Paranormal Pioneers and Other Strange Phenomena

Automatic Writing

Automatic writing is the process or production of writing material that devotees claim does not come from the conscious thoughts of the writer but is done in an altered state of consciousness that is sometimes attributed to spirits of the dead. It is believed by some that the spirits literally use the writing utensil in the hands of the sitter to communicate. Much of the time the writer is unaware of what is being written and often even scrawls out text in handwriting that is markedly different than his or her own.

Others believe that perhaps the spirits may also communicate by forming messages in the mind of the sitter which are reproduced on the page. Skeptics say it is most likely the sitter is writing unconsciously and messages are formed from material in the subconscious mind or from a secondary personality that is gifted with extrasensory perception.

One of America's most famous mediums, Leonora Piper, thought that perhaps her uncanny abilities came from such a personality, which manifested in automatic writing later in her career. But perhaps the most famous example of spirit dictation was the case of Pearl Curran, a St. Louis housewife who managed to get into contact with an entity named Patience Worth. The two collaborated for years and turned out entire novels and thousands of poems, all filled with material that the uneducated Curran could have known nothing about.

The Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle, also known as the Devil's Triangle, is an area in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean. The Triangle is located between the points of Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.

It is alleged that a number of aircraft and surface vessels have mysteriously disappeared in a manner that cannot be explained by human error, piracy, equipment failure, or natural disasters. The popular theory is that within the Triangle, the laws of physics are suspended, compasses go wild and there is no way to figure out where the ship or plane is in relation to anything else.

Triangle writers have used several concepts to explain the events. One explanation puts the blame on leftover technology from the continent of Atlantis. Sometimes connected to the Atlantis story is the submerged rock formation known as the Bimini Road off the island of Bimini in the Bahamas, which is in the Triangle. Other writers attribute the events to UFOs.

There are theories galore about why these events occur. However, a significant amount of documentation reveals that portions of the mysterious incidents have been incorrectly reported or embellished and numerous official agencies have stated that the number and nature of disappearances in the region is not so very different than that in any other area of ocean. Nevertheless, there continues to be reports about disappearing ships and airplanes, the earliest being reported in a September 16, 1950 in an Associated Press article by E.V.W. Jones.

When the UK Channel 4 television program "The Bermuda Triangle" (c.1992) was being produced, the insurer Lloyd's of London was asked if an unusually large number of ships had sunk in the Bermuda Triangle area. Lloyd's of London concluded that large numbers of ships had not sunk there, and the United States Coast Guard records confirm their conclusion. In fact, the Coast Guard say they collect and publish much documentation contradicting many of the incidents written about by the Triangle. For example, in one such incident involving the 1972 explosion and sinking of the tanker SS V. A. Fogg in the Gulf of Mexico, the Coast Guard photographed the wreck and recovered several bodies, in contrast with one Triangle author's claim that all the bodies had vanished, with the exception of the captain, who was found sitting in his cabin at his desk, clutching a coffee cup.

Some notable incidents that have occurred within the Triangle are the disappearance of U.S. Navy training Flight 19, the ship Mary Celeste, the USS Cyclops, the S.V. Spray and a number of other vessels.

Bigfoot

Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is a supposedly ape-like creature purportedly inhabiting forests is usually described as a large, hairy, bipedal humanoid.

The scientific community considers Bigfoot to be a combination of folklore, misidentification, and hoax, rather than a real creature. Scientific consensus does not support the claim of the existence of creatures such as Bigfoot, because they question whether there is a large enough breeding population to maintain their numbers, and because issues with climate and food supply would make the survival of such creatures unlikely. Nevertheless, Bigfoot is one of the more famous examples of a creature within cryptozoology, and minorities of accredited scientists hold the view that evidence collected of alleged Bigfoot encounters warrants further evaluation and testing.

Wildman stories are found among the populations of many countries and these legends existed long before a name was given to the creature. Although the stories differ in the specific details, similar stories are found on every continent except Antarctica

About a third of all Bigfoot sightings are in the Pacific Northwest, with most of the rest of the sightings spread throughout the rest of North America. Some Bigfoot studies have put forth the idea that that Bigfoot is a worldwide phenomenon.

The most notable sightings include:

• 1924: Fred Beck claimed that he and four other miners were attacked one night in July 1924, by several "apemen" throwing rocks at their cabin in an area later called Ape Canyon, Washington.

• 1941: Jeannie Chapman and her children claimed to have escaped their home when a large Sasquatch, allegedly 7.5 feet (2.3 m) tall, approached their residence in Ruby Creek, British Columbia

• 1958: Bulldozer operator Jerry Crew took to a newspaper office a cast of one of the enormous footprints he and other workers had been seeing at an isolated work site at Bluff Creek, California.

• 1967: Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin reported that on October 20 they had captured a purported Sasquatch on film at Bluff Creek, California. This came to be known as the Patterson-Gimlin film, which is purported to be the best evidence of Bigfoot by many advocates.

• 2007: On September 16, 2007, hunter Rick Jacobs captured an image of a possible Sasquatch using an automatically triggered camera attached to a tree. A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Game Commission challenged the Bigfoot explanation, saying that it looked like "a bear with a severe case of mange.

• And, as recently as 2020 two Ohio men claim to have encountered what they say looked like Bigfoot or Sasquatch in Salt Fork State Park.

Bigfoot supporters Grover Krantz and Geoffrey Bourne believe that Bigfoot could be a creature known as Gigantopithecus, a supposedly extinct type of ape that existed from roughly one million years to as recently as three-hundred thousand years ago. Bourne says that as most Gigantopithecus fossils can be found in China. However, since many species of animals simply came across the Bering land bridge, it is reasonable to assume that Gigantopithecus might have as well.

But it’s extinct, right? Well, not everyone believes it is. Bernard G. Campbellin wrote: "That Gigantopithecus is in fact extinct has been questioned by those who believe it survives as the Yeti of the Himalayas and the Sasquatch of the north-west American coast. But the evidence for these creatures is not convincing."

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831 -1891)

Helena Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society was born as Helena von Hahn. Her parents were Colonel Peter von Hahn and Helena Fadeyeva. Helena grew up amid a culture rich in spirituality and tradition, which introduced her to the realm of the supernatural.

She was married at age sixteen on July 7, 1848, to the forty-year old Nikifor Blavatsky, vice-governor of Erivan. After three unhappy months, she stole a horse and escaped over the mountains to her grandfather in Tiflis who promptly decided that she should be shipped off immediately to her father, who was retired and living near Saint Petersburg. Although her father traveled two thousand miles to meet her at Odessa, she was not there. She had sailed away with the skipper of an English bark bound for Istanbul.

According to a later biographer, she spent the years 1848 to 1858 traveling the world and is said to have visited several countries. She claimed to have become Buddhist while in Sri Lanka and to have been initiated in Tibet. She returned to Russia in 1858 and went to see her sister Vera, a young widow living in Rugodevo, a village which she had inherited from her husband.

About this time, she met and left with Agardi Metrovich, an Italian opera singer. It seems that Metrovich thought of himself as Helena's husband at this point and there is mention of a child, Yuri, who died at the age of five. There are two different versions of how Agardi died. One says he died in Ramleh on April 19, 1870 after being taken sick with a fever and delirium. In the second version, an explosion claimed Agardi’s life while he was bound for Cairo on the Evmonia, in 1871 and Blavatsky continued to Cairo alone. It was in Cairo in the early 1870s that Blavatsky established herself as a medium and began to hold séances. However, after she moved to New York city in 1873, she began to demonstrate physical and mental psychic abilities which included levitation, clairvoyance, out-of-body projection, telepathy, clairaudience, and materialization, that is, producing physical objects out of nothing.

In 1874 at the farm of the Eddy Brothers, Helena met Henry Steel Olcott, a lawyer, agricultural expert, and journalist who covered the Spiritualist movement. Soon they were working together in the "Lamasery" where her book Isis Unveiled was written.

In 1875, Blavatsky married her second husband, Michael C. Betanelly in New York City and separated from him a few months later, their divorce being legalized on May 25, 1878. On July 8, 1878, she became a citizen of the United States, but after leaving for India later that year she never returned.

In September of 1875 while living in New York City, with Olcott, William Quan Judge and some others, she founded the Theosophical Society. Blavatsky wrote that all religions were both true in their inner teachings and problematic or imperfect in their external conventional manifestations. Her writings connecting esoteric spiritual knowledge with new science are considered to be the first instance of what is now called New Age thinking. It might be said that her life’s work could be summed up by one of her maxims: compassion is the law of laws. She explained that brotherhood is not a mere ideal - it is a fact in nature on the spiritual plane.

She moved to India in 1879, landing at Bombay and it was here she made the acquaintance of A. P. Sinnett. In his book Occult World Sinnett describes how Blavatsky stayed at his home in Allahabad for six weeks that year, and again the following year.

By 1882 the Theosophical Society became an international organization. The society headquartered in Adyar near Madras, India for some time, but Blavatsky later went to Ostend, Germany for a while and it was here she wrote a big part of the Secret Doctrine. She also claimed to have had a revelation during an illness telling her to continue the book at any cost. Finally, she went to England.

In August 1890 she formed the "Inner Circle" of 12 disciples. Blavatsky was a close friend of John Watkins and inspired him to open an esoteric bookshop in London; Watkins founded Watkins Books a few years after her death.

Suffering from Bright's disease and complications from influenza, Blavatsky died in her home in London, on May 8, 1891. Her body was cremated at Woking on May 11; one third of her ashes were sent to Europe, one third with William Quan Judge to the United States, and one third to India where her ashes were scattered in the Ganges River. May 8 is celebrated by Theosophists, and it is called White Lotus Day.

After her death there was talk that her work was plagiarized and in his 1885 report to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), Richard Hodgson concluded that Blavatsky was a fraud. However, in a 1986 press release to the newspapers and leading magazines in Great Britain, Canada and the USA the same SPR retracted the Hodgson report, after a re-examination of the case by the Fortean psychic Dr. Vernon Harrison and Thomas De La Rue. They said "Madame Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, was unjustly condemned, new study concludes."

Since her death, Blavatsky's work has shown its influence in the works of dictators, political leaders, new religion leaders, writers, musicians, and other public figures.