THE MAMMOTH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNSOLVED MYSTERIES, by Colin Wilson, Damon Wilson.

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THE MAMMOTH ENCYCLOPEDIA

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES

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One begins to read the introduction, and there's so much worth quoting, that one gives up and sticks to reading; and it's so much in accord with what one thought, whether to begin with, or especially all the more so after various things, quoting would be preceded or followed by 'as one always thought', sounding silly after a couple of times.

Meanwhile there is a mention of Ian Wilson, and one wonders why Colin Wilson isn't mentioned. One looks again, and realises why!

Of course, if one began one's acquaintance with his works with The Philosopher's Stone, and didn't merely categorise it as another mystery or fight of fancy, it's bound to happen that one recalls his name as one begins this book, having forgotten why one bought it in the first place - not the monsters on the cover, but the name of the author!

Why Amazon has so few of his works, or those of similar beloved authors of one over decades, is the real mystery. Fans and connoisseurs of James Hilton, Colin Wilson, or for that matter A. J. Cronin and more, would love to see - and buy - their collected works on Amazon, but even the World's End series of Upton Sinclair wasn't available until recently, and Agatha Christie works aren't yet available as a complete collection.
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Contents

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Author’s Note

Introduction

1 King Arthur and Merlin

2 Atlantis

3 The Baader-Meinhof Gang

4 The Barbados Vault

5 The Basa Murder

6 The Bermuda Triangle

7 Bigfoot

8 Christie, Agatha

9 The Cleveland Torso Murders

10 Crop Circles

11 The Curse of the Pharaohs

12 The Devil’s Footprints

13 Was Philip K. Dick Possessed by an Angel?

14 The Dogon and the Ancient Astronauts

15 The Mystery of Eilean More

16 Fairies

17 Fulcanelli and the Mysteries of Alchemy

18 The Glozel Mystery

19 The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui

20 Kaspar Hauser

21 Rudolf Hess

22 The Holy Shroud of Turin

23 Homer and the Fall of Troy

24 The Hope Diamond

25 The Mystery of Hypnosis

26 The Enigma of Identical Twins

27 Jack the Ripper

28 Did Joan of Arc Return from the Dead?

29 Junius

30 Fedor Kuzmich

31 The Loch Ness Monster

32 The Man in the Iron Mask

33 The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

34 Glenn Miller

35 The Missing Link

36 Where is the Mona Lisa?

37 “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World”

38 Joan Norkot

39 The Oera Linda Book

40 The “People of the Secret”

41 Poltergeists

42 Possession by the Dead

43 Psychometry

44 Rennes-le-Château

45 Did Robin Hood Really Exist?

46 The Mystery Death of Mary Rogers

47 “Saint-Germain the Deathless”

48 The Miracles of Saint-Médard

49 The Sea Kings of 6000 BC

50 Sea Monsters

51 Who Was Shakespeare?

52 The Skull of Doom

53 Spontaneous Human Combustion

54 Synchronicity or “Mere Coincidence”?

55 Time in Disarray

56 The Great Tunguska Explosion

57 Unidentified Flying Objects

58 Vampires: Do They Exist?

59 Velikovsky’s Comet

60 Vortices

61 Who Was Harry Whitecliffe?

62 Patience Worth

63 Zombies

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Introduction

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Quoted from the introduction:-

"In 1957 the science writer Jacques Bergier made a broadcast on French television that caused a sensation. He was discussing one of the great unsolved mysteries of prehistory, the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs about sixty-five million years ago. He suggested that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by the explosion of a star fairly close to our solar system – a “supernova”. He then went on to make the even more startling suggestion that the explosion may have been deliberately caused by superbeings who wanted to wipe out the dinosaurs and to give intelligent mammals a chance.

"Even the first part of his theory was dismissed by scientists as the fantasy of a crank, and the reaction was no better when in 1970 Bergier repeated it in a book called Extra-Terrestrials in History, which began with a chapter called “The Star that Killed the Dinosaurs”. But five years later an American geologist named Walter Alvarez was studying a thin layer of clay on a hill side in Italy – the clay that divides the age of the dinosaurs (Mesozoic) from our own age of mammals – and brooding on this question of what had wiped out whole classes of animal. He took a chunk from the hillside back to California, and showed it to his father, the physicist Luis Alvarez, with the comment: “Dad, that half-inch layer of clay represents the period when the dinosaurs went out, and about 75 per cent of the other creatures on the earth”.

"His father was so intrigued that he subjected the clay to labouratory tests, and found it contained a high proportion of a rare element called iridium, a heavy element that usually sinks to the middle of planets, but which is thrown out by explosions. Alvarez also gave serious consideration to the idea of an exploding star, and only dismissed it when further tests showed an absence of a certain radioactive platinum that would also be present in a supernova explosion. The only other alternative was that the earth had been struck by a giant meteorite, which had filled the atmosphere with steam and produced a “greenhouse effect” that had raised the temperature by several degrees.

"Modern crocodiles and alligators can survive a temperature of about 100 degrees C; but two or three degrees higher is too much for them, and they die. This is almost certainly what happened to the dinosaurs, about sixty-five million years ago. And that is why this present book contains no entry headed: “What became of the dinosaurs”? We know the answer. And we also know that Bergier’s “lunatic fringe” theory was remarkably close to the truth."

" ... In the article on spontaneous human combustion, I have quoted a modern medical textbook which states that spontaneous combustion is impossible, and that there is no point in discussing it. But the evidence is now overwhelming that spontaneous combustion not only occurs, but occurs fairly frequently."

"In 1768 the French Academy of Sciences asked the great chemist Lavoisier to investigate a report of a huge stone that had hurtled from the sky and buried itself in the earth not far from where some peasants were working. Lavoisier was absolutely certain that great stones did not fall from the sky, and reported that the witnesses were either mistaken or lying; it was another half century before the existence of meteorites was accepted by science.

" ... The inference is surely that it is more fruitful to be intrigued by the possibility of some prehistoric monster in the depths of Loch Ness than to dismiss it as a childish absurdity."

"Sceptical investigators all seem to make this same curious logical error. William James pointed out that if you want to disprove that all crows are black, you do not have to try and prove that no crows are black; you only have to produce one single white crow. So a bookful of cases of fraud or excessive gullibility proves nothing except that those particular cases are fraudulent. But one single case of a paranormal event for which the evidence is overwhelming does demolish the argument that the paranormal is, by definition, fraudulent."

"Consider a question raised by the zoologist Ivan Sanderson. On a moonlit night, on a dust-covered road in Haiti, he and his wife both experienced a curious hallucination of being back in Paris in the fifteenth century. (The story is told in full in “Time in Disarray” in this volume.) Gardner would declare that this is a question that should simply not be asked unless the answer is that Sanderson was either drunk or lying. But it is obvious that he was neither. Those who knew him (and I have a letter on my desk from one of them at the moment) agree that he was an honest man who was not remotely interested in the “supernatural”. It is also worth asking how Sanderson’s servants knew he had been involved in an accident – although it occurred in a remote and deserted spot – and that he would be home at dawn."

" ... Russian and American scientists have been experimenting with ESP as a means of communicating with submarines under the polar ice. ... "

" ... But then we come upon a case in which someone has clearly foreseen the future, and we know this is not simply a question of intuition. The notion that time has a one-way flow is the very foundation of western science; everything depends on it. If precognition is possible, then our basic assumptions need revising."

"Sanderson makes it clear, for example, that he believes that some of the Haitians he encountered possessed powers of “second sight”. One of these remarked to him after his “timeslip” experience, “You saw things, didn’t you? You don’t believe it, but you could always see things if you wanted to”. In short, Sanderson himself could have developed or perhaps simply rediscovered his paranormal faculties."

" ... In my book The Occult I have cited many cases that seem to illustrate the same point. For example, the famous tiger-hunter Jim Corbett describes in Man Eaters of Kumaon how he came to develop what he calls “jungle sensitiveness”, so he knew when a wild animal was lying in wait for him. ... "

Would that be the story I read decades ago and still recall so vividly that it makes one shiver with goosebumps, about the hunter stepping back barely a fraction of the moment before the cheetah he was laying in wait for sprang at him from above the roof instead of sauntering in directly in front of him from the forest along the only way it normally came? While the hunter was waiting in the dark in the doorway of the hut, obscured by dark in the brilliant moonlit night, his rifle aimed ready, the cheetah had been on the roof over his head, paused to jump on him - and the instinct that made the hunter step back for no reason, saved his life; he fired even as the cheetah leapt down at him, facing him.

I believe Arthur Conan Doyle may have copied this in the final hunting down of Dr Moriarty by Sherlock Holmes.

"If this book needs any justification, it is that it is a modest attempt to catch a few glimpses of the strangeness that lies on the other side of the curtain."

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Reviews

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1. King Arthur and Merlin

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Author discusses the legends around Arthur and Merlin, describing various histories and giving a very satisfactory account of reality of Arthur, and then going on to Merlin, again bringing the legends to a satisfactory order.

"So it is a mistake to think of a magician as a Walt Disney cartoon character wearing a tall conical hat with stars painted on it. Real sorcerers are closely related to modern “spirit mediums”; they assert that their power comes from spirits. Modern “magicians” – such as the notorious Aleister Crowley – believe that power can be obtained over spirits by the use of certain precise rituals, which must be performed with punctilious accuracy.

"The traditional role of tribal witch doctors and shamans is as intermediaries between human beings and the spirit world, and their chief function is to ensure good hunting or good harvests. Celtic druids belonged to this tradition. Druidism was a form of nature worship; it came to Britain around 600 BC with the Celts, but many older forms of nature religion had existed long before that: Stonehenge, for example, was a temple for such worship and is precisely aligned to the stars."

Further parts about Merlin aren't as satisfactory as those about Arthur. However, author concludes -

"The books by Nicolai Tolstoy and Norma Lorre Goodrich are rich and complex detective stories that will leave most readers in a state of “enlightened confusion”. The final picture that emerges is of a real King Arthur, who was one of the greatest generals of the Dark Ages, and of a real Merlin, a shaman and druid, who was Arthur’s counselor and adviser. Both were men of such remarkable stature that, even within a few decades of their deaths, they became the subject of endless legends. The legends have blurred the reality to such an extent that it is now virtually impossible to discern the outline of the real men who lived sometime between AD 450 and 550. But the outcome of all the detective work is at least a certainty that they actually existed."

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2. Atlantis

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The chapter on Atlantis is mindboggling for anyone who knows little more than the germ of information, and is very detailed, but a tad disappointing to a reader of Colin Wilson, since not a shred of a conclusion is offered.

" ... Plato, writing about 350 BC, was the first to speak of the great island in the Atlantic Ocean which had vanished “in a day and a night”, and been submerged beneath the waves of the Atlantic."

" ... Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver, went to Saïs in Egypt about 590 BC, and heard the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. According to the priest, Atlantis was already a great civilization when Athens had been founded about 9600 BC. It was then “a mighty power that was aggressing wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city [Athens] put an end”. Atlantis, said the priest, was “beyond the pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar), and was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was “a great and wonderful empire” which had conquered Libya and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Etruria in central Italy). Deserted by their allies, the Athenians fought alone against Atlantis, and finally conquered them. But at this point violent floods and earthquakes destroyed both the Athenians and the Atlantians, and Atlantis sank beneath the waves in a single day and night."

" ... The Atlantians were great engineers and architects, building palaces, harbours, temples and docks; their capital city was built on the hill, which was surrounded by concentric bands of land and water, joined by immense tunnels, large enough for a ship to sail through. The city was about eleven miles in diameter. A huge canal, 300 feet wide and 100 feet deep, connected the outermost of these rings of water to the sea. ... "

"Isis Unveiled astonished its publisher by becoming a best-seller; it made its author a celebrity, and she went on to leave New York for India and to found the Theosophical Society. ... She also claims that the survivors of Atlantis peopled Egypt and built the pyramids about a hundred thousand years ago. ... "

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3. The Baader-Meinhof Gang

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"The Baader-Meinhof Gang" begins by detailing a joint hijacking of an airliner by Palestinian and German terrorists together, demanding release of terrorists in prison in Germany. This failed, but another kidnapped German was subsequently murdered by their associates who'd demanded release of the same prisoners as ransom.

Wilson then goes on to describe the history of the gang.

"Mahler now arranged for the group – which included Baader, Meinhof, Ensslin, and himself – to escape from Germany to the Middle East, where they were trained in terrorist tactics by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)."

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4. The Barbados Vault

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"The Barbados Vault" is interesting enough.

"The Negroes obviously believed there was some kind of voodoo at work – some magical force deliberately conjured by a witch or witch doctor, the motive being revenge on the hated slave-owners. It sounds unlikely, but it is the best that can be offered."

Again, notice their opinion being not taken seriously.

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5. The Basa Murder

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Next one, The Basa Murder, is interesting - and satisfactory - in its reaching a conclusion of justice for the victim.

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6. The Bermuda Triangle

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"The Bermuda Triangle" is one of the best discourses, in this book, and on the subject; Wilson mentions various incidents, various writings on the subject, and theories explaining the vanishing of various flights, ships, and crews. In particular he mentions work of Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey,, titled "The Bermuda Triangle", overshadowed by the far more famous one of same title by Berlitz, and leaves an impression that the former is far more worth reading.

He speaks of magnetic lines of earth, and this he's written about more, elsewhere in a work describing Salisbury mound, chalk horses and more.

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7. Bigfoot

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The next chapter, on and titled Bigfoot, gives details of various incidents if Nortwest U.S. and Western Canada involving sightings and more, and goes on to speak of the Asian version, mentioning incidentally that the word Yeti is of a Central Asian language.

The word in Sanskrit and therefore in most of India means a monk who attempts attaining Divine while undergoing, consciously or otherwise, great physical and worldly travails and pains; the usage of this word for a species other than homosapiens perhaps was due to the creatures being seen rarely, singly, and in remote locations, in the same state that such a monk would be, long haired and unkempt, observing no worldly customs that belonged to human settlements.

"It was in January 1958 that Dr Alexander Pronin, of Leningrad University, reported seeing an Alma."

Alma is the Russian name for the creature.

"In Russia more solid evidence began to emerge. In 1958 Lt Col Vargen Karapetyan saw an article on the Yeti – or, as it is known in Russia, Alma – in a Moscow newspaper, and sought out the leading Soviet expert, Professor Boris Porshnev, to tell him his own story."

It ends tragically for the creature, similar to the one killed by U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

"It was in January 1958 that Dr Alexander Pronin, of Leningrad University, reported seeing an Alma. He was in the Pamirs, and saw the creature outlined against a cliff-top. It was man-like, covered with reddish-grey hair, and he watched it for more than five minutes; three days later he saw it again at the same spot. For some reason good Marxists poured scorn on the notion of a “wild man”; but the evidence went on accumulating, until Boris Porshnev began to make an attempt to co-ordinate the sightings. The considerable body of evidence he has accumulated is described in some detail in Odette Tchernine’s impressive book The Yeti."

"Dr Myra Shackley, lecturer in archaeology at Leicester University, believes she knows the answer. She is convinced that the Yeti is a Neanderthal man. And this is also the conclusion reached by Odette Tchernine on the basis of the Soviet evidence."

" ... piles of animal bones discovered in such caves suggest that Neanderthal woman was a sluttish housewife, and that his habitation must have stunk of rotting flesh."

Why assume that females must be housewives? Felines ànd canines, after all, are known to have different social structures, as do equine and elephants, swans and penguins.

" ... Myra Shackley has travelled to the Altai mountains of Mongolia and collected evidence for the existence of Almas. “They live in caves, hunt for food, use stone tools, and wear animal skins and fur”. And she mentions that in 1972 a Russian doctor met a family of Almas. In fact, Odette Tchernine cites a number of such stories. Professor Porshnev discovered again and again evidence among mountain people that they knew of the existence of “wild men”; the Abkhazians still have stories of how they drove the wild men out of the district they colonized. Tchernine refers to these wild men as “pre-hominids”."

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8. Christie, Agatha

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Interesting bit in the chapter about Agatha Christie:-

" ... In 1930, she visited the archaeological site at Ur, in Mesopotamia, where Leonard Woolley had found evidence of what he believed to be the biblical Flood. ... "

Apart from the visit being source of some of her work, it connects her with Shirer, who wrote about this archaeological discovery in Nightmare Years.

Did they meet? His visit was much later, though.

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9. The Cleveland Torso Murders

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Chapter nine, and other similar ones if any, don't belong to a book of this level, and might have been included for reasons of boosting sales.

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10. Crop Circles

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The next chapter, on crop circles, could use photographs; and there have been other shapes, including ancient symbols with cultural and religious meanings.

"At the time of writing, the position taken by “cereologists” is that while some of the circles may be hoaxes, the majority show signs of being genuine, such as geometric perfection and an obvious lack of trampling of surrounding crops by human feet."

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11. The Curse of the Pharaohs

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"The Curse of the Pharaohs" begins, aappropriately, with the history of archaeological exploration of the sites.

"On 26 November 1922 the archaeologist Howard Carter peered through a small opening above the door of the tomb of Tutankhamon’s tomb, holding a candle in front of him. What he saw dazzled him: “everywhere the glint of gold”. He and his colleague Lord Carnarvon had made the greatest find in the history of archaeology. But a few days later they found a clay tablet with the hieroglyphic inscription: “Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh”. The following April Lord Carnarvon died of some unknown disease. By 1929 – a mere six years later – twenty-two people who had been involved in opening the tomb had died prematurely. ... "

"Tutankhamon was the heir of the “great heretic” Akhnaton (about 1375 BC to 1360), the first monotheist king in history. He abandoned the capital Thebes, with all its temples, and built himself a new capital, called Akhetaton (Horizon of Aton), at a place now called Tell el Amarna. He worshipped only one god, the sun god Aton. ... "

His account of Howard Carter, Theodore Davis, and the curse about the deaths, along with the long list of deaths of those connected with the excavation, was probably what inspired an Agatha Christie work about a curse, and deaths explained by her detective.

Wilson speaks of various similar things, not admitted by modern science, in various parts of earth, from Hawaii to Africa.

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12. The Devil’s Footprints

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Chapter 12, about mysterious footprints in Devon in February 1855, is quite intriguing, with no explanation satisfactory enough.

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13. Was Philip K. Dick Possessed by an Angel?

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Next one becomes interesting gradually, but makes it clear Wilson needed to understand better, and chose to stick within limitations of his social setup and upbringing.

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14. The Dogon and the Ancient Astronauts

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" ... Members of an African tribe called the Dogon, who live in the Republic of Mali, some 300 miles south of Timbuktu, insist that they possess knowledge that was transmitted to them by “spacemen” from the star Sirius, which is 8.7 light-years away. Dogon mythology insists that the “Dog Star” Sirius (so called because it is in the constellation Canis) has a dark companion that is invisible to the naked eye and that is dense and very heavy. This is correct; Sirius does indeed have a dark companion known as Sirius B."

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15. The Mystery of Eilean More

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"In 1947 a Scottish journalist named Iain Campbell visited Eilean More on a calm day, and was standing near the west landing when the sea suddenly gave a heave, and rose seventy feet over the jetty. Then, after about a minute, it subsided back to normal. It could have been some freak of the tides, or possibly an underwater earthquake. Campbell was convinced that anyone on the jetty at that time would have been sucked into the sea. The lighthouse keeper told him that this curious “upheaval” occurs periodically, and that several men had almost been dragged into the sea."

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16. Fairies

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Wilson speaks of W. B. Yeats doing research about beliefs of Irish, and realising they had a concrete belief in fairies.

"It is the fact that it is not abnormal men like artists, but normal men like peasants, who have borne witness a thousand times to such things; it is the farmers who see the fairies. It is the agricultural labourer who calls a spade a spade who also calls a spirit a spirit; it is the woodcutter with no axe to grind . . . who will say he saw a man hang on the gallows, and afterwards hang round it as a ghost."

He relates the story of Elsie Griffiths and Frances Wright, two cousins at Cottingley, whose photographs of fairies were published, and had convinced an expert photographer, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, of their genuineness.

"The last photograph was taken on a drizzly day, 21 August 1920. Later referred to by Frances as a “fairy sunbath”, it seems to show two fairies hanging a gossamerlike material over a tuft of grass, to make a shelter or suntrap. Frances said she often saw the little people doing this on dull days, as if to keep themselves warm. Oddly enough, this phenomenon has been reported in various unconnected fairy sightings before and after the Cottingley photographs. The fairies in this last photograph have a semi-transparent quality, which detractors claimed was a sign of double exposure but which believers ascribed to the effect of cold on the fairy constitution."

"One detractor, a doctor by the name of Major Hall-Edwards, even went so far as to say:

"I criticize the attitude of those who declared there is something supernatural in the circumstances attending to the taking of these pictures because, as a medical man, I believe that the inculcation of such absurd ideas into the minds of children will result in later life in manifestations of nervous disorder and mental disturbances."

"(One wonders how he felt about parents telling their children that Santa Claus was a real person.)"

"Frances had had no “psychic” experiences. But in the spring of 1918 she saw her first gnome. She had gone down to the stream after school and observed a phenomenon she had often observed before: a single willow leaf began to shake on the tree by the stream. Then a small man, all dressed in green, was standing on the branch. Frances watched, breathless, terrified of disturbing him. The little man looked straight at her, then disappeared. After that, she claimed, she often saw little men wearing coats of grayish green and matching caps by the stream. She gradually reached the conclusion that the little men were engaged in some kind of purposeful activity, perhaps associated with helping plants to grow. Later, she began to see fairies, with and without wings. These were smaller than the elves; they had white faces and arms and often seemed to be holding some kind of meeting. Elsie, she insists, never saw the fairies or little men."

"When the world suddenly became interested in the fairies, the girls were in a difficult position. The photographs were fakes. Yet – according to the girls – the fairies really existed. If the whole thing had been a hoax, it would have been easier to confess. But it was not a hoax – not totally, anyway. They were in an embarrassing and anomalous position. If they admitted that the photographs were fakes, they would be implying that the whole affair was a deception. And that would be as untrue as continuing to maintain that the photographs were genuine. So they decided to keep silent.

"When the whole affair blew up again in 1965, the situation was unchanged. It is true that Elsie, now a hardheaded woman in her sixties, was no longer convinced that Frances had seen fairies; yet she was absolutely certain that she had had “psychic” experiences and was therefore prepared to be open-minded. As to Frances, she had seen fairies and had nothing to retract. In a letter to Leslie Gardner, the son of Edward Gardner, Elsie remarked that after her interview with Peter Chambers (in 1965), in which she had declared that people must judge for themselves and that the pictures were “figments of our imaginations”, Frances had said indignantly, “What did you say that for? You know very well that they were real”.

"In fact, Frances had always maintained that the fairies were real. In November 1918 she sent the first fairy photograph to a friend in South Africa and scrawled on the back: “Elsie and I are very friendly with the beck Fairies. It’s funny I never used to see them in Africa. It must be too hot for them there”."

"W.B. Yeats had been convinced of the existence of fairies ever since he and Lady Gregory went door to door collecting information from the local peasants. They recorded these interviews in a 1920 book entitled Visions and Beliefs. Evans Wentz concludes his Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by acknowledging: “We seem to have arrived at a point . . . where we can postulate scientifically . . . the existence of such invisible intelligences as gods, genii, daemons, all kinds of true fairies, and disembodied men”."

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17. Fulcanelli and the Mysteries of Alchemy

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Next, Fulcanelli and the Mysteries of Alchemy, interesting, but Wilson gives no examples dealing with the opening paragraph.

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18. The Glozel Mystery

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Wilson mentions another case before describing and discussing The Glozel Mystery.

"Together with his friend Professor Vilanova, Marcelino announced his discovery to the world; visitors – including the king of Spain – flocked to the cave (today known as Altamira). But when he went to a congress of prehistorians in Lisbon, Marcelino was stunned to discover that they regarded his cave paintings as a fraud. Indeed, all the learned men of Europe denounced them. Marcelino had them reproduced in a book; it was ignored. Ancient cavemen could not possibly paint like that, said the experts; it had to be a confidence trick. His chief enemy, a prehistorian named Cartailhac, even refused him admission to a congress in Algiers.

"Years later Cartailhac went to look at newly discovered caves at Les Eyzies, in the Vézère Valley, and found them full of paintings like those at Altamira. Too late, he returned to Altamira to apologize for his mistake; the child Maria, now a grown woman, could only take him to see her father’s grave."

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19. The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui

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Chapter 19 tells about various people's similar experiences at and near Cairgnorms.

"He fell asleep and woke up “to a fear of a more terrifying nature”. Moonlight fell through the crack of the flysheet of his tent, and as he stared at it he saw a brown blur, and “knew that something lay between himself and the moon”. He lay there in frozen immobility until the shadow went away. He now pulled aside the flysheet of the tent. “The night was brilliant. About twenty yards away a great brown creature was swaggering down the hill. He used the word “swaggering” because the creature had an air of insolent strength about it”. His impression was that the creature was about twenty feet high, and was covered with shortish brown hair. It was too erect to be a huge ape; it had a tapering waist and very broad shoulders. Affleck Gray’s book contains a photograph of footprints in the snow taken on Ben MacDhui, and they look oddly like the famous photograph of the footprints of the “Abominable Snowman” discovered on the Menlung glacier on Everest by Eric Shipton in 1951."

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20. Kaspar Hauser

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Kasper Hauser is about an unusual case early nineteenth century in Nuremberg.

"One of the most curious things about him was his incredible physical acuteness. He began to vomit if coffee or beer was in the same room; the sight and smell of meat produced nausea. The smell of wine literally made him drunk, and a single drop of brandy in his water made him sick. His hearing and eyesight were abnormally acute – in fact, he could see in the dark, and would later demonstrate his ability by reading from a Bible in a completely black room. He was so sensitive to magnets that he could tell whether the north or south pole was turned towards him. He could distinguish between different metals by passing his hand over them, even when they were covered with a cloth."

"Then, a mere seventeen months after he had been “found”, someone tried to kill him. It happened on the afternoon of 7 October 1829, when Kaspar was found lying on the floor of the cellar of Daumer’s house, bleeding from a head-wound, with his shirt torn to the waist. Later he described being attacked by a man wearing a silken mask, who had struck him either with a club or a knife. The police immediately made a search of Nuremberg, but had no success in finding anyone who fitted Kaspar’s description of his assailant. ... He was moved to a new address, and two policemen were appointed to look after him; Ritter von Feuerbach was appointed his guardian. And for the next two years Kaspar vanished from the public eye. ... "

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21. Rudolf Hess

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Chapter 21, about and titled Rudolf Hess, begins with his suicide at the age of ninety three, and goes on to question his identity, discussing relevant history of Hess.

"Ignoring complaints by human-rights groups, the Soviet Union insisted that Hess be held in prison until he died – the real motive being to maintain that nation’s access to West Berlin, where Spandau Prison was situated.

"For more than ten years before his suicide, there had been odd rumors that Prisoner Number 7 was not Hess at all but a double, planted on the British for reasons unknown.. ... "

The chief reason to doubt his identity, after various people initially not recognising him or being not recognised by him, despite previous acquaintance, and the strange fact of his refusal to see either the wife or the son of Rudolph Hess, was medical.

"What Thomas now discovered puzzled him deeply. Hess had been wounded in the chest in the First World War, and the resultant lung injury had caused him much bronchial trouble in the days when he was Hitler’s deputy. Now there was no sign of a war wound and no bronchial trouble. Examination of Hess’s medical records made it clear that there should have been many scars from war wounds, none of which was visible on the body of the Spandau prisoner. When, at a second examination, Thomas asked him, “What happened to your war wounds”?, Hess blanched, began to tremble, then muttered, “Too late, too late”. What did that mean? That there would now be no point in admitting that he was not Rudolf Hess?"

But throughout, Wilson holds on to the view that if the said prisoner wasn't Hess, then Hess never arrived in England with that flight in 1941, when he took off from Augsburg and flew himself.

Another possibility, discussed somewhere that one read during last couple of decades or so, seems not to occur to the author, namely, that Hess did arrive in U.K. , and the person brought to Nuremberg by British authorities was a different one.

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22. The Holy Shroud of Turin

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Next, the Turin shroud.

"The shroud had been in Turin cathedral since 1578 – it was now the property of the Duke of Savoy – and on 25 May 1898 it was again put on public display. A Turin photographer, Secondo Pia, was commissioned to photograph it. And it was in his apartment, towards midnight, that the photographer removed the first of two large plates from the developing fluid. What he saw almost made him drop the plate. Instead of the dim, blurred image he was looking at a real face, quite plainly recognizable. Yet he was looking at a photographic negative, not the final product. This could only mean one thing: that the image on the shroud was itself a photographic negative, so by “reversing” it Pia had turned it into a positive – a real photograph. If the relic was genuine, Pia was looking at a photograph of Christ."

Wilson gives various existing theories of the history thereof, before coming to recent and well known part.

"In 1955 Group Captain Leonard Cheshire took a crippled Scottish girl to Turin, and she was allowed to hold the shroud in her lap; however, no cure took place. Possibly this failure decided Cardinal Pellegrino of Turin to make a determined attempt to establish the shroud’s authenticity or otherwise by scientific means. ... In fact tests showed that there was no blood on the shroud."

"Lomas and Knight believe that the scrolls in the Temple came from the same source as the Dead Sea Scrolls, but were of far greater significance. There is evidence that the Templar who took some of the scrolls back to France was Geoffrey de St Omer, the second in command after Hugh de Payen. The scrolls were taken to an old priest called Lambert of St Omer, who is mainly known to historians because of a copy of a drawing that depicts the Heavenly Jerusalem. It was made about AD 1120, and – Lomas and Knight point out – shows the basic symbols of Freemasonry five centuries before Freemasonry is said to have been founded. Lomas and Knight argue convincingly that the drawing originated in Solomon’s Temple."

"The Dead Sea Scrolls were the property of a Jewish sect called the Essenes, also known as the Nazoreans. These were what we might describe as Jewish Puritans, strict vegetarians who rejected animal sacrifice, and therefore refused to recognize the divine inspiration of Moses.

"The Essenes were founded because of a fundamental split among the Jews. When the Jews were dragged off into their Babylonian exile by the armies of King Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, they dreamed of a Messiah who would lead them to freedom. And when they returned to Jerusalem fifty years later, and a priest named Zerubbabel rebuilt the Temple, Zerubbabel was regarded by many as the Messiah – although he himself preferred to avoid that responsibility.

"Two centuries later, Alexander the Great conquered Palestine, and it was his generals, known as Seleucids, who then ruled. But when the Greek conquerors were rash enough to place a statue of Zeus on the altar of the Temple, the Jews under Judas Maccabeus, began a highly successful guerrilla campaign, and finally rededicated the Temple to Jehovah in 164 BC. The Maccabees became kings, as well as high priests, of Jerusalem."

"The most controversial part of the argument of Lomas and Knight is that the leader of the Essenes in the first century AD were Jesus, who became known as Jesus Christ, and his brother James. Jesus, they claim, was actually known as Jesus the Nazorean, not the Nazarene. Nazareth, they say, did not even exist in Jesus’ time.

"According to Lomas and Knight, it was Jesus’ younger brother James, also known as Ya’cov, who was the leader of the Essenes and the “Teacher of Righteousness”.

"The Roman Catholic Church has denied that Jesus had brothers or sisters, although this is actually contradicted by the Gospel of Matthew (13: 55): “Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brothers James, Simon and Jude? And his sisters, are they not all with us”?

"Lomas and Knight argue that Jesus was not simply a preacher of universal love; he wanted to get rid of the Romans, and was prepared to lead a revolt to do it. A large number of the Essenes preferred Jesus’ less radical brother James."

"The Romans issued a wanted poster for Jesus which still survives, describing him as short, (about 4ft 6ins), bald-headed and humpbacked. His brother James was arrested first, then Jesus was arrested in Gethsemane."

"When Saul became a Roman citizen, he changed his name to Paul and was given the job of stamping out the remains of the Jewish freedom movement. This was ten years after the death of Jesus, in AD 43. And it was seventeen years later that Paul had his experience on the road to Damascus, and was suddenly converted to Christianity. Lomas and Knight state that this would not have been the Damascus in Syria, where he would have had no authority, but probably Kumran, which was also referred to as Damascus. And it was probably on the way to Kumran to persecute the Essenes that Paul received his revelation. He became temporarily blind, and when he recovered, became romantically enthralled by the doctrine that would be later labeled Christianity. This doctrine, of Paul’s own invention, declared that Jesus had died on the cross to redeem humankind from the sin of Adam, and that all who believed in Jesus would become free of Original Sin.

"James and the other Nazoreans must have been astonished and delighted to discover that their persecutor had suddenly become Jesus’ chief admirer. But when, in due course, they learned the details of the Christianity that had been invented by Paul, they were enraged, and habitually referred to him as “the spouter of lies”."

"Lomas and Knight quote Pope Leo X as saying: “It has served us well, this myth of Christ”."

Hereon Wilson gives history close to what's given in Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and other works by Lomas and Knight, towards their theory about the shroud being, in fact, that of Jacques Dr Molay.

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23. Homer and the Fall of Troy

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Next, chapter 23, Homer and the Fall of Troy, discusses the modern trend that questions existence of Homer.

"Greek bards learned their poetry by heart and could recite many thousands of lines from memory – as their modern descendants still can today. So there was no question of Homer being lost in the dim mists of antiquity, in the days before there were any historical records. The memories of the bards themselves were the historical records. ... "

Wilson gives the story of life of Homer as written by Herodotus, which is heartwrenching.

" ... But as his fame spread throughout Greece, and bards recited his poems, Chian bards formed a school known as the children of Homer – or Homeridae – which was still flourishing when Herodotus wrote his life of Homer."

Wilson speaks about Samuel Butler studying the epics.

" ... And it was as he was reading about Circe that Butler was suddenly struck by a dazzling intuition: that Circe was not created by a man but by a woman – and, moreover, by a young one. Closer reading convinced him of this. The males of the Odyssey are wooden creatures compared to the women, who have that touch of life. Butler also concluded that while the author of the Odyssey shows intimate knowledge of the affairs of women, he is often oddly uncomfortable when describing things that are the province of males, especially seamen or farmers. What male would place the rudder in front of the ship? What seaman would believe that seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree? Or make the wind “whistle” over the waters? (It whistles on land, because of obstacles, but there are no obstacles at sea.) What man with any knowledge of farming would make a herdsman milk the sheep, then give them their lambs to feed (presumably with empty udders)? What countryman would make a hawk tear its prey on the wing? The author of the Odyssey makes these curious errors, and many more. Butler goes on to argue with great skill and conviction that the author of the Odyssey had to be a woman, and a young one at that."

" ... George Bernard Shaw attended a Fabian Society meeting at which Butler lectured on the female authorship of the Odyssey and admitted that, while initially skeptical about the idea, he took up the Odyssey and soon found himself saying, “Of course it was written by a woman”.

"Robert Graves was another classical scholar who allowed himself to be convinced, and whose novel Homer’s Daughter is inspired by the theory. ... "

"Another interesting footnote to the Butler theory is that James Joyce used his prose translation of the Odyssey as the basis of Ulysses."

Wilson describes various archaeological excavations in efforts to find Troy and other places mentioned.

" ... Finally, writing in its modern form – with paper and ink – was invented and at last the great epics were written down. ... "

No, it was always existing in India on leaves and bark; paper was brought to Europe from China, and ink from India (hence the word indigo, for what India calls "neel", which is, literally, "blue".

Wilson goes on to discuss facts of history about Troy and Greece, and the war, with much information packed in the chapter thereby from diverse sources.

" ... Homer tells us that the men of Troy were killed, and their women and children enslaved and taken back to Greece."

No surprises there - slavery was norm of Mediterranean cultures.

"All that we can say for certain is that Homer – whether one person or two – created a concept that is now almost synonymous with the human imagination: the concept of literature."

Colonial racism there, plain and simple. For, literature was far more ancient in India than Homer.

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24. The Hope Diamond

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Next, chapter 24, discusses The beautiful blue diamond known finally as Hope Diamond.

"The diamond was purchased by Louis XIV in 1668 from a French trader named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who is believed to have stolen it (like Milton Hayes’s “Green Eye of the Little Yellow God”) from the eye socket of an idol in an Indian temple. (One writer mentions the temple of Rama-sitra, near Mandalay.) Tavernier subsequently went bankrupt, sailed for India to try to recoup his fortune, and died en route."

Did Wilson make the careless mistake, due to colonial racist disregard, or was it only made in the transcript of the e-book? It should be"temple of Rama-Sita", of course. The atrocious mistake is repeated at the end, so presumably it was racism.

"Many similar stories could be told of “jinxed” ships, houses, airplanes, and cars.9 The car in which the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo (thus precipitating the First World War) went on to bring death or disaster to its next seven owners."

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25. The Mystery of Hypnosis

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Wilson begins chapter 25, The Mystery of Hypnosis, by giving account of a criminal case in U.K. in 1991, of a man who hypnotised over a hundred young women and assaulted them sexually, for years, while they had no clue. He then goes into history of hypnosis as known to West, from Svengali on.

" ... French peasants still use this method at market when buying a live hen. Africans probably knew about animal hypnosis long before that; in his book Hypnosis of Men and Animals (1966), Ferenc Volgyesi describes how wild elephants can be tamed by tying them to a tree and waving leafy boughs in front of their eyes until they blink and become docile."

He speaks of Mesmer and his pupil.

" ... With another excellent hypnotic subject named Madeleine, Puységur would give public demonstrations of mind reading; one total skeptic was converted when he himself was able to order Madeleine – mentally – to put her hand in his pocket and take out an object he had placed there. This ability to influence hypnotized subjects telepathically was demonstrated again and again during the nineteenth century; but medicine has continued to dismiss it as a myth.

"Mesmer’s enemies drove him out of Paris and Vienna; he died, discredited and embittered, in 1815. And the medical profession made sure that hypnosis was treated as a fraud throughout the nineteenth century; any doctor who practiced it was likely to be struck off the register. It was only toward the end of the century that Charcot rediscovered it. Charcot had noticed that patients suffering from hysteria behaved as if they were hypnotized. For example, a man who was convinced that his arm was paralyzed would behave exactly as if it was paralyzed, although there was nothing physically wrong with his arm. But he could be cured by being told under hypnosis that his arm was not paralyzed – and the paralysis could also be reinduced by hypnosis. When Charcot announced to the medical profession that hypnosis was simply a form of hysteria, his colleagues believed that he had solved the mystery and ceased to regard hypnosis as a fraud. It took some time before it was recognized that Charcot had inverted the truth and that hysteria is, in fact, a kind of hypnosis. A hysterical patient becomes convinced that he is suffering from some disability and “suggests” himself into it. Freud was one of the many who were impressed by Charcot’s theory of hypnosis; he later made it the basis of his own theory of the unconscious."

Another example, of a hypnosis performance in public in U.S., stinks of colonial racism.

" ... Finally, to convince the audience that they were not listening to the words of spirits, Carpenter summoned a philosophic pig, which discoursed learnedly on Hinduism."

Hudson, who had seen the performance, decided to cure a relative, living several hundred miles away, of rheumatism, using hypnosis. He succeeded.

"Hudson claimed that he went on to cure about five hundred people in the same way. He failed in only two cases and these – oddly enough – were patients who had been told that he intended to try to cure them.

"This, Hudson believed, underlined another peculiarity of the subjective mind: its powers have to work spontaneously, without self-consciousness. As soon as it becomes self-conscious, it freezes up, like the hand of a schoolboy when the teacher looks over his shoulder as he is writing. This also explains why so many “psychics” fail when they are tested by skeptics. It is like trying to make love in a crowded public square."

" ... Some of the most remarkable tests in the history of psychical research were carried out by a professor of geology named William Denton. He would wrap geological and archaeological specimens in thick brown paper packages, shuffle them until he no longer knew which was which, then get his “psychometrists” – his wife and sister-in-law – to describe the contents and history of packages chosen at random. Their accuracy was amazing – for example, a fragment of volcanic lava from Pompeii produced an accurate description of the eruption, while a fragment of tile from a Roman villa produced a description of Roman legions and a man who looked like a retired soldier."

"Hudson’s book became a bestseller and went into edition after edition between 1893 and Hudson’s death in 1903. Why, then, did its remarkable new theory not make a far greater impact? The reason can be summarized in a single word: Freud. The objective and subjective minds obviously correspond roughly to Freud’s ego and id – or conscious and unconscious. But there is a major difference. Freud was a pessimist who saw the unconscious mind as a passive force, a kind of basement full of decaying rubbish that causes disease – or neurosis. The conscious mind is the victim of these unconscious forces, which are basically sexual in nature. Hudson would have been horrified at such a gloomy and negative view of the subjective mind. But because Freud was a “scientist” and Hudson was merely a retired newspaper editor, the latter’s achievement was ignored by psychologists."

Interesting discovery of truth:-

" ... Sartre’s whole philosophy of human existence – he is known as one of the founding figures of existentialism – is based on his mistaken notion that “nausea” is some fundamental truth about human reality – the beautiful woman in hair curlers. Moreover, it is a philosophy that is echoed by some of the most respectable figures in modern literature, from Ernest Hemingway and Albert Camus to Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett. It could be said to dominate modern philosophy and modern literature. Yet we can see that it is simply a misunderstanding. “Nausea” is not some glimpse of reality; it is as unimportant as a headache, and in some ways curiously similar. If Sartre had known about the right and left hemispheres, he would have recognized that he was greatly exaggerating the importance of “nausea”. And if we could grasp, once and for all, that “alienation” in left-brain consciousness is not a glimpse of the reality of the human condition, we would experience an enormous and immediate rise in our level of optimism and vitality."

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26. The Enigma of Identical Twins

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Next, chapter 26,, Wilson describes amazing similarities shared by identical twins, especially amazing when separated at birth and unaware of existence of one another.

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27. Jack the Ripper

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Wilson deals next with Jack the Ripper in Chapter 27.

" ... Jack the Ripper still remains far and away the world’s most famous – or infamous – serial killer. This is not due simply to the grisly picturesqueness of the nickname but to the fact that the murders took place in the fog-shrouded London of Sherlock Holmes and that – unlike the three killers mentioned above – the identity of Jack the Ripper is still a total mystery."

Wasn't there a whisper about it possibly being the eldest son of the then Prince of Wales, who subsequently met an untimely death in bed after an illness that was the last of life for him, having never been known to be in good health for that matter?

" ... But the majority of criminals throughout history have killed or robbed for purely economic reasons. ... "

That certainly fits, for example, Dyer and his usage of tank, apart from soldiers bearing rifles, barring the only escape for a crowd of purely civilians enjoying a public park in Amritsar, Punjab, and having hundreds shot dead, including women, children, babies and old people - looting India was, after all, chief and a very serious financial enterprise of British, as evidenced in the collapse from a first power and globe gelding empire to a small fry that Britain was brought down to, after 1947.

" ... The lower classes were too hungry to bother about “forbidden” sex, and the upper classes could obtain it so easily that rape would have been pointless. ... "

Wilson disregards the obvious - most authority being comprised of male, few bothered to question if a woman had consented to a physical relationship; in most of Europe, when not confronted by victorious soldiers going berserk, feudal lines of caste were maintained in male assaults against women, so not only women had little recourse to justice but weren't even recognised as victims. Of course, victorious soldiers going berserk murdering civilian population of the defeated was accepted in Europe as norm, and women being raped as normal part thereof; this attitude prevailed well into 1980's.

"Compared to these, there was something utterly calculated about the Jack the Ripper murders, which took place in the Whitechapel area of East London, in the autumn of 1888, and which produced a morbid sense of shock and panic.

"It was still dark on the morning of September 1 when a cart driver named George Cross walked along Bucks Row on his way to work. It was a narrow, cobbled street with the blank wall of a warehouse on one side and a row of terraced houses on the other. In the dim light Cross saw what he thought was a bundle of tarpaulin and went to investigate. It proved to be a woman lying on her back, ... "

" ... A few hours before her death she had staggered back to the lodging house, her speech slurred with drink, and admitted that she lacked the fourpence necessary for a bed. The keeper had turned her away. ... "

"Oddly enough, the murder caused little sensation. Prostitutes were often killed in the slums of London, sometimes by gangs who demanded protection money. The previous April a prostitute named Emma Smith had dragged herself into London Hospital, reporting that she had been attacked by four men in Osborn Street. They had rammed some object, possibly an iron bar, into her vagina with such force that it had penetrated the uterus; she had died of peritonitis. In July dismembered portions of a woman’s body had been recovered from the Thames. And on 7 August 1888, a prostitute named Martha Tabram had been found dead on a landing in George Yards Buildings, Whitechapel; she had been stabbed thirty-nine times with a knife or bayonet. Two soldiers were questioned about her murder but proved to have an excellent alibi. Evidently some sadistic brute had a grudge against prostitutes, it was hardly the kind of story to appeal to respectable newspaper readers."

" ... Hysteria swept over the whole country. There had been nothing like it since the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811, when two families were slaughtered in East London, and householders all over England barricaded their doors at night.

"On 29 September 1888, the Central News Agency received a letter that began: “Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet”. It included the sentence; “I am down on whores and I shan’t quit ripping them till I do get buckled” and promised: “You will soon hear of me with my funny little games”. It was signed “Jack the Ripper” – the first time the name had been used. The writer requested: “Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight”. The Central News Agency decided to follow his advice.

"That night, a Saturday, the “ripper” killed again – this time not one, but two prostitutes. ... "

"The policeman who found it also found a chalked message scrawled on a nearby wall: “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing”. The police commissioner, Sir Charles Warren, ordered the words to be rubbed out, in spite of a plea from a local CID man that they should be photographed first; he thought they might cause a riot against the Jews, thousands of whom lived in Whitechapel.

"Macnaghten admitted later: “When the double murder of 30th September took place, the exasperation of the public at the non-discovery of the perpetrator knew no bounds”. The “Jack the Ripper” letter was released, and the murderer immediately acquired a nickname. And early on Monday morning the Central News Agency received another missive – this time a postcard – from Jack the Ripper. ... "

There were several theories later about the identity, all proven false due to inconsistencies.

"When, in 1960, I published a series of articles entitled “My Search for Jack the Ripper” in the London Evening Standard, I was asked to lunch by an old surgeon named Thomas Stowell, who told me his own astonishing theory about the Ripper’s identity: that it was Queen Victoria’s grandson – the heir to the throne – the Duke of Clarence, who died during the flu epidemic in 1892. Sowell told me that he had seen the private papers of Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician, and that Gull had dropped mysterious hints about Clarence and Jack the Ripper, as well as mentioning that Clarence had syphilis, from which he died. When, subsequently, I asked Stowell if I could write about his theory, he said no. “It might upset Her Majesty”. But in 1970 he decided to publish it himself in a magazine called The Criminologist. Admittedly, he did not name his suspect – he called him S – but he dropped dozens of hints that it was Clarence. Journalists took up the story and it caused a worldwide sensation. Stowell was so shaken by all the publicity that he died a week later, trying to repair the damage by claiming that his suspect was not the Duke of Clarence."

Wilson gives another story involving the Duke of Clarence, the painter Walter Sickert and a young woman Annie Crooks, and then proceeds to say it was full of holes too; but this time the inconsistencies seem less of an obstruction to the main story, that of Joseph "Hobo" Sickert, son of Walter Sickert, being grandson of Clarence; and the ripper murders being caused by blackmail that his mom's nanny subjected royals to, and her having taken several persons into confidence.

"It was, in fact, Hobo Sickert himself who pulled the rug out from under Knight by publicly admitting that the Jack the Ripper part of his story was pure invention. He insisted, however, that the story of Annie Crook giving birth to the Duke of Clarence’s daughter – and the daughter becoming his own mother – was true. And in this he was probably being truthful. The most convincing part of Knight’s book is his description of the various “clues” to the affair that Sickert slipped into his paintings."

"What the Florence Pash evidence does seem to prove is that the Duke really fathered an illegitimate daughter, who became the mother of Joseph Sickert. It also confirms the unlikeliest part of Hobo Sickert’s story: that Mary Kelly acted as a nursemaid to the baby. She may even have tried to blackmail Sickert. But even without the blackmail motif, we can understand why Sickert thought he was the custodian of a frightening secret. When Mary Kelly became – almost certainly by pure chance – the Ripper’s final victim, he must have felt certain that the long arm of Buckingham Palace was involved. ... "

Wilson continues for a few more pages ending up with two plausible candidates, one whose son migrated to Australia soon after learning it from his sadistic father who intended to confess publicly but didnt; another, added by Wilson in a postscript, gets his vote.

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28. Did Joan of Arc Return from the Dead?

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Next, chapter 28, Wilson asks if Joan of Arc returned from death.

"On 30 May 1431 Joan of Arc was burnt as a heretic by the English; she was only nineteen years old. She regarded herself as a messenger from Heaven, sent to save the French from their enemies the English (who were in league with the Burgundians who captured her). ... Her military career was brief but spectacular: in a year she won many remarkable victories, and saw Charles VII crowned at Rheims. Then she was captured by the Burgundians, sold to the English for ten thousand francs, tried as a witch, and burnt alive."

Wilson gives the history of her resurfacing. The person who surfaced claiming to be her, was immediately recognised and accepted by her brothers, other relatives, and various comrades in arms; the king met her, but did not denounce her as imposter until much later, not immediately. Wilson discusses how she could have escaped in the first place.

"It is easy to see how this could have come about. We know that Joan was an extraordinarily persuasive young lady, and that dozens of people, from Robert de Baudricourt to the Dauphin, who began by assuming she was mad, ended by believing that she was being guided by divine voices. We know that even in court Joan declared that she could hear St Catherine telling her what to say. Even at her trial she had certain friends; a priest called Loyseleur was her adviser. When Joan complained about the conduct of her two guards the Earl of Warwick was furious, and had them replaced by two other guards – which suggests that the earl held her in high regard. So it would not be at all surprising if there was a successful plot to rescue her. And it is possible that the English themselves may have been involved in such a plot; when Joan was apparently burnt at the stake in Rouen the crowd was kept at a distance by eight hundred English soldiers, which would obviously prevent anyone coming close enough to recognize her. At the trial for her rehabilitation in 1456 the executioner’s evidence was entirely second-hand, although three of Joan’s comrades who were with her at the “end” – Ladvenu, Massieu and Isambard – were actually present. If Joan was rescued, presumably they also were involved in the plot."

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November 17, 2020 - November 18, 2020 -

December 24, 2020 .

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29. Junius

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Chapter 29 has author look at a ticklish mystery of English recent history, that of identity of Junius, whose caustic correspondence caused much upheaval in political life of England at a time when newspapers were making the transition from entertainment to serious news, and opinions of people other than royals and parliament were beginning to be of account.

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December 06, 2021 - December 06, 2021.

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30. Fedor Kuzmich

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Wilson looks at another mysterious man in chapter 30, a hermit in Siberia, who was suspected to be the Tsar Alexander I who had defeated Napoleon. Wilson traces his popularity to his contrasting the previous Tsars, including Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

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December 06, 2021 - December 06, 2021.

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31. The Loch Ness Monster

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Chapter 31 has Wilson give detailed history of Nessie, the Loch Ness creature(s), or rather, known history of their sightings by humans.

And more.

" ... Peter Macnab was on his way back from a holiday in the north of Scotland, and pulled up his car just above Urquhart Castle. It was a calm, warm afternoon – 29 July 1955 – and he saw a movement in the still water near the castle; he hastily raised his camera, and took a photograph which has joined the “surgeon’s photograph” and the Lachlan Stuart photograph as one of the classic views of the monster. But he was so anxious to avoid ridicule that he released the picture only three years later, in 1958.

"Before that happened, interest in the case had been revived by the best book on it so far – More Than a Legend, published in 1957. The author was Constance Whyte, wife of the manager of the Caledonian canal, who became interested in the monster after she was asked to write an article about it for a small local magazine. Mrs Whyte interviewed every witness she could find, and produced the first overall survey of the evidence since Rupert Gould’s book of 1934. More Than a Legend aroused widespread interest, the author was deluged with correspondence, and once again the Loch Ness monster was news. What Mrs Whyte had done, with her careful research, was to refute the idea that the monster was a joke, or the invention of the Scottish Tourist Board. No one who reads her book can end with the slightest doubt that the monster really exists, and that it shows itself with a fair degree of frequency."

"In 1959 an aeronautical engineer named Tim Dinsdale read an article about the monster in a magazine called Everybody’s, and was intrigued. He spent most of that winter reading everything he could find; it was in the following February that (as already described) he looked at the surgeon’s photograph, and noticed the circle of ripples that convinced him that it was genuine. In April that year Dinsdale went off to Loch Ness to hunt the monster. But after five days he had still seen nothing. On the day before he was due to return home he was approaching his hotel in Foyers when he saw something out in the loch; his binoculars showed a hump. He snatched his 16-mm ciné-camera and began to film as the creature swam away. Then, almost out of film, he drove down to the water’s edge; by the time he got there the creature had vanished. But Dinsdale had fifty feet of film showing the monster in motion. When shown on television it aroused widespread interest and – as Witchell says – heralded a new phase in the saga of the monster.

"That June the first scientific expedition to Loch Ness embarked on a month-long investigation, with thirty student volunteers and a Marconi echo-sounder, as well as a large collection of cameras. A ten-foot hump was sighted in July, and the echo-sounder tracked some large object as it dived from the surface to a depth of sixty feet and back up again. The expedition also discovered large shoals of char at a depth of a hundred feet – an answer to sceptics who said that the loch did not contain enough fish to support a monster; the team’s finding was that there was enough fish to support several."

"In 1963 Holiday interviewed two fishermen who had seen the monster at close range, only 20 or 30 yards away. One said that the head reminded him of a bulldog, that it was wide and very ugly. The neck was fringed by what looked like coarse black hair. In a letter to Dinsdale, Holiday remarked: “When people are confronted by this fantastic animal at close quarters they seemed to be stunned. There is something strange about Nessie that has nothing to do with size or appearance. Odd, isn’t it”? He was intrigued by the number of people who had a feeling of horror when they saw the monster. Why were dragons and “orms” always linked with powers of evil in medieval mythology? He also began to feel increasingly that it was more than coincidence that the monsters were so hard to photograph: he once had his finger on the button when the head submerged. Either the monsters had some telepathic awareness of human observation or they were associated with some kind of Jungian “synchronicity”, or meaningful coincidence."

"In a letter to me in 1971 Ted Holiday described a further coincidence. Looking across the loch, he found himself looking at the word DEE in large yellow letters. Bulldozers engaged in road-widening had scraped away the soil running down to the loch, and the top half of the “letters” was formed by the yellow subsoil. The bottom half of the letters was formed by the reflection of the top half in the perfectly still water."

"He had caught his first glimpse of a lake monster in Loch Long in Ross-shire in 1967. In June 1968, in a boat in Norway’s Fjord of the Trolls, he saw another, which came straight towards them; the Norwegian captain who was with him told him not to be afraid: “It will not hurt us – they never do”. And in fact the monster dived before it reached their boat. But the Captain, Jan Andersen, was convinced that the monsters were basically evil, that in some way they could do harm to men’s characters (or, as Omand would have said, their souls). In 1972 Omand attended a psychiatric conference at which an eminent Swedish psychiatrist read a paper on the monster of Lake Storsjön, and said that he was convinced that the monsters had a malevolent effect on human beings, especially those who hunted them or saw them regularly. He thought their influence could cause domestic tragedies and moral degeneration. So Omand began to consider the theory that perhaps lake monsters are not real creatures, but “projections” of something from the prehistoric past.

"Holiday wrote to Omand, and the odd result was that in June 1973 Holiday and Donald Omand rowed out into the middle of Loch Ness, and Omand performed an exorcism of the loch. Holiday said they both felt oddly exhausted when it was over. And his suspicion that he was stirring up dangerous forces seemed to be confirmed two days later when he went to stay the night with a retired Wing Commander named Carey. Holiday was telling Mrs Carey about a Swedish journalist called Jan-Ove Sundberg who had been wandering through the woods behind Foyers when he had seen a strange craft in a clearing, and some odd-looking men; the craft had taken off at a great speed, and after his return to Sweden, Sundberg had been plagued by “men in black” – people claiming to be officials who often seem to harass UFO “contactees”.

"Holiday said he intended to go and look at the place where the “UFO” had landed, and Mrs Carey warned him against it. At this moment there was a rushing sound like a tornado outside the window and a series of violent thuds; a beam of light came in through the window, and focused on Holiday’s forehead. A moment later, all was still. The odd thing was that Wing Commander Carey, who had been pouring a drink only a few feet away from his wife, saw and heard nothing. The next morning, as Holiday was walking towards the loch he saw a man dressed entirely in black – including helmet and goggles – standing nearby; he walked past him, turned his head, and was astonished to find that the man had vanished. He rushed to the road and looked in both directions; there was nowhere the man could have gone. One year later, close to the same spot, Holiday had a heart attack; as he was being carried away he looked over the side of the stretcher and saw that they were just passing the exact spot where he had seen the “man in black”. Five years later, Holiday died of a heart attack."

" ... Most people still regard the question of the monster’s existence as an open one, and the majority of scientists still regard the whole thing as something of a joke. In 1976 Roy Mackal, a director of the Loch Ness Investigation Bureau and Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Chicago, published the most balanced and thoroughgoing scientific assessment so far, The Monsters of Loch Ness. He turns a highly critical eye on the evidence, yet nevertheless concludes that it is now proven that “a population of moderate-sized, piscivorous aquatic animals is inhabiting Loch Ness”. If the scientific establishment was willing to change its mind, this book should have changed it; yet it seems to have made no real impact."

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December 06, 2021 - December 06, 2021.

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32. The Man in the Iron Mask

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It's quite startling, to say the least, realising just his real the various stories and persons involved in some of the legendary literature - especially those by Alexandre Dumas - is! Especially, because, unlike some of the later writers, he wasn't tomtommed for realism; on the contrary, his work proliferated with thrilling, unlikely, far from everyday events and characters of average lives of normal people.

So realising that characters of Three Musketeers, and Man In The Iron Mask, were real, makes one wonder - what next? Who was Count Of Monte Christo, and who were the villains?

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December 07, 2021 - December 08, 2021.

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33. The Mystery of the Mary Celeste

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A ship beset by ill luck, and finally abandoned by her crew in a hurry, found 700 miles away by another ship a few days later, sailing without anyone on board ....

" ... Convinced that the whole ship was about to explode, Briggs ordered everyone into the lifeboat. In his haste, he failed to take the one simple precaution that would have saved their lives – to secure the lifeboat to the Mary Celeste by a few hundred yards of cable. The sea was fairly calm when the boat was lowered, as we know from the last entry in the log, but the evidence of the torn sails indicates that the ship then encountered severe gales. We may conjecture that the rising wind blew the Mary Celeste into the distance, while the crew in the lifeboat rowed frantically in a futile effort to catch up. The remainder of the story is tragically obvious."

Incidentally, this incident up written into a story, by a 23 year old doctor while waiting for patients, as he put up his nameplate in a new place, settling into a new practice, launched the career of Arthur Conan Doyle, for whose further works the magazine offered thirty guineas instead of the regular three from then on.

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December 08, 2021 - December 08, 2021.

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34. Glenn Miller

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" ... Perhaps, after all, Niven and Haynes were right when they decided that, as far as posterity was concerned, Miller had died in a mysterious airplane accident rather than in an undignified brawl in a Paris brothel."

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December 08, 2021 - December 08, 2021.

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35. The Missing Link

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Most interesting, not only for the obvious reasons, but more.

" ...In 1859 most British people accepted that the account of creation in Genesis was entirely factual, and most accepted Archbishop Usher’s estimate of the date of creation (worked out from the Bible) as 4004 BC."

Which had British dismiss all of the treasure of knowledge stored in legends of ancient India, and dismiss all Indian knowledge- but Indian knowledge included, not only evolution, and rising of the Himaalayan ranges out of the ocean, but more, much, much more. British ignoring it was racism and casteism - British or European castes, which dismissed knowledge and valued race, gender and property - at its purest and worst.

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December 08, 2021 - December 08, 2021.

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36. Where is the Mona Lisa?

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About Isleworth Mona Lisa, an unfinished painting of a younger Mona Lisa.

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December 08, 2021 - December 08, 2021.

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37. “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World”

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About the Voynich manuscript.

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December 08, 2021 - December 08, 2021.

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38. Joan Norkot

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A ghastly murder of a mother of a baby, with several family members conspiring!

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December 08, 2021 - December 08, 2021.

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39. The Oera Linda Book

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About Atland, an island, Doggers Bank, Atlantis, ....

" ... A later book speaks at length about a warrior named Friso, an officer of Alexander the Great (born 356 BC), who is described in other Nordic chronicles. (The Oera Linda Book also speaks at length of Alexander the Great.) These chronicles state that Friso came from India. The Oera Linda Book says that Friso was descended from a Frisian colony that settled in the Punjab about 1550 BC; moreover, the Greek geographer Strabo mentions this strange “Indian” tribe, referring to them by the name Germania. ... "

" ... consistent with the central claim of the Oera Linda Book: that after the “deluge”, the Frisians sailed the globe and became the founders of Mediterranean civilization, as well as settling in India. ... "

Startling, so far. But then Colin Wilson says -

" ... It is obvious why scholars have ignored the book. To take it seriously would mean virtually rewriting ancient history. If, for example, we accept that Calypso’s island, Walhallagara, was the island of Walcheren, in the North Sea (as the commentary on the Oera Linda Book claims it was), then Ulysses sailed right out of the Mediterranean. It is certainly simpler to accept Homer’s version of the story."

It's unclear why, except Europe is very averse to any corrections of mistaken assumptions by Europe about history, whether due to imposition by church or fear of inquisition that's gone deep in psyche. West firmly believed that Homer wrote fiction, until the discovery of Trojan gold in an archaeological find in present day Turkey by an amateur U.S. citizen of German origin; and more along the lines. Besides, the very name Walhallagara ought to intrigue, and if it turns out that Valhalla has a root in history, geography and a physical reality on earth, shouldn't that validate much of German and Norse "mythology", perhaps even as history? Or is that precisely the reason for discomfort, even fear? Seeming heresy, blasphemy?

"After nearly a century of neglect, the Oera Linda Book was rediscovered by an English scholar named Robert Scrutton. In his fascinating book The Other Atlantis, Scrutton tells how, in 1967, he and his wife – a “sensitive” with strong psychometric powers18 – were walking over Dartmoor when she experienced a terrifying vision of a flood: great green waves higher than the hills pouring across the land.

"Eight years later he found legends of a great deluge in ancient poetry known as the Welsh Triads (which also speak of King Arthur). The Triads explain that long before the Kmry (the Welsh) came to Britain, there was a great flood that depopulated the entire island. One ship survived, and those who sailed in it settled in the “Summer Land” peninsula (which Scrutton identifies as the Crimea – still called Krym – in the Black Sea). These peoples decided to seek other lands, because their peninsula was subject to flooding. One portion went to Italy and the other across Germany and France and into Britain. (In fact, this account does not contradict the little we know about the mysterious people called the Celts, whose origin is unknown.) So the Kmry came back to Britain – probably around 600 BC – and brought their Druidic religion, which involved human sacrifice."

Slightly confusing, but the last bit is tiresome - about West being ever ready to jump to conclusions about all others except church being religions of human sacrifice! And yet, in that respect, it's quite hard to compete with church, what with inquisition in Europe, and missionaries accompanying European migrants to other lands where they, European migrants, killed locals in thousands.

Wilson goes on to mention Ignatius Donnelly and Charles Hapgood, discuss their works and theories, and to see if various theories contradict; he concludes that they do not necessarily exclude one another.

He does not mention Graham Hancock, or his Fingerprints of Gods. Wonder why.

"One thing seems clear: that the ancient maps prove the existence of a great maritime civilization that flourished before Alexander the Great. Like the maps, the Oera Linda Book also points to the existence of such a civilization. Even if the Oera Linda Book proved to be a forgery, the evidence of the maps would be unaffected. But at the present time, there is no evidence that it is a forgery. In this case, it deserves to be reprinted in a modern edition and carefully studied by historians – as well as read by the general public for its fascinating tales of murder and battle. If it proves to be genuine, the Oera Linda Book could revolutionize our view of world history."

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December 08, 2021 - December 09, 2021.

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40. The “People of the Secret”

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Why did Wilson not title this simply "Madame Blavatsky "?

"Early in 1883 a book called Esoteric Buddhism caused an immediate sensation, and quickly went into a second edition. It was by a slender, balding little man called Alfred Percy Sinnett, editor of India’s most influential newspaper the Pioneer. ... "

" ... In October 1880 Sinnett and his wife had played host to that remarkable lady Madame Blavatsky, who told him that most of her knowledge had been obtained from her “secret Masters” who lived in the Himalayas. She convinced Sinnett of her genuineness by a series of minor miracles. ... "

Wilson goes on to describe how the book, and Sinnett, became sensations, only to fall when Richard Hodgson discovered that miracles by Madame Blavatsky were involved. He describes them, and it's unclear why they induced the fall, even though they were not of world shaking order.

" ... It was the result of an investigation by a young man named Richard Hodgson, who had talked to Madame Blavatsky’s housekeepers and learned that most of the “miracles” were fraudulent; their most convincing demonstration was to cause a letter – addressed to Hodgson and referring to the conversation they had only just had – to fall out of the air above his head. Hodgson’s report had the effect of totally destroying Madame Blavatsky’s credibility, and demolishing the myth of the “hidden Masters” in Tibet. ... "

The said miracles, described by him, seem not less than, say, turning water into wine!

Wilson goes on to discuss occult and cybernetics, Alice Bailey and Rev. Stainton Moses, and more.

" ... George Gurdjieff, one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century, spent much of his youth in search of a certain “Sarmoung Brotherhood”, and claimed to have received his basic teachings from a monastic brotherhood in the northern Himalayas. ... But books like In Search of the Miraculous (by Gurdjieff’s leading follower P.D. Ouspensky) make it clear that behind Gurdjieff’s “psychological” teachings lay a highly complex cosmological system, which has no obvious relevance to the psychological teachings, and which it seems unlikely that Gurdjieff invented himself."

"The existence of a secret tradition of hidden teachings is hinted at in Idries Shah’s book The Sufis, and it was in a review of this book in the London Evening News that its literary editor, Edward Campbell, wrote:

"For many centuries there has been a strange legend in the East. It suggests that in some hidden centre, perhaps in the Highlands of Central Asia, there exists a colony of men possessing exceptional powers. This centre acts, in some respects at least, as the secret government of the world.

"Some aspects of this legend came to the West during the Crusades; the idea was renewed in Rosicrucian guise in 1614; it was restated with variations last century by Mme Blavatsky and the French diplomat Jacoliot; was suggested again by the English author Talbot Mundy, and most recently by the Mongolian traveller Ossendowski in 1918.

"In the mysterious Shangri-la of this legend, certain men, evolved beyond the ordinary human situation, act as the regents of powers beyond this planet.

"Through lower echelons – who mingle unsuspected in ordinary walks of life, both East and West – they act at critical stages of history, contriving results necessary to keep the whole evolution of the earth in step with events in the solar system."

" ... Egypt gave birth to the world of the Greeks, and the Greeks transmitted the “energy of fertilization” to Rome via the philosophy of the Stoics and Epicureans. “Again a period of dazzling achievement seemingly from nowhere”. Early Christianity sprang out of Rome, but by the eighth century had fossilized into the corrupt church of the mediaeval papacy. ... “In each of these there was a suggestion of a whole unseen cosmology; each an encyclopedia in stone containing, for those who could read . . . a summary of the Plan and Purpose of evolution”. ... "

Wilson goes on to discuss Idris Shah, Delia Bacon, zeitgeist, Yeats, and more.

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December 09, 2021 - December 11, 2021.

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41. Poltergeists

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Wilson gives accounts of various poltergeist activities, chiefly in England, some in Germany, U.S., and so on. He mentions furniture thrown and so on.

"A similar case was investigated by the present writer. ... "

"Cases like these suggest that the poltergeist is not a manifestation of the unconscious mind of an unhappy teenager but – as Kardec stated – an actual entity or “spirit”, which remains associated with some place, but which can only manifest itself through the surplus energy of a human being – not necessarily a teenager."

"The view that poltergeists are “spirits” who make use of some form of human energy remains highly unfashionable among psychical investigators, who prefer the more “scientific” theory of Fodor. Yet the case of the phantom drummer of Tedworth seems to support Playfair’s view that poltergeist phenomena can be caused by “witchcraft”; and witches have traditionally claimed to perform their “magic” through the use of spirits. One thing is certain: that Podmore’s view that poltergeists are usually due to deliberate fraud is untenable in the face of the evidence. Skeptics point out that most “psychical phenomena” are intermittent, and that they are so much the exception that they may safely be ignored. But there have been literally thousands of cases of poltergeist phenomena, and they continue to occur with a regularity that makes them easy to record and investigate. No one who considers the phenomenon open-mindedly can fail to be convinced that the poltergeist is a reality that defies “purely scientific” explanation."

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December 11, 2021 - December 13, 2021.

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42. Possession by the Dead

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"In 1924 the National Psychological Institute in Los Angeles published a book with the arresting title Thirty Years Among the Dead, by Carl A. Wickland. It was not, as one might have supposed, the memoirs of a mortuary attendant but an account by a respectable doctor of medicine of his psychological research into Spiritualism. Inevitably, it aroused a great deal of scorn among the medical fraternity, one fortunate result being that first editions are still fairly easy to find in the “occult” sections of secondhand bookshops. Yet this is hardly fair to a work that proves, on closer examination, to be a sober and factual account of Dr Wickland’s theory that a great deal of mental illness is caused by “spirit possession”."

" ... (Wickland’s experience was that people who are insane or on the verge of a nervous breakdown are vulnerable to these psychic parasites.) ... "

"In a well-known case of the 1870s, a French youth named Louis Vivé was bitten by a viper and became paralyzed in both legs for three years; during this time he was quiet and well behaved. One day he had a “hysterico-epileptic” attack, followed by a fifteen-hour sleep; when he woke up, the well-behaved youth had given way to a violent, aggressive, and dishonest delinquent. But, unlike Frank James, Vivé’s two personalities continued to alternate. This new “criminal” self had a speech defect and was paralyzed down the right side of his body. After receiving a conviction for theft, Vivé was sent to an asylum at Rochefort, where two doctors became interested in his case. At this time there was considerable interest in the influence of magnets and of various metals on physical ailments like paralysis, and the doctors tried stroking his right side with steel. It had the effect of transferring the paralysis to the left side and restoring the patient to his previous quiet and well-behaved personality. All his memories of the “criminal” period vanished, and he could recall only his “own” earlier self – although his “other self” could be brought back by hypnosis.

"Here it seems clear that the “criminal” Vivé was a condition associated with his right brain – hence the speech disorder. (Speech is controlled by the left side of the brain). ... "

Interesting - because generally, most males brand women - however falsely - as talkers, and so do academics related to medicine and psychology; but then again, women arent credited with logical thought, which is supposedly left brain, only with unreasonable and unreasoning emotion, which is held not left brain! Does that imply there are more divisions of brain and functions, or just that males are completely confused every time it's concerning women?

" ... Rivail ... published the result in an influential work entitled The Spirits’ Book. (He used the pseudonym Allan Kardec, suggested to him by “spirits”.)

"According to The Spirits’ Book, man consists of body, “aura”, intelligent soul, and spiritual soul. The aim of human life, according to the spirits, is evolution, and this comes about through reincarnation – rebirth into new bodies. People who die suddenly, or are unprepared for death by reason of wasted lives, are often unaware that they are dead and become homeless, wanderers on the earth, attracted by human beings of like mind, and sharing their lives and experiences. They are able, to some extent, to influence these like-minded people and to make them do their will through suggestion. Some “low spirits” are activated by malice; others are merely mischievous and can use energy drawn from human beings to cause physical disturbances – these are known as poltergeists. When Kardec asked, “Do spirits influence our thoughts and actions”? the answer was, “Their influence upon [human beings] is greater than you suppose, for it is very often they who direct both”. Asked about possession, the “spirit” explained that a spirit cannot actually take over another person’s body, since that belongs to its owner; but a spirit can assimilate itself to a person who has the same defects and qualities as himself and may dominate such a person. In short, such spirits could be described as “mind parasites”."

"Perhaps the most obvious example of Oesterreich’s failure to allow facts to speak for themselves is in his account of one of the most famous of all cases of “possession”, that of “the Watseka wonder”, a girl named Lurancy Vennum. In July 1877 thirteen-year-old Lurancy, of Watseka, Illinois, had a fit, after which she became prone to trances. In these trances she became a medium, and a number of disagreeable personalities manifested themselves through her. On 11 February 1878, placed under hypnosis by a local doctor, Lurancy stated that there was a spirit in the room named Mary Roff, and a Mrs Roff who was also present exclaimed, “That’s my daughter”. Mary had died twelve years earlier, at the age of eighteen. Lurancy then stated that Mary was going to be allowed to take over her body for the next three months.

"The next day Lurancy claimed to be Mary Roff. She asked to be taken back to the Roff’s home, and on the way there, she recognized their previous home, in which they had lived while she was alive and which was unknown to Lurancy. She also recognized Mary Roff’s sister, who was standing at the window. And during the next few weeks, “Mary” showed a precise and detailed knowledge of the Roff household and of Mary’s past, recognizing old acquaintances and toys and recalling long-forgotten incidents. On 21 May, the day she had declared she had to leave, she took a tearful farewell of her family, and on the way home, “became” Lurancy again. The case was investigated by Richard Hodgson, one of the most skeptical members of the Society for Psychical Research, who was convinced of its genuineness."

"It is difficult to draw a clear dividing line between “possession” and poltergeist manifestations. Poltergeists are “noisy ghosts” who cause objects to fly through the air, and scientific observation of dozens of cases has established their reality beyond all doubt. The most widely held current view is that they are a form of ‘spontaneous psychokinesis” (mind over matter) caused by the unconscious mind of an emotionally disturbed adolescent, but this theory fails to explain how the unconscious mind can cause heavy objects to fly through the air. (In labouratory experiments, “psychics” have so far failed to move any object larger than a compass needle.) ... "

Wilson comes, after describing other cases, to church.

"It is important to realize that fornication among the clergy was a commonplace occurrence in the seventeenth century and that seduction of nuns by their confessors was far from rare. In 1625 a French orphan named Madeleine Bavent was seduced by a Franciscan priest, appropriately named Bonnetemps. In the following year she entered a convent run by Brother Pierre David, who secretly belonged to the Illuminati – a sect that believed that the Holy Spirit could do no harm and that therefore, sex was perfectly acceptable among priests. David apparently insisted that Madeleine should strip to the waist as he administered communion; other nuns, she later claimed, strolled around naked. She claimed that she and David never engaged in actual intercourse – only mutual masturbation – and that when David died in 1628, his successor, Brother Mathurin Picard, continued to caress her genitals during confession."

" ... But half a century later the notorious chambre ardente (“lighted chamber”) affair revealed that many priests did, in fact, take part in such practices. When Louis XIV was informed by his chief of police that many women were asking for absolution for murdering their husbands, he ordered an investigation. It revealed that an international poisoning ring, organized by men of influence, existed. A number of fortune-tellers provided their clients with poisons and love philters, while priests performed Black Masses involving the sacrifice of babies and magical ceremonies in which they copulated with women on altars. These facts duly emerged in secret sessions of the “lighted chamber”, and were recorded in detail. (The king later ordered all records to be destroyed, but the official transcript was overlooked.) One hundred and four of the accused were sentenced, thirty-six of them to death, while two of the fortune-tellers were burned alive. It is difficult for us to understand why the Church was involved in this wave of demonology – the likeliest explanation is that seventeenth-century rationalism was undermining its authority and that the protest against this authority took the form of licentiousness and black magic. Whatever the explanation, the chambre ardente transcripts leave no doubt that it really happened."

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December 13, 2021 - December 16, 2021.

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43. Psychometry

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Colin Wilson discusses a topic he'd gone into, extensively, in his Philosopher's Stone.

"In one of his most interesting experiments he showed his wife a fragment of Roman tile which came from a villa that had belonged to the orator Cicero. She described a Roman villa and lines of soldiers; she also saw the owner of the villa, a genial, fleshy man with an air of command. Denton was disappointed; Cicero had been tall and thin. But by the time Denton came to write the second volume of The Soul of Things he had discovered that the villa had also belonged to the dictator Sulla, and that Sulla did fit his wife’s description.

"Another impressive “hit” was the “vision” induced by a piece of volcanic rock from Pompeii. Mrs Denton had no idea what it was, and was not allowed to see it; but she had a vivid impression of the eruption of Vesuvius and the crowds fleeing from Pompeii. Denton’s son Sherman had an even more detailed vision of ancient Pompeii, complete with many archaeological details – such as an image of a boat with a “swan’s neck” – which proved to be historically accurate."

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December 16, 2021 - December 16, 2021.

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44. Rennes-le-Château

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"The mystery of Rennes-le-Château is the riddle of a poor priest who discovered a secret that made him a millionaire and which profoundly shocked the priest to whom he confided it on his deathbed."

All too familiar to anyone who read Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Henry Lincoln. Colin Wilson traces the story of the mystery pursued by author of that work.

"It was in a book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), co-authored by Michael Baigent and Richard Lee, that Lincoln finally revealed this astonishing theory. It is difficult to discover from the book how far this is his own deduction from the evidence, and how far he received the information from sources like Gérard de Sède, or from M. Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair, who claims to be a lineal descendant of Dagobert II, and the chief Merovingian pretender to the throne of modern France. But the theory itself is straightforward enough. It is that Jesus did not die on the cross – that the sponge that was proffered to him contained a drug. Lincoln points out that Jesus seems to have taken only a few hours to die, while most people took days, even weeks. His death forestalled the breaking of his legs – an act of mercy that prevented a crucified man from supporting himself on his nailed feet, and ensured his swift suffocation as his weight dragged on his arms. The sponge was offered in the nick of time. The theory also involves the assumption that Jesus was married, and that his wife was probably Mary Magdalene, who may have been identical with Mary the sister of Martha and of Lazarus. According to the theory, Jesus left Palestine and came to Languedoc, although he may have ended his life at the siege of Masada in AD 74. The hillside tomb depicted by Poussin could well be the actual tomb of Jesus."

Colin Wilson mentions alternative theories.

" ... Brian Innes, who conducted a four-part investigation of the mystery in a magazine called The Unexplained in 1980, points out that quantities of gold have been found in the area. In 1645 a shepherd boy called Ignace Paris was executed for theft; he was in possession of gold coins, and claimed that he had found these after falling down a ravine and finding his way into a cave full of treasure. Innes says that more recently a slab of gold weighing nearly 45 lb has been found near Rennes-le-Château, made from fused Arab (or Crusader) coins, and that in 1928 the remains of a large gold statue were found in a hut on the edge of a stream that flows below the village.

"In their book The Holy Grail Revealed: The Real Secret of Rennes-le-Château, Patricia and Lionel Fanthorpe also argue strongly that Saunière found real treasure, not merely some ancient secret. Yet they are also inclined to agree with Lincoln that there was also some “object” referred to as the Grail which could confer power on those who owned it: they compare it to the Ring of Power in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and even suggest in one place, that it might be of “extra-terrestrial origin”, linking Rennes-le-Château with the “ancient astronaut” theories of Erich von Däniken."

But what if those were sponsored by church, anxious to obliterate Lincoln's questions by raising a dust storm? After all, church has been most unwilling to admit that the gospels discovered in desert had any truth, going public with a dismayed reaction of just how those contradicted the official stances of the church.

Colin Wilson discusses history post publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Henry Lincoln, who discovered more mystery of the region, from a geographical pentagram on to more.

"That being so, it seems inevitable that in the Christian era, churches would be built so as to conform to this geometrical pattern. And in fact, an enthusiast named David Wood studied the map of the area, and quickly discovered that a precise circle could be drawn through five churches, including Rennes-le-Chateau, connected by a pentacular geometry. His book Genisis contains some remarkable insights into the geometry of the area, which Lincoln (who introduces the book) acknowledges to be remarkable. However, Lincoln – probably in common with most readers of the book – is unable to agree with Wood’s explanation of the mystery, which involves a super-race who came from Sirius 200,000 years ago, and became the gods of Ancient Egypt. Such speculations, while fascinating, are obviously unproven and unprovable."

"Equally controversial are the speculations contained in a book called The Tomb of God (1996) by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, whose geometrical constructions leave them to locate the tomb of Jesus at the foot of a mountain near Rennes-le-Chateau, and who are convinced that Saunière was murdered. But a BBC television programme about the book seemed to demonstrate that the BBC’s attitude to Rennes-le-Chateau had changed since Lincoln’s three programmes, and that they had become hard line skeptics."

What else is new! BBC of course is hidebound supporting every possible abrahmic institutional power, even if that amounts to jihadist massacres so long as they aren't in the vicinity of BBC. So of course they're hostile to anything viewed askance by church, even if it's that of Rome!

Colin Wilson goes on with some fascinating details regarding measurements of ancient era and how they precisely connect in round numbers with measurements of the earth, pointing out that such coincidences are unbelievable; he further relates it to the Languedoc region, megaliths, and more.

" ... Was the earth, in fact, measured by some much earlier civilization, dating back long before the Egyptians or the Sumerians? In our book The Atlantis Blueprint, Rand Flem-Ath and I have argued that Antartica was Atlantis and that a great civilization existed in Atlantis – as Plato suggests – as long ago as 10,500 BC."

But earlier, he spoke of Venus, of precession of axis of rotation of earth and of how ancient civilisations seem to have known that it was 26,500 years, and of Venus seen as important by them; all of which points to history of civilisation being far older, of course.

India woukdnt be surprised at that, except those with a mindset of slavery to invaders and colonial rulers, conquistadores and foreigners - India after all knew of Himaalayan ranges rising out of the ocean, of Sindhu river (called Indus by outsiders) having once been the location of an ocean (hence the name, Sindhu, which literally means ocean in Sanskrit and therefore in most Indian languages), of evolution and much, much more.

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December 16, 2021 - December 17, 2021.

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45. Did Robin Hood Really Exist?

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Author discusses possible identity of the legendary, and closes on one known to hsve lived during reign of Edward II.

" ... There had been a time when the forests of England were common land, and half-starved peasantry must have felt it was highly unreasonable that thousands of square miles of forest should be reserved for the king’s hunting, when the king could not make use of a fraction of that area."

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December 17, 2021 - December 17, 2021.

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46. The Mystery Death of Mary Rogers

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An abortion gone wrong, a coroner's report stating rape and murder, and story by Edgar Allan Poe, about a beautiful young woman.

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December 17, 2021 - December 17, 2021.

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47. “Saint-Germain the Deathless”

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About a man who fascinated various aristocrats and royals of Europe, from France to Russia.

" ... In 1845 Franz Graffer declares in his Memoirs that he had seen Saint-Germain, and that he had announced that he would appear in the Himalayas towards the turn of the century – a claim that in due course led Madame Blavatsky to include him among her “Secret Masters” in Tibet, and to quote him with respect in The Secret Doctrine. But again, the Memoirs of Franz Graffer are thought to be a forgery. On the other hand, Madame Blavatsky went to the trouble of visiting the then Countess d’Adhémar in 1885, and Mrs Cooper-Oakley, whose book on Saint-Germain appeared in 1912, discovered that there were still documents about him in the possession of the d’Adhémar family. ... "

" ... It is a disappointing conclusion that the Man of Mystery, the Secret Master, was merely a brilliant industrial chemist. But it is the only theory that corresponds to the facts as we know them."

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December 17, 2021 - December 17, 2021.

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48. The Miracles of Saint-Médard

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"One of those who investigated the happenings was a lawyer named Louis Adrien de Paige. When he told his friend, the magistrate Louis-Basile Carré de Montgéron, what he had seen the magistrate assured him patronizingly that he had been taken in by conjuring tricks – the kind of “miracles” performed by tricksters at fairgrounds. But he finally agreed to go with Paige to the churchyard, if only for the pleasure of pointing out how the lawyer had been deceived. They went there on the morning of 7 September 1731. And de Montgéron left the churchyard a changed man – he even endured prison rather than deny what he had seen that day."

Descriptions thereof, quite revolting.

"It would be absurd to stop looking for scientific explanations of the miracles of Saint-Médard. But let us not in the meantime deceive ourselves by accepting superficial “skeptical” explanations."

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December 17, 2021 - December 18, 2021.

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49. The Sea Kings of 6000 BC

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Thrilling from the word go, even when one is familiar with the beginning bit, due to Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of Gods.

"The story began in 1956, when a cartographer named M. I. Walters, at the U.S. Navy Hydrographic Office, found himself looking at a copy of a strange map that had been presented to the Office by a Turkish naval officer. It was obviously very old – in fact, it was dated 919 in the Muslim calendar, which is AD 1513 by Christian reckoning. It was basically a map of the Atlantic Ocean, showing a small part of North Africa, from what is now Morocco to the Ivory Coast, and all of South America. These were in their correct longitudes, a remarkable – in fact, almost unbelievable – achievement for those days, when most maps were laughably crude. (One of the most famous medieval maps shows Italy joined to Spain; another shows the British Isles shaped like a teapot.) It was also, for 1513, an astonishingly accurate map of South America. And what was even more surprising was that it apparently showed Antarctica, which was not discovered until 1818. Oddly enough, it also showed the mid-Atlantic ridge, which seems an unbelievable piece of knowledge for any period before the invention of sonar depth soundings – unless, of course, it had been observed while it was still above water.

"The original mapmaker had been a Turkish pirate named Piri Re’is (Re’is means “admiral”), who had been beheaded in 1554. He had been the nephew of a famous pirate, Kemal Re’is, and had held a high post, equivalent to the governorship of Egypt. Piri Re’is had made the interesting statement that he had based his map on twenty old maps, one of them made by Christopher Columbus and others from the great library of Alexandria, destroyed by invading Arabs in AD 640.

"In fact, the Piri Re’is map had been known since 1929, when it had been discovered in the Topkapi Palace museum in Istanbul, and there was already a copy in the Library of Congress. But thus far, no one had paid much attention to it. ... "

Typical of Europe and migrants there from, presuming they know it all, and anything else from anywhere else is myth, or worse! Experience doesn't teach them any better, either.

Walters took the map to a friend, admiral Mallery, who pointed out that the map showed Antarctica before it was covered by ice, which was long before the time of Alexander the great. Hapgood has a theory about ice ages and earth crust that fitted Antarctica being closer to equator.

But Hapgood discovered more of maps that showed Antarctica correctly without ice sheet, and polar ice cap, and more; this must have been based on even older maps, preceding Alexander the great by several millennia.

Which turns history as presumed by west completely on its head.

"And this, of course, suggested the staggering idea that some worldwide seafaring civilization had existed before Alexander the Great and that it had disappeared while the civilization of Mesopotamia was still primitive and illiterate. This is the suggestion that Hapgood – shunning all academic caution – outlines in his book’s last chapter, “A Civilisation That Vanished.” He points out that we had to wait for the eighteenth century to develop an accurate method of measuring longitude and the circumference of the earth, and until the nineteenth for the exploration of the Arctic and Antarctic. According to Hapgood: “The maps indicate that some ancient people did all these things.” And this civilization disappeared, either in some catastrophe or over a long period of time, and was simply forgotten. If it existed in Antarctica – and possibly the Arctic – then its disappearance is easily explained by the return of the ice cap about six thousand years ago."

"To be fair to von Däniken and The Morning of the Magicians, it must also be admitted that Hapgood’s carefully argued analysis of the portolans does offer some support for the “ancient astronaut” theory. The Oronteus Finaeus map does look as if it has been based on an aerial view. So does the 1550 Hadji Ahmed map of the world seen from above the North Pole. Moreover, it is still difficult to see how the lines and the vast drawings on the desert floor at Nazca could have been drawn by people who were unable to look down on them from the air – although primitive balloons would have been as effective as spacecraft for that purpose."

Again, wonder why Colin Wilson mentions Hapgood but not Graham Hancock.

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December 18, 2021 - December 18, 2021.

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50. Sea Monsters

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"At five o’clock on 6 August 1848, while the Daedalus was between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, one of the midshipmen reported a strange creature swimming slowly toward them off the starboard bow. Most of the crew were at supper, and there were only seven men on deck, including the captain, the watch officer, and the ship’s navigator. All of them witnessed what M’Quhae described as “an enormous serpent” – judged to be about 100 feet long – as it swam in a straight line past the frigate, apparently oblivious to its existence. The captain judged it to be travelling at around twelve to fifteen miles an hour and described how it had remained within the range of their spyglasses for nearly twenty minutes. Although the afternoon was showery and dull, M’Quhae stated that it was still bright enough to see the creature clearly and that it swam close enough that “had it been a man of my acquaintance I should have easily recognized his features with the naked eye”."

"Huevelmans quotes 587 sightings between 1639 and 1966. One of the 1966 sightings was made by two Englishmen, John Ridgeway and Chay Blyth. ... "

Colin Wilson goes on to describe ancient descriptions and more recent sightings of various such creatures, from kraken off Scandinavian coasts to giant squids and octopi, encountered or sighted in ocean or found on beaches off Atlantic ocean, to Loch Ness monster like creatures, sighted and photographed, off coast of Cornwall.

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December 18, 2021 - December 18, 2021.

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51. Who Was Shakespeare?

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Colin Wilson brings up the question of identity of the real author of works ascribed to Shakespeare, known in his time as an actor, a butcher's son and as a playwright, one who left no library, not even one of his own works.

Wilson describes various researchers going into the question, and concluding, mostly, that Francis Bacon was the obvious author of the works. But then he delivers a swift judgement with good reasoning, accompanied by a shirt sketch of Francis Bacon, to say that it's difficult to imagine the two being same.

"Bacon is a baffling character, a strange mixture of greatness and pettiness. He was the most intelligent man of his time, and in some ways one of the nastiest. It would be difficult to conceive a character more totally unlike Shakespeare’s. The dramatist had genius; yet in a sense was not particularly intelligent. He wrote as naturally as a bird sings. The pessimism in which he frequently indulges is the pessimism of a child who has just lost a favourite toy, not the gloomy cynicism of the brilliant intellectual who despises his own craving for success. It is as impossible that Bacon could have written Shakespeare as that Schopenhauer could have written Alice in Wonderland."

Wilson next presents the case for Christopher Marlowe and argues against it. Next, Wilson discusses another candidate, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. He goes then into the story of William Shakespeare and the two Annes in his life.

" ... Neither Bacon nor Derby nor Oxford nor Marlowe nor even Anne Whateley finally emerge as a more convincing candidate than the Stratford actor.

"But what of the Stratford actor? It seems, to put it mildly, unlikely that a man whose father was illiterate and whose children were illiterate, and who could not even be bothered to keep copies of his own books in the house, should have written Hamlet and Othello. We may reject all the other candidates as absurd; but at the end of the day we still find ourselves facing the same problems that made the Rev. James Wilmot conclude that, whoever wrote the plays and sonnets, it was not William Shakespeare."

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December 18, 2021 - December 19, 2021.

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52. The Skull of Doom

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A quartz crystal skull with prisms for eyes, Mayan temple, Maya and Atlantis, lost treasures, .... knights templar, ....

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December 19, 2021 - December 19, 2021.

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53. Spontaneous Human Combustion

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Wilson discusses various incidents and more.

" ... G.H. Lewes, George Eliot’s lover, took issue with Dickens and declared that spontaneous combustion was impossible, so in his preface to Bleak House Dickens contradicts Lewes and cites thirty examples from press reports. Yet at the end of his article on Krook in The Dickens Encyclopedia (1924), Arthur L. Hayward states dogmatically: “The possibility of spontaneous combustion in human beings has been finally disproved”. He fails to explain what experiments have “finally disproved” it."

"Another investigator, Larry Arnold, put forward his own theory in the magazine Frontiers of Science (January 1982): that so-called “ley lines” – lines of “earth force” may be involved. The man who “discovered” ley lines, Alfred Watkins, noted how frequently places called “Brent” occur on them (brent being an old English form of “burnt”). Other “ley-hunters” have suggested that megalithic stone circles are placed at crucial points on ley lines – often at crossing-points of several leys. It is again interesting to note how many stone circles are associated with the idea of dancing – for example, the Merry Maidens in Cornwall; Stonehenge itself was known as “the Giants’ Dance”. It has been suggested that ritual dances occurred at these sites, so that the dancers would somehow interact with the earth energy (or “telluric force”).

"Larry Arnold drew a dozen or so major leys on a map of England, then set out to find if they were associated with mystery fires. He claims that one 400-mile-long “fire-leyne” (as he calls them) passed through five towns where ten mysterious blazes had concurred. He also notes several cases of spontaneous combustion occurring on this “leyne”. He cites four cases which occurred on it between 1852 and 1908."

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December 19, 2021 - December 20, 2021.

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54. Synchronicity or “Mere Coincidence”?

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Wilson gives varios examples of coincidences, before going into story of Jung.

"For most of his life Jung was unwilling even to conceive of such a possibility – at least publicly. (He was, in fact, using the I Ching as an oracle from the early 1920s.)

"In 1944, when he was sixty-eight years old, Jung slipped on an icy road and broke his ankle; this led to a severe heart attack. While hovering between life and death, Jung experienced curious visions, in one of which he was hovering above the earth, out in space, then saw a kind of Hindu temple inside a meteor. “Night after night I floated in a state of purest bliss”. He was convinced that if he recovered his doctor would have to die – and in fact the doctor died as Jung started to recover. The result of these strange experiences was that Jung ceased to be concerned about whether his contemporaries regarded him as a mystic rather than a scientist, and he ceased to make a secret of his lifelong interest in “the occult”. In 1949 he wrote his influential introduction to Richard Wilhelm’s edition of the I Ching, in which he speaks about the “acausal connecting principle” called synchronicity; in the following year he wrote his paper On Synchronicity, later expanded into a book. ... "

Wilson proceeds to then argue against Jung, before resuming examples of coincidences.

" ... In 1898 a novelist named Morgan Robertson wrote a book about a ship called the Titan, “the safest vessel in the world”, which hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic; fourteen years later his story came to life in the tragic maiden voyage of the Titanic. Moreover, the editor W. T. Stead had written a story about a ship that sank, and concluded: “This is exactly what might take place, and what will take place, if liners are sent to sea short of boats”. Like the liner in Morgan Robertson’s novel, the Titanic did not have enough boats. And W. T. Stead was one of those who drowned."

"In 1885 a playwright named Arthur Law wrote a play about a man called Robert Golding, the sole survivor of the shipwreck of a vessel called the Caroline. A few days after it was staged, Law read an account of the sinking of a ship called the Caroline; the sole survivor was called Robert Golding."

"In the month preceding the Allied invasion of Normandy – D-Day – the Daily Telegraph crossword puzzle gave most of the codewords for the operation: Utah, Mulberry, Neptune and Overlord (the last being the name of the whole operation). MI5 was called to investigate, but found that the compiler of the crosswords was a schoolmaster named Dawe who had no idea of how the words had come into his head."

"Jung worked out his idea of synchronicity with the aid of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli himself seemed to have some odd power of causing coincidences. Whenever he touched some piece of experimental apparatus it tended to break. One day in Göttingen a complicated apparatus for studying atomic events collapsed without warning, and Professor J. Franck is said to have remarked: “Pauli must be around somewhere”. He wrote to Pauli, and received a reply saying that at the time of the accident his train had been standing in the station at Göttingen, on its way to Copenhagen. Pauli, understandably, was intrigued by Jung’s ideas about synchronicity, and Jung’s book on the subject was published together with a paper by Pauli on archetypal ideas in the work of Kepler – Kepler had apparently stumbled on the idea of archetypes three centuries earlier, although he meant something closer to Plato’s “ideas”. ... "

Wilson speculates about synchronicity being the right Britain halves reminding us that grinding bore is not all there is to life.

"But even if synchronicity declines to fit into any of our scientific theories, this is no reason to refuse to believe in its existence. Science still has no idea of how or why the universe began, of the nature of time, or of what lies beyond the outermost limit of the stars. In fact, science continues to use terms like space, time and motion as if they were comprehensible to the human intellect; no one accuses Cantor of being an occultist or mystic because he devised a mathematics of infinity. Science continues to grow and develop in spite of its uneasy metaphysical foundations."

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December 20, 2021 - December 20, 2021.

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55. Time in Disarray

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Wilson begins with something he mentioned in an earlier chapter, about Ivan T. Sanderson and his wife in Haiti suddenly seeing Paris of five hundred years ago.

"When eventually they arrived back home they were surprised to find that their servant woman had a hot meal waiting for them, and a large bowl of hot water, in which she insisted on washing Mrs Sanderson’s feet; the head man had prepared hot baths for Sanderson and Fred Allsop. They would not explain how they knew that Sanderson and his companions would be back at dawn. But one of the young men in the village later said to Sanderson: “You saw things, didn’t you? You don’t believe it, but you could always see things if you wanted to.”"

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December 20, 2021 - December 20, 2021.

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56. The Great Tunguska Explosion

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"On 30 June 1908 the inhabitants of Nizhne-Karelinsk, a small village in central Siberia, saw a bluish-white streak of fire cut vertically across the sky to the north-west. What began as a bright point of light lengthened over a period often minutes until it seemed to split the sky in two. When it reached the ground it shattered to form a monstrous cloud of black smoke. Seconds later there was a terrific roaring detonation that made the buildings tremble. Assuming that the Day of Judgment had arrived, many of the villagers fell on their knees. The reaction was not entirely absurd; in fact, they had witnessed the greatest natural disaster in the earth’s recorded history. If the object that caused what is now known as “the Great Siberian Explosion” had arrived a few hours earlier or later it might have landed in more heavily populated regions, and caused millions of deaths.

"As it later turned out, the village of Nizhne-Karelinsk had been over 200 miles away from the “impact point”, and yet the explosion had been enough to shake debris from their roofs. A Trans-Siberian express train stopped because the driver was convinced that it was derailed; and seismographs in the town of Irkutsk indicated a crash of earthquake proportions. Both the train and the town were over 800 miles from the explosion.

"Whatever it was that struck the Tunguska region of the Siberian forestland had exploded with a force never before imagined. Its shock-wave travelled around the globe twice before it died out, and its general effect on the weather in the northern hemisphere was far-reaching. During the rest of June it was quite possible to read the small print in the London Times at midnight. There were photographs of Stockholm taken at one o’clock in the morning by natural light, and a photograph of the Russian town of Navrochat taken at midnight looks like a bright summer afternoon.

"For some months the world was treated to spectacular dawns and sunsets, as impressive as those that had been seen after the great Krakatoa eruption in 1883. From this, as well as the various reports of unusual cloud formations over following months, it is fair to guess that the event had thrown a good deal of dust into the atmosphere, as happens with violent volcanic eruptions and, notably, atomic explosions."

Wilson gives details of subsequent exploration, begun only after Russian revolution, and discovery of the devastation at Tunguska, along with hundreds of locals testifying to the strange trajectory of the object as it swerved. First explorer thought it was a meteor, but the impact site was very different from others, and no fragments found. After WWII the effects were recognised as thermonuclear blast, and other theories were put forth.

"More recently, it has been pointed out that the Tunguska event took place on 30 June and that on that same day each year the earth’s orbit crosses that of a meteor stream called Beta Taurids, producing a “meteor shower”. ... "

" ... Professor Alexis Zolotov (the leader of the 1959 expedition to Tunguska) calculated that, whatever the object was, it was about 130 feet in diameter, and exploded about three miles above the ground with a force of 40 megatons, 2,000 times greater than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima."

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December 20, 2021 - December 20, 2021.

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57. Unidentified Flying Objects

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"The story of modern sightings began on 24 June 1947 when a businessman named Kenneth Arnold was flying his private plane near Mount Rainier in Washington State; against the background of the mountain, he saw nine shining discs travelling very fast – he estimated their speed at a thousand miles an hour, far beyond the speed of which any aircraft was capable at that time. Arnold said they were flying in formation, like geese, and that they wove in and out of the mountain peaks; he later compared their flight to a “saucer skipped across the water”. So UFOs came to be referred to as “flying saucers”.

"Arnold’s story was widely reported in the American Press, for he had a good reputation and was taken seriously – he had been out searching for the wreckage of a lost plane at the time he made the sighting, and obviously had no reason to invent such a story. Four days later, two pilots and two intelligence officers saw a bright light performing “impossible manoeuvres” over Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, and in Nevada on the same day another pilot saw a formation of “unidentified flying objects”. As these and other sightings were reported the Press began to give prominence to stories of flying saucers, and by the end of that year there had been hundreds of sightings – a number that soon grew into thousands."

" ... But was it conceivable that thousands of people – in fact, millions – could all be mistaken? For by 1966, a Gallup Poll revealed that five million Americans had seen flying saucers. ... "

Wilson discusses Chariots Of The Gods and points at various discrepancies in various works by the author, and things the author said but retracted later, yet let them continue in subsequent editions.

"As his investigation progressed, Keel became increasingly convinced that UFOs had been around for thousands of years, and that many biblical accounts of fiery chariots or fireballs are probably descriptions of them. In 1883 a Mexican astronomer named Jose Bonilla photographed 143 circular objects that moved across the solar disc. In 1878 a Texas farmer named John Martin saw a large circular object flying overhead, and actually used the word “saucer” in a newspaper interview about it. In 1897 people all over American began sighting huge airships – cigar-shaped craft. (This was before the man-made airship had been invented.) Dozens of other early “UFO” sightings have been chronicled in newspaper reports or pamphlets; Chapter 26 of Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned – written thirty years before the UFO craze – is devoted to strange objects and lights seen in the sky. One of the most convincing sightings was made by the Russian painter Nicholas Roerich (who designed Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring ballet); in his book Altai Himalaya (1930) he describes how, making his way from Mongolia to India in 1926, he – and the whole party – observed a big shiny disc moving swiftly across the sky. Like so many modern UFOs, this one suddenly changed direction above their camp. (In many UFO reports, the object seems to defy the laws of momentum by turning at right angles at great speed.) It vanished over the mountain peaks."

" ... Vallee devotes a chapter of The Invisible College to studying the case of Uri Geller. Geller, the Israeli psychic and “metal-bender”, was “discovered” by the scientist Andrija Puharich. Geller’s powers aroused such worldwide interest that it seemed inevitable that the first full-length book about him would become a bestseller. In fact Puharich’s Uri: A Journal of the Mystery of Uri Geller (1974) came close to destroying Puharich’s reputation as a serious investigator. It seems to be full of baffling confusions and preposterous and inexplicable happenings. Yet it also provides some vital clues to the mystery of “space intelligences”. In 1952, long before he met Geller, Puharich was studying with a Hindu psychic named Dr Vinod when Vinod went into a trance and began to speak with an English voice; this trance-entity announced itself as a member of “the Nine”, superhuman intelligences who had been studying the human race for thousands of years, and whose purpose is to aid human evolution. Three years later, travelling in Mexico, Puharich met an American doctor who also passed on lengthy messages from “space intelligences” – the odd thing being that they were a continuation of the messages that had come through Dr Vinod. When Puharich met Geller in 1971 the “Nine” again entered the story; while Geller was in a trance a voice spoke out of the air above his head explaining that Geller had been programmed by “space intelligences” from the age of three – the aim being to prevent the human race from plunging itself into catastrophe. Puharich goes on to describe UFO sightings, and an endless series of baffling events, with objects appearing and disappearing and recorded tapes being mysteriously “wiped”. Puharich assured the present writer (CW) that he had left out some of the more startling items because they would be simply beyond belief."

Colin Wilson has, not only in this chapter but throughout the book, used the term "spiritualism" in the sense of, not spiritual life or person as in yogi, but in sense of a medium dealing with spirits.

"In The Flying Saucer Vision (1967), the English writer John Michell also takes his starting-point from Jung. Michell accepts Jung’s view that the UFO phenomenon is somehow connected with the “religious vacuum” in the soul of modern man. He associates UFOs with ancient legends about gods who descend in airships, and his conclusions are not dissimilar to those of von Däniken, although rather more convincingly argued. But Michell also has an original contribution to make to “ufology”. In his researches he had stumbled upon Alfred Watkins’s book The Old Straight Track (1925), in which Watkins argues that the countryside is intersected with ancient straight trackways which were prehistoric trade routes, and that these tracks connect “sacred sites” such as churches, stone circles, barrows and tumuli. Watkins called these “ley lines”. Michell argues that the ley lines are identical with lines that the Chinese call “dragon paths” or lung mei. The Chinese science of feng shui, or geomancy, is basically a religious system concerned with the harmony between man and nature; it regards the earth as a living body. Lung mei are lines of force on the earth’s surface, and one of the aims of feng shui is to preserve and concentrate this force, and prevent it from leaking away. Michell was mistaken to state that lung mei are straight lines, like Watkins’ leys – in fact, the Chinese regard straight lines with suspicion; the essential quality of lung meis is that they are crooked. But Michell takes an important step beyond Watkins in regarding ley lines as lines of some earth force; he believes that ancient man selected spots in which there was a high concentration of this force as their sacred sites. Points where two or more ley lines cross have a special significance. Michell also points out that many sightings of flying saucers occur on ley lines, and particularly on their points of intersection – for example, Warminster, in Wiltshire, where a truly extraordinary number of sightings have been made. In a book called The Undiscovered Country, Stephen Jenkins, another serious investigator of such matters, points out how often crossing-points of ley lines are associated with all kinds of “supernatural” occurrences, from ghosts and poltergeists to strange visions of phantom armies. Once again we seem to have an interesting link between UFOs and the “supernatural”."

In fact, Colin Wilson had published a book, read three decades ago when it wasn't new, that spoke of Ely lines, Salisbury mound and more; recent search hasn't helped in identifying it, if it's at all available on kindle or Amazon.

" ... Like Vallee, Holiday finally became convinced that the answer to the UFO enigma lies in “the psychic solution”. It must be acknowledged that there is a great deal of evidence that points in this direction. On the other hand, it would be premature to discount the possibility that they may be spacecraft from another planet or galaxy; this is a matter on which it would be foolish not to keep an open mind."

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December 20, 2021 - December 21, 2021.

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58. Vampires: Do They Exist?

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Colin Wilson gives, to begin with, instances of documented cases, from region nrear Belgrade - Transylvania? -, most of which involve inspecting buried dead and finding them indicated, rather opposite.

Does cremation prevent the occurrence? Hopefully so.

"After the examination had taken place, the heads of the vampires were out off by the local gypsies and then burned along with the bodies, after which the ashes were thrown into the river Morava. The decomposed bodies, however, were laid back in their own graves. ... "

"As we study this strange account (which is admittedly difficult to do without skipping), there is an obvious temptation to dismiss it as a farrago of peasant superstition. Yet this is no secondhand tale of absurd horrors; the three doctors were officers in the army of Charles VI, Emperor of Austria – that newly emerging power that was succeeding the Holy Roman Empire. They were thoroughly familiar with corpses, having been serving in the army that had fought the Turks since 1714 and that defeated them four years later.

"A brief sketch of the historical background may clarify the emergence of vampires in the first half of the eighteenth century. For more than four centuries the Turks had dominated eastern Europe, marching in and out of Transylvania, Walachia, and Hungary and even conquering Constantinople in 1453. Don John of Austria defeated them at the great sea battle of Lepanto (1571), but it was their failure to capture Vienna after a siege in 1683 that caused the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. During the earlier stages of this war between Europe and Turkey, the man whose name has become synonymous with vampirism – Dracula, or Vlad the Impaler – struck blow after blow against the Turks, until they killed and beheaded him in 1477."

Colin Wilson gives a brief biography of Vlad Tapes, known as Dracula. He goes on to mention varios cases across Europe, both continent and U.K., and one factor common us the ceasing of disturbance after cremation. Thereafter Wilson digresses, discussing poltergeists, possession, and even a case of a spirit taking over a body of a small boy and reviving, but claiming the identity of the spirit and proving its truth; thus last one is called reincarnation by the original author, and it occurred in India, but Colin Wilson names it as possession; technically Wilson is closer to correct - since reincarnation involves a completely new life, not taking over body of someone dead at the same time.

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December 21, 2021 - December 21, 2021.

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59. Velikovsky’s Comet

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" ... Worlds in Collision ... According to the author, Immanuel Velikovsky, the earth had been almost destroyed about three and a half thousand years ago by a near-collision with a comet; in the earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that followed, cities were wiped out and whole countries laid waste. ... "

"Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian Jew, born in Vitebsk in June 1895 who had studied mathematics in Moscow. He went on to study medicine, qualifying in 1921, then studied psychiatry in Vienna with Freud’s pupil Stekel. In 1924 he moved to Palestine to practise, and became increasingly interested in Biblical archaeology. The turning-point in his career was a reading of Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1937). In this book Freud proposes that Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian, and that he was a follower of the monotheistic religion of the Pharaoh Akhnaton (see chapter 11), the king who replaced the host of Egyptian gods with one single sun god. Freud proposed that Moses fled from Egypt after the death of Akhnaton (probably murdered) and imposed his religion on the Jews.

"The obvious historical objection to this theory is that Moses is supposed to have lived about a century after the death of Akhnaton; but Freud contested this view, and moved fearlessly into the arena of historical research. Dazzled by his boldness, Velikovsky decided to do the same. His researches into Egyptian, Greek and Near Eastern history soon convinced him that much of the accepted dating is hopelessly wrong. But they led him to an even more unorthodox conclusion: that the pharaoh Akhnaton was none other than the legendary Oedipus of Greek myth, and that the story arose out of the fact that Akhnaton had murdered his father and married his mother."

"In 1939 Velikovsky moved to the United States, and continued his researches in its libraries. What precisely was the “great catastrophe”? The Austrian Harms Hoerbiger had put forward the theory that the earth has had several moons (see chapter 2), and that the collapse of one of these moons on the earth caused the great floods and upheavals recorded in the Bible and in other ancient documents. But Velikovsky came to reject the Hoerbiger theory. There was a far more exciting clue. Before the second millennium BC – and even later – the planet Venus was not grouped by ancient astronomers with the other planets. That might have been because it was so close to the sun that they mistook it for a star – in fact, it is called the morning star. But what if it was because Venus was not in its present position at that time? Velikovsky found tantalizing references in old documents to something that sounded like a near-collision of a comet with the earth. In legends from Greece to Mexico he found suggestions that this catastrophe was somehow linked with Venus. Only one thing puzzled him deeply: that other legends seemed to link the catastrophe with Zeus, the father of the gods, also known as Jupiter. He finally reconciled these stories by reaching the astonishing conclusion that Venus was “born out of Jupiter – forced out by a gigantic explosion. Venus began as a comet, and passed so close to Mars that it was dragged out of its orbit; then it came close to earth, causing the Biblical catastrophes; then it finally settled down near the sun as the planet Venus."

" ... Gordon Atwater, chairman of the astronomy department at New York’s Museum of Natural History; he published a review urging that scientists ought to be willing to consider the book without prejudice; the review resulted in his dismissal. James Putnam, the editor who accepted Worlds in Collision, was dismissed from Macmillan. Professors deluged Macmillan with letters threatening to boycott their textbooks unless Worlds in Collision was withdrawn. Macmillans failed to show the same courage that had led them to ignore similar veiled threats from Shapley; they passed on Velikovsky to the Doubleday corporation, who had no textbook department to worry about, and who were probably unable to believe their luck in being handed such a profitable piece of intellectual merchandise. Fred Whipple, Shapley’s successor at Harvard, wrote to Doubleday27 telling them that if they persisted in publishing Velikovsky, he wanted them to take his own book Earth, Moon and Planets off their list. (Twenty years later, he denied in print ever writing such a letter.)

"Velikovsky himself was rather bewildered by the sheer violence of the reactions; it had taken him thirty years to develop his theory, and he had expected controversy; but this amounted to persecution. He was willing to admit that he could be wrong about the nature of the catastrophe; but the historical records showed that something had taken place. Why couldn’t they admit that, and then criticize his theory, instead of treating him as a madman? The only thing to do was to go on collecting more evidence."

" ... In Velikovsky’s dating, Queen Hatshepsut, generally assumed to have lived about 1500 BC, becomes a contemporary of Solomon more than four centuries later (in fact, Velikovsky identifies her with the Queen of Sheba), while the pharaoh Rameses II – assumed to live around 1250 BC – becomes a contemporary of Nebuchadnezzar more than six centuries later. The great invasion of barbarians known as the Sea Peoples, usually dated about 1200 BC, is placed by Velikovsky in the middle of the fourth century BC, about the time of the death of Plato. The arguments contained in Ages in Chaos (1953), Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960), Peoples of the Sea (1977) and Rameses II and his Time (1978) are of interest to historians rather than to scientists, but, like the earlier works, are totally absorbing to read. Two other projected volumes, The Dark Age in Greece and The Assyrian Conquest, have not so far been published. But a third volume of the Worlds in Collision series, Mankind in Amnesia, appeared posthumously in 1982. It expands a short section in Worlds in Collision arguing that catastrophic events produce a kind of collective amnesia. ... "

" ... textbook of astronomy states that the temperature on the surface of Venus “may be as high as boiling water”. Velikovsky argued that it should be much higher, since Venus is so “young” in astronomical terms. Mariner 2 revealed that the temperature on the surface of Venus is about 900°C. It also revealed the curious fact that Venus rotates backward as compared to all the other planets, an oddity that seems incomprehensible if it was formed at the same time and evolved through the same process.

"Russian space probes also revealed that Venus has violent electrical storms. Velikovsky had argued that the planets have powerful magnetic fields, and that therefore a close brush between the earth and a “comet” would produce quite definite effects. The discovery of the Van Allen belts around the earth supported Velikovsky’s view. There also seem to be close links between the rotation of Venus and Earth – Venus turns the same face to earth at each inferior conjunction, which could have come about through an interlocking of their magnetic fields. In the 1950s Velikovsky’s assertion about electromagnetic fields in space was treated with contempt – in Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, Martin Gardner remarked dismissively that Velikovsky had invented forces capable of doing whatever he wanted them to do. His electromagnetic theory also led Velikovsky to predict that Jupiter would be found to emit radio waves, and that the sun would have an extremely powerful magnetic field. One critic (D. Menzel) retorted that Velikovsky’s model of the sun would require an impossible charge of 1019 volts. Since then, Jupiter has been found to emit radio waves, while the sun’s electrical potential has been calculated at about 1019 volts. It could be said that many of Velikovsky’s theories are now an accepted part of astrophysics except, of course, that no one acknowledges that Velikovsky was the first one to formulate them.

"Another matter on which Velikovsky seems to have been proved correct is the question of the reversal of the earth’s magnetic poles. When molten volcanic rocks cool, or when clay or brick is baked, the magnetic minerals in it are magnetized in the direction of the earth’s magnetic field. At the turn of the century Giuseppe Folgerhaiter examined Etruscan vases, looking for minor magnetic variations, and was astonished to find that there seemed to have been a complete reversal of the magnetic field around the eighth century BC. Scientists explained his findings by declaring that the pots must have been fired upside down. But in 1906 Bernard Brunhes found the same complete reversal in certain volcanic rocks. Further research revealed that there had been at least nine such reversals in the past 3.6 million years. No one could make any plausible suggestion as to why this had happened. Velikovsky’s suggestion was that it was due to the close approach of other celestial bodies and that the earth’s brush with Venus should have produced such a reversal. His critics replied that there have been no reversals in the past half-million years or so. But since then two more have been discovered – one 28,000 years ago, the other about 12500 BC, and one of Velikovsky’s bitterest opponents Harold Urey, has come to admit that the “celestial body” theory is the likeliest explanation of pole-reversal. Yet so far the crucial piece of evidence – volcanic rock revealing a reversal about 1450 BC – has not been forthcoming."

There's one problem with all this, namely, the various ancient civilisations across the world with megalithic sites seem to have given importance to a time period that has to do with orbit of Venus and earth, a matter of over 26,500 years, which does not accord with Velikovsky's theory about Venus; but it could all fit if another celestial body were involved, such as one doing everything that Velikovsky's theory says Venus did, but striking Venus instead of being Venus, and that after an encounter with earth.

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December 21, 2021 - December 22, 2021.

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60. Vortices

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From atoms and molecules and smoke rings, to vortices... the last of which was what Kelvin considered his top achievement.

"If, as Kelvin believed, matter is made up of “vortices” or whirlpools, what are these whirlpools in? Ash replies that the very question is based on a misconception. Before Einstein, scientists believed that light was a vibration in the “ether” – an unknown fluid that pervades all space. Two physicists named Michelson and Morley showed that the “ether” does not exist. Light seems to be “pure movement”, not a movement in something. A simple illustration might clarify this idea. Suppose I toss a book across the room – as I am always tossing books from my worktable onto the camp bed that serves as a halfway house to the bookshelf, while the book is in motion, it remains in every way the same book; a tiny Martian scientist sitting on it would detect no difference whatever. Yet its motion is undoubtedly real. You must regard its motion as a kind of invisible additive. Now try to imagine this invisible additive on its own. It is impossible, of course; but that does not prove that it cannot exist. When you look at the night sky you cannot imagine space going on forever; yet common sense tells you it does, even beyond the edge of the universe. Ash is suggesting that, just as energy is more “fundamental” than matter, so “pure movement” is more fundamental than energy.

"So why should energy be restricted to the speed of light? Ash writes: “If movement could have a faster speed, it would give rise to a completely different type of energy”. This he calls super-energy. (In fact, physicists have suggested in recent years the possibility of a particle called the tachyon, which is faster than light.)"

"A Cambridge don named T. C. (“Tom”) Lethbridge, who was also an archaeologist, often used his own dowsing abilities to detect buried objects. He also discovered that a pendulum – a weight on a piece of string – worked just as well as a dowsing rod – the pendulum would swing in a circle over things he was looking for. He then made another discovery that sounds absurd but that all dowsers will verify: that he could “ask the pendulum questions” and that it would reply in the negative or affirmative by swinging back and forth or in a circle. The theory advanced by scientists – like Sir William Barrett – is that the unconscious mind knows the answer and causes the muscles to make the pendulum move in a circle or a “swing”."

"So far, Lethbridge was merely “proving” that different metals caused the pendulum to respond at different lengths. He next proved to his satisfaction that all substances have their characteristic “rate” (length of the pendulum swing): oak (11 inches), mercury (12½ ), grass (16), lead (22 – the same as silver), potatoes (39). Many substances, of course, “share” a rate with others, but Lethbridge found that the weight “circled” a distinct number of times for each – for example, sixteen times for lead and twenty-two for silver."

"Lethbridge had established, at least to his own satisfaction, that emotions and ideas, as well as substances, caused the pendulum to react at a definite rate. The rate for death was 40, and this was also the rate for black, cold, anger, deceit, and sleep – obviously connected ideas. When he drew a circle divided into 40 compartments, and placed each quality or object in its appropriate compartment, he found that “opposite” qualities occurred where you would expect to find them: safety at 9, danger at 29, pleasant smells at 7, unpleasant smells at 27, and so on.

"In a moment of idleness, he tried placing the substances at their appropriate distance from the centre – sulphur at 7 inches along line 7, chlorine 9 inches along line 9, and so on – then joined up the dots with a line – which was, of course, a spiral. Spirals (vortices) seem to play an important part in most primitive religions; they are found carved on rocks all over the world. The vortex obviously embodies some important primitive idea. And now, looking at his own spiral, it struck Lethbridge that a spiral can go on indefinitely. Why should the “dowsing spiral” stop at 40?"

"Lethbridge’s deduction from these observations may sound totally arbitrary, although in his books he makes it sound reasonable enough: that since 40 is the “rate” for death, then the pendulum beyond 40 is reacting to a level of reality “beyond death” and to yet another level at 80, another at 120, and so on, possibly ad infinitum. (He found it impossible to test a pendulum at more than 120 inches because it was too long.)

"One of the oddities that Lethbridge observed is that in “our” world – below 40 – there is no “rate” for time; this is presumably because we are in it, and so time appears “stationary”, as a stream would to a boat drifting along it. At the second level – beyond 40 – time “registers” at 60 inches but – oddly enough – seems to have no forward motion. (I do not profess to understand what he meant.) Then, in the world beyond 80, time disappears again.

"Lethbridge concluded that many “worlds” coexist on different “vibration rates”. We cannot see the world “beyond 40” because it moves too fast for us, so to speak, just as you cannot read the name of a station if the train goes through it too fast. But some people – “psychics” – are better at reading fast-moving words, so to speak, and keep catching glimpses of the next level of reality."

"Lethbridge died in 1971, but he would undoubtedly have approved of David Ash’s vortex theory and of the notion that paranormal events can be explained in terms of super-energy (or, as he would have said, higher vibrational rates). He would probably have added that each level of reality has its own level of super-energy and that there is no obvious limit to the number of levels.

"This notion of levels is fundamental to occultism. Madame Blavatsky taught that there are seven levels of reality, the first three of a descending order and the last three of an ascending order. Earth is situated at the bottom, at level four, the “heaviest” and densest of all levels. Yet the sheer density of matter means that human beings are capable of greater achievement than on any other level – just as a sculptor can create more permanent works of art out of marble than out of clay."

"If I shine a beam of light through a pinhole it will form a circle of light on a screen (or photographic plate). If two pinholes are opened up side by side, the result – as you might expect – is two overlapping circles of light. But on the overlapping portions there are a number of dark lines. These are due to the “interference” of the two beams – the same effect you would get if two fast streams of traffic shot out on to the same roundabout. Now suppose the beam is dimmed so only one photon at a time can pass through either of the holes. When the image finally builds up on the photographic plate you would expect the interference bands to disappear. Instead, they are there as usual. But how can one photon at a time interfere with itself? And how does a photon flying through one hole “know” that the other hole is open? Could it possess telepathy, as Einstein jokingly suggested? . . . Perhaps the photon splits and goes through both holes? But a photon detector reveals that this is not so: only one photon at a time goes through one hole at a time. Yet, oddly enough, as soon as we begin to “watch” the photons, they cease to interfere, and the dark bands vanish. The likeliest explanation is that the photon is behaving like a wave when it is unobserved, and so goes through both holes, and interferes. The moment we try to watch it, it turns into a hard ball."

"In Science of the Gods, Ash and Hewitt have made a brave attempt to show how the vortex theory can explain many kinds of “psychic phenomena” in scientific terms, from ghosts and miracles to reincarnation and UFOs. It is an exciting and imaginative program that – inevitably – falls short of its objective. But at least it makes us aware that when Kelvin had his flash of “vision” in 1867 and developed it into the vortex theory of atoms, he may have laid the foundation for a new and more comprehensive science of reality."

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December 22, 2021 - December 22, 2021.

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61. Who Was Harry Whitecliffe?

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"According to a book published in France in 1978, one of England’s most extraordinary mass murderers committed suicide in a Berlin gaol in the middle of the jazz era. His name was Harry Whitecliffe, and he murdered at least forty women. Then why is his name not more widely known – at least to students of crime? Because when he was arrested he was masquerading under the name Lovach Blume, and his suicide concealed his true identity from the authorities.

"The full story can be found in a volume called Nouvelles Histoires Magiques – New Tales of Magic – by Louis Pauwels and Guy Breton, published by Editions J’ai Lu. In spite of the title – which sounds like fiction – it is in fact a series of studies in the paranormal and bizarre; there are chapters on Nostradamus, Rasputin and Eusapia Palladino, and accounts of such well-known mysteries as the devil’s footprints in Devon ... "

" ... He was a handsome young man of twenty-three, likeable, eccentric and fond of sport. He was also generous; he was said to have ended one convivial evening by casually giving a pretty female beggar five hundred pounds. ... "

"Meanwhile he continued to write: essays, poetry and plays. One of his comedies, Similia, had four hundred consecutive performances in London before touring England. It made him a fortune, which he quickly scattered among his friends. By the beginning of 1923 he was one of the “kings of London society”.

"Then, in September of that year, he vanished. He sold all his possessions, and gave his publisher carte blanche to handle his work. But before the end of the year he reappeared in Dresden. The theatre there presented Similia with enormous success, the author himself translating it from English into German. It went on to appear in many theatres along the Rhine. He founded a press for publishing modern poetry, and works on modern painting – Dorian Verlag – whose editions are now worth a fortune.

"But he was still something of a man of mystery. Every morning he galloped along the banks of the river Elbe until nine o’clock; at ten he went to his office, eating lunch there. At six in the evening, he went to art exhibitions or literary salons, and met friends. At nine, he returned home and no one knew what he did for the rest of the evening. And no one liked to ask him."

"This was the man who had committed suicide in his prison cell, and who addressed a long letter to his fiancée, Wally von Hammerstein. He told her that he was certain the devil existed, because he had met him. He was, he explained, a kind of Jekyll and Hyde, an intelligent, talented man who suddenly became cruel and bloodthirsty. He thought of himself as being like victims of demoniacal possession. He had left London after committing nine murders, when he suspected that Scotland Yard was on his trail. His love for Wally was genuine, he told her, and had caused him to “die a little”. He had hoped once that she might be able to save him from his demons, but it had proved a vain hope."

"This is the story, as told by Louis Pauwels – a writer who became famous for his collabouration with Jacques Bergier on a book called The Morning of the Magicians. Critics pointed out that that book was full of factual errors, and a number of these can also be found in his article on Whitecliffe. For example, if the date of Blume’s arrest is correct – 25 September 1924 – then it took place before Whitecliffe vanished from Dresden, on 3 October 1924 . . . But this, presumably, is a slip of the pen.

"But who was Harry Whitecliffe? According to Pauwels, he told the Berlin court that his father was German, his mother Danish, and that he was brought up in Australia by an uncle who was a butcher. His uncle lived in Sydney. But in a “conversation” between Pauwels and his fellow-author at the end of one chapter, Pauwels states that Whitecliffe was the son of a great English family. But apart from the three magistrates who opened the suicide letter – ignoring Blume’s last wishes – only Wally and her parents knew Whitecliffe’s true identity. The judges are dead, so are Wally’s parents. Wally is a 75-year-old nun who until now has never told anyone of this drama of her youth. We are left to assume that she has now told the story to Pauwels."

But an author who decided to write about him and corresponded with the two authors received no response, so she moved on to London, where there was no trace of his name or existence, either in theatre or in crime. Finally she found his identity by writing to Australia.

" ... They usually start off as petty swindlers, then gradually become more ambitious, and graduate to murder. This is what Blume seems to have done. In the chaos of postwar Berlin he made a quick fortune by murdering and robbing postmen. Perhaps his last coup made him a fortune beyond his expectations, or perhaps the Berlin postal authorities were now on the alert for the killer. Blume decided it was time to make an attempt to live a respectable life, and to put his literary fantasies into operation. He moved to Dresden, called himself Harry Whitecliffe and set up Dorian Verlag. He became a successful translator of English plays, and may have helped to finance their production in Dresden and in theatres along the Rhine. Since he was posing as an upper-class Englishman, and must have occasionally run into other Englishmen in Dresden, we may assume that his English was perfect, and that his story of being brought up in Australia was probably true. Since he also spoke perfect German, it is also a fair assumption that he was, as he told the court, the son of a German father and a Danish mother."

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December 22, 2021 - December 22, 2021.

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62. Patience Worth

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" ... Patience seems incapable of using one word where ten will do, bringing to mind Lincoln’s remark: “He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever met.” It was impossible to get her to answer even the simplest question with a direct reply. ... "

"On the other hand, the book seemed to indicate a knowledge of ancient Rome that Mrs Curran insisted she had never possessed. The distinguished psychical investigator G.N.M. Tyrrell, writing thirty years later, said: “There is not here the greatness of genius, but . . . there is a fount of inspiration which might have provided the material for a work of genius had it been expressed through the conscious mind of, say, a Coleridge instead of . . . Mrs Curran”, and he went on to quote Caspar Yost’s view that the book revealed an intimate knowledge of the Rome of Augustus and Tiberius, and also of the topography of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. But then, of course, Yost was a somewhat biased witness, having been one of the original “discoverers” of Patience Worth."

"In that same year – 1916 – Emily Hutchings called upon the eminent literary critic William Marion Reedy, and showed him the first ten thousand words of a novel about Missouri politics and journalism. In recent years Emily had dropped out of the limelight, for it had become clear that her presence was not essential for Patience to manifest herself. Reedy was impressed by the novel, and congratulated her. A week later he probably felt like eating his words when Emily called again, and confessed that the novel had been “dictated” by the spirit of Mark Twain – then proceeded to produce several pages with the help of the ouija board. The novel was accepted, and published under the title of Jap Herron, and was well received – although it was generally agreed that its quality was much inferior to the works Mark Twain had produced while he was alive. An effort by Mark Twain’s publishers to suppress the novel was unsuccessful.

"During this period Patience’s fame continued to grow. The Victorian novel Hope Trueblood met with an enthusiastic reception from many respectable journals, although the reading public found that even Patience’s “modern” style was too wordy. In England the book was issued without any indication of its “psychic” origin, and received mixed reviews; but at least most of the critics seemed to assume that it was the first novel of an English writer. The Currans also launched Patience Worth’s Magazine, to make Patience’s poems and lesser writings accessible to her admirers; it was edited by Caspar Yost, and ran to ten issues."

"For those who are willing to accept the possibility of life after death, the most convincing explanation is certainly that Patience was a “spirit”. But that does not necessarily mean that she was really what she claimed to be. Anyone who has studied “spirit communication” soon recognizes that “spirits” are very seldom what they claim to be; G.K. Chesterton put in more bluntly and said that they are liars. If Patience was a seventeenth-century Quaker who was killed by Red Indians, it is difficult to understand why she was so evasive and why she failed to answer straightforward questions that might have enabled the Currans to prove that such a person really existed. Litvag’s book leaves one with the conviction that if Patience was a spirit, then it was probably the spirit of a frustrated would-be writer with a strong tendency to mythomania."

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December 22, 2021 - December 22, 2021.

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63. Zombies

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"Zombies, according to Alfred Metraux’s book, Voodoo (1959), are “people whose decease has been duly recorded and whose burial has been witnessed, but who are found a few years later . . . in a state verging on idiocy”. In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, says Metraux, “there are few, even among the educated, who do not give some credence to these macabre stories”. Understandably, such tales have met with skepticism outside Haiti."

"According to Zora Hurston, people were “zombified” if they betrayed the secrets of the Haitian secret societies. No one believed her, and Metraux writes patronizingly of “Zora Houston [sic], who is very superstitious”. Nevertheless, Metraux tells a story involving two members of “high society”. After his car broke down, one of them was invited to the home of a little white bearded man, a houngan or vodoun (voodoo) priest. Piqued by his guest’s skepticism about a wanga (magical charm), the old man asked him if he had known a certain M. Celestin – who had, in fact, been one of the visitor’s closest friends. Summoned by a whip crack, a man shambled into the room, and to his horror the visitor recognized his old friend Celestin, who had died six months earlier. When the zombie reached out for the visitor’s glass – obviously thirsty – the houngan stopped him from handing it over, saying that nothing could be more dangerous than to give or take something from the hand of a dead man. The houngan told his visitor that Celestin had died from a spell and that the magician who had killed him had sold him for twelve dollars.

"Other stories recounted by Metraux make it clear that he considers zombies to be people who have literally died and then been raised from the dead. Understandably, he rejects this as superstition. In fact, as we shall see, Zora Hurston was correct and Metraux was wrong.

"Haiti, in the West Indies, was discovered by Columbus in 1492, but it was not until two centuries later that it became a base for pirates and buccaneers. French colonists developed Haiti’s rich sugar trade, using black slaves kidnapped from Africa. The Spanish ceded Haiti (or Saint-Domingue, as it was called) to the French in 1697.

"The slaves were treated with unbelievable cruelty – for example, hung from trees with nails driven through the ears or smeared with molasses and left to be eaten alive by ants. Another horrifying practice involved filling a slave’s anus with gunpowder and setting it alight, an act the Frenchmen often referred to as “blasting black’s ass”. In spite of the risks, slaves ran away whenever they could and hid in the mountains, until, eventually, certain mountainous regions became “no-go areas” for whites. In the 1740s a slave named Macandal, who had lost his arm in a sugar press, escaped to the mountains and taught the runaway Maroons (as the slaves were known) to use poison against their oppressors. Mass poisoning of cattle was followed by mass poisoning of the colonists. Macandal was eventually betrayed and sentenced to be burned alive (although, according to legend, he used his magical powers to escape). But from then on, the secret societies spread revolt among the black slaves. After the great revolts of the 1790s, French authority virtually collapsed, and although it was savagely restored under Napoléon, he was never able to conquer the interior of the island. A series of black emperors ruled until 1859, but the island has alternated between a state of virtual anarchy and harsh authoritarian rule ever since, both of which have nurtured the secret societies."

"When Davies went to Haiti to investigate, his attention focused on Datura stramonium, known in America as jimsonweed and in Haiti as zombie’s cucumber. ... Davies later concluded that “zombification” is not simply a matter of malice. The secret societies had a sinister reputation, but it seemed that they were less black than they were painted and often acted as protectors of the oppressed. Zombification, it seemed, was often a punishment for flagrant wrongdoing."

"But it was clear to Davies that the poison of the puffer fish is not the sole secret of “zombification”. In his extraordinary book The Serpent and the Rainbow (1985), he describes his search for samples of zombie poison. His aim was to obtain samples and take them back to be tested in the laboratory. But although he met a number of houngans and witnessed some remarkable ceremonies – in a number of which he saw people “possessed” by spirits (so that one woman was able to place a lighted cigarette on her tongue without being burned) – his quest came to a premature end when one of his major backers died and another suffered a debilitating stroke. But his book leaves very little doubt that the secret of “zombification” is a poison that can produce all the signs of death. When the body is dug up, an antidote is administered (Davies was able to study some antidotes and concluded that the “magical” powers of the priest seem to be as important as the ingredients themselves), and then the victim is often stupefied by further drugs that reduce the subject to a level of virtual idiocy."

"Wade Davies was left in no doubt about the reality of “zombification”. But his investigation into the vodoun religion also seems to have convinced him that not all the phenomena of vodoun can be explained in such naturalistic terms."

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December 22, 2021 - December 22, 2021.

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November 17, 2020 - November 18, 2020 -

December 24, 2020 - December 22, 2021.

Purchased April 21, 2016.

Kindle Edition, 624 pages

Published March 1st 2012

by Robinson (first published 2000)

ASIN:- B007JKFHXE

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https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3714299538

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Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Wednesday, December 22, 2021

THE MAMMOTH ENCYCLOPEDIA OF UNSOLVED MYSTERIES, by Colin Wilson, Damon Wilson.

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