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VOL. 10 NO.3 WHOLE NO. 39 SUMMER 1977


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VOL. 10, NO.3.

SUMMER, .1977


Robert C. Warth
John A. Keel (on Sabbatical)
Managing Editor
R. Martin Wolf


Devoted to the Investigation of "Things" that are Customarily Discounted

Consulting Editor
Sabina W. Sanderson
Senior Writer
Curtis Sutherly
Associated Editors
John Guenasio
Contributing Writers
Charles Berlitz
Jerome Clark
Lucius Farish
Vincent Gaddis
Brad Steiger
Steven Mayne
Martin Wiegler
Fred Wilson

The Incorruptibility of Saints - A/ter Death .
Navy to Investigate Sunken Aircraft

The Pyramids are an Ancient Space Communications Network

"Zounds, Holmes! It's a Case of the Combustible Corpse!"
by Larry E. Arnold .................... ; .... '.' '........... '.' ............. 75
Semen & the Demon: Sinistrari's Concept of Demoniality .
by George M. Eberhart ..... ',' ....................................... " . 82

Cover design by R. M. Wolf

"Faust" and the Student

Reflections of Chinese Form in Mexican and No'rse Ornament
What About Reality?
Harmonics Diagram

o Society for the Investigatien of the Unexplained 1977


by Larry E. Arnold

(Copyright 1977)

" ... the strange and exceptional is of absorbing interest, and it is often through the extraordinary that
the philosopher gets the most searching glimpses
into the heart of the mystery of the ordinary."
-Drs. Gould and Pyle [1,1]
Readers of PURSUIT and other periodicals devoted to
the paranormal are quite aware that the human body is a
plethora of strange events. We recently discussed in this
journal (Fall 1976) one example of an.enigma that affliCts
the living; spontaneous human combustion. What may
. be less well known is that physiolqgical anomalies continue to persist (and haunt Scie~ce) O/ter the body has
become "dead and buried."
Medical literature is replete with cases of cadaveric
perspiration; postmortem ~nitaf erection after a hanging; the growth of nails (sometimes up to several inches)
and hair (to the extent that after four
a girl's hair
protruded through her coffin's joints) chronologically
and physically long after interment; and movements in
the tomb after burial. However, the most mysterious
curiosity - because it affects not a portion but all the
body - is the incorruptibi/ity.ol the "human corpse itself.
This category of postmortem phenomena often happens amid the most perplexing .circumstances, and
(should) produce the most disturbing affronts to medical
theories and the alleged finality of death.
The enigma deserves - and could easily fill- a large
volume; however, we shall limit our cursory attention in
this article to those events inVolving saintly persons.



. Circa 68 A.D. St. Nazarius was buried after losing his
head (physically, that is). In the l'Jlid-4th Century, St.
Ambrose disinterred the corpse only to find it"so perfect
and free from corruption with all its hair and the beard,
that it looked .. , as if it had been washed and laid out for
inspection there in the tomb." Accompanying this remarkable find was a fragrance that "surpassed all perfumes in sweetness." Nor did the amazed St. Ambrose
end the discoveries of his 300-year pred.ecessor with just
a sweet scent of remembrance, for a "vial of the saint's
blood was foultd as fresh and red as if it"had been spilt that
day ... [Cf..2, XIV, 38; 3, III, 99]
St. Cuthbert. the Bishop of Umdisfame, was laid to rest
20 March 687 A.D. to becomethe prQVerbial ashes-toashes and dust-to-dust - .or so it was thought. In 698,
monks found the corpse to be unputrlfied, with its joints
flexible and clothing fresh. Time, the catalyst of decay,
proceeded another 414 years (to 1102 A.D.), when again
the Bishop's body was found Incorrupt. In the process of

being moved it emitted. a sweet fragrance "such as gives

the appearance of one living in the flesh, rather than dead
in the body." [3, I, 357] The relocation didn't disturb this
saint's immunity to natural processes either, for the body
was found intact during the reign of King Henry VlU over 800 years later!
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Sf. Edmund, was discovered "free from corruption," a condition described by
Alban Butler as "evidently miraculous, and cannot be.
ascribed to any embalming "uring about five hundred
years, without any change in the colour." [3, IV, 218]
In May of 1381 Emperor Wenceslas ordered"St. John
Nepomucen drowne" for his .unwmi.ngness. to disclose
the confidence of EmpreSs Jane .. Almost immediately
strange phenomena began. "The martyr was no sooner
stifled in the waters, but a heavenly light appeared over
his body, floating on the river and drew many to the
banks." We suspect WencesJas began having grave
doubts (forgive the. pun) about a decree which extinguished the life of this saint but couldn't quench the light
of Nepomucen's soul. Nevertheless, as a result of this
execution the Emperor outlived the saint in the flesh, but
Wenceslas' body never matched the survival of his
victim's. On 14 April 1719 - 336 years after the fateful
drowning - the saint's tomb was opened. Among the
customary and expected ashes was found an incredible
tongue "retaining the normal shape, size and colour of
the tongue of a Jiving man, and ... still both soft and flexible." [3, II, 165]
Other conditions like incorrupt hearts, blood flowing
after years of interment, and exudings of oil from the
bodies of those long-deceased, led many physicians
quietly to exclaim their wonder. As was said of Mary
Xaveria of the Angels, for example, "it must ~ supernatural." [4, 272-5]
(For further examples, see the abbreviated listing in
Table l.) .
"Petrification or mummification of the body are quite
well known," aSserted Dr. Gould and Pyle.in 1896 [1,
523]. In contrast to ~everal of the cases in Table I, a tomb
at Canterbury Cath~dral was opened toward the end of
the 19th Century to discover which Archbishop was
interred there (see Lancet, 1890,I,lIOS). The corpse was
identifiable as that of Hubert Walter, who had physically
transitioned in 1204 AD. Although decomposition had
been retarded (and indeed was still progressing), the
corpse had an extremely offensive and siCkening odo",
"unmistakably that of putrefaction."
Therefore the astonishment of physicians to not only
entire but lifelike corpSes after hundreds of years (in
some cases), cannot be attributed to.a retardation of

PURSUIT Summer 1977

~-------.----.- .....


You look at an indiuidual whom: thee all. term

saintly'. Why are they called.saints? Because they:.don't see the world as you see the world and they
can do things that you can't do. Why can they do
things that you 'can't' do? Because they .. _are seeing the Creator and the Maintainer in every thingand they're working with it! ... Everything is possible!

As with so much of Forteana, if the above set of anomalous postmortem phenomena is to be explained then
n~w frontiers must obviously be forge~-

One could proceed to challenge Science with additional cases like that above, but it's necessary that Forteans (or some other like-minded individuals) search for
the principles that lie behind the unorthodox - so that
the extraordinary of today will be understood in terms of
tomorrow's ordinary. Let us continue then by attempting to understa.nd how the phenomena discussed above
occurs, and why_
Maintaining our focus on saints and persons of saintly
demeanor for this moment, we surmise that those so
designated would have been truly evolved soul-entities
expressing t.hrough physical vehicles (their corporeal
bodies). Being at harmony with the world around them,
they would also have that balance within themselves.
After the physical body is vacate9 and the anim~ting
force perhaps had left (for there are episodes of movement in tombs, as well), the vital and healthy cellular
structure of the anatomy would remain impervious to
those destructive forces which normally affect the diseased bodies of imbalanced individuals.
Essentially the phenomenon of incorruption could.be
seen as the result of cooperation between the two
aspects of creation, what occultists term the F~ther and
Mother principles. T.he Father principle is "the creative
ability within" [5, 5] while the latter "maintains the
rhythm, the balance and the motion of that which has
been created." [5, 1]
Once established, this relationship would be a natural
process concurrent with and continuing after an entity's
incarnation within that body had ceased. As with St.
Cuthbert, for example, the body would remain (and even
smell) as incorrupt in death as it had in life. The longevity
of incorruptibility would depend on the extent to which
the body had been perfected and purified while animated.
But is this rather simple explanation the only one Forteans need to consider? We believe not.
The lives of saints are said to be models for emulation
by the rest of mankind. Having come to know the possibilities of. Man incarnate, some saints may wish to demonstrate - in addition to their deeds while living - the inherent potential of the spirit functioning in balance within
a physical form. One way to generate such awareness
would be to create an astounding situation, something
'impossible' and hence dramatic ..
The programming of incorruptibility or other phenomena into the physical body through mind working not.
over but with matter, would (or should) achieve such an
aim and purpose: to present living men with an enigma
which (hopefully) would stimulate and stir a search
towards realization of inate and greater human capabilities.
Through an altered state of consciousness which has
consistently demonstrated its reliability to the author,
the different realities of saints and 'lesser' men were compared (from the latter's perspect~ve).

So what does Man say? "We know that's impossible! So long as it's impossible I don't have to pursue it. Only a saint can have miracles; only a saint
can say 'You're healed'; only a saint. can do things!
That's their law - my law's differ~nt!" [6, 11]
Was 5t. John Nepomucen demonstrating to future
generations a law about the power of truth and faithfulness when, having been martyred for refusing to break
verbally the confidence entrusted to him by Empress
Jane, his tongue was found !'entire" and "soft and flexible" after 3-1/~ centuries?
Confronted with sucn a Possibility, how would most
men react? Wouldn't they choose to relegate such faith-.
fulness to a few special indiViduals like saints, rather than
develop such a quality in themselves? "See," stated the
voice, "then it gives you a good excuse to never even try!
And if you do try and you don't succeed, that's because
(you know) 'God made them better than He made me.
God made them better, made them Q holy person!'" [6-,

This rationale that "god" indiscriminately apportions

talents and success confli<;:ts with the philosophy of the
author that the only discrimination among men isoftheir
own making, and not at the whim of some Infinite power;
that each human is giveri the gift of life, to do with as fancy
and fate dictate.
But what is fate except the encountering of forces elected by a soul-entity for experience and experimentation?
Therefore the power that separates the miraculous from
the mundane within any individual is of one's own choosing. The voice of altered consCiousness made this cogent
observation about human behavior:

St. Cuthbert's tomb, Durham Cathedral

(C> 1977 L. E. Arnold)

PURSUIT Summer 1977


Remember the martyrdom: it's easier to be a

martyr than a saint. Because if you'J'e a saint,
you're expected to liue up to being a saint.l/you're
a martyr, you're -dead' before you start. [6, 12]
Thus if confronted with the quandary of POStmortem
phenomena in the corpses of saints, perhaps the maior
ity of mankind would begin to reject the limitations of
martyrdom and instead achieve. the expended. aware
ness that results from seeking "insight to the aims tKI
purposes" of creation. (6, 12J
The discussion of saints led to another concept so intrisuing (to the author, at least) and at least indirectlyevidential to the continuance of a soul's existence after
physical death, that we would like to' share it here.'
. The fol~ng is excerpted from material delivered on
"the law of the great Teachers" - wh.ich applies to
humans in this manner: '. ..

The manifestation oj the corn!Cious being ofagreat

Teocher: thee could draw on that essence at any
moment. Thee could call on the essence of the consciousness oJ your brother Buddha; you could call
on lhe essence of the consciousness of the man
Jesus the Nazarene. You could call Lq)On any great
piesenter who is manifesting as close as possible
unto the Father and Mother (principle). (6, 11]
What does this concept of an active inte{Change between the physically living and the phYsically transitioned (the so-called living and dead) have to do with incqrruptibility? There' is at least a two-fold purpose:

It is primarily to show yoU thQt you can work with

the Father-Mother principle - you know, the
Creator and the Maintainer.

And if il can be crecited and maintained, it can be

actiuated at any 'moment! And they [sain.ts) can
maintain it [the incorrupted'corpseJ!or that length
oj lime (0$ thee say it), they can also dissolue it and
make il materialize elsewhere al any momenl- if
they have arepJica of the original. So they can mart;Jest anywhere on your Earth-plane at any moment
in.a physical Jorrn because they haue a physical reference point - a body. [6, 18)
Thus if .an individual of religious persuasion was pra~

ins to a saint for aid and comfort, and that"~int had main-

~ a physical point of reference such as an incorrupted portion of his former body somewhere upon this
planet. then that object would provije the focalization
point necessary so "t#1q1 saint could materialize andgiue
... and uisil in." [6, 18) The existence of a tangible and
pure medium - thJ corpse or a portion of it - serves as
point or link between two different realities
Cthat of ~ petson praying, anc:l of the saint's spirit) and
facilitates and enhances the interaction.
One is reminded of Chades Fort's belief in Super-Geography, where~ different realms c:o-exist and occasion - bv accide.nt or plan - merge with one another.


Summer ]977

Such a concept is'an affront to orthodox: Science - but.

. just like postmortem phenomena, cannot at this moment
be discounted ~ the open-minded.
The maintaining of this focaIizing-deYice-in~the-tomb ..
does not limit the .form of !'Mnifestation which could subsequently oc~ur, however. A saul-entity who departed an
adult male's body co~d re-manifest as a child or a
woman, for exampJe, to one in need:

This person says they're lonely, lonely, lonely_ And

says, "So-and-so, help me from this


And ~ere comes this litlle child laughjns and skipping along, ane( smiles and ~es their dav. Ok?
And they never find out who that little child is. They .
neuer Jind out who. slopped to aSsist them. when
they haue afla.t tire.'. They neuer find out who. who.

who. It's one of thOse who has a reference point .

somewhere on' your 'Eartl:l wOrld. And they can .
manifest anywhere _.. (6, '18]

Again, Charles 'Fort collected cases of une~ted

appearances of. pepple with unusual abilities. 1'h8y
seemed to come from nowhere. only to qisappear soon
afterward. Their arrival and departure was as much an
enigma as their presence. ParapsychoJogis~ today
ponder the phenomena of synchronicity - When needs
and desires are suddenly met by a '!Qrtuitous' series of
events or encounters with 'just-the-right-per
The above concept gives an ans~r to both mysteries:
the intact energy pattern of a saint's body continues to
serve a vallJable purpose, even after 'death,' to its fonner
tenant who desires to assist t!1ose currently expressing in
, It is said of these former tenants and their preserwd

They need these emanations from the form - in

t/:le sense as a male and a female need the sperm

together to produce a child, do they not? So the

energy emanatingfrom theform of this saint meets
with the energy emanating from an individuill who
is praying. And the two logether produCe what-.
euer aim and purpose is needed to, how you say.
Qssist .. (6, 18).

The process thus begins on the nonphysicall~I:.a transference of thought between two levels of the multidimensional Super-Geog~aphy. "Mating with energy rather
tht;ln with physicality, " is onE! way to phrase the process.
Then this combination of energies is aple

to produce matter. Yoti see, matter and energv Qre

interchangable. And if these hauea reference pOint
0/ matter, thee can excnange with other enen.Jies
to produce matter. [6, 18J
Matter and energy' as interchangable: it's a principle
physicists are just beginning to recognize, as the boun-'
daries once thought to separate these t~ states are bec()ming ever more difficult to define and locate.
It seems saints had discovered and have beenapplving
the principle for millenia!




1: Well documented Postmorte~ Physical Phenomena


S. w.,burga

: S. Walbu,,-






206 years

body "'found entire"

over 1000 years


S. Ant~ony of Padua


S. Bridget of SwedeI'!





. S. JOhn of Capistran



56 days
309 vears

an oily fluid trickled from her bones

throughout this in~erim
tongue "found red, soft and entire"
while rest of body was ashes
body a clean skeleton, white dust
and an incorrupt htart
readily identifiable from still


Francis Xavier



1 year

body found quite fresh, even though

lime was heaped on corpse

. S. Charlts Borromeo


4 years:

medically attested not embalmed;

yet body was supple and naturafly


22 years


296 yeaTS

though embalmed, body largety

intact despite damp soil; "super
natural presemtion"
same condition as above


Maria Anna (ladr~nit of Jesus



107 years

priests and surgeons found

"interior organs, the viscera and
the fleshy tissues were all of them
entire, sound, moist and resilient
... supernatural perfume"

S. Andrew Babola



73 years

marty~ and bur.ied with others;

all segments of body found
intact and flexible; omen in

common ",VI had decompOllld




6 yean

"marvelous fragrance"


At the restingplace of Father Cherbal, in the mountaintop convent of Annaya north of Beirut, 30-year-old
Jeanette Howard was cured of paralysis. L Orient,
quoted in the Express & Star (19 May. 1967), says she was
,praying before the holy man's tomb when "a thin trickle
Of blood appeared" from its &ide. Suddenly the paralysis
left her body, and she left the shrine a healed woman.
HaUucination, or postmortem phenomenon? The cure
Wal reaL

23 June 1915: the tomb of St. Gabriel, ,near FJonmce, .

Italy. ~spjte the affront to Science and the warning of
the Director of the neurc;>1ogy department of Ancona Civil .
Jiospital, a miracle is about to occur. LorelJa Colangelo,
suffering brain-dflmaging leukoencephalitis and paral
ysis in her eleventh year, is languishing in the hospital.
For the past seven nights she had spoken of a dream in
which St. Gabriel urged her to come to his sanctuary and
be healed, according to Reueille (21 November 1975).
The doctors scoffed. and watched helples& their
patient neared death.


1977 .


In despair, and "convinced" by Lorella's recurrent

dream, her mother and father removed their daughter
from the physicians' care - under strenuous objections,
of course. Medicine, incapable of healing with its own sor- .
cery, condemns the magic of other meansSenor Colangelo described the result of his 'ominous'
decision: "I carried her inside the sanctuary and laid her
on the tomb of St. Gabriel. Almost at once Lorella fell into
a deep sleep. We prayed on our knees, watching her. Fifteen minutes went by like an eternity. Then, suddenly, I
saw [her] get up on her 'feet, climb over the three-foot railing surrounding the tomb, and r~n toward us .... It's a
Lorella detailed her own private experience this way: "I
fell asleep on the tomb and St. Gabriel appeared in a
dream, and told me 'Get up and walk.' And when J woke, I
Lo! The men of Science at Ancona Hospital agree: the
witchcraft of brain wave scanners confirm the leukoencephalitis has vanished, and their eyes see that the girl
walks. The astonished Dr. Primo Angeleri - we wonder
what Fortean lexicon links Ange/eri with Colangelo admits, or the National Enquirer (11 November 1975) has
him admitting: "Medical science did not heal her; some
thing else did."
Something elseWhen the unexpected results, it is given a label and
then forgotten. How many files are there, filled with

labeled folders that hold no contents? When a samaritan

appears amid distress, does one pause to reflect on the
fortuitous 'coincidence'? Or is the appearance shrugged
off along with so many other 'insigniflcances'? More
hollow labels and empty foldersWe have proposed a !"J1odel that belies the happenstance, that explains the causative factors of a baffling
enigma, and integrates philosophically (and physically)
two levels of existence.
If once accepts this hypothesis, then the blessings of a
saint don't end with his (or her) physical transition - for
the body may not be abandpned for a long time.
Does Man really understand 'the workings of the workl
in which he resides, with which he shares? At this
moment the answer must be "NO." As the physicians
said of St. Gerard Majella, the degree ot his body's preservation after 100 years is "beyond the laws of nature"
- but only as those laws are defined by physicians and
men, not as theYfunction in the realm of Creation.
There are other reasons for the incorruption of the
human body after death, but these exceed the scope of
this paper. Perhaps in another article-



lBased on the Appendices of the author's forthcoming book,ABLAZE! The C-

for, and Cases 0/, Spontaneous Human Combustions.]

[IJ Gould, "'George M., and Walter L. Pyle, Anomalies and
Curiosities of Medicine, W. B. Saunders, 1896.
[2J Migne, Jacque Paul, ed., Petrus Lombardi Sententiarum
libri quatuor, Paris.
[3 J Butler, Alban, The Liues of the Fathers, Martyrs and other
principai Saints, Virtue and Co., Ltd., London, 1926?, 4 vols.

[4J Hunter, Thomas, An English Carmelite: The Life of Catherine Burton, Burns and Oates, London.
15J Joachim, "The Third Commandment: Honor thy Father
and thy Mother,': See of Tranquility, P.O. Box 1003, Allentown, Pa., 18105, vol. XXXIX, Feb. 28, 1975.
[6] Joachim, "Universal Law," ibid., vol. LUI, Oct. 10, 1975.


It had appeared all that there was left to do upon the
completion of my article on "Flight 19," (INFO Journal,
February, 1974), was to hope that the facts of the case
would become known and the fraudulent authors of
"Lost Patrol" stories exposed along with their fabricated
radio conversations .
. Prompted by Ivan T. Sanderson's interest~the case
and with some assistance from Robert J. Durant, I was
able to locate the Board of Inquiry report and obtain a
copy for my own reference. What was not told in the
INFO article was reviewed briefly in "The Avenger Flight,
and Others," (Pursuit, October, 1973, p. 79); though J
would point out the declassification and. microfilming of
the report was due more to the Navy's trouble in xerox. ing my copy than in my argument for a full disclosure of
. PURSUIT Summer 1977

the report. What more was there to be done now that the
documents were available to all and an honest review of
the incident published?
It was in reading Weekend Magazine, (October 26,
1974), that I was startled to tum one page and read the
heading: "One diver discovered the grisly form of a
Second World War aircraft." The article was about Treasure Salvors Inc. of Key West and their adventures seeking old wrecks and sunken treasure. Once, when their
magnetometer indicated something metallic below (the .
article says), the diver found an Avenger lying on a shelf in
twenty-five feet of water, intact and with the cockpit still
sealed shut, with serial numbers and Navy markings still
visible. They claimed to have contacted some officials
who later denied having lost such an aircraft.


During the next week, Treasure Salvors was telephoned and confirmed that they had once come across
an Avenger as had been reviewed in the article; they did
not, however, have a record of the aircraft's serial
numbers or markings readily available, and despite
further written and cabled inquiries to them asking for the
identity markings of the sunken aircraft, I failed to elicit
any response. After a few months had passed, I cabled
the Navy and informed them as to the possible identity of
the aircraft which Treasure Salvors had found. The Navy
responded by informing me where to look for ~rial markings and said that "it is quite possible" that it was one of
the missing Avengers.
.It was not until November of 1975 when visiting Washington on business that I again contacted the Navy in the
hope that I could locate the proper office that dealt with
such matters. After being referred from one section to
another, I finally was put in c;:ontact with Capt. W. F. Sallada of the Naval Air Systems C~m!1land, who took note
of the information and promised to check into the matter.
Later, a fairly comprehensive fil~ of material was passed
on to Capt. Sallada, but it appeared that what could be
handled with a few well-placed telephone calls would
actually necessit~te a more lengthy procedure.
A few more months passed before another series of
telephone calls were made, this time with some positive
results. Treasure Salvors expressed their regret at not
having responded to my inquiries, but promised that they
would be participating with officials from the Navy who
had contacted them regarding their find. Although they
stated that the aircraffthey had found was within twenty
miles of Key West, they hesitated to state that it was an
Avenger or that they had a record of the aircraft's identification markings. They had been provided with a list of
. the serial markirigs that would identify anyone of the lost
Avengers, but rio guarantee was forthcoming that they
could confirm the identity of the sunken aircraft.
I also learned that an investigation had been started by
the Aircraft Accident Investigation Division of the Naval
Safety Center in Norfolk under the direction of Cmdr. H.
D. Daily. According to Comdr. Daily, his investigation
was initiated by the material previously forwarded to
Capt. Sallada. There was considerable interest in the
possibility that the sunken aircraft could be one of the
missing Avengers. If sufficient information can be
obtained concerning the type of aircraft, its identity
markings, and its location, there will probably be an
attempt to salvage the aircraft and examine it for clues as
to its loss.
Now that an active investigation-is under way, little can
be done other than to await the results; and yet 'there
arise several speculative questions that complicate the
incident even further than was suspected in my earlier
investigation into the fate of Flight 19.
If this is one of the missing Avengers, its location off the
Keys would contradict the general belief that the Flight
strayed out over the Atlantic and never even came close
to the Keys. Lt. Charles Taylor, flight leader and instructor of Flight 19, was not familiar with Navigation Problem
Number One but he was familiar with the Keys. Not only
had he been a flight instructor at Miami Naval Air Station,
but he also had served as a scout pilot while based at Key

West Naval Air Station for a full year. What is so hard for
Navy officials and pilots to believe is why Lt. Taylor was
so insistent that they were lost over the Keys even though
the student pilots were heard declaring their belief they
were still over the Atlantic. Originally, the Naval Board of
Inquiry blamed Lt. Taylor for the loss of the Flight owing
to his confusion as to their position; however, the decision was later changed by the Naval Board of Corrections, who placed the blame of the loss on reasons and
causes unknown. Should this be one of the missing Avengers, Lt. Taylor's estimate of their position will be vindicated, although it apparently contradicts all the facts concerning their location as brought up by the Board of Inquiry.
When Lt. Robert Cox first heard Lt. Taylor stating that
their flight must be lost, he was flying on FT-74near the
Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, where he too served
as a flight instructor. In an effort to direct the lost Flight
back to the Fort Lauderdale NAS, he gave them directions on how to reach the base by flying up the Keys to
Miami and also stated that he was flying down the Keys to
me~t them. Shortly thereafter his radio blew out on the
4805 kilocycle frequency - the same one on which all of
Flight 19's transmissions were fading out before his radio
blew out; thus he suspected that he was flying further
awayfrom Lt. Taylor and that he was probably not over
the Keys, but still over the Bahamas. Yet it must be remembered that his radio rievertheless failed only
moments later on that same frequency. Then, with seven
HF/DF Radio Stations taking bearings, only an estimated (within a one hundred mile radius) position at 29"
15' North and 79 West could be given for an averaged
time. The bearings, when mapped, hardly intersect at the
estimated position, and those bearings taken by three
HF/DF stations could not justify even an approximate
position up to 1712 hours even though twenty-five
minutes were taken in obtaining bearings.
According to Lt. JG. E. M. Sorenson, who was on duty
at the Evaluation Center and who plotted these bearings:
"The bearings thatwere transmitted from 2210Z to 2305Z
(1710 to 1805 hours) confirmed one another suffiCiently
to warrant an approximate fix. We received several confirming bearings from Cape May and Houma. Then we
also received a number of bearings from Green Cove,
Georgia, which showed a variation of 17 degrees but
were constant in their variation. At approximately 2250Z
or a few minutes before, we received quite a number of
confirmed bearings from Houston, one from Poyner's
Hill and one bearing from Brigantine, New Jersey. Pensacola transmitted bearings ~he entire time,but they varied
from 034 degrees to 216 degrees so could not be used
with any degree of certainty. However, I used two bearings from Pensacola that were specified as being taken on
Flight FT -28. Since a number of confirming bearings had
been received by 2300Z, we felt that an approximate location could be given. The bearings were still not sharp
enough to warrant an exact fix without a large radius, but
it did give the general location in which to search."
When further questioned on the difficulties in obtaining these bearings, Lt. Sorenson replied: "This was a
poor time of the day to get high frequency direction finder
bearings due to atmospheric conditions. Too, there was
PURSUIT Summer 19n

heavy interference by Cuban broadcasting stations and
there was a steady carrier note on that particular frequency from 1600 to 2400Z (hours)."
Thus, if we are willing to believe them, the radio bearing would tend to indicate Flight 19 was over the Atlantic
flying in a northerly direction, even though this cannot be
confirmed by the radio bearings.
Again, the mosfbizarre mystery of Flight 19 is the
sighting of aircraft flying in formation, an observation that
cannot be explained except as the lost Avengers. Both
the ~.~. Delaware and U.S.S. Solomons (an aircraft
carrier equip~cl for Avenger landings) reported unidentified aircraft formations and gave their course,
altitude, and speed. Yet Miami Air Traffic Control had no

record of these aircraft other than the missing Avengers.

As one of the radio logs noted: "Have been getting these
reports from Jacksonville and Brunswick. They are
planes that Air Traffic Control has no record of, but it the
fuel supply was correct, how could the five missing planes
be them'?"
In addition to phantom aircraft formations observed
flying over the Atlantic, we now have, less than twenty
miles from Key West, evidence of a watery grave tor
some long forgotten and drowned crew. Let us hope that
the Navy will provide some answers as its investigation
into the matter continues. ~


by T. B. Pawlicki
Last winter's Pursuit (Vol. 10, No.1) carried an article
by T. B. Pawlicki entitled "Prehistoric Megalithic En
gineering," in which the author presented one way in
which it could have been possible for prehistoric engineers to have constructed such magnificent monuments as the great pyramids. The following article repre
sents a continuation of the author's interest in the
pyramids. Since many of our members may have missed
the article when it appeared in the May 1977 issue of
Ancient Astronauts, we are reprinting it at this time.

* * *
According to a script made popular by Thor Hyer-.
dahl, an expedition of ancient Phoenicians financed by
the Queen of Sheba embarked from T yre on three papyrus rafts. After passing between the Pillars of Hercules
they continued across the Ocean of Atlas, hoping to discover America or a sea route to the Indies - whichever
came first. As soon as they made landfall in the Orinoco
country, they set out on a march through the jungles of
Amazonia until they reached the altiplanos of the Andes.
Upon reaching the high country, mission commander
viewed the Plains of Nazca with an inspired eye and
uttered the immortal words, "This is the place." Then he
directed half of his surviving crew to begin building great
pyramids like crazy. "Use local labor wherever possible
to stimulate the native economy, but layoff fraternizing.
with the squaws," he said. The remainder of his men were
put to work cutting the balsa logs they needed to reach
Easter Island. Their mission required the building of more
pyramids in the South Pacific, and penalty clauses would
come into effect if they did not keep moving.
After all the heroic labors Heyerdahl undertook to con
ceive of his theory and organize his daring expeditions, it
is a pity that he overlooked the interesting pattern of distribution taken by the prehistoric great pyramid civilizations.
PURSUIT Summer 1977

The main pyramid civilization grew up around the

Great Pyramid of Cheops, rising above the Delta on the
Giza Plateau, a few miles from ancient Memphis on the
Nile. As you can see for yourself by merely eyeballing a
global map, this isjust about the center of the world's land
masses. J should like to believe that Erich von Daniken
has his facts straight just this once, when he assures us
that this is the exact center of the earth's continental land
masses. This region has the most powerful electromagnetic effects known to occur naturally; perhaps this is
why the region has always been called "The Holy Land,"
long befo.re the Bible was written. Peter Tompkins says
the atmosphere in this land possesses a gradient of 500
volts to the metre. Also in his Secrets 0/ the Great Pyramid. Tompkins relates that when British inventor Sir W.
Siemens climbed to the summit of the Great Pyramid, he
found his body discharging sparks, as if he were standing
on a high voltage coil. This information, by itself, would
lead to some interesting speculation on the properties of
pyramid power, but the significance does not become
apparent until we look at the other great pyramidcivilizations.
The goal of Heyerdahl's first expedition was Easter
Island in the South Pacific. The island is also noted for
having very powerful natural electromagnetic field effects
on its soil. The island is the farthest out of a group of
islands which once was the home of another prehistoric
great pyramid civilization. These people called them
selves "Children of the Sun," as did the original pyramid
people in Egypt. This region is 180 degrees from the Nile
Delta - 180 degrees defining the second harmonic of the
planet Earth, considered as a vibrating sphere.
A third prehistoric great pyramid civilization grew up on
the west coast of the Americas, from the Great City of the
Sun at prehistoric Cuzco to the Great Pyramid of the Sun
at prehistoric T eotihuacan. This dispersion describes an
arc 120 degrees from the central Pyramid at Giza - 120


Map, drawn by the author, showing distribution of pyramids
throughout the world and their harmonic operating range.

degrees defining the third harmonic interval of the planet

Earth, considered as a vibrating sphere.
Ninety degrees in the other direction recent arche
ological digs have unearthed the greates~ pyramids yet
discovered, 1000 feet to the side, buried in the jungles of
southern China. They were thought to be natural mountains until the overgrown vegetation was cut away.
Ninety degrees is the fourth harmonic interval of the
Earth, and this region is the ancestral homeland of the
Japanese, who still call themselves "Children of The
Sun." .
The meaning of this far-ranging coincidence was discovered by accident in the early' days of the Second
World War. At that time radar spotters picked up echoes
from distant aircraft by listening in earphones instead of
watching "blips" on a f1uore!!icent screen. These crews reported with great frequency hearing whistles for w~ich no
one at the time could give any reason. Eventually, research published in Scientific American reported the discovery of an ionized layer in the upper atmosphere which
selectively filtered radio waves in the 7~ cycle per second
band and apparently reflected them back to the Earth,
bringing them to a focus at the antipodes. When lightning strikes, a broad band of radio waves is emitted to be
heard in unfiltered radio sets as static. Apparently, the 7~
Hz. band was filtered out from lightning striking at the


other side of the world by the ionized Schumann Layer

and brought to a focus 180 degrees distant, where the
early radar spotters heard the static as whistles.
The 7Y:! Hz. frequency possesses two properties of
great interest to the military. The first is that it can travel.
all around the world .on the Schumann Layer without
losing signal strength; the other is that it penetrates
water. The United States Navy realized this was just what
was needed to keep in constant radio communication
with the nuclear submarine fleets ranging under the
world's oceans, so the Navy began a new world-wide military communications system broadcasting on the 7~ Hz.
frequency by stripping to bedrock 10,000 acres in Wisconsin to function as the antenna.
The striking property ofthe 7~ cycle per second radio
wave is that it is exactly 25,000 miles long. This means' a
radio wave eJTlitted at that frequency will expand in a
growing circle at the speed' of light until it encompasses a
whole hemisphere of the planetary globe, and then it will
con tract until it comes to a focus at the antipodes. At this
point it changes phase and expands again to return to
another focus precisely at its point of origin. It arrives at
the point of origin at precisely the instant to coincide with
its own following wave. This means there is only a single
wave existing at anyone time. The entire planet beats
electromagnetically at this frequency like a cosmic heart.
The Earth is resonating.
PURSUIT Swniner 197-7

Resonance means the Earth also will be producing
overtones of one-half the fundamental frequency, with a
strong point 180 degrees from the source of the original
signal, one-third the fundamental frequency, with a
strong line 120 degrees from the source of the original signal, one-quarter the fundamental frequency with a strong
line 90 degrees from the source of the original signal, and
so on in fractions of twos and threes.
The locations of the prehistoric great pyramid civilizations are in precisely the right regions to receive the
strongest signals from the electromagnetic resonance of
the planet Earth. The great pyramids of antiquity are a
virtual duplication of the modem military radio communications network, broadcasting on the 7~ Hz. band
from the main transmission tower on the Giza Plateau,
with studios and executive offices at beautiful downtown
The official scientific reports say that the ionized Schumann Layer responsible for this phenomenon is a radio
mirror that traps this frequency and holds the waves to
the surface of the Earth. Any high school student, however, knows that resonance does not work this way. The
Schumann Layer is actually a radio diaphragm big
enough to wrap around the entire world. Not only do we
receive the radio signals inside this diaphragm, but it
turns the entire planet into a radio broadcasting crystal
that sends messages into space powerfully enough to
reach the other planets.
Is there anyone else out there? As it happens, Scientific American has published clear photographs of a pyramid complex on the moon! Nothing is said about this in
the public ~ress; we are living through a real life scene
from 2001: A Space Odyssey; in which great secrecy surrounded the discovery of a polished black monolith in the
Crater Clavius.
Beyond the moon, Mariner 9 has sent back photographs of another great pyramid complex on Mars.
These pictures are not c1e.ar enough to be unambiguous,
but if later exploration proves them to represent what
they appear to be, then we shall know that we are in radio
communication with an interplanetary society that has
established a base on this Earth.
The great pyramids, therefore, may be part of an interplanetary radio communications system that uses the
electric power generated by the entire planet to broadcast its messages throughout the solar system. If there
are also pyramids on Jupiter, that planet would generate
enough electric power to relay radio messages to the
stars. The evidence suggests that we are part of an interplanetary civilization, if not a galactic community, the
likes of which we are incapable of comprehending.
The most dramatic proof that the great pyramids of the
world are solid-state electronic modules in a world-wide
power generating network was established bY. that superhuman genius, Nikola Tesla, nearly a hundre~rsago.
T esla knew that there was a powerful voltage gradient between the Earth apd the upper atmosphere. If an antenna
is raised, the voltage gradient climbs the length of the
conductor to become concentrated on the tip. If there is
any fluctuation in the natural voltage, a minute current of
electricity flows in the antenna to balance the potential.
This ishow a radio works.
PURSUIT Summer 1977

In the early days of radio, this current was fed into a

resonating circuit that would filter out the wavelength of
the broadcasting station to which it was tuned and
amplify it until. it had enough energy to actuate a set of
earphones. TheSe were the good old days of crYstal
radios. Tesla figured that Earth would filter out its reso.. nant frequency and function as a planetary capacitor in a
circuit as big as the whole world. What he did was to
pump anelectric current into the earth which was tuned
to a precise harmonic of the earth's resonant frequency.
As he expected, the electric wave traveled to the antipodes and came back in time to coincide with the outgoing waves. The returning current was amplified by
resonance until it burst out from the top of Tesla's
antenna to illuminate the countryside with the most brilliant artificial lightning storm ever seen by man - and
melted the electric wiring that generated power for the
entire county.
Undaunted by this superabundant success, Tesla continued his experiments to prove that when his antenna
was pumping electric waves into the earth, he could drive
a metal rod into the ground anywhere and draw electricity for lighting lamps and driving motors as long as his
tap was located at precise harmonic intervals from his
transmission station. Besides the obvious fact that the
great pyramid civilizations arose at precise intervals of
the resonance of the earth, Tompkins writes that within
the civilization of the Holy Land, every city was built up
around a central pyramid; and these pyramids were
always located at precise degree intervals from the Prime
Pyramid on the Delta. Tesla provided conclusive proof
that the great pyramids were substations of a worldwide
power generating and radio communications network.
Until the end of his life, Nikola Tesla dreamed of removing the unsightly high-tension electric power transmission towers that march over the landscape; recycling
all those miles of wires and tons of steel, aluminum and
copper, and replacing them by electrifying the entire
. planet with his revolutionary engineering of planetary
resonance. But if power were broadcast instead of piped,
how could Consolidated Edison -General Electric -Westinghouse get their money? If anyone could get energy
from the ground, how could Standard - Shell and the
OPEC Cartel create an energy shortage in order to drive
up prices? If we can all communicate on the natural radio,
where will Ma Bell and RCA get their cuts?
. As soon as powerful financial interests learned of
Tesla's discoveries, they made sure that he would never
be able to accumulate enough money to do anything that
would upset the military-industrial establishment.
Tesla's inventions were credited at a later date to other
scientists who could be counted on to keep the boat
steady, and his name was virtually. erased from publication. When he died in New York on a winter's night in
1943, he was alone in a hotel room - not much wealthier
than the day he arrived in the United States 50 years earlier with four cents in his pockets. The Secret Service of
the United States immediately sealed his room and whatever papers he had were transferred to government
vaults, where they remain to this day.
Tesla was the last of the big-time pyral't:lid architects.
. .. ~



by Larry E. Arnold

(Copyright 1977)



called what should rank among the 10 most bizarre

events of 1973 - for it wasn't so much the interior of the
coffin that burned, as the corpse it contained!
Betty Satlow, 50, helped her husband Sam operate a
tavern in Hoquiam, Washington. * On Friday, 7 December 1973, Mr. Satlow walked into his garage and found his
wife dead on the seat of her car. Grays Harbor County
Coroner Harold Schmid said death was caused by CO
poisoning. Hoquiam Police Chief Richard Barnes could
find no evidence of foul play, only indication of intoxication. The coroner could attribute the cause of death to
neither accident, homicide or suicide; his report simply
listed the cause of death as "undetermined."
Her body was taken to Coleman Mortuary, prepared
for burial and given a rosary service on Sunday. But Mrs.
Satlow, now readied for her final resting, was not willing
to lie stillSmoke was reported issuing from the mortuary. Firemen soon discovered the blaze was inside the funeral
parlor ... inside the Satlow coffin .. , inside the late Mrs.
The lower portion of the casket was closed, but the lid
for the other half was open. In this exposed portion the
fire fighters found the lady's body "completely consumed to the hips," said Chief Barnes.
"Barnes said there is no evidence that would point to
arson," reported The Oregonian [5], "but investigators
can't determine the cause." The Police Chief was baffled,
so he "had the burned coffin sent to the Treasury Department's laboratories in Washington, D.C., and expects a report back in about 10 days."
Yet as in other cases of mysterious combustions, the
Federal agency refuses to divulge its findings (at least to
us). Chief Barnes, or his successor, has failed to reply to
our inquiries. Either the Treasury Department found an
explanation so simple that it should be obvious to everyone and doesn't warrant a reply, or the mystery was only
heightened by the Feds' perplexity and it became more
convenient to 'forget' the whole episode.
Other problems exist too [6], but we'll just recall here
the words of Chief Barnes in late December 1973: "We
really need a logical explanation to put an end to so many
wild, baseless rumors that are going around the community." [5]
He unfortunately doesn't elaborate on these wild speculations, even though he himself said of the cause of
Satlow's self-immolation: "It's all conjecture."
We wonder if spontaneous combustion by a corpse
was among those "baseless rumors"-

"It was like something out of nightmare theater: A fire

inside a casket bearing the body of a woman awaiting
burial." That's what the San Francisco Chronicle [4]

Michael Harrison's Fire From Heauen locates the town in Oregon. This is only
one of several confusing and contradictory (thus erroneous) statementa com
plicating this particular case.

"Yet, admitting that the phenomenon of preternatural inflammability is opposed to the laws of
combustion as far as we know, we should not
reject as unworthy of belief, the many curious
and authentic facts on record. They may be true,
.however incorrectly accounted for."
-Dr. W _H. Watkins, on
human combustibility_ [1,316]
As every Fortean knows, and as any competent researcher soon discovers, there are so many "curious and
authentic facts" to be found that one wonders how Fort's
Dogma (whether it be Science or Religion) managed to
survive unscathed and unaltered inside the Ivory Tower.
The Great Barrier around Science was recently transgressed when we wrote of the incredible self-combustion
of Dr. J_ Irving Bentley [2]. Now Orthodoxy, and perhaps
your own beliefs, shall be challenged even more as we
delve into another mystery involved with Spontaneous
Human Combustions.
Atheists, theologians and scientists have for centuries
debated between and amongst themselves this question:
What is the destiny of the animating life-force after its
escape from the body at death? Does it go to the grave
along with the corporeal form; does it reside for Eternity
in the "light of Heaven" or the "fires of Hell" as the result
of a one-time incarnation on Earth; or does a soul-entity
continue as a conscious being in another dimension with
the option of reincarnating into another physical form?
Regardless of the answer favored, there is one point on
which these divergent sects converge in agreement: after
death, bodily functions cease.
To some it may seem pointless to consume a paragraph to state such an obvious factMen of medicine also assert that once the body is dead
-that is, after whatever energy animating the physical
structure has departed - there are no more events
associated with that mass, save gradual decay to the proverbial "dust to dust and ashes to ashes." But we have
demonstrated elsewhere [3] the error of this assertion:
bodies, after burial, have repeatedly maintained high temperatures, blood flow and incorruptibility for varying
lengths of time.
Add to these mysteries yet one more: that a corpse can

PURSUIT Summer 1977



"Impossible!" screams the skeptic; corpses can't bum!
There must be another - conventional- explanation!"
Captain Barnes couldn't find one in Hoquiam, Wash'
ington. The experts in Pontiac, Michigan, couldn't either
when they confronted - well, here are the facts:
Billy Peterson was male.
He lived in Pontiac, Michigan.
He had been a welder for General Motors.
He was alive at 7 p.m. on Sunday, 13 December 1959.
He was burned - somehow.
All these facts are
., in the past tense, for by 8 p.m.
Billy Peterson was dead.
that Sunday
Pontiac General
patho1ogist Dr. Donald Mc
Candless said Peterson
of CO poisoning.
Deputy Coro~r Dr. John Marra decided Peterson

died accidentally.

wrote of this, case: "Whatever ~rned young BiD.

destroyed his skin and his flesh, but left his clothing and
his hair entirely intact." [8, 32; 10,62]
The police returned to their murder theory. aPoismie
Torture Killing" headlined The Detro;t Free Press on
Monday the 14th. The physicians promptly said the
victim couldn't have been undressed, burned and then
reclothed; besides, any ~emat fA wouk:l have burned
the hait off his chest instead of leaving it unharmed. No',
that theory would riot do.
Dr. Marra surmised that the exhaust pipe's heat
ignited the upholstery which caused 811y" blue jearlll to
"becQme so heated that superfICial burns of the skin re~
suited." SuperfICial burns would' ~ analogoUs to first~
degree burns; that is. red4enins of the skin. Yet his col
leagues spoke, of blistering and charring: Besides this
contradiction, how could hot blue jeans ~ ,&eVeN
burning on the wearer's .chest and. back? We have other
accounts of suicidebyCQ.poisoning. and yet noslrange
fires developed in the manner suggested here. Then too.
Fire Chief White.said the hot exhaust had caused ~t
$75 damage to the right front seat and that the blaze "had.
not touched ~terson.' [Italics added: 4. 100J No. this
rationale also fails to remove the perplexity surrounding
Peterson's fiery fate.
A query to Pontiac General Hospital for details gen"
erated a form letter requesting "an authorization signed
by the patient" before information could be released. Oh

Wachal fust suspected

Police Detective
murder. then .....~.........r1
opinion to "suicide.
concluded the dead man was
Fire Chief
by extreme heat.
cooked - after
the case by pronouncing
Pontiac offICials
"Death by Suicide."
. Oakland County PrO$eclutor George F. Taylor said,
however: "We haven't
the case yet." {8, 311
.' Why aU this
I among trained and competent .
professionals over a few
To have empathy for the
We do have this quote from Dr. Tad LOnergan's letter
officials found themselves,
consternation in which
to True. detailing the reaction of the staff when Peter
return now to the
evening of 13 December
son's body was brought in. He tok:l of "inexplicable inter1959nal and external third degree burns" on the vic:tin and
. BiOy i:lropped off his mnl'hQr at 7 p.m. and drove the
noted "this case was different. Onecouldnotoccount/or
mile to his garage. He
been despondent over ill health
the burns on his skin when the clothes were not even
. and missed work but
to return to the factory in two
singed. Hence, a thorough in~tigation Was launched.
Billy was "as jolly as couk:l be"
days, and his family
No explanation was available then, and as far as I know~
this day.
none is now. I haven't seen a case like it since. and it isstill
Fortyfive minutes
the Pontiac Fire Department
ball/ins to me." LItalics added: 11. 4J
was notified of a
in the Peterson garage, and
This is a propitious point at which to pause a
Fire Lieutenant
and crew arrived to find a
macabre scene. A
tube led from the shortened
.Foght noticed, even if the experts in Pontiac didn't'.
exhaust pipe into the I interior. On the driver's seat
that Peterson showed the symptoms of nuclear radiation
with a difference: his face and
sat Billy, dead. But
burns. "This fact, of course," he wrote in Fate (8. 33),
arms were livid with
yet, though portions of the
"brings us to an even greater mystery. Where was Billy
auto were smoldering,
was ablaze!
exposed to radiation?" Foght couldn't answer his ~
Billy was rushed to
General Hospital anyway,
question. though.
where Dr. McCandlesS
the blood's violent red q:,lor
Might Billy Peterson have been the victim of a belated
indicated CO poisoning. The .police, now alerted, sus
spontaneoUs human combustion?
pected foul play. But
missing tailpipe section and
As Billy subjected himself to CO gas. a proposal made
some extra flexible
found in the garage caused the
way back in the lSOOs by Dr. Adrian Hava is of interest:
police to alter their
to favor suicide.
"that the accumulation of cat-boni<: oxide gas (CO) was
Meanwhile back at
doctors were exclaim
the prime factor in spontaneous combustion." [12. 726)
ing "It's the strangest
ever seen!" (9] What
Spontaneous combustion of a human, did the doctor
mystified. these
was the
nature and extent of
's burns: his chest. back
This physician performed experiments on anImalS
and legs were
second and third degree
(though not the human species) to see what effect this
bums; the 'left arm so
that the skin rolled off;
gas had on tissue inflammabiliiy. Rabbits and roosten
ears and nose were
yet his eyebrows and hair
had a propensity to ignite in bluish flame after prolonged
,were untouched. And.
clothing was undamaged , exposure, he found. (Our files 'on SHC contain hum-:
not even his underwear I singed! To quote Foght, who
erous associations with electricblue flames.) But it t~ .
169 days for the rabbits' haemoglobin to store enough gas.'
[8, 31). who says !he . . II rl.
for the tissue to ignite; 8 months were neces&ifty for the
s.. Ec:kert 17. lIMJ.. Compare

PURSUIT Summer 1977

"brat! Wrong frequency! WfJ've lost. another eXP.8riill-fated roosters (12, 726-7). Billy PetersOn wasex~d
ment, Zeti Reticuli," says a transmission from aboVe."'No
to his car's exhaust for probably no more than 30 mmconcern," comes the reply; "the Earthling was about to
vacate his body anyway. But to continue our investiga
Did his job as a welder ex~ him to a ~ng-tenn
tion we must now find another suitable subject..."
accumulation of CO in his bloodand muscle tISSue? Or
In outer space, the collection of data continues; on
did Peterson, With the dedication of Odysseus before .
the data collects for cases of spontaneous c0mTroy spend the last 8 months of his life (or however long
bustion in humansit tak~s the human body to reach the critical point in CO
Whether any aspect of this proposal is correct, can't be
storage) in a carefully calculated and methodically
from the data now available; but, unlike those
applied plan which culminated in his final fiery act of~
Conventionalism, each is capable of explain
peration on the 13th of December? We find both POSSIing how the unemployed Michigari mi\Il cremated during
bilities less ~Iievable than the fac;:ts which baffled the
(or after) his suicide.
. authorities;
WhiCh brings us back to the theory of SHC. Fire Chief
White asked if Peterson might have succumbed to this
rare demise: "I wOuld not quarrel with the theory conONE-LEGGED vicrlM"
cerning. Spontaneous Human Combustion. .., I have
never had any knowledge of this, but certainly would not
More than two decades before Billy Peterson commit
care to say it was impossible." (7, 104) Excuse us while we
ted suicide only to internally combust, another case
marvel at. this momentous degree of cat:tdor*. occurred similarly in Cleveland, Ohio. Dr. Wilton Marion
Of course, naming SHC ~. mOre elucidating than
Krogman, ~ho. gained fame (and, depending on one's
simply calling Peterson's passing "accidental." It.also exview_ infamy) by reporting on the famous Mary Reeser
plains the episode more adequately than does "Death by
SHC case, told us about one of his more intriguing ex
Suicide." But it still doesn't resolve'"what initiated this
periences in forensic anthropology.
searing spontaneity, does it? .
To abbreviate, police found a man burned-to-dealh in
The editors of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organan old MOOeI T; one leg was completely missing, and 10
ization proposed the "strong suspicion that Billy Peteridentification was attempted from a list of amputees.
son may have been burned by an ultraSonic scanner
Krogman's expertise arrived at a different conclusion,
beamed at his car. ~t why? Therein lies the mystery."
however. ". found no evidence whatsoeuer in the right
, .
pelvis of this man that &;lid he had had an amputation.
linking alien life-forms and UFOs to SHC is not done.
And I concluded that it had been burned away!" (l4J
with disregard for the many cases in which contactees
We asked the doctor if he resolved how this man's leg
suffered varying degrees of burned flesh - but the docucould completely d~integrate.
mentation exceeds the scope of this article. Asserting
"Yes," Dr. Krogman responded, ~'because it was near
that extraterrestrial voyagers would (apparently) indisest the gas tank." Then, gesturingly dramatically. he
criminately assault another life form with their ''ultraadded that when this. "badly burned" corpse was ex
sonic scanner" may be an unjust accusation against these
amined carefully, "we found in his viscera (the belly waD
alien visitors. (This assumeS, of course, the aliens exhibit
had burned away), a gufi. And when we put the head toa higher degree of respect and rationality than many
gether, we found this - the gunshot wound. See? Soevihumans do.) But what if they did so with a purpose? 1bat
dently at the moment he fired a shot, he dropped a match
. would solve the mystery - if one could just think of a
in the gas tank. So that was the side that was completely
The key might lie in the tangible evidence for the vic~
Suddenly this case took on a whole new significance.
tim's suicide. Intrigued that an entity would seek to de;Not only was ttte man badly burned and his leg totally reo
stroy himself, passing aliens delayed their travels long
duced to ashes, but now it seemed to be a case ofsuic:ide
enough to study this curious behavior of an Earthling.
as well. Our mind flashed thoughtsofBiIJy Peterson in ..
They projected a mind-probe at Peterson to learn the
car, of Mrs. Satlow in her coffin, of other persons who sui, thought pattern that led to this aberrant act. The ray was
cided only to bum later. We sought more information.
too powerful though, and this subject was consumed, like
but Dr. Krogman was reticent to discuss the incident
paper when the sun's rays are concentrated in one spot;
. or the frequency (microwave?) was incompatible with the
Let's hold our attention on this episode a bit longer,
s~cimen and he was literally c~ked from within. like a
Krogman's detective work was long fmished; ours was
California radar teChnician had been; or, less likely per
just beginning.
.haps, the probe ignited the collected CO inside the car
Since the head was utterly fragmented, we must a&k
and triggered the mysterious holocaust.
whether a handgun's blast so completely destroyed the
skull or if its disrupted state was (more) likely the result 01
Compare the vieW of Chief White with thai held ~ Dr. Lester AdllIIIon, then
the fire which "badly burned" the rest of the body.
chief deputy coroner for Cuyahoga County, Ohio. Hilletter iroIiicaIIy appeared In
lhe same issue of TI'UI! lIS did Dr, Lonerpn's:
And about that 'fire': If the car's occupant was about to
HI calegoricall!l deny theexi&lence of both SHC and PC ,.. 1cqncIuded dogmdfi.
blow his head apart with a pistol, why woUld he feel the
CGl6I that the concepts of ~ and PC were :'~wnen"t~ ~ ~when
need to engulf himself in a fiery blow-up as well? Was he
IIftIIoChainpecuialiDn lurmshed the_rio bumingquastiol'lS. ,.,Beliawma,
air, I do not ,., believe in this incendiary fairy taIiI." (11IIics added: 5, 4-5)
that uncertain of his aim that he decided on a contino
. We Ieaw ilto the reader 10 ponder, lIS didCharlesFort,lhedalvrisofbeingdosgency
route to suicide - by it blaze if not by the bullet?
PURSUIT" Summer 1977


There's another quandary with Dr. Krogman's reconstruction. An antique automobile dealer reassured our
belief that the gas tank in the Ford car mentioned was beneath the dashboard and that its filler tube wasn't below
the driver but on the hood in front of the windshield.
Now consider the amazing dexterity of this soon-tosuicide man. He must reach over or under the windshield's glass with a lighted match, making sure the match
is held far enough above the gasoline filler tube so that
fumes won't prematurely ignite before he fires his gun.
Then upon discharging the weapon, whose bullet would
nevertheless find its way into the fuel tank whereupon
flaming gasoline somehow leaks out - because there is
no mention of an explosion - below the dash and onto
the man's leg. See?
True, the auto was said to be blazing and very hot. But
as discovered with Billy Peterson ( and as noted in other
cremation-in-a-car cases), one can no longer assume this
means the vehicle is on fire. If the fuel didn't explode,
what then fed the ravaging flames if it wasn't the gentleman's own body? It sounds like a case of spontaneous
human combustion accompanying suicide of one's physical form-


The unidentified resident of Cleveland, perhaps
spurned in romance or dejected over an inability to recover from the Depression, may have ended his personal depre!!"sion with a bullet to the brain. Thereupon his
body immediately inflamed - hardly due to a 'lucky'
drop-of-the-match-in-the-gasoline, but because the physiology, shocked by this sudden trauma, responded byreleasing sudden 'fire' just as white corpuscles are released
when the body is invaded with germs.
That processes in a body after dying differ markedly
from the animated state means the moment of Iife-todeath is a catastrophic point in the human biology. What
happens to the animating' or life-force at this instant has
been the subject of debates by theologians, physicists
and mystics since communication began. What can
happen to the physical, however, is less open for debate
- for here the evidence is tangible to Man's five senses.
(But in what forensiC textbook have you read that corpses
can combust by themselves?)
Yet !iometimes the subjective and objective tend to intenningle. Duncan Mac Dougall" claimed in the Journal of
the American SOCiety for Psychical Research (May 1907)
that dying patients had given him sufficient time to
make careful measurements of weight loss - about 21
grams - at the moment of their demise. Was this quantitative evidence for the existence of a soul,"g!1ost, lifeforce, personality-entity, or whatever name one'Ghooses
to term the quality that distinguishes the 'living' from the
'dead? Today MacDougall's work lies as forgotten as the
bodies he observed.
As MacDougall found, in many cases the person about
to leave the physical body has long prepared for the
event. The separation is expected; orderly; eased. But
the conscious decision to destroy one's physical being
may be arrived at suddenly: the spontaneity of the event
PURSUIT Summer 1977

permits no time for the energy adjustments that normally precede death" to be made. Suddenly making the
body inhospitable requires the animating energy to leave
the form abruptly, perhaps resulting in another catastrophe within the corpse: the creation of a flame-like bioelectrical arc that rages throughout the form_ The withdrawal of the life-force, fully vitalized a moment before,
literally burns out the body internally.
The situation we perceive is analogous to two abutting
pieces of current-carrying wire, with one piece representing the human body and the other the soul-entity which
utilizes that body for expression. When the moment
approaches for separation of the soul from the body, the
current is gradually reduced so that when diserigagement (the death experience) occurs there is no current to
pass through the wires. If a decision to separate the wires
is made without prior decrease of the current, the abrupt
separation of the two. wires (the soul from the body)
creates a huge arc that.jumps across the gap. In other
words, in a suicide the bioplasmic life-energy 'sparks'
through the corpse as the soul-entity is rapidly ejected
from its physical confines.
" The abruptness of the decision to self-destruct would
seem to be a factor in whether the suicide blazes or exhibits a less dramatic departure. Billy Peterson was said
to be "jolly as could be" just before he made the alterations that changed his"vehicle from a car to a coffin. We
sense the Cleveland man acted suddenly too, though
there is no way to support this feeling with documentation. We suggest, therefore, that it is the brevity of a suicide's premeditation that fires up the body after the emotions sink to the darkness "of gloom.
Support for this contention is found in the case of an
18-year-old lad in Chenango County, New York, who inflicted a gunshot wound to his body "in the late 1800s. Dr.
George O. Williams found the corpse fearfully charred,
the flesh split asunder by the heat, the face "cooked"; yet
the planking on which the remains were found was only
"trivially damaged." Like the cases mentioned above, this
youth had burned after inflicting the wound upon himself
- or so the physician reports. No accelerant was found;
only four pounds of clothing, a gun and the corpse were
Dr. Williams was frustrated; to him, the clothing was
the only source to sustain a fire_ Yet the limited amount of
combustibles plus the lack of neighboring destruction left
a mystery that remained, for him, unsolved. [15J
To resolve his quandary requires a concept alien to
19th Century Medicine - that the human organism consists of much more than tissue, bones and circulating
blood; that some unseen force inside the body can release a vengeful fury upon the body of one who attempts
to prematurely kill himself. Such a concept is still alien to
much of 20th Century medical knowledge, but ideas are
changing in Officialdom"


The extraterrestrial interver1tion theory, though suitable to combustions that coincide with the moment of


bodily death, is less applicable to a case like Mrs. Satlow

(whose body was inert for three days before some activity
ignited it). One would think the aliens would want a
fresher subject for their experiments - but it's presumptuous to impose our scientists' preferences on a really
foreign technology. Can Mrs. Satlow's postmortem experience, though, be explained in a less incredulous
Dr. W. H. Watkins' further statement on spontaneous
combustion and preternatural inflammability paves the
way for further inquiry:
Granting then, that such changes may take place in .
the human body, which permit it to be more easily
burned, the occurrance [sic] of the phenomen [sic]
must be entertained, although science cannot
account for the changes. [1,315]
Has science since 1870, when Watkins wrote his
article, progressed toward explaining these changes especially of corpses that self-combust?
Because of the compilation of cases by a few dedicated researchers, science in the last decade has begun
to discover what occurs to the soul-entity that animates
the body after the physical portion has attained that mysterious moment termed death. Dr. Raymond A. Moody,
Jr., Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and others studying deathand-dying have learned that death is not the final, terminal experience but merely a passage into another
realm of existence. (Eastern philosophy, mystics and
psychics repeatedly professed this truth for aeons, but
Western Medicine only now finds credence in these ageless sciences.)
Kubler-Ross says she has "hundreds" of cases where
an individual was pronounced medically dead - yet the
body revived and the person was able to describe the
reality 'on the other side.' [16]
The postmortem phenomenon generally consists of
the individual hovering above his body and 'watching' the
resuscitat.ion attempts, then hearing someone pronounce him "Dead," followed by realization that he still
ppssesses a 'body' - though quite different from the
flesh-and-blood one just vacated. This ethereal body
travels through a new realm, sometimes alone, sometimes greeted by "the spirits or relatives and friends who
have already died"; occasionally a being of light appears
who asks that an evaluation of the Earth-based life be
given. A barrier is met that seems to represent the separation between earthly life and this 'next' life - but that
borderline is not yet to be crossed, and reuniting with the
corporeal body occurs. Medicine has a miracle; the oncedead person, now resurrected, has a revelation.
It is the similarity in these after-death life reports that
in~rigues and inspires researchers to. analyze quantitatively the prospects for continued existence, and what
can be expeCted in this other level of existence. Dr.
George Ritchie related to us his memorable experience
of 19-24 December .1943. His temporary sojourn into the
afterlife was marked with vivid recollections of the events
surrounding his body in the hoSpital, then of meeting a
"bJminous. being" who showed him euerything he had
done in his life; not one secret was withheld fl'9m Ritchie's

life. Though surprised by this separation from his physical body, Ritchie learned it was not to be permanent. He
was told, to his chagrin, that there was still work for him
to do on Earth and he must return. Thus,fourdClyS after
the doctors said "Dead!", Dr. Ritchie's body arose and
sat on the bed. The 'life-support' equipment was no
longer needed: Dr. Ritchie's soul had returned [17] Like Ritchie, cases amassed by Moody (18] and
Kubler-Ross [19] detail the reluctance to return to the
three-dimensional world by those who transcend the corporeal. Still, these researchers report that re-entry
occurs with no more than an emotional loss. But is this readjustment to physicality always so serene? Could there
be difficulties in certain circumstances? Does the suicidal act, for example, create an energy barrier which
prevents rehabitation of the corpse; or is the one who
takes his own life (away from the body) merely disinterested in returning?
Having no first-hand human accounts to relate, the
next-best approach is to repeat what entities who currently exist in this non-terrestrial realm say of a suicide's
experiences. (We recognize the 'hazards' of doing this,
especially since we open ourself wide to criticism by taking this route. But then, Purs!Jit is devoted "to the Investigation of 'Things' that are Customarily Discounted," so
we'll pursue in the spirit of this journal.)
The period following physical transition is detailed by
two beings named Seth [20, 150] and Joachim [21, 5-6];
among other things, it is decided whether and how the
suicide will return to another physical body. That return
to the physical usually is accomplished by the selection of
a fetal human body. (Cases of rehabilitation collected by
Moody and KUbler-Ross, and instances of possession,
are the atypical exceptions.) But in the trauma of a suicide now discarnate, confusion and fear can reign. As
Joachim says, "they are scared as hell 0/ meeting God!"
[21, 8] The normal course of events can get circumvented.
Dr. Moody collected a few reports of near-death phenomena associated with attempted suicide. One man, in
despair over his wife's death, shot himself 'dead' only to
return and describe the expereince when resurrected: "I
didn't 90 where [my wife] was. Iwentto an awful place ... ,
I immediately saw what a mistake I had done .... I thought,
'I wish I hadn't done it'." [19, 127]
Engrossed in despondency and repentance, the disembodied personality is likely to cling to the vacated
body, even attempting to reincarnate in the vehicle just
destroyed. Says Seth: "In such instances, often the per-
sonality will insist upon focusing his perceptive abilities
and energies toward physical existence. This is a psychic
refusal to accept the face of death." [20, 189]
That unwillingness to sever completely from the
earthly corpse creates an energy link between the soulentity and its former physical body. That body is now in
an excellent position to combust.
How? We see two ways.
The first probability results from the discarnate's
fervent desire to rejoin with the body it just exited. Confused and frightened by the void of darkness in which it
finds itself, the soul-entity flees to the only familiar thing
remembered: the vacated body. In the interim, however, .
PURSUIT S~mmer 1977


decay has begun to change the body's constitution. The

two once-merged energy patterns are no longer compatible. As the discarnate tries harder and more frantically to
force itself back into that devitalized body a point is
reached where, like a match drawn repeatedly.harder
over its striking surface, the created energy is actually
sufficient to kindle the corpse.
Was this the unseen power that combusted Mrs. Satlow's corpse three days after her earthly suicide? Or was
her motivation the realization that,like Dr. Ritchie was
told, her abilities were needed; that she was important to
those with whom she lived? Aware now of her mistake in
terminating her physical life, she tried desperately to reenter her "previous existence." But 72 hours had passe~
and her body was prepared for burial. Mrs. Satlow, however, no longer wanted to be dead; the corpse in the Coleman Mortuary was her ticket to life - she thought. Instead, an attempt at forced reincarnation produced a
flaming torch of mystery.
"We really need a logical explanation," said Police
Chief Barnes about the combusted corpse in Hoquiam,
"to put an end to so many wild, baseless rumors that are
goingaround the community." We wonder if our theory
is acceptable- .
The second probability depends on the emotions and
belief structure of the one now-physically transitioned.
Was the victim taught to expect harp music and tranquility in the afterlife, or the devil's fire? lfthe recognition
that his suicide was an 'evil' act, then as Seth said: "A
belief in hell fires can cause you to hallucinate Hades' conditions." (20, 141)
The entity, by his own creation, finds himself embroiled (and boiling) in the Devil's flaming ovens, with all
the fire and brimstone of Dante's Inferno to assure his
just punishment. This belief or thought-fonn, so vitalized
by the intense sense of repentance and justice due,
travels the energy link back to the corpse on Earth. The
discarded body, now useless, is swept up in the energy
field reality of its former occupant: it burns in a very real
fire, but with flames kindled from another dimension.
Is this how one can account for the strange scene in
Glenn Burk Denny's bedroom?-

Across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, Mrs.
Stalios Cousins sat watching the rain through the window
of her Algiers, Louisiana, apartment. This Thursday, 18
September 1952, had so far been gloomy, depressing and
cheerless - one of those days when anything unpleasant would be expected. At one o'clock in the afternoon,
the expected happened.
"At first I smelled smoke and then I saw the smoke
coming from a window, so I called police," Mrs. Cousins
told The Times-Picayune. [22,1] Fourth District poiice
headquarters was just around the corner of her 216
Bermuda apartment; they notified the fire department,
and both agencies were on the scene in minutes.
The smoke came through the window directly above
Mrs. Cousins' room, in an apartment rented by Glenn
Denny. His door was broken down and firemen; rushing
PURSUIT Summer 1977

into smoke-filled rooms, stumbled over the body of a

man. Lieutenant Louis Wattigny, one of .the first
members of Algiers' Fire Engine Company 20 to enter the
bedroom, described his discovery to readers of the New
Orleans Item (September 18):
The man was lying on the floor behind the door
and he was a mass of flames. Not another blessed
thing in the room was burning. He was dead. I don't
know what caused the fire to burn so hot. He could
have been saturated with some oil. I did not smell
anything, however. In al/ my experience I neuer
saw anything to beat this. [Italics addedJ*
It wasn't to be the only strange event in this phenomenal
occurrence"Police and fire officials studied the possibility of foulplay in the death," stated The Times-Picayune account,
because there was no evidence to suggest cigarette
smoking started the fire. Bloodstains were found on the
kitchen and living room floors. But with testimony from
neighbors that the 46-year-old co-owner of a foundry in
Gretna was a quiet man who "never bothered anyone,"
this angle was soon exhausted by lack of motive and "no
evidence of a struggle." [22, 1]
There are several aspects to this case which lie beyond
the scope of this article, so we'll pass along to the Police
Report issl,led three days later that said Denny's death
was "due to burns," but also noted that several arteries
had been severed. One arm, both wrists and both ankles
had been slashed; carbon was found in his lungs, indicating he had been alive while ablaze. Otto Burma, an
investigator of Fortean events, asked the coroner what
caused the fire. The response given was "that Denny had,
after severing his arteries in five places, poured kerosene
all over himself and ignited it with a match." [23, 14J
HmmmThe firemen detected no fumes (not everi of burning
flesh!); the victim was losing 1 per cent of his blood every
second from each wrist artery alone (Burma calculates
that 30 percent of the suicide's blood would have been
lost by the time all lacerations were made), and death
could be expected in moments. Yet the victim is supposed to strike a match - with blood gushing over his
hands - and ignite his clothing just to make sure he dies?
"Strange things are afoot, my dear Watson," Sherlock
Holmes would say.
On top of the incredible is the fact that Denny was
intoxicated ~t the time, according to a friend who saw him
alive only a few hours earlier. (Alcohol is often found
associated with the victims of SHC, as many medieval
physicians claimed, only to be ignored by a new genera-
tion of doctors.) Now the coroner's offICe would expect
us to believe that Denny, last seen "shaking like a leaf"
and now los;ng 4 per cent 0/ his blood every second, managed to walk to another room, douse himself with an
accelerant, hide the container where police and firemen
would never find it, and finally strike a match to ignite his
body! "Egads! my dear Watson"Involved in this investigation were a police captain, two
homic~e detectives,. an assistant district attorney, two
Note the similarity 01 this statement with those made by the officials invoIIIed in
the fiery death of Dr. Bentley (2,75, n-8J.


deputy state ijre marshals, an assistant Orleans parish

coroner, and a Division director of the New Orleans Fire
Department. (All are named in The Times-Picayune
article previously cited.) The case of G. B. Denny, on
which they all worked for three weeks to prepare the official report, was, according to Burma, "declared suicide,
and closed." [23, 15]
Despite (or because of) all the problems created by the
Police Report, the source of fire and the unburned condition of the rest of the apartment remained disturbingly
Burma mentioned that he encountered a "reticent"
attitude among the officials when asked to divulge information about this case. Fourteen years later the response is one of ignoral, as every source contacted in
New Orleans remains silent to our letters. At least something about the Denny case is typicalBurma seems to have conducted a more rational investigation on his own than did the publicly paid agencies
in Louisiana, and we salute his effort by quoting his conclusion about Denny's demise as it was published in Fate: .
... his body caught fire due to some unknown
cause ...
What is the cause of these mysterious fires? In a
less "enlightened" age people believed in the spontaneous combustion of human bodies. But today no
"educated" person would believe such a phenomenon ever occurred. [23, 15]
At the risk of being labeled uneducated, we propose
that Denny did not soak himself in any odorless accelerant before striking a match; but rather than he died
from a self-induced spontaneous combustion created
when his mind (filled with thoughts of Hell's fire awaiting
anyone who killed oneself) and his noncorporeal self tried
to reunite with th~ blood-gushing body lying on the bedroom floor.
Does this explanation strain your credulity? For some
readers it surely will - but then we have not been discussing cases that follow the normal pattern for one's physical transition. As Seth has said of the human death-experience: "The mechanics of transition therefore are
highly variable, as t1w mechanics of physical life are highly
variable." [20, 189]
At least our premise doesn't raise the contradictory
and illogical reasoning one finds in the official reports.

This abbreviated examination of what happens to the
body at and after 'death' might encourage a new scientific discipline: postmortem biology. This new field of
study would exceed the limitations of forensic medicine,
which only examines (by comparative analysis) the conditions of the physical organs which contributed toward
the vacation of the life-force from the physical structure
it once regulated.
History amply shows that the body of the deceased is
not necessarily freed of the mystery which caused it to be
a functioning, animated mechanism. In some cases - we
have mentioned only a few of those concerned with pyrophenomena here - there is the unquestionable revela-

tion that there is life after death, at least fOI"; a c9rpse.

That coffined corpses combust; that suicides become
flaming torches for no apparent reason; that enigrMs'
from the dead haunt the IivingWhether or not we have sensed the correct (or oniy)
solutions to these eerie and enigmatic expirations, we
wish to leave you (and this article) with the closing
thought in Otto Burma's "Cremation in New Orleans":
It goes without saying, however, that "unbelievable" events occur as readily without our belief as
with it. [Italics added: 23, 15]
[Abridged from the author's forthcoming book, ABLAZE! The Case for, and
Cases oj, Spontaneous Human Combustions. I

[1] Watkins, W.H., "Preternatural Inflammability of the
Human Body. With Illustrative Case," The New Orleans
JoumalojMedicine (5. M. Bemiss&W.S.Mitchell,eds.),New
Orleans, vol. XXIII, no. 1, January 1870, pp. 315-318.
[2] Arnold, Larry E., "The Flaming Fate of Dr. John Irving
Bentley," Pursuit, vol. 9, no. 4, F~II 1976, pp. 7582.
[3] Arnold, Larry E., "The Incorruptiblity of Saints-after
Death," Pursuit, vol. 10, no. 3, Summer 1977.
[4] '''Ghoulish Fire in a Closed Coffin," San Francisco Chronicle, 26 December 1973, p. 7.
[5] "Mortuary fire baffles police," The Oregonian, 2Q Decem
ber 1973.
[6] Harper, George W., Parapsychology Division, National
Institute of Creativity, Seattle, Washington, personal communication.
[7] Eckert, Allan W., "The Baffling Burning Death," True,
Fawcett Publications,lnc., New York, May 1964, pp. 32-33, 104107, 112.
[8] Foght, Paul, "Guilty: The Mystery Ray that Kills," Fate, vol.
14, no. 3, March 1961, pp. 3133.
[9] "Man's Burned Body in Car Mystifies Pontiac Police," The
Detroit Free Press (Metro Final Edition), 14 December 1959, p.
[10] Foght, Paul, "Guilty: The Mystery Ray That Kills,"
Stranger Than Strange, The Editors of Fate Magazine, Paperback Library, New York, 1966, pp. 6264.
[11] "Letters Section - Burning Question," True, Fawcett
Publications, Inc., New York, August 1964, pp. 45.
[12] Hava, Dr. Adrian, "So-called 'Spontaneous Combustion,'
or Increased Incombustibility of the Human Body, with Experiments," New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, L.
Graham & Sons, New York, vol. XXI (N.S.), no. 10, April 1894,
pp. 721731.
[13] "Boy Roasted In Mysterious Fire," The AP.R.O. Bulletin,
Aerial Phenomena Research Organization, Tuscon, Arizona,
March 1964, p. 5.
[14] Krogman, Dr. Wilton Marion, personal interchange; 17
September 1975.
[15) Stockwell, Dr. G. Archie, "Catacausis E~riosus (Spontaneous Combustion)," The Theropeutic Gazette (Horatio C.
Wood & Robert Meade Smith, eds.), George S. Davis, Detroit,
3rd S., vol. 5, 1889, pp. 168174.
[16] KUblerRoss, Dr. ~izabeth, "Death and Dying," Bill
Varney's Downstairs Studio, WITF-TV, Hershey, Penna., 21
July 1976.
[17] Ritchie, Dr. George, "Return from Tomorrow (life after
Death)," Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship lecture, personal interchange; 16 November 1974.
PURSUIT Summer 1977 .

[IS] Moody, Dr. Raymond A., Jr., Life AfterLife, Mockingbird
Books, Covington, Georgia, 1975.
[19] KublerRoss, Dr. Elizabeth, Questions on Death and
Dying, Macmillan, New York, 1974.
[20J Roberts, Jane, Seth Speaks, PrenticeHall, Inc., (Reward
Book ed.,), Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1972.

[21] Joachim, "Suicide," See of Tranquaity, Box 1003, ADentown, Penna. IS105, vol. XLII, 9 May 1975,23 pp_
[22] "Foul Play Signs in Death Probed," The Times-Picayune,
New Orleans, 116th year, no. 239,19 September 1952, p. 1.
[23] Burma, Otto, "Cremation in New Orleans;" Fate, vol. 6,
no. 5, May 1953, pp. 12-15.

by George M. Eberhart
The famous treatise on incubi,DeDaemoniaiitate, 1 by
Father Ludovico Maria Sinistrari (1622-1701) represents
a maverick theory of demonic copulation which contrasted sharply with the traditional views expressed by
the fifteenth-century treatise on demons and witches, the
. Malleus Male/icarum. Sinistrari was a Franciscan friar
~ho" successively became professor ~f philosophy at
Pavia University, consultant to the Supreme Tribunal of
the Inquisition at Rome, Vicar-General to the Archbishop of Avignon, and theologian to the Archbishop of
Milan_ De Daemonialitate was an unpublished expansion of part of his De Delictis et po~nis,2 an ex1:t~~tive
listing of every imaginable crime and sin, along ~ft4.heir
matching punishments. It was his breakdown of the sIn of
demoniality (interco~rse with demons) into two differe"nt
crimes that set him apart from the mainstream of inquisitorial authors.
Sinistrari was concerried""bylhe fact that the stories he
had "heard of demons assaulting women against their will
seemed to disprove .the theory of an explicit pact with the
PURsurr Summer 1977

Devil, which was the essence of witchcraft. Nor could he

understand how the same demons might be driven away
by exorcism at .certain times and yet could completely
ignore the rite at other times. The Malleus noted this
problem but did not explore it in depth, simply mentioning that lustful incubi sometimes went on a rampage at
the request of local witches, and that if the last resort of "
excommunication did not drive the stubborn demons
away, then
... that affliction must be considered to be an expiatory punishment for sin, which should be borne
in all meekness_ ..3
Certain incubi, according to Sinistrari, "sometimes even
'" laugh at exorcisms, assault the Exorcists themselves,
and rend the sacred vestments." This indicated that they
could not be the true spiritual demons who were always
subdued by the name of Christ or presentation of a crucifix.4


Consequently Sinistrari conceived of two general

types of beings, intercourse with which must be termed
demoniality (to distinguish it from bestiality), although
the culpability varied from case to case. The first and
greater type of demon is the old Malleus-style Devil who
demanded worship from quite willing witches in return
for occult assistance and carnal satisfaction. This renunciation of holy religion is the "greatest of all sins which can
be committed by man," but in regard to the act of intercourse itself, Sinistrari considered it nothing more than
simple masturbation. After all, these devils are pure
spirits condemned eternally to hell, they aren't really
"alive" as we know the term, and the only bodies they
have are made of "inspissated air, partaking of some of
the properties of earth. "S He denies the traditional view
that demons use male sperm at the explicit request of the"
witch, who for some reason wants a demon-child,6 and he
scoffs at the opinions of Guazzo and the Malleus on how
the semen is obtained:
A Succubus [female] devil draws the semen from a
wicked man; and if he is that man's own particular
devil, and does not wish to make himself an Incubus
to a witch, he passes that semen on to the devil deputed to a woman or witch; and this last, under
some constellation that favours his purpose that
the man or woman so born should be strong in the
practice of witchcraft, becomes the Incubus to the
Sinistrari thought that these demons were incapable of
preserving the fertility of human sperm long enough to
use it properly. The true sin of this type of relationship,
however, is the "hideous enormity against Religion which
is presupposed by coition with the Devil. ''8
The second type of demon is a strange mixture of
poltergeist, satyr, and fairy, which Sinistrari claims is the
more common form of incubus. These demons chase
after humans through pure lust rather than any desire to
corrupt or turn them away from God. This incubus is a
rational creature provided with sense and emotion,
placed on a level higher than man but lower than the
angels, and equally subject to salvation or damnation.
They are possessed of both body and soul, but their
bodies are more subtle and compressible; hence they can
pass through the "pores" of material objects (as cosmic
rays penetrate intermolecular space, perhaps).9
The most remarkable aspect of these incubi is that
they have their own sperm which can actually fertilize the
human ovum. They were the mysterious sons of God
who generated the race of giants from the daughters of
men in" the days of Genesis. 10 Sinistrari claimed that the
incubi who produced the giants were aerial demons, but
the incubi who lusted after contemporary women (and
men and" beasts as well) were aqueous and begat offspring of normal size. Quite often they did this in an invisible or semi-visible state, but
... when they want to be seen by their mistresses,
and to taste the full joys of human copulation, they
assume a visible disguise and a palpable body. By
what means this is effected, is their secret, which
our circumscribed Philosophy is unable to dis-

cover. The only thing we know is that such disguise

or body could not consist merely in concrete air,
since this must take place through condensation,
and therefore by the influence of cold; a body thus
formed would feel like ice, and in the venereal act
could afford women no pleasure, but would give
them pain; and it is the reverse that takes place. I I
Intercourse with the spiritual demons of the Malleus, on
the other hand, was usually said "to be painful, although
the incubi sacrilegiously made up for it on Church feast
If a woman were to refuse an incubus's embrace, the
demon might resort to blows or ill treatment. When the
incubus lusted after horses, mares, or other animals, it
would hit and kick the beasts that rejected it, and sometimes infect them with diseases or even kill them. 12 This
aspect of physical abuse is reminiscent of modem poltergeist cases, and Sinistrari quotes one instance which he
personally investigated that probably was a poltergeist
Since these incubi had physical bodies, they could not
live in hell which was reserved for spiritual entities. Sin istrari believed (based partially on Guazzo) that they were
indigenous to the earth and that there were six races of
them: aqueous, igneous, aerial, phlegmatic, earthly, and
subterranean. Each race was more or less confined to its
habitat; igneous demons, for example, were never found
near marshes. These Aristotelian nature spirits were undoubtedly a synthesis of fairy folklore and the fauns,
satyrs, and" pans of Indo-European myth. Sinistrari
quotes from the life of St. Anthony in support of his
elementals, as well as Agricola, Thyraeus, and Molina. 14
The sin"of demoniality with these incubi is no greater
than that of bestiality since there is no rejection of God involved. However, if-a person believes that the incubus is
really a devil, then they "sin through intention, ex conscientia erronea, and their sin is in intention the same,
when having intercourse with Incubi, as if such intercourse took place with devils; wherefore the guilt oftheir
crime is exactly the same. "IS
De Daemoriialitate was never placed on the Index of
Prohibited Books like his earlier work, De Delictis et
poenis, because it remained unpublished until 1875. It
would probably have been condemned even though the
great days of demonology were almost over; old ideas die
hard, and any theory that even some demons were not
evil spirits incarnate would have made the entire Inquisition look silly. With twentieth-century hindsight, however, we can see that Sinistrari represented an important
transition between the theologians of the witch-craze and
the philosophers of the Enlightenment; and his dissertation, when stripped of its theology, comes rather close to
modern theories of the paraphysical realm. "~



I Louis Marie Sinistrari d'Ameno, De la d~monialite etdes animaux incubes et succubes (Isidore Liseaul( ed. 1876). An English translation by Montague Summers, Demoniality, appeared
in 1927, and was reprinted in R.E.L. Masters,Eros and Euil: The
Sexual Psychopathology of Witchcraft 191-267 (1962)_ The

"translations used here are from the Summers edition, but the
PURSUIT Summer 1977

page n~mbers refer to the Liseaux edition (hereafter cited as
J Ludovicus Maria Sinistrari, De Delictis et poenis trac:tatus

absolutissimus (1100).

Jacobus Sprenger & Henrich Kramer, Malleus MaleflCarum 110 (Montague Summers trans. 1968)lhereafter cited as
. Malleus].
~ Sinistrari 140.
;, Malleus 73.
b Sinistrari 1634, 23436.
;. Malleus 11; and Franc~scoMaria Guazzo, Compendium

male/icarum (1608).
6 Sinistrari 23436.
. ~ Sinistrari 72, 92126.

Sinistrari 222-34.
34-36, 14648.
13 Sinistrari 38-54. For modern theories of poltergeist manifes
tations see, for example, Herbert Thurston, Ghosts and Poltergeists (1954); and D. Scott Roga, An Experience of Phon,
toms (19"14) .
14 St. Jerome, Vita Pauli, in J.P. Migne, Patrologia, \/OJ. 23, pp.
1128; George Agricola, De re metaUica (1546); Peter Thyraeus, De terrijicationibus noctumis (1604); and 4Bs de Molina,

12 ~inistrari

Commentaria in primam paTtern D. Thamae (1592). See Sinistrari 17690. Sinistrari's theory has recently been examined in
relation to the modern UFO phenomenon by Jacques Vallee,
Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers 116-29
IS Sinistrari 238.

Genesis 4:4.



by Kaniil Pecher
"Every procesS of nature, rightly understood, awakens in us a new organ of cognition."
While reading PURSUIT Fall 1916,1 was struck by the
similarity of these cases of spontaneous human combustion with an old Czech story which has been - at least
partially - researched. The story, which concerns
"Faust's House" in Prague, might fit with other historical
The story and house are known to nearly everybody
from the Czech countries, and probably to Gennans as
well. A folk story collector, Adolf Wenig, published one
version in his book Stare Pavest; Prazske (Hokr Publ.,
1937) and.in Stare Pavest; (Hokr Publ., 1932).
I will attempt a basic outline of the theme for thoSe
readers ~ho may find the story relevant to their own
interests and research into the SHC phenomenon.
In the exact southwest comer of Charles Square in the
district of Nove Mistro (New Town) in Prague, is a houSe
which for ages has been called "Faust's HoUse." The
house, like most houses in the area, was built during the
reign of the Roman Emperor, Charles IV, 134678..
Owned originally by Vaclav, the Prince of Opava, as his
Prague headquarters, the building was later sold to
. Prokop, the recorder of New Town, in 1434. The house
then changed owners several times until 1124, when it
was bought by the noble Mladota family of Solopisk. At
this time it was rebuilt in the baroque style. and it remains
so today.
One of the Mladota men was known to be interested in
alchemy. Perhaps this was the basis for the stories which
were later circulated concerning the house. Some stories
claim that the house had been used by alchemists from an ..
. even earlier (Prince Vaclav's) time. One of the alchemistscientists who occupied the house was Dr. Faust - probably better known from Goethe's version of the Faust
PURSUIT Summer 1971

Faust (and his servant) ~ to work on the third Ooor,

grinding and mixing and melting and burnlng strange
things in his quest for a stone of wisdom. And; because he
had signed his soul to the devil, when his time carne due
the devil appeared to carry the fighting Faust away. As a
result. the house stayed deserted and neglected for many
years; people were convinced that it was cursed~ and
they feared devils and ghosts.
After some time .had passed, a student from the .
country came to study at the Prague University 01
Charles. Because he was an orphan and from a good
family, the student received permission from the town
council to live in the house of Faust.
He climbed the staircase to the second floor which had
a huge dining hall and a long marble fireplace still littered
with ashes. Behind the dining room was a study containing bookcases full of books, and a large table covered
with coils of papet. Dust lay on everything. Behind the
study there was a bedroom with a comfortable bed with
canopy. Being unafraid of anything, he used the bed and
slept well.
The next morning the student chanced upon a loose
plank in the floor, which turned out to t)e a lever for a
secret fight staircase that suddenly descended from the
wooden ceiling. Climbing to the third floor, he found a
large room equipped as a laboratory, complete with fireplace and many containers of wood. stone, glass, etc_
In the ceiling of the ~boratory was a blac.kened hole
which the student assumed was the place from which the
devil had car:ried away Dr. Faust.
The student began to explore the house_ He found
money and many strange things: a s~.atue of a drummer in
the corridor. which began to drum whenever: someone
would step on a certain cobblestone; a statue of the
Virgill which sprayed w~ter at visitol'$ (at the student's
secret manipulation); a door handle which- gave anyone
who touched it a charge of blue sparks; and many other
such tricks.

LJrawing by B. Wilkie

The student cleaned the house, covered the devil's

hole with cloth, and often had his student friends to visit.
After some time he started to read old books and scrolls,
and even began to exorcise spirits with a magic book on
the pulpit.
It was his custom to spend every evening in a tavern in
Dobytci Trh Square, drinking with his friends. One evening when he didn't come and because he had been acting
strange for some days, his friends decided to pay him a
~it. They knocked on the door, and when nobody
answered they climbed over the stone wall to get into the .
house. It was tidy inside, but no one was there. Upon
entering the laboratory, however, they found everything
strewn about, as if from a fight. The heavy pulpit and the
magic book were lying on the floor; beside them was a
candelabra with. partially. burned candles. A strange,
sulphurlike smell filled the room. And there was a large
blackened hole in the ceiling. The terrified students ran
away, positive that the devil had carried away their friend.
: The house once again remained abandoned for a IQng
tme. But human avarice is great, a,nd after ma~y years a
smar~ buyer bought cheap a house that nobody wanted.

This owner tore down the secret chambers, the stair

cases, and much of the int~rior; he destroyed the tricks
and magic books and odd things, completely rebuilt the.
interior, and began to live th~re.
From that time on nobody has had any problems in
Faust's house.

1) During the 15th and 16th centuries there was a wave
of doubts about religion in all Europe. At the same time
. the Czech countries were blossoming with science, culture and e<;onomy (for e.~ample, bookpr:inting ip the
Czech language .began in 1468, so~mer than bookprinting in English, French, orltalian). Also, the Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, the Habsburg, was collecting contemporary intellectuals, and Prague became a haven for
scientists and alchemists:
Theoretically, the Faust and student events could have
h9 Ppened in -a span ofabotlt fifty years, limited by 1434 to
1724. But from the stor.y. I am certain that the events
didn't hQPpen after 1620,for the Thirty-years War and
PURSUIT Summer 1977


the consequent political and religious environment

(Jesuits' persecution of any non-conforming action)
wouldn't allow it. Therefore the Mladota 'alchemist (after
1724) can be ruled out.
2) During the reign of Rudolf II (1576-1611) many alchemists concentrated in Prague. One of them, named
Kelly, is considered a prototype for all the consequent
stories about Dr. Faus't. That can place the student event
into the 16th or early 17th century. Of course, the alchemist in the story mayor may not actually be Dr. Faust
(or Kelly).
On the other hand, the student lifestyle reminds me of
the one we know from the more free 15th century
roaming. (Compare with life of poet Francis Villon.) This
could move Dr. Faust and student into the puzzling times
after 1434, when "the house changed owners several
times, .. " as Wenig found. (Puzzlin'g because the HUssite
Wars were over and there should be a record about the
3) The first paragraph of the text is based on Wenig's historical research of the house. He also included the explanation that the story dates from the time ofMladota.lt
is very'possible that the house was used by a succession

of alchemists, and' that the description of tricks, etc.

could be from the different periods of the house's occu
pation. The practice of alchemy, however, was more pop.
ular in the fifteenth century than in the eighteenth.
4) From the description it seems to me that the death of
both the alchemist (Faust) and the student could be
accounted for as instances of Spontaneous Human Combustion. Evidently, there is some confusion on the part of
the storyteller (or recorder) as to the actual location of
the burned holes. Logically, if both men were cases of
SHe, the holes should have been burned into thejloor of
the laboratory and in the ceiling of the bedroom. If the
holes iNere in the ceiling of the lab, then perhaps they
would also be through the roof of the house. There may
be many recorded cases of people carried away by the
devil, complete with a description of a blackened hole
through which the devil carried away his victim....
5) Interesting, too, is the fact that it happened twice in
the same place. The explanations offered for the dlsap
pearance,s ranged from magic (exorcism), to (later) a
chemical produced by Faust. It may prove worthwhile to
measure the house for geomagnetic anomalies or oU.r


by B. Wilkie
All drawings by the author

PURSUrr Summer 1977


Taken by travel to the Nepali city of Kathmandu, I paid
a visit to the National Museum, near the Gurka barracks
on the outskirts of town, where sculptured stones captured my attention through their ancient "curves_ While
my eyes renewed the form of a Hindu statue, a time suddenly dark and silent between my vision and the workman's hands, something in the ripe roundness and foliate
irony of the figures conjured for me the classical Mayan
spirits I had met with at Palenque, Chiapas, some years
before (Maya, feminine personification of illusion - she
plays freely with time and style)_ Here is an aesthetic
sphere best understood, not in terms of reciprocal influences, but in terms of a sort of magic - through which
cultures widely separated by space and time realize the
expression of similar motifs, recalling those "devil's balls"
of Chinese origin where many concentric globes appear
one within the other, each through holes much smaller in
circumference than the one within - the whole carved
impossibly from a single piece of ivory_
I remember as a child resident in Mexico, reading in the
lJIustrated London News of the discovery in the largest of
the temples at Palenque, of a rubble-filled stairway,
which, when cleared away, proved to be the entrance to a
chieftain's tomb - where he lay beneath a huge carved
slab wearing a mask of jade_ Visiting Palenque when"older
and bearded, finding a wonderful tropical garden of antiquity, I could not look upon the temples with their elaborate roof-combs without thinking of the bronzes of the
Shang and Chou dynasties_ Many rather tiny jade objects
had been found about the ruins - one a miniature of the
jade burial mask.
We can recall the Chinese practice of burying jade with
the deceased in the hope of preserving the body_ Recent
excavations in China have brought to light complete
funeral suits from the 2nd Century B.C. m;;tde up of many
small jade plates.

That we may better feel the rhyme of the styles,. depiCt
herewith (fig. 1) rectangular volutes with rou~d
corners from the Mayan temple at Hoch9~ alongside
comparable volutes from the Shang and Chou, older ~
perhaps two thousand years.
These volutes are as notes of common tone, combining in similar songs: the Song of the Dragon heard once
upon the plains of China, then again, with the twinkling of
an Aeon, within the jungles of Mexico; for both peoples"
do of stone serpents or dragons make, often seen as
heads in profile, joining left and right to sUSsest a single

PURSurr Summer 1m


entity. Before being borne aloft by this thought to follow
the dragon vortices to Central Asia, let us pause to recognize those who think they have seen, amongst the details
of the stellae at Copan, the images of elephants. They are
sure to find for us in the Gupta statuary of India (fig. 2)
outlines of a High Mayan character, demonstrating that
Maya is mistress of illusion indeed.
The genius of Chinese art, from earliest dynastic times, .
grins at us from the paintings, the sculpture, the vases,
from~ -masK halfhuman, half-reptilian, with finger-claws
grasping celestial pearls and a body of scaly coils. The
forces are invisible; immanent in nature, waves in water,
swirls in clouds, these scaly coils. The primal motions in
the cosmic void (as a space becomes a stone, and the
stone, a snake) find their mirrors among us through the
artist's mimicry. First, the lightning grin of the celestial
presence, then the thunder rolling through the clouds,
which sound becomes to our sight a fretwork of
swastikas, the garden-screen through which the dragonlords view the falling rain. (Fig. 3)

A stonn over Asia, whose westward moving clouds

mocK the westward expansion of the Han dynasty in the
firs!.. Christian centuries. From their inception," the Han.
expanded their domain deep into Central Asia. Around
the year A.D. 121 Chinese armies crossed the Great Wall
to conquer the steppeland of Mongolia ...
Our eyes learn the strange language more quickly than
our ears. Here (fig. 4) is a bronze plaque of the Han. Two
beasts are fighting: the larger has an upturned and curled
nose. To the right appears a Scythian plaque - two
beasts, one feline and the other fantastic, with not only
._,.......,... ,- 7:-:- ,-.--...,.,.,~ - ~~-.~c-~."""'-."::"''':.. :':':::'.--.::-_~.:~""i




















... ..L.L=:..-_. _

PURSUIT Summer 1977


;-- _ -:.:: _ _ _


upturned and curled nose, but a tail and mane of bird's
heads. The Scythians, a vigorous nomadic people,
served not only to transmit Chinese influence westward,
but also to nurture Hellenic motifs in northern India, so
that among the early f10werings of Buddhist art, we find
work in a Grecian style.
The Norsemen, whose expeditions around the Ninth
Century brought them as far east as the Caspian sea, and
whose settlements in Russia must have had access to
Chinese goods, seem, to my eye, to have enjoyed a very
strong Chinese influence. The beast (fig. 5) with the upturned and curled nose, as often as not a dragon, flourished among the Norse - whose carvings and cravings
show terrific energy.
Examining a stone from Gotland (fig. 6), we are surprised by the Chinese appearance of the little animals
surrounding what may be a suggestion of the polar
We compare (fig. 7) the decorative scrolls from the
. back of a bronze mirror of the Chou with, to the right, a
design from much later Norse metal work.

We may delight in finding spirals in the thighs of creatures (fig. 8) so different as, to the left, the Norse of
painted stone, conjuring with its primitive shape the cave
paintings of the remotest past, and, to the right, the
Chinese Gnffon of jade. There is a rather famous bronze
winged dragon of the Chou whose thighs .offer us the
spiral in a more energetic fashion. Being shy, he will not.
appear here, but kisses our eyes with further examples of
spiral thighs: From third century Loyang (fig. 9, top), a
design once worked in tile, and, to the right, a viking
image of the same theme, a Norse horse, of course ... _
Writing in The Book of Pottery and Porcelain, Warren
Cox mentions a type of small animal form (fig. 9, bottom)
which he describes as ..... reconstructions made by the
Chinese from dinosaur bones found along the caravan
routes of ~ongolia." With his huge Triceratops horns
and prominent vertebrae he yet has bull-like feet and the
characteristic spiral. What a strange beast!
We may be perturbed to the extent that symbols
emerge from decorative shape and move us intellectually or emotionally by a brass viking figurine (fig. 10, left)

PURSUIT Summer 1977

suggesting beth Buddhist and Christian sources of inspiration_ Here we risk an asterisk, whose spark radiates
line, the footprints"of the footnote,like dinosaur tracks, "
fossil impressions left in light whose reflecting symbolic
surfaces seem as sources, leading us to the "Asian practice" of depicting the Buddha with a swastika indicating
the region of the !'teart_ Among the artifacts recovered by
excavation from viking "ruins is an actual figure of the
~ha. Chinese or Tibetan, that found its way to the


Baltic shores_ The swastika is also commonly found on

bracteates, coin-like tokens (fig. 10, right) given by the
Norse upon festive occasions, where it is said to symbolize Thor, god of Thunder. In Japan, this device is
called "Manji", where, symbolizing the motionless or immovable aspect of the Buddha's compassion, FudoMyoo, it often appears in the negative - the spaces between the arms (fig. 11) having become thin lines, the
body of the figure an open space.


The Icelandic Volsunga Saga relates a curious legend:

One of the Aesir, Loki, divine trickster and mischief
maker, is travelling with several companions. Along their
way they kill an otter, taking his skin. Soon they come to a
house wherein an old man lives with his two sons. Being
received hospitably, they present the otter skin to their
host. He is outraged. It is the skin of his third son. He
holds Loki's companions hostage, demanding of him that
he fill the skin with gold.
Loki goes off and locates a dwarf who can make gold.
The dwarf tells him of his magic ring, with which he brings
the gold forth. Loki takes not only the dwarf's gold, but
his ring as well. The dwarf, angered,lays a curse on the
ring which will pass to all who possess it. Loki ransoms his
companions, leaving the treasure with his host.
At once, the man's sons, Regin and Fafnir, begin to
quarrel in their greed. Fafnir slays his father as he sleeps,
and makes off with his wealth. Time ~sses and the
knight Sigurd comes to Regin with word that his brother has- been transformed into a dragon. Together they pur
sue him.
When at length they come upon him, Sigurd beheads
him and kills Regin also. Finding.Fafnir's blood on his
fingers, Sigurd tastes it: the essences of dragon's blood
work a wonderful spell upon him - he understand~ at

once the language of the birds, who sing to him of a love
to win in a distant land, so that a sweet music pours into
him through the darkness of his coming tragedy. This
symbolism, the mystery of transformation and the "lan
guage of the'birds" is also a part of the literature of al
Glancing through a "Catalogue for the Exhibition of
Archaeological finds in the People's Republic of China" I
came upon the image of a vase of the Han dynasty, late
2nd Century B.C., upon which appears a band decorated
with small dragons and several fields of "The decorative
bird script," described by the catalog: ..... Inherited

PURSUIT Summer 1977


- from the art of the Period of Warring States which in this

- form survived into the Western Han. The artificial elaboration of the 'bird' characters (so-called from the earlier
form practiced in the Ch'u and Yueh in which more legible birds are incorporated) preserves only a slender connection with script shapes." I sketch here (fig. 12) a meet- .
ing of two dragons - a viking beast and his Chinese
cousin from the vase above elements of the "bird script."
We are pleased to picture the Icelandic bard contemplating the Chinese va~ ~nd concluding, we might
imagine, a viking dragon boat sailing westward - starguided - and thus close the ring we have begun in

Cox, Warren E. The Book of Pottery and Porcelain. New York:
Crown Publishers. 1944.
Fenollosa, Ernest F. Epochs of Chinese & Japanese Art.
London: William Heinemann, 1913_
Grimal, Pierre, ed. Larousse World Mythology. New York,
London: Hamlyn Publishing Group, 1965.
Grousset. Rene. The CilJi/ization of India. Tudor Publishing
Company. 1931.
The University Prints. Early Chinese Art. Series 0, Section II,
of black and white half-tone prints. Newton, ~&etts,

SITUATIONS -----------~........

",:;t,.. l


This photograph was sent to us by one of our members

living in Alaska. We wonder, as does the member who
sent it in, if any other SITU mem~rs can offer an explanatic;>n. The photo (the original is in color) is bqe of a
series of pictures, each of which is clear except fOlo. the
time exposure effect that appe~rs to distort the candle
flames. Notice that nbne of the reflections from the silver
show the same "streaking" effect.
The camerCl!was a new Fujica 5T 90 1. The picture was
taken inside using a flash attachment. SB flashbulbs were
PURsurr Summer 1977

. . . . . ..

used with a G.E. Honeywell reflector, anci there was

some overhead lighting as well. The aperture was set at
/11, and the photo was taken on Fuji film (100 ASA) at a
distance of 15 feet.
50 far, we ttave no explanation. AnI} feedback would
be most welcome. Comments should be addressed to
SITU and may be published. Please be sure to indicate
whether or not you want your name printed with ~r



by Curt Sutherly
for years Forteans have puzzled over the nature of
reality. What is it - really? Mass, energy, a combination
of the two, or something far more complex? Are there
perimeters of awareness of which we, as humans, are
simply unaware?
Of course, investigators of the paranormal have had no
corrier on such wanderings. Philosophers have likewise
sought answers for the basically unanswerable. And bioi
ogists - strangely enough - have al$o been so involved,
but from the direction of human or animal sensory inter
pretation of the universe/reality around us. For ex
ample, it's well known that certain animals per-ceive ~re
with their basic senses than do others; cats and dogs see
farther into the light spectrum .than do humans. It's
equally well known that the senses can be tricked into reo .
sponding to false stimuli - hence a false interpretation of
reality. (As an example within the example: let's assume
that a man is for several days repeatedlyhit in the eyE!S
with a bright light simultaneous with the ringing of an elec
tric bell at, say, 30 beats per second. After a time the light
flash is discontinued, but the subject's eye pupils con
tinue to contract each time the bell is sounded, .just as
they had when the light had been flashed into his eyes.
Next, the auditory nerve is tapped and connected to an
oscilloscope. Then the bell is rung - but at 20 beats per
second instead of 30: The subject, however, continues to
"hear" the 30-beat pattern as recorded on the oscilloscope. His brain is recording something fhat isn't really

But for the average Fortean, things are a bit more complicated, if such is possible. ~outinely, he must contend
With an impossible reality: UFOs, bizarre creatures, mys terious sOunds-in-the-night where none should be, an
assortment Qf phantoms, nylon lines hanging from the
sky - ~t suspended, apparently, from nothing; there
are, of course, a host of other apparitions, mysteries, and
you-narnetts that most mainstream scientists have no
frame of:.reference for and therefore refuse to recognize,
except in sarcasm .
. Yeah, it's a tough nut to crack. Now, however, I'm
going to hand out Something else ...
. , Around the beginning of Oct. 76,l was sitting in a small
restaurant, drinking coffee and doodling on a paper
napkin. It was late, approaching 2 a.m., and a thunder-
storm was making funny sounds outside. While staring
out the window at my left, watching the rain and lightning, I began writing on the napkin with a somewhat
great~r Purpose than the doodling I'd been entertaining
earlier. It wasn't specifically conscious writing, but more
on the order of a subconscious reaction to many
thoughts then wandering the corridors of my sometimes .
empty head. (Later,1 even speculated ,that the thoughts
outlined or the napkin were not my own, but rather im
. planted by some external int~lIigence; such was my surprise at finding what I had "created" that night.) At any
rate. I subsequently ended lip stuffing the napkin into a
pocket. forgetting it for the time being.

On the following day, I re-discovered the napkin and

the notes scribbled thereon. After reading with some
seriousness the message of those notes,.1 was relatively
surprised to find that they made a strange kind of sense.
Going to the typewriter, I spent a pair of hours going over
the notes, polishing them, making them more clear where
necessary. When finished, I had three sets of interlocking ideas that lent themselves quite readily to the title,
lhe Three Laws of Reality. But rather than belabor the
point, they areoutlined,below.

The first law: Anything that is conceivable of

happening .within the existing universe, will ultimately happen - but within a limited framework of
perception and belief.
The second law: As a result of the process called
learning, the fr~mework of perception and belief
must expand within the consciousness of the mind,
thereby en~bling the physical concept of reality to
expand and change.
. 1-he third law: The expansion and alteration ot
the physical concept of reality can only lead to a still
greater sequence of occurrence within the existing
universe. This, in turn, must inevitably result in
further growth of the framework of-perception and
belief, thus reinforcing both the first and second
laws of reality and thereby maintaining the .cycle.
In this way, the universe is maintained.

Translated, the three laws represent a philosophical

look at the cosmos/reality as perceived by the mind, and
the interrelationship of the mind with that reality structure. Essentially, this is what they state (jn more basic
terms): 1) the mind takes in so much knowlecdge ot the
universe around it. 2) the mind then matures to the point
where it begins to interact" (in some unknown fashion)
with "physical reality," after which "new" events begin to
occur - events that the mind couldn't have understood
or handled previously without going insane. 3) these new
events raise a standard of what is poSsible of happening
within the physical universe. thereby setting-up the next
go-around which cotnpletes the cycle.
Furthermore, if one reads between the lines, one might
even discover that the three laws also poin~ to a new
wrinkle in the concept of uniVersal evolution; one which
says that. instead of evolution being the strictly biological
process it has long been believed to be, it is more rightly a
sequence keyed by mind and matter intelWQven. It may
be, in effect, P,artly physical and partly metaphysical,
moving in quantum spurts rather than in any ordered
progression .
After retyping the three laws,l sent out copies to a few
colleagues in the hope of sparking some sort of feedback. One answer came. from UFOlogist David Fideler,

PURsurr Summer 1977


of Lambertville, Michigan (who puhlishes a newsletter entitled the Anomaly Research Bulletin)_ Dave asked: "if
such a cycle does exist, how, and when, did it starf~"
Thinking about this, I realized that part ot Dave's
question was easily answered: the cycle prob~bly began
when the universe was born. But since we have no way ot
(really) knowing how that came about, we likewise
you, I'm not saying these laws are definite or absolute).

Nevertheless, they do open up new areas ot thought,

and - providing they are valid - may explain why, in
recent years, our "reality" has suddenly taken a new turn,
what with the ever-increasing reports of UFOs (and'
. related aerial enigmas), paracreatures, and the like.
But being a journalist more than a philosopher ,I somehow feel I've overstepped certain boundaries in preparing this paper. Consequently, I'm open to any and all
questions - or for that matter, any answers.

After reading T. B. Pawlicki's article "The Pyramids Are an Ancient Space Communications Network," (this issue of Pursuit, p. 72)
Bill Whamond sent in the following diagram, which he feels supports his own research as well as that of others (Pawlicki, Sanderson,
Cathie, etc.). The diagram, which Mr. Whamond calls "China's Contribution to World Harmony," (since 40 is a 1/9th harmonic of
360) shows how nuclear tests at Lop Nor may influence earthquakes spaced at harmonic intervals across the Earth. Far from being
caused by "the will of Allah," Mr. Whamond speculates, these quakes are perhaps the result of "the hand of Mao.~'






- -


. / GLOBE .





"Only 4000 dead." Also 4 'x 40 from Murora, the French
nuclear test area (see Harmonics 33, p. 108); and thereby
caught in a crossfire between two nuclear testing areas..

60 from Murora; thus in the trough between 2 ripples, and
therefore a weakpoint. See Harmonics 33 (by B. L. Cathie);
midp. 191 and p. 84.

M/SCl:.LLANEOUS NOTES: The ripples are a standing waue pattern (i.e., a selfsustaining wave-system) '" the "quake" occurs at
weak-point on any ripple .. , if the sun is directly ouerhead, then it certainly weakens gravity there (presumably what Cathie's time-har
monic is all ao"out!) ... the East-Turkey/BAKU area is well-known as one of the thinnest points in the Earth's crust. Peru is wellknown
to be located in a Fault Zone (probably a part 'of the San Andreas Fault System, which extends South from San Francisco) ....
'pURSUIT Summer 1977



The material shown above represents one of a very few

existing clues found in connection with a mutilation. This
material, which proves upon analysis to be shredded
aluminum, was discovered stuffed into the mouth of a
mutilated calf which was found lying in a field (in Colorado) in February of last year. During our investigations, we were given a sample (shown above) to have
Ed Sanders who, besides publishing a second article on
the mutilation phenomena in Oui [May, 1977, p. 78], is
now collaborating with Tom Adams in Texas to produce
a new publication dealing with specific mutilations and
the mutilation phenomena in general. Having seen the
first issue of what promises to be one of five, I can confidently recommend to members that this publication,
called The Cattle Report, promises to be well worth the
$6.00 subscription price; interested members can write:
The Cattle Report, Box 729, Woodstock, NY 1249.8 for
Sanders (see his latest article in Oui), who also
acquired some of this substance, says:
An enquiry by law-enforcement officials to the Air
Force brought areply from a Major Keck in March
1976 that radar chaff of the type found in the
critter's mouth is used in training for the Strategic
Air Command, among other military agencies. __ .
... But there was a box found il) the field also_ The box
was lying near the calf and also near some other pieces of


more of the same shredded aluminum. The same Air

Force official added that the box, which bore a lettered
code reading: RR 112/AL, did not indicate a code used by
the Air Force.
Then what is the material? Our analysis has shown the
sample to be composed of evenly shredded high-quality
aluminum. The 3-5 mil aluminum strips appear to have
been shredded into tiny rectangular "fringes" from a
larger sheet of rolled aluminum. The aluminum is not one
of industrial quality, as it would be too pure t6 be priced
. within the range for industrial use. Itproves to contain
not only a very pure aluminum content, but other
interesting and thought-provoking characteristics as
well, one of which is the fact that there appears, from the
analysis, to be no trace elements evident in the sample_
This is unusual; normally in an analysis there should
appear trace elements, at least of the material utilized in
the manufacture of the rollers which were used originally
to roll out the foil from whi~h the pje~~s were cut. And yet
there were no traces (from steel, gallium, etc.) present.
This could, however, simply mean that the rollers used
were made of T etlon or some other substance which
would not leave trace evidence during the analysis. If so,
then we are left with a disturbing, open-ended question: If
the very fine aluminum is too high-grade for industry, and
the box indicating a code not used by the Air Force is in
fact not used by the military at all, then who would be
using such a material in conjunction with the mutilation of
a calf? And why . ... ?
":""'!'.n1.w,fs_n.m_ .
PURSUIT . Summer 1977 .


Comments and Opinions
Regarding the article "Prescriptions for the New Science," (Pursuit, Vol. 9, No_ 4) by Neil M. Lorber, I must
respond because I feel that the conclusions reached by the
author are not conclusive.
Man has long known the principle of gravity (i.e., that
water runs downhill, etc.) and yet when he began his
inquiry into the nature of gravity I doubt that he used a
precise set of scales with which to measure his "experiments_"
I believe there is enough evidence for the existence at a
new force, one which electronic equipment is incapable
of detecting and evaluating. The secret of using gravitational or electromagnetic force is not in the generation at
that force, but rather in the manipulation oj it. So.would it
be with the manipulation of any new force, and that manipulation will not correspond to the manipulation at other
forces. In the detection of gravity we balance one weight
against another. We would have had some grave difticul-'
ties without the simple "lodestone," which is comparatively rare; can it be that the "lodestone" for the newtorce
is even rarer"?
Consider this: The electromagnetic force has a host at
manifestations which casual consideration could hardly
relate. Consider also: We have evidence of many different manifestations of psychic phenomena, and also
evidence for some kind of a motivating energy for UFOs. :
The common thread here is that all of these energies
would seem to involve an almost instantaneous transmission_
is there a relationship of these energies to some
common force? I believe so. I also believe that the velocities of these energies would b~ to light what light is to
sound. This would fit much of the known evidence.
Also, since we are looking for a "lodestone," it might be
wise to gO-'back and re-evaluate some of the old folk
beliefs, much as medicine is now doing in its re-assessment of old folk remedies.
An amateur researcher could begin by asking himselt:
"Why is it, since antiquity, that Jade has always been considered goqci luck while Opal has been considered bad
luck'?" Could this opposition represent the polarity of an

energy? My own research indicates that it does, but I

really have not the time to follow up this line of reasoning.
If this energy does exist, however, I don't think any
present electronic device exists which can measure it;
and thus I feel it does remain in the hands of amateurs to
investigate things (even when this seems "wrong" to a
scientist). Because of this, I feel that any breakthrough
will more than likely come from an amateur - not out of
the research lab.
-Bruce Jordan


As a post-script to my article entitled "Prescriptions for

the New Science". (Pursuit, Fall 1976), I wish to point to
gravity, magnetism, lightning (and other forms of electricity - such as static electricity), as well as to light reflection (i.e., the mirror effect), as examples of phenomena that have always been very close to man in his
everyday life but which have not yet, or have only recently been, validly scientiJically explained. Human cognizance of the mysteries underlying these phenomena
have, in all cases, been long-preceded by their actual experience. Accordingly~ the full realm of our experience,
how~ver commonplace, should be very seriously pondered for its possible reflective significance (or relevance
otherwise) with respect t6 the challenging ontological
mysteries with which contemporary man struggles. Perhaps some day, for example, the very life-death sequence
which is so much the essence of our being will be looked
upon as having provided man, all throughout his history,
with the most obvious and.abundant phenomenological
"evidence" of a then-to-be-established multi-dimensionality to existence_ In short, we have to look more readily
and thoughtfully at what is staring us in the face.
-Neil Lorber

SITU Member #2519 (Bergen County, NJ) is interested in corresponding with other members in his area
(or state) on ~arious subjects: write #2519, c/o SITU.

Any members capable of and willing to translate a Russian article dealing with ancient maps please contact

. . . - - - - - - - - .BOOK REVIEW--------..
Without a Trace by Charles Berlitz; Doubleday &
Company,lnc., Garden City, New York,1977. 180
pages, $7.95
Meanwhile, in the Bermuda Triangle, master Fortean
Charles Berlitz has been meticulously pursuing new
leads, interviewing survivors of near disaste~d cataloging all the strange events that have taken place in that
peculiar patch of the Atlantic where space and time Seem
warped by another reality. He has produced a volume
that will rank .asa classic in Fortean literature. While
much of his first book on the subject, The Bermuda
Triangle, was a rehash of the research of Gaddis, Sander-
. son and others, Without a Tr:ace covers new ground (or
ocean). In addition to detailed descriptions of many new
PURSUIT Summer 1977

and interesting cases, it painstakingly examines all the

possible explanations ... and maybe a few impossible
ones. Here is strong evidence that eerie electromagnetic
forces are at work in the notorious Triangle, and that
many of the manifestatioI)s which have become
commonplace in UFO cases (e.g., mysterious luminous
clouds that transpOrt people and vehicles great distances
in incredibly short periOds of time) are also part and parcel
of the Triangle enigma" The professional anti-Triangle
critics should. have a difficult time finding flaws in his arguments, and Forteans everywhere will find the book fascinating and thought-provoking. You'd better read this
one because everyone will be talking about it.



Robert C. Warth
R. Martin Wolf
Albena E. Zwerver
Steven Mayne
Gregory Arend
Adolph L. Heuer, Jr.
-Susan Malone
Sabina W. Sanderson

President (and Trustee)

Vice President (and Trustee)
Secretary (and Trustee)
Treasurer (and Trustee)


Editor-in-Chief (on Sabbatical) - John A. Keel
Managing Editor - R. Martin Wolf
RobertC. Warth - R. Martin Wolf - Steven Mayne
R. Martin Wolf Susan Malone
Canadian Media Consultant - Michael Bradley
Robert C. Warth- Steven Mayne
Prehistoric Arch~eology and Oceanography Consultant - Charles Berlitz
Gregory Arend - Steven Mayne


Dr. George A. Agogino - Chairman, Department of Anthropology, and Director, Paleo-Indian Institute, Eastern New Mexico
University. (Archaeology)
Dr. Carl H. Delacato - Director, The Institute for the Rehabilitation of the Brain Injurep, Morton, Pa. (Mentalogy)
Dr. J. Allen Hynek - Director, Lindheimer Astronomical Research Center, Northwestern University. (Astronomy)
Dr. George C. Kennedy - Professor of Geology, Institute of Geophysics, U.C.l.A. (Geomorphology and Geophysics)
Dr. Martin Kruskal - Program in Applied Mathematics, Princeton University. (Mathematics)
Dr. Samuel B. McDowell- Professor of Biology, Rutgers University, Newark, N.J. (General Biology)
Dr. Vladimir Markotic - Professor of Anthropology, Department of Archaeology, University of Alberta, Canada. (Ethnosociology
and Ethnology)
Dr. Kirtley F. Mather - Professor of Geology, Emeritus, Harvard University. (Geology)
Dr. John R. Napier - Unit of Primate Biology, Queen Elizabeth College, University of London. (Physical Anthropology)
Dr. W. Ted Roth - Assistant Director, Baltimore Zoo, Baltimore, Maryland. (Ecologist & Zoogeographer)
Dr. Frank B. Salisbury - Head, Plant Science Department, College of Agriculture, Utah State University. (Phytochemistry)
Dr. Berthold Eric Schwarz - Consultant (Brain Wave Laboratory), Essex County Medical. Center, Cedar Grove, New Jersey.
(Mental Sciences)
Dr. Roger W. Wescott - Professor and Chairman, Department of Anthropology, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. (Cultural
Anthropology and Linguistics)

A. Joseph Wraight - Chief Geographer, U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey. (Geography and Oceanography)

Dr. Robert K. Zuck - Professor and Chairman, Department of Botany, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey. (Botany)


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