UFO Rope Tricks and Threads From Nowhere

 

We all love a good yarn, and anyone who has looked into mysterious phenomena with any degree of honest inquiry is well familiar with those tales that fall apart once you begin pulling at the threads. There are a great many ways one can react to this; one may choose to discard the story altogether for fear it might contaminate the legitimacy of the other good stories, or one may hold on to it and put it in the “Maybe” pile. Still others might examine the yarn for its implications, and study those who believe it and why they do. This writer prefers to consider these loose threads, these in-between zones on the rich and mottled tapestry that is the subjective scope of Forteana, as the key to understanding how all of this weirdness - the outrageous claims, the patently unsatisfactory explanations, the investigators involved and even you, the reader - are connected.

 

To illustrate this point, the reader is invited to step right up and consider the Indian Rope Trick. It goes something like this: the street performer throws a rope into the air, which becomes rigid as though hanging from an unseen platform. The rope is then able to be climbed, and various avenues of performance have been described following this initial feat of the impossible.* It's classic stage magic performance, more often written of or spoken of than actually seen, it has been explained away in the past as a form of mass hallucination. The fakir, adept in clouding the minds of men, simply convinces the audience that he is performing the familiar trick, and the audience fills in the blanks as they watch the show with slackened jaws. This sounds absurd, and an early reference to such a claim came from a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt.  In a Baltimore Sun article from 1927, Andre Roosevelt claimed to have filmed the trick being performed. He and the audience alike saw the performance as advertised, but yet the camera showed no such thing! “Hypnotism!” concludes the reporter, “That is the rope trick of India.” 

The explanations of mass hallucination and hypnotism have long been a part of the UFO narrative of skeptical explanations. Often, those who make these claims are stage magicians themselves. In 1952 John Mulholland, a popular stage magician who also worked with the CIA, described flying saucers as a “state of mind”. He goes on to say that his decades of stage performance experience taught him that all manner of intelligent people “can, by suggestion, quite readily be made to see things which aren’t.” In the same decade, FATE Magazine ran an article about the rope trick; another well-known magician, Joseph Dunninger, said he knew of 37 ways that the trick could be accomplished- most of which, he said, were impossible. Included among the unlikely methods of pulling of the feat was hypnotizing the audience into believing they had seen it. The control conditions would need to be very specific for such a thing to work, and it was much less risky to use one of the others. It seems an old explanation for the magic trick, when applied to odd things in the sky, is adequate- and yet unlikely for the trick itself. But the show must go on, and so it does. One wonders if the phenomena behind the saucer sightings might not be putting on a show of its own…

Mass hallucination seems like a convenient, albeit unlikely explanation in cases where no physical evidence is left behind. Without anything tangible, with only the testimony of witnesses, we are left to grapple with the very fallible aspects of human perception and memory. Even still, without a carefully directed hand to distract them from what the other is doing, the idea that a group of people would collectively hallucinate the same thing seems as unlikely as anomalous craft from other worlds landing near a school. It may actually make more sense that, as Mac Tonnes suggested, these beings intentionally reveal themselves as a performance of some kind. If all we have at the end is a good yarn with an unsatisfactory prosaic explanation, then we have to accept that and find new ways to contextualize it. But what of those cases in which the physical evidence is all you have, and the story of the origin along with its explanation is the part that’s missing? Enter: the Mystery Threads from Nowhere.

In August of 1970, according to Berthold Shwartz and later reported by John Keel, a silver thread inexplicably appeared over Caldwell, New Jersey. The thread, it appeared to Dr. Shwartz, “came from no place and went no place. It just hung there.” This phenomena was referred to as “Sky-Lines” in a 1971 issue of Pursuit Magazine, wherein the writers who investigated the case found at least half a dozen of such strands of what appeared to be fishing line dangled from an imperceivable source. In one instance, over the course of the several months these mysterious nylon strands grazed the ground in Caldwell, four local boys spent an hour hauling in the line before it finally snapped. Analysis of the strands by DuPont revealed that it was a nylon material of some sort, commonly used for fishing line, but the source remained a mystery. Perhaps even stranger, when Dr. Shwartz sent a sample of the material to another investigator, the envelope arrived intact with nothing inside of it. The strand had disappeared, presto change-o, as mysteriously as it had arrived. The mystery threads here seem to defy categorization; other than the fact that they seemed to come from the sky, there is no direct link to UFOs. In opposition to tales of sightings which leave no physical evidence, as concluded in the Pursuit article, “we have the thing, but the how and why of it remain totally mystifying.”

Mystifying though it may be, this was not the first case of Mystery Threads from Nowhere. In 1955 a small town called Blakedale, in South Carolina, was tangled up in its own anomalous twine. The string was described as being like the kind used to fly a kite, but not strong enough to hold a kite. A tangled ball of it was discovered on the roof of a Mrs. Smith, and the children took turns pulling on the drifting string until they tired of it and broke it off. The thread seemed to continue across town, leading to speculation that it had something to do with the military or perhaps came from a weather balloon, although neither explanation was borne out with any evidence. The only origin everyone could agree on was that it came out of the sky…

Another account was from a man named Hut Wallace, who discovered a glimmering strand above his house. Reported in a 1973 issue of FATE Magazine, the Georgia man called his friend who worked for the Atlanta-Journal Constitution to come and see it. Neither man could see any source for the dangling string, it just seemed to come down from a clear blue sky. Wallace’s nephew eventually got on the roof and hauled in yards of what appeared to be green fishing line, but never saw anything at the other end of it. A nearby company manufactured similar products, but how it could have gotten into the air, and what could possibly have dangled it, again beggars the imagination. 

The final example I will include here is the first one I came across, and had filed it in my memory as simply a good yarn as it was an anecdotal accounting of events and sounded utterly bonkers to me at the time. After all, who had ever heard of Mystery Threads dangling from the sky? The story was shared on Facebook by a man named Tim, and it occurred at Stonehenge in 1976. He was there for a music festival, when a kid handed him a string coming out of the blue sky. He figured there was a kite, but he couldn’t see anything at the end, so he started to reel it in. He could feel the pull as though there were a kite, but after 45 minutes of pulling in line he decided to pass the string off to some “likely looking candidate”. He admonished the man to not let go- “after all,” he said, with a wry wit that one often finds among the British, “we don't know what's on the other end... it might come crashing down, it might be depending on us, we might be depending on it... what if actually 'it' is flying us?” He concludes by wondering whatever happened with the string, and whether somewhere, someone is still holding the end of it. “I certainly hope so”, he said. 

There is something uncanny, mind-bending, and existentially disquieting about something so mundane as a nylon line defying all that we know of physics and by extension, reality itself. For such a common, unremarkable thing as a string to buck the norms of our expectations and leave itself behind for examination, only ever leaving in its wake more questions, one gets the sense that the yarns we take in, and the threads that we pull on, inform aspects of our shared experience of the world and all its weirdness far more than we care to let on. What if some being was “flying us”, holding on to the other end? What if, as suggested jokingly in an article about the New Jersey thread, something was fishing for us? What if the Mystery Threads are just intergalactic performance art, a way for the phenomena to show us an Indian rope trick of its own? After all, the rope trick is just that- a trick. Isn’t it?

I encourage anyone reading this to chase down these yarns, to pull on these threads, and remember to have fun with it. It’s all a show, and there’s no sense in coming apart at the seams…

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Addendum: a bonus "yarn" that's almost definitely not true, from The Saturday Blade, January 5th, 1895, in Chicago, Illinois.

 

* An oversight on my part- initially I failed to actually describe the Indian Rope Trick. This has been corrected. The writer would like to express gratitude to his friend Theresa Meis, the Unicorn who breaths Fire, for pointing this out!

Creeping into the Valley of the Uncanny

"The Uncanny Valley" is a term coined by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori, describing a sudden disorienting absence of familiarity that leads to a general feeling of eeriness and unease. It sounds poetic, not unlike Rod Serling's "between the pit of a man's fears, and the summit of his knowledge", but being a robot designer Mori illustrated the concept in a mathematical way - in the form of a graph. A sort of taken-for-granted, mundane acceptance of a given thing - in his studies, a human-like robot - can take a dive into the uncanny at the first failure of the robot to perform within the parameters of human expectations. His essay first appeared in a journal in 1970, and aimed to help robot designers avoid this reaction of repulsion; but perhaps the Uncanny Valley of Mori's aesthetic advice has applications within the myriad fields of the unexplained. In particular, it may well be a key to understanding the nebulous phenomena of High Strangeness. 

What's in a smile, anyway?

An anecdote Mori uses to illustrate his point involves a robot designer who sought to make a man-like robot smile by carefully crafting its face with 29 muscles, as a human being has, but found that if it wasn't timed correctly the smile seemed unnatural and, well, creepy. Mr. Sardonicus, pictured above - the villain of the eponymous 1961 movie by William Castle - is the best example I can think of for a smile gone wrong. A smile is supposed to be a welcome expression of happiness, but out of context or done incorrectly a smile can incite abject terror. Reports of a mysterious being known as the Grinning Man illustrate the point rather well. According to witnesses, the Grinning Man is unusually tall, bald, and sports a horrible grin. No one knows who or what he is, and it seems no one has asked him - they usually are too busy running away!

But what if the anomalous entity is more subtle, as is often the way in cases of High Strangeness? Encounters with the Men in Black come to mind. At first, MiB might seem like well-dressed (albeit in an old fashioned way) normal people. It's usually their bizarre behavior that ends up giving them away. Sometimes they have unique physical attributes or move in odd, mechanical ways; and oftentimes, those who encounter the Men in Black are unable to account for their own reactions upon meeting these mysterious beings. The oft-cited example of Mary Hyre's encounter with an MiB in John Keel's The Mothman Prophecies is a good one to illustrate the point - the Man in Black was perplexed by the presence of a pen, as though he'd never seen one before. When told that he could have it, he cackled unnervingly and ran out the door. This sort of absurd interaction is par for the course with these strange beings, and naturally leave the witness in a state of bewilderment. Perhaps the bizarre behavior is part of a hypnosis technique called shock induction, when the victim of the (in this case) non-consensual manipulation is taken advantage of during a moment of shock, or danger... Keel wrote, in an article entitled The Sinister Men in Black for Fate Magazine:

All of the witnesses I have interviewed have told me they felt there was something inherently "evil" about these Men In Black --- something alien and dangerous. In a number of cases, people apparently have been drugged or hypnotized by the MIB and several have suffered amnesia and memory lapses after alleged face-to-face confrontations.

A 2016 study by evolutionary social psychologist Frank T. McAndrew explores the topography of that Uncanny Valley which can result from such things. Through surveying over one thousand participants it was found that unexpected behavior is a major trigger for feelings of creepiness. McAndrew posits that the eerie feeling we refer to as being "creeped out" serves an evolutionary purpose, to keep us on our toes in the presence of a potential, ambiguous threat. Unpredictable actions, particularly non-verbal ones, set off alarms that stop short of causing a fight or flight response - in fact, the opposite is often true, with the victim of creepy activity freezes, stuck with their own loathsome chills. Interestingly, men were more often considered creepy than women, and unusual physical characteristics aren't necessarily considered creepy - although they can exacerbate the creep factor of an already creepy person. Some hobbies or occupations are considered creepier than others. Can you guess what the creepiest occupation is?

If you guessed Clown, you'd be correct. People HATE clowns. In McAndrews' article about his findings, he points out that the average clown is male, has outlandish physical attributes that can build upon already present feelings of unease, and due to the comical nature of the clown's profession he is by definition unpredictable. All together, these traits create a subconscious low-level threat alert, leading us to feel creeped out. A more extreme, irrational fear of clowns is a bit different - referred to as coulrophobia, it's usually trauma related.

Creepy clowns in horror movies such as IT's Pennywise or the real life serial killer John Wayne Gacy often cited as reasons for the prevalence of fear of clowns, but McAndrews' study gives more insightful reasons. Personally, I have no real problem with clowns, but then again I've never encountered the phantom variety that plagued the country in the spring of 1981. Loren Coleman wrote about them at the time, and his essay Phantom Clowns can be found in the Fate Magazine compilation The World's Strangest Stories. Beginning on May 6, in Boston, Massachusetts, and lasting less than two months - from Boston to Providence to Kansas City to Pittsburgh, reports of menacing clowns harassing children came in to the respective cities' police departments, but no one was ever arrested. It seems bizarre that such flamboyantly garbed perpetrators could abscond without being seen, but they seemed to always make a clean getaway. In Pittsburgh, a clown was even seen with accomplices in the form of Spiderman and someone in a bunny suit!

In a sense, the Phantom Clowns of the 80s and the MiB share a lot in common. They drive distinctive vehicles - Men in Black typically drive older model cars that appear brand new, black of course; Phantom Clowns seem to prefer full-sized vans replete with ladders... They both behave in strange, unpredictable ways. Indeed, their very presence in some cases is unexpected and frightening. Men in Black typically appear to witnesses of UFO or other odd events, playing upon an archetype of vague, yet menacing G-Man, while the Clowns seemed to prey on children and due to their general creepiness are well suited to shock anyone into an Uncanny Valley. More broadly, aspects of High Strangeness such as synchronicity make one feel as though they've dipped outside of a comfortable reality and into strange, unknown territory. There's a playfulness or mischief to the phenomena as well - a trickster element, for which the Phantom Clown or farcical antics of the MiB could well be totems for. Or perhaps there's a sort of psychological, shock induced hypnosis that produces in the cognition of the witness a panoply of perceived effects. Or possibly, it's some combination of all these things... perhaps the best you can do is laugh.