UFOs in Wales: Police Reveal Locations of Sightings From Past 10 Years
walesonline - The truth is still out there as new details emerge of the true extent of UFO reports across Wales.
Police have released details of UFO sightings in North and West Wales over the past decade.
View our map showing UFO sightings in the last 10 years
A total of 33 reports of strange crafts in the sky were made to North Wales and Dyfed-Powys Police services since 2002. A third of these were in 2009.
Only five of these reports were explained as human activity, such as army training exercises or night lanterns.
One man described how his car engine stopped working upon seeing a round unknown craft in the sky above Aberdyfi Estuary along the west coast.
Another witness saw a UFO illuminated by three glowing green, triangular lights hover directly above their Colwyn Bay house last year before flying off.
The sightings show Welsh households are still looking to the skies in search of new forms of life.
But sceptics say people should think twice before claiming they have seen a real-life ET.
Former RAF electrical engineer Bill Bevan said he saw an alien aircraft on a clear night two years ago while in his back garden smoking a cigarette.
The 79-year-old said: "I saw a big, white disk hovering over a tree. It was about two thirds the size of the moon. It was a bright, shining light, and it disappeared in about four or five seconds.
I thought it must have been going up at a fair rate of knots."
Mr Bevan, of Builth Wells, Powys, quickly called his wife to come and see it, but it was gone by the time she got there.
He said: "It left me a bit shaken, but it left me so intrigued that I have been standing outside night after night to try to see it again."
Bill is adamant that he saw some form of UFO.
He said: "It fully convinced me that there is life out there somewhere. I saw it, it was there and it just disappeared, and until my death I will still say I saw what I saw. I hadn't been drinking by the way, because I dont drink."
Bill also said his late father revealed to him that he and his neighbour saw a UFO over two decades ago in the Rhondda Valley.
Bill said: "He was stood with his neighbour and across the other side of the valley they say a cigar-shaped object in the sky. He had never talked about it before because he didn't think people would believe him.
There's something out there there's no two ways about it."
Phil Hoyle, of the UFO Investigation and Research Unit, has carried out numerous investigations into paranormal activity in Wales.
The 54-year-old said he has interviewed many reliable sources, such as army personnel, who have seen unidentified structured crafts landing and taking off.
He said: "I have interviewed people from the military and many reliable people, and quite a number have seen structured crafts leaving the scene. Some people have said they have touched the craft. I could tell you for days about these cases."
There must be other life forms and they could have been visiting us for quite some time.
Mr Hoyle's 12-strong team has also been investigating the new phenomena of animal mutilation through its Animal Pathology Field Unit.
The father-of-one said: "South Americans have come across cattle that have been clinically killed and dissected.
What has happened is that this has moved over towards Britain, but the majority of the incidents that take place over here are sheep.
Mr Hoyle, of Shrewsbury, has been investigating UFO sightings for the past 30 years and is in no doubt that we are not alone. He said: "What people have to remember is that they say there is no evidence. We don't pre-judge anything, and we look at information from the most incredible sources. How can you call all these professionals delusional?"
Martin Griffiths however a senior astronomy lecturer at the University of Glamorgan is a hardened UFO sceptic.
Mr Griffiths says strange objects in the sky can be explained through natural occurrences, such as ball lightning and man-made sky lanterns.
The 49-year-old said: "If people think they see a UFO, be a bit more critical about it. It's probably not somebody visiting from the planet Zog.
Don't think automatically that something in the sky is an alien craft. It is probably something else."
Joe McGonagle, who has researched UFO sightings for 12 years, is also unconvinced by the reports.
He said: "There is no tangible evidence that we have been visited by aliens. There's lots of speculation, but no evidence. For aliens to visit here, they would have to have a very good reason to do so."
Mr McGonagle said police forces in Wales were fuelling the UFO speculation by not making public when an alien encounter has been proved to be something else.
But Mr McGonagle still believes intelligent life exists somewhere in the universe.
He said: "I'm convinced that the probability is very high that there is life on other planets. Whether that life is visiting us here on Earth however, I very much doubt."
WHERE, WHEN AND WHAT WAS REPORTED
- Dyfed-Powys Police reports: (The location, the date and the sighting)
- Caersws, 2002 Bright light in the sky over the mountains towards Caersws. Did not make a sound or have flashing lights.
- Aberdyfi Estuary, 2004 Round craft of 200 to 300m in length. When seen his car engine stopped.
- Whitemill, Carmarthen, 2004 Something strange in the sky, like a streak of light.
- Beguildy, Knighton, 2004 Lights that looked like a lighthouse in the sky, and then later it was round with black spots with a ray of light.
- Penybont, 2005Something with two lights has landed in field. Later discovered to be orange flares from Army exercise.
- Llanyre, Llandrindod Wells, 2005 Oblong shaped bright yellow craft, going horizontally across, about 10 to 15ft off the ground.
- New Quay, 2006@ Spotlight from across the hill thought to be a UFO.
- Meifod, Powys, 2007 Triangular shape in sky with different coloured lights in each corner. A pulsing pink light lit up the vehicle. There was no sound to the object.
- Llanelli, 2008 Four low flying brightly lit objects.
- Newtown, 2008 Flashing balls of light though to be two UFOs.
- Llanidloes, 2009 Three orange lights thought to be UFOs. Object seized and discovered to be a night lantern.
- Beacons Reservoir, Brecon, 2009 Report of a UFO in the sky.
- Llangattock, Crickhowell, 2009 Large, vivid orange object, cylindrical in shape. Later thought to have been a night lantern.
- Ffrwdgrech, Brecon, 2009 Three lights, travelling at 20 knots.
- Glanamman, Ammanford, 2009 Report of large orange sphere in the sky, looks like a hot air balloon. Later clarified to be Chinese lanterns.
- Crickhowell, 2009 Report sighting of a red flare, possible UFO sighting.
- Brecon, 2009 Reporting sight of bright white light, then two orange lights, not high up and no sound coming from them.
- Newcastle Emlyn, Ceredigion, 2009 Three large orange lights in a triangular formation with white light around them.
- Cardigan, 2009 Two waves of UFO with red lights go past, high up in the sky.
- Llanelli, 2010 About 100 red lights in the sky. All very bright, all slow-moving, going from west to east. Moving too quick to be Chinese lanterns and too slow to be an aircraft.
North Wales
- Beaumaris, 2004 Three lights in a triangular pattern, travelling East.
- Denbigh, 2005 UFO in the sky
- Penmaenmawr, 2005 Two sightings of immense white light moving quickly and silently across the sky.
- Penmaenmawr, 2005 Intense bright light moving swiftly in a South-easterly direction.
- Abergele, 2006 Caller was suspected of being drunk, claimed to have seen a UFO.
- Blaenau Ffestiniog, 2007 Bright light witnessed disappearing into the clouds.
- Llangollen, 2007 Family saw a flame shimmering in the sky.
- Pwllheli, 2008 Luminous orange light with a white circle of light around it, making no noise and hovering around the area for 10 minutes.
- Denbigh, 2009 Three large red lights about the size of the moon before flying off. Shortly afterwards a fourth craft appeared in the sky.
- Prestatyn, 2009 Red, yellow and orange lights moving backwards and forwards really quickly, with no noise.
- Wrexham, 2010 Very large, orange in colour, but changed to red, blue and green.
- Bangor, 2010 A large, black triangular shaped craft appeared. It made a noise similar to a lawnmower. It hovered in the sky for just over a minute before vanishing.
- Colwyn Bay, 2010 Glowing green triangles at the back of the craft, which eventually faded
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Mysterious Cosmic Blast Keeps on Going
wired - Astronomers have witnessed a cosmic explosion so strange they don’t even know what to call it. Although the blowup, discovered with NASA’s Swift satellite on March 28, emits high-energy radiation like a gamma-ray burst would, the event has now lasted for 11 days. Gamma-ray bursts last for an average of about 30 seconds.
Also unlike a gamma-ray burst, the explosion has faded and brightened, emitting staccato pulses of energetic radiation lasting for hundreds of seconds.
“It’s either a phenomenon we’ve never seen before or a familiar event that we’ve never viewed in this way before,” says Andrew Fruchter of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. The outburst might have been generated by a star torn to shreds when it ventured too close to a black hole in its host galaxy, he suggests. Gas from the star falling into the black hole could have triggered the gravitational monster to emit a jet of X-rays and gamma rays that by chance happens to point directly at Earth.
A radio-wavelength image taken May 29 along with a Hubble Space Telescope image taken in visible light on April 4 supports that model. The images show that the explosion took place 3.8 billion light-years from Earth, at the center of a galaxy where a supermassive black hole would lie. It’s also possible that the star might have been ripped apart by a smaller black hole, Fruchter notes.
“Tidal disruption of a star by a black hole seems very plausible,” says Andrew MacFadyen of New York University. The blast’s duration “is much longer than anything we’d naturally expect from [explosive] collapse of a single star,” which is the traditional model for producing a gamma-ray burst, he says.
But Stan Woosley of the University of California, Santa Cruz says the event might be explained by the gravitational collapse of a giant star into a black hole, a scaled-up version of the process that usually produces a gamma-ray burst. In Woosley’s scenario, the core of the giant star collapses to form a black hole but it takes days for the outer layers to fall in and emit radiation, accounting for the unusually long duration of the observed explosion.
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The DAYTIME Jerusalem UFO of March 28th
Rick Phillips analyzes the recent daytime video from Jerusalem at UFO Disclosure Countdown Clock - The DAYTIME Jerusalem UFO of March 28th (Video)
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Dark Holiness: Forgotten Apparitions
Another interesting post by Scott Corrales at Inexplicata - The Journal of Hispanic Ufology.
It would be an interesting exercise to sit down and compile all a list of all major events which occurred during a given period in history but were later forgotten, despite their impact at the moment. Almost assuredly better minds have attempted such an effort, categorizing incidents which caused a stir in their time yet totally overlooked by subsequent generations.
One such event--of gargantuan proportions, but tamped down by the triple factors of time, space and language barrier--occurred during the 1930's in Spain. The mention of those two coordinates will prompt thoughts of Ernest Hemingway and the international effort to participate in that country's bloody civil war, yet the event in question is by no means political. It specifically took place in the Basque Country, the industrial backbone of the Iberian Peninsula, with its coal mines and factories; Euskadi, in the mystifying Basque language, unrelated to any other on the continent and fancifully assumed by some to be the parlance of lost Atlantis.
A Forgotten Apparition
In a small, nigh well unreachable town in the Cantabrian mountains known as Ezkioga, there occurred a religious phenomenon far greater than Fátima and Garabandal, and perhaps more troubling. The agitation and the civil strife that marked those times aided religious authorities in stifling the situation ; the Second World War would succeed in obliterating any memory of it.
Ezkioga was rescued from oblivion recently through the diligent efforts of two journalists--Carmen Porter and Iker Jiménez--the first of whom published a book entitled Misterios de la Iglesia in 2002 and included her research in the text. Porter had the incredible luck to find, against all odds, one of the only copies of a limited print book regarding the mystery of Ezkioga...a book which church authorities had condemned to the flames in a tradition that dated back to the Inquisition.
On June 30, 1931, a brother and sister from Ezkioga -- Antonia, 11, and Andrés, 7 -- engaged in their daily routine of walking to a nearby dairy for milk and returning over the slopes of Mount Anduaga. On this particular day, the children noticed a bright light hovering above the treetops; forgetting their errand, they approached the light in awe and quickly dropped to their knees and prayed fervently, after seeing an image within the light source which they identified with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The youngsters ran home to tell their elders of their religious experience; as in other Marian apparitions, they were scolded and warned not to lie about "things having to do with heaven." But such was their nervous excitement that they were later taken to see the parish priest, who was unable to detect any guile in their eyes and advised their father to be patient with the children. The priest apparently had reason for such a gentle approach: only days before, one of the communities most important landowners had had a much more dramatic encounter.
The landowner and his son had been dragging a fallen tree trunk across the steep terrain using a team of oxen when the tree unexpectedly rolled, dragging the beasts and his son with it over the edge of a precipice. Fearing his son dead, the landowner ran toward the edge of the defile and proceeded to descend. To his great surprise, he saw "a lady" holding one of the oxen by its horn; the son stood to one side, in shock but otherwise alive. The "lady" was covered by a long black veil and had a five starred crown which "glowed like a sun". The landowner "knew her to be the Blessed Mother". His friends, however, ridiculed him when the story was told.
But their clumsy jests would soon come to an end when reports of "a very beautiful lady in black" who would appear and cause children to kneel and pray with their arms outstretched began to surface. The children were none other than Antonia and Andrés, who continued to visit the location on Mount Anduaga where the initial contact had taken place.
Unlike Fátima, the miraculous visitations would not be restricted to the young. Less than a week later, a man known as Patxi, a carpenter who scoffed at the notion of apparitions and decried the foolishness of his fellow townsmen, claimed to have seen the woman in black himself: she had appeared to him wielding a bloody sword, addressing him in his native Euskera instead of Spanish. Her warnings were dire--there would be a civil war between Catholics and Non-Catholics in the Basque Country, but the Catholics would prevail in the end despite the death toll. A married woman named Maria Recalde had visited Mount Anduaga to pray the Rosary and was engulfed by a brightness she described as being "greater than that of the sun." She too saw a beautiful young woman, clad in black and holding a rosary, with her heart pierced by swords. María was shown horrific visions of desolation, rains of fire and poisonous gases killing thousands.
The sword motif would appear in a vision experienced by nine year old Benita Aguirre. She would tell clergyman Juan Bautista Altisent that she "could see the Holy Virgin...with two swords, on piercing her heart and another in her left hand, its point bloodied." The girl asked the apparition if she was bleeding for mortal sins, and the reply was affirmative.
So far we have a list of elements that are common to any Marian apparition, but there are details to Ezkioga, according to Carmen Porter, which suggest phenomena other than divine: some of the worshippers present at the Basque peak thought to have seen "a witch" rather than a beautiful woman; others saw a headless figure of the type reported in paranormal chronicles worldwide. Still another claimed to have seen the devil himself, describing the fearsome apparition as tall, red-headed and black, with fangs like those of a wolf. The man wanted to scream out of sheer terror, but managed to make the sign of the Cross and the apparition vanished.
Salvador Freixedo has the following to say about this part of the his native country: "There are in Spain two regions which have distinguished themselves throughout history for being the centers of witchcraft of the entire Peninsula. One of them is the region of the Basque Country and Navarre (Zugarramurdi, Berroscoberro)..." Church authorities in the 16th century believed that at least thirty thousand witches existed in the Basque country. Could there have been other forces at play here?
Summer had turned into harsh fall over Ezkioga, but the inner fire that inspired the believers did not waver. On October 15, another visionary named Ramona Olazábal informed the congregation that they should bring handkerchiefs with them, because the Virgin was about to induce stigmata in her. At five o'clock, Ramona raised her hands, standing at the site of the apparitions, and blood began to stream from the backs of her hands. The cry of "Blood!" rent the air as the faithful swooned and others hurried forward to dip their napkins in the seeress's vital fluid. A church hearing soon followed and Ramona's stigmata were questioned, especially when witnesses claimed having seen a razor blade on the ground beside her.
Even though this new aspect of the Marian phenomenon was called into question, the number of visionaries now soared past one hundred and fifty and up to eighty thousand people had visited Ezkioga to partake of the holy event. Church authorities were beginning to look into the event to ascertain that the events occurring in the remote Cantabrian mountains were other than natural, such as the healing of a stomach cancer patient whose recovery amazed physicians, or a paraplegic woman who felt better after praying the Rosary at site of the apparitions, and walked downhill to the echoed cries of "Milagro!" ringing in her ears. Even as eminent a physician as Gregorio Marañón visited Ezkioga and unequivocally stated that the phenomena were beyond the realm of the pathological sciences. "They belong to other disciplines that are beyond my competence."
The Church was not quite so sanguine. Religious authorities like Jose Antonio Laburu, a fiery preacher of the times, stood foursquare against the miracles, saying that the predictions had been false, that fraud was prevalent throughout the sightings, and that gift-giving had stimulated many of the seers "to keep having visions". Other religious, like Amado Bruguera, struggled to separate the wheat from the chaff (the true visionaries from the impostors, in this case) and to ferret out the impostors with inquisitorial zeal, firmly believing that Satan had also played a role on Mount Anduaga, deceiving the unworthy with false visions. His misplaced zeal would later win him a jail sentence and ecclesiastical censure.
By 1933, even as the political situation within Spain grew more precarious, Bishop Múgica of city of Vitoria wrote the Vatican, denying the presence of any paranormal phenomena and forbidding Catholics from keeping "any photographs, images, hymns" or other material regarding the apparitions. This decision was approved by Rome in a letter by Cardinal Sbarreti in which the "alleged apparitions and revelations of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Ezkioga are shorn of any supernatural character." The ruling also banned three books discussing the events.
The government was also finding the events in the village of Ezkioga tiresome. Pedro del Pozo, governor of Guipúzcoa, was given the order to put an end to the commotion over the Marian apparition. The governor ordered that the image of the Virgin be removed along with the souvenir stands which had cropped up at the site; if this was not done voluntarily, he cautioned, he would order workmen to demolish the chapel with dynamite. Although workmen had refused to manhandle the statue--being cautioned by the visionaries that to do so would mean their deaths--the image was removed to a cluster of houses for safekeeping. The authorities cut down the large cross which had been erected at the site, and the premises were fenced off to keep any further multitudes from congregating. Even more medieval-sounding was the decree issued by the mayor of Ezkioga under pressure from his superiors: the punishment prescribed for anyone having visions in public would range from heavy fines to prison, internment in an insane asylum, or deportation. Many of the visionaries indeed wound up institutionalized while others served jail time.
Was Father Laburu right about all of the prophecies being fraudulent? Apparently not. Most of the revelations concerning "a war in which much blood would be spilled within Spain" would come true, and which would begin with the closing of churches in Catalonia -- the event which would unleash the Spanish Civil War.
In 2001, Spanish film filmmaker Gutiérrez Aragón directed Visionarios: La Virgen de Ezkioga, starring Ingrid Rubio as one of the visionaries involved in the actual events. Although the production was not well received by contemporary audiences despite having been shot on location, it nonetheless served to rekindle interest in this all but forgotten paranormal event.
Headless at the Holy Sites
Strange creatures, some of them far from having a divine or holy aspect to them, are often reported at the sites of Marian apparitions. In the early 1990s, for instance, a "Bigfoot"-like creature was reported at the Marian shrine of Montaña Santa on the island of Puerto Rico. Believers like Ezkioga's Amado Bruguera shared the conviction that the devil's minions were at work at some of these locales, trying to frighten the faithful away from holy ground.
Most prevalent among these apparitions are the "headless" ones: the headless woman at Ezkioga had been preceded by a similarly decapitated figure--also female--which sent Lucía, Francisco and Jacinta, the young shepherds of Fátima, running for cover in 1915. The girl returned to her house and told her mother that she had seen "a white thing hovering over the trees which looked like a headless woman, having neither hands nor eyes." This presence was seen on two more occasions during the Fátima apparitions and became known as the "angel".
Journalist J.J. Benítez, writing in his landmark La Quinta Columna (Plaza y Janés, 1985), makes the curious note that strange headless entities form part of the lore of Spain's Las Hurdes region -- at one time so inaccessible and poor that it became the source of countless legends -- which is scarcely one hundred kilometers away from Fátima and Leira, across the Portuguese border. A mere coincidence or a fact filled with hidden significance?
Not to belabor the point about disturbing, seemingly non-angelic entities seen at Marian apparitions, but it is curious to note that the rituals of the ancient Coptic church (one of the oldest branches of the Christian faith) contain explicit prayers against the presence of "headless demons", such as the one appearing in the Zereteli-Tiflis collection, described as "a text containing a spell to provide protection against headless demons and powers that are bothering the person invoking angels and archangels". To make the link between Marian apparitions even more confusing, another such amulet invokes the virgin Mary's protection against a headless dog: "because I am having a clash with a headless dog, seize him when he comes and release me..." (Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power, Princeton: 1999). One wonders if this orison would have worked against the bat-winged, headless "Mothman" of West Virginia or a similar entity seen landing on a field in Britain in 1965.
Beatings from Beyond?
Salvador Freixedo has also made note of another strange negative feature that seems to afflict many of these Marian apparitions--the appearance of "persons unknown" who inflict bodily harm upon the seers or other involved with the miraculous phenomenon taking place at the site.
In October 1980, Amparo Cuevas, a fifty year-old mother of seven, became known as la vidente de El Escorial (the seeress of El Escorial) for her part in the Marian apparitions which occurred in said location. Cuevas was first visited by undescribable pain and voices which told her the suffering "was that of Christ on the Cross." From that moment on, Cuevas displayed the full range of manifestations that accompany the phenomenon: stigmata--including a curious image of a heart pierced by a sword on her chest--bilocation, levitation,speaking in tongues. She was able to take on the maladies of others, exhibiting the symptoms in her own body. Upon the onset of the pain, Cuevas supposedly "saw a beam of light heading straight toward her" which signalled the start of the mystical communion: during these ecstatic periods she would see the Virgin as a figure swathed from head to toe in a black mantle (with the detail of a white, gauzy veil included) as well as the crucified Christ.
While looking into the controversial El Escorial apparitions, Salvador Freixedo discovered that a gang of unidentified men--their faces conveniently covered by hoods--had inflicted a severe beating on Cuevas. The authorities considered the culprits to be members of some right-wing clique heavily opposed to any deviation of the Catholic doctrine, but the paranormalist drew an interesting conclusion of his own--based on his research into another, little-known Marian phenomenon of the 1970s.
Ladeira do Pinheiro, a small farming community not far from Fátima, became the focus of miraculous activity centered around visionary Maria da Conceicao Mendes. Mendes had startled members of the community and visitors with sixteen separate levitations, being transported--on one occasion--high into the air and losing herself among the clouds; three thousand communion wafers rained out of the heavens during one of the outdoor manifestations (their provenance was later determined to be the churches in the immediate vicinity) while other manifested in her very hands; the UFO phenomenon was also partial to Ladeira and its surroundings during the events, and some of these unknown lights outshone the full moon in their brilliance.
But one particular evening, while Maria da Conceicao Mendes held a nocturnal vigil with other worshippers, a group of men with clubs showed up out of nowhere to kick and batter the congregation. One of the worshippers died of a savage kick to the chest; Mendes lost her front teeth to another. The official explanation was that local roughs from Fátima -- incensed at the thought that Ladeira was "muscling in on the sweet deal" of the miracle business -- took matters into their own hands, possibly abetted by the clergy, who had declared the Ladeira incidents "demonic" from the onset.
"The resemblance between these incidents," writes Freixedo in Las Apariciones del Escorial (Quintá, 1991) "and what occurred at El Escorial is undeniable. Forces, whether human or non-human, appear to be always alert and active. These were not right-wing fanatics [...] but rather entities created by the apparition itself. In other words, they belong to the non-human montage behind the phenomenon. Absurd though it may seem, I suspect that the very entity that appears is the one responsible for the beatings."
The Devil at Garabandal?
So much has been written about the utterly inexplicable events at Garabandal--another town lost in the mountains of the Basque country-- that nothing can be added to it that will either make matters clearer or keep devotees of these apparitions, which ran from 1961 to 1970, from becoming enraged. For readers interested in delving fully into the matter, number of books and journals on the miracle are available in English and Conchita González, the principal seer, lives in the USA. Black and white footage of the girls walking backward and enduring some brutal testing by skeptics has been shown countless times on television.
But the bare bones of the event are as follows: four girls from the small town of Garabandal, near Santander, had repeated visions of both the Virgin and St. Michael and were given prophecies to disclose to the rest of the faithful. On June 18, 1961, while picking apples at a local orchard, the girls heard a "thunderclap" and saw a beautiful figure enveloped in light which they thought was an angel sent to punish them for stealing fruit. Over the course of the following twelve days, the girls would have visions of the same angel, dressed in blue and with pinkish wings, whom they took to be St. Michael the Archangel. The angel told them that they would soon be seeing the Virgin, and they did so after the eight visitation. The Blessed Mother appeared in garb that would be immediately recognizable to any school-age child in a Catholic country: a white dress with a blue mantle, a starry crown, and a scapular at her waist. The heavenly patroness told the girls to inform their elders that sacrifice and penance were in order to avert imminent punishment.
The thousands gathered in Garabandal to see the miracle were hoping for something more substantial, however, and in the wee hours of October 19, 1961 those present saw the famous miracle of the communion wafers manifesting itself on Conchita's opened mouth (and of which photographs have been reproduced in countless journals and religious tracts).
Garabandal's "dark side" -- if it can indeed be said to have one -- came about a few months earlier when theologian Luis Andreu lost his life in a car crash. Andreu had seen the four girls in their ecstatic trances and had been forced to proclaim aloud the miraculous nature of what he was seeing. When asked exactly what the miracle was, he told his friends that he was overwhelmed with joy at what the Virgin had shown him and that it was the happiest day in his life. Shortly after, he fell silent, much to the concern of those around him. The priest had died.
When news of Father Andreu's death reached the young visionaries, they claimed that they had seen the Virgin looking at him at one point, as though saying: "you shall soon be with me".
The death of this respected religious caused the bishopric of Santander to forbid members of the clergy from visiting Garabandal without permission from Church authorities. Worshippers were advised that they too must cease their visits, and the tide of pilgrims to the mountain village was stemmed for a while. But there was another death in the works...
In 1965, Monsignor Puchol assumed the bishop's crook at Santander and was even more stringent in his prohibitions against any veneration of Garabandal, issuing a terse pronouncement: "there has never been any apparition of the Blessed Virgin, nor of the Archangel Michael, nor of any other heavenly personage. There has been no message, and all of the events which have transpired at said location have a natural explanation."
It was this rejection of the miracle of Garabandal that many believed cost the bishop his life: he died while driving his car, allegedly screaming "God, what's wrong with me?!" before the collision. The car crash occurred on the same day as the feast of St. Michael the Archangel.
Another Jesuit father, José Warzawski, wrote a comprehensive study on the phenomenon entitled El Mito de Garabandal (Madrid: Ed. Studium) accepting the reality of the events which occurred at the site but ascribing them all to demonic forces. Does the Church know something else it isn't sharing?
Thanks to Scott Corrales for the great article! Check out his fascinating blog at Inexplicata - The Journal of Hispanic Ufology
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A stick in the ass?
Strange PSA Video
I don't know what to think about this one. I applaud the fact that they're getting the word out to kids and parents but the video is a bit weird. Here's the video link Click for video and website Yellow Dyno