Secret HistoryS


Archaeology

700 year-old Yuan Dynasty shipwreck discovered in China

Ship hull cracked
© Chinese Cultural Relics
A team of archaeologists have discovered a shipwreck in China, which had been hiding under silt and mud for more than seven centuries. Experts suggest that the new find dates back to a chronological era when the successors of Genghis Khan controlled China.

Ship Dates Back to Yuan Dynasty and Demonstrates Amazing Chinese Art

Even though China was dominated politically by the Mongols at the time, it was Chinese culture that prevailed. This is what the splendid art and artifacts discovered in the 21 meter-long (70 foot) wooden shipwreck clearly demonstrate. These include a bright-colored jar portraying a dragon and phoenix as Live Science reports.

Chinese vase
Yuan Dynasty Relic
Shougong Wang of the Shandong Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology and leader of the team of researchers that made the discovery, wrote in a paper published in the journal Chinese Cultural Relics that the ship was unearthed at a modern day construction site in Heze City, Shandong Province, and had a hull sectioned into twelve cabins by twelve bulkheads. He also added that the ship was probably used for river journeys.

Important Religious Figurines Found Inside the Ship

In the cabin that was used as a shrine, archaeologists found a religious burner and stone-carved figurines as Live Science reports. Carved out of agalmatolite stone, one of the figurines is 8.2 centimeters (about 3.2 inches) in height, and depicts a tiger sitting beside an "arhat" - an individual who in Buddhist belief has attained enlightenment. Another figurine portraying a dragon on the left side of an "arhat," was also found in the cabin. Carved out of agalmatolite stone as well, this figurine is slightly taller at 8.5 centimeters (about 3.3 inches), while the arhat is holding an alms bowl in his left hand.

"More than 100 artifacts were unearthed from both inside the shipwreck and its surrounding area, including artifacts of porcelain, pottery, lacquerware, jade, stone, iron, bronze and gold," the archaeologists wrote in the journal article.

For more on this article, go here.

Attention

What's missing from the JFK file archive: Documents purposefully destroyed or otherwise "lost"

oswald
© Stringer/AFP/Getty ImagesPresident John F. Kennedy's murderer Lee Harvey Oswald is pictured during a 1963 press conference after his arrest in Dallas.
Don't expect an end to the conspiracy theories about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy - even after the vast network of JFK-obsessed researchers pore over the final trove of government documents.

That's because the thousands of files made public by the National Archives late Thursday - and others that President Donald Trump announced will undergo an additional 180-day review - are still vastly incomplete, according to former government officials and leading assassination scholars, including those who believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and the many more who don't.

They insist that much of what the government knew or suspected about people who may have had knowledge of Kennedy's murder, or who had a motive to take part in a conspiracy or cover-up, remains hidden from the public or was destroyed.

The Secret Service, for example, has acknowledged it destroyed some of its records about the events in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. Army and Navy intelligence files on key individuals have never been made available, and in some cases were shielded from a trio of government probes into Kennedy's killing in the 1960s and 1970s.

Also missing, they say, is part of a CIA report on Oswald, an ex-Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning to the United States. And much mystery remains about all the files maintained by the late James Jesus Angleton, the top CIA counterintelligence official who took over the agency's probe of the assassination.

Comment: This is why no one should expect any major revelations from the tens of thousands of pages set to be released over the next 6 months. Anything really interesting is long gone.

The CIA is toying with the American and world public by releasing documents that provide nothing new on the assassination. In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a conspiracy involved in his murder and that there was very likely more than one shooter. Yet even that investigation was denounced by insiders as a whitewash and that the CIA misled the committee (see link above). The whole world and his dog knows that Oswald either wasn't the shooter or was not alone. Likewise, it's clear that Kennedy was shot from the front, reference the Zapruder film.

The only tidbits in these documents (so far) are references by eyewitnesses to or commentators on the original investigation that claimed that there was a bullet hole in JFK's car windscreen (i.e. he was shot from the front) and that a bullet entered his neck near the adam's apple (again shot from the front). For those who don't know, Oswald was in the book depository building BEHIND JFK's car. Plus, the bit about Hoover stressing the need to convince the public that Oswald was the "real" assassin.

The main point of the release of these documents appears to be to provide the scurrilous mainstream media the opportunity to promote the official Warren Report findings and poopoo conspiracy theories. In other words, it's another exercise in deep state and mainstream media gaslighting of the American public by feigning 'transparency' around the JFK assassination while simultaneously telling everyone that the official story still holds water. Nothing could be further form the truth, and just about everyone with a few neurons still firing knows it.

See also:


Info

A hedgehog down Uncle Sam's pants: The lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis

A US Navy P-2H Neptune of VP-18 flying over a Soviet cargo ship with crated Il-28s on deck during the Cuban Crisis
© WikipediaA US Navy P-2H Neptune of VP-18 flying over a Soviet cargo ship with crated Il-28s on deck during the Cuban Crisis.
Fifty-five years ago this weekend the world appeared to be on the brink of nuclear war as the Cuban missile crisis unfolded. What are the lessons that can be learned today about the events of October 1962?

It was the great filmmaker Charles Chaplin who commented that life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot. Perspective is everything. If we take a 'close-up' view of the Cuban missile crisis, we fail to see the wider issues involved. We're also likely to fall for the dominant narrative, which has the Soviet Union as the aggressor and the US as the side acting in self-defense. In fact, it was the other way round.

We call it the 'Cuban missile crisis, ' but in truth, it was only partly about Cuba. It was just as much about Turkey, and in particular, the fifteen offensive nuclear-tipped intermediate-range Jupiter missiles that had been provocatively deployed there by the US in 1961.

Blackbox

Best of the Web: JFK files revelations: CIA mind control, assassinations, mafia, terrorism, and more

jfk files
On Thursday, much to the chagrin of anyone seeking transparency, the US government released 2,800 previously classified files relating to the assassination of John F Kennedy while holding back several hundred more. President Donald Trump delayed the release of the others, saying he had "no choice" but to consider "national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns" raised mostly by the FBI and CIA. As TFTP predicted, the JFK files were no smoking gun. However, many of the documents contained in them reveal and confirm the absolutely horrifying practices of the world's most insidious spying agency.

In an amazing act of citizen journalism, Thursday night, the internet pored over the documents, including all of our staff here at TFTP. The information gleaned from these previously Top Secret documents reveals the dark truth about the CIA's covert, murderous, criminal, and outright terroristic workings.

From mind control to media control to working with the mafia and using covert chemical weapons to starve innocent civilians, the CIA has operated in the shadows breaking international law and laying waste to anyone who gets in their way.

The Free Thought Project has put together a list of documents retrieved from the JFK files detailing these outright ominous practices by the CIA.

Comment: The number of documents withheld is more likely in the thousands, not hundreds. See: JFK files set for release today - no sign National Archives will actually do so without delays - UPDATE: CIA/FBI pressure Trump to withhold 3000 docs for "national security"

With that in mind, here are some more details gleaned from today's tiny release of documents. This document, dated Oct. 25, 1963, and written by FBI Agent Warren de Brueys, confirms that the FBI were keeping tabs on Oswald before the assassination (h/t TFTP):
"Will maintain contact with Cuban sources for any indication of additional activity on the part of subject organization which appears to have become inactive since the departure from New Orleans of LEE HARVEY OSWALD."
jfk files
De Brueys was later promoted. In another document, CIA commission member David Belin asks former CIA Director Richard Helms:
Mr. Belin: Well, now, the final area of my internal investigation relates to charges that the CIA was in some way conspiratorially involved with the assassination of President Kennedy. During the time of the Warren Commission, you were Deputy Director of Plans, is that correct?

Mr. Helms: I believe so.

Mr. Belin: Is there any information involved with the assassination of President Kennedy, which in any way shows that Lee Harvey Oswald was in some way a CIA agent...
... but doesn't include Helms's answer. The document also contains this:
Helms was being questioned on the assassination of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, and whether the CIA was involved. He revealed that he was "not persuaded that President Nixon doesn't still believe that the Agency didn't have something to do with the demise" of Diem in 1963.

"The whole thing has been rather... heated by the fact that President Johnson used to go around saying that the reason President Kennedy was assassinated was that he had assassinated President Diem, and this was just justice," Helms said.
After the assassination, the Soviet Union feared an all-out war, seeing the assassination as an "ultra-right" conspiracy and coup and predicting that "without leadership, some irresponsible general in the US might launch a missile at the Soviet Union." They described Oswald as "a neurotic maniac who was disloyal to his own country", but downplayed his ties to the Soviet Union. An unnamed informant apparently told U.S. spies that the KGB had proof that U.S. "President [Lyndon] Johnson was responsible for the assassination."

A document also records FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's reactions to some aspects of the investigation. On Nov. 24, the day Ruby killed Oswald, he dictated this line: "There is nothing further on the Oswald case except that he is dead":
Hoover was critical of the Dallas Police Department's handling of the case, saying it could not have brought charges without the FBI's involvement. "We traced the weapon, we identified the handwriting, we identified the fingerprints on the brown bag," he said, adding that senior police had been seen too much on television.

The FBI director, working with then Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, was also eager to release information on the event "so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."
NBC adds:
It's not clear from the memo whether Hoover thought there might have been a conspiracy but didn't want it to be known or whether he sincerely believed Oswald acted alone and hoped to head off public fear and confusion.

Hoover also indicated that his concern may have been influenced, in part, by diplomacy, dictating that there could be serious international complications if the public thought Oswald might have been part of a larger plot.

Katzenbach is known from previously released documents to have shared Hoover's concern, writing in a memo the next day, on Nov. 25, 1963, that "the public must be satisfied that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial."

In the memo, Hoover excoriated the Dallas Police Department for not having prevented Oswald's killing by Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner. The FBI had warned the police that Oswald's life was in danger, but nothing was done, he complained.

"Oswald having been killed today after our warnings to the Dallas Police Department was inexcusable," Hoover dictated. "It will allow, I am afraid, a lot of civil rights people to raise a lot of hell because he was handcuffed and had no weapon. There are bound to be some elements of our society who will holler their heads off that his civil rights were violated - which they were."

Hoover argued against appointing an independent commission to review the evidence, contending that the matter should be left to the Justice Department, the FBI's parent agency. Lyndon Johnson, the new president, announced the creation of the Warren Commission a few days later.
More tidbits (h/t RT):
Oswald's meeting with 'KGB officer'

While Oswald's visit to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City in September 1963 had not been a secret, the files revealed that he had spoken with Consul Valeriy Vladimirovich Kostikov, described in the documents as "an identified KGB officer."

"He is a case officer in an operation which is evidently sponsored by the KGB's 13th Department (responsible for sabotage and assassination)," the document read.

On October 1, Oswald was said to have rang the embassy and asked: "Anything new concerning the telegram to Washington?"
Notice the weasel word "evidently". As MuckRock pointed out this week, Hoover said FBI files "do not contain any information to fully support" the CIA's assessment that Kostikov worked for the KGB's 13th Department. But U.S. businessman Brian Litman says he was - and he knows because he represented several ex-KGB officers, including Kostikov. According to a colleague of Kostikov, Pavel Nechiporenko, the meeting was entirely coincidental: Kostikov "said he arrived at the compound to find Oswald sitting there with his colleague, Pavel Yatskov, to whom Kostikov explained that the American had been there the previous day. Kostikov said Oswald 'was very riled up and broke into hysterics at the mention of the FBI, crying and saying as he wept: 'I'm afraid they'll kill me. Let me in.'' They gave him a glass of water and then went to a volleyball game they were late for.
FBI warned Dallas police of threats against Oswald

The FBI received a call to its Dallas office from a man claiming to be a member of a committee organized to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, according to a memo sent on the day of the assassin's death by FBI Director J Edgar Hoover.

"We at once notified the Chief of Police and he assured us Oswald would be given sufficient protection," the document read. Hoover added: "This morning we called the Chief of Police again warning of the possibility of some effort against Oswald and he again assured us adequate protections would be given. However, this was not done."

The document also states that the FBI had an agent at Parkland hospital, where Oswald was taken after he was shot, in the hope that he might make a confession before he died. He did not do so. Meanwhile, his attacker, Jack Ruby, was said to have told authorities that his grief over the killing of President John F Kennedy two days earlier had made him insane. Hoover labelled the claim "a pretty smart move" as it could have laid the foundation for a plea of insanity at his trial.

Ruby's connections with Dallas police

An informant told the FBI that Oswald's assassin, Jack Ruby, had close links to local police in Dallas. Ruby, whose real name was Jacob Leon Rubenstein, was said to have had a "good in" with the authorities, who were served free drinks at his nightclub.

A friend of Ruby's, Lou Lebby, described him in an FBI document as "emotional, unstable and a person who made his living primarily from 'scalping' tickets to sports events."
One more for now:
jfk files
On the whole, this release is pathetic. The CIA is toying with the American and world public by releasing documents that provide nothing new on the assassination. In 1978 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that there was a conspiracy involved in his murder and that there was very likely more than one shooter.

Yet even that investigation was denounced by insiders as a whitewash and that the CIA misled the committee (see link above). The whole world and his dog knows that Oswald either wasn't the shooter or was not alone. Likewise, it's clear that Kennedy was shot from the front, reference the Zapruder film.

The only tidbits in these documents (so far) are references by eyewitnesses to or commentators on the original investigation that claimed that there was a bullet hole in JFK's car windscreen (i.e. he was shot from the front) and that a bullet entered his neck near the adam's apple (again shot from the front). For those who don't know, Oswald was in the book depository building BEHIND JFK's car.

The main point of the release of these documents appears to be to provide the scurrilous mainstream media the opportunity to promote the official Warren Report findings and poopoo conspiracy theories. In other words, it's another exercise in deep state and mainstream media gaslighting of the American public by feigning 'transparency' around the JFK assassination while simultaneously telling everyone that the official story still holds water. Nothing could be further form the truth, and just about everyone with a few neurons still firing knows it.

Update (Oct. 28)

In addition to Hoover's curious insistence on convincing the public that Oswald was the "real assassin" (as opposed to what, a "fake" assassin?), there are at least two instances in the documents of suggestive redactions. The first is also mentioned above: the lack of an answer to the question asked of Richard Helms as to the evidence that Oswald "was in some way a CIA agent". His answer is redacted.

The second has to do with 1975 hearing testimony from former CIA Deputy Director of Plans Richard Bissell. Only three out of 33 pages of this Top Secret document were released. From TFTP:
The opening page of the document claims the transcript covers topics such as the attempt to overthrow Castro with the failed Bay of Pigs invasion; former CIA Director Allen Dulles and former President Eisenhower; the overthrow of Dominican Republic President Rafael Trujillo; the ZR/Rifle Project and CIA agent Arnold Silver; former CIA Director John A. McCone; Mafia boss Sam Giancana; CIA and FBI recruit Robert Maheu; and the Department of Justice.

The transcript of Bissell's responses to questions on any of the topics listed above would be incredibly telling regarding the inner workings of the CIA and the events that led up to, and occurred after the assassination of President Kennedy. However, the document that was released consists of 3 pages, and only 1 page contains text from the transcript.

The only page of text contains questions for Bissell such as "Now, Mr. Bissell, we went over the notes in the other room, didn't we?" to which Bissell responded, "Correct." The topic of the page appears to be on the actions of Bill Harvey, a CIA agent who played a crucial role in Operation Mongoose, the agency's attempt to overthrow Castro after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion.
Mr. Schwarz: "All right. Now, in light of that document ... does that have any effect upon your prior testimony that you had no reason to question Mr. Harvey's statement at the occasion you asked him to set up the capability you said that the White House had twice urged you to do so?"

Mr. Bissell: "Yes. I think these dates do call that into question, because accepting these dates, which are Mr. Harvey's own notations, it is clear that I had given him at least some exposure to that assignment at the end of January, just at the..."
The document ends there, leaving the public to wonder where the other 30 pages of the transcript are, why they were not released, and if they will ever be released in the future.



Dig

Canadian museum unveils perfectly preserved 2,500lb "dinosaur mummy" of ancient 18-foot-long Nodosaur

nodosaur mummy
© Wikipedia / MachairoThis nodosaur originally weighed around 3,000 pounds (approx. 1361 kg) when it was alive. The mummified nodosaur is so unimpaired that it still weighs 2,500 pounds (approx. 1134 kg)!
Scientists are hailing this prehistoric dinosaur as the "best-preserved dinosaur on Earth." In fact, it is so well-preserved that it cannot be defined as a fossil. This magnificent ancient 18-foot-long specimen has been called a genuine "dinosaur mummy."

The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada, recently unveiled a dinosaur exhibit: "We don't just have a skeleton," Caleb Brown, a researcher at the museum, told National Geographic. "We have a dinosaur as it would have been."

Since it was unearthed it has kept its shape; its bones aren't visible and even some of its innards are still intact. Researchers are amazed at the extent of the almost unparalleled degree of preservation.

Dig

New geological record shows Yellowstone's last catastrophic eruption 630,000 years ago spawned twin eruptions that altered global climate

volcano eruption
A new geological record of the Yellowstone supervolcano's last catastrophic eruption is rewriting the story of what happened 630,000 years ago and how it affected Earth's climate. This eruption formed the vast Yellowstone caldera observed today, the second largest on Earth.

Two layers of volcanic ash bearing the unique chemical fingerprint of Yellowstone's most recent super-eruption have been found in seafloor sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of Southern California. These layers of ash, or tephra, are sandwiched among sediments that contain a remarkably detailed record of ocean and climate change. Together, both the ash and sediments reveal that the last eruption was not a single event, but two closely spaced eruptions that tapped the brakes on a natural global-warming trend that eventually led the planet out of a major ice age.

"We discovered here that there are two ash-forming super-eruptions 170 years apart and each cooled the ocean by about 3 degrees Celsius," said U.C. Santa Barbara geologist Jim Kennett, who will be presenting a poster about the work on Wednesday, 25 Oct., at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle. Attaining the resolution to detect the separate eruptions and their climate effects is due to several special conditions found in the Santa Barbara Basin, Kennett said.

Safe

The one acknowledged JFK assassination conspiracy: The CIA and FBI covered up what they knew about Oswald

JFK kennedy
© Reuters
In the persistent, probably eternal whirlwind of conspiracy theories about the November 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, there is one conspiracy theory that is no longer just a theory - and hasn't been for years.

That wide-ranging conspiracy was for real. And proof of its existence will almost certainly grow more solid on Thursday with the imminent release of tens of thousands of pages of long-classified, assassination-related documents from the National Archives - supposedly the last of the government's secret files on Kennedy's murder.

What conspiracy? Not one involving a second assassin in Dealey Plaza. (All of the most credible evidence continues to point to Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman in Dallas.) Not some sort of mafia plot that resulted in the silencing of Oswald two days later by Dallas strip-club impresario Jack Ruby. (Really, what half-way competent Mob boss would choose a delusional blabbermouth like Ruby to carry out a second Crime of the Century by murdering Oswald?) Not a sprawling coup d'état involving everyone from President Lyndon Johnson to the Pentagon architects of the Vietnam war to a cabal of gay rightwingers in New Orleans. (See Oliver Stone's hit 1991 film JFK.)


Comment: Shenon is either an idiot or a liar. All the most credible evidence does NOT point to Oswald as the sole shooter, the mob elements were neck-deep in the assassination (even if they weren't running the show).


I'm referring to the well-documented, proven conspiracy within the highest reaches of the US government - a criminal conspiracy from the start, involving the destruction of top-secret documents and photographs, the silencing of witnesses and whistleblowers, and the wholesale suborning of perjury - to cover up the truth about what the government had known in advance about Oswald and the clear threat he had posed to one man: President Kennedy.

Comment: You can put Shenon in the "so safe he's useless" department. All the stuff he writes about the CIA/FBI cover-up is probably correct. But if he thinks that's the extent of it, he's dreaming. For an account by someone who can think, see David Talbot's Devil's Chessboard. And keep an eye out for Russ Baker's upcoming book on the assassination.


Microscope 1

Humans lost ancient DNA, moderns got it back after interbreeding with Neanderthals

neandertal
© PETR STUDENT/SHUTTERSTOCKAncient DNA was lost when some humans (example human skull in background) migrated out of Africa, but the missing genetic heritage was “found” again when modern humans interbred with Neandertals (foreground).
Interbreeding with Neandertals restored some genetic heirlooms that modern humans left behind in the ancient exodus from Africa, new research suggests.

Those heirlooms are versions of genes, or alleles, that were present in humans' and Neandertals' shared ancestors. Neandertals carried many of those old alleles, passing them along generation after generation, while developing their own versions of other genes. A small number of humans left Africa around 100,000 years ago and settled in Asia and Europe. These migrants "lost" the ancestral alleles.

But when the migrants or their descendants interbred with Neandertals, Eurasians reinherited the ancestral heirlooms along with Neandertal DNA, John "Tony" Capra reported October 20 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics.

Present-day Europeans have more than 47,000 of these reintroduced ancestral alleles, and East Asians - who have more Neandertal ancestry than Europeans (SN Online: 2/12/15) - carry more than 56,000, said Capra, an evolutionary geneticist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

Bad Guys

Death bed confession sheds light on Operation Gladio connection to violent gang in Belgium during 1980s

Crazy Brabrant Killer
© AFP
A deathbed confession has shed light on the identities of a violent criminal gang who terrorized Belgium in the 1980s. Independent researcher Tom Secker has told Sputnik the group was likely connected to "Operation Gladio" - a NATO effort that saw secret groups carry out false flag attacks in European countries throughout the Cold War.

A murder mystery that has gripped Belgium for three decades may be on the verge of resolution after a former policeman confessed on his deathbed to being one of the "Crazy Brabant Killers" - a violent criminal gang that killed 28 and left a further 40 injured in a string of robberies in the early 1980s.

Comment: One meaning such past events have for the present is that similar strategies are used today.
See also:


Megaphone

Condemning US imperialism: Elián González and Cuban contingent speak at the World Festival of Youth

The fisherman who found five-year old Elián González in 1998 thought he'd been saved by angels and dolphins. His mother put him on an inner tube before she and everyone else on the boat drowned. They were trying to get to Florida. It was US Thanksgiving. The Cuban boy became a household name.

Elián González
© Foto: Roberto Suárez/ CubadebateElián González, now 24 years old at the World Youth Festival in Sochi, Russia.
This week, at 24, Elián González, speaking in Russia, condemned US imperialism. 1 He talked about the lies he was told in Florida. He called them a violation. In early 1999, the media showed a small boy in a huge toy car, surrounded by colorful children's paraphernalia, saying he didn't want to return to Cuba.

Comment: