Woman In Red Attacks Pope

As Pope Benedict XVI was making his way down the long aisle in St. Peter's Basilica to give the Christmas Eve Mass (24 Dec 2009), a woman in red leaped over the barrier to get closer to him. But in doing so she lunged at him and pulled him down to the marble floor. The Pope was shaken but not injured.

Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, 87, however was hurt. He was wheeled off to hospital with a broken hip after falling during the incident. He'll be operated on in the coming days.

A statement released by the Vatican identified the woman as Susanna Maiolo, a 25-year-old Italian Swiss national. The statement said she was not armed but shows signs of mental instability, and has since been admitted to a health facility for compulsory treatment.

Maiolo is the same woman who tried to reach Pope Benedict XVI at Midnight Mass last year. Vatican officials speaking on condition of anonymity said Maiolo was involved in a similar incident last year in which she jumped the barricade as the pope processed. In that case, however, Maiolo never managed to reach the pope and was quietly tackled to the ground by security.

In both cases she wore a red sweatshirt.

Meanwhile, on Christmas Day, (25 Dec 2009), the FBI is questioning a suspect believed to have tried to ignite a powdery substance on Detroit-bound airliner. Delta Flight 253 [2 (2+3) 3], an Airbus 330 carrying 278 passengers, was arriving in Detroit from Amsterdam on Friday afternoon when the explosives went off. Minor injuries occurred. The passenger was immediately subdued and was not named (yet). It has been declared an act of terrorist.

It will be recalled that John A. Keel, who died this year, wrote of entities (being channeled through individuals he knew) telling of prophecies and predictions. The information to Keel told of the threat of an assassination of a pope.

An assassination attempt of a pope was to be followed by "days of darkness," and would trigger Armageddon. So wrote Keel in The Mothman Prophecies. Often it is forgotten that in Operation Trojon Horse and Haunted Planet, Keel also penned some passages on the "messages" he was receiving and on St. Malachy's Prophecy, which states that the final pope before Peter will be assassinated.

For those who speculate, there is general agreement that Pope Benedict XVI is Gloria Olivae, the last pope in St. Malachy's Prophecy before the final pope, Petrus Romanus. Peter of Rome (or Peter II?) will see the times when the "city of seven hills will be destroyed" (the Vatican? Rome?).

Will 2010 be a year of wondering what it all means?

Fort Hood-Linked Iman Killed

In the wake of recent police ambush incidents and other shootings, which appear to have occurred as copycats of the Fort Hood killings, there is more breaking news today.

A bulletin from Reuters reports that "radical Muslim preacher" Anwar al-Awlaki (linked by U.S. intelligence to the Fort Hood shootings) has died in a Yemen airstrike on al Qaeda militants, a security official from Sanaa said on Thursday, Christmas Eve Day, December 24, 2009. In the Fort Hood massacre, allegedly one gunman killed 13 people at the U.S. Army base.

The SITE Intelligence Group handout photo (at top) was obtained November 10, 2009, of Anwar al-Awlaki, a former US resident living in Yemen and accused al-Qaeda supporter, who commented on his website on November 9, 2009, that the attack at Fort Hood perpetrated by the alleged gunman, Major Nidal Hasan, was a "heroic act." As officials advance the investigation into the Army Major who allegedly perpetrated the massacre at Fort Hood, attention had turned to Anwar al-Awlaki, a top al Qaeda recruiter who was in contact with Major Nidal Hasan before the Army shootings.


Major Nidal Hasan.

According to the Washington Post, Imam Al-Awlaki of Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia at one time was the Muslim Chaplain at George Washington University. He held a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Colorado State University, a M.A. in Education Leadership from San Diego State University and worked on a Doctorate degree in Human Resource Development at George Washington University.

Doesn't the following image make you wonder, why would someone want to have their photo on Anwar al-Awlaki's Facebook page?



Information from AP, AFP, Newscom, KOMO, Reuters, Washington Post, SMiles Foster, and other media.

Sin City Star Dies: Brittany Murphy At 32

Brittany Murphy has died.

The 32-year-old actress went into full cardiac arrest early Sunday morning, December 20, 2009, following a 911 call from her husband, Simon Monjack, Variety reports. Around 8 a.m. local time, her mother found her unconscious in the shower in her home in the hills of West Hollywood. The star was pronounced dead upon arrival at 10:04 am on Sunday, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles County Department of Coroner confirms to E! News, "We do have a preliminary death report of a Brittany Murphy" coming from Cedars-Sinai.

Popular Movie Celebrity

Murphy starred in such films as 8 Mile, Uptown Girls, Sin City, Clueless and Don't Say a Word.

She also starred in the ironically named Drop Dead Gorgeous. Murphy's Drop Dead Gorgeous co-star Denise Richards lamented: "Brittany Murphy was in Drop Dead Gorgeous with me and was the sweetest and most adorable. Tragic, sad and devastating. Her poor family."

Murphy was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on November 10, 1977. Her parents divorced when she was two and she was raised by her mother, Sharon Murphy (Irish and Eastern European descent), in Edison, New Jersey, and later Los Angeles. Her father, Angelo Bertolotti (Italian American), is, allegedly, a convicted mobster, found guilty of racketeering.

Other Notable Deaths

In West Hollywood, other tragic deaths have included those of John Belushi and River Phoenix.

In 1982, John Belushi died of a drug overdose at the elegant Chateau Marmont hotel. On the night of his death, he was visited separately by friends Robin Williams (at the height of his own drug exploits) and Robert De Niro, each of whom left the premises, leaving Belushi in the company of assorted others, including Cathy Smith. This is just one of many notable sordid events at the location. A 1930s movie executive reportedly said, "If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont."

Actor River Phoenix died of a drug overdose on Halloween morning in 1993 at the Viper Room, a club that was opened that year and was partly owned by actor Johnny Depp until 2004.

Howard Hughes

West Hollywood, then called Sherman, formerly was an important retreat for Howard Hughes. In 1930, Howard Hughes purchased the building at 7000 Romaine Street, which was then used for an experimental film process company for a short time. Hughes eventually used the location as the communication nerve center for his empire. Employees called this location The Fortress.

The area around Fountain Avenue, Harper Avenue and Havenhurst Drive contains a high concentration of landmark 1920s Spanish Revival and Art Deco apartment buildings by such noted architects as Leland Bryant. This historic district has been home to many celebrities and at one time the Sunset Tower at 8358 Sunset Boulevard was home to Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn, the Gabor Sisters, John Wayne and Howard Hughes.

Close Encounters of Fourth Kind Author Dies

The death of author C. D. B. Bryan, 73, who wrote his last book about an academic symposium that examined claims of alien visitations, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind: Alien Abductions, UFOs and the Conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (NY: Alfred A. Knopf,1995), has been detailed in an obituary by Bruce Weber at The New York Times.

C. D. B. Bryan, a novelist and journalist whose 1976 book, "Friendly Fire," about the accidental death of a soldier in Vietnam, the consequent anguish of his family and their rage at the Army and the federal government, became one of the enduring works of reportage on the Vietnam War, died Tuesday [December 15, 2009] at home in Guilford, Conn....The cause was cancer, said his son, St. George Bryan.

Bryan's own military career involved serving in the U.S. Army in South Korea (1958–1960), but not happily, according to source material. He was mobilized again (1961–1962) for the Berlin Crisis of 1961. He was an intelligence officer, according to his profile at Wikipedia.

Bruce Weber notes later in the Times obituary:

Courtlandt Dixon Barnes Bryan, known as Courty, was born in Manhattan on April 22, 1936, and grew up in various locations, but mostly in Doylestown, Pa. His father, Joseph Bryan III, was a magazine writer and editor who had a fascination with unidentified flying objects, a subject C. D. B. Bryan would explore himself in his final book....

His father was a major actor in the study of UFOs, actually, especially regarding his role in the relatively mainstream workings of the Washington D. C.-based organization, the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena.

[Donald Keyhoe, Maj USMC (Ret.)]became NICAP’s director. He established a monthly newsletter, The U.F.O. Investigator. Another prominent figure joined NICAP’s board of governors: Keyhoe's Naval Academy classmate VADM Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, USN (Ret.) He had been Director of Central Intelligence and first head of the Central Intelligence Agency. Another important name on the letterhead was that of Gen. Albert Coady Wedemeyer USA (Ret.)....

By 1969, Keyhoe turned his focus away from the military and focused on the CIA as the source of the UFO cover up. By December 1969, NICAP's board, headed by Colonel Joseph Bryan III, forced Keyhoe to retire as NICAP chief. Bryan was actually a former covert CIA agent who had served as founder and head of the CIA's psychological warfare division. Under Bryan's leadership, NICAP disbanded its local and state affiliate groups. Source

The New York Times concludes with the following personal information:

His parents divorced when he was in his late teens, and his mother, Katharine Lansing Barnes, married the novelist John O'Hara, who was especially influential in turning the young man toward writing fiction.

Young Courty Bryan was educated at several private schools and was thrown out of two of them, one for cheating, an incident central to an early short story, "So Much Unfairness of Things," which appeared in The New Yorker and grew into his first novel, "P.S. Wilkinson." It won the Harper Prize, given by the publisher Harper & Row to the finest manuscript turned in by an unknown writer, in 1965.

In spite of his spotty academic career, he was admitted to Yale. After graduation he served in the Army in South Korea in the late 1950s, an unhappy episode that also found its way into the novel.

* * *

Mr. Bryan was a smoker, a drinker and an avid and gifted conversationalist who effortlessly commanded the attention of people around a dinner table, his son said. He will be cremated in advance of a memorial service early next year, St. George Bryan added; until then, his remains are to be stored in martini shakers.Source.

The Fourth Kind



It is to be noted that the movie The Fourth Kind opened on Friday, November 6, 2009. It is a science fiction/thriller/horror film directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi, and starring Milla Jovovich. The film is purported to be a documentary reenactment set in Nome, Alaska, and deals with alien abductions. The film's promotional material says the title is derived from J. Allen Hynek's classification of close encounters with aliens, in which the fourth kind denotes an alien abduction.

As researcher S. Miles Lewis points out in personal correspondence, this is technically incorrect.

A close encounter of the fourth kind is said to be when a "human is abducted by a UFO or its occupants." But this type was not included in Hynek's original close encounters scale.

Jacques Vallee, Hynek's associate, argued in "Physical Analysis in Ten Cases of Unexplaind Aerial Objects with Material Samples." (Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 12, No. 3., pp. 359-375, 1998) that a CE4 should be described as "cases when witnesses experienced a transformation of their sense of reality," so as to also include non-abduction cases where absurd, hallucinatory or dreamlike events are associated with UFO encounters.

Lonnie Zamora, famed historical UFO eyewitness who was a member of law enforcement when he had his experience, also recently died, on November 2, 2009. Zamora had encounters of the first, second, and third kind, but not the fourth kind.

C. D. B. Bryan's book, Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind, actually does involve the academic analyses of those level of claims of alien visitations. The five-day conference that Bryan covered was chaired by M.I.T. Professor of Physics David Pritchard and Harvard Professor of Psychiatry John Mack. John Mack, M.D. (who was killed when hit by a car in London, on September 27, 2004) was a historically significant figure in abduction studies, who gave much credibility to the field, especially after Bryan's book appeared.

NVCC Shooting

A 20-year-old student opened fire in a Woodbridge, Virginia community college classroom, but did not hit anyone and was arrested in a hallway, police said on December 8, 2009 (on the anniversary of John Lennon's death).

No injuries were reported following the afternoon shooting at Northern Virginia Community College's campus in Woodbridge, about 25 miles south of Washington, D.C.

Jason Michael Hamilton, 20, of Manassas was later charged with attempted murder and discharging a firearm in a school zone and was being held without bond. Whether Hamilton had hired an attorney was not immediately clear.

Prince William County Police spokeswoman Kim Chinn said the student, armed with a high-powered rifle, fired several shots and left the classroom. Officers found him in a hallway where he was cooperative and was taken into custody, Chinn said.

The spokeswoman said the unidentified teacher ducked when the student opened fire.

"When she saw the gun, she hit the floor," Chinn said.

Hamilton did not have the gun when he was arrested, but told police where it was, the spokeswoman said.

Chinn said she didn't know exactly where Hamilton's rifle was found, but it wasn't in the classroom.

Police spokeswoman Sharon Richardson said officers responded about 2:40 p.m. to an "active shooter" situation following reports of a gunman in the main administration building.

The college enacted its emergency lockdown procedures and later issued a statement saying all Woodbridge classes were canceled Tuesday because of the shooting. Some students, faculty and staff were sent to a nearby high school.

All classrooms are in one building and the students were in lockdown until about 5:30 p.m. Swat teams went into each classroom during the lockdown, said Chinn, who didn't know how many students were inside or how many shots were fired.

Biology professor Miriam St. Clair, of McLean, Va., said "we heard a loud noise, it sounded like a desk fell over and we heard another loud pop, we knew it was a gunshot."

St. Clair, 58, said she looked out the window and saw students running. The professor said she told her students to get inside the classroom and they closed the door, which did not have a lock, and barricaded themselves inside by piling about 20 desks against the door, crouching behind other desks in the room.

One of the students called 911 and the operator told them to stay where they were. About 2 1/2 hours later, a SWAT team came into the classroom and told them it was safe.

"We were very frightened," St. Clair said.

Two police cars were outside the suspect's home in an affluent new subdivision, but officers wouldn't let reporters close.

Neighbor Daren Edwards, 38, said Hamilton's parents moved to the subdivision about three years ago and Hamilton lived in the basement. Edwards said he sometimes saw him jogging alone, or with his mother.

"He's always by himself, he's always isolated," Edwards said

JFK Doctor Dies

Malcolm Oliver Perry II, 80, the doctor who attended JFK in Dallas has died, reports the Dallas Daily News.

As noted in the Paraview Press book, Trauma Room One: The JFK Medical Coverup Exposed by Charles A. Crenshaw, et al., Perry was one of the doctors who believed the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy had come from the front (not the back, as was the conventional Warren Commission finding).

Dr. Malcolm Oliver Perry II, who attended to President John F. Kennedy at Parkland Memorial Hospital after he was shot in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, has died.

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, the teaching hospital for Parkland, said Monday that Perry died Saturday, December 5, 2009, in Tyler, Texas, after a battle with lung cancer.

Perry was an assistant professor of surgery at UT Southwestern and a vascular surgeon on the Parkland staff when he became the first staff surgeon to treat Kennedy.

In an extensive interview by the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination, Perry recalled taking the case over from the senior resident, checking the president's vital signs and finding none but noting a convulsive effort to breath. He performed a tracheotomy on the president while other staff doctors and surgeons gathered to help.

Perry and another surgeon performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Kennedy until no brain activity was detected on the trauma room instruments. At 1 p.m., Kennedy was declared dead by Dr. Kemp Clark, the UT Southwestern neurosurgery chairman, from a catastrophic head wound.

Dr. Robert McClelland was the last surgeon to attend Kennedy in Trauma Room 1. McClelland, a longtime friend and Parkland and UT Southwestern colleague of Perry's, remembers that the shock of realizing whom they were treating faded quickly when they entered the trauma room.

"At Parkland we're accustomed, all of us are, to treating many different cases," McClelland told The Associated Press on Monday. "Of course, it's the president," he said. Was it hard to put that aside? "No, not really. Everything was so rapidly happening that we were called on the peak of the moment."

Perry told the commission that the neck wound Kennedy suffered from the sniper's first rifle shot would likely have not been fatal. However, he testified that neither he nor Clark could tell from their examinations from where the bullets came.

The vascular surgeon also was one of the doctors to operate on presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, who was shot two days after Kennedy's death by Jack Ruby.

After a long career, Perry retired in 2000 as professor emeritus of surgery at UT Southwestern. But McClelland, now 80, said that after the assassination his friend never mentioned their role in the case, and that they never discussed it even among themselves.

"No, we didn't, for reasons he kept to himself. Immediately after, he had a bad experience with interviews that hurt him deeply. Whenever the subject threatened to come up, he'd raise an eyebrow and that would be that," he said.

Perry was born in Allen, Texas, a once-tiny farming-and-railroad town about 20 miles north of Dallas that is now one of the city's fastest-growing suburbs. He was raised by his grandfather and namesake, Dr. Malcolm O. Perry I, a general practitioner in the small town.