According to a 2006 study, higher education seems to align itself with a higher tendency to believe in the paranormal. The researchers conducting the study expected the opposite and were surprised with the results. The study, conducted by Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City University and Gary Steward, Jr. of the University of Central Oklahoma, found that the numbers of college students that believed in the paranormal rose with higher levels of education. For instance, 23 percent of college freshman, 31 percent of seniors and 34 percent of graduate students acknowledged a belief in the paranormal.

Some of the paranormal categories that researchers polled students on included a belief in spiritual healing, a belief in witches, communication with the dead, telepathy, astrology and reincarnation.

Well, not officially. It is pretty odd, however, that a book written in 1898 by Morgan Robertson entitled "Futility, closely mirrors the real-life tragedy that occurred 14 years later involving the R.M.S. Titanic. In Robertson's book, the Titan, a transatlantic liner crosses the Atlantic Ocean on her maiden voyage, strikes an iceberg on her starboard side and sinks. If the obvious similarities aren't creepy enough for you, read on.

Both the fictional ship and the real ship sunk during the month of April — the Titan on the 15th and the Titanic on the 14th. The Titan carried 24 lifeboats and 3,000 passengers while the Titanic carried 20 lifeboats and 2,207 passengers. The Titan measured at 800 feet long and weighed 75,000 tons and the Titanic measured at 882.5 feet and weighed 66,000 tons. Both ships had three propellers. Both ships were going between 23 to 25 knots upon striking an iceberg. Oh, and it gets even weirder. Both ships sunk in similar areas of the Atlantic and the Titan left from New York to sail to England while the Titanic left England to sail to New York. In the fictional tale, the ship was called the largest ship of the time, unsinkable and "one of the greatest works of man." The Titanic was also the largest ship at the time, it was said to be unsinkable, and "a wonder of the age."

Did the 1954 nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll attract the attention of extraterrestrials and possibly lead one of their crafts to crash in England? This intriguing video posits a connection between investigative journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, the quest for eternal youth, and the death of actress Marilyn Monroe.

During the summer of 2001, something strange was repeatedly witnessed in the skies of Southern Pennsylvania that was likened to a centuries-old legend concerning a very big bird. What's so strange about a large bird, you ask? The alleged "Thunderbird," with a wingspan described anywhere between 12 to 20 feet, would be the largest predatory bird yet undiscovered if its existence can be proven. The largest identified birds are the Andean condor and the California condor, both possessing wingspans of around 10 feet, and the wandering albatross with a wingspan of 12 feet.

In 2001, a large bird was witnessed flying over cars and trucks on Route 119 in South Greensburg, PA. The witness saw the bird for about a minute and a half and even watched it land on a branch, which nearly broke underneath the weight of the creature. The site was searched after the report was received and no evidence could be found. More sightings followed in the same area during the same summer. A homeowner in Greenville was in her yard when she saw the enormous bird flying in the area for 20 minutes. Her neighbor described the creature as "the biggest bird I ever saw." A witness in Eerie County experienced similar sightings a month later.

Earth or ET? Nearly 50 years after its discovery in Mexico, the origin of a strange skull is on the verge of discovery. Eight years of scientific testing — culminating in DNA tests — may soon support the belief of some researchers that the skull belongs to no human being, but perhaps to a human-ET hybrid.

That's the hope of Lloyd Pye, the investigative writer and researcher who has taken the skull on its international odyssey of testing. DNA results are expected in 2009 or 2010.

The Starchild Skull, as it is known, was discovered in 1930 in Copper Canyon, a high desert region in northern Mexico, by a teenaged American girl who went exploring in abandoned mine shafts. She reportedly found a human skeleton lying on a shaft floor, and a misshapen hand sticking out from the dirt alongside it. She dug with her hands and found a smaller, misshapen skeleton.

On February 2, 1959, a man named Igor Dyatlov and eight other people were skiing in the snowy Ural Mountains in Russia when they decided to stop for the night. They took photos as they set up camp and retired for the evening. Over two weeks later, volunteer rescue workers found them all dead, and after almost 50 years, no one has been able to figure out what happened to them.

Investigators first found that the skiers' tents had been ripped open from the inside. The footprints leading away from the tents showed that they had run out into the snow without putting on their shoes or socks. The bodies of the first three skiers were found near the edge of the forest, and the second two were found closer to the tents, positioned as if they had been trying to run back towards the campsite. The other four bodies weren't found until two months later; they were buried in the snow far away from the campsite. They were wearing clothes that had belonged to the first five bodies found, and all four of them had sustained terrible internal injuries — one man's skull had been crushed, and a woman was missing her tongue.

The subconscious mind is a tricky thing. It's responsible for the dreams filled with cartoon characters and talking animals, the kind that make you wake and wonder, "What was that?" It's also responsible for the mundane matter that makes up the vast majority of dreaming, including replays of the day's experiences and some wish fulfillment thrown in. But sometimes, the subconscious may move beyond the fantastical or boring, and propose a vision of the future.

Precognitive dreams are posited by some as the cause of "deja vu," which literally means "already seen." Dreamers may experience a dream that envisions a probable future, and when this future becomes a reality, it seems familiar, odd, and done before.

"Forty feet below two million pounds are buried." The promise of buried treasure, believed to be contained in a strange cipher inscribed upon a stone found in the Oak Island Money Pit, has kept people digging through logs and clay and rising water for over 200 years. But what is the Money Pit?

From the late 18th century onward, there has been a persistent belief that an island in Nova Scotia, Oak Island, to be exact, contains a secret. This secret has been theorized to be anything from pirate booty to the lost treasure of the Templars. The location of this secret is a small portion of land where, at one point, settlers discovered the block and tackle of a ship hanging from a tree. Beneath the block and tackle, there was a depression in the earth, and it seemed to logical to assume that something heavy enough to require the block and tackle had been lowered into a pit at some point, and that pit had been covered up to conceal this mysterious item. And so began the digging, as well as the legend of Oak Island.

The lights are first visible just under the water. At first glance, you think they may be nothing more than reflections, perhaps some strange refraction of the moon overhead. And then the lights move with a life of their own, bursting out from beneath the surface of the river and rocketing like missiles toward the sky.

It sounds like a scene from some fantasy novel, but if you happen to be walking along the banks of the Mekong River in Thailand during the month of October, you may very well see this puzzling sight. The lights are attributed to the Mekong Dragon, a supernatural spirit of the river who governs the water flowing there. The Thai people propitiate this ancient being with a festival of lights. Dragon boats are raced upon the river, and human-made fireballs are launched into the sky in the form of cunningly crafted fireworks. But all of this pales to the amazing sight of the fireballs themselves, which emerge from the depths of the river and blaze forth in the night.

Are the lights man-made hoaxes? Perhaps they're merely swamp gas — although they would have to originate from some well-timed emissions, since the lights only emerge from the river during the time of the annual festival. Certainly, some strange things have come out of the Mekong River. Given the 646 pound catfish caught in 2005, the idea of a dragon lurking beneath those same waters becomes suddenly far more credible. Giant catfish aside, the river-born fireballs remain a mystery. While skeptics ponder, the Thai people engage in their lively festival, mingling Buddhist and animist beliefs in a richly textured worldview that leaves plenty of room for dragons.

There are many lesser-known types of divination. Acutomancy is divination via sharp objects, in which one drops seven needles or pins on a table in order to read the patterns. Aleuromancy is divination via fortune cookies, carromancy is divination via melting wax, and ichnomancy is divination via footprints. Papyromancy is divination via the folding of paper.

The word "papyromancy" is said to come from the Greek word "papyrus," meaning paper, but it's possible that it originated in Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: "Säure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papyromancy, the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers — the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof in the paper." No online examples can be found of divination via rolling papers, perhaps because the word "papyromancy" has more recently been used to describe divination via the folding of paper money.

In 1952, an amateur hypnotist in Colorado performed a past-life regression with a local named Virginia Tighe. In the first hypnosis session, and for many times after, Virginia spoke in an Irish accent, sang Irish songs and told stories, and identified herself as Bridey Murphy from Cork, Ireland, born in 1798 and dead in 1854. The hypnotist, Morey Bernstein, published the bestseller The Search for Bridey Murphy to tell the tale, renaming Virginia as Ruth Simmons. Tapes of the actual hypnosis sessions were also sold, snapped up in droves.

Support for the story came from the number of obscure details about Ireland that Virginia furnished. But disbelief came from numerous sources and for many reasons. Newspapers traveled to Ireland to investigate — did a Bridey Murphy live in Ireland in the 19th century? No evidence was found. But one domestic paper reportedly found a Bridie Murphey Corkell that lived in the house across the street from Virginia’s childhood home in Wisconsin, indicating the stories told under hypnosis were memories rather than past-life experiences. Additionally, other reviewers noted that the obscure details Virginia provided were probably familiar to any person of Irish descent.

The success of the book made many readers look twice at reincarnation and ideas outside of common religious beliefs of life after death, as well as accepted science. Believers say that this accounts for the vociferous attacks upon the book at the time and after.

Evil twins make for great soap opera drama. But this idea, used to drum up ratings and appeal to viewers' fears and desires, actually has a basis in paranormal folklore and history in the concept of "doppelganger." The term, German for "double walker," can refer to a number of different phenomena, including the appearance of a ghostly double or apparition, or a vision of an identical twin in the flesh. Doppelgangers often have distinctive physical characteristics, including no shadow.

The ancient belief of doppelgangers could represent a danger-free curiosity, with the fascinating idea of a having your own non-related identical twin somewhere out in the world. In some stories, doppelgangers exist as a result of magic or temporal shifts. But more and more throughout history, the idea of a doppelganger indicates a dangerous or malevolent force. Doppelgangers will act like an evil twin, causing mischief by confusing friends and family and giving bad advice. Alternatively, doppelgangers could be hands-off but be a silent sign of extreme bad luck or even death. The poet John Donne claimed to see his wife's doppelganger in the 1600s, shortly before their child was stillborn. Percy Bysshe Shelley told friends of seeing his doppelganger not long before his death by drowning, and Abraham Lincoln also saw his twin before his assassination.

In 2006, researchers found that electromagnetic stimulation of a certain area of the brain made patients see "shadow people," figures that at times resembled themselves and other times appeared as strangers. This development could be a fascinating insight into the long history and folklore of doppelgangers.

What became known as "The Philadelphia Experiment" began with a book published in 1955 called The Expanding Case for the UFO. This book was never famous for its topic but for the events that followed its release. The author, Morris Jessup, was an astronomer, Michigan University graduate and professor and UFO researcher. In January of 1956 Jessup received a letter from a "Carl Allen" who also called himself Carlos Miguel Allende. This and subsequent letters referred to Jessup's work but turned to an incident having to do with the US Navy. According to the letter, the US Navy had conducted a top-secret experiment in October of 1943. The result, according to Allen, was the total invisibility and teleportation of a US destroyer. Allen asserted that the experiment was an application of Einstein's Unified Fields Theory.

Allen claimed that in 1943, while he was aboard the USS Andrew Furuseth near Norfolk, Virginia, the U.S.S. Eldridge suddenly appeared out of thin air but remained partially shrouded by a spherical green fog. After several minutes the ship disappeared. According to a Philadelphia newspaper, Allen claimed, observers at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard witnessed the opposite — a ship disappeared and then came back again. He actually claims that the ship was teleported from Philadelphia to Norfolk in a matter of 15 minutes.

"...I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing, but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East Room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. 'Who is dead in the White House?' I demanded of one of the soldiers, 'The President,' was his answer; 'he was killed by an assassin.' Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since."

This is how President Abraham Lincoln described a dream, which would later be considered a premonition of his own death, to his friend Ward Hill Lamon. Apparently Lincoln experienced the dream several times and told a few other people, including his bodyguard W.H. Crook. Ironically, he related the dream to his bodyguard the very day that he was assassinated.

You wake up in the middle of the night and know that there is something ugly, perhaps even unholy, in the room. You can't see it, but you know it's there. It comes closer, making shuffling and snorting sounds, and then suddenly you see red eyes as a "thing" comes down on the bed — or even on top of you.

You're paralyzed in terror, can't move, can't even scream. And then suddenly it's gone... or things go black... and you wake up in the morning and wonder what the heck happened. Was it a nightmare — or a real experience?

Nighttime "entity" attacks like this have been going on in the human race since ancient times. They're often called "hag attacks" or the "Old Hag syndrome," because in earlier times they were blamed on witches (hags) and demons who sat on people's chests at night and caused bad dreams.

A lot of people are hearing about a phenomenon called cellular memory lately. The topic made it to the big screen in the new movie The Eye. However, cellular memory isn't a new thing. It's been a source of study and research for many scientists for some time now. The theory of cellular memory implies that memories can be stored within living tissues and can manifest in the form of disease and pain as well as personality traits, food preferences, music preferences, likes and dislikes for certain hobbies or interests and even sexual orientation. The evidence for this theory lies in the numerous studies of organ transplant recipients and the changes that occur after transplant surgeries. Basically our cells — not just our brain — have the capacity for memory. Science currently credits the brain with storing memories — but that could change one day given the expanding amount of evidence backing this phenomenon.

Candace Pert, author of Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel writes that "Memories are stored not only in the brain, but in a psychosomatic network extending into the body... all the way out along pathways to internal organs and the very surface of our skin." Pert believes that cells store memories that are "unconscious" but can become conscious. This theory explains how information or what I'll call "memory energy" can be present in an organ, consciously or unconsciously, and appears (or doesn't appear if it remains unconscious) in the recipient of that organ.

The doll had a burned face, but it was still collectible, and it was purchased by a husband and wife from a yard sale. It was placed in the couple's bedroom. Unbeknownst to them, the doll came with a nasty personality.

At night, the wife suffered mysterious bloody scratches on her legs. The attacks continued, and they sought the help of demonologist John Zaffis. The doll, they learned, had probably belonged to a little girl who died of burns from a fire. When they got rid of the doll, the bloody marks on the wife's legs disappeared.

The doll, it seems, was possessed, though by what remains uncertain. Perhaps it was the spirit of the little girl, or emotional imprints of her tragic death. Some might even say a demon. Whatever the cause, an unknown force acted out through the doll.

For 2000 years, the Virgin Mary has lit up skies in spectacular visions. She seems to pick her times and places carefully, for her appearances are rare, and when she does show up, she attracts millions of people from all over the world. The how and why of these events is a modern mystery.

To the faithful, the explanation is simple: Mary appears because the world is in need of her, and she delivers stern messages to pray and repent — or else. To others, she is a miracle and a grace, and she opens the door to the possibility of miraculous healings and cures to those with little or no hope.

The earthly mother of Jesus has big shoes to fill, serving as a heavenly mother in a religion without goddesses and precious little acknowledgment of the divine feminine. She has always inspired deep devotion — so much so that in the Middle Ages, she nearly surpassed her son in popularity.

In the Nazca desert plains of southern Peru, strange markings and designs have been the source for frenzied speculation and controversy over the years. Over nearly 500 square miles of desert, about 300 geometric shapes are etched into the sand. The shapes, called geoglyphs, were first spotted when commercial airlines began flying over Peru in the 1920s. The lines and shapes seem to make up various designs when viewed from the air, including figures of animals, plants, man-made objects and anthropomorphic figures.

The designs are unique and mysterious in many ways. The straight lines crisscross the desert plain in all directions and seem random. But many of the lines form angles, triangles, spirals, rectangles and other figures. All the figures have well-defined entrances to use as paths and seemed to have been used as gathering or travel points. The pressing question is this — how did a civilization from thousands of years ago with only simple technology manage to construct such vast and precise designs? And what were they used for? Explanations are many, but proof is scarce. Some believe the lines come from alien encounters, while others posit the lines as a celestial calendar created by the ancient Nazca civilization. Even others suggest the intervention of some ancient god, or simply a massive method of drawing worshippers towards a central pilgrimage spot.