issue 50

Fortean Mysteries SIG recent history issue 50 Newsletter of the Fortean Mysteries SIG of American Mensa

Finally, thank God, we have our own typewriter again. Hierogamous Enterprises (yours truly) will be taking on the publishing of Mpossibilities and the Fortean Mysteries SIG will distribute it to its members. We hope the quality of the layout will remain high. If we get quality input from our readers the content too will be good.

From Phyllis Weed we have "Please sign me up. I'm sure you've discovered inexplicable things to wonder about that I haven't thought of yet -- although I wonder about a lot."

In the article Rev. Sheldon Jackson tells of seeing what he calls "mastodins" by the thousands in the glacier on Kazatka Lake, "some standing ... caught in the embrace of the deadly foe." He saw this on a tour of mission stations five years before.

The explanation for the Siberian mammoths -- being trapped in the boggy ground after falling through the frozen crust won't fly here with englaciered beasts.

How could a glacier outrun and capture a mastodon? Could it perhaps not be a glacier, but an unknown lifeform like the one in Snow Fury. That too was water-with-a-few-impurities, like all known life, but unlike ordinary snow, seemingly alive.]

[Yes, there has been a rate change. Yes, a price decrease, an attempt to generate more participation in the newsletter. If interest and activity warrant we may expand again, but then it's rather incredible we have been going for 50 issues, for 12 years now!]

[Thanks for the renewal, Hazel. That's the best encouragement we could get. Mpossibilities' being irregular may tend to promote forgetfulness. We like to think that readers are so eager to open a new issue that they/you do not notice the expiration issue number.]

[Our data should not duplicate FT's. We have not seen one in some time. If you see anything therein of especial interest though please write and share it with us, J. S., O.K.?

FT likely maintains its wonderfully Fortean irreverence for the Powers That Be. We recommend it for anyone interested in British forteana.]

Our most recent interesting correpondence recently however has been with Michael Baran, author of Insights into Prehistory, Atlantis Reconsidered and Twilight of the Gods.

Michael ties together many mysteries -- Bible mythology (Cain and Abel, Noah), the Atlantis legend, UFOs, the aura, SHCs, disappearances, etc.

He has taken ideas from Plato, Cayce, Berlitz, Montgomery, Velikovsky, Churchward, Blavatsky, Bergier, Donnelly, Pauwels, seemingly everyone who has speculated on prehistory and wondrously come up with something new.

"The gods" in his reconstruction are not extraterrestrials or extradimensionals, but subterrestrials, denizens of the nether world -- a lost civilization using a gravitomagnetic force associated with miles-deeprivers (leynes).

In Insights to Prehistory he told of the fantastic hybredization using this force (griffind, sphinxes, pegasi, centaurs, ...), of enegry beam weapons (vitrified ruins), antigravity sports.

Such was life in prehistoric Atlantis until a magnetic reversal triggered a subatomic hyperresonance. The whole continent disintegrated, and disappeared into te Puerto Rico trench.

Some survivors of the Deluge have left traces of the Atlantean life in place names, in worldview, in the gene pool. Michael has searched Anatolian, Caribbean and European names for the "Atlantic sequence", infixed palindromization -- an "R" between another repeated consonant.

Having just seen the film "Conan the Barbarian" BARB* comes to mind. From whence we get Barbizon, Barbuda, Berbera, also perhaps barbecuing, burbling, Bourbon, burbot and Burbank. Conan is unbearded (Lat. barba) but babbling and barbs seem to fit even this brand of barbarianism.

Barbarian is said to have come from the Greek barbaros, but in Baran's archaic lexicon it comes from BARB-AR-YAN* (bearded-riverless-people).

Similarly Aryans are also riverless people, people not from Lemuria (LU-MU-RYU, Eden-home-river). America (A-MERU-KA) would mean "the island without the pole star", that is, not near Lu, Upper Eden.

Atlantis itself would come from A-TALA-NAT-KA or "without religion (?) island". The people from this high-tech, low-church civilization would be the KA-YAN or Canites, destroyed in the Deluge as told of in Genesis.

One can get carried away with this prehistory as so many Atlantologists have done, but this new view (including the Luvians whom we never heard of before) was the best we've read on the subject in years, if not ever.

I still like A-BEL ("without war") for the victim of the first KA-YAN, but perhap[s Abel in a way helped bring on Cain's jealousy and fratricide. We all seem to have that warring nature in us.

Have we come full cycle? Are the godless about to destroy civilixation again? What are the underground nuclear tests doing to the crust? If only a third of North America sunk in would be KA-tastrphic.

In the Time-Life series Mysteries of the Unknown is the category "Mystic Places" which ncludes Atlantis. It also includes Stonehenge, the pyramids and the Andes.

Psychics, out-of-body experiences, visions, prophesies, UFOs, mysterious phantom creatures -- mostly mental and nonphysical phenomena -- are dealt with, if only superficially.

Of particular interest to your editor was the case of William Horvath at Serpent Mound since we've been there. He claimed the leaves there crawled toward him; there was no wind. Mysterious, no? There are earthly winds and there may be other kinds.

In the April Scientific American was a story even more fantastic than the cold fusion claim in Utah. A mathematician calling himself "Arlo Lipoff" reportedly has applied the Banach-Tarski paradox and made a matter fabricator.

The paradox known since 1924 describes mathematically how a sphere can be cut into a few as five pieces which can be reassembled into two spheres -- of the same volume. The pieces' shapes are not at all simple however. It's there convoluted and intertwined surfaces that make such a thing possible,

It doesn't seem so great when compared to the matter fabrication attributed to the one called Lord. The breaking of the bread may have been the first application of the B-T paradox. Bread would more easily break into irregular pieces than would a gold ball.

Five loaves broken into five pieces and reassembled would yield ten, ten twenty, and so on. Perhaps by passing the intervening stages Jesus could have broken the bread into say 5120 pieces each the same volume as the originals.

In the Weekly World News July 25 (we read all sorts of stuff, don't we?) is Yolanda Robles' claim to be 170 years old. She has 13 marriage certificates but no birth certificate. We don't find it so hard to accept that or that Satan promised her she would live til 200.

What we find incredible in the story is that Scientists claim to have confirmed her age medically. How many 170-year-olds do they have for comparison?

P. T. Barnum's first attraction Joyce Heth only claimed 161 years. Joyce is dead now too. If you know of anyone else born in 1819 please write us and tell us how they're doing. We'll have some way to make a scientific comparison then.

Invertebrate paleontologyis not apparently so glamorous (or financially backed) as fusion research, but the story there is an interesting study of abnormal psychology of scientists too.

Viswa Jit Gupta has been accused of falsifying data for the klast 25 years. In the April Nature John A. Talent [Notice the way Science speedily selfregulates itself?] says, "It would be impossible for these things to happen geologically." He explains this to mean that when Gupta's specimens are included in the schema geologists come to weird conclusions."

Ah, the same ol song again, that we heard back before the continental drift theory became plate tectonics?

Even the Flat Earth point-of-vew can get a new alias and gain respectability. (Then again maybe not.)

The mathematics of manifolds, locally-Euclidean continua, includes two-manifolds like the flat Earth. It's just one aspect of a much more complex three-manifold.

Certain topological laws hold on the surface of Earth, others in three-dimensional space or four-dimensional space-time. By studying Euclidean geometry again we can better extrapolate to five-manifolds and beyond. Our solar system may just be a local anomality. The laws as we know them seem to work out as far as our probes have gone, the distance of Neptune, about 10 light-hours. Manifold theory seems to indicate things will get more complex at greater distances and infinitely complex at the limit.

It was to be expected. What follows "Life-styles of the Rich and Famous" but Ghosts of the Rich and Famous by Arthur Myers (Contemporary Books)? Clark Gable and Carole Lombard's spirits still doing it ("The spirit is welling but the flesh is returned to dust.") in a motel room in Oatman, AZ, Judy Garland's energy still lighting the theater of her last performance and so it goes on.

Is it others' memories that cause these manifestations? Or the not so departed departed? Is it the poor homeless pirits of greed and lust and ambition?

From Science Digest we have learned about Brian Williams steps toward the invention of an inventing machine. He is a PhD candidate at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is working on qualitative algebra, a wayto mathematically represent the interactions within a system, its physical constraints and its potential modifications. It would be like tackling the many-body problem not as an exprapolation of the one- or two- or three-body problem, but as it is as a whole.

That's what the word "hierogamous"means, the union of things not seemingly unitable, the holy union, one that takes a miracle, like the unexplainable mystery of the way a logical man with an intuitive woman to produce an illogicaland unintuitive offspring.

This typewriter may not have any AI but it is a bit spooky how we came to buy it. As we were making our way from store to store the typewriter was discovered in what had been thought to be an empty box. Coincidence or Providence?