The Marfa lights or the Marfa ghost lights are unexplained lights (known as “ghost lights”) usually seen near U.S. Route 67 on Mitchell Flat east of Marfa, Texas, in the United States.
The first published account of the lights was written in 1957, and this article is the sole source for anecdotal claims that the lights date back to the 1800s. Reports often describe brightly glowing basketball sized spheres floating above the ground, or sometimes high in the air. Colors are usually described as white, yellow, orange or red, but green and blue are sometimes reported. The balls are said to hover at about shoulder height, or to move laterally at low speeds, or sometimes to shoot around rapidly in any direction. They often appear in pairs or groups, according to reports, to divide into pairs or merge together, to disappear and reappear, and sometimes to move in seemingly regular patterns. Their sizes are typically said to resemble soccer balls or basketballs.
Sightings are reported occasionally and unpredictably, perhaps ten to twenty times a year. There are no reliable reports of daytime sightings; the lights seem to be a nocturnal phenomenon only.
According to the people who claim to have seen the lights, they may appear at any time of night, typically south of U.S. Route 90 and east of U.S. Route 67, five to fifteen miles southeast of Marfa, at unpredictable directions and apparent distances. They can persist from a fraction of a second to several hours. There is evidently no connection between appearances of the Marfa lights and anything else besides nighttime hours. They appear in all seasons of the year and in any weather, seemingly uninfluenced by such factors. They sometimes have been observed during late dusk and early dawn, when the landscape is dimly illuminated.
It is extremely difficult to approach an ongoing display of the Marfa lights, mainly due to the dangerous terrain of Mitchell Flat. Also, all of the land where the Marfa Lights are observed is private property, and access is prohibited without explicit permission from the owners. There are only a very few accounts of success in moving very close to observed lights, but those that exist generally describe objects resembling fireworks lacking both smoke and sound.
The state notes the lights in travel maps, the city has erected a viewing platform, and the Marfa Chamber of Commerce promotes the peculiar lights. The weekend-long Marfa Lights Festival is held annually in the city’s downtown.
The 23 enigma refers to the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some modification of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23.
Origins
Robert Anton Wilson cites William S. Burroughs as being the first person to believe in the 23 enigma. Wilson, in an article in Fortean Times, related the following story:
“I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.”
Discordianism
The Principia Discordia states that “All things happen in fives, or are divisible by or are multiples of five, or are somehow directly or indirectly appropriate to 5″—this is referred to as the Law of Fives. The 23 Enigma is regarded as a corollary of this law. It can be seen in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea‘s The Illuminatus! Trilogy (therein called the “23/17 phenomenon”), Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (therein called “The Law of fives” and “The 23 Enigma”), Arthur Koestler‘s Challenge of Chance, as well as the Principia Discordia. In these works, 23 is considered lucky, unlucky, sinister, strange, or sacred to the goddess Eris or to the unholy gods of the Cthulhu Mythos.
As with most numerological claims, the enigma can be viewed as an example of apophenia, selection bias, and confirmation bias. In interviews, Wilson acknowledged the self-fulfilling nature of the enigma, implying that the real value of the Laws of Fives and Twenty-threes lies in their demonstration of the mind’s power to perceive “truth” in nearly anything.
“When you start looking for something you tend to find it. This wouldn’t be like Simon Newcomb, the great astronomer, who wrote a mathematical proof that heavier than air flight was impossible and published it a day before the Wright brothers took off. I’m talking about people who found a pattern in nature and wrote several scientific articles and got it accepted by a large part of the scientific community before it was generally agreed that there was no such pattern, it was all just selective perception.”
In the Illuminatus! Trilogy, he expresses the same view: that one can find a numerological significance to anything, provided “sufficient cleverness.”
Cultural references
The 1998 German film 23, starring August Diehl, tells the real-life story of computer hackers inspired by Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy.
The 2007 film The Number 23, starring Jim Carrey, is the story of a man who becomes obsessed with the number 23 while reading a book of the same title that seems to be about his life.
Industrial music group Throbbing Gristle recounted in great detail the meeting of Burroughs and Clark and the significance of the number 23 in the ballad “The Old Man Smiled.”
Notes
- ^ boingboing.net article on Wilson and Burroughs
- ^ Article in the British newspaper The Mirror regarding the power of the number 23
- ^ “Going loco over ‘El Becko'”
- ^ Robert Anton Wilson on the “23 Phenomena”
- ^ Principia Discordia, pg. 23
- ^ Robert Anton Wilson sees the clustering illusion everywhere, not just 23, Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything (audiobook), December 2001.
- ^ Wilson, Robert Anton; Robert Shea (1984). The Illuminatus! Trilogy.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article 23 enigma, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Belchen Tunnel is a motorway tunnel in Switzerland, and forms part of the A2 motorway from Basel to Chiasso. It is 3.2 km long, and lies in the northern (slightly northwestern) part of Switzerland. It links Eptingen in the canton of Basel-Country with Hägendorf in the Canton of Solothurn. The tunnel was built in the mid-1960s. It was completely renovated in 2003.
The “white woman” – an urban legend
January 1981, a modern myth circulated, dealing with a “white woman” (“weisse Frau”) of the Bölchentunnel (“Bölchen” is local dialect for “Belchen”). This phenomena is a paranormal event and mystery that has never been solved. Shaped as an old white-clothed hitchhiking woman, a ghost (though not initially recognized as such) appears out of nowhere in front of the drivers and sometimes even speaks to them.
The first known Belchen ghost was actually male. The first written credentials about the phenomena (dated June 1980) are about a male hitchhiker who was picked up but, despite the high speed, after a while no longer sat in the backseat.
Towards the end of that year, the “white woman” began appearing in or outside the tunnel. On January 6, 1981, the tabloid Blick wrote about the sightings, followed by other media also adopting the story. Basel Police received many phone calls, dozens of which had to be logged.
The “Bölchengespenst” (Bölchen ghost) became a popular subject for 1981’s Shrove Tuesday carnival. Even the musicians of the Oberbaselbieter Ländlerkapelle treated the legend. Later, the discussion cooled down – until the 1983 edition of the book Baselbieter Sagen reported further strange sightings of the white woman. There were two female jurists who picked up an inconspicuously dressed, clumsy, pale, middle-aged woman in Eptingen. When later asked if she felt better, she answered “No, unfortunately not. I am not well at all (or “It isn’t going [at all] well (for me)” from the German “Es geht (mir) [gar] nicht gut.”). Something really awful is going to happen, something very dreadful!” (Swiss-German: “Nei, leider nid. Es goht gar nid guet. Es passiert öppis Schrecklichs, öppis ganz Furchtbars!”) When the two jurists next looked at the backseat, the woman had disappeared.
Other variations
Such visitations don’t only happen inside or around tunnels. A re-edited edition of the Baselbieter Sagen mentions similar cases at other Basel places: “the Heidegg castle’s lady,” “the maiden on the goat,” and “the grey woman in Zunzgen.” In Läufelfingen, the woman wears a green loden coat, in the Canton of Bern, a girl in a short leather jacket appears. In the area of Basel, as with the case in Tenniken, a man wearing black is seen. The man prophesizes an earthquake and a hard winter before disappearing. The mysterious hitchhikers can even disappear if the car has only front doors and no back doors.
A 1981 article in the magazine Schweizer Volkskunde describes analogous visitations. According to it, such “modern ghosts of the road” were seen in other Swiss Cantons and tunnels, such as the Luzernerland area and in Toggenburg.
External links
– (German) Belchen Tunnel
– (German) «Plötzlich war die Frau weg, fort, einfach nicht mehr da», Volksstimme, 25 January 2001
Photo Credit: BelchenTunnel.ch
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Belchen Tunnel, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Tannenbergbund was a far right German political society founded by the German Army general Erich Ludendorff in 1925.
Founding
Ludendorff had been a leading member of the National Socialist German Workers Party in the early 1920s and ran for the party in the 1925 Presidential election during Germany’s Weimar period. However, Adolf Hitler feared the possibility of Ludendorff as a potential leadership rival and rejoiced in the General’s derisory election result, telling Hermann Esser “now we’ve finally finished him”. With his credibility severely damaged by the election result, Ludendorff drifted from the Nazi Party and joined his wife Mathilde von Kemnitz in setting up the Tannenbergbund, with the organisation taking its name from the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg, one of Ludendorff’s greatest military triumphs.
Development
The Tannenbergbund soon developed as largely a circle of former officers who had served under Ludendorff in World War I.[3] In terms of ideology the Bund largely concentrated on who it opposed, attacking Freemasons, Jews, communists and Jesuits and accusing them of conspiracy.Such people were lumped in together as “die überstaatlichen Mächte” or “the powers above the state”.The Bund became a prolific producer of conspiracy literature, although they were openly rejected by the growing Nazi movement, for whom some of the Bund’s more wild ideas were even too fancifully conspiratorial.Central also to their ideas was an occultist vision inspired by the Thule Society to which Ludendorff had been introduced by his wife. As such, the Bund presented history as a struggle between the Nordic hero and the three-way alliance of the Jew, Catholic and Freemason.As a consequence, members of the Bund were expected to abandon Christianity and turn to the old Nordic gods.
Decline and suppression
The Tannenbergbund initially enjoyed support amongst rural political movements in Schleswig-Holstein, although it never presented a serious challenge to the Nazis. Among surviving senior officers of the Kaiserreich, Ludendorff’s politics were viewed with a mixture of skepticism and disbelief. Field Marshal August von Mackensen, who had commanded an army corps at Tannenberg, wrote that “der Mann ist krank” (the man is sick). Similarly, Paul von Hindenburg had no truck with the Tannenbergbund as he and Ludendorff had been estranged since the 1925 election, culminating in the two not shaking hands and Hindenburg snubbing Ludendorff’s speech at the dedication of a Battle of Tannenberg memorial in 1927.Given its composition of more junior officers loyal to Ludendorff, the Tannenbergbund failed to win over the support of the masses, and before long it lost a number of members to the Nazi Party. The Tannenbergbund was banned as soon as Hitler came to power, although the group carried on until Ludendorff’s death in 1937 before finally being suppressed by Hitler’s government.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Tannenbergbund, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors here.
SICSIC is an anonymous secret society and pep squad for Bowling Green State University.
History
SICSIC was formed on October 5, 1946 by then University President Frank J. Prout as a secret, anonymous booster organization to promote more campus spirit. President Prout selected the first six members from The Key, Bowling Green’s annual yearbook, and invited them to meet him in his office at 12:45am and told the students to not tell anyone where they were going. The six undergraduates met with the President in his office and agreed to join the secret society which they called SICSIC. Currently, SICSIC is composed of six undergraduates (two sophomores, two juniors, and two seniors). New members are chosen during the end of their freshman year in order to replace that year’s graduating seniors.
Traditions
The SICSIC members adorn Halloween masks, jumpsuits and gloves. As of the 2009-2010 school year, the masks are of Queen Elizabeth, Michael Jackson, Abe Lincoln, Darth Vader, Carlos Santana, and Regis Philbin. SICSIC members travel around the field and stands during athletic events distributing candy and taking pictures with fans. SICSIC members are always masked and their identities are not revealed until the last home basketball game of their senior year, where they are unmasked in front of the student body.
External links
Photo Credit: Alexandra Rae Design
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article SICSIC, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Cornish Foreshore Case was a case of arbitration between the Crown and the Duchy of Cornwall between 1854 and 1858. Officers of the Duchy successfully argued that the Duchy enjoyed many of the rights and prerogatives of a county palatine and that although the Duke of Cornwall was not granted Royal jurisdiction, was considered to be quasi-sovereign within his Duchy of Cornwall. The arbitration, as instructed by the Crown, was based on legal argument and documentation which led to the Cornwall Submarine Mines Act 1858. The Arbitrator was Sir John Patteson who communicated with the appropriate officers of the Crown and Duchy. The law officer representing the Duchy was the Rt. Hon.Thomas Pemberton Leigh, Baron Kingsdown.