Top Secret – Page 7 – Museum of the Weird

Posted on October 2, 2012 by MOTW Admin

BIGFOOT CAUGHT ON TRAIL CAM?

Bigfoot? Deer? Chupacabra? With a photo this blurry, it could be anything.

My belief in the almighty Bigfoot is based on common sense and some words from the foremost knowledgeable person on primates and monkeys, Jane Goodall. She basically says that the chance of them existing is incredibly high with the vast amount of untouched and truly un-examined Pacific NorthWest of America that, if there was something in there and it didn’t want to be found, that wouldn’t be a problem. If you’ve ever flown over the area, it’s a vast land of nothing but tree tops and canopy for miles upon miles, upon miles.

Today’s story comes from a picture submitted by a reader of Field & Stream Magazine caught on his own trail cam usually used for tracking the wildlife in the area. This creature on the other hand seems to be anything but the usual deer or fox.

Ghost Theory writes:

Fresh off the presses over at Bigfoot Evidence, this Bushnell trail cam photo contest entry (whew!), stands widely apart from the rest. A reader from Field & Stream submitted this interesting photo of a slightly intriguing animal dashing by.

Definitely an interesting photo to say the least. At a quick glance, the stalwart creature looks bipedal and oddly shaped. At a closer inspection, the oddness becomes a bit more revealing. Take the hind legs for example. They’re shaped more like a deer’s hind quarters than the anatomy that we’ve come to accept as what a Sasquatch should have. Next, take a good look at the front appendages. Either those are deer-like hooves or this Sasquatch is suffering from the T-Rex syndrome.

Now, onto the dubiousness that is to be the creature’s head. It’s puzzling. I’m really not sure what to say about this one. I mean it seems too anatomically incorrect, against Mother Nature herself, that a creature of that size and that posture can run with its head cocked in such manner. Oh no wait, I got it. I think I see it now. This forearm-lacking Sasquatch is about to eat shit. One of those nature bloopers, which are rarely witnessed by humans, was serendipitously caught by a trail camera.

This photo rightfully deserves to win.

Read more and investigate further at ghosttheory.com/2012

Posted on October 1, 2012 by MOTW Admin

WOMAN GIVES BIRTH TO A HORSE!

1209horse — The horse given birth to by a woman in Benin City, Edo State, on Tuesday.

Now here is a truly weird story! A woman claims to have given birth to a foal during a religious ceremony in Nigeria.

Could it be true? Maybe the church’s leader, evangelist Silva Wealth, knows more than he’s letting on.

Apparently, during prayers he had a revelation that there was a woman with an issue and that something was blocking her womb. Then the woman “gave birth” to the foal.

According to Wealth, “We have seen several things people vomit during our service but not this type of thing.”

Hmm… kinda makes me want to vomit…

The Nigerian Tribune writes:

A woman purportedly gave birth to a foal (horse like) creature, otherwise known as a baby horse, on Tuesday at the World Liberation Ministry, on the Benin-Sapele road old during the church’s prophecy programme.

The strange creature, which threw the church members into panic, had died by the time the church following journalists visited the strange occurrence.

The identity of the woman was yet to be known but some church members said she started screaming during the prayer session and began bleeding from her private part just before the foal-like creature emerged.

General Overseer of the church, Evangelist Silva Wealth, said I was still shocked by what came out of the woman’s womb.

During I said I had a revelation prayers that there was a woman with an issue and that something was blocking her womb.

According to him, as intensified prayers, the woman started screaming and began to bleed and eventually gave birth to the creature.

Evangelist Wealth could not have said the creature was confirm whether dead or alive because he did not go near it.

“I can not describe the object. We have seen several things people vomit during our service but not this type of thing. God has been blessing our ministry with prophecies and miracles,” he added.

The woman was reported to have gone for medical check-up when journalists visited, just as elders and leaders of the church’s host community, Evboriaria, were said to have launched investigation into the bizarre development.

GHOST HUNTING ON HAUNTED SHIPS?

Ghost ships seem to be the next 'hotspot' for paranormal activity.

With all the recent ghost ‘investigation’ tv shows and just the overall popularity of the looking into the paranormal right now, it seems all the good spots on land have been taken or debunked. Now, it’s time to go off shore!

The Huffington Post writes:

Trying to make contact with a ghost? The key to getting them to respond may be pie — or at least a question about it.

That’s the surprising claim made by paranormal researcher Matt Schulz, a San Diego-based art director when he’s not exploring old houses, hotels or ships.

“It sounds strange, but a question like ‘What kind of pie do you like? Cherry or Apple?’ actually seems to get a response from spirits,” Schulz told a group of wannabe paranormal researchers during a midnight expedition on the Star Of India, a 149-year-old ship that is harbored down in San Diego.

It’s a technique Schulz learned a few years back from another investigator.

“Asking questions like ”Do you like cherry or apple pie?’ or ‘Do you prefer lemons or oranges?’ seems innocuous,” he told The Huffington Post a few days after the expedition. “But, for some strange reason, the spirits will answer them. Once, we were investigating an adobe house and trying to contact the ghost of a girl and we asked her if she liked chocolate or vanilla better and she said clearly, as if she was in the room, ‘Vanilla.'”

Besides being the second oldest ship still sailing regularly and the oldest iron-hulled merchant ship still floating, the Star of India is also allegedly harboring a lot of ghosts, hence the late night expedition, which was part of the Maritime Ghost Conference, a recent event in San Diego that explored the connection between ghosts and ships.

RESEARCHERS WIN IG NOBEL PRIZE FOR SHUTTING PEOPLE UP!

Japanese researchers Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada have invented a way to stop people talking in their tack.s

Everyone seems to have a co-worker or friend that just doesn’t seem to stop talking, ever. Well, two young researchers in Japan have created a literal gun (you point it at someone’s face and pull the trigger) that make even the loudest, most obtrusive talkers, silent.

Science on MSNBC News writes:

BOSTON — For anyone who’s ever been tired of listening to someone drone on and on and on, two Japanese researchers have the answer.

The SpeechJammer, a device that disrupts a person’s speech by repeating his or her own voice at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds, was named Thursday as a 2012 winner of the Ig Nobel prize — an award sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for weird and humorous scientific discoveries.

The echo effect of the device is just annoying enough to get someone to sputter and stop.

Actually, the device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada is meant to help public speakers by alerting them if they are speaking too quickly or have taken up more than their allotted time.

“This technology … could also be useful to ensure speakers in a meeting take turns appropriately, when a particular participant continues to speak, depriving others of the opportunity to make their fair contribution,” said Kurihara, of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.

Still, winning an Ig Nobel in acoustics for the device’s other more dubious purpose is cool too.

“Winning an Ig Nobel has been my dream as a mad scientist,” he said.

NASA WORKING ON WARP DRIVE

Warp Drive was made famous by the television show Star Trek.

The more time we spend in space, the more we realize we have got to get around a little faster than our current means allow. Well, we just might be moving faster, a LOT faster.

Gizmodo writes:

With our current propulsion technologies, interstellar flight is impossible. Even with experimental technology, like ion thrusters or a spaceship’s aft pooping freaking nuclear explosions, it would require staggering amounts of fuel and mass to get to any nearby star. And worse: it will require decades—centuries, even—to get there. The trip will be meaningless for those left behind. Only the ones going forward in search for a new star system would enjoy the result of the colossal effort. It’s just not practical.

So we need an alternative. One that would allow us to travel extremely fast without breaking the laws of physics. Or as Dr. White puts it: “we want to go, really fast, while observing the 11th commandment: Thou shall not exceed the speed of light.”

The answer lies precisely in those laws of physics. Dr. White and other physicists have found loopholes in some mathematical equations—loopholes that indicate that warping the space-time fabric is indeed possible.

Working at NASA Eagleworks—a skunkworks operation deep at NASA’s Johnson Space Center—Dr. White’s team is trying to find proof of those loopholes. They have “initiated an interferometer test bed that will try to generate and detect a microscopic instance of a little warp bubble” using an instrument called the White-Juday Warp Field Interferometer.

It may sound like a small thing now, but the implications of the research huge. In his own words:

‘Although this is just a tiny instance of the phenomena, it will be existence proof for the idea of perturbing space time-a “Chicago pile” moment, as it were. Recall that December of 1942 saw the first demonstration of a controlled nuclear reaction that generated a whopping half watt. This existence proof was followed by the activation of a ~ four megawatt reactor in November of 1943. Existence proof for the practical application of a scientific idea can be a tipping point for technology development.’

By creating one of these warp bubbles, the spaceship’s engine will compress the space ahead and expand the space behind, moving it to another place without actually moving, and carrying none of the adverse effects of other travel methods. According to Dr. White, “by harnessing the physics of cosmic inflation, future spaceships crafted to satisfy the laws of these mathematical equations may actually be able to get somewhere unthinkably fast—and without adverse effects.”

He says that, if everything is confirmed in these practical experiments, we would be able to create an engine that will get us to Alpha Centauri “in two weeks as measured by clocks here on Earth.” The time will be the same in the spaceship and on Earth, he claims, and there will not be “tidal forces inside the bubble, no undue issues, and the proper acceleration is zero. When you turn the field on, everybody doesn’t go slamming against the bulkhead, which would be a very short and sad trip.”

SIGNS OF LIFE OFFICIALLY FOUND ON MARS?

Are these little spheres true signs of alien life?

Have we finally found signs of alien life? And on Mars of all places, the place we actually suspected we’d find something? How weird!

Gizmodo writes:

NASA claims that new mysterious spheres discovered by the Mars Opportunity rover are puzzling researchers to no end. According to Opportunity’s principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University in Ithaca, “this is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission.”

Soon after Opportunity landed, it discovered similar spheres. The scientists nicknamed them blueberries and soon they discovered that they were rich on hematite. Those were evidence of a Mars’ past full of water. But these spheres—which are 3 millimeters in diameter—are nothing like that.

Found in the Kirkwood outcrop, in the western rim of Endeavour Crater, these spherules’ composition is completely different from the old Martian blueberries. Scientists still don’t know how they got there and what they are supposed to be, says Squyres:

“They are different in concentration. They are different in structure. They are different in composition. They are different in distribution. So, we have a wonderful geological puzzle in front of us. We have multiple working hypotheses, and we have no favorite hypothesis at this time. It’s going to take a while to work this out, so the thing to do now is keep an open mind and let the rocks do the talking.”

In the image you can also see spheres that have been eroded, showing a concentric internal structure. Researchers are now conducting more tests, trying to come up with an explanation on what these may be and how they got there.

SHARK HELPS MAN LOST AT SEA FIND SAFETY

Did a 6ft shark save a man, or try to eat him?

A man lost at sea for over 15 weeks claims that a shark, ignoring its years and years and years of evolutionary instincts, decided to nudge the little wooden raft he was on to safety instead of bumping him off for a tasty treat.

Sky News writes:

A lost fisherman who drifted at sea for 15 weeks, sleeping next to his dead brother-in-law, was eventually helped to safety – by a shark.

Toakai Teitoi was stuck on a 15ft wooden boat for more than 100 days after he ran out of fuel and the vessel drifted deep into the Pacific.

The 41-year-old Kiribati policeman relived his harrowing voyage after a fishing boat eventually picked him up and took him to Majuro in the Marshall Islands.

The father-of-six told of sleeping with the body of his brother-in-law who died during the ordeal, suffering severe dehydration.

And he said it was only after the intervention of a circling shark that he was eventually rescued.

Mr Teitoi’s ordeal began on May 27 after he had flown from his home island of Maiana to the Kiribati capital of Tarawa to be sworn in as a policeman.

Instead of flying home he decided to join his brother-in-law Lelu Falaile, 52, on what was supposed to be a two-hour sea journey back to Maiana.

But after stopping to fish along the way and sleeping overnight, they woke the following day to find they had drifted out of sight of Maiana and ran out of fuel.

“We had food, but the problem was we had nothing to drink,” he said.

As dehydration took hold, Mr Teitoi, a Catholic, said he turned to prayer as it gave him strength. But Mr Falaile’s health began failing and he died on July 4.

“I left him there overnight and slept next to him like at a funeral,” Mr Teitoi said. He buried his brother-in-law at sea the next morning.

Only a day after Mr Falaile passed away a storm blew into the area and rained for several days allowing Mr Teitoi to fill two five-gallon containers with water.

“There were two choices in my mind at the time. Either someone would find me or I would follow my brother-in-law. It was out of my control.”

He continued to pray regularly and on the morning of September 11 caught sight of a fishing boat in the distance but the crew were unable to see him.

Dejected, he did what he had done most days, curling up under a small covered area in the bow to stay out of the tropical sun.

Mr Teitoi said he woke in the afternoon to the sound of scratching and looked overboard to see a six-foot shark circling the boat and bumping the hull.

When the shark had his attention it swam off.

“He was guiding me to a fishing boat. I looked up and there was the stern of a ship and I could see crew with binoculars looking at me.”

FUNNY LOOKING MOTORCYCLE YOU CAN’T TIP OVER

This is the world’s first gyroscopically stabilized cycle and can't fall over.

Here’s a weird little guy that might be changing the face of transportation forever.

Tech Crunch writes:

The recent influx of both high- and low-end EVs and electric motorcycles have shown promise, but current battery technology is still limiting, and the cost of entry is far too high with the benefits of switching from petrol-powered vehicles not being quite as obvious or apparent in the near term.

Now imagine a vehicle that’s smaller than a Smart Car, nearly a third of the price of a Nissan Leaf ($32,500), safer than a motorcycle with a range capacity that just lets you drive and won’t ever tip over? What you get is Lit Motors‘ C-1, the world’s first gyroscopically stabilized, two-wheeled all-electric vehicle, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today. Oh, and it will talk to your smartphone and the cloud. Did I mention that you can’t tip this thing over? (I’ve tried.)

Founder, President, and CTO Danny Kim and his team at Lit Motors have built and approached the C-1 much differently than others have with their respective EVs. Instead of Frankensteining existing technologies, the C-1 has been designed, machined, and built by hand from the ground up in San Francisco. They’ve not only created something unique based on proprietary technology, but have also put together a package that appeals to the “cool kids” and the price-conscious in both America and abroad.

“We aim to be the future of personal transportation,” Kim told me. “By taking our vehicles to the mass market quickly and internationally, we will ease traffic congestion, decrease fuel use, reduce CO2 emissions, create 2,000 to 10,000 green jobs, and allow people to get around quickly and efficiently.”

REMOTELY-CONTROLLED CYBORG COCKROACHES ARE A REAL THING

A simple setup and this roach can be accurately remote-controlled.

I feel like whenever a big giant roach crosses my path, it comes right at me as if it’s being remotely controlled by someone who has learned my deepest, darkest fears and is using them to torment and ‘bug’ me. Well, it seems I may be right!

Scientists from North Carolina have developed remotely-controlled roaches, not to torment me, more like to help find and save survivors of natural disasters.

National Geographic writes:

The sight of a cockroach scuttling across the floor makes most of us shudder, but in a disaster, roaches might prove to be our new best friends.

Cockroaches that are surgically transformed into remote-controlled “biobots” could help locate earthquake survivors in hard-to-access areas. This new video from North Carolina State University’s iBionics Laboratory shows how the lab’s enhanced roaches can be steered with surprising precision.

To learn more, Amanda Fiegl spoke to assistant professor of engineering Alper Bozkurt, who led the roach biobot project.

What exactly is a biobot? Is it like a cyborg, a combination of a living organism and a robot?

“Biobot” is short for “biological robot.” It is the first stage of creating what we would call an insect cyborg.

Currently, we can steer these roaches remotely and make them stop, go, and turn. If we can have them interact independently with the technologies we’ve surgically implanted in them, then they will become true cyborgs.

Is it hard to perform surgery on a cockroach?

No, it’s quite simple. Insects can be anesthetized by putting them in the fridge for a few hours—the cold basically makes them hibernate, so they don’t move. Then you just need tweezers and a microscope.

We do a simple surgery to insert the electrodes in the roaches’ antennae and cerci [rear sensors]. We also use medical-grade epoxy to glue tiny magnets to their backs, so that we can just snap on the backpack containing the wireless control system.

Your paper mentions that these biobots could help rescue earthquake survivors. How, exactly?

Their backpacks can carry a locator beacon and a tiny microphone to pick up cries for help. Of course, a human operator or computer still has to be listening and steering them. Our biobots are basically just beasts of burden. They could also carry a camera or any other kind of miniaturized sensor one can imagine.

These experiments were done in a very controlled laboratory environment, on a flat surface, so we are now in the process of building test-beds that mimic some real-life scenarios. I don’t think it will be very long before we can deploy them to actually help rescue people.

Read more of the Q & A at news.nationalgeographic.com

Posted on August 29, 2012 by MOTW Admin

THE HOVER BIKE OF THE FUTURE AVAILABLE TODAY

The Aerofex hover vehicle looks a little familiar.

If we weren’t living in enough of ‘The World of the Future” as we’ve seen in novels, movies and television for your liking, it looks like someone has taken a step in the right direction… up.

Space.com writes:

A resurrected hover vehicle won’t fly through dense forests as effortlessly as the “Star Wars” speeder bikes from “Return of the Jedi,” but its intuitive controls could someday allow anyone to fly it without pilot training.

The aerial vehicle resembles ascience fiction flying bike with two ducted rotors instead of wheels, but originates from a design abandoned in the 1960s because of stability and rollover problems. Aerofex, a California-based firm, fixed the stability issue by creating a mechanical system — controlled by two control bars at knee-level — that allows the vehicle to respond to a human pilot’s leaning movements and natural sense of balance.

“Think of it as lowering the threshold of flight, down to the domain of ATV’s (all-terrain vehicles),” said Mark De Roche, an aerospace engineer and founder of Aerofex.

Such intuitive controls could allow physicians to fly future versions of the vehicle to visit rural patients in places without roads, or enable border patrol officers to go about their duties without pilot training. All of it happens mechanically without the need for electronics, let alone complicated artificial intelligence or flight software. [See Hover ‘Bike’ Fly (Video)]

“It essentially captures the translations between the two in three axis (pitch, roll and yaw), and activates the aerodynamic controls required to counter the movement — which lines the vehicle back up with the pilot,” De Roche told InnovationNewsDaily. “Since [the pilot’s] balancing movements are instinctive and constant, it plays out quite effortlessly to him.”