as a little one I remember Bigfoot (sometimes known as Sasquatch) as an obscure monster on par with the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster.
at some point it seems that Bigfoot became mainstream.
Pizza Hut had a Bigfoot pizza.
Hollywood had a movie about called 'Harry and the Hendersons'.  as I recall there was a tv series.
the Colorado Avalanche NHL team had bigfoot prints on their uniforms.
   

speaking of the NHL, the Utah team wanted to call themselves the Yeti, but they were denied as there is a cup/cooler maker of that name.

so do we think the majority accepts Bigfoot as a real entity?  or is this just a modern myth?

https://www.reuters.com/world/pakistan-d...025-04-28/

 Pakistan's defence minister said on Monday a military incursion by neighbouring India was imminent in the aftermath of a deadly militant attack on tourists in Kashmir last week, as tensions rise between the two nuclear-armed nations.

The attack killed 26 people and triggered outrage in Hindu-majority India, along with calls for action against Muslim-majority Pakistan. India accuses Pakistan of backing militancy in Kashmir, a region both claim and have fought two wars over.

this doesn't seem to be getting much coverage so maybe it's known to be empty rhetoric.

a shooting war between these two would be a major event.
one good thing; they have a land border so the fighting shouldn't spread out too far.

there are serious water issues in that part of the world.  I've read commentaries that say WWIII will be fought over water, and could involve China and India.  Yikes.

Picture released from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows for the first time a Martian rover mid drive on the Planet. 

Curiosity was pictured on a drive through the Gediz Vallis channel where the rover has discovered conditions suitable for life adding to my belief there is still life on or rather in our red neighbour.


Staggering to think Curiosity has been on Mars for 13 years now.

Quote:The rover's work has been extremely intriguing to astrobiologists, showing that Gale was indeed a habitable environment long ago: The area hosted a long-lived lake-and-stream system that had the ingredients for life, as well as a possible chemical energy source that could support microbial metabolism.

MRO has been operating at the Red Planet even longer than Curiosity, reaching Mars orbit in March 2006. As the new photo shows, MRO is still going strong, hunting for signs of past water activity on the Red Planet, serving as a communications relay for surface craft like Curiosity and its younger cousin, Perseverance — and keeping tabs on these robots' movements from time to time as well.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/...anet-photo

Quote:Some guns just aren’t built to last—and after digging into reviews, owner complaints, and firsthand feedback, these 17 models prove it. Whether it’s the Taurus G3C’s fragile frame, the Hi-Point JCP’s deforming slide, or the Llama Max-1’s constant jamming, these firearms start breaking down fast—often before hitting 1,500 rounds. From weak springs and cracked slides to misaligned cylinders and worn-out triggers, the list includes compact pistols, budget revolvers, and even a few once-promising designs like the Kahr PM9 and Beretta Nano. If long-term reliability matters to you, these are the models you might want to think twice about.

Henry Tillman: China's Thorium Revolution - 60,000 Years of Cheap Energy
"The Belt And Road will be powered by thorium" - if his advisory optimism is correct this may/will change the world. All the energy AI/datacenters & transportation will ever need. Thorium Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) sounds exciting on the surface but I'm skeptical. Iran should invest in it since it apparently cannot be weaponized. Even if it doesn't pan out, why hasn't the US pushed thorium tech onto the Iranians?





Vid summary::

So, China has reportedly built one in the Gobi Desert and it might shatter the Western energy order.

Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) were first tested in 1960s America. Clean, meltdown-proof, and perfect for thorium.
But there was a problem.
They couldn’t make bombs.
So the Pentagon killed the program and shelved the data.

The Chinese exhumed the blueprints (apparently the tech was opensourced to the public), rebuilt the science, and quietly launched a thorium MSR program in 2011.

Why thorium?
3x more abundant than uranium
No enrichment needed
Can't be weaponized
Abundant in India, Africa, Brazil, and other countries.

This isn’t just about China going green.
It’s about China seizing control of the nuclear narrative.
No proliferation.
No petro-dependence.
No Western gatekeeping.

Imagine:
Indonesia, Pakistan, Kenya, Bolivia—running their grids on Chinese-built thorium reactors.
No sanctions.
No LNG extortion.
No lectures about democracy.

The West told the Global South:
"You can have wind, sun, or nothing."
China just offered them base-load, sovereign energy with no bomb risk.
That’s not a reactor.
That’s a geopolitical earthquake.

Next: What happens to the Western energy cartel when the Global South goes thorium?

Quote:Months after satellites picked up a massive nuclear fusion facility in China's Sichuan province, the country's nuclear industry has blown the lid off fission tech.

During a private meeting earlier this month, researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences revealed the successful operation of a thorium-powered nuclear reactor located in the Gobi Desert. The team had achieved "full-power operation" last June, according to South China Morning Post, and recently succeeded in reloading the reactor while it was powered up — a world first.

It's a major milestone for nuclear power. Thorium offers a more accessible but less weaponizable alternative to uranium, according to the World Nuclear Association, which notes that "thorium-based power reactor fuels would be a poor source for fissile material usable in the illicit manufacture of an explosive device."

The Gobi Desert reactor is a two megawatt research unit engineered to use molten salt as fuel carrier and coolant. A molten salt reactor (MSR) theoretically carries far less risk in the event of a meltdown compared to water-based systems, as salts can carry greater loads of thermal energy at much lower pressure.

In fact, a "meltdown" is basically a non-factor for these systems — the fuel is already molten.

A report sponsored by the US government on MSRs notes that a "possible advantage of the MSR is that the fuel is subject to freezing," so "upon breach of a vessel or pipe... the fuel will disperse, and thus increase its cooling geometry, until it reaches a freezing configuration and thus will be confined to that location and configuration." Basically, imagine lava rolling slowly down a mountain as the air cools it back into rock, compared to a spectacular steam explosion like the incident at Chernobyl.

Curiously, MSRs are nothing new. They had their day in the US back in the late 1940s and early 50s, when American cold warriors dumped nearly $1 billion into developing a nuclear-powered stealth bomber. Congress halted research on thorium-fueled airplanes back in 1961, and uranium more or less became the gold standard, due in no small part to its military potential.

Assumed obsolete, the US' MSR research has since been made public, forming the foundation of the Gobi Desert team's work.

"The US left its research publicly available, waiting for the right successor," said the project's chief scientist Xu Hongjie. "Rabbits sometimes make mistakes or grow lazy. That’s when the tortoise seizes its chance."


China Fires Up World's First Thorium-Powered Nuclear Reactor

Quote:What if the greatest unsolved mysteries of our time weren’t buried in ancient ruins—but foretold by a woman who saw the future before it arrived? In today’s video, we dive into the chilling prophecy of Jeane Dixon, a renowned American psychic whose visions shaped headlines and haunted history. From predicting presidential deaths to warning of global upheaval, Dixon’s story is filled with astonishing detail—and one prophecy stands out above the rest: her vision of the year 2025 as a turning point for humanity. Could this be the final warning? Or is it just another chapter in the world’s long list of unsolved mysteries? Fasten your seatbelt as we explore what may be one of the most compelling unsolved mysteries ever recorded. If you're fascinated by unsolved mysteries and prophetic visions that defy explanation, don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit the bell—because this is one mystery you’ll want to follow to the end.

The original Alice Cooper band split 50 years ago but now Alice has re-united with, guitarist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway , drummer Neal Smith and producer Bob Ezrin to revisit the 1970s shock rock era with the release in July of their new album entitled "The Revenge Of Alice Cooper".

The first single from the album , "Black Mamba" , was    released today featuring a guest appearance by legendary Doors guitarist Robby Krieger deputising for original guitarist Glen Buxton who died in the late 90s although Buxton also appears on the album thanks to his work on a previously unreleased song. 

The advertisement starts at 1:50 and ends at 5:00

Quote:STRIPPED: When Earth's Shield Fails the Dead Will Rise | The Plasma Apocalypse Our planet's magnetic shield is deteriorating rapidly, creating a dangerous vulnerability to solar storms of unprecedented power. Throughout history, events like the 1921 New York Railroad incident and the 1859 Carrington Event wreaked havoc on early technology. Cultures across continents left warnings through winter solstice rituals and megalithic structures designed not for worship but as sophisticated energy channeling systems during cosmic upheavals. Their stone warnings remain while our understanding fades. Military documents like CONPLAN 8888 reveal government preparations for phenomena beyond power outages. The magnetic north pole races toward Siberia at increasing speed, while the South Atlantic Anomaly grows larger each year. The approaching plasma event threatens to do more than disable our technology—it will transform reality in ways our ancestors deeply feared.

In the half-light of England’s most glorious age, where discovery and danger mingled like mist along the Thames, there lived a man who sought to unite all knowledge into a single divine truth. His name was Dr. John Dee — the Queen’s conjurer, the mathematician who mapped the oceans, the scholar who dreamed of touching Heaven itself. Yet for all his brilliance, there are whispers that he reached too high, and in doing so, unlocked doors no man was ever meant to open.

Dee was a man of endless hunger. Born in 1527, a time when heretics still burned for asking forbidden questions, he spent his childhood pulling apart the mysteries of the natural world. By the time he was barely a man, he had mastered mathematics, astronomy, optics — even the secret arts the Church condemned. To the cautious mind, Dee was dangerous: a man who saw no wall between science and magic, only undiscovered laws waiting to be understood.

The court of Elizabeth I knew Dee as a trusted advisor, a navigator who helped set the course for England’s future empire. It was Dee who coined the term "the British Empire," dreaming of a mighty nation guided by celestial wisdom. Yet even then, he hid deeper ambitions behind his public face. Dee believed that true knowledge — absolute, God-given truth — was not written in books or maps, but hidden among the stars, the spirits, and the secret languages of the angels themselves.

By the 1580s, in the fading glow of his worldly successes, Dee retreated from public life into the labyrinth of his own mind. His home at Mortlake became less a household than a temple: its walls lined with ancient manuscripts, magical instruments, and relics of lost civilizations. And there, among crumbling scrolls and gleaming astrolabes, Dee began to seek direct communion with the divine.

He built an altar, clothed himself in white linen robes, purified himself with fasts and prayers. And before him, always, sat the black mirror — a disk of volcanic glass said to have been carved by Aztec priests, its polished surface so dark it seemed to drink the light from the room. Through this mirror, Dee believed, he could summon the angels and receive from them the secrets of the universe.

But the angels did not come easily.

Frustrated by his failure to pierce the veil, Dee turned to a strange and troubled figure: Edward Kelley, a former apothecary and alchemist, whose reputation for fraud was as famous as his talents for scrying. Kelley claimed he could see into the spirit world — that he could act as a medium between Dee and the divine. Desperate, Dee agreed.

Together, they performed ritual after ritual. Dee would pray and chant, invoking the archangels by ancient names. Kelley, peering into the black mirror or into a translucent crystal ball, would describe visions of radiant beings descending from golden towers, bearing scrolls written in a strange, musical tongue. Dee called it Enochian — the language of angels, pure and undistorted by human sin.

The messages were often cryptic, filled with symbols, warnings, and elaborate instructions for building devices Dee called "heptarchic tables" — tools that could supposedly command the angelic hosts. At first, the communications seemed glorious: the angels praised Dee's piety, promised him wisdom and favor. But as time passed, the tone shifted.

The beings they contacted grew more commanding, more manipulative. Their demands became increasingly bizarre. They instructed Dee and Kelley to swap wives, an act that tore apart Dee’s conscience but which he obeyed, believing it a divine order. Kelley, already unstable, fell deeper into paranoia and resentment, convinced the spirits were deceiving them — or worse, that they had never been angels at all.

Indeed, the sessions took on a darker character. The so-called angels began delivering prophecies of apocalyptic doom, offering fragments of knowledge wrapped in riddles and threats. Dee's once-orderly mind began to fray. His diaries from this period are a tangle of fear and hope, filled with desperate pleas for clarification from spirits who gave only silence in return.

Even as the visions grew darker, Dee could not stop. He was a man possessed — not by demons, perhaps, but by his own bottomless yearning for certainty in a world built on shadows. Kelley, meanwhile, demanded ever greater rewards, seeking to transmute lead into gold with promises given by the spirits. In Prague, where they sought the patronage of Emperor Rudolf II, their reputation deteriorated into scandal. They became wandering outcasts, pitied, scorned, feared.

By the end, Kelley abandoned Dee altogether, dying in disgrace after either falling or throwing himself from a window. Dee returned to England a hollowed man. His books and instruments had been ransacked by mobs during his absence. Mortlake, once a house of wonders, was a ruin. Dee — who had once spoken with kings and queens — died in obscurity, an old man scribbling faded memories onto rotting paper, trying to hold onto the fragments of a broken revelation.

Yet the mark he left has never entirely faded.

The Enochian language survives, studied by occultists and magicians who believe it holds power even now. The black mirror sits in the British Museum — mute, but still gleaming with a depth that seems to swallow the soul. Those who have dared to recreate Dee’s angelic rituals often report the same thing he did: a presence... something watching... something responding.

Perhaps it was never angels that spoke through Kelley. Perhaps Dee, in his yearning, tuned his soul like an instrument — but called forth a music too old, too terrible for the human mind to bear. Perhaps the mirror still remembers.

John Dee remains a figure balanced between two worlds: celebrated for his contributions to science and exploration, but forever tainted by the shadows he chose to pursue. His life is a cautionary tale carved into the bones of history — a warning whispered across the centuries:

Not every light that shines from beyond is holy.

And once you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back — patient, silent, and hungry.




After John Dee’s death, the black mirror disappeared into private hands, shifting quietly from one collector to another like a secret too heavy to hold for long. No one ever seemed to keep it for a lifetime. Eventually, it resurfaced, tucked away among a noble family’s heirlooms, and then was sold off — a relic, a curiosity, a whisper from an age most people preferred to forget. When it finally entered the British Museum’s collection, it wasn’t just another exhibit. It came with an invisible heaviness, a kind of pressure that isn’t listed on any inventory sheet.

Museum staff over the years have spoken in hushed tones about it. Not official reports, not things you'd find in the archives, but the kind of stories that pass between night guards and maintenance workers. Some of them claimed that standing too close to the mirror made their skin crawl, like something unseen was brushing just over their shoulders. Others felt a pulling sensation — not physical, but mental — as if their thoughts were being drawn inward, into that smooth, endless blackness. There have been incidents where visitors collapsed near the mirror’s display, seemingly overcome by something they couldn’t name. The official explanations were always vague: dehydration, heat exhaustion, random fainting spells. Nothing unusual, if you’re willing to believe that.

Photographers who have tried to capture the mirror on film sometimes came away with blurred or distorted images. Equipment would malfunction in ways that couldn’t be replicated once they stepped away. Faces in the background of photographs sometimes appeared warped or half-there, with ghostly smudges where nothing should have been. Those who claim to be more sensitive to energies say they’ve glimpsed faces peering from inside the glass — ancient, alien, and very much aware.

What chills me about all this is the realization that the black mirror wasn’t simply an object in Dee’s time — it was a portal, an interface. Dee and Edward Kelley didn’t think they were playing games; they believed the mirror opened a real channel to the angelic — or perhaps something else wearing the skin of angels. They recorded visions, languages, entire systems of communication that seemed too complex for two men to invent alone. What if they really did open a doorway? What if something stepped through and has been lurking ever since?

The deeper you look into this, the more you realize that black mirrors never really went away after Dee. They’ve haunted history’s edges ever since. Modern occultists still use scrying mirrors today, often fashioned from obsidian or polished black glass, attempting to reach across the veil like Dee once did. Some claim that the act of gazing into a mirror under specific conditions — darkness, candlelight, trance — thins the boundary between the world we know and the one that watches from beyond. Some say you can catch glimpses of spirits, or of your own death. Some say it’s not your reflection staring back at you at all — it’s something wearing your face.

When you trace the thread from Dee to now, it feels less like a history lesson and more like a living current — something that started centuries ago and never stopped moving. An invitation, still hanging in the air, waiting for someone bold or foolish enough to answer it.

Once you open a door like that, can you ever really close it?
Or does the mirror simply wait… patient, silent, and very much alive?