The Anomalist is a daily review of world news on maverick science, unexplained mysteries, unorthodox theories, and unexpected discoveries.
http://www.anomalist.com/ - Feb 9, 2012 6:37:33 AM - Nov 28, 2004 11:50:54 AM
February 8From today's maverick science news: Most serious scientists consider tales of a giant boat that sheltered Noah and his family from a worldwide flood, along with representatives of all Earth's creatures, as a myth. The director of the Paleontological Research Corporation, Dr. Joel Klenck has just completed a survey of a site supposedly located over 4,200 meters up Mount Ararat that could make the difference between myth and reality. Did a Kurdish guide discover evidence of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat? Meanwhile, the just concluded effort to drill down to the pristine waters of Antarctica's Lake Vostok leads The Mathisen Corollary author David Warner Mathisen, who writes eloquently of the evidence of the flood of Noah, to ask We're Busting Into Undisturbed Lake Vostok Why? And that's not all Mathisen has to say about the days of the ancients as he goes on to cover some of the world's oldest and largest living trees in The Methuselah Redwood and examines evidence of pre-Columbus visits to the New World in The Lowly Amphora (and Ancient Contact Across the Oceans). Mathisen has company in the belief contact was ongoing between the Old World and the New, as Dale Drinnon shows evidence of contact that arrived from a different direction that may be indicated by the discovery of what could be an American Hanuman, and Drinnon also displays an artifact that may indirectly indicate the presence of Neanderthals in the New World, too, as he displays his own artwork to accompany what's billed as a Moche "Monkey-Man". Moving to a different scientific discipline, Stephen Smith of Electric Universe fame displays an image of the Solar System's largest planet and its auroras to discuss the electrical connection between the gas giant and its tiny moon Io, as seen in Jove’s Glowing Mantle, before we turn things over to scientists who have a slightly different take on the link between the moon and its parent exhibited in Tiny Volcanic Moon Controls Jupiter's Auroras.A December 2010 trailcam photo has just made its way onto the Net, and Loren Coleman is quick to offer details of the filming taken from remarks by an editor of an Ohio magazine which had been the only publication carrying the photo until now. What do you see? Meanwhile, another of our favorite monster hunters, Ken Gerhard, gets a nice mention from his local television outlet in Does Big Foot live in San Antonio? Then Loren Coleman casts a critical eye on another film product that's making the rounds these days, seen in Iceland River Monster? Or Robotic Hoax? Elsewhere, the continuing tangled tales of out-of-place big cats in the United Kingdom continues apace with The Beast of Stroud and Neil Arnold on a Kent Big Cat Photo.Encounters of the Third Kind? Not Even Close… Oh, Really? Mysterious UniverseAndrew Nicholson is the man behind the site WeirdAustralia, where he regularly regales us with strange tales from the Land Down Under. So, Nicholson is imminently qualified as an Australian and an anomalist to take on the skeptical comments of fellow Australian Perry Vlahos, former president of the Astronomical Society of Victoria, who made some bold statements recently in the online commentary Encounters of the Third Kind? Not Even Close. Nicholson does agree with some of the points Vlahos makes but, as you'll see, he believes Vlahos and others who embrace the close mindedness Vlahos champions are exhibiting a double standard. Nicholson has some remedies for this, including a system to preclude obviously erroneous claims from wearing the UFO appellation, setting out a list of four prerequisites for the sightings to meet and stating, "Tick two or more boxes, and you have a UFO sighting. No more sightings of satellites, Jupiter, Chinese lanterns, balloons or swamp gas..." That's a curious statement, since we were just about to get to the subject of bog effluvium in a Jeffery Pritchett commentary on a now legendary book written by one of our own and seen in Patrick Huyghe's Classic Book Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat, a book that's still in print at Anomalist Books. Setting aside the swamp gas and the skeptics for the time being, we can offer some praise from Billy Cox for the "adult conversation" about UFOs conducted by one South American government and explained in Three Cheers for Uruguay. It would be interesting to see what the Uruguayans would have made of the information in the report Yet Another Nuclear Missile Launch Officer Talks about UFOs at F.E. Warren AFB: Did the Unknown Intruders Erase ICBM Target Codes? And if what Nick Redfern reports in Animal Mutilations: An English Affair had happened in Uruguay, what would the public have been told? Micah Hanks tells it like it is each week on his online broadcast, and this week he covers the search for extraterrestrial life and more in The Gralien Report Podcast for February 7, 2012.February 2012: Issue 169 Alternate Perceptions MagazineThe popular online magazine is out with its latest issue, featuring editor and author Brent Raynes, Alexander Zikas, Dr. Greg Little, John Brent Musgrave and Paul Dale Roberts covering subjects ranging from ghosts to UFO disclosure and things even more bizarre. Other bizarre news is available today as a puzzling event continues to unravel in the American northeast, explained and questioned by Micah Hanks in Getting the Twitch: Mass Hysteria and “Mystery Symptoms” Spread at New York School; another up-to-the-minute enigma continues to evoke response, seen in the offering from Rick Phillips listed as Yes - The Sky Noise Phenomena Continues Into February In Pennslyvania; and Dr. Beachcombing's latest voyage back into the archives of bizarre history generates the report Irish Giants: Prehistoric and Otherwise.Gary S. Bekkum goes back to the secret documents that have become available under the Freedom of Information Act that reveal the Star Gate psychic spy files from the days of the first Gulf War in 1991. And what Bekkum finds reveals much of what was portrayed in the recent book and movie The Men Who Stare at Goats was real. Bekkum's report leads us naturally into Brendan D. Murphy's look at the history of a certain portion of psychic research he details in The Hidden Energy Behind the Sense of Being Stared At, along with Stacy Horn's revelations of other historic research that paved the way for the Star Gate program, unintentionally, and gave modern day ghost hunters a tool for their investigations, as detailed in EVP Experiment at the Rhine Research Center, and the current work mentioned by Dr. Dean Radin that's seeking volunteers for what's billed as an Online Precognition Experiment. Another area of parapsychology has been detailed in the recent interviews conducted by Alex Tsakiris, and Alex is back with another podcast that can be listened to online, downloaded or read in transcript, as he talks with Dr. Christof Koch on Human Consciousness and Near-Death Experience Research. Elsewhere, Malcolm Smith finds a tale of ghostly experiences in 1960s Hollywood and relays the details in The Haunted Movie Star, Paul Dale Roberts and the Haunted and Paranormal Investigations crew run into a case where excess electromagnetic emanations are more to blame than any Red Dirt Throwing Ghosts and Jeffery Pritchett gives his impression of what paranormal investigator Mark L. Croyden and his television documentary camera captured in Ireland and Croyden explained in the book Spirit Voices: The First Live Conversation Between Worlds.
WANTED: A 21st Century Charles Fort Our dedicated news editor of many years, Rick Stokes, is moving on to other projects beginning Feb. 16. That means we are looking for someone to fill some very big fortean shoes. If you are interested in volunteering for the position, write to: editor [at] anomalist.com.
February 7Stanley Kubrick and the Reality Stargate, Revisited The Secret SunWhat Christopher Knowles began last May with AstroGnostic: Stanley Kubrick and the Reality Stargate appears to culminate with Knowles's further push of Kubrick, the pioneer motion picture director, into the secret corridors of the governmental coverup of the UFO reality, tracing to the claims of Jay Weidner and Knowles's own beliefs about the misdirection of information by the government. Has some gigantic plot been underway since at least 1947 to bamboozle the world, even to the point of enrolling Stanley Kubrick into the scheme to further obfuscate reality with stunning science-fiction films? Or is it all just too fantastic to be true? Anthony Bragalia's hoax examination doesn't have such a monumental sweep as the one posed by Knowles, but it's far easier to believe, since we can often see it in our own neighborhoods with Remote or Radio Controlled (RC) craft buzzing around the satellite dishes, power lines and trees. And the preponderance of Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) has had a huge impact, too. Bragalia addresses both with Signals Of A Hoax: UFOs And Radio Control. While Bragalia addresses concrete examples of things that are not what they are represented to be, Josh Reynolds is addressing images painted on rocks in the Sahara Desert in ages long past, wondering what the images might represent within the context of recent writings about the psychological implications that may accompany both UFO sightings and alien encounters. Reynolds details his thoughts on the subject, such as they are - he invites conjecture from the readers - in ETs Stalking Primitive Tribesmen. Some well spoken commenters join Josh Reynolds's presentation, and we'll follow it with Rich Reynolds's examination of symbols much different from those on the Saharan rocks, as you'll quickly note in UFO Codes, Mental Interceptions, or Just Plain Coincidence? The images Rich Reynolds presents are not only easily identifiable in most instances, they don't trace their discovery back thousands of years. Why would UFOs exhibit markings resembling European auto tags or corporate trademarks? Whichever way you view them, they raise even more questions regarding UFOs and The Nature of Reality. Rich Reynolds hastens to question why images similar to those he provides from the 1960s era aren't reported today. While readers try to puzzle these enigmas into a semblance of something sensible, Tracey Parece presents the February 4th case of a UFO with Wings and Fuselage Spotted Near Roswell,NM, which prompts us to remember what Anthony Bragalia had to say a few short lines ago.From the maverick science files: You can breathe a sigh of relief over the fate of those Russian scientists drilling into the ice covering Antarctica's mammoth Lake Vostok, believed to have been sealed away from the outside world for 20 million years. There's no way of knowing, however, why this story had to include information about a secret Nazi cave completed to hide German artifacts at the end of World War II. Elsewhere, the mystery of the origins of the constellations, those forms in the sky familiar to followers of astrology, brings forth a close examination of the history of the forms by comparative mythologist Rens van der Sluijs in Seeing Things—In the Sky Part One and Seeing Things—In the Sky Part Two. Van der Sluijs, a proponent of Electric Universe theory, believes the grouping of stars into supposed animal and human shapes reflects ancient experiences of all peoples around the globe when plasma lightning shook heaven and Earth in massive cataclysms that came close to exterminating mankind. Dale Drinnon has images to show the face of ancient human dispersion, seen in Out of Africa By Faces, and Australian researchers reveal giant fields of ocean flora may be among the world's longest-lived organisms, as well as some of the largest, as noted in Behemoth Seagrass Clones Among Earth's Oldest Organisms.Phenomena and Madame H. P. Blavatsky Metaphysical ArticlesOne of the most polarizing personalities within the Spiritualist Movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries has been receiving much examination lately from Mark Russell Bell. And where the personality of Madam Blavatsky trod, her friend and documenter Henry Steele Olcott walked also, including a trip India and Ceylon, where Olcott claimed to have almost incidentally performed miracle cures while Madam Blavatsky produced occult phenomena. Bell relates the incredible claims of Olcott about that journey. While the reports of Olcott, replayed by Bell, are still sharp in your mind, consider the thoughts of Bruce Duensing on all anomalous occurrences put forth as A Vaudeville Of The Mind. Then consider the claims of a leading Catholic exorcist that will be put forth in an upcoming book and reviewed here in the report Pope Chased Demons from St. Peter's Square: Exorcist, an event alleged to have happened in 2009.Last year was a banner one for Bigfoot thanks to cable television's unblinking eye upon the subject. Greg Newkirk is no stranger to the hairy hominoid enigma, and he's got some insider information about another upcoming project. Sounds like it's a mix of Survivor and Finding Bigfoot, but will a hefty reward help close the case on Sasquatch once and for all, or just make money for cable companies? While that project may be less than seriously aimed at Sasquatch discovery, there is an individual who has accompanied Dr, Jeff Meldrum in his research who has equally impeccable credentials and is intent on pursuing the creature he believes is real, as reported in John Mionczynski: Naturalist, Accordionist, and Bigfoot Expert. Other cryptids besides Bigfoot are making their way into reports today, as well, brought to light by Dale Drinnon in Other Big Birds Possibly Being Reported as Pterosaurs and Texas Big Bird of the 1970s. And Loren Coleman demonstrates the depth to which the Bigfoot phenomenon and Fortean occurrences have penetrated into public awareness with two examples of Super Bowl advertising exhibited as Hyundai Canada Squatch Spots and Apocalyptic Fortean Ad.A return from the "undead" with a new gold tooth, no dreadlocks, a different appearance and a tale of zombie captivity landed an impostor in jail, no doubt charged with impersonating a famous singer. Cyriaque Lamar has the short but convoluted story from a land where tales of demons, witches and sorcery are still common. UPDATE: Perhaps the local gendarmes were too hasty in apprehending the arisen one, since It's Him Says Wife of 'Resurrected' Singer. Stay tuned. You don't have to travel to the Dark Continent for voodoo reports, since New Orleans, LA, where ties to the Dark Continent and rituals of voodoo still have some power, is no stranger to zombies, vampires, werewolves and ghosts. Having practitioners of the arcane arts handy was a blessing for the city's National Football League franchise, though, a tale which Lauren Davis spins, with references to other sports-related spells, in The New Orleans Saints Hired a Voodoo Priestess to Fight a Ghostly Football Curse. While we've made a good start into the realms of the bizarre news today, we'll begin to wrap things up with several bizarre scenes presented by Kentaro Mori as he demystifies such things as Sheep Cyclones, Ant Death Spirals, Ouroboros and Alien Hands. Or does he? Meanwhile, we'll wrap up the exceedingly weird tales of the day with a report from Dave Masko, who takes you back to those legendary days of yore when King Arthur seated his knights at the Round Table and a man with seemingly supernatural talents served the king, as seen in Merlin's Wizard Legacy Expands to New Claims He Was Not of This Earth.
February 6Yep: Those Bodies Again... Darkness in the DesertNick Redfern is the author of the controversial Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, and he continues to press for more information about the famous 1947 event. Now Redfern reveals information imparted to him by a former CIA employee who indicated disfigured bodies associated with unusual wreckage were found in New Mexico, later changing his story. And he tells of a promising lead he may be able to develop, if the party he needs to talk to is still living. Is Nick Redfern closing in on the answer to the riddle of Roswell? The British have their own Roswell, and news leaking out about the incident that took place there and entered the UFO narrative have suddenly taken a turn in a direction similar to Redfern's belief something contrived by the military occurred at Roswell. The British story is picked up by Jeffery Pritchett, and it's difficult, at times, to understand who's words are printed in his report Rendelsham Exposed. Government Inside Job. No UFO Time Traveling Aliens Present. Were both the Roswell and Rendlesham incidents the products of military testing? Elsewhere, Dave Masko points to a 2009 movie widely believed to be completely fictional and claims there's an element of truth in it making it a favorite among some alleged abductees, as he reveals in UFO Sightings and Abductions in Nome Alaska is Real Life Becoming Art.Sea Serpents Explore Australia’s Scenic Southern Coastline WeirdAustraliaJudging by the reports Andrew Nicholson offers here, 1935 was a blue ribbon year for sea serpents in Australian waters. Nicholson takes you back to the scenes where everyone from young boys to road workers got into the sea serpent sighting act. But sea serpents haven't been the only waterborne beasts to populate the tales of Australia, and CFZ - Australia reprints an article from a recent edition of The Geelong Advertiser that salutes a former paper mill, the Devil's Pool and a creature the aborigines say is The Bunyip Terror of Geelong. Alas, the sea serpent and bunyip stories do not exhibit any photos or illustrations of the beasts concerned, but a possible lake or river cryptid seems to have swum into the focus of a prepared videographer in Iceland, and you can view the footage in Video: Iceland 'Lake Monster' Captured on Film? Elsewhere, we turn your attention to North America's favorite cryptid with tales from the Four Corners area of the American Southwest woven together by Dale Drinnon's guest blogger Alysa Landers who points to the rugged mountains on the Navajo Nation, quoting Navajo Bigfoot experiencers and a 2002 field report posted online by the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization in Tracking Bigfoot. And Drinnon offers some surprising remarks of his own about the huge, hairy biped, including the claim there are two different kinds of Bigfoot creature in North America, the West Coast Creature and the Eastern creature, as explained, along with reference to some skeletal material, in Observations on Bigfoot Observations.The Strange Case of Mutilated Half Cats Returns Chris Holly's Paranormal WorldThe tales seem to have begun making the rounds in news items back in 2008. And for a time, it seemed the cruel practice had stopped. Maybe not. Maybe the senseless slaughter of cats has been going on all this time and is just making it back into the news again. Chris Holly presents the background of what appears to be some kind of ritual mutilation of cats and kittens that's taking place worldwide. An email to Holly from South Africa, included here, brought the cruelty to the fore, once again, and the call is out for anyone who knows who, or what, is perpetrating these animal mutilations to share the information. In other bizarre news, the malady that struck some girls at an upstate New York high school continues to be investigated by doctors, but one theory about the cause may have been laid to rest by an academic, as reported in Don't Blame Social Media for 'Twitching' Outbreak, Says Professor. The source of the affliction can't come soon enough for some as news sources are now revealing Four More Suspected Cases of Conversion Disorder in New York Town. While the cat deaths and the girls' afflictions are no laughing matter, aome current bizarreness almost evokes a laugh, and we're talking about fell from the sky in a hail storm in England recently, recounted in Have Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of the Blue Balls of Bournemouth? Elsewhere, the mysteries divulged by our favorite bizarre history investigator are often tinged with lightheartedness in Dr. Beachcombing's retelling, as can be seen in Mona Lisa Madness and Anticipating Email by Three Hundred Years.From the latest maverick science news: Rens van der Sluijs looks back on an incident in the 19th century that saw archaeologists ridicule the discovery made by a Spanish jurist and amateur archaeologist. What did Don Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola bring to the attention of the archaeologists that they chose to ignore and plaster him with vitriol? He discovered ancient artwork on the ceiling of a cave on his property in Spain in 1879. The Spanish amateur archaeologist didn't live to see his name rescued from oblivion by subsequent cave discoveries elsewhere. Now another amateur in the archaeology field, who happens to be a respected scientist in another discipline, is experiencing disdain from a dogmatic crowd of archaeologists for his demonstration that ancient rock carvings mirror plasma formations produced in the laboratory. Will the discoveries and theories of Anthony Peratt, PhD, survive the derision? Meanwhile, the Authors of the Month at Graham Hancock's official website, will no doubt face resistance from the archaeologists who specialize in Egyptology for the message in their book The Gisa Prophecy - The Orion Code and the Secret Teachings of the Pyramids, a portion of which they lay out in an examination of the hieroglyphics used to point to a specific pharaoh as the builder of the Great Pyramid, carefully illustrated with In Search of Khufu. One would think all archaeologists would be slow to point fingers of derision after Piltdown Man: British Archaeology's Greatest Hoax, wouldn't you? And there's more archaeological news, coupled with lots of anthropology, too, in Dale Drinnon's Direct Dated Evidence For Early Atlantean Mining In South America and science writer Matt Ridley's Did Early Humans Ride the Waves to Australia? There's also another cry of heresy in Tim Adams's report on a man whose inquisitive mind has pointed out some things that are uncomfortable for his colleagues, as examined in Rupert Sheldrake: the 'Heretic' at Odds with Scientific Dogma. And the latest collection of articles about a new energy source that thrills some and causes others to cry foul is offered by Sterling D. Allan in E-Cat Weekly -- February 2, 2012.Secret 'Stace: El Paso's Haunted Roads What's UpTyler Dudley thinks El Paso, TX, residents, as desert dwellers, are preoccupied with dying and what comes after. According to El Paso lore, what comes after death includes more than just what hangs around spooky buildings and mist shrowded graveyards, often preferring, instead, to maintain a seemingly interminable presence along the area's roadways. Dudley points out the highways and the hauntings in this report. Elsewhere in Texas, there's at least one town where one of the main municipal buildings demonstrates the presence of more than just some government pencil pushers, as reported in Is McAllen’s City Hall Haunted?, but in Michigan the small town haunting most famously pointed out is the haunting reported in Ed 'Mush' Bauer: Fond du Lac County's Biggest Legend, which details the continuing influence of a hotelier who was large in life - he weighed 800 pounds - and continues to be pretty hefty, in an ephemeral way, in death. Bauer's former stomping grounds isn't the only hotel making the most haunted list, either, as made clear in 10 Haunted Hotels Where You Can Check-In (and Hopefully Check-Out). Elsewhere, a British science teacher recalls the terror he experienced at a theme park during his time at a different occupation in Ex-security Guard Shivers at Memory of Ghostly Attack, and there's more British spookiness to revisit in The Birmingham Poltergeist Case: 30 Years on from the Ward End Ghost Mystery. Meanwhile, some of those fearless people who actually seek out ghosts are featured in Marcus F. Griffin's book Extreme Paranormal Investigations: The Blood Farm Horror, the Legend of Primrose Road, and Other Disturbing Hauntings, reviewed by Jeffery Pritchett in Extreme Paranormal Investigations: #213 Ghosts of Jeffrey Dahmer's Apartment, and other fearless investigators ply their skills in Judy Raderchak's Elk Grove Paranormal report, with video and EVP, Cleansing in Sac Town. Also, there's a programming note in a report we missed yesterday that has been archived for your listening, as Eric Altman and Lon Strickler welcome a longtime paranormal investigator who has authored Behind the Cosmic Veil: A New Vision of Reality Merging Science, the Spiritual and the Supernatural, as you'll hear during the broadcast of This Week on 'Beyond the Edge' Radio: Author/Researcher Thomas P. Fusco. And there's more paranormal listening to be had, including a discussion of what can happen when you allow a demon into your home, as Benjamin Grundy hosts Episode 504 - Mysterious Universe Plus +.
February 5Three Cryptozoological Mysteries The s8intcom BloggerChris Parker is certain to rouse controversy with this latest post, the full title of which is "Three Cryptozoological Mysteries: The Penn State Dinosaur that Was?; the Ancient Chinese Rhinoceros that Wasn’t; and the 19th Century Pterosaur Displaying Previously Unknown Morphological Features That Might Have Been." But his copiously illustrated discourse should surely pique even the most zealous protector of the current dogma about the coexistence of ancient man and extinct creatures. What do you think? Elsewhere, a creature that could fit right into the menagerie demonstrated by Chris Parker shows up in drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, prompting Danish researcher Lars Thomas to write Jon Downes at the Centre for Fortean Zoology seeking help in identifying the incongruous creature, as you'll see in A Little Something for the Blog. Meanwhile, the author of several cryptid creature books, Neil Arnold, takes on a new gig writing a newspaper column about the creatures that prowl the British countryside, and his first offering is Are There 'Big Cats' Roaming Britain?From the maverick science files: There's mystery and, perhaps impending tragedy, in the vicinity of the South Pole, explained in this report, followed by more on the predicament, including a researcher's admonition that "it's premature to fear the worst," in Fears for Antarctic 'Alien' Lake Scientists and another researcher's words of caution in Silence Shrouds Antarctic Dig. Not all Antarctic lakes are below the surface of the ice, however, and another mystery unveils itself in Strangely Moving Antarctic Lakes Surprise Researchers. And other Earth sciences research is showing a divergence in climatology, as revealed in Natural Tilts in Earth's Axis Cause Ice Ages, Says Harvard Scientist. Elsewhere, there is a wealth of scientific speculation to be found on both the archaeological and anthropoligical fronts, including a certain amount of implied overlap, in Dale Drinnon's series of posts that begin with Neolithic Neanderthals and Walk Like a Neanderthal. And one of the marks most easily identified in the prehistoric record, the extraction of useful minerals from the soil, is addressed by Drinnon in Origin Of Ancient Jade Tool Baffles Scientists and Mining Hastened Erosion and We Are Still at It!!UFOs & Ouija Final EventsNick Redfern, author of Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife, the book that brought to light the work of the secret group that came to believe UFOs and their occupants are part of a demonic effort against mankind, points out more evidence that as far back as the 1950s the Central Intelligence Agency and other American intelligence departments were looking into the occult as a way to augment their information gathering efforts. Particularly, they were looking at the device many think is a harmless parlor game. Meanwhile, the UFO beat goes on, and there's plentiful footage to document one element of the UFO enigma that has been fascinating the Russians, as well as the rest of the UFO-interested world, addressed in Russian TV News Films UFO in Russia’s Urals, Proves Villagers Not Having Mass Hallucinations. And the latest sighting to be released from the files of the Mutual UFO Network can be found in Roger Marsh's description of what happened during the witness encounter detailed in UC-Davis Witnesses Report Lights at Tree Line Seemed 'Tied Together'.A few days ago we posted about this talented young man with his distinctive eyes. Now science is getting involved and bandying about outlandish theories like "more rods than normal" and having his orbs be akin to cat's eyes. To Sarah Zhang's credit she provides a link for a diet that may change your perspective. No word on dietary changes for second sight, but one Jemima Packington may hold the key. Some toss yarrow stalks, others use dowsing rods, but This Lady Just Predicted the Future—Or at Least the Weather—with Asparagus! And she doesn't just stop with meteorology either. Elsewhere, halfway across the planet, in a country full of vegetarians who don't look askance upon the command “Here, Listen to My Underpants”: The Robot Psychics of India, brahmins and dalits are abuzz with over these unique prognostacorial insights for the low, low price of 5 rupees.