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Vol 6 #3, Issue #22
Fall, 2008
$6.95 US/CAN
Exploring Mysteries from Modern Times to Yesteryear.
+
Dr. Robert Schoch
Discusses the
Paranormal
Searching for
the God Particle
Rhode island’s
Mysterious
Newport Tower
THE REALITY BEHIND THE
GARDEN
OF EDEN
PRESORT STANDARD
US POSTAGE PAID
PERMIT #581
BOLINGBROOK, IL
Learn How to Cope,
Evolve, and Expand in
our Changing Universe!
Clarisse Conner
Clairvoyant Intuitive and
Coast-to-Coast Radio Psychic
For a reading, call (530) 877-3446
www.PsychicClarisseConner.com
cconnerseesu@aol.com
By appointment only.
I S S U E #22
F A L L , 2008
PUBLISHER, EDITOR, ART DIRECTOR
Kim Guarnaccia: editor@mysteriesmagazine.com
A S S O C I AT E P U B L I S H E R
Tim Swartz: trswartz@mysteriesmagazine.com
A S S I S TA N T E D I T O R
AND
EVENTS EDITOR
Judith Kane: assteditor@mysteriesmagazine.com
ADVERTISING DIRECTOR
Ellen McDaniel-Weissler: anjuli@atlanticbb.net
f
COLUMNISTS
This Space
Could Have
Been Yours
for Just $120!
(based on a 2-year contract; b/w ad only)
Kelly Bell
Jaye Beldo
Kenaz Filan
Roy Stevenson
Michael Newton
Richard Mackenzie
Charles Rammelkamp
Carolyn Beavers Gonzales
l
F E AT U R E W R I T E R S
Michael Ricciardi
Mark S. Longo
Michael Lohr
Steve Taylor
j
REVIEWERS
Jaye Beldo
Sean Casteel
g
PROOFREADERS
To place an ad,
contact Kim Guarnaccia
(603) 352-1645
editor@mysteriesmagazine.com
2
Alma Dizon
Jocelyn Comendul
Published and printed in the United States of America. Mysteries Magazine, Volume 6 #3,
Issue #22 is a publication of Phantom Press Publications, ISSN #1537-2928, and published
four times a year in the U.S. and Canada. Copyright © 2008 Phantom Press Publications, PO
Box 490, Walpole, NH 03608 USA. All rights reserved. No work may be copied or reproduced
without the express permission of the editor. Correspondence should be addressed to: Kim
Guarnaccia, Editor, Mysteries Magazine, PO Box 490, Walpole, NH 03608 USA, email: editor@mysteriesmagazine.com, web: www.MysteriesMagazine.com or call (603) 352-1645.
M YSTERIES M AGAZINE ,
ISSUE
#22
WWW.M YSTERIES M AGAZINE . COM
3
Contributors
Steve Taylor lives in Manchester, England and
is the author of The Fall: the Insanity of the Ego
in Human History and the Dawning of a New
Era (O books). Colin Wilson has described
the book as an “astonishing work” while Eckhart Tolle has described it as “a fascinating
and important book, highly enlightening and
readable.” For more information see
www.stevenmtaylor.com
Michael Lohr is a writer/journalist, university
researcher, and professional treasure-hunter.
He is a Fellow with the Mudlark Society of
the British Museum in London and belongs
to many adventuring groups.
Michael Ricciardi is a poet/writer, naturalist, and
teacher living in Seattle Washington. He is also an
award-winning video artist, whose most recent
video—My Name is HAM, an imagined memoir of
the first chimpanzee in space—premiered in April at
the Yuri's Night World Party for Space at NASA
Ames Research Center. He is currently writing a children’s novel called The Wizard of Dreams.
An avid historian, Mark S. Longo is
the founder of www.TheOptionsInsider.com. Although the current financial crisis consumes most of his
time, Mark looks forward to the day
when he can return to Newport, RI to
study this mysterious historical oddity
called the Newport Tower.
Caveat: The opinions of the contributors to Mysteries Magazine are not necessarily those of the editors of Mysteries Magazine. However, Mysteries Magazine welcomes helpful criticism or comments on any of the articles contained herein. Please note that we reserve the right to edit all submissions.
We also may occasionally use photos and illustrations that have been placed in the public domain. As it is not always possible to identify the copyright holder, if you claim credit for something we have published, please let us
know, so that we can acknowledge you in the following issue.
4
ISSUE
#22
If you are never going to die,
you don’t need to read this book.
W
ithout the physical body, we
begin our deceased experience
near the earth and then move
into increasingly energized levels, eventually
either returning to God/Source or deciding
on another lifetime on
earth. What is most
interesting, however, is
that we continue after
death with the same
mind, personality,
attitudes and spiritual
awareness that we had
in life. In Choices in
the Afterlife, psychic medium Gretchen
Vogel details our after-death processes of
self-realization, assimilation, healing
and progression, as well as describes
what we all will experience once our
life here on earth comes to an end.
“A must-read for any
spiritual truth-seeker…”
—Kim Guarnaccia, editor,
Mysteries Magazine
$14.95. Available at
www.HowSpiritWorks.com,
or by calling 603-209-1032.
Psychic readings also available!
Take a Spiritual Journey
In The Spirit Garden, author David Baker
carries readers through his unusual life of
psychic experiences and his failure to
understand them. Faced with an amazing
world of auras, ghosts, angels, and spirits,
Baker is unable to ignore a fear that there
is something severely wrong with him.
About to give up, a spiritual vision saves
his life and forces him in a new direction.
Inspired by spirit and held together by
faith, Baker slowly begins to take his life
back in this touching and inspiring story.
Available at your local bookstore,
on www.amazon.com, or at
www.DavidBakerSpiritMedium.com
6
ISSUE
#22
Mysteries
Issue #22
November-December, 2008
Feature Articles
41 A MERICA ’ S O LDEST M YSTER Y :
R HODE
ISLAND ’ S
N EWPORT T OWER
By Mark S. Longo
Newport, RI, has long been famous as the summer playground for the fabulously
wealthy. But nestled amongst the luxurious mansions and the private yachts is a mysterious stone tower whose history has baffled historians for centuries. It is believed to be the
oldest stone structure in America, though no one can say precisely when it was built.
46 WAS
THERE A G OLDEN A GE ?
H ISTORICAL P ROOF FOR THE
G ARDEN
OF
EDEN
By Steve Taylor
Almost all of the ancient cultures of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have myths which
speak of an earlier time when life was easier and humans lived in harmony with nature
and each other. Most historians believe that these myths are little more than fairy tales,
perhaps the result of our need to idealize the past. However, there is now evidence that
suggests that these myths may contain a kernel of historical truth, a kind of distant folk
memory of an actual historical era.
52 T H E H IGGS B OSON
AND THE
S EEKING THE G OD P ARTICLE
L ARGE H ADRON C OLLIDER :
By Michael Ricciardi
Tucked away in a sleepy Swiss
village lies the Center for Nuclear
Experimentation and Research,
the site of the recently completed
Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
the world’s largest particle
collider and perhaps the
most complex machine ever
built. The principle goal of the LHC is to reveal the so-called god particle: the
Higgs Boson, which is about 120 times more massive than a proton, and gives
mass to all other particles as they emerge from the primordial quantum field.
58 T H E P ARAPSYCHOLOGY R EVOLUTION
A N I NTERVIEW
WITH
D R . R OBERT S CHOCH
By Michael Lohr
7
"The best scientist is
open to experience
and begins with
the idea that
anything is possible."
—Sci-fi author Ray Bradbury
Columns
LETTERS
TO THE
EDITOR
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .10
N O T E W O R T H Y . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14
MYSTERIES
ON
V I E W . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24
Seattle’s Museum of the Mysteries Draws Paranormal Buffs
A R C H A E O L O G I C A L A N O M A L I E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .26
Mutually Assured Destruction: Has it Happened Before?
TREASURES
OF THE
DEEP
H A U N T E D H E R I TA G E
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30
AR’s Haunted Crescent Hotel
A R C A N E C U L T S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32
The Sky Kingdom of Malaysia’s Ayah Pin: Heretic or Healer?
FROM
THE
S K I E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .34
Byrd and the UFOs of ‘47
C R Y P T O C O R R A L . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .36
B O O K R E V I E W S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .66
MUSIC REVIEWS
IN
THE
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .71
T H E AT E R . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72
T H E C L A S S I F I L E S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74
A GLIMPSE
8
INTO THE
U N K N O W N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .76
ISSUE
#22
This Space
Could Have
Been Yours
for Just
$90!
IRAQ WAR
CASUALTY TOTALS
AS
OF
OCTOBER 30, 2008
W
e at Mysteries Magazine are dismayed that the U.S. government is no longer releasing casualty totals from the Iraq war, and that the mainstream media is not
properly covering these totals either. So to rectify this oversight, we have decided to provide these totals to you on an ongoing basis until the war officially ends.
U.S. MILITARY & COALITION
Deaths
(based on a 2-year contract;
b/w ad only)
Wounded
4,503
43,787
(approximate #)
IRAQI
To place an ad,
contact Kim Guarnaccia
(603) 352-1645
editor@mysteriesmagazine.com
Police/Military
Reported Civilian Deaths
8,729
96,000
(approximate #)
Total # of Deaths/Casualties
153,019
For more info, visit www.iraqbodycount.org and www.icasualties.org
9
Letters to the Editor
Ayahuasca Not a Drug but Medicine
Hello Kim,
just received issue #20 with the commentary on hallucinogenic drugs by
Jaye Beldo. I do not know why Mysteries is promoting a lot of negative things
about the drug. As a veteran of 20
ayahuasca ceremonies now, I take exception to your unproven, unsubstantiated
allegations about it.
These articles also failed to mention
that the active substance in the drug
DMT, is also produced by the human
brain, and is speculated to be the source
of our nocturnal dreams. Or that it is
probably the oldest pharmaceutical compound on the planet. Ayahuasca is not
addictive. In fact, it is utilized in Peru as
part of treatment for drug/alcohol addictions!
Ayahuasca ceremonies are serious
business, and preparations involve diet,
fasting, and sexual abstinence. There may
be people who will take it for a lark, but
I doubt they would try it a second time.
The foolish and irresponsible aside, it is
not for everyone, but I can say that I have
profound respect for anyone with the
courage to utilize it in their spiritual path.
As an agent of profound change in humans, it truly has no equal.
I
—TIM JACKSON
EMAIL
Vampires Real!
Dear Kim,
n an article entitled Michelle Belanger’s Life as a Psychic Vampire in
issue #20, the author implies that the
vampire of myth and legend is an archetypal personification of humanity’s fear of
the hungry dead. My friend Jackson
Grimes, however, would dispute this
statement, as he says he has met real vampires.
Allegedly, Mr. Grimes was staying at
the home of his friend, Anton La Vey, for
an extended period when he was intro-
I
10
T
his is a 40-foot mimetolith face of King Arthur holding Excalibur,
located 3,800 ft above sea level on Sharp Top mountain, part of the
Blue Ridge Mountain National Park, in Bedford, VA. Daniel
Pillsbury found it in the summer of 1993 during a remote viewing journey
while living on the south side of the mountain. He believes it is an ancient
sacred site imbued with history, mystery, and intrigue, but long forgotten.
For more information, photos, or participation in solving the mystery, go
to www.facemountain.com or e-mail info@facemountain.com.
ISSUE
#22
Letters to the Editor
duced to a man who was supposedly the
head of a vampire sect. Even though he
looked like a man of about 60, he swore
he had come to the New World in the
days of the wooden sailing ships. It seems
in spite of the taboos against race-mixing,
he got friendly with an Indian maiden
who made him what he was today.
According to his account, the human
host is inhabited by a demon that buddies
up in the body with the original spirit. By
some undescribed means, the demonic
companion is capable of slowing down
the rate at which the host’s body ages, so
it ages one year in nine. This, I assume, is
why it needs to feed on the blood of living victims.
—HEATHER GOLDSMITH
EMAIL
Remote Viewing Article Incomplete
Dear Ms. Guarnaccia;
have just recently read “Psi Spies The
History of Remote Viewing” in issue
#21. Though I find your information on the British involvement in RV intriguing, the article of its history is
redundant and incomplete.
Because Ingo Swann’s first RV data
originally had no verified comparison, a
second series of experiments were conducted at ASPR. It was this second series that helped to verify Swann’s
original RV data.
One of the participants in the second
series was Keith Harary, who later joined
SRI, when the lab experiments were on
the verge of falling apart, due to conflicts
between Swann and Patrick Price.
Harary would redefine the RV process
with another protocol called Extended
Remote Viewing or “ERV,” but the alleged resentment of Harary from the
other SRI team-members took its toll,
and Harary would receive little recognition for his efforts.
Meanwhile, another participant from
the ASPR second series would also break
new ground: A. Edward Moch. What
I
12
Swann and Co. would be with military
applications, Moch would be with the domestic applications of RV, such as with
law enforcement.
In the movie Suspect Zero starring Ben
Kingsley, there is a truthful dialog between RV agent O’Brian (played by
Kingsley), and an FBI Special Agent
(played by Echardt) about O’Brian’s involvement with Project Icaris (aka Project
Stargate).
The Paramount Pictures press kit stated
that former military RV participant Edward A. Dames was the consultant for the
movie (A. Edward Moch... Edward A.
Dames). It is claimed that the studio got
both of their names mixed up, with
Dames becoming the consultant for Suspect Zero, but his student associate M.
Donahue later complained that “he was
used” by Dames in the movie. The reality
is the original movie script was rewritten
with RV material that was originally inspired by A. Edward Moch!
Both Harary and Moch were the
youngest participants tested in RV as
teenagers. In fact, if it wasn’t for Harary,
Moch, and the other participants in the
ASPR second series, there would probably be no Project Stargate as we know it
or even an Ingo Swann.
—A. EDWARD MOCH
Independence Day Sighting
Dear Kim,
n Friday, July 4, right after the
fireworks display in our neighborhood had ended at about
9:20 p.m., I was about to go inside when
I saw a bright steak of light. Looking up,
I saw a large orange blending light and
could see a craft rotating slowly straight
above me, with red lights around its rim
and a domed top. I watched it for about
three minutes before it moved to the
right, then to the left, then rose straight
up and then it was gone!
The next day at the local flea market
everyone was talking about the UFO; it
appears that at least 20 people there had
seen it besides myself. Now I am watching the skies more often.
O
—JEAN BEDNAREK
EYNON, PA
Email your editorial comments, stories, and
critiques to editor@MysteriesMagazine.com,
or write to: Kim Guarnaccia, Editor, Mysteries Magazine, PO Box 490, Walpole, NH
03608 USA. We reserve the right to edit any
letter published.
EMAIL
Mea Culpa…
Thanks to a dedicated reader, we were
notified that we used the wrong photo to
represent Robert Monroe in the Psi Spies
article in issue #21. (Ronald Russell, the
author of Monroe’s biography, is the person who was mistakenly identified as
Bob Monroe.) Here is a photo of the real
Robert Monroe. Our apologies!
—KIM GUARNACCIA
EDITOR
ISSUE
#22
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Noteworthy
Revealing Stonehenge
Guardians Fought To The Death
rchaeologists are claiming that Stonehenge may
have been the site of ritual battles to the death,
which would explain why recently discovered
male remains from the 2.300 BC, buried with arrows
and a bronze axe, were from Switzerland, not Britain.
Archaeologist Dennis Price says skeletons found at or
close to Stonehenge have often been found buried with
weapons, suggesting that those buried close to the mysterious monument were warriors who died violent
deaths or who led lives of ritual fighting.
According to researchers, there is firm evidence of a
long-standing tradition of sentinels at Stonehenge going
back to when it was originally built in 2,600 BC. But
their function may have been more than just symbolic
guards of the temple; these warriors may have been
part of a complex social system in which they could only
be replaced by someone who defeated them in combat.
A
14
Lost Altar Stone Found
rchaeologist Dennis Price thinks that he has tracked down a lost altar
stone that was once an integral part of the rituals at Stonehenge. The distinctively shaped stone was described by Inigo Jones, a prominent 17thcentury architect who carried out the first known detailed study of the prehistoric
site in 1620. It was also shown in a Victorian woodcut of Stonehenge and supposedly moved to somewhere called St. James during the Victorian era. Researchers long thought that the account referred to the Palace of St. James, but
no such stone could be found there.
Price believes that the stone now stands in two pieces in the Wiltshire village
of Berwick St. James, just a few miles from Stonehenge. The two stones were
used in Victorian times to bridge a small stream and they now stand on either
side of a small lane in the tiny village. They are made of Jurassic limestone, which
is found in Dorset and the Cotswolds, but not in the area surrounding Stonehenge. If put together, the pieces would look remarkably similar to the lost altar
stone shown in the Victorian woodcut.
A
—JUDITH KANE
—MICHAEL LOHR
SOURCES: ASIAN NEWS INTL.,
SOURCE: LONDON TIMES
SALISBURY JOURNAL, GAZETTE & HERALD
ISSUE
#22
Getting Your Manuscript
Published Will Never Be Easier.
You Write it, I Perfect it.
K
im Guarnaccia is now pleased to offer her ed-
iting experience to both experienced and
novice writers. Editor and publisher of Mysteries Magazine—and editor and art director
of Renaissance Magazine for the past 12 years—Kim
can edit your manuscript for both grammar and
clarity of message so that you can more easily get
an article accepted by a prestigious magazine or
your book accepted by an established literary agent
or publisher. And if you plan to self-publish your
work, Kim can also professionally design your
book for you.
Although she can edit any type of manuscript,
Kim specializes in:
• New Age/Spiritual Topics
• Paranormal Topics
• History
• Both Nonfiction and Fiction
Call Kim at (603) 352-1645 or
email kim@mysteriesmagazine.com
for pricing and further information.
15
Noteworthy
Albino Killings in
Tanzania Worry Officials
A
t least 19 albinos, including children, have been killed in Tanzania since the start of the year, their
bodies mutilated in order to harvest their
organs. Addressing the African nation,
Tanzania’s President Jakaya Kikwete has
denounced the horrific trend of targeting
albinos for murders.
A beleaguered group whose members
are often shunned as outcasts and die of
skin cancer before they reach 30, albinos
are being targeted by witch doctors who
are now marketing albino skin, bones, and
hair as ingredients in potions that promise
to bring wealth and good fortune.
The young are the prime targets. In
early May, Vumilia Makoye, a 17-year-old
albino, was eating dinner with her family
in their hut in western Tanzania when two
men showed up with long knives. Vumilia
had dropped out of school because of severe near-sightedness, a common problem
for albinos. Vumilia’s mother Jeme saw
the men and tried to barricade the door
of their hut but the men overpowered her
and burst in. The men sawed off Vumilia’s
legs above the knee and ran away with the
limbs.
Police officials are at a loss to explain
precisely why there is a wave of albino
killings now. Commissioner Paul
Chagonja said an influx of Nigerian
movies, which play up witchcraft, might
have something to do with it, along with
rising food prices that were making people
more desperate.
There are more than 8,000 registered
albinos in Tanzania. Police officers are
drawing up lists of albinos in every corner
of the country to better look after them,
Morgellons Connected
to Lyme Disease
T
here may be a dramatic new breakthrough
for thousands of people who suffer from
Morgellons, a mysterious illness in which
people suffer from sores that produce strange
fibers from the skin, crawling and biting sensations, fatigue, and mental fog.
Morgellons victims are often diagnosed as
delusional. But San Francisco physician Raphael
Stricker is one of a few doctors who believes
something real is happening. His research has
focused on a type of plant bacteria called
agrobacterium which is known to cause infections in animals and humans with compromised
immune systems.
In 2007, Dr. Stricker studied skin
samples from seven Morgellons pa-
16
tients and found the DNA from the bacteria in all
seven samples. Dr. Stricker believes the bacteria is entering the bloodstream from the bite of
deer ticks. In fact, in a recent survey of 44
Morgellons patients in San Francisco, 43 of
them tested positive
for Lyme. “This suggests that the combination of the Lyme
bacteria and the
agrobacterium may
work together to
cause an unusual and
emerging
disease
such as Morgellons,”
Dr. Stricker says.
and
escorting
albino
children to school. Tanzania’s president
even sponsored an albino woman for a
seat in Parliament to show his support.
Salvator Rweyemamu, a Tanzanian
government spokesman, said the rash of
killings was anathema to what Tanzania
had been striving toward. “This is serious,” he continued, “because it continues
some of the perceptions of Africa we’re
trying to run away from.”
But the killings go on. They have even
spread to neighboring Kenya, where an albino woman was hacked to death in late
May, with her eyes, tongue, and breasts
gouged out.
—CHARLES RAMMELKAMP
However, research done by Vitaly Citovsky, professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Stony
Brook University in New York, suggests that there
may be a link between Morgellons and genetically modified (GM) food, as agrobacterium has
been widely used in creating GM plants since the
1980s.
The association of Morgellons disease with
dirt and soil where agrobacterium lives, the widespread use of agrobacterium in genetically engineered plants, and the ability of agrobacterium
to infect human cells all point towards a possible role of genetic engineering in
the cause of Morgellans disease
via agrobacterium.
The scientists all agree that the
Centers for Disease Control (CDC)
needs to seriously fund further research on the causes of Morgellons beyond the $338,000 that it
has pledged so far.
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: CBS-11 DALLAS/FT. WORTH
ISSUE
#22
We Want Your
Spooky Photos!
Have you captured on film a UFO,
ghost, light orb, or any other event
that defies easy explanation?
If so, we want to publish it! Just mail us the photo, slide, or
negative with a brief explanation as to where and when it
was taken and what is unusual about it. If we publish
your photo, you will receive a FREE 1-year subscription
(or if already a subscriber, a FREE 1-year renewal).
Mysteries Magazine
PO Box 490 • Walpole, NH 03608 USA • www.MysteriesMagazine.com
(Note: All submitted photos become the property of Mysteries Magazine and will not be returned.)
17
Noteworthy
Vampires of Celtic Heritage
T
he discovery of a 4,000-year-old
vampire burial cairn, believed to
be the world’s first such ritualized
grave, has set the archaeological world on
its ear, as it is similar to ancient Celtic
tombs in Ireland and the British Isles,
which were constructed to prevent
bloodsucking “revenants” from rising out
of the grave.
The discovery of the gravesite, during a
routine archaeological excavation of an
early Bronze Age burial site in
Mikulovice, eastern Bohemia, means that
the concept of vampires can now be
traced back to the cultural folklore of
Indo-European tribes.
During the site’s exploration, archaeologists also discovered the skeletal remains
of a man whose bore the unmistakable
signs of vampiric ritual, including a
bronze spike driven through its chest.
The corpse had also been weighted down
with large stones to prevent it from returning to the world of the living. Only
the ancient Celts in Europe and ancient
Irish tribes carried out such rituals on suspected vampires.
—MICHAEL LOHR
SOURCES: BBC & LONDON SUNDAY TIMES
Boy Kidnapped by
“Little People” in AK
A
n intriguing story circulated out of Alaska in May, 2008 when a hunter recounted how he
found a boy alleged to have been abducted by strange creatures known as the ircenrraat, or
little people who dwell underground, who disorient and trap unwary humans.
Nick Andrew Jr. from Marshall, AK was miles out of town on a snowmachine hunting birds when
he decided to check a different location on a hunch. Stopping to look, he recognized a small boy
standing all alone in middle of the marsh. He asked if he was alone. Scared and crying, the boy just
answered, “I don’t know.”
Andrew took the boy home, noting that there were no footprints in the snow to indicate anyone
had walked into the area. But he counted at least 10 other snowmachiners in the neighborhood,
none of whom had spotted the boy. It
was not until the next day that the boy
said he was brought into Pilcher Mountain, a site often associated with ircenrraat encounters. There, he was
questioned and saw other little beings.
“He said he made contact with a little
girl abducted over 40 years ago,” Andrew said. “She told him who she was
and she wanted help.”
After that, the ircenrraat released the
boy. “And that's when he came to, I
guess, a few minutes before I found
him.”
VATICAN SAYS…
It is OK
to Believe
In Aliens
T
he Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes (shown
below), the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory near Rome, said that
the vastness of the universe means it is
possible there could be other forms of life
outside Earth, even intelligent ones.
In an interview published in May, 2008
by Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, Funes said that such a notion “doesn’t contradict our faith” because aliens
would still be God’s creatures. “Just as we
consider earthly creatures as ‘a brother,’
and ‘sister,’ why should we not talk about
an ‘extraterrestrial brother’? It would still be
part of creation,” Funes said.
Funes said science, especially astronomy, does not contradict religion, touching
on a theme of Pope Benedict XVI, who has
made exploring the relationship between
faith and reason a key aspect of his papacy.
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS
18
ISSUE
#22
Noteworthy
In Passing
Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi,
a guru to the
Beatles who
introduced
the West to
transcendental meditation
(TM), died on
Feb. 5, 2008
at his home in the Dutch town of
Vlodrop. He was thought to be 91
years old.
He began teaching TM in 1955
and brought the technique to the
United States in 1959. But the
movement really took off after
the Beatles visited his ashram in
India in 1968, although he had a
famous falling out with the rock
stars when he discovered them
using drugs at his Himalayan retreat.
With the help of celebrity endorsements, Maharishi parlayed
his interpretations of ancient
scripture into a multi-milliondollar global empire. With his
background in physics, he
brought his message to the West
in a language that mixed the occult and science.
Science-fiction writer Arthur C.
Clarke, who co-wrote the epic
film 2001: A Space Odyssey and
raised the idea of communications satellites in the 1940s, died
on March 18, 2008 in Sri Lanka
at age 90.
Clarke
w r o t e
dozens of
novels and
collections
of
short
stories and
more than
30 non-fiction works
during a career that began in the
1950s. He served as a TV com-
mentator during several of the
Apollo moon missions and cowrote a 1970 account of the first
lunar landing with the Apollo 11
crew. He was knighted in 1998.
demanded respect. More important to him was the drug’s value
as a revelatory aid for understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature.
Physicist
John
A.
Wheeler, a
visionary
physicist
and teacher
who helped
invent the
theory of
nuclear fission, gave black holes their
name, and argued about the nature of reality with Albert Einstein
and Niels Bohr, died on April 13,
2008. He was 96. Dr. Wheeler
was also involved in the Manhattan Project to build the world’s
first atomic bomb. He later
helped Edward Teller to develop
the even more powerful hydrogen
bomb.
Erik Beckjord, a San Franciscobased paranormal investigator
who specialized in researching
reports of Bigfoot, died June 22,
2008. He was 69.
Beckjord theorized that animals such as Bigfoot and the
Loch Ness monster were extradimensional entities that only appeared on Earth for brief periods
of time. But Beckjord is probably
best known for his confrontational attit u d e
against not
only skeptics,
but
also fellow
cryptozoologists. He
actively
promoted
his claims on Internet message
boards, which often turned into
wars between Beckjord and his
opponents. Indeed, many webmasters banned Beckjord from
their sites. Despite the extreme
nature of his claims, his powerful
and aggressive personality drew
considerable attention from the
paranormal research community.
Dr. Albert Hofmann, the mystical
S w i s s
chemist
who gave
the world
LSD, died
April 29,
2008 at
his hilltop
home near
Basel,
Switzerland. He was 102.
Dr. Hofmann first synthesized
the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not
discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later,
when he accidentally ingested
the substance that became
known to the counterculture as
acid.
Hofmann took LSD hundreds
of times, but regarded it as a
powerful psychotropic drug that
Frank Joyce, a New Mexico
newsman who reported on the
Roswell Incident as it unfolded
and was a
familiar
face with
his
outdoor report
on
KOB-TV, recently died
at the age
of 85.
Joyce was in his 20s working at
Roswell radio station KGFL in
1947 and was the first reporter
to talk to rancher Mack Brazel
about the strange, metallic debris discovered on the J.B. Foster
ranch. Joyce thus became connected with the famous UFO
story. He was interviewed about
the incident a number of times
over the years and depicted in
documentaries and movies, such
as the TV film Roswell.
Later in his life, Joyce said that
he had mixed feeling about his involvement. He liked the positive
aspect of it but did not care for
the people that did not believe
that something unusual had happened.
—TIM SWARTZ
“All that
we are is
the result
of what
we have
thought.
The mind is
everything.
What we
think we
become.”
—Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi
19
Noteworthy
Sodom and Gomorrah
Destroyed by Asteroid
A
cuneiform clay tablet that has
puzzled scholars for over 150
years has been translated for the
first time and is now believed to be a
Sumerian observation of an asteroid impact at Köfels, Austria, leaving in its wake
a trail of destruction that may account for
the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The Planisphere clay tablet, which
shows drawings of constellations and
cuneiform, was inscribed around 700 BC.
The noted Victorian archaeologist Sir
Henry Layard unearthed the tablet in the
remains of the library of the Assyrian
royal palace at Nineveh, close to modernday Mosul, Iraq.
The tablet is a copy of the night diary
of a Sumerian astronomer who referred
to the asteroid as a white stone bowl approaching the earth and recorded that it
“vigorously swept along.”
Alan Bond, managing director of Reaction Engines Ltd. and Mark Hempsell,
senior lecturer in astronautics at Bristol
University, used software to simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky
thousands of years ago. They discovered
that the Planesphere described the sky before dawn on June 29, 3123 BC. Half the
tablet records planet positions and cloud
cover, but the other half records an object large enough to be noted even
though it is still in space. The astronomers made an accurate note of its
trajectory relative to the stars which, to
an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köffels.
Geologists have long puzzled over a
giant landslide close to the town of Köfels
in the Austrian Alps, but since there was
no crater, they were unable to prove it
had been caused by an asteroid. Now researchers say their translation of the Plani20
sphere offers proof that a mile-wide asteroid may have caused tens of thousands
of deaths in a path that extended from
Europe and into the Middle East.
Scientists believe that the incoming
angle of the asteroid was very low and
that it clipped an alpine mountain called
Gamskogel, which caused the asteroid to
explode before it reached its final impact
point. As it traveled down the valley it became a fireball, around six miles in diameter, causing the massive landslide near
Köffels. “The ground heating, though
very short, would be enough to ignite
any flammable material (752°F), including human hair and clothes. It is probable
more people died under the plume than
in the Alps due to the impact blast,” explained Mark Hempsell.
He also says that at least 20 ancient
myths record devastation of the type and
scale of the asteroid’s impact, including
the Old Testament account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,
which relates a tale of death and destruction when God rained fire and brimstone
down upon the cities because of the inhabitant’s evil ways.
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: BRISTOL UNIVERSITY
Gnome Caught on Video
A
town in South America is living in fear after several sightings of a “creepy gnome” that
locals claim stalks the streets at night. The small creature, who wears a pointy hat and
has a distinctive sideways walk, was caught on video in March, 2008 by a group of
teenagers.
Jose Alvarez, who caught the creature on his cellphone camera, told El Tribuno that they
spotted the creature in General Guemes, in the province of Salta, Argentina. “We were chatting about our last fishing trip. It was 1 a.m. in the morning. I began to film a bit with my cell
phone while the others were chatting and joking. Suddenly we heard a weird noise as if someone was throwing stones.” Alvarez said that the group then saw a gnome-like figure jump
from some nearby bushes.
After records showed that locals have reported seeing the creature for decades, police in Salta have launched an investigation. Only
weeks before it was captured on camera, frightened railworkers
called the police to say they had spotted the crab-walking gnome
moving around the train tracks at night.
El Tribuno reported that fear is now so widespread that the town
mayor has been inundated with calls from terrified locals and has
launched a police enquiry into the affair. He said that he was a little
skeptical, but had to respect that gnomes are a part of their culture.
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: THE SUN (UK)
ISSUE
#22
Noteworthy
DRS. BAFFLED BY
BLEEDING GIRL
A
13-year-old girl from Uttar
Pradesh, India, is suffering from a
strange disorder where she bleeds
through her skin without being cut or
scratched. Twinkle Dwivedi has even undergone transfusions after pints of blood
seeped through her eyes, nose, hairline,
neck, and the soles of her feet. Sometimes
her condition is so bad she wakes up with
her entire body covered in dried blood.
Her frantic family have sought help from
numerous doctors as well as preachers
from many different religions, without
success.
Last year, Twinkle was a normal 12year-old but then she suddenly started
bleeding between five and 20 times a day.
“It didn’t hurt, she said, “but it was scary
and messy, and my friends thought it was
disgusting.”
Twinkle was thrown
out of one school and
another school refused
to teach her because
of her strange condition. Now she studies
at home and rarely sees
other children.
The first time the
bleeding happened from
Twinkle's mouth in
July of 2007,
her parents took
her to a
doctor
w h o
sug-
gested a common ulcer. But then, a few
weeks later, the bleeding also started
from her nose, eyes, feet, and hairline.
Twinkle’s parents took her to see
dozens of different doctors who could not
find a reason for her blood loss. Finally,
doctors at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi decided she has
Type 2 Platelet Disorder, a rare condition
where blood is dangerously low in clotting particles.
However, consultant haematologist Dr.
Drew Provan of Barts Hospital in London believes her condition is not related
to the number of clotting particles, but
something called the von Willebrand factor, which helps platelets stick to blood
vessels and blood to clot. Sufferers of von
Willebrand disease are missing a protein
critical to the initial stages of bloodclotting. The glue-like protein interacts with platelets to form a
plug to prevent the blood from
free-flowing at the site of an injury. People with von Willebrand disease are unable to make
the plug.
Dr. Provan suggests that
Dwivedi see a coagulation specialist for the condition, but
Twinkle’s family is poor
and unless a cure can
be found soon, she
will
continue
growing weaker
and may one
day die from
blood-loss.
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: THE
TELEGRAPH
Giant Fish
Feasts on
Swimmers
A
huge catfis, called a Goon, has started
killing people in India and Nepal, after
it developed a taste for partially burnt
human corpses.
The extraordinary creature has been investigated by biologist Jeremy Wade for a TV
documentary to be shown in the UK. He said
that the locals told him of a theory that this
monster has grown extra large on a diet of
partially burnt corpses from funeral pyres.
Wade discounts theories that crocodiles
could be responsible for the carnage before
turning his attention to Goonches, among the
world's biggest freshwater fish. He caught
one fish which tipped the scales at 161
pounds and was nearly six feet long, a world
record weight and far bigger than any landed
before.
An 18-year-old man disappeared in the
river in 2007, dragged down by something
described as like an “elongated pig.” But the
first victim of a Goonch attack was thought to
have been a 17-year-old Nepalese boy. He
was killed in April 1988 as he cooled himself
in the river. Three months later, another
young boy was mysteriously dragged underwater as his father watched helplessly.
Local officials said that rumors of “giant,
man-eating fish” were merely local superstitions and that there was no reason to put an
end to the tradition of placing the burnt remains of funeral pyres in the Great Kali.
—TIM R. SWARTZ
SOURCE: THE SUN (UK)
21
Noteworthy
Peru Meteorite May Rewrite Science
S
cientists who have been examining samples of the meteorite that plunged into the
Peruvian countryside in 2007 say that the
space rock should have shattered and dispersed long before reaching the ground.
The meteorite, which left a 16-yard-wide
crater last September, made headlines when
over 100 people complained that strange gases
coming from the crater made them sick. Although follow-up investigations could find no
reason for the mysterious sickness, experts say
that the event challenges conventional theories
about the science of space impacts.
Usually, only meteorites made of metal survive the passage through Earth’s atmosphere
sufficiently intact to produce a crater. But the object that came down in the Puno region of Peru
was a fragile stony meteorite. During its descent,
it should have fragmented into smaller pieces,
yet the estimated one-yard-wide meteorite is
thought to have hit the ground in one piece. This
might have been due to the meteorite’s high
speed (15,000 mph), in which fragments were
unable to escape the shockwave barrier through
the atmosphere.
However, Dr. Thomas Kenkmann from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, suggested
that the crater was probably caused by a meteorite traveling at low speed and at a slanting
angle. Under this scenario, the space rock would
have broken into just a few pieces, the largest
of which would have made the crater. Others
suggest that the meteorite was made of iron and
that the bulk of it still remains hidden in the bottom of the water-filled crater.
—TIM SWARTZ / SOURCE: BBC
Saint Padre Pio on Display
S
ome 15,000 worshipers gathered
on April 25, 2008 in the town of
San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy, to
view the exhumed body of saint and mystic Padre Pio, on display for the first time
since his death in 1968. Catholic practice
allows for the remains of saints to be exhumed, checked for their state of deterioration, and exhibited as relics for
veneration.
Saint Padre Pio’s body was exhumed
on March 3 so that it could be prepared
for public display to commemorate the
anniversary of his death 40 years ago.
Local Archbishop monsignor Domenico
D’Ambrosio, who was present at the exhumation, said there was no unpleasant
smell and the body was well preserved.
Padre Pio’s body is central to the cult
that surrounds him. For believers, the visible evidence of his sanctity was the stigmata—the wounds of Jesus on the
cross—that first appeared on Pio in 1910.
But according to a book published in
2007, Padre Pio may have used carbolic
acid bought from a local drugstore to create his wounds.
A team of biochemists
and other experts have
worked since the exhumation to get the
body into a fit state to
be shown. Padre Pio’s
face was covered with
a lifelike silicone mask of the type used in
wax museums. This prompted a circle of
Padre Pio devotees to ask for an autopsy
to establish that the remains were authentic. Forensic scientists who took part
in the exhumation denied his face was
badly decomposed. Rather, they said the
mask was used to protect the sensibilities
of those who visited the body.
The Capuchin friar was made a
saint by the late Pope John
Paul II. He was credited by
his fellow friars with more
than 1,000 miraculous
cures and interventions.
Until his death in 1968,
the church authorities remained deeply skeptical of
the claims made on Padre
Pio’s behalf. It was only the
momentum generated by his
devotees that prompted a change
in attitude.
More than a million people are expected to file past a transparent casket
holding his restored corpse between now
and September, 2009.
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN (UK)
22
ISSUE
#22
Noteworthy
40,000-YEAR-OLD
A Call from
FOOTPRINTS FOUND the Grave
F
ootprints left in volcanic ash that fell
in central Mexico’s Valsequillo Basin
about 40,000 years ago
are evidence that humans have
inhabited the Americas far
longer than previously confirmed.
Silvia Gonzalez from Liverpool John Moores University
and Matthew Bennett of
Bournemouth
University
found the footprints in an
abandoned quarry close to the
Cerro Toluquilla volcano south
of Mexico City, in 2003. The
footprints were preserved as
trace fossils in volcanic ash along what was
the shoreline of an ancient volcanic lake.
Recent excavations in Baja California
have unearthed a rock shelter
containing heaps of shells that
are approximately 44,000
years old, a finding that bolsters the notion that people
lived throughout the region
about 40 millennia ago.
These findings support a
theory that the first colonies
may have arrived in the western hemisphere by water, migrating along the Pacific
coast, rather than by foot.
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: SCIENCE NEWS
Skin Can See
Colors, Shapes
A
researcher at Tel Aviv University says that humans may be able to see colors and shapes
with their skin. Engineering professor Leonid
Yaroslavsky explained that skin vision is likely a natural ability involving light-sensitive cells that are connected to neuro-machinery in the body and brain.
He believes that once understood, skin vision could
help the blind regain sight. Yaroslavsky is currently
developing imaging simulation theories, which may
lead to devices that can detect radiation, new nightvision goggles, or near-weightless mechanisms to
steer spaceships to stars beyond our galaxy.
Traditional imaging lenses only work within a limited range of electromagnetic radiation, are costly,
and limited by weight and field of view. But opticless imaging devices could be adapted to any kind
of radiation and wavelength. They could essentially
work with a 360-degree field of view, their imaging
capability determined by computer power rather
than the laws of light diffraction.
C
huck Peck (shown below) died in the
September 12, 2008 Metrolink train
collision but his Simi Valley, CA family is unable to explain why they received
calls from his cell phone hours after the
collision.
As firefighters worked to rescue survivors, family members said Peck's cell
phone kept calling his son, brother, stepmother, sister, and fiancée. But when they
answered, all they heard was static. And
when family members called back, the
calls went straight to voice mail. In all,
Peck’s family say they received about 35
calls from Peck’s cell phone through the
night.
Nearly five hours after the crash at 9:08
p.m., a family memner received a call. “We
were yelling in the
phone, ‘hang in
there baby.
W e ' r e
gonna get
you out.
Yo u ’ r e
gonna
b
e
o kay, ’ ”
Katz said.
When the
rescue efforts
turned to recovery, there was another
call, which prompted search crews to trace
it. They realized it was coming from the first
train so they went back in one last time
where the team discovered Peck's body. It
appeared that he had died immediately on
impact and that there was no way he could
have been making the calls. The calls
stopped at 3:28 a.m., about an hour before Peck’s body was found.
However, the phone calls helped the
family get through the night. Investigators
said they may never know how those calls
were made because Peck’s phone was
never found.
—TIM SWARTZ
—TIM SWARTZ
SOURCE: NEW KERALA (INDIA)
SOURCE: KTLA-TV
23
Mysteries on View
Seattle’s Museum of the Mysteries
Draws Paranormal Buffs
For paranormal aficionados,
the Seattle Museum of the
Mysteries is a quiet, friendly
haven where one can gather
with others who share
a similar fascination with
the world’s mysteries.
by Roy Stevenson
ucked away in a basement in Seattle’s Capitol Hill lurks the Seattle
Museum of the Mysteries, a nonprofit museum and research center dedicated to furthering education, research,
and history of paranormal science and ancient civilizations. The museum also explores alternate explanations of reality, such
as UFOs, crop circles, Bigfoot lore, and
local mysteries.
Special exhibits, photographs, artifacts,
T
books, documents, and weird inventions
line the walls of the museum. A wax head
reconstructed from FBI descriptions of
D.B. Cooper, the hijacker who bailed out
of a commercial airliner over southwest
Washington with a $200,000 ransom on
November 24, 1971, never to be seen
again, sits in a place of honor on a shelf, as
do four sets of plaster casts of Sasquatch
footprints. One set was found near Walla
Walla, WA. The other three are copies of
the Bluff Creek, CA casts taken by Roger
Charlette LeFevre,
director of the
Seattle Museum
of the Mysteries.
24
ISSUE
#22
Mysteries on View
The Maury Island UFO Mystery
O
n June 21, 1947, Harold Dahl, his son, and two crewmen were salvaging logs
south of Maury Island in the Puget Sound when they saw six doughnut-shaped
disks hovering over the bay. One appeared to be in trouble and the wobbling disk
dropped some sort of shiny metal on the beach and into the water, wounding Dahl’s son
and killing their dog.
A B-25 bomber then crashed near Kelso, WA, soon after take-off from McChord Field
south of Tacoma, carrying rock samples and pieces of the UFO from Maury Island. Was
the bomber shot down by an unknown government agency to prevent analysis of the
rock samples? Or did someone else have reason for preventing this sample from being
made public?
This intriguing mystery is just one of the UFO sightings explored at the museum.
—ROY STEVENSON
Patterson of the famous Patterson-Gimlin film. The Sasquatch exhibits are
amongst the most comprehensive in the
country, with footprint casts, skull comparison charts, hand and knuckle casts,
hair samples, and artwork.
Pacific Northwest anomalies that never
quite made the national press also grab a
guest’s attention at the museum. One of
them is Mels’ Hole, near Manastash
Ridge in Ellensburg, WA, which some
say is the deepest volcanic vent hole in the
world. Another is the ghost town of
Wellington that was abandoned after a
catastrophic train crash on the Iron Goat
Trail near Steven’s
Pass. One of the
worst train wrecks
in U.S. history, it
killed 96 people in
1910. Some say
ghosts still haunt
the ruins of the
abandoned town.
Another display tells about Dr. Linda
Hazzard, the northwest’s first serial killer
who lured at least 40 unsuspecting
women to her health farm between 1910
and 1938 and proceeded to starve them
to death. She was nicknamed the
“Tomato Soup Killer” because she fed the
women a tomato-water broth to weaken
them. She then had them sign over their
possessions and then starved them to
death. Convicted of manslaughter, she
served time in the State Penitentiary at
Walla Walla, but eventually returned to
Ollala and continued her “work.” The real
horror was how state officials and locals
looked the other way for years while she
performed her grim work. (www.starvationheights.com has more details about
this macabre case.)
But there is more here
than a collection of unusual artifacts. The private book collection of
James Widener Ray
holds shelf after shelf of
books on all aspects of
the paranormal. Visitors
can also watch DVDs
and videos about the
paranormal or browse
through
scrapbooks
about the unusual and
bizarre, in the small
lounge area. The museum also hosts weekly
A wax head
presentations
by aureconstructed
thors, explorers, refrom FBI descriptions of
searchers, investigators,
D.B. Cooper
and experts. z
sits in a place
of honor on a
shelf, as do
four sets of
plaster casts
of Sasquatch
footprints.
The Seattle Museum of
the Mysteries is located at
623 Broadway Ave., Seattle, WA 98102. For more
info, call 206-328-6499
or visit www.seattlechatclub.org.
25
Archaeological Anomalies
M U T UA L LY A S S U R E D D E ST R U C T I O N
Has it Happened Before?
Considering the destructive
potential of our atomic
arsenals, our world could well
be reduced to charcoal by a
thermonuclear war. But could
such an event have happened
in our long-distant past?
Archaeologists have dug up tektites in
Baalbek, and many of the huge stone
platforms (long assumed to be connected to Baal worship) are vitrified.
26
by Kelly Bell
hen the first atomic bomb was
detonated in the New Mexico
desert in 1945, its heat melted
the desert sand into millions of small glassy
fragments in a process called vitrification.
Some of the scientists who examined this
debris were stunned to find it looked identical to the tektites that, for centuries, have
been found in the vast region stretching
from Tasmania to north of the Philippines
and the East Indies to East Africa. Although tektites had long been assumed to
be meteorites, there was the question of
why, if of extraterrestrial origin, none have
fallen in recent times? Furthermore, nearly
all meteorites are composed of iron or
stone—not glass.
The 1945 New Mexico atomic test may
provide a clue. Considering the lack of any
other plausible explanation, could it be that
W
the tektites covering so much of the Pacific
Basin and East Africa were blasted aloft by
nuclear explosions and then rained back
down onto this huge area?
Additionally, the entire desert between
Damascus, Syria and Baghdad, Iraq is so
littered with charred, heat-blackened rocks
that literally thousands of square miles of
Mesopotamia must at one time have been
subjected to tremendous heat. Such stones
have also been found in Australia, France,
India, South Africa, and Chile. They are
composed mainly of aluminum and beryllium, and analysis shows them to have been
exposed not only to extreme heat, but also
to powerful doses of radioactivity.
Additionally, north of Beirut, Lebanon,
there is the ancient city of Baalbek. In ruins
since Biblical times, the city was dedicated
to the worship of the sun god Baal. Archaeologists have dug up tektites in Baalbek, and many of the huge stone platforms
(long assumed to be connected to Baal
worship) are vitrified.
The standard explanation for the partial
melting of these rock structures is that they
were struck by lightning. The problem here
is that it would have taken many lightning
bolts striking the same spot to vitrify the
stone. Lightning is a rare occurrence in the
arid Middle East. This is especially true
when we consider that vast areas of Mongolia’s Gobi Desert are also mysteriously
vitrified.
Moreover, outside Cuzco, Peru, there is
a vitrified hillside covering 18,000 square
yards. The 3,000-year-old Indian epic Mahabharata describes a battle scene in which
a “blazing missile” was shot into the midst
of an army and produced “a radiance of
smokeless fire” that instantly immolated
chariots, men, elephants, and forests, and
caused rivers to boil.” The passage in quesM YSTERIES M AGAZINE ,
ISSUE
#22
Archaeological Anomalies
tion is downright sobering:
“It was as if the elements had been unleashed. The sun spun round. Scorched
by the incandescent heat of the weapon,
the world reeled in fever. Elephants were
set on fire by the heat…The water
boiled, the animals died, the enemy was
mown down and the raging of the blaze
made the trees collapse in rows as in a
forest fire…
Horses and war
chariots were burnt
up, and the scene
looked like the aftermath of a conflagration. Thousands of
chariots were destroyed,
then deep silence descended on the sea.
The winds began to blow and the Earth
grew bright. It was a terrible sight to
see. The corpses of the fallen were mutilated by the terrible heat so that they no
longer looked like human beings.”
There is no way of knowing how long
before the Mahabharata was written that
this Hiroshima-type incident took place,
but the real question is how could the ancients have known how to perfectly describe an atomic blast if they had not
actually witnessed it? If there were witnesses who later described these events,
they would seem to have been quite fortunate to have survived the great burning.
It is likely that the reason for the paucity
of accounts of how the vitrification occurred is that few survived to tell the tale.
Aerial Warfare
verall, it appears that long ago,
someone with an extremely advanced technology laid waste to
a great deal of the Earth’s surface. By returning to primeval India, we find evidence that this war was aerial as well as
terrestrial.
An Indian classic from millennia ago
recounts how three “floating cities” were
destroyed by what sounds like nuclear
missiles. Known as the Drona Parva, it
O
contains this unsettling passage:
Formerly the valiant Asuras had in
heaven three cities. …When, however,
the three cities came together in the firmament, the Lord Mahadeva pierced
them with that terrible shaft of his consisting of three knots. The Danavas were
unable to gaze at that shaft inspired
with the Yuga fire and composed of
Vishnu and Soma.
Exploration of India reveals clues that
support these primordial accounts.
19th-century British explorer
Charles DeCamp
w a s
A typical
tektite.
traveling between
the Ganges River and
the mountainous area of
Rajmahal when he came
across stone ruins he described as
having been fused together “…like
lumps of tin struck by a stream of molten
steel.”
Then during a 19th-century hunting
expedition deep inside an Indian forest,
British sportsman/explorer H.J. Hamilton got the shock of his life when he
stumbled upon an ancient building that
had been exposed to such heat that its
walls were crystallized. Filled with curiosity, he got the shock of his life when he
entered the structure:
“Suddenly the ground gave way under
my feet with a curious noise. I got into a
safe place and then widened the hole,
which had appeared, with my rifle butt
and lowered myself into it. I was in a
long and narrow corridor.”
Easing his way cautiously down the
passage he saw a table and chair in which
a figure was slumped. The furniture and
humanoid outline were also crystallized.
Thinking it was a statue he took a closer
look and was horrified by what he saw.
“Under the ‘glass’ that covered that
‘statue’ a skeleton could clearly be seen!”
Yet another ancient epic was written by
long-forgotten Indian scribes who gave
descriptions so detailed that they seem to
have come from eyewitness accounts.
Called the Mausola Parva, it describes
how an entire army was decimated by a
“gigantic messenger of death” that poisoned food stores, turned birds white, and
caused survivors’ hair and fingernails to
fall out. It likened the detonation to “ten
thousand suns.” Those who survived the initial blast seemed
to have known what to
do in order to survive,
as the following indicates: “To escape from this
fire the soldiers
threw
themselves in streams
to wash themselves and all their
equipment.”
Although India appears
to have been the center of this hypothetical prehistoric thermonuclear holocaust
(or perhaps it is just that more written accounts from India survived), the clues of
its destruction are worldwide. Did an earlier civilization exterminate itself? Could
the lost societies of Atlantis, Mu, and
Lemuria all have existed at one time, only
to obliterate themselves so long ago that
we have only the barest evidence of their
existence and passing?
Scientific dogma says that these suppositions are ludicrous. Yet this establishment cannot even tell us where we
came from, why we age, or even why we
sleep. Perhaps the time has come to kick
the pedestal from beneath the Great God
Science. Who knows what we might
learn? z
27
treasures of the deep
Oldest Sub-Saharan Shipwreck Found
eologists from De Beers, the
world’s largest diamond mining
company, have discovered a late15th-century shipwreck behind a seawall
on the Atlantic coast of Namibia. The
wreck, which is the oldest ever found in
sub-Saharan Africa, has been badly battered
by the sea, but the site has already yielded
human remains, more than 50 ivory elephant tusks, several tons of copper and tin,
pewter tableware, navigational instruments,
thousands of gold and silver coins, and
weapons, including muskets, swords, and
breach-loading swivel cannons.
G
The coins constitute the most gold ever
found at an archaeological site in Africa
outside of Egypt’s Valley of the Kings.
Some of the coins were minted in Spain
and depict Spanish monarchs Ferdinand II
and Isabella I, who ruled in the late 1400s
and early 1500s. Others were minted in
Portugal and bear references to Portuguese
King John II, who ruled between 1481 and
1495.
Artifacts linked to Portuguese royalty
suggest that the 75-foot-long ship could be
the caravel of explorer Bartholomeu Dias,
a nobleman from the Portuguese royal
family who, in 1488, was the first European to sail around the Cape of Good
Hope, opening the lucrative trading route
with the Far East. Dias disappeared in a
storm off the cape in 1500.
Roman Boat Found in Spain
he wreck of a first-century BC
Roman boat was dredged up from
the bay of Cartagena, Spain in
March of 2008. The vessel is in nearly perfect condition and lies at a depth of about
330 feet. Experts think that the Roman
boat was used to transport wine, oil, and
T
Whale Vomit Worth $1 Million
T
wo beachcombers who found 110 pounds of whale vomit while walking their dog near
Criccieth, North Wales, could become millionaires as a result of the find. Commonly
known as ambergris, the clear substance vomited by sperm whales darkens and hardens
over time and becomes a sweet-smelling, waxy substance that has long been used in manufacturing perfume. It usually washes up in the Americas and Australia, so it is unusual for it to
be found on a British beach.
—JUDITH KANE
28
other perishables and could have held up
to 1,500 amphorae, suggesting that it was
a ship of considerable size. More investigations will be carried out.
Baltic Sea Yields Shipwreck
Swedish film crew using a remotecontrolled submarine to make a
documentary spotted a nearly intact shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. The
wooden ship, which lies between the
Swedish mainland and Latvia, is about 70
feet long and is thought to be a 17th-century Dutch merchant vessel. Experts say
that icy waters and low levels of oxygen
and saline helped to preserve the ship,
which features intricate carvings.
A
Bust of Caesar Found in River
ivers in May, 2008 pulled a lifesized marble bust of Julius Caesar
from
the
Rhone River near
Arles, in southern
France. The statue—
the earliest surviving
representation of the
Roman
leader—is
thought to date to as
early as 46 BC, when
Caesar founded Arles
as a base for his campaign against Pompey,
his rival for leadership
of the Roman Empire.
Experts think that the bust may have
been carved from life, in part because it resembles Caesar as depicted on coins struck
during his lifetime, at about age 50. The
bust has a broken nose, but is otherwise
well preserved. Experts speculate that it
was thrown into the river after Caesar was
assassinated in 44 BC.
Several other artifacts were found at the
site, including a nearly six-foot-tall marble
statue of the god Neptune and two smaller
bronze statues, one of which is a Greek
statue of a satyr with his hands tied behind
his back.
D
ISSUE
#22
treasures of the deep
Captain Kidd’s Ship Found
A
team of underwater archaeologists working off the coast of a tiny island near the Dominican Republic have discovered the wreck of the Quedagh Merchant, the last ship captained by legendary buccaneer William Kidd.
In 1696, Kidd was given a letter of marquee signed by England’s King William III, authorizing him to hunt pirates and seize the ships of Britain’s enemies at sea. Kidd was sent to the
Red Sea and Indian Ocean, where pirates
were attacking ships owned by the British
East India Company. Early successes
against the French earned him wealth and
glory, but his expedition ran into difficulties,
including a leaky ship and an outbreak of
cholera that devastated his crew. Kidd then
refused to allow the British navy to press
members of his crew into service and often
failed to turn over the 10 percent of his plunder that all privateers were supposed to
remit to the Crown.
In 1698, Kidd captured the Quedagh Merchant, a 500-ton Moorish trader loaded with
gold, silver, and valuable textiles. After seizing the ship, which was sailing under a
French flag, he learned that the captain was
an Englishman and briefly considered handing the ship back, but his crew threatened
to mutiny, so instead he renamed it Adventure Prize and set sail for the Caribbean.
When he arrived there, he learned that the ship had officially been part of an East India Company convoy and that he had been declared a pirate and was a wanted man.
Kidd loaded gold, silver, and silk onto a smaller, less conspicuous sloop and sailed to New
York in an ill-fated attempt to plead his case and clear his name of
criminal charges. But the men with whom he entrusted the
Quedagh Merchant looted the ship of its remaining treasure and
then set it ablaze and adrift.
Kidd was arrested and charged with piracy and the murder of a
crew member. He was sent to London, where he was tried, convicted, and hanged in 1701, but the hangman’s rope broke during
the execution, leaving Kidd only slightly injured, so he was hanged
a second time. His body was left hanging for three tides of the River
Thames, and was then locked in a gibbet (an iron cage), dipped in
tar, and left dangling over the Thames for two years as a warning to
would-be pirates.
The wreck of the Quedagh Merchant, was found just 70 feet from
the coast of Catalina Island in crystal-clear waters that are less than
10 feet deep. Experts say that studying the wreck’s construction,
contents, and armaments has potential for revealing further information about Captain Kidd and piracy in the Caribbean and offers
a rare opportunity to test the historical record against the archaeological record. The wreck site will ultimately be converted to an underwater preserve, accessible to divers and snorkelers.
—JUDITH KANE
Jacobian Ship Found in English Channel
n June of 2008, the wreck of a richly
jeweled 17th-century ship was discovered in 23-feet-deep waters in the
English Channel, off the coast of Dorset.
Among the treasures recovered from the
three-masted ship is a wooden statue of a
merman, whose eyes would have been set
with precious stones. Experts say that the
sculpture was probably one of a set that
adorned the ship’s stern and that the vessel would have been one of the largest of
its kind when it sank around 1520.
There are no known maritime records
of the sinking and the ship’s identity is
not yet known, but Britain was at war
with Spain, France, and the Dutch at the
time, and experts believe that the vessel
was likely of British or Dutch origin.
I
WWII Destroyer Discovered in Fiord
he Norwegian Navy has located
the wreck of the HMS Hunter, a
British Royal Navy destroyer sunk
by the German fleet in 1940, during the
first of two battles for control of the Arctic port city of Narvik. The ship rests at a
depth of more than 1,000 feet on the bottom of the Ofot fjord, on Norway’s
northern coast.
Only 35 of the ship’s 145member crew survived. Hundreds more perished aboard
two German destroyers, six
German merchant ships, and
several other British ships that
were sunk during the engagement. The site was marked as a
war grave in 2008 by a procession of ships that conducted
memorial ceremonies on their
decks as they steamed across
the site. Honorees and family
members laid wreaths and
poured a tot of rum into the
ocean in the traditional tribute
of the Norwegian people for
those lost at sea.
T
—JUDITH KANE
29
haunted heritage
AR’s Haunted Crescent Hotel
T
Many restless spirits walk
the halls at the Crescent
Hotel and Spa, located in the
Ozark Mountain resort town
of Eureka Springs, AR.
30
By Carolyn Beavers Gonzales
he foreboding, gothic Crescent with
its many towers, overhanging balconies, and 18-inch-thick granite
walls was built between 1884 and 1886 by
regional developers and railroad officials
who wanted to take advantage of the national interest in the “healing waters” that
were bubbling up from the ground nearby.
The hotel may have gained its first ghost
when one of the workmen, reportedly an
Irish stonemason, fell to his death during
the hotel’s construction.
After the hotel’s completion, people
came from around the country to “take in
the waters” in hopes of curing or easing a
variety of ailments. By the early 1900s, the
health spa’s popularity declined, and from
1902 until 1907, the Frisco Railroad operated the Crescent as a hotel in the summer
only. In 1908, the Crescent was opened as
the Crescent College and Conservatory for
Young Women.
In 1937, Norman Baker, a charlatan doctor, purchased the Crescent to turn it into a
hospital and health resort. Baker began his
medical practice by starting a hospital in
Muscatine but in 1936, he was convicted of
practicing medicine without a license. Despite this setback, Baker remodeled the
Crescent and in the process, removed some
of its distinctive wooden handrails and balconies. He also covered fine woodwork in
jarring shades of red, orange, black, and yellow paint. He decorated his own penthouse
in shades of purple and hung machine guns
from the walls. In addition, he installed secret escape passages for himself, in case
members of the American Medical Association came after him to shut him down.
Baker moved his cancer patients from
Iowa to Arkansas and attracted other patients by advertising his health resort at the
Crescent as a place where one could be
ISSUE
#22
haunted heritage
cured of cancer without having to undergo x-rays or surgeries.
Officially, Baker’s cures consisted of
nothing more than drinking spring water
and using various home remedies. Although most official reports say that
Baker did not actually kill anyone with his
medical treatments, local legends say that
Baker experimented on both the living
and dead. For instance, one of his miracle
cures for brain tumors was said to involve
peeling open a patient’s head and pouring
a mixture of spring water and watermelon
seeds directly onto the brain. He also is
rumored to have performed other bizarre
experiments, including live dissections.
The many who died from these experiments, or from their own untreated illnesses, were said to have been burned in
an incinerator in the middle of the night.
Since Baker claimed that he could cure
cancer in a matter of weeks, he had to
hide the fact that numerous patients were
dying every month. So those in the advanced stages of illness were moved to an
“asylum” area, where they died in extreme
pain.
Finally, in 1940, the law caught up with
Baker, and the so-called hospital was
closed, Baker was fined a minimal $4,000,
and sentenced to four years in Leavenworth Prison. After his release from
prison Baker moved to Florida and lived
comfortably until his death in 1958.
The Crescent began a comeback in
1946, when new owners started restoration and again opened it as a hotel. Many
changes were made through the years,
and today, the elegant old hotel continues
to fascinate its many visitors with its
strange history. Ghost tours are regularly
available for those wanting to learn the
Crescent’s secrets where various entities
are often seen, heard, and photographed.
Reported Ghostly Sightings
oom 218 is said to be a particular
hotspot for strange paranormal
occurrences. There is a specter
that hotel staff call “Michael the Irishman”
who is seen on the spot where the workman fell to his death. Room occupants
often say that in the room doors slam shut
mysteriously, and they hear footsteps
when no one is there. One guest was violently shaken awake at night to find that
no one else was in the room. Another
guest awoke in the middle of the night
and saw blood spattered all over the walls
and ran downstairs screaming. But when
hotel staff examined the room, they could
find no traces of blood.
Another reported ghost at the Crescent
is that of a distinguished-looking man
with a mustache who is dressed in oldfashioned, formal clothing who is often
seen in the lobby where people speak to
him, but he never responds. The hotel
also has a photograph, made by an unknown photographer, which shows a
misty figure slouching in the closet
of Room 202. And Room 419 is
reportedly occupied by “Miss
Theadora,” who often locks the
door to keep people out and has
been known to pack a guest’s bags
and put them by the door in a
spectral encouragement to vacate
the premises.
Another well-known ghost is
that of a nurse who is seen pushing a gurney down the hallways of
R
Crescent Hotel, c. 1886.
the second floor. In addition, the ghost of
a young woman student, who reportedly
either jumped or was pushed to her death
from the roof or upper balcony, is sometimes sighted.
The Crescent staff is familiar with
strange occurrences, including one of the
cooks, who saw the apparition of a small
child dressed in old-fashioned clothes
skipping around the kitchen. Also, on
more than one occasion, the cook opened
the kitchen door and turned on the lights
to see some or all of the pots and pans flying off their hooks and onto the floor.
SciFi Channel’s Ghost Hunters even
spent a week at the Crescent investigating
strange phenomena and filming an
episode of their show. One of the team
members came back to his room, 419, to
discover that his computer had been
propped up by the door. He had left it by
the TV, and no one else had moved it. The
team also got high electromagnetic field
readings in rooms 419 and 250. In addition, they saw an image on their thermal
camera in the morgue of what looked like
a Civil War soldier. After their experiences,
they proclaimed the hotel to be the second
most active site they had ever visited.
Psychics say they believe that more than
500 spirits may inhabit the site, many of
which are thought to be of people who
died during the days of Norman Baker’s
horrific medical experiments. But they
also say that the mountain upon which
the Crescent is built is a powerful earthenergy spot that was a sacred site to
American Indians, who used the area for
ceremonies and possibly for burials.
Local psychics say that they and others
are trying to help the spirits move on, but
the large number of sightings indicates
that this may take some time. Meanwhile,
the Crescent Hotel and Spa remains a
pretty sure bet for those looking for a
paranormal experience. z
For more info, write to Crescent Hotel and
New Moon Spa, 75 Prospect Ave., Eureka
Springs, AR 72632, www.crescent-hotel.com,
or call 800-342-9766.
31
Arcane Cults
THE SKY KINGDOM
OF
M A L AY S I A
Ayah Pin: Heretic or Healer?
M
Malaysian spiritual leader
Ayah Pin claims to be God’s
latest incarnation.
Ayah Pin
32
by Kenaz Filan
any religions have erected monuments to their faith, but only
the Sky Kingdom built a twostory pink teapot, a concrete fishing boat,
and an orange umbrella-shaped building.
While a casual visitor might have mistaken
Ayah Pin’s spiritual headquarters for an
amusement park, many of his Malaysian
countrymen were not amused. Despite
constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, the Sky Kingdom and its leader
have been the subjects of a vigorous campaign of persecution for years.
In 1973, Pin declared himself God’s latest incarnation. (Prior incarnations, according to Pin, include Shiva, Buddha,
Jesus, and Mohammed). As God, he asserted that he had reincarnated on earth
with yet another message for mankind:
you all come from me, and to return to me
you must be united. Hence, according to
Rosly Abdul Samad, one of his followers,
“He doesn’t teach any religion or faith.
He just heals those with troubled hearts,
minds, and souls by offering advice and
spiritual guidance, regardless of their religious background.”
Pin began preaching his message in
1975. Twenty years later, he and a few of
his followers founded the Sky Kingdom
compound in Malaysia’s remote Terengganu state. There, on its six-acre headquarters, they began building unusual
structures based on dreams by Pin and his
followers.
Each structure paid tribute to various religions. The teapot dispensed God’s blessings over the world, represented by a vase.
For instance, water collected from the vase
was then distributed to visitors as a blessing. The giant yellow umbrella represented
the Nine Planets of Hindu astrology and a
“shelter for God’s faithful” while the fishing boat represented Noah’s Ark and the
crescent moon the indigenous peoples of
Malaysia and the Orang Bunian
(Malaysian forest elves).
Moreover, the Sky Kingdom placed
great stock in visions. Many of the people
who came to the Sky Kingdom claimed
they saw Pin or his brightly colored buildings in a dream. Pin greeted pilgrims and
devotees while seated on a circular dais
and smoking Salem cigarettes. From there,
clad in a bright blue robe and an ornate
turban, he interpreted their dreams, offered advice, bestowed blessings, and
healed illnesses. As he preached, teenage
girls fanned him with ostrich feathers.
As his fame grew, Pin attracted followers
from Bali, Singapore, and other countries.
And since he accepted members from all
religions, Pin counted a large number of
Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians among
his entourage. Estimates on the total number of Sky Kingdom followers range from
ISSUE
#22
Arcane Cults
3,000 to 30,000. It is difficult to tell, because many have been driven underground by social disapproval and legal
threats.
a serious crime, which can be punished
with caning or imprisonment. So in
2001, Pin was arrested for “humiliating
Islam” and spent one month in jail. As a
result, many of Pin’s Malay followers
kept their affiliation with the Sky Kingdom secret. Others reminded authorities
that Pin had ordered his Muslim followers to obey Islamic laws.
later, 35 masked assailants armed with
machetes and Molotov cocktails attacked
the Sky Kingdom compound, destroying
cars, burning the giant umbrella, and
damaging the teapot).
The Divine Teapot
Pin escaped capture during the raid;
n some ways, the Sky Kingdom
according to some of his devotees, he was
would seem an ideal reflection of
cloaked by God’s protection and walked
Malaysia’s population and culture.
unnoticed through the hostile crowd. As
Situated on the maritime trade
of 2006, it was believed that
routes between China and the
Pin was hiding in neighboring
Middle East, Malaysia’s populaThailand, where he is said to be
tion has sizeable East Asian and
suffering from chronic diabetes
South Asian elements. Hindu
and other ailments. While he remandirs and Buddhist shrines apmains at large, his compound
pear alongside Christian churches;
remains deserted; the teapot
in remote areas, indigenous peoand other buildings now lie in
ples
still
practice
their
ruins.
animist/shamanic traditions. And
Malaysia is considered a relawhile there have been conficts in
tively progressive and liberal Isthe past between religions and
lamic country. Bad international
ethnic groups, by and large,
publicity surrounding the Sky
Malaysia is remarkably integrated.
Kingdom arrests—and the
But the Malay people who
heavy-handed treatment of Pin
make up a bare majority (60%) of
and his devotees—embarrassed
the population are overwhelmMalaysian political and business
ingly Muslim. A Malaysian citizen
leaders. Even many devout
of Indian or Chinese ancestry may
Malaysian Muslims feel that the
be any religion but according to
Sky Kingdom is a peaceful and
the Malaysian constitution, ethnic
harmless group that poses no
Malays are considered Muslim at
danger to society or to Islam.
birth and, as such, can be punBut other equally devout
ished for violations of Islamic law
Malays have called for stiff punand custom. Malays who reishment for Pin and his follownounce Islam can be disowned by
ers.
family members, lose their jobs, The infamous giant teapot, or kendul, signified the purity of
It is estimated that there are
be harassed by the authorities, or mankind, a sacred vessel that dispenses God’s blessings.
currently only several thousand
jailed for “deviations against
followers of the Sky Kingdom.
Islam.”
Of the 50 people originally arBecause Ayah Pin was born a Muslim,
Still, this did not protect them from inrested, the Shariah court was lenient with
he was subject to the rulings of Malaysia’s
creasing legal pressure. In 2005, the Sky
40 who chose to renounce their affiliaIslamic courts. And the courts of TerengKingdom compound was destroyed by
tion with the group, were underage, or
ganu state, where the Sky Kingdom’s
bulldozers and 49 of Pin’s followers were
foreign. Today, only 24 people remain at
headquarters were located, are among the
arrested during a raid by police and
the site of the commune, all of who are
most conservative in Malaysia.
Shariah (Islamic Court) authorities. The
understandably suspicious of outsiders.
Not only is Pin a Muslim in the eyes of
Sky Kingdom had great difficulty finding
In February of 2008, Kamariah Ali, a forMalaysian courts, so are many of his follegal representation, as most Malaysian
mer religious teacher and Sky Kingdom
lowers. Under Malaysian law, attempting
law firms refused to represent them for
member, was sentenced to two years in
to convert Muslims to another religion is
fear of vigilante reprisals. (Three months
prison for the crime of apostasy. z
I
33
From the Skies
Byrd and the UFOs of ‘47
Over the years, rumors have
circulated about the true
purpose of the largest Antarctic military expedition ever
organized. And some of these
rumors question the possible
connection with the first
major UFO sighting in
the U.S. and the beginning
of the modern UFO era.
34
by Tim Swartz
t the end of World War II, Admiral Richard E. Byrd was considered a relic of a more romantic
time when there were still parts of the
world that remained unexplored. Nevertheless, in 1946, Admiral D.C. Ramsey,
chief of naval operations, created the
Antarctic Developments Project with the
58-year-old Byrd as leader of the expedition. Even though the Antarctic Developments
Project
(code-named
“Operation Highjump”) was publicly
called an exploration and research operation, the basic objectives were not scientific or economic—they were military.
History tells us that Operation Highjump was simply an expedition of discovery to Antarctica that also included a
unique opportunity to test out military
equipment in the harsh Antarctic envi-
A
ronment. However, from the very beginning, there were elements about the mission that seemed unusual. For instance,
for a mission of exploration and discovery, Operation Highjump used an amazing number of military personnel, ships,
planes, and even a submarine. Three
Naval battle groups included 12 ships,
the submarine USS Sennet, six R4-D
(military version of the DC-3) transport
planes, and over 4,000 men.
The central group of Operation Highjump reached the Bay of Whales on January 15, 1947, and established Little
America IV, complete with three runways. The aircraft carrier Philippine Sea
carried six R4-D transport aircraft and
Admiral Byrd to the edge of the ice pack.
The R4-Ds successfully took off from the
flight deck of the Philippine Sea and
reached Little America six hours later.
ISSUE
#22
From the Skies
withdrew from the program after only
eight weeks. History books state that he
left because every objective had been met
and Byrd saw no reason to remain. But
newspaper and personal accounts taken
from those who actually participated in
the operation tell a different story.
BYRD
Antarctic Explorer
A
dmiral Richard E. Byrd was the perfect choice to lead a mission to
Antarctica. Interested in polar exploration since he was a young boy, in
1926, he took leave from the Navy to organize a privately financed expedition to
the Arctic. Supported by Edsel Ford, John
D. Rockefeller, Jr., the New York Times,
and others, Byrd and pilot Floyd Bennett
flew over the North Pole on May 9, 1926.
Both men were awarded the Medal of
Honor after their return to the United
States.
Byrd next turned his attention to Antarctica, where he conducted expeditions that
accounted for the discovery of hundreds
of thousands of square miles of territory
which he claimed for the U.S. He flew over
the South Pole in 1929. He then spent
most of the winter of 1934 alone in a hut
some 100 miles into the interior. This effort almost cost Byrd his life when he was
poisoned by carbon monoxide fumes.
Nevertheless, no other person in Antarctic
history has contributed more to the geographic discovery of the continent than
Admiral Byrd.
—TIM SWARTZ
The R4-Ds then conducted extensive aerial mapping that included a two-aircraft
flight to the South Pole.
Although the original mission statement declared that the operation would
last four months, Byrd unexpectedly
A Secret Nazi Base
n March 5, 1947, the El Mercurio newspaper of Santiago, Chile
reported that:
“Adm. Byrd declared today that it was
imperative for the United States to initiate immediate defense measures
against hostile regions. Furthermore,
Byrd stated that he “didn’t want to
frighten anyone unduly” but that it
was “a bitter reality that in case of a
new war the continental United
States would be attacked by flying objects which could fly from pole to pole
at incredible speeds.”
Before a news conference, Byrd then
repeated each of these points.
Because of Byrd’s statements to the
press, rumors began to circulate that the
true mission of Operation Highjump had
been to investigate, photograph, and possibly even invade an alleged secret Nazi
base located in Queen Mauds Land of
Antarctica.
This rumor was actually not so farfetched. At the end of the war, the Allies
had determined 250,000 high-level Germans were unaccounted for. Nazi scientists and intelligence officials, who had
been brought into the U.S. as part of
Project Paperclip—a secret program to
use former Nazis to assist the United
States in the growing cold war with the
Soviet Union—had reported that, during
the war, the Nazis had spent several years
sending materials and supplies to Antarctica in order to build a secret military
base. Known as Base 211, this base
would supposedly work in conjunction
with Nazi enclaves in South America to
offer the ultimate safe haven for high-
O
ranking Nazi officials, scientists, and top
secret technology.
One of the allegations made about the
abrupt ending of Operation Highjump
was that the flights searching for Base
211 were repeatedly harassed by strange
flying objects known at the time as “FooFighters.” These strange lights, thought
to be some sort of Nazi secret weapon,
were reported by Allied pilots over the
Rhineland starting in the autumn of
1944. Now they were being seen in the
skies of Antarctica, following the reconnaissance aircraft and possibly even interfering with their onboard controls,
resulting in several crashes and deaths.
Faced with their inability to pinpoint
the exact location of Base 211—and by
the apparent superiority of the mysterious, unidentified aircraft—Admiral Byrd
ordered the mission to withdraw in 1947.
In the end, the taskforce returned to the
U.S. with their data, which then immediately became classified top secret. As well,
Byrd was soon hospitalized for exhaustion and not allowed to hold any press
conferences.
The story might have ended there except it seems that the same mysterious
aircraft that harassed Operation Highjump in Antarctica followed them back to
the United States. Just a few months later,
on June 21, 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold
spotted a fleet of strange wing-shaped objects flying near Mt. Rainer, WA (later erroneously dubbed “flying saucers” by a
reporter). Then, around July 3, 1947,
something, crashed in the desert near
Roswell, NM. After that, UFOs, as they
were now called, were seen flying the
skies of the U.S., and later, other countries, with apparent impunity.
It would be nice if there were a tidy resolution to this mystery. Unfortunately,
when it comes to UFOs, there are no easy
answers. It is safe to say, however, that
what we think we know about UFOs and
their history may be a lot more complex
than we ever imagined. z
35
crypto corral
A New York ABC
n April 19, 2008, Tsermaa Plumley heard an intruder rummaging
through the compost heap outside her home in Keene, NY. Peering
through the window at the visitor, she told
her husband, “It’s a huge black cat!”
Dan Plumley grabbed his camera and
rushed outside to confront a “black panther.” Later, speaking to the Lake Placid
News, he said,
“This must have been an exotic pet that
had gotten too big for its owners. … It had
to be four and a half to five feet long from
its head to the tail. I judged its length in
comparison to the driveway.”
O
New Species Discovered
n May of 2008, researchers announced
their discovery of a new gecko family
whose scientific name Phyllodactylidae
(“leaf toe”) describes the shape of their
toes.
Two months after that announcement,
another team led by Dr. Ute Radespiel at
the University of Veterinary Medicine in
Hanover, Germany, announced discovery
of a new mouse lemur species on Madagascar, named Microcebus macarthurii, after
the MacArthur Foundation which funded
the research.
I
Nessie Captured on Film?
t Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, July 2008 produced a new
videotape of Nessie, the world-famous Loch Ness Monster. The tape was
actually made in April by David and Graham Garside of Slaithwaite, Huddersfield,
who were enjoying a cruise on Loch Ness
when David spotted “something strange”
in the distance and zoomed in with his
camera. The Garside tape is currently available for viewing on YouTube.
While the Scots debated the existence of
Nessie, reports of a three-foot crocodilian
emerged from Pluck Lake in Swansea,
Wales. Police received the first call at noon
on April 27, 2008. On April 29, fisherman
Steve Jenkins saw the creature. As he described, “It was definitely a crocodile.
There was a white van submerged in the
water and it swam over the top of it so I
had a good look. It was a meter long and
had a long tail.”
A
36
The cat soon fled and has not reappeared
in Keene, but the Plumley sighting is far
from unique. According to John Lutz,
founder and head of the Eastern Puma Research Network, New Yorkers logged 245
black panther sightings between 1960 and
2005. Lutz believes those cats are melanistic cougars, but that solution poses a riddle in itself, since New York’s last
acknowledged wild cougar was killed in
1894. Nonetheless, Lutz claims that there
have been more than 1,000 cougar sightings in the Empire State over the past quarter-century, including more than 70 cases
of adult cats seen with cubs.
Bend It Like Yeti
B
ritish wildlife artist Polyanna Pickering produced a policestyle “photo-fit” drawing of the elusive Himalayan yeti in
June, 2008—and she credits it, at least in part, to soccer
star David Beckham!
Pickering was on a private yeti hunt in Bhutan when she approached a remote monastery. The site’s sole occupant was a
monk, who proved to be both a proud anglophile and an obsessive
David Beckham fan. Pickering explained her mission after talking
soccer, and the monk produced a supposed 100-year-old yeti
scalp. Pickering told London reporter Richard Holt, “I was told this
was from a Migoi, their name for the
yeti. All I know is, it was bigger than
any human or ape scalp I have ever seen. It had tufts of reddishblack fur coming out of it and was mounted on a pole and seen as
a holy relic.” Aside from tufts of hair, the scalp also had shards of
bone attached.
Monastery regulations forbade taking photos of the scalp, but
Pickering sketched it, then expanded her drawing into a full-body
likeness. She also collected numerous local eyewitness accounts of
the creature, suggesting that it is well-known to Bhutanese natives.
“I was amazed,” she said, “when they told me of regular sightings,
close encounters, and even tales of people being carried off by
the Migoi. Their descriptions were so detailed, I ended up
doing this ‘photo-fit’ with them all sitting round telling me to
alter this or how that should look.”
Jonathan Downes, founder and head of Europe’s Centre for Fortean Zoology, told the Telegraph, “This is potentially explosive. If this scalp is authentic and has
bone still attached, it will probably be the single most
important zoological find since the discovery of the
coelacanth.”
—MICHAEL NEWTON
ISSUE
#22
crypto corral
Panther Hunting in US
A
Colossal Calamari
he capture of a rare colossal squid
(Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) made
global headlines in 2007. When it
was hauled aboard the fishing vessel San
Aspiring, it tipped the scales at 1,090
pounds and measured 26-33 feet long
(estimates varied). Once frozen and transported to the Museum of New Zealand
Te Papa Tongarewa, however, its tentacles
began to shrink. By the time it was defrosted and dissected in May 2008, the
specimen measured only 14 feet. Furthermore, researchers discovered that the
squid they had identified as female was,
in fact, a male.
Still, the squid was no disappointment.
Its partially collapsed eyeball measured
10.63 inches in diameter, suggesting that
it would have been 12-16 inches wide in
life, the largest eye of any creature known
to science. Nor is the present specimen
the largest known colossal squid. Its beak
measures 1.7 inches long, but other beaks
retrieved from sperm whale innards have
topped two inches, suggesting that their
owners exceeded 46 feet overall.
T
Argentina’s Dogsucker
he cryptid known as el chupacabra
(“the goat-sucker,” in Spanish)
first appeared in Puerto Rico, then
moved on from there to infest most of
Latin America, several parts of the United
States, and isolated beachheads in Europe. Descriptions of the creature vary
widely, and so does its taste for domestic
T
t 6 a.m. on May 19, 2008, Missouri sheriff’s deputy Donn Hall shot and killed a domesticated black panther which had tried to invade a woman’s rural home outside
Neosho, in Newton County. Captain Richard Leavens was skeptical when his department received the 911 distress call but it took two blasts from Hall’s 12-gauge shotgun, plus
10 rounds from his .45-caliber Glock 21 automatic pistol, to finish off the big cat.
Agents from Missouri’s Department of Conservation were summoned to examine the threefoot-long, 60-pound carcass. They determined that the “panther”—actually a melanistic leopard—was an immature male that had been surgically de-clawed. That operation marked the
cat as a former pet or occupant of some menagerie, but the information brought police no
closer to identifying its one-time keeper(s).
A different explanation was advanced for the black panther seen at northern California’s
Point Reyes National Seashore, north of San Francisco, in April of 2008. Hiker John Balawejder—who, with his daughter Alani, saw the cat and has prepared an academic paper on the
incident—believes it was a melanistic cougar or mountain lion.
“This lion was not darkish, not a brownish-tawny like some I’ve seen, but jet black,” Balawejder told the San Francisco Chronicle. Despite his confidence, most zoologists deny the
existence of melanistic cougars, noting that no confirmed specimen has ever been captured
or killed.
But witness Don
Callen
snapped
three photos of a
supposed
black
cougar on his 52acre Santa Rosa
property in late
April, using a stationary digital camera from a range of
50 feet.
Case
closed?
Hardly!
Jack
Dumbacher, a curator at
the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, examined Callen’s photographs and
ranked them as “enticing,” but ultimately inconclusive. “That would be a really exciting find,
if that’s what it was,” Dumbacher allowed, but he suggested that the creature in Callen’s
photos might also be a large domestic house cat.
—MICHAEL NEWTON
animals. Goats have never been the chupacabra’s only victims, but it seemed
noteworthy to Argentinean journalists
when a mystery mauler in Rosario (Santa
Fe Province) revealed an appetite for
dogs.
The attack occurred on May 1, 2008
when a Rosario resident heard his dogs
barking in the pre-dawn hours. He ignored them, and when he finally went out
to check the dogs at noon, he found one
dog lying dead beneath a patio grill,
drained of blood through a deep puncture
wound in its neck. Strangely, no bloodstains appeared on the ground.
The local newspaper La Capital reported that sheriff ’s officers filed a report
on the case and delivered the dog’s carcass to Argentina’s Instituto Medico
Legal for a necropsy. At press time, no
verdict had been announced.
—MICHAEL NEWTON
37
crypto corral
Bigfoot on Ice!
O
n July 9, 2008—prison guard Rick Dyer
and sheriff’s deputy Matthew Whitton—
proclaimed through YouTube videos
that they had found a Bigfoot carcass in the
woods and had it frozen in a block of ice. They
were prepared to share it with the world… but
for a price.
How much? For starters, Dyer and Whitton
offered Bigfoot safaris to the site where they
had found the corpse, beginning at $499 a
head. Word quickly spread that Tom Biscardi,
CEO of Searching for Bigfoot Inc. (shown here),
had paid Dyer and Whitton $50,000 as “a
good faith gesture,” in exchange for permission to view the remains. The story went global
on August 15, when Biscardi staged a press
conference to herald the discovery.
“I want to get to the bottom of it,” Biscardi
told the cameras. “I’ll tell you what I’ve seen
and what I’ve touched and what I’ve felt, what
I’ve prodded was not a mask sewed onto a
bear hide, OK?” Dyer warned skeptics, “They
don’t have a choice to believe us. We have a
body.”
But veteran Sasquatch trackers were not so
sure. They still recalled Biscardi’s promotion of
alleged Bigfoot photos faked by hoaxer Ivan
Marx, in the 1973 issue of Saga magazine.
When author William Childress suggested that
the photos might depict a man in an
ape suit—and a poorly fitted
one, at that—Biscardi
replied, “You’re looking
at the clearest pictures
of a Sasquatch ever
taken… And we’re
going find him.”
They did not, but
in 2005, Biscardi
claimed another triumph. Appearing on
George
Noory’s
Coast to Coast AM
radio program, Biscardi
said that he was “98 percent sure that his
group would capture the Bigfoot they have
been tracking. A month later, Biscardi said he
had access to a captive Bigfoot and was setting up a pay-per-view TV event to film it. Then
days later, came the truth: there was no Bigfoot. Biscardi blamed an unknown mental patient for misleading him and criticized Noory’s
listeners for their own gullibility.
Strike two. But was he being truthful this
time?
Early results of DNA testing on hair allegedly
plucked from the carcass, performed
by biologist Curt Nelson at the
University of Minnesota, revealed that the samples
had come from an opossum.
Disappointed
with that scientific
finding, Dyer and
Whitten
shipped
their frozen specimen off to Steve
Kulls,
host
of
B l o g Ta l k R a d i o ’ s
“Squatch Detective”
program. As Kulls thawed
out the “creature,” he “observed the foot, which looked
unnatural, reached in and confirmed it was a rubber foot.” The
rest, revealed by inches, proved to
be a tricked-out ape suit. Biscardi,
reached by telephone, told Kulls
that Dyer and Whitton “had admitted the corpse was a costume.”
The stunt cost Whitton his job,
as Clayton County Sheriff Jeff
Turner told reporters, “This is basically a disgrace to be in law enforcement. You must have
integrity. He has none.” As for Biscardi, confusion deepened when
spokesmen for the Bigfoot Field
Researchers Organization (BFRO)
declared that he “didn’t start this
hoax, but instead latched onto to
it once it was presented to him by
his dubious associate Steve Kulls.”
Kulls, in turn, blamed Rick Dyer for
that charge and urged his listeners
to consider the source.
—MICHAEL NEWTON
38
ISSUE
#22
The Best
Paranormal
Talk Radio
on the Web
Sunday, 9:30 p.m. EST
and Thursday, 10 p.m. EST
Hosted by EPIC co-founder
Jeremiah Greer, who has
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SHADOWS
IN THE DARK
www.ShadowsintheDarkRadio.com
www.blogtalkradio.com/shadowsinthedark
The tower was originally designed with
two floors and had a fireplace carved
into the wall on the second story.
40
ISSUE
#22
America’s Oldest Mystery
THE NEWPORT
TOWER
N
ewport, RI, has long been famous as the
summer playground for the fabulously
wealthy. But nestled amongst the luxurious
mansions and the private yachts is a mysterious
stone tower whose history has baffled historians for
centuries. It is believed to be the oldest stone structure in America, though no one can say precisely
when it was built.
This imposing structure is situated on a steep hill
that dominates the entrance to Narragansett Bay.
At first glance, it appears to have been lifted directly
from medieval Europe. Its ornate circular walls rise
24 feet into the air, supported on an intricate base
of octagonal pillars and sweeping Romanesque
arches. But why does this old tower inspire so
much controversy and debate? Simply put, it may
end up rewriting western history as we know it.
by Mark S. Longo
41
One of the oldest and most persistent
theories about the tower is that it was built
by ancient Norse explorers, long before
Columbus arrived on America’s shore. This
theory has been a favorite of Newport locals for centuries, but it gained international prominence when an armored
skeleton was discovered in 1831 in nearby
Fall River, MA.
First believed to be the remains of a
Viking explorer, the skeleton was later determined to be the remains of a local
Wampanoag indian. But that did little to
stem the Viking frenzy then sweeping across
the nation. The clamor over the skeleton
was so intense that it inspired Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow to write his epic
poem “The Skeleton in the Armor,” which
he crafted to sound like a Norse saga.
Three weeks we westward bore,
And when the storm was o’er,
Cloud-like we saw the shore
Stretching to the leeward;
There for my lady’s bower
Built I the lofty tower,
Which, to this very hour,
Stands looking seaward.
There lived we many years;
Time dried the maiden’s tears
She had forgot her fears,
She was a mother.
Death closed her mild blue eyes,
Under that tower she lies;
Ne’er shall the sun arise
On such another!
Since the poem’s first publication in
1841, a wealth of evidence has since
emerged to support the Viking theory, including the bizarre unit of measurement that
was used to design the tower: the ell.
Unlike most American structures, the
tower is not built around the English foot,
or any other widely recognized unit of
measurement. Instead, it was designed using
an ancient Scottish measurement known as
the ell. The ell equates to three Norse feet
and was a common measurement used by
Vikings.
Another strong piece of evidence is the
shape of the tower itself. The remains of
round towers that are supported by eight
pillars have been found in churches in both
Denmark and Norway. This has led to speculation that Catholic Norsemen built the
42
Newport Tower as it looked in the 18th and and early 19th centuries.
tower for use as a church during an early expedition to Narragansett Bay.
More evidence has been found in the
form of apparent runic inscriptions that
were carved into rocks throughout New
England which, although still hotly debated,
some claim were carved by Norse explorers.
(See Mysteries, issue #6)
Local Narragansett tribesmen have also
added fuel to the Viking theory. According
to tribal legends, the tower was built by redheaded men with green eyes who sailed up
the river on strange-looking ships. These
mysterious voyages were also believed to
have taken place centuries before the first
English settlers arrived in the area in the
17th century.
Although the Viking theory has remained
popular over the years, it is only one of
many. An even more outlandish theory
claims that the tower was built by the
Knights Templar, almost a century before
Columbus’ voyage to the New World. This
fascinating tale begins in the 12th century,
when Europe was at the height of its crusading frenzy.
ISSUE
#22
The Templar Theory
hile the Templars’ reputation as
fierce crusaders is well known,
most people are unaware that
they were also the first modern bankers. The
Templars allowed pilgrims to deposit valuables in preceptories throughout Europe,
before beginning their hazardous journey to
the Holy Land. These pilgrims were then
given a chit with which to withdraw their
funds when they reached their destination.
By the beginning of the 14th century, the
Templars’ elaborate financial system had
transformed the Order into one of the
wealthiest and most powerful organizations
in Europe. However, their immense wealth
eventually drew the attention of Phillip the
Fair, the cash-strapped King of France.
Phillip had borrowed great sums from the
Order to finance his military campaigns. In
order to avoid paying off these debts, he ordered his men to arrest the Templars on October 13, 1307. (It was a Friday, hence our
modern fear of Friday the 13th.)
While most of the Templars were tortured
and eventually burned at the stake, a small
number managed to escape Paris by ship.
Their ultimate destination is still hotly debated, although many historians believe that
Scotland is the most likely choice.
Scotland’s King Robert the Bruce was not
loyal to the Catholic Church, and he was
desperately in need of men with combat experience who could help train his men and
join his forces in his war with England. He
would have undoubtedly welcomed the
Templars into his country with open arms.
During their time in Scotland, the Templars abandoned their old name and came
under the protection of the Scottish noble
family of the Sinclairs. The Sinclairs were a
dominant force in Scottish politics who had
a long history of naval exploration from
their home in the Orkney Islands. They
were also the patrons of the Freemasons, a
secretive organization that would go on to
adopt many of the rituals and traditions of
the Knights Templar.
In 1365, Prince Henry Sinclair took up
the Templar mantle and joined King Peter
of Cyprus’ bloody crusade to Egypt. Known
for making naval voyages throughout the
Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe Islands, in
1398, Henry launched a naval expedition to
explore the lands west of Scotland. His jour-
W
ney was recorded by Venetian shipmate Antonio Zeno. Zeno’s letters, which were published in 1558, described landmarks and
native tribes that were indigenous to North
America.
More recently, evidence of a possible Sinclair presence in North America was then
found carved into a rock in Westford, MA,
which bears the image of a knight in full
plate armor. The style of the knight’s armor
is similar to the type worn during Henry
Sinclair’s voyage and the knight’s shield
bears the heraldic symbol of the Scottish
Gunn clan, a close relation and ally of the
Sinclairs.
Additional evidence of Sinclair’s voyage
to North America can be found in Rosslyn
Chapel in Scotland, which was built by the
Sinclair family in 1446. The chapel’s walls
are adorned with carvings of corn, a vegetable that was not introduced to Europe until Columbus’ voyage nearly 50
years after the chapel was built. (See
Mysteries, issue #1)
Some scholars also believe that
the Newport tower’s architecture
is proof of Templar involvement
in its construction. The
tower’s round design, complete with a fireplace
carved into the second
story, is reminiscent of
another
round tower
with a high
fireplace in the St. Clair church in Corstorphine, Scotland, which was built by the Sinclair family. It is also the burial site of Prince
Henry’s daughter. In addition, the use of the
Scottish ell in the tower’s construction suggests that a Scotsman, or at least someone
familiar with their measurements, was present when the tower was built.
Theories abound as to why Henry Sinclair may have built the tower. Some believe
that he constructed it as a reminder to future generations of the ways of the Templar
Order. Others believe that he built it to be
used as a church during their stay in the area.
Still others suggest that it was built to defend against Indian attacks or to serve as a
lookout for approaching ships.
Along with the true reason for the tower’s
construction, the real motive behind Sinclair’s perilous voyage to the New World remains a mystery. Templar legends claim
that a handful of knights sailed to
America to prevent the Order’s greatest possession, the Holy Grail,
from falling into the hands of
their enemies. This belief has
motivated treasure hunters
for generations, to search
the many islands along
Sinclair’s suspected
route,
including
Oak Island near
Nova Scotia
for Templar
treas-
43
ure. (See Mysteries issue #17).
However, a different version of the Templar theory has emerged over the past century, one that claims that the Templar
builders of the tower came not from Scotland but from Portugal.
One theory suggests that the Newport Tower
is actually the remains of a windmill built by
Benedict Arnold, the Governor of Rhode Island and the great-grandfather of the famous
Revolutionary War traitor. He is believed to
have drawn inspiration for the tower from
this windmill in Chesterton, England.
The Order of Christ Theory
s part of the Reconquista against the
Moors, the Templar Order was active in Spain and Portugal during
the 12th and 13th centuries. During their
long years of war, the Templars filled the
Portuguese countryside with circular towers and rotundas that were supported by
eight arches, a design meant to remind the
brethren of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem. (Examples of these structures
can still be seen today at the imposing Templar fortresses in Tomar, Zezere, Pombal,
Almoural, Idanha, and Monsanto.)
The Templars’ struggle to liberate Portugal from the Moors soon won them high regard throughout the country. When the
French king began his crackdown on the
Order in 1307, the Portuguese king refused
to follow suit. As a result, Portugal was
soon flooded with Templar refugees from
all over Europe.
In order to avoid further persecution, in
1320, the Portuguese Templars changed
A
The Templar stronghold at Tomar, Portugal, boasts of a circular tower that is similar in style to
the Newport Tower.
44
their name to the Order of Christ. Realizing
that their expansion opportunities in Europe
were limited, the Templars began to take an
active interest in naval exploration. Their
coffers financed a number of Portuguese
naval expeditions. In fact, many prominent
Portuguese explorers, including Ferdinand
Magellan and Vasco da Gama, were members of the Order of Christ.
Evidence for a possible Portuguese presence in New England was found on
Dighton Rock in Berkley, MA. The strange
carvings and ancient symbols carved there
have baffled scholars for centuries. In 1917,
Professor Edmund Burke Delabarre transM YSTERIES M AGAZINE ,
ISSUE
#22
NEW THEORIES
N
ew theories about the mysterious
tower continue to emerge every
year. One new study, conducted by
Rhode Island astronomy professor William
Penhallow, suggests that the tower is a
pre-Colonial structure that was built to
track the movements of the sun and the
moon. As with other celestially oriented
structures, adherents of this theory believe that the Newport tower was used to
determine the proper times for harvests
and other major events.
However, the most startling new theory
was raised in 2003 by Gavin Menzies, who
claims that the tower is actually a lighthouse built by Zheng He (shown here), a
15th-century Chinese explorer. He based
this assessment on a comparison between the Newport
Tower and a Chinese
lighthouse located in
the port of Zaiton. The
Newport Tower and the
Zaiton Lighthouse both
have octagonal bases
and they both consist
of grey stone shells
that were once covered
by plaster. In addition,
both the Zaiton Lighthouse and the Newport
Tower
were
constructed using similar units of measurement.
lated the symbols to reveal the date “1511”
and the name “Miguel de Cortereal.” A Portuguese coat-of-arms was also discovered on
the rock, which was taken as evidence that
the Portuguese explorer Miguel de Cortereal, who vanished in the early part of the
16th century, was shipwrecked in the area
and built the Newport tower as a lighthouse
to signal rescue ships.
This theory was given extra weight in
1921, when a grave containing five skeletons, a cannon, and a sword was discovered
in Charlestown, RI. The sword was later
identified as a Spanish blade from the 15th
century while the cannon was identified as a
Portuguese breechloader from the early 16th
century.
The Benedict Arnold Theory
he Viking and Templar theories
make for compelling tales, but they
are based on controversial evidence
that has yet to win over many mainstream
critics. A more mundane theory suggests
that the tower is actually the remains of a
windmill that was built by Benedict Arnold,
the Governor of Rhode Island and the
great-grandfather of the famous Revolutionary War traitor, in the mid-17th century.
The Arnold theory is based on a single
T
line from the governor’s 1677 will that referred to the tower as “my stone-builte
windmiln.” He also is believed to have
drawn inspiration for the tower windmill
from an almost identical structure in
Chesterton, England, and several scientific
studies of the Newport Tower have lent this
theory credence. In the late 1940s, an archaeological dig around the tower failed to
find any Norse or medieval European tools
or artifacts—only Colonial-era items were
recovered from the dig. Then in 1993, a
team of Danish researchers carbon dated the
tower’s mortar to the mid-17th century, precisely the time that Arnold was supposed to
have built his windmill.
However, these findings did not put an
end to the debate over who originally built
the tower. Critics say that the mortar was installed during a 17th-century restoration.
These claims are based on an archaeological
dig that was conducted in the late 1940s by
the Society of American Archaeology. This
dig found Colonial-era masonry tools and
timbers in the ground around the tower,
suggesting that the tower was once surrounded by a wooden structure similar to
those used in restorations.
These critics have also raised questions
about the accuracy of the carbon-14 testing.
The actual range of dates produced by the
tests was from 1410 to 1970, so the mid1600s date was determined by comparison
with a control sample taken from a nearby
17th-century house.
In addition to questions about the scientific findings, two other questions about the
Arnold theory remain unanswered. If the
tower is a Colonial structure, then why was
not the English foot used in its construction? In addition, why would anyone put a
fireplace in a windmill that was used to store
highly flammable grain dust?
Will the truth about this bizarre structure
ever be known? Perhaps not, but the mystery is part of the tower’s enduring appeal. It
is impossible to walk through the tranquil
streets of Newport and not be intoxicated
by the idea that the Vikings, Chinese, or
even the Knights Templar may have walked
that same ground centuries earlier. In a
country whose origins date back only a few
hundred years, it is exciting to think that a
true wonder of world history may be sitting
right under our very noses. z
45
Was there a
Golden Age?
Historical Proof for
the Garden of Eden
46
ISSUE
#22
A
lmost all of the ancient
cultures of Europe, the
Middle East, and Asia
have myths which speak of an earlier
time when life was easier and humans
lived in harmony with nature and each
other. Most historians believe that
these myths are little more than fairy
tale, perhaps the result of our need to
idealize the past. However, there is
now evidence that suggests that these
myths may contain a kernel of historical truth, a kind of distant folk memory of an actual historical era.
by Steve Taylor
47
Some of these myths describe a sudden
and dramatic fall from grace, as in the biblical story of the Garden of Eden. The ancient Iranians have a similar myth that
developed independently of the Bible story
that describes how the first man, Yima,
lived in a walled garden called Paira-daeza,
from which the English word “paradise”
comes, on a mountain where the water of
life flowed and the tree of life grew. It was
in a perfect country with a mild climate,
where the people knew,
“neither heat nor cold, neither old age or
death, nor disease… Father and son
walked together, each looking but 15 years
of age.”
But this perfect age came to an abrupt
end when Airyana Vaejo changed the mild
climate to a harsh one, destroying the garden with snow and ice.
Other myths speak of a long and slow
degeneration over many eras. For instance,
Greek poet Hesiod in around 800 BC, described an age when a “golden race” of
human beings lived with,
“hearts free from sorrow and remote from
toil or grief… The fruitful earth spontaneously bore them abundant fruit without
stint. And they lived in ease and peace
upon their lands with many good things.”
This Golden Age was followed by the
Ages of Silver, Brass, Heroes, and the present age of Iron. Through each age, human
nature became more corrupt and life became more difficult and full of suffering.
In India there is similar view of history.
According to traditional Hindu folklore,
time moves cyclically through four different yugas or ages. According to the Vaya
Purana, during the first age, the Krita Yuga
(or Perfect Age):
“Human beings appropriated food which
was produced from the essence of the
earth… They frequented the mountains
and seas, and did not dwell in houses. They
never sorrowed, were full of the quality of
goodness, and supremely happy; they moved
about at will and lived in continual delight… There existed among them no such
things as gain or loss, friendship or enmity,
or like or dislike.”
Since then, however, history has moved
through the three succeeding ages to the
present Kali Yuga (Age of Darkness), in
which human beings are materialistic, law48
less, and decadent. In fact, this age, as it is
described in the Vishnu Purana, sounds like
a fairly accurate description of the the modern world:
“Accumulated treasures will be spent on
dwellings. The minds of men will be solely
preoccupied with acquiring wealth; and
wealth will be spent on selfish gratifications.”
Further east in China, the story of humanity’s fall from grace appears in the form
of the myth of the “Age of Perfect Virtue.”
During this time, humans were naturally
part of the Tao, the natural harmony or
order of nature and the universe. As
Chuang Tzu wrote in the fourth century
BC, in the Age of Perfect Virtue, people
were:
“right and correct… [They] did not rebel
against want, did not grow proud in
plenty. Being like this, they could commit
an error and not regret it, could meet with
success and not make it a show.”
But since then, the Chinese believe that
humans have become separated from the
Tao, selfish and calculating, rather than
spontaneous. As a result, laws and rulers
have become necessary to keep our selfishness and greed in check.
The Myth of Prehistoric Misery
f someone asked you to imagine how
humans lived 20,000 years ago, you
would probably think of hairy savages
living in caves, carrying around clubs and
grunting at each other, fighting against nature to survive, with no protection against
the elements, disease, or wild animals. They
must have spent their short lives on the
verge of starvation, fighting with other
tribes over food and land, and with each
other over food and power.
Life only began to get easier—so the traditional view of history goes—once some
groups in the Middle East developed agriculture around 10,000 years ago. This
meant that people could settle down in one
area, control their own food supply, and develop more sophisticated cultures. Ever
since then, it is commonly believed that the
human race has been steadily becoming
more enlightened and sophisticated.
However, over the last few decades, archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered that the lives of prehistoric humans
I
were a lot easier than those of the agricultural peoples who came after them.
Until around 8,000 BC, all humans lived
as hunter-gatherers and survived by hunting wild animals and foraging for nuts,
fruit, and vegetables. When anthropologists
began to look at how contemporary
hunter-gatherers used their time, they were
surprised to find that they only spent 12 to
20 hours per week searching for food, between a third and a half of the average
modern work week!
Strange though it may sound, the diet of
hunter-gatherers was better than many modern peoples. Apart from the small amount
of meat they ate (10%-20% of their diet),
their diet was practically identical to that of
a modern-day vegan—no dairy products and
a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, roots,
and nuts, all eaten raw (which nutrition experts say is the healthiest way to eat). This
partly explains why skeletons of ancient
hunter-gatherers are surprisingly large and
robust and show few signs of degenerative
diseases and tooth decay.
The hunter-gatherers of Greece and
Turkey had an average height of five feet
ten inches for men and five feet six for
women. But after the advent of agriculture,
these declined to five feet three and five feet
one. Likewise, an archaeological site in the
lower Illinois Valley in central USA shows
that when people started cultivating maize
and switched to a settled lifestyle, there was
an increase in infant mortality, stunted
growth in adults, and a massive increase in
diseases related to malnutrition.
Hunter-gatherers were also much less
vulnerable to disease than later peoples. In
fact, until the advances of modern medicine
and hygiene of the 19th and 20th centuries,
they may well have suffered less from disease than any other humans in history.
In fact, many of the diseases which we
are now susceptible to only actually arrived
when we domesticated animals. Pigs and
ducks passed the flu on, horses gave us
colds, cows gave us the pox, and dogs gave
us the measles. And later, when dairy products became a part of our diet, we increased
our exposure to disease even more through
drinking milk, which transmitted at least 30
different diseases. In view of this, it is not
surprising that with the coming of agriculture, people’s lifespans became shorter.
ISSUE
#22
It is significant that the Bible tells us that the Fall
occurred as a result of Eve eating from the apple of
knowledge and that Adam and Eve then “realized that
they were naked so they sewed fig leaves together and
covered themselves.” This suggests that the Fall was
linked to the development of a new self-awareness, which
gave them the ability to observe and judge themselves.
49
Peacefulness and Egalitarianism
rchaeological evidence also suggests
that the prehistoric hunter-gatherers
were not war-like; in fact, there are
only two indisputable cases of group violence during all of these tens of thousands
of years. A cluster of sites around the Nile
Valley show some signs of violence from
around 12,000 BC. And in southeast Australia, there are some signs of inter-tribal
fighting—as well as of other kinds of social
violence such as the cranial deformation of
children—at several different sites dating
from 11,000 and 7,000 BC.
The lack of evidence for warfare is striking. There are no signs of violent death, no
evidence of damage or disruption by warfare, and although many other artifacts have
been found, including massive numbers of
tools and pots, there is a complete absence
of weapons.
Archaeologists have also discovered over
300 cave prehistoric “art galleries,” not one
of which contains depictions of warfare,
weapons, or warriors.
Additionally, the fact that women provided so much of the tribe’s food strongly
suggests that they had equal status, as it is
A
difficult to see how they could have low status while performing such an important
economic role. The healthy, open attitude
that ancient hunter-gatherers had toward the
human body and to sex—shown by the
massive numbers of sexually explicit images
and objects archaeologists have discovered—suggests that the oppression of
women appears to be closely linked to a
sense of alienation from the human body
and a negative attitude to instincts and bodily processes.
Contemporary indigenous peoples were
sexually egalitarian, too. Before European
conquest and colonization, many of them
traced descent and ownership of property
through the mother’s rather than the father’s side of the family. And as anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, in “immediate
return” hunter-gatherer societies (that is, societies that lived by immediately using any
food or other resources they collected,
rather than storing them for later use),
women usually chose their own marriage
partners, decided what work they wanted to
do and worked whenever they chose. And if
a marriage broke down, they had custody
rights over their children.
Moreover, in prehistoric societies there
were no different classes or castes, with people who had more power and possessions
than others. For archaeologists, the most
obvious signs of social inequality are differences in graves in terms of size, position,
and the goods which are placed inside them.
Later agricultural societies had larger, more
central graves for more important people,
and had more possessions inside them; men
also generally had more grave goods than
women. But the graves of the ancient
hunter-gatherers are strikingly uniform,
with little or no size differences and no grave
wealth.
Additionally, hunter-gatherers were also
strikingly democratic, as decisions were
made in co-operation with other respected
members of the group.
Transition to Agriculture
vidence from artwork, cemeteries,
and battlesites suggests that there
was an eruption of warfare, male
domination, and social oppression during
the fourth millennium BC, in the Middle
East and central Asia. It may be, then, that
these ancient myths of a Golden Age were
E
Objects archaeologists have discovered suggest that the oppression of
women was closely linked to a sense
of alienation from the human body
and a negative attitude to instincts
and bodily processes.
50
ISSUE
#22
developed by peoples from these areas,
people who were living a hard, agricultural
way of life, suffering from a whole host of
new diseases, and in constant danger of attack by invaders. It is hardly surprising,
then, that they looked back nostalgically to
the peaceful, leisurely life of their huntergatherer ancestors.
There are certainly references to the transition from the hunter-gatherer way of life
to agriculture in the myths. For example,
Hesiod stated that during the Golden Age,
“the fruitful earth bore them abundant fruit
without stint,” and the Vaya Purana commented that “They frequented the mountains and seas and did not dwell in houses”
(i.e. they lived a non-sedentary way of life).
The Vaya Purana also commented that during this perfect age, “the things which those
people desired sprang up from the earth
everywhere and always.”
Similarly, Hesiod’s phrase “remote from
toil” hints at the leisure-filled lives of the
hunter-gatherers while the Vaya Purana’s
comment that there were “no such things
as gain or loss” suggests a lack of property
and materialism. But perhaps the clearest
mythical description of the hunter-gatherer
way of life comes from the fourth-century
BC Greek philosopher Decaearchus. According to his fellow philosopher Porphyry,
Decaearchus spoke of “men in the earliest
age,” who lived at a time when all things
grew spontaneously, since the men of that
time produced nothing, having invented
neither agriculture nor any other art. It was
for this reason that they lived a life of
leisure, without care or toil, and also—if
the doctrine of the most eminent medical
men is to be accepted—without disease.
What Went Wrong
ut what about the transition from
peacefulness to conflict, or from egalitarianism to oppression? The myths
also give hints that environmental factors
were involved.
In both the Iranian and the Biblical myths
of humanity’s Fall, the first human beings
lived in a lush, fertile environment which
they were forced to leave. In the Iranian
myth, the climate changed and the walled
garden became barren, so that its inhabitants
could no longer survive there.
During the fourth millennium BC, a
B
massive environmental change occurred
throughout the Middle East and Central
Asia. Prior to this, the area had been fertile
and full of animal and plant life, and supported a large number of settled agricultural communities. But when the moisture
began to dissipate, it created a massive belt
of arid desert which runs from the Steppes
of southern Russia to the Arabian and Iranian deserts. The groups who lived in the
area, including the original Indo-Europeans
and Semitic peoples, were forced to flee.
The eruption of warfare and social oppression occurred at exactly the same time
as this environmental disaster, involving the
very same groups who were forced to leave
their homelands. In some way, this desertification of their lands seems to have changed
the psyche of these peoples. Whereas before
they had been peaceful and egalitarian, now
they became aggressive, hierarchical, and patriarchal.
A New Individuality
t is significant that the Bible tells us that
the Fall occurred as a result of Eve eating from the apple of knowledge and
that Adam and Eve then “realized that they
were naked so they sewed fig leaves together
and covered themselves.” This suggests that
the Fall was linked to the development of a
new self-awareness, which gave them the
ability to observe and judge themselves.
In a similar way, the ancient Indian epic
the Mahabharata says that the “holy men of
old” were “self-subdued and free from envy,”
suggesting a lack of self-awareness and selfassertion. According to the Chinese myth of
the Age of Perfect Virtue, when human beings fell out of the Tao, they developed a
new kind of individuality and self-sufficiency.
According to Chuang Tzu, the true man of
ancient times,
“did not grow proud in plenty, and did not
plan his affairs… He could commit an
error and not regret it, could meet with
success and not make a show.”
In other words, these ancient men acted
without analyzing their behavior, presumably because they were less self-aware, and
so free from feelings of guilt and pride.
Chuang Tzu also hints at how this new individuality led to a new kind of intellectual
discrimination and an awareness of sepa-
I
rateness. He states that early humans “were
not yet aware that there were things,” but
later humans “were aware that there were
distinctions.”
In other words, this environmental disaster seems to have affected people in such a
way that they became more individualistic
and selfish, a sudden intensification of the
ego. As a result, these peoples experienced a
new sense of inner discontent, which created
a powerful drive to gain power and wealth.
At the same time, they experienced a new
sense of separation between themselves and
others, the natural world, and even their
own bodies.
Whereas earlier peoples experienced a
shared sense of being and a natural kinship
with other beings and nature as a whole,
these peoples lost the ability to empathize
with others. And these were the roots of social pathologies such as warfare, male domination, and social oppression.
Over the following centuries, these
groups spread over Europe, the Middle East,
and Asia, killing and conquering the peaceful peoples they came across. By 500 BC,
these peoples conquered the whole of Eurasia, leaving only a few indigenous peoples
such as the Laplanders of Scandinavia, the
tribal peoples of Siberia, and the indigenous
peoples of the forests and hills of India. In
mainland Europe the only surviving nonIndo-European indigenous peoples were the
Basque people of northern Spain (who
amazingly still survive today) and the Etruscans of Italy, who were soon to be wiped
out by the Romans.
Most modern European, Middle Eastern,
Asian, and American peoples are the descendants of these peoples, and we have inherited their strong sense of ego. This is still
the main difference between us and indigenous peoples such as the Native Americans,
and Australian Aborigines, and the reason
why they have a more respectful attitude towards nature than us and a more spiritual vision of the universe.
As the myths of a Golden Age suggest,
rather than a progression, the last 6,000
years of war, oppression, and hardship are
the result of a painful degeneration from an
earlier, healthier state. We may finally be
moving forward now, but only in the sense
of turning a full circle, and rekindling glimmers of ancient harmony. z
51
THE HIGGS
BOSON A N D
T H E L A RG E
HADRO N
COLLIDER
e
h
t
g
n
i
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k
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e
A
S
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52
ISSUE
#22
:
E
L
C
I
T
ucked away in a sleepy Swiss village lies the Center for Nuclear
Experimentation and Research
(CERN), the site of the recently completed Large Hadron Collider (LHC),
the world’s largest particle collider and
perhaps the most complex machine ever
built. Just put online, the LHC will start
out at low energies, and soon will be
running at full strength, producing the
highest directed energy collision ever
produced on Earth, 362 megajoules of
work-energy per collision beam (or the
equivalent of 100 kilowatt hours). Perhaps for this reason, there has been much
apprehension concerning what might
happen when the collider is fully powered up.
The concern has been expressed like
this: what if a high-energy collision is induced between matter and anti-matter
particles, causing a local tear in the spacetime fabric and creating a mini black hole
that sucks the matter of this world into
its escapeless, gravitational void?
LHC scientists dismiss this as exaggerated fear-mongering. The collider has
numerous safety features (such as a particle beam escape valve that kicks out any
aberrant beam from the machine in a few
microseconds). Further, the LHC does
not have the power to create and sustain
a real black hole—one capable of sucking
in an entire solar system. Even if a miniblack hole were to be created, it would
be within the electromagnetic confines of
the machine, and would only last a tiny
fraction of a second.
The principle goal of the LHC is to reveal the so-called god particle: the Higgs
Boson, which is about 120 times more
massive than a proton, and gives mass to
all other particles as they emerge from
the primordial quantum field.
T
By Michael Ricciardi
53
The LHC is actually two accelerators that
curve around a ring-shaped structure,
each carrying its stream of protons in the
opposing direction. These beams of protons are guided by a series of 20,000 powerful and revolutionary electromagnets.
Adjacent to the collider are four different
detectors, each designed to detect a distinct type of particle. One of these—the
massive ATLAS detector—is eight stories
tall, half the size of a soccer field, and can
measure the path of a particle called a
“muon” to within 40 micrometers.
54
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#22
In quantum physics, a particle’s spin determines much of its interaction with other
particles. In this regard, there are two main
species of particle: fermions, which have half
integer spins, and bosons (named after the
renowned Bengali physicist Satyendra Nath
Bose), which have whole integer spins.
Fermions are elementary particles while
bosons are composite particles (those having smaller constituent parts), with the exception of four “gauge” bosons, one for
each of the four forces. Bosons are deeply
mysterious particles; at high energies, they
change their behavior and act like a group
of fermions. But unlike fermions, multiple
bosons can occupy the same space and time.
The Higgs Boson—named after quantum
physicist Peter Higgs—at the moment, just
exists only in mathematical equations, where
its presence is required for other particles to
derive their mass. But soon enough, scientists hope, the Higgs Boson will be detected
by the LHC via the smashing and shattering of two protons at speeds approaching
99.99999% of the speed of light.
If and when this happens, its discovery
will confirm the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics which, with the exception of
a particle for mediating gravity (the graviton), will then be complete. The problem is
that at the high energies achievable by the
LHC, the Standard Model breaks down and
starts spitting out mathematical gibberish,
such as negative probabilities. So physicists
are eager to find more particles, otherwise
their model will fail to explain extremely
high energy conditions.
But physicists are confident that the LHC
will detect a treasure trove of particles, such
as the elusive “graviton,” which mediates the
force of gravity across the cosmos. Although
Einstein, in his General Theory of Relativity,
did not envision a particle that mediates
gravity, in Quantum Mechanics, every force
has a corresponding particle. If no such particle is revealed, then this may mean that
Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity
(GR) may be wrong or incomplete.
Unifying the Fields… with Strings!
here has been a historical problem
merging Quantum Theory (QT) and
GR into one seamless theory. Quantum Theory is amazingly accurate at predicting the outcomes of subatomic
T
55
QUANTUM MECHANICS
and the
Hadron
Q
uantum physics is the study of subatomic (smaller than an atom) particles. These particles—protons,
electrons, neutrons, photons, and more
exotic ones such as mesons, muons, and
quarks—combine in different ways to produce the physical matter of the universe.
They also carry the four forces, or types of
energy, that comprise the cosmos: electromagnetism (sound and light), The Strong
Force (which hold atoms together), the
Weak Force (governs radioactive decay),
and gravity (which keeps the Earth in orbit
around the sun).
A hadron is a composite particle comprised of three “quarks” stuck together by
three “gluons.” One of the configurations
of quarks and gluons is a proton, the large
particle that sits in the center of, for example, a hydrogen atom, accompanied by
a neutron and encircled by an electron (in
the case of heavier elements, there are
more protons, neutrons, and electrons).
So then, a large hadron collider is a proton collider, and smashing two protons together at energies almost equivalent to
the energy of the universe moments after
the Big Bang should reveal constituent
matter more fundamental than even
quarks and gluons.
—MICHAEL RICCIARDI
processes. And GR has been accurate in predicting events on the super-huge scale of
solar systems, supernovas, and galaxies. But
the two theories use different mathematical
mechanics. Thus, physicists have long
sought a “grand unified theory” (GUT) that
56
will unite Quantum Theory and GR. The
current and most popular contender is what
is known as String Theory.
The actual strings that lend their name to
the theory are infinitesimal, vibrating, onedimensional threads of energy which, depending on their shape and vibration
pattern, become normal particles such as
photons, quarks, muons, mesons, electrons,
and protons. According to String Theory,
these high energy, vibrating string-states correspond to different partner particles. But
until these super partners are validated in the
scatter matrices of particle collisions, strings
remains only theoretical (and it may take
years to sort through and analyze the mountains of data generated by these collisions).
According to Einstein, we inhabit a four
dimensional space-time continuum, comprised of three spatial dimensions and one
temporal dimension. But unifying QT and
GR will depend upon finding telltale traces
of higher dimensions of matter. These dimensions exist on an incredibly small scale.
In fact, theories such as String Theory and
M Theory (the “mother of all theories”),
may require proving the existence of as
many as 11 dimensions!
In String Theory, these extra dimensions
are described mathematically as tiny, elaborately twisted shapes (known as Calabi-Yao
shapes, after the two mathematicians who
discovered them), and possess a peculiar
property called symmetry duality. Each Calabi-Yao shape has its mirror version. This is
where super-symmetry and super-partner
particles come in. Finding these particles
means verifying these tiny, twisted, supersymmetric dimensions, and this means that
physicists will have found their Grand Unified Theory.
But as of 2008, the previous crop of particle accelerators have failed to produced evidence of such particles, or the hidden
dimensions in which they are found. But the
LHC, with its ability to hurl subatomic particles at each other with unprecedented
speeds, may just have enough juice to break
on through to a higher dimensional universe.
In modern physics, unlike traditional
philosophies and religions, there is no god
that keeps the universe working. The “god
particle” is to Quantum Theory what the
“missing link” was to anthropology. Finding
it will complete QT by validating what is
theoretically believed to give mass to (that is,
bring into existence) all other particles. One
could equate this to René Descartes’ idea of
the “prime mover,” or the abstract power (or
force) that first set everything in motion, the
first instability that caused creation.
On September 10, 2008, the LHC went
online, starting off at low energies. However,
within a few days, an electrical failure between two of the collider’s gigantic magnets
forced a shut-down of the entire machine. At
present, LHC scientists do not anticipate
restarting the LHC until November or December of 2008, at the earliest. Once more,
the world awaits. z
ISSUE
#22
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The Parapsychology
REVOLUTION
58
ISSUE
#22
An Interview with
Dr. Robert
Schoch
A geologist and paleontologist by
profession, Dr. Schoch has studied
some of the greatest ancient monuments around the world including
the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx,
and the underwater structures near
Yonaguni Island, Japan. He has
also written several bestselling
books, including his most recent,
The Parapsychology Revolution.
by Michael Lohr
59
Tell us about your new book
The Parapsychology Revolution.
he Parapsychology Revolution is the result of collaboration between my former student Logan Yonavjak and
myself. In the book we include selections from 14 seminal papers, dating from
1886 through 2007 (some
published for the first time
in our book), by major figures in the field, plus a hundred pages of our own
commentary.
I am excited about the
book, as I believe that
parapsychology and psychical research are incredibly important while at
the same time poorly understood and often ignored, dismissed, or
ridiculed by mainstream
academics and conventional thinkers. It is my
hope that the book will
help make the case that studies of paranormal mental phenomena need to be taken seriously and demonstrate that many serious
scientists and researchers (include Nobel
prize-winning scientists) who have studied
parapsychology in-depth agree that there is
something there that needs explanation.
One of the principle concerns of many religious leaders, ethicists, researchers, and scientists is the fundamental nature of the
human personality and what determines our
boundaries and our role in the natural
world. It is topics such as these that are at
the core of psychical studies.
In The Parapsychology Revolution, we discuss paranormal and psychical phenomena,
including the concepts of ESP (extrasensory
perception: telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition) and psychokinesis (PK, or mind
over matter).
T
How did you become interested
in parapsychology?
y interest in parapsychology is a
logical extension of my work on
ancient cultures. I am a traditionally trained scientist whose first inclination
was to simply dismiss any reports of mindreading and similar “nonsense.” I was long
M
60
of the opinion that people can believe what
they want to believe, and if they want to believe in conjurer’s tricks or imagine that they
can know the private thoughts of others,
well, that just shows the sad lack of scientific
literacy in this present age.
However, in
the back of my
mind, I always felt
that maybe things
are not quite so
simple. Could there
just possibly be
something to this
paranormal stuff?
Might, every once in
a while, a thought or
feeling make its way
from one person to
another without the
use of any of the
known senses? Could
there be an occasional
instance when something abnormal occurs,
like a falling book,
when no one is near it
and no known forces act on it, which coincides with a strong emotional discharge
from a person on the other side of the
room?
As a child, I was introduced to what are
now referred to as paranormal phenomena
by my late grandmother, who just happened
to be a Theosophist. My grandmother was
one of the most rational people I knew, but
she was not one to belittle or ignore possible cases of the genuine paranormal. Maybe
this was due to her theosophical background, or perhaps she was attracted to
theosophy because of her interest in Eastern
philosophies, the occult, and paranormal
phenomena. I have never been a theosophist
myself. However, reading various theosophical works still made me wonder if perhaps there was a core of something being
touched on that transcended the typical materialistic view of the universe.
In college I studied anthropology as well
as geology, and it seemed that in one primitive society after another, supposed instances
of the paranormal kept cropping up. Why
are such beliefs so widespread if there is
nothing to them? If there is nothing to clairvoyance, why are clairvoyants found among
different cultures around the world?
Attending graduate school, I focused on
traditional science. Then in the 1990s, I
found myself applying my geological expertise to the study of ancient cultures, beginning with the Great Sphinx in Egypt and
moving on to the study of pyramids and
other megalithic structures around the
world. Questions I had not given much
thought to for years started to haunt me
once I became involved in studying not just
the stones, but why past civilizations had
erected the stones into magnificent edifices.
The why behind the monuments, more
often than not, included religious beliefs and
practices, initiation rites and rituals which,
in many cases seemed to have an ostensible
paranormal aspect, whether it was clairvoyance, divination, or manifestations of higher
levels of consciousness. Were the ancient
structures used, at least in part, to alter consciousness and possibly enhance paranormal
phenomena?
Logan Yonavjak prodded me even further along these lines. He not only served as
my field assistant during research trips to
Egypt and Peru in 2003 and 2005, but she
also challenged me to look at the serious scientific literature addressing the paranormal.
It was a result of our collaboration that gave
rise to the book.
Has your research validated telepathy?
ost people who have seriously
studied the subject conclude that
telepathy (mind-to-mind interactions) is the best-supported class of paranormal phenomena. There is strong
laboratory evidence for telepathy, such as
classic card-calling experiments, as well as
many more sophisticated tests of telepathy,
clairvoyance, and remote viewing. There is
also a large and compelling body of evidence
from spontaneous cases supporting the reality of telepathy.
In The Parapsychology Revolution, we include many examples of telepathy, both experimental (laboratory based) and
spontaneous (occurring unexpectedly). Because I can testify to it personally, I will give
an example of possible telepathy that occurred while I was working on the book.
One Saturday a spider bit me. This particular spider had the appearance of a hairy
little tarantula with large green eyes that I
M
ISSUE
#22
“Questions I had not given
much thought to for years
started to haunt me once I
became involved in studying
not just the stones, but why
past civilizations had erected
the stones into magnificent
edifices…Were the ancient
structures used to alter
consciousness and enhance
paranormal phenomena?”
61
found very striking and beautiful. I was
quite worried about the incident as my
thumb hurt where I had been bitten, and I
knew stories of people becoming extremely
ill or even dying from spider bites. I did not
know what kind of spider it was, and thus
could not judge whether it was poisonous
or not, so before letting it go (I do not believe in killing anything unnecessarily), I
took photographs of the spider in order to
later identify the species.
That night or early the next morning, a
friend of mine, thousands of miles away,
dreamed or hallucinated (her description)
of a tarantula-like spider with “beautiful,
large green eyes.” The next day, she sent
me an email about her dream (she does
not write to me that often, and does not
normally relate her dreams to me). Upon
receiving her email, I told her about the
spider incident and sent her photos of the
actual critter. To this day I am convinced
that my spider bite and her dream were
not just a simple case of chance coincidence.
Is there scientific data to support
the validity of remote viewing?
t is clear that the scientific data supports the reality of remote viewing. In
my opinion, however, every case of remote viewing can be interpreted as a form
I
temporally. That is, telepathic signals can
travel from the past or the future to the
present. Thus, even if no one is at a particular remote location at present, the remote viewer may pick up information
from someone who was at the location in
the past or will be at the location in the future. So there is no clear way to distinguish between telepathy and true
clairvoyance without a telepathic component; this is a continuing issue in theoretical parapsychology.
In Supernatural, Graham Hancock explored the use of psychotropic drugs
to induce hallucinogenic visions (see
Mysteries issue #17). How does this
methodology relate to parapsychology?
have interviewed psychotropic drugusers who have strongly asserted that
their telepathic and clairvoyant powers
were enhanced by the drug use. However,
given that they were in a drug-induced
state, it is sometimes difficult to evaluate independently the veracity of such claims.
My current interest is primarily in determining the capabilities and potentialities of
humans and other living organisms, in a
normal or baseline state, before adding
complicating factors such as powerful psychotropic drugs. I would like to point out
that even early in the serious study of men-
I
“In my opinion, every case
of remote viewing can
be interpreted as a form
of telepathy. In most cases
there is someone at the location
being remote viewed from whom
information could have been
picked up telepathically.”
of telepathy. In most cases there is someone at the location being remote viewed
from whom information could have been
picked up telepathically. Also, there is evidence that telepathic signals are not bound
62
tal paranormal phenomena, various forms
of hypnosis could affect telepathic performance. Also, some of the earliest systematic laboratory studies of telepathy and
clairvoyance at Duke University included
administering various drugs to test subjects.
For instance, it was found that sodium
amytal suppressed mental paranormal abilities in subjects.
Do you believe that poltergeists/
ghosts are real?
hen it comes to poltergeist activity (unexplained movements of
objects, such as items falling off
shelves or being thrown through the air
without any physical cause that can be observed), I am convinced that such activities
can be real. I say “can be,” as there are, unfortunately, occasional cases of fraud and
misreporting.
I have personally observed a minor, but
genuine, poltergeist incident. I also know
other people whose credibility is beyond reproach, who have either observed or experienced poltergeist activity.
In my opinion, however, poltergeist activity is not due to ghosts. Rather, I subscribe to the theory that poltergeist
manifestations actually are unconsciously
caused by—or emanate from—the person
who superficially appears to be the target
of the activity. Poltergeist activity appears
to be a method of working out unresolved
emotional and psychological tensions and
conflicts.
As far as genuine activity caused by discarnate spirits or entities, I am yet to be
convinced that such actually occur. Most
cases that I have analyzed, such as a music
box suddenly playing after someone’s
mother recently died and the child is grieving, can be explained in terms of classic poltergeist theory rather than as the activity of
an independent ghost.
Visions or sightings of so-called ghosts
also occur, even without any material manifestations (no objects are moved, for instance). An example would be a soldier in
the 19th century stationed in India. One
night he wakes up to see a ghost that resembles his grandmother standing at the
foot of his bed. He tells his friends about
the ghost the next morning, and they all
have a hearty laugh. Two weeks later, however, the soldier receives a letter with the
sad news that his beloved grandmother
died the very night and hour that he saw
her ghost. Does this mean that the discarnate spirit of the grandmother physically
W
ISSUE
#22
63
visited the grandson? Or was the grandmother thinking about her loved ones, including the grandson, as she lay dying, and
a telepathic connection manifested on the
part of the grandson as a vision of his grandmother standing at the foot of his bed?
Is there any evidence to support
the existence of past lives?
mong the best evidence for reincarnation is the work of the late Dr.
Ian Stevenson (University of Virginia) who worked with young children
who apparently remembered former lives.
Stevenson was able to actually identify (at
least to his satisfaction) the former personality. Typically in the cases documented by
Stevenson, the previous personality, or former incarnation, died no more than a few
years before the child was born and lived
not very far away.
The young child would recount aspects or
memories of the former life typically between the ages of two and five, but these
would fade away in the ensuing years. In
many cases, the children showed behavioral
traits that could be related to the previous
personality, and where the former personality died violently, birthmarks were found on
the child corresponding to wounds in the
former personality.
Some claim that this is incontrovertible
evidence for reincarnation. But Stevenson’s
evidence can also be interpreted simply as
the telepathic transmission of limited sets
of data from one person to another. When
it comes to past-life regressions, I tend to
believe that many recovered past lives are
fictional, although they may involve bits of
information from another time, place, or
persons that were acquired paranormally.
Another line of compelling evidence for
the reality of paranormal phenomena is the
study of presentiments or “pre-sponses,”
essentially a form of short-term precognition as measured by physiological parameters (heart rate, electrodermal activity, and
so forth). Numerous replicated experiments have demonstrated the physiological
responses of individuals to, for instance,
disturbing photographs a second or two
before they are actually viewed by the person. According to conventional science,
this should not be possible.
A
64
“Numerous experiments have
demonstrated the physiological
responses towards viewing
disturbing photographs a second
before they are actually viewed.
According to conventional science, this
should not be possible.”
ISSUE
#22
What paranormal paradigm did
you find little evidence for?
did not find much incontrovertible evidence for séance-style phenomena, such
as the materialization of objects from
empty space, the protrusion of material (ectoplasm) from a medium’s body, and the
like. Such phenomena were a mainstay of
séances in the 19th and early 20th centuries,
and even occurred in some cases when a
medium held a séance naked and after the
room had been thoroughly searched for hidden objects. However, numerous investigators at the time demonstrated how some
instances of materializations could be the result of hiding objects in body cavities, and
then the objects were regurgitated (or extruded from the vagina in the case of a female medium). Admittedly, there are some
cases of materializations that have never been
definitively explained by normal means, but
at this point, it is difficult to evaluate them
critically using only the historical records.
I
Why do you believe there exists certain
cultural stigma on the research of the
paranormal in western society?
o this day, it is not generally accepted
as a legitimate academic endeavor,
and those who insist on taking such
studies seriously are often marginalized,
passed over for promotion or ridiculed.
Why this active hostility to paranormal
studies? For one, charlatans and fraud
plague the field. Fraud is a serious problem,
and one reason it is important to undertake
large statistical analyses, both of lab results
and of field studies of spontaneous cases of
possible paranormal phenomena, searching
for regularities and patterns, as one would
expect among any natural phenomena.
Also, one of the strengths of certain nonhuman studies sometimes applied in parapsychology (for instance, studies of pets
responding telepathically to their owners) is
that it is less likely that animals will cheat and
lie. It should also be noted that many powerful mediums who appear to have genuine
paranormal abilities also have low moral values and will cheat and commit fraud, perhaps unconsciously, especially when their
genuine paranormal powers fail.
Even after sorting out fraud so that we are
dealing only with genuine instances of the
paranormal, there are major issues that re-
T
main unresolved. For instance, we do not
fully understand what conditions are best to
elicit paranormal phenomena and thus these
phenomena are not easily replicated in a laboratory setting.
Why do some people go out of
their way to be a skeptic?
or some, there seems to be a deepseated fear that there might be some
reality to paranormal phenomena. If
even the most minor paranormal phenomena might be genuine, for some, this would
upset their entire worldview. Indeed, there
are such strong feelings against the paranormal that claiming to have had a paranormal
experience can actually be used to diagnose
that person as having a mental illness. For
example, the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
explicitly includes “belief in clairvoyance,
telepathy, or ‘six sense’” as one of the diagnostic criteria for Schizotypal Personality
Disorder. Perhaps it is no wonder that many
people are hesitant to discuss paranormal experiences, or feel compelled to actively deny
the paranormal.
Simply dismissing all potential paranormal phenomena out of hand is much easier
than attempting to study such phenomena
carefully. For many people, a phenomenon is
not “real” unless it can be duplicated in a
laboratory setting under controlled conditions. Being a natural scientist and field geologist, I have never agreed with this
contention. After all, can we create a genuine volcanic eruption in the laboratory or
even on command in the field?
Finally, some people consider it immoral
to study, or even show a casual interest in,
paranormal phenomena. This appears to be
a legacy of the traditional fear of the occult,
and witchcraft in particular, that is still persistent in some sectors of modern society.
F
What is the most fascinating paranormal
anomaly that you’ve come across?
ascinating, compelling, and important
to me is the work of various modern
researchers who have demonstrated a
weak but persistent correlation between low
levels of geomagnetic activity and spontaneous telepathy. This is a strong argument
supporting the contention that there is
something genuine to the concept of telepa-
F
thy. It suggests that spontaneous telepathic
phenomena are real and natural and influenced by other natural parameters.
Alternatively, are we to hypothesize that
hundreds of hoaxers over nearly a century
and a half have conspired to fake telepathic
incidents in identical correlation with geomagnetic activity? This latter hypothesis
strikes me as downright ludicrous.
It has also been found that incidents of
the paranormal correlate with Local Sidereal Time (which relates to the position of
the horizon at any particular point on
Earth relative to the center of our galaxy).
Furthermore, there is evidence that paranormal mental phenomena are more common in certain geomagnetic and geological
settings. This ties in with my research on
ancient temples, tombs, and sacred sites. In
my opinion, many important ancient sites
were carefully chosen and aligned to natural environmental factors, such as rock
types and geomagnetic anomalies.
But a correlation between geomagnetic
activity and spontaneous telepathy does not
necessarily imply that the telepathic signal
is magnetic or electrical in nature. The
human brain is influenced by magnetic and
electric fields, and whatever may be the carrier of the telepathic signal, the transmission, reception, and manifestation of the
message by the brain could be hampered or
enhanced by differences in the magnetic
and electric fields.
What’s next on your agenda?
am interested in studying the correlations between certain locations on Earth
and heightened paranormal mental abilities. Could they be due to geological anomalies that have a genuine effect on human
consciousness? Were ancient temples and ritual sites used to focus energies and enhance
anomalous mental capabilities?
Likewise, the concepts of precessional
ages and a cycle of descent from a Golden
Age are found in many cultures. Could there
be a genuine basis for such traditions? Might
mental capacities and capabilities alter over
the course of time based on the external influences on our planet? These are topics that
I am currently exploring, and they may find
their way into my future books. z
To learn more, visit www.robertschoch.com or
www.bu.edu/cgs/faculty/inserts/schoch.html.
I
65
Book Reviews
The Origins of
Psychic Phenomena
Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi,
and The Unconscious Mind
BY STAN GOOCH
ISBN: 978-1-59477-164-4
$16.95, INNER TRADITIONS, 2007
N
o stranger to the paranormal, researcher Stan
Gooch takes on everything
from the heightened
psychic abilities of lefthanded people to multiple
personalities,
autism, schizophrenia, and reincarnation in The Origins of
Psychic Phenomena.
Claiming possession
of intuitive abilities
himself, the author
posits that most
ghosts, UFOs, discarnate entities,
and demons originate from our own
unconscious minds. While his
thesis is certainly welcome in an
age where the literalization of the
anomalous poses a real danger, it
takes a bit of effort to acclimate to
Gooch’s thinking process. Once
this is achieved, however, a refreshing world opens up that
keeps in check the profusion of
platitudes on psi phenomena that
abound in most current books on
the topic.
In the chapter on “Dynamic Unconscious,”
after
Sigmund
Freud’s peculiar resistance to the
occult is described, along with his
theories of neurosis, Gooch offers
the possibility that not only repressed sexuality causes psychological
disturbances
but
repressed paranormal abilities as
well. Such a prospect is astonishing, but unfortunately, the author
does little to expand on it. He
could have easily devoted an entire chapter to this theme alone;
how naturally psychic children are
discouraged from developing their
66
abilities and bury their talents only
to have them surface as psychological problems later in life. He
also dismisses UFOs as being
non-existent.
After a few more chapters of descriptive cumulus, the author regains his intellectual strength in
the conclusion, where he posits
that the unconscious mind possibly originates in the cerebellum,
an area of the brain that has been
neglected by
psychotherapists and psychiatrists (he
even provides
statistical proof
of how much
page space has
been devoted to
it in various scientific and medical
texts).
Dreams and the
bizarre phenomena he describes
are really attempts,
he suggests, of this part of the
brain to communicate with the
conscious mind.
Reading The Origins of Psychic
Phenomena will not only make us
more receptive to these cerebellar communiqués but also encourage us to derive benefit from
them in the form of increased
awareness, heightened intuition,
and psychological equilibrium.
—JAYE BELDO
The I-Files
ISBN 0-915024-74-8
$14.95, TRAILS BOOKS, 2008
The M-Files
ISBN: 0-915024-66-7
$14.95, WISCONSIN TRAILS, DATE
The W-Files
ISBN: 0-915024-59-4
BY JAY RATH
$14.95, TRAILS BOOKS, 2007
J
ay Rath is an award-winning
journalist and humorist who
has contributed to National
Public Radio and various national
Quest for Middle-Earth
BY DIRK VANDER PLOEG
ISBN: 9780595440931
$14.95, IUNIVERSE, 2007
A
uthor Dirk Vander Ploeg asks in his
fascinating book Quest for MiddleEarth whether or not J.R.R. Tolkien’s
rich tales of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and
men in his Lord of the Rings series were
simply products of one man’s vivid imagination or actually based on ancient myths and forgotten legends.
Vander Ploeg also sees a type of Da Vinci Code influence upon
Tolkien, who wove into his stories a belief that royal blood (San
Graal) must be preserved, and that installing the rightful king could
only save the land, Middle-Earth.
Drawing from centuries-old royal traditions, Tolkien insinuated
that the king must marry to continue and renew the royal bloodline.
That is the reason Arwen and Aragorn had to marry. She was an elfqueen, born of the royal blood.
Despite what science tries to tell us, we have no idea where we actually came from. It is nice to think that there lies within our inner
selves a mystic past full of great kings and queens, magical little
people, fearsome beasts, and great heroes. Quest for Middle-Earth
opens our imaginations so that we all can make our own search for
who we are, where we came from, and ultimately where we are
going.
—TIM SWARTZ
magazines. His fascination with outré
events and unsolved
mysteries has led him to
produce three books detailing unexplained phenomena, from Illinois
(I-Files), Minnesota (MFiles), and his native Wisconsin (W-Files).
In each case, Rath’s
primary focus is the UFO
phenomena and its related fields of alien abductions, “men in black,” and
livestock mutilations. Those
topics consume 29 of the 44
collective chapters found in
these three volumes, and
provide a fairly complete
record of UFOlogy from
1897 to 1998. Rath’s presentation of the evidence—as
in his coverage of other
strange phenomena—is defi-
nitely tongue-in-cheek, but
careful reading of his text
may reinforce the sense
that “we are not alone.”
Cryptozoology runs second in Rath’s attempt to
corral paranormal midwestern events, with
eight chapters devoted to
unidentified out-of-place
(OOP) creatures. Bigfoot
gets the most attention
here, although Wisconsin’s lake monsters rate
a chapter of their own.
Other OOPs include
phantom kangaroos
(Illinois and Wisconsin),
giant birds (Illinois), and
werewolves (Wisconsin). The goat-sucking
Chupacabra
also
crops up in The WFiles.
Lost Atlantis is
ISSUE
#22
Book Reviews
another subject dear to Rath’s
heart, and sure enough, he finds
putative evidence of the mythic
civilization both in Illinois and Wisconsin. Minnesota, not to be outdone, weighs in with artifacts
suggesting that errant Vikings
were on the prowl 130 years before Columbus sailed the ocean
blue.
Rath is a cartoonist as well as
an author and his
comedic sketches illustrate these three volumes. They
are
accompanied by several photos, sketches,
and engravings. Each
book includes a placename index and a short
bibliography.
Dedicated paranormal researchers may
rue the absence of
larger subject indexes,
but Rath’s books are for enjoyment, not scholarly research. In
that pursuit, they are all highly
successful.
—MICHAEL NEWTON
2012: The Return
of Quetzalcoatl
BY DANIEL PINCHBECK
ISBN: 15854248-3-8
$13.45, PENGUIN, 2007
D
ecember 21, 2012, according to the Olmec/Maya
calendar, is the date which
signifies the end of a great cycle
and the return of the feathered
serpent
king
Quetzalcoatl. Is
there a worldwide paradigm
shift of consciousness
forthcoming? Is
the destructive
chaos that has
bewitched humanity for so
long about to
give way to a
more
serene
state of awareness? Pinchbeck
seeks to answer these and many
other questions through a compelling analysis of mythological
studies and scientific research, in-
cluding astronomy.
In 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, Pinchbeck explains that
both the completion of this great
cycle and the return of Quetzalcoatl represent mythical archetypes, and not necessarily an
actual event. The underlying
meaning of these archetypes suggests a shift in the very nature of
the human psyche. Pinchbeck discusses such global problems as
terrorism, mass consumption, the
war in Iraq, and climate change,
analyzing each topic as symptoms
of a suffering society in desperate
need of change.
Pinchbeck also discusses Frederich Nietzsche’s concepts of “will
to ignorance” and “will to superficiality,” two ideas that give cause
to the current mood of ambivalence and apathy, and discusses
what needs to be accomplished to
lift humanity out of this quagmire.
He assails the diametrically opposed—but equally destructive—
fundamentalist religion and secular humanism for their utter lack
of spirituality. He pleads
Memoirs of a Monster Hunter
A Five-Year Journey in Search of the Unknown
BY NICK REDFERN
ISBN: 978-1-56414-976-3
$14.99, NEW PAGE BOOKS, 2007
M
ost authors wait until their twilight years to pen memoirs, but Nick
Redfern’s 43 years have been so jam-packed with mysterious adventures that he has already published two volumes recounting his
exploits. Now, after detours to Roswell and other assorted eerie destinations,
Redfern has produced a memoir of the years preceding his adventures
chronicled in Three Men Seeking Monsters (2004). Here, readers are privileged to eavesdrop on Nick’s courtship of his bride and track his move from Britain to the
Lone Star State where, naturally, he discovers no shortage of things that go bump in the night.
Redfern’s Memoirs are not confined to Texas, however. His quest for the bizarre is endless, taking him
to Canada (in search of Ogopogo), to Wisconsin (tracking werewolves), to the Puerto Rican jungles (seeking Chupacabras), and to Roswell, NM (pursuing alien corpses). Along the way, he investigates vampires,
man-eating catfish, spectral pets, and other oddities.
Whether or not you buy Redfern’s theories on any particular beast or phenomenon, it is always a treat
to watch him in action, racing around the countryside with rowdy friends, hot on the trail of monsters or
the next pub down the road. Memoirs gives us a peek inside his hectic life… and what a life it is!
—MICHAEL NEWTON
with the reader to walk away from
the old orders and embrace a new
spirituality. Utopian and idealistic,
perhaps. Dead-on about the current situation we find ourselves
in? You better believe it! If the
book has a negative aspect, it is
that several subjects deserve further focus. But this is a minor
complaint.
Like Graham Hancock’s exquisite masterpiece Supernatural,
2012 discusses the shamanic experience and ritual hallucinations
from the use of iboga, ayahuasca,
and DMT and how these experiences increase the parameters of
human consciousness. At the very
least, these studies into the origins and inherited psyche of humanity are fascinating.
—MICHAEL LOHR
Extraordinary Animals
Revisited
BY DR. KARL P.N. SHUKER
ISBN: 978-1-905723-17-1
$28, CFZ PRESS, 2007
D
r. Karl Shuker is Great
Britain’s premier cryptozoologist, the author of 12
major books, plus several hundred articles on unknown animals
and mysteries of nature. Since
1997, he has served as the primary zoological consultant for
Guinness World Records, and in
2001, he made headlines by winning £250,000 ($510,000) on
the British version of Who Wants
to Be a Millionaire.
Shuker’s latest book is a revision of his Extraordinary Animals
Worldwide, published in 1991.
Whether focused on a particular
class of cryptids or surveying the
planet at large, Shuker never disappoints his readers in their
search for the peculiar, the outlandish, and the astounding. His
new work runs the full gamut from
aardvarks to zorillas (an African
super-skunk), describing hundreds of unique creatures along
the way. Twenty-four chapters
67
Book Reviews
offer detailed information on
beasts both mythical and mundane.
Here, readers will find themselves enthralled by singing mice
and crowing snakes; “extinct”
beasts that survive,
despite death sentences imposed by
modern science;
sea monsters and
hulking
“globsters”; giant spiders,
flying
jackals, and furry
woodpeckers. At
the same time,
skeptics will app r e c i a t e
Shuker’s scientific rigor in exp l a i n i n g
nature’s mysteries
and his facility for baring hoaxes.
Extraordinary Animals Revisited is lavishly illustrated with 54
exotic 19th-century engravings, a
few modern drawings, and eight
photographs. Its exhaustive bibliography includes more than 300
sources, again, fully updated from
the original edition, with new
books and articles published
through 2006. An index of animal
names, both popular and Latin,
guides readers quickly and conveniently to their curious creatures
of choice.
This monumental work is highly
recommended for all ages.
—MICHAEL NEWTON
The Kolumbas Affair
BY SAMUEL BLANKSON
ISBN: 978-1905789993
$19.99, BLANKSON ENT, 2007
R
eminiscent of futuristic stories involving
good versus evil and
the annihilation of the universe, The Kolumbas Affair is a
swashbuckling adventure story
that takes its inspiration from
the Book of Revelations, the
final episode of the Bible that de-
68
scribes the end of time, the return
of Jesus Christ, and the final battle against the forces of evil.
The Kolumbas Affair follows the
adventures of Alfias, a miner on
an asteroid in the Kolumbas Solar
System who, on his 21st birthday,
receives a mysterious “call” from an
immaterial voice.
In the mold of all
universal heroes,
Alfias
embarks
upon a quest to uncover the secret of
Kolumbas Major, the
purple planet controlled by a secret society known as the
Elders. Just as in Star
Wars, in which Luke
Skywalker is pitted
against the Empire, so
Alfias must outwit the ETCA, the
government agency that employs
killer telepaths and mercenary
black operations teams to silence
its enemies.
Alfias teams up with Jonathon,
the captain of an alien ship called
the Triton, and becomes involved
in a conspiracy to overthrow the
ETCA. As Alfias attempts to open
the Abyss on Kolumbas Major and
thereby solve the mystery, he is
pursued by ETCA agents as well
as by the ancient Elders.
The Kolumbas Affair includes a
wealth of colorful characters who
help Alfias on his quest. There is
Tirimakashi, the ancient instructor
in
martial
arts; his ass i s t a n t
Tubac; and
Chi
Ling,
the demur
student
who assists Alf i a s .
There is
also a
whole
host of
The Way of the Explorer
BY DR. EDGAR MITCHELL
ISBN: 978-1-56414-977-0
A
s a member of the Apollo space
program of the 1960s/70s,
Mitchell was the sixth man to walk
on the lunar surface. Yet on his three-day
return flight to Earth, he became convinced of the universal connectedness of
all things. Thus, The Way of the Explorer
addresses the balance between the physical exploration of the material universe and the almost-spiritual probing of consciousness itself.
A year after his lunar flight, Mitchell left NASA to found the Institute
of Noetic Sciences, whose mission is to “advance the science of consciousness and human experience to serve individual and collective
transformation.” (“Noetic” comes from the Greek word nous, referring
to inner “knowing.”) The institute conducts research into the powers
of consciousness, including perceptions, beliefs, attention, intention,
and intuition. The Way of the Explorer is therefore something of
Mitchell’s manifesto.
The first part of The Way of the Explorer tells the story of Mitchell’s
journey to the moon. In the second part, Newtonian physics, philosophy, mysticism, Tibetan monks, shamans, hallucinogens, Einsteinian
dimensions, and out-of-body experiences are all analyzed in Mitchell’s
quest to map the interconnectedness of intelligent beings. He examines such phenomena as the role of consciousness in affecting physical reality; the acceleration of the expansion of the universe; matter
and anti-matter and the big bang; and why the universe is friendly to
carbon-based life. The urgent message Mitchell seeks to convey here
is the need to curb our penchant for acquiring material wealth as the
means for achieving happiness.
A far-ranging meditation on the meaning of life, this book is well
worth reading for the authoritative voice Mitchell brings to the discussion.
ETCA soldiers who are intent on
stopping Alfias and his cohorts.
In true suspense fiction fashion, there are cliffhangers; in fact,
The Kolumbas Affair ends with
Jonathon’s ship slipping to safety
out of hyperspace, suggesting
that the story will be continued in
an upcoming sequel.
This book will appeal to anybody with a taste for quick-paced
action stories and science-fiction
dramas.
The Parapsychology
Revolution
BY DR. ROBERT M. SCHOCH
AND LOGAN YONAVJAK
$16.95, TARCHER/PENGUIN, 2008
D
r. Robert Schoch, whose
previous best-selling books
Voices of the Rocks, Voyages of the Pyramid Builders and
Pyramid Quest: Secrets of the
Great Pyramid have focused on
the pyramids and the age of the
Sphinx, this time delves headlong
ISSUE
#22
Book Reviews
into the murky world of the paranormal, including clairvoyance,
telepathy, distance healing, remote viewing, past-life regression,
and the existence of ghosts.
Starting with documented
cases as early as the 1880s, The
Parapsychology Revolution provides a thorough review of the research of such scholars as Ian
Stevenson and J.B. Rhine. Among
the many additional case files reviewed, Schoch and Yanovjak consider the parapsychological
research of Dr. William G. Roll and
the electromagnetic field research
of Dr. William Jones, the extrasensory perception research conducted at Duke University and the
PSI studies by Dr. Stephen Baumann at the University of North
Carolina’s Spring Creek Institute.
Based upon these and many
other scholarly probes into the
paranormal, Schoch and Yanovjak
make the case that there is something mysterious and unexplained
happening, and that parapsychology is a valid area of study that
needs to be further pursued.
In addition, the concepts of
reincarnation and past-life regression are analyzed and applied to
quantum mechanics. What results is a rather groundbreaking
hypothesis that hints at the possibility that past life memories may
actually be a form of quantum
telepathy, where the remnant
memories of the deceased download
into the minds of the
living. Those individuals that are sensitive
to
such
experience, especially the young,
may have another’s memories
placed in their
mind at random.
This essentially
establishes the
theory that the
human mind can
be a conduit for remnant echoes
of once-living beings that still exist
in the ether of quantum reality.
There are extensively documented chapters addressing
cases of fraud. But Schoch and
Yanovjak build a good case that
discredits the skeptics, exposing
the close-mindedness that is
prevalent in some circles while
proving their charge that the paranormal is a legitimate area for scientific research and that the world
of the paranormal does indeed
exist, but that it may exist in a way
not previously considered.
—MICHAEL LOHR
The Shock Doctrine:
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
BY NAOMI KLEIN
ISBN: 978-0-312-42799-3
$16, PICADOR, 2008
I
n Norman O. Brown’s seminal
work Life Against Death, the author suggests that capitalism is
the inevitable result of anality, a
form of psychosomatic repression
in which the excretory functions of
the body are considered so repugnant that one’s ego pushes
them deep into the unconscious
mind where neurosis and anxiety
arise.
In The Shock Doctrine, author
Naomi Klein provides ample evidence that the kind of capitalism
levied against vulnerable thirdworld enclaves such as found in
South America, Africa, and Indonesia is based
on sheer psychopathy, indicated by the
willingness to intimidate, torture,
and kill people
who stand in the
way of the corporate bottom line.
Mere
Freudian
analysis fails to address this conscienceless
dimension. All the
stops in one’s psyche must be
pulled out in order to dive into the
abyss of the inhuman, where
state-sanctioned torture, genocide, and other forms of coercion
are employed with
routine
efficiency.
Klein manages to
delve fearlessly into
this heartless world
to produce one of the
most stunning indictments of disaster
capitalism ever written.
Citing countless examples of how independent,
thriving
countries have been
ruined by the cutthroat methods used
by thugs such as Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet, Klein then
traces the doctrine and suffering
back to one Milton Friedman at
the University of Chicago and “the
Chicago Boys,” who coached
politicians and their underlings in
various countries to carry out
these destabilization methods.
What has been carried out globally, Klein suggests, has its origins
in a form of mind
control first experimented with
by the CIA in
their MKULTRA
program and the
infamous
Dr.
Ewen Cameron,
who would reduce his patients
to
vegetables in an
attempt to wipe
their
brains
clean and rebuild their personalities. Klein’s description of
these methods is nothing short of
harrowing, for they are now implemented on a widespread scale,
primarily through electroshock torture, solitary confinement, and
Strange Guests
BY BRAD STEIGER
ISBN: 1-933665-17-3
$12, ANOMALIST BOOKS, 2006
A
ny English-speaking fan of paranormal or Fortean literature should recognize the byline of Brad Steiger, an
Iowa native with 162 books to his credit. The
work in hand, described by Steiger as his first
“conventional book,” was originally published
in 1966.
Strange Guests devotes itself to the poltergeist phenomenon, with 35 short chapters detailing various cases from 1662 to 1964. (A
passing reference to hauntings in 335 AD provides no details.) The tales are not collected chronologically, nor are
they sorted geographically. Like much of Steiger’s work, the book resembles a collection of short articles or columns.
Shortcomings of this work—as with most of Steiger’s paperback
originals—include the absence of an index or anything resembling
source documentation. Skeptics will predictably dismiss the tales as
fantasies or fabrications, but believers and undecided readers will
enjoy Steiger’s excursions into the bizarre.
—MICHAEL NEWTON
69
Book Reviews
water-boarding. Most noteworthy
is that Klein maintains her journalistic integrity in the face of the
ultimate insanity she so describes.
The Shock Doctrine may open
the doors for psychoanalysts to
push beyond the sexual repression envelope and confront the
very evil which fuels disaster capitalism. If only Milton Friedman
were alive to read this remarkable, scathing work and witness
the devastating consequences of
his delusional ideas.
—JAYE BELDO
Dark Mission: The
Secret History of NASA
BY RICHARD C. HOAGLAND
AND MIKE BARA
ISBN: 978-1-932595-26-0
24.95, FERAL HOUSE, 2008
T
he space program has long
been the target of conspiracy theorists, from unconfirmed UFO cover-ups to the
alleged staging of the Apollo
lunar landing. Now Richard
Hoagland, former NASA consultant and CBS News advisor—and
Mike Bara, an engineer who
worked for various aeronautics
firms—have written the hidden
story of the National Aeronautics
and Space Administration.
Hoagland and Bara begin their
exposition with the Viking mis-
sion to Mars in
the mid-1970s,
in
which
a
human face was
discerned among
the photographs
of the Martian surface, and from
which
Hoagland
other analysts deduced signs of intelligent life. Working
backwards, Hoagland
and Bara unravel a
NASA cover-up of the
discovery of civilizations more advanced than that of Earth. Such
a revelation would have devastating social consequences, a
Brookings Institution study asserted, leading to a complete disintegration of society and a rise
Flying Saucers and Science
A Scientist Investigates the Mysteries of UFOs
BY STANTON T. FRIEDMAN, MSC
ISBN: 978-1-60163-011-7
N
uclear physicist Stanton Friedman has been a warhorse UFO researcher
since the 1960s. But Friedman is best known for being one of the primary researchers of the Roswell Incident, as well as the controversial
MJ-12 papers that serve as proof in some quarters that the government knew
about the reality of the UFO phenomenon as early as 1947 and has kept a tight
lid on it ever since. More recently, Friedman coauthored a book with Kathleen
Marden, the niece of the late Betty Hill, about the groundbreaking Hill abduction
experience.
So it is with impressive credentials that Friedman offers Flying Saucers and Science, which serves to answer the skeptics. As Friedman so readily acknowledges, he is not an “apologist UFOlogist,” but rather
takes on all comers with the gloves off. Everyone from the late Carl Sagan (a classmate of Friedman’s at
the University of Chicago) to Seth Shostak, one of the head honchos at SETI (“Silly Effort To Investigate,”
Friedman jokes) gets put through the same wringer of logical, point-by-point refutation as Friedman builds
a virtually unassailable case for the reality of flying saucers and the alien occupants they carry.
Friedman also grapples with how the mainstream media handles the subject of UFOs, raising what he
calls the “laughter curtain” of ridicule and disinformation. He uses a series of public opinion polls taken
through the years that demonstrate, among other things, that the higher the education level of the respondents, the more likely they are to believe that some UFOs are intelligently controlled by forces not of
this Earth.
Admittedly, Friedman is part preaching to the choir. Real progress on this battlefront could only come from
reaching out to those not already predisposed to believe in UFOs that are flown by alien beings that are not
of this earth. If you are not listening to Friedman and his peers by now, one can only wonder if you ever will.
—SEAN CASTEEL
in religious fundamentalism. Therefore, the
conclusion was that
such a revelation
should be suppressed by the U.S.
government.
Hoagland
traces the secret
control of NASA
through Egyptian mythology
and the gods
Isis, Osiris, and Horus to
the cult of Freemasonry and the
German rocket scientist Werner
von Braun. From the Surveyor
moon mission of the 1960s to
the Mars Pathfinder mission of
the 1990s, Hoagland describes
what NASA found… and concealed (lunar glass towers, a Martian “Sphinx” complex, like that
of Giza) and draws conclusions
about the nature of these ancient
structures and the motives behind their concealment.
The connections are dizzying
and the reader can easily lose
the thread that links the seemingly benign elements of the conspiracy, but the authors weave
their way back to the Face on
Mars to reveal a complex conspiracy to hide the astounding evidence
of
extraterrestrial
civilizations.
Hoagland asserts that a complex strategy of disinformation
was put into place for this very
purpose. Indeed, Hoagland contends that the Apollo lunar landing was faked on a sound stage in
the Nevada desert by NASA to obscure the real reason NASA sent
astronauts to the Moon—to recover the artifacts left there by
previous alien visitors.
Dark Mission is a compelling, if
confusing argument that leaves
one wondering about the reasons
behind government policies and
secrets kept from the public “for
its own good.”
70
ISSUE
#22
Music Reviews
Arm Me
SPECIAL O.P.S.
MONKTAIL CREATIVE MUSIC CONCERN
funky retro surf-guitar
medley (punctuated by
the occasional scream)
that suitably caps off
the CD and erases any
doubt as to the group's
musical talents.
Not many groups can
proclaim their uniqueness in the way Special
O.P.S. can and still
make it tolerable. Leave
your expectations at
the door and just enjoy.
This album is not for
everyone, but an open mind will
likely find much to enjoy in this
chaotic bit of rock/jazz fusion.
CD#: 07541 91552
B
ells and chimes, drums, rattles, and even a bicycle
horn come into play in unprecedented ways throughout
Arm Me, as if Special O.P.S. went
to the music store, grabbed every
instrument they could find, and
started testing them out. It
squeaks, it whines, it growls and
grinds, and in “If Christian Wolff
Was a Train Robber,” it gallops,.
But somehow it all works, from
the barely audible crashes of cymbals and random notes to the
grinding guitars and pounding
percussion.
The fluctuations in sound are
always surprising, and if you find
a lot of the music out there predictable, this album guaranteed
that this won't be. The call-andresponse “refrain” of
“The Ceiling Down Here
Is The Floor Upstairs,”
with guitar and triangle
echoing off one another
is, along with the guitarbased arabesques of
“Demons
Dancing
Around His Pipe,” one of
the few points on the CD
that can be identified as
musical, albeit stretched
and tormented in creative
ways.
“Eye
Meta/Wave Eye” is a
Lawrence of Suburbia
THE DARBUKI KINGS
DARBUKI KINGS RECORDS
MARKETED BY MASSIVE MUSIC
melody underlaid with subtle
drum tempos while laouto, sitar,
and woodwinds evoke sultry Arabian Nights-style fantasy. “Blue
Eyes” adds a hint of flamenco and
strings to the other instruments
while a lush bouzouki accompanies the rollicking tune. “Drum
Talk” is a percussion fan's dream,
especially unusual in its showcase of the adjustable sounds of
the “talking drum,” a common instrument in Middle-Eastern and
African music that underlies most
melodies but rarely gets much
love on its own. “The Silk Road”
fuses a touch of electronica and
heavy drums into the mix.
A sonic journey down the fabled
Silk Road and beyond, Lawrence
of Suburbia winds its way into the
listener's soul with its engaging
style.
throughout and coaxing any facial
expression apart from boredom
on his face seems to be a herculean task while his habit of
throwing rocks, apple cores, and
twigs as a shorthand for what his
character feels is downright infuriating. When he disappears, however, he leaves behind only a
journal and recordings of his
songs, which become both a
soundtrack to the film and a hint
to his disappearance.
The music becomes the CD's
only saving grace, especially for
folk-rock fans. The soulful guitarbased melodies render feelings of
love and loss in a way the film
could only dream of achieving.
CD#: 44185 00017
T
he latest effort of the Darbuki Kings maintains their
trademark wit and potent
musical talent in a worthy followup to Doumtekastan.
“Yassir Ubetcha” morphs from
a medieval fantasy to guitar-driven funk to an accordion-lover’s
dream, all in the space of a few
bars; “No Habibi No,” in contrast,
is traditional mideastern music at
its finest, with all its rich tempos
and instrumentation while “Nile
Sunset” cruises along on a river of
sound.
“Khartoum” is a languid, eerie
Far From Haggersville
Peter Mathews
Trinema Media
n unusual multimedia experience, Far From Haggersville is supposedly best
listened to on a computer, since
its more esoteric aspects are unavailable otherwise. Part treasure
hunt, part musical exploration, it
purports to tell the story of “ADN,”
a mysterious young musician
whose songs are the key to solving the mystery of his own disappearance as well as in discovering
a small fortune in actual gold
coins. It is telling, though, that
there has to be some potential financial motivation to watch the
short film that accompanies the
music. for it is hard to be compelled by the drivel that appears
on the screen.
“ADN” is a young man on a road
trip, trying to find his estranged father. Predictably, he encounters
unusual people who advise him
on his quest. Its corny attempts at
profound dialogue fall flat in this
trite waste of film. “ADN” (Josh
Brail) seems utterly apathetic
A
Part of the code leading to the
treasure promised by producer
Peter Mathews is printed directly
on the CD itsel, the rest is carved
into granite Keystones scattered
along the trail followed by “ADN”
on his journey across the US. It is
a gimmick barely supported by
the music on the CD and undermined by the near unwatchability
of the short film.
Just stick this in the regular CD
player and enjoy “ADN”'s music,
unless you are passionate about
geocaching and have the time
and infinite patience required to
unearth the mysteries of Far From
Haggersville.
—RICHARD MACKENZIE
71
In the Theater
once hamhanded and offhanded,
clumsy attempts to influence the
audience that instead make them
more wary. While the film occasionally mocks itself as well as the
genre it inspired, the sense of fun
that shone through in the previous
films is largely lacking here, overwhelmed by an overblown sense
of its own importance. The hokey
New Age mysticism engendered
by the titular object clashes oddly
with all the mayhem that it takes
to discover the fact that alien lifeforms were apparently the first archaeologists.
Taken with a full shaker of salt,
the film is enjoyable but predictably shallow, and its sheer unbelievability at times stretches
that sense of enjoyment nearly to
the breaking point.
The Happening (2008)
Indiana Jones and
The Kingdom of The
Crystal Skull (2008)
T
he long-awaited fourth installment in the adventures
of Indiana Jones was almost
guaranteed to miss its mark to a
certain extent. Raiders of the Lost
Ark revitalized the action-adventure genre in a way few films had
before or since, and its sequels
each added their own components to the winning equation.
Neither the worst nor the best of
the films, Crystal Skull outdoes all
its predecessors in its stunning
special effects, but at times falters in its inability to focus.
Set in the early 1950s, we find
the intrepid Jones (Harrison Ford)
dragged from his dusty desk at a
university back into the line of
duty, trying to keep Soviet agents
from locating a mysterious artifact
held by the U.S. government.
Eventually his search dovetails
with the disappearance of an old
friend seeking the same item, a
crystalline skull that, if returned to
72
its original location in the
Mesoamerican jungles, would unleash a source of unbelievable
power. Aided by old flame Marion
Ravenwood (Karen Allen) and
their son Mutt Williams (Shia
LeBeouf), a frantic race ensues
as both Indy and the Soviets head
toward an ancient temple and a
history-changing secret that is
truly not of this earth
Visually, the film is stunning,
and the Spielberg/Lucas team
pulled out all the stops when it
comes to state-of-the-art special
effects. For a franchise based on
spectacular action, Crystal Skull
literally blows away its predecessors with its insane car and motorcycle chases and a nuclear
explosion to boot. It is in the details, however, that the film falters.
The characters seem constrained,
bound by an overdose of political
correctness that forces them into
ridiculous stereotypes. Unfinished
subplots hinting both at McCarthyism and the sense of fear
and distrust engendered in the
modern war on terror seem at
T
he latest offering from M.
Night Shyamalan is something of a departure from his
usual style. The Happening relies
on graphic imagery and a sense
of mystery to hammer home the
terror induced by events beyond
our control. Par for the course with
the imaginative director/screenwriter, an intriguing plot is
weighed down with a mixed bag of
ponderous dialogue and lackluster execution that leaves one intellectually
fascinated
but
emotionally numb.
A typical day in New York's Central Park is shattered by horrifying
self-induced deaths, occurring en
masse. As the inexplicable
tragedy spreads throughout the
northeast, the terrified survivors
flee what they initially believe are
the results of a chemical agent released by an act of terrorism.
When more people are affected, it
becomes clear that this airborne
catastrophe did not come from
the hand of man. Caught in the
middle are a couple of teachers
(Mark Wahlberg and John
Leguizamo) and their families,
and it is their odyssey we follow as
they make their way through rural
Pennsylvania in an effort to escape what seems to be a devastating act of nature.
Trying to be portentous and pretentious at the same time, the film
is heavy on symbolism and shock.
The striking and occasionally gruesome imagery of falling bodies,
suicide by hairpin, car, and even by
commercial lawnmower becomes
one of the film’s stronger points
since it has such a visceral impact
in light of Shyamalan's prior work,
where hints and allusions were his
stock-in-trade. The comatose acting typical of his films is eerie and
unsettling but wastes the talents
of the cast. Here it is more effective than usual, as the sheer scale
of the disaster is made clear. But
since the people who are affected
act just as catatonic as the sur-
ISSUE
#22
In the Theater
vivors, it is hard to tell who is who
except for the fact that the unaffected are still alive.
While one could interpret a
strong environmental message to
the film, the vagaries of the plot
leave the true nature of this cataclysm in the air (literally). The characters' various speculations about
its cause—from global warming to
a biological defense mechanism
developed by plants—ultimately
become more intellectually stimulating than their plight. Ultimately,
our powerlessness in the face of a
natural disaster and our vulnerability to the whims of nature is its
most profound theme.
Despite the prolonged suffering
for both characters and audience
induced by the torturous dialogue
and slow plotting, at its core, The
Happening is an unflinching look
at human behavior in a crisis.
Death Note (2008)
B
ased on the wildly popular
Japanese manga and
anime series, this live-action adaptation of the potent psychological thriller is a
tense and haunting
glimpse into the nature
of morality, justice, and
the human mind.
Adapting the first three
or four volumes of the
manga, the film provides enough subtle
twists and differences
to intrigue one already
familiar with the plotline, while those new to
the series will not be
confounded by its intricacies.
Bored and brilliant
student Light Yagami
(Tatsuya
Fujiyama)
finds nothing but corruption and frustration
in the world around
him, sickened by the
constraints of the legal
system and the injustices that he
sees every day. His dream of
changing the world is suddenly
made possible when he picks up
a seemingly unassuming notebook and finds himself face to
face with Ryuk, a god of death.
The notebook is question is the
shinigami's tool for taking lives.
Light sees the strange partnership Ryuk offers as an opportunity
to cleanse the world of evil and injustice by killing as many criminals as possible, needing only a
name and a face written in the
Death Note to do so.
Naturally, once those who Light
perceives as wrongdoers begin
dropping like flies, police and governments across the globe see
their own efforts to curb crime
thwarted and, fearful that their
own ineffectiveness might eventually be seen as corruption, they
hire the world's greatest detective,
a shadowy figure known only as
“L” (Ken'ichi Matsuyama), to flush
out the perpetrator. Thus begins a
lethal cat-and-mouse game where
justice, identity, and morality itself
are twisted to suit their ends while
their conflict could easily end in
the deaths of everyone involved.
Despite its supernatural underpinnings, Death Note is really a
crime thriller that gleefully plays
with one’s notions of morality.
Wanga creators Tsugumi Ohba
and Takeshi Obata clearly state
that many of the story's ambiguities are quite deliberate, forcing
their audience to draw their own
conclusions and notions about
the many philosophical questions
both text and film present. The
acting is first-rate, the fascinating
characters portrayed in superb relief, evoking both sharp differences and parallels between the
charming yet calculating Light and
L's eccentricities. The CG effects
that bring Ryuk and the other
shinigami to life unobtrusively
blend the surreal and monstrous
into the human world.
A thought-provoking introduction to a powerful series (a sequel
to the film has had a limited U.S.
release and will likely make its
way to video soon), Death Note is
an eerie must-see, replete with its
compelling plot, moral ambiguities, and unforgettable characters.
The Killing of John
Lennon (2006)
A
ndrew Piddington’s film The
Killing of John Lennon tells
the story of Lennon’s killer,
Mark David Chapman, during the
last months of his life, when he
flew to New York to murder the
pop star (See Mysteries issue
#18). Starring Jonas Ball as Chapman, the film does not portray
him as a tool of larger political
forces, much less a “Manchurian
Candidate,” but as a confused
young man. His dialogue is taken
from Chapman’s writings, interrogation, and interviews. Yet despite
blurry shots, stuttering quick-action sequences, and sound effects suggesting vertigo and
hallucinatory states (meant to
suggest somebody descending
into madness), Chapman’s motive
for killing Lennon never is convincingly fleshed out.
A great deal of emphasis is
placed on The Catcher in the Rye
angle. Chapman was obsessed
with the J.D. Salinger novel in
which the protagonist, young
Holden Caulfield, rails against
“phoneys.” One senses he felt betrayed by Lennon who sang,
“Imagine no possessions” but
owned yachts, farms, and several
residences. But is this really a reason to kill him?
The more fascinating sequences come after Lennon’s
death, when Chapman is protected from lynching by the New
York police department and later,
when he is taken to the correctional facility in upstate New York.
One gets a sense of the emotional
frenzy that Lennon's death unleashed; if craziness was at the
root of his killing, it was certainly
in evidence afterward.
Ball does a fine job portraying a
confused and unhappy young
man, but the movie does not provide insight into Chapman’s motives,
only
rehashes
the
circumstances of which the
moviegoer was already aware.
73
The ClassiFiles
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MISCELLANEOUS
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ISSUE
#22
The ClassiFiles
Meteorite or
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UFOS/ALIENS
UFO Detector
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$45, including battery. Abate Electronics, designer of the original
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NOTE: Mysteries is not responsible
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company placing the classified ad.
75
A Glimpse into the Unknown
W
hile visiting family for a holiday in August of 2008, Sharon
Green and her family had planned to attend a ghost tour
of Edinburgh, Scotland. The last night of their stay they attended the terror tour, which started in the street of old Edinburgh. After a while they entered the Niddry street vaults, which were
like tunnels with rooms coming off them. While they all stood outside
one vault, Sharon lifted the camera above the person in front of her
and snapped this photo. In this vault, according to the tour guide, people have said to have felt sick, passed out, and two people have even
levitated.
In this photo Sharon believes she captured a full manifestation of
a ghost in skeletal form. What do you think—is it a ghost or a trick of
the light?
—SHARON GREEN
SOMERSET, ENGLAND
ALEXANDSHARON@FSMAIL.NET
76
ISSUE
#22
FOR A FREE CATALOG, CALL (870) 269-4177
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Visit us online: www.UFOTV.com
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WORLD: 310-578-5300
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All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International
Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole
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