Phantoms and Monsters

Strange Mexican Witch Stories - Inexplicata
New 'Big Cat' Sighting Reported in Henley-on-Thames Area
Fortean / Oddball News - 8/2/2010
World's Sixth Largest River Discovered....Under the Black Sea

Strange Mexican Witch Stories - Inexplicata

Posted: 02 Aug 2010 10:26 AM PDT

The following is an interesting piece by Scott Corrales at Inexplicata. It includes an overview of the Monterrey Flying Witch or Flying Humanoid events as well:

A curious story occupied the headlines of a number of Mexican newspapers in 2006 regarding the startling re-emergence of strange entities best described as "witches" in parts of the country, but mainly in the area of Monterrey, Mexico's second most important city. According to Matamoros' El Mañana newspaper on September 19, 2006, Gerardo Garza Carvajal (Carbajal, in some newspaper accounts) a policeman from Santa Catarina claimed having seen two witches while on a routine patrol near a graveyard months earlier.

With five years' seniority with the Monterrey police department, Garza stepped forward with the story of his bizarre experience only because a fellow officer agreed to substantiate the experience. The young police officer had a glowing record and had never experienced any mental issues or hallucinations, as substantiated by tests performed on him at the Municipal Clinic.

Gerardo Garza's brush with the supernatural occurred near the Panteon Municipal cemetery, a short distance from the road leading to Villa Garcia." I was inside the guardhouse when I heard the sound of pebbles being thrown against the door. I went outside to see what was going on, and it was then that I saw two witches with faces like old women, with red eyes and black hats tipped backward; they had feathered wings and claws on the ends of those extremities. They began laughing horribly, and I got back into the guardhouse and saw what they were doing through a peephole. They were flying in circles, so I reported the situation to my fellow officers."

Garza said that he immediately requested backup, and in a matter of minutes was surrounded by several municipal police cars even some from the Ministerial Police.

"The witches flew off, but the police officers who came to my aid saw what I saw. They can attest to the fact that I didn't imagine anything. What I saw was real. I'd never been so scared before," said the officer. He added that he was subsequently taken to a medical center, since his blood pressure dropped excessively. He soon recovered from the powerful shock.

Local media gave the event a humorous twist, saying that law enforcement seemed to have a hard time dealing with organized crime, but oddly capable at dealing with the paranormal. Police spokesmen did their best to play down the report involving the strange "witches", but there already existed an uncomfortable precedent for the case: the January 16, 2004 experience that involved another police officer – Leonardo Samaniego – who had seen an entity similar to the one reported by Garza in the Valles de la Silla neighborhood at 3:15 am. near the mountain that dominates the city of Monterrey. The 21 year old Samaniego reported to his superiors that a "creature resembling a witch" had manifested itself suddenly in the residential area, and even pursued his cruiser in full flight as the terrified officer drove away in reverse, his eyes riveted all the time on the frightening manifestation.

"When the witch began chasing me," he explained, "I requested support from other police units over the radio. At that point, the witch descended between two trees at an elevation of six meters. She stopped and came down slowly. I saw her when she turned around – she was a completely black shape. She made a full turn and the light in her eyes vanished. Her eyes were just black sockets, without eyelids."

Like in the very best horror movies, the nightmarish figure's pursuit did not end there. According to Samaniego, the figure flew against the squad car, landing against the windshield and staring at him fixedly. "That's when I lifted my hands, screamed and passed out." One can hardly blame him.

Police dispatcher Angelina Guerrero's version of the event was only slightly different. "The officer reported that the woman approached him and gave him a nasty look, that she stuck to the windshield of the cruiser, pulled back and then rose into the night sky until she vanished.

It was suggested at the time that the unholy apparition had not hurt Samaniego Gallegos because he had an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe hanging from the rear view mirror. Another interesting note was that the vehicle's windows were fully lowered at the time.

The reader can imagine the teasing and practical jokes that the young law enforcement officer probably had to endure at the hands of his fellow policemen, but his experience prompted residents of Colonia La Playa – a residential district adjacent to Valles de la Silla – to come forward with their own accounts of high strangeness.

Norma Hernandez, 22, claimed having seen a black figure similar to a human being flying through the air two weeks prior to the policeman's hair-raising experience. Mrs. Hernández told the press that she had been doing laundry and hanging clothes out to dry when she became aware of the "black form" flying near her house. Frightened, the young housewife set aside her chores to run into the house and alert her husband, who scoffed at the suggestion. By the time Norma went out again, the entity was gone. "It was the size of a person," she said. "That's what frightened me the most."

The Hernandez experience was in turn corroborated by Seferino Gutiérrez, another resident of Colonia La Playa, who remarked that several years earlier he had seen a black-colored shape with clearly animal characteristics flying over their street.

Mexico's tradition of "witches" goes back into the Aztec past, and small communities have always maintained traditions that are an amalgamation of European Christian belief and native lore in this regard. Many regiomontano farmers and ranchers have the same fear of owls that the Aztecs felt for Tacolotl, the great horned owl, an evil far more terrible than the dreaded Tezcatlipoca. 19th century beliefs maintained that witches would adopt owl form to disturb the inhabitants of lonely farmsteads and would engage in curious animal mutilations – killing cats and stealing their eyes in order to see in the dark. It was also believed that witches in owl-shape could be made to fall out of the sky by reciting the Lord's Prayer backward.

The Witch Caught on Videotape?

Stories involving the "witches of Monterrey" – much more aerobatic and frightful than the witches of Eastwick or TV series like Charmed – captured the public's imagination and the media's as a result of Officer Garza's experience at the cemetery. A video dated May 17, 2006 was received by a Monterrey TV station, allegedly showing the flight of a "black shape" like the one described, only this time on a broomstick. The intriguing recording had been taken in the vicinity of Cerro de la Silla, unleashing a firestorm of controversy, and it remains to this day on YouTube.

The video begins with Garza providing a description of the attacking entity to an illustrator, who prepares a drawing based on his eyewitness account. "[Her] height was a meter, meter and a half, at most...[she] was dressed like a bird, with feathers, you know, she had feathers...seeing her face, it was an old lady's face, wrinkled, red eyes, black hair. What I really noticed were her black claws..and the hair. In other words, that's what shocked me the most. It was a bird's body and a face like a human's."

The news broadcast then cuts to the footage provided by Tomás Amador of the OVNIClub organization, showing the date and time stamp on the lower right hand corner. The "witch" can be seen as a small speck over a ridge at a considerable distance from the camera, but the camera manages to zoom in on the object, which remarkably looks like a classic Halloween witch on a broom, or at least a human moving across the air at considerable speed in a crouching position. The object flies across a wooded hillside and the video clip comes to an end. The voiceover corresponds to the two television reporters, remarking on the fact that the footage shows no sign of having been made with, or altered by, a computer, and the time sequence shown is uninterrupted.

It must be a hoax, one thinks automatically, since witches don't exist, or at least not in that particular form. Or do they? As the old Spanish saying goes: las brujas no existen, pero las hay – witches don't exist, but they're there.

A Fascinating Coincidence

When we approached our colleague Ing. Marco Reynoso of the Monterrey-based Fundación Cosmos A.C. for his comments, he attested to the factual nature of the video presented on the evening news and reported an even stranger wrinkle in this mind-bending sequents of events.

"In this case," says Reynoso, referring to the Samaniego encounter of 2004, "I was contacted by a person professing to be a white witch or sorceress for my opinion on the case, as she had cast a spell to bring down a witch who was about to cause physical harm to the grandchildren of one of her clients."

The magic user explained to the grandparents, continues Reynoso in his message to Inexplicata, and that they rejected her advice. They eventually embraced her advice and recommendations to perform certain rituals under the sorceress's guidance, incluiding a series of prayers. As events turned out, the very same evening that these rituals were performed to "bring down the witch", a strange creature fell out of a tree - the same bizarre entity that plastered itself against the windshield of Officer Samaniego's small patrol car.

At this point one wonders is rather than the hook-nosed crone of Hansel & Gretel, the so-called witches Monterrey correspond more to an elemental order of beings, perhaps even the lamias of ancient mythology, who were greatly feared by the peasantry of the Roman Empire. Curiously enough, tradition concerning the witches of Spain's Basque Country holds that the evil associated with Mt. Azpilicueta en the valley of Baztán is associated not to the area's extensive witch lore, but to the corpses of two lamias buried in the valley at some point in antiquity. Even more suggestive is the consideration that lamias were allowed to remove their eyes from their sockets at will, and the witch seen by Samaniego had nothing but empty black eye sockets, and the vampiric tendencies of the classical lamias dovetail with the northern Mexican belief that witches drain newborns of their blood.

Not Just Witches, Either...

Residents of a house in the municipality of Apodaca, also located in the state of Nuevo Leon, informed the Archivo Insolito website in 2006 of a problem they had been having for a while with an unwanted guest: the black, shadowy form of child. The grim shade would unexpectedly appear in different parts of the house, oftentimes weeping. Concepción Arreola, who owns the property, reported that a female lodger had once reported seeing the shadow entity appear under the staircase, crying, and that her own son had seen it materialize out of thin air in his own bedroom.

Fearful that the shadow entity might harbor unwholesome intentions, Mrs. Arreola contacted Father Hilario Gonzalez of the Monterrey Seminary for his expert opinion. The religious remarked that it was indispensable to determine the possibility of a natural origin to the phenomenon. Otherwise, he counseled, it would be best to study religious teachings to find a measure of peace.

When this answer did not satisfy, the homeowner approached Ricardo Escamilla, a researcher of the paranormal, who informed her that ghostly phenomena do not involve things have suddenly presented themselves but rather, something that has been there all along. "There have been cases," he added, "in which ghosts appear to choose a home at random, in some way. However, one usually deals with a situation that has occurred beforehand and manifestations begin to take place after a certain length of time." Escamilla expressed his willingness to look into this "shadow people" case from the standpoint of paranormal research, but adding that a religious approach is a way of solving these situations.

Cases involving "shadow people" have become increasingly common not only in the United States but around the world. Contemporary researchers, while classifying them as ghosts, still consider them to belong to a rather unique category. As far back as 1969, Oscar Gonzalez Quevedo had placed them under a separate classification in his landmark book Las Fuerzas Físicas de la Mente" (Spain: Editorial Sal Terrae,1969). Quevedo's classification of ghosts broke the restless apparitions into two categories: Group A, which included phantoms of human origin and nature, manifestations of the unconscious and human desire, along the lines of the "tulpas" of the Tibetan tradition; Group B, fraudulent ghost reports or misidentifications, and Group C, containing manifestations of the undead. The "shadow people" reported in the 21st century would correspond to the third set of insubstantial beings in the category. "Shadows," writes Quevedo, "have the peculiar characteristic of altering the temperature at the site of their materialization and feed on human fear. They are practically a silhouette or cutout image, rarely showing their features and traveling in groups. They appear in places where a death is about to occur and frequently remind the living of deceased relatives or those who are about to die. Animals react to their presence with tearful, frightened reactions. Shadows have the capacity of darkening the environment, and even if people cannot see them, it is unusual that they cannot feel them or sense their coming."

NOTE: Thanks to Scott Corrales for the great article! This phenomena has fascinated me for a long time, especially since the 'Flying Humanoid' sightings began. I have posted some of the videos and other information below...Lon

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The Flying Witches of Monterrey

Click for video
This was posted originally about a year ago but new sightings of the 'flying witches' are again being reported from Mexico. A police officer had a close encounter with one of these humanoids.

Testimony from dozens of persons and police officers depict seeing what appear to be witches flying through the skies of remote Mexican towns. Several people videotaped the strange phenomenon. The creatures appear to infest the skies over an old cemetery.

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Originally posted 5/9/2008

Flying Humanoid / UFO - Moctezuma District, Mexico City

Lic. Daniel Sanchez Rosales, a resident of Mexico City, recorded an unidentified flying object that he describes as having humanoid characteristics.

The video was taken on February 28 of this year in the Moctezuma district, not far from Mexico City International Airport, at 6:50 a.m.

It should be mentioned that the first one to see it was his nephew Quique (Erik) as left home toward his middle school. It was then that he woke his uncle Daniel and they observed the phenomenon through binoculars, at first. During this observation, the witnesses described it as "a flying humanoid" resembling an astronaut. They claimed that it was facing them and it seemed to survey its surroundings.

As part of this investigation, I visited the household and interviewed the witnesses. Both seemed like honest people to me, and are not looking for either fame or fortune, merely a chance to share their experience. Daniel Sanchez Rosales,36, is a graduate of the UNAM School of Law.

Research

After reviewing the video with filters, my conclusion is that it is authentic, but it is still necessary to determine the nature of what was recorded.

Objectively, we are aware that this could have an explanation: perhaps a balloon, but there are three aspects that draw our attention:

1. The recording has a 12-minute duation, and if we add to this the observation time through binoculars, the sighting was around 15 minutes, an uncommon period of time when we deal with balloons, as these are carried away by the wind, and it is hard to see them for an extended period of time.

2. At a given point in the video, the object or alleged humanoid makes descending movements, then remains static for a while and subsequently rises again. This ascending and descending isn't quite so common with balloon.

3. At two moments during the recording, the dogs' reaction can be heard. The appear to be keening or expressing fear. This does not occur when balloons are involved, unless it is a huge coincidence (the witness has 2 Labrador Retrievers).

The object remains close to an air corridor. The background information here is that researcher Alfonso Salazar had reported the presence of UFOs near MCIA.

More photographs located HERE

Strange Mexican Witch Stories - Inexplicata

New 'Big Cat' Sighting Reported in Henley-on-Thames Area

Posted: 02 Aug 2010 09:48 AM PDT

henleystandard - The "Black Wildcat of the Chilterns" saga continues.

Andrew Cleary, 45, was running between his home in Mill End and Dairy Lane when a large cat-like animal ran across his path.

He said: "Just a couple of feet in front of me this black animal went streaking across.

"It was much too big to be a house cat. It was about the size of a Labrador but it didn't move anything like a dog. It moved like a cat and I could see its long tail as it disappeared into the bushes."

Mr Cleary's sighting brings the number in the past 12 years to 14 but he wasn't aware of the previous ones because he only recently returned from four years in Columbia working as a teacher.

He said: "I have no thoughts one way or another as to whether all of these big cat rumours are true but I definitely saw something, so who knows?"

The sightings began in 1998 when there were several over a period of a few months in Goring, Stoke Row, Fawley, Ipsden and Woodcote.

A big cat was seen in Nuffield in 2001 and in 2005 a train driver reported seeing one near Wargrave station and a shopkeeper did the same in Binfield Health.

In 2006, an angler claimed to have seen a seven stone cat-like animal in Sonning Eye and another was reported at Nettlebed.

Last year, Nigel Spiers of Farm Road, Henley, described seeing a big cat at the roadside, Jane Alexander saw one in Nettlebed high street and rower Ben Lewis, 30, came across an animal on his morning run in Valley Road, Henley.

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Originally posted 5/26/2009

Big Cat Observed Near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

The "Wildcat of the Chilterns" has been spotted again.

The latest sighting was made by Nigel Spiers, who was driving to work early on Tuesday morning when he came across what he believes may have been a black panther.

He was in Greys Road just before Highlands Farm when he saw the creature sitting at the roadside.

Mr Spiers, 45, of Farm Road, Henley, said: "He was sitting down and just looking at me and didn't seem at all bothered I was there. He just stood up, ducked his head and, with two loping strides, was through the hedge and into the field."

He said the animal was about the size of a labrador.

"It was jet black," said Mr Spiers. "I know my wildlife and it was not a dog. I am certain it was a big cat. It looked just like a panther. It had the most beautiful tail, which was like that of a cheetah, designed to help balance when running."

Mr Spiers, a sash window renovator, said the animal could have been hunting rabbits.

He added: "I was aware that big cats like this had been seen before. My boss saw one once so I was not that surprised."

There has been a catalogue of sightings of similar creatures in the area. In 1998, in the space of just a few months, there were reports of a panther-like animal in Goring, Stoke Row, Fawley, Ipsden and Woodcote.

In May 2001, one was spotted in Nuffield and in June 2005 a beige big cat was seen by a train driver near Wargrave station.

In the same month, the shopkeeper at Binfield Heath stores saw a big cat resembling a panther walking through the centre of the village and a woman spotted one a week earlier in Harpsden.

In September 2006, there were reports from Nettlebed and Sonning Eye, where an angler said the creature was larger than his 7st dog,

The last sighting before Tuesday's was at Cookley Green when a large cat-like creature was seen jumping a stie by the B481.

Paul Westwood, who runs Big Cat Monitors, said South Oxfordshire was a hotspot for sightings.

"There has been quite a lot of activity in the area," he said. "I am convinced these creatures are either panthers or black leopards."

He advised anyone who came across a not to panic.

"Stand still and don't run," he said. "Avoid making eye contact and just slowly back away."

Mr Westwood said it is possible the animals were kept in a private collection and had escaped.

There is no distinct species as black panther. The term is used to describe a number of wild black-coated cats, normally leopards or jaguars. They get their colour from excessive production of melanin and are normally found in the dense, tropical rain forests of south east Asia.

New 'Big Cat' Sighting Reported in Henley-on-Thames Area

Fortean / Oddball News - 8/2/2010

Posted: 02 Aug 2010 09:29 AM PDT

Giant Hailstone Found in South Dakota Smashes US Record

A giant hailstone that fell in South Dakota has been, ahem, hailed as the biggest ever. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared that the hailstone, found in the town of Vivian, SD on July 23, measures a whopping eight inches in diameter and weighs a hefty one pound, 15 ounces. The committee says the South Dakota ice chunk breaks records set by hailstones discovered in Nebraska and Kansas.

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Rare Albino Raccoon Captured in Tennessee

knoxnews - The masked bandits of the great outdoors may be donning a new disguise.

Randy Wolfe, owner of Varmint Busters Wildlife Management Services, trapped a male albino raccoon Thursday near Nubbin Ridge in West Knox County.

Wolfe estimated the raccoon to be about a year old.

Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency wildlife biologist David Brandenburg said finding an albino raccoon is very uncommon.

"You don't see more of them because natural selection usually takes care of that," he said. "White is not a good color for a wildlife creature."

Wolfe, who has caught four albino raccoons in his 22-year career, said the white animal's look is very "striking."

"It's so unusual looking," he said. "At first I thought it was a possum because of the long snout, but then I noticed it had a big, bushy tail, not a thin, rat-like tail. It's a unique creature."

Bradenburg said albino animals have a rare gene that "just shows up" and that almost any wildlife creature, including squirrels, rabbits and deer, can be albino.

Wolfe said because of an overpopulation of raccoons and the presence of raccoon-strain rabies in East Tennessee, TWRA regulations forced him to euthanize the albino raccoon. Raccoons can carry diseases harmful to humans and other mammals, including rabies, parvo and raccoon roundworm.

Exceptions to this policy include raccoon mothers and the young, which may be sent to licensed wildlife rehabilitation centers, Wolfe said.

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Garbage Threatens to Jam China's Three Gorges Hydro-Electric Dam

abc.net - Layers of trash floating in the Yangtze river are threatening to jam China's massive Three Gorges hydro-electric dam.

Chinese state media reports the garbage is so thick in parts of the river that people can walk on the surface.

China Daily says nearly three tonnes of refuse are collected from the dam every day, but operators are struggling with inadequate manpower and equipment as rubbish accumulates more quickly due to rain-triggered floods.

"The large amount of waste in the dam area could jam the mitre gate of the Three Gorges Dam," China Three Gorges corporation official Chen Lei said in the newspaper.

More than 150 million people live upstream from the dam.

In several nearby cities, household garbage is dumped directly into the river - China's longest - because municipalities are not equipped for trash disposal.

Mr Lei said 160,000 cubic metres of trash was collected from the dam last year.

The newspaper says the China Three Gorges corporation spends about 10 million yuan ($1.6 million) per year to clear floating waste.

According to state newspaper Hubei Daily, a 60-centimetre thick layer of garbage covering an area of more than 50,000 square metres began to form in front of the dam when the rainy season started in early July.

China considers the $22 billion Three Gorges Dam a modern wonder.

Since its completion in 2008, it has pumped out much-needed hydro-electricity, increased shipping on the Yangtze and helped reduce flooding.

But critics say the world's largest dam has caused ecological damage and increased landslides in the area.

About 1.4 million people were displaced when the dam was built and several heritage sites have been put deep underwater.

NOTE: More proof that China is an ecological time bomb...that the West will end up being forced to help clean up! Not that we don't have our own problems...Lon

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Benny Hinn and His Miraculous Magic Jacket!

Click for video

Witness the almighty healing power of televangelist Benny Hinn (and his magic jacket)! Hinn claims to have the "anointing", a special power given to him by God to heal the sick. At Hinn's Miracle Crusades, he has allegedly healed attendees of blindness, deafness, cancer, AIDS, and severe physical injuries through his powers. Apparently these super-human powers extend to his jacket, which he uses as an instrument of God to cure the sick during his events.

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Armed Robber Calls To Complain About Loot Amount

Police say a man who robbed a fast-food restaurant with a gun was so mad about the amount of loot that he called back twice to complain.

The man walked up to the drive-through window of an Atlanta Wendy's late Saturday night, wearing a ski mask and holding a gun.

He demanded the cash drawer, grabbed it and ran away.

But police say he later called the fast food restaurant to complain about the amount of cash.

Police say in one call he said that "next time there better be more than $586."

He called again with a similar complaint.

Fortean / Oddball News - 8/2/2010

World's Sixth Largest River Discovered....Under the Black Sea

Posted: 02 Aug 2010 08:44 AM PDT

dailymail - Immense rivers that dwarf the Thames have been found at the bottom of the ocean by British scientists.

Like those on land, the submarine waterways carve out channels, tributaries, flood plains, rapids and even waterfalls.

One river, discovered underneath the Black Sea, is up to 115ft deep in places and more than half a mile wide.

If found on land, scientists estimate the so-far unnamed waterway would be the world's sixth largest river in terms of the amount of water flowing through it.

The flow – carrying highly salty water and sediment - is 350 times greater than the Thames, according to a Leeds University team who used a robotic submarine to scan the seabed near Turkey.

The undersea river - the only active one to have been found so far - stems from salty water spilling through the Bosphorus Strait from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea, where the water has a lower salt content.

This causes the dense water from the Mediterranean to flow like a river along the sea bed, carving a channel and deep banks.

The discovery could help explain how life manages to survive in the deep ocean far out to sea away from the nutrient rich waters that are found close to land, as the rivers carry sediment and nutrients with them.

Dr Dan Parsons, who led a team from the university's school of earth and environment, told the Sunday Telegraph: 'The water in the channels is denser than the surrounding seawater because it has higher salinity and is carrying so much sediment.

'It flows down the sea shelf and out into the abyssal plain much like a river on land.

The abyssal plains of our oceans are like the deserts of the marine world, but these channels can deliver nutrients and ingredients needed for life out over these deserts.

'This means they could be vitally important, like arteries providing life to the deep ocean.

'The key difference we found from terrestrial rivers was that as the flow goes round the bend, the water spirals in the opposite way to rivers on land.'

Scientists have long suspected seabed rivers can form, after sonar scans revealed meandering channels in many of the world's oceans.

But none have been found before to be have currents of water flowing through them.

Among the largest of these channels is off the coast of Brazil where the Amazon enters the Atlantic Ocean.

Most are believed to have formed when sea levels were much lower and the channels have been found to be up to 2,500 miles long and be several miles wide.

The channel in the Black Sea, although much smaller, is the only one to be found still flowing and proves that these mysterious channels are formed by underwater rivers.

Unlike ocean trenches, which are geological formations that form at the deepest parts of the ocean due to movements of the tectonic plates, the undersea river channels meander like rivers on land and form banks in the same way by eroding the silt from the bottom of the channel and building it up at the edges.

Dr Parsons found that the Black Sea river is flowing at around four miles per hour with 22,000 cubic metres of water passing through the channel every second – 10 times greater than Europe's biggest river, the Rhine.

The Black Sea river flows only for around 37 miles until it reaches the edge of the sea shelf and dissipates into the deep sea.

Dr Parsons said data from the research will also be important for oil companies looking to drill in areas where these rivers exist.

World's Sixth Largest River Discovered....Under the Black Sea

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