Above Top Secret Newsletter - http://www.AboveTopSecret.com Number 29 - 7th October, 2000 ******* "AUTHORISED ONLY" LOGIN DETAILS The login ID and password for this section are different from that for logging into ListBot. You can use either of the following sets of details: Login ID: egypt Password: secrecy Login ID: elite Password: force ******* LEGENDARY "GOAT-SUCKER" RESURFACES IN CHILE Friday, September 22, 2000 By Jimmy Langman - Fox News SANTIAGO, Chile - Last April, dozens of farm animals - sheep, pigs, chickens - began turning up dead in northern Chile, their bodies completely drained of blood and bearing odd vampire-like bite marks. For many Chileans, this could mean only one thing: The mythical "Chupacabras," or "goat-sucker," Latin America's version of Count Dracula, was back in the news. In the northern desert town of Calama, where the "attacks" first began, locals immediately began to hang crosses in front of their homes. Jose Ismael Pino, a farm worker near the central city of Concepcion, is among the many Chileans who claim to have had an up-close experience with the Chupacabras. "It just stood there looking at me," Pino told local newspaper Cronica. "It stood about four feet tall, like a big monkey, with long clawed arms, enormous fangs protruding from its mouth, as well as a pair of wings." The Chupacabras legend began in Puerto Rico in 1995, when eight sheep were found dead with the same telltale signs: bloodless corpses with bite marks. Over the next year, reports of attacks multiplied, with the Chupacabras popping up in Texas, Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala and Brazil. A cultlike - and no doubt profitable - industry has formed around the Chupacabras in Latin America, spawning T-shirts, bumper-stickers, squeaky toys, candies, sandwiches and songs. The myth lost steam after 1996, only to resurface a few months ago in western Nicaragua, northern Mexico and northern Chile. Since the first attacks in Calama last spring, well over 800 animals of all kinds have been killed in similar incidents in just about every region of Chile. The monster has been variously described as a large rodent or a mutant kangaroo, while others claim it is a winged, ape-like being that walks in a zig-zag pattern. Lilliana Romero, a school teacher in Concepcion, Chile, told the local newspaper that she woke up in the middle of the night and saw a Chupacabras. "I crouched and looked through the window," she told El Sur. "I could see the back of what appeared to be an immense man, standing more than two meters [6 feet, 8 inches] tall. The shoulder blades were split, as if he had wings." The next day, Romero said, she found a completely bloodless dog dead in the alleyway behind her house. Another wave of hysteria swept Chile in May when rumors spread that three Chupacabras - a male, a female and a cub - were captured by Chilean soldiers near a mine north of Calama. Some locals even claimed that a team of NASA scientists arrived in a black helicopter and took them away. The popular rumor in Calama these days is that the Chupacabras escaped from a secret NASA experiment in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, where they say the space agency is trying to replicate the conditions of a voyage to the planet Mars. As for Chilean authorities, they have steadfastly maintained that most of the attacks were caused by packs of feral dogs. The Chupacabras legend is beginning to take root in Chile for good, said Bernardo Valenzuela, an anthropology professor at the University of Chile. "These animals, whatever they are, just suck the blood of their victims, without eating their meat - no wonder the popular imagination has generated this legend," Valenzuela told FOXNews.com. Fear of the night and fascination with werewolves may have also played a key role in the popularity of the Chupacabras myth, anthropologists say. The Chupacabras' existence has never been scientifically proven; skeletal cadavers and decomposing remains have been proudly produced by farmers from time to time but have ended up identified as dead dogs or bats. But in the meantime, the Latin Goat-Sucker continues to inspire the public's imagination, and its legend grows in the Chilean countryside - as well as in thousands of Web pages. ******* EU ECHELON TO PROBE U.S. CHIEFS Published by WorldNews.com - September 12 2000 BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Senior members of a European Union committee said Tuesday they want U.S. intelligence chiefs to testify on whether an alleged American-led eavesdropping network monitors the businesses of its European allies. European Parliament Vice President Gerhard Schmid, a German who is a senior member on the committee investigating the alleged Echelon spy network, said he would like to see the U.S. National Security Agency head, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, come before the committee. Schmid said he wants the American intelligence chiefs to discuss how the NSA gathers intelligence. "If it's up to me, we will have American representatives, perhaps even U.S. senators and the director of the NSA," Schmid told reporters. In testimony before the U.S. House Intelligence Committee in April, Hayden and CIA Director George Tenet denied reports the United States was involved in spying on Europeans and Americans as part of a satellite surveillance network. Committee chairman Carlos Coelho of Portugal said that a list of industry experts, politicians, U.S. and EU officials would be called before the committee. The Echelon issue surfaced in February when a European Parliament report outline what it said were Echelon's practices. It said Echelon intercepts "billions of messages per hour," including telephone calls, fax transmissions and private e-mails. The EU Parliament set up the special probe in July. National inquiries were also launched in France and Denmark. The spy network is said to include Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand and is alleged to be led by the the National Security Agency. Hearings into Echelon got under way Monday and continued Tuesday. European Enterprise Commissioner Erkki Liikanen said he could not deny the existence of Echelon, but said the European Union would shortly implement new encryption and data protection rules to improve privacy rights to help deter eavesdropping. ******* TWO FRONT TEETH KEY TO MYSTERY WHALE TALE Published by "The Australian" By Belinda Hickman - 13/9/00 At first glance, the sleek creature washed up on a remote piece of West Australian coastline looked like a dolphin. It was 3m long and a shiny silver-grey, but protruding from its lower jaw were two tusks covered in purple barnacles. The creature, found at Coral Bay, 1000km north of Perth, amazed local conservationists who found it on Friday. News of the strange mammal, which was baffling scientists, hit local radio yesterday. Experts at the Museum of Western Australia, asked to identify it, said they thought it was an extremely rare find. The museum's assistant curator for mammals Norah Cooper said she thought the animal was a dense-beaked whale (species name mesoplodon densirostris), which usually kept to deep water, was shy of shipping and rarely seen. "Going by the description, and if it is the dense-beaked whale, it has a short head with a big bump on the jaw," she said. "The males have two large teeth on their bottom jaw, which look like tusks. It does look very peculiar. People will think this is really weird." The animal's head was being trucked to Perth yesterday for identification. Ms Cooper will compare it with a skull from a related species in the museum's collection and use the skull and tissue samples for research. The whale was found by a tourist walking on a beach near Coral Bay, a popular holiday spot on the north coast. It died about two hours later, before the visitor could make the return trip to town for help. A marine conservation officer in Exmouth, Caroline Williams, said she and colleagues had been studying whale books to work out what had washed up. "When I saw it, my first thought was: 'Wow!' she said. "We had no idea what it was, none whatsoever." Australian Museum collection manager for mammals Sandy Ingleby said the dense-beaked whale had been sighted around Australia through the years but there was only a handful of examples in museum collections. "They are a species people know very little about," Ms Ingleby said. "They are fairly rare, and they are certainly unusual-looking animals." ******* DID THE BRITISH NAVY SINK THE KURSK? Copied in full from http://www.farshore.f9.co.uk/kursk.htm It was a disaster of epic proportions and resulted in the deaths of at least 118 submariners. A superpower was humbled as its impotent decaying navy stood helplessly by while the crew of its stricken 19,000-ton nuclear-powered Russian Oscar II-class submarine were left to die; entombed at the bottom of the frigid Barents Sea. Following two violent explosions that rocked the Kursk perhaps most of its crew members had mercifully died within those first few seconds. But did they die alone that morning? Disasters by their very nature these days often seem swiftly to attract a cloak of mystery, as wild theories fly and rumour quickly surrounds such events. The sudden, catastrophic loss of the Kursk is no different and early on some remarkable information surfaced that was largely ignored by the British press and other media in general. The focus in the west was kept firmly on the build-up to a hoped-for successful rescue attempt of the survivors, which would be carried out by the combined resources of Britain with its LR5 minisub, and 15 deep-sea divers from Norway. As a member of the Northern Fleet the five-year-old double-hulled hunter class submarine was part of Russian manoeuvres involving some 50 warships and other craft that fateful August morning. Early on in the tragedy Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeev asserted that a collision with "an underwater object" the same size as the Kursk (twice the length of a Boeing 747) was the cause of the disaster. In that first 24 hours following the tragedy theories initially included the sub having rammed a cargo ship, an icebreaker, a World War II or cold-war-era mine, the seabed and even having become the victim of sabotage. Dmytro Korchynskyy, the head of the nationalist Ukrainian Political Association "Brotherhood", is reported to have said that the Kursk was destroyed by an act of Chechen sabotage. In a comment published at http://part.org.ua, Korchynskyy said two explosive devices equivalent to 800 grams of TNT were planted in the submarine during repair work carried out on the vessel. According to Korchynskyy, "people close to [Chechen field commander] Ruslan Gelaev" were responsible for the act of sabotage. And he commented that the Chechens paid only $6,000 to a member of the repair team to plant the explosive devices in the submarine. Korchynski also claimed that Russia's Federal Security Service was informed about a possible sabotage act in Severomorsk two weeks before the "Kursk" tragedy but ignored the warning since the informer was from the entourage of Chechen interim administration head Akhmed Kadyrov who, according to Korchynskyy, is not trusted by Russian military leaders. Cruising at 69�40" north, 37�35" east and within about 60 feet of the surface at 11:28, the submarine was blown apart by two explosions 27 seconds later that were recorded by seismic stations up to 2,000 miles distant, and by American submarines monitoring the Russian naval exercises some 70 miles away. It would be unusual in the extreme if warships of the Northern Fleet that had gathered for manoeuvres were not being shadowed both in the air, on the surface and underwater by NATO countries. Those involved in covert operations would of course include submarines of both the American and British navies. Nothing unusual in that, as both sides have been playing this same game since the Cold War era at least. This potentially dangerous game of cat-and-mouse has continued for decades. Sometimes the role-playing is taken a step further, as in the case of a British spy vessel used to monitor Russian radio signals in the North Sea. It officially operated as a mere simple fishing boat but this disguise was eventually recognized by the Soviets who, it is now believed, sank it. The fate of the crew is unknown, although reports that they appeared briefly in Northern Europe could never be confirmed. Meanwhile the British Government steadfastly refuses to corroborate any of this story. Recently I was discussing events surrounding the Kursk with an acquaintance who is a former Ministry of Defence employee that retains close contact with his MoD colleagues. He says the word is that a British submarine might well have been involved but on no account would the Government ever admit to this. The deaths of a British crew and the fate of its submarine would remain highly secret for decades to come. Close approach underwater has in the past even escalated to a point where one vessel actually makes contact with the other. Deliberate ramming of an opponent's ship is an acknowledged part of the 'game' among the navies of several countries it seems. In an interview with Russian Public Television (ORT) on August 21, Defense Minister Sergeev claimed that Russia has "localized" the object responsible for the loss of the Kursk but was unable to identify it. NATO, he continued, had denied that any of its vessels were in the area at the time of the disaster, but Sergeev added that "they have told us that even it that had happened, they would never acknowledge it." Intriguingly later the same day, Interfax cited unidentified "military sources" as saying that an object resembling part of a "foreign submarine tower" had been discovered 330 meters from the Kursk on the bed of the Barents Sea. According to those sources, a collision with another submarine, "most likely British," remains the most likely reason for the sinking of the Kursk. Russian navy spokesman Vladimir Navrotskii later rejected the Interfax report as false, as did the British Ministry of Defence. If this is true then we have a terrible double tragedy whereby alongside the grave of the Kursk's crew lies that of another, only these nameless men who served their country will eventually be mourned only by their families and in private when a government decides. ******* Don't forget, you can read past newsletters by logging into the Listbot Subscriber Area at http://ats_website.listbot.com . Simon Gray - Webmaster and Founder of http://www.AboveTopSecret.com E-Mail - [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Get on EqualFooting and get $25 back! Find everything your office will ever need-and get $25 back on your first purchase of $50 or more! For everything from erasers to printer paper-click and get on 'equal footing' today. http://on.linkexchange.com/?ATID=27&AID=1482
