I read "Connecticut's Mystery Felines" with great pleasure. One thing that struck me was the description of the "whatchamacallit" that was found in the Glastonbury area by a hunter in October of 1961. It was described as being the size of a small bear or a large racoon, with a 'head like a gorilla's,' the 'tail of a dog,' fur like steel wool, and weighing about 120 pounds with a black and brown coloration.
Except for the weight, which is a little on the heavy side, this is actually a pretty good casual description of a Wolverine (Gulo gulo) the largest of the North American and Eurasian weasels. As it happens, there is an article by Karl Shuker about out-of-place wolverines that have been spotted in Britain recently in the current issue of Fortean Times (No. 85), which includes a photo of a wolverine.
The wolverine is found only in northern Canada and Alaska today, although it was once found as far south as Michigan. Of course, wolverines were extirpated in New England long ago. Thus, the apparent discovery of a wolverine in Connecticut is really quite as remarkable as finding a black panther would be, if not more so, since panthers are far more common in captivity than wolverines.
It is the description of the gorilla-like head that gives the game away. The wolverine's blunt, rounded head really does look rather 'gorilla-ish' at certain angles.
Ron Rosenblatt
New York, NY
The article on "Involuntary Spontaneous Human Invisibility" seems to be flawed in that there is no back up for the claims. No multiple witnesses, no corroboration by anyone--just individual claims. It is true, extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof. I wait for some on invisibility.
Erik Beckjord
Pacifica, CA
Despite my respect for Martin Kottmeyer, I must challenge some parts of his award-winning essay, "UFO Flaps," which analyzes a variety of possible "trigger mechanisms" that might account for UFO Flaps.
Kottmeyer briefly cites but inadequately describes my own view, set forth in Chapter 26 of my book UFOs Explained, which begins: "The news media play a very significant and interactive role in the UFO mystery, periodically breathing new life int o it, which generally is not recognized, even by many of the journalists involved ....
"... there are so many natural and man-made stimuli that can become UFOs when observers are led to believe that 'they' are in the vicinity and when the observers--perhaps unconsciously--are anxious to participate in the great UFO adventure. This was de monstrated by the rash of 'mysterious airship' reports in the 1890s--an era when there were far fewer stimuli in the skies than are available today...."
Chapter 27 of my book, titled "The 1973 UFO Flap," began: "The 1973 UFO flap, which originated in Georgia during late August, proved an illustrative microcosm of the previous quarter-century of the UFO issue. A year before, a similar rash of UFO report s from Kansas stirred scant interest among the national news media, but the 1972 Presidential campaign was then in progress. The late summer of 1973 provided quite a different context. The Senate Watergate investigation, which had so completely dom inated the news for months, had recessed, leaving the media in the late-summer doldrums and its editors, along with the general public, weary of the sordid disclosures coming out of Washington. The reaction of the news media to the UFO reports coming from Georgia [in 1973] is aptly described by NICAP's account in the October issue of its publication UFO Investigator. [Emphasis added.]
"NICAP reported, 'The wave of sightings brought wide-spread reaction from national and local news media, and flooded many Southern newspapers with front-page stories At the same time, both major wire services, AP and UPI, were transmitting reports to p apers and broadcast stations around the country...newspapers as far as California and Connecticut began to cover the story, sometimes running several articles over a three or four day period...'"
On Jan. 20, 1972, The Washington Post prominently carried a feature article on Sasquatch ("Big Foot"), prompted by a short movie which had just opened in local theaters and purported to show a huge Sasquatch lumbering through the woods. The arti cle, authored by movie critic Tom Zito, cited several scientists who (allegedly) endorsed the authenticity of the film. (But when I checked two of the scientists, they disavowed the film.)
Later, when I talked with reporter Zito, he told me that since his article appeared he had received about a dozen phone calls from persons in the Washington D.C. area who reported that they had recently seen Sasquatch. Zito said that to t he best of his knowledge no Sasquatch sightings had been reported to The Post prior to his article. A few weeks later, I checked with Zito who informed me that Sasquatch sighting reports had dropped to zero. So far as The Washington Post has reported during the past 24 years, it has received no more Sasquatch reports.
Philip Klass
Washington, D.C.
Regarding the mystery of the Mexican and Puerto Rican "Goatsucker" or chupacabras, I'd like to mention, for the mere linguistic coincidence if nothing else, the discussion of the chupas of northeastern Brazil in French-American UFOlogist Jac ques Vallee's Confrontations: A Scientist's Search for Alien Contact (New York: Random House, Balantine Books, 1990). The chupas, a name derived from the Portuguese chupar "to suck, to absorb, to spend, to consume" and chupado "sucked dry, lean, emaciated," related to the Spanish chupar "to suck, to absorb moisture, to sponge or fool, to become lean or emaciated," chupado "sucked, absorbed, lean, emaciated," were small boxlike UFOs equipped with powerful light bea ms that terrorized rural areas of northeastern Brazil, mostly around the towns of Parnarama, Sao Luis, and Belem, in the 1970s and 1980s. The chupas, according to Brazilian reports summarized by Vallee, zapped many Brazilian farmers and fishermen a t night with their brilliant light-beams, causing their victims to waste away, often fatally, with a leukemia-like disease similar to radiation poisoning. The victims often became pallid grayish-white as if drained of their blood, hence, apparently, the n ame chupas, seemingly alluding to the victims being "sucked dry" of blood.
Interestingly, Vallee mentioned a "local rumor that the chupas are 'American prototypes' that take the blood of the victims to send it to the United States" (Confrontations, p. 135). Now, The Anomalist:2 ran an article, "Organ Theft Rumors i n Guatemala: Some Personal Observations" by John Shonder on popular rumors in Guatemala in the 1990s about American tourists kidnapping and killing Guatemalan children to use their organs in a black market for organ transplants! An eccentric Soviet Estoni an dissident, parapsychologist, and UFOlogist of the 1980s named Juri Lina, similarly, has recounted rumours in Estonia and elsewhere in the former USSR in the 1970s and 1980s about KGB blood trucks roaming the streets of Russian, Estonian, Ukrainian, Lit huanian, etc., cities, kidnapping people off the streets to drain their blood to use for Red Army blood-banks, especially in the Soviet "Vietnam" in Afghanistan! Blood sucking rumors, apparently, are in fact a fairly common anti-imperialist fantasy amongs t oppressed, colonialized, or exploited peoples. The June 2, 1996 New York Times piece by Julia Preston, "In the Tradition of Bigfoot and Elvis, the Goatsucker," on the Mexican "Goatsucker" mentioned contemporary Mexican political cartoons portrayi ng Mexico's President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as a chupacabras sucking the Mexican economy dry with corruption and mismanagement!
T. Peter Park
Garden City South, L.I., NY
I was astonished to see that someone of such conspicuous intelligence as Martin Kottmeyer could manage to swallow--of all people!--that dotty old cabalist Jung, and continue to suppose that all UFO sightings "must" be of purely endogenous origin! I dare say it's because he takes that pseudoscientific doctrine, bad as it is, to be "the only alternative" to the venerable, long disproven "E-T" explanation. But his acute critical sense will surely lead him beyond that foolish acceptation.
As to Darwin's far more plausible pseudoscience, you may have seen Michael Behe's recommendable Darwin's Black Box, updating Paley's "watch" argument by exhibiting the incredibly complex biochemical "machinery" now known to be required to make life function. And I'm sure you'd find entertaining the September issue of Commentary, in which science-writer David Berlinski undertakes to swat down sixteen angry hornets that had swarmed out to attack the blasphemer who had dared to deny Darwin.
Alexander Mebane
Venice, Florida
First, I'd like to say that I enjoyed your site and found it very informative. But when I was reading The Quotable Fort and came across the quotation "The Future of Warfare" I was confused. It seems the only way to read the quote is that, in the future, i f women are put on the front lines of war, then many people will die and battles will be lost because "girls" are incapable of handling war. I would like to believe that the quote was taken out of context and should mean something else, but as it stands, the quotation greatly detracts from the validity of the rest of your page. If you stand behind that kind of outdated philosophy, then, what credibility do the rest of your claims have?
Mark J. King and Jessica Cox
From the Internet
Dennis Stacy replies:
Thanks for your comments, but I think you need to go back and read the quote in question again. How you could arrive at your conclusion--"It seems the only way to read the quote is that, in the future, if women are put on the front lines of war, then many people will die and battles will be lost because 'girls' are incapable of handling war"--is, quite frankly, beyond me. Fort is postulating a scenario here in which girl poltergeists actually conduct and win a war in the future as casually as they now now chew gum and stick it under their schooldesks.
Besides, by quoting Fort we're not necessarily saying we agree with everything he says; the purpose of that section is simply to introduce people to the writings of Charles Fort. Everyone is free to agree or not. And it stands to reason that any quote or paragraph taken out of an entire book would be somewhat "out of context" by definition. Again, our intention in this particular section was--and will continue to be--to give visitors a taste of the writings of Fort. They're there to make you think, period. If they succeed, then most likely they'll make you want to read Fort for yourself--thereby supplying the context.
Am in receipt of The Anomalist:4, and find it intriguing, albeit a little biased on the part of some of your contributing authors. I point to the feature "DeLoys's Photograph: A Tool of Racism" and the authors' determination to downplay the peculiarity o f said photograph bymeans of a link to genocidal racism campaigns of later years.
While Coleman's and Raynal's historical citations may be well-researched, I note that there is a small, but significant discrepancy. The authors' remark on page 87 (Anomalist: 4) that the animal was propped up on an "old gasoline crate" during de Loys' photo session. Of course, gasoline is not (was not) "crated" in such small quantity, and I'm surprised that Coleman-Raynal didn't catch this, as it is one of the more interesting parts of the de Loy "ape" story.
True, G. Montandon took the de Loys "ape" question to heart and championed it; but he also took a few additional steps toward authenticating the dimensions of the photo--steps that Ivan Sanderson neglected to take and that Coleman & Raynal conveniently omitted from their story.
In the original photo (which doesn't reproduce well at all through various electronic/optical reproduction methods over the decades), the packaging of the "old gasoline crate" clearly identifies it as an OIL crate (containing three dozen canned quarts of motor oil). Montandon took note of the manufacturer's logo appearing on this crate and contacted them, requesting an identical oil crate to use as a reliable reference in determining the dimensions of de Loys' "ape."
Montandon then arranged a re-enactment of the de Loys photo session, using himself sitting on the oil crate with the camera at a distance of 10 feet (as a control photo). The next series of photos posed several dead spider monkeys of various sizes, propp ed up, sitting on the oil crate in the style of de Loys' "ape". Even the largest of these specimens (a "fair-sized" one at 2.4 feet from heel to head) does not even nearly approximate the dimensions of the de Loys "ape." To Montandon's observation, the de Loys anomaly would measure over four feet from heel to crown.
If de Loys' creature was, in fact, an abnormally large spider monkey, then it was abnormal on a scale of 2x, which would make it more a freak of nature (like a human being 12 feet tall). However, in de Loys' account, there were at least two of the beasties-one female, one supposedly male. A double freak of nature?
Also, and more directly concerning Coleman & Raynal's approach to this subject, I find it altogether tiring that anything in this recent age we find objectionable--for whatever reasons--need but be labled "racist" in order to damn it to hell once and for all.
Hax
From the Internet
Loren Coleman is preparing a reply.
I looked at the web pages of "The Anomalist" again today, and was amused at the story about the fund raising letter. It quoted a letter from a girl in Louisville KY who believed she was an alien because her parents were being paid by the government to raise her.
As a teenager, my brother believed for two years that there were space aliens in the United States, and they were required to register with the government. It seems that in the middle of cartoons where super heroes dealt with alien invaders, an ad came on:
"If you are an alien residing in the United States of America, you are required to register with the Department of Immigration in January of every year. ..."
Remember that ad? They drove us crazy with it every year. My brother didn't know about any kind of alien except space aliens. Naturally he assumed the "obvious." He asked me how, if the aliens in the ad looked just like us, that we could tell if they were from outer space. I told him that "alien" there meant someone from another country, not another planet.
I wonder if that girl was an alien (terrestrial) refugee or something like that, and saw too many flying saucers on saturday morning cartoons. Maybe she didn't know the other meaning for that word as well.
(: Did George Adamski's Venusian friend register every January? :)
Larry Robinson
Bloomington, Indiana