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Full text of "The Unexplained: Mysteries Of Mind Space & Time Part 25
"
See other formats
-
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THE
MYSTERIES OF MIND SPACE & TIME
Published weekly by Orbis Publishing Limited
Orbis House, 20/22 Bedfordbury, London WC2N 4BT
Volume 3 Issue 25 | In next week’s issue
Consultants to The Unexplained Picture Researchers we
Professor A. J. Ellison Anne Horton Who are the mysterious Men in black who visit —
Dr J. Allen Hynek Paul Snelgrove 4 and threaten — UFO witnesses and investigators?
Brian Inglis Frances Vargo Find out in a new series. We conclude Sensitive
Colin Wilson Editorial Manager plants with a survey of the further research that
Clare Byatt Cleve Backster’s startling discoveries have
Editorial Director Art Editor inspired. In 1855 the good people of Devon woke
Srian innes Stephen Westcott one snowy morning to find a mysterious and
Editor Designer disturbing line of footprints stretching for miles
Peter Brookesmith Richard Burgess across the countryside. Were they left there by
Deputy Editor Art Buyer the Devil? The answers are in Devon's
Lynn Picknett Jean Hardy mysterious footprints. We continue our series on
Executive Editor Production Co-ordinator Leys with an investigation of ‘black streams’ —
Lesley Riley Nicky Bowden ley lines with an evil influence — and how to deal
Sub Editors Circulation Director with them. And in Spiritism we look at the life
Chris Cooper David Breed and work of Allan Kardek, the Frenchman whose
Jenny Dawson Marketing Manager teachings are now followed by millions in Brazil.
Hildi Hawkins Michael Joyce
Place your order now!
Contents
Atlantis
WHERE WAS THE ISLE OF ATLANTIS? 481
What archaeological evidence is there for the lost land of
Atlantis?
Richard Thomas
R101 disaster
R101: THE DEAD CAPTAIN SPEAKS 484
What happened when the wrecked airship's dead captain The Unexplained Price U.K. 50p. Aus. & N.Z. $1.50. S.A. R1.50. U.S.A. $1.50.
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Hilo Offset. Printed in Great Britain by Jarrold & Sons Ltd, Norwich
Left: Santorini, or Thera, the
southernmost island of the
Greek Cyclades group — and
Where was the isle [jg
Below: a map by Greek
scholar Dr Angelos
ne ? Galanopoulos of the Thera
O | an 1¢ group of islands. Dr
@ Galanopoulos claims that the
crater at the centre of the
group was the site of Atlantis,
destroyed in a volcanic
eruption around 1500 Bc
Bottom left: a vision of the
delights of paradise before
the Fall, by the Dutch artist
Hieronymus Bosch
(c.1450-—c.1516). Many
people believe that the true
paradise was located on
Atlantis
THE ISLAND OF SANTORIN
Did the magical island of Atlantis ever really exist?
Modern research suggests it may have done — though
perhaps not in the Atlantic Ocean as Plato, originator of
the myth, claimed. RICHARD THOMAS reviews the evidence
ene
THE METROPOLIS OF ATLANTIS
AFTER PLATO (mRITIAS 430 VEC)
ATLANTIS: FACT OR FICTION? was the title of
a symposium organised by the Department
of Classical Studies at Indiana University in
April 1975. Experts in various fields of
learning, from classics to geology, came
together to attempt to settle the Atlantis
question once and for all. In many people’s
minds they succeeded — and proved Plato’s
2300-year-old story to be mere fiction.
Yet the final words by Professor Edwin
Ramage, editor of the subsequent book, were
far from conclusive. ‘No-one,’ he writes, ‘has
yet offered a satisfactory solution to the
problem — if, that is, there is a problem at all.’
And, sure enough, new theories and new
books continue to appear.
If Atlantis is a myth, it is one that will not
disappear. It owes a great deal to Ignatius
Donnelly’s best-seller Atlantis: the ante-
diluvian world (1882). At the start of the
book, reprinted some 50 times before being
revised in 1950, Donnelly listed what he
called ‘several distinct and novel proposit-
ions’, summarising his extraordinary thesis:
1. That there once existed in the At-
lantic Ocean, opposite the mouth of the
Mediterranean Sea, a large island,
which was the remnant of an Atlantic
continent, and known to the ancient
world as Atlantis.
2. That the description of this island
given by Plato is not, as has long been
supposed, fable, but veritable history.
3. That Atlantis was the region where
man first rose from a state of barbarism
to civilization.
4. That it became, in the course of the
ages, a populous and mighty nation,
from whose overflowings the shores of
the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi
river, the Amazon, the Pacific coast of
South America, the Mediterranean,
the west coast of Europe and Africa, the
Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Caspian
were populated by civilized nations.
5. That it was the true Antediluvian
world; the Garden of Eden; the Gar-
dens of the Hesperides; the Elysian
481
Atlantis
Fields; the Gardens of Alcinous; the
Mesomphalos; the Mount Olympus of
the Greeks; the Asgard, or Avalon,
of the Eddas [medieval Icelandic
poems]; the focus of the traditions of
the ancient nations; representing a uni-
versal memory of a great land, where
early mankind dwelt for ages in peace
and happiness.
6. ‘That the gods and goddesses of the
ancient Greeks, the Phoenicians, the
Hindus, and the Scandinavians were
simply the kings, queens and heroes of
Atlantis; and the acts attributed to
them in mythology, a confused re-
collection of real historical events.
7. ‘That the mythologies of Egypt and
Peru represented the original religion
of Atlantis, which was sun-worship.
8. ‘That the oldest colony formed by
the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt,
whose civilization was a reproduction
of that of the Atlantic island.
g. ‘That the implements of the Bronze
Age of Europe were derived from At-
lantis. ‘The Atlanteans were also the
first manufacturers of iron.
10. That the Phoenician alphabet,
parent of all the European alphabets,
was derived from an Atlantis alphabet,
Above: the distinguished
Greek archaeologist
Professor Spyridon
Marinatos inspecting ancient
ruins on the island-volcano
of Thera in the Greek
Cyclades which, he believed,
was the site of Atlantis
perplex mankind’. And Donnelly’s ‘brave
new vision’ is still the basis for the flood of
books on Atlantis, from the occult to the
‘rebel scientific’, that continues to pour from
the presses.
Donnelly’s claims are often based on
wrong or incomplete information, as
scholars delight in pointing out. But their
own claims are also often suspect; the moral
for any would-be seeker after the truth of the
Atlantis legend is to ignore both sides and to
return directly to Plato’s story. Even if it is
full of distortions and literary devices for the
purpose of propaganda or instruction, as
some academics claim, it may yet hide a lost
truth somewhere.
By this criterion, two recent hot favourites
for the ‘Atlantis found’ title are suspect: an
eastern Mediterranean civilisation, centred
on Crete or Thera; and northern Europe,
including Scandinavia.
Dr James Mavor’s book Voyage to Atlan-
tis Caused a minor sensation in 1969. It set
out the claims, first made by the Greek
scientists Dr Angelos Galanopoulos and
Professor Spyridon Marinatos, that Atlantis
was in fact the Minoan civilisation, and that
it was destroyed by the eruption of the
island-volcano Thera about 1500 BC.
The name ‘Minoan’ was given to the
which was also conveyed from Atlantis
to the Mayas of Central America.
11. That Atlantis was the original seat
of the Aryan or Indo-European family
of nations, as well as of the Semitic
peoples, and possibly also of the ‘Tu-
ranian races.
12. ‘That Atlantis perished in a terrible
convulsion of nature, in which the
whole island was submerged by the
ocean, with nearly all its inhabitants.
13. That a few persons escaped in
ships and on rafts, and carried to the
nations east and west the tidings of the
appalling catastrophe, which has sur-
vived to our own time in the Flood and
Deluge legends of the different nations
of the Old and New Worlds.
What Donnelly had done was to take Plato’s
original 7o00-word story and extend it to
offer a whole new version of Man’s pre-
history and ‘solve many problems which now
482
Many people, inspired by
Ignatius Donnelly’s classic
study Atlantis: the
antediluvian world (1882),
believe that mankind first
rose to a state of civilisation
in Atlantis. They claim that
the Sun-worship found
throughout the world — for
example in the Sun-motifs of
the mysterious carvings of
the Nazca plane (above left)
and the cult of Ra, the Sun
god of ancient Egypt
(above) — are relics of the
original religion of Atlantis.
The Christian legend of the
Flood, shown here in a
Coptic manuscript from
Ethiopia (right) is interpreted
as a jumbled memory of the
final submersion of Atlantis
oh
oe ‘ Ss
PHA ahh HATO ;
PHTWALEPITA CAPD —
ancient civilisation of Crete by the British
archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who began
to excavate its remains in 1900. He believed
that shadowy memories of it inspired the
Greek myth of Minos, son of Zeus and king
of Crete, who kept a bull-headed monster,
the Minotaur, imprisoned in a labyrinth. At
Knossos, Evans discovered the ruins of a
splendid palace in which there was a bull-
ring. In the reliefs and murals that adorned
the palace, and in pictures painted on the
large quantities of pottery that were found,
there were representations of bull-hunting
and bull-fights, conducted by youths armed
only with staves and nooses.
In Atlantis there was also a cult of bulls,
according to Plato: every four or five years
the 10 kings of the island had to face the bulls
unarmed, capture one and sacrifice it.
Death of paradise
By 1500 BC Crete was the centre of a
powerful seafaring empire. Yet within an
extraordinarily short time her power col-
lapsed. There was widespread destruction of
temples and other buildings throughout
Crete, and the Minoan colonies and trading
posts oversea were abandoned or destroyed;
there was an abrupt change in artistic styles,
and the quantity of pottery made sharply
decreased; a large proportion of the Cretan
population migrated to the west of the island;
and soon political power in the Aegean
shifted to Mycenae, on the Greek mainland.
Marinatos and Galanopoulos claimed that
the eruption of ‘Thera, known to have occur-
red about 1500 BC, could have caused this
collapse. The tidal waves from the explosion,
which must have been at least as powerful as
that of Krakatoa in 1883, would have drow-
ned many of the inhabitants of coastal towns
throughout the Aegean, and the volcanic ash
and dust that would have been deposited, in
layers perhaps 20 inches (50 centimetres)
thick, would have ruined harvests for years.
Marinatos and Galanopoulos hold that
‘Thera was actually the metropolis of Minoan
civilisation, rather than being an outpost, as
is generally believed.
The fall of Minoan civilisation was about
900 years before Solon received the story of
Atlantis from the Egyptian priests, rather
than the 9000 reported by Plato for the
sinking of Atlantis. Crete was probably the
country known to the Egyptians as Keftiu—a
land with which they were in regular com-
mercial and political contact, but that was for
them in the ‘far west’, and was ‘the way to
other islands and the continent beyond’ — as
Plato described Atlantis.
The claim that Minoan civilisation was
Atlantis is in many ways highly credible, and
remains the most favoured by those few
academics who still show any interest in the
subject. Yet Mavor and his supporters have
had to perform some deft twists of scholar-
ship to prove their case.
Does the Minoan civilisation really match
Above: the German scholar
Dr Jurgen Spanuth, who has
made out a fairly convincing
case for his claim that
Atlantis was actually located,
not in the Atlantic or
Mediterranean, but on
islands off the German coast
Above: a mural from the
palace of Knossos on the
island of Crete, depicting the
ritual bull-leaping that was
an integral part of Minoan
culture. Plato, the originator
of the Atlantis myth, wrote
of a bull cult on Atlantis; this
has led some experts to
suggest that Atlantis was in
fact the ancient civilisation
of Crete
Atlantis
Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis as closely as
Mavor claims? An eloquent opponent of the
claims for Crete or Thera is the German
scholar Dr Jurgen Spanuth, who accuses its
supporters of ‘a gross logical error’:
Neither Thera nor Crete lies in the
Atlantic ... neither island lies at the
mouth of a great river, neither was
swallowed up by the sea and vanished.
.. . In fact this great breakthrough in
archaeology is a bubble that burst long
ago.
Spanuth himself attempts to prove, in his
1976 book Atlantis of the north, that Atlantis
was centred on the sunken islands near
Heligoland, off the north-west German
coast, and was in fact the Bronze Age fore-
runner of the Viking civilisation of northern
Europe and Scandinavia, also known as
Atland.
Spanuth, although presenting a highly
convincing case, uses the same twists of
scholarship that he so readily condemns in
others — locating his version of the events in
the North Sea instead of the Atlantic. Robert
Scrutton does much the same thing in 7he
other Atlantis and The secrets of lost Atland,
also promoting the case for a proto- Viking
Atlantis.
All these recent attempts to locate and
prove Atlantis deserve respect for their open-
ness to the idea that Plato’s legend is a story
based on fact — but have then proceeded to
alter the story to suit historical events at a
different time in a different place.
Plato as adapted for consumption in the
20th century seems a far cry from the Plato of
fourth-century Greece. It is fair to wonder if
he would approve of the modern detective
stories emerging from his tale. Would he
think them nearer the truth or farther from
it? A help or a hindrance in the search for the
real origins and purpose of men?
Does, in fact, the real story still lie hidden
where Plato quite specifically put it —- on a
huge land-mass to the west of Gibraltar,
which disappeared beneath the sea nearly
12,000 years ago as the result of a colossal
natural disaster?
What is the evidence for Plato’s location of
Atlantis? See page §21
483
Bs
What exactly had brought the R107 to its fiery end? The
official inquiry could only guess — but, says EDWARD HORTON,
it ignored some extraordinary evidence. For the ship’s dead
‘Mites
(go-mape saake
ss
captain had ‘come through’ at an astonishing seance...
REPORTS OF THE CALAMITY that had befallen
the Rroz began trickling into London and
Cardington during the small hours of
Sunday morning, § October 1930. At first
they were guarded: even as late as 5.30 a.m.
Reuters in Paris would go no further than say
that ‘alarm’ had been caused by an ‘un-
confirmed report that the airship has blown
up’. But this was quickly followed by the
death knell: Rror HAS EXPLODED IN FLAMES
ONLY SIX SAVED.
The parallel with the sinking of the 77-
tamic Was inescapable — a vessel of heroic
proportions, the largest and most advanced
thing of its kind, safe ‘but for the millionth
chance’ and yet hideously fated on her very
first voyage. Public grief was unrestrained on
both sides of the Channel.
But even in the midst of that grief some
starkly insistent questions cried out for an-
swers: how had it happened? Whose fault? A
special Court of Inquiry was set for 28
October, amid angry rumours that its
unspoken function would be to whitewash
the Air Ministry in general and the dead
Lord ‘Thomson in particular.
As far as getting at the truth about the
flight itself, and particularly what happened
during those final minutes, there was a
peculiar difficulty. Fate had been awkward in
its selection of survivors. All the passengers
were dead; so were all the officers. ‘The only
survivors were six lucky crewmen, none of
whom was inthe main control car (which was
crushed) and none of whom was in a position
therefore to know precisely how it was that
the mighty Rrorz kept her rendezvous with
that small hillside outside Beauvais. Put
454
Above: the A707 cruises
over the outskirts of London
during her first test flight on
15 October 1929. Thousands
of sightseers had crowded
Cardington to see her take to
the air
Right: the captain of the
R707, Flight-Lieutenant H.
Carmichael Irwin. Would the
testimony of ‘his’ spirit voice
have helped the Court of
Inquiry that investigated the
tragedy?
:
o as
Rae ws
together, their recollections of the final mo-
ments added little of importance to what
Eugene Rabouille had seen from the ground.
The Court of Inquiry, sitting under the
distinguished statesman Sir John Simon,
delivered its verdict in April 1931. As the
immediate cause of the crash the Court
settled for a sudden loss of gas in one of the
forward gasbags; this, if the airship were
dangerously low to begin with (as she un-
doubtedly was) and taken in conjunction
with a sudden downdraught (which was
plausible) would certainly spell disaster. It
was as good a guess as any.
It may well be, however, that what the
Court did not consider in evidence was of
greater significance than what it did. There
was considerable testimony that, had it been
given credence, shed a much clearer light on
the disaster, and, because of its nature, on
issues of vastly greater significance. It was
testimony of an extraordinary kind from an
extraordinary source — the dead captain of
the airship.
On the afternoon of the Tuesday follow-
ing the crash, four oddly assorted characters
assembled at the National Laboratory of
Psychical Research in West London. Harry
Price, who had set up the laboratory a few
years earlier, was a singular man: wealthy,
mercurial, an amateur magician, a passionate
investigator of psychic phenomena. And,
what was of great importance in the light of
what was to follow, he was a savage foe of
Spiritualist hokum, whether of the deli-
berately fraudulent variety (which as a
magician he was perfectly equipped to
expose) or of the innocent type (in which
genuine paranormal experiences such as tele-
pathy were wrongly ascribed to ‘voices from
beyond’).
One of Price’s guests that day was the
celebrated medium Eileen Garrett, a woman
of unimpeachable integrity, whose paranor-
mal faculties continually astonished her as
much as they did those who witnessed them.
Despite the fact that in trances she frequently
delivered weirdly plausible messages pur-
porting to come from beyond the grave, she
refused to classify herself as a Spiritualist.
And she backed up her modest mystification
about her strange powers with a disarming
eagerness to expose them to the most search-
ing examinations that could be devised by
the Harry Prices of this world.
The other principal guest was an Aus-
tralian journalist, Ian Coster, whom Price
had persuaded to sit in on what promised to
be a potentially fascinating seance. Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle had died a few months
earlier. He and Price had wrangled for years,
Conan Doyle huffy about Price’s acerbic
views on Spiritualism, Price discerning a
credulity verging on dottiness in the celeb-
rated author.
Conan Doyle had vowed to prove his
point in the only way possible, and Price had
Above: Harry Price, who
arranged the seance at
which Flight-Lieutenant
Irwin's ‘spirit’ was first heard
Below: the bodies of those
killed in the disaster lie in
State in flag-draped coffins,
in Westminster Hall, London.
Public reaction to the crash
was intense: the French
provided full military honours
before the bodies were
brought across the Channel
by two Royal Navy
destroyers. An estimated half
million Londoners watched
the funeral procession; world
leaders from Hitler to the
Pope sent condolences
R101 disaster
arranged the seance with Mrs Garrett to give
him his chance. Coster, a sceptic, was there
as a witness. Eileen Garrett, as always, did
not know the purpose of the seance, nor did
she know who Coster was. As far as she knew
it was merely one of Price’s clinically con-
trolled investigations into her strange psy-
chic talents.
The three of them, along with a skilled
shorthand writer, settled down in the dar-
kened room, and Mrs Garrett quickly slip-
ped into a trance. Soon she began to speak,
not in her own voice but that of her regular
‘control’, one Uvani. He had first manifested
himself years before and claimed to be an
ancient Oriental whose purpose in establish-
ing himself as a link between Mrs Garrett
and departed spirits was to prove the ex-
istence of life after death. Sometimes he
would relay messages in his own voice (deep,
measured cadences, formal); at other times
he would stand aside, as it were, and allow
the spirit to communicate directly.
The uninvited spirit
‘Today, after announcing his presence, Uvani
gave Price a few snippets of information from
a dead German friend (of whom, incident-
ally, he was certain Eileen Garrett was per-
fectly ignorant), but nothing that excited
him. And no Conan Doyle. ‘Then suddenly
Eileen Garrett snapped to attention, ex-
tremely agitated, tears rolling down her
cheeks. Uvani’s voice took on a terrible
broken urgency as it spelled out the name
IRVING or IRWIN. (Flight-Lieutenant H.
Carmichael Irwin had captained the Rror.)
Then Uvani’s voice was replaced by another,
speaking in the first person and doing so in
rapid staccato bursts:
“The whole bulk of the dirigible was
entirely and absolutely too much for her
engine capacity. Engines too heavy. It was
this that made me on five occasions have to
scuttle back to safety. Useful lift too small.’
The voice kept rising and falling, hysteria
barely controlled, the speed of delivery that
of a machine gun. Price and Coster sat
rivetted as a torrent of technical jargon began
to tumble from the lips of Eileen Garrett.
‘Gross lift computed badly. Inform con-
trol panel. And this idea of new elevators
totally mad. Elavator jammed. Oil pipe plug-
ged. This exorbitant scheme of carbon and
hydrogen is entirely and absolutely wrong.’
‘There was more, much more, all delivered
fiercely at incredible pace: never
reached cruising altitude. Same intrials. Too
short trials. No one knew the ship properly.
Airscrews too small. Fuel injection bad and
air pump failed. Cooling system bad. Bore
capacity bad . . . Five occasions I have had to
scuttle back — three times before starting.
‘Not satisfied with feed . . . Weather bad
for long flight. Fabric all water-logged and
ship’s nose down. Impossible to rise. Cannot
trim... Almost scraped the roofs at Achy.
At inquiry to be held later it will be found
485
R101 disaster
that the superstructure of the envelope
contained no resilience... The added
middle section was entirely wrong... too
heavy ... too much overweighted for the
capacity of the engines.’
The monologue petered out at last, and
Uvani came back to ring down the curtain on
this portion of the astonishing seance. (In
fact Conan Doyle did ‘come through’, but
that is another story.)
Three weeks later, on the eve of the
Inquiry, there began a sequel to this mystify-
ing occurrence that was every bit as strange.
Major Oliver Villiers, a much decorated
survivor of aerial scraps over the Western
Front, was badly shaken by the Rzor cata-
strophe. He had lost many friends in the
crash, in particular Sir Sefton Brancker,
Director of Civil Aviation and Villiers’s
direct superior at the Air Ministry. Indeed
he had driven Brancker to the airship on the
day of departure.
Villiers was entertaining a house-guest
who had an interest in Spiritualism, and late
one night, when his guest and the rest of the
household had gone to bed, he suddenly had
an overwhelming impression that Irwin was
in the room with him (the two men knew each
other well). Then he heard, mentally, Irwin
cry out to him: ‘For God’s sake let me talk to
you. It’s all so ghastly. I must speak to you. I
must.’ The lament was repeated, then:
‘We're all bloody murderers. For God’s sake
ihe last few minute:
486
a
Gg?
oo
None of the survivors seemed to know
what had caused the Rror to dive into
the ground. One had just dozed off in his
bunk when he was jolted awake by the
chief coxwain rushing by _ shouting
‘We’re down lads! We’re down!’ Anoth-
er was relaxing over a drink in the
specially sealed-off smoking lounge
when he felt the airship dip, dip again —
and erupt into flame. ‘Two more, in
separate engine cars, were no better
informed.
Engine man Joe Binks, however, had
glanced out of a window only two min-
utes before the end, and was terrified to
see the spire of Beauvais cathedral,
‘almost close enough to touch’. He
shouted to engineer Bell, the sixth sur-
vivor, when the floor seemed to drop
away, then the ship lurched. At the same
moment a message was coming through
from the main control car: sLow. Thena
few moments’ silence. And then the
holocaust.
The Air Ministry clamped down on
any news of the crash, yet in the first
seance two days later ‘Irwin’ described
how he had failed to achieve cruising
height: ‘Fabric all waterlogged and
ship’s nose down...’
Three survivors stand near the wreck
Left: a session of the Court
of Inquiry into the disaster.
Though it could not
ascertain the precise cause
of the crash, it had no
doubts that the A707 should
never have been allowed to
attempt the flight to India
Right: taken shortly before
the R707 left Cardington on
its last doomed flight, this
photograph shows (left to
right): the navigator,
Squadron- Leader E. L.
Johnston, whose friend
Captain Hinchliffe’s spirit
had allegedly warned of the
inadequacies of the ship
through two different
mediums; Sir Sefton
Brancker, who was Said to
have agreed to join the flight
only because Lord Thomson
had accused him of
cowardice; Lord Thomson
himself; and Lieutenant-
Colonel V. C. Richmond,
designer of the A707. All
died in the final holocaust
help me to speak with you.’ In the morning
Villiers recounted this most disturbing ex-
perience to his guest, who promptly arranged
a session with Eileen Garrett.
The first of several seances was held on 31
October and it, like its successors, took a
significantly different form from the Price-
Coster episode. Rather than merely listen to
Irwin, Villiers conversed freely with him
through Mrs Garrett. Moreover, while in the
first seance Irwin came through alone, in
later seances he was joined by several of his
colleagues and even by Sir Sefton Brancker.
Villiers was not served by shorthand, but
he claimed the gift of total recall, which in
conjunction with notes hastily scribbled
during the ‘conversations’ convinced him
that the transcripts he made were virtually
dead accurate. ‘hey make absorbing read-
ing, and a short extract from the first one will
give their flavour:
Villiers: Now try to tell me all that happened
on Saturday and Sunday.
Irwin: She was too heavy by several tons.
‘Too amateurish in construction. Envelope
and girders not of sufficiently sound
material.
Villiers: Wait a minute, old boy. Let’s start at
the beginning.
Irwin: Well, during the afternoon before
starting, I noticed that the gas indicator was
going up and down, which showed there was
a leakage or escape which I could not stop or
rectify any time around the valves.
R101 disaster
Villiers: Try to explain a bit more. I don’t
quite understand.
Irwin: The goldbeater skins are too porous,
and not strong enough. And the constant
movement of the gasbags, acting like bel-
lows, is constantly causing internal pressure
of the gas, which causes a leakage, of the
valves. I told the chief engineer of this. I then
knew we were almost doomed. Then later on,
the meteorological charts came in, and Scot-
tie and Johnnie (fellow officers) and I had a
consultation. Owing to the trouble of the gas,
we knew that our only chance was to leave on
the scheduled time. ‘The weather forcast was
no good. But we decided that we might cross
the Channel and tie up at Le Bourget before
the bad weather came. We three were ab-
solutely scared stiff. And Scottie said to us -
look here, we are in for it — but for God’s
sake, let’s smile like damned Cheshire cats as
we go on board, and leave England with a
clean pair of heels.
Price and Villiers did not know one an-
other, nor were they aware of each other’s
seances with Eileen Garrett. They arrived
independently at the conclusion that the
‘evidence’ they had should be placed before
Sir John Simon (Price also informed the Air
Ministry). Neither the Court of Inquiry nor
the Ministry was prepared to accept that
these unusual happenings contributed to an
understanding of the Rroz tragedy.
On page 538: did the spirits really speak?
487
Goiset: the psychic detective
The Dutch clairvoyant and healer Gerard Croiset was often successful
in locating missing persons — dead or alive — and frequently made
the headlines for his work with the police. ROY STEMMAN outlines
the life and work of this remarkable psychic
EIGHT WEEKS after his 24-year-old daughter
Carol had disappeared, Professor Walter E.
Sandelius was prepared to try anything to
find her. Carol had disappeared from a
hospital in ‘Topeka, Kansas, USA, and al-
though photographs of the attractive young
woman had been circulated throughout the
country she was still missing.
Walter Sandelius, a professor of political
science at the University of Kansas, had read
about the Dutch clairvoyant and healer
Gerard Croiset, who had a reputation for
finding missing people — dead or alive — and
solving crimes with his psychic powers.
So, on 11 December 1959, with no other
immediate hope of finding his daughter, he
telephoned Utrecht University. He spoke to
Professor Willem ‘Tenhaeff, the parapsy-
chologist who had spent many years studying
Croiset, and arranged to call again the fol-
lowing day when the clairvoyant would be in
Tenhaeff’s office.
When he did so, Croiset told the Kansas
professor: ‘I see your daughter running over
a large lawn and then crossing a viaduct.
Now I see her at a place where there are
stores, and near them a large body of water
with landing stages and many small boats. I
see her riding there ina lorry and in a big red
Car.’
‘Is she still alive?’ asked the anxious
father.
“Yes, don’t worry,’ said Croiset. ‘You will
hear something definite at the end of six
days.’
On the sixth day, as arranged with
Croiset, Professor Sandelius went down-
stairs at 8 a.m. to telephone Tenhaeff. As he
picked up the telephone he glanced towards
the living room and was astonished to see his
daughter sitting on the sofa! Subsequent
questioning of the Dutch clairvoyant proved
that he had successfully ‘seen’ across nearly
5000 miles (8000 kilometres) and described
Carol’s movements with impressive
accuracy.
‘This is one of hundreds of such cases that
were investigated and kept on file at Utrecht
University. Many were described in Jackson
Harrison Pollack’s book, Crotset, the clair-
voyant. But not all had such happy endings.
Croiset was often the first person to break the
news to relatives that a missing person was
dead. Sadly in many of the cases they were
children who had fallen into Holland’s
waterway system and drowned.
The father of five children, Croiset was
Left: Croiset using an
electronic version of the
Zener card experiment,
designed to test the powers
of precognition. Croiset’s
guesses were often
significantly above average
Below: Croiset tells the
Dutch police in 1963: ‘The
body is there — you can look
for it. He had located the
body of a missing boy in the
Vliet Canal through psychic
means alone
488
always eager to help distraught parents
whose sons or daughters had disappeared,
and he refused to take any money for his
psychic work.
In the case of one missing boy, Wimpje
Slee, Croiset told an uncle over the telephone
that he had fallen into the water and drown-
ed, and that his body would be found near a
bridge. Then, on Friday 19 April 1963, in
order to get stronger impressions, he met the
boy’s uncle and was able to tell him that
Wimpje had drowned near a small house
with a slanted weather-vane. But, he added,
his body was no longer there. It would be
found, however, on Tuesday, between two
bridges near the house described.
Newspapers in The Hague heard of the
story and published Croiset’s prediction the
following day, enabling their readers to
check for themselves. On Tuesday, 23 April
— just as Croiset had foretold — Wimpje’s
body was discovered floating on the Vliet
Canal, precisely where the clairvoyant had
said it would be found. Not surprisingly, the
Haagsche Courant headlined its story:
‘Croiset proved right once more’.
Pictures of Croiset’s craggy features and
wiry hair frequently appeared in European
and Scandinavian newspapers. He assisted
the police to look for missing persons in half a
dozen countries and co-operated in tests
conducted by leading psychical researchers.
But it was to Professor Tenhaeff that he was
particularly loyal.
A star performer
Of the 47 psychics and sensitives tested by
the professor, Croiset was undoubtedly the
star performer. Unlike other clairvoyants
who shun research work, Croiset moved to
Utrecht in 1956 in order to be closer to the
university and to make himself more readily
available. And when grateful individuals
offered him money for helping to find lost
friends or relatives he always declined, say-
ing the only ‘reward’ he wanted was for them
to file a report of what happened with
Professor Tenhaeff. As a result, the Utrecht
archives must contain some of the best auth-
enticated accounts of clairvoyance on record.
Despite the research work, however,
Croiset never really knew how his psychic
power functioned. He once described it as
like seeing a fine powder, which formed first
into dots and then lines. Out of these lines
shapes and scenes would form, first in two
dimensions then in three. Usually his clair-
voyance was in black and white, but if a
corpse was involved he would see pictures in
colour.
Croiset’s involvement in police investig-
ations tends to make his popular image a
distorted one. Although he was undoubtedly
a brilliant psychic detective, he was hesitant
about working on certain cases of murder
and theft for fear that he would wrong an
innocent person. For example, at the site of a
murder he might describe a person in great
Professor Tenhaeff of
Utrecht University and the
Utrecht Chief of Police are
pictured here with Gerard
Croiset. They were a regular
team, Croiset helping the
police in their search for
missing persons and
Professor Tenhaeff
monitoring the clairvoyant’s
progress. Few psychics have
been as rigorously tested as
Croiset
Gerard Croiset
RIUVASPOLIT!E
OLPSCOMM AEDES
uv
detail who was not the murderer, but an
innocent passer-by. In fact, Croiset said that
in 90 per cent of criminal cases he found it
difficult to discover the culprit, though he
was able to give police valuable clues. On the
other hand, in cases of accidental disappear-
ances it is claimed that Croiset had an 80 per
cent success rate.
But it was not necessary for Croiset to wait
for crimes to be committed or for people to
vanish in order to prove that he possessed
extra-sensory powers. Instead, Professor
‘Tenhaeff devised a ‘chair test’, which was
repeated with astonishing accuracy over 20
years or more. It demonstrated that Croiset
could apparently see into the near future.
It worked like this: a week or more in
advance of a large public meeting, Croiset
would be asked to make written statements
about the person who would sit in a specific
seat. On the day of the meeting, individuals
would be allowed to sit where they wanted
(no one knowing which chair had been
selected) or were given numbered tickets at
random as they arrived directing them to sit
in certain seats. ‘Then Croiset’s predictions
would be read to the audience. ‘Time and
again, the unsuspecting person sitting in the
pre-selected seat confirmed that the majority
of the statements Croiset had made were
correct. ‘These would often consist of the
person’s sex, a physical description and
details of their work, people around them, or
descriptions of specific incidents in their life.
Occasionally, Croiset could get no advance
impressions — in which case it was usually
discovered that the seat was left unoccupied
on the night.
Gerard Croiset died on 20 July 1980, at
the age of 71. But the records on file at
Utrecht University of the world’s most
tested psychic will continue to intrigue and
baffle scientists for many years to come.
People, plants and psi
Do plants have feelings? Do they respond to kindness
or to cruelty? Can they react to human emotions?
BRIAN INNES begins a two-part investigation
into some pioneering experiments
PIERRE PAUL SAUVIN Sat at his desk in the
offices of International ‘Telephone & Tele-
graph in New Jersey. A tiny radio transmit-
ter was taped to his leg beneath his trousers.
Most of the day he hummed loudly to
himself, so that his workmates would not
notice his murmurings when he used the
telephone. Every hour or so he would dial his
home number and run his finger along the
teeth of a comb close to the mouthpiece to
identify himself to his answering machine.
He would set various other devices in action
by a series of signals from his transmitter,
and carry on a low conversation for some
minutes. Sauvin was talking with his plants.
Few people would want, or are able, to go
to such lengths in the care of their house-
plants. Most are content with muttering a
few encouraging phrases as they water their
scattered pots or devotedly sponge the leaves
of a languishing specimen. Nevertheless,
there are many thousands of people who will
swear that talking in a friendly tone to any
plant will result in its improved growth and
health.
Sauvin was trying to repeat and improve
upon a series of experiments carried out by a
certain Cleve Backster, whom he had heard
interviewed on the radio in the late 1960s.
Backster was an ex-CIA employee who had
set up on his own as an instructor in the use of
lie-detector machines. One night he had
been inspired to connect one of his lie-
detectors to a houseplant, of the species
Dracaena massangeana, to observe how it
Below: Cleve Backster, a
former CIA employee, takes a
look at his apparatus for
testing plants. The polygraph
is at the left, and in front of
Backster the electrodes are
lightly clamped each side of
a philodendron leaf. The
paper chart of the pen
recorder can also be seen
took up water from the soil in its pot.
The lie-detector employed by Backster
was a machine known as a polygraph: it
measures the blood pressure, respiration,
and involuntary muscular movements of a
subject under interrogation, and it also
measures small changes in the electrical
conductivity of the skin. This last pheno-
menon was first observed a century ago by
C.S. Féré; it is known to experimental
psychologists as the ‘psychogalvanic reflex’
or ‘electrodermal response’, and is a very
sensitive indicator of emotional changes.
Two electrodes are connected to adjacent
fingers, and the variations in skin conduc-
tivity are shown as a trace on a pen recorder
chart. When Backster connected his poly-
graph electrodes to the houseplant, and then
watered it, he expected to find a gradual
increase in the electrical conductivity of the
leaf as the water rose into the tissues. Instead,
he obtained a pattern of steadily decreasing
| | FEB 2 1966
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PLATES WITH PEN
PLATING MANNER
HE COULD THREATEN
conductivity, which he recognised as being
very similar to the response of a human being
undergoing a pleasant, relaxing experience.
Backster decided that this was worthy of
further study: how would the plant react to a
threat to its wellbeing? He had just made
himself a cup of hot coffee, so he tried
dipping the leaf to which the electrodes were
attached into the cup. To his great disap-
pointment there was no significant reaction.
Something more dramatic was called for. He
decided that he would try burning the leaf.
At the very moment the thought came into
his mind, and before he had made any move,
the pen of the polygraph recorder made a
sharp upward jump. Backster left the room
to find some matches, and discovered that his
return caused another jump. Had the elec-
trodes of the polygraph been attached to a
human being, such a reaction would have
indicated sudden apprehension. When he
actually held the flame to the leaf the reaction
was much less; and when, later, he pretended
to set about burning the leaf again, there was
no reaction at all.
To Backster, there seemed only one
possible explanation: the plant was reading
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his mind. It seemed able to differentiate
between his real intentions and his pretended
ones. He decided that the phenomenon
needed full investigation: perhaps the poly-
graph was faulty, or the plant had reacted in
an untypical way. In the course of the
following months, he investigated a wide
variety of plant life, checked on a number of
different instruments and enlisted the help of
other experimenters. Everything confirmed
his initial experience.
Backster reported that the phenomenon
persisted in the leaf when it was removed
from the plant, or when a piece no bigger
than the electrode area was cut from it. Even
when the leaf was shredded into fragments,
which were then mixed together and placed
between the electrodes, the same reactions
Above: Marcel Vogel claims
to be able to diagnose
disease by establishing a
telepathic link with a plant,
and then mentally asking
various questions about the
patient's condition. This
trace on Vogel's pen recorder
chart shows the plant's
apparent response
Left: the historic chart of 2
February 1966, showing the
way in which a plant
appeared to react to
Backster’s thought of
burning a leaf, the recurrence
of apparent apprehension
when he returned with a
match, and the gradual fall-
off in response thereafter
Sensitive plants
were indicated on the polygraph recorder.
The plants appeared to react to other
people besides Backster, or even to other
possible threats such as a dog suddenly
entering the room. Backster claimed that the
movements of a spider could be anticipated
by a plant, as if the plant were aware of
‘decisions’ being made by the spider. He also
explained the failure of his plants to exhibit
any reactions in the presence of a scientist
who had flown down from Canada to observe
the phenomenon for herself: the scientist
regularly baked plants in a drying oven as
part of her research. “Threatened with over-
whelming danger,’ said Backster, ‘my plants
passed out.’
His first assumption was that he was
investigating some kind of Esp, but he later
rejected the description since plants did not
appear to have any kind of nervous system. It
was not possible to think of them having any
of the five human senses, and therefore the
term ‘extra-sensory perception’ seemed par-
ticularly inappropriate. Nevertheless, it was
clear to him that he was dealing with some
kind of basic consciousness, and he coined
the phrase ‘primary perception’ for it.
Investigating how far this perceptive
ability extended, Backster returned to the
area of crime detection for which the poly-
graph was originally designed. He enlisted
the help of six of his lie-detection students,
who drew folded pieces of paper from a hat to
discover which of them was to commit a
‘crime’. Nobody knew which man had drawn
the marked paper except the man himself; it
was agreed that when Backster’s laboratory
was deserted the ‘criminal’ would destroy
one of two plants. This was duly done.
The surviving houseplant, which had
491
Sensitive plants
‘witnessed’ the destruction of its companion,
was then connected to the polygraph, and the
six students were paraded one by one before
it. Five provoked no reaction but the sixth,
the culprit, caused strongly erratic readings
to be obtained from the pen recorder.
Backster conceded that the plant could have
been reacting ‘telepathically’ to the man’s
sense of guilt; on the other hand, the student
experienced little or no feelings of guilt about
his participation in the experiment. Backster
claimed this as evidence that primary per-
ception included some sort of memory.
As a result of this experiment, Backster
managed to persuade his police friends to let
him assist in a genuine criminal investig-
ation. A girl had been murdered in a large
factory in New Jersey, and Backster sug-
gested that two houseplants that were in the
office where her body was found should be
connected to his polygraph. Then all those
who had been in the factory at the time of the
murder were paraded one by one before the
plants, in the hope that the plants would
‘recognise’ the murderer. Some kind of neg-
ative success was scored by this means: not
one of the factory staff provoked any reaction
from the plants, and the man eventually
charged with the murder was not a worker at
the factory. But it is not hard to imagine the
expression on the face of the police lieutenant
in charge of the investigation when Backster
asked that the plants be given protection as
‘material witnesses to a homicide’.
Pursuing his experiments further,
Backster satisfied himself that his pet philo-
dendron, one that he had always handled
with care and affection, could react to his
emotions over distances of 15 miles (24
kilometres) and more. Screening the plant
with a Faraday cage (to eliminate any kind of
radio wave) or a lead box (to exclude radio-
activity) seemed to make no difference.
One day, while he was at work with his
plants, Backster cut his finger; when he
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Below: Backster’s apparatus
set up for the experiment
with the brine shrimps. A
complex mechanism dropped
samples of water, with and
without shrimps, at random
intervals into the bath below,
which was kept close to
boiling point by the electric
immersion heater
painted the cut with iodine, the polygraph
recorder registered a_ strong. reaction.
Although this might be thought to be in
response to Backster’s pain, he decided that
the plant was in fact reacting to the death of
some of his body cells; he therefore under-
took an extensive programme of experiments
intended to show that single-celled organ-
isms possessed primary perception.
Amoebas, blood cells, yeast, even sperm,
were shown to be capable of producing the
appropriate reactions on the polygraph:
indeed sperm cells apparently could identify
and react to the presence of their donor,
while remaining inactive for other males.
Backster had now been experimenting
with his plants for over a year and, like all
researchers, he was anxious to publish the
results in a learned journal so that others
could learn about his investigations and
repeat them for themselves. So far, however,
his experiments laid themselves open to the
criticism that he himself was a part of the
experimental apparatus, so that other work-
ers could not necessarily expect to be able to
obtain comparable results. He therefore de-
termined to devise an experiment in which
there was no human involvement and every
process was automated.
Having shown that his plants reacted
sharply to the death of living tissue, Backster
decided to use tiny brine shrimps for his
tests: he set up a device that would kill them
almost instantaneously by dropping them
into boiling water. An ingenious piece of
Above left: David Tansley, a
chiropractor and practitioner
of ‘radionics’, connects a
split-leaf philodendron to his
apparatus. This machine is
somewhat simpler than
Backster’s, and is designed
solely to measure variations
in leaf conductivity
Above: a typical trace from
Tansley’s pen recorder
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mechanism dropped the shrimps into the
water at random times, and at other random
times dropped in water without shrimps.
Three new philodendron plants (not previ-
ously experimented with) were attached to
three independent recorders, and a fourth
recorder was used to monitor any fluctu-
ations in the power supply or electro-
magnetic disturbances in the vicinity. As
Backster put it, the test should show that
there exists an as yet undefined primary
perception in plant life, that animal life
termination can serve as a remotely
located stimulus to demonstrate this
perception capability, and that this
perception facility in plants can be
shown to function independently of
human involvement.
The results of the experiments were publi-
shed in 1968 in the International Fournal of
Parapsychology. The plants had apparently
reacted strongly when shrimps were killed,
and not at other times; the odds against this
being a coincidence were put at five to one.
However, nobody seems to have drawn at-
tention to the possibility that the compli-
cated array of sophisticated switch mechan-
isms could generate signals sufficient to pro-
duce sudden reaction traces on the charts.
Backster, in fact, became modestly
famous overnight; his experiments were de-
scribed (inaccurately, more often than not) in
newspapers and magazines all over the
world; and he claimed that more than 7000
scientists asked for reprints of his research
Sensitive plants
report — although he has not made their
names public, on the grounds that they
might not wish to be interrogated before they
performed experiments themselves.
It was as a result of all this publicity that
Sauvin first came to hear of Backster. An
electronics ‘freak’, Sauvin was soon devising
all kinds of sophisticated improvements to
Backster’s polygraph equipment. In place of
the pen recorder he introduced an oscillo-
scope, which would display changes in con-
ductivity instantly as a line on a cathode ray
tube. He also added an audio-tone oscillator:
this could generate a sound in response to the
signals from plants, and the tone could be
recorded by a battery of tape recorders.
So, as he sat at his desk some miles away,
Sauvin could telephone his plants and speak
directly to them; he could listen to their
replies as they were relayed by the oscillator;
and by means of the radio on his leg he could
control the lighting and temperature.
Causing a real sensation
The first emotional signal that Sauvin
experimented with was a mild electric shock:
he would swivel in his chair and then dis-
charge the accumulated static by holding his
finger to his metal desk. Later he discovered
that deliberately recalling the sensation of
the shock was sufficient to produce a reaction
in his plants, even when he was 80 miles (130
kilometres) away in his weekend cottage.
However, he also discovered that, if he
were away for any length of time, it became
difficult to retain the plants’ attention. He hit
on the idea of leaving some of his body cells
close to the plants and then killing them off
by remote control. Blood worked well, and so
did sperm; Sauvin settled for the latter
because,as he explained, getting it was more
pleasurable than cutting himself.
Arising out of this experiment, he began
to wonder whether plants might not respond
to feelings of pleasure. When witha girl friend
at his cottage, he claimed, he found his plants
reacting excitedly to his sexual pleasure, so
much so that the oscillator tone rose to a
shriek at the moment of orgasm.
After this, Sauvin’s ingenuity knew no
bounds. He planned a way to send ‘thought
waves’ toa plant that would react to operate a
relay, which would open his garage doors. He
claimed to have controlled a model plane in
flight by provoking one of his experimental
plants to change the speed of its engine by
remote control. And he put forward a scheme
for an ‘Operation Skyjack’, in which plants
connected to polygraphs would pick up the
emotional tension of a potential aeroplane
hijacker, and set off the necessary alarms.
Later, he began to interest himself in Kirlian
photography, another area of research that
seems to indicate some kind of primary
perception in the living plant.
Do plants possess senses? Can they be persuaded
to grow new, improved forms? See page 506
493
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:
short history of hauntings
Above: Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804-1864), the American
novelist and short-story
writer. His account of the
. See ghost of Dr Harris, which
enti: Seaee «haunted the reading room of
Boston's Athenaeum Library
(left), is remarkable for its
straightforward presentation
of the facts
Ghosts seem to take many different forms, appear in the most unlikely
places, and haunt all kinds of people. But what exactly are these
apparitions? And what causes them? FRANK SMYTH starts his search
for the answers with a survey of some famous phantoms from the past
BEFORE HIS NOVEL The scarlet letter made
him famous, the American novelist and
short-story writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was
an official at the Boston Customs House. At
this time, in the 1830s, he went every day to
the Athenaeum Library to research and write
for a few hours. One of the other regulars
there was the Reverend Doctor Harris, an
octogenarian clergyman who for years had
sat in ‘his’ chair by the fireplace, reading the
Boston Post.
Hawthorne had-never spoken to him, as
conversation was strictly forbidden in the
reading room, but Dr Harris was almost a
fitment of the place, so that Hawthorne felt
sure he would have missed him if Dr Harris
had not been there. The novelist was, there-
fore, surprised one evening when a friend
told him the old man had died some time
previously. He was even more amazed when,
the following day, he found the clergyman in
his normal chair, reading the newspaper. For
weeks Hawthorne continued to see Dr
Harris, looking perfectly solid and lifelike.
One of the things that puzzled Hawthorne
494
was the fact that many of the other regulars
had been close friends of Dr Harris, though
Hawthorne had not. So why did they not see
him? Or did they see him, but suffer from the
same reluctance as Hawthorne to acknow-
ledge his ‘presence’? Another factor that
puzzled Hawthorne in retrospect was his own
unwillingness to touch the figure, or perhaps
snatch the newspaper from its hands: ‘Per-
haps I was loth to destroy the illusion, and to
rob myself of so good a ghost story, which
might have been explained in some very
commonplace way.’
After a while the old gentleman appeared
to be watching Hawthorne as if expecting
him to ‘fall into conversation’.
But, if so, the ghost had shown the bad
judgement common among the spirit-
ual brotherhood, both as regarding the
place of interview and the person
whom he had selected as recipient of
his communications. In the reading
room of the Atheneum, conversation is
strictly forbidden, and I couldn’t have
addressed the apparition without
drawing the instant notice and indig-
nant frowns of the slumberous old gent-
lemen around me. And what an absurd
figure I would have made, sol-
emnly . . . addressing what must have
appeared in the eyes of all the rest of the
company an empty chair.
‘Besides,’ concluded Hawthorn in a last
appeal to the social proprieties, ‘I had never
been introduced to Dr Harris.’ After some
months, Hawthorne entered the Athenaeum
to find the haunted chair empty, and he never
saw Dr Harris again.
The only drawback to this story as a piece
of psychical evidence is that it rests on the
testimony of an author who wrote many
short stories concerning the supernatural.
Hawthorne was a friend of Edgar Allan Poe
and Herman Melville, both of whom dealt
with the realms of the unknown. On the
other hand, he became interested in ghostly
phenomena after moving into a house in
Massachusetts reputed for years to be haun-
ted. Of this place he wrote: ‘I have often,
while sitting in the parlour in the daytime,
had a perception that somebody was passing
the windows — but on looking towards them,
nobody is there.’
First class evidence
In neither case — that of his house nor that of
Dr Harris — does he appear to have tried to
embellish the facts at all, and yet he is
acknowledged as a great story writer, ac-
customed to giving his tales a beginning and
a satisfactory end. As a ghost story of fiction,
the Dr Harris tale is flat and relatively
uninteresting; but as a piece of evidence for
an apparition it is first class.
So what was it that Hawthorne saw? To
many people the ready answer would be that
he saw the earthbound spirit of Dr Harris,
somehow trapped in the place that he had
been accustomed to ‘haunt’ in life. Others
would say that the ghost was a projection of
Hawthorne’s memory of the old man, echoing
Hamlet’s mother’s comments on her son’s
visions: “This is the very coinage of your
brain.’ More recently, psychical researchers
would suggest that the apparently solid
person by the fire was a sort of spiritual
‘recording’, left by the dead man on his
environment, which was somehow received
by Hawthorne’s mind in much the same way
as a television set receives a transmission.
One thing is certain: Nathaniel Haw-
thorne was far from being alone in seeing a
‘ghost’ — or what serious parapsychologists
and psychical researchers prefer to term an
‘apparition’. Since earliest times all civilis-
ations have recorded ‘ghosts’ — some as a
mere generality, a part of folklore, while
others have produced specific instances. ‘The
difficulty, for the modern observer, is sifting
the likely from the less likely instances.
About 500 years earlier, at the beginning
of what are loosely known as the ‘Dark Ages’,
a Benedictine monk named Brother John
Below: Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849), master writer
of the macabre short story.
He was a friend of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and it is possible
that he could have ;
participated in the ‘creation’
of the ghost of Dr Harris
at the Athenaeum Library
Below: ‘Marley's ghost
appears to Scrooge’ from
Dickens's A Christmas carol.
Doomed to walk the earth to
atone for his ill-spent life,
‘Marley’ warns that Scrooge
too will be condemned
unless he mends his ways
Ghosts
Goby took ona case of psychical research and
recorded all the facts with commendable
care. Again, although to modern eyes the
incident seems bizarre enough at first to be
dismissed out of hand, the Goby case was so
rare for its time to be worthy of study.
In December 1323, a merchant of Alais, in
the south of France, died. His name was Guy
de ‘Torno, and within days of his death he
was reputed to have returned to haunt his
widow in the form of a ‘spirit voice’. News of
this persistent ‘ghost’ spread to the town of
Avignon, 40 miles (65 kilometres) away,
where Pope John xx1I then had his resi-
dence. (This was during the Great Schism,
when two popes, one in Avignon and one in
Rome, vied for power.) Pope John was
impressed, and appointed Brother John
Goby, Prior of the Benedictine Abbey of
Alais, to investigate.
Accompanied by three of his fellow Bene-
dictines and about 100 of the town’s most
respected citizens, Brother John went to the
widow’s house on Christmas Day and began
his investigations. First he examined the
house and gardens for any hidden tricks or
freak sound effects. ‘Then he posted a guard
around the premises to keep out sightseers.
The focus of the ghostly manifestations was
the bedroom. Goby asked the widow to lie on
the bed, along with a ‘worthy and elderly
woman’ while the four monks sat at each
corner.
The monks then recited the Office for the
Dead, and soon became aware of a sweeping
sound in the air, like the brushing of a stiff
495
Ghosts
broom. The widow cried out in terror. Goby
asked aloud if the noise was made by the dead
man, and a thin voice answered: ‘Yes. I am
he.’
At this point some of the townspeople
were admitted to the room as witnesses, and
stood in a circle round the bed. The voice
assured them that it was not an emissary of
the Devil —the usual assumption in medieval
times — but the earthbound ghost of Guy de
‘Torno, condemned to haunt its old home
because of the sins it had committed there. It
said that it had every hope of getting to
heaven once its period of purgatory was over.
It also told Brother John that it knew he was
carrying the Sacrament in a pyx—a silver box
in which the Host is carried — concealed
under his robes. ‘This was a fact known only
to Goby. The spirit added that its prime sin
had been adultery, which carried the penalty
of excommunication from the Sacrament in
those days. The spirit then ‘sighed and
departed’.
Brother John wrote out his report and
despatched it to the Pope at Avignon. The
incident’s abiding interest to psychical re-
search lies in the objectivity with which the
investigation was carried out. Of course it
was not perfect and does leave a number of
questions unanswered. ‘The ‘sweeping’ noise
and the ‘sigh’ might well have been a result of
the Mistral, the mournful wind that blows
across that part of France in the winter. The
‘voice’ itself may have been produced by
ventriloquism on the part of the widow —
Above: Pope John xxii, who
directed a Benedictine prior,
Brother John Goby, to
investigate the ‘ghost of
Alais’ in 1323
Below: Prince Rupert leads
his cavalry into the first
battle of the English Civil
War at Edgehill in 1642. For
months afterwards, people
claimed to have seen a
ghostly re-enactment of the
battle; among those reported
to have taken part was
Prince Rupert himself — but
he was still alive
consciously or unconsciously — particularly if
she suspected her husband of infidelity and
wanted to discredit his memory. Against
this, however, has to be weighed the fact that,
had she been discovered in such trickery, she
stood a very real chance of being accused of
witchcraft and suffering death at the stake.
Another impressive investigation, this
time of a ‘mass apparition’, was conducted in
1644 by a number of level-headed army
officers and remains an enigma: either they
were all lying, or something untoward did
indeed happen. On 23 October 1643, Royal-
ist troops under Prince Rupert of the Rhine,
nephew of King Charles I, and Parliamen-
tarians commanded by Oliver Cromwell
fought the first battle of the English Civil
War at Edgehill, Warwickshire. After the
indecisive clash the bodies of some 500 men
lay on the unseasonably frozen slopes of
Edgehill.
A month after the battle, a number of local
shepherds saw what they at first thought was
another fight at the same spot: the thunder-
ing cavalry, rolling gunsmoke, flashing steel.
And they also heard the neighing of horses,
the screams of the wounded and the steady
beat of drums. It was only when the whole
tableau suddenly vanished that they took
fright and ran to tell the authorities in the
nearby town. On Christmas Eve the phan-
tom battle was enacted again, and was so
convincing that a London printer, Thomas
Jackson, interviewed several witnesses and
published an acount of the phenomenon in
pamphlet form on 4 January 1644.
This was drawn to the attention of the
King, who was so intrigued that despite his
hard-pressed military position he appointed
half a dozen army officers to investigate on
his behalf. They were led by Colonel Sir
Lewis Kirk, former governor of the garrison
at Oxford, and a young cavalry captain
named Dudley who had ridden at Edgehill.
On their return the officers brought de-
tailed confirmation of the news. Not only had
they interviewed the shepherds and recorded
their accounts, but on two occasions they had
seen the battle themselves, recognising not
only a number of the men who had died on
the field, but also Prince Rupert, who was
still very much alive. Whether or not anyone
took notice of it at the time, this last fact
carried with it the intriguing suggestion that
the phenomenon was a sort of action replay
rather than haunting by revenant spirits.
Although Sir Lewis and his colleagues
were justifiably startled, they drew no con-
clusions, merely reporting the facts of what
they had seen. ‘There was no obvious reason
for them to lie: their evidence might have
pleased the King or upset him. As it chanced
he took the incident as a good omen -
wrongly, as it turned out, for five years later
he was beheaded.
The ghostly man in grey
A recent example of an apparition witnessed
on innumerable occasions by literally
dozens of people is that provided by the so-
called ‘man in grey’ who is recorded as
appearing at the Theatre Royal in Drury
Lane, London, from the early 18th century
until the late 1970s. The accounts are re-
markably consistent, although the ‘stagey’
look of the ghost and the fact that it appears
in a theatre has convinced more than one
witness that they were seeing an actor
dressed for a part.
The figure is that of a man of above
average height with a strong, handsome face.
He wears a three-cornered hat, powdered
wig, long grey cloak, sword and riding boots,
and emerges from a wall on the left hand side
of the upper circle, walks around behind the
seats, and vanishes into the opposite wall. He
has never been known to speak or pay any
attention to witnesses, and although he
seems perfectly solid, if his way is barred bya
living person he dissolves and then reappears
on the other side of them.
The identity of the ‘man in grey’ has never
been satisfactorily proven, but a possible clue
turned up in the late 1840s, when workmen
were making alterations to the wall from
which he appears. In a bricked-up alcove
they found the seated skeleton of a man, with
a rusty dagger between his ribs. A few
tattered remnants of cloth clung to the figure
but crumbled to dust when touched. At the
obligatory inquest it was suggested that the
man may have been a victim of Christopher
Ricks, the ‘bad man of old Drury’ who had
Top: this is not, as it may
seem, final evidence for the
existence of ghosts, but a
carefully staged visitation
photographed for the British
Tourist Authority at
London's Theatre Royal,
Drury Lane. The ghostly
apparition is the so-called
‘man in grey’, a spectre said
to have haunted the theatre
for over 200 years. Even in
reality it obligingly appeared
for the critic and historian
W. J. McQueen Pope
(above) when he was
conducting sightseers round
the theatre
Ghosts
managed the theatre in the time of Queen
Anne and was notorious for his violence.
Ricks made constant alterations to the
theatre’s structure, and could easily have
disposed of a body without too much dif-
ficulty. However, there was no solid evi-
dence, and after an open verdict was re-
turned the body was given a pauper’s funeral
at a nearby graveyard.
However, the ‘man in grey’ continued to
be seen throughout the Victorian era and on
into the 20th century. W. J. McQueen Pope,
theatre critic and historian, saw the ghost
many times and made ardent but fruitless
attempts to establish its identity. An interest-
ing point was that the ghost appeared regu-
larly in the period between the mid 1930s
and Pope’s death in 1960, while he was
conducting sightseers around the Theatre
Royal. On every occasion, the visitors saw
the ghost too, many of them signing test-
imonials to this effect.
This fact raises a salient question in the
minds of psychical researchers: did Pope
serve as an unconscious catalyst for the
apparition? We know that people differ in
their ability both to perceive psychic pheno-
mena and to project apparitions to others. If
Pope was gifted in both respects, was the
vision of his visitors somehow stimulated by
him? Did he, in some way, summon up the
‘man in grey’?
Certainly he did not invent the ghost, and
its last recorded sighting, by an American
who thought he was seeing an actor during an
afternoon matinée, took place in 1977, I7
years after Pope’s death. But it is certain that
the spectre appeared most frequently during
Pope’s association with the Theatre Royal.
The Pope puzzle presents just one more
baffling aspect of the complex phenomenon
known to parapsychology as ‘apparitions’.
On page 550: a phantom pig, a ghostly bear,
and the ‘soul’ of a London Transport bus
497
Were the cross-correspondences really an ingenious plot
designed deliberately to deceive psychical researchers?
Or did they, as some would claim, provide the ultimate
proof of post-mortem survival? LYNN PICKNETT investigates
SINCE THE DEATH in 1901 of F.W.H. Myers,
founder member of the Society of Psychical
Research, his discarnate spirit — it is widely
believed — has communicated many times
through the mediumship of living people. In
the first quarter of the 2oth century the
deceased Myers was most active, together
with dead friends, in the case of the ‘cross-
correspondences’.
Over 2000 examples of automatic writing
purporting to have come from Myers, Henry
Sidgwick, Edmund Gurney and, later, from
A.W. Verrall were transmitted through a
large number of mediums over a period of 30
years. The scripts took the form of fragmen-
tary literary and classical allusions—clues toa
highly complex puzzle, intended by its very
erudition to prove the existence of the
purported communicators, all of whom had
been literary or classical scholars in life. The
fragments delivered to various mediums at
different times made sense only when taken
together, and usually meant little or nothing
to the mediums taking them down.
‘The sea that moaned in pain’
One of the simpler cross-correspondences
was the Roden Noel case. On 7 March 1906
in Cambridge, Mrs Verrall, one of the
mediums most heavily used by ‘Myers’, took
down in automatic writing some lines of
verse, allegedly from Myers, which began
with the words “Tintagel and the sea that
moaned in pain’. The lines meant nothing in
particular to Mrs Verrall but her investi-
gator, Miss Johnson of the spr, thought it
reminiscent of a poem by the Cornishman
Roden Noel, called 7intadgel. Even when
Miss Johnson pointed this out to her, Mrs
Verrall could not remember having read the
poem or even knowing of its existence.
Four days later, in India, Mrs Holland
(pseudonym of Rudyard Kipling’s sister,
Mrs Alice Fleming) received this automatic
script: “This is for A.W. Ask him what the
date May 26th, 1894, meant to him — to me —
and to F.W.H.M. I do not think they will
find it hard to recall, but if so — let them ask
Nora.’
The date given is that of the death of
Roden Noel. ‘A.W.’ refers to Dr Verrall and
‘F.W.H.M.’ to Myers, both of whom were
acquainted with Noel. ‘Nora’ was the widow
of Henry Sidgwick, who had been much
closer to the poet. But Mrs Holland had not
discovered any of these pertinent facts when
on 14 March 1906 — one week after the
498
Henry Sidgwick (below) and
Edmund Gurney (below
right). Most of the scripts
from ‘them’ containing
classical references ‘came
through’ those mediums who
had knowledge of Latin and
Greek — Mrs Verrall, for
example, was a lecturer in
Classics at Newnham
College, Cambridge
(bottom). It may be that the
mediums were deliberately
chosen because they had
such knowledge. Or perhaps
the communications
stemmed from the mediums’
own subconscious minds
The end of the experiment
English communication, and much too soon
to have received any hints from Mrs Verrall
or Miss Johnson — she received this script:
‘Eighteen, 15, 4, 5, 14. Fourteen, 15, 5, 12.
Not to be taken as they stand. See Rev. [the
book of Revelations] 13, 18, but only the
central eight words, not the whole passage.’
Mrs Holland tried to make sense of the
references but found it hopeless. However,
when the script was sent to England, Miss
Johnson seized the clue of ‘the central eight
words’, which are ‘for it is the number of a
man’. The numbers cited in the script, when
taken as the letters of the alphabet, translate
as ‘Roden Noel’.
Noel was referred to again in a script from
Mrs Holland on 21 March and mentioned in
one from Mrs Verrall, in England, on 26
March. On 28 March Mrs Holland’s auto-
matic writing included his name spelled out
in full with descriptions of his native Corn-
wall and a muddled description of himself.
A complex case that took years to under-
stand was that of the Medici tombs. It began
in November 1906, through Mrs Holland.
Her scripts were full of oblique or unex-
plained references to evening, morning and
dawn, and death, sleep and shadows. In
Cambridge on 21 January 1907 Mrs Verrall
received the words ‘laurel’ and ‘laurel
wreath’ repeatedly. Then on 26 February yet
another medium, the American Mrs Piper,
said out loud (normally she only muttered
indistinctly, when coming out of her
trances): ‘Morehead — laurel for laurel. . . I
say I gave her that for laurel. Goodbye.’
Mrs Piper then had a vision of a Negro
sitting in place of Mr Piddington, one of the
investigators for the SPR, who was with her.
She rubbed her hands together and said:
‘Dead... well, I think it was something
about laurel wreaths.’ The next day Mrs
Piper received: ‘I gave Mrs V. laurel
wreaths’ in her script.
On 17 March Helen Verrall in Cambridge
laurel
received: ‘Alexander’s tomb.
wreaths, are emblem laurels for the victor’s
brow.’
Ten days later, in India, Mrs Holland’s
script included: ‘Darkness, light and
shadow, Alexander Moor’s head.’
A year and a half later, two rarely used
mediums — known as ‘the Macs’ — received:
‘Dig a grave among the laurels.’
It was two years before the topic was again
referred to by the communicator. This time
it was a London medium, Mrs Willett
(pseudonym of Mrs Coombe- Tennant), who
received: ‘Laurentian tombs, Dawn and
‘Twilight.’
A month later, on 8 July 1910, Mrs Piper
in the United States spoke the words: ‘Medi-
tation, sleeping dead, laurels’ when coming
out of her trance.
Yet another two years passed before the
investigators of the SPR discovered the mean-
ing of the allusions: they referred to the
Above: Mrs Leonora Piper,
famous trance medium of
Boston, USA, who was
involved in a complex case
of cross-correspondences
that took place between
1906 and 1910. Several
mediums ‘received’ a series
of references to shadow,
death, sleep, evening,
morning, dawn, meditation,
Alexander and laurels. Only
two years after the last
communication did SPR
investigators realise that the
references pointed to the
tombs of the Medici family
in Florence. On that of
Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino
(right), which also contains
the body of Alessandro
(‘Alexander’) de Medici, are
statues representing Dawn,
Twilight and Meditation; the
tomb of Guiliano, Duke of
Nemours (left) bears figures
representing Day and Night.
The laurel was an emblem of
the Medici family
Above: Helen Verrall (later
Mrs W.H. Slater), one of the
automatists concerned; she
was also a researcher for the
SPR
Cross-correspondences
Medici family, who were
tombs of the
wealthy and powerful in Florence in the 1§th
and 16th centuries. On the sepulchre of
Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, are statues rep-
resenting Meditation, Dawn and ‘Twilight.
On the tomb of another Medici, Giuliano,
are two statues representing Day and Night.
Lorenzo’s tomb also holds the body of
Alessandro (‘Alexander’) de Medici, who
was murdered; it is, therefore, as much
‘Alexander’s tomb’ as ‘Lorenzo’s’. Alexan-
der was of mixed blood and in his portraits
has clearly Negroid features: truly ‘Alexan-
der, Moor’s head’.
Helen Verrall had heard of the tombs, but
had never visited them and had no detailed
knowledge of them. She, like the others, had
taken ‘Alexander’s tomb’ to refer to that of
Alexander the Great.
But, perhaps significantly, Mrs Holland
did know the tombs well. And in one of her
previous scripts there were references to
Diamond Island, where the new Lodge-
Muirhead wireless system was being tested
(an experiment in which she was personally
very interested). The wireless connection
was linked with the tombs references by a
striking pun-—the fact that one of the wireless
pioneers was called Dr Alexander Muirhead
(Alexander Moor’s head). Yet in the same
script was a quotation from Othello that
reinforced the ‘Moor’ connection.
So was this witty allusion created by Mrs
Holland’s subconscious? Knowing the tombs
so well, did she perhaps unwittingly make up
that particular example of a cross-
correspondence? The alternative view is that
the communicator deliberately chose
mediums whose minds contained relevant
material. Communicating through mediums
was said to be extraordinarily difficult. ‘The
‘Myers’ persona had this to say about the
problems of communicating from ‘the other
side’ through Mrs Holland:
‘The nearest simile I can find to express
499
the difficulty of sending a message — is
that I appear to be standing behind a
sheet of frosted glass which blurs sight
and deadens sound — dictating feebly to
a reluctant and somewhat obtuse
secretary.
One of those involved in the _ cross-
correspondences was (it seemed) to find out
for himself about the reality of the ‘frosted
glass’ simile. On 18 June 1912 Dr A.W.
Verrall, husband of Mrs Verrall, died. Six
weeks later Mrs Willett received his first
post-mortem communication, drawing its
allusions from Christina Rossetti, Dante and
the humorous magazine Punch. His further
communications contained family jokes and
extremely convoluted classical references. In
combination, they proved beyond doubt,
according to his ‘oldest and dearest friend’,
the Reverend M.A. Bayfield, that they were
from Verrall himself. One of his scripts ends
with the wry note: “This sort of thing is more
difficult to do than it looked.’
Fragments and allusions
Most of the 2000 scripts that make up the
cross-correspondences are far too compli-
cated to examine here. H.F. Saltmarsh says
in his Evidence of personal survival:
The fragmentary, enigmatic and allus-
ive nature of these communications is
intentional, and their obscurity is due
not solely to the deficiencies of the
investigators.
Saltmarsh suggested experiments that, while
they could not prove the Myers group’s post-
mortem existence, will demonstrate the dif-
ficulties of cheating and of constructing
cross-correspondences deliberately.
Begin by choosing a book by an author
you know well, and a quotation or subject
from it. ‘Then from the same book or another
book by the same author pick out a quotation
that alludes to the subject without directly
mentioning it. Give the two quotations to
someone who acts as investigator, and who
must try to work out what the connection
between them 1s. It is remarkably difficult,
especially if the author’s works are unknown
to the investigator. Huge leaps in com-
prehension will have to be made.
When investigating Mrs Willett’s ‘Myers’
scripts, Sir Oliver Lodge remarked:
‘The way in which these allusions are
combined or put together, and their
connection with each other indicated,
is the striking thing — it seems to me as
much beyond the capacity of Mrs Wil-
lett as it would be beyond my own
capacity. I believe that if the matter is
seriously studied, and if Mrs Willett’s
assertions concerning her conscious
knowledge and supraliminal procedure
are believed, this will be the opinion of
critics also; they will realize, as I do,
that we are tapping the reminiscences
not of an ordinarily educated person
but of a scholar — no matter how
Two of the investigators for
the sPR: Eleanor Sidgwick
(above), the widow of Henry
Sidgwick, and Sir Oliver
Lodge (below). The
investigators studied each
script as it was produced,
comparing it with those from
other automatists to find any
cross-correspondences
between them
Further reading
Brian Inglis, Natura/ and
supernatural, Abacus
1979
Edgar D. Mitchell, Psychic
exp/oration, Paragon
(New York) 1979
Frederick Myers, Human
personality, University
Books (New York) 1961
H.F. Saltmarsh, Evidence of
personal survival, Bell
1938
fragmentary and confused some of the
reproductions are.
Saltmarsh’s second experiment concerns the
improbability that chance could produce
cross-correspondences between indepen-
dent scripts. Simply take a familiar book and
open it at random. Eyes shut, point to a
passage randomly. Repeat this with another
book and attempt to find a cross-
correspondence between the extracts.
Despite the impressive weight of scholarly
allusions, puns and quotations communi-
cated, many modern psychical researchers
regard the cross-correspondences as ‘not
proven’. Sceptics point out that all the people
involved, including the ‘investigators’, were
either members of the SPR or of the same
social circle. They could have been in collu-
sion. When reminded that deliberate fraud
would have involved cheating on a grand
scale (and over 30 years), the sceptics reply
that, nevertheless, once begun, it could
hardly be exposed.
The clues stop coming
When the last of the SprR’s founder-
members died, the cross-correspondences
stopped, having accumulated to form a huge
volume of scripts that any interested party
can study at leisure. Cynics want to know
why Myers and his group have ceased to
communicate their tortuous messages. It
may be because there is no one left to receive
them, no medium who is — perhaps literally —
on their ‘wavelength’. Mediumship seems no
longer to be practised in classically educated,
upper middle-class circles, and there must be
few automatic writers who would even
recognise Greek characters or apparently
nonsensical quotations jumbled together.
It is possible that subconscious telepathy
took place among a group of persons, in
different parts of the world and over many
years. That in itself would be worth in-
vestigating. The only other explanation is
that there is a life after death — at least for
Edwardian gentlemen given to intellectual
puns and anagrams — and that, under certain
circumstances, the dead may demonstrate
their existence to the living.
Although the complex cross-
correspondences no longer appear, Myers 1s
apparently still in communication. On 2
April 1972 the young English psychic Mat-
thew Manning received this automatic
script, signed ‘F. Myers’:
You should not really indulge in this
unless you know what you are doing. I
did a lot of work on automatic writing
when I was alive and I could never
work it out. No-one alive will ever work
out the whole secret of life after death.
It pivots on so many things — person-
ality — condition of the mental and
physical bodies. Carry on _ trying
though because you could soon be close
to the secret. If you find it no-one will
believe you anyway.
Dear Sir,
Reading your articles on EsP and precognition, | was
prompted to write and tell you of a paranormal
experience | had as a child, when | was nine years
old. | am nearly 22 years old now, and can remember
it vividly.
My mother, father and | were staying at my
grandmother's house because she was very ill and
needed someone to look after her. After about two
months, | had a horrible nightmare that concerned
my grandmother; it still disturbs me today. | saw her
lying on her bed in her room downstairs, and my
mother and aunt were crying —| could not understand
why. Then alll could see was a lot of blood all over my
grandmother and the bed. | woke up shouting in
terror.
The following morning | went downstairs, opened
the door to the front room — and saw exactly what |
had seen inthe dream. It wasn't until a few years later
that | was able to understand how my grandmother
died; it was of a massive brain haemorrhage. Have
any of your readers had a similar experience?
Yours faithfully,
M.J. Peach Rhondda, Mid Glamorgan
Dear Sir,
In the summer of 1979, in the early hours of the
morning, | suddenly sat bolt upright in bed and found
myself looking into the face of a young woman. She
was about 5 feet 7 inches [1.7 metres] tall, with
shoulder-length blonde hair, and she wore a sky-
blue dress. Faintly she smiled, turned and actually
drifted from the bedroom, leaving what | can only
describe as a pleasant atmosphere behind her.
| told only my parents about this incident. Weeks
later, my 20-year-old brother told me that he, too, had
seen a young woman standing near his bed. He
described exactly what | had seen. Later my cousin
came to stay with us, and he also saw the strange
lady standing near my brother's bed, leaning over
him while he slept.
This happened over a year ago, and none of us
has seen her since-—| for one would very much like to.
Yours faithfully,
Andrea Burwall Hull, Humberside
Dear Sir,
| am writing to you in connection with the photograph
of a Venezuelan UFO, taken from an aeroplane, in
issue 11 of The Unexplained (page 205). Looking at
the photograph, it seems rather obvious to me that it
is a fake. Take a look at the shadows: they must point
away from the sun, but if you draw lines from each
shadow to the sun, you can. see that the UFO is
superimposed. | hope you will point this out to your
readers. Apart from that, thanks for an excellent
magazine!
Yours faithfully,
Ashley Jenkins Southampton, Hampshire
Dear Sir, a
In the UFO Photofile in issue 11 of The Unexplained
(page 205) you show the Avera Airlines photograph of
an unidentified object over Venezuela.
This photograph is a hoax perpetrated by an
Post script
Your letters to
THE UNEXPLAINED
engineer in Caracas. It was done by placing a
photograph of a button on an enlargement of an
aerial shot, which was then rephotographed. The
shadow of the ‘saucer’ was ‘burned’ in when the print
was made.
You stated in your brief account that the shadow
shows that the object is solid. This shows how easy it
is to be fooled, and how careful you must be when
examining UFO photographs.
So — this picture becomes ‘explained’?
Yours faithfully,
S. Leadbetter Fleetwood, Lancs.
Dear Sir,
| very much enjoyed reading your excellent articles
onthe Turin Shroud (issues 15 and 16, pages 287 and
318). However, there are one or two points that came
to my mind and that! should like to raise.
Whether or not it is a real shroud, whether or not
the image on it was actually produced by the body of
Christ, that image was certainly not produced during
its use as a shroud. My friend Robert Hunt of
Kettlebaston, Suffolk, carried out a simple experi-
ment that anyone can perform. He painted the
highlight areas of his elder daughter's face and body
with poster colour, and then laid a strip of cloth down
her, tucking it in at the sides so that it was in contact
with the same areas ofthe body as are represented in
the image of the Turin shroud.
The resultant print was almost unrecognisable. It
represented a bloated figure whose breadth was
almost twice that of the body from which it was taken,
the face being even more distorted. The only
possible explanation — one that the members of
STURP in general seem to favour — is that the cloth
was held stretched some inches above the body, and
that Christ projected his image upon it by some kind
of radiation. But what about the print at the back ofthe
body? Was this taken at the same time and in the
same way? Did Christ's body in fact hover between
the two halves of the sheet, which was held stretched
some two feet [70 centimetres] apart?
Perhaps! could also comment on two other foolish
statements about the Shroud that have been around
for a considerable time. The first: we are frequently
asked by those who write about the Shroud how it was
possible for a 14th-century artist ‘to have known how
to paint a negative image.’ Any 14th-century artist,
painting an image of Christ upon a cloth, would have
been likely to use white lead oxide for his highlights.
Itis a matter of common experience that white lead,
subjected to the sulphur of smoky atmospheres, quite
rapidly turns black. After repeated washings, it would
be quite natural to expect that those areas that were
originally white would be left as a faint ‘negative’.
Secondly, a great deal of noise has been made
about the discovery, ‘by computer analysis’, that the
image contains ‘3-D information’. All paintings and
all photographs contain 3-D information: they are
projections upon a plane of a three-dimensional
object, and you can get a great deal of 3-D inform-
ation out of the skimpiest detail, let alone a carefully
executed painting by a competent artist.
Yours faithfully,
Neil Powell Muswell Hill, London
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