Thursday, December 27, 2012

Thursday, December 27, 2012

Taiwan Police Officer Captures Image of Supposed Alien Being



SUPERIMPOSED? A photo imaging expert said the photo does not appear to have been edited, but thought the so-called ‘alien’ looked too human

A local UFO association has released a photograph taken at a high mountain lake which it says shows the image of an “alien being,” but skeptics say it may be a digitally edited or multiple-exposure photo.

The Taiwan UFOlogy Society (TUFOS) announced on Saturday that a photograph taken by a policeman at Jiaming Lake (嘉明湖) — located at an altitude of 3,310m on the southern section of the Central Mountains in Taitung County — shows what appears to be a large alien creature, with a transparent body and webbed hands, walking in the distance.

Due to its strange features, TUFOS executives say it does not look like a human being, but must have come from outer space.

TUFOS chairman Huang Chao-ming (黃朝明) said the policeman gave them the photo, which was taken on his iPhone 4 mobile phone, for examination.

A close-up image of the so-called “alien being” shows double-exposure lines at the bottom. To determine whether the photo is genuine, TUFOS spent a year having experts on mobile phone technology, computer imagery and camera photography inspect the photo, but it has yet to make a conclusive finding.

Some experts have said it may be a leftover image from the mobile phone’s flash memory that was superimposed on the scenery shot.

Huang said if it was a faulty superimposed image, why did the “alien being” just happen to be at the top of the mountain ridge line?

The photograph was taken by Chen Yung-huang (陳詠鍠), a policeman who went on a hiking trip to Jiaming Lake with his colleagues on May 14 last year.

Chen told Huang that he did not notice anything unusual, and only discovered the strange figure in the picture after coming down the mountains.

Chien Jung-tai (簡榮泰), an expert on photo image processing, was shown the photograph on Saturday. Chien initially said that a shaking motion when the shot was being taken might have produced the double lines in what might be a leftover image.

However, it was interesting to see that the double lines in the leftover image appear only in a small section of the photo, he said.

Chien also compared the pixel elements of the double lines below the “alien being” and the image above it, and said they do not differ much, adding that it does not appear to be an edited photo.

However, he said that if it were an “alien being,” then it should have a body structure and composition different from that of a human being.

Judging from the photo, the creature appears to have a huge body, but if it is transparent, it would not have an outline and a shadow, he said.

“If it was an alien being from another planet, with its own special biological structure, then we would be unable to interpret its shape and appearance, based on what we see from creatures on Earth,” he said.

When asked if the image might be caused by a superimposition of a leftover frame image from the mobile phone’s flash memory, Chien said that was a question that can only be answered by experts in optical imaging technology for flash memory devices.

Based on his experience with digital cameras and mobile phones, he said the probability of having a multiple-exposure image superimposed at just the right place in an outdoor scenery picture was low.

Huang said there have been reports from other countries of cameras capturing images of beings and objects that are invisible to the human eye. - Taipei Times

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Top Ten Weirdest Stories of 2012



Coming in as tenth weirdest is the housefly-size frog Paedophryne amauensis (below), the world’s smallest known vertebrate.
10. World’s Smallest Frog Found
Photograph courtesy Christopher Austin, Louisiana State University

At an average of 7.7 millimeters long, the frog is a hair smaller than the previous record holder, the Southeast Asian fish species Paedocypris progenetica, whose females measure about 7.9 millimeters, scientists said in January. Full story>>

9.  Slime Has Memory But No Brain
Photograph courtesy Audrey Dussutour

The living slime that may have been the muse for the 1958 science-fiction film The Blob just got creepier: In October, scientists reported that slime mold, a brainless single-celled organism, has a form of memory. Full story>>

8. Two-Faced Cat a Mystery
Photograph courtesy TODAY Show/NBC

In August, Venus the two-faced cat became a feline hit: The three-year-old tortoiseshell debuted her own Facebook page, was featured in a YouTube video, and appeared on the Today Show. (Watch National Geographic cat videos.)
One look at this cat and you can understand why: One half is solid black with a green eye, and the other half has typical orange tabby stripes and a blue eye. The coloration may be a genetic mashup that one scientist called “absolute luck.” Full story>>

7. White Killer Whale Spotted
Photograph courtesy E. Lazareva, Far East Russia Orca Project

An white adult killer whale spotted off Russia in April may be the only one in the world.
Nicknamed Iceberg, the 22-foot-long (7-meter-long) whale is probably not a true albino, since he has color on his saddle—the area behind his dorsal fin, scientists say. (See pictures of albino animals.) The male appeared healthy and accepted by his pod, suggesting his odd coloration doesn’t affect him. Full story>>

6. World’s Leggiest Animal Found
Photograph by Paul Marek

The leggiest creature on Earth lives in California, but it’s not a movie star or a model—it’s a 3-centimeter-long (1.2-inch) millipede with 750 legs, scientists said in November.
First seen by government scientists in 1928, Illacme plenipes—”the acme of plentiful legs”—keeps such a low profile that for the rest of the 20th century the species was thought to be extinct. Then University of Arizona entomologist Paul Marek spied one near Silicon Valley. Full story>>

5. Turtles Urinate Via Their Mouths—a First
Photograph from FLPA/Alamy

When a species of soft-shelled turtle in China piddles in puddles, it does so through its mouth—the first evidence of an animal doing so, scientists reported in October.
The findings could also have stomach-churning implications for humans with kidney failure, scientists say. Full story>>

4. Rare Maned Lionesses Explained
Photograph courtesy Deon De Villiers

If it looks like a male lion and is perceived as a male lion—well, sometimes it isn’t. That’s the case of Africa’s unusual maned lionesses, which sport a male’s luxurious locks and may even fool competitors.
Though uncommon, maned lionesses have been regularly sighted in the Mombo area of Botswana‘s Okavango Delta (including the individual pictured above), where the lion population may carry a genetic disposition toward the phenomenon, experts say. Full story>>

3. Genitalia-Headed Fish is Evolutionary Mystery
Photograph courtesy Magnolia Press, reproduced with permission

How’s this for a head turner? A tiny new species of fish from Vietnam sports its genitalia on its noggin.
Phallostethus cuulong is only the 22nd known species of its family, Phallostethidae, all of which bear their copulatory organs just behind their mouths. Full story>>

2. World’s Weirdest Penis Studied
Photograph by Lucy Cooke

When National Geographic Emerging Explorer Lucy Cooke headed to Tasmania, Australia, this year, she on the lookout for the echidna, an ancient termite-eating hedgehog with a four-headed penis. (Read more about Cooke’s National Geographic Channel show Freaks & Creeps.)
As Cooke wrote on her blog in July, “This extraordinary member has four distinct heads and looks like a stumpy hand with no thumb waving at me. Or some sort of weird sea anemone. It definitely doesn’t look like any penis I have ever seen before. Thankfully.”

1. Giant Mysterious Eyeball Found on Florida Beach
Photograph by Carli Segelson/Fla. FWCC

Perhaps reminiscent of the infamous Montauk monster, a softball-size eyeball washed up in Florida in October (as if Florida needed anything else weird). The Internet was buzzing with questions: whose eye is it? What is it? A few days later, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported that the “mystery eyeball” appears to belong to a swordfish. Full story>>
For being justifiably weird, gross, and mysterious all at the same time, the giant eyeball is our weirdest story of 2012.

Monday, December 24, 2012

I saw paranormal Santa Claus

Aliens, sure. But the jolly bearded guy? Researchers survey evidence of mysterious sightings.



The truth is out there, and there’s an awful lot of it. If the stories zinging around the Internet are anything to go by, people are routinely pestered by beings from other dimensions or distant planets.
Less commonplace, however, are reports like this: “We [were] driving by a lonely McDonald’s and we [saw] something dashing through the clouds. We could all make out Santa’s sleigh and 9 reindeer including Rudolph’s nose.”
This is just one of the many Santa sightings that have recently been spotlighted on a website devoted to true-life tales of the unexplained. The person who compiled them, a veteran paranormal researcher named Stephen Wagner, is of the opinion that these accounts should be afforded the same respect as those concerning, say, Bigfoot or the Lost City of Atlantis, which represents a significant departure in a field that is sensitive about exposure to ridicule.
Wagner, who lives in Little Falls, N.Y., is no lightweight in the world of the paranormal. He has been researching supernatural events for over three decades. He has written a book on the subject—“Touched By a Miracle: True Stories of Ordinary People and Extraordinary Experiences”—and for 14 years has run a popular About.com page titled Paranormal Phenomena. Today, he is fast becoming the world’s leading—and possibly only—expert in Santa-seeing.
In the two years since Wagner started compiling these sightings, he has received “several hundred” submissions, and he is convinced that most of them are genuine in intent, if not verifiable in fact. His hope is that the stories will make people think a little differently about a holiday dream most of us leave behind in childhood. If nothing else, the frequency of these visions, and the sense of absolute certainty apparent in many of the people who have had them, speaks of the power this figure has over the collective imagination.
‘The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa.’ - Loyd Auerbach, Atlantic University
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Sarah, a 41-year-old Californian who contributed to Wagner’s Xmas Files, had her encounter back in 1975. “I felt exhilarated, bewildered and very special,” she recalls, going on to describe the experience in almost mystical terms: “It was the beautiful golden glow around the man in the big red suit that told me it couldn’t possibly be my father. It was glittery like a parade, but the pieces were not falling to the ground.”
And the intervening years have not diminished Sarah’s sense of wonder. “Seeing Santa changed my outlook forever,” she adds, “to the point that I am comfortable with tattooing ol’ Big Red onto my body. It means that much to me.”
***
Even in the open-minded world that Wagner occupies, these festive visitations are raising eyebrows. While paranormal research doesn’t abide by the same strict rules as, say, nuclear physics, it is not entirely without standards. Proof isn’t particularly important in this world, but possibility is, and researchers perform all manner of conceptual gymnastics to maintain it. For example: Faced with an ongoing and abject failure to find anything remotely monstrous in Loch Ness, some have put forward the idea that Nessie may, in fact, be the ghost of a dinosaur—the key word here being “may.”
Reuters

With Santa, even this standard falls away. Furthermore, these sightings sound a bit silly, which is something else serious researchers get touchy about. “I’ve never even heard of people seeing Santa,” says Loyd Auerbach, who teaches a course on parapsychology at Atlantic University in Virginia. “The Grim Reaper, yes, but not Santa.” Auerbach goes on to make a passable attempt at finding a maybe—“The only possibility of this being real is if it’s an alien or a ghost pretending to be Santa”—before giving up. “I wouldn’t put that kind of sighting in the paranormal category,” he says finally. “We can’t investigate that. There’s nothing we can do with that.”
Wagner, for his part, is adamant that Santa sightings have a legitimate place in paranormal research. “Paranormal is, by definition, something that’s beyond the norm, unknown, unexplained,” he says. “I have postings on my site about apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and I get the same kinds of reactions—‘That’s not paranormal, that’s religion.’ Well, where do you draw the line? Whether these characters are fictional or real, these are experiences that people have had that have not been explained by science.”
***
The one thing that seems beyond doubt in all this is that there are a number of adults out there who believe, in some instances many years after the fact, that they have come into direct personal contact with Father Christmas. “He was in full Santa attire,” recalls 51-year-old Missourian Sandra, whose sighting occurred in the mid-1960s. “He was bent over, then he stood up and took a puff from a pipe.” Not surprisingly, Sandra doesn’t share her story with too many people, but she insists that what she saw was real—maybe. “Who is to say what is real in this life?” she says. “Is our reality really real?”
Rebecca Knibb, a reader in psychology at the UK’s University of Derby who analyzes paranormal experiences, is interested in the same question. People who see ghosts, she says, tend to be those who already believe in them—they unconsciously mold reality to fit their beliefs. As for people who see Santa, Knibb speculates that these, too, are likely to be “fantasy prone” individuals whose imaginations have been colored by the season, and who therefore see a fat guy in a red suit rather than an old lady in Victorian garb walking through a wall.
This Santa-as-ghost-substitute theory provides an interesting spin on the creepier sightings people have reported to Wagner, of which there are quite a few. Time and again, we see the stranger lurking in the shadows, peeking around corners, putting his finger to his lips. “He didn’t look jolly or kind or happy,” writes one person. “He looked kind of eerie.” Another describes Santa’s suit as “more distinct than the red of a drop of blood.”
The most remarkable thing about these stories, however, is how matter-of-fact so many of them are, the meticulousness of the observations. “About seven minutes into my pacing, I saw a tall, fat figure scurry away about 20 feet away from me,” writes one observer. Another describes “a man in a red suit with white beard and white fur around his suit with black boots,” adding, “He was around 5’8” or 5’9”. ” While such clarity isn’t evident in all of these reports—one person recalls seeing “9 little shining splodges in the sky as well as a big splodge at the back of them”— the overall tone is of people giving courtroom testimony.
This makes sense. People with improbable stories often litter them with mundane detail, as if doing so might help root them in reality, and it doesn’t get much more improbable than nine shining splodges in the sky. Reading these accounts, you feel that these are people who are desperate to be taken seriously, and who see Wagner’s site as a chance to present their case.
“I told my mom what happened many years later and she insisted that I was dreaming or that it was my dad,” writes a New Yorker who claims to have seen Santa in 1969. “That wasn’t possible....I’m African American, and during that time the tenants in our building were all African American, so Santa stood out!”
You may not be convinced by this argument, and in the end this may not really matter. For Sandra, the woman who occasionally finds herself wondering if our reality is really real, just knowing that there are other people like her is enough. “It confirms I’m not insane,” she says.
Nine Farm Animals Mysteriously Attacked
in Waddy, Kentucky - By A Dog?


December 13, 2012, The Sentinel-News,
Shelbyville and Shelby County, Kentucky.

Waddy, Kentucky (red marker) is an unincorporated community within
Shelby County 41 miles east of Louisville in north central Kentucky.

December 20, 2012  Waddy, Kentucky - Between the nights of November 28 and December 5, 2012, six goats and three calves were mysteriously attacked on Ditto Road in Waddy, Kentucky, 41 miles east of Louisville. The night of November 28 to 29, two 9-month-old bull calves on the Kevin Cox farm had their faces bloodied and their ears torn. Then on November 30th at 2 pm only about a mile from the Cox farm on Ditto Road, Teresa Parker discovered her five female goats with “their faces ripped off below their eyes, their tongues removed and their ears torn off.” All five goats were in their locked pen attached to a barn. Then on the night of December 3 - 4, the attacker returned to the Kevin Cox farm and attacked his daughter's goat. The ears “were ripped off and part of the face was bleeding.” Then on December 5, at the intersection of Ditto Road and Hickory Ridge Road another calf was attacked and bloodied. The owner requested anonymity.
On Monday evening, December 17, 2012, some hundred Waddy residents attended a meeting organized by the Waddy Magistrate Tony Carriss to talk about the vicious attacks. Some argued the attacker had to be a large dog - perhaps even a hybridized wolf and dog mix. In the past, a couple of hybrids had been produced in the region but later put to death, according to local residents.

Monday evening, December 17, 2012, Waddy Town Meeting
at Waddy Ruritan Club on King's Highway. Some one hundred residents
attended the meeting organized by Waddy Magistrate Tony Cariss to discuss
“the attacks that have left livestock mutilated” between November 28
and December 5, 2012. Imager © 2012 by LEX18.com.
The Sentinel-News in a December 13, 2012, article (see Websites below) quoted Animal Control Director Rusty Newton, who had received several reports from residents describing “an unidentified large, black, hairy shape in the area. ...And one person said they heard an odd sound, a sound they had never heard anything make before, just indescribable.”
After the meeting on December 18, I talked with 50-year-old Teresa Parker about the mutilation of her five female goats that she raised, called “her girls,” and loved them as part of her family with her husband, Dale. The damage to each was so great that she called her veterinarian to “put them down” out of their misery. So those five goats were put to sleep on November 30th. The other three calves and one other goat survived their attacks.

Interview:
Teresa Parker, 50, resident on Ditto Road, Waddy, Kentucky:   “At the December 17th meeting people said since the attacks stopped after December 5th, that leads to the belief that the attacker was someone's dog. But nobody has seen the attacker enough to identify it. There have been reports of a large black hairy thing.
WHO WAS FIRST?
Mr. Cox, he had two bull calves attacked on November 28-29, and then his daughter's goat was attacked on December 3-4.
WHAT DID HE SAY HAD BEEN TAKEN?
The bull calve’s faces were chewed up pretty good and their ears. The goat's ears were ripped off, but the attacker only got part of that goat's face. He had three donkeys in the pen with the goat, so they assume maybe the attacker got scared off by the donkeys. And as of last night (Dec. 17 meeting) his animals had survived.
ALL OF THEM HAD SURVIVED? THE BULL CALVES AND THE GOAT?
Yes. And there was also an attack on December 5th at Hickory Ridge Road less than a mile from Mr. Cox. It was another calf attacked on the face in the same way that Mr. Cox's calves were attacked. I don't know if that calf was destroyed or not, but to my knowledge my girls (5 goats) were the only ones that had to be put down.
SO WE ARE TALKING ABOUT ATTACKS IN ALL FOUR CASES LEFT THE ANIMALS ATTACKED ALIVE?
Yes.

November 30, 2012:  Attack
On Teresa Parker's 5 Goats

200 feet from her house, Teresa Parker's wire pen is attached to barn where
her five female goats she called the “girls” were housed. The only entrance
to pen and barn is the wooden gate that was locked on November 30, 2012,
when all five goats were attacked by something that “tore off” their faces,
ears and tongues. Image © 2012 by Teresa Parker.
I would say between 2 and 3 PM in the afternoon because I had been home approximately an hour and I was packing to go to Alabama. I went upstairs, opened the curtains to look at my girls in their pen about 200 feet from the house.
HOW OLD WERE THEY?
Molly was born on March 6, 2007, she was my first one. In the summertime, I'd yell out the window, ‘Molly!’ and she would ‘baa’ back to me.

Molly, 5-years-old, one of the five female goats that Teresa Parker
called her “girls,” that were attacked on November 30, 2012,
inside their locked pen and barn on Ditto Road, a rural farm
area in Waddy, Kentucky. Image © 2012 by Teresa Parker.
Nana was born shortly thereafter within a couple of months.

Nana, 5-years-old. Image © 2012 by Teresa Parker.
Then I got a set of twins, Katie and Lucy, and they were born probably 6 months after Molly.

Lucy, twin with Katie, near 5-years-old.
Image © 2012 by Teresa Parker.

Katie. Image © 2012 by Teresa Parker.
And Bella was my youngest.

Bella, the youngest goat owned by Teresa Parker
on Ditto Road, Waddy, Kentucky. Image © 2012 by Teresa Parker.
When I looked out the window I noticed Katie was laying closest to the fence. I could see she didn’t look right. Then I could see she was bloody, and I thought that she had broken off a horn because they like to play pretty rough. I know that if a doe breaks a horn off, if it’s deep enough, they will bleed to death.

So I ran downstairs and when I got halfway up the hill to their pen, I noticed all five of them were covered in blood. At that point I started screaming and I called my husband on my cell and told him, ‘You need to get home immediately! Something’s happened to the girls.’
I got to their pen and saw that their faces were just a bloody mess. I mean they were just covered in blood. All of the girls were primarily white, Molly was solid white, and when I say there were covered in blood, they were covered in blood. So I’m screaming and opened the gate and ran over to them. I went to Molly first and her face from her eyes down was basically just gone.

The skin had been ripped off. There was bone and teeth sticking out, her tongue was gone, her ears were gone. Her face was just ripped off. I mean, she still had her eyes. My neighbor heard me screaming and he came driving up our driveway to the fence and said, “Oh, my God, what happened?!” I told him I did not know, but I had to put them down. I didn’t have a choice. They were all just destroyed.
One of Katie’s eyes was even punctured and then from their eyes down to their snoots it was all the same on all five. Their snoots had been ripped off, you could see their teeth, bones, nasal cavities. Their tongues and ears were gone.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THEIR EARS?
Like they had been ripped off, that’s the best description I have.
YOU’RE LOOKING AT JAGGED HIDE WHERE THE EARS HAD BEEN?
HAD been, yeah.
WERE THE ANIMALS TRYING TO MAKE ANY SOUND WHEN THEY SAW YOU?
Yes, they couldn’t. They were kind of a groan. When I got to Molly I took her her horn in my hand and turned her face so that I could look at her and so that she could see me. She just made a kind of  “uhhh” sound. I mean, they couldn’t vocalize. That’s one thing, they were very vocal, they were extremely vocal.

NO SOUND BECAUSE THEIR TONGUES WERE REMOVED?
Yes, and their nasal cavities were exposed.
SO YOU ARE LOOKING AT BONE FROM THE EYES DOWN HOW FAR?
Well, their lips were pulled off, their tongues were ripped off, the sides of their faces were gone. You have hanging flesh in some areas.
DID IT GO DOWN INTO THE NECK?
No ma’am. There was no damage on any of the girls from the ears back. There were no marks on their udders, stomachs, backs, tails, or legs. No marks other than their face from the ears forward.


What Got Into Teresa Parker's Locked Pen
without Leaving Tracks?
HOW WOULD ANYTHING HAVE BEEN ABLE TO GET TO THEM?
We don’t know. I walked the fence, the veterinarian walked the fence, my husband walked the fence, one of our friends from where I used to work with my husband who hunts here walked the fence. There were no marks indicating that anything went under the fence, anywhere. We walked every inch of that fence.
THE ONLY PLACE THAT SOMETHING COULD’VE ENTERED WAS AT THE GATE?
Over the gate, not through the gate because the gate was secure when I went up there Friday to see what was going on.
HOW HIGH WAS THE GATE?
I’m 5' 5" and the gate is chest high.
SO IT’S BETWEEN 4-5 FEET HIGH TO THE TOP OF THE GATE.
Yes.
IF THERE WERE NO TRACKS IN YOUR PEN, DOESN’T THAT ELIMINATE THE PRESENCE OF A DOG?
There should’ve been tracks. The ground was dry, but we looked and could not see any tracks.
WAS THERE ANY SIGNS OF STRUGGLE FROM THE FIVE GOATS?
Well, in the barn there is a blood spatter on one of the walls.


This blood-spattered barn wall attached to locked goat pen where Teresa Parker's
five goats were all viciously attacked on their heads, November 30, 2012, on Ditto Road,
in Waddy, Kentucky. Image © 2012 by Lisa King, Sentinel-News.
FOR YOU TO GET INTO THE BARN YOU WOULD HAVE TO GO THROUGH THAT SAME GATE INTO THE PEN.
Yes.