The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  If Amelia did go on a spy mission for Roosevelt when the 20th century was young, it’s surely safe today to lift the official veil and accord her, and Fred Noonan, the honour they deserve for the work they did - and for the brutal price they purportedly paid.

  The idealistic Amelia Earhart should have the last word here, as she did in her marriage. In a fond letter, which she bade her husband George to open after she had taken off on her final flight, she wrote:

  Please know I’m aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.

  * * *

  Triangular Evidence

  The Geometrical Markings

  on UFO Victims’ Skin

  * * *

  In the black early hours of 8 August 1993, Australians Kelly Cahill and her husband were driving home through the Dandenong Ranges when nightmare suddenly engulfed them. Ahead a circular, windowed craft was hovering above the tarmac. It swamped the car with light so blindingly bright that Kelly screamed in fear. Then blinked. Then woke, from a seemingly interminable darkness. Later, while undressing for bed, she noticed a strange triangular mark on her abdomen: a lesion she had not seen before. Through weeks of pain and illness she began gradually to recall what had happened on that lonely highway. She remembered struggling for her life against a being so impenetrably black that she would later say, ‘It had no soul.’ More darkness, then she and her husband were speaking to two women in a nearby car, who had suffered similar trauma. Doctors photographed the shocked females. All three had triangular burns on their abdomens. They had fallen prey to a sinister syndrome which has affected thousands of UFO witnesses…

  ANALYSTS REGARD the Kelly Cahill incident as one of the best-documented UFO cases recorded anywhere.

  When investigators asked Cahill and two fellow female abductees from another car to independently describe and draw the ship and its controllers, their stories and sketches matched in 20 places. All three women recalled being overpowered, then finding themselves in a grotesquely alien environment, where they were subjected to painful and disturbing procedures.

  Doctors photographed triangular burns on the woman’s abdomens.

  Industrial chemist Bill Chalker, who has devoted much of his life to the sceptical study of anomalous intrusions said, ‘This case has certainly made me rethink my position…that such reports are more about the workings of the human mind than a UFO phenomenon. I still haven’t completely eliminated psychological explanations, but it’s certainly given my theories about abductions a solid knock.’

  Keith Basterfield, director of the Australian UFO Abduction Study Centre, concurred. After spending a month working with the witnesses he said, ‘I’ve gone through all the possible psychological causes behind this sighting - but I’ve come through the other side. I can’t find a psychological explanation.’

  But most persuasive of all was the hard physical evidence that seemingly supported Kelly Cahill’s testimony:

  In the paddock where she said she had struggled with her attackers, researcher John Auchettl and a team of scientific analysts discovered a triangle of dark dead grass. Within it were traces of pyrene - a hard-to-obtain carcinogenic combination of carbon and hydrogen. Auchettl and his colleagues identified an abnormal magnetic effect within the triangle’s boundaries.

  Intensifying the mystery were the triangular burn marks that doctors had earlier found on the abdomens of the three abductees.

  Riddle of the Restless Wounds

  UFO-related skin-markings can sometimes ‘behave’ in extraordinary ways. Bronte Lloyd, 53, owner of a farm in Spalding, South Australia, not only sustained geometrical lesions following a close encounter, but was bemused to find that the marks were moving around his face.

  Bronte described his ordeal to me in February 1991:

  The troubles started about three years ago - June 18 1988. I was usually a good sleeper, but that night I was restless and worried for no reason I could think of.

  After a lot of tossing and turning I managed to drift off, but then I woke with a jolt. I couldn’t open my eyes and I had the feeling I was floating above the bed. My first thought was that I must be dead - but then I felt intense pain, as if big, vicious insects were biting my cheeks.

  I put my hands up to brush the things away, then realised they weren’t insects but two hard tubes buried in my skin. I tried to rip the tubes out, but they acted as if they were alive, writhing in my hands like snakes. As far as I can remember everything went black after that.

  Bronte Lloyd woke next morning, convinced he had experienced nothing more than a nightmare. But he quickly realised that something real, and apparently malign, had occurred.

  In the bathroom when I tried to shave, it hurt like hell. I looked in the mirror and saw that the blade had scraped across little pairs of pinpricks, painful to touch, on each cheek. Later that day I found four more pinpricks on one side of my nose. By the end of the day my face was unrecognisable, swollen up like a balloon.

  When the swelling finally went down I was left with those huge red markings on my face. I tried to work out what could have happened to me, but nothing seemed to fit. It wasn’t till three weeks later that I got a glimpse of what could be causing the pain.

  It was near nightfall. My son and I were ploughing when we heard the dogs barking in a way we hadn’t heard before. They were standing with their fur bristling, facing a grove of trees about 50 metres from our back door.

  We crept close and were rocked to see a shiny circular aircraft of some kind, sitting there on struts. We raced to the house to ring the rest of the family, who were visiting a nearby farm. But before we could get to the phone we saw two small, dark creatures, hurtling through the house in what looked like a blur of speed. Then everything went black - and the next we knew we were waking up in our beds.

  The police came to the farm and found that a large object had disturbed the ground under those trees.

  As far as the marks go - and what they’re about - that’s anyone’s guess. I’ve had a swag of pathology tests but the medics haven’t a clue what the markings are. One specialist photographed the cheek he’d taken samples from. He couldn’t believe it the next week when the mark had moved half an inch to the left.

  Bronte Lloyd said he knew other farmers who had been similarly ‘branded’: A lady living north of here had a floating experience much the same as mine. Now she has triangular marks that won’t go away.’

  Abductions ‘Began in Childhood’

  In 1992 Melbourne man Mark Hackett, 29, recalled experiences similar in certain details to those described by Bronte Lloyd. He told me:

  It was Christmas Eve last year. I was home alone, so I moved a portable TV into the bedroom. I watched till around midnight, then turned the set off and settled down to sleep.

  At about 12.10 am a bright light streamed through the bedroom window. I got up to see what was causing it and was confronted by a domed object hovering outside my window. It had three protrusions underneath and a ring of coloured lights running around the centre. The thing was obviously huge because it blocked most of my view of the mountains. I stood staring at it for a while, then I must have passed out.

  The next I knew I was awake in the morning. My first thought was that I’d dreamed the incident - but it had been so real I couldn’t really believe that. I got up and ran a bath. While soaping myself I noticed two tiny, deep circular holes on my left arm. They were far too precise and close together to be an insect bite. The skin around the holes was slightly tender.

  Mark was shaken by his experience - and anxious to understand the significance of what had happened. Knowing that many contacts of this kind are not isolated incidents, but may be part of a life-spanning pattern, I asked him to think back over his earlier years and recall any events that had seemed inexplicable.

  Well, I can remember several odd things. The most frightening was when
I was 11 years old. I’d drunk a large glass of milk before going to bed - and this made me get up at 4 am to go to the toilet. It was a very warm night, so when I returned to bed I left one leg sticking out from under the blankets.

  I’d just got comfortable when the room became icy-cold. Then something grabbed me by the neck and lifted me up from the mattress. I found myself suspended in mid-air. I was terrified, but when I tried to yell out to my parents in the next room I couldn’t produce any sounds. I was simply paralysed and floating. I was so scared that I began to weep inside myself. Whatever had hold of me seemed to take pity. It let me go and dropped me to the floor with a loud thud. Then, very gently, it picked me up again and put me back on the bed.

  My mother, who’d heard the thud, came rushing in. As soon as she opened the door, something brushed past her. I could tell by the look on her face that she knew what was wrong…that there was something in the house with us.

  Mark recalled that at about the time of this experience he became ‘quite psychic’.

  I could often tell what was going to happen - and what was going on at that moment, far away. One day I told Mum that I could see my father at work. I said, ‘He’s standing looking out of the window of the security guard’s office. He’s got a brown coffee mug in one hand and he’s looking at his watch.’ The picture was so powerful I took a note of the time. Mum checked with Dad when he arrived home - and sure enough I’d seen what he was doing, miles away, at that moment.

  The Triangle and the Opera-Singer

  The first intrusion occurred on a quiet evening in December 1987. Mrs Desley Pasini was standing in the back garden of her house in Thagoona, Queensland, when she became abruptly aware that the trees and flowerbeds around her had become brilliantly illuminated. She looked up and saw, hovering directly above the roofline, three flashing lights. They were forming a triangle in the dark sky.

  For the Pasini family it was the beginning of a period of disruption and fear. Peter Pasini, who would later become well known as a baritone and opera-singer, described how incursions by mysterious ‘visitors’ had forced him and his family to move house three times:

  In 1988, when I was 15, we were living at Rosewood, west of Ipswich. I was sitting inside the house at around 9 pm when I felt a sudden compulsion to go outside. Looking down the street I saw a golden ball of light hanging above the railway line. It seemed like some kind of aircraft, but it was totally silent. I started walking toward the light. The next thing I knew it was all around me.

  What surprised me was the peaceful relaxing feeling the light seemed to produce. Although it was brilliantly bright it didn’t hurt my eyes at all. As I stood there a human-like figure appeared. He was glowing, with a large head, teardrop eyes and a slit for a mouth. He looked at me, then everything vanished. The next I knew I was standing in the front garden shivering, with the worst headache I’d ever had in my life.

  I felt something wet and freezing on my face When I touched it I found there was a clear gel-like material clinging to my cheeks. It was then, for the first time, that I noticed my older brother Gary was with me. He said he’d seen the light too. All he could remember after that was someone massaging his feet.

  We went into the house to tell Mum, and were amazed to find she was fast asleep.

  We checked the time. It was 3 am, about six hours after I (and apparently Gary) had gone outside. We didn’t have the faintest memory of what had happened to us during those hours. When I looked in the bathroom mirror I saw a red circular mark in the middle of my forehead - and it was hurting like hell. I also had tender lumps behind both my ears.

  Singer Peter Pasini: ‘a golden ball of light was all around me.’

  For a year Peter told no one outside the family about his bizarre experience. But finally, troubled by curiosity about the ‘lost’ six hours, he acted on a friend’s advice and contacted UFO Research Queensland.

  They recommended me to a hypnotist who backtracked me to that evening. In the sessions I learned some of what happened, but not all. There was always a point where I started screaming and was too scared to keep looking at it.

  Under the hypnosis I remembered lying on a metal bed. A bright light was shining down on me. It was just like an operating theatre light, except that it was tremendously relaxing. Then a white figure was looming over me. He had the same kind of head and slanted eyes as the man I’d seen in the street. He picked up a dark grey cylinder and pointed it at me. I asked him if it would hurt. His lips didn’t move but I heard him replying in my mind, that it would be OK.

  Then he stuck the cylinder in my left ear and I blanked out. When I woke up I was looking out of a round porthole at a black sky full of stars. At that moment of the regression I always started panicking and the hypnotist had to snap me out of it. Something very frightening must have happened to me after I looked out of the porthole.

  Mrs Desley Pasini was convinced her entire family had, for some reason, been targeted for alien attention. ‘On the same night I saw the triangle over the house I noticed something else quite shocking. The palings of the back fence were about seven feet high, but I could see two grey, tremendously tall beings standing behind them. I didn’t know what they wanted of us. I hurried inside and locked the door.’

  Pyramid Shapes on a Model’s Face

  Fourteen months before farmer Bronte Lloyd was scarred in the night, the South Australian model Jillian Kass-Ross suffered a similar trauma [see photograph]. Jillian, of Mitchell Park, told me:

  It was April 1987. At about 2 in the morning I woke from a deep sleep feeling utterly terrified. A blazing orange light, which seemed as hot and bright as the sun, was shining on my face. I tried to open my eyes to see what was going on but the lids wouldn’t budge. After a few moments I went back to sleep.

  Jillian Kass-Ross: terror in the night.

  The next morning I noticed three pinpricks in a vertical row in the centre of my forehead. I didn’t think too much about them until that evening, when my face suddenly ballooned up. My doctor couldn’t work out what was wrong - and neither could the specialist he referred me to. There had been no bite and the tests showed no signs of poison.

  After a week or so the swelling subsided. But then I was distressed to see there were three deep triangular marks on my forehead.

  Several days later I took off to Egypt for a holiday - and everywhere I went, the locals would stare at my forehead, then clasp their hands in a praying position and bow. As I didn’t understand the language I couldn’t ask why they were doing it.

  ‘I began having recurring dreams, of a vividness I’d never experienced before.’

  While I was travelling through the Middle East, something else in my life changed. I began having recurring dreams, of a vividness I’d never experienced before. One dream became so familiar I almost knew it by heart…

  I’d be standing in the streets of a strange city watching a huge fireworks display. The flashes of light kept illuminating a minaret-like building on the skyline.

  I didn’t understand the dream’s significance until the following January, while I was watching the TV news. To my astonishment an image appeared that replicated what I’d seen in my dreams - missiles exploding over Baghdad and that domed building lit up.

  When Jillian returned to Australia she began to spend weekends on her small farm outside Adelaide.

  During one visit, while I was strolling around the property I came across a circle burned into the grass. I went back with a measuring tape. The circle was six metres in diameter. It was only at that point that the pieces began falling into place. I started wondering if all my experiences were somehow related to a UFO.

  At that time South Australia and neighbouring Victoria were becoming a focus for uncanny skin-brandings. Former RAAF officer Colin Norris, president of the South Australian UFO research organisation, told me that he and his associates had investigated and photographed at least a dozen people on whose skin the geometrical markings had appeared. />
  Scarred Schoolteacher Mystery

  One of the victims Norris interviewed was Jim Forbes [pseudonym], a Melbourne science teacher who presented in evidence an ugly straight-line scar on his neck. ‘This man is an outstanding witness who has given us detailed notes of his experience,’ Colin Norris told me. ‘The apparent abduction occurred at the victim’s house, in the same coastal area as the young pilot Frederick Valentich disappeared with his aircraft.’

  Jim’s ordeal began on a warm March night in 1980.

  I was at my home in Middle Park, opposite the beach. I’d been reading in bed and had fallen asleep with the lamp on.

  About 4 am. I woke suddenly and was startled to see five non-human beings at the foot of my bed. The window behind them was open. The creatures were about five feet tall, helmeted, with dark clothing. I tried to get out of bed and run - but I was totally paralysed. Then everything went black.

  I must have been unconscious for an hour or so, because when I woke, still in darkness, it was five in the morning. I was immediately aware of discomfort in my right nostril, which felt as if it had been scraped red-raw. The back of my neck was also painful - and when I manipulated a mirror I saw an unpleasant-looking straight red stripe on the skin.

  For several months after these events I was in a constant state of drowsiness and exhaustion. I’d fall asleep on trains and trams, and I’d struggle to stay awake at work.