Real-Life X-Files (20 page)

Not all of the reports of Lincoln’s ghost, however, have featured apparitions. In earlier times, there were frequent reports of sounds that were variously interpreted, by some as heavy footfalls (Cohen 1989, 10; Jones 1996, 8), by others as knockings at the door, with Lincoln’s ghost typically being thought responsible. Not only Queen Wilhelmina but also “Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman all said they heard mysterious rappings, often at their bedroom doors” (Scott and Norman 1991,74). However, ghost hunter Hans Holzer (1995,70) concedes: ”President Truman, a skeptic, decided that the noises had to be due to ’natural’ causes, such as the dangerous settling of the floors. He ordered the White House completely rebuilt, and perhaps this was a good thing: It would surely have collapsed soon after, according to the architect, General Edgerton.”

For all his greatness, Abraham Lincoln was of course human. Among his foibles were a tendency to melancholy, a sense of fatalism, and a touch of superstition from his frontier upbringing. However, as this investigation demonstrates, neither his life nor his death offers proof of paranormal or supernatural occurrences—not his very human apprehensions of mortality, not his wife’s sad seduction into spiritualism, and not the evidence, even if expressed as anecdotes of ghostly apparitions, that his great legacy lives on.

References

Alexander, John. 1998. Ghosts:
Washington Revisited
. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer.

Brooks, Noah. 1865. “Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln,”
Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
. July, 222-26.

Caroli, Betty Boyd. 1992.
Inside the White House
. New York: Canopy.

Cescinsky, Herbert. 1931.
The Gentle Art of Faking Furniture
. Reprinted NewYork: Dover, 1967,135.

Cohen, Daniel. 1989.
The Encyclopedia of Ghosts
. New York: Dorset.

Davis, Patti. 1995.
Angels Don’t Die
. New York: HarperCollins, 65.

Holzer, Hans. 1995. Ghosts,
Hauntings and Possessions: The Best of Hans Holzer,
ed. by Raymond Buckland. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn.

Jones, Merlin. 1996.
Haunted Places
. Boca Raton, Fla.: Globe Communications.

Lamon, Ward Hill. 1895.
Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865
. Chicago: A.C. McClurg.

Lewis, Lloyd. 1973.
Myths After Lincoln
. Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith.

Mackenzie, Andrew. 1982.
Hauntings and Apparitions
. London: Heinemann.

Neely, Mark E., Jr. 1982.
The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia
. New York: Da Capo.

Nickell, Joe. 1995.
Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings
. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus.

Reagan, Michael. 1998.
The Michael Reagan Show
, Oct. 30. Ronan, Margaret. 1974.
Strange Unsolved Mysteries
. New York: Scholastic.

Ross, Ishbel. 1962.
Grace Coolidge and Her Era
. New York: Dodd, Mead.

Scott, Beth, and Michael Norman. 1991.
Haunted Heartland
. New York: Dorset.

St. George, Judith. 1990.
The White House: Cornerstone of a Nation
. New York: G.P. Putnam’s.

Suits, Linda Norbut (curator, Lincoln Home, Springfield). 1998. Interview by author.

Temple, Wayne C. 1995.
Abraham Lincoln: From Skeptic to Prophet
. Mahomet, 111.: Mayhaven.

Winer, Richard, and Nancy Osborn. 1979.
Haunted Houses
. New York: Bantam.

Chapter 16

More than a half century ago, in the summer of 1947, the modern UFO craze began. Fed by fantasy, faddishness, and even outright fakery, the mythology has become so well nourished that it has begun to spawn bizarre religious cults like Heaven s Gate. In 1997, the Roswell controversy reached out to involve U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond and a former aide, Philip J. Corso, in a dispute over a memoir by Corso for which Thurmond wrote the foreword. The book claims that the U.S. government used alien technology to win the Cold War (“Thurmond” 1997). This controversy only intensified the planned fiftieth-anniversary hoopla July 1-6 at Roswell, New Mexico, the site of ufology’s Holy Grail. From near Roswell, according to a burgeoning legend, in late June or early July of 1947, a crashed alien spacecraft and its humanoid occupants were retrieved and hidden away at a secret government installation.

The “Roswell Incident,” as it is popularly known, was propelled into history on July 8, 1947, by an unauthorized press release from a young but eager public information officer at the Roswell Army Air Base. He reported that a “flying disc” had been retrieved from an area ranch where it had crashed (Korff 1997, Berlitz and Moore 1980). This came in the immediate wake of the first modern UFO sighting, the famous string of “flying saucers” witnessed by private pilot Kenneth Arnold on June 24. Just such sightings had long been anticipated by pulp science-fiction magazines, like
Amazing Stories
, and by the earlier writings of a crank named Charles Fort. Called “the world s first ufologist,” Fort reported on unidentified objects in the sky that he believed indicated visits from space aliens, reports taken from old newspaper and magazine accounts. Soon after the press release about the Roswell sighting made headlines around
the world, the young officer was reprimanded and new information was announced: the unidentified flying object had really been a weather bal-loon, said officials, and photographs of the “wreckage”—some flexible, silvery-looking material—were distributed to the press.

In 1949 came the first of the crashed- saucer hoaxes—a science- fiction movie, The
Flying Saucer
, produced by Mikel Conrad, which con-tained scenes of a purportedly captured spacecraft; an actor hired by Conrad actually posed as an FBI agent and swore the claim was true. The following year, writer Frank Scully reported in his book
Behind the Flying Saucers
that the United States government had in its possession no fewer than three alien spaceships, together with the bodies of their humanoid occupants. Scully was fed the story by two confidence men who had hoped to sell a petroleum- locating device allegedly based on alien technology (Clark 1993).

Other crash- retrieval stories followed, as did photographs of space aliens living and dead: one gruesome photo merely portrayed the charred body of the pilot of a small plane, his aviator’s glasses still visible in the picture. In 1974, Robert Spencer Carr began to promote one of the crashes from the Scully book and to claim firsthand knowledge of where the pickled aliens were stored. According to the late claimant’s son, Carr was a spinner of yarns who made up the entire story (Carr 1997). In 1977, a pseudonymous “Fritz Werner” claimed to have “assisted in the investiga-tion of a crashed unknown object” in Arizona. This included, he said, his actually seeing the body of one four- foot- tall humanoid occupant that had been placed in a tent. Unfortunately, there were suspicious parallels between the Werner and the Scully stories and other evidence of hoax-ing, including various inconsistencies in Werner’s tale.

In 1987, the author of a book on Roswell released the notorious “MJ- 12 documents,” which seemed to prove that a saucer had indeed crashed near Roswell and that its humanoid occupants really were recovered. The documents purported to show that there was a secret “Operation Majestic Twelve” authorized by President Truman to handle clandestinely the crash/retrieval at Roswell. A “briefing document” for President- elect Eisenhower was also included. However, MJ- 12 was another Roswellian hoax, the documents merely crude pasteup forgeries that utilized signatures cut from photocopies of actual letters and documents. The forger even slipped one document into the National Archives so that it could be “discovered” there. (The Archives quickly cast doubt on its authenticity.)

Forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I contributed to the evidence, conducting a lengthy, independent investigation of the documents that had me traveling to the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Our report was published in
International UFO Reporter
(Nickell and Fischer 1990; see also Nickell 1996).

In 1990, Gerald Anderson responded to an
Unsolved Mysteries
telecast about the alleged 1947 UFO crash (placing it between Roswell and Corona, New Mexico). He claimed that he and other family members, including his uncle Ted, were rock hunting in the desert when they came upon a crashed saucer with injured aliens among the still-burning wreckage. Anderson released a diary his uncle had kept that recorded the event. Alas, examination by a forensic chemist showed that the ink used to write the entries did not exist in 1947 but had first been manufactured in 1974. (Anderson claimed that the tested pages were copies, but he never made the alleged original available.)

The boldest of the Roswell hoaxes came in 1995 when an “alien autopsy” film surfaced, showing the purported dissection of a retrieved humanoid corpse (see “Extraterrestrial Autopsy? ” chapter in this book). More recently, there was the Roswell “UFO fragment” of 1996…. And so the hoaxes continue. Many ufologists have heralded the Roswell incident as providing the primary evidence for the UFO invasion of planet Earth. Supporting evidence, of course, purportedly comes from myriad UFO reports (most of which eventually become IFOs:
Identified
Flying Objects) and “alien abductions” (experiences that skeptics have shown are fantasy-based).

Ironically, the government’s claim that a weather balloon instead of a “flying disc” landed at Roswell was itself a deception although not necessarily intentional. It was not of course the grandiose cover-up of extraterrestrial visitation that conspiracy theorists now imagine. The best current evidence indicates that the crashed device was in reality a secret United States government spy balloon—part of Project Mogul, an attempt to monitor sonic emissions from anticipated Soviet nuclear tests. As a consequence of these sordid events, the Roswell incident has left a half-century legacy of bizarre cult mythology, anti-government conspiracy theories, and unrelenting sky watching by self-styled ufologists who seem to fancy themselves on the brink of a momentous discovery. What crashed at Roswell was the truth, plain and simple.

Berlitz, Charles, and William L. Moore. 1980.
The Roswell Incident
. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.

Carr, Timothy Spencer. 1997. Son of originator of “Alien Autopsy” story casts doubt on father’s credibility.
Skeptical Inquirer
21.4 (July/Aug. 1997): 31- 32.

Clark, Jerome. 1993. UFO hoaxes, in
Encyclopedia of Hoaxes
, ed. by Gordon Stein. Detroit: Gale Research, 267-78.

Korff, Kal K. 1997. What
really
happened at Roswell?
Skeptical Inquirer
21.4 (July/ Aug.): 24-30.

Nickell, Joe. 1996.
Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents
. Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky.

Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1990. The crashed-saucer forgeries.
International UFO Reporter
, March/April, 4-12.

Thurmond disputes book … 1997.
New York Times
, June 5.

Chapter 17

The subject is nothing if not controversial. On one television show an experienced detective insists that no psychic has ever helped his department solve a crime, while another broadcast features an equally experienced investigator who maintains that psychics are an occasionally valuable resource, citing examples from his own solved cases. Who is right? Is it a matter of science versus mysticism as some assert? Or is it an issue of having an open mind as opposed to a closed one, as others claim? Let’s look at the evidence.

Psychic Claims

In ancient times, those who sought missing persons or who attempted to uncover crimes could consult oracles or employ various other forms of divination, including astrology. After dowsing became popular in the sixteenth century, certain practitioners used divining rods to track down alleged culprits. Throughout the nineteenth century, certain “sensitive” persons received information regarding crimes in their dreams, while during the heyday of spiritualism, some mediums claimed to solve crimes through information provided by spirits of the dead.