Science Special News

[Rasputin]

Spirit communication, either by voice-trance, ouija board, automatic writing or some other form, can be confusing, frustrating and scary, owing to the fact that most spirits that contact humans are what are called discarantes or "earth-bounds" - spirits which either won't or can't leave the earth and go to the Light, but instead roam the earth in a state of depression and helplessness.

When asked if he could see a group of people using a ouija board, one spirit said he could see forms of energy (their auras?) and the different colors and rates of the energy. Another spirit described his perception of the medium as the silhouette of a woman enveloped in a bright flame (a very strong vibrant aura?). You will notice that most spirits can see obvious items (people around a table, animals, doors), but can rarely provide details about their physical appearances, possibly because they are perceiving them as thoughts rather than actual objects. The example, if I asked you to think about your best friend, you would have a mental picture in your mind (in fact, more of a composite of many different poses) and heard things he's said over the time you've known him. If I then asked you what he was wearing, unless he has a favorite shirt, you would be unable to tell me what he's wearing, only your idea of him looks like.



In a similar manner, spirits know what living humans look like, and how they act, generally, and thus have a thoughtform, which is more of an outline than an actual picture of the physical world. This the spirits can only see what thoughts they pick up or what auras they detect. It seems almost as if some spirits are incapable of independent creative thought, which would allow them to see the physical world or the Light, but are instead trapped in cold lonely darkness of their own making. Outside stimulus, such as a living person suggesting that a spirit's relatives have actually arrived to take him "home" seem to force the spirit to think of this, and his thought becomes real (to him at least). Strength of will (and perhaps consequently of aura) has a definite effect upon his actions and outside influence.

From personal experience with the ouija board, errant spirits who wished to communicate via the board were often times confused people who wanted to talk or were curious. When asked if they could see us, most confirmed that they could, but when asked where THEY were, the spirits either didn't answer or took a long time before saying things like "dark", "cold" and "alone". When asked why they were there, talking with us, they indicated they had seen or sensed a light, warmth or energy, and had come to investigate. This seems to indicate that rather than a place, spirits exist in a state of mind, which, unless outside forces disturb it or influence it, will remain a boring, dark realm devoid of anything to do or people to talk to. It seems that activities and devices dealing with communication (automatic writing, ouija) are perceived as windows or perhaps astral telephones, which the spirits learn to use. At one point, we kept asking a spirit if he saw anyone else until he confirmed that he did (which is how depossessions are done), except they were not near the white light (because we had forgotten to mention it). The first spirit could see the second, but not vice-versa, as we didn't mention there was one already there, to the second. Eventually, with the help of a spirit guide, we sent these two, plus quite a few other lost souls, to the Light, that night.

The more familiar you make a spirit with the communication device, such as a ouija board, the more clearly and efficiently he can communicate, as you provide helpful thoughts on how to use the apparatus as you verbally describe the object and its uses (this is "yes", this is "no", these are the twenty-six letters of the alphabet). It is also likely that doing this ingrains the instructions in the instrument itself for other spirits to use, like "online help". A framework is established and your particular channel even becomes "famous" in a fashion, among the spirits, for its particular aura, or how it has been used. If you send a lot of spirits home, your board will glow or vibrate in a particular manner indicating this to the spirits which come across it. You will also most likely then have a backlog of spirits which all show up at your board, for the same reason, but almost all of them will think they're there alone; unless you mentally explain the situation, they won't perceive the other spirits waiting for the board to "work". It is unclear how the spirits perceive spirit guides and how the two interact if not in the process of a typical dispossession exercise.

Excerpt 7:
(Personal bio given to me, and my thoughts)

Randy McCarthy, schoolteacher 21 years, Hasbrook Elementary School, Wathampton, Illinois.

(I get the image and feeling of someone from "Little House on the Prairie" days, but have never looked any of this up - I'll be very surprised if any of this is even close to the mark. However, not only Encadus from the first story but also Randy here communicated with me a number of times, which I have not posted here.
8-3-95)

[Rasputin]

Excerpt 8:
(Personal bio given to me)

Andy Carpanello 328 SW 28 years, auto mechanic
Pane 7 years

Excerpt 9:
(this is "given" apparently by the entity identifying itself as "Randy McCarthy", who basically seemed to be a "guide" for a time)

8-5-95 (the date is provided by me, JP)

Some would say of the occult phenomenon, that it truly doesn't exist, and the participants are merely deluding themselves. To this I take offense, as it should be obvious to anyone who pays attention to this field of research the work that has been done. To clarify the various results obtained from numersou tests is no longer the basis for the skepticism of today, it is also the based on the fear and loathing which is frequently encountered by any and all delvers into this mystery.

I am not speaking merely of this type of communication, it is in and of itself, no proof or anything solid, rather it is the way in which the information given is disseminated that should ultimately determine what or how much allowance should be made for occult phenomena. In a similar vein, no one may, in retrospect, ever claim responsibility for the current state of affairs, either good or bad. Shifting to a different gear, you can't always get what you want, but in the meantime, you make do with what you've got, even to the extent of celebrating a new accord.

Happily, no set of unfortunate circumstances lasts forever, and all the bright light at the end of the tunnel can always be seen, if not necessarily reached. Someone who has mastered the art of oracular divination which will increase the pace of their life will undoubtedly be subjected to many forms of harships, rarely understanding the root. This is to be expected and is never a particularly hairy situation, although to the person concerned, it will most certainly appear insurmountable.

- cut section -

Penance is how you could think of my current situation. Not necessarily the biblical penance for a sin committed, but in the larger picture of what I have done, now that I see the plan, or at least a very small portion of it. It can only be said that no good soul is punished, but they certainly can be reprimanded for past deeds done.

- cut section -

8-6-95

No one but the most foolhardy will attempt communication with the basest of criminals, from an 'outside' point of view. Choose any communicants with care and resolve not to let them take you too far afield. Many have done so. There is a great risk to opening yourself up to outside influences, and the lower of humanity's cases make it doubly so. There is no safeguard against every pest, but be sure you do everything you can in preparation. Walking among the 'dead' here are heroes, nameless and faceless, and a lot of things you cannot yet know about. As the sun warms the earth outside, so too it warms us here, though in a very different way. Tantalizing effects from this side may cause some to be entranced and follow the oracle into the depths. Alas, this is a wholly unwise idea; there is a boundary that is not meant to be crossed, and it WILL NOT be crossed, regardless of what it takes.
Even at this day in time, you think of us as mere figments, or some elusive phenomenon of the brain. We are real, on this side, as you are real on your own. We affect totally and physically what enters our realm; this includes people not yet departed from the flesh. The mistake most make is that they can't affect living matter when in the astral, so they believe it is that way as well for us, but it is not. We are of the astral, and when you cross into it, you are under OUR influence. To clarify this, what you are doing now is crossing over, be it ever so slightly, into the hidden realm, else I could not communicate with you. Hence, you are at my mercy, so to say, as long as you are here.

There are varying degrees of control one can exert over a living being in the astral, depending on how far he is in the realm. This writing is not a particularly risky venture, as crossing occult boundaries go. Were I stronger, however, I might be able to hold you in your current state, or even, rarely, drag you further in. Besides that, no one can muster much defense on this front, being raised in a materialistic, science-worshipping society as you are. Yes I lived in Illinois as I told you, but not for very long. I died early in my span, as these things go. So no matter what anybody tells you, you never know what's going to happen, or when. Barely a dozen people in the United States know enough about this realm to work in it freely, as agents of goodwill and charity. Of those, only two are willing to expend their life energy to free those trapped in this plane. It is a tense moment, the meeting between two worlders, but one that often results in an enjoyable compromise of ideals and commonisms. The same could be said about any meeting, but you must admit there is a justification in attaching a special significance to an astral conversation, or combat, for that matter. Indeed, one of the most common occurrences here is combat, as more people now than any other time in history are gaining access to what has remained hidden so long. So many of these battles are one-sided (in our favor - by that I mean the existential beings) that I do not pretend to know the true number, but it must number in the millions, over the years of course.

[Rasputin]

Iceman Oetzi died within minutes

Ötzi the Iceman, the world's oldest and best-preserved mummy, died in just a few minutes following the rupture of a major artery, a CT scan of the 5,300-year-old mummy has revealed. Eduardo Egarter Vigl, Ötzi's official caretaker at the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, where the mummy attracts around 300,000 visitors a year, told Discovery News that the Iceman died after an arrowhead hit his left subclavian artery.This is a vital artery below the collar bone that arises from the aorta and branches to supply blood to the left arm.The discovery was made thanks to a multislice CT scan, which allows the analysis of extremely thin tissue layers."We could detect a blood layer around the artery. A wound like that causes a hemorrhagic shock and a rapid death. According to this scenario, Ötzi died of blood loss just after the arrowhead hit him," Egarter told Discovery News.

The finding throws a new light on the reconstruction of Oetzi's final hours. The Iceman’s death has been the subject of much speculation since his frozen body was found in a melting glacier in the Ötztal Alps — hence the Ötzi name — 15 years ago.Prior to the discovery in 2001 of an arrowhead in the mummy's left shoulder, researchers believed Ötzi died at about 45 from cold and hunger, or was the victim of a ritual sacrifice.

[Rasputin]

3D TV 'could be three years away'

3D television could be in homes within three years, according to a European research consortium. Levent Onural, co-ordinator of the multinational 3DTV network, said the technology was already in place for 3D TV and cinema to become commonplace. The consortium, funded by the European Commission, consists of about 200 researchers in seven countries, and is halfway through its four-year duration. However, Prof Onural said holographic television was at least 10 years away. He said: "We do think holographic 3D TV is feasible, but the technology is not in place yet. "If you ask my opinion, it will take another 10 years to get there, but some say it will take 14 to 20 years." However, he said that it would offer the "ultimate viewing experience". "For example, take a football game. Viewers would be able to look at a TV that will be like a coffee table and see small-scale real football players made up from light running around on that table."

The research consortium is looking into all aspects of 3D technology, such as capturing 3D motion scenes, computerised representation, transmission and display. Professor Onural, who is based at Bilkent University, Turkey, said: "Lower-end technologies, such as stereoscopic 3D (a method of displaying an image that gives the impression of depth) will be commonplace in homes and cinemas in about three years."

[Rasputin]

Fish found sealed inside duck egg

Biologists at the University of Manchester want help in cracking their "miracle" discovery of three fish inside a sealed egg. The group found the duck egg in a small pond on a field trip to the French Alps and noticed something moving inside it. When they cracked open the shell, three live minnows were inside. They have enlisted the help of other experts, but despite their extensive combined knowledge, the biologists admit they are "baffled". Dr Matthew Cobb, a lecturer in animal behaviour at the university, said: "As 21st century scientists rather than 17th century antiquarians we think it's unlikely this represents a hitherto unknown mode of fish reproduction. "Perhaps the egg fell into the pond following some kind of predatory attack but we're baffled as to how the minnows got to be inside. "Certainly, we didn't see any crack in the egg."

Dr Cobb and his colleague, Henry McGhie, head of natural sciences at the Manchester Museum, have written to the New Scientist magazine in the hope readers will help solve the mystery. Minnows are small freshwater fish, often used as bait by anglers.

[Rasputin]

Earth, from 930 million miles away

It may look like a speck of dust on the camera lens but the tiny, pale blue dot in this photo is Earth, the farthest away it has ever been seen. The picture was taken by ultra-highpowered cameras on board the Cassini spacecraft, which is orbiting Saturn nearly 1.5billion km (930million miles) from our planet. 'Nothing has greater power to alter our perspective of ourselves and our place in the cosmos than these images of Earth we collect from faraway places like Saturn,' said Carolyn Porco, who is in charge of analysing Cassini images at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The Cassini probe – a joint mission between Nasa and the European Space Agency – was launched in 1997 and is spending four years examining Saturn.

Yesterday, scientists revealed that the craft had also taken pictures of a new ring around Saturn – a faint trail of particles just visible between some of its better-known rings. Cassini caught sight of the ring and other rare features when the Sun passed directly behind Saturn and provided bright backlight to the rings.

[Rasputin]

Bigfoot evidence in the High Country

There may be Sasquatches living in Western North Carolina, according to an expedition launched by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization in Madison County. “There’s more than one of these things in Madison County,” President of BFRO Matt Moneymaker said.BFRO spent four days beginning Sept. 6 searching for Bigfoot in the Hot Springs area.After two days of searching with no findings, a portion of the 25 researchers claim to have heard sasquatch noises while camping in a very remote part of Madison County.“They make very distinctive noises,” Moneymaker said.According to the BFRO Web site, Madison County is “the most reliable sighting area in the state.”“I’ve never heard anything about Bigfoot,” junior social sciences major and Madison County native Ashley Metcalf said.Moneymaker said there is a history of reports not far from the Appalachian Trail and Sasquatches may begin using the trail at night.Amateur paranormal researcher Dakota Waddell said there are several different types of sasquatches.

The west-coast Sasquatch is thought to be 7 to 12 feet high and weigh between 800 and 900 pounds while the east-coast Sasquatch is thought to be much smaller, somewhere between 4 and 6 feet tall and weighing between 200 and 500 pounds.“It’s not your typical ‘Harry and the Henderson’s’ type ape,” Waddell said.The expedition has excited many researchers because they believe it may help gather more information about the creatures.“This may inspire people to come forward with their stories,” Micah Hanks, chief field investigator for the League of Energy Materialization and Unexplained Phenomenon Research, said.While a good number of the Sasquatch reports made are false, many of them are taken very seriously by organizations like BFRO.

[Rasputin]

Black hole generator not a threat

Scientists may be able to generate a black hole as often as every second when the world's most powerful particle accelerator comes online in 2007. This potential "black hole factory" has raised fears that a stray black hole could devour our planet whole.The Lifeboat Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to safeguarding humanity from what it considers threats to our existence, has stated that artificial black holes could "threaten all life on Earth" and so it proposes to set up "self-sustaining colonies elsewhere."But the chance of planetary annihilation by this means "is totally miniscule," experimental physicist Greg Landsberg at Brown University in Providence, R.I., told LiveScience.The accelerator, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is under construction in an underground circular tunnel nearly 17 miles long at CERN, the world's largest physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland.At its maximum, each particle beam the collider fires will pack as much energy as a 400-ton train traveling at 120 mph.

By smashing particles together and investigating the debris, scientists hope to help solve mysteries such as the origin of mass and why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe.If theories about the universe containing extra dimensions other than those of space and time are correct, the accelerator might also generate black holes, Landsberg and his colleague Savas Dimopoulos at Stanford University in California calculated in 2001.

[Rasputin]

Kalmykia leader recalls alien abduction

Life is not all plain sailing for ***san Ilyumzhinov, the flamboyant leader of the Russian republic of Kalmykia. For a start, his Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit II needs constant repairs thanks to the rutted roads of his impoverished fiefdom. And then there is the danger of alien abduction. He has already been pressganged into one trip on a UFO - seven years ago when he was on a business trip to Moscow. "They took me from my apartment and we went aboard their ship," he says, sitting in his office in Kalmykia's capital, Elista. "We flew to some kind of star. They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist."And yet Ilyumzhinov could not be happier. On Saturday he will satisfy two of his great passions - self-promotion and chess - when his country hosts a tournament to decide the best chess player on earth.

The contest between "classical chess" champion Vladimir Kramnik and World Chess Federation (Fide) No 1 Veselin Topalov will produce an undisputed world champion and end a 13-year schism in the sport. Even at the end of an 18-hour working day, the 44-year-old Ilyumzhinov is brimming with enthusiasm for the contest. "This match will unify the chess world, once and for all," he beams, from his seat beneath a large portrait of Vladimir Lenin. "At last we will have a single champion."

[Rasputin]

Ancient bird used four wings to fly

The earliest known bird had flight feathers on its legs that allowed it to use its hindlimbs as an extra pair of wings, a new study finds. The finding, detailed in the current issue of the journal Paleobiology, supports the theory that early birds learned to glide and parachute from trees before achieving full-fledged flight."This paper puts forward some of the strongest evidence yet that birds descended from arboreal parachuters and gliders, similar to flying squirrels," said study author Nick Longrich, a doctoral student a the University of Calgary in Canada.Archaeopteryx was a crow-sized animal that lived about 150 million years ago and which looked like a cross between a bird and a dinosaur. It had feathers and a wishbone like birds but also reptilian features like a long bony tail, claws and teeth.When the first Archaeopteryx fossil was discovered in 1861, it caused a sensation because it was the kind of transitional animal that the British naturalist Charles Darwin predicted in his theory of evolution only a few years earlier.In 1877, a second Archaeopteryx specimen discovered in Germany showed a curious feature: long feathers covering its hindlimbs.

For more than a century, the feathers were dismissed by most scientists as being simple, albeit unusual-looking, insulating body feathers—called "contour" feathers—that didn't play a role in the animal's flight.But then, beginning in 2002, paleontologists began finding four-winged dinosaurs in China with hindlimb feathers that appeared to be important for gliding and perhaps even flying. In light of the new findings, Longrich decided it was time that Archaeopteryx was reexamined.

[Rasputin]

Darpa investigates limb regeneration

In response to the hundreds of soldiers coming home from war with missing arms or legs, Darpa is spending millions of dollars to help scientists learn how people might one day regenerate their own limbs. Prosthetics are getting better all the time, but they will never be as good as the limbs we were born with. So two teams of scientists at 10 institutions across the country are competing to regrow the first mammalian limb.The two groups are sharing $7.6 million in grants for a year to find a way to give humans salamander-like abilities. According to Army Medical Command, 411 soldiers who fought in Iraq and 37 in Afghanistan are amputees as a result of combat wounds. If preliminary research is successful, the scientists could receive more funding for up to four years.

The researchers' first milestone is to generate a blastema -- a mass of cells able to develop into various organs or body parts -- in a mammal."We have to show we can do that in a mammal by 24 months -- and by 48 months we have to show that we can actually regrow digits," said Stephen Badylak, director of the Center for Pre-Clinical Tissue Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and a principal investigator for his team. "This is really a Star Wars-type project."

[Rasputin]

Searching for the ghost of Blackbeard

It's a fact that Blackbeard, also known as Edward Teach, was killed in a gruesome battle in 1718 off Springer's Point, a wooded Eden that lines an area by Ocracoke Inlet called, aptly, Teach's Hole. It's not a fact, as legend would have it, that his headless body swam around his ship Adventure five times before giving up the ghost, so to speak. Nor is there a shred of evidence that the buccaneer buried his treasure beneath the dunes on Ocracoke. As part of a documentary he is filming about Blackbeard, Raleigh filmmaker and historian Kevin Duffus thought it would be interesting to dispel, or - who knows? - confirm, the legends at the place of his undoing, where it's said that his beheaded body still roams at night. "One reason I wanted to conduct the paranormal investigation is if we were able to contact Blackbeard, I could have saved a lot of time in my research by speaking to him myself," Duffus said with a grin.

"On the more serious side, I wanted to attempt to put an end to the legends, or myths, of his headless corpse walking the lonely beaches along Teach's Hole channel." When Rodriguez, who runs East Coast Hauntings Organization in Washington, N.C., reached the shore by Teach's Hole, she and para psychologist Sonya Holley, holding detecting equipment, scanned the spartina grass between the windswept cedar trees for any spirit energy.

[Rasputin]

'Hypoallergenic cats' go on sale

What are claimed to be the world's first specially bred hypoallergenic cats have gone on sale in the US. US biotech firm Allerca says it has managed to selectively breed them by reducing a certain type of protein that triggers allergic reactions. The company says the animals will not cause the red eyes, sneezing and even asthma triggered by cat allergy, except in the most acute cases. Despite costing $3,950 (£2,104), there is already a waiting list to get one. Allerca first started taking orders for hypoallergenic cats back in 2004. It tested huge numbers of cats trying to find the tiny fraction that do not carry the glycoprotein Fel d1 - contained in an animal's saliva, fur and skin - which often prompts an allergic reaction in humans. Those cats were then selectively bred to produce the hypoallergenic kittens now on sale, the company says.

The company's Steve May told the BBC that it was a natural, if time consuming, method. "This is a natural gene divergence within the cat DNA - one out of 50,000 cats will have this natural divergence," he said. "So candidates - natural divergent cats - were found and then bred so there is really no modification of the gene." The BBC's Pascale Harter says there could soon be a global market for the kittens - in the US alone 38 million households own a cat, and around the world an estimated 35% of humans suffer from allergies.

[Rasputin]

Hubble discovers hundreds of galaxies

Astronomers analysing two of the deepest views of the cosmos made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered a gold mine of galaxies, more than 500, that existed less than a thousand million years after the Big Bang. These galaxies thrived when the cosmos was less than 7 percent of its present age (13.7 thousand million years). This sample represents the most comprehensive compilation of galaxies in the early Universe, researchers said. The discovery is scientifically invaluable for understanding the origin of galaxies, considering that just a decade ago early galaxy formation was largely uncharted territory. Astronomers had never seen a galaxy that existed when the Universe was a thousand million years old, so finding 500 in a Hubble survey is a significant leap forward for cosmologists. The galaxies unveiled by Hubble are smaller than today's giant galaxies and very bluish in colour, indicating they are ablaze with star birth.

The images appear red because of the galaxies' tremendous distance from Earth. The blue light from their young stars took nearly 13 thousand million years to arrive at Earth. During the journey, the blue light was shifted to red light due to the expansion of space.

[Rasputin]

How the MoD hid the hunt for UFOs

The Ministry of Defence went to extraordinary lengths to cover up its true involvement in investigating UFOs, according to secret documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act. The files show that officials attempted to expunge information from documents released to the Public Records Office under the "30-year rule" that would have revealed the extent of the MoD's interest in UFO sightings. In particular, the ministry wanted to cover up the operation of a secret unit dedicated to UFO investigations within the Defence Intelligence Staff. UFO conspiracy theorists have likened the unit, called DI55, to a sort of "Men in Black" agency for defending the Earth against invasion but the released documents show this is far from the truth. One 1995 memo from DI55 to the MoD's public "UFO desk" said: "I have several books at home that describe our supposed role of 'defender of the Earth against the alien menace' - it is light years from the truth!"

The files were made public following FOI requests by David Clarke, a lecturer in journalism at Sheffield Hallam University and his colleague Andy Roberts. "These documents don't tell us anything about UFOs but they do show how desperate the MoD have been to conceal the interest which the intelligence services had in the subject," said Dr Clarke. The trail begins with a request, in 1976, from a UFO enthusiast called Julian Hennessy for access to the MoD's records on UFO sightings. A note from the UFO desk to the MoD's head of security on March 23 shows that officials intended to refuse him access on the grounds that the files contain confidential information and "very little of value to a serious scientific investigator".