Miscellaneous Mysteries

An occasionally updated summary of mystifying an amusing items mostly from Fortean Times.

Not really a mystery but I cannot resist this one:

In 1983 the the Parish priest of Calcata, a medieval village north of Rome put the alleged prepuce of Christ into a wardrobe for “safety's sake”. Naturally it was promptly stolen. It was kept in a silver box in the shape of two angels holding a vase crowned with jewels. The relic was alleged to have worked many blessings.

The Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus, dated no later than the second century AD says that when Jesus was circumcised an old woman stored it in an alabaster box used to hold oil of Spikenard and that was the box that held the oil Mary Magdalene poured on to the head and feet of Jesus.

The Church found the relic an embarrassment for some reason and threatened anyone writing or speaking about it with excommunication, and the cynic will note similar relics exist in Spain and Switzerland. Naturally Church Authorities were suspected of the theft.

Legend had it that a fugitive soldier brought the relic to Calcata in 1527 after the sack of Rome. 800 years before that Charlemagne received the relic “from an angel”, the same mode of transmission as the Golden Plates of the book of Mormon, and gave it to the Pope. Presumably it had been lost in the anointing of Jesus and the Celestial Lost Property Office took a while to decide where to send it.

(Source Sunday Times 15^th Jan 1984 and Fortean Times 43)

In a letter to Fortean Times 44 Michael Conway notes that at least one Catholic writer devoted a treatise to Christs's foreskin asserting I ascended into heaven and expanded into one of the rings of Saturn. I am told that the Rings were also considered to be God's foreskin. Conway cotes this as De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba by Leo Allatius and also notes that the book Crimes of Christianity by G.W Foote and J.M. Wheeler, published in 1897, states that the relic was kept at Rome and fell into the hands of soldiers, but would not let them touch it. However when a pure virgin approached it expanded readily

A farmer in West Germany watched as 22 of his prize pigs exploded. The explanation was they had eaten plastic explosive from an overturned railcar. Fortean Times 53 cited Grocer 17^th Sept 1988 quoting from “ a local South Coast paper”. I understood that Plastic explosive was very stable without a detonator. A story too good to miss but to be treated with caution.

The Huffington Post reports a new decaying corpse washed up on the shore. No, it is not the credibility of the banking system, that died long ago, but a globster with no distinguishing marks to help identification.

The photo of the original monster looks suspicious to me as does the fact that the alleged discoverer of the previous monster is not dislosing the location in which they buried the monster.

There have been a numbeer of identifications of the original monster as a decomposed furry animal, a dog or racoon. I am no expert but, from the photograph, the skin looks to me like that of a pig, but there are no indication of scale though looking at what coul be a shell suggests a size it is about 2 feet long

Provisonal diagnosis: A decomposed animal or a hoax in the original case and a decomposed seal in the second.

These Globsters are notoriously hard to identify. Any input from an expert who has touched the real thing would be nice. At present there is no hard information on the web

Sunday Express UK December 2nd 1984

Rick and Peter Timm got a shock when riding through one of their father's recently harvested wheatfields. There was a huge hole there. Ten foot long, seven feet wide and two feet deep.The bottom of the hole was flat and the sides straight, just as if it had been cut by a giant pastry cutter. The piece of earth weighed about three tons and there was no heavy machinery any where on the site and no one had any idea what kind of equipment could remove the earth so cleanly.

Lindsey Mclelland, a spokesman for the Smithsonian Institute said they had no reports of any similar happenings in the past. However I have read of others and will add these as I find them

A Swiss watch ring has been found in a Ming dynasty tomb in China.

Two archaeologists were excavating a Ming dynasty tomb believed to have been undisturbed for 400 years when they disturbed a piece of mud that hit the ground with a metallic ring. When they cleaned the object off they found it was a watch ring with the word “Swiss” engraved on the back. Apparently the watch is about 100 years old and was encrusted with mud. It had stopped at 10:06. The extrapolation to 10:06am is not justified as far as I can tell from the Photo in Fortean times. The time could also be 4:36

Three possible explanations for this out of place artefact are
1.Hoax
2.Time travel by the watch (how appropriate) or a wearer
3.It was lost outside the tomb and an animal brought it in

For now I will favour (3). But the results of a full examination of the watch would be interesting.


Anomalies

A watch ring is not easy to lose unless you take it off, though rings can slip off fingers

Most Swiss watches I see say "swiss made" on the dial not the back

Right now all the information seems to be coming from the same sources with no new developments.

The original site to which I linked has been classified as a Phishing or malware site so I removed it

At least this seems better documented than the alleged 123 Million year old map of the Urals that I discussed earlier

An article by Richard Freeman in the latest Issue of Paranormal Magazine reports a flap (!) of apparent pterodactyl sightings in West Yorkshire between 1982 and 1985 and on the other side of the Pennines in 1999, plus a sighting on a house in Liverpool in the late 1990s. This led me to wonder if the Brentford Griffin was actually a pterodactyl.

Or whatever.

More details when I get anything solid