Review: The Men Who Stare at Goats

Movie Review: I recommend seeing this movie.  It was funny, unexpected and did have a few connections to some strange things that really happened.

Here is an interesting report from TDG on the topic:

With the new public attention on the story, a number of the individuals involved have thrown some doubts on the veracity of Ronson’s account.

John Alexander has long disputed a number of the claims in The Men Who Stare at Goats, and in a recent article (“They Stared at Goats Because…“) states that even the title is incorrect, as the goat in question actually died after being struck using a martial arts move. Meanwhile, Stargate remote viewer Paul Smith, in an Amazon review of the book, says that while Goats is an entertaining read, it is not an accurate summation of the actual history – and at times, uses plenty of ‘artistic license’ in presenting material. And Jim Channon, whose ‘First Earth Battalion’ idea is central to much of Goats (and who has been very sporting and good-humoured about his treatment in the book), has a press release on his website which says that “Ronson’s tongue-in-cheek account is classified as a work of ‘non-fiction,’ but it is so loaded with speculation and inaccuracy, it sets the stage for much of the confusion.”

See ghosts? There may be a medical reason

Spooky footsteps, faint figures, the feeling of being watched – these unsettling signs of a ghost are as familiar to us as the goose bumps on the back of our arm (or neck).

But are there physiological explanations for those things that go bump in the night? …

“ghosts” are often the result of pranks, environmental phenomenon, or physiological conditions such as sleep paralysis and the hypnogogic and hypnopompic hallucinations that accompany it.

Carbon monoxide poisoning – and the hallucinations that can occur with it – is another possible explanation, although Nickell says he’s never encountered this scenario.

… In 1921, the American Journal of Ophthalmology published a case study involving a couple who moved into a house and promptly began to suffer headaches, listlessness and strange auditory and visual hallucinations (footsteps, mysterious figures, strange sensations, etc.). Their symptoms were finally traced to a faulty furnace.

A more recent case in 2005 involved a woman who was found delirious and hyperventilating after seeing a “ghost” while taking a shower; respondents discovered a new gas water heater had been improperly installed, flooding her house with carbon monoxide. …

via See ghosts? There may be a medical reason – The Body Odd – msnbc.com.

Tweeters ask: is there anybody (famous) there?

Tweeters are being invited to submit questions for the spirits of departed celebrities including Michael Jackson and William Shakespeare as part of the world’s first Twitter seance.

A psychic medium will then try to contact the stars — who were chosen along with actor River Phoenix and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain from nominations sent in by the public — at the London-based seance on Friday, the day before Halloween.

Other prominent dead figures nominated by tweeters keen to pose questions during the “tweance” included John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Abraham Lincoln and Houdini.

Twitter users will be able to follow the seance live on the micro-blogging site, which psychic Jayne Wallace will use to relay any responses she receives from the spirits.

via Tweeters ask: is there anybody (famous) there? – Yahoo! News.

Ripples from the Future, A link between the real world and the Lucid Dream world?

Today I learned that a co-worker friend of mine who worked a few doors down from the Forest Service Office in my building committed suicide last night after struggling for months with severe depression. In her memory, I have submitted the following true story to The Lucid Dream Exchange:

Ripples from the Future
A link between the real world and the Lucid Dream world?
By Xeno

During my undergraduate years at a University of California school, I learned about lucid dreaming from a psychology class titled “Altered States of Consciousness” taught by Charlie Tart. I was subscribing at the time to “the Lucidity Letter” where readers share experiences and experimental results and I’d read several books on the topic. I tried various techniques to become lucid, with Dr. Stephen LaBerge’s MILD being the most effective.

One night I realized I was dreaming when I found myself lying on my side but floating two feet above the grass in a specific location on campus. I decided to try an experiment. I knew my best friend “K” kept a dream journal, so I decided in my lucid dream to find her and see if I could influence her writing.

I got this idea because Professor Tart had told us of experiments with astral projection under hypnosis where people would try to read something written on top of a file cabinet that would be visible only to someone floating near the ceiling. I very much wanted to test for a connection between the real world and my lucid dream world.

In my dream, I next floated up to a standing position, then found someone who then morphed into my friend “K” .

I said excitedly, “K, I’m dreaming!”

She looked skeptical. I said, “If I can walk through that tree, will you believe I am dreaming?”

She said, “Sure”.

I walked straight inside a large oak tree. Since me expectation was that trees are dark inside, it got dark. I then woke up.

Unfortunately, when I called her in the morning, “K” did not recall her dreams that night and did not write in her dream journal. The dream was very powerful for me, nevertheless.

About six years after the tree dream, I got a job on the same campus. Guess what? Right through that very tree, in the direction I walked in my lucid dream, was my new office!

It gets better. After a few years of working there, I went on vacation.

When I returned, a workman was finishing the job of cutting down my tree. He said it had to be cut down to save the other nearby large trees because it had a disease.
Here’s the kicker: Every day, for years since, I have walked “though” where that tree was as I bring my lunch back to my office.  The missing tree, my office, and the dinning commons where I get my food each day are in a straight line. For years before they cut the tree down, I walked around it every day at lunch time.

Logic flaws such as “interpretation after the fact” of simple coincidences and mistaken memories are usually my explanation when I hear other people’s “prophetic” dreams. In this case, however, I wrote down my dream right when I woke up. The odds of a coincidence are too great. I had no idea, when I had the dream where I would end up working after I graduated from college. In fact, I worked at several jobs off campus before returning. I had no idea, either, that that particular tree would be singled out and cut down years later.

My prophetic tree dream is my personal best evidence that there is a deeper world than we currently know.  As a very concrete scientific thinker, my best explanation is that I somehow experienced a ripple of information from the future. If we discover that our brains communicate with light as well as known electrochemical processes, then the fact that anything moving at the speed of light has stepped “out of time” may allow light to bring information from the future back into the present. I can think of no simpler plausible explanation for my experience.

Researchers Say Photo of Jim Morrison’s Ghost Is Real

Jim Morrison has been dead for almost four decades but a snapshot belonging to longtime rock historian Brett Meisner allegedly shows the Doors frontman haunting his own grave. And now, just in time for Halloween, researchers now claim the image is authentic.

Back in 1997, Meisner decided to take a snapshot next to the rock legend’s grave in the famous Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, not exactly an uncommon thing to do considering some 1000 people visit the grave daily. The photo, taken by Meisner’s assistant, shows the historian casually standing next to Morrison’s plot with one hand in his pocket and a white cloudy shadow to his left, the latter going unnoticed until Meisner finally decided to revisit the photo in 2002. The cloudy obscure image to Meisner’s left appeared to be the deceased singer himself.

Word quickly spread thanks to the Internet and the historian sent the photo in for further analysis, which concluded that the snapshot was indeed as bone chilling as it was first perceived. In a new book titled ‘Ghosts Caught on Film 2: Photographs of the Unexplained,’ researchers rule out both lightning and image manipulation and conclude that the photo is simply “unexplainable.”

“Part of me wishes that I never stepped foot into the graveyard in the first place,” Meisner told the UK’s Sunday Express. His life was never the same after taking it. Not only did his marriage dissolve, but in an eerie coincidence to Morrison’s life, Meisner lost a close pal to a drug overdose as well. The photo also brought all sorts of characters to Meisner’s door, claiming they bore messages from the rock god.

“At first it was sort of interesting to see how many people felt a spiritual bond with Jim and the photo,” Meisner said, “but now the whole vibe seems negative.” Meisner hopes to privately donate the photo and negative.

via Researchers Say Photo of Jim Morrison’s Ghost Is Real – Spinner.

Comment:

Simple Optical Illusion. On a laptop screen move to side to side and you can tell its just the brick colors making up his left arm or the one on the right as we see it. unless his arm has three segments. The shadow from the doorway which is recessed moves in at an angle because of the cameras position. And the shadow that is his face runs into the rest of the doorway. And if you look closely his right leg does not line up with his body on his right side. the way the shadowing is makes it appear to have black pants on. And look at his midsection unless he has put on some weight around the hips. the white shirt effect is the sunlight shining it the recessed doorway at that time of day. It would be easy to reproduce the same effect with the f stop macking the background a little fuzzy

Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone

EARLIER this year, a puzzling report appeared in the journal Sleep Medicine. It described two Italian people who never truly slept. They might lie down and close their eyes, but read-outs of brain activity showed none of the normal patterns associated with sleep. Their behaviour was pretty odd, too. Though largely unaware of their surroundings during these rest periods, they would walk around, yell, tremble violently and their hearts would race. The remainder of the time they were conscious and aware but prone to powerful, dream-like hallucinations.

Both had been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder called multiple system atrophy. According to the report’s authors, Roberto Vetrugno and colleagues from the University of Bologna, Italy, the disease had damaged the pair’s brains to such an extent that they had entered status dissociatus, a kind of twilight zone in which the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness completely break down (Sleep Medicine, vol 10, p 247).

That this can happen contradicts the way we usually think about sleep, but it came as no surprise to Mark Mahowald, medical director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center in Minneapolis, who has long contested the dogma that sleep and wakefulness are discrete and distinct states. “There is now overwhelming evidence that the primary states of being are not mutually exclusive,” he says. The blurring of sleep and wakefulness is very clear in status dissociatus, but he believes it can happen to us all. If he is right, we will have to rethink our understanding of what sleep is and what it is for. Maybe wakefulness is not the all-or-nothing phenomenon we thought it was either.

Received wisdom has it that at any given time, healthy people are in one of three states of vigilance: awake, in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep or in non-REM (NREM) sleep. Each state is distinct and can be recognised by a characteristic pattern of brain activity, as measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG) (see chart, right). Wakefulness is easy to detect. Apart from the fact that a person’s eyes are open and they are responsive, their EEG shows a pattern of high-frequency, low-amplitude waves. NREM sleep is divided into four stages, each of which has its own distinctive EEG pattern. REM is trickier to spot because in EEG terms it closely resembles stage 1 NREM sleep. So to be sure it really is REM, researchers also look for the telltale rapid eye movements and a slackening in the muscles of the chin and jaw.

Mahowald is not the only person to have questioned these neat distinctions. David Dinges, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, has probably deprived more people of sleep in the name of science than anyone else. In one such study in the late 1980s, Dinges and his team revealed how easily the different states of vigilance can become intermingled. When volunteers were subjected to tests of working memory in which they had to subtract numbers, they could do an average of 90 sums in 3 minutes with few errors. After 52 hours deprived of sleep, their performance fell to around 70 subtractions, with not many more errors. However, after they had slept for 2 hours the change was dramatic. “When we woke them up abruptly, and they rated themselves as alert and ready to go, they couldn’t do even one subtraction,” says Dinges. People even seemed to be dreaming as they attempted the task. One subject mused: “What if people ran faster than normal people run home,” in the middle of a string of incorrect responses.

Known as sleep inertia, a less extreme version of such disorientation is now generally recognised as the cause of the grogginess some people get after their alarm clock goes off. It is as if they are socially awake but functionally asleep; as if the brain circuits underlying responsiveness are up and running, but those mediating working memory are still offline. Mahowald is convinced that it is just one of many disorders that can be explained as a breakdown in the boundaries between sleep and wakefulness. He lists a whole raft of such conditions in the same issue of Sleep Medicine as Vetrugno’s description of people with status dissociatus (vol 10, p 159).

One is REM behavioural disorder (RBD), in which people in REM sleep act out their dreams because the temporary paralysis, or cataplexy, that normally accompanies this state is replaced by the full mobility of wakefulness. In sleep paralysis the opposite is true. Here, cataplexy intrudes into wakefulness, and a person wakes to find him or herself unable to move. It is estimated that up to 40 per cent of people have experienced this disturbing phenomenon. Also surprisingly common are hypnagogic hallucinations – sensory illusions that occur on the cusp of sleep when the dreaming component of REM intrudes into wakefulness. Mahowald’s list also includes sleepwalking, night terrors and narcolepsy, which is an inherent instability in vigilance state boundaries characterised by rapid cycling between states and the tendency to fall asleep mid-sentence. Controversially, the list also includes near-death experiences and alien abductions. It is no coincidence, he says, that alien abductions almost always occur in the recumbent position, in the transition from wakefulness to sleep.

via Are you asleep? Exploring the mind’s twilight zone – life – 07 October 2009 – New Scientist.

Ghost hunter killed in fall from building

A first date with a playful, late-night search for ghosts inside a University of Toronto landmark ended in tragedy yesterday when a 29-year-old woman plunged to her death.

Leah Kubik, just two weeks shy of her 30th birthday, was found without vital signs inside a courtyard just before 2 a.m.

“They were believed to be exploring an old building because it’s rumoured to be haunted,” Toronto Police Const. Wendy Drummond told the Sun.

The Gothic-style, 134-year-old Connaught medical research building was the site of a grisly murder in 2001 but paranormal experts stress it’s not haunted, only rumoured to be cursed.

Police said the pair managed to enter the ivy-covered building through an open window and then climbed three flights of stairs to the roof. There was still dust used by forensic investigators to recover fingerprints around the window yesterday.

The man crossed from one roof to the other, but a wire the woman was holding onto gave way and she plunged several storeys to her death, Drummond said. Police tape was still blocking people from one stairway, which is suspected to have been used by the pair to gain access to the roof.

Police said they are still trying to determine whether it was death by misadventure.

“(The investigation) is ongoing and we’ll have to go over any video surveillance, if there is any,” Drummond said, adding they are also awaiting toxicology reports and an autopsy.

American-born Kubik worked in Toronto as a support centre engineer. She had also worked as a bartender. Bar owner George Bozikis recalled the former employee as a nice person who had an eccentric style accented by the homemade eyeglasses she fashioned.

The building, erected in 1875 as the former seminary for Knox College, is no stranger to tragedy. In January 2001, U of T professor David Buller was found stabbed there.

The talented artist suffered several wounds during the knifing frenzy in the second-floor studio where he’d taught painting for 15 years. Professor George Hawken said he was friends and a colleague of Buller. Hawken said employees use swipe cards to gain access to the building.

via Ghost hunter killed in fall from building | Canada | News | Edmonton Sun.

More accurate story:

By MARY KATE MALONE
Tribune Staff Writer

A former Osceola resident was not “ghost hunting” when she died after falling from a historic Toronto building Sept. 10, her mother says.

Contrary to media reports that 29-year-old Leah Cunningham Kubik was on a drunken ghost-hunting chase, her mother says her death was the tragic result of curiosity.

“She just saw the building and thought it was interesting,” said Sue Strantz, Kubik’s mother. “She had wanted to get in there for a long time, and it just so happened that (Sept. 10) was the night she did it.”

Kubik was on a first date with a 34-year-old Canadian the night of her death. After dinner, the pair decided to sneak into a 135-year-old University of Toronto building at 1 Spadina Crescent.

Kubik reportedly fell three stories while climbing on the roof. She died in her date’s arms once he reached her minutes later, said Kubik’s mother, who lives in Osceola.

The Toronto Star, the largest daily newspaper in Toronto, reported that Kubik had been on a “quest for ghosts” that night.

“Just before 2 a.m. yesterday, a drunken ghost-hunting trip across the building’s roof went from an eerie adrenaline rush to a painfully real-life tragedy,” the paper reported.

Strantz said her daughter was never interested in ghosts or ghost hunting. “It’s not as crazy as you might think when you think about things you have done in your life that could have ended badly,” Strantz said.

Police in Toronto said they will not know Kubik’s blood-alcohol level for several months.

Iain Marlow, the Toronto reporter who covered the story, said police initially told reporters that Kubik had been ghost hunting.

“Police originally told us they were ghost hunting and they had candles. … That piqued (the media’s) interest,” said Marlow, who quoted paranormal “experts” extensively in his story.

“The news stories are quite inaccurate, leading people to believe all kinds of things that never happened,” Strantz said.

Kubik, a 1997 graduate of Jimtown High School, was the eldest of four girls. She moved to Toronto four years ago, Strantz said. – southbendtrib

The Demystifying Adventures of the Amazing Randi

On a stage in a spacious Las Vegas banquet hall sits a nervous-looking, dark-haired Danish woman named Connie Sonne. The 46-year-old retired police officer made a name for herself as a psychic in Europe by claiming she knew the whereabouts of famous missing British toddler Madeleine McCann. Sonne also says she can read playing cards through sealed envelopes using only a crystal. If she can successfully demonstrate her skills in this controlled experiment at the South Point Hotel Casino and Spa, she’ll receive $1 million.

A broad-shouldered security guard enters, dressed in a standard-issue black polyester uniform. He walks toward the stage, carrying the precious cargo he’s been hired to protect: a large manila envelope sealed with duct tape.

The 700 people in the audience — famous magicians, television personalities, mind readers, scientists, and garden-variety nerds — sit in silence, their eyes fixed on the package. The guard passes VIPs: magicians Penn and Teller, astronomer Phil Plait, psychologist Dr. Ray Hyman — and there, at the end of the first row, with a bald head and a beard as long and white as Darwin’s, sits James Randi. For more than 60 years, “The Amazing Randi” has been performing magic, debunking psychics, and discussing the perils of all things paranormal. Now 81, he heads the Fort Lauderdale–based James Randi Educational Foundation. …

The security guard hands the envelope to Banachek. Inside is a 10-sided die and four smaller envelopes. Banachek cuts one open and removes 10 more envelopes. Inside each one is a playing card. Sonne rolls the die. It stops on three. She now must find the envelope containing the three of hearts, plus two other cards. If she can, the money is hers.

Sonne glances at the audience, then back at the envelopes spread before her. With her right hand, she dangles her crystal amulet over the table.

For four minutes, the room is motionless. Sonne’s dowsing charm sways like a pendulum over the envelopes. No one speaks — nobody wants to be Sonne’s excuse if she later says she was too distracted. Randi watches closely, his bushy eyebrows cocked. It’s his foundation’s million bucks on the line.

Randi has debunked more than 100 psychics and faith healers in a quest to rid the world of hucksters. It also makes him the subject of scorn among purveyors of the paranormal, true believers who say Randi has made himself rich, pulling in nearly $200,000 a year from his foundation, at the expense of others’ careers.

Now, however, Randi’s work may be in jeopardy. His foundation has been hemorrhaging money, and Randi, who has spent his career challenging the notion of an afterlife, now faces his own mortality. He has intestinal cancer and may not have long to live. He has been a commanding presence for four decades, but it’s unclear who could fill his role as the face of the skeptic community.

… When Sonne indicates she has found the three of hearts, Banachek writes “3″ on the sealed envelope. She rolls the die twice more, then searches for a seven and an ace. For the final card, the awkward silence lasts nearly five tedious minutes before Sonne chooses the envelope farthest to the left.

After nearly 20 minutes, it’s time to see how she fared. Banachek asks her to cut open the envelope marked “3.” She does, and Banachek peeks inside.

via San Francisco News – The Demystifying Adventures of the Amazing Randi – page 1.

The results:

“Asked to dowse for cards 3 7 1, Connie Sonne has dowsed 2 1 2, and has failed the JREF Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge.  The correct sequence was 3 7 1, as verified by the video.” -  randi.org

Intuition Through Time: What Does the Seer See?

Data contributed by 74 unselected volunteers in two experiments showed that: (a) pupillary dilation and spontaneous blinking were found to increase more before emotional versus calm photos (combined P = .00009), (b) horizontal eye movements indicated a brain hemisphere asymmetry before viewing photos, appropriate to both the emotionality (P = .05) and the valence of the future images (P = .01), (c) participants selected for independently obtaining significant differential effects in pupillary dilation showed positive correlations between their eye movements before versus during exposure to randomly selected photos (P = .002), and (d) a possible “transtemporal interference” effect was observed when the probability of observing future images was varied (P = .05 [two-tailed]). Gender splits on these tests showed that overall females tended to perform better than males.

Conclusions

These studies, which replicate conceptual similar experiments, suggest that sometimes seers do see the future. This implies that developing comprehensive models of anticipatory behavior, from understanding the nature of intuition to the placebo effect, may require consideration of transtemporal and teleological factors.

via Intuition Through Time: What Does the Seer See?.

James Randi’s Million Dollar Paranormal Prize to Continue after all.

I just came from Las Vegas where I saw Criss Angel’s magic show. Lot’s of disappearing acts plus  dance and surreal costumes by the Cirque Du Soleil people. Odd but interesting. Fun show.

Speaking of magic, Greg over at the Daily Grail has this:

Last year the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) announced that the famous ‘Million Dollar Prize’ challenge for claims of the paranormal would come to an end in 2010. If you had been honing your skills in preparation for a dash at the money, rest easy: the JREF has now announced that they have reversed their decision, and the Challenge will continue:

Last year, we announced that the MDC would end in March 2010 due to the strains on time and effort of the JREF staff. However, after much discussion, we have decided not to terminate the Challenge. Instead, we are in the process of examining how it can be improved, streamlined, and made more efficient so that we can continue to use it to test claims of the paranormal.

However, we haven’t made any final decisions about it yet; we’re taking our time and making sure we do this right. When next March comes around we will roll out the new and improved Million Dollar Challenge. So never fear! We will continue to test the claims and examine the evidence, and we will always strive to ensure that reality – as it usually tends to do – wins out.

Hopefully the “streamlining” of the MDC takes into consideration some of the criticisms I raised in my article “The Myth of the Million Dollar Challenge“. But if not, at least skeptics can now continue to look on in wonder, completely surprised at the fact that in a population of 5 billion and counting, there are actually some odd /delusional people in the world.