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You are here: Home / Archives for Paranormal Braintrust

Paranormal Braintrust

The Haunted Housewife’s 2016 Haunted Holiday Gift Guide

November 22, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

By Theresa Argie
By Theresa Argie

As we say goodbye to the last vestiges of Indian Summer and quietly wade through a colorful autumn, we cautiously prepare ourselves for a long cold winter. Thank goodness we have something wonderful to look forward to – CHRISTMAS!

Tis’ the season as they say. For many this is a religious holiday based on faith and tradition. For others it’s a time of giving. It’s the season of family, friends, food, and phantoms. Hey, even Scrooge had a visit from the ghosts of Christmas Past, right?

For those who enjoy a more “spirited” holiday, I’ve assembled a paranormal gift guide – perfect for the most particular people on your Christmas list.

Prices are accurate at the time of writing but change quickly this time of year, so your mileage may vary. Check out the links below where you can find ghostly gifts to delight the haunted people in your life. Plus, remember it’s OK to do some self-gifting, too!

SB11 Spirit Box – This is a newer version of the popular SB7, a devise that quickly scans radio frequencies. The spirit box is used by some of the most well respected paranormal investigators including myself. In theory, ghosts can manipulate the white noise or sound waves to communicate with the living. $136.00

Mel-8704 & K2 EMF Meters – A popular coupling of paranormal devices. The Mel Meter was developed by Gary Galka as a way to speak with his deceased daughter. It has proved extremely effective in paranormal investigations.The K2 meter measures electromagnetic anomalies in the environment, which could indicate the presence of ghosts. $149.95

Polaroid Studio Series Rechargeable IR Night Light 36 LED – Adding an infrared light to a camcorder or camera lets you film in low light conditions. This one is rechargeable, saving on batteries. A must for any nighttime paranormal investigation! $39.99

GhostPro Full Spectrum Night Vision Camera – Take nighttime investigation to a whole new level with a full spectrum “GoPro” with full HD 1080P recording capacity in a waterproof housing. Simply awesome. $149.99

FLIR TG167 Spot Thermal Camera with Extended Range – Finally, an affordable option to the industry’s most sought after piece of equipment. At less than half the cost of previous models, the TG167 puts forward looking infrared capabilities in reach of the armchair, the amateur, and the well-seasoned investigator. $349.99

Etekcity Lasergrip 800 Non-Contact Digital Laser IR Thermometer. A essential and inexpensive device that belongs in every ghost hunters arsenal. Easy to use and straightforward. $25.98

Dowsing Rods – For the Old School ghost hunters. These simple but effective tool of divination used for centuries to find water, gold, ley lines, and ghosts! The Haunted Housewives use these as a communication device on every case! $19.95

Spirit Board Cleo Hoodie (Women’s Black, Too Fast Apparel) – Ouija clothes are all the rage this year! Show you’re not afraid to talk to ghosts with this stylish, well tailored hoodie. $44.99

Healing Crystal Wands: Amethyst, Clear Crystal Quartz, and Rose Quartz – The power of crystals can feel like magic. They are used for everything from meditation, healing, spiritual cleansing, opening one’s third eye, and attracting spirits. You don’t need to be a ghost hunter to appreciate the beauty and power of crystals. $20.98

GHOSTBUSTERS The Movie – The long-awaited remake of the classic 80’s movie staring Kristen Wig and Melisa McCarthy. Great for fans of comedy or the paranormal. DVD or BluRay. $19.96

From the hit TV show SUPERNATURAL – Winchester Driver T-Shirt Fitted Ladies – “Driver Picks the Music, Shotgun Shuts His Cakehole” YES PLEASE! $9.49 – $20.95

“I’m Not Saying it Was Aliens.. but it Was Aliens” Giorgio A. Tsoukalos T-Shirt – A MUST HAVE for the Ancient Aliens fan on your list! Giorgio’s trademark hair adorns this stylish T-shirt.$15.99

BooBuddy Ghost Hunter Interactive Bear – This adorable teddy bear serves double duty as a trigger object an interactive paranormal investigator. Outfitted with lights and meters, BooBuddy can record changes in the environment, movement, temperature, and even ask EVP questions!
$169.95

Ecsem Portable Wireless Speaker – No need for cables or bluetooth, this speaker work like magic. Just place your smart phone on top of the speaker and listen to clear, amplified sound! Perfect when sharing audio files with a group. This is one of the most useful pieces of equipment I have used in the past year. $19.99

 

BOOKS

My recommendations for the book lover on your list. These are works by some of my very favorite authors on various paranormal/occult topics. All available on Amazon.com

Somewhere in the Skies: A Human Approach to Alien Phenomenon by Ryan Sprague (Richard Dolan Press, October 2016) The first book by fellow Paranormal Braintruster Ryan Sprague. This is a fascinating look into the topic of aliens that will satisfy the amateur and the elite UFO enthusiast on your list! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED by many in the paranormal, including myself and Fact or Faked star Ben Hansen.
ISBN-10: 0967799589

Monsters Among Us: An Exploration of Otherworldy Bigfoots, Wolfmen, Portals, Phantoms, and Odd Phenomena by Linda S. Godfrey (TarcherPerigree, October 2016)

Godfrey looks into creepy cryptids, monsters, and other unusual topics. Interesting, informative, and engaging!
ISBN-10: 0399176241

Women In Black: The Creepy Companions to the Mysterious M.I.B by Nick Redfern (Lisa Hagan Books, July 2016) You’ve heard of the Men in Black, but what about the Women in Black? These ladies are just as scary as their male counterparts! Redfern hits another home run with this amazing book!
ISBN-10: 0996968687

True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold’s Campfire 5 by Jim Harold (Jim Harold Media LCC ,September 2016) The latest addition to Harold’s very popular and successful Campfire series. More terrifying tales to keep you up at night!
ISBN-10: 1945676027

The True Ghost Stories Adult Coloring Book: Inspired By Jim Harold’s Campfire (Jim Harold Media LLC, July 2016) Who doesn’t love a good coloring book? This one is based on true campfire stories from Jim Harold’s followers! Great relaxation therapy for the paranormal lover!
ISBN-10: 1945676019

Mind Wars: A History of Mind Control, Surveillance, and Social Engineering by Government, Media, and Secret Societies by Marie D. Jones and Larry Flaxman (New Page Books April, 2015) This book will make you think and question everything you THINK you know about the subject. Well researched and beautifully written.
ISBN-10: 1601633580

The UFO Singularity by Micah Hanks (New Page Books December 2012) I’ve shortened the title but Micah Hanks doesn’t skimp on the information. The topic of UFOs is highly controversial but extremely interesting. Hanks keeps the reader engaged while fully delivering on the information. An awesome read!
ISBN-10 1601632401

Harsh Gods (Conspiracy of Angels 2) Shadowside Trilogy by Michelle Belanger (Titan Book August 2016) Book 2 in the Shadowside Trilogy by acclaimed author and occult expert Michelle Belanger. What’s next for Zack Westland? What new secrets will be revealed? What new characters come to life in the 2nd installment of this popular fictional trilogy?
ISBN-10: 1783299541

And finally, a shameless plug for my own book…

America’s Most Haunted: The Secrets of Famous Paranormal Places by Theresa Argie and Eric Olsen (Berkley September 2014) Follow the adventures of the Haunted Housewives as they explore the country’s scariest paranormal hot spots!
ISBN-10: 0425270149


NOTE: The prices listed are accurate as of Nov 23, 2016 and are subject to change or vary. The above are affiliate links that benefit Jim Harold Media.


Theresa Argie, The Haunted Housewife, is an experienced lecturer, educator, researcher and paranormal investigator and has had many years dealing with spirits, ghosts and paranormal activity. Theresa has worked beside some of the most well-known experts in the paranormal field, and has been featured by countless media outlets. She is also the co-author of America’s Most Haunted.

Filed Under: The Occult Kitchen, The Paranormal Braintrust, Theresa Argie Tagged With: 2016 Holiday Gift Guide, Haunted Holiday Gift Guide, Jim Harold, Paranormal Braintrust, Theresa Argie

The Haunted Housewives at The World’s Largest Ghost Hunt – Theresa Argie Writes

October 30, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

By Theresa Argie
By Theresa Argie

October 1st, 2016 was designated as the very first National Ghost Hunting Day. In celebration of this new holiday there was to be an event like no other – one that would reach far beyond the confines of the United States.

This was to be the night the Haunted Housewives, along with dozens of other ghost hunters, participated in The World’s Largest Ghost Hunt.

Over 70 ghost hunting teams from all over the U.S. and several European countries would simultaneously conduct a guided paranormal investigation. Each team would represent a haunted venue and live stream their entire investigation on Facebook for all the world to see. The teams were joined by participants who paid a small fee which was donated to local animal shelters.

This unusual holiday came about as an idea, a dream, that turned into reality with a lot of help from the paranormal field. The good folks at Haunted Journeys brought the idea to the powers that be at Scarefest – one of the nations largest paranormal and horror conventions held in Lexington Kentucky.

In cooperation with a multitude of ambassadors and dedicated enthusiasts, paranormal investigator Brian J. Cano (Haunted Collector, Destination America) was picked to lead the charge and organize this monumental world-wide event. His celebrity and reputation helped spread the word about WLGH.

This was no small task. Logistically, Cano had to unify hundreds of ghost hunters, haunted venues, and the curious public to pull off this complicated feat. The ghost hunt began with a bang – literally – a shotgun start at Scarfest.

The Haunted Housewives were one of the teams leading an investigation. Our chosen venue was Farnam Manor in Richfield, Ohio. Farnam is a historic gem nestled in northeast Ohio with an incredible array of paranormal activity and lively spirits. Our previous visit introduced us to the ghosts of Emily and Everett Farnam and we were anxious to return.

The Farnams’ is a tale filled with tragedy and hardship, interspersed with moments of love and happiness. The property on which they built the manor house dates back to Ohio’s earliest inhabitants. The Native American tribes that lived in the area considered it sacred. There is a special Indian marker tree on the property. This was said to guide the natives as they traversed the land.

Today Farnam Manor is a historic living museum with a paranormal reputation. Ghost hunts, lantern tours, and various gatherings are held at Farnam. It is also a fantastic venue for a brunch, bridal shower, or other “non-paranormal” type gatherings. But it is the ghosts that keep the doors open. Farnam Manor was an excellent choice for inclusion in the World’s Largest Ghost Hunt.

The night began with instructions to ask the spirits to communicate via ITC (instrumental trans-communication) using audio recorders. EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) sessions commenced simultaneously with all teams asking the same series of questions. But this was no ordinary EVP session.

Participants were asked to concentrate on the questions being directed to entities known as the Technician and Conductor on a metaphysical plane called the Timestream. (This refers to a little known paranormal experiment conducted in the early days of paranormal research.) The hope was that we would combine our efforts and communicate with these specific beings. This was a collective consciousness experiment called “The Bridge”.

Could hundreds, maybe thousands of people all thinking about the same thing at the same time have any measurable effect on a paranormal investigation? Could our combined energy, our intent, be enough to cross the veil between worlds?

Yes. It could.

In all honesty, I think attempting to connect with the Timestream was a bit vague and ambitious. I’ve been in the paranormal field for decades and was unfamiliar with the Technician or the Conductor. But I was certainly willing to try a collective consciousness experiment using Instrumental Trans-Communication.

We began our ITC session as instructed. I turned on the recorder and read the question aloud. Those that joined us eagerly gathered around and dutifully concentrated on the questions. We waited for 60 seconds before stopping and playing back the recording. My partner Cathi was also running a recorder so we had two files to review.

We repeated the series of questions twice. The EVPs we captured were amazing.

When we asked about the Timestream we did receive messages. Strange voices were captured on our digital recorders. Was it the Conductor? Did we contact one of the stations still operating on the other side? I would love to go on record and say that we cracked wide open the door between our realm and the next, that these voices were confirmation, but I cannot.

One of the questions posed to the spirits was, “How do you experience time?” We didn’t get any intelligible response to that particular question, just some low muffled sounds. But the fact that we got ANYTHING on the recorder was remarkable!

Another question was, “What do we look like to you?” Our recorder captured a low breathy voice that said “…normal people…”

The last question was, “How can we improve contact?” And in a very matter-of-fact tone the spirit answered “…you can’t…”

Well, that certainly was interesting!

Once our required line of questioning was over, we were free to conduct our own investigation. We still tried to have everyone participate and concentrate on each session en masse. The collective consciousness idea was working! We then switched our focus to the local haunted inhabitants.

The rest of the evening was filled with Ovilus and ghost box sessions. One of my favorite moments came when we asked what was the name of the family that once lived in the manor house. The ghost box proudly proclaimed “FARNAM!”

Who were we speaking with? The box said, “…Emily…”

What happened to Emily? The response was, “…drown…”
Emily was the name of Everrett Farnham’s daughter who, as a young girl, fell into a cistern and drown.

Over all we were thrilled with the results of The Bridge. Was the experiment a success due to the collective efforts of thousands of willing minds all concentrating on the same thoughts at the same time? Maybe. Or maybe the spirits were just feeling chatty.

The World’s Largest Ghosthunt was by all accounts a huge success. Many teams captured EVPs or recorded ITC sessions with answers to the provided questions. The Bridge was crossed.

The final tally of ITC sessions and EVPs are still being tabulated. Its a monumental task quantifying the submissions of each team. Hours of review and transcription is required.

2016 was the trial, the prototype of the event. Not everything went according to plans, There are kinks and technical issues that will need to be addressed next year but the idea was solid. The spirit of the experiment was honored. Everyone came out a winner.

The biggest winners of the night were the dozens of animal shelters that received the donation bounty. Another secondary benefit went to the various venues that hosted the World’s Largest Ghost Hunt; in our case Farnam Manor. This important historic site was, for one brief moment, in the national spotlight. Hopefully the publicity and awareness will translate into future visits by those in the paranormal community, which in turn will generate much needed funds. Historic preservation cannot happen without a monetary component.

Like many haunted venues, Farnam Manor is in desperate need of income to keep up with the preservation and restoration needs. Once slated for demolition, two of its former volunteers took a leap of faith and purchased the property in efforts to save it and its historic designation. Now their efforts combined with The Haunted Housewives and those involved in NGHD will make a significant difference in the future.

This is just the beginning. With any luck, the incredible results of the first National Ghost Hunting Day will fuel the fire for next year’s event. With Brian Cano at the helm and Scarefest as our mothership, we hope to see a bigger, better, more refined event in future years. With a bit of luck and a touch of tenacity The World’s Largest Ghost Hunt will spill out of the shadows and into main stream media.

National Ghost Hunting Day is long over due in my eyes, regardless of whether your believe in the paranormal or not. A day set aside to recognize the tireless pursuits of those in the field will help validate our work. In the past decade the topic of ghosts and the supernatural have gone from hushed whispers to loud proclamations.

And when National Ghost Hunting Day becomes International Ghost Hunting Day, the Haunted Housewives will be ready – aprons on, recorders out!

We’ll see you in 2017.

—

Theresa Argie, The Haunted Housewife, is an experienced lecturer, educator, researcher and paranormal investigator and has had many years dealing with spirits, ghosts and paranormal activity. Theresa has worked beside some of the most well-known experts in the paranormal field, and has been featured by countless media outlets. She is also the co-author of America’s Most Haunted.

Filed Under: Slider, The Occult Kitchen, The Paranormal Braintrust, Theresa Argie Tagged With: Cathi Weber, Haunted Housewives, ITC, Jim Harold, Paranormal Braintrust, Theresa Argie

Beware The Bedroom Invaders – Nick Redfern Writes

October 29, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

Nick Redfern
Nick Redfern

Of the many and varied monsters that have plagued and terrified people for countless centuries, there are very few which are more frightening than bedroom-invading things known as Incubus and Succubus.

They are male and female monsters that, in numerous quarters, are perceived as having outright demonic origins. And they are hideous things that have a long history of diabolical interaction with the human race. As evidence of this, reports of these evil entities date back not just decades or centuries, but millennia too. One of those reports comes from Michelle of Corpus Christi, Texas, who had just such an encounter in 1993.

Imagine the scene: it’s around 3:00 a.m. and you’re fast asleep when, suddenly, you find yourself in a semi-awake state. Confusion and terror quickly overwhelm you, as you realize you are unable to move. Even worse, you sense that something dangerous and malevolent is walking, or crawling, towards the bedroom.

You struggle to move, but it’s all to no avail. The thing then enters the room and you see its hideous form. It looms over you, like a monstrous sword of Damocles. Your heart pounds and your breathing becomes shallow as the nightmarish beast jumps onto the bed, straddles you, and forcibly pins you down. The creatures screams at the top of its voice, in a wailing, banshee-like style, and proceeds to have violent sex with you – against your will. You try and fight it off, but your arms and legs are like lead-weights.

And, then, as suddenly as the horrifying encounter began, it’s all over. The oppressive atmosphere is gone, the evil entity has vanished too, and you find yourself shaking, and in a cold sweat, as you wonder if what just happened was the result of a bad dream or something worse: violation at the claws of a supernatural monster. That is precisely what happened to Michelle.

Encounters of the kind I just described extend back to the earliest years of human civilization. Indeed, the term, Incubus, is taken from an ancient, Latin word, “incubare,” which means “to lie upon,” which is a most apt description. As for their appearances, Incubus and Succubus can take on multiple forms. They are forms which range from beautiful women to hideous monsters.

One of the very earliest examples of such a creature is Lilith. Her name is highly appropriate, too: in English it means “night hag.” Not exactly the kind of thing any of us should aspire to cross paths with. Lilith’s dark origins can be found in the ancient mythology and folklore of Mesopotamia, and particularly so within the culture of the Babylonians. Despite the fact that she was described as being a beautiful woman, with long and flowing hair, there was nothing positive about Lilith. She would regularly manifest in the homes of sleeping men, slip into their beds, and have sex with them. The purpose of which, ancient lore maintains, was to allow Lilith to steal sperm from her victims and use it to create hideous, demonic babies.

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Almost certainly connected to Lilith were Lilitu and Lilu, who played major roles in the lore of the Sumerian people, thounds of years ago. This paranormal pair, too, was focused on terrifying people in the middle of the night, violating them, and then vanishing back into the darkness from which they came. Joseph McCabe, a noted expert on these two demon-like entities, and the author of The Story of Religious Controversy, described them as “ferocious beings” that were part-animal and part-human.

Martin Baker’s encounter with just such a creature – in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada in 2007 – led him to conclude that, rather than being a demonic entity, his encounter with an entity that looked like Lilith was actually an alien-human hybrid engaged in gene-splicing experiments.

The people of Newfoundland, Canada have their own tradition of a particular shapeshifter. It is known to the locals as the Old Hag. For most people who have the misfortune to meet the monster, they describe it as a witch-like entity with long black hair and piercing, evil eyes, and dressed in a flowing black gown. She straddles her victims and either forces them into sex, or just sits on them, screaming wildly into their hysterical, wide-eyed faces.

Equally disturbing is the evil imp that squats atop a sleeping, beautiful woman in Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting, The Nightmare. Combining horror with erotica, the artwork graphically captures the nature of these evil encounters. In Thailand, these creatures of the night are known as Phi Am. For the people of China, it’s the Pinyin that they fear. Mongolia has the Kharin Buu. While, in Tibet, the Dip-non should be avoided at all costs. And Pakistan has centuries-old stories of the Shaitan. All of these things perform the same, stress-filled and sex-based acts; yet, they take on physical appearances that suit the era and the area.

As Halloween comes around, beware of these terrible things.

—

One of the most prolific Fortean writers on the planet, Nick Redfern is the author of many books, including Men in Black, Chupacabra Road Trip, and The Bigfoot Book.  His latest book is Nessie. He can be contacted at his blog, “World of Whatever,” at nickredfernfortean.blogspot.com

Filed Under: If Its Weird Its Here, Nick Redfern, Slider, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: Incubus, Jim Harold, Nick Redfern, Paranormal Braintrust, Succubus

Celebrating the Dead: The History of Dia de Muertos – Marie D Jones Writes

October 27, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

Marie D. Jones
Marie D. Jones

Every October 31st, Americans head to parties or hit the streets dressed in elaborate, often spooky costumes, in celebration of Halloween, a time when the veil between this world and the world beyond death is said to be at its thinnest.

We decorate our homes and yards with scary monsters, witches and ghouls, provoking a fun sense of repulsion of all things terrifying. We cut up pumpkins and light with candles, and watch out for black cats. We spend a ton of money preparing for and enjoying one of the biggest and most anticipated holidays in the United States, rivaling Christmas for some people!

But throughout Mexico and parts of America with large Hispanic populations, another holiday offers a truer reverence for the dead with a rich history dating back thousand of years. Dia de Muertos, or Dia de los Muertos, is the “Day of the Dead” to millions of people that both playfully mocks, and joyfully reveres, death. The tradition began over 3,000 years ago when Aztecs and other Meso-American cultures created rituals that honored the duality of life and death. One of their core beliefs was that reality was the dream, and that death was when we truly became “awake.”

Dia de Muertos celebrations lasted three days, as they still do today, and end on November 2nd. Because they began on the same night as Halloween, the two traditions are often confused and mistakenly intertwined. The major difference is in the tone of the celebrations. Again, Halloween looks at the scarier side of death, while Dia de Muertos celebrates it with colorful dances, decorative skulls and candles, and other festivities, including the construction of elaborate private altars called “ofrendas,” with pathways of marigolds that are meant to welcome the dearly deceased. The Mexican “cempasuchil” or marigold, is the traditional “flor de muerto” or Flower of the Dead. Altars can be decorated with sugar skulls and other foods and spirits (including tequila or mescal) that the deceased loved most, as well as pictures and objects once owned by the deceased. If the deceased was a child, the altar might include toys and trinkets including favorite candies. Families hold vigils at their homes, or at cemeteries, and take pride in decorating the gravestones of their dead relatives, leaving gifts of food, flowers and sugar skulls, or actual possessions that belonged to the deceased person.

Family homes are decorated with skulls and skeletons, made out of cardboard or tissue paper, and always colorful and bold. Because of the Spanish colonization of Mexico, often Christian objects are found on altars alongside much more pagan objects. This might include crosses, rosary beads and statues of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

As with most major holidays, food and drink is a big part of Dia de Muertos festivities, with cakes and breads such as pan de muerto (bread of the dead) that have been baked around a small skeleton or skull. In fact, the garishly painted skulls now most associated with the holiday period are sold in shops and markets, but those made by hand are most cherished. Some are meant to eat, and are made of sugar or chocolate or even wood, with the name of the deceased etched into the forehead, but others are purely decorative and have become a popular collector’s item in the Southwest for those wishing to give their homes a distinct Mexican traditional flavor. To show the difference between our Halloween and the Dia de Muertos, in our culture, a skull is an object to be feared and signifies death in a terrifying way. We even use it to identify substances that are toxic and deadly, while to the Mexican people, a skull is a symbol of life, death and rebirth.

Prayer and remembrance also mark most Dia de Muertos festivities, something we do not do at Halloween, even though Halloween also has at its roots a time of reverence and celebration of the dead before it became commercialized. Some cultures wear shells and use other noisemakers to dance around and “wake the dead.” Others actually wear the clothing of their deceased loved ones. From village to village, traditions might vary, but all would be centered on honoring, not fearing, the dead and treating them with love, respect and a sense of sacredness. This attitude towards death has obvious pagan roots where the cycles of life were not only understood, but also accepted and honored, unlike today’s more modern cultures that have all but wiped nature off the map and made death something to be dreaded and avoided at all costs.

Like Halloween, Dia de Muertos was altered by the course of history when the Spanish colonization of the 16th century prompted the Catholic Church to move the original August three-day celebration period to coincide with Allhallowtide, All Saints’ Eve, and All Saints’ Day. Yet, scholars state the original festivities most likely lasted the entire month of August during which the dead came back to visit their loved ones. These summer festivities honored a goddess, the Lady of the Dead or La Calavera Catrina of modern times. “Calavara” is Spanish for skull, and the word is also used to signify a poem playfully mocking the dead, a custom that originated in the 18th century. La Calavera Catrina is a fun parody celebration of a Mexican goddess or upper class woman, complete with little dolls called “Catrinas” and men and women wearing costumes with skull masks. They also might get tattoos of the names of the dead, or carry dolls of the dead with them for good luck, much like we carry a rabbit’s foot or tattoo our children’s and lover’s names on our bodies.

The use of costumes and masks no doubt influenced or at least coincided with dressing up for Halloween and taking on the persona of a spooky entity, ghostly being or today, a trampy French maid. In modern urban areas that mark the Dia de Muertos, children do wear costumes and walk the streets, knocking on doors to ask for a “calaverita,” which might be a small gift of money or some candy treats, and even ask passers-by on the streets for goodies, something our Halloween kids have yet to figure out (twice the candy!).

The Spanish conquest of the Meso-American cultures resulted in changes to their old traditions, just as the Celtic holiday of Samhain, a celebration of death and renewal which gave Halloween many of its symbolic traditions, was suppressed and absorbed by the Catholic celebrations as well, something that happened with most major pagan holidays and traditions (Easter, Christmas…). Dia de Muertos also is linked to an ancient Aztec festival that was dedicated to a goddess named Mictecacihuatl and was once only a day of celebration for indigenous peoples in a very specific part of Mexico, before spreading further into the world in the 20th century. Holidays honoring goddesses and women often later became morphed into Christian holidays honoring male saints, or degraded and disempowered the women figures, much like our Halloween took the pagan crone, a wise old woman, and turned her into an ugly, wart-covered witch. Because the Spanish who conquered the Aztec became the dominant force and religion in the Mexican region, their influences naturally became interwoven with those of indigenous peoples, when they didn’t completely wipe them off the map.

Recently, the Mexican government made Dia de Muertos a national holiday in line with educational policies enforced in the 1960s that encouraged the practice of national traditions that unified cultures and regions of indigenous peoples. Many modern regions in Mexico honor different things on each of the three days, with one day devoted to dead children, and one to adults. Children are honored on Dia de los Inocentes, Day of the Innocents, and Dia de lost Angelitos, Day of the Little Angels. November 2nd was reserved for Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead focusing on adults.

More recently, other nations such as Fiji, Indonesia, New Zealand and Australia have their own versions of a Day of the Dead, borrowing from the Mexican culture. South American nations celebrate as well, especially their indigenous populations. One of the more unusual rituals comes from Bolivia and is celebrated on May 5th. The Dia de los Natitas, or Day of the Skulls, comes from an ancient practice of actually spending the day with the skeletal bones of the deceased relative. Nowadays, they just keep the skull around, decorating it with flowers and trinkets, and making offerings of cigarettes and alcohol to thank the dead for watching over and protecting family members.

In America, the three-day festival now welcomes those of all cultures and races, who take part in enjoying a different perspective of the dead. Instead of being terrorized by ghost, ghouls and demons, those involved choose to celebrate the ones who have come before us with color, music, food and festivities alongside more serious prayer and remembrance. Though most festivities occur in the Southwest, a region with a high Hispanic population, cities throughout the country take part in this unique mash-up of Mexican and American cultures that, although they retain their classic Aztec origins, change with the times to adapt to new celebrations that honor the dead and embrace activism, environmental awareness and community involvement.

Sadly, the Spanish conquest thought the customs surrounding Dia de Muertos as being barbaric and primitive, not understanding the dual nature of life and death, light and dark, male and female, and other nature-related elements that were such a powerful part of the worldview of older tribes and cultures. Because of that, we may never know all the traditions and symbols used to show respect to the dead, since many of them were probably suppressed by Catholic Church leaders, who probably threatened punishment upon the lowly pagans who continued to practice such rituals and festivities. But like the old Aztec and Meso-American myths, their traditions remain at the core of many holidays we Westerners now like to think we created and evolved.

The subject of death is remembered mainly here in America as a time to mourn and grieve, as in our many holidays devoted to those lost in war or terrorist attacks. But other cultures that retain more pagan roots, while grieving death (as we are all human), instead look upon it as one part of a cycle or a wheel that turns over and over again, just as the natural world is a wheel of planting, harvesting, and planting again. Because our ancestors were so in tune with the earth’s cycles, whether they be the phases of the moon, the shifting tides, the changing seasons or the growth of animals, plants and humans evolving towards death, they came to see each part of the cycle as something to be cherished, and not feared or dreaded. Without death, there cannot be room for new life. Without the change of seasons, there can be no renewal of plant life in the spring, and new harvests of crops in the fall. Everything was in tune and in perfect order and harmony.

The Dia de Muertos may be just a time to party and eat great food and wear crazy skull masks for many people. But to millions of others around the world, it is an acknowledgement of a critical part of the ever-spinning wheel of existence, and a way to thank those who came before us and were a part of that wheel.

—

Marie D. Jones is the author of several books about the paranormal, metaphysics, and cutting-edge science (many coauthored with Larry Flaxman), including PSIence, The Déjà vu Enigma, Destiny vs. Choice: The Scientific and Spiritual Evidence Behind Fate and Free Will,11:11 The Time Prompt Phenomenon and Mind Wars. She has appeared on more than 1,000 radio shows worldwide, and on television, most recently on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. Her website is mariedjones.com.

Filed Under: Marie D Jones, The Outer Edge, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: Day Of The Dead, Dia de Muertos, Marie D. Jones, Paranormal Braintrust

The Feral Phantom Nose-Biter of the Carolinas – Micah Hanks Reports

September 30, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

Micah Hanks
Micah Hanks

The modern world, despite what is afforded us by science and discovery, is still very much a place of mystery. To the open-minded thinker, a world of possibility exists here, where, through logic and reason, we may be able to glean new ways of understanding the nature of the physical universe.

It has been this essential credo that, for nearly two decades now, has kept me passionate about the study of the unexplained. By the time I was in my early 20s, I was writing articles on the subject of mysteries, and though my skepticism has become more focused over the years, my fundamental curiosity about unusual things remains strong. Hence, I’ve often take my interests beyond the written page and have ventured into the field, investigating odd claims that include everything from purported sightings of unidentified animals, to stories about weird things seen in the sky that seem to defy logic.

One area of interest that I’ve been less involved with is that of purported “cattle mutilations,” though this isn’t to say I’ve never had a run-in with the phenomenon (as we’ll see shortly). Beginning during the middle 1970s, reports of cattle being found drained of blood, as well as having certain soft tissues around the mouth and other areas removed, began to make headlines. Subsequent concern over this mystery led to involvement by the FBI, who have made available a number of their documents about investigations into cattle mutilations at their website, www.FBI.gov. Perhaps most alarming had been that many alleged mutilations coincided with sightings of strange lights, and hence, many began to believe that the cattle mutilation phenomenon was somehow connected with reports of UFOs over the Americas at that time.

Researcher Christopher O’Brien pointed out to me a few years ago that one of the earliest incidents involving an apparent mutilation of livestock had actually involved a horse, rather than a cow. The incident in question occurred on September 9, 1967, when Mrs. Agnes King of Alamosa, Colorado, accompanied by her son Harry, discovered the body of their horse, Lady, who’s three years old at the time of death. Lady’s curious death possessed many of the familiar tropes of future mutilations, which included removal of the skin covering the horse’s head and upper neck, along with the removal of flesh. The Kings noted the presence of what appeared to be very precise incisions, which bore cuts along lines that seemed far too controlled to have been carried out by any animal. There was no blood, and during a later interview about the incident, Harry King would state that he had smelled a strong aroma at the site of Lady’s death, which he described as “medicinal.” Law enforcement could cite “no earthly causes” for the animal’s death, which led to speculation about popular sightings of UFOs at the time. Hence, Lady’s mysterious death, preceding more popular livestock mutilations and death by nearly a decade, nonetheless became the first to associate purported extraterrestrial activity with the phenomenon.

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Which brings us to my own experience with livestock mutilations. Several years ago, a news report on our local station here in Asheville, North Carolina, detailed a number of mysterious cattle deaths on a ranch in a neighboring county. Little was said about the cause of death, apart from the fact that law enforcement was investigating, and that a group of biologists, one of whom worked at the time with the Western North Carolina Nature Center, had been brought along to help determine whether the deaths might involve some kind of predator in the region.

Soon after the report had aired, I contacted a friend at the television news station, and asked if footage of the dead cattle was still available, to which I was told that the tapes had already been wiped (this was standard practice, I was told, and that the footage had not been removed for any “sinister” reasons). I then contacted the Sheriff’s Department for the county in question and inquired about their investigation, as well as the Western North Carolina Nature Center, hoping for any leads that might become available there.

Numerous queries with the aforementioned law enforcement group yielded no results. Then, within days of the initial news report on the cattle deaths, a statement was released by the department, which told a story that was almost as unusual as the initial animal deaths had been. According to law enforcement, a stakeout with the property owners over the course of three subsequent evenings led to the observation of a large, feral dog, which had been attacking the cattle late at night. The officers and property owners had allegedly observed this large dog latching onto the noses of the cattle, wrestling them to the ground and killing them in this way.

The explanation was patently absurd. No dog—feral or otherwise—would have slaughtered a cow in this way, let alone their being much possibility that such a method, had it been attempted, would have rendered a successful kill. Around this time, I was contacted by one of the biologists with the Nature Center here in town, who privately expressed some concerns to me about the case. For one, the individual (who asked not to be named) told me that the explanation involving the “nose-biting feral dog” was just as absurd as I had guessed. In order to verify this, I called a biology professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville with whom I often corresponded around that time, who similarly expressed dismay at such a clumsy manner of killing. “A dog would never attack any kind of bovine in that way,” he told me.

However, the eerie part of the story had involved the other information provided by my contact with the Nature Center. “Micah, if I may candidly tell you something,” her email began. “There were some very peculiar incisions on the cattle we observed.” She further explained that the ears appeared to have been removed and that in her opinion, whatever the cause might have actually been, “these killings looked just like the kinds of cattle mutilations you’ve seen on the TV shows.”

There was never any clear resolution to the matter, at least as far as why area law enforcement had offered such an absurd explanation for the incident, and why this had seemingly gone unnoticed, apart from my private inquiries with the biologists at the local university and wildlife resource center named here.

Granted, there are any number of factors that might reside at the heart of this mystery. During my talk with Christopher O’Brien, he expressed his belief that the majority of these livestock deaths have an earthly cause, although he does feel that some of the mutilations could involve testing by government agencies (and yes, this sounds very conspiratorial), which might be aimed at offsetting outbreaks of such afflictions as the well known “Mad Cow Disease”, otherwise known as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and other similar conditions that are specific to livestock of this sort. The same general idea has been endorsed in the past by Colm Kelleher, a biochemist who has engaged in his own first-hand field investigation into cattle mutilations.

Sure, the “secret government testing” hypothesis may sound nutty to a few of us. Then again, is it any crazier than the idea of aliens abducting cattle, for purpose of carrying out their bizarre hybridization programs, as has been long supposed by much of the UFO community? Weighing our options, the secret government testing theory might make as much sense as any.

However, there was a peculiar historical thread that I found worthy of mention here too, as it relates to all of this. Absurd though the “nose-biting killer” theory had been in my own review of a cattle mutilation case local to my region, a similar solution involving a dog involved in highly unusual behavior had been attributed to a classic livestock mass-killing, which occurred in Ireland in 1874. Writing of the incident in his book Lo!, the late-great Charles Fort described the incident thusly:

“For about four months, in the year 1874, beginning upon January 8th, a killer was abroad, in Ireland. In Land and Water, March 7, 1874, a correspondent writes that he had heard of depredations by a wolf, in Ireland, where the last native wolf had been killed in the year 1712. According to him, a killer was running wild, in Cavan, slaying as many as 30 sheep in one night. There is another account, in Land and Water, March 28. Here, a correspondent writes that, in Cavan, sheep had been killed in a way that led to the belief that the marauder was not a dog. This correspondent knew of 42 instances, in three townlands, in which sheep had been similarly killed—throats cut and blood sucked, but no flesh eaten. The footprints were like a dog’s, but were long and narrow, and showed traces of strong claws. Then, in the issue of April 11th, of Land and Water, came the news that we have been expecting. The killer had been shot. It had been shot by Archdeacon Magenniss, at Lismoreville, and was only a large dog.”

Fort, in his typically skeptical manner, had thought little of the large dog explanation, apart from the contention that it was of utmost absurdity:

“This announcement ends the subject, in Land and Water. Almost anybody, anyway in the past, before suspiciousness against conventions had the development that it has today, reading these accounts down to the final one, would say—”Why, of course! It’s the way these stories always end up. Nothing to them.” But it is just the way these stories always end up that has kept me busy. Because of our experience with pseudo-endings of mysteries, or the mysterious shearing and bobbing and clipping of mysteries, I went more into this story that was said to be no longer mysterious. The large dog that was shot by the Archdeacon was sacrificed not in vain if its story shut up the minds of readers of Land and Water, and if it be desirable somewhere to shut up minds upon this earth.”

Fort’s response is hardly surprising. However, it is the similar willingness to except anything that might appear logical, so long it is of a prosaic nature, in response to the seemingly unnatural, which seems to remain constant. A large dog slitting the necks of sheep, and the subsequent exsanguination of their remains only sounds foolish, perhaps, when contrasted against the image which springs to mind as we read the description of a feral dog clinging forcibly to the snout of some poor bovine, and suffocating the poor thing.

In either instance, we may never know precisely what happened to the livestock whose lives were lost, but the death-dealers were probably not the dogs who took the blame. Recognizing this is not to endorse an “alien” theory, of course, though either attempt from such extremities of dogmatic “explanation” might be worthy of ridicule. Thus, the livestock killings, though perhaps greatly misunderstood on such ideological grounds, seem to remain mysterious nonetheless.

—

Micah Hanks is a writer, podcaster, and researcher whose interests include history, science, current events, cultural studies, technology, business, philosophy, unexplained phenomena, and ways the future of humankind may be influenced by science and innovation in the coming decades. With his writing, he has covered topics that include controversial themes such as artificial intelligence, government surveillance, unconventional aviation technologies, and the broadening of human knowledge through the reach of the Internet. Micah lives in the heart of Appalachia near Asheville, North Carolina, where he makes a living as a writer and musician. You can find his podcasts at GralienReport.com and his books at Amazon.com

Filed Under: Micah Hanks, Slider, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: Cattle Mutilations, Jim Harold, Micah Hanks, Paranormal Braintrust

Doomsday Cults: Why Do People Have End Times Obsessions and Apocalypse Dreams? – Marie D. Jones

September 19, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

Marie D. Jones
Marie D. Jones

The band REM sang about the end of the world as we know it, and they felt fine. In fact, many people not only feel good about the world ending, but actually welcome it with open arms, often joining with others of like mind to predict, plan, and prepare for the demise of humanity and the extinction of existence. But why? Who in their right mind would want the world to come to a crashing halt, taking all of life with it?

Just recently, an end of the world prediction for July 29th went bust. A group calling itself End Times Prophecies predicted a solar flip, which would lead to an apocalyptic chain reaction ending all life. Never happened. Days later, another prophesized end was all over the place, courtesy of a YouTube psychic named T. Chase who warned the world of the apocalypse to come in the year 2017…complete with a giant alien spaceship invading earth, shooting out death rays upon humanity. Chase went on to predict that Jesus himself would lead an alien army in UFOs against Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, who will start the third world war. This alien army will stop us from extincting ourselves in a nuclear showdown.

Chase claims he gleaned this revelation from, well, the New Testament Book of Revelations (specifically chapter 19) and the teachings of Nostradamus. But fear not, because according to Chase, the alien-army of Christ will win and we will all be happy living under a one-government confederation (New World Order?)

These are not the first predictions of end times, and they certainly won’t be the last. Prophecies of the end go back probably as far as the beginning, when the first humans pondered their own mortalities and wondered how long their like would hold up against vicious animal predators, wicked natural disasters and marauding tribes. But to actually form a club, or a cult, with a leader whose sole purpose is to drive his or her members to their deaths in a pre-emptive bid on immortality? That’s more of a modern thing. Remember the followers of a man named Harold Camping? In May of 2011, the then 89-year-old self-claimed scriptures expert stated the world would end on the 11th day of that month. It didn’t. Yet he ended up making millions of dollars off of believers and those who had hopeful expectations of the end. You could say, end times predictions turn a good prophet, I mean, profit. Just ask all those who benefited off of the alleged Mayan Calendar end date of December 21, 2012. Or maybe I should shut up because I wrote a book about the entire shebang that did quite well (although in my defense I wrote about the mythologies and predictions and not that I thought they would come true. I never did!)

Doomsday cults, also known as Apocalyptic Cults, or End Times cults, usually have at their basis a fundamentalist religious belief system that focuses on the literal interpretations of symbolic and metaphorical texts. This unhealthy focus on the final destruction of earth leads some of them to mass suicides in an attempt to be taken elsewhere before the apocalypse occurs. Two such cults that made the international news were the Guyana/People’s Temple, led by Jim Jones, and Heaven’s Gate, led by Ti and Do, which occurred right in my own area. But before we get to them, a little more background into these cults in general.

There are two basic types of belief systems driving doomsday cults; apocalypticism and millenarianism. Apocalypticism suggests there will one day be an apocalypse that will end the world in a fiery global catastrophe, resulting in the end of civilization itself. Some groups believe they will be spared, or that if they commit mass suicide first, their souls will be taken to heaven before the rest of the wicked ones on Earth perish in agonizing suffering.

Apocalyptic end times cults often believe in a messiah and that their own leader is that messiah, following him or her blindly to their own deaths. The leader may instead claim to be a representation of God’s will on earth or an offspring of the messiah, but some are so arrogant as to claim that title for themselves. In fact, many Biblical scholars refer to Jesus Christ as a type of apocalyptic messiah prophesying the end of the world for the Jews and a final judgment day to be unleashed upon humanity. He was said to return on a cloud as the “son of man” and the divine judge during the end times spoken of in the Book of Revelation.

Millenarianism is a belief in a coming mass transformation of society by a specific event or catastrophe. This was a widespread force behind a lot of predictions surround the year 1000 A.D. and then again on 2000 A.D., or Y2K when religious sects and cults alike awaited doomsday, or at least utter technological breakdown that might lead to it. Christian millenarian cults await the Second Coming of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on Earth and in Heaven that will free the oppressed and usurp the powerful status quo. Often this goal can turn to mass suicides or violent acts of terrorism, such as the acts of Aum Shinrikyo, Heaven’s Gate, The Manson Cult, The People’s Temple and the Branch Davidians (led by David Koresh). Other millenarian cults include the Cult of the Holy Spirit and The Living Church of God, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, Cult of the Holy Spirit, Joachimites and the Lord’s Resistance Army.

There are some common tenets shared by these extremist cults.

  1. A charismatic leader who calls his/herself a God/Messiah/Messenger.
  2. A specific prophecy members must believe in and adhere to.
  3. A powerful and compelling argument for cult members being special and the chosen/saved.
  4. An exit strategy or plan should said prophecy not come true, or should the government crack down on them first.

When a prophecy doesn’t happen, the cult leaders are adept at deflecting criticism and coming up with a new end times date, usually admitting responsibility for misinterpreting a date or time during their “vision.” However, cults like Aum Shinrikyo go as far as to help bring about the very apocalypse they desire with acts of violent terrorism. This Japanese New Religious Movement founded in the mid-1980s by Shoko Asahara Aum, released the deadly gas, sarin, into the Tokyo subway system in 1995 and procured military grade weapons from Russia. Their leader was eventually sentenced to death for various criminal acts.

The term “doomsday cult” was first coined by John Lofland in a 1966 study of the Unification Church, titled “Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith,” which eventually became a book in 1966 published by Prentice-Hall. He examined methods of conversion of members, the charismatic characteristics of cult leaders and how members were kept from losing faith and straying outside of the cult.

His book was followed by numerous psychological studies asking why and how ordinary people could get sucked into something as crazy as a doomsday cult hell-bent on death and destruction. One such study, by Leon Festinger and his colleagues, later published in a book, “When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group that Predicted the Destruction of the World,” found that people tended to turn to such cults and the concept of the world ending in their lifetime when their own lives were meaningless. They found a purpose and meaning in these cults, becoming a part of a group with a very specific outcome, and belonging made them feel special. This is the driving mechanism behind why most people, in general, join cults, but the promise of salvation amidst a coming extinction served as extra magnetic fodder for the lost souls looking for meaning.

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The study, and others like it, also found that even as some members would leave the cult if the proposed end times date came and went uneventfully, others would stick it out, perhaps because they had already given up so much, they felt they had nothing to lose awaiting a new end date. This would keep members from humiliation and embarrassment of having to face the fact that they gave up their lives…for nothing.

To many suicide cult members, the promise of eternal glory elsewhere was so strong they didn’t even wait for the end date. They took matters into their own hands and took their lives in a mass ritual to find glory and salvation elsewhere. Heaven’s Gate was a UFO millenarian group in San Diego, California, that was founded in the 1970s by two enigmatic humans; Marshall Applewhite and Bonnie Nettles. They became known as Ti and Do, The Two, Bo and Peep and a variety of other names signifying their leadership and intergalactic connections. They taught their members to give up all material possessions and that the only way to “level up” and be free of all human and earthly attachments, which brought suffering, was to be ready to board the Mothership. The spaceship was trailing the comet Hale-Bopp and coming to take them to the “next level,” and doing so required 39 people to poison themselves to death. That’s how strong their belief was.

As the UK Daily Mail reported, “All but three of the bodies were arranged neatly on their beds with their faces and torsos covered with a purple cloth. Each body had a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets and along with packed luggage at their sides. They mixed Phenobarbital poison into applesauce or pudding and then washed it down with vodka. They then tied plastic bags on their heads to asphyxiate themselves and speed their deaths. The followers, age 26 to 72, killed themselves in three waves March 24, 25 and 26. The survivors always neatly arranged their dead comrades’ bodies before committing suicide themselves.”

In 1978, the charismatic church leader Jim Jones called for an act of “revolutionary suicide” at the Jonestown agricultural compound in Guyana, resulting in the deaths of over 900 people, a third of whom were children, who took poison-laced punch and died at the hands of a clearly psychotic man who thought he was a messiah. Many were said to not want to go along with the suicide but were forced to do so at gunpoint. The Jonestown Massacre would go down in history as the deadliest non-natural disaster in history, until the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In order to make people take their own lives, one must have a blend of a truly charismatic leader with so much charm and magnetism, people would follow him or her off a cliff, with a mission or purpose so compelling, that death by cliff would seem almost holy and sacred. Add to that a variety of mind control and brainwashing techniques such as coercive persuasion and intermittent reinforcement, and members don’t have much of a chance of leaving or even thinking clearly enough to contemplate it.

With complete control of their members’ minds and thoughts and behaviors, cult leaders can do anything, or make you do anything. Absolute devotion to a cult leader is equated with devotion to a deity or to God, and rules must and will be followed…or else. But the promise of salvation and being among the chosen few overrides the free will and instinct of people caught up in the fervor of end times proselytizing. Charles Manson had over 100 followers who hung on his every word…even committed murders for him. And he was nothing but a down on his luck musician who tapped into the emotions of the young and angry, the troubled and disillusioned. In them, he found his tribe and was able to manipulate them into believing in a coming race war that drove the violent acts of his most devoted followers. “Charlie,” as his cult members called him, is still in prison and gets thousands of “fan letters” every year from people who want to become a part of his “family.”

Sometimes, the government catches on and tries to stop a doomsday cult from bringing about doomsday…and yet bring it about anyway. Think of the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists Church, led by David Koresh, who went up against a coordinated siege by the FBI, ATF and Texas National Guard in 1993 that ended after fifty-one days in the fiery deaths of 82 members, including children. Koresh was also a musician, like Charlie Manson, who became a prophet and was accused of sexual abuse of young women followers, which led to the government investigation. The leaders of cults are not special people, but disillusioned people who come to believe they are special, and who have the ability to get others to believe the same.

In some cases, such as the followers of Elizabeth Clare Prophet and her Church Universal and Triumphant, founded in 1975, it was all about prepping – doing what was necessary to prepare for and survive a disaster such as nuclear war. In this case, Prophet encouraged the building of fall-out shelters in the late 1980s, anticipating a nuclear catastrophe that never came. She has since died.

The prepper movement, like the survivalists, plan for disaster and apocalypse, but with a bit more of a practical bent. Their mission is to be ready either by building bomb shelters or buying up tracts of land in remote areas to live off the grid, growing their own food, stockpiling guns or training in various survival and disaster prep methods. Without the religious obsession towards total Armageddon, preppers may go a tad overboard in the eyes of most of us, but to them, they are just being smart and getting ready for the inevitable government takeover, nuclear war, or clamp-down on Constitutional freedoms.

I belong to an organization called CERT – Community Emergency Response Teams. We are fully trained disaster responders under FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. I am trained in medical triage, disaster assessment, heavy lifting, urban and rural search and rescue, psychological trauma, crowd control, fire control, and a host of other things, including ham radio operations in an emergency. Does that make me a prepper? Sure it does. Does it make me a doomsday cultist? Nope. I am banking on a few disasters happening in my lifetime, and hope to be ready and able to respond…but I’m not waiting and hoping for full-on Armageddon.

I have too much to live for.

—

Marie D. Jones is the author of several books about the paranormal, metaphysics, and cutting-edge science (many coauthored with Larry Flaxman), including PSIence, The Déjà vu Enigma, Destiny vs. Choice: The Scientific and Spiritual Evidence Behind Fate and Free Will,11:11 The Time Prompt Phenomenon and Mind Wars. She has appeared on more than 1,000 radio shows worldwide, and on television, most recently on the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. Her website is mariedjones.com.

Filed Under: Marie D Jones, The Outer Edge, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: David Koresh, Doomsday cults, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Harold Camping, Heaven's Gate, Jim Harold, Jim Jones, John Lofland, Marie D. Jones, Marshall Applewhite, Paranormal Braintrust, T.Chase

A Case of Supernatural Murder – Nick Redfern Writes

August 24, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

Nick Redfern
Nick Redfern

February 14, 1945 was the date of a very controversial, and still-unresolved, murder in rural England. It was a murder which bore all the hallmarks of death at the hands of a secret society. Some observers of the mystery suggested that a band of witches were the culprits. Others, meanwhile, were of the opinion that it was all the work of a secret sect of druids. The victim was a farm-worker, 74-year-old Charles Walton, found dead with nothing less than a pitchfork sticking out of his chest.

He was a resident of a small, picturesque village in the county of Warwickshire, England called Lower Quinton. Walton had lived in the village for all of his life, in a pleasant old cottage that stood across from the local church. It was a scene not unlike what one might expect to see on Downton Abbey or in the pages of a Jane Austen novel. Until, that is, murder, mayhem, and a secret cult came to Lower Quinton and turned everything on its collective head.

Walton was known to all of the locals. He was viewed as an affable but quiet sort, and – somewhat intriguingly – he had the ability to entice wild birds to eat seeds from his hands. He was also said to have the power to reduce a wild, aggressive dog to a man’s best friend simply by speaking to it. On top of that, he had expert knowledge of local folklore, mythology and legend. Rumors suggest that perhaps Walton’s slightly uncanny “powers” had ensured him a place in a secret witchcraft cult, one which he ultimately fell out of favor with. And, as a result, he paid the ultimate price. Namely, his life.

What is known for sure is that on the day in question – which was Valentine’s Day, no less – Walton was busily trimming hedges on what was known as Hillground: a large field at the foot of the Meon Hill. His tools were a hook and a pitchfork. It was while working on the hedges that someone stealthily intervened and took Walton’s life – and in a distinctly savage fashion, too. When his body was stumbled on by a shocked local, all hell broke loose in the small village. He was lying dead on the grassy ground, with the pitchfork having fatally pierced his chest, and the hook having pierced his throat in what was clearly a savage and violent fashion. On top of that, a large cross had been cut into his chest. Clearly, something distinctly sinister had taken place.

It should be noted that Meon Hill has, for centuries, been associated with supernatural activity: sightings of blazing-eyed black dogs – not unlike the terrible beast in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel The Hound of the Baskervilles – have been reported. And, none other than Satan himself is said to have kicked a large rock from the top of the hill to the bottom of it, with the intention of flattening Evesham Abbey.

Such was the strange and sinister nature of Walton’s death, the investigation wasn’t just left in the hands of the local “bobbies.” None other than Scotland Yard’s finest detectives were soon on the case – which is hardly surprising, when one takes into consideration the extreme weirdness of the entire affair. And they weren’t just on the case; they took over the entire investigation, under the control of Detective Inspector Robert Fabian. Despite an extensive investigation, and suspicions that the guilty party was a man named Albert Potter – who was employing Walton on the day he met his grisly end – the matter was never resolved to the satisfaction of the police and the mystery remained precisely that: a mystery.

It’s worth noting, however, that Detective Inspector Fabian later said of his investigation of the affair: “One of my most memorable murder cases was at the village of Lower Quinton, near the stone Druid circle of the Whispering Knights. There a man had been killed by a reproduction of a Druidical ceremony on St. Valentine’s Eve.”

He also offered the following, memorable words: “I advise anybody who is tempted at any time to venture into Black Magic, witchcraft, Shamanism – call it what you will – to remember Charles Walton and to think of his death, which was clearly the ghastly climax of a pagan rite. There is no stronger argument for keeping as far away as possible from the villains with their swords, incense and mumbo-jumbo. It is prudence on which your future peace of mind and even your life could depend.”

It should also be noted that within Lower Quinton, the village folk are still very reluctant to speak about the decades-old affair. For example, the landlord of the village’s College Arms pub, told the BBC: “I can’t talk to you about that. After 17 years of running this place I know there are some things we don’t talk about. Talking about it would upset people and there’s no sense in alienating people in a small village like this. There are no relatives of Charles Walton left in the village and people that might have known what happened are all dead or gone.”

Another local was equally reluctant to say much to the BBC: “People don’t talk about it; it’s a closed subject. Those that know about it are gone, except one who’s in hospital and another that’s in a nursing home. All the others have gone or passed away.”

And a third spoke in a similar vein and tones: “No one will talk to you about it. The family have all gone now, anyway. There are none of the Walton family left here now. I have no answers to your questions.”

Death by pitchfork, rumors of a witchcraft cult, druids roaming around the landscape, and a village of people still living in uneasy and closed-mouth fashion, decades later. The memories of the murder of Charles Walton show no signs of fading away anytime soon. Indeed, that strange atmosphere of witchcraft, ritualistic murder, and sinister characters still hangs over Lower Quinton. In all probability, that will always be the case.

—

One of the most prolific Fortean writers on the planet, Nick Redfern is the author of many books, including Men in Black, Chupacabra Road Trip, and The Bigfoot Book. He can be contacted at his blog, “World of Whatever,” at nickredfernfortean.blogspot.com

Filed Under: If Its Weird Its Here, Nick Redfern, Slider, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: Charles Walton, Charles Walton murder, Nick Redfern, Paranormal Braintrust, supernatural murder

Are We Haunting Ourselves – A Paranormal Braintrust Article

August 10, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

EXTREME PARANORMAL, POLTERGEISTS AND RSPK – Theresa Argie’s Occult Kitchen

By Theresa Argie
By Theresa Argie

Tales of ghosts and hauntings come in all shapes and sizes, but a few stand out as “extreme”. These are cases where the paranormal activity reaches a level far beyond an average haunting, if there is such a thing. Extreme hauntings often include violent attacks and severe physical phenomenon.

The extreme haunting that has given me pause for over two decades is the strange and terrifying tale of Jackie Hernandez. Often referred to as the San Pedro Haunting, this case is one of the best known and well documented haunting in the United States. I studied the reports of those who were there – eyewitness accounts and official documentation of those involves in one of the most terrifying paranormal encounters of our time.

1989 – Single mother Jackie Hernandez moves into a small unassuming bungalow in San Pedro, California. The events began in a rather benign way but quickly escalated into one of the most dangerous hauntings ever recorded. The disturbing phenomenon weighed heavily on Hernandez who was newly divorced and expecting her second child.

Strange noises could be heard throughout the house including voices coming from empty rooms and the attic. There were weird lights and shadows, pungent smells, and objects moving of their own accord including a framed picture that flew off the wall crashing several feet away from its origin. Hernandez witnessed a water-like substance pouring inexplicably from a lighting fixture. It was soon evident that she was living in a haunted house.

After the birth of her daughter, Hernandez knew she had to do something. Her family was more vulnerable than ever and her sanity was slowly slipping away. After months of living through a barrage of paranormal activity, Hernandez had a face-to-face encounter with evil.

One evening after putting the children to bed, Hernandez encountered the ghost that had been haunting her home. She watched in horror as a face began to materialize out of the darkness. The distorted face turned into the full bodied apparition of a decrepit old man in shabby clothes. The darkness in its eyes chilled her to the core. This was not the case of a friendly family spirit dropping by to check on the children; this was something dark and negative.

Hernandez called in a team of paranormal investigators led by one of the most well respected names in the field Dr. Barry Taff. Taff was affiliated with the Parapsychology research lab out of UCLA.  He was accompanied by a small team of investigators and photographers, including camera man Barry Conrad and photographer Jeff Wheatcraft.

Conrad and Taff had investigated numerous paranormal encounters including the 1974 incident known as “The Entity Case.” Considered one of the most well documented and scientifically researched hauntings, the case was the basis of a 1983 movie staring Barbara Hershey also called The Entity. Dr. Taff acted as an advisor on the film.

The story of The Entity follows Doris Bither (fictional name Carla Moran) and her four children who experience severe paranormal disturbances in their Culver City home. The events quickly escalated from disturbing to violent. Taff, a colleague from UCLA, and a team of research assistants were called on to investigate the event. It quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary haunting. Something strange and powerful was at work in the home. Doris Bither was the target of this unusually strong energy, possibly a poltergeist.

Paranormal activity and physical attacks were common. Nothing researchers did seemed to lessen the severity. What shocked investigators was Bither’s claim that she was sexually assaulted by the malevolent entities in her home. According to Bither, two male entities held her down and another larger one raped her. The attacks happened frequently and sometimes in front of witnesses.

Among the numerous anomalies witnessed by Taff and his team were extreme temperature drops, repulsive smells of rotting flesh, strange lights, and what can be described as an (almost) full bodied apparition. Witnesses reported erratically moving balls of bright lights that coalesced into the upper torso of a human figure.

The Entity case garnered national attention from both media and the scientific world, propelling the careers of Dr. Taff and Barry Conrad. The film version received mixed reviews. Horror fans loved it but it was dismissed as a “true story” by most of Taff and Conrad’s academic contemporaries. But the multiple witnesses would say different.

Similarities can be drawn from both the Culver City and the San Pedro cases. Although in the San Pedro case, a bystander, not the homeowner was the target of the physical attacks.

August 1989 – During the initial investigation of the Hernandez residence the team witnessed peculiar events which included strange balls of glowing lights, muffled disembodied voices, and loud banging sounds coming from the empty attic. Photographer Jeff Wheatcraft made his way up to the attic to investigate.

While in the attic, Wheatcraft’s camera was violently and inexplicably pulled from his hands. The lens and the body of the camera were thrown forcefully, landing in opposite ends of the room.

Some of the other unusual activity happening at the San Pedro home included the inexplicable appearance of a liquid substance found oozing from the walls and floors. No source of origin could be found for the strange viscous fluid. Samples of the substance was sent to a lab where it was determined to be male human blood plasma.

September 1989 – Conrad and the team returned to the San Pedro house after receiving a frantic call from Hernandez. The activity was reaching a crescendo and Hernandez was in fear for her life.

Jeff Wheatcraft hesitantly went upstairs to the attic to take photographs with fellow photographer Gary Boehm (aka Gary Biehm). Hernandez, Conrad, and neighbor Susan Castaneda anxiously waited downstairs. Within seconds they were startled by a loud painful moan coming from above.

It was Jeff Wheatcraft fighting for his life.

Suddenly and without warning, Wheatcraft fell victim to a powerful paranormal force.  Within seconds of entering the attic, something unseen wrapped a clothesline around his neck, lifted his body over the rafters, and secured the rope to a nail essentially hanging him. Amazingly, Gary Boehm snapped several pictures at the exact moment of the attack. These photographs are some of the most compelling pieces of visual phenomenon I have ever seen.

Jim Harold’s Note: I do not have rights to include these pictures here but they can be found on the internet.

In the now famous pictures, you can clearly see Jeff Wheatcraft’s look of terror, head tilted to one side, clothes line wrapped tightly around his neck. Boehm rushed to loosen the rope, bending the nail in the process. Shaken, pale, and utterly confused, the pair quickly joined the team downstairs.

If Boehm had not been in the attic at the time, Wheatcraft believes he would have surely died. The rope burns around his neck showed the aggressiveness and the severity of the attack. It was later determined that the rope was tied in a nautical bowline knot, used commonly by seaman working the San Pedro docks.

Jackie Hernandez felt the haunting was becoming more and more dangerous. She moved out of the Bungalow shorty after the incident. It soon became apparent that the source of the activity was not tethered to the property itself. She relocated to Walden, California, but the paranormal still plagued the young single mother who was on the verge of a complete mental break.

Hernandez was alone, fighting a powerful force she did not understand. She called the only people who seemed to believe her deadly plight. Apprehensively, the investigative team made their way to Walden, determined to finally get to the bottom of the haunting.

Conrad, Wheatcraft, Hernandez, and a neighbor tried to communicate with the entity during a seance. The used a ouija board as a means to connect with the spirits. Sitting around a table in a storage shed with their finger on the planchette, the investigators began asking questions. A camera crew attempted to film the session. The answers received from the board seemed to indicate that the spirit was that of a murdered dock worker from San Pedro.

But there was much more than that.

When asked how many ghost were among them, the board answered; “Phantoms fill the skies around you.” When asked why Wheatcraft was attacked, the entity answered that Wheatcraft resembled his killer.

After ending the communication session, the spirit once again attacked Jeff Wheatcraft. Witnesses claim he was suddenly pulled from his seat, levitated in mid-air, and violently thrusted backwards against the wall of the storage shed. Unfortunately, the cameras that were recording the event all malfunctioned at the exact time.

That was the second deadly attack on Jeff Wheatcraft.

Jackie Hernandez suffered with the haunting for more than three years, but the scars left on her soul remain forever. Jeff Wheatcraft was never the same after the San Pedro haunting. Besides being attacked by a ghost, he was attacked by droves of non-believers and skeptics who accused him and the team of faking the entire series of events.

It is possible that this and the Culver City case were nothing but elaborate hoaxes. Possible, but not probable. Something strange was going on. Something out of the normal. By definition, something paranormal. There were numerous eyewitnesses to each occurrence as well as an unprecedented amount of recorded data. The film footage and photographs are considered some of the best evidence of the paranormal ever captured.

Dr. Barry Taft devoted his life to studying this and other extreme haunting cases. He has been quoted as saying “There is no such thing as the paranormal. It’s a misnomer.” He claims it is all a complex psychological phenomenon known as RSPK (Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis or Zero Point Energy) where the mind physically manifests the perceived paranormal events. Like the Entity Case, he believes that there is something much more complex at work.

Taff believed that Jackie Hernandez and Doris Bither were causing the poltergeist activity. They were the agents, the source of the energy that turned their world upside-down. Their unconscious minds were running amuck, emitting so much power that objects could be manipulated physically and audio phenomenon created out of thin air.

Jeff Wheatcraft became the victim of this power for reasons only Jackie Hernandez could know. She had the ability to create a devastating and possibly deadly force from within. Similar to poltergeist phenomenon, RSPK needs an agent. It’s not demonic, yet it could be mistaken for such.

So is it normal or is it paranormal when one’s energy causes such incidents? Taft believes it is internal, emanating from some powerful portion of our subconscious. It’s not the disembodied spirit of a once living person. It’s not dark energy from an evil demon. It’s not a ghost. Unless we are our own ghosts.

It begs the question – Are we haunting ourselves?

My personal opinion is that RSPK could possibly account for some of what was happening in the both cases, but not all of it. There are more than a few holes in that theory.

What happened in San Pedro and Culver City is not cut and dry. I think the incidents have more in common with extreme hauntings than just poltergeist activity or RSPK. According to many paranormal experts, Jackie Hernandez nor Doris Bither were the typical poltergeist agent, which is usually a teenager or sometimes an older women going through menopause.

There were things reported that, to me, point to an angry human spirit, or possible an inhuman energy with an agenda of chaos and destruction. Why would a woman, consciously or unconsciously, put her children in danger, right in the line of fire so to speak? Why would she target a stranger or manifest apparitions resembling humans? Why didn’t the activity “burn out” quickly like in most poltergeist cases?

Scientific and paranormal experts have studied the cases and may have a better understanding of the details than someone like me who is drawing conclusions from reports and evidence some 25 years after the fact. But I know it would be remiss to completely rule out the possibility of a more traditional, yet just as terrifying cause in extreme cases such as this.

When ghosts attack they do so for a reason. Jackie Hernandez was not a random victim. Jeff Wheatcliff certainly was not just someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sometimes the paranormal has to be experienced to be believed. The more severe the account, the harder it is for others to accept.

I’ve had my share of physical paranormal encounters and psychological attacks. I cannot accept the idea that I was the source, the essence of energy that powered the activity.

The human mind is complex and there is much to learn about its power. Science may some day have a better understanding of the intricacies at work inside our brains. But I cannot dismiss the idea that our consciousness can sometimes survive after death.

Are ghosts the cause of all paranormal activity? Probably not. There are some things we simply can’t explain with our current understanding of the world. Maybe the most frightening thing is not the spirit that haunts our house, but the entity from within.

How do we fight the ghost inside us? Is it completely out of our control? How do we stop haunting ourselves?

(Sources used for this article taken from first hand accounts of Dr. Barr Taff and Barry Conrad, including their subsequent books, official transcripts, televised stories, and film documentaries.)

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Theresa Argie, The Haunted Housewife, is an experienced lecturer, educator, researcher and paranormal investigator and has had many years dealing with spirits, ghosts and paranormal activity. Theresa has worked beside some of the most well-known experts in the paranormal field, and has been featured by countless media outlets. She is also the co-author of America’s Most Haunted.

Filed Under: The Haunted Housewife, The Occult Kitchen, The Paranormal Braintrust, Theresa Argie Tagged With: Barbara Hershey, Barry Conrad, Carla Moran, Doris Bither, Dr. Barry Taff, hauntings, Jackie Hernandez, Jeff Wheatcraft, Occult Kitchen, Paranormal Braintrust, Poltergeist, RSPK, the entity, The Entity Case, Theresa Argie

The People With No Past – Ryan Sprague

August 3, 2016 By Paranormal Braintrust

Ryan Sprague
Ryan Sprague

Who were these mysterious people with no past? Paranomal Braintrust writer Ryan Sprague asks.

In August of 2004, in Savannah, GA, a man was found sunburned and brutally beaten behind a dumpster outside of a Burger King restaurant. He was rushed to the hospital where doctors were able to save his life. But when the man finally awoke, he had no memory of what had happened. But even scarier, he had absolutely no idea where he’d come from or who he was. The man in question, Benjamin Kyle, had been diagnosed with retrograde amnesia, which occurs often after an injury or onset of disease. With very little to go on, Kyle found himself in a purgatory of life, seemingly lacking an identity, family, and a past. Upon recovery, Kyle spent many years on the streets, not being able to obtain employment due to his not being able to remember his social security number.

The entire incident caught the attention of many news outlets and afternoon talk shows, and through the generosity of viewers, and other sources, Kyle was able to find employment at a restaurant in Florida, where he took up residence in a small home. Eventually, Kyle was able to match his DNA through an online resource and found several family members. He was slowly piecing the puzzle back together again by finding relatives, but continued to struggle with who he truly was. But he took solace, knowing there was still hope of discovering the life he’d once led. “Looking at all these names, all these people, kind of gives me a sense of belonging,” Kyle stated in an interview with ABC News. “I have a history. I’m not just some stranger that materialized out of thin air.”

The idea of someone appearing out of thin air is actually more prevalent than one may think. There have been many others who have lived lives shrouded in mystery, drifting in and out of the world in the most obscure of fashion. And as we’ll see, they disappeared into thin air just as mysteriously.

Riddle of His Time

On May 26th, 1828, a teenage boy was found wandering the streets of Nürnberg, Germany. His clothes tattered, he tightly clutched two letters in his hands. One of the letters was addressed to the captain of the cavalry regiment, requesting that the boy be left in his possession, supposedly written by a poor laborer who’d raised the boy but could no longer afford to. The second letter was written by what was apparently the boy’s mother, and this letter stated that her husband had died and she herself couldn’t raise the boy alone. Her hope was that the boy would join the military.

The young boy was asked by local authorities to write down his origins, but he seemed very confused, and couldn’t read or write. The only thing he could recall was his name, Kaspar Hauser, which he scribbled down on paper. When some in the town tried to feed the boy, he requested nothing but bread and water, eventually explaining that these were the only form of subsistence he was given, having been held in a cell all alone for an undetermined amount of time and severely abused by an unknown captor. Pity, generosity, and curiosity led locals to take the boy in and try to educate him.

Astonishingly, within weeks, he’d learned to read and write. Word began to spread about this apparent idiot savant, and the curiosity of his origins only heightened. He became an overnight sensation, and countless books, magazines, films, and plays were eventually written about him. Such theories surrounding the true identity of Hauser ranged from a deranged epileptic who’d been passed on by caregivers to the dramatic theory that he’d been the rightful heir to a royal throne, but was stashed away in a cell so that someone else could take power. While many scholars today refute this theory, it fueled many to find some sort of political intrigue behind the boy’s origins. No matter the case, Hauser’s fame would lead to his untimely death, when in the winter of 1833, he returned to the house of Lord Stanhope, with whom he’d been taking up residence with at the time. He staggered into the home with a deep stab wound in his chest. He eventually died, a police investigation turning up a small violet purse with a note in its contents. The note, having been written in German, was translated as the following:

Hauser will be
Able to tell you quite precisely how
I look and from where I am.
To save Hauser the effort,
I want to tell you myself from where
I come _ _ .
I come from from _ _ _
the Bavarian border _ _
On the river _ _ _ _ _
I will even
tell you the name: M. L. Ö.

While M.L.Ö was never detained, let alone found, the mystery behind the death of Hauser was just as elusive as his life itself. While much contention remains on who this young man was, he has become a legend in the eyes of many, having been buried in the world famous cemetery, Stadtfriedhof, amongst many scholars and even those who’d been granted the Nobel Peace Prize. Hauser’s life was known to no one else except he himself, and it will remain that way for the rest of eternity. It could best be concluded with what was etched on his gravestone, eloquently stated in Latin: “Here lies Kaspar Hauser, riddle of his time. His birth was unknown, his death mysterious. 1833.”

A Tragic Tale of Persian Poetry

It was the first day of December in 1948. On the beach of Somerton, just south of Adelaide, Australia, the body of a man was found laying on top of the sand. Within his possession was an unused train ticket, a comb, gum, and a few loose cigarettes. The man was in peak physical condition, and no sign of illness or ailments seemed to be the cause of death. He was dressed in a very well-tailored suit, but mysteriously, no labels could be found anywhere on his clothing. In a hidden pocket of the suit, a small piece of paper simply read: “Taman shud”, which in Persian, means: “finished.” No identification of the man could be found.

While the tragedy of this man’s death was obvious, the intrigue behind his possession of the piece of paper is what struck most who had heard about the case. The piece of paper seemed to have been torn from Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, an extremely rare 12th century poetry book by the Persian poet. Police soon conducted a search for the book, and came across an anonymous man who said he’d found a copy in the backseat of his car around the same time the body had been found on the beach. When the police examined the book, they noticed that the book was indeed missing the exact words that were found on the man. Even more bizarre, the book had random capital letters throughout the poem circled, prompting investigators to theorize that this was some sort of code, perhaps one that could lead them one step closer to discovering who this man was.

Another big mystery was how exactly this seemingly healthy man had died. The prevailing theory was that he must have been poisoned, yet no trace of any type of poison such could be found in his system. But the pathologist who’d performed the autopsy believed it was possible that some sort of soluble barbiturate could have been responsible, which would have completely dissolved within a day. While this was contentious amongst other pathologists, even more contentious was a theory on breaking the code that the poetry book supposedly held. One theory was that the strong of circled letters, ITTMTSAMSTGAB, actually stood for, “It’s Time To Move To South Australia Moseley Street.” This crack in the code was only strengthened when a phone number was found in the book which belonged to a former army nurse who just so happened to live on Moseley Street. The woman, who also remained anonymous, confirmed that she’s in fact given a copy of this rare poetry book to a lieutenant Alfred Boxall, whom she’d met while in service. Many believed that Boxall was in fact the dead man, but in 1949, the actual Boxall came forward, stating that he held a fully intact version of the book in his possession, and clearly was alive and breathing. But some were suspicious of him, wondering if during his service, he was actually working for an intelligence program, and had in fact discovered the dead man was a Soviet spy, and had poisoned him. This was rather outlandish in the eyes of Boxall himself who once stated that this theory was “quite a melodramatic thesis”, claiming that he was no more than an engineer for a water transport company during his service.

The case remained unsolved for many years. But a possible break occurred in 2009 when Derek Abbott, a professor at the University of Adelaide, theorized that the supposed coded letters in the poetry book were a one time pad code, meaning that it’s based solely on one document being the key, in this case the book itself. But because the book was so rare, and no copies can be found today, the code is in essence, unbreakable, rendering Abbott’s theory unprovable as well. But this didn’t stop him from pursuing the identity of the man. Working off of the frustration of lost autopsy reports and a reluctance by the government in exhuming the man’s body, all Abbott had to go on were grainy photos of the dead man right before the autopsy. This is when Abbott made a very striking discovery. In the photo, the dead man had an unusual shape to the upper half of his ears. This formation could only be found in about two percent of caucasians, and he also had a condition known as hypodontia, in which one or more teeth fail to develop, present in less than two percent of the entire population. Abbott had spoken to the anonymous nurse who’d known Boxall, and discovered that her son had the same ear features and also had hypodontia, the same conditions of the Somerton man. The chances of two unrelated individuals with these conditions were one in ten million, prompting Abbott to postulate that they were possibly biological father and son.

In 2013, in an interview with the television news show, 60 Minutes, the nurse came forward as one Jessica Thomson. Her daughter, Kate, was also interviewed, stating that her mother did indeed know the Somerton man, and that she believed that her mother and the man were both spies, and that her late brother, Robin, was quite possibly the love child of the Somerton man. Kate went so far as to petition the Australian government to exhume the body to collect DNA evidence to make the connection between her brother and the man, but they remain steadfast on that not happening. The reasons remain quite conspiratorial, but the theory of both her mother and the Somerton man having been spies at the time could be one of those many reasons.

The Somerton man case remains unsolved, and hundreds of identities have been presumed of who this man may have been. As time lingers on, it is possible that perhaps a connection could be made to unravel this mysterious death in 1948. But for now, all we have is a modest gravestone that lay in Australia’s West Terrace Cemetery simply stating: “Here Lies The Unknown Man Who Was Found At Somerton Beach.”

For the Room

He checked in to the Lake Quinault Inn on September 14th, 2001. It had only been three days since the unfathomable tragedy struck the World Trade Center in New York City. And the entire country was on edge. The same could be said on this very day when a young man known as Lyle Stevik checked in to the inn, paying cash. He headed to his room, and didn’t leave for almost two days, requesting no cleaning of the room or any disturbance. He requested extra clean towels being left at the doorstep, and nothing else.

On September 17th, the housekeeper knocked on the door.It was past checkout time, so she needed to clean the room. There was no answer. After a few more knocks, she took it upon herself to open the door. There, she found the young man kneeling in an alcove in the corner of the room. His back was to the door, his arms by his side, and his head tilted back. It seemed as though he were praying, but he was completely unresponsive to the innkeepers entrance and apologies. This is when she phoned the owner of the inn, who made the long trek almost ninety miles away, to come see what was happening. When she arrived, the two approached Lyle hesitantly. Upon closer inspection, the owner noticed a leather belt wrapped snuggly around his throat, the other end attached to a coat rack on the other side of the room. It was now clear that he’d hanged himself. And while this site was gruesome, the events were about to become much more curious.

On the nightstand in the room, a comment card rested innocently with the words, “For the Room” scribbled on it. Inside, eight twenty dollar bills were present, a generous tip included. Soon, law enforcement was brought in and the body brought to the local coroner. Back in the room, police had also discovered, in the trash can, a crumpled piece of paper with the word: Suicide, scribbled on it. Investigators found no identification for Lyle on his person or in the room. For weeks, the police waited to hear any reports of the man missing. None turned up. They also ran Lyle’s DNA, dental information, and fingerprints in every database they could, finding nothing. A home address he’d left at the front desk merely belonged to a Best Western Inn located almost six hundred miles away in Idaho. When the police inquired with the owner of the Best Western, who’d been there for over six years, he could not confirm that anyone under that name or description had stayed there. After searching countless databases, phone directories, and community outreaches, nothing whatsoever turned up on the man known as Lyle Stevik. He, in essence, had never existed.

The search for the man’s identity widened, and many theories were thrown about. In Lyle’s room, two copies of the Daily World News were found, endless articles about the September 11th attacks filling the pages. Many speculated that perhaps he had something to do with the terrorist attack. While absolutely no evidence could solidify this theory, it remains on the table until today. Others believe he was a severely ill individual, as he seemed like he had recently lost a large amount of weight. The front desk clerk had noticed that his belt was much longer than it should have been, assuming it used to fit him much better before he’d at least arrived to the inn.

Many other theories centered around young men who’d been reported missing many years prior, but none of them matched the description of Lyle in the slightest. Perhaps even more intriguing was his name, which most likely was an alias, resembling all too strikingly that of the tragic character, Lyle Stevick in the classic novel, You Must Remember This, by Joyce Carol Oates. In the book, the character took his life as well. This easily could have been a cryptic way of this unknown man wanting to end his life in the shadow of the character of the book. Either way, the case remains unsolved until today, the man’s legacy living on in complete mystery, leaving many indeed remembering him long after his life was cut all too short at his own hand.

Conclusions

The mystery behind each of these men captivated many throughout their almost non-existent lifetimes. But perhaps even more captivating was the fact that even with today’s modern technology, it is quite possible that there are those who can walk through life and leave no identity or past behind, as we saw with Lyle Stevik. And while Kaspar Hauser became a celebrity of his time, the sad thought lingers that he never fully knew who or where he came from before he was murdered. Or did he? Could each of these men, in one way or another, have conducted a social experiment of epic proportions? Hiding their true identities to see if the world could somehow crack the code? Perhaps the most important thing to take away from this all is that each of these men were laid to rest by strangers who barely knew them, and that even in death, humanity and respect for the deceased reigned supreme. And even if they seemed to have no past, a questionable present, their futures cut far too short, their stories remain, whether they truly wanted them to or not.

– – –

Ryan Sprague is a professional playwright & screenwriter in New York City. He is also an investigative journalist, focusing on the topic of UFOs. He is the author of the upcoming book, “Somewhere in the Skies: A Human Approach to an Alien Phenomenon”, published by Richard Dolan Press. He is the co-host of the critically acclaimed podcast, Into the Fray, available on iTunes & Stitcher. His other work can be found at somewhereintheskies.com

Filed Under: Ryan Sprague, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: Amnesia, Jim Harold, Paranormal Braintrust, Ryan Sprague

The Exeter UFO Incident: Is This “Cold Case, Closed” Worthy of Being Reopened? – Micah Hanks Writes

May 23, 2016 By Jim Harold

Micah Hanks
Micah Hanks

Strange things were happening on the early morning of September 3, 1965. At approximately 2 AM, just a few miles outside of Exeter, New Hampshire, an 18-year-old hitchhiker found himself face-down in a ditch alongside Highway 150. As he lifted his head, the youth could see a large object passing above him, fitted with red lights, and gliding away toward a farmhouse nearby.

The youth was Norman Muscarello, who had been on his way back from Amesbury, Massachusetts, where his girlfriend’s parents lived. He would often visit her, getting rides from friends or, on occasion, hitchhiking home as he had been doing on this particular evening. Tonight he had been walking along hoping for a late-night commuter who might give him a lift, when he first noticed a series of flashing red lights in the forest nearby. As Muscarello walked, he counted five distinct sources of illumination, which lit up the surrounding trees, as well as the Dining family’s farmhouse just off the road, whose owners were gone at the time.

Writer and UFO investigator John G. Fuller would document what occurred next in his famous book on what became known popularly as the “Incident at Exeter”:

“Near an open field between two houses, the Thing, as he called it, came out of the sky directly toward him. It was as big as or bigger than a house. It appeared to be 80 to 90 feet in diameter, with brilliant, pulsating red lights around an apparent rim. It wobbled, yawed, and floated toward him. It made no noise whatever. When it seemed as if it was going to hit him, he dove down on the shallow shoulder of the road. Then the object appeared to back off slowly, and hovered directly over the roof of one of the houses.”

The house Fuller described here had been the Dining farm, and since the residents were gone at that time, Muscarello’s frantic pounding on the door went unnoticed. In a panic, he watched for the strange flying object, and darted back toward the road in time to see the headlights of an oncoming car. More afraid of whether the object might come back that the dangers presented by oncoming traffic, the teenager ran out into the road and waved his arms, causing the oncoming driver to stop a few yards ahead of him. Muscarello asked them if they would give him a ride to the Exeter police station, which the couple in the car agreed to do.

The Exeter UFO incident wouldn’t end with Muscarello’s strange encounter; upon reaching the Exeter police station, he met officer Reginald Toland at the desk, who knew Muscarello, and believed the youth to be in genuine need of assistance based on his frightened state. Toland radioed to other officers in the area, and soon Cruiser #21 arrived, driven by officer Eugene Bertrand, who told about an incident that had occurred on his patrol earlier that evening. While traveling near the overpass on Route 101, he had encountered a parked vehicle. Stopping to see if the driver needed any assistance, the woman behind the wheel told Bertrand that she had observed a large, silent object with red lights, which followed her car for some distance before it ascended and disappeared into the sky at a remarkable speed. Now, hearing Muscarello tell of seeing a similar object or aircraft, he agreed to return with Muscarello to the area where he had observed the object earlier that evening.


As the two approached the Dining farmhouse, officer Bertrand parked the car, and seeing no sign of any unusual aircraft, he and Muscarello began walking through the field near where Muscarello had first seen the lights in the nearby woods. As the pair walked along, the sounds of dogs barking in the distance caught their attention; soon afterward, horses in the farms nearby also began to offer similar protests. Within moments, the animal sounds were accompanied by the appearance of bright red lights from the forest, and suddenly the object Muscarello had seen here earlier rose out of the woods.

Rather famously, Bertrand, a former USAF veteran from the Korean War, was described as having dropped to one knee, at which time he drew his pistol, aiming it at the approaching object. However, thinking better of the situation, Bertrand replaced his pistol in its holster, and he and Muscarello then made haste to return to the patrol car.

At this time, Bertrand radioed to other officers in the area, to which policeman David Hunt responded. He arrived shortly thereafter, and joined Bertrand and Muscarello, who were still observing the object as it appeared to rock back and forth, its red lights flashing quickly in sequence. At one point, Hunt noted that a B-47 bomber flew overhead, of which he said “there was no comparison” in terms of its likeness to the strange aircraft he had seen with Bertrand and Muscarello that evening. Upon their return to the Exeter police station, all of the men filed separate reports about their observations, after which Muscarello was returned to his home.

The famous Exeter UFO Incident is well known enough, and has undergone extensive enough re-hashing in the past already, that few would see it as worthwhile to recount again here in all its glorious details. The aforementioned book by John G. Fuller, Incident at Exeter: The Story of Unidentified Flying Objects over America Today, already did a fine job with this, putting the story “on the map” as far as famous UFO incidents of its day. And for many years thereafter, it was believed that no reasonable explanation had been offered for what Muscarello and the two officers had observed that night.

However, that changed in 2011 when skeptical researchers Joe Nickel and James McGaha offered an explanation in the November/December issue of Skeptical Inquirer that year. “As it happens, the military pilot of our team (McGaha) has actually docked with a craft like the UFO at Exeter, and he recognized the sequencing lights for what they surely were: those on a U.S. Air Force KC-97 refueling plane.” The authors further asserted that, while a military training operation had in fact occurred in the area earlier that evening, aircraft were obviously still in the sky around the time of the “UFO” sighting of officers Bertrand and Hunt, returning to the area Muscarello had first seen the object earlier that evening. “It seems quite apparent that, although the particular exercise was reportedly over, there were still planes in the sky,” Nickel wrote. “Bertrand and Hunt, in fact, witnessed a B-47 jet at about the time the UFO disappeared (Fuller 1966, 67). Perhaps it had just refueled.”

As with many similar suggestions made by Nickel and McGaha in relation to UFO incidents, this is one of the most plausible explanations for the famous Exeter UFO. Nonetheless, there are still problems with their analysis: for instance, Fuller’s book mentions on the second page of the first chapter the following about officer Bertrand’s own prior USAF experience: “Bertrand, an Air Force veteran during the Korean War, with air-to-air refueling experience on KC-97 tankers…” In other words, the very sort of aircraft Nickel and McGaha propose the witnesses had seen that night should have been easily recognizable by Bertrand, since he had worked on the very sorts of refueling operations that the training exercise that evening had been involved with.

Furthermore, there are the correspondences between the policemen and the Air Force, which followed their encounter. The two officers emphatically stated that the object, which they observed approximately 100 feet above a field, and perhaps no more than a football field’s distance from them, had hovered silently; at no time was there any noise, apart from the apparent animal disturbance caused by its presence. Numerous descriptions like these were supplied in letters the officers sent to the Air Force, but with no reply. Finally, in January 1966, a letter arrived from the Secretary of the Air Force, from Lieutenant Colonel John Spaulding, which addressed the two men’s previous complaints. However, Spaulding’s response was far from satisfactory: ”Based on additional information submitted to our UFO investigation officer, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, we have been unable to identify the object you observed on September 3, 1965.” Had the object merely been a KC-97 tanker, would it not have been easy for the Air Force to determine what this aircraft was, since it had belonged to them, and was in use that very evening during one of their own training operations?

Nickel and McGaha, in response to this, noted in their article that, “Perhaps in the welter of paperwork the clue we found so significant went unseen by anyone who could fully grasp its import and who had time to devote to the case. Naturally, everything is much clearer in hindsight.”

“We believe this solves the so-called incident at Exeter,” the authors noted. However, they continue noting that, “As to the weeks of subsequent UFO reports in the vicinity, they were beyond the scope of our investigation.”

Nickel and McGaha are to be commended for working to understand the most likely explanation for what occurred on the night of the Muscarello/Bertrand sighting. However, while being the “most likely”, at least in terms of aircraft known to exist, and military operations occurring in the area at that time, does this explanation account for all the facts, and does it offer the best representation for the object as it was described by the witnesses? If anything, the “KC-97” solution may present us with even more questions, especially due to the following points of interest:

(1) Bertrand would likely have recognized the object if it had been a KC-97

(2) All three witnesses stated they were a relatively short distance from the object, which both hovered, and produced no noise while remaining in midair

(3)The USAF was unable to offer any explanation for the incident, despite the fact that the training operation which had been underway on the night in question should have made doing so a simple procedure.

In the end, we may be no closer to understanding what was seen near Exeter, New Hampshire, on September 3, 1965. This, of course, may not prove that an exotic spaceship, piloted by “little green men” had been diving around, pursuing vehicles in the area around that time; however, based on the evidence, it does suggest that a refueling plane may not be able to account for the circumstances much better, either.

—

Micah Hanks is a writer, podcaster, and researcher whose interests include history, science, current events, cultural studies, technology, business, philosophy, unexplained phenomena, and ways the future of humankind may be influenced by science and innovation in the coming decades. With his writing, he has covered topics that include controversial themes such as artificial intelligence, government surveillance, unconventional aviation technologies, and the broadening of human knowledge through the reach of the Internet. Micah lives in the heart of Appalachia near Asheville, North Carolina, where he makes a living as a writer and musician. You can find his podcasts at GralienReport.com and his books at Amazon.com

Filed Under: Micah Hanks, The Paranormal Braintrust Tagged With: Exeter UFO, Jim Harold, John G. Fuller, Micah Hanks, Paranormal Braintrust, UFOs

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