Is it an Alien: The Mysterious Moonwalker. Nasa's Recent Lunar pic/Video Shows a human figure walking on the Moon

The whole world is asking the same question. Are you too?
While the officials are still searching on the fact, and Nasa have not clarified anything as of yet, their recent pic/video showing a humanoid figure walking on the surface of the moon has caught the attention of many eyes and questions are popping out.
These images came out as google's moon project. and were recently noticed by wowforreal(the video uploader).

"Mysterious man on the Moon" Source:Google Moon

Most of the questions coming out are as expected, Is that an Alien?

Is this image going to reveal anything about those Alien Mysteries at last for good?

Is it that time traveler? yes, people are going after all kind of crazy questions.

Among all these questions Nasa itself seems amazed at the pic, and has been said to be researching the matter. We think pretty soon we will get a real fact about this image/video. Hoping they won't hide anything from us on this Mysterious humanoid figure walking on the moon.
Though among all these some are calling it a light effect, and some simply call it a photoshop effect. But until we really get the confirmation on as to what this mysterious figure on the moon is.
wowforreal have suggested that it could be something drawn into the picture, but whatever it is, is still there on the google moon.

Watch this viral going video for the alien on the moon, from google Moon.

          

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Brightening The Moon - The Mysterious Plan Of a Swedish Cosmetic Company

Brightening The Moon

It sounds like the plot of a James Bond movie: There's a plan afoot to make the moon brighter in the night sky, potentially saving the world billions of dollars in power costs running street lamps.

How would such an ambitious idea even be possible? By strategically placing highly reflective material on the lunar surface. A lot of it.

The project is called Brighter Moon, and Swedish parent company Foreo says it has already secured more than $52 million in funding.

The thing is, Foreo is a cosmetics company. When asked for more information on the backers of Brighter Moon, company reps declined to name even one, citing privacy reasons. The "Foreo Institute" is also supposedly trying to crowd-fund a new kind of toothbrush — which may in fact be real — so the moon project may be an elaborate hoax created to drum up interest in that.

Still, Brighter Moon proposes an interesting, if fanciful scenario. It also makes some good points: The moon reflects only about 12% of the sunlight that impacts it. By using the right material in the right places — over an area the size of Switzerland, or about 0.1% of the lunar surface — the amount of reflected light could be increased by 80%.

See here what Newsy Science has to say on this.

A brighter night sky would mean less need for streetlights, which could potentially translate to less electricity usage and thus fewer globe-warming carbon emissions, it said. "We want to raise public awareness about the project and generate consciousness about the global energy crisis," said
Paul Peros, CEO of Foreo.

However, scientists are skeptical about the idea. "Making the Moon brighter is not something I've ever heard of in the geoengineering literature," said Ben Kravitz, a postdoctoral researcher in the atmospheric sciences and global change division of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The company said it plans to use materials already available on the surface of the Moon to brighten it, but it is not clear how that would work. Peros said the company is investigating simply smoothing over a portion of the Moon's surface to increase its reflectivity.

"Furthermore, we are looking at the surfaces and composition of the soil and materials that currently exist on the Moon and how to best utilise them," he said.

Even if such a mission were successful, it could have side effects. Light at night can disrupt sleep and has been linked to increases in several types of cancer in lab animals. Foreo suggests the brightening effect would happen gradually over 30 years, allowing humans and animals time to adjust.

Nazca Lines- The Mystery

As a plane soars over the high desert of southern Peru, the dull pale sameness of the rocks and sand organize and change form. Distinct white lines gradually evolve from tan and rust-red. Strips of white crisscross a desert so dry that it rains less than an inch every year. The landscape changes as lines take shape to form simple geometric designs: trapezoids, straight lines, rectangles, triangles, and swirls. Some of the swirls and zigzags start to form more distinct shapes: a hummingbird, a spider, a monkey.

These are the renowned Nasca lines—subject of mystery for over 80 years. How were they formed? What purpose could they have served? Were aliens involved?

The Nazca Lines /ˈnæzkə/ are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 kilometres (50 mi) between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana about 400 km south of Lima. Although some local geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 AD.[1] The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, orcas, and lizards.

The plain, crisscrossed, by these giant lines with many forming rectangles, has a striking resemblance to a modern airport. The Swiss writer, Erich von Daniken, even suggested they had been built for the convenience of ancient visitors from space to land their ships. As tempting as it might be to subscribe to this theory, the desert floor at Nazca is soft earth and loose stone, not tarmac, and would not support the landing wheels of either an aircraft or a flying saucer.

So why are the lines there? The American explorer Paul Kosok, who made his first visit to Nazca in the 1940s, suggested that the lines were astronomically significant and that the plain acted as a giant observatory. He called them "the largest astronomy book in the world." Gerald Hawkins, an American astronomer, tested this theory in 1968 by feeding the position of a sample of lines into a computer and having a program calculate how many lines coincided with an important astronomical event. Hawkins showed the number of lines that were astronomically significant were only about the same number that would be the result of pure chance. This makes it seem unlikely Nazca is an observatory.

Perhaps the best theory for the lines and symbols belongs to Tony Morrison, the English explorer. By researching the old folk ways of the people of the Andes mountains, Morrison discovered a tradition of wayside shrines linked by straight pathways. The faithful would move from shrine to shrine praying and meditating. Often the shrine was as simple as a small pile of stones. Morrison suggests that the lines at Nazca were similar in purpose and on a vast scale. The symbols may have also served as special enclosures for religious ceremonies.

History

Contrary to the popular belief that the lines and figures can only be seen with the aid of flight, they are visible from atop the surrounding foothills. The first mention of the Nazca lines in print was by Pedro Cieza de León in his book of 1553, where he mistook them for trail markers. Interest in them lapsed until the Peruvian archaeologist Toribio Mejia Xesspe spotted them while he was hiking through the foothills in 1927. He discussed them at a conference in Lima, Peru in 1939, although it must be added that although some of the figures can be worked out from the surrounding foothills the full designs cannot be truly appreciated unless viewed from the sky.

Paul Kosok, a historian from Long Island University, is credited as the first scholar to seriously study the Nazca Lines. In the country in 1940-41 to study ancient irrigation systems, he flew over the lines and realized that one was in the shape of a bird. Another chance helped him see how lines converged at the winter solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. He began to study how the lines might have been created, as well as to try to determine their purpose. He was joined by Maria Reiche, a German mathematician and archaeologist to help figure out the purpose of the Nazca Lines. They proposed one of the earliest reasons for the existence of the figures: to be markers on the horizon to show where the sun and other celestial bodies rose. Archaeologists, historians and mathematicians have all struggled to determine the purpose of the lines.

Determining how they were made has been easier than figuring why they were made. Scholars have theorized the Nazca people could have used simple tools and surveying equipment to construct the lines. Archaeological surveys have found wooden stakes in the ground at the end of some lines, which support this theory. One such stake was carbon-dated and was the basis for establishing the age of the design complex. The scholar Joe Nickell of the University of Kentucky has reproduced the figures by using tools and technology available to the Nazca people. The National Geographic called his work "remarkable in its exactness" when compared to the actual lines. With careful planning and simple technologies, a small team of people could recreate even the largest figures within days, without any aerial assistance.

On the ground, most of the lines are formed by a shallow trench with a depth of between 10 cm (3.9 in) and 15 cm (5.9 in). Such trenches were made by removing the reddish-brown iron oxide-coated pebbles that cover the surface of the Nazca desert. When this gravel is removed the light-colored clay earth which is exposed in the bottom of the trench produces lines which contrast sharply in color and tone with the surrounding land surface. This sublayer contains high amounts of lime which, with the morning mist, hardens to form a protective layer that shields the lines from winds, thereby preventing erosion.

The Nazca "drew" several hundred simple but huge curvilinear animal and human figures by this technique. In total, the earthwork project is huge and complex: the area encompassing the lines is nearly 500 square kilometres (190 sq mi), and the largest figures can span nearly 270 metres (890 ft). Some of the measurements for the figures include that the Hummingbird is 93 meters (310 ft) long, the Condor is 134 meters (440 ft), the Monkey is 93 meters (310 ft) by 58 meters (190 ft), and the Spider is 47 meters (150 ft). The extremely dry, windless, and constant climate of the Nazca region has preserved the lines well. The Nazca desert is one of the driest on Earth and maintains a temperature around 25 °C (77 °F) all year round. The lack of wind has helped keep the lines uncovered and visible to the present day.

The discovery of two new small figures was announced in early 2011 by a Japanese team from Yamagata University. One of these resembles a human head and is dated to the early period of Nazca culture or earlier and the other, undated, an animal. In March 2012 the university announced that a new research center would be opened at the site in September 2012 to study the area for the next 15 years.The team has been doing field work there since 2006 when it found about 100 new geoglyphs.

In 2013, it was reported machinery used in a limestone quarry had destroyed a small section of a line, and caused damage to another.

Theories-

Kosok was followed by the German Maria Reiche who became known as the Lady of the Lines. Reiche studied the lines for 40 years and fought unyieldingly for her theories on the lines’ astronomical and calendrical purpose (she received a National Geographic grant in 1974 for her work). Reiche battled single-handedly to protect the site; she even lived in a small house near the desert so she could personally protect the lines from reckless visitors.

The Kosok-Reiche astronomy theories held true until the 1970s when a group of American researchers arrived in Peru to study the glyphs. This new wave of research started to poke holes in the archeo-astronomy view of the lines (not to mention the radical theories in the ‘60s relating to aliens and ancient astronauts).

Johan Reinhard, a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, brought a multidisciplinary approach to the analysis of the lines, “Look at the large ecological system, what’s around Nasca, where were the Nasca people located.” In a region that receives only about 20 minutes of rain per year, water was clearly an important factor.

"It seems likely that most of the lines did not point at anything on the geographical or celestial horizon, but rather led to places where rituals were performed to obtain water and fertility of crops," wrote Reinhard in his book The Nasca Lines: A New Perspective on their Origin and Meanings.

Anthony Aveni, a former National Geographic grantee, agrees, "Our discoveries clearly showed that the straight lines and trapezoids are related to water…but not used to find water, but rather used in connection with rituals."

"The trapezoids are big wide spaces where people can come in and out," says Aveni. "The rituals were likely involved with the ancient need to propitiate or pay a debt to the gods…probably to plead for water."

Reinhard points out that spiral designs and themes have also been found at other ancient Peruvian sites. Animal symbolism is common throughout the Andes and are found in the biomorphs drawn upon the Nasca plain: spiders are believed to be a sign of rain, hummingbirds are associated with fertility, and monkeys are found in the Amazon—an area with an abundance of water.

"No single evaluation proves a theory about the lines, but the combination of archeology, ethnohistory, and anthropology builds a solid case," says Reinhard. Add new technological research to the mix, and there’s no doubt that the world’s understanding of the Nasca lines will continue to evolve.

Related to Water?

Recently two researchers, David Johnson and Steve Mabee, have advanced a theory that the geoglyphs may be related to water. The Nazca plain is one of the driest places on Earth, getting less than one inch of rain a year. Johnson, while looking for sources of water in the region, noticed that ancient aqueducts, called puquios, seemed to be connected with some of the lines. Johnson thinks that the shapes may be a giant map of the underground water sources traced on the land. Mabee is working to gather evidence that might confirm this theory.

This figure appears to be a giant spider. (© Jarnogz & Dreamstime.com)

Other scientists are more skeptical, but admit that in a region where finding water was vital to survival, there might well be some connection between the ceremonial purpose of the lines and water. Johan Reinhard, a cultural anthropologist with the National Geographic Society, found that villagers in Bolivia walk along a straight pathway to shrines while praying and dancing for rain. Something similar may have been done at the ancient Nazca lines.

Human Sacrifice

A recently discovered headless body suggests that human sacrifice was used by the Nazca people in religion ceremonies. "Human sacrifice and decapitation were part of powerful rituals that would have allayed fears by invoking the ancestors to ensure fertility and the continuation of Nasca society," wrote Christina Conlee of Texas State University in an article in Current Anthropology. "The decapitation of the La Tiza individual appears to have been part of a ritual associated with ensuring agricultural fertility and the continuation of life and rebirth of the community." The body is one of eight found in the Nazca area, buried seated with no head. A ceramic jar painted with an image of a head was found next to the remains. The head on the jar has a tree with eyes growing out of it, making it seem likely that the sacrifice was part of a fertility ceremony.

A giant bird biomorph on the Nasca desert plain. (© Jarnogz & Dreamstime.com)

What was done with the heads of the victims? The Nazca were known to collect "Trophy Heads." The Nazca removed the brain and soft tissue from the skulls, sewed the lips closed with cactus spines and drilled a hole through the forehead to accommodate a loop of woven rope. The heads were then hung on the ropes for display. Originally these were considered to be war trophies collected from distant tribes, but recent DNA analysis shows that the heads came from the Nazca population itself, suggesting that the motive was religious in nature.

Other South American Lines and Figures

The lines at Nazca aren't the only landscape figures South America boasts. About 850 miles south of the plain is the largest human figure in the world laid out upon the side of Solitary Mountain in Chile. The Giant of Atacama stands 393 feet high and is surrounded by lines similar to those at Nazca.

Along the Pacific Coast in the foothills of the Andes Mountains is etched a figure resembling a giant candelabrum. Further south, Sierra Pintada, which means "the painted mountain" in Spanish, is covered with vast pictures including spirals, circles, warriors and a condor. Archaeologists speculate that these figures, clearly visible from the ground, served as guideposts for Inca traders.

"The geometric ones could indicate the flow of water or be connected to rituals to summon water. The spiders, birds, and plants could be fertility symbols. Other possible explanations include irrigation schemes or giant astronomical calendars."

MH370 The lost Flight

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

The missing aircraft, 9M-MRO,
Incident summary
Date 8 March 2014
Summary Missing
Site Southern Indian Ocean (presumed)
Passengers 227
Crew 12
Aircraft type Boeing 777-200ER
Operator Malaysia Airlines
Registration 9M-MRO
Flight origin Kuala Lumpur International Airport
Destination Beijing Capital International Airport

pictured in 2011

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 (MH370/MAS370)[a] was a scheduled international passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing that lost contact with air traffic control on 8 March 2014 at 01:20 MYT,[b] less than an hour after takeoff. At 07:24, Malaysia Airlines (MAS) reported the flight as missing. The aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was carrying 12 Malaysian crew members and 227 passengers from 14 nations.

A multinational search and rescue effort, later reported as the largest in history,[6] was initiated in the Gulf of Thailand and the South China Sea.[7][8] Within a few days, this was extended to include the Strait of Malacca and Andaman Sea. On 15 March, based on military radar data and radio "pings" between the aircraft and an Inmarsat satellite, investigators concluded that it had first headed west across the Malay Peninsula, then continued on a northern or southern track for approximately seven hours. The search in the South China Sea was abandoned. Three days later the Australian Maritime Safety Authority began searching the southern part of the Indian Ocean.

On 24 March, the Malaysian government confirmed two independently made analyses by the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) and Inmarsat, and concluded "beyond any reasonable doubt", that the aircraft had gone down in the southern part of the Indian Ocean with no survivors. This conclusion led to all earlier search areas being abandoned, and efforts being concentrated on the Australian-led area. There has been no confirmation of any flight debris, nor has a crash site been found.

Disappearance

Route: Kuala Lumpur – Beijing. Insert: initial search areas and known path through waypoints IGARI, VAMPI, and IGREX. Small red squares: radar contacts. Small circles: claimed spotting of debris.
The flight departed from Kuala Lumpur International Airport on 8 March 2014 at 00:41 local time (16:41 UTC, 7 March) and was scheduled to land at Beijing Capital International Airport at 06:30 local time (22:30 UTC, 7 March). It climbed to its assigned cruise altitude of 35,000 feet (11,000 m) and was travelling at 471 knots (872 km/h; 542 mph)[25] true airspeed when it ceased all communications and the transponder signal was lost. The aircraft's last known position on 8 March at 01:21 local time (17:21 UTC, 7 March) was at the navigational waypoint IGARI in the Gulf of Thailand, at which the aircraft turned westwards, heading towards a waypoint called VAMPI in the Strait of Malacca,[26] primary radar tracking suggests that the aircraft descended as low as 12,000 feet (3,700 m). From there, the aircraft flew towards a waypoint called GIVAL, arriving at 2:15 local time (18:15 UTC, 7 March), thereafter to the Southern Thailand Islands (Andaman Coast) of Phuket, and was last plotted heading northwest towards another waypoint called IGREX.

The crew was expected to contact air traffic control in Ho Chi Minh City as the aircraft passed into Vietnamese airspace, just north of the point where contact was lost.[30][31] The captain of another aircraft attempted to reach the crew of Flight 370 "just after 1:30 am" using the International distress frequency to relay Vietnamese air traffic control's request for the crew to contact it; the captain said he was able to establish contact, and just heard "mumbling" and static.

Malaysia Airlines (MAS) issued a media statement at 07:24, one hour after the scheduled arrival of the flight at Beijing, stating that contact with the flight had been lost by Malaysian ATC at 02:40.[4] MAS stated that the government had initiated search and rescue operations. It later emerged that Subang Air Traffic Control had lost contact with the aircraft at 01:22 and notified Malaysia Airlines at 02:40. Neither the crew nor the aircraft's onboard communication systems relayed a distress signal, indications of bad weather, or technical problems before the aircraft vanished from radar screens.

Passengers
152 of the 227 passengers were Chinese citizens, including a group of 19 artists with six family members and four staff returning from a calligraphy exhibition of their work in Kuala Lumpur; 38 passengers were Malaysian. The remaining passengers were from 13 different countries. Of the total, 20 were employees of Freescale Semiconductor, a company based in Austin, Texas – 12 of whom were from Malaysia and 8 from China. One passenger who worked as a flight engineer for a Swiss jet charter company was briefly suspected as potential hijacker because he was thought to have the relevant skill set.


But with no results from the multi-national search operation for the Boeing 777, which vanished on March 8 carrying 239 people, Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Thursday set a one-week deadline to locate the plane by mini-submarine. 

The Australian-led search effort is relying on a single US Navy submersible sonar scanning device to scour an uncharted seabed at depths of around 4,500 metres (15,000 feet) or more. 

Technical hitches, including the fact that the torpedo-shaped Bluefin-21 is operating at the extent of its depth limit, made for a slow start to the search. 

Launched from an Australian naval vessel, the device has so far made six deep-sea scanning runs but has detected nothing. 

"We have pursued every possible lead presented to us at this stage, and with every passing day the search has become more difficult," Hishammuddin, who is heading up the Malaysian government's response to MH370, told reporters in Kuala Lumpur. 

As the search and rescue effort expected to be the costliest in aviation history wears on, authorities have indicated alternative methods may be needed, including possibly deeper-diving devices. 


A second mystery around the disappearance of Flight MH370 has largely gone unnoticed: why hasn't the United States been in the forefront of providing information about it? The implications of this question are massive.

America has a fleet of the most sophisticated spy satellites, called "keyhole" satellites, covering the earth's surface daily with imaging systems comparable to those of the Hubble Space Telescope, but instead of data from any of these, we read of data from China and France. One can understand that the CIA does not want others to understand fully the capabilities of its satellites, but surely the lives of more than two hundred people are cause for some information, however indirectly supplied.

Then again, the American military has some of most sophisticated radars on earth, and there is, without a doubt, an installation of the highest capability at the secret base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. How could there not be? But we have read of no data from them, only from others less capable of telling us what happened.

Could it be that the United States shot down Flight MH370, either accidentally or deliberately, and now wants to keep it secret? The possibility of recovery of the full wreckage, even if its location were found, from 4 miles under the sea amongst underwater mountains is extremely remote at best, so the United States can remain confident that physical evidence will never emerge.


There would be nothing unprecedented in such an act: on at least 3 occasions, regrettably, America's military has shot down civilian airliners, only admitting eventually to the one they could not hide. They are also indirectly responsible for a fourth.

Iran Air Flight 655 was stupidly shot down in 1988 by the USS Vincennes in Iranian waters during the Iraq-Iran War, not only killing 290 people including 66 children, but there was a long period afterwards in which the U.S. admitted no wrong-doing, offered no apology, and no compensation to its victims (only 8 years later was a quiet settlement made).

It was a quite vicious set of circumstances and the injustice of it led unquestionably to the motive for bombing Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people and 11 on the ground, later the same year by people still unknown.  

TWA Flight 800 over the East Coast of the United States was certainly the victim of a shipboard American anti-aircraft missile accidentally released. The evidence included radar tracks and eye witnesses. But the U.S., instead of admitting its horrible error and compensating victims, conducted a long and almost farcical investigation headed up by the same FBI that gave us the farcical investigation into the Kennedy assassination.

Last, the fourth hijacked plane on 9/11, United Flight 93, of "Let's roll" pop legend, which crashed over Pennsylvania was almost certainly shot down by an air-to-air missile from a fighter plane. A plane was seen by witnesses, the distribution of the wreckage tends to support a shoot-down, and just the sheer impossibility of America's hundreds of billions of dollars in air defences staying asleep at the switch for a fourth event the same day argue powerfully for an attack.

I have no idea what event (a rogue pilot, a hijacker?) led to Flight MH370 turning off its communications, changing course, and flying low, but I do know that the event could not have gone unnoticed by America's military-intelligence eyes and ears, especially when its new course showed any possibility of Diego Garcia as a destination, a place which is top secret and from which America forcibly removed the locals when it leased it from Britain.  

It will likely remain one more "riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma," as Winston Churchill once described the Soviet Union, an expression now entirely suitable to a great many of the activities of the United States.

The Disappearance of Frederick Valentich

Valentich Disappearance- The Mystery

The Valentich disappearance refers to the disappearance of 20-year-old Frederick Valentich while on a 125-mile (235 km) training flight in a Cessna 182L light aircraft over Bass Strait in Australia on 21 October 1978.

 Frederick Valentich, was attempting to rack up flying time for his commercial license, flying his single engine Cessna 182 to King Island some 130 miles south of Melbourne Australia. He failed to touch down at the King Field airstrip on schedule. At 1906 his last radio transmission was received by Melbourne Flight Service Control on Saturday, October 21, which makes this disappearance unique in the annals of aviation history.

Just before his voice was abruptly cut off after making contact with Melbourne flight controllers, Valentich reported he could see four bright green lights- 1,000 feet above his position: “It is approaching from due east toward me, it seems to be playing some sort of game, flying at a speed I find impossible to estimate” And then: “It is not aircraft, it is…” Finally a long silence, broken when communication was initiated by ground control asking for an identification of the object in question. The young pilot’s answer: “It’s not an aircraft…” and the contact was lost…permanently.

An intensive land, sea and air search was begun by the Australian Navy and Air Force, centered on Bass Strait, 130 miles south of Melbourne and 25miles north of King Island, the point of Valentich’s last radio contact. But the search failed to turn out any trace of the pilot or his aircraft. It was determined that weather conditions at the time of disappearance were ideal, with almost unlimited visibility and a mild breeze. The pilot’s father Guido Valentich strongly believed his son was still alive—that he was being held by someone from another world. More importantly, the elder Valentich said his son had been interested in UFOs for many years and even reported sighting one about 10 months before. There were numerous other witnesses who called police that same night claiming to have seen a UFO on Saturday night. According to a Royal Australian Air Force spokesman, about 10 reports of UFO sightings were logged during the same weekend of the disappearance.

Frederick Valentich

Frederick Valentich had about 150 total hours flying time and held a class four instrument rating which authorized him to fly at night but only “in visual meteorological conditions”. He had twice applied to enlist in the Royal Australian Air Force but was rejected because of inadequate educational qualifications. He was a member of the Air Training Corps, determined to have a career in aviation. Valentich was studying part-time to become a commercial pilot but had a poor achievement record, having twice failed all five commercial licence examination subjects, and as recently as the previous month had failed three more commercial licence subjects. He had been involved in flying incidents, straying into a controlled zone in Sydney, for which he received a warning, and twice deliberately flying into cloud, for which prosecution was being considered. According to his father Guido, Frederick was an ardent believer in UFOs and worried about attacks from UFOs.

Details

Valentich radioed Melbourne Flight Service at 7:06 PM to report an unidentified aircraft was following him at 4,500 feet and was told there was no known traffic at that level. Valentich said he could see a large unknown aircraft which appeared to be illuminated by four bright landing lights. He was unable to confirm its type, but said it had passed about 1,000 feet (300 m) overhead and was moving at high speed. Valentich then reported that the aircraft was approaching him from the east and said the other pilot might be purposely toying with him. Valentich said the aircraft was "orbiting" above him and that it had a shiny metal surface and a green light on it. Valentich reported that he was experiencing engine problems. Asked to identify the aircraft, Valentich radioed, "It isn't an aircraft" when his transmission was interrupted by unidentified noise described as being "metallic, scraping sounds" before all contact was lost.

Search and rescue

A sea and air search was undertaken that included oceangoing ship traffic, a P-3 Orion aircraft, plus eight civilian aircraft. The search encompassed over 1,000 square miles. Search efforts ceased on 25 October 1978.

Investigation

A Department of Transport (DOT) investigation into Valentich's disappearance was unable to determine the cause, but that it was "presumed fatal" for Valentich. Five years after Valentich's plane went missing, an engine cowl flap was found washed ashore on Flinders Island. In July 1983 the Bureau of Air Safety Investigation asked The Royal Australian Navy Research Laboratory (RANRL) about the likelihood that the cowl flap might have "traveled" to its ultimate position from the region where the plane disappeared. The bureau noted that "the part has been identified as having come from a Cessna 182 aircraft between a certain range of serial numbers" which included Valentich's aircraft. The bureau also noted that while it is possible for cowl flaps to separate from aircraft in flight, this had not happened with any recent aircraft.^{[citation needed]}

Proposed explanations

It has been proposed that Valentich staged his own disappearance: even taking into account a trip of between 30 and 45 minutes to Cape Otway, the aircraft still had enough fuel to fly 800 kilometres; despite ideal conditions, at no time was the aircraft plotted on radar, casting doubts as to whether it was ever near Cape Otway; and Melbourne Police received reports of a light aircraft making a mysterious landing not far from Cape Otway at the same time as Valentich's disappearance.

Another proposed explanation is that Valentich became disoriented and was flying upside down. What he thought he saw, if this were the case, would be his own aircraft's lights reflected in the water. He would then have crashed into the water.

Another proposed possibility is suicide, although it has been suggested that he had a content lifestyle.

A 2013 review of the radio transcripts and other data by astronomer and retired U.S. Air Force pilot James McGaha and author Joe Nickell proposes that the inexperienced Valentich was deceived by the illusion of a tilted horizon for which he attempted to compensate and inadvertently put his plane into a downward, so-called "graveyard" spiral which he initially mistook for simple orbiting of the plane. According to the authors, the G-forces of a tightening spiral would decrease fuel flow, resulting in the "rough idling" reported by the pilot. McGaha and Nickell also propose that the apparently stationary, overhead lights that Valentich reported were likely the planets Venus, Mars, and Mercury along with the bright star Antares which would have behaved consistent with the pilot's description.

UFOlogists

UFOlogists have speculated that extraterrestrials either destroyed Valentich's plane or abducted him, asserting that some individuals reported seeing "an erratically moving green light in the sky" and that he was "in a steep dive at the time." Ufologists believe these accounts are significant because of the "green light" mentioned in Valentich's radio transmissions.

Phoenix, Arizona- based UFO group Ground Saucer Watch claim that photos taken that day by plumber Roy Manifold show a fast moving object exiting the water near Cape Otwaylighthouse. Though the pictures were not clear enough to identify the object, UFO groups argue that they show "a bona fide unknown flying object, of moderate dimensions, apparently surrounded by a cloud-like vapor/exhaust residue."

This picture was taken on the day of Valantich’s disappearance and to this day, has not been explained.

This whole mystery got an even more bizarre twist years later. According to the testimony of a number of witnesses, a young man who identified himself as Frederick Valentich, the Australian pilot who mysteriously disappeared in 1978 was alive and well in 1990 at Plaza del Charco, a resort on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Displaying an Australian passport to prove his claim, Valentich told those with whom he spoke on several occasions that he now belonged to a group of humans who had been “recruited” by extraterrestrials. It is also worth noting that the supposed Valentich showed no signs of aging, and resembled the photos circulated around the time of his disappearance at the age of 20. Pretty bizarre huh? I am also very curious what Valantich was doing there at this resort. Did the aliens give him a few days off?

The Bermuda Triangle - Mysteries and Facts

Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is a loosely defined region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, where a number of aircraft and ships are said to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Unexplained circumstances surround some of these accidents, including one in which the pilots of a squadron of U.S. Navy bombers became disoriented while flying over the area; the planes were never found. Other boats and planes have seemingly vanished from the area in good weather without even radioing distress messages. But although myriad fanciful theories have been proposed regarding the Bermuda Triangle, none of them prove that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than in other well-traveled sections of the ocean. In fact, people navigate the area every day without incident.

Located in the Atlantic Ocean, the Bermuda Triangle falls between Bermuda, Puerto Rico and Florida.

Origins

The earliest allegation of unusual disappearances in the Bermuda area appeared in a September 17, 1950 article published in The Miami Herald (Associated Press)  by Edward Van Winkle Jones. Two years later, Fate magazine published "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door", a short article by George X. Sand covering the loss of several planes and ships, including the loss of Flight 19, a group of five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger bombers on a training mission. Sand's article was the first to lay out the now-familiar triangular area where the losses took place. Flight 19 alone would be covered again in the April 1962 issue of American Legion magazine.In it, author Allan W. Eckert wrote that the flight leader had been heard saying, "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don't know where we are, the water is green, no white." He also wrote that officials at the Navy board of inquiry stated that the planes "flew off to Mars."  Sand's article was the first to suggest a supernatural element to the Flight 19 incident. In the February 1964 issue of Argosy, Vincent Gaddis' article "The Deadly Bermuda Triangle" argued that Flight 19 and other disappearances were part of a pattern of strange events in the region.The next year, Gaddis expanded this article into a book, Invisible Horizons.

Events-

Stories of unexplained disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle started to reach public awareness around 1950 and have been consistently reported since then.

Unverified supernatural explanations for Bermuda Triangle incidents have included references to UFO’s and even the mythical lost continent of Atlantis.

Other explanations have included magnetic anomalies, pirates, deliberate sinkings, hurricanes, gas deposits, rough weather, huge waves and human error.

Some famous reported incidents involving the Bermuda Triangle include:
The USS Cyclops and its crew of 309 that went missing after leaving Barbados in 1918.

The TBM Avenger bombers that went missing in 1945 during a training flight over the Atlantic.

A Douglas DC-3 aircraft containing 32 people that went missing in 1958, no trace of the aircraft was ever found.

A yacht was found in 1955 that had survived three hurricanes but was missing all its crew.

Supernatural explanations

Triangle writers have used a number of supernatural concepts to explain the events. One explanation pins the blame on leftover technology from the mythical lost continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is the submerged rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle by some definitions. Followers of the purported psychic Edgar Cayce take his prediction that evidence of Atlantis would be found in 1968 as referring to the discovery of the Bimini Road. Believers describe the formation as a road, wall, or other structure, though geologists consider it to be of natural origin.

Other writers attribute the events to UFOs. This idea was used by Steven Spielberg for his science fiction film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which features the lost Flight 19 aircrews as alien abductees.

Charles Berlitz, author of various books on anomalous phenomena, lists several theories attributing the losses in the Triangle to anomalous or unexplained forces.

Natural explanations

Compass variations

Compass problems are one of the cited phrases in many Triangle incidents. While some have theorized that unusual local magnetic anomalies may exist in the area, such anomalies have not been found. Compasses have natural magnetic variations in relation to the magnetic poles, a fact which navigators have known for centuries. Magnetic (compass) north and geographic (true) north are only exactly the same for a small number of places – for example, as of 2000 in the United States only those places on a line running from Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico. But the public may not be as informed, and think there is something mysterious about a compass "changing" across an area as large as the Triangle, which it naturally will.

Gulf Stream

The Gulf Stream is a deep ocean current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico and then flows through the Straits of Florida into the North Atlantic. In essence, it is a river within an ocean, and, like a river, it can and does carry floating objects. It has a surface velocity of up to about 2.5 metres per second (5.6 mi/h). A small plane making a water landing or a boat having engine trouble can be carried away from its reported position by the current.

Human error

One of the most cited explanations in official inquiries as to the loss of any aircraft or vessel is human error. Human stubbornness may have caused businessman Harvey Conover to lose his sailing yacht, the Revonoc, as he sailed into the teeth of a storm south of Florida on January 1, 1958.

Violent weather

Tropical cyclones are powerful storms, which form in tropical waters and have historically cost thousands of lives lost and caused billions of dollars in damage. The sinking ofFrancisco de Bobadilla's Spanish fleet in 1502 was the first recorded instance of a destructive hurricane. These storms have in the past caused a number of incidents related to the Triangle.

A powerful downdraft of cold air was suspected to be a cause in the sinking of the Pride of Baltimore on May 14, 1986. The crew of the sunken vessel noted the wind suddenly shifted and increased velocity from 32 km/h (20 mph) to 97–145 km/h (60–90 mph). A National Hurricane Center satellite specialist, James Lushine, stated "during very unstable weather conditions the downburst of cold air from aloft can hit the surface like a bomb, exploding outward like a giant squall line of wind and water." A similar event occurred to the Concordia in 2010 off the coast of Brazil.

Methane hydrates

Publications by the USGS describe large stores of undersea hydrates worldwide, including the Blake Ridge area, off the southeasternUnited States coast. However, according to the USGS, no large releases of gas hydrates are believed to have occurred in the Bermuda Triangle for the past 15,000 yearsAn explanation for some of the disappearances has focused on the presence of large fields of methane hydrates (a form of natural gas) on the continental shelves. Laboratory experiments carried out in Australia have proven that bubbles can, indeed, sink a scale model ship by decreasing the density of the water; any wreckage consequently rising to the surface would be rapidly dispersed by the Gulf Stream. It has been hypothesized that periodic methane eruptions (sometimes called "mud volcanoes") may produce regions of frothy water that are no longer capable of providing adequate buoyancy for ships. If this were the case, such an area forming around a ship could cause it to sink very rapidly and without warning.

All in All Bermuda Triangle Mystery..

A journalist named Larry Kusche asked the question if there is any mystery in the Bermuda Triangle at all, and came to a surprising answer: there is no mystery about strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche exhaustively re-examined the "mysterious disappearances" and found that the story was basically created by mistakes, mystery mongering, and in some cases outright fabrication — all being passed along as fact-checked truth.

In his definitive book "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved," Kusche notes that few writers on the topic bothered to do any real investigation — they mostly collected and repeated other, earlier writers who did the same. Unfortunately, Charles Berlitz's facility with language did not carry over into credible research or scholarship. His books on the paranormal — and on the Bermuda Triangle, specifically — were riddled with errors, mistakes, and unscientific crank theories. In a way, the Bermuda Triangle is largely a creation of Charles Berlitz's mistakes. Kusche would later note that Berlitz's research was so sloppy that "If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red, the chance of it being some other color is almost a certainty."

In some cases there's no record of the ships and planes claimed to have been lost in the aquatic triangular graveyard; they never existed outside of a writer's imagination. In other cases, the ships and planes were real enough — but Berlitz and others neglected to mention that they "mysteriously disappeared" during bad storms. Other times the vessels sank far outside the Bermuda Triangle.

It's also important to note that the area within the Bermuda Triangle is heavily traveled with cruise and cargo ships; logically, just by random chance, more ships will sink there than in less-traveled areas such as the South Pacific.

Despite the fact that the Bermuda Triangle has been definitively debunked for decades, it still appears as an "unsolved mystery" in new books — mostly by authors more interested in a sensational story than the facts. In the end, there's no need to invoke time portals, Atlantis,submerged UFO bases, geomagnetic anomalies, tidal waves, or anything else. The Bermuda Triangle mystery has a much simpler explanation: sloppy research and sensational, mystery-mongering books.

Zodiac Killer- The Mystery Killer

You love mysteries, and that's why we are here. Here we are presenting you one more mystery which remains unsolved as till today. The Zodiac Killer.

Sketches Issued by Police

The Zodiac Killer is one of the great unsolved serial killer mysteries of all time, taking only second place to Jack the Ripper.

The Zodiac Killer was a serial killer who operated in northern California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The killer's identity remains unknown. The Zodiac murdered victims in Benicia, Vallejo, Lake Berryessa, and San Francisco between December 1968 and October 1969. Four men and three women between the ages of 16 and 29 were targeted. The killer originated the name "Zodiac" in a series of taunting letters sent to the local Bay Area press. These letters included four cryptograms (or ciphers). Of the four cryptograms sent, only one has been definitively solved.

Suspects have been named by law enforcement and amateur investigators, but no conclusive evidence has surfaced. In April 2004, the San Francisco Police Department marked the case "inactive," yet re-opened the case at some point prior to March 2007. The case also remains open in the city of Vallejo, as well as in Napa County and Solano County. The California Department of Justicehas maintained an open case file on the Zodiac murders since 1969.

Even though police investigated over 2,500 potential suspects, the case was never officially solved. There were a few suspects that stood out, but the forensic technology of the times was not advanced enough to nail any one of them conclusively.

This October, 1966 killing began a ghoulish series of murders that panicked the people of the San Francisco area. For years the Zodiac taunted the police with weird ciphers, phone calls, insulting and cryptic messages.

Victims

Confirmed victims

Although the Zodiac claimed 37 murders in letters to the newspapers, investigators agree on only seven confirmed victims, two of whom survived. They are:

• David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16: shot and killed on December 20, 1968, on Lake Herman Road, within the city limits ofBenicia. Coordinates: 38°5′41.61″N 122°8′38.24″W
• Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22: shot on July 4, 1969, in the parking lot of Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo. While Mageau survived the attack, Ferrin was pronounced dead on arrival at Kaiser Foundation Hospital. Coordinates: 38°7′33.56″N 122°11′27.94″W
• Bryan Calvin Hartnell, 20, and Cecelia Ann Shepard, 22: stabbed on September 27, 1969, at Lake Berryessa in Napa County. Hartnell survived eight stab wounds to the back, but Shepard died as a result of her injuries on September 29, 1969. Coordinates: 38°33′48.29″N 122°13′54.43″W
• Paul Lee Stine, 29: shot and killed on October 11, 1969, in the Presidio Heights neighborhood in San Francisco. Coordinates: 37°47′19.47″N 122°27′25.54″W

Suspected victims

The following murder victims are suspected to be victims of Zodiac, though none has been confirmed:

• Robert Domingos, 18, and Linda Edwards, 17: shot and killed on June 4, 1963, on a beach near Gaviota. Edwards and Domingos were identified as possible Zodiac victims because of specific similarities between their attack and the Zodiac's attack at Lake Berryessa six years later. Coordinates: 34°28′11.20″N 120°10′7.14″W
• Cheri Jo Bates, 18: stabbed to death and nearly decapitated on October 30, 1966, at Riverside City College in Riverside. Bates's possible connection to the Zodiac only appeared four years after her murder when San Francisco Chronicle reporter Paul Avery received a tip regarding similarities between the Zodiac killings and the circumstances surrounding Bates's death.^[6] College coordinates: 33°58′19″N 117°22′52″W
• Donna Lass, 25: last seen September 6, 1970, in Stateline, Nevada. A postcard with an advertisement from Forest Pines condominiums (near Incline Village at Lake Tahoe) pasted on the back was received at the Chronicle on March 22, 1971, and has been interpreted as the Zodiac claiming Lass's disappearance as a victim. No evidence has been uncovered to connect Lass's disappearance with the Zodiac Killer definitively.

There is also a suspected third escapee from the Zodiac Killer:

• Kathleen Johns, 22: allegedly abducted on March 22, 1970, on Highway 132 near I-580, in an area west of Modesto. Johns escaped from the car of a man who drove her and her infant daughter around the area between Stockton and Patterson for approximately 1½ hours. Junction 132/I-580 coordinates: 37°38′16.14″N 121°23′55.22″W

Timeline

Lake Herman Road attack

The first murders widely attributed to the Zodiac Killer were the shootings of high school students Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on December 20, 1968, on Lake Herman Road, just inside Benicia city limits. The couple were on their first date and planned to attend a Christmas concert at Hogan High School about three blocks from Jensen's home. The couple instead visited a friend before stopping at a local restaurant and then driving out on Lake Herman Road. At about 10:15 p.m., Faraday parked his mother'sRambler in a gravel turnout, which was a well-known lovers' lane. Shortly after 11:00 p.m., their bodies were found by Stella Borges, who lived nearby. The Solano County Sheriff's Department investigated the crime but no leads developed.

Utilizing available forensic data, Robert Graysmith postulated that another car pulled into the turnout, just prior to 11:00 pm and parked beside the couple. The killer apparently exited the second car and walked toward the Rambler, possibly ordering the couple out of the Rambler. Jensen appeared to have exited the car first, yet when Faraday was halfway out, the killer apparently shot Faraday in the head. Fleeing from the killer, Jensen was gunned down twenty-eight feet from the car with five shots through her back. The killer then drove off.

Blue Rock Springs attack

Just before midnight on July 4, 1969, Darlene Ferrin and Michael Mageau drove into the Blue Rock Springs Park in Vallejo, four miles from the Lake Herman Road murder site, and parked. While the couple sat in Ferrin's car, a second car drove into the lot and parked alongside them but almost immediately drove away. Returning about 10 minutes later, this second car parked behind them. The driver of the second car then exited the vehicle, approaching the passenger side door of Ferrin's car, carrying a flashlight and a 9 mmLuger. The killer directed the flashlight into Mageau's and Ferrin's eyes before shooting at them, firing five times. Both victims were hit, and several bullets had passed through Mageau and into Ferrin. The killer walked away from the car but upon hearing Mageau's moaning, returned and shot each victim twice more before driving off.

On July 5, 1969, at 12:40 a.m., a man phoned the Vallejo Police Department to report and claim responsibility for the attack. The caller also took credit for the murders of Jensen and Faraday six-and-a-half months earlier. The police traced the call to a phone booth at a gas station at Springs Road and Tuolumne, about three-tenths of a mile from Ferrin's home and only a few blocks from the Vallejo Police Department.

Ferrin was pronounced dead at the hospital. Mageau survived the attack despite being shot in the face, neck and chest.

Letters from the Zodiac

The solution to Zodiac's 408-symbol cipher. The meaning, if any, of the final eighteen letters has not been determined.^[14]

On August 1, 1969, three letters prepared by the killer were received at the Vallejo Times Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, andThe San Francisco Examiner. The nearly identical letters took credit for the shootings at Lake Herman Road and Blue Rock Springs. Each letter also included one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram which the killer claimed contained his identity. The killer demanded they be printed on each paper's front page or he would "cruse [sic] around all weekend killing lone people in the night then move on to kill again, until I end up with a dozen people over the weekend."

The Chronicle published its third of the cryptogram on page four of the next day's edition. An article printed alongside the code quoted Vallejo Police Chief Jack E. Stiltz as saying "We're not satisfied that the letter was written by the murderer" and requested the writer send a second letter with more facts to prove his identity. The threatened murders did not happen, and all three parts were eventually published.

On August 7, 1969, another letter was received at The San Francisco Examiner with the salutation "Dear Editor This is the Zodiac speaking." This was the first time the killer had used this name for identification. The letter was a response to Chief Stiltz's request for more details that would prove he had killed Faraday, Jensen and Ferrin. In it, the Zodiac included details about the murders which had not yet been released to the public, as well as a message to the police that when they cracked his code "they will have me."

On August 8, 1969, Donald and Bettye Harden of Salinas, California, cracked the 408-symbol cryptogram. It contained a misspelled message in which the killer claimed to be collecting slaves for the afterlife. No name appears in the decoded text, and the killer said that he would not give away his identity because it would slow down or stop his slave collection.

Lake Berryessa attack

On September 27, 1969, Pacific Union College students Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard were picnicking at Lake Berryessa on a small island connected by a sand spit to Twin Oak Ridge. A man approached them wearing a black executioner's-type hood with clip-on sunglasses over the eye-holes and a bib-like device on his chest that had a white 3"x3" cross-circle symbol on it. He approached them with a gun, which Hartnell believed to be a .45. The hooded man claimed to be an escaped convict from Deer Lodge, Montana, where he had killed a guard and stolen a car, explaining that he needed their car and money to go to Mexico. He had brought precut lengths of plastic clothesline and told Shepard to tie up Hartnell, before he tied her up. The killer checked, and tightened Hartnell's bonds after discovering Shepard had bound Hartnell's hands loosely. Hartnell initially believed it to be a weird robbery, but the man drew a knife and stabbed them both repeatedly. The killer then hiked 500 yards back up to Knoxville Road, drew the cross-circle symbol on Hartnell's car door with a black felt-tip pen, and wrote beneath it: "Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27–69–6:30/by knife."

At 7:40 p.m., the killer called the Napa County Sheriff's office from a pay telephone to report this latest crime. The phone was found, still off the hook, minutes later at the Napa Car Wash on Main Street in Napa by KVON radio reporter Pat Stanley, only a few blocks from the sheriff's office, yet 27 miles from the crime scene. Detectives were able to lift a still-wet palm print from the telephone but were never able to match it to any suspect.

After hearing their screams for help, a man and his son who were fishing in a nearby cove discovered the victims and summoned help by contacting park rangers. Napa County Sheriff's deputies Dave Collins and Ray Land were the first law enforcement officers to arrive at the crime scene. Cecelia Shepard was conscious when Collins arrived, providing him with a detailed description of the attacker. Hartnell and Shepard were taken to Queen of the Valley Hospital in Napa by ambulance. Shepard lapsed into a coma during transport to the hospital and never regained consciousness. She died two days later, but Hartnell survived to recount his tale to the press. Napa County Sheriff Detective Ken Narlow, who was assigned to the case from the outset, worked on solving the crime until his retirement from the department in 1987.

Presidio Heights attack

Two weeks later on October 11, 1969, a passenger entered the cab driven by Paul Stine at the intersection of Mason and Geary Streets (one block west from Union Square) in San Francisco requesting to be taken to Washington and Maple Streets in Presidio Heights. For reasons unknown, Stine drove one block past Maple to Cherry Street; the passenger then shot Stine once in the head with a 9mm, took Stine's wallet and car keys, and tore away a section of Stine's bloodstained shirt tail. This passenger was observed by three teenagers across the street at 9:55 p.m., who called the police while the crime was in progress. They observed a man wiping the cab down before walking away towards the Presidio, one block to the north.

Two blocks from the crime scene, Officer Don Fouke, responding to the call, observed a white man walking along the sidewalk and stepping onto a stairway leading up to the front yard of one of the homes on the north side of the street; the encounter lasted only five to ten seconds. The radio dispatcher had alerted to be on the lookout for a black suspect, so they drove past him without stopping; the mix-up in descriptions remains unexplained to this day. A search ensued, but no possible suspects were found. The three teen witnesses worked with a police artist to prepare a composite sketch of Stine's killer; then, a few days later, this police artist returned, working with the witnesses to prepare a second composite sketch of the killer.

Detectives Bill Armstrong and Dave Toschi were assigned to the case. The San Francisco Police Department investigated an estimated 2,500 suspects over a period of years.

Communication from the Zodiac

On October 14, 1969, the Chronicle received another letter from the Zodiac, this time containing a swatch of Paul Stine's shirt tail as proof he was the killer; it also included a threat about killing schoolchildren on a school bus. To do this, Zodiac wrote, "just shoot out the front tire & then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out." At 2:00 p.m. on October 20, 1969, someone claiming to be the Zodiac called Oakland PD demanding that one of two prominent lawyers, F. Lee Bailey or Melvin Belli, appear on the local television show A.M. San Francisco, hosted by Jim Dunbar. Bailey was not available, but Belli did appear on the show. Dunbar appealed to the viewers to keep the lines open, and eventually, someone claiming to be the Zodiac called several times and said his name was "Sam". Belli agreed to meet with him in Daly City, but the suspect never showed up.

On November 8, 1969, the Zodiac mailed a card with another cryptogram consisting of 340 characters. The 340-character cipher has never been decoded. Numerous possible solutions have been suggested, but none can be claimed as definitive.

On November 9, 1969, the Zodiac mailed a seven-page letter claiming that two policemen stopped and actually spoke with him three minutes after he shot Stine. Excerpts from the letter were published in the Chronicle on November 12 including the Zodiac's claim; that same day, Officer Don Fouke wrote a memo explaining what had happened the night of Stine's murder. On December 20, 1969, exactly one year after the murders of David Faraday and Betty Lou Jensen, the Zodiac mailed a letter to Belli that included another swatch of Stine's shirt; the Zodiac claimed he wanted Belli to help him.^{[citation needed]}

Modesto attack

On the night of March 22, 1970, Kathleen Johns was driving from San Bernardino to Petaluma to visit her mother. She was seven months pregnant and had her 10-month-old daughter beside her. While heading west on Highway 132 near Modesto, a car behind her began honking its horn and flashing its headlights. She pulled off the road and stopped. The man in the car parked behind her, approached her car, stated that he observed that her right rear wheel was wobbling, and offered to tighten the lug nuts. After finishing his work, the man drove off; yet when Johns pulled forward to re-enter the highway the wheel almost immediately came off the car. The man returned, offering to drive her to the nearest gas station for help. She and her daughter climbed into his car.

During the ride the car passed several service stations but the man did not stop. For about 90 minutes he drove back and forth around the backroads near Tracy. When Johns asked why he was not stopping, he would change the subject. When the driver finally stopped at an intersection, Johns jumped out with her daughter and hid in a field. The driver searched for her using his flashlight telling her that he would not hurt her, before eventually giving up. Unable to find her, he got back into the car and drove off. Johns hitched a ride to the police station in Patterson.

When Johns gave her statement to the sergeant on duty, she noticed the police composite sketch of Paul Stine's killer and recognized him as the man who abducted her and her child. Fearing he might come back and kill them all, the sergeant had Johns wait, in the dark, at the nearby Mil's Restaurant. When her car was found, it had been gutted and torched.

Most accounts claim he threatened to kill her and her daughter while driving them around,but at least one police report disputes that. Johns' account to Paul Avery of theChronicle indicates her abductor left his car and searched for her in the dark with a flashlight; however, in one report she made to the police, she stated he did not leave the vehicle.

Further Zodiac communications

Zodiac continued to communicate with authorities for the remainder of 1970 via letters and greeting cards to the press. In a letter postmarked April 20, 1970, the Zodiac wrote, "My name is _____," followed by a 13-character cipher. The Zodiac went on to state that he was not responsible for the recent bombing of a police station in San Francisco (referring to the February 18, 1970, death of Sgt. Brian McDonnell two days after the bombing at Park Station in Golden Gate Park) but added "there is more glory to killing a cop than a cid [sic] because a cop can shoot back." The letter included a diagram of a bomb the Zodiac claimed he would use to blow up a school bus. At the bottom of the diagram, he wrote: " = 10, SFPD = 0."

Zodiac sent a greeting card postmarked April 28, 1970, to the Chronicle. Written on the card was, "I hope you enjoy yourselves when I have my BLAST," followed by the Zodiac's cross circle signature. On the back of the card, the Zodiac threatened to use the bus bomb soon unless the newspaper published the full details he wrote. He also wanted to start seeing people wearing "some nice Zodiac butons [sic]."

In a letter postmarked June 26, 1970, the Zodiac stated he was upset that he did not see people wearing Zodiac buttons. He wrote, "I shot a man sitting in a parked car with a .38."^[38] The Zodiac was possibly referring to the murder of Sgt. Richard Radetich, a week earlier, on June 19. At 5:25 am, Radetich was writing a parking ticket in his squad car when an assailant shot him in the head with a .38-caliber pistol. Radetich died 15 hours later. SFPD denies the Zodiac was involved in this murder; it remains unsolved.

Included with the letter was a Phillips 66 roadmap of the San Francisco Bay Area. On the image of Mount Diablo, the Zodiac had drawn a crossed-circle similar to the ones he had included in previous correspondence. At the top of the crossed circle, he placed a zero, and then a three, six, and a nine. The accompanying instructions stated that the zero was "to be set to Mag. N."^[39] The letter also included a 32-letter cipher that the killer claimed would, in conjunction with the code, lead to the location of a bomb he had buried and set to go off in the fall. The cipher was never decoded, and the alleged bomb was never located. The killer signed the note with " = 12, SFPD = 0."

In a letter to the Chronicle postmarked July 24, 1970, the Zodiac took credit for Kathleen Johns' abduction, four months after the incident. In a July 26, 1970 letter, the Zodiac paraphrased a song from The Mikado, adding his own lyrics about making a "little list" of the ways he planned to torture his "slaves" in "paradice." The letter was signed with a large, exaggerated cross circle symbol and a new score: " = 13, SFPD = 0." A final note at the bottom of the letter stated, "P.S. The Mt. Diablo code concerns Radians + # inches along the radians." In 1981, a close examination of the radian hint by Zodiac researcher Gareth Penn led to the discovery that a radian angle, when placed over the map per Zodiac's instructions, pointed to the locations of two Zodiac attacks.

On October 5, 1970, the Chronicle received a three-by-five inch card signed by the Zodiac with the  drawn with blood. The card's message was formed by pasting words and letters from an edition of the Chronicle, and thirteen holes were punched across the card. Inspectors Armstrong and Toschi agreed it was "highly probable" the card came from the Zodiac.

Zodiac letter to Paul Avery

On October 27, 1970, Chronicle reporter Paul Avery (who had been covering the Zodiac case) received a Halloween card signed with a letter 'Z' and the Zodiac's cross circle symbol. Handwritten on the card was the note "Peek-a-boo, you are doomed." The threat was taken seriously and received a front-page story on the Chronicle. Soon after receiving this letter, Avery received an anonymous letter alerting him to the similarities between the Zodiac's activities and the unsolved murder of Cheri Jo Bates, which had occurred four years earlier at the city college in Riverside in the Greater Los Angeles Area, more than 400 miles south of San Francisco. He reported his findings in theChronicle on November 16, 1970.

Riverside attack

On October 30, 1966, 18-year-old Cheri Jo Bates, a student of Riverside Community College, spent the evening at the campus library annex until it closed at 9:00 p.m. Neighbors reported hearing a scream around 10:30 p.m. Bates was found dead the next morning, a short distance from the library, between two abandoned houses slated to be demolished for campus renovations. The wires in her Volkswagen's distributor cap had been pulled out. She was brutally beaten and stabbed to death. A man's Timex watch with a torn wristband was found nearby. The watch had stopped at 12:24, but police believe the attack occurred much earlier.

"The Confession"

A month later, on November 29, 1966, nearly identical typewritten letters were mailed to the Riverside police and the Riverside Press-Enterprise, titled "The Confession". The author claimed responsibility for the Bates murder, providing details of the crime that were not released to the public. The author warned that Bates "is not the first and she will not be the last." In December 1966, a poem was discovered carved into the bottom side of a desktop in the Riverside City College library. Titled "Sick of living/unwilling to die", the poem's language and handwriting resembled that of the Zodiac's letters. It was signed with what were assumed to be the initials rh. During the 1970 investigation, Sherwood Morrill, California's top "Questioned Documents" examiner, expressed his opinion that the poem was written by the Zodiac.

On April 30, 1967, exactly six months after the Bates murder, Bates' father Joseph, the Press-Enterprise, and the Riverside police all received nearly identical letters: in a handwritten scrawl the Press-Enterprise and police copies read "Bates had to die there will be more", with a small scribble at the bottom that resembled the letter Z. Joseph Bates' copy read "She had to die there will be more", this time without the Z signature.^{[citation needed]}

On March 13, 1971, five months after Avery's article linking the Zodiac to the Riverside murder, the Zodiac mailed a letter to the Los Angeles Times. In the letter he credited the police, instead of Avery, for discovering his "Riverside activity, but they are only finding the easy ones, there are a hell of a lot more down there."

The connection between Cheri Jo Bates, Riverside and the Zodiac remains uncertain. Paul Avery and the Riverside Police Department maintain that the Bates homicide was not committed by the Zodiac, but did concede some of the Bates letters may have been his work to claim credit falsely.

Lake Tahoe disappearance

On March 22, 1971, a postcard to the Chronicle, addressed to "Paul Averly" and believed to be from the Zodiac, appeared to take credit for the disappearance of Donna Lass on September 6, 1970.^[7] Made from a collage of advertisements and magazine lettering, it featured a scene from an advertisement for Forest Pines condominiums and the text "Sierra Club", "Sought Victim 12", "peek through the pines", "pass Lake Tahoe areas", and "around in the snow". Zodiac's cross circle symbol was in the place of the usual return address.^{[citation needed]}

Lass was a nurse at the Sahara Tahoe hotel and casino. She worked until about 2:00 a.m. on September 6, 1970, treating her last patient at 1:40 a.m. Later that same day, both Lass's employer and her landlord received phone calls from an unknown male falsely claiming Lass had left town due to a family emergency. Lass was never found. What appeared to be a grave site was discovered near the Clair Tappaan Lodge in Norden, California, on Sierra Club property, but an excavation yielded only a pair of sunglasses.^{[citation needed]} No evidence has been uncovered to connect the Lass disappearance with the Zodiac Killer definitively.

Santa Barbara attack

In a Vallejo Times-Herald story appearing on November 13, 1972, Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Office Bill Baker (ret.)^{[citation needed]} postulated that the murders of a young couple in northern Santa Barbara County might have been the work of the Zodiac Killer. On June 4, 1963, high school senior Robert Domingos and fiancée Linda Edwardswere shot dead on a beach near Lompoc, having skipped school that day for "Senior Ditch Day". Police believed that the assailant attempted to bind the victims, but when they freed themselves and attempted to flee, the killer shot them repeatedly in the back and chest with a .22-caliber weapon. The killer then placed their bodies in a small shack and tried, unsuccessfully, to burn it down.^{[citation needed]}

Final Zodiac letter[edit]

After the "Pines" card, the Zodiac remained silent for nearly three years. The Chronicle then received a letter from the Zodiac, postmarked January 29, 1974, praising The Exorcistas "the best saterical comidy [sic]" that he had ever seen." The letter included a snippet of verse from The Mikado and an unusual symbol at the bottom that has remained unexplained by researchers. Zodiac concluded the letter with a new score, "Me = 37, SFPD = 0".

Later letters of suspicious authorship

Of further communications sent by the public to members of the news media, some contained similar characteristics of previous Zodiac writings. The Chronicle received a letter postmarked February 14, 1974, informing the editor that the initials for the Symbionese Liberation Army spelled out an Old Norse word meaning "kill". However, the handwriting was not authenticated as the Zodiac's.

A letter to the Chronicle, postmarked May 8, 1974, featured a complaint that the movie Badlands was "murder-glorification" and asked the paper to cut its advertisements. Signed only "A citizen", the handwriting, tone, and surface irony were all similar to earlier Zodiac communications.^{[citation needed]} The Chronicle subsequently received an anonymous letter postmarked July 8, 1974, complaining about one of its columnists, Marco Spinelli. The letter was signed "the Red Phantom (red with rage)". The Zodiac's authorship of this letter is debated.^{[citation needed]}

A letter, dated April 24, 1978, was initially deemed authentic, but was declared a hoax less than three months later by three experts. Dave Toschi, the SFPD homicide detective who had worked the case since the Stine murder, was thought to have forged the letter, because author Armistead Maupin believed the letter to be similar to "fan mail" he received in 1976 which he believed was authored by Toschi. While he admitted to writing the fan mail, Toschi denied forging the Zodiac letter and was eventually cleared of any charges. The authenticity of this letter remains unverified.

On March 3, 2007, an American Greetings Christmas card sent to the Chronicle, postmarked 1990 in Eureka had recently been discovered in their photo files by editorial assistant Daniel King. Inside the envelope, with the card, was a photocopy of two U.S. Postal keys on a magnet keychain. The handwriting on the envelope resembles Zodiac's print, but was declared inauthentic by forensic document examiner Lloyd Cunningham. However, not all Zodiac experts agree with Cunningham's analysis. There is no return address on the envelope nor is his crossed-circle signature to be found. The card itself is unmarked. The Chronicle turned over all the material to the Vallejo Police Department for further analysis.

Suspects

A number of suspects have been named. Robert Graysmith's book Zodiac advanced Arthur Leigh Allen as a suspect based on circumstantial evidence. A letter sent to the Riverside Police Department from Bates' killer was typed with a Royal typewriter with an elite type, the same brand found during a February 1991 search of Allen's residence. He owned and wore a Zodiac brand wristwatch. Allen lived in Vallejo and worked minutes away from where one of the first victims (Ferrin) lived and where one of the killings took place.

In 2002, SFPD developed a partial DNA profile from the saliva on stamps and envelopes of Zodiac's letters. SFPD compared this partial DNA to the DNA of Arthur Leigh Allen. A DNA comparison was also made with the DNA of Don Cheney, who was Allen's former close friend and the first person to suggest Allen may be the Zodiac Killer. Since neither test result indicated a match, Allen and Cheney were excluded as the contributors of the DNA, though it cannot be stated definitively that it is DNA from the Zodiac on the envelopes.

Current status of investigations

In April 2004, the SFPD marked the case "inactive," citing caseload pressure and resource demands. However, they re-opened their case sometime before March 2007.

In 2007, a man named Dennis Kaufman claimed that his stepfather Jack Tarrance was the Zodiac. Kaufman turned several items over to the FBI including a hood similar to the one worn by the Zodiac. According to news sources, DNA analysis conducted by the FBI on the items were deemed inconclusive in 2010. Kaufman's claims have later been widely discredited. He claimed to have incriminating rolls of film taken by his stepfather. The photos allegedly showed victims of the crimes. Kaufman later published some of these photos on his own web page. The photos were very small, had low resolution, and were so blurry that nothing could be positively identified. An associate of Kaufman's, Nanette Barto, who received her Forensic Document Examining certificate from an unaccredited school, claimed to have matched Jack Tarrance's handwriting to that of the Zodiac Killer. However, in 2010, the FBI's Head Document Examiner at Quantico deemed the handwriting "Inconclusive".^{[citation needed]}

In 2009, Deborah Perez claimed that her father, Guy Ward Hendrickson, was the Zodiac. However, Perez alleged previously that she was the illegitimate daughter of John F. Kennedy, so her claim that her father was the Zodiac has been viewed as unlikely.

In 2009, a lawyer named Robert Tarbox (who, in August 1975, was disbarred by the California Supreme Court for failure to pay some clients) said that in 1972 a merchant mariner walked into his office and confessed to him that he was the Zodiac Killer. The seemingly lucid seaman (whose name Tarbox would not reveal due to confidentiality) described his crimes briefly but persuasively enough to convince Tarbox. The man claimed he was trying to stop himself from his "opportunistic" murder spree but never returned to see Tarbox again. Tarbox took out a full-page ad in the Vallejo Times-Herald in which he cleared the name of Arthur Leigh Allen as a killer, his only reason for revealing the story thirty years after the fact. Robert Graysmith, the author of several books on Zodiac, said Tarbox's story was "entirely plausible." Retired police handwriting expert Lloyd Cunningham, who worked the Zodiac case for decades, added "they gave me banana boxes full of Allen's writing, and none of his writing even came close to the Zodiac. Nor did DNA extracted from the envelopes (on the Zodiac letters) come close to Arthur Leigh Allen."

In 2009, an episode of the History Channel television series MysteryQuest looked at newspaper editor Richard Gaikowski (1936–2004). During the time of the murders, Gaikowski worked for Good Times, a San Francisco counterculture newspaper. His appearance resembles the composite sketch, and Nancy Slover, the Vallejo police dispatcher who was contacted by the Zodiac shortly after the Blue Rock Springs Attack, has identified a recording of Gaikowski's voice as being the same as the Zodiac's. Additional circumstantial evidence exists but cannot definitively connect Gaikowski to the murders.^{[citation needed]}

The case is open in Napa County and also in the city of Riverside.^{[citation needed]}

Retired police detective Steve Hodel argues in his book The Black Dahlia Avenger that his father, George Hill Hodel, Jr., was the Black Dahlia killer whose victims include Elizabeth Short. The book caused the release of previously suppressed files and wire recordings by the Los Angeles district attorney's office of his father which showed that he was a prime suspect in Short's murder. The L.A. district Attorney subsequently wrote a letter which is published in the revised edition stating that if he were still alive he would be prosecuted for the crimes.^{[citation needed]} In a follow up book, Hodel argued a circumstantial case that his father was also the Zodiac Killer based upon a police sketch, the similarity of the style of the Zodiac letters to the Black Dahlia Avenger letters and questioned document examination.

On February 19, 2011, America's Most Wanted featured a story about the Zodiac Killer. A picture has recently surfaced of known Zodiac victim Darlene Ferrin and a man who closely resembles the composite sketch, formed based on eyewitness' descriptions, of the Zodiac Killer. Police believe the photo was taken in San Francisco in the summer of 1966 or 1967. Police hope someone can identify the man in the photo.It has been suspected that the man in the photo is Darlene Ferrin's ex-husband, James Phillips. This has not been confirmed.^{[citation needed]}

Former California Highway Patrol officer Lyndon Lafferty argues that the Zodiac killer is a 91-year-old Solano County, California man whom he calls "George Russell Tucker."Using a group of retired law enforcement officers called the Mandamus Seven, Lafferty discovered "Tucker" and a cover-up for why he was not pursued. The man died in February 2012 and is not considered a suspect by law enforcement agencies.

In February, 2014, it was reported that a man named Louie Myers had confessed to a friend that he was the Zodiac Killer in 2001, after learning that he was dying from cirrhosis of the liver. He requested that his friend, Randy Kenney go to the police upon his death. He died in 2002, though Kenney allegedly had difficulties getting officers to cooperate and take the claims seriously. There are several potential connections between Myers and the Zodiac case. Myers attended the same High Schools as victims David Farraday and Betty Lou Jensen. Myers also allegedly worked in the same restaurant as victim Darlene Ferrin. Myers also had access to the same sort-of military boot whose print was found at the Lake Berryessa crime scene. Futhermore, during the period between 1971-1973 when no Zodiac letters were sent, Myers was stationed overseas with the military. Kenney claims that Myers confessed he targeted couples due to a bad breakup with a girlfriend. While officers associated with the case are skeptical, they believe the story is credible enough to investigate.

Source: Wikipedia and the Internet.