THE CURSE OF LADY TICHBORNE
In the year 1150, the saintly Lady Mabella Tichborne lay dying in her room at Tichborne Manor in England. For months she had lacked the strength to even sit by her window and overlook her beautiful rich farmland. She summoned her husband, Sir Roger de Tichborne, and shared with him her dying wish: that a loaf of bread be given to all the poor once a year on Lady Day, a feast day of the Virgin Mary.
But greedy Sir Roger felt no compassion toward the hungry and poor, and he quickly schemed to put an end to her request. He told his wife that he would distribute an annual gift in her name, equal to the amount of land she could walk upon holding a lighted torch. Assured that she couldn't get out of bed, Sir Roger was certain that he had settled the matter.
But Lady Mabella surprised him. She crawled out of bed, took the torch, and dragged her body around twenty-three acres of their estate. (To this day, this parcel of land is known as the Crawls.)
Back in her bed, Lady Mabella gathered the household around her and uttered the Tichborne curse. If the yearly dole of bread was ever stopped, the Tichborne family would die out.
So began the Tichborne dole. The custom went on for 600 years, until the local government got fed up with the influx of riffraff that showed up for it and shut it down in 1794. Afterward, male Tichborne heirs began to die.
Edward Doughty, a Tichborne ancestor who had changed his name, realized that the curse was in action when four of his brothers died without children. With the sudden death of his six-year-old son—the only remaining Tichborne heir—he reinstated the dole, which has been handed out ever since.
THE CURSE OF THE SCREAMING SKULL
During the seventeenth century, Azariah Pinney, a resident of Bettiscombe, a town in the heart of the English countryside, returned home after living in the West Indies for quite some time. Pinney brought a slave home with him to help care for his house, known as Bettiscombe Manor. The slave, unfortunately, soon fell ill, and lying upon his deathbed, requested one thing from his master. He asked that his corpse be sent home and buried in the land of his birth. Pinney agreed, but when the slave passed away, he broke the promise and buried the slave in a nearby church cemetery.
Immediately after the burial, a strange moaning drifted up through the earth under which the slave had been buried. Before long, the moaning turned into an endless and agonizing scream, which tore through the countryside. Upon finding out about Pinney's broken promise, the local villagers demanded that he immediately dig up the body and remove it from the cemetery. Pinney did as told, and returned with the body to Bettiscombe Manor, where he stored the body in the attic. The tortured screams ceased. The corpse remained in Pinney's house, where it decayed over time, until all that remained was the skull.
As the years passed, Bettiscombe Manor saw many owners come and go. Some did not take well to sleeping so near the infamous skull and made the mistake of removing it from the attic. One owner threw the skull into a nearby pond, thinking it would sink, but the skull rose to the surface shrieking in anguish. Another family buried it in the backyard garden, but it dug itself out of the ground. In the end, the skull was returned to the house, where it is said to reside peacefully to this day.
THE CURSE OF KING TUT'S TOMB
For centuries, thieves broke into the tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings and ran off with gold and treasures. Modern-day archaeologist Howard Carter was certain that one untouched tomb remained undiscovered and untouched: the tomb of King Tutankhamen, a mysterious pharaoh who had died at the age of eighteen. For thirty years, Carter was obsessed with finding the king's tomb, but by 1922, he felt like his luck was running out. Carter's digs had been funded by his friend Lord Carnarvon, who was losing a fortune and didn't want to spend anymore. But Carter begged for one more dig, and he got the funds for it. He began digging in the last unexplored part of the valley, and in November 1922 uncovered a descending staircase. Excited beyond belief, Carter called his benefactor and had him join him immediately.
On November 26, 1922, Carter scraped a hole through the doorway to King Tut's tomb. Over the next few days Carter and Carnarvon broke through the sealed doors and found rooms filled with gold statues, furniture, jewelry, and other invaluable objects. They also found a frightening message on a clay tablet: “Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.” Fearing that the Egyptian workers who were with them would flee if they saw the inscription, the two men hid the tablet away.
King Tut's tomb soon proved to be the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. The curse—which reached the newspapers after Carnarvon sold the story—became the most famous in history as headlines around the world announced, “the Curse of the Pharaohs.”
The curse's first victim was Lord Carnarvon, who died of an unknown disease just five months after the discovery of the tomb. An American journalist who had helped unseal the tomb fell into a coma and died shortly after Carnarvon. A friend of Carnarvon's, who had come to visit the tomb, died the next day. A radiologist who took x-rays of King Tut's mummy died after returning to England. The death toll continued to climb, and by 1929 the curse had been credited with claiming twenty-two lives. Oddly enough, archaeologist Howard Carter survived the curse and died of natural causes in 1939, at the age of sixty-four.
THE CURSE OF THE HINEMOA
The ship Hinemoa was named after the beautiful daughter of a very powerful New Zealand chief. In 1892, the ship set sail on the first voyage of what would become a chilling history of terror. A string of bad luck for its first captains revealed that something was very, very wrong with the steamer. The first captain went insane and had to be replaced. The second captain fell victim to foul play and was thrown into prison. The third became a drunk and, shaking from d.t.'s, lost his job. Captain four mysteriously died in his cabin, and the captain of the fifth voyage committed suicide.
The next time the Hinemoa set sail, it lost its balance and turned over. Righted again, it went to sea once more and put its curse on two sailors, who were washed overboard into the Pacific during the trip.
This terrible and ghastly curse continued until the last voyage of the Hinemoa in September 1917, when it crossed paths with a deadly German submarine. Shortly thereafter, the Hinemoa sank, bringing the curse to a watery end.
The Hinemoa's faithful crew knew why the ship was cursed. They claimed that deadly forces entered the ship when it was being built and were stored up in the vessel's “heart.” How did these forces arrive and in what form? The first ballast—heavy material used to give the ship stability—was gravel from a London graveyard.
13. THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
UFO STORIES AND BIZARRE AND TRUE LUNAR FACTS
ROSWELL: WHAT HAPPENED?
William “Mac” Brazel was working as a foreman on the Foster ranch seventy miles north of Roswell, New Mexico, when reports about sightings of “flying discs” started circulating in the news and among locals. Weeks before, on June 14, 1947, Brazel had noticed some strange and suspicious debris on the property. He reported to the Roswell Daily Record that he and his son spotted a “large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks,” but that he didn't return to the wreckage until he connected the stories of the flying discs to the material he had found. The timing of the incident is controversial, but some contemporary accounts suggest that Brazel returned to the site with Air Force Major Jesse Marcel and some plainclothes officers on July 6. As the story goes, the officials collected the debris, which they claimed was the remains of a weather balloon. The subsequent investigation, which involved the FBI, was reportedly classified.
The story of UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico, would have probably stayed dead if Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist, hadn't lost his job during the 1970s. UFOs were Friedman's hobby, and soon after his termination, they became his career. He became a full-time lecturer. He delivered his favorite talk, titled, “Flying Saucers Are Real,” at more than 600 different colleg
e campuses and other venues around the country.
Friedman soon developed a nationwide reputation as a UFO expert, and people who'd seen UFOs began seeking him out. In 1978, Jesse Marcel, the U.S. Army intelligence officer who'd retrieved the wreckage from Mac Brazel's ranch thirty-one years earlier, even made contact with him. Friedman urged Marcel to give an interview to the National Enquirer, which he did, explaining that what he had picked up from the ranch was indeed not of this earth.
The interview couldn't have come at a better time: it was published in 1979, and Steven Spielberg's film Close Encounters of the Third Kind had just premiered, stoking the public's appetite for UFO stories. After thirty years, the Roswell story blew up once again, and since that time the story just kept on growing. New “witnesses” to the Roswell UFO began seeking out Friedman to tell him their stories. Soon, the Roswell story included humanoid alien beings. (For the record, neither Mac Brazel nor Jesse Marcel ever claimed to have seen aliens among the wreckage. No one went public with those claims until more than thirty years after the fact.)
So was the U.S. government hiding evidence of an alien crash-landing on earth? In 1993, Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico asked the U.S. General Accounting Office to look into whether the government had ever been involved in a space-alien cover-up, either in Roswell, New Mexico, or anyplace else. The GAO spent eighteen months searching government archives dating back to the 1940s, including even the highly classified minutes of the National Security Council. The GAO's research also prompted the U.S. Air Force to launch its own investigation. It released its findings in September 1994, and the GAO's report followed in November 1995.
The reports arrived at the same conclusion. What the conspiracy theorists believe were UFOs were actually products of top-secret research programs run by the U.S. military during the Cold War. According to the reports, the object that crashed on Brazel's farm in Roswell was a balloon, but not just any balloon—it was part of Project Mogul, a secret defense program geared toward detecting nuclear weapons exploded by the Soviets. In the late 1940s, the U.S. had neither spy satellites nor high-altitude spy planes that it could send over the Soviet Union to see if they were succeeding at building nuclear weapons. Government scientists figured weather balloons fitted with special sensing equipment, if launched high enough into the atmosphere, might be able to detect the shock waves given off by nuclear explosions thousands of miles away.
The Roswell intelligence officers who recovered the wreckage didn't have high enough security clearance to know about Project Mogul, and thus they didn't know to inform anyone of the discovery. On the whole, Project Mogul was successful. Apparently, the equipment it generated did detect the first Soviet nuclear blasts.
The air force's 1994 report suggested that a number of other military projects that took place in the 1940s and 1950s had become part of the Roswell myth as well. In the 1950s, the air force launched balloons as high as nineteen miles into the atmosphere and dropped human dummies to test parachutes for pilots of the X-15 rocket plane and the U-2 spy plane. The dummies, the air force says, were sometimes mistaken for aliens; because it didn't want the real purpose of the tests to be revealed, it did not debunk the alien theories. Some balloons also dropped mock interplanetary probes, which looked a lot like flying saucers. In one particular crash, a serviceman named Captain Dan D. Fulgham, crashed a test balloon ten miles northwest of Roswell and suffered an injury that caused his head to swell considerably.
The incident, the air force says, helped inspire the notion that aliens have large heads.
Have these reports deterred conspiracy theorists? Obviously not all of them have. Who knows what really happened, and whom we can trust?
Ufology, the study of UFO evidence, was invented during the late 1970s when investigators interviewed people who worked at or near Roswell. Ufology is now part of our popular culture.
The thirty-year-old Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal (CSICOP) opines that UFO sightings are hallucinations.
FIRST UFO SIGHTING
In 1947, less than a month before the incident at Roswell, New Mexico, Kenneth Arnold, a pilot from Boise, Idaho, reported seeing nine unusual objects in the sky near Mount Rainier. He described the mysterious objects as “bright” and said they were flying at a “tremendous speed.” His experience is said to be the first sighting of unidentified flying objects (UFOs). In 1952, Arnold wrote and self-published The Coming of the Saucers, the first UFO book.
“THOSE WHO DREAM BY DAY ARE COGNIZANT OF MANY THINGS THAT ESCAPE THOSE WHO DREAM ONLY AT NIGHT.” —EDGAR ALLAN POE
UFO RELIGIONS
UFOs are major components of some new religions, including Unarius, the Aetherians, the Order of the Solar Temple (whose believers thought they would be carried away by the Hale-Bopp comet), the Raelians, and Scientology (whose mythos tells of a galactic emperor who brought billions of people to earth and killed them). The UFO religions, which tend to be apocalyptic, profess a belief in superior beings (the old gods?) who will come down from the sky and save the true believers.
“The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.” —JOAN DIDION
According to a 2005 Gallup poll, 24 percent of Americans and 19 percent of Britons believe that extraterrestrials have visited earth at some time in the past. Men are more receptive to the idea of alien visits than women are.
IF YOU'VE BEEN ABDUCTED . . .
Each alien abduction story is different, but there are key elements to almost every one. Most people who claim to have been abducted describe combinations of the following:
Light, often from a beam that sucks the person into the spacecraft;
A disk-shaped spacecraft that looks very high tech;
Medical testing and experimentation, often quite invasive;
“Lost time,” or amnesia about a certain period of time.
THE TUNGUSKA EVENT:
A UFO CRASH LANDING?
On June 30, 1908, an explosion at or above the Tunguska River in Siberia felled sixty million trees. When the Soviet government funded an investigation in the 1920s, Leonid Kulik and his associates interviewed eyewitnesses who said they had seen a huge fireball crossing the sky. The blast was estimated to be between ten and fifteen megatons and left an enormous, butterflyshaped region of scorched and flattened trees.
What was it that exploded? An extraterrestrial body?
In 1930, a British astronomer proposed that it was a small comet. But in 1983, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote that comets are made of ice and dust and that a comet could not have flown so close to the earth without disintegrating. Expeditions sent to the Tunguska River region in the 1950s and 1960s found microscopic glass spheres containing nickel and iridium, which are found in meteorites, and in 2001, investigators suggested the blast was the explosion of a meteorite from the asteroid belt. But there's no typical meteorite crater in the area.
Other theories suggest that a small black hole was passing through the earth, a piece of antimatter exploded, or a nuclear-powered UFO blew up. Some blame Nikola Tesla. In an article written in 1908, Tesla claimed that he could direct electromagnetic-wave energy to any point on earth from his transformer at Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York. One of Tesla's associates reported that during one test the Wardenclyffe Tower glowed and an owl flying nearby disintegrated. That's when Tesla stopped talking about projecting electromagnetic force.
To this day, no one knows for sure. Star Trek's explanation is as good as any: An alien race saved humanity by exploding its planet and deflecting an incoming meteor that would have struck Europe. The remnants of the explosion hit Siberia.
MARFA MYSTERY
If you're ever driving through Texas and have some time on your hands, travel east from Marfa on U.S. Route 90 to the Mystery Lights Viewing Area, where you can witness Marfa's mysterious white-lights show. According to testimony, the lights
flash one at a time, quickly fade away, and then reappear for the public's viewing delight. Are the lights reflections from stars, cars, or city lights? Spaceship high-beams? Astral glowworms? Nobody knows for sure.
THE GRAYS
“Gray” is the term used to describe over 75 percent of aliens sighted in the United States. Grays are typically four to six feet tall and have light gray skin, amorphous bodies with short legs and elongated torsos, and lidless, bulbous eyes. Grays are sometimes known as Roswell aliens, Zetas, or Reticulians, and they are the protagonists in most modern-day UFO conspiracy theories and stories.
In 1948, military pilots and government officials in the New Mexico desert reported seeing strange green orbs floating in the sky. The orbs weren't the result of any secret military testing, officials confirmed, and they did not appear to be meteorites. Some people suggested that the green lights, which resembled pale green flares, were the result of extraterrestrial weaponry testing. A program called Project Twinkle was established to inspect the origins of the lights, but its results were not conclusive, and it was shut down in 1951.
THE ABDUCTION OF BETTY ANDREASSON
In 1967, Massachusetts housewife and mother of seven Betty Andreasson went public with her claims that she and members of her family were in regular contact with extraterrestrials. Among her many detailed stories was an incredible account of boarding an alien spacecraft and undergoing medical experiments at the hands of the extraterrestrials. A devout Christian, Andreasson was taken seriously by many in the UFO community because it was thought that such a religious person would not spin tall tales, especially concerning aliens and strange medical procedures. But alas, in 2007 Andreasson's stepson alleged that his mother's stories were untrue and all part of an elaborate hoax to gain money and fame.
The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories Page 16
