The Great Amherst Mystery

 

The Great Amherst Mystery was a notorious case of reported poltergeist activity in Amherst, Nova Scotia, Canada between 1878 and 1879. It was the subject of an investigation by Walter Hubbell, an actor with an interest in psychic phenomena, who kept what he claimed, was a diary of events in the house, later expanded into a popular book. The case was dismissed as a hoax by skeptical investigators.

Events

The Amherst Mystery centered on Esther Cox, who lived in a house with her married sister Olive Teed, Olive's husband Daniel and their two young children. A brother and sister of Esther and Olive also lived in the house, as did Daniel's brother John Teed.

According to Hubbell's account, events began at the end of August 1878, after Esther Cox, then aged 18, was subjected to an attempted sexual assault by a male friend at gunpoint. This left her in great distress, and shortly after this, the physical phenomena began. There were knockings, bangings, and rustlings in the night, and Esther herself began to suffer seizures in which her body visibly swelled and she was feverish and chilled by turns. Then objects in the house took flight.

The frightened family called in a doctor. During his visit, bedclothes moved, scratching noises were heard, and the words "Esther Cox, you are mine to kill" appeared on the wall by the head of Esther's bed. The following day the doctor administered sedatives to Esther to calm her and help her sleep, whereupon more noises and flying objects manifested themselves. Attempts to communicate with the "spirit" resulted in tapped responses to questions.

Walter Hubbell

The phenomena continued for some months and became well known locally. Visitors to the cottage, including clergymen, heard banging and knocking and witnessed moving objects, often when Esther herself was under close observation. In December, Esther fell ill with diphtheria. No phenomena were observed during the two weeks she spent in bed, nor during the time did she spend recuperating afterwards at the home of a married sister in Sackville, New Brunswick. However, when she returned to Amherst the mysterious events began again, this time involving the outbreak of fires in various places in the house. Esther herself now claimed to see the "ghost", which threatened to burn the house down unless she left.

In January 1879 Esther moved in with another local family, but the manifestations around her continued and were witnessed by many people, some of whom conversed with the "ghost" by questioning and rapped answers. Some were curious and sympathetic; others believed Esther herself to be responsible for the phenomena, and she met with some hostility locally. Esther was frequently slapped, pricked and scratched by the "ghost", and on one occasion was stabbed in the back with a clasp knife. Interest in the case grew as the news spread, and in late March Esther spent some time in Saint John, New Brunswick, where she was investigated by some local gentlemen with an interest in science. By now, several distinct "spirits" were associated with Esther and communicating with onlookers via knocks and rappings. "Bob Nickle", the original "ghost", claimed to have been a shoemaker in life, and others identified themselves as "Peter Cox", a relative of Esther's, and "Maggie Fisher". After the visit to Saint John, Esther spent some time with the Van Amberghs, friends with a peaceful farm near Amherst and then returned to the Teeds' cottage in the summer of 1879, whereupon the phenomena broke out again. It was at this point that Walter Hubbell arrived, attracted by the publicity surrounding the case, and moved into the Teed cottage as a lodger to investigate the phenomena.

Hubbell spent some weeks with Esther and her family, and reported having personally witnessed moving objects, fires and items appearing from nowhere and claimed that he saw phenomena occur even when Esther herself was in full view and obviously unconnected with them. He also claimed to have witnessed attacks on Esther with pins and other sharp objects, and to have seen her in several of her fits of extreme swelling and pain. He communicated with the various named "spirits" by rapping, and listed three others: "Mary Fisher", "Jane Nickle" and "Eliza McNeal", who were also manifesting themselves as part of events.

With Hubbell's professional help, Esther Cox embarked on a speaking tour, attracting audiences who paid to see her and hear her story. However, she met with some hostile reactions and, after she was heckled one night and a disturbance broke out, the attempt was abandoned. She returned to Amherst once more, working for a man named Arthur Davison, but after his barn burned down he accused her of arson and she was convicted and sentenced to four months in prison, although she was released after only one. After this, the phenomenon ceased for good. Esther Cox subsequently married twice, having a son by each of her husbands. She moved to Brockton, Massachusetts with her second husband and died on 8 November 1912, aged 52.

Aftermath

Hubbell's book was published in 1879 and proved popular, selling at least 55,000 copies. The Amherst case was also investigated by the British paranormal researcher Hereward Carrington, who took statements from surviving witnesses of the events in 1907 and published them, along with a detailed account of the case, in 1913. Other researchers looked at the case more critically than Hubbell: in particular, Dr. Walter F. Prince in the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research (Vol XIII, 1919) made a detailed case for trickery by Esther Cox while in a dissociative state.

Prince noted that Esther's male friend, who had attempted to rape he,r was Bob McNea,l and the alleged poltergeist activities of "Bob Nickle" only began a week after the assault. Egon Larsen, who summarized the evidence examined by Dr. Prince, commented:

All the evidence collected by Dr. Prince seems to indicate that Esther was more than just unstable: that she was a psychopath suffering from symptoms of a split personality: that she, or rather part of her, played 'poltergeist': furthermore, that most so-called eyewitness accounts were of little scientific value; and that there was only one beneficiary of the whole fraud: Walter Hubbell... The most unreliable witness, naturally, is Hubbell himself; for what use would his book have been if it had not told of amazing occurrences? There is no corroboration by others of the incidents he claims to have observed, only his own sworn affidavit (reproduced on the cover of the 1888 edition) that he actually 'saw and heard the phenomena as stated'.

Larson also wrote that Hubbell's first edition of his book asserted that his story had been fully corroborated by the inhabitants of Amherst and from strangers from distant towns but there was no evidence for this because not a single statement was verified by any witness mentioned by name. Hubbell quoted from some newspapers but upon investigation these turned out to trace to Hubbell himself. Larson stated that Hubbell had embellished facts to make his book sell more copies and the book served as excellent publicity for his acting career. Larson also quoted a letter from Arthur Davison who admitted that Hubbell "painted the facts up to make the book sell".

In popular culture

A play based on the story, Guilty! The Story of the Great Amherst Mystery was written by Charlie Rhindress and premiered at Live Bait Theater in Sackville, New Brunswick, in 1991.

In 2012, former Cumberland County Museum Curator Laurie Glenn Norris authored a book further investigating the mystery entitled Haunted Girl: Esther Cox and the Great Amherst Mystery. In 2015, the book's publisher announced that it had sold the film rights for the book to a project led by director Larysa Kondracki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Amherst_Mystery

Murder Ballads

Murder ballads are a subgenre of the traditional ballad form dealing with a crime or a gruesome death. Their lyrics form a narrative describing the events of a murder, often including the lead-up and/or aftermath. The term refers to the content, and may be applied to traditional ballads, part of oral culture.

Definition

The term ballad, applied to traditional or folk music, means a narrative song. Within ballads, the "event song" is dedicated to narrating a particular event, and the murder ballad is a type of event song in which the event is a murder. This definition can also be applied to songs composed self-consciously within, or concerning, the traditional generic conventions. Atkinson, referring to traditional English ballads, comments that "there is no shortage of murders in the corpus of ballads [...] and few of them are concealed with any success."

Perspectives are numerous. Some murder ballads tell the story from the point of view of the murderer, or attempt to portray the murderer in a somewhat sympathetic light, such as "Tom Dooley". A recording of that song sold nearly four million copies for The Kingston Trio in 1958. Other murder ballads tell the tale of the crime from the point of view of the victim, such as "Lord Randall", in which the narrator becomes ill and discovers that he has been poisoned. Others tell the story with greater distance, such as "Lamkin", which records the details of the crime and the punishment without any attempt to arouse sympathy for the criminal. Supernatural revenge wrought by the victim upon the murderer sometimes figures in murder ballads such as "The Twa Sisters" (also known as "Binnorie" or "Minnorie" Child Ballad #10).

Daniel A. Cohen comments that the murder ballads should be distinguished from a related genre, "dying verses", intended for reading rather than singing, a New England tradition from the 18th century. Their relation to courtship murders came in with the 19th century.

History

Murder ballads make up a notable portion of traditional ballads, many of which originated in Scandinavia, England, and lowland Scotland in the premodern era (suggesting an ultimate Germanic cultural origin). In those, while the murder is committed, the murderer usually suffers justice at the hands of the victim's family, even if the victim and murderer are related ("Edward/Son David", "The Cruel Brother", and "The Two Sisters" for examples). In these ballads, murderous women usually burn while males hang—see "Lamkin" and some Scottish versions of "The Two Sisters". Within the context of the British Isles, murder ballads are only found in English and Scots-speaking regions (broadly, England, lowland Scotland, and northeastern Ireland), and are not a feature of Gaelic or Welsh-language music.

The details and locales for a particular murder ballad did change over time. For example, "Knoxville Girl" is essentially the same ballad as "The Wexford Girl" with the setting transposed from Ireland to Tennessee—the two of them are based on "The Oxford Girl", a murder ballad set in England. Many American murder ballads are modified versions of Old World ballads with any elements of supernatural retribution removed and the focus transferred to the slaughter of the innocent. For example, the English ballad "The Gosport Tragedy" of the 1750s had both murder and vengeance on the murderer by the ghosts of the murdered woman and her unborn baby, who call up a great storm to prevent his ship from sailing before tearing him apart. In contrast, the Kentucky version, "Pretty Polly", is a stark and blood-soaked murder ballad with the victim being betrayed by the man she loves, stabbed in the heart, and buried in a shallow grave. The epilogue describes her killer being hanged by the community and his soul burning in hell and a "debt to the Devil" in a few versions.

African music traditions brought by slaves blended with the conventions. Olive Burt noted that the murder ballad tradition of the American Old West is distinct to some extent from that of ballads rooted in the old broadside tradition, noting that:

Western settlers found murder and bloodshed fascinating, and composed local ballads. But with printing facilities scarce, many of these items were not published at all while others saw fame only briefly in the columns of the local newspapers. As a result, true western ballads of murder—except those about such famous outlaws as Jesse James, Cole Younger, Sam Bass, and their ilk—have been entirely lost, or are known only to the children of those who knew and sang them. These children are now, of course, old men and women. Some of the best examples of western murder ballads will be lost forever when these people die.

While in Ukrainian folklore tradition, the murder ballad genre is not as distinct, though there are a few folk songs that definitely stand out. One of them is the very popular song from the 18th century called "Oi Ne Khody Hrytsiu" ("Don't Go to Party") written by semi-legendary poet and singer Marusia Churai. In the song a girl named Hanna being in love with a Cossack Hrytz (Greg) warns him not to go to the parties in fear of him being seduced by bewitching girls. He doesn't listen and falls in love with another girl. Hanna brews a deadly potion and gives it to Hrytz at supper. When he is buried, she goes to his grave and tells him why she did it.

Several historical murder ballads became hit pop songs in the 1950s and 1960s, including the Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley" (as mentioned above), which was a #1 Billboard hit in 1958, Lloyd Price's version of "Stagger Lee", which reached the top of the chart in 1959, and Lefty Frizzell's "Long Black Veil", which was a hit for several artists over the years.

Cultural references

Tom Lehrer's song, "The Irish Ballad", is a parody of the traditional murder ballad. J.H.P. Pafford, in a review of Olive Burt's American Murder Ballads and their Stories, states that the song contains "a running prose commentary on the incidents described in many [such] ballads".

Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games Trilogy of books, and the films based upon them, make much of Katniss Everdeen's ability to sing. "The Hanging Tree" was written specifically for the third film; it follows Appalachian murder ballad style.

During the late 2010s and early 2020s, murder ballads were reinterpreted to criticize knife crime committed by teenage gangs in London. Welsh guitarist Ren Gill's Story of Jenny and Screech (2019) draws upon folk music, hip-hop and spoken word to tell the melodramatic story of a teenage robber named James alias Screech who murdered his own sister with an illegal rambo knife, was rejected by his friends, attacked a policeman, and was shot dead by armed police. This was followed in 2022 with a prequel murder ballad about Jenny and Screech's mother Violet, a victim of fatal domestic abuse in "London City, far from pretty, 2005."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_ballad

Flannan Isles Lighthouse

 

Flannan Isles Lighthouse is a lighthouse near the highest point on Eilean Mòr, one of the Flannan Isles in the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. In 1900, its three keepers disappeared in mysterious circumstances.

History

The 23-meter (75 ft) lighthouse was designed by David Alan Stevenson for the Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB). Construction, between 1895 and 1899, was undertaken by George Lawson of Rutherglen at a cost of £1,899 (equivalent to £277,066 in 2023) inclusive of the building, landing places, stairs, and railway tracks. All of the materials used had to be hauled up the 45-meter (148 ft) cliffs directly from supply boats. A further £3,526 (£514,447 in 2023) was spent on the shore station at Breasclete on the Isle of Lewis. The lighthouse was first lit on 7 December 1899.

A cable-hauled railway was built to facilitate the transport of provisions up the steep gradients from the landing places. At that time, the light consumed twenty barrels of paraffin a year. The cable was powered by a small steam engine in a shed adjoining the lighthouse. The rail line descended from the lighthouse in a westerly direction and then curved round to the south. In the approximate center of the island it forked by means of a set of hand-operated points dubbed "Clapham Junction", in reference to a railway junction in London; one branch continued in its curvature to head eastwards to the east landing place, on the south-east corner of the island, thus forming a half-circle, while the other, slightly shorter, branch curved back to the west to serve the west landing, situated in a small inlet on the island's south coast. The final approaches to the landing stages were extremely steep. The cable was guided round the curves by pulleys set between the rails, and a line of posts set outside the inner rail prevented it from going too far astray should it jump off the pulleys. The cargo was carried in a small four-wheeled bogie.

In 1925, the lighthouse became one of the first Scottish lights to receive communications from the shore by wireless telegraphy. In the 1960s, the island's transport system was modernized. The railway was removed, leaving behind the concrete bed on which it had been laid to serve as a roadway for a "Gnat" – a three-wheeled, rubber-tyred cross-country vehicle powered by a 400-cubic-centimeter (24 cu in) four-stroke engine, built by Aimers McLean of Galashiels. This had a somewhat shorter working life than the railway, becoming redundant in its turn when the helipad was constructed.

On 28 September 1971, the lighthouse was automated. A reinforced concrete helipad was constructed at the same time to enable maintenance visits in heavy weather. The light is produced by burning acetylene gas and has a range of 17 nautical miles (20 mi; 31 km). It is now monitored from the Butt of Lewis and the shore station has been converted into flats.

1900 crew disappearance

Flannan Isles Lighthouse

The first record that something was abnormal on the Flannan Isles was on 15 December 1900 when the steamer Archtor, on a passage from Philadelphia to Leith, noted in its log that the light was not operational in poor weather conditions. When the ship docked in Leith on 18 December 1900, the sighting was passed on to the Northern Lighthouse Board. The relief vessel, the lighthouse tender Hesperus, was unable to sail from Breasclete, Lewis, as planned on 20 December due to adverse weather; she did not reach the island until noon on 26 December. The lighthouse was manned by three men: James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur, with a rotating fourth man spending time on shore.

On arrival, the crew of Hesperus and the relief keeper found that the flagpole had no flag, none of the usual provision boxes had been left on the landing stage for restocking and none of the lighthouse keepers were there to welcome them ashore. Jim Harvie, the captain of Hesperus, attempted to reach them by blowing the ship's whistle and firing a flare but was unsuccessful.

A boat was launched and Joseph Moore, the relief keeper, was put ashore alone. He found the entrance gate to the compound and the main door both closed, the beds unmade and the clock unwound. Returning to the landing stage with this news, he then went back up to the lighthouse with Hesperus's second mate and a seaman. A further search revealed that the lamps had been cleaned and refilled. A set of oilskins was found, suggesting that one of the keepers had left the lighthouse without them. There was no sign of any of the keepers, neither inside the lighthouse nor anywhere on the island.

Moore and three volunteer seamen were left on the island to attend the light and Hesperus returned to Lewis. Captain Harvie sent a telegram to the Northern Lighthouse Board dated 26 December 1900, stating:

A dreadful accident has happened at the Flannans. The three keepers, Ducat, Marshall and the Occasional have disappeared from the Island... The clocks were stopped and other signs indicated that the accident must have happened about a week ago. Poor fellows they must have been blown over the cliffs or drowned trying to secure a crane.

On Eilean Mòr the men scoured every corner of the island for clues as to the fate of the keepers. They found that everything was intact at the east landing but the west landing provided considerable evidence of damage caused by recent storms. A box at 33 meters (108 ft) above sea level had been broken and its contents strewn about; iron railings were bent over, the iron railway by the path was wrenched out of its concrete and a rock weighing more than a ton had been displaced. On top of the cliff, at more than 60 meter (200 ft) above sea level, turf had been ripped away as far as 10 meter (33 ft) from the cliff edge.

Northern Lighthouse Board investigation

On 29 December 1900 Robert Muirhead, a Northern Lighthouse Board (NLB) superintendent, arrived to conduct the official investigation into the incident. Muirhead had originally recruited all three of the missing men and knew them personally.

He examined the clothing left behind in the lighthouse and concluded that Ducat and Marshall had gone down to the western landing stage and that McArthur (the 'Occasional') had left the lighthouse during heavy rain in his shirt sleeves. He noted that whoever left the light last and unattended was in breach of NLB rules. He also noted that some of the damage to the west landing was "difficult to believe unless actually seen".

From evidence which I was able to procure I was satisfied that the men had been on duty up till dinner time on Saturday the 15th of December, that they had gone down to secure a box in which the mooring ropes, landing ropes etc. were kept, and which was secured in a crevice in the rock about 110 feet [34 meters] above sea level, and that an extra-large sea had rushed up the face of the rock, had gone above them, and coming down with immense force, had swept them completely away.

Ducat left a wife and four children; McArthur a wife and two children. The disappearances tarnished the lighthouse's reputation for many years after the incident.

Speculation and conjecture

No bodies were ever found, but there have been some mysterious sights resulting in "fascinated national speculation" in newspapers and periodicals of the era. Implausible stories ensued, such as that a sea serpent had carried the men away; that they had arranged for a ship to take them away and start new lives; that they had been abducted by foreign spies; or that they had met their fate through the malevolent presence of a boat filled with ghosts (the baleful influence of the "Phantom of the Seven Hunters" was widely suspected locally). More than ten years later the events were still being commemorated and elaborated on. The 1912 ballad "Flannan Isle" by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson refers erroneously to an overturned chair and uneaten meal laid out on the table, indicating that the keepers had been suddenly disturbed.

Yet, as we crowded through the door,

We only saw a table spread

For dinner, meat, and cheese and bread;

But, all untouch'd; and no-one there,

As though, when they sat down to eat,

Ere they could even taste,

Alarm had come, and they in haste

Had risen and left the bread and meat,

For at the table head a chair

Lay tumbled on the floor.

However, in a first-hand account made by Moore, the relief keeper, he stated that: "The kitchen utensils were all very clean, which is a sign that it must be after dinner some time they left."

Later theories and interpretations

Over time a story has developed of the existence of unusual log book entries. They supposedly have Marshall saying on 12 December that there were "severe winds the likes of which I have never seen before in twenty years". He also is said to have reported that Ducat had been "very quiet" and Donald McArthur had been crying. McArthur was a veteran mariner with a reputation for brawling, and thus it would be strange for him to be crying in response to a storm. Log entries on 13 December were said to have stated that the storm was still raging and that all three men had been praying. This was also puzzling, as all three men were experienced lighthouse keepers who knew they were in a secure structure 150 feet above sea level and should have known they were safe inside. Furthermore, there had been no reported storms in the area on the 12, 13 and 14 December. The final log entry is said to have been made on 15 December, stating "Storm ended, sea calm. God is over all." However an investigation by Mike Dash for the Fortean Times revealed that the logbooks were fictional, later additions to the story.

Subsequent researchers have taken into account the geography of the islands. The coastline of Eilean Mòr is deeply indented with narrow gullies called geos. The west landing, which is situated in such a geo, terminates in a cave. In high seas or storms water would rush into the cave and then explode out again with considerable force. It was possible McArthur saw a series of large waves approaching the island and, knowing the likely danger to his colleagues, ran down to warn them only to be washed away as well in the violent swell. Recent research by James Love discovered that Marshall was previously fined five shillings when his equipment was washed away during a huge gale. It is likely, in seeking to avoid another fine, which he and Ducat tried to secure their equipment during a storm and were swept away as a result. The fate of McArthur, although he had been required to stay behind to man the lighthouse, can be guessed to be the same. Love speculates that McArthur probably tried to warn or help his colleagues and was swept away too. This theory also has the advantage of explaining the set of oilskins remaining indoors and McArthur's coat remaining on its peg, although perhaps not the closed door and gate. Another theory is based on the first-hand experiences of Walter Aldebert, a keeper on the Flannans from 1953 to 1957. He believed one man may have been washed into the sea but then his companions, who were trying to rescue him, were washed away by more rogue waves.

A further proposal is based on the psychology of the keepers. Allegedly, McArthur was a volatile character; this may have led to a fight breaking out near the cliff edge by the West Landing that caused all three men to fall to their deaths.

In popular culture

Fictional use of this premise was featured in the Doctor Who serial Horror of Fang Rock.

The mystery also was the inspiration for the composer Peter Maxwell Davies's modern chamber opera The Lighthouse (1979).

The British rock group Genesis wrote and recorded "The Mystery of Flannan Isle Lighthouse" in 1968 while working on their first album, but it was not released until 1998 in Genesis Archive 1967–75.

The 2018 film The Vanishing is based on the event.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson's (1878–1962) poem "Flannan Isle" recounts the horror of the search party who find an empty lighthouse with no trace of "three men dead".

In the season 7 premiere of BuzzFeed Unsolved True Crime, hosts Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej covered the disappearance, with the episode premiering on 21 October 2020.

The Flannan Isles and the Lighthouse are featured in the 2021 Mark Dawson book Never Let Me Down Again, the nineteenth book in the John Milton series.

Natasha Pulley's 2021 book The Kingdoms also makes reference to the disappearance, which initiates the events of the novel.

The indie horror video game Dark Fall II: Lights Out was partially inspired by this occurrence, and references both the Doctor Who episode and the W.W. Gibson poem listed above.

Emma Stonex based her story "The Lamplighters" on the events at the Eilean Mor lighthouse.

The turn-based RPG video game Reverse: 1999 includes the Flannan Isles as a side story for the character named Marcus, in which she hopes to publish her writings about the isles with the help of the ghosts of the lighthouse keepers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flannan_Isles_Lighthouse

The Lonnie Zamora Incident

 

The Lonnie Zamora incident was an alleged UFO sighting that occurred on April 24, 1964 near Socorro, New Mexico when Socorro police officer Lonnie Zamora claimed he saw two people beside a shiny object that later rose into the air accompanied by a roaring blue and orange flame. Zamora's claims were subject to attention from news media, UFO investigators, and UFO organizations, and the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book listed the case as "unknown". Conventional explanations of Zamora's claims include a lunar lander test by White Sands Missile Range and a hoax by New Mexico Tech students.

Incident

On April 24, 1964, at approximately 17:45, Socorro Police radio dispatcher Nep Lopez received a radio call from Sergeant Lonnie Zamora reporting a possible motor vehicle accident. Zamora advised Lopez that he would be “checking the car down in the arroyo". Shortly after, Lopez received another radio call from Zamora asking Lopez to look out of the window, to see if he could see an object. When Lopez asked Zamora to describe it, Zamora said "it looks like a balloon” and requested New Mexico State Police Sergeant Chavez meet him at his location. When Chavez arrived, he asked Zamora what the trouble was. Zamora led him to examine some burning brush. When other police officers arrived, they noted patches of smoldering grass and brush.

Zamora's claims

Zamora told authorities he was pursuing a speeding car south of Socorro, New Mexico when he "heard a roar and saw a flame in the sky to southwest some distance away—possibly a 1/2 mile or a mile." Believing a local dynamite shack might have exploded, Zamora said he discontinued the pursuit and investigated the potential explosion. Zamora claimed to have observed a shiny object, "to south about 150 to 200 yards (450 to 600 ft; 140 to 180 m)", that he initially believed to be an "overturned white car ... up on radiator or on trunk". The object was "like aluminum—it was whitish against the mesa background, but not chrome", and shaped like the letter "O". Zamora claimed to have briefly observed two people in white overalls beside the object, who he later described as "normal in shape—but possibly they were small adults or large kids." Zamora claimed to hear a roar and see a blue and orange flame under the object which then rose and quickly moved away.

Investigations and explanations

Zamora's claims were investigated by Project Blue Book and ufologists, and have been reported in the popular press. Several explanations have been presented. UFO skeptic Steuart Campbell has suggested that everything seen and heard by Zamora and fellow witnesses was "almost certainly" a mirage of the star Canopus. It has also been suggested Zamora witnessed the testing of a lunar landing device by personnel from the White Sands Missile Range. Skeptic Robert Sheaffer suggested that the incident was a hoax perpetrated by students at New Mexico Tech. Then-president of New Mexico Tech Stirling Colgate supported this theory, and wrote that the object observed by Zamora was: "A candle in a balloon. Not sophisticated." Skeptic Philip J. Klass, who visited Socorro several years after the incident, claimed that the entire event was part of a conspiracy plot by the municipal government to increase tourism.

Aftermath

In 1966, the president of Socorro County's Chamber of Commerce, Paul Ridings, proposed developing the site of Zamora’s claimed UFO encounter to make it more accessible to tourists. Consequently, stone walkways and steps were built into the arroyo from the mesa top, with a rock walkway circling the supposed landing site that included some wooden benches. However, these were built approximately a quarter mile from the actual site of Zamora’s alleged sighting due to local rumors that the original site was contaminated by radioactivity. In 2012, Socorro city officials Ravi Bhasker and Pat Salome commissioned local artist Erika Burleigh to paint a mural on a spillway facing Park Street to commemorate Zamora's alleged UFO sighting. Zamora died on November 2, 2009, in Socorro; he was 76 years old.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Zamora_incident

Stargate Project (US Army Unit)

 

Stargate Project was a secret U.S. Army unit established in 1977 at Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and SRI International (a California contractor) to investigate the potential for psychic phenomena in military and domestic intelligence applications. The project, and its precursors and sister projects, originally went by various code names – based on the relevant agencies operating the program. "Gondola Wish", "Stargate", "GRILL FLAME (INSCOM)", "CENTER LANE (DIA)", "Project CF", "SUN STREAK (CIA)", and "SCANATE (CIA)" – until 1991, when they were consolidated and rechristened as the "Stargate Project".

The Stargate Project's work primarily involved remote viewing, the purported ability to psychically "see" events, sites, or information from a great distance. The project was overseen until 1987 by Lt. Frederick Holmes "Skip" Atwater (born 1947), an aide and "psychic headhunter" to Maj. Gen. Albert Stubblebine, and later president of the Monroe Institute. The unit was small-scale, comprising about 15 to 20 individuals, and was run out of "an old, leaky wooden barracks".

The Stargate Project was terminated and declassified in 1995 after a CIA report concluded that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. Information provided by the program was vague and included irrelevant and erroneous data, and there were suspicions of inter-judge reliability.  The program was featured in the 2004 book and 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats, although neither mentions it by name.

Background

According to Joseph McMoneagle, the CIA and DIA reacted to reports that the Soviets were actively researching parapsychology by approving and funding their research programs. McMoneagle wrote that reviews for these programs were made semi-annually at the Senate and House select committee level. According to McMoneagle, standard operating procedure for remote viewing was that the results were kept secret from the "viewer" so that failures would not damage the viewer's confidence and skill.

McMoneagle defines remote viewing as an attempt to sense unknown information about places or events, and said that it is normally performed to detect current events, but during military and domestic intelligence applications viewers claimed to sense things in the future, experiencing precognition.

History

1970s

In 1970, United States intelligence sources believed that the Soviet Union was spending 60 million rubles annually on "psychotronic" research. In response to claims that the Soviet program had produced results, the CIA initiated funding for a new program known as SCANATE ("scan by coordinate") in the same year. Remote viewing research began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in Menlo Park, California. Proponents (Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff) of the research said that a minimum accuracy rate of 65% required by the clients was often exceeded in the later experiments.

Physicists Targ and Puthoff began testing psychics for SRI in 1972, including Israeli Uri Geller, who would later become an international celebrity. Their successful results garnered interest within the U.S. Department of Defense. Ray Hyman, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, was asked by Air Force psychologist Lt. Col. Austin W. Kibler (1930–2008) – then director of Behavioral Research for ARPA – to go to SRI and investigate. He was to specifically evaluate Geller. Hyman's report to the government was that Geller was a "complete fraud", and as a consequence, Targ and Puthoff lost their government contract to work further with him. The result was a publicity tour for Geller, Targ, and Puthoff to seek private funding for further research work on Geller.

One of the project's successes was the location of a lost Soviet spy plane in 1976 by Rosemary Smith, a young administrative assistant recruited by project director Dale Graff.

In 1977 the Army Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (ACSI) Systems Exploitation Detachment (SED) started the Gondola Wish program to "evaluate potential adversary applications of remote viewing". Army Intelligence then formalized this in mid-1978 as an operational program Grill Flame, based in buildings 2560 and 2561 at Fort Meade in Maryland (INSCOM "Detachment G").

1980s

In early 1979 the research at SRI was integrated into "Grill Flame", which was redesignated INSCOM "Center Lane" Project (ICLP) in 1983. In 1984 the existence of the program was reported by Jack Anderson, and in that year it was unfavorably received by the National Academy of Sciences National Research Council. In late 1985 the Army funding was terminated, but the program was redesignated "Sun Streak" and funded by the DIA's Scientific and Technical Intelligence Directorate (office code DT-S).

George Stephanopoulos, in his 2024 book The Situation Room, mentions the project in discussing a May 8, 1980, Situation Room briefing for President Carter, after Carter's failed hostage rescue mission in Iran on April 24, 1980. In a 2005 GQ magazine interview, Carter said CIA director Stansfield Turner told him the agency once contacted a California woman who claimed to have psychic powers to help locate a missing plane.

1990s

In 1991 most of the contracting for the program was transferred from SRI to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), with Edwin May controlling 70% of the contractor funds and 85% of the data. Its security was altered from Special Access Program (SAP) to Limited Dissemination (LIMDIS), and it was given its final name, STARGATE.

Closure (1995)

In 1995, the defense appropriations bill directed that the program be transferred from DIA to CIA oversight. The CIA commissioned a report by the American Institutes for Research (AIR) that found that remote viewing had not been proved to work by a psychic mechanism, and said it had not been used operationally.  The CIA subsequently canceled and declassified the program.

In 1995 the project was transferred to the CIA and a retrospective evaluation of the results was done. The appointed panel consisted primarily of Jessica Utts, Meena Shah, and Ray Hyman. Hyman had produced an unflattering report on Uri Geller and SRI for the government two decades earlier, but the psychologist David Marks found Utts' appointment to the review panel "puzzling" given that she had published papers with Edwin May, considering this joint research likely to make her "less than [im]partial". A report by Utts claimed the results were evidence of psychic functioning; however, Hyman in his report argued Utts's conclusion that ESP had been proven to exist, especially precognition, was premature and the findings had not been independently replicated. Hyman concluded:

Psychologists, such as myself, who study subjective validation, find nothing striking or surprising in the reported matching of reports against targets in the Stargate data. The overwhelming amount of data generated by the viewers is vague, general, and way off target. The few apparent hits are just what we would expect if nothing other than reasonable guessing and subjective validation were operating.

A later report by AIR came to a negative conclusion. Joe Nickell has written:

Other evaluators – two psychologists from AIR – assessed the potential intelligence-gathering usefulness of remote viewing. They concluded that the alleged psychic technique was of dubious value and lacked the concreteness and reliability necessary for it to be used as a basis for making decisions or taking action. The final report found "reason to suspect" that in "some well-publicized cases of dramatic hits," the remote viewers might have had "substantially more background information" than might otherwise be apparent.

According to AIR, which reviewed the project, no remote viewing report ever provided actionable information for any intelligence operation.

Based upon the collected findings, which recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls, the CIA terminated the 20 million dollar project, citing a lack of documented evidence that the program had any value to the intelligence community. Time magazine stated in 1995 that three full-time psychics were still working on a $500,000-a-year budget out of Fort Meade, Maryland, which would soon close.

David Marks, in his book The Psychology of the Psychic (2000) discussed the flaws in the Stargate Project in detail. Marks wrote that there were six negative design features of the experiments. The possibility of cues or sensory leakage was not ruled out. Any independent replication; some experiments were conducted in secret, making peer review impossible. Marks noted that the Judge Edwin May was also the principal investigator for the project, and this was problematic, making a huge conflict of interest with collusion, cuing, and fraud being possible. Marks concluded the project was nothing more than a "subjective delusion" and after two decades of research it had failed to provide any scientific evidence for the legitimacy of remote viewing.

The Stargate Project was terminated in 1995 following an independent review which concluded:

The foregoing observations provide a compelling argument against continuation of the program within the intelligence community. Even though a statistically significant effect has been observed in the laboratory, it remains unclear whether the existence of a paranormal phenomenon, remote viewing, has been demonstrated. The laboratory studies do not provide evidence regarding the origins or nature of the phenomenon, assuming it exists, nor do they address an important methodological issue of inter-judge reliability.

Further, even if it could be demonstrated unequivocally that a paranormal phenomenon occurs under the conditions present in the laboratory paradigm, these conditions have limited applicability and utility for intelligence gathering operations. For example, the nature of the remote viewing targets is vastly dissimilar, as are the specific tasks required of the remote viewers. Most importantly, the information provided by remote viewing is vague and ambiguous, making it difficult, if not impossible, for the technique to yield information of sufficient quality and accuracy of information for actionable intelligence. Thus, we conclude that continued use of remote viewing in intelligence gathering operations is not warranted.

In January 2017, the CIA published records online of the Stargate Project as part of the CREST archive.

Methodology

According to Joseph McMoneagle, the Stargate Project created a set of protocols designed to make the research of clairvoyance and out-of-body experiences more scientific, and to minimize as much as possible session noise and inaccuracy. He wrote that the term "remote viewing" emerged as shorthand to describe this more structured approach to clairvoyance. McMoneagle said Project Stargate would only receive a mission after all other intelligence attempts, methods, or approaches had already been exhausted.

McMoneagle claims that at peak manpower, there were over 22 active military and civilian remote viewers providing data, and people leaving the project were not replaced, so that when the project closed in 1995, this number had dwindled to three, one of which was using tarot cards. According to McMoneagle, "The Army never had a truly open attitude toward psychic functioning", hence, the use of the term "giggle factor". And the saying, "I wouldn't want to be found dead next to a psychic".

Civilian personnel

Hal Puthoff

In the 1970s, CIA and DIA granted funds to Harold E. Puthoff to investigate paranormal abilities, collaborating with Russell Targ in a study of the purported psychic abilities of Uri Geller, Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Joseph McMoneagle, and others as part of the Stargate Project, of which Puthoff became a director.

As with Ingo Swann and Pat Price, Puthoff attributed much of his remote viewing skills to his involvement with Scientology, whereby he had attained, at that time, the highest level. All three eventually left Scientology in the late 1970s.

Puthoff worked as the principal investigator of the project. His team of psychics is said to have identified spies, located Soviet weapons and technologies, such as a nuclear submarine in 1979 and helped find lost SCUD missiles in the first Gulf War and plutonium in North Korea in 1994.

Russell Targ

In the 1970s, Russell Targ began working with Harold Puthoff on the Stargate Project while working with him as a researcher at Stanford Research Institute.

Edwin May

Edwin C. May joined the Stargate Project in 1975 as a consultant and was working full-time in 1976. The original project was part of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory managed by May. With more funding in 1991, May took the project to the Palo Alto offices at SAIC. This would last until 1995 when the CIA closed the project.

May worked as the principal investigator, judge, and the star gatekeeper for the project. Marks says this was a serious weakness for the experiments, as May had a conflict of interest and could have done whatever he wanted with the data. Marks has written that May refused to release the names of the "oversight committee" and refused permission for him to give an independent judgment of the Stargate transcripts. Marks found this suspicious, commenting, "This refusal suggests that something must be wrong with the data or with the methods of data selection."

Ingo Swann

Originally tested in the "Phase One" was OOBE-Beacon "RV" experiments at the American Society for Psychical Research, under research director Karlis Osis. A former OT VII Scientologist, who is alleged to have coined the term 'remote viewing' as a derivation of protocols originally developed by René Warcollier, a French chemical engineer in the early 20th century, documented in his book. Swann's achievement was to break free from the conventional mold of casual experimentation and candidate burnout, and develop a viable set of protocols that put clairvoyance within a framework named "Coordinate Remote Viewing" (CRV). In a 1995 letter, Edwin C. May wrote he had not used Swann for two years because there were rumors of him briefing a high level person at SAIC and the CIA on remote viewing, aliens, and ETs.

Pat Price

A former Burbank, California, police officer and former Scientologist who participated in several Cold War-era remote viewing experiments, including the US government-sponsored projects SCANATE and the Stargate Project. Price joined the program after a chance encounter with fellow Scientologists (at the time) Harold Puthoff and Ingo Swann near SRI. Working with maps and photographs provided to him by the CIA, Price claimed to have been able to retrieve information from facilities behind Soviet lines. He is probably best known for his sketches of cranes and gantries which appeared to conform to CIA intelligence photographs. At the time, the CIA took his claims seriously.

Military personnel

Lieutenant General James Clapper

The project leader in the 1990s was Lt. Gen. Clapper, who later would serve as the Director of National Intelligence.

Albert Stubblebine

A key sponsor of the research internally at Fort Meade, Maryland, Maj. Gen. Stubblebine was convinced of the reality of a wide variety of psychic phenomena. He required that all of his battalion commanders learn how to bend spoons à la Uri Geller, and he attempted several psychic feats, even attempting to walk through walls. In the early 1980s, he was responsible for the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), during which time the remote viewing project in the US Army began. Some commentators have confused a "Project Jedi", allegedly run by Special Forces primarily out of Fort Bragg, with Stargate. After some controversy involving these experiments, including alleged security violations from uncleared civilian psychics working in Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIFs), Stubblebine was placed on retirement. His successor as the INSCOM commander was Maj. Gen. Harry Soyster, who had a reputation as a much more conservative and conventional intelligence officer. Soyster was not amenable to continuing paranormal experiments, and the Army's participation in Project Stargate ended during his tenure.

David Morehouse

In his book, Psychic Warrior: Inside the CIA's Stargate Program: The True Story of a Soldier's Espionage and Awakening (2000, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 1-902636-20-1), Morehouse claims to have worked on hundreds of remote viewing assignments, from searching for a Soviet jet that crashed in the jungle carrying an atomic bomb, to tracking suspected double agents.

Joseph McMoneagle

McMoneagle claims he had a remarkable memory of very early childhood events. He grew up surrounded by alcoholism, abuse, and poverty. As a child, he had visions at night when scared, and began to hone his psychic abilities in his teens for his protection when he hitchhiked. He enlisted to get away. McMoneagle became an experimental remote viewer while serving in U.S. Army Intelligence.

Ed Dames

Dames' role was intended to be as session monitor and analyst as an aid to Fred Atwater rather than a remote viewer, Dames received no formal remote viewing training. After his assignment to the remote viewing unit at the end of January 1986, he was used to "run" remote viewers (as monitor) and provide training and practice sessions to viewer personnel. He soon established a reputation for pushing CRV to extremes, with target sessions on Atlantis, Mars, UFOs, and aliens. He has been a frequent guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio shows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit)