The following is an interesting piece on the origin of several odd and well-known superstitions. British author Harry Oliver has just released in the U.S. "Black Cats & Four-Leaf Clovers", a book that explores the origins of superstitions and old wives' tales from around the world.
1. Don't Walk Under a Ladder: After researching this superstition for a year at the British Library in London, Oliver says the belief's most-cited origin points to "a ladder forming a triangle with the wall and the ground, suggesting the Holy Trinity." Apparently, walking through that triangle would show disrespect to the Trinity and therefore bring bad luck. Another possible (and much simpler) origin: Where there's a ladder, there's usually someone working on top and walking underneath could lead to all sorts of cartoonish accidents, like a hammer falling on someone's head.
2. Black Cats Bring Bad Luck: Oliver says black cats are notoriously linked to witchcraft, which is why some people think they're unlucky. However, there are two sides to this one. Allegedly, if a cat crosses your path it's considered unlucky, but if a cat walks toward you, it's a good omen. Should the first scenario happen, though, Oliver says the "only way to avert the back luck is to spit."
3. Never Light Three Cigarettes With the Same Match: This superstition originated in military circles and dates back to those long nights in the trenches during World War I. "If three soldiers smoked at once, enemy snipers would easily detect them," says Oliver. "If they used the same match to light all three cigarettes, snipers would notice the match burning after the first one and would have enough time to load guns, aim and fire at the unlucky third smoker."
4. Carrots Are Good for Your Eyesight: Though some studies have shown that the vitamin A in carrots is good for the eyes, the vegetable alone isn't enough to spark 20/20 vision. Oliver says this old wives' tale -- or smart attempt by parents to get their children to eat their veggies -- originated as a myth during World War II. "That's when British pilots where rumored to be eating enormous amounts of carrots to see from high altitudes and in the dark. The rumor was widely spread to throw the public off from the fact that radar had been invented and was being used against the enemy," he says.
5. Cross Your Fingers: If you look hard enough, you can see this superstition has religious roots. Oliver says that crossing your fingers is a type of holy protection because the two overlapping fingers form a "slanted cross." This "good luck" ritual varies around the globe -- in Switzerland, people fold their thumbs in and wrap their other fingers around them instead of the standard index-and-middle-finger combination.
6. Don't Open an Umbrella in The House: The origins of this belief are simple -- what's designed for the outdoors should remain outside. While today's version of the old umbrella superstition is said to simply bring "bad luck," Oliver says there used to be a much darker cloud hanging over the belief in ancient times. "In earlier versions, opening an umbrella inside was an omen of death," he explains.
7. Always Have Something in the Oven: This old Jewish superstition could be considered "family friendly." Supposedly, leaving an oven empty will cause one's family to go hungry in the future. To avoid famine, it's enough to leave a baking sheet or a pan in the oven at all times as a precaution. "This belief is linked to ancient rituals in which food was left for household gods in order to ensure protection of the family," Oliver explains.
8. Wear Underwear Inside Out: When having a bad day, superstition suggests that turning your underwear inside out can make it all better. Oliver isn't quite sure where this odd belief came from, but we wouldn't be surprised if originated on a wild college campus somewhere, perhaps during a post-party "walk of shame."
9. Kiss a Mustachioed Man, End Up a Spinster: There are more superstitions revolving around marriage than we can count, and that includes "kissing a dark-skinned man at a wedding." If a woman does this, she'll supposedly get a marriage proposal shortly thereafter. But watch who you're smooching, ladies. If a woman kisses a man with a mustache and finds a stray hair on her lip after, she's destined to be a spinster.
10. Don't Praise Babies in China: If you're in China and you come across an adorable newborn baby, do not under any circumstances compliment the little one. In China, it's considered "unlucky" to praise babies because it "attracts the attention of ghosts and demons." Instead, Oliver says it's customary to "talk badly about babies" to keep evil entities away. Rather than getting upset, parents are told to convert those insults into praise quietly in their heads.
11. Don't Chew Gum at Night in Turkey: Even if your breath stinks, popping in a stick of gum after dinner in Turkey is a bad idea. "It's thought that if you're chewing gum at night in Turkey, you're actually chewing the flesh of the dead," says Oliver. Gross.
12. Lucky Four-Leaf Clovers: Because of how scarce four-leaf clovers really are, just finding one in a field is lucky in and of itself. Oliver says the rare leaf represents everything one could possibly desire in life: "wealth, fame, love and health."
Unlucky 13: The number 13 -- and Friday the 13th -- are considered unfortunate in many places, and the reasons go back to the Bible. Remember, Jesus had 13 disciples until one of them -- Judas -- betrayed him. - AOLNews
NOTE: I don't consider myself superstitious, per se....though I do carry a talisman and would never intentionally piss off a witch...Lon
Hello...
I believe your theory is correct concerning Sasquatch being an inter-dimensional being. One year ago, my daughter and I had a series of terrifying encounters with aliens and something that I came to believe was Sasquatch. Its rather a long story and we are hoping to talk with someone about our experiences, but the last thing we want is publicity. Nothing says "nutcase" like saying you've seen a UFO, then toss in aliens and a bigfoot too. We recorded and photographed everything we could. We have a recording of a 'Bigfoot" calling out whoops to my daughter, then we heard a terrifying scratching sound like large claws on pavement as it ran out of a field towards us. The photo enclosed is the tracks in our yard the next morning. I don't want to write out the whole story, only to have no answer come back or to be treated like we are crazy. So if you want to hear the whole thing, let me know. We live right up against the Bitterroot Mountains on the Idaho/Washington border in a very small town with fields all around us. It started with Black Hawk helicopters chasing a huge UFO, multiple weird sightings, then a ship that came out of the sky at us, aliens in our yard and ended with the sounds of the Bigfoot and finally my daughter experiencing strange visions of a very frightening future time. I believe the aliens and the Bigfoot were connected and you can't just go out looking for them, they have to be "here" in our dimension in order to experience them. My daughter believes our world is meshing with another dimension and the strange sightings people are reporting are all part of something coming down the turnpike at us. We are both professional women and especially my daughter would suffer if our names were connected to anything so crazy sounding as what we experienced. Let me know if you want to hear the whole story, it’s a long one.
Sincerely,
Christine
NOTE: I responded to Christine but have yet to receive a followup...Lon
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I was surprised to see the skinwalker article in your Phantoms and Monsters email. I try to read about skinwalkers and/or Navajo witches whenever I hear of any articles or books about them. When I was a little girl traveling with my family on vacation, we came across something strange that had to have been a skinwalker or Navajo witch. It was 1967 or 1968 and we were driving from Ca to Ark to visit family. On the way to Ark we were on Route 66 outside of Albuquerque, NM and we had stopped at a rest area so my Dad could sleep. It doesn't happen often now, but back then alot of people used to stop and sleep in the rest areas. It was the middle of the night and something startled my father awake. He woke up and was extremely scared and nervous. He was trying to figure out why he woke up and why he felt scared when he saw a man walking across the desert. He said that he almost couldn't take his eyes off the guy because even though the man was kind of far out there, something was wrong. The man was walking towards the rest area from out in the desert, as he got closer, my father saw what was different about him. The man had a fur skin thrown across his shoulders and as he walked his feet were not touching the ground. He passed right beside our car and looked my Dad in the eye. My Dad said that all of the hair on his body stood up and he turned on our car and drove away as fast as he could. It was later that we found out that some crazy guy came into the same rest area, the very same night that we were there, and shot a bunch of people. From what I was told, some of the people were killed. I was a little girl 3 or 4 years old, I was asleep when it all happened, but we never stopped in NM after that. Every year we went to Ark to visit family and we never stopped in NM again, we always drove straight through.
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Overhead view of Uravan, Colorado
MUFON CMS - Uravan, CO - June 1969 - (unedited): I was between for four and five years of age when I had my encounter. My family and I were living in small town west end of Montrose County called Uravan Colorado. In the early morning June of 69 I was waken by the barking of family dog name tippi outside by bedroom window. Tippi never really barked unless someone or something was in a yard that wasn't supposed to be. I remember wakening up out dead sleep and hearing tippi consent barking and wondering why older brother whose sleeping bunk above and my parents sleeping in the bedroom joining ours weren't get tell Tippi to be quit. Finally I had enough it and decided turn over in my bed and look out the window myself. When I did I couldn't believe what saw. There it was a small circle ship with its landed gear down and hatch with stairs fold down to the ground.Next to ship where green kinda lizard looking aliens. Their eyes were bright yellow,and the some tanks on there backs and another bag.They didn't have fingers but kinda web hands that look like to a bow and arrow.Their body were thin,and scaly,and legs also then,their feet had v shaped toes I remember thinking to myself this was some kinda hunting party, because my dad was bow hunter himself and that kinda gave the idea. I could tell the wear searching for something, then all the sudden another alien came of the ship. He was much bigger then the others and seemed to give the others orders. Tippi again began her barking and the alien closes to our house seemed to be upset with her barking. I could see it looking over at tippi, finally it appear "it" to had a problem with tippi barking and started walking over her. I then jump of my bed and headed into my parents room to wake my mother up. I remember how hard it was to wake my mother up and she acted like she was heavy drug or something.I couldn't get her wake up. Finally was able to get her up and told something was going on outside that it was going hurt tippi, she still not wake and sluggish my mother followed me to bed. Once there I showed what I was seeing outside. I don't what they did to my mom but she couldn't see them. All she wanted to do is sleep. Finally my mother got up from my bed and told me crawl to other side my bed away from the window. I did what I told. The last thing remember before going to sleep,was looking over in closet where window casted light on my close and saw to dark figure trying to look in window. No other sound came from Tippi. My mother wasn't drinking or taking anything that would make sedation. I firm believe they did something to family make sleep. It just didn't work on me. The morning the first I did was to run out check on Tippi in pj all. Sure enough she was lying in front yard waiting for kids to come play with her. She acted like nothing happen the night before.
Catalogue of Bizarre Naval Doctors' Records Disclosed by the National Archives
telegraph - In the calm lines of the notebooks' closely spaced copperplate are records of lightning strikes, gun fights and mutinous crews.
There are courts martial, shipwrecks and even murder during the long ocean journeys undertaken by the doctors' ships between 1793 and 1880.
The patients were the ratings, officers, emigrants and convicts being taken - often permanently - to other parts of the Empire and the records of their treatment provide a detailed glimpse into the past.
More than 1,000 Royal Navy Medical Officer Journals have been made accessible to the public following a two-year cataloguing project at the National Archives in Kew.
One passenger was 12-year-old Ellen McCarthy, who was on board the Elizabeth sailing from Cork, Ireland, to Quebec, Canada, in June 1825 when she fell ill and coughed up three intestinal worms which her mother took to the ship's surgeon.
The doctor, identified only as one P Power, wrote: "Complained yesterday evening of pain in the bottom of the belly increased on pressure, abdomen hard and swollen, picks her nose, starts in her sleep, bowels constipated, pyrexia [fever], tongue foul, pulse quick, skin hot, great thirst.
"Her mother brought me a lumbricus [worm] this morning 87 inches long which the patient vomited. The medicine operated well."
The naval surgeon treated the girl with a range of syrups and injections including barley water, calomel [mercury chloride - a laxative now known to be toxic], jalap [a tuber with laxative effects] and brandy punch to ease the symptoms and restore her digestive system to normality."
However, he said the most effective treatment was "oil of terebouth" - or turpentine.
Cures were required for scorpion, tarantula and shark bites, scurvy and many different forms of sexually transmitted diseases, while some of the doctors collected poisonous sea snakes for further study.
Other incidents recorded include offerings of disinterred skulls to Inuits, the 55-year-old sail maker who served in the Navy at Trafalgar and the Army at Waterloo, and the second mate who was lost overboard with the ship's keys in his hand.
Another surgeon was asked to observe Samuel Tapper, an 18-year-old sailor in 1802, and noted: “Tapper’s breasts so perfectly resemble those of a young woman of 18 or 19 that even the male genitals which are also perfect, do not fully remove the imporession that the spectateor is not lookin on a female.”
He was returned to active duty while in January 1802 one James Calloway, a seaman aged 40, fell overboard and was only revived when tobacco smoke was blown into his lungs.
The remedies prescribed seem harsh to modern eyes but the doctors of the time were often pioneering treatments which would later be refined, according to Dan Gilfoyle, the National Archives' diplomatic and colonial records specialist.
Bruno Pappalardo, the project manager, said: "The journals are the most significant source for the study of the history of health at sea for the 19th century."
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Habitable Exoplanet Discovered
wired - After years of saying habitable exoplanets are just around the corner, planet hunters have finally found one. Gliese 581g is the first planet found to lie squarely in its star’s habitable zone, where the conditions are right for liquid water.
“The threshold has now been crossed,” said astronomer R. Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, one of the planet’s discoverers, in a press briefing Sept. 29. “The data says this planet is at the right distance for liquid water, and the right mass to hold on to a substantial atmosphere.”
The discovery is both “incremental and monumental,” comments exoplanet expert Sara Seager of MIT, who was not involved in the new study. When a recent study predicted the first habitable world should show up by next May, Seager rightly said the real answer was more like “any day now.”
“We’ve found smaller and smaller planets that got closer and closer to the habitable zone,” she said. “But this is the first that’s in the habitable zone.”
The new planet is one of six orbiting the star Gliese 581, a red dwarf 20 light-years from Earth. Two of the planet’s siblings, dubbed planets C and D, have also been hailed as potentially habitable worlds. The two planets straddle the region around the star where liquid water could exist — 581c is too hot, and 581d is too cold. But 581g is just right. The discovery will be published in the Astrophysical Journal and online at arxiv.org.
The new planet is about three times the mass of Earth, which indicates it is probably rocky and has enough surface gravity to sustain a stable atmosphere. It orbits its star once every 36.6 Earth days at a distance of just 13 million miles.
The surface of a planet that close to our sun would be scorching hot. But because the star Gliese 581 is only about 1 percent as bright as the sun, temperatures on the new planet should be much more comfortable. Taking into account the presence of an atmosphere and how much starlight the planet probably reflects, astronomers calculated the average temperature ranges from minus 24 degrees to 10 degrees above zero Fahrenheit.
But the actual temperature range is even wider, says astronomer Steven Vogt of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who designed some of the instruments that helped find the planet. Gravity dictates that such a close-in planet would keep the same side facing the star at all times, the same way the moon always shows the same face to Earth.
That means the planet has a blazing-hot daytime side, a frigid nighttime side, and a band of eternal sunrise or sunset where water — and perhaps life — could subsist comfortably. Any life on this exotic world would be confined to this perpetual twilight zone, Vogt says, but there’s room for a lot of diversity.
“You can get any temperature you want on this planet, you just have to move around on its surface,” Vogt said. “There’s a great range of eco-longitudes that will create a lot of different niches for different kinds of life to evolve stably.”
Another advantage for potential life on Gliese 581g is that its star is “effectively immortal,” Butler said. “Our sun will go 10 billion years before it goes nova, and life here ceases to exist. But M dwarfs live for tens, hundreds of billions of years, many times the current age of the universe. So life has a long time to get a toehold.”
The discovery is based on 11 years of observations using the HIRES spectrometer at the Keck Telescope in Hawaii, combined with data from the HARPS (High-Accuracy Radial-velocity Planet Searcher) instrument at the European Southern Observatory in La Silla, Chile.
Both instruments looks for the small wobbles stars make as their planets’ gravity tugs them back and forth. The HIRES project started looking for planets 25 years ago, back “when looking for planets made you look like a nut,” Butler said. At first the instruments could detect changes in a star’s velocity that were 300 meters per second or larger. That’s why the first extrasolar planets discovered were almost exclusively hot Jupiters: These monstrous planets that sit roastingly close to their stars will exert a bigger gravitational pull.
Since then, techniques have improved so that changes as small as 3 meters per second can be seen. That wouldn’t be enough to see Earth from 20 light-years away, Butler says. Because red dwarfs are so small and their habitable zones so close, though, Earth-sized planets have enough gravitational oomph to make a difference.
“The excitement here is that by looking at stars that are small it’s much easier to find small planets,” said exoplanet expert David Charbonneau of Harvard, who is hunting for small planets that cross in front of dwarf stars. “I think it’s great news for those of us looking for this kind of thing around this kind of star.”
But finding them takes a long time. In all, 238 measurements of the star’s wobbles, went into the discovery, and each measurement took a full night of observing.
For Butler and Vogt, though, 11 years wasn’t so long to wait. He’s actually surprised that a potentially habitable planet showed up so quickly and so nearby.
“The fact that we found one so close and so early on in the search suggests there’s a lot of these things,” Butler says. Only about 100 other stars are as close to Earth as Gliese 581, and only 9 of them have been closely examined for planets. Odds are good that 10 to 20 percent of stars in the Milky Way have habitable planets, Vogt says.
Finding them won’t take a huge advance in technology, he adds. It will just take more telescope time.
“I have suggested that we build a dedicated automated planet finder to do this kind of work 365 nights a year,” he said. “If we had something equivalent to Keck that we could use every night, these things would be pouring out of the sky.”
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Drug-Filled Mice Airdropped Over Guam to Kill Snakes
NatGeo - Dead mice packed with drugs were recently airdropped into Guam's dense jungle canopy—part of a new effort to kill an invasive species of snake on the U.S. Pacific island territory.
In the U.S. government-funded project, tablets of concentrated acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, are placed in dead thumb-size mice, which are then used as bait for brown tree snakes.
In humans, acetaminophen helps soothe aches, pains, and fevers. But when ingested by brown tree snakes, the drug disrupts the oxygen-carrying ability of the snakes' hemoglobin blood proteins.
"They go into a coma, and then death," said Peter Savarie, a researcher with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Wildlife Services, which has been developing the technique since 1995 through grants from the U.S. Departments of Defense and Interior.
Only about 80 milligrams of acetaminophen—equal to a child's dose of Tylenol—are needed to kill an adult brown tree snake. Once ingested via a dead mouse, it typically takes about 60 hours for the drug to kill a snake.
"There are very few snakes that will consume something that they haven't killed themselves," added Dan Vice, assistant state director of USDA Wildlife Services in Hawaii, Guam, and the Pacific Islands.
But brown tree snakes will scavenge as well as hunt, he said, and that's the "chink in the brown tree snake's armor."
Snakes Pests Decimated "Naïve" Wildlife
The brown tree snake is an arboreal species native to Australia, Papua New Guinea, and several Pacific islands. The snake preys on birds, lizards, bats, and small mammals.
Inadvertently introduced to Guam from the Solomon Islands after World War II, brown tree snakes are responsible for the extinction or severe reduction of several of the island's native species.
The brown tree snake "is a nocturnal, arboreal predator. There's just nothing like it here. It arrived here and found an island full of very naïve native wildlife," Vice said.
Over the years, scientists have developed several strategies to fight the reptile pest, including traps, snake-detecting dogs, and nighttime spotlight searches along airport and seaport fence lines.
Most of these strategies have focused on keeping the snake species from leaving Guam and sneaking onto ships headed for other islands, such as Hawaii, where scientists fear the predators could wreak similar havoc.
By contrast, this latest approach aims to take the fight into Guam's jungles, where most of the invasive snakes reside.
A popular misconception about Guam, Vice said, is that the entire island is overrun by brown tree snakes. In reality, most of the snakes are concentrated in the island's jungles, where it is difficult for humans to reach.
"You don't walk out the front door and bump into a snake every morning," Vice said.
Before the laced mice are airdropped, they are attached to "flotation devices" that each consist of two pieces of cardboard joined by a 4-foot-long (1.2-meter-long) paper streamer.
The flotation device was designed to get the bait stuck in upper tree branches, where the brown tree snakes reside, instead of falling to the jungle floor, where the drug-laden mice might inadvertently get eaten by nontarget species, such as monitor lizards.
There are few other species on Guam that could be tempted by the mouse bait, USDA's Savarie said, because the brown tree snakes have eaten most of them.
On September 1 USDA researchers performed a small-scale airdrop of about 200 baited mice onto 20 acres (8 hectares) of jungle around the U.S. Naval Base in Guam. USDA personnel flying low over Guam's jungles in helicopters dropped the baited devices one at a time, to ensure even coverage.
The drop was only the second in the project's history, and was done to help refine the technique before a larger field test is conducted in late 2010 or early 2011.
A small subset of mice in the latest drop was equipped with radio transmitters, which the team will use to determine the baits' efficiency.
"If we go out tomorrow and the radio signal from the bait has moved, it's very likely that [it was eaten by] a snake," Savarie said.
Wildlife Services collects the bodies of only the snakes that eat the mice that have radiocollars.
"We would not find other snakes that would eat the bait," said Kathy Fagerstone, Technology Transfer Program Manager for USDA Wildlife Services.
"However, the amount of acetaminophen in each mouse is small and would not present environmental hazards."
The baited mice could prove to be an effective tool against Guam's brown tree snakes, especially medium- and large-size adults, said Haldre Rogers, a biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle who researches the effects of bird loss on Guam's native forests.
"The development of more tools like this is very important for restoring Guam's forests in the long run," said Rogers, who was not involved in the USDA project.
But all the tools currently at scientists' disposal, including the drug-filled mice, will at best simply control the island's snake population, not eradicate it entirely, she said.
"It's another arrow in our quiver," she said. "Unfortunately, we don't have the silver bullet for brown tree snakes yet."
USDA's Vice agreed: "There are a lot of things out there to control brown tree snakes. They all work, but they don't work completely," he said. "The idea of this aerial delivery of oral toxicants is that we now have a control tool that we can apply across a larger landscape."
Longer term, USDA researchers hope to create a nonbiological substitute for dead mice in the bait, something that the snakes will eat but that won't rot or attract flies, ants, and maggots in the jungle.
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JonBenet Ramsey Murder Case Heating Up Again
aol - The author of a book about the slaying of 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey says police want to reinterview her brother, who was 9 when the young beauty queen was killed in 1996.
Burke Ramsey, now 23, graduated from Purdue University in Indiana last year and lives in Atlanta, according to his Facebook page.
Boulder, Colo., police refuse to confirm a report that they want to question the brother of JonBenet Ramsey, shown here at a pageant in July 1996, regarding her death.
He was exonerated by DNA testing after JonBenet was strangled in the Ramsey family home in Boulder, Colo., but authorities are reportedly hoping that he may remember additional details.
Lawrence Schiller, author of a book about the Ramsey case titled "Perfect Murder, Perfect Town," told CBS's "The Early Show" on Tuesday that his sources had told him police were hoping to question the young man.
"They said the police had sent on their business cards and asked Burke, if his time permitted, if he could get in touch with them," Schiller said.
Boulder police refused today to confirm the report.
"We are not going to publicly reveal details about the investigation unless doing so would further the needs of the investigation," Police Chief Mark Beckner said in a statement.
After a seven-year hiatus, Boulder police became involved in the case again last year, creating a task force to review details and make recommendations. Beckner said at that time that advances in DNA testing and linguistics technology might help solve the case. He said agencies participating in the task force were the FBI, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, the Colorado attorney general's office, the Denver district attorney's office, and the Boulder County and Jefferson County sheriff's departments.
FBI spokesman Dave Joly told AOL News today that he had not heard of any developments in the case. Ramsey could not be reached for comment. His phone number is unlisted.
Last year, Beckner said authorities had investigated 140 people as potential suspects. He said in his statement today that based on recommendations from the task force, there has been additional contact with those who may have information pertaining to the case. Authorities refused to elaborate.
JonBenet was found bludgeoned and strangled in the basement of her family's house on Dec. 26, 1996. A ransom note seeking $118,000 was also found in the 7,000-square-foot home.
Boulder, an affluent community 35 miles northwest of Denver, was shaken by the crime, the only murder in 1996. Initially, prosecutors said JonBenet's parents, John and Patsy, were under "an umbrella of suspicion." A grand jury refused to indict them, but they weren't officially cleared until 2008.
Patsy Ramsey died in June 2006 of ovarian cancer. Less than two months later, John Mark Karr, a 41-year-old teacher in Thailand obsessed with JonBenet's killing, was arrested after making bizarre, detailed confessions in her death. He was brought back to the United States, but he was released after authorities said his DNA did not match evidence in the case. No one has ever been tried for the crime.
John Ramsey, who now lives in Michigan, ran unsuccessfully for the Michigan House of Representatives in 2004.
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Sarah Palin Obtains Order Against 'Evil' Stalker
Sarah Palin has obtained a protective order against an 18-year-old Pennsylvania man who began stalking the former Alaska Governor last year, the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman in Wasilla, Alaska reported Wednesday.
A 20-day protective order was issued in Anchorage District Court against Shawn R. Christy who Palin, 46, said sent her receipts from a gun purchase, along with a letter which read "he tried to follow the Bible but had evil and wickedness in him."
Palin's friend Kristan Cole, 48, also received a protective order against Christy for stalking her and her family.
Christy is prohibited from following, approaching, confronting, watching or otherwise staking or threatening to stalk or assault Palin or Cole and their families.
Christy claimed he had a sexual relationship with Palin but the former Republican vice-presidential candidate has disputed the allegation.
Attorney Thomas Van Flein provided evidence from the Secret Service that alleged Christy wanted to sexually assault Palin.
Cole and Palin requested a long-term order which will be heard in court on October 13 at Anchorage District Court.
I received the following email in reference to the Winged Manta Ray Shaped Cryptid post on August 16, 2010 (reposted below). I had heard that there was buzz in reference to this phenomenon recently....a few attendees at the 9th Annual Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, WV apparently mentioned new sightings. If anyone has witnessed anything unusual, please contact me at lonstrickler@phantomsandmonsters.com:
This is a very interesting report. I've been researching ghost, monster and cryptid reports in West Virginia for a few years now. Wrote a wee slim book on the topic. We now have a growing body of reports and stories about an odd "ray-shaped" cryptid in the area. For my book, I collected a story (which at the time I thought was an excellent story but very unlikely--just too weird to credit much beyond its campfire value) about a man who encountered a huge ray-shaped thing straddling the road ahead of him. Initially it was visible only as two reddish-orange spots that he mistook for bicycle reflectors in the fog. When he honked his horn, the "reflectors" blinked at him, then the whole body lifted up off the road and sort of glided down over the hill to disappear into the fog-filled valley below.
There is a sighting reported in Bob Tweet's excellent "West Virginia UFO's: Close Encounters in the Mountain State" in which a boy in a car spots a white "furry" shape gliding along beside the car. It was described as being four feet across with no discernible limbs or separate head.
More recently, a woman and her daughter reported the "Horton Horror" near Horton WV. This was also a manta-shaped Something that glided along over or near their car.
There's an old story about something in the fog at Foggy Bottom (I believe this particular "Foggy Bottom" is an area near Wheeling, WV--since developed) in which a dog is lifted up above the fog and is whisked off--sitting on the top of something that glides away. Dog is never seen again. That story is presented as a sort of UFO encounter, but I think it fits the pattern forming for these other stories.
There are now at least three stories/sightings from near Point Pleasant and others up the Ohio Valley. Strange.
I have no idea what is going on, what people may or may not be seeing, but I think there are enough reports now to say that this represents SOME kind of phenomenon. Folks, we have an emerging Monster tradition! All fresh and relatively new! Something that is most definitely not another manifestation of "Mothman", but a phenomenon in its own right!
Hey! I'm excited! It's not everyday you get to watch a paranormal or cryptozoological pattern form almost right in front of your eyes!
Kurt McCoy
(author "White Things: West Virginia's Weird White Monsters" and self-confessed monster aficionado)
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Winged Manta Ray Shaped Cryptid - Near Ashton, WV - 12/3/2004
I received the following email in reference to my post The Mothman Cometh: John Keel's Reports on August 13th. Much of this was included in a piece written by Chris Holly, but there have been a few changes. Note...click images for larger version:
Hi Lon, thanks for responding so quickly. Here are my drawings and report. Chris Holly reported my story pretty much verbatim, so I will repeat it here for you in a slightly different form.
Date: Dec. 3, 2004
Time:6:00 - 7:00pm
Weather Conditions: clear and already dark. Moon hadn't risen yet
Location: Traveling south on Rt.2 in WV from Point Pleasant to Huntington WV. Near Ashton WV (see map)
A friend and I were traveling on Rt. 2 towards Huntington WV. I was on my way to set up my booth for an art show and my mind was occupied with the booth set up and show logistics. We had just gone over the railroad tracks outside of Ashton WV and were on a long straight stretch of road. There was distant oncoming traffic and the headlights were on. There were no cars behind us in sight. I was in the passenger seat and my friend was driving. I noticed a sudden movement in the sky over the Ohio River to my right in front of the car. It was a greyish, smooth, winged shape. the shape swooped in a figure 8 in front of the windshield and then was suddenly gone to the left of us. It didn't fly out of sight, it was just gone. This happened very quickly, but as I am a visual artist, it was impressed into my memory banks!
Size: Bigger than the car. The wingspread was wider than the 2 lane road we were on. The wings seemed to stretch wider somehow as it did the figure 8 swoop. It was never more than 25 feet away from us as it flew towards the windshield. We thought it was going to crash into the windshield! At one point during the swoop it was only about 5 feet off of the pavement.
Color: Grey, translucent like a jellyfish. As it banked and swooped I could see many angles of it and somehow it looked more transparent as it turned some parts to us. I immediately thought it was like a manta ray. The body was flattish like a manta ray or a bat. The wings were long and smooth and sort of pointed at the tip. I saw no texture or roughness on it, only smooth surface.
Characteristics: Only body and wings- no head, eyes, tail, or feet. It did not look humanoid in any way. On the other hand, it wasn't a bird either. It moved more like something in the ocean would move - Did not flap the wings like a bird, or flutter them like a bat, but stretched them instead. My friend (who alas passed away a year ago) said to him the wings looked ragged like there were pieces coming off of them.
He also said he got a good look at the underneath and it looked grey and smooth. This absolutely was not a machine! It was articulated like a living creature and seemed like something organic.
As I look back on this sighting, I wonder if it was something playing with us - It happened so quickly that the only scary part was when we thought it was going to crash into the windshield. It was so beautiful and strange! It reminded me of a sea creature more than anything else, maybe our air is like water to them.
The only other time in my life I have ever seen anything remotely similar was in 2000 in Clay Co. WV, driving along a one lane road along the Elk River (a river was present in both instance -I just realized) In that case, I was alone and for about a mile as I drove, I kept noticing a shimmer in front of the car about 15 feet ahead of the car. This was late morning in the summer. It preceeded the car at the same distance for several minutes, then I noticed a shadow on the road too, large and shaped sort of like a bird. I looked up out of the windshield and there was a large crow flying above me. But what I first saw in front of the car was not a shadow, it was a disturbance in the air in front of my car that looked like a heat mirage sort of but was very close. This was a curvy country road right by the river. I had never seen heat mirages on that road before or since. At the time I thought that it was just sort of weird, then very close to that time I had a very lucid dream that I was in my car flying over the river right near the place where I saw the shadow.
As an artist, my mind is open to many possibilities and explanations - I think the unseen world is just a small vibrational frequency away. As a child I was fascinated by fairies and nature spirits and spent a lot of time alone outdoors.
NOTE: though there have been several variations in describing the 'Mothman', this particular description is unique and most likely represents another cryptid or non-terrestrial entity. As well as the Mothman sightings, the area along the Ohio River (southern Ohio and southwest West Virginia) has had a large number of other paranormal events including UFOs, large apparitions and hauntings, native and folklore based creatures, etc...Lon
dispatch - The best scientists in the world may have long ago written off the Bathurst “baboon boy” as a hoax but more than 60 years after he died, there are still a handful of people alive who cling to the belief he was a real-life Tarzan.
“It is fascinating for those of us that knew Lucas the Baboon Boy to still hear people writing him off as bulls**t,” 81-year-old retired farmer Gordon Arnold said.
As a child, Arnold would grab his catapult and hunt birds with “Luke” – who he claims “would wring their necks, pull out a few feathers and eat them raw” – in the Trappes Valley area 70 years ago.
“I was always convinced the story of Lucas the baboon boy was true.”
Arnold said Lucas had scars all over his body, including a massive one across his face, apparently from when he tried to steal ostrich eggs with the baboon troop. “He also said he broke his leg when he fell off a krantz stealing honey with the baboons.”
South Africa’s own Tarzan boy made headlines in the Dispatch and all over the world between 1928 and 1938, and there was even talk of making a Hollywood movie . But it all fell apart when the esteemed American Journal of Psychology (AJP) labelled the story a hoax in 1940.
According to a Dispatch story on a paper by internationally renowned Wits University anatomy professor Raymond Dart to a science congress in East London in 1939, the story of Lucas was “the most strongly certified case” of a feral child .
But Dart revised his findings less than a year later when he told the AJP he now considered the story an elaborate attempt to “exploit” and cash in on a “low grade imbecile”.
In the 1953 book Assegai over the Hills, by Grahamstown author FC Metrowich, news of Lucas’ death in Settler’s Hospital in 1948 “created only a faint stir of excitement in the South African press”.
“Yet there was a time this primitive, uneducated K****r achieved worldwide notoriety,” he wrote.
In the book, a copy of which is at the Cory Library at Rhodes University, a young Xhosa baby was “kidnapped” by baboons when his mother left him under a bush while she tilled a field.
Legend has it that several years later, in 1900, a young boy was captured by police after he was spotted running with a troop of baboons near Bathurst and taken to the Grahamstown Mental Hospital.
But no records of the feral boy existed at the hospital. Subsequent interviews with officials revealed although a young boy called Lucas was found and admitted to the hospital at the time, he came from “Burghersdorp” – miles away from where the baboon boy was allegedly found near the Fish River.
It was only after he was taken in by Bathurst blacksmith George H Smith in 1903 that the baboon boy story took root. He lived with the Smiths for more than 40 years.
A treasure trove of photographs and press clippings detailing the controversial “baboon boy” are housed at Grahamstown’s Albany Museum and Cory Library, which both allowed the Dispatch access to the archives.
Norman Clayton, who went to school with Smith’s son Eric 80 years ago, told how he used to see Lucas every day on his way to school at nearby Thornhill Farm. The retired farmer, 89, said Lucas “did not talk much” and was “a bit backward”.
“Lucas used to act like a baboon … he would run on all fours.”
Although academics scoff at claims that Lucas was raised by baboons, Clayton said locals always believed it. “We never questioned it … he ran around like a baboon.”
Eric Smith died earlier this year. His widow, “Aunt Aggie”, never met the “baboon boy”, but she heard all about him during their 59 years of marriage. “Some people say it is hooey, but I don’t think so. Eric always said it was true.”
Another retired farmer recalled Lucas riding a horse with no tack. “Boet, he used to ride around bareback … he would use his feet to steer the horse.”
But US historian Professor Roger Levine, who teaches modern South African and African history at Sewanee: University of the South, Tennessee, is not convinced Lucas ever lived with baboons. Levine did a “bunch of work on Lucas” when he was in Cape Town 10 years ago that featured on National Geographic’s Is it Real TV series for an episode on “wild” children. “ I argue that the way he was presented to the world reveals a lot about white racial attitudes.”
Levine, born in Johannesburg and educated at Boston and Yale universities, is certain the story was a hoax designed to cash in on a person who was “slow or mentally retarded”. “My take on it is that he exhibited a certain set of behaviour that Smith saw and said ‘I can say he grew up that way’ – and then perhaps he coached Lucas on how to answer certain questions.” Calling the “white settlers gullible”, Levine said: “I think it’s to do with how whites at the time hoped to view Africans … almost like wish fulfilment.”
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Las Vegas Hotel 'Death Ray' Burning Guests
myfoxla - A new hotel on the Las Vegas strip is so hot that it is burning guests.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the south-facing tower of the curving Vdara Hotel at CityCenter is reflecting the sun's rays and directing them at the pool area, melting plastic and causing hot areas. Hotel pool employees are calling it the "Vdara death ray."
A spokesman for Vdara owner MGM Resorts International is using the term "hot spot" or "solar convergence" and said designers are working with staff to find solutions.
Solar convergence is when the sun's heat is amplified off a curved building and creates areas of increased heat. The heat at the hotel pool was strong enough that the metal parts of some chairs were too hot to touch, AOL News found on a visit Monday.
Chicago attorney Bill Pintas, who owns a condo in the $8.5 billion, six-skyscraper development, which opened in December, told the news site that he experienced the intense heat after returning to his chair after a swim.
"Within 30 seconds, the back of my legs and back were burning, he said. My first thought was, 'They destroyed the ozone layer!"
ABC News reported that the heat has also melted plastic.
The Review-Journal said designers had worried about such an issue and tried to solve it by using a high-tech film on the south-facing glass panes. MGM spokesman Gordon Absher said more than 70 percent of the sun's reflected rays are scattered but acknowledged that is not enough.
Pintas, a personal injury attorney, told AOL News that he believes there is a liability issue.
"It's just a matter of time before someone's going to be very badly hurt," he said.
Absher said other Las Vegas resorts with glass facades have had similar problems.
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Another Chef Ramsay 'Goner'
nypost - A New Jersey restaurateur once featured on Gordon Ramsay's "Kitchen Nightmares" -- and told by the TV chef that his debt-ridden eatery was "about to swim down the Hudson" -- was eerily found floating in the river after jumping off the George Washington Bridge.
Joseph Cerniglia, the 39-year-old owner of Campania in Fair Lawn, is the second chef to commit suicide after appearing on one of Ramsay's high-heat, reality-cooking series.
Cerniglia -- once the executive chef at Manhattan's famed Gallagher's Steak House -- had been deeply in debt when his Italian eatery was featured in the first season of "Kitchen Nightmares" in 2007.
During the series, foul-mouthed celebrity foodie Ramsay would verbally bash down-on-their-luck restaurateurs in hopes of getting them back on track.
"Your business is about to f - - king swim down the Hudson," the brash Brit berated Cerniglia, a married dad of three who lived in Pompton Lakes.
Ramsay fumed about the eatery's huge portions, lousy food quality, poor service and the sophomoric antics of the kitchen staff.
"Why did you become a chef-owner if you haven't a clue how to run a business?" Ramsay railed at Cerniglia.
Cerniglia conceded that "Campania definitely has its share of problems, big problems."
He noted that the once-popular restaurant had fallen into desperate straits.
"I'm financially in trouble -- the debt of the restaurant alone is overwhelming. My personal debt -- wife, kids mortgage -- that's a lot of debt," he moaned on the show.
"I owe my purveyors about $80,000 right now in cold, hard cash . . . I can't see us going on another year."
Cerniglia's wife, Melissa, sobbed during the show, "People like us put everything on the line for a dream, and I just want to see him have the time to succeed.
"If this business fails, we will lose everything."
Cerniglia's business managed to survive after Ramsay made a series of changes and held a grand reopening.
In fact, patrons yesterday said the eatery had been thriving.
"The place is really doing well -- the parking lot is packed on weekends," said a woman who works at the tanning salon next door.
Another salon worker, Evelina Grzymala, 22, said Cerniglia was grateful to Ramsey for helping him turn his business around.
"[Cerniglia] said Ramsey was intense but that he turned out to be a nice guy, that in the end, he helped him out," Grzymala recalled.
"I don't believe Joe's gone," she said sadly. "I saw him here last week, and he was on his cellphone, waving and walking by, like he always did."
Cerniglia killed himself Friday afternoon. Authorities said a motorist called 911 after seeing a man standing on the George Washington Bridge just before 1 p.m. His body was later recovered from the river.
Cerniglia's family posted a message on his Facebook page saying they wanted "to thank all of the friends that have sent their condolences" -- and asked that financial donations be sent in lieu of flowers to support his widow and their three sons, Evan, Michael and Nicholas.
In a statement issued this morning, Ramsay said, “I was fortunate to spend time with Joe during the first season of 'Kitchen Nightmares.' Joe was a brilliant chef, and our thoughts go out to his family, friends and staff.”
The first person to star in a Ramsay show and then kill herself was chef Rachel Brown.
Brown, 41, competed on Ramsay's "Hell's Kitchen" -- a series pitting aspiring chefs against each other -- in 2006.
She had been eliminated on the fifth episode, but returned to the series for the finale to help chef Heather West nab the top prize.
Brown shot herself to death in her family's Dallas home a year later.
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Another Genius
metro - One man has proved people will do almost anything for money, after a leaked mugshot has shown him with the name of a radio station tattooed on his forehead. David Jonathan Winkelman was listening to the hard rock station KORB with his stepbrother Richard Goddard back in the year 2000, when the presenter announced anyone willing to permanently etch the logo of the station on their forehead would be in for a six-figure sum.
The gullible pair, who hail from Iowa in the US, upon hearing the offer, paid a visit to the local tattoo parlour and emerged a short while later with Quad City Rocker and 93 Rock etched on their faces. They then went on to hear the most disappointing news of their lives, when staff at the radio station informed the brothers that the competition had in fact been a practical joke – and their six-figure payout would never materialise.
Winkelman has now found that his mistake has been plastered all over the internet, after a mugshot taken when he was arrested on a misdemeanour charge found its way online.
Following the incident, both Winkelman and Goddard tried to sue the station, claiming that it had intended to permanently mark its listeners so they 'could be publicly scorned and ridiculed for their greed and lack of common good sense'. Both cases were eventually dismissed. With tattoo removal often costing thousands of pounds and taking several months, it looks like the pair will have to put up with the funny looks for a bit longer.
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New Stonehenge Mystery
cbsnews - A wealthy young teenager buried near Britain's mysterious Stonehenge monument came from the Mediterranean hundreds of miles away, scientists said Wednesday, proof of the site's importance as a travel destination in prehistoric times.
The teen - dubbed "The Boy with the Amber Necklace" because he was unearthed with a cluster of amber beads around his neck - is one of several sets of foreign remains found around the ancient ring of imposing stones, whose exact purpose remains unknown.
The British Geological Survey's Jane Evans said that the find, radiocarbon dated to 1,550 B.C., "highlights the diversity of people who came to Stonehenge from across Europe," a statement backed by Bournemouth University's Timothy Darvill, a Stonehenge scholar uninvolved with the discovery.
"The find adds considerable weight to the idea that people traveled long distances to visit Stonehenge, which must therefore have had a big reputation as a cult center," Darvill said in an e-mail Wednesday. "Long distance travel was certainly more common at this time than we generally think."
The skeleton, thought to be that of a 14- or 15-year-old, was unearthed about two miles (3 kilometers) southeast of Stonehenge, in southern England.
Clues to the adolescent's foreign origins could be found in the necklace, which isn't a recognized British type. But he was traced to the area around the Mediterranean Sea by a technique known as isotope analysis, which in this case measured the ratio of strontium and oxygen isotopes in his tooth enamel.
Different regions have different mixes of elements in their drinking water, for example, and some of those are absorbed into a person's tooth enamel as he or she grows up. Analysis of the isotopes of oxygen and strontium carried in the enamel can give scientists a good but rather general idea of where a person was raised.
The teen, whose necklace suggests he came from a rich family, is one of several long-distance travelers found near Stonehenge. The "Amesbury Archer," so-called because of the stone arrowheads he was found with, was buried three miles (5 kilometers) from Stonehenge but is thought to have come from the Alpine foothills of central Europe. The "Boscombe Bowmen," also found nearby, are thought to have come from Wales or possibly Brittany.
It isn't clear precisely what drew these people to Stonehenge, a site which has existed in various forms for some 5,000 years. It clearly had an important ceremonial function, and the area around it is dotted with the remains of prehistoric monuments and tombs. Some say it was at the center of a sun-worshipping culture or that it served as a kind of astronomical calendar.
Others, like Darvill, also say it might have been an important healing site, drawing pilgrims from across Europe like a prehistoric version of Lourdes.
In January 3, 1979 a Cuban exile Filiberto Cardenas was abducted in front of his family. Later, he had an encounter introducing his wife to the entities. This may be the first case on record where the original abductee was able to successfully introduce another person into the contact events and to actually take them aboard a UFO with them.
ORIGINAL REPORT
1st Encounter
Location/Date: Near Miami, Florida - January 3, 1979 - 6:30 pm
Filiberto Cardenas, age 45, was driving on Okeechobee Road, with three family friends just north of the city, when the car engine suddenly failed. He and another man got out of the car to check under the hood when a large luminous object emitting a humming sound descended over the vehicle. The witness vanished in plain sight of the others apparently taken up into the object by a beam of light. He was found dazed 2 hours later and 16 miles away from the original location by a police officer.
Later he recalled being taken up and blacking out. He found himself on board the object and three human-like beings all dressed in tight-fitting white suits took him to a ocean front like location where they opened a "lock" on a rock and entered through a tunnel beneath the sea. The beings were of average height, wearing dark tight fitting outfits that covered their heads, with winged snake-like emblems on their chests. They spoke to the witness in Spanish and mainly spoke about coming wars and disasters. He was led to a seat made out of stone and was given a liquid to drink that tasted like honey. A huge door then opened in front of him and several persons began coming out. Cardenas began feeling a strong pressure in his chest and at this point an individual approached him and told him he was welcomed. The individual appeared totally human and spoke with a South American accent. Indeed this man told Cardenas that he was from earth but had lived with the extraterrestrials for a while now.
He was taken through a door and corridor into what appeared to be a great city. He then entered a small room, there he was suddenly sucked into the wall, which then flipped over and became a bed. Paralyzed he was unable to move and noticed several figures moving around him. As a light blinded him something was inserted into his ear. From the wall emerged what appeared to be several arms ending in suction cups that covered his body almost totally. He felt no pain but could not move. After the examination he was taken into another room. There he saw a tall seat and on it was a tall man wearing a cape. He also saw numerous consoles and monitors. He was shown images of three pyramids joined by a thin ray of light.
Cardenas apparently slept several times and was awakened and given several tablets to eat. In another room he saw several human like figures wearing gray coveralls. In another room he saw a large gathering of people in what he thought was a "party". Soon he was taken into another room where he saw a large rocket style ship in which he was taken into along with three other humans. He was made to sit on a suction-like seat. After a short trip he was made to exit and given something to eat. He last saw the object disappear into the distance.
Cardenas was found disoriented by a police officer in an isolated section of southwest 8th Street. A medical examination found 108 tiny pricks on Cardenas body. Days after the encounter he suffered from severe sweating, extreme thirst and body temperature changes as well as a strong sulfur like smell followed him. He also suffered from memory loss, decreased sexual appetite and strange space-time altering episodes.
2nd Encounter
SECOND ENCOUNTER
Location/Date: Near Miami, Florida - February 21, 1979 - 1:00 pm
Filiberto Cardenas, this time accompanied by his wife, felt compelled to return to the site of the previous abduction. There they both entered a hovering top shaped craft with numerous terminals and buttons inside. Two men and a woman met them...each was four-foot tall, dressed in tight fitting silvery suits that covered everything except for their faces. The outfits had a serpent-like emblem on their chest area. An antenna like device covered their ears. This time the beings communicated with the witnesses via telepathy and spoke among themselves in an Arabic sounding language. They spoke mainly about universal love.
Source: Thomas E Bullard, "UFO Abductions The Measure of A Mystery"
A drawing of the ship used on the second abduction, and believed to have been used on the first one also. From an original sketch by Iris Cardenas. There were brilliant colored lights completely around the rim of ship, and the gondola-like cabin also had lights on its bottom. (credit: Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo)
Small craft where Mr. Cardenas flew underwater to the pyramid base in the ocean.(credit: Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo)
FILIBERTO CARDENAS CASE
Synopsis of the Case
From 1979 until 1982, we studied an abduction ease which required a staggering amount of work to complete. After careful review, we were convinced that a UFO contact and abduction had taken place. The case was investigated by a special team of professionals including engineers, doctors, a psychologist, a neurologist and a professional hypnotist. It also received the special attention of the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who maintained contact and advised us at difficult moments when we needed his cooperation.
On the evening of January 3, 1979, Filiberto Cardenas was in his gift shop, in Hialeah, when he received a call from his friend Fernando Marti. Fernando asked Filiberto to accompany him to the outskirts of the city to buy a pig from the local merchants, as he wanted to roast it the following Sunday. In a short time he appeared at Filiberto's business with his wife Mirta and their daughter Isabel, who was 13 years old.
Fernando agreed to drive his friend's station wagon after Filiberto said he was tired. They drove to two farms bud had no luck finding an available pig. They turned off onto a side road, following an arrow that marked the desired direction, and from there they turned onto another rural road in bad condition.
As they came off the dirt road onto the side road, the automobile began to lose power, and the engine died. Fernando, at the wheel, tried to start the engine but there was no response at all. The men looked at each other and they got out of the car. Fernando opened the hood and they both looked in trying to see what could be wrong, to locate the failure. He returned to the seat and tried to crank the engine again. Nothing, not even the lights would function. Filiberto was in front of the car looking under the hood near the battery. He didn't know much about mechanics and tried to see if the cables were loose or grounding, but they seemed to be firmly connected to the battery. Fernando got out of the car again and looked down past the hood near the windshield thinking that the problem could be in the general electrical connection situated near the steering column.
They were like this, Filiberto under the hood in front and Fernando under the hood on the right hand side, lying over the top of the engine so as to see behind it, when suddenly both of them realized that the engine was reflecting red and violet light in sequence. At the same time they heard a strange sound. Fernando later described it as "a swarm of bees". The sound as well as the light that illuminated the engine increased, and the whole car began to shake. Mrs. Marti, who was sitting on the back seat with her daughter Isabel at her side, began to panic. The Marti family came to live in Florida from California because of a bad earthquake. This had left a profound impression on Mrs. Marti, and her first thought, upon hearing the sound and seeing the light, was that they were facing a similar phenomenon. She pulled Isabel down across the seat of the car and covered her with her body as she screamed in panic.
When Filiberto heard the shouts from Mrs. Marti and her daughter, he tried to run to their aid but felt paralyzed. He could see lights and hear sound but could not move. He felt as though something restrained and impeded his movement. Fernando, in fear, tried to crawl further under the hood, seeking protection, when he also found himself immobile with his feet sticking out in the air from under the hood. He could not move.
Filiberto felt as though the force that paralyzed him began to lift him and suspended him in the air. Fernando, from under the hood, could see Filiberto as he began to rise. He could hear Filiberto shout, "Don't take me... Don't take me". Filiberto could see the car as he was lifted off the ground.
The noise and the light ceased and everything seemed to return to normal. Fernando came out from under the hood and looked toward the sky to see "like a bulky object (UFO) that ascended and then moved away". Full of fear, remembering that his wife and daughter were still in the back seat of the car, he shouted, "They have taken Filiberto...Mama, they have taken Filiberto". Then he got into the driver's seat and tried to crank the engine. After several attempts the engine started but it ran very poorly, "as if it were out of gasoline". When he got the car running, he returned to the highway.
Along the way he thought he should advise the police, but he was afraid they would not believe him and would think he had done something to Filiberto. Then he decided he had to run the risk, and near the edge of town he stopped at a service station on upper 29th Street. From there he called the police. He then called Mrs. Iris Cardenas and said that, "A light took Filiberto away";. Fernando got back into the car and he, Mirta and Isabel continued along the road; and as they came to the town of Hialeah, they saw a police car. He stopped and explained to the sergeant in the patrol car what had just happened.
At first, the police presumed that Filiberto would be found lost or unconscious. Fernando, in his confusion, thought that he might be mistaken about what he had seen, and decided to go back and look. Since it was already dark, the police tried to contact the Air Base at Homestead, to send an airplane or a helicopter with lights to the spot where the incident took place.
While all this was taking place, Filiberto first became aware of a sound of tires running on pavement. He was in the middle of a different highway, the Tamiami Trail, later found to be some 16 kilometers south of the place where he had disappeared two hours before.
The first officer to arrive on the scene was Patrolman William Christian, who at first felt he had a drunk, or someone who had been assaulted and left on the highway. A second officer arrived, but they could not communicate with Filiberto because of the language barrier and also the condition that Filiberto was in. Filiberto does not speak English but is fluent in Spanish, having been raised in Cuba. They searched his pockets and found identification. They decided to take him to the police station. On the way Filiberto began to recuperate. From the identification papers found on him, the police radioed ahead to the police dispatcher a general description of what was happening.
Meanwhile, in Hialeah, the police were getting ready to go out and search for the missing man when they received his description over the radio. They suspended their search plans and took Mrs. Cardenas and Fernando and his family to the police station.
According to one official, something very strange and very uncommon happened to Filiberto. On the official report, under Type of Offense, he wrote: CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF THE THIRD KIND. This may be the first time in the United States that on an official report, the police admitted that an abduction by a UFO had taken place.
THE ABDUCTION
After having been paralyzed by a combination of mysterious light and sound Filiberto woke up in a seat that seemed to hold him in place by some kind of suction which restrained all his movements. He was in a small room. At his side were three strange figures. One of the strange beings approached carrying a special kind of helmet in his hands. He raised it and placed it on Filiberto's head.
This helmet seemed to be full of small needles that came down to the shoulders. The beings tried to communicate with Filiberto, speaking in a language that sounded to Filiberto like German. When they realize that Filiberto did not understand, one of the beings rotated a button on the right side of his chest and then began to speak in English. Filiberto indicated that he did not understand that either. Again the strange being rotated the button and began this time to speak in Spanish. with a Portuguese or Italian accent. Meanwhile they continued making tests on Filiberto's body these test left 108 marks on his body.
The entities made him pass through to another bigger room. There, on a high seat, like a throne, was seated an individual wearing a cape. This person, who seemed to be in charge, perhaps their chief, addressed Filiberto in perfect Spanish while at the same time transmitting ideas telepathically.
The conversation revolved in turn from the subjects of human beings to humanity. On the walls they projected images, something like television pictures, that showed scenes from the past, the present, and also the future.
After this they opened another port and the captive Filiberto was carried to a small room, where he was placed in a seat similar to the first which sucked him down and impeded his movements as before. He was now in a small ship that was discharged from the mother- ship. Nearing the end of this flight, Filiberto could see what looked like a stretch of narrow beach approaching.
The UFOs began to move and plunge into the sea. All was obscured by the incredible velocity at witch the vehicle moved. The ship veered to the right and began to lose speed. In front of them Filiberto could now see a tunnel with walls that seen illuminated, as if they were phosphorescent. The ship went into this tunnel and later came to a stop in a place that was completely dry. It looked like a large cavern but he notice that it did not have any stalactites or stalagmites. It was a very big place. Here was a place made out of rock, where he noticed two symbols. One of them had the form of a serpent. It was of great size, as big as an "electric light pole." The other was similar to the first but smaller. In that place the entities disembarked from the ship with their captive and took him to a rock, where they let him sit down.
They opened an enormous door, and a number of "people" came out. Filiberto felt as if he could not breath, and a pressure on his chest. The sensations and odors were very strange in this place. At this point someone came up to Filiberto and said: "WELCOME."
This individual spoke to him in perfect Spanish with a South American accent. He looked like an Earth person. He informed Filiberto that he was "from Earth and had been for some time working with the entities." He also said that "he should be happy, because he was going to receive some instructions from a human being like us."
After they had taken Filiberto through another door toward a street of what seemed to be a city, they crossed it and entered a small building. In this place Filiberto felt like he was sucked up against a wall. This panel revolved a turn and converted itself into a sort of table. From the walls came mechanical arms full of instruments with which they looked at and tested most of his body. Upon terminating the examination they let him get up and get dressed again. They demonstrated, by means of the televisions, to Filiberto, new and different things that were going to occur.
He was taken to a big room where there was a ship (UFO) in a vertical position "like our big rockets." They went inside of this, and encountered in this spaceship three more entities, who placed him in one of those suction seats as before, and then they set up the controls and manipulated the ship for departure. Filiberto could see nothing of what was happening outside. After a short trip the door of the UFO opened and Filiberto was let out of the ship, in a pasture.
THE SECOND ENCOUNTER
On the night of February 21, 1979, Filiberto and his wife Iris could not sleep and decided to go to the place where Filiberto was abducted. It was around 5:00 AM. when the second encounter with a UFO ship and his occupants took place.
After returning to his house, Filiberto called me and told my wife what had happened. That afternoon I received a call from one of our local group, to inform me that he had received calls that people at Miami International Airport had observed a UFO that morning. One of the older employees at the airport had observed a large mother-ship and various smaller objects flying around it. There were five or six of us there. The object seemed fixed in the sky. It was round and had like three lights, one very white, one yellow, and the other one also white but more opaque than the first one, or you could say that it had one white light that shore brighter than the other, and also a yellow one. At the sides of the ship one could see two other ships a little smaller, of the same form but smaller. They had only one light each. It looked like one object with two more alongside it. The bright white light in the center was fixed but the yellow and the more opaque one pulsate. We watched them for twenty to thirty minutes. We got tired of looking at them."
We were able to localize the mother-ship with the other UFOs directly above the place where Filiberto was picked up, which is the same place where only hours before this observation, the second encounter of Filiberto and Iris had taken place. Iris Cardenas observed: "On the suit, on the right breast, they had an emblem made up of a serpent in the form of an 'S' or maybe more like a 'Z' with rounded corners, with a wide 'X'-shaped cross lying down underneath.
What make rare of this case, in the ufology history, is the second encounter, where a second person, Iris, went voluntarily to the encounter. Also, it is rare that we receive news of the sighting of UFOs at the same time and place, from independent witnesses. Making the Filiberto and Iris second encounter credible.
On December 6, 1985, Filiberto claimed that he was abducted again and carried to the same base under sea. For that motive, on March 30, 1986 we did another hypnotic regression. This time we had a different team, headed by psychologist and hypnotist Mercy de Armas, also present was hypnotist Rodolfo Morales. We took this opportunity to scan, back and forward, the first abduction. And the result was astonishing. It was like renting the same video movie, six years later, and playing it back and forward trying to find a gap.
THE MESSAGES
(Taken from the hypnotic regressions)
"They told me that the leadership of the Catholic Church will be without its head (the Pope) and that later another will come." "The Pope dies, and then shortly after that the second Pope also dies. There is a struggle to designate one who is not a Roman and they told me that it would endure for a little time, but that there is a conspiracy against him. After that will come one who is not born in that place (Italy). He is going to discover the New World. He is going to come to preach to the New World in our own language." (And so it happened)
Here is what they showed to Filiberto, on a thing that looked like a television set in the wall of their ship: "There is a city that is going to be destroyed. The city is called... the capital of Mexico!" ( Around the end of 1985 occurred the disastrous earthquake that destroyed part of Mexico City.)
"All, almost all the great population centers of California, all will go into the sea." (Parts of the coastal lands in California, from Eureka to the border with Mexico, were swallowed by the sea, according to the magazine Newsweek of March 28, 1983, pages 22 and 23.)"Here in the United States we will have an illness." (AIDS?)
"There is an artist who is very famous. In politics her husband could become the president of the United States." (Here, we also have to clarify that this prediction was made before the movie star Ronald Reagan took the Presidency of the United States, and his wife, also a well known artist, was the First Lady Nancy Reagan).
"The first people they showed me (on their television) were wearing loose fitting short pants. They used something like a small cap on the head. I got the impression that they were people from another planet. But later, continuing to watch as if in a movie, I could see that these were Chinese communists. Then they must have contact with the people of Communist China. They are carrying out great experiments there. They told me that Communist China would surprise the world shortly. Soon the world will be shaken by the news that is going to come out of there." "They control them. The thing is that the world will be surprised soon at what the Chinese are going to do. It is good. It is not bad." "They have control of the Chinese. There are going to be certain changes, certain things, provoked by the Chinese because there are some negative people, or would be, and in the changes those people disappear." "They showed me an example of one who was afoot and they said, 'This was their inclination,' then the person reversed his position front to back and they said, ' This is the way China will go.'
On May 4, 1989, some 100,000 pro democracy student activists staged a huge protest march in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China's capital city. The demonstrators erected a 33-foot obelisk entitled "Goddess of Democracy," modeled after the Statue of Liberty in New York. Then armored troops stormed the Square, killing an estimated 3,000-5,000, injuring another 10,000. In the ensuing political crack down, Zhao Ziyang was stripped of his party post, and Jiang Zemin became general secretary. The Eight National People's Congress elected Jiang president of China in March 1993.
"I know what you are trying to do with me, and they know also, and so they are telling me to watch what I am saying. But nevertheless, though I cannot tell you directly, it is possible for you to guess the person. I am going to mention two. One is the ruler of Egypt. The government of Egypt in a short time will lose its leader. It will lose its government and there will be great disasters throughout its territories. It could put this whole planet in peril of being disintegrated by a war of great consequences. This could occur before the end of 1981."
On October 6,1981, the president of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat, was assassinated by religious fanatics within his own army, during a military parade commemorating the Yom Kippur War.
" They want to avoid all this. In this year there is a great conspiracy against the government of Israel. At the same time there is a great conspiracy between the people that control energy, in Kuwait and also in Arabia where they have petroleum energy. All those governments will disappear."
This last message was incredibly exact. Kuwait was lost during a military struggle to Iraq, led by President Saddam Hussein, in August 1990.
Under the command of U.S. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the multinational coalition of the United States, Saudi Arabia, Great Britain, Egypt, Syria, and France began intensive aerial bombardment of military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. In mid-February, Iraq signaled its willingness to withdraw from Kuwait. A permanent ceasefire was accepted by the allies on April 6, 1991.
We have to remember that all these messages were given to Filiberto during his abduction on January 3, 1979. And they were privately published, before the events happened, in "UFO CONTACT FROM UNDERSEA" by Sanchez-Stevens, in 1982. According to Art Levine of "MIAMI NEW TIMES", the Cardenas incident is "the most famous abduction case in Miami history." - Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo and Wendelle C. Stevens. "UFO Contact from Undersea".
Overview of the Filiberto Cardenas Abduction/Contact Case
Summary: Detailed overview of the Cardenas case. As Stevens writes, "the UFO abduction of Filiberto Cardenas... is an important contribution to the body of UFO literature because this may be the first case on record where the original abductee was able to successfully introduce another person into the contact events and to actually take them aboard an alien spacecraft with him."
The UFO abduction of Filiberto Cardenas of 60 East 38th Street, Hialeah, Florida, is an important contribution to the body of UFO literature because this may be the first case on record where the original abductee was able to successfully introduce another person into the contact events and to actually take them aboard an alien spacecraft with him.
An important aspect of this case is Cardenas' willingness— after six weeks of recovery from the first shocking experience-to come out in public and tell the details in his own name and identity. The reason for this position is his absolute conviction, after an unbelievable amount of proof of the reality of the physical experience in full waking reality, that it is essential that the public be made aware of what is really going on and how much we are all affected by it. He has a message to tell and is impelled to disseminate it as widely as possible for him to do.
He has been advised, and shown, that he is not the only human being to be contacted by these particular space entities. He was told that he would recognize the others as he came in contact with them. There is some indication that one of these others has already been turned up in Brazil.
Another feature of this case that is becoming more evident in substantial contact cases, is considerable indication that he was identified a long time ago, earlier in his life, and that his life experiences may have been guided to some degree up to this point.
He has been a very honest, hard-working man and a determined husband and father. He was not particularly interested in the UFO phenomenon until this chain of events came about. But his fortune took a turn for the better after the contacts began and he is now rearranging his life to give himself more time to devote to the study of what is happening to him, and to others, and to tell the sleeping world what is really happening.
When the contacts began he owned a small gift shop called Zarabanda, at 4150 East 4th Avenue, Hialeah. He sold that and bought out a small filling station and automobile service shop called Barbara Service Center, Inc., at 4105 East 4th Avenue, which was then no big money maker. He developed the service station business into a highly successful operation, but it took all of his time, and most of his wife's, all days of the week and Saturdays and Sundays. He needed more time to conduct his own investigation into what was happening to him and to tell others who would listen to what was going on. He sold the business on his birthday, the 31 st of October, and began to make plans to visit UFO conferences and investigators around the country to see how much was happening to others. That is the day I met him for the first time.
Filiberto's experiences actually began on 3 January 1979, and investigation of the case was most ably undertaken by Dr. Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo, Jr., an Attorney and local UFO investigator and researcher who was working diligently on a number of substantial UFO cases already. Sanchez entered the case on 4 January, the day after the first abduction, while Cardenas was still in the clinic, and began the long and highly detailed debriefing. He developed details and tested the data. He arranged for medical and psychological, and even neurological examinations of the witness and provided a hypnotherapist and expert on the subject to conduct regressions of the witness back to the actual contacts to develop details. The witness was found to be perfectly normal in every respect, except for the body marks, skin abrasions, and systemic disfunctions resulting directly from the UFO contact. Sanchez was assisted by Mr. D'Agustino, an electronic Engineer, for many years a UFO investigator and MUFON representative in his country Uruguay, South America. Mr. D'Agustino is now living in Miami.
On the 3rd of January, at about six PM, a Thursday evening, Filiberto Cardenas, then 46 years old, was snatched by a buzzing object that emitted a beam of violet-bluish-white light which caused him to float up the beam and out of sight of his three friends with him. He seemed to go into a darkish bag-shaped (later described as roughly football-shaped) object which then flew away to the west with Cardenas aboard.
Filiberto and three members of the Marti family, Fernando 46, his wife Elizabeth 36, and daughter Mirta 13, of 8632 NW 35th Court, were returning from an unsuccessful effort to buy a suckling pig for a Sunday-night supper. The farmer they had gone to see had no more pigs for sale and they were returning to U.S. Highway Route 27, also known as Okeechobee Road, to go back home. Cardenas' 1970 Chevrolet Station Wagon developed electrical problems. The headlights and all other lights went out and the engine stalled, and the car came to a stop near Florida's Turnpike Extension. When Fernando tried the starter there was no electrical current al all. Fernando, who was driving at the time, and Filiberto got out and opened the engine hood and looked in at the engine to see what was wrong, Cardenas said.
"At that moment the engine began to reflect different colors, red, violet, blue, orange and then a bluish white." They heard an intense buzzing noise, "like many thousands of bees," Cardenas said. "I tried to move but I was paralized in position, unable to do anything—even unable to move my arms. I could hear the screams of the women in the car. I looked down and saw that I was suspended in the air and rising. When I was 8 to 10 feet above the car everything went dark, and I don't remember what happened.
"The next thing I remember is waking up to consciousness on my hands and knees, and two bright lights rushing at me. I heard brakes screeching and tires skid, and the lights swerved and came to a stop. I was helped from the road by a man taking my collar and leading me off the road. I learned later that this was near 137th Avenue on the Tamiami Trail, some 16 miles from where my car stalled."
A motorist called Police and Patrolman William Christian of the Fifth Precinct Station came and picked Cardenas up. This was about 8:15 PM, two hours after he had been elevated up the beam of light before the eyes of his friends. The police officer later said that Cardenas told him he had no idea what had happened. When I interviewed Cardenas he told me that he did not dare tell the policeman what he knew for fear of being considered crazy.
Meanwhile, Fernando Marti, who was also looking under the hood with Cardenas, saw the engine reflecting the various light colors and then saw Cardenas' feet ascending above the hood, to his left. He also felt weightless and jumped further into the engine area, on top of the hot engine, and grabbed hold—which probably saved him from Cardenas' fate. When the light dimmed and he felt weight again he looked out and saw Cardenas rising and shouting, "Let me go, let me go!" He watched Cardenas float up the beam of light until he entered the dark bag-shaped form that then flew west.
Fernando ran around the car to comfort the screaming, trembling women and told them, "They took Filiberto—they took Filiberto!" Fernando's wife Elizabeth had been in an earthquake in California, and fearing the same thing when the car started shaking had grabbed Mirta and pulled her across her lap, putting her arms around her for protection.
Fernando jumped into the car and tried the ignition again and this time there was spark and the engine truned over and started but ran very roughly—like it was not getting enough gas or something. The car chugged forward slowly and then began to improve a little, finally running all right again. Fernando stopped at the nearest facility and called the police to report the problem, but they told him to go to a pay phone and call back. He got back into the car, which started OK this time, and they drove to Hialeah to a pay phone. He called the police again and reported what had happened and Cardenas' disappearance. Then he called Cardenas' wife, Iris, and told her that an object with a large light had taken Filiberto. She wanted more details and he tried unsuccessfully to explain something he himself didn't understand. Mrs. Cardenas began to cry.
When Fernando hung up the phone, Iris got a nephew to drive her to where Filiberto had disappeared, and after checking with the police and finding that they knew nothing more than Marti's call, she and the nephew set out to see what they could find out. They didn't find anything at the scene.
When Cardenas was found about 8 PM, the police notified Mrs. Cardenas and she rushed to the station and took him to a local clinic for treatment.
"I would find it hard to believe if I read about it in a newspaper," admitted Marti, "but I was there with my wife and daughter. We were all terrified by the light and the noise," he said. "When it ended Filiberto had vanished."
"Before this happened," Cardenas said, "I scoffed at UFOs. Now I know differently."
Someone said that a checkup should be made for radiation if this was in fact UFO related. The local clinic was unable to treat or examine for such effects and Cardenas was taken to Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital about 01:30 in the morning of the 4th to see what they could do. His medical records show that he complained of pains in both knees and out-of-focus vision in the last hour. Following X-rays and a general examination, the hospital noted, "Stable vital signs," a 0.2x0.2 centimeter abrasion on his forehead and a 2x2 centimeter yellow lesion on his right shoulder. He was also checked for radioactive contamination at the hospital by an Air Force team sent up from Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami, The tests were negative and he was released and sent home.
Cardenas developed various odd symptoms, i.e. excessive thirst, profuse sweating, sulphurous body odor, short memory, hot and cold flashes, and sexual disfunction. His urine was a very dark yellow-brown and had a bad odor.
Homestead reported no unusual air activity observed by RADAR during the time of this abduction.
Dr. Jose Yedra, a local hypnotherapist who had no personal position on UFOs, pro or con, regressed Filiberto into the experience 4 times to develop details and help restore the lost memory. This had to be done in Spanish as Cardenas is not fluent in the English language. Cardenas spoke of being taken by 3 human-like alien entities dressed in tightly fitted bluish-white one-piece suits. He was taken to a beach someplace totally unfamiliar to him where he saw deep blue water, a narrow sand beach and reddish-brown to reddish-purple rocks rising steeply away from the beach sand. While the spacecraft hovered at ground level the aliens worked some kind of a lock on a rock. One of the aliens got out of the small craft they were in and pointed a "flashlight" kind of instrument at a large rock abutement. The rock parted and revealed a tunnel or a large cavern. More of the same or similar craft came out and they all took off and flew out over the ocean waves. Suddenly they all tilted down and descended into the water and went underneath the surface. He remembered being seated near the "glass" of the windshield, or port and seeing the sea water rush by at great velocity but it didn't seem to be touching the "glass".
One of the entities, Kiostros, spoke to Cardenas in good Spanish with a kind of Portugese or Italian accent, which the Cuban did not understand easily. Kiostros talked about the higher energy of the sexual organs, the need for a different religion, the sinking of California into the Pacific, the future disability of an actress who will become the First Lady of the White House, and the disastrous end of President Sadat's rule in Egypt before the end of 1981! More predictions included the death of another very famous actress, a cure for cancer, the Peoples Republic of China fighting Russia for control of Asia, an Arabic war in the middle east, eventually involving Saudi Arabia and Israel as well. But most important of all was that 6 people from Earth were coming back in a UFO craft in public to deliver a message. (This was supposed to occur after 3 months, April 3rd, and so far as is known it may have happened.)
(NOTE: we have a case in Brazil that happened exactly three months after Mr. Cardenas adbuction. Also when Cardenas said in his hypnotic regression, "after 3 months", we came up with April 3 date.)
Cardenas returned to the abduction site several times, and each time he arrived there his expensive gold electronic watch would run very rapidly and gain time. He could audibly hear it whirr inside. For some time after returning, each time he touched it with his right index finger it would speed up and whirr again, and he demonstrated this for his wife, Dr. Sanchez and other friends. He took it to be repaired.
At the abduction site he would hear "their" voices in his head and he would be given information. Later he could do this without going to the site.
On 21 February 1979, about a month and a half after the first abduction he was directed to the same site again. By now he was asking if his wife, Iris, could accompany him, and this time he took her along. At around 03:00 a top-shaped UFO arrived and he and his wife were BOTH taken aboard the ship and did not return until nearly 06:00 AM the following morning! This time they were both aboard in full waking consciousness and remained fully aware and alert the whole time. They could both remember the whole experience without hypnotic regression.
These UFOnauts were described something like the beings encountered by Herbert Schirmer in Nebraska in 1967. The aliens wore tight-fitted blue-white one-piece suits covering everything except the face. The Cardenases observed a serpent-like emblem on the right breast of the garment and a button-like earphone over the right ear with a small antenna sticking out the top. The main physical difference was the smaller 4-foot size of the beings. They spoke telepathically to the Cardenases, and conversed among themselves in a language that sounded like Arabic.
The two male and one female crew members seemed fascinated by Iris Cardenas' painted fingernails and toenails. The aliens suffered from sneezing throughout the experience, and explained that there was something that emanated from human bodies that caused this in close proximity.
The control room in the spacecraft was surrounded by one wall of small 3-dimensional TV-like screens showing a great many things. Another wall was covered with illuminated colored buttons of many shades.
Mrs. Cardenas said that she pinched herself to be sure she was not dreaming. She also asked one of the aliens if she could touch him and he agreed. The material of his suit felt slick in one direction and rough in another, like tiny fish scales. His body was firm under the material of the suit.
"They spoke to me of universal LOVE," Cardenas said, "And I have learned from them that this is what I must do—LOVE and help my fellow man." Cardenas experienced a period of time after the first abduction where he was telepathically influenced to say meaningless words and numbers for 5 minutes each night. He now reports heightened telepathic sensitivity toward others. He once sensed that his father-in-law need aid, and drove automatically to the spot where the man's car had broken down.
Although no spacecraft was actually seen on the first abduction, one was clearly observed by Filiberto and Iris the second time as it approached and hovered near their parked car in almost the same place as the first when Filiberto was snatched. The ship did not actually touch down, but hovered a few feet above the ground. It was as large as a refrigerated railroad car, roughly mushroom-shaped, and had a smaller gondola on the bottom. It was a dull silver-gray in color in the air until it "landed", and then a row of colored lights of blue, violet, silver and white came "on" and blinked all around the side of the mushroom-shaped larger upper part. More lights of the same colors blinked around the bottom of the gondola.
The Cardenas couple walked up to what looked like a plate-glass window, and then suddenly they were through the "glass" and inside the ship. They saw several narrow one-legged chairs with tall backs. The chairs could turn around. Then they saw the very human looking occupants of the ship. They were from 3 1/2 to 4 feet tall (smaller than Filiberto) and were dressed in the tight-fitted silvery bluish-white one-piece suits previously described by Filiberto. The emblem worn on the right side of the chest looked like an "X" lying down with a raised serpent in the center. The aliens have big eyes that are oblique, like orientals, but they were longer and came farther around to the side of the face. They had a normal straight nose and a small mouth that never moved.
Iris lighted a cigarette inside the craft and Mr. Cardenas told her not to smoke "so that she would not contaminate the atmosphere inside the ship".
When Cardenas, telepathically advised of this second meeting, asked if he could bring his wife to the contact, he was told that "they" considered Iris and him a unity or that she was one with him and therefore could accompany him. Iris asked the aliens if they were the ones who had abducted two little girls from Puerto Rico (she had heard the story from a nurse when she was in the clinic with Filiberto), and they answered that they do not abduct little girls..., which relieved Iris of the fears for her 3-year-old daughter, Barbarita.
The alien beings all had an identical arrangement of 5 thin cables that came from the lower waistline up to the neck of the suit and went inside. These cables did not hamper the movement of the beings in any way.
Filiberto says the aliens spoke of many things, but he does not want to elaborate on them at this time. Some things are best left to the future, that there is a time for everything. He and his wife were in the ship from about 04:00 to 05:15 AM. When they returned home—about 05:30—Filiberto immediately called Dr. Sanchez-Ocejo and told him of the second contact but that he couldn't say anything until after 10:00 AM. He would call Sanchez back later.
At exactly 10:00 AM a large mother-ship with 2 smaller discshaped objects flying around it was seen by hundreds of witnesses at Miami International Airport (10 miles from this most recent encounter). Mrs. Julia Gonzales and Mr. Ricardo Sanchez, airport employees working in the center of the airport runway area, stated that they observed all 3 objects clearly for several minutes. They also saw passengers who were boarding a flight for departure stop and stare at the unusual spectacle, and saw other airport employees watching the ships in the sky overhead. Gonzales called a local radio station to report the strange phenomenon and was referred to Dr. Sanchez-Ocejo, the same one who investigated the Cardenas case, whom they then called and reported the sighting, almost while it was still going on.
When Sanchez hung up the phone from that call, the second call from Filiberto, who was also trying to call him (on his instructions from the aliens to wait until after 10:00— to report the details of the second abduction aboard the spacecraft. Filiberto knew nothing of the airport sighting until Sanchez told him at that time, and then he began to wonder about the strange instructions to wait until after the specific time.
When Sanchez interviewed the airport workers from their particular sighting point and ascertained the exact position of the spacecraft, said to be about 11:00 o'clock from magnetic north and high in that direction, he could easily see that that position is DIRECTLY over the place where the Cardenas couple was taken aboard 5 hours earlier!
During the 4 hypnotic regressions on the first abduction, it was discovered that the alien beings first told Cardenas what they were going to do, and then they installed two very small (electronic) devices in his head—one behing each ear. After that they could transmit the same 3-D physical projections of scenes suspended in the air in front of him that they showed him in the "TV panels" in the control room aboard the spacecraft. He received full sight and sound, as well as other sensory sensations such as heat and cold and smells. The scenes are just as,-real to him as waking reality experience except that they take place completely withing the "frame" of the scene, like a very sophisticated picture frame suspended freely in the air. His scenes of future events are shown to him in this way.
He was told that the only reason he is being shown future events is to demonstrate, in time, the reality of his contacts, so that people will believe him and will accept the "message" on universal LOVE which he has been given.
The aliens have their place and we have ours, except that WE have forgotten the real law of Universal Love—REAL LOVE FOR ONE ANOTHER, that is the key to solving all of our own self-generated problems of existance...
The contacts continue and Filiberto is being prepared for a larger mission. He wonders if the world is ready for, or wants help. - Wendelle C. Stevens, 1982
NOTE: There is another report at ABDUCTION AND UNDERWATER EXCURSION OF FILIBERTO CARDENAS. There are many aspects of this case that are similar to the experiences of David Eckhart and his family, in particular the abduction scenarios, prophecies of future events and underwater facilities. Much of this information has yet to be presented...Lon
Sources:
Thomas E. Bullard, "UFO Abductions The Measure of A Mystery"
Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo and Wendelle C. Stevens. "UFO Contact from Undersea"
www.ufoevidence.org
Wendelle C. Stevens, "Overview of the Filiberto Cardenas Abduction/Contact Case" - 1982
www.waterufo.net
www.bibliotecapleyades.net
Sean Casteel - "The Truth About 'UFO Abduction From Undersea'"
www.nicap.org
Graham Hancock - "Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind"
