The Mary Celeste Syndrome

by John Pinkney

  In 1917, however, the situation changed when a relative found Evans’s long-lost journal of the 1851 trek. He had apparently made fuller notes about the meteorite and its location than he had remembered. The Smithsonian’s curator of mineralogy, William Foshag, persuaded his employers to reinstate the abandoned expedition to Oregon. The search failed, as did a subsequent attempt in 1939.

  From this point consortiums, spending tens of thousands apiece, mounted ever-more elaborate quests for what had become known as the Holy Grail Rock. The mounting tally of failures did nothing to disillusion believers - but did swell the number of observers who wondered whether Dr John Evans might, for some reason, have been lying.

  ‘A Hoax From the Start’

  One prominent disparager of the Jupiter Jewels story was Dr Howard Plotkin, a science lecturer at the University of Western Ontario. In an article, The Port Orford Meteorite Hoax (Sky and Telescope magazine, September 1993), Plotkin concedes that he too was a believer during the summers of 1986 and 1987, when he conducted his own field searches for the meteorite. But after this he gradually became convinced that Evans’s story simply couldn’t be true. How, he asked, could a scientist of Evans’s presumed calibre discover an exotic pallasite and not properly record it and map its location?

  I was reluctant to say Evans’s story was an outright lie. I therefore decided to study his life further and to re-evaluate his letters and journals…My research revealed that Evans had amassed a staggering debt through mismanagement of his government contracts. He was so crushed by this…and the sense of impending doom it gave him that…he had a compelling reason to lie - an urgent, desperate need for money.

  Most startling of all, continued investigation led me…to the inescapable conclusion that Evans had acquired a small, very rare type of meteorite and had fabricated a clever hoax. His scheme was to use it as a prop to get Congress to supply the funds he needed to solve his financial problems.

  Dr Plotkin suggests that the small pallasite Evans used in his alleged scam was actually a tiny part of the Imilac meteorite, which had been found in Chile in 1920. Thousands of small fragments came down with ‘Imilac and its kin’ - and Evans had the chance to obtain a curio-sized specimen during the well-chronicled period that he crossed the Isthmus of Panama.

  By presenting this splinter of rock, Evans had hoped to set a sprat to catch a mackerel. But the mackerel (Congress) failed to bite.

  Of course, the notion that the long-dead Dr John Evans was a conman is only one academic’s opinion.

  Today, regardless of such carpings, the quest for the mega-meteorite continues. The armies of believers would rather continue searching than have their jewelled dreams debunked.

  ‘Hoax’ #2: Is Lasseter’s Reef

  Beyond Belief?

  In 1897 a young prospector, Harold Lasseter, claimed he had found a vast gold-laden reef 700 kilometres west of Australia’s Alice Springs.

  Rearing from sun-seared sand, the immense outcrop of quartz was at least 14 kilometres long, he said. When the diminutive Lasseter and his new business partner rode into the desert town with glittering samples in their saddlebags, there was no shortage of locals anxious to help them map, assay and lay claim to the treasure.

  The problem was that young Harold didn’t know the way back. Shortly after he left the reef behind him, two of his horses had collapsed and died - forcing him to dump much of his water and food. Hungry, thirst-crazed and hopelessly lost, he had wandered in circles for a day. He was lying collapsed on the sand when an Afghan cameldriver found him and took him to a surveyor’s camp. The surveyor, Joseph Harding, nursed Lasseter back to health - and, having glanced at his gold samples, offered to become his associate.

  From that time onward the countless attempts to rediscover Lasseter’s Reef would kill more than 50 explorers. The toll eventually included Lasseter himself, who allegedly died at an Aboriginal camp into which he stumbled. In a previous book* I have described Lasseter’s life and ‘death’ at greater length - along with the scepticism that began to surround the bonanza in gold which he alone had seen.

  But shortly before this volume went to press I received a letter from Jim Rand of Phillip, in the Australian National Territory, offering intriguing new information:

  When I was a teenager, in about 1947, I lived in Collaroy. One of our neighbours was a Mr Bert du Faur, a retired mining engineer who had been with Mt Morgan Gold Mines for many years and had a working experience of other mines all over Australia. When he was asked to prove an old gold mining area near Braidwood, he took me with him as a ‘gopher’.

  On site I overheard many conversations he had with people who seemed to know nearly every outcrop of rock in Australia, from a mining viewpoint. A lot of them had first or secondhand information about Lasseter - and repeatedly I heard the same conclusion: that he did not die in the desert.

  One of the people convinced of this was Mr Faur himself. In the 1930s he had talked to another mining engineer (well known to him) living in Kalgoorlie. This man knew Lasseter well - and swore that he saw him walk out of the desert country, after which they spoke for some time. Lasseter revealed that he was about to ship out to America - which he did.

  Others said they had seen Lasseter in the United States - and that he’d died there after a few years. As someone who’d been enthralled by Ion Idriess’s book about the lost reef, I was quite shocked by these reports. But I listened - and I’ve never forgotten what I heard.

  Several days later Jim Rand sent additional information:

  Since writing to you I’ve remembered two other possibly relevant details from those conversations.

  The gold samples Lasseter displayed were not consistent with the area in which he said he’d found the reef. After the mining engineer in Kalgoorlie, and others, had sighted the samples, Lasseter’s story was under suspicion.

  A theory I heard discussed was that another prospector or bush worker had ‘done a perish’ (died) at the Aboriginal camp and that Lasseter had managed to impose his identity on the dead man. He may have found it convenient to do this so he could quietly disappear.

  The theories Jim Rand quotes would not be accepted as evidence in a court. But they’re persuasive, nevertheless. In 1930, the year in which his death would be announced, Harold Lasseter was under increasing pressure to demonstrate that his fabled reef actually existed. Many people and organisations had invested large amounts of money in him, and journalists had begun increasingly to catch him out - quoting published interviews in which he had offered inconsistent dates and made self-contradictory statements about himself. Lasseter owed money everywhere. Dunned for debts, his honesty increasingly in doubt, he must sorely have been tempted to end it all - by pretending to end it all.

  How he escaped (if indeed he did escape) nobody knows. But it’s diverting to imagine that, serendipitously, he found a large nugget in the search area and - deciding it would keep him into his old age - put it in a bag and took off for somewhere he could start, anonymously, again.

  Why lumber yourself with all the problems of a reef, when you have nugget enough to sustain you comfortably to the end?

  *Great Australian Mysteries

  * * *

  Strange Case of the

  Separated Sisters

  Astonishing Coincidences

  * * *

  British siblings Evelyn and Edna were parted as babies - and saw nothing of each other for 58 years. Then, following an eerie fluke of chance, the women were reunited. Each had independently decided to migrate with her family to Australia. But neither could have dreamed of what would happen next. In 1995, adopted Evelyn Rider was stunned to find that her long-lost sibling Edna Wilde had moved into the house next door. A mathematician calculated the odds against this globe-spanning fluke at tens of millions to one. But observers have recorded thousands of synchronicities similarly bizarre.

  IN 1996, THE YEAR AFTER EDNA AND EVELYN WERE REUNITED, mature-age student Tim Henderson hitched a ride to London wi
th a stranger - diving engineer Mark Knight. The pair, travelling from Newcastle, had been computer-matched by the Freewheelers Lift Share Agency, which had 16,000 names on its database.

  Tim Henderson, separated from his brother since infancy, met him again 25 years later - through a fluke of fortune.

  The two men chatted en route - and were quickly astonished at how many interests and attitudes they shared. But seconds after they began discussing friends and relatives they fell into disbelieving silence. Then Tim said, ‘You must be my brother.’

  More than a quarter-century earlier Tim’s father Tom had divorced, remarried and fathered a second son. According to Newcastle’s Northern Echo newspaper (23 February 1996) Mark’s mother also remarried - and he took his stepfather’s surname. The brothers met for a few hours when they were three and five, but then lost touch completely.

  * * *

  Coincidentally, Edinburgh’s Evening News had published a similar long-lost brothers report 21 days earlier. For seven years Peter Dawson and Peter Williamson had worked side by side at a local Milton Keynes factory and had enjoyed visiting pubs and cinemas together. Both men were reserved and little inclined to small-talk. But as time passed and the conversational clues gradually accumulated, they realised they must be brothers. Investigation confirmed that they had been separated as babies in 1956, whereupon Henry was adopted and given a different name.

  Lives Ended in a Dead Tie

  An uncanny chain of coincidence linked two Melbourne men for 44 years - ending with their deaths on the same day.

  Ted Davis and Fred Elston were strangers until they joined the Royal Australian Air Force on the same morning in 1944. Ted was allocated RAAF number 148882; Fred, 148883. After training at Shepparton they were sent in different directions. Fred was posted to South Australia and Ted to New South Wales. Neither man went to a battle zone.

  At war’s end they returned to Melbourne and met again when both happened to join the same RSL (Returned Servicemen’s League) branch in Mentone. The following year they moved and independently joined a second RSL branch, in Mordialloc. Ted then decided, independently, to join the Freemasons, and was surprised when he learned that Fred had just enrolled also - at the same branch.

  The coincidences continued, but became less pleasant. After working respectively as a carpenter and as a butcher, both men developed lung trouble. The condition, the same in each case, proved deadly. Ted died in Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital at 1 am. Fred died 75 minutes later in Prince Henry’s Hospital.

  Their funerals were held on the same morning.

  Relatives pieced the pattern of coincidences together when the two men’s death notices - containing their sequential RAAF numbers - appeared next to each other in a daily newspaper.

  A Chilling Photo Coincidence

  After Australian barefoot skier Karen Toms had victoriously finished her event, she posed for a magazine with a bottle of DEMI-SEC bubbly in her hand.

  Chilling coincidence: sportswoman Karen Toms and the champagne label that ‘foreshadowed’ her coach’s death.

  As the blow-up shows, Karen’s hand happened to be obscuring the letter C. The Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the word DEMISE is death. Shortly afterward, Karen’s coach Les Drysdale hit the water at 128 km/h in a speed record attempt - and was killed.

  In this eerily coincidental pattern of events, champagne and smiles turned to tears for Karen. It was as if the wine label had somehow warned of an imminent tragedy.

  Blond in a Billion

  In 1972, while acting editor of New Zealand’s Sunday Times, Paul Taylor decided to serialise Frederick Forsyth’s new novel The Odessa File. Paul told me:

  In those days, before fax and email, communication with the UK was slow. And the staff at the publishing company owned by Anthony Blond - although charming - seemed unable to act on anything. I wanted to know how many words I could buy for how much, but couldn’t get an answer. Although I didn’t tell them, I’d already had the serial typeset and was promoting it in the paper. Understandably I was starting to sweat. If we printed without permission we’d be in trouble with Forsyth’s publishers - and if I had to tell a quarter million Kiwis they’d be missing out on The Odessa File they’d be extremely vexed.

  Then came a breakthrough, of a rather extraordinary kind.

  One midweek afternoon on the Sunday before publication, I was browsing in a small Wellington bookshop when I overheard a chap talking in an extremely fruity English accent. I glanced around the bookcase and saw a plump dark-haired man in a beautifully cut pinstripe suit with a camelhair overcoat across his shoulders. He was very jolly and obviously enjoying life.

  I knew little about Anthony Blond. I’d never seen his photograph or heard him speak. And no one had told me he might be visiting New Zealand.

  Nonetheless, something prompted me to walk up and ask, ‘Excuse me, are you Anthony Blond?’ I think, with the Sunday deadline looming, I was simply desperate for this Englishman to be the great publisher. Surely a forlorn hope. But to my delight he confirmed that he was, indeed, Anthony Blond!

  I told him who I was and how I’d been vainly ringing London trying to get his OK for the serialisation. He asked me what I was proposing to pay and accepted the offer then and there. When I told him I’d already had four excerpts edited and set, he asked how many words. ‘Sixty thousand,’ I replied. This large figure staggered him somewhat - but he’d agreed to the fee and although he scolded me (‘You are a very naughty man’), he was obviously pleased.

  But not half as much as I was with this whole chance encounter.

  Conundrum of the Car Keys

  Coincidences, says the novelist Brian Inglis, are ‘like islands in an archipelago, where the connections on the seabed below the surface are invisible to us’. Along with psychologist Carl Jung, Inglis is convinced such connections must exist - and might (at least in the more intricate cases) convey a meaning we have not yet learned to interpret.

  A particularly elaborate coincidence was chronicled by American newspapers in 1985. Within a few minutes of each other two strangers with identical surnames (Baker) parked their identical 1978 maroon Concord sedans at a large shopping centre in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The keys to the cars also happened to be identical. One of the Bakers inadvertently opened his namesake’s vehicle and drove it away, leaving the remaining Baker to report his car stolen.

  Ben Dunn, a spokesman for American Motors Corporation, told reporters that the odds against a key fitting two Concords were approximately 10,000 to one. But the synchronicity only started there. Mathematicians, he said, would then have to calculate the odds against two people named Baker (strangers to each other) parking two identically keyed cars of the same model and colour in the same enormous carpark simultaneously.

  Returned, to the Right Address

  Another car coincidence, with its loose ends neatly tied, was reported to Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2005. Angela Shaw of Port Lincoln, South Australia, recalled, ‘Some years ago my brother-in-law, who lived about five kilometres from me, was visiting my house. We heard the loud sound of a Volkswagen entering my street, sputtering, then going very quiet.

  We looked out of the front door to see that it was in fact my brother-in-law’s car being abandoned by thieves. They had driven it all the way from where he lived - but it had happened to break down right in front of my house.

  Missing Ring Mystery

  When she was 10 years old Rosalind Pike’s parents gave her a present she had long coveted: a gold ring engraved with her name. But in 1975, while swimming with her primary school class in Colchester, Essex, Rosalind lost the ring in the water.

  In 2002, almost three decades later, 12-year-old Jamie-Louisa Arnold was biting into an apple when she almost broke a tooth. From her mouth she retrieved a gold ring - and was eventually able to return it to its owner because it was inscribed with the name Rosalind Pike. A gardening writer consulted by the Daily Mail said the ring might have been dropped in a tree
by a bird or orchard worker, whereupon fruit formed around it.

  A Knotty Synchronicity

  A shopper, searching a department store for a satin tie, became the focus of a particularly unsettling coincidence. ‘It happened when I was 18,’ Fiona Johnson of Broken Hill told me. At the time satin ties were the “in” thing - and I decided to buy my boyfriend a maroon one for his birthday.

  ‘With this in mind I went one Saturday morning to Myers in Melbourne. But I couldn’t find the tie I wanted on the rack. I took the escalator downstairs and just as I was nearing the rear entrance noticed a paper bag at my feet. I opened it and was shocked to find - one satin maroon tie.

  ‘My first reaction was panic. Had I actually bought the tie, then suffered - for the first time in my life - a lapse of memory? I checked my purse and was relieved to find I’d spent nothing apart from the tram fare to town.

  I then took the tie to the men’s department. The assistant disclaimed all knowledge of it. He didn’t sell that brand, he said - and besides, the cash register receipt (which had no store name on it) was not from Myers.

  Today I’m still wondering why, out of all the people in that emporium on a busy morning, did that obviously lost tie appear at my feet.’

  I suggested to Fiona that she might have experienced what Arthur Koestler described as the ‘angel syndrome’, in which a person seeking an obscure item is astounded when it appears, suddenly and inexplicably. Koestler chronicled numerous cases in which researchers, seeking abstruse references in libraries, found exactly what they were looking for in the first book they randomly opened. The explanation, he surmised, probably had less to do with ESP or coincidence than with some other unexplained force operating in our universe.