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.
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.
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.
Triskaidekaphobia (from Greek tris meaning “3,” kai meaning “and,” and deka meaning “10”) is fear of the number 13; it is a superstition and related to a specific fear of Friday the 13th, called paraskevidekatriaphobia or friggatriskaidekaphobia.
Origins
There is a common myth that the earliest reference to thirteen being unlucky or evil is from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (circa 1780 BCE), where the thirteenth law is omitted. In fact, the original Code of Hammurabi has no numeration. The translation by L.W. King (1910), edited by Richard Hooker, omitted one article:
If the seller have gone to (his) fate (i. e., have died), the purchaser shall recover damages in said case fivefold from the estate of the seller.
Other translations of the Code of Hammurabi, for example the translation by Robert Francis Harper, include the 13th article.
Some Christian traditions have it that at the Last Supper, Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th to sit at the table.However, the number 13 is not uniformly bad in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For example, the 13 attributes of God (also called the thirteen attributes of mercy) are enumerated in the Torah (Exodus 34:6–7). Some modern Christian churches also use 13 attributes of God in sermons.
Triskaidekaphobia may have also affected the Vikings—it is believed that Loki in the Norse pantheon was the 13th god.More specifically, Loki was believed to have engineered the murder of Balder, and was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. This is perhaps related to the superstition that if thirteen people gather, one of them will die in the following year. Another Norse tradition involves the myth of Norna-Gest: when the uninvited norns showed up at his birthday celebration—thus increasing the number of guests from ten to thirteen—the norns cursed the infant by magically binding his lifespan to that of a mystic candle they presented to him.
Ancient Persians believed the twelve constellations in the Zodiac controlled the months of the year, and each ruled the earth for a thousand years at the end of which the sky and earth collapsed in chaos. Therefore, the thirteenth is identified with chaos and the reason Persians leave their houses to avoid bad luck on the thirteenth day of the Persian Calendar, a tradition called Sizdah Bedar.
In 1881, an influential group of New Yorkers led by U.S. Civil War veteran Captain William Fowler came together to put an end to this and other superstitions.
They formed a dinner cabaret club, which they called the Thirteen Club. At the first meeting, on Friday 13 January 1881 at 8:13 p.m., 13 people sat down to dine in room 13 of the venue. The guests walked under a ladder to enter the room and were seated among piles of spilled salt. All of the guests survived. Thirteen Clubs sprang up all over North America for the next 40 years. Their activities were regularly reported in leading newspapers, and their numbers included five future U.S. presidents, from Chester A. Arthur to Theodore Roosevelt. Thirteen Clubs had various imitators, but they all gradually faded from interest as people became less superstitious.
On Friday 13 October 1307, the Knights Templar were ordered to be arrested by Philip IV of France. The theory has been suggested, in the book Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry by John J. Robinson, that the Templars went underground among masons in England and later developed into Freemasons. Because most of the founding fathers of the United States of America were Freemasons, it is possible the memory of the terror of that day is preserved in the Friday the 13th.
Similar phobias
– Tetraphobia, fear of the number 4 – (phonetically similar to “death”) in Korea, China and Japan, as well as in many other East-Asian and some Southeast-Asian countries, it is not uncommon for buildings (including offices, apartments, hotels) to lack floors with the number 4, and Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia’s 1xxx-9xxx series of mobile phones does not include any model numbers beginning with a 4. In China, this is because the pronunciation of the word for “four” (四, sì) can sound similar to that of the word for “death” (死, shi).
– 17 is an unlucky number in Italy, because in Roman digits 17 is written XVII, that could be rearranged to “VIXI”, which in Latin means “I have lived” but can be a euphemism for “I am dead.” Cesana Pariol, the bobsleigh, luge and skeleton track used for the 2006 Winter Olympics, had turn 17 originally named “Senza Nome” (“without name” in (Italian)), but the turn was renamed in 2007 in honor of luger Paul Hildgartner.
– Paraskevidekatriaphobia is the fear of Friday the 13th, which is considered to be a day of bad luck in a number of western cultures. In Romania, Greece and some areas of Spain and Latin America, Tuesday the 13th (called “martes trece”) is considered unlucky.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Triskaidekaphobia, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana about 400 km south of Lima. Although some local geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 AD. The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks or orcas, llamas, and lizards.
The lines are shallow designs made in the ground by removing the ubiquitous reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish ground beneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes; more than seventy are designs of animal, bird, fish or human figures. The largest figures are over 200 metres (660 ft) across. Scholars differ in interpreting the purpose of the designs, but they generally ascribe religious significance to them.
The geometric ones could indicate the flow of water or be connected to rituals to summon water. The spiders, birds, and plants could be fertility symbols. Other possible explanations include: irrigation schemes or giant astronomical calendars.
Due to the dry, windless and stable climate of the plateau and its isolation, for the most part the lines have been preserved. Extremely rare changes in weather may temporarily alter the general designs.
Discovery and construction
After people traveled over the area by plane in the 1930s and saw the Nazca Lines from the air, anthropologists started studying them. One of the issues that intrigued scholars was to try to understand how they were made.
Scholars have theorized the Nazca people could have used simple tools and surveying equipment to construct the lines. Studies have found wooden stakes in the ground at the end of some lines, which support this theory. One such stake was carbon-dated and the basis for establishing the age of the design complex. Researcher Joe Nickell of the University of Kentucky has reproduced the figures by using tools and technology available to the Nazca people. The National Geographic called his work “remarkable in its exactness” when compared to the actual lines. With careful planning and simple technologies, a small team of people could recreate even the largest figures within days, without any aerial assistance. Most of the lines form a trench about six inches deep.
The lines were made by removing the reddish-brown iron oxide-coated pebbles that cover the surface of the Nazca desert. When the gravel is removed, the light-colored earth beneath shows in lines of sharply contrasting color and tone. The Nazca “drew” several hundred simple but huge curvilinear animal and human figures by this technique. In total, the earthwork project is huge and complex: the area encompassing the lines is nearly 500 square kilometres (190 sq mi), and the largest figures can span nearly 270 metres (890 ft). The extremely dry, windless, and constant climate of the Nazca region has preserved the lines well. The Nazca desert is one of the driest on Earth and maintains a temperature around 25 °C (77 °F) all year round. The lack of wind has helped keep the lines uncovered and visible to the present day.
Purpose
Archeologists, ethnologists and anthropologists have studied the ancient Nazca culture and the complex to try to determine the purpose of the lines and figures. One theory is that the Nazca people created them to be seen by their gods in the sky. Kosok and Reiche advanced a purpose related to astronomy and cosmology: the lines were intended to act as a kind of observatory, to point to the places on the distant horizon where the sun and other celestial bodies rose or set. Many prehistoric indigenous cultures in the Americas and elsewhere constructed earthworks that combined such astronomical sighting with their religious cosmology, as did the later Mississippian culture at Cahokia in present-day United States. Another example is Stonehenge in England. But, Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni, experts in archaeoastronomy, concluded in 1990 that there was insufficient evidence to support such an astronomical explanation.
In 1985, the archaeologist Johan Reinhard published archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data demonstrating that worship of mountains and other water sources predominated in Nazca religion and economy from ancient to recent times. He theorized that the lines and figures were part of religious practices involving the worship of deities associated with the availability of water, which directly related to the success and productivity of crops. He interpreted the lines as sacred paths leading to places where these deities could be worshiped. The figures were symbols representing animals and objects meant to invoke the gods’ aid in supplying water. But, the precise meanings of many of the individual geoglyphs remain unsolved as of 2010.
Henri Stierlin, a Swiss art historian specializing in Egypt and the Middle East, published a book in 1983 linking the Nazca Lines to the production of ancient textiles which archeologists have found wrapping mummies of the Paracas culture.He contended that the people may have used the lines and trapezes as giant, primitive looms to fabricate the extremely long strings and wide pieces of textile that are typical of the area. By his theory, the figurative patterns (smaller and less common) were meant only for ritualistic purposes.
Alternative theories
Some individuals propose alternative theories. Jim Woodmann believes that the Nazca Lines could not have been made without some form of manned flight to see the figures properly. Based on his study of available technology, he suggests that a hot air balloon was the only possible means of flight. To test this hypothesis, Woodmann made a hot-air balloon using materials and techniques which he understood were available to the Nazca people. The balloon flew, after a fashion. Most scholars have rejected Woodmann’s thesis,because of the lack of any evidence of such balloons.
Swiss author Erich von Däniken suggests the Nazca lines and other complex constructions represent higher technological knowledge than he believes existed when the glyphs were created. Von Däniken maintains that the Nazca lines in Peru are runways of an ancient airfield that was used by extraterrestrials mistaken by the natives to be their gods.
Maria Reiche‘s protege Phillis Pitluga, an astronomer at the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum, believes, based on computer aided studies of star alignments, that the giant spider figure is an anamorphic diagram of the constellation Orion. She further suggests that three of the straight lines leading to the figure were used to track the changing declinations of the three stars of Orion’s Belt but does not take into account the other twelve lines. Aveni has commented on her work, saying
“I really had trouble finding good evidence to back up what she contended. Pitluga never laid out the criteria for selecting the lines she chose to measure, nor did she pay much attention to the archaeological data Clarkson and Silverman had unearthed. Her case did little justice to other information about the coastal cultures, save applying, with subtle contortions, Urtons representations of constellations from the highlands. As historian Jacquetta Hawkes might ask: was she getting the pampa she desired?“
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Nazca Lines, licensed under CC-BY-SA.
The Mothman is a creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant area of West Virginia from November 12, 1966, to December 1967.Most observers describe the Mothman as a man-sized creature with large reflective red eyes and large wings. The creature was sometimes reported as having no head, with its eyes set into its chest.
A number of hypotheses have been presented to explain eyewitness accounts, ranging from misidentification and coincidence, to paranormal phenomena and conspiracy theories.
Appearance
Mothman is described as a man sized, or larger, creature with glowing red eyes and wings of a moth. It may have eyes set in his chest. It is described as a 7-foot-tall (2.1 m) creature, with long wings and huge red eyes. It possesses an unusual shriek.
History
On November 15, 1966, two young couples from Point Pleasant, Roger and Linda Scarberry, and Steve and Mary Mallette, along with their young cousin, Lonnie Button, were traveling late at night in the Scarberrys’ car. They were passing the West Virginia Ordnance Works, an abandoned World War II TNT factory, about seven miles north of Point Pleasant, in the 2,500 acre (10 km²) McClintic Wildlife Management Area, when they noticed two red lights in the shadows by an old generator plant near the factory gate. They stopped the car, and reportedly discovered that the lights were the glowing red eyes of a large animal, “shaped like a man, but bigger, maybe six and a half or seven feet tall, with big wings folded against its back,” according to Roger Scarberry. Terrified, they drove toward Route 62, where the creature supposedly chased them at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour.
A plaque on the Mothman statue provides a version of the original legend: “On a chilly, fall night in November 1966, two young couples drove into the TNT area north of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, when they realized they were not alone.” Driving down the exit road, they saw the supposed creature standing on a nearby ridge. It spread its wings and flew alongside the vehicle up to the city limits. They drove to the Mason County courthouse to alert Deputy Millard Halstead, who later said, “I’ve known these kids all their lives. They’d never been in any trouble and they were really scared that night. I took them seriously.” He then followed Roger Scarberry’s car back to the old Ordnance Works and found no trace of the strange creature. According to the book Alien Animals, by Janet and Colin Bord, a poltergeist attack on the Scarberry home occurred later that night, during which the creature was seen several times.
The following night, on November 16, several armed townspeople combed the area around the TNT plant for signs of Mothman. Mr. and Mrs. Raymond Wamsley, and Mrs. Marcella Bennett, with her infant daughter Teena, were in a car en-route to visit their friends, Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Thomas, who lived in a small house near the igloos (concrete dome-shaped dynamite storage structures erected during WW-II) near the TNT plant. The igloos were now empty, some owned by the county, others by companies intending to use them for storage. They were heading back to their car when a figure appeared behind their parked vehicle. Mrs. Bennett said that it seemed like it had been lying down, slowly rising up from the ground, large and gray, with glowing red eyes. While Wamsley phoned the police, the creature walked onto the porch and peered in at them through the window.
On November 24, four people allegedly saw the creature flying over the TNT area. On the morning of November 25, Thomas Ury, who was driving along Route 62 just north of the TNT, claimed to have seen the creature standing in a field, and then it spread its wings and flew away, and Thomas sped toward the Point Pleasant sheriff’s office. He then reported the incident that he had seen.
A Mothman sighting was again reported on January 11, 1967, hovering over the town’s bridge, and several other times that same year. Fewer sightings of the Mothman were reported after the collapse of the town’s bridge, the Silver Bridge, when 46 people died. The Silver Bridge, so named for its aluminum paint, was an eyebar chain suspension bridge that connected the cities of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and Gallipolis, Ohio, over the Ohio River. The bridge was built in 1928, and it collapsed on December 15, 1967. Investigation of the bridge wreckage pointed to the failure of a single eye-bar in a suspension chain due to a small manufacturing flaw. There are rumors that the Mothman appears before upcoming disasters and seems to try to warn people of them. After that, Mothman was never again seen in Point Pleasant.
Analysis
There are several theories concerning the Mothman phenomenon.
Supernatural theories
John Keel claimed that Mothman was related to parapsychological events in the area, including precognitions by witnesses, and the December 15, 1967 collapse of the Silver Bridge spanning the Ohio River.
Misidentified bird
One of the early theories is that the Mothman was a misidentified Sandhill Crane, which, in the late 1960s had been a problem in surrounding regions. Sandhill cranes have an average wingspan of 5.3 feet (up to 7 feet), average overall length of 39 inches and have the general appearance described, glide for long distances without flapping, and have an unusual shriek. Other theories suggest the possibility of the Mothman being a Barn Owl, an albino owl, or perhaps a large Snowy Owl (based on artists’ impressions). Skeptics suggest that the Mothman’s glowing eyes are actually red-eye caused from the reflection of light, from flashlights, or other light sources that witnesses may have had with them.
All or part of the article above was taken from the Wikipedia article Mothman, licensed under CC-BY-SA.