Real-Life X-Files (18 page)

Kopp, Jon. 1998. Interview by author, Sept. 18.

The Legend of the Silver Lake Sea Serpent
. 1984. Silver Lake, N.Y.: Serpent Comics and Print Shop.

MacDougall, Curtis D. 1958. Hoaxes. New York: Dover.

Mackal, Roy P. 1980.
Searching for Hidden Animals
. Garden City,N.Y.: Doubleday, 209-10.

Peace, Carolyn. 1976. The Silver Lake sea serpent.
Buffalo Courier-Express
, May 16.

Penrod, Bruce. 1998. Interview by author, Sept. 14.

Perry; New York, As It Was and Is
. 1976. Perry, N.Y.: Perry Bicentennial Committee.

Pickett, Thomas J. 1998. Personal communication, Sept. 18.

Rice, Clark. 1998. Interview by author, Aug. 1.

Roberts, Frank D. 1915.
History of the Town of Perry, New York
. n.p. [Perry, N.Y.]: C.G. Clarke & Son, 184-203.

Scott, Sir Walter. 1815. Letter quoted in Binns 1984, 186-87.

The Silver Lake serpent. 1855.
Wyoming Times
, Sept. 26 (citing earlier issues of July 18-Sept. 19).

The Silver Lake Serpent: A Full Account of the Monster as Seen in the Year 1855
. 1880. Castile, N.Y.: Gaines and Terry.

Silver Lake serpent revived for Jaycee festival, undated clipping ca. 1960s, vertical file, Perry Public Library.

“The True and Unembellished Tale of the Great Serpent of Silver Lake,” 1974. Song, published in Legend 1984,1.

Vogel, Charity. 1995. Perry recalls fishy tale of sea serpent.
Buffalo News
, July 22.

Chapter 14

It has long been common, especially within the Catholic tradition, to discover faces of holy personages in random patterns and to suggest that these are miraculous. In my book
Looking for a Miracle
(Nickell 1993), and in a recent article in
Free Inquiry
magazine (Nickell 1997), I recounted several of these, including the famous image of Jesus discovered in the skillet burns on a New Mexico tortilla in 1978. Usually, these simulacra are the result of the inkblot or picture-in-the-clouds effect: the mind’s tendency to create order out of chaos. On occasion, however, they are faked.

On Good Friday 1995, when I appeared on a special live episode of
Oprah
to discuss miracles, I met a daughter of Mrs. Maria Rubio, the woman who had discovered the tortilla Jesus. Afterward, as we were waiting in a limousine for a ride to the airport, I also talked with a self-styled visionary who had been on the show. She showed me a “miraculous” rose petal that bore a likeness of Jesus, one of several such items that supposedly came from the Philippines. Examining the petal with my Bausch& Lomb illuminated Coddington magnifier (a penlighted loupe), I was suspicious and asked to borrow the object for further study. (See
figure 14.1.
)

I subsequently examined the rose petal by viewing it with transmitted light, using a fluorescent light box and a stereomicroscope (
figure 14.2.
  I noted that everywhere there were markings there was damage to the rose petal, resembling hatch marks made with a blunt tool (
figure 14.3
 In contrast, ordinary rose petals had no such markings. (See
figure 14.4,
top right).

Figure 14.1. Rose petal with “miraculous” portrait of Jesus.

Figure 14.2 (below). Author conducting examination of rose petal in CSICOP laboratory.

Figure 14.3. Facial markings constitute damage, resembling stylus marks.

Figure 14.4. An ordinary rose petal (top right) lacks markings, but a stylus (upper left) can be used to produce faces such as the three shown at bottom.

However, I found that faces could easily be drawn with a blunt stylus (
figure 14.4,
top left). I obtained dried rose petals, rejuvenating them with boiling water, then smoothing out the wrinkles on the surface of a light box and drawing the requisite pictures. They have characteristics similar to the “miraculous” one (
figure 14.4,
bottom).

Other imaged rose petals were shown on the Fox television network’s special, “Signs From God” (July 28, 1999). The program hyped numerous miracle claims, while more prosaic explanations were glossed over or, worse, unmentioned. When an art conservator and a botanist each demonstrated that the images on the petals had been faked—they even duplicated the effects by pressing petals with small medallions—journalist Michael Willessee became flustered. He suggested that fakery was unlikely because the “miracle” petals were not being sold, ignoring the possibility of what skeptics term “pious fraud”—deception used in an end-justifies-the-means manner to promote religious belief.

As these examples show, paranormal claims are not solved by assumptions (e.g. that rose petals have mottled patterns that could yield a facial image) but rather by investigation on a case-by-case basis.

References

Nickell, Joe. 1993.
Looking for a Miracle: Weeping Icons, Relics, Stigmata, Visionsand Healing Cures.
Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus.

———. 1997. In the eye of the beholder.
Free Inquiry
17 (2): 5.

Chapter 15

His guiding of the United States through its greatest crisis and his subsequent martyrdom have caused the shadow of the tall, sixteenth president to loom still larger. Called “the most mythic of all American presidents” (Cohen 1989, 7), Abraham Lincoln has long been credited with supernatural powers. These include an early mirrorvision, prophetic dreams, and spiritualistic phenomena. His ghost, some say, even haunts the White House.
⁹

In the Looking Glass

Many people have portrayed Lincoln as a man given to belief in omens, particularly with respect to his assassination. An incident often cited in this regard occurred at his home in Springfield, Illinois. Lincoln related it to a few friends and associates, including Noah Brooks in 1864. Brooks shared it with the readers of
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
the following July—three months after Lincoln’s death—recounting the president s story “as nearly as possible in his own words”:

It was just after my election in 1860, when the news had been coming in thick and fast all day, and there had been a great “Hurrah, boys!” so that I was well tired out, and went home to rest, throwing myself down on a lounge in my chamber. Opposite where I lay was a bureau, with a swinging-glass upon it—[and here he got up and placed furniture to illustrate the position]—and, looking in that glass, I saw myself reflected, nearly at full length; but my face, I noticed, had two separate and distinct images, the tip of the nose of one being about three inches from the tip of the other. I was a little bothered, perhaps startled, andgot up and looked in the glass, but the illusion vanished. On lying down again I saw it a second time—plainer, if possible, than before; and then I noticed that one of the faces was a little paler, say five shades, than the other. I got up and the thing melted away, and I went off and, in the excitement of the hour, forgot all about it—nearly, but not quite, for the thing would once in a while come up, and give me a little pang, as though something uncomfortable had happened. When I went home I told my wife about it, and a few days after I tried the experiment again, when [with a laugh], sure enough, the thing came again; but I never succeeded in bringing the ghost back after that, though I once tried very industriously to show it to my wife, who was worried about it some-what. She thought it was “a sign” that I was to be elected to a second term of office, and that the paleness of one of the faces was an omen that I should see life through the last term (Brooks 1865, 224-25).

The same story was told by Ward Hill Lamon in his book
Recollections of Abraham Lincoln
. Lamon was a friend of Lincoln’s, a fearless man who accompanied him to Washington for his protection, being given the special title, Marshal of the District of Columbia. In discussing the matter of the double image in the mirror, Lamon stated: “Mr. Lincoln more than once told me that he could not explain this phenomenon” and “that he had tried to reproduce the double reflection at the Executive Mansion, but without success.” In Lamon’s account it was not Mrs. Lincoln but the president himself who thought the “ghostly” image foretold “that death would overtake him” before the end of his second term (Lamon 1995, 111-12).