“TIME TRAVELING BROTHERS OF THE PHILADELPHIA EXPERIMENT” #WeirdDarknessRadio WEEK OF DEC 08-14, 2024
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Your best bet every day you want to play. Bovada.lv. Ready for everything. Deep roots, big ambition. Greatness grows in Alabama. This proud state is paving the way to build our Navy's next generation submarines. We build giants at BuildSubmarines.com. Paid for by the U.S. Department of the Navy in partnership with Blue Forge Alliance. The Philadelphia Experiment is one of the most grotesque military urban legends ever.

and it is endured as an infamous World War II conspiracy theory. But is there any truth to it? According to legend, on October 28, 1943, the USS Eldridge, a cannon-class destroyer escort, was conducting top-secret experiments designed to win command of the oceans against the Axis powers. The rumor was that the government was creating technology that would render naval ships invisible to enemy radar,

And there, in the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, it was time to test it out. Witnesses claim an eerie green-blue glow surrounded the hull of the ship as her generators spun up and then, suddenly, the Eldridge disappeared. The ship was then seen in Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia before disappearing again and reappearing back in Philadelphia.

The legend states that classified military documents reported that the Eldridge crew were affected by the events in disturbing ways. Some went insane. Others developed mysterious illnesses. But others still were said to have been fused together with the ship, still alive, but with limbs sealed to the metal. That'll give you nightmares. That's some event horizon kind of stuff right there. But how much of it is true?

There are competing stories that are mutually exclusive, making it hard to determine who to believe and why. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness.

Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained, coming up this hour

In one of the most controversial cases of Chilean ufology, beings that would have announced earthquakes, natural disasters, and the fall of the Challenger. For more than two decades, there has been speculation about the existence of the famous Friendship Island. However, until now, there is still no certainty of its possible location, nor of the truthfulness of the contacts with the extraterrestrial inhabitants of that island.

If we have time, I'll tell you about Plucky in Kent, UK. It may look picturesque during the day, worthy of a postcard, but it's also known as a place that you'll often hear something go bump in the night. But first... Allegedly in the fall of 1943, a US Navy destroyer was made invisible and teleported from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Norfolk, Virginia in an incident known as the Philadelphia Experiment.

Records in the Archives Branch of the Naval History and Heritage Command have been repeatedly searched, but no documents have been located which confirm the event or any interest by the Navy in attempting such an achievement. But then those who came to this conclusion probably didn't interview Duncan Cameron and Al Bialik. They were on board the ship when it happened. The two sides of the Philadelphia Experiment. We begin there.

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Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness! Before we go to the brothers who say the Philadelphia Experiment was not only real, but they were a part of it, let's look at the side that claims the whole thing was a complete farce.

And to do that, we need to talk about the man behind this supposed myth, Carl M. Allen, who would go by the pseudonym Carlos Miguel Allende. In 1956, Allende sent a series of letters to Morris K. Jessup, author of the book "The Case for the UFO," in which he argued that unidentified flying objects merit further study.

Jessup apparently included text about unifield field theory because this is what Allende latched onto for his correspondences. In the 1950s, unified field theory, which has never been proven, attempted to merge Einstein's general theory of relativity with electromagnetism. In fact, Allende claimed to have been taught by Einstein himself and could prove the unified field theory based on events he witnessed on October 28, 1943.

Allende claimed that he saw the Eldridge disappear from the Philadelphia Naval Yard, and he further insisted that the United States military had conducted what he called the Philadelphia Experiment, and was trying to cover it up. Jessup was then contacted by the Navy's Office of Naval Research, who had received a package containing Jessup's book with annotations claiming that extraterrestrial technology allowed the U.S. government to make breakthroughs in unified field theory.

This is one of the weirdest details. The annotations were designed to look like they were written by three different authors. One may be extraterrestrial. According to Vallée's article for the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Jessop became obsessed with Allende's revelations, and the disturbed researcher would take his own life in 1959. It wasn't until 1980 that proof of Allende's forgery would be made available.

Inexplicably, two ONR officers had 127 copies of the annotated text printed and privately distributed by the military contractor Vero Manufacturing, giving wings to Allende's story long after Jessup's death. So what really happened aboard the USS Eldridge that day?

According to Edward Dudgeon, who served in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Engstrom, which was dry-docked in the Philadelphia Naval Yard while the Eldridge was, both ships did have classified devices on board. They were neither invisibility cloaks nor teleportation drives designed by aliens. But instead, they scrambled the magnetic signatures of ships using the degaussing technique, which provided protection from magnetic torpedoes aboard U-boats.

The website HowStuffWorks suggested that the "green glow" reported by witnesses that day could be explained by an electric storm or St. Elmo's fire, which in addition to being an American coming-of-age film starring the Brat Pack, is a weather phenomenon in which plasma is created in a strong electric field, giving off a bright glow, almost like fire.

Finally, inland canals connect Norfolk to Philadelphia, allowing a ship to travel between the two in a few hours. The USS Eldridge would be transferred to Greece in 1951 and sold for scrap in the '90s. But Allende's hoax would live on in our nightmares forever.

Up next, we look a lot more deeply at the other side of the Philadelphia experiment, from those who not only believe it happened, but claim they were there on the ship when it occurred. We'll also look at what could possibly cause the time travel aspect of the experiment if it truly did happen. We'll look at a couple of time-traveling brothers when Weird Darkness returns.

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I'm Darren Marlar. Welcome back to Weird Darkness. If you'd like to get more Weird Darkness seven days a week, you can do so through the Weird Darkness podcast, which you can find wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube. Or visit WeirdDarkness.com slash listen and you can find a list of all the apps where you can listen to the show. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash listen. We continue now with the Philadelphia Experiment.

The prospect of time travel has long captivated the human imagination. To leap forward and know the future would give invaluable insight, or perhaps a maddening curse. For most of us, jumping backward or forward in time only exists in fiction. But for two military brothers, their supposed trip to the year 2749 was very real, and it was nothing like Back to the Future or Doctor Who.

Instead, it was a total nightmare. During World War II, brothers Duncan Cameron and Al Bielek were selected for a top-secret government study aboard the USS Eldridge. The brothers expected it to be secretive, but they could not have predicted the mind-bending nature of the study. Bielek was silent for years about what he experienced on the USS Eldridge, but at 60 years old he came forward with shocking news.

The Navy was developing a device that would make ships invisible to radar, and they'd been doing so for decades. This sounds far-fetched enough, but Bielek's next claim made the idea of an invisible ship sound totally plausible in comparison. It all started, he said, when he watched the science fiction film The Philadelphia Experiment. The events in the film were strikingly familiar to him.

Soon after he watched the movie, Bielek began experiencing strange flashbacks. He knew intuitively that these flashes of another world weren't imaginary but very, very real. They weren't visions. They were memories of a distant future. With that, Bielek claimed that the Philadelphia Experiment wasn't just a movie, but a real-life government experiment that he had unwittingly been involved with.

At a conference in Texas in 1990, he came forward and finally told the entire story. Bielek said that a real-life version of the Philadelphia Experiment was conducted on the USS Eldridge back in the '40s while he and his brother worked on the ship. When a strange device was activated on the ship, multiple witnesses claimed that the ship was enveloped with a green-tinged fog before all hell broke loose.

The ship vanished into thin air, only to return 15 minutes later. Upon arrival, the crew began suffering from delirium and nausea, and those were the tame symptoms. Others were completely dismembered, and five sailors were reportedly found suspended in metal flooring. Bielek claimed that he and Cameron tried to escape the ship by jumping overboard,

but when they did, they didn't land in the water. Instead, they found themselves floating in what he could only guess was some physical form of time before being catapulted into the future. When the brothers finally awoke, they weren't on the ship or even in the water. Instead, they were in a hospital and covered with radiation burns. When Bielek asked what year it was, the answer left him floored.

"We arrived in the year 2137," he said. The state of the world in 2137 was bleak, he discovered. The U.S. was unrecognizable as the West Coast and southeastern U.S. was submerged underwater. Florida had broken away from the country and sunk altogether. Before Bielek and his brother could even begin to fathom these changes, the unthinkable happened. They were once again transported through time

When he woke up again, Bielek was in another hospital room. But this one was filled with bizarre-looking machines. The advanced surgical material Bielek described allowed doctors to conduct vibrational and light treatment therapies as a way of healing people's wounds. The TV played only news and history programs. By then, Bielek wasn't surprised when he learned the year

It was 2749, he was told, and he had trouble wrapping his brain around the technological advancements of the future. He claimed that the whole planet was controlled by a synthetic computer system and that people communicated telepathically with the help of AI technology. Despite the technological advancements, Bielek stressed that the world of 2749 was no paradise.

He learned that wars between Russia and China and the US and Europe had decimated much of the planet and left most of the world under military rule. There were some potential bright sides, according to Bielek. The concept of money was obsolete in 2749, and humans had mastered anti-gravity to the extent that entire cities floated above the surface. Before he and his brother could truly explore, however, they were transported once again

but this time they went back in time. When they landed, it was in Montauk, New York, in the year 1984. Disoriented and confused, they were swarmed by Coast Guard patrols and taken to a secret location where they met a man named John von Neumann. What von Neumann told them was shocking.

The brothers, he claimed, were involved in a top-secret government program called the Phoenix Project, and the true aim of the project was to, you guessed it, harness time travel. Unfortunately, von Neumann explained, the USS Eldridge was now stuck in an expanding hyperspace bubble that would eventually consume the Earth. To prevent this from happening, Bielek and Cameron needed to board the ship and destroy the device.

They accepted the challenge, but began feeling nauseous and experienced hallucinations while on the ship. Just like when they were aboard the Eldritch during the initial invisible ship experiments. When they found the device, they took to it with axes. The next thing the brothers knew, they were once again in hospital beds.

But this time, their surroundings were familiar. They had been warped back to the 1940s, but were so confused about what they'd experienced that they kept their mouths shut for decades. It wasn't until a group of prominent scientists came forward with more sophisticated theories on time travel that Bielek began speaking on the incident. But when he finally shared his story concerning details about his past came to light. Bielek had a shady past that immediately alerted skeptics.

Apparently, Al Bielek wasn't even his real name. He was born Edward Cameron in 1916. He tried to pass this off as yet another effect of the time travel, but the damage to what little credibility he had was done. In the end, Bielek has been widely criticized for propagating whimsical fantasies as factual events.

So many variations of his time-traveling adventures exist that it's hard to know what really happened, and each story is wilder than the last. One version has Bielek and his brother escaping the 2700s through a wormhole. Another posits that Bielek and Cameron were permanently separated in time.

Scientists have no clue if time travel will ever be possible, but their studies of black holes bring us closer to understanding the mysteries of space than ever before. If Bielek truly did go back in time, how might it have happened? A black hole can be broadly characterized as a specific spot in space defined by an extremely high level of density.

Past a certain limit, nothing, not even light, is capable of ever breaking away from a black hole's gravitational pull. This limit is what's known as the event horizon. Meanwhile, what exactly happens when an object travels past the event horizon is unclear, but it is believed that it will be elongated into a long, thin strand known as spaghettification. However, another theory has suggested another possibility entirely.

but it hinges on the specific type of black hole being considered. For some time now, experts have suggested that there is a specific spot of limitless density residing within every black hole. Known as a singularity, this provides black holes with their immense pull of gravity. Singularities were once thought to all be equivalent to one another. They'd all lead to spaghettification, but in the 1990s the thinking changed.

During the earlier part of that decade, another type of singularity known as a mass inflation singularity was discovered. These were said to be found in huge rotating black holes and they might not necessarily stretch approaching objects out like spaghetti. This being the case, a vessel like, say, a spacecraft could potentially travel through it. And who knows what might await on the other side?

Meanwhile, the notion of a black hole can generally be traced back to 1784. This is when pioneering British astronomer John Mitchell detailed a rather primitive version in a letter. Mitchell envisioned a body in space about 500 times bigger than our sun, which wouldn't allow light to escape. He termed such a theoretical body as a "dark star," and he claimed that many might exist throughout the universe.

Looking back today, certain aspects of Mitchell's work have proven to be remarkably accurate. But back in his own time, the scientific community was generally unmoved by his dark star declarations. Indeed, it wasn't until the 20th century that his works would once again be duly evaluated. Could black holes be the key to space-time travel like the mysterious Philadelphia Experiment? Some scientists believe a spaceship might survive a journey through a spinning black hole.

With research and computer simulations, we're getting closer to uncovering what lies beyond the event horizon. We'll look a bit more into that when Weird Darkness returns.

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If you like what you're hearing, you might enjoy the free audiobooks that I've narrated. I have several books available, from Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Charles Dickens, Robert Heinlein, Robert Louis Stevenson, and more, all absolutely free to listen to at WeirdDarkness.com. Just click on the audiobooks page. When talking about the Philadelphia Experiment, it's hard not to talk about time travel. So let's delve a bit more into that.

In 1915, the theory of general relativity was published by German physicist Albert Einstein, ushering in new ways of astrophysical thinking. Along with many other things, Einstein's theory indicated the presence of black holes in the universe, and in the decades after its initial appearance, numerous thinkers have used the theory in consideration of these mysterious entities.

By the 1960s, the theory of general relativity had entered into what some consider to be its golden age. This relates to the 15 or so years in which general relativity and black holes became widely popular scientific notions. During this time, thinkers such as Roy Kerr, Roger Penrose, and Stephen Hawking became well-known authorities on the subject.

The notion of black holes has captured mankind's imagination, as evidenced by a number of fictional works published at the time. Even before the golden age of general relativity, a number of stories included primitive portrayals or descriptions of the entities. But as more came to be understood about actual black holes, elements of the fiction started to more closely resemble reality.

Science fiction, however, tends to speculate by its very nature. And so, writers of the genre are free to use black holes as a plot device, and have oftentimes done so. Indeed, a number of stories have referenced black holes as being a means of allowing characters to travel through wormholes. A wormhole resembles a tunnel which, in a manner of speaking, cuts through space and time. One might visualize this as a sort of shaft with two openings at either end.

and each one is placed at a different point in time and space. In other words, a wormhole can be thought of as a shortcut from one point in the universe to another. Meanwhile, according to the theory of relativity, wormholes may well exist. Nothing has been proven, of course, but the ideas behind them have been incorporated within a number of fictitious works. Some examples include Joe Haldeman's novel The Forever War and Paul Prius's The Gates of Heaven.

More recently, Christopher Nolan's 2014 blockbuster "Interstellar" made use of the notion of wormholes and black holes. In the film, astronauts pass through a wormhole, hoping to discover a distant planet for humans to inhabit. At one point, the protagonist even passes over the event horizon of a black hole. During "Interstellar's" development, physicist Kip Thorne was consulted so filmmakers didn't stray too far from the realm's scientific plausibility.

But despite his input, the film is a work of fiction, and scientific inaccuracies consequently crop up. However, the notion of a spacecraft traveling through a wormhole or a black hole might itself not be so ridiculous. In the wake of Interstellar, a doctoral student from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth attempted to establish whether traveling through a black hole would be survivable.

Indeed, in 2016, Caroline Mallory created a computer simulation to test the idea, and her findings suggested that it might actually be feasible, thereby opening up the possibility of hyperspace travel. One of Mallory's university professors is Gaurav Khanna, and in January 2019, he wrote an article for media outlet The Conversation in relation to his student's work. In his piece, he explored whether indeed humans could travel through hyperspace.

"Black holes are perhaps the most mysterious object in the universe," Khanna wrote. "They are the consequence of gravity crushing a dying star without limit, leading to the formation of a true singularity. This happens when an entire star gets compressed down to a single point, yielding an object with infinite density."

"This dense and hot singularity punches a hole in the fabric of space-time itself, possibly opening up an opportunity for hyperspace travel," Khanna continued in his piece in The Conversation. "That is a shortcut through space-time allowing for travel over cosmic scale distances in a short period." However, expert consensus generally agrees that a body traveling through a black hole would be destroyed.

Indeed, it would be strained, pulled apart and compressed in the process of spaghettification. But as Khanna explained in his article, this might not necessarily occur in the case of every black hole. "Specifically, if a black hole is of considerable size and rotates, then an object traveling inside might retain its integrity," Khanna said. "This is due to the so-called mass inflation singularity that is found within."

This differs to the singularities that were once considered to be within every black hole. Mass inflation singularities do lead to a pull of gravity, but they cannot pull apart an object infinitely. This is in opposition to the nature of the other type of singularity. In other words, an object being pulled inside a rotating black hole of considerable size might not necessarily be destroyed.

In his piece for the conversation, Khanna explained that the mass inflation singularities found within big rotating black holes are comparatively weak. Therefore, bodies that travel inside such black holes could be left undamaged. In case this proves to be a difficult notion to comprehend, he also provided a helpful analogy. To illustrate his point, Khanna described a candle with a scaldingly hot flame burning away.

"If one were to leave their finger upon this flame," he explained, "they would get burned. But if they were to swiftly pass their finger through, they wouldn't. By the same token, if an object passes through a big rotating black hole swiftly, it might escape damage." So is this to say that people aboard a spacecraft traveling inside a big rotating black hole would experience no effects?

Well, an associate of Khanna, called Lior Burko, has his own thoughts. As he detailed to Business Insider in 2019, he claimed, "...you would feel a slight increase in temperature, but it would not be a dramatic increase." However, there are a number of factors that must be noted when envisioning such a scenario. Caroline Mallory's computer simulation suggested that a spacecraft could potentially pass through a rotating black hole and emerge relatively unscathed.

but such an outcome would be dependent on specific conditions relating to the black hole and its surroundings. For one thing, the rotating black hole would need to be a considerable size. If it were too small, then the traveling spacecraft would be more intensely pulled apart. But if it were the size of the black hole that's featured in Interstellar, this pull might not even be noticeable.

Another vital consideration is that Mallory's simulations work on the basis of the rotating black hole being secluded. In other words, the computer presumed that it was nowhere near other celestial bodies that might interfere with its nature. But as Kanna noted in his piece for The Conversation, most black holes are surrounded by cosmic material. So Mallory's simulations were, in some way, divorced from the external factors that surround black holes.

But as Khanna has pointed out in his piece, her work can now be consulted and built upon. And such future work can take into consideration more genuine influences in the vicinity of rotating black holes. Computer simulations are undoubtedly an invaluable asset within the study of black holes. After all, the technology required to get close enough for practical experimentation is still far from reach today.

But if we imagine that such space travel was presently possible, where would be an appropriate site of analysis? Well, somewhere in the middle of the Milky Way, the galaxy within which our solar system lies, there lies a region which is an astronomical radio source. This area is known as Sagittarius A, and it's been noted for a number of specific features, including what is believed to be a supermassive black hole.

In 1931, a pioneering radio astronomer named Carl Yansky first noted radio waves emanating from the middle of our galaxy. He discerned they were headed toward a group of stars collectively known as Sagittarius. And, so fittingly, the point of origin of these radio signals was named Sagittarius A. By 1974, new discoveries by Robert Brown and Bruce Bailick shone more light on the nature of Sagittarius A.

In a 1982 paper published by Brown, an asterisk was added to the term, making it now known as "Sagittarius A*". The asterisk simply relates to the high levels of energy which define the source of the radio signals. Over time, evidence began to mount that the cluster of objects found in Sagittarius A* was indeed a supermassive black hole, which itself became proof of their very existence.

As Reinhard Genzel from Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics published in a paper in 2018, the result is a "restounding confirmation of the massive black hole paradigm." The Sagittarius A* supermassive black hole apparently lies up to 27,000 light-years away from Earth, and according to some estimates, it's said to possess about 4 million times as much mass as our Sun.

and given its close proximity to Earth, relative to other supermassive black holes, it might well represent the best opportunity for practical investigation of hyperspace travel. Yet 27,000 light years is quite the distance, and it's frankly unthinkable that present technology is anywhere near to achieving it. In fact, the furthest spacecraft from Earth is currently Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977,

Yet, at the time of this podcast, this craft is just over 13.5 billion miles away from Earth. Of course, 13.5 billion miles might well sound like a lot, but just consider that a single light year is equivalent to around 5.88 trillion miles.

So, in spite of the huge leaps that have occurred in space travel over the decades, the 27,000 light-years to Sagittarius A* will clearly be unobtainable for some time yet. So, all things considered, we can see the importance of Mallory's computer simulations and any like them. But even with multiple new missions to space on the horizon, it's unlikely that we'll be sending a spacecraft out to a black hole any time soon.

And as Khanna pointed out, predictive thinking will be necessary in the absence of practical analysis. Mallory's approach of using a computer simulation to examine the effects of a black hole on an object is very common in the field of black hole physics, Khanna wrote in the conversation.

Needless to say, we do not have the capability of performing real experiments in or near black holes yet, so scientists resort to theory and simulations to develop an understanding by making predictions and new discoveries. For now, the investigations into black holes are subject to speculation, yet computer simulations such as the one performed by Caroline Mallory might well help to make things clearer, and perhaps one day we'll know what lies beyond the event horizon.

And maybe it'll lead to somewhere far, far away. Or some time far, far away. Maybe we'll even bump into those brothers caught up in the Philadelphia experiment.

Well, it turns out I'm actually not going to have time to talk about the extraterrestrials in Chile, so I will place that story in the Sudden Death Overtime content of tonight's show, which you can hear through the Weird Darkness podcast. I'll be uploading that Monday night. So, up next, we'll go ahead and talk about the paranormal in Pluckley, Kent, UK, a place where you'll often hear something go bump in the night, despite it being so picturesque during the day, worthy of a postcard.

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Friendship Island is a famous location in Chile that, despite so many knowing about it, nobody knows exactly where it is. But the rumor is that for the past 20 years or so, the beings that lived there, possibly extraterrestrials, have predicted disasters such as earthquakes and even NASA's Challenger disaster. When the story of the so-called "Friendship" case was first published, a wave of speculation and theories began to circulate.

Some argue that it was all about a mental experiment. Others say that the hands of the Nazis are behind the case, and most believe that they are extraterrestrial beings who've chosen the southern end of the country as a base for their operations on Earth. The case is based on alleged radio communications between some people with inhabitants of an unknown island located in southern Chile in the '80s.

The protagonists of the story, the Ortiz family, for years maintained contact with mysterious characters with an accent. Octavio Ortiz was the first to tell how this mystery came to be. Tradesman by profession, he acquired an 11-meter radio for his communications.

"We made contacts with these gentlemen who first thought that they were religious or Mormons because of their way of speaking. We played many songs and it never occurred to us to link them with extraterrestrial beings. And to this day, I do not have the certainty that they are beings from another planet," said Ortiz. These characters claimed to have an island in the southern south of Chile. Their only contact was a yacht in which they transported machinery and the people who visited them.

"Even they invited us several times, but I was afraid. I did not know what we were going to find there," he said. One of the most controversial protagonists of this story is Ernesto de la Fuente, a mechanical civil engineer from the University of Concepción who in 1983 claimed to have made contact with the inhabitants who lived on that island in the south. Later, he would know they were members of a congregation called Friendship.

In those years, De La Fuente acquired an 11-meter radio station with which he tried to get out of the isolation he was in. Among the many contacts with people from different parts of the island, these interlocutors appeared who claimed to belong to a religious congregation called Friendship, which would have acquired an island in the Guadalques Archipelago. Conversations became very common during the afternoons. Many went on for more than two hours.

In these real conversations, other Chilean radio amateurs participated, as well as some guests from other parts of the world. De La Fuente had the opportunity to meet the supposed inhabitants of Friendship. According to the description he himself makes, the age of the character he met fluctuated between 35 and 55 years. His hair was dark blonde, with light eyes and slightly toasted skin. Its height far exceeded that of the average Chilean,

"What was most striking was the peace that radiated from his presence," he said. For a time, De La Fuente worked for the friendship. His work consisted of welcoming families and people who were invited to the island. In his vehicle, Ernesto took them to small ports, from where they were picked up by the "Midalus II," a small boat which was the only one authorized to reach the supposed island.

During the time he was able to remain on the island, De La Fuente claimed to have slept in a small piece of approximately three square meters. Inside, there was nothing but a bed and a table with a computer terminal. Everything was controlled through computer processors. There was a heated pool, three large greenhouses, satellite TV lounges, and other amenities that I would never have imagined, he said. One was with many people in the corridors. Everyone was smiling and nobody spoke loudly."

"I do not remember seeing a clinic or hospital," he told De La Fuente. Another fact that has given the international impact to the case is that the Friendship would have had the ability to predict things. This is how they would have announced earthquakes, natural disasters, and even the fall of the Challenger. It should be remembered that despite the efforts made by different media, it has not been possible to reach the location of the island.

That is one of the main questions raised by those who argue that the story is false. Two of the expeditions to locate it were made by the Nueva Imogen Production Company, one with the support of the Navy and the other completely independent. In none of them was it possible to reach the given coordinates. A Malaysian man recently encountered a spine-chilling experience during his stay at a hotel in Bukit Merah, which he documented on TikTok.

The man arrived at the hotel around 7:09 p.m. and proceeded to check into his room. Initially, everything seemed normal, but within just two minutes, he claimed to have experienced unsettling disturbances. According to his account, he heard knocks on the door, and the toilets began flushing unexpectedly. Feeling unnerved, he started praying for comfort. Strangely, the disturbances ceased momentarily, but resumed right after he finished praying.

Deciding to capture the eerie events, he began recording the incident. Curiously, once he started recording, the paranormal activities seemed to subside. Nevertheless, he felt an overwhelming urge to leave, not wanting to take any chances - especially as he was the sole guest in the entire hotel. He hastily packed his belongings, left his room, and while waiting for the elevator he alleged that he saw a ghost just as the lift doors were closing.

At the lobby, he promptly returned his room keys to the counter staff and hastily exited the hotel. The man recounted, "It was less than 30 minutes and I was already disturbed. I took out my phone to charge it for a moment and suddenly the door behind me slammed shut. I called out to inquire if anyone was there but there was no response." Alarmed, he decided to record his surroundings and claimed to have heard the curtains in the bathroom rustling, as if being pulled, though no one was present.

Realizing that the night ahead would be far from peaceful, despite having already paid for the room, he made the swift decision to check out after just 20 minutes of checking in. Many netizens expressed concern for his safety, given the hotel's long-standing reputation for being haunted. Some were relieved that he made it out unharmed, while others found it astonishing that he had even checked into the hotel in the first place.

The man clarified that he shared his experience not to offend anyone, but to serve as a warning to others to steer clear of the haunted hotel. In light of these events, it leaves you to ponder: would you have remained in the room under similar circumstances? Or would you have followed suit and made a hasty exit? Thanks for listening! It's one of the most controversial cases of Chilean ufology. Beings that would have announced earthquakes, natural disasters, and the fall of the Challenger

For more than two decades, there has been speculation about the existence of the famous Friendship Island. However, until now, there is still no certainty of its possible location, nor of the truthfulness of the contacts with the extraterrestrial inhabitants of that island.

We'll talk about that in the Sudden Death Overtime content of tonight's show, which you can find in the podcast. I upload it every Monday evening, and you can grab the podcast anytime at WeirdDarkness.com or just look for Weird Darkness in your favorite podcast app.

If you like the show, please, share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at [email protected]. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all my social media, listen to audiobooks I've narrated, sign up for my email newsletter, find other podcasts I host. You can also visit the store for Weird Darkness merchandise.

And there's the Hope in the Darkness page there if you or somebody you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. All stories used tonight are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes, which I've already posted at WeirdDarkness.com. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light.

Psalm 103:12: "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us." And a final thought: There's not enough room in your mind for both worry and faith. You must decide which one gets to live there. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

The quietest room in the world is at Orfield Labs in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Engineered to keep out as much noise as possible and absorb noise rather than reflect it, it has an average sound level of about -9 decibels, while most of us would call about 30 decibels a comfortable quiet level.

"Spending time alone in the room means that you can hear nothing but your own organs working, and it's such an unsettling experience that it's led to hallucinations and a record time spent in the room of only 45 minutes."

Some days, all we want is silence. We spent the whole day listening to phones ringing, people talking, music playing, and kids screaming. And it can seem like there's nothing more needed than some time spent in complete and total silence. But just what is silence? On average, we think of a room with a sound level of about 30 decibels as being pretty comfortably quiet.

The ambient sounds of a peaceful country setting — birds, water running in the distance, the rustling of trees — is somewhere around 40 decibels, and the sound of our breathing is about 10 decibels. The Anecowik Chamber is a room that has a sound level of -9 decibels,

The term means no echo, and these specially designed chambers absorb sound rather than reflecting it, creating a chamber with an amazing amount of absolute nothingness. The walls are lined with soundproof, wedge-shaped structures, and the floor is a mesh material. Any sound that you do hear, you hear exactly as it is created, with no echoes, reflections, or distortions.

Most anechoic chambers are built for universities or government research facilities. But there's an independently owned one in Orfield Labs in Minneapolis, and it's been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the quietest place on Earth. The lab was, ironically, once a sound studio that hosted artists like Bob Dylan and Prince. Now it's home to this deeply, deeply disturbing room that does have a practical purpose.

testing experimental technology from computer parts to medical supplies and hearing aids. When your phone lights up or the lights on your car's dashboard come on, you don't hear it at all. And that's probably in part because it's been tested in a chamber like the one in Minneapolis. And echoic chambers are even used by NASA to train astronauts to cope with the complete lack of sound that they can experience.

They need a crash course in this, because no matter how crazy a day we've had, absolute silence can drive us crazier. Absolute silence is filled by the sound of your own body. You can hear your breathing, your heart beating. You can hear the blood in your veins. You can hear your pulse. You can hear your bones rub against each other. You can hear your skin sliding over your muscles.

you can hear tendons creak, organs churning, and that's usually about the point where people start hearing things that aren't really there. It starts with hallucinations of noise as the brain tries to fill in what we are so used to being surrounded by. That can lead to nausea and panic attacks. With no sound, there are also no echoes to orient yourself, and that just makes the sensations even worse.

sit in the dark, and it's much, much worse. Without external stimuli, coordination and balance fail. Hallucinations start, and within minutes many people are asking to be let out. Most people are insufferably uncomfortable after about 30 minutes. The rare person can last 45 minutes or so

but that's about the limit of our ability to deal with such complete sensory deprivation. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness Radio, where every week you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre,

Crime. Conspiracy. Mysterious. Macabre. Unsolved and unexplained. Coming up this hour: According to the song "Silence is Golden" — and it really can be — there are plenty of times when we just want to shut everything out and relax in peace and quiet. But silence isn't always all it's cracked up to be, either. And too much silence can drive you mad.

It all starts with being able to hear your own organs working, and after about 45 minutes, you'll start to hallucinate. Silence and other types of sensory deprivation can do some weird things to the body and the mind - and to our planet.

If you're new here, welcome to the show! If you're already a member of this weirdo family, please take a moment and invite somebody else to listen in with you. Recommending Weird Darkness to others helps make it possible for me to keep doing the show. And while you're listening, be sure to visit WeirdDarkness.com where you can follow me on social media, listen to free audiobooks that I've narrated, and more! That's WeirdDarkness.com! Now,

Bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the weird darkness. Sensory deprivation can take you to the edge of insanity, and in extreme cases, over the edge. But you don't have to believe me. Here is what Alison Davis wrote after her experience:

Before I visited Brooklyn's new "Lift Next Level" float spa, my entire understanding of sensory deprivation tanks was limited to an episode of "The Simpsons." In the episode "Make Room for Lisa," Lisa Simpson floats in a coffin-sized tub and hallucinates that she's entered the body of her cat Snowball.

The modern incarnation I encountered was a zen-like space in Kabul Hill where you must take off your shoes and everybody whisper-speaks peaceful things at you before you begin your journey. My journey, I was whisper-told, would start in one of the spa's ocean float rooms, as opposed to the claustrophobia-inducing coffin-like pod that most people think of when they imagine a sensory deprivation experience.

"Ocean float rooms," the attendant whisper-boasted, "were better for first-timers. The rooms have six-foot-high ceilings adorned with twinkling LED constellations. I'd be able to stand up, fully." In practice, this meant something like a liquid-filled mausoleum — a small, enclosed, watery space that was still reminiscent of a container for dead people. The attendant whisper-instructed me to get naked,

take a shower, put Vaseline on any open wounds, and prepare to float my way into enlightenment. Then I was alone. Initially, what I discovered was where exactly all my unhealed cuts were. Nothing like a thousand pounds of Epsom salt mixed into ten inches of water to remind you of that blister on the back of your foot. Once I was situated, at first, all was well. My body floated around like a little buoy,

I felt like I was headed someplace spiritual, someplace deeper. I decided to turn off all the lights and enter full sensory deprivation mode, which is when things started to go to hell. Lying in the darkness, I couldn't see anything. I couldn't hear anything, save for my own breathing and the drip of the tank's filter system.

I adjusted my leg, flooding another cut with salt water, and suddenly all I could focus on was an intense burning spreading through my ankle as the salt water entered the wound. "Is this sepsis?" I thought. "Will I get sepsis?" "What is sepsis, even?" Then a little bead of salt water rolled into my ear, and I started to panic.

My whisper guide had pointed out some vinegar that I was supposed to use to flush my ears in case saltwater got into them, and I hadn't asked what would happen if saltwater did remain in my ear. Now I was having a flashback to some girl at camp when I was 10. She'd gotten river water in her ears, and for whatever reason it made her barf every day. They took her away to the infirmary, and we never saw her again."

Was I going to die barfing? And is this what it would have felt like to be on the Titanic? I started thinking about how many thoughts my brain was able to form in mere seconds. A voice from somewhere else in my brain started commenting on those thoughts and judging me for not being able to stop thinking about them, thereby forming more very loud thoughts. I couldn't figure out how many minutes or hours I'd been in the tank

That's when I realized there was no panic button in here, and everything became a jumble of death, barf, panic, sepsis, what-is-sepsis thoughts. Before entering my ocean float room, I'd been told that the experience would heighten my senses, the world would seem more vibrant, so I should think carefully about what I wanted to see, feel, hear, taste, and feel immediately after leaving.

If I had it my way, I'd have eaten pizza and had sex, but sadly it was a workday. I biked off into Brooklyn, which smelled extra like pee. Allison's story is not unique. It's easy to freak out if you're not used to being deprived of your senses. But there are many more sensory deprivation situations than just floating in saltwater in the dark, each one more terrifying than the next.

We'll look at a few when Weird Darkness returns. Welcome back to Weird Darkness, I'm Darren Marlar. We'll continue our discussion about sensory deprivation and the numerous forms that it takes in just a moment, but first, if you or somebody you know struggles with depression or dark thoughts, I'd like to recommend the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com.

There, I have gathered numerous free resources to help you fight depression, including the Crisis Text Line, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, Save.org, iFred, and more. These resources are absolutely free and they are there when you need them on the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. Allison's story of the "ocean float room" as they called it is just one story of sensory deprivation.

There are several types of sensory deprivation, and not all of them are as pleasant as the nightmare Allison went through: complete darkness. We're talking about complete, absolute darkness, not the darkness of the average night. Even in the deepest night, there's usually some kind of ambient light. Even when the power's out, there's still light coming in from outside.

But researchers from the University of Rochester have found that even in absolute darkness, we still think we see. Outfitting people with sensors that tracked eye movements and then engulfing them in darkness, they found that about half of us can actually see in the dark. At least, we think we can. Two groups of volunteers were outfitted with what they were told were different types of blindfolds.

One was said to allow in a small amount of light, while the other wouldn't allow them to see anything. In reality, both blindfolds blocked out all light, and when the volunteers were asked to wave their hands in front of their faces, computers tracked their eye movements. About half of the subjects could track the movement of their hand without hiccups or false starts and stops, suggesting that their eyes actually had something to focus on.

That's because of the connectivity between the brain's movement and visual centers. When the brain knows that something's happening, it's enough to trigger a reaction in the visual centers of the brain, what Vanderbilt University psychologists call a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

The connection between what the brain expects to see and what the eyes really do see might one day shed light on the weird phenomena of synesthesia, when stimuli cause a reaction in senses that aren't impacted in most people, like smelling colors. Darkness is one of those things that you expect to be all around us all the time. But to get a true sense of darkness, there are a limited number of places on Earth that you can still go.

The International Dark Sky Association keeps track of light pollution and monitors how much darkness you really get in places across the globe, designating the darkest of dark areas as "International Dark Sky Places." Most of the time, we now exist in a sort of sensory overload rather than sensory deprivation when it comes to light.

Light pollution is everywhere, and it's a huge problem. It disrupts the circadian rhythms of humans and animals alike, and that alone has an impact which is compounded as you move through an ecosystem. So where do you go for a complete sensory deprivation from artificial light and light pollution? Dark sky parks and reserves are the best places to go, recognized for their pollution-free dark skies and, consequently, their unprecedented stargazing.

Places like the Gold Tier Dark Sky Reserve on Ireland's Ivorra Peninsula, the Gold Tier Nambyrand IDSR in Africa, and the Silver Tier West Haviland IDSR are among the best locations. There are some communities that are even trying to become darker, like the Dark Sky Community on Scotland's Isle of Coal.

Preserving the darkness might seem like an odd thing, but it is something that even the UNESCO World Heritage Committee is getting involved with. Until fairly recently, light pollution wasn't even a thing. Generations upon generations of people looked up at the night sky in a way that we will never be able to truly experience in many places.

The night sky over cities is a sight we'll never actually see in our lifetimes, and they're trying to preserve some of the dark areas that are left and keep them the same way that our ancestors saw them. What about the world's quietest places? True silence isn't just the absence of talk. It's the absence of the background hum of computers, of traffic in the distance, and one of the most difficult things to get away from: airplanes.

even the most quiet of sounds. Those we don't even really recognize as sounds are received and rearranged by our auditory systems and manifest as tinnitus, most scientists agree. One can experience artificial silence in places like Minnesota's Sound Deprivation Room, but that's not the same thing as being out in the world and surrounded by silence.

One researcher from Auckland University described his time in Antarctica and being the only living thing for miles as "primeval." It was a very, very different type of silence than what's found in a chamber — a silence that has to be experienced to be believed. But even in Antarctica, those same scientists are adding noise with their remote outposts, weather monitoring equipment, and boats.

Planes are regularly routed over remote areas like the Sahara Desert, the North Pole, and Siberia. One ecologist on a quest for a place on Earth untouched by human sounds went deep into the Amazon rainforest, 1,900 kilometers or 1,200 miles from civilization, and still came back with recordings of airplanes.

The general consensus is that there is no place on Earth that you can go and not hear something man-made or artificial fairly regularly. That hasn't stopped people from trying to declare various places to be pretty quiet, even areas like a natural retreat in Northumberland. These places notwithstanding, it's now thought that we simply can't go anywhere anymore without something interrupting us.

So, what happens if you suddenly stop providing input to your vocal cords? While there are some conditions that make speech impossible, it's a different thing entirely to take a vow of silence and simply stop talking.

Perhaps strangely, especially in a world where dedication to a cause knows no bounds, leading some to record every waking moment in their diaries, it doesn't seem like anyone's actually made the commitment to test out just what happens when you swear to a lifetime of silence for science. There are theories, though, and they're pretty fascinating.

One suggestion from a Los Angeles speech pathologist is that absolutely nothing would happen, as there are plenty of other things that you use those same muscles for, like breathing or clearing your throat. That's certainly supported by patients who wake from comas after a long period of time and can still speak. But there might be some more devastating consequences than just atrophied vocal cords, and the brain could suffer them.

Scientists from NYU's Center for Neural Research suspect that while talking might not be required for keeping your vocal cords from being atrophied, it might be helping to keep the same thing from happening to your brain. Certain areas of the brain can become larger or stronger depending on how often they're used.

We'll talk a little bit about that when Weird Darkness returns. In the meantime, do you have a true paranormal story that has happened to you or somebody you know? You can share it by clicking on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com, and I might use it in a future episode.

I'm Darren Marlar, welcome back to Weird Darkness. If you'd like to stay up to date with the podcast – not only with episodes, but also with the planned livestreams on YouTube and our monthly Weirdo Watch parties – you can sign up for the newsletter. It's absolutely free – you can sign up for it at WeirdDarkness.com/Newsletter. Certain areas of the brain can become larger or stronger depending on how often they are used.

For example, the area that governs musical ability is larger in a professional musician. The opposite is likely to happen too. Neurons that control speech would no longer be used, and it's likely that those neurons would be requisitioned by other parts of the brain to do other things.

While that might in part be negated by the parts of the brain that are responsible for the listening part of conversation, it's also supported by the brain structure and acute listening ability that people who have been blind for a long period of time have developed. The flexibility of the brain means that it's likely that deciding to stop forcing sensory input into talking would shrink the part of the brain responsible for it. Have you heard of the Leningrad metronome?

In 1941, Nazi troops laid siege to Leningrad. It would last for a staggering 872 days, and by the end, nearly one million people would be dead. Some were killed in combat and bombings, while countless people died of starvation waiting for the siege to end. Descriptions of the conditions within the city are a different kind of sensory deprivation than what comes from inside a water-filled tank.

Cold weather and starvation made people even colder, and most public places started to close. Trains stopped. Snow filled the streets, and water pipes froze and burst. Freezing, poorly heated apartments became makeshift morgues, and corpses and human waste piled up outside. Those that lived were forced into extreme, despairing isolation.

Even gender differences began to fade, along with traditional social roles and identities. Isolation and deprivation from human contact and normal, everyday lives became greater and greater, and many began to cling to the sounds of their radios. There were fewer and fewer broadcasts as the siege went on. But there was one sound that filled the city of silence and dying people, a metronome.

The Leningrad metronome was playing continuously, ticking slowly when all was well. People remembered clinging to the sound as though it were a heartbeat, a reminder that there were other people out there through the loneliness, hunger, pain, and death.

The metronome would double in speed when there was an incoming air raid, but when it returned to its normal, steady 50 beats per minute, it was the maddening sound of resistance and reassurance that even in the most extreme times, people were not alone. One of the problems with determining just what's going on with extreme cases of sensory deprivation is an ethical one.

How far can you push people before you're endangering their sanity? And just how much nothingness can the mind recover from? John Lilly started his experiments in 1954, and while he's perhaps most famous for his odd relationship with dolphins, he also invented the idea of the sensory deprivation tank. Original tanks were a little different than the ones we see today, requiring the wearing of some horrifying blackout masks and total submersion.

Gradually, that was adjusted to something a little less terrifying. But listening to Lily's claims of his experiences are truly bizarre. Lily claimed that absolute sensory deprivation allowed him to come into contact with creatures from another dimension.

The tank acted as a portal, allowing him to leave his body behind and enter into a sort of mind meeting with other beings that discussed him as their agent on Earth, whose work was temporarily influenced by what he called psychoanalysis, or the process of learning how to remain human while being controlled by, relating to, and doing the work of these otherworldly beings.

The entity in control of those beings was called "Echo" or the Earth Coincidence Control Office, and Lilly got to the point where every time he went into the tank, he made contact. He never had an end goal in mind, he said, because that would have been just crazy.

Sensory deprivation and out-of-body experiences, which can also be done with dolphins and apparently allows him to link up with the dolphin hive mind, open the gateway to a whole different sort of reality. Of course, this probably also had something to do with the fact that, as a precursor to his experiments, he took LSD and ketamine.

It was after doing so that he reported such breakthroughs as getting into a mental state that allowed him to connect with dolphins that were looking beneath the floor to see the stars on the other side of the planet. While sensory deprivation is the lack of external stimuli, boredom is the lack of interesting external stimuli. It turns out that it's a weirdly complicated thing, too, and even though we've tried to measure it in countless ways, it's still pretty elusive.

Some people are more easily bored than others. And generally, it's been found that men are bored more often than women. There are a couple of different scales that have been created to try and measure boredom, but they're all highly debated. One thing that's been noticed by those who study the phenomenon of boredom — yes, that's a job — is that there are significant similarities between people who are chronically bored and those who've suffered from traumatic brain injuries.

When one researcher was working with patients suffering from brain injuries, one of the common questions was to ask them if they felt bored. Everyone said, "Yes." Just what the connection is, however, is still up for debate. That same researcher from the University of Waterloo in Ontario suggests that the higher levels of endorphins found in brain injury patients have something to do with elevating the entertainment threshold.

Higher levels means that it takes more to keep the brains occupied and more to supply the stimuli to make the brain happy. These findings indicate a serious potential for finding a major key in overcoming addictions to dangerous behavior, especially things like alcoholism, drug abuse, and gambling.

People who are easily bored are constantly looking for new ways to fight the boredom. And that makes them more likely to turn to risky behaviors in an attempt to make their environments more interesting. Understanding how the brain works in chronically bored people might help us understand addiction better.

For instance, if the root cause is elevated levels of endorphins that make a person repeatedly turn to risky behaviors for fun, then we can figure out how to alleviate that pressure to take bigger and bigger risks for the same levels of enjoyment. Teaching addicts how to fill the boredom gap with other, less risky behaviors might also have a huge impact on recovery. According to studies done by methadone clinics, many addicts said they turned to their addiction when they were bored.

There has also been compelling evidence that the more bored you are, the more likely you are to develop health issues. In 1985, British researchers began a study by collecting information on the boredom levels of civil servants. A few decades later, they went back to see if there was a correlation between boredom, health issues, and dying young. There was, suggesting that external stimuli aren't just keeping us entertained, they're keeping us alive.

Not being able to smell or taste anything is a hugely understudied type of sensory deprivation, which is even more surprising considering how widespread it is. Estimates from smell and taste loss charity Fifth Sense suggest that about 5% of the population in the United Kingdom alone suffer from an inability to smell. Called anosmia, it means constantly living with a condition that most of us only experience when we have a cold,

It can be caused by things like head trauma, frontal lobe damage, or nasal polyps, and the consequences can be life-changing. The majority of people who can't smell or taste report chronic feelings of loneliness and isolation. Depression is common too, and it's not surprising. Not being able to truly share or understand a good meal or a fine wine with friends and family can be incredibly isolating.

There are also potential health risks associated with not being able to smell. If you lack the ability to perceive potentially dangerous smells like gas, smoke, or spoiled food, you're likely to spend more time sick from them. Smell is also a major factor in bonding with other people. It's the experience of a favorite perfume, cologne or detergent, the association of roses with a birthday, or the making of happy memories.

Without a sense of smell to remind us of those memories, it's no wonder that life can seem pretty one-dimensional. It's made even weirder with the fact that an estimated 90% of people can overcome the condition with treatment. It's never been on the top of medical radar, though, in part because of the perception that losing the ability to detect smell is less important than other types of conditions which deprive a person of a sense, like deafness or blindness.

Something you might not know about is something called black patch delirium. And yes, it's as terrifying as it sounds. This one is a bizarrely specific type of disorder brought on by a very specific sort of sensory deprivation. The term black patch delirium was coined by Avery Wiseman and Thomas Paul Hackett Jr. in 1958.

and it describes the mental state of otherwise healthy patients who go through eye surgery and are required to wear eye patches afterward. Visual hallucinations are common and are described as similar to those suffering from another disorder, Charles Bonnet syndrome. Charles Bonnet syndrome was first described in 1760, diagnosed in Bonnet's 87-year-old grandfather.

Nearly blind, he was nevertheless seeing incredibly complex hallucinations, including people and animals. It was differentiated from other types of hallucinations by the fact that he was otherwise healthy and understood that the hallucinations were not real.

There's more to the hallucinations with black patch delirium, though. Associated with the sensory deprivation that comes along with the eye patches and possibly helped along by the medications that might go along with surgery, it was described as being not just hallucinations but full-blown delirium. Even today, cataract and other similar surgeries require the removal of bright light and stimulus for recovery.

But today's post-operative eye surgery procedures were developed with prevention of black patch delirium in mind. And then there's the horrifyingly sad reality of children who were either born into or lived in some type of sensory deprivation. We all know that neglect and sensory deprivation can be crippling to a child, but any real scientific research on the impact of such an environment is obviously pretty unethical.

Sadly, the world is a way of providing, and in 2000, researchers from Harvard, Tulane, and the University of Maryland started working on a study of 136 Romanian children left either in foster care or in government-run orphanages. The comparison allowed them to track just what kind of impact sensory deprivation, especially of touch, has on children.

Under Nicolae Sasescu, Romanian women were tasked with bearing pretty high numbers of children, and that left about 150,000 of them in state-run institutions that were ill-equipped to deal with so many kids. This meant that babies were left lying in cribs, and one caregiver was in charge of as many as 25 toddlers. In rural facilities, children were simply tied to their beds. Some stayed there for years. What they found was horrible.

Charles Nelson, pediatric professor at Harvard, talked about the unearthly silence that would greet researchers when they walked into the facilities. Most babies and young children were cross-eyed, with nothing to look at and focus on, their eye muscles didn't develop, physical growth was stunted. Children that might look like little more than five or six years old were really teenagers

Lack of sensory stimulation led to a lack of growth hormone, and the universally low IQs found in the institutionalized children pointed to environmental causes, not genetic. Researchers, including Nelson, recruited and trained a group of foster families to see if they could reverse the damage that had been done to the children in their early years of neglect.

Over the course of five years, researchers charted the development of the institutionalized children. The children were moved to foster care, and another group of children being raised by their own parents. They found that children who were removed from institutions and exposed to all of the sensory stimuli and care of a regular family recovered fairly quickly, but not completely, and only if they were young enough.

While many quickly caught up in terms of things like motor development, sitting and walking, there were still high rates of things like ADHD, repressed brain activity, and small heads. For Nelson, that seemed to cement the idea that there are critical ages when children learn some of the basic skills needed throughout life. Suffering sensory deprivation at a young age can, in some cases, be irreversible.

The headquarters of the U.S. Forces Japan, the Yokota Air Base, may also be home to supernatural activity, according to a couple who claim to help anyone dealing with paranormal disturbances to rid their homes of unwanted spirits.

Chaplain Captain Lance Brown of Yokota's 374th Wing Staff Agency and his wife Karen Brown, who is working on a master's in counseling, have been performing home cleanses, or anointings, for the past eight years in homes where odd things occur. Supernatural activity is reported so often at this base in western Tokyo that it inspired a Facebook group, Yokota Ghost Hunter Club,

Its members post about paranormal phenomena they've experienced at their homes and workplaces. Lance is endorsed by the Pentecostal Church of God, and the home cleanses are not officially sanctioned by the Air Force, he told Stars and Stripes in an interview. Ghosts, or spiritual demonic activity, things of an evil nature, God combats that, he said. We have the ability to be that beacon of hope as people invite us.

The Browns said their cleansings are sometimes about helping someone cope with anxiety, heartbreak or a troubled past than about literal evil spirits, though Lance said they are not suggesting the supposed presence of spirits is all in the person's head. Lori Pope, who lives in one of Yokota's garden units, said she started to feel uncomfortable in her home last year.

"My three-year-old daughter has been experiencing sleep regression the past year," she told Stars and Stripes over Facebook Messenger on March 1. "There have been several times when I'd be watching her video monitor and I would see orbs of light in her room. There have been a few instances where I'd be in my bedroom and I would see a white streak of light run past the foot of my bed. And more recently, my daughter has been saying she's seeing monsters and that she's scared."

Pope and her husband, Master Sergeant Austin Pope of the 374th Maintenance Squadron, decided that since Lori is six months pregnant, they needed to do something to help their daughter feel less afraid and sleep through the night before bringing a new baby home. The family found the Browns on Facebook and, despite not identifying with any religion, decided to give it a try. "I know it won't happen overnight, but I'm hoping we can all live more comfortably in our home regardless if there was a spirit existing here," Lori said.

The Browns' anointing process starts with talking to the family about what is happening at home. "We discuss what they're seeing, hearing and sensing to determine if it's just a creaky house or if something evil is going on here," Lance said. "Some people call it a spidey sense, but we refer to it as a discernment of spirits — a heightened sense of things that are different or off."

They then apply anointing oil, a mixture of frankincense, myrrh, aloes, and herbs, to anything that needs to be blessed, including people and objects. They also use incense and holy water. It's not as intense as movies like The Exorcist or anything like that, Karen said. After we've left, the situation has never gotten worse. Ever. The popes, who had their home anointed March 1st, are hopeful that the process worked for her family.

"My daughter still isn't sleeping through the night," Laurie said, "but I feel a much greater sense of peace being home alone, especially at night." The Browns do the cleanses free of cost, judgment or disclosure, they said. People need not be religious to have a home cleansing, and the Browns said their objective is not to convert anyone's belief systems.

The couple said they received more calls at Yokota over the past year than they did at their previous assignment in Fort McConnell Air Force Base, Kansas. The Browns weren't certain exactly how many calls they've received on Yokota, but explained that they receive a steady flow of requests and had a cleansing arranged for right after their interview with Stars and Stripes.

Belief in hauntings, dark spirits, and exorcisms is rooted in several factors, including religious beliefs about the afterlife and people's desire to connect and find patterns and significance in unusual or seemingly inexplicable incidents, according to Michael Shermer, a science historian and the founder of the Skeptics Society in Altadena, California. Incidents seem significant when you're looking for it, he said in a phone interview on March 9th.

"The uncertainty and restrictions associated with the year-long coronavirus pandemic possibly amplified stress and emotion," Lance said. "Add to that the feeling of isolation and separation from family and friends that comes with living in a foreign country." "These feelings can make someone more heightened to portals for spiritual activity," Lance said.

The Browns declined to share the details of specific cleansings, but they said they have experienced fear and emotional responses themselves during some visits. "It's not anything of Hollywood, but evil is a very real thing," Lance said. "You just sense an absolute darkness, and your skin tingles, and the hair on the back of your neck raises, and you get a sense of, 'I don't want to be here.'"

Thanks for listening! In tonight's Sudden Death Overtime content, human history reports strange sightings in the skies with the appearance of three suns, unnaturally shaped clouds, and fireballs in the sky. Do all of these ancient eyewitness accounts have a natural explanation, or could we be seeing reports of extraterrestrial visitations in centuries past?

Also, according to oral tradition, a pair of witches came up from the underworld, bringing the Native American Zuni people two gifts. And one of those gifts was… death. These stories and the Sudden Death Overtime content tonight, which you can find in the podcast edition of tonight's show. I'll be uploading it Monday night. You can get the podcast anywhere you find podcasts, or just go to WeirdDarkness.com/Listen and you can find a podcast app that will work for you.

If you like the show, please tell somebody about it who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do. And tell them where they can listen to the show so they can tune in next weekend. Visit WeirdDarkness.com, you can follow me on social media, drop me an email, send me your own true paranormal story, listen to other podcasts that I host, and more...

All stories used tonight are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes, which I've already posted at WeirdDarkness.com. Weird Darkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light.

Matthew 16:26: "What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" And a final thought: sometimes angels are just ordinary people who help us believe in miracles again. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

With more reports of ghost sightings per person than any other village in the country, Pluckley Village in Kent, UK, is said to be England's most haunted. It was even recognized as such by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1989,

terrifying tales of flickering lights and blood-curdling shrieks have helped earn Pluckley its spooky title. Named the most haunted village in England, the rural village just outside of Ashford has scary stories to boot, with 12 apparitions including a dying highwayman, a Victorian lady and a phantom headmaster, it is a well-deserved accolade. It is said that sounds of knocking can be heard in St. Nicholas' Church at night,

Sometimes a flickering light can also be seen. It's been said that the light belongs to Lady Daring, who was buried in three lead coffins to try and prevent her decay. A red lady is said to search the graveyard for her stillborn baby, while a white lady has been seen within the church. Named after the lady, Daring Woods is situated just outside Pluckley and is also said to be haunted.

Nicknamed the Screaming Woods, the screams are said to be those of the men and women who came to their end after becoming lost among the trees. At Rose Quartz, a Tudor lady, believed to be the mistress to a member of the Daring family who took her own life after eating poisonous berries, is apparently heard calling for her dogs between 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. A ghostly reenactment of the battle between an unknown highwayman and a lawman has been spotted at Fright Corner.

The highwayman was killed, pinned to an oak tree with a sword. And a watercress lady is said to haunt Pinnock Bridge, where she accidentally set herself on fire. Legend has it that she burned to death having fallen asleep whilst smoking her pipe. Even the Black Horse Pub is said to have more spirits than those in the optics, with an invisible hand which moves items on the bar and sometimes hides purses and tidies messes and disembodied screaming.

Here, there have been multiple instances of articles, normally clothing, vanishing on a regular basis, only to be replaced in much the same position, sometimes years later. The poltergeist responsible is believed to be a woman called Jessie Brooks, who has also been seen wandering looking for a child she'd lost. The blacksmith's arms is also a spooky haunt,

Previously called the "spectre's arms" and the "ghost's arms," three ghosts are said to reside here: a tutor maid, a coachman, and a cavalier. The Daring Arms was once a hunting lodge, but here at the pub, the ghost of an old lady is said to be sitting in the bar in Victorian dress, so clear that punters are said to have mistaken her for a real customer. An accident at the brickworks resulted in the death of a laborer, crushed by a falling wall of clay.

Screams have been frequently heard in the area and are said to be those of the deceased laborer. At the former mill site, the dark, ghostly figure of miller Richard "Dickey" Buss has been seen at the side of his windmill, usually prior to a thunderstorm. The windmill was destroyed by fire after being struck by lightning in 1939. And at Maltman's Hill, sounds and visions of a horse-drawn coach are said to haunt the area with two apparitions in recent times.

There's also a bush, it is said, which can be used to summon the devil by dancing round it and saying a spell, although no one knows where it is. Greystones, which was previously known as Rectory Cottage, is said to host a phantom monk, although no sightings have been reported by residents since the name change. At Elvie Farm, a phantom walker is said to frequent the farmhouse, now a hotel,

There have also been reports of a haunting smell, that of burning yarn or wool. Little Chart Church in the village has also had its fair share of hauntings. St. Mary the Virgin and Holy Rood, as it was originally called, was built by the Normans in the 11th century next to the Screaming Woods. Many visitors described a beautiful yet eerie feel to the church. However, on August 16, 1944, it took on a whole new existence.

This was when a doodlebug was flying overhead and dropped a bomb on the village, with St. Mary's taking the brunt of the damage. With only the damaged tower and parts of the chancel wall surviving, the bells were removed and stored. In 1955, a new church was built nearer the village. Fortunately, no one was killed, but that has not stopped the site from becoming a ghost hunter's paradise.

Back in 2019, before COVID-19 was even in vocabulary, Sean Doherty and fellow reporter Lauren McDougal set off on a dark Friday night to find out if there was any truth in these legends, or if the stories of hauntings were little more than tales to scare children and attract tourists. Both fairly cynical towards the idea of paranormal activities, they went without any real fear of what they might encounter. Their cockiness would not last long.

As they arrived at their hotel, just as things were getting dark, they encountered their first spook. And perhaps the scariest thing imaginable for any millennial, they suddenly lost all phone signal. It wasn't the only sign of electronics playing with their minds. Lauren's Fitbit buzzed for no reason, a digital hiccup or a message from beyond.

After settling in their room, they discovered another fright. They were not alone. An incredibly large spider had taken up residence inside the room's bathtub. It felt like a menacing sign of things to come. When they spoke to the lady behind the bar about the so-called haunted nature of the hotel, she scoffed, "It's nonsense." Reassured by this, once darkness fell, Sean and Lauren walked out of the hotel's main entrance. But in what felt almost cliché,

They were greeted by a black cat. He seemed friendly, but they both agreed it was definitely a sign of something. Following them in the dark for a mile and a half down a path away from the hotel, they wondered if the cat was trying to shepherd them back to safety. If so, his warning fell on deaf ears, as Sean and Lauren were there on a mission.

After stopping in at the Rose and Crown, the barmaid Becky Ward told them that while she had never experienced any horrors there, when she had been working at the plow in nearby Stalisfield Green, she had seen some things that defied explanation. "'I had stuff happening there,' she said. "'Glasses falling off the shelf. We had a glass one time that went flying off for no reason.' Next stop was the Black Horse Inn, allegedly the most haunted pub in Kent."

A manager of the bar had once claimed that she had seen a glass move of its own volition along a shelf until it reached the edge. She also said that cutlery had been arranged to the side of a dresser without anyone being nearby to have done it, that dogs would refuse to enter an upstairs room, and that dogs would bark at a specific spot by the kitchen for no reason. As Sean and Lauren got there at 11 p.m., the darkness of the building put them slightly on edge.

Quietly approaching the door, they realized the reason for the eerie silence was that the pub had closed. They stayed to see if they could sense any otherworldly presence. After a few moments of waiting, Sean and Lauren agreed there was nothing there. But no sooner had they made that decision, the barking of two dogs sent them both jumping.

In the darkness, there was no way of telling if these were the howls of incorporeal devil hounds or the landlord's pets. But they both agreed it was best to move along quickly. They moved onwards through the cold, black night to the Church of St. Nicholas. Members of the Daring family had been buried here, and the sound of knocking from the family vault is said to have been heard by numerous visitors.

A group of psychic researchers in the 1970s tried to find evidence of spirits in the church when they stayed there overnight. With nothing unusual found on their cameras or recorders, they expressed their disappointment to the vicar and said the only entertainment they had during the night was from the vicar's dog, who had repeatedly joined them. He replied, "I don't have a dog."

Sean thought the story was a little ridiculous, but as he read it aloud, he again heard the sounds of dogs barking. The two ghost hunters were too far from the pub for it to have been the same animals, and they could neither hear or see anyone nearby. Sean, the cynic, was beginning to feel a little less confident, and though he shrugged it off by sarcastically saying, "'Spooky,' he was somewhat shook."

On to the old house, Greystones, a spot rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a lovelorn Tudor monk. The man said to have been in love with a young lady, the mistress of another man who lived close by. The woman, unable to handle the love triangle she was involved in, took her own life. A brown-robed figure has apparently been seen by some in the area, though in the pitch black Sean and Lauren saw little.

It's safe to say that neither of them had any desire to stray from the beaten path and were feeling a little uneasy loitering around in the very residential area in the early hours. Passing through the screaming wood with their phone batteries rapidly dying and no other source of light, they were regretting the decision to go exploring during the witching hour, midnight to 1 a.m.,

Ramblers have been said to have heard terrible screams in these woods, and though they listened intently, Sean and Lauren heard little but the wind. Feeling relieved to be going to their last stop, the paranormal investigators arrived at a crossroads called Fright Corner. It was here that an outlaw was said to have been killed by officers of the law. During evenings such as theirs, some have reported seeing a corpse, impaled with a sword, lying in front of a tree.

Instead, it was the shadow of a phone in the distance and transit truck hurtling around the corner in the middle of the road that really gave the two a fright. Neither saw any bodies, living or dead, and had no more phantom dogs hounding them as they made their way back to the hotel. Shining their phone lights in front of them, they saw two silver spots flashing in the distance, just as they crossed the boundary of the hotel's grounds.

As they got closer, Sean and Lauren realized it was that cat again, this time accompanied by another feline friend. It was clear they were here to welcome the two investigators back to safety, but gave them a chastising stare as if to warn, "This time you got lucky, but don't go testing your luck again." It is one of the most controversial cases of Chilean ufology,

beings that would have announced earthquakes, natural disasters, and even the fall of the Challenger. For more than two decades, there has been speculation about the existence of the famous Friendship Island. However, until now, there is still no certainty of its possible location, nor of the truthfulness of the contact with the extraterrestrial inhabitants of the island. That story is up next on Weird Darkness.

Like many other indigenous tribes of the United States, the Zuni believed in magic and witchcraft. For the Zuni, the belief in witchcraft goes back to their earliest times, including in Zuni creation myths. According to oral tradition, a pair of witches came up from the underworld, bringing the people two gifts — death to keep the world from becoming overcrowded and corn to feed the people.

Magical powers were not always differentiated as good or evil, with the people using their magical skills for a number of purposes. In fact, the concept of a witch was tied to the concepts of life and human origin, with the people believing that witches existed alongside humans and not apart from other living beings. Thus, they were not supernatural. The Tua believed that witches accompany people daily and are defined as those, quote, of a different breath, unquote.

However, they had a different physical and spiritual existence, not like common humans. Rather, they had to live on the unexpired lives of their victims by capturing or indoctrinating their souls. Further, they had to continually kill or perish themselves. Because of this requirement to continually kill, witchcraft was blamed for any disaster of magnitude, like droughts, epidemic diseases, or a flood.

Further, any disharmony among the people or infractions of proper behavior were also equated with witchcraft. At one point, witchcraft among the Zuni was the only recognized crime. The council of high priests decided who the witches were, and the Baal priests were tasked for their executions. Because the council was supposed to be removed from any type of violence, the Baal priests who were associated with war enforced their decisions.

The Baal priests were also responsible for examining the accused and reviewing the evidence. If the accused was found guilty, he was hung by the wrists and tortured until he confessed. If the accused revealed the source of his or her power, he might be released or at least saved from execution. Though the Spanish, when they ruled the southwest, tried to change the culture of the Pueblo tribes, including their belief in witchcraft, they were unsuccessful.

After the Pueblo Revolt, the Spanish relaxed their restrictions on the Pueblo culture, and the belief in witchcraft continued. When the United States obtained New Mexico and other areas of the Southwest, Indian agents were sent out to monitor the Indians and to, once again, attempt to change their culture. Over the years, several reports were made regarding Zuni witchcraft and its punishment.

Reports indicated that in March of 1855, Indians of the Nambi Pueblo in New Mexico butchered three men and one woman of their village in a most horrible manner for alleged witchcraft. In 1880, an Indian agent reported seeing a man who was tied up by his wrists behind his back and lifted so that his feet could not touch the ground. The Zuni said that he had brought sickness and death to some of the people.

The agent reported the incident to his superiors at Santa Fe, New Mexico, who came to the Zuni to hold a council. When questioned, the Indians replied, "'We have our government and laws, and what has happened is all right. We do not want you to interfere, but we want you to allow us the same privileges as you white people claim.'" And they added, "'If you will tend to your own business, we will tend to ours.'"

Another report indicated that a Zuni Indian killed a woman of the same pueblo, believing her to be a witch and that she had caused the death of his children. In August 1889, accusations of witchcraft were agitated because of drought. It was said that someone must be keeping away the rain. A poor old man was accused, and he was hung up by his wrists tied behind his back. After he confessed, they let him down.

After he received more threats, the man left the pueblo and a Mexican who took pity on him gave him a home. The drought continued, and the witch excitement spread. In October, an old woman was hung up in like manner as a witch until she confessed. She then implicated her nephew, a boy of 16 years, a common thief.

He was hung in the same way, was let down once or twice, was beaten about his head with sticks, was then hung again, remained hanging all night and all day until he died the next night. A dozen Americans saw the hanging. One gentleman tried to cut the boy down but was forbidden to interfere and told "non-Americans business."

In an Indian agent report of 1892, it was recorded, "...this evil still goes on. The victims are often those who depart from the old Pueblo customs and incline to the ways of civilized life. In the estimation of the ruling Zuni, what we call progress is the most criminal of offenses and must be trotted out by the most summary and vindictive tortures."

While this report was waiting the printer, early in December, two Zuni Indians with whom I talked freely last July were seized and subjected to the witch torture methods. They were probably the most progressive of any people in the Pueblo. Seized, violently seized, they were strung up by their wrists, beaten with war clubs, and kept hanging all night, all the next day, and until 10 o'clock the second night.

They were let down occasionally for a few moments to induce confession, but suffered indescribable torture. To end the suffering, they finally confessed that they were witches and were let off when life was almost gone. Some perish in these tortures. I asked an intelligent gentleman, a resident in his Pueblo for 12 years, how often do these witch cases occur? He replied, "...one nearly every year."

either resulting in death or being run off from the pueblo, sometimes followed and killed. Some years more than one. Half a dozen Americans have witnessed some cases. No Zuni Indian has been brought to justice and punished for these outrages, but now three men are arrested for the late offenses and in jail awaiting trial. They are undoubtedly not the guilty parties.

The real offenders, men of influence in managing the affairs of the pueblo, turned over to the authorities these three poor men who were unable to help themselves and expect thus to clear their own skirts. In 1898 through 1899, a smallpox epidemic was blamed for witchcraft, and in 1910 through 1911, a measles epidemic was also blamed on sorcery. During the smallpox epidemic, two young men were held responsible.

They would have been executed except for an American school teacher who got a detachment of soldiers to protect them. Though the witches were saved, some of the soldiers and their horses later died of poisoning. The U.S. government stopped the Zuni's public torture and execution of witches, but some convicted witches were still killed in secret. The last public witch trials of the Zuni that at least we know of were in 1925.

However, a belief in witchcraft remained for many years. Since the beginning of time, people have been looking at the sky, observing celestial bodies and unexplained atmospheric phenomena. Historical records reveal that people from all cultures and times have also observed oddly shaped clouds and lights in the sky.

Ancient people could not always explain them as comets, planets, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, three stars of Orion's belt, or perhaps Sirius, the dog star located to the left of Orion. How do we explain the sightings of three suns or funnel-shaped clouds on fire and other unusual atmospheric phenomena? Are some of the weird objects seen in the skies actually cloaked UFOs?

On June 6, 1797, the English newspaper Brighton Advertiser reported a very interesting sighting that cannot be classified as a normal and natural atmospheric phenomenon. This extraordinary incident took place in the afternoon between the hours of 4 and 5 in Saint-Malo, a ring-walled old town and port in Brittany in northwestern France on the English Channel.

The newspaper wrote that "three perfect suns were seen all in a row above the western horizon. The sky was very clear at the time, and there was no one who saw the unusual sight that believed it to have been a mirage or other atmospheric illusion. The central seemed more brilliant than his two luminous attendants, and between the three there seemed to be a communication in the shape of waves of light composed of all the prismatic colors,

At about the same time, a rainbow made its appearance at a short distance above the central sun, upside down. That is to say, the two ends pointed toward the zenith and the boughs kneel toward the horizon. What did the inhabitants of St. Malo really observe in the sky? Could the three suns aligned all in a row be brightly shining, unidentified flying objects? Throughout the ages, people of all nations and backgrounds have seen strange clouds in the skies.

Ancient Indian manuscripts mentioned Vimanas that were highly advanced space vehicles used by the gods. Present in the sky of India, these flying machines were powered by using certain chemicals, and a pilot of a Vimana was able to cloak his flying machine and give it the appearance of a cloud

Strange clouds, which have been visible in the same place for hours, have also been witnessed by humans throughout the history of mankind and still are even in modern times. The Bible offers many good examples of such "clouds," which were the most common description used when referring to Yahweh's flying machines. It is said that Yahweh was moving around the skies in thick, swift, bright, dark, low, huge, and fiery clouds.

possibly all types of clouds one can think of. Moses frequently mentioned the presence of the cloud chariots. The Lord descended in the cloud. The Lord came down in a cloud. The Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead them the way, and by night in a pillar of fire. The prophet Daniel was another who described the use of a cloudy chariot for cosmic transportation.

On August 1, 1888, at 1:00, a strange phenomenon was witnessed in Monroe, Georgia. Mr. H. C. Harrison heard a loud noise and went outside to see what was happening. According to the New York Times, August 2, 1888, "Though the sky was clear and sun shining in all its splendor, a small funnel-shaped cloud was seen approaching from the southwest at a rapid rate, attended with a rumbling sound like thunder."

The whirling body rose and fell, and occasional reports were heard described as sounding like an explosion of oil barrels on fire. The body passed between Mr. Harrison's house and the Colored Baptist Church and crossed the street. It then turned in the direction of the old Stilwell Place. In crossing a sandy flat, a shaft of sand was elevated high in the air, having the appearance of almost a solid pillow.

The body afterward assumed the appearance of fire, and great flaming tongues emerged from the top as from a burning building, emitting heat for some distance, which was felt by those who witnessed the scene. In passing through a cotton patch some leaves were scorched to a crisp, and others on the same stalk were unharmed. The body passed into a skirt of pines and disappeared. Did Mr. Harrison perhaps see an extraterrestrial craft that used clouds as a form of camouflage to move around unnoticed?

In 1973, physicist David Kubrin and his wife were visiting the Pinnacles National Monument in California. They suddenly noticed a light streak by just above the treetops, producing shock waves in the air. Then it stopped without deceleration, as if weightless. The light was basically ovoid in form, and as it stopped, it seemed to go into a spin, causing its light to dissipate. It lost its shape and merged somewhat with the surrounding air.

David Kubrin took a photo when the object began spinning. It should be noted that beneath the pinnacles there is a cave system largely still unexplored by archaeologists. Unfortunately, there are no surviving Indian legends that refer to the use of the caves. Another incident that can easily be classified under the category "Unexplained Atmospheric Phenomena" occurred on February 11, 1922, when a mysterious fireball was seen off the Brazilian coast.

On the arrival of the lamport and holt liner Vauban from South American ports, Frank C. Blessing, the second officer, reported witnessing an unusual astronomical phenomenon which lit up the ship and startled people on deck. According to the New York Times, on February 20, 1922, the officer said he was in charge of the bridge at the bells in the first watch at 9.30 p.m.,

when he saw a huge ball of fire rise above the horizon in the west and describe a low arc ahead of the ship and disappear below the horizon. When he took his observations, the fireball, which was as large as the full moon in the southern hemisphere and surrounded by a flaming halo lighting up the sky and sea, was about 10 degrees above the horizon. It was traveling at great speed and was in sight 3 minutes and 20 seconds.

In describing the strange sight, Officer Blessing said, "...the ball was a very fiery and brilliant red, with a tall and long fiery trail, which lit up the sea in all directions. The ship, and for a quarter of a mile around, was lit up like day, and the light was so brilliant that it dimmed the lamp in the binnacle and the smoking-room lights, which caused passengers inside to rush out on deck to see what was the matter."

I was scared at the strange sight because I thought it had to do something with the end of the world. It was too large for a meteor and came up from the horizon on the west and did not drop from the zenith. I cannot estimate how far it was from the ship when it passed across the bows. I called the captain to see it, but by the time he reached the bridge, the ball of fire had disappeared. I cannot imagine what it could have been and the astronomers attached to the observatories could not explain it to me.

When we arrived at Rio de Janeiro, the scientists from the observatory came on board and questioned me as to the time I'd seen the phenomenon and what it was like. The same thing took place in Buenos Aires and Montevideo. From what the astronomers told me, the big ball of fire must have been visible with a radius of 700 miles north, southeast, and west of the Vauban when we observed it.

Unexplained atmospheric phenomena intrigue astronomers and other scientists, but also numerous ufologists who seriously consider that the presence of extraterrestrial spacecraft can explain many of these sightings. Until scientists can present an adequate explanation for unexplained, oddly-shaped funnel clouds, strange-behaving whirlwinds, and mysterious fireballs,

we can assume that certain unusual atmospheric phenomena can be related to the cloaked, unidentified flying objects.

We all dream, but for some people, what should be a time for their bodies and minds to rest turns into a nightmare from which they cannot escape. Our next Weird Darkness live stream is Saturday night, December 28th on the Weird Darkness YouTube channel. And during the live broadcast, I'll share some of these chilling nighttime stories.

Tales of shadow people, sleep paralysis, and demons who stalk their victims in that place between dreams and reality. I'll share true tales of prophetic dreams, some joyful, some not. Sleepwalking incidents that are both amusing and disturbing. I'll also share real stories of night terrors so horrifying that sleep

became something to fear and dread for those victimized by the night. You might not want to sleep after joining our next live stream. It's Saturday, December 28th at 5pm Pacific, 6pm Mountain, 7pm Central, 8pm Eastern. On the lighter side, I'll also be responding to comments and questions live on the air and doing a giveaway of some Weird Darkness merch.

Prepare yourself for our next live scream for chilling tales of what some people must endure in an attempt to get some sleep. Find the details on the live screen page at WeirdDarkness.com.