Founded in 1877, P2 or Propaganda Due was an irregular lodge formed as part of the Grand Orient of Italy. It had few members until Licio Gelli came to power and drastically expanded its membership within one year to over a thousand. Gelli was a former fascist, having been a “black shirt” in Mussolini’s government, and served as a liaison between Mussolini’s government and the Third Reich. Essentially setting the P2 Lodge up as a shadow government for Italy along fascist lines in the 60′s and 70′s, Gelli’s Lodge included four Cabinet Ministers, all three heads of Italy’s intelligence organizations, forty eight members of parliament, hundreds of military officers, and the cream of the crop of Italy’s industrialists, bankers and diplomats. In addition, he developed high level contacts outside of Italy as well, most notably meeting with Alexander Haig, and contacts with Henry Kissinger and the CIA.

The death of Aldo Moro and the Argentine Military Junta

P2 and Licio Gelli were implicated in a roundabout manner with the death of Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978. Kidnapped by the communist revolutionary group The Red Brigades, Moro was held hostage for over a month until the group concluded that the government would not negotiate. They shot Moro and dumped his body between the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party and Moro’s Christian Democrat Party as a symbolic political gesture. The Italian Chief of Intelligence, a P2 member, was accused of nearly criminal gross negligence in the case, due to his failure to determine where Moro was being held, perhaps orchestrated by P2 to discredit the communists at large and remove the roadblock they posed to a return of fascism in Italy.

Gelli spent some years after the fall of Mussolini’s government in Argentina, and claimed to be a close friend of Argentine President Juan Perone. Several members of Argentina’s military junta government were found to be P2 members, including an interim president. The effect this group had on Argentina’s government is not clearly understood, but it further illustrates the international reach of P2.

You can’t run the church on Hail Marys

The most notable of the group’s known activities involved the Vatican at very high levels. Roberto Calvi, nicknamed “God’s Banker”, headed the doomed Banco Ambrosiano that was investigated in 1981 of breaking the law when a whopping $27 million had left Italy in violation of currency transfer laws. Also accused of laundering money for the Mafia, the Banco Ambrosiano collapsed into bankruptcy in 1982. Calvi had clear connections with Licio Gelli, which led to the discovery of P2 and its infamous list of members. Very heavily invested in Banco Ambrosiano was the Vatican Bank, then headed by Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, who in an attempt to increase the finances of the Holy See, entangled himself with Calvi and his illicit activities – and presumably those of the Lodge – ultimately fleeing Italy to avoid prosecution to Sun City, Arizona where he died in 2006 under the protection of his Vatican passport. The Vatican had to pay over $250 million in settlement to Banco Ambrosiano’s creditors, and In response to the allegations brought against him, Archbishop Marcinkus famously remarked in 1986 “You can’t run the church on Hail Marys”. It is thought that much of the plundered funds from Banco Ambrosiano went to members of P2.

The strangest aspect of the Vatican Bank Scandal is how Calvi died. In 1982 he was found hanging from London’s Blackfriar’s bridge, his death was determined to be a murder, but most interestingly the P2 organization had often used the nickname “The black friars”.

The End of P2

A commission by the Italian Parliament outlawed secret organizations, even though they couldn’t prove much against most of the P2 Lodge. Most of the prominent members of the organization came out unscathed, and continue to affect Italian politics.

Licio Gelli spent time in prison for his connections with the Banco Ambrosiano crash, but he was paroled, and brought up on charges again. He disappeared the night before he was to report to prison, before being arrested in France. He spent several years in prison, but is now under house arrest for health reasons.

Nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996, Gelli has defended P2 as having the ultimate goal of a neofascist state that would consist of authoritarian democracy, even going so far as to state that Berlusconi’s government was implementing the ideals of the organization.

P2 remains the only case where a criminal organization in the form of a black Masonic group had become the shadow government of a nation, standing poised to mold the government into a neo-fascist state, only to be completely exposed through its financial activities. The list of prominent members is truly frightening in its power, and a defacto mission statement was also found that described nothing less than the takeover of Italy. Former members still hold power in Italian politics, and a new conspiracy conceived in 1990 has come to light designed to bring about the secession of the island of Sicily from Italy. Once again, this plot seems to have involved Licio Gelli along with the government of Libya, and the Sicilian Mafia. Does P2, perhaps in some new form, still lurk in the shadows of Italian Politics?

Theaters beneath the earth

The city of Paris is one of the most romantic places on earth. Couples stroll – in the sunlight – on the champs-elysees completely unaware that an entire world exists below their feet. Underground Paris is easily as interesting as its counterpart above. Miles of catacombs exist under that city that contain nothing but stacks upon stacks of human remains. In the late 1700′s, Paris’ churchyards were full from centuries of death. Thousands of skeletons were disinterred and moved to the caverns under the city, but the workmen didn’t just toss the bones into the darkness. They added an artistic flare to this world of the dead by arranging the bones in macabre designs and even adding a sign stating “Stop, this is the Empire of the Dead”. Tourists now visit the Paris catacombs by the busload, but during the after-hours other groups take to the depths. In 2004 a society known as “The tunneling Mexicans” was found to be using the catacombs as a cinema, complete with projection equipment, an extensive library of film noir, a fully stocked bar, and a restaurant. Taunting the police claiming that there are thousands of other such areas and activities in the catacombs, the group somehow managed to retrieve their equipment and apparently moved somewhere else beneath the streets of Paris to watch their movies.

In the heart of America lies a cavern beneath the streets of St. Louis that served as a playground for a very wealthy family. Originally a natural cave, this subterranean world was first used by the Lemp Brewery as a beer cooling cave in the days before refrigeration. The Lemp Mansion, now a bed and breakfast prolifically haunted by the Lemp family, was located nearby, so it wasn’t long before the family began using the cave’s cool environment for recreation. They built a small private theater in the cave, along with a swimming pool. The Lemp’s went broke during prohibition, resulting in a number of suicides within the family, and the cave found new life in the 1950′s as a tourist attraction. Eventually, the cave was partly collapsed during the construction of an interstate, and the rest of it sealed. Beneath the streets of St. Louis still lies Lemp’s playground, inaccessible and rotting quietly a century after its heyday, perhaps also haunted by the Lemp family.

Continuity of Government

Not surprisingly, governments are among the most avid users of underground caverns. In the UK, in Wiltshire, a cold war-era bunker served to ensure that the British government would survive a nuclear strike. Totaling 35 acres, the complex was designed to house 4,000 people including the cabinet, a number of civil service workers (most of whom had no idea they had a place there, due to the top secret nature of the bunker), and domestic staff. Underground roads in the bunker are set up in a city grid pattern, lined with everything that could possibly be needed including a hospital, offices and even a pub. The facility was finally decommissioned a few years ago, in light of the end of the cold war.

The US government has multiple bunkers to ensure continuity of government. Cheyenne mountain is the most public of this, a facility built by hollowing out a mountain, but others exist including “Site R”, an underground bunker used by Dick Cheney during the  9/11 attacks. Another is Mount Weather in Virginia, a poorly understood and enormous facility designed to house key parts of the government, in case of a national emergency. Since 9/11, this facility has seen drastic increases in funding and support. No doubt many other such facilities exist, but are kept entirely secret.

For the enthusiast of the subterranean, decommissioned bunkers are available for sale that they can call home. Former nuclear silo’s, going multiple stories into the ground, can be had for a price and turned into huge and luxurious living spaces. Unfortunately, they tend to be located in the middle of nowhere, and require huge amounts of money to renovate, but none the less if you really want to live under the earth, you too can become a resident of the underground.

Constantine I and a Sign from God

Constantine I “The Great”, Emperor of Rome from 307 to 337 A.D. inherited a troubled empire. Plagued with typical leadership struggles, Rome was also suffering from rebellion, war and increasing weakness. In the conflicts of the tetrarchy, or four emperor system, Constantine was able to maintain a level of neutrality that eventually put him in a position to gain power over the entire empire. But he would have to fight for it. On October 28, 312 A.D. Emperor Constantine met Emperor Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge crossing the Tiber River outside the walls of Rome and fought a battle colored on both sides by the supernatural.

Maxentius had prepared Rome for a lengthy siege, filling it with stores of food and fortifying it to the point that he should have been able to resist Constantine’s attack indefinitely. This tactic had already served him well against two other contenders for the imperial throne. At the last moment, however, following a seemingly good omen that the battle would take place on the anniversary of his accession, Maxentius chose to meet Constantine in open battle. One could say that this stands as a fine example of why one should not pay attention to omens.

Constantine, on the other hand, received something much stronger than an omen. On October 27, the day before the battle, he looked to the sky and saw the chi rho symbol emblazoned in light above the sun along with the words “By this sign, you shall conquer” written in Greek. Later that evening, in a dream, Christ appeared to him and explained that the symbol should be painted on his shields and standards, and with that he would achieve victory. He did as instructed, and victory was his. He continued to use the symbol on the standards of his solders during his battles with yet another emperor, Licinius, until Constantine would eventually become sole Emperor of the Roman Empire. The symbol is still in widespread use today, particularly in Roman Catholicism.

The Vision of Pope Pius V and the Battle of Lepanto

On October 7, 1571 Pope Pius V, during a meeting with a group of cardinals, abruptly stood up and opened a window before staring motionlessly outside. Some time later, he turned, dissolved the meeting and ordered everyone present to give thanks to God for the victory of the Christian fleet against the Turks. No one knew what he was talking about, and needless to say the incident was so unexpected that the Vatican treasurer noted it in the minutes of the meeting. Two weeks later, word came to Rome that a combined fleet of Italian and Maltese ships commanded by Don Juan of Austria had triumphed over the Turks at the battle of Lepanto. One of the largest naval battles in history, it happened precisely at the date and time of the Pope’s vision. One wonders if anyone bothered to tell him, since he apparently already knew.

Napoleon Bonaparte in Prophesy

Alessandro di Cagliostro was a rather flamboyant 18th century prophet. Hated by the Catholic Church, imprisoned by the French for fraud, and temerarious enough to give himself the title of Count, Cagliostro is normally the type of man to disregard as a charlatan. Except that he was often right, particularly when talking about the future French revolution. At a masonic meeting in Paris before the revolution, Cagliostro delighted his listeners with predictions about France using a form of numerology involving numbers associated with letters in names. He predicted the death of Louis XVI, and claimed this would happen before August 23, 1793. He predicted that Marie Antoinette would waste in prison before being beheaded. He predicted that the Princesse de Lamballe would escape imprisonment and the guillotine, but die on the Rue des Ballets. The prediction was true, she died at that very place, cut to pieces by a mob after being released from prison. All of the other predictions also came true, and when asked about the end of the revolution, he consulted the numbers again and said that a Corsican would be elected and would take the powers of the King, but with a new title. When asked his name, he replied that it would be Napoleon Bonaparte.

In 1812 Napoleon pressed a campaign into Russia that would ultimately prove disastrous for the Grand Army of France. Initially, things went well, but the turning point began outside a small village called Borodino. Absent was Napoleon’s typical military genius, seemingly due to a fever that he was suffering from, and the battle evolved into a very expensive affair estimated to have cost the lives of 30,000 French and 45,000 Russians. In the end, the Tsar’s forces retreated, allowing Napoleon to take Moscow but this would be the last battle where the French were on the offensive. Before the battle, the wife of Russian general Count Toutschkoff had been the recipient of a recurring dream in which she saw herself at an inn, where her father and small son stood before her and told her that her husband had fallen at Borodino. She told her husband, and they frantically looked for the town on a map, which they could not find. Soon after, staying in an inn some miles from the battlefield at Borodino, her dream became reality exactly as it had been in her dream.

Henry IV and Montezuma

King Henry IV of England thought he would die in battle. A zealous crusader, he dreamed of conquering the holy land and returning it to christian control. Affairs at home delayed his crusade, however a prophecy made to him years earlier claimed that he would die in Jerusalem, a prediction which he took very seriously. Extremely ill through most of his reign, he defiantly told those around him that he couldn’t die in England, as he still had not yet set foot in Jerusalem. As his health declined and death seemed near, he was brought to a room in the home of the Abbot of Westminster. He asked if the room in which he lay had a name. He was told that it was called the Jerusalem chamber, after which he promptly died.

Shakespeare made the Jerusalem prophecy famous in his play “Henry IV” , but more recently historical events foretold by obscure prophecy would be brought into the public eye by Mel Gibson, in his film “Apocalypto”. While not the most historically accurate film, it does detail some of the events that would lead to the final fall of the Central American civilizations, including that of the Aztecs. The Aztec Emperor Montezuma was himself an astrologer, and very in tune with prophecy. Prophesies about the end of their world had existed for centuries, some of them telling of men in strange armor with white beards who would destroy them. Another King, Nezahualcoyotl, had prophesied years before the arrival of the Spanish that tribulation and the destruction of the old order would soon come, heralded by omens. Montezuma may have taken all of this too seriously, as some claim that he believed that Cortes’ arrival in 1519 was the return of Quetzacoatl, a god linked to astrology. The predicted catastrophes were fulfilled as famine ravaged the land. A ceremony designed to light a new fire at the beginning of a new cycle of time, perhaps with the hope of starting over, was disrupted by the worst type of portent; a solar eclipse. An earthquake followed, and then a prominent meteorite was seen to fall. Montezuma himself had a vision of men conquering his lands who were riding deer. Perhaps he was really seeing horses which he had never seen before. Then a comet hung in the skies over the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and finally came the arrival of Spanish who would destroy their civilization.

History is full of visions and prophecies that seem to have accurately foretold the future. Some may be folktales, invented after the fact to embellish a story, but some are much more difficult to explain. Either way, they are fascinating reminders that prophecy and humanity go hand in hand.

SETI, or the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, is an effort designed to detect evidence of alien species. Dedicated mainly to finding radio waves from an intelligent extra-terrestrial source, the various SETI programs so far have not provided any proof of aliens. Except maybe once. On August 15,1977 a signal was detected by Dr. Jerry R. Ehman using an Ohio State University radio telescope. Lasting a full 72 seconds, the signal didn’t seem to come from inside the solar system, and had all the attributes that would have been expected of an alien signal. Ehman reacted by circling the signal on his printout and writing the words “wow” next to it.

The wow signal is interesting in that it seemed to come from a fixed point in the sky. The telescope Ehman was using wasn’t able to move, it pointed in one direction and then relied on the rotation of the earth to change its direction. The net result of this was that the telescope would only see a small area of the sky for a short time, and any signal coming in from outer-space would only be seen for 72 seconds – the exact duration of the wow signal. During the observation, ideally the signal should peak and then decrease as the earth rotated the signal out of the telescopes view, and again, that’s what was observed in the wow signal. This method generally rules out earthly radio interference as a source, and points directly to an area of interstellar space located in the constellation Sagittarius.

The problem with the wow signal is that it was never detected again. A number of radio astronomers on different telescopes have searched for the wow signal to no avail. Whatever it was, it seemed to be transient at best, if not just a one time deal. Ehman himself points out that there just isn’t very much data to go on, and that the signal may have simply been an earth signal bouncing off a piece of space debris. So what was the wow signal? No one knows, and until we see it again, it will remain a mystery.

Electronic detections of strange signals aren’t limited to astronomical objects. In 1997 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a US government agency, detected a bizarre sound moving through the ocean more or less off the southwest coast of South America. Known as the ‘Bloop’ this signal remains unexplained. Unlike the wow signal, the bloop was detected multiple times by an array of hydrophones in the pacific designed to detect Soviet submarines. The signal would behave in such a way as to only have been able to come from a living thing, but whatever it was had to be enormous.

Hear the Bloop Signal

The signal was heard at a range of over 5000 kilometers, suggesting that the creature would have had to have been much larger than a blue whale. The blue whale is considered to be the largest animal to have ever lived, though some research suggests that a few dinosaurs might have been bigger. Theories range from the sound being made by some unknown species of squid even larger than a whale, to a machine or man made source, but none of these theories fit very well with the bloop signal. If anything, the signal looked most like a whale, leading to speculation that either a particularly giant whale lurks in the oceans, or the sounds of a normal whale were somehow amplified by the currents tricking the hydrophones. The signal was never detected again after 1997 and remains a curious mystery.

From ghost-detecting EM devices to EVP’s, technology has revolutionized the effort to explain the unexplained. In practice, it has only deepened old mysteries, and added new ones to the catalog of the unexplained.

With the proliferation of technology going at an ever faster rate, we are likely in store for more of the unexplained.

Unlike bacteria and viruses, amoeba sit in their own class and are extremely difficult to treat. Normally targetting children or people with weak immune systems, Naegleria Fowleri responds only in its early states to broad antibiotic treatment. Experimental serums exist, but have not yet been proven on humans. Only six people have survived the infection, giving the disease only a 3% survival rate, with many of these cases only being diagnosed post-mortem. Its possible that many more cases have been seen, but not recognized.
 
The media has described this disease as a rare brain-eating amoeba, but it doesn’t seem so rare anymore. Between 1995 and 2004 twenty three cases of Naegleria Fowleri infection were found in the United States, average about 2.5 cases per year. However, in 2007, in a nearly three-fold increase, six cases have been reported, all of them fatal. The amoeba breakout is unusually widespread, with the 2007 deaths being reported in Florida, Texas and Arizona, covering the entire length of the southern United States.
 
What is causing the alarming rise in cases? The disease breeds in warm, stagnant water and as global warming continues to march, the CDC believes it will become increasingly widespread and common. Prevention is the key, do not swim in stagnant hot water, and be particularly careful when allowing children and young adults to swim. The best bet, in a hot climate, is to avoid natural swimming areas entirely and go for a cool swimming pool that has been properly chlorinated.
 
Hopefully, new treatments will be more effective against Naegleria Fowleri, but with cases on the rise and the disease seemingly moving from rare to scarce, it pays to be careful where you swim.

In 1673, near present day Alton, Ill. the French Catholic Priest and explorer Jaques Marquette spotted a very large Native American cliff painting, or petroglyph, on the face of the bluffs. He described in some detail two great monsters, hideous and frightening to him, with faces like that of a man, the antlers of a deer, red eyes and the tail of a fish. This was the legendary Piasa bird.

In reality, it wasn’t a bird at all. Marquette and later 18th century accounts of the spectacle made no mention of wings. Most of the legend that many of us from the midwest have heard is a fabrication; traced to a man named John Russell who made most of it up in an article he wrote in 1836. The piasa bird petroglyph, sadly, no longer exists, having both faded seriously and ended up being quarried off the face of the bluff itself. It remains, by and large, a mystery as to why the Native Americans went through such lengths as to climb the face of the bluff and create elaborate paintings of monsters. The basis for the subject of the paintings is now conjectural, the paintings themselves long gone – but the story does not end here.

In 1972 the town of Louisiana, Missouri, itself located on the banks of the great river, played unwitting host to a cryptozoological creature named Momo. Short for the Missouri Monster, Momo was described as smelling horrifically bad, with a pumpkin shaped head and a hairy body. Momo seemed to have a taste for rotten flesh, as he was known to dig up the graves of deceased pets, no doubt contributing to the stench. Supposedly six to seven feet tall, Momo was also known to emit growls and shrieks, not unlike those usually reported in bigfoot cases. A few days after the first sighting, and a particularly harrowing incident involving the monster terrorizing part of the congregation of the local pentecostal church, in old time small town fashion, the Sherriff of Louisiana formed an armed posse and went searching for Momo.

The posse found nothing, and plaster casts of tracks attributed to Momo appeared to have been fakes. The Monster more or less dissappeared as abruptly as he came. Occasional sightings continue in the area around Louisiana but they are often dubious or poorly detailed. In 1972, dozens of people ranging from Pike County to St. Charles County in Missouri along the Mississippi saw a cryptid that today remains unexplained.

The Momo sightings coincided with a UFO flap of sorts in the same area. Throughout the 1970′s, multiple reports of UFO activity, particularly disc shaped craft, accompanied by cattle mutilations gripped the area. Theories have been advanced for years that the Bigfoot and UFO phenomena are somehow linked, and in the case of Momo that may have been true, but most of the time these events often seem seperate, linked perhaps only by circumstance in all but a few cases. Was Momo a creature left here by an alien craft, or just the overactive collective imagination of a small Missouri town? What did the Indian’s see that inspired the Piasa bird petroglyphs? We will probably never know, but what we can say for sure is that the Mississippi still has secrets, and some day, Momo may yet appear again.

 

The first is the famous Mrs. Rosemary Brown who died in 2001. Early in life she had been visited by the ghost of Franz Liszt. At the time she had no idea who this white haired man in the flowing black cassock was until she saw a picture of him years later. At the age of seven he told her that he would make her a famous musician one day, before dissappearing for decades. He showed back up unexpectedly in 1964, and literally began releasing new compositions through her. He was soon joined by the spirits of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Rachmaninoff, Chopin and others. Some of them dictated notes directly to her, others controlled her hands on the piano and she wrote the notes down. Often, she couldn’t even play the compositions as they were beyond her skills as a musician, but as she got older her piano playing markedly improved. She claimed this was because Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Liszt had been tutoring her on the piano!

The consensus from the music world was, mostly, that the compositions bore a strong resemblance to the works of the composers. Some even stated that the compositions couldn’t be faked without years of training, which she clearly never had. Some of the pieces were simple, but others were apparently very complex. In any case, Mrs. Brown was either a very talented composer herself, or she really was in contact with the spirits of a host of deceased composers.
 
The other outstanding example is that of Mrs. J. H. Curran of St. Louis, Missouri who in 1913 made contact through a ouija board with a spirit calling herself Patience Worth. Claiming to have lived in 17th century America and killed by indians, the spirit of Patiences Worth dictated to Mrs. Curran a number of novels from a variety of different historical periods in multiple different literary styles. From a period novel written in medieval English, which Mrs. Curran had no way of studying, to her novel “Hope Trueblood” set in the 19th century which recieved critical acclaim even from reviewers that had no idea that the novel had been dictated by a spirit.
 
The Patience Worth spirit is strange in that it seemed capable of writing in many different styles, and in historical periods that Worth did not live. This might be suggestive that this was not a single spirit, but many functioning under some type of umbrella personality that Mrs. Curran had befriended. Typical ouija board, nothing is ever simple. Never the less, it seems highly unlikely that a 17th century spirit, and a 20th century housewife would have had the knowledge and ability to write convincingly in these different styles set in such wildly different historical periods.

So can the creative force conquer death? It would seem so, as both of these women would have done better to have composed or written in their own name, rather than as hoaxers writing in the name of someone else. But they probably weren’t hoaxers, and by some strange property of the universe they were able to make a connection to long dead artists, and give them a way to defeat the grave and communicate their work to the living.
And we all thought it was supposed to be an eternal period of rest…

The oldest of these ghost ships is the Griffon, launched in 1678 by the early French explorer and trader La Salle. The ship vanished on the return leg of its maiden voyage loaded with furs for trade. No trace of the ship was ever found until recently, when a possible candidate for the wreck was found by divers in the form of a very old hand-carved mast sticking out of the muck. In any case, sailors have seen a ghostly apparition of the Griffon under full sail on several occasions crossing lake Michigan. At least 10 more modern ghost ships are occasionally sighted plying the lakes, and.even the giant 729 foot Edmund Fitzgerald was sighted a decade after its infamous sinking.

But the stories do not end with ships. A diver working the Lake Superior wreck Emperor in the late 1980′s is said to have seen the ghost of a a crewman lying on a bunk looking at him. Easily the strangest and most macabre story is the tale of Grandpa. The great lakes are very cold in the depths, so cold that the frigid water will preserve almost anything through natural refrigeration. This includes human remains, and the story goes that there is a preserved body in the engine room of the wreck of the SS Kamloops, which went down in 1927. Locals and divers call him Grandpa, and he is known to float quietly behind divers, following them as they swim around the compartment. Perhaps this is just due to currents created by the divers, or maybe its something else, but the effect has scared the daylights out of more than a few divers. All the better, as they probably shouldn’t be disturbing a wreck that clearly is also the final resting place of preserved human remains.

The great lakes may be the most fruitful ground in the world for paranormal stories of ghost ships and their crew. Sightings are almost common, and show no signs of slowing. What’s most interesting is that, unlike the oceans, the majority of the ghost ships seen on the lakes are modern, with many having been lost within living memory. What makes these inland seas so haunted? Maybe its the cold of the water, or the inordinate amount of tragedies that the lakes have seen. We’ll never know, but if you ever visit one of the lakes, watch carefully as the strange ship you see in the distance may just be a ghost ship.

Helen Duncan was a spiritualist and medium from Scotland who traveled the UK during the war performing seances. Her customers are reputed to have included George VI and Winston Churchill, and she was one of the most widely known mediums of the day. Channeling for the parents of a missing sailor in 1941, she revealed that he had died when his ship HMS Barham had been sunk by the Germans. The ship had indeed sunk with a loss of 861 men, but the admiralty had kept the affair secret to mislead the Germans who weren’t aware that the ship had gone down. The cover-up made sense, since the germans would invariably spend resources on trying to track a ship that no longer existed. Plus it prevented an unnecessary blow to British public morale during the infamous blitz.The Germans found out in 1942 and the whole thing became public, but the fact remained that Helen Duncan had known about the sinking, allegedly through channeling the dead sailor, and had revealed information that could have been potentially damaging for the Admiralty’s coverup. Nothing came of it at the time, and Helen Duncan continued her seances.

Fast forward to 1944. The D-Day invasion was being prepared amid unprecedented secrecy. The British government was prepared to do anything to keep the invasion plans under wraps as the defeat of the Nazis depended on the success of the operation. In January, Helen Duncan was in Portsmouth performing a seance in the presence of two superstitious naval officers. The officers were alarmed that she might reveal secrets of the impending invasion that could get back to the Germans, so they arrested her. The authorites charged her under the British Witchcraft Act of 1735, along with charges of conspiracy and fraud. Strangely, only the charges of witchcraft stuck and she was convicted and sentenced to nine months in prison.

In fairness, at the time, most people thought the trial was ridiculous. She probably never had any malicious intent with her seances, as her own sons were in the military, and it isn’t very likely that the Germans would have paid attention to her claims. Winston Churchill called the whole thing “tomfoolery” and repealed the Witchcraft Act in 1951, a bit too late for Helen Duncan.The case of Helen Duncan is often referred to as the last witchcraft trial in Britain, and indeed the last in the western world. But that’s not entirely accurate.

Jane Rebecca Yorke – The last witchcraft trial

Another trial under the Witchcraft Act of 1735 happened later in 1944 when the medium Jane Rebecca Yorke was arrested and charged with fraud and witchcraft. Yorke was convicted in september of that year on seven counts of witchcraft, but unlike Helen Duncan, she got off light having been fined 5 pounds and released. Yorke may have been a fraud, or at least partly one, and does seem to have mislead families who were desperate to find out information about their loved ones in the war. Her conviction under the Act of 1735 was the last recorded trial of a witch in the western world, though threats of the use of the act continued in the British courts until 1950.

Hysteria Among Us

A more recent case comes from Oklahoma. While not a trial per se, a court case was filed by the ACLU in 2000 against school officials who suspended a girl who practiced wicca for allegedly casting a spell on a teacher. The ACLU claims that the girl was laughably suspended for fifteen days for making the teacher ill with her spell, and further undue disciplinary action was taken on the girl for other incidents, even though she had a perfect attendance record and no previous disciplinary actions.
While hardly at the level of the horrific witch trials of the 17th century, these cases show that the hysteria that can be brought against accused witches is still with us today. Nine months in prison is a long time for someone who simply channeled a spirit and got correct information, that sparked fear among a couple of naval officers who had the power to arrest her. Malicious witch trials continue unabated in the third world. Recent examples have come from Africa and India. In Tanzania, elderly women are sometimes killed as witches if they exhibit red eyes. Often, these trials are simply brought on by family members wanting their property. In Congo, children are sometimes accused of witchcraft, the most recent being a horrific period of hysteria directed against kids in 1999.

In the modern world, superstition should never play a part in law. Hopefully, sufficient safeguards now exist to prevent a resurgence of witchcraft trials, but under the conditions of war a return to these bizarre days could still come. Only public vigilance will ensure that it never happens again.

He named it Nemesis after the Greek goddess of divine retribution, and suspects that if it exists it would probably be a common red dwarf type star. He also thinks it should be easily visible from earth, if we knew where to look. If it exists, its almost certainly already been photographed, but simply hasn’t been noticed. Stranger things have happened in the history of astronomy. If its out there, Muller suspects it must orbit very distantly at a whopping 1 to 3 light years from earth, quite distant when you consider that the nearest seperate star is Proxima Centauri at 4.22 light years away. Nemesis’ orbit would be irregular, sometimes making a closer approach, near enough to disturb the grouping of icy comets at the edge of the solar system known as the oort cloud, and sending some of them our way.

But the distance of that orbit calls the whole theory into question. Stars that orbit so far from eachother are rare indeed, if they exist at all, though there also isn’t any particular reason why they can’t. Its also been suggested that Nemesis might be another type of star, known as a brown dwarf. These small failed stars are large, bigger than Jupiter for example, but are too small to sustain the nuclear hydrogen-to-helium reactions in a star’s core that are needed to run the stellar engine. Without that, its simply a giant ball of gas that is much, much harder to detect. That would make Nemesis much more difficult to find.

In recent years, the water has become increasingly muddy. Scientists have backed away from the observation that impacts seem to be periodic. But that hasn’t killed the Nemesis theory quite yet. Future planned astronomical surveys may detect the star, but until then, whenever you look up at the night sky, think of the possible companion to our sun that may exist in a distant orbit, waiting to unleash yet another flurry of extinction upon our world, and perhaps even ourselves.