issue 56

Fortean Mysteries SIG recent history issue 56 Newsletter of the Fortean Mysteries SIG of American Mensa

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

Mpossibilities and the Fortean Mysteries SIG are fifteen years old this March. It's hard to believe -- like most things.

That first issue talked about ancient astronauts, the Shroud of Turin, new moons for Uranus, sasquatch watching, rainmaking, manna, singing sands.

One piece worth repeating is the five warning signs of Forteanism: (based on those for psychosis.)

1. Do you think of yourself as a highly intelligent individual, a genius?

2. Do you see others as shortsighted and blinded to the obvious?

3. Do you feel a paralysing pressure of conservatism on your activities?

4. Has your belief in even the longest established and most widely held premises and ideas become weak?

5. Are you unable to express the concepts that you are aware to be transmediumized without creating new ones?

Eerie seems eerier, or at least more fortean, since the revamping in midseason. The newest episodes have featured a werewolf, a living tornado, a ghost in a haunted mill, a mad scientist and an alien teleportation machine made by a secret society.

The explanation is than the first bunch was just surface weirdness and that now the boys have gotten into deep weirdness.

The latest episode even made a passing reference to the alien's mishap over Siberia in 1908 -- obviously the Tunguska Object of July 30.

In the Sept. 15, 1981 Globe Dr. Gary Levine, SUNY, called Kinderhook, NY, "a window into another realm" because of the Bigfoot sightings reported there, especially the ones which seem more psychical than physical.

It perhaps ties in with the latest "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in which null space was mentioned, pockets of abnormal space invisible to light and energy dampening, just like Dr. Hern's "vacua", or "holes in space". He said these non-places were timeless. It reminds one also of Ambrose Bierce's "Difficulty on Crossing A Field" or the AAPV effect [That's the Aharonov-Ananandan-Popescu-Vaidman effect.] which describes meterologically isolated space-time regions.

We have plugged two gaps in our Fortean Calendar with Nov. 5, 1933 report of the firsat manned spaceship launch in the London Sunday Referee. Otto Fischer was supposed to have gone up 15 km in a rocket designed and constructed by his brother Bruno fro the Island of Ruegen Oct. 29th. Was it a hoax or was it covered up?

For Mar. 25 we have the report in 1986 in Weekly World News of a double spontaneous Human combustion (SHC) in Nueva Teka, Argentina the previou January. Jorge Valastro and Victorio Gorra are said to have burst into flame during a fight outside the local tavern.

So still remaining dates to fill are: Feb. 26, May 9 and 30, June 5, July 23 and Dec. 29.

On PBS last February was the interesting special "I Talk to Animals". It described yhe career of Samantha Khury, animal therapist, a wild talent tamed.

While still a child she felt close to animals, but it wasn't until she saw flying through the mind of a bird she was caring for that she realized just how close.

The show told of her conversations with elephants, dogs, cats, horses even ants. She cannot speak to the animals, though she was compared to Dr. Doolittle. She seems to be able to send and receive visual thoughts of the critters.

The elephant told her she had hurting feet, the cat a hurting back, the dog wanted a certain stuffed toy, the horse a vacation.

Did anyone read what the identification of the mysterious 1991-VG was? That's the object between one and eleven yards wide [That's an 83% error -- is it irregularly shaped, changing shap or what?]

Before the Dec. 4-5 near-approach Brian Marsden of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) was quoted as saying, "We don't know what it is." and Paul Chodas of NASA: "We've never seen anything like it." If it did turn out to be just some old space junk it would be rather disappoiting.

Maybe it's Fort's "left over (remains) from an ancient inter-planetary ... prowling."

In the Mar. '92 G'raffiti is an article on the Smez invasion by Neal Wilgus. The Smez are the original inhabitants of Tasmania who were driven into hiding under the South Pole.

They are described as naked, blue-skinned and three-eyed. Fort's Azurians?

If as he speculated these Blueskins were responsible for the vitrification of prehistoric sites in Britain and Bohemia they should be dealt with carefully.

According to the report they have already begun relocation of Humans to other hollow worlds until their restoration of Earth's surface is complete. If you meet a relocation assistant please be co-operative.

(G'raffiti is the newsletter of the Giraffe Society, another IQ group.)

Thank you for the back issues of Fortean Mysteries. Enclosed is my check for $30. Will let you know our feelings on your ideas, but at first glance, it looks as though you have done great work on carrying on the tradition.

We sent for the catalogue from Argurus Book Service, POB 831-383, Stone Mt., CA 30083-0023 as mentioned in the Bulletin and got some tempting offers:

Mother of All Nations by John Ashton (Harper 1989) on BVMs (appearances by Mary, aka Blessed Virgin Mary), or as Arcturus says "the epidemic of BVM sightings."

Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena by William Corliss (Arlington House, 1986), 423 pp!

Supernatural England by Eric Maple (R. Hale, 1988) illustrated ghost stories

Miracles: A Scientific Exploration of Wondrous Phenomena by Scott Rogo (Aquarian, 1991)

Werewolf: A True Story of Demonic Possession by Ed and Lorraine Warren (St.Martin's, 1991)

"America's Secret Space Program" by William Hamilton, i. e., UFOs R us

"Mystery Crop Circles Decoded" by Jon Eric Beckjord on his theory connecting crop glyphs to the ancient "Tifinag" alphabet

The Complete Books of Charles Fort by (who else?) Charles Fort (Diver, 1988) hard cover, 1125 pp., $29.95

We came across an interesting theory for the formation of supergalaxies in our roommate's copy of Heavens Above, A Beginner's Guide to Our Galaxy by Heather Couper and Terrence Murtagh. "Galaxies are gregarious and like to live in clusters or groups," they write.

They also have: "Like us, stars are born, they live and they die." "For a star like our sun the end comes after some 10,000 million years. All it can do is to leak away its dwinding heat reserves, growing steadily dimmer until it reaches the stellar graveyard as a cold, black globe."

Galaxies too they describe cosmobiologically as suffering from disturbed hearts when they eject radio waves.

Another interesting theory we found recently, this one geological, was in Chaos and Creation by Alfred de Grazia. He reasembles the 250 known strata into a hypothetical "geological column" 400,000 feet tall and asks where is it all now. Only 2% now exists on Earth. Who stole the other 98%?!

We thought this was an interestingline of thought to pursue, but he didn't. He goes on to say 50% never was and much of the other 48% is the moon.

He does somewhat redeem this too-orthodox explanation with a nice collection of anomalies.

Roman coin in Illinois (Corliss, 1974)

dollunder lava in Idaho (Wright, 1978)

fish fossil among varves in Idaho (Walworth and Sjostrom, 1977)

4,000-year-old log in iron deposit in Labrador (Cook, 1966)

upright whale in diatomaceous deposit in Labrador (Cook, 1966)

Human bones, artifacts in California Tertiary (Tuolumne, 1891)

If Fort's "redistributive teleportation" explains all this, what is being redistributed? What need does lava have for a doll? Or iron for a log? Is it chaos' way of getting back at creation?

"Revenant" is a handy term we just discovered, the preferred term used by the Lord Ruthven Assembly for the "undead." Lord Ruthven is the title character in The Vampyr (1819) by John Polidori.

The undead includes the familiar vampire, the zombi and ghost, but also less wellknown creatures:

anaun: walking dead of 4th C. Brittany

dearg-dul: Irish vampire

drud: batwinged vampire

dybbyk: body trespasser, usually drunk or child, sometimes animal or objects (familiars, fetishes)

ghula: female ghoul, shapeshifter, man-eater, bloodsucker

golem: animate but mute clay man

incubus: demon-possessed corpse or re-formed matter lusting for women

kinoly: demonic corpse of Madagascar

nightmare: fear indusing demon using vivid dreams, paralysis

nying-tul: tertiary phantom conjured by yang-tul

polt: short for poltergeist, a ghost heard not seen

rolong: Tibetan zombi

succubus: demon -possessed corpse or re-formed matter lusting after men

taxim: revenge animated corpse, sometimes able to pass through walls like ghost, at new moon

tii: Polynesian vampire

tulpa: phantom in archetypal form, possibly ancestral ghost

vetala: Hindu demon able to possess and re-animate a corpse

wengwa: one-eyed bloodsucker of Gabor, at night a were-leopard

wor: headless shepherd

yang-tul: secondary phantom conjured by tulpa

zuvembie: corpse possessing axe murderer

We read that actual dinosaur bones, not the surrounding rock, has now been carbon-dated by Kusnetsov and Ivanov at less than 30,000 years. And Hugh Miller of Columbus, OH, had his four bone samples tested at the University of Arizona, giving less than 20,000 years.

If the story in the Weekly World News is true, and a pregnant plesiosaur was caught in Loch Ness by Michel Genet last Dec. 22, it would be much less than 20,000 years. The captors however threw it back or so the "fish" story goes.

We read of Nathan Paldor, Univ. R. I., and Doron Nof, Fla. S. U., and their calculations showing the Red Sea could've been blown dry with 10 hours of 40 mph winds, the shallower part near Goshen at least.