Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious
Page 11
Mermaids and giant eels have receded in recent years; the giant octopus seems a little closer; but the regular surprises, from the coelacanth to the megamouth, indicate that the huge, barely explored territories of the great oceans are well capable of retaining many secrets even in the age of high-powered submarine technology.
Arthur C. Clarke comments:
A few years ago an oil company engineer passing through Sri Lanka told me a story which makes a splendid sequel to our programme 'Monsters of the Deep' (Chapter 4 of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World).
Everyone must have seen pictures of the enormous oil-rigs which are used for ocean drilling; some of them are as big as skyscrapers. Well, it seems that one of these rigs had a problem. The divers couldn't go down to inspect it because it was covered by an octopus! I could not discover exactly -or even approximately - what percentage of the rig was so ornamented. Of course, objects are magnified under water, and the first diver down probably did not stop to make accurate measurements.
As an inoperative rig costs a few hundred thousand dollars a day in lost revenue, the oil company, sadly but understandably, did not call for marine scientists to come and examine this splendid specimen whenever it was convenient. They shooed it away with carefully calibrated underwater explosions - without, I hope, giving it a headache.
Some new light has also been thrown on the giant squid (genus Architeuthis). These creatures of the deep apparently cannot survive long in warm waters because their blood will not transport oxygen efficiently at more than 10°C. So if you ever meet one on the surface in tropical waters (vide the chapter 'Squid' in Moby Dick), it is almost certainly dying. I would not suggest that even the most ardent conservationist attempt mouth-to-beak resuscitation.
Turning to less fearsome sea monsters (not that I would care to meet one when snorkling peacefully along the reef), I am grateful to Michel Raynal of Narbonne, France, for an item about the possible survival of Steller's sea cow. The translation is so delightful that it would be a pity to correct it:
Where are you, Steller's sea cow? (*)
'You know,' - told me once Ivan Nikiforovich Chechulin, projectionist of the Karaginskaya culture and propaganda team - 'in summer 1976, I took part in some operations during the salmon fishing season in the Anapkinskaya Bay. A team of sealers of the collective farm "Tumgutum" consisted of the local population, namely koryaks and Olutorsky Gulf inhabitants. Everybody took part in the fishery from their childhood.
Once, just after a heavy storm we noticed an unknown animal on a tidal belt, its skin was dark, its tail was forked like that one of the whale, the extremities of the animal were flippers. There were slightly noticed outlines of some round ribs. We approached the animal, touched it and were surprised as its head beared an unusual form and its snout was long. None of us has ever seen this animal.
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[*] Kamchatsky Komsomolets, Petropavlovsk, January 1977.
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'Perhaps, it was a small seal or a bearded seal, or a Steller's sea-lion' - asked me half-serious, half in joke. 'You don't say that," Chechulin felt hurt. 'Don't we know? Every one of us took part in the sealing hundred times. Small seal's blubber called by the local population "nymilan" is the best seasoning to "yukola" (local word for the dried and cured salmon) and "tolkusha" (also a local word). All marine animals are known to us.'
I showed several drawings of the Steller's sea cow to Ivan Nikiforovich, the animal whose description was firstly given in 1741 found on the Commander Islands by an eminent naturalist George Wilhelm Steller. Presently, this animal, the sea cow, bears the name of the Steller's sea cow. 'Just the same thing,' - said I. N. Chechulin examining the picture. - 'The same tail, the fore flippers and the head ... Aren't they left now?' - he asked surprised. 'Not a single one,' answered me. - Though in 1966, a Museum of local lore was created in an Ust-Pakhachinskaya school.'
TINRO scientists became interested in two school exhibits, those were bones of some marine animals. Later on, the scientists published the results of their investigations in a newspaper Kamchatskaya Pravda where they paid their attention to the fact that one of those bones appeared to be a bone of a sea cow died about 10 years ago.
For the present, the facts testify to another thing. The Steller's sea cow was fired out by hunters throughout a short term. Inhabiting lagoons in the ashore waters, where it fed on sea algae and eel grass, the Steller's sea cow was a relic and dying animal.
Presently, the skull of the Steller's sea cow is exposed in our Museum. A complete skeleton of the animal is kept in Khabarovsk Museum of local lore.
Kamchatka is studied insufficiently in biological and geographical aspects. There can be found hundreds of areas in our country seldom visited by people and where marine mammals can inhabit easily including the Steller's sea cow. These areas are lagoons, estuaries, lakes with warm water open to the sea.
The opinion of the scientists cannot be considered as a stable one for always. Let it be yet considered that the Steller's sea cow has died out. But ... to prove it finally, it is necessary to organize a special expedition. There is need to organize a great biological expedition which could start its work already in summer months 1977 throughout all regions of the Kamchatka area with application of the method elaborated by the scientists of the Kamchatka Branch of TINRO.
Undoubtedly, the youth of our area will take an active part in these investigations.
Vladimir Malukovich,
Senior Scientific Worker,
Kamchatka Museum Of Local Lore.
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6 - Supernatural Scenes
Fata Morgana
Travellers and explorers love to report curious sights, but some of the things they describe are decidedly stranger than others. Consider these weird tales.
On 24 June 1906 Robert E. Peary, who later claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole, spotted through his field glasses, far away on the Arctic horizon, 'the faint white summits of a distant land'. Four days later, according to his diary, from Cape Thomas Hubbard (on the edge of the polar ice) Peary saw the mysterious mountains again, more clearly, to the north-west. 'My heart leaped the intervening miles of ice as I looked longingly at this land, and in fancy trod its shores, and climbed its summits, even though I knew that that pleasure could be only for another in another season.'
Pausing only to name his discovery 'Crocker Land', after his expedition's sponsor, Peary pushed on towards the Pole, convinced that he had found an unknown island or even an uncharted continent. 'Crocker Land' duly appeared on US Hydrographic Office maps; but in 1914 an expedition sent to explore it found not a single trace of Peary's 'discovery'. After a gruelling journey over 150 miles of treacherous Arctic ice, the baffled explorers concluded that 'Crocker Land' simply did not exist.
On the other side of the world, in January 1915, Frank Worsley, captain of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated ship Endurance, noted as he sailed along the Antarctic coast: 'Inshore appears a beautiful dazzling city of cathedral spires, domes and minarets.' And yet, as Worsley well knew, there were no such buildings anywhere in the vast ice deserts surrounding the South Pole.
One August day in the seventeenth century an Italian priest, Father Angelucci, was looking out to sea across the Strait of Messina, which divides the southern tip of Italy from Sicily. Suddenly a shimmering city rose up before him from the midst of the waters. Its pillars, arches and aqueducts were dominated by glittering castles; but within minutes, as Father Angelucci watched in wonder, the magnificent metropolis had vanished.
Almost 300 years later, in the summer of 1929, villagers from Niemiskylia, central Finland, picking berries in the nearby Osmankisuo swamp, watched in amazement as 'an obscure dark mass' on the north-eastern horizon turned rapidly into 'a most wonderful city with its buildings, squares and streets'. In it, they told a reporter from the Iisalmen Sanomat newspaper, they could see people 'on their Sunday morning stroll'. One well-travelled berry-picker identified the city as far-off Ber
lin, complete with the Unter den Linden and its famous zoo.
In 1852 a Mr M'Farland, in a report to the British Association, described this charming scene; it unfolded as he stood with a party of friends upon a rock at Portbalintrea, Ireland. They
perceived a small roundish island as if in the act of emerging from the deep, at a distance of a mile from the shore; at first it appeared but as a green field, afterwards it became fringed with red, yellow and blue; whilst the forms of trees, men and cattle rose upon it slowly and successively; and these continued for about a quarter of an hour, distinct in their outlines, shape and colour; the figures, too, seemed to walk across it, or wandered among the trees, the ocean bathed it around, the sun shone upon it from above; and all was fresh, fair, and beautiful, till the sward assumed a shadowy form, and its various objects, mingling into one confused whole, passed away as strangely as they came.
These sights can be explained. The spangled 'cities' of the Antarctic and the Strait of Messina, Mr M'Farland's green and pleasant 'island', Peary's evanescent 'Crocker Land', even the 'Berlin townscape' that so astonished the berry-pickers of the Osmankisuo swamp, were all mirages created by peculiar atmospheric conditions. The travellers were all fooled because these mirages were of a particularly rare and spectacular type, known as the 'Fata Morgana', first accurately described by Father Angelucci and so called because passing Crusaders in the Middle Ages imagined the illusory turrets to be the legendary citadel of Morgan Le Fay, King Arthur's evil sister and a sorceress with a penchant for luring sailors to their doom. Simple mirages are common.
Drivers are used to seeing what looks like a pool of water ahead of them on a hot, dry road. The pool, of course, does not exist. What they are really seeing is the sky, 'reflected' in the layer of air heated by the ground. This is called an 'inferior mirage'. A 'superior mirage' is caused by a 'reflection' in a layer of warm air high above the ground. The 'Fata Morgana' is a much weirder and far more complicated type of mirage which occurs when unusual variations in atmospheric temperature create blurred and uneven 'reflections' of the sea.
Phantom Houses
Explanations for other 'phantom scenes' are more difficult to find. Often, after failing to find answers in the natural world, investigators have turned instead to the supernatural, sometimes with unexpected results.
In 1961, in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Rosalind Heywood, a prominent investigator of the paranormal, published a curious story told to her by a Mr and Mrs Fraser.
Six years earlier, on a Friday evening in November, the Frasers had been driving to Herstmonceux, Sussex, for a weekend in the country. About an hour and a half outside London they spotted a 'lovely old country house' hotel.
It was covered with lichen, [said Peggy Fraser] and its windows were lighted with a diffused light that speaks of comfort and welcome. There was a gravel drive leading to the porticoed entrance and on the left was built a low sloping-roofed addition with the words 'American Bar' in neon lighting. I can see as if it was only a moment ago the small red-shaded lamps and the bar and bottles and small inviting tables.
To the couple's regret, it was not the hotel where they had booked to stay; but they decided to come back later to sample the ambience and drink a nightcap after dinner. But that evening, although the Frasers tried repeatedly to find it again, the quaint hotel seemed to have vanished into thin air. Said Mrs Fraser:
We talked of nothing else that weekend and my husband was annoyed, for he felt such a thing should not have happened to him of all people. Since that time we have made many journeys along that road to visit my parents in Hastings and each time we have looked for the hotel but we have never seen it again.
The Frasers' was not the first 'phantom hotel' to have attracted the attention of psychical researchers. In 1933 a Mr and Mrs Clifford Pye were travelling round Cornwall by train and bus. Just outside Boscastle, as the bus paused for a moment to let off a passenger, the couple noticed what they took to be a splendid guest-house surrounded by a beautiful garden full of scarlet geraniums. Chairs and tables were set out on the lawn beneath black and orange umbrellas. Mrs Pye announced that it would be an ideal stopping-place for the night, but at that moment the bus moved on and took them into Boscastle. Later, when they tried to find the guest-house, they could see no trace of it, and further searches in the surrounding area proved fruitless.
The Pyes' story caused some excitement among psychical researchers, for they hailed it as an example of a rare phenomenon, a 'collective hallucination'. These are greatly prized, for the theory goes that while an apparition reported by an individual may exist only in the mind of the beholder, one seen by more than one person may have an objective reality. But the excitement was misplaced, for the Pyes' guest-house and the Erasers' country hotel turned out to exist after all.
Denys Parsons, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, was impressed by the detail of the Erasers' story. He was sure that they must have seen a real building, and confirmed his suspicions by the simple expedient of writing a letter to the East Sussex police. The 'phantom hotel', they replied, was a fifteenth-century tea-house called Waldernheath. It stood on the road the Erasers had taken and matched their description almost exactly, except in one inexplicable detail: Waldernheath had no bar and therefore no neon sign.
After a visit to the area and 'an excellent meal in the "non-existent building",' Parsons concluded that the Erasers' powers of observation were clearly first-class - their description of the 'hotel', which they had only seen from a moving car and during a torrential downpour, was accurate in almost every respect. What surprised him was 'their failure to identify a building which turns out to be not only where they thought it was but which tallies with eighteen out of twenty-one of the mental images they associated with it'.
As a result of Denys Parsons' revelations, the file on the Boscastle 'guest-house' was reopened, and an investigation by another member of the Society for Psychical Research, Miss A.M. Scott-Eliott quickly cleared up this case too. After a visit to Boscastle, she reported that the building which the Pyes had glimpsed from the bus did indeed exist. It was called Melbourne House and stood halfway down a steep hill into the village. Miss Scott-Eliott even established that red geraniums had been growing in the garden at the time of the Pyes' visit.
So why had they been unable to find it when they retraced their journey? For one thing, Melbourne House was almost totally hidden behind a hedge and a high wall. It would have been difficult for anyone on foot to see it, especially if they had been going up the hill and not down, as the Pyes had done in the bus. Secondly, there had never been any tables with black and orange umbrellas in the garden: these had been outside a cafe further down the hill and had somehow been 'transported' in the minds of the visitors to the lawn of Melbourne House.
Finally, the place was not a guest-house at all, but a private home. Perhaps the Pyes' eagerness to find somewhere pleasant for the night had caused them to assume that it did take guests. Since their first impressions of the place had been so inaccurate, it was hardly surprising that, even if the couple did catch a glimpse of Melbourne House during their search, they failed to associate it with the 'guest-house' that had seemed so welcoming from the bus.
In retrospect, the psychical researchers to whom the stories were first told may have been too uncritical in publishing them as evidence of collective hallucinations, and simple checks like a letter to the local police or a thorough search of the area by an independent investigator would have cleared up the mysteries long before they were enshrined in print. Denys Parsons pointed up the lesson:
We should indeed accord almost zero value to the type of statement with which accounts of such 'hallucination' cases always conclude: 'Although we searched everywhere and made all sorts of enquiries, the building had vanished without trace.' The layman knows neither how to search nor how to make enquiries ... Let us resolve to be more fussy about alleged hallucinations.
Today's researchers have t
aken the hint, and a remarkable story told by two married couples from Dover is being rigorously investigated. This, arguably the strangest of all tales of 'phantom scenery', began in October 1979 while Geoff and Pauline Simpson and Len and Cynthia Gisby were driving through France en route to a holiday in Spain. Late in the evening they turned off the autoroute near Montelimar and tried to find rooms at a nearby motel, the Ibis, but it was fully booked. Instead they were told to 'try down the road'. A short drive brought them to a long two-storeyed stone building fronting directly on to the highway. The travellers parked their car in the lay-by opposite and Len Gisby went in. He found himself in a large room that housed a bar. Then the patron appeared and indicated that there were rooms available (he spoke no English and the travellers knew very little French).
The place struck the couples as quaintly - almost comically - old-fashioned. The bedroom windows were unglazed but fitted with double shutters. The sheets were of heavy calico and there were bolsters instead of pillows. In the bathroom the travellers were amused to see that the soap was impaled on an iron rod. But the place was comfortable and clean and, after a dinner of steak, eggs, pommes frites and beer, they went to bed, relieved to have found somewhere for the night.