issue 58

Fortean Mysteries SIG recent history issue 58 Newsletter of the Fortean Mysteries SIG of American Mensa

only 200,000 millicents per 3 issues Published irregularly since Undecember 1658 AC

"The preposterous, the grotesque, the incredible ... the indeterminable and the unrecordable and the unknowable..." -- Charles Fort

Would you believe we just found the newsletter we were working on when we moved last Fall? Well, we did anyway. That's why the lastissue was even later than it ought to have been.

So some of the news herein is last year's, but since it's still as mysterious, though not so new, read on.

Colin Wilson and Dr. Christopher Evans, we see have put together a 500-page collection called The Book of Great Mysteries. The blurb says: "one of the most compelling books you will ever read." As compelling as Fort's?

It includes CasperHauser, the mysterious boy who appeared seemingly from nowhere to Anspach, Bavaria -- with the mental age of two and the ability to see stars in the daylight; Yukteswar, the Indian guru who predicted his own death and return; also "ghosts, vampires, and other bizarre phenomena ... like alchemy and astrology."

Fort didn't need to include such things, finding professional astronomy and chemistry quite bizarre enough.

Recently, John Keel spoke at an Archaeus Project lecture and his book on the Mothman, The Mothman Prophesies (of Pleasant Pt., WV circa 1966-7) is very interesting and amusing. (Write Archaeus Project, 2402 University Ave., St.

Paul, MN 55114 for information, largely funded and founded by Earl Bakker, inventor of the heart pacemaker and recently retired as CEO of Medtronics Corp.) -- Elvin Jensen

I thought you'd never ask! (about mysteries) unsolved. Here's a few to start with: About 1974-75 a highway construction crew in Oregon or Washington was drilling

through a mountain to form a path for the new road. They uncovered a tunnel in solid rock which was thirty feet in diameter. No one knew anything about it so the engineers and surveyors -- four in all -- decided to explore it on their day off, Saturday.

The four got into their four-wheel drive vehicle and proceeded to travel into the tunnel. This tunnel was a right angle to the proposed road and was not disturbed except for he initial unexpected breakthrough.

They travelled an estimated forty miles -- slowing continually down, so they reached quite deep into the Earth. Then something frightened them out of their wits (so to say) and they rapidly turned around and got out of there as fast as their four-wheeler could go.

The newspaper (I believe it was the Philadelphia Inquirer) promises to investigate and report on it to its readers. Nothing was ever again mentioned about it in any newspaper, TV or radio report.

[Ed.: We don't remember that story specifically, but it does remind us of the old one about a road crew through the Alps who dug into a cave with a live pterodactyl, given to a French museum in 1856 -- and, of course, since lost.

It also reminds us of what explorers in the recently aired remake of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" found: nasty, gnomish, batlike creatures under the control of apparently a near-immortal Atlantean sorcerer.

Then there's the stories a while back that told of a drilling crew hearing human-like screams coming from the record deep hole they had drilled.]

happenings related to space shuttles, strange sightings and sounds in an old castle in North Italy,

If you are interested in these I can provide more details. It may be a lot of fun. I hope so because very few people are able to discuss these kinds of occurances. The commonfolk love "sports".

[O.K. Good readers, uncommon Mensans, do you have any interest in Joseph's mysteries, any answers for him?]

It's time we wrote about "Monsters", our favorite television show -- at least during the summer rerun season.

Some of the interesting monsters have been: spear-carrying rats, a carnivorous ape, a garbage-eating apartment building, a noice-eater that eats even heatbeats, a sin extrctor, an octopus-leech.

Even the traditional vampires, zombies and demons are treated often with humor. These tend to be monsters created or released by uncareful or unethical investigators -- a warning to all of us.

There's been a lot on the Kennedy murder mystery, connecting Hoffa's disappearance and Marilyn Monroe and others' "suicides". There's different theories in The Hoffa Wars, R. F. K. Must Die, Double Cross and Secret Coup.

Whodunit? It seems like everybody. It's a mystery that won't be solved until everybody involved is dead it seems. Or if it's agencies like the FBI, the CIA and the mob protecting themselves it may be much longer than that. Nixon isn't the

The mystery of Fall River is still alive and well at 100 years old. On Aug. 4th, 1892 Abby and Andrew Borden were murdered. The misinformation spread by countless books since suspected "Lizbeth" Borden, but a few suggested the maid or

sister Emma did it. Was the accused acquitted because she was innocent or because the jury didn't want to be the first to ask for the execution of a woman?

In Science Trivia by Charles Cazeau we found the interesting Part 5: the Supernatural. Apparently spontaneous human combustion (SHC) is classified by Cazeau as supernatural along with vampires and zombies. The really strange part about Part 5 though is the natural explanations given for these "supernatural" phenomena. Some say it's demonic, others electrostatic, still others both.

Vampires may be demonic, porphyria, blood fetishism, premature burial. Zombies could be the result of tetrodotoxin or the Zobops' corpse-reanimating sorcery.

Are these trivial phenomena? Would Buffy the Vampireslayer think so? Like fer shurr not!

The mysterious sudden wave that hit Daytona Beach, FL, July 3rd was at first called a rogue wave caused by an underwater earthquake. Now witnesses have reported that before the wave they saw a mysterious light in the sky -- not a UFO exactly, but likely a fireball, a large meteor.

I happened to find (in my notes, not in the sky) the planetoid Adalbert, number 330, which was discovered in March 1892 ... Maybe. Some say Max Wolf was mistaken since they couldn't find it themselves. If an eight-kilometer rock fell

Speaking of rocks, in the Aug. 16th Weekly World News was an article on Richard Demonde's experiments and his discovery that they live. He found a very slow metabolic rate, true, but it does justify pet rocks, or the stones awaiting to cry out.

(Lk 19:40) Could they be crying out, trying to communicate? Might not ultraslowspeed recordings tell us something important? Or were they not rocks at all, but chenoo? Did Demonde employ an Iroquois medicineman to check this

In The Chose Few by Christian and Barbara O'Brien (Turnstone Press, 1985) is the interesting association between the Elohim and the elves.

According to their scenario strange, tall, large-eyed, shining-faced El arrived in Sumeria about 9,000 B. C. Noah, as they read the Book of Enoch, was a son of these Sons of God.

Are the elves still among us? Secret Life by Dr. David Jacobs and Intruders by Budd Hopkins (featured on "Current Affairs" and "Inside Edition" respectively) say so.

Dr. Corder said on "Current Affairs": "There are guardian angels or aliens looking over each individual."

But it's not truly new. In 1947 Brinsley le Poer Trench wrote: "We are already here, among you. Some of us have always been here, with you, yet apart from, watching, and occasionally, guiding you whenever the opportunity arose."

Hopkins says 85% of abductors are small, grey and large headed who take the same abductees over and over, possibly for crossbreeding purposes. Philip Klass calls it all "a dangerous game" influenced by movies like "E. T." and "Close Encounters", a confabulation.

In the April '92 Impact #226 the ICR (Institute for Creation Research) writes about the problem of ice core dating.

The Greenland ice is an average of 4,000 feet and Antarctica's about 12,000. C. U. Hammer, etal. correlated layer acidity with volcanic activity back to 533 A. D. The deeper the more pressure and the less correlations there are.

The changes in Oxygen 18 levels mark layers and the similarity to treerings imply annual snowfalls. They could however, ICR points out, be individual snowfalls, several per year, several per year and so less than 8,500 years old. This is quite different from the interpretation that gives 160,000 years for the ice layering.