“New York circa 1905. "Unloading at banana docks." 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company” [click for full-size original at Shorpy]

Given that the time-traveler hipster is the most viewed page here on Forgetomori, when I saw the time-traveler punk on Anomalist I just had to blog about it. Even though I must be first to admit this is not as impressive, as his clothes are quite clearly in context, his allegedly mohawk hairstyle is quite interesting.

And as it happens, I was about to blog about mohawk hairstyles, because like stamped T-shirts they look like something quite modern, when contrary to stamped T-shirts, they are not.

The oldest known record of a Mohawk hairstyle actually predates the Mohawk tribe: it’s been found on the Clonycavan Man, an Iron Age body in Dublin, Ireland. That’s a 2,300 years old quite well-preserved Mohawk hair. I didn’t include a photo here because it’s still not that much to look for, but just follow the above link to Wikipedia.

It would be the fierce image of tribal warriors that would make the Mohawk hairstyle enter modern popular culture, but long before the punk movement. In World War II, the US 101st Airborne Division famous for it’s bravery fighting in Europe, as depicted on “Band of Brothers”, had a sub-unit selected and trained for an almost suicidal mission: the Filthy Thirteen.

To incite fear in the enemies, and as a leader of the group, Jake McNiece, was part Native-American, they cut their hair Mohawk style and even painted their faces. The photo above was published by Stars and Stripes in June 1944, and soldiers later in the Vietnam war would also sport such hairstyle.

A fictional Vietnam veteran, Travis Bickle, would then be immortalized in “Taxi Driver” (1976).

Which brings us back to the time-traveler punk unloading at banana docks. By definition this sort of “time-traveler photos” will be singled out because of the fashion statements the apparently out of place hipsters/punks will be sporting.

However – this speaks a lot about fashion – as in the most famous photo, here too the punk wasn’t actually making any sort of fashion statement. He may have cut his hair that way for any number of reasons, you don’t know if he only shaved one side of his hair.

Yesterday’s worker at the banana docks with a ridiculous haircut my be tomorrow’s David Beckham.

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“Last fall, on Oct. 8, Gennady Osipovich met with a Gypsy woman to have his future told. He became enraged when the self-proclaimed clairvoyant informed him that he was bound for a "kazyonny dom," or "state-sponsored house," a Russian slang term for prison, regional prosecutors said in a statement Thursday.

Osipovich proceeded to employ dubious logic, according to the prosecutors. In order to prevent this fortune from coming true, Osipovich tried to kill the woman. He pulled out a knife and stabbed her, though she managed to escape.

Tragically, two witnesses were unable to flee in time. Osipovich stabbed each of them repeatedly, and the victims died of the knife wounds, investigators said.

Prosecutors said Osipovich was sentenced to 22 years in a maximum security prison.” [Moscow Times]

As incredible as the story is, and as skeptical as we usually are of such, here’s a link for an official website (in Russian) with confirmation. [via Marginal Revolution]

© forgetomori 2010. | Permalink

This picture gives me the shivers, even though it “has been rather universally labeled a hoax”, as cryptozoologist Loren Coleman points out. Darren Naish over at Tetrapod Zoology wrote an excellent piece back in 2008 on these amazing Hook Island sea monster photos.

It was on Naish’s post that I saw two additional photos that, even knowing they must have been hoaxed, managed to creep me out even further.

Perhaps that has something to do one with the fact one of my terrors since childhood have been giant underwater creatures. But I don’t think I’m alone and the story told by photographer Robert Le Serrec in 1965 that his wife saw this gigantic tadpole-like creature, and he along with friend Henk de Jong got off their boat to get better close-ups and even film this huge 75-80 ft thing is quite unbelievable. According to them, they only returned to the boat when the creature opened its mouth and moved towards them.

The story is highly doubtful even if you don’t take into account that Le Serrec was not a very credible man, that six years earlier he was apparently already talking about making money with a sea-serpent and that according to Coleman even the Interpol was after him.

So, this must have been a hoax, but how he did it? Darren Naish quotes Ivan Sanderson’s suggestions of “either a plastic bag used by the US Navy ‘for experiments in towing petrol’, a deflated skyhook balloon which had become covered in weed, or a roll of cloth which had been tied together in places”.

Naish favors however the idea that “it was a custom-shaped expanse of plastic sheeting, weighted down with sand”, an idea also favored by Bernard Heuvelmans already in 1968.

It’s a very good suggestion. Naish notes how the broken outline of the creature-thing, especially as can be seen in the head close-up photos, show  that “in at least four spots it looks like someone has placed handfuls of sand on top of the edge of the creature: exactly what you would do if trying to weight down a monster-shaped sheet of plastic.”

But this broken outline bothers me. They could be as Naish suggests the result of sand thrown over the black plastic sheet at the bottom of the lagoon, but I tried the best I could to better see the bottom and I would assume the several rocks that can be seen would mark the contour of the creature if it was plastic sheeting weighed down. Apparently, they don’t. The borders go over the rocks, perhaps that’s why Sanderson suggested weed and cloth tied together, because the border is very broken.

Most of the broken outline could be simply due to the water waves distorting the image of the borders of the creature at the bottom. This Japanese video parody of the Le Serrec photo is funny, but it also illustrates that water distortion on the borders:

But there’s another possibility: the whole black streak could be simply thick oil floating over water. If you look at the broken outline, is could composed of patches of oil breaking from the main blob. Here are some images from the oil spill by South Korean tanker Hebei Spirit in 2007.

This spill is on a much, much larger scale, and looks somewhat different from Le Serrec’s photos. But it illustrates the idea. It has its problems, starting from the fact that I don’t know if it would be even possible to get oil in that shape for a couple of minutes, or even longer; if one could make “eyes” by poking holes in the oil floating. Also, Le Serrec’s story actually mentions that the alleged creature was at the bottom of the lagoon, which favors the idea that that was true, only that the creature was a black plastic sheet, as suggested by Heuvelmans and Naish (and also supported by Coleman).

I hope further investigation, analyzing better quality versions of the original photos, and perhaps even some attempts at reproduction on site, would definitely settle how he did it. Naish even mentions rumors that Le Serrec may be still alive and living in Asia – as of 2003.

However he hoaxed this, and as skeptical as I am, the pictures really creep me out.

© forgetomori 2010. | Permalink

“Angels, demons, fairies, creatures from heaven, hell, or Magonia: they inspire our strangest dreams, shape our destinies, steal our desires.” – Jacques Vallée, “Passport to Magonia”

Recently, acknowledged Fortean researcher Jacques Vallée published a series of posts on our cherished BoingBoing regarding crop circles (part 1, 2, 3, 4). News from last year about a directed microwave weapon by the US army prompted Vallée to argue that, since “these things are typically revealed 30 years after they are tested”, their initial development and testing would fit well with the heyday of the crop circle frenzy.

That is, Vallée promoted the idea, which he initially suggested in 1991, that crop circles are made by the military using directed energy systems, beamed from “a low-observable dirigible using corn fields as a convenient calibration target.”

But this is the web, 2.0, this was BoingBoing, one of the biggest blogs on the web, and most of the 66 comments were very critical of the idea, several of them considering it even a joke. Most of the comment authors didn’t even know who Vallée was, an indication they had almost no background on the Fortean field.

In his second post, Vallée started saying that the original text was, “among other things, a social science test of the role of belief systems in the manipulation of memes and factual data”. Critical of the response, he then went on to explain why his hypothesis wasn’t a joke.

Curiously, in his own seminal book four decades ago, “Passport to Magonia” (1969), Vallée himself does not take very seriously the idea that Soviets were responsible for crop circles:

“Rumors circulated blaming the Soviets for using the vast open spaces of Australia to develop scientific ideas one or two centuries ahead of those of the Americans. Why the Soviets could not conduct their secret testing in the vast open spaces of Siberia was not disclosed. Neither was it revealed why the pilots of the super-secret communist weapon could not resist the temptation to buzz the tractor of a twenty-seven-year-old banana grower.”

He has changed his mind since at least 1991, but he should be able to understand why people would find it hard to consider seriously the idea that secret weapons would be tested on highly publicized events, besides Stonehenge for instance, instead of “the vast open spaces of Siberia” or anywhere else, and for what reason would the military “not resist the temptation to buzz” some farmers. Or any other witness.

If this was indeed a social science test, it seems nobody did their homework, as apparently no one confronted Vallée on what he had published. But let’s take the idea seriously: does it stand as something reasonable, even probable?

Keep reading for more of our long comment on the subject, with trackbacks to BoingBoing, of course.

Read on: Jacques Vallée: Magonians create crop circles (1,830 words)

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They are an amazing sight: even though the initial size figures were eventually corrected to a more comprehensible 66 feet diameter crater, 100 feet deep, those are still impressive and quite regular holes. The one in the image above engulfed a factory in the end of June at Zona 2, Guatemala, while a similar event happened in 2007 a few miles away, Zona 6. Below, an image of the 2007 hole:

While people were puzzled and many joked about these giant holes in the ground, the event in 2007 resulted in two casualties and the one a month ago in one death. Taking this seriously, we have to explain that these features are not mysterious nor have anything to do with “UFO tunnels”. Both features were ultimately the result of intense storms – and it’s an interesting coincidence that the new hole opened after tropical storm Agatha, since Agartha is the legendary city inside the hollow Earth.

These features do not lead to the center of Earth, however, at their bottom a hundred feet down what one finds is quite simply a sewage water collecting system. The infographic below, from Nuestro Diario (June 30th, p.5), illustrates how exactly below the opened hole a water collector tunnel around 10 feet in diameter goes through.

A few days ago a team of geologists also explored the bottom of the Zona 2 hole, you can find the whole Picasa set of photos here. All the soil in the giant hole didn’t disappear magically, it was simply washed away with the water and on to the sewage system. So much so that the sole victim’s body in the Zona 2 hole, Edwin Roberto Velásquez Salazar, was found days later in Las Vacas river, where the water from the collector system ends up.

Not only at the bottom of these giant holes one finds tunnels of the water collecting system: more importantly, perhaps, is that both of these holes were originally vertical shafts, that is, there were already originally vertical holes there, even though they were obviously not that large. Unfortunately many water draining shafts and tunnels were built in the 1950s and some were not properly recorded, and as the city grew some buildings were built over some shafts. That seems to be the case here.

Local geologists suggest then that the heavy water stream from the storm must have damaged the underground collecting tunnels, a problem aggravated by the fact that there was a difference in the level of tunnels. The graphic below (click to enlarge, from Diario de Centroamérica) illustrates, above, the proposed evolution of the holes in the first (above) and second holes.

Add to that that the soil in the city is particularly fragile, basically pumice fill – ash flows made up of loose, gravel-like particles deposited during ancient volcanic eruptions, and there’s no mystery here.

Days after the recent hole, called by many a giant sinkhole, geologist Sam Bonis, who was part of the team that investigated the 2007 case, correctly pointed out that it wasn’t in fact a sinkhole. As he told Discovery News (and National Geographic), "Sure, it looks a lot like a sinkhole. And a whale looks a lot like a fish, but calling it one would be very misleading."

According to Bonis, the hole was rather a “piping feature”, and the further info, photos and graphics here may help understand the giant holes in Guatemala.

Graphic: Nuestro Diario

[Almost all the info for this post comes from the blog “Ciudad Nueva zona 2 Guatemala”, with updated and detailed information on the events. It was suggested to me by friend José Ildefonso, who also provided me with most of the other information on the case]

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