Cullan Hudson's Blog, page 13

FRIDAY 13 GHOSTLY TALES TURNED SPOOKY

Oklahoma City-- The Spirit of Oklahoma Storytelling Festival, sponsored by the state arts organization, The Territory Tellers, held a free ghost tales concert on the first night of the event.   It was Friday...the 13th, a fat full moon filled the sky and the summer evening was mild with just a hint of cool breeze.  Held outdoors in an open pavilion on the campus of SNU in Bethany, near 50 people huddled in and around the brick structure as storytellers Liz Parker, Barbara Jones, Marilyn A. Hudson, and Tony Hardman shared suitably spooky tales.  The battery operated sound system worked perfectly during the first story but then...

The sound system strangely malfunctioned.  The light was red, the power was on, but the sound was - dead. The equipment was selected from the personal equipment of a professional performer for its reliabilty and its quality. The power lights glowed steady and bright. The batteries were fresh and it worked perfectly right up to the  first story...
Then, despite the still bright ready lights and solid connections, the microphone and speaker ceased to function.
Being professional storytellers the performers following compensated competently as they shared their stories without a mic.  The event was successful and enjoyed by all, including the storytellers who were initiated into the "Fellowship of the Flame", a special festival event for those who share stories of the ghostly variety in this popular item on the festival schedule.
Throughly unhappy, the next day the sound equipment's owner was ready to toss out the apparently now worthless sound system  when another check of the system was made.  The "dead" equipment  was checked. The mic worked on another system.  The batteries were all registering as good.  The dials had all been set to their highest settings the previous night attempting to get any sound and, now, when the mic hooked back up to the original speaker, the whole system blared to strong and steady life.
This workhorse sound system chosen because it was dependable and capable of functioning in extreme conditions (it went to a mountain top on one occassion!) had failed on a Friday the 13th, during a full moon, and during a concert of spine-tingling ghost stories.  A coincidence?  You be the judge.

Sneak Peek At A New Kreepy Girl Design

What Preys On The Predator?

As part of a project to better understand the elusive and mysterious lives of Great White Sharks, Australian scientists tagged some, set them free, and studied the telemetry. But four months into the project, one of their devices washed ashore. It appears that something larger and more ferocious attacked one of the oceans largest and most successful predators. All that could be discerned from the final readings were a temperature spike and a sudden descent of 1,900 feet into the ocean.

Could this fish have encountered another Great White shark? Do they attack each other? These are things scientists are looking at. It might also have been an orca, one of the few marine creatures known to attack Great White Sharks.

Others wonder about giant squid or the oft rumored giant octopus. Could it have been the prehistoric megalodon (a whale sized shark that presumably died out millions of years ago) or something else--something far older and far more frightening?

Listen To The Music Of The Trees

Bartolomaus Traubeck recorded the following by taking a PlayStation Eye Camera to transcribe via a program called Ableton Live the rings of various trees into music that is strange, evocative, and sometimes rather eerie.

"Reincarnated" Child Catches His Own Killer.

If the tales recounted in German therapist Trutz Hardo's tome, "Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today," are to be believed, then one particularly precocious 3-year-old has led police to the body of his murdered former self.

Along the Syrian-Israel border, a toddler recounted to his people that in a previous life he had been murdered. This didn't shock his family and community, though, as reincarnation is a part of daily life among the Druze, an offshoot religion of Shia Islam that incorporates other philosophies and religions as well.

It is common for the birthmarks of newborns in this community to be scrutinized as evidence of wounds from a previous life. In the boy's case, he told his people how he had been struck and killed by an axe to his head.

The villagers took him around in hopes that he could tell them where he once lived. The boy said he could also remember the first and last name of his killer.

In demonstration, the small child went up to a man who would otherwise be a stranger and asked if his name was... Puzzled, the man replied that was, indeed, his name. The boy continued, "I used to be your neighbor. We had a fight and you killed me with an axe."

The stranger seemed horror-struck.

The boy then announced that he knew where his body was buried. The village followed the boy to a simple cairn of stones, beneath which were the remains of a man with a severe wound to the front of his head. The boy then led them to where the axe was buried.

Under the onslaught of such startling revelations, the killer confessed.

Is this fourth-hand story to be believed? Is reincarnation real? Or did the boy, in fact, possess some type of post-cognitive gift that allowed him to glimpse past events that he would otherwise never have witnessed?

THE ENIGMA OF THE BLACK KNIGHT SATELLITE

For some time now, the legend of The Black Knight Satellite has floated through the literature on UFOs and other Forteana. The myth that has arisen over the years is of an object of unknown origin that circumnavigates a polar orbit--and has been doing so for 13,000 years.

Others believe the story is mere
ly an aggregate of half-truths and fantasy.

Legend has it that in 1899 Nikola Tesla received a strange, repeating radio signal that he believed originated from beyond Earth.

In 1954, before humans had ever launched a satellite, UFOlogist Donald Keyhoe was reported as saying the Air Force had detected two orbiting the planet.

A few years later, the Navy (according to some vague sources) detected a dark object in a strange orbit, but determined it was merely a piece of the damaged Discoverer VIII satellite casing.

Scottish writer Duncan Lunan concluded in 1973 that radio data collected by Norwegian researchers rendered a star chart to Epsilon Bootis in the Bootes constellation. Lunan believed a 12,600 year old object orbiting Earth was transmitting these aberrant signals. Eventually Lunan reconsidered his interpretation of the data and retracted his hypothesis, but not before it became ingrained in UFO literature.

In 1988, the first shuttle mission to the International Space Station (STS-88) snagged an image of what some considered an alien artifact (possibly Erich von Daniken's "Pakal Spacecraft" ), but was likely a thermal blanket inadvertently jettisoned during an extravehicular walkabout.

Over the years, these stories have coalesced into or otherwise bolstered the idea of an alien probe that orbits our planet daily.

The Dancing Plague

In the summer of 1518, the town of Strasbourg in France was literally dancing in the streets--and no one could explain why.

It seemed a strange sort of plague had taken hold of the city, beginning with Frau Troffea. Within a week more than 30 townsfolk were dancing in the streets. Within a month, that number swelled to 400.

These men and women were dancing night and day to the point of exhaustion. Some began suffering heart attacks and strokes.

Medical men were called in and came up with a sound solution: build them a stage and strike up the band!

Explanations range from spiritual ecstasy or the much-abused "mass hysteria" to an outbreak of ergot poisoning, the latter being a type of mold that affects grains and, if ingested, can cause hallucinations and seizures.

Eventually, those dancers that survived slowly began to leave the perplexing promenade and life returned to normal, leaving us scratching our heads the weird little dancing plague of Strasbourg, France.

Can You Solve The Mystery of Cicada 3301

In early 2012, a 4chan user posted a steganograph (a way to conceal data within code, text, images...) that said someone or something called Cicada 3301 was recruiting intelligent people. It's your classic White Rabbit trope, but if you could make it beyond the straight-forward Caesar cipher in the text, you would begin to unlock deeper, more technical layers of the puzzle and eventually find yourself...???

And that's the question. More puzzles followed and before long, like Slender Man before it, Cicada 3301 was a 4chan celebrity.

Some claim that they solved the seemingly unsolvable riddles and received e-mails from the entity, but beyond that it isn't clear what winners have received. Others posit that Cicada 3301 is a front for information security firms or even government agencies. The ability to crack complex codes is in high demand.

Or maybe it's not one person or group at all. Maybe it started out as a single poster with a puzzle and then others added their own under the same name. The reward being little more than knowing you could solve a complex puzzle.

Clients: Must or Mistake?

Here's a topic for you paravestigators... Clients: Must or Mistake? Let me know your thoughts on the concept of taking on "clients".  Is it a distraction to real work? If clients are seeking help, is there any to be given if you're a scientific team?

I'm Still Here

Haven't been posting much lately because, frankly, there hasn't been much worth writing about. I am still around though and much more active on the facebook page. If you aren't already following me there, here's the link FACEBOOK. I post links to strange stories and chip in with my own two cents. Check it out.