Someone Blow My Mind Vol. Illuminati, 2012, Aliens, Life

Description:

Descriptions vary but most say it looks fine silver-like hairs that form a cobweb, a gel of some kind, or ectoplasm.

Sightings:

Angel hair or siliceous cotton is a substance said to be dispersed from UFOs as they fly overhead.

It has also been reported at sightings of the Virgin Mary. Angel hair was reported at the Miracle at Fatima 1917.

The most reported incidence occurred in Oloron, France in 1952.

On October 27, 1954, Gennaro Lucetti and Pietro Lastrucci stood on the balcony of a hotel in St. Mark's Square in Venice and saw two "shining spindles" flying across the sky leaving a trail of angel hair.

In the Portuguese city of Evora on November 2, 1959, angel hair was collected and analyzed at the microscope by local school director and later by armed forces technicians and scientists of the University of Lisbon. Conclusions were not possible although it was formed, apparently, by a small organism featuring 10 'arms' stretching from a central core. It was advanced that it could be a single-celled organism of some kind. This event followed the sighting, by the population of the city, of several UFOs. Angel hair was also spotted in the same day, at the Air Force Base of Sintra, several kilometers to the north.



Twenty UFOs, described as "shiny silver spheres," flew over a number of farms near Quirindi, New South Wales, Australia last weekend, littering the ground with cobweb-like filaments called "angel hair." According to USA Today, "Residents of a small Australian community swear that they saw cobwebs fall from the sky after UFOs passed overhead. Dozens of residents of Quirindi called Australia's National UFO Hotline after the incident." According to the Tamworth, N.S.W. North Daily Leader, "Mrs. E. Stansfield, 61 years (old), said that she saw cobwebs falling from the sky. She saw twenty silver balls which passed overhead.

When she went out to her daughter, she too was covered in fine strands of cobweb. When she tried to pick it up, it disintegrated in her hand. The family car had cobwebs all over it." The incident took place at 5:04 p.m. on Sunday, August 9, 1998. Quirindi is just north of the Liverpool mountain range, about 70 kilometers (42 miles) southwest of Tamworth, N.S.W. and 300 kilometers (180 miles) northwest of Sydney. Australian researcher Raymond Brooks reported that the "various craft" performed aerobatic maneuvers over the farms "for 1.5 hours, including the release of 'angel hair.'

Published explanations

Explanations based on known phenomena include:

Some types of spiders are known to migrate through the air, sometimes in large numbers, on cobweb gliders. Many cases of angel hair were nothing other than these spider threads and, in one occasion, small spiders have been found on the material.
Atmospheric electricity may cause floating dust particles to become polarized, and attraction between these polarized dust particles may cause them to join together, to form long filaments.

On two occasions a sample was sent for testing once on the 13 of October in 1917 a sample found at Cova da Iria was sent to Lisbon and on October 17, 1957 another sample found at Cova da Iria and examined. The analysis of this proved to be natural consisting of white flakes. When put under a microscope it was found to be a vegetable product not animal.

Explanations related to Unidentified Flying Objects include:

Ionized air may be sleeting off the electromagnetic field that surrounds a UFO.

Excess energy converted into matter.

The usage by UFOs of a G-field would cause heavy atoms in ordinary air to react among themselves and produce a kind of precipitate that falls to the ground and disappears as the ionization decreases



"Angel grass" is a related phenomenon that occurs when short metallic threads fall from the sky, often forming intertwined loosed masses. Some believe they are a type of Chaff, a radar counter-measure which can be in the form of fine strands, which is dropped by some military aircraft. Allegedly they can form from sounding rockets and balloons, which would have released them at high altitude for radar tracking.

Ellie's Personal Experiences:

In the summer of 1988 a photographer used infrared film to take 20 photos in my bedroom as he hypnotized me about my past lives. The resulting images display layers upon layers of superimposed images with messages that never seem to end.



Just after Christmas 1989 I awoke one morning to find odd patterns made out of some sort of gel fiber-like material on my navy blanket and the navy carpet in my bedroom. They looked like translucent glitter used in art projects or translucent gel though they weren't sticky to the touch. Actually when touched they felt like nothing and disappeared. If left untouched, they remained for weeks. Unfortunately they did not show up in photos.

The lines varied in width from very thin and fine to one inch in diameter, creating never-ending patterns. One pattern followed in a zig-zag design from my bathroom door across the bedroom, about 12 feet, to my bed, then straight up and onto my navy blanket, but other designs were found in the room.

Not understanding what they were, and knowing they were not created by an insect, I went in search of answers in the world of metaphysics, having made friends with several paranormal researchers. One man came to see them and told me they were called angel hair and were messages left by Spirit.

A psychic told me they were left by little boy in spirit which I found interesting, because just after she left, I was visited by a 6 year old boy from another realm who stood beside me as I sat at my computer. He told me his named was Alexander and he had come to Earth to meet Sarah a human girl with who he shared a destiny. He told me he would dictate the story of Sarah and Alexander which would become a book and screenplay - and it did. 2012 Sarah and Alexander

Star jelly:





Star jelly (also called astromyxin, astral jelly, star rot, or star shot) is a gelatinous substance, which, according to folklore, is deposited on the earth during meteor showers. It is described as a translucent or grayish white gelatin which tends to evaporate shortly after having fallen.

Explanations have ranged from the material being the remains of frogs and toads, or of worms, to the byproducts of cyanobacteria, to paranormal origins. Reports of the compound date back to the 14th century and continue to the present.

There have been reports of star jelly for centuries. John of Gaddesden (1280-1361) mentions stella terrae (Latin for 'star of the earth' or 'earth-star') in his medical writings, describing it as "a certain mucilaginous substance lying upon the earth" and suggesting that it might be used to treat abcesses.

A fourteenth-century Latin medical glossary has an entry for uligo, described as "a certain fatty substance emitted from the earth, that is commonly called 'a star which has fallen'". Similarly, an English-Latin dictionary from around 1440 has an entry for 'sterre slyme' with the Latin equivalent given as assub (a rendering of Arabic ash-shuhub, also used in medieval Latin as a term for a 'falling' or 'shooting' star).

The Oxford English Dictionary lists a large number of other names for the substance, with references dating back to the circa-1440 English-Latin dictionary entry mentioned above: star-fallen, star-falling, star-jelly, star-shot, star-slime, star-slough, star-slubber, and star-slutch.

The slime mold Enteridium lycoperdon is named "caca de luna" or "MoonÕs excrement" by the locals in the state of Veracruz in Mexico.

Examples:

In 1950, four Philadelphia, Pennsylvania policemen reported the discovery of "a domed disk of quivering jelly, 6 feet in diameter, one foot thick at the center and an inch or two near the edge." When they tried to pick it up, it dissolved into an "odorless, sticky scum." This incident inspired the movie The Blob.

On August 11, 1979, Mrs. Sybil Christian of Frisco, Texas reported the discovery of several purple blobs of goo on her front yard following a Perseid meteor shower. A follow up investigation by reporters and an assistant director of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History discovered a battery reprocessing plant outside of town where caustic soda was used to clean impurities from the lead in the batteries, resulting in a purplish compound as a byproduct. The report was greeted with some scepticism, however, as the compounds at the reprocessing plant were solid, whereas the blobs on Mrs. Christian's lawn were gelatinous. Others, however, have pointed out that Mrs. Christian had tried to clear them off her lawn with a garden hose.

In December, 1983, grayish-white, oily gelatin fell on North Reading, Massachusetts. Thomas Grinley reported finding it on his lawn, on the streets and sidewalks, and dripping from gas station pumps.

Star jelly was found on various Scottish hills in the autumn of 2009.

Scientific analysis and theories:

Thomas Pennant in the 18th century believed the material to be "something vomited up by birds or animals".

Nostoc, a type of fresh water blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) forms spherical colonies made of filaments of cells in a gelatinous sheath. When on the ground, it is ordinarily not seen; but after rainfall it swells up into a conspicuous jellylike mass which is sometimes called star-jelly.

Scientists commissioned by the National Geographic Society have carried out tests on samples found in the United States, but have failed to find any DNA in the material.

Slime moulds are possible causes, appearing suddenly, exhibiting a very gelatinous appearance at first and later changing to a dust-like form which is dispersed by rain and wind. The colors range from a striking pure white as in Enteridium lycoperdon, to pink as in Lycogala epidendrum, to purple, bright yellow, orange, and brown.

The scrolls are traditionally identified with the ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, though some recent interpretations have challenged this association and argue that the scrolls were penned by priests, Zadokites, or other unknown Jewish groups.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are traditionally divided into three groups: "Biblical" manuscripts (copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible), which comprise roughly 40% of the identified scrolls; "Apocryphal" or "Pseudepigraphical" manuscripts (known documents from the Second Temple Period like Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Sirach, non-canonical psalms, etc., that were not ultimately canonized in the Hebrew Bible), which comprise roughly 30% of the identified scrolls; and "Sectarian" manuscripts (previously unknown documents that speak to the rules and beliefs of a particular group or groups within greater Judaism) like the Community Rule, War Scroll, Pesher.

Date and Contents



According to carbon dating, textual analysis, and handwriting analysis the documents were written at various times between the middle of the 2nd century BC and the 1st century AD. At least one document has a carbon date range of 21 BC-AD 61.

The Nash Papyrus from Egypt, containing a copy of the Ten Commandments, is the only other Hebrew document of comparable antiquity. Similar written materials have been recovered from nearby sites, including the fortress of Masada.

While some of the scrolls were written on papyrus, a good portion were written on a brownish animal hide that appears to be gevil.

The scrolls were written with feathers from a bird and the ink used was made from carbon black and white pigments.

One scroll, appropriately named the Copper Scroll, consisted of thin copper sheets that were incised with text and then joined together.

The fragments span at least 800 texts that represent many diverse viewpoints, ranging from the beliefs of the Essenes to those of other sects.

About 30% are fragments from the Hebrew Bible, from all the books except the Book of Esther and the Book of Nehemiah (Abegg et al 2002). About 25% are traditional Israelite religious texts that are not in the canonical Hebrew Bible, such as the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the Testament of Levi.

Another 30% contain Biblical commentaries or other texts such as the Community Rule (1QS/4QSa-j, also known as "Discipline Scroll" or "Manual of Discipline") and the War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness (1QM, also known as the "War Scroll") related to the beliefs, regulations, and membership requirements of a small Jewish sect, which many researchers believe lived in the Qumran area.

The rest (about 15%) of the fragments are yet unidentified.

Most of the scrolls are written in one of two dialects of Hebrew, Biblical Hebrew or Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew (on which see Hoffman 2004 or Qimron 1986).

Biblical Hebrew dominates in the Biblical documents, and DSS Hebrew in the documents composed in Qumran. Some scrolls are also written in Aramaic and a few in Greek.

Only a few of the biblical scrolls were written at Qumran, the majority being copied before the Qumran period and coming into the ownership of the Qumran community (Abegg et al 2002).

There is no evidence that the Qumran community altered the biblical texts that they did copy to reflect their own theology (Abegg et al 2002). It is thought that the Qumran community would have viewed the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees as divinely inspired scripture (Abegg et al 2002).

The biblical texts cited most often in the nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls are the Psalms, followed by the Book of Isaiah and the Book of Deuteronomy (Abegg et al 2002).

Important texts include the Isaiah Scroll (discovered in 1947), a Commentary on the Habakkuk (1947); the Community Rule (1QS/4QSa-j), which gives much information on the structure and theology of the sect; and the earliest version of the Damascus Document.

The so-called Copper Scroll (1952), which lists hidden caches of gold, scrolls, and weapons, is probably the most notorious.

Essenes

According to a view almost universally held until the 1990s, the documents were written and hidden by a community of Essenes who lived in the Qumran area. This is known as the Essene Hypothesis. Jews revolted against the Romans in AD 66. Before they were massacred by Roman troops, the Essenes hid their scriptures in caves, not to be discovered until 1947. The opinion that the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls were Essenes is the most prevalent view among scholars (Abegg et al 2002 ).
Sadducees

Another theory, which has been gaining popularity, is that the community was led by Zadokite priests (Sadducees). The most important document in support of this view is the "Miqsat Ma'ase haTorah" (MMT, 4Q394-), which states purity laws identical to those attributed in rabbinic writings to the Sadducees (such as concerning the transfer of impurities). This document also reproduces a festival calendar which follows Sadducee principles for the dating of certain festival days.
Additional evidence is found in 4QMMT which agrees with the Sadduceean position that held streams of liquid were ritually unclean contrary to Pharisee belief. Most scholars feel that despite the similarities in purity laws, some pretty large unbridged theological issues make this unlikely. For example, Josephus says that the Sadducees and the Essenes held opposing views of predestination, with the Essenes attributing everything to fate, while the Sadducees denied fate altogether. Similarly, many scrolls show evidence that the scroll authors believed the soul survived beyond death (and this belief included resurrection) which was contrary to the Sadducess who argued that there is no resurrection, no angel or spirit.

Temple Library

In 1963 Karl Heinrich Rengstorf of the University of Munster put forth the theory that the Dead Sea scrolls originated at the library of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. This theory was rejected by most scholars during the 1960s, who maintained that the scrolls were written at Qumran rather than transported from another location (a position supported by de Vaux's identification of a probable scriptorium within the ruins of Qumran). However, the theory was revived by Norman Golb and other scholars during the 1990s, who added that the scrolls probably also originated from several other libraries in addition to the Temple library.

Christian Connections

Spanish Jesuit Jose O'Callaghan has argued that one fragment (7Q5) is a New Testament text from the Gospel of Mark, chapter 6, verses 52-53. In recent years this controversial assertion has been taken up again by German scholar Carsten Peter Thiede. A successful identification of this fragment as a passage from Mark would make it the earliest extant New Testament document, dating somewhere between AD 30 and 60. Opponents consider that the fragment is tiny and requires so much reconstruction (the only complete word in Greek is "and") that it could have come from a text other than Mark.

Robert Eisenman advanced the theory that some scrolls actually describe the early Christian community, characterized as more fundamentalist and rigid than the one portrayed by the New Testament. Eisenman also attempted to relate the career of James the Just and Paul of Tarsus to some of these documents.

Other Theories

Some of the scrolls may actually be the lost books mentioned in the Bible. Because they are frequently described as important to the history of the Bible, the scrolls are surrounded by a wide range of conspiracy theories: one example is the claim that they were entirely fabricated or planted by extra-terrestrials. There is also writing about the Nephilim related to the Book of Enoch. Other theories with more support among scholars include Qumran as a military fortress or a winter resort (Abegg et al 2002).

Quamran Plateau











The settlement of Qumran is 1 km inland from the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. The scrolls were found in eleven caves nearby, between 125m (Cave 4) and 1 km (Cave 1) away. None were found within the settlement, unless it originally encompassed the caves. In the winter of 1946-47, Palestinian Muhammed edh-Dhib and his cousin discovered the caves, and soon afterwards the scrolls.

John C. Trever reconstructed the story of the scrolls from several interviews with the Bedouin. edh-Dhib's cousin noticed the caves, but edh-Dhib himself was the first to actually fall into one. He retrieved a handful of scrolls, which Trever identifies as the Isaiah Scroll, Habakkuk Commentary, and the Community Rule (originally known as "Manual of Discipline"), and took them back to the camp to show to his family.

None of the scrolls were destroyed in this process, despite popular rumor. The Bedouin kept the scrolls hanging on a tent pole while they figured out what to do with them, periodically taking them out to show people. At some point during this time, the Community Rule was split in two.

The Bedouin first took the scrolls to a dealer named Ibrahim 'Ijha in Bethlehem. 'Ijha returned them, saying they were worthless, after being warned that they may have been stolen from a synagogue. Undaunted, the Bedouin went to a nearby market, where a Syrian Christian offered to buy them.

A sheikh joined their conversation and suggested they take the scrolls to Khalil Eskander Shahin, "Kando", a cobbler and part-time antiques dealer. The Bedouin and the dealers returned to the site, leaving one scroll with Kando and selling three others to a dealer for $29 in 2003 US dollars.

Arrangements with the Bedouin left the scrolls in the hands of a third party until a profitable sale of them could be negotiated. That third party, George Isha'ya, was a member of the Syrian Orthodox Church, who soon contacted St. Mark's Monastery in the hope of getting an appraisal of the nature of the texts. News of the find then reached Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, better known as Mar Samuel.

After examining the scrolls and suspecting their antiquity, Mar Samuel expressed an interest in purchasing them. Four scrolls found their way into his hands: the now famous Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa), the Community Rule, the Habakkuk Pesher (a commentary on the book of Habakkuk), and the Genesis Apocryphon.

More scrolls soon surfaced in the antiquities market, and Professor Eleazer Sukenik and Professor Benjamin Mazar, Israeli archaeologists at Hebrew University, soon found themselves in possession of three, The War Scroll, Thanksgiving Hymns, and another, more fragmented, Isaiah scroll.

By the end of 1947, Sukenik and Mazar received word of the scrolls in Mar Samuel's possession and attempted to purchase them. No deal was reached, and instead the scrolls caught the attention of Dr. John C. Trever, of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), who compared the script in the scrolls to that of The Nash Papyrus, the oldest biblical manuscript then known, and found similarities between them.

Dr. Trever, a keen amateur photographer, met with Mar Samuel on February 21, 1948, when he photographed the scrolls. The quality of his photographs often exceeded the visibility of the scrolls themselves over the years, as the ink of the texts quickly deteriorated after they were removed from their linen wrappings.

The scrolls were analyzed using a cyclotron at the University of California, Davis where it was found that the black ink used was iron-gall ink. The red ink on the scrolls was cinnabar (HgS, mercury sulfide).

In March, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War prompted the removal of the scrolls for safekeeping, from Israel to Beirut, Lebanon.

Early in September, 1948, Mar brought Professor Ovid R. Sellers, the new Director of ASOR, some additional scroll fragments that he had acquired. By the end of 1948, nearly two years after their discovery, scholars had yet to locate the cave where the fragments had been found. With unrest in the country at that time, no large-scale search could be undertaken. Sellers attempted to get the Syrians to help him locate the cave, but they demanded more money than he could offer. Finally, Cave 1 was discovered, on January 28, 1949, by a United Nations observer.

The Dead Sea Scrolls went up for sale eventually, in an advertisement in the June 1, 1954 Wall Street Journal. On July 1, the scrolls, after delicate negotiations and accompanied by three people including the Metropolitan, arrived at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. They were purchased by Prof. Mazar and the son of Prof. Sukenik, Yigael Yadin, for US$250,000 and brought back to East Jerusalem, where they were on display at the Palestine Archaeological Museum then, after the Six-Day War, to West Jerusalem at the Shrine of the Book.

The caves surrounding Qumran are numbered based upon the order of their discovery and their production of scrolls and scroll fragments. Thus, caves 7-9 and 4 are very close to the settlement at Qumran, while caves 1, 3, and 11 are farther away. Likewise, there are hundreds of other caves surrounding Qumran discovered both before and after the 11 scroll caves that did not produce scrolls and are therefore not numbered as scroll caves.

Below is a summary of each of the Qumran Caves.

Cave 1





Cave 1 was discovered in the winter or spring of 1947 by a local bedouin. It was first excavated by Gerald Lankester Harding and Roland de Vaux from February 15 - March 5, 1949. In addition to the original seven scrolls, Cave 1 produced jars and bowls, whose chemical composition and shape matched vessels discovered at the settlement at Qumran, pieces of cloth, and additional fragments that matched portions of the original scrolls, thereby confirming that the original scrolls came from Cave 1.

Cave 2





Cave 2 was discovered by the same bedouin in February, 1952. It yielded 300 fragments from 33 manuscripts, including Jubilees and the Book of Sirach in the original Hebrew.

Cave 3



Copper Scrolls Found in Cave 3





Cave 3 was discovered on March 14, 1952. The cave yielded 14 manuscripts including Jubilees and the curious Copper Scroll, which lists 67 hiding places, mostly underground, throughout the ancient Roman province of Judea (now Israel and Palestine). According to the scroll, the secret caches held astonishing amounts of gold, silver, copper, aromatics, and manuscripts.

Cave 4





Cave four was discovered in August, 1952, and was excavated from September 22 to 29, 1952 by Gerald Lankester Harding, Roland de Vaux, and J—zef Milik. Cave four is actually two, hand-cut caves (4a and 4b), but since the fragments were mixed, they are labeled as 4Q.

Cave 4 is the most famous of Qumran caves both because of its visibility from the Qumran plateau and its productivity. It is visible from the plateau to the south of the Qumran settlement. It is by far the most productive of all Qumran caves, producing ninety percent of the Dead Sea Scrolls and scroll fragments (approx. 15,000 fragments from 500 different texts), including 9-10 copies of Jubilees, along with 21 tefillin and 7 mezuzot.

Cave 5



Cave 5 produced approximately 25 manuscripts.

Cave 6



Cave 6 contained fragments of about 31 manuscripts. Most of these were papyrus rather than the leather that predominated in the other caves.Mar Samuel, meanwhile, had made his way to America. Here he tried in vain to sell the texts in his possession, even displaying them once at the Library of Congress. Finally a now famous advertisement was taken out in the Wall Street Journal. On June 1, 1954, a Wall Street Journal ad proclaimed, "The Four Dead Sea Scrolls: Biblical Manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC, are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group." This ad was brought to the attention of Yigael Yadin, who, working through an intermediary, managed to purchase the scrolls for the sum of $250,000.

Caves 7 - 9



Cave 7 on the right -- Cave 8 on the left

Caves 7-9 are unique in that they are the only caves that are accessible only by passing through the settlement at Qumran. Carved into the southern end of the Qumran plateau, archaeologists excavated caves 7-9 in 1957, but did not find many fragments perhaps due to high levels of erosion that left only the shallow bottoms of the caves.

Cave 7 yielded fewer than 20 fragments of Greek documents, including 7Q2 (the "Letter of Jeremiah" = Baruch 6), 7Q5 (which became the subject of much speculation in later decades), and a Greek copy of a scroll of Enoch. Cave 7 also produced several inscribed potsherds and jars.

Cave 8 produced five fragments: Genesis (8QGen), Psalms (8QPs), a tefillin fragment (8QPhyl), a mezuzah (8QMez), and a hymn (8QHymn). Cave 8 also produced several tefillin cases, a box of leather objects, lamps, jars, and the sole of a leather shoe.

Cave 9 produced only small, unidentifiable fragments.

Caves 8 and 9 also yielded several date pits similar to those discovered by Magen and Peleg to the west of Locus 75 during their "Operation Scroll" excavations.

Cave 10



An Ostracon was discovered which is pottery (or stone), usually broken off from a vase or other earthenware vessel.

Cave 11



Cave 11 was discovered in 1956 and yielded 21 texts, some of which were quite lengthy. The Temple Scroll, so called because more than half of it pertains to the construction of the Temple of Jerusalem, was found in Cave 11, and is by far the longest scroll. It is now 26.7 feet (8.15m) long. Its original length may have been over 28 feet (8.75m). The Temple Scroll was regarded by Yigael Yadin as "The Torah According to the Essenes." On the other hand, Hartmut Stegemann, a contemporary and friend of Yadin, believed the scroll was not to be regarded as such, but was a document without exceptional significance. Stegemann notes that it is not mentioned or cited in any known Essene writing.

Also in Cave 11, an escatological fragment about the biblical figure Melchizedek (11Q13) was found. Cave 11 also produced a copy of Jubilees.

According to former chief editor of the DSS editorial team, John Strugnell, there are at least four privately owned scrolls from Cave 11, that has not yet been made available for scholars. Among them is a complete Aramaic manuscript of the Book of Enoch.

Publications

Some of the documents were published in a prompt manner: all of the writing found in Cave 1 appeared in print between 1950 and 1956; the finds from 8 different caves were released in a single volume in 1963; and 1965 saw the publication of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. Translation of these materials quickly followed.

The exception to this speed was the documents from Cave 4, which represented 40% of the total material.

The publication of these materials had been entrusted to an international team led by Father Roland de Vaux, a member of the Dominican Order in Jerusalem. This group published the first volume of the materials entrusted to them in 1968, but spent much of their energies defending their theories of the material instead of publishing it.

Geza Vermes, who had been involved from the start in the editing and publication of these materials, blamed the delay - and eventual failure - on de Vaux's selection of a team unsuited to the quality of work he had planned, as well as relying "on his personal, quasi-patriarchal authority" to control the completion of the work.

As a result, the finds from Cave 4 were not made public for many years. Access to the scrolls was governed by a "secrecy rule" that allowed only the original International Team or their designates to view the original materials.

After de Vaux's death in 1971, his successors repeatedly refused to even allow the publication of photographs of these materials so that other scholars could at least make their judgments.

This rule was eventually broken: first by the publication in the fall of 1991 of 17 documents reconstructed from a concordance that had been made in 1988 and had come into the hands of scholars outside of the International Team; next, that same month, by the discovery and publication of a complete set of photographs of the Cave 4 materials at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, that were not covered by the "secrecy rule".

After some delays these photographs were published by Robert Eisenman and James Robinson (A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, two volumes, Washington, D.C., 1991). As a result, the "secrecy rule" was lifted, and publication of the Cave 4 documents soon commenced, with five volumes in print by 1995.

Vatican Conspiracy Theory

Allegations that the Vatican suppressed the publication of the scrolls were published in the 1990s. Notably, Michael Baigent's and Richard Leigh's book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception claim that several key scrolls were deliberately kept under wraps for decades to suppress unwelcome theories about the early history of Christianity; in particular, Eisenman's speculation that the life of Jesus was deliberately mythicized by Paul, possibly a Roman agent who faked his "conversion" from Saul in order to undermine the influence of anti-Roman messianic cults in the region.

The complete publication and dissemination of translations and photographic records of the works in the late 1990s and early 2000s - particularly the publication of all of the "biblical" scrolls - has greatly lessened the credibility of their argument among mainstream scholarship. Today most scholars, both secular and religious, feel the documents are distinctly Jewish, rather than Christian. Dr. Trevor himself, in his book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, made the assertion that the scrolls have a deep archeological and historical significance, but asserts that they are the writings of another sect of Jews living out in the desert and nothing more.

Significance

The significance of the scrolls is still somewhat impaired by the uncertainty about their date and origin.

In spite of these limitations, the scrolls have already been quite valuable to text critics. Before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible were Masoretic texts dating to 9th century.

The biblical manuscripts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls push that date back to the 2nd century BC, and until that happened the oldest Greek manuscripts such as Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus were the earliest extant versions of biblical manuscripts.

Although some of the biblical manuscripts found at Qumran differ significantly from the Masoretic text, most do not.

The scrolls thus provide new variants and the ability to be more confident of those readings where the Dead Sea manuscripts agree with the Masoretic text or with the early Greek manuscripts.

Further, the sectarian texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, most of which were previously unknown, offer new light on one form of Judaism practiced in the Second Temple period.

An organism held in such a state (either frozen or vitrified) is said to be cryopreserved. Barring social disruptions, cryonicists believe that a perfectly vitrified person can be expected to remain physically viable for at least 30,000 years, after which time cosmic ray damage is thought to be irreparable. Many scientists in the field, most notably Ralph Merkle and Brian Wowk, hold that molecular nanotechnology has the potential to extend even this limit many times over.

To its detractors, the justification for cryonics is unclear, given the primitive state of preservation technology. Advocates counter that even a slim chance of revival is better than no chance. In the future, they speculate, not only will conventional health services be improved, but they will also quite likely have expanded even to the conquering of old age itself (see links at the bottom). Therefore, if one could preserve one's body (or at least the contents of one's mind) for, say, another hundred years, one might well be resuscitated and live indefinitely long. But critics of the field contend that, while an interesting technical idea, cryonics is currently little more than a pipedream, that current "patients" will never be successfully revived, and that decades of research, at least, must occur before cryonics is to be a legitimate field with any hope of success.

Probably the most famous cryopreserved patient is Ted Williams. The popular urban legend that Walt Disney was cryopreserved is false; he was cremated, and interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery. Robert Heinlein, who wrote enthusiastically of the concept, was cremated and his ashes distributed over the Pacific Ocean. Timothy Leary was a long-time cryonics advocate, and signed up with a major cryonics provider. He changed his mind, however, shortly before his death, and so was not cryopreserved.

A cryopreserved person is sometimes called a corpsicle (a portmanteau of "corpse" and "popsicle"). This term was first used by science fiction author Larry Niven, who credits its formulation to Frederick Pohl.

Obstacles to success

Cryonics has traditionally been dismissed by mainstream cryobiology, of which it is arguably a part. The reason generally given for this dismissal is that the freezing process creates ice crystals, which damage cells and cellular structures - a condition sometimes called "whole body freezer burn" - so as to render any future repair impossible. Cryonicists have long argued, however, that the extent of this damage was greatly exaggerated by the critics, presuming that some reasonable attempt is made to perfuse the body with cryoprotectant chemicals (traditionally glycerol) that inhibit ice crystal formation.

According to cryonicists, however, the freezer burn objection became moot around the turn of the millennium, when cryobiologists Greg Fahy and Brian Wowk, of Twenty-First Century Medicine developed major improvements in cryopreservation technology, including new cryoprotectants and new cryoprotectant solutions, that greatly improved the feasibility of eliminating ice crystal formation entirely, allowing vitrification (preservation in a glassy rather than frozen state). In a glass, the molecules do not rearrange themselves into grainy ice crystals as the solution cools, but instead become locked together while still randomly arranged as in a fluid, forming a "solid liquid" as the temperature falls below the glass transition temperature. Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world's largest cryonics provider, has since been using these cryoprotectants, along with a new, faster cooling method, to vitrify whole human brains. They continue to use the less effective glycerol-based freezing for patients who opt to have their whole bodies preserved, since vitrification of an entire body is beyond current technical capabilities. The only other full-service cryonics provider in the world, the Cryonics Institute, is currently testing its own vitrification solution.

Current solutions being used for vitrification are stable enough to avoid crystallization even when a vitrified brain is warmed up. This has recently allowed brains to be vitrified, warmed back up, and examined for ice damage using light and electron microscopy. No ice crystal damage was found. However, if the circulation of the brain is compromised, protective chemicals may not be able to reach all parts of the brain, and freezing may occur either during cooling or during warming. Cryonicists argue, however, that injury caused during cooling can be repaired before the vitrified brain is warmed back up, and that damage during rewarming can be prevented by adding more cryoprotectant in the solid state, or by improving rewarming methods.

Some critics have speculated that because a cryonics patient has been declared legally dead, their organs are dead, and thus unable to allow cryoprotectants to reach the majority of cells. Cryonicists respond that it has been empirically demonstrated that, so long as the cryopreservation process begins immediately after legal death is declared, the individual organs (and perhaps even the patient as a whole) remain biologically alive, and vitrification (particularly of the brain) is quite feasible.

Revival process

Critics have often quipped that it is easier to revive a corpse than a cryonicaly frozen body. Many cryonicists might actually agree with this, provided that the "corpse" were fresh, but they would argue that such a "corpse" may actually be biologically alive, under optimal conditions. A declaration of legal death does not mean that life has suddenly ended - death is a gradual process, not a sudden event. Rather, legal death is a declaration by medical personnel that there is nothing more they can do to save the patient. But if the body is clearly biologically dead, having been sitting at room temperature for a period of time, or having been traditionally embalmed, then cryonicists would hold that such a body is far less revivable than a cryonicay preserved patient, since any process of resuscitation will depend on the quality of the structural and molecular preservation of the brain, which is largely destroyed by ischemic damage (from lack of blood flow) within minutes or hours of cardiac arrest, if the body is left to sit at room temperature. Traditional embalming also largely destroys this crucial neurological structure.

Cryonicists would also point out that the definitions of "death" and "corpse" currently in use may change with future medical advances, just as they have changed in the past, and so they generally reject the idea that they are trying to "raise the dead," viewing their procedures instead as highly experimental medical procedures, whose efficacy is yet to be either demonstrated or refuted. Some also suggest that if technology is developed that allows mind transfer, revival of the frozen brain might not even be required; the mind of the patient could instead be "uploaded" into an entirely new substrate. The current state of neuro-electrical technology does provide limited control of a computer through neuro-electrical stimulus.

Financial issues

The biggest drawback to current vitrification practice is a costs issue. Alcor is currently developing such a storage system. Alcor believes, however, that even before such a storage system is developed, the current vitrification method is far superior to traditional glycerol-based freezing, since the fractures are very clean breaks that occur even with traditional glycerol cryoprotection, and the loss of neurological structure is still less than that caused by ice formation, by orders of magnitude.

While cryopreservation arrangements can be expensive (currently ranging from $28,000 to $150,000), most cryonicists pay for it with life insurance. The elderly, and others who may be uninsurable for health reasons, will often pay for the procedure through their estate. Others simply invest their money over a period of years, accepting the risk that they might die in the meantime. All in all, cryonics is actually quite affordable for the vast majority of those in the industrialized world who really want it, especially if they make arrangements while still young.

Even assuming perfect cryopreservation techniques, many cryonicists would still regard eventual revival as a long shot. In addition to the many technical hurdles that remain, the likelihood of obtaining a good cryopreservation is not very high because of logistical problems. The likelihood of the continuity of cryonics organizations as businesses, and the threat of legislative interference in the practice, don't help the odds either. Most cryonicists, therefore, regard their cryopreservation arrangements as a kind of medical insurance - not certain to keep them alive, but better than no chance at all and still a rational gamble to take.

Brain vs. whole-body cryopreservation

During the 1980s, the problems associated with crystallization were becoming better appreciated, and the emphasis shifted from whole body to brain-only or "neuropreservation", on the assumption that the rest of the body could be regrown, perhaps by cloning of the person's DNA or by using embryonic stem cell technology. The main goal now seems to be to preserve the information contained in the structure of the brain, on which memory and personal identity depends.

Available scientific and medical evidence suggests that the mechanical structure of the brain is wholly responsible for personal identity and memories (for instance, spinal cord injury victims, organ transplant patients, and amputees appear to retain their personal identity and memories). Damage caused by freezing and fracturing is thought to be potentially repairable in the future, using nanotechnology, which will enable the manipulation of matter at the molecular level.

To critics, this appears a kind of futuristic deus ex machina, but while the engineering details remain speculative, the rapidity of scientific advances over the past century, and more recently in the field of nanotechnology itself, suggest to some that there may be no insurmountable problems. And the cryopreserved patient can wait a long time. With the advent of vitrification, the importance of nanotechnology to the cryonics movement may begin to decrease.

Some critics, and even some cryonicists, question this emphasis on the brain, arguing that during neuropreservation some information about the body's phenotype will be lost and the new body may feel "unwanted," and that in case of brain damage the body may serve as a crude backup, helping restore indirectly some of the memories. Partly for this reason, the Cryonics Institute preserves only whole bodies. Some proponents of neuropreservation agree with these concerns, but still feel that lower costs and better brain preservation justify preserving only the brain.

History

Historically, cryonics began in 1962 with the publication of The Prospect of Immortality by Robert Ettinger. In the 1970s, the damage caused by crystallization was not well understood. Two early organizations went bankrupt, allowing their patients to thaw out, bringing the matter to the public eye, at which point the problem with cellular damage became more well known and the practice gained something of the reputation of a scam. During the 1980s, the extent of the damage from the freezing process became much clearer and better known, and the emphasis of the movement began to shift from whole-body to neuropreservation.

Alcor currently preserves about 60 human bodies and heads in Scottsdale, Arizona. Before the company moved to Arizona from Riverside, California in 1994, it was the center of several controversies, including a county coroner's ruling that a client was murdered with barbiturates by the company's staff, prior to her neuropreservation. Alcor contended that the drug was administered after her death. No charges were ever filed.

To me channeling, dialoging, or talking to an ascended master is the "switchboard effect" - you plug your consciousness into the grid connected to a specific entity and information unspools into your brain. It never made sense to me, but people seeking higher consciousness love it. Blavatsky was not the most balanced person on the planet, so her teachings need to be left behind now. Besides we have moved beyond the switchboard and are 4G - social networking. It's all changing now. Wait for it.

Theosophy and Brotherhoods





In Theosophy ascended masters are a group of spiritually enlightened beings, once mere mortals, who have undergone a process of spiritual transformation. According to these teachings, they remain attentive to the spiritual needs of humanity, and act as superintendents of its spiritual growth. In this, they can be compared to the Great White Brotherhood or Secret Chiefs who are posited by various magical organizations; and more remotely, to the bodhisattvas of Buddhism, or the saints of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.

The term may actually have originated with Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who in his satirical book The Coming Race posited the existence of "Nine Unknown Men" who secretly run things in the world.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky founder of the Theosophical Society, was a huge Bulwer-Lytton fan and may have decided he was presenting true facts, disguised as fiction. Or she may have gotten the concept of the Masters from her correspondence with the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, a mystic lodge which offered a correspondence course in esoteric doctrine.

Blavatsky brought attention to the existence of ascended spiritual leaders through her activities which included channelling messages from beings she called "Mahatmas", especially her spirit guide Kuthumi.

From these beginnings, her successors in the Theosophical Society leadership, Annie Besant and especially Charles W. Leadbeater, developed the mythology of Ascended Masters, and fleshed out many of their alleged biographies and past lives. Leadbeater's 1925 book, The Masters and the Path,marked the crystalization of the lore that had accumulated around the concept of Ascended Masters into a published, public form.

Belief in ascended masters is also found among the followers of the I AM movement, the Temple of the Presence, and Elizabeth Clare Prophet's Church Universal and Triumphant. The occult organization, Servants of the Light, claim to have contact with an ascended master. Many New Age channelers routinely talk about the Masters, taking it as given that they exist.

The Great White Brotherhood

In some versions of the doctrine, the ascended masters, as a collegiate body, are the "Great White Brotherhood," white referring to advanced spirituality rather than race - very much like "Gandalf the White" after his victory over the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings. In fact, most early reports of the masters described them as racially Tibetan or Hindi, not Anglo. Belief in the Brotherhood and the masters is an essential part of the syncretistic teachings of these several groups. Various important spiritual leaders such as Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, the Virgin Mary, and Kuan Yin the compassionate bodhisattva, take their seats alongside magical or alchemical personalities like the Count of St. Germain, and other mystic celebrities like Kuthumi, one of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky's claimed spiritual guides - all of these leaders have put aside any differences they might have had in their Earthly careers, and unite instead to improve the spiritual well-being of the human race.

Reincarnation

Reincarnation is a notable feature of some groups' teachings about the ascended masters. For example, according to the Summit Lighthouse the ascended master Kuthumi was also reincarnate as a number of historically important people, including Pharaoh Thutmose III, the philosopher Pythagoras, Saint Francis of Assisi, Balthasar the Magus, and Shah Jahan. Several of the other ascended masters are said to have had equally distinguished careers in reincarnation.

Ascension Bloodlines

One of the most interesting beliefs about ascension is the notion of "ascension bloodlines". According to the Gnostic tradition, ascension is said to happen only after several dedicated lifetimes that directly support the ascension process. If an individual ascends leaving daughters, the daughters supposedly become able to reproduce at will rather than going through the process of sex. The ascension process is said to transmit forward along the genetic line for seven generations, giving the females the ability to give birth through immaculate conception to offspring who will ascend. The priest class in various cultures were said to guard these bloodlines in order to ensure that all descendants would ascend. This belief is based on the many accounts in mythology and spiritual history of individuals born of virgin mothers (Jesus, Mithra, etc.) who then accomplish extraordinary social changes, preceding their ascension.

Beliefs and Disbeliefs Throughout History

The topic of ascension and ascended masters is one that probably will continue to spark controversy and disbelief, and can be a difficult subject to comprehend even for those who have spent years studying esoteric doctrines. Having been playfully described as something like getting "beamed up", as in the television series Star Trek, the idea of ascension has not reached widespread acceptance. Some relegate the subject matter to the realm of New Age myth and fantasy, while others maintain the process of ascension is as natural as human evolution.

Historically, for the past two thousand years, the concept of ascension seemed so outrageous and confrontational, especially within traditional, western, orthodox religious belief systems, that many people dismissed the idea immediately or have a very strong adverse reaction to it. The idea that all humans could conceivably do what Christ supposedly did is seen by many religious persons as presumptuous, if not blasphemous.

In the 21st century, the notion of ascension seems to attract individuals more interested in eastern religions, spirituality, metaphysics, or those simply looking for a deeper meaning to their existing beliefs and experiences.

One difficulty in discussing the idea of an ascended master is that there is no universally-accepted, definitive, scientific text which describes what the conditions are to become such a person, or how to verify the conditions. Even in the 21st century, most public sources, even books directly dealing with the topic, tend to describe various ascended masters, their activities, meetings with such people, etc., without giving us the requisite understanding of how we ourselves could undergo the process of ascension firsthand. With only anecdotal reports and no actual "how-to" manual, we are then left struggling with how to either retrofit this concept into our existing beliefs, how to shift our beliefs entirely, or simply reject the system altogether. Texts that claim to give a deeper understanding of ascension, including practical exercises, meditations, diet, etc., are often dismissed by mainstream audiences.

Beginning in the 1930s, a few books were published on this subject, the authors claiming to have had contact with Masters who encouraged the more pragmatic aspects of the Ascension process to be known. Prior to that, the practical knowledge is claimed to have been held in strict secrecy within Mystery schools, allegedly due to the pressures and intolerance of orthodox religious authorities. Even among many who believe themselves to be spiritual adepts or initiates, the concept of ascension has not been widely accepted or understood because of the radical nature of transformation that has been ascribed to it.

Books which purport to detail the developmental process Jesus went through in finding his own Inner Christ Self include The Urantia Book, published in 1955, and A Course In Miracles, allegedly dictated by Christ Himself and published in 1976.

Examples of Ascended Masters

The history of ascension predates Christianity, indeed extending back for thousands of years, yet the story of Jesus is one of the most widely known stories of ascension. In the Bible when Mary Magdalene wants to reach out and touch Christ at the tomb, he says, "Touch me not, for I have not yet ascended to my Father." This has led to the idea that the ascension process is apparently so delicate that even the touch of an ordinary human, who still holds the concepts of limitation and separation, is enough to hold the ascension process back.

It is generally thought that one does not have to die in order to ascend, but the fact that Jesus was said to have died, then resurrected, then ascended, has led some people to believe that this must be the case for everyone. This takes to Ancient Alien Theory wherein Jesus was an alien which makes sense based on his conception, life, and ascension. None of us are from here. We are all hybrids here to experience emotions in linear time. It's all an illusion and we are simulations in a hologram that is ending. No one is returning. We are all leaving.

Other allegedly ascended masters:

St. Germain a mysterious individual reputed to be a "magician" who flourished in France and was widely known among the aristocracy just before the revolution of 1789, was already an ascended master, which is believed to explain his reputed magical powers. Secret societies were the fashion in pre-revolutionary France, and some of them recognized Saint-Germain as an 'adept' one who knew the ancient wisdoms hinted at in the rites of the Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Knights Templars.

Kuthumi, is regarded as one of the "Masters of the Ancient Wisdom."

Djwhal Khul, is a Tibetan Master of the ancient esoteric religion. He is a member of the 'Brotherhood' of Mahatmas, who are the spiritual guides of mankind and the guardians of ancient cosmological and metaphysical teachings.

Morya, said to have been a Rajput prince, also incarnated as King Arthur and as Thomas More. Theosophists believe he was one of the masters who worked closely with Helena Blavatsky to found the original Theosophical Society.

According to traditional Chinese medicine, stimulating specific acupuncture points corrects imbalances in the flow of qi through channels known as meridians. Scientific investigation has not found any histological or physiological correlates for traditional Chinese concepts such as qi, meridians, and acupuncture points, and some contemporary practitioners use acupuncture without following the traditional Chinese approach.

Research suggests that traditional forms of acupuncture are more effective than placebos in the relief of certain types of pain and post-operative nausea. Recent systematic reviews found that acupuncture also seems to be a promising treatment option for anxiety, sleep disturbances, and depression, but that further research is needed in these regards. Although minimally invasive, the puncturing of the skin with acupuncture needles poses problems when designing trials that adequately controls for placebo effects. A number of studies comparing traditional acupuncture to sham procedures found that both sham and traditional acupuncture were superior to usual care but were themselves equivalent; findings apparently at odds with traditional Chinese theories regarding acupuncture point specificity.

Acupuncture's use for certain conditions has been endorsed by the United States National Institutes of Health, the National Health Service of the United Kingdom, the World Health Organization, and the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Some scientists have criticized these endorsements as being unduly credulous and not including objections to or criticisms of the research used to support acupuncture's effectiveness. There is general agreement that acupuncture is relatively safe when administered by qualified practitioners using sterile needles and carries a very low risk of serious adverse effects.

The general theory of acupuncture is based on the premise that bodily functions are regulated by an energy called qi which flows through the body; disruptions of this flow are believed to be responsible for disease. Acupuncture describes a family of procedures aiming to correct imbalances in the flow of qi by stimulation of anatomical locations on or under the skin (usually called acupuncture points or acupoints), by a variety of techniques. The most common mechanism of stimulation of acupuncture points employs penetration of the skin by thin metal needles, which are manipulated manually or by electrical stimulation.







Acupuncture needles are typically made of stainless steel wire. They are usually disposable, but reusable needles are sometimes used as well, though they must be sterilized between uses.

Needles vary in length between 13 to 130 millimetres (0.51 to 5.1 in), with shorter needles used near the face and eyes, and longer needles in more fleshy areas; needle diameters vary from 0.16 mm (0.006 in) to 0.46 mm (0.018 in), with thicker needles used on more robust patients. Thinner needles may be flexible and require tubes for insertion. The tip of the needle should not be made too sharp to prevent breakage, although blunt needles cause more pain.

Apart from the usual filiform needle, there are also other needle types which can be utilized, such as three-edged needles and the Nine Ancient Needles. Japanese acupuncturists use extremely thin needles that are used superficially, sometimes without penetrating the skin, and surrounded by a guide tube (a technique adopted in China and the West). Korean acupuncture uses copper needles and has a greater focus on the hand.

History

Antiquity:



Acupuncture chart from the Ming Dynasty(c. 1368-1644)

The precise start date of acupuncture's invention in ancient China and how it evolved from early times are uncertain. One explanation is that Han Chinese doctors observed that some soldiers wounded in battle by arrows were believed to have been cured of chronic afflictions that were otherwise untreated, and there are variations on this idea. Sharpened stones known as Bian shi have been found in China, suggesting the practice may date to the Neolithic or possibly even earlier in the Stone Age. Hieroglyphs and pictographs have been found dating from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BCE) which suggests that acupuncture was practiced along with moxibustion. It has also been suggested that acupuncture has its origins in bloodletting or demonology.

Despite improvements in metallurgy over centuries, it was not until the 2nd century BCE during the Han Dynasty that stone and bone needles were replaced with metal. The earliest examples of metal needles were found in a tomb dated to c. 113 BCE, though their use might not necessarily have been acupuncture. The earliest example of the unseen meridians used for diagnosis and treatment are dated to the second century BCE but these records do not mention needling, while the earliest reference to therapeutic needling occurs in the historical Shiji text but does not mention the meridians and may be a reference to lancing rather than acupuncture.

The earliest written record of acupuncture is found in the Huangdi Neijing translated as The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon), dated approximately 200 BCE. It does not distinguish between acupuncture and moxibustion and gives the same indication for both treatments. The Mawangdui texts, which also date from the 2nd century BCE (though antedating both the Shiji and Huangdi Neijing), mention the use of pointed stones to open abscesses, and moxibustion, but not acupuncture. However, by the 2nd century BCE, acupuncture replaced moxibustion as the primary treatment of systemic conditions.

The practice of acupuncture expanded out of China into the areas now part of Japan, Korea, Vietnam and Taiwan, diverging from the narrower theory and practice of mainland TCM in the process. A large number of contemporary practitioners outside of China follow these non-TCM practices, particularly in Europe.

In Europe, examinations of the 5,000-year-old mummified body of Otzi the Iceman have identified 15 groups of tattoos on his body, some of which are located on what are now seen as contemporary acupuncture points. This has been cited as evidence that practices similar to acupuncture may have been practiced elsewhere in Eurasia during the early Bronze Age.

Middle history:



Korea is believed to be the second country that acupuncture spread to outside of China. Within Korea there is a legend that acupuncture was developed by the legendary emperor Dangun though it is more likely to have been brought into Korea from a Chinese colonial prefecture.

Around 90 works on acupuncture were written in China between the Han Dynasty and the Song Dynasty, and the Emperor Renzong of Song, in 1023, ordered the production of a bronze statuette depicting the meridians and acupuncture points then in use. However, after the end of the Song Dynasty, acupuncture lost status, and started to be seen as a technical profession, in comparison to the more scholarly profession of herbalism. It became rarer in the following centuries, and was associated with less prestigious practices like alchemy, shamanism, midwifery and moxibustion.

Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century were among the first to bring reports of acupuncture to the West. Jacob de Bondt, a Dutch surgeon traveling in Asia, described the practice in both Japan and Java. However, in China itself the practice was increasingly associated with the lower-classes and illiterate practitioners.

In 1674, Hermann Buschoff, a Dutch priest in Batavia, published the first book on moxibustion (from Japanese mogusa) for the cure of arthritis. The first elaborate Western treatise on acupuncture was published in 1683 by Willem ten Rhijne, a Dutch physician who had worked at the Dutch trading post Dejima in Nagasaki for two years.

In 1757 the physician Xu Daqun described the further decline of acupuncture, saying it was a lost art, with few experts to instruct; its decline was attributed in part to the popularity of prescriptions and medications, as well as its association with the lower classes.

In 1822, an edict from the Chinese Emperor banned the practice and teaching of acupuncture within the Imperial Academy of Medicine outright, as unfit for practice by gentlemen-scholars. At this point, acupuncture was still cited in Europe with both skepticism and praise, with little study and only a small amount of experimentation.

Modern era:



In the early years after the Chinese Civil War, Chinese Communist Party leaders ridiculed traditional Chinese medicine, including acupuncture, as superstitious, irrational and backward, claiming that it conflicted with the Party's dedication to science as the way of progress. Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong later reversed this position, saying that "Chinese medicine and pharmacology are a great treasure house and efforts should be made to explore them and raise them to a higher level."

Under Mao's leadership, in response to the lack of modern medical practitioners, acupuncture was revived and its theory rewritten to adhere to the political, economic and logistic necessities of providing for the medical needs of China's population. Despite Mao proclaiming the practice of Chinese medicine to be "scientific", the practice was based more on the materialist assumptions of Marxism in opposition to superstition rather than the Western practice of empirical investigation of nature.

Later the 1950s TCM's theory was again rewritten at Mao's insistence as a political response to the lack of unity between scientific and traditional Chinese medicine, and to correct the supposed "bourgeois thought of Western doctors of medicine" (p. 109).

Acupuncture gained attention in the United States when President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972. During one part of the visit, the delegation was shown a patient undergoing major surgery while fully awake, ostensibly receiving acupuncture rather than anesthesia. Later it was found that the patients selected for the surgery had both a high pain tolerance and received heavy indoctrination before the operation; these demonstration cases were also frequently receiving morphine surreptitiously through an intravenous drip that observers were told contained only fluids and nutrients.

The greatest exposure in the West came after New York Times reporter James Reston received acupuncture in Beijing for post-operative pain in 1971 and wrote complaisantly about it in his newspaper.

Also in 1972 the first legal acupuncture center in the U.S. was established in Washington DC; during 1973-1974, this center saw up to one thousand patients.

In 1973 the American Internal Revenue Service allowed acupuncture to be deducted as a medical expense.

Acupuncture has been the subject of active scientific research both in regard to its basis and therapeutic effectiveness since the late 20th century, but it remains controversial among medical researchers and clinicians.

In 2006, a BBC documentary Alternative Medicine filmed a patient undergoing open heart surgery allegedly under acupuncture-induced anesthesia. It was later revealed that the patient had been given a cocktail of weak anesthetics that in combination could have a much more powerful effect. The program was also criticized for its fanciful interpretation of the results of a brain scanning experiment.

The use of acupuncture as anesthesia for surgery has fallen out of favor with scientifically trained surgeons in China. A delegation of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry reported in 1995: We were not shown acupuncture anesthesia for surgery, this apparently having fallen out of favor with scientifically trained surgeons. Dr. Han, for instance, had been emphatic that he and his colleagues see acupuncture only as an analgesic (pain reducer), not an anesthetic (an agent that blocks all conscious sensations).

On November 16, 2010, acupuncture was recognized by UNESCO as part of the world's intangible cultural heritage.

Despite considerable efforts to understand the anatomy and physiology of the "acupuncture points", the definition and characterization of these points remains controversial. Even more elusive is the basis of some of the key traditional Eastern medical concepts such as the circulation of qi, the meridian system, and the five phases theory, which are difficult to reconcile with contemporary biomedical information but continue to play an important role in the evaluation of patients and the formulation of treatment in acupuncture.

Qi, yin, yang and meridians have no counterpart in modern studies of chemistry, biology, physics, or human physiology and to date scientists have been unable to find evidence that supports their existence. Similarly, no research has established any consistent anatomical structure or function for either acupuncture points or meridians. Especially the nervous system has been evaluated for a relationship to acupuncture points, but no structures have been clearly linked to them. Controversial studies using nuclear imaging have suggested that tracers may be used to follow meridians and are not related to veins or lymphatic tissues, but the interpretation of these results is unclear. The electrical resistance of acupuncture points and meridians have also been studied, with conflicting results. In general, research on the electrical activity of acupuncture points lacks a standardized methodology and reporting protocols, and is of poor quality.

It is difficult to design research trials for acupuncture. Due to acupuncture's invasive nature, one of the major challenges in efficacy research is in the design of an appropriate placebo control group. The most commonly proposed placebo control has been "sham acupuncture" to control for different aspects of traditional acupuncture. This includes needling sites not traditionally indicated for treatment of a specific condition to control for the effectiveness of traditional acupuncture for specific conditions and/or needling performed superficially or using retracting needles or non-needles (including toothpicks) to control for needle penetration and stimulation.

A 2010 systematic review also suggested that acupuncture is more than a placebo for commonly occurring chronic pain conditions, but the authors acknowledged that it is still unknown if the overall benefit is clinically meaningful or cost-effective.

A 2012 meta-analysis found significant differences between true and sham acupuncture, which indicates that acupuncture is more than a placebo when treating chronic pain (even though the differences were modest).

In recent years, several Western countries have seen a sharp increase in the number of people using acupuncture to treat common ailments:

In Australia, a 2005 national survey revealed that nearly 1 in 10 adults have used acupuncture in the previous year.
In the United States, less than one percent of the total population reported having used acupuncture in the early 1990s.

In 2002, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine revealed that 2.1 million adults have used acupuncture in the previous 12 months.

By the early 2010s, over 14 million Americans reported having used acupuncture as part of their health care. Each year, around 10 million acupuncture treatments are administered in the United States.

In the United Kingdom, a total of 4 million acupuncture treatments were administered in 2009.

According to several public health insurance organizations, women comprise over two-thirds of all acupuncture users in Germany. After the results of the German Acupuncture Trials were published in 2007, the number of regular users of acupuncture jumped by 20%, surpassing one million in 2011.

International Organizations

In 2003 the World Health Organization's Department of Essential Drugs and Medicine Policy produced a report on acupuncture. The report was drafted, revised and updated by Zhu-Fan Xie, the Director for the Institute of Integrated Medicines of Beijing Medical University. It contained, based on research results available in early 1999, a list of diseases, symptoms or conditions for which it was believed acupuncture had been demonstrated as an effective treatment, as well as a second list of conditions that were possibly able to be treated with acupuncture. Noting the difficulties of conducting controlled research and the debate on how to best conduct research on acupuncture, the report described itself as "...intended to facilitate research on and the evaluation and application of acupuncture. It is hoped that it will provide a useful resource for researchers, health care providers, national health authorities and the general public."

The coordinator for the team that produced the report, Xiaorui Zhang, stated that the report was designed to facilitate research on acupuncture, not recommend treatment for specific diseases.The report was controversial; critics assailed it as being problematic since, in spite of the disclaimer, supporters used it to claim that the WHO endorsed acupuncture and other alternative medicine practices that were either pseudoscientific or lacking sufficient evidence-basis.

Medical scientists expressed concern that the evidence supporting acupuncture outlined in the report was weak, and Willem Betz of SKEPP (Studie Kring voor Kritische Evaluatie van Pseudowetenschap en het Paranormale, the Study Circle for the Critical Evaluation of Pseudoscience and the Paranormal) said that the report was evidence that the "WHO has been infiltrated by missionaries for alternative medicine". The WHO 2005 report was also criticized in the 2008 book Trick or Treatment for, in addition to being produced by a panel that included no critics of acupuncture at all, containing two major errors - including too many results from low-quality clinical trials, and including a large number of trials originating in China where, probably due to publication bias, no negative trials have ever been produced.

In contrast, studies originating in the West include a mixture of positive, negative and neutral results. Ernst and Singh, the authors of the book, described the report as "highly misleading", a "shoddy piece of work that was never rigorously scrutinized" and stated that the results of high-quality clinical trials do not support the use of acupuncture to treat anything but pain and nausea. Ernst also described the statement in a 2006 peer reviewed article as "Perhaps the most obviously over-optimistic overview of acupuncture", noting that of the 35 conditions that the WHO stated acupuncture was effective for, 27 of the systematic reviews that the WHO report was based on found that acupuncture was not effective for treating the specified condition.

On November 16, 2010, acupuncture and moxibustion were recognized by UNESCO as part of the world's intangible cultural heritage.

Fertility and Childbirth

Proponents believe acupuncture can assist with fertility, pregnancy and childbirth, attributing various conditions of health and difficulty with the flow of qi through various meridians.

A 2008 Cochrane review of randomized controlled trials of in vitro fertilization and acupuncture suggests that acupuncture performed on the day the embryo is transferred to the uterus may increase the live birth rate, although this effect could be due to the placebo effect and the small number of women included in acceptable trials. There was no evidence of benefit when the egg was initially removed and the review did not recommend the routine use of acupuncture during the luteal phase until better trials were available.

A different review article published in 2010 found that there was no evidence acupuncture improved pregnancy rates irrespective of when it was performed and recommended against its use during in vitro fertilization either during egg retrieval or implantation.

1st Book of Enoch, or simply the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal book in the Ethiopic Bible that is usually dated between the third century BC and the first century AD. It was discovered in Abyssinia in 1773 by a Scottish explorer named James Bruce. In 1821 The Book of Enoch was translated by Richard Laurence and published in a number of successive editions, culminating in the 1883 edition.

Enoch acts as a scribe, writing up a petition on behalf of the fallen angels, or fallen ones, to be given to a higher power for ultimate judgment.

Christianity adopted some ideas from Enoch, including the Final Judgment, the concept of demons, the origins of evil and the fallen angels, and the coming of a Messiah and ultimately, a Messianic kingdom.

The Book of Enoch was removed from the Bible and banned by the early church. Copies of it were found to have survived in Ethiopia, and fragments in Greece and Italy.

These recount how Enoch is taken up to Heaven and is appointed guardian of all the celestial treasures, chief of the archangels, and the immediate attendant on God's throne. He is subsequently taught all secrets and mysteries and, with all the angels at his back, fulfils of his own accord whatever comes out of the mouth of God, executing His decrees. Enoch was also seen as the inventor of writing, and teacher of astronomy and arithmetic, all three reflecting the interpretation of his name as meaning initiated.

Much esoteric literature like the 3rd Book of Enoch identifies Enoch as the Metatron, the angel which communicates God's word. In consequence, Enoch was seen, by this literature, and the ancient kabbala of Jewish mysticism, as having been the one which communicated God's revelation to Moses, in particular, the dictator of the Book of Jubilees.

The First Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish religious work, traditionally ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. It is not part of the biblical canon as used by Jews, apart from Beta Israel. It is regarded as canonical by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Eritrean Orthodox Church, but no other Christian group.

The Book of Enoch almost made it into the Bible but was then rejected as "apocryphal", even though Enoch and the book itself are mentioned and referred to several times in the Bible. The only people who accept the book as an official part of their holy scriptures are Ethiopian Jews and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and a few more obscure religious groups around the world. Official sources say the book was written 300 B.C. but since it is ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah, some speculate that it was written before the great flood.

Western scholars believe that its older sections (mainly in the Book of the Watchers) date from about 300 BC, and the latest part (Book of Parables) probably was composed at the end of the 1st century BC.

It is wholly extant only in the Ge'ez language, with Aramaic fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls and a few Greek and Latin fragments. There is no consensus among scholars about the original language: some propose Aramaic, others Hebrew, while the probable thesis, according to E. Isaac, is that 1 Enoch, like Daniel, was composed partially in Aramaic and partially in Hebrew.

Ethiopian scholars generally hold that Ge'ez is the language of the original from which the Greek and Aramaic copies were made, pointing out that it is the only language in which the complete text has yet been found.

A short section of 1 Enoch (1 En 1:9) is quoted in the New Testament (Letter of Jude 1:14-15), and is there attributed to "Enoch the Seventh from Adam" (1 En 60:. It is argued that all the writers of the New Testament were familiar with it and were influenced by it in thought and diction.

The Book of Enoch answers several mysteries. The age old question "why didnt the Gods leave evidence of their stay" is answered by the very policy of non-interference. The question of why certain knowledge is kept secret is answered by the "so that you can discover it out of your own power".

The book also somewhat confirms legends and tales of an advanced people that existed before a great flood that were destroyed because things went bad. Of course, the entire tale is indirectly confirmed by other ancient sources...Sumeran, Chinese and Pre-Columbian to name a few.

The first part of the Book of Enoch describes the fall of the Watchers, the angels who fathered the Nephilim. The remainder of the book describes Enoch's visits to heaven in the form of travels, visions and dreams, and his revelations.

The book consists of five quite distinct major sections:

The Book of the Watchers (1 Enoch 1 - 36):

The first part of the book is about "The Watchers", a group of "angel"s sent to earth to watch over humans. 200 of those angels committed transgression by having sex with humans, creating a hybrid race called the Nephilim. Of the Nephilim it is said that they were giants and savages that endangered and pillaged humanity.

It is said that the "Watchers" taught humans reading, writing, weaponry, cosmetics, sorcery, about the stars, meteorology, and many other arts and that this was problematic because it robbed humans the opportunity to discover the arts by themselves. They "revealed the eternal secrets which were preserved for heaven, which men were striving to learn." the book says.

"The Gods" were not pleased about the intervention of "The Watchers" in human affairs. (The same story of interventionists vs. non-interventionists is told in Greek Mythology, Sumerian Mythology as well as various Asian myths about the old days of mankind). Apparently there were also experiments in cross-breeding between animals and humans going on.

"And they became pregnant, and they bare great giants, whose height was three thousand ells: Who consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood."

And then Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel looked down from heaven and saw much blood being shed upon the earth, and all lawlessness being wrought upon the earth. And they have gone to the daughters of men upon the earth, and have slept with the women, and have defiled themselves, and revealed to them all kinds of sins. And the women have borne giants, and the whole earth has thereby been filled with blood and unrighteousness.

Disgusted by all this, "the Gods" decided to have a Great Flood to rid the earth of the Nephilim and other ghastly creatures (according to the Book of Enoch. The Bible says that the Nephilim are bound "in the valleys of earth" - beneath the earth?- until Judgement day).

Then said the Most High, the Holy and Great One spoke, and sent Uriel to the son of Lamech, and said to him: Go to Noah and tell him in my name "Hide thyself!" and reveal to him the end that is approaching: that the whole earth will be destroyed, and a deluge is about to come upon the whole earth, and will destroy all that is on it. And now instruct him that he may escape and his seed may be preserved for all the generations of the world."

Another book in which the angels, sent by God, are referred to as "The Watchers" is the pseudepigraphic "Book of Jubilees", the biblical book of Daniel and throughout ancient Jewish legend and folklore. In the Book of Enoch "The Watchers" only became fallen angels after mating with humans and teaching them forbidden and secret knowledge which they, according to Enoch, were not ready for.

In Genesis we read the following about the Nephilim:

When men began to multiply on earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw how beautiful the daughters of man were, and so they took for their wives as many of them as they chose. Then the Lord said: "My spirit shall not remain in man forever, since he is but flesh. His days shall comprise one hundred and twenty years." At that time the Nephilim appeared on earth, after the sons of God had intercourse with the daughters of man, who bore them sons. They were the heroes of old, the men of renown. (Genesis 6:1-4)

The relevance of the first Book of Enoch was recently strengthened when, among the Dead Sea Scrolls the "Book of Giants" was found, dated to 200 B.C. and talking about a time before the great worldwide flood when giants and dragons fought each other. Some of the names mentioned in "The Book of Giants" are also mentioned in the Talmud.

So in summary a group of angels were sent to earth as watchers. Since they had sex with humans we must assume that they had bodies, that they were present in physical form. Possibly the "higher ups" were non-physical or celestial or ultraterrestrial whereas the "Watchers" were what we would call humanoids, extraterrestrials.A part of those angels became "fallen angels" because they intermixed with humans, intervened in their affairs and taught them things they were supposed to learn by themselves.

As a result of the sins a race of savage cannibalistic beasts that ate flesh and drank blood arose and turned paradise into a nightmarish place. Whoever had created earth decided to have it destroyed with a Giant Flood which only a few species should survive. Some beings fled or were locked into the "Underworld" which would either be hell on the astral-planes or dwellings below the surface of the earth or both. Apparently humankind are like children that need to be watched over by "The Watchers" but without too much intervention because it would stifle their maturity. Today, many thousands of years later, the non-intervention policy is apparently still ongoing (this time more successfully) with a few ocassion all interferences happening.

Book of Parables of Enoch (1 Enoch 37 - 71) (Also called the Similitudes of Enoch)

The Book of Parables appears to be based on the Book of Watchers, but presents a later development of the idea of final judgement and eschatology, concerned not only with the destiny of the fallen angels but also of the evil kings of the earth. The Book of Parables uses the expression "Son of Man" for the eschatological protagonist, who is also called Righteous One, Chosen One, and Messiah, and narrates his pre-existence and his sitting on the throne of glory in the final judgment.

Astronomical Book (1 Enoch 72 - 82) (Also called the Book of the Heavenly Luminaries or Book of Luminaries)

Four fragmentary editions of the Astronomical Book were found at Qumran, 4Q208-211. 4Q208 and 4Q209 have been dated to the beginning of the 2nd century BC, providing a terminus ante quem for the Astronomical Book of the 3rd century BC, if not earlier. The fragments found in Qumran also include material not contained in the later versions of the Book of Enoch.

This book contains descriptions of the movement of heavenly bodies and of the firmament, as a knowledge revealed to Enoch in his trips to Heaven guided by Uriel, and it describes a Solar calendar that was later described also in the Book of Jubilees which was used by the Dead Sea sect. The use of this calendar made it impossible to celebrate the festivals simultaneously with the Temple of Jerusalem.

The year was composed from 364 days, divided in 4 equal seasons of 91 days each. Each season was composed of three equal months of 30 days, plus an extra day at the end of the third month. The whole year was thus composed of exactly 52 weeks, and every calendar day occurred always on the same day of the week. Each year and each season started always on Wednesday, which was the fourth day of the creation narrated in Genesis, the day when the lights in the sky, the seasons, the days and the years were created. It is not known how they used to reconcile this calendar with the tropical year of 365.24 days (at least seven suggestions have been made), and it is not even sure if they felt the need to adjust it.

Book of Dream Visions (1 Enoch 83 - 90) (Also called the Book of Dreams)

Book of Dream Visions, containing a vision of a history of Israel all the way down to what the majority have interpreted as the Maccabean Revolt, is dated by most to Maccabean times (about 163-142 BC). According to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church it was written before the Flood.

The Epistle of Enoch (1 Enoch 91 - 10

2nd Book of Enoch, (usually abbreviated 2 Enoch, and otherwise variously known as Slavonic Enoch or The Secrets of Enoch) is a pseudepigraphic (a text whose claimed authorship is unfounded) of the Old Testament. It is usually considered to be part of the Apocalyptic literature. Late 1st century CE is the dating often preferred. The text has been preserved in full only in Slavonic, but in 2009 it was announced that Coptic fragments of the book had been identified. Greek is indicated as the language behind the Slavonic version. It is not regarded as scripture by Jews or any Christian group. It was rediscovered and published at the end of 19th century.

Most scholars consider 2 Enoch to be composed by an unknown Jewish sectarian group, while some authors think it is a 1st century Christian text.[2][3] A very few scholars consider it a later Christian work.[4] This article discusses 2 Enoch. It is distinct from the Book of Enoch, known as 1 Enoch. There is also an unrelated 3 Enoch. The numbering of these texts has been applied by scholars to distinguish the texts from one another.

3rd Book of Enoch, a Kabbalistic Rabbinic text in Hebrew usually dated to the fifth century AD.

3 Enoch is an Old Testament Apocryphal book. 3 Enoch purports to have been written in the 2nd century CE, but its origins can only be traced to the 5th century. Other names for 3 Enoch include "The Third Book of Enoch", "The Book of the Palaces", "The Book of Rabbi Ishmael the High Priest" and "The Revelation of Metatron".

Modern scholars describe this book as pseudepigraphal, as it says it is written by Rabbi Ishmael who became a 'high priest' after visions of ascension to Heaven, 90 AD - 135 AD. Rabbi Ishmael is a leading figure of Merkabah literature.

The name Sefer Hekhalot (Hekhalot meaning Palaces/Temples), along with its proposed author, places this book as a member of Hekalot/Merkabah lore. Its contents suggest that 3 Enoch's contents and ideas are newer than those shown in other Merkabah texts. The book does not contain Merkabah hymns, it has unique layout and adjuration. All these facts make 3 Enoch unique not just among Merkabah writings, but also within the writings of Enoch.

3 Enoch contains a number of Greek and Latin words. This book, unlike 1 Enoch, appears to have been originally written in Hebrew. There are a number of indications suggesting that the writers of 3 Enoch had knowledge of, and most likely read, 1 Enoch.

Archimedes of Syracuse (c.287 BC - c. 212 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist and engineer. Although little is known about his life, he is regarded as one of the most important scientists in classical antiquity. In addition to making important discoveries in the field of mathematics and geometry, he is credited with producing machines that were well ahead of their time.

The Ancient Roman historians showed a strong interest in Archimedes and wrote several biographies relating to his life and works, while the few copies of his treatises that survived through the Middle Ages were a major influence on scientists during the Renaissance.

Archimedes produced the first known summation of an infinite series with a method that is still used in the area of calculus today.

Archimedes was a famous mathematician whose theorems and philosophies became world known. He gained a reputation in his own time which few other mathematicians of this period achieved. He is considered by most historians of mathematics as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

Biography

Archimedes was born c. 287 BC in the seaport city of Syracuse, Sicily, which was then a colony of Magna Graecia. The date of his birth is based on an assertion by the Byzantine Greek historian John Tzetzes that he lived for seventy-five years. In The Sand Reckoner Archimedes gives his father's name as Phidias, an astronomer about whom nothing is known. Plutarch wrote that Archimedes was related to King Hieron II, the ruler of Syracuse. A biography of Archimedes was written by his friend Heracleides but this work has been lost, leaving the details of his life obscure. It is unknown, for instance, whether he ever married or had children. Archimedes is believed to have spent part of his youth being educated in Alexandria, Egypt where he was a contemporary of Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes. Some of Archimedes' mathematical works were written in the form of letters to Eratosthenes, who was the chief librarian in Alexandria.

Archimedes died c. 212 BC during the Second Punic War, when Roman forces under General Marcus Claudius Marcellus captured the city of Syracuse after a two year long siege. According to the popular account given by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives , Archimedes was contemplating a mathematical diagram when the city was captured. A Roman soldier commanded him to come and meet General Marcellus but he declined, saying that he had to finish working on the problem. The soldier was enraged by this, and killed Archimedes with his sword. Plutarch also gives a lesser-known account of the death of Archimedes which suggests that he may have been killed while attempting to surrender to a Roman soldier. According to this story, Archimedes was carrying mathematical instruments, and was killed because the soldier thought that they were valuable items. General Marcellus was reportedly angered by the death of Archimedes, as he had ordered him not to be harmed.

The last words attributed to Archimedes are "Do not disturb my circles". This quote is often given in Latin as "Noli turbare circulos meos", but there is no reliable evidence that Archimedes uttered these words, and they do not appear in the account given by Plutarch.

Archimedes' tomb had a carving of his favorite mathematical diagram, which was a sphere inside a cylinder of the same height and diameter. Archimedes had proved that the volume and surface area of the sphere would be two thirds that of the cylinder. In 75 BC, 137 years after his death, the Roman orator Cicero visited the tomb in Syracuse which had become overgrown with scrub. Cicero had the tomb cleaned up, and was able to see the carving and read some of the verses that had been added as an inscription.

The account of the siege of Syracuse given by Polybius in his Universal History was written some seventy years after the death of Archimedes, and was used as a source by Plutarch and Livy. It sheds little light on Archimedes as a person, and focuses on the war machines that he is said to have built in order to defend the city.

Discoveries and Inventions

Most of the facts about his life come from a biography about the Roman soldier Marcellus written by the Roman biographer Plutarch. According to Plutarch, Archimedes had so low an opinion of the kind of practical invention at which he excelled and to which he owed his contemporary fame that he left no written work on such subjects. While it is true that--apart from a dubious reference to a treatise, On Sphere-Making - all of his known works were of a theoretical character, nevertheless his interest in mechanics deeply influenced his mathematical thinking. Not only did he write works on theoretical mechanics and hydrostatics, but his treatise Method Concerning Mechanical Theorems shows that he used mechanical reasoning as a heuristic device for the discovery of new mathematical theorems.

He was best known for his discovery of the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere and its circumscribing cylinder, for hisformulation of a hydrostatic principle Archimedes' principle and for inventing the Archimedes screw (a device for raising water).

Archimedes Principal states: an object immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant force that is equal in magnitude to the force of gravity on the displaced fluid.

He also invented things such as the hydraulic screw - for raising water from a lower to a higher level, catapult, the lever, the compound pulley and the burning mirror.

In mechanics Archimedes discovered fundamental theorems concerning the center of gravity of plane figures and solids.

Archimedes probably spent some time in Egypt early in his career, but he resided for most of his life in Syracuse, the principal city-state in Sicily, where he was on intimate terms with its king, Hieron II. Archimedes published his works in the form of correspondence with the principal mathematicians of his time, including the Alexandrian scholars Conon of Samos and Eratosthenes of Cyrene.

He played an important role in the defense of Syracuse against the siege laid by the Romans in 213 BC by constructing war machines so effective that they long delayed the capture of the city. But Syracuse was eventually captured by the Roman general Marcus Claudius Marcellus in the autumn of 212 or spring of 211 BC, and Archimedes was killed in the sack of the city.

Archimedes Screw



Archimedes Screw, or Archimedean screw, or screwpump, is a machine historically used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation ditches. It is one of several inventions and discoveries reputed to have been made by Archimedes, but as some researchers suggest, some form of this mechanism may have been used earlier by Sennacherib, King of Assyria, in the 7th century BC.



Modern screw pumps, consisting of helices rotating in open inclined troughs, are effective for pumping sewage in wastewater treatment plants. The open troughs and the design of the screws permit the passage of debris without clogging.

The Burning Mirror (Glass)

Archimedes invented many machines which were used as engines of war. These were particularly effective in the defense of Syracuse when it was attacked by the Romans under the command of Marcellus.



During the Roman siege of Syracuse, he is said to have single-handedly defended the city by constructing lenses to focus the Sun's light on Roman ships and huge cranes to turn them upside down. When the Romans finally broke the siege, Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier after snapping at him, "Don't disturb my circles,'' a reference to a geometric figure he had outlined on the sand.



While Archimedes did not invent the lever, he gave the first rigorous explanation of the principles involved, which are the transmission of force through a fulcrum and moving the effort applied through a greater distance than the object to be moved.



His Law of the Lever states: Magnitudes are in equilibrium at distances reciprocally proportional to their weights. According to Pappus of Alexandria, his work on levers caused him to remark, "Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth." Plutarch describes how Archimedes designed block and tackle pulley systems, allowing sailors to use the principle of leverage to lift objects that would otherwise have been too heavy to move.

A large part of Archimedes' work in engineering arose from fulfilling the needs of his home city of Syracuse. The Greek writer Athenaeus of Naucratis describes how King Hieron II commissioned Archimedes to design a huge ship, the Syracusia, which could be used for luxury travel, carrying supplies, and as a naval warship. The Syracusia is said to have been the largest ship built in classical antiquity. According to Athenaeus, it was capable of carrying 600 people and contained garden decorations, a gymnasium and a temple dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite. Since a ship of this size would leak a considerable amount of water through the hull, the Archimedes' Screw was said to have been developed in order to remove the bilge water.

Archimedes had stated in a letter to King Hieron that given the force, any given weight might be moved, and even boasted, we are told, relying on the strength of demonstration, that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this. Hiero being struck with amazement at this, and entreating him to make good this problem by actual experiment, and show some great weight moved by a small engine, he fixed accordingly upon a ship of burden out of the king's arsenal, which could not be drawn out of the dock without great labor and many men; and, loading her with many passengers and a full freight, sitting himself the while far off, with no great endeavor, but only holding the head of the pulley in his hand and drawing the cords by degrees, he drew the ship in a straight line, as smoothly and evenly as if she had been in the sea.

The Spheres

Archimedes is supposed to have made two "spheres" that Marcellus took back to Rome - one a star globe and the other a device (the details of which are uncertain) for mechanically representing the motions of the Sun, Moon, and planets.

One was a solid sphere on which were engraved or painted the stars and constellations, which Marcellus placed in the Temple of Virtue. Such celestial globes predate Archimedes by several hundred years and Cicero credits the famed geometers Thales and Eudoxos with first constructing them.

The second sphere, which Marcellus kept for himself, was much more ingenious and original. It was a planetarium: a mechanical model which shows the motions of the sun, moon, and planets as viewed from the earth.

Cicero writes that Archimedes must have been "endowed with greater genius that one would imagine it possible for a human being to possess" to be able to build such an unprecedented device.

Many other ancient writers also refer to Archimedes' planetarium in prose and in verse. Several viewed it as proof that the cosmos must have had a divine creator: for just as Archimedes' planetarium required a creator, so then must the cosmos itself have required a creator.

Cicero reverses the argument to contend that since the cosmos had a divine creator, so then must Archimedes be divine to be able to imitate its motions.

The Greek mathematician Pappus of Alexandria, who lived in the fourth century AD, writes that Archimedes wrote a now-lost manuscript entitled On Sphere-making. Pappus also states that it was the only manuscript that Archimedes wrote on "practical" matters. No physical trace of Archimedes' planetarium survives. Cicero refers to it as a "bronze contrivance" while Claudian describes it as "a sphere of glass."

The 1752 engraving of Rowley's orrery suggests how Archimedes' planetarium might have looked. On this orrery the sun, moon and planets revolve along a flat surface driven underneath by a hidden gear works.

Spherical bands surrounding the flat surface represent the celestial equator, the arctic circle, a movable horizon, and the ecliptic marked with the zodiacal signs.

In 1900 a shipwreck discovered off the shore of the Greek island of Antikythera uncovered an unexpected treasure. The ship dated from the first century BC and was sailing from the Greek island of Rhodes. Amidst its cargo was a complicated gear works in a deteriorated state about the size of a cigar box.

The device, now called the Antikythera mechanism, was analyzed by Derek De Solla Price of Yale University, who concluded that it was an ancient planetarium in which the positions of the heavenly bodies were indicated by dials on the face of the device.

The gear works are about as complicated as those in a modern mechanical clock and represent the earliest physical evidence of an advanced metallic mechanism. Price gives evidence that this mechanism was in the Archimedean tradition and strongly suggests that Archimedes' planetarium was its forerunner. A complete presentation of Price's research can be found in Gears from the Greeks.

Mathematics

Although he is often regarded as a designer of mechanical devices, Archimedes also made important contributions to the field of mathematics. Plutarch wrote: "He placed his whole affection and ambition in those purer speculations where there can be no reference to the vulgar needs of life."

Some of his mathematical proofs involve the use of infinitesimals in a way that is similar to modern integral calculus. By assuming a proposition to be true and showing that this would lead to a contradiction, Archimedes was able to give answers to problems to an arbitrary degree of accuracy, while specifying the limits within which the answer lay.

This technique is known as the method of exhaustion, and he employed it to approximate the value of (Pi). He did this by drawing a larger polygon outside a circle, and a smaller polygon inside the circle. As the number of sides of the polygon increases, it becomes a more accurate approximation of a circle. When the polygons had 96 sides each, he calculated the lengths of their sides and showed that the value of ¹ lay between 3 + 1/7 (approximately 3.1429) and 3 + 10/71 (approximately 3.140.

This was a remarkable achievement, since the ancient Greek number system was awkward and used letters rather than the positional notation system used today. He also proved that the area of a circle was equal to Pi multiplied by the square of the radius of the circle.

He used the method of exhaustion to show that the value of the square root of 3 lay between 265/153 (approximately 1.732) and 1351/780 (approximately 1.7320512). The modern value is around 1.7320508076, making this a very accurate estimate.

Another noted mathematical work by Archimedes is The Sand Reckoner. In this work he set out to calculate the number of grains of sand that the universe could contain. In doing so, he challenged the notion that the number of grains of sand was too large to be counted. He wrote: "There are some, King Gelon (Gelon II, son of Hieron II), who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude; and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited." To solve the problem, Archimedes devised a system of counting based around the myriad. This was a word used to mean infinity, based on the Greek word for uncountable, murious. The word myriad was also used to denote the number 10,000. He proposed a number system using powers of myriad myriads.

Geometry

Archimedes helped develop the science of geometry. He proved that the area enclosed by a parabola and a straight line is 4/3 multiplied by the area of a triangle with equal base and height.



He expressed the solution to the problem as a geometric progression that summed to infinity with the ratio 1/4:



If the first term in this series is the area of the triangle in the illustration then the second is the sum of the areas of two triangles whose bases are the two smaller secant lines in the illustration, and so on. This proof is a variation of the infinite series 1/4 + 1/16 + 1/64 + 1/256 + á á á which sums to 1/3.

It has been suggested that Heron's formula for calculating the area of a triangle from the length of its sides was known to Archimedes. However, the first reliable reference to this formula is given by Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD.

His methods anticipated the integral calculus 2,000 years before Newton and Leibniz. Although many solid figures having all kinds of surfaces can be conceived, those which appear to be regularly formed are most deserving of attention. Those include not only the five figures found in the godlike Plato, that is, the tetrahedron and the cube, the octahedron and the dodecahedron, and fifthly the icosahedron, but also the solids, thirteen in number, which were discovered by Archimedes and are contained by equilateral and equiangular, but not similar, polygons.



Truncated Tetrahedron

The first is a figure of eight bases, being contained
by four triangles and four hexagons.



Cuboctahedron

After this come three figures of fourteen bases,
the first contained by eight triangles and six squares



Truncated Octahedron

The second by six squares and eight hexagons,



Truncated Cube

And the third by eight triangles and six octagons.



Rhombicuboctahedron

After these come two figures of twenty-six bases, the
first contained by eight triangles and eighteen squares



Truncated Cuboctahedron

The second by twelve squares, eight hexagons and six octagons.



Icosidodecahedron

After these come three figures of thirty-two bases, the
first contained by twenty triangles and twelve pentagons



Truncated Icosahedron

the second by twelve pentagons and twenty hexagons,



Truncated Dodecahedron

The third by twenty triangles and twelve decagons.



Snub Cube

After these comes one figure of thirty-eight bases,
being contained by thirty-two triangles and six squares



Rhombicosidodecahedron

After this come two figures of sixty-two bases, the first
contained by twenty triangles, thirty squares and twelve pentagons,



Truncated Icosidodecahedron

The second by thirty squares, twenty hexagons and twelve decagons.



Snub Dodecahedron

After these there comes lastly a figure of ninety-two bases,
which is contained by eighty triangles and twelve pentagons.

The Archimedes Palimpsest

Archimedes' work was not as widely recognized in classical antiquity as that of Euclid, and some of his treatises are believed to have been lost when the Library of Alexandria was damaged at various periods in its history. Some of his writings survived through Latin and Arabic translations made during the Middle Ages, and these documents provided Renaissance scholars with an influential source of ideas. Around the year 1586 Galileo Galilei invented a hydrostatic balance for weighing metals in air and water after apparently being inspired by the work of Archimedes.

The most important document containing Archimedes' work is the Archimedes Palimpsest. A palimpsest is a document written on vellum that has been re-used by scraping off the ink of an older text and writing new text in its place. This was often done in the Middle Ages since animal skin parchments were expensive.

In 1906, the Danish professor Johan Ludvig Heiberg realized that a goatskin parchment containing prayers written in the 13th century AD also carried an older work written in the 10th century AD, which he identified as previously unknown copies of works by Archimedes. The parchment spent many years in a monastery library in Constantinople before being sold to a private collector, and reappeared at an auction at Christie's in London in October 1998 where it was sold to an anonymous buyer for $2 million.

The palimpsest contains seven treatises, including the only surviving copy of On Floating Bodies in the original Greek. Most importantly, it contains the only known source of the Method of Mechanical Theorems and Stomachion, which had previously been thought lost. The palimpsest is now stored at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, where it has been subjected to a range of modern tests including the use of ultraviolet and x-ray light to read the overwritten text.

The treatises contained in the Archimedes Palimpsest are:

On the Equilibrium of Planes (2 volumes)

This treatise explains the Law of the Lever, and uses it to calculate the areas and centers of gravity of various geometric figures including triangles, paraboloids, and hemispheres.

On Spirals

In this treatise he defines what is now called the Archimedean Spiral. This is an early example of a mechanical curve (a curve traced by a moving point) considered by a Greek mathematician.

On the Sphere and the Cylinder

In this treatise, Archimedes obtains the result of which he was most proud, namely the relationship between a sphere and a circumscribed cylinder of the same height and diameter. He proves that the sphere will have exactly two thirds of the volume and area of the cylinder.

A carving of this proof was used on his tomb.

On Conoids and Spheroids

In this treatise Archimedes calculates the areas and volumes of sections of cones, spheres, and paraboloids.

On Floating Bodies (2 volumes)

In the first part of this treatise, Archimedes spells out the law of equilibrium of fluids, and proves that water will adopt a spherical form around a center of gravity. This was probably an attempt at explaining the observation made by Greek astronomers that the Earth is round. His fluids are not self-gravitating, since he assumes the existence of a point towards which all things fall in order to derive the spherical shape.

In the second part, he calculates the equilibrium positions of sections of paraboloids. This was probably an idealization of the shapes of ships' hulls. Some of his sections float with the base under water and the summit above water, similar to the way that icebergs float.

The Quadrature of the Parabola

In this treatise he proves that the area enclosed by a parabola and a straight line is 4/3 multiplied by the area of a triangle with equal base and height. He achieves this by calculating the value of a geometric progression that sums to infinity with the ratio 1/4.

Stomachion

This is a Greek puzzle similar to a Tangram, and the treatise describing it was found in more complete form in the Archimedes Palimpsest. Archimedes calculates the areas of the various pieces. Recent discoveries indicate that Archimedes was attempting to determine how many ways the strips of paper could be assembled into the shape of a square. This is an early use of combinatorics to solve a problem.

Archimedes' Cattle Problem Archimedes wrote a letter to the scholars in the Library of Alexandria, who had apparently questioned the importance of his work. He challenges them to count the numbers of cattle in the Herd of the Sun by solving a number of simultaneous Diophantine equations. There is a more difficult version of the problem in which some of the answers are required to be square numbers. This version of the problem was first solved by a computer in 1965, and the answer is a very large number.

The Sand Reckoner

In this treatise, Archimedes counts the number of grains of sand that will fit inside the universe. This book mentions Aristarchus of Samos' theory of the solar system (concluding that "this is impossible"), contemporary ideas about the size of the Earth and the distance between various celestial bodies. By using a system of numbers based on powers of the myriad, Archimedes concludes that the number of grains of sand required to fill the universe in modern notation. The introductory letter contains the information that Archimedes' father was an astronomer named Phidias.

The Method of Mechanical Theorems

This treatise was thought lost until the discovery of the Archimedes Palimpsest in 1906. In this work Archimedes uses infinitesimals, and shows how breaking up a figure into an infinite number of infinitely small parts can be used to determine its area or volume. Archimedes may have considered this method lacking in formal rigor, so he also used the method of exhaustion to derive the results

Legends About Archimedes

Legend has it that Archimedes discovered his famous theory of buoyancy (Archimedes Principle) while taking a bath. He was so excited that he ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka, eureka (I have found it)!".



Another legend describes how Archimedes uncovered a fraud against King Hieron II of Syracuse using his principle of buoyancy. The king suspected that a solid gold crown he ordered was partly made of silver. Archimedes first took two equal weights of gold and silver and compared their weights when immersed in water. Next he compared the weights of the crown and a pure silver crown of identical dimensions when each was immersed in water. The difference between these two comparisons revealed that the crown was not solid gold.

Additional information

There is a crater on the Moon named Archimedes in his honor, and a lunar mountain range, the Montes Archimedes.
The Fields Medal for outstanding achievement in mathematics carries a portrait of Archimedes, along with his proof concerning the sphere and the cylinder.

Carl Friedrich Gauss, himself frequently called the most influential mathematician of all time, is said to have remarked that Archimedes was one of the three epoch-making mathematicians, with the others being Sir Isaac Newton and Ferdinand Eisenstein.

The exclamation of Eureka! attributed to Archimedes is the state motto of California.

The Death of Archimedes

Archimedes was killed in 212 BC during the capture of Syracuse by the Romans in the Second Punic War after all his efforts to keep the Romans at bay with his machines of war had failed. Plutarch recounts three versions of the story of his killing which had come down to him.

The first version:

"Archimedes ... was ..., as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken. In this transport of study and contemplation, a soldier, unexpectedly coming up to him, commanded him to follow to Marcellus; which he declining to do before he had worked out his problem to a demonstration, the soldier, enraged, drew his sword and ran him through."
The second version:

"A Roman soldier, running upon him with a drawn sword, offered to kill him; and that Archimedes, looking back, earnestly besought him to hold his hand a little while, that he might not leave what he was then at work upon inconclusive and imperfect; but the soldier, nothing moved by his entreaty, instantly killed him."
The third version that Plutarch had heard:

"As Archimedes was carrying to Marcellus mathematical instruments, dials, spheres, and angles, by which the magnitude of the sun might be measured to the sight, some soldiers seeing him, and thinking that he carried gold in a vessel, slew him."
Archimedes was buried Syracuse, where he was born, were he grew up, where he worked, and where he died.

On his grave their is an inscription of pi, his most famous discovery. They also placed on his tombstone the figure of a sphere inscribed inside a cylinder and the 2:3 ratio of the volumes between them, the solution to the problem he considered his greatest achievement.

Vata Types



In the physical body, vata--composed of Space and Air--is the subtle energy associated with movement. It governs breathing, blinking, muscle and tissue movement, pulsation of the heart, and all movements in the cytoplasm and cell membranes. In balance, vata promotes creativity and flexibility. Out of balance, vata produces fear and anxiety.

A person with vata predominant is blessed with a quick mind, flexibility and creativity. Vata provides the essential motion for all bodily processes and is extremely vital for health. One purpose of lifestyle considerations is to "ground" or stabilize this motion. On an annual basis, vata is most prominent in the fall and at the change of seasons, and these are the most important times to be careful of diet and lifestyle. Routine is very useful in assisting the vata individual to effectively ground all this moving energy.

Vata types have variable appetite and digestion. They are often attracted to astringent foods like salad and vegetables, but their constitution is balanced by sweet, sour and salty tastes. Vata people tend to produce little urine and their feces are hard, dry and small in size and quantity. Mentally, vata people usually grasp things quickly but then forget them quickly. They are alert, restless and very active.

They walk, talk and think fast, but are easily fatigued. They have less willpower and often feel unstable and ungrounded. They have less tolerance, confidence and boldness. When unbalanced, vata types have a tendency to become fearful and nervous, and may experience high anxiety. In the external world, vata types tend to earn money quickly and spend it quickly.

They are not good planners and as a consequence may suffer economic hardship. Vata resides in the colon, as well as the brain, ears, bones, joints, skin and thighs. Vata people are more susceptible to diseases involving the air principle, such as emphysema, pneumonia and arthritis.

Other common vata disorders include flatulence, tics, twitches, aching joints, dry skin and hair, nerve disorders, constipation, and mental confusion. Vata tends to increase with age as is indicated by drying and wrinkling of the skin.

Since the attributes of vata are dry, light, cold, rough, subtle, mobile, clear and dispersing, any of these qualities in excess can cause imbalance.

Frantic travel, especially by plane, loud noises, continual stimulation, drugs, sugar, and alcohol all derange vata, as does exposure to cold and cold foods.

Like the wind, vata types have a hard time becoming and staying grounded. Routine is difficult but essential if vata is to be lowered and controlled.

In general, people with excessive vata respond most rapidly to warm, moist, slightly oily, heavy foods. Steam baths, humidifiers, and moisture in general are helpful.


General food guidelines for decreasing vata are:

50% whole grains: whole grain cooked cereals,
some breads and crackers
20% protein: eggs, high quality dairy products, poultry, fish, seafood, beef, tofu, black and red lentils
20-30% fresh vegetables with an optional 10% for fresh fruits
As you continue to improve your eating habits, your body will begin to naturally detoxify itself. You can help boost your body's natural detoxification processes by stimulating digestion with an herbal fiber supplement. When combined with digestive herbs and psyllium husk, fiber supplements also make a great colon cleanse for detoxification.


General guidelines for balancing vata:

Keep warm
Keep calm
Avoid raw foods
Avoid extreme cold
Avoid cold foods
Eat warm foods and spices
Keep a regular routine

Pitta Types



Pitta, made up of Fire and Water, expresses as the body's metabolic system. It governs digestion, absorption, assimilation, nutrition, metabolism and body temperature. In balance, pitta promotes understanding and intelligence. Out of balance, pitta arouses anger, hatred and jealousy.

Pitta people have many of the qualities of fire. Fire is hot, penetrating, sharp, and agitating. Similarly, pitta people have warm bodies, penetrating ideas, and sharp intelligence. But they can also become very agitated and short tempered.

The pitta body type is one of medium height and build, with ruddy or coppery skin. They may have many moles and freckles. Their skin is warm and less wrinkled than vata skin. Their hair tends to be silky and they often experience premature graying or hair loss. Their eyes are of medium size and conjunctiva is moist. The nose is sharp and the tip tends to be reddish.

Pitta people have a strong metabolism, good digestion, and strong appetites. They like plenty of food and liquids. They tend to love hot spices and cold drinks. However, their constitution is balanced by sweet, bitter and astringent tastes.

Pitta people sleep well and of medium duration. They produce large quantities of urine and feces, which tend to be yellowish, soft and plentiful. They easily perspire. Hands and feet stay warm. Pitta people have a lower tolerance for sunlight, heat or hard physical work.

Mentally, pitta types are alert and intelligent and have good powers of comprehension. However, they are easily agitated and aggressive and tend toward hate, anger and jealousy when imbalanced. In the external world, pitta people like to be leaders and planners and seek material prosperity. They like to exhibit their wealth and possessions. Pitta people tend to have diseases involving the fire principle such as fevers, inflammatory diseases and jaundice. Common symptoms include skin rashes, burning sensation, ulceration, fever, inflammations or irritations such as conjunctivitis, colitis, or sore throats.

Since the attributes of pitta are oily, hot, light, mobile, and liquid, an excess of any of these qualities aggravates pitta. Summer is a time of heat, the pitta season. Sunburn, poison ivy, prickly heat, and short tempers are common. These kinds of pitta disorders tend to calm down as the weather gets cooler. The diet and lifestyle changes emphasize coolness-cool foods, avoidance of chilies and spices (especially difficult for New Mexicans), and cool climates. People with excessive pitta need to exercise at the coolest part of the day.

Dietary guidelines for pitta are:

50% whole grains--whole grain breads, cereals, cooked grains 20%
protein--beans (except lentils), tofu, tempeh, cottage cheese, ricotta cheese, milk, egg white, chicken and turkey (white meat), shrimp, rabbit, venison
20-30% vegetables with an optional 10% for fresh fruits

Other guidelines:

Avoid excessive heat
Avoid excessive oil
Avoid excessive steam
Limit salt intake Eat cooling, non-spicy foods
Exercise during the cooler part of the day

Kapha Types



Kapha is formed from Earth and Water and is the energy that forms the body's structure--bones, muscles, tendons--and provides the "glue" that holds the cells together. Kapha supplies the water for all bodily parts and systems. It lubricates joints, moisturizes the skin, and maintains immunity. In balance, kapha is expressed as love, calmness and forgiveness. Out of balance, it leads to attachment, greed and envy.

Kapha people are blessed with strength, endurance and stamina. They have sweet, loving dispositions and are stable and grounded. Their skin is oily and smooth. Physically, kapha people tend to gain weight and have a slow metabolism. They shun exercise. They have thick skin and their bodies and muscles are well developed. Their eyes are large, dark, and attractive with thick, long lashes and brows.

Kapha people evacuate slowly and feces tend to be soft, pale and oily. Perspiration is moderate. Sleep is deep and prolonged. Kapha types are attracted to sweet, salty and oily foods, but their constitutions are most balanced by bitter, astringent and pungent tastes.

Psychologically, kapha people tend to be calm, tolerant and forgiving. However, they may become lethargic. While they may be slow to comprehend, their long term memory is excellent. When out of balance, kaphas tend to experience greed, envy, attachment and possessiveness. In the external world, kapha tendencies toward groundedness, stability, and attachment help them to earn and hold onto money.

They tend to have diseases connected to the water principle such as flu, sinus congestion, and other diseases involving mucous. Sluggishness, excess weight, diabetes, water retention, and headaches are also common. Kapha can become more aggravated as the moon gets full because, as biologists have discovered, there is a tendency for water retention at that time. Winter is the time of greatest kapha accumulation and following the dietary and lifestyle changes are most important during that season.

Dietary guidelines:

30-40% whole grains: rye crackers, dry cereals, and cooked grains 20%
protein: chicken, turkey, boiled and poached eggs, rabbit, small amount of goats milk, and most beans
40-50% fresh vegetables with an optional 10% for fresh or dried fruits.
A daily salad is good.

Other guidelines:

Get plenty of exercise
Avoid heavy foods
Keep active
Avoid dairy
Avoid iced food
Vary your routine
Avoid fatty, oily foods
Avoid iced drinks
Eat light, dry food.
Ayurveda encompasses various techniques for assessing health. It assesses prodromal symptoms, cardinal signs and symptoms, and one's suitability for treatment to help determine the etiology and pathogenesis of an imbalance. Various methods are utilized to help acquire information during an assessment with a client.

These methods include: questioning, observation, palpation, direct perception and inference. Techniques such as taking the pulse; observing the tongue, eyes and physical form; and listening to the tone of the voice are employed during an assessment.

Palliative and cleansing measures, if appropriate, can be used to help eliminate an imbalance along with suggestions for eliminating or managing the causes of the imbalance. Recommendations may include: implementation of lifestyle changes; starting and maintaining a suggested diet; and the use of herbs.

In some cases, participating in a cleansing program, called panchakarma, is suggested to help the body rid itself of accumulated toxins so it can gain more benefit from various suggested measures of treatment.

In summary, Ayurveda addresses all aspects of life--the body, mind and spirit. It recognizes that each of us is unique, each responds differently to the many aspects of life, each possesses different strengths and weaknesses. Through insight, understanding and experience Ayurveda presents a vast database of the relationships between causes and their affects, both immediate and subtle, for each unique individual.

Ayurvedic Herbs




Amalaki - is used to rebuild and maintain new tissues and increases red blood cell count. It is considered helpful in cleansing the mouth, strengthening teeth, nourishing the bones and is the highest natural source of vitamin C. It reduces pitta without aggravating vata or kapha.

Ashwaghandha - has been traditionally used for general debility, sexual debility and nerve exhaustion. It also is said to generate the hormonal system, promote healing of tissues, and support sound sleep. It is very balancing for high vata conditions.

Bala - is commonly used for heart disease, arthritic pain, and helpful in soothing inflamed nerve tissue. Bala pacifies high vata-pitta conditions.

Bibitaki - has been used as a strong laxative to cleanse the bowels. It is also used as a gargle for sore throats because of its heating and soothing properties. It is a powerful tonic for kapha.

Brahmi has been traditionally used for nervous disorders, epilepsy, senility, premature aging, hair loss, obstinate skin conditions and venereal diseases. It pacifies high vata or pitta.

Bringaraj is considered helpful in premature graying of hair, balding , alopecia, loss of teeth, enlargement of liver or spleen, chronic hepatitis, anemia and skin diseases. It is a rejuvenative for pitta.

Guduchi is a considered a bitter tonic. It is regarded as a blood purifier and stimulant. It is considered helpful in eye disorders and promotes mental clarity. It balances high pitta conditions.

Haritaki - is used for coughs, asthma, abdominal distention, tumors and itching. It is a rejuvenative for vata.

Manjistha - is considered one of the best blood purifying herbs in Ayurveda. It is said to cool and detoxify the blood, dissolve obstructions in blood flow, and clear stagnant blood from the system. It clears high pitta from the system.

Neem is considered one of the best healing and disinfectant agents for skin diseases and anti-inflamatory for joint and muscle pain. It balances high pitta conditions.

Shardunikha is commonly referred to as "Gurmar, the destroyer of sugar". It is traditionally used to control blood sugar levels in the body.

****awari is traditionally used to support the female organs, prevent sexual debility, help menopausal conditions, stomach ulcers, and chronic fevers. It is a rejuvenative for pitta.

Traditional Formulations

Hingwastika is traditionally used in supporting digestion, reducing abdominal distension and flatulence and in controlling candida. It balances vata and kapha.

Trifala is said to promote normal appetite, good digestion, increase red blood cells and hemoglobin and aid in the removal of undesirable fat. It is a balanced formulation good for all doshas.

Trikatu is used as a digestive tonic and to clear the body of toxic material. It clears excess kapha from the system.

Yograj Guggulu is said to be useful for reducing joint pain, reducing cholesterol and excess fat from the system. It clears toxins and excess kapha from the body.

Task Specific Formulas

Digest Ease is a digestion formula for pitta. It supports proper digestion and absorption for individuals prone to hyperacity and heartburn.

Digestive Fire can aid in increasing appetite, promoting digestion and burning up excess toxins in the body.

Geriforte a proven rejuvenating tonic that slows down ageing.

JointCare helps to reduce morning stffness and joint pain. Also considered helpful for relieving pain due to sports strains and sprains.

LeanCare a unique herbal formula that regulates lipid metabolism and aids in weight reduction and contol of body fat.

LiverCare is a potent liver protection formula that acts against toxins from food, water, alcohol or pollution.

Liv.52 improves the functional efficiency of the liver and regulates levels of enzymes and optomizes assimilation.

Mentat enhances learning ability and attention span. A natural and safe calming product.

Prana/Breath of Life warms and energizes respiration and circulation and helps dispel excess cold and mucous in the system.

Rumalaya supports healthy joints, promotes circulation and maintains freedom of movement.

Septilin helps increase production of white blood cells and stimulates the immune function to cope with common allergens.

Shakti/Energy Tonic renews vital energy to strengthen mental and physical functions and maintain immunity against disease.

StressEase is a balancing formula for coping with stress and fatigue. It helps to deal with the mental strains of daily life.

SweetEase promotes healthy glucose levels. It may be useful for individuals prone to obesity, or related conditions of high blood sugar or high cholesterol.

Tentex Forte is a non-hormonal stimulant that tones up the male system and improves vitality and stamina.

TranquilMind promotes relaxation and sleep. It also alleviates nervous tension or anxiety due to stress.

Triphalax is a bowel tonic that strengthens the colon and supports proper assimulation of nutrients.

UriCare helps to clear impurities from the urinary tract and maintain efficient kidney and urinary system function.

Wisdom/Mind Force supports creativity by increasing mental energy without causing restlessness or difficulty sleeping.

Women's Freedom is a formula that nurtures and regenerates the female reproductive system

He pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. In the United States during this time, Tesla's fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture. Tesla demonstrated wireless energy transfer to power electronic devices as early as 1893, and aspired to intercontinental wireless transmission of industrial power in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project (1901-1917) also known as the Tesla Tower, located in Long Island, New York.

Tesla was fluent in eight languages - Serbian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, and Latin.

Early Years



Tesla was born to Serbian parents in the village of Smiljan, Austrian Empire near the town of Gospic, in the territory of modern-day Croatia. His baptismal certificate reports that he was born on 28 June (N.S. 10 July), 1856, to Father Milutin Tesla, a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church



His paternal origin is thought to be either of one of the local Serb clans in the Tara valley or from the Herzegovinian noble Pavle Orlovic His mother, Duka, daughter of a Serbian Orthodox Church priest, came from a family domiciled in Lika and Banija, but with deeper origins to Kosovo. She was talented in making home craft tools and memorized many Serbian epic poems, but never learned to read.

Nikola was the fourth of five children, having one older brother (Dane, who was killed in a horse-riding accident when Nikola was five) and three sisters (Milka, Angelina and Marica). His family moved to Gospic in 1862. He attended school at Higher Real Gymnasium in Karlovac. He finished a four-year term in the span of three years.

Tesla went on to study electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz. However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures.

In December 1878, Tesla left Graz and broke all relations with his family. His friends thought that he had drowned in the Mura River. He went to Marburg, (today's Maribor, in Slovenia), where he was first employed as an assistant engineer for a year. He suffered a nervous breakdown during this time.

Tesla was later persuaded by his father to attend the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which he attended for the summer term of 1880. Here, he was influenced by Ernst Mach. However, after his father died, he left the university, having completed only one term.

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books, supposedly having a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration.

During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by visions. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across, at other times they would provide the solution to a particular problem he had been encountering; just by hearing the name of an item, he would be able to envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms.

Tesla would visualize an invention in his mind with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. He typically did not make drawings by hand, instead just conceiving all ideas with his mind. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; these began during his childhood.


Hungary

In 1880, he moved to Budapest to work under Tivadar Puskas in a telegraph company, the National Telephone Company. There, he met Nebojsa Petrovic, a young, Serbian inventor who lived in Austria. Although their encounter was brief, they did work on a project together using twin turbines to create continual power.

On the opening of the telephone exchange in Budapest, 1881, Tesla became the chief electrician to the company, and was later engineer for the country's first telephone system. He also developed a device that, according to some, was a telephone repeater or amplifier, but according to others could have been the first loudspeaker.


France

In 1882 he moved to Paris to work as an engineer for the Continental Edison Company, designing improvements to electric equipment. In the same year, Tesla conceived the induction motor and began developing various devices that use rotating magnetic fields (for which he received patents in 188.

Soon thereafter, Tesla hastened from Paris to his mother's side as she lay dying, arriving hours before her death in April, 1892. Her last words to him were, "You've arrived, Nidzo, my pride." After her death, Tesla fell ill. He spent two to three weeks recuperating in Gospic and the village of Tomingaj near Gracac, the birthplace of his mother.


United States

On June 6, 1884, Tesla first arrived in the US in New York City. He had little besides a letter of recommendation from Charles Batchelor, his manager in his previous job.



In the letter of recommendation to Thomas Edison, Charles Batchelor wrote, "I know two great men and you are one of them; the other is this young man." Edison hired Tesla to work for his company Edison Machine Works. Tesla's work for Edison began with simple electrical engineering and quickly progressed to solving the company's most difficult problems. Tesla was offered the task of a complete redesign of the Edison company's direct current generators.

During his employment, Tesla claims Edison offered him $50,000 (equivalent to about $1 million in 2011, adjusted for inflation if he redesigned Edison's inefficient motor and generators, an improvement in both service and economy.

Tesla said he worked night and day to redesign them and gave the Edison company several profitable new patents in the process. During the year of 1885, when Tesla inquired about the payment on the work, Edison replied to him, "Tesla, you don't understand our American humor," and reneged on his promise. This anecdote is somewhat doubtful, since at Tesla's salary of $18 per week the bonus would have amounted to over 53 years pay, and the amount was equal to the initial capital of the company. Tesla resigned when he was refused a raise to $25 per week.

Tesla eventually found himself digging ditches for a short period of time - coincidentally for the Edison company. Edison had also never wanted to hear about Tesla's AC polyphase designs, believing that DC electricity was the future. Tesla focused intently on his AC polyphase system, even while digging ditches.

Tesla remained bitter in the aftermath of his dispute with Edison. Shortly before he died, Edison said that his biggest mistake had been in trying to develop direct current, rather than the superior alternating current system that Tesla had put within his grasp.

In 1886, Tesla formed his own company, Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing. The initial financial investors disagreed with Tesla on his plan for an alternating current motor and eventually relieved him of his duties at the company. Tesla worked in New York as a common laborer from 1886 to 1887 to feed himself and raise capital for his next project.

In 1887, he constructed the initial brushless alternating current induction motor, which he demonstrated to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now IEEE) in 1888.



The Tesla Coil

In the same year, he developed the principles of his Tesla coil and began working with George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company's Pittsburgh labs. Westinghouse listened to his ideas for polyphase systems which would allow transmission of alternating current electricity over large distances.

In April of 1887, Tesla began investigating what would later be called X-rays using his own single node vacuum tubes (similar to his patent #514,170 ). This device differed from other early X-ray tubes in that they had no target electrode. The modern term for the phenomenon produced by this device is bremsstrahlung (or braking radiation). We now know that this device operated by emitting electrons from the single electrode through a combination of field emission and thermionic emission. Once liberated, electrons are strongly repelled by the high electric field near the electrode during negative voltage peaks from the oscillating HV output of the Tesla Coil, generating X-rays as they collide with the glass envelope. He also used Geissler tubes.

In the "War of Currents" era in the late 1880s, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison became adversaries due to Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current (AC) advocated by Tesla.


1891-1898

On July 30, 1891, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States at the age of 35. Tesla established his 35 South Fifth Avenue laboratory in New York during this same year. Later, Tesla would establish his Houston Street laboratory in New York at 46 E. Houston Street. There, at one point while conducting mechanical resonance experiments with electro-mechanical oscillators he generated a resonance of several surrounding buildings but, due to the frequencies involved, not his own building, causing complaints to the police. He lit electric lamps wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission.

As the speed grew he hit the resonant frequency of his own building and belatedly realizing the danger he was forced to apply a sledge hammer to terminate the experiment just as the astonished police arrived. He also lit vacuum tubes wirelessly at both of the New York locations, providing evidence for the potential of wireless power transmission.


Some of Tesla's closest friends at that time were artists. He befriended Century Magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, who adapted several Serbian poems of Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj (which Tesla translated). Also during this time, Tesla was influenced by the Vedic philosophy (i.e., Hinduism) teachings of the Swami Vivekananda; so much so that, after his exposure to Hindu-Vedic thought, Tesla started using Sanskrit words to name some of his fundamental concepts regarding matter and energy.

By 1892, Tesla became aware of what Wilhelm Ršntgen later identified as effects of X-rays. In the early research, Tesla devised several experimental setups to produce X-rays. Tesla held that, with his circuits, the "instrument will enable one to generate Roentgen rays of much greater power than obtainable with ordinary apparatus." He also commented on the hazards of working with his circuit and single node X-ray producing devices. Of his many notes in the early investigation of this phenomenon, he attributed the skin damage to various causes. One of the options for the cause, which is not in conformity with conventional x-ray production, was that the ozone generated rather than the radiation was responsible.


At the 1893 World's Fair, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, an international exposition was held which, for the first time, devoted a building to electrical exhibits. It was a historic event as Tesla and George Westinghouse introduced visitors to AC power by using it to illuminate the Exposition. On display were Tesla's fluorescent lamps and single node bulbs.

As if lighting the Exposition was not enough, Tesla explained the principles of the rotating magnetic field and induction motor by demonstrating how to make an egg (made of copper) stand on end in his version of the Egg of Columbus.

Tesla continued research in the field and, later, observed an assistant severely "burnt" by X-rays in his lab. He performed several experiments prior to Roentgen's discovery (including photographing the bones of his hand; later, he sent these images to Roentgen) but didn't make his findings widely known; much of his research was lost in the 5th Avenue lab fire of March 1895.

A "world system" for "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon the electrical conductivity was proposed in which transmission in various natural mediums with current that passes between the two point are used to power devices. In a practical wireless energy transmission system using this principle, a high-power ultraviolet beam might be used to form a vertical ionized channel in the air directly above the transmitter-receiver stations. The same concept is used in virtual lightning rods, the electrolaser electroshock weapon, and has been proposed for disabling vehicles.

Tesla demonstrated "the transmission of electrical energy without wires" that depends upon electrical conductivity as early as 1891. The Tesla effect (named in honor of Tesla) is the archaic term for an application of this type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor).


In 1892 the first patents concerning the polyphase power system were granted. Tesla continued research of the system and rotating magnetic field principles. Tesla served, from 1892 to 1894, as the vice president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the forerunner (along with the Institute of Radio Engineers) of the modern-day IEEE.

Tesla served as the Vice-President of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (now part of the IEEE) from 1892 to 1894. From 1893 to 1895, he investigated high frequency alternating currents. He generated AC of one million volts using a conical Tesla coil and investigated the skin effect in conductors, designed tuned circuits, invented a machine for inducing sleep, cordless gas discharge lamps, and transmitted electromagnetic energy without wires, effectively building the first radio transmitter.

In St. Louis, Missouri, Tesla made a demonstration related to radio communication (he demonstrated radio energy crossing space (one side of a stage to the other) in 1893. Addressing the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the National Electric Light Association, he described and demonstrated in detail its principles. Heinrich Hertz had made such demonstrations, repeatedly, five years previously. Hertz' demonstrations were not public (they were conducted during his physics lectures) but strictly speaking neither were Tesla's (the Franklin Institute didn't open to the general public until 1934).

Tesla held over forty U.S. patents (circa 188 covering our entire system of Polyphase Alternating Current (AC). These patents are so novel that nobody could ever challenge them in the courts.

Tesla's four-tuned circuits (two on the receiving side and two on the transmitting side, secured by U.S. patents #645,576 and #649,621) were the basis of the U.S. Supreme Court decision (Case #369 decided June 21, 1943) to overturn Marconi's basic patent on the invention of radio.

Alternating-current power transmission
The Death Ray Machine
Fluorescent lights
Induction motor
Polyphase alternating-current system
Radio
Rotating magnetic field principle
Telephone repeater
Tesla coil transformer
Wireless communication
When Tesla was forty-one years old, he filed the first basic radio patent (U.S. Patent 645,576 ). A year later, he demonstrated a radio controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio controlled torpedoes. Tesla had developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control.


In the late 1880s, Tesla and Thomas Edison became adversaries in part because of Edison's promotion of direct current (DC) for electric power distribution over the more efficient alternating current advocated by Tesla and Westinghouse. Until Tesla invented the induction motor, AC's advantages for long distance high voltage transmission were counterbalanced by the inability to operate motors on AC.

As a result of the "War of Currents", Edison and Westinghouse went nearly bankrupt, so in 1897, Tesla released Westinghouse from contract, providing Westinghouse a break from Tesla's patent royalties. Also in 1897, Tesla researched radiation, which led to setting up the basic formulation of cosmic rays. In 1897, at the age of 41 years old, Tesla filed the first radio patent (U.S. Patent 645,576). A year later, he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat to the US military, believing that the military would want things such as radio-controlled torpedoes. Tesla claimed to have developed the "Art of Telautomatics", a form of robotics, as well as the technology of remote control.

In 1898, he demonstrated a radio-controlled boat to the public during an electrical exhibition at Madison Square Garden. Tesla called his boat a "teleautomaton". In the same year, Tesla devised an "electric igniter" or spark plug for Internal combustion gasoline engines. He gained U.S. Patent 609,250, "Electrical Igniter for Gas Engines", on this mechanical ignition system. Tesla lived in the former Gerlach Hotel, renamed The Radio Wave building, at 49 W 27th St. (between Broadway and Sixth Avenue), Lower Manhattan, before the end of the century where he conducted the radio wave experiments. A commemorative plaque was placed on the building in 1977 to honor his work. Remote radio control remained a novelty until WWI and afterward, when a number of countries used it in military programs.


1899 - Adventures in Colorado Springs



In 1899, Tesla decided to move and began research in Colorado Springs, Colorado in a lab located near Foote Ave. and Kiowa St., where he would have room for his high-voltage, high-frequency experiments.

Tesla, a local contractor, and several assistants commenced the construction of the laboratory shortly after arriving in Colorado Springs. The lab was established on Knob Hil. Its primary purposes were experiments with high frequency electricity and other phenomena, and secondary--research into wireless transmission of electrical power.

Tesla's design of the lab was a building fifty feet by sixty feet (15 by 18 m) with eighty-foot (24 m) ceilings. A one-hundred-forty-two foot (43 m) conducting aerial with a thirty-inch (760 mm) copper-foil-covered wooden ball was erected on the roof. The roof was rolled back to prevent fire from sparks and other dangerous effects of the experiments. The laboratory had sensitive instruments and equipment.

Upon his arrival he told reporters that he was conducting wireless telegraphy experiments transmitting signals from Pikes Peak to Paris.

Tesla's diary contains explanations of his experiments concerning the ionosphere and the ground's telluric currents via transverse waves and longitudinal waves.

At his lab, Tesla proved that the earth was a conductor, and he produced artificial lightning (with discharges consisting of millions of volts, and up to 135 feet long).

Tesla also investigated atmospheric electricity, observing lightning signals via his receivers. Reproductions of Tesla's receivers and coherer circuits show an unpredicted level of complexity (e.g., distributed high-Q helical resonators, radio frequency feedback, crude heterodyne effects, and regeneration techniques). Tesla stated that he observed stationary waves during this time.

Tesla researched ways to transmit power and energy wirelessly over long distances (via transverse waves, to a lesser extent, and, more readily, longitudinal waves). He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground as well as between the Earth's surface and the Kennelly-Heaviside layer. He received patents on wireless transceivers that developed standing waves by this method. In his experiments, he made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 hertz (Hz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed that the resonant frequency of the Earth's ionospheric cavity was in this range (later named the Schumann resonance).

In Colorado Springs Tesla carried out various long distance wireless transmission-reception experiments. Tesla effect is the application of a type of electrical conduction (that is, the movement of energy through space and matter; not just the production of voltage across a conductor). Through longitudinal waves, Tesla transferred energy to receiving devices. He sent electrostatic forces through natural media across a conductor situated in the changing magnetic flux and transferred electrical energy to a wireless receiver.

The lab possessed the largest Tesla Coil ever built, fifty-two feet (16 m) in diameter, known as the Magnifying Transmitter (further MT). Not identical to a classic Tesla Coil, it was a three-coil magnifying system requiring different forms of analysis than lumped-constant coupled resonant coils presently described to most. It resonated at a natural quarter wavelength frequency and could work in a continuous-wave mode and in a partially damped-wave resonant mode.

According to accounts, Tesla used it to transmit tens of thousands of watts of power wirelessly; it could generate millions of volts of electricity and produce lightning bolts more than one-hundred feet (30 m) long. Tesla posted a large fence around it with a sign "Keep Out - Great Danger".

Tesla became the first man to create electrical effects on the scale of lightning. The MT produced thunder which was heard as far away as Cripple Creek. People near the lab would observe sparks emitting from the ground to their feet and through their shoes. Some have observed electrical sparks from the fire hydrants (Tesla for a time grounded out to the plumbing of the city). The area around the laboratory would glow with a blue corona (similar to St. Elmo's Fire).

One of Tesla's experiments with the MT destroyed Colorado Springs Electric Company's generator by back-feeding the city's power generators, and blacked out the city. The company denied Tesla further access to the backup generator's feed if he did not repair the primary generator at his own expense; it was working again in a few days.

Tesla also constructed many smaller resonance transformers and discovered the concept of tuned electrical circuits. He also developed a number of coherers for separating and perceiving electromagnetic waves and designed rotating coherers which he used to detect the unique types of electromagnetic phenomenon he observed. They had a mechanism of geared wheels driven by a coiled spring-drive mechanism which rotated small glass cylinders. These experiments were the final stage of years of work on synchronized tuned electrical circuits.

These transceivers were constructed to demonstrate how signals could be "tuned in". Tesla logged in his diary on July 3, 1899 that a separate resonance transformer tuned to the same high frequency as a larger high-voltage resonance transformer would transceive energy from the larger coil, acting as a transmitter of wireless energy, which was used to confirm Tesla's patent for radio during later disputes in the courts. These air core high-frequency resonate coils were the predecessors of systems from radio to radar and medical magnetic resonance imaging devices.


On July 3, 1899, Tesla discovered terrestrial stationary waves within the earth. He demonstrated that the Earth behaves as a smooth polished conductor and possesses electrical vibrations. He experimented with waves characterized by a lack of vibration at points, between which areas of maximum vibration occur periodically. These standing waves were produced by confining waves within constructed conductive boundaries. Tesla demonstrated that the Earth could respond at pre-described frequencies of electrical vibrations.

At this time, Tesla realized that it was possible to receive power around the globe. A few years later, George Westinghouse stopped funding Tesla's research when Tesla showed him that he could offer free electricity to the whole world by simply "ramming a stick in the earth in your backyard". Westinghouse said he would go bankrupt if that happened.

Tesla conducted experiments contributing to the understanding of electromagnetic propagation and the Earth's resonance. It is well documented (from various photos from the time) that he lit hundreds of lamps wirelessly at a distance of up to twenty-five miles (40 km). He transmitted signals several kilometres and lit neon tubes conducting through the ground.

He researched ways to transmit energy wirelessly over long distances. He transmitted extremely low frequencies through the ground in his experiments and made mathematical calculations and computations based on his experiments and discovered that the resonant frequency of the Earth was approximately 8 Hz (Hertz). In the 1950s, researchers confirmed resonant frequency was in this range (interesting to note, Theta brain waves also cycle in this range).

Tesla thought his inventions could be used to talk with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. It is debatable what type of signals Tesla received or whether he picked up anything at all. Research has suggested that Tesla may have had a misunderstanding of the new technology he was working with, or that the signals Tesla observed may have been non-terrestrial natural radio source such as the Jovian plasma torus signals.

Tesla wrote that he observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio wave communications coming from Venus or Mars. He noticed repetitive signals from his receiver which were substantially different from the signals he had noted from storms and earth noise.

Tesla announced his findings in some of the scientific journals of the time. His announcements and data were rejected by the scientific community. He stated in the article "A Giant Eye to See Round the World", of February 25, 1923, that:

"Twenty-two years ago, while experimenting in Colorado with a wireless power plant, I obtained extraordinary experimental evidence of the existence of life on Mars. I had perfected a wireless receiver of extraordinary sensitiveness, far beyond anything known, and I caught signals which I interpreted as meaning 1--2--3--4. I believe the Martians used numbers for communication because numbers are universal."

Clearly, Tesla felt the signal groups originated on the planet Mars. In 1996 Corum and Corum published an analysis of Jovian plasma torus signals which indicate that there was a correspondence between the setting of Mars at Colorado Springs, and the cessation of signals from Jupiter in the summer of 1899 when Tesla was there.

Further, analysis by the Corums indicate that Tesla's transceiver was sensitive in the 18 kHz gap in the Kennelly-Heaviside layer which would have allowed that reception from Jupiter. Therefore, there is evidence the signals Tesla noticed came from Jupiter, among other possible sources. Tesla spent the latter part of his life trying to signal Mars.

It is important to recognize that when he says he "recorded" these signals, it is meant that he wrote down the data and his impressions of what he had heard.

Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900. On March 21, 1900, Tesla was granted US685012 patent for the means for increasing the intensity of electrical oscillations. The lab was torn down ca. 1905 and its contents sold to pay debts. The Colorado experiments prepared Tesla for the establishment of the trans-Atlantic wireless telecommunications facility known as Wardenclyffe.


1900-1914

In 1900, with US$150,000 (51% from J. Pierpont Morgan), Tesla began planning the Wardenclyffe Tower facility. In June 1902, Tesla's lab operations were moved to Wardenclyffe from Houston Street. The tower was dismantled for scrap during World War I.

Newspapers of the time labeled Wardenclyffe "Tesla's million-dollar folly".

In 1904, the US Patent Office reversed its decision and awarded Guglielmo Marconi the patent for radio, and Tesla began his fight to re-acquire the radio patent.

On his 50th birthday in 1906, Tesla demonstrated his 200 hp (150 kW) 16,000 rpm bladeless turbine. During 1910Ð1911 at the Waterside Power Station in New York, several of his bladeless turbine engines were tested at 100Ð5000 hp.

Since the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Marconi for radio in 1909, Thomas Edison and Tesla were mentioned in a press dispatch as potential laureates to share the Nobel Prize of 1915, leading to one of several Nobel Prize controversies. Some sources have claimed that because of their animosity toward each other neither was given the award, despite their scientific contributions; that each sought to minimize the other's achievements and right to win the award; that both refused to ever accept the award if the other received it first; and that both rejected any possibility of sharing it.

In the years after these rumors, neither Tesla nor Edison won the Prize (although Edison did receive one of 38 possible bids in 1915, and Tesla did receive one bid out of 38 in 1937). Earlier, Tesla alone was rumored to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize of 1912. The rumored nomination was primarily for his experiments with tuned circuits using high-voltage high-frequency resonant transformers.

1915-1937

In 1915, Tesla filed a lawsuit against Marconi attempting, unsuccessfully, to obtain a court injunction against Marconi's claims. After Wardenclyffe, Tesla built the Telefunken Wireless Station in Sayville, Long Island. Some of what he wanted to achieve at Wardenclyffe was accomplished with the Telefunken Wireless.

In 1917, the facility was seized and torn down by the Marines, because it was suspected that it could be used by German spies.

Prior to World War I, Tesla looked overseas for investors to fund his research. When the war started, Tesla lost the funding he was receiving from his European patents. After the war ended, Tesla made predictions regarding the relevant issues of the post-World War I environment, in a printed article.

Tesla believed that the League of Nations was not a remedy for the times and issues. Tesla started to exhibit pronounced symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in the years following. He became obsessed with the number three; he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, demanded a stack of three folded cloth napkins beside his plate at every meal, etc. The nature of OCD was little understood at the time and no treatments were available, so his symptoms were considered by some to be evidence of partial insanity, and this undoubtedly hurt what was left of his reputation.

At this time, he was staying at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, renting in an arrangement for deferred payments. Eventually, the Wardenclyffe deed was turned over to George Boldt, proprietor of the Waldorf-Astoria to pay a $20,000 debt.

In 1917, around the time that the Wardenclyffe Tower was demolished by Boldt to make the land a more viable real estate asset, Tesla received AIEE's highest honor, the Edison Medal. That year he first established principles regarding frequency and power level for the first primitive RADAR units.


Tesla received his last patent in 1928 for an apparatus for aerial transportation which was the first instance of VTOL aircraft.


On Tesla's seventy-fifth birthday in 1931, Time magazine put him on its cover. The cover caption noted his contribution to electrical power generation. By the end of 1931, Tesla released "On Future Motive Power" which covered an ocean thermal energy conversion system.


In 1934, Emile Girardeau, working with the first French RADAR systems, stated he was building RADAR systems "conceived according to the principles stated by Tesla". By the twenties, Tesla was reportedly negotiating with the United Kingdom government about a ray system. Tesla had also stated that efforts had been made to steal the so called "death ray". It is suggested that the removal of the Chamberlain government ended negotiations.

In 1934, Tesla wrote to consul Jankovic of his homeland. The letter contained the message of gratitude to Mihajlo Pupin who initiated a donation scheme by which American companies could support Tesla. Tesla refused the assistance, and chose to live by a modest pension received from Yugoslavia and to continue researching. In 1936, Tesla stated "I'm equally proud of my Serbian origin and my Croatian homeland."



Tesla made some remarkable claims concerning a "teleforce" weapon. The press called it a "peace ray" or death ray.

In total, the components and methods included:

An apparatus for producing manifestations of energy in free air instead of in a high vacuum as in the past. This, according to Tesla in 1934, was accomplished.
A mechanism for generating tremendous electrical force. This, according to Tesla, was also accomplished.
A means of intensifying and amplifying the force developed by the second mechanism.
A new method for producing a tremendous electrical repelling force. This would be the projector, or gun, of the invention.
Tesla worked on plans for a directed-energy weapon between the early 1900s till the time of his death.

In 1937, Tesla composed a treatise entitled "The Art of Projecting Concentrated Non-dispersive Energy through the Natural Media" concerning charged particle beams. Tesla published the document in an attempt to expound on the technical description of a "superweapon that would put an end to all war". This treatise of the particle beam is currently in the Nikola Tesla Museum archive in Belgrade. It described an open ended vacuum tube with a gas jet seal that allowed particles to exit, a method of charging particles to millions of volts, and a method of creating and directing nondispersive particle streams (through electrostatic repulsion).

Records of his indicate that it was based on a narrow stream of atomic clusters of liquid mercury or tungsten accelerated via high voltage (by means akin to his magnifying transformer). Tesla gave the following description concerning the particle gun's operation. The nozzle would send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation's border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.

The weapon could be used against ground based infantry or for antiaircraft purposes. Tesla tried to interest the US War Department in the device. He also offered this invention to European countries. None of the governments purchased a contract to build the device. He was unable to act on his plans.


In 1937, when he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a dynamic theory of gravity. He stated that it was worked out in all details and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. The theory was never published. At the time of his announcement, it was considered by the scientific establishment to exceed the bounds of reason. Some believe that Tesla never fully developed the Unified Field Theory.

The bulk of the theory was developed between 1892 and 1894, during the period that he was conducting experiments with high frequency and high potential electromagnetism and patenting devices for their utilization. It was completed, according to Tesla, by the end of the 1930s. Tesla's theory explained gravity using electrodynamics consisting of transverse waves (to a lesser extent) and longitudinal waves (for the majority). Reminiscent of Mach's principle.



Nikola Tesla, with Ruder Boskovic's book Theoria Philosophiae Naturalis, sits in front of the spiral coil of his high-frequency transformer at East Houston Street, New York.


Theoretical Inventions

Tesla began to theorize about electricity and magnetism's power to warp, or rather change, space and time and the procedure by which man could forcibly control this power. Near the end of his life, Tesla was fascinated with the idea of light as both a particle and a wave, a fundamental proposition already incorporated into quantum physics.

This field of inquiry led to the idea of creating a "wall of light" by manipulating electromagnetic waves in a certain pattern. This mysterious wall of light would enable time, space, gravity and matter to be altered at will, and engendered an array of Tesla proposals that seem to leap straight out of science fiction, including anti-gravity airships, teleportation, and time travel.


The single strangest invention Tesla ever proposed was probably the "thought photography" machine. He reasoned that a thought formed in the mind created a corresponding image in the retina, and the electrical data of this neural transmission could be read and recorded in a machine. The stored information could then be processed through an artificial optic nerve and played back as visual patterns on a view-screen.



Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer.


Marriage and Friends

Tesla was a life-long bachelor. Some believe Tesla was celibate and claimed that his chastity was very helpful to his scientific abilities. Nonetheless there have been numerous accounts of women vying for Tesla's affection, even some madly in love with him. Tesla, though polite, behaved rather ambivalently to these women in the romantic sense.

In 1926, Tesla commented on the ills of the social subservience of women and the struggle of women toward gender equality, indicated that humanity's future would be run by "Queen Bees". He believed that women would become the dominant sex in the future.

Like many of his era, he became a proponent of a self-imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. In a 1937 interview, he stated:

... man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct .... The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

Tesla was close friends with Mark Twain.



They spent a lot of time together in his lab and elsewhere.


Later Years - White Pigeons - Death

In his later years Tesla became a vegetarian. In an article for Century Illustrated Magazine he wrote: "It is certainly preferable to raise vegetables, and I think, therefore, that vegetarianism is a commendable departure from the established barbarous habit." Tesla argued that it is wrong to eat uneconomic meat when large numbers of people are starving; he also believed that plant food was "superior to meat in regard to both mechanical and mental performance". He also argued that animal slaughter was "wanton and cruel".


Tesla never put much focus on his finances and died with little funds at the age of 86, alone in the two-room hotel suite in which he lived the last ten years of his life in a two-room suite on the 33rd floor of the Hotel New Yorker, room 3327.


There, near the end of his life, Tesla showed signs of encroaching senility, claiming to be visited by a specific white pigeon daily. Tesla was obsessed with pigeons, ordering special seeds for the pigeons he fed in Central Park and even bringing injured ones into his hotel room to nurse them back to health. Several biographers note that Tesla viewed the death of the pigeon as a final blow to himself and his work.


He died of heart failure alone in his hotel room, some time between the evening of January 7 and the morning of January 8, 1943.

Tesla's funeral took place on January 12, 1943, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in Manhattan, New York City. His body was cremated and his ashes taken to Belgrade, Serbia, then-Yugoslavia in 1957. The urn was placed in the Nikola Tesla Museum in Belgrade.


After Tesla's Death

Tesla died with significant debts. Later that year the US Supreme Court upheld Tesla's patent number U.S. Patent 645,576 in effect recognizing him as the inventor of radio.

Soon after his death Tesla's safe was opened by his nephew Sava Kosanovic. Shortly thereafter Tesla's papers and other property were impounded by the United States' Alien Property Custodian office in Tesla's compound at the Manhattan Warehouse, even though he was a naturalized citizen.

Dr. John G. Trump was the main government official who went over Tesla's secret papers after his death in 1943. At the time, Trump was a well-known electrical engineer serving as a technical aide to the National Defense Research Committee of the Office of Scientific Research & Development, Technical Aids, Div. 14, NTRC (predecessor agency to the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence).

Trump was also a professor at M.I.T., and had his feelings hurt by Tesla's 1938 review and critique of M.I.T.'s huge Van de Graaff generator with its two thirty-foot towers and two 15-foot-diameter (4.6 m) balls, mounted on railroad tracks - which Tesla showed could be out-performed in both voltage and current by one of his tiny coils about two feet tall.

Trump was asked to participate in the examination of Tesla's papers at the Manhattan Warehouse & Storage Co. Trump reported afterwards that no examination had been made of the vast amount of Tesla's property, that had been in the basement of the New Yorker Hotel, ten years prior to Tesla's death, or of any of his papers, except those in his immediate possession at the time of his death. Trump concluded in his report, that there was nothing that would constitute a hazard in unfriendly hands.

At the time of his death, Tesla had been working on the Teleforce weapon, or 'death ray,' that he had unsuccessfully marketed to the US War Department. It appears that Teleforce was related to his research into ball lightning and plasma, and was conceived as a particle beam weapon. The US government did not find a prototype of the device in the safe.

After the FBI was contacted by the War Department, his papers were declared to be top secret. The personal effects were sequestered on the advice of presidential advisers; J. Edgar Hoover declared the case most secret, because of the nature of Tesla's inventions and patents.

One document stated that "he is reported to have some 80 trunks in different places containing transcripts and plans having to do with his experiments". Altogether, in Tesla's effects, there were the contents of his safe, two truckloads of papers and apparati from his hotel, another 75 packing crates and trunks in a storage facility, and another 80 large storage trunks in another storage facility. The Navy and several "federal officials" spent two days microfilming some of the stuff at the Office of Alien Properties storage facility in 1943, and that was it, until Oct., 1945.

Tesla's family and the Yugoslav embassy struggled with the American authorities to gain these items after his death because of the potential significance of some of his research. Eventually Mr. Kosanovic won possession of the materials, which are now housed in the Nikola Tesla Museum.

Conspiracy Theories

The truth about what the government found in Tesla's papers may never be known. Many people believe there was a cover-up. Tesla's advanced knowledge in so many fields allow one to wonder where his information came from. After WWII, technology and alien contacts/connections seemed to advance at an accelerated rate and continue on to this day. Were people like Einstein and Tesla receiving information to set things in motion for generations to come ... and did that information have a extraterrestrial link?

Bigfoot is commonly reported to have a strong, unpleasant smell by those who claim to have encountered it. The enormous footprints for which it is named have been as large as 24 inches (60 cm) long and 8 inches (20 cm) wide.

While most casts have five toes - like all known apes - some casts of alleged bigfoot tracks have had numbers ranging from two to six. Some have also contained claw marks, making it likely that a portion came from known animals such as bears, which have five toes and claws. Some proponents have also claimed that bigfoot is omnivorous and mainly nocturnal.

Scientists discount the existence of bigfoot and consider it to be a combination of folklore, misidentification, and hoax, rather than a living animal, in part because of the large numbers thought necessary to maintain a breeding population. A few scientists - such as Jane Goodall, and Jeffrey Meldrum - have expressed interest and belief in the creature, with Meldrum expressing that evidence collected of alleged Bigfoot encounters warrants further evaluation and testing.

Bigfoot remains one of the more famous examples of a cryptid within cryptozoology, and an enduring legend.


History


Before 1958
Wildmen stories are found among the indigenous population of the Pacific Northwest. The legends existed prior to a single name for the creature. They differed in their details both regionally and between families in the same community. Similar stories of wildmen are found on every continent except Antarctica. Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle argues that most cultures have human-like giants in their folk history: "We have this need for some larger-than-life creature."

Members of the Lummi tell tales about Ts'emekwes, the local version of bigfoot. The stories are similar to each other in terms of the general descriptions of Ts'emekwes, but details about the creature's diet and activities differed between the stories of different families.

Some regional versions contained more nefarious creatures. The stiyaha or kwi-kwiyai were a nocturnal race that children were told not to say the names of lest the monsters hear and come to carry off a person - sometimes to be killed.

In 1847, Paul Kane reported stories by the native people about skoocooms: a race of cannibalistic wild men living on the peak of Mount St. Helens. The skoocooms appear to have been regarded as supernatural, rather than natural.

Less menacing versions such as the one recorded by Reverend Elkanah Walker exist. In 1840, Walker, a Protestant missionary, recorded stories of giants among the Native Americans living in Spokane, Washington. The Indians claimed that these giants lived on and around the peaks of nearby mountains and stole salmon from the fishermen's nets.

The local legends were combined together by J. W. Burns in a series of Canadian newspaper articles in the 1920s. Each language had its own name for the local version. Many names meant something along the lines of "wild man" or "hairy man" although other names described common actions it was said to perform (e.g. eating clams).

Burns coined the term Sasquatch, which is used it in his articles to describe a hypothetical single type of creature reflected in these various stories. Burns's articles popularized both the legend and its new name, making it well known in western Canada before it gained popularity in the United States.


After 1958

In 1951, Eric Shipton had photographed what he described as a Yeti footprint. This photograph (see below) generated considerable attention and the story of the Yeti entered into popular consciousness.

The notoriety of ape-men grew over the decade, culminating in 1958 when large footprints were found in Del Norte County, California, by bulldozer operator Gerald Crew. Sets of large tracks appeared multiple times around a road-construction site in Bluff Creek.

After not being taken seriously about what he was seeing, Crew brought in his friend, Bob Titmus, to cast the prints in plaster. The story was published in the Humboldt Times along with a photo of Crew holding one of the casts.

Locals had been calling the unseen track-maker "Big Foot" since the late summer, which Humboldt Times columnist Andrew Genzoli shortened to "Bigfoot" in his article.

Bigfoot gained international attention when the story was picked up by the Associated Press. Following the death of Ray Wallace - a local logger - his family attributed the creation of the footprints to him. The wife of Scoop Beal, the editor of the Humboldt Standard, which later combined with the Humboldt Times, in which Genzoli's story had appeared, has stated that her husband was in on the hoax with Wallace.

1958 was a watershed year for not just the bigfoot story itself but also the culture that surrounds it. The first bigfoot hunters began following the discovery of footprints at Bluff Creek, California. Within a year, Tom Slick, who had funded searches for Yeti in the Himalayas earlier in the decade, organized searches for bigfoot in the area around Bluff Creek.

As Bigfoot has become better known and a phenomenon in popular culture, sightings have spread throughout North America. In addition to the Pacific Northwest, the Great Lakes region and the Southeastern United States have had many reports of Bigfoot sightings.


Prominent Reported Sightings


About a third of all reports of Bigfoot sightings are concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, with most of the remaining reports spread throughout the rest of North America. Some Bigfoot advocates, such as cryptozoologist John Willison Green, have postulated that Bigfoot is a worldwide phenomenon. The most notable reports include:

1924: Fred Beck claimed that he and four other miners were attacked one night in July 1924, by several "apemen" throwing rocks at their cabin in an area later called Ape Canyon, Washington Beck said the miners shot and possibly killed at least one of the creatures, precipitating an attack on their cabin, during which the creatures bombarded the cabin with rocks and tried to break in. The supposed incident was widely reported at the time.
Beck wrote a book about the alleged event in 1967, in which he argued that the creatures were mystical beings from another dimension, claiming that he had experienced psychic premonitions and visions his entire life of which the apemen were only one component. Speleologist William Halliday argued in 1983 that the story arose from an incident in which hikers from a nearby camp had thrown rocks into the canyon. There are also local rumors that pranksters harassed the men and planted faked footprints.

1941: Jeannie Chapman and her children said they had escaped their home when a 7.5 feet (2.3 m) tall Sasquatch approached their residence in Ruby Creek, British Columbia.

1958: Bulldozer operator Jerry Crew took to a newspaper office a cast of one of the enormous footprints he and other workers had seen at an isolated work site at Bluff Creek, California. The crew was overseen by Wilbur L. Wallace, brother of Raymond L. Wallace. After Ray Wallace's death, his children came forward with a pair of 16-inch (41 cm) wooden feet, which they said their father had used to fake the Bigfoot tracks in 1958.Wallace is poorly regarded by many Bigfoot proponents. John Napier wrote, "I do not feel impressed with Mr. Wallace's story" regarding having over 15,000 feet (4,600 m) of film showing Bigfoot.

1967: Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin reported that on October 20 they had captured a purported Sasquatch on film at Bluff Creek, California. This came to be known as the Patterson-Gimlin film. Many years later, Bob Heironimus, an acquaintance of Patterson's, said that he had worn an ape costume for the making of the film.

2007: On September 16, 2007, hunter Rick Jacobs captured an image of a supposed Sasquatch by using an automatically triggered camera attached to a tree, prompting a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Game Commission to say that it was likely an image of "a bear with a severe case of mange." The photo was taken near the town of Ridgway, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny National Forest.


Proposed Explanations for Sightings


Various types of creatures have been suggested to explain both the sightings and what type of creature Bigfoot would be if it existed. The scientific community typically attributes sightings to either hoaxes or misidentification of known animals and their tracks. While cryptozoologists generally explain Bigfoot as an unknown ape, some believers in Bigfoot attribute the phenomenon to UFOs or other paranormal causes. A minority of proponents of a natural explanation have attributed Bigfoot to animals that are not apes such as the giant ground sloth.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania Game Commission said that photos the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization claimed showed a juvenile Bigfoot were most likely of a bear with mange. Jeffrey Meldrum, on the other hand, said the limb proportions of the suspected juvenile in question were not bear-like, and stated that he felt they were "more like a human."

A tale presented in Theodore Roosevelt's 1892 book The Wilderness Hunter (reprinted in his 1900 book Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches) describing an encounter between two hunters and a violent bear is sometimes presented by Bigfoot proponents as historical evidence of the creature's existence.

In 2007, the Pennsylvania Game Commission said that photos the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization claimed showed a juvenile Bigfoot were most likely of a bear with mange.[41][46] Jeffrey Meldrum, on the other hand, said the limb proportions of the suspected juvenile in question were not bear-like, and stated that he felt they were "more like a human."

A tale presented in Theodore Roosevelt's 1892 book The Wilderness Hunter (reprinted in his 1900 book Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches) describing an encounter between two hunters and a violent bear is sometimes presented by Bigfoot proponents as historical evidence of the creature's existence.


Hoaxes

Both scientists and Bigfoot believers agree that many of the sightings are hoaxes or misidentified animals. Cryptozoologists Loren Coleman and Diane Stocking have estimated that as many as 70 to 80 percent of sightings are not real.

Bigfoot sightings or footprints are often demonstrably hoaxes. Author Jerome Clark argues that the "Jacko affair", involving an 1884 newspaper report of an apelike creature captured in British Columbia, was a hoax. Citing research by John Green, who found that several contemporary British Columbia newspapers regarded the alleged capture as very dubious, Clark notes that the Mainland Guardian of New Westminster, British Columbia, wrote, "Absurdity is written on the face of it."

On July 14, 2005, Tom Biscardi, a long-time Bigfoot enthusiast and CEO of Searching for Bigfoot Inc., appeared on the Coast to Coast AM paranormal radio show and announced that he was "98% sure that his group will be able to capture a Bigfoot which they have been tracking in the Happy Camp, California area." A month later, Biscardi announced on the same radio show that he had access to a captured Bigfoot and was arranging a pay-per-view event for people to see it. Biscardi appeared on Coast to Coast AM again a few days later to announce that there was no captive Bigfoot. Biscardi blamed an unnamed woman for misleading him, and the show's audience for being gullible.

On July 9, 2008, Rick Dyer and Matthew Whitton posted a video to YouTube claiming that they had discovered the body of a dead Sasquatch in a forest in northern Georgia. Tom Biscardi was contacted to investigate. Dyer and Whitton received $50,000 from Searching for Bigfoot, Inc., as a good faith gesture. The story of the men's claims was covered by many major news networks, including BBC, CNN, ABC News, and Fox News. Soon after a press conference, the alleged Bigfoot body arrived in a block of ice in a freezer with the Searching for Bigfoot team. When the contents were thawed, it was discovered that the hair was not real, the head was hollow, and the feet were rubber. Dyer and Whitton subsequently admitted it was a hoax after being confronted by Steve Kulls, executive director of Squatchdetective.com.


Scientific Community

The scientific community discounts the existence of Bigfoot, as there is no evidence supporting the survival of such a large, prehistoric ape-like creature. The evidence that does exist points more towards a hoax or delusion than to sightings of a genuine creature.

In a 1996 USA Today article titled "Bigfoot Merely Amuses Most Scientists", Washington State zoologist John Crane says, "There is no such thing as Bigfoot. No data other than material that's clearly been fabricated has ever been presented." In addition to the lack of evidence, scientists cite the fact that Bigfoot is alleged to live in regions unusual for a large, nonhuman primate, i.e., temperate latitudes in the northern hemisphere; all recognized nonhuman apes are found in the tropics of Africa and Asia. Thus, as with other proposed megafauna cryptids, climate and food supply issues would make such a creature's survival in reported habitats unlikely.

Furthermore, great apes are not found in the fossil record in the Americas, and no Bigfoot remains have ever been found. Indeed, scientific consensus is that the breeding population of such an animal would be so large that it would account for many more purported sightings than currently occur, making the existence of such an animal an almost certain impossibility.

A few scientists have been less skeptical about the claims of the existence of sasquatch. Jeffrey Meldrum characterizes the search for Sasquatch as a valid scientific endeavor and says that the fossil remains of an ancient giant ape called Gigantopithecus could turn out to be ancestors of today's commonly known Bigfoot.

John Napier asserts that the scientific community's attitude towards Bigfoot stems primarily from insufficient evidence.

Other scientists who have shown varying degrees of interest in the legend are anthropologist David Daegling, field biologist George Shaller, Russell Mittermeier, Daris Swindler, Esteban Sarmiento, and discredited racial anthropologist Carleton S. ****.

Jane Goodall, in a September 27, 2002 interview on National Public Radio's "Science Friday", expressed her ideas about the existence of Bigfoot. First stating "I'm sure they exist", she later went on to say, chuckling, "Well, I'm a romantic, so I always wanted them to exist", and finally: "You know, why isn't there a body? I can't answer that, and maybe they don't exist, but I want them to.

However, the vast majority of evolutionary biologists, anthropologists and paleontologists completely dismiss the possibility of the existence of sasquatch.

Yeti - Abominable Snowman



The Tibetan name for the Abominable Snowman, a humanlike monster whose tracks have been discovered in the frigid lands of perpetual snow in the Himalayan regions of India, Nepal, and Tibet. According to locals, the Yeti is but one of several unidentified creatures that inhabit the highlands of southern Asia.

Several sightings, mainly of footprints, have been reported by westerner explorers throughout the years.


Yeti Timeline

1832 - B.H. Hodson,the U.K. representative in Nepal, described a hirsute creature who reportedly had attacked his servants. The natives called the beast "rakshas," which means "demon." This was the first report of the Yeti made by a Westerner.

1889 - British army major L. A. Waddell found what he took to be large footprints in the snow on a high peak northeast of Sikkin. His bearers told him that these were the tracks of a man-like creature called Yeti, and that it was quite likely to attack humans and carry then away as food.

1913 - A group of Chinese hunters reportedly wounded and captured a hairy man-like creature, that the locals soon named the "snowman". This creature was supposedly kept captive in Patang at Sinkiang province for a period of five months until it died. It was described as having a black monkey-like face and large body covered with silvery yellow hair several inches long; it's hands and feet were man-like and the creature was incredibly strong.

1914 - J. R. P. Gent, a British forestry officer stationed in Sikkim, wrote of discovering footprints of what must have been a huge and amazing creature.

1921 - Members of a British expedition (led by Col. Howard-Bury) climbing the north face of Mount Everest sighted some dark figures moving around on a snowfield above them. When the explorers reached the spot, at some 17,500 feet, the creatures were not there but had left behind some huge, humanlike footprints in the snow.

1923 - Major Alan Cameron, with the Everest Expedition of that year, observed a line of huge and dark creatures moving along a cliff face high above the snowline. Pictures of the creatures' tracks were taken two days later, when the expedition reached the area where they were seen.

1925 - A Greek photographer and member of the Royal Geographical Society named N. A. Tombazi glimpsed a creature he later described as "exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull some dwarf rhododendron bushes." Tombazi, who was at about 15,000 feet up in the mountains, later reached the spot where he sighted the creature, only to also find some intriguing tracks in the snow.

1936 - An expedition led by H. W. Tilman found strange footprints in the snow by the outer reaches of the snowline on the slopes approaching Mount Everest.

1937 - Returning from a campaign in Tibet, British explorer Frank Smythe relayed several reports of strange hairy wildmen made by the native Sherpas and Tibetans. He also claimed to have personally seen tracks of the creature at the 14,000-foot level.

1938 - The Yeti emerges as creatures of kindness and sympathy according to the story of Captain d'Auvergne, the curator of the Victoria Memorial near Chowringhee in Calcuta. The Captain claims that, injured while traveling on his own in the Himalayas and threatened with snow-blindness and exposure, he was saved from death by a 9 foot tall creature resembling a pre-historic human which, after carrying him several miles to a cave, fed and nursed him until he was able to make his way back home.

1942 - Slavomir Rawicz best selling book, The Long Walk published in 1952, telling how he and six friends escaped from a Siberian war camp and made their way to freedom in India by crossing the Himalayas describes an encounter with two 8 foot tall creatures somewhere between Bhutan and Sikkim. According to Slavomir, he and his companions watched the outsized beasts for over 2 hours, from a distance of 100 yards.

1948 - Norwegian uranium prospector Jan Frostis claimed he was attacked by one of two Yetis he stumble upon near Zemu Gap, in Sikkim. His shoulder was badly mangled and he required extensive medical treatment to recover from his lesions.

1949 - A Sherpa named Tenzing claimed to have seen playing in the snow near a monastery. This was the same Sherpa that shared the fame of Sir Edmund Hillary in the first successful ascent of Mount Everest.

1950 - A patch of skin and a mummified finger and thumb were found in the Himalayan mountains. Zoologists and anthropologists considered the fragments to be "almost human" and "similar in some respects to that of Neanderthal man" even though they could not be associated to any known living species.

1951 - The Everest Reconnaissance Expedition (organized to evaluate routes for an attempt to ascend Everest) encountered fresh tracks at 18,000 feet. During the following months, several additional sightings of Yeti tracks were reported.

1953 - New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay spot giant footprints during their conquest of Mount Everest.

1954 - The London Daily Mail's financed expedition (originally to hunt and catch a live Yeti) examined some supposedly 'authentic' Yeti scalps, but determined that these were mostly fakes made out of from animal skin; a small handful of them proved to be intriguing though, and zoologists were unable to link them to any known animals. The expedition also found footprints and droppings that, when analyzed, proved to contain both animal and vegetable matter.

1955 - Frenchman Abb Bordet followed three separate trails of footprints that belonged to an unknown creature.

1957 - Texas oilman Thomas Slick sponsors a Yeti hunt. His expedition came back solely with reports made by Nepalese villagers that five people had been killed by severe battering from Yeti over the preceding four years.

1958 - An American scientist working in Katmandu (Nepal), Dr. Norman Dyrenfurth, reports to have explored caves that were at some time inhabited by a type of "very low grade of human or near human creatures", presenting documentation and physical evidence in the form of hair samples, plaster casts of footprints, and discarded food scraps. Also in 1958 a Dr. Alexander Pronin reports seeing the creature while he was in the Pamirs (a unique high mountain complex located primarily in Tajikistan).

1960-61 - The Himalayan Scientific and Mountaineering Expedition also found some unusual tracks in the snow.

1970 - After hearing a strange noise near Mount Annapurna in Nepal, mountaineer Don Whillans tracks and watches a strange humanoid creature for about twenty minutes through his binoculars before it lumbers away.

1978 - Lord Hunt photographed Yeti tracks.

1986 - Climber Reinhold Messner reported a close-up sighting of an Yeti as it came into sight from behind a tree.

1992 - Julian Freeman-Attwood and two other men camping at a secluded spot on a remote glacier in Mongolia reported finding an unusual trail of heavy footprints one morning on the snow outside their tent, definitely made by a creature larger and heavier than a human.

1998 - American climber Craig Calonica, on Mount Everest, reported seeing a pair of yetis while coming down the mountain on its Chinese side. Both had thick, shiny black fur, he said, and walked upright.

Sasquatch



Bigfoot's Canadian counterpart, known by its Salish Indian name meaning "hairy man."

Allegedly sighted for centuries, descriptions vary from being a creature at least eight feet tall, long powerful arms, thick hair and a foul smell, to being a semi-clothed, tool carrying hominid supposedly of "man" height.

Another names by which is known, depending on the North American region, are Arulataq (Alaska), Grassman (Ohio), Momo (Missouri), Oh-mah (California), Old Yellow Top (Ontario), Skunk Ape (Florida), Windigo (Quebec), Woods Devil (New Hampshire), Wookie (Louisiana), Nuk-luk, Nakani (North West Territories) or simply Bushman.

Windigo



Huge mysterious human-like creature, allegedly living in the forests of Quebec. According to Indian legends, the creature "goes naked in the bush and eats Indians, and makes a sinister hissing noise, often accompanied by fearful howls, to strike terror into the hearts of everyone who hears it."

Florida Skunk Ape



The Florida Skunk Ape is supposedly a seven-foot-tall gorilla-like creature said to resemble the legendary Abominable Snowman. Witnesses in the Florida Everglades have claimed to have spotted the red-haired Bigfoot, known locally as a Skunk Ape because of its appalling smell. The National Parks Service dismisses the stories as a hoax, but American tribes that live in the swamps insist it is real.

Yowie



Also known as Yoser, Tjangara, Yay-ho, Koyoreowen (southern Australia), Jimbra, Jingera, Turramulli, and Lo-an (western Australia). Yet another cousin of the Bigfoot, this time from down under. Reports of a Sasquatch like creature are also numerous throughout Australia, ever since European settlers first entered the continent. Before the coming of the settlers, Yowie sightings were made by the Aborigines and remembered in their folklore.

An earlier name for the creature was 'Yahoo', which according to some accounts was an aborigine term meaning "devil", "devil-devil" or "evil spirit." More likely, the indirect basis for the name was Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver's Travels book (1726) includes a subhuman race named the Yahoos. Learning of the aborigines' fearful accounts of this malevolent beast, nineteenth-century European settlers in all probability applied the name Yahoo to the Australian creature themselves. The term "Yowie" stared to be used in the 1970's, apparently because of the aborigine word 'Youree', or 'Yowrie', apparently the legitimate native term for the hairy man-monster. One can easily assume the Australian accent could distort "Youree" into "Yowie."

Sightings of the Yowie take place mostly in the south and central Coastal regions of New South Wales and Queensland's Gold Coast. In fact, according to local naturalist Rex Gilroy, the Blue Mountain area west of Sydney is home to more than 3,200 historical sightings of such creatures. In December 1979, a local couple (Leo and Patricia George) ventured into the region for a quiet picnic. Suddenly, they came across the carcass of a mutilated kangaroo; moreover, said the couple, the apparent perpetrator was only forty feet away. They described a creature at least ten feet tall, and covered with hair, that stopped to stare back at them before finally disappearing into the brush.

Mapinguary



Or Mapinguari. Also known as Isnashi. Brazil's Bigfoot, described as a tall black-furred hominid usually seen in the jungles along the 'Rio Araguaia', a large river in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

Ape-like creatures have been reported in many areas of Brazil for over two hundred years, but it seems that this central area of this immense and diversified country is the 'hotspot' for them.

In March and April of 1937 one of these creatures supposedly went on a three week rampage at Barra das Garas, a small farming town 300 miles southeast of the city of Cuiab‡, capital of the central state of Mato Grosso do Sul. A large number of heads of cattle were slaughtered by somebody or something with super-human strength, enough to torn out their huge tongues. Reports included unconfirmed sightings, humanoid-like tracks as long as 18 inches, and horrible roaring from the woods. All together, over one hundred heads of yellow cattle of old Spanish origin were killed, all the way to Ponta Branca, located 150 miles south of Barra das Garas. This Mapinguary rampage made the major newspapers in Rio de Janeiro and S‹o Paulo.

Other reports from South America describe the Mapinguari as a large foul smelling nocturnal animal, covered in red hair and with a frightful screaming cry. This other version of the legendary creature is supposedly a strict vegetarian, with feet that are turned backwards and claws capable of ripping apart the palm trees it feeds on. Other local names for this type include 'capŽ-lobo' (wolf's cape), 'm‹o de pil‹o' (pestle hand), and 'pŽ de garrafa' (bottle foot).

According to old Indian, 'seringueiro' (rubber tree worker) and 'caboclo' (local mixed race people) legends, the Mapinguary was a man whose hubris led him to seek immortality and who is now relegated to wandering the forest forever as a stinking, shaggy, one-eyed beast. Fifteen feet tall and with hair so thick it makes it invulnerable to bullets, swords, knifes, arrows and spears, the creature loves tobacco and twists off the upper skulls of its human victims so as to suck up their gray matter. But its most freaky feature is its 'extra mouth' in the middle of its belly! When it feels threatened, it lets out a truly vile stench -something like commingled garlic, excrement, and rotting meat -from this second mouth, which, the Indians say, is strong enough to suffocate any attacker. Because of this despicable odor, the creatures are often followed by clouds of flies, and the strongest warriors are forced to flee from the smell of the monster alone; others find themselves dazed and sick for days after an encounter.

Because of such reports, legends and descriptions, a small number of naturalists believe that these are surviving specimens of the giant ground sloth, Mylodons, generally assumed to have died out around ten thousand years ago. They were red-haired vegetarians that emerged about 30 million years ago and roamed the Americas, the Caribbean, and Antarctica. With large claws that curled under and faced backward when they walked on all fours, these giant marsupials could also stand on their hind feet like people. Some species had dermal ossicles, bony plates that made their skin very tough.

Maricoxi



South America's Bigfoot -- Ape-like creatures have been reported in many areas of South America, and they go by many different names, depending on the region. Some of these names are:

Aluxes, Goazis and Guayazis (dwarf-like man-faced animals).

Aigypans and Vasitris (evil man-like beasts).

Matuyus and Curupiras (wild men with their feet pointing backwards, which supposedly help the wild animals and are defenders of nature and ecology).

Curinqueans (giants measuring twelve feet tall).

Di-di or Didi, Mono Grande and the Mapinguary (Sasquatch-like creatures).

Since the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish in South America, a steady stream of reports about bestial and dangerous sub-humans have filtered out of the hinterland. None is more compelling than the one made by Colonel P. H. Fawcett, made world famous by his dramatic and still unexplained disappearance with his eldest son in this area. The Colonel's diaries were preserved up to his last fatal expedition, and published by his son, Brian Fawcett, under the title 'Lost Trails, Lost Cities'. In it, the Colonel describes an encounter in 1914 with a group of enormous hairy savages that, although looked very primitive, were carrying bows and arrows. Apparently these wild men could not speak, but just grunt, and upon arriving their village, the Colonel and his group were on the verge of being attacked, barely avoiding capture or death by firing their guns into the ground at the ape-men's feet, who then fled in terror.

Yeren




An alleged mysterious creature, half-human, half-ape, allegedly living in the remote forests of central and southern China. It is also known as Yeren and Xueren (also the name of like creatures in the Philippines)

The creature is said to stand an average of six and a half feet tall and to be covered in thick brown or red hair. It is bi-pedal and has a hefty abdominal region as well as an ape-like muzzle, large ears and eyes like that of a human, leaving behind large footprints, up to sixteen inches long, with five toes, four small toes held close together and a larger toe that points outward slightly.

According to Chinese folklore, the creature eats people. Coming across a human, it grips his or her arms tightly, making escape impossible. It is apparently so overjoyed by trapping its prey that it faints with mirth - but without losing its hold. When it returns to its senses, it kills and eats its victim. Thus travelers in the mountains were advised to wear a pair of hollow bamboo cylinders on their arms. If a Wildman caught them, they could then, while the creature was in swoon, slip their arms out of the cylinders and escape. Reports of the creature go back to as far as 2000 years.

Almas



Also Almasty and Albasty. Strange apelike creatures allegedly resembling Neanderthal man that reportedly live in the Caucasus Mountains, in the republic of Kazakhstan, central Asia.

In the Caucasus, Almas (which in the Mongolian language means 'wildman') are well known by the local people, who tell numerous stories of an apparent familiarity between humans and these creatures. Eyewitness accounts dating back hundreds of years describe Almas communicating with humans by means of gestures. There were even stories of Almas bartering food for trinkets.

Adult Almases have been described as being at least 5 ft tall, shy, hairy, with prominent eyebrow ridges, a receding chin and a jaw that protrudes out.

Other names by which these creatures are known, depending on the particular region, are 'Wind-Man', Abnuaaya, Bekk-Bok, Biabin-Guli, Gul-Biavan, Guli-Avan, Golub-Yavan, Kaptar, Kra-Dhan, Ksy-Giik or Ksy Gyik, Mirygdy, Mulen and Voita.

Almas Timeline

1420 - The first known printed reference on the Almas was made by a Bavarian named Hans Schiltberger. He traveled through the Tien Shan mountains as a captive to the Mongols. During his imprisonment he kept a journal in which he wrote:

"In the mountains themselves live a wild people, who have nothing in common with other human beings, a pelt covers the entire body of these creatures. Only the hands and face are free of hair. They run around in the hills like animals and eat foliage and grass and whatever else they can find. The Lord of the Territory made Egidi a present of a couple of forest people, a man and a woman, together with three untamed horses the sizes of ***** and all sorts of other animals which are not found in German lands and which I cannot therefore put a name to."

1807-1867 - Sightings reported at Khalkha, the Galbin Gobi and Dzakh Soudjin Gobi as well as in Inner Mongolia; also at the Gourban Bogdin Gobi, Chardzyn Gobi and the Alachan desert.

Mid 1800s - A wild reddish-black hair covered woman with both mongoloid and negroid features, dark skin, broad body, large hands and feet and a sloped forehead, was allegedly captured in the western Caucausus region of Abkhazia, and given the name Zana or Zanya. According to accounts, she was very physically powerful, able to perform feats of exceptional strength. While in captivity, Zana was passed on through a succession of owners, including noblemen, and mothered several children (she was reputed to have a fondness for wine, which supposedly played a role in her pregnancies). According to the story, she had as many as 6 offspring, by different men. Of these, the first 2 perished, due to Zana washing them in cold water after birth. The other 4 survived with the help of the local village women, who took care of the children. They were fairly normal, except for being dark and physically powerful, and grew up accepted among the villagers. Each of these children reproduced and allegedly had descendants throughout the region, up to nowadays. Zana died sometime in the 1880s.

1881 - As almost to confirm Hans Schiltberger's journal, a Russian named Nicholai Przewalski rediscovered the horses the sizes of ***** and called them, of course, the "Przewalski horses"; he also reported seeing 'wildmen' in Mongolia in 1871.

1906 - Badzare Baradyine, while on a caravan at the desert of Alachan, reports seeing an "hairy man standing on the top of a sand dune, outlined against the sunset." After being approached by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society's president and asked not to publish the incident, Badzare complies, but relays the information about his sighting to a personal friend, Mongolian professor Tsyben Zhamtsarano, who in turn begins a lengthy and determined investigation of the Almas.

1907-1940 - Professor Tsyben Zhamtsarano compiles eyewitness' acounts and recruits an artist to draw the likeness of the Almas based on the gathered descriptions. He also plots sightings locations and dates on a map of the region. After being imprisoned in Russia for a number of years, the professor dies in 1940. His files vanish, and are rumored confiscated by the authorities.

1937 - Dordji Meiren, an associate of Professor Zhamtsarano, reports seeing a carpet made out of a hide of an Almas, being used by lamas at their monastery in ritual ceremonies.

1941 - A Russian unit fighting the Germans in the Caucasus near Buinakst is asked by some partisans to look at an unusual prisoner. According to the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Vargen Karapetyan, the captive 'man' was naked, hairy, and covered with lice; he obviously didn't understand speech and appeared to be dim-witted, blinking often; he was evidently afraid, but made no attempt to defend himself when Karapetyan pulled hairs from his body. He was kept in a barn, because, as the partisans explained, in a heated room he stank and dripped sweat. Not wanting to get involved, Karapetyan told the partisans to do what they wanted with the prisoner. A few days later he heard that the prisoner had escaped, but according to a later report made by the Ministry of the Interior in Daghestan, the 'wild man' had been executed as a deserter after being court-martialed.

1963 - Ivan Ivlov, a Russian pediatrician, sees a family of manlike creatures consisting of a male, female and a small child, standing on a mountain slope. Ivlov observed the creatures through field glasses for some time before they vanished behind a jutting rock. Ivlov's Mongol driver also sees the creatures and assures him they are common in the area.

1964 - Russian historian Boris Porshnev visits the place where Zana had reportedly lived. Several centenarians (Caucasus people are noted for their longevity) claimed to have known her and to have attended her funeral. Dr Porshnev also meets a couple of the alleged descendants (her grandchildren) of the wild woman, and wrote of the episode:

"From the moment I saw Zana's grandchildren, I was impressed by their dark skin and negroid looks. Shalikula, the grandson, has unusually powerful jaw muscles, and he can pick up a chair, with a man sitting on it, with his teeth."

During the next few years, Porshnev and a colleague tried to find Zana's remains in the Genaba (the family name of her descendants) graveyard, and although they found the vaguely Neanderthaloid bones of what they speculated was one of her children, they never discovered the remnants of the Almas herself.

1972 - An unnamed Russian doctor met a family of Almas, according to British anthropologist Myra Shackley, who adds that their "very simple lifestyle and the nature of their appearance suggests strongly that Almases might represent the survival of a prehistoric way of life, and perhaps even of an earlier form of man. The best candidate is undoubtedly Neanderthal man."

1985 - Maya Bykova, an assistant to Dr Boris Porshnev (yes, the same one from 1964) at Moscow's Darwin Museum, is reported to have actually observed a hominoid of unknown identity, a creature nicknamed by the ethnic Mnasi people as Mecheny, or "marked," because of the the whitish skin patch seen on its left forearm, the only part of its body not covered by red-brown hair.

Meh-Teh



Another Hymalayan name for Yeti. The Meh-Teh ("man-beast") is a type of Yeti supposedly proportioned more like a hairy heavy set man (but it leaves a most unhuman type of footprint), and the Dzu-Teh like a gigantic ape-man. Another type of Yeti (pygmy size) is called Teh-lma.

The Meh-Teh is allegedly a very bestial and shy type of hairy hominid, with a animal-like behavior and thick reddish-brown to black fur, a conical head, stout neck, wide mouth with no lips, and long arms which reach almost to its knees, supposedly inhabiting the Tibetan upper plateau forests. Its five-toed feet are short and very broad, with a second toe longer than the big toe.

Chimiset

lso known as Chimiset, Chimisit (these, like Chemosit, mean 'devil' in the region's folklore) and Nandi Bear (after a Kenyan tribe), it is considered by some to be Africa's Bigfoot, although its description varies from those of sasquatch-like creatures.

Reports of the creature are numerous in the dark continent, specially in east-central Kenya. It is described as being as large as a man, long reddish to yellow hair, short broad tail, sometimes going on four legs, sometimes on two, and a general appearance of a huge, very fierce baboon. It is said to be as comfortable on the tree tops as it is on the ground, and to attack humans on sight, allegedly being responsible for several killings of men and live stock. According to some tales, it is specially fond of brains.

Other names by which the creature is known, depending on the part of Africa, are Duba (the Swahili and villages along the Tana river), Kerit, Shivuverre (Kakumega country, Kenya), Kikomba (West Africa), Koddoelo (Ngao state, Kenya), Sabrookoo (Kenya/Uganda frontier), Engargiya (Uganda), Gadett (Lumbwa district, Kenya), Ngoloko (Tanzania), Kikambangwe and Ikimizi (Ruanda).

Chuchunaa



Chuchunaa is Siberia's Bigfoot. The Chuchunaa (outcasts or fugitives) were reported by a branch of the Soviet Academy of Science as recently as the 1950s in the bitterly cold and forbidding region of northeast Siberia, who speculated that they might represented the last surviving remnants of paleo-asiatic aborigines that retreated to the upper reaches of the Yana and Indigirka rivers.

These people are said to have an extremely limited range of oral sound. This may have been a genetic mutation - or is it an indication of these people's Neanderthal origin?

The Chuchunaa are described as being very tall with a protruding brow and long matted hair, usually sporting some type of animal skin covering. Locals swear he is a man-eater. Recent reports suggest that they have withdrawn to even more remote areas away from encroaching civilization.


Higabon

Japan's Sasquatch. Sightings of a Bigfoot like creature are also reported in the Japanese islands, specially in the Hibayama mountains in Hiroshima. Another local names for the Higabon are Kappa and Mu-Jimi

Nguoi Rung



The Nguoirung is also known as the Vietnamese Wildman, or "Forest People". Appearance and legends are similar as for the Wildman of China; it is described as being approximately six feet tall and completely covered with hair except for the knees, the soles of the feet, the hands and the face. The hair ranges in color from gray to brown to black. The creature walks on two legs and has been reported seen both solitary and moving in small clans.

Along the Laotian border the beast is called Khi-Trau, meaning "buffalo monkey" or "big monkey".


Orang Pendek

Also Orang-Pendek (Little Man) and Orang Letjo (Gibbering Man).

Sumatra's Sasquatch. Other local names include Gugu, Sedapa, Sedabo and Atu. They are said to stand between three and five feet tall (a few reports describe slightly taller specimens), to be covered with short dark hair, with a thick, bushy mane going halfway or farther down the back, and to have a smooth, hairless brown face.

Witnesses frequently mention the Orang-Pendek's startlingly humanlike appearance, thus its name. Sightings have been reported for centuries on Sumatra, but what is considered to be the first modern sighting happened in 1916, described in an article by Dr. Edward Jacobson. He stated that, while camped near the base of Boekit Kaba mountain, some of his scouts sighted the creature. He also claimed to have found some footprints at Mount Kerintji.

Local folklore tells that these creatures walk with backward-pointing feet, to confuse anyone daring enough to track them. The local Kubu tribespeople also claim that unless tobacco was left for them at night, the Sedapas would go on the rampage, screaming and yelling as they destroyed the natives' camp.