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LOS ANGELES (Wireless Flash) -- A paranormal expert in Los Angeles thinks he may know the culprit to last week's blackout: E.T. Dr. Franklin Ruehl -- the resident UFO expert on Tom Green's new MTV talk show -- says it's not uncommon for UFOs to be seen hovering near power plants right before blackouts. Ruehl claims that prior to the big blackout in November, 1965, two pilots reported seeing UFOs near Indianapolis and Syracuse, New York. The phenomenon may be inadvertant but Ruehl says it's possible a UFO caused this year's blackout by trying to draw power from a provider...

Thursday’s massive power outages exposed our vulnerabilities in all of three minutes—the amount of time it took for 21 power plants to shut down. But over the next several hours, the whole messy affair demonstrated Americans’ resilience. It struck like a bolt of lightning—ironically, the original excuse given—leaving two nations simultaneously stunned and searching for instant answers. A lot of theories were advanced—the aforementioned lightning, a power plant fire, simple overusage—but the only answer embraced by one and all was: “this is not, repeat not, an act of terrorism.” If no one knew the actual cause, how could the authorities...

There are now reports going around that al-Qaeda has claimed responsibility for the recent massive electrical power outage in Canada and the United States. This is the sort of notion which will appeal to the paranoids of both the right and left, those who see sinister government conspiracies lurking behind ever curtain. However, with nearly absolute certainty I can say this: the Great Blackout of 2003 was an accident and any suggestion that al-Qaeda was behind it is absurd. The members of al-Qaeda could claim responsibility for earthquakes and hurricanes as well, but that wouldn’t make it true.

Terrorism Central?By Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | August 18, 2003 PONTEFICATIONS WAS LAST THURSDAY’S ELECTRICAL BLACKOUT that cut off power to millions from Michigan to Massachusetts an act of terrorism?  “No,” announced the White House less than an hour after it began. This reassurance came even before the point of origin of the cascading shutdown in the Northeastern power grid had been narrowed to Canada or the U.S. or, as experts now suspect, to Ohio. It did not help that Canada said that the first circuit-breakers clicked off at Niagara Falls, or that Canada initially said a lightning strike was the cause,...

Midwest power officials failed to isolate the electrical perfect storm building for hours before a huge current surge shot through the Northeast grid to trigger the largest blackout in the country's history, systems operators said yesterday. "We all want to know why Midwest didn't or couldn't quarantine the problem," said a New York State official who spoke on grounds of anonymity. Power officials also said the agency that supervises the Midwest power grid was aware that something wasn't right hours before the situation reached crisis levels. Not only did the Midwest utilities fail to wall off the problem, they never...

Al Qaida's Abu Hafs Brigades has claimed responsibility for the blackout last week in the Northeast and Midwest United States. A communiqué by the Abu Hafs Brigades made reference to Operation Quick Lightning in the Land of the Tyrant of this Generation." It was published as "the third communiqué by the "Brigades." In the first, they accepted responsibility for the downing of an airplane in Kenya. The second accepted responsibility for the Jakarta bombing of the Marriott hotel on August 5, 2003. The new communiqué says that in compliance with the orders of Osama bin Laden to strike at the...

Investigators say it will be weeks before they know for sure what caused last week's massive power failure, but their principal focus is on the actions of one Ohio power company where the blackout seems to have started. Akron-based FirstEnergy, the largest utility in the country, has a long record of troubling safety, operational and financial problems, an ABCNEWS investigation has found. Unionized employees complain the company cut back on workers who maintain its transmission lines. In addition, its Ohio nuclear plant was shut down by federal regulators last year because of safety violations, including a football-sized hole in the...

Monday, August 18, 2003 Al Qaida's Abu Hafs Brigades has claimed responsibility for the blackout last week in the Northeast and Midwest United States. A communiqué by the Abu Hafs Brigades made reference to Operation Quick Lightning in the Land of the Tyrant of this Generation." It was published as "the third communiqué by the "Brigades." In the first, they accepted responsibility for the downing of an airplane in Kenya. The second accepted responsibility for the Jakarta bombing of the Marriott hotel on August 5, 2003. The new communiqué says that in compliance with the orders of Osama bin Laden...

<p>Although government and energy-industry officials have continued to state that Thursday's massive power blackout was not an act of terrorism, they are unable to rule out the possibility that a computer hacker plunged 50 million people into darkness, a source told Fox News Monday.</p>

It was a blip on the screen that turned into a monster, leaving 50 million Americans powerless. The inside story of a sleepless night. In fact, federal investigators ruled terrorism out within the first 45 minutes—perhaps prematurely. True, there was no detectable physical intrusion; nor had terrorist hackers left the usual cyber footprints. But despite the initial reassuring signals to the public, during an emergency conference call with senior officials at 5:30 p.m., the CIA “put on the radar” the possibility that there might have been some terrorist tampering. Informants and interrogations of terror suspects have led the CIA to...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Ohio utility under intense scrutiny in the biggest blackout in the nation's history said Sunday there were problems, including strange voltage fluctuations, in the Midwest power grid hours before its transmission lines failed. "What happened ... is much more complex than a few tripped power lines in our system," said Todd Schneider, a spokesman for FirstEnergy Corp., which went on the offensive Sunday after being targeted by investigators. He said that some of the unusual power conditions occurred "as early as noon" - more than three hours before FirstEnergy's high-voltage lines, which have been the focus...

Ohio Lines Failed Before Blackout By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA The events that led to Thursday's blackout began when several high-voltage transmission lines near Cleveland failed, investigators said yesterday. The utility that owns the lines said an alarm that should have alerted controllers to the shutdowns also failed. The line failures — including one triggered by contact with a tree — began at 3:06 p.m., 65 minutes before a wide swath of the United States and Canada lost power, said Michehl R. Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council, the power industry group that is investigating the blackout. It is...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Computer network and security experts said on Thursday there was no evidence the power outage in the northeastern United States and Canada was related to the Blaster worm that began spreading on Monday. "I have no thought that (the outage) is Blaster related," said Alan Paller, research director at the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. "The Internet is built not to worry about that," he said. "If you blow up any big chunk, it is designed to work." "There is no information available at this time to indicate that the power outages in the Northeast...

Power grids and blackouts Yep, the lights went out for 50 million people yesterday, and we still don't really know why it happened. Canada blames a fault in our system; we blame a fault in Canada's system, or a bad transmission line in the Midwest, but we're all sure it wasn't a terrorist. Why? Just because nothing blew up? Let's try a little experiment, change the word terror to sabotage. Sound any more likely now? The leading theory on the root cause of the failure, at least, the leading theory as I rode in to work this morning, was the...

WASHINGTON (AP)--The failure of three transmission lines in northern Ohio was the likely trigger of the nation's biggest power blackout, a leading investigator said Saturday. Experts are working to understand why the disruption spread throughout the Northeast and Midwest and into Canada, and was not contained. ``We are fairly certain'' that the problem started in Ohio, said Michehl Gent, head of the North American Electric Reliability Council. ``We are now trying to determine why the situation was not brought under control.'' Gent said the transmission system was designed to isolate problems such as those apparently involving the three lines in...

A day after the still-mysterious record blackout that descended upon New York, Canada and the Midwest, about the only thing electricity experts could say for sure today was this: It could happen again. But what, exactly, happened? It will take days or even weeks before engineers determine the cause - or more likely, series of causes, said Michehl R. Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability Council. An early sign of trouble Thursday was a wild swing in power in the loop surrounding Lake Erie, Gent said in a conference call from the Princeton headquarters of the nonprofit industry...

Autism appears to be caused by a reduction in the brain at birth and then extremely rapid development in the first few months of life, researchers in San Diego, California said. "What we've discovered is really very startling - the first glimpse of when autism begins," said Eric Courchesne, director of the autism research center at the Pediatric Hospital of San Diego. "Excessive brain growth does not allow time for accumulation of experiences and emotions that guide and shape normal behavior." Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life, resulting from a neurological...

In the aftermath of the attacks of 9/11, the left paid a lot of lip service to the "root causes" of terrorism. They chastised President Bush for going to war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, rather than trying to "understand" what motivated the 9/11 terrorists. If terrorist training camps all over a country do not constitute a root cause for terrorism, then what does? Now that a war with Iraq is being debated, the root cause argument has suddenly faded into the background. Perhaps that’s because Saddam Hussein is one of the root causes of terrorism and by...

The National Park Service was recently induced to add at its Civil War battlefield sites information about the role slavery played in causing the South to leave the Union and go to war with the North. Is it going to follow a balanced policy and describe many Northerners' willingness to let slavery continue to exist in the South?Although he did not approve of slavery, President Lincoln considered blacks inferior to whites. Whites and blacks, he believed, could not coexist in equality. His pre-war solution to this problem was to return them to Africa.In his first inaugural address, Lincoln assured the...

Too much MSG could cause blindness 15:32 26 October 02 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition Eating too much monosodium glutamate - the flavour enhancer common in oriental and processed foods - could make you go blind. Easy on the tongue, hard on the eyes (Image: CARL DE KEYSER/MAGNUM) Researchers at Hirosaki University in Japan have found that rats fed on diets high in MSG suffer vision loss and have thinner retinas. Glutamate is an amino acid that acts as a neurotransmitter. It has already been shown to cause nerve damage in experiments where it is injected directly into the...