MONGOLIAN DEATH WORM Search
In July 1990—weeks after the end of Mongolia’s democratic revolution and as the country began to open up to the wider world—four Czech guys caught a flight to Ulaanbaatar, found a Soviet ATV and a couple of guides, and made a beeline for the most remote corners of the Gobi Desert. Their goal: Find the region’s resident cryptid, the olgoi khorkhoi, a.k.a. the Mongolian death worm.
Initially, they planned to bait traps with the worm’s favorite foods. But locals didn’t know its diet. So they took a page from Dune, jerry-rigging a “thumper” in hopes its rhythmic pounding would summon the burrowing beasts. For two months, they crisscrossed the desert, in what prominent cryptozoologist Karl Shuker characterized in a blog post as a “diligent, groundbreaking” monster hunt.
The death worm was an odd target for such an ambitious expedition. It’s a particularly implausible cryptid, supposedly growing up to six feet long, spitting acid poison that rapidly corrodes anything and kills on contact, and possibly shooting electricity. And yet, the worm has never left any physical evidence. The mystery of its existence was also seemingly solved in 1983 when a Soviet scientist demonstrated that the “worm” likely evolved from legends around a harmless local snake, the Tartar sand boa. Read more at Inside the Decades Long Hunt for the Mongolian Death Worm
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BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES Psychology
The Forensic View has frequently presented examples of influences that can alter eyewitness processes. Such influences are often strongly highlighted by real-world events outside the courtroom.
The Battle of Los Angeles, on February 24-25, 1942, presents us with just such an event; and this one was epic.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, an attack on the U.S. West Coast was strongly anticipated. As a direct result, the “Battle of Los Angeles” yielded a very uncomfortable night—a night which proved lethal in at least five cases.
Californians had blacked out their windows, to prevent Japanese bombers from zeroing in. Los Angeles hosted several antiaircraft batteries, accompanied by eye-searing batteries of aerial searchlights over the cities. Air-raid wardens roamed the city; an attack was anticipated at any moment. Read more at Eyewitness Processes at the Battle of Los Angeles
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UFO RELIGIONS Threat to National Security?
An interesting 30-minute interview that New York Post columnist Steven Greenstreet conducted with Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, former head of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO).
In it, Kirkpatrick once again stands by the official vol. 1 report published by AARO shortly after he resigned from the government, which failed to find any evidence that could validate the non-ordinary nature of some UFO reports, or the rumors of reverse engineering programs dealing with advanced exotic technologies —“Sorry, no aliens.”
Greenstreet began his involvement with the UFO topic firmly on the ‘believer’ camp, but as time went on he became disenchanted with the claims made by the loudest proponents of the ‘Disclosure movement’, and now he clearly has an axe to grind. Regardless, I pretty much agree with his conclusions —also validated by Kirkpatrick’s— that most of the pro-UFO narrative we’ve been swarmed in since 2017 has been promoted and cultivated by a small group of “true believers” as he calls them, some of whom have been involved in all sorts of paranormal research (official and privatized) since the 1970s. Read more at Former AARO Director Sean Kirkpatrick: UFO Religions Are a Potential Threat to National Security
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