Month: January 2014

The photo above, featuring an east view along the south wall of the White House, was taken during the remodeling of the White House on May 25, 1950 by National Parks Service photographer Abbie Rowe and shows a transparent human-shaped figure towards the rear of the room.  Various explanations have been offered including long exposure and reflected light but none explain why the ghostly figure in question is transparent while other persons in the photograph are so clear.  The consensus is that the photograph is authentic and unaltered.  The ghostly figure that appears in the photo however, is still unknown. Reports of ghostly apparitions at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are nothing new.  The White house maintains a haunted legacy that dates back well over 200 years.  Even

One step closer to cracking the Voynich Manuscript? The enigmatic Voynich Manuscript has puzzled cryptographers and historians for centuries but today, after botanists announced in the journal for the American Botanical Council that they had found matches for many of the plants depicted in the Voynich Manuscript, we may be one step closer to understanding the meaning of the 600-year-old codex.  How did botanist crack the code?  Rather than focusing on the words in the mysterious manuscript, the botanist focused on the pictures instead. Botanist Arthur O. Tucker stumbled across the discovery after recognizing one of the plants in the manuscript: "We were both immediately struck by the similarity of xiuhamolli/xiuhhamolli (soap plant ... sometimes known as the “Aztec Herbal”) to the plant in the illustration on folio 1v

Can’t say we blame them. With some of the worst pollution and only 10% of the population owning cars, a vending machine that dispenses cheap electric rental cars seems like a no-brainer to us.  Wait a minute – a *vending machine* that dispense cars?!?!  In Hangzhou, China, citizens walk up to the multi-story Kandi Car garage, insert their credit card, push a few buttons, and viola, a fully-charged electric vehicle is retrieved via robotic arms, tracks, and elevators and deposited at their feet. Kandi currently has two EV vending machines in Hangzhou (a city of 10 million people located just outside of Shanghai).  Kandi plans to add 10 more this year in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai.  Each vending machine holds between 30 and 300

Giving him the appearance of some sort of mythical creature, a California man has developed bizarre star-shaped cataracts in both of his eyes after suffering an electrical injury whereby 14,000 volts of electricity passed through his body.  According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the 42-year-old electrician was working when his left shoulder accidentally came into contact with 14,000 volts of electricity.  The massive electrical current passed through his body, including the optic nerve, the nerve that connects the eyes to the brain.  Unfortunately, the man’s vision was impacted by the accident.  Doctors are unsure how the electrical shock caused the strange star-shaped cataracts. Sources: New England Journal of Medicine

Encompassing most of the Southern Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains, Colorado's remote wilderness areas remain largely uninhabited - except for the scattering of hikers and backpackers who traverse the area, exploring the beauty of Colorado's immense natural environment.  The area is a perfect habitat for Bigfoot and in fact, during the past 50 years, there have been hundreds of documented Bigfoot sightings in the wilderness areas of Colorado, some of which provide us with the best proof to date for the existence of sasquatch. The Jim Holder Bigfoot sighting (Estes Park, Colorado, 2007) Widely considered to be one of the top Bigfoot sightings of all time, in 2007, Jim Holder and his

Off of scenic Minnesota State Highway 61 is a freak of nature that doesn’t take a pair of binoculars or hours of silent stalking to spot.  The Devil’s Kettle Falls is located on the Brule River where about 1 ½ miles from its mouth, the river forks at a rock outcropping to form two massive waterfalls.  The eastern flow is pretty normal – it plunges fifty feet and continues downstream towards Lake Superior.  The western flow however, tumbles thirty feet into a massive hole and disappears underground.  To date, scientists and researchers have been unable to unravel the mystery of the puzzling geological phenomenon nor determine where the immense volume of water (and rocks, trees, and boulders) goes making the most preposterous theory, that the

Last week, NASA scientists revealed the discovery of a mysterious rock on Mars that seems to have suddenly appeared out of thin air.  News of the errant “mystery rock”, which NASA said was “like nothing we’ve ever seen before”, were announced last week by NASA Mars Exploration Rover team members at an event in Caltech, California.  Amongst talk of the usual day-to-day NASA discoveries on the Red Planet (e.g. gypsum deposits, new clays), NASA shared the Mars rover team’s excitement over the discovery of a mysterious rock that appeared, out of nowhere, in NASA photos. During the event, NASA showed photos taken on sol 3528 of the Opportunity Rover mission, that captured a flat, bare bedrock.  But a few days later, on sol 3540, a large

At Altered Dimensions, we don’t put a tremendous amount of “faith” in the many odd-shaped objects spotted on the surface of Mars and the Moon.  We’re not saying they don’t exist but rather, our mind tends to fit objects into pre-perceived patterns so that they “make sense” after our brain sorts things out.  However, a newfound gigantic triangular-shaped object spotted on the surface of the Moon, likened by many to a secret moon base or alien spaceship, has us scratching our heads. Discovered in a Google Moon compilation of lunar surface images, the bizarre wedged-shaped object is configured with seven evenly-spaced light-like dots perfectly aligned in a triangle along its edge.  It’s too symmetrical to be a random topographical structure.  It’s not faked, it’s really there,

The picture above is not a rock or earthen statue - it's a real man, albeit a dirty one.  80-year-old Iranian Amou Haji, resident of the Dejgah village in the southern Iranian province of Fars, has not bathed in over 60 years, giving his skin and clothing an earth-tone that allows him to blend in with his surroundings.  Believing that cleanliness will only make him ill, the only water he comes into contact with is the 1 ½ gallons of water he drinks each day from an old, rusty oil can.  And his curious lifestyle choices do not end there… Haji also holds a special contempt for fresh food and instead chooses to dine on the putrid, decaying flesh of dead animals; rotting porcupine is his

Although not completely frozen (come on, - nearly 76,000 gallons of water flow over it every second), the flow over Niagara Falls’ American Falls and Bridal Veil Falls has certainly frozen a considerable amount since last week’s (January 2014) chilly “polar vortex” event blasted the United States and Canada.  In fact, the Buffalo News is reporting a considerable portion of the American Falls *has* frozen solid.  Ice floes and giant icicles form on the falls every year and the ice at the base of the falls, called the ice bridge, has historically grown so thick that people used to build concession stands and walk from the United States to Canada on it (three people died in 1912 when the bridge collapsed while they were crossing it). 

Former Defense Minister of Canada, Paul Hellyer, shaped Canada’s armed forces in the 1960’s when he ushered in a massive reorganization of the nation’s military. In 2005, when after retirement he made what he called a “life-changing discovery”, Hellyer stunned the world when he became the first high-level cabinet member from a G8 country to publicly state that there is extraterrestrial life present on Earth.  Hellyer, who personally experienced a UFO sighting in 2005, says that at least four different alien species, and as many as eighty, have been visiting Earth for thousands of years (with each species having different agendas).  More recently, at a 2013 Citizen Hearing on Disclosure in Washington, DC, Hellyer shocked the audience by admitting that “aliens are living among us

Filmmaker, Shawn Bannon, recently released a short documentary film titled “Creature in the Giant Sequoias” which includes a newly discovered clip of a Bigfoot creature in the wild.  On a funding grant from the National Geographic Society, the bigfoot was filmed in the Sequoia National Park, a location that has produced hundreds of sightings (and video/audio recordings) in the past.  Although the clip from the film includes many tell-tale signs of being a potential hoax (bumpy camera movements, sudden film stops, “convenient” blurs, poor “acting”, sasquatch walking like a gangster from the hood, etc.) and the video documentary itself seems a bit amateurish, I can’t help but notice this creature looks like a cross between a Bigfoot and a Transformer – it’s huge! Bannon has released

New NASA imagery from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array spacecraft has been released showing a bizarre, radiant human hand-like structure that appears to be reaching out to touch a brilliant glowing red cloud in deep space. Complete with clearly-defined forearm, wrist, thumb, fingers, and fingernails, the celestial object has been appropriately dubbed the “Hand of God”. Scientists are not sure what the structure is but believe it may be a “pulsar wind nebula”, the dense remnant of a star that exploded in a supernova. NuSTAR investigator Fiona Harrison said in a statement: “NuSTAR's unique viewpoint, in seeing the highest-energy X-rays, is showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light… We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion.” The photo, which looks like

Oklahoma authorities have arrested a 33-year-old man who they say killed his stepfather by giving him an “atomic wedgie” that caused the victim to suffocate on his own underwear.  33-year-old Brad Lee Davis was fighting with 58-year-old Denver St. Clair (the man’s stepfather) at their residence in McLoud, Oklahoma (just east of Oklahoma City) when Davis grabbed the back of his stepfather’s underwear, pulling the elastic waistband completely over the back of St. Clair’s head. Oklahoma Medical Examiners determined that the waistband wrapped tightly around the victim’s throat, suffocating him to death. Pottawatomie County Sheriff Deputy Travis Palmer said the fight began after Davis and St. Clair were drinking beer on the night of December 21, 2013 at the older man's residence when St. Clair began

A recently released airline investigative report has revealed that a British airline pilot reported a near-miss with a UFO that occurred last July near Heathrow Airport in London.  The pilot, who was the supervising captain of the flight, said the incident occurred while his Airbus A320 (the flight number was not revealed to the public) was cruising at 32,000 feet around 20 miles west of Heathrow Airport.  The pilot described the UFO as a “cigar or rugby ball-shaped”, bright silver, and metallic in construction.  He state that the UFO passed within a few feet of the top of his passenger jet.  The pilot reported the incident to authorities telling them that he was certain the object, which was travelling at “great speed”, was going to