A black hole is like a cosmic vacuum cleaner that sucks everything into it, even other stars. How do we know black holes are out there? Astronomers can see the swirling gases of other stars being sucked toward the blackness. It looks like water going down a drain.
The swirling gases around a black hole go so fast that they get superheated. This causes them to give off X-rays. That was the clue that led to the discovery of the first black hole. In 1970 astronomers detected X-rays coming from an area near a distant star. They expected to find another, even bigger star. But the area emitting the X-rays didn’t shine—it was pitch black and 10 times bigger than our sun. Astronomers named the mysterious black spot Cygnus X-1.
BLACK HOLE FACTS
• Black holes can grow. The more stars they swallow, the bigger they get.
• Black holes can swallow other black holes.
• There is a black hole right at the heart of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Gulp!
TRY IT...YOU’LL LIKE IT!
RAT-A-TOOEY
Quang Li-Do has been catching and eating rats for 30 years. He likes them so much that he opened a restaurant in Canton, China, that specializes in rat cuisine. Every year the Jailu Restaurant serves more than 7,500 rats to its satisfied customers!
SALSA STINGER
Some people can’t live without chocolate. Others love cheese. But Rene Alvarenga of Intipucá, El Salvador, has a very different craving—scorpions. Live ones! Every day, he snarfs down 20 to 30 of them. He claims to have eaten more than 35,000 in his lifetime.
ROACH BEEF
Entertainer Ken Edwards will do anything for attention. He once stuffed 47 live rats into a pair of pantyhose—while he was wearing them. Then, on March 5, 2001, on live TV, he attempted to break a world record by eating 36 cockroaches in one minute. (He did it!)
MAKE A OUIJA
Want to know what the future holds? Ask the Ouija.
WHAT IS IT? Communicating with “spirits” was a big fad in 19th-century America. Starting in the 1890s you could buy talking boards—called Ouija boards—to speak to them. One manufacturer, Charles Kennard, claimed the board itself told him the word ouija was Egyptian for good luck. Another, William Fuld, said the name was a blend of the French and German words for “yes”—oui and ja. Whatever it means, millions of people have given themselves creepy thrills playing with Ouija boards. Do they really work? You decide.
WHAT YOU NEED TO MAKE ONE:
• A sheet of white cardboard or art board
• Colored pens or pencils
• A small jar or glass
• Lots of imagination
BEFORE YOU BEGIN:
1. Be sure to leave lots of room around the edges of your board so that the pointer doesn’t fall off when it moves to a symbol.
2. It is very important that your board is flat and smooth so the pointer can slide easily across it.
DESIGNING THE BOARD:
1. Write the entire alphabet. You can arrange the letters across the top, across the bottom, in a circle, or in any other way you wish.
2. Write the numbers 0 through 9.
3. Write the words YES, NO, HELLO, and GOOD-BYE.
4. Decorate your board.
THE POINTER OR PLANCHETTE:
1. Use the small, clean jar or glass as your pointer.
2. Place it upside down on the board with your fingers on the bottom and ask the “spirits” your question. The glass will move, seemingly on its own, to spell out answers.
DISAPPEARING ACTS
Now you see them…now you don’t.
THE LOST COLONY. In 1587, more than 100 men, women, and children traveled from England to Roanoke Island off North Carolina’s coast and established the first English settlement in North America. Within three years, they disappeared. The colony’s leader, Governor John White, had sailed back to England for supplies, and when he returned he found the fort empty of people and their belongings. The only clue to their whereabouts was the word CROATOAN carved into a post, with letters CRO carved into a nearby tree.
White and others searched for the lost colonists (including his granddaughter, America’s first English baby, Virginia Dare)…but to no avail. Their disappearance remains a mystery. However, nearly 200 years later, British explorer John Lawson described a meeting with descendants of the Croatoan tribe. Many of them spoke English and were fair-haired. Could they have been descended from members of the lost colony?
THE VANISHING BATTALION. Three soldiers from a New Zealand field company witnessed the disappearance of an entire army battalion in World War I. It was 1915 and the soldiers watched as the Royal Norfolk Regiment marched up a hill at Suvla Bay, Turkey. A low-lying cloud covered the hill and the regiment marched straight into it. When the cloud lifted into the sky, the battalion of 267 men had disappeared. Their bodies were never found. There were no survivors. They did not turn up as prisoners of war. The entire battalion had simply vanished.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF DAVID. It was a crisp fall day in September 1880 when David Lang headed off across the pasture to check on his horses. His children, George and Sarah, were playing in the yard of their Tennessee farm. Lang’s wife, Emma, stood on the front porch, watching him go. David paused to wave at their friend Judge August Peck, who was trotting up the road in his horse and buggy. Seconds later, David Lang—in full view of his wife, his children, and the judge—disappeared in midstep. Emma screamed, thinking he had fallen into a hole. Everyone rushed to the spot where David had vanished, but there was no hole. They searched the area and found nothing. David was gone, never to be seen again. The Lang children later reported that a 15-foot circle of grass around the spot where their father had disappeared had wilted and turned yellow. Could that have had something to do with his disappearance? Many people believe it was hoax…but no one knows for sure.
TASTE THE MUSIC
Believe it or not, some people can actually say, “I like that song. It tastes like chocolate.”
Imagine every time you hear the phone ring…you taste spaghetti sauce. Or whenever you see the number three, it’s blue. There are people who see colors when they hear music. And there are other people who not only see colors, but also taste sounds.
This strange ability has a name—synesthesia. It’s from the Greek words for “together” and “perception,” and means that the part of your brain that sees or hears mixes with the part of your brain that tastes or smells. As unusual as this sounds, one in 2,000 people has the condition. One Swiss musician says that an F sharp makes her see violet and a C makes her see red. Minor chords makes her mouth taste sour or salty.
Major chords make her mouth taste bitter or sweet. Some sounds have weird tastes like mown grass; others are as delicious as creamy milk.
THE HENGES
STONEHENGE is a circle of giant stones that stand on a plain in Great Britain. They align with the sun, moon, and stars and are estimated to be 5,000 years old. Who put them there? What are they for? Archaeologists believe it may have been an astronomical observatory, but no one really knows.
CARHENGE is a replica of Stonehenge created from vintage American automobiles. It juts up from the Nebraska plains on Highway 87 just outside the town of Alliance. Six local families at a reunion decided to build it in 1987. Why? Only they know for certain.
UFO CRASH SITE
Something fell out of the sky near Roswell, New Mexico, on July 8, 1947. Was it a flying saucer? A test plane? Here’s what happened that week:
• Friday: Jim Ragsdale and Trudy Truelove claim to have seen a flying saucer crash into the desert and strange bodies—four to five feet tall—inside the wreckage.
• Saturday: Ragsdale and Truelove witness three army trucks hauling away all of the evidence from the crash site.
• Sunday: Local rancher William “Mack” Brazel hears about the crash and gives Major Jesse Marcel at Roswell Air Force Base some strange litter he found in the area. The scraps of metal cannot be cut or burned.
• Monday: Mort
ician Glenn Dennis gets an odd request from an Air Force officer for baby caskets. A nurse tells him she’s just helped doctors autopsy strange little bodies.
• Tuesday: Base commander Colonel Blanchard issues a press statement: “We have in our possession a flying saucer.”
• Wednesday: Blanchard’s superior officer, General Roger Ramey, says no, the wreckage is just a weather balloon.
• 1970: Retired Major Jesse Marcel comes forward and says that what he saw back in 1947 was no weather balloon! So, was it a flying saucer? What do you think?
UFO CENTRAL
One of the government’s most secret locations.
Area 51—also known as Groom Lake—is part of Nellis Air Force Range in southern Nevada. It’s a top-secret military base said to be a test-site for performing experiments on captured alien spacecraft. Want to see strange lights and hear weird sounds? Go there.
• Nevada State Highway 375, which runs south of Area 51, has been nicknamed “The Extraterrestrial Highway.” Why? Many UFOs have been spotted along this lonely stretch of desert road.
• The stories about Area 51 were mostly just legend…until 1989 when respected scientist Bob Lazar came forward. Lazar told reporters that, in an attempt to unlock its secrets, he had actually worked on an alien spacecraft in 1988.
• Extra-terrestrials have short, gray bodies with almond-shaped eyes.
IT CAME FROM WAY OUT THERE
Falling stars and unidentified flying objects bring some pretty weird gifts.
STAR JELLY
Have you ever watched a falling star or a meteor rocket through the night sky? Most of them burn up in the atmosphere. But some actually hit the earth. Many people who have gone to the places where meteors hit report finding an odd, gooey substance that they call “star jelly.” Unfortunately it evaporates pretty quicky, so it’s hard to study. Some scientists think this jelly could be nostoc, an extremely adaptable type of blue-green algae that grows in clumps in the soil or floats on water. Others think the jelly might be an organism called “slime mold,” which grows on the ground and can be quite large. But whatever it is, no one has yet explained why this strange jelly appears where a meteor has fallen.
ANGEL HAIR
It is white and silky and looks like spiderwebs floating in the air. Dubbed “angel hair” by those who’ve seen it, these silky fibers generally appear during the sighting of a UFO. In October 1952, in the village of Oloron, France, high school superintendent Jean-Yves Prigent, his wife, and children, spied a cigar-shaped flying object hovering over their town surrounded by 30 smaller flying saucers. Ten days later 100 people saw the same thing in the town of Gaillac. Both times a substance like “angel hair” fell from the saucers. But when people tried to gather up the silky hair, it turned to jelly and evaporated into thin air.
THE GREEN CHILDREN OF WOOLPIT
Where did these legendary kids come from?
In 12th century England, during the reign of King Stephen, two very strange children were found alone near the town of Woolpit. Workers harvesting in a field heard the cries of a young boy and girl and found them huddled in an open pit, crying. But these were no ordinary children. They spoke a language that no one understood and they were dressed in clothes of an odd metallic material. Stranger still was the color of their skin—green!
The two green children were taken to the home of a man named Richard de Calne. It was difficult for de Calne to get them to eat or drink anything (all they would eat were beans, and only beans that were freshly cut from the beanstalks). The boy soon became ill and died, but the girl survived.
As she grew older and learned English, the green girl was finally able to tell her story, which was as remarkable as her appearance. She said that she and her brother had come from a place that had no sun. All the people there were green and they lived in a land of perpetual twilight. She said her home was across a river of light. When asked how they came to be in the pit, she said that they had heard bells, become mesmerized, and followed the sound of the bells into a cavern. When they emerged, they found themselves in the open pit and were “struck senseless” by the bright lights of our world.
The strange girl’s skin faded as she grew up. She married a man from Norfolk, England, but never had any children. And the townspeople never knew if she had come from deep inside our planet or…another world. The green girl died a mystery.
RICE PORRIDGE
It’s a breakfast cereal! No—it’s a crystal ball.
Every year on February 26, a bowl of porridge is placed on the altar of the Chiriku Hachimangu Shrine in Japan. On March 15 the bowl is removed from the shrine and taken to the local fortune teller, who examines it and predicts what kind of harvest the village will have that year. This tradition has been going on for 1,200 years. In March 2005, the fortune teller spotted something unusual in the bowl of porridge: a crack cut through the shiny surface of the nearly month-old porridge. The fortune teller—Masahiro Higashi—saw the crack, and promptly warned people in the Kyushu area of an upcoming earthquake. Five days later Kyushu was shaken by a quake that measured a strong seven on the Richter scale and damaged more than 600 houses.
CROP CIRCLES
They appear overnight. What are they and where do they come from?
On the night of July 16, 2002, mysterious lights appeared over the fields of Pewsey Downs in Wiltshire, England. The next morning an elaborate pattern shaped like a nautilus shell was carved into the field. Who made it…and why?
Sightings of crop circles go as far back as the 1970s when mysterious patterns that looked like giant pictures suddenly formed in farmers’ fields. They have been seen in 29 countries and appear in wheat fields, corn fields, barley fields, rice paddies, and even in ice. They often appear near ancient sacred sites like Stonehenge in England and at crossing points of the earth’s magnetic currents.
At first, the circles were simple geometric shapes that resembled the ancient Celtic cross. Then they became more elaborate pictograms that looked like ancient rock carvings. Since the 1990s the shapes have begun to mimic computer-generated geometric patterns containing elaborate mathematic equations.
IS IT A HOAX?
In 1991 two 70-year-old men named Doug Bower and Dave Chorley came forward to confess that in the 1970s they had made some of the crop circles using a piece of wood and rope. They even demonstrated on TV how they smashed down the corn to make the patterns. But “hoaxers” have been found to be responsible for only some of the crop circles. The others? Nobody’s sure.
On July 8, 1996, a pilot flew over Stonehenge, England, and noted that all was normal below. Fifteen minutes later another pilot reported the formation of a 900-foot crop circle that contained 149 circles. It took surveyors 11 hours just to measure it!
THE REAL MCCOY
So, what makes a true crop circle? Usually the plants in the circles are bent, not broken. Quite often they are crisscrossed into as many as five layers. The circles have precise borders and contain very strong electromagnetic fields—sometimes strong enough to damage a digital camera or a computer. And many eyewitnesses have seen strange globes of light just before or during the formation of the circle.
If you want to actually see one for yourself, head for southern England in the summer. More than 90 percent of reported circles appear there.
ARE YOU A SLIDER?
Some people have strange powers over electrical appliances. You could be one of them.
When you walk under streetlights or drive by them, do they suddenly turn off or on? If so, you might be a SLIder, a person who appears to have an unusual effect on electrical lights and appliances. With SLIders, Street Lamp Interference (or SLI) doesn’t happen once or twice, but all the time. SLIders say that when they are in an extreme emotional state, such as if they’re mad, worried, or upset about something, streetlights often turn off.
SLIders also report that when they turn on lamps lightbulbs blow out, and they recount instances of TVs, electronic toys, radios, and CD play
ers going off or on without being touched. SLIders insist that this weird “power” can’t be controlled—it just happens.
Hillary Evans, author and paranormal investigator, has even established the Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange as a place for SLIders to share their experiences. So, if lights and TVs are going on and off when you walk by, you may want to get in touch with Evans. She wants to hear your story.
MORE AMAZING COINCIDENCES
R.S.V.P = R.I.P. In 1865 Robert Todd Lincoln was invited to attend a play with his parents. He arrived late to find that his father, Abraham Lincoln, had been assassinated. In 1881 President Garfield invited Robert to join him on a train trip. The president was killed at the station moments before Robert got on board. In 1901 President McKinley invited Robert to a public event. Seconds before Lincoln arrived, McKinley was shot. After that, Robert said he would accept no more presidential invitations, since three had invited him to their assassinations.
HELP! SAVE ME! Roger Lausier was four years old when he got caught in the surf near Salem, Massachusetts. A passing stranger named Alice Blaise rescued him. Nine years later, Lausier was swimming at the same beach when he heard a woman scream for help. Her husband was drowning. He quickly swam out and saved the man’s life. Who was the woman? Alice Blaise.
Uncle John's Creature Feature Bathroom Reader For Kids Only! Page 19