The Occult Section

Imagine you’re digging into your family’s history and you find out a). not only are there some indications that you and your spouse may possibly be related, and b). the guy you both are related to is a respected local historical figure who is buried in a place within driving distance to your home. So, you naturally go to visit his grave site and then find out c). his grave has been turned into a haunted attraction, complete with signs painted in dripping blood-red paint! AWKWARD.

All the answers to life’s questions can be found behind the goats.

The living never know to which cemetery a genealogical trail will lead, but a Cleveland man said he was shocked to find a prominent relative’s burial site turned into an amusement park attraction.

The small cemetery where the remains of Judge Charles Fleming Keith lie is part of the Judgment Day Haunted Trail in the Mayfield Farm and Nursery Corn Maze and Pumpkin Patch, north of Athens on Highway 307.

Dietrich said his wife accompanied him to the family cemetery that first time in January 2012.

“We tried to get permission to come on the property though we didn’t have to have it because it is a cemetery. We wanted them to know we were here. We went to the business office, but no one was there. There were a lot of vehicles, but no people. We started searching for it and drove all over the place until we finally found it there behind the goats.”

Dietrich said the overhead sign proclaiming “Judgement Day” in red, dripping paint shocked him. A line scrolled underneath described it as the gateway to a haunted attraction.“We were just shocked quite honestly to see the sign, the haunted trail and the way they were treating this as an amusement park attraction rather than a cemetery, because it has such historical significance to this area,” Dietrich said.

He was taking pictures when Michael Mayfield approached them. He was friendly and encouraged Dietrich to take all the pictures he wanted and visit at anytime.

“I went home and wrote a really nice letter to Michael asking him to please consider doing something else with the cemetery that would be more in keeping with the dead, particularly somebody as prominent in Tennessee history as Judge Keith was,” Dietrich said. “A year later, he hasn’t done anything.”

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Holy crap. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since “The X-Files” pilot episode aired. I watched the first episode when it premiered. I was 10 years old. And after that first episode, I subsequently taped every single episode, bought magazines, books, soundtracks…and can thank David Duchovny for pushing me right into puberty (even after all his, er, follies, I still have a really really creepy totally normal – I swear – crush on him). Don’t believe me? Ask my friends. Actually, don’t, they know far too much.

But I digress. 20 years, y’all! wow!

It’s been 20 years since “The X-Files” opened to viewers’ wanting-to-believe eyes, and the hit paranormal investigation drama’s creator, Chris Carter, doesn’t quite know what to make of that phenomenon.

“Scully, would you think less of me as a man if I told you I was kind of excited right now?”

“It’s surreal,” he told a sold-out crowd Sunday at the Hero Complex Film Festival shortly after entering to a standing ovation. “It’s like an X-File…. Twenty years’ missing time.”

Asked what he might do differently if he made the show now, he said, “It was of its time…. You probably could make the show today, but, I don’t know why, it just feels like it was made exactly when it should have been made.”

The festival’s closing night was devoted to the acclaimed Fox series, and included screenings of three fan-picked episodes – the pilot, which he wrote, “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” and “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.”

Carter said the pilot scene in which FBI special agent Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a skeptical scientist, first meets her new partner, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), a crusading believer in aliens and conspiracy, wasn’t just their introduction as a duo to the audience, but to him as well: “That’s the first time they really acted together. They didn’t audition together for the parts. We really cast them separately, so we didn’t know there’d be that chemistry. What you were watching was really a kind of test, and it ended up working.”

David, if you’re out there reading this…call me!

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Yes, it’s another addition to the list of celebrity ghost stories. Apparently Miley Cyrus had some paranormal activity in her London apartment during her 2009 tour. I’m terrible at research, so does anyone know if she had been smoking marijuana back then? Also, this is not the first time the Cyrus family has been linked to the paranormal…or featured  on our blog (see here, here and here, where Billy Ray Cyrus was supposed to host a show on SyFy).

“A ghost? That’s pretty cool!”

The 20-year-old singer and her family rented an apartment in the English capital during her 2009 European tour but they had to move to a hotel after a number of ghostly encounters.

She told British Elle magazine: “It was seriously so terrifying. One night, my little sister — it sounds crazy to tell you — but she was standing in the shower and all of a sudden, I hear her scream. I run in there and the water had somehow flipped to hot but it was still … It wasn’t like the water had just changed, the knob had turned but she hadn’t turned it and it was burning her. She was really red.

“I thought I had seen a little boy sitting on the sink watching me take a shower so I felt really freaked out. I was sitting there the next night and maybe I’m crazy, but I could have sworn I could see this little boy sitting there on the sink, kicking his feet.”

The family later discovered the apartment was reportedly haunted and Miley has vowed never to stay there again.

She said: “We found out that there was this older man that owned it [the bakery that had once been in the building] and his son lived with him there, and I guess the wife died or something, she had gotten sick.

“So it was just the son and the dad that lived there in the bakery, and then the dad died and the son took over the bakery, and I thought I was seeing the son. I’m not even kidding.

“I had to move. That’s not a lie. I will never stay there ever again.”

I think it’s safe to say that ever since Ghost Hunters came on the air, any business that can charge admission of some kind is not “reportedly haunted.” Hell, it’s an easy way to make a buck, and all you have to do is make up some cliché, non-verifiable story, and the knuckleheads will eat it up and pay $200 to get in and investigate with 150 other knuckleheads. Like, totally seriously though, old faucets and valves can move on their own if they are old, broken,, and there’s enough water pressure. Like, totally.

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I always find myself on the fence about retired military personnel who come out in their twilight years and make claims that UFOs are real and that the government has aliens or alien bodies. On the one hand, it makes sense. I mean, what do they have to lose? They can’t get fired. They aren’t afraid oif the government retaliating against them in any way. So they spill their secrets. On the other hand, maybe their old age has just made them bat-shit crazy? But honestly, none of the guys I’ve seen have come across as anything but completely sane and full of conviction.

When Air Force Lt. Col. Richard French was an alleged lead investigator of Project Blue Book in the 1950s, his job was to shoot down false reports of UFOs.

Given his job, French never dreamed he’d end up in Newfoundland one day watching what appeared to him to be two extraterrestrials performing repairs on a submerged, unknown circular craft.

In Washington, D.C., recently, the 83-year-old retired officer testified at the Citizen Hearing On Disclosure panel of six former members of Congress about his work as a UFO debunker in 1952.

French recounted how the Newfoundland incident unfolded decades ago, in the early 1950s, after two UFOs were seen by many people off the coast of St. John’s. French’s superiors ordered him to look into the situation.

“They said, ‘We have a UFO report and we want you to investigate it,’ and that was standard for what I was doing,” French told The Huffington Post. “They told me there were two of them involved and that they were deep under the water, after entering the water doing roughly 100 miles an hour.

“There were a lot of people assembled on the wharf, at least 100 standing around just looking in amazement at the water, including several local policemen.”

French recalls the water was very clear and he could see two circular craft, each one about 18 feet in diameter and approximately 3 feet thick. He said the two objects were floating below the surface of the water, a couple of feet apart, not more than 20 feet from the shore. And he saw two beings in the water near the ships.

“The first thing I saw was the UFOs, and it was apparent to me that they were doing something to the craft, and I couldn’t really tell what because they were on the bottom side of it and not visible to me except when they would occasionally get over to the side where I could see them. The water was fairly clear and I could see without any trouble. They weren’t down at the bottom of the [seabed] — they were about half way down.”

French told HuffPost that the two beings he saw “were about 2 or 3 feet tall, light grey in color, very thin, long arms with either two or three fingers. The top of their heads was much wider than their jaw line, their eyes were very slanted and you couldn’t see pupils in them. They looked the way [aliens] have been depicted in motion pictures.”

As the Air Force UFO debunker watched, he claims one of the ships began to rise out of the water.

“When it hit the [surface], it was going about 100 miles an hour. It then accelerated to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 to 3,000 miles an hour and disappeared. It returned about 20 minutes later, slowed down to nearly a stop before it entered the water, then went down, and the two [beings] worked together.

“It took them about 20 minutes and then the two ships departed together, again slow when they exited the water, and immediately they sped up to a very high speed. I believe they were repairing [the ship] and tested that the repairs had been adequate, and then away they went.”

Ironically, French’s job at the time — as a Project Blue Book investigator — was to debunk UFOs. So, what kind of report did he file with Blue Book about this case he had personally witnessed?

“Needless to say, it was a fictitious report, as all of them were. I didn’t really say that they were UFOs — I said that there was something we didn’t know — some type of foreign or unrecognizable vehicle there. In other words, I weasel-worded it.

“Oh, I think without a doubt it was a UFO and I think there were aliens aboard it. There’s no question in my mind that was exactly what it was, and my duty was to debunk the story, so I did my best to do so.”

The events of the Newfoundland UFO and alleged aliens took place some 60 years ago, in the days before everyone had a digital camera or image-capture cell phone in their pocket. Despite the fact that there are no photographs to substantiate the report, it’s still an amazing story.

So what are we to make of this? Because it’s not the first time French has stirred up the UFO-ET pot.

Last year, he told HuffPost exclusively that there wasn’t just one UFO crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947 — he said there were two.

I’m not sure about this whole “two crashes at Roswell” thing. I’ve heard it before, and other versions have it as two crash sites for the same vehicle. Ultimately though, without any real proof, these are just interesting stories.

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A big story floating around the interwebs this week has been the alleged discovery of giant crystal pyramids beneath the Bermuda Triangle. Now, of course there’s no proof (yet), and there’s no real mainstream media coverage of this story (yet), and the articles out there all seem to be the same article, verbatim (see below). Most of the sites covering this story seem to be weird fringe websites and conspiracy theorists (e.g., MSNBC). So I figured hey, we might as well get in on this too. We’re not really weird enough to be in the same category as those other sites, thankfully, but, behold: the story of the crystal pyramids of the Bermuda Triangle. Or something.

We had the underwater Millennium Falcon, so I guess this is the underwater Jedi Temple?

‘The Bermuda Triangle: mysterious, unworldly, sometimes deadly. For decades intrepid researchers delved into the maze of mysteries hidden deep within this most enigmatic place on Earth.

Some speculate the bizarre time anomalies, disappearances and weird phenomena can be explained by natural occurences. Others are insistent that relics of an advanced, unknown culture left behind fantastic technology…great energy machines that literally warp spacetime and open portals to other realities.

Now American and French explorers have made a monumental discovery: a partially translucent, crystal-like pyramid rising from the Caribbean seabed— its origin, age and purpose completely unknown.’

A gigantic structure, perhaps larger than the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt, and initially identified by a doctor in the 1960s, has been independently verified by diving teams from France and the U.S.

The discovery has rocked scientists around the world. Will they rush to investigate it? No, they’re more likely to studiously ignore it. If pressed, they’ll officially position themselves as highly skeptical—especially in light of the potential ramifications.

The pyramid could confirm some engineers’ contentions that pyramids were originally created as massive power sources, support the claim that the ancient city-state of Atlantis did exist, or even provide answers to the mysterious goings-on that have been recorded since the 19th Century in the region of the Atlantic dubbed the Bermuda Triangle.

According to the history, the pyramid was accidentally discovered during 1968 by a doctor of naturopathy, Ray Brown of Mesa, Arizona.

Brown was in the Caribbean on vacation and making dives with friends in a region off the Bahamas known as “the Tongue of the Ocean.” The area acquired that name because a tongue-shaped portion of the seabed extends out from the island before sharply dropping off into much greater depths.

When relating his discovery, the doctor explained he became separated from his diving friends underwater. While attempting to rejoin them he came upon a massive structure rising from the ocean floor: a black, hulking object silhouetted against the lighter sun-filtered water. The object was shaped like a pyramid.

Because he was low on air, he didn’t spend much time investigating the pyramid, but did find a strange crystal sphere.

He brought it to the surface with him and later when the ancient crystal was studied researchers were astonished by its properties.

Blah blah blah bling bling bling blah.

The article goes on, at some length, talking about how these pyramids might be the cause of the strange anomalies and energy fluctuations in the Bermuda Triangle. And how this might be proof of Atlantis. I think it’s still too early to tell, but this story is really reminding me of the whole Baltic Sea UFO that looked like the Millennium Falcon that turned out to be nothing. Of course, it would be really interesting if it turned out to be real, but as always, I won’t be holding my breath.

Thanks to my brother Keith for letting me know about this story

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