Files From the Edge (4 page)

Today, string and multiverse theories help explain the existence of parallel realities in a multidimensional universe. Accepting these theories allows us to achieve better understanding of how the elementary particles that make up the cosmos are produced. It’s strange to think that it took the scientists of today’s world so long to discover what the mystics, shamans, and Druid priests knew ages ago: these ancient people knew of the multiverse’s existence and incorporated it into their teachings and religions long before modern science was born. The great thinkers of today are beginning to realize that to understand the true nature of our existence, new ideas have to be considered no matter
how
radical they may be. UFO sightings and paranormal events do not seem to be part of our physical universe, but if they are real occurrences, where do they come from? It’s obvious to anyone who has done research in this area that most of it is very real; the majority of reports come from credible people who had encounters with other-worldly forces. If what we call “paranormal” does not originate in our reality, then where does it go when it can’t be seen? If we take into account the theory that there are other dimensions in our physical space that we can’t perceive in addition to other nearby parallel universes, then (and only then) can we begin to understand why paranormal events seem like nothing more than phantasms to humans trapped in a limited three-dimensional reality. We are indeed continually being confronted with experiences still mistakenly labeled as “supernatural,” and these modern mysteries are greater than any human beings have ever faced. The scientific community must start taking the stories of those who’ve had a brush with another reality more seriously; the same mistakes must not be repeated. In the next chapter, I present a brief introduction to paranormal phenomenon showing that the Law of Uniformitarianism is its case. This law (some call it a philosophy of science) states that what has taken place in the past is now taking place in the present and will take place in the future, but perhaps at a different rate.

Out of Nowhere

The first person who began a serious documentation of paranormal phenomenon was Charles Hoy Fort. Fort was born on August 6, 1874, in Albany, New York, and died in May 1932. Fort was a writer who spent most of his free time at libraries taking notes from newspapers, scientific journals, and various books looking for reports of strange occurrences. He felt strongly that science was suppressing anomalous data that didn’t fit in with current theory. In his early days, Fort lived in poverty and, although he had a number of works published in small magazines, he had considerable financial trouble and often took on other, non-writing jobs to make ends meet. It was because of this that he had to put his work of collecting tales of unusual events on hold.

In 1916 Fort inherited his grandfather’s estate and once finally free from financial burdens, was able to devote most of his time to what was a growing obsession: collecting reports of the unexplained. Fort meticulously looked through newspapers, magazines, and books for odd phenomena that science could not explain, and began to catalog them. Included in these detailed listings were frogs, fish, stones, blood, and ice falling from the sky. He also included mysterious fires, stigmata, fireballs, monsters, UFOs, and ancient artifacts discovered out of place. Out of all these strange anomalies, Fort seemed partial to reports of falls from the sky; they made up the bulk of his material. Until Fort began to write about these occurrences, no one realized how many bizarre events were taking place on our planet.

Charles Fort published his works in four books:
The Book of the Dammed
(1919),
New Lands
(1923),
Lo!
(1931), and
Wild Talents
(1932). Until the twenty-first century, the paranormal events mentioned above were known as “Fortean phenomena.” Several organizations still exist today trying to continue his work. One of these organizations is the International Fortean Society Organization (INFO), and in 2000 and 2001 I was invited to speak at their annual convention in Maryland. At the convention, I presented two papers concerning my research on the stone chambers in the Hudson Valley of New York and the alien contact and channeling phenomenon. This work was published in two of my books:
Celtic Mysteries: Windows to Another Dimension in America’s Northeast
(Cosimo Books, 2005) and
Contact of the 5th Kind
(Llewellyn, 2002).

A more recent attempt to record various anomalies was accomplished in 1979 by William R. Corliss, a freelance writer and author of twenty books on space technology. Corliss has published a number of volumes that document astronomical and atmospheric phenomena called
The Source Book Project: Mysterious Universe
. If you are doing research in this area, his books are a must for your library.

Like Charles Fort, my early days of paranormal research saw many Saturdays and Sundays at libraries in New York and Connecticut combing through old newspapers and journals looking for reports of unexplained events. I must admit that it was tedious, but thanks to Fort’s early work, I already had a considerable amount of information to work with; I mainly concentrated on events he either missed or that took place after 1930. Although this chapter and book does not permit me the necessary room to list all the events collected during my research, I will present the most impressive ones from the earliest to the most recent. I want to remind my readers that I researched all the Fortean paranormal activity presented in this chapter, but I only personally investigated a handful of them. After collecting a considerable amount of data, I divided them into the type of event that took place such as falls from the sky, monsters, poltergeists, psychic phenomena, and finally, UFOs (what Fort called “strange meteors, lightning and clouds”). My detailed investigations appear starting in the chapter High Strangeness and although some of the very early case studies are now more than thirty years old, they have never been published in any form until now.

Ball Lightning

The majority of the phenomena Fort cataloged still remains unexplained today; even modern science can only offer weak explanations for them, at best. For example, Fort collected reports of a strange ball of light that would glide around the sky before and after a thunderstorm. On occasion it would also strike the ground or enter a person’s home through a closed window (not breaking the glass) and then crash into a wall with a loud boom and disappear. Fort thought that this was some type of bizarre electrical phenomenon that he eventually named “ball lightning.” He noticed that reports of this ball lightning were one of the most frequent and widely witnessed phenomena he documented. Fort was sure it was some sort of rare variation of lightning created during an electrical storm.

The scientists of Fort’s time didn’t take these reports seriously at all because they insisted lightning could not take the shape of a sphere. Today, ball lightning has been documented and is now accepted by meteorologists as a form of atmospheric electrical discharge. A research paper published in 1960 by Harvard University scientists reported that 7 percent of the United States population reported having witnessed ball lightning during the twentieth century.
[1]
We now know that ball lightning is a real atmospheric electrical phenomenon, but how it is formed in nature is still controversial. Ball lightning can range in size from a pebble to up to nine feet in diameter. Unlike flashes of lightning that last a second or so, ball lightning has been reported to be seen for as long as several minutes. Scientists of Fort’s time ignored the reports because they insisted that what people were seeing could not possibly exist. They refused to investigate and considered the occurrence impossible, so we had to wait decades for ball lightning to be accepted in the scientific community as a real phenomenon. As a scientist and paranormal investigator of more than thirty years, I am not surprised at the attitude science took at the time regarding ball lightning—that very train of thought is still prevalent today. The learned gentlemen of Fort’s time refused to even consider the possibility of ball lightning’s existence despite credible reports and repeated incidents. Following are several of these cases, two of which I have investigated personally.

Deaths by Ball Lightning

The first documented death by what was evidently ball lightning was recorded by the historian Flavius Josephus in 80 ad in Jerusalem.
[2]
Although what actually took place is not clear, the great historian mentions the sky darkening, turning to dark green, and then without warning, a ball of pale blue light emerged from a cloud and sped toward Earth.
[3]
The sphere of light went up the side of a building and moved across the roof, rolling like a ball. Roman soldiers present at the time watched the ball of light as it jumped off the roof and fatally struck one of soldiers with a loud boom. Witnesses considered this incident to be the judgment of God since this particular Roman solider was known to be unjustly cruel.

On October 21, 1638, four people were killed by a ball of fire while attending church in Cherbourg, France, during a severe thunderstorm. The fireball was reported to have been more than six feet in diameter and entered the church through the ceiling window, destroying part of the roof. The ball smashed several of the pews and exploded, filling the church with a sulfurous odor. The minister of the church later explained the event as the work of the Devil who was upset with the good work they were doing saving souls.

In 1753, Professor Georg Richmann of Saint Petersburg, Russia, was attending a meeting at the Academy of Sciences when he heard thunder. He excused himself from the meeting and rushed home—he was performing electrical experiments and did not want to miss the chance of seeing a bolt of lightning striking a pole he had set up on his property. In a crude way, Richmann was trying to duplicate Benjamin Franklin’s electricity experiment.
[4]
While watching for a strike near the back door of his home a ball of light flew down from the sky and struck him in the head, killing him. The ball left a red spot on Richmann’s head, singed his clothes, and blew off his shoes. A nearby next-door neighbor was knocked unconscious, and the windows in the Richmann home were shattered.

Ball Lightning, Foo Fighters, or UFOs

During World War II, pilots described balls of light that were blue in color and ranging from the size of a baseball to that of a basketball following their aircraft as they flew over Europe. At first, Army Intelligence suspected they were some type of German secret weapon used to track Allied planes, but in 1944, they discovered German aircraft were also reporting the same objects. No one at the time had any idea what they were and since they didn’t seem to interfere with the air missions or disrupt operations, they became of little concern.

Pilots called them “foo fighters” and all types of stories were created about their origin, including gremlin-like creatures and alien probes. One such encounter with foo fighters during World War II was actually mentioned in a non-fiction book about the October 14, 1943, bombing of ball-bearing factories in Schweinfurt, Germany.
[5]
I also found references to the account in a declassified file from the Air Material Command; unfortunately the document gives very little detail and most of the information containing the pilots’ names was blacked out.
[6]
The story of this encounter is presented below.

As the Flying Fortress (bombers) approached their targets (the German ball-bearing factories), one of the most baffling incidents of World War II was to take place: an enigma that defies all explanation to this day. As the bombers of the 384th Group swung into their final bomb run, the German fighter attacks fell off. At this point, there were no enemy aircraft in the air and the pilots and gunners were puzzled and looked around the sky to see where they were, but they were gone. A moment later, the pilots and top turret gunners, as well as several crewmen in the Plexiglas noses of the bombers reported a cluster of discs in their flight path and approaching the 384th’s formation. The startled airmen focused their attention on the phenomenon and the crew members talked back and forth, discussing and confirming the astonishing sight before them. The discs in the cluster were silver colored, about 1 inch thick and 3 inches in diameter. The B-17 crewmen could see them easily, gliding down slowly in a very uniform cluster. Then, something incredible took place: B-17 Number 026 closed rapidly with a number of discs; the pilot attempted to evade an imminent collision with the objects, but was unsuccessful in his maneuver. He reported at the intelligence debriefing that his right wing went directly through a cluster with absolutely no effect to engines or the aircraft surface. Number 026’s pilot stated further that one of the discs was seen striking his B-17’s tail assembly, but that neither he nor any member of the crew heard or witnessed an explosion and the plane was not damaged in any way. The pilot reported that about 20 feet from the discs, they also sighted a mass of black debris of varying sizes.

The foo fighters of World War II still remain unexplained, and although they have a similar description to ball lightning, most UFO enthusiasts claim they were alien probes following the development of our aircraft. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these strange globes of light have been reported following aircraft, in addition to being seen near military bases involved with the space program and nuclear weapon development.

Over the years, I have personally investigated four cases of possible ball lightning, all reported around areas where UFOs had been seen. One of these incidents took place in 1978 just outside Newtown, Connecticut, near the sleepy little town of Sandy Hook. The encounter took place on a late summer evening and the weather was fair. In the past, electrical phenomenon like ball lightning seemed to be able to appear regardless of the weather, but it is reported more frequently in summer.

Encounter on a Bridge

After a hard day’s work, the witness (whom we will refer to as “Jim”) was driving home alone on August 30, 1978, at about 8:30 pm. He crossed the bridge near Newtown Road, about 60 feet in length and made of a steel alloy that shows a consdierable amount of oxidation in the form of rust (indicating high iron content). It was a clear night, and Jim was anxious to get back to his family in Newtown. He was listening to the radio as he crossed the bridge when suddenly the station faded and it was replaced by a great deal of static and other sounds he called “electrical interference.” Without warning, the car engine died, but the headlights were still on. Jim grabbed a flashlight from the glove compartment and popped the hood to take a look. As the man got out of the car, his attention was drawn to a bright light just above the bridge. It was flickering yellow, green, and red and at first, Jim thought it was the planet Jupiter, which he had heard was bright in the sky at that time of year. Jim looked under the hood but couldn’t see anything wrong. Looking up, Jim noticed the light was descending; now he could see that it wasn’t a star or any other celestial object—it was a glowing globe. Jim climbed back into his car and the light from the object became so bright, it illuminated the bridge and the road ahead. As he watched, the globe of light appeared to be rotating faster and faster, shooting out “flares of fire” in all directions. The object then split up into three smaller balls: one went under the bridge, one circled outside the bridge, and the third circled his car.