Forgotten: The Kundanbagh Horror House

He must've eventually gotten used to the bodies. There were three of them, lying prone on the dust-covered bed. The first time Mohammed Sajid broke through the window into the two storey house was some time in early Summer of 2002, and since then he had been routinely making his way into the abandoned home - after all, there was nobody alive in the house to watch him. He would often raid the empty rooms, opening all the almirahs (armoires) and rifling through the cheque books of the departed family. It was only when he was caught by the local Shahinayathgunj police during another crime that he finally told the story of what he had found in that accursed house. This confession would jump-start a media journey down a bizarre rabbit hole involving three unexplained deaths, witchcraft, and a house full of ghosts...

Something Terrible Happened Here...

One of the many photos of the house

The house in question was nestled in the city colony Kundanbagh within the city of Hyderabad, which is the capital of the Indian state of Telangana. Mohammed Sajid was arrested sometime in early September of 2002, and the police soon began their investigation of the abandoned house about which he seemingly had so many stories. This police investigation either took place on the 7th of September 2002, or one week later - the sources are unclear. A 56-year-old divorced woman from West Godavari named Jayaprada lived in the house with her two daughters, but this small family hadn't been seen by their neighbours for months. The last time anyone had said that they'd seen them was in June - and the stories the neighbours had to tell about this family were worrying to say the least. The community said that the people who lived in the house were 'a queer people' who apparently practiced witchcraft or something very much like it.

They would apparently light candles at midnight and walk around their house, and strange noises were often heard coming from the building. People reported that they had sometimes seen what appeared to be bottles of blood hung out on their verandah (open air porch). One of their daughters was said to have sometimes been observed sat outside on the porch playing with one of these blood bottles. Despite their garbage bins being just two minutes' walk away from the house, they would always use the car to travel this minuscule distance. Jayaprada would use an axe to chase away passersby - and it is said that her husband had left her because of how dangerous the family was. There was no money flowing into the house, no cable connection. Two to three years' worth of electrical bills had been paid in advance. A complaint had been filed about the odd family by some students from a nearby college roughly two years ago, according to the assistant commissioner of police for the area, P. Rama Rao.

The police soon learned that the family had mysteriously gone missing in June of that year - nobody saw them and presumably everyone was much too scared of them to go up to their door and enquire as to their wellbeing. Newspapers from June 21st had piled up on their porch, and the front door was locked from the inside. The police soon found the entrance which had perhaps been used by Sajid, however, as they discovered that there was a side door which wasn't padlocked. When the policemen got inside the house, they noted that the entire place had been ransacked - perhaps thanks to Sajid's handiwork - and that the family's clothes had been neatly stacked next to their bodies. Various documents were scattered all over the floor. The bodies were badly decomposed. The temperature had not been too high during that period, and so putrefication had been much slower than it might otherwise have been, meaning that the neighbours had not even noticed the stench of decaying bodies. A bottle of black liquid was discovered in the room where the bodies lay, and it was promptly sent off to a lab for analysis along with the bodies for autopsy.

Tall Tales

After such an upsetting incident (which was reported in local newspapers at the time and so is unlikely to have been a total hoax), it is hardly surprising that legends started to take root. Although details about what came of the autopsy examination are seemingly nonexistent - with a report from the time simply resorting to speculating that the cause of death was poisoning - stories about what this autopsy found have seemingly sprung up in the absence of any real information. Well, either this or there is real information that I have failed to find. What these stories say is that the autopsies revealed that the family had been dead for six months. This, of course, placed something of a spanner into the works of a purely materialistic explanation of this whole situation - the family had stopped being regularly seen three months after they had supposedly died. The residents of the surrounding city of Hyderabad were now questioning who they had been seeing performing those bizarre rituals and threatening passersby with axes.

Although the house lacks electricity after having been derelict for over a decade now, lights are apparently still turned on at night for no discernible reason. The gates are always locked, and there is a line of large rocks across the driveway for some nebulous symbolic purpose. There is a story about a cyclist whose headlight spontaneously went out as he entered the lane on which the haunted house is situated, resulting in him immediately getting into an accident with one of his friends who was driving along the lane from the opposite direction. The police are now apparently very present around the house to prevent any would-be ghost hunters from breaking and entering.

The Sowmith Testimony

A Quora forum user named Sowmith Raja claimed to have once been something of an afficionado for the stories surrounding the mysterious house. He lives in Hyderabad, and if his testimony is to be believed then he found something far stranger than any of the other stories while investigating the alleged haunted house. He discovered that the house which had been photographed and previously thought to have been the house in which the strange things had happened didn't quite fit the description of the property given in the story. There was no garbage disposal point two minutes away from it - and the nearest garbage disposal point was two minutes away from a different house. Beside the house which had been photographed was a lane which split into two. One of these lanes was fairly well-lit with streetlights while the other was completely dark. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the dark lane was the one which had the garbage disposal point on it and thus also had the real haunted house.

A photo that might portray the castle

On this lane there are three doors which are painted dark green, and are higher off the ground than normal doors. The three doors all lead to the same stretch of grounds, and contained within these grounds are several structures - a bungalow (as is sometimes described in variations of the main story despite the supposedly legitimate haunted house being two storeys high) and a castle-looking building. This odd space is apparently what is known as the Kundanbagh Haunted Palace, and it is much less well-known than the fake house which was apparently highlighted as being the location of the crime by the CID to stop people breaking in - as they allegedly did one Ramadan in order to ransack the place and vandalise a Honda City car which had apparently been previously parked outside this haunted palace.

A photograph which might portray the gates

The story about the light on the upper floor always being on in the haunted house is said to instead refer to the castle building by Mr. Raja. He says there are nightly police patrols around the haunted palace area, and that there was once a sign on the gates which read 'CID RESTRICTED AREA'. However, I must admit to being somewhat skeptical of what Mr. Raja is saying here on the grounds that he seems to have been able to enter this highly guarded area and yet it seemingly never occurred to him to take any photographs which could be used as evidence for his claims. Then again, there are a few photographs floating around the Internet which show the so-called haunted house as being a very different looking structure to what is normally depicted in other mainstream photographs, and this odd structure has dark green doors...

Turning on the Light

A blogger by the name of Aditya Chintha claimed in 2013 that he had solved the mystery of the haunted house and that he had conclusively debunked the claims made about it. He did so in a blog post which was later taken down 'due to the concern of the people in the neighbourhood'. Luckily, I have been able to retrieve the original post thanks to the Wayback Machine - and the story he uncovered is intriguing not least because it flies directly in the face of much of the rest of the testimony given about what may or may not be going on in the Kundanbagh house. He too lives in Hyderabad, and so during the summer of that fateful year he went out with a group of his friends to try and find the house. While he initially had some difficulties locating it, thanks in no small part to the reluctance of the people in the neighbourhood to reveal where it was - he and his companions were eventually able to find it - and they were sorely disappointed. It looked like a normal house. The gates had been locked and there were indeed rocks out in front of of the driveway, but a conversation with a neighbour cleared this up quickly - the residents of the house (yes, there were apparently people now living in the house) had locked the gate to discourage potential ghost hunters from breaking in while they were out on summer vacation. The stones were apparently placed there to make sure that people couldn't use the driveway as a free space to park their cars or bikes. Aditya thus considers the story to have been conclusively debunked. I am not so sure...

A photograph taken by Aditya Chintha depicting the gates and the stones outside said gates.

Theories

The neighbours to which Aditya talked said that the story about the strange family and their unexplained deaths had been true - and I am also inclined to believe that this is the case. It was reported in the Times of India newspaper in 2002 as the story broke. The details about the family and their deaths can all be backed up with proper sources - but unfortunately the detail about the autopsy finding that the family had died three months before they went missing cannot be verified as of yet. I will of course continue searching for a source, but I have not currently found one which I am comfortable with trusting. Aditya's explanation makes some sense in this context - and if we are to assume that the story about the ghostlly manifestations is false then we are still faced with an odd story about a family of witches who died under mysterious circumstances.

The testimony given by Sowmith Raja is intriguing, especially in light of the seemingly distinct buildings shown in different photographs from across the Internet - but unfortunately the lack of photographs taken by Mr. Raja himself points towards his story having potentially been fictional. Overall, the whole situation with this literally ungodly house is a tangled web of conflicting accounts. I've presented the information - make up your own mind.

There's Something in Devil's Hole!

It was 1969. Brushing his mattted brown hair out of his eyes, Charlie Manson looked up at the sun beating down on his Family from above Death Valley, Nevada. Perhaps he thought he was destined to be the 20th Century Moses - he was leading his followers through the desert towards a safe haven in which they could live. He had wandered for days through the desolate wastelands, and he now believed that he had finally found his Promised Land. He was now in the Amargosa Desert - one of the hottest areas in the Western Hemisphere, and only separated from the ominous stretches of Death Valley by the Funeral Mountains. He was looking at Devil's Hole - a fissure in the ground that led straight down into a labyrinth of flooded caves. However, Manson was certain that he wasn't just looking at the entrance to caves occupied only by water - instead, he was staring at the gateway to a lost underground city, and to the 'Bottomless Pit' mentioned in the Biblical Book of Revelation (9:1-12). The US Government was covering this up. All he had to do was drain the floodwater from the caverns to reveal what would surely be a haven for his flourishing cult in which they could escape the coming Helter Skelter Apocalypse. Legend has it that he would spend three days inside the observation area above the hole, meditating and trying to figure out a way to drain the caves of water.

Teleporting Fish and Tiny Tsunamis

Death Valley was declared to be an American National Monument in 1933 before finally being officially recognised as a National Park in 1994. There is a detached unit of this same National Park in what is called the Ash Meadows Complex, and this specific unit is called Devil's Hole - a geothermal pool situated within a limestone cavern. Its waters have a near constant temperature of 33°C, and a salinity which is just as consistent. It is at leas 500ft deep, but the bottom of the pool has never been mapped. As far as anyone knows, it might as well go down forever. There is an opening at the surface of the pool which is approximately 6x18ft wide, and leads down into caverns which are at least a further 300ft deep. Geologists JM Landwehr and IJ Winograd have stated that the pool formed over 500,000 years ago. Tectonic activity from earthquakes as far away as Indonesia, Chile and Japan has been recorded in the pool - which makes itself known in the form of small-scale tsunamis within its cavernous depths. Water has been observed to splash up to heights of up to two meters onto the walls of the hole.

The mysterious pupfish in question

The hole is also home to a confusing biological enigma known as the Devil's Hole Pupfish. The pupfish is unique to the hot, oxygen-poor water within the mysterious chasm - and has been described as the world's rarest fish. There are naturally usually no more than 500 of these fish, meaning that they were one of the first species to be officially protected by the Endangered Species Act in America as of 1966. Local landowners do not have the right to draw water from the hole due to the laws surrounding the protection of the rare fish. They have been found at depths of up to 66ft in the hole, but normally forage on the algae and diatoms growing on a shallow rock shelf near the surface. The population of these exceptionally rare fish has been decreasing from 200 in 2005 to only 75 in 2013. This decline is as of yet unexplained. The mysterious element of this information, which might otherwise be uninteresting from a Fortean perspective, is that it seems as if the fish appeared in the hole as soon as the hole opened up. According to University of California researchers Ismael Saglam and Michael Miller, it seems as if the collapse of the cavern's roof and the near-instant colonisation of the pool by this unique species of fish may have been caused by an 'unidentified geologic event'. So there we have it - teleporting fish!

Into the Abyss

Of course, the Endangered Species Act and other conservation acts by the US Government now protect the hole from any unwanted visitors - but such was evidently not the case in 1965, and this fact would cost two children their lives. Three young adventurers took the plunge into Devil's Hole in the darkness of nighttime on June 20th of 1965. They were going skin-diving that fateful Sunday night, and were presumably simply eager to make memories among their friend group. There were actually four of them originally, but one apparently had decided that it wasn't a good idea, and had stayed on dry land. The one diiver that survived the experience would forever be left with memories of a very different kind. Among the original three were brothers-in-law David Rose (aged 20) and Paul Giancontieri (aged 19) - and they would be the unfortunate two would never be seen again after getting into the water that night. 20-year-old Paula Rose, who had been married to David for two months at the time, was waiting outside the hole for her husband to emerge - and so was Giancontieri's mother - and both were horrified when only one diver clambered out of the water.

The search effort began soon after this horrifying double-disappearance. Fourty-five rangers and volunteer divers patrolled the cave for days, splitting into teams of four or five men each and diving to depths of 315ft with the aid of air tanks strapped to their backs. One of these divers was a man named Jim Houtz, and reporter Chris Dixon for the surfing magazine The Inertia spoke to him about his experiences with diving down into Devil's Hole in 2011. Just before the search commenced, he was giving a presentation on diving at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club to about sixty or seventy people. He suddenly got a call from the Federal Government asking him if there were any air pockets down in the hole - to which he replied in the affirmative. He quickly went up to Los Alamos accompanied by a small crew, whereupon he was met by a seaplane - a Grumman Albatross - on the runway with its engines running. He and his men boarded the plane, and they promptly took off, leaving the hatch open in their haste. They tried to land in the Ash Meadows Complex, but after three or four attempts they decided that this would be impossible. Instead, they landed at Nellis Air Force Base at dawn. The state police were out there, along with the military and the media. Houtz set up his first team of two men, including Harry Wham - who had accompanied Mel Fisher on a failed treasure-hunting dive in 1957 and would later be murdered by family members in 1981. They descended into the hole in increments, with divers at two different junctions to combat any issues that might've been posed by decompression. When Houtz got down to the lower chamber of the endless pit, he found a snorkel mask and a diving fin. A dimly-lit flashlight was discovered tied to a rock, and a decompression chart was later found as well. Houtz made a point of saying that once someone gets that deep, they will start to suffer from nitrogen narcosis, which induces a drunken state and makes it far more likely that they'll do something stupid. He had been training to overcome this.

A photo of Jim Houtz in Devil's Hole

Houtz returned to the surface and notified everyone about what had happened, and then said that he would go back down to recover the last of the discarded gear. He made it down to a depth of 325ft, which was marked by a little ledge after which the vast underwater pit opens up like a colossal inverted funnel. The water apparently gets slightly warmer as it goes deeper. Lt. Walter Butt of the Clarke County Sheriff's Department said that they would've continued the search if there was 'any indication that the bodies could be discovered'. The search for the missing boys was called off just before midnight on June 22nd 1965 - and their bodies have never been found.

Out of the Abyss?

It was Spring of 1892, and the unincorporated community of Daggett in San Bernadino County, California was about to be seized by monster fever. One Mr. George May reported to The San Francisco Examiner that sightings of a colossal reptile had been taking place around the community, and that a party was being organised to pursue the creature. According to May, EW Spear was seemingly the first to see the monster after having followed a strange trail he had found. He described the entity as being 'thirty feet long and thoroughly unpossessing'. Spear promptly retreated from the scene and would later tell his story to the local community, only to be laughed at. Henry Brown became the next witness, seeing the same creature and beating just as much of a hasty retreat from the beast's territory.

Oscar W. Clark now becomes our central figure. He was a geologist working with the Royal Academy of Sciences, and had been staying in Daggett to research the geological features of the coast there. He was on his way through the Death Valley desert to get some rest in the resort city of Coronado when he caught sight of the colossal critter. He was approximately 30 miles away from Daggett by 6pm when he stopped to rest, having already made some exciting additions to his fossil collection. He stole a glance to the Southwest through the desert haze, whereupon he saw a strange entity moving along roughly one mile away from his position. He approached it - and was 'both elated and horrified' to see something completely unlike anything else he knew to exist in our modern era. He described the immense creature as being 30ft long and as partially walking on its hind feet and partially 'dragging itself through the sand'. It left strange tracks, showing three-toed feet and 'a peculiar scratchy configuration' in the sand beneath it whenever it changed from walking to dragging itself. Its forelimbs were very short, but it sometimes used them to grasp at scraggly pieces of foliage to eat. There was a 'strong, conical spine' on the thumb of the forefoot. When the animal was stood upright it was said to be 14ft tall. Its head was the size of a large cask and was shaped like that of a horse. The body was as large as an elephant's, and its tail reminded Clark of that of an alligator. The whole thing was liver-coloured with bronze spots, and its eyes were described as being the size of saucers and as projecting out from its head - gleaming with fire. Steam-like vapour was exhaled from its mouth, and apparently smelled of 'something awful'.

An oil painting of an Iguanodon by Zdeněk Burian

He claimed that the monster was on the edge of a 'great sinkhole of alkaline water' which his guides had previously informed him was bottomless, and he speculated to be a remnant of Death Valley's days as an 'inland sea' (Lake Manly in the mid-Pleistocene era). Clark crept up on the beast, waiting in the sand approximately 100 yards away from it - from which vantage point he was able to watch the creature for half an hour. After this time had elapsed, the beast let out a 'blood-curdling' bellow - bringing itself to the edge of the hole before lashing its tail and falling into a dormant state. Clark took this as his cue to leave the scene - taking the opportunity to attempt to obtain the assistance of his guides in capturing the sleeping monster. However, they were apparently terrified and refused to help him.

According to the newspaper report, he would eventually send a description of his experience to the Smithsonian Institution so that they might consider organising a scientific party to capture the reptilian fiend. He said that he was 'rather anticipated' by the testimonies of Spear and Brown, and claimed that the monster he had seen was 'living proof of the exact authenticity of the researches made by savants into the field of paleontological study'. He was apparently certain that what he had seen was a specimen of 'Iguanodon Bennissantensis of the European Jurassic' - satisfied that his deductions were 100% correct based on his knowledge of the geological features of the Pacific slope, specifically of the Death Valley area. The species 'Bennissantensis' does not actually exist, but the species 'Bernissartensis' does, and so I am satisfied that this is not a slip-up which renders the story an obvious hoax. Of course, it seems likely that this incident was just one of the many such happenings fabricated by bored journalists in the days of yellow journalism. Researcher John LeMay analysed the report and proved to be unable to match the people mentioned in the article to any real people, unfortunately.

Conclusions

LeMay, however, also pointed out that the bottomless pit mentioned by Clark in this report was likely Devil's Hole, and then went on to talk about Loren Coleman's observation that places with the word 'devil' in the name are often rife with reported paranormal activity. If the reports that I've presented in this article are anything to go by, then it is clear that Devil's Hole is no different to any of the examples cited by Coleman.

Sources

'Devil's Hole' on Wikipedia

Information Provided by the National Park Service

'In A Hole' for The Economist

'We Know Where the World's Loneliest Species Came From' for BBC Earth

'Devil's Hole' on spookygeology.com

'Haunted Hikes' by Andrea Lankford

The Tuscaloosa News on June 23rd, 1965

'A Conversation with the King of Abalonia' for The Inertia

'Devil's Hole' on atlasobscura.com

'Cowboys and Saurians' by John LeMay

Full Spectrum Dominance?

Today, the cofounder of the research group to which I belong (The MRG) is here to talk about the UFO phenomenon's historical expansion attempts, and which of these are still very much active today and which have been abandoned by the Other for inscrutible reasons. Without further ado, I present to you - HL! 

The Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 24th, 1947

It all started on June 24th, 1947. The Phenomenon had its 20th Century genesis, buzzing the skies of our humble planet with baffling aerial objects. In about three years time on from this, the Phenomenon stepped up its game and started landing these strange craft in isolated fields and disgorging equally incomprehensible entities. Some people would even talk to these creatures, and a lucky (or unlucky) few would get a firsthand look at the innards of their UFOs and maybe even their supposed home-worlds. 

Meanwhile, the Phenomenon had moved towards breaching the other great unknown on our planet - the deep blue sea! Here, it would clearly connect this new group of anomalies - known as Unidentified Submersible Objects - with the first class of conundrums. It would show UFOs emerging from the abyss and flying up into the skies, and would compose vast apparitions of motherships dropping probes into the world's oceans. Just as it did in 1947, it was soon employing a new type of apparition. These were phantom submarines that could move through water like a hot knife through butter, moving faster and with more agility than anything known to the US or Soviet Union at the time - or indeed today. The next step was to show that the entities behind the Phenomenon had started to colonise our planet and exploit it just like we had. A lucky (??) few were taken by these strange submarines and given tours around vast underwater bases, usually comprised of great tunnels criss-crossing the seabed. 

Now that both air and sea were dominated by these impossible, otherworldly creatures, there was one domain left to be conquered - the very ground we walk upon. The vehicle of choice this time would be strange automobiles, zipping along secluded country roads without wheels or with impossibly sleek designs. It wasn't rare to see these vehicles sucked up by UFOs or flying off into the great beyond on their own accord, usually driven by strange humanoid entities.  It would also associate these weird 'Cosmic Cars' with colossal underground bases, and strange complexes hidden away in the middle of nowhere. This was one of the first great failures of the Phenomenon, however, because these high strangeness events never really caught on, so to speak. They remained something very much on the down-low, in the liminal space between public knowledge and total obscurity.

And so the master plan of the Cosmic Trickster to infiltrate all terrain remained just that - a distant plan. Perhaps human culture somehow selected UFOs and USOs as feasible enough, but everything else as far too outlandish to exist. Some of the concepts associated with the Cosmic Cars have seeped into Fortean subculture regardless, however, such as the Deep Underground Military Bases (DUMBs) of MILAB encounters and the 'Tic Tac' UFO bases supposedly situated somewhere near Catalina Island in California. However, the dream of the Cosmic Trickster to successfully take over all that we might hold dear has fortunately remained naught but a human's nightmare...

Well wasn't that intriguing? I have slightly different theories about the nature of the UFO phenomenon, and so I don't agree with all that has been said here - but I think that there are valid points to be gleaned from this material. The elements as perceived within esoteric culture have always had their elementals - beings of Earth, Fire, Water and Air. Perhaps that's what we're looking at here with this 'Full Spectrum Domination'? Anyway - I hope you enjoyed this, and I hope you'll look forward to further explorations of HL's Fortean worldview. 

Intergalactic Diva: The Pamela Stonebrooke Story

It's just human nature. If something exists, one of the ways we will try to explore it is by trying to have sex with it. Seeing as existence is required for this sexual exploration, I think that one of the best cases to be made for the existence of extraterrestrial life is the fact that many experiencers have claimed to have had some quite saucy encounters with the space invaders. You see my logic here? One of these experiencers is Pamela Stonebrooke, the self-titled Intergalactic Diva.

The Inside Scoop

The cover art of her album 'Alien'

Pamela's first alien experiences were of a non-sexual variety, and took place when she was somewhere between the ages of eight or nine. Her first odd experience was that of finding two strange scars on her skin. She had no idea where they had come from at the time - they had seemingly 'just showed up' - but when she grew older and more experienced she realised that they were likely the infamous 'scoop marks' left by extraterrestrial tissue sampling. She still has the scars on her shin, and she showed them to reporter Al Ridenour. These marks may have appeared without explanation, but her first consciously-recalled experience would be coming soon.

She eventually lost interest in the extraterrestrial phenomenon, and instead focused on her music career. Her talent was prodigious. Inspired by Billie Holiday, she assembled her first rock band at age sixteen - and after a tour through various cabarets and topless lounges (once she was of age, obviously) - she moved to California in 1975. Eventually, she was chosen to open the Playboy Club of Roppongi, Japan, and continued to perform with the top Japanese jazz musicians for eight years ater that. She then moved back to America to Los Angeles, where she quickly inserted herself into the local jazz scene as a platinum-haired wild child. However, she still maintained her interest in esoterica through the lens of astral travel and the New Age movement. She would later profess to be an experienced out-of-body traveller, and expressed some of her mystical leanings through her darker music throughout the ages. For example, she performed as Lilith in Exile and Incubus - both ironically named after malevolent spirits associated with sexuality. The irony will become apparent later.

It was 1994, and Pamela was working as a celebrity agent in Houston, Texas. She had not yet launched herself into her starstruck career as a jazz singer, but it seems that the space people didn't particularly care whether or not she had made it big yet. That day, she had just come home from working a long hours shift at her office, and had decided to go to sleep early. She closed her eyes and drifted off into a peaceful sleep - but when she woke she found that a scheduled return to the office would no longer be possible for her in that moment. She was curled in the foetal position in a dimly-lit metallic room 'shaped like a truncated pyramid', and the realisation quickly dawned on her that she was seemingly on board a spaceship. A line of small, grey-skinned beings walked into the room and looked at her. One of them - seemingly female - approached her and told her not to be afraid before requesting that she follow it. Perhaps realising that she had no other real options, she followed the Grey alien through a door into another room. The alien shut the door behind them and it instantly disappeared into the wall. When she turned from having watched the door vanish, she was startled to see that three female aliens of even smaller stature were looking up at her. She described them as being very frail like the other Greys, but with wispy hair like that of chemotherapy patients on their heads. They ran over to her, grabbed her arms and started calling her 'mummy'. A wave of fear suddenly crashed into her - leaving her dumbfounded with absolute terror before she suddenly found herself back in her bed. Staggering out of bed, brain still blazing with panic, she went to the bathroom to splash her face with water in an attempt to shake off what she perhaps thought was just a dream. 

The cover art of her album 'Experiencer'

As she was doing so, she had to roll up the sleeves of her kimono - and was horrified to see numerous small bruises on her arms. The reality of the experience came flooding back to her instantaneously, and she remembered when the aliens had grabbed her arms. Returning to bed, presumably with trepidation, she found herself unable to get a good night's sleep for obvious reasons. The experience continued to affect her in this way for 'nearly a year'.

Pamela would eventually agree to subject herself to hypnotic regression to try and retrieve further memories of alien contact - and she was terrified by what she uncovered. As she started to recall more and more, she came to the realisation that she had been subjected to several examinations by extraterrestrial Greys throughout the years - and that the aliens had been responsible for the four phantom pregnancies she had experienced. The aliens also showed her an apocalyptic vision of the future. She always found it 'pretty ludicrous', and actually spent the first year and a half after remembering it all feeling truly traumatised by it - but nonetheless she was able to embrace it as part of herself. She recruited an artist to draw one of the Reptilian aliens she now remembered having contact with, and even started a support group for people who had experienced similar phenomena. This support group, I presume, was what is referred to as having taken place in the Encino Women's Center in Los Angeles. An individual named Daryl Anka apparently made contact with an extraterrestrial metaphysician named Bashar in these sessions, and would relay messages of desire for intergalactic peace. Pamela told The Sun Online that she was able to overcome the embarrassment factor quite quickly and to tell her friends and family about what had happened to her. She used her musical talent - and career as a smoky-voiced jazz singer - to disperse some of the messages delivered to her support group by Bashar. Her song 'Alien' contains a segment consisting of her reading out a message from the extraterrestrial through a voice modulator. It's certainly an experience to listen to.

Scaled For Her Pleasure

A portrait of the alien entity involved with the sexual liason

It was 1998 - a few years after she had composed Alien - that her contact experiences took a turn for the erotic. She would eventually go on to have three encounters with an extraordinarily sexually talented Reptilian alien. The first of these illicit rendez-vous started when she woke from her sleep to discover herself already making love with a 'gorgeous blond man' whom she compared to a Greek god. She was shocked - seeing as she apparently never brought people home like she had evidently done that night - and eventually she concluded that she must've been having a lucid dream. She closed her eyes and relaxed, enjoying how 'comfortable' she felt with the unknown presence. When she next opened her eyes - however - this supposed dream became something far less conventional. The intercourse became more aggressive - 'the energy felt totally different' - and apparently the size of her partner increased inexplicably. The Greek god had morphed into a 6ft-tall reptilian humanoid with a vaguely alligator-like snout and scaly, snake-like skin. She realised that she was 'making love to a shape-shifting alien', and when the entity sensed that she was scared it simply whispered 'We've always been together, we love each other'. The telepathic communication she shared with the Reptilian was apparently so intense and sensual that she felt happy to simply surrender to the intensely enjoyable sexual experience. She described the Reptilian as being sly and slick, and as having a 'playful, kind of bad-boy attitude'. The orgasms she experienced as a result were like nothing she'd ever felt before - it was as if the climax extended to every single cell in her body.

She would eventually go on to appear on Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell to talk about her experiences, and would often say that she had received letters and emails from women relieved to know that someone else had experienced something similar. She regards these correspondences as opportunities to help people who might otherwise be institutionalised or even convinced that they are possessed by demons. An alien revelation that the Earth may well be nothing more than 'one big, terraformed experiment' inspired her to create an album called Experiencer - and this name would also be shared by a book that she published in late 2001. However, she chose to publish it seemingly exclusively on CD - and seeing as that medium is now effectively defunct, the book has also vanished. Her website is also now down (a reptile dysfunction, anyone?). I fear that her story may soon vanish to the ether if it is not publicised in blogs like this.

Sources

'Alien Lizard Jazz Goddess' by Al Ridenour

'Screwed by the Aliens' by Timothy Beckley and Sean Casteel

'Are You... Experienced?' by Skylaire Alfvegren for LA Weekly

'Sex and Alien Encounters' on crystalinks.com

That Time an Alien was Shot Dead by Military Police

In a two-hour period between 03:00 and 05:00 on January 18th, 1978, unidentified flying objects were sighted over Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base in Burlington County, New Jersey. Shortly after the sighting, a military policeman known by the pseudonym Jeffrey Morse was ordered to go to gate #5 of McGuire Air Force Base to allow a state trooper to enter the site after an alert had been issued. The trooper apparently wanted access to a runway area which led to the very back of the airfield and connected to a heavily wooded area which is part of the Fort Dix training area. The trooper informed Morse that a Fort Dix MP (Military Police) had been pursuing a low-flying object, described as oval shaped and featureless, glowing with a bluish-green colour. The object hovered over the MP’s car, and a ‘thing’ appeared in front of the car, said to be about 4ft tall and greyish-brown in colour. It had long arms, a slender body and a ‘fat’ head. The MP had panicked and fired five rounds from his .45 calibre handgun into the body of the creature, and another into the UFO above him, which then flew straight up to join with eleven other objects high in the sky. The alien then ran off into the woods and escaped over the fence between the two bases before collapsing and dying on the deserted runway to which the state trooper had requested access.

An artist's rendition of the incident

Morse Meets the Martian

By the time that Morse heard about the incident, there were already several patrols involved. Morse and the state trooper found the body of the alien near the runway, likely having climbed over the fence and died while running. Despite the aberrant turn of events, Morse and his colleagues still followed normal crime scene procedure, and attempted to rope off the area before the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) came over and took charge of the situation, relegating Morse to a background role, but he could still see what was going on from a distance. He claims that there was a ‘bad stench’ coming from the body, which he compared to ammonia.

An eyewitness sketch of the base's layout

At varying times during his patrol duty, Morse was within 40-70ft from the prostrate body on runway #5. He was never close enough to gauge finer details like facial features or its hands and feet, but as he revealed under additional interviews done for a MUFON symposium, he could see that the unclad, hairless body of the creature was wet, shiny and snake-like under the glare of truck headlights. This description fits the anatomical description so often heard from supposed military sources who have claimed to see such beings at crash sites, as well as by an intriguing medical source who says that they performed an autopsy on such a specimen in the early 1950s. These beings are often called ‘Grays’ because of their skin colouration, and are widely known in UFO literature, supposedly being the entities behind the famed Roswell Crash.

In that same MUFON interview, Morse was offered the suggestion that the entity could have been a deer or an escaped ape from a nearby military experimentation lab, but Morse immediately replied ‘No zoo nearby. We did have a problem with deer on the runway, but no one ever made such a big fuss over a deer’. Morse also claimed that there was a strong smell of ammonia in the night air, which is also a feature shared by many other UFO cases.

Eyewitness sketch of the body seen

Later that day, a blue beret-wearing team from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base arrived in a C-141 aircraft and approached the body. They sprayed the creature’s corpse with some kind of material projected from a portable tank before covering it with a white sheet, and by daybreak the body had been carefully set down on a platform with a wooden frame built around it. Finally, this frame was placed into a large, square metal container of silvery colour, which was estimated to be about 10x10ft with ‘undistinguishable’ blue markings. The mysterious men then loaded the box-in-a-box into the plane using a fork-lift and took off. Nothing more was said about the incident; no report was made, and Morse and his companion were told that they would be court-martialled if they said anything about their experience on that day.

Two days after the event, Morse and the other participants in the bizarre happening were summoned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where they were subject to an intimidating interrogation about the weird occurrence and were once again warned to not talk about the incident. As a side-note, Morse has supplied the names of the interrogators from his memories of their name badges, and their identities have been verified. Obviously, their names will not be listed here. According to Morse, the people ‘told me about my duty to keep my mouth shut… I signed a form and it is supposed to bind me for life.’ Quickly after returning to McGuire Air Force Base, Morse had more questioning forthcoming, being debriefed about the event by his commanding officer – a lieutenant colonel whose name has also been confirmed. Shortly after the debrief had finished, each of the airmen who were involved in the encounter were transferred to separate overseas bases, with Morse being shipped to Okinawa, one of the Ryukyu Islands of Japan.

The McGuire case is also interesting because a prominent UFO investigator named George Filer claimed to have been present at the base on the morning of January 18th in 1978, and told NIDS (National Institute for Discovery Science) that he had witnessed a commotion with red lights on one of the runways in question when he arrived at the base at 04:00. Filer further claimed that he heard from a Senior Master Sergeant at the McGuire command post on the same morning that UFO activity had been sighted by the control tower and captured on radar at Fort Dix, and that an alien had been shot and found dead on the runway at McGuire.

In one more strange incident, this time in October of 1986 when Morse went on a trip back to the United States to visit his family. He was ‘detained’ in California under rather obscure pretences. Outraged at the holdup, he filed a lawsuit against the California-based authority and notified the MUFON interviewer (named Stringfield) so that he could return to the US in January 1987 for court appearances. During Mores’s layover in the States, however, it seemed that he could learn nothing more about the cause or reason for his detainment, or the identity of the source who ordered the so-called ‘pick and hold’ operation. His legal probes had all been stalled in metaphorical red tape.

The aftermath of this bizarre event certainly highlights the strange issue of the alleged harassment of UFO witnesses, apparently in an attempt to intimidate them into silence. Among these methods are the infamous Men in Black, who will be discussed at greater length in a later article. If the story supplied by Morse can be confirmed to be credible, then it could go a great length to undermining the UFO coverup as a whole. Unfortunately, if the government really are behind the UFO coverup (which I personally doubt they are) then Morses’s knowledge about the subject makes him vulnerable to attack and retaliation, thus impeding his ability to live a normal life.

Despite the truly epic story that I have laid out for you, there are always going to be those who deny its veracity based on numerous different points. For example, the ‘Incident Report’ that Morse supplied has been disputed by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) because the style of writing and terminology used within supposedly does not follow proper Air Force style, thus providing grounds for the accusation that this admittedly-fantastic story is a hoax. One of the key points made by AFOSI was that the pay grades of the witnesses were given instead of their ranks on the official form. However, we must remember to view both the angles taken by the believers and the debunkers with equal skepticism, and this becomes worth it when we realised that the AFOSI statement is incorrect, and that pay grades are frequently filed in official Air Force reports instead of ranks.

Sources

I found this tale originally while browsing through the UFO Casebook. It is on this website that you can also read the official documents pertaining to the military's handling of the case. Further information is available on ThinkAboutIt Docs. 

The Baurú Incident

 It was July 23rd of 1947, and a group of surveyors were working in the countryside near Baurú in the Brazilian state of Sao Paulo when they became aware of a loud whistling noise before noticing the sudden arrival of a saucer-shaped craft. All but one of them, José C Higgins, fled the scene in terror. This is his story.

UFO Contact from Uranus 

Higgins, a topographer, watched the object descend. It was a lens-shaped craft with a surrounding flange, and was roughly 150ft in diameter with a 3ft rim and a height of 15ft, according to one source. Its body was 'crossed by tubes in several directions', and it was from said tubes that the whistling sound emanated. The UFO landed about 150ft away from the terrified topographer, and appeared to be supported by four metallic struts that seemed to bend a little.

A beautiful sci-fi depiction of the incident

His curiosity got the better of him as he walked towards the anomalous aircraft, and saw a black glass window on the craft from which two humanoid shapes seemed to be watching him. A door opened beneath the rim of the object and three entities of about 2.15 meters (7ft) in height emerged. They were wearing inflated transparent suits which covered their bodies like 'plastic bags', and there were metal boxes affixed to their backs. Beneath the bubble-like spacesuits, the creatures are visibly clad in colourful shirts and shorts which appeared to be made of paper as opposed to cloth. Their heads lacked eyebrows or any other hair, and their eyes were described as being large and round. Their legs were said to be proportionately larger than those of a human, and all three of the entities appeared to be identical. Higgins couldn't tell if they were male or female, but he claimed that they had 'a certain beauty' about them.

The entities spoke amongst themselves in an unknown language, and Higgins noticed that they chose to remain entirely in the shade except for some very brief periods. One of them pointed a tube-shaped object at him and motioned for him to enter the door of their odd aircraft. Through this door he could see another, inner door and the end of a 'pipe' which was presumably some kind of corridor.

Higgins presumably decided to try and learn something from his unique situation, and so somehow asked the entities where they came from using gestures. All the sources concur that this was what he did - how on earth (or any other planet for that matter) he did it I have no idea. On the ground, one of the aliens drew a dot surrounded by seven circles. The dot was apparently supposed to represent the Sun - which the beings referred to as 'Alamo' in their language. They pointed to the seventh circle (presumably meant to represent Uranus) and named it as 'Orque'. They gestured alternatingly to the seventh circle and their spacecraft, seeming to imply that they had come from Uranus.

Knowing how most of these alien encounter narratives tended to go, Higgins came to the (likely reasonable) conclusion that the entities may try and forcibly transport him to Uranus. As a subtle ploy, he showed them a picture of his wife and said that he either didn't want to leave her, or wished to take her on the seemingly-inevitable trip to Uranus. Falling for his subterfuge, the giants allowed her to leave the scene and he retreated into the forest beyond.

A considerably less accurate depiction

However, Higgins was not yet ready to completely leave the ostensibly-alien entities behind. His curiosity once again got the better of him and he decided to hide in some bushes and watch the humanoids for a bit. As if the situation couldn't get weirder, the entities appeared to be 'playing like children, jumping in the air and throwing enormous stones'. They played these games for roughly half an hour, and then boarded their craft once again after having 'carefully examined their surroundings'. The UFO took off with its signature whistling sound and the giants were never seen again. Except of course for when entities matching their bizarre description almost exactly were seen again in the Swedish town of Uddevalla in December of 1965 by one Richard Höglund!

'Sometimes I doubt that these things can happen. If it were not for the workers with me at the beginning, it might only have been a strange and fascinating dream' - Higgins later mused, presumably in response to questioning about the bizarre incident.

Monsters of Myth?

Legends from all across the world speak of giants constructing megalithic structures in the dark reaches of deep time. Some stories specifically refer to these massive creatures throwing giant stones between themselves to create these structures from those that they drop. Bigfoot encounters often feature the hairy entities throwing stones at alarmed witnesses, and poltergeists are famous for initiating physically-impossible showers of rocks from nowhere. It seems that the Others definitely enjoy rock-throwing for some reason or another...

Sources

I found the information required to tell this baffling tale on a wide range of different websites, including the Cosmic Jokers site which is now unfortunately entirely defunct as well as Thinkaboutit Docs and UFOArchives. 

To Dance with Devils

It was the early hours of the morning on a fateful day in the early 2000s when a middle-aged woman was found unconscious on the road in a Diwanya suburb. When she was taken to the hospital, she had a horrific story to tell the authorities. Apparently, she was a musician, and she had been hired to provide entertainment for a gathering in a large villa in the neighbourhood she was found in. As the night went on, however, she came to realise that a number of her clients weren’t entirely human. She tried to escape and evidently failed.

Ghoul Party!

This happened in Diwanya, Kuwait (Western Asia). In the early 2000s (source doesn’t give an exact date), stories appeared in the Kuwaiti media detailing the run-in that a hapless victim had with beings that would normally be confined to the dark reaches of mythology and folklore.

Art Source

The musician was a middle-aged woman who plays a traditional Kuwaiti instrument. She received a call from a prospective client who wanted to hire her for her services during the month of Ramadan. Since it is inappropriate to perform music during Ramadan, the witness initially refused - but the caller insisted, and tripled her usual fee - persuading her to go. The callers sent their own driver to pick her up, and what began as a usual musical event suddenly took a sharp turn for the supernatural. The party started early in the evening, but continued on till 12am, at which point some of the attendees began to act bizarrely. A group of young girls at the centre of the room, for example, started to dance very aggressively. They moved in such a vigorous manner that their legs began showing under their long dresses, revealing that their legs were not in fact those of humans - but rather bore a closer resemblance to 'horses’ legs’.

Terrified, as anyone would be in this anomalous situation, the woman ran out of the party where she found the driver who had picked her up waiting for her. Panicked, she quickly got into the car and refused to comment when the driver asked her what was wrong due to being too distraught to speak coherently. After a couple of minutes, however, she had calmed down enough to be asked again by the driver. She told him that some of the partygoers did not have human legs, prompting the driver to reply 'you mean just like mine?’ before revealing his legs under his clothes. Like the young girls at the gathering, they were those of an animal. The woman was hysterical with fear at this point, and so threw herself from the car and landed on the street, rendering herself unconscious. The next day, after reporting the bizarre incident, she decided to return to the villa accompanied by the local authorities. However, the villa was gone. It had completely vanished, leaving nothing behind but an empty yard.

Living Legends?

Ethiopia is sometimes said to be home to satyrs and fauns, which resemble humanoids with goat-like feet and legs. The source from which I garnered this story also makes a link to the Hebrew figure of the Queen of Sheba - or Bilquis - who was said in various folktales and apocryphal accounts from all three Abrahamic faiths to have animal hooves. This links her to the ghoul or ghul, which is sometimes classified as a type of Djinn in Islamic tradition. The words said by the driver just before revealing his non-human identity are also very closely mimicked in Japanese folklore, with the this time coming from the terrifying faceless shapeshifters known as Noppera-bō just before they make their human faces melt away with the intention of scaring the bejesus out of an unfortunate victim.

As for the source in question, well, unfortunately it's no longer available. It was a video on the YouTube channel Mysterious Middle East which has since been removed by the owners of the channel. I have no idea where they heard it from and I haven't been able to find reference to it elsewhere online. I think that this means that my retelling of the story is the sole surviving rendition - which is always pretty neat to know.