Stonehenge is one of the most recognizable sites in the world, but for centuries, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over the purpose of the prehistoric monument located in what is now southern England.
Also mysterious is how Neolithic builders, without the help of modern technology—or even a wheel—managed to erect the roughly 100 massive stones in a circular layout.
Its construction is all the more baffling because, while the sandstone slabs of its outer ring hail from local quarries, scientists have traced the bluestones that make up its inner ring all the way to the Preseli Hills in Wales, some 200 miles away.
As researchers continue to scrutinize the ancient ruins, it seems that every new discovery yields more questions than answers. READ MORE
The Winchester Mystery House is a mansion in San Jose, California, that was once the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of firearm magnate William Wirt Winchester. Located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, the Queen Anne Style Victorian mansion is renowned for its size, its architectural curiosities, and its lack of any master building plan.
Since its construction in 1884, the property and mansion were claimed by many to be haunted by the ghosts of those killed with Winchester rifles.
Sarah Winchester
Under Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around the clock, by some accounts, without interruption, until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased.
After her husband's death from tuberculosis in 1881, Sarah Winchester inherited more than $20.5 million (equivalent to $521 million in 2017). She also received nearly fifty percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, equivalent to $25,000 a day in 2018.
Tabloids from the time said that, at some point after her infant daughter died of an illness known as marasmus, a children's disease and her husband died of pulmonary tuberculosis, a Boston medium told her (while supposedly channeling her late husband) that she should leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must continuously build a home for herself and the spirits of people who had fallen victim to Winchester rifles.
Winchester left New Haven and headed for California. Though it is possible she was simply seeking a change of location and a hobby during her lengthy depression, other sources say that Winchester came to believe her family and fortune were haunted by ghosts and that only by moving West and continuously building them a house could she appease these spirits.
In 1884 she purchased an unfinished farmhouse in the Santa Clara Valley and began building her mansion. Carpenters were hired and worked on the house day and night until it became a seven-story mansion.
She did not use an architect and added on to the building in a haphazard fashion, so the home contains numerous oddities such as doors and stairs that go nowhere, windows overlooking other rooms and stairs with odd-sized risers. Many accounts attribute these oddities to her belief in ghosts.
The home itself is built using a floating foundation that is believed to have saved it from total collapse in the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
This type of construction allows the home to shift freely, as it is not completely attached to its brick base. There are roughly 161 rooms, including 40 bedrooms, 2 ballrooms (one completed and one unfinished) as well as 47 fireplaces, over 10,000 panes of glass, 17 chimneys (with evidence of two others), two basements and three elevators. READ MORE
In March of 1966 there was a sighting of UFO's that were spotted by Sheriff's Deputies. They are known to be pretty reliable witnesses. But as I was just 10 years old and living in Ft Leonard Wood MO instead of my home town of Ypsilanti, I missed this story back then.
My friend Joe told me all about it and another of my good friends is retired from the Sheriff's Department. Joe believes it and Mike remembers it making the Sheriff's Department, State Police and local community the "laughing stock" of the midwest.
Here is what happened according to the media from back then...
This March 14, 1966 article from the Ann Arbor news described the area's initial UFO sighting.
It began in March, 1966 , with a sighting over a farm in Dexter.
Lights were seen hovering and then zipping across the sky. Reports came in from all over the area. One Washtenaw County sheriff deputy was quoted as calling the objects, whatever they were, “the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.”
The official explanation — flares caused by the burning of gases bubbling up from the area’s swamps — was unsatisfactory to many of those involved. Then-congressman Gerald Ford called for a congressional investigation. It never happened.
It wasn’t long before UFO mania had swept the nation. UFO reports were pouring in from all over the country. This was the era that sparked Hollywood’s love-affair with aliens, leading to blockbusters like E.T. the Extra Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Walter Cronkite anchored a 1966 CBS report titled, “UFO: Friend, Foe or Fantasy?” which featured the Dexter incident.
But after the UFO fever subsided, after the Hollywood productions made their millions, after NASA's moon program closed for good—in short, after America moved on — the question remained: what really happened in Dexter that March?
Harry Willnus was a teacher in the area at the time. He has been searching for an answer to that question for the last 51 years.
During the course of that half-century, Willnus has spoken with many of the most important humans involved in the incident.
Nothing he's heard or seen has convinced him that the official version of events is the correct one.
“I’ve been studying this,” Willnus said, “I’m convinced that planet Earth is being observed.”
Willnus described a particularly strange series of events involving Allen Hynek, the scientist brought in by the Air Force to investigate the incident.
One afternoon not long after the sightings, Hynek spent several hours looking for evidence in the Dexter swamp. He was accompanied by Washtenaw County SheriffDouglas Harvey, who led the local response to the sightings.
Afterwards, on the drive back from the swamp, Hynek told the sheriff he still did not have an explanation for the sightings. But later, back at the sheriff's office, Hynek received a phone call from Washington, D.C.
"Hynek stepped out of the office, took the call, came back in a few minutes later. Harvey described him as looking a bit shaken," Willnus said. "He had his head down and he was mumbling ‘Swamp gas, swamp gas, it was swamp gas.' I don’t think Hynek knew what swamp gas was.”
Listen to our full interview with Harry Willnus above, in which he recounts a UFO sighting of his own.
Four Brutal Murders, Four Mysterious Churches, One Terrifying Purpose.
Driven by unearthly visions, a convicted killer escapes from a maximum-security psychiatric hospital. Days later a woman is ritualistically murdered in the grounds of a mysterious London church. When a Roman coin is discovered under the victim’s skin, Vincent Blake - London’s leading stolen-art investigator - is called in to assist the police with their investigations.
A series of copycat murders, all carried out within the vicinity of connected London churches rocks the heart of the city. As the body count rises, Blake is thrust into a race against time to solve a centuries-old mystery that sets him on a collision course with a terrifying secret.
Nothing can prepare him for what he has to face, because the churches are not what they seem … they have been designed by the Devil’s Architect.
You can get your ebook in my Amazon Store click the link or icon below!
A website broadcasting hacked webcams. A killer spying on his victims. A murder investigation team stumped. Into this stumbles hacker Brody Taylor...
Ian Sutherland was brought up in the Outer Hebrides, idyllic remote islands off the west coast of Scotland. In an effort to escape the monotonous miles of heather, bracken and wild sheep, Ian read avidly, dreaming of one day arriving in a big city like London.
And then, at the tender age of 12 he was unexpectedly uprooted to Peckham, an inner city suburb of South-East London. Ian quickly discovered that the real London was a damn sight more gritty and violent than the version in his books and shown on tv. Undeterred, Ian did what he did best, and buried his head in books, dreaming of other places to escape to.
Roll forward some years, and Ian can still be found with his head in a book. Or, given that he enjoyed a successful career in the IT industry, an eBook Reader. And now, having travelled a fair bit of the globe in person and even more of it via the Internet, Ian lives with his wife and two daughters in a small idyllic village, surrounded by green fields, copses and the occasional sheep, yet located just outside of the London he finally came to love.
Here, he writes gritty, violent crime thrillers full of well-rounded characters, set in and around London and its suburbs. His stories also feature the online world that most of us jump into blindly each day, but Ian exposes its underbelly and dramatically illustrates how dangerous the internet can be for the unwary.
