Eminent Zoologist Was Fired Over Nessie Sighting
In 1959, Dr. Denys Tucker of the Natural History Museum claimed to have seen the Loch Ness Monster.
An eminent zoologist and eel expert, Dr. Tucker was a respected scientist who climbed to the position of the museum's principal scientific officer within the space of only eight years.
In 1959 however his career suffered an unrelenting downward turn following his insistance that he had witnessed an unknown creature in the waters of Scotland's Loch Ness, a claim that would prove highly popular among the general public but extremely controversial among his peers at the museum.
At the time Dr. Tucker had concluded that the creature must have been an Elasmosaurus, a large plesiosaur with a long neck that was thought to have gone extinct over 80 million years ago.
"I am quite satisfied that we have in Loch Ness one of the most exciting and important findings of British zoology today," he wrote in a letter to New Scientist.
His obsessive interest in the phenomenon however did not go down well with his fellow scientists who deemed the topic to be inappropriate for someone working at such a prestigious museum.
The controversy continued to escalate until in 1960 he was fired by director Dr. Morrison-Scott. Tucker fought back with a high-profile lawsuit that even went as far as the Court of Appeal, but in the end he failed to achieve victory over his employers and his plight faded in to obscurity.
What he had actually seen in the loch that day in 1959 however continues to remain a mystery. -
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Earthworms Rain From Sky Over Norway
Biology teacher Karstein Erstad was out for a ski in the mountains outside Bergen on Sunday when he came across the unusual phenomenon.
“I saw thousands of earthworms on the surface of the snow,” he told The Local. “When I found them on the snow they seemed to be dead, but when I put them in my hand I found that they were alive.”
At first he thought that they had perhaps crawled though the snow from the ground beneath, but on reflection, he rejected this idea.
“In many places, the snow thickness was between half a meter and a meter and I think they would have problems crawling through the cold snow.”
Since Erstad’s discovery was reported in Norway’s NRK news channel, corroborating reports have flooded in from across southern Norway, with sightings of worm rainfall in Lindås and Suldal near Bergen, and as far away as Femunden on the Swedish border.
“People have now observed the same phenomenon in many places in Norway,” Erstad told The Local. “It’s very peculiar, I don’t know why so many people have discovered it. I don’t know if there have been some special weather conditions lately.”
Erstad has found reports of the worm rainfall phenomenon taking place in Sweden in the 1920s.
“It’s a very rare phenomenon,” he told The Local. “It’s difficult to say how many times it happens, but it has only been reported a very few times.” - Earthworms rain from sky over Norway
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During the 6 months Jason Charles Sumey lived with a Fall City, WA family, he used the name “Steven Davidson” because he was wanted by police for failing to register as a sex offender.
KIRO 7 has learned, while Sumey was on the lam, detectives believe he cooked-up a haunted house scheme to get his hands on the family's money.
The so-called haunting lasted for months. Windows were suddenly shattered, trucks were dented, “random items would be glued down or glued to walls,” according to King County Superior Court documents.
Investigators believe the 38-year old Sumey was responsible for the more than $30,000 in damage, which started shortly after Sumey moved into the Fall City home last August to live with the homeowners' granddaughter.
Chen Saeteurn said she didn’t know her granddaughter’s boyfriend was in trouble with the law until he was arrested in February. The family members also didn’t know their house guest’s real name. “We didn’t know,” Saeteurn told KIRO 7’s Amy Clancy. “We thought he was a good guy.”
According to court documents, the "strange happenings" also included faucets turning on by themselves and food coloring "splattered across carpets, walls and furniture." Sumey started multiple fires on the lawn surrounding the home, which he claimed would fight evil, but promised his "uncle" could get rid of the “spirits” for good --- for a fee. Over the course of four months, the family paid Sumey $64,452.
Sumey “used deception in order to trick the family into believing something that he knew was not in fact true,” King County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Sgt. Stan Seo told KIRO 7.
“What we believe he was doing was targeting vulnerable individuals and exploiting their belief system.”
Sumey has a long criminal history for theft by deception, rape and failing to register as a sex offender.
Investigators believe Sumey could have multiple victims who know him as "Steve Davidson" or another alias.
Meanwhile, Saeteurn said her family hasn’t had any problems with “spirits” since Sumey was arrested in February. “The bad spirits went with him,” she said.
Sumey has been charged with nine counts of theft in the second degree and malicious mischief in the first degree – domestic violence. He remains behind bars in lieu of $130,000 bail. - House guest claimed Fall City home was 'haunted,' took $64K to rid it of spirits
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Jinn Possession as a Form of Cultural Resistance in Morocco
El Jadida – The maraboutic scene continues today across the Moroccan countryside with many holy maraboutic shrines still dotting the landscape with their white exterior walls, domed shapes, and inside imbued with saintly chants, dances and perfumes. Maraboutic rituals from jinn evictions to trance dances appear to fulfill individual needs, especially psychological and emotional ones producing comfort, hope and relief from uncertainty, anomie and unhappiness. They also respond to the immediate needs of society by trying to answer to problems of sickness and economic and social malaise, and maintain social cohesion.
Folk music thrives with a plethora of maraboutic spirits and tunes evoked in ecstatic trance dances (hadras) and jinn evictions. The epistemic foundations of these practices are bizarre to the schooled who may rationalize things in terms of material empirical beliefs, and for whom these pursuits seem to be mystifying rather than mystic, serving finally only social and political obfuscation.
But we argue that the surviving and still-working culture of possession and maraboutism may indeed shed light on what most Moroccans feel towards the current political and economic order and how they may resist political domination and economic injuries. Deep down in their cultural logics, possession rituals and trance dancing can be understood as a form of cultural resistance against domination.
There are many strands to our argument. Theoretically speaking, spirit possession presupposes the permeability of the body; powerful external forces which could not be assimilated in their abstract forms enter as divinities, ancestors, ghosts, jinn, and have a hold on the body. They are still seen as separate and distinct— certainly detachable—from the body, ethnically alien and foreign to the group. But they are somehow known and capable of some bidding and exist within a daily realm. It is a way of sensing incomprehensibly large and abstract structural forces which cannot be named directly in local cultural and concrete terms.
We argue that there are challenging forms in this mystic soil suitable for transplant to modern dilemmas. For instance, the spectral mythic court assembled during jinn eviction (like the court of Bouya Omar, Ben Yeffu, Sidi Chamharouch…) is at least a court—more than most Moroccans get in normal social life for the many social and economic injuries to which they are subject.
With possession at least the human hosts stand in some equal capacity with a personalized, if still incomprehensible force, scoped in the present body. This is not the crushing of insects without human color and imagination. If not controlling their fate, at least in an unlikely swallowing, there is a condensation of outlandish and truly frightening structural forces into the more amiable personification of jinn, mischievous, answering back and at least partly controllable. Read more at Morocco World News
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