Photo Caption: Landsat image of Western Amazon showing possible impact crater. Slightly to the left of center of this image is a dark spot surrounded by a crater-like rim.
On June 30, 1908, something exploded above the Siberian taiga north of Lake Baikal, near the Tunguska (Stony) River, devastating some 2000 square kilometers of heavy forest in a single gigantic flash. Theories as to the origin of the so-called Tunguska Event have generated numerous articles and several books. They range from a large asteroid or comet, to a nuclear-fueled spaceship of extraterrestrial origin.
Now it appears something similar may have transpired in the equally sparsely populated Brazilian jungle in 1930, according to a recent article in the English science weekly, New Scientist (November 11, 1995, p. 12). [See also "Incident at Curucá," by Patrick Huyghe in The Sciences (March/April 1996, pp.14-17)] The Brazilian event was reported in some newspapers at the time, and was even investigated by a Catholic missionary, Father Fidele d'Alviano, who wrote a report for L'Osservatore Romano, the papal newspaper. But d'Alviano's account had largely disappeared from view. It was first cited in a 1931 paper by Leonid Kulik of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, who initially investigated the Tunguska explosion, and then again in a 1989 article in The Journal of the International Meteor Organization by scientists Nikolai Vasilyev and Gennadij Andreev, referencing Kulik's original citation.
British astronomer Mark Bailey, of the Armagh Observatory, backtracked the reference to d'Alviano's original article, aided by two local schoolboys, Damian Markham and James Scriven. Based on interviews with eyewitnesses, d'Alviano describes the event and its consequences--it happened at eight in the morning, August 13, 1930--in graphic style, but omits many key details that would aid astronomers in ascertaining origin. Hope is still held, though, as d'Alviano kept voluminous diaries, which the Vatican still possesses, and which Bailey wants to review.
Shortly before the explosion along its border with Peru in northwestern Brazil, says d'Alviano, the sun turned red and then the sky went totally dark, followed by a rain of white ash and an ear-piercing whistle. Then three fireballs streaked across the sky and exploded, their rumblings heard hundreds of kilometers around. Months later, some of the affected forest was still smoldering.
Bailey notes that three house-sized objects were probably involved, resulting in a combined one-megaton explosion, or about a tenth of the estimated energy released in the Tunguska Event. Whatever their cause ù the Brazilian bombs occurred at the height of the annual Perseids meteor shower ù such large scale invaders may be far more common than we previously suspected, says Bailey, when coupled in time with the earlier Tunguska explosion, perhaps ten times as common. "The Earth may be subjected to three or four [such events] a century," he warns.
As far as the twentieth century is concerned, then, that's two down and perhaps two to go, which could certainly make for some Millennium-ending or beginning fireworks. It seems patently unlikely anyone is aiming these things, but here's hoping, if they are, that they continue to target highly unpopulated areas as in the past. Otherwise, we'll all read about it--except those directly impacted.
--Dennis Stacy, San Antonio, TX
The spirit of Dr. Fritz (aka Adolf Frederick Yeperssoven) has allegedly possessed yet another medically illiterate Brazilian, according to a January 12, 1996, article in The New York Times. Dr. Fritz, a German doctor who reportedly died in a WW I field hospital in 1918, first gained notoriety as the spirit who supposedly benignly (as opposed to demonically) possessed the Brazilian peasant know as ZÄ Arigo, the subject of John G. Fuller's Arigo: Surgeon of the Rusty Knife (Thomas Y. Crowell, NY, 1974, Afterword by Henry K. Puharich, M.D.). Arigo died violently in a 1971 automobile accident, as he had reportedly predicted.
Arigo conducted literally thousands of "operations" while wielding an old pocketknife, a heavy German accent, and a pronounced disregard of medical hygiene. After Arigo's death, the improbably named Oscar Wilde claimed to be the next recipient of Dr. Fritz's spirit. Like Arigo, Wilde, too, died a violent death, although the Times doesn't say how. He was succeeded by a gynecologist from Recife, Dr. Edson Queiroz (apparently the only one of Fritz's beneficiaries with any existing pharmaceutical or medicinal knowledge), who was subsequently stabbed to death in 1991.
The latest recipient, according to the article filed from Rio de Janeiro by Times reporter Diana Jean Schemo, is 41-year-old engineer Rubens Farias, Jr, who operates out of the poor suburb of Bom Sucesso (Good Success). Hundreds of patients line up outside his office on weekends, often waiting from early morning until almost midnight for treatment, which may take as little as 30 seconds. Prior to these marathon treatment sessions, Farias is said to enter into a trance from which he emerges as the German-speaking Dr. Fritz. All patients are told to remain silent and trust in God. Many are injected with a miracle brew reportedly consisting of part alcohol, iodine, and turpentine. Knives, scissors and dull hypodermic needles are also routinely employed. Anaesthesia and sterilization are not. "Yes, if you or I did it, it would kill people, but he does it and it cures them," says someone. It is not clear from the article who this someone is, but it appears to be Farias' wife, Rita Costa. According to the reporter, Costa doesn't necessarily accept the possession theory, "but she does believe in the power of the imagination and personal will to overcome illness."
Farias, who claims to have been possessed by Dr. Fritz as early as 1986 (while Dr. Queiroz was still alive and making similar use of the good German's spirit), has also predicted his own violent death within a few years.
The Times, whose front page motto is "All the News That's Fit to Print," is actually surprisingly good at covering this sort of thing, if by surprising we refer to the fact that they bother to cover it all. For instance, the Tuesday, December 19, 1995, issue carries a similar article about the faithful who flock to Nancy Fowler's Conyers, Georgia, farm in hopes of glimpsing Mary and Jesus, who are said to visit the 13th of every month. (Both articles are accompanied by excellent photographs.)
Even so, innuendo is usually at work. The Times just happens to be more subtle at it than the professional debunkers. In the Dr. Fritz article, for example, Farias slices open a patient's back and inserts three pairs of scissors into the space between two vertebrae. "[Then] the doctor told a relucant stranger to feel the space by wiggling the scissors," writes reporter Schemo. The "reluctant stranger" here, of course, is Schemo herself, who must have been impressed, but is restrained from saying so by so-called journalistic protocol, which holds that "thou shall not insert thyself into the story," another way of saying report, don't editorialize.
But sometimes you just can't help it. Later in the same story we find this clear example of editorial comment: "[Farias] seems to be concentrating, then rises as if groggy with a hangover and [speaks] in a German accent that makes you wonder whether "Hogan's Heroes" ever made it to Brazilian television..."
--Dennis Stacy, San Antonio, TX
Hollywood wunderkind producer Don Simpson died on January 19th of this year in his Stone Canyon LA house of apparently natural causes, according to a preliminary statement issued by the office of the Los Angeles Medical Examiner, and as reported in the February 5 issue of "The New Yorker" by John Gregory Dunne.
Dunne, husband of Joan Didion, is the upscale author and sometimes screenplay writer who covered the O. J. Simpson trial for "Vanity Fair." The late non-related Simpson, in conjunction with co-producer Jerry Bruckheimer, was responsible for a string of lucrative cinematic successses (worth well more than a billion dollars total) that included "Flashdance," "Top Gun," "Beverly Hills Cop" and its Eddie Murray-starring sequel.
Unlike most of the postmordem, public-pulse puff pieces regading Simpson's death that appeared in "People," "Time" magazine and other media sources (the producer's drug and sexual excesses were legendary even by Hollywood standards), Dunne's article speaks from personal experience, which is where we here at The Anomalist intertwine.
Not that any of your humble scribes here claim to have ever met the aforementioned magesterial celebrities, mind, just that we find fascinating Dunne's revelations that Simpson's last work in progress was a project called "Dharma Blue," an idea, in Dunne's words, "based on an original story by Simpson, about a forty-year government coverup of U.F.O. sightings."
While Simpson and Bruckheimer must have conceived of the idea sometime in 1991, it was only in late February of 1992 that Dunne and Didion were brought into the picture as potential scripters of a subject of which they knew little about. By way of background, however, they soon received from Simpson "a massive amount of material," according to Dunne, consisting of the following:
". . . back issues of the magazine UFO, a copy of the Encyclopedia of Personal Surveillance (Book II: 'How to Get Anything on Anybody'), a Nexis cache of newspaper and magazine clips, a tape of a '60 Minutes' segment about a cashiered U. S. Navy officer whose elite SEAL unit had tested the security of Air Force One and several nuclear submarines by trying to break into them, usually successfully. There were videotapes of possible U.F.O. sightings, a bibliography of two hundred U.F.O. books, the listed and unlisted telephone numbers of U.F.O. researchers, a Las Vegas TV interview with a scientist who claimed he had worked at a top-secret military facility near Mercury, Nevada, where he said he had seen evidence of a government-sponsored U.F.O. coverup (that the scientist was part owner of a legal Nevada brothel compromised his bona fides), catalogues of U.F.O. trade shows, and transcripts of U.F.O. symposia, featuring the arguments of both U.F.O. debunkers and the true believers, called Ufologists."
The outline of the script Dunne and Didion came up with is not exactly awe-inspiring. As described, it amounts to little less than a slightly more literate version of the execrable (and highly expendable) "Hangar 18" of a few years back. To make an already long story short, the Simpson-inspired version of Dharma Blue never made it to the silver screen--and hopefully never will. In its final terminal stages the project was renamed "Zone of Silence," presumably after the landlocked (and so-called) Mexican equivalent of the alleged Bermuda Triangle. Which is another story altogether.
--Dennis Stacy, San Antonio, TX
In the 19th century the existence of the legendary Norweigan Kraken was verified by stranded specimens of dead or dying members of truly giant squid found off the Newfoundland coast. But since their acceptance by science more than a century ago much is still not known about the species, Architeuthis.
What is known about the giant squid is based upon 100 stranded specimens exmained in the last 400 years. But in recent months, three giant squid have been netted off the New Zealand coast. This situation has prompted Clyde F. E. Roper of the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. to actively search the ocean depths for a living 60 foot specimen.
Roper, 58, the world's foremost expert on giant squid, is in charge of a forthcoming $5 million scientific expedition to deep search the New Zealand seas for the elusive creatures. Watched by a National Geographic Society television crew, Roper will make daily descents in a four-man submersible to seek the hidden lair of the giant squid.
This New Zealand locale was chosen because of recent strandings and live captures of giant squid, according to data compiled by fisheries biologist Ellen C. Forch during the past 15 years. Since 1984, commercial fishermen utilizing the Chatham Rise, a rocky Texas-sized plateau half a mile deep in the southern portion off the South Island, have occasionally hauled up from 1,000 to 4,000 foot depths squid that had apparently been feeding on dense schools of fish. But the three recent giant squid captures, two females and one male (20 feet long and caught at 1,000 feet), have ecologists wondering if deep sea fishing might not be upsetting the diet and domain of the giant squid and forcing them into shallower waters.
The Roper expedition will first use a 230-foot fisheries vessel to make preliminary searchers for deep sea fishes and densitities. Then they will track and listen for sperm whales as they dive into the depths seeking giant squid for food. These "sea beagles" may point to the hidden lairs of the giant squid.
Next Roper will send down a robot to inspect the pinpointed area, followed by a personal inspection in a Johnson Sea Link Submarine operated by the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution at Fort Pierce, Florida. With its robotic arms and underwater lights and video cameras, this four-person craft can reach a depth of 3,000 feet.
The expedition is scheduled to begin sometime between November of 1996 and February of 1997. The exact start date will depend, as usual, on raising the necessary money for the hunt. Stay tuned.
--Gary Mangiacopra (Milford, CT) and Dr. A. Turko (Southern Connecticut State University)
In January of this year a set of mysterious tracks was found in an infrequently visited cave called Cueva del Arroyo in Central Mexico. On the caving trip were Bonnie Crystal, Peter Strickland, Andy Grubbs, and Ernie Garza. The unidentified animal tracks were found after the team's fourth rope drop into the middle of a deep lake. Following a 30 meter swim, the team reached an area of mud islands inside the 25 meter by 3 meter high passage.
There they found the tracks, leading into and out of the water and crossing several of the mud islands. The tracks showed no distinct claw marks, and no tail or body marks. According to Crystal, the tracks looked like they were made by a bipedal animal. The only known entrance to the cave is the a sheer-sided rope drop at the end of a long deep box canyon. Crystal believes they may have discovered evidence of an uncommon or previously unidentified troglodite.
Upon viewing the photographs of the tracks, a bird scientist stated that the tracks could not have been made by a bird and suggested a raccoon. Another dismissed the possibility of a lizard because the tracks are rather narrow and not splayed out like a lizard's. Others have suggested a crocodile (which some think is hilarious; since the caves flood from mostly dry arroyos, there are no crocs to wash in) and a rat (it would have to be a monster). One observer thought it might be due, not to an animal, but to some weird natural geological process. But most observers attribute the tracks to a turtle.
Bruce Rogers, a USGS scientist who had visited the cave in the past, made the following comments: the prints appear to be about 2 to 3 inches in diameter and recessed into the mud about an inch or so. The animals is amphibious, probably weighs about 10 to 18 pounds, is relatively small, and has very short legs. Coupled with the straddle walk, Rogers concludes the tracks were probably made by a troglophillic turtle.
But, Crystal asks, do turtles make bipedal-looking tracks? And don't turtles generally drag their bottoms as they go? There are no drag marks here.
What do you think? Check out the photographs, but don't forget to come back.
Patrick Huyghe
An Associated Press wire report says that on Sunday, March 24, a man who wishes to remain anonymous walked into Roswell's UFO Musuem with a piece of metal allegedly recovered from the 1947 crash of a UFO nearby. The "donor" was described only as a local citizen. The small piece of metal was said to be framed; later word on the Web was that it was being stored in the Sheriff's safe for safekeeping and would be taken to the University of New Mexico's School of Mines for metallurgical analysis, but this has not been confirmed.
One of the museum's administrators, Max Littell, was quoted in the AP article: "From the information we have," he said, "this is from a man who was stationed here and was part of the crew that helped pick it up. We are not saying one way or another that this is what it is, but we are going to do everything we can to find out."
The pictured specimen is some 80mm long and 43mm high (approximately three by one and a half inches). The hole, roughly in the center of the object, is 29mm (one-inch) across at the widest point.
The story of claimed UFO samples has not always been a felicitous one. The first known such "samples" surfaced in mid-July, 1947, in connection with the now infamous Maury Island, Washington, hoax. Two military intelligence officers investigating the case from Hamilton Field, California, were killed when their B-25 caught fire and crashed on the return flight. The samples, supposedly ejected by a doughnut-shaped UFO, were thought to be ordinary lava rock or perhaps industrial slag.
On April 18, 1961, Joe Simonton, a 54-year-old plumber from Eagle River, Wisconsin, claimed that a UFO landed in his driveway. Inside were three normal appearing men of apparent "Italian descent." One reportedly approached with a jug in hand and asked for water. The first occupant remained seated at what looked like a control panel; the second sat at some sort of grill, cooking "pancakes." In exchange for the jug of water, the occupant who had made the silent request handed Simonton four of the pancakes. Analyzed by both Air Force and Food and Drug Administration laboratories, the space cakes turned out to be indistinguishable from ordinary terrestrial buckwheat pancakes.
Slightly more intriguing, if ultimately ambiguous in the end, were the so-called Ubatuba fragments, named for the Brazilian town near where they were allegedly recovered following the aerial explosion of a "flying disc" in August or September of 1957. Analyzed, the material turned out to be pure magnesium. However, the author of the letter originally accompanying the samples could not be positively identified, nor did any corroborating witnesses of the original explosion ever come forth.
Almost in the same vein, though, an apparently new mineral has turned up out of the proverbial blue, according to the weekly newspaper column, "EARTHWEEK: A Diary of the Planet," by Steve Newman (April 1, 1996). British geologist Anna Grayson bought the vivid blue piece of rock from a roadside souvenir stand while on a field trip in Morocco 15 years ago. Unable to identify it, Grayson finally turned the specimen over to London's Natural History Museum. "Experts there discovered it is made up of millions of crystals that are fibrous on a submicroscopic scale, like asbestos, and could be lethal if inhaled. Containing silicon, aluminum, calcium, magnesium, iron and oxygen, the unnamed mineral changes from purple to blue to cream when rotated," a property reportedly never previously observed in nature.
This just in! According to an article by Miller Johnson published in the New Mexico MUFON Newsletter, the Roswell specimen has now indeed been analyzed by the New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources in Socorro, employing X-ray fluorescence technology. The object appears to be a thin layer of silver-plated copper. In contrast to eyewitness accounts of a material that was extremely durable, the specimen itself was apparently fairly fragile. The piece had to be bent to fit in the analysis chamber; when returned to its original configuration, a minor fracture was noticed.
Accompanying Johnson was Professor C.B. Moore (both witnessed the analysis) who had been the chief engineer for Project Mogul, a top secret balloon project of the time, the remains of which, some have suggested, might have given rise to the story of a crashed UFO at Roswell (as opposed to the original Air Force story of a wayward weather balloon).
In a fax to Johnson of March 31 (the analysis was conducted on the 29th), Moore noted that "The fragment clearly was not related to one of the radar targets or any of the other equipment used by the NYU group [New York University was behind Project Mogul]. Such a diaphragm may have been in the microphone section of the sonobuoys that we flew but, if this were the case, there is the question as to how it became exposed so that the alleged GI could have pocketed it. But, unless this fragment came out of a sonobuoy, there is little chance that it was associated with an NYU flight in 1947. The fragment could [be] easily bent; it could have been dented with a sledge hammer if one hit it. It clearly had been torn from its original setting. There was nothing associated with it to suggest an exotic nature or an exotic origin; it appeared to me to be a component of some terrestrial, technical artifact."
Moore's remarks, admittedly, are based largely on visual inspection. Via E-mail, he received a suggestion from David Thomas of the non-profit group, New Mexicans for Science and Reason, that isotopic analysis should reveal whether or not the copper was formed in this solar system or another one. Unlike X-ray fluorescence, isotopic analysis involves the destruction of the tested portion of the specimen. If and when such a test is performed, we'll announce the results. For the moment, Miller Johnson says he remains 100 percent behind Professor Moore's opinion.
Dennis Stacy
The faces on Mars are quickly multiplying. A fine webnaut and friend of The Anomalist has pointed out to our great surprise that there is more than one face on the red planet. He first told us to check out http://rs6000.adm.fau.edu/barton/mars.html and we did. What did we see? A Barney face!
"No, no, no!" our explorer replied. "I didn't mean the one on the first page that the guy made a joke out of. Go down the page, past the Barney picture, and click on 'Mars Cydonia region.' Then scroll down the 'Mars Cydonia region' picture all the way right, and almost all the way down to the bottom.
"Please notice the known face," he continued, " then bring your vision down just a slight bit. Follow right to the second protrusion from the surface. It does appear to be a smaller version of the bigger one; it even has a similar shadow. Maybe it's nothing, maybe not. I don't know. It is significantly smaller... maybe an optical illusion, maybe it was an original before somebody decided to make a bigger one, maybe it's a child and the worn one in-between was the mother. Like I said, I just don't know. Regardless of the possibilities, it does in fact appear to be a smaller version of the bigger one. But note this also: It is hard to tell whether it is actually raised from the surface until you notice that it has a shadow similar to the big face."
Well, yes, there does appear to be a face there. It seems to have a rather large nose. But, wait, there's more! Take a look at http://home.navisoft.com/cydonia/cydonia.htm and you'll see yet another face, we were told. And sure enough this face looks a bit like the second face pointed out above. That make three, right?
Wrong. Would you believe...five? "I downloaded NASA's bigger image of the area," our friend pointed out, "and I can now see three distinct faces, and two possible ones--the two lesser possibilities being the two I pointed out near the most obvious. These folks (the Martians, if they ever existed) were either terribly bored or I'm being very creative with my imagination.
"Well, I don't know about all this," this Mars explorer concluded. "I'm beginning to wonder if the guy with the Barney joke is right!"
Whatever the case, the joke certainly is on us.
Patrick Huyghe