Even in absurdity, sacrament.     Even in hardship, holiness.     Even in doubt, faith.     Even in chaos, realization.    Even in paradox, blessedness

 

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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage."    ~Anain Nin

{ Sunday, 31 July, 2005 }

poem 1 of 2 written on back of a receipt

(A Tower of Bauble)

It's a simulacra of starflight
On a festival night, in a dance club,
In the remotest possible corner,
This perch for observing as a gull on the mast
The waves of voices, the nebulous, the storm.

The men are beautiful, the women powerful,
There's a lover here for everyone,
Even in stupidity, even in lust.
Will the glitterball spin a name or a number
Crumpled in hopeful scraps into my pocket?

It doesn't matter much really,
I've made it this far, I think,
As I finish another unnecessary beer,
And float into the dancing smoke ascending,
This oracular cloud,
Burnt and cheap offerings to the god of leisure.

Somewhere in this mix,
There's a lover that's somewhat close to heaven,
And I must adore him even without holding him,
This ideal, this diagram of perfect mornings
And laughter-to-be,
But there's so many of you,
Too many would-be lovers...
Let's stagger from this place
And, at very least,
Make a dashing try at catching one's shadow.

jaybird found this for you @ 23:05 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink



This is a moblog* post:

I'm not supposed to leave here without a kiss damnit


*Moblogging is posting from a cellphone or other wireless device- if a picture, it's taken from the phone.

jaybird found this for you @ 00:53 in Local- Western North Carolina | | permalink



{ Saturday, 30 July, 2005 }

william carlos williams

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

like a buttercup

upon its branching stem-

save that it's green and wooden-

I come, my sweet,

to sing to you. more ->

jaybird found this for you @ 12:35 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink



{ Friday, 29 July, 2005 }

smiting the pure ones

The Brief Ascension of the Cathars

The Cathars believed that the world was split along lines of matter and spirit, good and evil. They believed in purifying themselves, clean living, chastity, poverty and equality of the sexes.

If you're thinking to yourself, "danger, danger, must exterminate," you would have made a good Pope Innocent III.

The Cathars were a gnostic Christian sect that arose in the 11th century, an offshoot of a small surviving European gnostic community that emigrated to the Albigensian region in the south of France. The name "Cathar" comes from a Greek work meaning "Pure Ones," a noble enough sentiment but one that would get them into a lot of trouble.

jaybird found this for you @ 19:39 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink



the future is so retro


The Prefab From Another Planet

The circular house, 11 feet high and 26 feet across, was designed by Matti Suuronen, a Finnish architect, in 1968. A hatch door in its lower half opened down to reveal steps, like the door of a small airplane, and led into a room outfitted with six plastic bed-chair combinations and a central fireplace slab, as well as a kitchenette and a bathroom. Photographs from the time make the house look like a place where the Teletubbies might live, with Barbarella as a frequent houseguest.

jaybird found this for you @ 15:35 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink



If only...

A Clinton Cargo Cult

Any day now, the checks would come.

Any day now, the forces of darkness would stop holding back the checks.

Any day now, Jesus Himself would return in a spaceship, bringing news that President Clinton had signed a secret law in 2000 abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, with the heavenly acronym NESARA. This law (which supposedly stands for the National Economic Stabilization and Recovery Act) would expose the "Republican Party" for what they are: literally reptile space aliens posing as fiscal conservatives.

jaybird found this for you @ 11:32 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink



to play and be played

The Game of Life: Family

I teach Orwell’s 1984 to my junior-level students, and I recall humbly how easy it is to be both played and to play others. And I urge my students to be authentic in their relationships with the friends, parents, and teachers in their lives, while knowing, all along, that capitalism and patriotism and all the other –isms that swarm all around us are actively trying to manipulate us into some course of action or another.

jaybird found this for you @ 07:28 in Culture, People & Customs | | permalink



{ Thursday, 28 July, 2005 }

truth grudge match

"What is truth? Is truth unchanging law?
People have truths- are mine the same as yours?"

The idea that truth matters actually sums up four claims. Together, these truisms, as I'll call them, explain what I mean by "truth" and what I mean by its "mattering." Accordingly, I begin by introducing these truisms about truth, with an aim toward convincing you that they are just what I say they are, obvious truisms. This doesn't mean that everyone agrees with them. As I already noted, some of us are confused about truth-we have contradictory beliefs about it. So we may believe these truisms but also believe something else that undermines our belief in one or all of them. Moreover, nothing is so obvious that someone hasn't proclaimed it to be false, misguided, naive, incoherent, impossible, or corrupting for the young. And lots and lots of folks, as we'll see, continue to say as much about these four ideas.

Wittgenstein once remarked that the job of the philosopher was to "assemble reminders"-to point out to us what has been right there in front of our face all along. While this isn't all that a philosopher does, there is a lot of sense in this point. The very familiarity of something can make us forget, or even deny, its importance. When that happens, we need to be reminded of its role in our everyday life. This is what we need in the case of truth.

jaybird found this for you @ 20:12 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink



The Christian Paradox

How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong [via Mefi]
Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture. The thing is, not only is Franklin’s wisdom not biblical; it’s counter-biblical. Few ideas could be further from the gospel message, with its radical summons to love of neighbor. On this essential matter, most Americans—most American Christians—are simply wrong, as if 75 percent of American scientists believed that Newton proved gravity causes apples to fly up.

meh.

jaybird found this for you @ 16:08 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink



whoops

Iraq has descended into chaos way beyond West's worst-case scenario

The bombers have paralysed Baghdad. I have spent half my time living in Iraq since the invasion. The country has never been as dangerous as it is today. Some targets have been hit again and again. The army recruiting centre at Al-Muthana municipal airport in the middle of Baghdad has been attacked eight times, the last occasion being on Wednesday, when eight people were killed. The detonations of the suicide bombs make my windows shake in their frames in my room in the al-Hamra Hotel. The hotel is heavily guarded. At one time the man who looked for bombs under cars entering the compound, with a mirror on the end of a stick, carried a pistol in his right hand. He reckoned if he did discover a suicide bomber he had a split second in which to shoot him in the head before the driver detonated his bomb.

The bombers, or rather the defences against them, have altered the appearance of Baghdad. US army and Iraqi government positions in Baghdad are surrounded by ramparts of enormous cement blocks that snake through the city. Manufactured in different sizes, each is named after an American state, such as Arkansas and Wisconsin. These concrete megaliths are strangling the city by closing off many streets.

For all the newspaper and television coverage of Iraq the foreign media still fail to convey the lethal and anarchic quality of day-to-day living...

jaybird found this for you @ 12:02 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink



huffington

The Magic 8 Ball of American Politics

Sure it'd be nice if we could trust the Bush administration to do the right thing as it seeks to protect us from terrorist attacks -- but it’s proven that we can’t. And even if the White House had a shred of credibility left, we shouldn't. This nation was founded on skepticism and distrust of those in power. Our founding fathers didn't even trust themselves to do the right thing, creating specific rules for what a president should -- and shouldn’t -- be allowed to do, and giving the legislative branch oversight over how the executive branch fulfilled its duties. Remember "trust but verify?" It's just another way of saying oversight.

It's amazing the extent to which Congress has ceded that responsibility. This negligence of its constitutional duties is what allowed us to get so deeply into the disastrous war in Iraq in the first place.

jaybird found this for you @ 07:28 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink



{ Wednesday, 27 July, 2005 }

cheers to science!

Japanese researchers unlock mysteries of drunkenness

Japanese researchers say they have identified the physical differences between people who get drunk easily and those who can hold their liquor -- a discovery that can help refine the use of medicine... They confirmed for the first time the different blood-flow levels after a few drinks between people with different tolerances to alcohol.

The study, conducted on people willing to have a free drink for the cause of science, showed that the blood flow to the part of brain that controls visual functions increased after people with low alcohol tolerance drank. But little change was observed in the same brain area among those with higher tolerance...

jaybird found this for you @ 20:02 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink



music of the ringed sphere

Cassini Reveals Saturn's Eerie-Sounding Radio Emissions

Saturn's radio emissions could be mistaken for a Halloween sound track. That's how two researchers describe their recent findings, published in the July 23 issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. Their paper is based on data from the Cassini spacecraft radio and plasma wave science instrument. The study investigates sounds that are not just eerie, but also descriptive of a phenomenon similar to Earth's northern lights.

"All of the structures we observe in Saturn's radio spectrum are giving us clues about what might be going on in the source of the radio emissions above Saturn's auroras..." We believe that the changing frequencies are related to tiny radio sources moving up and down along Saturn's magnetic field lines."

[sounds: 1, 2]

jaybird found this for you @ 15:55 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink



pagentry and speciation


Butterfly unlocks evolution secret

Why one species branches into two is a question that has haunted evolutionary biologists since Darwin. Given our planet's rich biodiversity, "speciation" clearly happens regularly, but scientists cannot quite pinpoint the driving forces behind it.

Now, researchers studying a family of butterflies think they have witnessed a subtle process, which could be forcing a wedge between newly formed species. The team... discovered that closely related species living in the same geographical space displayed unusually distinct wing markings. These wing colours apparently evolved as a sort of "team strip", allowing butterflies to easily identify the species of a potential mate.

jaybird found this for you @ 11:47 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink



Beyond NASA

The push to privatize spaceflight

Not far from bustling Los Angeles International Airport and the glistening office towers of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other aerospace giants sits a cluster of squat buildings that may hold a key to the future of manned spaceflight.

Inside the main facility, whimsical trash cans sport nose cones and rocket fins. A Segway electric scooter shares an expansive shop floor with segments of rocket bodies. In one corner, inside a "clean room," engineers piece together a rocket motor. Welcome to Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Think dotcom trailblazing with Buck Rogers technology. This upstart and others like it represent the potential of privatized spaceflight. "By the middle of this century, if it's not overwhelmingly private, we've really failed..."

jaybird found this for you @ 07:42 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink



{ Tuesday, 26 July, 2005 }

go ask everett

Is ours the only universe?

As far as I know there's been only one good explanation of how these other universes could have similar physical constants, and that's if black holes spawn other universes. That's something that's talked about, that every star that dies in our universe that is massive enough to collapse infinitely, to just keep collapsing because nothing can stop the collapse, somehow that black hole breaks out into somewhere else -- another universe, that may exist in other dimensions than our usual three dimensions of space and one of time. When that happens there could be a memory of the parent universe, and that might mean similar physical constants.

[see also]

jaybird found this for you @ 20:20 in | | permalink



anti-time

The concept of negative time

Yowsa: In the physical universe, the concept of time is always positive. However there are simultaneous parallel time dimensions within the physical universes. Every physical universe is associated with one time dimension and innumerable parallel time dimensions. The concept of time is always starts at zero – the time of the big bang in the physical universe.

But according to researchers in contemporary physics, the parallel universes have the concept of no time dimension and time can become negative in that environment. The time dimension that allows time as negative value makes strange things happen. One can literally fabricate the future in that environment from the past and them come to the present. A spatial with no time concept built in is not a point of singularity.

jaybird found this for you @ 12:16 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink



surely it wasn't my cave

Ancient phallus unearthed in cave

A sculpted and polished phallus found in a German cave is among the earliest representations of male sexuality ever uncovered, researchers say... The prehistoric "tool" was reassembled from 14 fragments of siltstone. Its life size suggests it may well have been used as a sex aid by its Ice Age makers, scientists report." In addition to being a symbolic representation of male genitalia, it was also at times used for knapping flints..."

You really just have to love the BBC.

jaybird found this for you @ 12:08 in Carnality, Naughtiness & Fun | | permalink



it could only happen here

Climate Change Research Controversy on Capitol Hill

"Unprecedented" is the best word to describe what has happened during the last month on Capitol Hill regarding climate change research. While debate about whether or not the Earth is warming and the role that greenhouse gases may play in such warming has been a constant on Capitol Hill, this issue has taken on an entirely new profile.

On June 23, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton (R-TX) and Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Ed Whitfield (R-KY) sent unprecedented letters to several parties involved in climate change research.

[snip]

"I am writing to express my strenuous objections to what I see as the misguided and illegitimate investigation you have launched concerning Dr. Michael Mann, his co-authors and sponsors." After commenting on committee jurisdiction, Boehlert states, "My primary concern about your investigation is that its purpose seems to be to intimidate scientists rather than to learn from them, and to substitute Congressional political review for scientific peer review. This would be pernicious.

"It is certainly appropriate for Congress to try to understand scientific disputes that impinge on public policy. There are many ways for us to do that, including hearings with a balanced set of witnesses, briefings with scientists, and requests for reviews by the National Academy of Sciences or other experts.

"But you have taken a decidedly different approach - one that breaks with precedent and raises the specter of politicians opening investigations against any scientist who reaches a conclusion that makes the political elite uncomfortable..."

jaybird found this for you @ 07:56 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink



{ Monday, 25 July, 2005 }

deep film critiquing

Metaphilm: I Heart Huckabees

One problem with the word “shaman,” which traces its origins to the Siberian steppe, is that it is popularly employed by people more interested in fantasizing about some alternate reality than squaring their shoulders to bear the mundane burdens of this one. However, in cultures where such an office exists, the job of the shaman is primarily to foster the interrelation of two groups or positions that have hardened into such stubborn opposition that the survival of the society is at risk. For life to go on, the two camps must overcome their polemic, and the shaman acts by throwing himself into the fray—mentally, bodily, and emotionally, sometimes at personal risk. The result of his labors typically constitutes a paradigm shift rather than a compromise: the rules, though not necessarily undone, are re-contextualized and the system changes, including the position of the shaman himself.

The Existential Detectives in Huckabees, including their dissenting French faction, are essentially concerned with one thing—conflict—and not, as protagonist Albert Markovski initially supposes, with understanding coincidence in itself. Ideas, for the detectives, are clues that reveal human soul-sickness or tools that can correct it. Their explanations of how the universe works—a unified “blanket” on one hand and a meaningless void on the other—tend to be goofy or oversimplified. But this is somewhat beside the point, for their aim is action rather than analysis. They are working toward the creation and resolution of conflict—achieving a moment of crisis in order to shift an entire system.

jaybird found this for you @ 19:38 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink



yup

Is it Treason?

Karl Rove seems never to have admired democracy, leaving a trail of filthy politics among the corpses of his political opponents. Karl Rove has always reeked of political trickery and as Americans, we are concerned with Karl Rove’s unethical and unpatriotic personal behavior. That's why citizens across America are fed up and outraged--especially by Rove's suspected role in Plamegate. America is asking, "Is it treason? And what then?"

jaybird found this for you @ 15:33 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink



may it be so

Has Huygens found life on Titan?

...They think the microbes would breathe hydrogen rather than oxygen, and eat organic molecules drifting down from the upper atmosphere. They considered three available substances: acetylene, ethane and more complex organic gunk known as tholins. Ethane and tholins turn out to provide little more than the minimum energy requirements of methanogenic bacteria on Earth. The more tempting high-calorie option is acetylene, yielding six times as much energy per mole as either ethane or tholins.

jaybird found this for you @ 11:31 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink



self and cosmic self

I am always I

In the end, evolution on this planet will have been the growth of an immortal spark of Divinity from an invisible evolutionary trigger to a hyperspatial Entity with complete mastery of Space and Time.

What began as an implicate order tightly knotted into the subquantum fabric of reality will end as a fully explicate architecture of dazzling supernatural complexity, an interplanetary flowering into Deity.

jaybird found this for you @ 07:27 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink



{ Sunday, 24 July, 2005 }

the clearing

It's time to write.

It's time to write
With the boldness of the moon
Of this walk tonight
This overgrown footpath through a land of unresolved thought
That leads, at last, to a clearing
A fire ring and a few bottles
Where tiny spiders live, undisturbed.

What scraps of paper, or poetry, fuel this fire
Seldom lit in the self-aware forest...
Looks like a search for truth and meaning
Fired the embers red,
Then black in the morning.
The quest is good for something.

It's time to write
Of this place,
Wildflower bowed in reverence to the moon
Where the self comes to see it's shadow
In the flickering campfire, for evidence,
To pass a moment when its being is substantial
And to weave a silver nest from cicada song
To rest the wounded and worn within.
In the clearing, we must reckon,
As syllables become sparks ascending
While fireflies count their gods.

It's time to write
Of your history, of you, a person in this life
An animate purpose guides your strident walking.
What have you done
That has altered the spin of this very place?
Wavelets of you are everywhere
And one must merely put a finger to the wind
To know your mind.
Yes you, in your wrinkled clothes and booked schedule
Are spectral tonight...
Could be evermore...
For even the moth drawn to the light of the clearing
Delights, as a mad monk, in your eyes.

It's time to write
Of the way you curse each morning you awake alone
But forget the green of the leaves that flirt with the window,
The purple spiral of datura, the awe of wind from the sun.
No, you are held-
No, you are made love to in your cloister-
Your fevered love is not reserved for man
But for the cosmic, the dew that pools mystic in the grass,
For there, in the soil and the heart of sun,
Does your passion find purchase
And the world grows wild around you.
What greater romance?
He who awaits must know these things
Before the fruit of human goodness can be harvested
And you taste of it, at last.

It's time to write
In no uncertain terms, no vague wordplay,
Of who you are and what you want,
And what, indeed, drew you with such force to the clearing,
For it was not some random meander
But purposeful pathwork
That got you here, with a pack of matches
And a stack of prosaic letters for light.
You've one beer in the knapsack and a whittling knife-
Whatever can you do with that?
Speak, even wordlessly.

It's time to write
Strongly, with conviction (even to nothingness)
And commit your words to fire, fearlessly,
Convert them to a moment's heat and light,
Be real with them and make a burnt offering unto Something
And overcome the idea that you're not really here.
You're in the clearing, and it's as real as anything.
Camp out, and awake in the morning to that floral light
That entice the birds to concertos and storytelling.
What's left to do after you've seen death so clearly
And no beasts have chomped you to the last minute of night,
For you're safe, you're here, it's now,
And for the sake of all that is holy,
You've written something (whoever you are)...

It's time to use it.

jaybird found this for you @ 23:16 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink



dillard

The Mysticism of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The other side of Dillard's mysticism explores with the unanswerable questions, such as -- why must there be pain and suffering? She wonders why God would create creatures in such great numbers that some must die of famine, or why God would create 10% of the earth's creatures as parasites -- creatures that live only by destroying other life - and she provides lots of examples of the gruesome ways that parasites devour their prey. Dillard feels that we give children the wrong idea in regards to the nature of reality -- and muses that perhaps stuffed teddy bears should come with little stuffed lice, to paint a true picture of the way things are. {PTC, 233} However, at the same time she is cursing God for the creation of parasites, she also understands that "these parasites are companions for life...more life to the universal dance." {PTC, 234} The existence of two such diametrically opposed facets of nature is confusing to her, and she finds herself dwelling on this paradox.

Annie really grapples with the horrors of reality. She realizes that death, pain and struggling must spring from the same source as do all of the wonders she experiences. She faces the issues despite her fears because she feels it is her holy duty to understand every aspect of the Divine that she comes into contact with - even if the process is a painful one.

One of the basic themes of the book is what Annie calls the Universal Chomp -- or, the horrors of the food chain. Here is a story she tells about the horrors of the food chain: "When I was in elementary school, one of the teachers brought in a mantis egg case in a Mason jar. I watched the newly hatched mantises emerge and shed their skins; they were spidery and translucent, all over joints. They trailed from the egg case to the base of the Mason jar in a living bridge that looked like Arabic calligraphy, some baffling text form the Koran inscribed down the air by a fine hand. Over a period of several hours, during which time the teacher never summoned the nerve or the sense to release them, they ate each other until only two were left. Tiny legs were still kicking from the mouths of both. The two survivors grappled...in the Mason jar; finally both died of injuries. I felt as though I myself should swallow the corpses...so all that life wouldn't be lost." Annie finds it very hard to come to terms with these types of occurrences in the world - the conditions of suffering which cannot be escaped.

She writes, "It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. The fixed is a mason jar, and we can't beat it open." Dillard sees that humans, animals, and plants alike are destined to exist as part horrific food chain, where it is "chomp or fast." She laments, "It is ridiculous...what happened to manna? Why doesn't everything eat manna? Into what rare air did the manna dissolve that we harry the free live things - each other?" She is confused and frightened of a God that would thrust such conditions on its creations. "Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me..." she broods, "are my values so diametrically opposed to those that nature preserves? This is the key point!" Her deliberations continue, "We value the individual supremely and nature not a whit. It looks for the moment as though I might have to reject this creek life unless I want to be utterly brutalized. Is human culture with its values my only real home after all?" Her wavering faith in light of the horrors of the world - horrors that spring from that same Divine she adores - is not unusual. On the contrary, she precisely conveys universal questions and doubts about the existence and nature of God.


jaybird found this for you @ 12:23 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink



{ Saturday, 23 July, 2005 }

hart crane

Chaplinesque

We will make our meek adjustments,
Contented with such random consolations
As the wind deposits
In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find
A famished kitten on the step, and know
Recesses for it from the fury of the street,
Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk
Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb
That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,
Facing the dull squint with what innocence
And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies
More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;
Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:
What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen
The moon in lonely alleys make
A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,
And through all sound of gaiety and quest
Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

jaybird found this for you @ 12:19 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink



{ Friday, 22 July, 2005 }

fortean friday #4

Elves no laughing matter in Iceland

(Short UPI story follows, no link. Hey, I beleive)

The Icelandic tradition of believing in elves is so strong roads have been rerouted to avoid disturbing rocks where they might live, a report said.

Polls consistently show most residents of Iceland either believe in elves, or aren't willing to rule out their existence.

Retired museum director Hildur Hakonardottir, 67, told the New York Times she saw and elf once, one bigger than life and dressed like my grandmother, in a 1930s national costume.

Tourists at Hafnarfjordur, a port on the outskirts of Reykjavik, are invited to tour known elf locations, including a large rock whose reputation as an elf habitat led to plans for a nearby road being changed so as not to disturb its supernatural residents.

Elly Erlingsdottir, head of the town council's planning committee, said some elves recently borrowed her kitchen scissors, only to return them a week later to a place she had repeatedly searched.

jaybird found this for you @ 20:27 in Forteana, Phenomena & the Bizarre | | permalink



fortean friday #3


NZ: 'Haunted' cave opens again to sightseers

He dismisses claims the cave is haunted despite local stories, including an alleged incident where a black water rafting guide, who did not want to be named, said he felt like he had been asphyxiated while in the cave earlier this year.

John Ash, a geologist who has been advising Tourism Holdings on the cave's reopening, said he was aware "quite a few people have had interesting experiences in it".

"People talk about a cave being alive or dead. This cave is very much alive."

According to Maori legend, the cave was discovered 400 to 500 years ago by a young Maori hunter.

A pack of wild dogs are said to have inhabited the entrance and the cave was named rua, meaning den and kuri meaning dogs.

Mr Ash said people who had been in the cave by themselves had said they heard or saw other people.

"To me the cave has mana, it has presence to it."

jaybird found this for you @ 16:18 in Forteana, Phenomena & the Bizarre | | permalink



fortean friday #2

Oz: Top-end X-files revealed

The crew described a series of lights which crossed their take-off path from Darwin airport, with no visible fuselage or structure. RAAF command in Sydney said the contact may have been a foreign aircraft.

"The fact the sighting was made by an RAAF aircrew and detected by the aircraft's radar leaves very little doubt ... (that something) was in the area," RAAF command said.

"As the aircraft has not been identified, a violation of our national airspace cannot be discounted."

jaybird found this for you @ 12:12 in Forteana, Phenomena & the Bizarre | | permalink



fortean friday

'Haunted house' taken off market

A single mother-of-two who said she saw strange figures on the stairs and heard noises in the dead of night was met with sniggers until a neighbour came to stay with her, Mr Marshall claimed.

"They heard it too and she forced the Executive to rehouse her. It was never occupied again," he said.

"Young ones went in to mess once but didn't stay long because they said there was something strange about it..."

jaybird found this for you @ 08:08 in Forteana, Phenomena & the Bizarre | | permalink