The Mtstery Chronicles

by Joe Nickell

  ————. 2001a. Real-life X-Files. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky.

  ————. 2001b. John Edward: Hustling the bereaved. Skeptical Inquirer 25, no.6 (November/December): 19-22.

  Ostrander, Sheila, and Lynn Schroeder. 1971. Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain. New York: Bantam.

  Psychic Pets and Spirit Animals: True Stories from the Files of Fate Magazine. 1996. New York: Gramercy Books.

  Sebeok, Thomas A. 1986. Clever Hans redivivus. Skeptical Inquirer 10, no. 4 (Summer): 314-18.

  Wiseman, Richard, Matthew Smith, and Julie Milton. 1998. Can animals detect when their owners are returning home? An experimental test of the “psychic pet” phenomenon. British Journal of Psychology 89: 453-62.

  34

  Cryptids “Down Under”

  The term cryptid was coined to refer to unknown animal species or to those which, though believed extinct, may only have eluded scientific rediscovery (Coleman and Clark 1999, 75). Examples of the former are the yowie (Australia’s version of Bigfoot) and the bunyip (a swamp-dwelling, hairy creature with a horselike head) (Coleman and Clark 1999, 49-50, 255-57). An example of the latter is the thylacine.

  At a skeptic’s convention in Sydney in 2000, Australian paleontologist Mike Archer discussed the thylacine as part of his talk, “Creationism and Its Negative Impact on Good Science.” Also known as the Tas-manian tiger, the thylacinus cynocephalus was a wolflike marsupial with prominent stripes on its back (Figure 34-1). It became extinct on the mainland some 2,500 years ago, but continued to exist on Tasmania (one of a group of islands comprising Australia’s smallest state), until it finally succumbed to habitat destruction, bounty hunters, and other forces. The last known thylacine died in a zoo in 1936 (Park 1985). Nevertheless, since then hundreds of sightings have been reported, some by multiple eyewitnesses. Alleged sightings were on the increase even in the 1980s. However, there were few reports of attacks on sheep or other domestic animals, as would have been expected if thylacines were making a comeback (Park 1985), so the increase in sightings might have been due to the bandwagon effect. As with reported sightings of other cryptids, the tendency to see what one expects to see is powerful. Para-normalist Rupert T. Gould called this tendency “expectant attention” (Binns 1984, 77-78).

  FIGURE 34-1. Thylacine or “Tasmanian tiger”—believed extinct since 1936 as a mounted specimen in the Australian Museum. (Photograph by Joe Nickell.)

  Although Tasmania would seem the most credible locale, the thylacine has allegedly also been sighted often on the mainland—albeit in relatively isolated areas (Coleman and Clark 1999, 239). For example, thylacines are “frequently reported seen in the coastal border country between Victoria and South Australia” (Gilroy 1995, 74). Indeed, in November 2000, as Australian skeptics Bob Nixon, Richard Cadena, and I drove along the Great Ocean Road from Melbourne to Warrnam-bool, Bob recalled one reported Tasmanian tiger sighting some years ago near Lome (where we ate lunch). This was an area of virgin “bush” country (a eucalypt forest), but, alas, all we saw was beautiful scenery. I also kept an eye out for the thylacine while looking for the yowie—to be discussed presently—in the Blue Mountains, another area where the striped creature is reportedly seen (Gilroy 1995).

  Hope springs eternal, but it increasingly appears that if the thylacine is not to remain elusive forever, an idea of paleontologist Mike Archer’s must prevail. Archer, who is also director of the Australian Museum, has suggested resurrecting the species. Using DNA from a preserved specimen, he proposes to clone the creature, giving us a glimpse of that possibility at the skeptics conference. (For a discussion of the relevant biotechnology, see Lanza et al. 2000.)

  The yowie, in contrast, has left only meager traces of its supposed existence, like those of other hairy man-beasts reported around the world. These include the Himalayan yeti, the North American sasquatch, and similar creatures alleged to inhabit remote regions of China, Russia, southeast Asia, and elsewhere.

  The yowie is a fearsome, hairy creature of Aboriginal mythology. Also called Doolagahl (“great hairy man”), it is venerated as a sacred being from the time of creation, which the Aborigines call the Dreamtime. An alleged sighting by a hunting party of settlers in 1795 was followed by increased reports from the mountainous regions of New South Wales in the nineteenth century. For example, in 1875 a coal miner exploring in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney reportedly stalked a hairy, apelike animal for a distance before it finally eluded him. Sightings of the yowie mounted as settlers penetrated the country’s vast interior, and yowie hunter Rex Gilroy (1995, 197) notes that his files now “bulge with stories from every state.”

  The self-described “‘father’ of yowie research,” Gilroy (1995, 202) boasts the acquisition of some 5,000 reports, together with a collection of footprint casts, but he complains of “a lifetime of ridicule from both ignothe mystery chronicles rant laymen and scientists alike.” When Peter Rodgers and I ventured into the Blue Mountains, we experienced something of the prevalent local skepticism at the information center at Echo Point (in the township of Katoomba). Staffers there were emphatic that the yowie was a mythical creature pursued by a few fringe enthusiasts. (To them, yowies exist only as popular toys and chocolate figures marketed by Cadbury.)

  Nevertheless, to Gilroy “the Blue Mountains continues to be a hotbed of yowie man-beast activities—a vast region of hundreds of square miles still containing inaccessible forest regions seldom if ever visited by Europeans.” The fabled creatures are known there, he says, as the “Hairy Giants of Katoomba” and also as the “Killer Man-Apes of the Blue Mountains” (Gilroy 1995, 212).

  In the Katoomba bushland, Peter and I took the celebrated “steepest incline railway in the world” (built as a coal-mine transport in 1878) down into Jamison Valley. The miserable weather gave added emphasis to the term rainforest, through which we “bushwalked” (hiked) west along a trail. We passed some abandoned coal mines, which Peter humorously dubbed “yowie caves,” before eventually retracing our route. We saw no “Hairy Giants of Katoomba” but, to be fair, we encountered little wildlife at all. The ringing notes of the bellbird did herald our visit and announce that we were not alone.

  Resuming our drive, we next stopped at Meadlow Bath, an historic resort area. From the “haunted” Hydro Majestic Hotel overlooking the Megalong Valley—also reputed to be yowie country (Gilroy 1995, 217-18)—we surveyed a countryside that was largely shrouded in fog. Proceeding through Blackheath and Victoria Pass (where a bridge is said to be haunted by a female specter [Davis 1998, 95-97]), we continued on to Hartley, then took a narrow, winding road some 44 kilometers to Je-nolan Caves. Gilroy (1995, 219) states that the Aborigines believed the caves were used in ancient times as yowie lairs, and he cites reported sightings and discoveries of footprints in the region. (For millennia the Jenolan area was known to the local Aborigines as Binoomea, meaning “holes in the hill.” According to legend, the first non-Aborigine to discover the area was a bushranger, an escaped convict named McKeown, who used it as a refuge in the 1830s. Once, after a pursuer had followed him for miles, he disappeared, but his tracks “led up to a wild cavern and into it. . . and burst again into open day, and the route lay along a rugged gorge for some three miles” [Bates 2000, 23].)

  Except for passing through the Grand Arch, a majestic limestone-cavern entranceway into a hidden valley, and surveying the spectacular grotto called Devil’s Coachhouse, we avoided the caves themselves in order to continue our cryptozoological pursuit. (This despite the discovery therein of a skeleton of the extinct thylacine [Gregory’s 1999].) We instead searched the surrounding mountainous terrain (see FIGURE 34-2 )for signs of the elusive yowie, again without success. Here and there the raucous laughter of the kookaburra seemed to mock our attempt. Neither did we encounter another claimed paranormal entity—a ghostly lady—when we dined at the “haunted” Jenolan Caves House. An employee told us he had worked at the site for three years without seeing either a yowie or the
inn’s resident “ghost,” and he indicated that he believed in neither.

  Failing to encounter our quarry, we ended our hunt relatively unscathed—soaked, to be sure, and I with a slightly wrenched knee. But consider what might have been: headlines screaming, “Skeptics mauled by legendary beast!”—a tragic way to succeed, certainly, and with no guarantee, even if we survived, that we would be believed! Even Gilroy conceded (1995, 202) that “nothing short of actual physical proof— such as fossil or recent skeletal remains or a living specimen—will ever convince the scientific community of the existence of the ’hairy man.’”

  That, however, is as it should be: In many instances the touted evidence for Bigfoot-type creatures—mostly alleged sightings and occasional footprints—has been shown to be the product of error or outright deception (Nickell 1995, 222-31). Cryptozoologists risk being thought naive when they too quickly accept the evidence of “mammal” footprints. “Some of these tracks,” insists Gilroy (1995, 224), “have been found in virtually inaccessible forest regions by sheer chance and, in my view, must therefore be accepted as authentic yowie footprints.” It seems not to have occurred to the credulous monsterologist that a given “discoverer” might actually be the very hoaxer. Thus, the debate continues.

  FIGURE 34-2. Terrain of the legendary yowie (Australia’s Bigfoot) viewed through Carlotta Arch in the Jenolan Caves region. (Photograph by Joe Nickell.)

  REFERENCES

  Bates, Geoff. 2000. Historic Jenolan Caves. In Blue Mountains Tourist, Olympic ed. (citing Government Gazette, 19 August 1884).

  Binns, Ronald. 1984. The Loch Ness Mystery Solved. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.

  Coleman, Loren, and Jerome Clark. 1999. Cryptozoology A to Z. New York: Fireside (Simon & Schuster).

  Davis, Richard. 1998. The Ghost Guide to Australia. Sydney: Bantam Books.

  Gilroy, Rex. 1995. Mysterious Australia. Mapleton, Queensland, Australia: Nexus Publishing.

  Gregory’s Blue Mountains in Your Pocket. 1999. 1st ed. Map 238. Macquarie Centre, N.S.W.: Gregory’s Publishing.

  Lanza, Robert P., et al. 2000. Cloning Noah’s Ark. Scientific American, November, 84-89.

  Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons, and Other Alien Beings. Amherst, NY.: Prometheus Books.

  Park, Andy. 1985. Is this toothy relic still on the lprowl in Tasmania’s wilds? Smithsonian, August, 117-30.

  35

  Joseph Smith

  A Matter of Visions

  Past attempts to understand the motivations of visionaries, psychics, faith healers, and other mystics—seers like Mormon founder Joseph Smith—have often focused on a single, difficult question: Were they mentally ill, or were they instead charlatans? Increasingly, there is evidence that this may be a false dichotomy, that many of the most celebrated mystics may in fact simply have possessed fantasy-prone personalities. Called “fantasizers,” such individuals fall within the normal range and represent an estimated 4 percent of the population.

  This personality type was characterized in 1983 in a pioneering study by Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber. Some 13 shared traits were identified:

  being susceptible to hypnosis

  having imaginary companions in childhood

  fantasizing frequently as a child

  adopting a fantasy identity

  experiencing imagined sensations as real

  having particularly vivid sensory experiences

  reliving (not just recalling) experiences

  claiming psychic powers

  having out-of-body experiences

  receiving special messages from spirits, higher intelligences, or the like

  having healing powers

  encountering apparitions

  experiencing hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations (“waking dreams”) with classical imagery (such as spirits or monsters from outer space).

  As in previous studies (Nickell 1997), I consider the presence of six or more of these traits in an individual to be indicative of fantasy-prone-ness. (Anyone may have a few of these traits, and only the very rare person would exhibit all of them.)

  Wilson and Barber also found evidence suggesting that “individuals manifesting the fantasy-prone syndrome may have been over-represented among famous mediums, psychics, and religious visionaries of the past” (1983, 371). These researchers further found that biographies could yield evidence that a subject was a fantasizer, and they reached such a determination in the case of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science; Joan of Arc, the Catholic saint; and Gladys Osborne Leonard, the British spiritualist, among others. It should be noted that Wilson and Barber also included Theosophy founder Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, although her propensity for trickery during seances is well known. Deception and fantasy are obviously not mutually exclusive, as we shall see in the case of Joseph Smith himself, whom most non-Mormon scholars regard as a veritable confidence man but whom Wilson and Barber also specifically include in their list of historical fantasizers (372).

  Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-1844) was the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon church. He was born 23 December 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, the third of nine children of Joseph and Lucy (Mack) Smith. A poor, unchurched, but religious family, the Smiths migrated in 1816 to Palmyra, New York. A contemporary recalled the young Joe as a disheveled boy, dressed in patched clothing with homemade suspenders and a battered hat.

  He was a good talker, and would have made a fine stump speaker if he had had the training. He was known among the young men I associated with as a romancer of the first water. 1 never knew so ignorant a man as Joe was to have such a fertile imagination. He never could tell a common occurrence in his daily life without embellishing the story with his imagination; yet I remember that he was grieved one day when old Parson Reed told Joe that he was going to hell for his lying habits [quoted in Taves 1984, 16].

  At the age of 14, Smith later wrote, he became troubled by the various religious revivals in the area, and so he sought a wooded area where he hoped to commune directly with God. As he later wrote:

  It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally. ... I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction. But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction— not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.

  Smith continued:

  It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name, and said— pointing to the other—“This is my beloved Son, hear Him.”

  My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, that I asked the personages who stood above me in the light, which of all sects was right— and which I should join. I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong, and the personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in His sight: that those professors were all corrupt; that “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; they teach for doctrines the com
mandments of men: having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.” He again forbade me to join with any of them: and many other things did he say unto me, which I cannot write at this time. When I came to myself again, I found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven [quoted in Brodie 1993, 21-22].

  Although Smith gave different versions of his visions (Persuitte 2000), his biographer Fawn M. Brodie notes that somewhat similar experiences “were common in the folklore of the area”—an indication that Joseph’s experience was probably genuinely real to him. A few years later, at the age of 17, he had another experience. Although again there are different versions, it is described in terms entirely consistent with an actual hypnogogic hallucination (waking dream):

  A personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air. . . . He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness. . . . His whole person was glorious beyond description. I was afraid; but the fear soon left me. He called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds and tongues [quoted in Taves 1984, 277].

  Then Smith received the crucial communication. Moroni supposedly told him where to find a book, written on gold plates, that gave “an account of the former inhabitants of this continent,” together with two stones—the biblical Urim and Thummin.

  It should be mentioned that during this period the young Smith was engaged in “money-digging,” searching for hidden treasure by scrying (i.e., crystal gazing) or by dowsing (using a witch-hazel wand or mineral rod that was supposedly attracted by whatever was sought).

  Some have seen this as a form of fraud, but Taves (1984, 19) points out that the practice was an old one and that treasure-laden burial mounds dotted the area. Nevertheless, Joseph Smith, Jr., was arrested on the complaint of a neighbor that he was “a disorderly person and an impostor.” Witnesses, who were divided as to the genuineness of Joseph’s skill, reported that he looked at a special stone which he placed in his hat. The dispensation of the case is unclear, but apparently Smith agreed to leave town (Persuitte 2000, 40-53; Taves 1984, 17-18).