John Fraser knows a hell of a lot about looking for ghosts. He serves on the Council of the UK’s renowned Society for Psychical Research (SPR), is a member of the SPR’s Spontaneous Cases Committee, and has been the Vice Chair (Investigations) of the Ghost Club, the world’s oldest psychical research organisation. He is also...
Category: Science & Fiction
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UK Paranormal Research Gets Professional
Rumours had been circulating for months among the UK’s paranormal research groups. ASSAP — the Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena — had let it be known they had a major announcement to make, and there was much speculation as to what it would be. The secret was finally revealed on Saturday, 10...
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Aliens On The Moon?
Is the Moon really as barren as we’re told? The makers of Apollo 18 are not the first to suggest something might be up there. In 1835, hopes were high that life would eventually be discovered on our satellite. So when a series of six articles claiming precisely that appeared in the New York Sun newspaper...
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Is the “Extinct” Thylacine Still Alive?
It’s not supposed to exist these days but people claim to spot it so often that the thylacine has been called the world’s “most common extinct animal”. The thylacine was always something of a contrary beast. Also known as the Tasmanian wolf because of its generally wolf-like appearance, and the Tasmanian tiger because of the...
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Ghostbusters And Ghost Hunters
In 1984 they came to save the world, and with a new comic book series from IDW Publishing due to hit the shops the Ghostbusters are back. The moment I saw them in the cinema more than a quarter of a century ago, I was captivated. Barely into my teens, I was already hugely interested in...
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UFOs Are Unidentified – I’ll Say That Again, Unidentified – Flying Objects
Extra-terrestrials buzzed London last week – except they almost certainly didn’t. On 17 August one of the local (south London, UK) news websites announced: “UFO spotted in Croydon town centre”. Predictably, the article accompanying this headline was illustrated with a picture of flying saucers. One reader soon joked that aliens had flown to Croydon from...
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The Rendlesham Forest UFO Revisited
It’s been called Britain’s Roswell, and it’s back in the news. Rendlesham Forest is in Suffolk, England. It stands close to what was once a twin military airbase (RAF Bentwaters and RAF Woodbridge) used by the USAF under the command of Colonel Ted Conrad. In the early hours of a late December morning in 1980...
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Exposed: The 100-Year-Old Riddle Behind Theft of the Mona Lisa
It all began in 1976 when I read a book about famed Italian Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci. On a page about the Mona Lisa, it said: ‘On August 21, 1911, an Italian workman named Vincenzo Peruggia stole the painting to take to Italy.’ I was immediately hooked. As a recent film school graduate from...
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Anonymous vs. Facebook – This Time It’s Personal
I am a Facebook user, though I am pretty resentful about it. It’s become one of those addictive time-sucks that modern technology has forced upon us in order to stay connected with the world, or in this case, friends and family. It’s like the advent of the cell phone, somehow we managed to live without...
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Death By Devotion: Tragic Tale of Scientology Celebrity Centre Brainchild Yvonne Jentzsch
It’s funny how people will take lies as gospel and give power to people who have the worst of intentions. It’s gone on for thousands of years, as Cicero pointed out in Roman times: “[F]or there are not so many possessed of virtue as there are that desire to seem virtuous. These last are delighted...