- "I was driving in a deserted part of a northern
state when I started seeing lizard-like things about 2 to 3 feet high standing
upright near the sides of the gravel road I was on. They looked 'intelligent,'
not like lizards or wild beasts. They seemed to follow me with their heads
and eyes. These lizard-like things were really ugly, so I started to drive
faster... and I swear the road turned into a light brown packed earth drive,
and the trees and such were all different, like nothing I've ever seen
anywhere. There were funny-colored plants with curly leaves and vines that
smelled funny (I had the window down). The whole scene was unreal and the
worst was that small, squat human-like people were around the sides of
this earthen trail working and not paying much attention to me. They were
gathering big triangular fruits and hitting them with sticks. Some did
look at me as I passed in my car and shook their heads as if to say I had
made a mistake. I actually wet my pants I was so scared... but I drove
out just like I drove in, and suddenly everything was normal."
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- History is peppered with intriguing tales of people who,
for all intents and purposes, inexplicably vanish from the face of the
earth without a trace. These stories - some of the most fascinating in
the annals of the unexplained - vary from being well-documented to having
the flavor of mere legend and folklore. But they are all fascinating because
they force us to question the solidity of our existence. Where did these
vanished people go? A time portal? Another dimension? Into a UFO? Consider
those chilling possibilities as you read these amazing reports:
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- The Bennington Triangle
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- Between 1920 and 1950, Bennington, Vermont was the site
of several completely unexplained disappearances:
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- * On December 1, 1949, Mr. Tetford vanished from a crowded
bus. Tetford was on his way home to Bennington from a trip to St. Albans,
Vermont. Tetford, an ex-soldier who lived in the Soldier's Home in Bennington,
was sitting on the bus with 14 other passengers. They all testified to
seeing him there, sleeping in his seat. When the bus reached its destination,
however, Tetford was gone, although his belongings were still on the luggage
rack and a bus timetable lay open on his empty seat. Tetford has never
returned or been found. * On December 1, 1946, an 18-year-old student named
Paula Welden vanished while taking a walk. Welden was walking along the
Long Trail into Glastenbury Mountain. She was seen by a middle-aged couple
that was strolling about 100 yards behind her. They lost sight of her when
she followed the trail around a rocky outcropping, but when they rounded
the outcropping themselves, she was nowhere to be seen. Welden has not
been seen nor heard from since. * In mid-October, 1950, 8-year old Paul
Jepson disappeared from a farm. Paul's mother, who earned a living as an
animal caretaker, left her small son happily playing near a pig sty while
she tended to the animals. A short time later, she returned to find him
missing. An extensive search of the area proved fruitless. * For more information,
see Vanishing Point.
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- The Vanished Cripple
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- Owen Parfitt had been paralyzed by a massive stroke.
In June, 1763 in Shepton Mallet, England, Parfitt sat outside his sister's
home, as was often his habit on warm evenings. Virtually unable to move,
the 60-year-old man sat quietly is his nightshirt upon his folded greatcoat.
Across the road was a farm where workers were finishing their workday by
pooking the hay. At about 7 p.m., Parfitt's sister, Susannah, went outside
with a neighbor to help Parfitt move back into the house, as a storm was
approaching. But he was gone. Only his folded greatcoat upon which he sat
remained. Investigations of this mysterious disappearance were carried
out as late as 1933, but no trace or clues to Parfitt's fate were ever
uncovered.
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- * For more information, see Legends of Shepton Mallet.
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-
- The Disappearing Diplomat
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- British diplomat Benjamin Bathurst vanished into thin
air in 1809. Bathurst was returning to Hamburg with a companion after a
mission to the Austrian court. Along the way, they had stopped for dinner
at an inn in the town of Perelberg. Upon finishing the meal, they returned
to their waiting horse-drawn coach. Bathurst's companion watched as the
diplomat stepped over to the front of the coach to examine to horses -
and simply vanished without a trace.
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- * For more information, see Teleportation and Vanishments.
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- Time Tunnel
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- In 1975, a man named Jackson Wright was driving with
his wife from New Jersey to New York City. This required them to travel
through the Lincoln Tunnel. According to Wright, who was driving, once
through the tunnel he pulled the car over to wipe the windshield of condensation.
His wife Martha volunteered to clean off the back window so they could
more readily resume their trip. When Wright turned around, his wife was
gone. He neither heard nor saw anything unusual take place, and a subsequent
investigation could find no evidence of foul play. Martha Wright had just
disappeared.
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-
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- The Mysterious Cloud
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- Three soldiers claimed to be witnesses to the bizarre
disappearance of an entire battalion in 1915. They finally came forward
with the strange story 50 years after the infamous Gallipoli campaign of
WWI. The three members of a New Zealand field company said they watched
from a clear vantage point as a battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment
marched up a hillside in Suvla Bay, Turkey. The hill was shrouded in a
low-lying cloud that the English soldiers marched straight into without
hesitation. They never came out. After the last of the battalion had entered
the cloud, it slowly lifted off the hillside to join other clouds in the
sky. When the war was over, figuring the battalion had been captured and
held prisoner, the British government demanded that Turkey return them.
The Turks insisted, however, that it had neither captured not made contact
with these English soldiers.
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- The Legend of David Lang
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- This famous case allegedly took place in September, 1880
on a farm near Gallatin, Tennessee in full view of several witnesses. The
two Lang children, George and Sarah, were playing in the front yard of
the family home. Their parents, David and Emma, came out the front door,
and David headed off across a pasture toward his horses. At this time,
a buggy carrying family friend Judge August Peck was approaching. David
turned to walk back to the house, saw the buggy and waved to the judge
as he strode across the field. A few seconds later, David Lang - in clear
view of his wife, his children and the judge - disappeared in mid-step.
Emma screamed and all of the witnesses rushed to the spot where David once
was, thinking perhaps he had fallen into a hole of some kind. There was
no hole. A thorough search by the family, friends and neighbors turned
up nothing. A few months after the unexplained disappearance, the Lang
children noticed that the grass on the spot where their father vanished
had turned yellow and wilted in a circle measuring about 15 feet in diameter.
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- * For more information, see The Mystery of David Lang.
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- The Stonehenge Disappearance
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- The mysterious standing stones of Stonehenge in England
was the site of an amazing disappearance in August, 1971. At this time
Stonehenge was not yet protected from the public, and on this particular
night, a group of "hippies" decided to pitch tents in the center
of the circle and spend the night. They built a campfire, lit several joints
of pot and sat around smoking and signing. Their campout was abruptly interrupted
at about 2 a.m. by a severe thunder storm that quickly blew in over Salisbury
Plain. Bright bolts of lightning crashed down on the area, striking area
trees and even the standing stones themselves. Two witnesses, a farmer
and a policeman, said that the stones of the ancient monument lit up with
an eerie blue light that was so intense that they had to avert their eyes.
They heard screams from the campers and the two witnesses rushed to the
scene expecting to find injured - or even dead - campers. To their surprise,
they found no one. All that remained within the circle of stones were several
smoldering tent pegs and the drowned remains of a campfire. The hippies
themselves were gone without a trace.
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- * For more information, see Only the Stones Know.
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- The Village That Disappeared
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- An individual that vanishes is one thing, but how about
an entire village of 2,000 men, women and children? In November, 1930,
a fur trapper named Joe Labelle made his way on snow shoes to an Eskimo
village on the shores of Lake Anjikuni in northern Canada. Labelle was
familiar with the village, which he knew as a thriving fishing community
of about 2,000 residents. When he arrived, however, the village was deserted.
All of the huts and storehouses were vacant. He found one smoldering fire
on which there was a pot of blackened stew. Labelle notified the authorities
and an investigation was begun, and which turned up some bizarre findings:
no footprints of any of the residents were found, if they had vacated the
village; all of the Eskimos' sled dogs were found buried under a 12-foot-high
snow drift - they had all starved to death; all of the Eskimos' food and
provisions were found undisturbed in their huts. And there was one last
unnerving discovery: the Eskimos' ancestral graves had been emptied.
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- * For more information, see The Vanishing Eskimo Folk.
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