Stop your car and put it in neutral at the base of Spook Hill in Lake Wales, Florida, and it will roll 200 feet uphill, according to reports drawn from the Wall Street Journal.
- UFO's have been observed over the suburbs of New York City, near Edwards Air Force Base in California, over Gulf Breeze, Florida, over central Russia and chased in Belgium by F-16s, whose radar showed a one-second acceleration from 175 miles per hour to 1,100 miles per hour and a descent of 3,000 feet in that sixtieth of a minute. And there have been many reported close encounters with extra-terrestrial beings from a variety of quarters.- Every month new stories emerge, paralleling those told to us by parents, relatives and friends, of appearances by those who have just died or who have been long dead, often bringing some sort of message or guidance.
- Elizabeth Taylor senses danger boarding a plane with Michael Wilding, insists they leave it. The next day, they read it crashed. Later she has a sense of imminent death getting into a helicopter. She convinces everyone to abandon it. The chopper, she reports, crashes shortly after with another crew.
The 1991 Utah State University Fife Conference, named after eminent folklorists Austin and Alta Fife, June 10-14 will focus on supernatural phenomena and the way in which folk traditions express or account for these.
Topics will include many aspects of religious folklore, near-death experiences, spiritual visitations, unidentified flying object or UFO encounters, Navajo witchcraft stories and Halloween customs.
The annual conference is open to the public and registration information may be obtained by contacting Conference and Institutes, Utah State University, Logan, Utah 84322 or by telephoning Thomas Borg, 750-1764.
Three speakers whose fields are cultural anthropology and parapsychology will join a slate of local folklorists who have participated in previous Fife Conferences.
David Hufford, director of the Center for Humanistic Medicine, College of Medicine at the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania; Sylvia Grider, associate professor of folklore at Texas A&M, whose dissertation was on supernatural narratives of children; and James McClenon, assistant professor of sociology, Elizabeth City State University, N.C., who works in parapsychology and supernatural narratives, are scheduled to participate in the conference on the Logan campus.
Utah folklorists Jan. H. Brunvand, William A. Wilson and Barre Toelken will help explore the traditions and phenomenology of the "not-everyday dimension," according to Toelken, who heads the USU Folklore Program.