For those not in the know, this is a vagary of planetary alignment that occurs about three times a year. From one night to the next, Mercury moves from east to west against the background constellations, reversing its normal course. Mercury began its latest reverse journey on Oct. 28; it will continue on a wayward path until Nov. 18.

And in astrological circles, it is well established that when Mercury, the winged messenger, flies backward across the heavens, all manner of havoc is unleashed on the earth.

"The retrograde periods are time periods when we experience communication, travel and information breakdowns," Anne Massey, a vice president of the International Society for Astrological Research, writes on the Web site astrologicallyspeaking.com.

Of course, there will always be those knee-jerk rationalists who insist that in a world with trillions of possible occurrences, it is easy to find a few that fit a given hypothesis. But aren't they, too, slaves to a sort of superstition, blinded by their faith in randomness?

In an effort to enlighten scoffers and believers alike, The New York Times set out to statistically determine the terrestrial effects of retrograde Mercury.

It wasn't easy. Some potentially Mercury-related phenomena are resistant to empirical measurement - crossed signals between spouses, botched pizza orders, busted real-estate deals. Other statistics proved difficult to pry out of their keepers. "It's just not something that we're able to sort of respond to," said an I.B.M. spokesman, Jim Larkin, when asked for data on network service interruptions during retrograde episodes.

But eventually, a handful of trouble indicators were gleaned and analyzed, mostly from the transportation sector.

Does Mercury control automobile traffic? It does not, according to data provided by Transcom, a regional traffic-monitoring agency.

During the retrograde periods in spring 2005 and 2006, Transcom counted an average of 41.9 major events per day - accidents, car fires, stoplight malfunctions and the like - on local roads.

During comparable nonretrograde periods, the average was 42.4 per day. That amounts to a decline of 1 percent in traffic headaches during retrograde episodes.

Can Mercury slow the trains? Doubtful. Metro-North and New Jersey Transit statistics from the past three years showed that trains were 0.4 percent less likely to arrive late when Mercury was in retrograde.

All this did not surprise Stephen J. Daunt, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Tennessee. Mercury's apparent migration, he said, is an optical illusion caused by the difference in the orbit speeds of Mercury and Earth. He compared it to driving on a highway and passing a cow that is walking in the same direction. The cow appears to be moving backward. But it's not.

"From a scientist's point of view," he said, "Mercury moving backward in the sky shouldn't really bother people very much."

But what about the sky itself? Might Mercury unsettle air travel?

Perhaps. According to figures from the federal Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the percentage of late flights into and out of La Guardia Airport during the past three summers rose to 24.6 during retrograde periods from 22.8 during nonretrograde periods.

What's more, during the past three years, claims of mishandled domestic baggage rose to 5.44 per 1,000 passengers during months when Mercury spent more than half the time in retrograde from 5.38 per 1,000 in months when the planet was not in retrograde. That works out to one extra lost bag per 15,000 passengers. If you feel that your bag might be the one, you might want to rethink your travel plans.

Ms. Massey said in a telephone interview that based on her readings, the current retrograde episode was particularly likely to result in missing possessions.

"At the moment I am giving a heads-up for people to be on the lookout for theft," she said. "Most of us have to let go of something."

The Police Department was consulted. During the first full week of the current retrograde period, burglaries were down 20 percent and car thefts were down 21 percent from the same (nonretrograde) week last year.

"We've got Mercury on the run in New York City," said Paul J. Browne, the department's chief spokesman.

Perhaps the most frequently cited Mercury effect of the modern era is the computer crash. "I hear that all the time," said David Cook, a manager at Tekserve in Chelsea, which says it is the nation's biggest independent servicer of Apple computers. He ran some numbers. The result: a piddling 0.6 percent increase in repair requests when Mercury is in retrograde.

Bruce Schaller, an expert on transportation statistics and former research director at New York City Transit, examined The Times's statistical findings and pronounced the influence of Mercury to be conclusively insignificant.

"If all this is due to randomness," he said, "that's the result you'd expect."

Ms. Massey was unimpressed. "I don't think that such short periods are statistically anything," she said. "You've just taken a couple of years." She said that for an upcoming book on Mercury, "I'm going to be looking at thousands of years of data to see what kinds of patterns emerge."

Mr. Cook of Tekserve, who described himself as a committed skeptic on astrology, said he would continue to offer his own pet theory to his customers.

"My excuse is, this is Earth, and 5 to 10 percent of everything on Earth is broken," he said, "whether it's a sewing machine, or a computer, or a relationship."

Not that he has any hard data to back up his claim.

"I don't really know," he said. "But that's what I've heard from other people."

"Well, I know that that soldier walked over to that rock because he got information from a 'remote viewer' from the United States."

Geller, who claims he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War, said his information came from a high-level source involved in American paranormal programmes.

At the time of his capture, US commanders said a source close to Hussein had given him up under interrogation. A US military spokesman in Iraq had no immediate comment on Geller's claim.

A Brazilian psychic had previously claimed the $25 million bounty offered for Saddam's capture, saying he had described the hiding place in letters to the US government. Uri Geller is currently in Israel in connection with a reality TV show.

ParanormalReview.com's editor, Roy Stemman, recently suggested that Geller himself may have been the unidentified remote viewer who was brought in by the Israeli Army to help locate two kidnapped soldiers.

Since research into remote viewing - the ability to use the mind to "see" events that are happening far away - has been financed by the US military in the past, it is likely that there is a grain of truth in Geller's claim. Indeed, it would be surprising if the US wasn't experimenting with remote viewing techniques back in 2003, alongside conventional investigation methods, in their hunt for SaddamHussein.

In fact, a remote viewing experiment conducted by US parapsychologist Stephan A. Schwartz (left), an internationally acknowledged expert on the subject, illustrates how accurate the technique can be, particular if the results are a consensus view taken from numerous "viewers".

The experiment, conducted on 3 November 2003, suggested that Saddam Hussein would be found crouching in a subterranean room or cave, beneath an ordinary-looking house on the outskirts of a small village near Tikrit, that is reached by a tunnel. And the former leader, they said, would look like a homeless person, with a ratty salt-and-pepper beard. He would have a gun and some money but would not put up any resistance.

All of these statements, subsequently, were scored as hits. And the drawings showed striking similarities with the diagrams and related evidence presented by the US military when they announced Saddam's capture (see Schwartz's comparison below).

Four days after the experiment, the Pentagon announced that a special "covert commando force to hunt Saddam Hussein" had been formed. He was captured more than five weeks later, on 16 December.

The ARE's magazine Venture Inward (March/April 2004) carried a news story about the seminar in which Stephan Schwartz emphasised it was just an experiment, adding:

"We had no access to military forces and, without that, there is no way to operationalise such information. People often target that remote viewing is just a piece of a complex puzzle, not some magic bullet that alone solves the problem.

"However, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that, had we been able to get it to someone in the command structure who was prepared to act on it, this data might have been quite useful."

Did Uri Geller hear about this experiment and misinterpret it? Or does he have information that suggests someone did have access to the command struct and it did act on it? Though Geller provides no evidence, the Stephan A. Schwartz experiment ddemonstrates that such a possibility is feasible.

Perhaps, one day, the Freedom of Information Act will reveal the full story.

Visit our Links to find websites about Uri Geller, Stephan A. Schwartz and the Association for Research and Enlightenment.

At about 1 a.m. Thursday, Steve Krueger was out doing his job. He contracts with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to remove dead dear from roadsides. He had just put a carcass in the back of his truck and climbed into his cab when something strange happened.

"I felt the truck shake. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw a large, black furry figure reaching into the back of the truck. At that point and time, I threw the truck into drive and gunned it, because it scared the dickens out of me," Krueger said.

Krueger told Miller he was reluctant to even report it to authorities because he knew it sounded unbelievable. But he wanted police and the public to know that there's something out there that could be dangerous.

At nearby Cabela's Outfitters, hunters were skeptical.

"About the only thing that matches that description would be a bear or a gorilla, and we don't have gorillas around here," Cabela's curator Marshall Henricks said.

Krueger told Miller has was not drinking on the job. He has seen black bears before, and whatever he saw had much longer, pointy ears.

"Generally, there's not many of them around here. Plus, with a truck sitting there with somebody in it with the motor running -- it's an animal that's not normally near people," Henricks said.

"A black bear wouldn't come up to the truck?" Miller asked.

"They're very elusive," Henricks said.

"I never said it was a Bigfoot or a Yetti or anything of that sort. It was some sort of an animal that was large. Whatever it was, it was there," Krueger said.

There are other police and fire services members in the Kenefick area that have seen this creature, and I have personally heard numerous stories of sightings. If I had not seen first hand, I would not have believed it myself.

Read the full report at the Texas Bigfoot Research Center's website.

Just look at some of the news popping up..today.

Boing Boing buddy David Pescovitz has posted over there about Dr. Jeff Meldrum's tome, in "Scientist's new book about Sasquatch". Pescovitz also notes the link to Meldrum's guest appearance on NPR's Talk Of The Nation.

CNN broadcast a story on the Wisconsin "non-Bigfoot" Bigfoot story. Now they've put it online, at least for a few days, via a link here to the video.

Meanwhile, documentary filmmaker Peter von Puttkamer, the producer/director of Sasquatch Odyssey: The Hunt for Bigfoot, is making news with his new film, The Real Lost World. It will be broadcast on Discovery HD Theater on December 14th, and on Animal Planet, December 10th and 17th, 2006.

Word now comes that on Monday, November 20, the National Geographic Channel will broadcast their new documentary on the Almas, calling it, perhaps misleadingly, "Russian Bigfoot". It was back on March 16, 2006, when I first wrote about this documentary here at Cryptomundo.

What's next?

She gave the woman crosses and trinkets to ward off black magic, allegedly told her that her mother was a witch, that she and her husband were trying to kill her, and suggested that she visit a Roman Catholic priest at Westminster Cathedral in London.

During the consultation at the Westside Contraceptive Clinic in Central London the doctor was said to have told the patient that she had black magic powers that could help to alleviate the problem.

The patient, identified only as Mrs K, was said to have left the clinic "very shaken and intimidated".

The General Medical Council's fitness-to-practise panel in Manchester was due to start a three-day hearing yesterday but Dr Pratt failed to appear. She was also not legally represented.

The panel then debated whether it could proceed in her absence to determine whether her conduct was irresponsible, unprofessional, intimidatory to her patient or liable to bring the profession into disrepute.

The incident is said to have happened when Mrs K attended the clinic, which offers free advice on family planning and contraception and counselling on sexual health. The patient, in her twenties, had complained of pain and bleeding and had gone to the clinic seeking a contraceptive injection.

Before the panel moved into private session, Heather Norton, counsel for the GMC, said: "It was made clear to Dr Pratt by Mrs K that she had concerns about the size of her stomach and about bleeding and pain she had experienced.

"Dr Pratt's response was effectively to tell Mrs K that she had black magic powers in order to alleviate the problem. She told her that she should take holy water and that she should see some priests. She gave her crosses and stones that she said would protect her.

"She told her that her mother was a witch and that she and her husband were planning to kill her. Mrs K was left very shaken and intimidated."

Dr Pratt was said to have then turned to a clinic nurse who was present and bragged about her special powers.

Miss Norton said: "The nurse was sufficiently alarmed that she contacted Mrs K to check she was all right and to notify her manager."

Dr Pratt also faces charges that she failed to co-operate with investigations carried out first by her employer and then by the primary care trust.

The panel was told that a number of attempts had been made to contact Dr Pratt to ask her to attend meetings but she had claimed not to have received the letters.

The hearing was adjourned until a later date for Dr Pratt to answer the allegations in person.

The show that gives self-described vampires a place to vent on its Friday night Wild Card line is the same one that was taking calls about Sept. 11 conspiracy theories just two weeks after the terrorist attacks. And "Coast to Coast AM," which airs in the Bay Area on KSFO 560 AM, is the same show that can now reach upward of 3 million listeners through 500 stations each week, according to Premiere Radio Networks, the company that syndicates the show.

"There's absolutely a growing conspiracy climate," said Noory, explaining the phenomenon of numbers typically unheard of for that time slot. "People are tired of being misled and confused from taking information directly from a government official. After a while, it becomes almost like a pressure cooker that needs to let off steam."

That conspiracy theories have joined the mainstream is an extraordinary phenomenon in itself, according to Michael Barkun, a political science professor at Syracuse University and author of "A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America."

"These kinds of ideas that used to be really out on the fringe and tucked away in a subterranean subculture are now a part of pop culture," said Barkun, who also sees a link between the growing political conspiracy climate and the end of the Cold War.

"As long as the Cold War was going on, the world seemed to make sense to the degree that we could think of (it) as clearly divided between forces of good and forces of evil. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, we were deprived of a defined enemy. The world became more difficult to understand."

Barkun also credits the Internet, which eliminates a gatekeeper, as an ideal medium to grow a culture of conspiracy.

"Whether that trivializes the subject matter as simple entertainment or turns it into something more powerful because it reaches a mass audience remains to be seen."

Noory, 56, took over "Coast to Coast AM" when the show's founder, Art Bell, retired. During the mid-1980s, Bell broadcast the same spooky subject matter under the name "West Coast AM" from Las Vegas. In the early 1990s, the show was syndicated and its name changed to "Coast to Coast AM."

Bell, who has come in and out of retirement several times over the years, now hosts the program on weekends from his new home in the Philippines.

Through the years, Bell was known for his sometimes wacky but fiercely loyal following. When Noory took the weekday helm, he managed to do two things that previous fill-in guests couldn't -- be accepted by Bell's believers and help "Coast to Coast AM" reach more listeners.

The even-keeled Detroit native splits his time broadcasting the show from a nondescript Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles County) studio and a damp, dark cave "somewhere out there" near St. Louis, where Noory was known for several years as the Nighthawk, sharing scary stories on the air.

Noory believes he had a paranormal experience -- his first and only, he said -- when he was about 11 years old in Detroit. Home sick from school, Noory remembers the sensation of floating to the top of his ceiling, looking down and seeing his body in the bed below.

"Suddenly I felt myself being lassoed around the ceiling as if with a rope," said Noory, who, unlike typical radio disc jockeys, sounds the same on the air at 1 a.m. as he does at 1 p.m. when he clocks in to prepare for the show.

Noory remembers waking up in his body. A couple of days later, feeling better, he headed straight to the library to read the first of many books on the paranormal. He was hooked.

Judging by the 300-plus phone calls and 1,000 e-mails the show receives on an average night, according to Noory's producer, Tom Danheiser, listeners include liberals, conservatives, senior citizens in San Francisco, college students in South Carolina and even soldiers in Iraq.

"It's not necessarily just the typical insomniacs who are listening," said Ken Berry, program director for KSFO, the mostly conservative talk radio station that has been broadcasting "Coast to Coast" in the Bay Area since its inception. "There are lots of night-shift folks who tune in, but there are also many who simply like to spend an evening hearing fascinating tales when the room is quiet and dark. I think it dates back to when people remember listening to ghost stories around the campfire."

Through the spring of 2006, 7 percent of people listening to the radio in the Bay Area tuned in to "Coast to Coast," according to Berry. During the same rating period, 4.6 percent in the Bay Area tuned in to Rush Limbaugh.

While the Bay Area doesn't exactly give Limbaugh a home-field advantage, it's still a surprise to those in the broadcast industry how Noory and Bell hold their own against a morning talk show.

Talkers magazine, the trade publication that tracks radio ratings, has Noory in the top 10 of its "Top Talk Radio Audiences," alongside Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Dr. Laura Schlessinger -- who all generally broadcast during the day.

"What makes George Noory's numbers impressive," said Talkers founder Michael Harrison, "is that the universe of listeners is much smaller at night. And it flies in the face of the belief that talk radio is only about politics and relationships." The numbers are based on a study by Arbitron, a radio audience research company similar to television's Nielsen ratings.

Recent guests on "Coast to Coast," like author Philip Carlo, have a much simpler way of gauging the show's listenership.

"I average about 2,500 hits a week on my Web site," said Carlo, best known for his biography on "Night Stalker" serial killer Richard Ramirez. "After I did the show with George, I got 29,000 hits in one day."

Carlo also got an unprecedented three-hour on-air time slot to talk about his latest book, "The Iceman."

"Before I went on the show, I checked out 'Coast to Coast's' Web site and saw some pictures of funny-looking Martians and nutty things, but it takes all kinds of things to make the world go 'round," Carlo said. "In this day and age, it's impossible to get that much time on the air. All the people in the book business think (the show is) the cat's meow. "

What makes the show popular across so many demographic groups, according to producer Danheiser, is that Noory uses a format that most broadcast journalists would call crazy.

"We just put the subject out there and let people make up their own mind," said Danheiser, a big-time "Twilight Zone" guy.

On any given night, "Coast to Coast" guests might include a NASA scientist, an "earthquake expert" or a Bigfoot biographer. Because of the respectful approach accorded most subject matter -- and the fact that no one actually has to prove that anything they assert is true -- "Coast to Coast" has on occasion scooped major media outlets like the New York Times and CNN, according to Noory.

"We broke the story on the Dubai ports," said Noory, who has been collecting sources since the 1970s, when he started his career in television news back in Detroit. "We broke the story on SARS, and we were the first to report on the bird flu pandemic."

"Coast to Coast" also broke stories on the "praying mantis playing the piano," a "ghost haunting a gentlemen's club," and "the guy who says he is the son of Satan."

In his quest to understand, Noory doesn't believe everything he hears on the show. For example, the fellows who called a couple of years ago claiming to have captured an alien that loves hamburger meat sounded a little too scripted. Noory told them to e-mail pictures, but they never did.

Noory works in the same Sherman Oaks building as radio hosts Jim Rome and Casey Kasem. On the other side of the glass broadcast booth, he looks no different from a typical disc jockey dealing with Top 40 songs or sports talk.

Just before airtime, he adjusts a set of reading glasses tucked between his earphones and slanted down his nose. Noory spends the entire broadcast standing, occasionally moving the microphone around during commercial breaks. He divides his attention between the notes in front of him and the digital clock across the booth, above a big-screen television set to the Fox News Channel.

Noory communicates with his producer on the other side of the glass via instant message. He never seems to roll his eyes, even when callers go off topic asking questions about ghosts instead of Noory's guests.

Recently, when a caller claimed to have discovered a time-travel device and offered to prove how it works, Noory decided to give it a test drive.

Strapping a "weird device" onto his head, Noory felt his eyes flutter and his mind sink into a sort of hypnotic state. The first stop was the Dark Ages, where Noory wanted to see if an asteroid had hit. Alas, he didn't see anything. Naturally, it was "too dark."

But Noory did see something when he set the time machine for 1947 in Roswell, N.M., when many believe a UFO crashed.

"I saw two nuns," he said. "I can't say it proves anything, but I later found out that nuns reported having seen a UFO."

Noory purposely avoids taking vacations during holiday weekends. He knows that's when the truck drivers in the middle of nowhere and the lonely little old lady with a transistor radio count on him most.

But Noory does have his limits.

"There are three things I won't do or allow," he said. "I won't let any bad language or vulgarity on the air. I won't take injections of any kind. And I won't eat any food delivered to me at the studio."

The last time food arrived, it was, fittingly, a half-eaten fruitcake.