Ripley's Believe It or Not! : searches the globe for the ultimate in unusual oddities, strange stories and terrific true tales. After reading and reviewing hundreds of stories from headlines around the world in 2010, the experts and weird-ologists at Ripley's are releasing their Top 10 Strange Stories of 2010. They range from the bizarre to the unbelievable
- but all are true!.. Read more
A group of Indiana motorists pulled over on December 27, 2010, after observing a silent, triangle UFO moving east at 2,000 feet, according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.
No town name is mentioned in the public portion of the MUFON report, filed on December 27, 2010, but the reporting witness states that the object was seen while driving southbound along Cleveland Avenue.
The witness reports lights on the craft. Read more
The Year of 2010 may be remembered, in popular culture, cryptozoologically, for its series of stories of cryptids such as a blond Bigfoot named Knobby, on misidentifications of common animals, of announcements of a few remarkable discoveries, and about groundbreaking new concepts on tribal Sasquatch and extraordinary True Giants.
Let’s look at the top ten memorable news items. Read more
Angry Haitian mobs have lynched at least 45 people in recent weeks, accusing them of spreading a cholera outbreak that has killed over 2,500 people across the country, officials said Wednesday.I get emails occasionally from readers who are convinced that witches are tormenting them. I always ask if they know any witches, and if they do, whether they have done something to them. So far I haven't gotten an answer.
The number included at least 14 suspected sorcerers previously known to have been lynched in the far southwestern region of Grand'Anse as local people feared they were spreading cholera with a magical substance. The area has been largely spared by the outbreak. Read more
The exorcism conference was closed-door. The October conference, in Baltimore, Maryland, preceding a conference of US Catholic bishops, was attended by 56 bishops and 66 priests. The bishops were the novelty. There is a small annual conference on exorcism, but only a few priests attend. The conference focused on the details of the rite of exorcism, and "the reality of demonic manifestations in our society", a participant said.
While all Catholic priests can theoretically perform exorcism, very few American priests are trained to do so. The conference, intended to remedy the shortfall, was organised by Bishop Thomas Paprocki, chair of the Bishops' committee on canonical affairs and church governance. "I thought it went well," he said. "We had lots of bishops, and lots of priests." Read more
In the American Southwest, the Navajo, Hopi, Utes, and other tribes each have their own version of the Skinwalker story, but basically they boil down to the same thing - a malevolent witch capable of transforming itself into a wolf, coyote, bear, bird, or any other animal. To the Navajo, yee naaldlooshii is "with it, he goes on all fours", a practitioner of Frenzy Way. The witch might wear the hide or skin of the animal identity it wants to assume, and when the transformation is complete, the human witch inherits the speed, strength, or cunning of the animal whose shape it has taken. Read more
If you were walking down the street and encountered a man with ‘glowing red eyes’ what would you do? Start to dial 911 then imagine the response from the operator before you punch in the numbers. An operator who will ask if you’re under psychiatric care? Or, a man with glowing red eyes floating down a street? Luckily for the villagers in Chile who witnessed the man, parapsychologists were called in to investigate extremely unusual poltergeist activity occurring at one of the villager’s home. The woman in the U.K. who saw the man with glowing red eyes walking down the street was ‘so shocked she couldn’t talk’. She decided she couldn’t tell anyone for fear of being labeled ‘insane’. A third encounter, an ‘evil’ shadow man with bright blood red eyes who appeared in a 12-yr-old boy’s room. The boy, when he was 18, posted online what occurred.
There’s a website in South America, Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic Ufology, which has numerous fascinating posts including the latest in UFO reports and Reports of strange creatures including the ‘Hopping Phantom of Calchin’: Read more
Maine’s close, but believe it or not, the first ghost story recorded belongs to the Granite State. All the way back in 1682 is when a New Castle, New Hampshire family experienced some interesting activity that made them move out of their house, and it even followed them there too!
The documented account takes place in 1682 in the small town of New Castle, when, even as it is today, was the smallest town in New Hampshire. A family named the Walton’s woke up one morning to the sound of heavy rain. Thinking this was strange they soon realized it sounded like the house was being hit by stones. Rowdy kids? You’d think so, but more like rowdy poltergeists.
The family went outside and realized that the house was being pelted by stones, but by unseen hands as it was practically falling out of the sky. Some were small others were big enough to cause some serious damage if they were to hit anyone, but they were falling from the sky like rain, but elsewhere it was nothing, but just an ordinary spring day. As if the pure astonishment of it raining stones outside was strange it was even more odd that it was raining stones INSIDE the house as well! What was going on?
Read more
Are the For generations, the mystery lights of Marfa, Texas, have entertained residents with their strange dancing. On some warmer nights, a ball of light seems to split into two, which will separate and fly away from each other before turning around and flying back together. They have recently been linked to flying lights in the southwest Pacific, lights that natives of Papua New Guinea testify are from large flying creatures.
In southwest Texas, local residents have speculated about dancing devils or ghosts. Scientists have preferred something along the lines of ball lightning or earthlights, but all their scientific explanations have tripped over the resemblances to line dancing. If atmospheric energies or tectonic stresses cause the displays, why do two lights horizontally separate for a long distance before coming back together?
Now a cryptozoologist from California has explained the dancing lights of Marfa. Tales of spooks may hold a spark of truth, for recent research implies intelligence directs the lights: Bioluminescent flying predators may be hunting at night and catching a few unlucky Big Brown Bats: Eptesicus fuscus. Read more
Terror over a fast-spreading cholera epidemic has triggered a violent witch-hunt in rural Haiti in which locals have murdered at least 12 neighbors on accusations they used "black magic" to infect people, police said Thursday. Read more
I’ve been away from this issue for a long while, but after the recent media flurry over Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem’s results, I thought I’d spend some time re-organizing my thoughts on it all.
First, as a sort of starting guidepost: Any branch of science, even mainstream modern “Science” broadly defined, has its own culture with its own relatively inelastic ways of seeing – and not seeing. Psi happens to be one of the many things that Science does not see; and in a sense, that’s not even remarkable, because for us humans, with our young civilization and small brains, probably most of the universe lies in our blind spots. We should be grateful for what we do see!
On the other hand, psi isn’t an advanced, yet-to-be-discovered phenomenon. It belongs to a rejected past, not to an inaccessible future. Parapsychology was once a very active branch of Science, with a literature that was full of positive and seemingly repeatable results. So the important question here is not, Why doesn’t Science see psi? but rather, How did Science come to unsee psi? Read more
The 39 year-old Australian, who is wanted by Interpol over a charge of rape and sexual assault in Sweden, said there were some references to extraterrestrial life in yet-to-be-published confidential files obtained from the American government. Read more
Recently a reader sent me his concerns about the ongoing mutilations of cats that are found all over North America. I am not sure if this phenomenon is world wide as I have only read reports concerning my area of the world.
I know that cats are often targets of malicious humans and slaughtered for many reasons ranging from fun to using them as a meat source and eating them. I remembered when I was a child a demented young man in my town was found to have a entire cat torture camp set up in the woods. He would catch the cats in the area and take them to this camp he built deep in the dense woods and torture the poor animals to death. When his camp was found the local police discovered hundreds of dead animals hanging from dozens of trees in this twisted bizarre camp. Read more
