mystery – Page 17 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Guest Blogger

MYSTERY TRIBE LEAVES BEHIND BODY-FILLED JARS

Human remains nside a log coffin at Phnom Pel. Photograph courtesy Nancy Beavan

A research team has been uncovering burial sights of a mysterious tribe that vanished a long time ago, since 2003. Even though they found up to 10 such spots in the Cardamom Mountains of Cambodia, some with humans remains that date back almost 4,000 years, there’s still little information on the ones who left the creepy, bone-filled jars made from wood, behind.

National Geographic writes:

Perched in some cases on precarious cliff ledges, centuries-old log coffins—such as this one, pictured alongside researcher Nancy Beavan—and “body jars” are the only known traces of an unknown Cambodian tribe. Now new dating studies are beginning to assure the unnamed culture a place in history.

Ten such burial spots have been found in the Cardamom Mountains since 2003, and at least one is at least 160 feet high (50 meters)—the intention apparently being that “anyone trying to disturb the burials would break their neck,” said Beavan, who led the new study.

Beavan’s team has radiocarbon-dated wood, teeth, and bones from four of the sites to between A.D. 1395 and 1650, placing them smack-dab in the decline of the Khmer Empire, based in Angkor. However it’s unclear what, if any, influence the empire had on these mountain people, said Beavan, of the University of Otago’s Department of Anatomy in New Zealand. “Until now, experts had no idea when the sites had been established or how long they’d been in use.”

Read more at news.nationalgeographic.com

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Guest Blogger

GRANDMOTHER AWAKES FROM THE DEAD, 9 DAYS LATER!

Well, at least one person is thankful for the current strike in Africa against the removal of fuel subsidy, and she’s alive because of it too!

67-year old mother of three, Mama Victoria Gbemisola Babatunde, was pronounced dead on January 7th of this year, due to a long battle with an illness. Fortunantly for her, the burial ceremony that would’ve normally been set just a day after, was delayed while travel was prohibited due to the ongoing fuel strike in mid-west Africa.

All of a sudden, on the 9th day after her official death was announced, she sneezed herself to life and awoke from what was said to be a deep coma, scaring the mortuary attendant so much she ran out of the room!

Vanguard writes:

A 67-year old mother of three resurrected 12 days after being pronounced clinically dead! Stranger than fiction you might say.

But this is the story of Mama Victoria Gbemisola Babatunde (née Bolarinwa) who was certified dead on January 7, this year but is now back to life, hale and hearty.

She would have been buried almost immediately she was certified dead.

But something delayed the burial: The nationwide strike against the removal of fuel subsidy made it impossible for the children to gather to arrange her burial.

A date was eventually fixed and the children were on their way for the burial when they learnt that she had resurrected!

LAWYER CLAIMS TO HAVE TRAVELED BACK IN TIME, FOR THE GOVERNMENT

Did the Attorney from Seattle really time travel?

An attorney based out of Seattle, Andrew Basiago, has come forward with some very interesting information. Is it about one of his clients? Maybe, about a unique case he was privy to? Nope, it’s all bout his time working for the government as a child time-traveler!

Watch the video of Andrew telling his story below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=p7lflso7mT0

The Huffington Post writes:

A lot of people have a hard time trusting lawyers as it is, but what about one who claims he was part of a secret government time travel program when he was a kid?

Since 2004, Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago has been publicly claiming that from the time he was 7 to when he was 12, he participated in “Project Pegasus,” a secret U.S. government program that he says worked on teleportation and time travel under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

“They trained children along with adults so they could test the mental and physical effects of time travel on kids,” Basiago told The Huffington Post. “Also, children had an advantage over adults in terms of adapting to the strains of moving between past, present and future.”

Skeptical? You’re not alone. Hong Kong physicist Shengwang Du issued a paper last year saying time travel is impossible, because nothing moves faster than the speed of light, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Nevertheless, Basiago’s claim gets support from Alfred Webre, a lawyer specializing in “exopolitics,” or the political implications surrounding an extraterrestrial presence on Earth. Webre said teleportation and time travel have been around for 40 years, but are hoarded by the Defense Department instead of being used to transfer goods and services faraway distances.

MAN FINDS METEORITES FROM GIANT FIREBALL OVER CALIFORNIA

Robert Ward holds up two pieces of a meteorite he found in Lotus, California.

A man in California has made an amazing find after a huge fireball was seen hurling in through the sky from Sacremento, CA to Las Vegas, NV.

Robert Ward of Prescott, Arizona, who’s been hunting down meteorites for over 20 years now as he travels around the world, decided he was going to find out exactly where the mysterious object that blazed through the night sky went to and amazingly enough, he actually did!

The Telegraph writes:

The rocks each weighed about 10 grams, or the weight of two nickels, said John T Wasson, a longtime professor and expert in meteorites at UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.

Experts say the flaming meteor, dating to the early formation of the solar system 4 to 5 billion years ago, was probably about the size of a minivan when it entered the Earth’s atmosphere with a loud boom early Sunday. It was seen from Sacramento, California, to Las Vegas and parts of northern Nevada.

An event of that size might happen once a year around the world, said Don Yeomans of Nasa’s Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. But most of them occur over the ocean or an uninhabited area, he said.

“Getting to see one is something special,” he said. He added, “Most meteors you see in the night’s sky are the size of tiny stones or even grains of sand, and their trail lasts all of a second or two.”

The meteor probably weighed about 70,000 kilograms, said Bill Cooke, a specialist in meteors at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. At the time of disintegration, he said, it probably released energy equivalent to a 5-kiloton explosion. The Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons.

SHARK FOUND WITH A REAL LASER ATTACHED TO IT, SERIOUSLY!

You’re always told not to believe what you hear, only what you see but, what if both are equally as absurd as the other?

That’s what happened when folks in the Bahamas saw a “shark in the water with a real-life laser attached to it’s body”, spread the word, watched it go viral and then got back the ensuing “Yeah, right!” from the world.

Well, unfortunately for us all, they were right!

The Herald Sun writes:

SHARKS with frickin’ lasers on their heads? Oh god, it’s real.

News just in confirms that last weekend, a shark in the Bahamas was seen with a frickin’ laser attached.

The shark was a ferocious lemon shark (Negaprion brevirostris), measuring more than two metres in length.

The laser was, well, a little disappointing to be honest – a “low end of potential energy output” model from George Lucas-bothering laser manufacturers Wicked Lasers.

BUT IT WAS ATTACHED TO A SHARK NONETHELESS, proving it could be done.

The frightening experiment was conducted by Wicked Lasers after it posted a Facebook statement last week saying if 2000 people Like their post by May 27, they’ll attach a real laser to a real shark.

That was Friday. By Monday, the laser was searing parts of the Bahamas sea floor and blinding clownfish.

FOUND: LOST PAGES FROM EGYPTS’ ANCIENT BOOK OF THE DEAD

The mummy of Hunefer, shown supported by the god Anubis (or a priest wearing a jackal mask). Hunefer's wife mourns, and two priests perform rituals.

An unexpected find by Egyptologist, John Taylor, has made a remarkable impact on the piecing together of the entire, original manuscript of the ancient Egyptian tome, the Book Of The Dead.

Wikipedia says about the book:

The Book of the Dead is made up of a number of individual texts and their accompanying illustrations. Most sub-texts begin with the word ro, which can mean mouth, speech, a chapter of a book, spell, utterance, or incantation. This ambiguity reflects the similarity in Egyptian thought between ritual speech and magical power. In the context of the Book of the Dead, it is typically translated as either “chapter” or “spell”. In this article, the word “spell” is used.

At present, some 192 spells are known,though no single manuscript contains them all. They served a range of purposes. Some are intended to give the deceased mystical knowledge in the afterlife, or perhaps to identify them with the gods: for instance, Spell 17, an obscure and lengthy description of the god Atum. Others are incantations to ensure the different elements of the dead person’s being were preserved and reunited, and to give the deceased control over the world around him. Still others protect the deceased from various hostile forces, or guide him through the underworld past various obstacles. Famously, two spells also deal with the judgement of the deceased in the Weighing of the Heart ritual.

CBC News writes:

Papyrus fragments from an Egyptian funerary text known as a Book of the Dead have been discovered in the archives of the Queensland Museum in Brisbane, Australia.

“We are incredibly surprised that we had such a significant object in our collection,” museum CEO Ian Galloway told Australian press.

The discovery was made recently during a visit to the museum by British Museum Egyptologist John Taylor.

While on a tour of the Australian venue’s Egyptian collection ahead of its new exhibit Mummy: Secrets of the Tomb (which opened Thursday), Taylor noticed a familiar name — Amenhotep, a well-known ancient Egyptian head of builders — on a fragile piece of papyrus long ago conserved by Queensland Museum curators.

Upon further examination of the collection, he confirmed that the ancient scraps were from The Book of the Dead of Amenhotep, an ancient Egyptian official from approximately 1420 B.C.

NASA CAPTURES PHOTO OF UFO SAILING AROUND THE SUN

Did NASA capture a ufo on film near the Sun?

NASA cameras have caught something very interesting hanging out near the sun recently.

The photo above shows a white streak in the bottom left hand corner which, in the time-lapse style the photo was taken in, represents a large, moving object, oddly close to the sun. In fact, they’ve never seen anything like it before!

Whatever it is, we can be sure it’s big, it’s floating around in space, it can withstand the heat of the sun, and it moves of its’ own accord and, that alone is fascinating!

Daily Mail writes:

A strange object flying close to the sun looks unnervingly like a huge, metallic ‘mothership’ familiar from Hollywood blockbusters.

The picture was released by Nasa’s sun-watching Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, known as SOHO – and has become an immediate cult hit on the internet.

UFO fan site Gather News said: ‘An unusually shaped, gigantic UFO was spotted on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and posted in a video on YouTube.

‘The unidentified flying object, which bears no resemblance to anything ever spotted near the Sun, somehow manages to withstand the blazing heat thrown off by solar flare activity and the incredibly high temperatures emanating from nuclear fusion generated on the surface of the star.

EXPEDITION LOOKS FOR LIVING DINOSAURS IN THE CONGO

Does the vastly unexplored Congo of Africa hide the legendary Mokele-mbembe?

An adventurous man and some friends of his have decided they are going on a mission. A mission that involves traveling to the most remote, dense, and dangerous part of the Republic of Congo’s very own jungle to discover and catalog hundreds of new species of insects, plant life, and oh yeah… to hunt for a living dinosaur that eats hippos. You know, everyday stuff.

According to the legends and stories told be natives, he shouldn’t have much trouble. They tell of a creature that resembles the species of dinosaurs known as Sauropods, with short legs, long necks, and even longer tails.

Yahoo News writes:

A young Missouri man has turned to the Internet in search of investors for his expedition into the remote jungles of Africa seeking to document undiscovered flora and fauna. That is not so unusual, but one of the creatures he hopes to find is: a living dinosaur.

The region Stephen McCullah, the organizer of the expedition, has chosen to explore is the reputed home of the Mokèlé-mbèmbé, a dinosaur-like creature said to be up to 35 feet long (11 meters), with brownish-gray skin and a long, flexible neck. Many locals believe that it lives in the caves it digs in riverbanks, and that the beast feeds on elephants, hippos and crocodiles.

McCullah posted his pitch on Kickstarter.com asking for $27,000 in donations so that he and his friends can launch the Newmac Expedition, “one of the first expeditions in this century with the goal of categorizing plant and animal species in the vastly unexplored Republic of the Congo.” The preliminary four-man venture is slated to launch June 26.

MEN IN BLACK PAY HOTEL A VISIT, ARE CAUGHT ON SECURITY CAMERA

As if things weren’t creepy enough for the staff of a hotel that had recently had a UFO sighting, they were apparently paid a visit by the enigmatic figures known as “men in black,” which often appear on the scene shortly after a UFO encounter.

Afterwards, one of the hotel staff decided to check the security cams, and sure enough the MIB were captured by the hotel’s cameras. If real, then this would mark the first time the mysterious “men in black” phenomenon has been recorded on video.

MIB — Could these figures be the mysterious "Men in Black"?

Ghost Theory writes:

From the Aerial Phenomen Investigations Team in Maryland comes this unique case with an exceptionally unique footage. According to the API Team, a recent UFO investigation case in Maryland received some attention from two strange looking men dressed in all black and looking so alike, that employees thought that they might be twins. They wore the exact same clothing, hats, and even had the same facial features. The men were captured on a hotel’s security camera entering the lobby in a straight strut.

According to those employees who talked to the men, they described them as tall, with extremely pale skin and no visible facial hair. Including no eyebrows and no eyelashes. Their eyes were described as being “so big and so blue, that they almost hypnotized..”

Here’s a clip of the actual footage:

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Guest Blogger

‘GRASPER’ THE NOT-SO-FRIENDLY GHOST

Queen's Arms Pub frequent guest, Ashley Beland.

Well here’s one ghost, named ‘Grasper’, has been getting a little too friendly for the owners and customers of a bar in Birmingham.

It seems this spirit that lingers around is always in a frisky mood and pinches guests and staffs behinds all the time!

Not a bad way to spend the afterlife, I suppose.

The Sun writes:

Terrified regulars at the Queen’s Arms have been keeping their backs to the wall since they realised the randy ghost was stalking the bar.

And it has become so bothersome that the exasperated owners have had called in a team of ghostbusters to give the saucy spook the bum’s rush.

Staff at the Birmingham city centre boozer have nicknamed the ghost Grasper after they described feeling a “firm pinch” to the buttocks.

Assistant manager Paula Wharton, 41, initially believed the tweaks on her body were muscle spasms.

She said: “One night three of us were talking and I mentioned that I’d felt this pinch on my bum, and everyone else said that it had happened to them too.