(VIDEO) Chandre Oraon, Man With Tail, Worshipped As God (But Not By His Wife)

A 35-year-old tea picker in Alipurduar, India, is getting tailed by followers every day -- mainly because the 14.5-inch tail growing out of his back makes them think he's a living god.

Chandre Oraon has had his tail since birth and some Hindus believe it's a sign he's an incarnation of a monkey god known as "Hanuman," Barcroft TV reported.
It isn't just the tail that makes believers think he's a monkey god. Oraon's job picking tea leaves requires him to climb up trees just like a monkey.
Worshippers from all over India travel to his home in hopes of touching his tail and getting blessings.
One woman, Monika Lakda, said she travelled overnight to see Oraon at his small makeshift shrine, hoping he would be able to cure her nephew's fever.
"We gave him medicine but it did not work. So we came to Chandre to seek his blessings. The baby recovered soon after that," she said, according to the Daily Mail. "We believe that Chandre is an incarnation of Hanuman. They say he was born on the Holy Hanuman day. So we have faith in him."
Not all people believe Oraon's tail is a sign he's a god.

Bhushan Chakraborty, the local medical officer, told the Indian Express that despite Oraon's outward appearance, he's no monkey god.
"He climbs up trees, behaves like a monkey and is a strict vegetarian, but he is no god and his condition is just a congenital defect," Chakraborty said.
Oraon's condition is actually a form of spina bifida, when the spinal column does not close all the way down.
Some people with the condition develop growths on their lower back or tufts of hair, according to Dr. Scott Meyer, a member of the neuro-spine team at Morristown Medical Center in New Jersey.
"The combination of a membranous sac with a tuft of hair could certainly produce a likeness to a monkey's tail,” he told The Huffington Post.
Most doctors recommend patients with tails like Oraon's have surgery to put it back into the body, but he refuses to have any work done on his vestigial tail.
“Once my mother chopped off my tail when I was young. Soon after, I got a high fever and I was very sick. My mother told me that I almost died," he said, according to the Mirror. “After that, everyone said I must keep the tail. My family said they felt me getting sick was a sign that my tail was divine."
It hasn't been easy. Kids used to make fun of Oraon's tail and, despite his fame, he lives in humble dwellings and can't afford to build his dream temple.
Even worse, he was rejected by more than 20 women before he met his current wife, Maino, and she's not exactly happy living with a living god.
“He doesn’t look good. My mother and my father passed away when I was young. So my brothers wanted me to get married. So I had to compromise," she said according to the Mirror.
Oraon isn't the only alleged monkey god in India.
Arshid Ali Khan, a 12-year-old boy in Chandigarh, India, has what looks like a 7-inch tail sticking out of his back.
Like Oraon, he's worshipped as a living incarnation of Hanuman, and has faithful followers who refer to him as "Balaji."
He also doesn't want surgery to have it removed, despite a serious risk of infection.
“I love my tail. It’s a gift from God. It’s unusual, but people respect me and bow before me because of it," he said, according to the Sun. "I feel special.”
About 40 cases of human tails have been reported according to a study by the People's Journal of Scientifc Research, but you don't necessarily need the condition to have one.

Source: HP

UFOs Cutting Through Clouds Video.

Filmed with camcorder, Canon M52. This UFO sighting filmed with this is a very rare and unique footage…

Is an earthquake behind the Shroud of Turin image? Radiation from earthquake could have led to 'wrong' 1988 dating.

Neutron radiation caused by 33 A.D. earthquake could have led to "wrong" 1988 radiocarbon dating of Shroud, suggest researchers.

An earthquake in Old Jerusalem might be behind the famous image of the Shroud of Turin, says a group of researchers led by Alberto Carpinteri of the Politecnico di Torino in Italy in an article published in Springer's journal Meccanica. They believe that neutron radiation caused by an earthquake could have induced the image of a crucified man -- which many people believe to be that of Jesus -- onto the length of linen cloth, and caused carbon-14 dating done on it in 1988 to be wrong.

The Shroud has attracted widespread interest ever since Secondo Pia took the first photograph of it in 1898: about whether it is Jesus' purported burial cloth, how old it might be, and how the image was created. According to radiocarbon dating done in 1988, the cloth was only 728 years old at the time. Other researchers have since suggested that the shroud is much older and that the dating process was incorrect because of neutron radiation -- a process which is the result of nuclear fusion or nuclear fission during which free neutrons are released from atoms -- and its interaction with the nuclei of other atoms to form new carbon isotopes.

However, no plausible physical reason has yet been proposed to explain the origin of this neutron radiation. Now Carpinteri's team, through mechanical and chemical experimentation, hypothesizes that high-frequency pressure waves generated in Earth's crust during earthquakes are the source of such neutron emissions. This is based on their research into piezonuclear fission reactions, which are triggered when very brittle rock specimens are crushed under a press machine. In the process, neutrons are produced without gamma emissions. Analogously, the researchers theorize further that neutron flux increments, in correspondence to seismic activity, should be a result of the same reactions.
The researchers therefore believe that neutron emission from a historical earthquake in 33 A.D. in Old Jerusalem, which measured 8.2 on the Richter Scale, could have been strong enough to cause neutron imaging through its interaction with nitrogen nuclei. On the one hand, this could have created the distinctive image on the Shroud through radiation imagery, while on the other, it could have increased the level of carbon-14 isotopes found on the linen fibres that could have confused the 1988 radiocarbon dating tests.
"We believe it is possible that neutron emissions by earthquakes could have induced the image formation on the Shroud's linen fibres, through thermal neutron capture on nitrogen nuclei, and could also have caused a wrong radiocarbon dating," hypothesizes Carpinteri.

Source: SD

(VIDEO) Disc-shaped UFO spotted in clear skies

A 23-year-old male apparently took this footage while taking his dog for a walk near Ramstein Air Base in Germany. What's your thoughts? Was editing involved or perhaps it was a man-made UFO?

Dyson Spheres: How Advanced Alien Civilizations Would Conquer the Galaxy (Infographic)

   Ancient extraterrestrial civilizations, millions of years older than humanity, would need enormous amounts of energy. By creating a swarm of satellites in a spherical shell, they could harness much of the power of their star.
Science fiction author Olaf Stapledon described spherical, energy-trapping alien structures in his 1937 novel "Star Maker": 
"Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of sub-atomic energy."

Incredible Technology: How to Search for Advanced Alien Civilizations

Recalling Stapledon's description, physicist Freeman Dyson proposed similar structures in a scientific paper in 1960. Dyson realized that alien civilizations could be recognized by their waste heat, which would be detectable as infrared radiation. Dyson proposed that really advanced civilizations would re-engineer their solar systems, perhaps dismantling planets to form a shell of satellites around their star to capture its energy. 

Astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev proposed in 1962 that very old and advanced civilizations would be of three types:
A Type I civilization harnesses all the resources of a planet. Carl Sagan estimated that Earth rates about 0.7 on the scale.
A Type II civilization harnesses all the radiation of a star. Humans might reach Type II in a few thousand years.
A Type III civilization harnesses all the resources of a galaxy. Humans might reach Type III in a few hundred thousand to a million years.
A solid shell around a star would be gravitationally unstable, and would probably require more material than all of the planets of a solar system could provide. Instead, practical Dyson spheres would be made from millions of individual solar-collecting satellites.
Solar sails could remain in place by balancing against the pressure of light from the sun. The satellite would not be in orbit, it would actually hover in space. Such a satellite is called a "statite." Rings of statites would form a cloud around the star, collecting its energy and beaming it back to the home planet.

Dyson spheres and other mega-structures appear frequently in science fiction. In his 1970 novel "Ringworld," Larry Niven features a ring-shaped artificial structure girdling an alien star. In the 1992 “Star Trek: The Next Generation” episode "Relics," the starship Enterprise encounters a Dyson sphere in the form of a rigid shell surrounding a star.

Source: LS

Open Minds' International UFO Congress Brings Alien Enthusiasts, Skeptics to Fountain Hills.

Every year, thousands of UFO enthusiasts, researchers, debunkers, and the simply curious arrive at the International UFO Congress in Fountain Hills. It's the largest annual UFO conference in the country, originally founded in Laughlin, Nevada, before moving to the Phoenix area in 2011.

Since then, the Congress has been organized by Tempe-based Open Minds Production, an LLC dedicated to UFO and paranormal research.

See also: Top 5 Things to Do in Metro Phoenix This Week

Open Minds publishes a magazine and produces a weekly radio program/podcast and an Internet show, Spacing Out! Each year staffers Angela Allison, Alejandro Rojas, Maureen Elsberry, and Jason McClellan coordinate the event, replete with speakers, private "experiencer sessions," a marketplace, and entertainment. The Congress draws UFO seekers from around the globe: Switzerland, South Africa, Canada, and from all over the United States.
The 2014 edition of the Congress starts Wednesday, February 12, and runs through Sunday, February 16, at Fort McDowell Resort and Casino.

"We have such a big crowd every single year that they register as soon as we open registration up," Elsberry, co-host of Open Minds' Spacing Out! program and cast member of Uncovering Aliens on Discovery's Science Channel.
"There's such a high demand...every year well sell out faster and faster," Jason McClellan, producer and co-host of Spacing Out! adds. "We sell out of three different hotels out there."
The organizers expect about 2,500 attendees, with about 1,000 people attending the conference each day. Many have a long history with the Congress.
"We get so many people that come up to us and say, 'I was at the first one,' or 'This is my 18th Congress,'" McClellan says.
Of course, McClellan and Elsberry say, there's plenty of diversity in the crowd.
"This is a terrible analogy," McClellan says, smiling. "You've got your various cliques. There are certainly pockets of people who are 100 percent convinced that extraterrestrials are here, abducting people and interacting with people. There are groups of people are fascinated by this, who aren't sure what to think. There are people who say, 'Yes, life is out there, and we're going to find it soon, but it hasn't been here.' And then you have the hundreds of people who say, 'We are aliens.'"
"And then you have the hardcore skeptics who come too," Elsberry adds. "We do have a group of debunkers who come every year."
This year, the Congress features a wide range of presenters, including author Timothy Good, Aaron Sagers, host of Travel Channel's Paranormal Papparazzi, and George Noory, host of the most popular paranormal program on the radio, the long-running late night show Coast to Coast A.M. While many of the speakers speak are "believers," the Open Minds crew deliberately seeks to add scientists and explore other ideas regarding alien life. Astrophysicist Jeffery Bennett will discuss recent discoveries on Mars and the Kepler satellites discovery of Earth-like planets; NASA astrobiologist Richard B. Hoover will speak about the idea of microbial extremophiles and microfossils from meteorites. Not the "little green men" of UFO lore, but definitely "life ou there."

"You get a lot of the same [speakers] at every UFO conference," McClellan says. "It's difficult, almost impossible to avoid that. And they are some of the key players in the field...so you gotta have those people. But something that we've done this year is that we get new people, who have interesting research and topics, things people are interested in hearing, but they're not the usual suspects you see around."
"There might be some backlash, because we do have a lot of scientists speaking," Elsberry says. "But I'll have these people come up to me and say, 'Why did you have this person? We know [extraterrestrial] life is here, we know it's abducting people. Why do you have this guy trying to say life exists out there?'"
But neither organizer is too worried. The debates and occasional head-butting are just part of what makes the event fun. Even if there's hairs to be split regarding exactly what is out there, the Congress unites people interested in asking the questions with people pretty convinced they have the answers.

"For the most part, magically, everything seems to mesh," McClellan says. "They have a shared interest. They have different beliefs, but they're there for the same thing. They're civil to each other. There are debates and stuff like that, but overall people are pretty cool about other people's ideas and getting along."

Source: NewTimes

Why Pointed Skulls Spawn Alien Theories.

The discovery of deformed skulls in southern Peru has one researcher speculating that it may be evidence of "a new human-like creature" unknown to science.

There is nothing unusual about finding deformed skulls in the Americas; archaeologists have found them for years. Cranial deformation is a widely known practice, and in 2012 archaeologists in Mexico found a burial ground of twenty-five skeletons; of those, more than half showed intentional skull deformation.

However, according to a widely discussed blog on the AncientOrigins web site, the skulls found near Paracas, Peru, appear to be unusually --and possibly genetically -- deformed: "A DNA analysis has now been conducted on one of the skulls and expert Brien Foerster ... reports on the geneticist's findings: 'It had mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) with mutations unknown in any human, primate, or animal known so far. But a few fragments I was able to sequence from this sample indicate that if these mutations will hold we are dealing with a new human-like creature... ."

Foerster states that his (as-yet anonymous) scientist found DNA with unknown mutations in a single sample. If it's true -- a big assumption given that Foerster's geneticist is unknown and no one has seen the study or any other information -- it's not clear what exactly that means. It could simply mean that the results are inconclusive, which would not be unusual, given the age and condition of the bone. Or it could mean a "new human-like creature." Or it could mean nothing at all. For now, it's nothing more than an attention-grabbing headline with nothing behind it except bold bluster.

The Starchild Skull
This is not the first time that deformed skulls have been offered as evidence for extraordinary claims about new, unknown species of humans. One skull -- dubbed the "Starchild skull" -- was found in Mexico and later obtained by a UFO researcher named Lloyd Pye, who exhibited it at UFO and paranormal-themed conferences for years. I interviewed Pye and examined his famous Starchild skull while it was on tour in Roswell, N.M. The presence of a deformed skull at a UFO conference -- instead of, say, a medical conference -- reveals less about the skull than what its owner believes about its origin.

Pye, who died last year, was adamant that his research proved (he used that word, "proved," several times) that the skull must have been the result of humans having sex with aliens. The title of Pye's 2007 book, "The Starchild Skull: Genetic Enigma or ... Human-Alien Hybrid?" offers two choices for the origin of his skull.

But this is a textbook example of a "false choice" logical fallacy. In fact, the Starchild skull, like hundreds of other skulls deformed to a greater or lesser degree found in the Americas, is neither a "genetic enigma" nor a "human-alien hybrid." Two sets of DNA tests (one in 1999 and another in 2003) confirmed that the skull was human: a male child from North America or Mesoamerica who likely suffered a condition which leads to skull elongation and deformation called hydrocephalus.
Pye disagreed, claiming that the deformation is too extreme to be human, a curious position, given that human physical deformities appear in a spectacularly wide variety. Most normal humans have approximately the same features and dimensions; we don't see healthy adults with skulls the size of an orange, for example, or hands growing from ears.

The vagaries of nature and genetic disorders can and do create very rare, but perfectly natural, non-extraterrestrial, humans, ranging from primordial dwarfs to conjoined twins. There's even a famous two-headed woman, Abigail and Brittany Hensel, whose lives have been documented on various television shows. It's possible that, hundreds of years from now, a future version of Lloyd Pye or Brien Foerster will locate the Hensels' nearly unique skeleton and issue a sensational press release proclaiming it a new human species or even the result of alien breeding.

The mystery of Foerster's Peruvian skulls has been embraced by many, though skeptics abound. Sharon Hill, a researcher specializing in the public understanding of science and editor of the Doubtful News website, told Discovery News that the way the skulls' DNA results were released smacks of pseudoscience.
"This is an unconventional way of making 'groundbreaking' claims," Hill noted. "It's not supported by a university, but by private funding. The initial findings were released in this unprofessional way (via Facebook, websites and an Internet radio interview) obviously because Foerster and the other researchers think this is very exciting news," she said.

"But science doesn't work by social media. Peer review is a critical part of science and the Paracas skulls proponents have taken a shortcut that completely undermines their credibility. Appealing to the public's interest in this cultural practice we see as bizarre -- skull deformation --instead of publishing the data for peer-review examination is not going to be acceptable to the scientific community."

While it may be tempting and entertaining to look for extraterrestrial, or even supernatural, reasons for strange human deformations, there is no need to do so. Those who have mystery-mongering books and DVDs to sell (and documentary films to promote) will always find an audience. For anthropologists and anatomists, however, there's little mystery about their origins.

Writer Benjamin Radford examining a model of the Starchild Skull, claimed to be of an alien-human hybrid, in 2007.

Source: DN