FATEMAG.COM

You could say I discovered FATE magazine while conducting an experiment. I am not sure of the year, but I think it was 2003. I was working a part-time job at a small shop in Lake Anne Village Center in Reston, Virginia.

One evening as the daylight ran out, I left work and walked to my car. I had recently been experimenting with “asking and listening.” I had some free time between work and an event I was attending later that evening, so I decided to try asking and listening to see if an angel or spirit guide might suggest something to for me to do. I posed my question and waited silently in my car for an answer. I had only so much faith in this kind of thing, but I was open enough to experiment, in spite of being uncomfortable with the whole business. Read the rest of this entry »

During the summer of 1991 interest in the crop circles in England reached a fever pitch. Newspapers were awash with photos of new formations and articles about this strange phenomenon. Fascinated members of the public converged on parts of Wiltshire where the circles were appearing and farmers often charged money for access to their cropfields.

Crop circle found at Barbury Castle in Wiltshire, England.

Giving the subject a certain legitimacy was scientist Dr. Terence Meaden, meteorologist and author, who had proposed that an elusive natural phenomenon, the Plasma Vortex, was causing these mysterious patterns in the crops. To prove his theory he set up an observation project with a team of Japanese scientists on a hilltop between Calne and Devizes where a watch was carried out using radar and other scientific devices. Nevertheless, the agency that caused the crop circles continued to evade detection and, despite the appearance of some circles in the fields below, nothing definite was established.

During the previous year the phenomenon had progressed from simple circles in the corn to highly elaborate shapes called pictograms which embodied both circles and rectilinear elements. Although most investigators (myself included) saw clear evidence of intelligent design, Dr. Meaden continued to insist that his plasma vortex was the answer, even suggesting that one could explode like some physical mechanism scattering cogwheels and springs, causing straight lines and possible key-shapes to result. Other researchers would cautiously allow that some unknown intelligence was at work, but at the start of 1991 there were few who seriously believed that the crop circles were all man-made. Read the rest of this entry »

By Lawrence D. Hills (1959)

July 1959- Vol. 12, No. 6

Here is a reconstruction of an amazing voyage that may have brought Cro-Magnons to American shores some 4,000 years ago.

One reason Cortez conquered Mexico with ease was the Aztec legend of strange white gods arriving from the sea. A dozen different tribes had such legends and many archaeologists believe that white men reached America before either Columbus or Leif Ericsson. Here Lawrence Hills marshals evidence to support his theory that they came in giant double canoes from the Canary Islands.

That this could have been done easily is indicated by the direction of the prevailing trade winds. Last December and January, the balloon Small World covered 1,800 miles by air and 1,200 miles by sea from the Canaries to Barbados in only 24 days. Its four occupants were blown over this route almost entirely by the same trade winds that would have carried the original Canarians centuries earlier.

The year is 1958 b.c. In Egypt the Pyramids have stood for over three centuries. In Crete the first good plumbing system in the world is operating. And in China, India, and around the Eastern end of the Mediterranean are men skilled in working bronze, copper, and gold, in writing, trading, and weaving. For the magic of metals, of the wheel and the turning shaft, harnessed first to the trade of the potter, have begun to change men’s lives. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember that balmy summer evening in 2006 as if it were yesterday: suburban noises echoing in the warm outside air, dogs barking, the excited laughter of children, and the distant sound of cars and motorbikes snorting past in the merriment. I sat alone in my sitting room, meditating quietly on the joyful sounds outside in my neighborhood. The clock on the mantelpiece told me that it was just after 7:00 p.m. The television was switched off, and my mind gently surrendered to a quiet smoothness of contentment. From time to time,my eyes wandered to gaze at the familiar objects in the room: the small statue of Buddha on the mantle, the family photographs, and finally the large, colorful tapestry of a proud American Indian chief wearing a fabulous headdress of feathers. Read the rest of this entry »

Vyktoria Pratt Keating Interview

It was in the city of Sedona, where Vyktoria Pratt Keating performed her mystical harmonies, that something amazing happened that would alter her perspective and her music forever. Although she had played many shows before, this would be the first time that her audience connected with her on a level that went far beyond previous experience. As an artist, Keating is an intellectual and metaphysical visionary with a down-to-earth style.

This niece of the famous horror actor Boris Karloff began playing her favorite Beatles and Bob Dylan tunes at the age of seven. Since then, she has been constantly perfecting her craft. Keating has toured the world with bands such as Jethro Tull, offering her the opportunity to spread her paranormal poetry with gypsy-like finesse.  Read the rest of this entry »

Deaf Bill
My name is Wayne Hensley and I do the haunted tours in Alton, Illinois, at the old Mineral Springs Hotel (now a mall), with my co-workers Janet Kolar and Crystal Beacon, and I also own the barbershop in the building,which I have operated for the last 28 years.

The Mineral Springs Hotel sits near the Mississippi River.Years ago there was an island near the Missouri side call McPike Island. During the Civil War it was home to Confederate prisoners of war who suffered from smallpox. The island disappeared while the Alton Dam was
being built in the 1930s. The water level rose and it was washed away. Read the rest of this entry »

Nazis in South America

Hitler allegedly fled to Bariloche, Argentina following WWII.

On Sunday, July 11, 2004, the Chilean newspaper Las Ultimas Noticias published a brief interview with an author whose book had created a stir throughout South America. Abel Basti’s Bariloche Nazi openly suggested that the German Führer Adolf Hitler did not die in a Berlin bunker, but managed to escape to South America along with his mistress Eva Braun. Both spent their last days in the Argentinean mountain resort of San Carlos de Bariloche in the Andes.

According to Basti, Hitler died in 1960. No date for Braun’s death has been put forth. One of the locations identified as a hideaway for Hitler in Argentina is the San Ramón estancia or ranch, owned by the German principality of Schaumburg-Lippe. Another is the Inalco Mansion on the shores of Lake Nahuel Huapi.  Hitler’s days in Argentina were apparently uneventful. He went for long hikes along the shores of Nahuel Huapi and took in the clean Andean air. His trademark mustache shaven and his hair gone gray, the architect of millions of deaths had settled down as a householder.

If Hitler did, in fact, live out his final years in South America, how did he get there from the bunker in Berlin where he is believed to have committed suicide? Read the rest of this entry »

Tank, Mary Beth Nelson's pug guided to her by her deceased aunt.

I grew up with Boston terriers and I absolutely love the breed, as did my mom, Catherine Lee, and my aunt, Mary Simmons, who was like a second mom to me. I have fond childhood memories of Pug, my first Boston, as well as Princess who helped me grow to adulthood. Princess passed away in 1989 at the age of 15 at my mother’s home. By this time I was married but my husband and I had a third floor apartment and Princess loved her yard at the house so we would just visit.

On December 22, 1991, my mother passed away. I had a vivid dream where she talked to me and said she had to go on because there was still a lot of work to do. The living experience intense sorrow because our loved ones, whether in human or animal form, aren’t physically in front of us to hold a conversation, to hug or to pet. However, I know they are with us in spirit form and able to communicate in a different way. Read the rest of this entry »

Teddy Roosevelt during his time as a rancher.

Just 100 years ago, Theodore Roosevelt was the country’s chief executive and favorite son. His personality was larger than life. His exploits captured people’s imaginations worldwide. After the death of his first wife in 1884, Roosevelt spent two years as a rancher and hunter on his ranch in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. He climbed down from the saddle long enough to pen three books during this period. In 1893, he published a lengthy and most entertaining narrative entitled The Wilderness Hunter: An Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle, a memoir of sorts of his days in the territories. Among the stories recorded here is what seems to have been a 19th-century Bigfoot encounter. Read the rest of this entry »

On the evening of Thursday, June 10, 2010 I went to prison – not as an inmate, but as a researcher. The Huntsville Unit Penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas is an ominous red brick structure jutting up from the East Texas hillside. The ‘Walls,’ as it has commonly been called for decades, is the oldest prison in Texas and it still currently processes and houses inmates. Stories of ghostly apparitions and strange noises abound, and it’s no wonder; history has been made here. Texas leads the country in the number of inmate executions every year, and this is where all of them are carried out.

There are two death houses here, though only one currently remains operational. From 1924 to 1964 Texas executed inmates via the electric chair. A total of 361 condemned individuals rode the “thunderbolt” into the afterlife, paying the ultimate price for the crimes they had committed. “Old Sparky” now resides at the Texas Prison Museum, also located in Huntsville. Today, inmates on Death Row are put to death by means of lethal injection.

I will admit that I was initially drawn to Huntsville and the prison museum to see the electric chair, wondering if it held residual energy from its past. As it turns out, the electric chair draws more people to the museum than any of the other displays; this, according to the museum’s director and retired warden of the Walls, Jim Willett.

Read the rest of this entry »