Paranormal Magazine

Exploring the world of the unexplained

Jazz Publishing

Google – Close encounters of the logo kind

Thursday, September 17th, 2009

What the heck is happening at Google? With UFO sightings on the search home page and ‘unexplained phenomenon’ the most searched for phrase this weekend, speculation about an alien abduction is mounting.

ufo-google-logo1.jpg

The Internet has been buzzing with rumour this weekend, ever since a UFO apparently tried to abduct the second ‘o’ in the Google logo. There’s not been this much anorak conspiracy theory since the Ministry of Defence released classified UFO sighting files a year ago.

Google likes to play around with the logo that appears on the search engine’s home page, changing it to reflect celebratory events in different locations around the world. Indeed, Google even employs an official logo designer in the shape of Dennis Hwang.

However, there is usually a fairly obvious reason for the novelty logo: chocolate dipped strawberries replacing the second g and l in the name for Valentine’s Day or an interlocking brick design to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Lego for example.

Which is why the appearance of that UFO abducting the second ‘o’ in the Google logo, which apparently coincides with no religious celebration, historical event or anything else for that matter, has caused such a stir. Well that, and fact that aliens also interrupted the Google Twitter stream.

On Saturday morning a coded message was posted on the official Google Twitter account which not so simply read: 1.12.12 25.15.21. 18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19 and which has been decoded, apparently, to become “all your O are belong to us”.

Obviously this is a publicity stunt for something or other, but for the answer as to exactly what it looks like we are going to have to wait a while. Could it be an alien conspiracy movie or book launch and mark some kind of marketing tie in? Maybe it is a strange way of showing support for Gary McKinnon ?

Who knows? The only thing we can say for sure is that the mystery is set to deepen over the coming weeks. Yes, weeks. This one is going to run and run if this official statement from Google is anything to go by:

“We consider the second ‘o’ critical to user recognition of our brand and pronunciation of our name. We are actively looking into the mysterious tweet that has appeared on the Google twitter stream and the disappearance of the ‘o’ on the Google homepage. We hope to have an update in the coming weeks.”

And the follow-up UFO encountering Google logo:

crop-circle-logo.jpg

[via itwire.com by Davey Winder]

Bad Science was pure gold!

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Few things irritate me as much as sceptics who deride our ancestors’ belief that the sun moved around the earth, that swallows hibernated in mud at the bottom of ponds, or that alchemists could transform base metals into gold.

mark-greenerConsider our ancestor’s perspective: the sun seems to travel across the sky; the idea that swallows, which weigh just 25 grams, could fly 200 miles a day to winter in South Africa seems preposterous; and while chemists often regard alchemists with the affection that we attach to endearingly eccentric great aunts, it’s worth remembering that many of the greatest minds of their time believed in the transmutation of metals, including St Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon and Isaac Newton.

F Sherwood Taylor, an eminent historian of chemistry, notes in his superlative book The Alchemists that alchemy arose from a theory, formulated by Aristotle, that there was only one type of matter, which was capable of infinite forms.

Taylor notes, ‘it follows that no material change is impossible, though some changes cannot take place directly’. A horse doesn’t spontaneously transform into a lion, he remarks, but if a lion eats a horse, matter loses its horse ‘form’ and takes on that of the lion. As the remains decay, the horse matter gains the form of, say, a maggot. Alchemists aimed at the demise of the form of copper and the matter’s resurrection in the form of gold.

Some attempts to transform matter’s form seemed to work. When heated with brimstone, copper loses its metallic form. Taylor explains why: the reaction between sulphur and copper produces a black mass of copper sulphide. Reacting copper with alum, acids and certain arsenic compounds produces alloys that ‘were white, lustrous, and much like silver in appearance’.
Around the late 13th century, the Arabic alchemist Abu’l-Qāsim al’Irāqī noted that heating lead for a long time yields small quantities of silver. We know – although medieval Arabs did not – that lead ore contains silver. Alchemists produced yellow alloys of copper with tin, lead, zinc, iron, silver and mercury. Taylor comments: ‘Though we must doubt if any goldsmith ever took any of these to be gold, their yellow colour must have given hope that success was near.’

Alchemists did not benefit from sophisticated chemical theories or high-tech analysis. They couldn’t tell – beyond the appearance and basic physical properties – whether they’d made a precious metal. So when they created a lustrous metal ‘much like silver’ when they altered the colour and properties of copper, it must have seemed that they had changed the form of matter. Many modern scientists placed in the same alchemical laboratories, furnished with the same chemicals, supported by the same Aristotelian theory, would probably come to the same conclusion.

Whether you see the earth going around the sun or the sun circumventing the earth depends largely on the theories you’re taught. New evidence, experimental techniques and insights continually refine scientific theories. Eventually, old theories become anachronisms. We now know the earth orbits the sun.

Scientists have no right to be complacent. Three-quarters of the energy that cosmologists predict should be in the universe is invisible (so-called dark energy), for example. I can’t help feeling that future sceptics will regard many of today’s scientific theories as just as quaint as chemists consider alchemy to be.

As Sherlock Holmes comments in The Sussex Vampire: ‘One forms provisional theories and waits for time or fuller knowledge to explode them.’

by Mark Greener

Mark Greener is an award-winning freelance journalist specialising in health and bioscience. Mark is a former research scientist who has written widely on his life-long passion: cryptobiology. He’s the author of nine books and his features have appeared in magazines worldwide. He lives between Cambridge and Ely and keeps a sharp look-out for the Fen Tiger but has sadly never even seen a footprint.

Curiouser and curiouser

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

I remain boggled by the vast wealth of weirdness that exists or has existed in every culture throughout the world.

RichardHolland2This issue I have been introduced to the extraordinary ‘draugr’ of medieval Norse belief. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that a gently drifting lady in white or a spectral chanting monk wouldn’t be enough to spook a Viking. Oh no. It’s not enough to go ‘boo’ to Eric Bloodaxe or Snarrl the Mighty (who I’ve just made up). They’d just chortle through their beards – before getting very, very angry.

The idea of a Viking ghost is a much more visceral and vastly more terrifying entity than the rather self-effacing spooks we’re used to today: an animated corpse grown to twice human size, with super strength and a violent, vengeance-fuelled temper. Imagine the Incredible Hulk but with blue skin, wielding an axe and clawing its way out of a tomb and you get some idea of how a draugr would appear. (Now have a nice cup of tea to calm yourself down).

These horrors feature in more than a few Norse sagas, mainly from those of ancient Iceland. They make their startling debut in Paranormal thanks to a new writer for the magazine, Thomas Polkinghorne, to whom we are most grateful for scaring us silly.

Meanwhile, several of our established writers are planning to outdo themselves in uncovering the most bizarre entities from other cultures around the world today. Richard Freeman, who has already done a good job in suggesting that the Philippines harbour the strangest spooks (see last issue) is now preparing an article encouraging us to think the same of Brazil. Richard’s colleague, Jon Downes, is planning to highlight the nightmarish beings said to haunt Puerto Rico, an island he knows well through carrying out several long-term investigations there.

But I’m pleased to say the Dr Karl Shuker is taking up the cudgels on behalf of good old Blighty by seeking to come up with his personal Top Ten of the weirdest entities ever seen on these shores.

Karl’s current article on the Witchie Wolf and other mystery canines of the Americas is also full of fascinating material, while Nick Redfern helps to underline the high strangeness to be encountered in the USA with his article highlighting that most paranormal of states, Texas. We also journey to Italy for a tour of surely one of the most mystical cities in the world, Turin, a place where the forces of good and evil are said to meet.

The UK holds its own as ever this issue, with ghosts reported from Cornwall, Hampshire, the Scottish borders and elsewhere, to say nothing of Janet Bord’s review of her favourite fairy-haunted sites.

And looking down on all of us, the world over, is the Moon – a place that may not be so lifeless and barren after all, but the possible centre of the entire UFO enigma.

All in all, this issue would tempt me to say ‘It’s a funny old world’, if that cliché were not so hopelessly inadequate.

Richard Holland, Editor

Tell the editor about your own experience with the paranormal. Email: editor@paranormalmagazine.co.uk or write to Richard Holland, The Editor Paranormal Magazine, Jazz Publishing, The Old School, Higher Kinnerton, Chester CH4 9AJ. Or submit your story through the EXPERIENCES section on our website by clicking HERE

Subscribe to newsfeed:RSS icon

ON SALE NOW