Lord Lucan’s homecoming?
The Connaught Telegraph of 14th January 1998 tells us that 'Eerie occurrences haunt Government buildings', in Castlebar, Co. Mayo. Staff at local government offices have reported regular appearances of a 'ghost' clad in an Aran sweater and a hat with a downturned brim. The appearances are apparently linked to a building extension which is being constructed on land once owned by the infamous Lord Lucan, the 7th Earl of Lucan, a British aristocrat and professional gambler. He vanished on 7th November 1974, after apparently bungling a murder of his wife, and rather successfully dispatching his children's nanny, Sandra Rivett, at their London home. He has been declared 'financially dead', but his son, merchant banker Lord Bingham (29) insists that his father is dead with respect to peerage, as he wants to inherit the title, and a seat in the British House of Lords. There have been hundreds of unconfirmed sightings,...
Creme, cults and suicides
If there's so much as one heinous crime of which Blather is guilty, we would tentatively suggest that it's certainly not a case of us failing to keep a abreast of bizarre goings on. . . Last week (I vaguely recall it myself) Blather dished up a dissertation on a recent documentary on Princess Grace of Monaco and the Order of the Solar Temple. I ended the piece with mention of a security step-up in Switzerland, due to fears of Solar Temple activity escalating around the Winter Solstice. It looks like the Swiss police weren't the only ones keeping a close eye. On Thursday, January 8th 1998, Spanish police arrested 32 - some reports say 31 - people (including four girls, aged between six and 12, and a 10-year-old boy), at five houses in the capital of Tenerife, Santa Cruz. They were due to travel to the top of 3,718-metre...
Bizarre Cults and Hairy Men
Happy New Year, and all that malarkey. Rejoice, for yet again, Armageddon hasn't taken place, the Great Flood II hasn't swept us away, asteroids haven't crashed into Dublin, and this Blatherskite is pretty healthy, not a sign of plague nor pestilence. Now, on with the show... oh please maestro, please... In last week's Blather, mention was made of a controversial documentary on the life of actress Grace Kelly, (High Noon, To Catch a Thief, Dial M For Murder, The Country Girl) a.k.a. Princess Grace of Monaco. Blather has thrown an eye over the 'Secret Lives' programme, shown on the British T.V.'s Channel 4 on Monday December 29th, and so for those who haven't seen it, or perhaps won't see it, here's the bones of the story. Apart from all the daft silhouettes of ritual, and irritating shots of incense burners swinging by candles, the documentary claims that the princess was...
Baaaaah-humbug
While considering the possible ingredients for the Bumper Christmas Blather, I did toy with the idea of doing something 'Christmassy', but eventually decided against it, bah humbug, due to the sheer weight of bizarre material that I've been hoarding over the last couple of weeks, which I've been unable to squeeze in to previous issues. HITCHCOCK IN ROMANIA? Following recent tongue-in-cheek Blatherings concerning Charles Fort's humorously hypothetical 'Super-Sargasso-Sea', yet more sky stories have bubbled to the surface of the mainstream media. Blather 1.30 mentioned crows falling out of the sky in China, and in a similar sort of story on December 15th, The Associated Press told of the Romanian newspaper 'Evenimentul Zilei' told of an infestation by thousands of crows of the town of Turda, 190 miles northwest of Bucharest. Residents were reportedly using pepper gas, air rifles, slingshots, and presumably anything else that came to hand to rid themselves...
War of the Wetlands
It was at about 18:30 on a rather chilly Sunday 14th of December that I found myself walking along the moonlit causeway to Bull Island Nature Reserve (on the north side of Dublin Bay), praying that I wouldn't have to explain myself to the gardaí who spun by in their four wheel drive Jeep. Bull Island was unwittingly created by Captain Bligh (Yes, of Mutiny on the Bounty), and 'where of course thousands of Dubliners have been conceived in the back seats of cars on a Saturday night'. I must have a cut a rather ridiculous figure in silhouette, wearing army surplus combats and thermal smock, standing high up on the dunes, clutching a Maglite in one hand, a mobile phone in the other, trying desperately to find the Irish Centre for UFO Studies folk that I was trying to locate. There were several cars cruising about - at least...
Skies Alive!
This week's Blather is to be a cogno-intellectual compendium of sundry anomalous aerial tidings... While discussing the merry topic of mystery humans falling from the sky, last week's Blather mentioned the death of a woman in Miami, Florida, who was suspected of having fallen from an aircraft. A matter of hours after my sending out Blather, she had been named as Helene Deborah Gusik, and the police now reckoned that she had fallen from a nearby apartment block, but didn't know why she was in the building... (The Associated Press) Regarding body temperatures of freefallers and stowaways on aircraft, Daniel Ko, in Blather's Hong Kong office, tells us that: 'I used to do a fair bit of skydiving (60 jumps) and even 13,500ft jumps from an open doored Cessna during v early spring through hailclouds (Brrrrrrr.) It's unlikely that the victim's body core temperature would drop significantly. Indeed, it's significantly...
Sargasso Sea Stuff
In Charles Fort's books, Book of the Damned, Lo!, New Lands and Wild Talents, a particular thread often raises its anomalous head - the appearance of sundry articles upon our planet, appearing to have been disgorged by the heavens above. These descents are all a little acceptable and perhaps explicable when the objects are chunks of rock or ice, but what about objects which are obviously of an earthly nature? Blather 1.9, 'Raining Toads' lists some of the objects and materials mentioned by Fort - and many more have been reported since - lizards, fish, shellfish, iron balls, turtles, china fragments, insects, blood, butter, fruit and other items and substances too numerous to list here. But clouds of dead crows? And Humans? On Monday, I received email from Daniel Ko in Hong Kong, with an article from The Nation (Thailand) on Saturday, November 29, 1997, (ppA7) which told of a...
Pontifications On Pabulum
Although it may appear, to all external analysis, that Blather is lapsing into some dank murkiness of ufology (or, as we prefer to call it around here, 'ufologyology' - the study of ufologists) on a permanent basis, we trip ourselves up in our haste to reassure The Readers that this is not in fact the case. Our excuse for such intense attention is merely due to the current flurry (slurry?) of Irish UFO interest - first two 'conferences' on consecutive weekends, and then UFO-related news made it to the front page of the 'The Examiner ' newspaper. Assuming that nothing utterly bizarre takes place in the next week with regard to Irish ufology(ology), next week's Blather will do its downmost to spew out bile of a different tangent. The front page of the Friday, November 21st issue of 'The Examiner' (Cork) had a piece headlined with 'Yes, the aliens landed....
All Gone PEIR Shaped
On Saturday 15th, Mark Pilkington and I trotted along to Wynn's Hotel, Dublin, to hear what the Irish Centre for UFO Studies had to say for themselves. I gathered that they were centralising some of their efforts on Boyle, Co. Roscommon, in light of the alleged 'crash' there in May 1996. In light of this, and their previous exploits, I expected more of the same wackiness that they had already been indulging in (see *several* earlier Blathers concerning Bantry, Co. Cork), but I have to admit, what they came out with on Saturday afternoon was even more surprising. We arrived, late, to join an audience of less than thirty people, including members of the mainstream press, children and elderly ladies, in a small over-furnished function room. When we arrived, Eamon Ansbro, of PEIR (Programme for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence Research) was using his highly dangerous laser pointer to skim through hand-written acetates...
Watching the Skywatchers
Last week's episode finished on a note of tongue-in-cheek anticipation of my possible demise by the hands of rabid ufologists. Although the conspiracy theorists among the readership may ponder whether or not this Blather was penned, so to speak, by an impostor, I would like to make it a clear that I emerged from the IUFOPRA (The Irish UFO and Paranormal Research Association) UFO Conference reasonably unscathed, despite the Irish coffees consumed during the latter part of the afternoon. Just before 10a.m., as the proceedings were kicking off, I bumped into two of Blather's old friends, Alan Sewell of the Irish Centre for UFO Studies, and his cohort, Eamonn Ansbro. Luckily enough, they don't seem to have read 'Blather' at all, and as the new issue of Fortean Times hadn't quite hit the shelves, they obviously hadn't read my article (FT105:43) about their, er, exploits. These days, the boys are...