Loch Ness Monsters and Raining Frogs The Worlds Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (5 page)
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Authors: Albert Jack
Also on the home page of the TBRC website is something that bears further examination. One Rick Noll is quoted stating his reasons why no firm evidence for the existence of a big, hairy, part-man, part-simian-type monster has been found:
NO ONE IS SPENDING ENOUGH TIME IN THE WOODS
,NOT MANY KNOW WHAT TO DO IN SEARCHING, OVERLOOKING THINGS, OR VICE-VERSA, SEEING THINGS THAT AREN'T SIGNIFICANT
[SIC]
TO THE TASK
,THERE ARE NOT MANY OF THESE ANIMALS AROUND
,THEY, LIKE MOST ANIMALS IN THE FOREST, KNOW HOW TO CAMOUFLAGE THEMSELVES QUICKLY AND EASILY
,MOST ENCOUNTERS WITH HUMANS ARE PROBABLY MISTAKES ON THE PART OF THE BIGFOOT, YET RESEARCHERS ARE TRYING TO FILL IN THE PICTURE WITH THEM AS TO BEING SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT.
So there you have it. Five good, solid, scientific reasons why we still have no credible evidence of the existence of Bigfoot. So how is it, then, that despite the use of the whole spectrum of technology—from heat-seeking cameras with night vision to thermal imaging—nobody has confirmed the existence of Bigfoot?
Bigfoot enthusiasts apart, the group of people keenest to obtain as much information as possible of the apeman's existence would be the U.S. government. And as they have surveillance equipment that can detect a small nuclear warhead buried in the desert somewhere near Baghdad, it is fair to assume they would have picked up one of the thousands of Sasquatches that have to exist if all the Americans and Canadians who claim sightings are not lying.
Such a large number of sightings does suggest that Bigfoot, or a relative of his, could well be out there; indeed I, like Janet Bord, refuse to believe that so many people can be lying. But hundreds of small, circumstantial, and unprovable reports do not add up to a single solid fact. It is like pouring thirty separate measures of Jack Daniel's into a large glass. Added together they do not make the drink any stronger in flavor; it still tastes exactly the same. But if you drink it all—as I have discovered through experimentation on your behalf for this very investigation—you will fall over. Scientifically speaking, weak evidence should not become any stronger just because there is lots of it, although it can affect your judgment in the end.
But the Texas Bigfoot Research Center is not the only organization dedicated to finding firm evidence: there are many others throughout America. On December 27, 2003, for example, the Pennsylvania Bigfoot Society (PBS) hosted their fifth annual East Coast Bigfoot Conference (ECBC). The keynote speaker, Stan Gordon—a veteran researcher with over forty years’ experience, founder-director of the Pennsylvania Association for the Study of the Unexplained (PASU), and winner in 1978 of the Meritorious Achievement in a UFO Investigation Award— concluded his opening speech linking Bigfoot sightings with known UFO activity in the same areas, although he stopped short of announcing: “Bigfoot is a spaceman.” Which I would have done, just for the headline. “There is no doubt the evidence suggests there is something out there,” he assured the audience, as they sat there hanging on his every word, then continued: “We just don't know what it is.”
Another speaker at the conference, Paul John son, a chemistry professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, thought he knew: “Bigfoot is a quantum animal that moves freely between the real world as we know it and a quantum world outside the reach of conventional laws.” He went on to explain how, in quantum physics, electrons do not follow the normal rules of physics. Although he admitted his ideas were unconventional, he also noted (contradicting himself in the process) that nothing as large as Bigfoot could behave like an electron in reality, which was a relief because everybody knows that a living being is unable to dematerialize and then reappear in perfect working order in another place. Unless, of course, you are traveling on the starship
Enterprise
, and then you can.
Another speaker at the ECBC, Janice Coy from Monroe County, Tennessee, claimed her family had developed a relationship with a family of Bigfoot (or should that be “Bigfeet”?) since 1947. Her grandfather, having stumbled across an injured Bigfoot, had bandaged its broken leg and allowed it to recover in a barn at the family farm. She claims to have even held a baby Bigfoot in her arms and explained that for years she had tried to obtain photographic evidence, without success. She picked up on Paul Johnson's quantum theory and suggested that was the reason none of her photographs ever showed images any clearer than a “shapeless fuzz.” And no one likes to see a shapeless fuzz now, do they?
On one occasion the Sasquatch family, realizing the camera was present on a nearby tripod, used long sticks to retrieve food from a place out of range of the lens. On another, the roll of film Janice submitted to a commercial processing lab was returned to her after the film had been mysteriously overexposed, and every image lost forever. She also claimed she was trying to obtain DNA evidence to provide comprehensive proof of the family's existence; no one asked her why she didn't just pinch a couple of hairs from the baby she had held in her arms. That would have been enough to prove her bizarre claims. But that's enough about the ECBC, so let's move on.
Where DNA testing has been carried out on purported evidence, none has been proved to come from an unknown beast. Usually Bigfoot hairs are found to have come from bison or other common animals. The absence of fossil evidence is another powerful argument that Bigfoot does not exist, although believers counter this by suggesting that the absence of fossil evidence is not evidence of fossil absence, and so it goes on and on and on. But the fact remains that not a single hair, bone, tooth, nail, or claw has ever been found that belongs to a giant hairy manlike being that cannot be explained, and yet there is plenty of evidence found in similar areas that bears, moose, deer, and even dinosaurs and hairy mammoths have left their traces behind them. So why not Sasquatch, if there is one?
The late professor Grover Krantz, a reputable anthropologist, was one of few scientists to state publicly that he believed in Bigfoot. He personally interviewed hundreds of witnesses, studied film footage and photographic evidence, and inspected many plaster casts of footprints and other imprints. He estimated that between two hundred and two thousand Bigfoot lived in the Pacific Northwest of America and he dedicated his life to proving it, but he never turned up any credible evidence that could be regarded as anything approaching proof. However, the professor was unabashed, once suggesting that most animals hide before they die and their bodies are quickly devoured by scavengers, noting that he had “yet to meet anyone who has found the remains of a bear that was not killed by human activity.” Which is a fair point, but then he hasn't met everybody yet, has he?
It was Grover Krantz who announced to the world that the clubfooted prints had offered the “first convincing evidence that the animals were real.” He also said of other tracks he had studied that a “push-off mound” was “impressive evidence” to him. This was a small mound of soil, present in some Bigfoot tracks, that Krantz had decided was created by the “horizontal push of the front foot just before it leaves the ground.” He stated with authority that no artificial rubber or wooden mold would leave such an impression.
More recently, in 2005, a story was told of a young Bigfoot that had been accidentally caught in a bear trap. A boy and his father had taken the beast back home and put him in a cage, but when the Bigfoot became distressed, the boy's father let it go. In a world where everybody now has video cameras, even on their mobile telephones, it is hard to believe that their first instinct wouldn't be to take a close-up picture of the creature. Quite frankly, although this story is reported as genuine, if it turns out to be true, then I will shave my head and become a French monk.
So, in summary, what is still needed is a carcass. That would be ideal, although any Sasquatch fossil or bone would do—just something more convincing than the plaster mold of an oversize footprint made by a carved wooden or plastic shape strapped to the foot of a prankster being pulled along by a slow-moving truck to help create the effect of giant footsteps that “man could not possibly have made.” Even the apparently genuine footprints look suspicious to me. Look again at the assessment of the small mound of earth focused upon by the expert Dr. Grover Krantz—caused “by a horizontal push of the front foot just before it leaves the ground.” Now go and have a walk across your living room as I just did, and notice how your front foot never leaves the ground, until the other one passes it of course, but by then it is your back foot. So what is he talking about?
As every single apparently credible piece of material evidence of Bigfoot has turned out to be a hoax, then there is nothing else for it—we do need a carcass. Indeed, Krantz himself believed this would be the only way to finally remove any doubt in people's minds as to the existence of Bigfoot, and he called for hunters to bring one in. But that also worries me, because what if the one that is shot turns out to be the only one? Hold your fire after all, fellas …
Either way, the search, for some, will continue, and groups of people known by their initials, including Central Ohio Bigfoot Research (COBR) and the Gulf Coast Bigfoot Research Organization (GCBRO), will continue to flourish and attract new members and devise new acronyms. I might even start my own group and call it the Time Wasters And Tricksters Society, of which I am told by some that I am perfectly qualified to be the president. Because if enough people continue to insist Bigfoot, or Sasquatch, is alive and well somewhere in the wilderness, there will always be hoaxers leaving clues for them to find. In reality, it will remain as impossible to prove Bigfoot does not exist as it is to prove you do not have an invisible, silent pink lion standing in your garden, looking at you right now and thinking, “Lunch.” You can't prove there isn't one, you know. After all, any absence of evidence for invisible, silent pink lions is not evidence of their absence.
ALBERT JACK
Chief TWAT
Nestling in the idyllic range of islands in the Caribbean Sea is the island of Barbados. The most easterly of them, Barbados is also the newest, having been created a mere million years ago when the oceanic plates of the Atlantic and Caribbean collided and a volcanic eruption formed new land in the clear blue sea. First discovered by the Portuguese, who were on their way to Brazil, the island was named Isla de los Barbados (“island of the bearded ones”) by the explorer Pedro a Campos after he noted that the fig trees along the coastline gave it a beardlike appearance. The island was first settled in 1511 by the Spanish, who enslaved the natives. But when outbreaks of smallpox and tuberculosis—the European diseases they had brought with them—led to the Caribs dying out completely, the Spaniards abandoned the island. The English then arrived, on May 14, 1625, in the shape of one Captain John Powell, who claimed the land in the name of King James I, and a few years later Captain Henry Powell (no relation) landed with a group of eighty settlers and ten slaves. The island then remained under British rule until its declaration of independence in 1966.
From the seventeenth century onward, the nobles of England who had been awarded land on the island began importing thousands of African slaves to work the newly formed tobacco, sugar, and cotton plantations. Over the next century, Barbados dominated the world's sugar industry and the plantation owners became powerful and successful figures throughout the British empire.
It was one of these landowners, the Honor able Thomas Waldron, who in 1724 built an elegant family burial vault in the cemetery of the parish church in the town of Oistins. It was intended for his married daughter and her family. Seven feet wide and twelve feet deep, and made out of carved coral, the vault was large enough to accommodate the entire Waldron family. The first person to be buried in it was James Elliot, the husband of Elizabeth Waldron. He was also the last of the family to be interred there.
Nobody has since been able to explain why Elizabeth failed to join her husband in his final resting place, nor why the next occupant, Mrs. Thomasina Goddard, was a nonfamily member (unless she was a descendant of the Elliots or the Waldrons by marriage), but what is known is that when the tomb was opened on July 31, 1807, to bury Mrs. Goddard, it was found to be empty. The absence of James Elliot's body was not considered particularly odd at the time, being put down to the work of grave robbers and looters. Rather more unusual was that, soon after Thomasina's death, the Elliot vault passed into the hands of yet another family after being purchased by Colonel Thomas Chase, one of the most hated men on the island.
A plantation owner of unstable mind and volatile temperament, Chase wasn't popular even with his own family. Within a year of the purchase of the vault, tragedy befell the Chase family with the death of the youngest daughter, two-year-old Mary Anna Maria Chase—the result, or so rumor had it, of a fit of violent temper by her father. Nothing, however, was proven, and islanders were left to draw their own conclusions about how the baby had died. On February 22, 1808, the vault was reopened and her tiny lead coffin gently placed on the shelf below the wooden coffin of Thomasina Goddard. Once the funeral was over, Chase ordered his slaves to seal the tomb with a large marble slab set in concrete.
Four years later, on July 6, 1812, the family were back at the crypt for the burial of their teenage daughter, Dorcas Chase, who had died of starvation. While some suggested the young girl had committed suicide to be free of her unpleasant father, others claimed he had locked her in an outbuilding and starved her to death himself. Either way, the marble was cut away and Dorcas's heavy leaden casket was placed alongside that of her sister inside the family vault.
Just over a month later, Thomas Chase himself committed suicide—although there were claims that his slaves had carried out their often repeated threat to murder him. In a land of cruel employers, Chase had been particularly notorious, and there was no shortage of offers to carry his heavy lead coffin, which would have weighed about five hundred pounds, to its final resting place. Presumably people wanted to make sure he had actually gone for good.
Eight slaves carried the casket down the steps of the Chase family vault. As they stepped inside, the men suddenly froze with fear. By the flickering light of their candles they could see that little Mary Anna Maria's coffin was now upside down, standing on end at the opposite side of the chamber from where it had originally been placed. Dorcas's had also moved to the opposite side of the vault, and only Thomasina's coffin remained in its original location. The men inspected the vault and could find no sign of forced entry or any other disturbance. The coffins of the two girls were replaced in their previous positions and their father's casket was settled on the opposite side of the vault. Once the service was over, the men checked for secret passages or other means of entrance before cementing the heavy marble slab back into place, this time using double-strength concrete lest the colonel himself should rise from the dead.
The disturbance was blamed on slaves with a strong grudge against the Chase family. Plantation and slave owners on the islands particularly feared revenge attacks upon their dead, which is why such strong family vaults were built in the first place. In fact, the reverse would have been true: fearing that the evil spirits they called “duppies” might be at work, slaves would stay a long way from cemeteries and graveyards, especially the one housing the Chase tomb.
Four more years passed before the next death, a young Chase relative, Samuel Brewster Ames, who died just before his first birthday. On September 25, 1816, workmen once again broke open the marble seal, but this time they were unable to push open the wooden doors at the vault entrance. A group of the strongest men on the island were called for, and after much effort they managed to force the door open. Thomas Chase's five-hundred-pound lead coffin had been standing on one end with the top resting against the doors, blocking them. The girls had also been disturbed again, while only Thomasina remained peacefully in place.
When the tomb was reopened a month later, for the funeral of the earlier boy's namesake, another Samuel Brewster—killed by slaves during an uprising—it was, once again, in complete disarray, with no obvious signs as to how the disruption had been caused.
The next time the tomb was opened was in 1820 to receive the body of Thomasina Clark, Mrs. Goddard's daughter. By now the mystery of the Chase Vault had spread far and wide, and a crowd of nigh on a thousand curious onlookers were squeezed into the churchyard. The presiding clergyman, the Reverend Thomas Orderson, was accompanied by Viscount Combermere, the governor of Barbados, who was keen to solve the mystery of the disrupted vault, and by island dignitaries such as Major J. Finch, the Honor able Nathan Lucas, Mr. Rowland Cotton (a trusted relative of Combermere's), and Mr. Robert Boucher Clarke. The viscount ordered a thorough inspection of the exterior of the tomb until all present were satisfied it had not been breached. Two masons were then ordered to remove the concrete seal of the marble slab and, accompanied by eight pallbearers, the dignitaries descended the steps.
As the door was pushed open, there was a loud grating sound from inside. This time Dorcas's coffin was found wedged into the doorway. Little Mary Anna Maria's casket had been thrown so violently against the wall it had gashed a chunk from the smooth surface. The other lead caskets had been so chaotically disturbed that Thomasina's wooden coffin appeared to have been smashed in the process and bits of her skeleton lay strewn around the vault.
It was a horrifying sight: some of the slaves fainted while others were violently sick. Comber mere and his shocked party were determined to solve the mystery, however. Lady Combermere recorded the subsequent events in her diary:
In my husband's presence, every part of the floor was sounded to ascertain that no subterranean passage or entrance was concealed. It was found to be perfectly firm and solid and not even a crack was apparent. The walls, when examined, proved to be perfectly secure. No fracture was visible and the sides, together with the roof and flooring, presented a structure so solid as if formed of entire slabs of stone. The displaced coffins were rearranged, the new tenant of that dreary abode was deposited and when the mourners retired with the funeral procession, the floor was sanded with fine white sand in the presence of Lord Combermere and the assembled crowd. The door was slid into its wonted position and, with the utmost care, the new mortar was laid on so as to secure it. When the masons had completed their task, the Governor made several impressions in the mixture with his own seal, and many of those others attending added various private marks in the wet mortar.
Lord Combermere reasoned that anything disturbing the coffins, even flooding, would leave telltale signs in the layer of sand on the floor. Then a few months later, a woman who had been visiting the cemetery reported a loud cracking noise coming from within the Chase Vault, accompanied by an audible moaning. Her horse became so distressed that it began foaming at the mouth, later needing sedation. Other horses tethered in the churchyard broke free and galloped away in fear, straight into the sea, where they were drowned.
On April 18, 1820, Viscount Combermere and his witnesses all returned to inspect the vault. The ground had not been disturbed in any way. The seals they had made in the cement remained intact and there was no sign of any foul play. But when the marble slab was removed and the heavy vault door slowly pushed open, a scene of complete devastation was revealed.
This time even the lead casket of Dorcas Chase had been smashed and her bony arm hung out through a gash in the side. Once again there was no sign of forced entry, or of someone having gained access via a secret passage, nor had the sand scattered on the floor been disturbed in any way. There were no footprints.
Combermere wisely decided to give up trying to solve the mystery, such was the hysteria building up across the island and throughout the empire. This time he ordered that all the bodies be removed and reburied in separate sites in different churchyards. At the same time, a thorough search was made for the coffin of James Elliot, the first inhabitant of the Chase Vault nearly a century earlier, but it was never found. The tomb has remained empty ever since.
Later on that evening of April 18, one of the members of the funeral party, Nathan Lucas, was—like Lady Combermere before him—moved to record the events of the afternoon:
… and so I examined the walls, the arch and every part of the Vault, to find every part old and similar. A mason in my presence struck every part of the bottom with his hammer and all was solid. I confess myself at a loss to account for the movements of these leaden coffins. Thieves certainly had no hand in it; and as for any practical wit or hoax, too many were requisite to be trusted with the secret for it to remain unknown; and as for negroes having anything to do with it, their superstitious fear of the dead and everything belonging to them precludes any idea of the kind. All I know is that it happened and that I was an eyewitness …
Over the following two centuries, much has been made of the events at the Chase Vault: every possible reason has been considered. At first it was thought to have been straight vandalism, such was the dislike among the community of Thomas Chase, but as the heavy coffins would have taken at least six men to move them around, let alone throw them about, and the vault simply wasn't big enough to accommodate that many people, this was ruled out. The absence of footprints or any signs of entry, forced or otherwise, also appears to rule out human interference.
Earthquakes have been considered, especially as Barbados sits on a seismic fault line, but no quakes had been reported during the period in which the vault was disturbed and there was no evidence of any other damage caused, either in nearby vaults or elsewhere on the island. Some prefer the idea that unseen magnetic forces were at work, especially as the coffins were usually found to be facing in the opposite direction to the one in which they were placed, suggesting they had rotated on their own axis. This may also explain why the wooden casket of Thomasina Goddard remained unaffected until it was smashed to pieces by the others. But lead is not a magnetic material. Furthermore, if such forces had been at work, locals would have noticed its effect on other metals in the graveyard, such as iron headstones or steel plaques. The church bell would surely have kept ringing too.
The wildest theory about what had caused the disturbances in the Chase Vault actually came from the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who, maybe unsurprisingly, appears to crop up in a number of mystery stories (including two in this book—“Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden,” page 101, and “Whatever Happened to the Crew of the
Mary Celeste?”
page 138). Conan Doyle believed supernatural forces had been at work but was unable to offer any further explanation except to suggest that the coffins had been moved by the spirits of the two family members who had apparently committed suicide and were therefore “cursed and restless” and in conflict with each other. Indeed, since Dorcas and her father have been separated, there have been no other signs of disturbance at any of the new grave locations.