George Michael wakes from coma with odd accent

Last December, famed pop star George Michael fell desperately sick with pneumonia. He ignored the symptoms for too long, and pushed himself too hard, and ended up in the hospital for five weeks - with fully three weeks spent in a coma. Michael and his medical team were fighting for his life, and he is very lucky to be alive. 

But strangely, when Michael awoke from his coma, his English accent had changed.

George Michael is from north London, and his normal accent reflects that. Here is a classic interview from 1987, which shows Michael's accent (as well as his fabulous 80s style!) to excellent effect.

However, he awoke from his coma speaking a West Country accent. The West Country accent is a dialect of the southwest corner of England, centered around the Bristol area. Among the English, the West Country accent is often considered rough or harsh, and is frequently associated with bumpkins and farm life. (The American equivalent would be a Southern accent.)
 
Three examples of a West Country accent which may be familiar to Americans are Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, and Samwise and Meriadoc from the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Here are two Youtube videos from native West Country accent speakers: one male, one female. (Notice how the woman apologizes for her accent being "too boyish.")
 
Doctors were understandably concerned that Michael may have suffered brain damage. People have lost their accents, or gained new ones, after brain damage: this condition is known as "Foreign Accent Syndrome," and is considered a permanent or semi-permanent speech impediment.
 
Sixty cases of Foreign Accent Syndrome have been reported since the syndrome was identified in 1941. Although the patient may start speaking in a foreign accent, they do not actually start speaking in a foreign language, as some people incorrectly believe. Instead, an American may start speaking English with a German accent, or a French person may start speaking French with a Russian accent.
 
Foreign Accent Syndrome seems to be a function of damage to the brain center that controls how you form your speech. It can be a change in the pitch, tone, rhythm, or vowel sounds, the combination of which sounds foreign in a specific way. For example, if someone who speaks standard American English loses the ability to pronounce the "r" at the ends of words, it may sound to listeners as though they are suddenly speaking with a Boston accent.
 
Luckily, George Michael's accent woes only lasted for two days, and he has suffered no long-term brain damage. 

Canadian police called in for alien sighting

Last Monday, July 16, police in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia were called in to a report of "a man and a woman screaming from their apartment on Wilson Avenue." The police soon determined that the couple were screaming because they had seen two "non-human entities" on their patio. I would scream, too!

The RCMP determined that neither drugs nor alcohol were involved. This surprised me because I assumed that it had just been a pair of crackheads freaking out at a plastic bag being blown past the window or something. But although many parts of Canada are impoverished rural communities which are suffering from the meth crisis just as here in America, Port Coquitlam is a nice little town. And if real estate listings and Google Street View are anything to go by, Wilson Avenue is a pretty nice area. Which isn't to say that people in nice neighborhoods don't do drugs, but still!

Police responded to the call on the assumption that it was actually a human entity, and that it was an attempted break-in. They scoured the area but found no other evidence. I have not found any accounts by the couple themselves. Remember, they are not the ones who called the police; it was their neighbors who heard screams and phoned the Mounties. Perhaps they are laboring under the same shame and fear that other UFO witnesses experience. Understandable, but sad.
 
The Northwest has experienced a lot of strange weather phenomena in recent days, and there is some speculation as to whether this could be related. Extensive thunderstorms - unusual for this part of the world - have blanketed the area, causing lightning strikes and other strange occurrences. Ball lightning (also known as St. Elmo's Fire) is known to be seen in conjunction with thunderstorms, even miles away from their source. 
 
Or could aliens be controlling the weather? There have often been correlations between alien and UFO sightings and strange electrical and weather disturbances.
 
Of course, the internet has certainly jumped to conclusions by labeling this as aliens. The couple only reported seeing "non-human entities." This could be the description of angels, demons, ghosts, or heck, two cats. (Really scary cats, I guess.) Without having any more information from the couple involved, we really should not assume it was aliens.
 
As charming as it would be to picture a brigade of Mounties facing off against Little Green Men.

Ex-CIA agent says Roswell was real

The Roswell incident is one of the most famous occurrences in UFO history. In many ways it marks the beginning of modern UFOlogy culture, particularly in the United States. Roswell is an incident which has literally gone down in the history books, and it remains as famous today - 65 years after the original incident - as it was at the time.

This hotly debated incident has also been proven, disproven, and argued about endlessly both within the UFO investigation community and without. And now an ex-CIA agent is throwing his hat into the ring, claiming that he has seen proof that Roswell really was the crash of an alien space craft.

On June 14, 1947, a New Mexico rancher named Mac Brazel spotted some metal debris in one of his fields. Later, he and his family returned to gather up the strange material, which included flexible sticks, rubber, strange fabric, and something like tinfoil. 
 
On July 8, 1947, a military officer near Roswell, New Mexico published a press release stating that military personnel had retrieved the remains of a "flying disk" from a crash site nearby. The next day, the military issued another press release (complete with photo opportunity) that the flying debris was from a weather balloon. (In other words: nothing to see here, move along!)
 
Since then, the tale has expanded to include the recovery of dead or possibly still living aliens, small grey figures who may or may not have been taken to Area 51, where they may or may not still be alive and providing the United States Military with secret alien technology over the years. 
 
Now, a man named Chase Brandon, recently retired from a 35-year career with the CIA, claims to have seen proof. According to Brandon, in the mid-1990s he entered a special area of the CIA's headquarters in Langley, VA "called the Historical Intelligence Collection."
 
There, he browsed through the CIA's secret archives until he spotted a box marked simply "Roswell." Although Brandon isn't telling what he saw in the box, he says that the contents of the box convinced him irrefutably that the Roswell incident involved an alien craft. "My god, it really happened!" Brandon says.
 
Apparently the box contained "some written material and some photographs," but beyond that, Brandon refuses to specify. "I'm telling you there was a box that had stuff in there having to do with Roswell, and I looked through it, and it validated everything I believed in, and that's all I have to say about it."

Massive solar flare headed toward Earth

Are we all gonna die? Probably not, but you would never know it from the hysteria that accompanies these reports of coronal mass ejections that the sun periodically throws our way. The latest X-Class solar flare was ejected from the sun on Thursday morning, and may hit the Earth over the weekend. (Although it is difficult to tell at this point - it could just as easily miss us entirely.)

This solar flare is apparently pretty significantly large, even as solar flares go. The "wind" of charged particles from a solar flare travels at between 1 million and 5 million miles an hour, which means it will reach Earth in 3-5 days from the event. Sources are noting that it could cause Aurora Borealis to appear over the northern United States over this weekend. As an Alaskan I can attest to the fact that seeing the Aurora in the middle of summer is a pretty strange thought!

The Aurora is caused when charged particles from the sun shoot through the Earth's magnetic field. They burst into sheets of color, depending on what type of particle it is. This visible display of the solar wind is truly breath-taking, and I hope that this weekend a lot of people will be able to see it who ordinarily wouldn't. It is one of the most incredible sights on Earth, and something that everyone should see at least once in their lifetime.
 
The sun is entering a very active phase of solar activity. A lot of people naturally have connected this to the supposed Mayan 2012 prophecy of the end times and what-not. I have long held that it's a mistake to believe that the end of the Mayan calendar does not equate to a prediction of the end of the world. Every year I buy a calendar, and every year the calendar ends, and you know what? All it means is that it's time to buy another calendar!
 
A significant solar flare has the potential to disrupt a lot of electronics on Earth, of course. Our power grids have been hardened since the famous massive blackout that hit Quebec in 1989 as a result of a solar flare. And while this current solar flare is big, thankfully it doesn't seem to be "Carrington Event" big. This famous event occurred in 1859, when the largest known solar flare caused telegraph systems to fail, and telegraph pylons to throw sparks, even causing fires in some locations.

Was Arafat poisoned with polonium-210?

In 2004 the Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat, who had been confined by Israel to his walled compound, suddenly became violently ill. He died soon after, of a massive stroke complicated by "inflammation, jaundice, and a blood condition known as disseminated intravascular coagulation, or DIC." 

Arafat had long been considered a road block to peace in the middle East. And many Israeli citizens blamed Arafat for killing countless Israelis during the long-running conflict between Israel and Palestine. Arafat's death was considered suspicious at the time, but no evidence of poison was found, and so Arafat's body was interred in a tomb.

But recently, Arafat's widow - who has contended all along that Arafat was assassinated - was able to get some of his belongings tested for polonium-210. Lo and behold, a Swiss nuclear research facility was able to confirm the presence of this lethal radioactive element. 
 
The next step is to test Arafat's body itself. Experts caution that this may not be fool-proof, as polonium-210 breaks down significantly after eight years. In fact, some people are suspicious about the fact that Arafat's belongings held onto enough polonium-210 to test positive after all this time.
 
Polonium-210 is probably best known from the world of spycraft as the element which killed former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. Litvinenko was a KGB officer who was arrested by the Russian authorities after he publicly accused the KGB of ordering the assassination of a prominent Russian politician. After his arrest, he obtained asylum in London where he became a freelance writer and consultant for MI5 and MI6.
 
Tests confirmed that Litvinenko was poisoned by polonium-210 which had been slipped into his tea. This was the first recorded case of polonium-210 poisoning, but many security experts suspect it was neither the first nor the last. 
 
In many ways, polonium-210 is ideal for this purpose. Unlike most other radioactive elements, it does not emit gamma radiation, which means that it will not set off most radiation detectors. Polonium-210 emits only alpha particles, which are so weak that they can be blocked by a sheet of paper, or human skin. This means that the element can safely be carried by a would-be assassin, without risking the assassin's own health.
 
Once in the body, however, the alpha particles wreak havoc. They penetrate soft tissue easily, destroying organs just like "normal" radiation poisoning - but from within the body. 

Lost in the woods under strange circumstances

Hundreds of people go missing every year. But retired police officer David Paulides claims to have located "clusters" of missing people incidents which follow the same strange formula. Odder still, these clusters are found in North America's mountain forests, including state and national parks.

Many of the incidents involve children or the mentally handicapped. Frequently they shed their clothes, which are often found all in a puddle together, as if the person had literally melted right out of them. The people are never found, or are found a remarkable distance from their starting location, with little or no memory of how they got there. Children who have moved across miles of wilderness, climbed mountain ranges or crossed fast-moving streams, for example. 
 
And park officials aren't telling. 

Despite numerous requests under the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), officials at both state and national parks have remained silent about both the number of people who have gone missing in their parks, and their final disposition. However, Paulides claims that he was alerted to this situation by a government employee who came to him in confidence and "told one heck of a story about people who vanish in national parks, places like Yosemite." 

The logical explanation here is simply a lost child who is stricken by hypothermia. Disorientation and a quixotic feeling of overheating (which often leads to shedding clothes) are both classic signs of hypothermia, of course. Children are more susceptible to hypothermia, being both smaller than adults and less able to understand what is happening and what to do about it. 
 
People often travel to national parks in summer, when lowland temperatures are high, and arrive at high altitude dressed for the summer heat only to find that the mountains are significantly cooler. (Which is why they went there in the first place.) If a child dressed in hot weather clothing wanders away from her family in the unseasonably cool mountain wilderness, she can easily become a victim of hypothermia. Children are also more inclined to panic and start running, not realizing that they are running away from their starting point. 
 
Nevertheless, Paulides has compiled a list of 400 people "who went into national parks but never came out." That is a startling number, and a sobering one. Can simple hypothermia account for all of them? Or could something more be happening in our parks, something more sinister or dare I say it, UFO-logical?
 
(Probably not. But at the very least it serves as a good reminder for this summer traveling season to dress appropriately for your location, keep a close eye on your kids when you're in the woods, and teach your kids what to do if they get lost: stay put and keep warm!)

What is Monarch Mind Control? (And are they controlling you right now?)

One of the more fascinating - if dubious - conspiracy theories out there revolves around Monarch Mind Control. This is a "puppetmaster" technique which is said to have been used by the Nazi party, and adopted by the U.S. Military under project MK-ULTRA.

I have to stop right here and say: it is straight up wish fulfillment to believe that the Nazis used mind control to propagate their beliefs and commit their crimes against humanity. The dismal truth is that in Nazi Germany, people did terrible things to other people of their own free will.
 
But I would say that, wouldn't I? Because one of the primary goals of Monarch Mind Control is to program the American population to believe that there is no Monarch Mind Control. 

They do this (so it is said) via the American entertainment industry. Here's how it works: little girls are indoctrinated through the Princess Myth to believe that they should lie back passively and wait for their prince to show up and save them. When they hit puberty, their prince shows up to claim his passive prize. 

Except it's not a prince, it's the Monarch entertainment machine. It snaps up these passive, willing victims (like Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and every pop starlet ever). It assigns them a handler, feeds them drugs to keep them compliant, and whores them out on stage to make billions of dollars. And when they get too old or sick to perform, it casts them away and starts over with a new fresh face.
 
As a feminist, I have a slightly different perspective on the princess myth. I believe that it's programming women to be passive, but that it's the patriarchal culture at large which is responsible for this, and which benefits from women's continued passivity. 
 
And here you can see the heart of the problem: all of these observed phenomena are easily open to interpretation by any lens you care to hold up. If music videos often feature imagery of pop stars reflected in mirrors, is that a symbol of Monarch Mind Control, or is it a half-baked take on some vaguely philosophic-sounding stuff like "the duality of human nature?" Or is it just because pop stars like to look at themselves in mirrors?
 
In the end, I think the ultimate critique of this theory is that it is utterly unnecessary. If reality television has taught us anything, it's that any American - male or female - will gladly throw away their lives in exchange for televised fame. Why construct an elaborate mind control system when your victims offer themselves up so willingly in the first place?
 

Stonehenge mystery solved?

Stonehenge is one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries, and one of its most fascinating sites. This collection of colossal stacked stones is a testimony to the human spirit: whatever they meant Stonehenge to be, the creators of it must have really wanted it, to go to all that trouble.

One of the most popular theories has long been the idea that Stonehenge is a kind of astronomical clock or calendar. This is partly due to the site's location, in an area which nicely silhouettes both the sunrise of midsummer and the sunset of midwinter. But a new team of researchers says that this was not meant as a literal tool of the seasons, but as an artistic paean to the unification of Stone Age Great Britain.
 
Five British universities contributed a crack team of archaeologists to solve the mystery of Stonehenge. After thousands of hours of research, putting the monument in its historical context, the team has decided that Stonehenge was meant as a monument to unite the various peoples of England. A symbol, in other words, of the cultural unity which Stonehenge's creation was to mark.

 
Stone Age Great Britain was a complicated and contentious place. It was covered with tribes that spoke their own languages, kept their own custom, and fought bitterly with one another. These battles not only caused bloodshed, they also prevented the people from moving forward. Stonehenge marks the beginning of the development of "island-wide culture," which improved the lives of everyone by reducing wars, forging trade routes, and sharing skills and information. 
 
Stonehenge would have been an astoundingly difficult project, requiring thousands of people to work together in order to complete it. The researchers' theory is that the construction of the monument itself was emblematic of the era the creators wished to bring into being. And of course, it would stand as a visible evidence of that collaboration for centuries to come. 
 
According to this theory, Stonehenge was difficult to build because it had to be difficult to build, otherwise what would be the point? Its creation required elements from all across the island, including manpower, skills, and raw materials. 
 
A commenter on this story at The Week dubs Stonehenge "a Paleolithic EPCOT center," which is as succinct as it is hilarious. I'm not sure if I believe this latest theory or not, to tell you the truth. But I like the idea of considering Stonehenge to be a work of art, rather than the literal-minded, "what does this thing do" kind of analysis that usually typifies Stonehenge theories.

Walking the Moai

Researchers have successfully tested a method for moving one of these huge statues

The Moai, those iconic giant stone human figures of Easter Island, have long been a rich source of mystery and theories. One of the many mysteries is how the heck they got to their final locations, given their size, heft, and distance from the quarries where they were cut. 

 
Two researchers, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo, came up with a theory. They tested it to surprising effect: their teams of assistants were able to successfully "walk" a replica along a path. The replica was ten feet tall and weighed five tons, and required three teams of about ten people each.
 
The process was not too dissimilar from when you "walk" a dresser or bookshelf that is too heavy to carry or drag. The key is to shift the weight from one side to the other, without letting it tip over, and to pivot the item slightly with each shift. This method takes advantage of some basic principles of physics, particularly leverage.

 
The original moai are considerably larger and heavier, but the principle is presumably the same. You would simply need more people on each team. Original moai were up to 30 feet tall, with the heaviest weighing in at an estimated 86 tons.
 
Most people are familiar with the moai heads, but the statues had bodies as well. Most of those bodies were buried inside deep holes, so that only the heads were visible above the soil line. Their eye sockets, most of which stare out empty now, were originally designed to hold eyes made of white coral with pupils of black obsidian. When the eyes are restored to the moai, the effect is even more unsettling than before.
 
The moai serve as the "living faces of deified ancestors." They were considered more than just a headstone or ceremonial marker, but an actual living object imbued with the spirit of the ancestor which that particular statue represented. This made them powerful objects, which is why so many of them were toppled by rival clans during the transitional era after the Europeans made contact with Easter Island.
 
There still remain many mysteries regarding the moai. Even if these researchers have been able to prove the way in which they were transported, we still don't know how their hats were placed. Many moai have large cylindrical hats or topknots placed atop their head, made from a carved reddish volcanic stone. We have evidence that they were rolled to their sites from their quarries, but how they were lifted up to be placed atop the statues' heads remains a mystery. 
 

Fascinating new data in Baltic UFO case

New dive team uncovers more questions than answers

The so-called "Baltic UFO" originally began last February as an unusual sonar image from the floor of the Baltic Sea. The large object was found by a deep-sea salvage company, and the images they released looked uncannily like the Millennium Falcon.
This expedition has returned to the Baltic Sea with a dive team, and so far everything they have found only deepens the mystery further. The dive teams first reported that the shape is not a flat disc, as it appears on the initial image. Instead, it is more of a mushroom shape with an egg-shaped hole in the center. It is about 10-15 feet high, and about 200 feet in diameter. 

Weirder still, the egg-shaped hole appears to be charred in the center. And the object seemed to be covered with "strange circular rock formations that looked like small fireplaces," which also appear to be charred with soot.
 
The team also found a trail in the sea bed, which leads up to the object. The trail is about 900 feet long, and speculation so far includes the theory that it is the crash path, a drag tail, or even a runway. 
 
Some people feel that this is a crashed UFO which has been lying at the bottom of the ocean waiting for us to find it. However, it is perhaps more plausible that this is just an example of glacier action at work. 
 
During the Ice Age, as glaciers spread out across the land, they pushed large rocks in their path before them. These rocks all accumulated at the front of the glacier as it moved forward like an excruciatingly slow bulldozer. When the glacier stopped and began to retreat, these piles of odd rocks are left all jumbled up together.
 
Collectively, this gathered material is called "glacial drift." Where glaciers have moved large rocks, these are termed "glacial erratics." Although a glacial erratic can be anything from a pebble up, larger rocks are typically given the name. Also called "dropstones," these large rocks and boulders can provide geologists with valuable information about prehistoric glacial movement. 
 
Large glacial erratics often become locally famous. The Wedgwood Rock in Seattle is a glacial erratic which was pushed all the way to Seattle from Mount Erie near Anacortes 14,000 years ago by the Vashon Glacier. 
 
The track in the sea bed leading up to the mushroom-shaped "UFO" is excellent evidence that the Baltic UFO may turn out to be a glacial erratic.

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