Not exactly a Creepy Mystery, but...

Well, I laughed.

The Mystery of the SS Ourange Medan

In February, 1948, distress calls were picked up by numerous ships near Indonesia, from the Dutch freighter SS Ourang Medan. The chilling message was, “All officers including captain are dead lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead.” This message was followed by indecipherable Morse code then one final grisly message… “I die.” When the first rescue vessel arrived on the scene a few hours later, they tried to hail the Ourang Medan but there was no response. A boarding party was sent to the ship and what they found was a frightening sight that has made the Ourang Medan one of the strangest and scariest ghost ship stories of all time.
All the crew and officers of the Ourang Medan were dead, their eyes open, faces looking towards the sun, arms outstretched and a look of terror on their faces. Even the ship’s dog was dead, found snarling at some unseen enemy. When nearing the bodies in the boiler room, the rescue crew felt a chill, though the temperature was near 110°F. The decision was made to tow the ship back to port, but before they could get underway, smoke began rolling up from the hull. The rescue crew left the ship and barely had time to cut the tow lines before the Ourang Medan exploded and sank.
To this day, the exact fate of the Ourang Medan and her crew remains a mystery.

Louis Keseburg

On April 14, 1846, a group of pioneers known as the Donner Party began their voyage to relocate from the U.S. state of Illinois to California. The trip covered 2,500 miles (4,023 kilometers) over the Great Plains, two mountain ranges and the deserts of the Great Basin. The voyage took between four and six months, but the Donner Party was slowed because they decided to follow a new route called Hastings Cutoff. The group was told that Hastings Cutoff was a shortcut, but, in fact, it was a longer and more treacherous path. Ultimately, 87 people made the journey through the cutoff, which crossed Utah’s Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake Desert. In all, 37 of the pioneers were members of the Reed and Donner families, while German emigrants Louis and Philippine Keseberg were also traveling with the group.
During the voyage, many of the pioneers documented their daily activities. Louis Keseberg was frequently mentioned in these journals. The connotation surrounding his activates was almost always negative. Louis Keseberg was routinely confronted for abusing his wife and children. Keseberg’s behavior was suspicious to the other travelers and he was regularly accused of theft, malingering and murder. In fact, the Donner Party journals are full of animosity, violent events and war.
After intense snow storms struck the Donner Party, it soon became evident that the group was not going to make it over the mountains before winter. To fend off the cold, all of the families built shelters in the area surrounding Truckee Lake and Alder Creek. By December 13, there was 8 feet (2.4 m) of snow. By the middle of January, most of the group’s food was gone and all that remained was dead human bodies. To stay alive, certain members of the Donner Party began to eat each other. Human bodies were labeled with the names of the deceased and the area became a “Cannibal Camp.”
On February 18, a seven-man rescue party scaled Frémont Pass and reached the Donner camps, which by this time were completely buried in snow. “The first two members of the relief party to enter the camp saw Trudeau carrying a human leg. When they made their presence known, he threw it into a hole with other dismembered bodies.” Twenty-three people were chosen and taken by the rescuers, but the pioneers were weak and some died on the long voyage to California. Dozens of people remained at the Truckee Lake and Alder Creek camp sites. One of these individuals was Louis Keseberg. Little is known about what Keseberg did during this time, but claims have been made that he became a predator.
The final rescue party didn’t reach the camp until April 21, 1847. When they arrived, Louis Keseberg was the only survivor. He was surrounded by dismembered bodies, gallons of blood, and had a fresh pot of human flesh over the fire. The men also found George Donner’s pistols, jewelry and $250 in gold in Keseberg’s cabin. The rescue group threatened to lynch Louis Keseberg, but he was ultimately taken to California. Upon return, Keseberg sued Ned Coffeemeyer for slander and for allegedly spreading stories about his deeds at the Donner camps. Keseberg won his case, but was awarded only $1 in damages. This was evidently all the judicial system felt his reputation was worth. During his lifetime, Louis Keseberg saw over ten of his children die in a number of different ways.

Vimanas - Ancient Flying Machines

Vimanas are the mythical flying machines chronicled in the ancient Sanskrit epics of India. The story of the Vimana predates Christ by many thousands of years, and the Hindus of today’s India believe the existence and usage of Vimana to be historical fact. There is a plethora of ancient Indian literature which deals with the Vimana and its many aspects. Most of the epics await translation. One epic, titled Manusa, gives clear instructions on how to build the craft and the proponents that make them able to fly. Other texts have names such as ‘The secret of making Planes invisible’, ‘The Secret of hearing conversations and other sounds in Enemy Aircraft’ and ‘The secret of making Planes motionless’. There are many other texts about Vimana which are spoken of in the epics, but have not yet been discovered. Many texts speak of ships and planes with nuclear capabilities and a great nuclear war that took place. In the ancient ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, once part of the Indus Valley Civilization, 3000 year old skeletons where found with radioactivity levels that surpassed that of the bodies at Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The ruins themselves also emit high radioactivity levels. It is a documented fact that the city was destroyed suddenly.
The wording of the texts is highly technical, and speaks at a high level of intellectual maturity in areas such as physics and aero dynamics. One text of the Vaimanika Shastra, which translates as ‘Science of Aeronautics’, includes 230 stanzas, concerning aviation matters such as construction, take off, cruising for thousands of miles, normal and forced landing, protections of the airships from storm and lightening and how to switch the power source to solar energy from free energy. The same text describes at great detail the construction of the mercury vortex engine, which is the forerunner of the Ion vortex engine used today by NASA. In 1895, a Sanskrit scholar named Shivkar Talpade designed an aircraft based solely on the Sanskrit document concerning the mercury vortex engine. The unmanned craft reached a height of 1500ft.

Countdown to Armageddon

17 Days until the beginning of Operation Noble Fury (codenamed Nerd Hippo)

Carrier Assets: 2 CSGs in the South China Sea, 2 Carriers in Eastern Pacific region ready to be moved on demand. CVN-68 Nimitz is in Dry Dock for maintenance and can be re-activated given 12 days notice.

Yesterday the 6th Mentor satellite was launched at Vandenberg for the NRO and is set for geosynchronous orbit over Korea. A 7th in the Mentor series is also scheduled for launch from Vandenberg on February 5th.

Defense contractor Raytheon's stock is up 12.3% month over month and is projected to yield the most gains from the operation.

Anyone have any questions about this?

Amphibians of Ancient MesopotamiaIn ancient Mesopotamia

In ancient Mesopotamia, the world’s first academically ratified, fully functioning civilizations of Babylon, Sumer and Akkadia emerged. Located in the middle of an area known as the Fertile Crescent, these civilizations inhabited what is now modern day Iraq and Iran. We owe the invention of writing and the wheel, among other crucial human breakthroughs, to these peoples. Their origins are shrouded in mystery. The biggest mystery surrounding the emergence of these civilizations is their almost overnight transformation from hunter gatherers to intelligent city building civilizations. The Sumer tells us, through their own records and writings, that they were aided by Aliens in establishing themselves as a sustainable, intelligent civilization. They referred to their god’s as the Annunaki, which translates as ‘Those who came from heaven to earth.’

A Sumerian priest named Berossus recorded how an amphibian, named Oannes, emerged from the Persian Gulf and taught the Sumerians numbers, medicine, astronomy, politics, ethics and law, encompassing all the necessities for civilized existence. Before his intervention the Sumerians ‘lived like beasts in the field, with no order or rule.’ He was described as follows ‘The whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and it had, under a fishes head, another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fishes tail. His voice, and language, too, were articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved to this day….When the sun set, it was the custom of this being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all night in the deep; for he was amphibious.’ Whoever Oannes was, it is certainly a given that he was exceptionally good at what he did. Sumerian astronomers were so gifted that their calculations for the rotation of the moon are only 0.4 off modern computerized calculations. They also understood that planets revolve around the sun, something that wouldn’t be hypothesized by renaissance science for thousands of years. Sumerian mathematicians were also gifted almost beyond belief for their time. A tablet discovered among the hills of Kuynjik contained a 15-digit number–195,955,200,000,000. Mathematicians from the golden age of ancient Greece could count no farther than 10,000.

Why are Humans Creating and Releasing Genetically Modified Mosquitoes?

Operation Drop Kick was a 1956 U.S. entomological warfare field testing program that modified and deployed the yellow fever mosquito. The goal of the project was to use the mosquito to carry and release a biological warfare agent. The concept was simply to drop a large collection of diseased mosquitoes over a populated area. Operation Drop Kick included a 1956 test in Savannah, Georgia, where uninfected mosquitoes were released in a residential neighborhood, and another 1956 test in Avon Park, Florida, where 600,000 diseased mosquitoes were released on the city.
Between the years 1956-1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted in the city of Avon Park. In the experiments, Army biological weapon researchers released millions of mosquitoes on the town in order to see if the insects would spread yellow fever and dengue fever. The residents of Avon Park were not notified of the deadly experiments. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis and typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, so that they could photograph and perform medical tests on the victims. Several people died as a result of the program.
The experiments in Avon Park were concentrated in low-income neighborhoods, in areas that were predominantly black with newly constructed housing projects. In 1978, a Pentagon document titled, Biological Warfare: Secret Testing & Volunteers revealed that similar experiments were conducted in Key West, Florida. Many people have raised the question of why the U.S. government was playing around with the Dengue fever virus. Dengue fever is an infectious disease that causes a number of symptoms, including severe headaches, a petechial rash and muscle and joint pains. In a small proportion the disease progresses to life-threatening complications. Since the middle of the 1950s, the rates of Dengue fever infection have increased dramatically, with approximately 50-100 million people being infected yearly. The disease has become a global epidemic in more than 110 countries with 2.5 billion people living in areas where it is prevalent.
In 2009, the British biotechnology giant Oxitec announced that they had developed a genetically-modified (GM) mosquito (OX513A) that, apart from a specific chemical antibiotic, is unable to successfully repopulate. After intense media scrutiny, the company gave a statement which indicated that the GM mosquitoes may help fight the spread of dengue fever by reducing or eliminating the wild mosquito population. In 2009, Oxitec released millions of the OX513A test mosquitoes over the Cayman Islands. Many people have questioned the decision to fight the spread of Dengue fever by using more infected mosquitoes. Nobody knows for sure what will happen when the new GM mosquitoes interact with animals and human life, or how the mosquitoes altered genes will disrupt the environment.

Skeleton Lake

One of the greatest mysteries of the Himalayas is a small glacial lake named Roopkund. The lake is located in the Uttarakhand state of India, at an altitude of about 5,029 meters (16,499 feet). The area surrounding the lake is completely uninhabited and the water is a five day treacherous hike from civilization. In 1942, Roopkund gained the name Skeleton Lake when over five hundred human skulls, bones and artifacts were discovered surrounding and inside the ice. These human bones have baffled scientists for decades because historians don’t understand who these people were or what they were doing so high in the mountains. Roopkund was never a historically significant region and no traces of any trade routes to Tibet have been found.
The documentary Skeleton Lake, made by the National Geographic Channel, claimed that Roopkund was the venue for the Garhwali religious festival called Nanda Jaat yatra, which is held every 12 years, but facts supporting this claim are limited. It was originally believed by specialists that the people died from an epidemic, landslide or blizzard, but after an archaeological team examined the site in 2004, it was determined that the skulls contained severe head trauma. Based on this evidence it has been hypothesized that the people died from a sudden hailstorm. It has been suggested that the hailstones were as large as tennis balls, and with no shelter in the open Himalayas, all of the people perished in the storm.
Probably the most remarkable discovery came after scientists conducted DNA tests on the bones, which proved to have a rich source of DNA material. The bodies were dated to AD 850 with a possible mistake up to 30 years. This date was 600 years earlier than initially reported. Remarkably, the experts have found that the dead individuals belonged to two different teams. One team is marked by a shorter stature of the skeletons, while the other human bones are significantly taller. The recorded DNA genetic mutations have caught the attention of the scientific community. It remains unclear exactly who these people were? What they looked like or why they were traveling in this remote area of the Himalayas?

Lupe Fiasco - The Show Goes On [Official Music Video]

Sinking of the ROKS Cheonan - North Korean Aggression or Friendly Fire?

The recent tension on the Korean peninsula, beginning last March, stems from the sinking of a South Korean Pohang class corvette, the ROKS Cheonan. On Friday, 26 March 2010, an explosion was reported to have occurred near the Cheonan, near the stern of the ship at 9:22 p.m. local time. The ship, which broke in half off of Baengnyeong Island in South Korean waters, had previously participated in a large anti-submarine warfare training exercise 8 days previously. 40 South Korean sailors were confirmed dead, and 6 missing. Rough waters caused the poorly executed rescue operation to cost more lives when a Cambodian freighter collided with a privately owned vessel participating in the rescue. Immediate South Korean response to the sinking of the ship stressed that there was no indication of North Korean involvement.

Although initial reports played down the possibility of North Korean involvement, as the days passed, South Korean "leaks" indicated that a North Korean miniature submarine could have launched a torpedo into the Cheonan. Pro-Government newspapers began publishing reports of North Korean involvement, indicating a torpedo had hit the Cheonan, causing it to split in half. Parts of an intact torpedo were shown as evidence, complete with North Korean markings and production numbers.

This is a picture of the North Korean torpedo that supposedly hit the Cheonan. The problem with this, however, is that a torpedo like the one supposedly launched at the Cheonan, would be traveling 40-50 knots, and would leave no distinguishable remains like the propeller. South Korean and American investigations "confirmed" North Korean involvement with its own investigation. Independent investigations, as well as Chinese reports, pointed towards a floating mine. Russian investigations reportedly agreed. The argument for a friendly fire incident can be attributed to the NATO-grade explosive residue found on the Cheonan. North Korean torpedoes would not be using NATO weaponry. The sinking was also well within South Korean waters, and close to a large anti-submarine base, which would have easily detected the poorly made North Korean submarines.

I personally doubt that the North Koreans were involved, but I'd like to know your opinions!

Happy Birthday Wikipedia!

10 years of giving me frequently misleading information to put on school papers. I'm also inching closer and closer to that 100 supporters mark, so I'd like to say thank you for those that made it possible!

Anyway.... To celebrate Wikipedia's birthday, I have some funny edits. Enjoy

He's in the pursuit of happiness

Kid Cudi is still a pretty cool guy.

My New Favorite

My long delayed return to blogging! Sorry for the delay, busy time in life, but now I'm single, haha. Not a bad couple of weeks :)

Mac Miller - the Spins