Hiatus Announcment

Dear readers,

It feels us with great emotion to formally announce that Asia Paranormal will be taking a indefinite hiatus as of today.

We would like to thank all our readers for their continued support for the past 3 years. We are also unable to determine when exactly we will return but we promise to give an update on this in the very near future.

Once again, thank you all and please continue to browse our website. Email us at AsiaParanormal@gmail.com for any enquiries or feedback.

We shall see you soon.

Sincerely yours,
Team Asia Paranormal

UK 'X-Files' reveal UFO sighting over Chelsea stadium

LONDON - Britain on Thursday released an archive of "X-Files" detailing government UFO briefings and probes into unexplained sightings, including one above Chelsea football club.

The 25 files released by The National Archives include "a lengthy briefing on UFO policy to then prime minister Tony Blair's office" along with a job description for the post of UFO desk officer, described as the "weirdest job in Whitehall."

According to an employee of the UFO desk, which closed in 2009, the perception that it consisted of "top secret teams of specialist scientists scurrying around the country in a real life version of the X-Files" was "total fiction."

Instead, daily duties included providing briefings on the Ministry of Defence's (MoD) position on UFOs, undertaking UFO investigations, handling Freedom of Information requests (FOIs) and managing UFOlogists (UFO "experts").

Among the stranger investigations included one into a UFO sighting by a police officer at Chelsea football club and another into a visit by three "men in black" to a person who reported a UFO encounter in Lincolnshire, east England.

According to the files, a hotel owner in Wales once complained to her MP after a UFO landed in a field "from which two tall silver-suited 'faceless humanoids' emerged and began "making measurements'."

Also included in the files are details of a 1995 briefing by one of the MoD's UFO intelligence officers which speculated on why aliens would visit earth.

[Click here to read full article]

Arrested for idol worship

A Sri Lankan youth employed as a domestic aid has been arrested in Saudi Arabia for worshiping a statue of the Buddha, which is considered an offence according to Shariah law.

According to the Bodu Bala Senaa, the youth bearing passport no. 2353715 identified as Premanath Pereralage Thungasiri has been arrested by Umulmahami Police, which is a grave situation.

The organisation states that information has been received regarding a plan that is underway to behead a Sri Lankan youth employed in domestic service in Saudi Arabia. Although a complaint has been lodged at the Foreign Employment Bureau, Battaramulla, under complaint no: CN/158/1205, so far no action has been taken.

While the youth is a Buddhist, the charge levelled against him is that he paid obeisance to the Buddha at the house where he was employed.

The Bodu Bala Senaa organisation further said those employed in Muslim countries are prevented from practicing their religious faiths, and if found to do so are punished severely. Recently a Sri Lankan woman was arrested for gazing at a child at a shopping complex, where she was accused of witchcraft, on the grounds that she had a black cord around her wrist.

However, the organisation accused the Foreign Employment Bureau officials of not educating the Sri Lankan workers travelling to Saudi Arabia regarding the laws in those countries pertaining to religious rights. Therefore, many of our migrant workers in Saudi Arabia face these situations due to their ignorance of the prevailing laws of those countries.

On prior occasions too many Sri Lankan female domestic workers were forced to embrace Islam, and wear the traditional attire, while so far four Sri Lankan youth have been beheaded in that country.

[Click here to read full article]

Is this a real pontianak caught on tape?

We don't really believe anything we see on the Internet, but this is really creepy.

A video clip shot using a camera phone reportedly shows a pontianak wandering near Bukit Tinggi has been spreading like wildfire on the social networking site Facebook. Watch the video here:

If psychic ability exists why can’t anyone predict winning lottery numbers?

Here is a common question. If psychic abilities such as precognition are reality why can’t anyone seem to pick winning lottery numbers? If psychic precognition is true, predicting winning lottery numbers should be commonplace. Why isn’t it happening? Skeptics roll their eyes, sigh, and say it’s because precognition doesn’t exist. That is the wrong answer.
The answer: People actually do predict winning lottery numbers.

The problem is with the question. We don’t understand precognition and other similar psychic phenomena. Precognition is not something anyone can call on at will. We assume some individuals can because of the claims of so-called psychics. Professional psychics are either scam artists, or have a natural talent but understand its limits even if they won’t admit it (bad for business).

Precognition and other psychic phenomena occur spontaneously and are generally uncontrollable. It just happens out-of-the-blue. Some people may never experience such a thing once in their entire lifetime, but for others it may happen fairly often. Precognition happens on its own terms, and why and when is a mystery.

Steve’s Story.

Of interest was a comment from the Steve, the blogger of the cool Ghostly Times. Here is what Steve wrote:

“I dreamed of the number 2895 and wondered why I would have that number pop up in a dream. 6 months later 2895 is the winning lottery numbers. I remember the dream. I start thinking about the dream and convince myself that I just had the dream and should have played the lottery. Was it a prophecy or coincidence?”

A straight pick-4 lottery number has a 1 in 10,000 chance of winning. Because a state lottery pays out only half of what the odds should provide (keeping the balance for its self) the prize is only $5,000. A very bad deal. Never the less, had Steve played both the mid-day and evening game for 6 months he would have bought 360 tickets at a cost of $360 and won 5K. A winning coincidence!

[Click here to read full article]

Islamic Prophecies of a coming messiah and the destruction of Israel

Disclose.tv - Islamic prophecies of a coming messiah and the destruction of Israel:

Sinkholes in China: July 2012

The official explanation is over-development but why would all these sinkholes show up more frequently in different parts of the world since last year? Here’re some of the key events:

Intense solar storms–> large amount of energy absorbed by the earth’s crust due to earth’s weakening magnetic field –> the earth’s core heats up –> the earth’s crust starts the process of breaking apart from the shifting of the inner core against its mass, active fault lines –> the planet opens relief fissures to handle the pressures exerted –> sinkholes, mysterious sounds –> earthquakes, volcanic eruptions etc –> Global Earthquake

[Click here to read full article]

Quest to find Chinese Bigfoot begins

A team of researchers will take an expedition to the Shennongjia forest of China’s central Hubei province, a forbidding 1,000 square mile reserve of high mountains and deep forests, to find evidence of the “Wild Man”.

For centuries, the villagers around the Shennongjia reserve have believed that the “Wild Man”, or Yeren, lives among them.

Standing just under seven feet tall (2.15 metres) and covered in dark grey hair, this Chinese incarnation of Bigfoot or the yeti has been spotted hundreds of times, the Age reported.

Size 12 primate-like footprints have been documented in the area, and long thick strands of hair have been tested by scientists, who concluded that they did not belong to any of the known creatures inside the reserve.

But no one has ever proven its existence.

This weekend, the team of 38 researchers drawn from several Chinese universities and research institutes will fan out across the Shennongjia reserve on an expedition to catalogue the region’s unique ecosystem.

Their trip will continue throughout August, and the researchers will collect data on some 1000 different types of animals that live in Shennongjia, including the golden snub-nosed monkey and a white-furred bear that is found only in the reserve.

If the researchers manage to uncover concrete evidence of the Wild Man, they will have succeeded where two previous major expeditions - one from 1974 to 1981 and one in 2010 - failed.

“I simply want to put an end to the argument that it exists,” said Wang Shancai, of the Hubei Relics and Archaeology Institute, when he set out in 2010.

In 2005, Zhang Jiahong, a shepherd in Muyu, near the forest, told state media he had seen two of the creatures, with “hairy faces, eyes like black holes, prominent noses and dishevelled hair, with faces that resembled both a man’s and a monkey’s".

Another explorer, Zhang Jinxing, spent years living as a hermit in the Shennongjia forest, and said he had seen footprints on 19 separate occasions, without ever finding the beast.

However, Zhou Guoxing, a former director of the Beijing Museum of Natural History and a paleontologist, has cast doubt on the idea that there may be a Chinese Bigfoot.

“There is no Wild Man in this world. I’ve visited every place where the Wild Man was reported in China. I’ve studied everything related to the Wild Man including hair, skulls and specimens. All of them are dyed human hair or come from monkeys and bears,” he said earlier this year.

He added that the local government in Hubei was simply trying to drum up tourist revenue.

[Click here to read full article]

"Rowdy" Roddy Piper recalles ghostly encounter with deceased WWE wrestler

WWE Hall of Famer "Rowdy" Roddy Piper recalled his ghostly encounter with a deceased WWE wrestler during the Biography Channel's Saturday night airing of Celebrity Ghost Stories.
Roddy summarized his early days in the professional wrestling industry as a 22-year-old kid with no family. He met another 22-year-old kid, named Adrian Adonis, and they became best friends. He recalled angrily snapping at people, with led to Adrian calming him down and advising him to purchase a house. Adrian believed that a house purchase would give Piper the family life he desperately wanted. He did months later and found happiness.

Roddy, who faced Adrian before 93,173 spectators at WrestleMania III, lamented his death in a car accident. Adrian was killed on July 4, 1988 in Lewisporte, Newfoundland while riding in a minivan with fellow wrestlers William "Mike Kelly" Arko, Victor "Pat Kelly" Arko, and Dave "Wildman" McKigney. Adonis, McKigney, and Pat Kelly were killed when the driver, Mike Kelly, allegedly swerved in order to avoid hitting a moose and, blinded by the setting sun, inadvertedly drove into a lake. Mike Kelly survived, albeit with severe leg injuries.

Roddy said his daughter Ariel would later wake up in the middle of the night and scream because she saw a man in her bedroom. His son would see shadows and hear noises in an inexplicable manner.


Read more: http://www.WrestlingInc.com/wi/news/2012/0623/553775/roddy-piper/#ixzz1zdi93iEU

[Click here to read full article]

Morning shower paints rural Kannur red

KANNUR: Though not for first time in the state, red rain in parts of Kannur on Thursday did create some panic and curiosity among the residents in the district. The strange phenomenon happened around 6:50am and lasted for 15 minutes. People in the 1km area in and around Edachery in Puzhati panchayat panicked as their courtyards turned blood red after rain.

Kannur block panchayat president Shaija M, who collected the sample of the rainwater, said the water was as dark as black coffee and had the smell of raw beetroot. "I thought someone killed some animal and its blood got mixed with water on the courtyard," she said. Akshay Sajeevan, another resident in the locality, said in his compound the colour of rainwater was a bit lighter. According to meteorological department, though red rain is a rare phenomenon, but it is no way harmful. "I assume this is due to atmospheric pollution. The pollutants in the air get dissolved in rainwater resulting in red rain," said M Santhosh, director of meteorological department, Thiruvananthapuram.

[Click here to read full article]

The Extraordinary Tale of Red Rain, Comets and Extraterrestrials

Panspermia is the idea that life exists throughout the universe in comets, asteroids and interstellar dust clouds and that life of Earth was seeded from one or more of these sources. Panspermia holds that we are all extraterrestrials.

While this is certainly not a mainstream idea in science, a growing body of evidence suggests that it should be carefully studied rather than casually disregarded.

For example, various bugs have been shown to survive for months or even years in the harsh conditions of space. And one of the more interesting but lesser known facts about the Mars meteorite that some scientists believe holds evidence of life on Mars, is that its interior never rose above 50 degrees centigrade, despite being blasted from the Martian surface by an meteor impact and surviving a fiery a descent through Earth's thick atmosphere.

If there is life up there, this evidence suggests that it could survive the trip to Earth.

All that seems well established. Now for the really controversial stuff.

In 2001, numerous people observed red rain falling over Kerala in the southern tip of India during a two month period. One of them was Godfrey Louis, a physicist at nearby Cochin University of Science and Technology. Intrigued by this phenomena, Louis collected numerous samples of red rain, determined to find out what was causing the contamination, perhaps sand or dust from some distant desert.

Under a microscope, however, he found no evidence of sand or dust. Instead, the rain water was filled with red cells that look remarkably like conventional bugs on Earth. What was strange was that Louis found no evidence of DNA in these cells which would rule out most kinds of known biological cells (red blood cells are one possibility but ought to be destroyed quickly by rain water).

Louis published his results in the peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space in 2006, along with the tentative suggestion that the cells could be extraterrestrial, perhaps from a comet that had disintegrated in the upper atmosphere and then seeded clouds as the cells floated down to Earth. In fact, Louis says there were reports in the region of a sonic boom-type noise at the time, which could have been caused by the disintegration of an object in the upper atmosphere.

Since then, Louis has continued to study the cells with an international team including Chandra Wickramasinghe from the University of Cardiff in the UK and one of the leading proponents of the panspermia theory, which he developed in the latter half of the 20th century with the remarkable physicist Fred Hoyle.

[Click here to read full article]

Michael Jackson's spirit haunts LA mansion

LOS ANGELES: He died three years ago, but King of Pop Michael Jackson’s spirit is said to be haunting his Los Angeles mansion, according to neighbours.

Neighbours say they have seen him strolling around his home like a scene from his “Thriller” video, and they have even heard his music and singing during the night, reports dailystar.co.uk.
Jackson died in his Beverly Hills house June 25, 2009, due to an overdose of Propofol.

“Everyone thinks that Michael’s ghost walks around the house. It has freaked everyone out. When he was living there, Michael would regularly look through the curtains and see who was around,” said a neighbour.

“People have heard his music coming from the house and even singing. It is so weird. The world knew that Michael was obsessed by the afterlife, from his songs like ‘Thriller’. He believed in spirits – now his own has returned,” added the neighbour.

Jackson lived at the mansion with his children Prince, now 15, Paris, 14, and Blanket, 10.

[Click here to read full article]

Shaffer: How much does your soul weigh?

DURHAM -- For at least 100 years, the more oddball branches of science have struggled to answer this metaphysical head-scratcher: How much does the human soul weigh?

In 1907, a Massachusetts doctor named Duncan MacDougall settled on the figure of 21 grams – the average weight loss experienced by six terminal tuberculosis patients he strapped to a scale at the moment of death.

A dozen years ago, an Oregon rancher named Lew Hollander tried to measure the souls of one ram, seven ewes, three lambs and a goat. His findings: The animals actually gained weight as they shook off this mortal coil – anywhere from 18 to 780 grams.

Now this summer, the Rhine Research Center in Durham will host the latest experiment aimed at nailing down the intangible essence of mankind.

The method: 1.) Stand on a scale. 2.) Have an out-of-body experience. 3.) Record weight.

“We want to have irrefutable evidence to present to the scientific community,” said Jerry Conser, a Dallas oil man and psychic researcher who came up with the idea. “We’re going to have a hurry-up, quick-and-dirty series of experiments. If we can show consistently and repeatedly that every time somebody goes out of body, there’s a corresponding weight change ...”

I’ll finish the sentence. It would be awesome.

The Rhine Center, named for the psychic research pioneer J.B. Rhine, is famous for probing into the world of unexplained phenomena: ESP, near-death experience, poltergeists.

Rhine himself was best-known for his ESP queries, including one that involved a mind-reading horse named Lady Wonder. But he also dabbled in the geography of man’s inner identity, penning an article in 1946 entitled, “Scientific Evidence Man Has a Soul.”

[Click here to read full article]

Maya Archaeologists Unearth New 2012 Monument With 'End Date' of Dec. 21, 2012

Archaeologists working at the site of La Corona in Guatemala have discovered a 1,300-year-old-year Maya text that provides only the second known reference to the so-called "end date" of the Maya calendar, December 21, 2012. The discovery, one of the most significant hieroglyphic finds in decades, was announced June 28 at the National Palace in Guatemala.

"This text talks about ancient political history rather than prophecy," says Marcello A. Canuto, director of Tulane's Middle American Research Institute and co-director of the excavations at La Corona.

Since 2008, Canuto and Tomás Barrientos of the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala have directed excavations at La Corona, a site previously ravaged by looters.

"Last year, we realized that looters of a particular building had discarded some carved stones because they were too eroded to sell on the antiquities black market," said Barrientos, "so we knew they found something important, but we also thought they might have missed something."

What Canuto and Barrientos found was the longest text ever discovered in Guatemala. Carved on staircase steps, it records 200 years of La Corona history, states David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at The University of Texas at Austin, who was part of a 1997 expedition that first explored the site.

While deciphering these new finds in May, Stuart recognized the 2012 reference on a stairway block bearing 56 delicately carved hieroglyphs. It commemorated a royal visit to La Corona in AD 696 by the most powerful Maya ruler of that time, Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk' of Calakmul, only a few months after his defeat by long-standing rival Tikal in AD 695. Thought by scholars to have been killed in this battle, this ruler was visiting allies and allaying their fears after his defeat.

"This was a time of great political turmoil in the Maya region and this king felt compelled to allude to a larger cycle of time that happens to end in 2012," says Stuart.

So, rather than prophesy, the 2012 reference places this king's troubled reign and accomplishments into a larger cosmological framework.

"In times of crisis, the ancient Maya used their calendar to promote continuity and stability rather than predict apocalypse," says Canuto.

[Click here to read full article]

Islam Creates Europe

Modern Europeans tend to have mixed feelings about the rise of Islam: Islam and Christianity have, after all, been butting heads for the last fifteen hundred years. What is not normally appreciated though is the fundamental role Islam had in creating Europe.

Islam, it will be remembered, was born in the Middle East in the early seventh century. By Mohammed’s death in 632 all the tribes of Arabia had been united into one bloc. Then, by 700, the armies of Islam had poured out of the Middle East across northern Africa and into Spain, and through Persia towards the Ganges; some had even made their way across the Sahara and into Sub-Saharan Africa. This ‘Empire’ was not destined to last: it would splinter into a hundred shards. But Islam would become the religion of the majority in these territories.

So what has this to do with Europe? First, it must be recalled that Europe did not, in any real sense, exist prior to the Islamic invasions. What we refer to as Western Civilisation was the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire was a Mediterranean Empire: with the Red Sea and Britain standing as distant and rather unimportant outliers. A family in Rome had far more in common with a family in Egyptian Alexandria than it did with a family in Britain let alone unconquered and tribal Germany. The Mediterranean was linked by city life that characterised every coastline on that sea: whereas city life never took off in what we think of today as northern Europe, where often towns and villages were lacking.

[Click here to read full article]

What if Time Stops Completely?

What would happen to the universe if suddenly time stopped? Would it be exactly the way things were before time started? And can an abstract concept like time actually stop? Scientists Jose Senovilla, Marc Mars, and Raul Vera working from the University of Salamanca and University of Basque Country in Spain have proposed that there may be a day in our distant future where time will stop.

Imagine a world where all objects in motion simply froze with the landscape, thought was isolated, and everything was caught in a state of absolute stasis. Generally when we think about time slowing down and stopping, it's in the context of a universe where objects still exist, much like our own planet. But in this interpretation, time itself is dependent largely on external objects and forces in order to exist. It would essentially stop without anything to move it forward. And so as energy eventually dissipates, it will no longer be able to sustain a concept like time.

The scientists are examining evidence gathered from exploded stars, which appear to move much faster out at the edge of the universe than they do at the universe's center. This isn't groundbreaking when you take into account the theoretical form of matter known as "dark matter." With a name like dark matter, it has quite a bit to live up to in sci-fi spookiness and according to proponents of the existence of dark matter, it certainly does with forms of the matter actually making the existence of the universe possible according to many contemporary interpretations.

[Click here to read full article]

Romans in Japan?!

Beach has long since pioneered the wrong place, wrong time tags that set out examples of artifacts, languages, ideas and even DNA turning up in unexpected places or unexpected time periods. These have included such wonders as the last Latin speakers of Africa, Japanese torpedo boats in the Baltic and Turkish in medieval Cambodia. Today he wanted to push the boat out a little further with a recent report on Roman finds from Japan.

Tests have revealed three glass beads discovered in the fifth-century ‘Utsukushi’ burial mound in Nagaoka, near Kyoto, were probably made some time between the first and the fourth century, the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties said.

The glass beads in question – reports differ but there seem to be three – do look Roman – note the tell-tale gilt, but they are only 5mm in length. And, as Beach has learnt to his peril, in archaeology as in linguistics, small things are more easily mistaken than bigger things. The Japanese scientists have claimed – in press releases, no academic publications have yet emerged – that their evidence is also chemical.

Japan was badly burnt in 2000 by the archaeological forgeries associated with Shinichi Fujimura. It is unlikely, after that fiasco, that as august a body as the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties would have lightly announced such a discovery. Then again as always with these ‘far-out’ stories, if the glass turns out to have been made by, say, some talented craftsmen in Korea there will be no correction in the international press… So if you are reading this in 2013 go out and hunt down the academic work and see what the real deal is.

[Click here to read full article]

Mickey on Mercury? That's goofy!

We've had the Face on Mars, the Smiley Face on Mars, even the Elephant Face on Mars — and now we've got the Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury, courtesy of NASA's Messenger probe.
The mousy shape comes from three overlapping craters in Mercury's southern hemisphere, northwest of a larger crater known as Magritte. The biggest crater in this scene, which serves as Mickey's head, measures about 65 miles (105 kilometers) across.

This picture was taken during Messenger's extended mission, with the aim of collecting imagery when the sun is near the horizon. Such conditions produce long shadows that highlight small-scale surface features. The result is that the Mercury mission's mapmakers get a better sense of the lay of the land.

Messenger became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury back in March 2011, and the end of its one-year primary mapping mission marked the beginning of a one-year extension. Which means we may be hearing more about Mickey, Magritte and their Mercurial friends for months or years to come.

The Mickey Mouse Face on Mercury was today's featured image for our "Where in the Cosmos" Facebook contest. It took just a couple of minutes for Leslie Kebschull and Brad Perdew to come up with the locale for the cartoonish craters. Their entries came in just three seconds apart. To reward their quick minds and fingers, I'm sending them a pair of 3-D glasses, courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope. (Microsoft is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)

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