Scientists are always scratching their heads. After a severe drought, when they expected numbers of wading birds to shrink, wildlife biologist Peter Frederick found that their numbers were the highest in 25 years. Go figure.

I have long subscribed to the idea that UFOs are just hallucinations caused by movements of the ground below us - after reading the work of Paul Devereux. Now there is scientific evidence. A labratory experiment has produced lights and electromagnetic effects from earthquakes.

"In a recent issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research, physicist Friedemann Freund theorizes that positive charges can be generated when huge stresses are generated along faults in the Earth's crust. The rocks in the crust normally act as insulators that conduct electrical charges only poorly. But under the severe stress generated before an earthquake, these rocks may behave briefly like 'p-type semiconductors" found in computer chips, capable of releasing large numbers of positive charges referred to as "holes.'

These charges speed upward toward the surface of the Earth at between 220 and 660 mph.

Freund, a professor at San Jose State University in California, thinks they ionize the atmosphere upon reaching the air, accounting for the bizarre effects -- radio interference and colored streamers, flashes and glows reported by thousands of observers."

The Anchorage Daily News has more...

"Pulses of light have been slowed down and stopped in a solid for the first time. Alexey Turukhin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US and colleagues used an yttrium-based crystal to slow light pulses to just 45 metres per second, and then to trap and release them. Previously, these effects had only been seen in gases, which are more difficult to control. A solid should be easier to develop into real applications, such as high-density information storage for quantum computing" - More at PhysicsWeb

Note: One month later they did the same thing at Rowland Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

PLUS! Electricity goes faster than the speed of light...(well, they cheat)

"Geologists once thought magma plates such as the one that created the Hawaiian Islands stay in one spot as the plates of the Earth's crust move over them. For years, they used these hot spots as a fixed point of reference to measure the motion of the plates in relation to the Earth's core"

But it is the hot spots, not the plates, that are moving. More in this New Scientist article