Unexplained shower of apples falls from sky

Now for something strange... More than a hundred apples was said to had rained down upon a small British town on Monday night. The still-unexplained apple shower left 20 yards of city streets and car windshields covered in the cascading fruit just after the daily rush hour.

The news immediately brought up comparisons to biblical tales of raining frogs and whether such reported freaks of nature actually occurred. In this instance, no one has officially confirmed when, how or if the apple rain truly took place as described.

However, Jim Dale, senior meteorologist from the British Weather Services, told the London Telegraph: "The weather we have at the moment is very volatile and we probably have more to come. Essentially these events are caused when a vortex of air, kind of like a mini tornado, lifts things off the ground rising up into the atmosphere until the air around it causes them to fall to earth again."

Dr. Lisa Jardine-Wright, a physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory, based at Cambridge University, told the BBC, "Cars and houses have been swept up by tornadoes, so apples are well within the realms of possibility. A tornado which has swept through an orchard will be strong enough to 'suck up' small objects like a vacuum [cleaner]. These small objects would then be deposited back to earth as 'rain' when the whirlwind loses its energy."

Nevertheless, witnesses report that the weather in Coundon in Coventry was reported to be stable and calm at the time of the alleged apple shower. Coventry residents have offered several competing explanations for the event, including a passing plane, roving teenage pranksters, and yes, even the supernatural witches.

But regardless of the ultimate explanation, the apple rain is no stranger than other confirmed, highly unusual forms of precipitation. The BBC offers a roster of pertinent examples:

Frog falls were recorded in Llanddewi, Powys, in 1996 and two years later in Croydon, south London. In 2000, hundreds of dead silver sprats fell out of the sky during a rainstorm in the seaside resort of Great Yarmouth.

There have also been maggot downpours in Acapulco in 1967 and during a yachting event at the 1976 Olympic Games.

On the sliding scale of inconveniences, an apple rain seems more palatable than maggots. Though, depending on the state of the apples, it's possible that some areas could have experienced both brands of offbeat precipitations at once.

Mysterious object spotted near Mercury

NASA's STEREO spacecraft had recently caught a wave of electronically charged material shooting out from the sun and hitting Mercury. Questions such as "Is a giant, cloaked spaceship orbiting around Mercury?" arises as people speculates over the image in which a mysterious object was found near Mercury.

Theorists have seized on the images captured from the "coronal mass ejection" (CME) last week as suggestive of alien life hanging out in our own cosmic backyard. Specifically, the solar flare washing over Mercury appears to hit another object of comparable size. "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," Youtube-user siniXster said in his video commentary on the footage, which has generated hundreds of thousands of views this week. Of course, that's just speculation. How this user was able to determine that the object was "obviously" a cloaked spaceship with no other natural explanation remains as much a mystery as the object itself.

Well, there's another scientifically sanctioned explanation for the curious images, though we're not certain that skeptics and UFO enthusiasts such as SiniXster will endorse it. Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries put the question to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). They're the people who analyze data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1) - better known in this context as the camera that shot the footage in question.

Head NRL group scientist Russ Howard and lead ground systems engineer Nathan Rich say the mysterious object is in fact Mercury itself. And what we're seeing in the footage is the equivalent of Mercury's wake, "where the planet was on the previous day," as it travels through the solar system on its natural gravitational path.

To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

The analysts say the practice works even better when applied to far-off objects such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But for moving objects, specifically planets, the process is a little more complicated. And making matters even trickier is Mercury's status as the closest planet to the sun. "When (this averaging process) is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich explained in an email.

China's Mysterious Desert Construction

A strange tangle of white lines appeared in China's Gobi desert, this had been the content of the new mystery that's been circulating the web for the past week.

The said structure was discovered in Google Map images. Military pundits, armchair investigator, and conspiracy theorists have had a field day with the strange set of lines, which seems to not make any sense, although numerous theories could be drawn out, none of them have supporting evidence.

Among the theories/hypothesis that were made were:

It's a UFO landing strip!

It's a mockup of the streets of Washington, D.C., constructed for nefarious military purposes!

It's China's Area 51!

It's a top-secret military installation doing experiments in controlling the weather!

It's a nuclear testing range!

It's a military base!

It's a new weapon!

It's a hoax: the Google Map images themselves are fakes, and the lines are not actually there!

And the long list of guesses goes on...

A previous Discover News piece concluded that it probably had some military significance (such as target practice range, based in part on the fact that other similar sites in the area had airplanes sitting in them).

However, a space researcher has offered what he believes is the correct solution to the mystery that's been flying around cyberspace for quite a while already. The researcher was a NASA scientist, and his theory seems to be most plausible. "They are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites," says Jonathan Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the camera used during NASA's Marsa missions.

China, like many countries including the United States, is known to have spy satellites in orbit. There's been no official explanation from the Chinese government - which is not surprising, since China doesn't need to explain some white lines in its desert to anyone.

Mystery of Dead Sea Scroll Authors Solved?

Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea.

The texts are of great religious and historical significance, as they include the oldest known surviving copies of Biblical and extra-biblical documents and preserve evidence of great diversity in late Second Temple Judaism.

These are written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, mostly on parchment, but with some written on papyrus. These manuscripts are said to be generally dated between 150 BCE (Before Common Era) or BC (Before Christ) and 70 CE (Common Era) or AD (Anno Domini).

The Dead Sea Scrolls are traditionally divided into three groups: "Biblical" manuscripts (copies of texts from the Hebrew Bible), which comprise roughly 40% of the identified scrolls; "Apocryphal" or "Pseudepigraphical" manuscripts (falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed authorship is unfounded. Also known as documents from the Second Temple Period like Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Sirach, non-canonical psalms, etc., that were not ultimately canonized in the Hebrew Bible), which comprise roughly 30% of the identified scrolls; and "Sectarian" manuscripts (previously unknown documents that speak of the rules and beliefs of a particular group of groups within greater Judaism like the Community Rule, War Scroll, Pesher on Habakkuk, and the Rule of the Blessing), which comprise roughly 30% of the identified scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls may have been written, at least in part, by a sectarian group called the Essenes (an ancient Jewish sect that flourished from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE, which some scholars claim seceded from the Zadokite priests), according to nearly 200 textiles discovered in caves at Qumran, in the West Bank, where the religious texts had been stored.

Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran, and so the new finding could help clear up this long-standing mystery.

The research reveals that all the textiles were made of linen, rather than wool, which was the preferred textile used in ancient Israel. They also lack decoration, with some actually being bleached white, even though fabrics from the period often have vivid colors. Altogether, researchers say these finds suggest that the Essenes penned some of the scrolls.

Not everyone agrees with this interpretation however. An archaeologist who has excavated at Qumran told LiveScience that the linen could have come from people fleeing the Roman army after the fall of Jerusalem in AD/CE 70, and that they are in fact responsible for putting the scrolls into caves.

The Iconic Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls consist of 972 texts, the first batch of which were discovered by a Bedouin shepherd in 1947. They date from before CE 70, and some may go back to as early as the third century BCE. The scrolls contain a wide variety of writings including early copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with hymns, calendars, and psalms, among other works.

Nearly 200 textiles were found in the same caves, along with a few examples from Qumran, the archaeological site close to the caves where the scrolls were hidden.

Orit Shamir, curator of organic materials at the Israel Antiquities Authority, and Naama Sukenik, a graduate student at Bar-Ilan University, compared the white-linen textiles found in the 11 caves to examples found elsewhere in ancient Israel, publishing their results in the most recent issue of the journal Dead Sea Discoveries.

A breakthrough in studying these remains was made in 2007 when a team of archaeologists was able to ascertain that colorful wool textiles found at a site to the south of Qumran, known as the Christmas Cave, were not related to the inhabitants of the site. This meant that Shamir and Sukenik were able to focus on the 200 textiles found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves and at Qumran itself, knowing that these are the only surviving textiles related to the scrolls.

They discovered that every single one of these textiles was made of linen, even though wool was the most popular fabric at the time in Israel. They also found that most of the textiles would have originally been used as clothing, later being cut apart and re-used for other purposes such as bandages and for packing the scrolls into jars.

Some of the textiles were bleached white and most of them lacked decoration, even though decoration is commonly seen in textiles from other sites in ancient Israel.

According to the researchers, the finds suggest that the residents of Qumran dressed simply.

"They wanted to be different than the Roman world," Shamir told LiveScience in a telephone interview.

"They were very humble, they didn't want to wear colorful textiles, they wanted to use very simple textiles."

The owners of the clothing likely were not poor, as only one of the textiles had a patch on it. "This is very, very important," Shamir said. "Patching is connected with the economic situation of the site."

Shamir pointed out that textiles found at sites where people were under stress, such as at the Cave of Letters, which was used in a revolt against the Romans, were often patched. On the other hand "if the site is in a very good economic situation, if it is a very rich site, the textiles will not be patched," she said. With Qumran, "I think economically, they were in the middle, but I'm sure they were not poor."

Robert Cargill, a professor at the University of Iowa, has written extensively about Qumran and has developed a virtual model of it. He said that archaeological evidence from the site, including coins and glassware, also suggests the inhabitants were not poor.

"Far from being poor monastics, I think there was wealth at Qumran, at least some form of wealth," Cargill said, arguing that trade was important at the site. "I think they made their own pottery and sold some of it, I think they bred animals and sold them, I think they made honey and sold it."

Who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls?

Scholars are divided about who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls and how the texts got to Qumran. Some argue that the scrolls were written at the site itself while others say they were written in Jerusalem or elsewhere in Israel.

Qumran itself was first excavated by Roland de Vaux in the 1950s. He came to the conclusion that the site was inhabited by a religious sect called the Essenes, who wrote the scrolls and stored them in caves. Among the finds he made were water pools, which he believed were used for ritual bathing, and multiple inkwells found in a room that became known as the "scriptorium." Based on his excavations, scholars have estimated the population of the site at as high as 200.

More recent archaeological work, conducted by Yitzhak Magen and Yuval Peleg of the Israel Antiquities Authority, suggests that the site could not have supported more than a few dozen people and had nothing to do with the scrolls themselves. They believe that the scrolls were deposited in the caves by refugees fleeing the Roman army after Jerusalem was conquered in CE 70.

Magen and Peleg found that the site came into existence around 100 BCE as a military outpost used by the Hasmoneans, a Jewish kingdom that flourished in the area. After the Romans took over Judea in 63 BCE, the site was abandoned and eventually was taken over by civilians who used it for pottery production.

They found that the pools de Vaux discovered include a fine layer of potters' clay.

There are other ideas as well. Cargill argues that while Qumran started out as a fort, it was later occupied by a sectarian group whose members were deeply concerned with ritual purity. "Whether or not they are the Essenes, that's a different question," he said. This group, much smaller than earlier estimates of 200 people, would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others, he argues.

Other groups, not part of the Qumran community, may also have been putting scrolls into the caves, Cargill said.

Solving the mystery with Clothing?

The new clothing research may help to identify the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shamir told LiveScience that it is unlikely the scrolls were deposited in the caves by Roman refugees. If that were the case, the more-popular textile in ancient Israel, which is the wool, would have been found in the caves along with other garments.

"If people run away from Jerusalem, they would take all sorts of textiles with them, not only linen textiles," she said. "The people who ran away to the Cave of Letters, they took wool textiles with them."

Peleg, the archaeologist who co-led the recent archaeological work at Qumran told LiveScience that he disagrees with that assessment. He said he stands by the idea that there is no connection between Qumran and the scrolls stored in the caves.

"We must remember that almost all the textiles were found in the caves and not at the site. The main question is the connection between the site and the scrolls," Peleg wrote in an email. "I can find alternative explanations for the fact that scrolls were found with linen."

For instance, linen could have been chosen as scroll wrapping for religious reasons or perhaps priests were responsible for storing the scrolls and they wore linen clothing. "The clothes of the priests were made from linen," Peleg wrote.

In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik say that the clothing found in the Dead Sea Scroll caves is similar to historical descriptions of the clothing of the Essenes, suggesting that they in fact lived at Qumran. They point to an ancient Jewish writer, Flavius Josephus, who wrote that the Essenes "make a point of keeping a dry skin and always being dressed in white."

However, Josephus never said anything about the clothing being made of linen, Peleg points out.

Josephus also wrote that the Essenes were very frugal when it came to clothing and shared goods with each other.

"In their dress and deportment, they resemble children under rigorous discipline. They do not change their garments or shoes until they are torn to shreds or worn threadbare with age. There is no buying or selling among themselves, but each gives what he has to any in need and receives from him in exchange something useful to himself..."

~Translation from "Jewish Life and Thought Among Greeks and Romans: Primary Readings," Louis Feldman and Meyer Reinhold, 1996. 

In their paper, Shamir and Sukenik also point to another ancient writer, Philo of Alexandria, who wrote that the Essenes wore a common style of simple dress.

"And not only is their table in common but their clothes also. For in winter, they have a stock of stout coats ready and in summer cheap vests, so that he who wishes may easily take any garment he likes, since what one has is held to belong to all and conversely what all have one has."
~Translation from the "Selected Writing of Philo of Alexandria," edited by Hans Lewy, 1965.

Cargill said that the clothing is further evidence that there was a Jewish sectarian group living at Qumran.

"You do have evidence of a group that raised its own animals, pressed its own date honey, that appears to have worn distinctive clothes and made its own pottery, and followed its own calendar, at least a calendar different from the temple of priesthood," he said. "Those are all signs of a sectarian group."

He also noted the presence of mikveh (ritual baths) at the site and the fact that the residents could make pottery that was ritually pure.

This group appears to have wanted to separate itself from the priests based at the temple in Jerusalem. "There is a congruency within many of the sectarian documents that appears to be consistent with a sectarian group that has separated itself from the temple priesthood in Jerusalem," Cargill said.

According to Cargill's theory, the people of Qumran would have written some of the scrolls, while collecting others. "Obviously, they didn't write all of the scrolls," Cargill said. Dating indicates some of the scrolls were written before Qumran even existed. One unusual scroll, made of copper, may have been deposited after Qumran was abandoned in CE 70.

Cargill says it's possible that some of the scrolls may have been put in caves from people outside the community. If that's true, some of the textiles could also be from people outside of Qumran.

"If not all of the Dead Sea Scrolls are the responsibility of sectarians at Qumran, then it would follow that not all of the textiles that are discovered in the caves are the product of a sect at Qumran," Cargill said.

Were there women at Qumran?

The new research may also shed light on who created the textiles.

The textile are of high quality and based on the archaeological finds at Qumran itself, where there is little evidence of spindle whorls or loom weights, the team thinks it's unlikely they would have been made at the site.

"This is very, very important, because this is connected to gender," Shamir said, "spinning is connected with women."

She explained that the textiles were likely created at another site in Israel, with women playing a key role in their production. This suggests that there were few women living at Qumran itself. "Weaving is connected with men and women, but spinning was only a production of women, and we don't find this item at Qumran."

Yeti "Bigfoot" Nests found?

Yeti, bigfoot, or sasquatch, is an ape-like cryptid that purportedly inhabits forests. It is usually described as a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid. It's existence has long been discredited by the scientific community, believing it to be a combination of folklore, misidentification, and hoax. However, recently, Bigfoot researcher and biologist John Bindernagel claims his research group has found evidence that the Yeti not only exists, but builds nests and shelters by twisting tree branches together.

"We didn't feel like the trees we saw in Siberia had been done by a man or another mammal... Twisted trees like this have also been observed in North America and they could fit with the theory that Bigfoot makes nests. The nests we have looked at are build around trees twisted together into an arch shape," Bindernagel told the British tabloid The Sun.

Bindernagel was part of a small group of scientists who visited western Siberia to examine evidence of the Yeti in October. That group made headlines around the world for issuing a statement that they had "indisputable proof" of the Yeti and were 95 percent sure it existed based on the evidence - a few strands of hair - they found.

Tree twisting, also called splintering, has been claimed as Bigfoot evidence for decades throughout the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. In some cases, tool markings have been found on trees said to have been twisted by Bigfoot. This suggests that the creatures are even possibly more intelligent than previously suspected and may be able to somehow locate and use pliers, monkey wrenches, and other common hardware tools.

Unless the marks were made by human hoaxers.

Although many of the "mysteriously" twisted tree limbs are conveniently near ground level, some are found at the top of trees. Bigfoot researchers claim these are stronger evidence of the Yeti's existence, because whereas any hoaxer could easily twist small, waist-level branches, only a Bigfoot-like animal would be able to climb up that high.

However, that raises the non-significant question of how a huge, heavy animal would get to the top of a tree without breaking it, or at least snapping a few branches on the way up. Bigfoot are often said to be between 8-and 12-feet tall and weigh several hundred pounds; surely if such a tall, heavy animal made its way up a tree - most of the trees that have been found twisted are spindly in nature - there would be much more obvious damage than a few woven branches at the very top. And if Bigfoot or Yetis spend time perched at the tops of trees doing arboreal decorating, why arent' they spotted more often?

There's even more reason to be skeptical of Bindernagel's claim. According to Sharon Hill of the Doubtful News blog, another scientist who participated in the same Russian expedition concluded that hoaxing was afoot. At a Bigfoot conference that Hill attended last month, Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropologist at Idaho State University who endorses the existence of Bigfoot, said that he suspects the twisted tree branches had been faked. Not only was there obvious evidence of tool-made cuts in the supposedly "Yeti-twisted" branches, but the trees were conveniently located just off a well-traveled trail. Meldrum, who eventually concluded that the whole Russian expedition was more of a publicity stunt than a serious scientific endeavor, refused to sign the group's statement endorsing "indisputable proof" of the Yeti, and returned to the United States. Others, including Bindernagel, remain convinced that conclusive Yeti/Bigfoot evidence is just around the corner — a belief that the Bigfoot community has clung to for more than half a century.

Bermuda Triangle truth revealed

The Bermuda Triangle, with boundaries covering the Straits of Florida, the Bahamas, the entire Caribbean Islands area, and the Atlantic east to the Azores, this region became known as the site of the disappearances of multiple ships and aircraft.

There have been many stories surrounding the mysterious region, stories such as UFO abduction, magnetic anomalies, and technology left behind by the lost city of Atlantis, although none of them has proof to support it.

The very phrase "Bermuda Triangle" has appeared only recently. It was coined by a fan of Spiritualism and esoteric Vincent Gaddis in 1964. By this toponym he meant an area located between the island of Puerto Rico, the Florida coast and Bermuda. According to the famous mystic of the last century, this area of the Atlantic became notorious due to the fact that hundreds of ships and aircraft disappeared there. Some ships, however, were found later, but without their crews and passengers. All these made Gaddis suggests that there was some anomaly in this area. However, he was not the first one to express this idea. In 1950, an American journalist Alexander Jones wrote an article about the mysterious disappearances of ships in this region. He called the region Sea Devil. Yet, the Bermuda Triangle acquired real popularity in 1974, when Charles Berlitz, a popularizer of Science, published a book under the same title where he collected descriptions of various mysterious disappearances in the area. The book immediately became a bestseller, and as a result, the mysterious and dangerous Sea Devil became known to the entire world. After that, different groups of scientists engaged in searching for reasons to explain these disappearances.

However, over time, the skeptics slowly gained the upper hand over amateur mystics. No anomalies in this part of the ocean were found, and the U.S. Coast Guard has issued several reports according to which the disappearances of ships in the Bermuda Triangle did not occur more frequently than in other regions of the ocean, and they occurred mainly due to storms. Historians, digging in the archives, found that the area since the discovery of America was very often visited by various vessels, including that of the pirates. Until the second half of the 20th century, sailors made no mention of it as a mysterious place where ships were constantly perishing. Persnickety journalists analyzed Berlitz's book and found that most of the facts presented by the writer were not entirely true, and some were just made up. And so it would seem that those who perpetrated the story only did it to make money.

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