WPARanormal Inc. Paranormal Investigators

What Happens When You Die? Evidence Suggests Time Simply Reboots

Robert Lanza, M.D.

What happens when we die? Do we rot into the ground, or do we go to heaven (or hell, if we've been bad)? Experiments suggest the answer is simpler than anyone thought. Without the glue of consciousness, time essentially reboots.

The mystery of life and death can't be examined by visiting the Galapagos or looking through a microscope. It lies deeper. It involves our very selves. We wake and find ourselves in the present. There are stairs below us, which we seem to have climbed; there are stairs above us, which go upward into the unknown future. But the mind stands at the door by which we entered and gives us the memories by which we go about our day. Everything is ordered and predictable. We're like cuckoo birds who appear through a door each morning. We fancy there's a clockwork set in motion at the beginning of time.

"UFO Cloud" Spotted over Moscow

And you thought rainbows were cool. A few days ago, a mysterious cloud shaped like a halo appeared over Moscow, and the buzz has yet to break.

We're the first to admit that a photograph of the heavenly cloud appears to be photoshopped. It's just so...perfect. But meterologists have spoken up and said the cloud wasn't digitally altered. However, it wasn't exactly what it appeared to be, either.

FBI delves into DMV photos in search for fugitives

RALEIGH, N.C. – In its search for fugitives, the FBI has begun using facial-recognition technology on millions of motorists, comparing driver's license photos with pictures of convicts in a high-tech analysis of chin widths and nose sizes.

The project in North Carolina has already helped nab at least one suspect. Agents are eager to look for more criminals and possibly to expand the effort nationwide. But privacy advocates worry that the method allows authorities to track people who have done nothing wrong.

"Everybody's participating, essentially, in a virtual lineup by getting a driver's license," said Christopher Calabrese, an attorney who focuses on privacy issues at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Earlier this year, investigators learned that a double-homicide suspect named Rodolfo Corrales had moved to North Carolina. The FBI took a 1991 booking photo from California and compared it with 30 million photos stored by the motor vehicle agency in Raleigh.

In seconds, the search returned dozens of drivers who resembled Corrales, and an FBI analyst reviewed a gallery of images before zeroing in on a man who called himself Jose Solis.

A week later, after corroborating Corrales' identity, agents arrested him in High Point, southwest of Greensboro, where they believe he had built a new life under the assumed name. Corrales is scheduled for a preliminary hearing in Los Angeles later this month.

"Running facial recognition is not very labor-intensive at all," analyst Michael Garcia said. "If I can probe a hundred fugitives and get one or two, that's a home run."

Facial-recognition software is not entirely new, but the North Carolina project is the first major step for the FBI as it considers expanding use of the technology to find fugitives nationwide.

So-called biometric information that is unique to each person also includes fingerprints and DNA. More distant possibilities include iris patterns in the eye, voices, scent and even a person's gait.

FBI officials have organized a panel of authorities to study how best to increase use of the software. It will take at least a year to establish standards for license photos, and there's no timetable to roll out the program nationally.

Calabrese said Americans should be concerned about how their driver's licenses are being used.

Licenses "started as a permission to drive," he said. "Now you need them to open a bank account. You need them to be identified everywhere. And suddenly they're becoming the de facto law enforcement database."

Dracula's Cellar found.

Toronto, October 3: Archaeologists have found a cellar in the university town of Pecs in southern Hungary, which they believe to have belonged to Wallachian Duke Vlad III, more commonly known as "Dracula."

According to a report in the Digital Journal, Tamas Fedeles, tutor of medieval and early modern history at Pecs University said that his research showed that Vlad III Tepes alias "Dracula," lived in a two-story town house on what is now the city's central square.

Fedeles said that the Duke of Wallachia (modern-day southern Rumania) owned the house in the 1460s and this is confirmed by a 1489 document that refers to it as "Drakulya House."

The document contains a detailed description of the house and from this, Fedeles said that the cellar most likely belonged to "Drakulya".

Oliver Gabor, a local archaeologist, said that this cellar was one of the most impressive medieval cellars found to date. In his opinion, further excavations could turn up interesting finds.

Science appears to contradict Mayan 2012 doomsday

By DESMOND LAWE

The class of 2012 may have more to worry about in the months following their graduation than a struggling job market.

There is a growing belief that the world as we know it will end shortly after current freshmen graduate. Most believers point to an ancient Mayan calendar as a harbinger of the end of days.

According to the Web site www.armageddononline.org, the Mayans developed a measure to count days called the Long Count, which began Aug. 11, 3114 B.C. and is scheduled to end Dec. 21, 2012.

There are many proposed theories of how the world will end. One involves the alignment of planets and galaxies during the Winter Solstice, which is scheduled to occur Dec. 21, 2012. Believers of this theory predict that a planetary alignment will affect the gravitational pull throughout the solar system and cause Earth’s polarity to reverse, making the North Pole the south and the South Pole the north.

Paul Stoddard, an NIU planetary science professor, discredits this theory.

As Child, 'Psychic' Teen Included Auras in Drawings

By CHRIS CONNELLY and IA ROBINSON

All her life, Heather, a 19-year-old from Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., has seen light and color where others do not. In her childhood drawings, she added rainbows around everything from people to trees to blades of grass.

"I would be drawing auras and colors around people and trees and rocks," Heather said, "and nobody else would."

At a young age, Heather said, she began to notice meaning in the auras that she, alone, saw. Green or gold was good. Muddier colors, like brown, spelled trouble.

"I started seeing colors that weren't healthy ... so I'd be, 'OK, something's not right there,'" Heather said. "I started realizing, 'OK, well, certain colors aren't good. I don't like being around those.'"

Other children and young adults across the United States say they have paranormal encounters, or psychic powers. To get inside the phenomenon, "20/20" recently sought out several supposedly psychic kids and their families.

In Heather's case, her special ability never fazed her mother, Liza, who runs a pet-sitting business and asked that the family's last name and hometown not be used. But it was something very new for Noreen Lowry, a family friend and Liza's client.

A no-nonsense native New Yorker, Lowry was a retired nurse living with her husband, Charles. One day, three years ago, she began to ask Heather more questions about her strange gift of seeing auras.

"I said, 'Well, you know, do I have an aura?'" Lowry recalled. "And she said to me, 'Yeah.' And, I said, 'Well, what color?' And, she said, 'It's kind of gold.'

"And, then, I had asked her what color my husband was, and she said, 'He's brown.' And even her tone of voice, I said, 'What does that mean?' And she said to me, that he's sick ... that he's pretty sick."

Heather had no idea that, a couple days earlier, Charles Lowry had, in fact, been experiencing shortness of breath just from walking his dogs.

For Part I of "20/20's" coverage of self-described psychic kids, CLICK HERE.

NASA bombing the moon to search for water

NASA plans to launch a powerful missile aimed directly at the South pole of the moon with the goal of blasting a hole in the lunar surface. Space scientists believe the blast would break up any lunar ice trapped underneath, propelling it above the moon’s surface, allowing NASA to detect the water molecules.

The search for water and other natural resources in space has long been a goal of space exploration. And finding sources of water on the moon would make future lunar missions easier and less costly, if there is no need to transport water from Earth.

The Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite or LCROSS mission will send a missile traveling at twice the speed of a bullet to blast a hole in the lunar surface of the moon on Friday.

Before Lucy came Ardi, new earliest hominid found

WASHINGTON – The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about "Ardi," a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, 4-foot female roamed forests a million years before the famous Lucy, long studied as the earliest skeleton of a human ancestor.

This older skeleton reverses the common wisdom of human evolution, said anthropologist C. Owen Lovejoy of Kent State University.

Rather than humans evolving from an ancient chimp-like creature, the new find provides evidence that chimps and humans evolved from some long-ago common ancestor — but each evolved and changed separately along the way.

"This is not that common ancestor, but it's the closest we have ever been able to come," said Tim White, director of the Human Evolution Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley.

The lines that evolved into modern humans and living apes probably shared an ancestor 6 million to 7 million years ago, White said in a telephone interview.

But Ardi has many traits that do not appear in modern-day African apes, leading to the conclusion that the apes evolved extensively since we shared that last common ancestor.

A study of Ardi, under way since the first bones were discovered in 1994, indicates the species lived in the woodlands and could climb on all fours along tree branches, but the development of their arms and legs indicates they didn't spend much time in the trees. And they could walk upright, on two legs, when on the ground.

Formally dubbed Ardipithecus ramidus — which means root of the ground ape — the find is detailed in 11 research papers published Thursday by the journal Science.

"This is one of the most important discoveries for the study of human evolution," said David Pilbeam, curator of paleoanthropology at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

Mars Hoax Returns

If no one has asked you about it yet, they probably will. A bogus e-mail chain letter, sometimes titled "Mars Spectacular," has been circulating around the Internet, as it did for the last few years. It claims that on August 27th the planet Mars will dazzle the world, appearing brighter than ever in history and "as large as the full Moon to the naked eye."

A bogus e-mail chain letter is misleading people into thinking that Mars will look as big as the full Moon to the naked eye in late August 2006. To learn the truth, see the image below.

Moon: Rick Fienberg; Mars: NASA / J. Bell (Cornell U.) / M. Wolff (SSI)

Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet

HATFIELD, England – In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.

"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.

An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."