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Please enter a valid web address * About * Blog * Projects * Help * Donate * Contact * Jobs * Volunteer * People * Sign up for free * Log in Search metadata Search text contents Search TV news captions Search radio transcripts Search archived web sites Advanced Search * About * Blog * Projects * Help * Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape * Contact * Jobs * Volunteer * People Full text of "The Unexplained: Mysteries Of Mind Space & Time Part 25 " See other formats - SNOS LY VS OS LS ZN 8 SNYV os ls U THE fiexp tte ote @ os t ine 50p ' 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. ‘came through’ at a series of seances How to obtain copies of The Unexplained Copies are obtainable by placing a Edward Horton regular order at your newsagent, or by taking out a subscription Subscription Rates Gerard Croiset For six months (26 issues) £15.00. for one year (52 issues) £30.00. Send your CROISET: THE PSYCHIC DETECTIVE 488 order and remittance to The Unexplained Subscriptions, Punch Subscription The man who used his psychic powers to locate missing Services, Watling Street, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, Bucks MK2 2BW, being persons — and to foretell the future sure to state the number of the first issue required Roy Stemman Back numbers U.K. & Eire: Back Nos are obtainable from your newsagent or from The Ghosts Unexplained Back Nos. Orbis Publishing Ltd, 20/22 Bedfordbury, London A SHORT HISTORY OF HAUNTINGS 490 WC2N 4BT — 50p each, post free A new series, opening with a survey of some authentic Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Europe & Malta: Back Nos are available historical cases at cover price from your newsagent. In case of difficulty write to the address in Frank Smyth your country given for binders. South African readers should add sales tax. How to obtain binders for The Unexplained Sensitive plants U.K. and Eire: Send a cheque/posta! order for £3.25 per binder (incl. p & p) PEOPLE, PLANTS AND PSI 494 payable to Orbis Publishing Ltd to: The Unexplained Binders, Orbis House, 22 Do plants react to human emotion? Who gave a lie-detector Bedfordbury, London WC2N 4BT. Please state the volume numbers required. test to plants that ‘witnessed’ a crime? Australia: Binders are available through your local newsagent price $7.25. In Brian Innes case of difficulty write to The Unexplained Binders, Gordon and Gotch (Aus) Ltd, 114 William Street, PO Box 767G, Melbourne, Vic, 3001 Cross-correspondences New Zealand: Write with remittance of $6.60 plus $1.21 sales tax per binder to THE END OF THE EXPERIMENT 498 The Unexplained Binders, Gordon and Gotch (NZ) Ltd, PO Box 1595, Could this intriguing psychic phenomenon have been the Wellington result of an elaborate hoax? Why did it stop? South Africa: Binders are available through your local newsagent or through Lynn Picknett any branch of Central News Agency, price R5.75. (please add sales tax). In case of difficulty write to The Unexplained Binders, Intermag, PO Box 613 Cape Town, PO Box 938 Durban or PO Box 10799 Johannesburg. Picture acknowledgements Europe: Write with remittance of £4.00 per binder (including postage and Cover: Photri; Mary Evans Picture Library (inset); 481: Popperfoto (t); Associated Press (c); packing) payable to Orbis Publishing Ltd, to The Unexplained Binders, Orbis Michael Holford (b); 482: Associated Press (t); Tony Morrison (cl); Michael Holford (cr and b); Publishing Ltd, 20/22 Bedfordbury, London WC2N 4BT, England, being sure to 483: Deutsche Presse-Agentur (t); Picturepoint (b); 484: Poppertoto (t); Aldus Books (c); 485: Mary Evans Picture Library/Harry Price Collection (t); Popperfoto (b); 486: Aldus Books (t): 488: Leif Geiges (t); Rex Features (b); 489: Rex Features; 490-491: Backster Research Foundation. state the volume number(s) required Malta: Binders are obtainable by ordering from your local newsagent price Santiago; 491: David Tansley (r); 492: David Tansley (t); Backster Research Foundation £3.25. In case of difficulty write to The Unexplained Binders, W.H. Santiago (b); 493: David Tansley; 494: Boston Athenaeum Library (1); Peter Newark’s Western Smith—Continental Ltd, PO Box 272, 18a Scots Street, Valletta. Americana (r); 495: Mansell Collection (t); Mary Evans Picture Library (b); 496: Peter Newark’s vr Historical Picture Service; Mary Evans Picture Library (t); 497: B.T.A. (t); Keystone (c); NOTE: Binders and Back Numbers are obtainable Subject to availability of 498: Mary Evans Picture Library/Society for Psychical Research (cr); Jonathan Goodliffe (b): stocks. Whilst every attempt is made to keep the price of issues and binders 499: Scala (tr and c); Mary Evans Picture Library/Society for Psychical Research (b); 500: Mary constant, the publishers reserve the right to increase the stated prices at any Evans Picture Library/Society for Psychical Research time when circumstances dictate. Binders depicted in this publication are those produced for the U.K. market only and may not necessarily be identical © 1981 Orbis Publishing Limited. Typesetting by Servis Filmsetting Limited. Reproduction by to binders produced for sale outside the U.K 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 | i : TAP PG2 CONTACT 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 | NO INSTRUMENT ADJUSTMENTS WERE WADE HERE T'S WELL-BEING 2 Biscopee ae ‘ ' ‘ ’ i ' ! i | he 3 ' , LEFT EXAMINATION ie daee +— FIRST THOUGHT OF ROOM FOR A MATCH _. OBTAINING A MATCH TO BURN A PLANT LEAF ——— --. | — - | ee ey ae : - - - .. *s —_ od ; 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 He eye \- voles eee . fy Mp Ranh petits ligt 2h) - SUPT Ps ey as YP Hes ry ne 2 s a i Spi iwmiry ° opine = — een | ea fe ES a rie ook Pg Sar tea éhiecacaae Seagur On at Bt Ye ar Yet Be Aes ee eer eee. Oe Sr ee ee eras ferephes e 2 tree ee) OE Ee ey | ee ee ae eee eee bee eee Cetasel| eepecere eens Bic FS SE fares «| Seeee eee ke og ek ee Ts weet ce Se Caves Ot fees, ‘ ‘ rer Tt ss coy ko 68 ee beg RS feed 84 Se! os eee eS eee Pag? So ey de ee ro a Ae eee Pay te me : Pes ae oy we me Aix ty bee ee 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 rant 4 + . . SR SO eh PPR OP OE ee eo LS Or: PE Sater, Sry as or oa ~” | .| . . o ) ta) .* . > ‘ Fe = 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 fi — Te era ag ae - Sa . <4 oe ay > ese s pte « S 4 i - x =f: aif — he. wat << - Sia ery ws, -_ “zx — ae BS. ty So ar ar Se Te . ~ oat cee oe ee “- Paine }- ae inet 4 er 1.) oa a es et ta =. ay : . . 4 = 4 i Se batete Pau occ ale we aap he eae tee ee een ek = r * sa > ~) ee Sie = dg ene : Sse : 5 y Bees ~ieg aes ’ age - ’ ae. - - Be -- . - 1 : 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 Send your letters to THE UNEXPLAINED, Orbis House, 20-22 Bedfordbury, London WC2N 4BT Make an Orbis standing order-take Volume One COMPLETELY FREE! There ts still time to send us an ordercard for your binders, and take advantage of our special offer. Volume 1 will be sent to you completely free of charge when you fill in an ordercard, either from this issue or from earlier issues 7,8, 9 or 11, asking for a Standing Order. To start your collection we will send Volume 2 (with its Payment Advice for £3.25) with your free Volume 1. The Orbis Standing Order service offers you the chance to receive a binder when you need it—every twelve weeks. 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