by Albert Jack
A young maid, Mary Stevens, was intimidated on Barnes Common. Polly Adams, a barmaid in south London, was attacked as she walked across Blackheath. A servant girl at the home of Mr. Ashworth in Whitechapel answered the door to a hooded beast with fiery breath, and her screams were heard hundreds of yards away. Lucy Scales, a teenager from Limehouse, reported an assault. And Jane Allsop was virtually strangled by the hooded creature, until her family fought it off.
To local press hounds, the young women all described a “hideous face and his eyes were balls of fire. He had ice claws and breathed fire.” With a photofit picture like this, you would think Spring-heeled Jack shouldn't have been too hard to find, especially if you were standing next to him in the omnibus queue. It was a description echoed by many Londoners, who also reported seeing him bounce across the rooftops to make his escape.
That old English warhorse the Duke of Wellington, by then nearly seventy, armed himself to the teeth and went in search of the creature, but without success. Reports of attacks continued to flood in, and the army set a trap. After nightfall, sentries reported the beast suddenly appearing in front of them and “slapping their faces with icy hands” before bouncing away. Reports continued to arrive, mainly from the outskirts of London, in the areas of Ealing, Chiswick, Hammersmith, and Kensington.
Rumors abounded of servant girls dying of fright as soon as Jack appeared and of children being found ripped to shreds in the street—although there is no evidence of any of this and it is almost certainly untrue, so you can sleep easy. By the end of the century, Spring-heeled Jack had spread his wings to Surrey, Devon, and Hampshire and made his last appearance in Liverpool in 1904. Presumably he had his springs nicked and was forced to retire.
The true identity (or identities) of Spring-heeled Jack has never been discovered, although, despite frightening people and giving them the odd slap around the face, he had committed no serious crimes. History is littered with pranksters, and my guess is that “Jack” was one, or several, of these.
(That's Unidentified Submersible Objects to you.)
If there are intelligent beings on planets so far away that we haven't discovered them yet and they are watching us, then their technology must be far more advanced than ours. So forget those saucer-shaped tin cans people kept photographing during the 1950s and ’60s, as they clearly couldn't have traveled that kind of distance. Even so, it does lead you to wonder where minds immeasurably greater than our own would hide an observation post to keep a closer eye on us human beings. It occurred to me that since the first lunar landing (assuming you believe Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969), we have gained a pretty good understanding of everything within 240,000 miles of our planet, and obviously, thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, way beyond, but we still know very little about things that are right under our noses.
Consider the oceans, for example. The farthest-reaching submarine was the remote-controlled Japanese Kaiko surveillance sub, an unmanned craft designed for deep-sea observation. The Kaiko could reach depths of nearly thirty-eight thousand feet, which sounds impressive initially until you work out that that comes to a grand total of just over seven miles. So we can see, thanks to the Hubble telescope, a distance of between thirteen and fourteen billion light-years upward, but only seven miles downward. Now, we already know that unless you are Bigfoot (see page 25) or the Loch Ness Monster (see page 121) there is nowhere on earth to escape the long reach of satellites or modern radar systems, so if I were an alien capable of traveling thirteen billion light-years to come and spy on us, I would set up home underwater, happy in the knowledge that nobody would find me. Better still, directly underneath one of the polar ice caps.
So that led me to research unidentified submersible objects, the deep-sea version of UFOs. My attention was quickly drawn to a small port on the southern coastline of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. But I'd like to point out that this had absolutely nothing to do with its name. Shag Harbor is normally a very quiet place, but on October 4, 1967, it suddenly became a hive of activity. At 11:20 P.M. a group of eleven people watched as a low-flying object suddenly veered downward at an angle of forty-five degrees and plunged into the water. Some reported a bright flash of light as it hit the surface, while others claimed they saw four or five glowing orange lights. Laurie Wickens, a Shag Harbor native, jumped onto the harbor wall to get a better view and said he saw the UFO floating on the surface with a strange orange light glowing on top of it.
Believing it was an airplane crash, residents immediately called in the Canadian Mounted Police, who were then joined by the U.S. military, suspiciously quickly. Within half an hour, local fishermen had put together a civilian rescue team and were already at the scene of the accident. But they were puzzled to see no signs of any debris, wreckage, oil, or bodies—only a large patch of foaming yellow bubbles. When one of the men attempted to take a sample by dipping his net into the water, the bubbles failed to attach themselves and the net always came up clean.
By the following afternoon, the authorities were satisfied that no aircraft had been reported missing and the area was sealed off while divers combed it for clues. The official report of the incident revealed nothing, although it was later leaked that a second, identical craft had soon joined the first under the water and that after a short delay, they both rose to the surface and zoomed away. Thirty years later, one of the navy divers, interviewed for a television documentary, claimed the U.S. military had monitored the two USOs for several days before losing contact with them. To this day nobody knows what happened at Shag Harbor, although the sheer number of witness statements—all consistent in timing and in their descriptions of the size, color, and speed of the craft, coupled with the evidence of the yellow foam observed by most of the initial rescue team— would appear to provide credible evidence of a kind of under water USO activity that had never been seriously considered before.
And the events at Shag Harbor are by no means the only sightings. During the prolonged Cold War (which followed the very hot Second World War), many submarine commanders reported tracking mystery underwater vessels, often in Norway and other Scandinavian countries, that, when cornered in one of the fjords, would mysteriously vanish. On September 4, 1957, The Daily Telegraph reported that three uniformed police officers had witnessed a red, circular USO emerging from the depths of the Bristol Channel and taking a westerly route toward Wales. In the Lake District many sightings of USOs have been reported since the 1980s, and on one occasion during 1994 twenty-two people reported observing two underwater craft at Derwent Water for five minutes before these disappeared without a trace. The Lakes now receive as many as one sighting every year, the latest being in December 2004, leading to suggestions that beings from outer space have set up observation posts beneath the tranquil waters.
One sighting in 1977 was independently confirmed by no fewer than ten policemen. Soon after midnight on August 28, officers claim to have witnessed a large diamond-or triangular-shaped object close to Lake Windermere, the largest natural lake in England. PC David Wild was the first to spot the strange craft, and he watched it hover above the A592 at fifteen hundred feet for twenty-five minutes before it vanished in front of his very eyes. Two other officers also witnessed the same phenomenon some distance away, and John Platt described seeing what looked like a “massive seagoing catamaran with two hulls,” adding that the “surface was a dull charcoal color and giant lights were mounted on the front.” Which sounds exactly like a catamaran with headlights to me. But despite Windermere being such a vast body of water, it is only 220 feet deep—hardly the best place in the world to hide a colony of aliens.
More recently, the Dutch submarine Bruinvis (yes, the Dutch do have submarines) reported an underwater collision with a “solid object” on October 19, 2001, in the Sognefjord in Norway. Most of the crew clearly heard the noise and the sub limped back in to port for emergency repairs. Navy divers later confirmed damage to the underside of the vessel. But it was in August of the previous
year, in the Barents Sea at the northern tip of Norway, that one of the world's worst submarine disasters took place, the sinking of the Russian vessel the Kursk. Could it have been involved in a collision with a USO?
The Kursk, the flagship submarine of the Russian Northern Fleet, was proudly launched in 1995. But less than six years later, the world held its breath when the Russian authorities announced that an accident had caused the submarine—with 118 men on board—to sink to the bottom of the ocean. One team of rescuers reported that major damage to the front section had rendered the escape hatch useless, but that there were also deep gashes along the side to the fin at the rear, suggesting the cause of the accident had not been an explosion, as was first thought, but a collision with an unidentified object. Yet neither the U.S. nor the Royal Navy, which also had submarines in the area, were able to report a collision with any of their own craft.
Furthermore, the Kursk's periscope and external masts were fully extended, suggesting that the submarine had been operating within ten meters of the surface when it was struck, as these sections of the vessel are always fully retracted, even during emergency dives, in deeper water. Who can forget the rescue team's harrowing reports of the hammering made by the surviving sailors as they tried in vain to save them? The subsequent salvage operation revealed that at least twenty-three men had remained alive for many days in the dark and cold, hoping for a rescue that never materialized. When the craft was eventually brought to the surface, it was revealed that a neat circular hole had been punched into the side, unlike the damage made by a torpedo or collision with another sub marine, and the front section was almost completely torn away.
To this day, nobody knows what collided with the Kursk, although the rescue teams later described some green and white marker buoys bobbing on the surface that then mysteriously disappeared. (Such buoys are used for alerting passing vessels or aircraft that an accident has occurred; Russian vessels use only red and white rescue buoys, however.) Russian sources later confirmed that when the Kursk was eventually located there was a second, large object lying next to it on the seabed, which slowly moved away and then disappeared altogether. For weeks afterward, Russian attack submarines and warships of the Northern Fleet closely guarded the entire area. But whatever it was that sank the Kursk, with the loss of 118 lives, remains unknown to this day.
And it's not just in far northern waters. The Japanese deep-sea submersible the Kaiko mysteriously disappeared in May 2003 in the Pacific Ocean close to Japan after the steel cable attaching it to the mother ship, the Kairei, in explicably snapped, and it has never been seen since, leading to all kinds of speculation about mysterious forces lurking deep in our oceans.
But I've got the same problem with USOs that I have with all UFOs. If there are life forms from other galaxies that have found planet Earth and discovered it inhabited by, in most cases, intelligent life, then why don't they just land, shake hands, and introduce themselves? If we were to discover life on Venus, for example, would we buzz around their planet scaring the crap out of everybody living there? I doubt it very much; I expect we would do what the great adventurers of the past centuries have done when they discovered new lands. And that is to introduce themselves politely to the natives and then steal all their diamonds and other mineral wealth. They wouldn't lurk around for decades first, would they? They'd wade straight in. So instead of laboring too hard over this problem, I think it may be time to pay a visit to Shag Harbor. Not to investigate any ongoing USO activities, but to find out how it came by its interesting name.
Who was really behind the notorious mass shooting
in Prohibition-era Chicago?
On the evening of February 14, 1929, Chicago police made a grisly discovery. Inside a garage complex at 2212 North Clark Street lay the bodies of seven well-dressed men, who had all been brutally executed.
The investigators were puzzled. The victims were all mobsters with violent reputations who worked for the Irish bootlegger George “Bugs” Moran. As Moran's gang was known to be feuding with other gangsters, they should have been heavily armed and fully prepared for one of the shootouts that were becoming increasingly common in Prohibition-era Chicago. How had so many of them ended up unarmed in a run-down warehouse in the backstreets of the city? And why had none of them fought back—indeed, how could such experienced criminals have been led so tamely to their fate? It was a mystery to the police and a mystery to Bugs Moran. The American press and public wanted to know what could have possibly led to the horrific events of that bleak winter's night.
The place to start in any murder investigation is motive: finding out who would benefit most from the killing. The motive in this instance was obvious, and the person likely to benefit most from the killing seemed pretty obvious too. It was the height of the Prohibition era and many mobs and gangs were competing for the lucrative (and illegal) trade in alcohol, drugs, gambling, and prostitution. Bugs Moran had formed an impressive smuggling and supply racket in Chicago. He also had a small army of followers, mainly from the Irish community. Taking on the Irishman would be akin to going to war, which ruled out all the smalltime operators. For a suspect, the investigators kept returning to one name and one name alone, Al “Scarface” Capone.
Capone's gang of Italian mobsters were well known to the authorities. His network of prostitutes, gambling dens, smugglers, boot legging, and protection rackets had created an impressive empire, and he was estimated to be worth in the region of $65 million, a staggering sum of money in 1929, equivalent to approximately $7.2 billion today. He was a force to be reckoned with in Chicago and his policy of expansion through killing his business rivals placed him atop the list of suspects. It seemed obvious that he was behind it. But he denied all knowledge. His rival, Moran, had been neither killed nor even threatened, and the men lying dead in that garage were mere foot soldiers whose death could not have benefited Capone in any way. He had also been in Florida on Valentine's Day.
Even the single eyewitness to the shooting couldn't shed any light on the identity of the perpetrators. The police had found Frank “Tight Lips” Gusenberg lying amid the carnage and choking on his own blood. He was rushed to the hospital and, on finally regaining consciousness, was immediately asked who had shot him. Gusenberg carefully looked around the room before replying, “Shot? Nobody shot me!” He died soon afterward and the general belief was that he had recognized somebody in the room, although his silence hadn't helped him survive.
The police returned to the scene and tried to piece together the events leading up to the shooting from what little evidence they had. It was statements from the inhabitants of North Clark Street that provided their first real breakthrough. Several residents confirmed they had heard gunfire but swore they had then seen two uniformed policemen leading two civilians away at gunpoint. The two “suspects” had been handcuffed and bundled into a police car and then driven away. Reassured that the police were already present and everything appeared to be under control, no one made any effort to report the matter to the authorities. However, the Chicago police had no record of any shootings or arrests made on North Clark Street on the night of February 14. The investigators followed up every clue and lead they had, but they were all dead ends and no convictions were ever secured for the brutal murders in the warehouse on that cold February night.
Even though there was no proof linking Capone to the massacre, Bugs Moran had gotten the message. He promptly moved his gang out of the North Side, leaving all business in that area for the Italians. But he had already made a major error by commenting publicly to a journalist, “Only Capone kills like that.” These five short words were a serious breach of the gangster code of silence, after which even his own gang members began to lose respect for their boss.
Moran became an increasingly marginalized and desperate figure. In 1946, he was finally arrested for robbing a bank messenger of $10,000, a far cry from the high-level crime and luxurious lifestyle he had formerly enjoyed. Moran was sentenced to ten years’
imprisonment but was immediately rearrested on his release. He was given another ten years at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, where he died of cancer in 1957. His body lies in a pauper's grave within the prison walls.
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre also led to the downfall of Al Capone himself, because it brought his activities to the attention of the federal government. Despite no evidence being found to connect him to the killings on North Clark Street, the gangster was soon convicted on charges of income tax evasion and, in 1931, sentenced to eleven years at the notorious high-security prison at Alcatraz.
While in prison, Capone's mental health began to deteriorate: toward the end he was convinced that the ghost of James Clark, one of the St. Valentine's Day victims, was haunting him. It was the only clue he ever gave of any involvement in the killings. After his release, Capone spent the last seven years of his life quietly at his luxury estate near Palm Beach, Florida. On January 25, 1947, he died of a heart attack thought to have been caused by the third-stage complications of syphilis.