Phantoms and Monsters

World Record: Largest Shark Landed With Rod and Reel
Retired Police Officer Reports Alien Close Encounter
Former MoD UFO Expert Nick Pope Says Pasture Close, Bushey Video 'Very Interesting'
Humanoid / Cryptid Encounter Reports 19
Fortean / Oddball News - 7/2/2010

World Record: Largest Shark Landed With Rod and Reel

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 11:07 AM PDT

politiken - Per Jensen and Henrik Hansen have smashed the world record for a shark landed by fishing rod.

According to NRK it took the Danes 45 minutes to land the 880 kilo, 4 metre and 10 cm Eqalussuaq or Greenland shark (Somniosus microcephalus) in Norway's Bokna Fjord. The previous record for a rod-caught shark specimen is said to be 775 kilos.

The Bokna Fjord is in Rogaland County between Stavanger and Haugesund.

"It all went very well," says Henrik Hansen.

Bait

The two had traveled to the Bokna Fjord as they had heard that particularly large Greenland shark were to be found there. For bait, the two used an empty potato sack full of plaice.

The plaice would probably have been a better bet if the two had hoped to catch something to eat in the near future. The meat of the Greenland shark is toxic as the flesh contains trimethylene oxide, which when digested has the same effect as severe drunkenness.

When properly prepared in a painstaking process, it can however be eaten and is considered a delicacy in Iceland and particularly Greenland, where the fish, which is not generally dangerous to humans, is closely tied to Inuit folklore.

The Greenland shark, which also bears the names sleeper, ground, gurry or grey shark is one of the largest species of shark and can grow to over six metres.

World Record: Largest Shark Landed With Rod and Reel

Retired Police Officer Reports Alien Close Encounter

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:52 AM PDT

herald24 - A former police officer saw a UFO, and what he thought were children that "disappeared all of a sudden", while driving from Hertford to Puckeridge.

The sighting was in July last year, but has only emerged within the last few days on a UFO-watcher's website.

In his tantalizing account the ex-cop, who identified himself only as Nick R, wrote: "I saw whilst driving along the A10 going home one evening after work north a light which was not the moon, orange and oval in shape. I drove into my parking space in Puckeridge and went into my flat. Faffed about for about 10 minutes then went outside for a cigarette.

"I saw something which I have never told anyone about. My flat was in Cambridge Court in Puckeridge backed on to fields. I saw in the twilight what I thought were kids messing about. No, as the light faded around 21.30 the orange globe appeared in the sky. I was at this time watching something on TV, then went outside for a fag again."

Chillingly he raised the prospect of seeing alien beings that he initially thought were "children", in the field – a so-called 'close encounter of the third kind'.

He added: "I know that area is a flight path from Stansted, but that was strange.

"The children disappeared all of a sudden. I lived there for one-and-a-half years, and never experienced anything like that."

In reply to the post another site user wrote: Intrigued by your report, am interested in sightings on either 25/26th of July in this area seems to be a pattern."

He suggested Nick R report his sighting on another site dedicated to serving and retired police officers' sightings of UFO-related phenomena.

Retired Police Officer Reports Alien Close Encounter

Former MoD UFO Expert Nick Pope Says Pasture Close, Bushey Video 'Very Interesting'

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:40 AM PDT

Click for video

Former Ministry of Defence UFO investigator Nick Pope described unusual footage of a Bushey sighting as "very interesting". Pope, who worked for the MoD between 1991 and 1994, is recognized as a leading authority on UFOs and continues to investigate and comment on unusual sightings.

After viewing the video taken in Pasture Close, Bushey, on Wednesday, Mr Pope said he could not be sure what the object was, but that it probably had a logical explanation.

He said: "We are getting more and more sightings of UFOs. I think this is partly down to science fiction movies and people becoming more open to the possibility we are not alone.

"When I was running the government UFO project we got about two or three hundred sightings a year. Now people have more access to technology to record what they see, we are getting more and more good footage of UFOs."

Mr Pope said the object in the video, taken by Jackie Noise, was probably a Chinese lantern but could not rule out the possibility of extra-terrestrial life visiting Earth.

"There is a lot of strange stuff being seen. Is there life out there? Definitely. Is there life visiting us? I'm not so sure. It is possible and throughout my career I have seen evidence, but no proof."

Former MoD UFO Expert Nick Pope Says Pasture Close, Bushey Video 'Very Interesting'

Humanoid / Cryptid Encounter Reports 19

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:21 AM PDT

The following are previous humanoid / cryptid encounter reports received by various agencies worldwide:

THE ALIEN SOMBRERO

Location/Date: Kadima, Israel - March 20, 1993 - 6:30 am

Ziporet Carmel woke up earlier than usual and went to her kitchen. As she got there she noticed that the room was bathed in a strange light. She went to check the grounds and as she walked around the storage shed she noticed what appeared to be a large fruit silo on a nearby field. As she took a closer look she noticed that the silo-like object was silver colored and square in shape. It had what appeared to be 18 glowing square windows along its side. Five huge beams of a powerful light shone from its top into the sky.

Suddenly what appeared to be a second section of the object materialized doubling in size. Then a seven-foot tall man-like figure appeared near the object. The dogs reacted in a violent manner upon seeing the figure. The figure wore a metallic overall and what appeared to be a sombrero-like headgear with a veil that covered his face completely. The figure and the witness then stared at each other for about 30 seconds. Ziporet then quietly whispered "Why don't you take off your hat so I can see your face." She then heard a clear voice inside her head that spoke in Hebrew telling her that, "That's how things were." The witness then felt compelled to go back to her kitchen. Later during a search of the field numerous ground traces of an unknown smelly substance, that made people sick with nausea, was also found.

Source: UFO Universe

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SUDDEN 'FAIRY'

Location: Lake Erie, New York - June 22, 2010 - 8:00 pm

Last week while out at my summer cottage near Lake Erie in Western New York State, I was walking my dog out at about 8:00 p.m. The sun was just beginning to go down behind the trees, casting a beautiful fractured light on the front of the house. In the distance could be heard the sound of my neighbors ATV driving around the undeveloped wetlands adjacent to my property.

Suddenly my dog began acting erratically, pulling on the leash to go back inside and turning his head toward the sky, looking this way and that. I spoke to him asking what was wrong and looked around to see what was disturbing him, other than the noise in the woods. That is when I saw a peculiar winged creature flying from out of the woods across the front of the house.

The creature's wings were about three inches across. The wings were transparent and rounded at the ends. If you formed a "c" with your thumb and forefinger and then touched your thumb nails together, you would have a rough estimation of the shape of the rear wings of the creature. The wings were not fluttering like a butterfly or vibrating like a dragonfly, which are two common insects in my yard. The creature was gliding, with perhaps a slight vibration.

I only saw the creature for the length of time it took to fly to the end of the house. Once it got beyond the house into the open area of the front yard, it disappeared. My eyes were on it the whole time.

I was not able to see any of its body, just the back wings from below as described above. By the shape of the wings I assumed it was a four winged creature. My thought after the being disappeared was, "That must be what people see when they say they have seen a fairy."

I felt elated seeing this creature. It was nothing I had ever seen before.

Source: MUFON

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FACELESS HUMANOIDS

Location/Date: Lausanne, Switzerland - 1989 - night

The witness was alone in the apartment and suddenly woke up terrified, her heart beating loudly. Two figures then came in through the closed door. The figures appeared to be wearing wide beige raincoats, made of some sort of cloth, also wearing hats made of the same material and color. The beings seemed to be faceless, with ovoid heads without ears, their faces showing darker shades where the eyes and the mouth would normally be. Their mouths were thin and horizontal. They had oval shaped, expressionless eyes in a vertical location, both wide and hollow. The beings were slim and very tall. The witness somehow knew that the closest one was a "male" and the one following right after was a "female." That's all she is able to remember of the incident.

Source: GREPI

NOTE: there was a similar account reported from Zug, Switzerland around the same time period. The only reference I have is a note of the encounter that I made after hearing of it. The date was of reference was July 7, 1989 and the humanoids were described wearing 'tan colored slickers' and having 'odd featureless faces'...Lon

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THE STRANGER

Location/Date: Brooklyn Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota - July 2003 - evening

Kim Courteau and her sister were attending a monthly MUFON meeting. At the meeting they noticed a woman there whom Kim (a regular attendee) had not seen before. She was different. Her features were severe and noticeably pronounced, especially from a side view of her face. They could not help but notice that her face was large in size and elongated slightly with a rounded head and ending in a very pointy chin. Another striking feature of her appearance was her oversized sunglasses, which she kept on during the entire meeting, even when the room was darkened to watch a video, the dark sunglasses never came off and covered half of her face.

Kim and her sister kept stealing glances at her whenever they felt she was not looking, but somehow the woman would always be looking at them before they would even think of looking in her direction. She said nothing the entire meeting. Her hair was big and feathered. Her lips were quite thin. She seemed to be much more interested in scanning the room and the other attendees than anything else. She gave the witnesses the creeps. After the meeting was over the witnesses lost track of the stranger and asked the other participants, but incredibly no one else had noticed the peculiar woman.

Source: Kim Courteau (witness)

Humanoid / Cryptid Encounter Reports 19

Fortean / Oddball News - 7/2/2010

Posted: 02 Jul 2010 10:24 AM PDT

The Battle of Loch Ness

bbc - Rival Loch Ness Monster tourist attractions have settled a legal dispute by agreeing out-of-court to change their names.

Operators of the Official Loch Ness Exhibition Centre were suing the owners of the Original Loch Ness Monster Exhibition Centre for £1.3m.

The sites are 100 yards apart in Drumnadrochit near Loch Ness.

They are now to be known as the Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition and Nessieland Castle Monster Centre.

The case was set down for five days at Inverness Sheriff Court, but was resolved after two days of talks.
Lost profits

Sheriff Ian Abercrombie had appealed to both parties to sit down together in a bid to resolve the matter before any evidence was led.

Robbie Bremner, of the Official exhibition which will now become Loch Ness Centre and Exhibition, took the long-running row to court.

He alleged the Original run by Donald and Gillian Skinner had cost his business £1.3m in lost profits since 1987.

In court documents, the Bremner family claimed that the Skinners had deliberately sought to confuse the public by using similar names and a similar colour scheme on promotion material to their company.

The Skinners denied the allegations.

Following out-of-court discussions, solicitor Bobby MacDonald, representing the Skinners, told Sheriff Abercrombie: "I am happy to say all matters have been resolved."

He said there were no longer any matters for the court to decide on.

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Witches and Miracle Healers Still Rule Roost in Superstitious Balkans

heraldscotland - It might sound weird, but even in 2010 the brooding Balkan countries can't shake their addiction to psychics, clairvoyants, soothsayers and assorted 'white witches', all of which are still doing a roaring trade, from Bulgaria to Translyvania.

Clairvoyants and soothsayers ply their ancient trade around hospitals in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, reassuring anxious relatives with visions of a rapid recovery for their loved ones. They market 'miracle cures' and love potions, and in newspaper columns advise lovelorn women on how to land a man.

Some claim to be able to read, from coffee grounds, the fates of their fearful customers, while others predict the future from the stars. Their clientele pay handsomely for every divined word. Old women from the countryside tout herbal cures for everything from frigidity to erectile dysfunction and cancer, and claim that their healing craft extends well beyond traditional medicine. Credulous Bulgarians are the world's biggest spenders when it comes to the miracle cures market.

Every second Bulgarian who took part in a survey for the Sofia television channel BTV said they believed in supernatural powers, and especially feared a curse being put on them. Professor Ljubomir Halachev confirmed in the programme that "trust in psychic powers and second sight is widespread in Bulgaria".

At the upmarket end of this booming business, savvy younger 'practitioners' use state-of-the-art tools – internet websites, blogs and chatrooms – to spread their psychic messages, and give their readings a techy edge. Soothsayers' most sought-after services include the lifting of curses, countering havoc wreaked by an evil eye and turning bad luck to good.

The apparently unchallengeable claim by Bulgarian clairvoyants and psychics to paranormal powers rests on the world-renowned reputation of their late peer, the seer Baba Vanga.

Born Vangelia Pandeva Dimitrova in 1911, this blind clairvoyant and herbal healer is claimed to have predicted, before her death in 1996, a number of world events, including the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the death of Princess Diana, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US – "two American brothers would fall under attacks by birds of steel" – and the sinking of the Russian nuclear cruise-missile submarine Kursk.

Then there was her 'chilling' prophecy of the date for the outbreak of the Third World War – December 2010. Enigmatically, she said this would be the result of "attempts on the lives of four leaders following a conflict in Hindustan".

Of course, 'Hindustan', in the parlance of an illiterate Bulgarian village clairvoyant, could well have covered the entire Indian sub-continent. And, as the slayings of Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of Bangladesh among others bear witness, the sub-continent is no stranger to political assassinations.

Asked, when she was quite elderly, about her psychic sources, she became shrewdly vague. Her words were especially difficult to decipher because she had spent her entire life in the Rupite region of the Kozhuh Mountains, and spoke with a heavy local accent barely comprehensible to outsiders. Her television interviews were always supported by subtitles.

She spoke of "creatures invisible to people with ordinary sight", who told her about the fate and future of many people.

In the good 'white witch' stakes, Romania has the edge on the rest of the Balkans – even on Bulgaria. While keeping their ancient craft traditional, Romanian white witches use websites, blogs, email messaging and chatrooms to reach their clientele.

To judge by the claims of her website, Rodica Gheorghe is the leading 'white witch healer' in the country. Her credentials are based on her family tradition of witchcraft. She is the daughter of the witch Mama Omida and granddaughter of the witch Sabina. Some joke that her family are well on their way to having enough for their own coven.

But in the competitive cut-throat witch business, nothing is lasting, and in Romania's Transylvania province, 'black witches' have muscled in on the lucrative evil eye and funerary markets. Proven spells to keep a newly widowed man from remarrying, and thus depriving his children of their inheritance, are especially well paid for.

After any death in the village of Camarzana, a witch is called in to smear the udders of cows with garlic to prevent 'revenants' – vampires returning from the grave – stealing their milk.

As long as the ancient Balkan superstitions rule ordinary lives, witches, clairvoyants and miracle healers will do brisk business, with or without the internet.

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Study Links Bee Decline to Cell Phones

cnn - A new study has suggested that cell phone radiation may be contributing to declines in bee populations in some areas of the world.

Bee populations dropped 17 percent in the UK last year, according to the British Bee Association, and nearly 30 percent in the United States says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Parasitic mites called varroa, agricultural pesticides and the effects of climate change have all been implicated in what has been dubbed "colony collapse disorder" (CCD).

But researchers in India believe cell phones could also be to blame for some of the losses.

In a study at Panjab University in Chandigarh, northern India, researchers fitted cell phones to a hive and powered them up for two fifteen-minute periods each day.

After three months, they found the bees stopped producing honey, egg production by the queen bee halved, and the size of the hive dramatically reduced.

It's not just the honey that will be lost if populations plummet further. Bees are estimated to pollinate 90 commercial crops worldwide. Their economic value in the UK is estimated to be $290 million per year and around $12 billion in the U.S.

Andrew Goldsworthy, a biologist from the UK's Imperial College, London, has studied the biological effects of electromagnetic fields. He thinks it's possible bees could be affected by cell phone radiation.

The reason, Goldsworthy says, could hinge on a pigment in bees called cryptochrome.

"Animals, including insects, use cryptochrome for navigation," Goldsworthy told CNN.

"They use it to sense the direction of the earth's magnetic field and their ability to do this is compromised by radiation from [cell] phones and their base stations. So basically bees do not find their way back to the hive."

Goldsworthy has written to the UK communications regulator OFCOM suggesting a change of phone frequencies would stop the bees being confused.

"It's possible to modify the signal coming from the [cell] phones and the base station in such a way that it doesn't produce the frequencies that disturb the cryptochrome molecules," Goldsworthy said.

"So they could do this without the signal losing its ability to transmit information."

But the UK's Mobile Operators Association -- which represents the UK's five mobile network operators -- told CNN: "Research scientists have already considered possible factors involved in CCD and have identified the areas for research into the causes of CCD which do not include exposure to radio waves."

Norman Carreck, Scientific director of the International Bee research Association at the UK's University of Sussex says it's still not clear how much radio waves affect bees.

"We know they are sensitive to magnetic fields. What we don't know is what use they actually make of them. And no one has yet demonstrated that honey bees use the earth's magnetic field when navigating," Carreck said.

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Check out Rick Phillips' latest blog entry - Finding 'Portal' Intrusions - in which he uses my personal Bigfoot encounter as an example of an entity moving through portals. Very interesting read...Lon

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Boulder, Colorado Police Search for Leprechan

kdvr - Boulder Police are looking for a Leprechaun who caused mischief and mayhem in a King Soopers parking lot.

They received calls from people about a man dressed as a Leprechaun outside the store at 30th St. and Arapahoe Ave. at about 1:00 p.m. Wednesday.

Boulder Police Sgt. Fred Gerhardt told the Daily Camera they responded because the caller said the Leprechaun was jumping in and out from between cars, pretending to shoot at people with his fingers. The report also said on top of that, he may have made obscene gestures with his fingers.

"I think that's why they called us," Gerhardt says. "He was acting bizarre."

But officers didn't find anyone matching the suspect's description.

Boulder Police had not ever received a complaint about a Leprechaun before this,Gerhardt said.

NOTE: I wonder if it has anything to do with the 'vampire' that caused the woman to crash her car the other day? Lon

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Maggots Force Plane to Return to Gate

Click for video

A flight bound for North Carolina was forced to return to the gate in Atlanta after passengers noticed maggots falling from an overhead bin. Passenger Donna Adamo describes her experience in video above.

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Scare Tactics...FREAKED!

Click for video

NOTE: reminded me of Yvette Fielding and the other neurotics on 'Most Haunted' who constantly scream, cry and freak out. This guy would fit right in that show...Lon

Fortean / Oddball News - 7/2/2010

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