Strange phenomenon ..is it really paranormal?20:20 Nov 02 2008
Times Read: 938
I hear of hundreds of spooky accounts of strange lights,sounds,feelings.When I look into them closer,more often than not, many have a thing in common...they normally occur along fault lines known as subduction zones.
Many odd things can happen along these fault lines..
BALL LIGHTNING does not look like "lightning." Instead, it usually appears as a mysterious glowing sphere which drifts horizontally through the air. It is typically the size of a grapefruit, but sometimes appears as small as a pea, or as large as a bus. It sometime hovers at a few feet or tens of feet altitude, but can also bounce along the ground. It usually lasts only a few seconds, but sometimes persists much longer. Various colors of "BL" have been seen, sometimes it changes colors, and sometimes it has internal structures such as glowing layers or moving sparks. Sometimes it disappears silently, other times it explodes with extreme violence.
At one time BL was thought to be extremely rare, but this was because most BL eyewitnesses feared ridicule and wouldn't come forward. In reality, five percent of the population has seen BL close up. Today most researchers agree that it is real, yet its nature is still highly controversial, and no sensible theories yet exist to explain it. (For example, BL cannot be hot plasma, since plasma would be much lighter than air and would immediately rise like fire, or like a balloon.) See Scientific American's Ask the Experts under BALL LIGHTNING, also SAINT ELMO'S FIRE
http://amasci.com/tesla/ballgtn.html
UFOs ..Sprites and Thunderstorms ?
As you know, I am very skeptical of claims that UFOs are real. I feel that evidence showing that UFOs are real is sorely lacking, and it surprises me how fervently people will believe in cases that have little substance. When I heard Stanton Friedman speak, I was quite surprised that he considered the Barney and Betty Hill case part of the proof that UFOs are real and we are being visited by alien spacecraft on a regular basis. To me, believing that Barney and Betty's abduction was a real event seems to rely more on wishful thinking than on anything of substance.
Does it matter if people believe in UFOs even though they are not real? Yes, it does. Devoting one's life to a fictitious belief is a terrible and unproductive waste of time and energy. There are so many interesting and exciting things in the real world and our time here is limited.
Being overly credulous may hide some real and unrecognized phenomena from view, or at least delay its recognition. Scientists tend to be reluctant to devote time and energy pursuing claims or ideas that seem farfetched or unlikely to be true. Much of this attitude is probably due to the large number and wide range of unusual claims and the overly credulous attitude of many people making such claims. It is likely that some real and interested phenomena may be buried in the noise.
A good example is a recent discovery about lightning. Lightning has been studied for about two centuries, and scientists felt that it was fairly well understood. Recently and unexpectedly a whole new class of lightning was discovered. Flashing upward from thunderheads are two new types of lightning---red sprites and blue jets. The red sprites, which may be pink or red, are many miles wide and rise to heights of 60 miles. Blue jets are cone shaped with their apex atop the clouds. They extend to heights of about 20 miles. While red sprites appear all at once, the blue jets move upward from the cloud tops.
The new class of lightning was first photographed by accident in 1989 when a retired physicist, Dr. John R. Winckler, was helping a friend try out a new low light video camera. A check of videos of thunderstorms taken by the space shuttles revealed more examples of this new and strange lightning. Soon searches for the phenomena were easily succeeding and it is now being widely investigated.
These forms of lightning eluded science because they are not as obvious as common lightning. They are rarer, fainter, and faster than normal lightning. They were, however, reported before they were recognized as something real. Airline pilots had sometimes seen them, and the May, 1995, issue of Sky & Telescope contains a letter from Stuart L. Becher. He writes that he is personally gratified that the sprite phenomena has at last been recognized as real, and then relates witnessing them twenty-five years ago when he was serving in Vietnam. Although he reported his observations to physicists and atmospheric scientists, most were indifferent.
People who are interested in anomalous phenomena claim scientists should take such phenomena more seriously, and should not be indifferent to reports such as that of Mr. Becher. Such reports might be taken more seriously if people interested in unusual phenomena would take science more seriously and become more critical. The perception that they will believe almost anything hurts their credibility, makes it unlikely they will be taken seriously, and may well slow the recognition of new and unrecognized phenomena.
http://www.amasci.com/weird/unusual/sprite.html
Crystal magic? Energy sucking crystals?
This is not magic. In order to help to exceed the Vf of the crystal diode, we could instead place a step-up transformer between the antenna/ground section and the rest of the circuit. But there is some magic to be had: if we place a parallel LC circuit between the antenna and ground, we can eliminate the antenna/ground capacitance, and we can actually increase the net amount of energy received by the antenna as if the antenna was electrically larger. The tuned circuit in a crystal radio is *not* simply a bandpass filter. Instead its oscillations grow as it takes in energy, which *drives* the receiving antenna and creates a strong EM field. And this EM field then "funnels" the incoming EM waves to the antenna which would otherwise pass right by. (Or from another viewpoint, the resonator drives the receiving antenna, causing it to emit an EM sphere-wave which superposes with the incoming waves to form a diffraction pattern... and this diffraction pattern takes the form of an "EM shadow" which appears downstream from the receiving antenna: a shadow-region where some EM energy is missing. The missing energy has gone inside the crystal radio.)
COMMENTS
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Infernalmage
05:51 Nov 25 2008
Excellent!!!
Oceanne
07:10 Nov 25 2008
Thought you might find this handy.;)
dabbler
01:43 Dec 12 2008
Is this to possibly become a accepted as a new branch of science?
Oceanne
02:14 Dec 12 2008
No Dab,it is an old discovery that has finally been validated .