Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

The image above is not some Photoshop job or a perspective trick. It’s the photograph of one of the Nile’s flood taken on October 1937 — check the full-size original here, from Tufts University.

Though everyone may have learnt on high school (or even elementary) that the floods of the river Nile were a fundamental element of the Ancient Egypt civilization, the real meaning of this doesn’t quite get to many, probably for a very simple reason. They no longer happen as before.

In 1970, with help from Soviet Union, the Egyptians completed the ambitious high Aswan dam, one of the biggest in the world which tamed the second largest river in the planet. It was on this occasion that many ancient temples were moved, as their original locations were flooded, like the famous Abu Simbel, reconstructed some 65 meters higher, or Dendur, 800 tons moved to New York.

After the dam was completed, the floods were controlled and near the pyramids, where there were periodical floods before, flourished a densely populated city.

“Coincidentally“, the Nile’s water periodically neared the Gizeh plateau and the pyramids were built on its margins. One cannot help but think that that may have greatly helped moving stones from the quarries, as Herodotus had alreay said.

This is one coincidence that many mystery sellers like to ignore. Other images from the Nile’s floods before the Aswan dam can be seen here and here.

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The story that Francisco Henrique de Souza, nicknamed “Januncio”, told late ufologist Bob Pratt is somewhat unique. One night of January 1979, he was walking home alone on Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil.

Around the middle of his way, he decided to lit a cigarette. That was his mistake, as that apparently caught the attention of an overhead flying saucer that started to follow him very closely. He was terrorized.

“Januncio” described the object as cylindrical, around 6-7 meters in height and 3-4 meters in diameter. It was extremely close to him, only a couple of meters over his head, and he described seeing two people inside, a man and a woman, seated. “The woman looked like she was wearing a dress”.

The object emitted a light that somehow sucked Januncio. To avoid being captured by the light, he grabbed a palm tree as best as he could — in the photo above, Januncio shows the bizarre situation.

“The light was very hot and I was scared”, he said. The suction from the light was very strong and despite firmly grasping the tree, Januncio was being lifted from the ground. “This happened some five times. Up and down, up and down… My chest was all scratched”. He started to cry and thought he was going to die.

“Then, when the man and woman saw that I was not leaving the tree, they threw something like boiling oil on me, to release me from the tree. I felt I was between the fire and the frying pan. I couldn’t move. The thing burned my arms and hurt me a lot, but I was afraid of leaving the tree”.

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Wikipedia actually has a page listing “valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but [that] are somewhat odd, whimsical, or something you wouldn’t expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica or similar”.

It’s worth hours and hours of lurking through fascinanting entries such as the village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (complete name sign above), Toynbee tiles, Project Mohole, the mythical Utah teapot, the Man-eating Tree…

In short, Forteana on the Web 2.0.

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“I’d never seen anything like it in my life,” the Washington lawyer said. “They were large for dragonflies. I thought, ‘Is that mechanical, or is that alive?’ “. That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security. – Dragonfly or Insect Spy? Scientists at Work on Robobugs.

A very bizarre article to read in the Washington Post, given that it’s almost the exact plot of an X-Files episode. Only without deaths and alien cockroaches. But still, X-Files.

[via TDG]

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Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log has a very informative item on the meteorite crater in Peru, “Sparks fly over meteorite“, dealing with the adventures of Michael Farmer, the “meteorite guy“.

Farmer apparently went to Peru days after the event and managed to buy samples of the meteorite from the locals. But things soon went tense, and he had to flee the country in a “a slight international incident”. Peruvians are not happy at all.

Meanwhile, Farmer revealed some details of analysis done on the samples he got, which allegedly confirm it was indeed a meteor.

“It’s probably the largest chondrite meteorite to have fallen,” Farmer said. He said the mass could be as much as 10 tons – which would be like a moving van falling from orbit. “It will be talked about for many years in the meteorite world,” Farmer predicted.

That would explain the strangeness of the crater, and would be a lesson for the initial outright dismissals of the crater as a meteor impact given its appearance.

And it doesn’t stop there. One more interesting item, though also pending further confirmation is a picture shared by Farmer of what’s supposed to be the smoke trail from the meteor:

Farmer claims he is not the only one who managed to get samples and take them out of Peru. And as analysis are already being done worldwide, the crater in Peru is still, as it seems, untouched, which may ruin much of what may be there.

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