On March 13, 1997, a mysterious formation of lights was spotted above the Valley and across much of the state. People who saw the formation said it was miles long and wide. Weeks later, Dr. Lynne Kitei said the military passed off the event as flares from a military training exercise. Kitei didn't buy the explanation then or now.

"You can only think that they were pushed to come up with something," the Valley physician said. Kitei said to this day there is no clear-cut answer to what she and thousands of others witnessed. "A formation of lights attached to something or an actual craft."

Overhead cables touched under the weight of perched pigeons causing an explosion which sent them hurtling to their death in a giant fireball and set fire to the ditch below.

This extraordinary event in Benwick Road, Ramsey Forty Foot, on February 22, was witnessed by Ron Laverick who says it was reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds.

Mr Laverick, of Benwick Road, Ramsey Forty Foot, said: "Sparks went everywhere, some pigeons were incinerated, others dropped into the ditch and the fire raged.

A researcher with ParaScience International flew to Oklahoma this week to get more information on a suspicious death in Sequoyah County. Autopsy results are pending, but experts say it could be a case of spontaneous human combustion.

"Just because it's rare doesn't mean it's impossible," said Larry Arnold, director of ParaScience International, in an interview with CBS-affiliate KFSM in Fort Smith, Arkansas.

A mysterious death has local authorities stumped. "The nature of his burn injuries are something that has captivated our interest," Arnold said.

Arnold flew from Pennsylvania to Sequoyah County to study the death of Danny Vanzandt, 65. Last month deputies say Vanzandt was found dead in his home on Bawcom Road.

The tsunami that engulfed northeastern Japan two years ago has left some survivors believing they are seeing ghosts.

In a society wary of admitting to mental problems, many are turning to exorcists for help.

Tales of spectral figures lined up at shops where now there is only rubble are what psychiatrists say is a reaction to fear after the March 11, 2011, disaster in which nearly 19,000 people were killed.

"The places where people say they see ghosts are largely those areas completely swept away by the tsunami," said Keizo Hara, a psychiatrist in the city of Ishinomaki, one of the areas worst-hit by the waves touched off by an offshore earthquake.

"We think phenomena like ghost sightings are perhaps a mental projection of the terror and worries associated with those places."

Hara said post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) might only now be emerging in many people, and the country could be facing a wave of stress-related problems.

"It will take time for PTSD to emerge for many people in temporary housing for whom nothing has changed since the quake," he said.

Russell Crowe has sparked a furore after claiming to have photographed a UFO outside the window of his office.

The Hollywood megastar posted a video on YouTube which he says could show a spaceship moving across the night sky.

The actor seems to have anticipated that some would be sceptical of his supernatural claims, as the clip was captioned 'THESE ARE REAL'.

Do ghosts exist? A forensics lab in New York thinks so. Or at least, that's what a group of Tennessee based paranormal investigators claim.

Global Paranormal Services have been delving into a supernatural mystery at their local library for over a year now, and this Friday, they'll be visiting again to not only continue their investigations, but to unveil evidence of that they say is definitive proof of the afterlife.

As you can imagine, they're champing at the bit to share their findings.

"Keeping it quiet has been killing us, we've seen, heard, and experienced things in the Chattanooga Public Library that we've never found before," ghost hunter Robert Groover, told The Chattanoogan. "Some of the evidence has been sent to a New York forensic lab and they have confirmed the photos are of a paranormal nature."

That last line is particularly interesting, isn't it? If a forensic lab has really stuck it's neck out and risked it's credibility to confirm what the GPS team says it has, I can only imagine that this news will be the envy of every ghost hunter to ever swing a K2 meter.

There's a whodunit on South Whidbey and it has nothing to do with Langley's Mystery Weekend.

This mystery involves a healthy black Angus cow found dead by its owner, Diane Schneider, on her farm near Midvale off Maxwelton Road.

"I've got 11," she said when asked how many cows she has. "I had 12 until just a few hours ago."

She was standing over the body of what was a healthy 6-year-old cow. She discovered its carcass lying in the corner of a muddy, grassy pasture. The other 11 cows, including the dead cow's 6-month-old calf, huddled next to a fence near the house.

Schneider fed the cows that morning and found the dead one at 1 p.m. The cow's calf was still at its side.

"The calf was suckling even though she was dead," Schneider said, estimating the value of the cow at $1,500.

"It can eat by itself," she added, referring to the calf.

There were no footprints from other animals near the dead cow, which looked like it could have been peacefully lying down to catch the last rays of the fading sun. There was nothing abnormal about it except for one side of its face. Something or someone had stripped away the hide on the left side of the face, from below the eye to the jawline.

In 1725, a tavern owner in Rheims, France named Jean Millet was accused of the murder of his wife. Millet's wife was overweight, past her prime, and Millet, an otherwise upstanding member of the community, was reputed to be interested in a young servant girl from Lorraine. When Mme Millet's remains were found smoldering in the kitchen one night - with only her legs, part of her head, a few large bones and some vertebrae identifiable - suspicion quickly fell to her husband, who was quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Luckily for the tavern owner, he was saved at the last minute by one of his lodgers, a young and promising surgeon named Nicholas Le Cat, who argued that because Mme Millet was a known alcoholic, the likely cause of her death was not murder, but spontaneous human combustion. Millet was ultimately acquitted, though the ordeal left him destroyed, and he lived out the remainder of his life in a mental institution - haunted, perhaps, either by the fact that he had gotten away with murder, or that his wife really had, suddenly and without warning, burst into flames from too much drinking.

The evils of alcohol abuse have long been known and preached against by the more sober-minded, but for a period of about two hundred years imbibers had a particularly dire consequence to fear: that too much drinking would cause them to catch fire and be reduced to a small pile of greasy ash. A few decades after the Millet trial, on the evening of June 20, 1745, Countess Cornelia Zangari de Bandi of Cesena, of Verona, also burned to death. She was sixty-two years old; she went to bed at a normal hour, but when the maid came in the following morning, she found the Countess's "corpse on the floor in the most dreadful condition.

At the distance of four feet from the bed there was a heap of ashes. Her legs with the stockings on remained untouched and the head half-burned lay between them. Nearly all the rest of the body was reduced to ashes." The scene was noteworthy in that it many details defied conventional understandings of pyrotechnics: "A small oil lamp on the floor was covered with ashes, but had no oil in it, and, in two candlesticks which stood upright upon a table, the cotton wick of both the candles was left, and the tallow of both had disappeared." The bed was disturbed as if she had just risen from bed, but neither it, nor any other item in the room, showed any trace of fire. As with Millet's wife, the Countess was a known drinker.

Throughout the years, stories have filled the small communities of coal mining towns in Eastern Kentucky, whose lifeblood has always been the coal industry.

But a different story fills the air in Van Lear, a small community tucked away in Johnson County.

In Van Lear along the stretch of the road sits a museum. A place that houses a part of this community's history. But between the walls, you'll find something else... a ghost story.

"We hear walking all the time, we hear talking all the time. I've seen full-body apparitions," said Tina Webb, a museum volunteer.

The people who work at the coal miner's museum say they have no doubt spooks and specters are permanent visitors.

This mysterious creature was washed up on Tenby's South Beach over the weekend.

The photographs were taken by 27 year-old Peter Bailey from Tenby who was walking his dog along the beach on Friday evening.

He told the Western Telegraph: "I was taking my dog for her evening walk across the south beach when she started acting out of character by howling and running round in circles.

"I ran up to her to see if she was ok and then I came across this hideous looking carcass. I could see it had little hair left on it's decomposing body.

"Immediately I thought it was a horse but it had claws like a bear and a body of a pig. Surprisingly it didn't smell."

Do you know what this strange Beast from the East could be? Leave your comments below.