To explore this issue, I intend to take us on a brief diversion into the fringe sciences - those places where there is little agreement among scientists. One of the most vehemently disputed areas is that of psi research - psi being the new name for telepathy, ESP and so forth. Psi is a catch-all phrase intended to describe unexplainable phenomena related to mind. I have no desire to argue the case for or against psi - I merely wish to draw attention to a particularly interesting experiment, known as the Ganzfeld, and its implications for science as a whole.

The Ganzfeld is a rather silly experiment. I say this not to refute its scientific credentials, as I personally believe the Ganzfeld is a perfectly legitimate experiment, but rather to draw attention to the fact that this is an experiment in which the test subject sits in a chair with half a ping pong ball over each eye, while they are played white noise and sat in front of a red light source (see the opening image to appreciate how ridiculous this looks). The purpose of all this is to induce a state of sensory deprivation in the subject.

The experiment then consists of another subject (the sender) viewing a picture or video clip (randomly selected from a large pool), and then attempting to project this message mentally to the receiver in the Ganzfeld (i.e. under the ping pong balls). The receiver describes the visions they experience in their sensory deprived state, which are recorded. This recording is then played back to an independent panel that compare the transcript with the original picture or video clip, and three others chosen at random, ranking each in order of how accurately they deem the transcript describes them.

A hit is scored if the panel assigns the top rank to the correct source image. Otherwise, a miss is scored. Obviously by chance one would expect a 25% hit rate. However, the hit rate that is actually reported is around 35%. Of course, the number varies from study to study, and some studies report no significant finding. However, this is the gist of the Ganzfeld experiment, and any further details are left for the interested party to dig into in their own time.

The interesting thing about this experiment, at least in terms of what we are discussing here, is the response from the scientific community at large. Initially, responses began by pointing to possible experimental flaws that might be the source of the effect. One by one, these experimental errors were addressed by experimenters and the procedure repeated. The reported results have not changed. The number of experimental revisions the Ganzfeld has undergone appears to have exceeded any previous experiment in scientific history, making it the most rigorously refined experiment to date.

Now let us put aside the Ganzfeld experiment, it's results, and any criticisms. I do not claim to know how to interpret the experiment, nor is its interpretation material to the matter at hand. Let us focus solely on the behaviour of the two sides involved.

One side, the experimenters, keeps repeating its experiments eliminating any and all systematic flaws that are suggested. They keep reporting the same results. The other side, the critics, keeps proceeding from the assumption that the source of the effect is an experimental error. When all possible sources of experimental errors have been eliminated, the critics conclude that the experimenters have behaved fraudulently.

Consider this comment by psychologist Mark Hansel from the University of Wales:

If the result could have been through a trick, the experiment must be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP, whether or not it is finally decided that such a trick was, in fact, used... [As a result,] it is wise to adopt initially the assumption that ESP is impossible, since there is a great weight of knowledge supporting this point of view.

This is an odd state of affairs! We appear to have a scientist suggesting that it is better to believe that these results are a consequence of experimenter fraud than to change beliefs in respect of the published results. Neither is Mark Hansel alone in expressing such views. G.R. Price (another psychologist) suggested that since psi was clearly impossible, fraud was the only remaining explanation for psi effects. Donald O. Hebb (another psychologist) was troubled by the fact that the experimenters had presented sufficient evidence to convince the scientific community on any other issue, and admitted that his own rejection of the research was "in a literal sense prejudice."

The claim that science is an objective process is apparently falsified by the Ganzfeld experiment. From examining the experiments and the scientists that conduct them, I can state confidently that there is no scientific evidence of fraud at this time, and consequently any decision to impugn the results must draw upon either prior metaphysical beliefs, or a subjective decision to distrust the experimenters. Either way, if the meaning of a scientific experiment depends upon subjective elements (such as metaphysics, or a value judgement) then the entire scientific endeavour has lost its claim to objectivity.

Robert Anton Wilson suggested that every study that had set off with the goal of proving that telepathy existed had succeeded, and that every study that had set off with the goal of proving that telepathy did not exist had also succeeded. This was very close to the actual state of affairs! It just overlooks that there are many more studies of the former kind than the latter, because those who believe that telepathy does not exist have little motivation to conduct an experiment about which they believe the result is already known.

Neither is the Ganzfeld the only example of a scientific experiment being left open to subjective interpretation, although I suggest it is as clear an indication of this phenomenon as we could hope to find. In fact, Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions cites many similar examples from more conventional positions, some of which we examined earlier. Scientists do not change their views in the light of new evidence as readily as Popper presumed, and this is only natural because science is not an objective process at all.

Science is a subjective process with an objective goal. Genuine objectivity is beyond the reach of any individual scientist, or any community of scientists, as we are all human and subject to biases of many different kinds. The scientific endeavour achieves something that approximates to objectivity only over time. Scientific theories receive popular validation when they result in technology, or when sufficient time has passed for the most effective explanations to prove their worth (as we saw previously in the case of continental drift).

Trust in science is a metaphysical belief. I place a certain amount of trust in science, in so much as I believe that over time the scientific process approximates to its goals. But excessive trust in science is probably misplaced, because science is simply the name we place on the activities and knowledge of scientists. And scientists are people - hence the interpretation of the results reported by any scientist depends on how much people trust the scientists concerned.

For science to win back the trust of the general populace may require the adoption of a more modern model for how science functions. Individual scientists must work harder to keep their metaphysics (and hence ideology) out of their scientific writings if they want to win back public trust - that is, scientists must strive to adopt an ideologically neutral stance, or at least to accurately report the sources of their potential bias so that this can be taken into account.

Furthermore they must work on positioning science in its proper social context. Science has no absolute right to pursue its goals - scientists are granted that right by societies that choose to invest in the work of scientists. And to earn that right, scientists must gain and maintain the trust of the general public, something which is better achieved by open discourse than by individual scientists pugnaciously insisting that they are right. This is the challenge that science faces at the start of the 21st century - to convince people that scientists can be trusted. It is a trial that I hope and believe that scientists are ready to take on.

Glass shards, nearly 1.5 inches long and 0.5 inch wide, have been coming out of her forehead since January, her mother Dhansara Bista told the Rising Nepal daily.

The phenomenon started when Sarita fainted one day after which she began to bleed from the forehead and a sliver of glass came out. However, the wound healed soon after that, leaving no scars.

When the puzzled youngster told her mother, Dhansara said she did not believe the story at first. But since then, nearly 100 slivers have come out.

Sarita said she felt no pain. According to her family, both her physical and mental conditions are normal.

The daily said Sarita's schoolteachers were aware of the extraordinary feat.

Chakra Prasad Adhikari, a teacher at the Trinity English Boarding School, told the daily they had noticed the phenomenon about four months ago but had kept it a secret on being requested by the girl's family.

There have been no attempts by rationalists or scientists to explore the phenomenon and prove its veracity, let alone find a reason if it was true.

Nepal also suffers from a high incidence of superstition.

A large number of the population still believes in witches, divine cures and supernatural manifestations.

Typically, a person who has this effect on streetlights - also known as a SLIder - finds that the light switches on or off when he or she walks or drives beneath it. Obviously, this could happen occasionally by chance with a faulty streetlight (you've probably noticed that it's happened to you once in a while), but SLIders claim that it happens to them on a regular basis. It doesn't happen every time with every streetlight, but it occurs often enough to make these people suspect that something unusual is going on.

Very often, SLIders also report that they tend to have an odd effect on other electronic devices. In letters I've received, these people claim such effects as:

* Appliances such as lamps and TVs go on and off without being touched.
* Lightbulbs constantly blow when the SLIder tries to turn them off or on.
* Volume levels change on TVs, radios, and CD players.
* Watches stop working.
* Children's electronic toys start by themselves when the SLIder is present.
* Credit cards and other magnetically encoded cards are damaged or erased when in their possession.

What's the Cause?
Any attempt to pinpoint a cause for SLI at this point would be mere speculation without a thorough scientific investigation. The problem with such investigations, as with many forms of psychic phenomena, is that they are very difficult to reproduce in a laboratory. They seem to happen spontaneously without the deliberate intention of the SLIder. In fact, the SLIder, according to some informal tests, are usually unable to create the effect on demand.

A reasonable speculation for the effect, if it is a real one, might have something to do with the electronic impulses of the brain. All of our thoughts and movements are the result of electrical impulses that the brain generates. At present it is known that these measurable impulses only have an effect within an individual's body, but is it possible that they could have an effect outside the body - a kind of remote control?

Ongoing research at the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab is suggesting that the subconscious can indeed affect electronic devices. Subjects are able to influence the random generations of a computer far more than would occur merely by chance. This research - and research being conducted at other laboratories around the world - are beginning to reveal, in scientific terms, the reality of such psychic phenomena as ESP, telekinesis and soon, perhaps, SLI.

Although the SLI effect is not a conscious one, some SLIders report that when it does occur, they often are in an extreme emotional state. A state of anger or stress is often cited as the "cause." SLIder Debbie Wolf, a British barmaid, told CNN, "When it happens is when I'm stressed about something. Not really manically stressed, just when I'm really mulching something over, really chewing something over in my head, and then it happens."

Could it all be just coincidence, however? David Barlow, a graduate student of physics and astrophysics, suspects that the phenomenon might be attributed to people seeing patterns in "random noise." "It is unlikely that a light will turn itself on when you walk past it," he says, "so it is a shock when it happens. If this should happen a few times consecutively, then it appears some mechanism is at work."

SLI Research

A research project into SLI has been started by Dr. Richard Wiseman at the University of Berkfordshire in England. Wiseman recently made the newspapers with a project to test ESP with a kiosk-type machine - called The Mind Machine - that he set up in various locations around England to collect a large amount of data about the possible psychic abilities of the general public.

Hillary Evans, an author and paranormal investigator with The Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena (ASSAP), is also studying the phenomenon. (You can download the original SLI Effect book in PDF format by Hilary Evans completely free from their website.) She has established the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange as a place where SLIders can report their experiences and share those of other SLIders. "It's quite obvious from the letters I get," Evans told CNN, "that these people are perfectly healthy, normal people. It's just that they have some kind of ability... just a gift they've got. It may not be a gift they would like to have."

"It's a tantalizing discovery. I think it could be the beginning of a new era of focus on Olmec civilization," explained Houston. "It's telling us that these records probably exist and that many remain to be found. If we can decode their content, these earliest voices of Mesoamerican civilization will speak to us today."

Construction workers discovered the Cascajal block in a pile of debris in the community of Lomas de Tacamichapa in the late 1990s. Surrounding the piece were ceramic shards, clay figurine fragments, and broken artifacts of ground stone, which have helped the team date the block and its text to the San Lorenzo phase, ending about 900 BCE; approximately 400 years before writing was thought to have first appeared in the Western hemisphere.

The block weighs about 26 pounds and measures 36 cm x 21 cm x 13 cm. The text itself consists of 62 signs, some of which are repeated up to four times. There is no doubt that the piece is a written work, say the archaeologists. "As products of a writing system, the sequences would, by definition, reflect patterns of language, with the probable presence of syntax and language-dependent word order," they explain.

Interestingly, the surface containing the text appears to be concave and the team believes the block has been carved repeatedly and erased - an unprecedented discovery according to Houston, who added that several paired sequences of signs could even indicate poetic couplets.

Source: Brown University

I just stared in amazement, not being a little green men fanatic, trying to figure out what I was looking at. This was more than a group of plains it appeared to be as large as a small town. Being a US Army Veteran, it certainly wasn't something I could recognize or didn't sound like a B1 either. Hmmm! I went and asked my son if he heard the strange plane and he said he did. I told him... I saw a U.F.O. Unidentified Flying Object. Then I went back to watching TV.. With in a matter of a few minutes like "10 -15" the noise returned.

I didn't think much about it at first except, I thought I better go see what is going on. I stepped back out my front porch and once again I see the same lights but in a different configuration. This time flying vertical. Flying extremely slow and closer in the exact opposite direction. I couldn't believe my eyes. The lights weren't flashing like plane lights, they where more of a bright strobe light. Now I was freaking out. This time I ran to get my video camera. No film loaded, I ran back outside to see it they where still there. 'Gone! This time I called 911 to report this strange night time flight. The Spearfish dispatch forwarded my call to the Deadwood dispatch. The officer in charge said he could tell I was concerned, he actually said he could hear the "Fear" in my voice. He said that one of the officers reported Black Hawk helicopters flying earlier in the afternoon. I told him that I helped develop the Black Hawk helicopters back in the late 70s when I was in the service and this wasn't Black Hawks... but could have been I guess. Anyway it was strange. So strange I went back to my computer to try and duplicate what I saw. This is what it looked like on the first flight.

GO TO ORIGINAL to see Graphics and read the rest of the story.

He spent a few hours in a Mason County field under cover of dark waiting for a chance encounter with the Mothman.

This weekend at the Fifth Annual Mothman Festival, Turner will recount the time he spent investigating sightings of the creature in the Point Pleasant area and his part in one of the most best-known mysteries in Mountain State history.

It's a story Turner once pledged he wasn't going to tell anymore.

But the monster, or the myth at least, has a hold on him.

"No matter what I did in my career as a professor or all my years as a reporter, this is what follows me," Turner said. "I decided a year ago I wasn't going to talk about it again, but I shouldn't have done that. I almost gave it up, but you can't. Mothman won't go away."

Turner, an award-winning journalist and retired Marshall University professor, has for years told his tales to Boy Scout troops and Rotary Clubs. They tend to capture an audience's imagination, not because he has any real answers about the mystifying red-eyed creature, but because he has first-hand experience of what it was like when the monster captivated an entire town.

He went to Point Pleasant that night in 1966 not really knowing what to expect.

"I had one of those tough city editors," Turner recalls. "He called me up and told me to go up there and check out the nonsense. He didn't believe in it at all."

Turner didn't either. Well, not really.

"It seemed unrealistic that it was some sort of Mothman thing, so the challenge was to find out what was going on," he said. "I didn't think there could be such a thing, but I do remember I stopped at my house on the way and got a ball bat. Just in case."

Turner and a photographer from the newspaper made the hour-long drive from Huntington to Point Pleasant in an old Ford Bronco.

"It was foggy around the river," he says. "It looked like Dracula-type weather all along Route 2. It was misty and foggy and damp."

The duo set up shop near the abandoned powerhouse in Point Pleasant, known as the TNT area. It was the place where most of the Mothman sightings, which numbered 10 or so at that time, had occurred.

Even at 10 o'clock at night, the spot was crowded with people hoping to catch a glimpse of the monster.

"There were people still stirring, and we just set up some railroad ties there, and we kind of camped out with our reporters' pads and cameras," Turner said. "We stayed up all night and didn't see anything."

The story didn't end there, of course. Turner took it upon himself to try and find the source of the weird phenomenon.

He called a biology professor at West Virginia University, and wound up writing the first report that attempted to solve the mystery and explain the sightings as something other than the supernatural.

A story -- "That Mothman? Would You Believe a Sandhill Crane?" -- appeared that week in the Herald-Dispatch with Turner's byline. Nonbelievers still tout the story today as proof that the Mason County myth is based on a bird.

In an interview with Turner and with local police, biologist Robert Smith said descriptions of the Mothman perfectly matched those of a sandhill crane, a huge winged bird usually found in the Deep South and in Canada.

Smith said he thought one of the animals, with its seven-foot wingspan and ringed, fleshy red eyes, might have gotten caught in a corner of West Virginia while trying to migrate further north.

Turner's story temporarily stalled furious speculation in Point Pleasant, but the crane explanation didn't hold up for long.

"I figured, case closed, people saw a bird," Turner said. "I think there's a logical reason for everything, and it was the most logical conclusion I know of that anybody has offered. Obviously, a lot of people didn't agree with me."

Turner says he only wrote, at most, a handful of stories about the Mothman sightings, but he has become one of the central characters in the story that's now known nationwide and that became the basis for a blockbuster movie just a few years ago.

"I started getting calls from friends telling me that someone had done a book in Indiana or somewhere and I was known in it as the Mothman reporter," Turner said. "The movie was a real stretch. I like to kid that Richard Gere played my part."

Turner will be a keynote speaker in this weekend's Mothman Festival, an event that's growing each year and is expected to attract as many as 5,000 monster fans and paranormal experts from all over the country.

He isn't planning on publicizing the fact he still believes the legend of the Mothman probably was born by people witnessing the frenzied fight for freedom of a lost bird.

"I don't think they're going to change it to the Sandhill Crane Festival," Turner quipped. "For years in Point Pleasant, they didn't know much about it. The movie has had to do with a lot of it, but they have a lot of fun with it."

In one of his news stories about the Mothman, Turner turned speculative about whether the mystery might ever be solved. He seemed to have fairly accurate foresight of how the incident would forever change the county.

"Just what was seen in the dark that night may never be firmly established," he wrote in a Nov. 22, 1966 story. "The Mason County monster may become a legend. Maybe a new tourist attraction has been born."

Contact writer Kris Wise at kriswise@dailymail.com or 348-1244.

Chris Mullins, founder and co-ordinator of Beastwatch UK, which compiled the data, said: "It is clear the United Kingdom contains far more exotic wild animals than the British public could ever imagine."

The figures show that in the last six years 51 wallabies, 13 spiders including a tarantula and a Black Widow, 13 racoons, 10 crocodiles, seven wolves, three pandas, two scorpions and one penguin have been spotted.

There were also reported sightings of 5,931 big cats, 332 wild boars and 3,389 sharks in British waters.

Southwest England was a big cat hotspot, wild boar are most common in the southeast while Buckinghamshire - north of London - and neighbouring Oxfordshire have the most numbers of wallabies.

Oban, on the west coast of Scotland is home to several monkeys, the study found.

Fortunately, the ship and passengers survived, but the instance occurred just months after the first scientific recording confirmed the validity of old sailors' tales once considered skeptical: the existence--and prevalence--of freakishly giant waves, also known as rogue waves.

Before the first laser measurement of a freak wave in January 1995, oceanographers and mathematicians predicted that such monster waves should only occur about once every 10,000 years. But as the occurrence inspired satellite measurements, scientists observed many more freak waves than theory predicted. In fact, observations imply that a handful of these waves is occurring at every moment somewhere on the ocean. Although it's controversial just how many ships and lives have been lost in modern times due to these fairly common giant waves, most ships today are only built to withstand waves up to 50 feet tall--while freak waves have been calculated to reach heights of up to 198 feet. Technically, a freak wave is defined as a wave that is twice the "significant wave height," which is the mean of the largest third of waves in an area.

Intrigued and terrified by freak waves and their potential for swallowing giant ships whole (from oil rigs to cruise ships), scientists are trying to formulate a theory or theories to describe the evolution of these mythical realities. Recently, scientists from Sweden and Germany, Padma Shukla et al., have presented the first analysis and simulation of its kind for the instability of nonlinear waves interacting in deep water. In the past, nonlinear theories have seemed capable of explaining the greater prevalence of rogue waves than previous theories which were linear.

"The basic reason for the occurrence of freak waves seems to be what is known as nonlinear wave interactions--by a certain mechanism there is an energy exchange between the waves resulting in a large growth in wave amplitude, much larger than what would be possible through ordinary linear superposition of waves," coauthor Mattias Marklund told PhysOrg.com.

Nearly all waves originate as ripples on the water's surface blown by the wind. (The exception is tsunamis, which are caused by seismic tremors on the ocean floor and only become dangerous when they reach the shore.) Most waves, however, die down due to viscosity in the water, unless heavy winds cause the swells to increase. Scientists believe that heavy winds--especially when blowing in the opposite direction of the water current--play a large role in forming freak waves. This idea may explain why locations with strong currents (e.g. the Agulhas off Africa and Gulf Stream off the U.S., including the Bermuda Triangle) have a history of reported freak waves.

"The freak wave a phenomenon is important to understand since it may be the cause of serious accidents involving oil platforms and ocean-going ships," said Marklund. "If a greater understanding of the mechanisms behind these waves is obtained, one may, for example, in the future combine this with observational and statistical tools in order to construct warning systems."

Shukla, Marklund and their colleagues built their theory on a two-wave system, where two waves interact nonlinearly, which is described by the Schrodinger equations. These quantum mechanics equations, originally developed to describe the wave-like behavior of electrons in atoms, have since been used for a variety of wave systems. The scientists found that two-wave cases behave much differently than single waves, which exhibit standard instabilities and dissolve into a wide spectrum of waves.

"We have presented a theoretical study of the modulational instabilities of a pair of nonlinearly interacting two-dimensional waves in deep water, and have shown that the full dynamics of these interacting waves gives rise to localized large-amplitude wave packets," wrote the scientists in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters. "[T]wo water waves can, when nonlinear interactions are taken into account, give rise to novel behavior such as the formation of large-amplitude coherent wave packets with amplitudes more than 3 times the ones of the initial waves."

Using the Schrodinger equations, the scientists studied the impact of different wave speeds and different angles at which two waves intersect. The team found that for a certain, relatively small angle, a new instability arises with a "maximum growth rate that is more than twice as large as the ones for the single wave cases," they report. Two waves meeting at such an angle would escape normal stabilizing effects and exhibit constructive interference that would result in a freak wave. Strong currents can help further by "focusing" waves, continually building them up to giant sizes.

"This particular piece of research describes a possible mechanism behind rogue wave formation," said Marklund. "In order to statistically predict their location, one will need further observations and analysis of such data using various methods, in particular statistical analysis and computer simulations."

Citation: Shukla, P.K., Kourakis, I., Eliasson, B., Marklund, M. and Stenflo, L. "Instability and Evolution of Nonlinearly Interacting Water Waves." Physical Review Letters. 97, 094501 (2006).