Unexplained: Crack forms in the water’s surface near Hong Kong
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Here’s the latest video that’s been making the rounds. Allegedly, a fisherman near Hong Kong [map] saw something strange in the water. It looked like a whirlpool, and he whipped out his video camera to record it. What happened next was a hole suddenly ripped open in the surface of the ocean.
Possible explanations being offered include a submarine, a whale caused this, the city’s drainage or sewer pipes that were siphoning water from the sea.
My thoughts? Glad you asked. It smells of bullshit to me for a few reasons.
Firstly — and this might be petty on my part — the added “drama music” is always a turn-off to me. It tells me that the makers are more interested in theatrics than documenting an event.
Speaking of the audio; is it just me, or does the sound of the water sound like something added to the video? While I am hardly an expert, it just doesn’t sound like audio picked up by the microphone of a handheld video camera.
And two — speaking of documenting an event — the guy in the boat really only got a few seconds of this? What happened next? I always get more than a little suspicious when a video only shows a teasing 30 seconds of an orb, or monster, or, well, the surface of the ocean splitting open.
On the other hand, maybe the witness thought “omg, I need to get the hell out of here!” and turned off the video camera. To be honest, I would have dropped the camera and piloted my boat away from that area in a hurry. - datelinezero
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Naked humanoids?
Location: Near Pasiano, Italy - May 19 1995 - 11:15 PM
A professional stopped his car to watch a metallic top shaped craft with a transparent section hovering over the road. Inside he was able to see up to 25 apparently naked smiling humanoids standing around. These were about 4-foot tall with large elongated heads, topped with short-cropped dark hair. The humanoids appeared to be smiling and had normal looking eyes and noses, and large pointed ears. They had long dangling arms with large hands. The craft took off after a few minutes. That same evening witnesses watched moving lights in the sky in the same area.
Source: Dario Bortolini ITUFOR Vol. 2 # 2 / Forwarded by Albert Rosales
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Man accused in bizarre murder-for-hire plot planned to use ex-stripper wife as bait
A convict with a conscience helped the feds unravel a murder-for-hire plot that involved a carjacking and electrocution by cat, according to federal court records.
It also included the suspect's ex-stripper wife being used as bait.
Brett L. Nash, 45, of 43 Shirlwin Drive in Granite City, Illinois, was arraigned in federal court Tuesday on charges of interference of commerce by threats of violence. Charges unsealed Wednesday state he recruited an unidentified friend to "help in robbing an old man" who Nash intended to lure with his wife, carjack, hold hostage while the victim wrote checks and then murder.
Nash planned to put the victim in a Jacuzzi and electrocute him by throwing in a radio, court records state. They planned to toss the cat in the water to make it appear the cat knocked in the radio.
The plot came apart when Nash's unnamed friend told FBI agent Nick Manns that "he did not want the intended victim killed." The friend was previously convicted of second-degree murder and sexual assault.
"He told me he had straightened out his life, believed in God and could not live with himself if someone were murdered and he had not done anything about it," Manns states in the affidavit accompanying the federal charges. The document also states the friend was worried that Nash was setting him up.
Here's how the court records lay out Nash's plan. The victim and would-be accomplice are never named.
Nash approached his friend Jan. 9 with the plot.
He told his friend that the person he was going to rob "liked women who were crackheads" and his wife knew him through her crackhead friend. Nash described his wife as a cross between Angelina Jolie and a Barbie doll and said the victim wanted to have sex with her.
Nash said his wife knew the intended victim had about $250,000 and that she could get him a key to the victim's house.
Nash wanted his friend's help to carjack the victim while Nash's wife was in the car so police would not suspect she was involved in the criminal activity with Nash.
After carjacking the intended victim, Nash's plan was to take the victim back to the victim's house, where Nash would hold him hostage for up to two weeks. During that time Nash would have the victim write out checks, including $5,000 to the accomplice for "labor" and $65,000 so the wife could buy her house out of foreclosure.
He also talked about strapping a bomb to the victim to force him to withdraw money from the Bank of Edwardsville. He planned to use an idea he'd seen on television, rigging up a collar and a Bluetooth device so Nash could hear the victim's conversation with the teller.
Nash planned to kill the victim after he had gotten all of his money by putting the victim in his Jacuzzi, tossing in the radio and adding the cat.
Nash also discussed an alternate plot that included stabbing a teenage blond girl who lived with the victim.
They would extort money by putting the victim in a chair with a hood, dripping chicken blood on him and then putting the victim's bloody fingerprint on a kitchen knife. They would threaten to stab the teen and call police to let the victim explain how his fingerprint got on the knife unless the victim paid them.
Nash told his friend that he had been to the victim's house and had been planning the murder for about a year, the affidavit said. In addition to the $5,000 check from the victim, Nash was promising the accomplice half of the take from the extortion.
Nash also told the friend that his wife was a former dancer and that the pair had made money for the past two years by extorting her married customers. She would promise sex for $1,000 at a hotel room and Nash would take pictures of the victim's car and then enter the room to take pictures of the victim.
Nash said they'd obtained $25,000 from one man that way.
He also said the intended victim had security cameras after being ripped off by a crack user and had cameras in his shower to take pictures of women who stayed over. The man was about 60 and looked like Barney Fife, was a former corporate lawyer who got into computers and then retired, lived off Maryville Road in Granite City and regularly traveled to Las Vegas to gamble accompanied by four crackheads, court records quoted Nash as saying.
Nash said he'd been in entertainment and could disguise his accomplice using make-up techniques he'd learned in college. He also discussed using hair styling gel and latex gloves to avoid leaving DNA, even taking their used toilet tissue with them.
At the direction of the FBI, Nash's friend called Nash at 7:34 a.m. Friday and gathered evidence against him, including text messages.
Nash is in federal custody. He was arrested Monday afternoon at his home after the friend made a dry run to the intended victim's home.
The plot was to begin at 9 p.m. Monday night, the court record stated.
FBI agent Manns interviewed the intended victim, who said he had known Nash's wife for about two years, had watched her shower but had not had sex with her.
He said he'd recently installed the Jacuzzi, had been hoping for a hot tub party with Nash's wife and the blond teen and they planned to get together Monday or Tuesday. He also said Nash's wife had taken him for cataract surgery.
He said he had accounts at the Bank of Edwardsville. He also said he had a cat.
Manns also talked to Nash's wife, who said he'd physically abused her for the past two years and that it escalated in the past six months and especially during the past two weeks.
She showed Manns photos of bruising, and a recording of an assault during which Nash told her she had no choice but to be part of the extortion plan.
When Nash's house was searched Monday, agents found a diagram of the intended victim's house and a gray backpack containing a black ski mask, handcuffs, a CO2 gun that looks like a .45-caliber pistol, black socks and gloves, a flashlight, plastic bag and black hair dye. - bnd
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Fran Drescher says she was abducted by aliens: They planted a chip
Fran Drescher, whose "Happily Divorced" has been a hit for TV Land, believes that she was abducted by aliens while she was in junior high. She also, very seriously, says that said aliens planted a chip in her hand and programmed her to meet her ex-husband, Peter Marc Jacobson, who inspired the TV series.
"You know, it's funny because Peter and I both saw [aliens] before we knew each other, doing the same thing, driving on the road with our dads," she tells HuffPo. "We were both in junior high."
Years later, they met and compared experiences. "We realized that we had the same experience. I think that somehow we were programmed to meet," she says, pointing out a small scar on her hand. "We both have this scar. It's the exact same scar on the exact same spot."
Jacobson doesn't share her opinions. He suggests that Drescher got the scar from a drill bit or a burn from a hot beverage. "I said to him, that's what the aliens programmed us to think," Fran explains. "But really, that's where the chip is."
...It could explain some things. - zap
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Quebec woman was ‘cooked to death’ at retreat, coroner says
Quebec police officers have completed their report into the bizarre death of Chantale Lavigne — who was “cooked to death” at a personal development seminar — and investigators are expected to meet with the Quebec prosecutor assigned to the case as early as next week.
It will be up to the prosecutor “to decide whether any charges will be filed, and, if so, what they would be,” Rene Verret, a spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said Thursday.
The manner in which Lavigne died was “very unusual,” Verret noted.
An autopsy report on Lavigne’s body has yet to be completed, the Quebec coroner’s office said. But Radio-Canada quoted coroner Gilles Sainton as saying the 35-year-old mother of two from St. Albert, Que., “was cooked to death.”
Sainton conducted that interview last November for the TV show Enquete, said Dana Deslauriers, a lawyer for the coroner’s office.
Sainton wouldn’t be available for any followup interview, Deslauriers added.
Lavigne died in hospital after she and eight others in a personal-development seminar called Dying in Consciousness were covered with mud, wrapped in plastic, put under blankets and immobilized with their heads in cardboard boxes for about nine hours, under instructions to hyperventilate.
Lavigne was removed, unconscious and with a body temperature of 40.5 C, from the Ferme Reine de la Paix in the Drummondville, Que., area after a 911 call that Radio-Canada said had been made by Gabrielle Frechette, a self-styled therapist who was the seminar’s operator.
A 49-year-old woman taken to hospital at the same time survived.
Radio-Canada quoted Sainton as saying that Lavigne died of hyperthermia, when the body produces or is subjected to more heat than it is able to dissipate. The normal human body temperature is 37 C.
Sainton “has not completed his report,” Deslauriers said. “Generally, it takes about nine months before a coroner’s report is ready.”
Results of the uncompleted autopsy report are required as “part of the proof that the coroner will use to complete his report,” Deslauriers said.
“There are an enormous amount of complaints about the length of time it takes to receive autopsy reports,” she added, noting that some autopsy reports take two years to be completed. “There are many families waiting for coroner’s reports.”
According to Radio-Canada, Frechette has been running self-improvement courses for about two decades, and claims to be channelling Melchisedech, a Biblical figure.
Frechette told Radio-Canada, which was slated to air the show at 9 p.m. Thursday, that about 2,000 people have taken her courses.
Lavigne apparently completed 85 sessions and paid more than $18,900. - nationalpost
