Chinese "alien research station"
Rumors of UFO sightings and aliens visiting this planet seem to be increasing, report Cui Jia and Wu Wencong in Beijing.
After 17 years of hard work, Xiang Kuansong has finally completed the "alien research station" he has been building in his village in Mayang county, Hunan province. The 79-year-old said he was told to build it by two beings from another planet.
"Don't be afraid. We are not ghosts or god. We are people from another planet who want to help you," the aliens allegedly told Xiang in Chinese.
Xiang's research station has none of the radio dishes and high-tech equipment that are usually associated with the search for extraterrestrial life. In fact, it looks more like a traditional Chinese temple, with a sign at the entrance that reads: "The harmonious way to a foreign planet".
The retired soldier said he first met the two aliens from the planet of "Dongsheng" in the late 1980s. They are about 1.95 meters tall and visit him quite often, wearing clothes that make them invisible but he can see them and communicate with them. The two "Dongshengians" asked him to build the station so they could have a place to rest during their trips to other planets, and so far he has spent 200,000 yuan ($31,470) on their way station.
Inside there is a concrete model of a saucerlike spaceship, and stone tablets marking the spots where Xiang says the aliens talked to him are scattered around the compound.
Although the other villagers believe Xiang is crazy, he just smiles and ignores their taunts.
UFO detectives
But even some of those who believe that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe pour scorn on those who claim to have been visited by aliens.
"I always turn my back on people who claim that they have seen aliens. Most of them have mental health problems," said Zhou Xiaoqiang, secretary-general of the Beijing UFO Research Organization, which was founded in 1983 and now has more than 100 members.
"If aliens visited earth, it doesn't make sense they would not make themselves known to all of us. These stories of meeting aliens are just unbelievable,' he said.
An increasing number of UFO sighting have been reported in China since 2011, but according to Zhou, such sightings are fueled by the media.
"People read about mysterious things or see television reports about such things and it fires their imagination," he said.
"The media have been reporting supposed UFO sightings for the past three or four years and they always mystify the incidents to grab people's attention. Meanwhile, people have become more interested in unsolved phonomena - I think it has something to do with the 2012 end of the world theory," said Zhou, who has been studying UFO sightings for more than 20 years.
Also, some people still try to manipulate others by claiming they are in contact with aliens, he said. "In the old days, such people would say that they could see and talk to ghosts. Nowadays, its aliens."
Zhou said the mission of his team is to simply identify what it is people have seen when there has been a UFO sighting.
"We investigate the circumstances and analyze the evidence. We are more like detectives," he said.
The Beijing UFO Research Organization has received 14 detailed reports of UFO sightings in Beijing so far this year. All of them have been identified as kites with lights, aircraft or insects.
According to Zhou, the majority of UFO sightings are reported during public holidays in big cities or scenic spots.
China's Roswell
Zhu Jin, curator of the Beijing Planetarium, also believes intelligent life probably does exist elsewhere in the universe, but says that most "sightings" of UFOs have nothing to do with aliens from another planet.
"Chinese people love to associate UFOs with alien spaceships. But all UFO sightings can be explained by natural phenomena, man-made objects, illusions or hoaxes. Aliens might not even need a spaceship to travel to earth."
In the most recent UFO sighting to grab the public's attention, Li Hui told the media of the UFO she saw at Fenghuang Mountain, a scenic spot in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province.
On the afternoon of July 8, Li, a local tourist, claimed she had seen a flying object faintly glowing on the opposite mountain when she finished posing for photos at one of the viewing platforms. She said the object had already disappeared when she took off her sunglasses for a clearer view, but its image had been caught on camera.
Most media showed a cropped version of the photo, which showed a glowing oval with two bright "wings". But the original photo, which was obtained by a reporter from Harbin Daily, shows that Li is the subject of the photo and the "glowing" object is on the left side of the photo.
On July 13, five days after the incident, Xi Wang, a doctoral candidate in bioscience at the Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, posted a photo of a hoverfly, which was clearly similar to Li's UFO.
Xi told China Daily that considering her major and personal interests, she is very familiar with the flying posture of the insect.
"It looks more like sensationalizing the scenic spot to me," said Xi. "I understand UFO fans' enthusiasm, and personally I also believe in the existence of extraterrestrial life in such a big universe, but we need to investigate and analyze every incident carefully before coming to a conclusion."
Other netizens also pointed out that judging from the size of the object in the photo, if it really was an alien spaceship more people would have noticed it as it would have been about 1 kilometer long.
But despite all the doubts, UFO researchers and enthusiasts rushed to Fenghuang Mountain, because this is not the first time the mountain has been linked with UFOs and extraterrestrial beings. It is known as China's Roswell because of the many UFO sightings that have been reported there.
Loving the alien
In June 1994, a local farmer claimed he had seen a shining white "metal monster" when he was out picking wild plants on the mountain. Meng Zhaoguo became famous throughout the country after he claimed he'd had sex with a female alien three times. Once at the landing site and twice at his house the same night. The alien then told him that she would have his child once she returned to her planet.
Meng, now 45, later told local governmental officials that about a month after his amorous adventures with the alien, he was invited to her spacecraft, where a male extraterrestrial spoke to him in his dialect.
"Sixty years from now, the son of a farmer from the Earth will be born on our planet," the alien told him.
Since then the mountain has been a popular destination for UFO enthusiasts.
"There is nothing wrong with using UFO sightings to attract tourists. It might even be a good thing because it might make people more interested in exploring the unknown," said Zhou Xiaoqiang of the Beijing UFO Research Organization.
But Wang Sichao, a scientist at the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, which is run by Chinese Academy of Sciences, said that people should not be so quick to dismiss all sightings of UFOs as illusions or publicity ploys. He believes that there have been more than a dozen genuine sightings of alien spacecraft in China.
He files unexplained UFO sightings into two categories: those that lack details, so that it is difficult to say what they really are, and those that are detailed, but they still can't be explained. These, he says, could be genuine sightings of alien spaceships.
"People should not underestimate the power of aliens. Although there is no evidence that they are harmful to people," he said. - Chinadaily
The Chinese Roswell: UFO Encounters in the Far East from Ancient Times to the Present
China, the Oval Office, and UFO's: alien ambassador series
Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is To Come
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Hallucinating mother killed, ate her sons
A woman accused of butchering, cooking and eating her two sons last week is believed to have done so because she hallucinated that they were pigs, Mental Health Department deputy director general Kiattiphum Wongrachit said on Tuesday.
"The woman killed her children because she didn't continue her treatment and didn't take her medication," Dr Kiattiphum said.
He said mentally ill patients often became violent and experienced hallucinations if they stopped their regular treatment. About 90 per cent of violent cases involving mentally ill patients were due to lack of regular medication.
The woman, a member of the Musur hilltribe whose name was withheld, will be kept under close watch in the hospital for a long time, he said. The hospital will check whether she is a drug addict and if she will need to keep her calm when she realises that she killed her children, he said.
There are more than 600,000 patients being treated for mental illness by the hospitals under the Health Department, he said.
Police last week received a complaint that a Musur woman butchered her two sons, ages one and five years, in Chiang Mai's Mae Ai district.
Police said they found her asleep at her home, with several body parts apparently from children near her.
They took her in for questioning, but she did not respond to any of their questions.
They did a background check on her and found that she had been treated for a mental illness in 2007.
She has been charged with murder, but being deemed mentally unfit to fight her case she was sent to Suan Prung Hospital for treatment. - bangkokpost
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New spontaneous human combustion theory
A Cambridge professor has tackled the issue of spontaneous combustion – using belly pork.
Prof Brian J Ford is a research biologist and author of more than 30 books, most about cell biology and microscopy but he has turned his attention to the mechanisms behind why people ‘explode’.
He said in an article in New Scientist: “One minute they may be relaxing in a chair, the next they erupt into a fireball.
“Jets of blue fire shoot from their bodies like flames from a blowtorch, and within half an hour they are reduced to a pile of ash.
“Typically, the legs remain unscathed sticking out grotesquely from the smoking cinders. Nearby objects – a pile of newspapers on the armrest, for example – are untouched.”
The first record of spontaneous combustion dates back to 1641 when Danish doctor and mathematician Thomas Bartholin described the death of Polonus Vorstius – who drank wine at home in Milan, Italy, one evening in 1470 before bursting into flames.
Since then more reports of spontaneous combustion have been filed and linked to alcoholism – though the link was later disproved.
The most recent case was 76-year-old Michael Faherty who died on December 22, 2010. West Galway coroner Ciaran McLoughlin recorded the cause of death as spontaneous human combustion.
Prof Ford wanted to disprove the alcoholism theory and also something called the ‘wick effect’ suggested by London coroner Gavin Thurston in 1961.
Thurston had described how human fat burns at about 250c, but if melted it will combust on a wick – such as clothes or other material – at room temperatures.
He wrote: “I felt it was time to test the realities, so we marinated pork abdominal tissue in ethanol for a week.
“Even when cloaked in gauze moistened with alcohol, it would not burn.
“Alcohol is not normally present in our tissues, but there is one flammable constituent in the body that can greatly increase in concentration.”
The body creates acetone, which is highly flammable.
He added: “A range of conditions can produce ketosis, in which acetone is formed, including alcoholism, fat-free dieting, diabetes and even teething.
“So we marinated pork tissue in acetone, rather than ethanol.
“This was used to make scale models of humans, which we clothed and set alight.
“They burned to ash within half an hour.
“For the first time a feasible cause of human combustion has been experimentally demonstrated.” - cambridge-news
Spontaneous Human Combustion
Faith, Madness and Spontaneous Human Combustion
Spontaneous Human Combustion: A Case History
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- Rick brings 15 of his best blogging essays to life once again in this wide ranging thought provoking E-Book offering. Beginning with the essay that corresponds with the title of the book `Beyond The Great Beyond’ – He digs into the parts of our reality that the mainstream media simply avoids. Rick explores the scientific finding that our visible universe is simply a tiny portion of the totality of the complete universe. NO, not some dimensional or multiverse theory – the idea that OUR UNIVERSE’S contiguous space – is that massive. Indeed, the idea that part of `our universe’, indeed the largest part, is filled with planets and suns and such that will NEVER come into our view, is almost NEVER mentioned about our real human condition.**********
So...you think our Justice system is corrupt? Well...look at China
As shocking as it may sound the practice of hiring body doubles to serve jail time in the place of rich and powerful individuals is well-documented in China. So if you thought your country’s legal system was corrupt, think again.
Just two days ago I wrote a post about another bizarre job available in China – hiring white guys to pose as employees or business partners – but that’s nothing compared to the “profession” you’re about to discover. Apparently, China’s wealthy can get away with just about anything, even serving jail time, as long as they’re willing to part with a small fraction of their fortune. Sure, that’s not very surprising, considering even in some Western countries where the legal system is considered impartial, the rich and famous are often shown leniency. Only in China, the so-called “1%” has a different way of dealing with unpleasant situations, like serving time in prison. Instead of wasting their time behind bars, they just pay stand-ins who, for the right sum are willing to take their place. Yes, apparently that’s possible.
Slate.com recently wrote an article about this bizarre practice of hiring body-doubles for jail time, which according to a police officer in central China is “not common but not rare either.” Although this kind of “job” has apparently been around for hundreds of years, it became a more popular subject in 2009, when multiple cases of hired stand-ins were discovered and discussed online. A hospital president who caused a deadly traffic accident hired an employee’s father to stand-in for him in jail. In another case, a man driving without a license who caused the death of a motorcyclist hired someone to take the blame for just $8,000, and the owner of a demolition company that illegally demolished a home earlier this year, hired a poor man making his living digging through the rubble to be his body double in court and promised him $31 for each day spent in prison. In fact, the practice has become so popular that the Chinese even found a name for it – ding zui. “Ding” means substitute and “zui” means crime, so “substitute criminal”.
This kind of “replacement convicts” have apparently been a part of Chinese culture for centuries, and it was one of the first things visiting Westerners reported about the country’s legal system. In 1899, Ernest Alabaster, a scholar of Chinese criminal law, wrote that courts “permitted” the real offenders to hire substitutes, and that such things “frequently happen”.In 1895, Taiwan missionary George Mackay also described the practice noting that “It was an open secret that these men had nothing to do with the case, but were bribed to wear the cangue for six weeks.” Incredibly enough, substitute criminals could even be hired for executions. After all, if a family was starving, wouldn’t parents accept this price knowing their children would be saved? Some imperial Chinese officers even admitted this sort of practice, and considered it effective. In their view, the real criminal was punished by paying the market value for his crime, while the stand-in’s punishment frightened other criminals. So I guess, everybody was happy…
But it was the case of Hu Bin, a wealthy 20-year-old who killed a pedestrian while drag racing on the streets of Hangzhou that really drew attention to the phenomenon known as ding zui. Photos of Hu Bin and his rich friends smoking and laughing while waiting for the police to arrive on scene caused a public outrage, but it was nothing compared to the allegation that the man who appeared in court and served the three-year sentence wasn’t Hu, but a paid body double. Photos of the man arrested on scene and the one who appeared in court were compared by Chinese netizens, and the vast majority agreed it was not the same person. While it was never proven Hu Bin hired a body double to take his place in jail, the lenient sentence of only 3 years for killing a person is bizarre enough, considering others involved in similar accidents were sentenced to death.
The latest alleged case of hired body double involved Gu Kailai, the Chinese woman convicted of the murder of Neil Heywood. According to rumors on social networks, she hired a woman to serve her suspended death sentence. - odditycentral
Cadres and Corruption: The Organizational Involution of the Chinese Communist Party
Double Paradox: Rapid Growth and Rising Corruption in China
