Creepy Disclosures Weblog

Web notables, scary news and hypochondria.

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Creepy Disclosures Weblog- issue#48

  • RHESSI Satellite Captures Giant Gamma-ray Flare
    Source: University Of California, Berkeley
    Date: 2005-03-11
    URL: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/02/050222112537.htm
    BERKELEY – Astronomers around the world recorded late last year the brightest explosion ever of high-energy X-rays and gamma rays — a split-second flash from the other side of our galaxy that was strong enough to affect the Earth's atmosphere.
    The flash, called a soft gamma repeater flare, reached Earth on Dec. 27 and was detected by at least 15 satellites and spacecraft between Earth and Saturn, swamping most of their detectors. Some of the best observations were recorded by the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), a NASA/University of California, Berkeley, satellite launched in 2002 to study gamma-ray emissions from solar flares.
    "It was the mother of all magnetic flares — a true monster," said Kevin Hurley, a research physicist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory who leads a major international team studying the event.
    Thought to be a mighty cataclysm in a super-dense, highly magnetized star called a magnetar, it emitted as much energy in two-tenths of a second as the sun gives off in 250,000 years. Its intrinsic power was a thousand times greater than the power of all other stars in the galaxy put together, and ten thousand times brighter than the brightest supernova.
    "This is a key event for understanding magnetars," said Robert C. Duncan of the University of Texas at Austin, who along with Christopher Thompson of the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics, originally proposed and developed the magnetar theory. They both worked with Hurley's team to understand the immense power of the Dec. 27 flare, which exceeded all previous magnetar outbursts in our galaxy by more than 100. The team's observations and analysis are summarized in a paper that has been submitted for publication in the journal Nature.
    "Soft gamma repeater" bursts — pinpoint flashes of highly energetic X-rays and low-energy (soft) gamma rays coming repeatedly from one place in the sky - were first noticed in 1979 and remained a mystery until theorists proposed in 1992 that they originate from magnetically powered neutron stars, or magnetars. Formed by the collapsing core of a star throwing off its outer layers in a supernova explosion, neutron stars are extremely dense, with a mass greater than the Sun packed into a ball about 10 miles across. Many neutron stars spin rapidly - some rotating a thousand times a second — and are called pulsars because they signal their presence by the emission of pulsed radio waves.
    Magnetars are a special kind of neutron star. They are born rotating very quickly, which causes their magnetic fields to get amplified. But after a few thousand years, their intense magnetic field slows their spin to a more moderate period of one rotation every few seconds. The magnetic fields both inside and outside the star twist, however, and according to the theory, these intense fields can stress and move the crust much like shearing along the San Andreas Fault. These magnetic fields are a quadrillion — a million billion — times stronger than the field that deflects compass needles at the Earth's surface.
    The shear moves the crust around along with the magnetic fields tied to the crust, generating twists in the magnetic field that can sometimes break and reconnect in a process that sends trapped positrons and electrons flying out from the star, annihilating each other in a gigantic explosion of hard gamma rays.
    The flare observed Dec. 27 originated about 50,000 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius, which means that the magnetar sits directly opposite Earth in the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy.
    As the radiation stormed through our solar system, it blitzed at least 15 spacecraft, knocking their instruments off-scale whether or not they were pointing in the magnetar's direction. Such energetic X-rays and gamma rays pass right through satellites, Hurley said, though the Earth's atmosphere absorbs them, both protecting us and preventing observation by surface telescopes. One Russian satellite, Coronas-F, detected gamma rays that had bounced off the moon.
    "While all the real X- and gamma-ray detectors in space were swamped, the particle detectors on NASA's Wind spacecraft gave us our best reading on the distribution of energies of the gamma rays, and the particle detector on RHESSI told us the total energy content of the flare," said Steven Boggs, assistant professor of physics at UC Berkeley, who is leading the analysis of the Wind and RHESSI data.
    "The initial spike killed us — completely saturated the RHESSI telescope — but after a half second, RHESSI recovered to observe the X-ray tail in its entirety," he added. "The RHESSI particle detector, however, with its minimal sensitivity to gamma-rays, has just become the smallest gamma-ray telescope ever in space. The fact that it is so small is why it was able to operate properly throughout the entire initial spike."
    The flare also ripped atoms apart, ionizing them, in much of the Earth's ionosphere for five minutes, to a deeper level than even the biggest solar flares do, an effect noticed via its effect on long-wavelength radio communications.
    Hurley and his team combined information from many spacecraft, including neutron and gamma-ray detectors aboard Mars Odyssey and many near-Earth satellites, in order to localize the giant flare to a spot well-known to astronomers: a magnetar known as SGR 1806-20. This position was accurately confirmed by radio astronomers at the Very Large Array in Socorro, N.M., who studied the fading radio afterglow of the event and obtained important information about the explosion.
    The tremendous power of the event has suggested a novel solution to a long-standing mystery — the origins of a strange phenomenon known as "short-duration gamma ray bursts." Hundreds of brief, mysterious flashes of high-energy radiation from deepest space, lasting less than two seconds, have been measured and recorded over decades, but nobody knew what they were.
    "It now seems likely that a sizeable fraction of these events, at least, are magnetar flares in distant galaxies," Hurley said.
    The similarity between the Dec. 27 burst and these short-duration bursts lies in the brief spike of hard gamma rays that arrives first and carries almost all the energy. In the recent burst, for example, the hard spike lasted only two-tenths of a second. This was followed by a "tail" of X-rays that lasted over 6 minutes. As the tail faded, its brightness oscillated on a 7.56 second cycle, the known rotation period of the magnetar.
    According to Duncan and Thompson's theory, the oscillating X-ray tail that followed was due to a residue of electrons, positrons and gamma-rays trapped in the magnetar's magnetic field. Such a hot "trapped fireball" shrinks and evaporates over minutes, as electrons and positrons annihilate. The measurements of Hurley's team corroborate this picture. The tail's brightness appears to oscillate because the fireball is stuck to the surface of the rotating star by the magnetic field, so it rotates with the star like a lighthouse beacon.
    Hurley and his team argue that the hard initial spike of these giant flares is so bright that it can be detected from very far away, meaning that the flares we see are from other galaxies, though the soft X-ray tails are too faint to be seen.
    "If a magnetar flares up in a distant galaxy within a hundred million light-years of Earth, we should be able to detect it, assuming that it is as bright as the December 27 event," Hurley said. "Since there are very many galaxies within this distance range, we should see these events frequently."
    A test of this theory should come soon, because the recently launched Swift satellite carries sensitive gamma-ray detectors designed, in part, to unravel the short gamma-ray burst mystery. Launched in November 2004 and gathering data only since January, it is designed to automatically turn its X-ray telescope toward a burst in order to accurately pin down its position.
    Hurley's team estimates that Swift will spot an abundance of magnetars lurking in other galaxies. In some cases, Swift's X-ray telescope may even catch the oscillating tail and measure the rotation period of the faraway star. In any case, Swift will probably localize some short bursts of gamma-rays to galaxies within about 100 million light-years of Earth, betraying their magnetar origins.
    "Swift will open up a new field of astronomy: the study of extragalactic magnetars," said Duncan.
    Co-authors with Hurley, Boggs, Duncan and Thompson were D. M. Smith of the UC Santa Cruz physics department, RHESSI and Wind principal investigator and Space Sciences Laboratory Director Robert Lin, and teams of U.S., Swiss, Russian and German scientists.

  • MRI Scans Could Have Antidepressant Effect -Study
    Thu Mar 10, 2005
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) - High-speed magnetic resonance imaging scans produce effects in rats similar to the use of antidepressants, confirming observations made in human patients, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.
    The finding suggests that electromagnetic fields can affect brain biology, the team at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School reported.
    "We found that when we administered the magnetic stimulation to the rats, we saw an antidepressant-like effect, the same effect as seen after administration of standard antidepressant drugs," said William Carlezon, director of McLean's Behavioral Genetics Laboratory.
    Writing in the journal Biological Psychiatry, Carlezon and colleagues said they tested the rats after another team at the hospital reported a new type of magnetic resonance imaging, called echo planar magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (EP-MRSI), had improved the mood of people in the depressed phase of bipolar disorder.
    The new study was designed "to see if we could demonstrate in an animal model what the clinicians thought they were seeing in humans," Carlezon said.
    When repeatedly stressed, rats develop helpless behavior, which may be their version of despair, the researchers said. But in the experiment, the rats that had been exposed to EP-MRSI showed less helplessness during the stress tests.
    "They behaved as if they had received an antidepressant," said Dr. Bruce Cohen, psychiatrist in chief at McLean.
    "It's a non-drug way to change the firing of nerve cells," Cohen said. "That's why the implications of this work have the potential to be so profound."
    While this may offer a new way to treat depression, it also suggests that at least some forms of MRI are more invasive than previously thought, the researchers said.
    "Renewed caution is warranted when high-speed MRI is used to diagnose or study disorders involving the brain," the researchers wrote.
    "People assume when they are getting an MRI that nothing is happening, that you are simply getting a picture of the brain. But in actuality the body is being exposed to magnetic and electrical fields," Carlezon said.
    "They may cause other effects we don't understand yet," he added.

  • Scott Ritter Says US Attack On Iran Set For June
    By Mark Jensen
    United for Peace of Pierce County (WA)
    2-21-5
    On Friday evening in Olympia, former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter appeared with journalist Dahr Jamail. -- Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq....
    Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
    Olympians like to call the Capitol Theater "historic," but it's doubtful whether the eighty-year-old edifice has ever been the scene of more portentous revelations.
    The principal theme of Scott Ritter's talk was Americans' duty to protect the U.S. Constitution by taking action to bring an end to the illegal war in Iraq. But in passing, the former UNSCOM weapons inspector stunned his listeners with two pronouncements. Ritter said plans for a June attack on Iran have been submitted to President George W. Bush, and that the president has approved them. He also asserted that knowledgeable sources say U.S. officials "cooked" the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
    On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million -- a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.
    The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.
    Asked by UFPPC's Ted Nation about this shocker, Ritter said an official involved in the manipulation was the source, and that this would soon be reported by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in a major metropolitan magazine -- an obvious allusion to New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh.
    On Jan. 17, the New Yorker posted an article by Hersh entitled The Coming Wars (New Yorker, January 24-31, 2005). In it, the well-known investigative journalist claimed that for the Bush administration, "The next strategic target [is] Iran." Hersh also reported that "The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer." According to Hersh, "Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. . . . Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military's war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. . . . The hawks in the Administration believe that it will soon become clear that the Europeans' negotiated approach [to Iran] cannot succeed, and that at that time the Administration will act."
    Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.
    Scott Ritter's talk was the culmination of a long evening devoted to discussion of Iraq and U.S. foreign policy. Before Ritter spoke, Dahr Jamail narrated a slide show on Iraq focusing on Fallujah. He showed more than a hundred vivid photographs taken in Iraq, mostly by himself. Many of them showed the horrific slaughter of civilians.
    Dahr Jamail argued that U.S. mainstream media sources are complicit in the war and help sustain support for it by deliberately downplaying the truth about the devastation and death it is causing.
    Jamail was, until recently, one of the few unembedded journalists in Iraq and one of the only independent ones. His reports have gained a substantial following and are available online at dahrjamailiraq.com.
    Friday evening's event in Olympia was sponsored by South Puget Sound Community College's Student Activities Board, Veterans for Peace, 100 Thousand and Counting, Olympia Movement for Justice & Peace, and United for Peace of Pierce County.

  • What the #$*! is Ramtha
    http://www.wweek.com/story.php?story=5860#
    12/22/2004
    The year's sleeper hit was inspired by a 35,000-year-old warrior spirit from Atlantis.
    The most intriguing movie of 2004 has nothing to do with George W. Bush, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, or killer zombies. No, the topic is metaphysics--and the movie is What the Bleep Do We Know?
    Shot in Portland, the film stars deaf actress Marlee Matlin as a Xanax-gobbling photographer whose world turns inside out after a chance encounter on a basketball court. Her story is punctuated by a Greek chorus of physicists, philosophers, psychologists and mystics slinging soundbites about quantum mechanics.
    Think Stephen Hawking on an acid trip.
    The premise may sound outlandish, but the film has become a cult classic. More than 60,000 people saw it at the Bagdad Theater, where it played for 18 weeks. "It's been a huge success," says Peter Boicourt, the film buyer for McMenamins theaters. "We've never played a film that long before."
    The Chicago Tribune called it "modern science for dummies." The Dallas Morning News described it as "a film that dares to treat people as smart and deeply curious rather than dumb and deeply cynical."
    "It's the best movie I've ever seen," declared teacher Brooke Kaye-Albright, who attended an event with one of the film's directors at the New Renaissance Bookstore last week. "It helps me realize what I'm really capable of."
    "I loved it," added Leisa Vandehey, an office worker for Multnomah County. "I wish I could bring everyone I know to see it."
    To date, the film has drawn more than a million viewers and grossed $9.6 million--piddling by Hollywood standards (Spider-Man 2 grossed $373 million) but a smash hit for an indie film.
    What most viewers don't realize is that What the Bleep (which also screens as What the #$*! Do We Know?) is the work of a strange sect headquartered a couple of hours north of Portland in the prairie town of Yelm, Wash.
    The sect is dedicated to Ramtha, a mighty warrior-spirit from Atlantis, who speaks in a hokey English accent through his channeler, a former cable-TV saleswoman named JZ Knight, who plays herself in What the Bleep.
    On the surface, Ramtha's message sounds like a cross between New Age spirituality and Amway optimism. Everything happens for a reason. Take charge of your life. Don't be a victim.
    But delve a little deeper, and you find some strange, even disturbing ideas. Ramtha says mirrors are portals to a parallel universe. Ramtha says children with Down syndrome have "chosen" their condition. Ramtha says you can read minds, alter your own DNA, reverse aging, teleport, travel through time, and prolong your life with Twinkies.
    Seriously.
    All religions have an article of faith. Mormons believe the angel Moroni spoke to Joseph Smith. Catholics believe the wafer and wine become the body and blood of Christ. And "Ramsters" (as they're known in Yelm) believe that when a 58-year-old woman strides on stage, settles into her ceremonial chair, and speaks in a low, strange voice, she is no longer a blue-eyed grandmother named JZ Knight but an enlightened being named Ramtha, who flourished 35,000 years ago.
    In 1997, parapsychologists from the Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco measured Knight's pulse, respiration and other vital signs before and after channeling Ramtha.
    "The type of results we got from the psychological and physiological tests are so unique that it's beyond my ability to imagine how someone could fake them," says researcher Stanley Krippner.
    Knight refused to speak to WW, but her autobiography describes a difficult childhood. Born in Roswell, N.M. (a year before the infamous Roswell Incident), she grew up dirt-poor in a family with nine children. Her father was an alcoholic who beat her mother. She married a gas-station attendant and had two boys before leaving her husband and moving to Washington state.
    She was just another Tacoma housewife until a Sunday afternoon in 1977, when she put a cardboard pyramid on her head and was startled by a shining apparition, 7 feet tall, with "black dancing eyes" standing in her kitchen.
    "My name is Ramtha the Enlightened One," he intoned. "And I have come to help you over the ditch."
    Whatever Ramtha's reasons for slumbering through the millennia, his timing--in commercial terms--was impeccable. The Age of Aquarius was dawning, channeling was all the rage, and Ramtha's gospel of self-empowerment seemed to strike a chord, especially among women (celebrity fans include Salma Hayek, Linda Evans and Shirley MacLaine.)
    Ramtha's disciples (known as "masters") have now swelled to an estimated 5,000 people around the globe, who plunk down $1,000 for a weeklong spell of ancient wisdom every year. To cater to this spiritual hunger, Knight employs 60 people churning out books, tapes, CDs, videos, posters, scents, lotions, candles and elvish capes.
    Her company, JZK Inc., refuses to divulge any financial information, but one observer pegs its annual income at $10 million at least. Whatever the figure, it is substantial enough that the girl who was born in a one-room shack now lives in a 12,000-square-foot French-style chateau with six bedrooms, seven fireplaces, a spiral staircase and an indoor pool.
    Driving through Yelm (population 3,300) you can't help but feel that the town seems miscast as a mecca. Set 20 miles southeast of Olympia, where the Nisqually River wends its way from the jagged peak of Mount Rainier, Yelm is the kind of place where men wear overalls to work, green moss sprouts on the roofs, and the Christmas parade is front-page news.
    On the edge of town, behind a high stone wall, sits the Ranch, a.k.a. Ramtha's School of Enlightenment--a 49-acre spread that functions as a sort of intergalactic headquarters. Here, in an indoor horse ring dubbed the Great Hall, Ramtha holds court before audiences of a thousand masters or more, who sit cross-legged on a floor paved with Astroturf.
    WW was barred from attending any of Ramtha's appearances, which typically occur a couple of times a month. But videos and eyewitness accounts depict a charismatic woman thundering from the stage, sometimes challenging the masters, sometimes lecturing them, sometimes leading them in "wine ceremonies" where the entire assembly gets plowed.
    On a recent visit, my tour guide was Greg Simmons, RSE's marketing director. With his blue jeans, black wool sweater fraying at the elbows and piercing gaze, Simmons somehow broadcasts both intensity and calm, like a transistor radio tuned to two stations at once.
    Simmons' first audience with Ramtha was 22 years ago. He was so awestruck that he eventually quit his job and moved to Yelm.
    Ramtha's appeal is plain to see. Stripped to its essentials, the idea is that you possess untapped hidden powers. If you could just channel your own potential, all your problems--your depression, your coke habit, your crummy marriage--would melt away.
    This idea is hardly unique--ask your local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. But Ramtha takes it one step further. By creating your own reality, Ramsters believe, you can violate the laws of physics. Ramtha teaches that with proper training, you can learn to see in the infrared wavelength, transmit thought or predict the future. To hone their mental powers, disciples wander through a vast outdoor labyrinth with blindfolds duct-taped to their heads for up to eight hours at a time, concentrating on the "void" at the center of the maze. "It builds focus within," says Simmons. "It's just a question of mind over matter."
    They also practice telepathy. One will take a scrap of paper, sketch an image--a canoe, for example--and focus on transmission. A second will sit, blindfolded, across the Great Hall, and sketch what they receive. Hundreds of apparently successful transmissions are taped up on the walls, side by side: bicycles, numbers, triplets of colors. "These people don't even speak the same language," Simmons says.
    We have lunch together at Annie's Bistro, a well-known Ramster joint in Yelm. He orders the calamari. I choose the stroganoff. Afterwards, we walk out to the parking lot, where I discover that I somehow left my headlights on. My battery is dead. We string a pair of jumper cables from Simmons' immense pickup to my Honda, which fires right up.
    "I probably could have done that by just touching the battery," he smiles. "But I didn't want to freak you out."
    Approximately 2,000 masters now reside in the Yelm area (only JZ Knight actually lives at the Ranch). While there is no overt hostility, the spiritual immigration has created some friction. The mayor of Yelm refused to make any comments about Ramtha, and local residents roll their eyes at talk of telepathy and quantum potentials.
    The fact is that Ramtha has become a significant part of the Yelm economy. The School of Enlightenment draws thousands of masters every year--some of whom have set up cafes, bookstores, galleries and auto shops.
    Most of these businesses would seem at home in the dreadlock district of any American city. But deep in the woods between Yelm and Rainier, masters have also set up an operation that would raise a few eyebrows on Hawthorne Boulevard--a private school where 40 children learn, along with the three Rs, how to read minds and sense the unseen.
    Sitting on a minuscule blue chair in the first-grade classroom of the Children's School of Excellence, teacher Cheryl Nichols spreads a deck of cards face-down, invites me to choose one--and then guess what it is.
    I pull a card from the deck and lay it down on the table, staring at the yellow smiley face on the reverse. Focus. After 30 seconds, the face starts to shimmer. It seems to float up off the table, mocking me.
    "Think about it this way," Nichols says. "You've already chosen the card. Now imagine that you've already turned it over. You just have to look and see what it is."
    Suddenly, a card appears in my mind's eye--the Seven of Diamonds. I write it down in my notebook, then turn the card over.
    It's the Six of Diamonds.
    Suddenly, my pulse is racing. Nichols looks at me and smiles.
    In 1988, David McCarthy's life was falling apart. A musician and cabinetmaker living in New Zealand, he was stretched to the breaking point by the pressures of raising two daughters, paying a mortgage, and the suicide of his best friend. "I felt like if I stopped for a day, everything would fall apart," he says. "I had to find some answers."
    Then he stumbled across a book by Ramtha. "A lot of it rang true for me," he says. "It said, 'Love yourself into life,' and I thought that sounded pretty good."
    McCarthy came to Yelm in 1990--and was blown away. "When you're with a thousand kindred spirits, all seeking enlightenment, from all over the world, there's an enthusiasm and camaraderie that's very powerful," he says.
    He signed up for classes, workshops and retreats, generally immersing himself in Ramtha's world. To advance through the school and join elite groups such as the Blue College, the Red Guard or the Comrades, masters are required to attend at least two events every year. Skip a mandatory event and you're busted back down to the bottom rank.
    Year after year, McCarthy kept coming back, working at his disciplines, seduced by the promise that his new powers were right around the corner. He suppressed his doubts. "You're taught that doubt is your problem," he says. "We are sleeping Gods, and Ramtha will wake us up."
    One day, McCarthy and other masters were working on "manifesting"--creating a physical object out of nothing by focusing on a mental image, like a gold coin, a rose, or a blue feather. "After several days, I'd not created anything solid," he says.
    Then, across the Great Hall, he heard people shouting. He saw a woman walking through the crowd holding a blue feather over her head. Pandemonium broke out. Over roars of appreciation, the woman took her place next to McCarthy. He leaned over and asked her how she did it.
    "She says she went into the store and bought it. I said, 'That's not creating something out of nothing!' And she said, 'Yes it is!--I've created my own reality.' And I thought, 'I have to get out of here.'"
    McCarthy, who still lives in Yelm, is now fiercely critical of Knight. "It was a scam," he says. "I have no doubt but that JZ is a fraud."
    Another former student, who asked that she be identified only as "Stephanie," spent hours every day following the school's disciplines--focused breathing, meditation, and concentrating on a list of positive thoughts, such as I am fabulously wealthy, I am radiantly healthy, I am 20 years younger, I never age. She believed that she could heal her own illnesses by generating a high-frequency force field where decay could not survive. If she got sick, she thought it was because she wasn't disciplined enough.
    Then, one day, she developed a toothache. She went to the dentist for the first time in 10 years and had to get two teeth extracted. "That was my first indication that something was wrong," she says. "I did the disciplines every day for years. But it didn't work. I thought, 'I did not maintain my teeth. I did not reverse aging.'"
    "The whole thing is rigged," she says. "I just don't want to do it anymore."
    Stories like these sound familiar to Robert Menna, who started collecting information about Ramtha 12 years ago, after his teenage daughter, Alex, ran away to Yelm (she has since quit the group.)
    "These are not stupid people," says Menna, who is working on a book about Ramtha. "They're open-minded, idealistic. They want to change the world. But the longer you're in, the harder it is to get out."
    Menna says masters follow Ramtha's every pronouncement--no matter how bizarre. In the '80s, when his teachings were filled with tales of UFOs and alien abduction, Ramtha declared that copper could ward off extraterrestrial attacks. Masters lined their ceilings with copper strips and copper pennies. Ramtha warned of apocalyptic battles, or a catastrophic flood. Masters built underground shelters by the score. Ramtha said drinking seawater could boost psychic powers. Masters actually flew to the Dead Sea to scoop up buckets of brine.
    In September, Ramtha revealed that Hostess Twinkies contain an ingredient that can prolong life. Masters cleared the nutritious treats from grocery-store shelves. "Ramtha made some kind of announcement, and now everybody's going nuts about Twinkies," says a manager at the Yelm QFC.
    "This is a future Heaven's Gate," Menna says.
    Simmons dismisses the criticism. "A 'cult' is a dirty little four-letter word you call people you don't like," he says. "The school is too difficult, too scientific, and too wonderful to be a cult."
    The most intriguing concept in What the Bleep--and in Ramtha's teachings--is the idea that quantum mechanics is the ultimate proof that the universe is a sort of metaphysical putty we shape with our minds. But one of the experts quoted in the film says this claim is nonsense.
    Philosopher David Albert, who runs the Philosophical Foun-dations of Physics program at Columbia University, says the filmmakers totally misrepresented him. "They must have filmed me for four hours," he told WW. "It became clear to me they believe that...by positive thinking we can alter the structure of the world around us. I spent a long time explaining why that isn't true, going into great detail. But in the movie, my views are turned around 180 degrees."
    "The film is pushing a claim that quantum mechanics shows that consciousness is the basis of external reality," he continues. "And that's not an accurate representation."
    Back at the Ranch, the masters don't worry too much about the skeptics. They are convinced their "disciplines" produce authentic miracles. They boast of incredible healings--tumors shrunk, T-cell counts restored, cancer destroyed.
    "It's all been documented," says Simmons, who personally claims to have levitated (something about counter-rotating magnetic fields spinning fast enough to create an anti-gravity matrix).
    Pressed for evidence, however, Simmons demurred. "We're not interested in convincing people," he says finally. "It's not about trying to convince anybody--we're not in the convincing business. We know we have the proof."
    It's hard to know whether to be amused or alarmed by the Ramtha phenomenon. History is replete with prophets claiming miraculous powers. Some soar to spectacular heights. Others barely clear the runway. Some genuinely believe they are appointed by God--others are basically con artists in cloaks.
    Which is Ramtha? Only JZ Knight knows. Certainly, she has achieved some spectacular results. Since she started channeling Ramtha, she has gone from being a Tacoma nobody to a million-dollar prophet who commands thousands of followers. Whether by divine inspiration or savvy marketing, she has given birth to a creed, a cult or a circus--or maybe, if you go for the quantum outlook, all three.
    What the Bleep Do They Know?
    Film's "experts" boast intriguing résumés.
    Several authorities appear in What the Bleep Do We Know? offering mind-bending insights about reality and perception. But who are they, really? Here's a look at some of the more controversial speakers.
    David Albert is a professor and the director of the Philosophical Foundations of Physics program at Columbia University. He says the film completely misrepresented his views.
    Dr. Joseph Dispenza is a chiropractor and a master teacher at Ramtha's School of Enlightenment.
    Dr. Masaru Emoto is a doctor of alternative medicine who has written three books about messages from water.
    Amit Goswami (above) is professor emeritus (in theoretical physics) at the University of Oregon and member of its Institute of Theoretical Science, as well as author of a slew of New Age books. He also lectures at Ramtha's School of Enlightenment.
    John Hagelin is a physicist and fan of Transcendental Meditation. He is the director of the Maharishi University of Management's Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy, and has twice run for president as the candidate of the Natural Law Party (whose platform included natural health care, deep tax cuts and "conflict-free politics").
    Mgr. Miceal Ledwith is a Catholic priest and former president of Maynooth College in Ireland who resigned after a seminarian accused Ledwith of abusing him as a boy. He is also a master teacher at Ramtha's School of Enlightenment.
    Dr. Jeffrey Satinover (above) is a psychiatrist, physicist and author of several books (The Quantum Brain and Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth) who supports reparative therapy for homosexuality and lists Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as one of his heroes. --Chris Lydgate
     

  • Biological clock may shut down long-term memory at night
    http://www.uh.edu/admin/media/nr/2005/02feb/021805aeskin.html
    If you crammed for tests by pulling 'all nighters' in school, ever wonder why your memory is now a bit foggy on what you learned? A University of Houston professor may have the answer with his research on the role of circadian rhythms in long-term learning and memory. Arnold Eskin, the John and Rebecca Moores Professor of Biology and Biochemistry at UH, was recently awarded two grants totaling $2,472,528 from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue pursuing his investigations of memory formation and the impact of the biological clock on learning and memory.
    Scientists have known for a while that the brain's biological (or circadian) clock influences natural body cycles, such as sleep and wakefulness, metabolic rate and body temperature. New research from Eskin suggests the circadian clock also may regulate the formation of memory at night. This new research focuses on "Circadian Modulation of Long-term Memory Formation" and "Long-term Regulation of Glutamate Uptake in Aplysia," with NIH funding to be disbursed over four years.
    "There is a lot of research going on in memory," Eskin said. "How do we remember things given that we don't have a camera in our brain to record events? What changes take place in our brains that allow us to remember? These grants are about fundamental learning and memory and about modulation of memory."
    For the grant on circadian modulation of long-term memory formation, Eskin will continue studies based on his data that reveal the circadian clock modulates several forms of long-term memory in the marine snail Aplysia.
    These studies involved experiments on the defensive reflexes and feeding responses of Aplysia. Eskin's results showed that Aplysia form long-term memory when they are trained during the day but not when they are trained at night. However, short-term memory of the same behaviors is formed equally well during the day and night, which might explain why all-night cram sessions may have helped you get through certain classes in school, but did not leave you with enough of a lasting impression to become part of your long-term store of knowledge.
    "Somewhere in the molecular circuit, in the neural circuit in the brain, the biological clock is shutting that circuit off at a particular time of night. It's shutting molecules down so that long-term memory can't happen," Eskin said.
    Lisa Lyons, a research assistant professor at UH, is the primary investigator on this grant and is already investigating molecules involved in memory formation that might be activated during the day but not at night. NIH funding will help advance the pursuit of this line of research.
    For the grant on long-term regulation of glutamate uptake in Aplysia, Eskin will focus on the transmitter substance glutamate, which is involved in memory formation.
    "The formation of memory happens at places in the brain called synapses, where cells 'talk' to one another through the release of chemicals called transmitter substances," Eskin said. "In order for transmitters to work, once they are released they have got to be cleared away so that others can subsequently act. So, there are not only important mechanisms to release the transmitters, but also mechanisms to get rid of them, and these are called reuptake systems."
    Eskin is studying glutamate reuptake and glutamate transport to understand the mechanism or change that takes place at the synapses of nerve cells (or neurons) that enables people to remember. In previous research, Eskin found that glutamate transport molecules, which act as the brain's cleaning crew during learning and memory formation, actually increase once the long-term memory-forming process begins. Deficiencies in these glutamate transporters that affect the strength of connections among the neurons associated with memory may explain why memory lapses such as forgetting where you last set down your keys occur.
    "This research will provide significant information toward understanding memory and thus diseases that affect memory," Eskin said.
    With the potential to shed light upon neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's – marked by a loss of brain function due to the deterioration of neurons – studying these nerve cells could one day take this research from helping you be better able to find your glasses to providing relief from a debilitating illness.
    "At the end of the day, we can't make memory better or improve it unless we understand how memory works and is modulated," he said. "That's what this research is all about."
    He is currently completing the last year of another NIH-funded grant on "Glutamate Transport Regulation and Synaptic Plasticity" that complements these two new grants, but investigates the role of glutamate uptake in associative learning in mammals. This research project on mammals represents a great example of traslational research in which basic findings in a simple system (i.e. Aplysia) were quickly applied to a higher organism (i.e. mammals). They found that glutamate transport increased in the brains of mammals during learning as also found in Aplysia. (See related release at http://www.uh.edu/admin/media/nr/2002/032002/eskinlearning.html.)
    Coming to UH more than 25 years ago, Eskin guided the merger of two departments into what is now the Department of Biology and Biochemistry in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. As department chair from 1994 to 2000, Eskin tripled research grants to approximately $6 million per year and developed the department's research foci of neuroscience, the biological clocks and infectious disease. The author or co-author of more than 150 publications, he has received numerous honors, including the Esther Farfel Award, the university's highest faculty honor. He is the only faculty member to receive both the Farfel Award and the Moores Professorship in the same year. Eskin earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Vanderbilt University and his doctorate in zoology from the University of Texas.
    UH's Biological Clocks Program is one of the world's leading centers for circadian rhythms research, with five laboratories and a team of more than 30 scholars. In addition to Eskin, the group is led by four other tenured faculty members in the biology and biochemistry department – Associate Professor Gregory M. Cahill, Professor Stuart Dryer, Professor Paul Hardin and Professor Michael Rea.
    From University of Houston

  • Madrid Suspect Had Grand Central Sketch
    1010wins.com
    Mar 2, 2005
    A crude sketch of Grand Central Terminal was found in the home of a suspect in the Madrid train bombings, but it was never deemed a cause for alarm, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said on Wednesday.
    The one-page, hand-drawn document "was a very basic schematic," Kelly said at a news conference. "It's not an operational plan. It's not something that would indicate an immediate threat."
    Kelly was responding to a report in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo saying the drawing and other data were on a computer disk seized about two weeks after the train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people on March 11, 2004.
    Spanish police turned the disk over to U.S. agents from the FBI and CIA in December. Kelly said the data -- found on the disk of a laptop computer -- was also shared with the New York Police Department's counterterrorism division and city transit officials, who concluded the sketch depicted Grand Central.
    The evidence also included photographs, and another drawing of a private building in the city, which Kelly refused to identify. But an analysis found no indication of a terrorism plot, and authorities quickly decided there was no need to alert the public, he said.
    "We didn't see it as a threatening piece of information," he said.
    On Wednesday at Grand Central, visible security was at its usual high level, with National Guard, machine-gun-toting law enforcers and bomb-sniffing dogs.
    "I'm used to this," said Elaine Weaver, a tourist from Bristol, England, who was passing through the station. "We're used to bomb scares everywhere. So you're careful but it doesn't deter me."
    The NYPD's intelligence division studied the bombings in Madrid, which killed 190 people, as a possible template for a New York attack. The department responded by tightening security in the subways and at commuter train stations -- measures that were in place long before the city received word of the Grand Central sketch.
    "This is not something I think people should be panicked about or worried about," Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters on Wednesday. "We took the appropriate steps and we do not think that in that particular case there was a real plan to attack Grand Central."
    There were conflicting descriptions of what the drawing showed: A Spanish police official said it depicted a facade similar to that of Grand Central; Kelly said it showed only the building's interior.
    The same Spanish police official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the sketch was found in the home of Mouhannad Almallah, a Syrian who was arrested in Madrid on March 24. He was later released, but is still considered a suspect.
    Almallah was questioned over his alleged ties to two suspects jailed in connection with the attack after witnesses placed them aboard trains targeted in the string of 10 bombs, El Mundo said.
    A total of 24 people are in jail over the attack, although at least 40 more who were arrested and released are still considered suspects.
    Three other accused Islamic militants have been indicted here on charges of using Spain as a staging ground for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. They are expected to go on trial next month, along with 21 other men accused of belonging to al-Qaida.
    One of the three, Ghasoub al Abrash Ghayoun, a Syrian, traveled to the United States in 1997 and took video footage of the Twin Towers, the Golden Gate Bridge and other landmarks and passed the video on to al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan, Spanish judges and prosecutors say. These officials say the video was too detailed to have been simply for tourism.
    After the Madrid terrorism, security around New York City's subways and commuter points, such as Grand Central and Penn Station, had been ratcheted above the already-high post-9/11 levels.
    At the time, Peter Kalikow, chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, inspected transit points, including Grand Central, which he said was "analogous to the Madrid one -- trains over subways."
    Kalikow said then that the chance of a transit attack in New York is "diminished, but possible." He added that if an emergency occurred, "100 guys would show up right away." He refused to disclose exact numbers.

  • Some heart recipients report strange changes
    02.27.2005
    ARIZONA DAILY STAR
    For most of her life, the young woman hated sports.
    And though she was born and raised in Tucson, she never liked Mexican food. She craved Italian and was a pasta junkie.
    But three years ago, all that changed for Jaime Sherman, 28, when she underwent a heart transplant at University Medical Center, after battling a heart defect since birth.
    "Now I love football, baseball, basketball. You name it, I follow it," said Sherman, a psychology student at Arizona State University. "And Mexican food is by far my favorite."
    She'd heard similar stories - of people who get donor hearts, develop new and surprising tastes and traits, then trace them to the donor. It's an eerie phenomenon that has triggered controversy and skepticism.
    Could it be happening to her?
    No scientific evidence exists to explain how characteristics of an organ donor might live on in the person who gets their organ. But theories and speculation abound, from the transforming power of beating a death sentence to the notion that the body's cells store memory.
    Some blame the toxic effects of potent transplant drugs and heavy anesthesia, while others cite the psychological trauma of knowing someone had to die to save a life.
    But even the self-described skeptics admit there may be more to this than imagination, though they insist it happens to a minority of patients.
    "It's highly controversial, but I don't exclude it completely," said Dr. Jack G. Copeland, UMC's chief of cardiothoracic surgery and head of the heart team that has performed more than 700 transplants in 25 years, including Sherman's.
    Driven personality
    Bill Wohl was a Type-A, overweight, money-obsessed businessman pursuing a jet-setter life - until five years ago, when he got a new heart at UMC.
    Today, at age 58, he works part time and spends most of his new-found energy winning speed and performance medals in swimming, cycling and track. It's a passion matched only by the good he wants to do with his new charitable foundation.
    And he surprises himself by crying when he hears Sade, a singer he'd never heard of - and a reaction unimaginable before his transplant.
    For months after his February 2000 operation, Wohl was convinced he'd received the heart of some poor kid who died in a car accident.
    "I was sure that was the scenario. No one tells you anything about your donor," he said.
    For years, efforts were made to keep secret the identities of organ donors, so emotionally explosive was losing one life to save another. But now, they can write letters to one another or to surviving family six months after the transplant. The letters are transferred through the Donor Network of Arizona.
    "So one day, six months later, there's the letter," Wohl said. "OK, it says I've got the heart of a 36-year-old Hollywood stuntman. I looked at his picture - at this incredibly good-looking, super-fit, super-athletic guy - and I thought, are you kidding me? That's whose heart I've got?"
    Wohl's donor was a man named Michael Brady - who used the stage name Brady Michaels during his career as a stuntman for Universal Studios.
    Specializing in aerial skydiving stunts, Brady appeared in action films, TV shows and commercials for Chevy trucks and Burger King. On the day he died, Brady was in Benson, preparing for a stunt in which he'd parachute onto the top of a moving train for the UPN daredevil show "I Dare You."
    Climbing up the iron ladder on the side of the train, he accidentally fell, hitting his head and dying instantly.
    "He was a very loving and caring son who loved God and cared about people …," Brady's parents wrote to Wohl, noting their son had done volunteer work with children and AIDS patients in California. "We fulfilled our son's wishes to donate his organs."
    Wohl immediately responded and has since met the Brady family, becoming "like an uncle," he said.
    At their first meeting, Brady's brother, Chris, brought a stethoscope and asked Wohl if he could place it on his chest.
    "He said, 'Would you mind? I want to connect with my brother one more time.' So, of course, I said yes," Wohl said.
    It was Chris who told Wohl the stuntman had loved Sade.
    "That's when I said, 'Whoa,' " Wohl said.
    "Is there some sort of connection possible? I don't know," Wohl said. "Some people think I've become more sensitive because of the ordeal I've been through. Or is there a very real part of Mike - of who Mike was - living inside me now?"
    Strong resemblance
    Jaime Sherman understands.
    When she met her donor's family nearly two years ago, they kept staring at her, at first unable to speak.
    "Finally, his mother said, 'You look so much like him,' " she said.
    That's when she learned 29-year-old Scott Phillips - who died of a head injury after a fight at a Phoenix bar - was a sports fan who loved Mexican food. He played on several teams at Kansas State University and followed college and pro sports.
    Sherman's metamorphosis from nonfan to superfan occurred well before she knew anything about her donor, though her obsession with Kansas State began after she met his family.
    She recently dreamed she met Scott, too. "I went up to thank him, and he said, 'Jaime, I'm so happy for you.' I feel quite close to him," she said. "I know he was a wonderful guy."
    Well aware of the speculation that traits can transfer from organ donor to recipient, Sherman accepts the concept.
    "I'm a psychology major, and my professors will tell you it's all in your mind," she said. "But the scientists, the psychologists - they don't have someone else's heart beating inside them. I do. I have a very strong faith in God. And I am willing to believe there are things we cannot explain."
    So are some other transplant recipients.
    There is the ballet dancer, Claire Sylvia, who wrote the book "A Change of Heart" after her 1988 heart-lung transplant, when she developed unfamiliar cravings for beer, green peppers and chicken nuggets - foods she had disdained as a health-conscious dancer. After contacting her donor's family, she learned these were the favorite foods of the young motorcyclist who became her donor.
    There is the 8-year-old girl who got the heart of a 10-year-old murder victim, according to medical reports. Plagued by nightmares of the crime after her transplant, the girl used the images in her dreams to help locate and convict her donor's killer.
    No scientific explanation
    Tales of post-transplant transformations have become the stuff of "medical jokes," said Copeland.
    "Fiction," said Dr. Sharon Hunt, heart transplant surgeon at the Stanford University School of Medicine. "There is no science to explain such a thing."
    But Copeland does not entirely dismiss the notion.
    "With any solid organ, you are transferring DNA from the donor to the recipient," he said. "These are genes that relate not only to the specific organ, but to other systems as well, such as cerebral function. So there may be something to this thing that personalities can change."
    But Copeland stresses the huge change a transplant brings to a person's life.
    "They go from being a cardiac cripple, an invalid, to being a pretty active normal person again," he said. "We've seen all kinds of effects from that kind of change - people turn athletic, they get divorced, they get married, they have kids. They tend to take one day at a time and live life to the fullest. Whether that could be confused with acquiring the habits of your donor, or whether this is a real phenomenon, we don't know."
    Others blame the potent anti-rejection drugs and steroids transplant patients must take. Or the "hospital grapevine theory" that says patients may hear hospital staff talking about donors while anesthetized. Or the brain effects of anesthesia itself. Or sheer coincidence.
    "The combination of the post-transplant drugs and the pre-transplant trauma of nearly dying is a very heavy hit, both physically and psychologically," said Dr. John Schroeder, a Stanford cardiologist specializing in heart transplant research. People become a lot more emotional, they cry more easily, some even hear voices.
    "Bottom line is, we don't buy the idea the donor is somehow emerging in the recipient," he said. "But it certainly is a mystery, and it's hard to put it all up to coincidence."
    Perhaps most controversial is the theory of "cellular memory" or "systemic memory" - the idea that cells, or even atoms and molecules, contain the living being's memory and energy, which are transferred in a donated organ.
    Proposed by University of Arizona psychologists - who also have studied near-death experiences and spiritual mediums - the theory was developed after studying 10 heart transplant patients who reported donor-related changes, including a male UMC patient who got a woman's heart, and soon was bothered by his new preference for the color pink and desire to wear perfumes.
    "What happens to these patients is not just a personality change, but a targeted personality change," said Dr. Gary Schwartz, a psychology professor and director of UA's Human Energy Systems Laboratory.
    "If this is the result of drugs, or stress, or coincidence, none of those would predict the specific patterns of information would match the donor."
    There is no way to determine how many patients actually experience this because many never learn anything about their donors.
    But most medical professionals - and even many organ- transplant recipients - find such accounts somewhat fantastical.
    "The heart is a pump and no more - it is not capable of emotional transfer," said Patti Cook, 68, who got her donor heart at UMC in 1989, and is president of the New Heart Society, a statewide support group. "I've seen this stuff on TV, but I think some people need their 15 minutes of fame. I don't think the idea holds credibility."
    It is the profound, all-encompassing gratitude to the donor - known or unknown - that may be at the root of this phenomenon, believes Nina Gibson, UMC's patient No. 583, who was given her new heart five years ago.
    She knows her donor was a 21-year-old male who broke his neck while riding on the back of a motorcycle after a night of partying. She has no interest in motorcycles or anything that might be linked to a healthy, adventurous young man.
    "But his family gave all of his organs that night, and several people are alive today because they did, in the midst of incredible trauma," said Gibson, 62, a psychologist who lives in Vail.
    "The power of knowing somebody did that, and you are alive, is overwhelming. People have to make sense of that somehow, and they do it in very different ways," Gibson said. "All I can tell you is that I have never met this family, but there is a bond I have with their son that you cannot understand until you are at death's door."

  • Bacterium frozen in Antarctic ice for 30'000 years started swimming as soon as it thawed.
    Thursday, February 24, 2005
    WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A U.S. scientist claims to have thawed out a new life form, which he said raises questions about possible contemporary life on Mars.
    The organism froze on Earth some 30,000 years ago, and was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, said Richard Hoover from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.
    The life form -- a bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium -- probably flourished in the Pleistocene Age, along with woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, said Hoover.
    He discovered the bacterium near the town of Fox, Alaska, in a tunnel drilled through permafrost -- a mix of permanently frozen ice, soil and rock -- that is kept at a constant temperature of 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 4 degrees Celcius).
    "When they cut into the Fox tunnel, they actually cut through Pleistocene ice wedges, which are similar to structures that we see on Mars," Hoover said in a telephone interview.
    The ice wedges contained a golden-brown layer about a half-yard (half-meter) thick, and this layer contained a group of microscopic brownish bacteria, Hoover said.
    When he looked at a small sample of this bacteria-laden ice under a microscope, Hoover said, "These bacteria that had just thawed out of the ice ... were swimming around. The instant the ice melted, they started swimming. They were alive ... but they had been frozen for over 30,000 years."
    This discovery, coupled with research released this week by the European Space Agency, makes it more likely that life could be found on Mars, Hoover said.
    Scientists have focused on Mars as the most likely spot in our solar system for Earth-like life, but none has so far been confirmed.
    What has been found is ample evidence that water once flowed on this currently cold and frost-locked planet.
    This is significant because liquid water -- not ice -- has been seen as a prerequisite for life as it is known on Earth.
    Images made by the European Mars Express space probe indicate a giant frozen sea near the Martian equator, the first time scientists have detected evidence of ice beyond Mars' polar caps.
    This vast sea is covered by a layer of dust, which might be heated by the sun and could conduct heat down to create sub-surface layers of water from time to time, Hoover said.
    "Those layers would be ideal regions for microbiological activity and so that means that the presence of this frozen sea, if that turns out to be precisely what's going on, it greatly enhances the possibility that there may be life existing on Mars today," he said.
    The discovery of the living bacteria in Alaska's permafrost raises another possibility, Hoover said.
    "The other thing that's exciting: Just like we found in the Fox tunnel of Alaska, frozen biology in the form of unicellular bacteria might even have remained alive, frozen in the Martian sea," he said.
    Hoover found the bacterium in 2000, but it took five years to confirm that it was in fact a new form of life.
    The finding was published in January in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology, the official journal of record for such matters.

  • Suspect Said to Admit Plan to Kill Bush
    Tue Mar 1, 2005
    Associated Press
    ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A Virginia man accused of plotting with al-Qaida to assassinate President Bush (news - web sites) has admitted his guilt on numerous occasions, an FBI (news - web sites) agent testified Tuesday.
    Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 23, admitted "multiple times" that he joined al-Qaida while studying overseas in Saudi Arabia and discussed plans with the terrorist network to assassinate President Bush, FBI agent Barry Cole said. The agent also said the suspect talked about plans for a Sept. 11-type attack in which "hijackers would board planes in Great Britain and Australia ... so they did not have to have U.S. visas."
    "Once into U.S. territories they would fly into designated targets," he said.
    Abu Ali also discussed killing U.S. congressmen, soldiers and blowing up naval ships in American ports, Cole said. He said Abu Ali's confessions are corroborated by the admissions of an al-Qaida cell leader in Saudi Arabia who surrendered to authorities.
    Abu Ali, a U.S. citizen who grew up in Falls Church, is charged with conspiring with al-Qaida to kill the president in a plan that prosecutors said was hatched while he studied in Saudi Arabia in 2002 and 2003.
    Cole said that the al-Qaida leaders gave Abu Ali two options: He could either become part of a martyr operation or he could establish a cell in the United States and he would "marry a Christian woman, assimilate into the community and he would be provided operatives."
    Cole also said that Abu Ali was hostile to his Saudi captors and that he would hurl insults at them, such as "Jew scum."
    Cole testified at a pretrial hearing at which prosecutors are seeking to have Abu Ali detained prior to trial.
    Abu Ali's lawyers were to respond to offer their response later Tuesday. In the past, however, they have claimed that the government obtained its evidence through torture and so it is unreliable.
    The government has denied those allegations.

  • Huge 'Star-Quake' Rocks Milky Way
    BBC News
    2-20-5
    Astronomers say they have been stunned by the amount of energy released in a star explosion on the far side of our galaxy, 50,000 light-years away.
    The flash of radiation on 27 December was so powerful that it bounced off the Moon and lit up the Earth's atmosphere.
    The blast occurred on the surface of an exotic kind of star - a super-magnetic neutron star called SGR 1806-20.
    If the explosion had been within just 10 light-years, Earth could have suffered a mass extinction, it is said.
    "We figure that it's probably the biggest explosion observed by humans within our galaxy since Johannes Kepler saw his supernova in 1604," Dr Rob Fender, of Southampton University, UK, told the BBC News website.
    One calculation has the giant flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashing about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts.
    "This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. We have observed an object only 20km across, on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a 10th of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years," said Dr Fender.
    Fast turn
    The event overwhelmed detectors on space-borne telescopes, such as the recently launched Swift observatory.
    This facility was put above the Earth to detect and analyse gamma-ray bursts - very intense but fleeting flashes of radiation.
    The giant flare it and other instruments caught in December has left scientists scrabbling for superlatives.
    Twenty institutes from around the world have joined the investigation and two teams are to report their findings in a forthcoming issue of the journal Nature.
    The light detected from the giant flare was far brighter in gamma-rays than visible light or X-rays.
    Research teams say the event can be traced to the magnetar SGR 1806-20.
    This remarkable super-dense object is a neutron star - it is composed entirely of neutrons and is the remnant collapsed core of a once giant star.
    Now, though, this remnant is just 20km across and spins so fast it completes one revolution every 7.5 seconds.
    "It has this super-strong magnetic field and this produces some kind of structure which has undergone a rearrangement - it's an event that is sometimes characterised as a 'star-quake', a neutron star equivalent of an earthquake," explained Dr Fender.
    "It's the only possible way we can think of releasing so much energy."
    Continued glow
    SGR 1806-20 is sited in the southern constellation Sagittarius. Its distance puts it beyond the centre of the Milky Way and a safe distance from Earth.
    "Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and would possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Dr Bryan Gaensler, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is the lead author on one of the forthcoming Nature papers.
    "Fortunately there are no magnetars anywhere near us."
    The initial burst of high-energy radiation subsided quickly but there continues to be an afterglow at longer radio wavelengths.
    This radio emission persists as the shockwave from the explosion moves out through space, ploughing through nearby gas and exciting matter to extraordinary energies.
    "We may go on observing this radio source for much of this year," Dr Fender said.
    This work is being done at several centres around the globe, including at the UK's Multi-Element Radio-Linked Interferometer Network (Merlin) and the Joint Institute for VLBI (Very Long Baseline for Interferometry) in Europe - both large networks of linked radio telescopes.
    © BBC MMV
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4278005.stm

  • Many report seeing Bigfoot in Virginia. One man is trying to prove it
    The Virginian-Pilot
    February 21, 2005
    MANASSAS — Those who know 46-year-old William Dranginis say he’s a levelheaded guy.
    He has a sharp mind, an easy smile, an attractive family, a nice home and a trustworthy job designing surveillance equipment for the government.
    But 10 years ago, Dranginis says he crossed paths with something in the deep, dark woods of Culpeper County.
    Snicker if you want, but his life has never been the same.
    March 11, 1995. Dranginis recites the day with unwavering detail.
    Blue skies. The hint of spring. A perfect Saturday to mess around with his latest passion: hunting for artifacts with his new metal detector.
    Today had a special destination: a string of old gold mines from the early 1800s that still stab deep into the rolling earth of Virginia’s Piedmont. He headed out early with an old friend, an FBI agent named Frank, who shared his itch for hidden treasures. About an hour southwest of home, near Richardsville, they picked up another agent, a man Dranginis was meeting for the first time.
    The day slipped by peacefully. The three hiked along dirt roads and forested paths, poked into old mine shafts and scoured the soil. Around mid afternoon, they turned back toward the car, tired and empty-handed.
    On a logging road, about a half-mile from the pavement, Frank abruptly shot his arms outward in a silent signal to halt.
    “Behind that tree,” he whispered. “There’s a man.”
    The three stood stock-still, staring at a cluster of slender pines just ahead on the right. Why would a man duck out of sight unless he was up to no good? Frank drew the 9 mm handgun he wore holstered on his side. The other agent produced one as well. Both trained their barrels at the shadows behind the trees.
    Suddenly, Dranginis says, a dark, shaggy head peered out at them from behind a pine, then jerked back. Seconds later, he says, a creature like none he’d ever seen darted out and began running, following the edge of the road.
    “ It ran for about 75 feet, moving from our left to our right, before it took a sharp turn that took it deeper into the woods,” Dranginis said. “We watched the top of its head bobbing as it disappeared down into a ravine.”
    During that 10 or 12 seconds, Dranginis says, he was shocked into a kind of tunnel vision.
    “I don’t remember hearing anything, and I can’t tell you what its face looked like,” he said. “I was just stunned by how tall it was, like 7 feet. And it was so quick and agile. It moved on two legs like a man, but so much more powerfully. I remember watching the muscles work as it ran. And the hair flowing, back and forth, every time it pumped its arms.”
    The creature was gone, but the men didn’t move. The agents stood frozen in their firing stances. A minute passed. Maybe another. No one spoke. Finally, the agent from Richardsville found his voice.
    “That was a bear,” he said quietly. “Let’s get out of here.”
    They double-timed it to the car, looking over their shoulder the whole way. They drove in silence, dropped off the Richardsville agent, then stopped for a bite.
    Over a burger, Dranginis finally looked Frank in the eye.
    “That was no bear,” Dranginis said.
    “I know.”

    Until then, Dranginis says, he had not entertained a single serious thought about Bigfoot. A big hairy creature, hiding out in North America, that no one had ever managed to capture?
    Come on. That stuff was for supermarket tabloids.
    Actually, the legend of an elusive, upright, ape-like animal spans centuries and cultures. The towering Yeti of ancient Asia. Abominable snowmen of the Himalayas. Sasquatch of Native American lore.
    The term “Bigfoot” took hold in the 1960s during a rash of footprint finds and creature sightings in Northern California. “Bigfoot fever” hit a high point in 1967, when a Sasquatch-type animal was supposedly filmed on a few grainy frames of now famous – and much disputed – footage.
    Real or not, the film became the cornerstone of a subculture of Bigfoot believers. They flourished in the Pacific Northwest – an untamed place where it seemed possible for a giant to hide.
    But here? In long-settled, heavily trod Virginia?
    John Green, 78, is considered by many to be “Mr. Sasquatch.” He lives in remote British Columbia, an epicenter of Bigfoot lore. Green has spent much of his life probing the mystery.
    In 1976, he crossed the U.S. to document sightings. Green says he found reports in every state except Hawaii.
    “Maryland was absolutely loaded with sightings,” Green said. “And Virginia is right next door.”
    If Bigfoot does dwell in the Old Dominion, state wildlife experts say, it’s news to them.
    “I checked around with our long time game wardens,” said Julia Dickson-Smith of Virginia’s Department of Game and Inland Fisheries. “None of them remembers ever getting a report about Bigfoot – not from the public and not from anyone on staff.”
    Green says he’s not surprised.
    “Your wife doesn’t believe you. Your best friend doesn’t believe you,” Green said. “It doesn’t take long to realize that the smartest thing to do is shut up.”
    But what folks might hesitate to tell a uniform, they will tell cyberspace. Bigfoot Web sites have ample reports from Virginia, with encounters from the Blue Ridge to the Dismal Swamp.
    The experiences range in intensity – from no more than other worldly howls in the night heard at Surry’s Chippokes Plantation State Park in 1998 to a 1981 report of a Bigfoot sprinting through the middle of a campground in Chesapeake’s Northwest River Park.
    All that chatter from Virginia – as well as other Eastern states – has won the attention of seasoned researchers, who once thought the West Coast had a corner on the phenomenon.
    “No, we don’t think Bigfoot is sitting in downtown D.C.,” said D.B. Donlon of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization. Based in California, the group bills itself as the oldest and largest of its kind.
    “But we have good reason now,” Donlon said, “to believe that the same creature being seen in the W est is also being seen in the E ast.”
    Even among believers, theories about the creature’s identity ramble widely. On the far fringes: Bigfoot is an alien, or a ghost, or even the ghost of an alien.
    Most students of Sasquatchery, however – including a handful of reputable scientists – think Bigfoot may be a remnant relative of Gigantopithecus, a large primate found in fossils in Asia, but thought to be long extinct. A nocturnal, skittish lifestyle, they say, coupled with thin numbers and more brainpower than most animals, has helped the creatures avoid mankind.
    Still, after decades of searching, doesn’t it seem someone would have collared a Bigfoot by now, dead or alive – or at least found some verifiable remains?
    “I can’t explain that,” said Jeff Meldrum, an anthropologist and associate professor at Idaho State University. “I only know that just because you lack a body doesn’t mean you’re justified in offhandedly dismissing all evidence.”
    Meldrum specializes in primate studies, with a focus on how two-legged species walk. Fake Bigfoot prints abound, Meldrum says, but scattered among the pranks have been a few he considered genuine.
    “Details – like toe dynamics, flexibility and weight shift – all pointed to a real animal,” Meldrum said. “That’s when the hair stands up on the back of your neck.”
    Dranginis’ friend, Frank, does not want his last name used in a newspaper story about Bigfoot. He’s retired from federal law enforcement now, but says he still works a job that requires a security clearance.
    “I can’t have people thinking I’m a nut,” he said. “I never told anybody about what we saw. I figured they wouldn’t believe me anyway.”
    Dranginis told anyone who would listen, even his co-workers at Windermere Group, an Annapolis, Md.-based private contractor specializing in government security. A gadget geek by nature, Dranginis has spent 14 years designing spy stuff for the company – hidden eyes, bug detectors and the like.
    His job also requires a security clearance, but no one at work seemed too worried about his state of mind. Most just raised an eyebrow, then asked what he’d been drinking or smoking. Others tried to suggest some reasonable explanation: Man in a monkey suit? An old hermit? Kids playing a joke?
    Few took him seriously, except his wife, Carol.
    “I’ve known my husband since high school,” she said. “He came out of those woods a different man.”
    Over and over, Dranginis returned to Culpeper, hoping for another glimpse. When that proved fruitless, he began building camera systems to show the world, once and for all, that Bigfoot was real – and that he, Dranginis, wasn’t crazy.
    He tried motion-triggered setups. Heat-triggered. Cameras mounted in trees. Wrapped in camouflage. Buried in the ground.
    None found a Bigfoot. Dranginis suspected the equipment was emitting tiny, ultrasonic noises that were alerting the cagey creature.
    He kept trying, trolling online auctions and supply houses, spending just about every spare dollar he had on ever-more sophisticated components.
    After a while, Bigfoot became his full-time hobby. Maps of sightings papered his garage. Electronic gizmos took over the shelves. Late-night hours found him red-eyed, but still in his workshop.
    By early 2001, Dranginis had given his mission an official name: the Virginia Bigfoot Research Organization. He placed an ad in a rural magazine: “Have you seen a Bigfoot or Sasquatch-type creature here in Virginia?”
    More than 60 people responded. Dranginis wrote down their stories and checked out still-hot trails.
    Two years ago, he turned the key on the Bigfoot Primate Research Lab – a 24-foot Ford camper once used as a mobile veterinary clinic. Now outfitted with an arsenal of high-tech spy gear, the camper has cemented his status as the state’s go-to guy for Sasquatch.
    In all, Dranginis figures, those few seconds in the woods of Culpeper have cost him around $55,000.
    “At first, I just wanted to look this creature in the eye, to see what it was, then get back to my life,” he said. “But after a while, it became something I had to prove – not just for me, but for everyone else who’s seen it.”
    So far, Bigfoot hasn’t cooperated. After a decade of trying, Dranginis has managed to land little more than a couple of fuzzy photos and an intriguing clump or two of hair.
    His family, however, still supports him.
    “My friends think it’s cool,” said Katie, 18, the younger of his two daughters. “They come over here, and they’re all into my dad. They’re really impressed with his toys.”

    Dranginis found what might be his best evidence on an old farm in Chesterfield County, south of Richmond.
    The couple who own the property don’t want their names or the location of their home revealed. Word has already leaked out, drawing gun-toting trespassers with a thirst to be the first to bag Bigfoot.
    The couple are working with Dranginis because they like his no-kill approach.
    “He doesn’t want to hurt these creatures and neither do we,” said the husband, a country preacher. “We’re just curious about their origins.”
    Neither he nor his wife claim to have seen one.
    “It’s all from people who come to visit us or work on the place,” the husband said. “They’ve asked me, 'What kind of animals are you raising here? Orangutans?’”
    They have noticed huge prints in the snow shaped like a human’s bare foot. They’ve heard chilling sounds from the 2,500 acres of woods hemming their property. They’ve wrinkled their noses at an overpowering, sewer-like smell – a scent often reported by people who say they have gotten close to Sasquatch.
    “For the longest time, we thought it was a bear,” the wife said. “But wild bears don’t walk on two legs.”
    Dranginis mounted one of his cameras on the couple’s barn. The few images it captured were too dim to prove anything. Then, the hair turned up, a few wads of reddish-brown mats fluttering on the ground nearby.
    Dranginis sent a portion of it to a specialist at the Smithsonian’s natural history museum. A copy of the results he received says the sample “ most closely matches the characteristics of human hair.”
    He sent the same hair to a lab for a chemical profile. Janet Starr Hull, a Texas nutritionist well-known on lecture and radio talk-show circuits, reviewed the readings. Hull said she’s puzzled by the low level of toxins in the hair.
    “I’ve studied hair analysis for many, many years,” Hull said. “I’ve never seen test results like this. Humans are exposed to all kinds of pollutions and chemicals that show up in their hair. This is not a human profile. At least not a modern one.”
    Dranginis wants to have DNA analysis done on the hair, but the going rate at a private lab – around $5,000 – is too steep. He has tried to persuade a number of university labs to do the work for free, but so far, there have been no takers.
    “The most hurtful ridicule comes from science,” Dranginis said, “the people I expected to at least be anxious to disprove me. I can’t even get them to take me seriously enough to look at it.”
    Every now and then, though, Dranginis gets a little backup when a respected expert steps a toe onto his side – like Jane Goodall, the famed primate researcher.
    “Jane has heard similar stories from indigenous people all over the world,” said Nona Gandelman, a Goodall spokeswoman. “She is open to the possibility that there may be a primate out there we haven’t met yet.”
    But – once again – here? In Virginia?
    Some long time believers still aren’t buying it.
    Bob George, a Portsmouth native and long time Bigfoot researcher, teaches biology at Florida International University in Miami.
    “Look,” George said, “when you start talking Virginia, it’s getting to be a little preposterous. I mean, what’s next? New Jersey?”
    Well … perhaps. According to the Sasquatch Information Society, folks say they’ve bumped into Bigfoot at least four times in the state better known for its turnpike than its green space.
    Bigfoot could not be reached for comment.

  • Bush as Deep Throat? Author: Former prez was secret source behind Watergate
    http://news.bostonherald.com/politics/view.bg?articleid=67015
    Saturday, February 5, 2005
    A new theory about Deep Throat, the most mysterious figure in American political history, has been posted on a media Web site.
    Could former President George H.W. Bush be the elusive source who brought down President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal by leaking key information to Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward?
    That's the opinion of Adrian Havill, the author of a 1993 biography ``Deep Truth'' on reporters Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
    Havill, a Virginia-based writer, previously had concluded the unnamed Watergate source was not one person but a composite. Now, after new research, he posted a note on the Romenesko site of the Poynter Institute (poynter.org) targeting the elder Bush as Woodward's unnamed contact.
    Havill said he began to suspect Bush when his president son, who dislikes the press, gave Woodward an unusual seven hours of interviews.
    Also:
    The elder Bush had motivation to dislike Nixon, who had urged him to leave a safe congressional seat for an assistant Secretary of Treasury position and hinted he would replace Spiro Agnew on the 1972 ticket. Nixon reneged, and Bush ``was given the thankless task of heading the Republican National Committee in 1973,'' Havill said.
    Bush was United Nations ambassador in New York from 1971 to 1973 but came to his Washington home on weekends. Seven of the eight Deep Throat/Woodward meetings were on weekends.
    Bush, who later became CIA director, had intimate knowledge of Washington. ``This is a guy with deep political contacts from way back,'' Havill said.
    Both Woodward and Bush are Navy men and Yale graduates.
    Woodward has said he will reveal Deep Throat's identity only when the source is dead. Bush may not want to come forward because the revelation he took down Nixon would make the entire Bush clan the ``black sheep'' of the GOP, Havill said. A call to a Bush spokesman at his presidential library in Houston was not returned.
    Havill posted his theory after Watergate notes from the two reporters, sold in 2003 for $5 million to the University of Texas, went on display - minus Deep Throat's identity.

  • Can A Strange Black Box See Into the Future?
    Global Consciousness Project
    Princeton University
    Story from REDNOVA NEWS:
    http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=126649
    Published: 2005/02/11 00:00:00 CST
    DEEP in the basement of a dusty university library in Edinburgh lies a small black box, roughly the size of two cigarette packets side by side, that churns out random numbers in an endless stream.
    At first glance it is an unremarkable piece of equipment. Encased in metal, it contains at its heart a microchip no more complex than the ones found in modern pocket calculators.
    But, according to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.
    The machine apparently sensed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre four hours before they happened - but in the fevered mood of conspiracy theories of the time, the claims were swiftly knocked back by sceptics. But last December, it also appeared to forewarn of the Asian tsunami just before the deep sea earthquake that precipitated the epic tragedy.
    Now, even the doubters are acknowledging that here is a small box with apparently inexplicable powers.
    'It's Earth-shattering stuff,' says Dr Roger Nelson, emeritus researcher at Princeton University in the United States, who is heading the research project behind the 'black box' phenomenon.
    'We're very early on in the process of trying to figure out what's going on here. At the moment we're stabbing in the dark.' Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.
    And machines like the Edinburgh black box have thrown up a tantalising possibility: that scientists may have unwittingly discovered a way of predicting the future.
    Although many would consider the project's aims to be little more than fools' gold, it has still attracted a roster of 75 respected scientists from 41 different nations. Researchers from Princeton - where Einstein spent much of his career - work alongside scientists from universities in Britain, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. The project is also the most rigorous and longest-running investigation ever into the potential powers of the paranormal.
    'Very often paranormal phenomena evaporate if you study them for long enough,' says physicist Dick Bierman of the University of Amsterdam. 'But this is not happening with the Global Consciousness Project. The effect is real. The only dispute is about what it means.' The project has its roots in the extraordinary work of Professor Robert Jahn of Princeton University during the late 1970s. He was one of the first modern scientists to take paranormal phenomena seriously. Intrigued by such things as telepathy, telekinesis - the supposed psychic power to move objects without the use of physical force - and extrasensory perception, he was determined to study the phenomena using the most up-to-date technology available.
    One of these new technologies was a humble-looking black box known was a Random Event Generator (REG). This used computer technology to generate two numbers - a one and a zero - in a totally random sequence, rather like an electronic coin-flipper.
    The pattern of ones and noughts - 'heads' and 'tails' as it were - could then be printed out as a graph. The laws of chance dictate that the generators should churn out equal numbers of ones and zeros - which would be represented by a nearly flat line on the graph. Any deviation from this equal number shows up as a gently rising curve.
    During the late 1970s, Prof Jahn decided to investigate whether the power of human thought alone could interfere in some way with the machine's usual readings. He hauled strangers off the street and asked them to concentrate their minds on his number generator. In effect, he was asking them to try to make it flip more heads than tails.
    It was a preposterous idea at the time. The results, however, were stunning and have never been satisfactorily explained.
    Again and again, entirely ordinary people proved that their minds could influence the machine and produce significant fluctuations on the graph, 'forcing it' to produce unequal numbers of 'heads' or 'tails'.
    According to all of the known laws of science, this should not have happened - but it did. And it kept on happening.
    Dr Nelson, also working at Princeton University, then extended Prof Jahn's work by taking random number machines to group meditations, which were very popular in America at the time. Again, the results were eyepopping. The groups were collectively able to cause dramatic shifts in the patterns of numbers.
    From then on, Dr Nelson was hooked.
    Using the internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran constantly, day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line.
    But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.
    For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.
    Dr Nelson was convinced that the two events must be related in some way.
    Could he have detected a totally new phenomena? Could the concentrated emotional outpouring of millions of people be able to influence the output of his REGs. If so, how?
    Dr Nelson was at a loss to explain it.
    So, in 1998, he gathered together scientists from all over the world to analyse his findings. They, too, were stumped and resolved to extend and deepen the work of Prof Jahn and Dr Nelson. The Global Consciousness Project was born.
    Since then, the project has expanded massively. A total of 65 Eggs (as the generators have been named) in 41 countries have now been recruited to act as the 'eyes' of the project.
    And the results have been startling and inexplicable in equal measure.
    For during the course of the experiment, the Eggs have 'sensed' a whole series of major world events as they were happening, from the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia to the Kursk submarine tragedy to America's hung election of 2000.
    The Eggs also regularly detect huge global celebrations, such as New Year's Eve.
    But the project threw up its greatest enigma on September 11, 2001.
    As the world stood still and watched the horror of the terrorist attacks unfold across New York, something strange was happening to the Eggs.
    Not only had they registered the attacks as they actually happened, but the characteristic shift in the pattern of numbers had begun four hours before the two planes even hit the Twin Towers.
    They had, it appeared, detected that an event of historic importance was about to take place before the terrorists had even boarded their fateful flights. The implications, not least for the West's security services who constantly monitor electronic 'chatter', are clearly enormous.
    'I knew then that we had a great deal of work ahead of us,' says Dr Nelson.
    What could be happening? Was it a freak occurrence, perhaps?
    Apparently not. For in the closing weeks of December last year, the machines went wild once more.
    Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people.
    So could the Global Consciousness Project really be forecasting the future?
    Cynics will quite rightly point out that there is always some global event that could be used to 'explain' the times when the Egg machines behaved erratically. After all, our world is full of wars, disasters and terrorist outrages, as well as the occasional global celebration. Are the scientists simply trying too hard to detect patterns in their raw data?
    The team behind the project insist not. They claim that by using rigorous scientific techniques and powerful mathematics it is possible to exclude any such random connections.
    'We're perfectly willing to discover that we've made mistakes,' says Dr Nelson. 'But we haven't been able to find any, and neither has anyone else.
    Our data shows clearly that the chances of getting these results by fluke are one million to one against.
    That's hugely significant.' But many remain sceptical.
    Professor Chris French, a psychologist and noted sceptic at Goldsmiths College in London, says: 'The Global Consciousness Project has generated some very intriguing results that cannot be readily dismissed. I'm involved in similar work to see if we get the same results. We haven't managed to do so yet but it's only an early experiment. The jury's still out.' Strange as it may seem, though, there's nothing in the laws of physics that precludes the possibility of foreseeing the future.
    It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but backwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future.
    'There's plenty of evidence that time may run backwards,' says Prof Bierman at the University of Amsterdam.
    'And if it's possible for it to happen in physics, then it can happen in our minds, too.' In other words, Prof Bierman believes that we are all capable of looking into the future, if only we could tap into the hidden power of our minds. And there is a tantalising body of evidence to support this theory.
    Dr John Hartwell, working at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, was the first to uncover evidence that people could sense the future. In the mid-1970s he hooked people up to hospital scanning machines so that he could study their brainwave patterns.
    He began by showing them a sequence of provocative cartoon drawings.
    When the pictures were shown, the machines registered the subject's brainwaves as they reacted strongly to the images before them. This was to be expected.
    Far less easy to explain was the fact that in many cases, these dramatic patterns began to register a few seconds before each of the pictures were even flashed up.
    It was as though Dr Hartwell's case studies were somehow seeing into the future, and detecting when the next shocking image would be shown next.
    It was extraordinary - and seemingly inexplicable.
    But it was to be another 15 years before anyone else took Dr Hartwell's work further when Dean Radin, a researcher working in America, connected people up to a machine that measured their skin's resistance to electricity. This is known to fluctuate in tandem with our moods - indeed, it's this principle that underlies many lie detectors.
    Radin repeated Dr Hartwell's 'image response' experiments while measuring skin resistance. Again, people began reacting a few seconds before they were shown the provocative pictures. This was clearly impossible, or so he thought, so he kept on repeating the experiments. And he kept getting the same results.
    'I didn't believe it either,' says Prof Bierman. 'So I also repeated the experiment myself and got the same results. I was shocked. After this I started to think more deeply about the nature of time.' To make matters even more intriguing, Prof Bierman says that other mainstream labs have now produced similar results but are yet to go public.
    'They don't want to be ridiculed so they won't release their findings,' he says. 'So I'm trying to persuade all of them to release their results at the same time. That would at least spread the ridicule a little more thinly!' If Prof Bierman is right, though, then the experiments are no laughing matter.
    They might help provide a solid scientific grounding for such strange phenomena as 'deja vu', intuition and a host of other curiosities that we have all experienced from time to time.
    They may also open up a far more interesting possibility - that one day we might be able to enhance psychic powers using machines that can 'tune in' to our subconscious mind, machines like the little black box in Edinburgh.
    Just as we have built mechanical engines to replace muscle power, could we one day build a device to enhance and interpret our hidden psychic abilities?
    Dr Nelson is optimistic - but not for the short term. 'We may be able to predict that a major world event is going to happen. But we won't know exactly what will happen or where it's going to happen,' he says.
    'Put it this way - we haven't yet got a machine we could sell to the CIA.'
    But for Dr Nelson, talk of such psychic machines - with the potential to detect global catastrophes or terrorist outrages - is of far less importance than the implications of his work in terms of the human race.
    For what his experiments appear to demonstrate is that while we may all operate as individuals, we also appear to share something far, far greater - a global consciousness. Some might call it the mind of God.
    'We're taught to be individualistic monsters,' he says. 'We're driven by society to separate ourselves from each other. That's not right.
    We may be connected together far more intimately than we realise.'

  • Man charged with 'explosion plan'
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4260463.stm
    12 February, 2005
    A man has been charged with conspiring to cause an explosion with intent to endanger life, Scotland Yard has said.
    Salahuddin Amin, 29, was arrested at Terminal 4 in Heathrow Airport on 8 February after arriving on a British Airways flight from Pakistan.
    He was held at Paddington Green police station and quizzed under the Terrorism Act, but was charged on Saturday under the 1883 Explosive Substances Act.
    He will appear at Bow St Magistrates Court on 14 February.
    He is accused of unlawfully and maliciously conspiring with others to cause, by an explosive substance, an explosion of a nature likely to endanger life or cause serious damage to property, between 1 October 2003 and 31 March 2004.
    BBC home affairs correspondent Margaret Gilmore said she understood the arrest followed an investigation by MI5 and the police.
    And she said it was thought the accused had been arrested in Pakistan but had later been released.
     
  • Virus-Infected Cash - Russian Mob Poisoning Money
    Exclusive: Contaminated Money
    Jan 28, 2005
    http://kyw.com/Local%20News/local_story_028223622.html
    PHILADELPHIA (KYW) Money that has been contaminated with a virus; it’s a whole new possible direction for bioterrorism. It is a case that the FBI terrorism unit has taken over from state police that involves several cities, including Philadelphia. As CBS 3’s Tamsen Fadal reports, the unit is trying to determine whether or not a virus was actually placed over money to protect the interest of the Russian mob.
    In an exclusive investigation, CBS 3 has obtained documents detailing a bizarre criminal plot involving a virus, suspected drug money, and the Russian mob in Northeast Philadelphia. Earlier this month, Pennsylvania State Troopers intercepted $250,000 dollars during a routine traffic stop. The alleged drug money, which had been sealed in plastic, was being driven from Columbus, Ohio to Northeast Philadelphia.
    According to law enforcement sources, after counting the seized cash, troopers began feeling ill and one trooper was even hospitalized with flu-like symptoms. Sources tell CBS 3 that tests on the cash counter revealed the presence of a toxin derived from the bacteria staphylococcus.
    http://kyw.com/Local%20News/local_story_028223622.html

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