A crop circle is a sizable pattern created by the flattening of a crop such as wheat, barley, rye, maize, or rapeseed. Crop circles are also referred to as crop formations, because they are not always circular in shape. The documented cases have substantially increased from the 1970s to current times. In 1991, two hoaxers claimed authorship of many circles throughout England.
Twenty-six countries reported approximately 10,000 crop circles in the last third of the 20th century; 90% of those were located in southern England. Many of the formations appearing in that area are positioned near ancient monuments, such as Stonehenge. According to one study, nearly half of all circles found in the UK in 2003 were located within a 15 km (9.3 miles) radius of Avebury. Archeological remains can cause cropmarks in the fields, in the shapes of circles and squares, but they do not appear overnight and they are always in the same places every year.
The scientific consensus is that crop circles are almost entirely man-made with a few possibly due to meteorological or other natural phenomena.
History
The concept of crop circles began with the original late-1970s hoaxes by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley (see Bower and Chorley, below). They said that they were inspired by the Tully “saucer nest” case in Australia, where a farmer found a flattened circle of swamp reeds after observing a UFO. Since the 1960s, there had been a surge of UFOlogists in Wiltshire, and there were rumors of “saucer nests” appearing in the area, but they were never photographed. There are other pre-1970s reports of circular formations, specially in Australia and Canada, but they were always simple circles, which could have been caused by whirlwinds. In Fortean Times David Wood reported that in 1940 he had already made crop circles using ropes near Gloucestershire.
Early reports of circular formations
In 1686, British scientist Robert Plot reported on fairy rings in his The Natural History of Stafford-Shire, and said they could be caused by airflows from the sky. In 1991 meteorologist Terence Meaden linked this report with modern crop circles, a claim that has been compared with Erich von Däniken’s pseudohistoric claims.
A 1880 letter to the editor of Nature by amateur scientist John Rand Capron, describes how a recent storm had created several circles of flattened crops in a field.
In the 1960s, in Tully, Queensland, Australia, and in Canada, there were many reports of UFO sightings and circular formations in swamp reeds and sugar cane fields. For example, in 8 August 1967, three circles were found in a field in Duhamel, Alberta, Canada, and the Department of National Defence sent two investigators, who concluded that it was artificially made but couldn’t make definite conclusions on who made them or how. The most famous case is the 1966 Tully “saucer nest”, when a farmer said he witnessed a saucer-shaped craft rise 30 or 40 feet (12 m) up from a swamp and then fly away. When he went to investigate the location where he thought the saucer had landed, he found a nearly circular area 32 feet long by 25 feet wide, where the grass was flattened in clockwise curves to water level within the circle and the reeds had been uprooted from the mud”. The local police officer, the RAAF and the University of Queensland concluded that it was most probably caused by natural causes, like a down draught, a Willy-Willy, or a waterspout. In 1973, G.J. Odgers, Director of Public Relations, Department of Defence (Air Office), wrote to a journalist that the “saucer” was probably debris lifted by the causing willy-willy. Hoaxers Bower and Chorley were inspired by this case to start making the modern crop circles that appear today.
Modern crop circles
The majority of reports of crop circles appeared since the 1970s, and spread in the late 1970s as many circles began appearing throughout the English countryside. This phenomenon became widely known in the late 1980s, after the media started to report crop circles in Hampshire and Wiltshire. After Bower’s and Chorley’s 1991 statement that they were responsible for many of them, circles started appearing all over the world. To date, approximately 10,000 crop circles have been reported internationally, from locations such as the former Soviet Union, the UK, Japan, the U.S., and Canada. Skeptics note a correlation between crop circles, recent media coverage, and the absence of fencing and/or anti-trespassing legislation.
Although farmers have expressed concern at the damage caused to their crops, local response to the appearance of crop circles can be enthusiastic, with locals taking advantage of the increase of tourism and visits from scientists, crop circle researchers, and individuals seeking spiritual experiences. The market for crop-circle interest has consequently generated bus or helicopter tours of circle sites, walking tours, T-shirts, and book sales.
The last decade has witnessed crop formations with increased size and complexity of form, some featuring as many as 2000 different shapes, and some incorporating complex mathematical and scientific characteristics.
A video sequence used in connection with the opening of the Olympic Games in London in 2012 shows two crop circle areas shaped as the Olympic Rings. Another Olympic crop circle area was visible for those landing at Heathrow Airport, London, UK before and during the Olympic Games.
Bower and Chorley
In 1991, self-professed pranksters Doug Bower and Dave Chorley made headlines claiming it was they who started the phenomenon in 1978 with the use of simple tools consisting of a plank of wood, rope, and a baseball cap fitted with a loop of wire to help them walk in a straight line. To prove their case they made a circle in front of journalists; a “cereologist” (advocate of paranormal explanations of crop circles), Pat Delgado, examined the circle and declared it authentic before it was revealed that it was a hoax. Inspired by Australian crop circle accounts from 1966, Doug and Dave claimed to be responsible for all circles made prior to 1987, and for more than 200 crop circles in 1978–1991 (which other 1000 circles not being made by them). After their announcement, the two men demonstrated making a crop circle. According to Professor Richard Taylor, “the pictographs they created inspired a second wave of crop artists. Far from fizzling out, crop circles have evolved into an international phenomenon, with hundreds of sophisticated pictographs now appearing annually around the globe.”
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Crop Circle, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Centralia is a borough and a near ghost town in Columbia County, Pennsylvania, United States. Its population has dwindled from over 2,761 residents in 1890 to 10 in 2010, as a result of a mine fire burning beneath the borough since 1962. Centralia is one of the least-populated municipalities in Pennsylvania.
Centralia is part of the Bloomsburg-Berwick micropolitan area. The borough is completely surrounded by Conyngham Township.
All properties in the borough were claimed under eminent domain by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1992 (and all buildings therein were condemned), and Centralia’s ZIP code was revoked by the Postal Service in 2002. A few residents continue to reside there in spite of the failure of a lawsuit to reverse the eminent domain claim.
NOTE: In the 2006 horror film Silent Hill, the town of Silent Hill has been abandoned due to a prolonged mine fire, which writer Roger Avary says was inspired by Centralia. Aspects of this are shown throughout the movie, such as characters wandering through the misty version of Silent Hill wearing mining gear.
Mine Fire
A small part of the Centralia mine fire as it appeared after being exposed during an excavation in 1969.
In 1962, a fire started in a mine beneath the town and ultimately led to the town being abandoned.
There is some disagreement over the specific event which triggered the fire. David DeKok, after studying available local and state government documents and interviewing former borough council members, argues in Unseen Danger and its successor edition, Fire Underground: The Ongoing Tragedy of the Centralia Mine Fire, that in May 1962, the Centralia Borough Council hired five members of the volunteer fire company to clean up the town landfill, located in an abandoned strip-mine pit next to the Odd Fellows Cemetery. This had been done prior to Memorial Day in previous years, when the landfill was in a different location. On May 27, 1962, the firefighters, as they had in the past, set the dump on fire and let it burn for some time. Unlike in previous years, however, the fire was not fully extinguished. An unsealed opening in the pit allowed the fire to enter the labyrinth of abandoned coal mines beneath Centralia.
Joan Quigley argues in her 2007 book, The Day the Earth Caved In, that the fire had in fact started the previous day, when a trash hauler dumped hot ash or coal discarded from coal burners into the open trash pit. She noted that borough council minutes from June 4, 1962 referred to two fires at the dump, and that five firefighters had submitted bills for “fighting the fire at the landfill area”. The borough, by law, was responsible for installing a fire-resistant clay barrier between each layer,[clarification needed] but fell behind schedule, leaving the barrier incomplete. This allowed the hot coals to penetrate the vein of coal underneath the pit and light the subsequent subterranean fire. [6][7] Another theory of note is the Bast Theory. According to legend, the Bast Colliery coal fire of 1932 was never fully extinguished. In 1962, it reached the landfill area.
In 1979, locals became aware of the scale of the problem when a gas-station owner and then mayor, John Coddington, inserted a stick into one of his underground tanks to check the fuel level. When he withdrew it, it seemed hot, so he lowered a thermometer down on a string and was shocked to discover that the temperature of the gasoline in the tank was 172 °F (77.8 °C). Statewide attention to the fire began to increase, culminating in 1981 when a 12-year-old resident named Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole 4 feet (1.2 m) wide by 150 feet (46 m) deep that suddenly opened beneath his feet in a backyard. His cousin, 14-year-old Eric Wolfgang, in pulling Todd out of the hole, saved Todd’s life, as the plume of hot steam billowing from the hole was measured as containing a lethal level of carbon monoxide.
In 1984, the U.S. Congress allocated more than US$42 million for relocation efforts. Most of the residents accepted buyout offers and moved to the nearby communities of Mount Carmel and Ashland. A few families opted to stay despite warnings from Pennsylvania officials.
In 1992, Pennsylvania governor Bob Casey invoked eminent domain on all properties in the borough, condemning all the buildings within. A subsequent legal effort by residents to have the decision reversed failed. In 2009, Governor Ed Rendell began the formal eviction of Centralia residents.
The Centralia mine fire extended into the town of Byrnesville, Pennsylvania and caused this town to also be abandoned.
Today
Very few homes remain standing in Centralia; most of the abandoned buildings have been demolished by the Columbia County Redevelopment Authority or nature. At a casual glance, the area now appears to be a field with many paved streets running through it. Some areas are being filled with new-growth forest. The remaining church in the borough, St. Mary’s, holds weekly services on Sunday and has not yet been directly affected by the fire.[citation needed] The town’s four cemeteries—including one on the hilltop that has smoke rising around and out of it—are maintained in good condition. There is also a notice board posted near Hammie Hill, about 500 yards from the cemetery, protesting the evictions and demanding former Governor Rendell intervene.
The only indications of the fire, which underlies some 400 acres (1.6 km2) spreading along four fronts, are low round metal steam vents in the south of the borough and several signs warning of underground fire, unstable ground, and carbon monoxide. Additional smoke and steam can be seen coming from an abandoned portion of Pennsylvania Route 61, the area just behind the hilltop cemetery, and other cracks in the ground scattered about the area. Route 61 was repaired several times until its final closing. The current route was a detour around the damaged portion during the repairs and became a permanent route in 1993; mounds of dirt were placed at both ends of the former route, effectively blocking the road. Pedestrian traffic is still possible due to a small opening about two feet wide at the north side of the road, but this is muddy and not accessible to the disabled. The underground fire is still burning and may continue to do so for 250 years.
Prior to its demolition in September 2007, the last remaining house on Locust Avenue was notable for the five chimney-like support buttresses along each of two opposite sides of the house, where the house was supported by a row of adjacent buildings before it was demolished. Another house with similar buttresses was visible from the northern side of the cemetery, just north of the burning, partially subsumed hillside.
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania did not renew the relocation contract at the end of 2005, and the fate of the remaining residents is uncertain.
In 2009, John Comarnisky and John Lokitis, Jr. were both evicted, in May and July respectively. In 2010, only five homes remain as state officials try to vacate the remaining residents and demolish what is left of the town. In May 2009, the remaining residents mounted another legal effort to reverse the 1992 eminent domain claim. In March 2011, a federal judge refused to issue an injunction that would have stopped the condemnation. In February 2012, the Commonwealth Court ruled that a declaration of taking could not be re-opened or set aside on the basis that the purpose for the condemnation no longer exists; seven people, including the Borough Council president, had filed suit claiming the condemnation was no longer needed because the underground fire had moved and the air quality in the borough was the same as that in Lancaster.
The Pottsville Republican & Herald reported in February 2011 that the Borough Council still has regular meetings. The news story reported that the town’s highest bill at the meeting reported on came from PPL at $92 and the town’s budget was “in the black”.
On August 28, 2011, The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary Church celebrated 100 years of worship. This church is located on the north hill overlooking the town. It was allowed to stay because of its distance from the mine fire.
It is expected that many former residents will return in 2016 to open a time capsule buried in 1966 next to the veterans’ memorial.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Centralia, Pennsylvania, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Danvers State Hospital, also known as the State Lunatic Hospital at Danvers, The Danvers Lunatic Asylum, and The Danvers State Insane Asylum, was a psychiatric hospital located in Danvers, Massachusetts.
It was built in 1874 and opened in 1878 under the supervision of prominent Boston architect Nathaniel Jeremiah Bradlee, on an isolated site in rural Massachusetts. It was a multi-acre, self-contained psychiatric hospital designed and built according to the Kirkbride Plan. It is rumored to have been the birthplace of the pre-frontal lobotomy.
History
Constructed at a cost of $1.5 million, with the estimated yearly per capita cost of patients being $3,000 the hospital originally consisted of two main center buildings, housing the administration, with four radiating wings. The administration building measured 90 by 60 feet (18 m), with a 130 feet (40 m) high tower. The kitchens, laundries, chapel, and dormitories for the attendants were in a connecting 180 by 60 feet (18 m) building in the rear. In the rear was the boiler house of 70 feet (21 m) square, with boilers 450 horsepower (340 kW), used for heating and ventilation. Middleton Pond supplied the hospital its water. On each side of the main building were the wings, for male and female patients respectively, connected by small square towers, with the exception of the last ones on each side, which are joined by octagonal towers. The former measured 10 feet (3.0 m) square, and were used to separate the buildings. The outermost wards were reserved for extreme patients. West side was male, east was female.
Over the years, newer buildings were constructed around the original Kirkbride, as well as alterations to the Kirkbride itself, such as a new gymnasium/auditorium on the area of the old kitchens and multiple solaria added onto the front of the wards.
Most of the buildings on campus were connected by a confusing labyrinth of underground tunnels, also constructed over the years. Many of the Commonwealth institutions for the developmentally delayed and the mentally ill at the time were designed with tunnel systems, to be self-sufficient in wintertime. There was a tunnel that ran from a steam/power generating plant (which still exists to provide service to the Hogan Regional Center) located at the bottom of the hill running up to the hospital, along with tunnels that connected the male and female nurses homes, the “Gray Gables”, Bonner Medical Building, machine shops, pump house, and a few others. The system of tunnels branched off like spokes from a central hub behind the Kirbride building (in the vicinity of the old gymnasium) leading to different wards of the hospital and emerging up into the basements. This hub was also an underground maintenance area of sorts. Some nicknamed it “The Wagon Wheel” due to its design. These older brick and cobblestone tunnels were used in the production of the movie Session 9. The original plan was designed to house 500 patients, with 100 more possible to accommodate in the attic. However, by the late 1930s and 1940s, over 2,000 patients were being housed, and overcrowding was severe. People were even held in the basements of the Kirkbride.
While the asylum was originally established to provide residential treatment and care to the mentally ill, its functions expanded to include a training program for nurses in 1889 and a pathological research laboratory in 1895. In the 1890s, Dr. Charles Page, the superintendent, declared mechanical restraint unnecessary and harmful in cases of mental illness. By the 1920s the hospital was operating school clinics to help determine mental deficiency in children. Reports were made that various, and inhumane shock therapies, lobotomies, drugs, and straitjackets were being used to keep the crowded hospital under control. This sparked controversy. During the 1960s as a result of increased emphasis on alternative methods of treatment, deinstitutionalization, and community-based mental health care, the inpatient population started to decrease. On June 24, 1992, the hospital closed. After abandonment, the wards and buildings were left to decay and rot for many years until the demolition.
Demolition and Present State
In December 2005, the property was sold to Avalon Bay Development, an apartment company. A lawsuit was filed to stave off the demolition of the hospital, including the Kirkbride building, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. However, this ultimately did not stop the process, and to some public outcry, demolition of most of the buildings began in January 2006, with the intent to build 497 apartments on the 77-acre (310,000 m2) site. The people who filed the lawsuit criticized how the case was handled by the courts.
By June 2006, all of the Danvers State Hospital buildings that were marked for demolition had been torn down, including all of the unused buildings and old homes on the lower grounds and all of the buildings on the hill. Despite the anger of many, the historic Kirkbride was also demolished, with only the outermost brick shell of the administration area (along with the G and D wards on each side) being propped up during demolition and construction while an entirely new structure was built behind and inside of it, leaving the historic Danvers Reservoir and the original brick shell. A replica of the original tower/steeple on the Kirkbride was built to duplicate what was removed around 1970 due to structural issues. (The first picture illustrates the original tower in 1893, the second and third pictures illustrate the new replica in 2006 and 7, and the fourth picture illustrates the short, fat, rebuilt one from 1970.) the Avalon Bay predicted that they would have properties available for rent/sale by Fall 2007.
However, on April 7, 2007, four of the apartment complex buildings and four of Avalon bay’s construction trailers burned down in a large, mysterious fire visible from Boston, some seventeen miles (27 km) away. The mysterious conflagration was confined mostly to the buildings under construction on the eastern end, with damage to the remaining Kirkbride spires from catching fire due to excessive heat. An investigation was started concerning the cause of the mysterious fire. Avalon Bay provided a live webcam of the construction at the old site of the hospital at their website; however, the pictures cut out at approximately 2:03 AM the night of the fire, and the webcam was disabled, possibly due to the fire.
The underground tunnel leading up from the power plant still exists, blocked off at the top of the hill, however it is uncertain whether the tunnel network on top of the hill was actually removed or not during demolition and rebuilding.
While the initial outward appearance of the hospital’s irreplaceable Kirkbride complex was preserved as far as the center of the old building is concerned, it is widely believed that the entire Kirkbride could have been further restored to some extent rather than demolished and replaced with the modern and comparatively cheap construction inside of it. Traverse City State Hospital in Michigan is an example of a successful similar renovation. The only thing left of the asylum is the cemeteries, some tunnels which are blocked off, and the brick shell of the administration and the D and G wings.
In popular culture
- The hospital was the setting for the 2001 horror film, Session 9. The asylum was also featured in the 1958 film Home Before Dark.
- In the game Painkiller, one of the levels, called Asylum, is based on the central administration section. While the outside is a faithful reproduction, the inside is not.
- In the book Project 17 by Laurie Faria Stolarz, the plot involves six teens breaking into Danvers, to investigate the allegedly haunted asylum.
- In the tabletop RPG Mage: The Awakening, the hospital’s reflection in the World of Darkness was administrated by soul-stealing Tremere vampires, who fed upon their patients.
- “The Danvers State” is a song by Portland artist Archeology which appears on the band’s second E.P. The Wildwood Hymns.
- The Hospital is commonly used as a theme and icon in the animation and video art of Boston artist Fluffy Conti.
- The Danvers State Hospital is largely believed to have served as inspiration for the infamous Arkham sanatorium from H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep”. (Lovecraft’s Arkham, in turn, is the inspiration for Arkham Asylum, a psychiatric hospital within the Batman universe.) It is referenced by name in the short story, “Pickman’s Model.”
External links
- Danvers State Insane Asylum — information, news and preservation efforts
- O.T.I.S.(Odd Things I’ve Seen): A Firsthand Account of Danvers State Hospital nee Danvers Avalon Apartments
- Danvers State Hospital Digital Archive, An User Contributed Educational Site
- http://www.kirkbridebuildings.com/buildings/danvers/
- Danvers State Hospital – Asylum Projects
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Danvers State Hospital, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Dybbuk Box (or Dibbuk Box) is the commonly used name of a wine cabinet which is said to be haunted by a dybbuk, a spirit from Jewish folklore. The box achieved recognition after it was auctioned on eBay with an accompanying horror story.
The term “Dibbuk Box” was first used to describe the subject of an original story by Kevin Mannis which he posted as an eBay auction listing. Mannis, a writer and creative professional by trade, owned a small antiques and furniture refinishing business in Portland, Oregon at the time. According to Mannis’ story, he purportedly bought the Box at an estate sale in 2001. It had belonged to a German Holocaust survivor named Havela, who had escaped to Spain and purchased it there before emigrating to the United States. Havela’s granddaughter told Mannis that the Box had been kept in her grandmother’s sewing room and was never opened because a dybbuk—an evil spirit from Jewish folklore—was said to live inside it. He offered to give the box back to her, but she became upset and refused to take it.
On opening the box, Mannis found that it contained two 1920s pennies, a lock of blonde hair bound with cord, a lock of black/brown hair bound with cord, a small statue engraved with the Hebrew word “Shalom”, a small, golden wine goblet, one dried rose bud, and a single candle holder with four octopus-shaped legs.
Numerous owners of the box have reported that strange phenomena accompany it. In his story, Mannis claimed he experienced a series of horrific nightmares shared with other people while they were in possession of the box. His mother suffered a stroke on the same day he gave her the box as a birthday present—October 28. Every owner of the Box has reported that smells of cat urine or jasmine flowers and nightmares involving an old hag accompany the Box. Iosif Neitzke, a Missouri student at Truman State University in Kirksville Missouri and the last person to auction the box on eBay, claimed that the box caused lights to burn out in his house and his hair to fall out. Haxton had been following Neitzke’s blogs regarding the box from day one and when he was ready to be rid of the Dybbuk Box Neitzke sold it to Jason Haxton, Director of the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri. Haxton wrote The Dibbuk Box, and claimed that he subsequently developed strange health problems, including hives, coughing up blood, and “head-to-toe welts”. Haxton consulted with Rabbis (Jewish religious leaders) to try to figure out a way to seal the dybbuk in the box again. Apparently successful, he took the freshly resealed box and hid it at a secret location, which he will not reveal.
Skeptic Chris French, head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths’ College, told an interviewer he believed that the Box’s owners were “already primed to be looking out for bad stuff. If you believe you have been cursed, then inevitably you explain the bad stuff that happens in terms of what you perceive to be the cause. Put it like this: I would be happy to own this object.”
Design
The cabinet has the Shema carved into the side of it. Its dimensions are 12.5″ × 7.5″ × 16.25″.
In popular culture
- The box inspired a British performance tour, The Thirteenth Box, a cave tour led by Jez Starr in Cheddar Gorge, in which audience members claimed to have taken a picture of the Dybbuk.
- The box is the subject of a 2012 Sam Raimi film by Ghost House Pictures, entitled The Possession, starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Kyra Sedgwick and Natasha Calis and directed by Ole Bornedal. The script was written by Juliet Snowden and Stiles White and was based on an Los Angeles Times article by Leslie Gornstein, which told the story of the Dybbuk box after the first eBay auction. Mannis and Haxton served as production consultants.
- The box’s story has been featured on the Mysterious Universe podcast.
- The box’s story has been covered in an episode of Syfy’s Paranormal Witness.
- A Portland radio show entitled “The Daria, Mitch and Ted Show” found out about the story via the film The Possession. The program told the stories from previous owners who attempted to sell the box to exorcists. Immediately after that, odd things began happening in the studio.
References
^ Kevin Mannis (September 2, 2009). “The Dibbuk Box, A.K.A. The Haunted Jewish Wine Cabinet”. Yahoo. Retrieved July 29, 2012.
^ “TONIGHT (7-21) on Paranormal Underground Radio We Talk About the Haunted Dibbuk Box”. Paranormal Underground. July 21, 2011. Retrieved July 29, 2012.
^ Max Gross (February 13, 2004). “A Box Full of Bad Luck: Haunted Wine Cabinet Goes to Highest Bidder”. The Forward.
^ Leslie Gornstein (July 25, 2004). “A jinx in a box?; Maybe mischievous spirits do haunt this Jewish scroll cabinet, or maybe it’s just another Web-spawned legend run wild.”. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved October 31, 2010.
^ Collis, Clark. “Little Box of Horrors.” Entertainment Weekly, August 3, 2012, pp. 50-55.
^ “Paranormal Witness Episode “Dybbuk Box””. SYFY.
^ “Mystery of possessed box at caves”. Cheddar Valley Gazette. June 10, 2010.
^ “Demon ‘haunts show audience member'”. Bridgwater Times. October 21, 2010.
^ “Magician’s shock after demon ‘haunts carer’ following show”. Cheddar Valley Gazette. October 21, 2010.
^ CATHY DUNKLEY and NICOLE LaPORTE (October 26, 2004). “Horror unit will unlock new ‘Box'”. Daily Variety.
^ Nicole LaPorte (October 30, 2006). “Brand New World for Scribes”. Variety.
^ “Episode 209 Mysterious Universe”.
^ “Episode 524 Mysterious Universe”.
^ Syfy’s Paranormal Witness Returns in August Dread Central
External links
Dybbuk Box website
Mirror of eBay auction
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Dybbuk Box, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Urban Legend Status: TRUE
Gloria Ramirez (January 11, 1963 – February 19, 1994) was a Riverside, California, woman dubbed “the toxic lady” by the media when several Riverside General Hospital workers became ill after exposure to her body and blood. Her case was the basis for a scene in one episode of the American TV series The X-Files, an episode of the American TV drama Grey’s Anatomy, a segment of a show on Discovery Communications’ channel Investigation Discovery called “The New Detectives”, and the “Stink Bomb” segment of the animated film Memories.
The emergency room visit
About 8:15 in the evening on February 19, 1994, Ramirez was brought into the emergency room of Riverside General Hospital by paramedics, suffering from the effects of advanced cervical cancer. She was extremely confused, and suffering from bradycardia and Cheyne-Stokes respiration.
The medical staff injected her with Valium, Versed, and Ativan to sedate her, and agents such as lidocaine to stimulate her heartbeat. When it became clear that Ramirez was responding poorly to treatment, the staff tried to defibrillate her heart; at that point several people saw an oily sheen covering Ramirez’s body, and some noticed a fruity, garlic-like odor that they thought was coming from her mouth. A registered nurse named Susan Kane attempted to draw blood from Ramirez’s arm, and noticed an ammonia like smell coming from the tube.
She passed the syringe to Julie Gorchynski, a medical resident who noticed manila-colored particles floating in the blood. At this point, Kane fainted and was removed from the room. Shortly thereafter, Dr. Gorchynski began to feel nauseated. Complaining that she was light-headed, she left the trauma room and sat at a nurse’s desk. A staff member asked her if she was okay, but before she could respond she also fainted. Maureen Welch, a respiratory therapist who was assisting in the trauma room was the third to pass out. The staff was then ordered to evacuate all emergency room patients to the parking lot outside the hospital. A skeleton crew stayed behind to stabilize Ramirez. At 8:50, after forty five minutes of CPR and defibrillation, Ramirez was pronounced dead from kidney failure related to her cancer.
Investigation
The county health department called in California’s Department of Health and Human Services, which put two scientists on the case, Doctors Ana Maria Osorio and Kirsten Waller. They interviewed 34 hospital staff who had been working in the emergency room on February 19. Using a standardized questionnaire, Osorio and Waller found that the people who had developed severe symptoms such as loss of consciousness, shortness of breath, and muscle spasms tended to have certain things in common. People who had worked within two feet of Ramirez and had handled her intravenous lines had been at high risk. But other factors that correlated with severe symptoms didn’t seem to match a scenario in which fumes had been released: the survey found that those afflicted tended to be women rather than men, and they all had normal blood tests after the exposure.
Theories
Possible role of dimethyl sulfoxide
Dr. Gorchynski denied that she had been affected by mass hysteria, and pointed to her own medical history as evidence. After the exposure, she spent two weeks in the intensive care unit with breathing problems, she developed hepatitis and avascular necrosis in her knees. Eager to clear her name and win her lawsuit against General Hospital in Riverside, she and RN Susan Kane contacted Livermore Laboratories for a second opinion.
Livermore Labs postulated that Ramirez had been taking dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), a solvent, as a home remedy for pain. Users of this substance report that it has a garlic-like taste. The Livermore scientists theorized that the DMSO in Ramirez’s system might have built up, due to urinary blockage. Oxygen administered by the paramedics would have combined with the DMSO to form dimethyl sulfone (DMSO2). DMSO2 is known to crystallize at room temperature, and crystals were observed in some of Ramirez’s drawn blood. Electric shocks administered during emergency defibrillation could have then converted the DMSO2 into dimethyl sulfate (DMSO4), a powerful poisonous gas, exposure to which could have caused the reported symptoms of the emergency room staff.
However, while the conversion from DMSO to DMSO2 may be scientifically plausible, the subsequent conversion from DMSO2 to DMSO4 inside the human body is questionable at best. In addition, while DMSO4 is highly volatile, it seems unlikely that it would have completely evaporated, leaving no trace whatsoever.
Final conclusion and burial
Two months after Ramirez died, her badly decomposed body was released for an independent autopsy and burial. The Riverside Coroner’s Office hailed Livermore’s DMSO conclusion as the probable cause of the hospital workers’ symptoms, while her family disagreed. The Ramirez family’s pathologist was unable to determine a cause of death because her heart was missing, her other organs were cross-contaminated with fecal matter, and her body was too badly decomposed. Ten weeks after she died, Ramirez was buried in an unmarked grave at Olivewood Memorial Park in Riverside.
Status of technical forensic analysis
The possible chemical explanation for this incident by Dr. Patrick M. Grant of the Livermore Forensic Science Center is beginning to appear in basic forensic science textbooks. In Houck and Siegel’s textbook, the authors opine that, although some weaknesses exist, the postulated scenario is “the most scientific explanation to date” and that “beyond this theory, no credible explanation has ever been offered for the strange case of Gloria Ramirez.”
Everything that Grant ever speculated or concluded about this incident was evaluated by professional forensic scientists, chemists, and toxicologists, passed peer-review in an accredited, refereed journal, and was published by Forensic Science International.[9][10] The first paper was very technically detailed and did, in fact, give two potential chemical reaction mechanisms that may possibly have formed dimethyl sulfate from dimethyl sulfoxide and dimethyl sulfone precursors. The second communication gave supplemental support for the postulated chemical scenario, as well as insight into some of the sociology and vested interests inherent in the case.
One of the letters proposed the production of toxic chloramine gas due to urine mixing with bleach in a nearby sink. This hypothesis, previously proposed to the investigators and to the medical personnel involved in the incident, was apparently never considered by all involved. The noxious effects of this gas are documented in the New England Journal of Medicine, Vol.341:848-849, Sept.9,1999, “Severe Lung Injury after Exposure to Chloramine Gas from Household Cleaners”. In reality, Grant addressed this chloramine scenario in Ref. 8, and it did not come close to fitting the ER incident.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Gloria Ramirez, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Dyatlov Pass incident refers to an event that resulted in the deaths of nine ski hikers in the northern Ural mountains on the night of February 2, 1959. It happened on the east shoulder of the mountain Kholat Syakhl (Холат Сяхл) (a Mansi name, meaning Mountain of the Dead). The mountain pass where the incident occurred has since been named Dyatlov Pass (Перевал Дятлова) after the group’s leader, Igor Dyatlov (Игорь Дятлов).
The lack of eyewitnesses and subsequent investigations into the hikers’ deaths have inspired much speculation. Investigators at the time determined that the hikers tore open their tent from within, departing barefoot in heavy snow. Though the corpses showed no signs of struggle, two victims had fractured skulls, two had broken ribs, and one was missing her tongue. According to sources, four of the victims’ clothing contained substantial levels of radiation. There is no mention of this in contemporary documentation; it only appears in later documents.Soviet investigators determined only that “a compelling unknown force” had caused the deaths. Access to the area was barred for skiers and other adventurers for three years after the incident. The chronology of the incident remains unclear due to the lack of survivors.
Background
A group was formed for a ski trek across the northern Urals in Sverdlovsk Oblast (Свердло́вская о́бласть). The group, led by Igor Dyatlov, consisted of eight men and two women. Most were students or graduates of Ural Polytechnical Institute (Уральский Политехнический Институт, УПИ), now Ural State Technical University:
– Igor Dyatlov (Игорь Дятлов), the group’s leader
– Zinaida Kolmogorova (Зинаида Колмогорова)
– Lyudmila Dubinina (Людмила Дубинина)
– Alexander Kolevatov (Александр Колеватов)
– Rustem Slobodin (Рустем Слободин)
– Yuri Krivonischenko (Юрий Кривонищенко)
– Yuri Doroshenko (Юрий Дорошенко)
– Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolle (Николай Тибо-Бриньоль)
– Alexander Zolotarev (Александр Золотарёв)
– Yuri Yudin (Юрий Юдин)
The goal of the expedition was to reach Otorten (Отортен), a mountain 10 kilometers north of the site of the incident. This route, at that season, was estimated as “Category III”, the most difficult. All members were experienced in long ski tours and mountain expeditions.
The group arrived by train at Ivdel (Ивдель), a city at the center of the northern province of Sverdlovsk Oblast on January 25. They then took a truck to Vizhai (Вижай) – the last inhabited settlement so far north. They started their march towards Otorten from Vizhai on January 27. The next day, one of the members (Yuri Yudin) was forced to go back because of illness. The group now consisted of nine people.
Diaries and cameras found around their last camp made it possible to track the group’s route up to the day preceding the incident. On January 31, the group arrived at the edge of a highland area and began to prepare for climbing. In a woody valley they cached surplus food and equipment which would be used for the trip back. The following day (February 1), the hikers started to move through the pass. It seems they planned to get over the pass and make camp for the next night on the opposite side, but because of worsening weather conditions, snowstorms and decreasing visibility, they lost their direction and deviated west, upward towards the top of Kholat Syakhl. When they realized their mistake, the group decided to stop and set up camp there on the slope of the mountain.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Dyatlov Pass incident, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
Metrolink Crash/Derailment
On 12 September 2008 at 4:22 p.m. in California’s San Fernando Valley, a commuter train carrying 225 passengers collided at a combined speed of 83 mph with a Union Pacific freight train run by a crew of three. In what came to be known as the Chatsworth crash, 135 people were injured (of which 87 were taken to hospitals, 46 in critical condition), and 25 died.
One of those who died in that horrible accident was Charles Peck. Peck was a 49-year old Delta customer service agent at Salt Lake City International Airport. He had come to Los Angeles for a job interview at Van Nuys Airport to be closer to his fiancé, Andrea Katz. His fiancé heard about the crash from a news report on the radio as she was driving to the train station to pick up Charles up. Peck’s parents and siblings (who live in the Los Angeles area) were with her.
Peck’s body was recovered from the wreckage 12 hours after the accident. Yet for the first eleven of those hours, his cell phone placed call after call to his loved ones, calling his son, his brother, his stepmother, his sister, and his fiancé. In all, his various family members received 35 calls from his cell phone through that long night. When they answered, all they heard was static; when they called back, their calls went straight to voicemail. But the calls gave them hope that the man they loved was still alive, just trapped somewhere in the wreckage.
The barrage of calls prompted search crews to trace the whereabouts of the phone through its signal and to once again look through what was left of the first train, the location the calls were coming from. At 9:08 p.m., nearly five hours after the crash, Peck’s fiancé Andrea Katz received one of those calls. But when she answered, all she heard was static. Despite hearing nothing from the other side she told him to hang on and that help was on the way. The last phone call came from Charles Peck’s phone at 3:28 a.m., almost an hour before they found his lifeless body.
Medical examination of his body showed that he had died quickly after the collision, almost instantaneously.
Sources:
Photo Credit: Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times / September 12, 2008
The investigation, if it can properly be so called, of the unsolved murder of the former high ranking Pentagon official and presidential adviser John P. Wheeler III, who was also an expert on chemical and biological weapons, may be taking a turn in the direction of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Wheeler, 67, a West Point grad, was beaten and thrown into a garbage dumpster. His body was discovered in a Wilmington, Del. landfill last New Year’s weekend. Both police detectives and news commentators described it as “an apparent hit,” but little else was ever learned, and no suspects have surfaced.
There was great speculation by many at the time that Wheeler had begun to blow the whistle on the mysterious bird and fish deaths in Arkansas and Texas, and was about to expose the facts tying this to the chemtrails seen in our skies over the past decade.
Now the speculation may be reverting to British Petroleum and the gulf spill because a number of other BP whistle blowing scientists, before and since the Wheeler murder, have also died mysteriously, been jailed on questionable charges or disappeared without a trace.
Matthew Simmons, 67, a former energy adviser to President George W. Bush and admired among survivalist groups for his dire warnings on the upcoming commodity and fuel shortages about to hit this nation, died in his hot tub in Maine last August. Simmons had been gaining popularity as a whistle blower for blaming BP for its covered-up responsibility in defacing and vandalizing the Gulf of Mexico while hiding the truth from the general public.
Only four days later, Ted Stevens, the 87-year-old defrocked senator from Alaska, said to have received communications regarding BP’s faulty blowout preventer, perished in a plane crash. British Petroleum had donated $1 million to the University of Alaska to catalog the papers from Stevens’s long political career.
Roger Grooters began a cross country bike ride in Oceanside, Calif. on Sept. 10 to draw attention to the Gulf Coast oil disaster. On Oct. 6, in front of the horrified eyes of his wife, who was trailing in a support vehicle, Grooters was struck by a truck and killed instantly in Panama City, Fla.
Only a month later, Dr. Geoffrey Gardner of Lakeland, Fla. disappeared. He was investigating the unexplained bird deaths near Sarasota that are suspected to have been caused by the BP oil disaster. No one has heard from or spoken with him since.
On Nov. 15, Chitra Chaunhan was found dead of cyanide poisoning in a Temple Terrace, Fla. hotel. It was officially ruled a suicide. She worked in the Center for Biological Defense and Global Health Infectious Disease Research and left behind a husband and five-year-old child.
The following week, James Patrick Black, director of operations for BP’s restoration organization for the oil spill, died near Destin, Fla. in a small plane crash.
Dr. Thomas B. Manton was one of the first to warn the public that far more oil than what BP had reported was gushing into the gulf every day and that the massive, toxic oil and chemical plumes would travel up the eastern seaboard, contaminating beaches and wildlife all the way.
“Once the winds change, it will come eastward and pollute the beaches of the west coast of Florida, and the ‘loop current’ could carry this oil spill right around Florida, through the Florida Keys and pollute the east coast of Florida as well,” Manton wrote on May 28, 2010.
Dr. Tom Termotto, national coordinator of the Gulf Oil Spill Remediation Conference, says Manton was murdered in prison. Manton had been sentenced to 15 years last August on a phony child pornography charge. Termotto and others say evidence was planted on his computer.
It is not known whether or not Anthony Nicholas Tremonte, 31, posed any threat to BP, but he too was arrested in January and charged with one count of possession of child pornography. Was this charge also faked? As an officer with the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources on the Gulf Coast, he may have known enough to qualify him for membership in this exclusive series of coincidences. He faces up to 40 years in prison if convicted.
Source:
Short Life Expectancy for BP Whistleblowers?
by Pat Shannan
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/whistleblowers_266.html
Links to each individual case under question:
Professor Greg Stone
Officer Anthony Nicholas Tremonte
Dr. Thomas B. Manton
John P. Wheeler II
James Patrick Black
USF biologist Chitra Chauhan
Roger Grooters
Senator Ted Stevens
Matthew Simmons
Joseph Morrissey
The Badlands Guardian is a geomorphological feature located near Medicine Hat in the south east corner of Alberta, Canada. Viewed from the air, the feature bears a strong resemblance to a human head wearing a full native American headdress, facing directly westward. Because of additional man-made structure, it also appears to be wearing earphones. The apparent earphones are a road and an oil well, which has been recently installed.
The head is a drainage feature created through erosion of soft, clay-rich soil by the action of wind and water. The arid badlands are typified by infrequent but intense rain-showers, sparse vegetation and soft sediments. The ‘head’ may have been created during a short period of fast erosion immediately following intense rainfall. Although the image appears to be a convex feature, it is actually concave — that is, a valley, an instance of the Hollow-Face illusion.
Continue reading “Badlands Guardian”
The Cottingley Fairies appear in a series of five photographs taken by Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, two young cousins who lived in Cottingley, near Bradford in England. In 1917, when the first two photographs were taken, Elsie was 16 years old and Frances was 10. The pictures came to the attention of writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who used them to illustrate an article on fairies he had been commissioned to write for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine. Conan Doyle, as a spiritualist, was enthusiastic about the photographs, and interpreted them as clear and visible evidence of psychic phenomena. Public reaction was mixed; some accepted the images as genuine, but others believed they had been faked.
Interest in the Cottingley Fairies gradually declined after 1921. Both girls grew up, married and lived abroad for a time. Yet the photographs continued to hold the public imagination; in 1966 a reporter from the Daily Express newspaper traced Elsie, who had by then returned to the UK. Elsie left open the possibility that she believed she had photographed her thoughts, and the media once again became interested in the story. In the early 1980s Elsie and Frances admitted that the photographs were faked using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children’s book of the time, but Frances continued to claim that the fifth and final photograph was genuine.
The photographs and two of the cameras used are on display in the National Media Museum in Bradford.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Cottingley Fairies, licensed under CC-BY-SA.