by Joe Nickell
Finnan, Mark. 1997. Oak Island Secrets, rev. ed. Halifax, N.S.: Formac.
“Freemasonry.” 1978. Collier’s Encyclopedia.
Furneaux, Rupert. 1972. The Money Pit Mystery. New York: Dodd, Mead.
Hamill, John, and Robert Gilbert. 1998. Freemasonry. North Dighton, Mass.: J.G. Press, 228, 241,245.
Harris, R.V. 1958. The Oak Island Mystery. Toronto: Ryerson.
Hunter, C. Bruce. 1996. Masonic Dictionary, 3rd ed. Richmond, Va.: Macoy.
Lester, Ralph P. ed. 1977. Look to the East! rev. ed. Chicago: Ezra A. Cook. Macoy, Robert. 1908. Illustrated History and Cyclopedia of Freemasonry. New York: Macoy.
Masonic Heirloom Edition Holy Bible. 1964. Wichita, Kans.: Heirloom Bible Publishers.
Morris, W.J. n.d., Pocket Lexicon of Freemasonry Chicago: Ezra A. Cook.
Nickell, Joe. 1980. “Uncovered—The Fabulous Silver Mines of Swift and Filson” Filson Club History Quarterly 54 (Oct.): 325-345.
———. 1982a. Barbados’ restless coffins laid to rest. Fate, Part I, 35.4 (April): 50-56; Part II, 35.5 (May): 79-86.
———. 1982b. Discovered: The secret of Beale s treasure, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 90, no. 3 (July): 310-24.
———. 2000. Canada’s mysterious Maritimes. Skeptical Inquirer 24 (Jan./Feb.):15-19.
O’Connor, D’Arcy. 1988. The Big Dig New York: Ballantine.
Preston, Douglas. 1988. Death trap defies treasure seekers for two centuries. The Smithsonian. June, 53-63.
Randle, Kevin D. 1995. Lost Gold & Buried Treasure. New York: M. Evans and Co., 75-107.
Revised Knight Templarism Illustrated. 1975. Chicago: Ezra A. Cook.
Rosenbaum, Ron. 1973. The mystery of Oak Island. Esquire 79 (Feb.): 77-85, 154-57.
Sora, Steven. 1999. The Lost Treasure of the Knights Templar. Rochester, Vt.: Destiny.
Waite, Arthur Edward. 1970. A New Encyclopedia of Freemasonry, vols. 1 and 2. New York: Weathervane.
Chapter 38
Enigma of the Crystal Tears
Gosh, I thought, after watching an episode of the then-new Fox TV series, Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal Those Office of Scientific Investigation and Research (O.S.I.R.) types sure seem cool. “Case file 20168, ” they would begin. They would make sure their phone calls went out over “secure lines”—real “secret agent-y” stuff. And the equipment O.S.I.R. uses, like Magnetometers—wow! According to the Psi Factor Web page, these are used because “Fluctuations in the magnetic spectrum are common in coincidence with anomalous activity.” Really? I don’t think there’s evidence that ghosts have magnetic personalities, but I’ve always wanted to talk like that. I began to dream of the possibilities…..
Suddenly, I perceived a dark shape approaching. Was it real or—? I broke off in mid-thought to reach for an O.S.I.R. Spectral Photometer, a “sophisticated device ” that is used to “determine whether unusual phenomena is [sic] real or if the phenomenon is a purely subjective experience.” It showed I was right: I was dreaming. Then I realized I wasn’t in a Psi Factor episode; and the dark shape wasn’t the host, “actor/writer/producer/musician Dan Aykroyd, a lifelong student of the paranormal. ” It was actually Barry Karr, CSICOP’s executive director, leaning over me. Apparently I had fallen asleep at my desk again. I raised my head, pushed aside my Maltese Falcon paperweight, and asked, “What is it, shweetheart?”
“Martini lunch again?” he asked. I let that pass. “Here’s the video from New York you’ve been expecting, ” he said, and walked off.
“Oh, yeah. ” Now it was coming back to me. I had agreed to look into the case of a young Lebanese girl who “miraculously ” produced “crystal tears ” from her eyes. A Brazilian TV production company—the largest in South America—was doing the story and wanted our view. They had rushed the video from their New York office.
Now I knew why I was thinking of Aykroyd. Episodes of his new Fox TV series Psi Factorare “fictionalized ” from “closed cases ” taken from the files of O.S.I.R., a group whose “methods and technical support run the gamut, from state-of-the-art science to folklore and mystic philosophy. ” Their “lab facilities ” (and tarot-card divination quarters?) are located in “Central California. ” (Where better to mix science with mystic philosophy?) (Psi Factor Web page, 1996) It’s pretty easy to see why they use the term “fictionalized. ” One episode features a meteorite that has brought with it some huge eggs. These hatch into gargantuan fleas that kill a team of NASA scientists. (Psi Factor1996) (Does NASA know about this?) Aykroyd hosts the show, which is coproduced by his brother, another man, and a magician named Christopher Chacon. Chacon—to finally get to the point—is supposedly a professional conjurer who investigates paranormal claims. One of these was an earlier case of “crystal tears ” that was featured on TV’s Unsolved Mysteriesin 1990. It gives us a chance to assess Chacon’s critical acumen—or lack thereof.
The program heralded “a woman named Katie, ” whom her psychiatrist—paranormal enthusiast Berthold Schwarz—described as “a great, classical physical medium ” and “a medical marvel. ” She demonstrated a wide variety of alleged psychic phenomena, notably producing “apports ”—such as a “glass stone, resembling a diamond ” that supposedly materialized from her eye. Schwarz gushed his approval and stated he could not envision trickery being involved, although Katie’s effects seemed to skeptics to be on a par with the efforts of a beginning conjurer. For example, the glass gem was never seen in her eye; rather, she covered her eye with her hand and then opened her fingers, whereupon the object fell from between them. Seen in slow motion, the effect was entirely consistent with the object having been hidden between her fingers. Indeed, at the behest of CSICOP, magician Bruce Adams demonstrated the trick for the Unsolved Mysteries program. However, before approaching CSICOP, the producer of the program had sought out Christopher Chacon. He responded to Katie’s effects by stating: “From my observations I don’t feel that she is, at present, utilizing magical abilities to produce the materials that she is producing. I don’t think she is skilled in those particular aspects of sleight of hand or illusion. ” (Chacon 1990)
Figure 38.1. “Crystal tears ”—actually, natural quartz crystals known as “Herkimer diamonds ”—are obtained.
I don’t know whether or not Chacon works for O.S.I.R., but if Dan Aykroyd and his Psi Factor are relying on Chacon’s critical skills, they might wish to reconsider. (Incidentally, Chacon’s segment was not aired but was instead replaced by the one featuring CSICOP’s duplication of Katie’s major effects.) (Unsolved Mysteries1990)
I have presented this 1990 case not only for the light it sheds on the new television series but also because it serves as a useful introduction to the case at hand—that of the girl who produces “crystal tears. ” As shown on a Globo International documentary, a twelve-year-old girl named Hasnah, who lives in Lebanon’s fertile Bekaa Valley, has the apparent ability to produce small crystal stones from her eyes. No sleight of hand is involved, since the camera zooms in close as the girl’s father gingerly pulls down her lower eyelid and a crystal comes into view. It then pops out, whereupon it is shown to be a hard, faceted rock whose sharp points can cut paper. Her father believes the appearing crystals represent “a gift from Allah. ” Lebanese ophthalmologists say the stones are “crystal rocks, ” but otherwise they are reportedly unable to explain the phenomenon.
Figure 38.2. The author demonstrates how the lower eyelid is pulled out and a crystal inserted.
Figure 38.3. A tug on the lower lid causes the crystal “tear ” to come into view. (Photos for the author by Tom Flynn)
Hasnah, who claims to produce up to seven crystals a day, showed a collection of the allegedly apported rocks. From their rhomboidal shape and other properties, I recognized them as types of natural quartz crystals that are generally known as “Herkimer diamonds. ” With the television crew being expected to arrive here the following day, I hastily made some phone calls and soon had acquired a handful of the g
emstones. (See figure 38.1.)
Although such stones are indeed sharp—and I could see a dark red spot inside the girl’s eyelid that probably represented a wound from one of them—I decided to duplicate the effect. All that was necessary was to pull out the lower eyelid to form a pouch and drop in a small crystal so that it rested, only a bit uncomfortably, out of sight (figure 38.2). A tug on the lower lid causes the stone to come into view (figure 38.3) and then pop out of the eye. This I demonstrated at an appropriate time for the television camera, allowing their reporter to actually do the extraction himself. The effect was indistinguishable from the Lebanese “miracle. ”
The final product appeared on the Globo program “Fantastico, ” described by one correspondent (who sent e-mail to Barry Karr) as “one of the most popular programs in Brazil. ” He remembered the appearance of a CSICOP magician but not the name. (How fleeting is fame!) He found it an “interesting report ” and offered a prediction that actually came true: that we would receive a number of subscription orders from it (Karr 1996). Maybe soon we can buy some of that fancy O.S.I.R. equipment to play with.
References
Chacon, Christopher. 1990. Unused outtake for Unsolved Mysteries. Oct. (Copy in CSICOP Video Archive.)
“Fantastico. ” 1996. Brazil: Globo International Television, Oct. 13.
Karr, Barry. 1996. Personal communication, Oct. 15.
Psi Factor: Chronicles of the Paranormal.1996. “File no. 33130, ” Nov. 2.
Psi Factor Web page. 1996.http://www.psifactor.com/. The World Wide Web. Nov. 4.
Unsolved Mysteries.1990. Oct. (Copy in CSICOP Video Archives.)
Chapter 39
Death of the
Fire-Breathing Woman
Spontaneous human combustion (SHC) cases continue to spark controversy (so to speak), largely due to the efforts of nonscientist authors and journalists. These include self-styled British paranormal researchers Jenny Randles and Peter Hough (Spontaneous Human Combustion 1992), Pennsylvania school bus driver Larry Arnold (Ablaze! 1995), English coalminer-turned-constable John E. Heymer (The Entrancing Flame1996), and—more recently—the producers of A 8c E networks TV series, The Unexplained. The continued lack of scientific evidence for SHC (Benecke 1998) keeps proponents desperately looking for cases they can attribute to the alleged phenomenon—cases that are often quite disparate. They assign instances of unusual burning deaths to SHC rather like one might blame freak auto accidents on the Highway Gremlin. (For a discussion, see Nickell and Fischer 1987 and Nickell 1996.)
The case of Jeannie Saffin, included in Heymer (1996,179-88) and Arnold (1995,208-9), is quite instructive. Because the source of the body’s ignition is not obvious in Saffin’s death, paranormalists are especially quick to propose SHC. In doing so, of course, they engage in a logical fallacy called argumentum ad ignorantiam (literally, “arguing from ignorance”), since one cannot prove a cause from a lack of facts. The case also illustrates how crucial details may be omitted and how accounts become exaggerated over time; therefore, it demonstrates the consequent need to return to original sources.
Jean Lucille “Jeannie” Saffin was a sixty-one-year-old English woman with the mental age of a child, due to brain damage from a forceps delivery at birth. Her mother having died the previous year, she lived with her eighty-two-year-old father and a brother at the family home in Edmonton, north London. On Wednesday, September 15, 1982, a hot, humid day, Jeannie was sitting with her father in the kitchen. The windows were open. Suddenly, at about 4:15 p.m., Jack Saffin’s attention was directed to his daughter—who was ablaze. He shouted to his son-in-law, Don Carroll, who had been doing some work in the house and was just returning from upstairs, and the two men put out the fire with water. Carroll phoned for an ambulance, which arrived quickly, and Jeannie was transported to North Middlesex Hospital. She was later transferred to the burn unit at Mount Vernon Hospital, where she died nearly eight days later at 8:10 a.m. on September 23. The cause of death was listed as “broncho-pneumonia due to burns.”
To proponents of SHC, however, the case is a spine-tingling mystery. In a chapter devoted to Jeannie Saffin’s death, Heymer expresses “puzzlement about the source of her burns” (1996,186), and he includes a statement by Don Carroll, who says “there was nothing alight in the kitchen except the pilot light on the grill.” Even so, Carroll insists that he saw “flames coming out of her mouth and her midriff.” Indeed, he says, “the flames were coming from her mouth like a dragon and they were making a roaring noise.” Yet, he insists, “Her clothes did not burn much at all” (Carroll 1994). Heymer emphasizes the latter point, insisting it is “a mystery how she came to be burned inside unburned clothes” (original emphasis; Heymer 1996,187).
Arnold essentially repeats the claims, obtaining his information largely from Heymer and apparently doing little actual investigation of his own. He writes: “As the men battled to save Lucille [sic], the son-in- law swore that ’she had flames roaring from her mouth like a dragon.’” He adds: “Ambulance men … noticed there was no smoke damage in the kitchen; that her clothing was not burned. Only a portion of her red nylon cardigan only [sic] had melted” (Arnold 1995, 208-09).
Certainly the case sounds impressive—at least until we go back to original sources, whereupon we obtain quite a different picture. First, regarding the allegedly unburned clothing, there is the signed statement Don Carroll gave to authorities soon after his sister-in-law’s death. In that account from twelve years earlier, he noted that “Her clothes were in ribbons and were charred black. She was black as well. She started to try to pick her clothes off herself but I told her to stop” (Carroll 1982). In addition, a typed account by Constable Leigh Marsden stated: “The clothes were still burning when I got there. I pulled off the rest of her clothes. She and her clothes were burning. I put it out with a towel” (Marsden 1982). The ambulance attendants supposedly reported that Jeannie Saffin’s clothing had not burned, but what they actually wrote was that she was “wearing nylon clothes, not on fire” (Heymer 1996,186)—obviously meaning “no longer on fire,” not “unburned.” It is disingenuous to state, as Heymer does, that the nylon cardigan was “melted not burned” (Heymer 1996,186). In addition to the cardigan, her clothing consisted of a cotton apron and dress (Marsden 1982; Heymer 1996,196).
As to Mr. Carroll’s statements about the fire, the flames probably did appear to come from Ms. Saffin’s midriff. That may have been where the nylon cardigan began burning. Also, flaming blobs of melting nylon may have caused the burns on the victim’s “front of left thigh” and, after she stood up, on her “left buttock” and “patches on the right knee”—as related in the autopsy report. Since damage is greatest above a flame rather than below it, it is not surprising that there were also “Full to partial thickness burns on the face, neck, both shoulders, front of upper chest” and “patchily distributed on the abdomen” as well as “affecting both hands” (see “Post-Mortem” 1982). ( “Full thickness burns” mean the skin is destroyed down to the underlying fat.)
As to the flames issuing from her mouth “like a dragon,” that claim is not supported by the medical evidence. A report from Mount Vernon Hospital to the coroner’s office stated that when the victim arrived at the burn unit “There was soot in her nose, but the back of the mouth appeared undamaged” (Whitlock 1982). This was confirmed by the autopsy. Except for the bronchopneumonia (with the inflammation of the trachea and bronchi) there was “no evidence of natural disease”; neither, it may be added, was there any indication of internal combustion. To the contrary, the autopsy report confirmed “Total body surface burns being about 30-40% ” (emphasis added; Post-Mortem 1982).
But what of Don Carroll’s description of the flames being expelled from Ms. Saffin’s mouth and “making a roaring noise? ” (Carroll 1994) That may have been the effect on Carroll—especially after twelve years’ reflection. Those details are absent from his original statement to the police. However, Carroll does say in his later statement that, a
t the hospital, despite her head being swathed in bandages, “I could see into Jeannie’s mouth and the inside of her mouth was burnt” (Carroll 1994). It is possible that Ms. Saffin was breathing excitedly so that the flames attacking her face were partially drawn into, then expelled from her mouth. Heymer (1996, 195) agrees with this possibility. As to the alleged “roaring,” although a doctor reportedly told Carroll he must be mistaken (Arnold 1995,208), and even though he is admittedly technically deaf, “Even so, I heard the sound of the flames coming from Jeannie,” he says (Carroll 1994). Possibly due to expectation and the interrelationship of the senses, he simply thought the flames roared.
The medical evidence makes clear that the fire was not internal but, instead, that Jeannie Saffin suffered external burning as a result of her clothing catching fire. As usual, SHC proponents are unable to imagine how that could have occurred. But a clue comes from Carroll’s original report in which he states, “I made a point of checking on the gas cooker and saw that it was not on and saw that my father-in-law had his pipe in his hand and I checked it and saw that it was fresh tobacco which had not been lit” (Carroll 1982). At first sight this seems to rule out the pipe, and indeed there is no further mention of it—by Carroll (1994), Heymer (1996), or Arnold (1995). Yet Her Majesty’s coroner for Greater London (Western District), John Burton, told Arnold, “we usually find some smoking material, particularly in the immobile or elderly victim” (Burton 1996). The pipe represents just the type of smoking material one looks for, and Carroll’s insistence that it was freshly filled and unlit nevertheless begs the question, did the elderly Mr. Saffin previously knock the hot ashes from his pipe, and in the process, did an ember land in Jeannie Saffin’s lap? To this very plausible scenario we must add the fact that the kitchen window and door were open, as was the back door, so that there was the potential for a draft. This could easily have caused the smoldering clothing to flare up.