The history of mankind is riddled with the weird and the wonderful; bizarre people, strange places and odd events. For centuries, we’ve told each other fantastic stories around campfires and in darkened rooms. Tales of ghosts, UFOs, and conspiracies, but are these stories exactly that: Stories? There’s only one way to find out! Join me as I dive down the rabbit hole and into… the Unexplained Files.
This week: China's Floating City
WTF?
Jiangxi, China. 7 October 2015. In the streets of Jiangxi hundreds of baffled citizens have their necks craned skyward as, in the clouds above the city is… wait for it… another city? That can’t be right… *checks notes* Nope, that’s right. There was another city. In the clouds. And we’re not talking some grainy, wavering, mirage-like city. It’s a full on cityscape, all straight lines and angles, with high-rise buildings and skyscrapers. “Great!” I hear you cry. “Another one of those stories where people say they saw something, but nobody had a camera handy.” Only they did. Lots of them. Here comes the crazy part: the folks in Jiangxi weren’t the only ones pointing their faces skyward. Y’see, two days earlier, over 500 miles away in the city of Foshan, they saw the exact same image. You’re Kidding, Right? The towering skyline appeared in the clouds over both cities, witnessed and photographed by thousands of baffled citizens. So what was going on? A glitch in the matrix? Maybe so, but as you can imagine, the interwebs went into overdrive coming up with possible explanations. One of the most popular ideas floated (see what I did there?!) was Project Blue Beam. Hold on to your tin foil hats for this one… According to the theory, BlueBeam is a NASA project that will use holographic images (amongst other things) to convince the public of one of two possible scenarios: firstly, in a series of steps that the ideas that have been built around religion are wrong, BlueBeam will be used to convince people of a second coming; and secondly, if that idea isn’t batshit crazy enough for you, BlueBeam will be used to convince folks that aliens are attacking. As nuts as that sounds, the origin of such an idea comes from a real live scientist, albeit a Nazi one. But one clever enough that Uncle Sam thought was keeping around. Dr Wernher von Braun was shipped over to the US after WWII as part of Operation Paperclip, and in 1977, he made a startling deathbed confession. Von Braun said the military industrial complex’s perpetual war machine would always need an enemy. At that time, it was the Russians and Communism, after that he said there would be something harder to tie down: not a single area or state, but individuals - namely terrorists. After the terrorists it would be “rogue nations”. Nations of concern like Iran, Libya, or North Korea. Then there would be the big one: the weaponisation of space, all in the name of protecting us from asteroids and cheesy Michael Bay movies. And after the asteroids, there would be E.T. Suddenly, the populace would need their government to protect them from such a threat, because how can we protect ourselves? After that, the huddled masses would gladly go along with whatever they proposed including an insidious sounding ‘One World Government’. Hold Your Horses! Hang on there a minute! Surely there’s a more mundane explanation? Of course there is! Fata Morgana. Fata Morgana is the Italian name for Morgan le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress, and is a weather phenomenon which can be seen on land or at sea; so basically a natural mirage. Fata Morgana mirages usually distort the images of boats or skylines on which they’re based, often to the extent that the original object is unrecognisable. The image also has the appearance of changing rapidly, flipping between right-way-up to upside-down that can be stacked upon one another. How does it work? Light rays are bent when they pass through layers of air, which are at different temperatures, through something known as a “steep thermal inversion”. This creates an atmospheric duct. In essence, a layer of warmer air sitting atop a layer of much cooler air. This is the opposite of the usual situation with cooler air on top. So, in calm weather, the warm layer rests on top of the cool one, which acts like a refracting lens. For a Fata Morgana to exist, this warm air on top of cool air duct must be present. Make Your Mind Up Time. I have a problem with that official explanation because of course I fucking do. See, if you check out any images of real Fata Morgana, they look nothing like what appeared in the skies over China. Fata Morgana images are shimmering, hanging just over the horizon, all on cloudless days. Do you see how easily I shat all over the theory with not one but three different ways of debunking? That shit was too easy. Not to mention the fact that the identical images would have to come from the same place at the same angle. Don’t get me wrong: I fucking love science. But trying to shoehorn a phenomena into a pre-made scientific theory isn’t very… well, scientific. When we do this, we’re missing an opportunity to actually discover something new, and science should be about exploring frontiers, not about dismissing something just because we don’t understand it. The science should fit the story, not the other way around. It’s like saying someone saw a ghost because they’d had a couple of Sherries, even though they’d never ever seen anything before, with or without Sherry. But low-level sonic frequencies causing a disturbance in the witness’s perception? BOOM! Science! But I digress… Were China’s floating cities Fata Morgana? Fuck no! Were they a result of NASA’s project Blue Beam… RATING: 1=Bollocks 2=Not convinced 3=Possibly… 4=Compelling stuff 5=Holyshittheskyisfalling Further Reading: Countless newspaper articles can be found online, most of which are accompanied by video. What do you think? Comment below! If you enjoyed this, feel free to share it with your friends! Use the buttons at the bottom of the page to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for more!
The history of mankind is riddled with the weird and the wonderful; bizarre people, strange places and odd events. For centuries, we’ve told each other fantastic stories around campfires and in darkened rooms. Tales of ghosts, UFOs, and conspiracies, but are these stories exactly that: Stories? There’s only one way to find out! Join me as I dive down the rabbit hole and into… the Unexplained Files.
This week: John Titor, Time Traveller.
WTF?
Art Bell’s Coast to Coast Radio Show. 29 July 1998. Art Bell is hosting one of his usual ‘out there’ radio shows, on this occasion the topic being time travel, when a fax rolls in. The fax is from a man claiming to be from the year 2036, and the story he has to tell has a strange ring of plausibility to it. He claims the coming change of millennium will bring with it disaster. This, remember, was in the time when there was genuine worry about the Y2K bug. And so began the fascinating tale of John Titor. Not long after his faxed appearance on Coast to Coast AM, in November of 2000, on a public internet forum, posts start rolling in from someone using the handle TimeTravel_0. The same someone who faxed Art Bell. You’re Kidding, Right? If this sounds like complete horseshit, the forum posts had the strange ring of truth that accompanied the faxes sent to Art Bell. This guy didn’t tiptoe around the subject, like a man intent on killing the circus, he went straight for the juggler. Among his early posts were pictures of his time machine and its operations manual. He even posted a photo of the time machine. Not only that, but as you’d expect, he was flooded with questions about why he was here, the science and philosophy of time travel, and what the Christ he was doing here – and he ducked not a one. So why was he here? According to the man himself, the Y2K bug had caused disaster, in his timeline, and there was a new disaster looming, so he was sent back to collect an IBM 5100 computer. He claimed the computer was needed to debug computer programs in 2036. Now, as my main man @LaughingWolf will testify, my knowledge of all things technological is shite, but apparently, the IBM 5100 runs both the APL and BASIC programming languages. I have no clue what that means, but according to Titor, it was super important. More importantly, to the people back in 2000 who did know what it meant, it made perfect sense. Hold Your Horses! So it was all true? Well, there were obviously the people who wanted to test Mr Titor. They weren’t happy with detailed answers to specific questions, they wanted predictions. Here’s where Titor didn’t do so well. He said that the US would suffer a civil war that would begin in 2004. For those of you without your finger on the pulse of current affairs, that didn’t happen. He then said that the boffins at CERN would discover the basis for time travel around the year 2001, which also didn’t happen, unless they’re really good at keeping secrets from us and oh Christ I’ve just opened a can of worms labelled ‘Mandela Effect’. He also said that the last Olympics would take place in 2004, at which point we have to ask: What the fuck were they doing in 2008 in Beijing? One caveat to all of these failed predictions was the claim that there are many universes, and each time he travels there is a slight deviance from one timeline into another. This he claims, is why he stopped off in 2000 on his way back to 1975. It also handily makes any claims of his unfalsifiable. Make Your Mind Up Time. So is it real? Did he create alternate timelines? An Italian documentary on Titor hired a private detective by the name of Mike Lynch to get to the bottom of the story. What did he find? He discovered The John Titor Foundation. An IP address connected to the foundation is located in Florida, the home of John Titor. The John Titor Foundation is a limited liability corporation led by a fellow by the name of Lawrence H. Haber. Haber is an entertainment lawyer from Orlando, Florida. PI Mike Lynch discovered that Haber’s brother is a computer scientist. Someone who would have known about the importance of an IBM 5100 computer and its relevance in fixing futuristic technological problems; something that gave the whole story its air of credibility in the first place. On top of all that, I gave John Titor until 9 o’clock on the morning of this post to email me and prove that he's totally not full of shit. That email is yet to arrive. Sorry, John. RATING: 1=Bollocks 2=Not convinced 3=Possibly… 4=Compelling stuff 5=Holyshittheskyisfalling Further Listening/Viewing: Those Conspiracy Guys are the only ones who’ve covered the story in any real depth that I can find. Plus there’s a 12 minute video from StuffTheyDon’tWantYouToKnow on JT. What do you think? Comment below! If you enjoyed this, feel free to share it with your friends! Use the buttons at the bottom of the page to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for more! The history of mankind is riddled with the weird and the wonderful; bizarre people, strange places and odd events. For centuries, we’ve told each other fantastic stories around campfires and in darkened rooms. Tales of ghosts, UFOs, and conspiracies, but are these stories exactly that: Stories? There’s only one way to find out! Join me as I dive down the rabbit hole and into… the Unexplained Files. This week: Spontaneous Human Combustion WTF?
Galway, Ireland. December 2010: Forensic experts enter the home of Michael Faherty to find a scene as baffling as it is macabre. Mr Faherty’s home had been the scene of a blaze; oddly, the blaze hadn’t spread beyond the confines of the living room. The 76 year-old was dead, lying on his back, with his head closest to an open fireplace. Thing is, the baffled experts had ruled that a fire in the fireplace had not been the cause of the fire. Aside from the floor beneath and ceiling above the body, there was no other damage to the room. On top of that, there was no trace of any accelerant, and there was nothing at the scene to lead investigators to believe that the badly burned body had fallen victim to foul play. So had the victim just burst into flames? According to the coroner, Dr Ciaran McLoughlin, yes. You’re Kidding, Right? I shit you not, dear reader. At that point in his career, Dr McLoughlin had been investigating deaths for over a quarter of a century; this was the first time he’d ruled someone victim to spontaneous combustion. "This fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation," he said. Hold Your Horses! So at any given time folks can just burst into fucking flames?! Apparently, yep. This is far from the first case. In September 1967, a call was made to the emergency services: whilst walking to work, the good people of Lambeth, South London, had noticed a derelict house with an odd bright light burning inside. Shortly after the call was made, The Lambeth Fire Brigade arrived on the scene, and what Brigade Commander John Stacey saw left him shocked. The source of the bright light was the burning body of Robert Bailey, a local alcoholic. He’d sheltered in the house overnight, and caught fucking fire the next morning. The house itself was untouched, only Bailey burned. According to Stacey, Robert Bailey was found in the foetal position at the bottom of the stairs. In his stomach was a four inch slit and burning from it a cone of blue flame, similar to that of a blow-torch. There was no damage to neither the house, nor Bailey, apart from the area immediately surrounding the slit. The rest of his body and even his clothing was untouched. Thinking the poor bastard might actually still be alive, they emptied several fire extinguishers, eventually dousing the fire. As horrible as all of that sounds, you haven’t heard the worst: Stacey said that the flame was coming from inside Robert Bailey; that the man was burning from the inside out. Such was Bailey’s agony, during the episode he’d bitten into the solid mahogany of one of the newel posts of the stairs. His dead body remained teeth locked into the wood. His jaw had to be prised open by the firemen. Fuck that. An investigation determined that no source of ignition could be found. In what might be one of the greatest understatements ever committed to record, Bailey’s death was put down to “unknown causes”. Make Your Mind Up Time. Is spontaneous combustion a thing? One documentary hosted by Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson (because why the hell not?) tested a bunch of theories around some of the possible causes of this most bizarre of mysteries. One theory quickly dismissed on the show actually replicated the results of the sad tale of Robert Bailey. A mixture of gases created by the gut in very rare circumstances that ignited upon contact with oxygen. In other words. Flatulence. Death by farting. This sounds like making light of the matter but the truth is, the sad stories of Robert Bailey and Michael Faherty are not so easily dismissed. Is there something more to this? I think so. RATING: 1=Bollocks 2=Not convinced 3=Possibly… 4=Compelling stuff 5=Holyshittheskyisfalling Further Reading: The article the death of Michael Faherty is available on the BBC website. If you enjoyed this, feel free to share it with your friends! Use the buttons at the bottom of the page to follow me on Facebook, Twitter and Amazon! This post and the other Unexplained Files are available in a handy little ebook. Just 99p! The history of mankind is riddled with the weird and the wonderful; bizarre people, strange places and odd events. For centuries, we’ve told each other fantastic stories around campfires and in darkened rooms. Tales of ghosts, UFOs, and conspiracies, but are these stories exactly that: Stories? There’s only one way to find out! Join me as I dive down the rabbit hole and into… the Unexplained Files. This week: The Loch Ness Monster WTF?
Loch Ness, Scotland. 22nd July 1933. George Spicer and his wife are driving along the banks of the loch when a huge creature appeared from the bushes and dragged itself into the dark waters of the loch. The monster was the length of a bus with a long, slender neck similar to an elephant’s trunk. It was the first modern appearance of the beast that would become famous across the globe (yes, flat earthers, I said GLOBE) as the “Loch Ness Monster”. It was later revealed that the Spicers were ‘high as fuck’. Only kidding. The Spicers were respectable folk. You’re Kidding, Right? A monster? In a loch? There have been many photos of the beast over the years. Blurry ones, inconclusive ones, and even fake ones. There are some videos too. For the most part, they fall into similar categories, with many sceptics commenting that the videos show seals, otters, detritus, or in some cases, absolutely nothing. There have been numerous searches of the loch, using more and more modern technology and techniques, all have which have given us… cock all. Nothing. Zilch. Zero. Hold Your Horses! So it’s all horseshit? Well, over the years there have been many witnesses, many respectable witnesses. Lab technicians, police officers and whatnot. They can’t all be lying, can they? Maybe not. The first report of something beastly dwelling in Loch Ness actually dates back to 565 when St. Columba (an Irish monk) met a bunch of locals burying a man by the River Ness. They said he was swimming when he was attacked by what they called a “water beast”, which is what I might say if someone caught me disposing of the body of a guy I’d killed. According to the men, the dead guy was mauled and dragged beneath the surface by the aforementioned water beast. They attempted a boat rescue, but alas, were too late. Make Your Mind Up Time. I’m remiss to disregard a lot of eyewitness testimony, but despite being one of the largest bodies of water in Britain (22sq miles in surface area, 56km2 for fans of metric), it’s a loch, not an ocean. It’s a finite area. Granted, it’s fucking deep (~800ft/230m), which would theoretically give Nessie plenty of hiding space, but for almost a century of searching, all we have to show is inconclusive videos and blurry pictures. The biggest cluster of sightings was in the 30s when technology wasn’t great, but nowadays we’ve got cameras in our pockets. And this isn’t like trying to take a picture of something moving across a dark sky. If anyone sees anything, it’s in the daytime; there should be more (and better quality) photos of the Loch Ness Monster. But there aren’t. Is there something lurking in the murky depths of Loch Ness? I hope I’m wrong, but I’m yet to see anything to convince me. RATING: 1=Bollocks 2=Not convinced 3=Possibly… 4=Compelling stuff 5=Holyshittheskyisfalling Further Viewing: To see the level of quality of evidence for this myth, check out the 'Top 5 Loch Ness Monster Sightings' video on YouTube. Just shy of minutes, most of the evidence in this film has quality theories to debunk it. What do you think? Comment below! If you enjoyed this, feel free to share it with your friends! Use the buttons at the bottom of the page to follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ for more! The history of mankind is riddled with the weird and the wonderful; bizarre people, strange places and odd events. For centuries, we’ve told each other fantastic stories around campfires and in darkened rooms. Tales of ghosts, UFOs, and conspiracies, but are these stories exactly that: Stories? There’s only one way to find out! Join me as I dive down the rabbit hole and into… the Unexplained Files. This week: MKUltra WTF?
New York City, November 1953. Frank Olson, a US Army biochemist and biological weapons researcher, suffers a severe psychotic episode, which ends with him plummeting thirteen storeys from a hotel window to the streets below. Suicide, right? Not so fast. At the time of his death, his blood was coursing with the drug lysergic acid diethylamide – a.k.a. LSD. One week earlier, without his knowledge, Frank had been laced with the psychedelic drug as part of an experiment. As mental as that sounds, what's more mental is that the experiment was conducted by the CIA. On the evening of his death, an internal investigation at the CIA had ruled, Frank had been told that the drug was in his system, but he wasn’t informed the exact nature of the drug or its effect until twenty minutes later. You’re Kidding, Right? Nope. You read it right: Frank Olson died because he was given LSD by the CIA. See, the Agency was conducting experiments (sometimes illegal) on human test subjects with the main aim of identifying and developing drugs and procedures that could be used in interrogations to weaken the subject, thus making it easier to get confessions. I’ll just say that again. The CIA gave people LSD with a view to controlling their minds. Surely after killing one of their own in poor Frank Olson, that brought a swift end to the MKUltra Program. Yeah, no. Not even close. The experiments continued for a further TWENTY years, and that’s just officially. Hold Your Horses! It gets worse. Aside from slipping unwitting US and Canadian citizens Mickeys, the program also used other charming methods to alter test subject’s mental states. Methods like isolation, verbal abuse, sensory deprivation and psychological torture. By the time it was officially closed down in 1973, the project had included over forty colleges and universities, 12 hospitals or clinics, 15 research foundations, and three prisons. So what about Frank Olson? Well, his family disputed the official story of his death. See, a few days before his death, he’d left his job. The toll it had taken on him was too great. The CIAs development of ‘assassination materials’ (I’m not sure what those are, but they sure as shit don’t sound nice), use of biological warfare materials, and cooperation with former Nazi scientists (they hired them at the end of WWII in the now infamous Operation Paperclip) were among the reasons he quit. Frank’s family thought the CIA were worried that he’d blab. Sounds crazy, right? It does, until you learn that a medical examiner told the Olsens that Frank had been knocked unconscious before he went through the window, ruling Frank’s death a “homicide”. In 1975, Frank’s family received a formal apology from then President Gerald Ford and CIA director William Colby, along with $750,000 from the US government. So, yeah, there’s that. Make Your Mind Up Time. Was Frank Olson the only death at the hands of MKUltra? We may never know. If they killed a dude then thought ‘fuck it, let’s carry on’ for another two decades, it would suggest not. So, how do we know about it? Just after the Watergate incident caused the government to break out in assholes and shit themselves to death, then CIA director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. But in a classic and monumental balls-up, 20,000 documents survived, because they’d been stored incorrectly in a financial records building, and in 1977, they were discovered in a Freedom of Information Act request. If not for that simple mistake, we’d have never found out about it. Dwell on that a while. There are some who hold the belief that the experiments only closed down ‘officially’ in ’73, and that they actually carry on to this day. I can’t verify that, but again, if they carried on for twenty more years after killing a dude they worked with, it wouldn’t come as a massive shock. Did the CIA give people LSD in a mind control program named MKUltra? You’d better believe it. RATING: 1=Bollocks 2=Not convinced 3=Possibly… 4=Compelling stuff 5=Holyshittheskyisfalling Further reading/listening: the book The Men Who Stare at Goats by Jon Ronson. The MKUltra podcast episode by Those Conspiracy Guys (NSFW). And for those of you that think I’m making this shit up, there’s always the CIA’s own website... If you enjoyed this, all of my Unexplained Files are in a handy little ebook on Amazon Feel free to share with your friends! Use the buttons at the bottom of the page to follow me on Facebook and Twitter for more! |
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In this blog I'll be bringing to you short tales of things that go bump in the night, true stories of weird and unexplained events, and the real-life news of all things odd and macabre, and entertain you along the way. Categories
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