Previously, in Indigo Springs:

What we know for certain, so far:

145 years ago: Wildfire at an illegal potlatch kills nineteen celebrants, including popular leader Godfrey Walks-in-Shadow. The fire effectively ends a dispute between townspeople and the Chinook Nation over expansion of town boundaries beyond Indigo Ravine.

122 years ago: Elizabeth Walks-in-Shadow disappears after filing a lawsuit claiming ownership over artifacts recovered from potlatch fire.

3 years ago: A chronically under-employed gardener and handyman named Albert Lethewood dies in the Indigo Springs Hospital, of apparent liver failure.

2 years ago: Albert Lethewood's daughter, Astrid, moves into her father's old house with childhood friends Jackson Glade and Sahara Knax.

Eighteen months ago: A minor tremor in Indigo Springs is registered by Pacific Northwest Seismic Network in Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.

Seventeen months ago:

A hostage siege at house formerly belonging to Albert Lethewood ends with one dead, one missing, and three taken into custody. Images of Images of Sahara Knax escaping the scene the scene on a a flying carpet are broadcast by news agencies around the world.

Indigo Springs is epicenter of a 6.3 Richter quake. Building are reported destroyed and there are multiple fatalities. Dozens of people are missing.

Massive release of magical energy concurrent with earthquake causes vegetation and animal to mutate and suffer from giantism.

Widespread panic spreads across the world as news footage and social networks continues to spread word of magical contamination.

Sixteen months ago:

Evacuation of Indigo Springs begins

Sahara Knax declares herself source of magic at Western Music Festival in California and founds the Alchemite cult.

The forest surrounding Indigo Springs is declared uninhabitable; search for missing residents is ended. Town is cordoned off and fire crews patrol the boundary, burning everything that comes out.

Falling stock markets trigger global recession.

Alchemite membership suspected to top 100,000.

Fourteen months ago:

Alchemites sink USS Vigilant and distribute video footage of the sinking worldwide via the Internet

Alchemites attack government facility in Washington. Key witnesses from hostage siege escape, but Sahara Knax is is arrested

Nine months ago: Caroline Forest, wife of Portland Police Detective William Forest, is arrested on charges of terrorism and treason. The Forest children, Carson and Eleanor, remain missing despite a substantial reward offer.

Six months ago: Sahara Knax and multiple co-defendants charged in Federal Court for terrorist acts and treason

Wendover Air Base to rise again

The government's plan to try cult leader Sahara Knax and a number of her high priestesses for treason took another step forward today with the announcement that a former air force base in Wendover, Utah, will be home to a temporary Federal Courthouse and a short-term U.S. Air Force operation.

Wendover Air Force Base was the training site for the B59 unit which dropped atomic bombs on Japan in the latter days of World War II. The base had been given to Wendover City and converted to a civilian field, but many of the original military buildings and two long runways remain. The runways are key to the continuing efforts by the USAF to suppress magical contamination in the town of Indigo Springs, Oregon.

Authorities have been tight-lipped about the move, but it seems apparent that setting up a temporary courthouse on a military base is a strategy to prevent attempts to rescue Knax, by bring a concentrated security presence to bear on the trial. Federal authorities lost considerable face last year when two of Knax's co-conspirators, Astrid Lethewood and Mark Clumber, escaped from a base in Washington State. Since that time, Alchemites have clashed with the Navy, Coast Guard, National Guard and numerous state and federal police forces. Though a number of highly-placed Alchemites have been arrested in these clashes, the price has been high: at least 200 police officers, federal agents and soldiers have been listed as missing.

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.

Since Sahara Knax was captured in a failed attack on a military base in Northwestern Oregon, a series of mysterious technical glitches have prevented me from posting to this blog. I'm back now, and here's a few of the news stories I'm tracking as the mystical outbreak continues--

• In the weeks since Knax's arrest, there have been several major clashes between Alchemites, various police forces, the National Guard, and the actual Army. The skirmishes have taken place across the country. A half-dozen Alchemites have been captured in these clashes; over thirty police officers and soldiers are rumored to be MIA, but the government has declined to confirm this.
• Those same missing soldiers, it is rumored, have turned up in the dreams of their friends and loved ones, apparently safe and sound. (No official confirmation on that either, but the phenomenon's pretty widespread.)
  
• In the absence of Sahara Knax, the leader of the Alchemites still at large seems to be a woman known as Passion. Little is known about Passion, but a two million dollar reward for information leading to her arrest has nevertheless been posted.
• As even the mainstream media has reported, the mystical contamination in Oregon has spread radically, and three more towns in the Indigo Springs / Great Blue Reservoir region have been evacuated.
• The mystical celebrity known as Patience has not been seen since Sahara Knax was arrested. It has been rumored that Patience may have left government custody, and that perhaps Astrid Lethewood has escaped, too. Again, nobody in a position of authority seems willing to confirm or deny this.
• What the government is willing to tell us is that Sahara Knax will be facing charges of terrorism, assault and treason in Federal Court as soon as a facility can be secured in which to hold a trial.

Signal lost...

Followers of this blog will note it hasn't been active for a few weeks--ever since the Alchemites sank that aircraft carrier a month ago, I've had a host of problems logging on and posting. Alchemite interference? Government tampering? Nobody wants to be paranoid, but those of us trying to cover the mystical outbreak do seem to be having a lot of computer problems lately.

I'm hoping to resume full coverage shortly; in the meantime, here's a contest for you all.

Mystical outbreak changes the weather?

A cold snap and storm in the Midwest may have been triggered by the largest clash to date between authorities and followers sheltering fugitive Sahara Knax.

The Alchemites, as they call themselves, were apparently ransacking the home of a Huron, South Dakota resident when representatives of a new anti-mystical task force arrived on scene to take Knax into custody.

Video shot by the homeowner shows Knax emerging from the house with an object in hand--from all appearances, a child's hobby horse--while reciting gibberish. Moments later, portions of the equipment carried by task force members, including their weapons and restraints, appears to fall apart in segments.

The video also shows fog pooling around Knax and her followers and moving outward from them at increasing speed before it ends abruptly.

Metal objects in a five mile radius around the scene have been sliced to pieces and freezing temperatures are being reported in the Huron area. A serious and unexpected windstorm is raging in the region.

Police injured in clash with Alchemites

(DENVER) Three police officers were rushed to hospital after an attempt to arrest eco-terrorist Sahara Knax at a local casino went awry late last night.

Sources at St. Anthony Central Hospital say that the officers were not shot and are not suffering from mystical contamination. Instead, their condition has been likened to a severe form of either clinical exhaustion or, perhaps, exposure.

The Denver Police Department has yet to make an official statement about the incident, or to respond to critics who state that too few officers were sent to investigate the sighting by a casino blackjack dealer. However, law enforcement officials have been saying for weeks that sightings of Knax have become so routine across both the United States and Canada that few police departments have resources available to respond in force to every sighting.

"Knax was thought to be in the Southern U.S., possibly Georgia, this week," said Mary Freiling. Freiling--along with other self-appointed 'mystic watchers'--decode blog entries and Twitter feeds posted by suspected followers of Knax. "Nobody knew the Alchemites were in Colorado. So many people have cried 'wolf' with regard to seeing her that the police couldn't have expected this call, of all the calls they've had, to be the real thing."

Freiling also pointed to anecdotal reports of other Alchemite enemies falling ill of exposure or exhaustion in the wake of magical events. "The general theory is that they are vamping the life energy out of their victims to power the magic that's destroying the property of these corporate targets."

The injured police officers' names have not been released to the public and their condition is unknown. The Denver Police Department is expected to make a statement about the alleged clash tomorrow morning.

Knax, followers, suspected in Oregon Grape Theft

Bend, OR--Fifty tons of mystically contaminated grapes that were slated for incineration have disappeared from Volcano Vineyards Winery in Bend.

The grapes were taken from a locked cellar late Saturday night. No staff or security were injured in the incident, but one Volcano winemaker is known to be missing, fueling rumors that the grapes were hijacked as part of an attempt to make mystically contaminated vintages of wine.

Multiple sightings of women matching the descriptions of fugitive Sahara Knax and an associate known only Passion were reported in the Bend area in the days before the theft.

Sahara Knax was involved in the original outbreak of mystical energy in the town of Indigo Springs and is now described as being "profoundly" contaminated, with birdlike characteristics including a beak, pinfeathers and growths on her back (which have been described by witnesses as "winglike.") Like other victims of the mystical outbreak, Knax is thought to be also suffering from delusions, and has convinced an unknown number of Americans that she may be a goddess, a living embodiment of the spirit of the Earth. Blog posts and online communities have variously hailed her as "the first prophet of the Millennium," "An Avenging Angel of the Ecological Movement," and an eco-terrorist. Her followers, some of whom refer to themselves as Alchemites, say that the working magic is a holy act, and is the key to reversing global climate change.

In the meantime, Oregon winemakers south and west of the town of Indigo Springs have suffered millions of dollars of damage to their vineyards. Windborne contamination has caused some vines to grow rapidly and necessitated the burning of acres of arable land, while alchemically contaminated bears have destroyed much of the healthy crops remaining on the vine.

Mystical contamination spreads...

Sixteen people were apprehended by health officials this morning and put in quarantine after they tested positive for mystical contamination, say anonymous sources within the CDC.

The individuals, mostly residents of Indigo Springs, Oregon, were not evacuated with the majority of the townspeople. Most had escaped in the confusion after the original mystical outbreak, and were staying with relatives and friends near the contaminated zone.

Indigo Springs was evacuated on August 31st after a so-called "magical event" caused a series of earthquakes centered in the small town. The quakes occurred as police were negotiating a hostage crisis in a local home. Following the quakes, the trees and other plant life surrounding the beseiged home grew to giant size. Animals and insects, also enlarged, attacked police and National Guard troops who were on-scene trying to resolve the crisis.

Some analysts have likened the events in Indigo Springs to a magical equivalent of the 1986 Cherynobyl disaster. As in 1986, the town and surrounding area have been fully evacuated and the area has been closed to human habitation for the foreseeable future. However, dozens of people from the town are still missing. They are presumed to be either dead, contaminated, or trapped within the overgrown forest surrounding the former town.

The CDC is asking Americans to report any suspicious behavior or possible contamination among their friends and loved ones. Victims of mystical contamination are said to behave in a disordered, delusional fashion and may present with physical changes as well, most notably fur, horns, and claws. One such victim, Sahara Knax of Boston, Massachusetts, has claimed responsibility for the outbreak, and says that similar accidents will occur if human society does not move to a carbon-neutral footing immediately.

Knax remains at large, and is considered extremely dangerous.

Fishermen fight off "monster" in Puget Sound

The six-person crew of the Pass-Me-By sailed to the rescue yesterday after a mystically contaminated monster capsized a speedboat in Puget Sound.

"It looked a little like a seal to me," said Freddie Singh, skipper of the the Pass-Me-By, a small fishing boat. "It had two heads and it had to be at least twenty feet long, but the shape of its body and the color of its fur . . . it was like a seal in a lot of ways."

Singh's crew bravely put their own boat between the creature and the speedboat, protecting newlyweds Thomas and Sarah Ward. Singh had a shotgun and a pistol aboard and the Pass-Me-By crew shot the monster several times.

"It disappeared underwater and we hauled the Wards aboard. Then we got out of there fast."

The body of the seal-like creature was found early the next morning, near Seattle, and quarantined by officials from the U.S. Navy. Anonymous sources indicate the corpse was on the beach for several hours, however, and may have contaminated a significant number of gulls, crabs and other coastal life.

Puget Sound has been hard hit by the alchemical contamination which spread west from Indigo Springs, Oregon in the past week and sightings of this particular monster had been reported several times since Monday .

"Hailstones looked like skulls," say witnesses

(Valier, MO) Citizens of a small Montana community phoned the Pondera County Sheriff's office, contacted radio talk show hosts and posted creepy images online after a hailstorm yesterday, all reporting that some of the balls of ice which struck their homes, cars and crops were shaped like skulls.

"There were human and animal skulls in the mix," reported the popular blogger Grist, who suffered a concussion when a hailstone punched through the umbrella he was using to shelter himself while photographing one of the alleged 'skulls,' which he described as having the features of a small mammal, like a squirrel or muskrat.

The Pondera County sheriff's department reported similar complaints by a number of citizens, some of whom posted digital photographs of the 'skulls' online, in blogs and on other websites.

Witnesses to the bizarre event reported that the skull-shaped hailstones were hollow and melted quickly, but a few witnesses transferred the peculiar hailstones to their freezers. They have called for the National Weather Service to conduct an investigation into the event.

Serial killer has 'change of heart,' surrenders to police

(Logan, UT) A serial killer who murdered four women over the past two years in the Logan area has surrendered to police.

"Jason Mitchell Burnett has confessed to the so-called Daycare killings and is cooperating fully with our investigation," confirmed Detective Kim Stanley today in a standing-room only news conference. "He knows details of the crimes that have not been released to the public--we are
one hundred percent certain it's him."

Sources within the police department say that Burnett has also disclosed the location of his final victim, Leticia Armington.

Burnett's victims were single mothers, all of whom disappeared on their way to pick up children from daycare. The body of the first victim, Susan Bikstra, was found in her apartment in May of 2008. Amita Syed and Jodie-Lynn Hawke were left inside their cars, which were driven to
remote areas and abandoned.

Asked to speculate as to why Burnett surrendered, Detective Stanley said, "The only explanation he's offered is that he woke up this morning feeling unsupportable guilt over his acts of violence."

Platinum eggshells a work of art?

(Vancouver, BC) Officials at Canada Place are mystified by the discovery of a number of metallic 'eggshells' in what looks like an ordinary seagull's nest.

"We come upon nests from time to time and there are bits of shell in them, but the weird thing is, these are metal," said Eli Sycazlyk, one of the convention center's maintenance workers. "I thought they were silver at first but they had them examined by a jeweler and apparently they're platinum."

Sycazlyk thinks the shells may be part of an art installation, perhaps as a tie-in to the upcoming Winter Olympics in 2010.

King of the Cats myth found misprinted in textbooks across America

Teachers and publishers alike have been baffled by a mysterious misprint found in textbooks arriving in schools across the country.

"Page seventeen of our new Western History text has been replaced with a two-page story about a dead cat," says Irma Janzen, principal of the Westchester County High in Boston. "By itself, that might not be so strange, but we have a new math book from a completely different publisher, and the story appears there too, also on page seventeen." Janzen is just one of hundreds of school administrators who have called in staff from summer vacation to open and examine new texts before classes begin in September. To date, over twenty books in a variety of subjects have been affected.

William Beale, Vice President of Marketing for InStep Publishing, who published three of the tampered books, is convinced the misprint is the work of computer hackers. "This is going to turn out to be high school or maybe college students pulling a sophisticated prank. Unfortunately, it is also a serious crime. As publishers, we are obligated to recall and replace the altered books. The cost of this high-tech vandalism could run in the millions."

When asked why students would choose an obscure myth like King of the Cats as opposed to something political or perhaps pornographic, Beale said, "Who knows?"