Strange Planet

Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Surrounding Unknown
by Mike Dash, Ph.D.

Near-death experiences ... lake monsters ... crop circles ... fairies ... visions of the Virgin Mary ... Using his vast research and privileged access to case files, noted paranormal investigator Mike Dash has compiled this unprecedented collection of the most baffling puzzles of our time. Touring the globe and sifting through a vast array of eyewitness accounts and film and photographic evidence, Dash separates genuine cases from hoaxes and dares to record those macabre, inexplicable, and terrifying events where there is no other explanation except - that what people saw, heard, and sometimes lived to tell about is true!

Chapter 1

Red snow. It stains the virgin purity of sterile Antarctica: a pinprick of the peculiar in the howling fastness. Red spots, like blood drip-dripping from a blank-faced statue of the Virgin to speckle the freshly laundered crispness of an altar cloth. An alien redness in the whitest world-something that doesn't belong.

For a while, when the first explorers reached the fringes of the southern polar regions, the patches of red snow they found along the edges of the continent remained a minor mystery. Then the mystery was solved. The Antarctic whiteness had been stained by penguin droppings, colored red by the shellfish that the birds had eaten. Nothing strange about the redness now.

Except that it appeared elsewhere. In the province of Macerata, Italy, at the end of the last century, a myriad small, blood-colored clouds blew over, covering the sky. When the storm broke, those clouds dumped a hundred-thousand seeds upon the ground-seeds that came from a tree found only in central Africa and the Caribbean. In dusty Baghdad, on the night of 20 May 1857, a heavy darkness fell, succeeded after midnight by a red and lurid gloom. As panic seized the inhabitants, a dense shower of sand began to rain upon the city. More redness fell upon the little town of Stroud in Gloucestershire on 24 October 1987, this time in the shape of hundreds of thumbnail-sized, rose-colored frogs, which tumbled from the sky, bouncing off umbrellas and pavements amid townspeople going about their business.

Three red things, all coming from the sky. Such patterns may be found wherever unexplained phenomena occur, combining, piece by piece, to form the fragmentary portrait of a truly colorful world, haunted by aliens and fairies, miracles and wonders, monsters and ghosts, all the way from Alaska to Argentina and from Britain to Japan.

We can explore this strange planet in many ways: by continent, listing the phenomena of each country, dating and placing them, and feeding the information into a computer that might confirm that ghosts appear near running water, and that odd things tend to happen on Wednesdays; by category, concentrating first on monsters, then on ghosts and, finally, on possible connections between the two; or by color, in the hope that this unorthodox approach may yield unexpected insights.

Choose another color. Yellow: a yellow rain fell in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. Some feared it was a Russian chemical warfare agent, but it was later positively identified as a blizzard of dung from a million bees. Green: a disc-shaped UFO glowed green as it hovered over a weapons depot near Astrakhan on the night of 28 July 1989, watched by servicemen from two army units in the area. Blue: thirteen-year-old Jean Bernard saw the Virgin Mary in the village of Vallensanges, near St. Etienne in France, on 19 July 1888. She wore a white dress and a blue cloak spangled with stars, and encouraged him to kill a lizard. Silver: the color of the Big Muddy Monster, an eight-foot-tall ape-creature that haunted Murphysboro, Illinois, between 1972 and 1988. Two men saw it at about one-thirty a.m. one night, moving through the rustling treeline at the edge of a salvage yard full of decaying cars and angled shadows. It had glowing red eyes and yellow teeth, and smelled of sewers and skunk.

Choose another continent-it makes no difference. From a vision of the Virgin in a Patagonian bedroom to an encounter with the devil in an Irish pub; from the great sea serpent of the North Atlantic to giant wheels of phosphorescent light spinning slowly beneath the tranquil waters of the Persian Gulf; from the ghost riders of the Mesopotamian desert to Christ's grave-in Japan; from the planetary bar code stretching hundreds of miles across the Australian wilderness to the poltergeist-haunted toilet of a German dentist, Dr. Bachseitz . . . this earth is uniformly rich in wonders.

A world away from Antarctica, far in the frozen north, a phantom township appears in the sky over the Muir Glacier, Alaska. This is the bewitching "Silent City," one of the strangest and most spell-binding sights to be seen at the top of the world: a chaos of weird architectural forms, from clusters of glittering spires to gables, obelisks, monoliths and castles, all shimmering over the 700-foot-deep crystal waters of Glacier Bay, all beautiful beyond description. Some say it is a vision of a real and ancient city, now covered by the icy waters of the inlet; others that it is a mirage, either of Bristol or perhaps of the capital of an undiscovered civilization situated near the pole. It is certainly not the only ghostly settlement to be seen in the far north. During the Cold War, when the Americans built bases in Greenland to study ways of fighting in Arctic conditions, soldiers from the baking dust bowls of the Great Plains sometimes saw "medium-sized midwestern cities" on the white horizon, in such detail that they could identify individual buildings and churches.

It was in the skies over Alaska, on 17 November 1986, that a Japanese Airlines Boeing 747 cargo plane on a flight from Paris to Tokyo had an alarming close encounter with a gigantic UFO. It was dark and the aircraft's experienced pilot, Captain Kenju Terauchi, first noticed some unusual lights as he passed over the northeastern part of the state, flying at about 35,000 feet. The lights were to his left and about 2000 feet below him; he assumed they might be military aircraft. However, the visitors seemed to keep pace with him, and as the aircraft turned left they appeared directly in front of it. They seemed closer now, and Terauchi and his crew could see they formed two pairs, each made up of about 120 rectangular lights arranged in rows. The glowing shapes appeared to be as few as 400 yards from the plane, each pair somewhat smaller than his 747.

Copyright © 2000 by Mike Dash.

About the Author

Mike Dash studied history at Cambridge University and naval history at the University of London, where he received his Ph.D. He has been a chief researcher at Fortean Times, the journal of strange phenomena, since 1983.