Phantoms and Monsters

The White Room
Just the Facts? - Probability of ET Small, Daytona Beach Sighting and Unknown Beings
'St. Croix Cougar' Traveled From South Dakota to Connecticut

Posted: 27 Jul 2011 02:10 PM PDT

In 2006 an associate forwarded the following inquiry for my opinion. It had been directed to them by an 'experiencer' name Melody. As far as I know this incident has not been published previously. I have recently received permission to post after a follow up statement was provided directly to me by Melody. Here is the original inquiry:

Sir - what I am about to reveal to you is an absolute true event. I will describe only what I can recall. I have told my story to two people other than my Mother and Father. One day I hope to be able to remember all of my experience.

I have read several stories of alien abduction and missing time - I would have never believed these recollections before I went through my own ordeal.

In the Summer of 2004 my family (my Mother, Father and I) took a trip to the Bahamas. It was going to be a three-day jaunt to Nassau and a few other spots. I was 17 and was looking forward to my senior year in high school.

We were staying at a beachfront hotel in Nassau which was a large suite with separate bedrooms. We arrived mid-afternoon and started to take in the scenery as soon as we were done checking in. After a long evening of sightseeing, I was totally exhausted and decided to go to bed at about 10:30 pm. No sooner had I laid down I was fast asleep (at least that is what I think happened).

After awhile I was startled by a loud humming sound that was coming from outside. I was curious so I started to get out of bed to investigate when suddenly a bright blue light hit me in the face. I was very warm but soothing. I don't know what happened right after that.

I woke up much later when, in fact, it could not have been more than a few minutes. I laid back down in the bed and went to sleep, like nothing had happened. I still don't know why I didn't alert my parents. I started to hear the loud humming again and started to feel like I was a passenger in an airliner. I opened my eyes, looked around but could only see large high back flight chairs arranged in several rows. I was the only person seated in my row.

I must have went back to sleep because the next thing I remember I was sitting in a large brightly-lit white room that was completely bare except for 5 metal chairs and four other people sitting. These people were not human in my estimation and seemed to be there to monitor me. They were dressed in white smocks and looked human-like but had a few irregularities, for example slightly larger heads, no hair anywhere on the exposed body and a strong antiseptic odor. They didn't talk but you felt like you knew what they were saying when they would look directly at you. After several minutes each of these 'people' got up in unison and walked through a sliding door that quickly disappeared. I was completely alone, just waiting - but I never had any apprehension or fear.

All I remember after that is hearing my Mother screaming.

You see, I had been missing for over 40 hours. My Mother screamed when she discovered me laying on my bed in the hotel room almost two days after I was reported missing.

That is all I remember. I have been to psychiatrists and have been taken regressive hypno-therapy but I can not recall any further details.

I suppose that I was abducted by someone or something. Why else would I be physically missing for almost two days? When I 'reappeared' I had on the same night clothes - nothing was different. I have had no ill effects since.

Could you offer an explanation?

To be honest I had forgotten about this incident. I had never conversed with Melody and had never received any direct contact from her. On Tuesday I received an email from her that included the following statement:

Mr. Strickler - My name is Melody (redacted). I was given your email address from (redacted). I have included a copy of an email I sent to (redacted) several years ago that described an incident I had. I would like to provide an update to you.

Since my first email to (redacted) I have endured a few events that I feel may tie into my abduction. Yes - I am positive at this point that I was actually abducted by unknown beings. It took me a long time to accept that fact. Unfortunately my parents, especially my Mother, never got over the incident. My parents divorced in 2009 and my Mother subsequently took her own life not long after the divorce. I am just starting to face facts and learning to deal with what happened to me.

My recollection of the event is still not totally accessible to me. I have had many hypnosis sessions with several doctors - it's just the same. None of my recall is any different.

A recent occurrence is the reason why I am contacting you at this time. My Husband (we were married this past Spring) mentioned that I occasionally talk in my sleep - to the point where it seems I am having a conversation with someone. A few weeks ago, I was talking in my sleep and my Husband heard 'replies'. These 'replies' were part of the conversation and where coming from another part of the bedroom. He could not see anything unusual but sensed that 'something' was there while carrying on a conversation with me.

There have been bits and pieces of other strange activity over the years but I am quite bowled over by this revelation. Who could I be talking to? I don't usually dream while asleep and I have no memory of conversations. Could I still be in contact with my abductors?

I hope you are well and thank you for reading my email - Melody

I replied to Melody and received permission to edit and publish her account and emails. I really could not give her a definitive answer as to what she is experiencing. I have offered her the services of Spirit Rescue International...this may be the only option that she currently has in order to find answers. SRI has worked abduction, non-terrestrial and interdimensional scenarios in the past. What are your thoughts? Lon

Just the Facts? - Probability of ET Small, Daytona Beach Sighting and Unknown Beings

Posted: 27 Jul 2011 10:11 AM PDT

Probability of ET Life Arbitrarily Small, Say Astrobiologists

The Drake equation is one of those rare mathematical beasts that has leaked into the public consciousness. It estimates the number of extraterrestrial civilisations that we might be able to detect today or in the near future.

The equation was devised by Frank Drake at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1960. He attempted to quantify the number by asking what fraction of stars have planets, what fraction of these might be habitable, then the fraction of these on which life actually evolves and the fraction of these on which life becomes intelligent and so on.

Many of these numbers are little more than wild guesses. For example, the number of ET civilisations we can detect now is hugely sensitive to the fraction that destroy themselves with their own technology, through nuclear war for example. Obviously we have no way of knowing this figure.

Nevertheless, many scientists have attempted to come up with a figure with estimates ranging from a handful of ET civilisations to tens of thousands of them.

Of the many uncertainties in the Drake equation, one term is traditionally thought of as relatively reliable. That is the probability of life emerging on a planet in a habitable zone. On Earth, life arose about 3.8 billion years ago, just a few million years after the planet had cooled sufficiently to allow it.

Astrobiologists naturally argue that because life arose so quickly here, it must be pretty likely to emerge in other places where conditions allow.

Today, David Spiegel at Princeton University and Edwin Turner at the University of Tokyo say this thinking is wrong. They've used an entirely different kind of thinking, called Bayesian reasoning, to show that the emergence of life on Earth is consistent with life being arbitrarily rare in the universe.

At first sight, that seems rather counterintuitive. But if Bayesian reasoning tells us anything, it's that we can easily fool ourselves into thinking things are far more likely than they really are.

Spiegel and Turner point out that our thinking about the origin of life is heavily biased by the fact that we're here to observe it. They point out that it's taken about 3.5 billion years for intelligent life to evolve on Earth.

So the only way that enough time could have elapsed for us to have evolved is if life emerged very quickly. And that's a bias that is entirely independent of the actual probability of life emerging on a habitable planet.

"In other words, if evolution requires 3.5 Gyr for life to evolve from the simplest forms to sentient, questioning beings, then we had to find ourselves on a planet on which life arose relatively early, regardless of the value of [the probability of life developing in a unit time]," say Spiegel and Turner. #

When you strip out that bias, it turns out that the actual probability of life emerging is consistent with life being arbitrarily rare. In other words, the fact that life emerged at least once on Earth is entirely consistent with it only having happened here.

So we could be alone, after all.

That's a sobering argument. It's easy to be fooled by the evidence of our own existence. What Speigel and Turner have shown is the true mathematical value of this evidence.

Of course, that doesn't mean that we are alone; only that the evidence can't tell us otherwise.

And if the evidence changes then so to will the probabilities that we can infer from it.

There are two ways of finding new evidence. The first is to look for signs of life on other planets, perhaps using biogenic markers in their atmospheres. The capability to do begin this work on planets around other stars should be with us in the next few years.

The second is closer to home. If we find evidence that life emerged independently more than once on Earth, then this would be a good reason to change the figures.

Either way, this debate is set to become a major issue in science in the next few years. That's something to look forward to. - technologyreview

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Click image for larger version

Unexplained sighting at Daytona Beach, FL

I was vacationing in Daytona Beach sitting on the shore of the ocean July 24th 2011 at 3 in the morning. I started getting a creepy feeling about being in the ocean with sharks and stuff at night and was trying to figure out if they would be more active at night. After a lot of deliberation I decided to get out and go sit with the other people I went to the beach with. I was with my sister Rachel, her friend Kenley, and someone that was a friend of a friend named Jess who lived an hour from this spot. All of us saw this. After I sat down with them, my sister started freaking out because a huge roach was running all over her legs. We were all laughing at here and I looked out over the ocean as we had been doing prior to that and noticed what at first appeared to be a lantern. It was a distant bright orange light that was pretty far off in the distance over the ocean. I thought it was some boat that was coming up closer to shore because a storm had just went through. I said out loud to everyone else, "What the hell is that?" and everyone just sat there staring at it. It slowly moved across the ocean and lined up straight with us which would have made this thing if floating on the ocean go against the current. It wasn't bobbing so it would had to have been a massive boat. But someone said something about how bright it was and almost as if on cue it seemed to get brighter. It started getting bigger and by the end of this part of the sighting it almost looked like the moon fell and started floating on the ocean. It was crescent shaped and had another piece right above it and looked like something was in front of it but it was fairly bright outside for it to be as late as it was and I didn't see anything near this thing. I attempted to take a picture of it but this thing wasn't picking up on my camera. It sat in front of us for quite some time before it started to lift in the air very slowly. When it lifted (about an inch from my perspective) off the water line it started shrinking rapidly and ended up the size of a star that you would normally see on a clear night. Then in the blink of an eye it shot up into the sky. By the end of all this I was so overwhelmed that my eyes started watering and I couldn't say anything but, "What the hell was that!". All the ladies I was with started screaming and were as excited as me. - MUFON CMS

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Close encounter of the unknown beings

March 1979: Arrived at Joshua Tree National Monument on a Friday evening to camp and do some rock climbing for the weekend. It was very windy and cold and the sun had set. We set up camp with a small 2-man tent (without windows)and were sitting inside discussing what to do about dinner since it was too windy to light the camp stove.

We had only been in the tent about 10 minutes when a soft whirring (hard to describe) sound flew directly over the tent and stopped what sounded like 20 to 25 feet away. As we looked at each other, asking simultaneously "did you hear that", we could hear foot steps approaching from the direction the strange noise had stopped. They were clearly discernible as bipedal walking on the decomposing granite as it came toward the tent. The foot steps circled the tent twice and stopped at the zipper door and proceeded to sniff the entire zipper (the door was an inverted T). Then nothing. I probably don't need to say we were thoroughly frightened out our wits.

Not exactly sure how long we sat listening but seemed like forever that we sat waiting for that door to open or at least hear more footsteps but we heard nothing. Finally whispering to each other we decided to make a run for the car which was only 10 feet away.

We unzipped the door and ran on the count of three, jumped in the car and locked the doors. We turned on the lights and looked around and saw nothing. After we calmed down, we got out the flashlights and started looking around for anything including footprints, there were only ours from setting up the tent. We headed out the direction that the sound came from and the only thing we found was a set of three round depressions in the gravel approximately 10-12 feet apart in a triangular pattern, also with no footprints around them.
Don't really know what to think. - MUFON CMS

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Man attempts DIY hernia surgery using butter knife and lit cigarette

A man is recovering in hospital after attempting surgery on himself using a butter knife.

Police say the 63-year-old Glendale man cut into himself with a six-inch butter knife in an attempt to remove a protruding hernia from his stomach.

The unnamed man was found on Sunday and taken to Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center.

According to Sargent Tom Lorenz, Police who arrived at the man's house came across a gruesome scene.

The man was found lying naked outside on a lounge chair with the handle of a knife protruding from his stomach.

Amazingly, as they waited for paramedics to arrive, the man pulled the knife out and shoved a cigarette inside the open wound.

Speaking to the Glendale News Press, Sargent Lorenz said the man's wife told him her husband had 'become frustrated' with the hernia and 'wanted it out'.

He added: 'Out of frustration, he tried to cut it out.'

Speaking to the paper, surgeon Sam Carvajal said the DIY surgery had probably caused more harm than good.

He said: 'It is absolutely impossible for someone to fix their own hernia.'

Dr Carvajal said most hernia patients don't actually suffer that much pain, leaving him to conclude the patient was suffering, 'some amount of psychosis.' - dailymail

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'St. Croix Cougar' Traveled From South Dakota to Connecticut

Posted: 27 Jul 2011 08:37 AM PDT

Need more proof that mountain lions / cougars are moving into the eastern US? The following is an amazing account:

In what's being called the longest journey a mountain lion has ever taken in the United States, a cougar killed in Milford, CT, six weeks ago—believed by some to be the same cougar sighted June 5 in Greenwich, CT—traveled 1,100 miles from South Dakota to get to New England, Connecticut officials said Tuesday.

According to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, collected analyst data shows that the feline known in South Dakota known as the "St. Croix Cougar" journeyed from that state's Black Hills, through Minnesota and Wisconsin (see attached map) and across the Midwest—likely southern Ontario, Canada—eventually to Greenwich, where it met its end after colliding with a SUV on the Wilbur Cross parkway in Milford.

"This is an incredible journey, nearly double that of any mountain lion [ever recorded]," Connecticut DEEP Commissioner Dan Esty said during a press briefing.

Though the first confirmed sighting occurred in Minnesota, officials believe the mountain lion likely was born in South Dakota, meaning a total distance traveled of closer to 1,800 miles is possible.

Scat samples, including those found in Greenwich, as well as sightings across the nation dating back as far as Dec. 2009, snow tracks, photos from trail cameras, tissues collected for genetic testing and the young male's unmanicured condition, led analysts—including in a lab in Rocky Hill, CT—to the conclusion mountain lion had not been held in captivity, according to Paul Rego, a supervising wildlife biologist with the DEEP.

Esty touted the cougar's ability to traverse so far in the wild as a testament to efforts from conservationists and environmental protection groups.

"Although this is the story of the first recorded example of a mountain lion sighting in Connecticut in more than 100 years, there is no evidence of a mountain lion [in Connecticut] beyond this single individual," Esty said.

The findings mark the latest chapter in a story that's captured the attention and imagination of residents throughout Fairfield County and Connecticut—the gregarious "Greenwich Mountain Lion" on Facebook last week notched her 3,000th friend—as a species said to be extinct in the Nutmeg State appeared to have reemerged.

Within days of the mountain lion's death on a highway in Milford (see photo), state DEEP officials launched an investigation into whether that cougar had been held in captivity illegally.

In Greenwich and throughout the state, the dual sightings sparked debate over whether mountain lions were present in greater numbers than state officials had acknowledged. In Fairfield, police were given the green light to kill mountain lions that couldn't be contained.

As investigators searched for answers, including in neighboring states, residents in Greenwich and other Connecticut towns, including Fairfield, began reporting sightings of their own, at least one of which was found to be inaccurate. - newrochelle

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