Micah Hanks

Conversations With Ghosts: The Ouija Board Experience – Micah Hanks Writes

October 31, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

“Where are you?”, the couple asked, as they watched the planchette begin to slowly move again across the lettered board. The arrow passed several of the symbols, before clearly coming to rest on the letter “H”. Hovering there for a moment, the arrow began drifting to the left, now hovering over the letter “E”. After a pause, the couple felt the planchette moving beneath their fingers again, this time more purposefully, gliding sharply to the right and coming to rest on the letter “L”, where it stayed.

“Hell,” she read aloud to him, looking up to meet his frightened gaze.

Chris had never believed in the supposed “power” of Ouija boards. When he agreed to play this game with Jessica, rather than going out to the movies as they normally would on a Friday night, he had done it mostly for her amusement. But within the first few moments after the planchette began to move eerily amidst the symbols across the board, he became fascinated—if not a bit unsettled—at the story which seemed to now be revealing itself to them.

Through their questions, and the movement of the planchette, a narrative emerged, as told from the perspective of a young girl, saying she had died more than a century ago in a small town in the Western United States. She, like many others at that time, had been a victim of consumption; but this apparent conversation with a ghost hadn’t been what frightened them. In addition to being aware of her death, the girl also expressed a desire to be reborn, and through the lettered face of the Ouija board, told Chris and Jessica she would come into the body of their eventual firstborn child.

This hadn’t set well with the young couple, hence prompting Chris to ask about the child’s whereabouts.

“HEL”

“Why are you in Hell, if you died as a child?” Chris then asked.

“I” was the first letter the planchette indicated, followed by a pause. It then slowly drifted over to the next sequence of letters, “K”, “I”, and “L”, where it stopped again.

“I kill?” Jessica gasped. Chris had already felt her fingertips trembling across from his on the face of the planchette.

“What are you?” Chris asked. The planchette moved again, spelling the letters “D”, “E”, “M”…

Goodbye.

It would be the final word the planchette rested on that night, in addition to marking the last time either of them ever touched a Ouija board. The experience, though badly frightening for them, certainly opened the couple’s minds to the strange kinds of experiences Ouija boards seem to be able to elicit, as so many others have described over the years.

Among all the modern implements of the occult, perhaps there is nothing else that remains so disturbing in people’s minds as the Ouija board. Despite their sale as common playthings in most department stores today, there are a striking number of individuals, like Chris and Jessica’s story above illustrates, who claim to have had unsettling experiences with the devices. Thus, even in modern times there are many look to biblical passages as evidence of their wicked nature, such as that which appears in Deuteronomy 18:10-11, reading: “There shall not be found among you anyone… that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter or a witch, or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.” Similarly, many interpret this passage from the Quran to be in reference to such things, which it calls an abomination: “O ye who believe! Intoxicants and gambling, (dedication of) stones, and (divination by) arrows, are an abomination; of Satan’s handwork: eschew such (abomination), that ye may prosper.”

Perhaps the earliest historical mention of Ouija-like devices began to appear in China at around 1100 BC, although the rise of the Ming Dynasty coincided with the use of a stick or stylus crafted from the branch of a willow or peach tree called the “Fuji method”, which roughly resembled a dowsing-rod. By around 540 BC, Pythagoras and his students were widely believed to have used some sort of table mounted on wheels to communicate with the spirits of the dead.

The modern Ouija board, despite its similarity to ancient divination practices, appeared only as recently as the 1890s when two business-men, Elijah Bond and Charles Kennard, leapt on the idea to combine the popular planchette of spiritualist practices with a board covered in letters of the alphabet. On May 28, 1890, the duo filed for patent protection of their new idea, which became the first official Ouija board to be marketed and sold, with production duties handed to an employee named William Fuld in 1901.

The famous “talking boards”, as they became known, would first be marketed under the name “Ouija” by Fuld, who also rewrote the history of the devices, claiming that not only that he was the true inventor, but that his employers Bond and Kennard had stolen the idea from him. Once other companies began to produce the Ouija boards, Fuld sued many over the use of what he believed to be “his” design, until his death in 1927. In 1966, William Fuld’s estate sold the rights to the Ouija name to the famous maker of children’s games, Parker Brothers, who today holds all official trademarks and patents for the item.

Despite being generally marketed and sold as a plaything, the Ouija boards have remained controversial, due in no small part to the negative experiences so many have claimed to have with them. The famous esotericist Manly P Hall was quoted as far back as 1944 in Horizon Magazine saying that, “During the last 20-25 years I have had considerable personal experience with persons who have complicated their lives through dabbling with the Ouija board. Out of every hundred such cases, at least 95 are worse off for the experience.”

Some of the stories related to me personally over the years do seem to underscore the strange, and often unsettling nature of the Ouija experience. My earliest experience with such a tale dates back to my childhood, when my mother talked about an experience she had with a neighbor of hers, Nancy, while experimenting with a Ouija board. The story related to them during the experience involved a young man who, about a decade earlier, had become trapped under his convertible after he drove off the side of a bridge; pinned beneath the wrecked car, he drowned before help could arrive. After this experience, my mother maintained a strong aversion to Ouija boards, and was resolute in telling me not to use them, either.

On one occasion, a young man in Australia named Artemis wrote to me years ago, asking about whether I thought Ouija boards were “safe” to use. This was just after an experience he had with one he had obtained recently, believing his deceased grandfather had spoken to him through the device.

“What did he tell you?” I asked.

“He told me not to play with Ouija boards!” Artemis said. I figured that the response he received was more or less self-evident.

Perhaps the most unique story about Ouija boards ever shared with me was told by the American singer and songwriter Ellis Paul, who I met in 2007. “I have a song called ‘Conversation with a Ghost’ that’s about my one weird paranormal experience,” Ellis told me, during a live radio interview in Asheville, North Carolina. “I was out for a run with a buddy of mine named Vance in Boston, and he said ‘why don’t you come over for dinner?’ I said sure, and before we left we sat and had a glass of eggnog, since it was around Christmas time.”

“Once we got over to his place, his girlfriend, Margaret, was working on dinner in the kitchen, and I said ‘Well what have you been up to?’ She said, ‘I just bought this Ouija board for a dollar at a garage sale.’ She said she’d kinda been addicted to it, talking to some ‘spirit’ with a friend of hers named Beth. She’d been on it like most people get on the Internet, just going haywire. I told her, ‘You know, I’m kind of a doubter on that kind of thing, so why don’t we get it out as part of the dinner party?’ I thought we’d take it for a spin, and see what happens.”

“There were about fifteen of us there, and we went into the living room. I was the one asking questions to the ghost, whose name was ‘Pug’—Margaret Putnam was her real name, but ‘Pug’ was sort of a handle she apparently used communicating through the Ouija board. I asked Pug, with Beth and Margaret on either side of the board handling the little wooden triangle, ‘what song did I play last night?’ It spelled out R-A-I-N. Sure enough, the night before I had played a song called ‘Let it Rain’.”

Initially Ellis laughed about this, and noted that “if you’re gonna pick a title for a song, ‘rain’ might be in a good percentage of them.”

“Then, I asked ‘what’s the name of my booking agent’, which was something I knew neither of the women operating the Ouija board new. It spelled out G-E-R-M-A-N-E, or Germaine.” Indeed, this was the name of his booking agent at the time, despite the name being “misspelled it by one letter.”

The final question Ellis asked the board was, “What did Vance and I have to drink before we came over here?” As the planchette moved, it spelled out the letters N-O-G.”

“I got up and I locked myself in the bathroom for a while, freaked out,” Ellis confided to us. “I ended up writing a song about it, based on someone who had passed away, using a Ouija board to communicate.”

Ellis Paul’s unique story didn’t end here, though. “What’s even weirder about that story,” he told me, “is that after I calmed down a bit, I decided to go down to the Courthouse and dig through records to see if I could find this ‘Pug’ anywhere in Boston’s history, since she had told Beth and Margaret a few things about herself. For instance, she had been married to a doctor, and also described roughly the time and circumstances of her death. Sure enough, looking around I found that a Margaret Putnam had not only existed, but had lived there in Boston, and even married a prominent doctor operating in town at the time. I was floored.”

When considering stories like those of Ellis Paul and countless others, it becomes difficult to rule out the possibility that Ouija boards may indeed serve as a mode of communication between this world and the next. The view of modern science attributes no such “mystical” capacities to the function of the board, however, instead suggesting that a psychological effect known as ideomotor phenomenon can explain this, which similarly explains such spiritualist practices as automatic writing, dowsing, and other varieties of facilitated communication that purportedly links the living world to the afterlife in some way. The term was first used by researcher William Benjamin Carpenter in 1852, after which an alternative name for the phenomenon, “The Carpenter effect”, was derived.

Could the Ouija board truly be nothing more than a simple device, designed as a parlor game and long heralded since its conception as a tool of divination, which relies on mysterious functions of our deeper psyche? In truth, if this were indeed all there is to the “magic” of the Ouija board, one might argue that it would make the strange devices—and the bizarre stories associated with them—no less interesting. Whether their mystery stems from this world, or worlds beyond our own, it seems that there is much about the function of the human mind that eludes us… and hence, the inner space within each of us seems to remain, at the end of the day, the greatest mystery of our time.

—

Micah Hanks is a writer, podcaster, and researcher whose interests include history, science, current events, cultural studies, technology, business, philosophy, unexplained phenomena, and ways the future of humankind may be influenced by science and innovation in the coming decades. With his writing, he has covered topics that include controversial themes such as artificial intelligence, government surveillance, unconventional aviation technologies, and the broadening of human knowledge through the reach of the Internet. Micah lives in the heart of Appalachia near Asheville, North Carolina, where he makes a living as a writer and musician. You can find his podcasts at GralienReport.com and his books at Amazon.com

The Feral Phantom Nose-Biter of the Carolinas – Micah Hanks Reports

September 30, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

The modern world, despite what is afforded us by science and discovery, is still very much a place of mystery. To the open-minded thinker, a world of possibility exists here, where, through logic and reason, we may be able to glean new ways of understanding the nature of the physical universe.

It has been this essential credo that, for nearly two decades now, has kept me passionate about the study of the unexplained. By the time I was in my early 20s, I was writing articles on the subject of mysteries, and though my skepticism has become more focused over the years, my fundamental curiosity about unusual things remains strong. Hence, I’ve often take my interests beyond the written page and have ventured into the field, investigating odd claims that include everything from purported sightings of unidentified animals, to stories about weird things seen in the sky that seem to defy logic.

One area of interest that I’ve been less involved with is that of purported “cattle mutilations,” though this isn’t to say I’ve never had a run-in with the phenomenon (as we’ll see shortly). Beginning during the middle 1970s, reports of cattle being found drained of blood, as well as having certain soft tissues around the mouth and other areas removed, began to make headlines. Subsequent concern over this mystery led to involvement by the FBI, who have made available a number of their documents about investigations into cattle mutilations at their website, www.FBI.gov. Perhaps most alarming had been that many alleged mutilations coincided with sightings of strange lights, and hence, many began to believe that the cattle mutilation phenomenon was somehow connected with reports of UFOs over the Americas at that time.

Researcher Christopher O’Brien pointed out to me a few years ago that one of the earliest incidents involving an apparent mutilation of livestock had actually involved a horse, rather than a cow. The incident in question occurred on September 9, 1967, when Mrs. Agnes King of Alamosa, Colorado, accompanied by her son Harry, discovered the body of their horse, Lady, who’s three years old at the time of death. Lady’s curious death possessed many of the familiar tropes of future mutilations, which included removal of the skin covering the horse’s head and upper neck, along with the removal of flesh. The Kings noted the presence of what appeared to be very precise incisions, which bore cuts along lines that seemed far too controlled to have been carried out by any animal. There was no blood, and during a later interview about the incident, Harry King would state that he had smelled a strong aroma at the site of Lady’s death, which he described as “medicinal.” Law enforcement could cite “no earthly causes” for the animal’s death, which led to speculation about popular sightings of UFOs at the time. Hence, Lady’s mysterious death, preceding more popular livestock mutilations and death by nearly a decade, nonetheless became the first to associate purported extraterrestrial activity with the phenomenon.

Which brings us to my own experience with livestock mutilations. Several years ago, a news report on our local station here in Asheville, North Carolina, detailed a number of mysterious cattle deaths on a ranch in a neighboring county. Little was said about the cause of death, apart from the fact that law enforcement was investigating, and that a group of biologists, one of whom worked at the time with the Western North Carolina Nature Center, had been brought along to help determine whether the deaths might involve some kind of predator in the region.

Soon after the report had aired, I contacted a friend at the television news station, and asked if footage of the dead cattle was still available, to which I was told that the tapes had already been wiped (this was standard practice, I was told, and that the footage had not been removed for any “sinister” reasons). I then contacted the Sheriff’s Department for the county in question and inquired about their investigation, as well as the Western North Carolina Nature Center, hoping for any leads that might become available there.

Numerous queries with the aforementioned law enforcement group yielded no results. Then, within days of the initial news report on the cattle deaths, a statement was released by the department, which told a story that was almost as unusual as the initial animal deaths had been. According to law enforcement, a stakeout with the property owners over the course of three subsequent evenings led to the observation of a large, feral dog, which had been attacking the cattle late at night. The officers and property owners had allegedly observed this large dog latching onto the noses of the cattle, wrestling them to the ground and killing them in this way.

The explanation was patently absurd. No dog—feral or otherwise—would have slaughtered a cow in this way, let alone their being much possibility that such a method, had it been attempted, would have rendered a successful kill. Around this time, I was contacted by one of the biologists with the Nature Center here in town, who privately expressed some concerns to me about the case. For one, the individual (who asked not to be named) told me that the explanation involving the “nose-biting feral dog” was just as absurd as I had guessed. In order to verify this, I called a biology professor at the University of North Carolina at Asheville with whom I often corresponded around that time, who similarly expressed dismay at such a clumsy manner of killing. “A dog would never attack any kind of bovine in that way,” he told me.

However, the eerie part of the story had involved the other information provided by my contact with the Nature Center. “Micah, if I may candidly tell you something,” her email began. “There were some very peculiar incisions on the cattle we observed.” She further explained that the ears appeared to have been removed and that in her opinion, whatever the cause might have actually been, “these killings looked just like the kinds of cattle mutilations you’ve seen on the TV shows.”

There was never any clear resolution to the matter, at least as far as why area law enforcement had offered such an absurd explanation for the incident, and why this had seemingly gone unnoticed, apart from my private inquiries with the biologists at the local university and wildlife resource center named here.

Granted, there are any number of factors that might reside at the heart of this mystery. During my talk with Christopher O’Brien, he expressed his belief that the majority of these livestock deaths have an earthly cause, although he does feel that some of the mutilations could involve testing by government agencies (and yes, this sounds very conspiratorial), which might be aimed at offsetting outbreaks of such afflictions as the well known “Mad Cow Disease”, otherwise known as Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and other similar conditions that are specific to livestock of this sort. The same general idea has been endorsed in the past by Colm Kelleher, a biochemist who has engaged in his own first-hand field investigation into cattle mutilations.

Sure, the “secret government testing” hypothesis may sound nutty to a few of us. Then again, is it any crazier than the idea of aliens abducting cattle, for purpose of carrying out their bizarre hybridization programs, as has been long supposed by much of the UFO community? Weighing our options, the secret government testing theory might make as much sense as any.

However, there was a peculiar historical thread that I found worthy of mention here too, as it relates to all of this. Absurd though the “nose-biting killer” theory had been in my own review of a cattle mutilation case local to my region, a similar solution involving a dog involved in highly unusual behavior had been attributed to a classic livestock mass-killing, which occurred in Ireland in 1874. Writing of the incident in his book Lo!, the late-great Charles Fort described the incident thusly:

“For about four months, in the year 1874, beginning upon January 8th, a killer was abroad, in Ireland. In Land and Water, March 7, 1874, a correspondent writes that he had heard of depredations by a wolf, in Ireland, where the last native wolf had been killed in the year 1712. According to him, a killer was running wild, in Cavan, slaying as many as 30 sheep in one night. There is another account, in Land and Water, March 28. Here, a correspondent writes that, in Cavan, sheep had been killed in a way that led to the belief that the marauder was not a dog. This correspondent knew of 42 instances, in three townlands, in which sheep had been similarly killed—throats cut and blood sucked, but no flesh eaten. The footprints were like a dog’s, but were long and narrow, and showed traces of strong claws. Then, in the issue of April 11th, of Land and Water, came the news that we have been expecting. The killer had been shot. It had been shot by Archdeacon Magenniss, at Lismoreville, and was only a large dog.”

Fort, in his typically skeptical manner, had thought little of the large dog explanation, apart from the contention that it was of utmost absurdity:

“This announcement ends the subject, in Land and Water. Almost anybody, anyway in the past, before suspiciousness against conventions had the development that it has today, reading these accounts down to the final one, would say—”Why, of course! It’s the way these stories always end up. Nothing to them.” But it is just the way these stories always end up that has kept me busy. Because of our experience with pseudo-endings of mysteries, or the mysterious shearing and bobbing and clipping of mysteries, I went more into this story that was said to be no longer mysterious. The large dog that was shot by the Archdeacon was sacrificed not in vain if its story shut up the minds of readers of Land and Water, and if it be desirable somewhere to shut up minds upon this earth.”

Fort’s response is hardly surprising. However, it is the similar willingness to except anything that might appear logical, so long it is of a prosaic nature, in response to the seemingly unnatural, which seems to remain constant. A large dog slitting the necks of sheep, and the subsequent exsanguination of their remains only sounds foolish, perhaps, when contrasted against the image which springs to mind as we read the description of a feral dog clinging forcibly to the snout of some poor bovine, and suffocating the poor thing.

In either instance, we may never know precisely what happened to the livestock whose lives were lost, but the death-dealers were probably not the dogs who took the blame. Recognizing this is not to endorse an “alien” theory, of course, though either attempt from such extremities of dogmatic “explanation” might be worthy of ridicule. Thus, the livestock killings, though perhaps greatly misunderstood on such ideological grounds, seem to remain mysterious nonetheless.

—

The Mystery Satellites – Micah Hanks

August 31, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

MICAH HANKS REPORTS ON UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS IN EARTH’S ORBIT

Humanity has a long history with reports of odd things seen in Earth’s skies. For decades, reports of unidentified flying objects have captured the public imagination, with particular emphasis on descriptions of things likened to “flying saucers”, and more recently, large, ominous triangle-shaped craft that occasionally plod their way through the night sky at fairly low altitudes.

Harkening back to the early days of modern UFOlogy, there were reports of other things, as well. Beginning in the early 1950s, astronomers began to detect a number of unusual satellites circling the Earth, some of which moved against the natural spin of the planet in a retrograde orbit.

Today, the observation of such satellites is quite commonplace, and on any clear night, one can step out into a field or other area relatively free from city lights, and observe any number of objects reflecting sunlight as they traverse the sky overhead. However, until the launch of Sputnik I by the Russian space agency in 1957, there were no artificial satellites believed to have been launched into orbit, let alone any rockets powerful enough to carry one into space. Despite this, a number of odd observations occurred in those early days of the Space Age, many of which remain unidentified to this day.

The mystery all seemed to have begun around 1954, with a number of newspapers that featured stories quoting UFO proponent Donald Keyhoe, who around that time had overheard that the U.S. Air Force was monitoring two mysterious satellites orbiting Earth. Granted, at the time there shouldn’t have existed any technology capable of launching such a satellite into orbit; some further assert that Keyhoe’s statements had merely been in support of a new UFO book he had published. This might seem plausible, if not for the fact that Keyhoe revisited the “mystery satellite” cases from the 1950s in 1973, with the publication of his book Aliens From Space: The Real Story of Unidentified Flying Objects, which examined in greater depth the various observations of mystery satellites. In other words, it seems unlikely that Keyhoe brought up or borrowed the notion of mystery satellites purely as a publicity stunt.

Long-time UFO researcher and NICAP member Fran Ridge is also one who has taken note of these odd reports, discussing them in a lengthy article last year at the NICAP website. “At first there were reports in the 1950’s,” he said, “followed by reports in 1960, and more recently the reports of a Dark Star Satellite.” This “Dark Star” Ridge refers to here is, of course, the infamous “Black Knight Satellite”, an object that has appeared in many NASA photos over the last few years. Many continue to assert that the object is something akin to a 13,000 year old alien “probe” placed in Earth orbit by extraterrestrials long ago, with intent of studying the proceedings of human evolution as it ensued below. However, much to the chagrin of its proponents as a “genuine” alien vessel, the object that is commonly referenced as evidence of a “Black Knight Satellite” is well known to have been identified as a discarded thermal blanket from one of NASA’s EVA missions.

According to space historian James Oberg, “There’s a long sequence of the slowly-tumbling
thermal cover, clearly the same object previously misidentified as the ‘Black Knight’ satellite. It’s viewed through a dirty window but the shape is unmistakably the same.”

“You can hear the inside crew speculating on whether the spacewalkers would have a chance to grab it if it floated back,’ he further noted in a PowerPoint presentation he features on his website, jamesoberg.com.

In defense of those who have looked at the unusual object and leapt to an “alien” conclusion, it does, at times, look far more strange that its identity would seem to suggest. In fact, some photos depict the object looking far too large to even qualify as being a “thermal blanket”; it should be noted, however, that a number of obviously photoshopped images of the blanket exist online, which have further given the object a disproportionate size, and thus bolstering the “alien satellite” theory.

Despite all of this, many continue to argue that a single, massive “Black Knight Satellite” does exist, which, if taken in the broader context of more legitimate accounts of mystery satellites, only does us injustice by attempting to unite all the various observations into a single phenomenon. While the solitary “Black Knight” remains easily debunkable, the same cannot be said for other mystery satellites that have been observed.

“What really spawned my interest in all this was the Lunascan Project’s detection of what my Lunascan team believes was an unidentified LUNAR orbiter in 1996,” Fran Ridge recalled last year in his overview of the mystery satellite phenomenon. Ridge co-wrote a paper with astronomer Lan Fleming about the 1996 incident, in which a strange object was noticed in an apparent orbit around the moon for a brief period in September of that year (I should further note here that, according to an aerospace engineer friend of mine, the object may be an asteroid, although he noted that it is “unlikely a manmade object in lunar orbit since such orbit, as [Ridge] correctly states, are unstable, if low.” My friend’s best guess was that the object was an elliptical satellite in Earth orbit, or possibly a balloon, which had been among the possible theories proposed by Ridge and Fleming in their paper).

“As I began to collect information on Earth orbiters,” Ridge continues, “some in the form of documentation, the findings began to take the shape of a more comprehensive and interesting paper, rather than what I had initially envisioned.” Indeed, there does appear to be some interesting data about observations of unidentified satellites that exists today; consider an Advanced Research Projects Agency (former name of DARPA) document available online, titled “DOPLOC Observations of Reflection Cross Sections of Satellites”, which was filed under BRL Memorandum Report N. 1330, in March 1961. The report discusses no less than fourteen “reflections” of unidentified satellite objects, which to this day appear to remain unexplained.

There are a variety of theories about what these “mystery satellites” observed during the 1950s and early 1960s could have been. One involves the “moonlet” theory, which describes asteroids or other objects too small to qualify as being an “actual” moon, but large enough to have been detected with monitoring equipment during the period in question.

Fran Ridge expresses dissatisfaction with the “moonlet” theory. “It was accepted as a legitimate statement back then,” he wrote last year, “but today we know better, much better. It was a preposterous explanation. For several asteroids or meteoroids to come in from space and just go into a low and safe controlled orbit IS ridiculous.”

“Even if there were moonlets out there,” Ridge says, “we would be hard pressed today to get them into a stable orbit and make missile launching bases from them.”

It seems that, while there may be a non-zero chance that such a “moonlet” phenomenon could exist, is is far from likely. What would allow some asteroids to enter Earth orbit, and merely coast along overhead, while others present the grave threat of being captured in Earth’s gravitational field, and thus plunge downward, with potentially grave consequences?

Whatever the strange mystery satellites were that astronomers were observing back in the 1950s, their origins remain as much a mystery today as they had been when they first appeared; perhaps we’ll never know precisely what had been drifting along overhead, back in those formative years leading up to our own entry into outer space.

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The Exeter UFO Incident: Is This “Cold Case, Closed” Worthy of Being Reopened? – Micah Hanks Writes

May 23, 2016 By Jim Harold

Strange things were happening on the early morning of September 3, 1965. At approximately 2 AM, just a few miles outside of Exeter, New Hampshire, an 18-year-old hitchhiker found himself face-down in a ditch alongside Highway 150. As he lifted his head, the youth could see a large object passing above him, fitted with red lights, and gliding away toward a farmhouse nearby.

The youth was Norman Muscarello, who had been on his way back from Amesbury, Massachusetts, where his girlfriend’s parents lived. He would often visit her, getting rides from friends or, on occasion, hitchhiking home as he had been doing on this particular evening. Tonight he had been walking along hoping for a late-night commuter who might give him a lift, when he first noticed a series of flashing red lights in the forest nearby. As Muscarello walked, he counted five distinct sources of illumination, which lit up the surrounding trees, as well as the Dining family’s farmhouse just off the road, whose owners were gone at the time.

Writer and UFO investigator John G. Fuller would document what occurred next in his famous book on what became known popularly as the “Incident at Exeter”:

“Near an open field between two houses, the Thing, as he called it, came out of the sky directly toward him. It was as big as or bigger than a house. It appeared to be 80 to 90 feet in diameter, with brilliant, pulsating red lights around an apparent rim. It wobbled, yawed, and floated toward him. It made no noise whatever. When it seemed as if it was going to hit him, he dove down on the shallow shoulder of the road. Then the object appeared to back off slowly, and hovered directly over the roof of one of the houses.”

The house Fuller described here had been the Dining farm, and since the residents were gone at that time, Muscarello’s frantic pounding on the door went unnoticed. In a panic, he watched for the strange flying object, and darted back toward the road in time to see the headlights of an oncoming car. More afraid of whether the object might come back that the dangers presented by oncoming traffic, the teenager ran out into the road and waved his arms, causing the oncoming driver to stop a few yards ahead of him. Muscarello asked them if they would give him a ride to the Exeter police station, which the couple in the car agreed to do.

The Exeter UFO incident wouldn’t end with Muscarello’s strange encounter; upon reaching the Exeter police station, he met officer Reginald Toland at the desk, who knew Muscarello, and believed the youth to be in genuine need of assistance based on his frightened state. Toland radioed to other officers in the area, and soon Cruiser #21 arrived, driven by officer Eugene Bertrand, who told about an incident that had occurred on his patrol earlier that evening. While traveling near the overpass on Route 101, he had encountered a parked vehicle. Stopping to see if the driver needed any assistance, the woman behind the wheel told Bertrand that she had observed a large, silent object with red lights, which followed her car for some distance before it ascended and disappeared into the sky at a remarkable speed. Now, hearing Muscarello tell of seeing a similar object or aircraft, he agreed to return with Muscarello to the area where he had observed the object earlier that evening.

As the two approached the Dining farmhouse, officer Bertrand parked the car, and seeing no sign of any unusual aircraft, he and Muscarello began walking through the field near where Muscarello had first seen the lights in the nearby woods. As the pair walked along, the sounds of dogs barking in the distance caught their attention; soon afterward, horses in the farms nearby also began to offer similar protests. Within moments, the animal sounds were accompanied by the appearance of bright red lights from the forest, and suddenly the object Muscarello had seen here earlier rose out of the woods.

Rather famously, Bertrand, a former USAF veteran from the Korean War, was described as having dropped to one knee, at which time he drew his pistol, aiming it at the approaching object. However, thinking better of the situation, Bertrand replaced his pistol in its holster, and he and Muscarello then made haste to return to the patrol car.

At this time, Bertrand radioed to other officers in the area, to which policeman David Hunt responded. He arrived shortly thereafter, and joined Bertrand and Muscarello, who were still observing the object as it appeared to rock back and forth, its red lights flashing quickly in sequence. At one point, Hunt noted that a B-47 bomber flew overhead, of which he said “there was no comparison” in terms of its likeness to the strange aircraft he had seen with Bertrand and Muscarello that evening. Upon their return to the Exeter police station, all of the men filed separate reports about their observations, after which Muscarello was returned to his home.

The famous Exeter UFO Incident is well known enough, and has undergone extensive enough re-hashing in the past already, that few would see it as worthwhile to recount again here in all its glorious details. The aforementioned book by John G. Fuller, Incident at Exeter: The Story of Unidentified Flying Objects over America Today, already did a fine job with this, putting the story “on the map” as far as famous UFO incidents of its day. And for many years thereafter, it was believed that no reasonable explanation had been offered for what Muscarello and the two officers had observed that night.

However, that changed in 2011 when skeptical researchers Joe Nickel and James McGaha offered an explanation in the November/December issue of Skeptical Inquirer that year. “As it happens, the military pilot of our team (McGaha) has actually docked with a craft like the UFO at Exeter, and he recognized the sequencing lights for what they surely were: those on a U.S. Air Force KC-97 refueling plane.” The authors further asserted that, while a military training operation had in fact occurred in the area earlier that evening, aircraft were obviously still in the sky around the time of the “UFO” sighting of officers Bertrand and Hunt, returning to the area Muscarello had first seen the object earlier that evening. “It seems quite apparent that, although the particular exercise was reportedly over, there were still planes in the sky,” Nickel wrote. “Bertrand and Hunt, in fact, witnessed a B-47 jet at about the time the UFO disappeared (Fuller 1966, 67). Perhaps it had just refueled.”

As with many similar suggestions made by Nickel and McGaha in relation to UFO incidents, this is one of the most plausible explanations for the famous Exeter UFO. Nonetheless, there are still problems with their analysis: for instance, Fuller’s book mentions on the second page of the first chapter the following about officer Bertrand’s own prior USAF experience: “Bertrand, an Air Force veteran during the Korean War, with air-to-air refueling experience on KC-97 tankers…” In other words, the very sort of aircraft Nickel and McGaha propose the witnesses had seen that night should have been easily recognizable by Bertrand, since he had worked on the very sorts of refueling operations that the training exercise that evening had been involved with.

Furthermore, there are the correspondences between the policemen and the Air Force, which followed their encounter. The two officers emphatically stated that the object, which they observed approximately 100 feet above a field, and perhaps no more than a football field’s distance from them, had hovered silently; at no time was there any noise, apart from the apparent animal disturbance caused by its presence. Numerous descriptions like these were supplied in letters the officers sent to the Air Force, but with no reply. Finally, in January 1966, a letter arrived from the Secretary of the Air Force, from Lieutenant Colonel John Spaulding, which addressed the two men’s previous complaints. However, Spaulding’s response was far from satisfactory: ”Based on additional information submitted to our UFO investigation officer, Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, we have been unable to identify the object you observed on September 3, 1965.” Had the object merely been a KC-97 tanker, would it not have been easy for the Air Force to determine what this aircraft was, since it had belonged to them, and was in use that very evening during one of their own training operations?

Nickel and McGaha, in response to this, noted in their article that, “Perhaps in the welter of paperwork the clue we found so significant went unseen by anyone who could fully grasp its import and who had time to devote to the case. Naturally, everything is much clearer in hindsight.”

“We believe this solves the so-called incident at Exeter,” the authors noted. However, they continue noting that, “As to the weeks of subsequent UFO reports in the vicinity, they were beyond the scope of our investigation.”

Nickel and McGaha are to be commended for working to understand the most likely explanation for what occurred on the night of the Muscarello/Bertrand sighting. However, while being the “most likely”, at least in terms of aircraft known to exist, and military operations occurring in the area at that time, does this explanation account for all the facts, and does it offer the best representation for the object as it was described by the witnesses? If anything, the “KC-97” solution may present us with even more questions, especially due to the following points of interest:

(1) Bertrand would likely have recognized the object if it had been a KC-97

(2) All three witnesses stated they were a relatively short distance from the object, which both hovered, and produced no noise while remaining in midair

(3)The USAF was unable to offer any explanation for the incident, despite the fact that the training operation which had been underway on the night in question should have made doing so a simple procedure.

In the end, we may be no closer to understanding what was seen near Exeter, New Hampshire, on September 3, 1965. This, of course, may not prove that an exotic spaceship, piloted by “little green men” had been diving around, pursuing vehicles in the area around that time; however, based on the evidence, it does suggest that a refueling plane may not be able to account for the circumstances much better, either.

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Triangle UFOs: Are They Secret Military Aircraft? Micah Hanks Reports

March 28, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

Since the years following World War II, “flying saucer” has been widely recognized as a household term. Shortly after its appearance in the American media in 1947, U.S. Air Force investigator Edward Ruppelt introduced the term “unidentified flying object”, or UFO, which was devised with hope of employing a more ambiguous, catch-all term that could be applied to a wide variety of alleged aerial phenomena. However, today the use of “UFO” is generally accepted as representing the presence of extraterrestrial spacecraft in our skies, despite a lack of any sufficient evidence that can support, without dispute, a belief in this exotic origin.

Descriptions of UFOs vary greatly enough, in fact, that no single explanation has ever been offered that accounts for all of the kinds of aerial phenomena observed over the decades. However, within the broader range of UFO reports that have been collected over the last several decades, there are some reliable examples that have emerged, which also present consistencies from case-to-case, particularly in recent years.

Among these are reports of the so-called “flying triangles”, objects which are typically described as large, silent, slow-moving triangular objects which are dark enough in color to nearly blend in against the night sky, save only for lighted portions which are often reported at the corners, as well as the center of the base of the objects. The website of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) includes a description given for an alleged kind of mysterious blimp, listed on the site’s page for “Mystery Aircraft”, which began to appear as early as the 1980s:

“A very intriguing aircraft was been reported in the late 1980s. Some observers claim to have witnessed a vast black flying wing, estimated at between 600 and 800 feet in width, passing silently over city streets in California. The craft moved so slowly one observer claimed that he could jog along with it. The aircraft reportedly executed bizarre maneuvers in which it stopped, rotated in place and hovered vertically, pointing its thin trailing edge toward the ground. This vehicle’s unlikely gyrations suggest that it is distinct from the other sightings, and could be a lighter-than-air craft pushed by slow- turning propellers.”

Clearly, the FAS entry excerpted above does appear to reference the giant triangular UFOs which have risen to prominence over last few decades. In fact, the prevalence of triangle UFO sightings has resulted in a number of books, articles, and television documentaries devoted almost entirely to solving the mystery of their appearances. David Marler, an independent UFO researcher and member/State Director of MUFON, published a book on the subject, titled Triangular UFOs: An Estimate of the Situation. With the book, Marler has, as described at his website, “collected, collated, and analyzed hundreds of reports. In the process, he has created a detailed profile of these objects and written a rich narrative of their history. He tackles the arguments made by skeptics that dismiss these triangular UFO reports outright. He also addresses the claims of so-called insiders who claim these objects are a creation of the U.S. military.”

Indeed, many have asserted that these strange aircraft are the result of some secretive U.S. Military project, with some further asserting that the triangles are likely a variety of platform blimp developed by DARPA. While this may be a likely explanation for the origin of the objects, no conclusive data has been presented which helps confirm this.

Whatever their origins, as stated previously the “flying triangles” are indeed unique among UFO reports for the consistency they provide. Over the years, this author has collected reports and corresponded with a number of individuals who have claimed to have had their own encounters, a few of which we will review here (though some of the names of the individuals who supplied these reports have been changed or omitted, due to requests for anonymity).

The first of these, which I collected from a South Carolina resident named “Aaron”, occurred in October 1998, just outside the town of Liberty, South Carolina. The time was roughly 1 AM, local time:

“At the time, I was about ten miles from the nearest town, so light pollution was fairly low. As I came around a bend in the road my headlights malfunctioned causing me to stop the car. The car had some electrical problems, and I do not attribute that to what happened next.

As I opened the door to get out of the car, I looked up, and at around a 45 degree angle to my line of sight was a black triangular object. It was to the right side of the road, and moving slowly to my left. It appeared to be about the size of a large commercial airplane, and had three dim red lights near each corner. The illumination of these lights [had been] just enough that I could make out the shape. I watched for about 1-2 minutes as it moved over the road, and it then began to accelerate and moved out of view.

At the time, I was 17 years old and thought that I had witnessed something extraterrestrial. I was terrified, and didn’t tell anyone for months. As I have grown older, I have come to think that this may indeed have been very terrestrial in origin. I find the reports of mystery blimps fascinating, and wonder if this was something similar.”

A similar report was supplied to me by an individual whose encounter occurred in the early 1990s, near the small town of Enon, approximately four miles from Fairborn, Ohio:

“I was driving from Enon into Fairborn on Dayton Springfield Road on the overpass of a railroad track (if you Google map this it is about ½ mile East of I-675). As the crow flies, it is less than 3 miles to the large landing strip at WPAFB. To the North I saw a very large, silent, low flying black triangle. It was headed toward Wright Patterson’s airstrip.

I grew up in Enon and as a child there were B52s at this airstrip where the triangle was headed. The triangle looked to be twice the size of a B52. One last odd thing, it seemed as if I was traveling faster than the triangle.”

The witnesses’s description that the object appeared to move more slowly than he did while traveling by car is not unusual, per se, at least as it relates to flying triangle reports. In many instances, these objects appear to be capable of hovering, in addition to a number of other unusual airborne maneuvers that involve such things as clockwise rotation, as described by “Lance”, a contact who reported observing one of the craft behaving in this manner in the evening sky over Jacksonville, Florida, in 1999. His report described the following:

“This object made the same clockwise and counter-clockwise spins on its axis, hovered motionless and, most strangely, pivoted vertically with either the nose or the tail pointed to the ground until it formed a thin, nearly imperceptible line in the sky. Due to the relatively close proximity of the sighting to a naval air station I’ve always suspected that the object was one of the military’s new toys and your article boosts my belief that this is the case.

I’m hoping that one day soon the pentagon will take the wraps off these things so I can be vindicated in the eyes of my family. Of course, if it helps keep our various global adversaries on their toes to keep them secret then I suppose I can take the sideways glances for another decade or two.”

Note here the recurring sense the witness expresses that these aircraft are some variety of military aircraft, rather than being of exotic origins.

A final report for consideration here was supplied to me by a woman who, along with her late husband, observed a large, black triangular craft as it passed above them at low altitude in August, 2002. It was near midnight on the local question, and the two were watching the Perseid meteor shower together at their home near Saskatoon:

“We had noticed a very bright light on the eastern horizon but didn’t take much notice of it until we realized that it was slowly coming directly towards us. We kept checking in that direction and watched as the now amber light kept coming straight at us. When it was almost on top of us it was like we became frozen to the spot staring at this light that we could now see had a dark shape behind it.

The triangle flew directly over us. I estimate that it was about 75 – 100 ft. off the ground. I made this estimate because at one point I realized that it was so low I was concerned that it was going to hit the chimney on our 2 1/2 story house! We sat transfixed as it seemed to take the triangle forever to pass overhead due to the extremely slow speed that it was travelling at. I would estimate it was going no more than 10 mph. As it was about halfway over I realized that the triangle was so massive that it filled my entire field of vision. We couldn’t make out any detail of the underneath of the triangle; it was just an enormous black shape lit on each corner by an amber light. I really can’t think of anything to compare the size of the triangle to it was so huge.”

The witness noted that the object moved perfectly silently, and that she had been given the impression that she and her husband observed it for much longer than they realized, as it was nearly 2:30 AM when they returned indoors. She further questioned why, in the event that this aircraft had been the product of a U.S. “black budget” program, the object had been moving within Canadian airspace.

While the U.S. military explanation remains the most likely explanation for the flying triangles, their presence in our skies remains a mystery in lieu of the absence of further evidence that clearly helps substantiate a government origin. Whatever the case, the number of similar reports of these objects, now spanning several decades, does seem to support their existence… which is more than can be said of many other varieties of alleged UFOs which have traversed the public consciousness since the late 1940s.

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Sea Monsters: Have Earth’s Oceans Kept A Few Large Creatures Hidden? – Micah Hanks Reports

February 25, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

Space is, as famously uttered at the outset of each classic Star Trek adventure, the “final frontier.” Yet, despite our fascination with what alien realms may await off our terrestrial home, many would argue that new discoveries of equal magnitude—and strangeness—are likely to exist within the ocean depths.

The notion of “sea monsters” is one that has long been with us. The famous treatise of ancient Norway known as the Konungs skuggsjá, or “King’s Mirror,” dates back to around 1250; in it, one will find the following fanciful account of one of the most well-known among mythical monsters of the sea, the kraken:

“I can say nothing definite as to its length in ells, for on those occasions when men have seen it, it has appeared more like an island than a fish… It is said, that when these fishes want something to eat, they are in the habit of giving forth a violent belch, which brings up so much food that all sorts of fish in the neighborhood, both large and small, will rush up in the hope of getting nourishment and good fare. Meanwhile the monster keeps it mouth open, and inasmuch as its opening is about as wide as a sound or fjord, the fishes cannot help crowding in in great numbers. But as soon as its mouth and belly are full, the monster closes its mouth and thus catches and shuts in all the fishes that just previously had rushed in eagerly to seek food.”

The monster described above, though often compared with modern giant squid, may likely have been inspired by sightings of other creatures well-known today, namely humpback whales and other cetacean species. However, there have been other rumors of “monster” sightings over the decades which, taken by many as purely the mythic sort, may yet beg further attention.

In 2011, the words of paleontologist Dr Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth made headlines, after he commented on the “huge number” of alleged sea monster reports collected over the years. “Sightings now on record can’t all be explained away as mistakes, sightings of known animals or hoaxes,’ Naish was quoted saying in the Daily Mail.

Naish is not alone in his theory of possible monsters that remain undiscovered in Earth’s oceans. “There is a good chance that some pretty large animals remain undiscovered in deep oceans,” says Gustave Paulay of the Florida Museum of Natural History, as quoted by Hamilton Norton in a Gawker article from 2014. “Large invertebrates are commonly found of course, but few are giant squid sized,” Paulay added. “I would think that large fish could remain undiscovered; the megamouth shark was a good example of that a couple of decades ago.”

Stanford Professor of Marine Sciences Stephen Palumbi further noted that, “The deep ocean is the biggest life zone in the known Universe. For a rare animal, it may still be possible we have not run into it yet. If it never washes up – if it never gets counted in gut contents – and if it avoids fishing nets and submarines – we maybe haven’t seen it yet.”

Those cited above certainly make a good case for how certain water monsters might exist, and remain unseen, in locations like the deeper ocean extremities. In equal measure, there are those who maintain that no such creatures could possibly exist, without marine scientists and paleontologists having to rethink our general understanding of the fossil record.

In midst of the fracas surrounding questions over the existence of such beasts, there are the handful of qualified naturalists who have weighed in with their own sightings; observations which have left them convinced that as-yet mysterious animals do populate desolate watery spots around the globe. Such had been the case in 1959, when British naturalist Dr. Denys Tucker visited Scotland on holiday and, during a short stay at Loch Ness, observed a strange, long-necked animal swimming in the Loch’s waters. A letter to New Scientist would soon follow, recounting his experience, and paired with new conviction that an Elasmosaurus—an aquatic dinosaur believed to have been extinct for 80 million years—had been the animal he observed.

“I am quite satisfied that we have in Loch Ness one of the most exciting and important findings of British zoology today,” Tucker said emphatically. The bold proposition was, of course, met with certain skepticism by his colleagues at the Natural History Museum, with many today supposing it resulted in a heated discourse that ultimately led to Tucker’s dismissal. All this, despite once being held to be among Britain’s very finest, and most qualified naturalists.

Of course, if it wasn’t one of the many “cranks and weirdos” assumed to be the sole witnesses to such uncanny things of our natural world, our most skeptical academicians make certain that, in the end, the specialists who share such experiences are relegated to the same batch of credulous “believers.”

Another sighting of a mystery marine monster comes to us from 1905, somewhere fifteen miles offshore in Brazil’s coastal waters. On the morning of December 7, scientists Edmund Meade-Waldo and Michael Nicoll, each Fellows of the Zoological Society of London, were at sea aboard the research vessel Valhalla when they observed a most unique creature swimming a short distance away; Meade-Waldo inscribed in his log the following description:

“I saw a large fin or frill sticking out of the water, dark seaweed-brown in color, somewhat crinkled at the edge. It was apparently about 6 feet in length, and projected from 18 inches to 2 feet from the water.”

Each of the men observed the creature, which soon displayed a long neck protruding from the water ahead of the fin. Setting his binoculars to work, Meade-Waldo focused on the long-necked creature, which he estimated to be, ”about the thickness of a slight man’s body, and from 7 to 8 feet was out of the water; head and neck were all about the same thickness.”

The men described a saurian face upon the creature, resembling that of a tortoise, moving its head and neck back and forth in a peculiar manner as the creature propelled itself against the waves. The coloration was dark brown, with the exception of a light, almost white coloration on the underside of the neck, similar to that of some snake species.

After watching the creature for several moments, it thrust its head below the water again, during which the pair of scientists continued to observe “a very large brownish-black patch, but could not make out the shape of the creature.”

“This creature was an example, I consider, of what has been so often reported, for want of a better name, as the ‘great sea-serpent’,” Nicoll wrote of the impressive animal.

A very similar creature, to the point of displaying nearly identical coloration and features, was seen by the crew aboard the sailing vessel HMS Daedalus several years earlier in 1848. This animal, which purportedly bore a mass of hair (or possibly seaweed, as suggested by Daedalus Captain McQuhae, the principle observer), was later surmised by Meade-Waldo as possibly having been the same variety of animal he and his colleague Nicoll observed more than half a century later. Of equal intrigue had been Mr. Nicoll’s assessment that the creature’s appearance suggested, to his discerning eye, that the “serpent” had in fact been some form of mammal. “It is of course, impossible to be certain of this, but the general appearance of the creature, especially the soft, almost rubber-like fin, gave one this impression.”

Skeptics are often quick to dismiss such reports; it had been no less an authority of such prehistoric matters than Sir Richard Owen had, at the time of the Daedalus encounter, assured the public that the creature had merely been a sea lion set adrift on a large piece of ice. More recently, evolutionary biologist Gary J. Galbreath wrote in Skeptical Inquirer that the creature— despite the “lizard-like” appearance described by those who had seen it at close range—had merely been a sei baleen whale, skimming the surface of the ocean as it enjoyed its afternoon meal.

However, few similar rebuttals have been offered of the Meade-Waldo and Nicoll observation. With each of the men having been seasoned naturalists, it would seem unusual indeed that a sudden, curious failing memory might beset them both; or at very least, a sudden, gross inability to properly assess the appearance of some known animal species.

Do mysterious beasts the likes of our mythical “sea serpent” truly populate the ocean depths, and if so, how might their discovery have eluded us for so long? While this enduring problem will remain mysterious, for now, we are nonetheless left to recognize that, of all places where unusual earthly lifeforms may exist, the oceans remain the most promising. There may yet be a few surprises to uncover… and maybe even a few big ones.

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Apparitions: On Moving Toward a Better Theory of Ghosts – Micah Hanks Reports

January 6, 2016 By The Paranormal Braintrust

In October 2013, the results of a then-recent Pew Research poll had been making the rounds, which stated that 18% of Americans believe they have actually seen a ghost. Arriving just in time for Halloween, the study addressed the persistence of belief in the supernatural among adults in the 21st century, despite the absence of scientific theories about such phenomena to match these beliefs.

University of California at Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer noted at the time that, “most American adults in the 21st Century say that they believe in life after death and in the devil,” while more than one-third believed in similar things like haunted houses.

The numbers of those who count themselves among “believers” remains in the distinct minority, as one might expect with the passing of time, and furtherance of scientific thought, rather than attitudes that are purely faith-based in their leanings. The application of methodical, scientific approaches to understanding nature and its various phenomena have cast light into the darkness of the once-unknown; with the recessing shadows, more about our universe is revealed, and little space seems to have remained for those things once deemed “supernatural” to hide.

The idea of a “ghost” has always remained conjoined to themes that include death and the afterlife, and for what would appear to be good reason: a ghost, after all, has always been taken to represent some apparitional form that exists apart from the physical body of an individual. More specifically, the ghost represents the soul or spirit of an individual, and logic would imply here that only in bodily death might the natural separation of a spirit from one’s physical form occur. More mysterious, however, is the presumed process by which this soul, upon separation from the body, becomes capable of manifesting visibly (and/or audibly, in some instances). It is this manifestation that forms the distinction between the mere concept of the soul, and the apparitional form which we call a “ghost.”

Amidst these general preconceptions about what a ghost actually represents, scientific study of the subject has been relegated mostly to anthropological circles, in which the ghost is equivalent, again, to the broader concept of the soul, and the soul being represented as some essence of an individual which is carried through life within the body, as a sort of “spirit vessel.” Further, the religious concepts of body, soul, and the afterlife generally hold that the spirit is actually the true self, and that the body or vessel is merely a physical representation of this disembodied, everlasting “soul-self” during our time on Earth. Within this mechanism of beliefs surrounding the idea of a soul, the anthropologist aspires to understand “ghosts” as being an extension of superstitions and ritual beliefs, which stem from the broader soul concept. Additionally, the “ghost” is found here to have further ties to traditions involving ancestral worship, and other religious beliefs that incorporate themes where the soul may exist apart from the body.

When addressing the subject of ghosts, seldom is the interpretation of any purported apparition removed from this religious and anthropological context, in which a “ghost” is almost exclusively taken to be the disembodied form of a deceased individual. Thus, few instances exist where we seek to explain the purported ghostly manifestation as some natural phenomenon, resulting from physical forces and in accordance with the universal laws observed by modern science.

Arguably, if no hard scientific proof of ghosts exists, this is for one of two reasons: either no such phenomenon exists, or our approach to studying it is inherently flawed. Hence, the simplest conclusion offered by science is that the likelihood that no phenomenon exists outweighs the likelihood that some existent phenomenon has been poorly studied.

However, let us assume, for a moment, that the less likely scenario were actually correct—that some phenomenon might exist after all, but we have simply failed in our efforts toward studying it. If this were the case, then why might we have failed? Or what element, in our present attitudes pertaining to this subject, might have actually helped it to elude us?

The first, and perhaps most obvious assumption attributed to ghosts is the notion that they are remnants of the soul, which linger after the bodily death of an individual. Before trying to “prove” that ghosts exist, I would ask here, what evidence can we first present for the presence of the soul?

It is true that the soul itself, like a ghost, is primarily identified as a concept, rather than a measurable quantity. Thus, its existence is recognized, even to the open-minded, largely based on cultural traditions and religious beliefs that have helped established an approximation, and nothing more: our belief in ghosts relies purely on our best guesses as to what a ghost might be.

It could be argued, therefore, that trying to explain a concept like a “ghost” as an extension of an equally unexplainable and scientifically unprovable concept (here, we mean the soul) does us few favors, at least in terms of trying to understand whether any physical phenomena is indeed present when one claims they have seen a “ghost”. In other words, if we wish to look at ghosts as being possible evidence of some physical, as-yet unexplained phenomenon, we cannot attribute their mode of appearance to a concept that is equally relegated to the realm of the supernatural.

Our aim here is not to disprove or doubt altogether the existence of a soul; it is merely to assert that a soul can no more easily be qualified, in a physical sense, than a ghost can; and hence, one uncertainty cannot be better understood merely by pairing it with another uncertainty of equal measure.

This illustration begs a further question: how can we understand the concept of a ghostly apparition, if not based on our archaic preconceptions that ghosts are simply spirits of the dead? The fact is, ghosts very well may be souls of the departed, for all we know. However, that presumption has done little to further our knowledge of apparitions, and their pervasive presence in mythologies around the world.

One clue as to the possible nature of what a “ghost” really could be does emerge from within the archetypal elements present during the classic ghostly encounter. This has to do with the fact that a ghost, by definition, seems to represent the appearance of an individual, or at very least, their quasi-physical likeness, in a past-state of existence (note here that I refrain from using the term “deceased individual”, for reasons which I will clarify in a moment). These apparitional forms nearly always represent a being as they once appeared, rather than how they might appear in the present, or future, for that matter. Of great importance is the fact that the ghost is presumed to appear only after death of that individual has occurred, which is a hallmark of the mythos surrounding ghostly encounters.

It is true that this is most often the case in alleged observations of ghosts: that a person must be deceased for their apparitional form to appear. However, this is not always the case; and since most of the data constituting “evidence” of ghosts is based on anecdotal observation, it won’t hurt here to offer discussion of a separate, though similar phenomenon, and one similarly relegated to the realm of conjecture.

In his later years, William Thomas Stead, the nineteenth century newspaper editor and renowned investigative journalist, took an interest in spiritualism. Stead was known to have held court with the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle (with whom he had, on occasion, also been duped by fraudulent mediums), and had even predicted that his own demise would occur either by hanging, or by drowning; Stead was, in fact, one among the many passengers who went down with the Titanic on her maiden voyage. Following his death, Stead’s daughter Estelle published a few written works dealing with her father, throughout which she included a number of Stead’s observations about the spirit world. Among them, she quoted an account Stead had written years earlier, in which he discussed a friend of his who possessed the unique ability of “projecting her phantasmal double, sometimes voluntarily, and sometimes without any conscious exercise of volition.”

“It is by the aid of the double,” Stead had written, “and by automatic handwriting with living persons, that there seems to me the best chance of solving the abysmal mystery of personality.”

More of interest to our present discussion of ghosts, what Stead discussed of his friend in this instance appears to bear similarity to what, today, might be called bilocation, or the apparent ability of an object or individual to appear simultaneously in two separate locations.

Stead went on to discuss the importance of bilocation in relation to the study of ghosts as follows:

“Ghosts of the dead are important, no doubt, but they are from the Other Side, and often seem to experience great difficulty in translating their thoughts into the language of earth, and not less difficulty in adjusting their fitful apparitions to the necessities of the psychical researcher.

“But with the double it is different, for there is no chasm to be bridged in its case between the living and the dead, and with automatic communications from the living, when all allowance has been made for disturbing influences, cross currents, and the intruding influence of the medium’s consciousness, it affords by far the best clue to the mysterious, subconscious region in which most of the phenomena of the Borderland either arise or come into our knowledge.”

The conjecture here proves little more than mere claims of ghostly manifestations would offer “proof” of the afterlife; proof, at least, that would satisfy a physicist, chemist, or biologist. What it does achieve, however, is that it offers us a new conjecture about a phenomenon similar to ghostly manifestations, though without the apparition being recognized as a deceased individual.

One could make the argument that these two phenomena—ghosts and bilocation—are entirely unrelated, as Stead himself assumed in the passage above. However, with Stead’s assessment, the reason for this distinction is clear: it was based upon the presumption that a ghost is the apparition of a dead person, and only a dead person, whereas a “double” is, in essence, the apparition of a living individual… but is this distinction truly a necessity?

Probably not, if we observe again that the origins of the cultural notion of a “ghost” stem from religious beliefs, which are appended to deeper concepts of soul and spirit. We must admit to ourselves that such suppositions have been with us for so long, that they may indeed present fallacies that have been nearly impossible to overlook. Here, if we are to truly understand what a ghost may be (in the event that they exist at all), we must challenge ourselves to look at the phenomenon differently, as well.

If we were to consider that each phenomenon discussed here are constituent parts of a broader observation to be made about nature, then perhaps we could also consider the following: the notion that ghosts must represent the presence of a deceased person may be a logical fallacy, since anecdotal data also exists that describes similar phenomenon like bilocation, where the individuals or “apparitions” observed are people that were alive and well at the time of the observation.

Having suspended our disbelief for long enough to take such things as ghosts—whatever one may interpret them to be—as well as their similarity to alleged phenomena like bilocation, we must face the glaring problem with each of these: there is no physical proof of either phenomenon, nor is there any apparent way to account for them by means of physical experiments. Our very best data to support the existence of either of these things is the anecdotal information we have about them, expressed through the testimony of experiencers. That, while certainly worth something, still fails to satisfy the experimental sorts of requirements in order to qualify for being good science.

So where does all of that leave us when it comes to “ghosts”, what they may be, what we can learn about them, and whether the subject is indeed worthy of scientific attention? At present, the field would seem to be extremely divided on the subject, although the vast majority of serious scientists wouldn’t stop to consider serious research into ghosts, since our general attitudes and beliefs about what a “ghost” is supposed to be, as outlined in this essay, contradict observable laws of our universe. In other words, for a “ghost” to represent some energetic expression of any kind, let alone a deceased individual, they would have to disobey the laws of thermodynamics in doing so, something that has not occurred in our observations of the physical universe since the beginning of scientific inquiry. It seems a pretty fair estimate, then, that a “ghost” certainly isn’t anything akin to what they have long been supposed to be; the modern physicist would take this one step further, and say that since they appear to be impossible, they don’t exist at all.

I do wonder, in conclusion, if outright dismissal is the best line of thought to be applied here. We have cultural traditions from all over the world that involve the concept of “ghosts” having existed for centuries, as well as modern reports from witnesses that describe remarkably similar phenomena that may occur today. Perhaps we shouldn’t close the book on ghosts entirely; but there seems to be little merit in attempting to address the subject through the lens of our old attitudes and beliefs.

In this case, as with every institution of a “good” scientific theory, we need one that predicts a number of observations accurately—based on data, rather than faith or belief—using a basic model consisting of arbitrary elements to help guide these observations. Our theory must also correctly, and definitely, predict future observations of the phenomenon in question.

So the question at the end of the day, rather than being “do ghosts exist”, should instead be this: “If ghosts represent any valid, tangible phenomenon, what might account for their existence, and can this—whatever it may be—occur in keeping with a good scientific theory?”

At present, it seems we are still searching for our “good ghost theory”.

—

The Shocking Story of England’s Electric Woman – Micah Hanks Reports

December 10, 2015 By The Paranormal Braintrust

For years, many have claimed to have been afflicted by unusual electrical phenomenon. Among the complaints of such individuals, common threads that appear include watches stopping, interference with televisions and radios, and certain appliances ceasing to work altogether. Some consider this to be an unusual natural phenomenon, while others believe that the ability to affect electrical appliances might represent something else, and perhaps even otherworldly.

Although a number of stories of individuals with such strange abilities have been reported over the years, one incident does stand out among them. It is the story of Jacqueline Priestman, an English woman whose strange experiences with electrical devices had once caused her to believe in otherworldly forces acting upon her… and circumstances which led to suffering that nearly claimed her life.

The strange experience that would mark the beginning of Jacqueline Preistman’s trouble occurred in 1980, in the English town of Stockport, Manchester, where she lived with her husband, Ron. Jacqueline, as Ron knew all too well, was occasionally prone to fits of anger, but this time things seemed different. They had been in the midst of a heated argument, and just before he left their home on his scooter, this still angry Jacqueline called after him shouting, “I hope you break your neck!”

As he sped away on his scooter, neither Ron, nor Jacqueline would have imagined that he would be involved in an accident later that same day, in which his spine and neck had been broken in multiple areas. Sadly, Ron would never recover; he passed away due to complications from the injuries within weeks of the accident, leaving Jacqueline with a harsh reminder of the power of words; whether or not anything she said had affected her late husband’s fate, she knew she would have to live with what she said regardless.

This was only the beginning of Jacqueline’s troubles, though. As she began to adjust to living alone, it was around this time that strange occurrences began to happen around her home. Things came to a head one afternoon, when a lightbulb in her bathroom exploded above her while she was bathing, showering her with broken glass and injuring her arm.

“My arm was badly cut,” Jacqueline remembered of the incident. “I still have the scar, but I put it down to a faulty bulb.”

Within days of the incident with the lightbulb, her vacuum cleaner burned out as well, and a repairman who visited said he could find no cause for the apparent malfunction. With time, additional incidents involving exploding lightbulbs would suggest there had been more at play here; she had chalked the first one up to being faulty, but could all of the bulbs she kept buying have been from the same “bad” batch?

The problems weren’t relegated to things happening in her home. Even when Jacqueline went to restaurants or grocery stores, lights would go out in fixtures she came into contact with. “Some freezer shops and supermarkets even tried to stop me going in, in case I blasted their machinery,” Jacqueline told the New Straits Times in 1985.

Throughout the maddening ordeal, Jacqueline couldn’t shake the sense that this strange activity — or curse, depending on how one chose to see it — had been connected with Ron’s death. “When I think about it now, that was the trigger that changed my life,” Jacqueline remembered. “I suppose my own guilt prevented me from crying, but the internal strain was tremendous. Ron even joked as he lay in his hospital bed that if he died, he would come back and haunt me.”

With time, Jacqueline actually began to consider that she was being haunted by the ghost of her dead husband. His spirit, she reckoned, might be tormenting her by interfering with electrical appliances around her, just as he had joked he might do before his death.

One day, as she passed a particular cupboard where Ron had kept a number of his possessions, another lightbulb exploded violently above her, frightening her and her infant child. Jacqueline shouted aloud, Ron, what do you want? “I was convinced it was his ghost,” she said of the incident, “but I daren’t tell anyone else.”

Eventually Jacqueline remarried to a man named Paul (rather ironically, Paul was an electrician), but even after moving in with him the strange and frightening phenomena continued to occur. Her radio would turn itself on and coast between stations, and her television would do the same thing without her intervention. Her stove, like the vacuum cleaner, burned out, and often when she would touch appliances, she would receive a jolting shock.

On one occasion, Jacqueline was accused by a visiting reporter of perpetrating an elaborate ruse, in which she had concocted the entire story of her alleged “powers” in order to gain attention and, perhaps, sympathy too. Jacqueline was so angered by the reporter’s assertion that a vacuum cleaner she was holding reportedly caught fire, frightening both Jacqueline and her accuser. But in truth, she hadn’t wished for sympathy at all, instead wishing only for release from whatever was causing so much madness in her otherwise normal life.

By this time, Jacqueline had begun to suffer from headaches, as well as intermittent fainting spells; at one point, she even contemplated suicide. At last, at the advice of her new husband, Jacqueline agreed to meet with a Professor Roy Gough, who provided data about broken electric rings from one of the cookers Jacqueline had accidentally destroyed with her touch. Gough contacted Paul, and reported that the contacts had been high-voltage welded. “They weren’t fused,” her husband said of the information the professor provided. “That’s when we began to suspect that Jackie was somehow the cause of all these electric disturbances. She was blowing the ring circuits without realizing it.”

With time, Paul developed what he believed may be a solution to the problem: he believed Jacqueline was a likely candidate for a natural, but unusually high build-up of static electricity within her body, possibly due to an alkali-acid imbalance within her body that helped her to adapt to artificially retaining static charges. He developed a number of methods for treating Jacqueline’s condition, ranging from the consumption of more fruits and vegetables, to having Jacqueline carry onions in each hand while walking around the house, which helped dissipate the excess electricity.

“She was discharging her surplus static into the onions,” Paul told the New Straits Times in an interview, noting that based on this he had managed to create a smaller, simple device which Jacqueline wore that achieved a similar effect.

As unusual as Jacqueline’s story may seem, she isn’t the only individual to have suffered from this strange, and literally shocking affliction. The disorder is sometimes known as as High Voltage Syndrome (or HVS), and a number of similar cases have been documented. At least one may date back as far as 1837, as Fortean researcher Mark Pilkington noted in The Guardian in 2004.

On a final strange note, it was reported that in 1985, with the birth of Jacqueline’s fourth child (a daughter), on one occasion the midwife had been startled by a shock she received from the infant. As unusual as Jaqueline’s own condition had been, it seemed that she may also have passed it along to her progeny, as well.

The odd circumstances which had led Jacqueline from having once believed she was “haunted” by her deceased husband, to having eventually felt her husband’s knowledge of electricity had helped save her life, presents a unique case, and one worthy of study. Some have expressed skepticism of the incident; one Wikipedia editor, for instance, had recently argued over whether an entry for Jacqueline Priestman should be kept at all, based on what he perceived as doubt over whether it can be proven she existed (despite numerous photographs and interviews appearing in publications like the aforementioned New Straits Times article from 1985).

In the annals of folklore surrounding claims of the unusual, which range from ghosts and hauntings, to alleged UFO contact, many have similarly discussed the presence of strange electrical phenomenon. This begs the question, might further study of cases like Jacqueline’s lead us to a better understanding of natural conditions which, as Jacqueline herself had once believed, might otherwise be interpreted as the onset of some inexplicable paranormal phenomena?

—

Causal Looping: A Strange Story From. . . Nowhere — Micah Hanks Reports

October 29, 2015 By The Paranormal Braintrust

There is an old saying that goes, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

The origin of the phrase actually entails what really were, in fact, free lunches that used to be provided in bars around the United States back in the old days. The stipulation had been that a patron who purchased at least one beverage would be offered food, although generally of a variety rich in salt, which only increased one’s thirstiness. In modern usage, the phrase is generally taken to have the underlying meaning that “you don’t get something for nothing,” and saw its greatest popularity following its use in Robert Heinlein’s libertarian science fiction masterpiece, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

On the subject of issues that arise from “getting something from nothing”, imagine the following scenario: a professor travels into the future and visits a library, where he discovers an innovative book on mathematics. He opens the book and begins skimming through the pages, and eventually finds an equation unlike any he had known to exist in the present day from which he arrived. The professor makes note of this equation, and brings knowledge of it back with him when he returns to his temporal point of origin.

Later, he meets a student for coffee, and tells of his marvelous trip to the future, along with his discovery of this futuristic new mathematical equation. The student is equally fascinated by it, and decides to write a paper detailing the equation, along with the theory behind. The paper is later published, and it appears in a journal… which turns out to be the very same which the professor had discovered in the library during his visit to the future.

There is a problem that arises from this story, however. When the professor learned about the equation by reading of it in a book, we must presume that it existed because of his own eventual actions which, in turn, had the effect of changing the course of events which actually led to the existence of the equation in the first place. Here’s the catch: neither the professor, nor his student, actually created the equation… each of them independently learned of its existence second hand. So where did the equation actually come from?

The problem this presents has to do with what is called a causal loop, a hypothetical time travel scenario in which a future event that occurs is actually the cause of a past event, which thus causes the future event to occur as well. Despite their existence together in spacetime, neither event has a definite, independent origin.

So why, exactly, is this a problem? According to thermodynamic laws, there are serious limitations on what can happen to information in our universe. Like energy, the premise is that it can neither be created, nor destroyed, although transitions may occur between its various states. If the paradox we’ve outlined above—sometimes referred to as “The Bootstrap Paradox”, in reference to a short story by (you guessed it!) Robert Heinlein—holds any water, then we must presume that the information in question came from nowhere, since neither the professor, nor the student, actually did the work that resulted in the formation of said equation. In other words, it simply manifested in spacetime, as if by magic, as a result of the influence (or blundering, perhaps) of our nutty time-traveling professor.

The situation I’ve outlined here bears similarity to what, until fairly recently, had been a long held (and famous) debate between physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind, as outlined in the latter’s book The Black Hole War. In this book, Susskind argued against Hawking’s premise that information was lost once it entered a black hole, rather than being preserved in Hawking radiation. For information to be “lost” in this way would essentially constitute a violation of the conservation of information, an extrapolation upon the law of conservation of energy, which is fundamental to the mechanics of our universe (I will note, however, that Hawking eventually retracted this paradoxical view toward black holes and their appetite for information, accepting a position in agreement with Susskind).

So to be clear, information from nowhere is not the kind of thing that jives well with the laws of physics. Of course, in keeping with the known mechanics of the universe, I tend to agree on all the aforementioned points; although the discussion of causal loops and information paradoxes does remind me of a peculiar experience I had a number of years ago, which had been both serendipitous, as well as a bit baffling.

On the occasion in question, I had been visiting Joshua Warren, author and paranormal researcher, at his home along with a number of other guests. As memory serves, a handful of us were there in Joshua’s living room late one night, probably enjoying a glass of whiskey, as our host began sharing a strange story his family had told over the years. The story detailed the disappearance of Claude Calloway, an ancestor on Warren’s mother’s side of the family. Claude, probably in his late twenties at the time, had been sitting on the front porch talking through the open kitchen window with his father, when he suddenly vanished.

Claude’s father presumed at the time that Claude had simply wandered off someplace, but this would later prove to be the last time anyone recalled seeing Claude alive. The theories about Claude’s fate would range from foul play, to an attempt to leave town quietly due to a bad deal having gone down. Whatever the case, his disappearance seems to have remained a mystery.

The strangest part, however, was yet to come. Only a few days before Claude vanished, he had posed for a family picture, and in the photograph that was later developed, Claude’s face had somehow been obscured. The family had always maintained, rather superstitiously, that the picture had somehow managed to foretell of Claude’s disappearance in the days to follow.

As I sat nearby, overhearing Joshua telling this story, I was amazed, but not because of the incredible nature of the story itself. It was because my family had the exact same story.

In addition to recognizing the story, I similarly recalled that there were a number of Calloways that existed on my father’s side of the family, and hence, it seemed almost undeniable that I had indeed heard this same story before… which would likely mean that Joshua Warren and I were, in fact, distant cousins.

My father has long held an interest in genealogy, and so I went to him with the story, and soon put him in touch with Joshua’s mother, who helped fill in a number of details about various members of the family. Within a few days, my father had managed to fill in the gaps, and confirmed without question that Joshua and I were indeed fourth cousins, and that Claude Calloway had been a common ancestor.

As if this story couldn’t get any stranger, here’s where the real twist enters the picture. Upon the realization that I was correct in my belief that Joshua and I were related to the same line of the Calloway family in Western North Carolina, my father admitted that there had been one element to the story that still troubled him.

“Who did you say originally told you the story of Claude Calloway?” my father asked me. I told him that I had heard it from him, obviously, but this didn’t seem to be case. My father explained that not only had he been unaware of the story until I approached him with it, but that on our side of the family tree, there had been virtually no interaction with the Calloways on Joshua’s side. In other words, there had been no way that any of my immediate family members should have known the story about Claude Calloway’s disappearance.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Did Micah Hanks have his own brush with time travel?” quote=”Did Micah Hanks have his own brush with time travel?”]Moments like this can have the effect of challenging one’s own perception of things. Here, I certainly found myself having to question whether I had really recalled the story from my youth, or if I had merely convinced myself that I had. In psychology, the notion of hindsight bias entails that a person may perceive that they had known the outcome of a series of events, despite that outcome having been unpredictable (this is sometimes also called “creeping determinism”). I wondered if I had merely fooled myself into thinking that I had known Joshua’s story, and its outcome, when in fact it was completely alien to me. And yet, had this been the case, of equal concern would be the question of why this “alien” story had nonetheless managed to confirm precisely what I had thought that it would: that Joshua and I shared a common family story, because we had common ancestors who experienced it. The fact that the story correlated perfectly with common ancestry between us seemed to make the possibility of mis-remembrance increasingly doubtful. Then as now, it seems more likely to me that I had indeed been told the story by some family member of mine… but who could that have been?

Who knows, maybe one day in the distant future, we will finally achieve what, today, seems impossible: actual, physical time travel. Whenever that occurs, perhaps someone scanning the web will have read the odd tale I’ve related here, and will decide to have a go with it themselves. Maybe he or she will travel backwards in time, far enough, perhaps, to be able to find a more youthful version of yours truly.

Maybe they’ll approach the younger “me” of yesteryear, and they’ll share with the young lad a very unusual story about his distant cousin Claude, and how a photo predicted that he would vanish into thin air only days later.

It all sounds like it could be a story fit for the printed page, and in fact, maybe it is: as I’ve written it here, perhaps I’ve just planted the very seed of an idea that will one day make its way back around, and thus explain this strange tale of time travel, paradoxes, and the bizarre synchronism that makes life so interesting. Who knows.

The Cash-Landrum Incident: A Case For Critical Review? – Micah Hanks Reports

October 7, 2015 By The Paranormal Braintrust

Among the more contentious and hotly-debated UFO incidents of the last four decades, the Piney Woods UFO case, often referred to as the Cash–Landrum incident, is perhaps also one of the most troubling, and for a number of reasons.

Here, we are presented with a tale of three witnesses to some strange source of aerial illumination, which was immediately pursued (or perhaps escorted) by a number of helicopters. This seemed, in the minds of the observers, to indicate military involvement of some kind. Further, we find that the victims had reported health problems shortly after the incident, which they believed may have resulted from their proximity to the object as it hovered over the roadway ahead of them. Finally, despite all the seemingly substantive evidence this case provides, barely a clue has emerged as to what the origins of the object may have been, let alone the source of it’s apparent military escorts: a fleet of helicopters which, if they existed, have yet to be accounted for, given their numbers, and the timeframe during which the witnesses described seeing them.

Though the case is well known, a brief summary will be provided here. The incident occurred just after Christmas on the evening of December 29, 1980. Driver Betty Cash, Along with Vicky Landrum and her seven-year-old grandson, Colby, were traveling home to Dayton, Texas in Betty’s Oldsmobile Cutlass. The threesome were on their way back home from dinner, traveling along Farm to Market Road 1485. It was just after 9 PM, and although they had been looking for an open game of Bingo somewhere along the highway earlier that night, all of the usual spots were closed for the holidays.

In the distance ahead of them, 51-year-old Cash first observed a bright light through the trees. Vicky and Colby soon noticed it also, and the group supposed it might be an aircraft leaving nearby Houston Intercontinental Airport. As their vehicle approached the light, the travelers could see that it was very bright, shining through the trees of the Piney Woods that lined either side of the highway. Soon, the object was clearly visible ahead of them; though it appeared to be an indistinct source of light hovering in midair (the witnesses compared it with daylight), later retellings would describe the object is being diamond-shaped, and seemingly producing flame from its base.

Cash emerged and stood outside the car, observing the object the longest of the three. Although Vicki emerged from the vehicle also, she returned quickly to comfort Colby, who was badly frightened by what was unfolding. Landrum, a Christian, would later recount that she had thought this was the second coming of Christ, and had advised Colby not to be afraid. Cash described that the object also gave off a tremendous amount of heat, and recalled being able to stand in the December night air throughout the duration of the experience as though it had been a summer day.

The object continued to hover in the sky, occasionally bobbing slowly up-and-down, and eventually rising to a point well above the treetops. At this time, the witnesses claim a group of helicopters (possibly Chinooks) moved into the same airspace as the object, and assuming a formation around it, proceeded to move out of the area, as though guiding the strange source of the illumination as it left with them. Cash and Landrum said they recalled counting 23 of the helicopters; however, a local detective named Lamar Walker (one of the very few to have come forward later who claimed to have seen anything similar on the same evening in question) told that he and his wife observed 12 Chinook helicopters passing through the sky near Dayton that night.

Upon returning to the vehicle, Cash recalled burning her hand as she reached for the handle of her car door, which had grown hot from the tremendous heat the light had created. Landrum would similarly claim the dashboard of the vehicle on the passenger side was left with an imprint where her hand pressed against it it during this period.

In the days that followed the incident, the three observers—Cash in particular—would claim to suffer from a variety of health effects, which had included irritation and reddening of the skin similar to a sunburn. The witnesses eventually sought medical attention, and subsequently approached Senators Lloyd Bentsen and John Tower about what they felt had been ill effects rendered after exposure to the object. Under the advice of their state representatives, Cash and Landrum contacted officials at Bergstrom Air Force Base, where they were interviewed. A subsequent law suit against the U.S. Government was filed for $20 million, but judges eventually dismissed the case, based on the fact that a previous investigation in 1982, carried out by Lt. Col. George Sarran of the Department of the Army Inspector General, found no evidence that the helicopters the witnesses claimed to see had belonged to any branch of the military. Further, there were no known operations underway on the evening of December 29, 1980, as this coincided with the Christmas holidays.

The case was championed my many in the UFO community, including John Schuessler,

MUFON founding member and former Director of General Services for the Boeing Company. UFO skeptic Phillip J. Klass similarly investigated the incident, coming to the rather predictable conclusion that based on the lack of evidence, there were credible reasons to doubt the story altogether. Others had not been so quick to dismiss the event and its witnesses, including Lt. Col. Sarran himself who, despite his determination that the helicopters could not be accounted for, maintained that the witnesses (Cash and the Landrums, as well as Lamar Walker and his wife) were credible, and that “there was no perception that anyone was trying to exaggerate the truth.”

The case has maintained a certain appeal over the years, despite the conflicting opinions about what had or hadn’t happened, and whether a case could be made for a UFO incident at all, based on the spotty supporting data. Skeptical UFO researcher Robert Scheaffer has expressed doubts about the case based on the fact that the witnesses ultimately would seek financial compensation, while those more moderately minded, namely independent researcher Curt Collins, have nonetheless come to critical conclusions about certain aspects, though without dismissing the case altogether.

I spoke at length with Collins in July 2015, where we reviewed a number of elements about the case, and its subsequent investigation throughout the years that followed. Chief among the elements in Collins’ review had been initial descriptions given by the witnesses which, as were alluded to earlier, seemed to differ from popular retellings of the story that emerged later. The earlier descriptions of the object, rather than depicting a diamond shaped aircraft, seemed more nebulous, and only described a very bright source of illumination; so bright, presumably, that the illumination itself managed to obscure much further detail pertaining to its source. The famous “diamond shape”, according to Collins, may in fact have been suggested later by young Colby, who we will recall had been terrified, and remained in the back seat of Cash’s Cutlass for the majority of the encounter. Cash, observing the light from outside the car, had also described the movement movement of the light as being similar to something suspended in the air by a balloon.

This is an interesting description, to say the least, since one among the more conservative interpretations of this case involves the notion that the object might have been some variety of flare. This sentiment was mirrored to me by a friend (who requested anonymity), whose background in aerospace engineering led him to the same notion:

“I have wondered if the sighting could have been due to a test of some sort of military flare (used to protect against heat seeking missiles). They had some odd flares back then. But why test it there (why test a purported nuclear system there either)? Also, the flares would burn for too short a period, even ones fueled by jet fuel. Still, these were very bright so might have caused some sort of physiological damage/soften plastic of the car.”

The use of flares in military activity has a long history, and for a variety of applications. As far back as the 1920s, the United States Naval Institute Proceedings of 1921 referred to a new kind of weapon that had been designed for use with flares. The weapon would be tested in a training exercise that involved the decommissioned battleship Alabama, with intention for eventual use against Germain craft:

A “light barrage,” composed of giant aerial flares, each of more than 200,000 candlepower, will be one feature of the attack. Army engineers have submitted such enthusiastic reports on this weapon the larger flayers estimated to be able to 1 million candles have been placed under construction.

Giving a greenish white light, literally “brighter than day,” the flares to be used in the Alabama test will illuminate an area of five square miles and, expert flyers say, should enable the aviators to obtain greater accuracy than in the daytime. The flares are attached to a parachute of white silk, which reflects the light downward with sufficient intensity, it is believed, to Blondie officers and gutters on the ship under attack, so as to demoralize any plan for defense, while keeping the upper air reaches shrouded in gloom.

This is merely one among many examples spanning the last century that illuminate the use of experimental flares in creative ways for military operations. But perhaps of greater interest in relation to the Cash-Landrum case is a U.S. patent (US 3837281 A) filed in April 1969 and subsequently published five years later, detailing a thermal infrared emitter source designed as means for supplying hot gas for the quick inflation of a closed balloon. According to the patent’s abstract:

“A device is presented which emits infra heat rays at specific predetermined wave lengths and defines a particular cross sectional pattern of such heat emission so that the emission source can be both detected and identified by an infra red detector. A hot gas generant is employed to inflate a balloon of known cross section having a surface which is known to emit infra red heat rays within a certain selected range of wave lengths.”

During the discussion with Curt Collins, Cash’s description of the object and its movement through the air as being “balloon-like” does come to mind here. The patent, which saw publication in late 1974, would comprise technology that emerged just six years prior to the incident that occurred near Dayton, Texas, on December 29th.

This is by no means a conclusive “solution” to the Piney Woods Incident, although presumably a device similar to this, with its emission of “infra heat rays”, might be capable of producing some of the photochemical damage reported by Cash after her observation. Certain other effects, such as stomach sickness and symptoms of dehydration that Cash and Landrum reported, might be consistent with a condition such as severe sun poisoning, whether or not prolonged exposure to sunlight had indeed been the cause.

However hopeful one’s attempts at explaining the case may be, a number of questions remain. For instance, how many helicopters were actually seen that night? Had Cash and Landrum miscounted, or perhaps in their excitement, merely exaggerated the number they had seen? Even a fleet of Chinooks numbering half that of what Cash and Landrum reported seeing (which was roughly the number the Walkers said they saw on the same night) would be difficult to account for during the Christmas holidays. As Robert Scheaffer notes, “It ought to be quite straightforward to trace a fleet of 23 Chinook helicopters flying over the United States. Much effort has been expended to trace such helicopters, to no avail. The U.S. military simply didn’t have a fleet of that many Chinook helicopters in one place, nor did any private firm.” It would certainly seem that the number of Chinooks Cash and Landrum reported is impossible. A good question, perhaps, might be to ask whether we should rule out all possibility that a smaller fleet was seen.

However we choose to look at it, we see that the case presents not only inconsistencies, but also a fair number of dead ends. The skeptical interpretation has thus moved further and further from the notion that there may be any credibility to the case at all, while on the opposite extreme, others in the UFO community, namely Stanton Friedman, have argued that it couldn’t have been any kind of a nuclear aircraft of our own (Friedman is, of course, a nuclear physicist). On September 25, 2011 during a debate with John B. Alexander on The Paracast, Friedman noted that, “I worked on nuclear airplane engines back on the late 50s. It seems unlikely… I don’t think it was one of ours.” Thus, the logical turn here which some might take is that it simply might not have been our own; in other words, perhaps it was a more exotic alien craft, after all. Admittedly, this argument seems rather dubious if we are to believe there had been any helicopters involved; even if that number was less than Cash and Landrum reported.

Whatever the case, it has been the debate over such issues that has kept this case so fresh on people’s minds, and even after the passing of so many years. Yes, by definition the object could be called a “UFO”, although even among the more hopeful researchers who have sought to legitimize the incident, the most probable solution would involve something our military had been behind, and of which details still remain obscure. What we are left with are few facts, but a story which nonetheless bears a ring of credibility perhaps unlike most other UFO reports of the last four decades.

Micah Hanks

The modern world, despite what is afforded us by science and discovery, is still very much a place of mystery. To the open-minded thinker, a world of possibility exists here, where, through logic and reason, we may be able to glean new ways of understanding the nature of the physical universe.

MICAH HANKS REPORTS ON UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS IN EARTH’S ORBIT

There is an old saying that goes, “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

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