Sonic boom remains a mystery
The search for the cause of the sonic boom Central Coast residents felt Wednesday morning may be a bust. Thursday, a Federal Aviation Administration official said the search for the source of the mysterious morning rattling has turned up nothing. "We reviewed all the radar data for flights in the airspace in Northern California around the time that people reported this boom," said Ian Gregor, FAA spokesman for the Western-Pacific Region. "There were several military aircraft operating but they were slow. None of these aircraft were going supersonic."..
Mysterious moon flashes signs of "last gasps"?
Ever since the invention of the telescope, said the Columbia University astrophysicist, observers around the world have occasionally watched small areas of the moon brighten or "turn fuzzy." Sometimes they even turn reddish. Because the bright patches are ephemeral, lasting only last a few minutes, these events have come to be known as transient lunar phenomena, or TLPs. "About 1,500 of these have been reported," Crotts said...
The snow-beast
Nick Redfern: Well, last night a sizeable fall of snow hit the little English village of Woolsery where CFZ Director Jon Downes and his distinctly better-half, Corinna, make their home. And, as it appears from this breaking story, something has been prowling around the area.....
Spirits of the departed appear reluctant to check out of local B&B
A young female voice emanates from an empty room. Footsteps are heard from another part of the house, but no one is there. A black cat leaves the room - through a solid wall. During the 12 years that Fred Nolte and Sandra Frye have owned the Chapman Inn Bed & Breakfast on the Bethel common, their guests have repeatedly related such stories over breakfast...
MonsterQuest impacts pop culture
Loren Coleman: The people at MonsterQuest have passed along a press release ("Monster Quest Goes Pop") that points to their show's growing popular cultural impact. Here's a reader-friendly edited version of their release: MonsterQuest is slowly becoming part of our culture and even pop culture. Billboards have popped up in downtown Manhattan New York and even along LA Freeways. A new pop song called "Monsterquester" has been written and performed about the show. It is about to become a new music video...
Striped cryptid sighted
Loren Coleman: The cryptid being sighted is unlikely to be a quagga. Apparently while I was in London, quite a bit of dust was kicked up over in Little Hocking, Washington County, Ohio, by the sightings of at least one striped horse-like cryptid. Now why would I call it a "striped horse-like cryptid," you might ask? Because that's what it looks like, of course...
Okay, what the hell was that?
If we lived in California there'd be an easy explanation: Earthquake. But we live in McKinney, so there's no logical reason why our house mysteriously shook this morning at 6 a.m. I was yanked from my sleep by what sounded like the loud, violent slamming of a door, followed by the rattling of the large piece of iron art on the wall above our bed. Simultaneously, my wife shot up off her pillow and one of our dogs - from the far, opposite corner of the house - began barking as if startled. Something happened. But what?..
'Vampire' discovered in mass grave
A skeleton exhumed from a grave in Venice is being claimed as the first known example of the "vampires" widely referred to in contemporary documents. Matteo Borrini of the University of Florence in Italy found the skeleton of a woman with a small brick in her mouth (see right) while excavating mass graves of plague victims from the Middle Ages on Lazzaretto Nuovo Island in Venice (see second image here). At the time the woman died, many people believed that the plague was spread by "vampires" which, rather than drinking people's blood, spread disease by chewing on their shrouds after dying. Grave-diggers put bricks in the mouths of suspected vampires to stop them doing this, Borrini says...
'Spooky action at a distance' of quantum mechanics directly observed
In quantum mechanics, a vanguard of physics where science often merges into philosophy, much of our understanding is based on conjecture and probabilities, but a group of researchers in Japan has moved one of the fundamental paradoxes in quantum mechanics into the lab for experimentation and observed some of the 'spooky action at a distance' of quantum mechanics directly...
