Pluto’s Looking at You, Kid.

How wonderful… Here we go again!

Peace.

Hypnotized – Fleetwood Mac. Now, about that “pond.”

…from the album Mystery to Me.

Uploaded by FavoriteTunes2009 on Jul 31, 2009

from the CD “Mystery to Me”, by fleetwood Mac.
pics and video clips taken here in Oregon

Enjoy, yes, indeed do that thing!

I haven’t posted a tune in a while, so we’re due, but this thread didn’t start out in the usual way. You all know that I’m always lurking on ATS for the latest in high strangeness and conspiracy; I saw a thread entitled North Carolina’s strange, strange pond. by member ColeYounger, which as you might imagine is right up my alley, so of course I had to click it.

In it was the following very cool story and the reference to this song, along with this YouTube music video. Two birds, one stone for WATT, eh? Ha!

On the discussion board, there was an old post by a guy who said he grew up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Apparently, the guy had been checking out the online discussions about strange power spots, vortexes and ‘Earth anamolies.’ [sic]

He said that one day in 1969, he and three friends were riding dirt-bike motorcycles in a large forested area near Winston-Salem. He described it as thick forest with bike trails worn through the woods. Deep in the middle of the forest was a large clearing. They had ridden their bikes there many times before, but on this day, when they reached the clearing, they were shocked to see a huge, perfectly round depression in the ground that was probably 80 – 100 feet in diameter . He said it was as if a giant iron ball had been pressed into the ground, buried halfway, and then lifted out. The dirt in the indentation was ‘smooth as glass’. There was not a bump or a ripple anywhere. Of course they thought that it had somehow been man-made…dug out with bulldozers or something. But there was no machinery anywhere. There was no way to get any machinery there! There were no roads, just bike trails. They got really spooked and got the hell out of there. From what the guy said, all four of them were pretty spooked.

They went back to town and told some friends. A couple other guys went there shortly thereafter and they saw it too. The weird depression was gone within a few days, as if it was never there.
Now this is weird! ….supposedly someone took some photos, but never gave them to any news people, reporters, etc. The story became quite a local legend. I’m surprised it’s not really famous. Maybe because the “mystery circle” was there and gone so quickly?

A couple years later, Fleetwood Mac released their song “Hypnotized”. Some of the lyrics definitely sound like the Winston-Salem circle, although the term “pond” is used.

Cole then wonders just exactly how Bob Welch, Fleetwood Mac’s guitarist and songwriter at the time, came up with the lyrics in question…

Well… In FleetwoodMac.net’s The Penguin Q&A Sessions section, ATS researcher Pauligirl found this quote regarding this very happening from the guy who wrote the song, Bob Welch, August 4 – 17, 2003:

Hey Bob! In Hypnotized you talk about a strange pond in North Carolina. What’s the story behind it, and where’s it supposed to be? A curious North Carolinian… (Louie Golden, Charlotte, NC, USA)

A guy that I used to work with from Winston-Salem told me the story of he and some friends riding dirt bikes 20 miles or so out in the woods when they came upon a strange “crater” in the ground with smooth sides like melted glass. It was a “pond” in the sense that there was some rainwater in it I guess.There were no access roads or caterpillar tracks so it wasn’t a construction site. I think the location must have been near Winston-Salem. They all immediately got the feeling they should get out of there. Maybe it was a meteor impact ? I just liked the imagery for the song.

So, Bob actually met and talked with one of the guys who experienced this first-hand. Seriously, how cool is that? What are the odds? Spock?

Needless to say that this is one heck of a mystery. The ‘smooth as glass’ nature of the depression is particularly fascinating. As is the fact that it ‘repaired itself,’ so to speak, after just a few days. Weird! Groundwater rising and falling within a water cave has been suggested, which I suppose is reasonably plausible, but what about the glassy smooth effect? Not a common sinkhole feature that I know of.

And in this reply, posted after I started writing, this feature, or a remnant of it, may have been located! Only those who were there could verify that, of course, but it is certainly intriguing. Maybe they’ll show up and clarify things! It’s happened before. But them Gol darn odds are agin’ us. It would be fabulous if the photos mentioned were to turn up!

I just love how utterly strange our world can be. I really do.

And,  it turns out, much to my delight, that Bob Welch is a big fan of various Fortean subjects, most notably UFOs. I like that and wonder if this incident helped trigger off his interest in the unexplained. If you read the interview with him at the Fleetwood Mac site you will see several questions relating to UFOs and the like. Such as this one…

Hi Bob and thank you for doing another Q&A for your devoted fans ! My questions are….

Since you are into the paranormal like me, who are your favourite authors on the subject ? (i.e. John A. Keel, Stanton Friedman, and Jenny Randles) (Arizona Ranger, Cranford, NJ, USA)

Jacques Vallee, Ingo Swann, Gary Schwartz (the Afterlife Experiments), David R. Hawkins MD (The Eye Of The I), Stephen Greer(Disclosure Project). The ones you mentioned (Freidman etc.) are also good. There are many more…John G White “The Unobstructed Universe” comes to mind. I’m planning to put a list of all the authors I like on my website.

Shame about Greer being in there, really… hopefully Bob has seen the light on that matter. It’s one I fell for initially, too, back in the day, so I can relate and I’m sure all’s well.

May strangeness befall you.

Peace.

Nature’s Weirdest Events 2012 – BBC

YouTube link

Uploaded by ImBigOnReddit on Feb 13, 2012

Chris Packham examines some of the weirdest natural events on the planet. With the help of footage taken by eyewitnesses and news crews, he unravels the facts behind each story.

Episode 1 (3rd January 2012)

In the first programme, there is the mysterious case of the car cocooned by caterpillars in Holland, and the baffling case of the exploding toads in Germany. In Switzerland a lakeside town is entombed in ice and a once in a lifetime storm turns Sydney, Australia crimson overnight. There are some disturbing plagues of mice and locusts and a swarm of ladybirds. And finally there are extraordinary strandings of starfish, crabs and whales.

Chris tells the real story of the events behind the headlines and helps to explain what on earth happened.

YouTube link

Uploaded by ImBigOnReddit on Feb 13, 2012

Episode 2 (4th January 2012)

The second programme features the incredible sea foam which turns part of the Australian coast into what looks like the world’s biggest bubble bath. Plus there is a look at the mysterious death of thousands of sea birds on America’s west coast, and the otherworldly phenomenon known as milky seas.

Other strange events include thousands of birds falling from the sky in America, causing panic and predictions of the apocalypse among the residents, and the fish that fell from the sky in south London.

And finally there is the story of the truly terrifying holes which open up in the earth’s crust and swallow not only buildings, but in the case of a nature reserve in Florida, an entire lake.

Pretty cool, pretty cool. Two hours of Fortean fun.

I must say that the causes found for a few of of these incidents are nearly as odd as the events themselves. That’s always nice. They do give the “standard ‘excuse’” for the fabulously Fortean fish falls, though, defaulting to waterspouts, which I suppose is to be expected, but I must note that it is in fact a plausible cause for at least some of them. For one such event that is mentioned, though, I think you’d agree that… it would be a stretch.

The most interesting segment to me is the examination of the behavior of crows in episode 1 within the exploding toad story. It is really amazing to learn just how intelligent these birds really are. I am seriously impressed and I assure you that you will be, too.

There’s a nice piece on glows  coming from the sea, or milky seas, and although it is simple bioluminescence, the scale is just astounding and you’ll find the end result of the work of a scientific team quite fascinating.

A few of the events are a little mundane looking at them now from afar, but they did cause a stir and a couple did the rounds on the internet, but if you were there they’d be mighty impressive. They’re all worth a watch. Mother Nature is always good for a shocker…

Peace.

Tranquillityite, A Moon Mineral – Found In Western Australia!

Not so Fortean, but very interesting, nonetheless…

A mineral brought back to Earth by the first men on the Moon and long thought to be unique to the lunar surface has been found in Australian rocks more than one billion years old, scientists say. Image Credit: Birger Rasmussen

Wow! Unexpected, eh?

A remarkable find indeed… on January 5th, 2012 it was reported here on PhysOrg.com in a piece by Bob Yirka and then reported here by Universe Today in a piece by Tammy Plotner on January 7th, 2012.

From Universe Today:

When it comes to our natural human curiosity, we want to know if there’s something new out there… something we haven’t discovered yet. That’s why when lunar rock samples were returned, geologists were thrilled to find very specific minerals – armalcolite, pyroxferroite and tranquillityite – which belonged only to our Moon. However, over the years the first two were found here on Earth and tranquillityite was disclosed in specific meteorites. Named for Tranquility Base, site of the first Moon landing, tranquillityite was supposed to be the final hold-out… the last lunar unique mineral… until now.

Birger Rasmussen, paleontologist with Curtin University in Perth, and colleagues report in their Geology paper that they’ve uncovered tranquillityite in several remote locations in Western Australia. While the samples are incredibly small, about the width of a human hair and merely microns in length, their composition is undeniable. What’s more, tranquillityite may be a lot more common here on Earth than previously thought.

Rasmussen told the Sydney Morning Herald, “This was essentially the last mineral which was sort of uniquely lunar that had been found in the 70s from these samples returned from the Apollo mission.The mineral has since been found exclusively in returned lunar samples and lunar meteorites, with no terrestrial counterpart. We have now identified tranquillityite in six sites from Western Australia.”

This would seem to lend a pretty large helping of support for the theory that the Moon was created from the Earth’s material as a result of a major collision with something quite large soon after the Earth itself had formed and was apparently still cooling.

Quite plausible that both the Earth and Moon formed from a large singular blob of protoplanetary material.

I doubt this will affect the “Moon as a spaceship” guys.* “They just covered the titanium skin with Earth dirt, so yeah!” Hehehe. Interesting that it really does seem to have a titanium skin … but… I digress…

I’m just imagining now the scale of improbability in finding such tiny samples of pretty much anything. I find it very nearly as fascinating as the fact that they found this stuff that was previously presumed alien to our world. Very nearly. How would you get a clue as to where to look? Seriously. Look for concentrations of similar material to which it’s encased in on the Moon, perhaps? I wonder how they found the other two minerals… and if those samples were equally tiny.

Further along in the articles it is noted that Rasmussen thinks Tranquillityite took so long to find because people aren’t looking hard enough. Well… he is right in that, of course, but still it just floors me.

Just imagine what we might find if we spent the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars spent every hour of every day on “defense” (read: killing, profiteering, etc), and spent it instead on science and discovering more about this rock we live on. We know more about the Moon than we do our own oceans. I think that is a tragic thing.

Maybe that will in time change.

Peace.

* Don’t know if I should say this, but I was at one point leaning in that direction, truth be told, but not so much now, as reason stepped in. I am still as fascinated with our Moon as ever and note that it really is just tops in weirdness.