PARANORMAL WAS STIMULUS TO MUSIC ARRANGER

Russell Hunter, who had been a St. Louis nightclub performer, a music arranger for CBS-TV, and a creator of musicals, died on August 25, 1996 in Denver, Colorado at the age of 67. The August 29, 1996 Washington Post related that two of the creations for which he was best known were based on unusual phenomena he had experienced in his own home.

An apparent haunting of his house, which he was convinced was genuine, led to his creating the musical Little Boy Blue, and to the movie The Changeling, a 1979 Canadian movie directed by Peter Medak and starring George C. Scott.

THE ONE THAT DIDN'T GET AWAY

Dr. William Shachtman's wife screamed at the giant thing that was coming straight at him. It was 18 feet long and 4 feet and had a circumference of four feet.

Shachtman, a Colorado eye surgeon who was in a lagoon off northern Mexico's Baja California peninsula, described on August 7, 1996 how the snaky creature "...swam right past me at arm's length." The snorkeller saw the saucer-shape of its eyes--and its back's red crest.

Greg Willis, the captain of the boat that had brought the Shachtmans there, ascertained that the creature was not a shark, and joined the Doctor in the water. Willis clung to the creature's dorsal fin and was towed a ways--the only human known to have been transported by this type of fish--before being flicked off.

The animal, which turned out to be a Regalecus glesne, an oarfish, beached itself and writhed itself to death on some rocks. This unpleasant end was captured on videotape, which Scripps Oceanographic Institute scientists in San Diego are studying. The fish appeared to have been previously hurt by a sea lion or a shark.

Oarfish--which can reach lengths of 30 feet or more--are believed to spend the majority of their existences at 1,000- to 3,000-foot depths; having only one known reason to surface. This is, as is related in the August 8, 1996 London Times, to meet their deaths.

DINOSAUR'S ROAR TO BE HEARD AGAIN

Computer simulations should allow a Parasaurolophus's cry, or some approximation thereof, to be heard again.

The dinosaur, of the duck-billed type, had a 1.4-meter backward-sweeping crest; its nasal passages looped back and down, according to the Toronto Star's description. A largely intact fossil skull was found in August 1995 some 300 kilometers northwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was distorted over the millennia, and missing the nostril area.

From it, a computer model of the skull is being constructed, allowing work to be done that is non-invasive to the actual specimen.

Described in the May 12, 1996 Toronto Star, this work is intended to later include recreations of the Parasaurolophus's voice. According to paleontologist Tom Williamson, it is, according to approximate calculations, thought to have used a low frequency, below 10 vibrations a second (10 hertz), to call across the swamps. This is so low that a human would not have been able to hear it.

Michael Brett-Surman, a Smithsonian Institution specialist on dinosaurs, indicated that the creature--like elephants--probably also made more human- hearable sounds, to communicate with young dinosaurs.

CURE OF "HUMAN WEREWOLF SYNDROME"

Two-year-old Abys DeJesus, born in Puerto Rico, is undergoing a series of surgical procedures to save her from future cancer, and a werewolf-like appearance.

Dr. Adrian Lo, of St. Christopher's Hospital in Philadelphia, is sure that his operations will remove the hairy appearance on part of her face as well as twenty-three small areas of her body, and eliminate the associated cancer- prone cells, and thus allow Abys to live a normal life without noticeable facial scars.

Abys suffers from hairy congenital nevus, so, according to the Associated Press, as of March 28, 1996, hair covers the area between her eyes, as well as on her nose and more than 50% of her face.

Nobody else in Abys DeJesus's family has the rare condition, which has up to now caused adults to stare at her and children to scream.

STRANGE SEA CREATURE

In a report out of New Shoreham, Rhode Island, which was printed in the June 27, 1996 USA Today, residents of Block Island do not know what to make of a ribless sea creature captured in a fishnet during June 1996. The animal has feelers upon its head, and is ten feet in length.

WHO MURDERED THE MAMMOTH?

A murder mystery that dates back some eight- to twelve-thousand years may be solved through the efforts of Larry Agenbroad, a paleontologist. This is the question of who or what eliminated the pygmy mammoth (mammuthus exilis), a small and hairy elephant.

Full-sized mammoths died out about 10,000 years ago. But a horse-sized pygmy version, some five- to six-feet-tall, lived both on Wrangel Island and on the Channel Islands until later.

The February 12, 1996 Los Angeles Times indicated that Agenbroad's question about their extinction hinged on whether it was "overkill or overchill."

During February 1996, Agenbroad commenced a six-month fossil-hunting expedition to Santa Rosa Island in the Channel Islands. This was where Tom Rockwell, a geologist from San Diego State University, two years earlier had uncovered the most complete skeleton of a pygmy mammoth, estimated to be 12,840 years old.

Though extinction from hunting, upon the arrival of the Chumash Indians, has seemed the most likely hypothesis, no signs of butchering have been found. Thus climatic change has also been considered as a possible cause.

By excavating more mammoth skeletons on the island, Agenbroad hopes to settle this question. If further skeletons show evidence of predation by humans, then men killed the mammoths. If there is no such evidence, the theory of a lethal weather change becomes more convincing.

Interesting information about the animal may be found at the following URL: The Pygmy Mammoth Page 11 July 1996

SLOW POLYNESIAN TREE SNAIL STOPS FOREVER

It took London Zoo personnel awhile to be sure that the one known remaining Polynesian tree snail (Partula turgida) in their care had ceased moving, and thus the species was, to their knowledge, extinct.

Paul Pearce-Kelly, who coordinates a program to conserve Partula snails commented how it had not responded well to its environment.

The slow little creature will be given a tombstone with the words "1.5 million years B.C. to January, 1996."

LIZARD PEOPLE NOT YET FOUND UNDERNEATH LOS ANGELES

There are 270 tunnels beneath Los Angeles, arranged in a network. Since they have, for the most part, been sealed up with fences, they are no longer used for street-crossings.

There are older tunnels, under Bel-Air estate, UCLA, and El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park not far from Olvera Street. The latter tunnel is alleged to have hid many during the 1871 massacre of Chinese, recounts Cecilia Rasmussen in her article "L.A. Scene: The City Then and Now" in the July 22, 1996 Los Angeles Times.

Hopi Indian legend reports a sub-surface maze existing almost 5,000 years ago. G. Warren Shufelt, a mining engineer, went in search of it during 1934. That year, using a dowsing rod he called a "radio X-ray," he claimed to have secretly discovered caves beneath downtown L.A.

He claimed to have consulted Little Chief Greenleaf, a Hopi leader, and was told about the Lizard People, who lived circa 3,000 B.C. Before the destruction of their culture by meteors or a fire, they were said to have created three underground cities around the Pacific Coast, including one under Los Angeles and another beneath Mt. Shasta.

The Lizard people reportedly made the caves housing thousands by using chemicals to melt bedrock. According to Shufelt's version of the Hopi legend, the city was in a lizard's shape, and extended from Dodger Stadium to the Central Library.

Whether the Lizard People were reptiles or humans, Shufelt did not clarify. (There is a post-Shufelt account of a humanoid "reptile" clad in both trousers and a shirt on Mt. Shasta in 1972.) Paul Apodaca, of Chapman University, said that Shufelt's account of Hopi history was "exaggerated and corrupted." (Hopis did have a social division called the lizard clan, however.)

The [L.A.] Times of January 29, 1934 reported Shufelt's claims of radio X-ray pictures of the subsurface rooms.

Shufelt said he thought he had found under Ft. Moore Hill a treasure room. With the permission of L.A. authorities, he had a 350-foot hole drilled. Cave-in worries stymied further drilling. After that, Shufelt vanished from public view.

Some five weeks prior to the drilling, Edith Elden Robinson had described her psychic vision of "a vast city...in mammoth tunnels extending to the seashore." The American Society of Psychical Research subsequently recounted her story of this supposed artifact of a vanished race.

On a website entry (http://www.lapl.org/central/urbanleg.html) dated March 29, 1996, Los Angeles' Central Library notes that, quite appropriate to the later library setting, the Lizard People owned golden tablets which delineated the story of the world since its beginning, the Lizard People's history, and even the origin of humanity.

SALE OF A DEATH-MAN

Thomas Shinkle, an East Dayton antique dealer, was charged with corpse abuse, but that was not the Ohio resident's intention.

On June 29, 1996, he had put an unusual antique on display at a yard sale. It was a wooden coffin containing a human skeleton viewable through an oval opening. After a quarter-hour, a woman had summoned the police. Their resultant report noted that most of the sale's attenders were offended, but that Shinkle himself regarded the display as an interesting antique inaccessible to children. He did not understand why people were upset.

Arraignment of Shinkle was set for August 5 in the Dayton Municipal Center. The highest penalties facing Shinkle were a jail sentence of 90 days and a fine of $750.

On July 25, the coroner╒s office of Montgomery County still had the corpse and the coffin. James H. Davis, the coroner, was unsure whether a skeleton was a corpse according to Ohio law. According to the authorities, the bones are thought to have belonged to a Caucasian male who died in his thirties about a century ago. Since many of the bones were wired together, it is thought they had been used in a medical school. Oddly, some of the bones were not correctly assembled.

Before the authorities stepped in, the teardrop-shaped coffin and its bones had been displayed on top of a gambling table at Third and Bates street.

Afterward, it seemed likely Shinkle would get back the coffin--but not the skeleton, according to the July 26 Springfield News-Sun and its source the Cox News Service.

YOWIE! AN OLDIE BUT GOODIE FROM DOWN UNDER

Was it a "massive monitor" lizard, as Rex Gilroy of the Blue Mountains Museum in Mt. Victoria thought, or was it the legendary Yowie?

About a dozen years ago, Bill King of Bateman's Bay was using a tractor to clear an area of land behind Surf Beach in New South Wales, Australia, so that a concrete slab could be poured. One morning during this job, footprints were spotted on moistened soil. They emerged from the bush and onto the site where a house was later built.

Years later, in 1994, the Bay Post-Moruya Examiner was contacted by Bill and Fran King, who wanted the case referred to Paul Cropper, the noted Yowie investigator. The Kings hoped he would include their case in his then- forthcoming volume about the unusual and legendary creatures of Australia.

There was still evidence to consider, including a plaster cast of a huge footprint. Cropper became excited at the prospect of seeing the cast and the relevant footprint photos.

Identification of them remains a mystery to this day, because of details differing from known animals. For example, Fran King said that monitor lizards have very little feet and that ostriches have three toes, characteristics not shown by the entity making the prints.

This could rule both creatures out as suspects, it might seem.

Unless Gilroy's theory of a massive monitor is the correct one.

An article in the July 13, 1994 issue of The Bay Post--out of Bateman's Bay, New South Wales--pointed out that the creature's sizeable stride certainly puts it on the list of possible Yowies, and its tracks provide possible evidence that something large and unknown still exists Down Under.

DON'T TOUCH THAT E.T.

The Code of Federal Regulations, Section 14, Part 1211 used to make it problematic for people who touched extraterrestrial objects--or entities. They had to face quarantine without even a hearing. But, George Sloup, attorney advisor for the Ames Research Center, reveals that these codes--dating back to 1969 and the moon missions--are no longer in effect.

The chief counsel for NASA-Ames, Dr. George Lenehan, noted that these codes had been instituted because of worry about contamination from postulated extraterrestrial microbes on the surface of the moon.

However, in 1995, on the Internet, speculations were posted that these codes were actually meant to intimidate efforts at communication with UFO occupants.

Lenehan disagreed, according to a March 23, 1995 article in San Jose, California's Metro. He felt that alien contact would be desirable since it would increase his agency's budget.

Now that, in 1996, scientists have identified apparent fossils of Martian life on Earth, Lenehan's contention of such an increased NASA budget seems especially plausible.

FANCY FISH FOOD

Seventy-eight-year-old Lewis Slight caught a 5 pound bass while fishing at a beach not far from Netley Abbey in Southampton, England.

That was not his only "lucky catch" circa late June 1995. The fish's stomach contained a silver ring dating back a century-and-a-half.

PLUNGING PINNIPEDS

The walruses have been dropping to their deaths in behavior that has not until now been widely documented--but their actions are not deemed suicides. On August 27, 1996, some 41-60 of these pinnipeds fell off a number of high bluffs sometimes 100 feet high, at Cape Peirce, a part of the 4.3 million-acre Togiak National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Biologists, monitoring the group of as many as 12,500 walruses at any single time, obstructed 155 of the beasts from the cliffs, but about 70 of the animals got there anyway, indicated a report in the August 31, 1996 Washington Post.

In 1994, 42 walruses fatally fell off the cliffs, and in 1995 approximately 59 met their death that way. But the fatalities are apparently not uncommon to these creatures whose populations are not at present imperiled.

PHEW! AT KEW

The largest flower on earth bloomed around 9:00 a.m. on July 31, 1996. It did not smell as nice as it looked--in fact, the titan arum's aroma was described as being like rotting fish and dead mice.

Its home was the tropical section of London's Kew Gardens Princess of Wales Conservatory. The previous time one of its ilk--Amorphophallus titanum- -blossomed at Kew was 33 years previously, in 1963, reported the August 1, 1996 Washington Post.

Crowds had gathered on July 29 to see the blooming of the vertical yellow-and- purple flower, but insufficient sunlight put that off for two days. From July 30 to August 4, 49,000 people visited the Gardens. Roger Joiner, the Marketing Manager at Kew, enthused about the international media attention.

This carrion flower arum is native to the Sumatran jungles, where it is called by Indonesians the "corpse flower." Other names for it are the krubi ["grubi"] or "devil's tongue."

It is not the only gaggingly fragrant blossom in Sumatra, though. Dr. Karl P. N. Shuker, in "More Mystery Plants of Prey" (Strange Magazine no. 12), and William A. Emboden, in Bizarre Plants: Magical, Monstrous, Mythical, write of the parasitic Rafflesia arnoldii, a horizontal flower, also called the "stinking corpse lily" and the "giant panda of the plant world." It possesses a stench that nauseates humans but attracts blowflies and carrion beetles. They search for rotting meat upon it, and transfer pollen to other plants of the same species while questing for carrion. Other animals that aid the seed dispersion process are, according to some accounts, wild pigs, tree shrews and elephants.

The titan arum's stink is designed for a more limited repertoire; it lets bees know it is ready for the pollination process.

Either of these blooms could be mistaken for the man-eating Death Flower of legend--if encountered at the right time. The titan arum flowers once every six or seven years under normal jungle conditions.

Dr. Odoardo Beccari, the Italian botanist, was the first western expert to come across the Titan Arum in the Pading Province during 1878. Seeds he sent back to his patron the Marchese Corsi Salviati in Italy were grown, and a few plants were at Beccari's request sent to Kew in 1879. One of those seedlings flowered in June 1887. Another plant bloomed there in 1926, to wide attention.

At the New York Botanical Garden, a 1937 flowering was even filmed for a newsreel.

Even its appellation attractions attention. The plant's generic name of Amorphophallus is derived from the Greek and means shapeless phallus. According to a June 5, 1996 entry on the Wayne's Word! website (http://issfw.palomar.edu/Wayne/WW0602.html), at maximum size, the spadix of an A. titanum is about the size a blue whale's male sex organ.

William A. Emboden described the plant's unusual erect spadix, having "male parts above and female parts below" as "bizarre and erotic."

Thus the great appeal to the publics of 1937 and 1996 is made clear: it is large, "dangerous" (to one's nose at least), and sexy.

APPARENT "ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS" IN ART

The nine-thousand-year-old statues are the oldest known life-size representations of the human form--but to modern eyes they do not look quite human. Due to their big--sometimes slanting--eyes, rudimentary noses, and tiny mouths, some have compared them to space aliens. They resemble the kind popularized by Whitley Strieber's "visitors" books and Steven Spielberg's movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Ann Gunter, the curator of ancient Near Eastern art at the Sackler Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., acknowledges this. She and her colleagues feel that, since the sculptures may have depicted the ancients' ancestors, the creation of features looking like "beings from some other time and place" may have been intentional, reported the August 1, 1996 Washington Post. The figures, made of plaster, and with actual human skulls within their heads, were retrieved from their longtime home at 'Ain Ghazal in Jordan after a bulldozer accidentally revealed a corner of their place of rest. The figures were in two groups, discovered in one cache. After a decade of study and restoration in Suitland, Maryland, at the Smithsonian's Conservation Analytical Lab, the public finally could view these seemingly unearthly pieces from 3,000 years before the use of writing, now that they were on display at the Sackler.

James Lochart, writing about the exhibit for the August 2 Washington City Paper, suggests another unorthodox theory that could be applied to the statues. He recalls the theory of the bicameral mind, explicated by Julian Jaynes, which posits that, until about 1000 B.C., people did not possess subjective consciousness. Decisions were supposedly carried out via auditory hallucinations--the sacred voice of authority. But he feels the Jaynes theory applies more to the famous Olmec heads (on temporary display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) than to these small-mouthed depictions, unless "their makers had yet to fine-tune their technique...."

TAROT AND A TIP

Octavia, a fortuneteller in Warsaw, pays mind to macroeconomic texts and marketing tomes as well as to her tarot cards. The Polish prognosticator recently revealed: "Sometimes the tarot cards are only to distract clients. What I say is mostly common sense."

Also known as Barbara Drazek, the 34-year-old onetime nurse is commercializing on the concerns that have come lately to Poland.

Her spiel combines the jargons of both mysticism and management-consulting, and has proven useful to some.

One client, who did not take her advice, was told not to ship during late 1996 thousands of frozen chickens from the United States to Russia via Gdynia. She said he would miss the New Year deadline. When he shipped the cargo anyway, the birds arrived at their final destination three weeks late.

Octavia's advice here came from her good sense rather than any methods of mysticism; dock workers in the Polish port of Gdynia are known to get mid- December bonuses. After that, work is hampered by liquid celebrations.

Octavia is just one among many. The March 18, 1996 Wall Street Journal, which reported about Octavia, revealed that the popularity of her line of work is indicated by the 250,000 per month sales of the magazine Fortuneteller.

PILTDOWN PERPETRATOR PUBLICIZED

The May 23 issue of the English science journal Nature contains an article dealing with Brian Gardiner's findings which may, after many decades of speculation by others, reveal the true culprit in the Piltdown Man hoax.

The Piltdown Man fossils, originally thought in 1912 to be of a missing link, turned out to be, when exposed as a hoax forty years later in 1952, more recent fossils from a human and an orangutan.

Gardiner shows that Martin A. C. Hinton was probably the actual hoaxer, rather than those people commonly blamed. Some eight decades ago, Hinton was a curator at the Natural History Museum in London. Unhappy over delayed payments, in revenge he chemically treated fossils, Gardiner claims.

Corroborating this theory are identically processed bone samples in Hinton's trunk, found in a loft in the museum. Also, human teeth, prepared in the same way, were discovered among Hinton's belongings.

The May 24, 1996 Washington Post disclosed that the Nature article is based on a manuscript by Gardiner, who elsewhere stated that one of the usually blamed culprits, Charles Dawson, was too ignorant to have been capable of the hoax.

PRAIRIE DOGS GET SUCKED

A report out of Amarillo, Texas, reveals that Dog Gone, a company specializing in pest control, has a profitable use for the prairie dogs it eliminates from U.S. sites.

It sells them to Japan--at $700 per animal--after collecting them in a gigantic vacuum cleaner.

This suction device was invented by Gay Balfour, the co-owner of Dog Gone, reported the May 24, 1996 Washington Post.

On May 21, some three to four dozen valuable rodents were sucked out of their underground dwellings by the machine and deposited into a containing area. Only creatures of lighter weight made the trip through the big hose, because of the machine's specs.

The other co-owner, Dave Honaker, spoke of capturing only the littler prairie dogs, and added, "They make good pets; they're real trainable and social animals."

His announcement did not answer certain questions that could occur to one. Like: how much did the process traumatize the creatures, and how did the wholesale removal of their young affect the parents left behind in the colonies?

However, the company's methods are certainly preferable to other, more fatal, types of "pest control."

RUSSIAN VAMPIRE BITES HIMSELF TO DEATH

An article by Dimitry Frokofeiv in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper (apparently circa early 1996) reviews a few weirdnesses that happened in Russian forests, including a six-month mystery concerning people found dead--with "vampire" marks on their necks.

Russian police found some camps where barefoot residents wore unprocessed animal furs. In one of these, a jar of human blood turned up--which, after testing, turned out to be that of a person missing three weeks.

In another incident, a police truck ran into trouble in the area. When stopped to check the vehicle's wheels, one officer was attacked. His partner left the vehicle to rescue him, helping him arrest the malefactor.

The uncouth arrestee wore only a torn gown made of furs and rags. He said nothing in his defense, just growled. A bottle of human blood was found in his pocket. He did not survive captivity, having that same night bitten his wrists and died.