Archive for the ‘Forteana’ Category
Mystery Of The Nevada Triangle by Stuart Winter
February 3rd, 2010 | 
Author: MYSTERY OF THE NEVADA TRIANGLE
CRASHED: Steve Fossett
Posted Sunday January 3, 2010 at Express.co.uk
By Stuart Winter
A MYSTERIOUS area of Nevada where thousands of planes have disappeared without trace may finally have given up its secret.
So many aircraft have vanished there that it has been nicknamed the Nevada Triangle, echoing the so-called Bermuda Triangle, an ocean zone infamous for the loss of ships and planes.
No one knows exactly how many flights have vanished inside the Nevada Triangle over the past 60 years.
Crash sites are seldom discovered in the remote wasteland of desert and mountain, which stretches across more than 25,000 square miles of virtually-uninhabited country.
But speculation is that the total is more than 2,000.
Conspiracy theorists have long claimed the reason so many flights have disappeared is connected to the presence in the area of America’s most guarded tract of landscape – Area 51, the top secret air base where it has been claimed the bodies of alien pilots from crashed UFOs are kept in deep-frozen storage.
The US Air Force also tests its most secret prototype aircraft, including the mysterious superfast Aurora, inside Area 51 protected by squadrons of fighter aircraft primed to shoot down any suspicious intruders.
The truth about the crashes however is far more prosaic. Record-breaking aviator Steve Fossett vanished inside the Nevada Triangle in September, 2007.
At first, theories surrounding millionaire Fossett’s disappearance included the idea that he had faked his own death, the suggestion that he had been shot down by top secret aircraft inside Area 51 or even the claim he had been abducted by aliens.
But when Fossett’s aircraft was eventually discovered more than a year after it disappeared, experts were able to piece together the most likely reason for the crash.
A new Channel Four documentary explores what apparently happened to the pilot after he set off on in a single-engine Bellanca Super Decathlon on what friends thought was a short joy flight. He was never seen alive again. Far from being the victim of aliens or super-secret aircraft, the cause of his death and of the inordinate number of crashes in the area was simply freak weather.
The Triangle’s strange geography and climate create unique atmospheric conditions which can rip aircraft from the skies.
A combination of fast-moving Pacific winds and steep mountainsides produces a phenomenon called the Mountain Wave, a roller-coaster effect that can send aircraft soaring up and then bring it crashing down to earth.
With much of the Sierra Nevada over 5,000ft and some peaks reaching 14,000ft, air-fuel mixture can also become so thin that engine power fails even in low-level flight.
In Fossett’s case it is thought climatic conditions had created a 400mph downdraft. His aircraft could climb at a maximum speed of only 300mph. The difference meant he was doomed.
Air accident expert Craig Fuller says besides hundreds of vanished light aircraft, the area has also seen crashes involving many military warplanes like B-24 Liberators, B-17 Flying Fortresses and P-38 Lightnings.
Fuller, who works for the voluntary Aviation Archaeological Investigation and Research group, cannot say how many aircraft have gone missing while flying over the area.
“I cannot give you exact numbers. No one knows, not even the government agencies,” he said.
But he has visited more than 75 crash sites and with the help of air historian John Lopez he has been able to study many of flights that went missing in the same area as Fossett’s plane.
One of the stories regarding the Triangle dates back to 1943 when a B-24 bomber crashed in the mountains. Co-pilot Lieutenant Robert Hester’s father, Clinton, was determined to find the plane.
“He basically spent every summer in the Sierras looking for his son,” Fuller said.
Clinton died without having found any trace. But in 1960, a year later, a survey team found the bomber in a remote lake. It’s now known as Hester Lake.
Fuller cited another example, that of Lt Leonard C Lydon who parachuted to safety in 1941 after his Army fighter squadron got lost over the mountains.
He saw his P-40 fall within a mile of where he landed in the remote Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks.
But to this day the wreckage has never been found.
The Mystery of the Nevada Triangle aired in the UK on Channel Four.
International UFO Congress Convention and Film Festival
7 Days, 8 Nights… At the Aquarius Casino Resort in Laughlin, Nevada, from Sunday, February 21st to the 27th, 
they’ll be “Educating The World One Person At A Time” at the 2010 International UFO Congress Convention and Film Festival. Join the hosts of the International UFO Congress (IUFOC) and 30 fabulous speakers. ufocongress.com Phone: 602.889.3083 Email: nicole@ufocongress.com
The speakers so far… Ross Hemsworth, Donald Ware, Lt. Col., Chuck Zukowski, Richard Dolan, John Ventre, Wendelle Stevens, Paul McCarthy, Gary Heseltine, Melinda Leslie & Niara Isley, Mary Rodwell, David Sereda, Douglas Taylor, Stan Romanek, Judy Goodman CPC CSRC, Barbara Lamb, Jaime Maussan & Santiago Yturria, Ann Eller, Neil Freer, Jim Nichols, Marc D’Antonio, Dolores Cannon, Mary Joyce & Evelyn Gordon, Dr. C.V. Tramont, Travis Walton, Ronald Nussbeck, Danny Sheehan and Frederick Burks.
Posted in Forteana, UFO, aliens, belief systems, events, nevada, religion | 
Tags: aliens, extraterrestrials, laughlin, nevada, UFO, ufo congress | 
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Attack of the Killer Vegas Bees
It would all make for a great early ’70s TV movie starring Gloria Swanson if it wasn’t so damn scary. Apparently, Africanized honey bees in Las Vegas swarm-stung a guy after he accidentally broke open their 50-pound underground hive. We’re talking more than a thousand stings here, people.
It happened late Saturday morning when the victim was digging a trench in the backyard of his son’s home off Spencer and Eldorado Drive. The man, operating a backhoe, moved a large boulder exposing a giant hive underneath. The man jumped from the backhoe, trying to escape by running into a vacant yard, but was brought down by the stinging horde.
Firefighters encountering the attack were forced spray the man down with a fire hose to halt the attack. The man was rushed to St. Rose Dominican Hospital-Siena Campus where he was listed in stable condition, but undergoing painful removal of the estimated 1,000 stingers, one-by-one.
I remember watching plenty of fictional and non-fictional TV shows dedicated to the impending attack of killer bees, including this one:
Learn more about “assassin bees” here.
And remember: Never jump into a pool to escape a swarm. They will simply wait for you to surface. Always try to outrun them, because they are slow.
Posted in Forteana, entomology, las vegas, nevada |
Tags: entomology, invasive species, killer bees, las vegas, made-for-TV horror |
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Giant Eagle Head-ons Tractor-trailer
Looks like the big bird came out on top, if a little banged-up:
Matthew Roberto Gonzalez of Opa Locka, Fla., was driving on U.S. Interstate 80 in northeast Nevada near Wells, about 60 miles west of the Utah line, when the eagle came crashing into the cab of his truck.
I really want to write a Gram Parsons-type truckin’ anthem loosely based on this event. Where’s my acoustic guitar at anyhow?
Posted in Forteana, cryptozoology, nevada, reno |
Tags: big rig, cryptozoology, giant creatures, nevada, reno, tractor-trailer |
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Ancient Atomic Warfare in Nevada?
Spring in Death Valley is a breathtaking spectacle. What was once mere desert for nine months out of the year suddenly blossoms into a vast ocean of yellow and purple wildflowers, drawing photographers, sightseers, and whoever else happens to be driving through.
On the Nevada side, U.S. Route 95 borders the eastern portion of Death Valley National Park, about 140 miles north of Las Vegas. Driving the 95, you’ll find more than flowers, of course; you’ll also encounter giant salt deposits (left over from when the valley, like California, was an inland sea) that will tempt the B-movie director in you to film a low-budget sci-fi opus. Indeed, the beautiful desolation in wandering a seemingly infinite salt pan in the desert sun will leave its mark on your imagination.
And it wouldn’t require much of an imaginative leap to believe that somewhere around here a 19th-century American explorer named Captain Ives William Walker stumbled upon the vitrified ruins of a mile-long city. Among these ruins, there was, according to Walker, liquefied rock surface that looked to have “been attacked by a giant’s fire-plough.”
Walker’s mysterious observation first crops up in a 1977 book by Rene Noorbergen called Secrets of the Lost Races — without any citation, of course. Regardless, the Walker discovery has taken on the guise of fact and spread through the literature of what speculative researchers characterize as “ancient atomic warfare.” Basically, ancient atomic warfare is a term that helps explain geological anomalies like patches of fused green glass found in deserts around the world. After all, nuclear detonations at the Nevada Test Site just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, turned desert sand into glass, right?
Well, lightning strikes and meteor impacts cause the same reaction. Except that many of these questionable patches lack the characteristic patterns created by lightning and meteors. So what caused these anomalies, then?
Speculative researchers like David Hatcher Childress (Technology of the Gods: The Incredible Sciences of the Ancients) and Charles Berlitz (World of Strange Phenomena) look no further than ancient Indian adventure narratives like the Bhagavad-Gita to posit their theories. These stories include descriptions of super-weapons like the “Iron Thunderbolt,” a death-dealing mega-bomb that eerily formed giant umbrella-shaped clouds in its wake. The Bhagavad-Gita was written around 500 B.C.
Of course, it was Robert Oppenheimer himself who noted the connection between the atomic bomb he helped father and the Bhagavad-Gita. Indeed, he famously quoted the ancient Indian text in the aftermath of the Trinity explosion at Alamagordo on July 16, 1945: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” But it’s doubtful old Oppy would have placed any value in tales of prehistoric nukes.
Besides, ancient India is a long way from Nevada, even if UFO-flying extraterrestrials introduced the technology to humans in order to, say, turn the biblical Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt (which is not a post-nuke byproduct). Or to level Sodom and Gomorrah. And so on.
Squelching further the notion of Ye Olde Armageddon is the added fact that it’s impossible to find a single archeologist, geologist, or any “-ist” on the West Coast who has heard of Death Valley anomalies like glass-like sand fusions.
At the same time, however, there isn’t a single scientist who laughed at the question, “Do you believe in ancient atomic warfare?” Most have never heard of the theory and, believe it or not, are eager to learn more.
So maybe the anomalies are waiting to be rediscovered. Maybe William Walker’s vitrified ruins are out there somewhere in the desert’s expanse.
In any case, a trip to Death Valley trip is definitely a must-see part of your Nevada experience. The terrain is so marvelously strange — alternating between beautiful flowers and utter barrenness — that your mind will escape its shackles of convention and begin to ponder new and exciting possibilities.
Besides, according to Hal Turner, Chief Archeologist for the Nevada State Department of Transportation, the problem in locating an ancient nuke site is the simple fact that history is written by mainstream historians instead of long-time Nevadans with firsthand knowledge of the state.
“The old timers who might have know about something like a patch of fused green glass in Death Valley are dead or have one foot in the grave,” says Turner. “History continues to be lost.”
