; Phantoms and Monsters: Pulse of the Paranormal

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Daily 2 Cents: The Palermo Monster -- The 'Glastonbury Glawackus' Legend -- The 'Other Bloop'


The Palermo Monster

Eight beachcombers thought fame & fortune awaited them when they found a monstrous carcass washed ashore near Palermo, Italy, July 2,1989. “It was at least 100ft long, snake-like, & had a huge head & a wide mouth full of vicious, needle-like teeth.”

Excitement turned sour when “military types showed up, confiscated our cameras & made us leave.” Later, no trace of it could be found, & nothing appeared in the media. This pic is the only apparent survivor.

NOTE: Fact or fake?

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What was in my house?

Where do I even start? I'm exhausted, I have bags under my eyes and I feel like I'm about to fall over. Last night my roommate went out around 8PM with a guy, and I climbed up to bed at 10PM, making sure I locked the front and back doors. I did my ritual, and got situated in bed, then I heard the bathroom door downstairs close. I figured my roommate was home so I brushed it off, then I heard a soft voice say "no" and heavy footsteps on the bottom of the stairs.... So I texted her, asking if she was home. Then the footsteps were in my hall and I could hear the voice again, "no, no, no" over and over again, it sounded like a little kid. I texted her two more times before I got a response, that kept me up and watching my door for my life. She wasn't home..... The heavy footsteps came to my door around 11, and I could hear a faint scratching, followed by a whispering child's voice, "no, no, no" I flipped the f**k out then, hid under my blanket like a child and cuddled with my cat.... Her tail was bushed up, as if she angry....

Sure enough daylight broke and the noises stopped, I looked out Ito the hall.... Her door was closed when I went to bed last night.... It's wide open... Now she's sending me weird messages.... Saying it's a spirit from her dreams... I didn't know how to respond when she said no.... So I waited til this morning to reply.... (WARNING...LANGUAGE) http://m.imgur.com/NPLVmtR http://m.imgur.com/L3VvQSP

Here's her response to that....
http://m.imgur.com/YjDSf8x

Yes her name in my phone is Tyrone, it's an inside joke. - Reddit.com

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The 'Glastonbury Glawackus' Legend

GLASTONBURY, CT — It was a creature that let out "blood curdling yells at night." It was described as witnesses who saw it as a large dog with a cat-like face. Small dogs disappeared or were found mutilated along with goats and sheep.

And so the legend of the "Glastonbury Glawackus" began.

It was the middle of a cold, snowy winter in 1939 when The Hartford Courant ran a story of a hunting party that went into the wilds of Glastonbury in search of the creature. It was a headline writer's dream as the newspaper's front page read: "Guffaws of Glastonbury Glawackus Greet Gloomy Gang Of Gunners." The search party turned up nothing.

"The Glawackus was still loose in the snow-covered hills of Glastonbury Tuesday night, victor over the wiles of the best huntsmen in these parts," read the January 18, 1939 article. "Until they're sure, the scientific term Glawackus will be used. The name come from Glastonbury, its habitat, and from wacky, to describe the way everyone feels about the whole thing. The ending makes it sound Latin and authentic."

The Courant printed a map showing the area of the three big Glawackus hunts and pinpointing bits of "Glawackiana" – areas where dogs and other domestic animals killed or mauled; areas Glawackus heard howling; areas where Glawackus was seen and "dogs chased something" locations.

The sightings and hunts were confined to the wilderness portion of southern and eastern parts of town. Some believed the creature was a mountain lion that escaped from a Manchester, Vermont zoo after the great hurricane of 1938.

"Because the animal is out of its native habitat, the animal is probably restless," warden Charles Allshouse said. "and might move on and be reported some distance away in a short time. However, it will probably stay around as long as there are enough rabbits to meet the needs of a mountain lion's appetite."

Others thought the creature may be a lynx.

"I never saw a glawackus," said a New Britain policeman in a Jan. 23 article. "but I'll bet that animal over there in Glastonbury isn't one. I'll bet it's a lynx. Four years ago there were two lynx off here in the Pinnacle Mountains. They were mates and nobody caught or killed them. They can have a whole family around these parts by now."

The lone hunter to see the creature was Hartfordite William F. Bonvouloir in the wilderness near Diamond Lake when a "beautiful black creature about three feet long with a tail two feet long leap out of the scrubwood in front of them."

"Bonvouloir brought up his shotgun and cut loose with the right barrel," according to the Courant article. "The 12-gauge charge bit into a rotted tree stump as the startled cat began zipzagging through the underbrush." A second shot misfired as the cat "kicked back sprays of snow as it fled into a stretch of green cedars."

But once a legend is born, it was hard to resist the pull of a myth. There was a community dance called the Glawackus Ball. An article ran about children making a Glawackus-man in the snow. Hunting clubs made Glawackus targets for members to shoot. Even local poets were inspired.

"The Glastonbury 'lion,'

Or wildcat, where is he?

Perhaps it's some poor tabby

Now hiding in a tree.

But if the great safari

Its big game could not stalk,

Through wood and open landscape,

It had a lovely walk."

The fervor began to die down when a large brown dog was killed in July by hunters. The headline from July 7, 1939 read "Mysterious Glawackus Is No More." The dog was taken in a baited bear trap, shot and buried in an unmarked grave.

"In a few days the beast was caught and bullets ended its suffering," read the article. "A few persons witnessed the incident and they decided to bury the animal and say no more about it."

"After that, Glawackus was seen no more and, one by one," read a 1958 article marking the 20th anniversary, "Glawackus men admitted that the dog probably was the terrible monster – well, maybe, perhaps. Still others waited until Middletown farmers one night reported seeing a "strange beast passing through. That, they said, must have been him."

The bottom line? The legend of the Glawackus sold newspapers and brought some excitement to a sleepy town during a long winter.

"It relieved the monotony of a dreary winter," a July 8 editorial noted. "It provided small talk for uncounted dinner tables just as the subject of the hurricane began to pall. It got any number of ordinarily slothful individuals into the open air...Now it is dead, but if one knows Glastonbury, it will rise again. It was too useful to remain long buried." - Courant

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The 'Other Bloop'

An unexplained sound has permeated the water from one end of the Pacific to the other since 1991. What could it be?

It isn’t whales or ship vibrations or any of the other usual suspects making this noise in the ocean. In 1991, scientists first detected what has become known as the Upsweep.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes Upsweep: “It consists of a long train of narrow-band upsweeping sounds of several seconds duration each.” It’s been detected from one end of the Pacific to the other, a huge range.

The US Navy had never seen this signal before in its decades of listening under the waves, according to a 2002 New Scientist article. Upsweep was heard straight across the Pacific, ruling out certain localized or small-scale sources.

What Was 'The Bloop'

The sound persisted, with a peak in strength in 1994. Since then, it has been subsiding, though it remains audible, reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It seems to peak in the spring and fall. This could be related to the source of the sound, or it may simply be that the sound travels better in the aquatic environment at these times for whatever reason, says NOAA.

The sound is uniform overall, unlike the varied sounds of most volcanic activity and unlike the varied intonations of whale communications. But Emile Okal of Northwestern University in Chicago and Jacques Talandier, formerly with the French Atomic Energy Agency, suggested a particular type of volcanic activity that may be the cause.

In 1996, they hypothesized that it may be the sound of seawater coming into contact with a large pool of lava, explained New Scientist. They used seismometers to trace where the sound may be coming from, concluding that it may originate in the remote southern Pacific. NOAA states that the source may be in this region, at the location of inferred volcanic seismicity. “But,” notes NOAA, “the origin of the sound is unresolved.”

Another theory was explained by Christopher Fox, who studied the sounds as director of NOAA’s acoustic monitoring project. The movement of water can make noise like the movement of wind and currents may be responsible.

Until the mystery is solved, many theories will continue to be excite human curiosity—could it be an unknown species of sea creature? Could it be a geological oddity or undiscovered phenomenon? Some explanations are more likely than others, but with 95 percent of the world’s oceans unexplored by humans, the possibility of discovering something new is ever-present.

Mysterious noises of the deep have perplexed scientists before, but were eventually explained. For example, the Bloop was a loud, ultra-low frequency sound heard in 1997 across some 3,000 miles of the Pacific. NOAA later discovered that it was the sound of an icequake created by the cracking and melting of sea ice and the calving of glaciers. Find the audio files at The Epoch Times

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