Forteana

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18733084

Filmmakers Richard Rossi and Kelly Tabor may have unintentionally captured drone footage of 'Champ,' the lake monster said to inhabit Lake Champlain, while shooting their film, 'Lucy and the Lake Monster'.

The press release stated that longtime friends Rossi and Tabor were reviewing footage when they noticed a “large, unknown creature gliding beneath the water's surface” near a boat used in the film.

A ten-second clip featuring the mysterious object was published to Rossi’s YouTube channel over a week prior to the press release.

In that footage, the object can be seen below the water’s surface in the lower righthand corner of the frame.

According to a second press release from August 14th:

The present document delineates the preliminary scientific evaluation of the Tabor-Rossi Champ footage, juxtaposing it with the renowned 1977 Mansi photograph. A comprehensive and exhaustive analysis is scheduled for dissemination in the following year.

The Tabor-Rossi footage constitutes the most compelling extant evidence to date supporting the potential survival of a plesiosaur-like species. It incorporates numerous elements that the 1977 Mansi photograph of "Champ" does not possess:

1. The inclusion of a boat in the footage, occupied by two individuals, provides a critical reference for scale, thereby facilitating an assessment of the dimensions of the observed organism. The boat's measurements are documented at 11.8333 feet in length and 4.28333 feet in width, with the subject appearing to exceed the size of the vessel. Notably, large sturgeon are documented to reach lengths of up to 7 feet, with the recorded maximum being 8 feet. Conversely, the Mansi photograph lacks any objects for scale reference.

2. The original Mansi Polaroid depicts the Champ entity in relatively shallow waters, not exceeding depths of 14 feet, in proximity to the shoreline. In contrast, the Tabor-Rossi footage was captured via drone technology in the deepest section of Bulwagga Bay within Lake Champlain, effectively eliminating the likelihood of misidentification as a rock formation or sand mounds, which are prevalent in shallower aquatic regions.

3. An additional caveat regarding the Mansi photograph pertains to the inability of Sandra Mansi to determine the precise location where the image was acquired. In contrast, the Tabor-Rossi footage benefits from the corroborative accounts of multiple eyewitnesses, including cast and crew members, who have unequivocally identified the exact geographic coordinates of their filming location.

4. Importantly, Sandra Mansi did not retain the original negative of her photograph. The Tabor-Rossi footage is distinguished by its production in high resolution using a quality drone camera. The five seconds of footage available on YouTube represent only a diminutive sample of the entirety encompassing a broader five-minute segment that includes the subject in question. This raw footage was retained, allowing for enhanced scientific scrutiny through subsequent review. Initial morphological assessments, conducted through pixel and color threshold adjustments, as well as zoom enhancements, reveal concordance with established plesiosaur anatomical features, while presenting proportions inconsistent with sturgeon or alternative explanations. Noteworthy characteristics include, but are not limited to:

a. A flattened plesiosaur head

b. Locomotion via reptilian-like fins

c. A slender, serpentine neck in conjunction with a more robust body structure

A series of rigorous tests is slated for execution and will be submitted for scientific peer review as part of a scholarly article in the upcoming year, thereby inviting formal academic scrutiny of these findings.

The six-tonne Altar Stone at the heart of Stonehenge came from the far north of Scotland rather than south-west Wales as previously thought, new analysis has found.

Trail cams have been set up in the Cumbria countryside following a reported sighting of a big cat and her cub.

A report came into a dedicated Big Cats Facebook group that a couple spotted the feline, described as a 'large black cat', alongside her cub.

The myth of the elusive 'Beast of Cumbria' is believed to have started when big cats kept as pets in the 1970s were released due to licensing changes.

Big cat expert Sharon Larkin-Snowden, who discovered Panthera DNA on a sheep's carcass in Cumbria in May of this year, posted the latest sighting reported to be by a couple in the group.

The post read: "Exciting news! We have had a few reports of a large black cat and her cub. Both look well and healthy. We now know her whereabouts (lair) and are setting up many trail cams in the vicinity in hope of capturing footage of mum and cub.

A couple believe they've captured footage of a "big cat" roaming the grounds of a well-known West Country manor house and gardens. They say that it was no ordinary 'house cat'.

The video, taken last Sunday (August 4) around 7.20pm, shows a black figure moving across the grass at Lanhydrock House, near Bodmin St Neot in Cornwall. The woman who filmed the incident, from St Austell, said it even startled the local deer causing them to "bolt".

Gemma Smith, who was with her partner Jamie Williamson and their children at the time, said: "Doesn't look like your average house cat.... could it be? ! " She added: "We were halfway up from the manor house and even from that distance you could see it was a big cat.

"Funnily we did spot a pair of deer down from the manor house on our way up and the female kept looking in that direction and then bolted and her partner followed." She said her phone let her down though and the images came out of poor quality.

Footage - which you can see at the top of this page - shows what they believe was a bigger-than-average black cat stalking about the National Trust property, seeming to fit the description of the Beast of Bodmin Moor.

Vasile Gorgos was 63 years old when he left his home in eastern Romania to go on a short business trip.

As a cattle farmer and trader, Vasile often made such excursions and, this time, had bought his train ticket in advance.

The difference here was that on this fateful day in 1991, he didn’t return home.

Knowing that he was due to come back the same day, his family immediately called the police who launched a search effort.

But after days turned into weeks, then months, then years, with neither sight or sign of Vasile, his loved ones were forced to assume the worst.

With no leads or traces to follow, they suspected foul play, but endless questions were left unanswered.

But then, on 29 August, 2021, three decades after Vasile’s disappearance, his family was faced with the ultimate plot twist.

A car stopped in front of their home – the same one they’d had for the past 30 years – and out stepped an old man, looking confused.

That man was none other than 93-year-old Vasile, wearing the same clothes he left in all those years ago. His pocket even contained the same train ticket he was due to travel with.

The car allegedly raced off before anyone had a chance to question the driver, but when asked where he’d been, a baffled Vasile replied that he’d been “at home”, Medium reports.

He subsequently underwent a thorough medical examination but doctors concluded that he was in remarkably good health.

Lisa Fagin Davis was starting her medieval-studies Ph.D. at Yale in 1989 when she got a part-time job at the university’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Her boss was the curator of early books and manuscripts, and he stuck her with an unenviable duty: answering letters from the cranks, conspiracists, and truthers who hounded the library with questions about its most popular holding.

In the library catalog, the book—a parchment codex the size of a hardcover novel—had a simple, colorless title: “Cipher Manuscript.” But newspapers tended to call it the “Voynich Manuscript,” after the rare-books dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it from a Jesuit collection in Italy around 1912. An heir sold the manuscript to another dealer, who donated it to Yale in 1969.

Davis grew up in Oklahoma City, transfixed by the fantasy worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons. When the Beinecke curator first showed her the Voynich Manuscript, she thought, This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

Its 234 pages contained some 38,000 words, but not one of them was readable. The book’s unnamed author had written it, likely with a quill pen, in symbols never before seen. Did they represent a natural language, such as Latin? A constructed language, like Esperanto? A secret code? Gibberish? Scholars had no real idea. To Davis, however, the manuscript felt alive with meaning.

Davis, then 23 years old, with a rosy sense of the world’s knowability, wanted to figure out what the Voynich Manuscript was, what it meant, where it came from. But people in her field saw the Voynich as a waste of time, a house-of-curiosities gewgaw unworthy of the serious scholar, especially when so many legible manuscripts begged for study.

...

This shape-shifting—this inability to see it from any one angle—persuaded the Malta computer scientists, led by Colin Layfield, to assemble a multidisciplinary team. So little was known about the underlying language—if it was a language—that even artificial intelligence, in its current state, lacked the models to decode it. Good AI requires “massive amounts of data to learn from,” Layfield told me. “We simply don’t have that luxury with the text in the Voynich.” In 2021, Layfield recruited Davis, Bowern, and other specialists, and they began meeting online to develop ideas for collaboration. In late 2022, the Voynich Research Group, as it became known, held its first conference, with 16 peer-reviewed papers, touching on history, literature, paleography, linguistics, cryptology, and—because of some of the drawings—medieval gynecology. Davis was invited to give the closing keynote.

Scholars inside and outside the group are now pressing in a variety of directions. Some are using mathematical tools to hunt for “cribs”: words whose meanings can be inferred because they consistently appear, like labels, beside certain illustrated objects.

Others are reevaluating the alphabets that earlier scholars created to convert the Voynichese letterforms into machine-readable ASCII text—the raw data for computational studies of the language. AI might be unable to decrypt the Voynich, but it could contribute in other ways, once enough of the world’s hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts are digitally imaged and accessible. Models trained on those images may eventually develop the power to spot visual similarities to the Voynich—the curvature of a particular pen stroke, the shades of certain pigments—that have eluded the human eye. Those similarities could help scholars identify writing communities with possible ties to the Voynich.

Still conspicuously missing from the research are professional art historians. Scholars of medieval art could bring a whole new field to bear on the Voynich’s illustrated world, but like other medievalists, they have been reluctant to engage.

In 1992, “multiple witnesses” in California reported that more than 200 disk-shaped objects soundlessly exited Santa Monica Bay waters, hovered for a moment, and then sped away into the sky. Six years later, U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer Charles Howard wrote an account of an apparent underwater anomaly. “My ship was visiting Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, when I saw three strange, big white lights in the water,” he said in the History Channel show UFO Files. They were “10 or 20 feet on each side with a rounded shape,” according to Howard’s written account.

Claims of such Unidentified Submerged Objects, or USOs, have intrigued UFO enthusiasts for decades. Based on eyewitness reports, some of the objects have even seemed to traverse the boundary between air and water, traveling at shocking speeds of hundreds of miles per hour.

...

In 2021, the Department of Defense created the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, a program within the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence meant to “standardize collection and reporting” of UFO sightings. Aiming to integrate knowledge and efforts across the Pentagon and other government agencies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense established the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) soon afterward. By law, every federal agency must “review, identify, and organize each Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) record in its custody for disclosure to the public and transmission to the National Archives.”

Prior to the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act—which authorizes funding levels for the U.S. military and other defense priorities—UAP originally stood for only aerial objects. Now, it includes underwater and trans-medium phenomena. It’s why AARO was so named, to investigate “All-domain” anomalies. But, before the legal name change, AARO was already considering objects over and in the water—so it was a little confusing to keep calling them all “aerial.”

In 2022, the terminology to describe unexplained incidents officially switched from “aerial” to “anomalous.” Congress enacted the name change that December. At the time, Ronald Moultrie, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security told a roundtable of AARO:

“You may have caught that I just said unidentified anomalous phenomena, whereas in the past the department has used the term unidentified aerial phenomena. This new terminology expands the scope of UAP to include submerged and trans-medium objects. Unidentified phenomena in all domains, whether in the air, ground, sea or space, pose potential threats to personnel security and operations security, and they require our urgent attention.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18182913

Highlights

•Independent genetic mtDNA analyses in three laboratories gave identical results

•Hair and blood samples attributed to Kaspar Hauser yielded the same mtDNA

•Kaspar Hauser’s mtDNA is unambiguously different from the "Baden lineage"

•Kaspar Hauser was not the hereditary Prince of Baden born in 1812

SUMMARY

Kaspar Hauser's parentage has been the subject of research and debate for nearly 200 years. As for his possible aristocratic descent through the House of Baden, there is suspicion that he was swapped as a baby, kidnapped and kept in isolation to bring a collateral lineage to the throne.

In the last 25 years, various genetic analyses have been carried out to investigate this possible aristocratic origin. Previous results using less sensitive Sanger and electrophoresis-based methods were contradictory, and moreover, the authenticity of some samples was disputed, thus leaving the question open.

Our analyses using modern capture- and whole genome-based massively parallel sequencing techniques reveal that the mitochondrial DNA haplotypes in different samples attributed to Kaspar Hauser were identical, demonstrating authenticity for the first time, and clearly different from the mitochondrial lineage of the House of Baden, which rules out a maternal relationship and thus the widely believed “Prince theory”.

"A worried householder reported a ‘large feline creature’ to the government body responsible for looking into big cat sightings, official records show.

The resident spoke of a ‘large hissing animal’ and of being ‘a little on edge’ during the nighttime encounter in Rawcliffe, North Yorkshire..."

A couple in New Jersey had their Tesla damaged by a fish that apparently fell from the sky outside their home.

The car was parked in their driveway in Atlantic Highlands on Sunday when the whole incident was caught on camera.

At first, Cynthia and Jeff Levine said they didn't even know anything had happened.

"The car started honking, it went crazy honking which we had never heard. I didn't know how to turn it off," Cynthia said. "I went out and he was in the yard somewhere. He heard the crash and everything, but ignored it."

Then they saw the damage to their car.

"We were like holy crap look at this, and I said to him, it looks like fish scales and blood on the windshield," Cynthia said.

...

The Levines live about a mile away from where that fish would have come from in the Raritan Bay. That gave them a pretty good idea of who -- or what -- may have dropped it.

Residents said it's pretty common to see birds flying around with fish in their mouth.

"We also have an eagle's nest in our backyard... We think it was probably the eagle," Cynthia said.

Police are investigating a strange case involving two suspects who allegedly shapeshifted and became cats in order to escape from the Meyerton Police Station holding cells on Tuesday morning.

The suspects, brothers Omari and Ali Mustafa, were among 11 suspects who were arrested for possession of hijacked good.

Omari has since been rearrested, while his brother remains on the run.

In the summary of events given to Gauteng provincial commissioner Tommy Mthombeni, police say the two men allegedly disappeared while being processed in the holding cells.

The statement reads:

The cell commander, Warrant Officer Phakathi, and Constable Mahloko were also in cells locked themselves in while the suspects were charged (sic). When it was a turn to charge this other [two] suspects, known as Mustafa Ali and Omari Mustafa, their names were called but they couldn't be found. Among those suspects, there is a suspect known as Erick Tumbulu - who informed the police that he saw when these two suspects made a strange like owl bird noise, turned into cats and they escaped while the gate was still locked, he was prepared to even give a statement.

...

A senior police officer, on condition of anonymity, said it was very suspicious that the suspects waited to arrive at the police holdings cells before they could turn into cats.

Have we been too hasty to dismiss the possibility of interstellar spacecraft nearby? Are there limits to our sampling depth that we are not fully aware of?

To help find out, in 2022 NASA commissioned an independent study to determine whether current satellites and surveillance systems have sufficient sampling depth to detect “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs (government talk for what could be alien spaceships). The researchers’ conclusions:

NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites collect the most data within the Earth system, yet they typically lack the spatial resolution to detect relatively small objects such as UAP....

Commercial satellite constellations provide imagery at sub- to several-meter spatial resolution, which is well-matched to the typical spatial scales of known UAP.... The limitation on this data is that at any given time most of the Earth’s surface is not covered by commercial satellites at high resolution—for a particular UAP event, we will need to be fortunate to obtain high-resolution observations from space.

It seems that Earth’s atmosphere is unintuitively large, just as microorganisms are unintuitively small. While the atmosphere is so transparent and so close, we do not have a complete grasp of everything inside it. Consider that the average depth of Earth’s oceans is 2.3 miles, while the atmosphere extends up to about 6,200 miles, where it gradually transitions into space.

If Earth’s atmosphere is truly a rock unturned, why aren’t more astrobiology-minded scientists scrambling to take a peek? (One notable exception is Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb, co-founder of the Galileo Project, an effort to search for and study evidence of UAP activity on or near Earth.) Just as Fracastoro’s colleagues made a series of assumptions about the nature of disease, so has the scientific community made a series of assumptions about technological species. Foremost among these is the idea that alien spacecraft in the solar system or cosmic civilizations percolating through the Milky Way would emit unmistakably prominentsignals. This notion encourages us to look for displays of cosmic technological might that could be considered absurdly wasteful and impractical. In turn, it discourages us from seeking out quieter, more subtle forms of alien technology, even though they may be more common.

From our privileged position in history, we know that advances in energy use often come with increases in efficiency, not simply increases in size or expansiveness. Think of the modern miniaturization of smartphones versus the mid-20th-century trend of computers that filled up whole rooms. Perhaps we should be looking for sophisticated and compact alien spacecraft, rather than motherships spewing misused energy.

With this in mind, we can imagine going back to 1950 and rephrasing Fermi’s famed lunchtime question.

His shirt ripples in a hot desert wind. He looks up at the sky.

“Where are all the loud, obvious indicators of aliens?” he asks.

When phrased like this, the simplest explanation stands out like a sore thumb. Perhaps aliens don’t leave loud, obvious indicators. Perhaps their vehicles are nearby, and perhaps no one has bothered to check properly—yet.

Evesham and Villages Big Cat Group has 513 members and rising as people share their experiences of sightings in the county after Martin Burford revealed two of his own close encounters.

Members have also shared other evidence of big cats, including the carcasses of prey and footprints.

Those who have seen the big cats themselves argue fear of being disbelieved may be what stops more witnesses from speaking openly about sightings.

Even experts have not ruled out the possibility of the big cats roaming through the remoter parts of the county, including the Worcestershire Wildlife Trust. They just say more conclusive proof has yet to be found.

...

One of the founders of Evesham and Villages Big Cats Group on Facebook, Mandy Acres, has lived in Evesham all her life.

The 37-year-old said: "The reason I created the group was because I had a sighting in August 2013. Whilst I did not report the sighting at the time, not fear of being disbelieved but I didn’t want any harm to come to the animal by telling everyone where I saw it.

"In the last few years I’ve seen stories on and off about sightings and my sister Beckie Gurney who is also an admin on the group had a friend who had seen large footprints and a deer carcass.

"So after this, I set the group up."

Her sighting happened in August 2013 at 6.40am when she was travelling between Offenham and Badsey via Aldingto

Mrs Acres said: "I had taken this route about the same time every day that week so knew there were no animals in the fields I passed.

"One morning on my way through on this road I saw something black to my right.

"Immediately I thought “oh, the farmer has put a black sheep in the field” then the animal turned and started to run away from me, which made me think “someone’s black dog is loose!”

"It wasn’t until my car had got 20 yards side on to the animal that I saw it was 1000 per cent a big black cat.

"The gait was the same as a cats not a dogs, it was roughly the size of an Alsatian dog, the head and ears were smaller in comparison to the body but the tail which was thick, as long as the body and in a fixed low bend position which made me immediately realise “oh my god it’s a big cat!”

The fight over the science of an ancient Indonesian landmark has taken another turn in the archeological community—a controversial October 2023 study claiming that Gunung Padang is a pyramid created by humans 27,000 years ago was recently fully retracted from Wiley, the publishers of the journal Archaeological Prospection.

On one side, a robust range of leading archeologists seem perplexed on how the study ever made it past peer review and into print in the first place. On the other side, the team of authors call the retraction “unjust” and based on “unfounded claims raised by third parties who hold differing opinions and disbelieve in the evidence, analysis, and conclusions.”

Let’s go back to the science.

The Gunung Padang site in West Java, Indonesia, includes a raised earth site. The paper’s authors—led by Danny Natawidjaja—claim that it is the remnants of a prehistoric pyramid from up to 27,000 years ago, far surpassing the oldest known pyramid in the world at a mere 4,700 years old. The team based much of their findings on radiocarbon dating from core drilling. But the retraction says that the dating has no tie to human interaction, especially in a place not believed to have been inhabited at the time the paper’s authors say humans were hand-forming the pyramid.

It all adds up to an article with a “major error,” the publishers write in the retraction. “This error,” they say, “which was not identified during peer review, is that the radiocarbon dating was applied to soil samples that were not associated with any artifacts or features that could be readily interpreted as anthropogenic or ‘man-made.’ Therefore, the interpretation that the site is an ancient pyramid built 9,000 or more years ago is incorrect, and the article must be retracted.”

...

Add in the fact that there’s been no evidence of an advanced civilization at that site since the last ice age. While the soil samples may well be from 27,000 years ago, without the telltale signs of human activity—think charcoal or bone fragments—those skeptical of the study say there’s no reason to believe there was any sort of large settlement in the area during that time.

Natawidjaja and his team aren’t budging. They claim the soil samples “have been unequivocally established as man-made constructions” that feature three distinct phases of construction. They claim the shapes, composition, and arrangement of the stone bolsters the argument.

...

To complicate the skirmish a bit more, politics comes into play. The Gunung Padang hilltop site is a travel destination for those practicing Islamic and Hindu rituals, and more than a decade ago—according to The New York Times—the Indonesian government was funding the narrative that the site was an ancient pyramid. Graham Hancock interviewed Natawidjaja during a Netflix documentary, Ancient Apocalypse, that aired in 2022, and he promoted the site then as an ancient pyramid.

Hancock now supports Natawidjaja and denounced the retraction, but the Society for American Archaeology wrote an open letter arguing that Hancock’s documentary “devalues the archaeological profession on the basis of false claims and disinformation.”

The fight over Gunung Padang seemingly predates the controversial study.

Camps on both sides feel strongly about their position, and the middle ground of archeologists simply don’t believe the study’s evidence supports the conclusions. “It was unfortunate that the paper had to get to this stage,” Noel Tan, a Bangkok archaeologist who had concerns about the study, told The New York Times. “But it was better to be retracted than to have nothing said about it at all.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/17457794

"Although the long chain of custody for this specimen cannot be verified, public and media interest in the specimen warranted a transparent investigation that adhered to the scientific method,” the report said. “The specimen’s physiochemical properties are claimed to make the material capable of “inertial mass reduction” (i.e., levitation or antigravity functionality), possibly attributable to the material’s bismuth and magnesium layers acting as a terahertz waveguide.”

"Many experimental [magnesium] alloys failed for reasons not well understood at the time of testing, e.g., stress corrosion cracking,” the AARO said in its press release. “Unsurprisingly, records of failed [magnesium] alloy designs are scant. Neither AARO nor ORNL could verify the specimen’s historical origin. Unverifiable, conflicting personal accounts complicate its undocumented chain of custody.”

Neither the press release nor the Oak Ridge report mention Roswell, New Mexico, but pinpointing the recovery date of the material to 1947 makes it likely that whoever gave the sample to To The Stars has claimed that’s where it came from.

“This specimen has been publicly alleged to be a component recovered from a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle in 1947, and purportedly exhibits extraordinary properties, such as functioning as a terahertz waveguide to generate antigravity capabilities,” the AARO said in the press release. “Considering all available evidence, AARO assesses that this specimen is likely a test object, a manufacturing product or byproduct, or a material component of aerospace performance studies to evaluate the properties of [magnesium] alloys.”

https://gizmodo.com/pentagon-publishes-report-on-material-from-a-reported-alien-aircraft-2000469433?utm_source=press.coop

Martin Piper, 80, from Cheltenham, is not easily startled. However, he admitted to being slightly taken aback when he spotted a large cat just 30 yards away from him and his two dogs, Polly and Percy, in a field near Bentham Lane, in Bentham, earlier this month.

He says the animal was beige and brown with dark flecks and pointy ears, and a very wide face, like a feline and it was 'beautiful'. The field was a little difficult to access as you have to navigate two styles which have brambles on either side, however when you get to the field you are met with the sigh of a natural blanket of buttercups and foot tall grass.

...

"The animal was looking at me from the top of the long grass. What struck me is that I did not see the body. However the tail was stood up and curled round like a question mark.

"It was beautiful. It had light brown and beige fur with dark markings around the eyes. I do not think it was very strange to see it, there have been other reports of big cats being seen in Cheltenham over the years.

"I had been able to watch the animal for around ten seconds. The animal was close to a copse and must have run into the wooded area before I could get near the creature."

Mr Piper decided to get in touch with wildlife enthusiast Frank Tunbridge to discuss the big cat sighting in Bentham, near the A46 and A417 between Cheltenham and Brockworth.

No real evidence, just an encounter with what was probably a black bear.

A video has been released purporting to show a non-native black cat running through a field in the semi-darkness.

Martin Burford, the man who took the video in an unrevealed location on the Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border a year ago, has told Worcester News that it was a “panther”. He claimed there was a thriving population of these cats in the area and that this one had been attacking and killing lambs.

Leaving aside the issue of exactly what a panther is (the term is vague and refers to one of two species), does the video actually shows a non-native cat such as a leopard or jaguar?

BBC Wildlife has shown the video to Dr Luke Hunter, executive director of the Big Cats Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), one of the world’s foremost conservation groups – and he says it doesn’t.

“It’s a moggy,” Hunter says. “The gait is very much a small cat’s, not a leopard or another big cat’s.”

...

“It amazes me that these claims persist,” says Hunter. “If there were big cats in the UK countryside, it would be almost unavoidable that unequivocal evidence would emerge.”

Some strong evidence – though arguably not conclusive beyond all doubt – did emerge in May when the DNA of a cat in the Panthera genus was found on a swab taken from a sheep carcass in Cumbria. In 2022, a hair found on barbed wire in Gloucestershire was identified as belonging to a leopard.

A Maldives minister has been arrested for allegedly performing “black magic” on President Mohamed Muizzu.

Maldives Police on Thursday said State Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Energy, Fathimath Shamnaz Ali Saleem, and two others were arrested on Sunday from the capital Male

Cops said Shamnaz has been remanded in custody for a week pending investigations.

“There have been reports that Shamnaz was arrested for performing black magic on President Dr Mohamed Muizzu,” the Sun, a local media outlet, said.

...

Sorcery is not a criminal offence under the penal code in the Muslim-majority Maldives, but it does carry a six-month jail sentence under Islamic law.

People across the archipelago widely practice traditional ceremonies, believing they can win favours and curse opponents.

A 62-year-old woman was stabbed to death by three neighbours on Manadhoo in April 2023 after she was accused of conducting black magic ceremonies, the Mihaaru news site reported last week, after a lengthy police investigation.

A woman out walking in the Forest of Dean was staggered to see a herd of deer being chased down by what she believes was a wolf. She had expected to maybe see a wild boar or even a polecat, yet not for one moment did she expect to see a wolf from just a few metres away and in broad daylight.

...

"I decided I was going to go on up ahead on to Verderers trail. When I got near the track at the top, about ten deer were running from my left out of the woods onto the track, and in the middle of them there was a wolf."

April could not believe all she was seeing. The deer and wolf were so close for a moment and she was able watch on as the deer made their way down the track with a wolf hot on their heels.

April said: "The deer and wolf was about two metres away from me. They were running down the track and was at the top.

"The wolf was bigger than the deer, and its colours really stood out. The fur of the wolf was grey and it had dark flecks towards it lower back and its tail was so bushy.

"The deer and the wolf had run off and into the bracken. I was there just speechless until my partner had caught up with me.

...

Keen to find out if there have been any more sightings of wolves in Gloucestershire, April contacted wildlife expert Frank Tunbridge.

Frank, 76, from Podsmead said: "A walk in the woods in the Forest of Dean can be an interesting and enlightening experience where our native wildlife is concerned. Especially if they are lucky enough to encounter some of the varied bird species, deer, or even see a wild boar or two, if you happen to be in the right place at the right time.

"l received an email from a lady outlining her experience of suddenly seeing a small herd of deer being hotly pursued by a wolf. After, when back home she checked out wolf images, and they confirmed that the physical shape and colouration matched the animal that she had seen.

"Many people will discount her report, implying that it was probably a husky, or maybe a wolfdog. However over the years, I have had received quite had few similar reports from the Forest of Dean area, and in every case they were identified as displaying all the features and behaviour of a wolf.

"Wolves are very efficient predators, secretive, and great wanderers, who can scent a human on the wind from over a mile away, so are not often seen. When one crosses your path, it is a sight that you will remember forever, similar to encountering a British big cat, or a lynx , which also exist in Gloucestershire, and throughout the UK.

"Many exotic species, have now established themselves throughout wild places across the UK, after being dumped and released when the 1976 Dangerous Animals act came into force. The amount of prey species in the Forest of Dean, especially the over abundance of deer, rabbits, pheasants, and wild boar piglets being available, will fuel any large carnivore's diet for years."

A "mysterious monolith" has appeared in a desert north of Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department says the shiny, reflective structure – similar to one found in Utah years ago – was spotted by its search and rescue unit near Gass Peak over the weekend.

"We see a lot of weird things when people go hiking like not being prepared for the weather, not bringing enough water... but check this out!" police wrote on X alongside an image of the monolith.

The discovery comes months after a hiker in Wales captured a video of a mysterious "UFO"-like monolith on top of a hillside along the country’s border with England.

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Similar monoliths also have been found in Belgium, Romania and the Isle of Wight – an island in the English Channel.

In November 2020, one of the monoliths, estimated at between 10 feet and 12 feet high, was found by Utah state wildlife employees who were counting sheep from a helicopter.

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Then a week later, another monolith was discovered in Atascadero, California, which is north of Los Angeles.

It’s unclear who is behind the placement of the monoliths. A New Mexico artist collective claimed responsibility years ago.

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Previously: monolith in Powys

Earlier this week media across the country have reported a story of John Broomhead, 68, who spoke about a scary incident that happened to him when he was camping near Tansley in July 2022.

It has been reported that after a barbecue with friends, John went to put out the fire when he heard what he described as a ‘rustling noise’. He said that soon after he saw a ‘huge black shadow ’ which was three or four times bigger than a regular cat.

John said that he could see the 'bright yellow eyes’ of the creature coming towards him. It has been reported that John ‘threw himself into the caravan’ after the animal moved from 40 yards away to 20 yards from the man in ‘an instant’. John said that he ‘feared he could get killed’ and that the incident left him traumatised.

Rick Minter, the host of the Big Cat Conversations podcast and author of Big Cats Facing Britain’s Wild Predators spoke to the Derbyshire Times to discuss the incident.

Rick said: “I hope to be able to speak to John in person about this case, but from his reported comments it would seem he witnessed a black leopard, also called a black panther.

“In their native lands, leopards can do a warning charge when provoked or threatened. This is possibly what John experienced. Leopards attack by surging low to the ground at blistering speed, so from what he described it is much more likely to have been a charge to warn-off John.

“Black leopards are the main big cats described by people across Britain. When mated together two black adult leopards breed 100% black offspring. There are now a few DNA results to back up the UK witness reports.

Radio 1’s Sian Eleri will return to investigative work for BBC One and BBC Three's upcoming series, 'Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens.'

The series delves into strange happenings along the south-west coast of Wales during the 1970s and 1980s, dubbed the largest reported UFO and extra terrestrial activity in history.

Dozens of unconnected people in various locations spoke of terrifying sightings, sparking fear and intrigue.

The series, in particular, lays focus on a 1977 incident where 14 schoolboys in Broad Haven reported seeing a UFO in their school playground.

The boys' account, supported by similar drawings executed under exam conditions, set off a wave of unexplained happenings on the Welsh coastline.

Presenter Sian Eleri, initially a sceptic, delved deep into the historical incident, tracing the boys and the original investigator, Randall Jones-Pugh.

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Mr Jones-Pugh's own words in an old VHS tape warn: "If the public knew the truth behind UFOs, they would run for their lives."

Ms Eleri also explores other theories, including the possibility of the boys spotting a military

The reported birth of a rare white buffalo in Yellowstone National Park fulfills a Lakota prophecy that portends better times, according to members of the American Indian tribe who cautioned that it’s also a signal that more must be done to protect the earth and its animals.

“The birth of this calf is both a blessing and warning. We must do more,” said Chief Arvol Looking Horse, the spiritual leader of the Lakota, Dakota and the Nakota Oyate in South Dakota, and the 19th keeper of the sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman Pipe and Bundle.

The birth of the sacred calf comes as after a severe winter in 2023 drove thousands of Yellowstone buffalo, also known as bison, to lower elevations. More than 1,500 were killed, sent to slaughter or transferred to tribes seeking to reclaim stewardship over an animal their ancestors lived alongside for millennia.

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For the Lakota, the birth of a white buffalo calf with a black nose, eyes and hooves is akin to the second coming of Jesus Christ, Looking Horse said.

Lakota legend says about 2,000 years ago — when nothing was good, food was running out and bison were disappearing — White Buffalo Calf Woman appeared, presented a bowl pipe and a bundle to a tribal member, taught them how to pray and said that the pipe could be used to bring buffalo to the area for food. As she left, she turned into a white buffalo calf.

“And some day when the times are hard again,” Looking Horse said in relating the legend, “I shall return and stand upon the earth as a white buffalo calf, black nose, black eyes, black hooves.”

A similar white buffalo calf was born in Wisconsin in 1994 and was named Miracle, he said.

Troy Heinert, the executive director of the South Dakota-based InterTribal Buffalo Council, said the calf in Braaten’s photos looks like a true white buffalo because it has a black nose, black hooves and dark eyes.

“From the pictures I’ve seen, that calf seems to have those traits,” said Heinert, who is Lakota. An albino buffalo would have pink eyes.

A naming ceremony has been held for the Yellowstone calf, Looking Horse said, though he declined to reveal the name. A ceremony celebrating the calf’s birth is set for June 26 at the Buffalo Field Campaign headquarters in West Yellowstone.

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Heinert sees the calf’s birth as a reminder “that we need to live in a good way and treat others with respect.”

“I hope that calf is safe and gonna live its best life in Yellowstone National Park, exactly where it was designed to be,” Heinert said.

The source of a mystery humming sound which has plagued people living in Omagh may now have been identified – but is not being made public.

People in the County Tyrone town first started to report a persistent humming that was keeping them them awake in the second half of last year.

A Fermanagh and Omagh District Council investigation has now ended.

John Boyle, the council’s director of community and wellbeing, said it had been “complex” but had been able to “hone in on a specific spot”.

Mr Boyle said the noise “wasn’t audible every night", and was linked to atmospheric conditions, making the investigation very difficult.

“We were able to hone in on a specific spot, and undertook a targeted screening exercise with a number of industrial businesses using equipment on a 24-hour basis," he said.

“However, a particular premises became the focus, and environmental health officers engaged with the management.

“While nothing was absolutely concluded, the noise did cease in a sense, but we will keep the complaint open and under review over the next number of months."

He told the council’s regeneration and community committee the council had received a total of 11 hum complaints.