Mary King’s Close is located under buildings in the Old Town area of Edinburgh, Scotland. It has long been associated with reports of ghostly activity.

Perhaps you’ve seen paranormal investigations conducted at Mary King’s Close on television’s Most Haunted or Ghost Hunters International.

If you have had the opportunity to visit, you may want to dig out those old vacation photos. The same apparition has been caught on camera on at least two separate occasions, according to a recent report by STV Scotland.

What appears to be the same blond-haired woman appears in both photos, both taken during late night tours in 2009.

The staff at Mary King’s Close is certain that the woman who appears in both photos was not a customer. The extra person in each of the photos does not correlate with tour attendance records.

Mary King's Close Ghostly Tourist / Courtesy STV Scotland

Staff at Mary King’s Close is asking anyone who sees a strange apparition in their pictures to allow them to be examined.

In the meantime, the tour hours will be extended for the month of August, with hopes that this same anomaly will reappear in photos.

We’ve long been associated with supernatural and unexplained stories. We’ve had sightings of dark shadowy figures who lurk in the myriad of passageways, rooms and corners of the Closes, and reports of lots of strange noises – these images seem to give us even more evidence. By running tours late in to the night with the last one finishing at midnight, we hope that this might make the ghostly image reappear.” – Lisa Robshaw, spokesperson for The Real Mary King’s Close

Ms Robshaw insists that images had not been doctored by staff, and hopes that by making the images public that someone might be able to help. She added, “If there are people in the images who can explain who the lady is we would love to hear from them.  We’ve tested the static camera that we use and it appears to be working normally so we really do not have an explanation.  We just want to try and understand what has happened.”

UFOs Over Washtington 1952

Today marks the 58th anniversary of a bizarre wave of UFO sightings in Washington D.C. that wrapped up on July 27, 1952.

Also known as the “Washington flap”, the sightings took place over two-week period, most notably July 19/20 and July 26/27.

Unlike the recent China UFO sighting, these objects in 1952 were detected on radar in two places: Washington National Airport and Andrews Air Force Base. The objects reportedly reached speeds of up to 7,200 mph. (Yes, 7,200 mph. That is not a typo.)

The U.S. Air Force Air Defense Command was notified of what was occurring in the skies over Washington. Several F-94 night fliers began their pursuits of the objects on the radar. The resulting pursuits proved to be frustrating. When the planes lifted off, the UFOs disappeared. When the planes landed, the UFOs reappeared. When the planes would see the objects in the distance, the objects would disappear as the plane approached.

However, there were times when the UFOs didn’t disappear. As one pilot stated: “They’ve surrounded my plane, what should I do?”

It wasn’t only military planes that interacted with the UFOs. Two passenger flights within a several hour period had contact with the objects.

At 8:15 p.m. on Saturday, July 26th, a National Airlines pilot and flight attendant observed strange objects above the plane. The radars at National Airport and Andrews AFB tracked these and more objects.

In the early hours of July 27th, at 3:00 a.m, an Eastern Airlines flight over Washington was informed that an unknown object was in its vicinity, yet the crew saw nothing unusual. Personnel on the ground tracked the object on radar. When the flight crew was told that the object had moved directly behind their plane, the crew began a sharp turn to see for themselves.

When the plane began to turn, the object disappeared from both the sky and the radar.

The official Air Force explanation for the two week wave of sightings and the scrambling of the military: “temperature inversion” (a weather phenomena that gives the illusion of lighted craft flying in the sky).

Many people didn’t accept the findings and continued to question and even formally study the event.

Dr. James E. McDonald a physicist at the University of Arizona and a prominent ufologist n the 1960s, did his own analysis of the Washington sightings. After interviewing four pilot eyewitnesses and five radar personnel, McDonald argued that the Air Force explanation was “physically impossible” – Excerpt from Wikipedia

The fascination with this event continues 58 years later.

Further reading:

1952 Washington D.C. UFO Incident at Wikipedia

CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947 to 1990 at CIA.gov

Air to ground communication transcript at ufocasebook.com

Apollo 15 Insignia

On July 26, 1971, Apollo 15, the ninth manned mission of the Apollo program, was launched into space.

NASA called Apollo 15 the most successful manned flight ever achieved.

Apollo 15 was the fourth lunar landing mission. The flight to the moon was led by Commander David Scott. Alfred Worden was the Command Module Pilot. The Lunar Module was piloted by Jim Irwin.

The crew received intense geology training prior to the launch, making it the first Apollo flight to rank geology the highest priority of the mission. The field training took place in Arizona and New Mexico.

Like other space flights before and after this one, UFO enthusiasts believe that the crew of Apollo 15 was witness to UFOs in space during this mission that ended on August 7, 1971.

Photos of these UFOs (which can be fake or simply show “normal” phenomena) can be viewed here.