UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENON - THAT YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER OF HEARD BEFORE

 IMPOSSIBLE FOOTPRINTS

Is it possible to find fossil-trace foot prints of dinosaurs and humans in the same rock?  Some people believe that they have evidence for just such an impossible occurrence.

Archaeologists and palaeontologists as well as other interested amateurs have been discovering dinosaur footprints in various types of sedimentary rock.  These footprints are created when a creature leaves an imprint in soft material such as mud, clay or sand.  If the conditions are right then the imprint is filled-in with more material while retaining its shape.  Over time the soft material is covered by new layers which preserves the prints and hardens into stone.  Millions of years later these tracks may be revealed by natural erosion or excavation. 

There is nothing strange or inexplicable about this process.  However, there have been many reported accounts of human footprints being found together with dinosaurs - or in rocks that date from many millions of years ago and long before humans are believed to have evolved.  Naturally, this has created a significant controversy between scientists, creationists and other interested parties.  The most famous site, and the one featured in the image, is the Paluxy site near Glen Rose in Texas, USA.  Still, claims persist that some of the tracks were modified to look more like human footprints after the locals realised the potential tourism value.  Some additional ancient footprint-examples include the Burdick Print also from Glen Rose, the Meister Print from Antelope Springs, Utah, the Nevada Shoe Print and the Coffee Print from Stinnet, Texas.  Most reputable palaeontologists dismiss these claims as hoaxes or misinterpretations but advocates of the fossil-trace footprints argue that in many cases the finds are dismissed unfairly simple because mainstream science declares them impossible and refuses to carry out the correct study.  In this case we at Aquiziam tend to side with the mainstream science that there is a better explanation that human-dinosaur coexistence.  Still, who knows for sure?

VANISHING PEOPLE

Worldwide there are literally hundreds of thousands of missing persons and many more disappear every day.  One only has to search Google Images for “Missing People” to appreciate the scale of the problem. Many of these missing people are found but a significant proportion disappears forever.  Where they went or what happened to them is a mystery in its own right but still not as strange as Vanishing People.  These are individuals that for no apparent reason simply vanish in front of witnesses who are at a complete loss to explain what happened.  It is worth noting, as with many other mysteries, that some of these cases have turned out to be hoaxes.  In general, there are a couple consistencies in the most well known cases that are worth mentioning. 

THE HESSDALEN LIGHTS

Strange and still-unexplained lights in the sky are a fairly common occurrence and most can be explained as either manmade objects or natural phenomena such as the Aurora Borealis or even shooting stars.

However, there are occasions when the phenomena persist and the mysterious lights that still materialise over Hessdalen in central-eastern Norway are one such case in point. According to various sources they started to appear in 1940 but it was in 1981 that the intensity of these phenomena increased dramatically and started to be recorded by everyday people.  Records show that at certain times there have been 20 reported sightings in just one week. 

Although the intensity of this mysterious phenomenon has declined over the years there are still regular sightings and various scientific and quasi-scientific study projects have been established to monitor these lights. Visually they look like small pockets of burning gas (blue or orange) but maintain their luminosity for far longer than just a simple flaming of combustible methane or hydrogen.  The lights also move in a way that is similar (but slower) to reports of ball lightning but otherwise have no similarities.  The Hessdalen Automatic Measurement Station was established in August 1998 and has regularly recorded inexplicable lights from 1983 until now.  Everyone has a theory as to what might be casing these phenomena.  Some of the claims include UFO portals, spontaneous combustion of natural gasses, Will-o'-the-wisps, ball lightning, Scandium effects and localised Ionic charges.  At times it seems as if the Hessdalen lights are used as proof of everything from divine apparitions to alien invasion.  There have been several claims in the media that the mystery of the Hessdalen lights has been solved usually accompanied with a statement that these results will be released sometime in the future.  We’re still waiting.

TIME SLIPS

According to great scientists such as Albert Einstein, time is not as stable as most of us think.  As humans we’re adjusted to time and our evolution has established tricks to allow our conscious minds to deal with it but in reality it’s a slippery concept.  Time slips occur when a current time (now) interlaces with a previous time (then) and can be experienced by the person from the more recent time.  However, the event is usually unnoticed by the people from the earlier time. What is the evidence for this phenomenon? 

Well ... plenty if you know where to look.  In fact it is so common that we’ve even built it into the English language.  We’ll explain.  When a time slip occurs people in both realities are able to experience the alternative reality.

Still, according to most accounts, this usually lasts for only a few seconds and the human brain does its best to filter out these anomalies.  This has given rise to expressions such as “I could have sworn that I’ve just seen” or “my eyes must be playing tricks on me” or even “you won’t believe what I just saw”.  Over the years people have claimed that they’ve seen old airplanes parked in fields that were once airports or roman soldiers marching down their road.  In almost all cases the person experiencing the time slip blinks, looks again and is startled to find that whatever they saw has now vanished.  However, photography has captured these anomalies from the time that the camera was first invented.  In fact, the longer exposure times of early cameras have revealed more than the modern “instant” versions do but there are still oddities such as the image captured on Google Earth that clearly shows a World War Two bomber flying over Britain.  Is this a time slip or just the folks at Google having a laugh?  Perhaps it’s a reconstruction from an air show? Not all time slips are brief and there have been occasions when people have entered a room and been startled to find that they are in a completely different time.  One case was recorded by Mr Archie “Racer” Carmichael who was driving from Birmingham to London in 1953 when he stopped for a drink in a Cotswold village near Borton-on-the-Water.  He parked his Austin-Healy 100/4 outside the local pub and entered for a drink.  He was shocked when the he found the people inside the bar looked as if they were from an earlier century.  His attempts to communicate were ignored and after a few minutes the scene dissolved and Archie found himself being asked if he was alright by a worried looking barman. It seems that he thought he had seen ghosts but was probably experiencing a time slip.