Out Proctor?: Doesn't scare me ... much.

This might be the last smorgasbord entry like this; the Chaos is killing me --- plus, I've overstayed my welcome Out Proctor. Even the trees are starting to look weird.

I have a friend who has fairly strong arachnophobia. {I don't care for the eight-leggers myself.} Coming across this tree would not be his favorite Nature experience. But, despite first impressions, it remained an anomaly.

1982: Kumaor Hills, India. A British photographer came upon this tree and snapped the picture. Naturally curious, he was informed by the locals that the webs just showed up not long previously. No other trees were or had ever been so affected, nor was this tree so impacted in the past. Thinking the obvious, the tree was inspected for spiders --- there weren't any. Thinking the next obvious, the tree was inspected for things like tent caterpillars --- there weren't any. In fact there were no insects involved with the webbing at all, as far as anyone could see. No birds would land on the thing. The webbing clung strongly, resisting strong winds and rain. Beneath the webs, the tree seemed to still flourish.

I'm with the birds on this one. Leave well enough alone.

Attack of the Giant Furballs? Well, not quite but pretty odd. 

1969 [Ivan himself was able to write the commentary on this one]: Heydon Lake, BC. 

A gentleman named Robert Davidson lived near this small lake with his wife. One day Davidson saw a large globular thing floating near the shore and grabbed it. He pulled it out, thought that it was mighty odd, and carried it up to the house. As days went on, there were more wooden-ish globs and he piled them up much to the consternation of his wife, who wished that he'd just stop it and toss them back into the lake. 

Davidson however was too curious for that and notified a friend who wrote for the newspaper. This fellow was also curious and decided to follow Davidson's story further. The first serious look-see was by a PhD botany expert from the Provincial Museum of British Columbia. Dr. Szcazwinski noted that the thing of course was not alive, and seemed to consist of grass or roots or a mixture of things like that. He said that he'd never seen such a huge specimen of such a "ball-of-grassroots" as this 27" circumference thing. 

Heydon Lake is five miles long, one and a half mile wide, and very deep. it's a nice size and shape for a mini-Nessie, or perhaps the Vancouver area Wasgo Sea Serpent of the Haidas. {maybe these are its "leavings"? --- uhh, sorry, impolite commentary.} Some people theorized that the globs were caused by the balling up of sawdust from lumbering. One was taken to B.C. Forest Products and it was judged completely unlike any such debris. Another was taken to the research labs at the BC provincial research center, and these guys were very interested in the things, but couldn't come up with a theory. 

Adding to the mystery, Mrs. Davidson pointed out that if one handles the fibreballs, one can get an acidic or caustic or ? irritation from something in them. Her own hands showed peeling. The litmus tests show a slight acidity. Also weird, the fibres seem "glued together" somehow --- vigorous rubbing of the outside surface does not dislodge any of it. One day Mrs. Davidson came down to the newspaper office and dumped a whole truckload of them off [happily no doubt]. The largest of the fuzzballs weighed 16 1/2 pounds. She said that in her opinion it is the wind that is doing it, somehow rolling up debris in the lake. The newsman disagreed. He speculated that there was a large unknown underground river which rages upon the coming of snowmelts and rips up peat and other organics to make the balls. Ivan said that he tended to side with "geology" on this one, tossing his hat in the ring as a supporter of an underground river. 

Hmmmm..... sounds like the nefarious remnants of some underground Deros out of Richard Shaver's imagination to me.    {well, not really. I'd rather go with a Wasgo Furball than that.} 

.... or discarded underwater soccer balls from the Mer-people's World Cup? The above-ground people's Cup was held near there afterall, just this year. 

1969: off the coast of Cornwall, UK. 

Some guy named Simon Regan, who was allegedly a professional diver, was off the Cornish coast as part of a science team investigating puzzling deaths of fish and seals, which seemed to have something like burn marks on them. He had rented a small trawler at Penzance and sailed around Lands End to the northern coast. This area was off Nancekuke, near a Ministry of Defense laboratory suspected of chemical weapons research. The suspicions and reasons for picking this environmental location were obvious. 

Upon diving there, he experienced a loud cacophony of sounds. At about 20 foot depth, "screaming, humming, whining, and drumming" sounds assaulted him. At around 100 feet, things get stranger. Voices began to emerge from the chaotic earlier sounds. These voices speak various languages: French, English, and perhaps Russian could be distinguished. Finally, there is music. Regan said that he heard a Rachmaninoff and a Brahms that he was familiar with { these folks have good taste at least.} 

Regan talked about this with several divers. They'd all heard it. One 25-year veteran diver said:

"I've been diving {off Nancekuke} for five years. We have all heard the strange sounds off the coast near Hayle and Nancekuke. At first we didn't take much notice. We thought they were probably some sort of underwater detection device, dreamed up by the boffins. But a few days ago, when I was diving all day with three other men, we all heard strange voices speaking in French. The deeper we got the louder they got. Many other divers have heard music --- always classical. " 

Hmmm.... three theories come to mind:

1). made up bunk [source is poor]; 

2). sound transmission from British, French, and Soviet submarines doing their stupid games;

3). water entities alternating between complaining about human pollution and playing good music.

I like "3", but I'll bet on "1". [perhaps with a dash of "2".] 

1961: rural Lake County, OR.

Two young couples were driving back home at night. Rounding a sharp curve, they were blinded by the lights of a car in imminent collision. Brakes were too late and there was a violent crash. The reporter of this event briefly saw a woman thrown out of the other car before blacking out. 

The black-out seemed very brief. She found herself swimming in a beautiful pool in natural surroundings of flowers, forest, and singing birds. Then another singing began. Thinking that this wonderful singing was a Heavenly Choir, she allowed herself to float lazily in this perfect state. But suddenly the sounds of trumpets, like Gabriel's Horn, joined the symphony and brought her out of her reverie. She knew that she had to get to shore; she didn't belong in this paradise and had to leave. As she gained the bank of the lake, she was immediately back to her normal consciousness.

Her boyfriend lay across her unconscious, and she pushed him off. Pushing at the car door, it gave way. She crawled out of the wreckage to hear men yelling orders as rescue personnel were already on the scene. She was taken to hospital with a broken nose, fractured skull, and dislocated hip, along with all the bruises. But mostly she thought of the wonderful paradise of beauty and music that she'd experienced. Her life had one other experience that we might call an NDE, and during that one she also heard the "Heavenly Choir." 

Not the sounds off Cornwall, true, but something far more significant?

Let's come back to Earth.... 

1984: Colville Reservation, WA. 

A farm operator on Native American land, Fred Timm [with his two sons] worked both wheat fields and ranched cows. One day his sons were out herding the cattle when, near a wheat field, they came across a fresh hole in the ground. The hole was not geometrical but roughly "pear-shaped", about ten feet long and seven wide at its fattest point. The depth of the hole varied within a 1 1/2 to 2 foot range. The sides were fairly sharp. 

Then they noticed the chunk of earth which came out of the hole lying 70+ feet away, The dimensions of the giant clod matched the hole precisely in size and shape. It was as if, as observers stated, a giant cookie-cutter had come to Earth and removed the piece and dumped it 73 feet away. The chunk was estimated to weigh greater than two tons. 

The mystery deepened when the brothers observed that there was no sign of Earth-moving equipment anywhere. There were no tracks of any kind. Somehow a huge piece of soil had been taken up from the ground forcefully, and placed back down gently enough so that the Superclod retained its shape. 

Things got worse. Investigators looked closely at the straightline path between the hole and the displaced earth piece. There was no debris from the Superclod along that line. But there WERE small "droppings" elsewhere. Those droppings indicated that the airborne clod went from its natural location to where it landed by "flying an arc." [The only other explanation seemed to be that, if the chunk "flew a straight line", then the debris had to be displaced in the arc by strong winds ... which just happened to pick up at the beginning of the "flight", smoothly gain strength throughout the travel until the halfway point, and then smoothly drop back to zero at the landing site ... or some other such unexpected wind coincidence.] The clod also rotated during its travel, landing 20degrees counterclockwise to its original orientation. 

All manner of hilariously stupid "explanations" have been floated so that Skeptics can sleep well at night; nothing comes remotely close to even being worth remembering. Even the desperation "it's a hoax" speculation falls short given the number of investigators involved and the absence of serious [heavy] equipment marks. 

This just seems to be a "pure" Fortean phenomenon --- deal with it.

1966: Trenton, NJ. 

A lady had returned to her home from a shopping trip, and had gone into her bedroom to put away what she had purchased. An explosion erupted in her room. Looking about, she saw two holes in the window area of the room: one in the inner glass pane, the other in the "storm sash" just outside it. The two holes lined up, she realized with a chill, with her head when the eruption occurred. Glass was all over the room, reaching as far as covering her bed. BUT WHATEVER BLEW OUT THE TWO HOLES NEVER REACHED HER, nor was there any sign whatever of anything which could have punched through the double window. The sheer curtains which covered the window were undamaged, even though glass [pulverized] covered the floor. Just flat-out weird.....

A gardener was cutting grass nearby, just on her property, at the time, but heard and saw nothing. There was no sonic boom. Along the line-of-sight of the holes [about nine feet above the ground] entry would have been a tight fit as a nearby tree was pretty much in the way. Within the bedroom no sign of anything coming in [other than the glass] and no sign of any marking on the wall opposite. 

OK. What-the-heck?!  Somehow, if we are to take this literally, some force phenomenon [energy or material projectile] entered in a straight line from just outside a window and expended its force in two limited ways: 1). it pulverized glass in a neat circular pattern, and 2). it then distributed the pulverized material within a space without impacting any other matter [curtains or Mrs. Green's person] and dissipated with no further sign of its existence. It did this with one instant of explosive sound. 

Yep. I'll have this one worked out over lunch. Trending towards a tiny speck of antimatter projected by Norbbobble Szank's notoriously out-of-control space-warping research on Epsilon Eridani. 

1984: Dylife, Wales. 

There was a guy who liked Welsh mining history [in an amateur way] and spelunking down in old mines. {not my cup of tea if the wiggle spaces get at all narrow, but some people, including Ivan I believe, like it --- he was fascinated by cave creatures.} {Ivan might have liked this adventure too, although some things seem a little to close for comfort.} 

Our adventurer was in one old mine, by himself as it had been abandoned long ago. There were the usual abandoned mine noises, but our spelunker enjoyed them. He was making slow progress in a wet level of the mine when he came to a pool of water. He prodded around with his stick which he took for just this safety purpose, and began to hear a stranger than usual noise. Instead of the ordinary wind-driven wheezings of old shafts, this was a humming; not a motor humming, but like a human humming. 

This humming seemed to come from the other side of the pool. He couldn't see anything. Wondering if another spelunker was down there already and further along, he turned off his light, reasoning that if his companion had one he would now see it. Ten yards in front of him there was indeed something. 

It was a shape sized like a small man. It glowed, not like a flashlight, but a subdued pale blue glow. The shape seemed to hum its subterranean tune. 

Our hero got the hell out of there. 

Back at the local pub that evening his story regaled the oldtimers. When he'd finished, one came up to him and privately said that years previous he and friends had seen lights emerge from that mine level and fly slowly away in the sky. 

I KNEW UFOs would get here somewhere. Demons, Faeries, ET, or swamp gas --- as usual, everything's still at play. 

1986: Pittston, PA.

Once upon a time, a family of six, a very Catholic family of six, began getting what can only be called poltergeist experiences in their home. Unfortunately this was the nasty sort of poltergeist, not the mild fooling-around type that my brother and sister have in their house. 

The Smurl family got loud banging during prayer time, dark shadows moving, walking and animal hooves sounds, toilet flushing ... bunches of stuff which was at a minimum distracting. Being conservative Catholics, the family thought that demons were at work [they reported one "lifting" of the husband during prayers], and called for an exorcist. The Church wouldn't send an exorcist over, but the ghost-buster investigators were happy to arrive. These folks claimed to record all the claimed sounds, and to take film of not-very-clear things which they deemed intriguing, but as usual with such matters, nothing really emerged as evidence. The TV ghostbusters echoed the call for the Church to send in exorcists. 

..... well, as you know, I am a good Catholic boy, and "still" have unshakeable faith in angels and demons [really, no joke], but I don't know about this. Lots of poltergeist cases, especially the violent ones, have turned sour with heavy scrutiny. Still, if the family was telling the truth about something other than sounds and smells [like the levitation], maybe the Church should have risked embarrassing themselves and sent an exorcist in. My personal philosophy is that none of these things are "demons", but rather are other spiritual manifestations [if real] --- something of the unquiet spirit of a deceased person or a paranormal psychic imprint upon a place or a member of the Middle Kingdom, who would do better to be out in the natural world with the rest of Faerie.  But as this is the greatest confusion to me of any category of anomaly, I freely admit that I am at pure BS stage, and refuse to go All-the-Way-Fool with any conviction whatever. ... just bring on the data. 

Hamsters --- The Dark Side.

Well, that tears it. 

Gotta plane to catch. 

See you in about a week. Peace.