Have you seen a Ghost?


Unexplained Australia along with Alison from Paranormal Field Investigators have created a Survey to collect data on Ghost Sightings.

Please take the time to fill out our survey on the nature of Ghosts and Apparitions. This survey should only take a couple of minutes to complete but the information supplied by you for this survey will be invaluable to our research.

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Seen a Yowie, Bigfoot, Black Panther, Chupacabra, Lake Monster, Thylacine or other Cryptic Creature?

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Documentary on the Unexplained
Had a Paranormal Experience?
We want you for our documentary!


To all interested. Independent film company Problem Child Productions will be making an independent feature documentary on the Unexplained in Australia with a focus on NSW. We are looking for people who would be willing to come forward and share their stories and would be willing to appear on film.


The Film is an honest study on the subject and will not be sensationalising or re-enacting any events, merely presenting the facts. If you are interested in being interviewed please contact Scott at scott.sowter@gmail.com
Submit your Ghost Photo!
Plight of the Dingo

Plight of the Dingo



Australia's Native Wolf is being hunted to extinction by Archaic laws! Please visit Plight of the Dingo on Myspace and follow the links to help create awareness and spread the word! Lets not let the Dingo go the way of the Thylacine!


Haunted Places in Newcastle
The Most Haunted Places in the Newcastle/Hunter region.





Moon Phases
CURRENT MOON
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Welcome to Unexplained Australia.


Attention members and guests this website has been hacked! Several Articles have been deleted or over written by spammers or hackers. Articles that we have spent many hours on wrtitng for you are lost possibly forever. My apologies for any inconvenience we will do the best we can to get our missing articles online again. Internet scumbags strike again!

Unexplained Australia is a Paranormal Investigations group based in the Hunter Region of NSW Australia.

If you have any information on haunted locations or houses in the Hunter we would love to hear from you. If you have any information on Yowies, or other cryptic animals we want to hear from you.
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Unexplained Australia Investigations are conducted professionally using scientific methods and common sense in the hope to present tangible evidence of the Paranormal.

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Thursday 18 February 2010
New YouTube clip sparks UFO debate
Murray, Thursday 18 February 2010 - 23:49:59 // comment: 0


Melbourne: People believing in the existence of the extra terrestrial and UFO say a new video uploaded onto YouTube shows an alien plane either entering or leaving the Earth.


The anonymous researcher, who put up the video, claims the unusual cloud formation in Mexico could have been caused by a UFO wormhole.

"AMAZING FOOTAGE shows what may have been a U.F.O. ENTERING or LEAVING our EARTH," News.com.au quoted the YouTube entry, as saying.

The post further read: "Location as stated on the original posting is that of MEXICO. Stand by for further information."

However, some people are far from convinced.

A viewer said: "I? do believe the phenomenon you speak of is called a ... cloud."

The Mexico footage shows unusual cloud formations, which many other UFO watchers claim to have seen.

However, scientists say the unusual formations are Lenticular clouds, which form at high altitudes.


Saint Mary MacKillop Today?
Murray, Thursday 18 February 2010 - 23:41:46 // comment: 0




Mother MacKillop is hoped to recieve sainthood later today.
Print Email this Share Permalink Just over a century after her passing, today may mark the day for the announcement of the canonisation of Mother Mary MacKillop to sainthood.

Pope Benedict XVI is expected to announce Mary MacKillop as Australia's first saint after a meeting in the Vatican City later today, just after 8:30pm ACDST.

Mary MacKillop's second miracle, helping an Australian woman recover from an inoperable cancer, was acknowledged recently, with her first miracle of curing a woman with leukemia recognised by the church in January of 1995.

Tim Fisher, Australia's ambassador to the Vatican, spoke with 891's Breakfast with the Bald Brothers this morning from the walls of the Vatican City to convey the building excitement of the Australian Catholic community.

"I think it is going to be a very special day for Sister Maria Casey [Postulator for the Cause], for the Sisters of St Joseph, Strand Irwin and many others throughout Australia, and for Penola and the Coonawarra wine region.

"The joy will be far beyond those who go to church; it will be an Australian wide thing because she was an outstanding leader in education and in many other fields."

Born in Melbourne in January of 1842, Mary MacKillop is best known to South Australians for her work with children and the needy after she worked in Penola as a governess to her uncle's children in the late 1850s.

After meeting Father Julian Tenison Woods, Mary MacKillop began working with Father Woods to provide religious education to outback children.

In 1866, she opened St Joseph's School in Penola and with the help of other young women formed the congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph.

In 1867, by request of Bishop Shiel, Mary moved to Adelaide to open another school, and soon took charge of an orphanage and founded a house of refuge and house of providence for women in need.

The Sisters of St Joseph congregation continued to spread around the country and internationally.

Sainthood has been sought (after) for Mary MacKillop for several decades, with the first application for beatification made in 1961.

If Mary MacKillop is granted sainthood later tonight Adelaide-time, a date will be announced by the Pope, on behalf of the Cause of Saints, for the official ceremony to take place later in the year.

"She is an outstanding Australian, every which way you look at it," Mr Fischer said.

It is also hoped a Canadian, Brother Andre, will be named for canonisation at the same time.


Friday 22 January 2010
Are these the ghosts of a boy and girl who died 60 years apart?
Murray, Friday 22 January 2010 - 02:39:47 // comment: 1




DOES this photo show the figures of two children, born more than half a century apart, walking in their paranormal playground?

The family who took this picture while on a Picton ghost tour swear there were no children inside the St Mark's Cemetery.

Which begs the question: Who, or what, is out there?

Local legend has it that the two children are David Shaw and Blanche Moon, who died 60 years apart.

Blanche was crushed to death in 1886 when a pile of sleepers that she and a number of children were playing on slipped.

David was the son of a minister who died in 1946 from polio.

Renee English, the woman behind the lens of this mysterious photo, said she was "a sceptic" before undertaking the ghost tour on January 9.

"When we were standing at the bank looking into the cemetery I was just snapping away and making jokes about the whole thing," the Port Macquarie resident said.


"I know that when I took that photo there was no one else in the cemetery.

"The only people we saw were a family of four about 10 minutes later but those kids were clinging to their parents the whole time.

"When we uploaded our photos and saw the children all the hairs on my arm stood up and I just went cold all over. That night I couldn't sleep at all and I'm never watching a scary movie again.

"I wasn't a believer in ghosts but now I'm intrigued."

Local historian Liz Vincent conducted ghost tours in Picton, claimed to be Australia's most haunted town, until her death last year. Since then her husband John and daughter Jenny Davies have taken up the mantle.

"Picton's just so haunted," Ms Davies said.

"We find people always love to see their photos afterwards because most of these things aren't visible to the naked eye."

One of the tour's most popular figures is Emily, a lady who was hit and killed by a train in 1916 while taking a shortcut through the Redbank Range Tunnel, also known as the Mushroom Tunnel, to visit her brother.

Emily Bollard resided near the railway line and was a single woman aged in her 50s. Before taking her shortcut, she didn't check the timetable and was hit in the tunnel by a train coming from Thirlmere. She died instantly.

"She likes to move among the participants and loves to touch their hair and body, particularly their arms and legs," Ms Davies said.

"Those on the tour often say that they've also felt a cold wind blowing through the tunnel."


What to make of the Yowie?
Murray, Friday 22 January 2010 - 02:27:10 // comment: 0




Like many people interested in cryptozoology (the study of animals - or alleged animals - known only from anectodal evidence), I'm of the opinion that the Australian Yowie is one of the most problematic of mystery beasts. It is, in fact, so ridiculous and inconvenient that it's difficult to take seriously. As if sasquatch, yeti and orang pendek aren't difficult enough*, what are we to make of antipodean reports of a hairy, bipedal, ape-like creature? Back in 2006 (oh my god, four years ago already), Tony Healy and Paul Cropper collated everything known about the Yowie for their book The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot (Strange Nation, Sydney, 2006).

The Yowie may, or may not, have anything to do with North America's Bigfoot but, as the authors admit (p. 161), they had to use the word 'bigfoot' in the title 'in order to make the subject of the book more easily recognisable to non-Australian readers'.

* I don't reject the possible existence of these creatures out of hand.

While it's all very well saying that any and all reports of an ape-like creature in the Australian bush are nonsense and that the phenomenon can hence be rejected without question, the problem is that at least some Yowie accounts really do sound extremely intriguing at the very least. Maybe all the reports represent misidentifications, hoaxes and the manifestations of cultural stereotypes or something, but even if this is so, there's still an interesting phenomenon here that's worthy of investigation. Those of us predominantly interested in zoology sometimes forget that cryptozoological reports might tell us more about folklore, psychology, witness perception and/or cultural transmission than anything else (see Meurger 1995, Meurger & Gagnon 1988). As a result I still think that investigation of subjects like the Yowie is worthwhile, and within the remit of science. Please remember this as you read the following: I'm nowhere near happy with the idea that the Yowie might be real, but - whatever the phenomenon represents - it's interesting.


Anyway... I really enjoyed reading Healy and Cropper's book, even though some of the material was, necessarily, repeated from their 1994 book Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia (Healy & Cropper 1994). They discuss everything that's known about the Yowie, include virtually all relevant illustrations, and include a catalogue of the 300+ Yowie accounts of which they're aware. An early chapter reviews Aboriginal references to the giant, hairy, man-like creatures known variously as Dulugar, Yahoo, Devil-Devil, or Jimbra. I was interested to discover that a Yowie was reportedly seen by the three girls who star in the book and movie Rabbit Proof Fence during their 1931 escape from the Moore River Native Settlement [adjacent illustration of a 'wood devil' attack represents an event that supposedly happened near the Einasleigh River, Queensland, during the 1880s].

Colonial awareness of hairy, bipedal, primate-like creatures in the Australian bush goes back to the 1820s at least, and various 'Australian gorilla' accounts were reported during the late 1800s and early 1900s. We'll call this the 'historical phase'. For the most part, these early accounts sound much like modern ones (Healy & Cropper 2006).

Yowie reports went quiet for much of the 20th century (we'll call this the 'quiet phase'), though we do know that people in rural areas were still aware of the creature, and apparently encountering it (as demonstrated by recently discovered and long-overlooked accounts from the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s). Healy & Cropper (2006) suggest that there might be a few reasons for this 'quiet phase'. The Australian population became highly urbanised during this time, naturalists became less active, rural news became ignored or was deemed irrelevant by city-based newspapers, and Aborigines went through one of their most difficult periods ever and lost much of their cultural heritage.

During the 1970s, the Yowie became better known to white Australians. This was almost entirely due to the newspaper and magazine articles written by Rex Gilroy. As the authors state, Gilroy is a problematic character (search Tet Zoo for previous comments), and his contributions haven't exactly made mystery animal research in Australia all that reputable. Nevertheless, it would be wrong not to credit his contribution, and he's essentially responsible for getting the 'modern phase' up and running. Other Yowie researchers emerged soon after, and in the following decades, including Graham Joyner, Malcolm Smith, Healy and Cropper themselves, Dean Harrison, Gary Opit and Tim the Yowie Man (yes, really). You may have heard that Tim successfully fought against Cadbury's (the confectionary company) after they tried to get him to stop using his unique moniker (at the time, Cadbury's were marketing chocolate products called yowies: they're hollow chocolate figures containing toy animals. I collected these toys, but was only able to do so up to series 2, as shops stopped selling them after that!) [adjacent sketch produced by Katrina Tucker following a sighting made in Acacia Hill, NT, in August 1997].

Healy and Cropper's discussion of 'modern phase' eyewitness reports makes entertaining and fascinating reading. Among the most interesting accounts (for me) were Neil and Sandy Frost's from the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. The Frost's accounts involve a prolonged history of sightings (many made at close range), the discovery of tracks and other field signs (namely, 'bites' taken out of tree bark), perceived interactions (viz, where something banged on the side of the house), and even attempts to capture the animals on film (they only succeeded in getting two photos of a humanoid face, obscured by darkness, peering in the camera's direction). It's fairly typical for writers to regard anecdotes as particularly impressive when the witnesses are of the 'reliable' sort (that is, they come from a trained background of some kind, and are somehow more trustworthy than 'average' witnesses). It's been argued that such perceived reliability doesn't count for much, and that hoaxing and misinterpretation can come from a 'reliable' witness as much as a 'less reliable' one. I know all of this, but I can't help but be impressed by the Frost's sincerity and credentials. In similar vein, Percy Window's daylight encounter of 1978 seems impressive. Window was a ranger for the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, and claimed to have a prolonged, face-to-face sighting of a black, gorilla-like Yowie at a range of about 4 m.

Many other fascinating encounters are discussed in the book. Yowies have been reported by some witnesses to be unbelievably aggressive, and to pursue people with what was interpreted as predatory intent. Yowies have sometimes been reported to peer into windows, hang around the outsides of houses, and to approach cars on remote roads - all motifs that sound familiar if you've read the sasquatch literature. In further parallels with sasquatch, extremely bad, lingering smells have also been associated with Yowie sightings, and Yowies also seem to be good swimmers and waders.

Hoaxing has definitely played a role in the Yowie phenomenon: in fact, the earliest account on record (a 1790 handbill depicting a 'Monstrous Giant') was a hoax, and additional definite hoaxes have been exposed or revealed over the years. However, while I feel gullible saying it, the sincerity of many of the eyewitnesses, and the quality of their accounts, makes me think that many people have indeed experienced something.



[ Read the rest ... ]


Tuesday 12 January 2010
Meet Windale grandmother Kathleen Evans, Mary MacKillop's final miracle woman
Murray, Tuesday 12 January 2010 - 05:14:24 // comment: 0




IF God had a reason for choosing Windale grandmother Kathleen Evans as the final miracle woman behind Australia's first saint, Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop, he hasn't told the miracle woman herself.

The reformed smoker who was 49 and had two months to live when her lung and brain cancer disappeared in 1993 after prayers to Mother Mary had no answer to the question "Why you?" at a media conference yesterday.

"When I finally do get upstairs [to heaven] that'll be the first question I'll ask, then you'll have to find me to find out," she said.

A buoyant Mrs Evans, mother of five, grandmother of 20 and great grandmother of two, spoke to the media for the first time after Pope Benedict XVI confirmed her cancer "cure" was considered a miracle by the Church, brought about because of prayers to Mother Mary.

The Windale grandmother's dramatic recovery without any medical treatment was the second miracle required so that Mother Mary can be canonised as a saint as early as next month.

Mrs Evans's husband of 31 years, Barry, their daughter Annette and son Luke were tearful as Mrs Evans recalled how doctors gave her no hope of surviving aggressive lung cancer that quickly spread to her glands and brain in 1993.

Told that chemotherapy would not help and radiotherapy would give her only a couple of more weeks to live, "I said 'Thanks, but no thanks.' I went back to my doctor and asked him to see me through until the end".

Then "all I had left was prayer".

A friend from the Hunter Valley gave her a picture of Mother Mary with a piece of the nun's clothing attached to the back which she wore on her nightie.

"It never left me," she said.

At the media conference yesterday she laughingly admitted she still kept it with her, attached to her bra.

Mrs Evans said despite being "in a bad way" as prayers were said over her, she felt peaceful and, surprisingly, very happy.

"There was a sense of peace in the house and I was very happy, and I'm not a person to be happy when I'm sick," she said.

She began to feel better and two weeks later, attended a weekend retreat at the Sisters of St Joseph, Lochinvar, where a priest prayed over her to Mother Mary.

It was 10 months after she was told she would die that tests revealed all of her cancer had gone and only scarring remained.

"My response was 'Oh wow. That was wow'," she said.

Kathleen and Barry Evans left Windale four years ago to travel Australia and live at Lightning Ridge to keep their secret until last month's Catholic Church ruling of a miracle was confirmed.

Mrs Evans told the media conference yesterday she had "absolute faith that I'll never get cancer" again.

"I'll die of a heart attack," she said.


Sunday 10 January 2010
On the tail of a tiger in Tasmania
Murray, Sunday 10 January 2010 - 15:23:40 // comment: 0



On a bright summer morning in the back end of Tasmania's north-west, I wandered into an office of Forestry Tasmania for advice about a forest dirt road. The sketch map the official offered was expected; not so his story. On that same track a decade or so ago, he had seen a creature that was not supposed to exist. And not just him; loggers and surveyors, an old-timer shacked up in the bush, all had glimpsed the animal before it slipped away into one of the most ancient rainforests on Earth.

Foresters are generally a practical bunch who measure life by certainties such as sawlogs and stray limbs lost to heavy machinery. When they swear to a sighting, you begin to wonder if there's truth after all to the Tasmanian tiger.

There are really only two things you need to know about the world's largest carnivorous marsupial. The first is that it looks nothing like its namesake except for the sandy orange coat and stripes that extend down to a stiff tail. The tiger – or thylacine as it is usually known because of its scientific name, Thylacinus cynocephalus, which means "pouched dog with a wolf's head" – is an evolutionary concept-creature that bolts the back half of a kangaroo on to a rangy dog the size of an Alsatian. The second is that it has been extinct for seven decades. Or it has unless you ask around. Then it turns out they're everywhere.

The first one I saw was in Hobart, the state capital. In the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, a small crowd gathered around footage of a restless creature in the city zoo with a slender snout that opened to a snake's gape and a stiff gait that another believer later compared to a dairy cow. When "Benjamin" became history one chilly September night in 1936, he is thought to have taken the species with him.

Start to look, however, and a tiger will be there staring back at you. It gazed coolly from the label on my bottle of Cascade beer. It slinked into grass on the number plate of every car in front. And tigers rampant flanked the heraldic crest on state buildings – who needs unicorns when you have a home-grown fabulous beast?

No wonder tiger-hunters become obsessed. To the newcomer, Tasmania is the surprise of Australia. It is an island of hidden secrets in a nation of infinite space; a place where real-life devils utter banshee wails and moss-bearded giants stand silently in forests that predate mankind. In this Middle Earth of lost myths, a legendary tiger is just part of the scenery, and there's a lot of that to cover in a state that's one-quarter wilderness.

Many otherwise eminent people have suffered ridicule and nights cooped up in a chicken shed with a camera in their pursuit. The government's Parks and Wildlife Service mounted its own two-year hunt in 1984 before it pronounced the species extinct and devoted its energies to finding feral foxes instead. That only upped the ante.

"Parks don't want to say anything publicly to attract attention," Ned Terry confided. We were drinking coffee in Deloraine in the state's north, where farming villages were scattered over my map like seed and the landscapes are so vivid that the first pioneers christened their settlements Eden, Paradise and Promised Land. Hard to believe that the Alpine wilderness of Cradle Mountain lay an hour's drive south. "The bush was full of tourists after a national park fellow reported a thylacine on the central east coast a few years ago. But those blokes got a lot of cameras out there to look for foxes. I wouldn't be surprised if there's some skulduggery going on."

In this zoological X-Files, the 80-year-old bushman plays Mulder. Every couple of months he listens patiently to an excited witness, asks a few questions to weed out the fakers, then follows up whoever is left. His latest credible lead in half a lifetime's tiger-chasing came from Lake Peddar in the south-west wilderness.

"Fellow camped out there says he heard one for three weekends in a row; that yapping noise they make when hunting. Says it ran so close he could smell it."

Many witnesses mention the smell – a sharp, hot, animal stink that electrifies the air. "Smelled it myself once," Terry said. "Makes the hairs on your neck stand on end, I can tell you."

The truth is out there, somewhere. Probably (I dragged out of Terry) in the remote northern corners of the state. So, in the late afternoon I rolled east over swells of grass bound for Scottsdale. Every so often a timber farmhouse heaved aloft on a crest then vanished into the rear-view mirror. Beyond lay the high country of the north-east.

Around seven thylacine sightings a year, more than anywhere else in Tasmania, were made up there in the half-century after Hobart Zoo lost its star attraction. A few tiger-hunters still came to shoot blurry images, stalking the edge of old-growth rainforest that had barely changed since Tasmania ripped away from the global supercontinent of Gondwanaland.

In the pub I met a farmer who yarned about a wolfish head that had poked through the bracken fern. "When he comes out he sits up like a kangaroo, then starts sniffing the air like one. I thought: 'What the hell's that?'" A stray dog, perhaps, I suggested. "No dogs up there," he bristled.

It turned out the area was swarming with rumours. Craig Williams, Tasmania's premier wildlife guide and a fourth-generation bushman, kept up a rumble of anecdote and oath as we skirted the forest, stopping occasionally to practise an arcane element of bushcraft or stare after a furry backside that disappeared into the scrub. He indicated a farmstead as we swerved around one corner. "You know the last thylacine died in 1936? An old bloke shot one there in 1946. Said it was killing his chooks [chickens]."

Later, after a meal that belonged to a Sydney restaurant rather than a remote mountain shack, Craig told tiger tales around the campfire. There was the thylacine witnessed by four people on a logging road just over that ridge, and the waxy scat found late last year by the manager of a wilderness lodge. Or there was his mate whose car had broken down up here one night: "He said he heard these high-pitched yaps following him as he walked."

Apparently Craig's grandfather and great-grandfather used to trap thylacine on the mountain behind us. I tried and failed to reconcile the mysterious thylacine with the plantation forest that now striated its flanks. Could it really survive here?

As the sky deepened to a velvety black, Craig strobed the treeline with a torch. There were secrets as well as possum eyes in the dark spaces between eucalyptus trunks. Suddenly, at the edge of our clearing, something twitched. A stoat-like animal froze in the torch's beam then skittered into the bush – a spotted-tailed quoll.

"Amazing killing machines; the ultimate predators," Craig said with admiration. "They're only a few kilos, but they can pull down a wallaby." With jaws that opened to 90 degrees and overlapping teeth, it was a distant relation of the thylacine colloquially known as a tiger quoll. "Been quite a few tiger sightings by quite a few people made around here."

I'd lost my bearings way back on the unmarked dirt roads. "Good," said Craig. "I don't want loads of people running around with traps and cameras. If the tiger's up here, let him be. That's what I reckon." Another Tasmanian secret was safe.


Brisbane Arts Theatre is Queensland's most haunted site
Murray, Sunday 10 January 2010 - 15:09:48 // comment: 1



The Queensland Paranormal Society provided The Sunday Mail with its 10 most-haunted sites and the theatre – where the ghost of founder Jean Trundle is said to haunt the floorboards and backstage – was top of the list.

Paranormal Society team leader Shane Townsend said the theatre was a hot spot for activity.

"Every time that we've been here doing an investigation we've found that the footage and the different groups of people have caught different things, but when we go through and collate the information a lot of the findings are very similar," Mr Townsend said.

Brisbane Arts Theatre president Alex Lanham said he was not superstitious until he began work at the theatre but had become used to sharing an office with a ghost.

"My first experience of the theatre was in 1990, on the second-last full-dress rehearsal I came walking on stage and there was a figure up walking on the balcony and making a bit of a racket," he said. "I stopped and had a bit of a whinge to the stage manager about the sound people and the lighting people but they were all down behind the stage.

"They asked me where this person was. I pointed out the chair and they told me it was Jean's chair. And that was the first time I heard about Jean."

Jean Trundle founded the theatre with her husband, Vic Hardgraves, in 1936. Flamboyant and eccentric, Trundle died on July 23, 1965, at Ashgrove and was cremated.

"People love theatre and they love performing and they love the adulation," Lanham said.

"You have got to have an ego to get on stage and to be involved with theatre.

"My personal belief is that some people can't leave that adulation – they need to keep receiving it.

"My theory is that the reason Jean hangs around is her husband's ashes are buried in one of the garden boxes upstairs."


Sunday 03 January 2010
Eerie outpost unnerves US Marines with strange lights and whispers in the night
Murray, Sunday 03 January 2010 - 11:52:30 // comment: 0



The Marines found the bone as they scraped a shallow trench. Long, dry and unmistakably once part of a human leg, it was followed by others. They reburied most of them but also found bodies. Three of the graves were close together; in another was a skeleton still wearing a pair of glasses. The Marines covered the grave and told their successors to stay away from it.

Observation Point Rock sits a few hundred metres south east of Patrol Base Hassan Abad, where a company from 2/8 Marines has been stationed for the past seven months. It is a lonely and exposed outpost 20 metres (65ft) above the surrounding landscape, which has been in Nato hands since it was captured from the Taleban in 2008.

Groups of Marines are posted to guard it, usually for a couple of months at a time, and “the Rock” has acquired a peculiar reputation. American troops widely refer to it as “the haunted Observation Point”.

It is hard to say how much the 100F (38C) heat, round-the-clock guard shifts and months spent living in trenches and peering out of sandbagged firing points have gilded the legend of OP Rock. The only break from the tedium, apart from dog-eared magazines and an improvised gym, has been small-arms or rocket-propelled grenade attacks from the Taleban, usually on a Sunday morning.

But as Sergeant Josh Brown, 22, briefed his successor when a detachment of men from Golf Company was swapped for an incoming contingent from Fox Company, he warned of the strange atmosphere and inexplicable phenomena that plagued OP Rock. “The local people say this is a cursed place,” he said. “You will definitely see weird-ass lights up here at night.”

Others in the outgoing unit had reported odd sounds. “It is weird what you hear and don’t hear around here,” he added.

Each successive detachment that guards the Rock appears to add its own layer to the legend, which has spread through the Marine units pushing into southern Helmand.

There is talk of members of the Taleban entombed in caves below; the bodies buried on the summit are identified confidently as dead Russian soldiers from the ill-fated Soviet invasion.

Corporal Jacob Lima’s story is the latest addition. One night he was woken by the sound of screaming. It was Corporal Zolik, a Marine who has since been moved to a unit farther south. “He was yelling and begging me to go up to the firing point he was guarding,” Corporal Lima, 22, told the men taking over from him. “When I got there he said that he was sitting there when he heard a voice whisper something in his ear. He said it sounded like Russian. He begged me to stay in there with him till he was relieved from guard duty. After that he really didn’t like standing post up there.”

The Marines’ predecessors, a unit of Welsh Guards, also produced tales of the unexpected. “The Brits claimed to see weird things, hear noises,” Corporal Lima said. “Lots of them said it’s creepy at night, especially from midnight till 4am. You see a lot of unexplained lights through night-vision goggles.”

Its elevation has clearly made the Rock a natural defensive position for centuries. It is not a rock, though it resembles one. Medieval arrow slits and the remains of fortified turrets on its eastern flank show that this was once a large mud fort that collapsed in on itself and was probably built upon in turn. The locals say that it dates back to Alexander the Great, and another similar structure is visible in the distance to the south, part of a supposed line of such forts built at some point in Afghanistan’s history of invasion and war.

When US Marines seized the post last summer they dropped a 2,000lb (900kg) bomb on one side, collapsing part of the structure on to what its current occupants claim was a cave where Taleban fighters were sheltering.

“This place really sucks,” said Lance Corporal Austin Hoyt, 20, putting his pack on to return to the main base. “The Afghans say it’s haunted. Stick a shovel in anywhere and you’ll find bones and bits of pottery. This place should be in National Geographic — in the front there are weird-looking windows for shooting arrows. You know, they say the Russians up here were executed by the Mujahidin.”

He looked meaningfully at his successors and prepared to leave.


Genetic Origin Of Facial Cancer Among Tasmanian Devils Identified
Murray, Sunday 03 January 2010 - 09:41:29 // comment: 0



Australian researchers have successfully identified the genetic origin of the deadly cancer wreaking havoc among the Tasmanian devils
. The discovery raises hopes over the preservation of the fast vanishing breed.

The Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) is a carnivorous marsupial now found in the wild only in the Australian island state of Tasmania. The Tasmanian Devil is the only extant member of the genus Sarcophilus. The size of a small dog, but stocky and muscular, the Tasmanian Devil is now the largest carnivorous marsupial in the world after the extinction of the Thylacine in 1936. It is characterized by its black fur, pungent odour when stressed, extremely loud and disturbing screech, and ferocity when feeding.

The Tasmanian Devil was extirpated on the Australian mainland at least 3000 years ago, well before European settlement in 1788. Because they were seen as a threat to livestock in Tasmania, devils were hunted until 1941, when they became officially protected. Since the late 1990s, devil facial tumour disease has reduced the devil population significantly and now threatens the survival of the species, which in May 2009 was declared to be endangered. Programs are currently being undertaken by the Tasmanian government to reduce the impact of the disease.

Australian National University scientists said they have unlocked the genetic "fingerprint" of the contagious cancer which starves the dark, furry marsupial to death by disfiguring its face so badly it cannot eat.


Tuesday 08 December 2009
Paranormal Activity - The Movie
Murray, Tuesday 08 December 2009 - 08:07:57 // comment: 0



WE THRILL-SEEKERS at last week's preview of Paranormal Activity – hailed as “the scariest movie of all time” – were treated to an assortment of trailers for current and coming attractions before the film started. One was for the new Conan Doyle adaptation featuring Robert Downey jnr as an unusually energetic Sherlock Holmes. Another gave us a taste of 2012, Roland Emmerich's equally vigorous depiction of the end of the world. And the third was for James Cameron's Avatar. This one's being heralded as the most expensive film of all time, which probably makes its backers regard it as much scarier than any rival production could hope to be.

Paranormal Activity's investors, on the other hand, are feeling no pain. For a cost of $US15,000 ($16,400) or so, it's already earned $US100 million at the box office, riding high on an internet marketing campaign that looks set to eclipse the one that powered The Blair Witch Project 10 years ago.

It could easily have been otherwise. The last Blair Witch offspring was a comparatively sickly creature called Quarantine. A mock-documentary remake of a Spanish horror movie, it had all the usual features – the giddy shooting style, the grainy footage, the flashing lights and the plaintive yelps of “Oh, my God!” and “Turn off that camera!” But it cost about $US12 million and delivered lacklustre returns. It looked as if the genre had run its race. But no, it's vertigo time again.

This one is by Oren Peli, a young California-based Israeli filmmaker who was inspired by the authentically scary experience of buying his first house. It was in San Diego and when he and his girlfriend moved in, they started hearing mysterious noises. What to do? Make a film about it, of course. To play his leads, he found two screen newcomers – Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat – and he shot the film in the house, editing it on his own computer.

Once that was done, the important stuff – the marketing – took over. First stop was a connoisseurs' festival called Screamfest. Then on to the Sundance Festival's cheekier sibling, Slamdance, where the film attracted the attention of Paramount and DreamWorks, which flirted briefly with the thought of remaking it as a conventional Hollywood movie. It was Paramount that finally ran with it, drumming up the hype via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. They then set about artfully manipulating supply and demand so that the film's target audiences were eventually petitioning for it to be released across the US.


Satanist who used a fake online gothic society to lure girls to a Sydney cemetery for sex jailed for at least six years
Murray, Tuesday 08 December 2009 - 07:54:38 // comment: 0




A SATANIST who preyed on young girls by luring them to a Sydney cemetery for sex through a fake online gothic society has been sentenced to nine years' jail.

As a condition of membership to the "Rookwood Gothic Society", Daniel William Peckham, 24, required teenage girls to send naked photographs of themselves and be prepared to have sex with him.

He convinced at least two girls to meet him in the grounds of Rookwood cemetery at night, where he kissed and touched them before trying to persuade them to have sex.

At his sentencing hearing, a girl he sexually assaulted in an open tomb in April 2007 told the District Court in a victim's impact statement she felt the attack was her fault.

She said her school grades have suffered greatly and she now has trouble trusting people.

"At the time ... it felt like what was happening was my fault and everything was what I deserved," she said.

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The girl, who was 15 when the assault took place, said she began self-harming by cutting her legs and arms and became "obsessed" with talking to people on the internet because she "could pretend to be someone else".

The court heard Peckham had asked her to have sex with him previously. When she refused, he posted a video of her naked on YouTube as "punishment".

Judge Peter Berman said it was disturbing how easily "young, naive girls can be persuaded to act in such a way by a person prepared to manipulate them for his own sexual gratification".

Peckham pleaded guilty to aggravated sexual assault, three counts for each of the three victims of using the internet to procure underage girls for sexual activity, and transmitting child pornography.

He also admitted using the internet to menace one of the girls and two counts of attempting to pervert the course of justice by asking two girls to hide his stored images of child pornography.

Judge Berman sentenced him to nine years jail with six years non-parole. With time already served, he will be eligible for release in June, 2013.


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