The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts and Strange Stories (71 page)

For centuries, thieves broke into the tombs in Egypt's Valley of the Kings and ran off with gold and treasures. Modern-day archaeologist Howard Carter was certain that one untouched tomb remained undiscovered and untouched: the tomb of King Tutankhamen, a mysterious pharaoh who had died at the age of eighteen. For thirty years, Carter was obsessed with finding the king's tomb, but by 1922, he felt like his luck was running out. Carter's digs had been funded by his friend Lord Carnarvon, who was losing a fortune and didn't want to spend anymore. But Carter begged for one more dig, and he got the funds for it. He began digging in the last unexplored part of the valley, and in November 1922 uncovered a descending staircase. Excited beyond belief, Carter called his benefactor and had him join him immediately.

On November 26, 1922, Carter scraped a hole through the doorway to King Tut's tomb. Over the next few days Carter and Carnarvon broke through the sealed doors and found rooms filled with gold statues, furniture, jewelry, and other invaluable objects. They also found a frightening message on a clay tablet: “Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.”
Fearing that the Egyptian workers who were with them would flee if they saw the inscription, the two men hid the tablet away.

King Tut's tomb soon proved to be the greatest archaeological discovery of all time. The curse—which reached the newspapers after Carnarvon sold the story—became the most famous in history as headlines around the world announced, “the Curse of the Pharaohs.”

The curse's first victim was Lord Carnarvon, who died of an unknown disease just five months after the discovery of the tomb. An American journalist who had helped unseal the tomb fell into a coma and died shortly after Carnarvon. A friend of Carnarvon's, who had come to visit the tomb, died the next day. A radiologist who took x-rays of King Tut's mummy died after returning to England. The death toll continued to climb, and by 1929 the curse had been credited with claiming twenty-two lives. Oddly enough, archaeologist Howard Carter survived the curse and died of natural causes in 1939, at the age of sixty-four.

THE CURSE OF THE
HINEMOA

The ship
Hinemoa
was named after the beautiful daughter of a very powerful New Zealand chief. In 1892,
the ship set sail on the first voyage of what would become a chilling history of terror. A string of bad luck for its first captains revealed that something was very, very wrong with the steamer. The first captain went insane and had to be replaced. The second captain fell victim to foul play and was thrown into prison. The third became a drunk and, shaking from d.t.'s, lost his job. Captain four mysteriously died in his cabin, and the captain of the fifth voyage committed suicide.

The next time the
Hinemoa
set sail, it lost its balance and turned over. Righted again, it went to sea once more and put its curse on two sailors, who were washed overboard into the Pacific during the trip.

This terrible and ghastly curse continued until the last voyage of the
Hinemoa
in September 1917, when it crossed paths with a deadly German submarine. Shortly thereafter, the
Hinemoa
sank, bringing the curse to a watery end.

The
Hinemoa
's faithful crew knew why the ship was cursed. They claimed that deadly forces entered the ship when it was being built and were stored up in the vessel's “heart.” How did these forces arrive and in what form? The first ballast—heavy material used to give the ship stability—was gravel from a London graveyard.

ROSWELL: WHAT HAPPENED?

William “Mac” Brazel was working as a foreman on the Foster ranch seventy miles north of Roswell, New Mexico, when reports about sightings of “flying discs” started circulating in the news and among locals. Weeks before, on June 14, 1947, Brazel had noticed some strange and suspicious debris on the property. He reported to the Roswell
Daily Record
that he and his son spotted a “large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks,” but that he didn't return to the wreckage until he connected the stories of the flying discs to the material he had found. The timing of the incident is controversial, but some contemporary accounts suggest that Brazel returned to the site with Air Force Major Jesse Marcel and some plainclothes officers on July 6. As the story goes, the officials collected the debris, which they claimed was the remains of a weather balloon. The subsequent investigation, which involved the FBI, was reportedly classified.

The story of UFOs in Roswell, New Mexico, would have probably stayed dead if Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear physicist, hadn't lost his job during the 1970s. UFOs were Friedman's hobby, and soon after his termination, they became his career. He became a full-time
lecturer. He delivered his favorite talk, titled, “Flying Saucers
Are
Real,” at more than 600 different college campuses and other venues around the country.

Friedman soon developed a nationwide reputation as a UFO expert, and people who'd seen UFOs began seeking him out. In 1978, Jesse Marcel, the U.S. Army intelligence officer who'd retrieved the wreckage from Mac Brazel's ranch thirty-one years earlier, even made contact with him. Friedman urged Marcel to give an interview to the
National Enquirer
, which he did, explaining that what he had picked up from the ranch was indeed not of this earth.

The interview couldn't have come at a better time: it was published in 1979, and Steven Spielberg's film
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
had just premiered, stoking the public's appetite for UFO stories. After thirty years, the Roswell story blew up once again, and since that time the story just kept on growing. New “witnesses” to the Roswell UFO began seeking out Friedman to tell him their stories. Soon, the Roswell story included humanoid alien beings. (For the record, neither Mac Brazel nor Jesse Marcel ever claimed to have seen aliens among the wreckage. No one went public with those claims until more than thirty years after the fact.)

So was the U.S. government hiding evidence of an alien crash-landing on earth? In 1993, Congressman Steven Schiff of New Mexico asked the U.S. General Accounting Office to look into whether the government had ever been involved in a space-alien cover-up, either in Roswell, New Mexico, or anyplace else. The GAO spent eighteen months searching government archives dating back to the 1940s, including even the highly classified minutes of the National Security Council. The GAO's research also prompted the U.S. Air Force to launch its own investigation. It released its findings in September 1994, and the GAO's report followed in November 1995.

The reports arrived at the same conclusion. What the conspiracy theorists believe were UFOs were actually products of top-secret research programs run by the U.S. military during the Cold War. According to the reports, the object that crashed on Brazel's farm in Roswell was a balloon, but not just any balloon—it was part of Project Mogul, a secret defense program geared toward detecting nuclear weapons exploded by the Soviets. In the late 1940s, the U.S. had neither spy satellites nor high-altitude spy planes that it could send over the Soviet Union to see if they were succeeding at building nuclear weapons. Government scientists
figured weather balloons fitted with special sensing equipment, if launched high enough into the atmosphere, might be able to detect the shock waves given off by nuclear explosions thousands of miles away.

The Roswell intelligence officers who recovered the wreckage didn't have high enough security clearance to know about Project Mogul, and thus they didn't know to inform anyone of the discovery. On the whole, Project Mogul was successful. Apparently, the equipment it generated did detect the first Soviet nuclear blasts.

The air force's 1994 report suggested that a number of other military projects that took place in the 1940s and 1950s had become part of the Roswell myth as well. In the 1950s, the air force launched balloons as high as nineteen miles into the atmosphere and dropped human dummies to test parachutes for pilots of the X-15 rocket plane and the U-2 spy plane. The dummies, the air force says, were sometimes mistaken for aliens; because it didn't want the real purpose of the tests to be revealed, it did not debunk the alien theories. Some balloons also dropped mock interplanetary probes, which looked a lot like flying saucers. In one particular crash, a serviceman named Captain Dan D. Fulgham, crashed a test balloon ten miles northwest of Roswell and suffered an injury that caused his head to swell considerably.

The incident, the air force says, helped inspire the notion that aliens have large heads.

Have these reports deterred conspiracy theorists? Obviously not all of them have. Who knows what really happened, and whom we can trust?

Ufology, the study of UFO evidence, was invented during the late 1970s when investigators interviewed people who worked at or near Roswell. Ufology is now part of our popular culture.

The thirty-year-old Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Paranormal (CSICOP) opines that UFO sightings are hallucinations.