; Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Monday, April 25, 2011

Fortean / Alternative News: Virgin Mary Apparition Over Ivory Coast and Luminous Beings in Chile

Above: filtered screen capture

Believers say they witnessed Virgin Mary appear over Ivory Coast - 4/20/2011


Click for video

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Chile: Luminous Beings Startle Researcher

Another great post by Scott Corrales at Inexplicata - The Journal of Hispanic Ufology

Source: La Estrella de Valparaíso (Chile)
Date: 04.25.11

Chile: “Luminous Beings” Startle Researcher
By Claudia Pizarro M.

Alberto Urquiza has spent 13 years researching and working in the field of anomalous phenomena and UFOs. He has been a panelist on a variety of television shows, such as “Mucho Gusto” on Canal MEGA and he is working on a new season of Alfredo Lamadrid’ s“Cada Dia Mejor”

And that’s not all. He was also an advisor to the Chilean Air Force regarding the presence of anomalous phenomena and UFOs in the skies. Therefore, he isn’t a person to be easily shocked by any strange event, as he has devoted his life to anomalies and extraterrestrials.

This does not diminish the experiences that has experienced in person. In statements made to La Estrella, one of the most recent ones was truly surprising. He found himself face to face with what he termed as “two luminous beings”. This experience, in his opinion, was a blessing and a very significant chapter in his life. His wife and his assistant were witnesses to hitherto unpublished and unique encounter.

An Alien Experience

“I was heading toward Mirasol Square in Algarrobo, where the cultural center and a restaurant can be found. I going was with my wife and assistant to perform “quantum healing”. These are holistic therapies that integrate reiki and hypnosis, among other disciplines, to find the source of disease. We on our way to the place where our patient had agreed to meet us. Upon arriving we found two people. They were fair, with light colored eyes, tall and clad in nearly phosphorescent clothing. It wasn’t the kind of clothing that made you inconspicuous – quite the contrary. These were outfits to stand out it,” said the expert.

He explained that he approached them, thinking these were the patients. He greeted them and they did so in kind. To his surprise, one of them asked him what was his line of work. Urquiza immediately understood that these were not his patients. He explained that he worked in the field of quantum healing. “When I told him what I did, one of them – the speaker – smiled a smile as broad as his eyes. In seconds, [his eyes] began to light up impressively. As his face lit up, he placed his hands on my shoulders, on my head, and a tremendously powerful agency began to emerge. It only took seconds, but was very intense,” he explained, adding: “when he pulled away his hands, he fixed his gaze on me and said: “Welcome to the community.”

Vanished

So what was going through Alberto Urquiza’s head in those brief, intense seconds, you may wonder? He replies: “Nothing. I was blank, in a sort of trance, but super aware of it all.”

After speaking those words, the expert reacts and turned to look at his wife and assistant, standing only meters away. In that moment, the two people had disappeared as though by magic.

The expert indicates that there was no time for the beings to run and hide. “They simply disappeared. My assistant was unable to take photos.”

The strangest thing that Urquiza recalls is being unable to discuss the subject with his wife and assistant until the next day at noon. “It was very strange. I was unable to mention a single thing, as though it was erased from my mind until the next day at noon, when I was able to speak to my wife. She was standing only meters away from where I was and also saw the same intense light.”

(Translation (c) 2011, S. Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Liliana Núñez Orellana)

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The Tea Party / Church of Satan connection

telegraph - Question: what have the Tea Party and the Church of Satan got in common? Answer: their favourite writer is Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand is recapturing the hearts of American conservatives. The Cold War writer’s individualist philosophy is back in fashion among the Republican faithful. Her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged has just been released as a movie and while critics call it slow and two-dimensional, Tea Partiers are queuing around the block to see it. Something about Rand’s take-no-prisoners prose strikes a chord with people exasperated by Obama’s tax-and-spend liberalism and desperate for a road-map to liberty.

But Ayn Rand is not a natural pin-up for American conservatives. Her individualism went beyond libertarianism. It was an exciting, revolutionary mix of greed, atheism, materialism and the Marquis de Sade. It comes as no surprise that the 1960s Church of Satan lifted most of its high-camp gospel from Ayn Rand. One of its acolytes notes with approval that, “Rand’s philosophy rejects as ethical accepting the sacrifice of another to one’s self … The Satanic view sees as ethical the reality of domination of the weak by the strong.”

The story of how Rand fell out with the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard is instructive of her anti-conservative temperament (many versions exist; this one is attributed to Rothbard’s protégé, Prof Harry Veryser). In 1958, Rothbard and his wife JoAnn Schumacher attended a seminar by Rand on the subject of God. Arguing that Christianity inhibited self-interest, Rand declared that anyone who had faith in the Almighty was “a damn fool”. She then went around the group asking each student if he or she was a believer. JoAnn happened to be a Presbyterian and, with a nervous whimper, answered in the affirmative. Rand turned to Murray and barked, “Your wife is an idiot, you must divorce her immediately.”

Murray’s response was admirable. He grabbed his wife’s arm and said, “JoAnn, we’re leaving. This woman’s nuts!”

The anecdote underlines three distinctly non-conservative, non-Tea Party traits about Ayn Rand. First, she confused worship of the individual for worship of an individual – herself. The Randian movement was a cult with Rand at the centre. She tolerated no opposition and schooled her pupils in an old fashioned didactic style: “I’m right, you’re wrong, and here’s why”. Sometimes she used the tools of totalitarianism to bring her people in to line. Rothbard was ostracised from the group, turned into a non-person in much the way Stalin expelled dissenters from the Soviet Communist Party. In this instance, her obsession with what she defined as “objective fact” (i.e. the physical “fact” that there is no God) was stronger than her belief in intellectual liberty. Her style of leadership runs counter to the Tea Party’s sensible refusal to lend its support to an individual political personality, to become the vanguard of one person’s ego trip.

Second, Rand’s insistence that Murray divorce JoAnn reflects a disregard for the most conservative of institutions: the family. Rand often stated that it was “immoral” to put family and friendship above productive work. To her, family was an accident of birth and marriage the bringing together of like minds with shared ambitions. Rationality trumped love and duty.

Third, Rand’s aggressive atheism puts her outside of the Right-wing mainstream. You don’t have to believe in God to be a conservative, but most conservatives recognise His social value – the importance of moral codes, tradition, volunteerism, mystery and the presence of an authority higher than man. But, like Nietzsche, Rand saw God as a barrier to greatness; like Karl Marx, she saw God as a distraction from material reality too.

The small-town, Calvinist populism of the Tea Party is centuries and continents apart from Rand’s libertine utopianism. Were she alive, Rand probably would have preferred to keep her distance. In the late 1940s, the Right-wing Motion Picture Alliance asked the former screenwriter to produce a manifesto for conservative movie making. Along with “Don’t Smear the Free Enterprise System” and “Don’t show that Poverty is a Virtue and Failure is Noble”, one of her commandments was “Don’t Deify the Common Man”. Yet there is nothing more healthily common than the Tea Party, which has revived a petit bourgeois spirit that would probably have horrified Rand.

Ayn Rand was a libertarian revolutionary, the Che Guevara of science-fiction writers. While her faith in the productive capacities of the free-market is useful, there is nothing of the apple-pie wholesomeness of American conservatism. Conservatism is about more than servicing the bottom-line; far more than the victory of the strong over the fantasies of the weak.

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Alligator invites itself into Florida bathroom

baynews9 - A Manatee County woman got quite a surprise Saturday when she found a 6-foot alligator in her house.

Seeing the gator was quite a shock for homeowner Alexis Dunbar, who had just walked in her front door.

"I look to the right," she said. "And there's an alligator in my guest bedroom."

Dunbar immediately got out of the house, and became concerned for her pets.

"My cats are like my daughters," she said. "So I thought my cat was eaten. There was blood everywhere."

But the blood was from the gator himself.

Both of Dunbar's cats were shaken up, but are otherwise doing fine.

It is believed the gator crawled up the bank of the pond behind the house, under a chain-link fence, across the yard, through a screen on the porch, and then through a doggie door and into the house.

It's something Dunbar said she's never even heard of.

"No," she said. "Alligators get into pools or something, but never in a house."

But one apparently did get into her house Saturday afternoon.

That's making it tough for her to close her eyes.

"I'm gonna be scared to sleep here tonight," she said. "Definitely gonna go look under my bed again before I go back inside."

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Dog-Cat?

Zhou Yun, the cat's owner, says she knew her furry friend was pregnant so she wasn't surprised when she happened upon two kittens at the beginning of the month.

On closer inspection, however, she noticed that one of the babies was dead.

'I then noticed the other kitten surprisingly looks like a dog,' Zhou, who lives in Yangshan, in eastern China's Jiangsu Province, told reporters.

Zhou, who's also the owner of a pet dog that likes to eat and sleep with its feline pal (hmm...), added: 'Quite possibly the kitty is a mixed child'.

Lai Xiaoyun, president of a local pet clinic, has sagely pointed out (after having a good look at the kitten-puppy, to be fair) that it's impossible for a cat to give birth to a dog.

He reckons Zhou's cat popped out two kittens and one died shortly after: 'So the cat went out and accidentally found a litter of newborn puppies and took one home.'

'Cats and dogs are two different species and it's impossible to have joint descendants,' he concluded.

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Literally....