Atlantis-The Lost Continent

Over 11,000 years ago there existed an island nation located in the middle of the Atlantic ocean populated by a noble and powerful race. The people of this land possessed great wealth thanks to the natural resources found throughout their island. The island was a center for trade and commerce. The rulers of this land held sway over the people and land of their own island and well into Europe and Africa.
This was the island of Atlantis.
Atlantis was the domain of Poseidon, god of the sea. When Poseidon fell in love with a mortal woman, Cleito, he created a dwelling at the top of a hill near the middle of the island and surrounded the dwelling with rings of water and land to protect her.

Cleito gave birth to five sets of twin boys who became the first rulers of Atlantis. The island was divided among the brothers with the eldest, Atlas, first King of Atlantis, being given control over the central hill and surrounding areas.

At the top of the central hill, a temple was built to honor Poseidon which housed a giant gold statue of Poseidon riding a chariot pulled by winged horses. It was here that the rulers of Atlantis would come to discuss laws, pass judgments, and pay tribute to Poseidon.

To facilitate travel and trade, a water canal was cut through of the rings of land and water running south for 5.5 miles (~9 km) to the sea.

The city of Atlantis sat just outside the outer ring of water and spread across the plain covering a circle of 11 miles (1.7 km). This was a densely populated area where the majority of the population lived.

Beyond the city lay a fertile plain 330 miles (530 km) long and 110 miles (190 km) wide surrounded by another canal used to collect water from the rivers and streams of the mountains. The climate was such that two harvests were possible each year. One in the winter fed by the rains and one in the summer fed by irrigation from the canal.

Surrounding the plain to the north were mountains which soared to the skies. Villages, lakes, rivers, and meadows dotted the mountains.

Besides the harvests, the island provided all kinds of herbs, fruits, and nuts. An abundance of animals, including elephants, roamed the island.

For generations the Atlanteans lived simple, virtuous lives. But slowly they began to change. Greed and power began to corrupt them. When Zeus saw the immorality of the Atlanteans he gathered the other gods to determine a suitable punishment.

Soon, in one violent surge it was gone. The island of Atlantis, its people, and its memory were swallowed  by the sea.

(This is a summary of the story told by Plato around 360 BC in his dialogues Timaeus & Critias. These writings of Plato are the only specific known references to Atlantis. They have prompted controversy and debate for over two thousand years)

Valley of the Headless Men

In the Nahanni National Park of Northwest Canada lies the Nahanni River. The area is only accessible by boat or plane and is home to many natural wonders, such as sinkholes, geysers and a waterfall almost double the size of Niagara Falls. Lord Tweeds Muir (John Buchan), author of The 39 Steps, once said of the valley: “It’s a fancy place that old-timers dream about. … Some said the “valley was full of gold and some said it was hot as hell owing to the warm springs. … It had a wicked name too, for at least a dozen folks went in and never came out’ … Indians said it was the home of devils.”
The 200 Mile gorge has become infamous, due to a number of gruesome deaths and many disappearances, earning itself the eerie name, The Valley of the Headless Men. Anomalies first began in 1908, when the Macleod Brothers came prospecting for gold in the valley. Nothing was heard or seen of the brothers for a whole year, until their decapitated bodies were found near a river. Nine years later, the Swiss prospector Martin Jorgenson was next to succumb to the Valley, when his headless corpse was found. In 1945, a miner from Ontario was found in his sleeping bag with his head cut from his shoulders. While skeptics of an unknown power at work in the Valley would put the grizzly mutilations down to feuding gold prospectors or hostile Indians, there are other strange happenings in the area which add to the valleys mysteriousness. The fiercely renowned Naha tribe simply vanished from the area a few years prior to the first deaths. Other Indians of the area have avoided the Valley for centuries, claiming an unknown evil haunts it. Many parts of the valley remain unexplored, and there are tales the Valley holds an entrance to the Hollow earth. Others believe the Valley is home to a lost world, with lush greenery and a tropical climate, due to the hot springs generating warm air, as well as untapped goldmines and wandering sasquatches. While a haven for Bigfoot remains unlikely, one thing is for certain, something strange lurks in the Nahanni Valley.


Lost World...??

Saint Januarius’ Blood

Saint Januarius, Bishop of Naples, is a martyr saint of the Roman Catholic Church. He was imprisoned while visiting incarcerated deacons at the sulphur mines of Puteoli, the modern Pozzuoli. After many tortures, including being thrown to lions in Pozzuoli’s Flavian Amphitheater, he was beheaded at Solfatara along with his companions. He died in 305 AD. According to an early hagiography, his relics were transferred by order of Saint Severus, Bishop of Naples, to the Neapolitan catacombs. In the early tenth century the body was moved to Beneventum by Sico, prince of Benevento, with the head remaining in Naples. Subsequently, during the turmoil at the time of Frederick Barbarossa, his body was moved again, this time to the Abbey of Montevergine where it was rediscovered in 1480.
Despite very limited information about his life and works, he is famous for the reputed miracle of the annual liquefaction of his blood, first reported in 1389. The dried blood is safely stored in small capsules in a reliquary. When these capsules are brought into the vicinity of his body on three occasions in the year, the dried blood supposedly liquefies. Thousands of people assemble to witness this event in the cathedral of Naples. The archbishop, at the high altar amid prayers and invocations, holds up a glass phial that is said to contain the dried blood of the city’s patron saint. When the liquefaction has taken place, the archbishop holds up the phial again and demonstrates that liquefaction has taken place. The announcement of the liquefaction is greeted with a 21-gun salute at the 13th-century Castel Nuovo. The ceremony takes place three times a year. The most famous is on the feast day on September 19, which commemorates the saint’s martyrdom. Attempts to explain the event in scientific terms suggest that the liquefaction miracle involves not blood but rather a thixotropic gel, such as hydrated iron oxide, FeO(OH) which has demonstrated similar behavior in a laboratory – but the fact that the dried blood liquifies on certain dates add further to the mystery.

Is there any superpower controlling this phenomenon? 

Stonehenge.........What it is?????

 
No place has generated so much speculation and wild theories as the standing stones of Stonehenge. After driving for miles through the rolling hills and plains of the English countryside the sight of this unusual structure makes people gasp. A walk around it only provokes more strange feelings. There's a sense that this is something very important. It taunts us with it's mystery. For over 5000 years it has stood silent vigil over the earth. It has been excavated, x-rayed, measured, and surveyed. Yet despite all that has been learned about its age and construction, its purpose still remains one of the great mysteries of the world.
Around 3500 BC the semi-nomadic peoples that populated the Salisbury Plain began to build the monument now known as Stonehenge. The original construction was a circular ditch and mound with 56 holes forming a ring around its perimeter. The first stone to be placed at the site was the Heel Stone. It was erected outside of a single entrance to the site. 200 years later 80 blocks of bluestone was transported from a quarry almost 200 miles away in the Prescelly Mountains. It is surmised that these blocks were transported by way of rafts along the Welsh coast and up local rivers, finally to be dragged overland to the site. These stones were erected forming two concentric circles.
At some point this construction was dismantled and work began on the final phase of the site. The bluestones were moved within the circle and the gigantic stones that give Stonehenge its distinctive look were installed. Some of these massive stones weigh as much as 26 tons! It remains a mystery how such huge stones could have been moved from the quarry at north Wiltshire by a supposedly primitive people.
Reasons behind Construction
Although it’s probably a futile effort, it is sometimes very intriguing to try to understand the motives behind the building of a monument such as Stonehenge. If the builders are somewhat a mystery to us, then their reasons to build Stonehenge are absolutely outside our scope of knowledge; we can only make educated guesses based on assumptions, so there is no way we could say that some idea is better than other. Here comes some thoughts on the subject. The fact that caused the whole astronomical connection with Stonehenge was the direction of the summer solstice, or the direction of sunrise on the longest day of the year. This direction is almost exactly the same than the direction from the middle of Stonehenge, along the Avenue to the Heel Stone. This causes the image of sun rising behind the Heel Stone on the longest day of the year when observed from the Altar Stone.
                                                                  

Religion
Many researchers have argued, who more convincingly than others, that Stonehenge was a site of religious rites of its time. There are several good reasons behind this assumption, but unfortunately it only takes one aspect of the theory that cannot be proven to collapse the whole train of thought. Remains of pig bones found on the site emphasize the theory of religious site, because no pig skulls were found among the bones. This means that the animals had to have brought to the site ready to cook (=beheaded), which would most likely have been done for the sake of the gods or the clergymen (or both).
This actually doesn't deny the "religious site" scheme (just the opposite), and it is almost as sure as something can be in history that Stonehenge has been used as a site for religious rites at least some point of its history. Now the wild-minded readers may get the impression of brutal human sacrifice rites, and while some evidence have been found to back this, there are no signs of continuous use of megalithic sites as sites for human sacrifice. Animals and such have almost certainly been involved, though. What neither of the previous tell us, is that was religion or sacrifice the initial reason to build Stonehenge, or was it something else? This derives from the fact that no verbal nor written heritage has survived through the times about the ideas and motives of those Neolithic tribes (and of course from the fact, that we cannot go back in time to ask them…).
Astronomy
The facts tying Stonehenge to astronomy aren’t foolproof, but some at least very interesting points have been made in several studies of this topic. Probably the best known study of "astronomical Stonehenge" is Gerald Hawkins’ "Stonehenge Decoded", for which he used a modern computer to calculate all the sightlines (line of sight from one point in Stonehenge to a body of sky via landmarks such as stones) and their relation to objects of sky, mostly the Moon and the Sun, though.
The "modern man" must keep in mind, that things may not be what they first seem to be. Being very close to earth and nature, not much unlike the close-to-nature cults today, the Neolithic Britons might have held objects of the sky as gods, and predicting the will of the gods was something essential to their existence, thus mixing the concepts we distinguish from each other today – religion and astronomy.
Hawkins and also Fred Hoyle stated that not only Stonehenge was used as observatory, it was also used to keep records and predict astronomical events, such as eclipses. Let’s look at these possibilities a little closer.
Observatory?
If those ancient people really thought that the Sun and the Moon are gods, did they build a site where they could observe and worship their gods? There is a good possibility that this is the case, when viewed the characteristics of Stonehenge. For starters, there is a good view to the skies from the middle of the plain, there are no major obstructions to the field of vision, but then again, such is the case in many other places around southern England and Wiltshire, places that might have been more easily maintained and constructed.
According to the studies of other megalithic sites, the circular banks around sites could have been made to smoothen the horizon by elevating it a bit. If this was the case, there is no reason to think that the bank around Stonehenge would have been made for any other reason. On the other hand, this is just an assumption based on other sites that have higher banks around them.

Is this an ancient time machine?