by Albert Jack
ALSO BY ALBERT JACK
Red Herrings and White Elephants
Black Sheep and Lame Ducks
Phantom Hitchhikers
Pop Goes the Weasel
This book is dedicated to
(insert name here)
Introduction
The Famous Aurora Spaceship Mystery
Try to See It from My Angle: The Bermuda Triangle
Does Bigfoot Exist?
The Spine-chilling Tale of the Chase Vault
The Real-life Agatha Christie Mystery
Committing the Perfect Crime: The Mysterious D. B. Cooper
Who Really Makes Crop Circles?
John Dillinger: Whatever Happened to America's Robin Hood?
The Missing Navy Diver
The Dover Demon
The Mysterious Disappearance of the Lighthouse Keepers of Eilean Mor
Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden
The Mystery of Our Lady of Fatima
What Happened to the Lost King of France?
The Strange Case of Kaspar Hauser
The Great Loch Ness Con Trick
Will the Real Paul McCartney Please Stand Up
The Magnetic Strip
Whatever Happened to the Crew of the Mary Celeste?
The Men Who Cheated Death
Not in the Mood: The Real Glenn Miller Story
The Mystifying Death of a Media Mogul
The Real Da Vinci Code: The Mona Lisa Debate
If Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Who Killed Marilyn Monroe?
The Piano Man
The Dreadful Demise of Edgar Allan Poe
It's Raining Frogs
The Terrifying Affair of Spring-heeled Jack
Beware of USOs
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
The World's Strangest Unsolved Crimes
Acknowledgments
We all love a good mystery, don't we? And by all, I mean each and every one of us is, or will be, captivated at one time or another by a decent real-life mystery, either one of the world's best or something on a smaller scale, such as the baffling question of why the best-looking girl is going out with a loser (again). And so, after writing my last book, Phantom Hitchhikers (on urban legends), and inspired by the legend of the Beast of Bodmin Moor (described in that book), I started looking at some other famous mysteries, ones that continue to fascinate us. The story of the Beast of Bodmin Moor is an example of an urban legend that could also be properly researched as a genuine mystery, and the same could be said for various other topics covered in the book. There is clearly a crossover between an urban legend and a full-scale mystery. Mysteries are fact-based, of course, and tend to be longer and more complicated; indeed, some, such as the Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, crop circles, or the Loch Ness Monster, easily provide enough material for a whole series of books.
But writing a book on just one of these would have been relatively easy. The challenge came from researching lots and lots of them and then condensing them down in a way that I know you, the readers, who continue to pay my wages, enjoy reading. And that is short, sharp, informative sections you can read on the train, in the bus queue, or while waiting to pick up the kids after you arrive at school to find them in detention. In other words, the challenge was to explain the longer mysteries in a way you can enjoy and absorb in about ten minutes. Inevitably some information will be missing, for which I apologize in advance. But the missing information isn't critical to the basic story; the “core” details of the mystery in question should all be there. In some cases, such as the sections on the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, and crop circles, there are literally thousands of examples that I could have used, of course, but in each case I've kept them down to just a handful.
Another challenge has been which mysteries to select out of the scores of famous stories that exist. I have tried to be as diverse as possible, including mysterious disappearances (such as the lighthouse keepers of Eilean Mor or the crew of the Mary Celeste) and deaths (Marilyn Monroe and Robert Maxwell), famous crimes (the St. Valentine's Day Massacre or D. B. Cooper jumping out of a jet with $200,000 in cash), science (UFOs and USOs—science fact or science fiction?), history (the tale of the “lost dauphin”) and the arts (the Mona Lisa and Edgar Allan Poe), ranging from the obscure (the “Dover Demon”) to the world-famous (the disappearance of Glenn Miller). For example, did you know that sometimes it rains frogs or fish, or that the Mary Celeste was nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle, despite several claims to the contrary?
And this brings me to an important point. Given that I am a fan of the unknown and the unexplained, I have not set out to be a mystery buster in this volume. Instead I just wanted to tell the story, provide some little-known detail, and offer a rational explanation wherever I could. I wanted to provoke a bit of thought and conversation, but leave you to decide the answer for yourselves: Does the story remain a mystery, in your view, or have you managed to piece together a theory of your own? To be fair, I must admit there are some cases where I just couldn't resist presenting my own ideas and giving full rein to my skepticism, but don't let that stop you enjoying yourselves.
The truth is that the mind can play tricks on us. We know this is the case; it is why we enjoy marveling at an optical illusion or a magician's skillful sleight of hand. There are other occasions, however, when we don't (or won't) acknowledge that we have been deceived: we believe we can see something and, even though we know that it doesn't actually exist, we can still see it— because we want to. Perhaps that is why there are still so many sightings of the Loch Ness Monster. A lump of wood floating innocently on the surface of Loch Ness is immediately classified as a “sighting,” while the very same lump of wood goes totally unnoticed when tossed into a less famous loch nearby.
Some things remain mysterious, of course, such as unsolved crimes and disappearances (the fate of the crew of the Mary Celeste remains a mystery to this day); or ghostly goings-on (no one has come up with a satisfactory explanation for the frightening disturbances that took place in the Chase vault). Where there is insufficient evidence a mystery will surely arise, but nonetheless we like to blind ourselves to this sometimes, preferring the reason to be strange and otherworldly rather than clear and matter-of-fact. The crew of the Mary Celeste didn't abandon ship because it was about to sink or catch fire, but because a giant squid snatched them up in its writhing tentacles, or a passing UFO swooped them away to another planet. And why should there always be a boring, down-to-earth answer for everything? A bit of mystery makes life much less dreary and infinitely more exciting.
Then there are those things that mystify us but should really be explained, such as what makes that loser so irresistible to women or why Big Brother—a program dependent on an audience of boring people with nothing better to do than sitting around in a room in a house watching the same sort of people doing the same thing on television—remains so popular. Or, for that matter, how Russell Brand gets to be on television. You see what I mean; some things should really be explained.
As I wrote this book I had a number of imaginary readers sitting at my shoulder. The first was you, of course, who above all want to be entertained. The rest were representatives from the groups of people who passionately believe in a particular topic, whether Bigfoot, UFOs, or the Loch Ness Monster. While our views will inevitably differ, I have still tried to be as sensitive as possible. Well, I tried. And that is the reason I gave up on my efforts to investigate the Mystery of God and the Mystery of the Mind of the Modern Woman. With the first I was on a wild go
ose chase, and with the second I realized it was not a subject for a ten-minute mystery. More like a ten-year mystery.
Mystery in death, as in life, has a lot going for it, and there are a lot of mysterious deaths or disappearances in this book. It's true that I once replied to the question “What would you like written on your gravestone?” with “Here lies Albert Jack, aged 287.” But would “Here lies Albert Jack, aged 28” have been better— tragically cut off in my prime—or maybe no gravestone at all because I had vanished without a trace? Wouldn't it be better to be remembered for dying in mysterious circumstances after your helicopter crashed into the side of Table Mountain, upside down, than for sitting in a pool of urine, covered in biscuit crumbs in an old people's home? At least that way your children would have a good story to pass on to future generations. That way others can wonder for years what really happened to you.
I don't want to appear a mystery buster, because I love a good mystery as much as the next person. But a healthy dose of skepticism never goes amiss when tackling any of the world's mysteries. For example, when researching the Bermuda Triangle I considered the question “Who has the most money to gain or lose in the area of the Bermuda Triangle?” No, not the storyteller, nor the TV documentary maker, nor the tour operator either. It must be the marine insurance companies who would have the most at stake if mysterious forces were at work down Bermuda way. And so the first place I turned to was Lloyd's of London. Such an approach, I have always found, is the best way to separate fact from fiction, myth from mystery.
I hope you enjoy these mysteries and some of the alternative theories that I have put forward. If I come across as overly opinionated from time to time, blame it on all the research and my get ting caught up in the subject. So, if you are a passionate believer in UFOs or crop circles, please don't take what I've written too much to heart and send round Reg Presley or David Icke to set fire to my trousers.
ALBERT JACK
Cape Town
July 2007
Did a UFO really crash in a small town in Texas
over a century ago?
When it comes to spaceships and little green men from Mars, most people's thoughts turn to the notorious events at Roswell, New Mexico, where in 1947 the U.S. government apparently captured an alien who had crashed his flying saucer. U.S. military personnel are then said to have quickly sealed off the area, removed all evidence, and engaged in a complete cover-up.
After a thorough debriefing, presumably in sign language, the little green man sadly died. Much later, the film of the top-secret autopsy supposedly carried out on him was sold on the black market, ending up nearly fifty years later, in 1995, on a prime-time TV documentary broadcast around the world. This program, Alien Autopsy, caused a sensation and “Martian gate” was back on the agenda with a vengeance. As is often the case, those who wanted to believe such a story inevitably did, while those of us really living on planet Earth could smell a rat. In fact, there were rats everywhere.
But it took eleven years before the program maker, Ray Santilli, admitted that the autopsy had been staged, for the most part, in a flat in Camden Town, London. Strangely enough, he owned up to this two days before a humorous parody of his subject was due to be aired on television. He confirmed that his props had included sheep brains set in jelly and knuckle joints and chicken entrails bought from Smith field meat market.
That should have knocked the Roswell mystery on the head for good, and all those UFO enthusiasts who had been obsessing about the whole affair for years should now be quietly licking their wounds in their garden sheds, or wherever it is they go to study their favorite subject.
But Roswell wasn't the first time: aliens had been captured before. In 1897, Aurora, a small, unremarkable town near Dallas, Texas, became the site of an astonishing event.
On April 17 that year, ten-year-old Charlie Stevens was sweeping his backyard when he looked up to see smoke trailing from a large silver airship flying overhead toward Aurora. Soon after it had flown out of sight, he heard an explosion and saw a thick plume of smoke rise into the air. He was about to rush off to see what had happened when he was stopped by his father, who told him he had to finish his chores first. Just imagine that something truly momentous has just happened right in your sleepy little town: a strange airborne vehicle—something you have never seen before, maybe even a craft from another planet—crashes just a few hundred yards away from your own back gate and you are told: “Nope. You finish sweeping that there yard first, boy and then come inside and help your ma with the breakfast.”
In fact Charlie wasn't allowed to go at all. According to him, it was his father who went into town and saw the wreckage scattered about the place. Mary Evans, aged fifteen at the time, also claimed to have witnessed the crash, but stated that her parents wouldn't allow her to visit the scene either.
As S. E. Haydon reported in The Dallas Morning News:
About 6 o'clock this morning the early risers of Aurora were astonished at the sudden appearance of the airship which has been sailing around the country.
It was traveling due north and much nearer the earth than before. Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles per hour and gradually settling toward the earth. It sailed over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town it collided with the tower of Judge Proctor's windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge's flower garden.
The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one aboard, and while his remains were badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world.
Curiously, this story did not make even the front page. Instead it was buried on page five along with several other reports of UFO sightings. It would appear the flying saucer crash at Aurora was not particularly shocking in 1897 —run-of-the-mill, you might say (in more senses than one)—even if it did destroy Judge Proctor's flower garden.
The story then told by the people of the town is that the Martian pilot, as he was termed, was given a decent Christian burial in the town cemetery and his grave marked with a single stone. The remains of the spaceship were taken away to an unknown location by the authorities and the smaller pieces were thrown into Judge Proctor's well. No other newspaper covered the story and, amazingly, the alien's resting place in the Aurora cemetery went unremarked for nearly eighty years, the small town settling back into obscurity.
That was until 1973, when the founder of the International UFO Bureau, Hayden Hewes, announced to United Press International that a grave in a small north Texan cemetery contained the body of an 1897 “astronaut” whom the report at the time had identified as being “not … of this world.”
Newspapers all over America took up the story, and interest in the alien grave rapidly gathered pace. Curiously, as the press hounds sniffed around Aurora, they found very few residents willing to discuss the events of 1897, but despite their reticence the town soon became a hive of activity as alien hunters from around the world descended en masse.
The International UFO Bureau claimed to have found traces of radiation at both the crash site and the grave, on top of which, they said, the grass glowed red. But they were soon barred from the graveyard by local administrators, who adamantly refused to allow them to start digging around. When the investigators attempted to obtain a court order to exhume the body, the small headstone marking the grave was removed and state troopers were placed at the gates of the cemetery to prevent unauthorized access.
Hayden Hewes, interviewed for a television documentary on the subject, condemned these actions as irresponsible, stating that there was now no way of locating the grave—a site, he claimed, that was of national importance. Interestingly, Bureau representatives have never explained why they didn't just walk around looking for the red patch they had found only weeks earlier. Abandoning the gra
ve, they turned their attention instead to Judge Proctor's farm, now under different ownership.
In 1945, Rollie Oats (yes, his real name) had bought the place. He had removed the pieces of spaceship and cleaned out the well so that his family could drink the water. Twelve years later he developed severe arthritis in his hands and, convinced the well water was responsible, had it sealed over with a six-ton slab of concrete.