- Backers Raise Cash for Nikola Tesla Museum -
- Britain Visited By One UFO a Month, No Threat Says MoD -
- UFOs, Demon Dogs and the Rendlesham Forest Connection -
- UFO-Sweden Dives For Unknown Object in Lake -
AND: UK Couple Pelted By Raining Yellow Plastic Balls

PICKS UP WHERE SHERLOCK HOLMES’ LEFT OFF. . . DEVIL HOUNDS. DEMON DOGS. PHANTOM CANINES FROM HELL. THEY DO EXIST!

This fantastic book is now available at the special price of only
$18 (plus $5.00 shipping). 

At the dawn of the 20th century, Nikola Tesla wanted to save the world from fuel dependency. Now, an Internet cartoonist wants to save Tesla's last remaining laboratory as a tribute to the futurist inventor.

The structure, a 94-by-94-foot building, was the location where Tesla hoped to develop wireless communications and clean, free energy for everyone in the early 1900s. He moved his operation to the Wardenclyffe Tower in Shoreham, New York, in 1902 -- so named because of a 187-foot tower rising from the ground (as well as being sunk 120 feet below it) that was to be one of the great transmitters for his wireless energy dream.

The facility was lost a few years later due to debts Tesla racked up, and the huge tower was demolished in 1917. The site would ultimately become a Superfund location because of silver and cadmium toxicity in the ground after a photographic film company used it for nearly 48 years. It has now been cleaned up and is no longer harmful.

Tesla died penniless and in debt in 1943.

Currently, the building and surrounding land sit idle and are up for sale. Matthew Inman, the creator of Web cartoon "The Oatmeal," is joining forces with a nonprofit group, The Tesla Science Center at Wardenclyffe, to help preserve the facility as a science center and museum honoring "the father of the electric age."

"Tesla is an unsung hero, and there are very few monuments to him in the United States. I feel like that's something we need to fix," Inman said. "I made a comic about Tesla on my site. It got the most 'likes' on Facebook that I've ever seen in my career. Combine (the fact) that I've got this army of Tesla fans and the experience and success with my other fund-raiser, I felt like I was the ideal person to step in to control."

Inman's previous experience with the IndieGoGo crowdfunding site stemmed from a potential lawsuit and his subsequent campaign to raise money for the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. This current effort, bluntly titled "Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum," exploded after it was launched, raising more than $750,000 within five days.

It had topped $792,000 as of Tuesday morning.

The goal was to raise enough money to buy the property and begin efforts to restore the facility. The asking price is $1.6 million, and Inman's goal of $850,000 would be matched by a New York state grant for the same amount, raising a total of $1.7 million. Inman said he was shocked by how much, and how quickly, people have donated to save Tesla's lab.

"What I expected to happen was we'd raise 20 or 30 grand and trickle over for the next six weeks. I didn't expect to average $27,000 per hour (in the first few days)," he said. "That was insane."

Inman used the power of social media and drew from his 700,000 fans on Facebook, 300,000 followers on Twitter and over 1 million followers on Google+ to get his campaign rolling. He's also asked the General Electric Company, co-founded by Tesla rival Thomas Edison, to contribute, and received a "modest amount" from Elon Musk, co-founder of PayPal and Tesla Motors.

The site quickly sold out of donation perks, items people could receive for their gift. So the campaign created new perks, using Tesla's love of the number 3 in the amount.

"Tesla, for the past year or two on the Internet, has risen as a cult hero to geek people," Inman said. "I think a lot of people are donating, not to say how noble they are, but are willing to support him."

Wardenclyffe was the last official laboratory where Tesla worked. Jane Alcorn, president of the Tesla Science Center, said he moved into offices in New York City later, but Wardenclyffe was his final experimental location. That fact, along with his efforts to develop green energy, is why the site holds special significance.

"Tesla viewed the Earth as a generator of electricity. He believed that each of the planets resonates," Alcorn explained. "If you could tap into that resonance, you would be able to tap into the energy that is in the Earth and you could bounce it off the ionosphere to any other place on the globe."

Designed by Stanford White, a pre-eminent architect at the time, the square brick building was originally split down the middle, creating two large rectangular rooms for experiments. The tall tower and the overturned bowl at the top loomed over the countryside, and started out as a transmitter of messages while Tesla turned his thoughts and creativity toward global energy.

"Tesla foresaw the wireless transmissions we do with our cell phones and our laptops," Alcorn said. "He said there would come a day when people would send pictures, messages, words from one place to another without wires."

The inventor convinced banker and philanthropist J.P. Morgan of how beneficial such wireless communication would be to business and received financial backing for his project. But after Guglielmo Marconi sent his radio signal across the Atlantic in 1901, Morgan pulled his funding.

Eventually, the property was lost in 1915 -- to pay off a debt to George Boldt of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel -- before Tesla could realize his dream of free electricity for everyone. The U.S. government destroyed the tower in 1917, fearing German spies were using it to send messages during World War I.

The property changed hands a couple more times and is currently owned by Agfa-Gevaert, a technology company based in Belgium. The company put the property up for sale in 2009 and got an offer from a potential buyer who wanted to develop the land.

That created a sense of urgency for Alcorn's group, which has been working for nearly 17 years to preserve it.

"When we heard that, and there was a letter of interest with a price involved, all of that made us a little bit wary and concerned because someone could come along and purchase this property before we had an opportunity to make an offer, " she said. "But we didn't have the money to make an offer."

She said her group made a plea on the Internet to the people involved, which attracted the attention of Inman. He reached out to Alcorn to offer his online influence and experience to the effort.

Alcorn said the money raised by the IndieGoGo campaign would just purchase the property and facility, not finance the cleanup or restoration of the building into a museum. If the group is successful in its bid, she expects it will be a couple of years before the museum opens, while additional funding and exhibits are arranged.

Contribute to "Let's Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum"

For more about Nikola Tesla, Visit www.teslasecretlab.com

Source: CNN
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/21/tech/innovation/tesla-museum-campaign/index.html

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It is official at last: Britain is not at risk from unidentified flying objects.

Those who have long feared an invasion from Mars or further afield can relax – at least, that is, if they believe the Ministry of Defence.

An end has been ordered to all official investigations of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs, after the ministry ruled they do not pose a threat to the nation’s security.

It comes as the head of UK Air Traffic Control admitted the country is visited by around one unidentified flying object a month.

Asked on BBC Radio 4's Today programme about the existence of UFOs, Mr Deakin confirmed they were still being seen by his staff.

He said: "Occasionally there are objects identified that do not conform to normal traffic patterns. It does not occupy a huge amount of my time. There are approximately one a month."

Yet despite this, the MoD insists it will no longer investigate UFO sightings.

The ruling came after the careful collation over the years of reports of strange lights in the skies, odd noises and apparent close encounters.

The move to end all investigation was disclosed after a dedicated hotline for UFO sightings was discontinued for cost grounds, and the “UFO desk”, which cost £44,000 a year was also removed.

Now officials say that any UFO investigation would divert valuable resources and instead a sophisticated network of radar infrastructure and anti-ballistic missile systems to monitor British airspace will spot any genuine threat.

An MoD spokesman said: “In over fifty years no UFO report revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom.

“The MoD had no specific capability for identifying the nature of such sightings and there would be no benefit in such an investigation. Furthermore, responding to reported UFO sightings diverted MOD resources from tasks that were more relevant to defence.”

The abandonment of the UFO hotline and dedicated desk officer in 2009 had already caused concern among those who believe in the phenomena.

Now the decision to abandon investigations entirely has frustrated some members of the public convinced they have glimpsed the extraterrestrial – and those who are simply unsure of what they have seen.

Jane Randall, a housewife from Woking, Surrey, captured a strange looking object in the skies above Silbury Hill in Wiltshire when she took a photograph using her mobile phone while taking part in a field trip to learn about the archaeology in the area.

She said: “I didn’t see anything at the time, nor did the ten people I was with, but when I looked back over the photos there were two pictures a second apart with this strange conical shape hovering behind the hill.

“The pictures I took either side of this didn’t have any mark on them so I don’t think it could have been dust on the lens.

“I’m just an ordinary person, but thought I should report it to someone so they could take a look. When I phoned the police, they said it was not a police matter and I spoke to someone at the RAF who said they did not investigate UFOs any more.”

Nick Pope, who ran the MoD’s UFO desk from 1991 to 1994 and now researches UFO sightings privately, said: “One of the problems was that an increasing number of the reports the MoD was getting were low quality.

“When someone has a photograph though, that should be considered to be a different situation. The MoD has the personnel and equipment to very quickly analyse an image to tell whether it has been altered and identify what an object might be.

“A lot of ordinary members of the public feel it is their duty to report anything out of the ordinary.

"I get a lot of people contacting me now about sightings and it is frustrating that there is no where official that they can report them – it has become a black hole.”

Source: The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/9468022/Britain-visited-
by-one-UFO-a-month-but-MoD-rules-they-pose-no-threat.html

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A Cambridge professor has tackled the issue of spontaneous combustion – using belly pork.

Prof Brian J Ford is a research biologist and author of more than 30 books, most about cell biology and microscopy but he has turned his attention to the mechanisms behind why people ‘explode’.

He said in an article in New Scientist: “One minute they may be relaxing in a chair, the next they erupt into a fireball.

“Jets of blue fire shoot from their bodies like flames from a blowtorch, and within half an hour they are reduced to a pile of ash.

“Typically, the legs remain unscathed sticking out grotesquely from the smoking cinders. Nearby objects – a pile of newspapers on the armrest, for example – are untouched.”

The first record of spontaneous combustion dates back to 1641 when Danish doctor and mathematician Thomas Bartholin described the death of Polonus Vorstius – who drank wine at home in Milan, Italy, one evening in 1470 before bursting into flames.

Since then more reports of spontaneous combustion have been filed and linked to alcoholism – though the link was later disproved.

The most recent case was 76-year-old Michael Faherty who died on December 22, 2010. West Galway coroner Ciaran McLoughlin recorded the cause of death as spontaneous human combustion.

Prof Ford wanted to disprove the alcoholism theory and also something called the ‘wick effect’ suggested by London coroner Gavin Thurston in 1961.

Thurston had described how human fat burns at about 250c, but if melted it will combust on a wick – such as clothes or other material – at room temperatures.

He wrote: “I felt it was time to test the realities, so we marinated pork abdominal tissue in ethanol for a week.

“Even when cloaked in gauze moistened with alcohol, it would not burn.

“Alcohol is not normally present in our tissues, but there is one flammable constituent in the body that can greatly increase in concentration.”

The body creates acetone, which is highly flammable.

He added: “A range of conditions can produce ketosis, in which acetone is formed, including alcoholism, fat-free dieting, diabetes and even teething.

“So we marinated pork tissue in acetone, rather than ethanol.

“This was used to make scale models of humans, which we clothed and set alight.

“They burned to ash within half an hour.

“For the first time a feasible cause of human combustion has been experimentally demonstrated.”

Michael Faherty, of Ballybane, Galway, died on 22 December 2010. The inquest was told that forensic experts were certain that a fire in the fireplace of the sitting room where the badly burnt body was found had not been the cause of the blaze that killed him.

There had been no trace of an accelerant, such as petrol or alcohol, and there had been nothing to suggest foul play.

While his body was totally destroyed by fire, it had not spread and the only minor damage in the sitting room was to the ceiling above him and the floor beneath him.

Dr McLoughlin said he had consulted medical textbooks and carried out other research in an attempt to find an explanation.

'This fire was thoroughly investigated and I'm left with the conclusion that this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion, for which there is no adequate explanation,' he said.

Mr Faherty's daughter Mairin said her family was satisfied with the investigation and they accepted the inquest's findings. However, she added: 'Unfortunately, it doesn't provide us with any real explanation.'

Claims about SHC have been made for centuries. The gin-drinking character Krook the alcoholic in  the Charles Dickens novel Bleak House is said to spontaneously combust.

Relatives of a British woman who died in 1982 said they saw her burst into flames in her north London home but coroner Dr John Burton said there was 'no such thing' as SHC and recorded an open verdict.

The human body is mostly water and its only properties which burn readily are fat tissue and methane gas.

Temperatures of nearly 2,000F are required to reduce a body to near ashes.

Spontaneous combustion occurs when an object -- in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person -- bursts into flame from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source.

The first known account of spontaneous human combustion came from the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin in 1663, who described how a woman in Paris "went up in ashes and smoke" while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire. In 1673, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work "De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis."

The hundreds of spontaneous human combustion accounts since that time have followed a similar pattern: The victim is almost completely consumed, usually inside his or her home. Coroners at the scene have sometimes noted a sweet, smoky smell in the room where the incident occurred.

What makes the charred bodies in the photos of spontaneous human combustion so peculiar is that the extremities often remain intact. Although the torso and head are charred beyond recognition, the hands, feet, and/or part of the legs may be unburned. Also, the room around the person shows little or no signs of a fire, aside from a greasy residue that is sometimes left on furniture and walls. In rare cases, the internal organs of a victim remain untouched while the outside of the body is charred.

Not all spontaneous human combustion victims simply burst into flames. Some develop strange burns on their body which have no obvious source, or emanate smoke from their body when no fire is present. And not every person who has caught fire has died -- a small percentage of people have actually survived what has been called their spontaneous combustion.

These are just a few of the many hundred reported cases of "spontaneous human combustion":

In 1938, a 22-year-old woman named Phyllis Newcombe was leaving a dance at the Shire Hall in Chelmsford, England. As she descended the staircase of the hall, her dress suddenly caught fire with no apparent cause. She ran back into the ballroom, where she collapsed. Several people rushed to her aid, but she later died in the hospital. Although the theory was that Newcombe's dress had been ignited by a cigarette or a lit match thrown from the stairwell, no evidence of either was ever found. Coroner L.F. Beccles commented on the incident, "From all my experience I have never come across a case so very mysterious as this."

In 1951, a 67-year-old widow named Mary Reeser was at home in St. Petersburg, Florida. On the morning of July 2, a neighbor discovered that Mary's front door was hot. When she broke into the apartment with the help of two workmen, they found Mary in an easy chair with a black circle around her. Her head had been burned down to the size of a teacup. The only other parts of her that remained were part of her backbone and part of her left foot. Other than Mary's charred remains, there was very little evidence of fire in her apartment. A forensic pathologist, Dr. Wilton Krogman, said of the incident, "[It's] the most amazing thing I have ever seen. As I review it, the short hairs on my neck bristle with vague fear. Were I living in the Middle Ages I'd mutter something about black magic." But the police report cited a far less supernatural explanation for the cause of death: a dropped cigarette, which ignited Mrs. Reeser's highly flammable rayon-acetate nightgown.

John Irving Bentley was a physician who burned to death in the bathroom of his house in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. Bentley was last seen alive on December 4, 1966, when friends visiting him at his home said goodnight to him at about 9:00 P.M. On the following morning, December 5, Don Gosnell, a meter reader, let himself into Bentley’s house and went to the basement to check the meter—since Bentley could only move about with the help of a walker, Mr. Gosnell had permission to enter as necessary.

While in the basement, Gosnell noticed a strange smell and a light blue smoke. Intrigued, he went upstairs to investigate. The bedroom was smoky and in the bathroom he found Bentley’s cremated remains. All that was left intact of the aged doctor was the lower half of his right leg with the slipper still on it. The rest of his body had been reduced to a pile of ashes on the floor in the basement below. His walker lay across the hole in the floor generated by the fire. The rubber tips on it were still intact, and the nearby bathtub was hardly scorched. Gosnell ran from the building to get help, screaming “Doctor Bentley’s burned up!”

Robert Francis Bailey was a homeless person who allegedly died by spontaneous human combustion. At 5:21am on 13 September 1967, an unnamed member of a group of female office workers phoned the London Fire Brigade. While waiting for their bus to work, they had noticed flickering blue flames visible through an upper window of 49 Auckland Street, Lambeth, London. They presumed it was burning gas. The first fireman to the scene said:

“When I got in through the window I found the body of a tramp named Bailey laying at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the second floor. He was lying partly on his left side. There was a four-inch (102 mm) slit in his abdomen from which was issuing, at force, a blue flame. The flame was beginning to burn the wooden stairs. We extinguished the flames by playing a hose into the abdominal cavity. Bailey was alive when he started burning. He must have been in terrible pain. His teeth were sunk into the mahogany newel post of the staircase. I had to prise his jaws apart to release the body. The fire was coming from within the abdomen of his body. [...] There’s no doubt whatsoever, that fire began inside the body. That’s the only place it could have begun, inside that body.”

At inquest, it was found that the cause of Bailey’s death was ‘asphyxia due to inhalation of fire fumes’. Bailey had suffocated on the fumes of his own combustion. A search of his body revealed no portable sources of ignition (lighters, etc) or inflammable substances. He was a non-smoker.

In 1982, a mentally handicapped woman named Jean Lucille "Jeannie" Saffin was sitting with her 82-year-old father at their home in Edmonton, in northern London. According to her father, a flash of light caught his eye. When he turned to his daughter, he saw that her upper body was enveloped in flames. Mr. Saffin and his son-in-law, Donald Carroll, managed to put out the blaze, but Jeannie died of her third-degree burns about a week after entering the hospital. According to Carroll, "the flames were coming from her mouth like a dragon and they were making a roaring noise." There was no smoke or fire damage in the room. Some have wondered if an ember from her father's pipe ignited Jeannie's clothing.

There have been people who have apparently survived spontaneous human combustion.

On Christmas Eve 1984, Mrs Christine Middlehurst was sitting in the lounge after friends had gone home, and her common-law husband was upstairs. He came down to find her in flames.

He threw water over her, shouted for help and got his hands, arms and body burned as he tried to put out the flames.

Mrs Middlehurst ran outside screaming and a neighbor took her upstairs and put her in a bath of water, where her skin 'floated off'.

The house at Newton Abbot (Devon) was virtually untouched by the fire.

In September 1985, Debbie Clark was walking home when she noticed an occasional flash of blue light. As she claimed, "It was me. I was lighting up the driveway every couple of steps.

"As we got into the garden I thought it was funny at that point. I was walking around in circles saying: 'look at this, mum, look!' She started screaming and my brother came to the door and started screaming and shouting 'Have you never heard of spontaneous human combustion?'"

Her mother, Dianne Clark, responded: "I screamed at her to get her shoes off and it [the flashes] kept going so I hassled her through and got her into the bath. I thought that the bath is wired to earth. It was a blue light you know what they call electric blue. She thought it was fun, she was laughing."

Paul Hayes, a 19-year old computer operator living in London, was walking along a quiet road in Stepney Green late on the night of May 25 1985. Suddenly, he found himself surrounded by intense flames from the waist up. he reported his experience:

"It was... like being plunged into the heat of a furnace... My arms felt as though they were being prodded by red-hot pokers, from my shoulders to my wrists. My cheeks were red-hot, my ears were numb. My chest felt like boiling water had been poured over it. I thought I could hear my brains bubbling.

He tried to escape the flames by running, but fell on the pavement and curled up into a ball, thinking he was dying. Then, about thirty seconds after it began, his ordeal was over. I opened my eyes. There was no flame, no smoke. For a few minutes, I lay still, terrified. I began to shiver with shock."

Hayes managed to stumble to a nearby hospital, where he was treated for burns to his hands, forearms, face, neck and ears.

The most well known survivor is Jack Angel. On the evening of November 12, 1974, Angel, a travelling clothes salesman, parked his camper at the Ramada Inn in Savannah, Georgia, and settled down to sleep. He awoke later than usual, around midday, feeling rather odd. Looking down, he was horrified to see that his right hand was burned black; other burns dotted his legs from groin to ankle.

In a state of shock but in no pain, Angel showered, dressed and made his way to the hotel. Here he discovered that the date was 16 November - he had been asleep for 4 days. He collapsed and was rushed to a nearby hospital.

His leg injuries healed, but his hand had to be amputated.

Angel hadn't been smoking on the night of the fire, nor was he scalded by boiling water from a kettle or the radiator in his camper. The van's electrical circuits were perfectly sound. The possibility of freak lightning was also ruled out.

Source: Cambridge News
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Professor-gets-crackling-on-human-
combustion-theory-21082012.htm

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It’s all here wrapped up in one large format, fully illustrated, package to while away the late night hours and it’s likely to knock your socks off and scare your pants off, as it has done to many over the course of countless centuries.

They are the demon dogs from hell, the huge black canines with blazing red eyes that haunt country lanes, and the phantom hounds that are regarded by some as Satan’s personal minions.

In the just released “Hounds of the Baskervilles – From Demon Dogs To Sherlock Holmes” the reader will indeed discover that there exists on the periphery of UFOs and aliens a shadowy realm of supernatural phenomena that includes many weird crypto-zoological monsters and creatures, none of which are housebroken and do not in any way, shape or form, make good domestic pets . . . demon dogs or hellhounds included! Encounters with the oversized, red-eyed canines of torment and terror have been reported down through the ages and have often been associated with subsequent death or other forms of tragedy. To hear such a creature howling in the night is to tread close to dangers of many kinds.

It is just such a hellhound that occupies the attention of Sherlock Holmes in the classic novel “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” For more than a hundred years, the Baker Street sleuth has fascinated readers and spawned a slew of well-received movies, most recently with Robert Downing, Jr., and Jude Law playing the beloved Holmes and Dr. Watson. Though their latest film incarnation more closely resembles a comic book/action movie, the basic components of Holmes’ genius battling the evil Moriarty remain intact.

The highly prolific and well known editor/publisher Timothy Green Beckley has recently done further honor to the venerable franchise by reprinting “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” as a part of a much larger, expansive work on unexplained crypto phenomena. Yes indeed, he does the great detective one better by opening with a series of chapters on real-life hellhounds and devil dogs which he penned himself along with the celebrated Nick Redfern, a British literati recently transplanted to the state of Texas. In addition, there are also contributions by Andrew Gable, Claudia Cunningham and William Kern.

Beckley commences with some unabashed gushing over Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He waxes nostalgic about the many happy hours of his youth spent reading Doyle and especially “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” He also discusses Doyle’s own beliefs regarding psychic phenomena, to include life after death, spiritualism, levitation, spirit photography and the overall conviction that anything is possible in the kingdom of the supernatural. Doyle even considered abandoning his writing career and studying the mystical fulltime.

Doyle differed quite openly with Harry Houdini, who scoffed at Doyle’s beliefs as “hocus pocus” and nonsense. Beckley has previously published other books dealing with Doyle’s paranormal interests, such as “Revealing the Bizarre Powers of Harry Houdini,” which suggests that Houdini’s fanatical debunking of psychics and mediums was a subterfuge to conceal his own remarkable powers, a belief which Doyle himself fostered after the two famous spotlight seekers clashed in public over the validity of spiritualism and life beyond the grave.

Beckley was also a huge fan of the movie version of “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which he first saw as a young boy when it was aired on a local television station. It is estimated that between 40 and 50 movie and TV adaptations of the novel have been produced over the years, beginning with a 1915 German silent movie called “Der Hund von Baskervilles.” What follows next in the book is a section of rare movie posters from the various film incarnations and a few publicity shots of Basil Rathbone, the actor most famous for playing Sherlock Holmes.

NICK REDFERN STRUGGLES WITH THE FIERY HOUNDS

But the new book is just warming up. The next chapter is written by Nick Redfern, one of the most visible faces in the field of paranormal research who once revealed that his bedroom was “invaded” by a werewolf-type creature which vanished as it crept closer and closer to where he was sleeping. Redfern introduces the topic with a genuinely frightening story, told in second person, of a hapless traveler encountering a hellhound and fleeing for his life. One is then informed that the story was not a work of fiction, but actually happened in 1997 in a small English village called Ranton.

“But what are these infernal creatures?” Redfern asks. “Are they legend, reality, or both? And how, and under what circumstances, did they inspire the most famous, cherished and loved Sherlock Holmes story of all time? Published in 1902, Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ tells the memorable and atmosphere-filled saga of the noted and wealthy Baskerville family that has called Dartmoor, Devonshire, England, its home for centuries. Dartmoor is filled with supernatural tales of terror, horror and intrigue – but leading them all is the legend of the terrible hound that haunts the Baskervilles.”

Conan Doyle took the lead from all-too-real supernatural occurrences of the paranormal hound variety on Dartmoor. He also relied on stories about the real-life resident of Devonshire County named Richard Cabell, a monstrously evil squire who may have sold his soul to the Devil himself for personal gain. When Cabell died in 1677, presumably into the embrace of his fork-tailed, horned master, a pack of supernatural hounds materialized on the old moors and raced for Cabell’s tomb, where they howled ominously all night long and struck cold fear into the locals.

“Thus, the story began to develop in Conan Doyle’s mind and imagination,” Redfern continues. “He moved the location of the old hall to Dartmoor and changed Richard Cabell to the evil Hugo Baskerville. In the process, literary history was made and ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ was born. But there is one important factor to remember: Conan Doyle did not invent Britain’s fiery-eyed hounds. He merely brought them to the attention of the public in spectacularly entertaining, fictional style.”

It is at this point that Redfern begins to chronicle several instances of people encountering the real thing, and in more recent times than one might think. For example, there is the story of Nigel Lea, who in the early weeks of 1972 was driving across the Cannock Chase woods that dominate much of Staffordshire when he saw a strange ball of glowing blue light that seemingly came out of nowhere and slammed violently into the ground some short distance ahead of him before releasing a torrent of bright, fiery sparks. As he slowly approached the area where the light had fallen, he was both shocked and horrified to see looming before him “the biggest bloody dog I have ever seen in my life.”

“Very muscular, and utterly black in color,” Redfern goes on, “with a pair of large, pointed ears and huge thick paws, the creature seemed to positively ooze both extreme menace and overpowering negativity, and had a crazed, staring look in its yellow-tinged eyes. For 20 or 30 seconds, both man and beast alike squared off against each other in classic stalemate fashion, after which the animal both slowly and carefully headed for the darkness and the camouflage of the tall surrounding trees, not even once taking its penetrating eyes off of the petrified driver as it did so.”

Somewhat ominously, two or three weeks later, a close friend of Lea’s from back in his childhood days was killed in a horrific industrial accident in a West Midlands town. Today, after having deeply studied – almost to the point of obsession – the history of British Black Dog lore and the creature’s associations with both deep tragedy and death, Lea believes his strange encounter was directly connected.

BLACK SHUCK AND THE SHUG MONKEY IN RENDLESHAM FOREST

According to Redfern, perhaps the most famous of all of the phantom hounds of old Britain are those that are said to have frequented, and in some cases still frequent, the ancient roads and pathways of Norfolk, Essex, Suffolk and Sussex. Their various names include Black Shuck, the Shug Monkey and the Shock. The Shuck and the Shock are classic black dogs, whereas the Shug Monkey is described as being a combination of spectral monkey and immense hound.

“Even their very names having intriguing origins,” Redfern writes. “While some researchers consider the possibility that all of the appellations had their origins in the word ‘Shucky,’ an ancient east coast term meaning ‘shaggy,’ others suggest a far more sinister theory, namely that Shock, Shuck and Shug are all based upon the Anglo-Saxon ‘scucca,’ meaning ‘demon,’ a most apt description for sure.”

In the winter of 1983, a couple in their twenties, Paul and Jayne Jennings, encountered a black dog in Rendlesham Forest, home to Britain’s most famous UFO encounter, a December 1980 event in which numerous personnel from the nearby Royal Air Force Bentwaters military base encountered a UFO in the woods. Like Nigel Lea’s witnessing a glowing blue light before his face-to-face meeting with a black dog, the close proximity of the military’s UFO incident creates a tenuous connection between both phenomena.

The Jennings were walking along a trail in the Rendlesham Forest when, according to researcher/author Nick Redfern, they saw what Jayne described as a “big black dog that kept appearing and disappearing.” When Redfern asked her to elaborate, she explained that on rounding a bend on the path they came face to face with the dog, which was a huge creature whose head was unmistakably that of a large hound while the body, strangely, was more feline in nature.

The dog was not aggressive, and seemed to have a mournful expression on its face. But the Jennings were shocked when it vanished in the blink of an eye. They were even more shocked when a moment later it reappeared and proceeded to “flicker on and off” four or five times before vanishing permanently. After the dog’s disappearance, the air was filled with a strange smell that resembled “burning metal.” Could it be the fires of hell, to which the mournful-looking dog was dispiritedly returning? And what of the possible Rendlesham connection? Are the weird goings on here proof that this might be what John Keel once determined to be a “window area” to another dimension? One must be their own judge and jury.

THE HOUNDS IN MYTHOLOGY

Further along in his chapter, Redfern tells the story of the Wild Hunt and even wilder hounds. He quotes the famed crypto-zoologist Jon Downes: “Belief in the Wild Hunt is found not only in Britain but also on the Continent, and the basic idea is the same in all variations: a phantasmal leader and his men accompanied by hounds who ‘fly’ through the night in pursuit of something. What they are pursuing is not clear; although Norse legend has various objects such as a visionary boar or wild horse, and even magical maidens known as Moss Maidens.

“Greek myth has Hecate roaming the Earth on moonless nights with a pack of ghostly, howling dogs and the phenomenon has also been reported from Germany, where according to folklore, the procession includes the souls of unbaptized babies in the train of ‘Frau Bertha,’ who sometimes accompanied the wild huntsman.”

(The mythic apparition of the Wild Hunt is said to resemble, and may have inspired, a well-known Country and Western song called “Riders in the Sky,” in which a band of ghostly cowboys are condemned forever to chase a herd of cattle across the sky yet never actually catch them. The song has been recorded by the likes of Johnny Cash, Gene Autry, Bing Crosby and Peggy Lee, as well as a later rock version by The Outlaws.)

Downes explains that the hounds are universally believed to be portents of war, death and disaster, and an unfortunate traveler would who heard one would fling himself face downward to the ground to avoid seeing the beast. The Devil’s hunting pack, and the related phenomenon of the Devil Dogs, have been reported on more occasions during years of warfare than at any other time.

BLACK DOGS FROM COLONIAL TIMES TO THE PRESENT

The next chapter of “Hounds of the Baskervilles: From Demon Dogs To Sherlock Holmes” crosses the ocean and examines Big Black Dogs and Phantom Hounds in America.

“Legends of black dogs and phantom hounds,” writes contributing Fortean blogger Andrew Gable, “are widespread throughout the Chesapeake Bay region, which was one of the earliest areas settled by the English. The tales of British black dogs were combined with werewolf traditions and typical ghost stories, as well as possibly with crypto-zoological sightings of weird creatures, to create traditions that are like the British ones, and yet unlike them at the same time.”

One of the interesting stories Gable relates concerns a phantom hound named “Snarly Yow” who haunted a section of the National Pike near Turner’s Gap in Frederick County. Gable references an 1882 book by Madeleine V. Dahlgren called “South Mountain Magic” in which no less than a dozen sightings of the beast are recorded.

A man named Daniel Mesick testified that his father kicked at a huge dog near Dame’s Quarter and his foot passed directly through it. Sticks, rocks and even bullets were said to pass right through the “animal.” Other accounts have it that the dog left physical traces and frightened horses so much they threw their riders.

“A staple of Frederick County legendry for years,” Gable writes, “the Yow was seen in 1962 near Zittlestown. In this instance, it was headless, white and dragged a chain along behind it.”

There is a phantom dog called the Fence Rail Dog, an enormous hound nearly ten feet in length, which haunts a stretch of Route 12 near Frederica in Delaware. The dog appears in the wake of automobile accidents on the road. Gable points out that folklore from around the globe speaks of dogs as a kind of psycho-pomp – or spirits which guide the dead to the afterlife – and that the Fence Rail Dog’s appearance in the wake of death may be an example of this. Gable also recounts the folklore concerning an outlaw named Silas Werninger, who was cornered in his home but committed suicide rather than be taken by his pursuers. He was buried in the forest near his home, and after his death a large black wolf emerged from the grove and menaced townspeople. A witch advised the people to dig up the outlaw’s remains and bury them in consecrated ground to dispel the phantasmal wolf. Gable says the source of the folklore is the real life story of a Pennsylvania outlaw named William Etlinger, who did indeed kill himself after taking his wife and children hostage. His cabin was burnt to the ground by authorities trying to flush him out. It is said that the cabin sometimes reappears on its burnt foundations and that the outlaw’s body was moved after it was felt a black wolf familiar in the area may have been feeding on the corpse. Even suicidal outlaws deserve better. There is more to the story Gable tells than is recorded here, but let’s leave that to readers of the actual book, eh?

DEMON DOGS AND THE MIB?

Claudia Cunningham, nicknamed “The MIB Lady,” contributes a section of text in which she and Beckley visit the grave of Charles Fort in Albany Rural Cemetery, near the state capitol of New York. Cunningham says that perhaps the site where Fort and his entire family are entombed is a fitting place for dastardly black hounds and phantom dogs from hell to be seen since Fort collected such beastly stories throughout his writing career and placed them in the volumes that make up “The Complete Works of Charles Fort,” available in a 1,000+ page, four volume, large print set directly from publisher Tim Beckley. While Cunningham and Beckley failed to sight any phantom dogs of their own, their story still makes for a lively break in the action. to include some local Men In Black stories that center around the cemetery just outside Albany, which, in addition to being the place where Charles Fort is buried, is also the resting spot of the little known president of the United States, Chester Arthur. Is it any wonder haunting hounds, the MIB and other strange incidents raise their heads up from the etheric from time to time?

Cunningham then goes on to relate several late 19th and early 20th century stories from Fort’s research concerning the mysterious slayers of sheep in the UK. In one case in England, the police were unable to explain how the sheep had died since it was not possible for the killer to have been a mere dog.

“Dogs are not vampires,” said Sergeant Carter of the Gloucestershire Police, “and do not suck the blood of a sheep and leave the flesh almost untouched.”

A few weeks later, a newspaper report declared that the “marauder” had been shot and was said to be a large black dog, which Cunningham claims was an early example of convenient “debunking,” a pattern repeated throughout the history of the subject of demon dogs by the newspapers of the time. It appears that even in Fort’s time, a media cover-up of the paranormal was firmly in place.

Then finally, there is William Kern’s short story, “The Man Who Fell From A Clear Blue Sky.” Kern is a sort of jack-of-all-trades; he writes both fiction and nonfiction, as well as working as a graphic artist and layout designer, to include his designing efforts on “Hounds of the Baskervilles.”

Kern’s short story revolves around the phenomenon of “changelings,” specifically human/wolf changelings, which are called “hulfs,” we learn, and is the last warm-up piece before Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles” begins, complete with wonderful illustrations throughout.

If you’re looking for some quality recreational reading as a change of pace from your normal paranormal pursuits, then “Hounds of the Baskervilles: From Demon Dogs To Sherlock Holmes” would be just the thing. One can easily lose oneself in the pages therein, as Beckley himself did in his youth as a voracious reader of all things Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a believer in a great deal of paranormal phenomena, and his story of the great sleuth matching wits with the hound from hell is a masterpiece of the supernatural that can be read and reread with a fascination found few other places.

[If you enjoyed this article, visit Sean Casteel’s “UFO Journalist” website at www.seancasteel.com]

Source: UFO Digest
http://www.ufodigest.com/article/ufos-demon-dogs-and-rendlesham-forest-connection

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