The grave, which also held 50 tortoise shells, a leopard pelvis and a human foot, is thought to be one of earliest burial sites of a shaman on archeological record and is the first of its kind found in the Middle East, said Leore Grosman, the archeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who led the excavation.

She said that the precise way the shaman, who was about 45 at the time of her death, was buried and the type of objects buried with her suggests her high standing in the community.

“Clearly a great amount of time and energy was invested in the preparation, arrangement, and sealing of the grave,” said Miss Grosman, noting the body was placed in an unusual way – laid out on its side and its legs folded inward at the knees.

It was then covered with 10 large stones, either to keep wild animals away, speculated Miss Grosman, or as part of efforts by the community to keep the shaman’s spirit inside the grave.

The shaman would have been a member of the Natufian culture that lived in the areas now recognised as Israel, Lebanon and western Jordan at the end of the Paleolithic period, a time when human society was on the cusp of transition into an agricultural age.

The organised burial site lends to the evidence of the changes their society was undergoing, said Miss Grosman.

Shamans were thought to connect between the community and the individual and spiritual entities which were often represented in animal form.

Additional objects found in the grave included the wing tip of a golden eagle, the tail of a cow, the skulls of two martens – a relative of the weasel – and the forearm of a wild bar which was placed in alignment with the woman’s left upper arm bone.

Technorati Tags: Shamanism

Two U.S. fighter planes were scrambled and ordered to shoot down an unidentified flying object (UFO) over the English countryside during the Cold War, according to secret files made public on Monday.

One pilot said he was seconds away from firing 24 rockets at the object, which moved erratically and gave a radar reading like “a flying aircraft carrier.”

The pilot, Milton Torres, now 77 and living in Miami, said it spent periods motionless in the sky before reaching estimated speeds of more than 7,600 mph.

After the alert, a shadowy figure told Torres he must never talk about the incident and he duly kept silent for more than 30 years.

His story was among dozens of UFO sightings in defense ministry files released at the National Archives in London.

In a written account, Torres described how he scrambled his F-86 D Sabre jet in calm weather from the Royal Air Force base at Manston, Kent in May 1957.

“I was only a lieutenant and very much aware of the gravity of the situation. I felt very much like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,” he said.

“The order came to fire a salvo of rockets at the UFO. The authentication was valid and I selected 24 rockets. Continued…

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Technorati Tags: UFO

Over a three-month period this summer there were 1,000 UFO sightings filed with the National UFO Reporting Center.

Some 75 of those UFOs were reported over the state of Texas.

Stephenville is one hot spot we’ve shown you before.

Now the small town is getting buzzed by UFOs again and we have the video.

“You could see the oval shape. Got my friend, I said ‘dude, you got to come look at this,’” said Andy Monrreal.

Monrreal was hanging out with his Dublin High School friends when they all saw something they say looked like a UFO.

“You could see a shape. It was like a complete circle,” said Monrreal.

He rolled off a half minute of video on his mom’s digital camera.

His dad saw it too.

“I never seen nothing like that in my life. Big lights and everything,” his father said.

So did mom.

“It was a round thing. You could see lights around it, flickering and changing. It was awesome. Just turning and flickering,” she said.

Back in January, Erath County went UFO crazy after a handful of people reported similar lights over Stephenville.

International press and UFO hunters descended on the town.

This time, many more eye witnesses are phoning the Stephenville Empire Tribune or the ET.

Reporter Whitney Ashley said many people don’t want to talk publicly, like several workers at the paper, who also saw the lights.

“I’ve got at least 10 right now willing to go on record,” Ashley said.

“The sheriff’s department got lots of calls in the southern part of Erath County.”

Down around Dublin, home of DR Pepper.

The Joint Reserve Base in Fort Worth confirms seven F-16s training in the area at the time.

Several witnesses told us they saw the fighters, after they saw the mysterious lights.

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Technorati Tags: National UFO Reporting Center

The vision was taken by 42-year-old night guard Yalcin Yalman in a compound in Turkey earlier this year, The Sun reports.

The files contain a wide range of UFO-related documents covering the years 1986–1992. If you want to find out more about close encounters over Gatwick Airport, alien abductions, stray satellites - and what the UK Government thought of it all - then this is the place to be. The files are in PDF format.

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Source: CNA

Perhaps one of the most remarkable conversions in the history of the Church was that of Bartholomew Longo who went from being a Satanist priest to a beatified, through the extraordinary assistance of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Born in 1841 to a practicing Catholic family, he was not an irreligious youth, but when he went to university in Naples to study law all that changed. He first went from being a practicing Catholic to being involved in anti-papal demonstrations and then an atheist, following that a Satanist, eventually being ordained to the Satanist priesthood. He had become a complete apostate.

However, Bartholomew’s family and friends continued to ardently pray for him and his conversion back to the faith of his childhood. A university professor of his hometown in southern Italy began to have discussions with him and with much perseverance managed to persuade him of the irrationality of his position. This was the beginning of his road to sainthood. He then was referred to a Dominican priest named Father Albert who directed his deprogramming and finally guided him back into communion with the Church.

He had recovered his faith, but realizing the awful scandal and damage he had caused, he wished to make reparations. He learnt first-hand of the awful poverty of the tenant farmers near his hometown. It is said that at the sight of their destitution the words of Our Lady of the Rosary came to his mind: “One who propagates my Rosary shall be saved.”

He believed that from this point on he would devote his life to spreading devotion to the Rosary. His first step was to organize Rosary groups around a shrine he established in his neighborhood church around a picture of Mary called Our Lady of the Rosary. The shrine grew and became a basilica in 1901, attracting thousands of pilgrims daily to this day.

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NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander has dug up new clues to the red planet’s wet past and has witnessed what could be a current water cycle in the form of falling snow, scientists announced today.

From its landing site near Mars’s north pole, the lander has collected and analyzed soil samples that show minerals on Mars that are associated with liquid water on Earth.

Phoenix also recorded the planet’s real-time transition from summer to fall, which revealed tantalizing evidence of an ongoing hydrological cycle, said Peter Smith, Phoenix’s principal investigator based at the University of Arizona.

Jim Whiteway, lead scientist for the Phoenix Meteorological Station, said that instruments on board the craft recorded rising temperatures and humidity in the two months leading up to the Martian summer solstice in July.

Temperatures have been falling ever since.

“In the second half of the mission we saw frost, ground fog, and clouds. This is now occurring every night,” Whiteway said.

Ice crystals were detected coming from clouds about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the spacecraft’s landing site. The crystals are most likely water-based, the scientists said, because it’s not yet cold enough on Mars for carbon-dioxide snow to form.

The team hopes Phoenix will help confirm whether the snow hits the ground before the craft—which has already survived beyond its expected lifespan—freezes up forever during the cold Martian winter.

“We’re going to be watching very closely for the next months to see if the snow is falling on the Martian surface,” Whiteway said.

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Source: Independent.ie

THE truth is out there — and if a senior garda, a Fianna Fail politician and a pilot are to be believed, aliens are keeping a close eye on us from above.

Dramatic eye-witness testimony was heard at a conference over the weekend which, delegates were told, provided “definitive” proof of recent UFO activity in the skies around north Dublin and Meath.

Footage, filmed on a camera phone at 10.35pm on August 3 near Dunboyne was also played and replayed to over 70 delegates who attended the fifth Irish International UFO conference in Carrick-on-Shannon.

The triangular shaped image, with lights at each point, which appeared to send a red laser-type light towards earth, drew gasps of amazement from the 70 or so delegates who attended the world premiere of the footage.

Unusual

A senior garda officer who was driving when he noticed the unusual light formation in the sky stopped to film it.

“There is no footage like this in the world. It is the most amazing and spectacular I have ever seen,” said Carl Nally, co-founder of UFO and Paranormal Research Ireland and joint author of ‘Conspiracy of Silence’.

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Source: Palin affair claim, ‘witchcraft’ blessing dog McCain camp | theage.com.au

The controversial choice for Republican vice-president is also the subject of a grainy YouTube video showing her being blessed in her home-town church three years ago by a Kenyan pastor who prayed for her protection from “witchcraft” as she prepared to seek higher office.

The video shows Mrs Palin standing before Bishop Thomas Muthee in the pulpit of the Wasilla Assembly of God church, holding her hands open as he asked Jesus Christ to keep her safe from “every form of witchcraft”.

“Come on, talk to God about this woman. We declare, save her from Satan,” Bishop Muthee said as two attendants placed their hands on Mrs Palin’s shoulders. “Make her way my God. Bring finances her way even for the campaign in the name of Jesus … Use her to turn this nation the other way around.”

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Two British archeologists declared Monday that they have uncovered the core reason behind the construction of one of the world’s best known and least understood landmarks.

The stone circle at Stonehenge has stood for thousands of years — and bred endless debate over whether it was a temple for ancient sun-worshippers, a sacred burial site, or even a kind of massive prehistoric astronomical calculator.

Professors Geoffrey Wainwright and Timothy Darvill argued their own explanation for the mysterious monument: Stonehenge, they said, was a kind of primeval Lourdes, drawing prehistoric pilgrims from around Europe.

“We found several reasons to believe that the stones were built as part of a belief in a healing process,” Wainwright told journalists assembled at London’s Society of Antiquaries.

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