Call it birth defect or wish of the Almighty, a goat with six legs, four testicles and three penis will be spared from holy sacrifice on the occasion of Id-ul-Juha (Bakrid) this year.

While the black-coloured goat, barely one-year-old and weighing around 10 kg, is all set to attract attention during the goat exhibition prior to the festival, the owner of the goat has ruled out any chances of sacrifice of the unique goat on the auspicious day.

"This goat is a gift of God and the sacrifice of such a goat is not allowed in Islam," said Sher Mohammed, the owner of the goat, while talking to TOI on Sunday. "The goat can be displayed during Bakrid exhibition, but sacrifice of the goat is strictly prohibited," he added.

Saying the goat was born with six legs, four testicles and three penis a year ago, the owner adds it can walk freely and normally like other goats. "It faces problems in defecating and urinating, as discharge of urine is witnessed after frequent intervals from different penis. But still, it is a special goat that attracts attention of people," he added.

His neighbour Sarfaraz maintained that such a goat was rare in the city and had not been witnessed till date in any parts of the region. "I have seen goats with the name of Allah or the holy number 786 on their bodies, but a goat with six legs is definitely unique and special," he said.

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The adventures of Robert Bigelow continue. He first popped up on our radar when he set-up the NIDS, which researched cattle mutilations, became the official repository of black triangle reports and bought Skinwalker Ranch. They appear to have shut down operations but it soon emerged that he was funding MUFON''s investigations into UFO encounters. Now we hear that he has bought the HBCC UFO Research site which has been collecting UFO accounts and producing reports summarising activity, and they have been doing well in recent years.

Here is the announcement from previous owner Brian Vike:

As many of you know, I have retired from actively running the HBCC UFO websites so that I may spend more time with my family and the things that I enjoy. I appreciate all the support you have given me over the years and I have an announcement to make. Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies (BAASS), administered by Robert T. Bigelow, has purchased the HBCC UFO websites. BAASS will investigate, analyze and periodically publish updates of UAP cases that the public submits. Please continue to serve our community well and support the HBCC UFO websites by submitting your reports as you have in the past.

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The simplest, and most generous, reading is that it is good to see Robert Bigelow putting some of his billions to use supporting researching into fringe areas. However, given his previous activities, which includes working with leading members of The Aviary, his continuing landgrab is a cause for concern. Not enough for people to not submit to the site (the more information brought to light the better) but enough for me to be very interested in finding out what Bigelow will do next. If it involves the Humanoid Sighting Reports, then we should be worried.

A month ago, I discussed the problem that there was no reason for the aliens people report visiting them to have the same basic bauplan as us, something I've touched on before. This topic has recently being getting some high profile attention because of a debate about the evolution of aliens involving leading Creationist-botherer Richard Dawkins:

What are the odds that intelligent, technically advanced aliens would look anything like the ones in films, with an emaciated torso and limbs, spindly fingers and a bulbous, bald head with large, almond-shaped eyes? What are the odds that they would even be humanoid? In a YouTube video, produced by Josh Timonen of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, I argue that the chances are close to zero

What's interesting is that it sparked a debate with Dawkins who points to the dinosauroid. Unfortunately, that is a flawed thought-experiment, that doesn't have much bearing on this question, as it relies on the having a bipedal, bisymmetrical animal as a starting point, which you can't guarantee on other worlds.

The late astronomer Carl Sagan, in a Planetary Society debate with Mayr (Bioastronomy News, Vol. 7, No. 4, 1995), noted that technologically communicating species “may live on the land or in the sea or air. They may have unimaginable chemistries, shapes, sizes, colors, appendages and opinions. We are not requiring that they follow the particular route that led to the evolution of humans. There may be many different evolutionary pathways, each unlikely, but the sum of the number of pathways to intelligence may nevertheless be quite substantial.”

Thus, the probability of intelligent life evolving elsewhere in the cosmos may be very high even while the odds of it being humanoid may be very low. I strongly suspect that we are blinded by Protagoras’ bias (“Man is the measure of all things”) when we project ourselves into the alien Other.

As graylien has pointed out, the idea that human evolution would end up with a spindly hairless figure with a big head owes more to Lamarck and Wells (helped by pulp sci-fi and poor special effects) than anything we have found out about evolution in the 100 years since then.

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Professor Joaquim Fernandes has done extensive research on the Fatima apparitions, resulting in the books of the Fatima Trilogy. His studies underline he importance of going back to the original sources, as well as trying not to be led by any belief system (although some might argue he has just stumbled into another one).

Q: Did you find any kind of surprises there?
 
A: The main surprise was that the extraordinary events could not have been invented. In our opinion they occurred in fact. But as more of the original documents emerged the more the events were mimetic of the ufological phenomena. Another surprise was the certification that Canon Formigao had modified the first historical description of the Fatima “Lady”: a little girl with a skirt to her knees he changed to an adult lady with a long and shining skirt. We also discovered that the image that the people can see today ay the Sanctuary was inspired by an old image of the previous cult of Senhora da Lapa Lady. But, more surprising was finding witnesses that described the so-called “Sun Miracle” as a “disk-like metal object” with equidistant lights in the periphery, like the classical hard daylight UFO cases.

...

Q: Do you plan to continue looking for new clues to the Fatima events?
 
A: We keep always in our minds the urgency to rethink religious personal experiences, like the “Marian apparitions” as a syndrome that calls for a deeper and deeper interest and research to find its origins and ways of expressions as a part of the Extraordinary Human Experiences in its totality. So, the different scientific disciplines and other cultural paranormal approaches must give attention to this aspect of popular religion. Also, we urge the experimental and theoretical experts to look at these rich documents that we think can be a good exercise to discover and understand how our brain and spirit can be stimulated to surpass the ordinary limits of human perception, “tuning” new extensions of the consciousness.

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As there are parallels with UFOs, are these actual flying saucers? I've mentioned Fatima in relation to electric clouds and the links with clouds seen at other BVM sightings, something I expand on in Darklore 2. No clear answer presents itself, but I do suspect that both TLAs are not only describing the same phenomena (as seen in these examples) but they are both wide of the mark.

Books

Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science
Amazon.co.uk
Amazon.com

The sighting of an "alien" by a councillor in Winchester was a great story with a good Old School feel to it (you just don't get kooky aliens like that as much these days) and luckily it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon:

A Hampshire councillor has made a bizarre video claiming that aliens are secretly walking the planet.

Adrian Hicks posted the 27-minute speech on the Internet.

He addresses a shady organisation called Majestic which he alleges is made up of scientists, military officers and politicians tasked with making contact with extra terrestrials following a UFO crash in 1947.

The 52-year-old Liberal Democrat is calling for the unelected group, which he says has links to both the UK and US governments, to come clean and tell the public about the existence of aliens.

...

 Cllr Hicks, of Granville Place, Wharf Hill, said: “Majestic’s success in protecting mankind from the shock that we are far from alone in the universe has been completely successful.

“For the past 60 years the subject has been shrouded in secrecy. The magnificent job they have done in keeping from us, the ordinary citizens, that we are not alone, is in itself a truly remarkable achievement.

“An organisation that started small but is now colossal, its dilemma is when to formally announce that extra terrestrial contact has been established.”

In some ways we can see he is on a similar journey to Whitley Strieber (and David Icke) - he has had a strange experience and is on a journey to find and answer to it, even if that search can take him into some odd conspiracy quagmires.

However, he should be very careful as he is buying into some rather dubious theories with extremely rocky provenance. In fact, it can be seen how nicely the UFO mythos works as a disinformation tool. There are important questions politicians can be asking about the governments role in studying UFOs, but he is pretty much hosing any credibility down the drain.

Source (video)

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We often deal with stories that are pretty depressing and, as the title suggests, this is one of them and it comes from the new centre of human wonder, China:

Medics are caring for an abandoned two-headed baby dumped in an irrigation ditch by his mother.

Police in Hanzhuang, central China, found the hours-old infant after reports of a baby crying in the middle of the night.

Doctors say the tot has one fully formed head and another, smaller, head with only partially formed features.

The second head includes eyes, a nose, mouth and ears but has no body.

Carer Yuan Xianrong - in charge of the baby's well-being until his mum is found - said: "He is completely healthy except for his two heads. It's too early to talk about surgery yet.

"But it is amazing that he survived after being dumped in the ditch. It was filled with rubbish and mud and old water.

Of course, we can also look on the bright side - not only is it a rare birth but pretty miraculous survival and he seems to be healthy. Equally, the extra head doesn't seem fully formed, which should make separation easier - the main complications come when the blood vessels run through the thickened skull bones at the juncture.

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We have looked at UFOs being sighted in the Cannock Chase area as part of the local oddities and it looks like the blighters haven't gone again:

Halloween saw the return of alien spacecraft in our skies, according to yet another bewildered Cannock resident.

The recent spate of other worldly sightings show no sign of diminishing, and now a Longford man and his sceptical wife can be added to the band of converts.

The man, who does not wish to be named said, “It was incredible, I saw them on Halloween night clear as anything, hovering over the Longford estate. They disappeared, but were soon back at around 9pm.

“I can only describe them as balls of orange light, that were there one minute and nowhere to be seen the next.”

Suggestions that once again these supernatural sightings were merely Chinese lanterns have been rubbished by our witness.

“I wouldn’t have bothered taking photos and telling everyone what I saw if I thought they were lanterns.”

What’s more, Saturday night was not the first encounter. Our spotter has confessed to seeing the UFOs three weeks prior to the Halloween sightings.

“This is the third time I have seen the lights, there were about six of them on Saturday, hovering at about 60 foot over the houses, I was gobsmacked.”

Of course, a more obvious answer would be fireworks being let off my naughty sorts getting excited ahead of Bonfire Night (if the wind was blowing in the wrong direction you might not hear the bangs) - I know people round here have been setting them off for weeks. That said fire lanterns also might be an obvious one and I'm afraid his explanation that he wouldn't have taken photographs of them if they were fire lanterns doesn't seem rock solid logic - you have taken photographs of an Unidentified Flying Object, so they could be a fire lantern (unless one automatically jump to the conclusion it is a flying saucer, as our witness seems to have done). Of course, a bit of lightweight reporting would be nice - as the lights are seen over some houses on the estate, so why not ask around to see what they were up to? Too much to ask?

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Often witchcraft cases are real eye-openers, but this story is more than enough to surprise even those with the most jaded of palettes:

Corporal Rogers reportedly told the Lumley Police that during the late hours of Saturday 24th October 2009, he was driving home when he came across an attractive young lady standing at the junction of Blue Bell along Spur Road in the west end of the city.

He reportedly decided to give the lady a ride. According to Lumley Police sources, the Corporal proposed to take the lady to a hotel; a request that the lady reportedly rebuffed and suggested that her house would be fine.

The lady reportedly introduced herself as Mabel Sesay, and skillfully led the officer to her home.

On arrival, Mabel left the officer in her room, and returned minutes later only for her to allegedly hit her guest with a stick on his face. The corporal is also quoted to have told the police that the lady mysteriously blew a heavy wind from her mouth on his face.

Griped with fear, the Corporal reportedly dashed out of the house shouting at the top of his voice for help.

By the time the neighbours intervened, the lady had already transformed herself to a teenage boy.

I think most of us are stroking our chins thinking that is possibly the world's worst excuse for being caught with a boy, except the boy has claimed that is exactly what he was doing for some impressively odd reasons:

Fifteen years old Yusiff Kamara confessed to the Awareness Times at the Lumley Police Division that he became a member of a cult group since he was three years old. According to him, he was introduced to the group by his father, Samuel Kamara, adding that he now holds a very senior position in the group. The boy furthered that his mission is to spiritually transform himself into a woman to hunt men who go after prostitutes at night for sexual purposes. The sperm of his victims, he continued, is gathered and submitted to the Cultic Head, who, according to the boy, is residing in the Atlantic Ocean. He said the victim will afterwards be faced with severe hardship, troubles, diseases and ill-luck for the rest of his life.

One might suspect that the confession was coerced or he is delusional or covering up for being a rent boy, as this can't be true, can it? The Cultic Head lives in the Atlantic? Really?

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We should be getting used to tales of marine horrors, having seen a boat in danger of being sunk by randy flying fish on David Attenborough's Life this week, coming (if you'll excuse the pun) hot on the heels of a 20ft shark washing ashore with a dirty great big bite taken out of it (presumably from a larger, harder shark). Pity nature didn't get the memo, serving two sea monster stories within days of each other, the evil, old bitch:

A 10-ton fishing boat has been sunk by gigantic jellyfish off eastern Japan.

The trawler, the Diasan Shinsho-maru, capsized off Chiba`as its three-man crew was trying to haul in a net containing dozens of huge Nomura's jellyfish.

Each of the jellyfish can weigh up to 200 kg and waters around Japan have been inundated with the creatures this year. Experts believe weather and water conditions in the breeding grounds, off the coast of China, have been ideal for the jellyfish in recent months.

...

One of the largest jellyfish in the world, the species can grow up to 2 meters in diameter. The last time Japan was invaded on a similar scale, in the summer of 2005, the jellyfish damaged nets, rendered fish inedible with their toxic stings and even caused injuries to fishermen.

Relatively little is known about Nomura's jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures.

Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish.

Source

Carrying the remains of a roughly 30-foot (9-meter) giant squid in her jaws, a female sperm whale, with a calf at her side, swims near the surface off Japan's Bonin Islands (map)in the northwestern Pacific. Taken on October 15, this and other "absolutely sensational" new pictures offer rare proof of the sperm whale's taste for giant squid, said giant squid expert Steve O'Shea of the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.

The pictures may also reveal that adult sperm whales, which grow up to 59 feet (18 meters) long, use pieces of their prizes to teach youngsters how to catch their own, O'Shea told National Geographic News.

...

The whale almost certainly carried the giant morsel up from the dark depths of the nearby Osagawara Trench, a favorite hunting ground of sperm whales. The whales routinely dive for an hour or more to depths of up to 3,280 feet (1,000 meters) in pursuit of giant squid, which are thought to rarely venture higher than 1,000 feet (300 meters) below sea level.

Battles between giant squid and sperm whales often leave the whales scarred with sucker marks. Until recently, such wounds--along with analysis of sperm whale stomach contents--were the only proof of the whales' appetite for giant squid. 

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Earth's oldest living inhabitant, Methuselah, is a bristlecone pine nearly 3,050m (10,000ft) up in California's white mountains. It was found in 1957 and is reckoned to be 4,768 years old - so it would have been a seedling when the pyramids went up. A much older pine, known only as WPN-114, was cut down in 1964 by a geography student! Another ancient is Wonderboom, a 1,000-year-old willow leaf fig tree found in South Africa and the world's heaviest known organism - thanks to a massive root system - is an aspen colony named 'Pando' in Utah.

Britain has some record-breaking trees such as the Yew found at Shugborough Hall, Staffs that has a canopy the width of the Albert Hall. There's also Britain's tallest tree, a Stronardron Douglas fir found in the grounds of Dunster Castle, West Somerset. In High Wycombe, locals are still left baffled by the Shoe tree, something which seems to be a common-place theme in the USA.

Previously on CoW, we saw a tree that you can milk and also a tree that has apparently developed a taste for the rest of the cow, the pili mara or Tiger Tree. There are also trees that grow in strange places and fairy doors discovered in trees which leads me finally onto the Elfin Oak, found in Kensington Gardens - a 900-year-old oak stump. Teeming with elves and animals carved during the late 20s/ early 30s, during the 1990s a campaign to preserve and restore the oak for future generations was lead by the late, great Spike Milligan.

As part of the build up to the release of The Men Who Stare at Goats in Blighty The Guardian has published a number of articles including one from Mark Pilkington. He looks at the myths the military have cultivated, something he deals with in greater length in his upcoming book Mirage Men: UFOs, Disinformation and the Making of a Modern Myth (something I'm wetting myself to read). In the piece he touches on some topics I've talked about before:

imaginary weapons can be just as powerful as real ones. If a potential adversary claims to have its hands on advanced military toys, you can't afford to ignore them. At the very least you will expend considerable amounts of time and money finding out if the claims are true. You may also try to build one yourself. Meanwhile, the effect of these dream weapons on civilian and military morale can be devastating.

Leading to his top 5 military myths and in at #3 is remote viewing (a big topic I'll be returning to later):

The US army and CIA experimented with psychics from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s. The psi-war began in the early 1970s as news of Soviet psychical research, combined with rumours of Uri Geller's abilities in Israel, reached America. The leaked Soviet research was possibly disinformation intended to waste US time and resources. However, some of the project's early psychics did appear to demonstrate feats of anomalous cognition, unless this was disinformation too. Over 20 years the programme's budget was approximately $20m, suggesting that it was considered a marginal operation at best.

This raises the worrying possibility that disinformation is generating projects that themselves may also be largely disinformation (leading to wild and wasteful feedback loops which hoovers up a lot of funding).

And at #1 is:

Back in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative was hyped as the ultimate defensive weapon, a missile shield impervious to Russian ICBMs. Unfortunately it didn't work but, thanks to devious technological sleight-of-hand, the Pentagon made sure that SDI's trial by television was a spectacular success. An impoverished Soviet Union couldn't hope to keep up the pace of the arms race and its sense of defeat was a contributing factor in the end of the cold war.

I looked at this before and it formed part of my piece in Darklore 3, The picture that emerges suggests we might be seeing the biggest Big Con in history and one that might have saved the world. I was led to this through SIGMA, the current group of science fiction writers working with the US government. The fact that the US military are one of a number of groups interested in creating/manipulating belief systems means it is an area that warrants further investigation.

Of course, the thing that set my radar pinging over the SDI was the involvement of Robert Heinlein, who had also come up on my radar over the Philadelphia Experiment (the core of the DL3 article). One of the possible explanations for the Philadelphia Project is that it was the proof-of-concept for the idea that you don't need a superweapon you just need people to think you've got one. Robert Heinlein brought together a team of sci-fi writers at the Philadelphia Naval Yard (essentially recreating the Manana Literary Society on the West Coast) to brainstorm ideas to help with the War in the Pacific. Why it was later dusted of, weaponised and deployed against Morris Jessup (or how it leaked out) is far from clear but there is shifty behaviour attached to it throughout its history (and not the kind you'd expect over a secret, as everyone, including the Navy, seemed to have been trying hard to make sure it got out - not something that would happen with an actual secret weapon or the ramblings of a crank).

It seems like these military myth makers may have been at work for a long time.

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The man who paid the Men Who Stare at Goats

In related news a slightly older article looked at the links that go from 911 to the Men That Stare at Goats (and also take in Uri Geller and The Council of the Nine too):

The man who owned the flight school that taught Mohamed Atta to fly got rich selling his insurance company, we have learned, to the man who PAID “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

Wally Hilliard’s links to American intelligence go back (at least) to November of 1981, when his insurance company, Wisconsin Employer’s Group, was bought out by Myron Du Bain, a World War II OSS/CIA operative and the Chairman of Fireman's Fund of San Francisco.

...

But only recently did we learn that Myron Du Bain’s life-long ties to the CIA included two stints at the helm of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI),  famous for its classified research into psychic viewing. the results of which are currently on display in “The Men Who Stare at Goats.”

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Also on conspiracy front the Debris Field point us to a review on Amazon which points out that Stare goats is an anagram of OS (Occult Services) Stargate. Then again so does the book.

A strange story emerges from Fiji, where a man has been burning footprints in the grass he walks on (like I do when I step on consecrated ground). However, there is no obvious cause and nothing in the local legends, leaving everyone more mystified than frightened:

Mr Nadiri said it happened the previous week on Wednesday when he went to his farm to tend to his cows.

The ground he walked on were seen scorched the next morning leaving footprints leading from his house to the farm.

He said on Thursday, villagers were talking about the strange footprints which had turned brown.

...

Last week, police visited him on Tuesday and the ground he walked on during the interview was also affected.

The next day, Mr Nadiri said he followed the footsteps he took during the interview and noticed the same kind of footprints.

The grass had withered and turned brown in colour.

...

He said he didn't step on any chemical before walking to his farm to check on the cows.

Mr Nadiri said if he had stepped on chemicals, his feet would have been affected.

He said there were no traditional links or history related to his mysterious footsteps.

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Well it has been a while since The End is Nigh 3 but here comes TEIN 4, with a lovely cover from Defoe artist Leigh Gallagher:

I've got a piece in it on the gathering storm that is global warming (and the dangers of trying to fix it with geoengineering), as well as summarising odd 2012 news and looking at the signs we might already be on the Road to the Rise of the Machines. However, there is a lot of goodies in there - as the cover shows the lead article is on the dangers of flu in all its sneaky forms and there is a JG Ballard tribute with input from Alan Moore and Iain Sinclair

You should be able to order it from the official site.

Werewolves are one of the most commonly reported phenomena in Britain, of which the Cannock werewolf is the most famous (or is it something weirder?). Now a special Halloween fieldtrip on the Wrexham-Flintshire border has uncovered reports of a werewolf going back decades:

I am standing on a playing field in the village of Cymau on the Flintshire-Wrexham border with renowned supernatural writer and editor of Paranormal Magazine Richard Holland.

We are next to a small playing area and behind us is thick undergrowth beneath a line of trees.

A few years ago on this very spot, a group of youngsters from the area witnessed something very strange indeed and – as Richard’s research revealed – they are not the only ones to have seen what some described as a werewolf.

“A group of friends were up here one evening,” Richard explained.

“It was just beginning to get dark when they heard a crashing in the undergrowth. What they saw, they described as a dishevelled man hunched over an animal.

Because of the light it was almost silhouetted and one of them described it as a werewolf.

“Whatever it was, they took one look at it and ran. They went back the next day and they saw that the nettles had been flattened so something had been there.”

Richard might have dismissed the tale were it not for a similar story he had heard some years earlier.

“What interested me was that I suddenly remembered that somebody had told me something similar that had happened in Abermorddu, just down the road.

"It was in the early 80s, this chap and his girlfriend were near the school there when they saw what they described as a caveman.

"They ran and it had chased them across the fields. It came to mind because they too had mentioned this dishevelled appearance.”

But that wasn’t all.

“Then I remembered another completely separate story that somebody else had told me about something that happened in Caergwrle in the late 80s,” he continued. “A group of people were up in the woods near Caergwrle Castle.

Although they didn’t see anything they were really spooked because they could hear the vegetation crashing really loud as though trees were being knocked down and it was getting louder like whatever it was, was coming towards them.

“Anyway, they didn’t hang around to find out what it was, they legged it out of there.”

This is great as it isn't that far from me and could be good place to start with my plan to become a professional Monster Fighter. I have had my offer to fight a Colossal Squid accepted but they are creatures from the abyss, so even if you find one at the surface they don't last long and it is a long flight to New Zealand (and then I'd be jetlagged and not on fighting form - only expect to get a few digs in but I want them to be good punches). If there was a werewolf report I could be there in an hour or so and I also stand a better chance of kicking the tar out of it.

They also raise another point:

"There have been increasing reports about something termed the ‘British Bigfoot’, particularly around Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, the local papers around there report a sighting almost every week.

“There’s no conceivable way any big animal, other than a deer could live there, but people have been seeing things there all the time

We've touched on this before - there is really nowhere for any one of these big beasts to hide on the Chase, In fact, better explanations are that they are werebeasts (able to go back to their human lives) or zooforms (animal-shaped tulpas. However, we'd need to eliminate simpler explanations first like misunderstandings (in one of the cases mentioned above nothing is actually seen and the others are only brief glimpses, easy to mistake a tramp for something more sinister in those circumstances) and we have to take into account dodgy reporting (as crops up over Cannock Chase).

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Transubstantiation is one of those core principles of Catholicism - water into wine, that kind of thing. But the Eucharist into heart tissue? Actual heart tissue? It'd certainly put an overly-literal, even Sam Raimi-like, spin on my years of wafer-gobbling. Hell I might start going again!!

The Catholic Church in Poland is investigating claims of a miracle after a piece of communion wafer was reported to have been transformed into human heart tissue after falling into water during a mass.

In an incident that has generated a storm of publicity in devout Poland, Professor Maria Sobaniec-Lotowaska, of the medical university in Bialystok, has dumbfounded sceptics by saying she considered the material found in the container as heart tissue.

But her findings have already been dismissed by other scientists. "The professor saw what she wanted to see.

She is very religious," said Prof Lech Chyczewski, a blood specialist. "In order to rule out any doubts, it would have been necessary to carry out molecular and genetic testing."

Pawel Grzesiowskia, a leading biologist from the National Medical Institute, has attributed the miracle to nothing more than bacteria growing on the small piece of wafer, which fell into a water container during a mass in the eastern village of Sokolka.

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More on the bacteria angle, which has been thought to be the cause of earlier Eucharistic miracles:

biologist, Pawel Grzesiowski says that what was found in the church was the serratia marcescens bacteria.

“This bacteria does not require much – it needs moisture and a temperature not higher than 30 decrees Celsius,” says Dr. Grzesiowski director of the Contagious Diseases Unit at the National Medicines Institute. He added that the host most likely got a damp in the tabernacle where it was stored after the mass.

The s. marcescens bacteria is commonly found in bathrooms and feeds off of starch and sugary substances. It manifests itself as a pink, slimy substance.

The bacteria has been mistaken for a miracle before. Scientists now attribute the miracle declared by Pope Urban IV when ‘blood’ appeared on the Eurcharist in 1264 to have been the bacteria.

Source

If there are any further tests I'll update this - granted the outcome might seem obvious, but tests of the Miracle of Lanciano have suggested it is heart tissue. Which might suggest that, just when we think it is over, it sparks another round of claim and counter-claim.