Freaky Friday – Maura Murray

The required US legal disclaimer: All images are the property of their owners I reproduce them here under the Fair Use Doctrine of the copyright law for commentary and critique The required US legal disclaimer: All images are the property of their owners I reproduce them here under the Fair Use Doctrine of the copyright law for commentary and critique

The Maura Murray case is another case of a college aged girl who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. She disappeared in 2004. Like the Elisa Lam case there are people who have become obsessed by it but this more than a what happened that night question, but rather a longer mystery that ended up with a disappearance.  The armchair investigators have become so obcessed that one, James Renner, has written a book about how it consumed him entitled True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself In The Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray.  It is on my to read list and when done will be a Tuesday Thoughts book.   Many of the armchair investigators are adamant that their theory is the right one and much in-fighting is done that just undermines the goal of finding Maura IMHO.   But today let’s just look at Maura and her disappearance not the effects it’s had others even years later.

Freaky Friday – Lost Cosmonauts

Whoa, I just won a Mercury space suit, the iconic silver wardrobe of our dreams and the first American astronauts. by Steve Jurvetson on Flickr. He gracious granted use under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0). Thanks Steve and BTW congratulations!

Today’s Freaky Friday isn’t about Cosmonauts that were edited out of Soviet photos for misbehavior, expelled from program, and medical reasons.  Which is interesting in and of itself but is hardly Freaky given the well know editing of the May Day parade reviews in the 1960s and 1970s were how the West got clues as to who was in favor and who was out. What is is about is the idea that there deaths in the Soviet space program that were covered up except for a pair of Italian brothers who happened to record their transmissions with improvised radio equipment they built to listen in on the Soviet space program.

Freaky Friday – American Mad Gassers

Image from page 99 of “Railway and locomotive engineering : a practical journal of railway motive power and rolling stock” (1901) posted at Flickr by Internet Archive Book Images. No known copyright restrictions.

In abnormal psychology in college I heard about the Mad Gasser of Mattoon mass hysteria case. It was one where people claimed they were gassed in their homes by something that made them ill. I thought this an odd thing to become mass hysteria but creepy clowns just happened so who am I to just reasonable hysteria? Then I started looking into the Mad Gasser and found there was more than the 1944 case in Mattoon, Illinois. There were cases 11 years earlier in Boutert County, Virginia. some in Lake County, Florida 9 years before Mattoon. These weren’t mentioned in the case study I read so was there something going on? Was it all group madness? Was it a combination of both?

Freaky Friday – Omm Sety

Entrance to Seti I Temple at Abydos (I) by Institute for the Study of the Ancient World on Flickr. Who offer free digital photography related to the ancient world as part of its Ancient World Image Bank initiative. This image was offered under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 .

I’ve always been facinated with ancient Egypt. I wanted to read heiroglyphics because these people had something to say that has reached us, I wanted to read it for myself. So I took several classes at a local museum and now if it’s Middle Kingdom I can tease out the meaning of hypergraphia of ancient Egypt.

One woman who felt not just an interest in ancient Egypt but a kinship was Dorthy Louise Eady Maguid (1904-1981). She was not only a great Egyptologist who contributed greatly to field in chartography of tombs and temples, refining heirglyphic translation, and understanding customs practiced today that trace back to ancient Egypty (thus starting a whole new field of study). She also believed she was a reincarnated Priestess of Isis and once lover of Seti I. Her interesting life and even more intriguing story still amazes people today. Did she know so much from a previous life or just a quick study with intiuntive insight into the ways of Ancient Egypt?

Freaky Friday – Finding Dulce Base

underground by Chris Frewin on Flickr. Who granted use under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic posted with photo. Thanks Chris!

Welcome to 2017 Freaky Fridays. I took a break over the holidays. Now I’m back with tales of an underground base that is uneasily shared between aliens and humans complete with a Hall of Horrors that were gentic testing results between earth life (including humans) and alien life. Apparently at one point the uneasy sharing of this base resulted in a shoot-out fight between aliens and humans. I’d not dived into these but noticed them referenced in fictional works. So I decided it was time to jump down this rabbit hole and see if I could come up with a theory on how this got started. So what did I find?

Freaky Friday – Toynbee Tiles

The required US legal disclaimer: All images are the property of their owners I reproduce them here under the Fair Use Doctrine of the copyright law for commentary and critique The required US legal disclaimer: All images are the property of their owners I reproduce them here under the Fair Use Doctrine of the copyright law for commentary and critique

Imagine one day you are going about your business in a city crossing a street you’ve crossed many times before but here in the middle of the crosswalk that’s so familiar you pay no attention to it something catches your eye. It’s a tile, a tile that’s had letters cut from it and those letters replaced with ones cut from another color tile. You stop to read the message.

Toynbee Idea
In Movie 2001
Resurrect Dead
On Planet Jupiter

You walk on puzzling over just what that means. Now that message becomes part of your daily routine. You find a few more over the following years as you move about your city. Then you take a trip to a few other cities and are surprised to find similar tiles there. Then when on vacation in Chile dang if you don’t see one there. What is this? This is the phenomena known as Toynbee Tiles.

Freaky Friday – Number Stations

Motorola Transistor Radio 1960s by Allen on Flickr. Graciously shared under the Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic license.

This Friday I’d like to introduce you to something that isn’t a mystery but is by its very nature mysterious – Number Stations. Have you ever pondered what the world of international spying is like? Do you enjoy glimpses into that world when hearing spies of the past tell their Cold War tales? Would you like to witness a current spying even in operation RIGHT NOW without any danger or consequences? Wouldn’t that be freaky? Well you can with number stations!  Just get yourself a radio that picks up short-wave frequencies and you have a front row seat to current spy operations around the world.