[This article originally appeared in Issue 13 of Sott.net's The Dot Connector Magazine]

"If there is a universal mind, must it be sane?" - Charles Fort

On the fateful evening of December 15th, 1967, the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia collapsed from structural failures during full rush hour traffic. The incident killed 46 people, many of whom were holiday shoppers; most of these people died trapped in their cars under the weight of the iron bridge beams, submerged in the icy December waters. The tragedy made national headlines and put the little town of Point Pleasant on the map and in the minds of many that holiday season.

While the collapsed bridge was certainly the climactic event for the residents of Point Pleasant that year, there were many preternatural events leading up to this. UFO sightings and other high strangeness were endemic across the Ohio River region that year. These sightings and stories were later documented by John Keel in his book The Mothman Prophecies.

1967 was a pivotal year for UFOs and related phenomena. Reports of UFO sightings poured in from all across the United States; others were reported as far away as South America and Russia (adding a new dimension to those who believed that UFOs were of Communist origins). The very first publication of an alien abduction case (the infamous Hill abduction) was presented in the book Interrupted Journey by John Fuller just a year prior to this. Men-In-Black (MIB) reports came into focus for the first time, along with cases of animal mutilation. Sightings of humanoid-type beings associated with UFOs were popping up all over the world.

On the February 4, 2005 Signs page, we published the following article:

First Artificial Neon Sky Show Created

By Robert Roy Britt
Live Science Senior Writer

02 February 2005

By shooting intense radio beams into the night sky, researchers created a modest neon light show visible from the ground. The process is not well understood, but scientists speculate it could one day be employed to light a city or generate celestial advertisements.

Researchers with the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) project in Alaska tickled the upper atmosphere to the extent that it glowed with green speckles. The speckles were sprinkled amid a natural display known as the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. [...]

The HAARP experiment involves acres of antennas and a 1 megawatt generator. The scientists sent radio pulses skyward every 7.5 seconds, explained team leader Todd Pederson of the Air Force Research Laboratory. "The radio waves travel up to the ionosphere, where they excite the electrons in the plasma," Pederson told LiveScience. "These electrons then collide with atmospheric gasses, which then give off light, as in a neon tube."

Pederson and his colleagues missed the show, but they snapped images. "We unfortunately were indoors watching the data on monitors during the experiment and were busy scrambling trying to make sure the effects were real and not some glitch with the equipment," he said. "We knew right away it was something extraordinary to show up in real time on the monitor against the natural aurora, but did not confirm that it would have been visible to the naked eye until a day or two later when we had a chance to calibrate the raw data."

The experiment is detailed in the Feb. 2 issue of the journal Nature. The research could improve understanding of the aurora and also help explain how the ionosphere adversely affects radio communications. It is not yet clear if the aurora must already be active before an artificial sky show can be induced, says Karl Ziemelis, chief physics editor at the journal. If no pre-existing aurora is required, Ziemelis said, "we are left with the tantalizing (some would say disconcerting) possibility that such radio- fuelled emissions could form the basis of a technology for urban lighting, celestial advertising, and more."

I have to say that I am quite skeptical about the stated "commercial" intentions of said experiment, considering that it is being carried out by the Air Force. When have they ever spent multiplied millions of dollars to research ways and means to promote Coca Cola? Get real! Frankly, if producing images in the sky is on their agenda, my guess would be that such images might be used for "military" purposes as in "how to scare the bejeebies out of everybody so we can control 'em!"

"I've always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn't? What if it is built on insanity?"

So asks Jon Ronson in his latest book, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry. Ronson is probably best known for his book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was adapted for the big screen and starred George Clooney. It documented a slightly loony group of American Army men who were convinced they could walk through walls and kill goats by simply glaring at them menacingly (apparently they took the phrase "looking daggers" a tad too literally). He also wrote a book on fundamentalists, extremists and radicals, even tailing David Icke for a spell. For research, of course. Having already spent much of his career peering into the fringe boundaries of normality, The Psychopath Test pushes him further into the sphere of madness and the science that attempts to explain it. The result is entertaining, sometimes informative, yet a mixed-bag that never really answers the questions he set out to tackle.

I'm going to avoid giving a chapter-by-chapter rundown of the book. As I said above, it's an entertaining, and easy, read. I'm not a particularly fast reader but wolfed this one down in three sittings over two days. So if you've the time, cash, and/or inclination, check it out. Rather, I want to focus on what I'll call the good, the bad, and the so-so. Ronson gets a lot of things right. First of all, he's a great writer. The book is peppered with entertaining, funny, and somewhat disturbing accounts of his interviews with people he comes to believe are genuine psychopaths. Pitting a self-described neurotic, over-anxious journalist against some of the world's most dangerous criminals and manipulators is a recipe for a good story, and in this regard, Ronson delivers.

[Note: We're rerunning this 2009 article (with 2013 update below) for consideration in light of the missing Malaysian Airliner.]

Air France Flight 447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared over the Mid-Atlantic (just north of the equator) at approximately 1.33UTC on June 1st 2009.

No mayday signal was received from the aircraft and almost two weeks later, aviation officials have yet to give a coherent explanation as to what could have caused the sudden demise of a high tech Airbus 330-200 passenger plane.

As usual, the media are missing (or concealing) some very obvious yet understandably disturbing data about the nature of the threats to life on planet earth, and as usual, it is left to Sott.net to spell out the details.

A friend just sent me a link to an article: Iran accused of September 11 role

All I can say is: that is just PATHETIC!

Anyway, the only reason I'm writing this late is because something is bugging me.

What struck me tonight were a number of strange juxtapositions. First off, there are the items about weather and earthquake weapons that made the rounds over the past week or so. The first one was about former Defense Secretary Cohen openly referring to HAARP when he admitted to programs that could "alter the climate, set off earthquakes, volcanoes remotely through the use of electromagnetic waves." Search for it on the net, you'll find it on a bunch of conspiracy sites (not that we don't think there's a whole bunch of conspiring going on ourselves here on SOTT.net).

Admitting to programs that can alter climate, set off earthquakes, etc., is a bit ambitious and really has nothing to do with HAARP. HAARP is for mind control.

However, earthquakes can be set off with EMP weapons from satellites.

I think these clowns would love people to think that they can control climate - and maybe they can if they set off a volcano. But what they are really trying to do is blow smoke around REAL Earth Changes; changes that they have no weapons to stop. And these Earth Changes are what could, conceivably, destroy most of life on Earth.

Between the mass animal deaths, the deadly earthquakes and tsunamis in the Pacific rim, the record-setting extreme weather across the US, and the once meandering gulf-stream now shutting down, clearly something is up on the big blue marble this year. And now we may have a new one to add to the list: exploding transformers.

In the last couple weeks numerous electrical transformers have malfunctioned or exploded, in some cases causing major fires. Many of these are not your usual explosions either; some consisted of an almost fireworks-like display of electrical arcing as shown in some of the videos below. Given the sheer number of out-of-control transformers, this appears to be a new phenomena, or perhaps a sign of things to come.

With the connections we've noted between electrical activity in space and major events such as tornadoes, cyclones, volcanoes and earthquakes, one might suspect that the same electrical phenomena responsible for these displays of nature's fury could be responsible for these exploding transformers too. Typically large spikes in electrical current are the cause of transformer explosions. It seems that, like the exploding transformers, our planet is being electrically overloaded in ways it can't properly handle either, causing all manner of weather and ground-shaking chaos. Perhaps what we've seen so far this year in terms of crazy weather and earthquakes is only the start of things to come.

[This article first appeared in Issue 13 of The Dot Connector Magazine]

"We can't prevent what we don't identify, we can't treat what we don't diagnose. And we can't teach how to spot them unless we understand pathology ourselves."

Millions of dollars have been spent researching and writing about psychopaths while almost nothing has been spent, either in terms of time or money, on the profoundly disturbing byproduct of psychopathy - its victims. Since male psychopaths outnumber the female variety by about 3 or 4 to 1, I'll be talking mainly about female victims of male psychopaths in this article.

Despite the fact that psychopaths devastate everyone in their path including the women and children who love them, why have clinicians not seen fit to study and write about the single most obvious source of insight into this issue: the survivors of intimate relationships with psychopaths? The study of any disease involves carefully collecting and examining its symptoms, and psychopathy is definitely a societal disease. Even our legal system gathers information about criminals by taking testimony from on-site, first hand witnesses. So again, I ask: why is there no clinical material about - much less interest in - the psychopath's partner?

Connecting the Dots is a new series of short videos about...well, about everything.

This installment is about the death of Bin Laden and other lies. It's everything you need to know about U.S. politics in a song you can sing along to!

In 1866, Russian scientist Alexander Saytzeff isolated a most curious and peculiar chemical compound. It was crystalline, odor-less, non-toxic and had a garlic-like taste when consumed. At the time, Saytzeff had no way to predict that his discovery was going to prove highly controversial throughout its entire medical history, that it was going to be tested in thousands of studies and provide miraculous relief for numerous patients.

I'm talking here about dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO), an organic sulfur compound which was used only as an industrial solvent, that is, until its medical properties were discovered in 1963 by a research team headed by Stanley W. Jacob, MD.

DMSO is a by-product of kraft pulping (the 'sulfate process') which converts wood into wood pulp leaving almost pure cellulose fibers. As industrial as it may sound, the process simply entails a treatment of wood chips with a mixture of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide, known as white liquor, breaking the bonds which link lignin (from the Latin word lignum, meaning wood) to the cellulose.

DMSO is useful as a pain reliever and also in burns, acne, arthritis, mental retardation, strokes, amyloidosis, head injury, scleroderma, it soothes toothaches, eases headaches, hemorroids, muscle strains, it prevents paralysis from spinal-chord injuries and softens scar tissues. In fact, it is useful in well over 300 ailments and is safe to use. You might think that a compound that has so many alleged uses and benefits should be automatically suspect, so let's have a close look at its properties and the data available and we'll shed some light in this miraculous chemical.

Interview by Geoff Brady from In Other News Radio with Harrison Koehli on Political Ponerology and psychopaths.