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Post by auntym on Aug 18, 2017 17:58:23 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/08/the-bizarre-disappearance-of-agatha-christie/ The Bizarre Disappearance of Agatha ChristieBrent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/ August 18, 2017 Among the greatest mystery novelists of all time, surely English crime novelist Agatha Christie ranks high. So well-known and ubiquitous are her works in literature that even people who have never read even a single one of her novels know her name, and over the course of her career until her death in 1976, during which she wrote 80 novels, Agatha Christie became the best selling novelist in history, the most widely published, behind the Bible and Shakespeare, as well as the most translated author, making her works known and enjoyed throughout the world, and she was celebrated with some of the highest accolades and awards a writer could ever possibly achieve. However, one of her greatest mysteries was carried out in real life, when she went missing without a trace and reappeared over a week later, with none of it ever being explained or satisfactorily solved. In 1926, Christie was having a tough time of things. Earlier that year her mother, Clara Miller, had passed away from bronchitis, and to make matters worse her husband at the time of the illness, Archie Christie, was not around to help since he was away in Spain and proceeded to avoid the whole affair by going off to London after that. On top of all of this, Archie was embroiled in an affair, and indeed had informed Agatha that he planning on leaving her. The whole mess left Agatha Christie in a deep state of despondency, and many claimed that she was on the verge of an incoming nervous breakdown. She became addled and unfocused, prone to getting upset and worked up over the slightest annoyances, and had mostly lost her will to write. On December 3, 1926, Agatha and Archie had a fight and she left to go on some errands, coming home to find that Archie had packed his bags and leave once and for all, heading off to see his mistress, Nancy Neele. At around 9:45 PM that evening, Agatha Christie got up at her home in Berkshire and kissed her 7-year-old daughter goodnight before packing a small suitcase, going downstairs, getting into her car, and driving off into the night. The only clue as to where she had gone was apparently a note she had written to her secretary claiming that she was going for for a trip to Yorkshire. The next day, Agatha’s vehicle, a green Morris Cowley, was found abandoned on an embankment of a natural spring known as the Silent Pool, near Guildford, Surrey. The car had been left with its hood up and the lights on, along with her fur coat, her suitcase still filled with all of her belongings, and an out of date driver’s license lying within. There was no evidence of any sort of accident, and of the vehicle’s occupant there was no sign, and it seemed as if the great author Agatha Christie had simply stepped off the face of the earth. Considering that Agatha Christie was a major literary star, the disappearance soon hit national news and a massive manhunt was launched immediately, which would go on to be one of the biggest the country has ever seen. During the intensive search nearly a thousand police officers and thousands more volunteers, as well as tracker dogs, airplanes, and divers spent days scouring every inch of the area looking for the missing woman and dredging the waterways, and hefty rewards were widely offered for any information. Even the renowned detective writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and Dorothy L. Sayers, were recruited to help in the search, in the hope that they could offer some unique insights into the mystery, but none were forthcoming. Known occultist Doyle even apparently went to psychics with some of Christie’s gloves in an effort to find answers from beyond, but this ended in frustration, with the medium merely giving the cryptic answer that she was alive but dazed and confused somewhere. Newspaper headline about Christie’s disappearance In the meantime, speculation ran rampant as to what had happened to the missing Christie. One idea was that she had committed suicide by jumping into the Silent Pool Spring, but there was no body ever found there despite extensive searches and Christie’s novels had been really taking off in popularity. Would she really want to kill herself? For others the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of her unfaithful husband, who was seen as suspicious to say the least. Still others thought this was all merely a publicity stunt to promote her latest book. None of it amounted to little more than blind speculation in the absence of any physical evidence whatsoever. Then, in the very middle of all of this mad searching and speculation, Agatha Christie just suddenly appeared under comparatively mundane circumstances. On December 14, which was 11 days after she had vanished, Agatha was found to be staying at the elegant Swan Hydropathic Hotel near Harrogate. According to hotel staff, she had arrived by taxi the day after she had vanished and checked in under the name of Teresa Neele, from Cape Town South Africa, which was particularly interesting as this was the surname of her husband’s lover. The mysterious woman had been seen around the hotel grounds keeping to herself reading newspapers and playing bridge, as well as dancing, explaining to other hotel patrons that she was merely a bereaved mother getting back on her feet. Oddly, despite her high profile and widely publicized disappearance, the one who eventually recognized Christie as the missing famous author was allegedly the hotel’s banjo player, Bob Tappin, who was the one who would go on to contact authorities. When confronted, Christie claimed to have no memory whatsoever of the past 11 days, suggesting that she had some form of amnesia. Police would later speculate that as she had been traveling she had been involved in a car crash and subsequently lost her memory in the accident, after which she had made the dazed journey to Harrogate. There was also the idea that she had been propelled into a “fugue state,” or temporary loss of memory and out of body state brought on by trauma and stress, after suffering a severe nervous breakdown, which she had been on the verge of doing before she vanished. Christie herself would explain of her apparent amnesia, while offering no real clues into her vanishing, by saying thus: For 24 hours I wandered in a dream, and then found myself in Harrogate as a well-contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa.Despite these claims of memory loss, there were plenty of people who were suspicious to say the least. Many thought that this was just an elaborate shot at revenge against her straying husband, and that the amnesia was all a ruse, but several doctors and other witnesses seemed to support the fact that the troubled author was actually suffering from amnesia of some form. Regardless of what the real answers are, Christie herself would remain silent on what had actually happened over those missing 11 days, never elaborating at all on what had really happened and dooming the whole affair to speculation and debate. Although her marriage was dead and she would officially divorce Archie and go on to marry archeologist Sir Max Mallowan, Agatha Christie’s career would not seem to suffer from all of the incident and its publicity, as she then went on to pen some of her most renowned works, such as Murder She Wrote, Murder on the Orient Express, and Gosford Park. Her strange 11-day disappearance has remained largely unsolved, with no one really knowing what happened to her during that missing time, despite the intense debate, speculation, and numerous books and articles that have swirled about it. It seems rather fitting that one of the most talked about and mysterious vanishings of all time would happen to a renowned writer of mystery novels. It is almost too fitting to be true, yet there it is, and the case has been picked apart and discussed ad infinitum. What happened to Agatha Christie during those 11 missing days? Why did she fall off the face of the earth only to reappear again Was that part of the plan all along or a fluke? Was this an effort to get revenge on her straying husband, an attempt to start a new life, or a genuine case of total amnesia? No one really knows the answer for sure, she never spoke of it even up to her death, taking the secret with her, and the strange vanishing of Agatha Christie has gone unsolved. mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/08/the-bizarre-disappearance-of-agatha-christie/
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Post by auntym on Sept 25, 2017 14:18:42 GMT -6
www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvwjkv/the-man-who-went-to-space-and-disappeared-the-story-of-granger-taylor
The Man Who Went to Space and Disappearedby Tyler Hooper Jul 1 2016 Thirty-five years ago, Granger Taylor left a note saying he was boarding an alien spaceship for an interstellar journey. He was never seen again.Today Robert Keller looks out of his office window, thinking about the last time he saw his best friend more than 30 years ago. "Granger and I were inseparable for years... everywhere he went I was on his heels... Granger and I were like best friends." On the evening of November 29, 1980, 32-year-old Granger Taylor left his parents a peculiar note before vanishing from their farm in Duncan, a small town on southern Vancouver Island. The note read: "Dear Mother and Father, I have gone away to walk aboard an alien spaceship, as recurring dreams assured a 42-month interstellar voyage to explore the vast universe, then return. I am leaving behind all my possessions to you as I will no longer require the use of any. Please use the instructions in my will as a guide to help. Love, Granger." In Taylor's own will he crossed out the word "death" and replaced it with "departure." According to a local newspaper, the Times Colonist, there was also some sort of map drawn on the back of the note. The significance of it has never been determined. The same article says Taylor was last seen leaving a local diner, Bob's Grill, around 6:30 PM. Soon after, Taylor vanished. Police were called and a search ensued, but neither Taylor nor his bright pink Datsun truck were found. "One would expect the car at least to be found," Cpl. Mike Demchuk of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) told the local paper. "You just don't get rid of something that large without someone knowing about it." The note that Taylor left was a surprise to many, but those who knew him were well aware of his ongoing obsession with aliens and space. Just before his disappearance, Taylor's obsession grew to a point where he decided to build a life-size replica spaceship on his parent's farm that he sometimes slept in. Taylor's friend Robert Keller told VICE, "He did have dreams that they [aliens] were coming to get him." CONTINUE READING: www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvwjkv/the-man-who-went-to-space-and-disappeared-the-story-of-granger-taylor
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Post by auntym on Oct 31, 2017 15:18:15 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/11/bizarre-disappearances-and-mysterious-sightings/ Bizarre Disappearances and Mysterious Sightingsby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/November 1, 2017 It is unfortunate that our world on occasion seems to swallow people up without leaving any trace behind, and that people can sometimes just seemingly step right out of existence. In some instances these cases are eventually solved with a body or the return of the vanished to their families, at other times neither they nor any sign of them are ever found, and in still others the missing person is sighted after their vanishing yet still elusive, like a ghost or specter. These are the cases in which a person has inexplicably disappeared or is even thought to be dead, only to be allegedly spotted lurking about like some mysterious beast such as Nessie or Bigfoot, giving us tantalizing yet ultimately fleeting potential glimpses into their fates and very often clouding their vanishings in even more mystery, yet ultimately providing hope to those who seek them. The earliest case we will look at here occurred on June 1, 1948, when a 21-year-old college student by the name of Virginia Carpenter took a train to Denton, Texas to take summer courses at a college there. Along the way she met a schoolteacher who was also on her way to Denton, and they agreed to share a cab upon arrival. When Virginia reached her destination she realized that she had left one of her bags at the station and took a cab all the way back to retrieve it. Much to her disappointment the station staff told her that her bag was in fact on another train, but would be delivered to Virginia’s dormitory first thing in the morning. Taking a taxi back to the dorm, Virginia reportedly got out to talk to two men sitting outside in a yellow car, with whom she seemed to be familiar with, and the cab driver drove away without thinking anything of it. That would be the last confirmed time anyone would ever see her. Although Virginia never checked into her dorm room and never showed up for her scheduled classes, she was nevertheless spotted around the area in the coming days. On one occasion she was seen at a nearby gas station riding with two men in a yellow convertible, and she was later sighted allegedly getting off a bus in Texarkana, after which she had purportedly asked around for hotels in the area, the whole time acting noticeably nervous and uncomfortable. She would then talk with an unidentified man who approached her and they would leave together. The next sighting described her as looking disheveled and haggard, walking along a road near Chino, Texas apparently hitchhiking. A witness would see the missing person poster, recognize her, and approach police to say that they had picked her up hitchhiking and that she had told them her name was Virginia and that she had run away from home. This made little sense because she had been looking forward to her summer classes and had no obvious problems at home that would cause her to run away. Another theory was that she had fallen victim to a serial killer in the area who went by the ominous nickname “The Texarkana Phantom,” which was made all the more shocking in that several of Virginia’s friends would die later die at the hands of this killer. Whatever the case may be, it is unknown why Virginia Carpenter vanished, who the men she had been seen with were, what connection she has to the serial killer, or even if the woman sighted all over the place was even her at all. We move on to 1961 in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where 31-year-old Joan Risch and her husband lived with their two young children. On October 24 of that year, Joan’s daughter came home from visiting a neighbor’s house to find that her mother was gone and that her 2-year-old brother was fast asleep with no one around to watch him. The father was away on business at the time and it was not at all like Joan to leave her youngest child unattended like that. While this was rather odd, things would quickly go to alarming when the girl found what seemed to be a trail of what she thought to be red paint leading from the kitchen out to the driveway, but there was no sign of where her mother had gone. Authorities were able to discover that the “paint” was in fact blood, and that there were other strange clues left behind as well, such as a telephone ripped from the wall and a phone book opened up to a section of emergency numbers. In the kitchen was found a blood infused fingerprint, but oddly it was not of Joan nor anyone in her family, leading to the initial idea that she may have been kidnapped. Strange eyewitness accounts painted a more bizarre picture when police were told by other residents of the area that they had seen Risch wandering about outside of her house looking dazed and disoriented at around the time of her odd disappearance, and several other witnesses claimed to have seen her walking aimlessly along nearby Route 128. Police would find more weird clues when it was discovered that the woman had previously checked out 25 books from the library on mysterious disappearances, including that of a woman who had been married to Brigham Young. One of these books even featured a case spookily similar to what appeared to have happened to her, with the vanished woman in the story also leaving ominous blood stains behind. Due to this new development is has been speculated that she may have intentionally staged her own disappearance to get away from her life and that she is still alive, which is somewhat supported by the many alleged sightings of the vanished woman over the decades, but this is uncertain and Joan Risch has never been found. One theory now is that she may have been injured and sustained amnesia, possibly from falling while walking along Route 128, which was under construction at the time, or that she had even been knocked unconscious and buried by asphalt, but this is all wild speculation and no one really knows what happened to her. It also doesn’t explain all of the sightings. The case of Joan Risch remains a mystery. CONTINUE READING: mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/11/bizarre-disappearances-and-mysterious-sightings/
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Post by auntym on Feb 20, 2018 19:22:15 GMT -6
www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2018/02/daily-2-cents-military-foo-fighter.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PhantomsAndMonstersAPersonalJourney+%28Phantoms+and+Monsters%29Tuesday, February 20, 2018 Military 'Foo Fighter' Investigator DisappearedPosted by Lon Strickler / plus.google.com/+LonStricklerRick in North Carolina called in to tell of a weird disappearance that happened in North Carolina: “There's a lot of paranormal stuff that goes on here, around here. Back in 1945, there was a military investigator...a Major. He had some friends here, he went to go see in a town called Bryson City, North Carolina. This was right after World War 2 had ended and he had been in on the investigation of the Foo Fighters and he had come here to visit his friends but he was still on duty. He was still active. He stops in there. It was a local restaurant. People would know him to see him, and talk to him. And he had gotten a phone call, got very agitated and left in one of those kind of limousine cars that the bigwig staff has. He disappeared. No trace ever found of him. Nobody has any idea what happened to him. However, seven years later. Literally, seven years later. In a totally inaccessible part of the mountains around here, they found his car...pristine condition. No rust. No nothing. No dirt. No anything around it. Stuck in between a couple of trees. And one pack of cigarettes left in it. No prints. No nothing.” Source: Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis - February 14, 2018 www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2018/02/daily-2-cents-military-foo-fighter.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PhantomsAndMonstersAPersonalJourney+%28Phantoms+and+Monsters%29
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Post by jcurio on Feb 21, 2018 17:35:05 GMT -6
He must have been a nice guy. One whose every intention was to discover if “foo fighters” were evil. And if they were, to try to do something to get that corrected. (No sarcasm).
Think about it. Why should investigating a “flying object” cause someone on the ground to disappear?
Oh yeah. He caught the attention of one of the many local serial killers, and eventually his bones (with wallet intact in clothes) will be found inside the walls of the house at the end of the street (another city 100 miles away from the woods). SARCASM. 😝
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Post by auntym on Apr 5, 2018 16:02:09 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/04/weird-cases-of-whole-towns-that-vanished-without-a-trace/ Weird Cases of Whole Towns That Vanished Without a Traceby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/April 5, 2018 There have long been mysterious disappearances and inexplicable vanishings throughout history, with numerous questions floating about the answers to which are not always apparent. Yet in addition to the various individuals who have stepped off the face of the earth are those cases when large numbers of people have apparently simply vanished into thin air. It is a subject which I have covered here at Mysterious Universe before, and which never ceases to inspire speculation and wonder. Among these various mysterious accounts of not only certain people who have disappeared into nothingness, but whole towns that seem to have melted away into the ether, never to be heard from again. An early and very bizarre account of a vanishing town is that of the mysterious Urkhammer, in the state of Iowa, in the United States. The small rural town was apparently in rather good shape and just as normal as any other mid-American town until around 1928, when some aerial photos emerged that appeared to show that there was perhaps simply no one living there, and that the fields looked overgrown and untended. Things took a turn for the decidedly weird when there was a report from a tourist passing through, who stopped at a gas station in the town to fill his tank, after which he learned that he had been ripped off and that there was no gasoline in there at all. He then angrily headed back to town, but reported that he could not reach it, as it seemed to forever remain in the distance no matter how fast he drove. Even when he ran out of gas and walked he could not reach the town, which was still sitting there maddeningly before him, forever out of his reach. Other people driving past the town began to report that the previously bustling town seemed to be abandoned and lifeless, and when some investigated they purportedly found rows and rows of houses sitting peacefully with no sign of the occupants. The story goes that this was indeed reported upon by several local newspapers, such as the the Clarion-Sun-Telegraph, but that these reports were drowned out by news of the impending stock market crash of 1929. Other reports of anomalies would come in from the town as well, such as people who seemed to have witnessed the town actually evaporating into thin air, as if being absorbed into some other dimension, with one such account concerning a group fleeing through the area during the dust bowl of 1932 and going to the town to retrieve supplies, the story which was written of on the Strange State website thus: Imagine their surprise when they were unable to mount the steps leading to the store, their feet each time passing through the lowermost step as through a cloud. Convinced that this was some sort of plot to prevent outsiders from shopping at the store, they attempted to scale the steps using an old board found nearby. Imagine their surprise when their feet passed through both board and steps as easily as a potato passes through the smoke of a campfire! Terrified, the men ran back to their nomadic camp and reported what they had seen, only to be accused of spending the group’s hard-gotten money on illegal hooch rather than on beans and bacon. But they displayed the money and challenged others in the camp to try the same experiment. A group of a dozen men, some armed, went back to the general store, and lo! and behold! had the same eerie experience. The caravan covered its fires and decamped with all deliberate speed, but the story quickly circulated, and soon a group of State Police were ordered to investigate the phenomenon.
They went to the Urkhammer Sheriff’s office to confer, converse and otherwise hobnob with their brother law enforcement officials. The group’s leader approached the office of this guardian of the peace and attempted to knock on the door, only to see his had pass through the thick oak as though it were merely painted steam. Their report began the gradual decline of Urkhammer. It became less substantial with every passing day, and passersby noted the absence of children playing and the growing seediness of the houses and barns. Then, on May 7, 1932, Phineas Bumf, a Huguenot immigrant farmer, passed by at dawn with his cargo of produce, and what to his wondering eyes did appear but- nothing! Where the town had stood were only abandoned fields and long-rotted fences. A cast-iron bathtub, used long ago as a watering trough for livestock, sat alone in a field of weeds, the sole relic of human presence. Urkhammer was no more. Many years later a gypsy caravan camped on the site but left abruptly. The Ataman of the group, “Baxtalo,” told a Roma-friendly neighboring city councilman that the place was “saturated with the tears of the dispossessed, and with the despair of those who had never borne names.In later years people would begin to move into the region and find that indeed there was a town there that had grown weed-choked and feral, crumbling away into nothingness. It remains unknown just where all of the people of this alleged town went, or even if it ever really existed in the first place, and it remains a strange historical oddity and unconfirmed mystery. A very intriguing story that has made the rounds in recent times is the odd story of the town of Ashley, in the U.S. state of Kansas. Apparently Ashley was a tiny farming community of around 700 people and supposedly according to the United States Geological Survey on August 16, 1952, the area was rocked by a massive earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter Scale. Considering that Ashley was rather remote, it managed to escape the news for the most part, but when investigators finally arrived it was oddly found that there was simply no one there. Things were already apparently rather ominous as authorities approached the town, as there was found to be a smoking, heat-belching blazing fissure measuring 1,000 yards in length and approximately 500 yards in width, but as for the town itself there could be found not a single man, woman, child, or even pet, neither alive nor dead, even after a 12-day intensive search. It seemed that everyone had simply vanished off the face of the earth, or been swallowed by it. Interestingly, an aftershock allegedly rocked the region in the coming days after the aborted search, and when rescuers arrived this time the fissure was reportedly gone as mysteriously as it had appeared. Taking things deeper into the bizarre, further investigation would supposedly turn up a variety of strange phenomena that had plagued the area before everyone had seemingly disappeared. Allegedly on August 8 there was a report coming from a local by the name of Gabriel Jonathan, who claimed that he had seen a “small, black opening in the sky,” and not long after that police were deluged with calls reporting the same exact thing. The following morning a police officer from the nearby town of Hays by the name of Allan Mace was sent in to investigate, after which he would radio in to claim that he had been headed down the only road towards Ashley but had somehow found himself back in the town of Hays, despite the fact that he had not turned around. He had apparently been rerouted by some mysterious force. When more officers were sent in to see what was going on they too apparently encountered the same strange phenomenon. Things got stranger still when reports kept coming in about the weird atmospheric anomalies, and that there were also people who had mysteriously gone missing without a trace. Other reports would filter in that the town was in total darkness, as if the sun had never risen. Perhaps even more bizarre still were the reports that people were having conversations with long dead family members. The first such report was allegedly from a woman named Phoebe Danielewski, who reported that her daughter was talking with her father, who had died 3 years earlier, and more worrying the girl apparently kept trying to go outside to “join them.” Police would purportedly get hundreds of similar calls in the coming days, after which it was claimed that all of the children in the town had spontaneously vanished in the middle of the night on August 12, 1952. On the evening of August 13, 1952, a caller named Scott Luntz claimed that there was a fire in the distance that was described as “bright red and orange [that] seemed to extend high into the sky,” and numerous other calls would begin to flood in claiming the same thing, further adding that the fire seemed to be coming from the sky itself. Throughout all of this there were no similar reports from any of the neighboring communities, and it seemed to be confined solely to Ashley. According to the story, another call of this came in on the morning of August 14, 1952, when a frantic local named Benjamin Endicott contacted police in an utter panic to claim that there was a vast fire in the sky that had turned night into day. The following day, just two days before the earthquake, would bring perhaps the strangest, and indeed the last purported call from Ashley, placed by a Ms. April Foster. The transcript of this conversation supposedly goes thus: CONTINUE READING: mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/04/weird-cases-of-whole-towns-that-vanished-without-a-trace/
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Post by auntym on May 30, 2018 14:36:16 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/05/mysterious-disappearing-phantom-houses/ Mysterious Disappearing Phantom Housesby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/May 30, 2018 There are many cases of haunted houses in the world, ranging from the odd to the truly bizarre. Yet going beyond merely just being the lairs of ghosts and specters, what of those houses that seem to be specters in and of themselves? There have long been tales of whole houses seeming to dissipate from view, to blink into nothingness, often to reappear just as mysteriously, and here are some of the strangest. One instance of a pervasive tale of a phantom house occurred in the early 20th century in Versailles, France. At this time two women by the names of Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain went for a visit to the Petit Trianon, which was a modest house situated within the Trianon gardens on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles. There they experienced a classic time-slip, witnessing the house as it had appeared in the 18th century, seeing buildings and structures in the area that no longer existed, and even sighting ghosts walking about in antique clothing, including that of none other than Marie Antoinette herself. In the wake of this decidedly strange experience the two women researched the history of the area and returned to the same house for their investigation. However, when they arrived there was no trace of any such house having ever been there, nor even the path they had walked along to get there. All they could see were droves of tourists, none of whom had any idea of what they were talking about when asked. The women would write of this strange anomaly in a book entitled An adventure, but it was mostly written off as mostly a delusion at the time. In the late 1800s there was also the tale of a phantom house that seemed to randomly warp about in the region of Suffolk, England. On one summer evening in 1860 one farmer named Robert Palfrey was baling hay when he suddenly was overcome by a biting chill despite the otherwise warm air. When he looked up he claims to have seen a majestic and pristine red brick house surrounded by green gardens looming nearby, which he had never seen before in all of his years in the area. The house then vanished into thin air just as suddenly as it had appeared right before his eyes, melting away into nothingness. This particular house would be seen on and off again in later years. In 1912, Palfrey’s own great-grandson, James Cobbold, was in the very same area when the air became frigid and he claimed to hear a loud whooshing sound, as if a great amount of air had been abruptly displaced. When Cobbold and his companion looked up they noticed an opulent, three-storied, double-fronted, red brick, Georgian-style house surrounded by lush, blooming gardens, even though just moments before there had been nothing their but open expanses of open farmland. After a few moments, the house was ensconced with some sort of a fog or mist, before blinking back out of existence. Then in 1926 a young teacher and her student were walking through the same area when they claimed to have come across a massive house with a wall around it, imposing iron gates, and verdant gardens. When the teacher later asked local residents about the estate she was informed that no such home had ever existed anywhere near there. The teacher returned to the area with her student the following spring to find that indeed the house was not there, and she would say of this: My pupil and I did not take the same walk again until the following spring. It was, as far as I can remember, a dull afternoon, with good visibility, in February or March. We walked up through the farmyard as before, and out on to the road, where, suddenly, we both stopped dead of one accord and gasped. “Where’s the wall” we queried simultaneously. It was not there. The road was flanked by nothing but a ditch, and beyond the ditch lay a wilderness of tumbled earth, weeds, mounds, all overgrown with the trees which we had seen on our first visit. We followed the road on round the bend, but there were no gates, no drive, no corner of a house to be seen. We were both very puzzled. At first we thought that our house and wall had been pulled down since our last visit, but closer inspection showed a pond and other small pools amongst the mounds where the house had been visible. It was obvious that they had been there a long time. This incident was notably written of by Edward Bennett in his 1934 book Apparitions and Haunted Houses. Yet another sighting was made by a young man named Edward Bentley in the early 1940s, when he was out passing out catalogs along Southall Street for the clothing store he worked for when he came across a large Georgian style house set some distance back from the road. He called out to his employer, a Mr. Aubyn Davies, but by the time he arrived there was nothing their but brush and weeds, with no sign whatsoever of the grand house that had been seen. Suffolk seems to have had a good number of sightings of mysterious phantom houses roaming about all over the place, especially in the area of Rougham, and this has earned these spectral dwelling the nickname “The Mirage of Rougham.” The phenomenon has been reported well into modern times, including as recently as 2007, when a Jean Batram and her husband were driving though Suffolk along Kingshall Street in Rougham, near Bury St Edmunds, when they spied a stately Georgian house complete with a picturesque blooming garden. On their way back, they wanted to see the stunningly beautiful house again but it proved to be gone, with nothing but a field where it had stood. She would later learn of the area’s history of sightings of ghostly houses, and Batram would say of her experience: I know I saw this house, I can see it now and could sketch it if I needed to. It was a lovely big Georgian house with a whole row of long windows and trees at the back of it. I have talked to other people and they have heard of it and people in Rougham have heard of the tale. I would just love to get to the bottom of it. At the time it happened, I knew nothing about this house at all. I was looking across some ploughed fields when I noticed this great big house and remarked to my husband how nice it was.I had a quick look and saw these lovely big windows and then thought I would see it again when I came back. But when we drove back, there was no house there. The spectral house of Suffolk has been covered in numerous publications on the paranormal, including the books Spectral Suffolk, by Chris Jensen Romer, Eric Quigley and Nicola Talbot, as well as Ghosts of Suffolk, by Betty Puttick. One theory is that the house is nothing but a fleeting mirage, a trick of the eyes, while others suggest that is is a dwelling that usually resides in another dimension, occasionally briefly popping through to ours. Nothing is conclusive, and it remains an odd, unexplained phenomenon that continues to be one of the more well known strange hauntings of the Suffolk area. Moving over to the United States, one odd tale of a mysteriously disappearing home appeared in the book The Big Book of Virginia Ghost Stories, by L. B. Taylor, and concerns a witness by the name of Kathleen Luisa, of Falls Church Virginia. She claims that she had driven past an old manor called the Stone House, situated near Sudley Road, many times and had always wondered about its history. The house was located amongst some of the old battlefields of the American Civil War, and was absolutely steeped in history, as well as being a common landmark in the area. One night in 1986, Luisa went out to one of the old battlefields along with her mother and grandparents in order to gaze upon the passing Halley’s Comet, but as they approached the intersection where the Stone House should have been looming it simply wasn’t there. The baffled witness turned the car around and was finally able to locate an empty lot where the house should have been standing, yet there was not a scrap to suggest it had ever been there at all in the weed-choked lot. The only thing that remained were the well and some fences. The puzzled witnesses figured that the house must have been unexpectedly torn down or relocated sometime very recently without their awareness, even though it seemed as if the lot of land was relatively untouched and did not display the sort of activity that one would expect from such an undertaking. There was no rubble, no scars in the earth from machinery or vehicles, no holes in the ground, no foundation walls. It seemed to be merely a lonely expanse of land that had remained there open to the elements for some time, the only sign at all that there had ever been anything there that well leading down into the dark. The group milled about the lot for some time trying to figure out what had happened before dejectedly continuing on. Two weeks later, the same group drove by the same intersection and was absolutely baffled when she saw that the house was there once again as if it had never been gone. They all swore that they had seen the empty lot, and were equally befuddled as to how the house could be there. She would insist that she had been living in the area her whole life and had definitely not made any mistakes about the location. In the same book was another odd story concerning the Stone House, this time with the testimony of a Beverly Kish, of Merrifield, Virginia, who claims that in January of 1997 she had her own unusual experience concerning the structure, which she felt compelled to share upon hearing of Luisa’s experience. Kish would say: I experienced a ghostly encounter of sorts in January 1997, but I didn’t know about it until I read about the lady (Luisa) who said she drove by the location of the Stone House and the house had disappeared. The same thing happened to me! I was living in Manassas at the time and wanted to take a drive one night. It was clear with the moon out. It wasn’t pitch dark. I was alone. Having lived in the area tenty years, I know exactly where the Stone House is. In fact, I took a tour there a couple of years ago, yet on this night it was gone! I even turned the car around and said to myself ‘That’s funny, I’m at the right intersection,” and all I saw was a patch of grass with the glow of the moon on it where the house had been. And you can’t miss this house. It’s close to the road, so I can personally vouch for what the other woman saw- or rather, for what she didn’t see. Also in the United States is the spectral house of Cuba Road, in Lake Zurich Illinois, in the United States. The road in question meanders through the affluent towns of Lake Zurich and Barrington, and is already imbued with all manner of tales of the strange with the many reports of inexplicable and eerie spook lights reported from the nearby White Cemetery, as well as numerous specters and ghosts. Perhaps strangest of all is what supposedly lies along a side street called Rainbow Road. The area was previously the home of an abandoned mansion estate that was so expansive that it has frequently been claimed to have been an old asylum that has gates that inexplicably change position. The estate sits right by the infamous White Cemetery, which dates to at least the 1820s and known for numerous hauntings and bizarreness, including phantom vehicles, dancing orbs of light, and shadowy wraiths, and one particular house in can certainly add to this. It is said that there is a modest shack that occasionally will appear in the woods right next to the cemetery, and which is inhabited by an elderly woman who is sometimes reported as holding a lantern. It is said that if one is to approach the house it will simply vanish into thin air, along with anyone who happens to be too close to it when it does. The house is often reported as being wreathed in spectral flames as well, leading to the theory that it is perhaps a ghost structure that was somehow imprinted onto the area in the wake of a tragedy, probably a fire that most likely took the dwelling’s occupant with it. Is that is what is happening in such cases of spectral vanishing houses? Have these structures somehow been etched into the location through some mysterious means, as if an image burned upon film? Can a place have the memory of a house pervading it? Or are these instances of time slips, in which scenes from different eras become visible for brief stretches? Could it even be that parallel realities are bleeding over into our own, with these houses being denizens of another dimension temporarily crossing over into our own reality through some thin spot in the veil that separates us? Perhaps it is just mistakes and memory glitches? These are questions for which we have no real answers, and we are left to merely speculate on what is going on with these houses that seem to flicker in and out of existence at will. mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/05/mysterious-disappearing-phantom-houses/
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Post by auntym on Jun 1, 2018 15:38:23 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/05/supernatural-cars-on-the-highways/ Supernatural Cars on the Highwaysby Nick Redfern / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/nredfern/May 31, 2018 In 2012 I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe titled “The Strange Saga of the Vanishing Cars.” An extract from the article reads as follows: “As I know only too well, and as a result of years of looking into the MIB mystery, it isn’t just the MIB that are weird. Their cars are, too. Just like the dark-suited characters that drive them, their vehicles also display evidence of deep and bizarre high-strangeness, including having the ability to vanish into complete oblivion. Even to be able to fly! They are definitely justified in being called CIBs: Cars in Black. “Dr. Josef Allen Hynek, a well-renowned UFO authority who died in 1986, was provided with the details of a fantastically-strange MIB encounter that occurred in a small Minnesota town in late 1975, and that falls firmly into just such a category. Ironically, no UFO was seen on this particular occasion, but the chief witness was harassed by the driver of a large, black Cadillac on a particular stretch of highway, and who nearly forced the man into an adjacent ditch. The irate man quickly righted his vehicle and headed off in hot-pursuit, only to see the black Cadillac lift into the air and, quite literally, disappear in the blink of any eye .” There is a very good reason why I bring the issue of “Cars in Black” to your attention again. While going through a bunch of old files in early March 2017, I stumbled upon a few scribbled notes from years earlier that concerned a good friend of mine, Tracie Austin, and the MIB. On finding those notes, I called Tracie – who runs the “Let’s Talk Paranormal” show – on March 13 and asked her if she could expand on this other story. It was time to get it all down, once and for all. It all revolved around Tracie’s personal encounter with a CIB, back in the late 1990s. She said: “I remember when me and you went to the UFO Magazine conference in September 1999, in Leeds [England]. I got the train there, you drove there, and then you drove me home, afterwards. Well, it wasn’t long after that that this thing happened. I had moved up to Cheshire the week after I got back from the conference. While we were at the conference I had met Brigitte Barclay a well-known alien abductee in the U.K. That was the first time I had met Brigitte. We just got talking and she happened to tell me of when she lived in the States she had Men in Black episodes. And how she was followed by black cars and black helicopters. “So, I went to the conference, talked to Brigitte, and then was the house move. A few days after, me and a friend went to the movies and a Pizza Hut – it was a Sunday night; I remember that. We were driving from Cheshire into Staffordshire, for about fifteen miles. And Cheshire is full of country roads, as you know. Farmers’ fields, countryside; that kind of thing. “As we entered Staffordshire, I noticed there was an old, black Lincoln car coming towards us in the opposite direction. Although it was old, it looked new, but it was an old style, and it was totally out of place. And, coming from England, in Cheshire, that’s just not the kind of car you see: an American Lincoln. That’s what I thought: what’s an American car doing here? “As the car approached us – coming the other way – I tried to see who the driver was, but I couldn’t see anybody. I’m not saying the car was driving itself, but I just couldn’t make out anyone. No-one. I could see it had really shiny bumpers and there was no [license] plate, at all. And I noticed that with every car behind that Lincoln, it was like it was the leader of the pack. I could see the drivers of the cars behind were all kind of “switched off.” It looked like an automatic mode. Like they were in a daze. It was very, very odd. “We got down the road and my friend said: ‘Did you see the way that vehicle was moving?’ “I said, ‘No, what do you mean?’ “He said: ‘The wheels were going around, but they weren’t touching the ground.’ “It was just like it was hovering, but not high, or I would have known. I was too busy trying to see the driver. I just said: ‘Oh, my God.’ It was really odd that I had had that conversation with Brigitte only a week prior, and now, a week later, I was having my own Man in Black encounter. I don’t believe in coincidence at all; I think everything is synchronicity.” mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/05/supernatural-cars-on-the-highways/
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Post by paulette on Jun 1, 2018 16:41:58 GMT -6
I honor synchronicity. I've had lights behind me that disappeared even though I was on a highway with few exits and there was none where we were. I reported it here but it was one of those little strangenesses that I am somewhat used to. OK. Lights and then suddenly, no lights. They could have plunged off the road (not in the paper). They could have pulled to the side and turned their lights out. Yup, that's possible. Not strongly likely but...I donno. Most of the time when we happen to see something that they thought they had shielded. No evidence (they'd fix that) but maybe the odd sighting or encounter with someone who is able to resist being wiped.
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Post by auntym on Jun 8, 2018 13:29:59 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/06/mysterious-vanishings-and-the-devils-sea-of-japan/ Mysterious Vanishings and the Devil’s Sea of Japanby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/ June 8, 2018 The sprawling oceans of our planet have long been a wellspring of tales of the strange and the unexplained, perhaps not surprising considering the sheer vastness of their largely unexplored depths. Among all of the various phenomena of the sea, perhaps the most well-known is that famous anomalous region of vanishing ships and planes called the Bermuda Triangle, which has long been a persistent paranormal mystery and the subject of much debate and speculation. Yet, the Bermuda Triangle is not the only such vortex of missing ships, and half a world away, in a whole other ocean, there lies a counterpart in the waters near Japan, which by all accounts is just as strange as its Bermuda cousin. The area that has come to be known variously as the Devil’s Sea, the Dragon’s Triangle, Ma-no Umi in Japanese, and the Taiwan Triangle, is an expanse of ocean lying off the coast of Japan that has over the centuries accrued a sinister reputation for swallowing vessels up to never be seen again. The exact location of this dreaded patch of malevolent ocean remains nebulous, with most estimates putting it as a triangle with one corner in Taiwan, another at the Japanese island of Miyake-jima, and another at the island of Iwo-jima, although reports vary and the exact geographical dimensions and perimeter fluctuate and are uncertain. What is consistent is that this place has a dark history that goes way back, and involves ships and aircraft disappearing without a trace, sort of like a Bermuda Triangle of the Orient. The region has apparently been seen as a menace since around 1,000 BC, when it was widely believed that dragons lurked in the depths here, pulling down various fishing and military vessels to their doom. One story tells of how the warlord and 5th Khan of the Mongol Emprire, Kublai Khan, tried to invade Japan twice in the years 1274 and 1281 by crossing the Devil’s Sea and ended up losing many of his ships and around 40,000 men in the process, with many of these wrecks still dotting the ocean floor in their watery graves. Through the centuries since, the area was supposedly known as a place to be avoided, and countless fisherman and travelers were said to venture out over the waves to vanish off the face of the earth here. However, for all of these alleged mysterious disappearances the phenomenon remained largely unknown to the outside world until the notable author Charles Berlitz published his 1974 book on the matter, titled The Bermuda Triangle, which mentions the Devil’s Sea, as well as a follow-up 1989 book The Dragon’s Triangle, which was devoted to it and provided numerous modern cases of supposed vanishings in the area. Berlitz claimed that Japan had lost at least 5 military vessels between the years of 1952 and 1954, along with their crews totaling 700 men, all of whom were supposedly never heard from again. The Japanese government also sent a research vessel called the Kaio Maru No. 5 into the area on September 24, 1953, but it too disappeared with its crew of 31, becoming one of the most well-known casualties of the Devil’s Sea and also prompting the government to issue a warning that the area was unsafe for travel. Interestingly, besides ships or planes seeming to cease to exist, the Devil’s Sea has allegedly produced reports of many other weird phenomena as well. UFOs are frequently spotted in the area, as well as ghost ships and mystery lights out over the waves. In addition, there are accounts of people experiencing lost time, inexplicably malfunctioning equipment, or anomalous magnetic disturbances. Due to this high strangeness and the number of missing ships in the region, and greatly helped along by Berlitz’s mainstream book, the Devil’s Sea has become known as a phenomenon similar to the more well-known Bermuda Triangle, and has such generated plenty of theories as to why this particular stretch of ocean should claim so many lives. Perhaps the most rational lies in the fact that the two islands most often associated with the triangle, Miyake-jima and Iwo-jima, happen to lie right along a line of very active undersea volcanoes called the Izu-Bonin volcanic arc, which spans 2,500 km across the Pacific all the way to Guam. Considering this, violent volcanic activity or related underwater seismic events could very well be causing some of these reported vanishings. Indeed, in his book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved, skeptical researcher Larry Kusche blames a volcano called Myōjin-shō on the incident with the Kaio Maru No. 5, pointing out that debris actually was found that suggested this, and going even further to mention that this particular volcano wasn’t even in the traditional Devil’s Sea to begin with. Other rational theories are that these vessels were lost due to storms or some environmental phenomena, or were just the victims of the any one of the other many perils inherit to the ocean. With the sheer size of the purported Devil’s Sea and the heavy boat traffic through the region, it seems only natural that there should be wrecks and even vanishings, and perhaps these have been over exaggerated as being caused by supernatural phenomena focused on this one area. One of the more fringe theories about the Devil’s Sea is linked to a concept put forward by the cryptozoologist and paranormal researcher Ivan T. Sanderson. In the 1960s and 70s Sanderson came up with the idea that the earth was intersected with lines of power that converged at 12 portals located throughout the world, which he referred to as the “Vile Vortices.” He believed that these vortices formed triangles in a certain pattern along particular lines of latitude, including the infamous Bermuda Triangle, that were responsible for making ships and planes vanish through mysterious means, possibly even to other dimensions through some sort of doorway. These vile vortices have been blamed for the phenomena of the Bermuda Triangle, as well as for other areas of the planet that have been ground zero for strange disappearances or paranormal phenomena, and the Devil’s Sea apparently lies right in the middle of one. Sanderson would write of these vortices and the Devil’s Sea in an article in Saga Magazine called The Twelve Devil’s Graveyards Around the World. Then of course there is the idea that the Devil’s Sea never really existed at all outside of the minds of the writers who have covered it. Many skeptics have pointed out that there seem to be no reports or mentions of the Devil’s Sea or its bizarre vanishings in newspapers or other publications prior to Sanderson’s work on vile vortices and the publication of Berlitz’s book, even in Japan, and that almost every piece of literature on the phenomenon can be traced back to these works on the matter, with little verification or sources to back up their vague claims and frequent bending of certain facts to fit in more with the Devil’s Sea mystery. All of the books and articles on the phenomenon seem to begin there, gradually building upon the history and mythology of the Devil’s Sea to the point where it is no longer possible to disentangle any fact from fiction. Is the whole mystery of the Devil’s Sea and its claimed history of centuries of unexplained vanishings and paranormal phenomena merely a relatively recent invention based on a figment of the imagination and a twisting of facts? We are left with an intriguing tale of the high seas, of a realm with a fearsome dark history where people venture to drop off the face of the earth without explanation, but is any of it true? Does a mysterious force thrum beneath the waves in this corner of the world, or is it all due to normal, natural phenomena? Is it somehow connected to other similar places such as the Bermuda Triangle? Or is it all tall tales and speculation? Indeed, has the Devil’s Sea ever even existed outside of the imagination at all? Whatever the case may be, it is all certainly an entertaining case of yet another supposed mysteries place in our world’s vast and little-understood oceans. mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/06/mysterious-vanishings-and-the-devils-sea-of-japan/
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Post by jcurio on Jun 8, 2018 14:20:23 GMT -6
Ivan T. Sanderson to make up stuff?
Nah. Never heard that about him.
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Post by auntym on Jul 1, 2018 14:10:58 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/07/the-strange-tale-of-the-carnivorous-pink-mist/ The Strange Tale of The Carnivorous Pink Mistby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/July 1, 2018 Fog and mists have always had a strange allure for us. They invoke a certain sense of eerie beauty yet at the same time a feeling of dread scratching at the back of our mind. There has always been an irrational sense lurking somewhere within us that to enter a bank of sudden fog might mean to never come back out, that something malevolent and unknowable prowls within, and it is this that has caused mists and fog to become steady features upon the landscape of both horror stories and sinister legends. Although the innate creeping fear we may feel towards such fogs is largely unfounded and merely a vestige of some primordial irrational fear, there seem to be some cases in which the danger posed by mist is by all accounts real, and one of these is a supposed supernatural bank of fog that eats people alive. The location of this very strange series of events is the woods lining the the Tomoka River west of Daytona, Florida. Beginning in the year 1955, fishermen and hunters in the area began to report seeing a strange, thick bank of pinkish mist that would form low to the ground out of nowhere and seemingly move about on its own accord, regardless of wind direction. Although this is perhaps spooky enough already, this cloud is said to have had some sort of corrosive property, supposedly stripping dead animals and even humans of their flesh to leave only bleached bones behind. It is even said that it is not only dead carcasses that were the victims of this ominous cloud, but that it also took living prey as well. The Tomoka RiverIndeed, the cloud over the years has apparently been blamed for around a dozen mysterious disappearances in the area, as well as the discovery of unidentified human bones, and it is said that this ominous pink mist is almost like some voracious carnivore oozing across the landscape to devour all it comes into contact with. Some of the carcasses and remains found have rather gruesomely been described as appearing to have been melted or half-digested, and there have even supposedly been reports of the predatory fog in action, with animals, birds, or insects that come into contact with the mist said to drop dead and be ensconced by its wispy tendrils. The mist was also said to strip trees of their bark or dissolve brush, leaving swaths of dead land in its wake. Such sightings and strangeness continued up until 1965 or 66, and there have been many legends as to what the bizarre cloud could have been. One popular theory is that it has something to do with a local Native named Chief Tomkie, who is said to have once been cursed for stealing a golden cup and drinking from some mysterious fountain of youth without permission. For his transgressions the chief was hunted down and killed by other tribes, and his golden cup taken back. It is the spirit of Chief Tomkie that is said to prowl the land intertwined with the mist, although what connection any of this has is up for debate. Other ideas are that this is just folklore based on the odd color of light hitting the frequent fogs of the area, that it is swamp gas, or even that it is some sort of toxic cloud of lethal fumes formed by chemicals from industrial plants. On the site Weird US there were several commentaries made by readers familiar with the area, one of them by a person called “welder2,” who said: They called it the cannibal cloud when I was in school and it was supposed to be pink and would eat the meat off anybody that came in contact with it. It wasn’t swamp gas; it was more like a fog that really didn’t cover but a small area in a low spot. If you go into the woods called the Tiger Bay preserve right near the Tomoka River you might be able to see it. I don’t think you can see it all the time, just certain times of the year when we get a lot of fog. I don’t think there is anything to the cannibal stuff or people disappearing, I think it is just fog that reflects a pinkish color in that area. Most of these newcomers who have moved in don’t know anything about it; you have to talk with people who were around in the sixties to hear about it.Another commenter called “NSB” said of the carnivorous cloud: There’s a lawyer I know that could fill you in more on the Pink Cloud. What it was nobody knows, except it was like a thick pink fog that covered a wide area of the Tomoka forest. Now there are claims that many people vanished in that area and only their bones were found. The pink cloud was blamed for the disappearances and people said it would actually eat the flesh off your bones.Curiously, there is another unexplained phenomenon from the same area that may be connected, and this is the history of strange spook lights haunting the area of the Tomoka River at around the same time. For years there were stories of anomalous lights flitting about the same woods that the mist is said to inhabit, and this light would often follow people about or even chase vehicles before vanishing into thin air. These lights are said to have been seen by numerous people over the years, who were more often than not left perplexed as to what they have just witnessed. Suzanne Heddy, executive director of the Ormond Beach Historical Society, had her own run in, with the mysterious lights on many occasions, of which she would say: The first time I saw them, as the car approached they separated in two and went around the car and reformed behind the car. The second time I saw them, they formed in front of the car and went over the car together. There was a lot of speculation as to what it was. Nobody ever really knew what it was. Of course the most obvious answer was aliens but other people discounted it as swamp gas but I find that hard to believe because they weren’t reflective lights.In some versions of the reports, these mystery lights themselves were carnivorous and lethal, with the Assistant Manager of Tomoka State Park Joe Isaacs remaining skeptical but saying of these darker accounts: There are a whole bunch of versions about the lights. There’s one person that says if the lights make contact with you, it would eat your flesh. It’s a little gory. Locals say that a young couple that were parked on the side of the road were involved in an accident and died and they are a part of the haunting now. I don’t want to be a naysayer but I’ve lived here in the park for 30 years and I’ve never seen them. I think every town in the world probably has a legend like this.Whether these lights and the mysterious ravenous pink mist are linked or not is unclear, but what is known is that both phenomena seem to have ended at around the same time in the mid-1960s, leaving us to wonder just where these tales originate. Were these due to some sort of ancient Indian curse on the land? Is it ghosts, aliens, or other supernatural beings? Is there a chance that this really is just an optical illusion melded together with superstition and spooky folklore? If so, then why should it just begin in 1955 and then end approximately a decade later? There are no clear answers, but whatever the “carnivorous pink mist” or these mystery lights were, they remain a creepy bit of legend from this rural area that has never been truly solved, and perhaps give us a reason to fear the fog after all. mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/07/the-strange-tale-of-the-carnivorous-pink-mist/
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Post by auntym on Jul 31, 2018 13:48:20 GMT -6
www.history.com/news/bermuda-triangle-uss-cyclops-mystery-world-war-i?=kkj&cmpid=TWITTER_TWITTER__20180731&linkId=54975258July 31, 2018 Bermuda Triangle Mystery: What Happened to the USS Cyclops?by Natasha Frost / www.history.com/authors/natasha-frostThe USS Cyclops sailed between 1910 and 1918. (Credit: The Naval History and Heritage Command)How could the biggest ship in the U.S. Navy vanish without trace? This was the question on many people’s minds in March 1918, when an enormous collier, the USS Cyclops, disappeared on a voyage between the West Indies to Baltimore. A century on, it’s no closer to being answered. The Cyclops was nearly 550 feet long, with a crew of 306 people and around 11,000 tons of manganese aboard. She had been sailing successfully since 1910, traveling between the Baltic Sea, the Caribbean and Mexico and assisting with moving coal around the world and helping refugees. But in 1917, when America entered World War I, Cyclops became a key naval asset, transporting troops and coal to fuel other ships all over the world. In March 1918, the ship was given a new cargo: tons and tons of dense manganese ore, used in steelmaking. She left Brazil loaded up with the brittle metal, then voyaged to Barbados to resupply for the long journey home to Baltimore. The last known message from the ship said simply: “Weather Fair, All Well.” But on the nine-day journey, something went awry, and no one from the ship was ever seen or heard again—vanishing without even an SOS. In a feature published a couple of years after the ship’s disappearance, Santa Fe Magazine described the strangeness of the disappearance: “Usually a wooden bucket or a cork life preserver identified as belonging to a lost ship is picked up after a wreck, but not so with the Cyclops,” they reported. “She just disappeared as though some gigantic monster of the sea had grabbed her, men and all, and sent her into the depths of the ocean, and the suddenness of her destruction is amplified by the absence of any wireless calls for help being picked up by any ship along the route.” Throughout the decades, there have been a flurry of sometimes sensational theories about the ship’s disappearance, as one among more than 100 ships and planes to have mysteriously disappeared in the so-called Bermuda Triangle—the region roughly bounded by Bermuda, Miami and Puerto Rico. Was the ship eaten by some beast of the deep, carried off as evidence by UFOs, or simply scuppered by a storm? At the time, people wondered whether the ship and crew had been the victim of a German submarine or raider. It was barely a year into the war, and the Cyclops would have made a strategic target. Yet nothing materialized, and as time went on, it has become less and less likely that German crafts had been in the area at all. Others have pointed fingers at the captain, George W. Worley. Months earlier, some members of the crew claimed Worley was a drunk, unsuitable to steer a ship. There were even reports of a minor mutiny staged on board the ship. The Navy defended Worley of these charges, and he returned to his command with apparently little fanfare. The U.S. Navy says in its official statement about the Cyclops, “The disappearance of this ship has been one of the most baffling mysteries in the annals of the Navy, all attempts to locate her having proved unsuccessful.” But some still cling to investigations—particularly those with a personal connection to the ship. Marvin Barrash is the descendant of one of the firefighters aboard the ship. He has spent more than a decade researching its history, painstakingly gathering Navy records, ship logs and any ephemera that might come in useful—including a blackened bag of manganese ore. “The whole existence of the ship has been swept under a rug,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “It wasn’t like it was lost in a glorious battle. It just kind of fell off the face of the Earth.” Barrash has his own suspicions about what happened to this lost colossus—a series of mechanical failures, a crew unused to the new heavy cargo—and a final, great rolling wave that tipped the ship and her passengers into the ocean forever. All of this, he thinks, may have coincided with the ship passing over the Puerto Rico Trench, the deepest part of the Atlantic, where she would be near irretrievable. Despite his misgivings, Barrash retains some hope that the ship will be discovered, especially as undersea exploration technology improves. There are fewer and fewer lost shipwrecks every year, with high-tech devices spotting vessels believed to be gone for good. The Cyclops may be next on the list. “I just want her to be found,” Barrash said. “I want the 309 to be at rest, as well as the families. It’s something everybody needs: some resolution.” www.history.com/news/bermuda-triangle-uss-cyclops-mystery-world-war-i?=kkj&cmpid=TWITTER_TWITTER__20180731&linkId=54975258
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Post by paulette on Aug 3, 2018 10:42:19 GMT -6
Rouge waves. I assume that a boat built in 1910 did not have the safety glass (and ability to climb up the face of the wave before it broke). When we fished off the West Coast of Canada - one had to power up the waves and then pull back on the throttle so as not to bury the bow in the face of the next one. One slid over the top and then went like a bat out of hell to get up the next face. We weren't in waves like this and we were in a 38 foot boat that could only go 8 knots or so. The movie Perfect Storm was believable to me. The last moments when the only choices were to be pulverized with the boat or go overboard and quickly enough drown or die of hyperthermia.
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Post by auntym on Sept 26, 2018 12:14:19 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/09/the-strange-vanishing-of-dorothy-forstein/ The Strange Vanishing of Dorothy Forsteinby Brent Swancer mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/September 26, 2018 Sometimes the last person one would expect winds up being a great unexplained mystery. Our story here begins in 1944, with an otherwise unassuming and well-liked housewife and mother of three by the name of Dorothy Cooper Forstein, who lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with her husband, magistrate Jules Forstein, who had brought to their marriage two children he’d had with his previous wife. She also had an infant son with Jules, and by all accounts Dorothy was quite happily married, and had no known problems with anyone around her whatsoever. Dorothy would have been by all appearances to be just another upper middle class housewife, and there would have been no reason to suspect that she was going to become the center of one of the strangest vanishings there is. On the evening in January of 1944, Dorothy dropped her three children off at a friend’s house and went off to do some shopping. She came home at around nightfall and nothing seemed to be amiss at all as she let herself into her home and began to unload her groceries. Considering that this was a very safe neighborhood with no crime there would have been no reason for her to even suspect that she was in any danger at all. Unfortunately for her she was not as alone as she had thought, and from the shadows crept the form of a menacing stranger, who proceeded to pounce upon her and begin to savagely beat her. At some point in the melee a phone was knocked from the wall, and the operator on the other end heard the struggle and alerted police. Dorothy Forstein When authorities arrived they found Dorothy Forstein crumpled unconscious upon the floor, and she was found to have suffered serious injuries including a broken jaw and nose and a fractured shoulder, as well as a concussion and myriad crapes, scratches, and bruises. When she was questioned on the attack she was unable to give any description of her assailant, as it had been too dark and she had not gotten a good look at him as she was ruthlessly beaten to within an inch of her life. It would be found that, oddly, nothing at all had been stolen from the house and that there were no fingerprints of the mysterious trespasser to be found anywhere, nor was there any evidence as to how the intruder had gotten into the house to begin with, leaving authorities quite baffled as to what was going on. The best anyone could come up with was that it may have been carried out by a person with a grudge against her magistrate husband, but no one had any real clue, there were no suspects, and no arrests were ever made. Indeed, it is still unknown if this assault has anything to do with what would happen next. A few years went by, and although Dorothy recovered physically, both her and her husband were still considerably troubled and shaken by the unsolved crime. They had never really gotten quite back to normal, but things were about to take a turn for the bizarre and make their paranoia justified. On the night of October 18, 1949, Jules Forstein was away on business for the evening, leaving Dorothy at home with her two youngest children, as her then 19-year-old oldest daughter was out with friends. During this time the evening was allegedly quiet and uneventful, and the neighbor would later even say that she had spoken with Dorothy on the phone and that nothing at all had seemed strange. At around 11:30 PM, Jules came home to find quite a sight awaiting him. The house at first seemed to be empty, and he could not fathom where his family could have got off to at that hour. Going upstairs he would find his two youngest children hiding in their bedroom, cowering in fear from some unseen threat. When asked what had scared them so badly they allegedly could only say “Mommy’s gone!” over and over again. When they calmed down they would allegedly tell a very curious series of events indeed. According to the 9-year-old daughter, Marcy, they had heard a noise and when she had looked to see what it was there had been a stranger wearing a “a brown peaked cap” and brown jacket carrying their mother’s unconscious body over his shoulder down the stairs. The girl claimed that she had asked the man what he was doing and that he had simply kindly patted her on the shoulder and calmly told her “Go back to sleep, little one, your mommy has been sick, but she will be all right now.” After that he had continued on his way down the stairs and out of the house, oddly making sure to lock the door behind him. It would be the last time anyone would ever see Dorothy Forstein again. Most surprisingly this had apparently all happened only 15 minutes before Jules had arrived at home, but there was no sign at all of where the man and Dorothy had gone. There was a massive search carried out for the missing Dorothy Forstein, with police checking all over Philadelphia, including hospitals and even morgues, all to no avail. Philadelphia police Captain James Kelly of Philadelphia’s detective bureau sent out 10,000 notices to police departments and institutions all over the country, but no trace was discovered. No sign of either her or her alleged captor has ever been found, and indeed it is not even clear as to how accurate Marcy’s account of events is. In the end we are no closer to figuring out what happened to her than we were way back in 1949, and it looks to be a disappearance that will never be solved. Oddly, there have been some strange little details surrounding the mysterious case in the years since. One is that while the case was very widely covered in the news at the time, the story quickly went out of circulation and was sort of swept under the carpet. From around a week it was all over the news, then nothing. Currently there is very little information to be found on such a weird case, which seems odd to say the least. There is also the rather bizarre claim that articles written of on the case seem to be shut down by Forstein’s own family, which was claimed by an author and researcher named Troy Taylor, who said of the drop off the radar and subsequent cover-up of the Forstein case thus: For decades, no further word of Dorothy Forstein appeared in print. Then, in 2003, I featured the story of Dorothy Forstein on my website and soon after I received a letter from an attorney from the Forstein family asking if the story could be removed. The letter was not threatening. It merely made an appeal for the privacy of the family members and asked if I would consider removing it out of consideration for their grief. I agreed to do so and I later learned that several sites that had also featured my article on the disappearance had received a similar letter. Why the secrecy about a 50-year-old disappearance? No one could say, and to this day no one is talking.This is one part of the mystery that seems to be almost as intriguing as the case itself. Why would someone want to surpress this story after so many decades, and is it even someone who is really in the family at all? Is there some sort of cover-up going on, and if so why? It is hard to say, but if this article suddenly disappears, you know where to look. It at the very least adds a new sheen of the weird to an already strange case. In the end the case of Dorothy Frostein is a curious one that is hard to really unravel. Why did she disappear and who took her? Was it the same person who attacked her years prior? Where did she go and was the child’s account true? There are so many questions and few answers, leaving this another odd unexplained disappearance doomed to forever lurk in the realm of speculation. mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/09/the-strange-vanishing-of-dorothy-forstein/
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Post by paulette on Sept 26, 2018 21:38:12 GMT -6
Creepy.
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Post by jcurio on Sept 29, 2018 8:54:16 GMT -6
recently got a subscription to newspapers.com, and I was just derping around, looking at random things. I knew about the Dorothy Forstein disappearance -- it's always intrigued me. There is a write up about her in this forum here: /r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/1hfa2u/the_mysterious_disappearance_of_housewife_dorothy/. I found an article that stated that in September of 1944 in Philadelphia, a crowd was booing Governor Dewey because of his past anti-Semitic remarks. One man, Morris Anmuth, was taken from the crowd by two policemen, dragged into an alley, and beaten so severely he had to taken to the hospital after being arrested for inciting a riot. Later, Dorothy's husband Jules, a magistrate, dropped all charges against the policemen, and Morris was fined $10 for the riot charge. A few months later, Dorothy was beaten in her home so severely that she suffered fractures to her jaw and a shoulder that would "fall out of its socket" several times a year. I wonder if Morris Anmuth was responsible for Dorothy's beating, as retaliation against Jules Forstein dropping the charges against the policemen who so savagely beat him? Here's an article about the beating: www.newspapers.com/image/13205163/. I know this is too old to be solved, but that beating connection just
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Post by jcurio on Sept 29, 2018 9:18:34 GMT -6
Apparently, there was no sign of a forced entry, and Dorothy had left her keys, money and purse at home _______________
Even in those days, people had personal items that they always carried (purse; wallet)
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Post by auntym on Feb 20, 2019 13:55:33 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/02/the-national-park-ranger-who-vanished-into-thin-air/ The National Park Ranger Who Vanished Into Thin Airby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/ February 20, 2019 Sprawled out under the scorching sun and amongst the remote Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona, in the United States is a dry, vast, and rugged land of canyons, steep gullies, arroyos, jagged rocks, and the odd sight of massive boulders balancing atop each other, called the Chiricahua National Monument. Although it looks like the moonscape of some alien world, the whole area lies within the National Park system, holds a place on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a place renowned for its natural beauty and unique rock formations. It is a land of wild, often lethal beauty, famous for its scenic hiking trails, but sadly also rather well-known for one of the most puzzling unsolved National Park vanishings on record. In 1980, then 41-year-old Paul Fugate had been employed with the National Park Service and working at the Chiricahua National Monument as a law enforcement ranger for years. He was known as an enthusiastic ranger, a consummate adventurer, and an experienced hiker, very knowledgeable of the terrain and geology of the region. Although he had faced disciplinary trouble for his refusal to trim his wild beard in the past, he was mostly seen as a dedicated and hoannable member of the ranger service. On Sunday afternoon, January 13, 1980, Fugate told the seasonal staff member working with him at the park Visitor Center that he was going to go out and check the trail leading to a new 400-acre parcel of land acquired by the park called Faraway Ranch. He headed off down the dusty trail in his full ranger uniform and badge, and although he had told the staff member to close down without him if he wasn’t back by 4:30 PM, there was no reason to think there was anything wrong as the experienced, seasoned park ranger walked off along that well-marked trail in broad daylight. It was just to be a quick hike, with him not even bothering to take his radio, and he waved goodbye to casually hike off out of sight, and seemingly off the face of the earth, as this is the last confirmed time anyone would ever see him again. When Fugate did not return on time, a search was launched that would come to include tracking dogs, aircraft, and hundreds of law enforcement personnel from various agencies, including the National Park Service, the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, the Bureau of Land Management, the US Forest Service, and the Southern Arizona Search and Rescue Association, as well as volunteers and family, who first scoured the trail to Faraway Ranch to find no trace of the man. The search quickly expanded, until 17 square miles of rough and rugged terrain had been meticulously and thoroughly combed multiple times, yet there was no sign whatsoever of the missing ranger. Desperate law enforcement posted a $5,000 reward, which quickly ballooned to $20,000, yet none of this produced any leads. The only promising clue that could be gleaned was a witness who under hypnosis claimed to have seen Fugate unconscious in a truck between two unidentified men, but there was absolutely no corroborating evidence for this at all, the witness admitted he could have been mistaken, the vehicle had been going very fast, and it was ultimately a useless tip that led nowhere. It was widely assumed that he had met with foul play, but there was nothing to support this, and it was all a baffling mystery. Paul FugateAs authorities desperately searched for clues there was much speculation that swirled about. The main theory was that Fugate had stumbled across drug dealers operating in the area doing drug-dealing stuff and been either murdered or kidnapped, but again there is no real evidence for this other than the fleeting glimpse of who a witness thinks was the victim in a truck. There is also the idea that he may have been attacked and dragged off by a wild animal, or had fallen and been injured, but he was such an experienced ranger who had known the area so well that this was considered unlikely. Besides, if that were the case why could absolutely no remains or even a trace of the missing man be found despite numerous searches? Yet another idea is that he had wandered out of the search zone, but considering the harsh terrain it is thought that he could not have gotten that far on his own within the time frames involved. Yet another theory is that Fugate disappeared intentionally. One clue to this is that he had told the Visitor Center staff to close if he had not returned by 4:30PM, suggesting that he knew he might not be back, but considering he is estimated to have gone out on his hike at 3 PM this could mean nothing. There were also rumors that he had been having marriage problems with his wife, a photographer at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory named Dody Fugate, although she has adamantly denied this. There indeed seems to be no strong evidence to indicate at all that he would have wanted to walk away from his life and vanish, and he had additionally left behind all of his money and belongings at his home, as well as an expensive car he had been restoring and his beloved camera equipment. Nevertheless, Howard Chapman, then the director of the NPS’ Western Region, proclaimed in 1981 after reviewing the files that Fugate had abandoned his post, something the victim’s family has vehemently challenged. Various sightings of Fugate in the days after his disappearance also led support to the theory that he simply ran away, but no one really knows. Despite the rumors and theories that Fugate was perhaps still alive somewhere, after years of dead-ends and no new information, the National Park Service declared Paul Fugate officially deceased in 1986, despite having never found a trace of him or his remains, but this lag actually presented problems for his wife as she was sure he must be dead and was unable to collect benefits during this time. Indeed, there has been much criticism aimed at the authorities for how they handled the case, with accusations that they did not take appropriate measures, such as extending the search area past park land, as well as that the FBI did not take the case seriously enough and tried to brush it away, refusing to get involved. Dody Fugate has said of this lackluster response from federal law enforcement: The Government would investigate if a Navajo woman’s dress was missing. I think Paul Fugate is worth more than a Navajo woman’s dress, and I don’t think the Federal Government is concerned about what happened to him. Interestingly, in June of 2018, nearly four decades after Fugate went missing, the National Park Service suddenly and without warning reopened the case and greatly increased the reward for information to $60,000, citing the discovery of promising new evidence, although they have been tight-lipped on what this exactly means. It does seem odd that such a long cold case should be reopened and resurrected with such renewed interest out of the blue, but whether this means it is close to being solved is anyone’s guess. What happened to Paul Fugate? Was he the victims of foul play? Did he run off away from his life into the unknown? Was he lost and died out there in the wilderness he loved so much? It is particularly odd in that almost every ranger who has ever gone missing in National Parks has been found, or at least their remains, yet Paul Fugate remains a perplexing conundrum decades later, and it does not seem that his case will be fully solved anytime soon. mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/02/the-national-park-ranger-who-vanished-into-thin-air/
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Post by auntym on Feb 21, 2019 16:44:01 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/02/disappearance-by-design-cases-where-people-intentionally-vanished/ Disappearance by Design: Cases Where People Intentionally Vanishedby Micah Hanks / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/mhanks/February 22, 2019 No student by the same name had ever attended the high school where he claimed he went. He apparently had a Social Security number, but it didn’t appear on file until 1987, nearly 40 years after he was believed to have been born. Records did exist for an individual with a similar name–Paul Raymond Harrod–that included the same date of birth and next of kin; however, they belonged to a 5-year-old who was killed in a car accident years ago. That incident occurred in Harrod, Ohio. Some things just aren’t what they seem, as the old expression goes. While the idea has applications in many different walks of life, it has particular relevance to certain people; and when it comes to missing person cases, while it is true that some individuals do vanish under mysterious circumstances, at least some of those individuals seem to have wanted to disappear. On November 27, 1992, Paul Harrod’s wife found a note from him, along with a $100 bill. The note simply read that he, “needed to get away for a while.” He was never seen again. Harrod was officially reported missing the following year on May 7, 1993. Investigators with the Hamilton County Sherriff’s Department in Hamilton, Indiana, did manage to find the car he was driving when he left–a white 1992 Geo Metro–which had been sold two years later in Denver, Colorado. Beyond this, Harrod’s trail went cold, and authorities are still seeking information about his possible whereabouts today. Harrod is believed to now be in his 70s. While there are many similar cases that involve people who seemingly just “vanished” under odd or unresolved circumstances, many of them share a common element, where the missing individual seems to have actually chosen to leave. There are surprising lengths some will go to in order to erase themselves from the problems they perceive with everyday life. In 2008, Matthew Alan Sheppard was a happily married father who seemed to enjoy his life as an environmental health and safety manager for an electrical equipment company. That February, in an elaborately staged drowning incident during a family retreat in the Ozarks, Sheppard attempted to fake his own death; he did so convincingly enough that his own wife made the 911 call, after watching her husband’s apparent drowning. However, authorities investigating his presumed death became suspicious when his body never turned up. Within days, phone records revealed that calls and texts had been made from his Blackberry several days after he was believed to have drowned. As it turns out, Sheppard had gone to Mexico, where he intended to hide out for long enough that his wife could collect on a life insurance policy (although she had no idea what his intentions had been, and presumably actually believed that her husband was dead). Sheppard was eventually tracked down and arrested after he was found living under the assumed name “John P. Howard.” Every year, hundreds of thousands of people go missing in the United States. Whether these disappearances involve adults or children, what statistics show is that a large percentage of those who go missing fall into the category of those who made a conscious decision to do so. According to statistics gathered by the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), there were 88,089 total active missing person records for 2017 (up .6% from the previous year). Of these, 41,089 (46.6%) of the total missing persons were juveniles (when defined as 21 years of age or younger). Nancy McBride, executive director of Florida Outreach at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), says the vast majority of missing children–close to 90%–involve runaways, according to a statement she gave USA Today in 2017. This matches with the NCIC’s 2017 statistics, which showed that 306,753 (nearly 96%) of missing children were coded as Runaway, in contrast with the 2,359 (7%) coded as Abducted by Non-custodial Parent, and 326 (.1%) as Abducted by Stranger. While much of this information pertains to juveniles reported missing in the United States, many adults also fall within these statistical groups of individuals who choose to vanish. As we can see, information pertaining to abductions and foul play associated with missing person cases is surprisingly low, at least when compared with the figures that show how many individuals actually disappear of their own volition. With the amount of material that exists online and in other media today that deals with disappearances that are deemed strange or otherwise unexplained, a healthy (and skeptical) look at the statistics might help reveal what’s been hiding under our noses all along: that a fair number of the “mysterious” disappearances that occur are actually the result of people’s fundamental desire to vanish when they so choose… and in many cases, with the intent of never being found. mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/02/disappearance-by-design-cases-where-people-intentionally-vanished/
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Post by paulette on Feb 22, 2019 12:07:00 GMT -6
I had a client who, as a young woman, was obsessed with/in love with a man. He had, let us say, taken advantage of her youthful innocence. She wanted him to apologize. Just that. She found out he had gotten married - and later disappeared with a trace. She is stuck - we use the word "closure" but that includes anger, grief, confusion, feeling a little crazy (or a lot crazy). When people are dead or incompetant - we understand that. But just...gone. That's a lot harder.
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Post by auntym on Feb 27, 2019 13:02:28 GMT -6
www.lasvegasnow.com/news/local-news/i-team-nevada-triangle-s-unexplained-disappearances/1812713764 I-Team: Nevada Triangle's unexplained disappearancesBy: George Knapp / & Matt Adams / Posted: Feb 26, 2019 LAS VEGAS - Eleven years ago this month hikers found identification belonging to Steve Fossett, world famous aviator and adventurer who vanished a year earlier. The vast search for Fossett focused attention on what is now called the Nevada Triangle. It's an area not nearly as infamous at the Bermuda Triangle, but has seen far more disappearances. In 2007, famed aviator Steve Fossett flew out of a landing strip in northern Nevada and vanished. For months, searchers combed the rugged mountains looking for Fossett. What they found were eight other plane wrecks no one knew about. By one estimate, 2,000 planes have vanished in the last 60 years in what pilots call the Nevada Triangle, the vast area between Las Vegas, Reno and Fresno. That averages out to about three planes per month, far more than have ever disappeared in the more infamous Bermuda Triangle. Scientists have determined that strong winds from the Pacific create a powerful downdraft when they cross the Sierra, strong enough to slam small planes into the ground. But many of the aircraft that have gone missing weren't small at all -- a B-24 Bomber and other military craft among them. The Nevada Triangle: A Graveyard For Planes Powerful winds and treacherous weather are major factors in why so many planes crash or vanish in what's called the Nevada Triangle but it's more than just planes that disappear. It's also people. 10 Strange Facts About the Nevada Triangle "Then I pulled out a map of Nevada and California and almost fell out of my seat because the largest cluster zone we've established is in that Nevada Triangle, and there's two other cluster zones also in that triangle," said David Paulides, investigator and author of Missing 411 books. For nine years, former police officer turned author David Paulides has scoured through about 20,000 missing persons files. Based on very specific criteria, he's whittled them down to about 1,200 seemingly inexplicable mysteries -- people who vanish under unusual circumstances. In a series of books, Missing 411. Paulides has identified dozens of clusters, many of them national parks or forests, where the number of missing is way out of the ordinary. Three of those clusters exist within the Nevada Triangle, including, at the top of the list, Yosemite National Park. "There's no concrete one item that can say this is causing that, and because of no tracks, no scent trail, no witnesses, we've had people say it's got to be UFOs, it's got to be reptilians, Bigfoot, it's got to be this. In reality, I don't think you can say it's just one thing," Paulides said. Often the missing vanishes into thin air while with other hikers. Dogs are unable to pick up any scent. There are no tracks. Small children who vanish are found a day later many miles away, over mountain ranges. Human abductions and animal attacks are ruled out. For years, Paulides requested lists of the missing from the National Park Service but was told they don't keep any such list. More recently Yosemite officials have opened up. "It might be ten years later, you find a shoe, a piece of clothing," said Scott Gediman, Yosemite National Park Ranger. Paulides has investigated cases closer to home, including the 1966 disappearance of 6-year-old Larry Jeffrey of Henderson who vanished while with his family on Mount Charleston and a 1977 case of a missing woman near Tonopah. Some have tried to link the mystery to the Area 51 military base but that facility is far to the east of the triangle's boundaries. While speaking to a national conference of search and rescue experts, Paulides was addressed by a pair of state troopers. "They said, 'Dave, you're talking about things that nobody in this room wants to talk about. Everybody knows it's going on. Everybody here faces it, but nobody wants to talk about it.'" WATCH VIDEO: www.lasvegasnow.com/news/local-news/i-team-nevada-triangle-s-unexplained-disappearances/1812713764 Mysterious Vanishings at the Nevada Triangle: mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/07/mysterious-vanishings-at-the-nevada-triangle/
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Post by auntym on Mar 5, 2019 0:24:21 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/03/mysterious-cases-of-vanished-basketball-players/ Mysterious Cases of Vanished Basketball Playersby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/ March 4, 2019 It is pretty hard to miss most basketball players. Standing at nearly 7 feet tall and up, they don’t exactly blend into the background, and it seems like they would have a hard time disappearing into a crowd. This makes it all the stranger that there have been some odd cases of basketball players who have managed to go beyond that and simply seemingly cease to exist, vanishing into thin air to never be seen again. The earliest case we have is the odd case of Slim Wintermute, who was a college basketball superstar back in the 1930s and played professionally for the Detroit Eagles. The 6-foot-8-inch (2.03 m) center was perhaps most famous for his time with the Oregon Ducks, who were the winners of the first NCAA Tournament championship, and he would was elected to the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame in 1980. He is also rather well-known for his sudden and bizarre disappearance. After retiring from basketball, Wintermute would work for Boeing for some years, and it was during these years that he took up yachting, usually on Seattle’s Lake Union. On October 21, 1977, Wintermute headed out on one of his yachting excursions along with a friend, leaving Portage Bay at 7 AM in the morning. At 2 PM the boat was found floating about out on the lake, its engine in neutral and Wintermute’s friend sleeping on board but no sign of the basketball player. When the friend was awoken he seemed to be very surprised that Wintermute wasn’t there, as he had been on board when he took his nap. A search of the area turned up no sign of the basketball player, and foul play was ruled out, with no evidence at all to show that the friend had had anything to do with it. Wintermute has never been seen again, and although one idea is that he fell overboard his body and is officially considered deceased, no body has never been found and he seems to have just evaporated into thin air. Slim Wintermute Next we have the tragic story of the basketball player once known as bob Williams, but more well-known by his other name Bison Dele. The famously eccentric NBA player was a center for such varied teams as the Orlando Magic, Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers, Chicago Bulls, and Detroit Pistons, at one time being the highest paid player in the Pistons’ history. Towering at a height of 6’10”, he was as well known for his off-court antics as he was for his playing skills, and Dele suddenly up and left the league at the tender age of 30, which was still in the prime of his career, walking away from the remainder of a $36.5 million contract. It was thought that he had just wanted to earn enough money to be independent and that he was never really all that passionate about basketball, and although we can’t be sure of his motives for giving the game up, we can be sure of what happened next. For a while Dele embarked on a bizarre journey, traveling through Lebanon, Asia, the Mediterranean, and in Australia’s Outback, as some sort of drifter and becoming a beat poet in the process. At some point he got it into his head to buy a catamaran, the Hakuna Matata, in order to set sail on a journey from Tahiti to Hawaii, and on July 7, 2002 he set out to do just that. Aboard with him were his girlfriend, Serena Karlan, the ship’s captain, Bertran Saldo, and Dele’s older brother, Miles Dabord, and it must have seemed like some amped up, party-*bleep* adventure at the time. Unfortunately, some of them would never make it to Hawaii, and indeed have not been seen since. The last known transmissions from Dele and his girlfriend by satellite phone to their families were made on July 8, after which all went quiet. On July 20, the catamaran came cruising in to Tahiti, with only Dabord on board. Of Dele and Karlan there was no sign. Dele’s brother would claim that they had been lost at sea, but this did not sit well with some of the other family members of the missing parties. On September 5, 2002, a sting operation was organized after suspicion fell on Dabord, who had always been a bit of a loose cannon and well known to be jealous of his brother’s success as a basketball player, and he was arrested in Pheonix, Arizona when he tried to buy $152,000 worth of gold with one of Dele’s checks and his passport. Bison Dele Dabord would be released on bail shortly after and skip town, and it was soon discovered that he was renting a place in Tijuana, just across the border. This did nothing to garner confidence in his innocence, and the investigation expanded to include the FBI, as they closed in on Dabord. For his part, Dabord contacted his mother and insisted on his innocence, saying that he had had nothing to do with the vanishings and would never do anything to hurt Dele. Unfortunately for him, no one believed this, least of all the authorities, who were now under the impression that Dabord had killed Dele, Karlan, and Saldo while out at sea and then dumped their bodies in the middle of the ocean where they would never be found. Dabord would later claim that Dele had gone psycho and killed everyone on board, forcing him to kill his brother in self defense, but his story was so full of holes and inconsistencies that no one knew what was true and what was lies. Sadly, we will never probably never know, as desperate and panicked about going to jail, Dabord would commit suicide by insulin overdose and take his secrets to the grave him. To this day Dele, Karlan, and Saldo have never been found, and probably never will be. Finally, we have the mysterious case of a well-known college player named Rico Omar Harris, who perhaps had his most fame during his short stint as a member of the legendary Harlem Globetrotters in 2000 and is even more famous still for his mysterious disappearance. The 6 feet 9 inch, 280 pound Harris has a bit of a dark history, once a top 100 college basketball recruit that saw his promising future in the sport compromised by his demons of alcoholism. Indeed, he would not only get sidetracked from a potential career in the NBA, but would also be fired from his job as a security guard for being drunk on the job. This would grow to include other drugs, and he went through a series of arrests in relation to his substance abuse problems, which had already shattered his basketball career and threatened to ruin his life. On top of all of this, his already floundering basketball career took a fatal blow when Harris was injured during an altercation during which he was hit on the head with a baseball bat, causing him to suffer ongoing intense headaches and balance problems that would cost him his job with the Globetrotters. At this point Harris was pretty much at rock bottom, moving in with his mother in Alhambra, California, and spiraling into more alcoholism and drugs, jobless and aimless, and he was repeatedly arrested for public intoxication. Throughout it all, this once promising potential NBA player found himself out begging for money in the streets to support his substance abuse problems, and a friend of his would say of this, “It was despair, bro. It was down there. It was the darkest of the dark.” This would continue until 2007, when he began to turn his life around, entering a rehabilitation program, getting a job, and moving in with his girlfriend at the time, Wilfredo Mayorga. He would then go on to meet another woman named Jennifer Song from Seattle, beginning a whirlwind long-distance romance that would see Harris going back and forth from Albambra to Seattle and eventually making plans to move there, going so far as to set up an interview for a job in Seattle. As he enacted his plans to relocate, on October 10 of 2014 Harris decided to visit his family in Alhambra one last time before heading out to Seattle by car, after which he would drive out along Interstate 5 north towards Washington and apparently off the face of the earth. Rico Omar Harris Not long after leaving his mother’s house Harris called Song from near Sacramento at 10:45 AM and things seemed to be normal, with him mentioning that he was going to get something to eat and take a nap. This would be the last time anyone heard from him, he would never arrive in Seattle, and a few days later his car was found abandoned, with no gas and and a dead battery, at a county regional park in Yolo County, along a stretch of California State Route 16 by Cache Creek Canyon. Nearby was found Harris’ discarded backpack with all of his money and valuables within it, as well a phone with video of him in his car and photos of the nearby creek and selfies on it, and jumper cables. Search and rescue teams were brought in, who scoured the surrounding terrain with aircraft, tracker dogs, and thermal cameras, as well as using divers to search the creek, but after three days not a sign of Harris could be found. It was all incredibly odd, because he was such a large man it seems bizarre that he could have so thoroughly vanished without a trace, and Yolo County sheriff’s detective Dean Nyland would say: How does this guy not pop up somewhere? I mean, big guy has to eat three or four times a day … I can see how a lot of people who don’t stand out can disappear, but this guy stands out. There actually would be several alleged sightings made of Harris for around a week after his disappearance, with people spotting a large man walking along State Route 16 and enormous size 18 footprints in the mud, but nothing that could be confirmed. It remains totally unknown what happened to Rico Harris or where he went, but there are some ideas. Since there was absolutely no sign of struggle at the site of the abandoned car foul play has been mostly ruled out, and it is believed that he had probably gone to the road to hitchhike for a ride, but what happened after that or where he got off to or why is anyone’s guess. It is unclear why his backpack and all of his belongings were left behind, or why he would have stopped at that particular spot in the first place, and the whole bizarre vanishing has remained a perplexing mystery, ending up on shows such as “Disappeared,” and without any answer in sight. In every one of these instances we have these enormous guys who have nevertheless managed to just vanish without a trace. What happened to them and there did they go? How could they so totally disappear? All of these remain unsolved mysteries for which we may never have the answers we seek, and it seems likely that the only ones who know what really happened are the missing themselves. mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/03/mysterious-cases-of-vanished-basketball-players/
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Post by auntym on Mar 19, 2019 12:47:17 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/03/strange-vanishings-and-an-unsolved-mystery-in-iceland/ Strange Vanishings and an Unsolved Mystery in Icelandby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/ March 20, 2019 When most people think of Iceland they perhaps think of windswept grey tundras, long nights in the winter, and not much else. It is a sparsely populated country dominated by bitterly cold wilderness, but it is also one of the safest countries in the world, and has a unique and charming culture all its own. Yet despite its famed safety, sometimes bad things happen, and there are unsolved crimes even all the way out there in this faraway land. One of the most famous in Iceland, but still relatively unknown to the outside world, is a series of unsolved vanishings that would launch one of the longest, most intense, and weirdest the country has ever seen. The whole strange tale begins at the bleak, wind blasted lava fields sprawled over much of the Reykjanes peninsula and passes near the Icelandic town of Hafnarfjordur, south of Reykjavik. Here lies a swath of gnarled, jagged lava frozen in its final death throes, concealing crevasses, fissures, cracks, and caves, that span for hundreds of miles and look like the surface of some surreal alien world, all covered with a sheen of green moss and concealed in a cold, perpetual night during the winter months. It was here in this dangerous realm of twisted rock where on January 24, 1974 an 18-year-old laborer by the name of Guðmundur Einarsson was taking a 6-mile hike home from a party at a community hall in Hafnarfjordur. It was a bad night to be out in this moonscape rocky wilderness, the snow falling heavily at the time, the relentless wind a howling, biting beast, and it seemed to have been getting the better of Guðmundur, who was seen by a passing motorist falling over by the side of the road to get back up again to keep stumbling along. As far as anyone knows, this is the last time anyone would ever see the young man, and he trekked off along those lava fields and off the face of the earth. He never returned home and an extensive search of the area would find no trace of the man. He had just vanished. Lava field in Iceland With no leads at all and nothing to go on, the case quickly went as cold as those rocky fields, and the disappearance of Guðmundur Einarsson was sort of forgotten, authorities convinced that he had tragically tumbled into one of the many fissure in the area and doomed to remain unfound in his icy grave. It may have remained that way if it wasn’t for another vanishing that would follow 10 months later, when on the endless night of November, 1974, 32-year-old Geirfinnur Einarsson, who was not related to Guðmundur despite his last name, received a phone call as he sat at his home in the town of Keflavik and got up to go out on an unknown errand. He allegedly drove out to a nearby café and proceeded to vanish into thin air, leaving behind his unlocked car with the keys still in the ignition. He was never seen again. Although disappearances are not unheard of in Iceland, these two cases had happened in an otherwise quite area where nothing much happened within a year of each other, and considering their close geographical proximity were suspected to be perhaps linked somehow. Authorities quickly became certain that some sort of foul play had been involved, despite absolutely no evidence to that effect, and so began the most extensive, intense police investigation in Iceland history, which would go on to last decades. It began with a full search of the areas where the men had gone missing, including a thorough combing of the harbor at Keflavik, as well as complete background checks on the two missing men, including scouring their personal histories and bank account activity, but nothing suspicious at all was found. In the case of Geirfinnur, police believed they had a lead in the person who had called him at his home before he vanished, but oddly the person could not be located anywhere despite a massive manhunt, just as much a specter as the victims had become. Interviews with family and friends found that the two men had had no known enemies, no nefarious dealings, just an unfounded rumor that Geirfinnur had maybe been involved in alcohol bootlegging, and they had not been on any drugs and no witnesses to any crime could be found, yet authorities still clung tightly to the idea that this had been murder. Guðmundur Einarsson (left) and Geirfinnur Einarsson (right) By the middle of 1975 it was looking as if the case would never be solved, and the police became increasingly desperate to crack it, with pressure mounting by a minor mass hysteria among locals who demanded that they do something. This was around the time when authorities checked into some rumors they had heard that a Polish immigrant and known petty criminal named Saevar Ciesielski had had something to do with it all, or at least knew who did. He was rounded up for questioning, along with a motley crew of his associates, Kristjan Vídar Vídarsson, Tryggvi Rúnar Leifsson, Albert Klahn Skaftason, Guðjón Skarphéðinsson and Erla Bolladóttir, and so would begin one of the most bizarre interrogations ever, which would eventually span decades and not really do much to find real answers. Police immediately absolutely went to town on these suspects, beginning with strong arm gestapo tactics of keeping them in custody despite any evidence and aggressive, long interrogations with no lawyer present, in which they were told over and over to confess to what they had done and that they knew something. They were also taken to the areas where the men had disappeared and asked to “re-enact” what had happened, forcing them to act out strangling or otherwise killing a stand in for the two missing men, in a sort of “If you did it how would it have gone down?” sort of scenario. This graduated to torture such as water boarding and sleep deprivation, and between rounds of questioning and torture they were kept separately in solitary confinement and given drugs. Former Icelandic detective Gísli Guðjónsson would in later years describe what these suspects went through: I’ve worked on miscarriages of justice in many different countries. I’ve testified in several countries – hundreds of cases I’ve done, big cases. I’d never come across any case where there had been such intense interrogation, so many interrogations and such lengthy solitary confinement. I mean I was absolutely shocked when I saw that. The suspect list would soon grow longer, as more people were detained and subjected to the same harsh treatment. At first all of the suspects flat out denied it, but the tactics being used slowly started to whittle away at their psyches, making them doubt whether they remembered correctly or not, and they began to wonder if they really had done it after all, whether they remembered it or not. In the end, many of these people were kept in solitary confinement for months or in some cases well over a year, all without any evidence and constantly tricked into incriminating themselves, and they began to mentally deteriorate, one by one caving in and signing confessions to murdering the men just to get out of solitary and get it over with. It made no difference at all that their stories were completely all over the place and contradictory, or that they still said they couldn’t really remember much. It didn’t matter that some of the “confessions” were more or less admitting to being in the same area at around the same time as the vanishings. For the authorities, confessions were confessions, case closed, and the police took it and went with it, proclaiming that they had solved the case. When the smoke cleared, all six of the original suspects were found guilty in December of 1977, receiving varying prison sentences ranging from 3 years to life. Sævar Ciesielski, Kristján Viðar and Tryggvi Rúnar were convicted for killing Guðmundur, with an accomplice, Albert Klahn, accused of hiding the body in the lava fields and a Erla Bolladóttir convicted of perjury for giving false leads to the police. As for the death of Geirfinnur, he was deemed to have been killed by Sævar Ciesielski, Kristján Viðar and Guðjón, allegedly over a failed illegal alcohol deal. And so the police had their criminals, despite any bodies, no physical evidence at all, and varying versions of supposed events. Case closed right? Even as their sentences were read out none of them could actually remember anything they had been accused of, and their minds were addled and foggy. It is perhaps no surprise at all that the whole thing was rather suspicious, and it did not take long at all for people to begin complaining that this had been a miscarriage of justice, and that these supposed criminals had been coerced into giving false confessions. Experts who looked at the treatment and interrogation techniques used pointed out that this had likely been an example of memory implantation, meaning that the torture and interrogation techniques used had sown doubts in the suspects’ minds. Essentially, they were told so many times that they had done it, mislead into incriminating themselves, asked to reenact things, and taken to the scenes of the vanishings so often, not to mention been locked away in solitary, tortured, and sleep deprived, that they had started to believe and been infected with the delusion that maybe they had something to do with it after all. Over the years there was mounting suspicion that the police had harangued and arrested innocent people, but the convicted remained languishing behind bars. It would not be until decades later that they would finally see any action on their behalf. When word got out in the mainstream European press in outlets such as the BBC in 2014, the world was shocked. How had this gross violation of the law and miscarriage of justice happened? The outrage, publicity, scrutiny, criticism, and growing pressure from the international community had the Icelandic government do an about face, reopen the case in 2016, and set up a retrial with the Supreme Court of Iceland in 2018, during which five of the six convicted suspects were acquitted, with only Erla Bolladóttir remaining guilty of perjury. Sadly, Rúnar and Ciesielski were acquitted posthumously, with both of them having died years before without ever being able to see their names exonerated. The six original suspects It is important to note that even after all of this, we are still left with the mystery of who actually did it, and what happened to the two missing men. On this front there have been very few clues or leads, but there was a promising new piece of information given to police as recently as 2016. In October of that year a man claimed that the night before Geirfinnur disappeared back in 1974 he had seen two strangers at the docks guiding a third, weaker looking man between them onto a boat to head into the harbor. When the boat came back, there were only two who got off. He would later find out from missing persons posters that the third man was Geirfinnur, but telephone threats from a mysterious party had kept him from coming forward with what he had seen. It is a curious potential lead, but so far has not led to anything groundbreaking. In the end, the disappearances of Guðmundur and Geirfinnur Einarsson have never been solved, their bodies never found, and now no suspects or solid clues at all remain, all of it made even muddier by the false confessions and retrial. The case has become legendary in its native Iceland, where it has been hotly talked about and discussed for decades, and in 2017 it was introduced to a wider audience through a 2104 BBC program called The Reykjavík Confessions, and more recently with the Netflix documentary Out of Thin Air, released in 2016. It is an amazing odyssey of strange vanishings, blurry clues, police cover-ups and case mishandling, and sheer bizarreness in the frozen wilds of a faraway, exotic land that most people know little about, and it seems like the mystery will remain buried out there in that grey alien landscape forevermore. mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/03/strange-vanishings-and-an-unsolved-mystery-in-iceland/
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Post by auntym on Mar 28, 2019 15:27:32 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/03/the-mysterious-vanishing-ghost-bomber-of-pittsburg/ The Mysterious Vanishing Ghost Bomber of Pittsburgby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/March 29, 2019 Besides the many disappearances on record of people, other things seem to go missing all of the time, and sometimes there is no real logical solution to it all. From ships, to planes, to nuclear weapons, it sometimes seems that pretty much anything can go missing at a moment’s notice. One very intriguing mystery of modern times is that time a giant B-52 bomber went crashing into a river to never be seen again, leaving us scratching our heads all the way up to the present. It was the year 1956, right in the middle of the Cold War, with the populace of the United states living with a constant mist of fear and tensions between the United States and the Soviets running high. It was during this climate of simmering aggression that on January 31 a B-25 Mitchell bomber took off from Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada on its way to Olmstead Air Force Base in Harrisburg, PA, along with six crew members on what is thought to have been a routine training flight. Things went smoothly during the first portion of the cross country flight, with the plane making scheduled refueling stops at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma and Selfridge Air Force Base in Michigan, and there was no reason to suspect at the time that there was anything amiss at all. Indeed, it would have been a picture prefect run if it weren’t for what would happen next. As the massive behemoth of a plane roared over the landscape that at around 4 AM Maj. William Dotson radioed in to report that they had run dangerously low on fuel and were also experiencing an engine malfunction. The fuel situation was apparently dire enough that Dotson was forced to make an emergency decision, flying low over the Monongahela River near Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, buzzing the Homestead High Level Bridge and attempting to gently put the limping plane down in the water near the Glenwood Bridge in Hays. It must have been quite a startling sight for the civilians that took in this spectacle, this enormous WWII era bomber thundering down over the bridge to go splashing down into the river, and the plane was sturdy enough that it did not break apart. B-52 Mitchell All six of the crew members initially survived, and rescue efforts were immediately launched to fish them out of the river, but they were on borrowed time as the freezing waters threatened to kill the survivors as their mortally wounded aircraft rapidly sank. Of the six who had made it through the landing, only four would come out of that frigid water alive, with Capt. Jean Ingraham and Staff Sgt. Walter Soocey drowning after a bid to swim to shore. After retrieving the men, the Coast Guard tried to save the plane, but it sank down into the depths and was lost. Oddly, when the Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers continued the search for the missing plane over the next 2 weeks, dredging the bottom extensively, but they were unable to locate it, and indeed the mysterious B-52 has not been seen since, nor indeed any trace of it, as if it had been swallowed up by the river itself. Herein lies the main thrust of the mystery. How does a whole gigantic B-52 Mitchell bomber, which measures 52 feet long, 17 feet tall and has a wingspan of 67 feet, just go missing in a river? Andrew Masich, of Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center, an organization helping to search for the missing B-25, has said, “There is nothing logical about losing a 15-foot plane in a 20-foot river.” After all, this is not the deep sea out in the middle of the ocean, but rather a mere 20 to 30 feet of water, so how is it that not even a scrap of it has ever been recovered, despite many even more modern attempts to find it with everything from divers to advanced sonar equipment? Well, this depends a lot on who you ask, and there have been countless conspiracy theories as to the ultimate fate of the bomber, running the full spectrum from the rational to the absurd. The Monongahela River One very pervasive theory is that the plane had been not on a training mission at all, but rather had been carrying some very important top secret cargo, and that the military secretly came on to retrieve the plane and whisk it away. There were several witnesses who came forward in the days after the crash with uncorroborated reports claiming to have seen a mysterious black barge at the site carrying divers in black suits, or even a truck carrying the wreckage away, which seems to support this opinion. A tugboat captain who had helped with search efforts also came forward to claim he had seen a barge carrying the plane off down the river, and would claim that he had been warned by an unidentified caller not to say a word. One of these witnesses spoke of the area crawling with the military shortly after the crash, saying: Hundreds of soldiers descended to the crash site and closed the river. They guarded the banks of the river while barges came in and pulled the bomber to the surface. The plane was then offloaded to railroad cars, where it was taken to one of the local steel mills and melted down. In another report a man claiming to work at an Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, said that the wreckage had been brought there, and there were several witnesses who claimed that there had been a 7th or even 8th man aboard the plane, who had been wearing uniforms without insignias. What this theoretical cargo could have been and why the military would want to cover it all up is anyone’s guess, but ideas have included that is was some dangerous biological agent, some deadly chemical or nerve agent, a nuclear weapon, spies, or even a UFO or alien bodies, which is a favorite of the tinfoil hat wearing crowd considering that the plane had been coming from Area 51 territory and Nellis Air Force Base, in itself ground zero for conspiracy theories of all kinds. The tense climate and paranoia of the era only made the rumors and speculation worse, but in the end no one really knows what was on that plane and it could have been carrying the Lost Ark of the Covenant for all we know. Others believe that the missing bomber is still out there in the river, although its location has never been found despite the crash area being well-delineated and there having been hundreds of witnesses to the crash and the sinking. One idea has been that the plane fell into a hole or gravel pit on the bottom of the river which effectively swallowed and concealed it as silt covered the remains. This may be true, but the fact is that no one has managed to locate it despite numerous searches by various organizations and private individuals who have used cutting edge sonar equipment and underwater mapping equipment to scan the entire area. Even if the plane is still down there somewhere there is probably not much left of it, as the highly polluted water serves to quickly corrode and dissolve any metal left here for any appreciable length of time. Bob Shema, Operations Director for The B-25 Recovery Group, a private organization dedicated to finding the wreckage, has said of this: We expect to find the engine blocks, landing gear and tires – they were all made to be bulletproof, but the rest of the plane – doubtful. You couldn’t keep an outboard motor in the water all year – the propeller would be dissolved in no time. All the aluminum [of the plane] is expected to be gone, except what may have come in contact with the bottom. Whether the lost plane is there somewhere or not, it is remarkable that something so big could go missing so completely in such a confined area, and the search and discussions go on. What happened to this plane? Where did it go? Was it whisked away by the government and covered up, and if so why and what could have been such a precious cargo to make that necessary? Is it still at the bottom of the river, and if so how has it managed to remain so elusive even in the face of ongoing concerted efforts to find it? Wherever the answers to these answers may lie, the mystery of the “Ghost Bomber” of Pittsburg has remained an intriguing enigma still much discussed and debated today. mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/03/the-mysterious-vanishing-ghost-bomber-of-pittsburg/
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Post by auntym on Mar 30, 2019 14:04:15 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/01/bizarre-unsolved-vanishings-from-hospitals/ Bizarre Unsolved Vanishings from Hospitalsby Brent Swancer / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/brentswancer/January 12, 2017 Hospitals are supposed to be where people go to be nursed back to health, to be brought back from the clutches of death, to be saved. They are not typically thought of as places from which people would step off the face of the earth, and yet some of the world’s most mysterious disappearances have revolved around hospitals, with some people coming to these institutions to never leave, or to ever be seen again, often right under the noses of those whose care they have been put in. It seems that the brightly lit corridors and shiny equipment of these places of healing are not beyond the grasp of strange vanishings, and here are some of the most baffling. On April 9, 1947, the deadliest tornado to ever hit Oklahoma came raging through. A monstrous class F5, the maelstrom of wind and flying debris meandered through Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, eventually ripping a path directly through the town of Woodward, Oklahoma, leaving in its wake utter destruction, 185 dead, over 1,000 injured, and one of the most baffling mysterious disappearances out there. Although many people were tragically killed by the rampaging, whirling specter of death, others were spared, and one of those was 4-year-old Joan Gay Croft. The child’s mother had been killed in the disaster, her stepfather critically injured, but she had come away from her brush with death with merely a piece of wood that had penetrated her leg, a non-life threatening injury that she was rushed to the hospital for treatment for, along with her sister Jerri, who had also suffered relatively minor injuries. Powerful Tornado - destroying property with lightning in the background Considering the vast influx of grievously injured and dying people arriving at the hospital in the aftermath of the tornado, the two girls were hastily treated and then regulated to the basement, which had been transformed into a shelter where other refugees from the tornado were being housed and treated. The next day, two men dressed in what were reported as khaki army uniforms made their way down into the basement and went to whisk Joan out of there in full view of everyone, apparently specifically asking for her by name. The girl protested, saying that she did not want to leave her sister behind, but the men reportedly calmly explained that they were friends and would come back for Jerri later. When hospital staff intervened and tried to stop them, the unidentified men remained calm and composed, and said that they were merely taking the girls to another hospital where the girls’ relatives were waiting for them. Amazingly the men were allowed to leave with the girl, but they never returned for the sister and indeed neither them nor Joan Gay Croft were ever seen again. When it was noticed that Joan had vanished and apparently been abducted, a major manhunt was mounted that turned up very little at all, in fact no trace of her or her kidnappers was ever found. The case gained international coverage, spawned many anniversary articles of the event in the following years, and appeared on shows such as Unsolved Mysteries, on May 22, 1993, which featured a full dramatic reenactment of the odd incident. Interestingly, many women have come forward over the years claiming to be the long lost Joan Croft, but these leads have never gone anywhere. In one case in 1999 a woman claimed to an editor of The Oaklahoman that she was the missing girl, but she suddenly ceased communication even after agreeing to meet. Another woman living in Canada also claimed to be the missing girl, but once again the actual woman sort of disappeared and could not be located. Yet another elderly woman calling herself Jean Smith came forward to claim that she had gone to a psychoanalyst to try and uncover the first 6 years of her life, of which she had no recollection, and said that under hypnosis she had had traumatic visions of blood and death around her. She started to believe that she was in fact the missing Joan Croft when she saw the Unsolved Mysteries episode in 1993 and contacted the family. There were many little pieces of evidence that supported the woman’s story, such as a scar on her leg that matched up to where the pencil-sized splinter of wood had pierced Joan’s leg, and they both had lisps. The woman claimed that she had been adopted and that the birth certificate she had was not genuine. Joan Croft’s relatives had high hopes that the mystery was finally solved, and were even able to get blood and tissue samples from Smith in an attempt to prove it, but unfortunately the results turned out to be negative, and Smith sort of dropped off the map. Joan Gay Croft Despite all of those who have come forward claiming to be Joan Croft, none of them have turned out to be her, and she is still listed as missing. The most prominent theory of course is that the girl had been kidnapped, but this does not do much to calm the mysteries swirling about the whole thing, with many questions left lingering. Who were those men who came for her and why did they come for Joan specifically? Since they knew her name it seems they possibly knew her, but what did they want and why did they whisk her away to vanish without a trace? Indeed, is Joan Gay Croft still alive somewhere out there, or did she die shortly after her abduction? These are questions that we may never know the answers to, and the ultimate fate of Croft remains a baffling mystery. For their part, Joan’s family believe that another family had lost their own daughter in the disaster and had kidnapped Joan to replace her, but this is sheer speculation. Simply put, no one knows, and we probably never will. Another very strange vanishing with more of an air of the unexplained occurred on March 2, 1959, when a Private First Class Gerry Irwin woke up in a hospital in Cedar City, Utah, with no memory of how he had ended up there. He had apparently been out cold for a full 23 hours, during which time he was reported as having been talking in his sleep about a “jacket on the brush,” and when he finally came to he is said to have asked hospital staff if there had been any survivors. Survivors of what? No one knew. When Irwin was lucid enough to relate his tale, he told of having just been off a leave of absence and on his way from Nampa, Idaho to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas, where he said he was a technician of Nike missiles. After he had reached Cedar City, he said that he had been driving along Route 14 when he had seen a strange glowing object pulsating in the sky. He had then exited his car to see what it was and thought that it was perhaps a large airplane coming in for a possible emergency landing. Irwin then allegedly wrote a note on his car saying: “HAVE GONE TO INVESTIGATE POSSIBLE PLANE CRASH. PLEASE CALL LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS,” as well as scrawling the word “STOP” on the side of the vehicle in shoe polish before going off to investigate the strange disturbance. When the car and note were found by a Fish and Game Inspector some time later, the note was sent to the Sheriff’s office and a search party was launched. Irwin was then found lying unconscious upon the ground, but there was no sign of the plane crash he had described. When he was brought to the hospital, it could not be ascertained just why he wouldn’t wake up, as there seemed to be nothing noticeably physically wrong with him. When Irwin had finally woken up, he claimed that his jacket was missing, but that other than that he felt fairly normal. He would be transferred to William Beaumont Hospital at Ft. Bliss to be observed for 4 days and then was put back into circulation. Not long after continuing his duties, Irwin suddenly fainted one day on base, and this happened again not long after that. Fearing for his health, the base had him brought to a hospital to be evaluated again, and he was found to be in a similar state to when he had first been found after his initial disappearance. He even awoke to ask once again “Are there any survivors?” Indeed it seemed to be some sort of flashback, and Irwin acted as if he had just awoken at the time of his first hospitalization, unaware of the time that had lapsed between the incidents. After a full month of observation he was once again released. The next day, he suddenly left the base without permission and got on a bus at El Paso, finally disembarking at Cedar City and heading to the same location he had originally been investigating. There he purportedly found his missing jacket, which had a pencil shoved in the buttonhole with a piece of paper entwined around it, which he burned. He then came out of whatever daze or trance he was in and made his way back to the road, where he was picked up by the Sheriff. The Sheriff told him what had happened to him, but Irwin had very little recollection of having left the base or why he had ventured back out to the original location. Irwin was subjected to another psychiatric evaluation and when no answers could be found a deeper analysis was ordered. Irwin was once again put into Beaumont Hospital for observation, and he was eventually released. Immediately after this, he went AWOL without warning yet again and has apparently not been seen since. What happened to Irwin and why was he so obsessed with that location? What did he mean when he asked “Are there any survivors?” Indeed why had he ended up in that hospital in the first place? We may perhaps never know. CONTINUE READING: mysteriousuniverse.org/2017/01/bizarre-unsolved-vanishings-from-hospitals/
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Post by auntym on Aug 15, 2019 14:13:13 GMT -6
www.ufoinsight.com/the-truly-bizarre-case-of-granger-taylor/The Truly Bizarre Case Of Granger TaylorFirst Published: July 8, 2019 by: Marcus Lowth / The case of Granger Taylor truly is bizarre in every sense of the world. And while it is an account that is seemingly easy to brush off as the ravings of someone slightly beyond eccentric, there is also something about the incident that niggles away at the minds of even the most skeptical and conservative person. According to the accounts of his friends, Taylor had received messages from alien entities. And what’s more, they had invited to take him on just short of a four-year journey around the universe. What makes these claims even more unnerving, is that Granger Taylor seemingly literally disappeared into thin air. Just what happened to this undoubtedly hugely intelligent and almost unnaturally gifted young man? Why was he so sure of his impending cosmic journey? And where is he, or his remains, today? He would leave a note for his parents, which we will examine shortly, and in two purposely drafted wills to make everything legal, left all of his possessions to them with instructions on how to share them out. Interestingly, the word “deceased” was removed from the wills and replaced with the word “departed”. In his bank account was $10,000, also now in the care of his parents. Of course, like many of these seemingly strange cases we examine, sometimes lost in all the outlandishness is that very real people stand at the center of such accounts. Whether it be the families and friends of such people, or the witness themselves. This is undoubtedly the case with Granger Taylor. So much so, that almost 40 years later, investigations – official and unofficial – continue into his fate or whereabouts. And it is most likely that the Granger Taylor case will remain unsolved for the foreseeable future. A Contemporary Legend In Real Time? On the evening of 29th November, 32-year-old Granger Taylor would leave his parents home and set out in his blue Datsun pick-up truck, driving away into a particularly heavy storm. In fact, so intense was the storm that it caused widespread power outages for large portions of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. When we take into consideration that Taylor was not seen or heard from again, as well as the contents of the note he would leave behind for his parents (which you can see below), we should perhaps wonder, if only speculatively, if the storm and subsequent power cuts might have more behind them than Mother Nature. The contents of the note raised an eyebrow or two among the wider population and investigators who would examine the case. As did the map leading to mountains around 20 miles away. Were these the location of Taylor’s apparent meeting with his alleged extraterrestrial contact? We have examined on several occasions UFO and alien encounters that have taken place on or around some of the world’s most famous mountains. Perhaps of further interest, certainly for those who subscribe to the Ancient Astronaut Theory, is that many historical legends and Biblical accounts that might be perceived as UFO encounters also take place near such mountains. Might the mysterious events of 29th November 1980 be such a contemporary “legend” in the making? CONTINUE READING: www.ufoinsight.com/the-truly-bizarre-case-of-granger-taylor/
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Post by jcurio on Aug 16, 2019 19:36:32 GMT -6
I did not watch this video posted here. There is plenty of information about this “case” on the net. And I have previously posted on another thread about this.....
I do hope all the information that I originally researched on the Net is still available.
There is testimony from his sister. And a “mysterious friend” who then went on to be somewhat of an “investigator” of weird things because of this case.
John Keel alerted me to his own studies (Keel talking about his own discoveries) of similar names at times, of supposed “alien abductions”. Or dates. Or days of the week. So, when I came across the name of the “mysterious friend”, I applied Keels “theory” to it, and found this name on another case.... it became all coincidental (or not 😉).
In other words, these “beings”, EBE, or whatever, seem to get “stuck” in patterns.
(IMO, it’s almost like “they” keep trying to repeat the exact same experiment, and get different results? LOL).
Or they get fascinated with certain names..... (which is REALLY weird... what with some abductees making “lists” of names or such). Or, looking for someones’ relatives?
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Post by jcurio on Aug 16, 2019 19:47:50 GMT -6
Now to my personal theories..... 😂 and Im going to sound whacked.
There WERE pictures of Grangers truck, found in the mountains, so many years later, and a “blast” site.
Blast as in, Granger May have stolen explosives like dynamite from somewhere. His sister also talked about Grangers experimenting with drugs that are known for mind-bending.
He WAS extremely smart, and gifted, and so, out of boredom, or temptation.... or a sense of loneliness....
His sister thinks he possibly killed himself.
But where is the body?
Yes, I think there is the possibility that he was in contact with “another world”, even what some people call a “Spirit world”, and was taken. Even if he did commit suicide, and bones were found, I think he was talked “into it” by some sort of “being”.
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Post by jcurio on Sept 10, 2019 9:34:35 GMT -6
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