A week long series of evening lectures and demonstrations took place at Halton Lea library, Runcorn.  The lectures were given in the auditorium and much use was made of Powerpoint slide, audio and video projection.  The lectures were given by MARA members and independent investigator Colin Veacock.  Colin gave a talk on paranormal happenings in the Halton area.  Mark Rosney and Mike Jaega also gave talks on paranormal Halton but added the UFO phenomenon and strange creature sightings to their talks.  Bill Bimson gave a talk on the scientific evidence for extra-terrestrial visitation and Tony Eccles gave talks on UFO phenomena and the sinister aspect of UFO sightings including animal mutilation.  Pete Tiernan gave a talk on Britain's most haunted house which is allegedly Chingle Hall in Lancashire.  All of the evenings were well attended but on the Friday evening which was described as "Fright Night" when Pete Tiernan talked about Chingle Hall and Tony Eccles talked about the sinister side of the UFO phenomenon, the auditorium was packed to capacity and was described by Janette Fleming of Halton Libraries as the best ever attendance for any event at the library.

During the interval between talks, free tea coffee and biscuits were provided by Halton Lea library and the public were encouraged to take part in paranormal experiments such as dowsing and ESP testing.

Fiona Campbell gave talks on parapsychology including the Ganzfeld Experiment and a MARA research experiment known as the Humphrey Experiment  The latter requires the setting up of various pieces of recording equipment and a demonstration of the experiment in front of the audience indicated that there was some unusual electromagnetic activity which was recorded on a chart recorder.  One member of the audience claimed that during the demonstration, she could feel a tight band around her head and a tingling in her lips and she could see an aura around the people taking part in the experiment.  The participants themselves did not feel any thing unusual but the recorded electromagnetic activity was greater than what would normally be recorded when the experiment takes place at the usual location.  While setting up for the experiment, a member of the audience (Jim McDowall) took a picture with a digital camera and found some rather strange orbs in the photograph.  Jim McDowall has a website http://homepage.ntlworld.com/james.mcdowall4/ with many pictures of orbs and other anomalies on it.  The picture he took is shown below along with blowups of the main areas were orbs were found.  MARA do not claim that the orbs indicate paranormal phenomena at the conference but they are shown to the public for general interest.  Further pictures from the conference are shown below the orbs picture provided by Jim McDowall

MARA would like to thank Jeanette Fleming of Halton Libraries for allowing MARA to give the talks and demonstrations at Halton Lea Library and for the tea coffee and biscuits provided all week.  We would also like to thank everyone who attended and for the stimulating conversations and ideas generated during the intervals and at the end of lectures 

In the 3 pictures above, Fiona Campbell invites members of the public to perform Psychokinesis during the tea/coffee break, Tony Eccles delivers a talk on UFOs and is then put back in his cage to do the washing up :-) 

Meet the Investigator Night

At Halton Lea Library 8 May 2003 7-9pm

This event was a great success for the MARA team. Although there were fewer speakers than originally planned, the evening went very smoothly. The lecture room was filled with a large group of new faces and a couple of old ones, who were recognised from the last event we held there. Coffee, tea and biscuits were made available to all who attended and the guest speakers were treated to some lovely sandwiches. The team also managed to sell some copies of The Researcher.

Pete Tiernen was the first to talk and his presentation on Chingle Hall was very entertaining. He made use of Microsoft PowerPoint, and this added to his exciting delivery. The audience was certainly entertained by his ideas of Chingle Hall being a ‘des res,’ his selected spooky imagery and those particularly haunting sounds.

Next up was Tony Eccles and he gave a short presentation on the entities confronted by witnesses. His focus was not on space visitors per se but something closer to home, a sinister intelligence that can appear at will and whose purpose may be to serve as a guide for human destiny. An animated talk which included Tony’s impression of the Risley ‘Spaceman’.

Fiona Campbell gave a somewhat different presentation; this was a remote viewing experiment that included the whole audience. This was a lot of fun as many people enjoyed being part of the activity. Fiona held onto an image that she did not know the contents to, she had asked a friend of hers to select an image for the experiment and this was done so that the experiment could rule out the possibility of telepathy being present. At the end of the session it was interesting to note that most people were able to draw something and only a couple of people chose to use words as a means of conveying any signals they may have been picking up.

Finally, Mark Rosney gave a brilliant account of the group’s investigation into EVP. Mark held the audience’s attention extremely well by presenting technical information in a very simplistic and understandable way and by showing how one particular case was solved via the analysis of two people who were trained as sound engineers, Paul Fitzgibbon and Mark himself. However, Mark then went onto play the audience a weird track of an EVP case that has yet to be solved.

Thanks must also go to Karianne and Dennis Grierson who came along to support the evening. Karianne has offered to do a talk on the subject of Wicca for MARA week long event at Halton Lea Library in July of this year. Thanks to Mike Jaega, Mark Rosney for organising the MARA side of things and to Janette Fleming for hosting the event at Halton Lea Library.