Unexplained!: Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena

609 Pages·2012·10.3 MB·English

by  Jerome Clark

A A
BOUT THE UTHOR
J
erome Clark is a prize-winning author of the multi-volume UFO Encyclopedia
(1990-1998) and other books, including Unnatural Phenomena (2005) and
Hidden Realms, Lost Civilizations, and Beings from Other Worlds (Visible Ink
Press, 2010). A former editor of Fate magazine, he serves on the board of the J.
Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. In June 2008 the Society for Scientific
Exploration, an organization of professionals in the physical and social sciences,
gave him its Dinsdale Award for “significant contributions to the expansion of
human understanding through the study of unexplained phenomena … which
have brought to the general public comprehensive and trustworthy information
presented from a sophisticated perspective.”
Photograph by Carmen Ronan.
Clark is also a songwriter (Emmylou Harris, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tom T.
Hall, Seldom Scene, Mary Black, and others) and a prolific writer on folk and
roots music. He pursues a wide range of interests—political, historical, and
literary—from his home in Minnesota.
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UNEXPLAINED!
Strange Sightings,
Incredible Occurrences,
and Puzzling Physical
Phenomena
3rd Edition
Copyright © 2013 by Visible Ink Press®
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CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Photo Credits
Mysteries
Anomalous Clouds
Black Dogs
Beast of Exmoor
Falls from the Sky (Inorganic Matter)
Falls from the Sky (Organic Matter)
Flying Humanoids
Hairy Dwarves
Ghost Lights
Green Fireballs
Hairy Bipeds
Almas
Lake Monsters
Lake Worth Monster
Lindorms
Living Dinosaurs
Momo
Morag
Pterosaur Sightings
Sea Serpents
Tatzelwurm
Dover Demon
Thunderbirds
Thylacines
Unidentified Submarine Objects
Water Hounds
Yowie
Curiosities
Belled Buzzard
Cosmic Jokers and Saucer Critters
Nazca Lines
Entombed Animals
Green Children
Hoop Snakes and Joint Snakes
Monstrous Serpent
Ice Falls
Jersey Devil
Kangaroos in America
Alligators in the Sewers
Mad Gassers
Merbeings
Ringing Rocks
Moving Coffins
Onza
Pwdre Ser
White River Monster
Stuart’s Monsters
Teleportation
Skyquakes
Wheels of Light
Fables
Cottingley Fairy Photographs
Oliver Lerch Disappearance
Flight 19
Hollow Earth
Bermuda Triangle
Jacko
Martian Mummies and Others
Devil’s Sea
Mono Grande
Noah’s Ark
David Lang Disappearance
Paluxy Tracks
Stomach Snakes and Other Gastrointestinal Creatures
Thunderbird Photograph
Atmospheric Life Forms
Vulcan
Wahhoo
Index
F
OREWORD
T
he first edition of this book appeared in 1993, the second in 1999. With this
edition the book enters the twenty-first century in considerably revised,
much expanded form. The mass of fresh material that had accumulated
over a dozen years rendered the new volume something worth doing. A good
deal of what you will read has never appeared between book covers. Some
subjects—for example the curious affair of the Belled Buzzard—have not, as far
as I know, been examined comprehensively until now.
This is not an attempt, let me be clear, to represent the broad spectrum of
anomalies and other allegedly unexplained events and experiences. Such an
effort would require many fat volumes, and it would also cover paranormal
phenomena—ESP and psychokinesis, apparitions, out-of-body and near-death
experiences—which are, frankly, outside my area of expertise (to the extent that
anyone can pretend to have “expertise” in anomalous matters). Nor does the
present volume carry over everything from its previous incarnation. Some things
simply didn’t seem worth revisiting because I felt I had said all I had to say about
them and there were no interesting new developments. Ultimately, what I have
kept and what I have added have one element in common: they interest me.
A few chapters and sidebars return more or less intact because I thought they
needed to be there to serve as a corrective to persistent misinformation regularly
peddled by cable television’s snake-oilish “true mystery” shows. (My inclination
is to think of these as the television equivalent of those ubiquitous unsourced
email forwards that peddle bald-faced lies and shameless distortions for the
edification of the näive and otherwise readily bamboozled.) In fact, this book is
intended, in part anyway, for intelligent persons who have seen those programs
—a few of which, fairness compels me to state, rise above the generally abysmal
level—and who may be looking for something more accurate and substantive.
Veterans of anomalies literature, however, will also be exposed to information
they haven’t seen until now.
In that regard, this third edition, in contrast to its predecessors, does not
include chapters on UFOs, Sasquatch, and the Loch Ness Monster. Information