The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  The respected market analyst’s tip created great consternation among clients, especially as he reminded them of his Crawford Perspectives’ warning in May 2000 of a ‘bloody bear market in six to 18 months’ - a prediction into which, in hindsight, the date 11 September 2001 snugly fits.

  In his September newsletter, released 10 days before the WTC attack, Crawford published the headline CRASH BY OCTOBER 5th? He added, ‘According to a Chinese tradition, the I Ching, or Book of Changes, we are faced with the Darkening of the Light.’

  Unashamedly basing his analysis, in part, on ancient Chinese wisdom and astrological charts, he proceeded to predict that planetary movements on 8 September would be ‘leading as to war’…that 9 September would be another turning point for markets and that financial dealings could be ‘occulted’ (hidden) on 10, 11 and 12 September.

  He further asserted that ‘warlike action’ would affect the US dollar on world markets. Toward the end of 2001 President Bush validated this prophecy by ordering the US invasion of Afghanistan - to destroy the Taliban and attempt (unsuccessfully) to capture arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden.

  In the Age (24 September 2001), Melbourne Wall Street financial commentator Brian Hale wrote, Arch Crawford’s reasoning for his market predictions was based partly on technical analysis - and largely on looking at the positions of the stars and planets.

  ‘That’s not what the major investment banks do, of course. But it’s always worth reading what Arch has to say because experience has shown that he can be more right than the rest; which is why he is always among, and often leads, the Top 10 ranks of market-timers, even for five- and 10-year periods.

  ‘He did predict the 1987 crash. He did get the 1994 bonds crisis. He did warn of the approaching Tech Wreck in 2000 - and he also got a lot of the upswings too. Nor is he always bearish.’

  * * *

  Did a White Lie Avert

  World War III?

  * * *

  For much of the 20th century, the daily threat of nuclear war hung like an evil shadow over the earth. And during that dark period few incidents posed a starker threat to humankind than the destruction of the American atomic submarine USS Scorpion. The vessel was found shattered on the Atlantic floor, her 99 crew dead. Pentagon experts speculated that she might have been sunk by a Soviet torpedo: an act of war that could have triggered a full-scale nuclear holocaust. For months, some historians believe, both sides desperately scrambled to conceal the true cause of the tragedy. Even today, with the Soviet Union long-defunct, the agreement those diplomats reached remains unknown. But it seems more than possible they concocted an untruth that spared our planet’s peoples from the misery of a nuclear winter…

  ON 17 MAY 1968 the American nuclear submarine USS Scorpion received a top-secret command. She was to proceed immediately to the Canary Islands off Africa’s east coast where a suspiciously large assemblage of Soviet warships had appeared.

  Scorpion was well-equipped for such espionage work. Aboard her was a special unit of codebreakers and linguists able to eavesdrop on Russian transmissions. She was girded also for war: her principal firepower an armoury of nuclear-tipped torpedoes.

  Doomed submarine USS Scorpion, photographed in her final days: May 1968.

  The submarine’s captain, Commander Francis Slattery, promptly obeyed the order, speeding within the hour from the US submarine base in Rota, Spain.

  Neither he nor his 98 crew would be seen alive again.

  Two weeks later, senior naval officers belatedly visited the men’s families to deliver the terrible news. Scorpion had failed to respond to all attempts at contact. She was now presumed missing; her sailors almost certainly dead.

  Its duty done to the next-of-kin, the navy then issued a statement to the press. The text was rich in sympathy but factually threadbare. For obvious security reasons the release revealed nothing about Scorpion’s orders to spy on the Russian ships. The disaster was presented as a probable accident.

  Unlike the nuclear sub USS Thresher, which had sunk in April 1963 with 136 dead, the Scorpion’s disappearance attracted relatively minor attention. The United States was distracted by the daily death-tolls of the Vietnam War and by the assassinations in April and June of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy.

  However, public interest grew keener in October, when the US Navy, after a secret five-month search, finally discovered the Scorpion’s wreckage lying three kilometres deep in the Atlantic, southwest of the Azores. All 99 men aboard had died. The navy now broke its long silence to announce, ‘While the exact cause remains undetermined, there is no information to support any theory that the submarine’s loss resulted from hostile action by a Soviet ship or submarine.’ The statement was designed to keep the American public in the dark. But ironically, the defence organisation that released it was itself being grossly deceived.

  Earlier that year, John Anthony Walker, a treacherous US Navy warrant officer, had begun to supply Soviet agents with the codes used by American submarines. From the moment the Scorpion set out on her spying mission the Russians had closely tracked her movements, with experts decrypting every message she sent or received. Scorpion had been a sitting duck.

  Three decades after Scorpion’s sinking, several retired Russian and American naval chiefs dared at last to break silence. Among the most prominent was Vice Admiral (ret.) Philip Beshany, who at the time of the crisis had worked in the Pentagon, helping direct submarine warfare programs. ‘From the beginning, our intelligence agencies feared the Scorpion was heading into trouble,’ he said. ‘Their belief was based on intercepted Soviet naval communications in the Atlantic.

  ‘There was analysis that the Scorpion had been detected by the group she had been shadowing and conceivably they had trailed her. Unconfirmed speculation suggested that not only did they track her, but attacked her.’

  The US government went to enormous lengths to conceal what really befell the Scorpion. Even the 1350-page report of a 1969 court of inquiry remained classified for 24 years. When some (but not all) of the in-camera hearing’s conclusions were published they were overwhelmingly noncommittal, speculating only that the submarine might have been blown apart by one of her own torpedoes, which - perhaps - was accidentally fired before circling around and exploding against the hull. The court also concluded that it was ‘improbable’ Scorpion sank as a result of a deliberate Russian attack. Its findings said nothing about a clash that neither side had intended to happen.

  As analysts in both Russia and USA have noted, both sides were strongly motivated to collude in a cover-up. In March - two months before Scorpion exploded - the Soviet missile submarine K-129 sank in similarly mysterious circumstances, drowning the 98 men aboard. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Russian sailors alleged in newspaper interviews and letters that an American submarine had been tracking the vessel, and had either attacked or collided with it.

  The two nations involved were well aware that such incidents could be construed as pre-emptive strikes, necessitating a nuclear response. This might well explain why such stringent secrecy was observed for so long regarding the fate of the two submarines. It’s easy to imagine diplomats from both sides sitting down in uneasy 1968 to swear a mutual vow of silence. If (as seems likely) that’s what happened, the US and Soviet leaders displayed commonsense for which we should all be grateful. Instead of descending into the hell of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) they were wise enough to abide by Winston Churchill’s dictum, ‘Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War.’

  Portrait of a Traitor

  John Anthony Walker, who made large profits selling American submarine codes to the Soviet Union, operated undetected for 18 years.

  As a 17-year-old in 1955 he was arrested for petty theft. His older brother begged the judge to allow him to join the US Navy rather than go to jail. The kindly judge agreed. It was possibly the least wise decision the American judicial system ever made.

  Walker performed brilliantly in the navy, becoming an expert in submari
ne communications. Before long he was a chief warrant officer with a top-secret security clearance. But in February 1968 his career began to fray. A bar-restaurant he was running on the side was losing money. Anxious to rescue his investment, he walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington and announced that he had secrets to sell.

  The first transaction - a radio cipher card - netted him several thousand dollars in cash. The friendly Russians advised him not to visit the embassy again. Instead they assigned a handler who met him clandestinely and provided lists of the documents and photographs his controllers most coveted.

  Before long, Walker’s restaurant was back in the black - and the Soviet Union was able to eavesdrop on every submarine in the American fleet.

  The Russians were demanding employers - and eventually Walker was obliged to hire friends and family members as assistant espionage agents. Among his new workers were his wife and his son - and importantly a close friend, chief radio operator Jerry Whitworth, who had access to highly classified satellite communications data.

  In 1976 John Walker retired from the navy, full of honours - but the spy-ring he had established continued its work under his direction. Living in lavish retirement in Indiana, he began to worry that the authorities might wonder how he afforded such luxury on a naval pension. As a cover he established himself as a charter pilot and as a private investigator. The latter business enabled him to travel regularly to Europe, where he met his Soviet handler to sell his countrymen’s safety for cash.

  Surprisingly for someone who had become a mainstay of the Communist system, Walker used his limited spare time to actively support two extreme right-wing organisations - the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan.

  By 1985 he had pocketed more than $US1 million in exchange for the thousands of technical documents and photographs he had sold to his nation’s enemies. Although the US Navy was worried by the leakage of its most prized secrets to Russia, no one thought to seek answers from a greying pensioner living in Virginia.

  It was Walker’s former wife who blew the whistle. Angered by her ex-husband’s refusal to keep up alimony payments she went to the FBI and revealed all she knew about the spy-ring.

  Walker and his associates were arrested, convicted of espionage and sentenced to multiple life terms in prison.

  KGB director Yuri Andropov, whose agents had controlled Walker’s activities, was sorry to see him go. But the relationship was to prove more valuable than Andropov could have foreseen. When Leonid Brezhnev died, the KGB man was appointed premier of the Soviet Union.

  * * *

  Nightmare in the

  Garden

  Reports from Reality’s Edge

  * * *

  On a mild spring night in 1999 Laura Jones retired early to bed. She little guessed it was the last time she would confidently close her eyes for months to come. In the black small hours Laura was jolted from sleep by the frenzied barking of her dogs. Pulling back the bedroom curtain she was astonished to see that the garden outside had been invaded, by ‘something’ so stupendously large that it numbed her with terror. From that moment onward Laura’s life would be irrevocably changed…

  IN JANUARY 2007 LAURA JONES WROTE to me to describe an experience that had haunted her for seven years.

  I have absolutely no explanation for what I’m about to tell you. All I can do is present the facts, hoping you might, to some degree, be able to throw light on what happened to me.

  I live in Kojonup, a small town in the southwest of Western Australia. When all this occurred (late October 1999) I was working at a roadhouse as a cook and was getting up very early. On this particular night, a Friday, I managed to be in bed by 9 pm and quickly fell asleep.

  At 1.30 am I was woken by my two dogs (rottweilers) going completely crazy. I could hear them running from one side of the backyard to the other and barking in a way I’d never heard before. At first I was annoyed, thinking they’d been disturbed by drunks on the road beyond the house, even though it’s 100 metres away. But then, fully awake, I realised something wasn’t right. A bright blue light was intermittently flashing into my room.

  Still lying there I assumed the police must be booking someone - but I couldn’t imagine why the dogs were still going mad. I decided I’d better bring them inside so the neighbours wouldn’t complain. I sat up in bed and pulled the curtain across to check what was going on.

  What I saw from my bedroom window I’ll never forget till the day I die.

  Witness’s sketch of the gigantic machine that hovered in her garden

  An enormous object, completely silent and shaped like a gigantic cone, was hovering in the garden, about 10-15 feet off the ground. It was covered in thousands of cylinder-shaped lights. When they came on, the light was an intense blue and everything in the garden was as sharply visible as it would be during the day. The light was intermittent, flashing on and off, and when it was off the darkness was intensely black, like a coalmine.

  The thing would have had to be 40-50 feet high and about 20 feet wide at the bottom. I was able to estimate this because the trees are about 40 feet or more.

  I stood there staring for a while, but then I knew I really should go and get the dogs in. As I passed through the family room I saw it was completely blue, and so brilliantly lit you could have read by it.

  I was scared, but I forced myself to go outside, where the dogs were still barking as frantically as ever. When I stepped out of the laundry door I was shocked at the sight of them. They had saliva pouring from their mouths and down their chests where it formed a mass of froth. I’d never seen them in that condition before. They were relieved to be let in, but they were still agitated and running around in circles, barking non-stop.

  The rottweilers ran in circles, barking non-stop.

  And then suddenly the blue light went out for the last time - and the house was in darkness, normal darkness, again.

  By this time it was 2 am. I had to leave for work in two-and-a-half hours, but I couldn’t sleep. I lay there going over and over what had appeared in my garden. I couldn’t make any kind of sense of it. Next morning at work I asked everyone if they’d seen anything, or heard reports on the radio, but with no result. When I got home I asked the neighbours. They’d slept right through it all.

  I recognised Laura as an outstanding witness with a keen sense of the importance of detail. I asked her a series of supplementary questions, the most relevant of which proved to be a query about her health, and the health of her dogs, in the weeks following the incident.

  It’s interesting you wanted to know that - I’d never have thought of it or connected the two things.* One of the dogs - a very healthy five-year-old - became extremely sick, and was diagnosed with diabetes about a month after the sighting. I developed a growth - which had not been there the previous year as I have regular routine checks. Then it turned out I had a tumour, for which I’ve now had surgery three times.

  Your questions have made me remember a number of other things that may be connected to the sighting. For quite a few months after it I sensed that I was being visited at night. I’d feel as though I was paralysed, and then I’d become aware of a figure in my room. I could never see his face.

  I have given Laura an introduction to one of Australia’s leading investigators of close-encounter cases. With his help (and possibly with the aid of a hypnotist) she may not only learn more about what happened to her in 1999, but whether related events had occurred - only to be forgotten - in her earlier life.

  The Blue Light that Stopped a Clock

  In 1992 a correspondent described to me how a supermarket alarm clock had ‘stopped for good’ after a UFO bathed it in brilliant blue light. Charles Canden of Deloraine, Tasmania, wrote:

  I was driving to Sydney when I decided to camp beside Paddy’s River. I went to sleep with my battery radio playing, but was woken around 4 am by loud bursts of static. Thinking the station was having problems I twisted the knob, but there was interference all along
the dial.

  It was only then that I noticed a blue light in the sky. At first it looked like some kind of police helicopter, but as it got closer I saw it was like a huge spinning fishbowl, with a dome on top and no windows. As the thing hovered directly above the car I could feel the hairs on my head and arms standing up on end as if a powerful vacuum cleaner was sucking at them. My dog was cowering under a tree and I could see his fur was raised up in spikes.

  What impressed me most about this incident was the deathly quiet everywhere. It was as if the whole world had suddenly been wrapped in cotton wool.

  After about two minutes the craft took off - and so did I. I grabbed the dog, packed my things into the car, and drove out of there as fast as I could. Next morning I noticed that my Westclock-brand alarm clock (which I’d recently bought from Coles) had stopped at 4.04 - roughly the time the UFO appeared. The clock had always worked perfectly - but from that day on, no amount of winding or banging would persuade it to go.

  I wrote to Sydney University, offering the clock for analysis, but got no reply.

  I’ve never thought there was anything random about what happened on that riverbank. I’ve always felt I was individually targeted for some reason - and that the destruction of the clock was somehow part of the message.’

  A Close Encounter of the

  Funereal Kind

  A Queensland undertaker and his family were bewildered when two hovering globes appeared in their garden.

  Mark Grant of Howard, Queensland, told me, ‘Over the years, whenever we looked back at the incident we’d always agree that the things had either been intelligent creatures or intelligently controlled machines: they darted around with such apparent purpose.