This episode is dedicated to the men and women of our armed forces and first responders. Whether you are currently serving or have served in the past, you are appreciated. It is because of your courage and sacrifice that we enjoy the freedoms and liberties we hold dear. And I, for one, appreciate every single one of you for protecting what many of us take for granted. So thank you. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. While you're listening, you might want to check out the Weird Darkness website. At WeirdDarkness.com you can find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated, streaming video of horror hosts and old horror movies. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety or thoughts of suicide. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness. The U.S. government explained the rapidly maneuvering lights as a weather balloon, but if you believe what fighter pilot George F. Gorman says, you'll believe there are some giant holes in the U.S. government's story, because Gorman ended up in an aerial battle with one of those so-called weather balloons. A passerby found scraps of paper on the ground, implicating that one of the area's most prominent families was harboring a secret, that the husband had his own wife imprisoned in their own home for months on end, unable to leave her own bedroom. But that was just the beginning of the story. In the wilds of Africa, it is said there is a man-like creature, human in every way aside from one. The being has no head. The most famous being the Grim Reaper. Dark hooded entities seem to be relatively common in the reports of ghost-like beings. They can be intimidating, foreboding, and downright terrifying. One man's experience didn't stop with only one encounter. They haven't stopped at all. A couple have a fight. One of them leaves the home to cool off. It's something that happens every day in every town and city. It's simply how some couples have to work through things. But in one case, 32 years later, the woman who left to cool off has yet to return, and her family is still waiting.  In the words of Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, the man who investigated unidentified flying object reports for the U.S. Air Force in the early 1950s, the Gorman dogfight remains one of the classics among UFO sightings. The incident, which still lacks an airtight explanation, involved a 27-minute air encounter between a veteran World War II fighter pilot named George F. Gorman and a mysterious white orb at a high altitude above Fargo, North Dakota. I've never seen anything like it, Gorman told a local newspaper following the October 1, 1948 event. If anyone else had reported such a thing, I would have thought they were crazy. Captain Ruppelt operated Project Blue Book, which continued the work of Project Sign and Project Grudge, a series of hush-hush studies conducted by the U.S. Air Force between 1947 and 1969, his mission to determine if UFOs were a threat to national security and to scientifically analyze UFO-related data. What makes the Gorman dogfight unique in the now declassified pages of Project Blue Book is not only the length of the encounter, but that it was recorded both on the ground and in the sky by numerous reputable sources. At the time of the incident, Gorman, a 25-year-old former fighter pilot, served as a second lieutenant in the North Dakota Air National Guard. It was this role that placed him behind the flight controls of a P-51 Mustang on October 1, 1948, taking part in a cross-country flight alongside other National Guard airmen. While the other pilots landed at Fargo's Hector Airport, on that fateful evening, Gorman stayed in the air in order to get in some night flying time in the cloudless conditions. Having circled his P-51 over a lit football stadium, he was preparing the land at about 9 p.m. Advised by the control tower that the only other plane in the vicinity was a Piper Cub, which Gorman could see about 500 feet below him, he witnessed what he believed to be the taillight of another craft passing on his right, though the tower had no other object on the radar. Deciding to take a closer look at the unidentified object, Gorman pulled his plane up and closed to within about a thousand yards. It was about six to eight inches in diameter, clear white and completely without fuzz at the edges, he said of the object in his report.  As I approached, however, the light suddenly became steady and pulled into a sharp left bank. I thought it was making a pass at the tower. Deciding to follow, Gorman tried in vain to catch up with the object, reporting that he finally got behind it at around 7000 feet, where it made a sharp turn and headed straight for the P-51. Almost at the point of collision, Gorman dived and said the light passed over his canopy at about 500 feet before cutting sharply once more and heading back in his direction. Just as collision seemed imminent once again, the distance of the object shot straight up in the air in a steep climb, so steep that when he tried to intercept, his plane stalled at about 14,000 feet. The object was not seen again, but according to Gorman, he had been engaged in aerial maneuvers with it for 27 minutes by the time he brought his plane in to land. Shaken by the encounter, the pilot went on to report he noticed no sound, exhaust trail or odor from the object, and while he had reached speeds of up to 400 miles per hour while in pursuit, he couldn't keep up with whatever it was. I'm convinced that there was definite thought behind its maneuvers, Gorman said in a sworn statement to his commander. I am further convinced that the object was governed by the laws of inertia because its acceleration was rapid but not immediate, and although it was able to turn fairly tight at considerable speed, it still followed a natural curve. Gorman reported blacking out temporarily due to the excessive speed he reached in attempting to turn with the object. I'm in fairly good physical condition, and I do not believe that there are many, if any, pilots who could withstand the turn and speed affected by the object and remain conscious, he wrote. The object was not only able to out turn and out speed my aircraft but was able to attain a far steeper climb and was able to maintain a constant rate of climb far in excess of my aircraft. Gorman wasn't the only one to see the mysterious object that night. It was also witnessed by air traffic controllers Lloyd D. Jensen and H.E. Johnson who were manning the Hector Airport Tower. According to Johnson, who reported seeing the Piper Cub and the UFO at the same time, the object was traveling at a high rate of speed and was fast enough to increase the spacing between itself and Gorman's fighter. Johnson described the object as appearing to be only a round light, perfectly formed with no fuzzy edges or rays leaving its body. Dr. A.E. Cannon, the pilot of the Piper Cub and his passenger, also viewed the object both in the sky and upon their return to the airport where they immediately joined the traffic controllers in the tower. Johnson described the light as moving very swiftly, much faster than the 51. Two civil aeronautics authority employees on the ground also reported seeing the object. Could it have simply been another aircraft? Taking the technology of the time into account, Dr. Travis S. Taylor, aerospace engineer and author of Introduction to Rocket Science and Engineering believes any other aircraft would have been apparent to Gorman. Earlier that year, he points out, Chuck Yeager made his famous flight in the Bell X-1 at record-breaking speed in which he broke the sound barrier. A craft like that would have been very obvious to a pilot in a P-51. Gorman would have known what he was looking at. The X-51 looked like an airplane, says Taylor. If he was chasing something that didn't look like a standard aircraft and he couldn't keep up with it, either it was too far away and he didn't realize how far away it was or it was moving faster than a P-51 could move. US Air Force investigators from Project Sine, later to become Project Grudge and ultimately Project Blue Book, soon arrived in Fargo, where Geiger counter-measurements of Gorman's plane revealed heightened radioactivity, though this was later explained away as a side effect of the high altitude flying that took place. Was Gorman a kook or maybe touched in the head by his war experiences? Government investigators found him to be a credible witness, noting that he did not make the impression of being a dreamer. He reads little and only serious literature. He spends 90% of his time hunting and fishing, drinks less than moderately, smokes normally and does not do drugs. He appears to be a sincere and serious individual who was considerably puzzled by his experience and made no attempt to blow his story up. One conspiracy theory speculated that Gorman's encounter may have been with a top-secret test craft. With World War II a very recent memory, tensions in 1948 were heightened both in military and civilian circles and as the Cold War tightened its grip on the American psyche, the US government sought to boost its scientific firepower with a clandestine initiative called Operation Paper Clip, through which it recruited former Nazi scientists, engineers and technicians, including Werner von Braun and his V-2 rocket team to America to boost the nation's chances in the Cold War and looming space race. Further revealed, the Soviets had begun testing the R-1 rocket, a Soviet version of the German V-2 of World War II the same year as Gorman's encounter, raising questions of whether the object he and the other saw could have been a Soviet craft or weapon. The R-1 didn't have the range to go from wherever their launch capability was in the Soviet Union to Fargo, says Taylor.  All the rockets at that time were projectiles. They used aerodynamics mostly to guide them. They could do slow maneuvers, but if they did a fast maneuver they'd start tumbling apart. Back in Fargo, after the air weather service revealed it had released a lighted weather balloon ten minutes before Gorman first saw the object, investigators pounced, proclaiming the balloon the likeliest explanation for the object's scene. As for the seemingly incredible movements witnessed, the report said those were due to Gorman's own maneuvers as he tried to chase the bright object. Essentially, investigators wrote his high speed gave the balloon the appearance of moving in opposite directions as he passed by. Added to that theory, investigators noted the bright appearance of Jupiter on that date, hypothesizing that Gorman had been attempting to chase the bright dot of the planet at the same time the weather balloon was in range. The lighted weather balloon would become the official cause of the encounter in the Project Blue Book file. We were doing Project Mogul at the time, which was high-altitude balloons fitted with high-powered microphones that we were trying to listen to see if the Soviets were doing above-ground nuclear testing, says Taylor, who points out that the famous Roswell, New Mexico, UFO sighting was explained away as a Project Mogul balloon. Whether Gorman was happy with the official outcome remains unknown. Maintaining his silence, he returned to the Air Force full-time, eventually retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1969. He never spoke publicly about the encounter again, though according to the Bismarck Tribune, he did tell friends he was never convinced that he had been dueling with a lighted balloon for 27 minutes. Gorman died in 1982. Taylor has his own theory. Possibly somebody was playing around with rocketry. But he notes there were no known test facilities or scientists in the Fargo area when the encounter took place. All the operation paperclip Germans were at the missile grounds in White Sands, New Mexico, while rocket guru Robert H. Goddard had died in 1945. It makes no sense, says Taylor, that there was anything there that was man-made that they were chasing. Up next. In the wilds of Africa it is said that there is a man-like creature, human in every way aside from one. The being has no head. And a passerby found scraps of paper on the ground with writing implicating that one of the area's most prominent families was harboring a secret, that the husband had his own wife imprisoned in their own home for months on end, unable to leave her own bedroom. But that was just the beginning of the story. I'm a man of habits. Okay, truth be told, my bride says I'm boring. I like the same stuff and that's what I stick with. And that includes what I eat. Even for breakfast, I used to opt for a leftover pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers. Did I mention pizza? Anyway, now that I'm trying to lose weight and cut back on the carbs, I've had to make changes for breakfast. Now instead of a big heavy breakfast, I just grabbed one of my built bars, the best-tasting protein bar on the planet. Built bars satisfy my hunger with up to 19 grams of protein and also satisfy my sugar craving, despite being less than 3 grams of sugar. And at only about 150 calories per bar, if I'm really hungry in the morning, I can grab two of them and still feel good about it. Try replacing your dessert or even a meal like breakfast with a built bar. You won't even know it's not really a candy bar. Visit WeirdDarkness.com slash built and build a box of your own.  That's WeirdDarkness.com slash built promo code WeirdDarkness. A gaunt, a wretched figure stood at the barred window of a ground floor room attempting nervously to attract the attention of anyone passing by. Laurel House was in an isolated position at the far end of Peckham Rye Common on the road leading down to Camberwell Old Cemetery, surrounded by market gardens and farmland with a few neighboring houses. Using a pencil begged from a kind servant and scraps of wallpaper covertly peeled from the wall, the woman wrote a series of notes in which she explained her plight and asked that her brother-in-law, Thomas Morgan, be informed that she was being kept against her will. She had been estranged from her family for some two years, but she had no doubt that in spite of their disappointment and disapproval, they would come to a rescue. Her savior was one Miss Jane Charlotte Barber, a single woman who resided two doors down from Laurel House in Piermont Cottage and who was fully aware of the style in which Dr. Hammond and his young family lived in their detached villa, where they were attended by a devoted housekeeper, two maids, and a gardener. Miss Barber had also noticed the attractive young lady who would often drive out with a dashing doctor dressed expensively in a black silk gown with a red velvet jacket and jaunty bonnet. And it was Miss Barber, who on this particular occasion, a Tuesday in September 1864, saw the ragged note flying through the open window. Although alarmed, she summoned her courage and picked up the note. Horrified by what she read, she hurried to the local police. They had no hesitation in contacting the Mr. Morgan mentioned in the note, having learnt that its author was Rosalind Hammond and that she was being held against her will by Dr. Edward Hammond, her husband. Police constable Spinks, accompanied by Mr. Morgan, arrived at the house and demanded to see Mrs. Hammond. The doctor said that it was not possible, as she was sleeping and could not be disturbed. But after firm words from Spinks, he relented, and with a show of reluctance he took them to her room, which was bolted from the outside. The room was dirty and meekly furnished with just an iron bedstead and fusty linens. The occupant was thin and pale and dressed in nightclothes. She explained that her husband kept her locked up and that he was aided and abetted by Elizabeth Allen, who was his housekeeper, and by Emily Wakeman, who had once been his maid and was now his mistress. But she appeared to be unbroken by her ordeal. The newspapers described her as an intelligent woman, and she had clearly retained her senses. How had the wealthy Mrs. Hammond come to such a pass? Aged 37, she was worth £600 per annum, which would be about £70,000 in today's money. And yet, she had to borrow a hat and a cloak in order to present herself decently at Lambeth Police Court. Her story is one of misfortune and cruelty, headed out not only by her husband, but also by Victorian society and its legal system. Rosalind Hammond, nay Buckley, was born at The Lawn in South Lambeth in one of the houses built by her grandfather, Philip Buckley. Her mother, Anne Wolfe, who was the only child of an East India house employee, had married the wealthy widower Henry Buckley, who made his living as a floorcloth manufacturer trading from premises adjoining King's College in the Strand and at 39 Westminster Bridge Road, where the manufacturing was based. Floorcloths, which were sold as alternatives to expensive carpets and elaborately tiled or marbled floors, were made of canvas, protected by up to 12 coats of paint per side, with a stenciled or hand-painted design. Being both popular and expensive, floorcloths certainly contributed to Henry's fortune. He had two children by his first marriage and four much younger daughters with Anne. Rosalind, who was the youngest of the children, enjoyed a privileged childhood in Lambeth and at River Hill, the family's country house near Seven Oaks in Kent, which boasted nine indoor servants and gardens laid out in a Himalayan style. She was only 15 when in 1841 her father died, leaving significant money and property, including four houses in Lambeth, the leasehold manufacturing, the lease to River Hill and thousands of pounds in stocks. His wife and children were all handsomely provided for. The daughters would inherit their share when they reached the age of 21 or earlier if they married. The respectable and wealthy Miss Buckleys were eagerly sought as brides. Henrietta married the Reverend Cyril Cousteis. Helen married John T. Wright, a solicitor, and Fanny Alicia married Thomas Morgan, a wine merchant of Tower Hill. Rosalind, too, would have been expected to lead a life of respectability either as the perfect Victorian wife, the angel in the house, or as her widowed mother's companion, which was often the fate of the youngest daughter. Then in 1848 when she was 22, she was sent for a water cure at an establishment run by a homeopathic doctor, and things did not go quite to plan. The water cure, or hydropathy, gained popularity from the 1840s. Kate Summerscale in Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace describes it as a popular treatment for the vague anxiety-related sicknesses of the mid-19th century. The theory was that immersion in hot and cold baths and showers could restore health to an unbalanced body. Patients might include men who overworked or overindulged, and women suffering from female complaints or hysteria. Female hysteria was the diagnose for a raft of symptoms that included fainting, insomnia, bad temper, and an unmaidenly interest in sex. Enlightened doctors of the time believed that the cause was often unfulfilling lives centered on the needs of others. Women, they argued, were obliged to repress their natural desires, whether these were sexual or simply a yearning for something more interesting than needlework. We do not know why Rosalind took the water cure, but we do know that she was seduced by her doctor at the Hydro and that in 1850 she gave birth to a boy who was christened at St. John's Church in Erith in Kent. The baptismal record declared that the boy was Stanley Ellis Buckley, that he was the son of James and Rosalind Buckley, and that his father was a farmer, that this was not entirely true was soon discovered, whereupon James and his occupation were expunged from the record and the blank space filled with the damning words single woman. We now find it hard to grasp how scandalous an illegitimate child born to an unmarried middle-class girl would have been in the 19th century. It is interesting to speculate on the identity of Rosalind's seducer, for which we have no other evidence than that his name was probably but not necessarily James. The proprietor of the Sudbrook Park Hydro in Petersham was James Ellis, but then again there was a clutch of homeopathic James' running water cure establishments in and around Malvern. James Manby, who seduced the future Florence Bravo when she was his patient, his partner James Wilson and a James Marsden. I think we can assume that whatever had brought it on, Rosalind was being treated for hysteria, for in the 1851 census she was living in Laytonstone in Essex at the home of Dr. Stephen McKenzie along with the doctor's family and a clutch of female patients. McKenzie is described as extensively known by his successful treatment of the most inveterate of hysterics in On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria, written by his assistant Robert Brudenau Carter in 1853. Sadly, Carter also records that McKenzie, who died tragically falling from his carriage, kept no patient records. For the next ten years Rosalind remains a mystery, until on the 20th of August 1861 she married a man called Edward Hammond at St. Nicholas Church in Brighton. At this point her sisters were probably relieved that a man who had full knowledge of her unfortunate past was willing to take Rosalind off their hands. He was not quite the addition they wanted for the family. He was a man of limited means. He had four young children and he was determined to have control of Rosalind's generous annuity. But in light of her youthful lapse they knew that Rosalind was lucky to find a husband. After a few months married life in Lower Clapham Road, soured. Edward encouraged Rosalind to behave as a semi-invalid who stayed in bed all day and dosed herself with morphia and brandy. Numerous local doctors were brought in to treat her rather vague symptoms and early in 1862 she suffered the double affliction of the death of a twelve-year-old Stanley and a difficult confinement. Rosalind was also beginning to entertain suspicions about the nature of her husband's relationship with Emily the maid. In March she took the new baby to live with a wet nurse and maidstone in Kent. She was accompanied by Emily and in the course of the overnight stay she challenged her. The girl said that she had been raped by Dr. Hammond with a pillow pressed over her face to muffle her screams. Rosalind furiously rejected Emily's story and wrote to her father accusing her of being Edward's mistress. She refused to go back to Clapham instead asking her family for help. As they disliked Edward they encouraged her to separate from him. But Rosalind capitulated, possibly because she loved the doctor, possibly because she was trapped. If she left him she also left her money. When they married all her assets became his, but she also had to have his agreement for any legal separation. A divorce might free her but in 1864 she did not have sufficient grounds. Whereas a man only had to show that his wife had committed adultery, a woman had to prove not only that her husband was an adulterer but that he had also deserted her or had committed sodomy or incest or had been guilty of bigamy or cruelty. Cruelty was no easier to prove than adultery. An act for the better prevention and punishment of aggravated assaults upon women and children had been passed in 1853, but it merely redefined what was or was not acceptable behavior without banning violence outright. And so Rosalind returned home and retracted her accusation against Emily Wakeman, later saying that she had been coerced. By September 1862 the family had moved to a property called Lannark House on Queens Road in Peckham, where previously Edward had encouraged his wife to stay in bed for most of the day, he now employed Elizabeth Allen to stop her from leaving the house. Rosalind was no longer treated with respect by anyone in a household and on Christmas Eve her husband hit her around the head. He was the worst for drink and he was encouraged by Emily Wakeman. Even though the maid was now his acknowledged mistress he continued to sleep with his wife who gave birth early in January 1863 to a girl named Emily Rosalind. If Hammond was to keep both Rosalind's annuity and his paramour it was important that no one in the neighborhood begin to ask questions about his wife's whereabouts. With this same he moved the family in May 1863 to Laurel House on the edge of the much less densely populated Peckham Rye. Here Rosalind was confined to a single room. Meals were brought to her by Elizabeth Allen and one or two of the children. To stop her making an escape the window was barred and the door was kept locked. Her day clothes were removed and she suffered the further indignity of seeing them on Emily Wakeman. Her jewelry box was pilfered by her husband who then sent his gardener Thomas Abraham's to pawn the contents. In fact Dr. Edward Hammond was not a doctor at all. In contravention of the medical act of 1858 his medical title was self awarded. Born in Dartford and Kent in 1818 Hammond had not had the privileged upbringing that Rosalind had enjoyed and he was not a professional man. In 1843 when he married his first wife, another Emily, he was working as an oil merchant. Eight years later with Emily and their young family he was living in rural Lower Tooting, now Tooting Broadway a few doors from the miter public house. He was a manufacturer of the gelatin used as a setting agent in many of the elaborate puddings loved by Victorians. Knowing that your Blanche mange or jelly was given its wobble with boiled down connective animal tissue cannot to been very appetizing. By 1861 he was a widowed chemist and drugged living in East Wickham in Kent which was only three and a half miles from Ereth where Rosalind's son Stanley was baptized. Moving forward to September 1864 those attending Lambeth police court were horrified to see how unwell Mrs. Hammond looked and how poorly she was dressed. But her husband's lawyers were determined that she would receive no pity and they set about demolishing her character by revealing that she had given birth to an illegitimate child and that she habitually stayed in bed all day imbibing Brandy and Morphea. Hammond himself explained away the fact that she was kept locked up by claiming that she had threatened to murder him. The two knives hidden in her bed were evidence of her homicidal tendencies, the implication being that if not quite mentally unstable she was at least a degenerate woman who needed to be restrained for her family's safety. Rosalind calmly countered all that was said about her and a doctor was brought in to explain that she was sane. The magistrate was not sympathetic to Edward Hammond and he sent the case to trial. When the case came to court in November 1864, Hammond pleaded guilty but sentencing was deferred to allow his lawyers time to negotiate a settlement with Rosalind's legal team. The not guilty pleas submitted by Emily Wakeman and Elizabeth Allen were accepted because they had acted under Hammond's orders. At the sentencing hearing in January 1865, Hammond was confident he would be returning to Laurel House for dinner with his faithful Emily, relying on his generosity in agreeing to a legal separation from Rosalind and in allowing her half the annuity that she had brought to the marriage. But his mutifence cut no mustard and he was sentenced to 12 months hard labor in Wandsworth prison. Hammond moved. With him went his children and also Emily Wakeman who remained with the family in some capacity for the rest of her life. Even if Hammond had wished to marry the girl it would prove impossible as Rosalind remained resolutely alive until 1896. Rosalind lived alone in various lodging houses on the Isle of Wight and in south London. She was deprived of her child Emily Rosalind who remained with her father. She also had to relinquish half her annuity for it would not be until 1882 that a woman was legally entitled to keep the money that she had brought to a marriage. On her death Rosalind was buried in the family grave in Norwood Cemetery, leaving a paltry 76 pounds to a reverend John Beresford. Although people living in medieval Europe knew a lot more of the wider world than many initially think with strong trade links in Asia and Northern Africa they were still intrigued about what lay beyond the land known to man and stories of mythical creatures abounded. One such creature which fascinated for centuries was the Blemie. These creatures were said to be a type of man who lived in Africa but they did not have a head. Rather their face appeared on their chest, their shoulders above them. The Blemies were in fact a real African people, forming a nomadic kingdom in northern Nubia between 600 BC and 300 AD. Even from their early origins, however, stories were told of their headless nature. Herodotus, who lived between 484 and 425 BC, wrote in his histories that they were known as the Akafei Loy or those without a head and that they lived on the eastern edge of Libya. A few centuries later, in circa 45 AD, Mela, a Roman geographer, wrote that the Blemie lived in Africa and had their faces in their chest and this was confirmed by Pliny the Elder who said the tribe had no heads, their mouths and eyes being seated in their breasts and located them in Ethiopia or Nubia. The stories of these strange headless men continued long after the real Blemie tribe was gone. In medieval Europe drawings of these creatures can be found in manuscripts and in the extremities of world maps charting the unknown. The drawing of a Blemie features an Anglo-Saxon manuscript in the British Library dating to circa 1025 and Blemies are also found on the Herford Mapa Mundi of 1300, the largest medieval map to still exist. Isidore of Seville, who lived from 560 to 636 AD, explains in his etymologies, people believe that in Libya, Blemie are born as trunks without heads and have their mouth and eyes on their chest. Others born without necks have their eyes on their shoulders. As the centuries progressed, the Blemies continued and they moved with the boundaries of exploration. In the late medieval period, some are shown as being in India, such as on the 1436 Andrew Bianco map. As the 16th century arrived and the discovery of the Americas began, the Blemies moved across the seas. Ottoman admiral Piri Rice placed a Blemie on his 1513 world map near the coast of Brazil and put a description next to the drawing. He said the Blemies grew to around 5 foot 3 inches. Their eyes were close together but that they were harmless. In 1596, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote a book about his journey to Guyana where he reports that there was a nation of people whose heads appear not above their shoulders, who are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts and that a long train of hair grows backward between their shoulders. Although Raleigh did not see these people for himself, he decided that the stories were truthful as everyone he met there confirmed it. So why did people believe these stories for so long and where did it originate from? Numerous theories have been centered on the idea that the original Blemie warriors may have carried shields with faces on them or that they marched with their heads tucked close to their chests. Others make links with how some types of ape, such as the Bonobo, sit with their shoulders hunched up, head down and suggest various tribes people may have sat similarly or that the apes themselves were the origin. The mythology of human creatures with their faces in their chests spanned over a thousand years and found its way into aspects of culture in the West. From adorning maps and manuscripts and churches to being reported as scientific fact to appearing in literature including Shakespeare, the Blemie fascinated Europe. They were a symbol of something other that can be found in the margins of the civilized world, strange creatures on the edge of truth. And even now they continue to intrigue us today. When Weird Darkness returns, the most famous being the Grim Reaper, dark hooded entities seem to be relatively common in the reports of ghosts like beings. They can be intimidating, foreboding and downright terrifying. One man's experience didn't stop with only one encounter. In fact, they haven't stopped at all. And a couple have a fight. One of them leaves the home to cool off. It's something that happens every day in every town and city. It's simply how some couples have to work through things. But in one case, 32 years later, the woman who left to cool off has yet to return. And her family is still waiting. Central Massachusetts is a land of oddities in apparitions. Stories of the strange and paranormal have been passed down from generation to generation. And only the local populace has any idea of just how vast and deep their superstitions run. The world around you is much more than you can touch, taste, smell, see and hear. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad. But all of them give you a taste of what it's like to be from the oddest part of the United States. You can't have a region of the country that has been settled for centuries without getting a few odd tales out of it. Open up a whole new world of fact and fiction that'll leave you with a deep appreciation for the strange and bizarre ghosts and heroes await.  Slightly Odd Fitchburg by Ed Sweeney, now available on Kindle, paperback and audiobook versions on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. It's a scenario that plays out every day in the real world. A couple have a fight and one of them leaves to cool off. However, in this case, 32 years later, her family is still waiting for her to return. Elizabeth Ann Campbell was born on May 31, 1967, to Tom and Sam Soon Campbell. She was the youngest of five children and grew up in a very close-knit family who resided in Limpasses, Texas. Elizabeth was said to have led a quiet, sheltered life and was very close with her mother. She was a month shy of her 21st birthday and she was attending Central Texas College in nearby Colleen, Texas along with her boyfriend, Ricky Ray. She had plans to attend Texas A&M in the fall to study marine biology. Then, on April 25, 1989, what started out to be just an ordinary Monday for Elizabeth would end in a horrible way that no one could have ever imagined. Elizabeth was working a shift at a 7-Eleven convenience store on Ransier Avenue in Colleen, Texas. Her boyfriend came that night to pick her up after her shift ended. The couple had planned on studying together that night for some upcoming tests at college. There was an argument concerning some things related to Elizabeth's job, as well as Ricky wanted to study English that night and Elizabeth wanted to study trigonometry. The argument apparently got heated enough that Elizabeth wanted to leave Ricky's house, so she phoned her mother for a ride. Ricky was heard by Elizabeth's family in the background, promising that he would give her a ride home so her mother didn't make the drive. Elizabeth is said to have walked outside of Ricky's house, thinking he would soon join her and drive her home. However, Ricky never came outside, so, angrily, Elizabeth started to walk home on her own. Unfortunately, her house was 30 miles away. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Elizabeth had left Ricky's house in Colleen and then gone from there to near Central Texas College, CTC, in Colleen. Police believe that Elizabeth probably got a ride to travel that distance in that amount of time, but no one has ever come forward to confirm that. The next sighting of Elizabeth was when a fellow student of CTC said he witnessed her walking down a service road near the college. He was working late at the computer lab that night and saw her on his way home. He said he didn't personally know Elizabeth but recognized her from college. He stated he gave Elizabeth a ride to a 7-eleven in Copperus Cove, about 17 miles from her house, where witnesses did report seeing a green gremlin drop her off. She then went inside to use the phone to call Ricky to ask him to give her a ride. This was approximately 45 minutes after Elizabeth left and 11 miles away from Ricky's house. Elizabeth said she was scared. The couple argued again about her leaving and, during the fight, he refused to pick her up, so she hung up. She told him she was going to call her family to come get her. She knew that would be a long-distance call, so she used the pay phone outside the 7-eleven to try to reach them. Around midnight, Elizabeth's mother said the phone did ring. She had turned the phone off in the bedroom, so by the time she got to the other phone in the house, it had stopped ringing. Presumably judging by the time and the situation, the missed call was from Elizabeth. What happens next is the biggest unknown of this case. No one ever sees or hears from Elizabeth again after she has sighted at the phone booth outside the 7-eleven except one witness who claims to have seen her leave the 7-eleven and get in a maroon car with a Landau roof. Although there is never another confirmed sighting of Elizabeth, many people over the next several months will report that they have seen her in a variety of locations and situations. The family didn't realize that Elizabeth was even gone until the following morning. When she wasn't in her bedroom, they phoned her boyfriend Ricky. He didn't know where she was exactly but thought she'd probably gone to her sister's apartment at the CTC housing complex. When she wasn't there, her family tried to report her missing with the police right away. They were told they could not because it had only been 12 hours. The family was reportedly told conflicting things by the police such as they had to wait 24, 48, or 72 hours to report her as a missing person depending on who they talked to. The family felt the police were not as proactive as they could be and some didn't even think Elizabeth was missing at all but was an adult who chose to leave. The family then sprang into action on their own. They did absolutely everything to try to track their loved one down. They initially hired a PI but it was getting to be expensive and they felt they could do just as good of a job. Elizabeth's father then takes a lengthy leave of absence from his job to help in the search. Over the years they sell property, cattle, stocks, land, jewelry, and anything they had of any value to help fund the search for their beloved daughter. The family distributed flyers, made countless phone calls, traveled anywhere there was thought to be a sighting and even went to some very seedy and dangerous locations. Elizabeth's mother, Sam Soon, refused to sleep in a bed for the first one and a half months after her daughter went missing because if her daughter was suffering, she would be too. There was even a bizarre phone call made to a worker at the Lampasses Hospital the week after she went missing, asking if the ambulance carrying Elizabeth's body had arrived at the hospital yet. Also, Tom Campbell, Elizabeth's father, is said to have hounded the television show Unsolved Mysteries until they agreed to do a segment on Elizabeth's disappearance. After the segment aired in November of 1989, there were 200 phone calls of possible sightings. Just six days after Elizabeth disappeared, there was a possible sighting in Waco, Texas, 85 miles from where she disappeared. The witness at the gas station said the woman was with a rough-looking Asian man who held the female by the wrist and spoke in a foreign language. The woman kept looking down and would not make eye contact. The second sighting was two weeks after the disappearance just two miles from where she vanished. The clerk at the convenience store said a woman resembling Elizabeth was with an angry-looking Asian man who was holding her by the wrist. It appeared the woman was not allowed to talk. The third sighting was two months after Elizabeth vanished and was in Garland, Texas, 150 miles from where she went missing. The lady bumped into a woman as they were entering a convenience store. The woman appeared to be nervous and hurried to get back to the car with the man inside. She's convinced the woman she encountered was Elizabeth. The police didn't really put too much confidence into these sightings. They did say, however, that at the time there was an underworld pipeline that supplies Asian prostitutes from Kaleen to Dallas in Houston. Elizabeth was attractive and was half Korean, so she could have been a target, but there was no actual evidence to support it. That in May of 1992, there was a possible development in the case that gave Elizabeth's family renewed hope. Briefly, four years after her disappearance, her purse was discovered in the Crockett County Sheriff's Department, more than 200 miles from where she was last seen. What at first gave the family hope soon turned into anger and frustration. It was revealed that the purse had actually been in the evidence room of the Crockett County Sheriff's Department since between April 25, 1988 to January 1989, shortly after Elizabeth had disappeared, so someone apparently found the purse around Azona, Texas and turned it in where it was put in an evidence room and completely forgotten. There was no record made of who found it and exactly when and where it was found. There were too many fingerprints on the purse to be of any help and it didn't appear to have been out in the elements for any amount of time. The only reason it was discovered in 1992 was a new deputy had arrived and was going through the evidence room for things to be auctioned at the annual Alliance Club auction. When the deputy saw what was inside the purse, her driver's license, military ID and bank statements, he ran the information and discovered she was still missing and alerted Copperus Cove PD. Barbara Campbell also stated in her radio interview that she actually visited the Crockett County Sheriff two years after her sister went missing. She gave him a missing person flyer and talked to him about the purse and what might be in it. All the while, during this conversation, she was apparently near feet away from the evidence room where her sister's purse was sitting and had already been turned in. She angrily confronted the new Sheriff in 1992 when this came to light and he seemed to put the blame on the former, now deceased, Sheriff and was never given a satisfactory answer. There is another possible theory as to what happened to Elizabeth Campbell that is not widely mentioned in discussions about her. There is no concrete proof or evidence to support this, but it could be related to serial killer Robert Ben Rhodes, dubbed the truck stop killer. He was thought to have been active from 1975 to 1990. He was an over-the-road truck driver and was known to be in the vicinity during his routes near where Elizabeth went missing. His first victim's body was even disposed of near Azona, Texas, where Elizabeth's purse was later discovered. His first murder wasn't discovered until 1990, but he has claimed his crimes went back 15 years. In the research by the police cross-referencing Rhodes' trucking logs with records of young women who went missing during the years he was active, it's thought he could have had as many as 50 victims. His semi was said to have been a traveling torture chamber and he usually picked up young female hitchhikers as well as truck stop prostitutes. In 1994, he was convicted of three of the murders and is currently serving a life sentence at the Menard Correctional Center in Chester, Illinois. There seems to have been a lot of regrets from Elizabeth's loved ones in the years since her disappearance, which is understandable. Had the family known Elizabeth needed a ride home that night, they would have certainly been there for her. Her brother was driving around Colleen visiting friends at the time and one of her sisters was actually working at a 7-11 in Colleen that night across town. The missed phone call at her parents' house was just a very unfortunate circumstance that happened by accident. I'm sure Elizabeth's then-boyfriend Ricky also regrets his actions that night in refusing on two occasions to give her a ride home.  Ricky was never really viewed as a suspect in his girlfriend's disappearance. He had witnesses who verified where he was that night and he also passed a polygraph test. The eyewitness sightings are interesting, but it doesn't seem likely that someone who abducted someone and had an interest in trafficking them and stripping them of their identity would parade them out in public spaces so soon after, especially after the missing flyers had been put up. It would make sense they would want to keep her isolated. Elizabeth had already accepted a ride that night with someone she didn't know, so it's entirely possible she accepted another ride hoping to get from Copperus Cove to her home in Lampasas, but sadly came to harm then. Even though Elizabeth was angry that night, I don't believe she left with the intention of staying on. She had made a few phone calls to try and solicit a ride and seemed eager to return home, plus there was a paycheck that was never picked up and there has been no bank account or credit card activity since she disappeared. Elizabeth Campbell's family still to this day works day and night to find out answers as to what happened to their loved one. Her mother is in fragile health but will never stop her fight. When Elizabeth went missing, in her room she found wrapped birthday and Mother's Day gifts to her from her daughter, which she still refuses to open. Her logic behind that is simple. She wants her daughter to see her expression when she opens up her gifts, so she's saving them until she's reunited with her beloved daughter. The family also has a makeshift memorial to Elizabeth in the living room of their home. Sadly, Elizabeth's father Tom Campbell passed away in 2018, still heartbroken over his missing daughter. Tom's quote in the Unsolved Mysteries segment, regarding if she had been brainwashed and forced to be on the streets, is very poignant. She's our daughter, not what somebody's tried to make her. She'll always be our little girl. The Campbell family is undeterred in their fight to find their loved one and return her to those that love her. I hope they can get all the answers one day and finally know whether Elizabeth's disappearance was the result of trafficking or tragedy. This black cloaked hooded entity has visited me at least four times in my life. I believe it all began after I bought a kid's puzzle game that showed a black cloaked hooded entity, skeleton in a black cloak with an ace symbol on its skull's forehead and the title is Alchemist. In September 1997, when I was a kid, I was watching an episode of Zoro on TV with my mother when Zoro became a black cloaked hero to scare his enemies. He made this sound, that night at 4am, I was awake on my bed when the bedroom door opened and I heard this exact same sound, but I knew the TV was turned off and everyone was sleeping. I knew this sounded crazy, but it was real. I stood up on my bed to see outside the door and I knew that it was a real ghost this time, but it was too dark that I did not see anything. But I know that something was there. I tried to ignore it and lay back down on my bed and closed my eyes to sleep. Suddenly, I became paralyzed and could not move while I could hear a strange sound that sounded like a high-pitched airplane engine and I could see a pathway image in my head as if I was moving at a very high speed. It was terrifying. Or perhaps this entity had the power to control my emotions. I was frightened to the point I was able to get control on my hands, so I rubbed my eyes very fast to get the image away, but then I became paralyzed again. However, the image and sound were gone and a new image appeared that showed a tree and grassland with two people who were talking about something. I was not frightened anymore, so I smiled to show the ghost that I was not afraid, so the image disappeared and I was able to open my eyes and move again. It seemed that the ghost had a power over me when I was afraid, but when I was not afraid of it, then the ghost could not do much. The next incident happened in 1998 when I was playing a video game. At the corner of the reflective frame of the screen of the TV, I could see something moving behind me. It looked like the black cloaked hooded figure with a bit of white skull inside the hood. I looked back, but did not see anything. I was then overcome with a rancid smell as if something dead and rotting for days was in my bedroom. I investigated to see if there was a dead rat in my bedroom, but I already knew that was impossible since I lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building and I had never seen a rat in my apartment. The third incident happened late at night. I could not sleep because I was hungry, so I went to the kitchen to find myself something to eat. While I was slicing some sausage, I caught something out of the corner of my eye outside the door of the kitchen. It looked as if there was a transparent black cloaked hooded figure with no legs, no arms, and no face moving above the floor at a fast speed while its hood was staring down as if it was looking down while walking. I wasn't very scared, but I knew something was there as it moved from left to right outside the kitchen doorway. The last incident occurred in August 2013, more than 15 years after the first incident. I am not a kid anymore, and it has been a long time since this black cloaked hooded entity visited me, but I think it still remembers me and this is why it came back to see me. I could hear the ghost making that same sound. Just like the first incident back in 1997 when I was a kid. This time, however, I could also feel what I believed to be two hands shaking on my blanket very fast, and I could hear the sound of chain rattling as if both of my entity's arms were wrapped in chain. It's as if this entity was once a prisoner or something and had been executed, which would explain the chain. I could also smell that same rancid smell of a dead body like the second incident in 1998. Again, I was able to open my eyes and I wasn't very scared, but I saw something that looked like the transparent black cloaked hooded entity floating in mid-air with no legs, no arms, and no face. To my surprise, it was much smaller than what I expected. I was expecting to see it standing next to my bed and looking larger than normal human size, but it looked smaller and moved freely in mid-air. I think this was the first time I was able to see this entity much clearer than before. It seemed to me that this black cloaked hooded ghost or entity was not as threatening or evil as I expected it to be. I don't know if it's evil or not, but it was not threatening yet at the same time could be frightening too. The lesson I learned is that if you can control yourself and prove or show the entity that you're not afraid of it, then this entity cannot do anything to you. At the same time, however, never even challenge it or offend it because perhaps it could also be dangerous if it gets angry. We cannot underestimate this entity. I would never recommend anyone to offend this entity because we might never know its full capability or what it can do to us. From what I have learned, Satanists and many Devil worshipers would normally wear this black cloak with a hood during the Satanic ritual, while some Christian priests would wear a brown cloak with a hood. I suspect that it could be the ghost of a Satanist who was prosecuted and executed by the Church for following Satanism during the medieval times. Also, a friend once told me that near where I live, there's a small hill where Satanists used to perform the Satanic ritual. If you made it this far, welcome to the Weirdo Family. If you liked this episode, please share it on your social media or tell a friend or family member about the podcast and maybe they'll become a Weirdo Family member too. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction, click on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The Gorman Dogfight was by Colin Bertram for History.com. Beware the headless Blemie is by Gemma Holman for Just History Posts. The black hooded figure that haunts me is by Steven Wagner for Live About. Imprisoned in her own room by her husband is from London Overlooked. And the Elizabeth Campbell Mystery is from Heather Grubb for Lost and Found blogs. Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. John chapter 14 verse 27. Peace I leave with you. My peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid. And a final thought. Don't ask God to guide your footsteps if you're not willing to move your feet. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Laurel House was in an isolated position at the far end of Peckman Rye Laurel House was in an isolated position at the far end of Peckham Rye Laurel House was in an isolated position at the far end of Peckham Rye Common on the road leading down to Cambridge Well Old Cemetery. Why does that sound terrible to me? It's perfectly fine. Which was bolted from the outside. The room was dirty and meekly. The room was dirty and meekly furnished with just an iron bedstead. The room was dirty and meekly furnished with just an iron bedstead and fusty linens. Fusty? Fusty? It's fusty. Alexa, what does fusty mean? Not feisty. No, not feisty. Fusty. Forget it. I'll look it up. It means musty. Alright.  It means musty. Okay, I'll go with it. Alright. Let's try that sentence again. The room was dirty and meekly furnished with just an iron bedstead and fusty linens. That they were known as the acafolaia. Acafalo, acafalo, acafalo, aca, aca, aca. A-K-E-P-H-A-L-O-I. Yeah. Acafaloie. Okay. We're going to need some pronunciation up on this one. Let's see if YouTube can help me. Probably not. That's going to be, no, results found. That's what I thought. Let's try 4vo.com, see if that has any options for me. No. Okay, let's see if the Oxford Dictionary has any clue as to what the heck I'm talking about. No. Aka-philia. Aka-file.  I'm just gonna skip that. Can I skip it? Because that doesn't come up again, does it? I hope not. Aka-philo. Aka-philo. That's what I'll go with. Aka-philo. There we go. Moving on.


Well, an environmental group has sued the U.S. Forest Service to block it from swapping land for the planned Polymet Copper Nickel Mine in Northeastern Minnesota. Polymet needs the land for its mine near Babet in Hoyt Lakes. The deal calls for trading 6,650 acres of federal land for a similar amount of private land. But Paula McCabe, an attorney for Water Legacy, says the Forest Service seriously undervalued the land when it agreed to the exchange because it ignored what the land would be worth as a mine. The complaint filed in federal court today says the government valued it at $550 per acre, as if it were timberland instead of mining land worth much more. Polymet says it's confident in the accuracy of how the Forest Service appraised the land. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.


Okay, jump right in. Coming soon. Okay, coming soon. We've got this RaspberryBoré kind you put on your single board computer. This is something I designed for myself actually because I was so tired of wiring and unwiring displays and STEMIQT connectors and I had wanted to test functionality with some buttons so I decided, oh, I'll put this in the shop. Other people might find it handy. It's a very slim hat, a very tiny little hat that goes on your 2x20 Raspberry Pi. You get two tactile buttons on pins 5 and 6, one switch on pin 13 and an iSpy connector which you can use to connect to our various OLEDs and TFTs and the ink displays. It's got the SPI, DC, chip select, busy pin, IRQ pin, touchscreen, selector pin, whatever, all those. So you can, many of our displays now have it automatically so you can definitely make your like any ink display here. You just plug it in and you can use a fairly long cable and you don't have wires sticking out all over the place and also a STEMIQT port. It's very handy. This is coming soon. It's not yet. This one is kind of house-ish coming soon but it's going to be in the store so quickly and might as well just cover it now. It's the TSC 2046. It's an SPI, resistive touchscreen controller. We have in the shop a very similar sounding TSC 2007. That's the iSquad C version. This one is SPI. It's a really common. This is like supporting the Linux kernel. There's a Arduino library we wrote. You can use it with any 4-wire resistive touchscreen. It's 3 to 5 volt compatible which is very nice so you can use it with just about any microcontroller or microcomputer. We have a 1 millimeter bi-directional top and bottom contact connector on there but also there's breakouts. It is SPI so there's more pins than iSquad C but you get an IRQ so it tells you when the touchscreen's been touched. Busy pin, you let me know. You can tell when it's doing attach and it's also to VBAT and auxiliary are two ADC inputs. It's actually kind of handy if you're on a single board computer or something where you want to measure a battery voltage and you don't want to wire up an ADC just for that. This has an input that is two times. There's a resistor divider already in it so you can measure two times whatever your power is so like 2.5 volts I think is the ARAF. It can give you up to 5 volts input.  We'll be using it in some future breakouts. Next up. Next up, more swirly grids. Scott loves these. He's designed some more for me. This is a 2 by 10. This is a 5 by 5 and then we have the biggest 10 by 10 size. We have many sizes. It's basically each block is 0.6 inches so it's either 6 inch by 6 inch, 3 inch by 3 inch or 1.2 by 6 inch. We'll hold them up. I'm going to show them on the overhead different sides. Which do you want to do? Yeah. I'm going to do it over here. Let's do it over here because I think you're doing it right now. Okay, so this is one second. Let's focus. It's too autofocus-y. You know, they're still in the plastic. Yeah, but I'm going to go on. Okay, so this is the 10 by 10 and somebody asked I think like last week why are these aluminum and not PCB? I think they're like FR4. First off, these are a lot easier to machine. You could drill and cut them and you shouldn't be doing that with FR4 because you're going to get fiberglass dust or this is just aluminum. There's a lot of tools that can handle cutting, drilling, filing, bending aluminum. Also, it's not too bad to have it be conductive. You might want a gigantic ground plane, but definitely easier to machine and work with. So I think full roboticists, this will be handy. You could also bend these. If you have a break, you could use this to make cuts and bends and to turn these into different shapes. So this is the 5 by 5 grid. So this is 3 inches by 3 inches. We also already have the 5 by 10, which is 3 by 6 inches, and then this one is 6 by 6. Of course, you can take this and you can cut this and you have a hacksaw cut it down, but probably more convenience to get the size that you need. And then finally, I kind of like this ruler-ish size. What's nice is you've got the mounting holes and mounting slots every 0.2 inches and the slots go 0.3 inches. And so as long as you don't mind not having all four points connected, you can pretty much connect anything that you want onto this grid. I mean, I think it's got enough motion in each direction. And then we've got some demo images, maybe you could show. So I expect people will probably use this with stuff like STEMIQT and feather boards. You just do opposite corners and then you can mount them easily for a nice semi-permanent, yeah, use dial-on standoffs, maybe a semi-permanent setup, nice and durable, but configurable. Okay. And then the star of the show tonight besides you, Lady Aid, our community, our customers, our entire team that makes this thing go called Idford is... The Matrix Portal S3. So we have Matrix Portal. Well, we actually did just have Matrix Portal M4s back in stock, but here's the thing. I'm not going to get more SAMD51 still 2024. You don't want to wait that long. So what we did is we designed a board that's basically drop-in compatible functionality to the SAMD51-based Matrix Portal, but it's 5x less, features the ESP32-S3, has great RG Matrix support, and I improved a couple things as well. There's now mounting holes, and now you can either plug it in the bottom or you can connect from the tops. If you look at the first video graphic, you see there's a cable that connects. So you no longer have to have it attach the back. You know, we're poking at the port because somebody's going to ask, how big can you drive? You can drive up to 128x128 pixel grid, which is, I think... Hold on, let me get a calculator. Calculator. So 128x128.  But of course, it doesn't have to be 128x128 square. It's just like the total number of pixels is that many. So if you're using like 16x32 panels, that would mean you can... You can do 32 panels. If you're doing 64x64, you can do four panels. If you're doing 64x32, you can do eight panels, whatever. However, the math works out. That definitely works, but we're going to try to poke it and make it be able to drive even bigger displays. Of course, it's got Wi-Fi built in. In Arduino, there's even bluetooth, the energy support. It still has the accelerometer, USB type-C for power, you know, a stomach UT port, buttons, NeoPixel, for indication. It's a really easy, solderless way to get started with RG matrix displays. And thanks to maker Melissa, the circuit python, matrix portal library automatically detects which version you have this one or the previous, and she tested every example that we have and they all work all by demos. So you can pick this up if you don't want to wait till next year to get a matrix portal and four. And I think this is also going to have much better Wi-Fi speed support. So as we do more cool wireless projects, the S3, you know, is going to... You know, because there isn't a secondary chip, it's all in one. It's going to do a great job.


Many, many, many petabytes of data is what we're talking about this time today. Excuse me, terabytes, I'm getting mixed up here. Anyhow, here's James Wrigley, who works for the data analysis team at the European Exefe-EL, that is the largest generation of light sources, and they have really big loads of data to handle. He's going to tell us today how to do it, and actually he wrote, one of the things that touches his cold heart is H-top showing all cores running at 100%. This is what I suppose this is going to be. So here we go, James. It's yours. Alrighty. Thank you very much, Andre. So yeah, my name is James, and I want to talk about how to grok or understand an experiment at NFEL. Which basically means that I'm going to try and give you the perspective, I'm going to try and work you through an experiment from the perspective of the facility. So I'll talk about the hardware that we have here, the data that it creates, and the systems that we've built to manage all of that data. So I will start off with a little personal background. I am originally from New Zealand. I started working in the data analysis group at the European Exfall this year, and I'm what's called an instrument contact. So that means that I'm assigned to one of the six instruments at European Exfall to help them with their specific analysis needs. And so far, that has mostly involved working on things related to online analysis, which is the real-time analysis that's used to guide an experiment, but we'll get to more of that later. From day to day, the most common languages I use would be Python, along with C++, and with regards to tools, I generally go for Emacs, with Condor, and Viobu. So some of you may perhaps not be familiar with what NFEL is, so I'm going to give a quick introduction to that. So Exfall stands for X-ray free electron laser. It's the latest generation of what are called light sources, and it's basically a massive machine that is designed to create very short and very intense pulses of X-ray radiation, which is used to study various physical processes. There are other kinds of light sources, such as synchrotrons, for example, but some things that set X-rays apart from those, for one, the very short pulse length. This is often on the order of femtoseconds or tens of femtoseconds, and every one of these X-ray pulses is really intense, so there's lots of photons in there. The radiation is coherent. That's very important for experiments. And NFELs also are capable of a really high repetition rate, which is on the order of a megahertz. So that means we're able to create a lot of pulses in a very short amount of time. And on the right-hand side, I just have a little picture here of one of the X-ray detectors at Exfall. This is the DSSC, and we'll get back to it in a bit. But here's just an example of the kind of data that you could expect to collect at an Exfall. So that brings me to the European Exfall, which is the world's most powerful X-ray-free electron laser. This is actually located in Hamburg, and the whole thing is about 3.4 kilometers long. So this all starts at the DC side, in Barenfeldt, and there's a machine here called an electron gun. What this does is it injects electrons into a linear particle accelerator, which is located in this section. And I have here a little picture just showing the inside of the tunnels. The entire facility is underground. And the electrons travel through these superconducting RF cavities, which accelerates them to very high velocities. And after they've been accelerated, they enter what we call the undulator systems. So this is a picture of one of the undulators.  And an undulator is basically an array of magnets. The magnetic field that these magnets create, which are on the top and bottom of these metallic slabs, the magnetic field that this creates causes the electrons to wiggle. And that motion or acceleration creates X-ray radiation. And that's the thing that we really want. So after the radiation is generated from the electrons, the electrons adapt. We don't need them anymore. But the radiation continues down these tunnels into the experimental hole at the second X-ray site in Schoenfeld. And here I just have a picture of one of the experimental hushes in the experiment hole. So there are six different instruments at the European X-ray which focus on different kinds of science. And each of them have their own experiment hush with their own detectors and equipment and so on.  This is the sample chamber. So that's where they would place the samples. The radiation would come in from tunnels from the right-hand side. It would hit the sample in here. And then the result of that would be recorded by an X-ray detector. So that's the facility overview, a very simplified version. Let's get to some of the technical details. So the accelerator that we have is capable of delivering laser pulses at 27 kHz. That means 27,000 pulses of radiation per second. But they don't arrive continuously. They arrive in batches. And these are called trains. And in this diagram you can see something about the structure of the trains. So the trains arrive at 10 Hz, 10 times every second. And each pulse of X-rays is compressed within this train. And the repetition rate for the European X-ray can be as high as 4.5 MHz. And this is really unique. And it's really important for searching kinds of experiments. The pulse lengths are also very, very short. So they're on the order of 10s or 50s or even lower. One thing that you probably might have noticed is that this whole machine is extremely complicated. And there are literally thousands or tens of thousands of different devices that produce data at X-ray. These can be either hardware or software devices. But all of them are controlled using our in-house control system. It's called Carabo, and it was developed from scratch within Excel. And on the right-hand side, you can see a little diagram of the devices just for one instrument, just for the MIT instrument. Each of the nodes here represents a single device. And the lines between nodes represent some data that is being shared or sent between devices. And there are similar graphs you could generate for the other five instruments at Excel. So it's a really complicated system that produces a lot of data. But this is all necessary to carry out the experiments that we do. So the experiments usually last about six days. And they can create anything from hundreds of gigabytes to petabytes of data. In fact, recently, we actually broke our internal record for the most data collected during a single experiment. And there was some users at MIT who recorded about 3.3 petabytes of data in just six days, which is really insane. But that does beg the question of what exactly is generating all this data, right? And the answer is that most of it is coming from 2D detectors. So let's talk about that for a second.  And I've listed some of them up here. On the right-hand side, there's a picture of the DSSC. This detector was actually developed especially for Excel, like also the Egypt. But there are some others that are slightly more commercialized. This DSSC detector is one megapixel. But in general, the resolutions can be anywhere from half a megapixel to four megapixels. And the most common one megapixel detectors like the DSSC are what we call pulse-resolve. So that means that they're able to record data for every single pulse within a train. And this is where the high repetition rate comes in, because you can imagine if you have lots of pulses within a train, and these trains are coming 10 times per second, and you're getting a megapixel data for each one of those, that's really a lot of data. For the DSSC, for example, it's capable of holding frames for 800 pulses at a time. So it's got 800 memory cells. And if you do the math, this works out to create about 16.7 gigabytes of raw data per second. That's really, really a lot. Another way to think about it is that it's about two and a half Bitcoin blockchains per minute. And keep in mind that this data is just coming from a single detector. Usually at Excel, there will be multiple experiments running simultaneously between the different instruments. So you could very well have situations where there's three detectors that are all spitting out data at gigabytes or tens of gigabytes per second. So a big area of interest for us is data reduction, because this kind of data rate is really difficult to manage. And in some cases, there are ways that we can actually reduce it ahead of time, so we don't need to store so much raw data. And to give you an idea of how much this is in proportion to the rest of the data, I've got a little table here, which is showing the rough grouping of all the data at Excel. So each row here vaguely corresponds to a group of some kind of data. So we've got data coming from the HH, the DSSC, LPD, and the Jungfrau. These are all 2D detectors. And then we've got this other source in here called DA. This basically represents all of the non-detector data. So that would be things like, excuse me, that would be things like motor positions, various other sorts of information like beam energy, that sort of thing. And in total, we have something like 60 petabytes of data at Excel. And you can see in this column here, which is showing the total storage amount, the non-detector data only takes up about 3 petabytes, which is really not much. So that's why data reduction is such a big topic for us at the moment. And you can imagine with these kind of data rates, like 16 gigabytes per second, there needs to be some special systems to be able to handle that. And to do that, we have a special compute environment. This is called the online cluster. So the online cluster is a cluster that is physically located on-site in Schoenfeld. And it's used for running all of the systems that we need during an experiment. So of course, this would be the devices, which are run by the control system, Karabba. But it's also things like online calibration and online analysis. So there's about 150 nodes in this cluster. Most of them are CPU. There are a couple of GPU nodes, but those are mainly used for the online calibration pipeline. For the sake of security, it's quite... For the sake of security, access to it is quite restricted. So you need special permissions to access it remotely. And there's also no direct access to the outside engine now. When it comes to storage, the main file system we have is GPFS, which is a proprietary distributed file system. And this is all running on SSDs for performance because we need to write a lot of data really quickly. And again, for performance, we use Infiniband, which is a different kind of networking technology that's designed for very high-speed data rates. And here is a grossly over-simplified view of the different systems that we have running on the online cluster. So all of these would be active during an experiment. So starting on the left-hand side, we have devices. These are things that are running in the control system, and they produce data. They could either be representations of physical hardware, so maybe a digitizer or a camera or a detector, but it could also be a purely software device. So let's say, for example, that you want to produce some image processing on data from the camera in real-time. You might have a software device to do that. And the instrument scientists who are operating the instrument are able to select the data from which devices they want to save because there can be hundreds of devices per instrument, and it's not usually necessary to store all of that. So they will select a certain subset of devices to save data for. And this will be used by the DAQ, which is the data acquisition system. And one of the DAQ's main responsibilities is aggregating the data from all of those devices and then writing it to the online cluster storage here, which, as I said before, is which is using GPFS running on top of SSDs. But feedback for the instrument scientists is also really important during an experiment because getting beam time at the European Excel is extremely expensive. If you do the math, I think it works out to something like thousands of euros per minute. So it's very important that the instrument scientists know exactly what it's having at any given point. And that's the point of online analysis. But online analysis usually requires some data from a 2D detector, for example. And the raw data that the detector spit out isn't really usable. It needs to undergo some kind of calibration. And that's what the online calibration pipeline is for. So this thing takes the raw detector data from the DAQ, it calibrates it, and then it can be fed into whatever online analysis tools we have running. We've actually done a lot of work over the last year in upgrading this for better performance. And the end result is that the instrument scientists are able to get some feedback from the instrument on the order of a couple of seconds, which is very useful. Now, the last part that I want to talk about with regards to this diagram is this process that we call migration. So the storage on the online cluster is not meant for long-term use. It's really just there for the data that's being saved right now during an experiment. There is a separate compute environment called the offline cluster. And this is used for long-term data storage and for any kind of rigorous final analysis. So there is a process called migration, which will basically copy all of the data from the online cluster to the offline cluster. So after some data has been recorded, it will just be copied, and it will now be accessible on the offline cluster for scientists to analyze. And now I want to give a couple of examples of the online analysis, because I think that can be quite interesting. So the first example I want to show is this thing called Bragg peak analysis. So just for background, when you fire photons at some kind of crystalline structure, they will reflect in a certain direction. And on the detector, it basically shows up as a blob. And for certain kinds of experiments, it's very useful to be able to track the features of this blob. So by that, I mean things like the position. So where is it on the detector? Often you'll do some curve fitting to a Bragg peak. So in this particular case, we're fitting a Gaussian to it, and we're getting this metric called the full width at half max, which is basically the width of that Bragg peak. And then another thing is the intensity. So how bright is this peak? And on the right hand side, you can see an example of some analysis of a Bragg peak that was done during an experiment. And what was really cool in this screenshot that I have is that you can see how the position of the Bragg peak changes as the instrument scientists move a particular motor. And being able to view this kind of data in real time is extremely helpful for them to know that they're actually doing the right thing. So that's one kind of analysis. Another kind is this thing called azimuthal integration.  That's just a Bragg peak. But in some kinds of experiments, they actually create lots and lots of Bragg peaks. And the data from the detector ends up having radial symmetry. So these rings are called scattering rings. And they're actually composed of lots and lots of Bragg peaks all at the same radius from each other. And for this kind of experiment, what's really useful is to count, for example, how many rings there are, the radial position of the rings, so how far is the ring away from the center of the beam, and also the intensity of the rings. You do need to have good geometry for this as an accurate geometry because it's quite sensitive. But as long as you have this, you're good. So just to explain a little bit more what azimuthal integration is, imagine you're taking this image that's on the right-hand side with some radial symmetry, and you convert it to polar coordinates. So one way of thinking about this transformation is imagine you have a circle, then you make a cut at one point in the circle, and then just unfold that circle into a line. That's kind of the transformation that's happening here. And what you see happen is that the circles that show up in the image with Cartesian coordinates end up as straight lines and polar coordinates. So on the bottom axis, you have the radius. This is the distance from the center of the beam. And on the vertical axis, you have the angle. This is the azimuthal angle. And what we want to do in this case is just integrate along the azimuthal angle to get what's called a 1D scattering curve. That's something like this. And you can see that the bright lines in this image of the polar coordinates basically correspond to the peaks that are visible in the scattering curve. And this is really what instrument scientists want to see. So they want to know how many peaks there are here. Roughly speaking, you could say there's maybe three big ones. They want to know their position. So how far away are they from the center of the beam? And they want to know the intensity. So how tall are the peaks? And this can all be done online in semi-real time with a couple seconds of latency. And I have a very simple example here. This is using a slightly different data set. Previously in this data set, you can see there's actually many different scattering rings. In this data set, there's only one fairly broad ring. And you can see that showing up quite clearly in the 1D scattering curve. And we also have tools for doing peak finding automatically so they can find the position of the peak, like how far away is it from the center of the beam. And if they want, they can also do some curve fitting to it. So in this example, they've just fitted a Gaussian to this curve and you can see the parameters that it spits out. So that is online analysis. So this is stuff that happens during an experiment while it's running. I want to switch now and talk about the different environment that we have for doing offline analysis. And that is the offline cluster. So what I'm calling the offline cluster is actually the Maxwell cluster, which is a compute cluster that DC operates for its users. And we, like, X-File works very closely with DC. We share a lot of the infrastructure. And that's the reason why we're using the Maxwell cluster here. So we use it for long-term storage and for any final analysis, primarily because it's just way bigger and more powerful than the online cluster. So the Maxwell cluster has about 800 nodes compared to about 150 for the online cluster and about a quarter of those are GPU nodes. It is quite different from the online cluster in that there's a real mixture of storage systems. There's also a mixture of the physical media that's used to store the data. So of course you have HEGs, but there is also magnetic tape storage available. And just like the online cluster, it also uses infinite band 4 for networking. So this cluster is what we and the users who come here use for offline analysis and to be specific, this is the analysis that happens after an experiment. And it's usually where you would prepare some analysis for publication in a journal, for example. And the exact kinds of analysis varies very much from experiment to experiment. There are session fields with techniques that have existing tools for analyzing FEL data. So one example would be serial crystallography. I'm going to get to this in a second, but serial crystallography is just an experimental technique. And there's a couple of existing tools with both command-lining graphical interfaces that the users can use to analyze the data they get here. Another option would be using Jupyter notebooks. So the Maxwell cluster operates a Jupyter Hub instance. And these are very popular. So on the right-hand side, I have a little example of this. Typically, they're written in Python. And you can see here just a quick example of someone analyzing some data from a spectrometer. And here we're just using a map polyp to display all this. So it's using fairly standard tools. Coincidentally, the offline calibration system also uses notebooks. So remember I said earlier that we have an online calibration system, and this is used for correcting the detector data in real time. But it's not entirely rigorous, and we have another system for doing this more rigorously. And that's the offline calibration system. So this will actually use this Jupyter notebooks as well, which might seem like a bit of an odd choice, but the advantage is that it's very usable for detector scientists to look at to play around with different methods of correction, for example. And all of the data that we create, both from the raw data and the offline calibration system, this is all stored in HDF5 files. And we have a couple of libraries for working with these files, like extra data and extra geom that I mentioned. Extra data is really for working directly with... It's more generic, it's meant for working with data from a run. And extra geom is used for working with data from 2D detectors. And I have a little example here showing the use of extra data. So in the first cell up at the top, you can see that we do a bunch of imports, we import this class called run directory from extra data. In the third cell, we open a specific run from an experiment and we look at what's in this run. So in this particular run, there were 4,000 trains. It lasted for about six and a half minutes. And you can also see all of the devices that this run has data for. In this case, it's a spectrometer. And in the final cell, you can see that we're actually getting some data out of this run. So in this first line, for example, we're getting a bunch of camera data. And the data that's returned here is actually just a regular NumPy array. So we make use of Python and the regular... Python ecosystem number crunching libraries quite a lot. So there's a lot of use of NumPy and SciPy and X array and that sort of thing. And yeah, this is just a multi-dimensional NumPy array. Now, the entire point of offline analysis is to do some rigorous analysis that is ready for publication. And just to conclude, I want to give a couple of examples of what kind of analysis users do. So there's two that I want to talk about. And the first one is related to this technique called serial femtosecond crystallography. And this technique is used to find out the structure of biological samples like proteins, for example. This particular technique requires a very high repetition rate and lots of photons.  You put them in a liquid solution and then you fire it in a liquid jet right in the path of the X-ray beam. And the idea is that hopefully there will be one sample, one protein sample per X-ray pulse. You'll get some data on the picture and then later on, working backwards from all that data, you will be able to figure out the structure of that protein or whatever biological sample you have. The problem is that you need a lot of, you need a lot of hits, basically. You need a lot of photons scattering off a lot of different proteins for this to work. Like on the order of tens of thousands, for example. And this is why the high repetition rate is so important for this kind of experiment. And because ideally you've only got one protein per pulse, you need lots of photons because the probability of a photon actually hitting and scattering off the detector is very low. And that's why the intensity of X-ray is so important. The final example I have is ultrafast dynamics. And there was an experiment recently where some scientists looked into the radiation damage from water molecules. And to cut a long story short, what they ended up discovering was some information about how a water molecule is destroyed from X-ray radiation. And this process is extremely fast. It happens in femtoseconds. And that's why the short pulse length of an FEL is so important. The pulse length is sort of analogous to the exposure time of a regular camera. So you can imagine if you're trying to take a regular photo of a fast process, you need a very small exposure time. And it's the same thing with an FEL. You need a very short pulse to capture the dynamics of these really fast processes. And this is just two examples. There are many others that you can find. And yeah. So, thank you very much. Well, very charming. Thank you very much. I'm flabbergasted. I would lie if I would say that I understood all of it to be quite honest. I was social science. Sorry. Yeah, we're a bit overdraft, but never mind. You don't have that many questions. We'll handle it. Okay, they're coming in by now. Okay, if you want to ask questions, go to below. Go to the info drop-down menu. Excuse me, go to the chat and you'll find the hashtags and the IRC clients, web client, where you can post them. We have some here. I'm just going to read it out to you. If you need a high amount of pulses per second, why don't you spin a few plates with holes in front of a continuous light source? So, the problem is that, actually, let me just go back to slide number two, four. So, this thing uses an electron gun. And the reason we have this bunch structure is because the electron gun needs to be recharged, basically. The thing that you're referring to with having like a continuous stream of pulses is actually possible. I believe there is one facility in the States. I'm not exactly sure which one. Maybe it's LCLS. But they actually have a storage ring. So, I think what's happening is that in front of their electron gun they have a circular storage ring. This is storing all of the electrons and then they're all fired off continuously. But we don't have that. So, that's why you have this bunch structure of all the pulses arriving in from trains. Okay. Well, here's the thank you. Here's the next question. Has your lab considered or evaluated Julia as an alternative tool chain? So, Julia is on my personal radar. But I don't think there's been any rigorous study of it just yet. So, I can certainly see why it would look attractive. I believe there was like a brief foray into using Julia. If I remember correctly for the use cases that they were using it for, IO was the bottleneck rather than compute. So, Julia didn't offer much of an advantage over Python. Having said that, there's certainly other use cases where I think Julia could make a lot of sense. Okay. Thank you. This is a question that is sort of fundamentally probably for your application. Do you consider photons to be waves or particles? I'm just going to pass the question. I have no idea how to answer it. I'm sorry. Yeah. I have no idea. What I might suggest is perhaps emailing Excel. There's probably someone there who would be able to answer that question. But I don't have the background for that. Sorry that I exposed you there and didn't mean to. All good. Do you use event-based cameras? I'm not exactly sure what you mean by event-based cameras. Perhaps the question is referring to whether events trigger a camera. And I think the answer to that is no. There is a very elaborate timing system at Excel, which tries to synchronize all of these things at the same time. So I don't think there are any event-based cameras, but perhaps I misunderstood the question. Okay. Currently there's no further question coming up. So we'll just wait a minute or two, maybe. Tell me the long way from down under, excuse me, New Zealand. Yeah. How did you get here? So after I graduated from university, I worked for a little while in the Netherlands for a financial technology company. But doing this kind of scientific computing work was always my goal, I suppose. So a couple years ago when Excel published their opening for the position that I got, I applied for it. And I'm very lucky that they picked me. So I didn't exactly move all the way from New Zealand to Hamburg, it was more from Hamburg to the Netherlands, sorry, New Zealand to the Netherlands to Hamburg. Even still, New Zealand to the Netherlands is quite a jump in itself, isn't it? It is, yeah, yeah. The flight was terrible. I think it was about 30 hours. It was not right. I would imagine. I ate flying, I was staying in my younger days, I loved it, took me to wild places. But I just sort of become a drag and a pain in the neck. Do you miss New Zealand? I'd say not particularly. It's a great country to be sure. It's going to be a great country. Yeah, but I have to say I really enjoy the work that I do here. So there's not many days that I miss New Zealand. Perhaps I just haven't been away from it for long enough, maybe in a couple of years I'll feel homesick. I would assume the weather is better. It depends, it depends. So I used to live in the capital city, which is called Wellington. And it's a harbour city, kind of like Hamburg. And the weather was actually not so different. I would say that on average it was maybe a couple of degrees warmer. It's always an extremely windy and rainy city. So it doesn't feel too different from Hamburg in that sense. True point taken. Sorry. People are still listening to us because somebody asks here, is the software comparable between the physics and the financial industries? Did it take you a great reboot split from finance to physics? Good question. Or is it just data? No, I would say it was actually very different. So, I mean, for starters, most of my work now is in Python, whereas previously it was in C++. We do use C++ at Exxon for like the very compute intensive parts of our pipelines. But the majority is really in Python. I'm just trying to think what the other differences are. Financial technology is typically, or at least for the stuff that I was working on, it was a lot simpler. So at Exxon it's really helpful to have some background knowledge of physics. And there was none of that in financial technology. I also find the work a lot more interesting. And does Exxon fulfill these expectations so far? So far it has, yes. I'm very happy to say that it has. Well, come back. Last question is on your HPC cluster. What schedule do you use? So on the offline cluster we use learn. I haven't actually used it that much myself. So I think that's the only schedule we use. Yeah, I think it is. But as far as I'm aware, we don't use Slurm on the online cluster. Can you hear me now? Yes. I'm sorry. I'm awfully sorry. I should have changed that hardware before that. I'm supposed to say hi to you from Andrea Thorne. I'm not sure he remembers me, but I work in the same area and he's also in Hamburg and I'm around in the RC3 world if he likes to meet. So here you are. Here's the message for you. Cool. Thank you. Hey, Andrea. There's another question that's come in. What's the unique feature of GPFS? As far as I remember, this seems to be happy with AFS. This is a good question. Unfortunately, I'm not sure I have a good answer for you because I'm not very familiar with those two file systems. Like off the top of my head, I guess one... So I don't know anything about the performance characteristics of those two systems. I guess one kind of nice thing about GPFS is that we get support from IBM for it. I can't really answer that better. Okay, that does it with the questions. I was wondering if it was worth the while going to the breakout room because the questions don't seem to be so thick. Actually, there is no question around anymore. So if that's okay with you, we can call it. We're right on time. It's perfect. So thank you again, stunning. I'm still flabbergasted by the amount of data, whatever it is. It's a lot. It really is. Thank you very much for having me. It was great. Thank you for coming. Thank you for giving us some of your time and have some happy times in Hamburg. Thank you. And remember when the fish start swimming by in about the height of your eyes, yes, you may complain about the weather. Sounds good. Sounds good.


Soon the concert of Voices of Migration will start. I'm so very happy. It's a unique occasion to voice the music. Well Tina, I think in this program the thing that is exciting to me is the stories that are told. We have these composers who are from Iran and from Afghanistan and from China and from Turkey and of course from Austria and we of course also have a little bit of Bach from Germany. But the stories that the music tells in the relationships with the composers that each artist has are truly profound and truly exciting to me. So it's with great pleasure that you and I have worked in this program and we have thought through many things and now we have the time to tell the story and to share this music. Thank you very much. It has been a unique experience and a fantastic one. Migration is not only about numbers, statistics, trends, border controls or security or trafficking or smuggling. It's also about music, about diversity, about culture, something that unites us. It brings us together like today. We enjoy and we celebrate it together. I'm an expert in migration. They were experts in music. Linking migration with music today was the best we could do. Music has a powerful voice. I'm so glad that we could have a very successful event today.