Hey all –

As we near the six-month mark of when we launched Damned Connecticut, we have been told a few times how much people like this site, and for that, we are very appreciative. We created this site simply because we love this stuff and are interested in learning more about damned-type things, and hope you have enjoyed the ride thus far.

But like any creative endeavor, we are constantly looking for feedback on how to make this site better.

Many of you have suggested damned subjects to write about, haunted sites and creepy spots — and as such, we have a looong list of places we plan write about and to visit.

We know you like trying to find the true story of “The Haunting in Connecticut” and learning about the Melon Heads, reading our interviews and checking out the weird news, but what other “damned”-type stories would you like to see here? More TV, books and movie reviews? Classic Connecticut cases (like the famous Lindley Street haunting, Phelps Mansion or the Waterbury UFO story)? More mysteries of deep space? More giant squid or mystery corn? You tell us.

We also are going to try and make the site more user-friendly and interactive — we are toying with adding message boards or discussion forums, places where you can better share your damned stories and pictures with us as well as with each other. We want to make this more of a community (for lack of a better word), so we can continue to find out about all the cool stories out there. As Steve has said, one thing we have learned since we launched this site is that it seems as though pretty much everyone has a ghost story or odd tale to tell. We want to collect them all here, if possible.

Feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments section of this post, or if you’re a bit shy, you can send us an e-mail.

Anyway, we hope the next six months here at Damned Connecticut will be as fun and productive as the first, and look forward to bringing you the most damned stuff we can find! Thanks again.

Ray, Kate and Steve

It’s almost the third Thursday of the month, so that means it’s time for the next meet-up of the Connecticut Drinking Skeptically group.

This month Margey has invited an old friend of ours (sort of), the New England Paranormal Video Research Group, the paranormal investigative team of Don Carter, who was our first Damned Interview.

The New England Paranormal Video Research Group (NEPVRG) is made up of dedicated members who each bring unique experience and skills to researching the paranormal field. NEPVRG conducts scientific investigations of residential and historic properties primarily in Connecticut, but also in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York.

The meet-up is this Thursday night at The Field in Bridgeport. Hope to see you there!

I don’t know how we didn’t hear about this one, but this weekend, June 13-14, the Monster-Mania Horror Convention visits the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cromwell.

From the website …

Bruce Campbell?! Awesome! Plus, Robert “Freddy Kruger” Englund and many more special guests, plus a ton of vendors and other horror stuff.

This looks like a lot of fun. Check the website for the full schedule, ticket packages and more. Hope to see you there!

After my recent chat with archaeologist Dr. Kenny Feder [shameless Damned Interview plug alert!], I’ve been sort of focused on archeological-type mysteries and the like.

And of course, my mind got around to one of the biggest ones known in human history, STONEHENGE!

Oh wait, I meant the real one!

That’s better.

Anyway, as luck would have it, I caught “Stonehenge Decoded” on the National Geographic channel the other night, and found it to be an excellent program, especially in HD. (Oh, and for more Stonehenge and Spinal Tap goodness, National Geographic has done a few short clips with ‘Tap guitarist Nigel Tufnel — who suggests that the giant monoliths of Stonehenge were partially made with dinosaur saliva. Definitely worth a watch!) It was nice to see a presentation on Stonehenge rooted strongly in fact and the scientific method — actually, the latest discoveries about the monument came directly because of solid and thoughtful archeological work. Good stuff.

My wife and I visited England back in 1998 B.C. — Before Children — and during our trip, found our way to the Salisbury plain and Stonehenge. As you might expect, it was a great experience — it’s hard not to look at these massive stones that have been sitting there for thousands of years and not be impressed. We also made our way to nearby Avebury, home to an even older and more interesting ancient megalithic complex that features a larger stone ring as well as the mysterious Silbury Hill.

Created over 4,000 years ago, it stands over 130 feet tall, and despite centuries of study and excavation, no one is still really sure what its purpose was. Burial chamber? Fortress? Sacred monument? Doorstop? Like how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie-Pop, the world may never know.

Closer to home, there’s Mystery Hill in New Hampshire, aka “America’s Stonehenge,” which some have suggested it is as old as Stonehenge and built by the same peoples or other visitors from the Old World. Although there are some parts of the site that have been dated to over 2,000 years ago, the majority of the complex lacks the actual evidence to bolster the more exotic claims — a lot of the structures at the site apparently may have been built by 18th- and 19th-century farmers. Despite its muddled pedigree, it looks like a fun place to check out.

And finally, here in Connecticut, there’s “Clonehenge” — aka “The Circle of Life” in the Sachem Head section of Guilford.

Designed and built on private property, its history and purpose are a lot clearer. In 2003, Dr. Jonathan Rothberg decided he wanted to build an observatory on his property but was thwarted by the local zoning board. Being resourceful, he instead circumvented the board and commissioned renowned architect Cesar Pelli to design an astronomically correct and working replica of Stonehenge, an enormous celestial clock using 700 tons of granite . . . as a pure work of art.

According to the New York Times story linked above, Dr. Rothberg said, “My position is, if I put up a piece of art, I don’t need permission.”

Sure, it’s not as old or as storied as the original Stonehenge or Avebury, but then again, the ancient people of Great Britain didn’t have Yankee ingenuity, now did they?

Going for the trifecta on recent UFO-type stories, I recently found this article on Popular Mechanics’s website about NASA and UFOs. It’s an interesting read, covering the ongoing controversy of whether NASA has repeatedly recorded footage of UFOs during shuttle missions and has been denying it to the public. In the story, two astronauts talk about the clips and the ongoing “cover up” stories.

Here is one of the clips they address from You Tube — in it, you can see “unidentified objects” floating in space that suddenly change direction, seemingly of their own volition.

The shuttle astronauts say what you are seeing here are ice crystals and other shuttle debris that are suddenly hit by the exhaust from the shuttle’s thrusters during a firing, thus creating the change of direction. Others contend you are really seeing alien spacecraft monitoring our ongoing foray into space, which NASA has known about for years and refuses to divulge to the American public.

So which is it? I love a good conspiracy as much as the next person, but what astronaut Mario Runco says in the article just makes a tremendous amount of sense here:

UFO proponents tend to dismiss official responses from members of NASA, the Pentagon or any other government agency, but Runco says that even if there was an active coverup, no amount of coercion could prevent an astronaut—himself included—from laying claim to a confirmed sighting of an alien spaceship. “If I thought it was an intelligent craft, I’d be the first one to speak up,” says Runco. “I’d want the credit: Mario Runco was the first person in history to conclusively document the existence of an extraterrestrial civilization. Why would I ever want to keep it secret?”

I think that’s been my biggest problem with any of these NASA conspiracies — just too many people to try and keep quiet. I don’t know about most of you, but my impression is that human beings in general have a hard time keep anything secret for too long, be it about alien autopsies, bigfoot captures or MTV Movie Award stunts seemingly gone awry.

Anyway, for those interested in outer space doings, Popular Mechanics also celebrates the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings with “the untold story” behind the event. A lot of really cool stuff here, including exclusive video, audio and photographs. Highly recommended!

I saw this story about the possibility of habitable planets in the Alpha Centauri system, our “next door space neighbors.” So rather than looking in the deep recesses of space, we’re looking closer to our galaxy, in our own galactic neighborhood as it were.

Of course, the only problem is if there are planets in the system that hold life, Alpha Centauri is still 4 light years away, and even though in terms of space that’s not an enormous distance, we still haven’t figured out how to go anywhere near that far.

As a matter of fact, we are still far away from solving this challenge. From the article …

The problem with interstellar spaceflight is the “interstellar” part. We happen to live in a universe that is strikingly vacuous. The Centauri system is nearly 26 trillion miles away.

That’s roughly 280,000 times the distance of the Earth from the sun. It’s so distant that a beam of light traveling at 186,000 miles per second needs more than four years to cross the interstellar void. If you looked at Alpha Centauri tonight (it’s overhead in the Southern Hemisphere), you’d be seeing light emitted right around the time of the second inauguration of George W. Bush.

To frame it another way: The venerable robotic probe Voyager I, which has traveled farther from Earth than any man-made spacecraft, is racing away at nearly 11 miles per second and has already traveled 10 billion miles. It would need on the order of 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri were it traveling in that direction.

Although I have generally long-life genes from all four of my grandparents — they all lived into at least their 80s — I don’t think I can hang around the 79,950 years or so it’s gonna take at this rate. Someone, better come up with something. And quick!

Of course, there are those who want us to believe that we have already gone to alien worlds!

One of my favorite “conspiracies” (read: “hoaxes”) of the past few years is The Zeta Reticuli Exchange Program. In a nutshell, the “story” here is that according to “a retired U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency official” the U.S. has been participating in a top secret exchange program where twelve U.S. military personnel were sent to live on Serpo, a planet of Zeta Reticuli, between the years 1965 and 1978. In exchange, an alien from Serpo lived on this planet for a number of years.

Sound familiar? Yeah, the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where the Richard Dreyfuss character is among the astronauts who get on the alien mothership and fly off into space. The Serpo conspiracy story also has all the pieces you’d expect, from crashed alien spacecraft to government cover-ups. However, there’s nothing about sculpting landing sites out of mashed potatoes or memorable synthesizer music.

To the credit of whoever created the Serpo story, they did a masterful job, crafting an amazingly detailed narrative that I encourage you to check out if you’re looking to kill some time on the web and enjoy this kind of thing. Here’s a good place to start … make yourself some popcorn, sit back and take a trip across the galaxy!

So on a recent glorious April morning I found myself on my buddy Rick’s clam boat, out on the Sound just south of Milford and East of Charles Island. Because it was a clear day and the rising sun was providing spectacular color and light, I snapped a ton of photos.

I went through the majority of them right away, picking out all the best ones of the crew and the boat. About two weeks ago, I was going through the rest to dump them (yay digital photography!) when I came across one that wasn’t of the crew, but of the sunrise. I thought it might make a nice background for my computer, but I noticed it had a few marks on it — must’ve been a water spot on the lens, right? So I opened the file in Photoshop to clean it up, but when I looked at it closer, one of the marks didn’t look like any water spot I’d ever seen. As a matter of fact, as I zoomed in on it, it looked like an object which appeared to be floating in the clouds. It also didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before … to me, it looked like a well, an unidentified object … flying …

click to embiggen

I don’t remember seeing anything in the sky when we were out on the boat, and something of that size certainly would’ve been noticed by the crew, right? It’s size and shape reminded me a of a smokestack, but there were no factories in that direction (a few hundred feet in the air over a large body of water), and it couldn’t have been a double exposure because I was shooting digital. Hmm …

Here’s an even larger version of the picture for you to peruse — unfortunately, we’re limited on how big an image we can upload to the site — my original image is twice as large as this.

click to embiggen even more!

What the heck, right? I mean, it looks like some sort of giant cylindrical object floating right up there in the clouds, doesn’t it? I’m sort of skeptical at heart, but the more I looked at it, the more I thought it was just weird …

And I also laughed at the irony of the situation — here’s someone who runs a website dedicated to weird and unusual things in Connecticut and coincidentally, he gets a UFO picture? Yeah, right. Still, it looked odd, and I thought it might merit a look by someone who is more skilled in analyzing these kinds of things.

Well now that I have these type of connections, I sent the original full-sized image to our friend Marc D’Antonio of MUFON, whose expertise is in image analysis. While I waited for Marc’s analysis, I did a little research of my own, and came across this picture and story about a similar object recently seen in the skies over Great Britain.

Of course, the video of this object is shaky at best, and those analyzing it suggest it was a weather balloon. I supposed the object in my photo could’ve been a weather balloon, but out there in the Sound on a cloudless day, it would’ve been obvious, right? When I took the photo, I know I didn’t see anything unusual in the sky, and no one on the boat noted anything odd either.

Luckily, before I could get my knickers in a full twist, I got a response back from Marc –

I looked at the image. The first thing I can say without a doubt is that this artifact is close to the camera if not in the camera. You can see this by zooming in actually. It does not exhibit the same characteristics if the sky behind it or the water below. Its sharpness and refined edges indicate that as a close object it is probably something on the lens or the optically clear covering in front of the lens more likely . It can be very tiny on the lens and be larger on the photo. This is one of those things you dont see until later when you look at the image. That is usually an indicator that it was not really there. In this case, such an object would have definitely caught your attention had it appeared as you see it in this image.

Based on the lighting of it in fact, it looks like it might be a scratch on the clear glass over the lens. The reason is the way its illuminated. If you noticed, the bright ‘sunlit’ side of the vertical object is on the opposite side of the object from the Sun. This says that for this to be illuminated in this way with the darker part of the object TOWARD the Sun side, and the brighter part toward the opposite side of the Sun, that its a RECESSED artifact, which can be likened to a little ‘valley’ on the lens aperture, or… a scratch. If it was a raised piece of debris on the lens, you would see the lit side of the artifact on the same side as the Sun.

So in my view, check out your lens’ optically clear cover on the Powershot camera you have and see if you can see that scratch. Just my thoughts!

So, no UFO. But a nice lesson demonstrating how easy it is to accidentally capture something “unexplained.”

Maybe next time!

Apparently this is the last weekend (May 23 & 24) you can see this odd art exhibit featuring “ingenius gadgets and curiousities” at the MAC650 Artspace Gallery in Middletown — sounds cool!

I only wish we knew sooner — people, you have to tell us about these things when you see them!

Here’s an article about it in the Middletown Press, and from the website, this image …

Get there while you still can.

This Thursday night, May 21, is the monthly meet-up of the Fairfield Drinking Skeptically group. As usual, our good friend Margey has another great speaker on tap –

How to Pull Off An Archaeological Fraud: A Primer

Dr. Kenneth L. Feder is a professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University. He has authored several books on archaeology and criticism of pseudoarchaeology such as Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. He gained his Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology in 1973 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, his Master of Arts in anthropology from the University of Connecticut in 1975 and his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1982. He is the founder and director of the Farmington River Archaeological Project which studies the prehistory of the region. He has also appeared on the ancient astronauts episode of the National Geographic Channel’s Is It Real? and several episodes of the BBC documentary series Horizon discussing Atlantis and Caral.

This month’s meet-up is at 7:00pm at The Field Restaurant, 3001 Fairfield Ave., Bridgeport. If you plan on going, please give Margey a heads up through the Drinking Skeptically site. Should be another great event.

Well, any time we hear of a movie starring two cryptozoological creatures, of course, we’re interested. And then throw in Lorenzo Lamas and my one-time future wife (unbeknownst to her), and it sounds like an instant cinematic cryptozoological classic, on the scale of King Kong or Jaws!

Okay, maybe it’s closer to Anaconda or Deep Blue Sea.

Here’s a nice story from MTV about how the buzz for the film has sort of taken Deborah by surprise.

From that article –

The whimsical nature of the film attracted Gibson to the project. “I remember when I got the script, I just thought, ‘This is so much fun. I cannot say no to this,’ ” she recalled. “Which I think is probably what other people sense too. Obviously, the title alone makes people say, ‘What?!’ And then put my name with that title, and it’s an absolute bizarre combo.”

I had the great pleasure of interviewing my crush Ms. Gibson about two years ago for an article in conjunction with a concert she was putting on at one of the casinos. She was funny, smart, down-to-earth and an absolute professional — I even managed to keep my cool when she started talking about her infamous Playboy pictorial. (Different 80s band, but “My blood runs cold; angel is a centerfold!”) She did say, “I’m waiting for my big Cher comeback hit!” Maybe this is it? I hope for her it is — she truly seems like a decent person in an industry bereft of them.

Anyway, this looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun, and as it’s going directly to DVD, certainly worth a few bucks to rent. It’s not every day we get to see giant squids and mega sharks running rampant while Deborah Gibson tries to stop them! Only in my dreams …