HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 1998-07-01, Page 5International Scene
By Raymond Canon
THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 1998. PAGE 5.
The truth
is out there
The supernatural is the natural
not yet understood
Elbert Hubbard
You're a rational person. You believe that
one plus one equals two and that A and B are
inexorably followed by C, but suppose...
Suppose you were walking out in the bush
one day, listening to the birds, feeling the sun
on your face, the clean air in your lungs, the
delicious absence of tire squeals, internal
combustion engines, and the mindless drone
of TV's and radios.
You round a bend in the trail looking for a
good spot to hunker down and eat lunch
and...
You see it.
A ... creature. As big as a bear - even
bigger - and yet ... not a bear. It looks like a
giant wino dressed in a bad fur coat.
Your ever-rational mind desperately
thumbs through every possibility.
Too big for a wolverine ... not some giant
cat ...
It's standing on its hind legs, looking right
back at you!
Gorilla escaped from some zoo?
Some friends pulling a prank?
It's swaying now, looking back at you out
of two eyes like black anthracite under
shaggy brows. Not threatening ... but not
Land mines
Canada has played a leading role in
attempting to persuade the world to ban the
use of land mines. Some countries, including
the United States, are, in principle, in favour
of such a move, although Washington wants
to make several exceptions, one of the most
important of which is the border between
North and South Korea. Canada, and most of
the world, has ploughed on regardless.
An even bigger job than getting all the
nations to agree on a ban appears to be that
of getting rid of the more than 110 million
mines that have been buried just under the
surface of the ground and are waiting for
someone to step on them. As it is, the United
Nations calculates that every 20 minutes,
someone is either killed or injured by
stepping on one of these land mines.
To make the situation even worse, a
majority of these mines are buried in
countries that are least able to afford the cost
of removing them, countries such as
Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia.
It is not easy to detect the mines, especially
if they are of the plastic variety and consist
of little more than a cylinder packed with
explosives and a fuse.
Some of these mines are so small that they
are equal to a can of tuna which we buy from
retreating either.
You'd like to turn and run but it's been ages
since you even dared to take a breath and
anyway your legs have turned to marble.
Hallucination? Hangover? Incipient mental
breakdown?
Your eyes lock with the creatures' for what
seems like an eternity. It might be three
minutes.
Then, in less time than it takes to blink, the
vision vanishes. It is gone in a blur. Only the
undulating brush betrays the fact that
anything ever stood there.
Was it ever there? Are you going mad?
Never happened to me, I'm relieved to say,
but Henry Franzoni says it did happen to
him, up in the Olympia Mountain range of
the state of Oregon, on Aug. 1, 1993.
Henry remembers the date very well -
because up until then, he thought Sasquatch
stories were a bunch of hooey. From that day
on, Henry has dedicated his life to finding out
everything he can about what he knows he saw.
Sasquatch. Bigfoot. Yeti. Abominable
Snowman. A mystery by any other name.
Henry Franzoni is not some fuzzy-minded
mystic. Nor is he a 20th century Fruit Loop
who leaps to uncritically embrace any loopy
idea that pops up on the Internet - from
Martians in the Oval Office to clandestine
government Alien Autopsies in Roswell,
New Mexico.
Henry Franzoni doesn't drink or do drugs.
He is a U.S. Government fisheries scientist
our grocers. Such mines cannot be detected
by the metal detectors which have generally
been used to locate the metal variety.
Dogs are sometimes used to look for the
mines but they have one inherent
disadvantage; they tend to tire very easily.
Large machines have been developed to
remove or explode mines but they have
proven to be only about 80 per cent effective
and, what is worse, some of the mines are
scattered, without exploding, as the machines
pass by.
It all boils down to doing it by hand;
exploring the ground carefully with a
bayonet or a metal probe with the hope that
the mine does not blow up by the prodding
before it is removed. With such a method,
you can imagine how long it will take to
remove 110 million or so.
However, in many cases necessity is the
mother of invention and the task of removing
land mines is no exception. An electrical
engineer at the University of Auckland in
New Zealand, is trying to speed up the
removal of land mines by perfecting a device
which depends, not on what the mines
contain, but what they do not, namely water.
Microwaves aimed at a mine heat the water
which is in the soil but do not heat the mine,
because there is no water in it.
In the. experiments to date, the researchers
have found that an image can be made of a
mine that is detectable for at least 15 minutes
working out of Portland, OR. He is also a
First Nations American who was raised in
the bush. He knows the difference between
bears and ... whatever it was he saw.
He doesn't know much more than that, but
he's working on it - in a most scientific way.
Other Sasquatch "hunters" mount documen-
tary expeditions into the back country,
hoping to film - or even shoot - a Sasquatch.
Henry Franzoni combs computer data bases.
He's looking for Sasquatch references in
native lore and language.
He's found scores of aboriginal place
names right across North America that refer
to Sasquatch-like creatures. He's documented
the Sasquatch's place in aboriginal culture
and learned that virtually every tribe has a
name for these beings.
And he's the first to admit that so far, he
can't prove a thing.
Scientifically.
But he's working on it. His obsession has
cost him friendships. It's made him the
subject of ridicule among more orthodox
colleagues in the scientific community.
But Henry Franzoni is a stubborn man. He
was stubborn in his belief that Bigfoot was
BS. Right up until his moment in the bush on
Aug. 1, 1993.
Now he's just as stubborn in his belief that
there is something we don't know about out
there.
Because Henry Franzoni knows what he
saw.
if not longer. The next step will be to create a
mobile robot that will house the detector. If
anything goes wrong and the mine blows up,
it will be the robot that sustains the damage
and not a human body.
It is hoped that the cost can be kept down
to about $8,000 which is admittedly about
three times the cost of a metal detector
currently being used. On the other hand it is
much more efficient.
If the experiments are successful and the
device is suitable for production, it is
expected that, given the number of mines
there are to locate and remove, mass
production of the detector will reduce the
price to a level somewhat below the above
mentioned $8,000.
For those currently in the mine-locating
business, this looks like the bargain of the
century. There are all too many stories in
their mind of fellow mine searchers who
have made one little error in the vicinity of a
mine and who have paid for it, either by
losing their life or by spending their
remaining years with a badly mangled body.
A Final Thought
Life is just a mirror, and what you see out
there, you must first see inside of you —
Wally "Famous" Amos
The
Short
of ►c
By Bonnie Gropp
Tempting fate
Life has always been pretty good to me, a
fact I've always known, but am reluctant to
verbalize.
However, as I seem to be experiencing one
of those less than ideal spans of time right
now, I thought a public reminder might do
me well. So despite an on-going plague of
petty problems, which are triflingly
troublesome simply because of their
numbers and not their magnitude, I throw
caution to the dense humidity of the summer
wind and say I'm doing okay.
Why not sing out my praises of good
fortune, you might ask? Shouldn't we
regularly weigh our assets against our
liabilities? Aren't we to count our blessings
and not our woes?
Definitely. My reluctance, however, has
come as a result of my stuggle against
superstitition and a fear of tempting fate.
Recently at a retirement party, a woman
stood in a room full of people and in
expressing her gratitude, unwaveringly noted
that life has been very good to her.
And to my surprise, no hand came down
to smite her.
I have no idea where the silly notion came
from that listing the good things will
ultimately bring bad, but I could hazard a
guess. Let's just say the influence may have
started right from birth.
Mom is a very superstitious lady. While
she assures me that my aforementioned
pessimism did not come from her, I believe
it is steeped its her influence.
Let me just give you a sampling. Going
into a house by one door and leaving by
another is an invitation for a lot of company.
Not one she loses much sleep over. Friday
the 13th is just silliness, she says, but I have
heard her send the ominous warning
associated with a broken mirror. Throwing
salt over your shoulder if you spill the
shaker is something she scoffs at, but she has
admitted to asking someone to turn back
because a black cat crossed their path.
Mom was the first, and only, person to tell
me it's bad luck to meet someone on a
stairway, and anyone who would walk under
a ladder when they could go around it is just
plain crazy, she says.
But while most of these warnings are
given cavalier treatment, there are others
about which she feels strongly. Many a
family dinner party has been guided by
Mom's vehement opposition to having 13
seated at a table. I believe the premise is
based somehow on the Last Supper. All I
know for certain is that she will stand to eat
rather than 'stand for' unlucky 13.
Another is a portent of tragedy based on
factual evidence told to her as a young girl
by the party involved. The woman told Mom
that her ailing mother had once said to her,
"I won't be here tomorrow; a bird just hit my
window." She died that night.
While Mom does agree that a frail elderly
woman could have willed her death inspired
by superstition, she then tells the story of a
couple whose son was killed the same day a
bird was in their house.
Trying to point out to Mom that many
times birds hit windows or get into homes
and nothing happens, doesn't change
anything. In her head she knows, in her heart
she has her stories.
And she swears she has no idea, though
she knew my fear as I was explaining it,
where I got the idea that talking about my
blessings would tempt the fates.
Arthur Black