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IN THE WINK OF AN EYE:
Mysterious Disappearances
by Scott Corrales
The Roman author Julius Obsequens, worthy perhaps
of the distinction of being the earliest "Fortean" researcher,
approached the subject of unexplained disappearances in his Liber Prodigiorum
with a story that was well-known to his audience: "One day, when Romulus,
founder of Rome, exhorted his troops in the vicinity of the Caprean Swamp, there
erupted a sudden, noisy thunderstorm during which Romulus was enveloped in a
cloud so dense that he was lost out of sight, and was never again seen by mortal
men. He was then ascended to divine rank, and worshipped under the name
Quirinus".
People still disappear, perhaps not as spectacularly as Romulus did (nor are
they elevated to godhead), but that they do so is an undisputed fact. It is
necessary to separate what could best be described as commonplace
disappearances--the ones involving people on the run from the law, deadbeat
parents, parents who abduct their children to live in obscurity elsewhere, and a
host of other mundane reasons--from the cases which boggle the mind and defy
common sense: cases where people vanish without a trace from airplanes
travelling at thirty thousand feet, or disappear from rooms that have been
locked from the outside. Perhaps even more than UFOs, the enigma of sudden
disappearance has challenged investigators for a hundred years, and an ominous
silence stifles the small, silent question at the end of every case, often
all-too-horrible to enunciate: where did these people disappear to?
The ability to "take a powder" in antiquity was considered the
exclusive province of sorcerers and witches. The notorious Apollonius of Tyana
disappeared from the sight of the Emperor Domitian and his court, as tradition
would have it, causing great consternation. Mexican author Artemio del Valle
Arizpe gave us the legend of "La Mulata de C˘rdoba", a witch from
colonial times who was imprisoned for her uncanny ability to find lost items and
hidden treasures: when her jailor stopped by her cell to check on her, he was
astounded to see the woman boarding a tiny sailing ship she had drawn on the
wall, and sailed off, waving at her captor. The vampires of Eastern Europe were
reputedly able to vanish and reappear at will thanks to the evil powers at their
disposal.
Even if the aforementioned were true, it would not begin to solve our dilemma:
contemporary cases involving mysterious disappearances do not, as a rule,
involve people who want to vanish from the sight of their peers for one reason
or another. Their disappearance is often sudden and unexpected, taking place by
day or by night, alone or escorted, and sometimes involving the evaporation of
the vehicle in which they travelled.
In 1941, a Swiss rescue team was called upon to search for a group of mountain
climbers that had not returned to their base camp. After a number of days, the
rescuers managed to find the footprints of the mountaineering party, which
stopped abruptly in the middle of a glacier. In this case, the authorities
determined "it was a disappearance under circumstances which could not be
clearly determined, on account of the facts".
The Florida state police would be next in line for bemusement, this time
resulting from the 1952 disappearance of Tom Brook, his wife, and his 11
year-old son. According to the report, the Brooks had visited a friend some 30
miles away from Miami, and got into their car to return home at 11:40 p.m.. They
never completed the trip: local law enforcement found their empty car,
headlights ablaze and doors open, just 7 miles away from their friend's house.
Mrs. Brooke's handbag was found in the back seat, containing a considerable
amount of money. Police records indicate that the family's footprints led to a
meadow at the edge of the road, stopping abruptly after a few dozen steps, as in
the case involving the missing Swiss mountaineers eleven years earlier. A
similar fate befell a French family in 1972: after spending an evening with
friends, and heading back to their home in the early hours of the morning, they
never reached their destination, a scant 2 miles away. No satisfactory
explanation was ever provided.
It is difficult enough to find conjectures to account for the fates of these
hapless individuals. The task becomes overwhelming when the disappearance of
hundreds, even thousands, must be accounted for.
During the War of the Spanish Succession in 1707, a four thousand-man invasion
force under the Habsburg Archduke, Charles, camped at the foot of the Pyrenees
on their way to Spain, breaking camp the following morning and marching through
a mountain pass. This well-armed and equipped force never reached its goal, nor
was it ever accounted for. During the French invasion of Indochina in the mid
19th century, a column of 650 fusiliers marched toward Saigon, disappearing
without having ever engaged the enemy. The possibility that the fusiliers had
been ambushed by Vietnamese forces was discounted, since another group followed
close behind and did not hear the sounds of an armed encounter, nor did it find
any scattered arms, gear, or bodies.
The preceding case histories are well-known to fortean and paranormal
researchers. They are the "classic" cases which serve as an
introduction to the more recent cases, which remain equally unexplained--a
reminder to the determined investigator that others have covered the path before
and have been unable to come up with answers. The more recent cases that follow
are no less intriguing.
When the Dutch sensitive Gerard Croiset was employed by the Puerto Rican police
in the mid-1970's to find two children belonging to a local millionaire, he
concluded, chillingly, that the children were nowhere to be found on this
physical plane. Unwilling to be blinded by what they perceived as mysticism, the
police thanked Croiset and resumed their investigations with conventional means:
the children remain missing to this very day.
Jose Maria Carnero, a 26 year old medical student, vanished off the face of the
earth in April 1987 while on maneuvers with the military unit to which he
belonged on the Montelareina Military Base in Zamora, Spain. Reports indicate
that Jose Maria wandered away from his squad in the midst of a light rainfall,
while the other soldiers tried to find shelter under the trees. The young man
was never seen again, even after a massive search by the Spanish army, which to
this day lists him as a deserter.
Author Salvador Freixedo, who looked into the subject of these bizarre
disappearances as part of his book La Granja Humana, cites the curious case of a
vehicular accident in Burgos, Spain which caused the deaths of a number of
people and the disappearance of a 10 year-old from one of the trucks involved in
the accident. He was not found among the victims of the crash, and has never
been seen again. The police initially believed that the boy had wandered away
from the crash scene in an amnesic state, and a thorough search of the area was
mounted by both civilians and police officials, yet nothing was turned up. In
order to bring the case to a close, the authorities suggested that the boy had
been disintegrated, in fact, by a cargo of sulfuric acid being hauled by the
tanker truck in which he was a passenger.
Some of the cases read like science-fiction in their thriller-like quality (bear
in mind that science fiction author Isaac Asimov used a mysterious disappearance
to transport one of his protagonists to the future in A Pebble in the Sky)
and detail. In 1950, a New York City paper allegedly carried a four-line news
item relating the death of a pedestrian hit by a car near Times Square. The car
had apparently been unable to stop and a crowd of onlookers ran to offer
assistance to the unfortunate victim, one Rudolf Fenz, who was pronounced dead.
There were details to the sad but uneventful story which were impossible to
overlook: the late Rudolf Fenz was wearing decidedly vintage clothing--a frock
coat, narrow trousers, buckle shoes and a matching hat. His pockets contained
several calling cards to his name, an invoice regarding the lodging and upkeep
of a horse and carriage, and a letter postmarked 1876. A search of the New York
phone book revealed the number of a Rudolf Fenz, Jr., who had passed away some
years earlier. Nonetheless, his widow was able to tell investigator Hubert V.
Rihn of the Missing Persons division that her late husband's father had
disappeared mysteriously in 1876 while on a trip to the local tobacconist, and
never returned home. Rihn allegedly looked through records for that year and
found that one Rudolf Fenz, age 29, had disappeared on the same night, last seen
wearing a black frock coat, narrow trousers, and buckle shoes.
Certain locations on the planet have acquired the reputation as places where
human disappearances are quite common. Some of them, like the Bermuda Triangle
and the Devil's Triangle of Japan, have formed part of "pop"
paranormal study for decades. Nonetheless, mountains play a greater role as
locales for mysterious disappearances than any other site. In ancient tradition,
travelers straying too close to Greece's Mt. Parnassus or Mt. Olympus would
often be lost for good. Puerto Rico's El Yunque, New Hampshire's Mt. Glastenbury,
and Eastern Zimbabwe's Mt. Inyangani never quite managed to acquire the name
recognition of the better-known ones, despite the vast number of unexplained
cases which have occurred in and around them.
Mist-shrouded El Yunque has always been a source of mystery involving paranormal
phenomena and more recently, UFOs. Dozens of individuals, largely weekenders and
campers, have disappeared inexplicably from this mountain rainforest. A child
disappeared while walking down a trail with its parents, and even rescue teams
sent to investigate have been swallowed by this deceptive wilderness area.
Forestry officials are quick to blame quicksand and unexplored sinkholes as the
reasons for these evaporations, even when they occurred in areas far from where
any of the aforementioned conditions would be encountered.
The disappearances at Mt. Glastenbury managed to cause a sensation in peaceful
rural Vermont. During a five year span running from the mid-1940's to the early
'50s, seven individuals vanished from this peak near Bennington, Vermont. Unlike
El Yunque, this location had no prior history of being one from which people
could fade into thin air. A number of theories--ranging from black magic
activity to UFO abductions--have been shuffled around to explain the
disappearances. Mt. Glastenbury's first victim, curiously enough, was a mountain
guide who took hunters on treks through the wilderness. This guide, plus four
hunters, was never seen again. Another victim was lost under even weirder
conditions: he boarded a bus in Saint Albans, Vermont, took a seat, was noticed
by the driver and other passengers...but was never seen getting out of the bus,
which was a non-stop service to Bennington.
Zimbabwe's Mount Inyangani is perhaps the most interesting of the mountain sites
known for their ability to make people vanish, precisely because in some
instances, those missing have turned up with peculiar stories to tell. UFO
investigator Cynthia Hind, in an article for FATE Magazine, discusses the
experience which befell a present deputy minister in the Zimbabwean government,
who was once lost on Mount Inyangani with two companions. According to the
deputy minister, the three men walked aimlessly in a state of confusion, feeling
neither thirst nor hunger, all the while seeing and waving frantically at the
elements of the rescue team, who could not see them at all. Apparently, certain
blood sacrifices were offered to the tutelary deities of the mountain, which
enabled the three men to "reenter" our normal space-time continuum.
Hind's article goes on to say that in the early 80's, a district assistant for
the locality which includes Mount Inyangani was himself involved in the rescue
operation undertaken to localize a missing government official. The elders of
the Tangwena tribe were informed of the official's plight, and a ritual aimed at
securing his "return" was performed. The missing official was found
the next day, none worse for the experience, but unable to remember what he had
done during the two days he was missing. Others have been less fortunate, and
their disappearances have never been solved. The efficacy of ritual magic in
these cases indicates that there is an intelligence of sorts that can be
persuaded, upon occasion, to give up those it has taken, or have heedlessly
wandered into its domain. Did the ancient Tainos of Puerto Rico have spells to
ransom their lost kin from El Yunque's misty depths? We shall never know.
Humans have always had a healthy respect for certain bodies of water, mainly
freshwater lakes with a reputation for evil. Some of these include the Scottish
and Irish lakes investigated by the late F.W. Holiday and lakes and lagoons
elsewhere in the world which allegedly harbor monsters or exotic life-forms.
Still other lakes are notorious for the matter which occupies us here:
mysterious human disappearances.
British mystery researcher H.P. Wilkins looked into the traditions associated
with the "hot" lakes of Iceland's northeastern corner, the unoccupied
land known by the ominous moniker of Od dharhraun. This vast wasteland harbors
the Askja volcano, a gargantuan crater thirteen miles across, surrounded by a
lunar landscape of lava fields and black ash.
Into this nightmarish corner of the world--suggestive of Tolkien's Mordor--entered
a group of young German geologists conducting a survey of Iceland's astonishing
volcanic activity. They arrived in 1905 at the fishing village of Husavik and
hired a guide to lead them to the Od dharhraun, hitherto shunned by all
Icelanders as a supernatural, malevolent place. Against their guide's warnings,
the Germans made camp in the forsaken region and two of them boarded a dinghy to
reach the center of the volcanic lake. When their companion, who had remained
ashore, turned to check on his fellows' progress, he was stunned to realize that
they were no longer there--the scientists and their boat had disappeared. The
authorities later mounted a rescue effort and the hot lake was dragged, but the
scientists had vanished for good. Wilkins adds to this story that any
investigator spending some time in Iceland's lonely interior can easily collect
a number of stories regarding bizarre disappearances.
These disappearance-inducing lakes are not safely tucked away in remote regions
of foreign countries, either. George Andrews, author of Extraterrestrial
Friends and Foes, includes the disturbing supernatural activity surrounding
Lake Whitney in the Dallas/Ft.Worth area. Quoting an article from the Fort Worth
Star Telegram which appeared in 1976, Andrews introduces us to a body of water
into which people and vehicles have disappeared in the most unusual manner
possible. Almost a dozen cars have driven off the road into the water since the
1950's, and planes have inexplicably plunged into the depths. Scuba divers have
disappeared as well, even though Whitney is a contained lake lacking an
undertow. UFOs have also been reported in the vicinity. The official verdict
regarding the mysterious disappearances, in most cases, is "negligence
leading to drowning."
The Lake Whitney incidents enable the transition from a passive reason for
disappearances to an active one which has received the most attention over the
past several decades: UFOs. It is undeniable that there exists a strong link
between heavy UFO activity and mysterious disappearances. Researcher Phil
Imbrogno points out the sharp increase in missing children reports shortly after
the outbreak of saucer activity over the Hudson Valley in the late
1980's--nearly three thousand children disappeared from Westchester County, NY
alone. Law enforcement officials were dumbfounded both at the number of missing
children and by the fact that they never turned up at halfway homes or red-light
districts.
Patrice Gaston, whose Disparitions Mysterieuses remains the textbook on
the phenomenon of human disappearances, notes that in the wake of the
still-unexplained blackouts that plunged New York City and the Northeast into
darkness in 1965, amid heavy UFO activity, 4 million persons were reported as
missing by the Tracers Company in the United States alone: an increase by two
million to the average yearly figure of people who are listed as missing. Add to
this figure the number of unexplained disappearances following the subsequent
mystery blackouts that engulfed the planet (from Argentina to the Far East), and
it reminds one of Charles Fort's statement, "I believe we are fished
for."
However, we must refrain from succumbing to the temptation of placing the blame
forsquarely on UFOs--most disappearances, like the ones pointed out earlier,
take place independently of UFO flaps. The flying saucer and the intelligence
behind it is merely another symptom rather than the cause.
The truly difficult questions regarding the mysterious disappearance of human
beings throughout the ages are: (a) what caused their disappearance? and (b)
what became of them? Several theories have been put forward to answer both
distressing questions.
The British scholar F.W.H. Myers believed that in order to fall through the
cracks that lead out of our reality into another, wholly unimagined one, the
victim must have a hidden "talent" which he termed psychorragic
diathesis. This mental condition or ability causes a disruption of the fabric of
mind, energy, and matter, sending the hapless victim through the crack in
reality. According to Myers, this ability would cause an unintentional, abrupt,
and undesired passage from our three dimensional world into a fourth dimensional
one, or allow the passage of strange creatures from their own dimension into
this one. If Myers was at all on the right track, then one can also suppose that
there may be those who have mastered this skill and use it to
"teleport" themselves between worlds or planes of existence. The
mystery felines, hairy monsters, and chimerical creatures which compose the
backbone of Fortean research may have an instinctual predisposition for
teleportation, thus shuttling between our reality and their own at will. Authors
D. Scott Rogo and Jerome Clark suggested that among the physical characteristics
of many bizarre creatures reported, most feature luminous eyes, suggesting that
their "home dimension" may be one of darkness.
Argentinian parapsychologist Juan Jacobo Bajarlˇa offers a different
explanation: parapsychology admits the existence of a phenomenon known as
hyloclasty--the penetration of matter by matter itself. This phenomenon explains
how a solid object can traverse a wall through another dimension without leaving
a physical trace. While teleportation would perforce be a side-effect of
hyloclasty, Dr. Bajarlˇa warns us that the paranormal effects would only come
about in a trance state. The individual must enter the state he denominates
paragnosia (the state of paranormal awareness), which overrides the five senses,
along with reason and free will. The energy produced by the individual
experiencing this condition, usually as a result of fear, can be so intense that
it causes the victim to either levitate or be thrust into another dimension, or
stranding him/her in an "unfindable" place. A more complete treatment
on this interesting hypothesis appears in Dr. Antonio Las Heras' Respuestas
al Tri ngulo de las Bermudas (Solutions to the Bermuda Triangle).
Both Gordon Creighton, editor of the prestigious Flying Saucer Review, and
Spanish ufologist Salvador Freixedo have expressed a belief that the elemental
beings known to the Islamic world as djinn, jinas, or genies are responsible for
a measure of these enigmatic disappearances. These Arabic elementals find their
counterparts in the European fairies and Native American spirits and dwarves.
The djinn take a great delight in meddling in human affairs, and are able to do
so because they are invisible to our eyes. They have the ability to appear in
our world under any guise of their choice, and they take great pleasure in
abducting humans.
Fourth and last, we return to UFOs as a cause of disappearances. In a
mind-bending case that allegedly occurred in Cajamarca, Peru (no date given), a
woman named Isabel Tuct was kidnapped in the wink of an eye by a brilliant UFO
that suddenly descended from above while she was hanging the laundry out to dry.
Several neighbors allegedly witnessed this event, and the case remains unsolved.
The testimony of the Zimbabwean officials who disappeared in Mt. Inyangani
remains our only means of answering the second question, what becomes of those
who vanish under these circumstances. They wandered aimlessly, able to see the
rescue teams, but unable to communicate with them. While they didn't experience
any hunger or tiredness at the time, it is hardly likely that they could have
gone on indefinitely. On a more sobering note, it is interesting to know that
the skeletons of some of the victims of Vermont's Mt. Glastenbury turned up
many, many years later. Did the act of dying expel the physical body back into
our reality?
Perhaps falling through a time/space/reality warp has devastating consequences
for the victim, jumbling their senses and causing irreparable damage. Charles
Fort mentions the sudden appearance of apparently amnesic "wild men"
in England during the winter of 1904-1905. They were naked and spoke no language
known to the available police experts. Could these have been the victims of
mysterious disappearances, "spat" out at random in another place and
time, their minds ruined by the unnatural passage? If the culprits are indeed
the djinn or unseen beings who share the world with us, it's anyone's guess what
the victims' ultimate fate might be.
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