The Unexplained

As bathtubs go, Lake Okeechobee is fit for a kingdom: 135 miles around, more than 30 miles across and filled with a trillion gallons of water (give or take a few million). It's a scale that makes sloshing scary.A sudden windstorm this week set the big, shallow lake sloshing back and forth with avigor usually associated with a near-hurricane.

At the storm's peak, the lake was lopsided 17.6 feet above sea level at the north end but just over 12 feet above sea level at the south. The water teetered for nearly three hours early Tuesday until the winds died around 7 a.m. and the lake settled back to an even 14.3 feet."It was freaky," said Larry Crossman, owner of the WantaLinga motel on U.S. 441 near the lake's north shore in Okeechobee. "There were weeds from the lake blown across the road. There were water hyacinths on the other side. I wouldn't want to be out on a boat when that happened." Read FullArticle

The ghostly image of a man's face has emerged on the back side of the Turin Shroud, the piece of linen long believed to have been wrapped around Jesus's body after the crucifixion, according to new digital imaging processing techniques. The discovery adds new complexity to one of the mostcontroversial relics in Christendom, venerated by many Catholics as the proof that Christ was resurrected from the grave and dismissed by some scientists as a brilliant medieval fake.

The study, which will be published on Tuesday by one of the journals of the Institute of Physics, the Journal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics, examined the back surface of the famous handwoven linen.The front sideof the shroud, on which the smudged outline of the body of a man is indelibly impressed, has been investigated by a multitude of scientists. But the reverse side has remained hidden for centuries beneath a piece of Holland cloth that was sewn by nuns in 1534, after a fire had blackened parts of it. Read FullArticle

From the time he was a child, Ted Phillips has been looking up into the sky. In those early years, growing up in rural Missouri, all Phillips saw was stars. But it wasn't long before he started hearing stories about things that went "whoosh" in the night - things other people swore they had seen and he wanted to know what they were.He'shas been investigating UFO sightings ever since.This weekend, Phillips will be preaching to the choir when he speaks at the 2004 Ozark UFO Conference in Eureka Springs.

And he admits he'll hear stories even he doesn't believe."Good stuff is hard to find," Phillips says of UFO evidence. "And the stuff that gets in the newspaper is goofy! Reporters don't want to write about plant evidence at a landingsite."That, however, is one of Phillips' specialties. Over the last 35 years, he has logged some 3,059 investigations and heard stories from witnesses so credible, he says, they could "send a man to the electric chair on their testimony. Yet once they start talking about flying saucers, they're no longer credible. Read FullArticle

The discovery of a second face on the Turin Shroud has again divided opinion. Does this mean it is real after all? Or does it mean it's an even better hoax than was previously thought? Some people, and not just the faithful, never stopped believing in the first place. Easter could not have been bettertimed this year for publicity purposes.

First, it coincided conveniently with The Passion of the Christ which attracted audiences several million times bigger than the original crucifixion. And now the Turin shroud - the supposed burial cloth of Jesus, ever-wrapped in controversy - has been showing its contentious face again. A textiles expert working on the restoration of that countenance divinehas claimed that the cloth is from the 1st Century. Though carbon-dating performed in 1988 suggested that the shroud dates from between 1260 and 1390, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg found that the fabric was woven in a three-to-one herringbone pattern, used for high quality cloths in the ancient world. Read FullArticle