The British government has released their “first batch” of UFO files at ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk, as part of a four year program to make the files available to the public.

Also available at the national archives UFO site are videocasts and podcasts from Nick Pope and Dr. David Clarke, respectively, as well as older, already released UFO files, in PDF format (available for download at “a small fee”, according to the site, although all but those available under the UFO Files from the 1970s link are listed at £0.00, and the various PDFs available under UFO Files from the 1970s are either free or £3.50 per document).

Southern Ohio may seem a world-away from the Pacific Northwest habitat one typically pictures when they hear the word Bigfoot, but the region does have a rich history of hairy biped reports. The rugged Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio, in particular, have a number of reports from the Shawnee State Forest in Scioto and Adams Counties, and the Wayne National Forest further east. In his book “Field Guide to Bigfoot and Other Mystery Primates” Loren Coleman recounts the story of a devil monkey seen in the Duncansville area of Adams County. (Duncansville, which is mostly Amish owned hilltop pasture land and forest, is a short drive from the famous Serpent Mound and was a destination for curiosity seekers in the mid to late 1980s because of an image of an angel or Christ supposedly burned into a church door when a young girl was cured of an illness after stepping outside during a service for some fresh air and having the entity appear to her.) The famous Ohio Howl was also recorded in eastern Appalachian Ohio, in Columbiana County where Ohio borders Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Read more »

Nick Redfern alerted us to an event that our North Texas readers might be interested in attending. And if you can’t attend the lecture, you may want to find a copy of Chad Lewis’ book … which also features a foreward by Mr. Redfern.

Hidden Headlines of Texas: Strange, Unusual and Bizarre Newspaper Stories, 1860 - 1910 by Chad Lewis

Bizarre Texas History

Denton TX – UFOs sightings in the Texas sky are not a new phenomenon; in fact, a mysterious airship was reported in Denton in April 1897. Chad Lewis, author and paranormal investigator, will explore this sighting and other bizarre stories reported in turn-of-the-century Texas Newspapers.

Join us at the Emily Fowler Central Library at 502 Oakland Street, March 15, 2008 at 3:00 for this fascinating presentation cosponsored by the Denton Area Paranormal Society. Copies of the book “Hidden Headlines of Texas” will be available for purchase.

For more information, contact Laura Douglas, Special Collections Librarian, at 940-349-8749 or at laura.douglas@cityofdenton.com

Hat tip to Nick Redfern at UFOMystic » Texas UFOs

Once upon a time there were a couple of guys in Texas with an interest in Bigfoot reports from their state who started an organization called the Texas Bigfoot Research Center. Over time the organization grew. They began investigating reports. They began organizing field expeditions and conducting long-term camera trap surveys. Their dedication to detail gained the discrete support of many scientists and academics, and the open support of notable researchers and authors such as Dr. Jeff Meldrum and Loren Coleman. Eventually the group gained non-profit status and changed their name to the Texas Bigfoot Research Conservancy.

And now they have a new web address. After a long period of stasis, the new TBRC site is up and active at www.texasbigfoot.org. The old address, texasbigfoot.com, is still active and will redirect to the new site, so if you’re already familiar with the organization but are too lazy to update your links, you’re fine. There is still good reason to check out the new site though. Besides the new look there are a number of newly updated Incident Reports (many of which have been setting in queue waiting for the new site to be finished) and new features, including an RSS feed option for receiving updates when those new Incident Reports are entered and an easy to use search function for locating Incident Reports by State and County. Other features include a News page, details of TBRC Research Methodology, details of current and past Research Projects, and image after image of amazing landscape and wildlife photography. Even if you have no interest in Bigfoot, it’s worth checking out just to see some of the amazing shots captured by their camera traps.

This Saturday, February 16 at 2 PM, Nick Redfern will be speaking at the downtown Dallas Public Library. The talk is entitled:

Weird Mysteries of Texas: UFO’s, Bigfoot, Ghosts and more.

J. Erik Jonsson Central Library (2-3 PM)
1515 Young Street
The Studio, Humanities Division, 3rd Floor,
Dallas, TX75201

I was recently tipped to an MP3 of David Lee Roth’s isolated vocal track for “Running with the Devil”

You can find it here.

Enjoy!

In the medieval era most parishioners did not speak Latin. Mass, however, was delivered in Latin (sometimes, undoubtedly, by illiterate priests who were simply reciting by rote). In the highly organized structure of the Catholic Church the fact that the laity could not understand Latin did not matter. It was not their lot to truly understand, but to accept on faith. There were priests to act as intermediaries in absolving their sins. There were Bishops and Cardinals whose jobs were to pour over esoteric texts and pages filled with strange symbols and letters, to unravel and understand the workings of God’s Universe and to dole out that knowledge in spoonfuls and dollops as they saw fit.

Jump forward thirteen centuries and although the players have changed, the game has stayed pretty much the same. Today it isn’t God’s Universe but a universe ruled by laws of physics and complex mathematics that only professors (cum-priests) can decipher. As with the medieval parishioners and their Latin mass, the average person today doesn’t understand the mathematics used to calculate the redshift in a star, they simply take it on faith that the calculations are correct and that Star X is Y light years away. Read more »

The year 2007 has been a banner anniversary year for Forteans in general and ufologist in particular. Those with even a passing interest in unexplained phenomenon know that 2007 marks the 60^th anniversary of the June 24, 1947 Kenneth Arnold sighting that ushered in the modern era of UFO sightings and gave popular birth to the term flying saucer, as well as the 60^th anniversary of the purported late June or early July crash in Roswell, New Mexico (reports of the exact crash date vary and the story would remain buried until Stanton Friedman, a physicist with experience working on various government air and spacecraft projects, began investigating the Roswell rumors in 1978).

Read more »