A Very Short Flight Out Proctor With Ivan

A brief thing, just because....

Ivan was a friend of Vincent Gaddis [and I think that Gaddis somewhat inspired him about the underwater stuff and the Bermuda triangle and on to the "Vile Vortices."] Gaddis wrote for Argosy in 1964 on the Bermuda Triangle, and Ivan followed up in the same magazine in 1968. Gaddis sent him a report by a military person on vacation going to Bermuda, and encountering a freak, rather unexplainable, turbulence with radio knock-out, which fed into Ivan's growing idea of "Vile Vortices" around the globe.

But it was Ivan's own Argosy piece which brought him two letters which set his mind spinning.

One of these was from a B-26 pilot/navigator flying in Korea in 1955. This material found its way into Ivan's book Invisible Residents  [which in itself imitates Gaddis' Invisible Horizons.] The fellow was navigating at the time and on their way north-to-south through the middle of the Korean peninsula, he found that they had a ground speed of 550 knots. Knowing what his engines were doing at the time, this meant that, if this was correct, they were getting a wind assist of 265 knots. At jet stream altitudes this was barely possible, but they were only at 7000 feet. Plus there was no evidence of any such high wind at all.

The military guy and the pilot just laughed it off, as just some strange thing, and flew the rest of their route. But the anomaly grated on the navigator, and the more that he thought about it, the harder it was to let it go. Many years later [thankfully he had good notes], he read Ivan's article and wrote him.

Ivan wasn't comfortable with interpreting the letter but felt that it was interesting and maybe important. Fortunately PURSUIT had on the editorial staff a very good anomalies researcher, ufo-expert, and an experienced professional pilot, Robert Durant.

Ivan asked Bob to work on these ideas with him, and he ended up asking several key questions of the witness, who was happy to correspond.

In that correspondence, Bob determined that the witness was very sharp about navigation, and his facts convincing as to their accuracy. BUT, if these facts were as stated, and it would take someone of Bob's intelligence and openness to see this, this anomalous speed phenomenon could not have been a simple meteorological freak wind storm.

Durant determined that the data held by the witness was incompatible with the idea that the jet stream somehow came all the way down to 7000 feet and just blew the plane along. Not only does the jet stream never do this [low-level 265 knot winds], but even if it had the experience of the navigator and crew should have been different. Everything instrumentally and sensationally indicated that the B-26 was operating normally, and there was no indication of "entering" a forceful wind area which sped up their pace by double.

The only theory which fit the data in Bob's mind was that the aircraft made its turn towards the north-to-south flight path and all measurements showed that everything was normal. [the B-26 was at 230 knots and its true groundspeed was 250 knots.] Bob postulates that it entered an anomalously fast area of air sometime after the turn and rode with that excess speed most of the way down the peninsula. He says that there would be great turbulence at that point, but my reading does not see the navigator saying that there was any odd turbulence at all --- I believe that Bob just assumed it because not assuming it was just too weird. 

Even then, the event remains stranger yet. The speed readings for the B-26 were stable at 230 knots during this "fast"[550 knots] time. The ride seemed smooth. This shouldn't have been possible with a violent extremely high speed wind carrying them. Such chaotic systems are not homogeneous and cause all manner of turbulence. It was, as Bob concluded, as if the plane had entered a bubble of atmosphere moving at greater speed than all the surrounding atmosphere, but being relatively smooth and calm within itself. "I know how absurd this sounds, but it is the best 'explanation' --- the only explanation which fits the reported facts." 

Ivan would later privately disagree.

From the same article came a response from a different witness to the unusual. This fellow was flying in a C-97 transport from Kwajalein to Guam, a trip taken often. After two hours of flight, navigational checks indicated normal flight direction and speed. But at the third hour, the navigational measurements indicated that they had been traveling at 110 knots faster than expected [despite clear, normal conditions. The correspondent said that he nearly fell off his chair at the calculation. He checked and rechecked, but no error. At the end of that hour, the plane's speed was dropping well back towards normalcy, but it had traveled 340 nautical miles in that time "for no apparent reason."

Durant also corresponded for Ivan about this. They determined that instead of the expected nne-to-ssw wind of 10-40 mph, the actual air-assist measured was a nearly flat east-to-west "wind" of 70-110 mph. Making some reasonable assumptions about when the "third hour wind" began and ended, an estimate of 190 knots was not unreasonable as a guess for this anomaly. Bob said: where's the turbulence? Where's the drift? "Something very weird is going on here."

Bob's model for what was happening in these cases was that the aircraft had gotten enclosed within some bubble which being internally smooth did not indicate to the travelers that they were in anything at all. YET, the portion of the atmosphere that they WERE in was moving at a super rate compared to the normal outside. The bubble insulated the planes from any sense of this abnormal, should-be-violent motion. But how could such a thing be possible? Bob apparently had begun to believe that this "space" that surrounded the aircraft was abnormal in some fashion, perhaps even not truly part of normal reality at all. 

Ivan, not content to merely go Out Proctor with Bob, decided to go "All-The-Way-Fool" and do him one better. Not part of normal space? Yes! BUT, this area of space which the planes had flown into were realities wherein the rate of time flow was different. It wasn't bubbles of air which were going fast, it was Time which was going slow.

THAT's the ticket! That's what's odd about certain areas of the planet, and how certain anomalies take place! Shiftings into parallel physical realities with different time rates.

This is what the Vile Vortices were. These were areas more likely to suddenly glitch and encompass planes, boats, people, "stuff" into parallel physical conditions, mostly like our own, and transport such catches anywhere and everywhere ... or nowhere.

In Ivan's notebook file on the Vile Vortices, he had a couple of letters from a gentleman whose thoughts make little sense to me. One of the pages is above. REAL SPACE VANISHES INTO IMAGINARY TIME.

I can't imagine that Ivan understood a bit of it.

But he liked it ... and kept it.

Got a plane to catch.

Peace, friends.

Down in the Cryptodumps, part last: Stuff that Ivan was reading.

Last entry on the big pile of miscellaneous cryptozoological chaos which accumulated in an anomalies dump box with no filing. It gives me GREAT pleasure to wrap this small part of the four dump boxes up. 

Most of these things to follow are bits which I found in the SITU files [also chaotic there] and thought interesting enough to photocopy before they disappeared beneath the thermodynamic noise content never to break surface again. This particular set of articles/newsclips etc was stacked together in a way that indicated that Ivan had read them together. So, without further delay: 

This is a famous 1910 article reporting on the alleged sighting of a dinosaur in central East Africa. 

I won't have much insight on most of these articles but I believe that I know just a little about Sanderson's opinion of this one. That's because it rested on the authority of Carl Hagenbeck. Ivan saw Hagenbeck as an outstanding example of his own "tribe", animal collectors and zoo providers. If Ivan had an ideal profession, that was his passion. Because this claim of extant African dinosaurs was a claim of a hero, I believe that Sanderson saw it as strongly likely. As he said: "Hagenbeck was no fool." 

..... and once you accept Hagenbeck, other claims, such as this in a 1919 clipping [unfortunately by a much less known guy] are pretty easy to buy into. I am intrigued by the fact that the location here is Congo --- almost right on top of the claimed area of our later Mokele mBembe claims which got Roy Mackal, Richard Greenwell, and Herman Regusters exploring there 60 years later. 

Ivan didn't have this drawing in these files, just a typed version of an 1819 report of an African explorer traveling up the western coast, and once getting to Gabon, hearing tales of a giant "ourang-utan" called the "Ingeena." The illustration is from Paul duChaillu's book about his extensive [and amazing] travels through central Africa and could fairly be used to illustrate this 1819 claim. In those days, "we" had discovered the Orangutang but not yet the Gorilla. In Africa tales were however coming in that there were two "mysteries" afoot there. The "Lesser Mystery" turned out to be the Chimpanzee. The "Greater Mystery"= the Gorilla. 

The 1819 story told a weird tale of the Ingeena being almost impossible to fight due to its incredible strength, but that you could win due to its stupid imitative behaviors [the origin of the idea of "ape-ing"]. The Ingeena it was said would see us carrying wood on our shoulders and pile so much wood on its own and carry it around endlessly, that it would exhaust itself and you could dispatch it. Other ridiculous claims like this were also made. 

These tales sound so much like the primitive ideas that we had about the Gorilla that it's hard for me to credit them with anything else ... but Ivan seemed looking at them as if they might hint of a "third" mystery ape. 

An 1816 article [typed only] was in the pile. It spoke of a Flathead River, WA experience reported by hunters in the wilderness. Allegedly a bear broke into their camp and grabbed one of the men, then rose on two feet and ran rapidly away on a two-legged sprint. The illustration above is of the recent case of a urban-going bear which walked two-legged all over town. So, bears with a reason [this one had both front paws damaged] can walk on twos just fine. 

So, it's possible that the hunters' tale of the temporary abduction of one of their buddies was true. What one wonders however is whether the Bigfoot Albert Ostman tale decades later relates to this at all. Did Ostman have a bear encounter and embellish it by morphing it into Bigfoot? Ivan doesn't tell us why he was interested in this. 

There was a 1781 report from Quebec with quite charming descriptions of [as far as I'm concerned] walruses and lake sturgeon --- both of which had wowed the writer [he considered the walrus a sea monster]. The diagram included above is my addition not the writer's. 

The writer also said that there was another mystery beast called the seawolf --- again no illustration, so I've appended one sort of old representation of a seawolf. Frankly the author's description sounds like neither the beast above nor my own favorite seawolf [the Wasgo/Sisiutl] but rather another form of walrus-like creature. Why was Ivan interested? Who knows?

A 1778 article described encounters with a wildman of the Pyrenees Mountains. In this case my appended picture isn't far off. Here's a quote: 

"In the year 1774, a savage, or wild man, was discovered by the shepherds, who fed their flocks in the neighborhood of the forest of Yuary. This man, who inhabited the rocks that lay near the forest, was very tall, covered with hair, like a bear, nimble as the Hisars, of a gay humor, and, in all appearance, of a solid character, as he neither did, nor seemed to intend, harm to any body. He often visited the cottages, without ever attempting to carry off anything. He had no knowledge of bread, milk, or cheese. His greatest amusement was to see the sheep running, and to scatter them, and he testified his pleasure at this sight by loud fits of laughter, but never attempted to hurt these innocent animals. When the shepherds (as was frequently the case) let loose their dogs after him, he fled with the swiftness of an arrow shot from a bow, and never allowed the dogs to come near him. One morning he came to the cottage of some workmen, and one of them endeavouring to get near him, and catch him by the leg, he laughed heartily, and then made his escape. He seemed to be about thirty years of age." 

..... the author then went on to assume that this must have been a human abandoned in the forest long ago, who grew up subsisting on local plants. {Not too long thereafter, in early 1800s France, such a "wolfchild", the "Wild Boy of Aveyron", would become the most famous such abandoned survivor in the world, if you discount Romulus and Remus.}

Ivan probably saw in this story a possible primitive humanoid, his favorite of which was the Wudewasa --- and who knows? maybe he was.

The reference to "nimble as a Hisar" flummoxes me, and the widest stretch that I can come up with there is that it could be slang for the fantastically successful and agile Polish cavalry, the Winged Hussars. These forgotten troops were essentially invincible for 100 years of fighting during the 1600s.

The next bit was from the journals of Alexander Henry and David Thompson, 1799-1814. This reference was by Henry, and to the local Native American "Saulters" of the Northwest Great Lakes, that an animal was known there at that time called by them Kitche Amick, or, a giant beaver. I always thought that this sort of thing was a joke, forgetting that such animals DID exist in palaeolithic times or a little earlier. The tale here was of an armed Saulter seeing an animal on the water which he thought was a moose, but was then seen to be a giant beaver. These animals, being felt to be spirit animals, the Saulter refused to shoot. {Saulter is the old French name for the Ojibwe.}

Second to last is a letter in Ivan's files from a guy named Curtis L. Gibson. This letter [sent to someone else] Ivan had copied to his Thunderbird file. The fellow, who I've never heard of, stated plainly that he was an authority on all Fortean Lore {Wow!}, had neatly wrapped all cryptozoology up in a three-point nutshell. Ready?

All cryptozoological claims are due to one of three things:
1). "natural" biological species not recognized by zoologists. He gave as examples super-condor, sea serpent, sasquatch, and a subclass of this category including things like mermaids and satyrs. He kind of lost me there --- biological or not, big fella?
2). "metempsychic creatures": everything you can imagine with "were-" stuck in front of it. These things are completely physical, and only [violating all reason, but a casual matter to Gibson] morph into entirely different forms whenever they want to. He also had a subclass here which included witches, who he said were "slightly more supernatural" --- I can't wrap my head around that and am not sure I want to.
3). Animate robots which are the products of UFOs, and probably left behind by them, or possibly similar creatures which have been inserted into our environments by some technological intrusion. I suppose that you COULD explain about anything with hypotheses like that.

He then comes SLIGHTLY more down to Earth by discussing some claims that the original letter writer posed to him.

The first was that there is no doubt that Satyrs "still" occupy the desert area of Babylon. He said that he had explained this all in his earlier article in Explore The Beyond magazine in 1960. He based his certitude on the sighting of such by a British traveler whose story he read in an unnamed book, PLUS the Bible says that satyrs will be the eternal inhabitants of Babylon along with bats. He does seem to have great trust in biblical things.

His second topic might have more legs, or wings. It was about the large salt desert bird nests found in Utah. The crypto part of this was the flurry of letters he said his article got about these things, which included thunderbird sightings in that area.

He followed that up with a report from a man in Canada who said that he had seen giant birds several times at a lake there {please tolerate the Japanese film monster picture; his claims weren't that big.} Gibson refused to name the exact location as he did not want tourists crowding in there and extincting the animals.

Apparently some winged creatures were visiting the St. Louis region at that time [c.1971], and he thought that he had the solution for that. {Buckle up on this one}. He saw this as a future projection coming back 100 years or so in time. But that's not all of it. Such things happen when a member of a cult merging Christianity and Trance Exercises doses off [in Church --- he said it, not me]. If this fellow is of exceptional psychic strength he will create in his dreams physical manifestations which will appear not in his own time, but in the past.

Uhhh.... OK.

Lastly, he allowed that many of our unusual creatures past and present have been the aliens abandoning their pets. When they do this in pairs or more, these animals will breed a new colony of alien animals sooner or later to be seen by us. This explains most of Earth's humanoid species.

Uhhh... don't bother to get up, I'll let myself out.

One wonders how much of this Ivan paid any attention to, or why he had it in his notes at all. Maybe the Canadian thunderbirds.

The last thing for today was not during Ivan's period --- just a note stuck in among the rest.

In 1985, at a campsite near Greenwater Texas, a couple said that a big [8-foot] hairy [brown curly] heavily built [must have weighed a ton] bear had strode into their camp and --- ready?--- asked them if they had permission to camp there. Not believing their protestations, the bear told them to get off the premises. To hurry them along, the bear threw rocks at them.

A Narnian Bear in Texas ... THAT's a tale that I can get behind.

Peace, folks.

Down in the Cryptodumps, part four: Stuff Flying Around With Wings.

Back to the Cryptozoology Dump Box from the SITU collection that I was once perusing and making copies for filing, which never took place [panic not, readers, all the originals DID get back in Ivan's files.] My Fortean Heart is pure and my finger tips not sticky.

Today: weird stuff flying about not related to UFOs.

TEXAS AERIAL TITANS. 

c.1976 News accounts were coming out of Texas of a very big bird seen. SITU received several clippings. Ivan had already passed away, but he would have been interested [as I'll show you later]. The Texas sightings reported seeing a flying animal around 15-20 feet in wingspan. The majority of the sightings were along the Rio Grande on both the US and Mexican sides. 

Perhaps the human mind was playing jokes or perhaps The Universe was, but earlier in 1975 palaeontologists discovered, in Texas, the largest fossil pterosaur ever found. The beast had a wingspan of nearly fifty feet, and its skeleton challenged science to tell how it could even get off the ground. The "Texas Pterosaur" seemed a ripe candidate for inspiring goofy Texas sightings.

The hitch in that hypothesis was that not all the witnesses could easily be written off as goofs. One sighting was by three k-12 teachers and another by two policemen. Both "birds" were about one third the size of the Texas Pterosaur. 

OJIBWE THUNDERBIRDS.

A letter in the files from the same time came from a researcher looking into cryptozoological mysteries in Eastern Canada. He referred to thunderbird sightings from two areas, approximately as marked on the map above. The Quebec [Laurentian-area] information was from a trip that he had taken in 1975. A Quebecair pilot told him that his plane had been buzzed by a bird of approximately 25' wingspan as he was flying over the Laurentians in 1972. Another man told the correspondent that he had seen a similar bird in the same area in 1969. 

The Northern Ontario information came from a woman researching Ojibwe legends of the Thunderbird. The Thunderbird is a primary Nature Force/Deity/Manitou of the Peoples of the Ojibwe/Chippewa. The old pictoglyph above is from the Jeffers Minnesota park. This lady said that during her interviews several Native Americans of the area told her that they had seen the Thunderbird nests in Northern Ontario. 

IVAN'S VIEWS: 

Sanderson would have been interested in all this 1975-6 input had he lived. He had a fairly extensive resource notebook on the topic. When you glance through this thing, you notice that Ivan had some favorite bits which sort-of hooked him. 

Though not buying everything that he read in this article, much of the thing [minus the tone] intrigued him. 

One case that he liked has been repeated many times. You can read it above. But he also said that to get the gist of the subject, readers should read the entirety of Pearl's article. 

Another case, which Ivan might not have seen, appeared in PURSUIT after his death in an article by Curt Sutherly. Sutherly was intellectually "congenial" to both Pterodactyls and Thunderbirds, but informed us in the article that they were two utterly different things: Pterodactyls were physically/biologically real animals of the past, which possibly could have lasted into prehistoric-humans' times but are now extinct, and Thunderbirds were "monsters popping in and out of our reality", semi-real parodies of physical/biological things, that he wished to call "para-creatures". 

 Ivan wouldn't have liked Sutherly's conclusions [though I would] {The above are Ivan's notes} . 

Ivan didn't like non-physical things in general. He was a hands-on and in the lab [or the zoo] kind of guy. He'd MUCH prefer a still existent pterosaur AND an unknown really big raptor of some kind to any other set of choices. For Sutherly, the Ojibwe, and myself, the Thunderbird as a "Real" Manitou is quite the most compelling of the hypothetical sets. 

PIASA BIRD. 

This was in a large box of things sent to SITU from Joan Whritenhour's organization after her passing. A good bit of that stuff wasn't too interesting, but the organization had some "odd" contacts that SITU didn't have. Occasionally a mention of something would occur in a letter or newsclipping that was right down SITUs alley. As you can read, the report is of a "monster bird" in the vicinity of Belvidere, IL which is close enough to be called Piasa Bird Territory. In 1948 there was a flurry of sightings in that area all the way down river towards St. Louis. 

I'm a fan of the idea of the Piasa Bird. It's one of those cryptozoological mysteries which has a long but solid provenance thoroughly attached to Native American lore. There were two other Piasa Bird references in this cryptobox: One was a FATE magazine article that I didn't think much of, and the other was the oldtime article above. This latter was one of Ivan's articles --- he had a little group of photocopies of 19th century newsclips that he was apparently once reading. 

The 1889 clip above is quite enthusiastic for the possibility of a real Piasa. It is based upon knowledge by someone who was a scholar and serious about finding out about the painting on the hillside. It comes at a time just after one of the great collectors of information about American pictographs had published his work. The writer knew of McAdams' book on the Relics of Ancient Races as well as having talked to one of the most important informants of the time, John Russell. The writer also may have talked to the pictograph collector, or maybe it was he himself doing the writing.

Here's our pictograph hero, Garrick Mallery. Preserving the designs of the ancient Native American pictographs was his avocation and his passion. He ended up creation an 8oo page manuscript of his work. Within that work he mentions the Piasa Bird. 

So what's that all about? The FATE magazine article stated that the Piasa Bird had no wings. It intimated that we probably had no idea what the thing was like at all because the glyph was so degraded by the time anybody looked. But I disagree and I think that Garrick Mallery and John Russell disagree. There is a statement by some early viewer that the "Bird" was a crudely drawn monster with no wings. FATE takes that as the definitive reference. But Russell [I believe] states that because of the brown-red color of the wings, you will have a hard time seeing them from a distance and in less than good lighting conditions. Then, as what is for me the coup de grace, Mallery publishes this in his monograph:

Our favorite Mississippi Flying Monster could fly by wing after all. 

Why do I care? Well, it's a small matter in the larger business of living one's life, admittedly, but having a winged Piasa makes several things "fit" and others maybe possible. The "fit" is with the Native American legends, even those told way back to Marquette and Joliet. It "fits" with the idea of the powerful spirits or Manitous that we've talked about earlier. It "fits" with the dislike that the modern Native Americans had for that particular dangerous-in-their-stories manifestation, so much so that they fired guns at the image once firearms arrived. 

And, the Piasa Bird, unlike almost all other old images anywhere, is pretty close to a "proper" British-style Dragon [if it has wings]. As longtime readers of this blog know, we searched [some time ago] rather intensely trying to find a proper dragon anywhere, and, with the possible exception of "Beowulf's Bane" {not Grendel but the other thing, that killed him}, came up almost empty.

With wings our Piasa Bird remains a rare candidate for an ancient romantic concept. 

STURM'S DRAGONS.

Inspired by this small victory, I looked a bit for Dragons. I came across this quizzical fellow, Christopher Christian Sturm { even for a Catholic like myself, I think that Christopher Christian is overdoing it .} He wrote of Dragons in his famous work.

Sadly, Mr. Sturm's flying dragons turn out to be Swamp Gas. The irony of that staggers me. 

I DO notice, however, that "swamp gas" seems a little insubstantial to deal with all the things that Sturm mentions --- it seems that the "sophisticated" English doubters were busily substituting one anomaly for another. But dragonless still am I. 

Ivan had the book above in his SITU library --- I don't have any means of knowing if he read it. It contains things about Vietnamese animals so he may have. It was one of those items which was marginal at best to any interest that SITU would have, and I considered passing it on to someone else. But first I wondered what "Vermilion Bird" meant. 

The Vermilion Bird is a deity or Nature Power --- the Phoenix. In some renditions it looked pretty dragonish to me. 

In Chinese mythology it is one of the four directional powers, one of which is the Azure Dragon. So, my Vermilion Bird seems to be no Dragon either. 

But the Vietnamese had other ideas. In their view, and especially before the Chinese influence thoroughly took over [we're talking mediaeval times here, not recently], these images of powerful significant Spirits sort of melded together. The important Spirit was the Kua, or water dragon, who mated with a goddess/fairy queen to produce the warrior dynasties of early Vietnam. 

The stories say that these dragons lived offshore in places like Ha Long Bay even until recent times. What did they look like? 

Curses! Foiled again!! I'm looking for Dragons and find Sea Serpents instead!!!

Happy Hunting, Folks.

Till next time, Peace.