Puckwudgies

Goblins of Southern New England

 

If you've never heard of puckwudgies, you probably don't live in southern New England. Many cultures all over the world have fairy and goblin legends of their own, and the Native peoples of southern New England are no exception. Puckwudgies are goblin-like creatures that are supposed to haunt the Freetown-Fall River State Forest as well as other forests and swamps in the region. They are described most often as little men with gray skin, although they are also said to take other shapes sometimes such as that of a porcupine-like creature.

Similarly to other types of goblins from around the world, puckwudgies are supposed to be both mischievous and dangerous. They can shoot at people with stone arrowheads (just like the Scottish fairies known as the Host) and they can control the will o the wisps or swamp lights, leading travelers off the path. The similarity between puckwudgie legends and Scottish fairy lore is quite striking, but there doesn't appear to have been any influence as such between the two- the two traditions developed independently.

 

People still claim to spot puckwudgies from time to time in the Freetown state forest, and they are also supposed to inhabit a nearby island. The legend of the puckwudgies is just one of the many legends associated with that area of Massachusetts, the region known as the Bridgewater Triangle. The Triangle is one of the most active “window areas” or paranormal hot spots in the United States, featuring every strange phenomenon you can think of from Satanic cults to UFOs.

 

 

Emails from beyond the grave?

"It seems that Froese might have been displeased by his untimely death, as well."

Everyone who has lost a family member hopes for some sign from the dearly deceased that they’ve made it elsewhere, that they’re in a better place. Most of the time, we’ll find signs in random or mundane occurrences just because we some sort of guidance so acutely. But for the friends and family members who knew Jack Froese, no searching for signs was necessary. They got concrete emails instead.

Jack Froese was a young man of 32 when he died unexpectedly of a heart arrhythmia in June 2011. Froese’s friends and family in Dunnmore, Pennsylvania were shocked at his unexpected passing.

 

It seems that Froese might have been displeased by his untimely death, as well. If you believe in ghosts sticking around to complete unfinished business, what happened next will send tingles up your spine: his best friends started receiving emails from Froese’s account in November, six months after his death.

 

The strangest part about the emails was their specific nature. Froese’s friends say that they included information about things about which only Froese could have known.

 

His good friend Tim Hart received an email with a subject of “I’m watching.” The content of the email spoke about a subject that Hart believes only the two men knew about—before his death, Froese had teased Hart about not cleaning his attic. The email body said “Did you hear me? I’m at your house. Clean your f---ing attic!!!” Hart said he turned white when he read the message. He later wrote a response to the email, but has not heard anything back.

 

Froese’s cousin, Jimmy McGraw, also received an email from Froese’s account, telling him to avoid an ankle injury that did happen long after Froese’s death. McGraw doesn’t necessarily that believe that his cousin was communicating with him from beyond the grave, but he does seem to hold out some hope that he cousin wanted to connect with him to tell him to feel better and move on.

 

Froese’s mother, Patty, doesn’t want to get to the bottom of the emails; instead, she prefers to label them as gifts from someone, even if that someone is not her son. She welcomes anything that keeps people talking about her son. Hart, too, doesn’t care if the emails are a prank because, at least for a moment, he could believe his friend was still with him.

 

What do you think of the mysterious emails from a dead man? If Froese wasn’t sending them, who was?

Russian Invests in Robots with Human Brains

Russian media mogul Dmitry Itskov's side-project? Building robots capable of sustaining a human brain...indefinitely.

Oh, those uber-wealthy Russians. Always coming up with incredible (incredibly unrealistic) schemes into which they can dump their money and boredom. One of the most recent ideas to come out of Mother Russia is, what else, immortality. In this case, a 31-year old Russian media mogul by the name of Dmitry Itskov is funding an incredibly ambitious project to create a robot that could house and sustain a human brain, preserving its consciousness in perpetuity. A recent feature in Gizmodo outlines Itskov’s plan to create this man-bot in as little as one decade.

"This project is leading down the road to immortality,” Itskov told Gizmodo. “A person with a perfect Avatar will be able to remain part of society. People don't want to die.” Itskov, owner of the online news outlet managing company New Media, has made millions from his online ventures. With the fortune he’s made from New Media he claims to have hired 30 researchers from inside Russia for his sci-fi-sounding project, but now wants to outsource the work to the larger global scientific community. He announced his plan at Global Future 2045, a convention of futurists hosted in Moscow.

Itskov’s plan is to develop the robot in stages, starting with robotic components that can be manipulated by the human mind. The first stage, at least, is feasible with other researchers in other parts of the world already having created robotic arms controlled by the minds of Chimpanzees. Johns Hopkins University has also develops artificial limbs that are controlled by paraplegic patients.

Of course, the difference between controlling a robotic limb with a human mind and actually transplanting a human brain into a robot is massive (to the point of being surreal). Within ten years, Itskov envisions these brain-toting robots walking among us in as little as ten years. Scientists have not yet been able to sustain an animal brain outside of a body for any length of time, let alone within a robotic structure that is built to do a bunch of other things as well. Furthermore, within 30 years Itskov wants to be able to simply download a person’s brain into the hardware, eventually replacing robots with holograms. That’s right, a human being would be replaced by a light projection that have, as Itskov says, “plenty of advantages. You can walk through walls, move at the speed of light.”

DARPA, the research wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, is also working on an Avatar program to create robotic surrogates controlled by real soldiers. Itskov’s own Avatar program (called the same thing, coincidentally) is opening up offices in the U.S., and wants to work with DARPA. Of course, the application of light-projected soldiers on the field of battle is still under investigation…

Email From Beyond The Grave?

[Insert "dead letter department" joke here.]

 

Last June, a British man named Jack Froese suddenly died at the age of 32 of a heart arrhythmia. Six months later in November, the BBC reports that several of Froese's close friends and loved ones received emails which seemed to come from his account. More mysteriously, several of the emails had content that Froese had only discussed with the recipients in the days and hours right before his death.
 
For example, shortly before Froese's death, he and his childhood friend Tim Hart had occasion to venture into Hart's attic. Froese teased Hart about the messy state of the attic. A few days later, Froese was dead. 
 
In November, Hart received an email from Froese's account with a subject of "I'm watching" which said "Did you hear me? I'm at your house. Clean your f***ing attic!!!"

 
It's a trivial matter to forge the headers on an email to make it appear as though it came from a different account. As a former email server admin, I can tell you three ways to do it off the top of my head, none of which would take more than about thirty seconds to accomplish. And then there's always the chance that someone managed to hack into Froese's email account and actually send the emails from his account.
 
To date, the email headers have not been analyzed professionally. Several people responded to their emails from Froese, but no replies have been reported.
 
There are also several services which will send emails out on your behalf after your death. These services work on the principle of the "Dead Man's Switch." If they don't hear from you for a certain amount of time, they assume you are dead, and act accordingly. Could Froese have popularized one of these services? Would he have kept his email messages that up-to-date and specific, and included a six-month delay?
 
My question would be whether Froese and Hart had discussed the state of Hart's attic over email. Or if Froese might have emailed someone else about Hart's attic. If this was the case, someone who broke into Froese's email account would have been able to comb through, find the information, and then send the seemingly-impossible email.
 
Then again, many people believe that the dead communicate with us primarily through electricity. And what is more electric, more easily manipulated than the 1s and 0s which make up the internet? Perhaps the dead have found a modern way to communicate with us directly, after all. 

Phoenix Lights: Then and Now

What lit up the sky over Phoenix last week?

Phoenix seems to be a hotbed of bizarre UFO activity. Whether it's the large flat area with a high density of population (thus providing excellent fodder for multiple observations), or the odd illusions that can happen in the desert, or some other factor known only to the aliens. A famous spate of UFO activity was recorded there in 1997, and a news broadcast recently caught what some people believe is a UFO, live on television.
 
In 1997 and 1998, reports flooded in from all across the desert Southwest, including Arizona, Nevada, and northern Mexico. People witnessed what seemed to be a craft shaped like a boomerang, marked with between five and seven very large steady lights on the underside. The craft moved slowly and silently, and was well documented by multiple reliable sources - including Fyfe Symington, who was Arizona's governor at the time.

(There's a line in Neil Gaiman's book American Gods to the effect that the less often you watch a show, the more likely it is that when you do catch it, it will always be the same episode. This certainly holds true for me and History Channel shows about UFOs, because I have seen their show about the 1997 Phoenix Lights at least five times, and never any other.)
 
Last week, a Phoenix newscaster was giving a traffic report at 4:45AM with footage from live traffic cams in the background. As she covered the traffic situation, the traffic cam showed a bright ball of light appear over northwestern Phoenix then suddenly disappear. 
 
Most people assumed that it was some kind of explosion, perhaps a power transformer blowing. I have seen transformers blow during big storms, and it looks very similar - like the flash from a huge camera. However, initial reports from the Arizona Public Service (the power company responsible for the area) were that there had been no such outages. And a National Weather Service meteorologist explained that there was no weather in the area that could account for a flash of lightning.
 
Oddly, after four days of intense investigation, the following answer was provided by the Phoenix Fire Department: a woman was driving alone in that area when she saw a breaker explode on an Arizona Public Service power pole. APS crews scrambled to the scene and restored power within a few minutes. Why did it take four days for this story to come forth? And why didn't the APS administrator know about it when the reporters asked? Open questions, all!
 

Fox Posession

The Bane of Japan

In America, demons possess people. In Japan, that job is reserved for foxes! Fox possession isn't really all that different from demonic possession. If you're possessed by a fox, you act crazy (which may just mean that you are crazy, or that “fox possession” is a culturally-specific pre-modern way of talking about mental illness, or even that people tend tend go crazy when a fox possesses them), you “speak in tongues” (specific languages you've never been taught before, not Holy Roller stuff) and you need to be exorcized by a priest, but it's a Shinto priest rather than a Catholic one.

Female fox spirits also like to seduce otherwise upstanding men and lead them astray, just like succubi. So the whole legend is really pretty similar to its Western equivalent, except for that one little Japanese detail about it being a fox instead of a demon. As strange as that is, it does make sense if you consider the difference between Japanese and Christian mythology. Christian mythology includes an entire underworld of evil demonic beings hellbent (literally) on destroying human souls. Shinto mythology is more about the numinous powers inherent in the natural landscape.

 

When you look at it that way, it makes sense that Westerners would conceive of possession as being the work of malignant spirits, while the Japanese tradition saw the same phenomenon as being connected to the world of nature. In Ireland, possession was thought to be the work of fairies, but that's a topic for another blog.

 

Another Sun Storm: Solar Flares Hit Earth

X5 class storm is severe, but also surprisingly common
You may have noticed that life on Earth has not come to an end over the last 12 hours. In truth, solar storms hit the Earth with massive solar flares on a somewhat regular basis. Most people never notice nor care. (I used to notice because when I worked as a Unix system administrator I kept an eye on the solar weather report, so that I could be prepared to blame solar flares for whatever oddball problems we had. My next favorite silly excuse was "barometric pressure.")
 
The most common side effect of being hit with massive solar flares is that the Aurora Borealis show gets pushed much farther south than usual. Over the last two nights, people have reported seeing the "Northern Lights" as far south as New York and Washington State. 

 
But news agencies love to be alarmist, and we're still in the first quarter of The Great "World's Gonna End" Panic of 2012. So we get news reports warning of potential "planet-wide radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation." Sounds scary, right? 
 
Thanks, national news media! As if people don't have enough scary stuff to crap their pants over on a daily basis… sure, go ahead and make my grandma scared of solar flares, too. Good work.
 
At any rate, on a calmer note, it is true that an X5 storm is fairly substantial. This level of storm has blown out power grids and caused massive blackouts in the past. In 1989 a solar storm caused a nine-hour blackout over the Eastern seaboard that left over 9 million people in the dark. But the national power grid has undergone a lot of transformation and improvements over the last few decades. The likelihood of another such blackout happening again is very small indeed.
 
(Even if it did, I hasten to point out that a blackout is, like… not really that big a deal. It's not as if it opens the portal to Hell or anything. You just have to eat dinner on crackers, and then go to bed early because it's dark and you're bored. Complaining about a temporary blackout is definitely what you would call a First World Problem.)
 
As ABC News reluctantly points out, down at the very bottom of their article where no one will see, in every 11-year solar cycle you will typically see about 175 of these X5 events. This means we get hit on average by 15 of these storms a year, more than once a month. End of the world? Hardly. 
 

Woodwose

Sasquatches of the Middle Ages

I am not a skeptic. Far from it, in fact- I believe in everything, but I don't believe in anything all that much. What do I mean by that? That I'm inclined to grant some measure of my belief to just about anything magical, supernatural or legendary, but that I'm never all that attached to any specific belief. If a whole bunch of people say there's a Sasquatch out there somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, I say “sure.” If they try to convince me of something more specific, such as the theory that the Sasquatch is a species of large primate, I say “maybe, maybe not.”

The first claim is only that something is out there. I can accept that claim, because I believe the way the universe really works is a lot weirder and a lot looser than what most scientists would be willing to accept. I don't know exactly what Sasquatch is, but if a lot of people say they saw it, I say it must be something. It could be an almost infinite number of weird things, but the theory that it's a large primate species is one of the least convincing to me. Why?

 

Because while it's true that the Native peoples of the Pacific Northwest have legends of a hairy wild-man of the woods, it's equally true that the medieval English, French and Germans did. The English called them Woodwose, and they appear on a number of heraldic designs such as the one above. Looks a lot like a Sasquatch, doesn't it?

 

So if the Native legends are evidence for the literal biological reality of Sasquatch, the Woodwose legends must be as well. We could speculate all day if we wanted to. Were the Woodwose a Stone Age people surviving in deep forests in medieval Europe until the forests got cut down? Was there a large species of non-human primate in medieval Europe? Were the Woodwose just a distant folk memory of Stone Age lifestyles? Were they a legend based on distorted rumors about African apes?

 

Or do weird things just happen sometimes? That's my personal favorite theory, because it doesn't require you to explain away the lack of any Sasquatch bodies in the woods, or the absence of a sufficient breeding population. (For them to exist at all as a species of primate, there would have to be more of them than there appear to actually be, based on the frequency of sightings.)

 

No, I'm inclined to see both the Woodwose and the Sasquatch as “fey” creatures rather than big apes. What do I mean by that? I mean something otherworldly, a creature of myth, manifesting in our consensus reality for brief moments before disappearing Elsewhere. That's what I believe- but I don't believe in it all that much. It's an idea to play with, not a hypothesis to be proved!

 

 

 

The Mysterious Sounds of Yellowstone Lake

Unlike recent "sky sounds," this one is probably real
The Ghost Theory blog had an interesting article recently about a phenomenon that I had not heard of before: strange sounds in the sky over Yellowstone Lake. Unlike the other recent "sky sounds" that have been fairly conclusively proven to be hoaxes, these sounds have been reported hundreds of times, over at least the last hundred years. The reports come from both inexperienced park visitors and well-established naturalists, guides, rangers, and other respected figures.
 
The sounds happen most often on a quiet morning, when the lake is still. An observer standing on the shores of the lake may hear a sound that seems to be approaching from a distance, like the whistling wings of a flock of ducks. The sound has a distinct element of horizontal motion, as if it is passing overhead or moving across the lake. 

 
One of the earliest reports describes the sound as being "like a rapidly whirling current of air moving at a great speed horizontally above the lake," and that it was "a swishing sound of varying volume with a faint trace of a whistle; something akin to the sound of ducks in flight."
 
As someone who lives only a few hundred feet from a large body of water (north Puget Sound) I can attest that sound travels strangely over water. At night when the wind is still, I can plainly hear sounds coming from boats up to half a mile away. The sounds of engines, voices, and equipment travel much farther across water than we usually expect. 
 
Perhaps adding to this effect is the possibility of a temperature inversion in the air above the lake. One naturalist believes that this inversion - which would be most plausible on quiet mornings, coinciding with most sightings - would serve as a sound reflector, bouncing sounds out across the lake even further than usual.
 
If this is the case, it could simply be the remains of distant noises carrying across the lake. The sounds of the park's geysers, distant trains, actual flocks of ducks, and more. This would certainly account for the varying nature of the sound, which seems to never be the same noise twice.
 
It's a pity that it is so difficult to reliably document or attempt to reproduce aural phenomena like this. But I like the idea that there are still mysteries out there in the wilderness, perhaps waiting to be solved, perhaps not!

4 Possible Alien Artifacts on Google Earth

Are UFOs hiding in plain sight?
You can find some pretty interesting stuff on Google Earth if you know just where to look. Beyond the silliness you might expect (like this shark carved out of the forest at 31 59’20.53?S 152 34’18.47?E), there is also a lot of mysterious formations and shapes that some people suspect might be alien artifacts, alien communications, or even crashed UFOs.
 
1. Laguna AAF Runway UFO, Yuma Proving Ground: 32.866436,-114.385992
This bizarre shape was recently spotted on a military base in Arizona. It seems to be a central light, surrounded by a spoked wheel of other lights. Not unlike the "wheels within wheels"  described by Ezekiel in the Book of Revelation, which has long been assumed by UFOlogists to be an early description of a UFO sighting. 
 
Could the US military be testing UFOs at the Laguna AAF Airport? Is it an odd design painted on the runway? (And if so, why?) Or could this just be a weird visual artifact?

 
Just outside the Romanian town of Timisoara, what seems to be a UFO can be spotted in a pasture, without any seeming attempt to hide its presence. The shape is silver, metallic, and looks hilariously similar to a UFO from a 1950s science fiction movie, the sort that would have been assembled from hub caps and strung across the sky on visible fishing line.
 
Romanian UFO Network field operatives traveled to the coordinates and discovered... an abandoned water pumping facility which used to serve Timisoara.
 
A strange triangular shape can be seen in the desert outside Western Australia's capital city of Perth. This shape is eerily similar to the floating triangular craft which are frequently reported as UFOs.  Its sides are not quite completely equilateral, and it's difficult to tell whether this is an impression in the soil, or a very large object lying on the ground. Bright spots mark each of the three corners, and three more bright spots form a triangle inside the triangle. Could these be landing lights, or markings on the craft's hull?
 
An intrepid Australian astronomy buff, familiar with the area from past stargazing expeditions, traveled to the site of the "crashed UFO." He reported that it is a massive antenna, which is apparently part of the remote-controlled wind farm nearby. Although a locked gate prevented him from getting close enough to see, he speculated that the darker shape might be due to brush having been cleared out from around the antenna. 
 
These famous shapes were carved into the thin soil of Peru hundreds of years ago, long before people were able to fly. Hundreds of shapes (from plain straight lines to intricate stylized animals and humans) dot the otherwise barren desert. Who was meant to see them? Were the Nazca communicating with their religious deities, or with aliens?
 
These shapes are plainly visible on Google Earth. Scroll down this page to see an exhaustive list of coordinates you can paste into Google Earth, to browse the lines and shapes yourself.
 

 

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