Why is this important?

Well, it turns out that ol’ Lykaon grew up just a mere 30 miles from Stephenville. Whatever those folks saw may have well been visible to my hometown and all of its residents.

The original article on the sitings was posted up on January 17, 2008 and told of the accounts. At the time, the Air Force denied having any aircraft in the area, fueling speculation that the townfolk really did see a UFO.

This morning, however, the Air Force has backpedaled into this statement:

In the interest of public awareness, Air Force Reserve Command Public Affairs realized an error was made regarding the reported training activity of military aircraft.

So, now the Air Force is saying that they did in fact have aircraft flying over Stephenville in the form of a number of F-16s.

I’m not going to jump on a conspiracy band wagon here and say the Air Force is trying to cover something up.

I’ve had enough experience to know that, more than likely, they really did just fudge it up and fail to realize that they had multi-million dollar fighter jets flying around.

The problem, of course, is that this is how UFO conspiracy theories are born. The Air Force failing to check its facts will cause decades of UFO talk in Stephenville, ultimately hurting the credibility of the US Government (and probably Stephenville as well).

It’s sad that they couldn’t have been a little more thorough when releasing their first statement.

Or maybe it really was a UFO cover-up…

Who knew?

It’s not that I’m completely unwilling to believe in UFOs and Ghosts, but I require some evidence that can’t be explained away with science.

One of the more recent and interesting scientific explanations for a paranormal encounter is the idea that sleep paralysis is responsible for people believing they have been abducted by aliens.

When your body enters REM sleep, it ‘paralyzes’ your muscles so you don’t get out of bed and try to live through your dreams, ultimately hurting yourself or others. It’s a defense mechanism that is incredibly important.

Occasionally, however, it can happen that your mind awakes from REM but your body doesn’t wake up with it. This leaves your body in this funky state where you’re completely aware but cannot move your body.

This can be slightly terrifying to say the least, but it gets worse with a high chance of hallucination occurring during this time as well. Many people who experience sleep paralysis report seeing strange things in the room with them, and more commonly, figures around the bed.

Another common theme of the hallucinations is the feeling that something is weighing on you, such as someone sitting on your feet or chest.

Since the hallucinations are usually unreasonable and unearthly, most people report bouts of sleep paralysis as a dream, easily chalking up their visions to an overactive dreamstate.

A common theme in alien abductions is waking to aliens standing near your bed and being unable to move, followed by being taken to an alien ship.

Sounds an awful lot like sleep paralysis to me, and so far is one of the most interesting theories for such a widespread phenomenon that I’ve heard.

To my delight, I believe I encountered sleep paralysis last night (or I was abducted by aliens).

I was dreaming about being on vacation at a lakehouse that I’ve never seen before. On the lake there were two piers. I was on one with my wife, and some friends of ours were on the other.

We were yelling across the water at each other, waving and having fun, when a UFO popped out of the water on the other pier and started flying circles around our friends. I had a camera with me and tried to snap a photo when the other pier collapsed, our friends falling into the water.

I awoke, a bit winded and scared. My cats were sleeping on my feet (as they are prone to do). I couldn’t move, and I remember thinking how heavy the cats seemed and how strange it was that their weight was preventing me from moving.

Then I saw someone standing in the doorway of our bedroom. Just a shadowy figure. I couldn’t tell you if it was human or not. I could really only see it out of the bottom of my eyes since I was laying down.

Strangely, I wasn’t scared. I felt one of the cats methodically bathing himself. I thought to myself, “Ok, Lykaon, if there was someone in the bedroom with you, the cats wouldn’t just be bathing themselves. They’d be freaked out.”

I looked again and the figure was gone, and I drifted back to sleep.

I’m not sure how awake I ever really was. The fact that the figure in my doorway didn’t really scare me is a bit odd. I hope I don’t react that way if someone ever really is in my bedroom!

I also now question whether my cats were really on my feet at all. Since one of the symptoms of sleep paralysis can be the feeling of something on your feet, I wonder if I just assumed it was my cats. It was certainly too dark to see.

I’ll never know for sure if I experienced true sleep paralysis, but it was a delightful experience nonetheless, and not nearly as frightening as I would have imagined.

Today I learned something that I’ve never even heard of: You can tell the temperature by counting cricket chirps.

Growing up in Texas, I’m really surprised I never picked up on this little tidbit. Seems like a great thing to do as you drift off to sleep.

The exact formula is debated, but the Farmer’s Almanac suggests the following:

To convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit, count number of chirps in 14 seconds then add 40 to get the temperature.

One caveat to this whole thing is that it only works down to 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Any lower than that, and crickets don’t chirp. You can’t really blame them.

The whole thing was originally pioneered in 1897 by physicist Amos Dolbear who performed studies indicating that the frequency of cricket chirps could be predicted based on the temperature.

Somebody must have come along afterwards and realized that no one cares how often crickets are chirping, especially if they need a thermometer to predict it.

Being able to tell temperature, however, could be immensely useful if you were in the middle of nowhere with no thermometer, television, internet, or radio. Now you know how.

By his own estimations, the world will end no earlier than 2060. That doesn’t mean that it will end in 2060, but that it won’t end before then. That’s a relief.

This news also proves something that I’ve thought for years. If the world does end in 2060, that will be 53 years in the future. I’m currently 28, which means I’ll be 81 years old if I’m alive at all.

Based on my family history, I doubt that I will live that long. Clearly, my death will be so impactful on the world that it will start to deteriorate leading up to the 2060 armageddon.

Excuse me. I have some lightning to dodge.

They say curiosity killed the cat, but it just may kill humans too. Plans are to send some robots down into the underbelly of Mars to see what it turns up.

Hopefully there are no subterranean robot eaters, though a disappearing robot might be a fun story. It could be the next great mystery of mankind.