Science Special News

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"Baby Bigfoot" a poachers' cover story ?

Submitted by Pendekar Timur: Could the people in four-wheel-drive vehicles and a truck purportedly carrying a baby Bigfoot, who dropped in for dinner at a restaurant at a rest area at Felda Tenggaroh 2 here last month, be poachers? This is the question on the minds of people at the rest area who saw the group of about 20 men and their vehicles bearing the Wildlife Department licence plates. The Wildlife Department has denied that such an operation was carried out by its officers.They are now asking if the group, which had also been seen at two other rest stops along Jalan Mersing and the town area around the same time, could be Bigfoot poachers.According to people at Felda Tenggaroh 2, it was raining at the time and the casually-dressed men who arrived in their mud-splattered vehicles were sitting near the shop after having their dinner.Some of the men were seen chatting with a couple of salesgirls at a shop, and when asked where they came from, they said had come from the jungle further up Jalan Mersing.The men also told the girls that they had come from Kuala Lumpur and had camped in the jungle for the past two or three days, adding that they had shot a baby Bigfoot using a tranquiliser gun.When the girls asked if it was a mawas (orang utan) they had shot, the men confirmed that it was indeed a Bigfoot creature and volunteered to show it to them.

However, when the girls went outside the shop with the men, the truck where the baby Bigfoot was believed to have been kept, was just being driven away.Met yesterday, the girls said following a newspaper report on their story about the Bigfoot hunters on Wednesday, officers from the district Wildlife Department had quizzed them on the validity of their story.The girls, who did not wish to be named, said they told the officers what they had seen and heard from members of the expedition group last month.A businessman at the Kota Tinggi town area, who had also met the expedition members, claimed that he had taken a peek into the truck purportedly containing the Bigfoot and saw something big lying inside.However, as the window screen of the truck was tinted, he could not see the creature clearly.

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New Nazca line picture discovered

A new giant picture on the Nazca Plateau in Peru, which is famous for giant patterns that can be seen from the air, has been discovered by a team of Japanese researchers. The image is 65 meters long, and appears to be an animal with horns. It is thought to have been drawn as a symbol of hopes for good crops, but there are no similar patterns elsewhere, and the type of the animal remains unclear.The discovery marks the first time since the 1980s that a picture other than a geometrical pattern has been found on the Nazca Plateau.The picture was found by a team of researchers including Masato Sakai, an associate professor at Yamagata University, after they analyzed images from a U.S. commercial satellite. They confirmed it was a previously undiscovered picture in a local survey in March this year. It is located at the south of the Nazca Plateau, and apparently went undiscovered since few tourist planes pass over the area.

There is evidence that vehicles had driven in the area, and part of the picture is destroyed.Two parts of the picture, that appear to be horns, bear close resemblance to those that appear on earthenware dating from 100 B.C. to A.D. 600, during the time when the Nazca kingdom flourished, and it is thought that they relate to fertility rites.The research team will use images from the advanced land-observing satellite "Daichi," which was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency in January this year, to create a distribution map of images on the earth that can be seen from the air."We want to identify all the images, and work to preserve earth pictures that are gradually being destroyed," Sakai said. (Mainichi)

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Public interest in UFO's is waning

Mankind has been spotting strange objects in the sky since biblical times, but it wasn't until the 1940s that terms such as "flying saucer" regularly appeared in the headlines. Footage of an alien autopsy near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 reached an estimated global audience of one billion before being exposed as a fake. The film of this story - Alien Autopsy, starring Ant and Dec - opened earlier this month. However, it would appear that public interest in UFOs has waned significantly since the 1970s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind suggested we are not alone. A forlorn statement on the website of the British UFO Research Association (Bufora) declares that they are scaling down their activities. "The halcyon days of ufology are over," explains chairman Robert Rosamond, bemoaning the effects of "dwindling subject material". A number of regional affiliates have closed down altogether, some of them blaming the end of The X-Files series for waning interest. It is a far cry from 1951, when the ministry of defence set up the flying saucer working party. Although the committee dismissed reports of alien sightings as "optical illusions and psychological delusions", its findings were not made public until 50 years later, fuelling suspicions of a cover-up. Public paranoia was not helped by the fact that most UFO sightings have occurred near RAF bases, with the result that the MoD has been reluctant to release too many details. Today, however, rational explanations appear to exist for most UFO sightings.

Last October, drivers on the M25 pulled over to stare at what turned out to be Thai lanterns. In December 2004, Southern Electric was moved to persuade its customers that a huge flash of light was due to a power surge and not any extraterrestrial interference. Even the infamous Rendlesham Forest incident in December 1980 was later blamed on a prank-loving American airman. Kites, soap bubbles, feathers, weather balloons, parachutes and tumbleweeds have all been mistaken for alien visitors. UFO enthusiasts have also suffered by association with their fringe, loony element. The Flying Saucer Review - which bizarrely claims to have Prince Philip among its subscribers - has an online article suggesting HIV was brought to earth by aliens. A documentary in 2004 reported that flying saucers were actually created by Nazi scientists and sold to the American military.

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Mysteries of 'UFO ranch' in spotlight

In 1996 a Las Vegas billionaire bought a ranch in Fort Duchesne from a family who had, for all intents and purposes, been run off of their property by forces they could not explain. All they knew was that a series of bizarre events on their ranch had left them financially ailing, mentally anguished, and in the end, horrified and afraid.Vanishing and mutilated cattle. Unidentified flying objects. Huge, otherwordly creatures. Invisible objects emitting magnetic fields capable of causing destruction.A book has now been published about what went on in the late 1990s and early 2000s at what was dubbed the "UFO ranch," an area in west Uintah County known for its 50-year history of perplexing and even frightening events said to have taken place there.Colm Kelleher, the co-author of the recently published "Hunt for the Skinwalker," was a research immunologist at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center, in Denver, when he came across "a very strange job-placement advertisement" in a respected scientific magazine. The wording caught his eye, he said. The ad's author was looking for scientists interested in "exploring the origin and evolution of consciousness in the universe."Kelleher said he found the ad "so completely unusual" that he was compelled to respond.

"I have had a long-standing interest in scientific anomalies," he said in an interview from his home in northern California. Kelleher is currently working as a senior scientist in biotechnology in the private sector.A native of Ireland, with reams of scientific degrees behind his name, Kelleher answered the ad and joined a team of respected mainstream research scientists with backgrounds in physics, biochemistry and veterinary studies, who were working for the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS).Founded by real-estate and aerospace tycoon Robert Bigelow, NIDS was intent on removing the crackpot element from the study of the paranormal. Bigelow's goal was to study paranormal events purely from an unbiased and authentic scientific angle, using the brightest minds and the latest technology.

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Haunting tales told at ghost conference

Describing the "true and shocking tale of a soul-eating house," Rosemary Ellen Guiley, a self-described paranormal researcher and investigator, told the story of a haunted house at a ghost conference here on Saturday. "Everything we're going to learn about today is real," she told some 75 people at the third annual New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society conference at the Hackettstown Community Center. "It's a soul-eating house because, if you die in the home, you don't leave," Guiley said. Guiley described the stories of several people who died in the home and whose ghosts still occupy the building. Among them is a farmer who committed suicide in 1795 and "is probably buried on the property," she said. Guiley and Karl Petry, a psychic and a man who said he can see ghosts, both described their experiences with the Millburn home during the daylong conference. Petry would not provide the exact address of the building, but he did note that on his first trip there with another psychic colleague in 2001, "our minds started to spin."

He could see ghosts as he spoke with the home's owner, who contacted him to examine the house, Petry said. It is not entirely clear why ghosts are tied to that particular home, both Guiley and Petry told the audience, though they offered several guesses. "These are purely speculatory paranormal hypotheses,"Guiley told the crowd, "but I think the energy of the place has a lot to do with it." The building also can "sit on an inter-dimensional doorway,"she said. "The spirit world, if you don't know it already, is a serious place," Kelly Weaver, who presented audio and video of various haunts at the conference, warned her audience. John Wilton, a member of the New Jersey Ghost Hunters Society since 2000, called Saturday's turnout "the best I've ever seen."

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UFO investigator to burn his research

Angry alien investigator Russ Kellet is to torch 20 years of research into UFOs and extraterrestrial activity today... all because of Ant and Dec. Russ, 42, said the comedy duo's film, Alien Autopsy, pokes fun at his hobby by glorifying a hoax, while his life has been dedicated to proving there really is something out there.He has been studying alien phenomena since spotting what he believed to be a UFO near Keighley, West Yorkshire, in the 1980s.Since then, Russ, of Filey, North Yorkshire, has built up his own X Files from sightings reports, photography and video footage. But now they will all go up in smoke.He said: "I'm going to a friend's house and will burn everything - all my footage, videos, and photos - which is 20 years' worth of work."People have been phoning me from America telling me not to do it, but I've had enough... I'm so disillusioned."Ant and Dec's spoof film is glorifying a hoax and taking the mickey out of what these two guys did."

"The two of them are making money on the back of other people's beliefs."They are stars and a job is just a job to them, but to make a film out of something that is a hoax is just undermining what real investigators are doing."I've spent most of my life researching and collecting footage from around the world and no one is bothered. They would rather go and pay money to see Ant and Dec and laugh at UFO investigators."Alien Autopsy tells the story of hoaxers Gary Shoefield and Ray Santilli, who fooled the world with a fake film of an autopsy being carried out on an extraterrestrial.Russ said: "Seeing those two guys from Newcastle come and do this just made me sit up and think, `why am I bothering wasting my time?'"No one listens and the powers- that-be don't want to know the truth. I'm just sick of so-called academics telling me when they see a flying saucer that it's a balloon."

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Blackstar: the conspiracy that never was ?

Those among you who like their skies filled with black helicopters, or indeed secret space launch vehicles, might have already caught a quite remarkable March report in Aviation Week & Space Technology which claims that the US has successfully developed and tested a "two-stage-to-orbit system that could place a small military spaceplane in orbit". The spook system, deliciously dubbed "Blackstar", allegedly comprises a carrier vehicle (codename "SR-3" according to AWST), to which is docked a reusable spacecraft (XOV or "experimental orbital vehicle"). On 4 October, 1998, claims AWST, eyewitness James Petty of Salt Lake City saw "a small, highly swept-winged vehicle nestled under the belly of the XB-70-like aircraft. The vehicle appeared to be climbing slowly on a west-southwest heading. The sky was clear enough to see both vehicles' leading edges, which Petty described as a dark gray or black color".The orbiter apparently lands in a conventional manner, a la Space Shuttle, and reported sightings encompass Hurlburt AFB, Florida, Kadena AB, Okinawa, and Holloman AFB, New Mexico.Provocative stuff. Of course, nobody in the US military has ever heard of Blackstar.

ASWT says "top military space commanders apparently have never been 'briefed-in'," concluding that "most likely user is an intelligence agency" with eyes on the deployment of surveillance equipment comprising "an advanced imaging suite that features 1-metre-aperture adaptive optics with an integral sodium-ion-sensing laser".So what's the solid evidence supporting AWST's story? As noted above, the SR-3 carrier vehicle resembles the XB-70 Valkyrie - legendary in both its technical ambitions and sheer cost.The XB-70 programme, initiated in 1955 by manufacturer North American, was designed to provide a very fast, long-range replacement for the B-52.Powered by six turbojet engines to Mach 3, the XB-70 (left) was 196 feet long with a wingspan of 105 feet. Two prototypes were built at a cost of $700m a pop. The first (AV/1) made its maiden flight in 1964, with sister ship AV/2 taking to the skies in July 1965. The programme was dogged by technical problems from the start, and ultimately doomed in June 1966 when AV/2 collided in midair with an accompanying F-104 Starfighter during a photo call flypast for the benefit of the manufacturers. Two pilots died and the aircraft was destroyed.

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Police baffled by paranormal activity

British police responding to a call about a possible break-in at a pub in northern England Monday found themselves in the middle of a ghoulish riddle. Officers arrived at the Low Valley Arms pub near Barnsley in South Yorkshire, 400 kilometres north of London, after being told the alarm had been set off, but instead of finding any signs of a robbery, they were faced with a shaken landlord convinced he had encountered a ghost with half a face missing in the ladies washroom. Although they saw no ghoul-described as a woman in flowing white gown-officers were shocked to find toilets flushing themselves, said Insp. John Bowler of South Yorkshire Police. Pub landlord Roger Froggat, 55, and his wife Kathryn, 49, moved in a year ago and said they had seen nothing before, despite rumours of a resident spectre. "I heard the alarm go off for a second time, went into the pub and all the television screens had turned on," the pub owner said.

"I went to check the rest of the pub and standing in the women's lavatories was a woman with half her face missing. I was petrified." Officers found no signs of forced entry and were left quite scared, Bowler added. Since the ghost story became public, the pub has become the talk of the town, attracting everyone from mediums to a national television film crew determined to catch a glimpse of the mystery woman should she appear again. Despite their shock, the Froggats said they have no plans to leave their village pub.