Town council repeals decades-old law that banned 'magic arts'
FRONT ROYAL, Va. (WJLA) -- A Northern Virginia community is divided tonight over a debate that sounds like something out of history books.
In Front Royal a decades-old law bans things considered "magic arts."
At a town council meeting Monday night, the passions were front and center.
Someone called this a faith war—pagans versus Christians.
Many in Front Royal say they'd pretty much forgotten about the law that bans fortune telling, Tarot card readings, or practicing magic arts.
When a Tarot card reader set up shop at the Brooklyn Marketplace on Main Street—for just one day—the manager says some people in the town threatened to boycott the other vendors if the Tarot card reader stayed.
"This is an extreme group of people who,have taken on an ordinance to push their own political agenda," says Arlene Ballou.
After looking the law over, the town council scheduled a vote to repeal the ban.
And opponents sprang into action.
Outside the town council meeting, one group of citizens marched carrying a cross while others bowed their heads in prayer.
“For the Judeo-Christian tradition, it's an abomination; it's giving someone the power that God has. Only God knows the future," says Leo Morton.
Inside, it was a packed house and things got heated.
At the last minute one councilmember tried to amend the law to take out offensive terms like "gypsy" but he was quickly voted down.
In the end, the council voted to repeal the ban, 4-2. - WJLA
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Police Confirm UFO
Several witnesses, including multiple police officers, saw a strange object over Lower Paxton Township.
The anomalous object was first spotted by Stephanie Wilkerson who had been sitting on her porch on Monday night when something in the sky caught her attention.
Initially believing it to be an airplane, Wilkerson became intrigued when she noticed it start to change color and called her husband outside to see what he thought. A neighbor went inside to fetch some binoculars in an effort to identify the object but remained unable to determine what it could be.
Eventually the police were called in to investigate and an officer turned up at the scene. Having no idea what the object was either he called his superiors for a second opinion but even they were unable to shed any light on the phenomenon.
One officer contacted Fort Indiantown Gap and Harrisburg International Airport to find out if they knew anything about it but was told that there had been no scheduled flights at the time.
Click for video - UFO Sighting VIDEO Harrisburg PA Police witness REAL UFO in Pennsylvania
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Death Valley's sailing stones mystery solved
A team of researchers has finally managed to explain how such large boulders can move all by themselves.
The phenomenon, which was discovered in the 1940s, pertains to the inexplicable movement of extremely heavy boulders across a dry lake bed situated in Death Valley National Park.
Nobody has ever seen the boulders move directly but long trails left behind them in the sand seem to suggest that they have somehow traversed significant distances all by themselves. Some of the rocks that have shifted even weigh upwards of 320kg.
In an effort to solve the mystery once and for all a team of scientists from Scripps Institution of Oceanography visited the site in 2011 and set up a high-resolution weather station and 15 rocks fitted with GPS devices to measure even the slightest movements with impeccable accuracy.
It would take a further two years for anything to happen, but eventually during a visit to the site in December 2013 the team discovered that the area had been submerged in 3 inches of water.
As it turned out the movement of the rocks occurs under a very specific set of circumstances that requires there to be just enough water to cover the ground but not enough to submerge the rocks. The actual movement occurs due to a combination of strong winds, the freezing of the water during the night and the thawing of the ice by the hot sun during the day.
"It's possible that tourists have actually seen this happening without realising it," said co-author Jim Norris. "It is really tough to gauge that a rock is in motion if all the rocks around it are also moving." Read more at Scripps
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Early Photobomb c. 1840's
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American Monsters: A History of Monster Lore, Legends, and Sightings in America
- Buy it now!The Monsters have been uncaged! The whole furry, scaly, red-eyed, bat-winged, fanged, dripping-clawed, oversized pack of slavering unknown creatures that I spent two years cramming into a 376-page paperback are now free to romp and roam where ever anyone may care to read about them. And in this book, it’s not just all about upright, wolf-like creatures. I wanted to create a work that shows something of the breadth and depth of the unknown kingdom that eyewitnesses continue to glimpse day and night in sky, land and water. I think it’s amazing that people see giant primates, huge flying things thought to have died out with the dinosaurs, and weird beasties like the Chupacabras that looks like nothing ever seen before, and yet we know next to nothing about most of them.
Not that this is anything really new. People like Ivan Sanderson, John Keel and many other investigators were slogging through marshes and tromping far off lands long before I began to collect the experiences of otherwise ordinary people. Nor is my occupation all that unique; I have plenty of contemporary colleagues, friends and investigators from all sorts of backgrounds and abilities–too many to name here but see the acknowledgments page in Monsters for mere starters–to whom I and the whole field of cryptozoology owe an enormous debt for their own research and studies.
I hope this book, if nothing else, will help make the case that although modern science insists these creatures are not here, they sure look like they are to those who see them. And that there is something more to these anomalous events than mass hallucination, the occasional hoaxer, or misidentifications of known animals. - Linda Godfrey's Blog
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