; Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Just the Facts?: Village Panics Over Bigfoot Prints -- The Ghost of Stump Lake -- Uri Geller...Psychic Spy?



Village in panic over Bigfoot prints

About 200 Bigfoot-like footprints have been discovered near Kampung Kepis Baru, Kuala Pilah, causing panic among villagers, reported Harian Metro.

Adnan Pungut, 48, claimed he discovered the footprints when he was clearing rubbish and wood at his rubber estate at 3pm on Saturday.

“I immediately informed the others because I was scared. I told the other villagers and all of us went back to the area.

“We found 200 footprints that were about the same size and tried to follow them,” he was quoted as saying.

“Based on the footprints, we can assume that the creature has two legs and weighs more than 100kg,” he said.

According to Adnan, further checks by villagers found that the creature could be headed towards a nearby forest.

The report stated that the villagers decided not to pursue the creature as they were afraid.

“We will let the authorities handle it as the animal could be endangered,” Adnan said. - TheStar

The Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates

The World's Weirdest Places

Alien animals: A Worldwide Investigation - lake Monsters, Giant Birds & Birdmen, Black dogs, Mystery pumas, Bigfoot


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Uri Geller...Psychic Spy?

We may know him for spoon bending antics and for his lengthy friendship with pop star Michael Jackson but showbiz psychic Uri Geller has seemingly had a lengthy second career as a secret agent for Mossad and the CIA, albeit one that was more Austin Powers than James Bond.

Geller was at the Sheffield Doc Fest this week for the premiere of Vikram Jayanti’s The Secret Life Of Uri Geller – Psychic Spy?, a new film that offers compelling evidence of his involvement in the shadowy world of espionage.

“Uri has a controversial reputation. A lot of people think he is a fraud, a lot of people think he is a trickster and makes things up but at the same time he has a huge following and a history of doing things that nobody can explain,” Jayanti says of his Zelig-like subject.

Speaking to The Independent, Geller acknowledged alarm when he first saw Jayanti’s documentary.

“I was worried and I am still concerned,” Geller said of the way the documentary outs him as a spy. “I didn’t realise that Vikram was going to do such a thorough job of tying all the loose ends…making that the little hints I dropped throughout my career were real.”

When he signed up for the doc, the psychic didn’t realise quite how diligently Jayanti would track down his old spy masters. Nonetheless, he is happy that the doc is showing “a serious side” to him. “Some countries think I am a freak, bizarre, an eccentric,” he sighs.

On camera and in interview, Geller still remains coy about his espionage activities. Nonetheless, the psychic acknowledges that his handlers once asked him to use telepathy to stop a pig’s heart. He refused, knowing that if he had succeeded, the next target would almost certainly have been a human.

“I tried to execute missions that were positive,” Geller claims. “I said ‘no’ to dark things.”

Jayanti didn’t rely on Geller’s own cryptic testimony. Instead, he spoke to the high-level officials involved in recruiting and using him. These include scientists from The Stanford Research Institute as well as senior CIA operatives. Among the interviewees with first hand knowledge of Geller’s psychic spying activities are former CIA officer Kit Green, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell (the sixth man to walk on the moon), physicists Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff, and retired US army colonel John Alexander (of The Men Who Stared At Goats fame). A Brit, Nick Pope, once the British Government’s UFO boffin, also puts in an appearance. We also learn about Geller's stint as a psychic bodyguard for Mexican President Jose Lopez Portillo.

The doc leaves a question mark in its title but provides so much background evidence that we are left in little doubt that even its most outlandish assertions are rooted in truth. Whether or not Geller had psychic powers, US security forces were certainly prepared to take a very hefty wager on him.

It is inferred that Geller attempted to use his psychic powers to disable radar during the “raid on Entebbe,” when Israeli commandos stormed a hijacked plane.

The spoon bender also used his mind powers to try erase the contents of floppy discs being carried back to Russia by Soviet diplomats in Mexico and to convince a Russian minister to sign a nuclear arms reduction treaty. (Geller is pictured alongside the minister flanked by a youthful and grinning US Vice-President Al Gore.)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears in the doc, testifying to his many years of friendship with Geller.

Jayanti’s thesis is that Geller was recruited as the US security forces were caught up in “psychic arms race” with their Soviet rivals, who were almost certainly bluffing about the strength of their own psychic warriors.

“When Jimmy Carter was elected President, one of the first things he did was to have Uri Geller give him a four hour briefing on the Soviet psychic threat. America didn’t want a psychic gap and Uri was the go-to guy about these things,” Jayanti said. “Sometimes, you wonder whether Uri’s entire public career has actually been a front for his shadow world activities.”

After 9/11, Geller was apparently “re-activated” as a psychic spy.

The key formative event in Geller’s youth appears to have been his near-death experience while fighting for the Israeli army during the Six Day War. He came face to face with a Jordanian soldier and shot him to save his own life.

“Out of the entire war, that one incident, that split second of killing another human being, left me scarred and I definitely have recurring nightmares about that. I learned to live with it,” Geller tells me. “When I woke up in hospital in Jerusalem, I realised what I had committed…that soldier is embedded in my soul now. He is like my brother. That is the way I feel. Although these recurring nightmares are such that he comes and grabs me and says what did you do to me, I still feel his soul is in my soul.”

Although Geller is coy about how he helped the Mossad, he had one revealing anecdote about Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan in a restaurant.

“He (Dayan) was an avid collector of archaeological items, very ancient ones, four, five six thousand years old. They’re all around Israel. When he met me and saw my powers, the first question he asked me, after the serious questions of military use and all that…was ‘Uri, do you think you can find for me some archaeological artefacts with your powers.’ I said, ‘You know, Moshe, I’ve never done it but let’s try!’”

This led to various late night trips when Geller would take Dayan with him as he went dousing for ancient relics. “I found quite a few things for him. He loved it. He used to collect them in his garden.”

Spying for the CIA is one thing, football another. In Sheffield, Geller belatedly offered his apologies to the Scottish people for using his psychic powers from a helicopter above Wembley to try to make the ball move before Gary McAllister took his fateful, missed penalty against England during the Euro 1996 tournament. He acknowledged that was one occasion when he had most definitely crossed ethical lines.

“I then realised after I got hate letters, hundreds and hundreds from Scotland, that it was absolutely and utterly unethical,” Geller confessed. “Guess what, I bought a Scottish island. I made up with Scotland. I am an owner of a Scottish island. That, to me, means I am partially Scottish.” - Independent

ESP & Psychic Spies

The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a "Psychic Spy" for the U.S. Military

Tell Me What You See: Remote Viewing Cases from the World's Premier Psychic Spy


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Documentary suggests UFO folklore was deliberately fabricated under a U.S. psychological warfare program

Delving into the shadowy hinterland of delusion, deception and paranoia that fuels UFO mythology, this tantalizing British-made documentary has just had its world premiere at the tenth annual Doc/Fest in the northern English city of Sheffield. Mirage Men features testimony from true believers, close-encounter witnesses, airline pilots and highway patrolmen. But it is chiefly concerned with a more prosaic and earthbound conspiracy, which suggests that much key UFO folklore was deliberately fabricated by U.S. military insiders to discredit extraterrestrial investigators as unhinged cranks, thus deflecting attention from their own covert projects.

Never less than engaging and generally good fun, Mirage Men touches on some accidentally topical material, including the ethics of NSA snooping and secret unmanned drone aircraft. The evergreen theme, eccentric personalities and bizarre anecdotes here are strong enough to guarantee further festival slots following the documentary's Sheffield debut. After that, television seems to be the most obvious platform, though the juicy subject matter and high-end production values may well attract niche theatrical business.

Mirage Men is distilled from the 2010 book of the same name Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by the British author Mark Pilkington, who is also involved here as writer, producer and onscreen talking head. The film’s focus is narrower, concentrating on the U.S., specifically a handful of well-known figures and events in UFO circles. One pivotal player in both the book and film is Richard Doty, a former counterintelligence officer with the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), who claims to have spent decades deliberately spreading disinformation about extraterrestrials: “weapons of mass deception,” as one interviewee memorably puts it. Another is ufologist and author William Moore, whose books include The Roswell Incident / by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore and The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility

Doty and Moore initially seem plausible enough on camera, though they share a shadowy past. Both admit to feeding false information to Paul Bennewitz, a World War II veteran and electronics expert living alongside a USAF base in New Mexico. According to Doty, the NSA targeted Bennewitz in the early 1980s as a useful idiot in their black propaganda wars, beaming fake extraterrestrial messages into his house and planting bogus spaceship evidence on a nearby mountain range. Convinced he had uncovered an alien invasion plot, Bennewitz turned into a deranged version of Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Blu-ray] wrote warning letters to President Reagan, developed paranoid psychosis and was briefly institutionalized. Mission accomplished.

Many rich threads are woven into this colorful patchwork story: Apache folk myth, Cold War paranoia, macabre animal mutilations, top-secret stealth bombers and even an early experiment with fracking. Pilkington and his fellow directors maintain an admirably unsensational but agreeably playful tone, punctuating artfully eerie shots of the New Mexico desert with kitschy clips from vintage science-fiction thrillers.

Mirage Men takes a fascinating excursion into a twilight zone of wild conspiracies, obsessive believers and psychological double agents, even if the claims and counterclaims it stirs up never quite harden into solid investigative journalism. The open-ended finale is also disappointingly flat, leaving only the impression that USAF insider Doty is as slippery and deluded as any tinfoil-hatted UFO conspiracy nut. But Pilkington and his fellow filmmakers know their audience well. As with all paranormal myths, nobody really wants conclusive proof that little green men were fakes all along. The Truth is still out there. - Hollywood Reporter

Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs

Passport to Magonia: On UFOs, Folklore, and Parallel Worlds

Close Encounters of the Third Kind [Blu-ray]


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The Ghost of Stump Lake

Wisconsin Widow's Strange Experience With an Unearthly Thing

Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Sentinel - 20 December 1896

Deerfield, Wis., Dec. 19, 1896 A ghost story told by Widow Olson of Stump lake is more difficult of solution than any yet published. Mrs. Olson and her 14-year-old son were living on the south shore of Stump lake, which, before the mill dam at the lower end was washed out, was about three miles long by one mile wide except at about midway from end to end where it narrowed down to a neck only about a half mile across. It was on the south side of this neck that Widow Olson lived. One day a boy came up and asked the way to a farmer living on the opposite shore of the lake. The widow directed him the way by land, but as this was about three miles, suggested that her son might take him across in his boat and save him a long walk. The stranger accepted and the two started for the landing. Young Olson took his position at the oars and invited the stranger to a seat at the stern. The strange boy took the seat as indicated but instead of facing the oarsman turned his back to him and sat motionless without uttering a word all the way across. Young Olson made some commonplace remarks but his passenger took no notice of them. His strange behavior made Olson observe him more closely and the more he looked at him the more did he appear unlike a human. His attention was first attracted by the stranger’s ears, which were abnormally large, reaching almost to the top of his head, where they came to nearly a point or sharp angle and were covered with a fine downy hair. His head was small and angular, something like that of a dog and covered with short, black curly hair that hugged the skin tightly. The hands were small, shriveled and covered with hair similar to that on his ears. Young Olson was now becoming almost frightened out of his wits at being alone in the boat with such an unearthly looking being and rowed with all his might. On arriving at the opposite landing he got out of the boat hastily to let out his uncongenial passenger. The stranger arose to leave the boat, but instead of facing about to walk out, he backed out and carefully kept his face from view. Olson, who was now thoroughly frightened, rowed back quickly and ran for the house to tell his mother of his strange passenger. As he was telling his mother, she turned around to look at her boy to see if he were joking or was in earnest. As she looked around she saw the very same lad her son had rowed across running up a little hill close to the house quick as a flash chasing her sheep ahead of him. Mother and son both made after him, but on arriving at the crest of the hill no body was to be seen while the sheep stood down the slope a little way huddled together looking frightened as if recently chased by a wolf or dog. There was nothing within eighty rods that the stranger could have hid behind. Why they did not notice his strange appearance before starting in the boat, how he got back so quickly and where he disappeared to was more than the frightened widow and son have been able to account for and they firmly believe there are still a few left of the old-time elf family. - Haunted Wisconsin

Ghost Stories of Wisconsin

Wisconsin's Ghosts