Jonathan Hamilton committed suicide on August 12 2008, by ingesting yew berries from a nearby graveyard. His father Mr Reckless, who he was living with at the time described Jonathan Hamilton thus:

“He was a ball of fire, full of ideas and energy, but was going through horrific turmoil inside. His death is in keeping with his character. He would have wanted to do something spectacular.”

This is a long story, though, so bear with me.

In 1899, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin constructed the first Zeppelin, a rigid airship with a covered aluminium skeleton and multiple gas internal gasbags, in a floating hangar on lake in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Von Zeppelin was a bit of a visionary, and was obsessed with potential for airships after seeing the French use hot air balloons in the Franco-Prussian War. The idea of an airship had been around for a while, since the 1785 when Jean-Pierre Blanchard crossed the English channel in a balloon with crude hand powered wings for propulsion, but they were crackpot ideas. Von Zeppelin ushered in the golden age of airships, but he had two advantages: Aluminium had become drastically cheaper to produce over the previous 20 years (consider the fact that the Washington Monument in 1884 had a capstone of aluminium, considered as valuable as gold) owing to new processes of extracting the metal. And he had major popular backing, the modern age had begun and people were ready to take to the air. The German Empire before WW1 was the world's third biggest economy, and was undergoing radical expansion and social changes.

So popular was the airship project with the population, that the flight of the LZ1 (his first rather crude design) ignited public euphoria, and the capital for his second airship after LZ1 crashed was financed through donations. LZ2 and LZ3 was bought by the military. When LZ4 crashed dramatically outside Echterdingen near Stuttgart, and caught fire and almost killed 2 technicians, the public was still so enthusiastic that one of the spectators in the crowd spontaneously initiated a collection of donations, yielding an impressive total of 6,096,555 Mark.

To give a little perspective though, an early zeppelin like the LZ4 was 140m long, like a flying cathedral. Sense of scale of the LZ4:
Zeppelins were used quite extensively in WW1, because they could carry heavy bombs and could attain great heights quickly and had a massive range. However, they also had the tendency to turn into a large fireball when attacked, incinerating everyone on board.

After the war, airships regained their enormous popularity, with interest growing in trans-Atlantic passenger flights which was only possible by airship at the time. The Graf Zeppelin between 1931 and 1937 made 136 flights to South America. This era was brought to an abrupt end, when the Hindenburg entered passenger service in 1936. It crossed the Atlantic 36 times, before it crashed dramatically in Lakehurst, New Jersey on May, 6 1937. The reasons for the crash are still debated, but the entire 245m ship burst into flames and was consumed in 30 seconds. A third of the 90 odd people on board perished.

Worse crashes with bigger fatalities had occurred before the Hindenburg, but the Hindenburg effectively ended all airship construction. The belief in the airship as a symbol of modernity burned with it for two reasons: Firstly, Germany had begun to exploit the popularity of the flights of the Zeppelins as propoganda for the Third Reich, and as a result thousands of people had gathered at Lakehurst to see the Hindenburg. Secondly, it was the start of the era of mass media, the landing was covered live by radio and was being filmed, which made the disaster available for consumption quickly and dramatically.


Planes capable of trans-Atlantic flight became more efficient and common, and the great age of the airship became a subject for enthusiasts and hobbyists. However, the concept still ignites some burning passion into the hearts of people. An airship is far more efficient than an aeroplane, because it doesn't need energy for lift, and is far faster than boat because their isn't the resistance of water. In 1995 in Bryanstown, South Africa, a young entrepreneur, Jonathan Hamilton started the Hamilton Airship Company (THAC), and raised a massive amount of capital. The airships were designed mostly for intercontinental cargo transport. However, he ran out of money when the hanger was only 80 percent complete. He quietly disappeared in 1999, with all his shareholders losing their money. Hamilton was down, but not out, and he moved to England to continue raising capital for his dream. However, in 2008, broke, divorced and living with his father, he committed suicide. Another fatality in the war of airship dreams.

A second airship company folded in 2002. Called Cargolifter, it was a massive concern and had built an enormous hangar before its demise. The hanger which is 360 metres long, 210 metres wide and 107 metres high and 5.5 million m³ stands as one of the largest buildings on Earth by volume, and is the world's largest single hall without supporting pillars inside. In 2004, the entire building was purchased and converted into Tropical Islands, an artificial environment with rain forest, beach, artificial sun, palm trees, orchids, and birdsong. The air is kept at a warm 25 °C. Tropical Islands is open around the clock, every day of the year.

All I can think is how appropriate that the death throes of a dream of industrial modernity and flight spanning a century and inspiring millions, ends in a suicide and a vast swathe of hyperreality. How our dreams have changed.

I was sheriff of this county when I was twenty-five years old. Hard to believe. My grandfather was a lawman; father too. Me and him was sheriffs at the same time; him up in Plano and me out here. I think he's pretty proud of that. I know I was. Some of the old time sheriffs never even wore a gun. A lotta folks find that hard to believe. Jim Scarborough'd never carry one; that's the younger Jim. Gaston Boykins wouldn't wear one up in Camanche County. I always liked to hear about the oldtimers. Never missed a chance to do so. You can't help but compare yourself against the oldtimers. Can't help but wonder how theyd've operated these times. There was this boy I sent to the 'lectric chair at Huntsville Hill here a while back. My arrest and my testimony. He killt a fourteen-year-old girl. Papers said it was a crime of passion but he told me there wasn't any passion to it. Told me that he'd been planning to kill somebody for about as long as he could remember. Said that if they turned him out he'd do it again. Said he knew he was going to hell. "Be there in about fifteen minutes". I don't know what to make of that. I sure don't. The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

From No Country For Old Men.

"Was it an invisible miasma that killed these people? Was it an unknown epidemic influence of atmospheric-cosmic-telluric nature, all pervading, inexorable, sneaking into them, poisoning them, killing them?"

These words, penned in the 50s by an Australian doctor, described a mysterious disease that was afflicting a small tribe, the Fore, in New Guinea. The disease, known as Kuru (literally translated as "shaking"), was characterised by uncoordination, trembling, uncontrollable laughter and eventually death.

In the 60s similarities were noted between the deceased from Kuru and sheep who had died from Scrapie. Kuru, it turned out, was an incredibly rare type of disease transmitted through proteins. The infectious proteins, known as prions, had a strange but stable fold in them and had the ability to refold other proteins around it. It affected brains and essentially reformed the neural structure. If you have read Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, it is like brain ice-nine. Just a protein, not a virus or a bacteria. An entirely normal protein. The Fore tribe were transmitting the disease to each other through their endocannibalistic funeral practices. The disease wouldn't be passed on via consumption, but if you had any cuts or sores while handling brain, you had a high chance of getting infected. Kuru has a long incubation time, so people were unaware that they were eating infected brain.

The Fore's practice of cannibalism was heavily discouraged by the colonial government and the disease eventually died out. Although the cannibalism angle to this story is grisly by contemporary standards (few people still practice societally condoned cannibalism), no judgement is implied. What is interesting is how our own proteins reform and kill us: Laughing to death with our own proteins as the joke. Somewhere between the Joker and a zombie film. It becomes very hard not to imagine this disease with a different infection vector.

Another variation of the disease was noted in Italy in the seventies, called Fatal Familial Insomnia, in which the prion seemed to have a genetic origin and caused insomnia until the person literally died of exhaustion:

Mr. MAX: That's right. I mean I would always be reluctant to rank diseases in terms of horribleness, but I think a case certainly could be made that this disease in many ways - one, because of this insomnia - and anyone who's ever, you know, suffered insomnia knows just how dreadful a condition it is...

FLATOW: Right, right.

Mr. MAX: ...even if the insomnia is simply worries about work tomorrow.

FLATOW: Sure.

Mr. MAX: You stay awake and the clock ticks and the clock ticks. But while this disease has much in common with Alzheimer's in terms of some of the things going on physiologically in the brain, what makes it quite different from Alzheimer's is that you - is that many, many of the sufferers of the disease have the ability to understand exactly what's going on. And even to be in, you know, routine verbal contact with their loved ones at the end, even though they've had this extraordinary insomnia. (via)

Studying Kuru and FFI was vital in understanding BSE, more commonly known as Mad Cow Disease, in which a similar prion got passe from infected cow offal to humans, especially in Britain.

The Essex was a normal whaling ship of the early 1800's. It was 87 feet long (26 m). It had three masts and a hold full of barrels. It carried five smaller whaling boats, a pile of muscle-powered harpoons, and a crew of 20. Its task was to generally wander around the world for 2 to 3 years, hunting sperm whales, filling their barrels with precious whale oil and then returning, and sharing out the profit according to rank. Normal in every aspect.

But let us set the scene.

In the 1800's whaling was the principle industry on Nantucket, and Nantucket was the whaling capital of the world. The demand for whale oil was huge (for lamps and lubrication), and for Sperm Whale Oil, known as spermacetti, in particular because of it's high quality and pleasant odour. The whale industry on Nantucket was starting to peak in 1819 when the Essex set forth on its fateful journey, but the high demand and the expanding industry made two noticeable changes:

Firstly, Nantucketers had a reputation as the best and toughest whaling men, but demand led them to hire more and more inexperienced men to man the ships. Interestingly, many black men were joining crews to enjoy the greater (but by no means complete) freedom it allowed. Similar perhaps to the system that existed on pirate ships.

Secondly, and more significantly, overfishing had led to shortages in the normal whaling grounds. The whaling grounds in the Pacific had slowly receded. An adventurous captain in 1818 discovered the 'Offshore Ground', a new rich ground but far far from the safety of the shore. This is where the Essex was headed.

The Essex set sail in August, 1819, and had a rather boring 15 months, except for losing two of its whale boats in a storm. They sighted few sperm whales, but things were looking up around November, by which time they had sailed close to 2000 miles from the coast into almost unchartered waters. On November 20th most of the crew set off in the whale boats, chasing the sperm whale's distinctive forward pointing spout. Two of the boats had gotten lucky and were tied up to the floating corpses, when a sperm whale crushed the side of the third boat with it's tail. They limped back to the mothership to repair. It may have been the thumping of the hammers or it may have been pure vengeance that led the massive bull sperm whale to the ship.

A sperm whale is a big big animal. A large bull can grow up to 20 metres.
It is the largest hunter in the sea, and possibly the largest that ever lived. Unlike other whales of its size it doesn't filter feed, but it uses its massive teeth to chew up prey like fish and squid. Scientists suspect sperm whales hunt by using sound as a weapon. In the head of the whale is an organ called the spermaceti, which contains the valuable oil. The whale can use this as a kind of "sound lens" in order to focus an intense beam of sound energy on a specific target. The explosive "crack" sound is enough to stun or kill the animal. They can dive to a depth of 3 kilometres. Their only natural enemy is the giant squid, and they often fight to the death.

To hunt one of these in the early 19th Century required team of men to row the small whaling boat up to the whale. Then the harpooner would throw his razor sharp harpoon as deep into the whale as they could. If it landed, the harpoon would be tied to the main rope which stretched from where it was coiled in the aft to a notch in the prow. This rope would feed out at an incredible speed as the panicked whale dove. The boat would be dragged along behind it, until the whale got exhausted and surfaced. Then smaller hand harpoons would be pushed into it's vital organs till blood came out of its blow-hole. Any part of this hunt was incredibly dangerous, and many men were crushed, drowned or worse left behind if they fell out of the boat pulled by the speeding whale.

It was a massive bull whale that lined itself up with the Essex. It raised its head out of the water and swam straight into the prow. It wallowed for a moment, stunned, while the crew rushed to the pumps. The whale then swam off to gain some distance, pulled its head out and aimed for the more vulnerable port side, which snapped into little splinters. According to the First Mate Owen Chase, the whale crashed into it at them at a speed of 6 knots. The Essex began to sink.

"The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock and trembled for a few minutes like a leaf," recalled Chase. "We looked at each other with perfect amazement, deprived almost of the power of speech."

The whale boats, seeing the distressed ship, cut themselves free of the corpses, and rowed back to the others ship. Captain Pollard quickly organised the three boats, and tried to load in food and water before all was lost.

The three little boats were in as much trouble as it is possible to be in at sea. They were in the middle of the sea. They had little food, and little water. The closest land was the Marquesas, 1200 miles west. But the islands were thought to be inhabited by cannibals, so they set off south, hoping that breezes would carry them the 1800 miles to Chile. If severely rationed they had enough food for 60 days. The Captain estimated the journey at 56 days. But the weather turned bad. Storms drove them off course and threatened to sink the boats.

As weeks wore on, the men began to suffer from hunger. Constantly exposed to the wind and sun, their thirst drove them to distraction. When their hard tack bread became soaked with salty seawater, they had to choose between feeding their starving bodies or increasing their thirst. A month into the voyage, they happened upon an unpopulated island called Henderson in the Pitcairn archipelago. It was a small and barren place, but they found a small spring and some sea birds. Three men chose to remain on the island rather than face the open sea again.

The boats sailed on. A storm separated the three boats. The first to die was a sailor who was probably sick beforehand. Then the black sailors who were less well nourished started to die of starvation. The first few were sewn up in their clothes and pushed overboard. Then the crew decided, that rather than face starvation they would eat the bodies of the dead.

Later, the situation on Captain Pollard's boat became desperate. The four remaining men drew lots to determine who would be sacrificed for the survival of the crew. A young man named Owen Coffin, Captain Pollard's young cousin, whom he had sworn to protect, drew the black spot. Lots were drawn again to determine who would be Coffin's executioner. His young friend, Charles Ramsdell, drew the black spot. Ramsdell shot Coffin, cut off his head and threw it over board and his remains were consumed by Pollard, Barzillai Ray, and Charles Ramsdell. Some time later, Ray also died. For the remainder of their journey, Pollard and Ramsdell survived by gnawing on the bones of Coffin and Ray and sucking out the marrow. They were rescued by the Nantucket whaling ship Dauphin 95 days after the Essex sank. Both men by that time were so completely dissociative that they did not even notice the Dauphin alongside them. The two of them had hoarded more than a few bones, and were reluctant to give them up even when they knew they were saved.

The boat guided by First Mate Owen Chase was rescued by the British ship The Indian after 93 days at sea, with two other men aboard, the cabin boy Thomas Nickerson and Benjamin Lawrence. The third boat was never seen again.

Pollard, Chase, Ramsdell, Lawrence, and Nickerson were reunited in the port of Valparaiso, where they informed officials there of their three shipmates stranded on Henderson Island. A ship destined on a trans-Pacific passage was ordered to look for the men on Henderson. The three men were eventually rescued, although they were nearly dead.

By the time the last of the eight survivors were rescued on April 5, 1821, seven sailors had been eaten.

Chase was plagued by nightmares, and in later life hid food in his attic. He wrote an account of the voyage called Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex.


In the 1960s an account by the Cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, was found called The Loss of the Ship "Essex" Sunk by a Whale and the Ordeal of the Crew in Open Boats. The drawing on the top of this page comes from his notebook, and reads, "Here lay our beautiful ship, a floating and dismal wreck"

http://www.24.com/media/beeld/UFO1a.swf

In 1972, I was a sergeant in the South African Police, with eight years of service, in the small South African town, Fort Beaufort. The morning of June 26, I received a report of an object which appeared on the farm Breaside, which belonged to a Mr. Bennie Smit. At that stage I did not know Mr. Smit well. I persuaded the Station Commander, Warrant Officer Philip Van Rensburg to accompany me to the scene. On the farm we met Mr. Smit and some of his workers including a worker by the name of Boer de Klerk. Boer told us that during the morning when he was in the veld at the reservoir when he witnessed a round "ball of fire" which changed in colours, hovering about 20 meters above the ground and which were slowly moving in the direction of the hill, which separates the farm from the Fort Fordyce bush.

On our arrival we did not witness any suspicious objects. We did the initial investigation and were skeptical. At that stage we were seven people. Four laborers, 2 policemen and Mr. Smit. Whilst we were standing looking at the hill which were 150 meters from us, I saw an object which emerged from the thick bush and vegetation at the foot of the hill and hovered just above the vegetation. It moved slowly to our right and again disappeared behind the thick bush. It did this movement a couple of times and I had the feeling that we were being watched. Mr. Smit had a .303 rifle with him and I decided to take a shot at it. The object was oval shaped and it was difficult to estimate the size of it. It might have been just over a meter in diameter.

It had a shiny dark metal grey colour. I fired three shots at it, hitting with each shot. Mr. Smit also fired at the object. During firing at it, I saw a sharp bright light, flickering on the right of the craft, just above it. During the shots it also disappeared and emerged again from behind the trees. It was in broad daylight after 10am in the morning and the weather was clear. Mr. Smit and some of the workers went into the bush with a handkerchief, tied to a stick enabling us to direct him. We noticed that the object moved away as if it were reacting to our voices giving direction to the searchers. I heard further shots coming from close to where we last seen the object disappeared and Mr. Smit enquiring if we could see it. We kept observation but did not see its departure. According to Smit who claimed that they came close to it.

The object turned upright and became a greyish white in colour before it veered of making a whirring sound. It just disappeared. The following day we combed the area with other police officers and found nine evenly spread circular imprints about 10cm in diameter in the soil directly from where we saw it disappearing behind the bushes. The imprints were in hard clay soil easily 25 - 30 mm deep, as if the legs were spiraled in the ground. Samples were taken and send to the Council for Scientific & Industrial research Laboratories. Apparently it never reached them.

Also of interest is that a couple of days later in the evening the town engineer Dr. D. Verschoor, interrupted a Council meeting to show the councilors a UFO flashing in colours as it moved in the direction of the Fort Fordyce bush and Breaside

On Saturday 8 July during the night, Mr. Smit heard a loud explosion on his farm. On investigation the next morning he discovered that his reservoir, which were constructed of brick and cement were shattered and large concrete blocks were lying up to 20 meters away from the actual site. Another mysterious incident, never solved.

From here.

I was unsurprised to see that South Africa has a long history of UFO sightings. More on this later.

I recently read Moby Dick, because I wanted to immerse myself in Captain Ahab, the monomaniacal sailor, who when you look the one way is a tough peasanty sailor and the other way is a tragic hero of Hamlet proportions. And it is true, it is all in the book: the obsession which becomes a symbol for everything wrong in the world. The conflict between modernising man and nature. Fate's cracked heels. It is truly great stuff.

Captain Ahab is named rather unfortunately for King Ahab from the bible (biblical allusions pepper this book), the king who envied Naboth's garden, plots and kills Naboth. Elijah the prophet then says he will die an ignominious death and true, he ended up with the pigs licking his blood. It is of course a metaphorical naming, a warning against obsessional desire. Eljah pitches up in the book too, as a crazy old beggar, who speaks in riddles but warns off the narrator Ishmael.

Ahab's story when it comes out late in the book is rather pitiful. He is a man dedicated to the sea, from a young man he has sailed whaling ships around the world, never settling down. He is the epitome of hardwork, of the PrHe gets married late in life, over 40, but gets to sleep with his wife once before leaving again to sea, only once meeting his child. Then Moby Dick, the Great White Whale, crunches off his leg. Delirious and feverish, half-bled to death on the trip home, Ahab begins to see the whale as the root of all evil and strife. He swears revenge.

When the boat he is sailing on, The Pequod, is far from land he convinces the crew to undertake his mission of retribution with the following words:

"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers."

The crew goes wild for his rhetoric, and even the stable first-mate Starbuck, relinquishes his free will to Ahab's mad desire.

Although Starbuck mutters under his breath, "God help me, god help us all."

In fact, this is my favourite part of the whole book. The rest of the paragraph reads:

But in his joy at the enchanted, tacit acquiesence of the mate, Ahab did not hear his foreboding invocation; nor yet the low laugh from the hold; nor yet the presaging vibrations of the winds in the cordage; nor yet the hollow flap of the sails against the masts, as for a moment their hearts sank in.[...]

This is the precise moment, the moment of no return, that changes this novel from a hearty intense sea adventure into a grand tragedy. The signs are there to be read, but no one is watching.

In the end, and rapidly, Ahab realises his fate is utterly twisted up in that of the whale: "to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee." And the whale vicious to the last takes out the whole ship and everyone drowns. Except Ishmael who is rescued by a coffin which floats up.

Several other of my favourite bits:
Pip, the cabin boy jumps overboard in a moment of terror, and floating around and thinking he will never be rescued the loneliness of the sea swallows up his mind. After being hauled back on board, he becomes the Joker to Captain Ahab's madness. His own madness is a counterpoint.

Queegueg, the savage cannibal, has tattoos all over his body. They were inscribes by a great prophet, and they describe a complete theory of the universe. Unfortunately, the prophet dies before he can explain them, and Queequeg often spends time puzzling over the meaning. his own skin is indecipherable.

The story of the Pequod is at least partly based on a true story of the whaling ship, The Essex. The Essex was rammed 4000 kilometres off the West coast of South America. The sailors on board set out on the whaleboats, with practically no supplies, and resorted to cannibalism to survive. More on the Essex later... but for now, the Raft of the Medusa:

The Amazon was a brigantine, a ship with two mast of which the foremast is square rigged. It was built in 1861 at Spencer's Island in Nova Scotia, and she reached 99 feet and displaced 198 Gross tons. She was owned by a consortium of 8 merchants.

Her start to life was rather unfortunate. Her first Captain, Robert McLellan died from pneumonia 9 days into her maiden voyage. Her second Captain, John Nutting Parker, crashed it through a fishing boat and then let a fire rage on deck during the repairs. He was let go.

After this, however, she had many peaceable and profitable years doing South and Central American runs. She ran aground during a storm near Nova Scotia in 1867, salvaged and resold. The new owners wanted her to do trans-Atlantic trips to trade with Adriatic ports. To this end they rebuilt her to 107 feet with a gross tonnage of 282. She was renamed the Mary Celeste and relauched in October 1872.

To cope with the dificult Atlantic crossing, an experienced lifelong sailor Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, 37, was hired to skipper the bark.

Briggs was well-known as an excellent and fair captain, and had a good reputation amongst owners and crews alike. Briggs brought his wife and two year-old daughter on the trip, leaving his eight year-old boy in the care of his mother. They were accompanied by a crew of seven, a characteristic amount for the small brigantine. They were mostly of German nationality, with the exception of the first and second mates and the cook who were Amrican, Danish and American respectively. On November 5, 1872, the ship docked on New York City's East River and picked up a cargo of 1,701 barrels of commercial raw alcohol intended for fortifying Italian wines on behalf of Meissner Ackermann & Co.
1692 of the barrels were made of white oak and nine were crafted out of red oak. The Mary Celeste set sail from Staten Island, New York to Genoa, Italy. The cargo was exceptionally valuable, worth around $35,000 (an extemely large amount of money for the time, $520,000 in current money) and it was heavily insured in Europe. Seven days later, another brigantine, the Dei Gratia carrying 1735 barrels of petroleum set sail on the same route. The sea was notably calm on the trip.

It was the helmsman of the Dei Gratia, John Johnson, who 600 miles from the coast of Portugal and exactly a month into the trip, spied the Mary Celeste 5 miles of the port-side bow. He immediately got a cold feeling. Firstly, the Mary Celeste, having departed 7 days before them should have been in Italy already. Secondly, and more telling, its torn sails were flapping in the gentle wind.

When they boarded the ship, it got stranger yet. The ship was totally abandoned, yet it was in perfect condition. There was some water in the hold, but not more than normal after a month at sea, or at least not nearly enough to sink her. Not a soul on board, just the creak of ropes pulling unmanned sails and the echo of empty cabins. All the ships papers, except the Captain's log were missing. There was plenty of fresh food and water. The chronometer and compass were broken and the sextant was missing. A rope was found tied to the stern with it's badly frayed end dipping into the water. The only lifeboat was missing.

The next mystery was the location of the ship and the set of her sails:

When he examined the ship's log, the captain of the Dei Gratia found that the last entry was on November 24. That would have been 10 days earlier, when the Mary Celeste had been passing north of St. Mary's Island in the Azores — more than 400 miles west of where it was found. If it had been abandoned soon after that entry, the ship must have drifted unmanned and unsteered for a week and a half. Yet this could not have been. The Mary Celeste was found with its sails set to catch the wind coming over the starboard quarter: in other words, it was sailing on the starboard tack. The Dei Gratia had been following a similar course just behind. But throughout the 400 miles from the Azores, the Dei Gratia had been obligated to sail on the port tack. It seems impossible that the Mary Celeste could have reached the spot it did with its yards and sails set to starboard. Someone must have been working the ship for at least several days after the final log entry.

(from Occultopedia)

Piracy was immediately ruled out: there was no sign of a struggle, and all the valuables were still on board.

The Dei Gratia's first mate took control and sailed the mysterious vessel to Genoa, where an inquiry was launched into the fate of the crew. No conclusion was reached. When the ship was eventually offloaded, the nine red oak barrels were found to be empty all though not breached in any way.

The ship's owner was in two minds whether to sell the ill-fated ship, when his father was drowned sailing the ship back to America. It then passed through seventeen hands in the next thirteen years till it eventually was wrecked in a failed insurance scam near the Carribean.

The mystery of the Mary Celeste would have passed into quiet maritime lore if it hadn't been for two incidents. The first was a story published in the respectable Cornhill Magazine's January 1884 issue. It was called J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement. It told the story of the Marie Celeste, and its fate at the hands of revengeful African savages. The detail of the story and the fact that it was loosely based on the tale of the original Mary Celeste lead many to be fooled and to believe the yarn was real. It sparked off a new interest in the ship, and speculations ran wild and continue till this day (it is still often referred to as the Marie as opposed to Mary Celeste in much popular culture). Many who were not as easily fooled speculated as to the real author, putting the finger on Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allen Poe. Our good friend Arthur Conan Doyle, then a young and upcoming writer, took this as a great compliment as he was in fact the original pen. Read the story here, which with a contemporary eye has one of the most bizarre plots, and a strange fixational fear of the black body.

The second incident was very similar with an even more bizarre plot. Known as the Abel Fosdyck Papers, it was presented as true in a 1914 issue of Strand magazine. In it a highly respected schoolmaster A. Howard Linford claimed to have found papers belonging to Abel Fosdyck his late servant. They explain the Mary Celeste mystery in terms of an offbeat bet, a collapsing observation deck and a swarm of sharks. This true story set off another wave of fascination with the poor ship. If one were to read the tale closely, he does however claim the Mary Celeste weighed 600 tons and that the crew were English.

To be honest, you can read a thousand other accounts that explain the mystery. Many have something to do with the Bermuda Triangle, or water spouts. But what really strikes me, and sticks in my mind is the unbearable, deep and mysterious sadness of an empty boat, rocking on a calm sea. It's like a word without a meaning.

Rest in Peace John Keel
Read tributes here and here and here and here

See the show which resulted from some of this research at Whatiftheworld/Gallery, till the 25th July. Or check out the exhibition's website here.

After the bridge at Xangongo collapsed, no one from the 1-Recces saw “die Mot” again.

The exact occasion of the first sighting is uncertain. Three months earlier Sergeant Marais was overheard telling Sergeant Du Toit that he had seen glowing red eyes in the undergrowth before his Puma lifted off the ground. It was on this trip that the operational map got sucked out the window, forcing the first operation to be cancelled, for fear that the paper had drifted into enemy hands. Hindsight gave this incident particular import. However, Sergeant Kloosterziel also reported being followed by piercing red eyes. After being the sole survivor when his deep reconnaissance group was deployed near a chana observed by a SWAPO unit, this was assumed to be post-traumatic stress. Either way, Kloosterziel never spoke of it again, or returned to active duty for that matter.

The first corroborated sighting occurred during the final preparations for Operation Rooihoek. Captain Venter, under political pressure from General Loots whose connections to the cabinet made him a forcible opponent, relented and planned a second mission to the bridge, although military intelligence could neither confirm nor deny any major placement changes along the river after the fateful loss of the map. Venter insisted on a photographic flyover. The SAAF sent an Impala Mk II and determined that no changes in defensive patterns were evident. Venter moved the 1-Recces to the staging base at Mpupa Falls, for final strategy and training. Sergeants Sachse and Van Wyk were securing the perimeter above the waterfall, when according to the report submitted to Captain Venter, they saw a large man-like creature raise itself from the ground. As it moved from the horizontal to the vertical it did not bend its knees or seem to move a muscle. Then it spread its wings. They described it as being at least 8 feet high, with an equal wingspan. The wings were grey and smooth like a moth’s. Both Sachse and Van Wyk claimed to be mesmerized by large glowing red eyes. When they tore themselves away and ran it launched into the air and kept pace with them without flapping its massive wings. It just wheeled along, casting a long dark shadow from the evening sun. “I’ve never seen anything like those eyes,” reported Sachse. “They were like coals in a wind.”

When the rumor spread, with much hilarity, around the camp Sergeant Du Plessis, known as “Dup”, quoted a school boy poem in his clearest Afrikaans:

Maar ek hoef nie van een kant af net te kyk,
ek vlieg 'n wye sirkel om,
dan weet ek van alkant af hoe hy lyk,
om beter te sorg om nie nader te kom.

My sirkel was skeef en ingebuig,
maar daar ook waar ek die naaste was,
het niks gebeur, ek maak verniet
my sirkel so groot en so ver van die as.

Die wieletjie draai al vinniger om,
die lig en die gloed word al groter genot.
Die velling word nouer al rondom die as
en die end van die wiel, is die as van 'n mot.

After which the name “die Mot” seemed to stick, though the sense of good-natured teasing dissipated quickly. In the following days Sergeant Schulz saw the same creature rising like the ascension above the escarpment. Dup thought he saw it silhouetted by the sun and felt terrified. Sergeant Kleinholz spotted it gliding behind the tips of the trees. The cracks of his rifle brought the other men. “I clean jumped out of my skin,” he told them. “But it didn’t seem to notice. It just hovered there. Watching.” They all shivered. Night was falling and a cold air drifted off the falls.

It was a relief to all to get the operation on the go. Venter felt especially grateful. Being a rational man he was still skeptical about the verity of the sightings, in interpretation at least. No one, however, wants jittery frightened troops. Especially not when one’s career was riding on it; General Loots would not take blame for a second failure. The plan of action was simple. The two Puma helicopters would fly north to Cassinga and stage a dummy drop to the southwest of the SWAPO encampment to act as a diversion. Meanwhile, a C130 transporter would fly at a high altitude northwest to the river. The men trained in high-altitude low-opening drops, would inflate two Krokodil boats and paddle the 10km downstream to the bridge, place the charges and then rendezvous with the returning Puma choppers on the south bank.

The first bad sign was when a vast storm moved in that afternoon, forcing the buffeted plane to fly far lower than planned. Once inflated one of the boats broke free, pummeled by the swollen current, and it took twenty minutes to finally snatch it off a submerged rock. The sun was beginning to sink when Sachse and Van Wyk, who had dropped first and moved ahead by foot to recon the banks radioed movement two clicks from the bridge, nearly forty men, apparently at full alert on the north bank. Whether it was the loud plane or the lost map that was responsible for this unexpected development one thing was for sure: moving down the river would mean getting stuck in a deadly bottle neck ambush. The forewarning was all the well-drilled 1-Recces needed to gain the advantage. The first team of six disembarked on the north shore and circled round to get the higher ground, while the second team moved further down to pick up Van Wyk and Sachse. They crossed over to target the enemy’s west flank, set timed charges in the boat, filled it with excess ammunition and aimed it down the last stretch of the river.

As the Krokodil exploded, sending shrapnel in from the south, Schulz’ team crept up behind, their noises masked by the rain, and laid cover through the brush. The second team meanwhile charged in from the west. Kleinholz rolled two grenades into the artillery dugout, while Van Wyk blew covering fire. The screams of trapped burning men echoed through the bush. Dup and Sachse moved in too fast. Sachse had to draw his knife when he practically stumbled over two panicked enemies, precluding swinging his rifle. He aimed a graceful thrust through the throat of the first, before rolling and snicking the Achilles of the second. Then kneeing on the gasping man’s chest he pushed the blade up through the chin. He looked into his eyes as the blood gushed. Dup knocked down a third with a slash of his rifle, before standing on his throat and putting two bullets into his stomach. He then tucked a grenade into the corpse’s mouth and rolled him down the incline to where three SWAPO insurgents had taken aim at Sachse. An immense roll of thunder met Van Wyk pumping lead into the flaming dugout. He was rewarded with fresh screams, before being spotted. The slight graze across his ear caused him to dive into a low ditch from where he sniped five men with well-placed bursts. Du Toit coming from the north put a bullet in to the temple of a fleeing soldier from thirty feet, flipping a proud grin at Kleinholz who was converging on his position. Kleinholz, feeling exposed, grabbed a corpse off the ground in time to feel two rounds thump into it. Using it as cover he pushed forward, shooting from the hip. Meeting with Du Toit, they leopard crawled behind the machine gun position, still putting misguided lead into the burning boat. Du Toit cut a perfect straight line of holes in the back of the gunner, while the chin of the ammo feeder caught Kleinholz’ shot. The momentum carried him up and over on to the smoking barrel. The smell of roasting flesh wafted through the rain. Schulz wandered around putting pistol bullets into anyone still moving.

As they waded the river, slapping shaped charges onto the bridge’s pillars, all twelve men saw “die Mot” rising out of the water. Water poured off its outstretched wings, and it impassively gazed at them with glowing burning red eyes. The standoff lasted a full two minutes. The twelve recces on one side, Dup frozen in mid-slap. The water rushed and pulled at their legs. Die Mot on the other, floating two inches above the water, inhuman, staring. Then it lifted off. They watched it until it disappeared into the watery distance.

While they waited for the Pumas the dust and smoke from the bridge was battered down by the pouring rain.

In 1984 a series of documents were leaked to the UFO community in the States, and thousands more surfaced until 1997. Collectively they have been called the Majestic Documents. There have been debunkings of some of the main documents, citing errors in style and anachronism, but the body of evidence is still hotly disputed by the interested parties.

The documents essentially outline a highly secret committee of 12 scientists and military leaders, instituted by President Harry Truman. The document trail starts 3 days after the 'Battle of LA' in 1942 with Frankelin D Roosevelt writing a memo to General George Marshall in which he promises "the Army will have the fruits of research in exploring further applications of this new wonder." However, the trail really starts to blaze after the now infamous Roswell incident in 1947. Truman allegedly set up a committee to study and gain technology from the crash. The committee, contained people like General Hoyt Vanderburg, Dr Vannevar Bush and General Nathan Twining all of whom have well-documented links to official white UFO research. For example Vanderburg was responsible for the investigation into the Ghost Rockets over Norway in 1946 (which he claimed were rockets from Peenemünde, even though that facility had been closed in 1945).

The documents were released after the last of the purported members died, but the question still remains: is there an exceptionally powerful committee of people who have access to some of the most explosive technology on earth. And why are they withholding it?

With Cold War tensions rising in the 80's, could these 'leaked' documents have been a massive case of misdirection? Who would be most frightened of the technology?

Lake Monster
Via Cryptomundo
I particularly love the quiet sunset setting of this video.

When I watched the second Star Wars Trilogy (Episode I-III), it really struck home that Star Wars was the tale of Darth Vader and never the story of Luke. Luke is just a supporting role to add tragedy to the life of Vader. I'd be the first to admit that Star Wars is a terribly written wooden series of films, but somehow the power of the characters themselves shines through it. The overarching narrative is far more deeper than the script, and has held allure for generations of fans. And not just any kind of allure: crazy psychotic fandom. The dedication of fans to a fictional world really moves me on an emotional level because of its earnestness and passion. And on an intellectual level when considering history and culture as mostly fictional (by which I mean how these things are about point of view and narrative), the dedication seems a valid way of navigating reality.

Darth is born into a poor household. But he is smart. He makes his way into the universe, by hard work and brains. He falls in love and builds a career. But it is never enough, life can't give him everything he wants even though it is sitting in front of him. He becomes angry, taps into the anger of the poor kid that has always been waiting latent inside him. With his fury, comes the desire to escape the anger by attaining more power to make it right. He bickers with his friends and mentors. He cannot see his wife through his anger. Her love for him seems tainted because he can't see it anymore in himself, poor boy. He hurts her, and rather than face his disgust for himself, face his desire, his anger now blocks everything, it defines him. He has moved over to the dark side. He attains more power, he becomes the most successful person in the universe. Rags to riches. Deep inside him the anger that affected the small boy (not this massive growing anger but it's pathetic root) still needles him, makes him seem stupid and powerless. Seeing his son he is reminded of it, he tries to change him, he hurts him. But, in the end, right at the last minute, he cannot let go of his last bit of humanity, he protects his son. When dying he takes off his helmet and faces his sacrifice and what it means in the scope of his life. It is an act of redemption.

Essentially, here's the equation: Our father's idyllic past breeds into the Empire. We grow up in its shadow, a new hope. We struggle. We long for a return of goodness, for the good side of the force. We feel we make it, our fathers redeem themselves in our eyes. Then we have progeny and the cycle starts anew. We can take the metaphor further too, into the way the world passes down through the generations in perpetuating cycles which seem to be advancing but are in fact...

ps. Also read this great piece about Star Wars and modernism. I think it is an appropriate end to these thoughts.

(It seems true that most momentous things swing on a small incident that swings on a something massive)

BERLIN — It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”

The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.

Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.

Read more

From the NY Times. Via GreatDismal on Twitter

From here, by Andrew Lycett

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle let me down. Shortly before I completed writing his biography, I went to a small corrugated building in North London to see if I could substantiate his belief in communication with the dead.

My destination was the Rochester Square Spiritualist Temple. As a plaque inside the door attests, Sir Arthur had helped finance its construction in the decade before his death in 1930. Having grown rich through his Sherlock Holmes stories, he had become the world’s most famous exponent of spiritualism.

In my coat I carried a letter in Conan Doyle’s hand. Perhaps I hoped this would give off some subtle communication to the temple's medium, who was busily delivering messages from the dead to members of the small, mainly female, congregation. I had hoped to learn more about the man, and maybe even something about myself.

But while the medium singled out people in the congregation to tell them details about themselves and their loved ones, she failed to alight on me. Despite her histrionic efforts to get in touch with ‘spirit’ (as she put it, without the definite article), she left my many queries unsolved and my scepticism fortified.

What a pity. It would have been sensational to round off my biography with definitive answers to nagging questions, such as: What was Holmes’s actual relationship with Watson? And did the upright Sir Arthur have an adulterous affair with a younger woman while his first wife was dying of tuberculosis?

More apposite: how could Conan Doyle, a medical man steeped in empirical reasoning at Edinburgh University and the creator of a super-rational detective, have fallen for this mumbo jumbo? His support for spiritualism lent credence to some of the more outrageous frauds perpetrated on people desperately trying to get in touch with loved ones lost in the first world war. In his desire to prove the existence of spirits, he notoriously promoted two Yorkshire girls who, for a lark, claimed they had photographed the Cottingley Fairies (pictured).

On one level, his was the story of a lapsed Roman Catholic troubled by an alcoholic father and never quite able to cast off his sense of the supernatural. On another it was the intellectual journey of an inquisitive man, dissatisfied with Victorian materialism but intent on using its tools to examine alternative forms of consciousness. This was also a time when orthodox religion was giving way to Darwin and science.

As a doctor Conan Doyle was fascinated by early experiments in thought transference and healing through mesmerism and hypnotism. These were given an occult twist by early spiritualists, such as the Fox sisters from upstate New York, who won acclaim in the 1840s for their apparent ability to communicate with the dead through table-rapping (though they later confessed to fraud). America-based clairvoyants such as Daniel Dunglas Home crossed the Atlantic to become celebrities in Victorian Britain, where, despite being denounced by Robert Browning in his poem "Mr Sludge, 'the Medium'", they were even feted by scientists.

Paradoxically for an anti-materialist movement, spiritualism began boasting ever more tangible signs of such communication, including ‘spirit photographs’, ectoplasm and objects that floated round a room at a medium’s behest. The conditions for fraud were widespread.

Conan Doyle became interested in the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), set up in 1882 to scientifically investigate paranormal phenomena, such as extra-sensory perception. But he found himself at odds with the SPR’s objectivity. He felt he didn't need laboratory experiments to prove what he knew to be true.

After holding séances with his wife Jean to get in touch with members of their family killed in the first world war, Conan Doyle came out as a spiritualist. He claimed to converse with the spirits of the dead. Virtually abandoning Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle churned out books on spiritualism and addressed vast audiences around the world on the subject. He proudly adopted the sobriquet "the St Paul of the New Dispensation", ruffling some feathers along the way. In North America he clashed with Harry Houdini, an illusionist, who argued that all spiritualists’ "tricks" could be replicated by a competent magician.

He was a crusader who enjoyed fighting for a minority cause. Shortly before his death in July 1930, he headed a spiritualists’ delegation to the Home Secretary, J.R. Clynes, protesting against police harassment of mediums under antiquated witchcraft and vagrancy laws.

Almost eight decades later, spiritualism has seen off the threat of official persecution. (One of the last mediums to be tried for witchcraft in Britain was Helen Duncan in 1944, largely because she had seemed to imperil D-Day security by providing information about a sunken British ship.) Yet like many Victorian phenomena, spiritualism has fallen by the wayside. Those who are disenchanted with religion but keen on the supernatural may now content themselves with the new-age movement.

For all his commitment to spiritualism, Conan Doyle, who would have been 150 on May 22nd, was canny enough not to compromise Sherlock Holmes’s credibility with it. Presented with evidence of the supernatural in "The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire", the great detective says, "This agency stands flat-footed upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply."

(Andrew Lycett’s "Conan Doyle: The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes" is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in Britain and by Free Press in America. He recently spoke at a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sesquicentennial Celebration at Harvard University.)

On the 18th and 19th of December 1982 four massive explosions ripped through the pipes of the unfinished reactor of the Koeberg Nuclear Power station. Umkhonto we Siswe took credit for the bombing, which caused R500 million worth of damage and set back the construction of the plant by 18 months. Rodney Wilkinson and Heather Gray, two employees of the power station and secret members of a special Operations Unit with MK, placed four limpet mines into pipes. The explosions were designed to not breach the reactor heads which would have made Cape Town into another Chernobyl (this incident is, of course, pre-Chernobyl. Below is the abandoned town of Pripyat, with Chernobyl in the background. One can only imagine...).
Regardless of this being the single most effective act by MK, and potentially the most dangerous, it seems to have very little publicity, to the degree that even the date is a little unclear. Some sources claim the attack took place on 8 January 1982, marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of the MK, while others claim it took place on the 18th of December (which seems more likely, considering that this information comes from the TRC). Unfortunately, I can't find the TRC transcripts for this case online and some more research will be needed to find all the facts, but below is the decision:

The applicant makes application for amnesty in respect of an act of sabotage in terms of Act 34 of 1995 as amended.

During December 1982, the applicant and one Heather Wilkinson (nee Gray) were members of Umkhonto weSizwe, (MK) the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC).

They were attached to a special Operations Unit and were ordered to damage the Koeberg Power Station in the Western Cape. The power station was a key source of power under the previous government. The proposed attack was part of the overall strategy of attacking apartheid and its installations and consequently the previous government.

In pursuance of the order the applicant and Heather Wilkinson (nee Gray) planned the attack and the applicant eventually carried out a successful act of sabotage on the Koeberg Power Station on or about the 18 December 1982. The deed was clearly politically motivated.

The applicant disclosed that 4 limpet mines were planted and detonated so as to cause the said damage.

The Committee is satisfied that the applicant has complied with the requirements of the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, No 34 of 1995 and he is accordingly GRANTED amnesty for the act of sabotage committed at the Koeberg Power Station on or about 18 December 1982.

This aside, the incident really sounds like one of the most daring tales of sabotage. It's like a spy novel.

Other important things to happen on that day: Mrs Sloon went into labour.

Early in the morning of February 25th 1942, a strange object drifted over Los Angeles.

Two days before, a Japanese submarine had surfaced near Santa Barbara and had fired onto an oil production facility, causing very little damage, but being the first shelling on mainland USA in World War 2 it caused widespread panic along the west coast. This incident took place two and a half months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and three years before Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima.

The exact story is conflicting and confused, but the Office of Airforce History's 1983 report on the incident tells a part of the tale:
During the night of 24/25 February 1942, unidentified objects caused a succession of alerts in southern California. On the 24th, a warning issued by naval intelligence indicated that an attack could be expected within the next ten hours. That evening a large number of flares and blinking lights were reported from the vicinity of defense plants. An alert called at 1918 [7:18 p.m., Pacific time] was lifted at 2223, and the tension temporarily relaxed. But early in the morning of the 25th renewed activity began. Radars picked up an unidentified target 120 miles west of Los Angeles. Antiaircraft batteries were alerted at 0215 and were put on Green Alert—ready to fire—a few minutes later. The AAF kept its pursuit planes on the ground, preferring to await indications of the scale and direction of any attack before committing its limited fighter force. Radars tracked the approaching target to within a few miles of the coast, and at 0221 the regional controller ordered a blackout. Thereafter the information center was flooded with reports of “enemy planes, ” even though the mysterious object tracked in from sea seems to have vanished. At 0243, planes were reported near Long Beach, and a few minutes later a coast artillery colonel spotted “about 25 planes at 12,000 feet” over Los Angeles. At 0306 a balloon carrying a red flare was seen over Santa Monica and four batteries of anti-aircraft artillery opened fire, whereupon “the air over Los Angeles erupted like a volcano.” From this point on reports were hopelessly at variance.

The essence of the story is that the military flung 1500 rounds into the air at something. No plane, object or balloon was shot down. This has gone down in history as the largest mass UFO sighting. I particularly enjoy this idea of a well documented mass sighting which is still unexplained, from the same report:
At the end of the war, the Japanese stated that they did not send planes over the area at the time of this alert

I also like how the strange but harmless object appearing over the West coast of the USA neatly mirrors the terrifying deadly object that later appeared over the East coast of Japan. The spectre of the Cold War hangs over these incidents, the latter in the raw display of nuclear power and intitutional racism that seperated Easterners into worthless killable others foreshadowing Vietnam. The former in the terror of potential unknown destruction.

The famous image itself, first displayed in the LA Times holds for me a certain poetry.
If you take the original LA Times image, at the top of this post, and invert it, a distinct saucer like shape appears. The black spots are explosions from Anti-Aircraft rounds.Searchlights have a common usage in LA as a publicity mechanism. In the past a waving searchlight would attract customers to it's source, a Hollywood cinema, a symbol still used as a design element for 20th Century Fox studios. There is a distinct assonance between the elusive search for a mystery aircraft and empty publicity of the media machine. The search for stardom and a normative cultural superiority and it's dark and terrifying flip-side: domination, abuse, exploitation. Like the two faces of a politician.

An artist's rendition of Mothman, based on eyewitness reports.

One of my constant fascinations is with understanding the nature of images, especially the idea that images lie, they mislead and manipulate us. These sorts of vague musings and loose analyses take their most concrete form in the study of photographs, which bear the great weight of representation (ie. they collect and scientifically store light, reality), but which can be picked apart with a fingernail.
And if there is one movement in photography which really excites these ideas in me it is spirit photography. It's like a distillation of the theme truth vs belief, or representation vs the need to believe. It also encapsulates some of my other preoccupations: external manifestations of internal fear, paranoia, mystery, horror, sadness and pathos, hoaxes and of course bizarre men.

Spirit photography tends to well up in a society after moments of national trauma. The movement started in the States after the civil war there, followed by another uprising after the First World War and with a more modern occurrence in the 60's with the deadly tensions of the Cold War.

William Mumler, shot to fame with this self-portrait featuring a ghost of his cousin in 1884. Before that he was a jeweller. His most famous image was of Mary Lincoln and the ghost of Abraham Lincoln.
He died a pauper after P.T. Barnham (the great showman and hoax maker) publicly accused him of fraud,and put him on trial. Eventually he was aquitted, but his career was over.

Ted Serios was a notorious drunk who could embed images on film using his mind. He called them Thoughtographs. Before making a killing (and never being disproved) he was a bellhop and had been arrested many times for sociopathic behavior.


Next up, photographs of Mediums and Ectoplasm, and Arthur Conan Doyle.

With the European Mars Express taking incredible photographs of Mars, there's been many conspiracy theories developed which claim there is life on Mars (it's not that new, Life on Mars conspiracies have been going forever, since somebody saw that face in the rocks. But it has picked up in pace). Compression artifacts, such as geometric shapes and fuzzy smudging are claimed to be evidence of farms and construction in the former, and tampering to deliberately obscure by scientists in the latter.

There is this academic idea that digital compression hides the "truth" of an image. Essentially, information is removed when an image (or whatever) is compressed. I really like these people that then find new meanings and truths in these omissions. I find it a potent metaphor for the way people process information in general. I also like the way the logic in their arguments is idiosyncratic and subjective, showing maybe that with another step removed, scientific logic is all that universal (see this article on the limits of Scientific logic).

See Mars Anomaly Research for some pretty intense stuff.

I found this YouTube video which illustrates the point, and then compressed it.




You can find the original video here.

Bouvet Island is the most remote island in the world. It is located at 54°26′S 3°24′E, with its closest neighbour being over 1600 kms away. It is uninhabited, except for some lichen, seals and birds. And an automated weather station. The island is exceptionally hostile, glacial and volcanic.

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The island was first sighted in 1738 by French explorer Jean-Baptiste Charles Bouvet de Lozier. Bouvet was convinced it was the northernmost tip of Antarctica but could not circumnavigate or land upon the island due to severe weather. Steep cliffs surrounding most sides of the island also made access difficult, and after various attempts, a landing was made in 1822 by an American sealer, Benjamin Morrell, who named the island after Bouvet. He took some seal skins. A British whaling/sealing expedition arrived three years later and named it Liverpool Island. The Norwegians claimed sovereignty of the island in 1928, and they renamed it in honor of Bouvet during their expedition of 1929. It remains orwegian territory, for what it's worth.

In 1964 a lifeboat and supplies were discovered there. No trace of the passengers was found.

In 1979, the American Vela Sattelite picked up a double flash of light near Bouvet Island. It was interpreted as a small scale nuclear bomb. It was at the same time that Dieter Gerhardt was in command of Simonstown Naval Base, and he later in a 1994 City Press article confirmed that it was a joint South African Israeli test. He claimed that no South African warships were involved. However, it was publicly announced that Simonstown Naval Base was off limits from 17th to 23rd September 1979.

The movie Alien versus Predator was released in 2004. The byline for the movie was 'Whoever wins, we lose'. It was a critical failure, but a commercial success. The movie was set on Bouvet Island.

The idea of fragmenting reality down into a hundreds of analysed fragments really appeals to me. Essentially the Zapruder film (the famous film of Kennedy's assassination) sums up the Twentieth Century for me: mediated politicised conspiracy theory. I wish resources like this existed for moments in South African history. Once in a presentation I made the analogy between postmodernism and the Zapruder film, in which Kennedy was a symbol of Western progress, happy and waving, until the skull is shattered by a violent rupture revealing the bloody mess on the inside. Jackie O is us, desperately scrabbling for the fragments of the skull to put together. A tragic image. Here are all 486 frames of the film.

The Warren Commission Report is another fascinating document of minutiae. It's like a cloak of little fragments.

I like to think of these two items as the birth of conspiratorial thought (although this is probably in no accurate sense true). Metaphors, then. Its the thought that knowledge is suspect and must be studied, and that the fragments of knowledge don't make a complete map, irrational connections must be made to fill the gaps.

Lee Harvey Oswald, the outsider, the loser, the violent rupture or the witless patsy. This is my favourite photograph ever. It's both domestic and violent, posed, faked but revealing, empirical and suspect. And the soft tonal gradation and lens abberations making the medium so visible but so exquisite.

Vastrap was the proposed site for South Africa's first underground nuclear test in 1977:

During 1975-77 two test shafts measuring 216 and 385 meters deep were drilled at the Vastrap testing range north of Upington in the Kalahari Desert for conducting nuclear tests. A fully instrumented test cold test of the feasibility demonstrator prototype with a depleted uranium core (basically a dry run for an actual nuclear test) was scheduled for August 1977. Preliminary plans for a subsequent nuclear test were considered. As preparations proceeded, the US was passed information by South Africa of its intention to conduct nuclear tests. The US urged SA not to conduct the test, but kept the information secret. But in August 1977 a Soviet surveillance satellite detected these test preparations, and the Soviets notified the US of their discovery. With its cover blown, heavy diplomatic pressure was brought by the US, the Soviet Union, and France on South Africa. The French foreign minister warned on 22 August of "grave consequences" or French­South African relations. Although he did not elaborate, his statement implied that France was willing to cancel its contract for the Koeberg reactors. Upon direct instruction of the PM Vorster, the site was abandoned in August 1977 and was not revisited until 1987 when the test shafts were inspected and a corrugated iron shed with a concrete floor constructed over one of the two shafts to prepare the shaft for future testing contingencies. From Nuclear Weapon Archive In Al Venter's book How South Africa Built Six Atom Bombs, he states that the Soviet satellite was sent over on information obtained from the spy Commodore Dieter Gerhardt. Gerhardt was one of the USSR most succesful spies. He was arrested in 1982, but after 30 years of being a Soviet mole in the South African Navy. He went to command the South Africa's major naval base at Simonstown.

In 1994 talking of the Vela Incident (Spetember 22 1979) Gerhardt that the flash was produced by an Israeli-South African test code-named "Operation Phenix". Gerhardt, who said he was not yet ready to reveal the full facts, stated that although he was not directly involved in planning or carrying out the operation, he had learned of it unofficially.

Gerhardt was quoted in the February 20, 1994 City Press: "The explosion was clean and was not supposed to be detected. But they were not as smart as they thought, and the weather changed - so the Americans were able to pick it up."

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Pelindaba is the uranium enrichment plant near Joburg. The name roughly translates as 'the talking is over'. The brutality of this naming is evident when the function of the plant was not necessarily to make HEU for peaceful nuclear purposes.Pelindaba in the news recently

Also known as the Vela Incident. Much more on this to come
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This is a blog to document some of the thoughts, images and links that make up my practice as an artist.