M.J. Rose

“They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from home. Their median age was 33. All but one — 116 of the 117 — were healthy men…”

Twenty-five years later, in her new book, author Shelley Adler pieces together what happened…

The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills
By Alexis C. Madrigal

“While people of all cultures experience sleep paralysis in similar ways, the specific form and intensity it takes varies from one group to the next

They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from home. Their median age was 33. All but one — 116 of the 117 — were healthy men. Immigrants from southeast Asia, you could count the time most had spent on American soil in just months. At the peak of the deaths in the early 1980s, the death rate from this mysterious problem among the Hmong ethnic group was equivalent to the top five natural causes of death for other American men in their age group.

Something was killing Hmong men in their sleep, and no one could figure out what it was. There was no obvious cause of death. None of them had been sick, physically. The men weren’t clustered all that tightly, geographically speaking. They were united by dislocation from Laos and a shared culture, but little else. Even House would have been stumped.

Doctors gave the problem a name, the kind that reeks of defeat, a dragon label on the edge of the known medical world: Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. SUNDS. It didn’t do much in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but it was easier to track the periodic conferences dedicated to understanding the problem.

Twenty-five years later, Shelley Adler’s new book pieces together what happened, drawing on interviews with the Hmong population and analyzing the extant scientific literature. Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection is a mind-bending exploration of how what you believe interacts with how your body works….”

For the rest click here to go to The Atlantic.

More on the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, here.

A 1,000-Year-Old Buddha statue hides the remains of a mummified monk. (Some practicing Buddhists claim that similar mummies are not deceased, but are actually in an advanced state of meditation!)…

CT Scan of 1,000-Year-Old Buddha Statue Reveals Mummified Monk Hidden Inside

by Christopher Jobson (thisiscolossal.com)

“What looks like a traditional statue of Buddha dating back to the 11th or 12th century was recently revealed to be quite a bit more. A CT scan and endoscopy carried out by the Netherlands-based Drents Museum at the Meander Medical Centre in Amersfoort, showed the ancient reliquary fully encases the mummified remains of a Buddhist master…”

For the rest, click here.

And now for something completely different:

Scientists have identified “space seeds” that could have been used by extraterrestrials to seed life on Earth.

UK Scientists: Aliens May Have Sent Space Seeds To Create Life On Earth
The Huffington Post  |  By Lee Speigel

“Scientists in the U.K. have examined a tiny metal circular object, and are suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.

Don’t be fooled by the size of the object in the microscopic image above. It may appear to look like a planet-sized globe, but in fact, it’s no bigger than the width of a human hair.

The University of Buckingham reports that the minuscule metal globe was discovered by astrobiologist Milton Wainwright and a team of researchers who examined dust and minute matter gathered by a high-flying balloon in Earth’s stratosphere.

“It is a ball about the width of a human hair, which has filamentous life on the outside and a gooey biological material oozing from its centre,” Wainwright said, according to Express.co.uk.

“One theory is it was sent to Earth by some unknown civilization in order to continue seeding the planet with life,” Wainwright hypothesizes.

That theory comes from a Nobel Prize winner…”

For the complete piece, click here to go to HuffPost.

And then there’s this…

Obama aide John Podesta says ‘biggest failure’ was not securing the disclosure of UFO files