Skagway to head up Alchemite Trial?

Rumor has it that Federal Judge George Albert Skagway of Reno, Nevada has been tapped to preside over the trial for treason of Sahara Knax and seven high-ranking members of the Alchemite cult.

Skagway, was born in 1946 the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia, Canada, but has been a resident of Nevada since 1962. He attended the University of Nevada in Reno and graduated from Stanford Law in 1973. He was nominated to the bench by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and is frequently referred to as a 'moderate' in the press. He has made no public statements about the mystical outbreak or the Alchemite cult.

In 1976, Skagway, his wife Stacy and their daughter June were travelling to Carson City when their car was struck by an oncoming motorist. Skagway, the only survivor of the crash, has been confined to a wheelchair since that time.

Though this rumor has yet to be confirmed, it raises a number of questions: will the trial be held in, or near, the state of Nevada? And will authorities allow the media full access to proceedings, as was promised when Sahara Knax was arrested in December of 2009?

No Confirmed Photo Evidence of July 4th Sightings

A young man riding bareback on a brown and white horse was spotted in U.S. towns across the nation as July Fourth celebrations concluded with latenight picnics and fireworks displays.

Described by most witnesses as a teenaged Native American male with long black hair, clad in khaki-colored camoflage shorts, the apparition was spotted at around sunset in towns in at least nine states, mostly in the Midwest, including Illinois, Kansas, North Dakota, and Nebraska.

Mistaken by many celebrants as a performer, the rider did not participate in or interfere with fireworks displays, and was nowhere to be seen after the fire shows concluded.

Digital photographs of the rider have been posted online, but due to low light conditions most show a featureless silhouette on horseback. At least one such image has clearly been doctored to bolster an unsubstantiated claim to have seen the young man. Another image, captured on film, shows a dozen additional riders of various ages and genders, in the background behind the apparition; this shot has been discounted as a hoax by witnesses who insist he was alone.

Easing into another magical summer...

Everything seems to be in a bit of a holding pattern, doesn't it? The mystical forest has stopped expanding, thenks to the fire brigades working its perimeter. The first wave of refugees from Oregon has mostly been settled. Clashes between rogue mystics and law enforcement have become almost routine, as have the reports of contaminated animals turning up outside the firebreaks.

The government says it is going to bring Sahara Knax and the Alchemite leadership to trial, and are quietly prepping their case. The promise is that the trial will be open, on TV for everyone to see.

Just so you don't get too complacent, here are a few things from the magical rumor mill as we wait for the legal festivities to start:

• Online video services are voluntarily pulling any and all posts by anyone claiming to demonstrate or explain the magical objects known as chantments.
• A hot spring in Yellowstone Park and much of a square mile surrounding it were found frozen solid, a sure sign that someone drew heat for a major casting.
• A certain Congressperson's talk of a law requiring all US citizens to go out in public emptyhanded but for glass objects and consumer electronics--both of which seem to be magically resistant--won't quite die out. This despite the fact that such a restriction on personal freedom would be both unenforceable and ineffective.

Schism looming for Alchemite Leaders?

A former Alchemite has gone into police protection to escape vengeance of her former fellow cultists.

This blog has learned that the Prima known as Breeze has been a gold mine of information on how the cult has managed to stay out of police custody.

Breeze has told authorities that the cult's leader, self-styled goddess Sahara Knax, has hidden caches of magical objects in locations throughout the United States. The location of these caches is revealed to senior Alchemites, who retrieve them for use in their ongoing rebellion against the Federal Government.

Rumor has it that competition for the various chantments is fierce. If Breeze is to be believed, bickering has broken out among the faithful over dispensation of the most powerful objects. Though no Alchemites have come forward publicly to accuse their leaders of hoarding or misusing magical objects, another sign of dissent within the cult may be a photo that has been widely distributed on the Internet this week.

The picture appears to show two missing children at the heart of the government effort to repress the Alchemical cult. Ellie Forest and her brother Carson have been missing since their mother Caroline joined Sahara, shortly after the original mystical outbreak in September 2009. The image of the two children, which immediately went viral, is dated March 21st and shows them posing with the Alchemite known as Passion. Its source has not been traced.

The children's father, former Portland Oregon police detective William Forest, has made no official comment as yet on the image. The Bureau of Mystical Affairs has confirmed, however, that the reward for the children's safe return was increased, last week, to $75,000 U.S.

Magic to clean up Great Pacific Garbage Dump?

An individual using the alias "Rumplestiltskin" claims to be removing tons of plastic garbage floating in the North Pacific Gyre.

According to an e-mail sent directly to this blog, Rumplestiltskin possesses a magical object, a chantment, that extracts pollution from seawater without damaging marine plant or animal life. According to Rumplestiltskin, the object, a baby's teething ring, was a 'gift' and came with written instructions on how to use it safely.

"Nothing on the materials provided says whether this object came to me from Sahara Knax and the Alchemites, but I am not a believer in the Alchemite cult," writes Rumplestiltskin, who added that some of the plastic is being burned in a home-built generator to provide power for their effort to clean the ocean.

The North Pacific Gyre is located in the Northern Pacific Ocean and is reputed to be heavily polluted with small particles of plastic garbage, over an area twice as big as the State of Texas.

Rumplestiltskin is not the first chantment user to claim to have successfully turned ordinary electricity into power for magical objects, a claim that has yet to be verified. The proposition that people use some form of recitation, sometimes referred to as "cantation," to channel power into their mystical objects is becoming widely accepted. Cantations have been said to allow mystics to draw power from their surroundings: including the life energy of nearby animals and people. This last procedure, known as vamping, has been used to deadly effect by Alchemites in their clashes with law enforcement.

The fact that magic requires energy has been well-documented, and in one well-publicized experiment, physicist Ravi Sharp has shown that a candle and a light-generating chantment use the same amounts of energy to produce comparable amounts of light. Sharp argues that this implies that magic cannot be used to simply reverse climate change and other devastating effects of human habitation on earth. This runs strongly contrary to claims made by Sahara Knax and her followers.

"If the power requirements are comparable, we will still need fossil fuels to accomplish large-scale effects, just as we would through the use of technology. This implies that using magic to combat pollution might simply beget more pollution."

In a related story, Sharp went missing from his home in Brooklyn, New York, two weeks ago.

Rumplestiltskin's e-mail message includes a call for a volunteer video-blogger and a marine biologist to witness and document the use of the magical teething ring. The e-mail message promises future communications, including a schematic of the power generator and information about the cantation used to turn electricity into magical energy.

The Canadian and U.S. Coast Guard have statements to the effect that individuals caught using magic in coastal waters will be arrested and prosecuted under the increasingly strict anti-mystical laws.

Missing officers said to be "caught in dreams"

By now, hundreds of missing U.S. soldiers, police officers and National Guardsmen have appeared in the dreams of their family members, lovers and close friends. Though there is no way to conclusively prove that these people remain alive, a number have been able to provide answers to "third-party" questions from loved ones.

"Essentially a third-party question is something only the missing party and one other person would know," says Jules Mayfern, a 2nd year psychology student at the University of Alberta who pioneered the questioning technique. "My brother, for example, went missing in December and I wrote down two questions for my parents to ask. They gave me a question as well."

"Neither of my parents knew the answer to my questions, but my brother did. So, six weeks later, my father was able to ask Del for a 'secret code' we'd exchanged as kids. When he woke up, he contacted me and I was able to confirm he'd gotten the answer right."

The widespread success of this questioning technique has led many to assume that Alchemite activists have been truthful when they say these so-called 'prisoners of war' have not been harmed, but merely trapped in dreams. There has been no response to calls for the Alchemites to prove the imprisonment can be reversed. The cult's spokesperson, Passion, has declined to comment on a growing number of reporters, anti-Alchemite bloggers and former members of the group who have also been similarly trapped.

Mystical activity on the rise outside U.S.

Quiet rumors of magic-wielding "do-gooders" are continuing to circulate among the blogosphere, coming from every nation on earth and giving rise to speculation that the Alchemite Cult is far from down and out, as authorities have claimed.

Some reports will no doubt prove to be hoaxes, but claims have been made about people with chantments working miracles of every type and description--erecting shelters in flooded areas, combating or curing diseases from cholera to malaria, extinguishing forest fires, fixing broken toys, repairing roads and solving crimes.

As yet, none of these alleged Alchemites has come forward to take credit for their actions, and the cult's spokeswoman, Passion, will only say that the hand of their imprisoned goddess, Sahara Knax, can be found wherever you seek.

Within the United States, Alchemite gangs have continued to clash with police and the National Guard, most recently in Selma, Alabama where ten Guardsmen are reported missing. One Alchemite, Jemmy Burlein, was captured in the skirmish.

As far as anyone knows, Astrid Lethewood remains alive and at large.