Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Giant telescope to view other worlds

They call it the Planet Machine. Weighing 1,000 tons and standing as tall as an 18-storey building, the world's biggest optical telescope is designed to see where no-one has seen before. It has been a gleam in the eye of astronomers for nearly a decade and now they are on the verge of seeing the birth of their brainchild - a telescope that for the first time will enable us to watch other Earth-like planets orbit distant suns.The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be four times bigger than the biggest existing telescope and 10 times more powerful than the hugely successful Hubble Space Telescope.It will use computer optics to eliminate atmospheric interference so that from its mountaintop perch in the bone-dry Atacama desert of Chile it will see further than any terrestrial telescope into the depths of time and space.In addition to seeing "exoplanets" beyond our Solar System, the telescope could quite literally shed light on some of the biggest mysteries of the universe, from the origins of creation to what might happen if time itself comes to an end.

The Australian National University announced this week that it is the latest partner to sign up to the consortium of nine institutions dedicated to building the GMT at a total estimated cost of £310m.The largely American consortium is being led by the Carnegie Institution of Washington which built one of the first large telescopes at the beginning of the 20th century that led the great American astronomer Edwin Hubble to discover that the universe was expanding.

[Rasputin]

"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.

[Rasputin]

The paranormal pictures of William Mumler

In 1861, a man was taking a self-portrait when he captured something on film that had never been seen before. Next to William H. Mumler was a ghost.The photograph sparked controversy and a strange career for Mumler as he took his “talent” and began taking portraits of people who, later on, saw the images of dead relatives next to them.Though his photographs were never proven to be false or genuine, Mumler started a public fascination with the spiritual world that has lived on today.Crista Cloutier is the self-described “world expert” on Mumler’s life and wrote the first chapter in the book “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult,” which is dedicated to the 19th century photographer.“I first heard about Mumler 10 years ago,” Cloutier said. “I was a religious studies major at ASU and a professor suggested him to me for a thesis. After the thesis, I couldn’t let go and continued my research.”Cloutier will present a slideshow of Mumler’s pictures and talk about the man who opened the public’s eyes to the supernatural.More of a hobby, than an obsession, Cloutier discovered that Mumler sold his ghostly self-portrait photographs to the public, with most of them seeing dead relatives next to them after the pictures were developed.Many, at the time, thought it was a scam.

“People started accusing him of breaking into their house and stealing their family photos,” Cloutier said. “It didn’t happen every time. But it happened often enough that he could make a living off of it.”Toward the end of Mumler’s career, he was arrested for fraud, but was never convicted of anything. Cloutier said she has reserved judgment as to whether or not the photographs were real in the interest of conducting her research objectively.“It would close off certain information,” Cloutier said. “I kept an open mind about it. We look at the photos now and they are so vague because we are looking at them with 21st-century eyes, and not 19th- century eyes.”

[Rasputin]

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)

[Rasputin]

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.

[Rasputin]

Inner demons

T. Stokes: The late occult author Lobsang Rampa, once trounced the sceptics who had claimed that it was impossible if spirits existed for them to travel through walls, as in physics, no two substances can occupy the same space at the same time. The author showed in a now famous demonstration, that in showing a glass filled to the brim with water, and asking could anything else occupy the same space ? To various shouts to the negative, he then put in 8 spoon-full’s of sugar, without a drop being spilt.He explained that as the molecular structure of the water had large gaps which were widely spaced, the sugar would dissolve into those gaps and lie between them, So two things could occupy the same space at the same time, disproving one of the basic laws of physics.This same principle explains how ghosts can walk through walls, because the ghosts atomic structure is widely spaced and can pass through the spaces in the wall.

The applying of physics to the paranormal is called Metaphysics, now an increasingly popular avenue of proper study, away from the psuedo-quacks, T.V psychologists, and nonsense-mongery of the sceptics.The widely spaced molecular structure of the ghost allows most people to see right through them, but some people who are extra sensitive do see or feel ghosts and astral bodies of sleepers.Many religionists believe that Heaven is a place in the sky, whereas it is a place that is all around us, and like the sugar in the water experiment, interpenetrates the molecular structure of our physical world.Just as in that famous book, Dante’s Inferno, the author describes his journeys to Heaven and Hell, and the mystic Swedenborg said he travelled to the “Planets,” we ourselves can with tuition and training, travel in a “journey to inner space”The particular place I travelled to is as live and vivid in my heart and mind as if it were yesterday, in my sleep state I found I was walking to some damp stone steps that led down to a large pair of gates, where I took from the wall outside a large key and a lantern, to let myself in, and my familiarity suggested I had been there before, and after walking along inside and holding aloft the lantern I saw that along both sides of a long under ground stone flagged corridor were strange beasts, fierce and frightening to behold, there were seven in number and as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw in the first cage, a large menacing creature, with claws and fangs, the stench of his breath choked me, and as I stood back I saw the name plate over the cage to read, “Anger” so unable to really take this in, and passing on, and peering in to the next cage a green scaly beast with red eyes stared back through the bars, this second creature of such unpleasantness seemed to actually look inside me and in hurrying on to the third I glanced back at the name plate over the cage which read “Envy”Coming to the third cage and with trepidation I held aloft the lantern and the damp dark cage showed a beast just as appalling in nature as the others, and slumped across the far corner, it was a mixture of dirty colours which blended into the squalid brown mass, that represented its body, its nameplate was “sloth” or laziness, in realising that all these 7 beasts, represented the 7 deadly sins, I understood that my reason to be there was to occasionally check that the cages were still holding the creatures, and somehow to ensure this, was my job.

Coming hurriedly down the other side now I saw the foul creature as constantly preening itself, and with a huge tongue washing its body, this beast had a tail that had patches of skin worn away with the preening, yet still wreaking with a smell of sulphur and decay, and curiously wondering what the name for the thing was I read the nameplate, “pride” and so all along this cavern I checked these beasts were safely shut away, and grasping tightly the key to the iron gate, I pressed on until I could breathe a sigh of relief at the door I ran my hand over a large plaque revealing that St Gregory the Great in the 6th century had described these beasts, and I had seen them closely, Lust, Gluttony, Sadness, Envy, Avarice, Anger and Pride, this was the real tale behind the 7 dwarves, who represented these vices, which were originally allied to the 7 chakras of mysticism, and the 7 major planets of Astrology, and 7 categories of soul.

[Rasputin]

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.

[Rasputin]

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."

[Rasputin]

Air Force One subject to internet hoax

A startling Internet video that shows someone spraying graffiti on President Bush's jet looked so authentic that the Air Force wasn't immediately certain whether the plane had been targeted. It was all a hoax. No one actually sprayed the slogan "Still Free" on the cowling of Air Force One.The pranksters responsible for the grainy, two-minute Web video — employed by a New York fashion company — revealed Friday how they pulled it off: a rented 747 in California painted to look almost exactly like Air Force One."I wanted to do something culturally significant, wanted to create a real pop-culture moment," said Marc Ecko of Marc Ecko Enterprises. "It's this completely irreverent, over-the-top thing that could really never happen: this five-dollar can of paint putting a pimple on this Goliath."The video shows hooded graffiti artists climbing barbed-wire fences and sneaking past guards with dogs to approach the jumbo jet.

They spray-paint a slogan associated with free expression.After the video began circulating on the Web on Tuesday, the Air Force checked to see whether the plane had been vandalized."We're looking at it, too," said Lt. Col. Bruce Alexander, a spokesman for the Air Mobility Command's 89th Airlift Wing, which operates Air Force One. "It looks very real."Alexander later confirmed that no such spray-painting had occurred.Ecko acknowledged Friday that his company had rented a 747 cargo jet at San Bernardino's airport and covertly painted one side to look like Air Force One. Employees signed secrecy agreements and worked inside a giant hangar until the night the video was made. Ecko declined to say how much the stunt cost."It's not cheap," he said. "You have to be rich."

[Rasputin]

Soulmates: Our relationship to trees

What is the nature of our relationship to trees? CJ Stone goes beyond a mere hug: Just around the corner from me there is a little park, known as the Castle Grounds. It is called that because there is indeed a “castle” in the middle of it: a small late-eighteenth century folly, complete with crenellated roofs and a mock ruined wall.Parts of the park are very formal, with sunken gardens, square cut hedges, a fountain, and a very fetching statue of an eighteenth century milkmaid, complete with bucket. Personally I always fancied that milkmaid. It’s a pity she’s made of stone.Other parts are more wild, with crumbling footpaths twisting beneath overhanging trees. There’s also a bowls green in the middle of it.When I’m feeling depressed or restless or confused with my life, I like to go and sit in that park and contemplate. I will park myself on a park-bench in the dark cathedral space beneath one particular oak tree, and look out at the shimmering world outside. Usually after an hour or two just watching the fountain, or listening to the wind, I will feel a little better.There are one or two trees in there that I regard as friends.

Now it’s quite difficult to make friends with trees, as their conversation tends to be limited. Also, they don’t get around much, so their point of view can be dismissed as static; but what they lack in variety they make up for in depth. Their conversational style can appear tedious if you are expecting sparkling repartee, but their statements are deeply considered and portentous, and it can take up to a year for them to finish a single sentence.Patience is a virtue, so they say. In the case of trees, patience is the whole of life. Perhaps it is this that can have such a calming effect upon the human psyche. Let’s face it: we are rushed, restless, impatient beings, always running about looking for the next surge of excitement; whereas a tree remains where it is, accepts life for what it is, and merely contemplates life’s changes.Actually, when I say I regard these trees as friends, I really can’t say for certain whether they return the affection or not. They may, they may not, who knows? Perhaps “affection” is the wrong word in any case, implying, as it does, some warmth and animated intent. I suspect that the nature of a tree’s being is wholly different from ours, being conditioned by slow growth and steady awareness - a kind of stretching towards the light, like an old body waking up in the morning, full of aching determination over countless years.Of course, it is in the nature of human beings to want to project onto the world our own thoughts. This is known as the “pathetic fallacy”, the presentation of inanimate objects in nature as possessing human feelings.

We see a face in a tree-trunk, and we ascribe human characteristics to it: as good, or evil, as happy, or sad. And yet - and yet - are we not creatures of nature ourselves? Were we not born of the Earth? Who is to say that we didn’t learn these characteristics from contemplating the world around us in the first place?And trees are full of emotion, however you want to look at it.Take those roots, for instance, like fierce knuckles clenching the soil, the merest fraction of which will extrude above the earth. Can we not read determination into that grip: a powerful unwillingness to let-go, a mighty holding-on against all but the most outrageous winds? That determination for survival is something we share. It is life itself.And in the Maytime, when full of blossom, is not a tree gay, in the original sense of the word: meaning carefree and merry, brightly coloured and brilliant, full of joyousness and life? And when the sap rises in the trees, is it not also rising in us, urging us to music and merriment, to love and laughter, and to the celebration of our lives? And in the autumn, when the leaves are falling, does this not bring to mind the passing of our lives, and the sweet melancholy of remembrance?It’s no wonder that the ancient druids worshipped trees. There is nothing in nature more worthy of our attention.Trees are not only our companions, they are also our main historical resource. In fact, I would argue that what we call the Stone Age - the vast bulk of human history, lasting many tens of thousands of years - was not the Stone Age at all, but the Wood Age.

[Rasputin]

TV show claims Lennon voice recording

The producers of a pay-per-view television seance that will be broadcast in America tonight claim to have contacted John Lennon from beyond the grave. Viewers are being asked to fork out $9.95 (£5.60) to hear him deliver a message to the world. “It’s definitely a voice. It’s a few words,” Paul Sharratt, the British producer of The Spirit of John Lennon, said. The show comes after Sharratt’s unsuccessful pay-per-view effort to contact the late Diana, Princess of Wales, in 2003 and has provoked outrage among Beatles fans and ridicule from scientists. Yoko Ono’s friend and long-established spokesman, Elliot Mintz, has called the enterprise “tacky, exploitative and far removed” from Lennon’s way of life. “A pay-per-view seance was never his style,” he said. But Sharratt insists that Lennon and Ono delved into the spirit world with a seance in 1980 at their flat in the Dakota building in New York to try to contact its former residents. The producers claim that Lennon, who was murdered outside the building later that year, was captured this month by a television crew’s sound equipment after a seance at his favourite New York restaurant, La Fortuna, by a British psychic, Joe Power.

“None of us heard him at all,” Power said. “What happened is it was one of the cameramen who discovered the voice shortly afterwards when he was listening back. This is the most powerful message to the world, what is being said. You listen to one word and it gives you a shiver down the spine. It’s a sentence. It’s very, very clear. It’s one of the most clear messages you would have. It’s not like your normal ‘light flashes on and off’.” Sharratt says that the recording is an example of a paranormal “Electronic Voice Phenomenon”, or EVP. “It’s on one track of a stereo microphone. You have the psychic’s voice on one track — on the other track, another voice. We have had experts down to listen to it. They say it’s a class A case of EVP.

[Rasputin]

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."

[Rasputin]

Who were the Knights Templar ?

Following the colossal success of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, two new thrillers, The Last Templar and The Templar Legacy, have remained firmly planted on the New York Times best-seller list. These books don't chase the chimera of the Holy Grail, so breathlessly pursued by the two protagonists of the Code; instead they focus on one of the links in the chain of clues in Brown's book—that of the extraordinary Order of the Knights Templar. The real Templars bear little resemblance to their fictional re-creations. They were founded in the Holy Land in 1119 by two French knights, who swore to devote themselves to the protection of Christian pilgrims visiting Jerusalem and the holy places. Crusaders had captured Jerusalem in 1099 and then struggled to establish an effective military and political structure to protect their conquests. The contribution of these founding knights was tiny, but they quickly captured the imagination of the Western Christian world. Soon, they were given a base in the al-Aqsa Mosque, which Christians believed had been the site of the Temple of Solomon.

They received papal recognition at the council of Troyes in Champagne in 1129, where they were described as a "military order," a quite unique institution at the time, for they not only swore the usual monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience but made a fourth key promise—to defend the holy places from the infidel. From then on they grew rapidly into an international order, receiving lands in the West that they developed into a great network of preceptories. This enabled them to supply men and money for the cause of the Holy Land, as well as to offer a range of services to crusaders, most important help with finance, a role that they expanded into something like a modern banking service.

[Rasputin]

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.

[Rasputin]

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.