The Strange Father Of The Real X-Files...!

Sometimes it seems that some folks have an over-active imagination!

Now don't get me wrong. This can be a good thing for creative people, like writers or story tellers. To envision just how imaginative these folks can get can best be explained by this next story.

The Marsh Paper

Charles Hoy Fort spent much of his adult life compiling some of the most bizarre phenomena that he could find records of while taunting the scientific community for their explanations and theories. The Book of the Damned was published in 1919, and in it, he explored phenomena like the marsh paper.

According to his research, a group of workmen in the German city of Memel came across a mysterious mass lying on the frozen, snow-covered ground in 1686. Witnesses claimed that the mass, which was described as a flaky, damp, leafy, black substance that smelled vaguely like seaweed when wet, had fallen from the sky. When it was dried, the bad smell disappeared, and it became more fibrous, reminding them of paper.

The explanation of the day was simply that it was some sort of plant matter that had been picked up in the recent snowstorm and dumped on the ground. The Royal Irish Academy claimed that they even knew what it was—a substance (albeit a rare one) that was known to form on the marshlands under certain circumstances.

Fort was offended by the comparison and the attempt, as he put it, to simply claim the unknown substance is a known one rather than figure out what it was—even if the evidence doesn’t seem to line up. The Memel mystery marsh paper was black and leafy, while the Irish marshland substance was green and felt-like. It clearly wasn’t the same stuff, Fort concluded, in spite of some similarities under certain conditions.

Later, Fort said, it was determined that the now-named “meteor-paper” was mostly of plant origin. He likens the findings to the idea that a peanut and a camel are the same thing, which is an obviously wrong conclusion that he says only happens when you’re just looking at the hump. He goes after the other explanation that it was clearly picked up and deposited by the wind or another storm by pointing out that there were no other mysterious appearances of things like fence posts.

There are also records from 1686 of another mysterious substance, this one described as leaf-life and looking like burned paper, being identified as the black scale from meteorites. Fort didn’t say what he believes about the substance, aside from the fact that it was clearly misidentified. He wondered if there had been any otherworldly writing on the sheets to give further clues as to what it was, if only people had bothered to look.

I can't help but wonder what the guy's blog would read like today. With so much information ouit there to choose from, it would be hard to decide on a topic!

Better have our coffee inside today. Supposed to be getting stormy later.

Sidney Gottlieb On Monday Mystery...!

Sometimes the truth is much stranger than fiction, as you all know. How much stranger you may not know, though.

The PTB here in the states have often used some very mysterious people to help them along in what ever projects they had going at the time. This article from Listverse is about one of those mysterious fellows!

Sidney Gottlieb

In 1918, Sidney Gottlieb was born in New York under the name of Joseph Scheider. He received a PhD in chemistry from Caltech and became an expert on lethal poisons. In 1951, Gottlieb joined the CIA and was given a job on the top secret biological warfare program MKULTRA. Project MKULTRA was a now-infamous series of experiments used to study human mind control and modification. During the project, Gottlieb organized experiments in which humans were used as guinea pigs. For this reason, he was given the nicknames “Black Sorcerer” and “Dirty Trickster.”

Gottlieb helped organize Operation Midnight Climax, which was a program where the CIA purchased houses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York in order to watch people. For the project, the CIA hired a large group of prostitutes that lured subjects back to a house, drugged them, and then had sex while Gottlieb and others observed from behind two-way mirrors. The experiments gave results in sexual blackmail, surveillance, and mind-altering drugs. Gottlieb was also involved with the Cuban Project, in which he developed ideas to poison Fidel Castro.

During his career, Gottlieb worked for Lockheed, DARPA, the Department of Defense, and the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence. In one incident, he attempted to contaminate Iraq’s General Abdul Karim Qassim’s handkerchief with botulinum. He was also involved with the Phoenix Program, in which the U.S. performed mind control experiments on the Vietcong during the Vietnam War. In 1960, he played a role in America’s attempt to kill the Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba. On November 28, 1953, biological warfare specialist Frank Olson died under mysterious circumstances while working under Sidney Gottlieb.

Doesn't it seem just a bit strange that we would find it necessary to have someone like this on the payroll? I have to ask myself how many more of these strange types are on the payroll now days and exactly what are they up to? Maybe I really don't want to know!

Coffee inside this morning. I'm thinking some biscuits and gravy would hit the spot!