Every week we find new structures."

The secret seems to be the black soil that has been a mystery since the late 19th Century. It is similar to biochar which some see as the holy grail of agriculture and climate change as it can lock carbon in the soil and increase fertility. Some even suggest this is the true gold of El Dorado and is a less we might want to take on board if we want to help save the world. The irony that the findings of these cities thanks to widespread deforestation is not lost on me either.

There are also literary links:

They are also vindicating, said Grann, Percy Fawcett, the explorer who partly inspired Conan Doyle's book The Lost World. Fawcett led an expedition to find the City of Z but the party vanished, bequeathing a mystery

Source

Other news reports on this:

• "Lost" Amazon Complex Found; Shapes Seen by Satellite
  
• Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest

Book

The Lost City of Z: A Legendary British Explorer's Deadly Quest to Uncover the Secrets of the Amazon by David Grann
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

The New Year brought a lot of things but in Hilltown, PA it brought some mysterious, coloured snow (and not the yellow variety that is so common on New Years Day as the cold weather hits booze-swollen bladders):

Less than eight hours before the arrival of 2010,  Hilltown police began what was likely their strangest investigation of 2009.

On Revere Drive, just off of Chalfont Road, there was pink snow everywhere.

“It was on the roofs, the grass and the nearby woods,” said Officer Matthew Reiss, who arrived at the scene around 4:30 p.m. “I had no idea what we were dealing with.”

Reiss called the Federal Aviation Administration to see if the strange substance could have fallen from a plane.

“It was covering the entire length of the roofs of seven homes,” said Reiss. “I picked up some the snow that was on the ground. It had no odor or oily texture.”

It does look oddly artificial but is there an explanation? Sure is:

“She said that it was ‘watermelon snow’ that was from an algae, whose name I wouldn’t try to pronounce,” said Reiss.

The algae are chlamydomonas nivalis, or snow algae, that owe their red color to a bright red carotenoid pigment.

According to the National Geographic Web site, the snow algae, like all algae, are green at heart, the red comes from the secondary pigment.

Usually in a dormant stage in winter, at times they “wake up” germinate, and squirm up through the ice crystals toward the sunlight, coloring the snow.

Reiss said the pink snow was only on the sections of roof that faced the sun.

According to one source, watermelon snow has puzzled mountain climbers, explorers, and naturalists for thousands of years.

Source

Hat tip

Looking it up and it is called watermelon snow, not just because of the colour but it also appears to smell slightly of water melons!! It even gets a mention in Jules Verne's "The Desert of Ice," the second part of The Adventures of Captain Hatteras:and, even though the cause is incorrect, it is certainly evocative of the strange sight:

But here a new phenomenon met their gaze—a phenomenon which was long a subject of patient inquiry among the learned of both hemispheres. They came to a long chain of low hills which seemed to extend for miles, and were all covered on the eastern side with bright red snow.

It is easy to imagine the surprise and half-terrified exclamations of the little company at the sight of this long red curtain; but the Doctor hastened to reassure them, or rather to instruct them, as to the nature of this peculiar snow. He told them that this same red substance had been found in Switzerland, in the heart of the Alps, and that the colour proceeded solely from the presence of certain corpuscles, about the nature of which for a long time chemists could not agree. They could not decide whether these corpuscles were of animal or vegetable origin, but at last it was settled that they belonged to the family of fungi, being a sort of microscopic champignon of the species Uredo.

Turning the snow over with his iron-tipped staff, the Doctor found that the colouring matter measured nine feet deep. He pointed this out to his companions, that they might have some idea of the enormous number of these tiny mushrooms in a layer extending so many miles.

This phenomenon was none the less strange for being explained, for red is a colour seldom seen in nature over any considerable area. The reflection of the sun’s rays upon it produced the most peculiar effect, lighting up men, and animals, and rocks with a fiery glow, as if proceeding from some flame within. When the snow melted it looked like blood, as the red particles do not decompose. It seemed to the travellers as if rivulets of blood were running among their feet.

The Doctor filled several bottles with this precious substance to examine at leisure, as he had only had a glimpse of the Crimson Cliffs in Baffin’s Bay.

This Field of Blood, as he called it, took three hours to get over, and then the country resumed its usual aspect.

We have looked at muti a lot here, usually in connection with the use of human body parts as ingredients in magic spells. However, a whole range of other things can be used, including animals with certain desirable abilities and it is this which appears to be causing a crisis in South Africa, as the demand for vulture brains as soared, while their numbers have plummeted:

It's a tiny organ that, the superstition goes, holds the secrets of the future. When smoked and inhaled, the brain of a vulture is said to confer the gift of premonition. To put it bluntly, most users hope to sneak a look at next week's national lottery numbers.

Such is the demand for vulture brains to use in muti – traditional medicine – that wildlife experts fear the birds could be driven to extinction within two or three decades. They also warn that hunting could intensify as gamblers seek an advantage when betting on the football World Cup in South Africa.

Vultures' acute vision, and ability to find prey, has kindled a belief that they possess clairvoyant powers. Their brains are dried and rolled into a cigarette or inhaled as vapours in the hope they will bring a vision of the future - including lottery numbers and sports results.

Andre Botha, manager of the birds of prey working group at the Endangered Wildlife Trust in South Africa, said: "People believe it's foresight and this finds fertile ground in people's imagination. If it worked for the lottery, everyone would use it and we'd have a lot of millionaires walking around today.

"There is a lot of betting in South Africa. So we may see an increase connected to gambling around the 2010 World Cup."

A 2007 study found that 160 vultures are sold a year for muti in eastern South Africa, with the total across the region thought to be much higher. About 1,000 are killed every year in Tanzania alone.

The birds are shot, trapped or poisoned by hunters. One tactic is to poison an animal so the vultures that feed on the carcass themselves fall victim. "You can have 300 or 400 converge on a poisoned carcass and all be wiped out," Botha added. Brains and other body parts are then sold at street markets or shops in Johannesburg and other cities.

...

Seven of the nine species of vulture are rated endangered. Botha said there was demand for the bearded vulture in Eastern Cape province. Traditional healers prefer that the bird be captured alive as the head needs to be removed while it is still living so that "the brain does not flow down into the spinal cord" and the muti loses its potency.

Source

Sooooo another year gone, but how was the news that was fit to report (and quite a lot that wasn't?). Well all fields of Forteana seem to be thriving and even if my pallet might be getting jaded there was still more than enough to tickle my fancy, and much more besides.

Human wonders positively rushed through the doors this year, with one rushing out, as were saddened to have to report that Kim Peek had died. Leading the charge (as always) were conjoined twins and looking back over them demonstrates the unfortunate names that can become attached to the as we saw the Spider Sisters, Octopus Man and the Snake Twins and the whole area reached its nadir with news that a two-headed baby had been found in a ditch but there was also good news with one boy hailed as a reincarnation of Ganesh (although some said he was a witch) and news of a successful separation. Other twins sneaking in were a second pair of black and white twins born to one couple. Behind them can an odd selection all linked with a general reproductive theme with a man giving birth to his own twin, a child born "pregnant", a woman pregnant for 60 years, a woman who conceived while pregnant and, just sneaking into this category if you squint, a man who planned on breastfeeding his kids. Backing them up are the general human wonders like China's hairiest man getting all that hair removed round the same time a "cat girl" was growing her own "pelt". We returned to look at Dede the Tree Man's treatment and the news that he wasn't alone as there was the Chinese Coral Man, coming from the hotbed of human diversity (China - but they do have a lot of people so the odds are in their favour on this). Ocular oddities included two people who cried blood and one girl whose eyes were turning to crystal. There was a girl who wasn't growing older (which might show us the path to immortality) and a superstrong young boy (who might have lessons we can learn for all sorts of wasting disease). If they were emerging superpowers ushering in Homo superior, then we also saw other evidence with electric people and more on human echolocation. There were also two people with their organs in all the wrong place, a boy with glowing eyes who could see in the dark (I was suspicious of that one) and someone with 24 digits balanced out by one woman who had an imaginary extra arm. The year ended with some favourites which I have long pondered: organ memory followed by two stories on massive burst of strength in adversity - none of which gave any easy resolution to the mysteries.

Animal oddities also strongly parallel our human wonders with all sorts of conjoined and multi-extremitied creatures that would give Noah a nightmare trying to define what he really meant by two of every animal (do you count heads, legs, noses?). There were snoutless pigs and a rabbit with two noses. There were all sorts of permutations of cows, a 5-legged dog that caused a fight, a frog with enough legs to make even the hungriest Frenchman happy and my favourite - a conjoined rattlesnake. We also have to mention the chicken that laid green eggs, now if only we could find a green pig for a full breakfast of green eggs and ham. To end not only did we see a young boy worshipped as Ganesh, but we also saw a mutant pig foetus getting the same treatment, which brings us nicely on to religion.

Religion also seems to be a big deal this year, whether you want to believe it or not. Strange animals also featured as a colour-changing frog was worshipped as a god (this reached a point this year when it might have been easier to point out things not being treated as deities) and to avert disaster two frogs got married, as did a young boy and a puppy. One of the first appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) was highlighted and she showed up in Mexico where she was hailed a miracle by two Mexican wrestlers, a move which resonated with pre-Columbian religion, as did the death of two dwarf wrestlers. Still down Mexico way there were big problems emerging with Santa Muerte and its spread into the US. The BVM stayed with us and made one of her statues come alive in Ireland. Miracles abounded all over the place from communion wafers turning into heart tissue, passages from the Koran appeared on a boy's skin and oily walls were hailed as the first step on the way to creating Australia's first male saint. A favourite topic of mine emerged when a resurrection failed, another possibly worked and someone did indeed come back from the dead (all with suitable caveats attached - which you should be assuming for most things here anyway). In Italy we looked at the Satanic Panic that might underlie one of the big news stories from there but it was in Nigeria that the war on the Devil was still being most fiercely waged: We looked at the situation a year on from the ground-breaking documentary on the problem of Nigeria's witch children and in the intervening time the problem had spread to the Congo, the witchfinder spoke out and we saw the legal threats being made to the charity. All this as a small part of a wider pattern of ongoing witchhunts, scapegoats and victimisation. Elsewhere, there was the Egyptian Hulk with the strength of 30,000 men and the founder of the Spiritualist religion Oahpse who made similar claims and received his new religion through automatic typing. Clearly if it had been a few dozen years later it would have been pitched as more of a UFO religion.

In Ufology itself we looked at other means of receiving messages from beyond with Tesla's communications from the stars, the Navy being on stand-by for messages from Mars, and other broadcasts from the stars - which seemed to have links with the odd phenomena of cold, mechanical voices being reported. Obama's election continued to cause waves through the Fortean firmament with UFOs sighted over his inauguration and Bigfoot and UFO links cropping up amongst his fiercest opponents/wannabe assassins. Over here in the UK, fire lanterns continued to generate hundreds of UFO sightings and, after concern being expressed by farmers, the lanterns eventually killed a cow. On a personal note at the stroke of midnight I saw dozens ascend majestically into the sky from the kind of distance required to mistake them for flying saucers and, as the whizzed past high overhead, I felt some sympathy for those who mistook them for otherworldly visitors but not a lot (as common sense might dictate there was a simpler explanation). An old "friend" Robert Bigelow refused to stay hidden in the shadows investing heavily in MUFON and buying HBCC UFO Research, not helping anyone who was worried about the alien/military mind control agenda at Skinwalker Ranch. My concerns over what Ufology actually is were raised early on and was a topic that got explored during the rest of the year looking at the Fermi Paradox, how fairies might fit in and the tricky question of alien evolution, including why they'd not look like us and how come Greys oddly look like an ancestor of ours (as opposed to our putative future selves, an idea stemming from science fiction and early ideas about evolution). I'm sure I'll be returning to that one, and another topic I know I'll be back to is early UFO reports and their ilk - last year we looked at an airship crash hoax, the attempt to find evidence for scareship witnesses and a few early flying lights/alien/entity encounters in Britain. One story to come out of the blue was the faking of a flying saucer crash at a British school, which had happened twice before. Another unexpected eye-opener was Buzz Aldrin's statement that there is a monolith on Phobos. More fun with figures of authority came from with a Winchester councillor claiming to have seen an alien and going on a bit of a disclosure crusade. I became interested in reports of UFOs around lakes and reservoirs - could some of them be connected with what might be a solution to the Naga fireballs? Of course, we didn't expect Cannock Chase to stop providing the goods (although almost all of rather dodgy provenance) and we saw UFOs and rocketman reported, as well as the suggestion the area may have seen the British Roswell.

Of course, the Chase weirdness grades effortlessly into cryptozoology including reports of (deep breath) Bigfoot, hellhounds, big cats, air krakens, strange fish and a giant serpent. There were also two possible explanations for some of the oddity: a Doctor's menagerie and an escaped gorilla (although there is no proof either explain any one of the dozens of reports, whereas sloppy and sensationalist reporting might come close to explaining an awful lot). Elsewhere a Batsquatch appeared on Mount Shasta and the North Carolina sewer monster briefly set the Net ablaze (before we all concluded it was a bunch of worms). The Man-bat flew in Mexico and got the blame for swine flu, which seems a little unfair. In addition there were  Japanese "monster mummies" as well as a mummified little person, that proved quite controversial.

In archaeology I was impressed to hear Shangri-La had been found and ancient mysteries abounded from the Nebra sky disk to the Antikythera Mechanism. I was pleased to offer the bog bodies documentary which had got my mind racing on the problems of the restless dead, which include the vampire graves in Venice. For me getting even tangentially involved with Uri Geller was a surprise but, in testing the claims for the Great Pyramids of Scotland, I inadvertently contributed a new piece of evidence - more on this soon. Taking a side step into anthropology we took a very close look at shrunken heads, but could only scratch our heads in wonder at the hunt for monkey menstrual fluids so were glad to bring it back to the restless dead with some tales of jumping Malaysian corpses.

The year was also dominated by the triumphant return of crop circles, helped by the splendid weather (which you would think more less mundane circlemakers might not have worried about). We saw a jellyfish, dragonfly, phoenix, mushrooms, trilobites and a "Mayan" design, quite a few of which seemed to have stylistic similarities. Some circles showed complex "weaving" which some claimed made it impossible for humans to have made (ignoring the centuries of strawcraft). It just got weirder though when a policeman spotted "aliens" at a crop circle and fake video emerged of aliens making crop circles. It seems fitting to end on the discovery that Australian circles had been made by wallabies on drugs. I am unsure if this is somehow a metaphor or a great band name. Either way, somehow I think Charles Fort would have enjoyed that story.

Which naturally, brings us to general Forteana (or just stuff I couldn't fit in elsewhere) and I was pleased to report on a series of storms that swept Japan depositing frogs, tadpoles and fish across large parts of the country. Meanwhile, a woman found money in a coconut, I don't imagine there was a run on coconuts to see if it was a fluke. More flying people were sighted in a number of places, including a fine sighting in Poland. Meanwhile simulacra didn't fade away with an impressive GOD appearing on salami and, just to scotch the claims for divine interventions with food, Tommy Cooper appeared on a pie.

As well as the Nigerian witch children fiasco mentioned above there seemed to be no end to the occult in the news, usually more the persecution of subsections of society than any actual rooting out of supernatural evil. So we had occult murders galore, while on the other side of the fence, there was a gigantic round-up of witches in the Gambia who were fed hallucinogens in order to make them confess. Elsewhere albinos murders rumbled on, to supply the insatiable demand for human body parts as ingredients for spells and while some killers were dragged to court, (over those killings and other muti murders), we also heard of a market where human body parts were sold for muti and pondered the voodoo economics. The political problems in Zimbabwe also seemed to prompt an increase in superstitious beliefs with witch trials, a boy murdering his father for turning him into a goblin, dubious claims about a baby's leg being used for magic and a father who chased of a naked old witch he caught suckling on his daughter. Elsewhere, there was a witchboy turn into a woman, an undead Queen of the Underworld and her witch slaves, a car thief who was a were-goat and full on magic war in Indonesia using some bizarre "weapons". This years best attempt at being a supervillain must go to the world record holding crow summoner who threatened to unleash bird terror of Hitchcockian dimensions over some imagined slight. In Bangladesh some "genies" were arrested and in Saudi Arabia some more were sued.

This brings us neatly to strange crime and it doesn't get any stranger than the reports that emerged this year. Mesmerising bank robbers returned in a story more plausible than most. Claims emerged of human fat-stealing thieves, which turned out to be cobblers, and suggestions that a bone-stealing cult was on the loose in Venezuela, which seems dubious. Even when they locked up some criminals they couldn't keep them behind bars, especially when one thief showed an ability to chew through them. The headline of the year may also get scooped up by a mix of crime and magic: "Sex change curse placed on flowerpot thief", although the most frightening aspect was the rather large "blast radius" for the curse - in a built up area that could cause a lot of raised eyebrows (if not much else!!).

Of course, to expand on Jim Morrison's idea, people are bloody strange whatever they do and we saw enough of that this year. The discussion of mechaphilia was one of the big hits of 2008 and we managed to dig out and post the documentary on car humping this year, and that themed continued with a woman marrying an amusement park ride. We'll do anything for love, apparently, including making corpse brides and even digging up your dead wife, encasing her in clay and bringing her home for cuddles on long lonely nights (perhaps the saddest and strangest story of the year). We had Nazi twin experiments in South America, medicinal cannibalism, sword-swallowing accidents, and two-handed writing - backwards, forwards and just about every way (almost magical for someone like me with appalling handwriting).

The year ended with two stories that urged caution: snow circles and human mutilation, both of which seemed to fade away under the glare of scrutiny. Although somehow I don't think that is the last we'll see of either, so we remain vigilant for this and much, much more.

The Compendium of Curiosities did well this year, starting strongly with the finding of Prometheus and then hooking up with the Cabinet of Curiosities Blog Carnival for a special on fairies and one on trees.

Personally I was very pleased to have got two pieces in Darklore 3 and 4, thanks also to Greg for guiding me in the direction of the Philadelphia Experiment and all the oddities that spin-off or tie into it. It definitely, sharpened my take on the situation, made me round off more research and gave me some more leads to follow next year which you should see plenty more on, especially on pre-1947 reports of strange happenings, in the influence of sci-fi and the occult on Ufology, and the odd characters that seemed to crop up all over the place. I also got a lot of small press comics done: continuing three series and contributing one-offs all over the place. Hopefully next year I'll make comics pay, and not in a dragging it off into the back field for Odd Bob's Funtime way either. Equally it was great to get the End is Nigh back up and running with issue #4 and hopefully it should be resuming a regularish schedule from now until at least 2012 - beyond that all bets are off. Soooo in some ways this year was all about building the foundations for next year and I hope it should be a good one.

Previously

Our previous round-ups for:

• 2007
• 2008

Other best ofs of 2009

As it is the end of a decade (kind of, depending on whether you are going to be a pedant) there have also been some best of the decade round-ups:

• 2009: The Lists in Review - the Daily Grail's review of 2009 lists
• The Second Annual Top 10 Anomalous, Dubious, Hoax, Events And Links Of 2009
• The Fortean Tinged Links of 2009
• The Most Popular Gralien Report Articles of 2009
• Top Fortean Books of 2009
• Top 15 Lists Of Cryptozoological Interest of 2009
• UFOs: A Decade in Review
• Ghosts, masturbation and weird findings - Weird, wild and decidedly offbeat research findings have emerged in 2009.
• Sharks, Zombies, and Weird Clouds: Wired Science's Most Popular Stories of 2009
• Top Ten Archaeology Finds: Most Viewed of 2009
• Top Ten Archaeology News Stories of the Decade
• Worst movie sex scenes of 2009 - for a little... light relief, you've earned it if you've got this far

So we have just had the latest Day of the Triffids remake on the BBC and, after a decent enough opener, the second half was a bit of a let down. Which makes me wonder why they bother making a second-rate (relatively) faithful adaptation of John Wyndham's excellent book when they already had a superb one "in the bank" with the 1981 TV series. Luckily, Auntie, in her wisdom, has made that series available free to watch online at YouTube (unfortunately with no embedding, which seems a bit silly), which takes away the pain for those of us who saw the new version and is a real treat for those who have never seen this one. It is also a good kick in the pants for those still suffering from New Year's Eve excesses and it buys me so time to put together the best of 2009 compilation (while nursing a fierce Wii sports injury).

Also, while we are here I should also raise the boarder issue: walking plants is always going to be a bit silly and no matter how good you are there is no amount of CGI that can boost the plausibility much above "things that make you go hmmmmm." Meanwhile John Wyndham has some superb books with much better apocalyptic scenarios in them, which would work just as nicely in the anti-festive vein the Beeb seem like to weave into their seasonal merriment. I'm a BIG fan of The Kraken Wakes since I found it in the school library and would love to see that on TV next year and I'm positive you could give it a "man messes round with the environment and gets a kick in the nuts" spin on it to make it 'relevant.' Equally, The Chrysalids is already pretty there on that front as global warming would make the perfect apocalypse there, better than the implied nuclear annihilation. In fact if the Beeb get their arses in gear now they could sort this all out in time to get a few shakes of piss on our festive chips in 2010.

Tis the season to be dicking around in the snow, apparently. Crop circles are now soooooooo last decade, so it is good to get the ball rolling early for the new era of field formations - snow circles.

The case comes from Robbert van den Broeke in the Netherlands, who is worth a mention in his own right:

[He] is singular in his ability to consistently and accurately predict the appearance of new crop formations in his general vicinity. Now 28 years old (2008), he has since early adolescence experienced "visions" which contain both the location and the design of the new crop circle accompanied by a clear sense that the new formation is either occurring at that precise moment or that it will occur soon. In the days just prior to these experiences he generally feels a build-up of physical and/or mental "angst" (nervousness and tension) which dissipates once the crop circle has actually formed.

Over the years he has also visually witnessed quite a few crop circles forming, these circles usually accompanied by unusual light phenomena although not the same light anomalies in each instance. In both daytime and at night he has observed single or multiple spheres of bright white or yellowish light hovering over a field (frequently the one that is directly behind his home), under which the plants suddenly flatten into a crop circle. Sometimes he simply sees a flash, or multiple flashes, of light, after which new circles or formations of circles are seen in the field.

...

He also states that he increasingly experiences both a "UFO" energy (a vibrant, intense sort of feeling) and a "Mary" energy (also intense, but gentle and very loving) as being present both at the time when specific crop circles are forming and afterwards, when he visits the new formations in the fields

...

Over the years events around Robbert have included many which are generally labeled variously as "psychic" or "poltergeist" situations, "out-of-body" experiences, "remote viewing," physical "translocation," "lucid dreaming," and "UFO" and/or "ET" encounters--and are documented with thousands of highly unusual photographs.

Which is turning everything up a notch or two from previous claims and throws in a BVM/UFO link to boot.

So on to our snow circles.

On December 17-18th Robert began to get the feeling some circles were imminent:

When they arrived at the field around 1:00 am (now Saturday, Dec. 19th) Robbert immediately felt what he described to me as a peaceful, very still, "holy" feeling and heard what he could only describe as sounding like a choir of "angels singing" in the air above the field. I asked if Ellen heard this, too, but Robbert said "no" -- it was only he who heard the "singing." As they walked down from the dike they could both see multiple rings scooped out of the snow-covered field.

Because it was dark, and quite cold Robbert and Ellen did not stay long to inspect the field. Later, when the sun had come up (Saturday, Dec. 19th), Robbert's friend Roy Boschman returned to the field to take photographs and was stunned to see the entire formation -- the largest such snow "circle" ever reported anywhere.

There were some interesting features - the lack of human footprints (apart from theirs), the way the snow seemed uncompacted in the circles like it had been scooped out not stomped down, the circles themselves were a generally consistent 11 inches wide, with some evidence for "brush-strokes" inside the circles.

The odd thing is, when the snow began to clear, it persisted for longer where the circles were.

Then after it all cleared it became obvious that one of the reasons for this was that the snow was resting in circles in the grass below.

Meanwhile, a second, even larger one appeared in an adjacent field over the 21-22nd December. It was 140m long and contained 35 rings.

So what is going on? Well the most obvious explanation is that Robert is doing it all but that would involve some pretty consistent hoaxing over a number of years or someone else is taking advantage of his gullibility to report their own efforts (not impossible, of course, but a lot of effort, often requiring messing around in freezing weather conditions.. Also it is unclear how the grass was damaged when the snow had been cleared not stamped down). I suppose it is also possible that he has some wild talent that could either manifest itself in such a manner or he is sensitive to whatever forces are at work here (from the descriptions it doesn't really sound like classic flying saucers though). It is tricky knowing where to go from here to find out the real cause of all thisk - the simplest way would be to set up cameras to monitor the field when he thinks a circle is about to appear and see what happens - it is rare someone claims they get premonitions about a circle's appearance, so it'd be a shame to not take the opportunity to test it. Unfortunately, such talents do seem to become even more... "elusive" when subjected to scrutiny. Without it you have a lot of impressive sounding claims, some fairly run-of-the-mill photos showing camera problems and a whole series of impressive crop and snow circles.

Of course, it might just be snowmen rolling their snowballs around - you know what they are like!!

Anyway they have a lot more details and photographs (of which the above are only a small selection to highlight the main aspects) over on the main page for this so check it out and make it up our own mind.

Source

Hat tip

Update

Thanks to Mori for the links in his comment to this article. He has looked at some of Robbert van den Broeke's rather iffy collection of photographs before and some of them are quite clearly laughably obvious fakes, as are his attempts at mediumship (Randi in that link describes him as a "wide-spectrum nut-case"), while others are unproven fakes but look to be equally crude attempts at hoaxing, So it looks awfully like the simplest explanation, that this is all a big fat hoax, is probably also the right one. At least with the snow circles he has actually put in a lot of time and effort to produce something impressive even if the ball is now well and truly in his court if he wants to demonstrate that this isn't another in a long series of leg pulls. Looking around for more I see crop circle researcher Colin Andrews is promising an overview of vab den Broeke and Nancy Talbott, the President of BLT Research, the source for the original story (presumably focusing on the crop circle claims), so I'll keep an eye out for that. In the meantime this lengthy dissection of one of the "best cases" for something weird being at work behind two 1999 crop circles in Holland is worth a read. They have also looked at the latest claims and are not impresssed.

We have covered human mutilation before (although a link to cattle mutilation  remains unclear, as do possible causes) and looked at its influence on Whitley Strieber's The Nye Incidents (about which I still owe you a review/overview). Now Joseph Capp from UFO Media Matters has posted about a talk at the PA MUFON meeting, which focuses on the Todd Sees case:

A friend of mine last year had asked me to do some reading on "Human Mutilations" he mentioned a case in South America. I had already read about the case and had drawn my own conclusions. I told him I believed it was copy cat murder. Some maniac had read about cattle mutilations and copied it trying to throw the police off.

Then enters Butch Witkoski a homicide detective with 27 years experience. When he spoke on stage that day at PA MUFON about "human mutilations" and how inexplicable the forensics around these case tuned out to be, I listened intently. As much as the topic doesn't make sense it still scared me.

Here is the video of his talk:

So how does this case stack up? It is certainly unpleasant but, the presentation was problematic. The quoting of the statistics at the beginning is a little sensationalist, "X number of people abducted [pause] or missing," and has no actual connection to this case, where Todd Sees is clearly not missing (in some ways it reminds me of the "argument by juxtaposition" claims made by ads for probiotic yoghurt, shampoo and beauty products were they make a number of "true" but unconnected statements and let the viewer fill in the gaps to prove that product A will actually address problem B) Equally, his conclusions on the case are at least partly based on the "argument from disbelief" (I don't believe he died that way, etc.) but without any evidence, or even a theory which we could test future evidence against, it is only his belief. The sandwich is finished off with a couple of cases of human mutilation which underline the fact that there is no clear link to either human or cattle mutilation, because Todd Sees wasn't actually mutilated (or if you want to count the burn, then he wasn't mutilated in the pattern commonly described). There does seem to be something fishy going on (at least according to the way this is commonly described in the Ufological community) but there is little proof that it is a cover-up of a "human mutilation" case - it will be interesting to see what the files on the case reveal if/when they are finally extracted from the authorities.

So what is behind the human mutilations? Well let's take a look at this which do initially appear to be actual classic human mutilation reports. The one with Sgt Lovette is eye-opening but sourcing it seems tricky - it is case 24 on the 1956 Humanoid Sighting Reports, which says "This is supposed to be from the officially “unpublished” Project Grudge report # 2," which all sounds pretty shaky and suspicious - if this isn't just pure fantasy it sounds like someone may have leaked story straight out of pulp sci-fi for their own purposes (perhaps even as disinformation to discredit cattle mutilation research). The Guarapiranga Reservoir body is at least [warning nasty pictures ahead] well-documented, although it is less obviously linked to aliens - the autopsy lists the cause of death as torture (and not with space gizmos either), which seems the most likely answer there is a discussion on this case on ATS where some suggest animals).

So there are any number of theories that could be put forward, at least for cases where we know something happened, even though one size may not fit all. Capp's idea of a serial killing copycat is an interesting one and I discussed other possibilities (occult murders are not unknown in Brazil after all, along with violent gangs). We only need look at what the Nazis and Unit 731 did during WWII to know that people can do horrific "medical" things to other humans. So, even if we can't glean the motivation(s) here, it doesn't mean we should jump to the alien answer. Personally, I find the human theory far more frightening and disturbing than the idea it might be extraterrestrials, at least until a bunch of little grey sadists turn up in my bedroom tonight to teach me a lesson for doubting them.

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Update

Mori has picked up the Guarapiranga Reservoir and run with it, giving us his always thorough analysis of the case over on Forgetomori. He details follow-up investigations that have been done (and which seem to go unmentioned in Ufological circles) - not only was it actually a completely different reservoir but the evidence all points to one horrific conclusion: a combination of drink and medication seems to have rendered him unconscious and he was eaten alive by animals. A truly grim fate, but not one that has anything to do with intentional mutilation by humans or aliens.

What it also underlines is that, no matter what the initial similarities between cases might be, each incident should be investigated thoroughly on a case-by-case basis.

A small collection of little known hominds from Africa may cast some interesting light on the early days of modern humans, but does Boskop Man also offer more insights? First some background - they were found in eastern South Africa by two farmers in 1913:

They brought the find to Frederick W. Fitz­Simons, director of the Port Elizabeth Museum, in a small town at the tip of South Africa. The scientific community of South Africa was small, and before long the skull came to the attention of S. H. Haughton, one of the country’s few formally trained paleontologists. He reported his findings at a 1915 meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa. “The cranial capacity must have been very large,” he said, and “calculation by the method of Broca gives a minimum figure of 1,832 cc [cubic centimeters].” The Boskop skull, it would seem, housed a brain perhaps 25 percent or more larger than our own.

The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.

The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.

...

As if the Boskop story were not already strange enough, the accumulation of additional remains revealed another bizarre feature: These people had small, childlike faces. Physical anthropologists use the term pedomorphosis to describe the retention of juvenile features into adulthood.

Humans are said by some to be pedomorphic compared with other primates.Our facial structure bears some resemblance to that of an immature ape. Boskop’s appearance may be described in terms of this trait. A typical current European adult, for instance, has a face that takes up roughly one-third of his overall cranium size. Boskop has a face that takes up only about one-fifth of his cranium size, closer to the proportions of a child. Examination of individual bones confirmed that the nose, cheeks, and jaw were all childlike.

This increase in brain size is even more impressive when you consider that it would largely be in the areas like the cortex and in particular the prefrontal cortex, which might have been half again as large as ours, bringing with it spectacular increases in processing power.

This, however, is enough to make you sit up and take notice:

The combination of a large cranium and immature face would look decidedly unusual to modern eyes, but not entirely unfamiliar. Such faces peer out from the covers of countless science fiction books and are often attached to “alien abductors” in movies. The naturalist Loren Eiseley made exactly this point in a lyrical and chilling passage from his popular book, The Immense Journey, describing a Boskop fossil:

“There’s just one thing we haven’t quite dared to mention. It’s this, and you won’t believe it. It’s all happened already. Back there in the past, ten thousand years ago. The man of the future, with the big brain, the small teeth. He lived in Africa. His brain was bigger than your brain. His face was straight and small, almost a child’s face.”

We have previously dealt with the idea that Greys are the "man of the future", an idea based partly on outmoded ideas about evolution and a big pinch of science fiction. The question we should be asking ourselves is: "what are the odds that 'aliens' who are visiting us evolved on another planet to look awfully like one of our evolutionary cousins?" It seems highly improbable, so the next question is: "why are people reporting seeing such a figure?" (even if just in their imaginations). If Greys are real (and yes it is still quite a big "if") then do they really come from the stars or... elsewhere?

If Mac Tonnies were still with us I wonder if he'd be looking at these smart cousins and wondering if they did become extinct or whether, faced with the big dumb cousins down the road, they slipped away into the quiet places on the first road to becoming cryptoterrestrials.

In the end though, I think the lesson we all should take away with us that the Boskop people may well have been smarter than us but sometimes brains just aren't enough - they might even cause you other problems, like those threats we face now from the "success" of our own cleverness.

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