Phantoms and Monsters

UFO Encounter - 1963 - Innisfail, Queensland, Australia
Washington Irving's Home Has A New Mystery
Fortean / Oddball News - 7/10/2010
New Book: Monsters of Texas

UFO Encounter - 1963 - Innisfail, Queensland, Australia

Posted: 10 Jul 2010 02:48 PM PDT

The following encounter was forwarded by a reader, Will:

Hi Lon,

In the early sixties, my friend Elaine and her family lived in Australia (she now lives in the Caribbean). We were talking about crop circles one day and Elaine mentioned that she vaguely remembers that her dad saw a UFO near a place called Innisfail. She immediately sent her father (who used to be a trained hypnotherapist) an email asking him about the incident and this is the email that her father sent back to her from the UK.

Hello Love,

We have seen a number of crop circles recently on the TV, those you have shown were new to me and spectacular! The incident you asked about re. Sam's Pies, I recall very well. It happened when we lived in Innisfail, in 1963. Sam Nightingale, the proprietor of Sam's Pies, had a call from nature at about 2 a.m. looking out of the bathroom window he saw a extremely bright vertical beam of light moving slowly across the field behind his house, the light stopped moving over the Johnstone River for some 15 minutes. Looking up he could see a huge shining object with slowly revolving coloured lights around the edge. He called his wife (Flo') and son James (aged 12) to the window all of them saw this happening. He ran next door and then down the street - many of his neighbours came out and witnessed the same sight. The sightings lasted some 25 minutes - the UFO then shot off to the right totally silently, and at great speed. One of his neighbours was the sergeant of police (whom I also new quite well). In short - it created quite a stir, eventually two R.A.A.F. officers arrived in Innisfail and took statements from everyone involved. I was called in to hypnotise Sam and some of the others. ALL THEIR STORIES WERE THE VIRTUALLY IDENTICAL. We were all told not to say anything about it, to anyone, unfortunately for the R.A.A.F. the story had already made the local newspapers! Many years later back in Innisfail I met James Nightingale, he asked me to hypnotise him at length - he had total recall! Remember this was long before any jet aircraft were in the skies above North Queensland, no military, no helicopters etc. About the only variation was - some saw it as a long oval 'cigar' shape, others as a disc. Other folk in the town came forward saying they had also witnessed the same sight, as did folk from South Johnstone, Mena Creek and the villages around Innisfail. There was no comment from the government - eventually a 'D' notice was issued, which effectively closed it down.

Well, that's it. The closest I have ever come to the unexplained.

Hope you and Will find it interesting. I was certainly convinced that 'there was something up-there'.

Cheerio for now, all my love,

Dad x x x x x x

So, there you go – a story that has been 'under wraps' for 47 years…

I found it most interesting and I hope that you do too.

Thanks for all your fantastic posts – I read as many as I can!

Best wishes,

Will

UFO Encounter - 1963 - Innisfail, Queensland, Australia

Washington Irving's Home Has A New Mystery

Posted: 10 Jul 2010 02:15 PM PDT

Click for video

<-- Is this a ghost? Could it be the apparition of Washington Irving?

TP - On June 26, 14-year-old Rachel Lambert saw something a bit unusual in a photograph she took earlier during her trip to Washington Irving's Sunnyside.

After seeing Tim Burton's film, "Sleepy Hollow," Rachel pursued her interest in the paranormal and convinced her family to take a trip from Rotterdam, N.Y. to see what the town of the horseman is really like.

They ended up wandering the estate of Tarrytown's Sunnyside and as they did, Rachel saw something strange in a window of Irving's cottage. She snapped a picture and moved on, as not to miss any of their tour guide's fascinating historical speech. When Rachel got home the next night and viewed the picture on the 27-inch screen of her computer, she found that the creator of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow had not let her down (see attached video).

She and her family were able to make out a figure that looks like the head and upper body of a ghost holding a quill pen. Rachel determined that before her eyes was a picture of the ghost of Washington Irving.

Rachel's father Ed believes that his daughter's sighting of the spirit may not have been a sheer streak of luck. Just before the family stopped outside the cottage, they were having a conversation with the guide about Rachel's achievements as an English honors student and her dream of becoming a writer. They additionally spoke about her interest in Sleepy Hollow and how she had planned out sights to see and goals for the trip, which included stopping at Washington Irving's grave in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery beforehand. The family thinks that Irving's spirit may have overheard this conversation and acted. Perhaps Irving's thoughts were, "I'm gonna let her see this and do this for an aspiring author," as Rachel's father put it.

When Historic Hudson Valley, the organization entrusted to maintain the estate, was contacted, spokesperson Rob Schweitzer said he was "unaware" of any ghosts at the estate.

But some ghost enthusiasts maintain the Sunnyside is known for holding the spirit of Washington Irving.

"The legend says he still haunts the house," said Donna Davies, of Haunted Hudson Valley. "He passed away in the house. If he was going to haunt any place he would haunt Sunnyside."

Another ghost hunter, Linda Zimmermann, has written many books on the hauntings in the Hudson Valley and agrees with Davies' assessment in her book Ghost Investigator: Hauntings of the Hudson Valley, Volume 1:

* "Irving made his home at Sunnyside in Tarrytown. Some people claim that to this day, he still resides in his beautiful mansion. That are reports that Irving's spirit walks the halls and rooms of Sunnyside, and that he particularly favors the tower know as the Pagoda. It seems to be poetic justice that the man most know for his ghost story would pass on and create one of his own."

Rachel was certainly excited by this sighting and claims that she is now even more interested in Sleepy Hollow, Irving and ghost stories. As for her parents, Rachel's mother emphasized that they have always been open about the paranormal with their children and allowed them to explore its possibility rather than fear it.

Ed however, stated that he always thought there could be a potential for the spirit world, but that there are also other scientific ways to explain such mystical events. "Do we make these things up in our minds or are they there?" he initially thought. But after taking several close looks at the photograph he said, "I think it's there."

Many family members and friends that were shown Rachel's photograph were similarly shocked by the image and questioned their ideas about the spiritual world.

"I think it made some people believers," said Ed Lambert.

Some even said that it looks like there are several ghosts in the image, besides Irving's spirit. The Lambert family believes that some kind of paranormal investigation should be done to determine what is really in the photograph and at Sunnyside.

The Lambert family plans to return to Sleepy Hollow and Tarrytown in the fall to see the scenery of the season, and perhaps to further explore the possibility of the supernatural in the villages.

Although Rachel is likely to also pursue her interest in the paranormal elsewhere, her recent experience and haunting souvenir caused her to admit, "I think there's something special about Sleepy Hollow.

**********

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Ichabod Crane, a Connecticut schoolteacher, arrives in Sleepy Hollow in 1790 and is immediately attracted to the supernatural tales told by the area's Dutch housewives, particularly the tale of a headless horseman. According to the story, he is a Hessian cavalryman who was decapitated during a battle in the American Revolution. Each night he rides out searching for his lost head.

Crane also spends his time pursuing a young woman, Katrina Van Tassel, the "plump," 18 year-old daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer. This infuriates a rival for Katrina's hand, "Brom Bones" Van Brunt, a handsome but rather rowdy and brutish man who subjects Crane to ridicule.

One Autumn night after attending a party at the Van Tassel home, Crane encounters the headless horseman near a bridge and the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. A pursuit through the countryside follows during which the spectral horseman hurls his "head" at Crane. The next day the schoolteacher is missing, leaving behind a riderless horse, a trampled saddle, Crane's hat, and a smashed pumpkin.

Irving leaves it to the reader to decide if the horseman was an actual specter or Van Brunt in disguise.

The Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

The cemetery in Sleepy Hollow is a beautiful Victorian era cemetery with many hills and valleys in a gothic park-like atmosphere, situated on the east side of the Hudson River. It contains the final resting place of Washington Irving, the author of the Legend of Sleepy Hollow – Ichabod Crane's encounter with the Headless Horseman. Washington Irving wrote, in a letter addressed to the editor of Knickerbocker Magazine, "I send you herewith a plan of a rural cemetery projected by some of the worthies of Tarrytown, on the woody hills adjacent to the Sleepy Hollow Church. I have no pecuniary interest in it, yet I hope it may succeed, as it will keep that beautiful and umbrageous neighborhood sacred from the anti-poetical and all-leveling axe. Besides, I trust that I shall one day lay my bones there." Washington Irving's gothic revival home, known as Sunnyside, is situated not far from his gravesite, along the Hudson River.

Also buried at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery are other luminaries such as: Andrew Carnegie, Walter Chrysler, William Rockefeller, and Elizabeth Arden. The television series "Dark Shadows", which featured vampire Barnabas Collins, witches, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures, inspired a film, "House of Dark Shadows". In the film, Lyndhurst, a gothic revival mansion in nearby Tarrytown, was the Collinwood estate and a mausoleum in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery was shown as the Collins family tomb. The cemetery is rather renowned and guided tours are offered in October. It is also adjacent to the cemetery of the Old Dutch Church, which is the resting place of those who inspired Irving's characters of Katrina Van Tassel, Brom Bones, and the headless Hessian soldier.

Sources:
tarrytown.patch.com
longislandgothic.com
classic-american-fiction.suite101.com
www.wordcraft.net

Washington Irving's Home Has A New Mystery

Fortean / Oddball News - 7/10/2010

Posted: 10 Jul 2010 10:43 AM PDT

Stephen Hawking Uses CG to Bring Aliens to Life

heraldsun - They aren't just any aliens - they are extraterrestrial life as only one of the universe's best brains could envisage them.

Stephen Hawking has taken advantage of the latest computer graphics to display his versions of ET, based on hard science, for a new documentary series, Into The Universe.

Picture gallery: Hawking's aliens come to life

The British theoretical physicist, trapped in a body paralysed by motor neurone disease, and author of the best seller A Brief History of Time, spent three years to finish the series, which airs this weekend on the Discovery Channel.

The 68-year-old suggests in the first episode that extraterrestrials are almost certain to exist.

He points out the universe has 100 billion galaxies, each with hundreds of millions of stars, and that in such a huge place Earth is unlikely to be the only planet where life has evolved.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," he said. "The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

Among the theoretical aliens are terrestrial herbivores and carnivores, lizard-like predators with limb membranes that allow them to glide using venom-loaded stingers to bring down a two-legged herbivore that has a huge vacuum snout to suck up food.

Such land-based aliens would probably feed and move in ways similar to animals on Earth.

Prof Hawking also came up with a squid-like creature that could feed on the bottom of the salty ocean thought to exist below the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa.

Life on planets where the average temperatures are below -150C would require organic components and physiologies radically different than those found on terrestrial planets largely dependent on liquid water.

**********

Eye Telescope Implant Approved by FDA

cbc - A U.S. regulator has approved the use of a small telescope that can be implanted in one eye to help some patients suffering a loss of vision.

Two versions of the implantable miniature telescope can replace the natural lens and provide an image that is magnified by 2.2 or 2.7 times, the Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday.

The telescope magnifies and projects images onto a healthy portion of the retina, but can be used in one eye only; the other eye is needed for peripheral vision.

The device could help some patients suffering from end-stage age-related macular degeneration, a disease related to aging that is a leading cause of vision loss for people over 60.

The telescope is intended for patients 75 and older with severe to profound vision impairment caused by blind spots, the FDA said. Because the brain must merge the views from two eyes into a single image, patients will need rehabilitation after the surgery to make it work, the FDA said.

A clinical test of the telescope involving 219 patients found that 75 per cent had their vision improve from severe or profound impairment to moderate impairment.

Due to the size of the device, implantation can cause other problems, including the need for a corneal transplant, the FDA warned.

The agency and manufacturer VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies Inc. of Saratoga, Calif., agreed to create detailed labelling to communicate the risks.

And as a condition of approval, VisionCare must conduct two studies, following up existing patients and beginning a study of 770 new patients, the FDA said.

The telescope costs $15,000 US, VisionCare said.

**********

Death by Condiment

news.com.au - Six workers drowned after falling into a giant vat of tomato sauce at a factory in India, the Indian Express reported.

The horrifying incident unfolded Wednesday evening when a female worker slipped and fell into the 6m deep tank.

As five colleagues dived in to grab her they were all overcome by fumes given off from fermenting vegetables and drowned, the newspaper said.

Two more workers were in a hospital following the tragic incident at the Akansha Food Products unit in Lucknow, in the Uttar Pradesh region of northeastern India.

Investigators say the woman, named as Usha, was scooping up fermented vegetables from the vat when she slipped off her ladder and plunged into the raw material used to make the sauce.

"When the woman fell in, the other workers jumped in to help her," said Rajiv Krishna, Lucknow's Senior Superintendent of Police.

The factory owner was taken into custody, the Indian Express said.

**********

Fish Can Talk...Also Listen

telegraph - Far from being a place of deep silence, the underwater world is abuzz with the sound of fish sweet-talking the opposite sex, warning others of danger, giving directions, and general background chatter.

Predators may even hunt out prey by intercepting fish talk, researcher Shahriman Ghazali of Auckland University said.

"All fish can hear but not all can make sound -- pops and other sounds made by vibrating their swim bladder, a muscle they can contract," he said.

Mr Ghazali, who is presenting a paper on his research to fellow marine scientists in Wellington this week, hopes to decipher the contexts for different types of communication.

"This is the next step. We are 99 per cent sure they are fish sounds.

"Now we want to find out what the sounds mean," he told the New Zealand Herald.

The main reasons appear to be attracting mates, scaring off predators, and orientating themselves around reefs, he said.

He placed groups of fish into tanks in a laboratory, gave them a few weeks to settle in, and monitored them using an underwater microphone and instruments that detect water movement.

It emerged that gurnard are among the most talkative, making distinctive grunts and keeping up a pattern of chatter throughout the day.

Cod, on the other hand, stay mostly silent, except while spawning when they become very vocal.

"The hypothesis is that they are using the sound as a synchronisation so that the male and female release their eggs at the same time for fertilisation," Mr Ghazali said.

"Outside spawning season, you won't hear a sound from them."

Fish known as bigeyes produce a popping sound, which appears to operate as a sort of Morse code.

Mr Ghazali debunked a commonly held belief that crayfish in New Zealand waters make a similar popping sound when divers approach.

"I didn't get any sound from any of them," he said.

He also advised pet owners who tap the bowls of goldfish not to hold their breath for a reply.

"Goldfish have excellent hearing but they don't make any sound whatsoever," he said.

NOTE: I must have had some dumb and/or deaf fish because they never listened to me. Though, I'm positive that the corals heard me...Lon

Fortean / Oddball News - 7/10/2010

New Book: Monsters of Texas

Posted: 10 Jul 2010 09:48 AM PDT

Monsters of Texas - By Ken Gerhard & Nick Redfern

Texas - or the Lone Star State, as it is affectionately and widely known - is the second largest U.S. state in both area and population, spanning no less than an astonishing 268,820 square miles, and with an ever-growing population that is currently in excess of 24 million. Houston is its largest city and the fourth-largest in the United States; while Dallas–Fort Worth is the biggest metropolitan area in the state, and the fourth-largest in the nation. Other major cities in this diverse and multi-cultural state include San Antonio, and the capital: Austin.

But that is not all: all across Texas there lurks a wide array of monsters, mysterious beasts and diabolical creatures that science tells us do not exist – but that a significant percentage of the good folk of Texas certainly know otherwise.

In Monsters of Texas, you will learn a great deal about countless bizarre critters, including the following:

· Giant winged-things: feathered batmen, huge birds, pterodactyl-like beasts, and glowing-eyed gargoyle-style entities that haunt the Texas-Mexico border;
· Texas' very own version of Puerto Rico's infamous vampire-like monster, the Chupacabras;
· Blood-thirsty, predatory werewolves said roaming the wilds of Texas by the eerie light of a full moon;
· Texan equivalents of the famous Loch Ness Monster of Scotland: water-based beasts of unknown origin and identity that occasionally surface from the murky depths;
· The legend of the hairy wild-man, and wild-woman, of the Navidad that struck terror into the minds and souls of the people of the area way back in the 1800s;
· Encounters of the distinctly Bigfoot kind in central and east Texas; as well as in the state's legendary and mysterious Big Thicket woods;
· Out-of-place animals: those creatures that are found within the Lone Star State, yet that have apparently strayed – sometimes inexplicably so - far away from their normal habitats;
· Those truly ominous beasts that may be far less than flesh-and-blood in nature, and far more paranormal and supernatural in origin;
· The diabolical, cloven-hoofed Goat-Men that haunt the dark woods of Lake Worth, the old Alton Bridge at Denton, and Dallas' White Rock Lake;

· PUBLISHED BY CFZ PRESS (www.cfz.org.uk)
· AVAILABLE FROM ALL GOOD BOOK-SELLING OUTLETS!!!
· ISBN: 978-1-905723-57-7

NOTE: Nick and Ken will be on 'Beyond the Edge' radio talking about their new book 'Monsters of Texas' - July 11th at 9 pm ET...Lon

New Book: Monsters of Texas

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