Disappearing objects: the "borrowers" phenomenon

Something's missing - and then it's returned
I think just about everyone has had this experience. You put something (maybe your keys, or a pair of scissors) the same place you always do. But when you go back for it, it's gone. You search everywhere, tear your home apart, to no avail. Later - maybe minutes or hours, maybe days - the object turns up again, right where you (should have) left it, or in another obvious place.
 
It's easy to dismiss these incidents as being just a mistake, or an error of perception, or something else. "There must have been a sheet of newspaper on top of it," we tell ourselves. Or "I must be getting old." But you have the uncomfortable feeling that this isn't the case, you know you thoroughly searched that area. 
 
What happened?
 
Sometimes called "disappearing object phenomenon" or "the borrowers," this phenomenon has been observed throughout human history. Every human culture has come up with a story to explain it, it's that ubiquitous. Many cultures blame this problem on hidden gremlins or goblins, spirits which range from "harmless pranksters" to "downright malicious."
 
In the contemporary west, this phenomenon is often attributed to poltergeists. And yet, unlike classic poltergeist phenomena, it does not seem to be tied to the presence of a teenage girl. 
 
Have poltergeists been responsible for this phenomenon all along? Or is "poltergeist" simply the framework that we choose to explain it? An easy metaphor, swiped from any number of popular films and books. 
 
In many cultures, the creatures responsible for these disappearances can be appeased with small gifts. If you find a lot of your things going missing, you can set out a dish of wine, or rum, or milk, or whatever your area's creatures are said to like. 
 
In 1952, English children's author Mary Norton published a YA book titled The Borrowers which was later made into a movie. The novel follows the tiny people who live inside the walls of an English home, swiping small objects and later returning them. Norton put a charming spin on this strange phenomenon, by ascribing it to friendly people who are basically just like us, but tiny. 
 
The Borrowers are the protagonists of the book, and the conflict in the stories arises from their interactions with the large, often oblivious, and capricious humans who own the houses, essentially grappling with the way that adults often seem to children. But one has to wonder if that's just so much pleasant fantasy. Who's really calling the shots in this relationship: us, or the creatures who keep taking our stuff?
 

Intuition: What is it, and how can you get more of it?

A skill you can hone
People speak of "intuition" as a mysterious force that no one can quite explain. Although it turns out that if we look closely enough in the right spots, a lot of what we call "intuition" turns out just to be either a very well-educated guess, or an observation that just doesn't quite break the surface of your conscious mind, and instead has to resort to nibbling at your subconscious.
 
Developing your own intuition is one of the best skills you can teach yourself. Even if there is sometimes an unknown component (as often seems to be the case), intuition relies heavily on your powers of observation. 
 
Gavin de Becker's famous book on the subject, The Gift of Fear, breaks down this topic in great detail. It has been years since I read the book, but I still vividly remember how, when he went back and carefully questioned witnesses who had experienced flashes of intuition, it turned out that they had been cued in by something. Usually it was something out of place, like the brief flicker of movement in the corner of the victim's eye. 
 
Intuition is often associated with women, but that's just a relic of gender constructs. Men may feel like they have to come up with rational explanations for all of their behavior, whereas women may be more likely to just brush something off as "women's intuition." The truth is that we all have the same capacity for listening to and developing our intuition.
 
There are a lot of opinions on how you can improve your intuition, particularly since this topic has been co-opted in many respects by the New Age movement. The truth is that your intuition is talking to you all the time; you're probably just tuning it out. (Or it's being drowned in the flood of incoming information that we all have to cope with every day.) 
 
The best thing you can do to improve your intuition is to consciously decide to listen to and heed your own intuition. This can be easier for some people than others, depending on how you relate to your own feelings. Listening to your intuition means paying attention to how you feel about things - about the situation you're in, the person you're talking to, everything down to which line you're in at the grocery store. It also means acting on those feelings, which can be difficult for those of us who sometimes insist on finding rational reasons for our actions. 

Was journalist Michael Hastings murdered by the NSA?

We still don't have any answers
Journalist Michael Hastings was a high-profile figure, and when he died in a fiery car crash last June a lot of people immediately assumed he had been killed to keep him quiet. Personally I thought that it was probably just an everyday tragedy, and that it would soon come to light that he had been drinking, or someone had cut him off, or he had simply made one of the mistakes that millions of drivers make every year that end in death.
 
But it's been nearly two months since Hastings' death, and we don't have any more answers than we did then. In fact, we have even more questions.
 
Last night when Hastings' widow was interviewed on CNN by Piers Morgan, she dismissed conspiracy theories. On the topic of the hot story he had been following, she brushed this aside with the statement that "He always had at least five hot stories going." She mentioned that the LAPD investigation is ongoing, but stated that "my gut here is that it was just a really tragic accident."
 
Tragic, certainly. Accident? Even the LAPD doesn't think so, which is why the investigation has been open for the last six weeks, with few details being released to the public.
 
What we do know is that Hastings, who had not had any alcohol in the last five years, crashed his Mercedes into a tree hard enough to eject the engine, which was found over 100 feet away. Unlike most real-life auto crashes, Hastings' car burst into a fireball upon impact. 
 
Less than 24 hours earlier, he sent out an email to his fellow staff members and a friend. In it, he expressed concern for his own safety based on the story he was pursuing. Hastings, an award-winning journalist who had previously investigated the Benghazi attacks and published the scathing article that forced General Stanley McChrystal to resign, had evidently been investigating the FBI and NSA. 
 
Hastings had frequently spoken out against the "surveillance state" in the past. Many people have speculated that Hastings was working on the PRISM story, although there is also a rumor that he was working on a story about a high-profile Tampa Bay socialite.
 
While the LAPD remains close-mouthed about the Hastings investigation, surveillance video has surfaced which seems to show the vehicle catching fire before it crashed. And a group of "digital carjackers" have come forward to explain how Hastings' vehicle could have been hacked and remote controlled to drive into a tree at high speed. 
 
Frankly, if we don't have the answers by now, I suspect we may never get them. Regardless of the cause, the world has lost a valuable talent in Michael Hastings.

Seller of "bomb dowsers" found guilty of fraud

Surprise: empty box does not detect explosives
Dowsing is an interesting phenomenon. I have seen a water dowser at work, and it really was impressive. It was a grizzled old man, something of a local legend, who had been dowsing for decades. A neighbor hired him to find a place where they could drill for a new well, because their old well had gone dry. The old man located the spot, they drilled, and presto: water. 
 
If water dowsing works - and it does often seem to be a real thing - it most likely is a combination of luck and an experienced eye that can read the landscape and plant life and take a well-educated guess. Whether this happens on a conscious level or a subconscious level, with the dowser's subconscious manipulating the dowsing rod (which is extremely sensitive to tiny hand movements).
 
But bomb dowsing detectors being sold to the military for tens of thousands of dollars… that's just criminal. Literally, according to the British military, which recently prosecuted a man for selling them empty plastic boxes which he marketed as bomb detectors. The GT200 was sold as a "remote substance detector," and sold for up to $32,000 per unit. 
 
(Actually, these bomb detectors were not entirely empty. One of them contained a strip of paper, onto which dead ants had been glued. So there you have it. Maybe the ants were supposed to be the magic part?)
 
Gary Bolton is only the latest of the bomb detector fraudsters. Last May, another British man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for having sold over 7,000 fraudulent bomb detectors.
 
Bolton claimed that his detectors could be set to detect drugs, bombs, ivory, cash, and tobacco, and that they worked through lead linings, and within a range of 766 yards at ground level and 2.5 miles in the air. Magic boxes, indeed. 
 
One British government office found that the bomb detectors had no working parts. The University of Cambridge conducted strict double-blind tests in which the detectors performed worse than random chance, detecting explosives only two out of 24 times.
 
Despite these magic bomb detectors being patently ridiculous, militaries around the world continue to buy them in droves. It's hard to say if these militaries are extremely gullible, just desperate for solutions, or if they believe that word of these magic detectors will make terrorists so nervous that they will betray their intentions (or serve as a deterrent). 

Cattle mutilations

Truly deserving of the title "freaky phenomena"
Out of all the freaky phenomena in the world, one of the most puzzling is the topic of cattle mutilations. And even though many cases and symptoms of cattle mutilations have been debunked over the years, there continue to be cases that simply do not fit the standard pattern. When it comes to cattle mutilations, there are definitely far more questions than answers.
 
What differentiates a case of cattle mutilation from a plain old dead cow? First, organs may have been removed with seemingly surgical precision (not the slashing wounds you would expect from an animal attack). Sometimes it appears that the wounds were made by lasers, complete with scorched and cauterized flesh around the edges of the cuts. Frequently, there is no blood at the scene, as though the animal had been killed and bled elsewhere before its body was dumped. There is never any sign of a struggle, nor tracks from a predator that might have done the deed. To all appearances, the animal was abducted, killed, had bits removed, then dumped back on the original landowner's property.
 
For example, many of the mutilated corpses have evidently been dropped from a great height, as demonstrated by broken bones on the bottom of the corpse. In other cases - as was the situation with a recent report - broken tree branches directly above the corpse, as though the cow's body had been dropped through the tree from above.
 
Although your first thought might be to UFOs and tractor beams, most sightings of airborne craft in conjunction with cattle mutilations involve the seemingly ubiquitous black helicopters. Are these just aliens in disguise? (After all, it's somewhat less conspicuous to pilot a black helicopter around than a UFO.) Or could it be either our own government or a shadow government conducting these bizarre killings? Or are the black helicopters "the good guys" who are flying around doing their own investigation on the abductions and mutilations? We have no way of knowing, but it seems that black helicopters and cattle mutilations go together like peanut butter and jelly.
 
The question remains, who would want parts of our cattle? And why? And if they wanted them so badly, why go to all the trouble to abduct and carve up cattle? Why not just buy the parts you need from any slaughterhouse or butcher shop in the country? Many sources have pointed the blame on the U.S. Government, but surely it would be cheaper for the Feds to just raise or buy their own cattle than to fly around stealing random cattle from the landscape. 
 
Definitely a lot of weirdness going on out there!

How did a psychic find the body of Terry Smith?

Was it her psychic abilities, or just dumb luck?
Last week, an 11 year-old boy went missing in the semi-rural southern California town of Menifee. The authorities led a massive search for four days before finally calling it off. Then an Orange County psychic stepped in, claiming to have had visions of the missing boy's location. Based on her vision, she searched the family's back yard and discovered the body, which had been partially buried just feet from the family's home.
 
How legit is this story, really? Cops will tell you, any time someone goes missing, the psychics crawl out of the woodwork with thousands of unhelpful clues that waste departmental time and resources. These psychics are never right…  until this time, it seems.
 
Pam Ragland describes herself as "an intuitive," in addition to experiencing visions. She runs a business helping clients grapple with addiction and other problems, using a technique that she calls "Quantum Thought Shifting." On the third day of the search for Terry Smith, as Ragland watched a news report about the fruitless search, she had a vision of Terry lying beneath a tree. A dirt road and a distinctive building were also in her vision.
 
Ragland drove out to the Smith home, where she found the distinctive building in the back lot next door: a storage shed behind a neighboring convenience store. With the help of a firefighter, she convinced the Smith family to give her access to their back yard. There, she and her children (who had come along to help) found the body of Terry Smith, who had been killed and partially buried beneath a tree in their back yard.
 
Despite how accurate it sounds like Ragland's visions were, apparently it was not actually that difficult to find Smith's body. Once she gained access to the family's back yard, Ragland smelled "something dead." Then her children spotted the top of Smith's head, which was poking up out of the ground. By the sounds of it, Smith's body had barely been buried at all. 
 
The real surprise in this story is that no one else found him first. How could you coordinate a multi-day search effort and never notice the bad smell or the exposed head in the family's back yard? Did no one think to check back there? No one noticed that the soil had been disturbed? 
 
Smith's 16 year-old half-brother has been arrested on suspicion of the murder. The half-brother has apparently acted violently in the past, and had an argument with the 11 year-old Smith on the night he went missing. This is one sad story all around.

Did Snowden reveal UFO secrets?

Um... I'm thinking not.
Over the weekend a report began circulating that Edward Snowden had accepted an offer of asylum in Venezuela, and upon acceptance had released a long report about what the American government knows about UFOs. I think Ghost Theory is right to be skeptical about this report; every other UFO-related news outlet seems to be taking it seriously. But it's just a little too much, if you ask me.
 
I was prepared to believe that Snowden would have read reports about UFO activity in general. Maybe some photographs or eyewitness accounts. Sure. 
 
Instead, what we have is a lengthy and complicated treatise about aliens who live inside the Earth's mantle. Inside the planet's molten core, the aliens have as little concern for us as we do for ants, although they get annoyed when we try to scan them or drill too deep into their territory, and they retaliate by sending us earthquakes and tsunamis. 
 
Furthermore, it is well known (according to this fantastical "report") that the aliens periodically shoot out from deep sea hydrothermal vents and rocket into outer space. If civilians or scientists have never observed this happening, it's because we schlubs don't have access to the government's ballistic missile tracking system or deep sea sonar networks, both of which have been used to track the aliens' comings and goings.
 
According to this report, we have little to no defense against these inner-Earth aliens. The worst we could do would be to detonate nuclear weapons in deep caverns to "sting" the aliens. Cold comfort indeed, given that they could apparently wipe us off the surface of the planet in a trifle, if they wanted to.
 
This is what I find most striking about this purported Snowden UFO report: the drumbeat of fear. Everything about the aliens in this story is terrifying, and the only thing the government can do about it is hide us from the fear. It's an undeniably compelling narrative, even though I don't believe it for a second. Particularly once we get to the punchline, which is that the aliens live in cities that are "laser-etched of pure diamond."
 
As for the idea that aliens live in the center of the Earth, the so-called "Hollow Earth Hypothesis" holds that the Earth is hollow, and inside is a sun in the center, with alien civilizations living along the inside of the Earth's crust. This theory has been kicking around for centuries, and was most recently championed by the Thule Society (which counted Adolph Hitler among its many fans).
 

Tunguska mystery: Solved

What caused the incredible destruction in this remote Russian wilderness?
The Tunguska event has been a mystery for over a hundred years. On June 30, 1908, an explosion occurred over the Tunguska river in Russia. The mysterious event, which went largely unrecorded at the time, knocked over about 80 million trees in an area the size of a large city. 
 
Eyewitnesses nearby reported seeing a huge, bright blue light streaking through the sky, followed by a colossal flash followed by an explosion that knocked people off their feet and blew out windows for miles around. 
 
Theories regarding the Tunguska event have been numerous over the years. The most common theory, and the one which was largely held by the scientific committee, was that it represented an airburst of a small meteorite. This unusual impact was difficult to prove, as the theorized meteorite did not hit the ground and leave a tell-tale crater like most other such strikes. 
 
Other theories have been floated, including the explosion of a chunk of antimatter, the natural venting of a pocket of gas from inside the Earth's crust, and the existence of a microscopic black hole (my personal favorite). 
 
However, researchers have been painstakingly combing over the soil and remaining tree debris in Russia, and they have finally discovered conclusive proof that a meteorite was the culprit. Fragments of minerals that could only have come from a meteorite have been found in the Tunguska blast zone, recovered from a nearby peat bog. 
 
Of course, the Tunguska event occurred long before the day of the dashboard cams. Nowadays, these rogue meteorites are often caught on film for the entire internet to watch in horror. Earlier this year, a smaller air burst occurred over Russia. This one was caught on several cameras, and injured 1,200 people in the Russian town of Chelyabinsk. Most of the injuries were inflicted by fallen glass, as the meteorite blew out windows with its passing shock wave.
 
In recent years our improved atmospheric monitoring has shown that events like these are actually somewhat commonplace. A medium-sized event (like the one that happened this February in Chelyabinsk) occurs about once a year. A large-size event (like the megaton blast at Tunguska) happens about once every 300 years.
 
As the Earth becomes more populated, it becomes more and more likely that an event like this will occur over a populated area. If a Tunguska event were to happen over, say, New York City, the entire area would be instantly destroyed. Just one more reason we need to get crackin' on that planetary laser shielding project!

Sheep-eating plant blooms in UK greenhouse

Puya chilensis has an interesting strategy for getting the nutrients it needs
For fifteen years a plant named Puya chilensis has been growing in the greenhouse of the Royal Horticultural Society's Garden Wisley. And finally this year the plant has bloomed, sending up a mace-like spire of spiky, forbidding flowers to match the rosette of sharp, hook-shaped spines that grow at the plant's base. This lovely little Chilean plant is now ready to eat some sheep, and look florally fabulous as it does so.
 
Puya chilensis is a bromeliad, a distant relative of the pineapple (among many other plants). This plant is native to the arid highlands of Chile, where the soil is thin and nutrients are scarce. These sparse desert regions would be a tough place for most large plants to find enough nutrients to support their growth. But the Puya chilensis is a large plant indeed: it commonly grows up to six feet tall.
 
How does the spiky Puya chilensis accomplish this feat?
 
By trapping and digesting sheep and birds.
 
The many hooks and sharp thorns at the base of the plant snag the wool of passing sheep, and can also entrap birds. The trapped animals eventually die of starvation or thirst. After which point, their corpses slowly decay into the ground, providing nutrients which the Puya chilensis eagerly consumes.
 
Luckily, there is no need to feed sheep to the Royal Horticultural Society's Puya chilensis. In captivity the plant thrives on a base of liquid fertilizer.
 
Of course, the Puya chilensis is hardly the world's only dangerous plant. If you're talking poison, the white oleander and the water hemlock are some of the most toxic plants in the world, and they are common in North America. 
 
The oleander is pretty and is commonly grown as a cultivated garden plant, but can cause cardiac arrest within seconds of ingesting its flowers or leaves. The hemlock grows wild in marshy disturbed areas, and every part of the plant is just as toxic today as it was in Socrates' time. It's so toxic that gardeners trying to dispose of it are advised to wear thick gloves, full-body clothing that leaves no skin gaps, and to dispose of the plant in the garbage, not in the yard waste or compost.
 
This strange plant is definitely one for the record books. I think someone should try to figure out how to breed it with a Titan arum. Then it can smell like death and devour dead sheep, thus becoming the world's scariest plant!
 

Ghost hunters shot at by angry neighbor

Lucky for them, it was just a BB gun
Ghost hunting can be a dangerous pastime. Just ask the group of ghost hunters who went out to investigate a remote rural tunnel last week. Even though the tunnel was on public property, a woman living on land adjacent to the tunnel took offense when the car full of investigators pulled up in the middle of the night. A 28 year-old woman named Brandi Lea Avery allegedly told the investigators to leave the area. When they did not comply, she fired on them with a BB gun.
 
Avery was arrested the next morning and charged with five counts of aggravated assault, then released on $10,000 bail. At the time of her arrest, she told the arresting officer that she was tired of being disturbed by paranormal investigators tramping around in the middle of the night to examine the tunnel.
 
This incident highlights the need of paranormal investigators to ensure that they have all the proper clearances, and that their presence is tolerated, even welcomed by anyone whose property they impact. Even though Avery was clearly in the wrong for shooting at the investigators with a BB gun, one imagines that she had been driven to the end of her rope by middle-of-the-night gatherings of investigators who doubtless had no idea (or didn't care) that there were neighbors trying to sleep nearby.
 
In fact, paranormal investigators can be a real problem for "attractive" properties. Notorious paranormal hotspots like Western State Asylum have to post extra guards to keep away investigators who would otherwise run rampant over the grounds in the middle of the night. Most true investigators are respectful, but others are just thrill seekers who may be bent on removing property as a "souvenir," leave their garbage lying around, and even spray paint graffiti as part of their adventure.
 
The Sensabaugh Hollow Road Tunnel in Tennessee is a popular location of paranormal activity, from phantom trains to a mysterious crying baby. One story locals tell is that the tunnel was named after an area man who went on a killing spree one night and murdered every member of his family, ending with the slaughter of an infant inside the tunnel. The infant's cries supposedly still echo there.
 
Another rumor holds that a pregnant girl was murdered in the tunnel. Legend has it that if you park your car there in the middle of the night, it will be surrounded by light and the pounding of her fists as she tries to get into your car, along with the cries of her unborn infant.
 

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