Forteana

... very credible sources have reported seeing UFOs — unidentified flying objects. Now they’re called Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAP. But whatever you call them, the U.S. government has lately begun taking these mystery objects seriously. Very seriously. And it’s recruited a lot of scientists to investigate what’s behind them (albeit quietly).

We still don’t know what the pilots and others have seen. But here’s what’s motivated the new and growing scientific interest in them...

A brand new case for Halloween. Helen, her husband and baby son move into a 200 year-old house in the Lake District. At first all is fine, but one October morning they open their front door to find a pile of small stones on their doorstep.

The odd incident sets into motion a series of terrifying events that lasts for the next 18 years…

That's part 1 and part 2 is also available:

For the last of our chilling Halloween episodes, we return to Meadow Cottage for the gripping second half of this brand new investigation into a terrifying haunting in the Lake District that spanned two decades.

As Helen’s young son Jake grows up, events take an even more sinister turn. What is going on in that house?

Every country has its ghost stories, its mythical monsters and its ghoulish urban legends. But the United Kingdom – the home of the Gothic novel and the birthplace of paranormal investigation – may stake a claim to being the most haunted country on Earth.

With one of the world's highest concentrations of castles and no shortage of centuries-old pubs and coaching inns, there are plenty of reputedly haunted places to enjoy a drink or a meal, or even lay your head for the night – if you're feeling brave.

In addition, the country's relatively small size means it's possible to combine several of these places into one ghost-heavy itinerary. Here's where travellers with a penchant for the paranormal should head to get spooked this Halloween...

• Skirrid Inn, Abergavenny, Wales
• Chillingham Castle, Northumberland
• Whitby, North Yorkshire
• Ancient Ram Inn, Gloucestershire
• Edinburgh Castle, Scotland

A special Halloween episode full of new cases to investigate. Danny is joined by Evelyn Hollow and guest expert, celebrated writer and comedian Stewart Lee, a lover of ghost stories and weird folklore. Can they explain these strange real-life stories of the paranormal?

It’s witching hour deep in the Nevada desert. The time of night when ghosts and demons are most likely to appear. I’m standing with a torch in an eerie, dark bedroom of the self-proclaimed “most haunted motel in America” to try and glimpse the paranormal in action.

“Can you feel that cold air?” says Christopher Alefeld, my ghost hunting guide for the night. “You can feel it in some of the rooms, it just feels different. More tense”.

Our ghost-detecting equipment (an “EMF Meter”) bleeps and lights up with activity, indicating it has picked up on changes in a nearby electromagnetic field. It feels like I’m a member of the Ghostbusters when I’m told a sudden unexplained spike in the EMF reading is considered evidence of the paranormal.

But here at the Clown Motel it’s a regular occurrence. They even have a disclaimer on their site about the potential risks involved with a supernatural encounter. And, yes, you heard correctly – because your run-of-the-mill regular haunted motel just ain’t scary enough, this is a clown-themed haunted motel...

A mysterious radio station that has broadcasted a monotone buzzing sound and the occasional odd voice for decades has left scientists baffled.

The shortwave radio station, found on frequency 4625 kHz, has been running for at least 50 years. It has been appropriately nicknamed 'The Buzzer'.

But rumors as to its origins continue to swirl online today.

One alarming theory is that the sound is a signal which, if ceases, indicates a nuclear attack is imminent. Others say the buzzing sound is a foreign government's attempts to communicate with visiting alien species.

However, the most common theory among experts is that the radio waves come out of Russia, which may be reserving the frequency for an impending emergency...

... The belief in ghosts is a funny thing. Despite there being no evidence to support their existence, ghosts have haunted humanity wherever they have settled across the planet. Every age and every culture has its own type of ghost and ghost stories, each shaped by its own peculiar context. And despite the rise of scientific thinking in the 20th and 21st centuries, the belief in unquiet spirits is still very much alive...

Since the shocking revelation about the US Government's UFO research programme in 2017, the topic of extraterrestrial visitors has gradually shifted from conspiracy theories to mainstream discussion.

In recent times, military experts have sworn before the US Congress that the Pentagon ran a "multi-decade" programme which collected and attempted to reverse-engineer crashed alien crafts.

However, the official government "disclosure" of contact with aliens, whether through interstellar craft landings or the recently reported "non-human technological signature" allegedly detected by an Australian radio telescope, seems as distant as ever.

Nick Pope, who was once in charge of analysing UFO reports for the Ministry of Defence, shared his unsettling theory about why that might be with Simon Holland in a leaked email...

Activist Leo Igwe is at the forefront of efforts to help people accused of witchcraft in Nigeria, as it can destroy their lives - and even lead to them being lynched.

“I could no longer take it. You know, just staying around and seeing people being killed randomly,” Dr Igwe tells the BBC.

After completing his doctorate in religious studies in 2017 he was restless. He had written extensively about witchcraft and was frustrated that academia did not allow him to challenge the practice head on.

...

So Dr Igwe set up Advocacy For Alleged Witches, an organisation focussed on “using compassion, reason, and science to save lives of those affected by superstition”.

Dr Igwe’s prevention work also extends to Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe and beyond.

One of the people the organisation has helped in Nigeria is 33-year-old Jude. In August, it intervened when he was accused and beaten in Benue State.

Jude, a glazier, who also works part-time in a bank, says he was on his way to work one morning, when he met a boy carrying two heavy jars of water which prompted him to comment on the boy’s physical agility.

The boy did not take the comments kindly, but he went on his way.

Later, Jude was followed by a mob of about 15 people throwing stones at him. Among them was the boy he had greeted earlier.

“Young men started fighting me as well, trying to set me ablaze,” Jude says.

He was accused of causing the disappearance of the boy’s penis through witchcraft, an accusation that shocked him and is untrue.

Claims of manhood disappearances are not uncommon in some parts of West Africa.

It is a claim that has been linked to Koro syndrome, a mental illness otherwise known as missing or genital retraction hysteria.

It is a psychiatric disorder characterised by an intense and irrational fear of the genital organs going missing or retracting into the body of the victim.

Most people imagine philosophers as rational thinkers who spend their time developing abstract logical theories and strongly reject superstitious beliefs. But several 20th-century philosophers actively investigated spooky topics such as clairvoyance, telepathy – even ghosts.

Many of these philosophers, including Henri Bergson and William James, were interested in what was called “psychical research”. This was the academic study of paranormal phenomena including telepathy, telekinesis and other-worldly spirits.

These thinkers attended seances and were attempting to develop theories about ghosts, life after death and the powers exhibited by mediums in trances. My recent archival research has been looking at how these topics shaped 20th-century philosophy...

Halloween’s roots lie in the ancient festival Samhain. Celebrated on the evening of 31 October and into 1 November, Celts believed this was when the boundary between the living and the dead was at its thinnest. They would make offerings to their gods around a bonfire, and dress in costumes to confuse the malevolent spirits that might wander the earth.

It’s no surprise, therefore, that today we gather in the darkened evenings of autumn to share a ghost story or two – a tradition that has lasted centuries.

From medieval hauntings to Victorian messages from the dead, explore ten ghost stories from history…

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20962941

Paranormal researcher Brian J. Cano has been investigating ghosts for 22 years now, visiting locations all across the globe.

Brian started out as a skeptic but now he says he’s a skeptical believer, which means he thinks there’s something out there but is skeptical on how it’s reported. Saying not everything that happens during the night is paranormal activity.

One of those stories talks about Brian’s demonic experience with the circle of fire at the Grand Midway Hotel. Brian says, “When I say off the chart, I mean literally you go down the list: Chris was getting touched, I was hearing things audibly, Lisa Ann was communing directly with spirits… it was the most poignant encounter I ever had.”

The childhood home of the late Queen Mother, Glamis Castle, has been declared one of the most haunted places to visit in the UK this Halloween.

Located in Angus, Scotland, Glamis Castle has royal connections that go back over a thousand years, and grisly spot where Malcolm II of Scotland was murdered in 1034.

Even before the castle was built, there were warnings that the land was cursed, and its original location was changed from a nearby hill after workers claimed to hear a voice say: “Build not on this enchanted spot, where man hath neither part nor lot, but build down in yonder bog, where it will neither shake nor shog!”

Ghosts claimed to haunt the walls of Glamis Castle include the Tongueless Woman – a maid said to have been murdered after discovering a secret of the Earl. She is rumoured to appear with blood spilling from her mouth...

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/18915016

In 1964, two young academics clambered into a red Mini and, armed with a mountain of printed slips, set out to conduct what would become the definitive survey of English folklore and traditions for the next 60 years.

John Widdowson and Paul Smith went to town centres, ­community halls, Women’s Institute meetings. They handed the simple forms out to anyone who visited Sheffield University, where they were based. And they wanted to know the answer to one simple question: what do you know to be true?

Now held in the university’s archives, the thousands of replies make for illuminating reading, creating a patchwork of observances, superstitions and local legends, passed down through families and communities.

“Don’t bring hawthorn blossom into the house. It’s bad luck,” wrote David Smith of London, who had learned this from his mother, Molly, then living in Scarborough.

The story related by Florence Swaby of Hertfordshire was perhaps a little more dramatic: “Just outside the village, part of the road is called the white highway, and at that point there are two large open fields and the devil haunts there. This is the story handed down from my great grandmother and really happened …”

Exactly six decades on, the Survey of Language and Folklore is finally being updated, with a more scientific method than two men in a Mini handing out questionnaires almost at random. The Centre for Contemporary Legend, based at Sheffield Hallam University, is to conduct the National Folklore Survey, financed with £271,000 of government money from the UK Research and Innovation body.

The project will be led by David Clarke along with Diane Rodgers, also of Sheffield Hallam, and Ceri Houlbrook and Owen Davies who founded the MA Folklore Studies course at Hertfordshire University. It will be conducted by Ipsos-UK, ­polling almost 3,000 people in the first phase to create a clearer picture of what folklore means today.

The new survey aims to address “the lack of robust research evidence into the cultural value of folklore in post-Brexit, post-pandemic, multicultural England. It aims to create new data to answer two research questions: ‘How have folkloric beliefs and practices shaped England’s social, cultural and spiritual identity?’ and ‘To what extent are ideas of nationalism and colonial attitudes informed by contemporary notions of English folklore?’”

...

“You might think that in an increasingly technological world we have no place for folklore, but it seems to be the opposite. Technology and mobile phones create a kind of disenchantment in people’s lives, and I think they’ve started to realise that. The revival of interest in folklore is a wonderful thing, and long may it continue.”

Have you ever heard of the Hexham Heads or Wolf of Allendale?

Now that Halloween is approaching you might want to clue yourself up because, well there's no easy way of saying this, a werewolf may be out there.

On 10 December 1904, we, the Hexham Courant, published a story with the title "Wolf at Large in Allendale".

The wolf committed a "great slaughter of sheep" on the moors above Hexham in the winter of 1904 and was believed to be an escapee from the private zoo of Captain Bain in County Durham.

A hunt quickly ensued among petrified locals thinking the wolf may move on from sheep and start attacking children.

After many weeks the drama soon came to a grisly end when the wolf was cut in twain by a Midland Railway express near Cumwhinton station on the Settle-Carlisle railway.

Too badly mutilated to be preserved, the wolf was beheaded and sent to the Midland Railway's headquarters at Derby.

For a week, the head of the Allendale wolf was displayed in the window of a taxidermist's shop in Derby before being mounted outside the Midland Railway's boardroom.

In 1936, the head was still there, but it has now vanished, and subsequent searches for it have been unsuccessful.

Now let's fast forward to the 1970s, when things start to get even creepier...

In October 1964, a young man was driving to a dance in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, when his radio began to pick up a strange frequency. At first he thought it was just tuning in to a local channel, but then voices came through discussing some kind of nuclear war – and issuing bomb reports.

Recalling the incident decades later, the driver described the simultaneous appearance of a star overhead followed by the sudden realisation that he could see through the floor of his car.

‘I hadn’t done any dope, I wasn’t doing any beer,’ he adds so casually that you feel inclined to believe him. And yet his body felt like jelly. The episode only lasted what seemed like five or ten minutes, but on arriving at the dance, the man realised that the half-hour journey had actually taken nearly two hours. He never found a logical explanation for what had happened.

Between 1980 and 1992, a Cornell graduate from Ohio named John P. Timmerman travelled across America with a recorder and case of cassette tapes. Diversifying from his day job as the owner of an air-conditioning business, he spent his weekends conducting interviews in shopping malls as a volunteer for the Center for UFO Studies. In each mall he visited, he asked shoppers whether they had ever experienced anything inexplicable. The jellified driver was just one of nearly 1,200 people he spoke to across the course of his peculiar career.

We Are Not Alone, which airs on BBC Radio 4 this Sunday evening, replays a selection of these interviews in one continuous stream. There is no introduction – and no explanation – and the only interruptions during the programme are the clicks of a tape ending, the ‘this is side two, cassette one’, type markers made by Timmerman himself and, in the final three minutes, some appreciative reflections from Timmerman’s son. I became quickly hooked.

What struck me, in particular, was how many of the close encounters described took place when people were travelling. Aliens, it would seem, are fascinated by human transport. One woman spoke of a saucer-like object with multi-coloured lights zooming towards her car and disappearing only when another car came into sight. A man with 40 years’ experience in the aviation industry assessed that the sophisticated flying object he saw had no jet engine and was manifestly ‘not from this Earth’.

Many reports released in recent years offer more comprehensive descriptions of sightings than those gathered by Timmerman. But the raw beauty of some of the latter nevertheless astounds.

The captain of a commercial jet summoned the most striking image of the glow he observed while flying north of the Grand Canyon. It was ‘something like the light of the Aurora Borealis’, he recalled, ‘only it was encompassing most of the western sky’. Within it appeared a sphere ‘about the size of a moon when it comes over the horizon’. The moon itself was half-full and directly overhead.

On his journey, Timmerman inevitably encountered some cranks. Top marks go to the woman who informed him that UFOs live inside mountains and only come out at night. ‘How did you know this?’ Timmerman asked her. ‘A lady told me on the bus,’ she replied.

But for the most part, the people recorded were characterised by their wonder and yearning for something beyond what the eye usually sees. The fascination you hear in their voices is as captivating as the stories themselves. The programme will leave you gazing skywards.

You can listen on Radio 4.

We live in times where Mark Robinson and the Nude Africa porn forums are threatening to become one of the most consequential stories in American history, so you’ll excuse me if I roll my eyes at the folks who believe our reality is not absurd enough to accommodate the potential notion of visitors from another realm. If you want to know why I feel this way, I wrote 6,500 words across two articles explaining why both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and I think there’s something to UFOs (Here is part 1 and part 2).

UFOs are news worth covering simply because so many credible government actors have lent their own credibility to it, and if a fraction of any of this is true, it is world-changing. If it’s all a lie, then why this lie was perpetrated on the entire globe is a question that demands an answer. There’s no route out of this mess that isn’t newsworthy and worth exploring, and there is enough physical evidence of unexplained things in the sky at this point that dismissing it all as mankind’s overactive imagination requires a bigger conspiracy theory than the legend that Lockheed Martin is housing UFOs.

Last summer’s UFO hearing starred David Grusch telling explosive tales of UFO crash retrievals, and while most were quick to dismiss this as the rantings of a lunatic or a huckster, I refuse to go that far. I, like most others, am unqualified to assess Grusch’s credibility and lack the appropriate security clearances. All I can say is that he is not a James Clapper-type who is at the top of an agency and can just lie to Congress all willy nilly and go to fancy D.C. cocktail parties like nothing happened. Grusch is blowing the whistle from the great middle of the Defense Department organizational chart, where the rules still do theoretically apply to normal people.

I don’t know if David Grusch’s testimony was true (The Intelligence Community Inspector General found his complaint “credible and urgent” in July 2022, which should be noted is not an assessment of whether it is true), but I do know that if he did lie, he is in extremely deep shit because he accused some immensely powerful entities of some very serious crimes under oath. That guillotine hovering over his neck is convincing enough to me to at least hear him and any others out who are willing to put themselves on the line to take a leap of faith in our democratic institutions. You can listen to people tell their stories with an open mind without having to make an instantaneous judgement about their veracity, and if they are lying, time will bear that out. If someone wants to go in front of Congress and tell us something they think is important, we owe it to them to listen...

An aristocrat 'fainted' after being visited by the ghost of his dead mother, according to an unearthed 239-year-old manuscript.

The ‘haunting’, which was said to have taken place in a stately home in 1785, has been discovered by auctioneers going through an old box of legal deeds and papers. The official papers described how aristocrat Francis Eld was visited by the spirit of his dead mother Catherine around the time she died - unbeknownst to him - 150 miles away.

The manuscript told how Mr Eld was in his infant daughter’s bedroom in the early hours of March 29, 1785, when the apparition appeared. He experienced a “puff of air” across his face and saw “a sort of cloud or vapour”, which took on the appearance and voice of his mother.

The ghost said: “My child, be not grieved, I am dead, but happy.” The spooky visitation is said to have taken place at Seighford Hall, near Stafford, Staffordshire.

Jim Spencer, Director at Rare Book Auctions, in Lichfield, came across the papers while carrying out a valuation.

He said: “It was quite eerie discovering these papers during the run-up to Halloween. I found it in a box full of old indentures relating to the Whitby family of Shugborough and Haywood.

“It’s the sort of thing I see all the time but the word 'visitation' just caught my eye. As soon as I realised they were talking about a ghost, I genuinely couldn't read quickly enough, my eyes were racing ahead of my brain”...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20893597

With its gray, scaley skin, protruding dorsal spines, menacing fangs and proclivity for small livestock, the mythical chupacabra has stoked both curiosity and fear across portions of the Americas for decades.

If you consider the most common descriptions of the chupacabra, from its physical appearance to its behavior, you're likely dealing with a coyote that is in the late stages of mange.

Mange is a debilitating disease that can infect a wide range of fur-bearing mammals,depending on the animal's ability to overcome the symptoms of mange, the condition can become chronic, leading to behavioral changes and even death.

On canids, the last place they lose fur is right between the shoulder blades in an area that we call the ruff, this fits descriptions of chupacabras having spikes or a ridge along their backs.

The vampire-like punctures often reported on victims of the chupacabra also correspond with the coyote's standard predation method of strangulation through multiple bites to their prey's neck.

Reports of chupacabras fully draining an animal of blood may also be explained by how rapidly blood will settle and coagulate within the dead animal, making it appear as though it has been drained.

The US government is keeping tabs on any and all claims of UFO sightings as part of an ‘above top-secret’ programme, a whistleblower has alleged.

‘Immaculate Constellation’ is an alleged database of high-quality photographs, videos, firsthand accounts and electronic sensor evidence of UFOs.

Officials use the off-the-books programme to ‘detect’ and ‘quarantine’ UFO materials without congressional knowledge or oversight, according to a leaked report shared with the Substack newsletter Public.

American military and intelligence officials have a ‘high level of confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the data gathered’, which includes mentions of not only UFOs but ‘Alien Reproduction Vehicles’, or reverse-engineered crafts.

If confirmed, the very existence of ‘Immaculate Constellation’ would be a ‘game-changing development’, the UK’s top UFO expert told Metro...

We don’t want to put you off taking the Tube, but according to legend London’s historic network and its stations are home to a whole variety of ghosts.

Among them is the mysterious ‘Girl on the Train’, as she’s now known.

Several people, both underground employees and passengers, have reported seeing her on Bakerloo Line trains at Elephant and Castle.

The young woman boards the train, walks through the carriages, then disappears without a trace, they say.

Unexplained foot steps, possibly running, plus rapping noises have also been heard at the station while it’s been closed.

The BBC has previously shared one employee’s account of seeing the apparition...

'Big cats' were spotted near a farm but the animals ran off before the witness could take a photo to prove once and for all the legends of 'leopards on the loose'.

The latest sightings both took place on Saturday night many miles apart at Woodmancote, near Defford, and at Eastham between Great Witley and Tenbury Wells.

The sighting at Eastham was so sudden and surprising, the driver said it caused him to swerve the car slightly in shock.

...

A witness said: "I saw two big cats in Woodmancote near Defford crossing the road last night opposite Copeland Court Farm.

"They were definitely big type cats. I stopped my van but they ran off into fields before I could get photos. I probably couldn't have got a decent shot because it was dark.

...

"I'd say they was about the size of a big dog."

Meanwhile, a further sighting has been described in Eastham which is out towards Tenbury Wells, also on Saturday night, at 7.48pm.

Writing on the Evesham and Villages Big Cat Group, the witness said: "A large black cat was spotted by myself entering a field in Eastham (WR15) on Saturday night. I saw the rear end of an animal approximately 18 to 24 inches tall. It was way too big to be a domesticated cat and it wasn't a dog or any other normally seen animal. The animal caused me to swerve slightly when I saw it due to its size."

...

The shocking sightings of large leopard-like cats have been reported as recently as this year in Harvington, near Evesham and others date back 20 years.

Possible sightings have now been noted in Harvington (this year), Gorse Hill and Elbury Mount Local Nature Reserve, Aldington (between Offenham and Badsey), near Kidderminster, near The Walshes in Stourport, Upton Snodsbury, Powick, Madresfield, the Lenchford Inn at Shrawley, Bewdley, Bentley (near Bromsgrove) and Stoke Prior.

Many of these encounters are in Worcestershire's wildest tracts of country. However, not all are in remote areas with one dog walker describing how she fled a Worcester nature reserve with her two powerful dogs, one of which was bred to fight wolves.

The people of Newfoundland post all kinds of photos online of the captivating things they find washed up along the island’s 17,000 kilometres of coastline. Most of the time it’s run-of-the-mill flotsam from the Atlantic. Random boat parts. A giant fish head. Sea glass. Lots of sea glass.

Then the white blobs showed up – a mystery that has been baffling government scientists for weeks.

Philip Grace was the first to post a photograph of the lumpy gelatinous goop (sorry, Gwyneth) scattered over the pebbly beach in Ship Harbour, a community in southern Newfoundland.

“Anyone know what these blobs are?” he wrote on the Facebook page Beachcombers of Newfoundland and Labrador last month. “They are like touton dough and all over the beach.” (Toutons are fried biscuits, a traditional Newfoundland breakfast food.)

Soon, others chimed in. They’d seen them too: on Shoal Cove Beach, Barasway Beach, Gooseberry Cove Beach, Southern Harbour, Arnold’s Cove – mostly up and down the eastern shore of Placentia Bay.

The white globs floated in from the sea covered in seaweed, sand and pebbles. They were strangely combustible, with a pocked slimy surface and firm spongy flesh. Flies were indifferent. The gobs ranged in size from toonies to dinner plates. And amateur hypotheses ran the gamut, from the pithy to the improbable with some suggesting that they were cheese, alien poo or whale boogers...

Nearly two-thirds of American homeowners believe that their house is haunted, according to a new survey.

The survey by Angi, a service to help people find home service providers, found that 60% of homeowners believe that they may be living with ghosts.

Of the 1,000 homeowners surveyed, more than 65% claimed to have experienced unexplainable occurrences in their homes. About 31% reported hearing unexplained sounds in the walls, 30% reported creaking floorboards and 24% reported hearing unexplained footsteps.

About 13% of respondents reported seeing or hearing the toilet flush on its own. However, Angi did note that there is a phenomenon called "ghost flushing" where toilets will flush on their own due to a leak somewhere in the home's toilet system.

Almost 20% of homeowners surveyed said they were scared of one or more parts of their home, such as their basement or attic. Nearly 60% said they would not like to be left alone at home.

However, 58% of respondents said they would consider living in a haunted house if it meant saving money.

A British academic believes he has stumbled on the most world-changing piece of news in recorded history.

Professor Simon Holland, who has produced documentaries for NASA-funded projects including a project pinpointing Earth-threatening asteroids, says that two rival groups of astronomers are in a race to publish the first confirmed evidence of an extraterrestrial civilisation.

He told The Mirror: “We have found a non-human extraterrestrial intelligence in our galaxy, and people don't know about it.” Simon explains that he has been given information by a contact within Mark Zuckerbeg's Breakthrough Listen, a privately-funded initiative aimed at finding evidence of civilisations beyond Earth.

And the news may come within the next month to coincide with the US election, he believes. He claims that astronomers within the Oxford-based project have identified clear evidence of transmissions from another world...