; Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Monday, April 25, 2016

Daily 2 Cents: Bigfoot on Oregon Rt 58 -- Giant Octopus Under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge? -- Pondering Aliens During Medieval Times


Bigfoot on Oregon Rt 58

Stacey in Oregon called in to tell of his Bigfoot sighting:

“About four years ago I had an experience with Bigfoot. This was about 7 to 8 feet tall and it had a physique on it that would put Arnold Schwarzenegger to shame. I was on Oregon route 58. It was the first snowfall of the year that year. I had to pull over to the side of the road to put my chains on. As I got my last tire chained up I had my upper half of my body in the tire-well trying to hook up the chain on the inside... and I heard real fast talking Japanese behind me. And I thought my co-driver had woken up and was mumbling to me, you know, like half asleep. And I was like, Hold on! Hold on! Let me hook this chain up. And I came back out of the well after hooking up the chain, get up, turned around and there was nobody there. I looked up towards the front of the truck thinking maybe he went up front and there was only drag marks from the chain and my footprints. And I was like, well, okay, maybe he's on the other side of the truck so I walked around the rear trailer, looked up towards the front and only my footprints and drag marks again. And I was like, What the? And then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. So I turned around and looked down hill and walking diagonally across the road was this figure that was 7 to 8 feet tall, like I said, muscles like Arnold Schwarzenegger and real dark hair, top to bottom, just lumbering along... walking without a care. It came across the road. One side of the road was woods and a hill and the opposite side was a creek bed with more woods and a hill. And it just went right across the road. In about two steps, it crossed the road and another two steps it was across the parking area and on down into the creek bed.”

Source: Coast To Coast AM - April 22, 2016

Transcribed by Jamie Brian


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Is there really a giant octopus under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?

Douglass Brown was 15 when he saw a giant tentacle emerge from Puget Sound.

He was in Tacoma, walking down the beach with a girl he liked. Then he looked out at the water.

“I see this arm come out of the water. It was 10, 15 feet in the air,” Brown says. “It looked like an octopus or something like that, and I just took off running.”

Was it a trick of imagination, or should Douglass have been afraid? His mom, Renee Brathwaite, asked Local Wonder to investigate.

“The big octopuses, they’re around,” says commercial diver Kerry Donahue. Donahue’s company helped build the newer, eastern span of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.

“They try to scare you,” he says. “Their big defense mechanism – they get bigger than you are.”

The first time it happened to Donahue, it terrified him. He screamed. “Because your radio is to the surface, you take a lot of flak for screaming like a 2-year-old when you run into an octopus.”

But octopuses are not sea monsters, and they don’t seek humans as prey. Read more at Is there really a giant octopus under the Tacoma Narrows Bridge?

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Which Alien Civilizations Are Looking At Us (Maybe)?

As Earth whips around the sun, it casts a shadow into the galaxy. If that shadow passes over cosmic neighbors that host reasonably intelligent aliens, they would see Earth the same way NASA’s Kepler space telescope sees some of them: as a periodic dip in the light from our sun. If we want to listen for alien radio broadcasts, those are the parts of the sky we should tune into, argue astronomers René Heller of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and Ralph Pudritz of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.

Within 3,500 light-years of Earth, there are 82 known stars that might host curious extraterrestrials who could detect Earth’s shadow, the researchers report in the April Astrobiology. The stars, roughly similar to or a bit cooler than the sun, encircle the solar system in nearly the same plane as Earth’s orbit — a narrow band that’s home to the 12 zodiac constellations. And these are just the stars that astronomers know about. Heller and Pudritz calculate that there could be 300,000 stars hosting 30,000 rocky habitable worlds in this sliver of the galaxy.

Since there’s a chance that the inhabitants of those worlds know about us, they might already be trying to get in touch, the researchers suggest. Even if we have no interest in an interstellar palaver, they say, we can’t hide from aliens that might see Earth silhouetted against the sun. Read more at To find ET, look at who’s (maybe) looking at us

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Humans have pondered aliens since medieval times

For beings that are supposedly alien to human culture, extraterrestrials are pretty darn common. You can find them in all sorts of cultural contexts, from comic books, sci-fi novels and conspiracy theories to Hollywood films and old television reruns. There’s Superman and Doctor Who, E.T. and Mindy’s friend Mork, Mr. Spock, Alf, Kang and Kodos and My Favorite Martian. Of course, there’s just one hitch: They’re all fictional. So far, real aliens from other worlds have refused to show their faces on the real-world Earth — or even telephone, text or tweet. As the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi so quotably inquired during a discussion about aliens more than six decades ago, “Where is everybody?”

Scientific inquiry into the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence still often begins by pondering Fermi’s paradox: The universe is vast and old, so advanced civilizations should have matured enough by now to send emissaries to Earth. Yet none have. Fermi suspected that it wasn’t feasible or that aliens didn’t think visiting Earth was worth the trouble. Others concluded that they simply don’t exist. Recent investigations indicate that harsh environments may snuff out nascent life long before it evolves the intelligence necessary for sending messages or traveling through space.

In any event, Fermi’s question did not launch humankind’s concern with visitors from other planets. Imagining other worlds, and the possibility of intelligent life-forms inhabiting them, did not originate with modern science or in speculative fiction. In the ancient world, philosophers argued about the possibility of multiple universes; in the Middle Ages the question of the “plurality of worlds” and possible inhabitants occupied the deepest of thinkers, spawning intricate and controversial philosophical, theological and astronomical debate. Far from being a merely modern preoccupation, life beyond Earth has long been a burning issue animating the human race’s desire to understand itself, and its place in the cosmos. Read more at Humans have pondered aliens since medieval times

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