Lon From Phantoms On C2C

Being a big fan of both show and blog/newsletter I missed the show but here is thr report from the C2C Newsletter\" Lon Strickler, paranormal researcher and creator of the website Phantoms and Monsters, talked about his Bigfoot encounter, the nature of ghosts, remote viewing, and the current state of paranormal research.  As a collector of numerous reports concerning a wide range of paranormal phenomena, Strickler said that his goal is to "give people the benefit of the doubt" rather than pass judgement as to the veracity of their experiences.  "Some of the stories are pretty outrageous," he conceded, "but my thought is, if the person did not think it was real, I don't think they would have contacted me."  That said, Strickler explained that he usually tries to contact these witnesses before posting their story and, upon speaking to them, "most of these people are very sincere" about their paranormal experiences.

Regarding his 1981 Bigfoot encounter, Strickler recounted being on a fly fishing trip in Maryland when he noticed a stray dog amongst the weeds and then heard it barking and growling.  "All of a sudden, this dark hairy creature was bobbing up and down in the thicket," Strickler said.  briefly grew silent and then let out a yelp, which appeared to startle the creature as it quickly stood up.  "It was about seven or eight feet tall and had dark matted hair on its body," he recalled.  Unable to investigate further, since he'd been wearing waders into the water and couldn't follow the creature, Strickler returned to town and reported the sighting to the police. Oddly, he was told to return to the area, where he was amazed to see numerous state police cruisers and was subsequently told to get out of there."

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Oklahoma Man Dies In Fire, Spontaneous Combustion Not Ruled Out As Cause

The Sheriff in an eastern Oklahoma county said his office is investigating what could be a case of spontaneous combustion.

Sequoyah County Sheriff Ron Lockhart told News On 6 that deputies were called to a house on Bawcom Road, between Sallisaw and Muldrow, around 10:50 a.m. Monday. A neighbor had reported seeing smoke coming out of a home.

Lockhart said they found the nearly completely charred remains of a man in the kitchen, but that there was no other damage done to the home.

The man has been identified as 65-year-old Danny Vanzandt, according to CBS affiliate in Fort Smith, KFSM.

Sheriff Lockhart spent about 20 years as an arson investigator for the Fort Smith, Arkansas Police Department, before retiring to run for Sheriff in Sequoyah County. Lockhart said he'd never seen anything like it. He said it didn't seem that any accelerant was used and only the floor below Vanzandt's body was damaged.

Lockhart said his remains have been sent to the Medical Examiner's office in Tulsa for examination.

Lockhart said Vanzandt was an alcoholic and a smoker. But KFSM reports that Lockhart said Vanzandt's body was burned in a way that was inconsistent with the fire being started by accident, such as by dropping a lit cigarette.

The Sheriff said the investigation is still ongoing, but that he is not ruling it out spontaneous combustion as the cause of the fire. - News On 6

Worldwide 'Bermuda Triangle' Zones

Recently from the newsletter from Phantoms and Monsters

"When ships and planes mysteriously vanish -- sometimes without a trace -- speculation runs wild.

Many worry about the conventional -- pilot error, kidnapping and terrorism come to mind. And there are those who worry about the supernatural.

Acclaimed fashion designer Vittorio Missoni and five others boarded a twin-engine BN-2 Islander aircraft in the Los Roques island chain near Venezuela on Jan. 4. They were headed for Caracas and had only flown about 11 miles when they vanished into thin air.

After hundreds of people in boats, planes and helicopters searched the area for days, no wreckage or debris of any kind was found, according to ABC News.

The mystery deepened when the only item that turned up was a bag that didn't even belong to anyone on the Missoni flight. The bag, recovered on the nearby island of Curacao, was placed onto Missoni's plane while its Italian tourist owner, caught a different flight out of Los Roques.


More recently, according to Vogue News, two bags belonging to Missoni were found on the island of Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles. A statement released by the Missoni family said that, a month and a half after Missoni's plane vanished, "the case is not closed."

Something else added more fuel to speculation that Missoni's flight may have been deliberately diverted. According to ABC News, Missoni's son, Ottavio, told an Italian newspaper that a puzzling text message was reportedly sent from the cellphone of Guido Foresti -- one of the passengers on the missing plane -- to Foresti's son two days after they disappeared.

The younger Missoni told the newspaper the message said: "Call now. We are reachable." No follow-up news has been reported about this.

So what happened to Missoni's plane? Could foul play have been involved, in an area that has seen its share of kidnappings or hijackings by possible drug dealers?

The Guardian reports that unexplained plane crashes and disappearances have allegedly occurred over the last 10 years in the same geographic location between Caracas and the Los Roques chain of 350 islands, cays and islets covering an area of about 40 kilometers.

If any of this sounds even vaguely familiar, it's probably because this area, dubbed locally as the Los Roques Curse, is not far from the infamous Bermuda Triangle -- bordered by Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico -- where people, planes and ships have vanished for decades.

1918: The U.S.S. Cyclops, a World War I Navy vessel, is refueling ships in the south Atlantic Ocean. After stopping in Barbados, the ship, with more than 300 passengers and crew aboard, vanishes without a trace in the Bermuda Triangle.

1945: During a training exercise, five U.S. Navy planes disappear in the same Bermuda Triangle area. Adding more mystery to the incident, a search aircraft sent to find the lost planes also unexplainably vanishes.

1950: A Northwest Airlines flight -- with 55 passengers and three crew members -- is en route to Minneapolis from New York City when it apparently simply drops out of sight while passing over what's known today as the Michigan Triangle.

1955: Nine ships disappear from an area of the Pacific Ocean about 60 miles south of Tokyo. Another ship sent to find them also vanishes. This has been dubbed The Devil's Sea.

All of the above cases involve ships or planes that mysteriously vanished and the explanations of those incidents may seem as diverse as the number of cases themselves:
-Unexpected severe weather conditions
-Pilot or captain error
-Pirates or kidnappers
-Methane gas buildups capable of sinking a ship without warning

Of course, disappearances in the infamous Bermuda Triangle and some other areas have come amid fears of UFOs, mysterious vortexes, time portals and sea monsters. To be sure, fear can play on any nervous traveler's mind, but some disappearances just defy conventional explanations and fall in the murky category of unexplained phenomena.
...
Numerous smaller ships and planes have disappeared in the decades following the 1940s after often reporting disturbances causing compasses, radios and other instruments to malfunction.

And yet, according to the United States Coast Guard, the Bermuda Triangle is much ado about nothing....

While The Bermuda Triangle is the most famous of areas around the world laying claim to causing people, planes and ships to vanish, there actually hasn't been such a report from there for almost a decade. - THP"

Bigfoot DNA

Bigfoot DNA

From the newsletter from Coast To Coast AM ;

"In the first half of Sunday's show, Dr. Melba S. Ketchum joined George Knapp to discuss the official release of her DNA analysis of possible Bigfoot hair samples. Her publication titled "Novel North American Hominin" is available for paid download through the DeNovo Journal. Ketchum's findings were based on the analysis of 111 samples of blood, tissue, hair, and related materials sent in to her lab by Sasquatch researchers and eyewitnesses. Mitochondrial DNA testing revealed that the hair was human in origin, yet a forensic hair specialist examined the specimens and declared them to be novel-- "it was not human hair and didn't match any of his animal knowns it was tested against," he told her.

When it came to testing the nuclear DNA of the samples "we started getting really strange results," she said, "with weird looking bands that were all different sizes." One testing facility reported that the sequences didn't match anything in the GenBank database. Ketchum has concluded that the creatures are either derived from humans and mutated excessively, or some type of hybrid. Further, she believes them to be a fairly modern species, paralleling humans in the last 13,000 years. She also suggested that there were some 16 different subtypes of Bigfoot, typically associated with different regions. "\
There is a recap of a show at thrir website www,coasttocoastam.com

THREE BIGFOOT GENOMES SEQUENCED IN 5-YEAR DNA STUDY

Ftom my favorite source Phantoms and Monsters.The study was to be published Friday.
"New Research Paper Published Friday Shows Homo Sapiens/Unknown Hominin Hybrid Species Extant in North America

DALLAS, February 10th --A team of scientists will publish their five-year long study of DNA samples from a novel hominin species, commonly known as “Bigfoot” or “Sasquatch,” on Friday February 15th, 2013. The results suggest that the legendary Sasquatch is extant in North America and is a human relative that arose approximately 13,000 years ago as a hybrid cross of modern Homo sapiens with an novel primate species.

The study, “Novel North American Hominins, Next Generation Sequencing of Three Whole Genomes and Associated Studies,” was conducted by a team of experts in genetics, forensics, imaging and pathology. The team, led by Dr. Melba Ketchum of DNA Diagnostics in Nacogdoches, TX, included Dr. Pat Wojtkiecicz, Director of the North Louisiana Criminalistics Laboratory; Ms. Aliece Watts of Integrated Forensic Laboratories in Euless, TX; Mr. David Spence, Trace Evidence Supervisor at Southwestern Institute of Forensic Sciences; Dr. Andreas K. Holzenburg, Director of the Microscopy & Imaging Center at Texas A&M University; Dr. Douglas G. Toler of Huguley Pathology Consultants in Fort Worth, TX; Dr. Thomas M. Prychitko of Wayne State University in Michigan; Dr. Fan Zhang of the University of North Texas Health Science Center; and Sarah Bollinger, Ray Shoulders, and Ryan Smith of DNA Diagnostics.

In total, 110 specimens of purported Sasquatch hair, blood, skin, and other tissue types were analyzed for the study. Samples were submitted by individuals and groups at 34 different hominin research sites in 14 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces. Ketchum’s team sequenced 20 whole and 10 partial mitochondrial genomes, as well as 3 whole nuclear genomes, from the samples.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) comes from mitochondria, energy-producing organelles in the cellular cytoplasm, and is passed down on the maternal lineage across generations. Nuclear DNA (nuDNA) is the genetic information contained in the cell nucleus and is the equal combination of DNA from the parents of an individual.

Initially a skeptic, Ketchum implemented strict protocols to ensure the scientific integrity of the study. DNA samples from submitters and scientists working with study specimens were obtained for use as controls. DNA was extracted from samples using forensic procedures to prevent contamination. Forensics experts examined the morphology of the submitted hair samples against known human and animal samples before beginning DNA testing. “We soon discovered that certain hair samples--which we would later identify as purported Sasquatch samples--had unique morphology distinguishing them from typical human and animal samples,” says Ketchum. “Those hair samples that could not be identified as known animal or human were subsequently screened using DNA testing, beginning with sequencing of mitochondrial DNA followed by sequencing nuclear DNA to determine where these individuals fit in the ‘tree of life.'”
After extensive forensic controls to prevent contamination, mtDNA testing of the Sasquatch samples yielded fully modern human profiles. Sixteen haplotypes indicating 100% homology with modern human mtDNA sequences were observed from 20 completed whole and 10 partial mitochondrial genomes. The human mtDNA results are consistent with prior, unrelated mtDNA tests of purported Sasquatch samples from other laboratories.Next-generation whole genome sequencing with the HiSeq 2000 platform by Illumina was performed at the University of Texas, Southwestern on one tissue sample, a saliva sample and one blood sample to produce 3 whole genomes. In contrast to the mtDNA which was unambiguously modern human, the Sasquatch nuDNA results were a mosaic of novel primate and human sequence.

“While the three Sasquatch nuclear genomes aligned well with one another and showed significant homology to human chromosome 11 which is highly conserved in primates, the Sasquatch genomes were novel and fell well outside of known ancient hominin as well as ape sequences,” explains Ketchum. “Because some of the mtDNA haplogroups found in our Sasquatch samples originated as late as 13,000 years ago, we are hypothesizing that the Sasquatch are human hybrids, the result of males of an unknown hominin species crossing with female Homo sapiens.”Hominins are members of the taxonomic grouping Hominini, which includes all members of the genus Homo.

Lair of the Beasts: From Bigfoot to Nessie Pondering on Monsters

By Nick Redfern     February 09, 2013
Source: MANIA.com
On December 21, 1977, the U.S. Government’s Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service published a controversial and thought provoking document titled Are We Ready for “Bigfoot” or the Loch Ness Monster? It began in what was most certainly eye-catching fashion and raised some important questions:


“What if they really did find the Loch Ness monster or the legendary Bigfoot of the Pacific Northwest? Most scientists doubt that these creatures exist, but thoughts of the discovery of a new species that might be the closest living relative to man, or the possibility of finding a leftover dinosaur, excite the imagination of scientist and nonscientist [sic] alike. It also poses another question: Would such a creature be subjected to the same kind of exploitation as the giant movie ape, King Kong?”
The DoI noted that scientists, for the most part anyway, accepted that our world was likely the home of a number of types of bird and mammal that, at the time – 1977 - were still largely, or fully, unknown to the domain of conventional zoology, chiefly as a result of a combination of their scarcity in numbers and the remoteness of their respective locations.


Indeed, the agency added weight to this scenario by noting that pretty much up until the latter part of the 19th Century, both giant pandas and gorillas were still perceived as being very much animals of folklore, myth and, frankly, not much else at all.

Today, of course, each and every one of us knows very different. And, clearly having done its homework, the DoI added that the Komodo dragon – a marauding and violent lizard of the islands of Indonesia that can grow to a length of around ten feet - remained undiscovered until the early part of the 20th Century.
Comment was also made on the astonishing fact that, in 1935, a deep water prehistoric fish known as a coelacanth – presumed extinct for 65-million years, no less – was captured very much alive off the coast of Madagascar.


Bringing matters more up to date, DoI staff noted:  “Just last year [Note: this would have been a reference to 1976] a Navy torpedo recovery vessel dropped a sea anchor into 500 feet of water off Hawaii. But instead of a torpedo, it hauled up a 15-foot representative of a new species of shark. The dead shark, named megamouth after its bathtub-shaped lower jaw, had an enormous, short-snouted head and 484 vestigial teeth.”


So, with amazing and undeniable discoveries of large animals in the late 19th Century and throughout the following century, and right up until 1976, what about the monsters of our world? How did the Department of the Interior think they fared, in terms of credibility, evidence, and the possibility that they might really be out there?


Let’s see what officialdom had to say. Admittedly, the DoI stressed there was an unfortunate and troubling lack of physical remains of monsters, that none could be found in zoos anywhere, and that the whole situation was made problematic and controversial by such matters as mistaken identity and hoaxing.

ut if, one day, hard evidence that monsters really do exist fell into our eager hands, it would be a discovery of amazing proportions, the author of the report noted. Of that, there’s no doubt whatsoever.


In the DoI’s very own words: “...finding a Loch Ness monster or Bigfoot is still a possibility, and the discovery would be one of the most important in modern history. As items of scientific and public interest they would surely command more attention than the moon rocks. Millions of curiosity seekers and thousands of zoologists and anthropologists throughout the world would be eager to ‘get at’ the creatures to examine, protect, capture, or just look at them.” No-one can deny that!


Nick Redfern is the author of many books, including Memoirs of a Monster Hunter; Wildman and There’s something in the Woods.

Vampirism

My newest favorite author was on Coast To Coast am last week.He is beginning a new series. This is from their Newsletter.

"On Wednesday's show, author James Rollins, who has a degree in Veterinary Medicine, discussed the literary and medical back story of vampirism, uniting the forensics, anthropology, and myths to show how vampires have earned their place in history. The notion of vampires as the blood-sucking undead has existed for millennia, he pointed out. In Homer's epic, The Odyssey, for instance, he refers to ghosts consuming blood so they can communicate with the living. Around the year 1100, the historian William of Newburgh wrote of an evil man who died from a fall, and then was seen rising from his grave, and terrorizing the villagers. "The brave young men, excited by wrath, struck a wound on the lifeless corpse, from which so much blood flowed that it was understood that he had been the bloodsucker of many," Newburgh wrote.

Many accounts detail how newly buried corpses were dug up and found with blood on their lips, their stomachs bloated as if from a recent gorging, with fresh looking organs, clawlike fingernails, and elongated teeth. Terrified villagers often drove stakes through the heart of the corpses or chopped off their heads. Rollins sought out a scientific or medical explanation for such reports. Necrotizing bacteria inside a corpse can cause the body to bloat with gas, distending the stomach, and moving blood from the lungs up the trachea to stain teeth and lips. Also the decay of flesh and gums would make the teeth and fingernails appear longer. Specific diseases such as rabies may have also contributed to the vampire mythos, he noted, adding that when humans are infected with the virus they can drool bloody saliva, act violently, and are sensitive to strong smells such asRollins also related vampirism to a rare genetic quirk called porphyria, and a more common condition known as polymorphic light eruption, in which sufferers are allergic or highly sensitive to the sun, and break out in blisters if exposed. They shun mirrors because of the risk of light reflection in a darkened room, "and often times sleep in dark boxes to further avoid the daylight," he noted. Interestingly, one of the treatments for this condition was a dose of enzymes their bodies couldn't produce, and before the modern medical era, the only way they could get those enzymes was through blood. Rollins also touched on literary and filmic representations of vampires throughout the years (including his current novel, Blood Gospel), and how each generation has tended to re-invent the character, and relate it to social and cultural concerns of their time."
The picture is from Etsy.comhttps://www.etsy.com/listing/30507847/not-your-usual-vampire-earrings     \