Join us at the First Anomaly Archives Meetup of 2010 this Saturday at the Austin History Center from 3-4pm.(See end of email for venue details)

Sponsoring this meetup and venue is the local Austin Mufon chapter headed by Anomaly Archives board member Mike DeGroff.

The monthly Austin Mufon meeting is 1-4pm the first Saturday of most months.

As this is our first official “MeetUp” we’ll be answering questions about the organization, its mission, projects and goals, etc.

We may watch a video or two, talk about books we’re reading, and generally talking about a wide variety of anomalous subjects.

We’ll also be giving away a couple of books to some lucky attendees. Kind of like a door prize. Details at the meeting.

Also, after the meeting, if there’s enough interest, perhaps we can retire to some comfortable outdoor eatery for “conversations over saucers” with coffee, tea, beer, etc.

Finally, we’re pleased to announce that the Anomaly Archives will be hosting British Fortean Cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes the afternoon of Saturday, March 20th. Details to follow shortly.

Thank you for your support. We look forward to seeing you all at the Austin History Center this Saturday.

- SMiles Lewis

Founder & President
www.AnomalyArchives.org
AUSTIN HISTORY CENTER
810 Guadalupe, Austin, TX 78701

Anomaly Archives Meetup this Saturday – Austin Anomaly Archives (Austin, TX) – Meetup.com.

RESCHEDULED FOR TUESDAY MARCH 2nd

“People Often Fear What They Don’t Understand”

Paranormal Response

The Paranormal Response Team

Paranormal Response – People often fear what they don’t understand

Join the Paranormal Response Team LIVE Tuesday Night on Austin Community TeleVision as they welcome their guest, SMiles Lewis, to talk about the Anomaly Archives lending library, UFOs and other Anomalous Phenomena.

Tune in to Austin cable Channel 10 from 9-10pm CST Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 – Hosts Sara & Kristi will discuss with SMiles Lewis the various areas of overlap between paranormal and UFO investigations.

Check out these interesting episodes exploring Lucid Dreams, Marfa Mystery Lights and the UFO world of Freeman:

SMiles Lewis is guest on Paranormal Response TV live in Austin, Tuesday Night

Oh, the wonders of the internet! You never know what you might find, how far it might travel, and who might lay claim to it.

Recently a video has been making the rounds that shows some sort of blob-like, pulsating masses living in a sewer pipe. Whatever they are, they appear to be animal (although slime molds have not been completely ruled out yet) and despite their ability to move, they seem to be attached to the wall of the sewer pipes by some sort of mucous or film. In some portions of the recording you can see this mucillagenous layer floating in the water beneath the bulk of the mass. Early speculation at the Cryptoworld website ranged from bryozoan to freshwater jellyfish to tubifex worms. Although tubifex worms sometimes clump, they are an aquatic species and the blob shown on the video exists at least partially out of the water. Another popular explanation, bryozoans, typically create colonies of calcium structures, much like corals, however not all species do so. But while comments were still being posted and debates were raging about just what the video showed, a couple of television news sources surfaced, each identifiying the blob.

The only problem is, there are at least two different stations, from two different cities, in two very different parts of the country, both identifying the creatures as something found beneath their streets, and both offering different explanations of just what the blob is.

TV News 14, out of Raleigh, North Carolina is identifying the blob as a colony of tubifex worms found in a private sewer system by the Raleigh Public Utilities Department.

But Fox 31, out of Denver, Colorado went with the bryozoan explanation when they reported a similar story in January of last year, and quoted a water system worker who claimed this particular colony was actually residing in the Crestview Water System, in a pipe near the intersection of 76th and Pecos.

Although the images are surprisingly similar, it is defintiely possible that they are from two different colonies, filmed in two separate locations, on different dates. The images supposedly coming out of North Carolina, for instance, display a late April, 2009 time stamp. However, given superficial appearances and the habitat, its highly unlikely that they represent two separate organisms. Although I’m in no way an authority, or in any way qualified to make a defintive identification, based on what I have read about the life cycles and habits of tubifex and bryozoans, I’m leaning more toward the latter as an explanation for our mystery blobs.

What do you think?

Watching the ARGonauts Play

If you’ve followed the Elfis Network from the beginning then you know of my early interest in Alternate Reality Gaming and their potential for “mucking up the works” for paranormal and parapolitical researchers. You may also know that my interests were rekindled in 2007 by the provocative hypotheses of blogger DreamsEnd, who speculated that the mysterious suicides of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake were some kind of sophisticated art hoax or viral marketing / alternate reality game. After a very rough period of defending his theories online, blogger DreamsEnd temporarily pulled up shop, taking down his websites. My own re-investigations into ARGland dwindled and I too went back to my normal para activities…

That is until I became aware of a new blog that was following many of the threads explored by DreamsEnd; KadesKorner. Here was another blogger (with a writing style nearly identical to that found at DreamsEnd) writing about many of the themes and topics we’d been exploring during the Theremicity period: Andy Kaufman, Election Fraud, Andy Stephenson, false identities, the Franklin Coverup, the Octopus and PROMIS, Middle East parapolitics and … Theresa Duncan and ARGs! And through “Kade” I learned of a new ARG to watch out for; what has come to be called TGATT or The Great And The Terrible aka I’m Sorry. But before getting off into the I’m Sorry mindfu…, er um, ARG, let’s take a peek at some of the more interesting ARGs and Viral Marketing campaigns that have been bleeding through their alternate ARGiverse realities into our own.

Read more »

Just plain weird and Fortean … a great pick-me-up story in a world gone mad.

Woman Claims To Find $5 Bill Inside Coconut

PEARL CITY, Hawaii — It is a mystery to a family in Pearl City, Hawaii, and they swear it really happened. A woman said she found a $5 bill inside a coconut.

Kuulei Mata said she brought home fresh coconuts from a local market and cracked some of them open.

She was disappointed to find that one, and then another, had water but no meat.

The coconuts were so bad she was going to return them and ask for her money back. Then she cracked open another one and reached inside.

“I went in with my fingers and out came this money. I didn’t realize it was $5,” Kuulei Mata said. “I called my husband and said, ‘Look! Look!’”

Ron Mata had been watching TV. He said sure enough, his wife produced $5 from the coconut, which had been in a refrigerator.

“So I grabbed it. It was a wet, damp and cold $5 bill she got. I said, ‘No! No way,’” Ron Mata said.

The couple has no idea how the money found its way into the hard shell fruit.

The Matas understand skeptics saying, “It’s too good to be true. It’s like, believe it or not, you know?”

It makes one wonder if money may grow on trees after all.”

via Rigorous Intuition Forums via Cabinet of Wonders via Professor Hex.