10:00 PM CST, TONIGHT: Once again, it is that time of the week… time to ease into your favorite chair, sit back and relax as we explore the sublime world of the strange, the odd, and the unusual. It’s time once again for… The Shadow Hour.
Author, Arlene Uslander, is an award-winning journalist who has published hundres of articles and essays as well as sixteen non-fiction books. Tonight she will talk to us about “The Mystery of Fate : Common Coincidence or Divine Intervention?”, a collection of stories where some apparent force has intervened in the lives of everyday people. We’ll talk about some of her favorite events and he own views on Fate.
As always, the lines will be open and we encourage you to call in with your questions. The call in number for tonight’s show is (347) 826-9662 or call toll-free at (877) 867-0829.
Listen right here with our blogtalkradio widget in the sidebar. You can listen to past broadcasts at any time, or tune in every Wednesday at 10pm Central for the live broadcast.
Wow, two great Bigfoot videos in the same week! First the Ketchikan, Alaska video and now this new one from the Spokane River area.
Here’s the clip, originally posted by YouTube user samantha13950 with the following description:
While hiking, we accidentally caught an image of bigfoot walking through the woods. I didn’t even notice until I got home and saw it on the computer! This scared the crap out of us!
Learning all the time: The Lingodroids project at the University of Queensland has developed robots that can create and speak their own language
In the Terminator films it was the moment when machines learned to think for themselves that sparked the downfall of humanity.
If that hypothesis proves to be true then scientists at the University of Queensland might have a lot to answer for.
Their Lingodroid project has developed robots that are creating and speaking their own languages – and increasing their own knowledge in the process.
The robot language has now evolved to a point where they can arrange to meet each other in different places, and even hold polite conversations.
‘Words’ are electronic noises, created using a random number of syllables, which are then assigned to locations. Location names created so far have included ‘kuzo’, ‘jaro’ and ‘fexo’. Each location was around a few metres in size.
To test and develop their language skills the Lingodroids play ‘word’ games in which they arrange to meet in other places, and it has worked successfully in simulations and in a real office.
The robots are creating their own ‘words’ because human languages are so complex and nuanced that the robots found it hard to decipher.
‘Robot-robot languages take the human out of the loop,’ project leader Dr Ruth Schulz told the BBC.
‘This is important because the robots demonstrate that they understand the meaning of the words they invent independent of humans.’
The Lingodroids themselves are two-wheeled robots, looking not too dissimilar to some vacuum cleaners, which use an onboard camera, sonar and a laser range-finder to map the space around them.
The language, which sounds similar to the keytones on a phone, is actually spoken aloud by the robots using a microphone and speaker.
Games played among them include the go-to, the where-are-we and the how-far game.
In the where-are-we game, the robots map their environment independently by driving around, and then whenever they meet another robot, one gives the area in which they meet a name and both update their vocabulary with the new word.
Sci-fi: In the Terminator series of films the moment when robots learned to speak for themselves that brought catastrophic consequences
In the go-to game, one robot chooses a location, both robots find the place in their own map, and then the navigate to that place independently.
The vocabulary this creates, called a toponymic lexicon, allows the robots to go on to develop ‘words’ for distances and directions.
With their expanded lexicon, the robots were even able to meet each other in places they had talked about but never been together, and to describe places they ‘imagined’ exist outside their own maps.
FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — It sounds like a scene from a Poltergeist movie. A house in Massachusetts, getting ravaged by water from a leaky pipe, managed to call for help on its own.
Police got a 911 hang-up call Wednesday and when they called back they just got static.
So officers headed out, they made a forced entry and found a total mess.
Wood floors were buckled, ceilings were sagging, the basement was filled with five feet of water and potentially toxic mold was growing all over the place.
It appears the water short-circuited the phone system, triggering a 911 call.
This YouTube video was uploaded on May 10, 2011. While the creature appears very briefly (less than a second), it is somewhat clearer than the typical “blobsquatch” videos out there. That, combined with the cameraman’s apparent genuine fear and excitement reflected in his voice, makes this video worth taking a closer look.
Here’s what the original post by YouTube user putua76 had to say about the clip:
I was on a logging road in Ketchikan hiking with my friend when I saw it! Boy did my heart start racing!! It was about 40 yards from the road! Not sure if it knew I was there or not, because the noise of flowing water from the stream. It seemed to travel fast! It made my hair stand up!! At one point you can see a whitish yellowish thing in it’s hand! I believe it was skunk cabbage. Not sure, but it is in bloom.
You see it jump and after that point it just seems to disappear. There was a lot of brush and trees between it and I, I could not tell where it had gone. It was a scary sort of exciting feeling at the same time!! We went to search for tracks but the river bed where we thought it was walking was full of perfect skiping rocks, we found no prints! If there is a BigFoot, Sasquatch, or Kushtaka I swear I saw him!!
10:00 PM CST, TONIGHT: It’s that time of the week… time to ease into your favorite chair, sit back and relax as we explore the sublime world of the strange, the odd, and the unusual. It’s time once again for… The Shadow Hour.
Tonight’s guest is author and magical practitioner Allie Theiss, who will join us to talk about her experiences with magic and witchcraft.
As always, the lines will be open and we encourage you to call in with your questions. The call in number for tonight’s show is (347) 826-9662 or call toll-free at (877) 867-0829.
Listen right here with our blogtalkradio widget in the sidebar. You can listen to past broadcasts at any time, or tune in every Wednesday at 10pm Central for the live broadcast. See you in the shadows…
Devotees of science fiction have been convinced for decades that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert of New Mexico – and that the American government covered up the recovery of extraterrestrial bodies.
The so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 spawned conspiracy theories by the score.
But now, sadly for UFO spotters, a new book offers an entirely man-made – and some would say even more bizarre – explanation, featuring two of the greatest villains of 20th century history: the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr Joseph Mengele.
During a powerful storm in July, 1947, an object crashed near a rancher’s home in Roswell, New Mexico.
Roswell army air base initially said that a “flying disc” had come down, but hours later, as government scientists arrived in the area, it was stated instead that a weather balloon had crashed.
The incident went largely unreported until books and documentaries in the 1970s made allegations of alien life forms.
Area 51, the new book by Annie Jacobsen, is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, the top secret test base in the Nevada desert.
It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938. According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Unionseized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.
This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.
The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.
Jacobsen’s source, a retired engineer from the former defence company EG&G, which handled the US government’s most sensitive projects, said he was put on to the Roswell project in Area 51 in 1978.
Miss Jacobsen writes: “They found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall.
“They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes.”
Two were supposedly found “comatose but still alive”.
The EG&G engineers were told “that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience”.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a spokesman for the US Air Force said: “We have not yet read this book so we are not able to make a comment on it.”
A planet 20 light years away is the first outside the solar system to be officially declared habitable by European scientists.
The ‘exoplanet’ Gliese 581d has conditions that could support Earth-like life, including possible watery oceans and rainfall, they say.
Yet any future space voyagers landing there would find themselves in truly alien surroundings.
The sky is likely to be murky red, not blue, gravity is twice that of Earth, doubling the weight of anyone standing on the surface, and the carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere would almost certainly not be breathable by humans.
Harold Camping (inset) is the progenitor of the most recent doomsday theory.
Next Saturday will be the end of the world… that is, if you believe Harold Camping and his devoted group of Christian followers. They believe the Rapture, as prophesied in the Bible, will take place on May 21, 2011.
Spring is finally here — but apparently, the apocalypse will be fast on its trail. That’s the word from a slight but outspoken group of spiritual devotees who believe that the world as we know it is coming to an end.
Maybe you’ve already encountered the literature: pamphlets, subway ads,billboards on the side of the highway. “Judgment Day is coming” reads one billboard, which features a man praying in silhouette against a sunset backdrop. These are the works of a peculiar breed of Christian activists who’ve taken to the road to preach their belief in the fast-approaching End of Days. The self-appointed harbingers are not tied to any particular church — they claim organized religion has been corrupted by the devil — but rather to Internet- and radio-based ministries. And their lone mission is to tell anyone and everyone that the end of days is May 21. That’s when, they insist, God’s true believers will be lifted into heaven and saved, during a biblical event widely referred to as the Rapture.
The finer points of Christian eschatology have long been the subject of dispute (not to mention the inspiration for movies and books, like the blockbuster “Left Behind” series). Though mainstream churches reject the the notion that doomsday can be predicted by any man, fringe scholars continue to work feverishly pinpointing the moment of the final, divine revelation. And one such man — 89-year-old radio host Harold Camping — has been at the game for decades.
In the early ’90s, Camping published a book titled “1994?,” which claimed judgment day would arrive in September of that year. When confronted with such a staggering anticlimax — the world, after all, kept on spinning — Camping chose not to be discouraged, but to learn from his mistakes. (He hadn’t considered the Book of Jeremiah, he says.) A civil engineer by trade, Camping went back to the drawing board and continued to crunch the numbers, before arriving at the adamant determination that Rapture would come on May 21, 2011. He began to spread the word through his broadcasting network, Family Radio, in 2009, and quickly built up a fervid following.
But what, exactly, is his argument? We’ve compiled an explainer below with all the information you’ll need to prepare for May 21.
What happens during and after the Rapture?
In a nutshell: The worthy dead will first rise up to heaven, followed shortly thereafter by about 200 million faithful followers saved by God. Those left behind will endure several months of ghastly torment. And what remains of our fair Earth will swiftly careen toward its ultimate destruction — which will occur in October.
According to one advocate, Brian Haubert, who was interviewed for a recent article published by NPR:
On May 21, “starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth,” he says. The true Christian believers — he hopes he’s one of them — will be “raptured”: They’ll fly upward to heaven. And for the rest?
“It’s just the horror of horror stories,” he says, “and on top of all that, there’s no more salvation at that point. And then the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and planet Earth will be destroyed forever.”
Why does Camping believe the end is nigh?
Camping and his affiliates present at least three explanations — what he refers to as “infallible, absolute proofs” — for May 21 being the day.
It’s the anniversary of Noah’s Flood: A great deal of effort has been made by biblical literalists over the years to identify the exact chronology of the events dictated in the Old Testament. Some scholars, including Camping, adhere to the theory that the Biblical Flood took place on May 21 in the year 4,990 B.C. Then, in Genesis, God told Noah seven days before the Flood to warn people of the impending cataclysm. And Camping posits that this figure, seven days, holds greater significance than meets the eye. According to the biblical passage 2 Peter 3:8, “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” Therefore, argues Camping, Rapture should occur 7,000 years after the Flood. And the 7,000th anniversary of the biblical deluge, by his math, falls on May 21, 2011.
It’s the anniversary of Creation … sort of: Another piece of evidence — explained by Family Radio affiliate eBibleFellowship — suggests that the world began in 11,013 B.C., and its 13,000th anniversary came and went in 1988. During that year, apparently on May 21, the end of the “church age” came to pass. Then, a 23-year time of “tribulation” began, during which Satan claimed dominion over all the world’s churches. (Camping also supports this notion. He claims that the number “23” — far from just being apoorly received Jim Carrey film — also represents “destruction” in biblical symbology.) The end of this particular period of cosmological strife is said to fall on May 21, 2011.
Divine Numerology: This elaborate line of reasoning first argues that Jesus Christ was killed on April 1 in the year 33 A.D. Using that date, the crucifixion would have occurred exactly 1,978 years and 51 days — or 722,500 days — before May 21, 2011. It turns out that 722,500 is also the product of an equation — (5 x 10 x 17)^2 — that includes three different numbers of significance, according to Camping. Five means “atonement.” Ten indicates “completeness.”And 17 signifies “heaven.” Thus: Armageddon.
10:00 PM CST, TONIGHT: It’s that time of the week… time to ease into your favorite chair, sit back and relax as we explore the sublime world of the strange, the odd, and the unusual. It’s time once again for… The Shadow Hour.
Our guest tonight is Mike O’Mary, founder of the Note Project, a campaign to make the world a million times better by inspiring 1 million people to share notes of appreciation with others. In addition, Mike is author of The Note, a book about the power of appreciation, and Wise Men and Other Stories, a collection of holiday-related essays.
As always, the lines will be open and we encourage you to call in with your questions. The call in number for tonight’s show is (347) 826-9662 or call toll-free at (877) 867-0829.
Listen right here with our blogtalkradio widget in the sidebar. You can listen to past broadcasts at any time, or tune in every Wednesday at 10pm Central for the live broadcast. See you in the shadows…
