Did St. Joseph mysteriously appear in Santa Fe, New Mexico more than 100 years ago in answers to prayer? According to legend, the disguised father of Jesus built a miraculous spiral staircase in Loretto Chapel, which attracts people the world over. Modern skeptics, however, are less than impressed.

Loretto Chapel was built for Loretto Academy, a women's school founded in 1852 by the Sisters of Loretto. The story goes that upon completion of the chapel in 1878, the nuns had no way to access the choir loft that was 22 feet off the floor. It seemed that an inelegant ladder was the only solution. The nuns prayed a novena for a solution.

On the ninth and last day of the novena, a stranger appeared. All he had was a donkey and a box of tools. He said he was looking for work. The nuns asked him to build a staircase. He brought wood, soaked it in water, and constructed a double-helix wooden staircase using only wooden pegs. He said very little, asked for nothing but food and water — and when he was done, he disappeared without taking any pay.

Dayton, Ohio is not a town that most people would find remarkable. Folks elsewhere in the country might not have even heard of it, except for the presence of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. This military base started life merely as Wright Field (named for the Ohio-born brothers who invented modern aviation). Allegedly, not long after the UFO crash at Roswell, NM, all of that changed. Material from the New Mexico crash is believed to have been transported to Dayton, whereupon Wright Field became Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Many UFOlogists believe that, since that fateful summer in 1947, Wright-Patterson has been used to store not only wreckage from downed alien craft but also bodies of the aliens themselves. It was not long before rumors began to circulate about the mysterious "Blue Room," or, more widely, about Hangar 18. Stories about this top secret location in the Air Force Base were so persistent that in the 1960s, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona dropped in on the base and sought permission to view Hangar 18 from General Curtis LeMay. His request caused quite a stir at the base and was flatly denied by LeMay.

"Do I believe in a prehistoric reptile living in Lock Ness like something out of Jurassic Park? Of course not, that's nonsense," says cryptozoologist Jonathan Downes, "But do I think that there's a genetic anomaly in the gene pool of eels in various lakes in northern Scotland, which can cause the occasional much larger eel? Of course."

In fact, hundreds of new animals are discovered each year. This fact, largely unknown to the average person, could shed some light on the seemingly fantastical stories of Loch Ness and Bigfoot. In 2005, sea-life surveyors who hope to have a complete list of global ocean life, alive and extinct, by 2010, discovered the Yeti Crab, a white, blind, crab-like animal with long furry pincers and arms living in the Pacific Ocean. The creature did not fit into the crab or lobster categories so a new taxonomic category had to be created. During the following year, a giant lobster was discovered in the waters of the Indian Ocean off the island of Madagascar. Some of the lobsters found were around 50 years old.

Sacred sites... spiritual tools... magical circles... astronomical observatories. These are some of the purposes ascribed to dozens of ancient stone circles called medicine wheels that dot North America, left behind by early Plains Indians. The truth of the matter is, however, that no one really knows why those people built stone circles.

Even the term "medicine wheel" is modern. No one knows what name they were given by their builders. Little archaeological or cultural lore exists to shed definitive light on medicine wheels, some of which are at least 2,000 years old.

Little also is known about the early Plains tribes, who led a nomadic life and built no lasting habitats or structures. They lived only a few seasons in any one spot. When they moved to new locations, they left behind small stone circles, which apparently were used for anchoring tipis, and mysterious large circles now called medicine wheels.

Our latest reader story comes from JB.

I started working in an assisted living facility in June of 2004. I worked the 2nd shift, 2-10pm. There were two units in the 40 bed facility. Unit one was for patients who needed assistance with their everyday needs. Unit two was the unit that I worked all the time, the Alzheimer's/Dementia unit. Most nights, I would be assigned to the until alone. At the time, there were only ten rooms filled out of the twenty rooms total. A year had passed and more patients moved into the facility. Staffing grew, and on most days, there were two staff members assigned to both units.

During a three month period, we were short staffed, and I was working the unit alone. This never bothered me. The building at the time was only a few years old, but many deaths had occurred since the opening of the facility. Working alone, you would always catch a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of your eye. Lights would be on in rooms that were unoccupied. The call light system, which sounded an alarm in the nurses station when a patient needed help, would go off in rooms that were unoccupied. These were normal occurrences, that didn't bother me.