Monsters Beneath Our Feet

 

Nick Redfern

Over the years, I have collected a number of very weird stories on one particular subject that doesn’t necessarily always get the coverage it deserves – regardless of whether the subject actually has any merit to it or not! It’s the issue of strange, humanoid creatures living deep below the UK, whether in caverns, caves, huge tunnels, and/or old and disused mines. And we’re talking about the modern era: the 20th and 21st centuries.

Yeah, I know: it sounds like something straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. And, perhaps, that’s all it is. The fact is, however, there are more than a few stories out there that suggest – just maybe – there is something to the controversy. And I stress the maybe! We only have to look at the phenomenal interest that the claims of Richard Shaver still provoke to this day, to recognize that the Human Race has a fascination for secrets and tales of the underground kind.

Indeed, it’s almost as if each and every one of us possesses a kind of vague, inherited memory of times long gone when the under-dwellers were all-too-real, and not just perceived as the stuff of legend and folklore. That may also be the reason why Mac Tonnies’ book, The Cryptoterrestrials caught the attention of so many people when it was published back in 2010.

As for the stories I have personally come across, well, they are a strange bunch, to be sure. And here are just three of what amounts to around thirty or thereabouts.

Before his passing in 2007, Frank Wiley, who spent his entire working life in the British Police Force, told me a bizarre and unsettling tale of his personal memories and investigations of a number of very weird killings on the London Underground, always late at night, in a particular period of time that covered 1967 to 1969. The killings, Wiley said, occurred on at least three stations, and were hushed up by the police, under the guise of being the unfortunate results of particularly vicious, late night muggings.

Read the rest of this article at -

Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Fragments on Giants

This is an excerpt from the page Jason Colavito has set up on his site. You can check it out at - http://www.jasoncolavito.com/fragments-on-giants.html

This page will collect brief passages recording classical, medieval, and early modern authors' experiences with so-called giants. It's a work in progress, and I will be adding to it as time allows.

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Herodotus, Histories 1.68 (c. 420 BCE)

Lichas then, being one of these, discovered it in Tegea by means both of fortune and ability. For as there were at that time dealings under truce with the men of Tegea, he had come to a forge there and was looking at iron being wrought; and he was in wonder as he saw that which was being done. The smith therefore, perceiving that he marvelled at it, ceased from his work and said: "Surely, thou stranger of Lacedemon, if thou hadst seen that which I once saw, thou wouldst have marvelled much, since now it falls out that thou dost marvel so greatly at the working of this iron; for I, desiring in this enclosure to make a well, lighted in my digging upon a coffin of seven cubits in length; and not believing that ever there had been men larger than those of the present day, I opened it, and I saw that the dead body was equal in length to the coffin: then after I had measured it, I filled in the earth over it again." He then thus told him of that which he had seen; and the other, having thought upon that which was told, conjectured that this was Orestes according to the saying of the Oracle, forming his conjecture in the following manner:--whereas he saw that the smith had two pairs of bellows, he concluded that these were the winds spoken of, and that the anvil and the hammer were the stroke and the stroke in return, and that the iron which was being wrought was the trouble laid upon trouble, making comparison by the thought that iron has been discovered for the evil of mankind. Having thus conjectured he came back to Sparta and declared the whole matter to the Lacedemonians; and they brought a charge against him on a fictitious pretext and drove him out into exile. So having come to Tegea, he told the smith of his evil fortune and endeavoured to hire from him the enclosure, but at first he would not allow him to have it: at length however Lichas persuaded him and he took up his abode there; and he dug up the grave and gathered together the bones and went with them away to Sparta. From that time, whenever they made trial of one another, the Lacedemonians had much the advantage in the war; and by now they had subdued to themselves the greater part of Peloponnesus besides.

Translated by George Macaulay.

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Strabo, Geography 17.3.11 (c. 1st century BCE)

And Gabinius also, the Roman historian, does not abstain from telling marvellous stories of Maurusia; for example, he tells a story of a tomb of Antaeus near Lynx, and a skeleton sixty feet in length, which, he says, Sertorius exposed to view, and then covered again with earth.

Translated by H. L. Jones.

Are The “Huge, Alien Air Monsters” (That Live Inside The Clouds Above The Earth According To Some UFOlogists) The Same As The Principalities In “High Places” The New Testament Described?

Nigel Watson says, ‘The idea that ET type sky creatures exist in our skies was put forward by Charles Fort who was a great collector of mysteries in the early part of the 20th Century. In his book Lo! He notes: “Unknown, luminous things, or beings, have often been seen, sometimes close to this earth, and sometimes high in the sky. It may be that some of them were living things that occasionally come from somewhere else.” Arthur Conan Doyle the creator of Sherlock Holmes even penned a story in 1913 called The Horror of the Heights that imagines semi-solid sky creatures gobbling up aviators

When the hero of the story goes up to get evidence of their existence he never comes back, all that remains is a blood stained notebook that ends with the words: “Forty-three thousand feet. I shall never see earth again. They are beneath me, three of them. God help me; it is a dreadful death to die!” Ufologist, Trevor Constable, pioneered the photography of UFOs using infrared film during the 1960s. He considered UFOs to be biological beings, which live in the sky. As they come closer to Earth, they become more visible and they can fire bolts of lightning to defend themselves. In his 1958 book They Live in the Sky he says these creatures are invisible to our eyes, but infrared film can capture images of them as they fly above us. Today, some ufologists have adapted video cameras to capture infrared images of UFOs.’

Ever seen a really weird-shaped cloud? Like, one that looks like the devil or some kind of space monster?

What if it WAS a monster?

UFO sites such as UFO International Project suggest that some UFO sightings – and just really weird clouds – might in fact be soaring, vast alien monsters which fly around hundreds of miles above the Earth.

Maniacs on YouTube are WAY ahead of them, of course – with videos such as this unsettling glimpse into a world of pure madness (below).

Read the rest of this article at - http://metro.co.uk/2015/02/12/could-huge-alien-air-monsters-live-inside-the-clouds-above-the-earth-5060782/

Sea Monster Vs. Submarine

Brent Swancer

 

The oceans of the world have long been the alleged haunt of various merfolk, sea serpents, sea monsters, and assorted hulking, mysterious beasts beyond the fringes of our understanding. Since mankind first took to the seas and started our odyssey into this vast, watery domain, sailors have been captivated by such fantastical creatures, and maritime history and folklore is thickly steeped in countless tales of mysterious monsters from the depths. However, sometimes these creatures jump from out of the cloudy realm of legend and fleetingly glimpsed anomalies to come violently crashing into our reality, indeed into our nightmares. Such is the story of the numerous accounts of sea monsters boldly attacking seagoing vessels such as boats, ships, and yes, even submarines. In fact some of the most harrowing sea monster accounts there are involve submarines. It seems that in some cases, mysterious sea creatures do not appreciate sharing the depths with our steel contraptions. How did these encounters between man and beast turn out? Let’s take a look.

Certainly one of the most well-known accounts of an alleged sea monster attack on a submarine occurred during World War I, when German submarines prowled the waters of the Atlantic looking to make trouble. For one German submarine, the UB-85, on April 30, 1918 it was trouble that found them. The story goes that the submarine was discovered floating on the surface by the British patrol boat Coreopsis. At the time the U-boats, as the German submarines were called, were a fairly novel and highly feared weapon of war, known for being invisible, deadly killers of the high seas, so it was quite a fortunate turn of events for the British to come across one that was basically a sitting duck out in plain view. They immediately fired upon it and the submarine began sinking without any attempt to retaliate. Things became even weirder when the British vessel approached and the submarine crew quickly surrendered without any resistance. The crew of the British ship was mystified. The only time most crews saw a U-boat coming was when a torpedo was snaking through the sea towards them, and to have a whole submarine just sit and wait to be sunk and its crew apprehended without incident was mind bogglingly strange.

It wasn’t until the Germans were brought aboard and the U-boat captain, a Captain Gunther Krech, was questioned that the reason became both clearer and more bizarre. Krech allegedly reported that the submarine had surfaced during the night for the purpose of recharging its batteries, during which there had been a violent surge of frothing water off the starboard bow. When Kech and some crew members had gone to investigate, a creature the captain described as a “strange beast” had suddenly erupted forth from the cold, dark water and begun clambering up the side of the ship, which had caused the whole submarine to start listing to the side. The beast was described as being enormous, with a small head with large eyes deeply set in a horned skull and a large mouth with sharp teeth that glinted in the moonlight. This strange monster was then claimed to have reached the forward mount gun and to have begun ferociously attacking it, chomping down on the weapon with its formidable jaws and thrashing back and forth.

The submarine UB-85

 

Fearing that the submarine would continue to tilt under the creature’s weight until the open hatch hit the sea and sank the sub, all available crewmen had opened fire on the mysterious attacker, yet the thing had refused to let go of the gun mount. It apparently had taken a sustained, intense volley of gunfire to finally make the monster relinquish its iron grip, after which it disappeared into the black sea, its ultimate fate unknown. Final score: Submarine-1, Sea Monster-0.

Read the rest of this article at - http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/02/sea-monster-versus-submarine/