Because I only realized as I started this post that I never explained to you guys what LandWatch is, I figured I'd do it in true style--and in a way that involves unicorns. Because unicorns are true style.
LandWatch is the cryptzoo part of my blog, where I'll write about things like Bigfoot and well-meaning politicians and other strange, possibly nonexistent creatures that are rumored to exist or once existed on land (and soon-to-come SeaWatch, my intelligent readers, will, yes, be about things like Nessie and creatures such as her).
They called me crazy. Well, my dad did. But I found them. In the Bible. Just like I said.
Unicorns. Beautiful rhinos. Whatever you call 'em, Job talks about them. Don't believe me?
In the King James Bible, in Job 39:9-12:
"Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib?
Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee?
Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him?
Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?"
God talks about unicorns like they were any other animal, trying to show Job the awesomeness that He had wrought by creating all of these animals with their various talents and abilities. The unicorn shows up in a few other passages as well.
In Numbers 23:22:
"God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."
In Deuteronomy 33:17:
"His glory is like the
firstling of his bullock, and his horns are like the horns of unicorns:
with them he shall push the people together to the ends of the earth:
and they are the ten thousands of Ephraim, and they are the thousands of
Manasseh."
In Psalm 22:21:
"Save me from the lion's mouth: for thou hast heard me from the horns of the unicorns."
In Psalm 29:6:
"He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon and Sirion like a young unicorn."
In Psalm 92:10:
"But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil."
In Isaiah 34:7:
"And the unicorns shall
come down with them, and the bullocks with the bulls; and their land
shall be soaked with blood, and their dust made fat with fatness."
Uh-huh. Unicorns. In the Bible. Maybe this isn't hard-hitting journalism or ways to survive a demon attack (hint: Super-Soaker filled with Holy Water), but it can't be death and government conspiracies all the time, can it? Sometimes I need to blog something to lighten the mood--and what's lighter than unicorns? I'm not asking for a literal answer. Just enjoy the unicorn-awesomeness.
And Dad called me crazy.
Well, not just men, because the women were pretty good, too (Donna, Lisa, Paula, etc.), but it's a figure of speech, all right? From a Bonnie Tyler song.
A while back, I got the DVDs of the first few seasons of SyFy's Ghost Hunters and watched them; I just finished season three and am waiting to get season four. I also jumped into the second half of season eight once they put them up On Demand, and the differences between them are pretty startling. I mean, it almost seems to be a completely different show and, to a point, it does bother me, for several reasons. I mean, I know that change happens and all that, but not all change is good and, so far, this doesn't seem to be.
TAPS, in the beginning, was all about debunking a haunting, not proving it, and that seems to have completely gone out the window. Now almost everything found by the new investigators is considered "paranormal," and when you're used to TAPS's old way of doing things that can get annoying pretty fast. Most of the time, sitting on my couch at home I can see explanations for the weird noise Britt is hearing or the weird shadows Adam is seeing--one of the worst instances of that was when they were down in Louisiana investigating the Alexandria Zoo and Adam was getting a really high EMF spike, so he and Britt were freaking out over it, when asked about it later they said they thought it might have been something paranormal. The problem with that? At the time Adam was picking up the EMF spike, he was standing on old zoo railroad tracks (metal)...during a thunderstorm (lightning). And it was never once suggested that the high electric field was caused by the reaction of metal to lightning. Not. Once. Not cool, guys.
Most of the crew seem to go into a place expecting it to be haunted, completely in contrast to the "old days" at TAPS. And, half the time, they focus on one reported haunting while barely mentioning another, like up at Fort Ontario. The fort reportedly houses the ghosts of both American soldiers and Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust, and yet throughout the entire episode, most of the investigators asked the spirits if they had fled World War Two or if they were refugees, even if they were in places where the soldier-ghosts had been seen. This is the part where I give props to Amy, which I really didn't expect to be doing, because she usually asked if they were a soldier or refugee, and then continued asking questions about refugees once she felt she got a response in the positive. If only most of the others had done that, maybe I wouldn't have been screaming at the TV so much during that episode (although I feel like I have to yell at Amy a bit for investigating even though she is pregnant, because there are factors on investigations that can both physically and spiritually harm you and I don't feel she should be exposing her unborn child to that).
I want to point out something good, though, just so this post doesn't seem like one big put-down fest. The three remaining members of what I think of as the "original" TAPS crew (Jason Hawes, Steve Gonsalves, and Dave Tango) still hold the most to the whole debunking thing--although I've seen Jason accept some evidence that I felt he would have glared at Brian for thinking was paranormal a few seasons ago--my, how things change.
Positive, Star Baby. Right.
On the same investigation, up at the fort, Steve and Dave kept hearing a strange noise they couldn't place and eventually managed to figure out that it was something up on the roof blowing in the wind. I screamed "THANK YOU!" because it was like a huge present, seeing that the word "debunk" still lingers somewhere in TAPS's collective subconscious. Jason and Steve also, during an EVP session, also waited until they felt they had received confirmation the ghost they were trying to communicate with was a refugee ghost before they started asking refugee questions and, when a locked door tried to open, made sure nothing else could have caused that to happen before they presented it as evidence.
The Trinity, as I've come to call them to myself (and now to you) still show me the stuff I started watching the show for, although at a much smaller volume than they used to when the whole group was like them. They're doing their best, I guess, and considering the level my blood pressure spikes up to when I watch the newbies do their stuff (and some of them aren't that new, which makes things worse), that's all I can ask for, though I remember when I didn't have to.
And would it be too hard to analyze the evidence a little better? I mean, when I hear some of the EVPs they catch and compare it to what they think it says, it's a Queen Mary-length apart. Of course, back in the "old days" there were EVPs where I heard different things than TAPs did, but those times were relatively few and far between, not every single time they play a dang thing. I know that people can hear things differently, especially when it's encased in static, but sometimes it's ridiculous how differently we hear things, and a lot of the time they don't even hear anything close to what I hear. They've presented things as words when all I heard was laughter, as names when the words didn't even to start with the same sound (for example, once they thought an EVP said "Amy" and I couldn't even pick an A-sound out, and to me it sounded much longer, like they were saying a multi-syllabic word or phrase).
Jason doesn't even seem the same these days. He hardly seems to smile--he doesn't look that happy to be there on most investigations, even. He seems sad and drawn half the time, like all of this is taking a bad toll on him, and combine that with that goatee he's sporting and it starts looking like he's been kidnapped and replaced by an evil Jason from another dimension.
Seriously, though, it bothers me to see something like this happening, because I love Ghost Hunters so much and watching the first few seasons helped to cement my desire to become a ghost hunter myself. It almost hurts watching the old seasons in parallel time with the new one, because it's like watching the TAPS van roll down some giant hill and crash into schlock-soaked nitroglycerine at the bottom. There have been barely any residential cases lately, which makes me doubt the sincerity now of their "We're TAPS and we're here to help" slogan. Who are they helping now? Hotels? Forts? They should be helping normal people, too, just as they did when Grant was there with them. A home potentially being invaded by spirits of some sort or another used to be a large portion of their cases, and now those have all but faded from sight.
Will I keep watching? Yes, I will, but I'll be wishing it was even just a little bit more like the old Ghost Hunters and a lot less every other stumble-around-in-the-dark show on TV.
And I'll always miss the way the shows used to end, with Jason and Grant together in the TAPS van discussing their last case and closing things with a fist-bump, a true ghost-hunting bromance.
Well, on to the next.
After I posted my last rant, about the ability of jolly old England's ability to protect itself from aliens, I came across another interesting fact that cast even more doubt on that for me.
Britain once misplaced a 50,000 pound unexploded bomb.
Yes. They lost a freaking bomb. It was part of their strategy in WWI to place bombs in strategic locations and blow the Nazis up to kingdom come, but some of them ended up never being detonated. They then lost track of these undetonated things, and only found them recently using old maps.
And one of those bombs? It was set off by lightning and killed a cow.
Hmmm. Maybe a few of the animal mutilations that happened in England weren't really caused by aliens after all. Maybe they were killed by bombs that the British government lost.
Hey, England, tell your UFO adviser that all the top-notch technology you say you have can't protect you from the grays if you can't find it.
Sometimes I'll go off on a tangent about things that I've seen on other websites that are in no way affiliated with mine; this is one of those times.
The article that I'm going to be drawing off of this time is at http://theoccultsection.com/2012/10/18/can-britain-repel-a-ufo-invasion/, if you want to check it out yourself. I love www.theoccultsection.com, because it amuses me to no end and it continually shows me that I am not the only one out there who has aliens on the brain...and sometimes fears zombies trying to get at yours.
No matter what the "British government's former top UFO advisor" says, I don't really think Britain could push 'em back, push 'em back, waaaay back. I keep thinking about the American Revolution, where a bunch of farmers and first-time fighters managed to completely kick Britain's butt by the time the war was over. If they lost to us rebels, how do they expect to be able to repel aliens like the ones who make you do horrible things like go around killing people and rhen forgetting you ever saw them once you look away from them (that reference was brought to you by the basic knowledge of Doctor Who that comes from having two best friends who are obsessed with the show)? I mean, all the fancy-schmancy Taranis combat SUVs in England aren't gonna help the Brits against them. They need a TARDIS and bow-tie-wearing man for that.
I'm not just saying that because I'm an American and that means I automatically think most Brits suck (well, that's not the only reason). But thinking logically about this, how long do you think a man in a beef-eater is going to be able to resist before being vaporized by an angry Klingon?
Of course, American forces might be vaporized just as fast--after all, aliens who can hop from galaxy-to-galaxy when we can't even go to the moon anymore probably have, um, better technology than any country on Earth. But the difference is that the advisers in our government's UFO department don't come out and say we won't be.
What I'm trying to say, Britain, is that if a Dalek shows up on your street corner, you'd be better off running to your closest blue police call box than your government. If that doesn't save you, not much else can...except maybe America.
Yep, that's right. Your friendly neighborhood SkyWatcher now has a Twitter account. I'll be tweeting links to posts on SkyWatch as well as other articles I find interesting and that I think my readers will find intriguing too, so follow me if you want to and miss out on everything if you don't.
If you want to follow me, just hop on over to Twitter and follow Star Baby @aubtleaurora. I'll be just as weird there as I am here, so don't worry that I'll have to limit my weirdness or anything. All my strangeness will now be compacted into 140 neat little characters. Enjoy.
https://twitter.com/asubtleaurora
