There are 270 tunnels beneath Los Angeles, arranged in a network. Since they have, for the most part, been sealed up with fences, they are no longer used for street-crossings.
There are older tunnels, under Bel-Air estate, UCLA, and El Pueblo de Los Angeles State Historic Park not far from Olvera Street. The latter tunnel is alleged to have hid many during the 1871 massacre of Chinese, recounts Cecilia Rasmussen in her article “L.A. Scene: The City Then and Now” in the July 22, 1996 Los Angeles Times.
Hopi Indian legend reports a sub-surface maze existing almost 5,000 years ago. G. Warren Shufelt, a mining engineer, went in search of it during 1934. That year, using a dowsing rod he called a “radio X-ray,” he claimed to have secretly discovered caves beneath downtown L.A.
He claimed to have consulted Little Chief Greenleaf, a Hopi leader, and was told about the Lizard People, who lived circa 3,000 B.C. Before the destruction of their culture by meteors or a fire, they were said to have created three underground cities around the Pacific Coast, including one under Los Angeles and another beneath Mt. Shasta.
The Lizard people reportedly made the caves housing thousands by using chemicals to melt bedrock. According to Shufelt’s version of the Hopi legend, the city was in a lizard’s shape, and extended from Dodger Stadium to the Central Library.
Whether the Lizard People were reptiles or humans, Shufelt did not clarify. (There is a post-Shufelt account of a humanoid “reptile” clad in both trousers and a shirt on Mt. Shasta in 1972.) Paul Apodaca, of Chapman University, said that Shufelt’s account of Hopi history was “exaggerated and corrupted.” (Hopis did have a social division called the lizard clan, however.)
The [L.A.] Times of January 29, 1934 reported Shufelt’s claims of radio X-ray pictures of the subsurface rooms.
Shufelt said he thought he had found under Ft. Moore Hill a treasure room. With the permission of L.A. authorities, he had a 350-foot hole drilled. Cave-in worries stymied further drilling. After that, Shufelt vanished from public view.
Some five weeks prior to the drilling, Edith Elden Robinson had described her psychic vision of “a vast city…in mammoth tunnels extending to the seashore.” The American Society of Psychical Research subsequently recounted her story of this supposed artifact of a vanished race.
On a website entry (http://www.lapl.org/central/urbanleg.html) dated March 29, 1996, Los Angeles’ Central Library notes that, quite appropriate to the later library setting, the Lizard People owned golden tablets which delineated the story of the world since its beginning, the Lizard People’s history, and even the origin of humanity.
SALE OF A DEATH-MAN
Thomas Shinkle, an East Dayton antique dealer, was charged with corpse abuse, but that was not the Ohio resident’s intention.
On June 29, 1996, he had put an unusual antique on display at a yard sale. It was a wooden coffin containing a human skeleton viewable through an oval opening. After a quarter-hour, a woman had summoned the police. Their resultant report noted that most of the sale’s attenders were offended, but that Shinkle himself regarded the display as an interesting antique inaccessible to children. He did not understand why people were upset.
Arraignment of Shinkle was set for August 5 in the Dayton Municipal Center. The highest penalties facing Shinkle were a jail sentence of 90 days and a fine of $750.
On July 25, the coronerÕs office of Montgomery County still had the corpse and the coffin. James H. Davis, the coroner, was unsure whether a skeleton was a corpse according to Ohio law. According to the authorities, the bones are thought to have belonged to a Caucasian male who died in his thirties about a century ago. Since many of the bones were wired together, it is thought they had been used in a medical school. Oddly, some of the bones were not correctly assembled.
Before the authorities stepped in, the teardrop-shaped coffin and its bones had been displayed on top of a gambling table at Third and Bates street.
Afterward, it seemed likely Shinkle would get back the coffin–but not the skeleton, according to the July 26 Springfield News-Sun and its source the Cox News Service.
YOWIE! AN OLDIE BUT GOODIE FROM DOWN UNDER
Was it a “massive monitor” lizard, as Rex Gilroy of the Blue Mountains Museum in Mt. Victoria thought, or was it the legendary Yowie?
About a dozen years ago, Bill King of Bateman’s Bay was using a tractor to clear an area of land behind Surf Beach in New South Wales, Australia, so that a concrete slab could be poured. One morning during this job, footprints were spotted on moistened soil. They emerged from the bush and onto the site where a house was later built.
Years later, in 1994, the Bay Post-Moruya Examiner was contacted by Bill and Fran King, who wanted the case referred to Paul Cropper, the noted Yowie investigator. The Kings hoped he would include their case in his then- forthcoming volume about the unusual and legendary creatures of Australia.
There was still evidence to consider, including a plaster cast of a huge footprint. Cropper became excited at the prospect of seeing the cast and the relevant footprint photos.
Identification of them remains a mystery to this day, because of details differing from known animals. For example, Fran King said that monitor lizards have very little feet and that ostriches have three toes, characteristics not shown by the entity making the prints.
This could rule both creatures out as suspects, it might seem.
Unless Gilroy’s theory of a massive monitor is the correct one.
An article in the July 13, 1994 issue of The Bay Post–out of Bateman’s Bay, New South Wales–pointed out that the creature’s sizeable stride certainly puts it on the list of possible Yowies, and its tracks provide possible evidence that something large and unknown still exists Down Under.
DON’T TOUCH THAT E.T.
The Code of Federal Regulations, Section 14, Part 1211 used to make it problematic for people who touched extraterrestrial objects–or entities. They had to face quarantine without even a hearing. But, George Sloup, attorney advisor for the Ames Research Center, reveals that these codes–dating back to 1969 and the moon missions–are no longer in effect.
The chief counsel for NASA-Ames, Dr. George Lenehan, noted that these codes had been instituted because of worry about contamination from postulated extraterrestrial microbes on the surface of the moon.
However, in 1995, on the Internet, speculations were posted that these codes were actually meant to intimidate efforts at communication with UFO occupants.
Lenehan disagreed, according to a March 23, 1995 article in San Jose, California’s Metro. He felt that alien contact would be desirable since it would increase his agency’s budget.
Now that, in 1996, scientists have identified apparent fossils of Martian life on Earth, Lenehan’s contention of such an increased NASA budget seems especially plausible.
FANCY FISH FOOD
Seventy-eight-year-old Lewis Slight caught a 5 pound bass while fishing at a beach not far from Netley Abbey in Southampton, England.
That was not his only “lucky catch” circa late June 1995. The fish’s stomach contained a silver ring dating back a century-and-a-half.
PLUNGING PINNIPEDS
The walruses have been dropping to their deaths in behavior that has not until now been widely documented–but their actions are not deemed suicides. On August 27, 1996, some 41-60 of these pinnipeds fell off a number of high bluffs sometimes 100 feet high, at Cape Peirce, a part of the 4.3 million-acre Togiak National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.
Biologists, monitoring the group of as many as 12,500 walruses at any single time, obstructed 155 of the beasts from the cliffs, but about 70 of the animals got there anyway, indicated a report in the August 31, 1996 Washington Post.
In 1994, 42 walruses fatally fell off the cliffs, and in 1995 approximately 59 met their death that way. But the fatalities are apparently not uncommon to these creatures whose populations are not at present imperiled.
PHEW! AT KEW
The largest flower on earth bloomed around 9:00 a.m. on July 31, 1996. It did not smell as nice as it looked–in fact, the titan arum’s aroma was described as being like rotting fish and dead mice.
Its home was the tropical section of London’s Kew Gardens Princess of Wales Conservatory. The previous time one of its ilk–Amorphophallus titanum- -blossomed at Kew was 33 years previously, in 1963, reported the August 1, 1996 Washington Post.
Crowds had gathered on July 29 to see the blooming of the vertical yellow-and- purple flower, but insufficient sunlight put that off for two days. From July 30 to August 4, 49,000 people visited the Gardens. Roger Joiner, the Marketing Manager at Kew, enthused about the international media attention.
This carrion flower arum is native to the Sumatran jungles, where it is called by Indonesians the “corpse flower.” Other names for it are the krubi [“grubi”] or “devil’s tongue.”
It is not the only gaggingly fragrant blossom in Sumatra, though. Dr. Karl P. N. Shuker, in “More Mystery Plants of Prey” (Strange Magazine no. 12), and William A. Emboden, in Bizarre Plants: Magical, Monstrous, Mythical, write of the parasitic Rafflesia arnoldii, a horizontal flower, also called the “stinking corpse lily” and the “giant panda of the plant world.” It possesses a stench that nauseates humans but attracts blowflies and carrion beetles. They search for rotting meat upon it, and transfer pollen to other plants of the same species while questing for carrion. Other animals that aid the seed dispersion process are, according to some accounts, wild pigs, tree shrews and elephants.
The titan arum’s stink is designed for a more limited repertoire; it lets bees know it is ready for the pollination process.
Either of these blooms could be mistaken for the man-eating Death Flower of legend–if encountered at the right time. The titan arum flowers once every six or seven years under normal jungle conditions.
Dr. Odoardo Beccari, the Italian botanist, was the first western expert to come across the Titan Arum in the Pading Province during 1878. Seeds he sent back to his patron the Marchese Corsi Salviati in Italy were grown, and a few plants were at Beccari’s request sent to Kew in 1879. One of those seedlings flowered in June 1887. Another plant bloomed there in 1926, to wide attention.
At the New York Botanical Garden, a 1937 flowering was even filmed for a newsreel.
Even its appellation attractions attention. The plant’s generic name of Amorphophallus is derived from the Greek and means shapeless phallus. According to a June 5, 1996 entry on the Wayne’s Word! website (http://issfw.palomar.edu/Wayne/WW0602.html), at maximum size, the spadix of an A. titanum is about the size a blue whale’s male sex organ.
William A. Emboden described the plant’s unusual erect spadix, having “male parts above and female parts below” as “bizarre and erotic.”
Thus the great appeal to the publics of 1937 and 1996 is made clear: it is large, “dangerous” (to one’s nose at least), and sexy.
APPARENT “ANCIENT ASTRONAUTS” IN ART
The nine-thousand-year-old statues are the oldest known life-size representations of the human form–but to modern eyes they do not look quite human. Due to their big–sometimes slanting–eyes, rudimentary noses, and tiny mouths, some have compared them to space aliens. They resemble the kind popularized by Whitley Strieber’s “visitors” books and Steven Spielberg’s movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Ann Gunter, the curator of ancient Near Eastern art at the Sackler Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., acknowledges this. She and her colleagues feel that, since the sculptures may have depicted the ancients’ ancestors, the creation of features looking like “beings from some other time and place” may have been intentional, reported the August 1, 1996 Washington Post. The figures, made of plaster, and with actual human skulls within their heads, were retrieved from their longtime home at ‘Ain Ghazal in Jordan after a bulldozer accidentally revealed a corner of their place of rest. The figures were in two groups, discovered in one cache. After a decade of study and restoration in Suitland, Maryland, at the Smithsonian’s Conservation Analytical Lab, the public finally could view these seemingly unearthly pieces from 3,000 years before the use of writing, now that they were on display at the Sackler.
James Lochart, writing about the exhibit for the August 2 Washington City Paper, suggests another unorthodox theory that could be applied to the statues. He recalls the theory of the bicameral mind, explicated by Julian Jaynes, which posits that, until about 1000 B.C., people did not possess subjective consciousness. Decisions were supposedly carried out via auditory hallucinations–the sacred voice of authority. But he feels the Jaynes theory applies more to the famous Olmec heads (on temporary display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.) than to these small-mouthed depictions, unless “their makers had yet to fine-tune their technique….”
TAROT AND A TIP
Octavia, a fortuneteller in Warsaw, pays mind to macroeconomic texts and marketing tomes as well as to her tarot cards. The Polish prognosticator recently revealed: “Sometimes the tarot cards are only to distract clients. What I say is mostly common sense.”
Also known as Barbara Drazek, the 34-year-old onetime nurse is commercializing on the concerns that have come lately to Poland.
Her spiel combines the jargons of both mysticism and management-consulting, and has proven useful to some.
One client, who did not take her advice, was told not to ship during late 1996 thousands of frozen chickens from the United States to Russia via Gdynia. She said he would miss the New Year deadline. When he shipped the cargo anyway, the birds arrived at their final destination three weeks late.
Octavia’s advice here came from her good sense rather than any methods of mysticism; dock workers in the Polish port of Gdynia are known to get mid- December bonuses. After that, work is hampered by liquid celebrations.
Octavia is just one among many. The March 18, 1996 Wall Street Journal, which reported about Octavia, revealed that the popularity of her line of work is indicated by the 250,000 per month sales of the magazine Fortuneteller.
PILTDOWN PERPETRATOR PUBLICIZED
The May 23 issue of the English science journal Nature contains an article dealing with Brian Gardiner’s findings which may, after many decades of speculation by others, reveal the true culprit in the Piltdown Man hoax.
The Piltdown Man fossils, originally thought in 1912 to be of a missing link, turned out to be, when exposed as a hoax forty years later in 1952, more recent fossils from a human and an orangutan.
Gardiner shows that Martin A. C. Hinton was probably the actual hoaxer, rather than those people commonly blamed. Some eight decades ago, Hinton was a curator at the Natural History Museum in London. Unhappy over delayed payments, in revenge he chemically treated fossils, Gardiner claims.
Corroborating this theory are identically processed bone samples in Hinton’s trunk, found in a loft in the museum. Also, human teeth, prepared in the same way, were discovered among Hinton’s belongings.
The May 24, 1996 Washington Post disclosed that the Nature article is based on a manuscript by Gardiner, who elsewhere stated that one of the usually blamed culprits, Charles Dawson, was too ignorant to have been capable of the hoax.
PRAIRIE DOGS GET SUCKED
A report out of Amarillo, Texas, reveals that Dog Gone, a company specializing in pest control, has a profitable use for the prairie dogs it eliminates from U.S. sites.
It sells them to Japan–at $700 per animal–after collecting them in a gigantic vacuum cleaner.
This suction device was invented by Gay Balfour, the co-owner of Dog Gone, reported the May 24, 1996 Washington Post.
On May 21, some three to four dozen valuable rodents were sucked out of their underground dwellings by the machine and deposited into a containing area. Only creatures of lighter weight made the trip through the big hose, because of the machine’s specs.
The other co-owner, Dave Honaker, spoke of capturing only the littler prairie dogs, and added, “They make good pets; they’re real trainable and social animals.”
His announcement did not answer certain questions that could occur to one. Like: how much did the process traumatize the creatures, and how did the wholesale removal of their young affect the parents left behind in the colonies?
However, the company’s methods are certainly preferable to other, more fatal, types of “pest control.”
RUSSIAN VAMPIRE BITES HIMSELF TO DEATH
An article by Dimitry Frokofeiv in the Yediot Aharonot newspaper (apparently circa early 1996) reviews a few weirdnesses that happened in Russian forests, including a six-month mystery concerning people found dead–with “vampire” marks on their necks.
Russian police found some camps where barefoot residents wore unprocessed animal furs. In one of these, a jar of human blood turned up–which, after testing, turned out to be that of a person missing three weeks.
In another incident, a police truck ran into trouble in the area. When stopped to check the vehicle’s wheels, one officer was attacked. His partner left the vehicle to rescue him, helping him arrest the malefactor.
The uncouth arrestee wore only a torn gown made of furs and rags. He said nothing in his defense, just growled. A bottle of human blood was found in his pocket. He did not survive captivity, having that same night bitten his wrists and died.
ANTIPODEAN GIANT SQUID
A research ship with American scientists caught a 26-foot-long giant squid 600 miles east of New Zealand on December 31, 1995, according to a bulletin from the Pelagic Shark Research Foundation released January 31, 1996.
Steve O’Shea, a marine scientist working for the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, revealed that the usually elusive squid was netted near the Chatham Islands, and that it was one of merely twenty captures known during the last ten years. National Public Radio on January 31, 1996 revealed that it soon died.
Its remains were refrigerated until the ship arrived in Wellington, New Zealand, during late January 1996.
The giant animal, which turned out to be a female, ended up at the Department of Invertebrate Zoology, headed by Dr. C.C. Lu, at the Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia.
Clyde Roper, heading up the Smithsonian Natural History Museum’s “Quest for the Giant Squid” is set to disembark in November 1996 for a $5 million dollar expedition in which each day a four-person submersible will explore the ocean’s abyss in the waters off New Zealand in order to film the enormous animal alive in its own habitat. Roper’s Squid Squad includes Steve O’Shea. Roper will also be accompanied by a National Geographic Society TV Crew, whose results will be beamed by satellite to classrooms, reported USA Today on February 1, 1996.
THE BRAIN-EATING MERMAID
The Mambu Mutu–Swahili for crocodile-man–is a lake monster to contend with. According to the people around Lake Tanganyika, it looks like a person with the tail of a fish, i.e. a mermaid, and eats the brains and drinks the blood of its prey.
Though, according to the July 1995 Ano Cero, initial theories took the creature to be a sirenid, Carlos Bonet, a zoologist from Spain, thinks that the thing might be a flat-skulled giant otter–a creature known in fact to drink blood.
CHINESE BIGFOOT HUNTER DIES
Yu Gong, who had been searching for Bigfoot for more than a decade. died while on a hunt–but Bigfoot had nothing to do with it. The Xinhua News Agency reported on January 26, 1996, that Yu had died in a northern China traffic accident.
During hunts, Yu’s modus operandi was to hide in forests at night. Thus he was able to obtain nests, hairs, feces and footprints which were claimed to belong to the elusive entity.
His death was just one calamity affecting plans for more elaborate and sophisticated quests for the creature.
THE SINGING SANDS OF MONGOLIA
The Chinese Academy of Mongolia has during late 1995 reported a number of musical sand dunes in the Badainjaran Desert. The area, part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in north China, has, according to the Xinhua News Agency circa early December 1995, been found to be home to a phenomena in which, during a mild wind, the dunes make noises that resemble sometimes a flying airplane, sometimes a groan, and sometimes even singing.
These may be caused by sand grains of uniform size rubbing against each other, figured scientist Zu Jiangjun.
HE HAD BETTER BE CHARMING
As of October 1995, Mohd Yusof wishes to spend fourteen days in a cage. But he does not want to be alone–he intends to have as his companions 300 poisonous snakes.
The world’s record for this type of captivity was set in 1987 by Yusof’s uncle, who spent a mere ten days caged with only 200 snakes at the Kuala Lumpur Zoo.
According to Australia’s Sunday Mail on October 10, 1995, snake charmer Yusof was attempting to obtain the needed moneys for his effort and was arranging for a 3-meter-wide glass box at the World Trade Centre in Singapore.
MIRACULOUS FAKE
Dr. Nick Allen, the head of fine arts at South Africa’s University of Port Elizabeth, is convinced that while the Shroud of Turin is not the burial cloth of Christ, it is indeed special: a photograph–taken perhaps during the 13th century.
All the technologies needed to create photographs were in place during that period. Light sensitive emulsions were available, and lenses were used in glasses in Venice during 1275.
To test his thesis, art historian Dr. Allen duplicated the proposed conditions. A giant camera obscura with a quartz lens–7 millimeters thick and 15 centimeters in diameter–was deployed so that a life-size model’s image could be focused on a canvas sheet soaked in silver sulphate, a chemical used since the 9th century AD. An image developed four days afterward, and was fixed in an ammonia bath–not composed of the bodily byproduct probably originally used.
On the BBC1 Tomorrow’s World television program of September 8, 1995, Allen spoke of how, if he had seen the Shroud incognito, he would have thought it a photograph.
The shroud’s artist, perhaps a 13th century alchemist, may have kept his process secret both to “authenticate” the Turin shroud and keep others from creating copies.
Dr. Allen, whose shadow analysis of the shroud supports his photographic thesis, speculates that the Turin shroud was fabricated in Venice circa 1248-1386, and had either been commissioned by the Knights Templar or was stolen by them.
GULP!
A flock of birdwatchers in central England got to see a giant fish instead, reported The Sun in late September 1995. The enthusiasts had come from all over the country in order to get a view of a migrating red-necked phalarope, a rare bird indeed. But enjoyment turned to horror when the object of their observation, during a swim, was gobbled up by a 4-foot-pike. Only a few feathers remained to indicate that the scarce creature had even been to the Leicestershire reservoir.
One observer of the incident likened it to a scene from the movie Jaws, related the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of September 24, 1995.
REPTILE ON THE RAMPAGE
Iguanas and other reptiles are known for a tendency to jar lamps and inadvertently start fires. In many cases, their tails are deployed.
A recent 1995 blaze in Munich, Germany, however, was caused by a quieter creature. This was a pet tortoise, which had knocked a lamp, and set curtains on fire.
According to the September 21, 1995 Columbus Dispatch, the blaze grew, until $20,700 worth of damage was done. While two women were medically treated for their breathing of smoke, the animal escaped injury.
NEANDERTHALS IN VIETNAM
Angel Morant Fores via COUD-I shared the following:
The central plateau in Vietnam is apparently home to some stone-age people who are linked to Neanderthals. Thus claimed the local press in Hanoi, working from accounts of military veterans, scientists and investigators.
In September 1995, a report via France Presse stated that come December an international team was going to investigate these eyewitness stories by visiting the plateau, reported the September 14, 1995 El Perriodico.
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Thirty-two-year-old Paco Cazanga threw himself into a pit of jaguars at Guatemala City’s zoo after his attempt to make a sale ended disastrously. Circa late August 1995, Cazanga had been engaged in a product demonstration, trying to sell a customer a pistol, when the weapon went off and killed the prospective buyer.
HYPNOTIC DOG DEPARTS
Hugh Cross, the owner of an escaped labrador, warned the public not to look into the pooch’s eyes if they encountered it. The animal, named Oscar, was, according to its publicity, the world’s only canine hypnotist.
During a sold-out show in Edinburgh on August 21, 1995, the dog took its leave while being put through its paces by co-star Cross.
Scottish police, as of August 23, were still seeking the staring-eye dog, noted the August 23, 1995 USA Today.
GRAIL, GRAIL, WHO’S GOT THE GRAIL?
The Order of the Knights Templar gave a news conference on August 17, 1995 from an apartment in a dilapidated Rome suburb, claiming that they possessed the Holy Grail. Showing a tiny, green, mottled glass flask, Rocco Zingaro di San Ferdinando, Italy’s Grand Master of the Templars, announced that it was time for the world to know the “grail’s true whereabouts.”
This was in reaction to what they deemed a false claim from England by Graham Phillips. Another reason for their showing of the Grail was that, as the year 2000 was approaching, humankind needs “the grail for its salvation.”
While the artifact has been subjected to no dating techniques, “numerically it is perfect” in its, to the Templars, meaningful measurements, reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on August 18, 1995.