Ruins of Bhangarh

Bhangarh is a place on way from Jaipur to Alwar city in Rajasthan state of India. Today Bhangarh is known for its ruins where nobody dares to stay after sunset. Looking through history we find that this town was established by Madho Singh, younger brother of King Akbar’s General Raja Man Singh, in 1631. But the city seems to have been abandoned in a hurry some centuries later.

The local folks say that due to a curse the whole town was vacated overnight. According to the story of the curse, if the town was ever rediscovered the township would not be found, but only temples would show up.

True to the story only temples dot the landscape and even far up on the mountains only shrines can be seen. It is said that nobody returns from there who stays after dark.

By the Government of India rules there has to be an office of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) beside every historical structure in India. But even government authorities did not dare to open an office there. They opened their office about one kilometer away from the ruins of Bhangarh. Even this office is close to a temple because of this myth. ASI has put a signboard at Bhangarh saying, "Staying after sunset is strictly prohibited in this area."

People who visit this place out of tourist interest say that there is a strange feeling in the atmosphere of Bhangarh, which causes sort of anxiety and restlessness.
The story of this restlessness goes as the following. The charm of princess of Bhangarh Ratnawati was said to be matchless in entire Rajasthan. Being merely eighteen years old, the princess started getting wedding offers from other states. In the same region there also lived a tantrik, a magician using black magic, named Singhia who was desperately in love with the princess and who also knew that king would never even allow him to see the princess.

Once he saw princess's maid in the market buying scented oil for princess. Seeing this he got a wicked idea of getting the princess. He used his black magic and put a spell on the oil which would hypnotise the princess by her mere touching the oil and she would immedialely walk towards the tantrik to satisfy him sexually. But as soon as the princess got the oil she threw it on the block of a stone as she had seen the tantrik eying the oil. As soon as the oil touched the stone, the stone started rolling towards the wicked tantrik Singhia and crushed him. While dying Singhia cursed the palace that there will be such an incident that everybody in the palace would die and their souls will stay there for centuries without rebirth. The very next year there was a battle between Bhangarh-Ajabgarh and no one survived in the battle nor in the palace, not even the princess Ratnawati.

 

Havelis are elaborate residences, almost miniature palaces, built around large courtyards. The walls are painted in bright colors with detailed frescoes. If the old city of Jaipur is anything to go by, Bhangarh must have been an extremely prosperous city. Today nothing remains but the temples.

 It is said by the local villagers that whenever a house has been built there its roof has collapsed. It seems to be true because inside Bhangarh all the houses are without a roof and even at the closest village where people reside, they still have roofs made of straw but not bricks.

THE BEAST OF BODMIN MOOR

Whether it is a native cat, previously thought extinct,or an escaped exotic pet, the Beast of Bodmin is a creature that refuses to disappear. Indeed, sightings of the panther-like creature continue and, unlike other mysterious beasts, modern technology is actually helping to prove its existence.

Location of the sightings : Bodmin Moor-Cornwall (SW England-UK)

This creature has been reported as looking like a black panther or dark colored mountain lion. The creature has large white-yellow eyes. It's size has been reported as ranging from 3-5 feet long for the body, with a tail of roughly 18-24 inches.

There have been about 60 big cat sightings recorded in the area since 1983 but in 1995 a government report concluded there was no evidence that big cats existed on the moor.

However, since 1995 some quite startling, tangible evidence has been produced. A 20-second video released in August 1998 clearly shows a large black animal roaming the moor. Experts believe the footage is the best evidence yet to support the idea that big cats are living in the area.
Many also suggest the beasts may be a native species of cat which was thought to have become extinct over a hundred years ago.

Real biological evidence has also been found in recent years. A large skull with huge fangs was found near the River Fowey on Bodmin Moor. The bones were sent to mammal specialists at the British Natural History

Museum who, when they examined it, quickly realised that the skull did not belong to a creature normally found in the English countryside. Because of the size and position of the teeth, they also deduced that it was the head of a large cat.

In November 1999 a spate of farm animal mutilations on Bodmin Moor caused a high tech option to be introduced in finding the beast. When a calf and two sheep were attacked and torn apart by an unknown creature, a motion-activated infrared video camera was installed on the moor.

Similarly, in January 2001, reserve volunteers from a nearby Royal Air Force base used state-of- the-art night-vision military equipment to hunt for the creature. Rather than practice exercises against an imaginary foe, RAF commanders thought that it would be more interesting for the troops to look for the fabled Beast of Bodmin. {Whatever happened can be viewed here.}

Farmers in southwest England do not agree that these creatures are so benign, and many skeptics believe the Beast of Bodmin is, if anything, an escaped foreign cat. A number go missing from zoos and wildlife parks each year, and Britain’s 1976 Dangerous Wild Animals Act made ownership of exotic big cats illegal.

Some people believe that if such a pet were to escape from a private collection, its owner would be hesitant to report it missing. Whatever the truth about its origin, there is growing, indisputable evidence that a large, black, feral cat is stalking the land of Bodmin Moor.

Related Links : Beast of Bodmin

UFOs and the Truman syndrome

That Harry Truman instigated the Majestic group and was privy to the alleged flying saucer crash near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 - is what MJ-12 advocates contends.

Let’s assume that the is all true…

How did Truman react to the Earth-shattering revelation that extraterrestrials were visiting this planet, and had provided tangible evidence of those visits, with a clue to their technology, when they had an accident over the New Mexico skies?

Truman seems have been to be nonplussed.

He didn’t rearrange his life or the Presidency in any inordinate way, even becoming more mundane and folksy after leaving office.

During the 1947-1952 period of his Presidency, Truman contended with lots of Earthly matters, including the Cold War, the Korean War, Communists in the United States government, establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, domestic crises (labor strikes, taxes, etc.), and his daughter Margaret’s imbroglios with critics of her music-making.

Truman didn’t react to an interplanetary visit as a normal Earthling would. He virtually ignored the supposed intrusion (as did his successor, Dwight Eisenhower).

Truman, if he did have access to flying saucer crashes and other UFO events, he wasn’t affected by them, privately or publically.

Truman lived until the end of 1972, never altering his daily existence or snarky attitude toward news media and the public generally; he remained an Earth-bound S.O.B. right up to his last days on Earth.

(Eisenhower, who followed him in Office, played golf regularly, obsessively, and also wasn’t affected by the insertion of an inter-galactic alien presence that many ufologists say he was aware of, even having communicated with some extraterrestrials held captive at secret military facilities.)

The Truman Syndrome may be described as a lackluster reaction to life on other planets that had the temerity to visit Earth on various occasions, making their presence known by accident and/or direct contact.

This is where ufologist go haywire. They make MJ-12 a reality but the patina of those documents and the committee that forged them doesn’t ring true: those involved remained oriented to everyday life, in ways that indicated nothing out of the ordinary had been experienced or occurred during their sojourn on the so-called Top Secret Majestic committee.

If flying saucer/UFO beings had come to Earth, these men, Truman mostly, would have reacted differently, in overt ways but, more importantly, in subtle ways. And those subtle ways would have been discerned by observation and scrutiny of their lives. This didn’t happen.

And there is no evidence of changes in behavior or lives, by others who were provided information and proof that alien visitors had come to Earth, and were here in droves by some estimations.

Truman was a folksy curmudgeon during his Presidency and for all of his life, right up to 1972, well after the Betty/Barney Hill event, the Socorro episode and dozens of other UFO manifestations.

Would this be the case if he had knowledge of an alien presence? Would Truman have gone about his life, after experiencing a UFO reality, in the way that he did, oblivious to the ramifications and impact of an extraterrestrial visitation, maybe many of them?

We think not.

So, for us, MJ-12, and a secret, government cover-up of actual flying saucer accounts seems outside the realm of how humans would act – even political types – if such things were true.

How Many Species Exist on Earth?

The question takes on increasing significance as plants and animals vanish before scientists can even identify them.

Taxonomists -- biologists who specialize in identifying and classifying life on the planet -- have named approximately 1.7 million species so far. Each year, about 13,000 more species are added to the list of known organisms. While scientists continue to turn up surprises -- new species of whales, monkeys and deer within the past few years, for instance -- a large portion of the world's mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and flowering plants are named. In contrast, the lion's share of unknown species are small, mostly microscopic organisms that live in some of Earth's least-accessible habitats: beneath the ground, in the deep sea, in the crowns of tropical trees, and on the backs or in the guts of other creatures. Such insects, worms, mites, fungi, bacteria and other tiny life forms are what Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson calls "the black hole of taxonomy." Unimaginably abundant, their numbers could alter overall species totals by a factor of 10 or more.

The prospect of discovering little green men on other planets has long captured our imaginations, but many scientists are just as excited about finding new life forms in our own backyard.

Though humans have shared the planet with millions of other creatures for thousands of years, we know surprisingly little about our neighbors—we don’t even know exactly how many flora and fauna call Earth home.

The National Science Foundation’s “Tree of Life” project estimates that there could be anywhere from 5 million to 100 million species on the planet, but science has only identified about 2 million.

“We’ve only touched the surface of understanding animal life,” said entomologist Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences. “We’ve discovered just 10 percent of all living things on this planet.”

Environmental index

Taking an exact count of Earth’s creatures may not seem like the most important task, but taxonomy, the science of discovering, describing and categorizing living things, is “the foundation for understanding life on this planet,” Fisher said.

Knowing just who we share the planet with is of particular concern now because global warming, deforestation and other signs of human development are threatening many species, which may be essential to the functioning of ecosystems or may have inherent value in terms of developing medicines or other products.

As Fisher puts it, knowing what kind and how much life is out there could make society more “bio-literate”—we would better understand the impacts that human activities have on other living things.

“We could have kind of a Dow Jones index of the environment,” Fisher said.

No simple answer

Though taxonomists have been cataloguing plants and animals for more than 250 years, they still have no exact answer to the question, “How many species are on Earth?”

“It’s a very simple question, but we have no simple answer,” Fisher said.

One of the reasons we can’t get an accurate count is that the bulk of the things that have yet to be discovered and described are in the realm of the very small: insects, bacteria and other microbes.

“We’ve done a pretty good job of categorizing from the size of a fly up,” but anything below that is far less known, said Joel Cracraft of the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Another part of the problem is that the tradition of taxonomy has been confined to the developed world for the bulk of its existence, leaving out the enormous diversity of much of the southern hemisphere, which is less developed on average.

“Species aren’t equally distributed across the Earth; they have these hotspots,” Fisher said.

For example, says AMNH entomologist Randall Schuh, there are about 2,000 known insect species in North America, but only 200 in Australia, while the sampling of Australia’s plant diversity that Schuh has done suggests that there could be as many as 3,000 insect species in Australia.

Complicating the matter are “cryptic” species, which look the same to the human eye, but genetically are quite different, making them that much harder for scientists to classify.

“When we go out in nature and we see individual organisms, they don’t wear little name tags, they don’t tell us what they are,” Schuh said.

New tools

But taxonomists now have new tools such as DNA sequencing that are making distinguishing one species from another, particularly “cryptic species” and smaller creatures, much easier.

“We’re going to find more and more things through these tools, there’s no doubt about it,” Schuh said.

Biologists are also combining their knowledge in projects such as the “Tree of Life,” the bug-focused Planetary Biodiversity Inventory co-headed by Schuh and the Census for Marine Life (a network of researchers in more than 70 nations engaged in a 10-year initiative to assess the diversity and abundance of marine life), all of which are intended to identify, catalogue and connect lineages of Earth’s millions of species.

“I think now we can, if we put some resources behind it, address this exciting fact that 90 percent of life is yet to be discovered on the planet,” Fisher said.

Of course, the only way to really find out how many species inhabit the planet is to go out and count them, one by one. Spurred by concern over species extinctions, several scientists over the past decade have advocated such a complete global biological survey. To date, however, not even a single country has attempted to comprehensively survey its own biota. Now a new U.S. program called Discover Life in America -- made up of some 60 U.S. government agencies, universities and other groups -- is making a significant start with the launch of an "all-taxa biodiversity inventory" of species in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The organizers' goals are not only to identify the park's estimated 100,000 species, but to collect data on their distribution and natural history.