October 30, 2000 -
International Space Station Historic Mission
NASA is counting down the hours until American astronaut Bill Shepherd will lead the first expedition to the International Space Station. The historic mission is scheduled to lift off on Tuesday, October 31st at 2:53 AM east coast time. Shepherd will be joined by two Russian cosmonauts, Yuri Gizenko and Sergei Krikalev. This expedition crew plans to spend nearly four months on the space station.
October 29, 2000 Derwent, Alberta, Canada - Oscar Jackson had been checking fences on the Saddle Lake Indian Reserve in Derwent, Alberta on October 13 when he last saw the six-year-old Charlais bull alive. The owner, Marshall Kisiak, runs close to 200 head on that pasture. Three days later on October 16, the bull was found dead with a pattern of neat and largely bloodless excisions from his head to his scrotum with no signs of struggle. Fern Belzil of St. Paul raised purebred cattle professionally. Now in retirement, he has taken a serious interest in the cattle mutilation mystery and has investigated several dozen Alberta cases, including this recent bull death. He traveled to Derwent on October 19th to photograph the odd excisions.
October 22, 2000 Panama City, Florida - More than a hundred blacktip and Atlantic sharpnose sharks were found October 16, 2000 dead and decaying along a half mile of beach on the eastern side of Shell Island near Panama City, Florida. Marine biologists so far cannot explain the mass deaths of a rugged species sometimes called "living fossils" because modern sharks arose during the Jurassic Period between 135 and 190 million years ago. No one can remember so many shark deaths at one time before.
October 22, 2000 Frankfort, Kentucky - Kentucky Governor Paul E. Patton visited the Martin County site near Inez where an estimated 210 million gallons of coal mine sludge collapsed into the Big Sandy and Cold Water Branches of Wolf Creek. Public water supplies in the town of Louisa and Martin County District Number One were immediately polluted. On October 16, Governor Patton declared a State of Emergency for ten counties "in the wake of last Wednesday's failure of a Martin County coal slurry impoundment. ...The declaration covers the counties of Boyd, Bracken, Carter, Fleming, Greenup, Lawrence, Lewis, Martin, Mason and Robertson, all lying within the Big Sandy and Ohio River watersheds." By October 22, at least seventy miles of waterways were filled with the cement-like sludge.
October 16, 2000 Chagrin Falls, Ohio - Retired analytical chemist Phyllis A. Budinger now operates her own independent lab, Frontier Analysis, Ltd., in Chagrin Falls, Ohio. In July 2000, she received from biophysicist W. C. Levengood two sets of the anomalous particles collected from the Red Bluff, California mutilated bull's testicles and chest on January 18, 1997.
October 15, 2000 Boulder, Colorado - Since the 1950s, unusual deaths called "animal mutilations" have been reported around the world. Both domestic animals and wild game have been affected, especially horses and cattle. Ranchers and law enforcement have long been puzzled because animals are found with the same pattern of hide and tissue removed usually without blood from the head, sexual organs, and rectum with no signs of struggle or tracks around the dead animals. Not even the animal's own tracks which provoked law enforcement to wonder if perpetrators came in and out of pastures using aerial craft.
October 15, 2000 Grass Lake, Michigan - Since the 1950s, unusual deaths called “animal mutilations” have been reported around the world. Both domestic animals and wild game have been affected, especially horses and cattle. Ranchers and law enforcement have long been puzzled because animals are found with the same pattern of hide and tissue removed usually without blood from the head, sexual organs, and rectum. There are no signs of struggle or tracks around the dead animals, not even the animal's own tracks. That peculiar fact provoked law enforcement to wonder if perpetrators came in and out of pastures using aerial craft.
October 9, 2000 Cambridge, Massachusetts - The Chandra X-ray Observatory has been revealing layers of the cosmos around us with beautiful clarity. One of its x-ray images from October 1999 shows the Sirius A and B star system located 8.6 light years from Earth. The large central light is Sirius A, the brightest star in the northern sky in optical light. Sirius B is a white dwarf that is ten thousand times dimmer, but clearly shows up in x-rays. Because the two stars are so close together, Sirius B was not discovered until 1862 by Alvan Clark using the best optical telescope in the world at the time. The pink sapphire pattern is produced by the satellite's transmission grating. For comparison, below is an optical image by Arizona's McDonald Observatory.
October 8, 2000 Tahuya, Washington – Bigfoot tracker, landscape contractor and Tahuya resident, Derek Randles, has a large plaster cast of what might be the first partial body print of a Bigfoot ever found. In September, he helped the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO) plan an expedition of fourteen people into the Gifford Pinchot wilderness west of Yakima, Washington. Their goal was to find Bigfoot tracks, hairs and screams for an Australian camera crew producing a segment for the Discovery Channel program Animal X . The group set up a sound projection system to loudly broadcast a Bigfoot scream recorded recently at Lake Tahoe, California. On September 21st, after one of the broadcasts of three Bigfoot screams, the researchers were shocked to hear a nearly identical series of three screams answer back.
Around 3:30 AM on September 22, Derek Randles and some of his colleagues went in the direction of the screams and placed fruit in the middle of a watery, muddy wallow in hopes that whatever was producing the eerie answers might be tempted to eat the fruit and leave tracks in the mud. After sunrise, the men found more than footprints.
