VIDEO footage of bright balls of light forming a crop circle will be shown to Western Australians during a series of seminars on the connection between crop circle formation and contact with alien intelligence.

The seminars, to be delivered by two of world’s leading crop circle and alien contact researchers, Janet Ossebaard and Mary Rodwell, are the first of their kind in Australia.ºº

Ms Ossebaard, director for the Dutch Centre for Crop Circle Studies (DCCCS), author and producer of award winning documentaries on the subject, said crop circles remain an unexplained enigma.

“What we do know is that crop circles have been reported in many countries all over the world and found in mediums such as wheat, barley, canola, grass, corn/maize, trees, ice, rice paddies and linseed,” Ms Ossebaard said.

“We also know they are formed in just a few seconds as a result of light, sound and magnetism interacting with plants to form amazing geometric patterns.”

“What we don‚t know for certain is who is making them and why.”

Ms Ossebaard said contrary to common belief scientists have found people haven’t made the majority of circles.

Many are claimed each year, but only very few are actually man-made.

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The giant lizard dines on stray cats. It menaces people with its hiss, and, with each sighting, the mystery around it grows.

At least, that’s what the neighbors say.

The mini-Godzilla — a Nile monitor lizard — has been lurking around their Opal Court cul-de-sac for months, possibly years. They have enough grainy photos of the African predator to prove it.

“Interested?” one man asks from a door that he has cracked open just far enough to pop out his head.

He briefly disappears inside with a terse, “Stay right where you are.” He then returns with a fuzzy printout of his next-door neighbor’s fence. The nearly 3-foot lizard is a brown streak that blends into the fence.

The man said he has seen the monitor once. His wife has seen it twice.

“Animal control didn’t really want to talk about it,” the man says. “It was April 8.”

Kristen Hathaway remembers that day well. The 20-year-old was the first to spot the monitor while looking for her Chihuahua pup.

“I was like ‘Kiwi, come here,’ ” Hathaway said. She didn’t have her glasses on and mistook the lizard for her dog. Then she got closer.

“I was like, OK, that’s not my dog,” Hathaway said. Then she ran — for a camera.

“No one is going to believe that this thing is in my cul-de-sac, so that’s why I took pictures,” she said.

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The naked swimmers were in the water for 14 hours and completed one length of the loch, before high swell and low temperatures forced them to reconsider.

The relay, organised by British Naturism, was scheduled to complete three lengths between Fort Augustus and Lochend, covering 69 miles.

British Naturism president Pat Thompson said the weather was “atrocious”.

The team, which included a writer, a policeman and a housewife, had hoped to raise more than £2,000 for Cancer Research UK.

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TWO CAPE Town men had a hair-raising encounter with a great white shark when the predator attacked the surfski of one of the paddlers at the weekend.

Three hours before Trevor Wright’s ordeal at Sunny Cove, Fish Hoek, the beach was closed because of a shark sighting.

Wright and his paddling partner Alan Weston - both aged 54 - did not know this when they went out on the water on Saturday afternoon.

Shortly after they set off near Sunny Cove station, Wright’s surfski was attacked by what was estimated to be a four-metre-long shark. He escaped unscathed.

The attack took place about 100m from where Fish Hoek resident Tyna Webb, 77, was attacked in November last year.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Authorities on Tuesday dismissed a claim that a wrangler had nabbed a 7-foot-long alligator named “Reggie” from a city lake, where he had been dumped several months ago and repeatedly avoided capture.

Earlier Tuesday, a man claiming to be wrangler Jay Young, who had been hired by the city, told several media outlets, including The Associated Press, that he had caught the alligator overnight.

That story was cast into doubt when the promised delivery of the alligator to the Los Angeles Zoo never happened.

“To the best of my knowledge and all the reports I have received this morning, it was a hoax,” said Ron Berkowitz, the Los Angeles Recreation and Parks superintendent, who supervises the area that includes the lake. “I called the zoo to verify and the gator is not there. I called the rangers, the city council office and my staff at the lake. There was no capture.”

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ST. BLAZEY, England: The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals warned people in St. Blazey, England, to be on the lookout for an alligator sighted in an area pond.

The society issued the warning to the Cornish town when Stacey Clayton said she spotted a 2-foot gator while she and her 7-month-old daughter fed ducks in a pond.

“I noticed this big log in the water, but as I got closer I saw its eyes,” Clayton told The London Telegraph. “I wasn’t sure whether it was alive so I threw a stone near it. It lifted its head and looked straight at me.”

While the society warned area residents to be on the lookout for the gator, it also said the creature that likely once was a pet may have already died from the cold.

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Did you get the e-mail with images of the big alligator purported to have been caught swimming down the street in New Orleans?

You guessed it. An urban myth (but a good one, no?).

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After reports of an alligator in a Pike county pond, several people spent Monday searching for the animal.

City officials who work in the area everyday say an alligator could be possible, but they have seen a beaver on several occassions that could be mistaken for an alligator.

“Looking at it on the inside of the water, it looks just like an alligator. It’s probably three or three and a half feet long,” said Ricky Slone, a city employee.

“If you look up and down both ponds, you’ll see where the beavers have been hard at work,” said Pike County Fire Chief Tommy Hall.

Officials said they will continue to search the waters to make sure there are no alligators, and if anyone see anything unusual they urge citizens to report it immediately.

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NORTH MIAMI BEACH, Florida A crocodile caused quite a scare in a North Miami Beach, Florida neighborhood when it was found in a resident’s garage.

Dr. Morton Zisk’s wife found the large croc Wednesday under a car in his garage.

“She came out of the carport to get the morning newspaper and saw the alligator, came back in and said to me, ‘We got a problem,’ and I said, ‘What?’ She said there’s an alligator in the carport.’ I thought she was kidding because we went though the exact same thing 15 years ago, exactly the same way,” said Zisk.

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A Chatsworth policeman has been implicated in the killing of a young woman, who was whipped to death in an eight-hour exorcism ritual.

The family of 20-year-old Farhana Khan on Monday told the Daily News a policeman was one of the spiritual leaders who had conducted the exorcism. They say the policeman is based at Chatsworth.

Inspector Collin Chetty of the Bayview police confirmed that a policeman had been questioned about 20-year-old Khan’s death.

He said their detectives were also questioning witnesses and family members, but no arrests had been made.

“If we find the policeman played a part in the girl’s murder, he will be arrested,” said Chetty.

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A woman has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing a friend during an exorcism ritual, police said Thursday.

Justice Claudette Singh imposed the sentence late Wednesday, saying Patricia Alvez, 42, had been convicted “of a shocking crime which claimed the life of a woman she befriended.”

A 12-member jury convicted Alvez of manslaughter last week for killing Kamille Seenauth, 34, on Feb. 15, 2002. She allegedly beat Seenauth with an iron bar in an attempt to drive evil spirits out of her.

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A SUNSHINE Coast university student will need to have an artificial lens fitted to his right eye after it was speared by a wild darter bird perched on a railing at Australia Zoo at Beerwah.

The freak accident happened last Thursday in the open wetlands area of the zoo, which is frequented by wild ducks, herons and other waterbirds.

Similar to a cormorant, the darter’s thin beak popped Owen Vagg’s eye cornea and lens, releasing his eye fluid.

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SALEM, Mass. — Three would-be ghost busters appeared in court in Salem Wednesday after trespassing on old hospital grounds that the men believe are haunted.

NewsCenter 5’s Jack Harper reported that Matthew Selecky, Matthew Doherty and Ron Gordon took a video camera to the old Danvers State Hospital.

“Many people have said that it was haunted, and we just wanted to check it out. We got caught for trespassing,” Selecky said.

The three men were arraigned on trespassing charges. Each admits a fascination with ghosts and believes there are spirits at the hospital.

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A struggle between a Burmese python and an American alligator has left both creatures dead in a Florida swamp.

A photo taken by wildlife researcher Michael Barron shows the hindquarters of the 2m alligator protruding from the belly of the 4m python after the snake apparently exploded as it tried to digest its victim, the Miami Herald reported.

The Burmese python population has exploded in the Florida Everglades as owners dump unwanted pets.

Scientists have documented four encounters between pythons snakes and alligators in the last three years.

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Scientists digging in a remote Indonesian cave have uncovered a jaw bone that they say adds more evidence that a tiny prehistoric Hobbit-like species once existed.

The jaw is from the ninth individual believed to have lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. The bones are in a wet cave on the on the island of Flores in the eastern limb of the Indonesian archipelago, near Australia.

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