The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries
Colin Wilson
THE MAMMOTH
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF
UNSOLVED
MYSTERIES
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Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2000
Copyright © Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson, 2000
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84119-172-8
ISBN 978-1-84119-172-0
eISBN 978-1-78033-705-0
Printed and bound in the EU
10 9 8 7 6 5
Contents
Author’s Note
Introduction
1 King Arthur and Merlin
2 Atlantis
3 The Baader-Meinhof Gang
4 The Barbados Vault
5 The Basa Murder
6 The Bermuda Triangle
7 Bigfoot
8 Christie, Agatha
9 The Cleveland Torso Murders
10 Crop Circles
11 The Curse of the Pharaohs
12 The Devil’s Footprints
13 Was Philip K. Dick Possessed by an Angel?
14 The Dogon and the Ancient Astronauts
15 The Mystery of Eilean More
16 Fairies
17 Fulcanelli and the Mysteries of Alchemy
18 The Glozel Mystery
19 The Grey Man of Ben MacDhui
20 Kaspar Hauser
21 Rudolf Hess
22 The Holy Shroud of Turin
23 Homer and the Fall of Troy
24 The Hope Diamond
25 The Mystery of Hypnosis
26 The Enigma of Identical Twins
27 Jack the Ripper
28 Did Joan of Arc Return from the Dead?
29 Junius
30 Fedor Kuzmich
31 The Loch Ness Monster
32 The Man in the Iron Mask
33 The Mystery of the Mary Celeste
34 Glenn Miller
35 The Missing Link
36 Where is the Mona Lisa?
37 “The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World”
38 Joan Norkot
39 The Oera Linda Book
40 The “People of the Secret”
41 Poltergeists
42 Possession by the Dead
43 Psychometry
44 Rennes-le-Château
45 Did Robin Hood Really Exist?
46 The Mystery Death of Mary Rogers
47 “Saint-Germain the Deathless”
48 The Miracles of Saint-Médard
49 The Sea Kings of 6000 BC
50 Sea Monsters
51 Who Was Shakespeare?
52 The Skull of Doom
53 Spontaneous Human Combustion
54 Synchronicity or “Mere Coincidence”?
55 Time in Disarray
56 The Great Tunguska Explosion
57 Unidentified Flying Objects
58 Vampires: Do They Exist?
59 Velikovsky’s Comet
60 Vortices
61 Who Was Harry Whitecliffe?
62 Patience Worth
63 Zombies
Index
Author’s Note
This book contains most of the chapters from two earlier works: An Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries and Unsolved Mysteries Past and Present. This explains why some chapters contain nuggets of information that can be found in other chapters: they were originally part of different books. We have not removed such repetitions, because they are always relevant to the chapter in which they occur, and readers who read this book piecemeal will probably not notice them anyway.
CW and DW
Introduction
In 1957 the science writer Jacques Bergier made a broadcast on French television that caused a sensation. He was discussing one of the great unsolved mysteries of prehistory, the sudden disappearance of the dinosaurs about sixty-five million years ago. He suggested that the dinosaurs had been wiped out by the explosion of a star fairly close to our solar system – a “supernova”. He then went on to make the even more startling suggestion that the explosion may have been deliberately caused by superbeings who wanted to wipe out the dinosaurs and to give intelligent mammals a chance.
Even the first part of his theory was dismissed by scientists as the fantasy of a crank, and the reaction was no better when in 1970 Bergier repeated it in a book called Extra-Terrestrials in History, which began with a chapter called “The Star that Killed the Dinosaurs”. But five years later an American geologist named Walter Alvarez was studying a thin layer of clay on a hill side in Italy – the clay that divides the age of the dinosaurs (Mesozoic) from our own age of mammals – and brooding on this question of what had wiped out whole classes of animal. He took a chunk from the hillside back to California, and showed it to his father, the physicist Luis Alvarez, with the comment: “Dad, that h
alf-inch layer of clay represents the period when the dinosaurs went out, and about 75 per cent of the other creatures on the earth”.
His father was so intrigued that he subjected the clay to labouratory tests, and found it contained a high proportion of a rare element called iridium, a heavy element that usually sinks to the middle of planets, but which is thrown out by explosions. Alvarez also gave serious consideration to the idea of an exploding star, and only dismissed it when further tests showed an absence of a certain radioactive platinum that would also be present in a supernova explosion. The only other alternative was that the earth had been struck by a giant meteorite, which had filled the atmosphere with steam and produced a “greenhouse effect” that had raised the temperature by several degrees.
Modern crocodiles and alligators can survive a temperature of about 100 degrees C; but two or three degrees higher is too much for them, and they die. This is almost certainly what happened to the dinosaurs, about sixty-five million years ago. And that is why this present book contains no entry headed: “What became of the dinosaurs”? We know the answer. And we also know that Bergier’s “lunatic fringe” theory was remarkably close to the truth.
This is the basic justification for a volume like this. It underlines the point that it is always dangerous to draw a sharp, clear line between “lunacy” and orthodox science. In the article on spontaneous human combustion, I have quoted a modern medical textbook which states that spontaneous combustion is impossible, and that there is no point in discussing it. But the evidence is now overwhelming that spontaneous combustion not only occurs, but occurs fairly frequently.
In 1768 the French Academy of Sciences asked the great chemist Lavoisier to investigate a report of a huge stone that had hurtled from the sky and buried itself in the earth not far from where some peasants were working. Lavoisier was absolutely certain that great stones did not fall from the sky, and reported that the witnesses were either mistaken or lying; it was another half century before the existence of meteorites was accepted by science.
The “poltergeist”, or noisy ghost, is even more commonplace than spontaneous human combustion; at any given moment there are hundreds of cases going on all over the world. Yet in America scientists have formed a kind of defensive league called CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) whose basic aim is to argue that the “paranormal” simply does not exist, and is an invention of cranks and “pseudos”. Anyone who has taken even the most superficial interest in the paranormal knows that such a view is not merely untenable, but that it represents a kind of wilful blindness.
Let us be quite clear about this. I am not arguing that scepticism is fundamentally harmful. Reason is the highest faculty possessed by human beings, and every moment of our lives demands a continuous assessment of probabilities. Our lives depend upon this assessment every time we cross a busy street. I have to judge the likelihood of that car or bus reaching me before I can step on to the opposite pavement. And when a scientist is confronted by the question of whether, let us say, an Israeli “psychic” can bend keys by merely stroking them, he can only appeal to his general experience of keys and try to assess the probabilities. Yet I think every scientist would agree that it would be wrong to make an a priori judgment and decide that the question is not worth investigating because keys cannot be bent by merely stroking them. If he is honest, then he must at least be willing to be prepared to study the matter more closely.
Most scientists would reply that this is precisely how they operate, and in principle this is perfectly true. In fact, they are human beings, and are subject to boredom, impatience and touchiness like the rest of us, which means that they can easily drift over the borderline that separates scientific detachment from emotional commitment.
One of CSICOP’s less dogmatic members was the mathematician Martin Gardner, whose book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science is an amusing and delightful study in “cults of unreason”. We can read of the prophet Voliva, who believed that the earth is flat, of Captain Symmes, who believed it is hollow, of Cyrus Teed, who believed it is shaped like an egg and that we are living on its inner surface. Gardner is wickedly amusing on the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the cranks who believe that the Great Pyramid contains information about the second coming of Christ. But after half-a-dozen chapters the reader begins to find this attitude of constant superiority rather cloying. Is the author some kind of super-intellect who has discovered the secret of eternal truth? Is he quite sure that dowsing for water is a laughable superstition, that everyone who has seen a UFO is deluded or mistaken, that the continent of Atlantis was a figment of Plato’s imagination, that Wilhelm Reich’s later ideas were pure lunacy? It is surely a question of where one decides to draw the line. I am inclined to agree that Immanuel Velikovsky was, in the last analysis, a crank – that is, that his theories about the connection between Venus and Biblical catastrophes are the result of inspiration rather than careful scientific reasoning. But many of his inspired guesses were amazingly accurate – for example, his belief that earth is surrounded by powerful magnetic fields. And there are influential philosophers of science like Sir Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi and Abraham Maslow who believed that all scientific thinking is based on “inspiration” rather than on careful scientific reasoning. In short Gardner seems to me to be drawing his line in the wrong place.
I have written a biography of Wilhelm Reich, and I agree that Reich was dogmatic and paranoid, as well as being a thoroughly disagreeable character. But then, the trouble with Reich was that he had, like so many other psychoanalysts, borrowed from Freud a mantle of papal infallibility. All neurosis is sexual in origin, and a neurotic person is incapable of facing up to the sexual nature of his problems. You disagree? It only proves that you have sexual problems that you are afraid to acknowledge. In this respect Reich is like Dr Johnson; if his pistol misfires he will knock you down with the butt. Anyone who disagrees with him must be “mentally sick”. But Gardner’s own book is full of this same tone of brutal dogmatism. There is an underlying assumption that he is infallible. And while the reader is willing to entertain this as a possibility, he would like to know more of the methods by which Gardner arrives at his unshakeable certainties.
In fact, it would be disastrous if Gardner’s attitude became widely accepted and part of the “conventional wisdom”. The progress of human knowledge depends on maintaining that touch of scepticism even about the most “unquestionable” truths. A century ago, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection was regarded as scientifically unshakeable; today, most biologists have their reservations about it. Fifty years ago, Freud’s sexual theory of neurosis was accepted by most psychiatrists; today, it is widely recognized that his methods were highly questionable. At the turn of this century, a scientist who questioned Newton’s theory of gravity would have been regarded as insane; twenty years later, it had been supplanted by Einstein’s theory although, significantly, few people actually understood it. It seems perfectly conceivable that our descendants of the twenty-second century will wonder how any of us could have been stupid enough to be taken in by Darwin, Freud or Einstein.
Gardner devotes a chapter to attacking the ideas of Charles Fort, the New Yorker who spent his life insisting that scientists are too dogmatic, and ought to be more willing to question their basic assumptions. He objects that, since Fort is merely a destructive critic, with no theories of his own to offer, he is basically barren. There is an element of truth in this. But Gardner fails to grasp that what Fort is really objecting to is the rigid, commissar-like attitude that characterizes his own book. Fort is arguing that scientific discovery has its roots in a sense of wonder, and that a sense of wonder, even with a touch of gullibility, is preferable to a kind of humourless Marxian dogmatism. Newton himself was fascinated by alchemy, and regarded his greatest work as his commentary on the Book of Daniel. Does this qualify Newton as a crank? Obviously not. The inference is surely that it is more fruitful to be intr
igued by the possibility of some prehistoric monster in the depths of Loch Ness than to dismiss it as a childish absurdity. It is more fruitful to concede that UFOs may be real than to dismiss them as hallucinations. It may even be more fruitful to admit that the evidence suggests that Shakespeare may not have written his own plays, or that Andrew Crosse created life in his labouratory, or that Orffyreus may have discovered the secret of perpetual motion, than to take the attitude that such extravagances are not even worth discussing.
The career of another “sceptical” friend, Ian Wilson, has also provided me with a great deal of wry amusement. A Roman Catholic convert, he began by writing an important book that argued that the “Holy Shroud of Turin” is genuine. He followed this with a book about reincarnation entitled Mind Out of Time, which brilliantly attacked a number of cases of alleged “memories of past lives”, like the famous Bridey Murphy case. (The Catholic Church has officially condemned the notion of reincarnation.) He was then asked to participate in a television series based on the files of the Society for Psychical Research, and although he was again able to use his debunking technique to considerable effect in cases like that of the “Croglin vampire”, he had to admit that in other cases, particularly those involving ghosts, the evidence simply could not be dismissed. When Wilson turned his attention to “the after-death experience” (in a book of that title), the same thing happened, and even after dismissing much of the evidence as fraudulent, he ended by acknowledging that the overall case for “survival” was very powerful indeed. A more recent book of Wilson’s, Superself concerns unusual powers of the mind, including dowsing and healing, and ends by acknowledging the reality of what might be called the “superconscious mind”. Here we have an example of a man who has the patience and honesty to study many cases of apparently paranormal powers in some detail and who ends with his scepticism deeply eroded – although he finds himself too embarrassed to come out openly and admit that he has, in effect, made a 180 degree turn.
Another interesting example of the “wholesale” attitude toward paranormal phenomena can be found in a book entitled Secrets of the Supernatural by Joe Nickell and John Fischer. The authors’ aim is to solve a number of mysteries through the investigative approach. The first chapter describes an investigation into a haunting at Mackenzie House, in Toronto. They cite various witnesses, who claim to have seen ghosts over the years and some who have heard spooky noises at night. They then describe how they spoke to the caretaker of the house next door, who demonstrated that various noises made in the basement were “telegraphed” to the “haunted house”.
