The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

The next contact I can remember came just over three years later, in May 1983. A music teacher friend gave me a lift to Adelaide in his VW Passat. As we approached Ballarat in the pre-dawn darkness we both saw an intense white light. At first we took no notice, thinking it was a police helicopter, But as we got closer I could see a solid object shining two white pencil beams down onto the other side of the dual highway.

  I told my friend to stop the car. As soon as he’d pulled over onto the gravel I got out and - for reasons I can’t explain - stood with my hands on the VW’s roof. The ship moved to within 20 metres of me - and I saw its details, which will stay with me forever. It was a silvery-white cylinder, at least 30 metres in length. It had large oblong windows glowing violet along the sides. As it passed the car it made a swishing sound. I had a powerful impulse to cross the road and stand under the object, but I resisted.

  The cylinder cruised above the bitumen, heading toward Melbourne, and finally disappeared.

  When I got back into the car my companion was sitting staring ahead. I started to discuss the cylindrical object, but he looked blank and said, ‘I only saw a light.’ Soon afterward, the Passat developed electrical problems - something that had never happened before.

  On the morning the teachers’ highway encounter occurred, local TV and radio reported multiple UFO sightings over nearby Bendigo. Analysts surmise that ‘missing time’ was involved in this case. They think it’s possible Jim Forbes was abducted from beside his friend’s car, then returned to the passenger seat, with both men’s memories having been expunged.

  The Uncanny Intelligence Test

  In 1992 Colin Norris, aided by two scientific analysts, audiotaped one of the most bizarre testimonies in his investigative career. The interviewees were a van driver, Don, and a retired piano teacher, Jack, who shared a property beside the Murray River. The men claimed they had been abducted and forced to undergo hours of psychological testing aboard an alien craft.

  UFO investigator Colin Norris.

  A medical specialist who examined the pair after their alleged ordeal noted a spectrum of perplexing physical effects. The men’s skins were jaundiced - and both had ‘peculiar half moon-shaped swellings’ under their eyes. The specialist could offer no explanation for these grotesque changes.

  On the tape Jack says:

  Several days before we were kidnapped we were aware something odd was going on. We’d find our roof antenna had been spun around to face in the opposite direction. I climbed up several times and tightened the clamps till the nuts were biting into the fascia board. But next day, although the screws were still tight, it would swing round again.

  After that, strange-looking people began appearing behind the house. They seemed constantly to be fiddling with the five-metre-high hot water service tower. Then one night, just as we were preparing dinner, they burst in. It started with the venetian blinds shooting up of their own accord - then the next we knew, two squat men were inside. The dog, a half-corgi, was so scared he hid under a chair.

  One of the intruders pointed a chrome device, like a torch, at me and my eyes began to itch unbearably. Then there was a gap and we found ourselves standing beside some kind of large oval craft. One of the men sprayed us with a pressure-pack and ushered us through a narrow doorway and into a cabin, where we fell into soft seats.

  Don described the ship’s interior:

  We were in a long cockpit with three sets of controls and a silver wheel with two spokes, which resembled a car’s steering wheel. Above our heads was a transparent dome through which the moon was shining. A few drops of rain spotted down onto it.

  The cabin was bitterly cold. When I complained, one of the men said that was the normal temperature where they came from. He talked in clicking sounds, but I could understand him inside my head. He allowed me to go back to the house, accompanied by one of the women, to get pullovers for myself and Jack. Then I was back in the cockpit where Jack was saying his feet were frozen numb.

  After that we took off in a nauseating spiral. Through the canopy I could see the neighbours’ houses and a caravan pulling up beside the river far below.

  The men claim, in the recording, that the aliens next took them to a rectangular room where they were subjected to an apparent intelligence test. Don continues:

  When we entered, it was like stepping into an unlit cellar. The room was pitch-black. Then one of our captors said, ‘Now we’ll teach you to see in the dark.’ Suddenly I could see everything clearly.

  They sat me at a table and asked me to press a plastic-type switch repeatedly. This released two small cups which rolled toward me. The men ordered me to place certain cups, which were made of a glassy material, to the left of me and to crush the other cups with my right hand. When I did this, the latter cups dissolved into powder which quickly vanished. But whenever I got it wrong - and I often did - they’d say, ‘You missed that one.’

  According to my watch they kept me doing this from 1 am to 7 am. The next day I could hardly bend my aching arms.

  At last someone said, ‘He’s tired - let him stop.’ Then someone gave me a peculiar soft drink. It tasted like sugary water but it was refreshing. After that I blacked out and the next I knew Jack and I were sitting back at the kitchen table.

  Colin Norris heard about the alleged abduction when the men were admitted to hospital. He persuaded them to describe their experiences on tape before witnesses while the memories remained vivid. ‘We believe there’s a reasonable degree of external evidence to back this report,’ he told me. ‘The doctors’ tests indicated the men had suffered an unusual form of trauma. And according to the local people, glowing red UFOs were widely reported over the area for weeks before the abduction.

  ‘There were also some decidedly unusual after-effects. The victims reported that for several days after they returned home, bubbles would form in anything they drank. Whether they had tea or coffee or simple tap water it would be full of effervescence.’

  A Skin-Mark Carved in 1937

  Mrs Jean Franklin of Richmond, Tasmania, quite regularly astonished TV and radio audiences with her predictive abilities. She often succeeded, months ahead of the events, in predicting aviation disasters, major international earthquakes and even (like Jillian Kass-Ross) the first Gulf War.

  When I interviewed Jean she had no difficulty in explaining her psychic gifts. They were linked, she claimed, to the small triangular scar on the left side of her head - a lesion she had carried since she was eight years old. Jean was convinced that the beings which carved that scar had implanted a mind-altering device beneath it:

  Clairvoyant Jean Franklin: stamped with a strange scar from childhood.

  I was an extremely unremarkable child, living in Essex, England. But that changed to a quite considerable extent on a summer afternoon in 1937. I was in a meadow picking bluebells when I noticed a shape looming above me.

  I still vividly remember the thing all these years later. To my childish eyes it resembled a round house, incredibly made of silver, standing on stilts, with its walls flashing in the sun. In those days the terms ‘flying saucer’ and ‘UFO’ were yet to be invented - so there was no thought in my mind that I was looking at an aircraft. I dropped my flowers and stood there gaping, unable to understand how this strange building had appeared so suddenly. I wanted to run away but my limbs seemed to be frozen.

  Then a platform descended from the silver structure and three tall red-uniformed men stepped down. I believed in that moment that I’d never see my parents again.

  …The first thing I noticed when we entered the craft was its huge internal size. On the exterior it had seemed no bigger than a cottage - but inside it was so vast you couldn’t see the far wall. From the first moment, my abductors began putting me through some kind of drill. First they made me sit in a moulded chair which had risen from the floor. Then they shone a dazzlingly bright light on me. This had the effect of filling my mind with thoughts and scenes I’d never imagined before.*

/>   NOTE: In my book Great Australian Mysteries 2 electronics apprentice Andrew Wilson describes a similar experience. An ‘alien entity’ invading his Adelaide house announced its intention to show him pictures. ‘She produced a stick of whitish-looking metal and placed its tip, which seemed to be brass or copper, on my forehead. Immediately I felt…I was on my back, looking up at a beautiful sunset. The few clouds in the sky were coloured deep crimson or orange. I stared into that sky…’ In his accompanying sketch [reproduced here] Andrew includes what he describes as ‘the picture-stick’ plus the crude triple-triangle the entity introduced into his left side.

  Finally they took me to a place where an enormous pyramid stood and indicated with gestures that I should enter. I wandered through the corridors of that dark and very frightening pyramid for hours. But at last I found a door and was back in the brilliant sunshine of the meadow, surrounded by bluebells and wild primroses.

  Before the UFO encounter Jean, by her own account, was ‘an ordinary little girl’. But she remembered, from the moment of her release, sensing a profound change in herself.

  Over the following months I alarmed my parents more than once by accurately predicting the deaths of relatives and friends - some of whom were on the other side of the planet. I even had a vivid dream in which I foresaw the Second World War, including the evacuation of Dunkirk and the German V-bombs. I learned not to talk about these things at school, because the other children would call me mad and pelt me with stones. But sometimes I felt it was my duty to speak out… During the 1940 Blitz, for example, some neighbours invited me into their air raid shelter. I’d only been inside for a few seconds when I had a strong sense of impending disaster. I begged the family to abandon that shelter with me, saying that something terrible was about to happen there. But they laughed at me, so I left alone.

  Next morning I learned that a bomb hit that shelter, killing the entire family.

  People didn’t always ignore what I said. As a 14-year-old, while talking with a young policewoman, I had a sense of terrible danger to her womb. I couldn’t tell her what was wrong but I urged her to see a doctor as soon as possible. She took my advice - and the doctor referred her to a specialist who performed an exploratory operation. He discovered fibroids and removed the womb immediately.

  Jean Franklin was not the first clairvoyant to claim that intruders had enhanced her mental abilities. Uri Geller, among others, made a similar claim.

  The ‘Mass Branding’ in Brazil

  In 1977 the Brazilian island of Colares became the focus of an unprecedented invasion. Anomalous craft, ranging from cylinders to triangles, appeared daily through July to September, emerging from the clouds and bursting from the sea. The phenomenon panicked many islanders, who fled to seek refuge in the cities. Records kept by a local medical unit show that more than 80 victims sought treatment for flesh-burns and scars which they said had been caused by ‘rays’ or ‘beams’ fired by the intruding vehicles.

  The crisis was so widely reported by South American newspapers and TV networks that Brazil’s government was obliged belatedly to act, despatching to Colares a combined army and air force investigative team headed by Captain Uyrange Hollandia. These military analysts, as it later emerged, were bound by two contradictory commands: to gather as much information as possible - and to do all in their power to debunk and disprove what everyone on the island was experiencing.

  During its visit the group took numerous photographs of the UFOs and the physical effects their fusillade had allegedly caused. The soldiers also amassed 15 hours of film, which was automatically classified secret, even though the media had published similar images weeks earlier.

  While his men were collecting data Captain Hollandia concentrated his efforts on the local physician Dr Wellaide Carvalho. He urged her to state publicly that mass hysteria, rather than UFOs was creating the trouble. The doctor refused. Not only had she devoted much of her time in preceding months to treating scars and burns, she had witnessed a beam-victim’s death, and had even seen one of the craft herself.

  Colares, population 2000, is one of a group of islands one degree south of the equator, clustered near the mouths of the Amazon and Tarantins rivers. The island’s sudden rash of grievous aerial attacks climaxed two years of intense UFO activity over urban Brazil.

  The army had little success in suppressing the truth about the Colares mystery - and were even less efficient at keeping foreign observers out. A significant visitor was the French physicist and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, who spent several weeks interviewing local witnesses. His scientific paper, later published as a book, Confrontations, reproduces Dr Wellaide’s clinical notes on her beam-patients’ symptoms:

  Blackened skin where the light had hit, with several red circles, hot and painful, two to three centimetres in diameter.

  Inside each circle, two puncture-marks resembling mosquito bites, hard to the touch.

  Hair in the blackened areas fell out and did not re-grow, suggesting that follicles had been destroyed.

  Patients complained of extreme weakness. Some could hardly walk.

  Low arterial pressure and anaemia with depressed haemoglobin levels.

  Vallee remarked particularly on the regularity of 1977’s events:

  ‘The reason the phenomenon could not be denied was very simple: every evening the UFOs, appeared, coming from the north. In some cases they came down from the sky, in others they emerged from the sea. I saw a photograph of an object with a luminous white ring flying right out of the brackish water at dusk.

  ‘They came over the islands at low altitude and circled… they hovered over houses and probed the interiors with beams…they even emerged from larger objects and re-entered them. And this happened on schedule, every evening for three months.’

  Vallee was astonished by the lack of academic interest in the events on Colares.

  ‘The material gathered here…is a very small percentage of the data compiled by other researchers and by official agencies. The realisation that none of this data has ever been seriously examined by professional scientists is staggering. Their refusal to consider the facts of this phenomenon is a remarkable statement about the narrow limits within which our society authorises the serious pursuit of knowledge.’

  Triangular Secrets, Under the Flesh

  But Vallee notwithstanding, some scientists and specialist physicians are striving to find answers. Wary of their colleagues’ scorn and its possible effect on their careers, these volunteers usually work unpaid, part-time and in secret, with UFO research organisations.

  Geometrical skin-markings, and what they can hide, have become a major subject of study. Surgeons in Britain, Europe and the United States are quite regularly finding foreign objects purportedly implanted beneath skin on which triangles and circles have appeared. A principal driver of this research is Derrell Sims of the Houston UFO Network. Working with physicians and medical scientists he has further demonstrated that about five per cent of abductees’ bodies give off a bluish-white fluorescence that seems to originate internally.

  Within this fluorescence, such shapes as crescents, triangles and Mandelbrot designs can sometimes appear. And to add further to the enigma, some of the minuscule foreign objects retrieved from beneath the skin are, themselves, near-perfect triangles.

  Unannounced surgeries for the removal of so-called implants became widespread in the 1980s. Mysterious objects, whose purpose has so far defied analysis, are now being discovered everywhere from the brain and forehead to the chest, hands and feet. Some of these objects may be expelled automatically, from a patient’s nose or eye. Certain others, identified by X-rays, prove impossible to remove because of the tough, scalpel-resisting ‘cocoons’ that protect them. And others can be too dangerous to pluck out because they are close to the brain or to vital organs.

  What do all the triangles, circles and Mandelbrot shapes mean? Some theorists suggest they could be a form of identification, enabling alien imprinters to k
eep track of selected human subjects. But the solution - if indeed there is a solution - is probably far subtler than that.

  * * *

  The Woman Who Slept for

  32 Years

  * * *

  Carolina Olsson lived a quiet - and in most respects undistinguished - life. But when she died aged 89, the world’s newspapers prominently published her photograph. Carolina had one claim to fame: Between 1876 and 1908 she had slept uninterruptedly for more than 32 years. And then she had suddenly woken, healthy and seemingly unaffected, to live the rest of her allotted years on earth. Specialists visited Carolina from around the world - but none were able to establish the cause of her strange trance-like slumber. All they knew was that no other patient in the recorded annals of medicine had remained asleep for so long, only to wake unharmed…

  THE OLSSON FAMILY OF MONSTERAS IN SWEDEN would remember 18 February 1876 as the worst day in their lives. Carolina, 14, one of five siblings, had been brought home by a neighbour in his horsedrawn trap, bleeding from the back of her head. She had hurt herself on the way home from school. Nobody knew exactly what had happened - but it was assumed she had slipped and fallen on the icy pavement.

  Carolina’s mother (according to medical journals published decades later) used a clean rag and hot water to swab the blood from her daughter’s hair. The girl, now seemingly normal again, sat down to a meal of pot soup, herring and bread with her parents and her four brothers.

  In the days that followed she behaved normally - and the family quickly forgot about the injury she had suffered. But then, on the afternoon of 22 February, she complained of a headache and retired to her narrow bunk in the other room of the mean crofter’s cottage where the Olssons lived.