Yes, there are details (including a link to the original paper) towards the end of this recentish thread. Not necessarily that mysterious.
Well, when we all kicked it around a few months back, the conclusion seemed to be: pretty far out.
Tesla is said to have been able to produce ball lightning, or something closely akin. Margaret Cheney in her book Tesla: Man Out of Time quotes witnesses (including, IIRC, Mark Twain) who described how Tesla could hold a glowing ball of electricity in his hand, and store it in a box.
I am unfamiliar with stories of Tesla having destroyed his notes–not that this necessarily proves anything. The story I have read various times is that the FBI seized a great many of his papers after he died and they appear to have since disappeared.
Sorry, I was a bit unclear there. They were just meant to be general examples, showing the breadth of research into anomalous findings that Corliss carries out.
Blimey -
Tesla-
Oak Island-
Roman ships-
I thought I’d strayed onto the Fortean Times messageboard again!
well if you can find details as to what exactly THIS ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1697038.stm ) is please let me know. According to National Geographic, who was funding at least part of the research, they were going to do a TV special on it summer 2002, or so I was told when I emailed them directly to find out if they had published anything. No news since, and the curiosity is driving me NUTS!
I grew up with a 1963 World Book Encyclopedia, and it had a section on possible future propulsion systems for spacecraft, and at the time they seemed to believe ion engines were the wave of the future. They had a simple design you could make with a 6 volt battery, some copper wire, and I forget what else, that would make this little rocket fly around on circles on the end of the wire.
If someone hasn’t already mentioned it, don’t forget http://www.skepdic.com - it’s dry assassination of many favourite myths is an absolute pleasure. It quite compensates for the disappointment in not being able to believe in [insert bizarre wacko phenomenon here] any more.
That’s a great site you got there Istara. I’m enjoying it now.
I picked up one of the books mentioned earlier in this thread, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat”, and began reading it. So far it is completely fascinating. But several of the chapters mention the loss of proprioception, or a sort of disembodiedment (is that a word???) and also mention “phantom” limbs. That is an amputee still “feels” his lost arm. What is that phenomina? How is it possible. Maybe I haven’t put proprioception and phantom limbs together yet, but isn’t this a mystery that defies conventional reality (MTDCR)?
Nothing on phantom limbs?
No. (I’m actually reading the same book right now!)
Proprioception: Hold your arm out to your side. Close your eyes. Do you know where your arm is? Yes–it’s out to your side. Why, since you can’t see it? You have nerves in your arm (and everywhere else) that give you very subtle feedback, info. on muscle tension, etc. If this system of nerves is damaged (as was the case of Chris in the book), then you lose that subliminal sense of where your body parts are.
Phantom Limbs: your brain creates a map of your various body parts (nerves it’s connected to) as you develop as a youngster. Later, sometimes even when the body part is lost, your brain will still be expecting it to be there, and will convince you that it’s still attached. Expectation is a powerful thing–wait until you read the “transports” section of the book, in which he describes a man who lost his sense of smell–but eventually, was able to conjure up perfect “smell memories” of things like coffee, pipe tobacco, springtime, etc., when he expected to smell them–despite the fact that he was still unable to detect smells.
Iteki, check out this fine rebuttal of Dr. Fell’s “translation.”
It’s interesting that there are two “serious” attempts to provide translations, each assuming it is being translated from different languages. The same series of marks could mean “Club blows in abundant measure (were needed) because many which had fallen into the ravine resisted with obviously broken legs. Brothers, come and help the slaughterer to finish them off,” or “A happy season is Christmas, a time of joy and goodwill to all people.”
A system that reduces each word to a single consonant leaves a lot of room for interpretation.
To expand on what toadspittle said: there is a patch of neurons in the brain receiving input from, interpereting, and controlling each bit of your body. Not the same for all functions, necessarilly, but obviously something is receiving the signals, figuring out what they mean, and sending signals back. If, say, your left arm gets lopped off, all of those neurons in your brain are still perfectly functional, but are no longer attached to a limb. So whenever they fire (due to stimulation from other cells they may still be attached to), it “feels” like that limb is still there.
I’m not sure what the OP is looking for. If you want things like people teleporting or “lifters” or pyramid power, then you’re outside of the range of things which are documented to exist. On the other hand, there are plenty of real things which are scientifically proven to exist, annd which we can’t explain, but they’re not nearly as interesting to most folks.
For instance, ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. At energies above about 10[sup]18[/sup] eV (the GZK cutoff, named after the three guys who got the idea), cosmic rays should have fairly strong interactions with the cosmic microwave background radiation, making it very difficult for them to travel significant distances through space. Problem is, we do see a few super-GZK events, and there’s no known source that is both close enough and powerful enough to produce them. There is a genuine mystery of science for you, with no tinfoil hat required.
Regarding what bryanmcc and toadspittle said about phantom limbs,
Ok, I follow, but what about the lady who had a hangnail which still gives her pain despite being amputated years ago? Is that a nerve response or possibly expectations?
Chronos- That’s a great example, though hard to follow. But I’m also looking for items like the “WOW” signal mentioned on page one of this thread. Perhaps even the underwater city, but I suspect that is a case of natural formation.
The WOW signal is a bit tricky to deal with, precisely because we only got one of them. With just one example, there are a host of possibilities which can’t be ruled out, many of them quite mundane. It could have been a power surge. It could have been a prank. It could have been a fluke of noise. And yes, it could have been an alien communication. Guess which one I’m not putting my money on?
On another note: I checked up on the Venus-Earth resonance mentioned by Sofa King, and by my calculations, the Venus-Earth relative synodic period is 5.0008 times the synodic day of Venus. If that number is an integer, then yes, Venus will always show the same face to Earth, when they’re at closest approach. But it looks to me like that 8 should be a significant digit, which would mean that it’s not quite an integer, and therefore just a coincidence. Don’t trust me on that, though: I’m unaccustomed to working out to five sig figs, so that may be an integer after all.
In any event, though, the page that Sofa King linked to undoubtedly has the wrong interpretation. They consider it evidence that Venus and Earth were closer together in the past, but for that to be the case, at least one of the periods would have to have been different. So if the matching were set up when the planets were close, and they then separated, they wouldn’t match any more.
Certainly, the Earth is exerting a tidal force on Venus, and qualitatively, such a force could cause a resonance like the one observed. But I lack both the background and the data to compute whether the effect is large enough to be expected to produce the observed results. Lacking that, I’m not going to call that one a mystery, yet.
www.crank.netThe logic behind most of these sites defies conventional reality
Why does anything dropped in the bathroom somehow end up landing in the toilet???
A very good book on the Mary Celeste is The Mystery of the Mary Celeste. It was written by an executive of the company which insured the vessel, and originally was privately published. After decades of lying in obscurity, it was reissued by Dover.
The ship was found adrift in calm seas, undamaged aside from some strange holes bored in the hull well above the water line. The lifeboat was missing and a hatch to the cargo hold had been removed and set to one side. The cargo, barrels of alcohol, was in good shape aside from a few leaks. While the captain, his wife and child, and the crew were missing, they appeared to have taken little with them.
While all of this is mysterious, it is a good deal more mundane than many accounts suggest. The story has been repeated and misrepeated many times, with mistaken details such as that the life boat was still attached being added. The book Dover publishes is exactingly detailed, listing such minutia as the contents of each sailor’s trunk. It includes an afterword examining various detail which have been added over time, such as the claim that there had been a cat on board. (It is concluded there was not).
The book does not give a definitive explanation of what happened, reading between the lines one can draw one’s own conclusions. It appears likely that the captain over-reacted (possibly because of the presence of his wife and young child) when vapor escaped from leaking barrels. He ordered everyone into the lifeboat, which was attached to the hull of the ship, while the cargo hold was given time to air out. The sea grew a little rougher than expected, the lifeboat was not fastened as securely as was thought, and broke free of the ship. Then the people aboard watched helplessly as they drifted away the ship.
It may not be a perfect explanation, but it beats a lot of the theories which have been offered-- including time travel, alien abduction, and attack by sea monsters.
Don’t forget the Voynich Manuscript, an odd 200-page document from the 1300s, written in an unknown and to date untranslated character set, with drawings of naked women and strange plants.
While the giant image of a winged creature is no longer visible on the bluffs north of Alton, Illinois, there is now a large painted panel mounted there which more-or-less reproduces how it looked. It takes a fair amount of imagination to suppose that it looks like a pterodactyl or similar prehistoric creature.
It is locally known as the “Piasa Bird”, although an anthropology professor I had when I was an undergraduate in the St. Louis area assured my class that the “piasa” (pronounced “pie-uh-saw” )was actually something else entirely, a large cat which local Native American legend claimed lived under water. In any event, I dimly recall there are accounts of early European explorers to the area having seen–at a considerable distance–a winged creature large enough to pick up a deer.