Month: December 1997
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...