THE ANOMALIST:1 Summer 1994 Contributors: Martin Cannon Loren Coleman William Corliss Ted Holden Patrick Huyghe Martin Kottmeyer Mario Pazzaglini Paul Rydeen Dennis Stacy Ingo Swann THE ANOMALIST Edited and published by Patrick Huyghe and Dennis Stacy The Anomalist is published twice a year and is available directly from us or through select booksellers. Unless otherwise noted, each issue is $10.00 (plus $2.50 postage and handling if ordering direct). Manuscripts, letters, books for review and advertising inquiries may be sent to either editor. For information about forthcoming issues, send an SASE to: Patrick Huyghe or Dennis Stacy P.O.Box 577 P.O.Box 12434 Jefferson Valley,NY 10535 San Antonio,TX 78212 [email protected] 72450. [email protected] fax:(914) 526-4204 fax:(210) 828-4507 Authors guidelines: We suggest that authors contact the editors prior to manuscript submission to determine whether the proposed article is appropriate for The Anomalist. 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ISSN 1076-4028 Copyright (C) 1994 by Patrick Huyghe and Dennis Stacy 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Quadratic Equations by Patrick Huyghe and Dennis Stacy 4 Dinosaurs and the Gravity Problem by Ted Holden 6 Interview: Mario Pazzaglini on "Alien Writing" 20 The Numbers Game by Martin Cannon 35 The Daytona Beach Mystery Wave by Patrick Huyghe 46 Cargo of the Gods? by Paul Rydeen 63 The First Extraordinary Claim by Martin Kottmeyer 69 Incendiary Poltergeists, Spontaneous Human Comb and Fire Suicide Clusters by Loren Coleman 97 The Perils of Erasing Astrology From the Past by Ingo Swann 110 Commentary by William Corliss 122 Contributors 123 3 QUADRATIC EQUATIONS There is more mystery than knowledge in the world."Mystery surrounds us," writes the naturalist Chet Raymo in Honey from Stone. "It laps at our shores. It permeates the land. Scratch the surface of knowledge and mystery bubbles up like a spring. And occasionally...a tempest of mystery comes rolling in from the sea and overwhelms our efforts..." But while the mass media and the scholarly press cover "know- ledge" adequately,"mystery" is by and large ignored. There is not only an avoidance of things we do not know, but those who profess an interest in the unknown are often the subject of ridicule. Somehow that attitude seems very wrong to us: it is, in fact, just the opposite of what we feel the quest for knowledge really is. Mystery is our prime subject and those who are brave enough to tackle it we regard as the true pioneers. By mystery, of course, we rnean the anomalous. And by the anomalous we mean simply that which "departs from the common; not conforming to what is usual; irregular." This definition of the anoma- lous is intended to be as broad as possible by design. The definiton is cerainly not meant to be limited to "popular" anomalies such as UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, ESP, or Bigfoot, though it is hardly meant to eliminate them from consideration either. We will be dealing with a whole host of astronomical, biological, geological, psychologi- cal, physical, geophysical, linguistic, religious, and archeological phenomena. 4 No one really knows where one mystery ends and another begins, where one boundary or category begins, ends or merges with another. Or for that matter, whether the whole notion of boundaries is appli- cable to the issue at hand. One measures a circle, after all, beginning anywhere. That is why we are not The Ufologist, or The Parapsy- chologist, or The Cryptozoologist, or some other Mystery-ologist. That is why we are The Anomalist. What we are trying to do is ex- plore and, perhaps, solve for several unknowns at once. That, in essence, is the reason for The Anomalist. It is, to be quite honest, a product borne of frustration. We are tired of the lack of courage, the lack of wonder, and the lack of curiousity that often passes for scholarship. We intend to make this publication a serious yet entertaining showcase for presentations of enigmatic data and radi- cal ideas of all kinds. But be forewarned. Though we hope to serve as a voice for anomalies, we will not shield any subject from justified criticism. We are not believers. We are not skeptics. We are writers, investigators, and scientists looking for the truth--whatever that may be. And though we are not without preconceptions we will try to be upfront about them. We are interested in investigating all layers of reality with a par- ticular fondness for those subjects lying on the shadowy margins of the scientific world. At times we may even be critical of science, for its ostrich-like stance in the presence of the mountain of anomalies it tends to disregard, but we are by no means anti-science. On the con- trary, we would argue that no subject should be beyond the realm of science. We wish to open the doors and place a crowbar across the tran- som. And through these doors will come a parade of the neglected, the unexplained, the unexpected, the extraordinary, and, of course, the damned. Welcome. Patrick Huyghe and Dennis Stacy 5 DINOSAURS a n d t h e G r a v i t y P r o b l e m b y Ted Holden cientists delight in devising explanations for the great dinosaur extinctions. But there are several questions which they have s failed to even ask, much less tried to answer. Why, for instance, in all of the time claimed to have passed since the dinosaur extinc- tions, has nothing ever re-evolved to the sizes of the large dinosaurs? If such sizes worked for creatures which ruled the Earth for tens of millions of years, then why would not some species of elephant or rhi- noceros have evolved to such a size again? What kinds of problems, if any, would sauropod sizes entail in our world as it is presently consti- tuted? Could it be that some aspect of our environment might have to be massively different for such creatures to exist at all? A careful study of the sizes of these antediluvian creatures, and what it would take to deal with such sizes in our world, has led me to believe that the super animals of Earth's past could not live in our present world at all. A look at sauropod dinosaurs as we know them today requires that we relegate the brontosaur, once thought to be one of the largest sauropods, to welterweight or at most middleweight status. Fossils found in the 1970's now dwarf this creature. Both the brachiosaur and the supersaur were larger than the brontosaur, and the ultrasaur ap- pears to have dwarfed them all.1 The ultrasaur is now estimated to have weighed 180 tons.2 A comparison of dinosaur lifting requirements to human lift- ing capabilities is enlightening, though there might be objections to do- ing so. One objection that might be raised is that animal muscle tissue was somehow "better" than that of humans. This, however, is known not to be the case. According to Knut Schmidt-Nielson, author of Scaling: Why is Animal Size So Important?, the maximum stress or 6 force that can be exerted by any muscle is independent of body-size and is the same for mouse or elephant muscle.3 Another objection might be that sauropods were aquatic crea- tures. But nobody believes that anymore; they had no adaptation for aquatic life, their teeth show wear and tear which does not come from eating soft aquatic vegetation, and trackways show them walking on land with no difficulty. A final objection might be that dinosaurs were somehow more "efficient" than top human athletes. This, however, goes against all observed data. As creatures get bulkier, they become less efficient; the layers of thick muscle in limbs begin to get in each other's way and bind to some extent. For this reason, scaled lifts for the super- heavyweight athletes are somewhat lower than for, say, the 200-pound athletes. By "scaled lift" I mean a lift record divided by the two-thirds power of the athlete's body weight. As creatures get larger, weight, which is proportional to vol- ume, goes up in proportion to the cube of the increase in dimension. Strength, on the other hand, is known to be roughly proportional to the cross-section of muscle for any particular limb and goes up in propor- tion to the square of the increase in dimension. This is the familiar "square-cube" problem.4 Consider the case of Bill Kazmaier, the king of the power lift- ers in the 1970s and 1980s. Power lifters are, in my estimation, the strongest of all athletes; they concentrate on the three most difficult total-body lifts, i.e. bench press, squat, and dead-lift. They work out many hours a day and, it is fairly common knowledge, use food to fla- vor their anabolic steroids. No animal the same weight as one of these men could be presumed to be as strong. Kazmaier was able to do squats and dead lifts with weights between 1,000 and 1,100 pounds on a bar, assuming he was fully warmed up.