Unexplained Phenomena

It’s a sad and historic anniversary, yesterday was the the 15th of April, the 100th anniversary of sinking of the Titanic. Amid the 3d showings of the movie and the wild commercialism that seems endless, I wondered what else might be lurking in the Titanic story within my own field of interest. The Paranormal.

As it turns out, there’s quite alot.

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One of the most rare and disturbing religious paranormal phenomena is the stigmata, or the manifestation of the wounds of the passion of Christ on the body. These wounds can range from a seemingly psychosomatic feeling of the wounds and the associated pain, but with no corresponding visible damage to the skin, to full blown unexplainable wounds that bleed and cause great discomfort to the stigmatic. The 20th century saw one of the most famous stigmatics, Padre Pio of Italy, who bore the bleeding wounds for decades and has since been declared a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

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The Korean war was given the moniker “the forgotten war” because of the relatively small amount of attention it received from the public compared to the two world wars. As time has progressed, however, World War I seems to get increasingly less attention, and the Korean war more. As the veterans of WWI die, there are only a handful left now, that war is rapidly fading from living memory and becoming a conflict relegated to academia and an all too brief mention in school history books. In fact, WWI was a horrific conflict that took the lives of nearly nine million people and served to shape the subsequent history of the 20th century. WWI was also a war riddled with supernatural occurrences more fitting accounts of a medieval war, than a modern one. Chief among these stories are the Angels of Mons.

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Isn’t it interesting how easily accepted a poor explanation can be passed off? The latest in our constant stream of paranormal happenings that our world is kind enough to dish up are the Wisconsin underground booms. Now, unexplained underground booms are nothing new. They even have a term, ‘Mistpouffers‘ among others, and have been reported around the world for centuries. Coastal areas are often most affected, early settlers in the American Northeast were told by the Indians that the sounds were the great spirit busily hammering away as he continued to create the earth. Obviously, this was nothing new to the Indians either. They are heard in Canada, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, Ireland and many other places, most all covered by various legends as to what they really are ranging from ghost ships firing cannon to the more modern underground alien bases theories.

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Psychokinesis, or the ability to manipulate objects with the mind, is a notoriously difficult to prove ability. Most famously Uri Geller achieved fame in the 1970′s with his seemingly amazing ability to bend spoons with nothing other than the power of his mind. Early on in his career, a number of scientists concluded that Geller does indeed posses psychic and psychokinetic abilities, however controversy over Geller’s power developed after a number of stage magician’s, most recently Criss Angel, claimed that Geller’s abilities are simple stage magic tricks. Whichever is the case, Geller remains the most public individual claiming to have these powers.

Ninel Kulagina

More obscurely, and more defiant against attempts to debunk, is the case of Ninel Kulagina. A female soldier in the Soviet Red Army, Kulagina found that whenever she became angry poltergeist activity would manifest in the room around her. After some time, she began to sense that the force that was responsible for the moving objects came from within her, rather than from a spirit. With practice, she learned how to focus her power and move objects at will. Soviet Scientist Edward Naumov was among the first to test her claims by spreading a box of matches on a table. Straining to the point of shivering, Ninel spread her hands over the matches and within seconds the matches moved to the corner of the table in a cluster, and fell to the floor one by one. Read more

Still standing after nearly 3,400 years, two statues of the ancient Egyptian Pharoah Amenhotep III stand guard over a temple that no longer exists. They are called the Colossi of Memnon and remain to this day one Egypt’s major archaeological tourist attractions. At one time, however, they were more notable for the sound they made at dawn, rather than as monuments to a long dead pharoah. The ancient greek historian Strabo wrote in the first century A.D. of a great earthquake that shook Egypt and damaged the statues. In particular, he mentions that the northern colossus cleaved in half. Soon after, each day at dawn, the statues mysteriously began to ‘sing’ by emitting an audible, and apparently loud, hum. Read more

In the west, we tend to categorize everything. We try to come up with rules and regulations that define what something is, sometimes to desperate lengths and great frustration when something just doesn’t fit. Mythical creatures are no exception. We view the vampire as a blood drinking undead human, and a werewolf as a living human that can take a wolf-like form and ravage the population like an animal. In Eastern Europe, the homeland of most folklore relating to the vampire and werewolf, these lines can become hopelessly blurred, and the creatures can become almost the same. Read more

The world has been ending for thousands of years. Early Christians believed the end would happen in their lifetime and that the Roman Empire represented the last gasp of humanity. As it turns out, it was one of the first gasps in the birth of the modern world in which we live. In the year 1000, medieval millenialists nervously wondered if the addition of a digit to the way we count our years would herald the end. It would seem it didn’t. A thousand years later people wondered if the change in that digit would result in a mass computer failure that would reverberate around the world and cause a major disruption of society to the point of the world regressing to the stone age. Didn’t quite happen that way.

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