Reported and Edited by Linda Moulton Howe
April 14, 2003 Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada - Today, the World Health Organization (W.H.O.) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) are reporting that the number of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome cases, known as SARS pneumonia, have risen around the world to 3169 and 144 deaths. This is an epidemic. Many doctors are wondering if it will become a global pandemic that can infect hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of people over the next several months.
"I noticed that the seed itself still had the skin or a membrane around it which makes the seed smooth to the touch. So, in fact, you would have to take off this skin or membrane to actually feel the markings or engravings that are in the seed. ...There was no way that a worm or any insect could do that because it would have eaten through the skin or membrane."
- Dave Rosenfeld, Photographer, Salt Lake City, Utah
March 28, 2003 Salt Lake City, Utah - As I reported on March 15, 2003, about 500 "engraved" seeds were found inside an otherwise fresh, healthy banana squash by Salt Lake City restaurant owner, Kasim Barakzia, on March 14, at his restaurant, Baba Afghan. Almost every seed had letters or symbols engraved on both sides in what appeared to be different languages. The first symbol that Kasim recognized was the Arabic symbol for Allah.
Kasim has cut open dozens of banana squash every week since he opened his restaurant nine years ago and has never seen anything like these seeds before. Normal squash seeds are smooth and glisten with a thin, transparent membrane.
March 15, 2003 Grass Lake, Michigan - Biophysicist W. C. Levengood has been examining both normal control and body pattern samples I collected from the cotton and polyester woven bed sheet in Urandir Oliveira's home in February. The body pattern was discovered by several people at Oliveira's farm around 8 p.m. on September 15, 2002. (See previous Earthfiles reports about Corguinho, Brazil.)
This week I received photomicrographs from Levengood taken at 40X magnification under his microscope and today we discussed the images shown below with his comments.
"I believe this is the first time we have observed a coronal mass ejection (from the sun) apparently interacting with a comet."
- Gareth Lawrence, Ph.D., Goddard Space Flight Center
March 7, 2003 Greenbelt, Maryland - Comet NEAT was named after the "Near-Earth Asteroid Tracking System" based at the Jet Propulsion System in Pasadena, California. NEAT's job is to monitor the solar system for comets and asteroids that might be on a collision course with Earth and warn about size and nearest approach date. The comet was not discovered by the NEAT system until November 6, 2002. When it was first seen, it was extremely faint to even the most sensitive ground-based observatories. But as it moved in its orbit toward the sun, it began to brighten intensely as gas and dust cooked off the comet and deflected sunlight back towards the Earth. The comet brightened so much faster than predicted that some scientists were worried nothing would be left. At its closest to the Earth on December 24, 2002, it was .8 of an Astronomical Unit from our planet, or about 74 million miles.