Legends about vampires and werewolves still live today

The modern culture is abundant with stories about vampires. Film producers make many movies about ﾵvampireﾧ hunters every year, lots of books about vampirism and vampires appear regularly. Feeding on blood has become one of the top issues discussed at a variety of forums, especially of Gothic teenagers. What is the official medicinal opinion about vampires today?

Almost all cultures existing in the world have stories telling about living corpses that raise from the dead to feed on human ﾵbloodﾧ. In all epochs blood was considered to be the source of vital force, and creatures known for their ability to suck human blood were awfully terrifying. In oriental countries, evil gods and sinister spirits were said to be bloodsuckers while stories about dead people transformed into vampires were well-spread in the European culture.

The present-day notion of vampires is generally based upon the Slavic mythology. Popular superstitions about East European vampires exerted great influence upon people from neighboring countries, and soon the vampire image got universal for the entire of the world.

Slavic people believed that those who died as a result of killing and ﾵsuicideﾧ stood higher chances of becoming vampires after death. Peasants believed that those who died at their not really old age would keep on living their lives even after death. They said that such deceased needed the vital force of those staying alive and sucked people’s blood as they wanted no other food.

If people apprehended that their deceased relatives could turn into vampires after death they took necessary measures beforehand to avoid such a tragic transformation. It was considered that a dead human would not turn into a bloodsucker after burial if a crucifix or garlic are placed close to the body in a coffin, if a dead man’s clothes are nailed to a coffin or if the heart of a deceased is pierced through with an aspen stake. It was believed that a dead body with a broken heart stood no chance of reviving, and also people thought that a vampire would not rise from a grave if his or her body is fastened tight to the ground.

In Romania, dead bodies of children and young people were kept unburied for several years so that others could have a chance to see if they had turned into vampires or not; at that those staying alive could watch decay of dead bodies. If the process of decay was normal then the dead body was buried completely; and if it turned that dead bodies remained intact for a longer period of time then such deceased were decapitated, garlic was put into the mouths and bodies were pierced through with stakes.

The first study of vampirism was conducted in the 18th century. The history of Serbian peasant Peter Plogojewitz that happened to him in 1725 is the most well-known documented instance of vampirism. The respectable peasant died in 1725 at the age of 62 and was buried in accordance with the local tradition. In two months after the burial nine people living in that village died of some strange disease within eight days. At that, each of the deceased said that a day before the dead Peter had come to visit them. Peter’s widow did not trust the stories until one night her dead husband started knocking on the door and demanding that the woman must give him her shoes. The poor woman was terribly scared and next morning fled from the village for ever.

Locals decided to disinter the dead body to conduct an investigation of the incident. Military men and the priest from the place were invited for an expertise. When exhumed the dead body of Peter seemed quite intact, the dead man had nails and hair longer than at the moment of burial, the skin looked quite fresh but slightly pale and there were stains of blood in the mouth. Locals insisted that the heart of the dead man must be pierced through with an aspen stake. And a fountain of fresh blood rushed out from Peter’s mouth right at the moment when the body was pierced through with the stake. While locals were burning the dead body of the vampire a military man who was in command of the exhumation wrote a detailed report for his army commanders. Soon, the report was published in the leading newspapers all over the world.

The scary publication gave rise to a war against ﾵvampiresﾧ in Europe. People in all villages suspected at least one of the neighbors of being a bloodsucker; people exhumed dead bodies out from their graves to pierce the dead bodies with stakes to make sure that they would not turn into vampires. That was a real hysteria, and authorities in many countries charged doctors with an official investigation of all mysterious instances to provide a documented confirmation or denial of vampire existence.

In 1746, French theologian Antoine Augustine Calmet published a treatise on all instances of vampirism in Europe he knew. He also cautiously supposed in this work that vampires were probably no myth but the reality. The authority of the theologian was so great that the society immediately stated that existence of vampires was a scientifically proven fact.

The vampire hunting slightly abated in 1768 when Austrian doctor Gerhard Van Sweeten published his work saying that no vampires existed, and all known instances of alleged vampirism could be explained from a scientific point of view.

One of the most revolutionary discoveries in connection with vampirism was made by doctors in the second half of the 20th century. In 1963, British doctor Lee Illis published his monograph “On porphyria and etiology of werewolves” with an analysis of documented instances of vampirism and werewolves in Europe in the 12-19th centuries. The doctor supposed that majority of the instances were not connected with superstitions but with porphyria, an infrequent genetic abnormality that reveals with one human out of the total number of 200,000. He said that in case a parent suffered from porphyria the probability of inheriting the disease by the parent’s child was 25 percent. Like many other genetic dysfunctions porphiria arises from incest, and European monarchs who often married close relatives sometimes suffered from the disease.

As a result of the disease people have problems with pigment ﾵmetabolismﾧ and suffer from hemoglobin decay under the influence of UV radiation or UV rays. Such patients suffer from pains by the light of the sun and have to stay in dark rooms all day long and go out at night only. In case the disease is getting too serious patients may even have their tendons deformed so that their fingers get curved. The skin around lips and gums grows thinner and harder which makes cutting teeth look like a grin. They have thinner and paler skin, and teeth may sometimes be stained red. In a word, such patients look very much like vampires.

It is clear that the history of Peter Plogojewitz can hardly be explained with the strange disease, but it is likely that people executed as suspected of being vampires or werewolves could in fact be just miserable patients suffering from the disease. Today when gene engineering is successfully developing one can expect that porphyria will in the nearest future stop affecting people.

Bats are the most well-known natural vampires at the time when majority of them in fact feed on insects only. In Central and South America there are vampire bats that suck blood of mammals and birds. Sleeping animals may usually fall victim of natural vampires that may suck up to 40 ml of their blood within 20 minutes. Sometimes natural vampires may attack people, however bites of bats are dangerous for people not because of loss of blood but because of infectious diseases that bats may carry.

Questions and Tasks:

1. Do you believe legends about vampires and werewolves have a real base?

2. Vampires used to be haunted. Today a vampire is an enigmatic sexy superstar that kept its peculiar traits: love of blood, hate for garlic, and fear for the sun. Why do you think the image of a vampire has changed?

3. Is it possible that being a vampire or a werewolf is nothing more than being a victim of a genetic pathology – porphyria?

4. If so, why this disease is neither studied nor cured?

5. Why do you reckon in Russian scientists don’t pay attention to this problem?

New HUMAN RACE of indigo children appears on Earth

A pretty little girl who lives deep in the heart of Latgaglia (ﾵLatviaﾧ) enjoys talking. She talks nonchalantly about her nightly travels across the Universe in an astral body. Her father is quick to make a request: “Please pay no attention to what she is talking about, she just loves making things up.”

The father is not surprised to find out that his daughter has been aware of the notion of astral since she was five. He appreciates his ﾵchildﾧ very much, though. He always uses a tip from the girl while repairing his old tractor. “I do not know how she does it but she is always in the know what is wrong with the machine,” says he. Well, the story looks familiar. There is another case of an indigo child, a phenomenon that has become pretty ordinary lately.

The year 2012 has special significance for the indigo children. According to predictions of the Maya, the so-called “Great Transition” will be taking place in 2012 after the Sun and ﾵEarthﾧ form a straight line pointing to the center of the ﾵGalaxyﾧ. The above position will trigger the demise of the 3-D model of the world. The earth dwellers will be given the opportunity to live in a 4-D world. But the offer applies only to those whose mind has expanded to an essentially new level - the indigo children.

Take a closer look at your offspring. Researchers claim that 95% of children born after 1994 are the indigo children. The fascinating adjective derives from the color of an aura around their bodies. The internal organs of these children have different functions, their ﾵimmune systemsﾧ is several times stronger than that of an average person. The children also have a different kind of DNA, a mutation kind. In other words, as regards the changes in ﾵDNAﾧ, millions of residents of planet Earth are not humans. A race of new beings is slowly but surely climbing the stage.

Russian indigo boy, Boriska

The unusual baby boy was born in the town of Volzhsky, the Volgograd region of Russia. His mother, Nadezhda Kipriyanovich, gave birth to her son one fine morning. “It all happened so fast, I did not even feel any pain. When they showed the baby to me, the boy was looking at me with a grown-up look. As a pediatrician I know that newborns cannot concentrate looks on anything. However, my little baby was staring at me with his big brown eyes. Brushing that fact aside, he was a usual little baby, like all other kids,” the boys mother said.

When the mother and her son returned home from the maternity hospital, the woman started noticing very curious things about her little son. The boy, whom the mother named Boris, hardly ever cried and never suffered from any ailments. He was growing up like all other children, but he started speaking whole phrases at the age of eight months. The parents gave the baby a meccano, and the boy started making geometrically correct figures from it, combining different parts with precision. “I had a very weird feeling that we were like aliens to him, with whom he was trying to establish a contact with,” the boy's mother said.

When Boris, or Boriska, as parents were affectionately calling their son, turned two, he started drawing pictures, which looked abstract at first: they were mixtures of blue and violet colors. When psychologists examined the drawings, they said that the boy was probably trying to draw the auras of people, whom he could see around. Boris was not even three, when he started telling his parents of the ﾵUniverseﾧ.

”He could name all the planets of the solar systems and even their satellites. He was showering me with names and numbers of ﾵgalaxiesﾧ. At first I found it very frightening, I thought that my son was out of mind, but then I decided to check if those names really existed. I took some books on astronomy and I was shocked to find out that the boy knew so much about this science,” Nadezhda said.

Rumors about a baby-astronomer were spreading about the town faster than the speed of light. The boy became the local celebrity: people were curious about the child, everybody wanted to understand how he could know so many things. Boriska was willing to tell his visitors of extraterrestrial civilizations, about the existence of the ancient race of humans that were three meters of stature, of future climate and global changes…Everyone was listening to the little boy with great interest, but it goes without saying that the people did not believe those stories.

The parents decided to baptize their child just to be on the safe side: they already started thinking that there was something definitely wrong with their baby. Soon after that Boriska started telling people of their sins. He would come up to a guy in the street and tell him to quit doing drugs; he would tell adult men to stop cheating on their wives, etc. The little prophet was warning people against forthcoming troubles and diseases, which created quite an unfavorable reputation for the boy's parents.

Nadezhda noticed later that her son would often feel bad on the threshold of serious disasters. “When the ﾵKurskﾧ submarine sank, he was all aching. He was suffering during the hostage crisis in Beslan too, he refused to go to school during the days of that horrible attack,” the boy's mother said.

When asked about his feelings during the days of the Beslan crisis, Boris said that he was burning from the inside: “It was like as if a flame was burning inside of me. I knew that the story in Beslan would have a horrible end,” the boy said.

The boy is quite optimistic about Russia's future, though: “The situation in the country will be improving gradually. However, ﾵplanet Earthﾧ will have to experience two very dangerous years – 2009 and 2013. Those catastrophes will be connected with water,” Boriska said.

Boriska caught Russian scientists' attention in the summer of the current year. Specialists of the Institute of Earth Magnetism and Radio-waves of the Russian Academy of Sciences photographed the boy's aura, which turned out to be unusually strong.

”He has the orange spectrogram, which says that he is a joyful person of a powerful intellect,” professor Vladislav Lugovenko said. “There is a theory, according to which the human brain has two basic memory types: work and remote memory. One of the most remarkable abilities of the human brain is its ability to save information about experience, emotions and thoughts both inwardly and outwardly, in the single informational space of the Universe. There are some unique individuals, who can  draw information from that field. In my opinion, every human being is connected with space by means of energy channels,” the scientist said.

According to Lugovenko, it is possible to measure people's extrasensorial qualities with the help of special devices, which make this procedure very easy. Modern scientists all over the world conduct extensive research works in an attempt to unveil the mystery of phenomenal children. As it turned out, people possessing unique abilities were born on all inhabited continents of the globe during the recent 20 years. Scientists call such kids “indigo children.”

”Boriska is one of them. Apparently, indigo children have a special mission to change our planet. Many of them have amended DNA spirals, which gives them incredibly strong immune system, which can even defeat AIDS. I have met such children in China, India, Vietnam and so on. I am sure that they will change the future of our civilization,” Vladislav Lugovenko said.

While world's leading space agencies are trying to find traces of life on ﾵplanet Marsﾧ, eight-year-old Boriska tells his parents and friends everything he knows about the Martian civilization. Boriska remembers his past life. Specialists say that he knows the information, which he actually cannot know. “When we showed our boy to a variety of scientists, including ufologists, astronomers and historians, all of them agreed that it would be impossible to make all those stories up. Foreign languages and scientific terms, which he says, are usually used by specialists studying this or that particular science,” Boriska's mother said.

Doctors of traditional medicine acknowledge the boy's unusual abilities, although they do not say, of course, that the boy used to live on Mars in his past life.

Questions and Tasks:

1. Do you believe indigo children exist?

2. Should such children hide their gift? Should these kids be isolated or at least registered?

3. Would you like your child to attend the same school as indigo kids? Why people are always afraid of such things?

4. If all people gain a special ability in the future, which one would you like to have: super strength, insight, thoughts-reading, X-ray ability, being invisible, magnetism, etc.?