Paranormal Tavern - Occult & Supernatural Knowledge

26th Novemeber 2007

Soon after his election as U.S. President, Ronald Reagan demonstrated an apparent "rigid" belief of the nature of an Extraterrestrial (ET) threat, and laced many of his public statements referring to the ET presence and its threat to humanity. [1] According to Dixon Davis, one of the two CIA agents appointed to brief Reagan when he was President-elect: "The problem with Ronald Reagan was that all his ideas were all fixed. He thought that he knew about everything -- he was an old dog." [2]

Reagan’s anti-communist rhetoric and massive build-up of military forces was a cover for Reagan’s true desire to militarily confront ET races. [3] His first major public comment on an ET threat occurred at a 1985 US-Soviet Summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev at Geneva when he said:

I couldn’t help but - when you stop to think that we’re all God’s children, wherever we live in the world, I couldn’t help but say to him (Gorbachev) just how easy his task and mine might be if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species from another planet outside in the universe. We’d forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together. Well I guess we can wait for some alien race to come down and threaten us, but I think that between us we can bring about that realization. [4]

If his unscheduled comment at a U.S.-Soviet Summit were not itself a provocative enough expression of Reagan’s views on the possible threat of an ET presence, then his speech to the Forty-Second UN General Assembly of the United Nations on September 21, 1987, was even more provocative and disturbing in its implications:

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world. And yet I ask -- is not an alien force already among us? [5]

For Colonel Phillip Corso, and other conservative military officers, Reagan was a hero who knew how to best respond to the ET presence -- a global defensive shield that could shoot down ET craft anywhere around the planet. [6] The Strategic Defense Initiative had little to do with shooting down ballistic nuclear missiles, and really was part of a planetary shield desired by clandestine organizations in the military wanting to militarily confront the ET presence.

Source

MOSCOW -- The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.

Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist's chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. "We've had volunteers, a lot of them," she said, the thick concrete walls muffling the noise from the college campus outside. "We worked out a program with (a psychiatric facility) to study criminals. There's no way to falsify the results. There's no subjectivism."

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia's capital. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study -- dubbed psychoecology -- that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research.

What's gotten DHS' attention is the institute's work on a system called Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, a software-based mind reader that supposedly tests a subject's involuntary response to subliminal messages.

SSRM Tek is presented to a subject as an innocent computer game that flashes subliminal images across the screen -- like pictures of Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center. The "player" -- a traveler at an airport screening line, for example -- presses a button in response to the images, without consciously registering what he or she is looking at. The terrorist's response to the scrambled image involuntarily differs from the innocent person's, according to the theory.

Rusalkina markets the technology as a program called Mindreader 2.0. To sell Mindreader to the West, she's teamed up with a Canadian firm, which is now working with a U.S. defense contractor called SRS Technologies. This May, DHS announced plans to award a sole-source contract to conduct the first U.S.-government sponsored testing of SSRM Tek.

The contract is a small victory for the Psychotechnology Research Institute and its leaders, who have struggled for years to be accepted in the West. It also illustrates how the search for counter-terrorism technology has led the U.S. government into unconventional -- and some would say unsound -- science.

All of the technology at the institute is based on the work of Rusalkina's late husband, Igor Smirnov, a controversial Russian scientist whose incredible tales of mind control attracted frequent press attention before his death several years ago.

Smirnov was a Rasputin-like character often portrayed in the media as having almost mystical powers of persuasion. Today, first-time visitors to the institute -- housed in a drab concrete building at the Peoples Friendship University of Russia -- are asked to watch a half-hour television program dedicated to Smirnov, who is called the father of "psychotronic weapons," the Russian term for mind control weapons. Bearded and confident, Smirnov in the video explains how subliminal sounds could alter a person's behavior. To the untrained ear, the demonstration sounds like squealing pigs.

GHOSTIES IN THE UK

The UK is full of ghosts. Why is this? Whether we accept ghosts as existing or not, stories of ghosts persist. Could it be that there is value in those stories? Could they have a distinct purpose that guarantees they will exist?
Croft Castle on the Welsh border near Leominster is older than Chingle Hall, being mentioned in the Doomsday Book. During the 1920s a host of stories were told, such as the visitor who saw a spectral man dressed in a black leather coat.
Folklore states that it is the ghost of Welsh folk hero, Owen Glendower. Even in the 1950s stories continued to be told, including a visitor who heard 18th century music coming from the castle when it was known to be empty; and a head teacher who, whilst talking to the custodian, saw a reflection in a mirror of someone walking across the room.

MOST HAUNTED

One of the most haunted houses ever was 50 Berkeley Square in London. Ghosts, here, are said to include an insane man who died in the room in which he was imprisoned, a Scottish child killed by a servant, and a woman who threw herself out of a window to avoid being raped.
A terrifying ’shape’ was often seen in the house, inducing a sailor spending the night there to throw himself out of a window. When the writer Lord Lyttleton spent a night there, he fired pistols at the shape.
Burton Agnes Hall near Driffield is occasionally haunted by Awd Nance, the ghost of a woman who died after a beating in the 19th century. Before dying she made her sisters promise they’d keep her head in the hall.
Horrified, they buried her intact. Within days doors started banging, and the sound of people would be heard in the corridors at night. Eventually a vicar exhumed the woman and placed her head in the hall. The haunting stopped, yet occasionally she still flexes her ghostly muscles.

TALES DOWN THE CENTURIES

Few ghosts are as persistent as the Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, Norfolk, thought to be the daughter of Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. Dorothy Walpole married one Charles Townsend after living a scandalous life. When Charles found out about her past, he imprisoned her in a room in the Hall for ten years until her death. However, she has been seen many times since then.
One famous witness was George III who, staying at the Hall, woke up one night to see her standing by his bed. Another witness saw her in a corridor, and walked through her. In 1835 a Colonel described her brown attire, but also noted the apparition seemed to have no eyes, her appearances becoming malevolent.
Indeed, when Captain Frederick Marryat saw her with a group of friends, she chased them into their room, laughing wickedly. However, the most amazing sighting was when two photographers were taking pictures of a staircase in the Hall in 1936. Seeing a shape, they exposed a plate. The plate showed the vague outline of a woman in bridal costume.

HISTORY AND PLACE

We can, if we choose, discount all of these ghost stories. I don’t, but let us assume they are all made up – let us be really skeptical. But even if we do this, we are still left with an intriguing possibility. Is there any value in the ghost story itself?
One vital element of all of the above is that they record an element of history or culture. Coming at a time before a modern media, could it be that their transmission WAS a valid element of media?
If we accept such a possibility, then the recounted ghost story takes on a life of its own. It is a vital part of the transmission of a sense of identity – it places a person in his historic and cultural heritage.

Read the rest HERE

MYTHS OF FISH PEOPLE

The above is a classic mermaid encounter – a sighting or story related to a half human, half fish entity. How long such sightings have been made is impossible to tell, but they are popular in mythology.
The Babylonians had the fish-tailed God, Oannes, who lived in the sea but came ashore to teach mankind. His wife, Damkina, had several fish-tailed children.
The Greeks had a variation in the half-woman, half-bird Siren who’s song used to lure seamen to disaster. Ulysses escaped the Siren by putting wax in his companion’s ears and lashing himself to his boat mast.

HISTORIC SIGHTINGS

The navigator Henry Hudson documented a sighting of a mermaid in 1608 by two of his seamen near an island off the northern coast of Russia. The size of a fully developed human, it again had long hair and a tail like a porpoise.
Often, people who disappeared near the sea were said to be victims of the mermaid. Typical was Cornish chorister Matthew Trewhella, who was said to have been lured into the sea, fell in love and had several children to a mermaid.

RATIONAL THEORIES

Such sightings aside, what are we to make of the mermaid phenomenon? Most logical people deny their existence. Rather, sightings are misidentifications of sea cows - the manatees and dugong - which can hold themselves vertically, and suckle their young on clearly visible breasts.
The skin complaint, ichthyosis could also be to blame in the past, creating black fish-like scales on the body. In 1694 the ten year old Italian boy, Peter Consiglio, was displayed in London. He was totally covered in fish-like scales.
Skeletons of supposed mermaids were often put on show in the 19th century. Naturalist Frank Buckland observed one which turned out to be the skull, torso and arms of a monkey fastened to the headless body of a large fish.
One theory supposed to give credence to the mermaid is the idea of Elaine Morgan, who argued mankind developed from an ape-like aquatic animal. Is the mermaid an offshoot of this evolutionary chain?

PSYCHOLOGY

The writer Dorothy Dinnerstein hinted that mermaids and other human/animal hybrids such as the minotaur, were actually distant memories of our evolutionary past. It was a recognition that we are different, yet similar to our animal ancestors.
Some researchers argue the mermaid has a more likely explanation in the psychology of early sailors. As ancient myths show, mermaids and Sirens lured sailors to their doom. Sea journeys in those days took a long time, and without women aboard ship, sexual urges would be strong.
Could mermaids therefore be nothing more than hallucinations based on sexual urges? Possibly, but sightings by people such as Christopher Columbus suggest not. He commented on how absolutely ugly they were.

A MOMENT OF CRISIS

Staff at the next door Camera Obscura use the bottom two floors of the long-neglected Ragged School, but admit no-one goes up to the top two floors.

So when Edinburgh medium Ewan Irvine, of Scottish Paranormal, and his team carried out a recce of the building recently in preparation for an event at this month's annual Ghost Fest, they weren't quite sure what to expect. But on a bright Saturday afternoon, with the happy chatter of Castle visitors clearly audible from the street outside and sunshine streaming through the cobweb-covered windows, it became clear that they were more likely to uncover health and safety issues than ghostly encounters.

"It was a bit dusty but really it was quite clean. And it was a lovely sunny afternoon," says Ryan O'Neill, founder of Scottish Paranormal. "But once you got upstairs it was quite strange, quite eerie."

The discovery of a Victorian doll's pram on the top floor only added to the atmosphere. And it wasn't long before the three mediums among the team of nine began to pick up on some ghostly vibrations in the main classroom and the upstairs dormitory.

Ewan says: "I picked up on some of the characters. There was a lady in her 50s who was a nurse there, who went by the name of Eaddie Watkins and we picked up on how stressed she was. And I picked up on a minister who used to visit once a week, and felt a woman who had been seen in the building with a brown dress."

Fellow medium Fiona Williamson felt a spirit called Andrew, a young man who used to be a chimney sweep, while feelings of being locked in cupboards were also noted. The surnames of Turner, McDonald, Galbraith and the dates of 1826 and 1709 also came to the mediums. And then fellow medium Heather Taylor began to feel a "negative energy" that wanted the group to leave the school.

The information gathered is being researched by Scottish Paranormal historical researcher, Rachel Atkinson. The Ragged School's founder, the charismatic preacher Thomas Guthrie, is remembered as one of the city's most noble characters - his monument with one of the ragged boys beside him faces the Castle from Princes Street Gardens.

The Brechin lad was little more than a child when he first came to Edinburgh to study at the university. As a 12-year-old, in 1815, alone in the city, he would have brushed shoulders with many slum-dwellers as he set out from his lodgings on the fringes of the Old Town. In 1837, after studying in Paris and working at his ministry in Arbirlot, in Angus, Guthrie returned to the city and its slums, taking up a position at old Greyfriars and frequently preaching at the Magdalene Chapel in the Cowgate. In his autobiography he noted how his wealthy parishioners were often seated next to beggars. And after joining the Free Kirk of Scotland, he gave sermons at what was the Free St John's Church.

Being surrounded by so much poverty - the Old Town was notorious for its slums in those days - the committed Christian could hardly have failed to be moved to act. While out walking in Holyrood Park, he sat down by St Anthony's Well and began chatting to some of the beggar boys.

Their conversation convinced him that what was needed was a free school - which included food. So the idea of a ragged school was born, where poverty-stricken scholars received their meals, basic education and some industrial training. He continued to pull juvenile beggars off the street and send them to the school with the words: "Not a sixpence, sir, not a penny, you go to the ragged school and say Dr Guthrie sent you."

Andrew Johnson, manager of the Camera Obscura, which owns the adjacent school, explains: "The Ragged School movement was to do with taking destitute children off the streets. Dr Guthrie published a booklet called the Plea for Ragged Schools in 1847 and he got public support for it.

"He raised about £2000 that year and he opened up the Ramsay Lane Ragged School - you can still see on the outside of the building a carved bible."

He continues: "The Ragged schools cleared the streets of juvenile beggars and it reduced the children in the city's prisons by 75 per cent. The constitution of the school was to reclaim the destitute, and give them the freedom to earn an honest living."

So on the surface it seems unlikely that the Electronic Voice Phenomena workshop which takes place on Wednesday May 16 at Camera Obscura, from 8pm, when investigators will use their scientific recording equipment in an attempt to capture spirit voices, will uncover anything in a place where so much hope and faith in the future was fostered.

But even Andrew, while paying tribute to Guthrie's achievements, admits there is something eerie about the empty sections of the building. He says: "I will be going along to see what goes on in the investigations at the Ragged School. Even here in the Camera Obscura building, we've had eerie things happen. One of our cleaners once saw a lady in a brown dress which really spooked her. In one room, a workman just wouldn't go into it. He just felt it was oppressive and scary.

"We've heard giggling children on our third floor too. And on the back stair, footsteps have been heard. In Camera Obscura we've had visitors who've just had to leave, and somebody has been seen a lot - a man in a grey coat. We didn't tell Ewan this beforehand, and he actually found the man, who is called George."

Ryan says: "On the footage we have, we have a breath which comes into the camcorder - it's right next to the microphone. It was eerie, especially as there were no investigators there at that time."

• The third annual Ghost Fest will take place from May 11-20. For more information on individual events visit www.edinburghghostfest.com. To join one of the Camera Obscura and Ragged School events telephone 0131-226 3709 for a range of times, dates and prices.

To read the rest of this acticle please click Here

The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.

Power of suggestion
People who are likely to make these kinds of errors might end up convincing themselves of things that aren’t true, said lead researcher Maarten Peters of Maastricht University in The Netherlands. When people who are prone to making these mistakes undergo hypnosis and are repeatedly asked to talk about a potential idea — like a past life — they might, as they grow more familiar with it, eventually convert the idea into a full-blown false memory.

Past life memories are not the only type of implausible memories that have been studied in this manner. Richard McNally, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, has found that self-proclaimed alien abductees are also twice as likely to commit source monitoring errors.

Creative minds
As for what might make people more prone to committing such errors to begin with, McNally says that it could be the byproduct of especially vivid imagery skills. He has found that people who commonly make source-monitoring errors respond to and imagine experiences more strongly than the average person, and they also tend to be more creative.

“It might be harder to discriminate between a vivid image that you’d generated yourself and the memory of a perception of something you actually saw,” he said in a telephone interview.

Peters also found in his study, detailed in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition, that people with implausible memories are also more likely to be depressed and to experience sleep problems, and this could also make them more prone to memory mistakes.

And once people make this kind of mistake, they might be inclined to stick to their guns for spiritual reasons, McNally said. “It may be a variant expression of certain religious impulses,” he said. “We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death.”

Romanian Priest Sentenced for Exorcism

Monday February 19, 2007  4:01 pm

BUCHAREST, Romania (AP) - A Romanian priest who led a dayslong exorcism ritual for a young nun that ended with the woman's death was sentenced Monday to 14 years in prison. Four nuns were also sentenced in the case. The dead nun, Maricica Irina Cornici, believed she heard the devil talking to her. She was treated for schizophrenia, but when she relapsed, Daniel Petru Corogeanu - a monk who served as the priest for the secluded Holy Trinity convent in northeast Romania - and the four other nuns tried exorcism.

Cornici, 23, was tied up for several days at the without food or water and chained to a cross. She died of dehydration, exhaustion and suffocation.

The court in the northeast city of Vaslui convicted Corogeanu and the nuns of holding Cornici captive, resulting in her death. One of the nuns, Nicoleta Arcalianu, was sentenced to eight years in prison, and the other three - Adina Cepraga, Elena Otel and Simona Bardanas - received five-year sentences.

Dozens of Corogeanu's supporters packed the courtroom and prayed for the priest; several burst into tears when the verdict was announced.

The defendants' lawyers plan to appeal.

Cornici's death prompted Romania's dominant Orthodox Church to promise reforms, including psychological tests for those seeking to enter monasteries.

The Orthodox church, which has benefited from a religious revival in recent years, condemned the ritual at the convent as ``abominable'' and banned Corogeanu from the priesthood and excommunicated the four nuns from the church.

In 1999, when the Vatican issued its first new guidelines since 1614 for driving out devils, it urged its priests to take modern psychiatry into account in deciding who should be exorcised.

The Haunted Devon team

THE spooky goings-on at a Mid Devon pub are to be investigated by the county's lea-ding paranormal team, Haunted Devon, over the next few weeks.

The Exeter Inn near Bampton is well known for its ales and food but it apparently also boasts several former residents, who have decided to stay on in the inn after their deaths.

The Haunted Devon team visited the inn late last year to carry out preliminary investigations.

They felt the presence of several spirits, and so have decided to return for more detailed analysis.

The team, led by Byron Jack-son, will use a variety of methods in order to confirm or negate the presence of the inn's former residents.

Byron said: "We had some good results at the Exeter Inn in 2006 and the venue was worthy of additional investigation.

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"The spirit of an old man and his granddaughter were just two of the many spirits who have chosen to remain in this delightful building.

"We will be concentrating our efforts on the more technical aspect of paranormal investigations and deploying additional studio quality digital sound recorders, thermal data loggers and infrared cameras in order to provide technical support to our resident medium Caz Parnell."

Haunted Devon has covered many of the key sites around Devon and has worked with English Heritage, BBC, ITV and American TV.

The investigation has an additional twist in that this event will be filmed in its entirety for the release of the team's DVD to be released later this year.

TO see how the team got on at the Exeter Inn last year visit http://haunted-devon.co.uk

8:30am Friday 19th January 2007

From HERE

Since the early 1990s, Sparks, a professor of communication, has been researching how the media affects the public's belief in the paranormal.

"I had done a number of studies early in my career on the effects of frightening movies on emotional reactions that children had. I was interested in the sorts of things that scared children in the media at different points in their development and what parents could do to help children who were scared," said Sparks.</