Scientists Find 'Active Thermitic Material' in WTC Dust - Vatican Claims Shroud Of Turin Hidden By Knights Templar

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Vatican Claims Shroud Of Turin Hidden By Knights Templar Posted: 05 Apr 2009 06:17 PM PDTMedieval knights hid and secretly venerated The Holy Shroud of Turin for more than 100 years after the Crusades, the Vatican said yesterday in an announcement that appeared to solve the mystery of the relic’s missing years. The Knights Templar, an order which was suppressed and disbanded for alleged heresy, took care of the linen cloth, which bears the image of a man with a beard, long hair and the wounds of crucifixion, according to Vatican researchers. The Shroud, which is kept in the royal chapel of Turin Cathedral, has long been revered as the shroud in which Jesus was buried, although the image only appeared clearly in 1898 when a photographer developed a negative. Barbara Frale, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, said the Shroud had disappeared in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, and did not surface again until the middle of the fourteenth century. Writing in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, Dr Frale said its fate in those years had always puzzled historians.However her study of the trial of the Knights Templar had brought to light a document in which Arnaut Sabbatier, a young Frenchman who entered the order in 1287, testified that as part of his initiation he was taken to “a secret place to which only the brothers of the Temple had access”. There he was shown “a long linen cloth on which was impressed the figure of a man” and instructed to venerate the image by kissing its feet three times. Dr Frale said that among other alleged offences such as sodomy, the Knights Templar had been accused of worshipping idols, in particular a “bearded figure”. In reality however the object they had secretly venerated was the Shroud. They had rescued it to ensure that it did not fall into the hands of heretical groups such as the Cathars, who claimed that Christ did not have a true human body, only the appearance of a man, and could therefore not have died on the Cross and been resurrected. She said her discovery vindicated a theory first put forward by the British historian Ian Wilson in 1978. The Knights Templar were founded at the time of the First Crusade in the eleventh century to protect Christians making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Order was endorsed by the Pope, but when Acre fell in 1291 and the Crusaders lost their hold on the Holy Land their support faded, amid growing envy of their fortune in property and banking. Rumours about the order’s corrupt and arcane secret ceremonies claimed that novices had to deny Christ three times, spit on the cross, strip naked and kiss their superior on the buttocks, navel, and lips and submit to sodomy. King Philip IV of France, who coveted the order’s wealth and owed it money, arrested its leaders and put pressure on Pope Clement V to dissolve it. Several knights, including the Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, were burned at the stake. Legends of the Templars’ secret rituals and lost treasures have long fascinated conspiracy theorists, and figure in The Da Vinci Code, which repeated the theory that the knights were entrusted with the Holy Grail. In 2003 Dr Frale, the Vatican’s medieval specialist, unearthed the record of the trial of the Templars, also known as the Chinon Parchment, after realising that it had been wrongly catalogued. The parchment showed that Pope Clement V had accepted the Templars were guilty of “grave sins”, such as corruption and sexual immorality, but not of heresy. Their initiation ceremony involved spitting on the Cross, but this was to brace them for having to do so if captured by Muslim forces, Dr Frale said. Last year she published for the first time the prayer the Knights Templar composed when “unjustly imprisoned”, in which they appealed to the Virgin Mary to persuade "our enemies” to abandon calumnies and lies and revert to truth and charity. Radiocarbon dating tests on the Turin Shroud in 1988 indicated that it was a medieval fake. However this had been challenged on the grounds that the dated sample was taken from an area of the shroud mended after a fire in the Middle Ages and not a part of the original cloth. After the sack of Constantinople it was next seen at Lirey in France in 1353, when it was displayed in a local church by descendants of Geoffroy de Charney, a Templar Knight burned at the stake with Jacques de Molay. It was moved to various European cities until it was acquired by the Savoy dynasty in Turin in the sixteenth century. Holy See property since 1983, the Shroud was last publicly exhibited in 2000, and is due to go on show again next year. The Vatican has not declared whether it is genuine or a forgery, leaving it to believers to decide. The late John Paul II said it was “an icon of the suffering of the innocent in every age.” The self proclaimed heirs of the Knights Templar have asked the Vatican to “restore the reputation” of the disgraced order and acknowledge that assets worth some £80 million were confiscated. The Association of the Sovereign Order of the Temple of Christ, based in Spain, said that when the order was dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1307, more than 9,000 properties, farms and commercial ventures belonging to knights were seized by the Church. A British branch also claiming descent from the Knights Templar and based in Hertfordshire has called for a papal apology for the persecution of the order.Are you interested in the paranormal, cryptozoology, UFOs and conspiracies? Go to Phantoms and Monsters Wiki and become a member of this unique network. Start a page on a subject or add your input to an existing page or thread. Phantoms and Monsters updates are posted daily at Twitter. Signup today!SETI Senior Astronomer Confident Alien Contact Within 20 Years Posted: 05 Apr 2009 09:43 AM PDTSome leading astronomers are quite confident that mankind will make contact with intelligent alien life within two decades. The search for extraterrestrial life will leap forward next year when NASA launches the Kepler space telescope. The instrument will be constantly scanning the same 100,000 stars over its four-year mission with the exciting objective of discovering Earth-sized planets in the habitable zones around suns.This will allow SETI to home in on where the odds of life are possibly greatest. Currently, SETI’s mission to find life on other planets is like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. But now, whenever Kepler identifies planets most likely to sustain life, the team at SETI will be able to focus in on those solar systems using deep-space listening equipment. This will be a huge upgrade from their present work of randomly scanning the outer reaches of space for some kind of sign or signal. Also, upping the ante, is the recent discovery of Earth-like planets outside our solar system, which has led astrophysicists to conclude that Earth-like planets are likely relatively common in our galaxy."Everything has caused us to become more optimistic," said American astrophysicist Dr Frank Drake in a recent BBC documentary. "We really believe that in the next 20 years or so, we are going to learn a great deal more about life beyond Earth and very likely we will have detected that life and perhaps even intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy."However, some astrophysicists have warned that we humans may be blinded by our familiarity with carbon and Earthlike conditions. In other words, what we’re looking for may not even lie in our version of a “sweet spot”. After all, even here on Earth, one species “sweet spot” is another’s species worst nightmare. In any case, it is not beyond the realm of feasibility that our first encounter with extraterrestrial life will not be a solely carbon-based occasion.Alternative biochemists speculate that there are several atoms and solvents that could potentially spawn life. Because carbon has worked for the conditions on Earth, we speculate that the same must be true throughout the universe. In reality, there are many elements that could potentially do the trick. Even counter-intuitive elements such as arsenic may be capable of supporting life under the right conditions. Even on Earth some marine algae incorporate arsenic into complex organic molecules such as arsenosugars and arsenobetaines. Several other small life forms use arsenic to generate energy and facilitate growth. Chlorine and sulfur are also possible elemental replacements for carbon. Sulfur is capably of forming long-chain molecules like carbon. Some terrestrial bacteria have already been discovered to survive on sulfur rather than oxygen, by reducing sulfur to hydrogen sulfide.Nitrogen and phosphorus could also potentially form biochemical molecules. Phosphorus is similar to carbon in that it can form long chain molecules on its own, which would conceivably allow for formation of complex macromolecules. When combined with nitrogen, it can create quite a wide range of molecules, including rings.So what about water? Isn’t at least water essential to life? Not necessarily. Ammonia, for example, has many of the same properties as water. An ammonia or ammonia-water mixture stays liquid at much colder temperatures than plain water. Such biochemistries may exist outside the conventional water-based "habitability zone". One example of such a location would be right here in our own solar system on Saturn's largest moon Titan.Hydrogen fluoride methanol, hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen chloride, and formamide have all been suggested as suitable solvents that could theoretically support alternative biochemistry. All of these “water replacements” have pros and cons when considered in our terrestrial environment. What needs to be considered is that with a radically different environment, comes radically different reactions. Water and carbon might be the very last things capable of supporting life in some extreme planetary conditions.At any rate, the odds of there being some type of life somewhere out there are good. As for intelligent life, well, that will depend on the definition of intelligence. There are a lot of other intelligent species here on Earth besides humans, that we don’t generally regard as such. In spite of many Star Trek episodes to the contrary, the odds of alien life forms having evolved to talk, look and act exactly like super hot humans are slim to none. If life is out there, it will have evolved according to it’s particular niche in the universe and will likely be quite foreign to us in the way it looks, communicates and thinks. We might not even be able to recognize hypothetical life forms as alive in the sense that we understand life. In fact, it would be more “miraculous” if we could effectively communicate with extraterrestrial life than to find that it exists. From that perspective, even if there are other life forms out there, we’d still be alone in the universe. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn't look for the answers.Are you interested in the paranormal, cryptozoology, UFOs and conspiracies? Go to Phantoms and Monsters Wiki and become a member of this unique network. Start a page on a subject or add your input to an existing page or thread. Phantoms and Monsters updates are posted daily at Twitter. Signup today!Scientists Find 'Active Thermitic Material' in WTC Dust Posted: 05 Apr 2009 09:25 AM PDTA team of nine scientists have unearthed startling data from dust gathered in the days and weeks after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9/11. They discovered that scattered throughout the dust samples were red and gray chips of 'active thermitic material', or an un-reacted pyrotechnic explosive.Thermite is used in steel welding, fireworks shows, and hand grenades. It is the combination of a metal powder and a metal oxide which produce a reaction known for extremely high temperatures focused in a very small area for a short period of time. The 'active thermitic material' discovered in the World Trade Center dust was a combination of elemental aluminum and iron oxide, and is a form of thermite known as 'nano-structured super-thermite'.“These observations reminded us of nano-thermite fabricated at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere; available papers describe this material as an intimate mixture of UFG[ultra-fine grain] aluminum and iron oxide in nano-thermite composites to form pyrotechnics or explosives. Commercially available thermite behaves as an incendiary when ignited, but when the ingredients are ultra-fine grain and are intimately mixed, this 'nano-thermite' reacts very rapidly, even explosively, and is sometimes referred to as 'super-thermite',” the report explains.The full article in The Open Chemical Physics Journal can be found here.Some of the authors of the paper have lost their jobs at universities and chemistry labs for their outspoken breakdown of what happened at the World Trade Center on 9/11. Kevin Ryan lost his job as a lab director after writing a letter to the National Institute for Standards and Technology(NIST was conducting an investigation into 9/11 at the time) challenging the common theory that burning jet fuel weakened the steel supports holding up the 110-story skyscrapers. Ryan claims that the owner of his laboratory subsidiary "was the company that certified the steel components used in the construction of the WTC buildings,” according to the South Bend Tribune. Dr. Steven E. Jones, a physicist at Brigham Young University, presented a paper in 2005 discussing alternative theories to the commonly accepted 'jet fuel' reasoning. In September 2006 he was placed on paid administrative leave and his paper was removed from the BYU database.Jones has told Visibility911.com, "In short, the paper explodes the official story that 'no evidence' exists for explosive/pyrotechnic materials in the WTC buildings."Parts of the report mention other studies being conducted by the scientists that will come out soon.Craziness in South Korea: Alien Annihilation or North Korean Nukes? Posted: 05 Apr 2009 09:09 AM PDTThe last week has been a strange one for South Korea. Beginning on the last day of March a series of deafening sonic booms have been heard over the entire nation prompting many to believe they were under alien attack. Now it appears that the deafening roars that set of car alarms and had panicky pedestrians running for cover in sheer terror were probably related to the North Korean satellite launch and the various air forces monitoring the area.None of that stopped virtually every newspaper in the country reporting that Korea might be under UFO attack. Adding to the strangeness of the week unusual lights or UFOs were seen over a number of cities in the country. Internet sites crashed as people debated as to whether South Korea was facing annihilation at the hands of ET’s or devastation as a result of North Korean missiles.Underground nuclear tests were proposed by a few commentators as the cause of the sound while others even suggested that time travellers from the future may have arrived to save their ancestors from destruction. Some talked of ancient prophecies coming to pass.As a doomsday mentality gripped the nation many felt intrinsically that the world as they knew it was on the threshold of a major change. Many local UFO research groups continue to suspect an ET involvement in the weeks events.Florida Museum's Notorious Ghost Still Active Posted: 05 Apr 2009 08:54 AM PDTAt the start of the last week’s Quilt Walk, some curtains appeared to have been moved at the Lake City-Columbia County Museum, 157 SE Hernando Ave.This is not earth-shattering news, but it harkens back to stories of a ghost in the house. Some past and present museum docents give credit to such incidents to a former resident of the house.“Cora has been here,” said Museum President Pat McAlhany said as she pointed to the curtains. She then told the story of the museum’s ghost.Whether moving curtains, plates or an extremely heavy bookcase is supernatural or just physics of an old structure can be debated until the end of time.For some individuals, however, these occurrences are the work of a particular spirit.The majority of the house where the museum sits today was built in the late 1870s, McAlhany said. There was a young lady named Cora Vinzant who was from High Springs. She stayed with family members in the house while she attended Lake City Institute.“The night before she was to graduate,” McAlhany said, “Cora died from yellow fever.”Vinzant died on May 26, 1892, according to an original hand-carried announcement of the day, which is at the museum in a scrapbook.Opening curtains in one room on the second floor of the museum at some time between the night of March 26 and the morning of March 27 is among the less spectacular feats attributed to Cora.The ghost is given credit for moving very heavy furniture too.Four people left the museum at 9 p.m. on the Thursday before the 2008 Quilt Walk, McAlhany said. They returned at 8 a.m. on Friday.In those 11 hours, a bookshelf with 300 books on it somehow had moved to another room and was sitting at a 45-degree angle, Karen Cross said. She was among those who discovered it.“And there were no scratches on the wooden floor from it being moved,” Cross said, “until two of us moved it back.”Jerry Horton said Cora gave him a start a few weeks ago.“I was showing a visitor this display case,” Horton said. “This Bible here went in slow motion and fell face down. It was May Vinzant’s Bible. She lived here from 1881 until 1981. She died at the age of 102 or 103.”That Bible was sitting on a carrier similar to those used for placing collectible baseballs, so they will sit on a shelf.That same glass display case offered another opportunity for Cora to exhibit a prank, McAlhany said.One day, there were four people sitting in the same room as the display case, she said. Its door four times, with a person having closed it each time. There was no person walking on the outside porch or making enough movement in the room or the house to shake the floor.Mark Cross, Karen’s husband, said he spoke with a person who gave him unsolicited input about Cora.“I had a lady, a museum visitor, who said she is sensitive to spirits. She told me that she saw a lady in blue sitting there,” he said as he pointed toward the front door of the museum.McAlhany said there have been only happy experiences from Cora.“I always feel happy and good when I am here,” she said. “I think Cora was a youthful person when she died, and now she is still young. She is just doing pranks.”A worker with Florida Power & Light once asked McAlhany about the museum’s second story lights being left on.“He said he saw lights upstairs in the front bedroom - in Cora’s room,” McAlhany said. “We always check very carefully to make sure all the lights are off.”And so, on those occasions when the lights are on, but everyone thinks that no one is home at the museum, there are some who say Cora is playing tricks on people.Are you interested in the paranormal, cryptozoology, UFOs and conspiracies? Go to Phantoms and Monsters Wiki and become a member of this unique network. Start a page on a subject or add your input to an existing page or thread. Phantoms and Monsters updates are posted daily at Twitter. Signup today!********************Have you had a close encounter or witnessed something unusual?Send us an email