As I discussed the shortcomings of the CIA’s recent report on Havana Syndrome in my previous post, I thought I’d stay in the murky world of espionage and tell you how I came into the possession of KGB microfilm of American secrets.
I spent three years teaching English in Russia in the 90s, mostly based in the small town of Dubna, best known for its physics institute and the fact that the town has an element, dubnium, named after it.
Every so often, I’d have to make the three-hour train journey to the Moscow office for training sessions. On one occasion, the company had acquired a new office complex in the basement of a huge tower block in central Moscow. The basement offices had previously belonged to the KGB (or the FSB as they became), who were still in the process of emptying the building as we were moving in. As you went in through a massive thick metal door, you stepped through a shower cubicle. We speculated that this was to wash irradiated survivors of a nuclear attack before allowing them into the bunker… or was it to gas unwelcome visitors?
Inside, there was a large walk-in cupboard housing a chunky filing cabinet with drawers open and overflowing with little envelopes. These little envelopes, most stamped with США (‘USA’ in Russian, were piled up to knee height on the floor and wrapped in bundles of 20-30 with elastic bands. There were thousands of them….
Reverse engineering a crashed saucer? Or a time machine? One of the files I stole from the KGB.
Several of the English teachers, myself included, couldn’t resist helping themselves to some Cold War memorabilia as souvenirs. I came away with several bundles of these envelopes, perhaps close to a hundred. All contained microfilm with text in English and mysterious diagrams, though it was too small to make much out.
The next time I returned to the UK, I took my KGB files to the library to examine my stolen secrets using the microfiche reader. I was hoping for a crashed flying saucer, or the truth about JFK, or sonic ray guns or at least a nuclear submarine or something.
What I got were US patents for automatic car parking mechanisms. Every single one. Some films were from 1947, some were from 1953 and 1957. Around a hundred of them, all different, but all showing various types of conveyor belts, lifts and pulleys for automatic car parking. I checked them all. No UFOs, no hit lists, no nukes and not even mind zapping commie ray guns.… Just loads and loads of automated car parking systems! I didn’t realise the world of international espionage was so, well…. dull.
Another KGB file
I’ve lost or given away most of the files over the intervening decades, though I’ve still got a few left. If the FSB or the CIA want them back, well make me an offer. I may be in possession of lost classified information that could change the world of, er…. automated car parking mechanisms, for ever.
More mystery US tech stolen by the KGB then stolen by me…
Statue of Lenin, Dubna, Russia. My home for three years (By Harveyqs – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Recently I wrote about my Top Three Mass Hysterias happening now in 2022.[i] Top of my hysterical hit parade was Havana Syndrome, the name given to a mysterious illness among US and Canadian embassy staff in Havanna, Cuba (and later in several other cities around the world). The symptoms included hearing a strange, high-pitched noise, nausea, dizziness, changes to hearing, headaches, memory loss…. A belief grew among the staff that they were being targeted by a futuristic weapon that was zapping them through the walls of their buildings.
The weird high pitch sounds generated by this mystery ray gun were recorded by several embassy staff in Cuba and were later recognised as the mating calls of crickets.
Not those Crickets, you idiot
However, in February the CIA released a (redacted) summary of their latest investigation into the syndrome. Much of the media interpreted the report as saying that the symptoms the staff are suffering from may be caused by ‘directed energy’ (according to the BBC) or ‘pulsed energy devices’ according to the Guardian.[ii]
However, as soon as reports of these ‘attacks’ emerged in 2016, alarms bells were ringing in my ears and there were no enemy ray guns in sight. I’d been aware of so-called phantom attacker panics since researching the Halifax Slasher scare for Weird Calderdale, and I’m always alert for new episodes of this strange kind of mass hysteria. And Havana Syndrome has all the signs of mass hysteria, or as academics prefer to call it nowadays ‘mass psychogenic illness’.
Let’s take a look at what the CIA report says. There’s a link in the references below.[iii]
The Symptoms
The report says the symptoms, or ‘anomalous health incidents’ (AHIs), have four core characteristics, and we can take these as the definition of Havana Syndrome:
Acute onset of ‘audio-vestibular sensory phenomena’. This includes a feeling of pressure in the head, ear pain, a strange sound often in one ear.
Vertigo, loss of balance and ear pain.
Sense of locality (in other words, the symptoms are associated with a certain place or are perceived as coming from a particular direction).
There are no medical or environmental causes.
Here’s the thing, though. Have you ever had any of these symptoms? I mean, ringing in the ears sometimes, sudden dizziness as if you stood up too quickly? I have. They’re pretty common, and yet we don’t assume we were being zapped by a communist mind ray. But the embassy staff in Havana were no doubt under stress as they had been warned that dastardly agents would try and intimidate or gaslight them. They were told to be vigilant against threats or attacks so will have been hypervigilant, and the idea of a sonic weapon seemed plausible to them at the time.
Oddly enough, the report makes no mention of those embarrassing crickets![iv] And yet it was the weird mating call of these critters that set the hysterical ball rolling. This seems a remarkable omission.
But never mind, let’s get to the report’s findings.
The Findings
The first finding of this investigation is that the symptoms embassy staff have are genuine. Well, no one doubts this, though, remember in mass hysteria, symptoms are genuine too: hysteria is when stress and anxiety lead to physical symptoms in the absence of an organic cause. The report also notes that the symptoms are ‘diverse’ which should give us pause for thought. Can we be sure that various diverse symptoms aren’t being lumped together when in reality there is no connection between them?
But these underhand foreign ray guns have caused brain damage in the diplomats, haven’t they? No. The report says that in some individuals there are ‘transient elevations in biomarkers suggestive of cellular injury to the nervous system.’ Did they detect injury to the nervous system? No. There was (in some individuals) a temporary increase in something that might suggest injury to the nervous system. This finding is hedged to death and only applies to a small number of sufferers. It cannot be said to be a smoking (ray) gun.
The second finding is that the combination of the four core symptoms is unique in the medical literature (especially being focused on one ear) and cannot ‘easily’ be explained by medical or environmental conditions and that therefore could be caused by an ‘external source’. But is it really unique? As we have seen, some of the strange noises heard by diplomats in Havana were clearly crickets, and in later cases from other embassies where no recordings of crickets were made, one possible explanation for symptoms could be tinnitus, or more specifically transient auditory dysfunction, a very common form of temporary hearing loss or tinnitus episode that can occur in one or both ears.[v] Anxiety, stress and hypervigilance may account for other symptoms such as dizziness, loss of balance and nausea. This was even acknowledged by a previous government report.[vi]
The third finding of the report is that ‘pulsed electromagnetic energy’ could ‘plausibly’ explain the core symptoms, though there are ‘information gaps’. This finding is the most heavily redacted of the sections, but the ‘information gap’ the authors admit to suggests one thing to me: this is bullshit.
The fourth finding is that ultrasound beams could also ‘plausibly’ explain the symptoms, though this would only work in close proximity and not through building walls, but again there are ‘information gaps’. Ultrasound is inaudible, and yet several early sufferers from Havana Syndrome recorded the sound they believed was responsible. In other words, bullshit on stilts.
And speaking of bullshit on stilts, let’s get to the fourth finding: psychosocial factors cannot explain the core symptoms (though the authors grudgingly admit these factors may lengthen the duration or compound some of the symptoms). In the words of the report: ‘No known psychosocial factors explain the core characteristics, and the incidents exhibiting these characteristics do not fit the majority of criteria used to discern mass sociogenic illness.’ Well, the fact is psychosocial factors (along with crickets and pre-existing medical conditions) can explain the core symptoms. And the conditions associated with mass psychogenic illness (mass hysteria) are present: a background of stress and anxiety and a close-knit social group with symptoms that have no apparent physical cause (imaginary ray guns don’t count, I’m afraid).
The final finding was that radiation, chemical or biological attacks and acoustic weapons were implausible causes. Well, they got something right.
Recommendations
The CIA report makes several recommendations, including setting up a database of incidents, and identifying biomarkers (of what, we don’t know, as this part of the report is censored) and testing for them. They also suggest ‘detectors’ for something, though in this section, every word is redacted except ‘detectors’. We can only speculate what kind of detectors the CIA recommend. I would suggest a bullshit detector.
Another recommendation is a communication strategy to educate government diplomats and other staff to reduce the effect of any psychosocial factors at work. Think about this for a minute. The CIA recommends educating their staff about attacks from a mystery brain bending weapon, the evidence for which is non-existent, and this is supposed to reduce the psychosocial factors at work? However, it seems to me that accepting at face value claims associated with mass hysteria will actually exacerbate the problem.
The final recommendations made in the report are for the long term. These include better and faster clinical measurement of the symptoms. This seems to make sense, but if you search for symptoms that are already pretty common (and the symptoms of Havana Syndrome are common in the general population) then you’re sure to find them. This seems like a measure that would keep the madness churning.
The last two long term recommendations are almost totally redacted, though one is about the biological effects of something, and the other is about devices to aid research, but that’s as much as we can say.
What Goes On?
It almost seems that this report is designed to keep the hysteria going. After all, two previous reports had found no evidence of a mystery weapon.
It’s like the CIA observed a light in the sky and rather than concluding it was a plane, or a satellite, or a planet, they concluded that the Martians were attacking. Why would they do that? Well, there are several possibilities:
They believe their own bullshit.
It serves an international political agenda by being a stick to beat Russia and/or China.
It serves as a distraction from domestic politics.
Embarrassment. It would be hard to admit that all these clever people were suffering from mass psychogenic illness, even though it’s something that everyone is susceptible to. It’s a normal human reaction to stress and anxiety.
Trump Derangement Syndrome. The Trump administration, including senior CIA officials and the FBI, viewed claims of attacks by a mystery weapon with scepticism.[vii] If Trump said the world is round, the Flat Earth Society’s membership would be through the roof.
Perhaps it’s a combination of some of the above.
But here’s the problem. Fuelling hysteria is a dangerous and irresponsible game, whatever the motives. And for that reason, Havana Syndrome retains its place as Number One in my Top Three Mass Hysterias Happening Now in 2022.
I’m often asked if I’ve ever had any supernatural experiences myself. Well, sort of…. In fact, I’ve done battle with ghosts and a demon in the wild Balkan Mountains of Northern Greece. But of course, there’s a twist.
I lived in a town called Florina in the Macedonian region of Greece for three years in the very early 1990s. Florina is a mountainous ski resort near the borders with Albania and the former Yugoslavia. This was my first job after leaving university: teaching English as a Foreign Language to Greek teenagers in this small, isolated town, snowbound in winter, boiling in summer.
I’d been there for over a year, when, during the hot summer I moved to a new flat across the town. The summers were so hot that in the early afternoon, everything stopped: offices, shops and cafes closed, and most Greeks took an afternoon nap. With nothing else to do, I took to doing the same. Only problem was, learning how to sleep in the afternoon meant I couldn’t sleep at night and so my sleeping patterns were completely disrupted.
On the first night in my new flat, I was woken suddenly in the early hours when the bedroom light was turned on. This unnerved me. I was the only person in the flat, and the light switch was on the opposite side of the room. I nervously checked the flat for intruders, and everything was fine. But I just couldn’t understand how a light could switch on by itself.
The next night, it happened again. No sign of anyone in the flat. I’d never seen a light spontaneously switch on before, so the next day I asked a colleague who had a good knowledge of electronics if this was even possible. He assured me it was not, and jokingly suggested that the flat was haunted.
It was the next night when things really kicked off. I woke in the early hours with the feeling that someone was in my room. And there, approaching my bed was a shadowy figure. I was filled with terror and panic. I blinked and shook my head. Surely, I was dreaming. But no, I was wide awake, and the figure was still there approaching across the room towards me.
Assuming the intruder to be a burglar, I clasped the pillow over my chest in case he had a knife and leapt at him with my other fist flailing. But it quickly became apparent that I was punching empty air and I was alone in the room. I was confused and shaking with terror. I didn’t believe in ghosts. But I’d just seen one.
It took a long time for me to get to sleep again, and when I finally did drop off…. Click! On came the light.
It all culminated a couple of nights later. Only this time, it was even more horrific. Again, I became aware of a malign presence in the room and woke up. Sitting on my chest was a grotesque monkey faced demon that was crushing the breath out of me. I was paralysed and unable to breathe and the horrible demonic entity leered malevolently in my face as it suffocated me. This wasn’t a dream. I was awake.
And suddenly, it was gone, and I could breathe again. I didn’t tell anyone about what I had experienced over those nights. I was afraid I was going mad. Because I didn’t believe in ghosts and demons, and yet I’d seen them with my own eyes.
One strange thing is that I felt I had seen that monster somewhere before. And it finally came to me. I’d seen this demonic entity on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley that I had read some time ago. The cover reproduced a painting known as The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli from 1781.
Thankfully, these episodes never happened again. But I had no idea what to make of them…
Part Two ~ Sleep Paralysis and alien abduction
It was only a few years later that I heard about the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. This is a sleep disorder where the body may be unable to move, but the sufferer is fully conscious and may see vivid, terrifying hallucinations. It’s a kind of altered consciousness that mixes sleep and wakefulness and feels utterly real.
There are generally thought to be three kinds of sleep paralysis hallucinations. Firstly, intruder hallucinations as in my first experience. Secondly, incubus hallucinations accompanied by the sensation of having one’s chest crushed as in my later experience. A third type of hallucination is vestibular motor, which involves the feeling of flying, falling or out of the body experiences. It’s relatively common with some estimates suggesting 8%[i] of people will experience it sometime in their lives. Other estimates claim as many as 40% will suffer an episode.[ii] There are various possible causes, but for me it was probably the disturbed sleeping patterns arising from me adopting the local custom of having a siesta through the hottest part of the day.
Sleep paralysis has been offered as an explanation of various paranormal phenomena such as night-time visions of ghosts, out of body experiences and even alien abduction.
Take this alien abduction experience described by Whitley Streiber in his famous book Communion:
There were three small people standing beside the bed, their outlines clearly visible…I thought to myself, My God, I’m completely conscious and they’re just standing there… I can only describe the sensation I felt when I tried to move as like pushing my arm through electrified tar.[iii]
Whitley Strieber’s best selling account of his alien adventures
Similarly, one of Harvard University psychiatrist John Mack’s abductees reports that ‘she would wake paralysed, hear “buzzing and ringing and whirring” noises in her head, and see humanoid beings in her room’.[iv] Under hypnosis, this subject went on to reveal a rich narrative involving aliens, hybrid human-alien babies and spiritual growth typical of many of Mack’s investigations.
In fact, UFO researchers like Mack are likely to see episodes of sleep paralysis as being evidence of alien abduction, rather than alien abduction experiences being evidence of sleep paralysis. In Mack’s words:
Awakening paralyzed, with a sense of dread, and experiencing strange beings or a presence in the room, are common indicators [of alien abduction] in both children and adults.[v]
Some sceptical scholars who have studied alien abduction go so far as to argue that the epidemic of such experiences in the 80s and 90s was largely due to sleep paralysis being redefined as evidence of alien abduction. Then, through the use of hypnosis, further details are ‘remembered’ and added to the nocturnal experience to create a fuller abduction account.[vi]
I have a lot of sympathy for this view, as it seems to capture the phenomenology of the abduction experience as well as acknowledging the baleful role that hypnotists have played in confabulating pseudo-memories in their patients.
But this explanation also captures a noticeable change in the nature of alien abduction. Classic early cases of abduction by UFOs tended to involve cars on lonely roads meeting a strange craft, followed by the hapless abductee being beamed up into the craft. This is what we see in the classic Betty and Barney Hill abduction case from 1961 (often regarded as the first modern abduction report), but also in Todmorden’s own Alan Godfrey affair.
However, as the decades passed, abductions from vehicles became rarer and abduction from the bedroom started to dominate. Folklorist Thomas Bullard’s study of over 400 abduction accounts between 1966 and 1999 revealed that before 1978, 50% of alien abductions occurred on highways with only 10% occurring from bedrooms. However, after 1987 only 10% of abduction cases involved a highway encounter and over 60% were abductions from the bedroom.
It seems clear that sleep paralysis is at least part of the solution to the alien abduction mystery.
Epilogue ~ The Haunted Light Switch
But what about the mystery of the light spontaneously switching on? Well, I soon discovered that the bedroom actually had two light switches, one of which was two feet off the floor and hidden by the bed clothes. As I turned over in my sleep, my knee had been hitting the switch and turning the light on….
[vi] See, for example, Ronnevig, Georg M., ‘Towards an Explanation of the “abduction epidemic”’ in Alien Worlds: Social and Religious Dimensions of Extraterrestrial Contact, by Diana G. Tumminia (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007)
Call me hysterical, if you like, but it seems like we’ve been living through hysterical times. But hysteria is real, and so is mass hysteria. In this article I’m going to nominate the top three mass hysterias that are happening NOW in 2022. And it’s going to be controversial.
By Pieter Brueghel the Elder – Pieter Bruegel d. Ä. – Das gesamte graphische Werk. Wien-München: Schroll [o. J.], Abb. Nr. 124 (Scan durch H.-P.Haack, Leipzig), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3307982
Hysteria means that physical and psychological symptoms are experienced, but there appears to be no medical cause.[i] It often seems to be triggered by anxiety, and anxiety is contagious. And that’s mass hysteria: fear and anxiety lead to physical and psychological symptoms in the absence of an organic cause.[ii] It’s like a negative placebo effect.
I became fascinated with mass hysteria while writing the first edition of Weird Calderdale, back in 2002. I was particularly taken by the Halifax Slasher, a classic case of mass panic when the people of 1930s Halifax were terrorised by a razor wielding maniac leaping out of dark corners and slashing his hapless victims….
Of course, it soon transpired that the ‘victims’ had cut themselves, and the mystery attacker was a figment of their imagination. But as the press published sensational stories of the ‘attacks’, there suddenly sprang up a Manchester Slasher, a Glasgow Slasher, a Birmingham Slasher…. There were slashers everywhere. Except, there weren’t. The hysterical fear of the Halifax Slasher was contagious and spread round the country, all in the month of November 1938.
Daily Mirror 28 November 1938: The height of the Halifax Slasher’s reign of fear
Part Two ~ Some ‘Hystery’
There are countless cases of mass hysteria throughout history and all over the world. There were medieval dancing manias where the poor sufferers suddenly began to dance uncontrollably. They danced until their feet bled, and still didn’t stop. They cried out in anguish to passers-by for help. In Strasbourg in 1518, the authorities set up stages for the sufferers to dance on and hired musicians to play for them in the belief that this would allow them to dance the curse, or whatever it was, out of their system.[iii]
Big mistake. It just attracted more hysterical dancers. They danced till they dropped. Many danced until they died.
ÇPilgrimage of the Epileptics to the Church at MolenbeekÈ | ÇDancing ManiaÈ | ÇThe dance at MolenbeekÈ
Pieter Breughel the Younger, painting.
Mass hysteria can be weird. Take the phenomenon known as koro. In several Asian countries, men become convinced that their penises are shrinking and disappearing into their body. Some clamp or tie string around their genitals to stop them vanishing. These episodes, too, are contagious and affect thousands at a time. There were several major outbreaks in the late twentieth century.[iv]
But hysterical panics are not just a phenomenon of distant times and far away places. The USA and the UK had their share in the 1980s and 1990s, and these were some of the weirdest in ‘hystery’. An unlikely alliance between gullible Christian fundamentalists, earnest but uncritical therapists, hypnotists, social workers and feminists created the bizarre modern myth of Satanic Ritual Abuse. In effect, hapless patients were brainwashed into imagining ‘lost memories’ of satanic rituals, child abuse, bestiality, murder and cannibalism. Lives were and reputations were ruined and innocent people imprisoned for preposterous imaginary crimes.[v]
But hysteria is always with us in some form. So here are my controversial candidates for the top three mass hysterias that are happening NOW in 2022…
Part Three ~ The Top Three Mass Hysterias Happening Now in 2022
3. Needle Spiking
As more and more young people began venturing out to nightclubs after lockdown restrictions were relaxed, a disturbing new form of attack emerged: needle spiking. Young women began reporting that whilst in a nightclub they had been secretly injected with a drug that led to intoxication, memory loss, nausea, loss of inhibitions and a variety of other symptoms. As of the end of January 2022, police have received over a thousand reports.[vi]
Ouch
Just like the Halifax Slasher scare of 1938, the media have lapped up these morality tales of the dangers of young women going out and enjoying themselves. But no trace of an injected date rape drug has been found in any of the victims. And authorities and journalists uncritically accepted that secretly injecting a substance into someone’s back or leg is even possible in a night club.
Of course, the symptoms of being needle spiked (intoxication, balance problems, loss of inhibitions, vomiting, memory loss) are rather similar to drunkenness, it must be said. But what also seems to be happening here is anxiety hysteria. Robert Bartholomew, an authority on mass hysteria, describes anxiety hysteria as an overwhelming stress reaction to anxiety, the symptoms of which are the sudden onset of ‘headaches, dizziness, nausea, breathlessness and general weakness.’[vii] In fact, a very similar pool of symptoms reported by the alleged victims of needle spiking.
And it’s clear why these young women might have been anxious. For two years they have been bombarded with government propaganda promoting fear of a virus that in fact poses little threat to most young people. Add to this the guilt the nightclub goers may feel at mixing with large numbers of people after this had been discouraged for so long. And then there is the needle. Perhaps, this reflects anxiety about the ‘safe and effective’ vaccination.
There’s an understandable desire on the part of authorities to believe alleged victims. And there is no doubt that drinks are sometimes spiked for malicious purposes. However, it’s an uncomfortable truth that sometimes people imagine or invent attacks that never happened.
Young people have suffered enough fear, anxiety, guilt and repression during our era of pandemania, so it’s time the hysterical bubble of needle spiking was pricked.
2. Long Covid
Well, if you thought number three was controversial, strap yourself in for a bumpy ride…. I’m going to suggest that there is a hysterical element to Long Covid. Deep breath.
Long Covid, also known as Post-Covid Syndrome, is when symptoms of the illness persist for longer than twelve weeks. The list of symptoms is long. The NHS gives 28 symptoms of long covid that include palpitations, fatigue, headaches, brain fog, dizziness, pains, anxiety, tinnitus, depression…[viii]
In fact, the various symptoms associated with long covid are common. A large French study found that most symptoms of long covid (with the exception of loss of smell) are just as common in people who never had covid.[ix] And what’s more, symptoms of long covid were more common in people who thought they had had covid, even though tests revealed they had not. This is how the authors summarise their findings:
‘…persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection may be associated more with the belief in having been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than with having laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection.’[x]
Could some, perhaps many, long covid cases be anxious people in anxious times being hypervigilant about their health? Could the reduced exercise and health consequences of lockdowns, where people were fearful of seeking medical help, be part of the picture in explaining these symptoms? It seems to me that the government’s deliberate use of scare tactics has been even more successful than they could imagine.[xi] The relentless fearmongering is causing covid symptoms in people who don’t even have the illness.
I’m not saying that covid doesn’t cause persistent symptoms in some individuals. I’m not even saying that the symptoms reported by suffers are not real. I’m saying that it is plausible to suggest that some long covid sufferers’ symptoms were caused by fear and anxiety and changes in their behaviour due to the pandemic and the way authorities have responded to it. In other words, mass hysteria.
1. Havana Syndrome
Imagine a ray gun that could scramble your victims’ brains just by being pointed at the building they were in. Sounds like something from science fiction. But this is just what American diplomats and other embassy staff around the world are imagining right now. This is the mass hysteria known as Havana Syndrome.
It all started in the newly opened American embassy in Havana, Cuba in 2016. Staff there had been told to expect surveillance and harassment by Cuban security services and were no doubt feeling stress and anxiety. Soon diplomats started coming down with a range of symptoms: fatigue, nausea, dizziness, tinnitus, brain fog and more.[xii]
Sound familiar? Well, in this case many of the victims also reported a piercing, buzzing high-pitched sound. This led to the fear that a sonic or microwave weapon was being used to attack American diplomats causing this array of health complaints.
Recordings were made of this mysterious noise that seemed to be causing the alarming symptoms. And the source of this debilitating sonic mind ray turned out to be…. crickets! The sounds the embassy staff had heard and blamed their symptoms on were the mating calls of Indies short-tailed crickets.[xiii]
This revelation did not stop Havana Syndrome. Instead, it spread to other embassies.[xiv] Anxiety and hysteria are contagious. And because this hysteria could have diplomatic and geopolitical consequences, I’ve put it at the top of my list of the Top Three Mass Hysterias Happening NOW in 2022.
[ix] Joane Matta et al, ‘Association of Self-reported COVID-19 Infection and SARS-CoV-2 Serology Test Results With Persistent Physical Symptoms Among French Adults During the COVID-19 Pandemic’, JAMA Intern Med, 182(1) (2022) doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2021.6454
[xi] For an account of how fear was used to manipulate us during the pandemic see Laura Dodsworth, State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic, (Pinter & Martin, 2021)
[xii] Robert W Baloh and Robert E. Bartholomew, Havana Syndrome, (Springer, 2020) p.1
Many are familiar with former Todmorden police constable Alan Godfrey’s 1980 UFO adventure. It’s a thrilling tale involving a mysterious death, conspiracy, UFOs, teleporting cows, hypnotists (not all of them reputable), an alien and his robots. And a big dog. Of course, all is not as it seems, and I invite the reader to see the full story in my book Weird Calderdale.
Alan Godfrey’s sketches of the UFO, Joseph and one of his robots
For anyone unfamiliar with the story here’s a quick summary. On the 29 November 1980 PC Alan Godfrey was near the end of his nightshift and driving through Todmorden. There in front of his panda car on Burnley Road was a huge glowing diamond shaped object with what appeared to be panels or windows round it. It was 20 feet wide and 14 feet high and hovering over the ground. Alan says that at this point he made his famous sketch of the object, which he claims was definitely ‘nuts and bolts’ (a term UFO buffs often use to refer to a physical craft). Suddenly, Alan was aware of being further down the road and the UFO had gone.
Several months later, under hypnosis with two different hypnotists, Alan recounted a tale of being abducted by the occupants of the UFO: a Biblical humanoid with beard and skull cap called Joseph, some horrible insect like robots and a large black dog. It’s widely regarded as the first case of alien abduction in the UK and cemented Tod’s reputation as a UFO hotspot.
Unsurprisingly, it was reported recently that Alan’s story may be snapped up by Hollywood.[i] Screenwriter Michael Grais, who co-wrote the classic 1982 horror Poltergeist, is planning to write it this year.
In the Mail article (linked below), Godfrey dismisses the suggestion that the UFO he saw hovering over Burnley Road on that November morning was a hallucination. After all, he told the paper, he hasn’t had any other hallucinatory experiences before or since that fateful night. And it’s the subject of hallucinations that I’d like to touch upon. Because as a matter of fact Alan Godfrey does have a history of hallucinations. And oddly enough, like the hypnosis induced memories of his abduction, Alan’s hallucinatory experiences often involve dogs….
We know about Alan’s visionary experiences because he told them to UFO researcher Jenny Randles and she included them in her 1983 book The Pennine UFO Mystery. However, these earlier experiences are never mentioned in Alan’s talks, interviews or even in his autobiography, Who or What Were They? When I asked him directly about these at a talk many years ago, he was clearly reluctant to discuss them. Why would this be? Let’s take a brief look at some of Alan’s other strange encounters…
In one childhood episode he encountered a mysterious ball of light in his bedroom. In another, as a young man while driving one night he became convinced he’d run over a woman and her dog who’d stepped out in front of his vehicle. When he stopped and got out, there was no sign of woman or dog. Another strange encounter took place when he took his brother’s dog to the park and the dog returned without Alan. His brother eventually found Alan in the park confused and saying he’d been talking to a friend. However, the friend he said he’d been with had died some months earlier…[ii]
So what could explain these strange experiences and how do they relate to his famous UFO adventure?
Well, one possible answer came with my serendipitous discovery of a fascinating lost chapter in Alan Godfrey’s story: The Third Hypnotist. I discovered that Godfrey was also hypnotised by a third hypnotist named Tony Gibson, one of the most eminent in his field. Gibson’s conclusion: Godfrey was faking his hypnotic trance. In fact Dr Gibson thought Godfrey was suffering from a sleep disorder called narcolepsy, which can lead to falling asleep at inappropriate times and the experiencing of hallucinatory visions.[iii]
Given the history Alan has with strange hallucinatory experiences, this explanation seems plausible. It would suggest that on that night in November 1980, Godfrey fell asleep at the wheel at the end of his nightshift and had a vivid hallucinatory experience, perhaps suffering from narcolepsy or exhaustion from working nights. Indeed, Godfrey tells us that when he came to himself the car was still moving. My suggestion is that he made his sketch of the object from memory after he had come back to consciousness rather than with the UFO there in front of him.
In fact, sleep related hallucinations similar to this are not rare. It’s estimated that around 5% of the population will experience something similar at some point in their life.[iv]
If you’ve ever suffered from sleep paralysis, you’ll know just how real these hallucinations feel. In my case I was visited by an evil grinning monkey faced demon that sat on my chest and leered in my face as he crushed the breath out of me.
It’s also worth mentioning Kary Mullis, the Nobel prize winning scientist who invented the now ubiquitous PCR test. He describes how one night he was walking to his house when he encountered a glowing green racoon who wished him a good evening in English. The next thing he remembered was he was walking in the woods the following day with dry clothes even though it had been raining…[v]
The point of these hallucinatory diversions is that sometimes people see things that aren’t there. And that, in my opinion, is what happened in Todmorden’s most famous UFO encounter.
But, I hear you ask, what about the other witnesses, mysterious death, scandalous hypnotic malpractice and the teleporting cows? I’ll save those for another day!
The story of the Broad Bottom Ghost was told by Hebden Bridge born political activist and suffragette Lavena Saltonstall to the Todmorden and District News in the early twentieth century.[i] It concerns the area between Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd with the unflattering name of Broad Bottom, consisting of some woods, fields and a few houses. During the reign of Elizabeth I when Catholics were forbidden from holding mass in Heptonstall, they would worship here instead, in a house known as the Old Chapel.[ii] The ruin is always locked, not that anyone would want to go inside due to it having a ‘very weird aspect’, though you might be tempted to peer in through a crack in a boarded-up window. Inside, everything is black and rotten, the floor has mostly fallen in and there are centuries of dust and cobwebs. There was said to be a mysterious locked chest fastened to the wall, the contents of which are unknown. Even stranger, rumours say that an underground passage connects the ruin to a wood and a gentleman’s residence three quarters of a mile away.
The haunted ruin at Broad Bottom
The ruin has the ‘inevitable ghost’, according to Saltonstall. The spirit appears on a white horse and makes its way from the ruin to the top of the hill before plunging furiously back down to the valley bottom and across the canal and into a rag shunt at a nearby mill. Who the ghost was or the reason for the headlong gallop are lost to time.
One windy Christmas Day, Lavena and a party of students went for a walk past the ruin. They paused by the ruin’s gloomy window and wondered what might be inside its mysterious kist. One of the party, for a lark, ‘entreated of the ghosts and goblins to come forth’. The laughter of the friends turned to silence, though, when ‘a very thin streak of light appeared above the kist top and the wall. It gradually grew bigger until it formed a bright patch of light about 9 inches square.’ After a few seconds it disappeared, and the party of ramblers made a mad scramble over the wall and away. They all asked each other the same question: ‘Did you see that? What was it?’
We are assured that no one could be in the ruin as the floor is rotten and greatly fallen in. Perhaps, then, rumours of an underground passage are true and some person unknown was traversing the passage. But this raises the question of just who was there and why? The author of this account of the Broad Bottom ghostly happenings, Lavena Saltonstall, certainly had a sharp wit when it came to destroying her political opponents with facts and logic in the letter columns of the local press.[iii] The tone of her ghostly account is tongue in cheek and one might wonder if this young rebel was having a bit of fun and doing a bit of leg-pulling in her account.
In any case, there is a little epilogue to the story of the Broad Bottom ghost. According to R. Thurston Hopkins in his 1953 survey of hauntings Ghosts Over England, one of the students that had accompanied Lavena on her adventure at Broad Bottom returned to the scene a few weeks later. She again invited the presence to appear, and again she saw a strange light in the ruin. ‘It was not an ordinary light,’ she said. ‘It looked just like a woman wearing a robe of some kind of lustrous metallic material.’[iv]
This version of the legend in all its melodramatic Victorian glory is adapted from the ‘Lancashire Burns’ Edwin Waugh’s dialect telling.[i] Most of the action takes place a little outside Calderdale, but I’ve decided to include it here.
The Ghost of Brown Dick (Larisa Moskaleva)
One snowbound mid-winter evening, a party of travellers were sheltering from the weather by the warm fire of the White House Inn, Blackstone Edge. The wind whistled around the pub as if all the witches of Pendle were frozen and riding the storm on a mad boggart hunt in the air. Suddenly, the Inn door burst open and in staggered a man shivering violently, teeth chattering and as white as milk. He asked for water, and told the party that he had ‘seen summat’.
The frozen traveller told how he had been visiting his dying uncle in Sowerby and was now travelling home across the moor. As he approached the White House Inn, he saw a tall figure in a fur cap 20 yards ahead of him. Thinking he would like some company in this lonely and desolate landscape, he called out but received no answer. He did, though, notice that the figure’s clothes didn’t seem to be ruffled by the howling wind. As the traveller approached, the figure turned and showed its long white face was streaked with blood. Then the figure started to melt away into the moonlight before drifting across the moors towards the stone known as Robin Hood’s bed. It was this sight which led to the terrified traveller bursting through the White House door.
The assembled party listened in amazement to the story. Some were sceptical; after all they had never seen a ghost. And even if ghosts did exist, they were not sure why clothes and fur caps should also have ghosts. However, two gamekeepers who were present remained quiet during the discussion, before one turned to the other and said: ‘He’s seen Brown Dick.’ He then proceeded to tell the tale of Brown Dick of Blackstone Edge.
In the distant past, the White House Inn was kept by a widow and her beloved son Dick, whom she doted on and spoilt rotten, giving him everything he wanted and always letting him have his own way. Of course, being brought up this way meant that Dick (or Brown Dick as he came to be known) soon fell in with a bad crowd: Iron Jack’s gang. Iron Jack led this violent bunch of highway robbers, thieves and murderers and they terrorised the neighbourhood. They robbed travellers on the lonely moor, burgled the surrounding farms and cottages, and people who crossed them sometimes disappeared, never to be seen again. Dick’s mother, though, would not believe that her beloved son would ever be involved in such business.
Brown Dick was often away from home for a couple of nights at a time, but on one occasion when he didn’t come back after a week his mother began to worry. More and more weeks passed and still her son did not return, leaving his poor mother more and more distracted. She placed two candles in the window of the inn every night to guide him home should he return, but he never did. If the howling wind across the moor rattled the inn’s door, she would open it and call out her son’s name to no avail. She even took to wandering across the desolate Blackstone Edge crying for him to come home.
One night, the Inn was dark except for the usual two candles flickering in the window, when three men burst in. They were carrying a fourth man who was grievously injured with a gunshot wound. The three men were travellers who had met Iron Jack and his crew and the gang had attempted to rob them. They resisted and a fight ensued in which Iron Jack was accidentally shot by one of his own men. The cowardly gang left their leader for dead and escaped into the night, leaving the three travellers to carry Jack to the nearest shelter, which happened to be the White House Inn. It was clear that Iron Jack’s wound was so serious that he was not long for this world and so a parson and a doctor were sent for from Littleborough.
Iron Jack knew he was dying and confessed to many murders, but he said that the deed that troubled him most was the murder of Brown Dick. This had happened when the gang had completed a successful robbery and had headed over to Robin Hood’s Bed to divide up the spoils by lantern light, for it’s said that no matter how much of a gale is blowing on the moors, Robin Hood’s Bed is always wind free. The gang, though, fell out about how the ill-gotten gains should be split and Brown Dick was murdered and buried there near Robin Hood’s Bed.
Iron Jack refused to name the treacherous colleagues who had deserted him and soon expired. Brown Dick’s remains were found where Iron Jack had indicated and they were removed to Ripponden church yard. His poor mother went mad with grief and could often be found sitting by his grave singing to her lost son. One day she was found lying dead over her errant boy’s grave and was at last reunited with her darling son.
Now that Brown Dick had been laid to rest, some say that his mother’s ghost walks the moors of Blackstone Edge despairingly calling for her wayward son.[ii]
Of course, the White House Inn still stands out there on the moors, though in his 37 years of running the pub, landlord Pete Marney hasn’t seen the ghost of Dick or his mum. However, he told me that some customers have had spooky experiences in the pub: ‘people have sworn blind to have witnessed paranormal activity mainly in the loos and some have even been sober when making the claims.’[iii]
There was a great deal of alarm in Todmorden at the end of May 1864.[i] Rumours had circulated that one Saturday at midnight, the night watchman on the station platform had seen a ghost and that subsequently both the ghost and the watchman had disappeared. The following Sunday and Monday great crowds gathered round the station to enquire what had happened to the poor watchman and what he had witnessed that night.
Thankfully, the watchman turned up safe and well, but he had seen something. As he patrolled the platform that night, he saw a strange shape, white and silent, gliding towards him. As it was midnight, dark and lonely, he feared that there might have been a terrible rail accident (all too common at the time) and that he was witnessing a spirit bringing news of the catastrophe. In the words of the Courier:
‘His fears chained him to the spot, and, to add to his excitement, when this something came within the light of his lamp… he saw that it was perfectly white, and had a most brilliant red eye like a flame…’
The terrified watchman ran to get help from station staff before approaching this fearful red-eyed spectre. However, on closer inspection the ‘ghost’ turned out to be an escaped ferret.
In the November of 1938, reports began to emerge of a razor blade wielding maniac roaming the streets of Halifax and mounting violent and terrifying slashing attacks on his mostly female victims. The fear of this attacker led to vigilante mobs roaming the streets, businesses staying closed and widespread fear and panic. The attacks escalated beyond police control and then, strangely, the horrible assaults spread across the country….
… Until Scotland Yard arrived in Halifax and began to re-interview the victims. One by one, the victims admitted they had slashed themselves and made up the story of the mystery attacker. It was a classic case of mass hysteria. Read the incredible full story in my book Weird Calderdale.
But could something similar be happening now?
There are numerous reports in the media this week of young women being physically spiked with a mystery drug in nightclubs. Typically, the victims might feel suddenly much more intoxicated than expected from the amount of drink they had consumed. They may also feel nauseous and dizzy and perhaps suffer from loss of balance, vomiting or unconsciousness. Some claim to have found what seems to be a scratch or pin prick about their body which is assumed to be the result of being maliciously injected with an unknown substance.
A widely reported example was that of Sarah Buckle, a Nottingham student. She became so sick on a night out that she spent 10 hours in hospital. She also had a bruise on her hand, about which a nurse speculated: ‘It seems as if you’ve been spiked possibly by a needle’.[1]
According to Superintendent Kathryn Craner of the Nottinghamshire Police: ‘a small number of victims have said that they may have felt a scratching sensation as if someone may have spiked them physically… We do not believe that these are targeted incidents; they are distinctly different from anything we have seen previously as victims have disclosed a physical scratch type sensation before feeling very unwell…. This is subtly different from feelings of intoxication through alcohol according to some victims.’[2]
But to me, this bears all the hallmarks of a Halifax Slasher type episode of mass hysteria. This isn’t to say that this kind of spiking is impossible, though surely it seems rather unlikely. After all, research suggests that the malevolent figure of the predatory male spiking innocent girls’ drinks with date rape drugs in night clubs in order to molest them is largely a myth. Actual evidence of this type of drink spiking is extremely rare.[3]
Yorkshire Evening Post 28 November 1938
An Australian study examined blood of 97 people who suspected the had had their drink spiked. Guess how many of that sample actually had any sedative or other drug (aside from narcotics knowingly taken) in their system? That’s right. None of them.[4]
But if you’re worried that you’ve been spiked through your drink or intravenously, the Express helpfully gives us a checklist of symptoms to look out for:
It may be noticed that these ‘symptoms’ are not dissimilar from being, well, pissed.
The prick marks the women have found upon themselves were often not noticed or barely felt at the time and could have been caused by innocent or accidental means. I suspect most people could find evidence of a ‘pin prick’ somewhere on their body if they tried. In the case of Sarah Buckle, it seems that the idea of being spiked with a needle was suggested by the nurse, not something the student had suspected.
There’s an understandable pressure to ‘believe the victim’, but the Halifax Slasher hysteria of 1938 (as well as other similar panics such as the London Monster in the late 18th century or the Mad Gasser of Mattoon in the 1940s) demonstrates that people do sometimes imagine things that didn’t happen or simply make stuff up. This may be especially true in times of anxiety. The Halifax Slasher hysteria occurred in the build up to World War Two, and against a background of tabloid fascination with razor wielding gangsters. Add to this the status, respect, sympathy and attention afforded to ‘victims’, and the stage is set for imagined and/or invented attacks.
And it’s safe to say that after living in a climate of fear for the last couple of years, today’s young people will have plenty to feel anxious about. Added to this is also the understandable concern generated by the horrific abduction and murder of Sarah Everard by a depraved policeman. The Halifax Slasher mass panic was spread by word of mouth in tight working-class communities, but also in the local and national press which encouraged more ‘victims’ to concoct or imagine slashing attacks. In the spiking cases, though, it seems clear to me that social media platforms have played an important role in the spreading of this modern myth.
I wonder if these stories of malicious ‘needle spikers’ jabbing young women in nightclubs operate as a kind of dark fairy tale warning with the nightclub standing in for the dangerous forest (don’t stray from the path, girls!) and the needle wielding maniac playing the role of the Big Bad Wolf. Perhaps these fears also reflect unconscious concerns about the Covid vaccines, or guilt about being out and having fun after 18 months of dour Covid Puritanism, but that’s just my speculation.
It’s with some of trepidation that I write this, as I wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘blaming the victim’ or downplaying real cases of sexual abuse. Perhaps I’m wrong, and there really are hordes of despicable needle spikers preying on young women. But as of yet no physical evidence of drugs in the allegedly spiked women has been found. And we need to look at these apparent spikings in the light of what we know about mass hysteria and how it operates. The strange case of the Halifax Slasher presents us with an important lesson in this regard.
But dialling down irrational fears benefits everyone, except, perhaps, sensation hungry news media and petty authoritarians. Going out and having fun is part of being young and portraying young women as helpless victims in need of protection is just Victorian sexism, pure and simple.
[3] Adam Burgess, Pamela Donovan and Sarah E. H. Moore (2009) ‘Embodying uncertainty? Understanding Heightened Risk Perception of Drink ‘Spiking ’’, British Journal of Criminology, 49, pp.848-862. doi:10.1093/bjc/azp049
This experience can be found in a letter to the editor of the Todmorden Advertiser from 1932, and is perhaps the strangest of the pre-saucer era sightings I uncovered in researching Weird Calderdale. It is signed ‘Old Lydgatian’ and is reproduced below in full.
A CURIOUS PHENOMENON
“Sir,- One day this year, in about the third week in September, I was witness of a curious phenomenon. As I was walking the Royd hills in the cool of evening I happened to lift up my eyes unto the hills (somewhere in the direction of Orchan Rocks), and to my intense surprise I saw, hanging in the heavens a glorious globe of green. This object was semi-transparent, and moving from North to South (i.e., from right to left) at a high pace, emitting a high-pitched whistle as it went. When it was – as far as I could judge – directly over an historic monument known as Stoodley Pike, it suddenly changed from green to yellow, and from yellow through all the remaining longer wave length colours of the spectrum. When it had reached a fiery glowing red, it hung for a moment motionless, and suddenly faded away as a tale that is told.
Could any of your readers give me an explanation of such a curious – shall I say – manifestation?”[i]
None of the paper’s readers could explain this strange sighting, but it goes to show that strange things have been witnessed in the skies above Todmorden and its neighbouring towns for a long time.
Paul Weatherhead 