“There are no answers, only mysteries.”---W. T. Killeen
Where, oh where, did Texas go? One day it was there, the next day it was gone, leaving a very large white space on the map along with Harry Edwards’ eyeglasses. There were no signs of violence.
“I was just out hangin’ the clothes and lookin’ over the backyard fence,” relates Mrs. Birdie Terwilliger of Hugo, Oklahoma, “when POOF---the whole damn thing was gone. Ain’t never seen anythin’ like it. Took the Dollar Store and all.”
Republican politicians immediately blamed the Democrats. The Democrats blamed Good Fortune. Cartographers rushed to work on a new map of the American Southwest. Semi drivers wondered if you could still drive on the white stuff and if so, how long it would take to install truck stops. People still remembered the Alamo but nobody could go look at it.
“Frankly, I won’t miss it one damn bit,” smiled Buddy (“Peatmoss”) Crudelips of Texarkana, Arkansas. “Them Texans were just too uppity. Biggest this, biggest that. All hat and no cattle. Maybe Disney will come in and put up a water park.”
Citizens from Mexico quickly scurried over the non-border, staking their claims to…well, whatever. The federal government immediately installed border security in southern Oklahoma. Willie Nelson, who was on tour, announced he’d be moving to Carmel By-The-Sea. Beto O’Rourke set up campaign headquarters in Truth of Consequences, New Mexico. Nuevo Laredo, Mexico dropped the “Nuevo” from their official name. “What the hell---we were here first, anyway” said….um, Laredo mayor Enrique Rivas Cuellar.
Whatever Happened To The Bermuda Triangle?
And what’s going on with the once-scary Bermuda Triangle? Is it on hiatus? Just taking a long coffee break? Or, like Garbo, does it just want to be left alone? When was the last time a big ship disappeared into its murky waters or a plane’s electronics failed while flying over, dropping it into the sea? This sort of thing used to happen all the time in and over the so-called Devil’s Triangle, but lately….bupkus. Nada. The Bermuda Bust.
In 1918, the U.S.S. Cyclops, one of the Navy’s biggest fuel ships, set out to sail from Brazil to Baltimore through the Bermuda region carrying 10,800 tons of manganese ore with a crew of 309. The Cyclops set off on a fairly good weather day and the only message she sent indicated everything was fine as frog hair. The ship was never heard from again. Not a peep. A vast search of the area yielded nothing and no remains of the vessel were ever found. The Cyclops is just one of over 100 ships and planes to have vanished under strange circumstances in the Bermuda Triangle.
Sometimes, the ships don’t vanish but the people who man them do. In 1881, the American schooner Ellen Austin was traveling from New York to London when she stumbled upon a derelict ship near the Bermuda Triangle. Everything seemed fine aboard the drifting ship but for the lack of a crew. Not a soul was aboard the well-stocked vessel. The captain of the Ellen Austin attempted to tow the derelict back to port but after two days in calm waters, a squall arose and separated the two ships. Shortly afterward, the mystery ship completely vanished.
Perhaps the most famous Triangle story occurred on December 5th of 1945. At 2:10 p.m., five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 took off from the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station on a routine three-hour training mission, which would take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, then back over a final 120-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. None of them was seen again. Radio messages from the squadron leader claimed his compasses had failed, his whereabouts were unknown and fuel was low.
The role of paranormal activities and the presence of aliens have been strongly suggested by the usual suspects. Scientists counter with a theory of electromagnetic interference which causes compass problems. Supposedly, there is a very high pull of the Earth’s natural magnet in the area which redirects the compass and other sophisticated equipment, rendering them useless. The most recent incident in the Devil’s Triangle involved the sinking of a cargo vessel in October of 2015, but even that was in a hurricane. Since then, quiet. If electromagnetic interference is the issue, how does it simply disappear? Is the Maytag Repairman branching out?
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| Lily Van Halen and Gary Borse look to the skies at Stonehedge; The Boys are back in town. |
Why Do Extraterrestrials Show Up At Gary Borse’s House But Not At Yours?
“Maybe he has better dope.”---Bill Killeen
Gary Borse is a talented painter, amateur beekeeper, ex-cattleman and altruist who lives on a lovely hilltop in tiny Fairfield, Florida. His friendly wife Lily is a prolific gardener, expert massage therapist and cheerful helpmate with Gary’s many projects. Together, the pair were significant participants in saving the old Huff’s orange grove property overlooking Orange Lake from private ownership, retaining it for a public park. So, a relatively normal couple, just like you and I, except for one thing. Gary sees space people.
If, in fact, this is true, why Gary Borse? Why not Richard Helms, with his spacious landing field? Or Chuck LeMasters, with his eyes to the skies? Or Patricia McKennee, with a large apartment? Maybe it’s because the ETs know Gary is sympatico. He will always have tea and crumpets available and is willing to play the Guy Lombardo music they love so much. Gary has his own notions:
“I wonder why people ridicule the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. And just because we can’t go there doesn’t mean they can’t come here. The reason we can see and interact with ETs is because we’re outside under the stars watching for them while everybody else is in the house watching TV, waiting for television to construct their realities. Saturday night we had incredible life-changing experiences. Two people went home in shock. When you are ready, you can come and see for yourself. How can you dismiss something out of hand when you have the opportunity to have your eyes opened?”
The welcome mat is out. The aliens are waiting. The rest is up to you.
The Beale Ciphers
If you’re a numbers freak, congrats, we got numbers for you right at the bottom of this article. These are the Beale Ciphers which, if solved, may lead to the pot of gold at the end of Thomas Beale’s rainbow---2921 pounds of it, together with 5100 pounds of silver and another $1.5 million in precious jewels just for the hell of it. Good luck, it’s been quite a while now, 200 years to be exact.
Beale was a 19th century adventurer who was said to discover gold and silver on a hunting trip near the current Colorado-New Mexico border. He hauled his new riches home to Virginia and buried them, confiding the location, contents and heirs in three separate ciphers. To this day, only one of these ciphers (describing the contents) has been decrypted.
The codes are basic substitution ciphers. Each number represents a letter of the alphabet, which can be found by numbering the words in a “key” text. For example, take the cipher [87 118]. If the key text is Mary Roach’s book Stiff, just number each word in her book. The 87th word starts with “h.” The 118th word starts with “i.” Therefore, the code spells “hi.” As long as a cipher is available, a substitution cipher is a safe, simple way to encrypt a message. The trouble with Thomas J. Beale’s ciphers is that we don’t have a clue about the keys.
For the past two centuries, attempts to solve the Beale codes have been largely unsuccessful. In the late 19th century, however, an anonymous cryptanalyst stumbled onto the key to Beale’s second cipher---the Declaration of Independence. The codebreaker revealed this opening sentence:
“I have deposited in the county of Buford, about four miles from Buford’s, in an excavation or vault, six feet below the surface of the ground….”
The message describes the treasure in detail and ends with the maddening sweetener: “Paper number one describes the exact locality of the vault so that no difficulty will be had in finding it.”
So far, no luck. Amateur and professional cryptanalysts alike have desperately searched for the lost key texts, consulting the Louisiana Purchase, Shakespeare’s plays, the Magna Carta, the Monroe Doctrine, the United States Constitution, the Star-Spangled Banner, the Lord’s Prayer, the Songs of Solomon, the Book of Psalms old local newspapers and even the thrilling text of the Molasses Act of 1733. Sorry, wrong numbers.
“Cryptanalysts say a second-grader could break the ciphers if he just happened to luck into the documents on which they are based,” writes journalist Ruth Daniloff. But until that happens, the remaining unsolved ciphers are but an unintelligible jumble of numbers. Like all good riddles, the Beale codes have an addictive quality that would-be solvers can’t resist. Made even lustier by the fact that solving them might make one a millionaire.
So get out your metal detectors, magnetometers, Geiger counters, dowsing rods, backhoes and pickaxes and join the crowd. Bring along your favorite medium, the more the merrier. Virginia state law says finders-keepers, even on private property, so the avid treasure-hunters prowl nearby foothills, farms, caves, graveyards, cisterns, creeks and roads. One of them insists the pot of gold is buried under the local visitors’ center, right under the ladies room. He could be on his way there now, tunneling through the night, wired, exhausted, in a trance, “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the headphones. Somewhere, Thomas Beale is laughing.
Stoned Again
Stonehenge in southern England ranks near the top among the world’s most iconic archaeological sites and is one of its greatest enigmas. The megalithic circle on Salisbury Plain inspires awe and fascination---but also intense debate 4600 years after it was built by ancient Britons who left no written record.
Everyone in England has his or her own ideas about the place. Folklore has it that Stonehenge was created by Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, who magically transported the massive stones from Ireland, where giants had assembled them. Others claim the invading Danes erected the circle or perhaps it’s the ruins of a Roman temple or even a landing area for alien spacecraft. Archaeological investigation of the site dates back to the 1660s, when it was first surveyed by antiquarian John Aubrey, who wrongly credited the installation to the Celts, who moved in much later.
Recently, a radical new theory as arisen---that Stonehenge served as a “prehistoric Lourdes” where people came to be healed. This notion revolves around the smaller bluestones there which researchers argue must have been credited with magical powers, allowing them to be floated, dragged and hauled 145 miles from west Wales. Excavations at Stonehenge by Tim Darville of Bournemouth University in 2008 bolstered that hypothesis when a number of Bronze age skeletons with signs of deformities were unearthed.
Competing to solve the enduring prehistoric puzzle is Sheffield University’s Mike Parker Pearson, who claims that Stonehenge was a center for ancestor worship linked by the River Avon and two ceremonial avenues to a matching wooden circle at nearby Durrington Wells. Supposedly, the two circles with their temporary and permanent structures represented the domains of the living and the dead. “Stonehenge isn’t a monument in isolation,” Pearson claims, “it is actually one of a pair---one in stone, one in timber. Stonehenge is a kind of spirit home for the ancestors.”
Gary Borse would naturally beg to differ.
The WOW! Signal
One summer night in 1977, Jerry Ehman, a volunteer for SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, may have become the first human ever to receive an intentional message from an alien world. Ehman was scanning radio waves from deep space, hoping to randomly come across a signal which might be sent by intelligent aliens. Suddenly, he saw his measurements spike.
The signal Ehman received lasted for 72 seconds, the longest possible time it could be measured by the array that Ehman was using. It was loud and appeared to have been transmitted from a place no human has gone before---the constellation Sagittarius, near a star called Tau Sagittari, 120 light-years away.
Ehman was flabbergasted and quickly penned the remark “WOW!” on the original printout of the signal. All attempts to locate the signal have failed, leading to much controversy and mystery concerning its origins and its meaning. Jerry Ehman and several SETI colleagues are considering a meeting at Gary Borse’s house to get a proper explanation.
That's all, folks….
