Call Of The Desert: Mojave Phone Booth

Until 2000, if you ventured into the Mojave Desert of California, into the middle of nowhere, you have have been lucky enough to discover a rather surreal sight. Eight miles from the nearest paved road, fifteen from the nearest numbered highway, sat a phone booth. A pay phone. Sat alone, in the middle of the desert.

The phone booth was originally set up in 1948 at the request of the owner of a local mining company, Emerson Ray, to serve his workers and others who lived in the area at the time as well as to comply with an initiative by the Californian government to deliver communications to isolated communities.

The original phone was a hand-cranked telephone magneto which was replaced with a rotary payphone in the 1960s, which was again later replaced with a touch-tone phone in the 1970s.

The Mojave Phone Booth first came to prominence in 1997 when the surreality of its existence turned it into an early Internet sensation, with several websites becoming devoted to the phone. Fans of the phone would ring it as well as trekking out to answer such calls. Many recordings of such calls have been made. In 1999 the Los Angeles Times writer John Glionna reported that one his own pilgrimage to the phone booth he had met a man who claimed he was called their by the Holy Spirit to answer calls. The man had camped out their for over a month and had answered more than 500 phone calls.

The new-found fame of the Mojave Phone Booth and it becoming a tourist attraction eventually lead to its demise. In the May of 2000 it was removed by the National Park Service due to the environmental impact pilgrims were making to the local area. With its removal, the phone number was also retired. A victim of its own notoriety.

Fortunately, in 2013, the phone number of the Mojave Phone Booth was purchased by the radio personality and telecommunications expert Jered Morgan, with the intention of once again allowing strangers to communicate with each other via the number.

The phone number is (760) 733-9969.

Bird Colony: Guano Islands Act

Guano. The faeces of sea birds. An abundant source of saltpeter and a wonderful fertiliser. In the 19th century it became essential for newly developed intensive farming techniques. Many nations rich in guano deposits took advantage of this economic boom while others took steps to stake an interest in this newly prized commodity. An example of this was the United States' Guano Island Act, enacted in 1856.

Guano Deposits

The United States became aware of large guano deposits on the islands of the Pacific Ocean aswell as in the Caribbean and passed the act as a measure of acquiring such assets. The Act allows for U.S. citizens to take possession of islands with guano deposits as long as they were not occupied or in the jurisdiction of another government. It also incorporated the island into the United States criminal jurisdiction aswell as putting it under the protection of the U.S. military.

Islands that are currently considered United States Territories which were acquired under the Guano Islands Act include Midway Atoll, of Battle of Midway fame; Howland Island; Baker Island and Jarvis Island amongst others. Many of these islands are currently disputed with other nations, such as Bajo Nuevo Bank and Serranilla Bank which are claimed by Colombia and Navassa Island which is claimed by Haiti.

Most of the islands claimed under the act have since been incorporated into other sovereign states, with many now being part of the Pacific island nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu aswell as Associate States of New Zealand such as Cook Islands and Tokelau. The Guano Island Act states that while islands containing guano could be claimed as territory, it also states that the United States was under no obligation to retain possession after the guano deposits were exhausted. Previous to the act all territory that had been acquired by the United States was considered to be an integral part of the country and could eventually ascend to statehood in its own right as part of the Union. The Guano Island Act was the beginning of the concept of Insular Areas in the United States, territory that was under the control of the country without actually being an integral part of it.

Current insular areas include American Samoa, Guam and Puerto Rico. In some respect it can be argued that the Puerto Rico statehood debate can be all blamed on the American desire for bird droppings.

Its a weird world.

Endless Fire: The Door To Hell

The Door To Hell, an ominous name. It conjures images of a a pit descending into the earth, aflame with dark, foreboding menace. A mythical place. Surely no such place could truly exist in the real world?

Turkmenistan. Ahal Province. Derwese Village.

One of the largest natural gas deposits in the world. 1971. Soviet scientists start drilling operations in Derswese in order to assess the quality of the gas reserve at the site. While the Soviets were overly pleased with what they had uncovered, and after starting a large scale operation to store the gas they had uncovered, disaster struck. The ground had become unstable and the area around the drilling rig collapsed into an overly large crater. No lives were lost but a large amount of methane gas was suddenly released from the deposit, posing a risk to those who lived in the surrounding area. Fearing the release of further gas, a decision was made. Burn off the gas. Extraction would have been overly expensive and possibly would have worsened the situation. The only logical thing was to burn it away. The Soviets assessed that it would only take a couple of days. They couldn't have been more wrong.

It would only take a couple of days, they said.

Over four decades later the crater is still burning. The smell of sulphur filling the air for miles around.

In 2010 the President of Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, visited the site and ordered that the crater be closed and the fire put out in order to limit its affect on other gas deposits in the area. The economy of Turkmenistan is highly reliant on the trade of natural gas, with Berdimuhamedow hoping to increase the state's production and export drastically in the next twenty years. 

As of 2014 the fire is still burning. The Door To Hell has become an international tourist destination. 

Cosmic Meat: Kentucky Meat Shower

Some really weird things happen sometimes. Take the Kentucky Meat Shower for example, it was a rather odd occurrence.

On 3rd March 1876 in Olympia Springs, Kentucky, for several minutes, a large amount of red meat fell from the sky. It landed in an area 300 by 150 feet, falling in rather large chunks. A mystery. How could meat simply fall from the sky?

According to the locals at the time, the meat resembled beef but when eaten (of course they ate some of it) it apparently tasted of venison or mutton. What was this mysterious meat?

Leopold Brandels identified the meat as Nostoc, a type of bacteria which is found in soil and swells into a jelly-like mass after rain, leading to the belief that it fell with the rain itself. Mystery solved? Apparently not.

Brandels passed the sample to the Newark Scientific Association who further analysed the meat. Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton identified the meat as being lung tissue, either from a horse or from a human infant (who apparently have very similar lungs). Further analysis confirmed the lung tissue identification with other samples being verified as lung and muscle tissue as well as cartilage samples.

The Nostoc theory of Brandels would have been the most plausible with other instances of weird, unidentified matter falling from the sky being in fact swollen bacterial colonies. Unfortunately for us the analysis raises as many questions as it answered. How did the lung tissue of a horse, or worse, and human infant end up falling from the sky in sleepy 19th century Kentucky?

Nostoc: Where's The Beef?

There are no firm explanations but the leading theory is that of a pack of buzzards flew over the area after feasting on several recently dead horses, with one of them spontaneously vomiting the horse remains from the sky. Apparently buzzards tend to follow suit with such behaviour, explaining the large amount of horse meat raining down as well as the area covered by the event.

Less realistic, and therefore more amusing, explanations includes the theory by William Livingston Alden of cosmic meat floating in space, falling to earth like meteorites. Personally I am not sure how serious he was with this suggestion, but I hope he was sincere.

Bacteria would have explained everything so easily, but sadly the world is often more bizarre. Buzzards or Space Meat, who are we to know? Either way, we can take solace in the knowledge that it tasted pretty reasonable to the residents of Olympia Springs.

The Divine Rice-Farmer: Jesus In Japan

The village of Shingō, in the Aomori Prefecture of Japan's Tōhoku Region, is in generally pretty unremarkable. It has a population of 2,632, an economy mainly based on agriculture and it has chosen the Asian Skunk Cabbage as its official flower. The Skunk Cabbage may, indeed, be amusing but other than that all seems rather normal about this northern Japanese settlement. 

Did I mention that it claims to have the final resting place of Jesus Christ? No? Oh.

According to local legend, the young Jesus came to Japan from Judea to pursue knowledge of the divine for 12 years before returning to his homeland to engage in his evangelical mission. As we all know, his mission did not go all to plan and the subsequent betrayal lead to the execution of Jesus by crucifixion. Or did it? The people of Shingō, Jesus was replaced on the cross by his brother Isukiri (a wonderfully Japanese name) while the Son of God fled back to Northern Japan. It is claimed that Jesus then became a rice farmer, married, had three daughters and died at the grand old age of 106. His body was then excarnated and the bones collected and buried in a mound in the Shingō village. 

Resting place of the divine rice-farmer.

I can not help but feel that this tale takes a lot away from the traditional Jesus story. The removal of his own personal sacrifice and the redemption of all sin; the purity of the Christ figure; and most importantly the whole darn resurrection thing. I am not sure that the people of Shingō actually fully understand the point of the Christian story. It is a legend, without basis, but it is an intriguing one. As the Christian world is full of relics of saints and disciples (often multiple versions of the same people and body parts if everyone is to be believed), it is rather amusing that a small village in Japan, where Christianity is a minority religion, is bold enough to claim the Christ figure himself. 

While the legend of Shingō is in essence no more fanciful that the legends of Joseph of Arimathea coming to England or the tales of saintly miracles, the fact the Shingō legend places Jesus in Japan is such a seemingly absurd notion that one can not but laugh at the suggestion. It makes one suspend the usual casual acceptance of legendary contrivances in such tales. We are able to humour the absurd notion that Jesus could turn water into wine, it makes sense in the context; but to suggest that he was able to and wished to flee to Japan seems more unlikely to us. Physically more possible, more rooted in reality but so far out of the context of the accepted biblical story that we dismiss it out of hand. Quite peculiar, really. It's interesting how much our suspension of disbelief is so firmly routed in our cultural context. 

I quite like the idea of a rice-farming Jesus settling down in a remote area of a far-flung land, living a life of peace. Seems far more in-fitting with his evangelical mission than the divine banisher of demons, leader of the armies of heaven and the right hand of God into which Christian Mythology has developed him. I'd rather put my faith in a peaceful rice-farmer any day. 

Changing The Past: Anatoly Fomenko

Have you ever heard of Anatoly Fomenko? I only discovered him last year through a late night, bleary-eyed Wikipedia marathon. In such dazes I am usually attracted to topics that defy casual sanity; the fringe of human thinking. Basically the weird things that makes for a good bedtime story but is otherwise without sound footing. Conspiracy theories and anything with 'pseudo-' or 'crypto-' as prefixes. Always a laugh. Fomenko is certainly a stalwart of the genre. A fascinating character who produces works of such meticulous and detailed absurdity that it has to be admired.

Anatoly Fomenko

While being a respected mathematician and a professor at Moscow State University, Fomenko has in his private hours devoted endless amounts of time to the study of history. Well, I say study; more of the complete destruction of academic consensus, replacing it with his own amateur theories. He is a proponent of what he calls 'The New Chronology', a claim that the whole of conventional history is in fact an illusion constructed in the last few centuries.

One of the core arguments of Fomenko is that of historical parallels being, in fact, reports of the same events with the names of people and locations involved simply being replaced by localised names and variants. He argues that rather than history repeating itself, parallels are actually different accounts of the same occurrences. Using his own discretion, logic and methods, Fomenko rigorously found such cloning of accounts in the historical record and condensed such parallels into what he believes to be the truth behind these repetitions. The cutting of vast amounts of history, such as whole lines of kings; wars; the existence of whole nations, peoples and countries vastly reduces the time such events in which such events could have happened. As such Fomenko argues that the majority of history as we know it occurring between AD1000-1500 with all events before the 16th century being rehashes of the same grander truth. He believes that there are hardly any accounts of events between AD800-1000 and absolutely no recorded history before that. I told you he was a character.

Fomenko's views are also rather euro-centric and essentially dismiss all of Chinese and Arab history as the creation of 17th and 18th century Jesuits, with all of the achievements of these cultures being attributed to Europeans. As a Russian, he also writes extensively on the history of his own country, with rather nationalistic tone. Fomenko makes claims of a vast Slav-Turk empire that existed before the 17th century, on which the historical accounts of many ethnic and national groups are merely reflecting. He claims that accounts of the Mongols, the Huns, the Goths, the Bulgars and others are actually corrupted accounts of true Russian history. Fomenko further claims that accepted Russian history is actually a forgery by German scholars to legitimise a usurping Romanov dynasty.

He also claims that the historic cities of Rome, Jerusalem and Troy were one and the same, duplicates in the accounts, with the Crusades and the Trojan Wars being cloned accounts. Other claims include relocating many of the biblical accounts to the Byzantine Empire, as well as conflating Byzantine and English history and claiming that the forgery of the ancient past being part of a Medici family conspiracy.

As with most fringe thinkers, Fomenko is as compelling as he is absurd. The seeming ridiculousness of his claims, coupled with his over-enthusiastic compilation of apparent evidence produces rather enjoyable reading. As with other things such as conspiracy theories and stories of the elusive, suspending disbelief and momentarily falling into their world can provide excitement, awe and incredible tangents of though. I would say it is my favourite extreme sport. As long as you remember, in the end, to be sceptical and logical with these matters, slipping into such fantasies is the type of escapism I enjoy most. Fantasy in reality. As much as I do not believe in what Fomenko claims; as much as I see the flaws in his arguments and the overwhelming evidence against him, it is hard not to hold a soft spot for him. As I said earlier, I have to admire the absurdity. It is pure entertainment, ultimately harmless and just based in enough of reality to be incredibly compelling. It is certainly more entertaining than most fantasy fiction.