Emails? Yes, we get lots of them. In response, the Outcast Earth website now provides a convenient email feedback service which will allow our visitors to comment on the various bulletins posted on this page, or any material posted on the site. Just click on the icon you see to the left. All emails will be reviewed for their appropriateness and then posted on this page. The newest material is posted at the top of the page and progresses downward.
If you would like to upload this page to your Twitter, Facebook, Myspace pages or any other social network, you can do so by clicking on this toolbar:
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: OLD OUTCAST EARTH "FOE" ACCUSES THE TEAM OF FRAUD
We received news through our grapevine of friends and associates yesterday that our old foil, Jeremy Riposte, dropped a bombshell in the recent edition of his self-published newsletter entitled ANCIENT FOOTPRINTS. This is a publication he puts out several times a year to promote his paranormal / adventure tour business in Kaua'i. In it was an article entitled "Back from the Dead: When Paranormal Investigators Turn to Fraud."
You may have already guessed this, but the "fraudulent paranormal investigators" listed in the article are the Outcast Earth team members. Jeremy claims to have found alive "Meryl," the step-sister of our former team member Trespass whom we were told was killed in a boating accident years ago.
JULY 22, 2010: Scientists scouring the area around Stonehenge said Thursday they have uncovered a circular structure only a few hundred meters (yards) from the world famous monument.
There's some debate about what exactly has been found. The survey team which uncovered the structure said it could be the foundation for a circle of freestanding pieces of timber, a wooden version of Stonehenge. [Huffington Post]
JULY 21, 2010: Cambridge University experts believe the crudely etched circles are the Neolithic version of a modern office worker's scribbles on a post-it note.
The 6.6in (17cm) chunk of sandstone was discovered by an amateur archaeologist from the bottom of a deep quarry in Over, Cambs., during a university fun day. [Telegraph.uk.com]
JULY 20, 2010: Proton beams have shed new light on the origin of the longest of the Dead Sea scrolls, suggesting its parchment was manufactured locally.
According to a study carried out at the labs of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) in Catania, Sicily, the 28-foot-long Temple Scroll was made in Qumran, in what is now Israel, in the same area on the Dead Sea coast where the faded parchments were found hidden in caves half a century ago. [Discovery News]
JULY 19, 2010: Steve Feltham’s eyes and smile grow wide when the subject of the Loch Ness monsters comes up. “I think they’re out there, certainly,” he says, though he adds with a hint of sadness that it may not be true for much longer. He estimates there are probably a half-dozen creatures left in the lake (down from dozens in earlier eras) and will be fewer each passing year: “Sightings have declined. They’re gradually dropping off of old age, I think.” [Alibi.com]
JULY 16, 2010: After tens of thousands of years under the Siberian frost, a baby woolly mammoth is taking a summer vacation in southeast France.
Baby Khroma, one of the oldest intact mammoths ever found, went on display in a French museum Friday - after it underwent special tests to ensure it was no longer bearing the anthrax believed to have killed it. [Huffington Post]
JULY 16, 2010: The enigmatic smile remains a mystery, but French scientists say they have cracked a few secrets of the "Mona Lisa." French researchers studied seven of the Louvre Museum's Leonardo da Vinci paintings, including the "Mona Lisa," to analyze the master's use of successive ultrathin layers of paint and glaze - a technique that gave his works their dreamy quality. [Huffington Post]
JULY 16, 2010: An extraordinarily toxic bacterium harbored by the "infernal" Styx River might have been the fabled poison rumored to have killed Alexander the Great (356 - 323 B.C.) more than 2,000 years ago, according to a scientific-meets-mythic detective study.
The research, which will be presented next week at the XII International Congress of Toxicology annual meetings in Barcelona, Spain, reviews ancient literary evidence on the Styx poison in light of modern geology and toxicology. [Discovery News]
JULY 15, 2010: Workers at the World Trade Center site are excavating a 32-foot-long ship hull that apparently was used in the 18th century as part of the fill that extended lower Manhattan into the Hudson River. It's hoped the artifact can be retrieved by the end of the day on Thursday, said archaeologist Molly McDonald. A boat specialist was going to the site to take a look at it. [Huffington Post]
JULY 14, 2010: Scientists who exhumed the remains of several members of the Medicis, the clan that dominated the Florentine Renaissance, have conclusively dismissed the theory of family murders, solving a more than 400-year-old cold case. Malaria, not poison as long rumored, killed Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his second wife, Bianca Cappello, according to research to be published in Transactions of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. [Discovery News]
Today, Ruby is a largely forgotten ghost town located near the Arizona - Mexico border. But a century ago, Ruby was a prosperous gold mining community and one of the few "civilized" outposts on a rugged desert frontier. This newsletter, and the accompanying video by the same title, provides the Outcast Earth team's firsthand look at Ruby and an investigation into twin homicides that may have left some lingering spirits among its crumbling buildings. Visit the Outcast Earth YouTube page by clicking here.
JULY 9, 2010: Remote and mysterious Easter Island is bracing for an influx of tourists and problems with Sunday's solar eclipse that is being seen as a mixed blessing for the tiny Pacific territory.
The Chilean island of only 60 square miles is expecting an estimated 4,000 visitors, doubling the population of the barren isle which already suffers from water pollution and deforestation. [Discovery News]
JULY 9, 2010: Where did all the mammoths go? It's a subject that has fascinated naturalists for 300 years. Scientists generally agree that most mammoths died off gradually during the late Pleistocene, probably due to a combination of hunting from humans and environmental change. They've also known that a few isolated mammoth communities managed to survive into the Holocene, which began about 10,000 years ago. [Discovery News]
JULY 7, 2010: ONE OF THE greatest Warner Bros. cartoons of all time is the one about the singing frog. A construction worker demolishing an old building finds a time capsule in the cornerstone. When he opens it, out leaps a grinning green frog, which commences to dance and sing old show tunes: "Hello, my baby... hello, my honey... hello, my ragtime gal...." The construction worker is amazed and quickly sees that this astonishing find will make his fortune. He quits his job and opens a theatre starring his talented amphibian. When the curtain rises on opening night, however, the frog just sits and croaks. [About.com]
JULY 3, 2010: The ancient Romans slaughtered dozens of babies at a villa in England’s Thames Valley, a new study into the tiny remains has revealed.
Located in Buckinghamshire, just northwest of London, Yewden Villa, as the site is known, was excavated in 1912 by Alfred Heneage Cocks, a naturalist and archaeologist. [Discovery News]
NOTE FROM THE WEBMASTER: Recently, we were contacted by a visitor to our website who was a student at Oregon State University during the Nancy Jean Wyckoff murder. Nancy is pictured to the right. You can read about this crime and the haunting legend it may have contributed to by clicking here. The following is the visitor's account of those dark days:
To Whom It May Concern,
I was a student at Oregon State University during the time of the Marlowe Buchanan murder of Nancy Jean Wyckoff in Poling Hall, 5th floor I believe. My best friend lived on the same floor as Nancy Wyckoff and had asked me to stay overnight that night. For whatever reason I refused. I remember my mother waking me up the next morning saying that there was a murder in Poling Hall during the night. I contacted my best friend to see if she was okay, and thank God she was. She stayed at my parents house for the next week because she was too afraid to go back to school and of course the dorm. Many women didn't return to classes right away after that murder. It was a terrifying time at the University. Pranks were being played on students such as you mentioned with the concrete blocks, not just concrete chunks being dropped off of various buildings. I was not aware however that Marlowe Buchanan was behind those "pranks". A body (turns out it was a mannequin) was thrown off of one of the dorms roofs. There were incidents around town that happened supposedly caused by "the murderer", but later were found to be caused by a few histrionic and attention seeking girls in the town. Male students formed an "escort" service for female co-eds, walking them to the library or other areas of the campus after dark. One of these escorts was Marlowe Buchanan. Corvallis Police Department invaded Poling Hall after the murder was discovered and they required residents to give fingernail scrapings and pubic hair samples. My best friend who was from the San Francisco area was so traumatized that she went back to San Francisco shortly after that incident. For a tiny town like Corvallis this murder was huge news. I was from New York and never expected that a murder could happen in such a tiny "backward" little town such as Corvallis. One of the interesting things about this case was that after Buchanan was found to be responsible for the murder, his parents asked that their son be allowed home for the weekend stating that he was an honor student and that they would watch him closely during that weekend visit! Fortunately the judge said no. I remember Nancy Jeans mother saying that "Nancy was a " '70's girl" (whatever that was supposed to mean). I believe that Nancy and her family were from California. From what I can remember Marlowe Buchanan because he was underage, did no prison time. He was sentenced to the Oregon State Hospital, the state mental hospital in Salem, Oregon for psychiatric treatment. I forget how many years Buchanan "served" at the hospital, I believe it was something like 3 and 1/2 years. It was a frightening time for everyone.
JULY 2, 2010: Global warming is turning out to be a savior for archaeologists like Craig Lee from the University of Colorado at Boulder, who are finding ancient relics in recently melted ice patches.
Lee's lucky strike is the oldest known atlatl dart, an early wooden spear-like hunting weapon, in the Rocky Mountains [Discovery News]
JUNE 30, 2010: An image taken in 2008 by the Gemini Observatory has finally been confirmed to be the first direct image taken by a ground-based telescope of an "alien planet" (a planet outside our solar system).
As Geekosystem notes, "While we have images of other alien planets -- a.k.a. "exoplanets" -- such images have been composed via indirect means of observation, such as gravitational fluctuations, rather than as true photographs." [Huffington Post]
JUNE 29, 2010: A group of researchers affiliated with legendary Big Foot Hunter Tom Biscardi left North Carolina Sunday after spending Saturday night camped out in the woods near Highway 18, south of Morganton, to investigate a recent footprint sighting.
The researchers set up cameras but said they didn’t find anything. They told Eyewitness News that they will evaluate what they do have and determine if they will return to look again. [wsoctv.com]
JUNE 29, 2010: Scientists have come up with a possible explanation for a weird monstrous looking bright green gas cloud floating in intergalactic space.
The mysterious cloud was discovered in 2007, by Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel while combing though images for the Galaxy Zoo galactic classification project. [Discovery News]
JUNE 28, 2010: An enigmatic character, dubbed "Horse-Boy," has appeared on Google Street View in Aberdeen, Scotland, and has generated considerable buzz and speculation by Internet users the world over. The man can be seen standing against a wall in a purple shirt and brownish pants wearing a large horse mask.
The BBC writes, "Dozens of BBC news website users have e-mailed from across Europe to say they know who horse boy is." Some have even sent in photos of the mysterious "Horse-Boy." [Huffington Post]
JUNE 28, 2010: A site at Marden, near Devizes, rivalled Stonehenge and Avebury in its day, says English Heritage.The group is about to undertake a six-week dig at the site close to the village, starting on June 28. Unlike Stonehenge and Avebury, Marden Henge no longer has any surviving standing stones, but its sheer size is astounding. [This is Wiltshire]
JUNE 25, 2010: A "psychic" octopus is said by its aquarium owners to have predicted the country's football team will knock England out of the World Cup.
When consulted, Paul the octopus chose a mussel from a jar with the German flag on it ahead of one in a similar jar bearing the cross of St George.
The two-year-old cephalopod has a record of predicting past German results in this manner, his owners say. [BBC]
JUNE 25, 2010: Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator, may have survived several weeks, or even months as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island, according to preliminary results of a two-week expedition on the tiny coral atoll believed to be her final resting place. [Discovery News]
JUNE 23, 2010: France has her share of cryptozoological beasties; in the Auvergne, at the Château de Villeneuve-Lembron, there are two delightfully non-pc murals. One shows the Chiche-face, a sort of starveling she-wolf who eats only obedient wives. These are rare; thus the creature’s emaciation. Opposite is the Bigorne, a bloated, scaly monster with a triple tail that lives exclusively on husbands ruled by their wives. These are many; thus the creature’s obesity [Foretean Times]
JUNE 22, 2010: Twenty-first century laser technology has opened a window into the early days of the Catholic Church, guiding researchers through the dank, musty catacombs beneath Rome to a startling find: the first known icons of the apostles Peter and Paul.
Vatican officials unveiled the paintings Tuesday, discovered along with the earliest known images of the apostles John and Andrew in an underground burial chamber beneath an office building on a busy street in a working-class Rome neighborhood. [Yahoo News]
JUNE 17, 2010: A surveillance camera may have captured the moving image of a ghost, seen in this video. The motion-sensing alarms were triggered at the Habitat for Humanity store in Franklin, North Carolina. The police responded but could find nothing amiss. When store employees checked the surveillance video footage, however, a mysterious figure can be seen moving across the warehouse. The ghostly figure appears near a closed door, walks down a few steps and then across the area. [About.com]
JUNE 16, 2010: Professor David Fontana took a deep breath and opened a side-door into the mechanic’s workshop. He peeked inside but could see virtually nothing through the murky gloom. “Well, here goes,” he mumbled as he stepped into the workshop.
An icy chill rippled slowly down his spine. He looked up, momentarily startled by what he saw. A small piece of engine casing appeared to be levitating a few feet in front of his nose. It tilted slightly to the side and then flew directly towards him. He ducked aside as it whizzed past his head and smashed into the wall behind him. [News Monster]
JUNE 16, 2010: Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of Caravaggio, but 400 years later some of the mysteries surrounding the death of the artist may never be solved.
After a year of digging and analyzing centuries-old bones, the researchers said Wednesday they have identified a set of bones they believe to be Caravaggio's, though they admit they can never be 100 percent certain. [Huffington Post]
JUNE 15, 2010: He was 10 feet tall, with a long beard and yellowish-blond hair, Tim Peeler says.
And in the early-morning hours of June 5, Peeler told authorities, the creature – a Cleveland County version of Bigfoot – wandered onto Peeler’s property in the rural northwest part of the county.
The Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office has filed the case as a “suspicious person report” but says it is keeping an open mind. [Charolette Observer]
JUNE 12, 2010: Early in 1943, Allied forces were massing along the coast of North Africa, preparing to make a push across the Mediterranean. They’d settled on strategically important Sicily as a target… but they needed to convince the Germans that they were aiming somewhere else.
How did they do it? With a great deal of imagination, and the dead body of an unfortunate Welsh laborer who’d died from eating rat poison. [NPR]
JUNE 11, 2010: A Soviet robot lost on the dusty plains of the Moon for the past 40 years has been found again, and it is returning surprisingly strong laser pulses to Earth.
"We shined a laser on Lunokhod 1's position, and we were stunned by the power of the reflection," says Tom Murphy of UC San Diego, who leads the research team that's putting the old robot back to work. "Lunokhod 1 is talking to us loudly and clearly." [NASA]
JUNE 11, 2010: Back in college, when I was majoring in English, I read Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, in which he sings of himself, it's true (in his most famous poem, "Song of Myself"), but he also sings the glories of nature -- including comets and meteors. Specifically, he describes with great accuracy a "strange huge meteor procession," raising questions about whether his inspiration was an actual event. Now that question seems to have been answered by a team of astronomers at Texas State University-San Marcos, headed by Donald Olson, who has earned a solid reputation over the years as one of the pioneers of "forensic astronomy." [Discovery News]
JUNE 10, 2010: Brad Pitt may have no use for religion, but his psychic tells Life & Style he is very spiritual and often seeks divine advice. [Huffington Post]
JUNE 10, 2010: Back in August of 1996, headlines around the world were ablaze with three remarkable words: "Life on Mars!" The evidence was circumstantial but compelling: a Martian meteorite recovered in the Antarctic contained what seemed to be fossilized bacteria. NASA's breathless press conference breaking the news, which pre-empted daytime programming, signaled that the discovery should be taken very seriously. But before long, scientists came to the general conclusion that it was probably all just a mistake. Never mind. [TIME]
JUNE 10, 2010: What happens when we die? Do we rot into the ground, or do we go to heaven (or hell, if we've been bad)? Experiments suggest the answer is simpler than anyone thought. Without the glue of consciousness, time essentially reboots. [Huffington Post]
JUNE 7, 2010: How did the world's largest living reptile, the saltwater crocodile, reach so many South Pacific islands separated by huge stretches of water despite being a poor swimmer? Apparently, like a surfer catching a wave, these goliaths can ride currents on the ocean surface to cross large areas of open sea, researchers now reveal. [Yahoo News]
JUNE 7, 2010: Archaeologists believe they have found the world's best-preserved gladiator cemetery in York after unearthing skeletons that suffered the kind of violent injuries usually sustained in a Roman amphitheater, researchers said on Monday.
The York Archaeological Trust has dug up 80 skeletons that date from the first century AD to 4 AD. They were found at the Driffield Terrace site in York where excavation work started in 2004. [Discovery News]
JUNE 7, 2010: Ray Midgett hunts the Corolla beaches on the Outer Banks of North Carolina almost every day.
"Beachcombing, or metal detecting, or relic hunting is in my blood," said Midgett, a retired government worker who hits the sand between October and April.
"There are so many shipwrecks up here, it's just beautiful." [CNN]
JUNE 6, 2010: One small step for man, one giant leap for modern art?
Andy Warhol and five other artists likely left a 1969 calling card — a so-called moon museum of six sketches etched in miniature on a penny-wide ceramic chip — on the Apollo 12 lunar lander, an upcoming PBS show concludes. [USA Today]
JUNE 3, 2010: The unknown visitor came from deep space. It passed nearly as close to the Earth as the moon on May 21st. Its spectrum didn't match any known asteroid. At a feeble absolute magnitude of +28.9, the traveler must have only been about the size of a truck.
Object 2010 KQ, what are you? Is this a scouting ship for Stephen Hawking’s hypothesized evil aliens planning a mass invasion of Earth? [Discovery News]
JUNE 2, 2010: MENTION THE USE of a Ouija board to a paranormal research group these days and you’ll get a lot of head shaking and statements about “opening portals” and “demonic entities”. Mention it to religious fundamentalists and you’ll practically see them shudder and back away on shaky legs, as if the board was created by Satan himself as a means of enslaving human souls. [About.com]
MAY 30, 2010: Archaeologists have discovered the 3,300-year-old tomb of the ancient Egyptian capital's mayor, whose resting place had been lost under the desert sand since 19th century treasure hunters first carted off some of its decorative wall panels, officials announced Sunday. [Huffington Post]
MAY 28, 2010: Field&Stream.com has many readers, and naturally the editors get a lot of mail. Some of it offers praise or suggestions. Some of it offers criticism and anger. And sometimes - every once in a great while - some of it broaches subjects and asks questions so profound we feel compelled to share with readers. Such is the case with this letter (portions of which are published below) from one Odie Ellis.
Mr Ellis, it seems, wants the federal government to list Bigfoot under the Endangered Species Act. No, really. [Field & Stream]
MAY 26, 2010: A number of sightings have been reported over the years at the New Lanark World Heritage site in the Clyde Valley, but there has so far been no evidence to back up witnesses' claims.
But CCTV footage of the hotel’s rear car park captures an image that staff are convinced is in fact a ghost. [STV]
MAY 26, 2010: At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti, known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor, and architect, was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. [Huffington Post]
MAY 25, 2010: The house made famous in the 1979 film "The Amityville Horror" is up for sale in New York – ghosts not included.
The five-bedroom Dutch Colonial went on the market Monday for $1.15 million. [Huffington Post]
MAY 22, 2010: Paranormal researcher Javier Ortega provides insight on a video currently circulating that purportedly shows the ghost of a girl at a home in Lima, Peru. According to the reporter on the video, "What you are seeing is not a recreation nor a fabricated camera trick. It's the photograph of a ghost. It's the spirit of a little girl who died in this house in Magdalena, and who has remained here in the shadows, hidden between the walls of the home.
MAY 21, 2010: A snaggle-toothed, furry creature with a bald face and a rat’s tale has mystified natives in northern Ontario, but they have a name and a history for it.
“The elders used to see it a long time ago,” the manager of Sam’s Store in Big Trout Lake told the Star on Friday.
“No one has seen one for 40 years or so. The elders have a word for it: omajinaakoos. In English, it means ‘the ugly one’.” [thestar.com]
MAY 20, 2010: Airborne lasers have "stripped" away thick rain forests to reveal new images of an ancient Maya metropolis that's far bigger than anyone had thought. [National Geographic]
MAY 15, 2010: Scots have long enjoyed the reputation for being handy in a scrap. But the country doesn’t rely on mere flesh and blood bruisers, oh no. There are tales aplenty of altogether different scary scrapers too and here are just a few of them. [Caledonian Mercury]
VISITOR COMMENT RECEIVED ON MAY 15, 2010:
Re: Meridian's story of the kidnapping of June Robles.
For the record, June Robles, my 2nd cousin and godmother, still lives in Tucson.
The modern play 'June in a Box' is a far fetched, poorly portrayed version of the event, and unauthorized.
Her kidnapping was not a hoax nor did the family ever perpetrate it as such. All of the twisted reports and stories are the reasons she has never commented on the story to the public.
BTW - she is in her early 80's
MAY 12: 2010: rchaeologists working on Easter Island have disproved the 50-year-old theory that the road system on the island was used to move the famous statues around. [Blog About History]
MAY 10, 2010: Prahlad Jani, an 82-year-old Indian yogi, is making headlines by claims that for the past 70 years he has had nothing -- not one calorie -- to eat and not one drop of liquid to drink. To test his claims, Indian military doctors put him under round-the-clock observation during a two-week hospital stay that ended last week, news reports say. During that time he didn’t ingest any food or water – and remained perfectly healthy, the researchers said.
MAY 4, 2010: It prowls desolate, forested parts of southern New Jersey, killing livestock, leaving behind odd footprints and filling the night air with chilling sounds.
At least that's how legend and folklore describe the creature known as the Jersey Devil. (Not to be confused, by the way, with the New Jersey Devils, the professional hockey franchise named after the legendary creature.)
At the Paranormal Museum in Asbury Park, N.J., a recently opened exhibit features a variety of artifacts, including reproductions of a Jersey Devil skull, drawings and relics. [AOL News]
MAY 2, 2010: Dr Bob Sharp, 64, is the retired head of the department of sports studies at Strathclyde University. He was part of the team that put together Scotland’s first degree in outdoor education. He has also been involved in mountain rescue for 33 years, 12 of them as leader of the Lomond mountain rescue team. [Caldonian Mercury]
MAY 2, 2010: Last November, the Centre For Inquiry (CFI) hosted Monsters of the Deep! at Conway Hall in London’s Red Lion Square. Meetings devoted to marine cryptozoology are few and far between, but then the same might be said about crypto zoology meetings in general. Meetings about academic crypto zoology are rarer than sightings of crypt ids themselves. [Fortean Times]
MAY 2, 2010: Referring to the Skunk Ape story in last week’s editions of The Valdosta Daily Times, the man’s voice paused on the recorded phone message.
“... I saw it.”
The Times received calls from readers who believe they have seen what may be a Skunk Ape in South Georgia. One reader account came from Brooks County, the other from Berrien County. [Valdosta Daily Times]
NEW ENEWSLETTER POSTED ON MAY 2! Enewsletter 2-2010: Tucson's Fiery Ghost Hotel. In December 1970, on the cusp of the Christmas holiday, a fire mysteriously broke out on the fourth floor of the renowned Pioneer Hotel in Tucson, Arizona. That incident is still remembered as the worst tragedy to ever befall the city with over two dozen people, including many children, killed in the blaze. Today, the Pioneer Hotel is thought to be one of the most haunted buildings in the city as a result of the 1970 fire. The Outcast Earth team investigates the blaze, the arsonist who set it, and rumors of ghosts who still linger in the Pioneer's hallways.
MAY 1, 2010: Orbs. Love them or hate them there's no getting away from them. Particularly if you're using a compact digital camera and firing the flash during your photography.
For those who have been out of the loop orbs are light coloured (generally) circular patches on photographs. Many claim that these are spirits or the first manifestation of a ghost lacking sufficient energy to fully manifest. When these images have been blown up it is claimed that faces can be seen inside. Further claims relate to size, distance from camera and orbs allegedly interacting with individuals. And there are others who claim that orbs are dust particles, water vapour, insects etc. close to the camera and illuminated by the on camera flash, this gives an out of focus highly reflective image. [Charles Fort Institute]
MAY 1, 2010: They are taken to exams, job interviews and weddings in the hope they will bring good fortune.
But rather than being mere superstition, lucky charms do actually work, psychologists claim.
Researchers told half the golfers on a putting green that they were playing with a lucky ball, and the rest that they were playing with a normal one. [Mail Online]
APRIL 30, 2010: Earlier this week a group of Chinese Christians held a news conference to announce they were 99.9 percent sure they had found Noah's Ark. Most likely, the claim is false, but that won't stop Ark enthusiasts from believing the biblical boat is out there somewhere. [FOX News]
APRIL 28, 2010: Noah's Ark has been found atop a mountain in Turkey, a team of Turkish and Chinese evangelical explorers said Monday, April 26.
The 15-person team claims to have recovered fragments of wood and pieces of rope from a structure on Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey that carbon dating has put at 4,800 years old, roughly coinciding with the time the biblical flood was said to have been occurred. [Huffington Post]
APRIL 27, 2010: Satellite pictures appear to reveal the Lord's bearded face staring out of the ground in eastern Hungary.
Eagle-eyed web browsers noticed it while looking at Google Maps images of remote farmland.
Last month, we reported how the Son of God's face was spotted burned into the cooking fat of a pan of bacon. [Daily Telegraph]
APRIL 27, 2010: What lurks beneath the dark waters of Scotland's Loch Ness? Newly released documents on display Tuesday in Scotland show that during the 1930s, police in Scotland were convinced some sort of creature inhabited the Highlands lake – so sure, in fact, that they worried about how to protect it from big-game hunters. [Huffington Post]
NEW FEATURE ON ABANDONED AMUSEMENT PARKS POSTED ON APRIL 22! The first is a small abandoned waterpark located on the Interstate-10 frontage road near the Ina Road exit. The park can be easily seen from the highway as you're entering Tucson from the north. Despite some diligent hunting through newspaper archives and on the Internet, I was not able to find much background information on this park... Click here for more.
APRIL 16, 2010: A mystery beast that resembles a chupacabra ("goat-sucker"), a legendary, fearsome and possibly mythical beast said to inhabit parts of the Americas and Puerto Rico, is seen shortly after its capture in a village in Suining, Sichuan Province on March 24.
In this case, the gray colored animal wasn't attacking goats, but chickens and it was the fowls' cries that alerted village Ke Suying to find the mystery predator tearing into his birds. He tried to drive it away with a stick but failed, though later with the help of neighbors caught it in a steel net. [Global Times]
APRIL 14, 2010: Before he died at Pearl Harbor less than a month after turning 18, Gerald Lehman sent letters home to his mother in Michigan — letters that she treasured and saved.
Unknowingly, Lehman was also sending home something that wouldn't be useful until decades later — his own DNA. [USA Today]
APRIL 11, 2010: Our Loch Ness Monster is famed the world over, and pops up in very strange circumstances from time to time.
Now she has surfaced at the centre of an art mystery in Italy.
This centres around a charcoal drawing dating from 1949, which is described as Loch Ness Monster and Black Man without a Face, and which could possibly have been drawn by famous Dutch artist, MC Escher. [The Press and Journal]
APRIL 10. 2010: The Turin Shroud, which is believed by some Christians to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, has gone on display for the first time in 10 years.
The shroud is expected to draw some two million visitors to the northern Italian city over the next few weeks.
The cloth shows the faint image of a bearded man with stains of blood on his hands and feet. [BBC]
APRIL 9, 2010: A three-year-old German boy who was brought back to life after his heart stopped for three hours claims he met his grandmother in heaven.
The boy, identified in media reports only as Paul, was playing on his own beside a lake at his grandfather's property in Brandenburg when he fell in, the Bild newspaper reports. [9MSN]
APRIL 8, 2010: HAVE YOU LIVED BEFORE? The concept of reincarnation -- that our souls may experience many lifetimes over centuries, maybe even thousands of years -- has been present in virtually every culture since ancient times. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Aztecs all believed in the "transmigration of souls" from one body to another after death. It's a fundamental precept of Hinduism. [About.com]
APRIL 6, 2010: The Turin Shroud, said to be the burial cloth of Christ, was secretly hidden in a Benedictine abbey during the Second World War because the Vatican feared that Adolf Hitler wanted to steal it. [Telegraph.co.uk]
APRIL 5, 2010: 24 August, AD79. The day one volcanic mountain came to life and two cities met their deaths.
Pompeii and the nearby settlement of Herculaneum were consumed by a mixture of heat, falling pumice stone and ash.
Mount Vesuvius, about 9km (5.5 miles) away, had exploded, sending a mass of volcanic debris high into the air, which then landed like a military bombardment on the citizens of the two cities below.
Estimates of deaths in both places range from between 10,000 and 25,000. [BBC]
APRIL 2, 2010: The former boyfriend of Olivia Newton-John, who vanished five years ago, has given private investigators conclusive proof he is alive in the hopes everyone will now leave him alone. Patrick McDermott, missing since a 2005 fishing trip in California, reportedly sent voice messages and other documents to Philip Klein, who was hired by NBC's 'Dateline' to track him down. Klein told the Daily Telegraph on Thursday that after reviewing the items, he and his team had "concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. McDermott is alive." [PopEater]
APRIL 2, 2010: Christianity holds that every living being, from the tiniest insect to the largest whale, has a chance at entering the pearly gates. Psalm 145:-9-10,13,15-21 reads, “God loves all His creation and has made plans for all His children and the lesser creatures to enjoy His eternal Kingdom.” Don’t expect to see your favorite individual plant in heaven, however. That’s because the Book of Genesis suggests all animals have souls, but plants do not. Genesis 1:30: “To every animal of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens and to every creeping thing on the earth, in which is a living soul, every green plant is given for food.” [Discovery News]
APRIL 2, 2010: There's no story in the Bible about a long-eared, cotton-tailed creature known as the Easter Bunny. Neither is there a passage about young children painting eggs or hunting for baskets overflowing with scrumptious Easter goodies. And real rabbits certainly don't lay eggs.
So why are these traditions so ingrained in Easter Sunday? And what do they have to do with the resurrection of Jesus?
Well, nothing.
Bunnies, eggs, Easter gifts and fluffy, yellow chicks in gardening hats all stem from pagan roots. They were incorporated into the celebration of Easter separately from the Christian tradition of honoring the day Jesus Christ rose from the dead. [Discovery News]
APRIL 2, 2010: Discovered in 1902, little is known about the monkey, named after the region in Africa in which it lives.
But scientists have now discovered it spends most of its life in the trees of a bamboo forest, eating young leaves to avoid getting poisoned.
Very few primates depend on bamboo, and the Bale monkey's reliance on it makes the primate vulnerable to extinction.
Researchers from Ethiopia, US and Norway describe the behaviour of the Bale monkey for the first time in the International Journal of Primatology. [BBC]
APRIL 2, 2010: The Shroud of Turin, the controversial piece of 14- by 4-foot linen that some believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, will enter the 3D age when it goes on display for six weeks after Easter.
Special two-filter glasses, just like the 3D glasses that hit movie theaters with the recent releases of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, are set to make their way to the Turin Cathedral. [Discovery News]
APRIL 1, 2010: As the story goes, former Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa has attended every event at Giants Stadium since 1976, buried in a final resting place somewhere under the west end zone.
As former New York Giants punter Sean Landeta once joked, "It gives a whole new meaning to kicking into the coffin corner." [New York Daily News]
APRIL 1, 2010: Happy April Fools' Day! This year, at HuffPost Books we're celebrating April Fools' by looking back at some of the greatest literary hoaxes of all time. From a faked document by Roman Emperor Constantine to the woman who posed as a young transvestite prostitute in a series of "memoirs," the tradition of less-than-truthful writing is as old as writing itself. The authors below go beyond James Frey changing some details of his life story; these people invented entirely new personas and documents that left the whole world fooled. [The Huffington Post]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: YES, MUSIC WAS ALLOWED AT ALCATRAZ: We noted this a while ago on our YouTube page but people are missing it, I think. The part in the narration that says that music was not allowed at Alcatraz is an error. Our initial research noted that music was not allowed, but after lots of our YouTube visitors began to dispute that claim, we checked again with the National Park Service. This time, the NPS said that music was allowed. So again, that part of the video is in error and you can ignore that comment. Our bad. Thanks.
VISITOR COMMENT POSTED ON YOUTUBE: I work there as a volunteer and I've spent several overnights in the cellhouse and I've heard a lot of strange sounds. Other staff have told me they've seen ghostly images (one was a civil war soldier, another a guard). Is it haunted? I can't say. The banjo music is a bit far fetched, imo. BYW, Capone spent the last year and a half in the prison hospital because of his mental state. Although, yes., he did practice his banjo in the basement in his early years on the island. –zazozung
MARCH 31, 2010: The ancestors of modern Scottish people left behind mysterious, carved stones that new research has just determined contain the written language of the Picts, an Iron Age society that existed in Scotland from 300 to 843.
The highly stylized rock engravings, found on what are known as the Pictish Stones, had once been thought to be rock art or tied to heraldry. The new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, instead concludes that the engravings represent the long lost language of the Picts, a confederation of Celtic tribes that lived in modern-day eastern and northern Scotland. [Discovery News]
MARCH 29, 2010: The stone spheres of Costa Rica – known locally as Las Bolas – have been the focus of University of Kansas researcher John Hoopes, who has evaluated the spheres for protection as a Unesco World Heritage Site. [BBC]
MARCH 29, 2010: The missing pyramid of an obscure pharaoh that ruled Egypt some 4,300 years ago could lie at the intersection of a series of invisible lines in South Saqqara, according to new astronomical and topographical research.
Connecting the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the 6th Dynasty between 2,322 B.C. and 2,151 B.C., these lines would have governed the sacred space of the Saqqara area, in accordance with a number of criteria such as dynastic lineage, religion and astronomical alignment. [Discovery News]
MARCH 29, 2010: Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor, the Egyptian antiquities authority said Monday.
These recessed niches found in nearly all ancient Egyptian tombs were meant to take the spirits of the dead to and from the afterworld. The nearly six-foot- tall (1.75 meters) slab of pink granite was covered with religious texts. [The Huffington Post]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: Yes, plane wreckage from World War II is still being uncovered to this day in Oregon. But perhaps one of the most amazing discoveries concerned a vanished aviator named Frank Lupo. The 22-year old U.S. Navy pilot mysteriously disappeared on December 3, 1945, while flying a training mission over Crater Lake, Oregon. Lupo reported that his external fuel tank had run dry and he was switching to a full tank. That was the last that was heard or seen of him. Twenty-five years later, a national park ranger was hiking the lake’s east end when he had an eerie feeling that he was being watched. He looked up to see a human skull perched on top of a nearby log, staring back at him. The skull would turn out to be the only surviving remains of Frank Lupo. The identification was made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation based on Lupo’s dental records.Click here for more.
MARCH 26, 2010: Loggers working near the Oregon coast discovered the wreckage of a World War II-era warplane in woods not far from a naval air station decommissioned in 1948, military and police officials said Thursday.
Investigators said human remains may be in the aircraft.
The origins of the Curtiss SB2C Helldiver, a U.S. Navy dive bomber, are a mystery. The crash site is not far from two naval air stations that were active during World War II. [Discovery Channel]
MARCH 24, 2010: Anthony Ambrose remembers his parents' fear 31 years ago, when five teenagers close to his age disappeared in Newark, his hometown. "Our parents were wondering, 'Was this a random act? Was it targeted?' " Ambrose says. "In my area, there was concern by my parents, 'Is there someone going around kidnapping kids?' " [USA Today]
MARCH 20, 2010: ALIENS could be the latest to weigh in on the nuclear waste storage debate after UFOs were spotted near the proposed Territory facility.
Muckaty Station manager Ray Aylett said he saw UFOs hovering over a part of his station north of Tennant Creek last Wednesday.
He said he spotted strange lights between the two sites on the property under consideration for the dump. [ntnews.com.au]
VISITOR COMMENT POSTED ON MARCH 16, 2010: I happened to be doing a search on Wake Island and the Japanese ship Hayate on the computer recently and came across your excerpt of Wake Island. Back in 1996, I was in the U.S. Marines and was sent to Wake for a one week operation for a marine unit to test the AA stinger missile because of the need for unrestricted airspace. While on island I had plenty of time to search and explore and even do some scuba diving. On one particular dive I and my partner came across a huge chain at approx. 100 feet in water depth. This chain was obviously an anchor chain and we followed it to the edge of the reef where it literally dropped off into the abyss. At the other end was an anchor maybe 7 feet in height approx. 60 yds towards the island. I became extremely interested in this find and upon returning to Okinawa, Japan I began to research this discovery in the military library and came to find that this anchor and chain belonged to the Japanese ship Hayate which was the first Japanese ship sunk in WWII. The book showed a black and white photo of a ship that had been sunk but hanging on the edge of the reef by it's anchor. Subsequently, it had slid off the reef and fell into the deep blue abyss.
I also felt a eery presence at the POW 98 rock but never mentioned it to anyone. I know where this anchor is approx. still to this day. Just for yur info... The Hayate is no longer within scuba depth, only by deep sea rig I am guessing. The anchor chain just drops off the edge of the reef into a deep blue. Not sure of the depth at the edge of the reef but I am guessing 3,000 feet straight down. –Scott A.
FEBRUARY 5, 2010: The last member of an ancient tribe that has inhabited an Indian island chain for around 65,000 years has died, a group that campaigns for the protection of indigenous peoples has said.
Boa Sr, who was around 85 years of age, died last week in the Andaman islands, about 750 miles off India's eastern coast, Survival International said in a statement. [CNN]
FEBRUARY 2, 2010: Skeptics who say that the Roswell UFO crash was never discussed before 1980 with the publication of the seminal book "The Roswell Incident" are wrong. In fact, the 1947 UFO event in New Mexico was brought up in many ways -and at many times- throughout the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's. [Blogspot]
FEBRUARY 1, 2010: If you get a chance, be sure to catch the episode of American Paranormal (a new series on the National Geographic channel) on Bigfoot. It's quite good and presents new evidence in the form of a thorough, expert analysis of the famed Patterson-Gimlin film. They pretty much prove, to my satisfaction at least, that the creature in the film could not have been a man in a suit. Physically, anatomically and costume-wise, it's just not possible. I highly recommend checking it out. If this first episode is any indication of what this new series is going to be like, it's going to be great! [About.com]
JANUARY 30, 2010: Italian scientists are seeking permission from French authorities to exhume the body of Leonardo da Vinci in order to conduct carbon and DNA testing they hope will solve many of the mysteries about the famous artist, the Associated Press reported Friday.
Should da Vinci’s skull be found intact, the scientists believe they can answer a question that has long fascinated scholars and the public alike: the identity of the "Mona Lisa”, and whether or not it was a self-portrait in disguise. [Red Orbit]
JANUARY 27, 2010: A resident of Nevada City, Calif., William Barnes is a modern-day explorer whose strong sense of wonder fuels his drive to uncover age-old mysteries that have haunted humankind for centuries.
While some have written off Big Foot as a corny hoax after the Roger Patterson film of 1967 was widely discredited, many go on in search of the allusive man-beast, undetered in their quest for cryptozoological truth. [The Humboldt Beacon]
JANUARY 27, 2010: Whether birds first evolved flight as ground dwellers or took to the skies from trees has been a longstanding debate.
A new study of an ancient four-legged creature called Microraptor gui, poised on the boundary between dinosaurs and birds, suggests that the arboreal, or tree-living, idea may be correct. [www.msnbc.com]
JANUARY 25, 2010: McG's Wonderland shingle and Warner Bros. TV are plotting a spinoff to the CW's long-running spooky drama "Supernatural."
But rather than produce it for TV, the new show -- "Ghostfacers" -- is heading straight for the Internet. "Ghostfacers" reps the latest expansion into the digital studio space for Wonderland, which is producing the "Supernatural" spinoff with Warner Bros. TV's Studio 2.0. [Variety]
JANUARY 23, 2010: Eric Altman is awaiting test results on “some possible hair samples.” Altman is the director of the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society. He collected the samples recently in Clearfield and Jefferson counties, which he described as Pennsylvania’s “hot area” for bigfoot reports.
Bigfoot sightings in the midstate are dwarfed by the dozens of reports that have come out of the state’s north-central wilds, Altman said. Adams and York counties provide some reports in “areas that are more remote, a little more wooded,” he said. [Pennsylvania Local News]
JANUARY 21, 2010: New Orleans is a haven for fun-loving revelers, but beneath the surface of this colorful coastal city lay ghosts and spirits—perhaps more than in any other city in the United States. We’ve narrowed down New Orleans’ plethora of scary places to six, including a hauntingly beautiful cemetery, an alleyway with a past and a bar beloved by Tennessee Williams. [Finding Dulcinea]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: If you're interested in more on haunted New Orleans, check out these archived features from Outcast Earth.
JANUARY 21, 2010: Scientists from the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in the U.S. have calculated that 1.2 million years ago, at a time when our ancestors were spreading through Africa, Europe and Asia, there were probably only around 18,500 individuals capable of breeding (and no more than 26,000). This made them an endangered species with a smaller population than today’s species such as gorillas (approximately 25,000 breeding individuals) and chimpanzees (an estimated 21,000). They remained an endangered species for around one million years. [www.physorg.com]
JANUARY 20, 2010: Some say it resembles a prowling hyena, others a ferocious wolf.
While there are those who have seen the mysterious creature menacing Buckshaw Village and describe it as a terrifying cross between a wild boar and some kind of big cat.
Whatever it is, it has been blamed for mauling several deer to death, and one resident's Alsatian dogs were left quivering with fear after a particularly close encounter.
Now one intrepid villager has taken a photograph of what locals have dubbed the Buckshaw Beast, sparking a feverish online debate about what exactly it might be. [Mail Online]
JANUARY 19, 2010: Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old temple that may have been dedicated to the ancient Egyptian cat goddess, Bastet, the Supreme Council of Antiquities said Tuesday. The ruins of the Ptolemaic-era temple were discovered by Egyptian archaeologists in the heart of the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in the 4th century B.C. [Huffingtonpost.com]
JANUARY 19, 2010: UFO investigators see references to rocket ships, aliens and astronauts that go back to the days when humans first put chisel and paintbrush to rock. More than 6,000 years later, objects that are unidentified - at least at first - continue to appear in the skies and generate buzz. [www.msnbc.com]
JANUARY 19, 2010: A mysterious visitor who has left roses and a bottle of Cognac at the original Baltimore gravesite of Edgar Allan Poe failed to appear this year for the first time in 61 years.
Is the mysterious ritual nevermore?
Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House, tells The Baltimore Sun that a "Poe Toaster," whose identity is unknown, has shown up every Jan. 19 since 1949. "I'm confused, befuddled," Jerome says. "I don't know what's going on." [USA Today]
JANUARY 18, 2010: Animal experts are baffled by a small, hairless creature found dead on the golf course at Runaway Bay in Wise County.
Maintenance worker Tony Potter picked it up Wednesday morning. To him it looked a little like a raccoon with no hair.
"Definitely not a dog," he said. [www.kens5.com]
JANUARY 18, 2010: Cruises with a theme are all the rage these days, from Elvis cruises to cougar cruises to, yes, even cruises that focus on the paranormal.
Television personality David Wells, billed as one of the world's leading astrologers, psychics and "past-life therapists," announced this week he'll be hosting a voyage focused on the topic for the first time in June on Royal Caribbean's Liberty of the Seas. [USA Today]
JANUARY 13, 2010: Hound of the Cannock hills?
A wave of paranormal and mysterious episodes in the town have helped usher in a new decade of spooky sightings, with readers encountering UFOs and wild wolves in the first week of the year.
The area has a long standing association with paranormal activity – with websites across the World recording spooky incidents in the area. [Sunday Mercury.net]
JANUARY 13, 2010: The legend may be back, just as mysterious and dark, to stalk the unsuspecting.
Until last weekend, Cesar Garcia and brother-in-law Juan Miranda saw their life near Horizon City as secluded and peaceful.
They moved to the area from Chicago three years ago, but have suddenly been beset by strange and unexplained occurrences.
Their rabbits went into hiding, their cat spent the weekend on the roof of their house, their roosters didn't crow, and their dogs didn't bark.
And at least 30 of their chickens were killed by an unknown interloper.
The brothers are hesitant to say what they think spooked their animals or killed their chickens.
But when pressed, they said it: El Chupacabras. {El Paso Times]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: A NICE MESSAGE FROM A GHOST-HUNTING COLLEAGUE
Hi Team, I just want to say that i really respect you and your team members, you did a good job on Alcatraz. I run my own team here in the UK, we are based in Loughborough in Leicestershire, we are hoping to be filming at Alcatraz in the near future. If you want to go to my website its, www.thespookedteam.co.uk we did have a load of filmings on the old site but the service providers messed up and we lost everything so got to start again which is a right pain in the butt!!! If your ever in the UK or want to come to the UK and do some work with us your all welcome any time.Are you on facebook?? All the best,
Jester.
(Thanks, Jester! If you get a chance, check out Jester's website and some of the work our friends "across the pond" are doing!)
JANUARY 9, 2010: On a bright summer morning in the back end of Tasmania's north-west, I wandered into an office of Forestry Tasmania for advice about a forest dirt road. The sketch map the official offered was expected; not so his story. On that same track a decade or so ago, he had seen a creature that was not supposed to exist. And not just him; loggers and surveyors, an old-timer shacked up in the bush, all had glimpsed the animal before it slipped away into one of the most ancient rainforests on Earth. [The Independent]
JANUARY 8, 2010: Cammie, the purported Cameron Lake monster, has made its presence known once again. This time the creature was sighted by Coombs resident Kim MacDonald and her eight-year-old son Tristan, who were driving towards Port Alberni on just after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 5. [bclocalnews.com]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: NEW ENEWSLETTER ON ODD ARIZONA: In 1934, six-year old June Robles vanished from in front of her elementary school and was not seen again for nearly three weeks. In between, the community of Tucson, Arizona, organized a frantic search for the child and her kidnappers. The child was finally found buried alive in an iron box sunk into the desert floor outside the city limits. But who put her there... and how did she survive? The mystery of June Robles still haunts the Tucson authorities to this day. Click here for more.
JANUARY 6, 2010: The train tracks in Emmaus carry lots of trains, of course, but on Tuesday morning they were traversed by something else, and no one quite knows what it was.
''There are all kinds of bobcats that live on South Mountain, and we assumed that's what it was,'' said Dave East, a construction contractor who has been working at the Seven Generations Charter School on E. Minor Street and spotted the four-legged something-or-other strolling along the tracks. [The Morning Call]
JANUARY 4, 2010: Dolphins are almost as clever as people and should be given human status, according to a zoologist at Emory University.
Lori Marino used MRI scans to compare dolphin brains with those of primates, and concluded that they are more intelligent than chimpanzees.
Corrected for body size, dolphins have larger brains than any primates except man, and the same surface folds found in human brains. They also have a cerebral cortex and neocortex that approach the size of those found in humans. [TG Daily]
JANUARY 3, 2010: Remains of the first airplane ever taken to Antarctica, in 1912, have been found by Australian researchers, the team announced.
The Mawson's Huts Foundation had been searching for the plane for three summers before stumbling upon metal pieces of it on New Year's Day. "The biggest news of the day is that we've found the air tractor, or at least parts of it!" team member Tony Stewart wrote on the team's blog from Cape Denison in Antarctica's Commonwealth Bay. [USA Today]
JANUARY 1, 2010: Harold Camping lets out a hearty chuckle when he considers the people who believe the world will end in 2012. "That date has not one stitch of biblical authority," Camping says from the Oakland office where he runs Family Radio, an evangelical station that reaches listeners around the world. "It's like a fairy tale."
The real date for the end of times, he says, is in 2011. [San Francisco Gate]
DECEMBER 30, 2009: There is growing evidence that, contrary to what we have been told, the US landed on the moon only to find that someone else had got there before them. This evidence may be disturbing to many, because it implies that a civilization, or civilizations, more advanced than our own has built enormous structures on the moon. This evidence comes not from some remote planet like Mars but from the Moon right above our heads. [About.com]
DECEMBER 29, 2009: Mystic Jemima Packington has forecast that Gordon Brown will be ousted in the general election while she also predicts the economy will continue on a slow burn.
Miss Packington, who claims to be the country's first asparamancer, makes her forecasts by throwing the vegetable in the air and analysing how it lands. [Telegraph.co.uk]
DECEMBER 28, 2009: The Marines found the bone as they scraped a shallow trench. Long, dry and unmistakably once part of a human leg, it was followed by others. They reburied most of them but also found bodies. Three of the graves were close together; in another was a skeleton still wearing a pair of glasses. The Marines covered the grave and told their successors to stay away from it. [Times Online]
DECEMBER 28, 2009: Chinese archaeologists believe they have found a nearly 1,800-year-old tomb belonging to the legendary ruler Cao Cao, who was known as a cruel tyrant but also a cunning military strategist and poet.
The tomb is located in central Henan province, not far from the Yellow River and near the city of Anyang, the state China Daily reported Monday. Cao Cao ruled the Kingdom of Wei from 208 to 220, when he died at age 65. [Discovery News]
DECEMBER 28, 2009: Scientists have just found insect parts stuck between the teeth of two Paleozoic reptiles. This strongly suggests that the pre-Dinosaur Era equivalent of today's lizards feasted on insects, and it's the first known evidence for this behavior among vertebrates.
The prehistoric reptiles represent a new, as of yet unnamed, species that lived 280 million years ago. [Discovery]
DECEMBER 26, 2009: John Warms is on a monstrous quest for "strange creatures seldom seen."
The 65-year-old researcher from Manitoba, Canada, visited Utah recently, hoping to hear firsthand tales of legendary beasts.
A retired public school teacher, Warms is working to publish a new book on "Strange Creatures." "I'm certain they exist," based on many expeditions and interviews, Warms told the Deseret News. [Deseret News]
DECEMBER 25, 2009: On his first visit to Toledo on Oct. 19, 1894, Scottish-born Arthur Conan Doyle discussed his captivating books featuring detective Sherlock Holmes.
The tall 35-year-old was a guest of the Toledo Cycling Club at the auditorium in the seven-story National Union Building on Huron Street. It was his first tour of the country and he charmed Americans in 30 cities. [About.com]
DECEMBER 18, 2009: For decades, the Maya –– and their descendents –– have gotten a bad rap from archaeologists, anthropologists, and other scholars who cite the ancient civilization's agricultural practices for its eventual collapse. While they agree that other factors contributed to the fall of Maya society roughly 1,000 years ago, they claim the civilization's slash-and-burn approach to farming caused such widespread environmental devastation that the land simply could not sustain them. [University of California]
DECEMBER 18, 2009: A&E sets out on a ghost patrol with a team of Chicago-area police officers who spend their off duty hours as paranormal investigators in the new original real-life series "Paranormal Cops." The six-episode half-hour series kicks off with a special one-hour season premiere on Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:30 PM ET/PT on A&E. [The Futon Critic]
DECEMBER 18, 2009: Police officers will study hypnosis techniques to help them encourage suspects and witnesses to tell the truth. Skip related content. It will be held by hypnosis specialist Tom Silver and aims to teach officers how to produce "the deepest and most receptive states of hypnosis". [Yahoo News]
DECEMBER 17, 2009: A group of 'undersea archaeologists' have become the latest to claim they have uncovered the lost city of Atlantis.
The scientists - who have refused to identify themselves - have released a series of images taken beneath the Caribbean.
They insist the snaps show what appear to be the ruins of a city that could pre-date Egypt's pyramids, which appeared after 2600 BC. [Dailymail.co.uk]
DECEMBER 16, 2009: Many of the decorations we use at Christmas are steeped in tradition and legend. I think it’s important to remember that legends are just that. . . a legend. A story passed down that is unverified, fun to tell, but probably not true. It’s important for our children to realize the difference between the legends of Christmas and the truth of Christmas. [Hartselle Enquirer]
DECEMBER 16, 2009: One of Spain's most enduring mysteries has remained unsolved after archaeologists exhumed a mass grave without finding the remains of Federico Garcia Lorca. The project on a remote hillside outside the southern city of Granada was intended to trace of the nation's most celebrated modern poet and playwright.
But the two-month excavation of an area of parkland about the size of half a football pitch will come to an end this week and as yet no human remains have been unearthed. [Telegraph.co.uk]
DECEMBER 10, 2009: A holy cow in Connecticut, perhaps? Or maybe a divine bovine?
A calf with a white marking on its forehead in the approximate shape of a cross was born last week at a dairy farm in Sterling, a small rustic town on the Rhode Island border.
Owner Brad Davis tells WFSB-TV he thinks the marking may be a message from above, though he's still trying to figure out what that message might be.
The mostly brown calf is half Jersey, half Holstein. Neighborhood children have named it Moses. [USA Today]
DECEMBER 10, 2009: Discovery of a primitive precursor to Tyrannosaurus Rex, some 215 million years old, points to a South American origin for dinosaurs, paleontologists reported Thursday.
In the journal Science, a team led by Sterling Nesbitt of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, unveils Tawa hallae, found in a fossil bone bed near New Mexico's Ghost Ranch, made famous by the artist Georgia O'Keefe. Nesbitt's team named the creature, a 6.5-foot-long meat-eating precursor to T. Rex, after a Pueblo sun god and the fossil collector Ruth Hall. [USA Today]
DECEMBER 7, 2009: White stags have long been associated with mythology and legend, an elusive yet magnificent beast.
King Arthur was left frustrated by his attempts to capture one, as were the Kings and Queens of Narnia, who chased the creature through the woods and found themselves tumbling out of a wardrobe.
But photographer Ken Grindle has managed to get a little bit closer, taking this picture of the animal in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. [dailymail.co.uk]
DECEMBER 6, 2009: A site where dozens of prehistoric mammoths died in a landslide and flooding some 68,000 years ago has opened to the public in Waco, Texas. The fossils were discovered in 1978 by two men hunting for snakes. They took one of the bones to a Baylor University museum official who identified it, triggering an archaeological dig. Baylor and the city preserved the remains for two decades and, following a community fundraising effort, a permanent pavilion was built over the site, which opened to the public for the first time Saturday. [MSNBC]
DECEMBER 6, 2009: Archaeologists have found evidence of mass cannibalism at a 7,000-year-old human burial site in south-west Germany, the journal Antiquity reports.
The authors say their findings provide rare evidence of cannibalism in Europe's early Neolithic period.
Up to 500 human remains unearthed near the village of Herxheim may have been cannibalised. [BBC]
DECEMBER 4, 2009: The MoD department, which has dealt with more than 12,000 reports – including 135 last year - was used to assess threats posed by any Unidentified Flying Objects sightings throughout Britain.
Any reports made would now not be investigated or followed up as the hotline had been closed, a spokesman said.
UFO experts expressed anger at the decision. [Telegraph.co.uk]
DECEMBER 4, 2009: Google has added Pompeii to its Street View application, allowing internet users to take a 360-degree virtual tour of the ancient Roman city.
Italy's culture ministry says it hopes the move will boost tourism to the site, state news agency Ansa reports.
Among the ruins visible on the search engine's free mapping service are the town's statues, temples and theatres. [BBC]
DECEMBER 2, 2009: Experts are now investigating reported sightings of a large, hairy, 'Bigfoot-type' creature on the West Side.
Police said the 'Bigfoot-type' creature was spotted in the area around Highway 151 and Loop 1604. A caller told police a large, tall, hairy creature dragged a deer carcass into the woods. Officers searched the area, but said they did not find anything. "If one sighting is real, then that means something is out there," said Rick Tullos, who is a member of the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization. [woai.com]
DECEMBER 2, 2009: It is a truth universally acknowledged -- or nearly so -- that Jane Austen, the author of "Pride and Prejudice," died of a rare illness called Addison's disease, which robs the body of the ability to make critical hormones.
Katherine White doesn't believe it.
White, herself a sufferer of Addison's disease, has studied Austen's own letters and those of her family and friends, and concluded that key symptoms just don't match what's known about the illness. [CNN]
NOVEMBER 26, 2009: A creepy string of calf mutilations in southern Colorado has a rancher and sheriff's officials mystified. Four calves were found dead in a pasture just north of the New Mexico state line in recent weeks. The dead calves had their skins peeled back and organs cleared from the rib cage. One calf had its tongue removed. [Fox News]
NOVEMBER 23, 2009: A see-through sea cucumber, a "big eared" octopus-like animal, a "gold treasure" crustacean, and more are among the many new deep-dwellers collected during an ongoing marine census. [Huffington Post]
NOVEMBER 21, 2009: In the oceans of a moon hundreds of millions of miles from the sun, something fishy may be alive—right now.
Below its icy crust Jupiter's moon Europa is believed to host a global ocean up to a hundred miles (160 kilometers) deep, with no land to speak of at the surface.
And the extraterrestrial ocean is currently being fed more than a hundred times more oxygen than previous models had suggested, according to provocative new research.
That amount of oxygen would be enough to support more than just microscopic life-forms: At least three million tons of fishlike creatures could theoretically live and breathe on Europa, said study author Richard Greenberg of the University of Arizona in Tucson. [National Geographic]
NOVEMBER 21, 2009: For the most part, the overwhelming majority of all reports, stories, accounts and tales I receive of strange beasts roaming the United States tend to be relatively down-to-earth – or at least as down-to-earth as it’s possible to be when dealing with accounts relative to Bigfoot, lake-monsters, werewolves and a truly wide and varied assortment of other creepy critters. [Mania.com]
NOVEMBER 21, 2009: Easter Island's mystery — brooding statues atop a treeless Polynesian island — fascinates tourists and scholars alike.
And inspires debate. "Who or what destroyed the ancient palm woodland on Rapa Nui (Easter Island)?" ask German ecologists Andreas Mieth and Hans-Rudolf Bork, in an upcoming paper in the Journal of Archaeological Science. "The circumstances, causes and triggers of these environmental changes are the subject of persistent scientific discussion. {USA Today]
NOVEMBER 20, 2009: A Vatican researcher has rekindled the age-old debate over the Shroud of Turin, saying that faint writing on the linen proves it was the burial cloth of Jesus. Experts say the historian may be reading too much into the markings, and they stand by carbon-dating that points to the shroud being a medieval forgery.
Barbara Frale, a researcher at the Vatican archives, says in a new book that she used computer-enhanced images of the shroud to decipher faintly written words in Greek, Latin and Aramaic scattered across the cloth. [Huffington Post]
NOVEMBER 20, 2009: Two fingers and a tooth belonging to famed astronomer Galileo Galilei have been found more than 100 years after going missing, a museum in Italy says.
A collector bought the items, lost since 1905, at auction and gave them to Florence's History of Science Museum.
The museum said it had no doubt about the authenticity of the items. [BBC News]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: NEW VIDEO UPLOADED – THE BREATH OF THE EARTH
This video short (2 minute duration) was created by Polaris and Ash at Wupatki National Monument in northern Arizona. Polaris demonstrates how this unusual nature feature was thought by the Hopi and Anasazi Indians as being the breath of earth gods inhaling and exhaling through a rift in the earth. Download video | Visit the Outcast Earth YouTube Page
NOVEMBER 19, 2009: Paleontologists have discovered 3 new species of crocodile cousins in the Sahara, which have been nicknamed PancakeCroc, BoarCroc, and RatCroc, along with new skeletons of the previously identified DogCroc and DuckCroc.
Paleontologists have been looking in the region since 2000 for what they term a "lost world" of crocodile ancestors -- which they believe were evolutionary "oddballs" and even ate dinosaurs. [National Geographic]
NOVEMBER 19, 2009: When her miniature skull and tiny skeleton were revealed publicly for the first time in 2004, scientists expressed their amazement that such a small species of human could have existed on the island of Flores in Indonesia.
She became known as "the hobbit", standing just over 3ft tall with a brain the size of a grapefruit, about a third of the average brain volume of modern humans. It seemed that the last of her species, Homo floresiensis, died out not long after she lived around 18,000 years ago. [The Independent]
NOVEMBER 15, 2009: If you believe retiree Russ Sittloh, the canals around Crystal Island have their own version of the infamous Loch Ness Monster.
After four sightings of the mysterious creature, he is so convinced that something's out there that he has dubbed it Normandy Nessie. [St. Petersburg Times]
NOVEMBER 14, 2009: While visiting the rugged Falkland Islands in the 1830s, Charles Darwin puzzled over a local wolf that was the only endemic land-dwelling mammal and looked little like other canids on the mainland. By 1876, the Falklands wolf (Dusicyon australis) was extinct and with it threatened to go its mysterious history. But a new genetic analysis of five preserved specimens, published online last week in Current Biology, has chased away speculation about these baffling animals. [Scientific American]
NOVEMBER 13, 2009: For years while he was on the run, robbing banks and holding up stage coaches, police were determined to have bushranger Ned Kelly's head.
Now a farmer claims to have handed over his skull to forensic scientists in Australia, asking them to determine if it really is the head of the notorious highwayman who to this day remains an iconic figure in the country's history, literature and film.
Kelly was hanged in Melbourne on November 11, 1880, but just what happened to his remains has been a mystery down through the decades. [Dailymail.co.uk]
NOVEMBER 11, 2009: Four hundred years after it locked up Galileo for challenging the view that the Earth was the center of the universe, the Vatican has called in experts to study the possibility of extraterrestrial alien life and its implication for the Catholic Church. [USA Today]
NOVEMBER 7, 2009:
A young woman buried as Jane Doe in Colorado 55 years ago. An Arizona family puzzled and saddened as Dorothy Gay Howard's disappearance stretched into decades.
It took a historian, a detective and a determined family member to make the connection after more than a half century that these two people were one and the same. [MSNBC.com]
WANT MORE ON HAUNTED HAWAI'I? CHECK OUT THESE OUTCAST EARTH FEATURES:
NOVEMBER 3, 2009: Hawaii is well known for being the ideal tourist spot, but there are certain aspects to this paradise that elude most people. There are stories spoken in hushed whispers that would give a chill to even the bravest individual. Ke Alakai brings you a paltry sample of locales that are frequented by paranormal activity and has been a favorite place for the thrill seeker and the adventurer. [Ke Alaka'i]
NEW FEATURE JUST ADDED!
Enewsletter 6-2009: The Crash at the Bottom of the Canyon. Outcast Earth member Mist investigates the tragic 1956 mid-air collision and crash of two passenger airliners over the Grand Canyon. At that time, it was the worst aircraft tragedy in United States history, with 128 deaths. Aside from the long-standing mystery of how the collision occurred in the first place, a recently published book tells eerie accounts of rangers who have witnessed crowds of ghostly people wandering the hills where the planes fell. Are these the specters of the crash victims, now lost in time and space at the bottom of the canyon?
OCTOBER 31, 2009: The Beast of Bodmin was first spotted in 1992 and is probably the most celebrated of Britain's phantom big cats, which are usually blamed by farmers for slaughtering their livestock in an especially savage manner (not like the abattoir, then).
An official inquiry into the phenomenon in 1995 concluded that there is "no verifiable evidence" of alien felines on the loose. Even so, there is at least one authenticated case of a Eurasian Lynx, a species that ought to be classified as a "not-really-that-big-cat", being shot in Norfolk in 1991. [The Independent UK]
OCTOBER 31, 2009: Shadow people may be the most commonly seen apparitions. What are they? Dark ghosts? Beings from some other time or dimension? Whatever they are, they can be terrifying to those who see them, as you'll read in the frightening cases told here. In all of these encounters - including some in which these shadows have actually been felt - they seem to have intelligence and may even be following some mysterious purpose. What are they... and what do they want? [About.com]
OCTOBER 31, 2009: Fake blood, canned screams and plastic skeletons are fun, but if you want a real haunted house, turn to scientists. To test whether it’s possible to artificially induce paranormal experiences — or, from a different perspective, to technologically summon a spirit — researchers at London’s Goldsmith College and architect Usman Haque designed a scientifically haunted room.
They were inspired by earlier studies in which test subjects reported contact with the phantasmic when exposed to electromagnetic fields and waves of infrasound. [Wired.com]
OCTOBER 31, 2009: It has been 10 years since The Sixth Sense and Haley Joel Osment caused us to "see dead people." With Halloween upon us, Tom Armstrong of Tauck World Discovery (tauck.com) shares with Larry Olmsted for USA TODAY his favorite places to catch the ghostly spirit. [USA Today]
OCTOBER 31, 2009: He's chipped his way through more than a foot of snow and ice to get to Ernest Hemingway. He's walked right up to Al Capone and Karl Marx. He's dragged his mom to visit the infamous cannibal Alferd Packer and just came back from seeing Farrah Fawcett.
He is Jim Tipton, founder of Find a Grave, a free online database of burial sites for the famous and otherwise around the globe. [CNN]
OCTOBER 30, 2009: This month will mark the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A recently declassified oral history by Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy's military aide on the Dallas trip, sheds new light on the critical hours after the shooting. McHugh makes startling claims about Lyndon Johnson's behavior in the wake of the assassination. [Huffington Post]
OCTOBER 30, 2009: A disused stone quarry on the Greek island of Crete which is riddled with an elaborate network of underground tunnels could be the original site of the ancient Labyrinth, the mythical maze that housed the half-bull, half-man Minotaur of Greek legend. [The Independent]
OCTOBER 30, 2009: A church made famous by Washington Irving's short story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," has rejected a couple's request to hold a Halloween-themed wedding.
Lisa Panensky and Jim Nieves signed a contract 13 months ago to get married on Halloween at the Old Dutch Church in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.
Church officials balked at the couple's plans to wear costumes and include theme music from The Addams Family and The Munsters. [USA Today]
OCTOBER 29, 2009: Do you believe in ghosts? Accommodations across the country say they do. Whether it’s the historic Hotel Chelsea in New York City, the Queen Mary ocean liner that’s permanently berthed in California or the towering Heceta Head Lighthouse Bed and Breakfast in Oregon, these hotels offer something more than chocolates on your pillow: a room with a boo. [Bing.com]
OCTOBER 28, 2009: A creature that could fit in your hand has long been seen as the strongest evidence that humans and apes originated in Africa.
But now scientists say 50-million-year-old Algeripithecus was not an ape or human ancestor and was more like today's lemurs, after all. [National Geographic]
OCTOBER 28, 2009: A mysterious UFO that allegedly fell over Latvia on Sunday has turned out to be a fake. A local mobile operator has confessed to being involved in staging a hoax with the meteorite. [Russia Today]
OCTOBER 24, 2009: Her bold achievements in aviation made history. Her adventurous spirit remains legendary. But Amelia
Earhart’s magnificent and inspiring life was lost in a tragic mystery. In the decades that followed her
disappearance in 1937, many theories arose about her fate. Now, for the first time ever online, you can
see a unique government case file containing evidence of many questions and investigations that followed.
[Ancestry.com is undertaking an unusual promotion... see documents related to Earhart and her disappearance for free on their website.]
BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT: THIRTEEN BONES BY DR. TOM KING
On July 2, 1937, nearing the end of a flight around the world, aviation pioneers Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific. Despite a massive search, they were never found. Their fate remains a mystery to this day. Earhart’s last generally accepted radio message put her on course that likely would have brought her close to Nikumaroro – then called Gardner Island – a tiny, uninhabited atoll in the Phoenix Islands. In early 1939, British authorities in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony launched the Phoenix Islands Settlement Scheme, and began to clear Gardner Island for coconut planting. In early 1940, the colonists found thirteen human bones near the island’s southeast end, along with a sextant box, a Benedictine bottle, some corks, and a woman’s shoe. In Thirteen Bones, author Tom King imagines the discovery and its aftermath through the eyes of the discoverers.
Dr. Tom King is an archaeologist, consultant, teacher and writer, who has worked since the late 1980s with The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery’s (TIGHAR’s) Amelia Earhart project – doing archaeological research on Nikumaroro, the island where colonists in 1940 found thirteen human bones that may well have been Earhart’s. His co-authored 2004 non-fiction book, Amelia Earhart’s Shoes, recounts TIGHAR’s adventures on the island. In Thirteen Bones, King tells the story of the 1940 discovery as it might have seemed to the Tunguru colonists, weaving the tale around facts revealed by TIGHAR’s historical and archaeological research.
Learn more by visiting Tom's website by clicking here.
OCTOBER 20, 2009: People are coming up to me lately to say how much they enjoy playing the new Atari Ghostbusters video game and expressing hope that a third movie might be made.
Sometimes they ask me, an entertainer, if I think ghosts really could exist. Are ghosts real? And if so what are they made of?
Doctor Hans Holzer, probably the world's most credible and respected ghostbuster, writes in his Travel Guide to Haunted Houses (Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers): "A ghost appears to be a surviving emotional memory of someone who died traumatically... but is unaware of his or her death." [Huffington Post]
OCTOBER 20, 2009: Contributors are sharing their spooky stories from around NE Wales as well as offering theories and explanations - do you believe? [BBC]
OCTOBER 19, 2009: Coventry's Guildhall is over 650 years old. Ghosts or no ghosts, this historic part of the city looks slightly eerie any night of the week.
BBC Coventry & Warwickshire's Tom Cooke, Rev Mervyn Roberts and I arrived at the Guildhall just before 9pm.
We met the organisers of this special paranormal night and the 35 other ghost hunters in the Undercroft before going on a guided tour of the building.
Our ghostly tour of the Guildhall would last until the eerie early hours. [BBC]
OCTOBER 16, 2009: Under a canopy of elegant Italian pines, the foundations of a mini Roman Coliseum are at once unmistakable and exhilarating. The intricate statue head archeologists unearthed while excavating the site at Fumicino, Italy in early 2009. The structure at "Portus," the Romans' ancient Mediterranean port, has remained undiscovered for eighteen centuries until now.
University of Southampton archaeologists have just this summer uncovered the remains of an amphitheater, a Roman warehouse and the ruins of an Imperial palace even though archaeologists have been digging at this site since the 19th Century. [CNN]
OCTOBER 15, 2009: Art experts believe they have identified a new Leonardo da Vinci— in part by examining a fingerprint on the canvas.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said Tuesday that a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German painting of a young woman has convinced art experts that it's actually a da Vinci. [USA Today]
OCTOBER 13, 2009: A mysterious halo-shaped cloud was seen hovering in the sky over the city of Moscow a few days ago. Lest you believe that this confirms your various conspiracy theories, meteorologists have ruled out any supernatural cause. [Huffington Post]
Emails? Yes, we get lots of them. In response, the Outcast Earth website now provides a convenient email feedback service which will allow our visitors to comment on the various bulletins posted on this page, or any material posted on the site. Just click on the icon you see to the left. All emails will be reviewed for their appropriateness and then posted on this page. The newest material is posted at the top of the page and progresses downward. 
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: OLD OUTCAST EARTH "FOE" ACCUSES THE TEAM OF FRAUD
JULY 19, 2010: Steve Feltham’s eyes and smile grow wide when the subject of the Loch Ness monsters comes up. “I think they’re out there, certainly,” he says, though he adds with a hint of sadness that it may not be true for much longer. He estimates there are probably a half-dozen creatures left in the lake (down from dozens in earlier eras) and will be fewer each passing year: “Sightings have declined. They’re gradually dropping off of old age, I think.” [Alibi.com]
JULY 16, 2010: After tens of thousands of years under the Siberian frost, a baby woolly mammoth is taking a summer vacation in southeast France.
Baby Khroma, one of the oldest intact mammoths ever found, went on display in a French museum Friday - after it underwent special tests to ensure it was no longer bearing the anthrax believed to have killed it. [Huffington Post]
JULY 16, 2010: An extraordinarily toxic bacterium harbored by the "infernal" Styx River might have been the fabled poison rumored to have killed Alexander the Great (356 - 323 B.C.) more than 2,000 years ago, according to a scientific-meets-mythic detective study.
The research, which will be presented next week at the XII International Congress of Toxicology annual meetings in Barcelona, Spain, reviews ancient literary evidence on the Styx poison in light of modern geology and toxicology. [Discovery News]
JULY 9, 2010: Remote and mysterious Easter Island is bracing for an influx of tourists and problems with Sunday's solar eclipse that is being seen as a mixed blessing for the tiny Pacific territory.
The Chilean island of only 60 square miles is expecting an estimated 4,000 visitors, doubling the population of the barren isle which already suffers from water pollution and deforestation. [Discovery News]
NOTE FROM THE WEBMASTER: Recently, we were contacted by a visitor to our website who was a student at Oregon State University during the 
JUNE 29, 2010: A group of researchers affiliated with legendary Big Foot Hunter Tom Biscardi left North Carolina Sunday after spending Saturday night camped out in the woods near Highway 18, south of Morganton, to investigate a recent footprint sighting.
The researchers set up cameras but said they didn’t find anything. They told Eyewitness News that they will evaluate what they do have and determine if they will return to look again. [wsoctv.com]
JUNE 28, 2010: An enigmatic character, dubbed "Horse-Boy," has appeared on Google Street View in Aberdeen, Scotland, and has generated considerable buzz and speculation by Internet users the world over. The man can be seen standing against a wall in a purple shirt and brownish pants wearing a large horse mask.
The BBC writes, "Dozens of BBC news website users have e-mailed from across Europe to say they know who horse boy is." Some have even sent in photos of the mysterious "Horse-Boy." [Huffington Post]
JUNE 25, 2010: Amelia Earhart, the legendary pilot who disappeared 73 years ago while flying over the Pacific Ocean in a record attempt to fly around the world at the equator, may have survived several weeks, or even months as a castaway on a remote South Pacific island, according to preliminary results of a two-week expedition on the tiny coral atoll believed to be her final resting place. [Discovery News]
JUNE 16, 2010: Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of Caravaggio, but 400 years later some of the mysteries surrounding the death of the artist may never be solved.
After a year of digging and analyzing centuries-old bones, the researchers said Wednesday they have identified a set of bones they believe to be Caravaggio's, though they admit they can never be 100 percent certain. [Huffington Post]
JUNE 10, 2010: Brad Pitt may have no use for religion, but his psychic tells Life & Style he is very spiritual and often seeks divine advice. [Huffington Post]
JUNE 10, 2010: Back in August of 1996, headlines around the world were ablaze with three remarkable words: "Life on Mars!" The evidence was circumstantial but compelling: a Martian meteorite recovered in the Antarctic contained what seemed to be fossilized bacteria. NASA's breathless press conference breaking the news, which pre-empted daytime programming, signaled that the discovery should be taken very seriously. But before long, scientists came to the general conclusion that it was probably all just a mistake. Never mind. [TIME]
JUNE 7, 2010: How did the world's largest living reptile, the saltwater crocodile, reach so many South Pacific islands separated by huge stretches of water despite being a poor swimmer? Apparently, like a surfer catching a wave, these goliaths can ride currents on the ocean surface to cross large areas of open sea, researchers now reveal. [Yahoo News]
JUNE 6, 2010: One small step for man, one giant leap for modern art?
Andy Warhol and five other artists likely left a 1969 calling card — a so-called moon museum of six sketches etched in miniature on a penny-wide ceramic chip — on the Apollo 12 lunar lander, an upcoming PBS show concludes. [USA Today]
MAY 26, 2010: At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti, known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor, and architect, was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. [Huffington Post]
MAY 25, 2010: The house made famous in the 1979 film "The Amityville Horror" is up for sale in New York – ghosts not included.
The five-bedroom Dutch Colonial went on the market Monday for $1.15 million. [Huffington Post]
MAY 12: 2010: rchaeologists working on Easter Island have disproved the 50-year-old theory that the road system on the island was used to move the famous statues around. [Blog About History]
MAY 4, 2010: It prowls desolate, forested parts of southern New Jersey, killing livestock, leaving behind odd footprints and filling the night air with chilling sounds.
At least that's how legend and folklore describe the creature known as the Jersey Devil. (Not to be confused, by the way, with the New Jersey Devils, the professional hockey franchise named after the legendary creature.)
At the Paranormal Museum in Asbury Park, N.J., a recently opened exhibit features a variety of artifacts, including reproductions of a Jersey Devil skull, drawings and relics. [AOL News]
NEW ENEWSLETTER POSTED ON MAY 2! 
APRIL 27, 2010: Satellite pictures appear to reveal the Lord's bearded face staring out of the ground in eastern Hungary.
Eagle-eyed web browsers noticed it while looking at Google Maps images of remote farmland.
Last month, we reported how the Son of God's face was spotted burned into the cooking fat of a pan of bacon. [Daily Telegraph]
APRIL 16, 2010: A mystery beast that resembles a chupacabra ("goat-sucker"), a legendary, fearsome and possibly mythical beast said to inhabit parts of the Americas and Puerto Rico, is seen shortly after its capture in a village in Suining, Sichuan Province on March 24.
In this case, the gray colored animal wasn't attacking goats, but chickens and it was the fowls' cries that alerted village Ke Suying to find the mystery predator tearing into his birds. He tried to drive it away with a stick but failed, though later with the help of neighbors caught it in a steel net. [Global Times]
APRIL 14, 2010: Before he died at Pearl Harbor less than a month after turning 18, Gerald Lehman sent letters home to his mother in Michigan — letters that she treasured and saved.
Unknowingly, Lehman was also sending home something that wouldn't be useful until decades later — his own DNA. [USA Today]
APRIL 11, 2010: Our Loch Ness Monster is famed the world over, and pops up in very strange circumstances from time to time.
Now she has surfaced at the centre of an art mystery in Italy.
This centres around a charcoal drawing dating from 1949, which is described as Loch Ness Monster and Black Man without a Face, and which could possibly have been drawn by famous Dutch artist, MC Escher. [The Press and Journal]
APRIL 6, 2010: The Turin Shroud, said to be the burial cloth of Christ, was secretly hidden in a Benedictine abbey during the Second World War because the Vatican feared that Adolf Hitler wanted to steal it. [Telegraph.co.uk]
APRIL 2, 2010: Christianity holds that every living being, from the tiniest insect to the largest whale, has a chance at entering the pearly gates. Psalm 145:-9-10,13,15-21 reads, “God loves all His creation and has made plans for all His children and the lesser creatures to enjoy His eternal Kingdom.” Don’t expect to see your favorite individual plant in heaven, however. That’s because the Book of Genesis suggests all animals have souls, but plants do not. Genesis 1:30: “To every animal of the earth, and to every bird of the heavens and to every creeping thing on the earth, in which is a living soul, every green plant is given for food.” [Discovery News]
APRIL 2, 2010: The Shroud of Turin, the controversial piece of 14- by 4-foot linen that some believe to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, will enter the 3D age when it goes on display for six weeks after Easter.
Special two-filter glasses, just like the 3D glasses that hit movie theaters with the recent releases of Avatar and Alice in Wonderland, are set to make their way to the Turin Cathedral. [Discovery News]
MARCH 29, 2010: The missing pyramid of an obscure pharaoh that ruled Egypt some 4,300 years ago could lie at the intersection of a series of invisible lines in South Saqqara, according to new astronomical and topographical research.
Connecting the funerary complexes raised by the kings of the 6th Dynasty between 2,322 B.C. and 2,151 B.C., these lines would have governed the sacred space of the Saqqara area, in accordance with a number of criteria such as dynastic lineage, religion and astronomical alignment. [Discovery News]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE:
JANUARY 25, 2010: McG's Wonderland shingle and Warner Bros. TV are plotting a spinoff to the CW's long-running spooky drama "Supernatural."
But rather than produce it for TV, the new show -- "Ghostfacers" -- is heading straight for the Internet. "Ghostfacers" reps the latest expansion into the digital studio space for Wonderland, which is producing the "Supernatural" spinoff with Warner Bros. TV's Studio 2.0. [Variety]
WEBMASTER'S NOTE: If you're interested in more on haunted New Orleans, check out these archived features from Outcast Earth.
JANUARY 19, 2010: A mysterious visitor who has left roses and a bottle of Cognac at the original Baltimore gravesite of Edgar Allan Poe failed to appear this year for the first time in 61 years.
Is the mysterious ritual nevermore?
Jeff Jerome, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe House, tells The Baltimore Sun that a "Poe Toaster," whose identity is unknown, has shown up every Jan. 19 since 1949. "I'm confused, befuddled," Jerome says. "I don't know what's going on." [USA Today]
JANUARY 4, 2010: Dolphins are almost as clever as people and should be given human status, according to a zoologist at Emory University.
Lori Marino used MRI scans to compare dolphin brains with those of primates, and concluded that they are more intelligent than chimpanzees.
Corrected for body size, dolphins have larger brains than any primates except man, and the same surface folds found in human brains. They also have a cerebral cortex and neocortex that approach the size of those found in humans. [TG Daily]
DECEMBER 30, 2009: There is growing evidence that, contrary to what we have been told, the US landed on the moon only to find that someone else had got there before them. This evidence may be disturbing to many, because it implies that a civilization, or civilizations, more advanced than our own has built enormous structures on the moon. This evidence comes not from some remote planet like Mars but from the Moon right above our heads. [About.com]
DECEMBER 25, 2009: On his first visit to Toledo on Oct. 19, 1894, Scottish-born 
DECEMBER 4, 2009: Google has added Pompeii to its Street View application, allowing internet users to take a 360-degree virtual tour of the ancient Roman city.
Italy's culture ministry says it hopes the move will boost tourism to the site, state news agency Ansa reports.
Among the ruins visible on the search engine's free mapping service are the town's statues, temples and theatres. [BBC]
DECEMBER 2, 2009: It is a truth universally acknowledged -- or nearly so -- that Jane Austen, the author of "Pride and Prejudice," died of a rare illness called Addison's disease, which robs the body of the ability to make critical hormones.
Katherine White doesn't believe it.
White, herself a sufferer of Addison's disease, has studied Austen's own letters and those of her family and friends, and concluded that key symptoms just don't match what's known about the illness. [CNN] 
WANT MORE ON HAUNTED HAWAI'I? CHECK OUT THESE OUTCAST EARTH FEATURES:
OCTOBER 31, 2009: Shadow people may be the most commonly seen apparitions. What are they? Dark ghosts? Beings from some other time or dimension? Whatever they are, they can be terrifying to those who see them, as you'll read in the frightening cases told here. In all of these encounters - including some in which these shadows have actually been felt - they seem to have intelligence and may even be following some mysterious purpose. What are they... and what do they want? [About.com]
OCTOBER 30, 2009: This month will mark the 46th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A recently declassified oral history by Brigadier General Godfrey McHugh, President Kennedy's military aide on the Dallas trip, sheds new light on the critical hours after the shooting. McHugh makes startling claims about Lyndon Johnson's behavior in the wake of the assassination. [Huffington Post]
OCTOBER 15, 2009: Art experts believe they have identified a new Leonardo da Vinci— in part by examining a fingerprint on the canvas.
Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said Tuesday that a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German painting of a young woman has convinced art experts that it's actually a da Vinci. [USA Today]