mummy – Museum of the Weird

Posted on July 18, 2014 by MOTW Admin

The Salesman, The Lights, His Alien Lover and a Mummy

The Place: The Appalachian Mountains

The Time: 1965

The Story: Pretty wild, man.

Meet Ralph Lael, a furniture salesman who was scouting a mountain in North Carolina that was famous for what was called “The Brown Mountain Lights”. On certain nights, many claimed that mysterious lights would rise up from the forest and into the skies. Pre-1947 and the beginning of the UFO craze, they were believed by Native Americans and early settlers to be ‘spirit lights’, but of course after…

But back to Ralph…he encountered these lights, and in a very direct way: “I’m frightened, don’t know what to do,” he wrote. “One light moves forward. It is now about ten feet from me and it is glowing. I could read a newspaper by the shining of it. It is ten to twelve feet across. Almost a perfect circle. It has a brown center that does not look solid. The shape of the brown center is like a tumble bug but without a head standing on its back end. Not touching the ground but suspended in the center of the glowing ball. It seems to have three hands or feelers protruding out from each side.”

Ralph claimed in the book he wrote about his experiences that after learning to communicate with the light using basic yes-no questions, it led him through crystal walled tunnels into a secret cave base in the mountain where he met an alien race called The Pewam. They took him to the planet Venus (which he said was made entirely of crystal), warned him about the dangers of nuclear science, and totally let him nail a hot alien chick named Noma who showed up to greet him in just a bra and panties.

….

Yeah, that too. I kinda want to get abducted now.

After he was brought back, he says he found a small mummified alien body in one of the caves and he brought it back to town where he displayed it in a glass case in hit furniture store for years until he died and the store was bulldozed….AND NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED TO THE BODY!!!

Naturally, stories of the Men in Black showing covering up evidence immediately surfaced, but many have more reasonably tied the mummy to being a sideshow attraction created by the legendary Homer Tate. Regardless of it’s earthly or unearthly origins, we still don’t know what happened to it.

Ok, so Venus isn’t made of crystal, and Ralph was almost certainly a huckster trying to attract folks coming to see the lights (which appear to be a real and probably naturally occurring phenomena), but it’s certainly more fun to imagine Ralph on a sexy space adventure.

Posted on November 9, 2012 by MOTW Admin

NEW BOOK DELVES INTO THE SCIENCE OF MONSTERS

We all know, love, and have our favorite of the classic monsters from our childhood but, what was the original inspiration for these creepy creatures of the shadows? A new book being published called “Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters” delves into what fears and real dangers the people of the time were living with that would have created them. From disease to war, times have most certainly been tough in the past and everyone had plenty to worry about.

Reuters reports:

Nov 8 (Reuters) – The suave and sensitive Edward Cullen of “Twilight” may be the norm for vampires these days, but fictional monsters such as Dracula originally sprang from the fear of inexplicable diseases and the mysteries of death in the natural world.

So argues science journalist Matt Kaplan in “Medusa’s Gaze and Vampire’s Bite: The Science of Monsters,” an examination of monsters around the world and throughout history – the science behind their origins, and why they matter to us even now.

“When our kids ask for monster stories around the campfire, they are behaving in a way that is not dissimilar to lion cubs,” Kaplan said in an email.

“Lion cubs play fight so they can test out their skills in a safe place where nobody is going to get maimed or killed. Monster stories serve a similar purpose, they allow us to face our worst fears without the risks that are normally associated with them.”

Some are simple. The Kraken tales of mammoth monster squid, along with the Leviathan of the Bible, are most likely based upon the existence of real creatures such as whales.

The terrifying Medusa of Greek myths, with her hair made of snakes and a gaze that could turn things to stone, may have been distantly connected to the idea of fossils for ancient people, with the snakes in her hair an example of pure fear.

Though mentions of vampire-like creatures exist as early as ancient Greece, it took hundreds of years for tales of the creatures to gradually evolve into the haunting undead of more recent history.

Accounts of people found in their graves with blood on their lips and their stomachs seemingly full, as if they had just eaten, may be explained by simple decay, with gas buildup throughout the body sometimes pushing blood up from the lungs. Elongated canine teeth and fingernails was due to skin shrinking after death and pulling away, making both more prominent.

Later, greater awareness of contagious diseases such as influenza and tuberculosis – which could cause people who came in contact with the ill person to also sicken and die – further contributed to the myth. This was especially true due to incubation periods that weren’t understood at the time, making it unclear how the diseases were being spread.

“One death would follow another in a dominolike progression,” writes Kaplan. “In a morbid sense, these patients were literally killing their friends and relatives, but from their deathbeds rather than the hereafter.”

But vampires have now undergone a radical transformation, a process that began with the publication of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” but has speeded up in recent years.

“If tuberculosis, influenza, rabies and bloated bodies are the human experiences from which Dracula came, how have we now ended up with the kind, honorable and handsome Edward Cullen?” Kaplan said.

ALIEN MUMMY FOUND IN EGYPT

Now, this seems to be quite the find coming from an unexplored part of an ancient pyramid; a mummified alien!

Before It’s News writes:

The body of a perfectly preserved, carefully mummified an alien was found buried in an ancient pyramid. A mysterious creature from between 150 and 160 centimeters was found by an archaeologist near Lahun when exploring a small pyramid near the Dynasty doceaba of Senusret II. However, this fact was not revealed immediately. “The mummy of what appears to be an alien, dates back more than 2000 years and it seems it would be a humanoid” said a source at the Egyptian Antiquities Department, who provided details and photographs of the find but did so under condition anonymity. “

Some online sources said that this is a species-being for its fur and reptilian traits that characterize them, such as their eyes, too large and oval shaped. Inscriptions on the tomb of the mummy showed that the king was a counselor named Osirunet, meaning star or sent from heaven. ” The mummified body was buried with great respect and care, accompanied by a number of strange objects far from the archaeological museum managers can not identify.

DID KING TUT HAVE EPILEPSY?

The mysteries surrounding one of the most famous pharaoh’s death are a constant facet of investigation by archeologists and historians from around the world and this time, they turned up with some new information!

New Scientist writes:

TUTANKHAMUN’S mysterious death as a teenager may finally have been explained. And the condition that cut short his life may also have triggered the earliest monotheistic religion, suggests a new review of his family history.

Since his lavishly furnished, nearly intact tomb was discovered in 1922, the cause of Tutankhamun’s death has been at the centre of intense debate. There have been theories of murder, leprosy, tuberculosis, malaria, sickle-cell anaemia, a snake bite – even the suggestion that the young king died after a fall from his chariot.

But all of these theories have missed one vital point, says Hutan Ashrafian, a surgeon with an interest in medical history at Imperial College London. Tutankhamun died young with a feminised physique, and so did his immediate predecessors.

Paintings and sculptures show that Smenkhkare, an enigmatic pharaoh who may have been Tutankhamun’s uncle or older brother, and Akhenaten, thought to have been the boy king’s father, both had feminised figures, with unusually large breasts and wide hips. Two pharaohs that came before Akhenaten – Amenhotep III and Tuthmosis IV – seem to have had similar physiques. All of these kings died young and mysteriously, says Ashrafian. “There are so many theories, but they’ve focused on each pharaoh individually.”

Ashrafian found that each pharaoh died at a slightly younger age than his predecessor, which suggests an inherited disorder, he says. Historical accounts associated with the individuals hint at what that disorder may have been.

“It’s significant that two [of the five related pharaohs] had stories of religious visions associated with them,” says Ashrafian. People with a form of epilepsy in which seizures begin in the brain’s temporal lobe are known to experience hallucinations and religious visions, particularly after exposure to sunlight. It’s likely that the family of pharaohs had a heritable form of temporal lobe epilepsy, he says.

This diagnosis would also account for the feminine features. The temporal lobe is connected to parts of the brain involved in the release of hormones, and epileptic seizures are known to alter the levels of hormones involved in sexual development. This might explain the development of the pharaohs’ large breasts. A seizure might also be to blame for Tutankhamun’s fractured leg, says Ashrafian (Epilepsy & Behavior, doi.org/h8s).

MUMMIES MADE OF DIFFERENT BODIES FOUND IN SCOTLAND

This female mummy was found comprised of at least 3 different people.

A little over 10 years ago, archaeologists in Scotland found a set of 4 skeletons that dated back to almost 3,500 years ago but, there was a problem.

Every other bone or so dated back to a different time, some of them 100 of years apart! How could this be?

LA Times writes:

An international team of archaeologists have discovered that two mummies found on an island off the coast of Scotland are, like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, composed of body parts from several different humans. The mummified remains, as much as 3,500 years old, suggest that the first residents of the island of South Uist in the Hebrides had some previously unsuspected burial practices.

The West Coast of South Uist was densely populated from around 2000 BC until the end of the Viking period around AD 1300. Researchers led by archaeologist Michael Parker-Pearson of the University of Sheffield have been working at a site near the modern graveyard of Cladh Hallan, which gives the site its name. The team has so far excavated three roundhouses from a village that was apparently occupied from around 2200 BC to 800 BC. A little more than a decade ago, they found the two skeletons under one of the houses, as well as the remains of a teenage girl and a 3-year-old child.

The two primary skeletons were buried in a fetal position and showed evidence of having been preserved. Chemical evidence suggests they were mummified by being placed in nearby peat bogs for a year or longer. The high acidity and low oxygen content of the bog prevents bacteria from breaking down body tissues. After preservation, the skeletons were apparently removed from the bog and buried.

But the skeletons did not “look right” to the researchers. The female’s jaw didn’t fit into the rest of her skull, for example. Closer examination of the male, they reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science, showed that arthritis was present on the vertebrae of the neck, but not on the rest of the spine. The lower jaw had all of its teeth, while the upper jaw had none; but the condition of the lower jaw’s teeth showed that they had been paired with upper teeth. The team concluded that the skeleton has been assembled from parts of at least three bodies, some of which were separated by several hundred years of time.