Author: NW0.eu

Click for video 1Click for video 2Click for video 3NOTE: Paranormal State’s season finale offered a bit of cryptozoology and legend…the search for the ‘Jersey Devil’. They were able to capture an infra-red image of a creature that appeared to have w…

Chris Holly’s Paranormal World – Years ago my good friend told me her brother had a terrible experience while working in New York City. He was traumatized to the point he refused to return to the job or go back to the city at all for that matter. He li…

This is pretty big news in the mental health world. There are all sorts of reports on it, this one from the Los Angeles Times:

After years of research, professional infighting and maneuvering from various interest groups, the nation’s psychiatrists Tuesday unveiled proposed changes to the manual used to diagnose and treat mental disorders around the world.

The draft document, released by the American Psychiatric Assn., for the first time calls for binge-eating and gambling to be considered disorders, opening the way for insurance coverage of these problems. But it refrains from suggesting a formal diagnosis for obesity, Internet addiction or sex addiction, as some professionals had proposed.

The document also recommends a single category for autism spectrum disorders, unifying what has been a multifaceted and complicated diagnostic scale.

The fifth edition of the…

Heathrow Airport’s denial that Indian film star Shahrukh Khan’s naked body scanner images were printed and circulated by airport staff because the devices have no capability to print or distribute images contradicts leaked government documents that prove the x-ray backscatter machines do have the option to store and send images, as well as actual images of the print outs that are freely available on the Internet.

Congressman Ron Paul warns that the movement his supporters founded nearly three years ago has been infiltrated and overtaken by neo-cons, following the de facto election of Sarah Palin as the leader of the nationwide tea party movement.

This is a brief post, mainly because I’m too lazy at the moment to work any harder. Still, there may be something of worth to someone here. In this 21st century, we are sometimes proud of our accomplishments and sometimes have reason to be. I was reading very old NICAP files the past few days [to get a break from reality and just enjoy something without having to argue about it] and something struck me that I’d not seen before. NICAP, even when it was losing its great war against the Air Force for congressional hearings was respected by heavyweight persons and organizations outside of UFO studies like nothing in our field before or since. This finally penetrated my dull wit when coming upon three such instances in a pile–concentrated enough so even I could not miss it. ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
The three pieces of documents were these: a citation in a scientific journal by a physicist not yet turned on to UFOs [at least as he would later be]; another citation in a formal scientific report by a leader in his field of study; and a request from one of the country’s leading aerospace research labs. The first was in a paper by Jim McDonald from the year 1960. As an atmospheric physicist, he was interested in the mystery of falls of large chunks of ice. NICAP kept large files on everything that could possibly pertain to the UFO mystery, and Dick Hall had reported to the journal [Weatherwise] on those ice-fall files. McDonald read it, and requested the raw information. Hall happily sent it. Thus began a major collaboration in UFO research history. McDonald’s 1960 paper praised NICAP for its wholehearted sharing of data on the anomaly. The second was similar. Famed American Meteor Society leader, Dr. Charles P. Olivier, was, of course, interested in fireball sightings. He requested that NICAP send him whatever they had on this sort of sighting. Hall did. “These sources of reports are invaluable to us”, was the quote from the AMS’ Annual Report for 1960. ———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
The third example came from Douglas Aircraft Corporation’s Research and Development Space Sciences Department. The request was by the chief scientist, A.D.Goedeke, a well-known expert on plasmas and several other areas of frontier physics. Goedeke was interested in “kugelblitz” [ball lightning] and wanted to make field studies of the phenomenon. Of course his problem was exactly like the UFO research problem–with a rare and unpredictable phenomenon, where does one go to set up one’s equipment? He asked NICAP to kindly provide data on incidents which might be ball-lightning as well as “areas of concentration” of such sightings. He was, in other words, saying: boys, where should the research team go? His plans were extremely high-tech and it would be good to learn if he ever managed to corral a BOL. In his letter he said the following: “On a recent trip to Brazil, it was learned that there exists a small area, on a plateau, in Brazil, where numerous observations of ball lightning, or some phenomenon, have been made”. Hmmm. Makes one wonder if the good sir was open to possibilities other than kugelblitz?————————————————————————————————————————————————-
For some reason, in that strange way that we do this, the remark reminded me of something buried in the files. I was, miraculously, actually able to find it. [big anomaly]. It was a letter to Fortean Times 22 years ago from Cynthia Luce, a person interested in many things paranormal. She had moved to Brazil [in the area shown on the Google map, near Petropolis]. She described her new residence as a “remote mountain village” and that is possible in that country, even though cities are not that far away. She wanted to tell FT about the local folklore involving the Mae de Ouro [Mother of Gold]. There is a village not far away called Ouro Preta, by the way, so Gold is playing a role in this area. The Mae de Ouro was a frequently seen yellow-gold ball of light that was a bit smaller than a volleyball. It had been around for at least 150 years [as of 1987]. Locals interpreted it as a spiritual entity [and perhaps so it is], but Luce, and ourselves, would probably put it in UFO file folders. Goedeke, and Douglas, no doubt, want to put it under kugelblitz or at least some novel earth energy emission. Luce says she saw the thing herself. The BOL “passed from east to west with the wavering flight of a butterfly about five feet off the ground…It made a wide curving turn and headed off towards the stables and vegetable garden near the spring. My gardener…reached out to touch it. The ball faded away to nothing as he put out his hand, then reappeared about 15 feet ahead of him….The phenomenon seemed to him to have intelligence.” One can’t help wonder if Luce and Goedeke were talking about the same area. Those mountains that Luce was living in are called, Serra da Estrela, the “Mountains of the Stars”. When you go for a visit, tell me what you see.————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–
The Mae de Ouro was the fun of this post. The real reason was a reminder. We in the community have not at all gone forward on the criterion of respect in the scientific or technological community. How many requests for information from our files have any of our organizations gotten [from anyone but media]? NICAP did certain things right. Part of that was the conservativeness of its publications and public pronouncements that everyone rags them about. Sure, UFOlogy deals with things MUCH stranger than those conservatisms. But the “outer world” isn’t even ready for our most conservative statements, yet we try to cram hyper-weirdness down its throat. Many of our most notable UFO-personages have no social sense at all. They’re running as fast as they can and are getting as far away from acceptability as they can. They don’t care. They’re on their great explorations, and they really don’t think that they need anyone else. Especially they don’t think that they need to build a respectable field of study brick-by-brick from the ground up. But we really need to at least try–even if we bite our tongues on the weirdest stuff until we can lay the foundation upon which that weird stuff might be able to be swallowed. Then, like the lady above, we might actually see the Light.

One thing most Democrats, Republicans and Americans of all ideological stripes seem to agree on is that their government is too cozy with Wall Street — and that that’s not a good thing.

There is more than a little irony in the fact that congressman Ron Paul is facing three primary challengers this year, all of them linked in some way to the Tea Party movement.

Already frustrated by post-Christmas airport security, Andrea Pilati thought she had seen it all. And then airport security personnel told her to stick her hands down her pants.

Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan made headlines over the weekend when he caught airport employees at Heathrow passing around printouts of his naked body, as revealed by full-body security scans.

Leading Democrats and Republicans alike agree on the need for action against Iran. At least some liberal Democrats seem reluctant to use military force; in contrast, many conservative Republicans are eager to start bombing.

21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence.

One also predicted that in 30 years, “virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings…can be done by computers for pennies an hour,” adding that AI “is likely to eliminate almost all of today’s decently paying jobs.”

The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test – and the experts estimate the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that’s bad for humanity…with four estimating that probability was greater than 60%! (Regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source…) Yet interestingly,…

Yet another paper questioning the theory that man is behind the warming of the earth over the past half-century.

Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report – it’s the one where they decide that global warming is manmade. This is the one where the headlines are made.

Bishop Hill has unearthed a jaw-dropping critique of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. His post’s so delightful there’s no need for embellishment.

The ”War on Terror” is likely to last as long as the Cold War, a senior Government security official has warned.

Labour threw open the doors to mass migration in a deliberate policy to change the social make-up of the UK, secret papers suggest.

That didn’t take long, did it? But it was bound to happen.

Tony Blair was accused by the French government of “Soviet-style” black propaganda in the run-up to the Iraq war, secret memos obtained by the Iraq inquiry have found.

With full body searches becoming the norm at airports amid terror threats, a Canadian engineer has invented a three-dimensional scanner that doesn’t violate passengers’ privacy.