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The Mystery of the Mad Gasser of Mattoon Illinois: A Madman on the Loose or a Case of Midwest Mass Hysteria in 1944?

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  On the night of August 31, 1944 in the town of Mattoon, Illinois, Urban Reef, a sheet metal worker, who has lived most of his adult life in the same small ranch-style house located at 1817 Grant Avenue is awakened by a strange and pungent odor. He rises out of his bed to investigate but instantly becomes nauseous and weak in the knees.  He drops to the floor of his bedroom and starts to retch and vomit.  His wife, fearing that she may have accidentally left the stove on after cooking dinner only a few hours before, attempts to get up out of bed to go to the kitchen, but she finds that she is paralyzed from the neck down and unable to get up out of the bed at all.  While her husband vomits on the floor Mrs. Reef feels as if a heavy weight is pressing down on her chest and she is forced to lay there inert and completely immobile. Only a few hours later in the early morning of September 1, 1944, and only a few blocks away from where Mr. and Mrs Reef suffered their...
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Mankind become Death and Destroyer of Worlds: The Trinity Atomic Bomb Test of July 16,1945

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  J. Robert Oppenheimer the scientist in charge of the Manhattan Project codenamed the test “Trinity” after a sonnet by Elizabethan poet John Donne--Holy Sonnet 14--famed for these lines: Batter my heart, three personed God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine and seek to mend That I may rise, and stand o’erthrow me and bend Your force to break , blow, burn and make me new…. A fitting and prophetic poem, indeed, for what the gathered scientists, military personnel and unwitting civilians in the desolate New Mexico desert witnessed on that July day in 1945--the destructive power of God harnessed by man for the first time in human history. The Trinity Test--the first successful detonation in history of a nuclear device on the planet earth--took place at exactly 5:29 in the morning Mountain Time, only moments after sunrise, on July 16, 1945.  It was the penultimate achievement of the Manhattan Project, which thousands of individuals had worked on so diligently at the cost ...
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Louis Le Prince: The Story of the Man Who Made History's First Movie and then Vanished without a Trace in 1890. Did his own Family make him Disappear?

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  It is a movie that is aptly titled Roundhay Garden Scene because that is exactly what it is.  That is exactly ALL that it is--simply a movie of people walking in a garden that lasts for a whopping three seconds.  But what makes this mundane few seconds of grainy black and white footage of an English garden so remarkable is that Roundhay Garden Scene is believed to be the very first motion picture--the very first recorded moving images of human beings ever captured on film--in the history of the world. Roundhay Garden Scene was produced, filmed and directed by French born inventor and artist Louis Le Prince nearly one-hundred and forty years ago, at the height of the Victorian Era, on October 14, 1888 in Leeds, Yorkshire England at about the exact same time in history that the infamous serial killer Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the slums and working class neighborhoods of London. This three second film of formally dressed Victorian Era folk frolicking in an arist...
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