THE BROWN MOUNTAIN LIGHTS

For centuries, mysterious lights have baffled observers on Brown Mountain in Burke County, North Carolina. The strange lights are often described as white, red, or yellow balls of light. They reportedly move around or remain stationary. Sometimes they are said to look like misty spheres or produce a sizzling sound. Close encounters with the lights have been said to cause dizziness as was described in a 1962 report in the "Charlotte Observer". Twelve eyewitnesses watched the lights from a 60-foot tower. When one of the lights approached one of the men, he suddenly had "a static-like feeling of dizziness". According to the report, when the men climbed down from the tower, they were unable to stand. Explanations for the lights range from several ghostly legends to scientific theories including ball lightning and "earth-lights".
Dating back to 800 year-old Cherokee legends where the lights were said to be the spirits of slain warriors, the Brown Mountain Lights have been observed and investigated numerous times. In 1771, German engineer Geraud de Brahm wrote about the lights in his journals. In an attempt to provide a scientific explanation for the phenomenon, de Brahm wrote: "The mountains emit nitrous vapors which are borne by the wind and when laden winds meet each other the niter inflames, sulphurates and deteriorates." "The Charlotte Observer", a local newspaper, was the first to feature a story on the lights in 1913. W. J. Humphries, of the U.S. Weather Bureau investigated the lights and compared them to a similar phenomenon in the Andes Mountains of South America.
Another government organization, the U.S. Geological Survey, launched two expeditions on Brown Mountain in 1916 and 1922, digging deeper into the mystery. During the 1922 survey, scientist George Rogers Mansfield found a variety of possible causes for the lights including cars, trains, stationary lights and brush fires. Fireflies were even a culprit, but were later viewed as an unlikely explanation. While Mansfield found numerous possibilities for the cause of the lights, he found that a small percentage still had no known cause. Others who have investigated the phenomenon suggest they are "earth lights", a luminous phenomenon caused my seismic activity. Mirages, ball lightning, and swamp gas (despite the lack of swamps on Brown Mountain) have all failed to completely explain the nature of the lights.
The luminous orbs eventually made their way into a bluegrass hit, "The Legend of the Brown Mountain Light," performed by musician Tommy Faile in the 1960’s.
Over a two-week period in November 2000, L.E.M.U.R. Paranormal Research Team based in Asheville, North Carolina observed and filmed the Brown Mountain Lights using an Infrared Night Vision camera. Over an hour of activity was captured on the first known video evidence of the Brown Mountain Lights. L.E.M.U.R. hopes this footage will yield more clues about the mysterious lights that always have eluded a suitable explanation.
The L.E.M.U.R. team plans to show the footage during the First Annual Paranormal Weekend in Asheville, N.C. on January 11-13, 2002. Joshua P. Warren, founder and president of L.E.M.U.R., has written two books, "Haunted Asheville" and "How To Hunt Ghosts". "I believe footage of this quality is the most significant step forward in the history of researching the lights," says Warren. "By studying the video, we’re targeting places on the ridge to research further. Ultimately, we hope to solve the mystery."

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THE POPOBAWA - A ZANZIBARI INCUBUS

The infamous Popobawa has struck again causing panic in the Zanzibar islands off the coast of Tanzania in Africa. The "creature", described as a cyclops dwarf with bat-like wings and ears, and sharp talons, is feared for its nasty habit of sodomizing men while they sleep in their beds. The presence of the often invisible Popobawa can be detected by an acrid smell or a puff of smoke. Sometimes, the Popobawa is visible to everyone except the terrified victim. It is believed to take human form by day, but with pointed fingers. After doing its vile deed, the Popobawa instructs its victims to spread the word about their ordeal or it would be back.
The Popobawa, its name derived from the Swahili words for "bat" and "wing", first appeared in the neighboring island of Pemba in 1972. More attacks were reported in the 1980s, again in April of 1995, and recently in 2000 and July 2001. Attacks appear to coincide with political stress such as election. The 1972 attacks followed the assassination of the country’s president. Interestingly, the recent attacks have come without any political turmoil.
Hospitals in Zanzibar have treated numerous broken ribs, bruises, and other injuries attributed to the Popobawa. One mentally ill man was hacked to death after confessing that he was the troublesome demon. During times when the Popobawa terrorizes the islands, whole families will often sleep arm-in-arm in front of their houses, seeking safety in numbers.
Mjaka Hamad, a peasant farmer in his mid-50s and a victim of the Popobawa’s attacks in 1995, has related his ordeal to the media. "I could feel it," Hamad said. "...something pressing on me. I couldn’t imagine what sort of thing was happening to me. You feel as if you are screaming with no voice. It was just like a dream but then I was thinking it was this Popobawa and he had come to do something terrible to me, something sexual. It is worse than what he does to women." Hamad claimed that he did not believe in the Popobawa or other spirits before the attack and suggests that is the reason he was attacked. "I don’t believe in spirits so maybe that’s why it attacked me. Maybe it will attack anybody who doesn’t believe."
The Popobawa appears to be an African version of the wide-spread Mara phenomenon. Joe Nickell, an investigator with CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), has compared the Popobawa to Medieval legends of succubi (female spirits) and incubi (male spirits) who sexually molested their victims in bed at night. In Newfoundland, an ugly old woman sexually molested men in a phenomenon known as Hagging. Other similar reports from around the world describe vampires, formless black blobs, and extraterrestrials among other bizarre entities.
Skeptics claim that these experiences are a result of a hypnogogic hallucination during a "waking dream". Paralysis, a sense of being weighted down, floating sensations, and encounters with otherworldly beings are often all unifying characteristics of the phenomenon.

news source of www.xprojectmagazine.com

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BERMUDA TRIANGLE

On 5 December 1945, disaster was about to strike the personnel of Fort Lauderdale in Florida. That afternoon five torpedo-bombers took off on a routine training flight. Soon, things began to go wrong. The flight leader reported equipment malfunctions, gyro-compasses went crazy, and he lost his horizon. Finally, he reported that he was lost. This happened just off the Florida coast and, as the day progressed, the weather worsened rapidly. Two hours later, the aircraft disappeared and were never seen again. No bodies were found and no wreckage spotted.In isolation, the tragedy was not unprecedented. Disorientation is easy to achieve over water and, if lost, it is easy to fly until your fuel runs out, simply falling from the sky. The lack of evidence of a crash was unusual but, again, it has happened before. But what do we make of a sixth plane - part of the search and rescue operation - blowing up less than half an hour after take-off, with total loss of life?
A CATALOGUE OF DISASTER
The above is one of the major episodes of what has become known as the Bermuda Triangle. Others include the loss of two aircraft in 1948, taking sixty lives. In 1950 a freighter disappeared with all hands. 1963 saw a triple tragedy with the loss of another freighter and three large aircraft.Indeed, if you add up the minor incidents as well you come up with a continuous list of mysterious disappearances of over 140 ships and planes and a thousand lives. The greatest tragedy happened in March 1918. Sailing from Barbados to Norfolk, Virginia, the US Navy Supply Vessel Cyclops disappeared without trace, taking three hundred lives.The Bermuda Triangle stretches from Bermuda to Cuba, and along the US coast from Miami to New York. Sceptics would argue there is no mystery as traffic is so dense that disasters are inevitable. But a whole industry of the fantastic has been built up to explain such disappearances.
PSEUDOSCHOLASTIC SHENNANIGANS
Vincent Gaddis blamed a space-time continuum touching our dimension at this point.Charles Berlitz put it down to UFO activity and time warps. A Dr Kenneth McCall postulated the tormented souls of black slaves thrown overboard to be cursing the area.Ivan Sanderson suggested a slightly less bizarre theory with his magnetic vortices. Identifying similar areas around the Earth, such vortices are formed where warm and cold currents collide.A further idea is offered by geo-chemist, Dr Richard McIver, who blames gas hydrates trapped in the seabed. Geo-disturbances can cause the release of large amounts of methane. When this happens, the sea can go frothy, like the head of beer, causing ships to lose buoyancy and sink.When the methane reaches the air, a plane engine can cause it to ignite, the wreckage falling into the frothy sea and disappearing. However, whilst this last theory holds real possibilities, perhaps we are looking at the mystery from the wrong angle.
CLEARING THE FOG
From the myriad disasters and close escapes in the area a list of factors leading to disaster can be highlighted. For instance, escapees speak, almost unanimously, of faulty gyro-compasses, equipment malfunction, loss of horizon, lack of wreckage, planes blowing up, water seeming to rise up as if a water-spout, dense banks of sudden fog, and sudden turbulent waters.Yet each of the above events are experienced all the time by sailors and airmen the world over. There is nothing really unusual about any of them in isolation. What IS unusual is that, in the Bermuda Triangle, they all seem to strike at once. We have a word for such a congregation of events. Coincidence.Even skeptics are wary of using this word to explain the Bermuda Triangle. Better, they think, to not think about it at all. After all, the mystery is just so ridiculous. But this is a mistake. For instance, you do not need to study other disasters for long before you realize that coincidence is often the major factor in disaster. It is the coming together of small mistakes and failures that build up to the coincidental congregation of events that cause disaster.
AN INEVITABLE THEORY
This is, actually, inevitable. The universe is obviously designed in such a way as to allow coincidental happenings to occur. If it wasn’t, they simply wouldn’t happen. The law of chance itself demands that coincidences DO occur. Indeed, in such a ‘coincidental’ universe, the Bermuda Triangle is, itself, an inevitability, for coincidence would dictate that sometime, somewhere, a congregation of events must come to a particular location.Folklore would speak of such an inevitability with terms such as curse or jinx. This, in itself, is interesting. For inevitability can have a marked effect on the human mind, causing people to make silly mistakes they otherwise would not make. For instance, if you think you’re going to have an accident, you will be wary and perform different to the norm, increasing the possibilities of an accident happening. Hence, could it be that, as a culture of disaster arose in the area, human psychology dictated that the prevalence of mistakes would increase?Science is quite rightly based on Reductionism, where the simplest explanation is preferred, and the ‘incidences’ of single events take priority over the wider ‘pattern’ of related events. But I am sure that science requires a bedfellow in terms of a more holistic way of looking at things – a discipline I have called Patternology, or P-ology.The Bermuda Triangle could be a classic example for P-ological study, for nowhere else has such a congregation of events occurred, ripe for analysis and study. The suggested statistical bias towards disaster, combined with a possible collective human psychology of inevitability, could be studied in the raw, with the possible outcome of a ‘science of disaster’ that could offer guidance for avoiding disaster in the future.To ignore such a possibility is to condemn us to a continuing bias towards disaster.

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The Tesla Connection

Oliver Nichelson has a very interesting web site entitled, "Tesla Wireless and the Tunguska Explosion" that advocates this theory, with some very compelling information about the background and secret experiments of the Serbian-born American inventor. "Tesla's writings have many references to the use of his wireless power transmission technology as a directed energy weapon," says Nichelson. "The Tunguska explosion of 1908 may have been a test firing of Tesla's energy weapon."
Nichelson details many of the experiments with electricity conducted by Tesla in many areas of the United States. He relates one such experiment at his Colorado Springs laboratory where he erected a 200-foot pole topped by a large copper sphere that discharged lighting bolts up to 135 feet long.
"People along the streets were amazed to see sparks jumping between their feet and the ground," Nichelson writes. "Flames of electricity would spring from a tap when anyone turned them on for a drink of water. Light bulbs within 100 feet of the experimental tower glowed when they were turned off." Nichelson then chronicles the evolution of Tesla's method of the wireless transmission of electrical energy, and how it led up to the secret test in 1908. Apparently, Tesla had proved that directed electrical energy could be used as a beneficial or destructive force. "Beset by financial problems and spurned by the scientific establishment, Tesla was in a desperate situation by mid-decade... and, according to Tesla's biographers, he suffered an emotional collapse. In order to make a final effort to have his grand scheme recognized, he may have tried one high-power test of his transmitter to show off its destructive potential. This would have been in 1908."

In fact, perhaps Tesla was confessing in 1915 when he wrote: "It is perfectly practical to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance. I have already constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible. But when unavoidable [it] may be used to destroy property and life. The art is already so far developed that the great destructive effects can be produced at any point on the globe, defined beforehand with great accuracy."

The Tesla experiment might also account for the enigmatic aspects of the Tunguska event, according to Nichelson: the lack of a crater; the disturbances in the planet's magnetic field; the odd glow in the sky seen before and after the event; the radiation-like burns; and the electromagnetic pulse.

The test, however, may not have been a complete success, says Nichelson. Tesla may have been aiming for the completely uninhabited region of the north pole. He may have overshot his target.

Research Continues

Scientists continue to research the Tunguska event and debate its causes. As recently as 1996, they gathered in Bologna, Italy for the Tunguska International Workshop. More than 65 participants attended the conference, mostly Russians and Americans, but no consensus was reached. The scientists remained divided between those who favor the meteorite hypothesis and those who favor the comet hypothesis.

Why is it important to study Tunguska? Because it may have been the most recent occurrence of a major meteor or comet impact on our planet. If it had struck over a major city instead of an isolated forest, hundreds of thousands of people would have been killed.

But no one at the conference, it seemed, was seriously interested in the Tesla theory, nor in the suggestion raised that the explosion was actually caused by an errant, 2,000-year-old Japanese nuclear spacecraft returning home... but missing the runway.

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So What Happened?

The theories put forth to account for the Tunguska event range from the scientifically plausible to the ridiculous to the intriguing. They included:

A fragmentary asteroid or meteorite that exploded in the atmosphere.

The nucleus of a comet that likewise exploded in the atmosphere.

An unusual tectonic event.

A tiny black hole that entered the Earth's atmosphere from outer space and imploded. A chunk of antimatter that reacted with the matter of our planet.

A crashed UFO, the propulsion drive of which exploded.

A deliberate attack by extraterrestrials.

The result of a test of Nikola Tesla's wireless power transmitter.

Again, there's no definitive proof for any of these ideas, but let's consider each.

Asteroid - This and the comet theory are favored by scientists, of course - mainly because they can't conceive of any other explanation.

I'd have to agree that it's the most likely. But because there is no crater and little debris, there's only circumstantial evidence. Before Tunguska, scientists rarely considered that an asteroid would explode in the atmosphere before striking the ground. Yet, because there is no crater, they reason, that must be what happened. So where are all the fragments of the asteroid that they estimate must have weighed some 100,000 tons? Vaporized, they say - pulverized into dust and tiny gravel. The only fragments found thus far have been tiny glass nodules embedded in the fallen trees, which are consistent in makeup with stony asteroid fragments that have been super-heated.

Comet - This is the prevailing theory today - that it was a 100,000-ton fragment of Encke's Comet. Since there is little debris, the explosion might be consistent with a comet, which generally is a loose mixture of stone and ice. Upon explosion, very little debris would remain as evidence. Ironically, it is the very lack of evidence that boosts the credibility of the comet theory.

An unusual tectonic event - Andrei Yu. Ol'khovatov, a Russian scientist, has recently come up with the interesting, plausible theory that Tunguska was "a geophysical event, associated with tectonic processes" - a powerful earthquake, the enormous pressures of which also resulted in the recorded atmospheric effects.

Black hole - This idea isn't taken very seriously by mainstream scientists, simply because it's not known whether such small black holes even exist. And if they did, what the result would be upon one entering our atmosphere is completely unknown.
Antimatter - This idea is also readily dismissed, since it is unlikely that antimatter would be able to transverse space and reach our planet without already encountering some matter and annihilating.

Crashed UFO - There's no evidence whatever of this idea, of course. No fragments of the spacecraft or piece of an alien's intergalactic map. If it were the explosion of the UFO's propulsion system - nuclear or whatever - it might have vaporized all traces of the ship, but come on....

Extraterrestrial attack - If they were going to attack, why would they choose an unpopulated region, unless their intelligence was bad? Or unless it was meant as just a warning. And it it was just a warning, where was the follow-up or contact?

Nikola Tesla's experiment - Granted, this idea is far more unlikely than an asteroid or comet strike, but I find it quite a bit more interesting. A lot of myth has grown around the mysterious, dark and temperamental figure of Tesla. Although known as the discoverer of the principals of alternating current and other inventions, he is also credited in some quarters with far more notorious inventions, including a death ray. Some say the controversial HAARP array in Alaska is a continuation of Tesla's experiments that used electricity to create super weapons. The Tunguska event, they say, was the result of a test of such a weapon - a test that didn't go exactly as planned.

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The Tunguska Mystery

In 1908, something exploded in an isolated area of Siberia. What was it?"

I was sitting on the porch of the house at the trading station, looking north. Suddenly, in the north... the sky was split in two, and high above the forest the whole northern part of the sky appeared covered with fire. I felt a great heat, as if my shirt had caught fire. At that moment, there was a bang in the sky, and a mighty crash. I was thrown twenty feet from the porch. The earth trembled."
Dialogue from some asteroid impact movie? An excerpt from a science fiction novel? A witness to the test of a nuclear explosion? The witness is real, but the event was not the test of an atomic or nuclear device. And it certainly wasn't fiction.
This incredible event, related by this Russian witness, took place on the morning of June 30, 1908 in a remote area of Siberia called Tunguska. And exactly what happened there is still unknown. There are several theories as to what caused the great explosion in the sparsely populated forest at 62 degrees north latitude, but there is no definitive proof for any of them. Nearly 100 years later, the debate about the Tunguska event continues.
Whatever happened, the resulting devastation was enormous. A fireball as bright as the sun was seen streaking across the sky. Observers 300 miles away heard deafening bangs. Trees were flattened in a radial pattern over an area of 850 square miles. Seismic vibrations were recorded by instruments as far away as 600 miles. Fires burned for weeks. Forty miles from ground zero, people were thrown to the ground and knocked unconscious. One man was hurled into a tree and killed. Scientists examining the area calculated that the explosion was equivalent to 40 megatons of TNT - 2,000 times the force of the atomic bomb released on Hiroshima in 1945. Yet there was no crater.
Other, more enigmatic effects were recorded:
-disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field

-a local geomagnetic storm
-a reversal of soil magnetization

-an electromagnetic pulse, similar to what would becreated by a nuclear explosion

-aurora displays before and after the event

-unusually bright nights seen before and after the event

-genetic mutations in plants and animals

-accelerated growth of plants afterward

-radiation-like burns and deaths of exposed people.

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