Oh, Look, Two Breweries Work Out A Trademark Issue Without Lawyers, Threats, Or Asshole-ery   ~ imagine that ? people working 2~gether  WTF !

from the good-guys dept                                   

Trademark
by Timothy Geigner

Thu, Nov 3rd 2016,https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161103/09561035955/look-two-breweries-work-out-trademark-issue-without-lawyers-threats-asshole-ery.shtml

Trademark disputes are often petty, heated, and vitriolic. We know this. Interestingly, it often seems as though the temperature level for trademark disputes is inversely proportional to how valid they are: the pettiest disputes are often the most heated. And we cover enough of those sorts of things that it can often seem like no companies out there approach a trademark issue in any other way.
But that isn't the case and it's probably useful to highlight when companies get this right. Enter Hopworks Urban Brewery in Portland, makers of a beer it has named "Abominable." Another brewery, Fremont Brewing Company, has produced a very popular seasonal brew for some time that it has entitled "Abominable Winter Ale." In other words, there is an actual potential trademark issue here, with a naming convention and vernacular unique enough to quite possibly result in some confusion. So Hopworks set its lawyers to work, right?
Wrong.

Don’t get your barley in a bunch; Fremont Brewing says it was a friendly conversation and not an acrimonious kerfuffle. In a Twitter statement, Fremont Brewing said:
“Our friends at @HopworksBeer trademarked the name before us and we worked out a friendly transition. Now, we have to brew a beer together:)”
Collaboration, not litigation!

In other words, Hopworks contacted Fremont to let them know of the issue, behaved like human beings, and everything has now been worked out. All without the cost of billable hours and court fees, too. It's almost like there can be a common sense approach to these types of trademark issues, one that doesn't require lawsuits.
The craft beer industry in particular should be both particularly conducive to this sort of friendly interaction and particularly in need of it. It's been noticed for some time that the industry's explosion has poised it for an explosion in trademark disputes. Unless, that is, the typically friendly breweries take their cues from Hopworks and Fremont on how to settle them.

Kenny Rogers - JUST DROPPED IN ("The Big Lebowski") ᴴᴰ      

Cuttingyou Cuttingme

Destination Nowhere: Mysterious Travelers Who Vanished Into Thin Air        ~ ALL over THIS Orb we call home ... missing,missing ,Missing, MISSING ...people r just  go~in ... puff ?        ...ALL   over this Planet ( & maybe OFF )     &  yet the "so~called" powers that ...B                       ... silence !   how many   MORE   ...folks how many    ... MORE       4   we's ALL go  ... WTF !!!

• http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/11/destination-nowhere-mysterious-travelers-who-vanished-into-thin-air/
•  November 1, 2016
•  Brent Swancer

 

At times the stresses of modern life can get to us and we seek to get away from it all and escape the burdens and responsibilities that bog us down. We embark on journeys out into the world to seek a life that eludes us in our everyday toil. Perhaps it is to visit friends, or maybe it is to fulfill our dream to journey to some faraway land that we perceive to be exotic and welcoming. Very few of those who push forth into such travels and vacations would expect that they may never make the return journey home, but for a surprising number this is where the road out into the release they seek has ultimately taken them. Indeed, some of the more chilling and perplexing missing person mysteries revolve around people who just wanted to escape, if even for a short time, the rigors of their daily life. These are some of the people who went out to travel and for one reason or other kept on venturing out right off the face of the earth, to vanish into thin air and leave nothing but mysteries and strange clues behind.
By far one of the most well-known and widely covered cases of a mysterious disappearance concerning travelers is the tragic vanishing of 3-year-old Madeleine McCann, who in May of 2007 was on vacation in Portugal with her parents Kate and Gerry McCann of Leicester, England, her younger 2-year-old twin siblings, and a group of family friends and their children. On May 3, Kate and Gerry left their children asleep in their holiday apartment in the resort area of Praia da Luzat at around 7PM, and went to go have dinner with some friends at a restaurant a mere 50 yards away. According to the parents, they made regular check-ups on the children every 30 minutes, and a check at 9:05 PM showed them all to be sleeping peacefully. Then, at around 10 PM, Kate went to go check up on her children again and found that little Madeleine was nowhere to be found. Authorities were soon notified, and so began one of the most famous, baffling, and controversial missing persons cases of all time.
The whole handling of the case was bungled right from the start. Since the apartment was not initially treated as a crime scene, an estimated 20 Portuguese law enforcement personnel trounced about the place contaminating any potential evidence before the area was finally officially sealed off, and road blocks to and from the location were not set up until 10AM the following morning, more than enough time for a potential perpetrator to be long gone. Additionally, border authorities were not notified of the incident for hours, and it took 5 days for Interpol to finally put out a missing persons report, all of which conspired to make solving the case much more difficult to solve considering typically for such potential kidnapping cases the first 24 hours are absolutely crucial. Further complicating matters was that Madeleine’s parents were initially treated as suspects by the Portuguese police, despite a complete lack of evidence that they had had anything to do with it.

Madeleine McCann

So dead-set were Portuguese authorities on their misguided mission to prove that the McCanns were somehow guilty that they allocated a good amount of resources toward this goal. Two sniffer dogs were brought in and taken to several areas of interest, but it was in the McCanns’ own apartment that they got the most excited, further bolstering the police belief that they were guilty. 24 days after Madeleine had gone missing, one of the specialized cadaver dogs picked up a scent in the car the family had been renting, and DNA samples were invariably taken. Even though these tests turned out to be wholly inconclusive, Portuguese authorities nevertheless went on to make the confident and bold proclamation that they were a 100% match for Madeleine McCann. This led to a whole scenario concocted by police that said Madeleine had been killed accidentally by giving her too much of a sedative to sleep, after which they had essentially made up an abduction case and then moved the body in the rental car to hide it in an unknown location. It got so bad that Kate McCann was told by police that if she just confessed to the crime she would only serve 2 years in prison and her husband would be let off completely. Then, suddenly in July of 2008, the McCanns were released as suspects.
It certainly appears that this mad dash to try and prosecute the most likely innocent McCanns detracted from resources and manpower that could have gone into actually investigating what had really happened. Indeed, the ball was dropped on other occasions as well. Around the time of the vanishing, two people came forward with sightings of suspicious activity near the apartment. In one case, one of the McCann family friends, a Jane Tanner, who had been at dinner with them on that fateful evening, reported that she had seen a man carrying a small child who had been wearing pink pajamas, just as Madeleine had been wearing. This was considered to be a key suspect at the time, but the Portuguese police kept it secret and under wraps, and it wasn’t until years later that Scotland Yard, who took over the case in 2011, would conclusively deduce that it had merely been another holiday maker carrying his daughter home.
Another sighting was made by a vacationing Irish couple by the name of Mary and Martin Smith. They claimed that on the night of Madeleine’s disappearance they had seen a suspicious man carrying what appeared to be a child of 3 or 4 around 500 yards from the McCanns’ apartment. The man was described as looking like a local, as not looking comfortable with the child in his arms, and had allegedly been carrying the child towards the nearby beach. Despite this seemingly credible break in the case, it was not until 2013 that the mystery man would be considered a prime suspect and his sketch composite finally released to the public, far too long after the events for it to be of much use.

The McCanns

Throughout the investigation, a few suspects other than the McCanns themselves have been apprehended. One was a property consultant by the name of Robert Murat, who was finally cleared after extensive questioning and a thorough search of his apartment that turned up nothing suspicious. Another was convicted burglar Euclides Monteiro, but he too was released and died in 2009, any secrets he might have held taken to the grave with him. There have been other persons of interest as well, but none of these have led anywhere at all.
Over the course of Scotland Yard’s extensive investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance, called Operation Grange, they have considered a wide range of possible suspects and leads, from bogus charity collectors operating in the area at the time, to prowling child sex-offenders, to photos of men who they believe may have been staking out the apartment either for the purpose of burglary or to abduct people, to a sexual predator who was on the loose in the area at the time of the vanishing, to numerous alleged sightings of the missing girl. None of these has led to the case being solved, and indeed authorities are really no closer to finding the missing girl than they have ever been, which is not very close at all. Theories range from Madeleine being killed in a botched burglary, being whisked away by human traffickers, or wandering out of the apartment to die in an accident, but there is no evidence at all to support any one of these and no one has any real idea of what happened to her. The disappearance and ultimate fate of Madeleine McCann remains a complete, impenetrable mystery.
Certainly one of the stranger unexplained cases of a vanishing traveler is that of 20-year-old Charles Horvath. In the spring of 1989, the adventurous resident of England decided to take an ambitious journey to the wilds British Columbia, Canada, where he planned to spend several months traveling around by hitchhiking, and also to meet his natural father, Max A. K. Horvath Sr., and his godfather in Ontario, after which he meant to fly over to Hong Kong to visit his mother, Denise Horvath-Allan, for his 21st birthday. On May 11, 1989, Horvath was in British Columbia staying at a campground in Kelowna. From here he would send a fax to his mother in Hong Kong to finalize his travel plans. It was the last time anyone would ever hear from him.

Charles Horvath

Several months went by without further contact from her son, which was highly odd for him, as the two were close and up to that point he had frequently contacted her, and Denise officially declared him missing on August 10, 1989. The Kelowna Detachment RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) launched an extensive search of the area where Charles had last been known to be, but no trace of him was turned up. In the meantime, Denise traveled to Canada to aid in the search efforts, and she would be joined by her husband Stuart Allan, “Charles” Nana Austin-Thorpe, and Step Grandfather Tony Thorpe. Flyers and missing person announcements and advertisements were placed throughout the country and in various newspapers worldwide in a desperate effort to glean any pertinent information from the mystery. It was partly due to these flyers that a woman by the name of Joanne Zebroff came forward claiming to have known Charles, and that her family had allowed him to temporarily stay with them, after which he had gone off to stay at a campground called Tiny Tent Town, on Lakeshore Road in Kelowna.
The Zebroffs claimed that the last time they had seen him was when he had unexpectedly arrived during a family reunion, and they had been forced to decline his wish to come up to see them. When the campground was investigated, it turned out that Charles had left his tent, sleeping bag, and all of his belongings behind, including all of his clothes, as wells as his wallet, cash, ID, and family photos, and additionally other campers at the site claimed that Charles had suddenly left the campsite in a hurry. Other than this, no sign of Charles could be found, leaving authorities and Charles’s family in a state of desperate frustration. There seemed to be no reason why Charles, who had been very close with his family, should want to disappear, and there was no sign of foul play. He had just disappeared from the face of the earth. Denise expressed bafflement as to why her son would have left his photographs behind, saying:

It was assumed that something terrible had happened to him which caused him to leave his belongings, because it was so unlike him to have left his photographs behind, which were very important to him.

It was from here that the case gets stranger still. In March of 1992, Denise Horvath made her second trip to British Columbia in a desperate effort to dig up clues on her missing son’s whereabouts, and it was as she was staying at the Pandosy Inn that she received a very odd anonymous letter that had arrived by taxi of all things. The handwritten note held the chilling message that Charles had been partying with other campers at Tiny Tent Town when a fight had broken out and he had been knocked out, after which he had died and his body disposed of from a bridge into nearby Okanagan Lake. The note claimed that the body was still there floating in the cold depths, prompting a search of the area by divers, but no such body was found. Bizarrely, not long after this dive search, a second anonymous note arrived saying that they had been looking on the wrong side of the bridge. With this new tip, authorities searched again and this time did find a body, but it turned out to be not that of Charles, but rather that of a 64-year old Kelowna resident who had probably committed suicide. No other body could be found.

A witness would later come forward in the form of a fellow camper at Tiny Tent Town named Gino Bourdin, who claimed to have known Charles and that he had seen him shortly before his disappearance. Bourdin confirmed that there had indeed been an all-night party at the campground, but that he did not recall anyone attacking Charles. He claims that he went to sleep and when he woke up Charles was nowhere to be seen. Other campers also said that he had just merely left in a rush, and that there had been no violent altercation. Bourdin would also shed some insight into Charles demeanor and personality at the time, saying:

He was a nice guy. He was a good friend. He used to always come over to our camp, little camp and have coffee in the morning and play Frisbee and catch with my son and just sit and chat with us. He was friend, a real friendly guy, probably too friendly. He seemed, I don’t know, naïve … He’d talk to anybody, make friends with anybody.

In the decades since his mysterious vanishing, no further evidence has turned up, and Charles Horvath remains inexplicably missing. Despite hundreds of leads, tips, and sightings of the missing man, authorities have never come closer to cracking the case. Charles Horvath’s vanishing was covered on the January 12, 1994 episode of Unsolved Mysteries.

Another rather odd vanishing occurred in November of 2001, when 86-year-old Leo Widicker, of Bowdon, North Dakota, was on his 41st humanitarian trip for a Seventh-day Adventist organization called Maranatha Volunteers International. This trip took Leo and his wife to Tabacon Hot Springs, in Costa Rica to paint two churches and a school, and despite their advanced age, the couple was described as being incredibly healthy and active for their age, having travelled around the world to such far flung destinations as India, Nicaragua, and Peru. On November 8, 2001, Leo and his wife were at a luxury resort beach, and as his wife waded about in the beachside hot springs, he reportedly sat down on a nearby bench to rest. At the time he was reported as being in good spirits, lucid, and quite talkative. When Leo’s wife returned around 30 minutes later, her husband was nowhere to be found. It was assumed at the time that he had just taken a nap and woken up confused, but he had always been mentally healthy.
When hotel guests and staff were questioned, they reported that Leo had been seen wandering around asking where his wife was, and guards at the resort gate claimed that he had approached them and asked if it was alright to leave. The guards had then opened the gates and claimed that the last time they saw him he had been walking slowly down the main road. Just 15 minutes after the time when the guards claimed they had let Leo out, a friend of the couple drove off down the road to retrieve him. Since Leo was known to be a very slow walker, and indeed did not seem to like taking walks in the first place, it was assumed that they would quickly find him, and there was no particular panic at this time. However, after driving up and down the main road up to 10 miles away from the resort there was still no sign of Leo. A more extensive search was organized, scouring the area but still no trace of the missing man could be found. It didn’t make sense because he simply did not walk fast enough for him to have gotten very far within the time frame of events, and considering that the road was fenced off on one side and dropped down a steep volcanic cliff on the other, he could not have possibly ventured far off road.

Other strange details added to the general weirdness of the disappearance. At the time, it had been raining heavily, making it seem odd that Leo should suddenly decide to go for a walk. In addition, he had left with a mere $4 in his pocket and no wallet, meaning it did not seem that he would have been planning to be gone long. He also had no history of mental deterioration due to age and had been perfectly fine and in control of his faculties as he had sat on the bench. This all led to the theory that he may have been picked up by someone on the road, perhaps with nefarious intentions, but this was just speculation. Some suspicion has been leveled at resort workers, with Leo’s daughter, JoAnn claiming that the story they were given does not make sense, and that even if he had decided to go for that uncharacteristic walk in the rain, he could not have possibly gone far, yet there is no trace of him. It is as if he just walked off the face of the earth. JoAnn would say of the ordeal:

He wouldn’t go for a walk, that’s not my dad. How does a human being totally vanish? It’s so absurd. There’s no word for it.

What happened to Leo Widicker? How could he have possibly disappeared right under everyone’s noses at at a bustling resort? How could such an elderly man have managed to walk off into oblivion within 15 minutes of being last seen and evade all efforts to find him? Is there something else going on here and does the resort staff know more than they are letting on? Although efforts by the family and Red Cross continue to try and located the vanished man, Leo Widicker has not been seen since, and his disappearance remains a profound mystery.

Missing Person poster for Karen Denise Wells

Spooky vanishings of travelers abound, and another concerns 23-year-old Karen Denise Wells, of Oklahoma, in the United States. In April of 1994, Wells decided to rent a car and take a cross country road trip to visit a childhood friend living in New Jersey, a Melissa Shepard. The evening of April 12 found Wells staying at the Pike Motel, in Carlisle, PA, and at 7:30PM that evening she called her friend to tell her to come meet up with her. During the phone conversation she was in good spirits, and mentioned that she was going to go to a nearby McDonald’s to get something to eat and then go to bed. Shepard claims that when she arrived at the hotel in the early morning hours of April 13, her friend was not there. Hotel staff let the concerned woman into the room when repeated knocking went unanswered, and within the room were found Wells’ belongings and the hotel room key. A look at the parking area found no sign of the rented car she had come in with.
Authorities were contacted, and it was found that the hotel room itself and the bed had not been disturbed in any way, with no sign of forced entry or a struggle. The missing rental car was located abandoned and out of gas around 35 miles away, in the middle of Route 274 near New Germantown. The car was scratched and splattered with mud, both the passenger and driver doors were wide open, and Wells’ purse was found on the ground, with a substantial amount of cash still inside. Inside of the car was found a small amount of marijuana, some empty bottles, and an uneaten box of McDonald’s french fries, meaning she had gone out for that bite to eat after all. There was no sign of blood or a struggle in or on the vehicle. Bizarrely, the car had an extra 700 miles more on the odometer than should have been there considering her route, and it was in the westbound lane, suggesting that she had been headed east when she ran out of gas. It is unknown just why the missing woman would have driven an additional 700 miles totally out of her way and then double back. Authorities believe that she had driven almost all the way to New Jersey, before inexplicably turning back around to make her way back to Carlisle. But why? No one knows.

Some other odd little details emerged as well. First, it seems odd that at no point did she contact her 6-year-old son, with whom she was very close. There is also the fact that it was reported that Shepard was with two unknown men when she filed the missing persons reports, and at one point Shepard herself was questioned by police, but was quickly dismissed as a potential suspect, after which she stopped talking to authorities and then sort of vanished herself. Apparently there was also a strange voice message left on Thanksgiving of 1994 for the wife of a man Wells had reportedly been seeing, which said “Tell Mike I’m not coming home. I’m already married.” This is just about the extent of the sparse evidence and clues that have been uncovered on the case, and in the years since there have been no further developments or leads. Authorities have come to the conclusion that she may have met up with foul play and been killed, possibly during a drug deal gone bad, but there is no particular evidence of this and she is still officially listed as missing. Wells’ family remains hopeful that she is still alive out there somewhere, and her mother, Deorma Wells, has expressed this hope by saying:

I have always hoped that someday she will return, although I do feel something has happened to her. I know there is no way on earth that she wouldn’t have contacted her son that she so adores or the many people that love her. I am sure that only a handful of people know what happened and I can’t point the finger at any one person.

What article about missing vacationers would be complete without at least a selection of the vast number of people who have inexplicably disappeared from aboard cruise ships? I have written on this topic here at Mysterious Universe before, but that is really just scratching the surface, and while a cruise may seem to be the height of vacation luxury, the fact is that nearly 200 people have mysteriously vanished from cruise ships over the past decade. One such person is 63-year-old book store owner John Halford, of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire in the United Kingdom. Halford was enjoying a week-long Egyptian cruise in 2011 and would never make it back home.

The cruise had been a long-time dream of his, and he had departed on March 31, 2011, after saying goodbye to his wife, Ruth Halford and his three children, completely unaware that this would be his last time to see them. On April 6, John mailed his wife to remind her to come pick him up at the airport the following day and to give his flight details. As Ruth prepared to go to the airport the next day, she was informed by the cruise company that her husband was gone, and that he had never made that flight.
According to witnesses, John was last seen at a bar aboard the ship, the Thomson Spirit, at 11.45pm on April 6 drinking cocktails. Witnesses describe him as being in good spirits and friendly at the time, as the ship approached its final port, Sharm-el-Sheikh.
When the ship arrived, Halford was nowhere to be found, and ship records showed that he had not gone ashore. The entire ship was searched but no trace of John Halford could be found and authorities were perplexed. It was at first thought that he might have slipped overboard by accident, but the cruise line was quick to dismiss this, pointing out that the high railings were designed to prevent people from accidentally falling or stumbling into the sea, and that it would have been “virtually impossible” for the 5’5” Halford to have done so. It was also suggested that he might have committed suicide, but several pieces of evidence go against this. One is that his suitcases were found to have been set out by his cabin door, as is required on the last night of a cruise, and that they had been filled with gifts for his wife and children. Another was that he was not suicidal at all, and had seemed to be happy when he was last seen. Ruth Halford has added:

He was happy, certainly not depressed, enjoying his cruise and meeting people but looking forward to getting home again to be with me and the children. I can only assume there was a freak accident and he somehow slipped into the sea.

John Halford

John Halford’s body has never been found, and his disappearance remains inexplicable. Another equally baffling case aboard a cruise ship is the strange vanishing of a Vietnamese-American couple by the name of Hue Pham and Hue Tran, of Westminster, California. In May of 2005, the couple was aboard a Carnival Cruise Line ship along with their daughter and granddaughter, on a one-week cruise between the islands of Barbados and Aruba for what was supposed to be a Mother’s Day gift. The cruise was going great until May 8, when Hue Pham and Hue Tran just up and vanished into thin air. When the ship was searched, the only thing that could be found was the surreal sight of the couple’s empty flip flops casually lying on the deck as if the couple had simply evaporated out of them.
In the wake of the disappearance, the crew of the cruise ship showed an impressive amount of neglect in pursuing the case. First, it was 2 hours later that an announcement was finally made on the ship informing of the disappearance and not until 4 hours later that the Coast Guard was notified, and at no point during that time did the cruise ship turn around to look and see if the couple had fallen overboard. Even with authorities notified, it was not until a shocking 12 hours later that the ship, the Destiny, would finally arrive back at the area where the couple had vanished. Indeed, according to the family, the ship crew seemed to be far more interested in planning the next day’s activities at St. Martin island than looking for the missing people. In fact, when the ship reached its final destination of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the family was issued no apology and the cruise line refused to speak to them again on the matter, leading the frustrated daughter of the missing Hue Pham and Hue Tran to lament:

We believe there is more detailed information on our parents’ cause of death, than what is actually being released by CCL. The immediate actions taken by the cruise staff were acts of negligence and cover-ups. They were more focused on planning the next day’s shore activities in St. Marten (replacement for Aruba), then protecting crucial information and evidence pertaining to 2 of their missing passengers… Our parents!

What happened to these people? Where did their final destination take them? They went out to travel, visit friends, and see the world, and their road took them perhaps farther than they had ever expected, leading them off into the pantheon of great missing persons mysteries. With clues and leads that seem to lead nowhere, sparse evidence as to what became of them, and in some cases uncooperativeness from authorities themselves, will we ever find the answers we seek? Vacations and travel are meant to be light, fun affairs where we escape the perils and stresses of modern life, not the instruments of such dangers. These mysterious people have gone out with dreams and visions of fun, relaxation, and basking in paradise, yet they have ended up somewhere else, somewhere past out current ability to understand. Perhaps some day we will glean from the inscrutable clues the answers we seek, but until then these are prime examples of vacations to nowhere; a place from which they will seemingly never return.

 

Mysterious Murders and Vanishings on the Highway of Tears    ~ hehe folks !  some~thin STRANGE ...is go~in  ... on ?

• http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2016/11/mysterious-murders-and-vanishings-on-the-highway-of-tears/
•  November 3, 2016
•  Brent Swancer

 

Some places in this world seem to be magnets for evil. Often lying on the fringes of civilization, they pull to themselves a thick air of menace, murder, and woe. Here are the hunting grounds of maniacs, monsters, and the haunts of grim mysteries we may never solve. One such place is a road that lies unfurled amongst the cold expanses of rough, unforgiving wilderness sprawled across Canada. It is a place that is at once beautiful and deadly, a vein through the land that courses with inexplicable murders, vanishings, and indeed perhaps evil itself. This is a hungry, bloodthirsty place, which seems to draw to it violence and death even as it hides itself within natural splendor. It is a road through some of the most remote, rugged terrain of the country, and which has been ground zero for some of its most numerous and unsolved crimes.
Across a 720 km (450 mi) stretch of remote, heavily forested expanse of rugged land in British Columbia, Canada spans a road that on maps is called Highway 16, which is a section of the Trans-Canada Yellowhead Highway, also known as the “Park-to-Park Highway,” that itself meanders across a vast swath of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. This is rough, untamed country, where wild animals outnumber humans and the nearest settlement could be miles away through a thick, dark sea of trees. It is a tangle of unkept wilderness that despite its breathtaking beauty is permeated with a certain sense of foreboding and bleak desolation, where one certainly does not want their car to break down. This unavoidable ominous shadow that seems to hang low over the land is only empowered by the fact that it is here that dozens of people have gone to vanish of the face of the earth, or to even end up dead under mysterious circumstances, earning this wild slash of highway the sinister nickname “The Highway of Tears.” Investigative Journalist Bob Friel perfectly explains this place quite perfectly thus:

The road’s called Highway 16. It’s part of the Trans-Canada Highway system. … There are places in this road where you will see more bears than you will see cars. The road can take on kind of a sinister aspect to it. It’s a place that can be a good friend to evil. The locals know it as the Highway of Tears. And it’s called that because there’s been a — a series of disappearances and murders of women and girls that date back four decades, and a large number of them are still unsolved.

A section of the Highway of Tears

It is perhaps not surprising that people would disappear in this place. The area is sparsely populated, with only scattered logging settlements and villages belonging to the Twenty-three First Nations that the highway cuts through. There are vast stretches where there are no people at all, and the lack of public transportation and crippling poverty here conspire to make hitchhiking the most common way to get around. With this remoteness and the inherit dangers of hitchhiking, it seems a perfect storm for murder and vanishings, yet what is shocking is just how many there have been in this area and how few of them have ever been solved. Since 1969, dozens of people, mostly indigenous girls and women, have either gone missing or turned up brutally murdered along the road and its adjacent routes. There have been 18 officially listed murdered or missing persons between 1969 and 2006, with the actual number likely much higher and rising all the time, and authorities have been largely completely baffled by the cases, which are often surrounded by weirdness and strange clues.
The trail of missing people and murder attributed to the Highway of Tears officially begins in 1969, when on October 25; 26-year-old Gloria Moody was seen alive leaving a bar in Williams Lake, British Columbia. The next day, her dead body was found 10km away stashed in the thick woods near a cattle ranch. The very next year, in July of 1970, 18-year-old Micheline Pare was dropped off at the gates of Tompkins Ranch by two women who had given her a ride, after which she proceeded to vanish off the face of the earth to never be heard from again. She is still missing. 1973 would see the mysterious murders of two young women, Gale Weys (19), Pamela Darlington (19), both of whom had disappeared while hitchhiking and their bodies found unceremoniously dumped in muddy ditches by the side of the road.
In August of 1974, 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen went missing as she was hitchhiking to go see a friend. Her brutalized body would turn up in the wilderness one month later. Later that year, in December of 1974, 14-year-old Monica Ignas vanished while walking along Highway 16 in Thornhill near Terrace, BC, and it wasn’t until 4 months later that her decomposed corpse would be found a few kilometers away from where she had disappeared. The 1970s streak of death would continue in 1978, with the disappearance of young, 12-year-old Monica Jack, who was last seen riding her bike along the road. At the time, Monica had just totally vanished of the face of the earth, and extensive searches turned up nothing. It would not be until 17 years later that her skeletal remains would be discovered at the bottom of a remote, forest choked ravine by forestry workers.

The shocking deaths and disappearances did not abate, and continued right on into the 1980s. 33-year-old Maureen Mosie was last seen hitchhiking near Salmon Arm, BC, on 8 May 1981, and her severely beaten body would be found at the end of a run-off lane leading to Highway 97 by a no doubt startled woman out walking her dog. In May of 1983, Shelley-Anne Bascu (16) vanished and was never seen again. 24-year-old Alberta Williams wandered off and disappeared after leaving a crowded bar with her sister and a group of friends in September of 1989. No one was quite sure how she could have just vanished, and she had been there one moment and gone the next. A few weeks later, her lifeless body was found near Prince Rupert, BC near some old railroad tracks by the Tyee Overpass. The body showed evidence of strangulation and sexual assault. Also in 1989 was the mysterious disappearance of 15-year-old Cicilia Anne Nikal, who was last seen on Highway 16 near Smithers, B.C. and hasn’t been seen since.
Perhaps the most chilling disappearance here from the 1980s involves not just one lone hitchhiker, but rather an entire family. On the night of August 2, 1989, a man by the name of Ronald Jack allegedly was drinking at a bar in Prince George, BC, when he met a man who offered him 2 weeks of work at a logging camp. Since he had been desperately looking for a job, Ronald gladly accepted, and he reportedly made preparations for him, his wife Doreen, and their two children 9-year-old Russell and 4-year-old Ryan to make the trip to his new place of temporary employment. At 1:30AM that evening, Ronald called his mother from a resort area along Highway 16 to inform her of his plans. It was the last time anyone would ever hear from him, and Ronald Jack and his entire family simply disappeared off the face of the earth.
Tragically, and not a little spookily, Cicilia Anne’s cousin Delphine Nikal (16) would mysteriously vanish into thin air the following year, on June 13, 1990, as she was hitchhiking on Highway 16 between Smithers, BC, and her home in Telkwa, BC. Like her cousin, Delphine was also never seen again. The 1990s certainly saw plenty of sinister activity along the Highway of Tears, and in 1994, Ramona Wilson (16) vanished without a trace as she was hitchhiking on July 11 of that year on her way to a graduation party. For 7 months intensive searches turned up nothing, and then Ramona’s mother received an anonymous call claiming her daughter’s body could be found in a field near the airport. Strangely, a search of the area turned up no corpse. It was not until 10 months later, in April of 1995, that her remains would finally be found by two moose hunters lying under some trees in the woods well off the road.

Another case from 1994 was the disappearance of a 16-year-old prostitute named Roxanne Thiara, who in July of that year told her friend that she was going to meet a customer and was never heard from again. Roxanne’s corpse was found by chance stuffed within some dense underbrush near Burns Lake on August 17, 1994. This was a busy year for the seemingly bloodthirsty road, as in December of 1994 we also have the case of Alishia Germaine (15), whose body was found stabbed to death behind Haldi Road Elementary School off of Highway 16 W. outside of Prince George. The following October, 1995, 19-year-old Lana Derrick would vanish without trace as she was heading along Highway 16 from Northwest Community College in Houston, BC to visit her home in the Hazelton area. Lana was last seen on October 7, 1995 at a gas station near Terrace (Thornhill) in BC, and has never been seen again.
The list of missing and murdered people on the Highway of Tears has grown well into the new millennium. On June 21, 2002, Nicole Hoar (25) disappeared while hitchhiking from Prince George to Smithers on Highway 16 West. She has not been found and is unusual in that she does not fit the overall pattern because she was not an indigenous woman. In 2005, Tamara Chipman (22) also vanished along the Highway of Tears in Prince Rupert, British Columbia, and in February of 2006 the body of 14-year-old Aielah Saric Auger was found in a ditch by a passing motorist shortly after she disappeared.
Even more recent is the mysterious disappearance of 20-year-old Madison Scott in May of 2011. Madison had last been seen camping at Hogsback Lake, around 25 km southeast of Vanderhoof, BC, and according to witnesses there had been a big party with her friends at the campground on the evening of her vanishing. Madison was last seen in the early hours of May 28, 2011, and after that no one has any idea of what became of her. She failed to return home and all attempts to contact her cell phone met with failure. A subsequent search for the missing girl found her pickup truck parked right where she had left it, with her purse and backpack left behind but her cell phone missing. Madison’s tent was also found, and it proved to be undisturbed. An extensive ground, air, and water search was launched to try and find her, but no trace could be found.

The Highway of Tears

The RCMP also intensively interviewed every person who had been at the party, but could find no one who disliked her, held some sort of grudge, or would have had any reason to harm her. However, some amount of suspicion was aroused when it was learned that everyone else who had been at the party had ended up going home rather than camping out with Madison except for one, her friend Jordy Bolduc, who as far as anyone knows was the last person to have seen the missing woman. Bolduc claimed that she too had eventually gone home that evening and that Madison had been set on camping there alone. Police questioning of Bolduc turned up no solid evidence that she had anything to do with the disappearance and she was released.
Another person of interest in the Madison Scott case was a man named Fribjon Bjornson, a 28-year-old logger who had been friends with her and had apparently told some people that he knew what had happened to her. A look into Bjornson’s past found that he was a degenerate drug user and had had run-ins with the law in the past, and it was found that the man was convinced that Madison had been abducted because he owned drug dealers money. He was considered a suspect and questioned, but he was found to be clear, even passing a lie detector test, and the RCMP released him. Chillingly, Bjorson then also vanished 2 days later and his severed head would be found at an abandoned house two weeks after that. The rest of his body was never found. Although certainly spooky, authorities came to the conclusion that Bjorson’s brutal murder was unrelated to the disappearance of Madison Scott. Although other suspects have been questioned in connection with the strange case, Madison Scott’s disappearance remains unsolved and she has not turned up anywhere.
One thing that remains shocking is just how little progress police have made in any of these cases, especially considering that a special task force, called Project E-Pana, was set up in 2005 committed to pursuing them. The task force has collected hundreds of reports, tips, and leads, as well as interviewing around 60,000 people, 1,400 of which were considered actual persons of interest linked to the disappearances and crimes. Despite all this, most investigation leads nowhere, and success stories on the Highway of Tears are few and far between, with the vast majority of these cases remaining completely unsolved. Additionally, the cases mentioned here so far are only the tip of the iceberg, and organizations from the area’s indigenous people say that there are many other such crimes and vanishings that are not part of the official record.

One of the problems in getting to the bottom of these cold cases is the difficult terrain of the area. This is a vast expanse of remote, rugged country far from prying eyes and where cell phone reception is often spotty at best. There is no one to help a victim of foul play out here, and plenty of places to stash a corpse where they would never be found. This is a wild land of sprawling forests which one task force member, Sgt. Wayne Clary has called “a perfect hunting ground,” a fact which is only compounded by the number of out of state truckers and travelers passing through, which all makes it very difficult to investigate these crimes.
This is not to say that there has been no progress whatsoever in pursuing the mysteries of the Highway of Tears, and a scant few of the cases have seen some major breakthroughs over the years. One such moment came in the wake of the murder of 15-year-old Loren Leslie in 2010. On November 27, 2010, an RCMP constable made a routine traffic stop along the Highway of Tears. The driver of the black pickup truck he stopped was a 20-year-old young man named Cody Legebokoff, who the constable described as acting suspiciously. After questioning and IDing him, it was suspected that Legebokoff had been poaching, and the constable retraced the tracks of the truck through the snow, expecting that he would find the man’s stash of poached deer, moose, or elk, but rather than animal carcasses, the constable was met with the macabre sight of the fresh corpse of a murdered girl who had seemingly just been dumped into a ditch. The body, which had been assaulted, beaten, and the throat cut, would be found to be that of Loren Leslie.
Cody Legebokoff, a local man who was up until that point considered to be an upstanding model citizen would be charged for the murder, and an investigation would tie him to three other murders committed along the Highway of Tears between the years of 2009 and 2010. Authorities believe the number could be even higher, causing them to label him a “homegrown serial killer,” and at only 19 years old at the time of his first killing, the youngest serial killer in Canadian history. Legebokoff would be found guilty of these gruesome murders and sentenced to life in prison. While the arrest and conviction of Legebokoff was a significant achievement and went some way toward solving some of the cases and providing peace of mind for the scared locals, he nevertheless could not have possibly been responsible for all of the disappearances and murders, especially considering his young age and that these things had been happening since 1969. He also could not have been responsible for the disappearance of Madison Scott, as he had been in police custody at the time. This means there were likely other ruthless killers out there prowling the road.

Another significant development was made in 2012, in connection with one of the earlier murders that had occurred, that of 16-year-old Colleen MacMillen in 1974. When tests were run on the girl’s clothing using advanced, modern DNA analysis, a match was made between male DNA found on the clothes and a man named Bobby Jack Fowler, a drifter who proved to have a long criminal history of sexual assault, violence, and firearm possession. He was strongly suspected to be behind the murder and was believed to have been responsible for the deaths of Gail Weys and Pamela Darlington as well, both also along the Highway of Tears, in a addition to possibly even up to 6 other murders in the same area.
Unfortunately, Fowler was never able to answer for his sadistic murders, as he had died in prison in 2006 while doing time for an unrelated charge of kidnapping and assault, and so we may never know the true extent of his monstrous crimes. Again, although this evidence helps answer some of the questions hanging over the Highway of Tears, Fowler could not have been behind all of the killings and disappearances, and certainly not the ones that occurred while he was in prison or after he died, leaving much mystery still to solve. Another arrest in connection with the crimes along this sinister highway was made in the form of Garry Handlen, who was charged for the 1978 killing of 12-year-old Monica Jack.
However, these successes are ultimately overwhelmed by the large number of mysterious murders and disappearances along the Highway of tears that remain unsolved. The road has accrued such a menacing reputation that it is not uncommon to see signs posted along its length warning of the dangers of hitchhiking here, and announcing the presence of a killer on the loose. Yet these signs are largely ignored due to the reliance on the mostly poor people who live here on hitchhiking as a vital means of transportation. In recent years there has been more public awareness on the need for a proper public transportation system here, and there have even been plans put into action to open up a bus line along the route, as well as improved safety measure along the road such as security cameras and more lightning but this all remains largely on paper, and there has been criticism that action has been slow due to the largely indigenous population of the area.

Warning signs along the Highway of Tears

Indeed, the lack of progress in investigating and getting to the bottom of the sinister mystery of the Highway of Tears has been cause for much accusation that the government is not doing as much as it can because the victims were mostly indigenous women. A scary statistic is that although indigenous women make up less than 4% of the total female population of Canada, they comprise 16% of all female homicides, and most of these have gone unsolved, causing many to cry discrimination. Worryingly, around 4,000 indigenous women have gone missing or been murdered over the past three decades in Canada. Fittingly, British Columbia, where the Highway of Tears passes through, itself tops the charts for the highest number of unsolved murders of aboriginal women countrywide.
There are numerous accusations that the Canadian government mishandles these cases, downplays their gravity, or completely sweeps them under the carpet. There have been claims that the media coverage of these cases is limited due to the race of the victims, and much outrage over the fact that, although these killings have been covered since at least 1969 no task force was focused on them until 2005. Further damning evidence of this alleged discrimination can be found in the fact that the disappearance of Nicole Hoar, who was completely caucasian, gathered up the most publicity and resources towards investigation. Indeed, it is often pointed out that it is with the vanishing of this white woman that the Canadian government did anything about the situation at all. This outrage has led to outcries that government protection of aboriginal women is inadequate and constitutes a violation of human rights, which has inspired a government inquiry into the murders and disappearances of indigenous women and girls, pledging $31 million (U.S.) to the cause, but how far this is to actually do any good remains to be seen.

For now, most of the murders and vanishings along the desolate stretch of dark, wild road known as Highway 16, the Highway of Tears, are still unsolved. The ultimate answers to these missing girls’ fates remain clouded and hidden to us. This is an enigmatic place pulsing with both natural beauty and unseen danger. The investigative reporter Bob Friel once again adequately summed up this strange place thus:

It’s one of the most beautiful, most spectacular roads you’ll travel. So you can be there on the most beautiful day of the entire year, and suddenly you see one of these [hitchhiking warning] signs. And you feel this foreboding on the road … it’s a place that definitely has a personality, and a lotta times, that’s dark.

What lies at the bottom of the macabre mysteries of this lost highway? What happened to these young women and girls that the road seems hungry for? How many killers stalk along its remote, untamed expanse? For now these young women continue to hitchhike here, to walk along its stretches, and to perhaps die here. They make themselves targets for the nefarious agents that patrol it, and risk traveling along this grim stretch of road to keep on walking into the files of the unknown. There are truly rugged dens of death and mystery in this world, those hunting grounds of unseen, unknown horrors, human or otherwise, and among these one of those that shows no sign of stopping or letting up its secrets is the Highway of Tears. This is a place that seems to exist in almost another realm, and which may forever keep its secrets hidden.

THE STRANGE DIVERSION OF A BRITISH AIRWAYS AIRBUS A380

http://gizadeathstar.com/2016/11/strange-diversion-british-airways-airbus-a380/

Mr. S.C. shared this story, and there's more questions here than answers, and I can't help but talk about it because of its possible relationship to the still unresolved issue of missing Malaysia Air flight 370. We'll get back to that high octane speculation in a moment. For now, here's the story:

5 questions about British Airways Flight 286 emergency landing in Vancouver

Lisa Johnson, who wrote the story for the CBC, indicates that there are more questions here than answers, and Canadian and British authorities don't seem to be in any hurry to answer them, nor even to provide a plausible "cover story."

You'll note first of all that the enormous aircraft was flying from San Francisco to London, when it was then said to have been initially diverted to Calgary, which repportedly can handle the big Airbus aircraft, but wait, no, instead of diverting for the much closer Calgary, the aircraft flew on to Vancouver. So one question is:

4. Why didn't the plane land in Calgary?

And the provided answer is:

The passengers were initially told they'd land in Calgary, but actually touched down over the Rockies in Vancouver.

Some speculated that the size of the A380 — the largest commercial passenger jet in the world — meant it couldn't land at Calgary International, but the airport said it is "designed for and capable of accommodating A380 aircraft."

It's possible, said Williams, that burning more fuel en route to Vancouver made the landing easier.

OK, more fuel needed to be burned off. But as I recall, aircraft like the A380 are fitted with "dump" valves to jettison fuel for precisely such situations. Now, I'm certainly not an aircraft expert by any means, so someone out there might be able to provide more accurate information, but to the best of my knowledge, fuel dumps can be made for these types of situations. If... if... that is the case, then the "explanation" being offered here is no explanation at all: why, if there was an emergency, did the aircraft lumber on from Calgary to Vancouver, thus seemingly putting passengers and crew in more danger?

So what was such an emergency that the aircraft had to be diverted first to Calgary and thence to Vancouver? We're not told. All we're told is that the passengers as as mystified as we are. Those on the upper deck thought the problem was on the lower deck, and vice versa, those on the lower deck thought the problem was on the upper deck.

Then it gets more mystifying. At first the passengers are informed of a "technical difficulty":

Then, as dinner was being served, an announcement came from the captain.

"The captain came on and said there was some minor technical difficulties and we were diverting to Calgary instead of London," recalls passenger Jaakko Virtanan.

"I didn't smell any smoke.… I just smelled the roast beef or whatever that I didn't get, because they stopped serving dinner at that point."

Ok, so there were technical difficulties. But if there were technical difficulties, again, why not land at Calgary? Why seemingly compound the risk by flying on to Vancouver? Oh but wait, there weren't technical difficulties at all. Rather, someone (again unspecified), was ill:

Then, another announcement: someone was sick, and they'd land in Vancouver.

Who was sick? A passenger? A crew member? A member of the flight crew? Again, if someone was sick, and this is the reason the flight made an emergency landing, then why not Calgary? After all, they have electricity and indoor plumbing and hospitals and doctors in Calgary now, so why fly on to Vancouver?  And what was the nature of this "sickness"? Was it physical? Psychological?

The article suggests it was a crew member, or possibly, several:

2. How many people got sick?

The airline has said 25 crew members went to hospital — as a precaution — but it's not clear how many were actually ill.

An initial statement said "a crew member required medical attention," but by Tuesday afternoon the company said "several crew members reported feeling unwell."

"When we landed, the crew came and got their luggage and left immediately, and we're all sitting there looking around," said passenger Don Blaser, irritated that customers were left on the plane.

Video from the airport shows an ambulance leaving the scene, accompanied by a city bus filled with a number of crew members and paramedics.

At Vancouver General Hospital, flight crew could be seen walking through the emergency room doors with their carry-on bags, escorted by paramedics. All were discharged.

OK, so several crew members were sick, and went to the hospital in Vancouver, where "all were discharged." Strange, especially since one passenger stated that gas masks were seen, and others reported crew members asking them if they felt anything in their eyes:

One passenger told CBC News that rescue personnel came on the plane wearing "gas masks" or some kind of respirator, but that he didn't smell smoke.

Another passenger, Stefan Orberg, wondered if there was something in the air.

"The [flight] attendants asked me, did you feel anything in your eyes? I thought, well, maybe I had."

A number of technical problems can lead to smoke or air problems on the plane, said Williams, but the air conditioning system would be shared by the whole plane — not just a few crew members.

Alternatively, a malfunction in the cockpit could affect just the cockpit crew, said Williams.

The story ends by even suggesting some form of "mass hysteria."

So why bring this up in connection with the mysterious disappearance of MH 370? Well, for the simple reason that to this day no one seems to know exactly what happened to that flight, nor where it went down (nor even, really, if it went down, since most of the alleged wreckage from the craft that has been claimed to be found, according to some pilots, has not been conclusively shown to be from that flight. In some cases,the pictures of the actual alleged parts of the aircraft appear to be different than those of a Boeing 777, at least, to my highly untrained eye). In the case of this British airways flight, we're confronted by an equally mysterious event, and all public explanations are either just plain silly, or raise as many questions as they purport to answer.

Which brings me to an extraordinarily silly high octane speculation of my own, one which, I hasten to point out, has absolutely no evidence in its favor, other than a simple "gut intuition". And that intuition is perhaps, just perhaps, British Airways Flight 286 began to experience something very similar to MH 370, and the crew took action to avoid a similar fate. If that ridiculous idea did indeed happen, then it bears with it a hidden implication, namely, that there is a quiet and hidden protocol in place, based on whatever hidden conclusions might have been derived about the mysterious disappearance of MH flight 370. We'll call this the "MH370 emergency protocol" for what airliners are to do when confronted by highly abnormal circumstances. Part of that protocol might include cover stories about sick passengers, or crew, technical difficulties, and strange emergency landings.