The Horror from the Hills

Hey, so I found this amazing list the other day. Its called the "List of Great Old Ones", and it was originally created by H.P Lovecraft, and expanded by his band of followers throughout literary history. Its essentially a compendium of names and descriptions of deities belonging to the "Cthulhu Mythos". Now, that probably won't mean much to you unless you're some sort of terrible Satanic Sci-Fi geek - but believe me, its objectively one of the bigger goldmines that the internet has offered up since eBay.

Dick with this:

Watch out! Its CHAUGNAR FAUGN! Also known by the epithet "The Horror from the Hills". Firstly, Chaugnar is a motherfucking badass. Secondly, he's a humanoid elephant with horribly grotesque features, combining the worst aspects of octopus, elephant, and human being. Also he's made of "night", or something. He moves incredibly fast for his size and will drain the blood of any being it encounters. Especially YOU.

Chaugnar Faugn falls into the category of "black magic" mythology, stories that were whispered amongst the endarkened (opposite of enlightened, is that cool? I might have just invented a word...) rather than passed along as regular legends like the Hydra/Minotaur/Larry Bird.

Seriously, grimoires are the best things ever. Way better than textbooks. I'd much rather have studied black magic than "Society & Environment". Then maybe all these bloody talismans would come in handy once in a while.

"Project Rainbow"

Hey there, so have you ever wanted to drive around in an invisible battleship? There's only one answer, and its "Yes."

So it turns out, that the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Eldridge is believed to be the first significant object successfully (or pseudo-successfully, I guess) "cloaked". Cloaking is a fictional process in which an object, usually something epic like a spaceship or a tank - is rendered invisible to the electromagnetic spectrum. So yeah, lets totally defy physics and inivisble a fucking ship, we'll see how that goes.

So, the Navy decided, based on something called the "Unified Field Theory", to use electrical generators to bend light around the object in order to make invisible. The story goes, that a test in July of 1943, resulted in the Eldridge being almost completely cloaked, with witnesses reporting a green fog appearing in its place.

But this is where it becomes awesome. It is said that when the ship reappeared, sailors were actually embedded in the metal of the ship, including one sailor who ended up on a deck level below that where he began, with his hand embedded in a steel girder. At that point, it is said that the experiment was altered at the request of the Navy, with the new objective being solely to render the Eldridge invisible to radar. Unfortunately for me, none of these claims have been officially substantiated.

This whole thing, popularly referred to as "The Philadelphia Experiment" or "Project Rainbow", has been surpressed/disproved/abandoned over the years, but remains a point of discussion & debate for conspiracy theorists to this day. I'm totally going to break into Area 51 one day, and do some snooping around for myself... Then we'll see what's what.

The Mountain of the Dead

So I've already gone and blown my own mind with the title of this post, but there's a little more to explain before we all strip off and run screaming into the snow. The Mountain of the motherfucking Dead. Today I'm referring specifically to Kholat Syakhl, a mountain pass in which some seriously macabre shit took place. I know, who would be crazy enough to expect sunshine, bluebirds and survival on "The Mountain of the Dead"? Nobody, that's who - even still, the poor souls who did fall victim to the pass would have a pretty good story to tell if they were English-speaking ghosts. Lets do this thing:

So, It all begins fairly innocently, with a group of 9 experienced Ski hikers setting out into the great white Russian wilderness. Diary entries for he days leading up to the "event" have been found. It is reported that after becoming lost due to snowblindness (boom), the hikers set up camp to weather a blizzard of some kind. Here's what the inquest into the demise of the group reveals (paraphrased from http://en.wikipedia.org/Dyatlov_Pass_Incident) :

• Three of the group members died as a result of fatal injuries, Six from hypothermia. 
• There were no indications of other people anywhere close by, apart from the nine travelers.
• The tent had been ripped open from within.
• The victims had died 6 to 8 hours after their last meal.
• All group members left the camp of their own accord, on foot.
• The fatal injuries of the three bodies could not have been caused by another human being, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged".
• High doses of radioactive contamination were found on the clothes of the victims.

Holy ghost! So, I'm led to believe - based on this cryptic but "officially gathered" evidence, that the hikers were involved in some kind of RADIOACTIVE BLIZZARD MADNESS? I guess so. Such an incredible & mysterious way to go out, on the mountain of the dead, sprinting through the snow barefoot with newfound radioactive superhuman strength/bloodlust. I'm forced to believe there's no other sensible explanation. Here's something else (wikipedia is my/your best friend) :

• After the funerals, relatives of the deceased claimed that the skin of the victims had a strange brown tan, for no reason.
• Another group of hikers (50kms away from the pass) reported that they saw strange orange spheres in the night sky over the mountain, the night of the incident.
• Some reports suggest that there was a lot of scrap metal in the area, leading to speculation that the military had utilized the area secretly and might be engaged in a cover-up.

So yeah, you go to the Mountain of the Dead, you get explosively dramatic results. Lets go!