Mince Pies and Cigarettes. And a Skull. And a Seance...

Mince pies and Cigarettes

I should wait until Christmas to post this, but I have to say it's the most wonderful alien story I've ever read.  Think of it as an early Christmas present!

Jean Hingley and her husband Cyril lived in a small council house in Rowley Regis, near Birmingham, England. On January 4, 1979, Cyril went to work, and after he left, she saw a light in the back garden. She figured it was the light in the car port, but when she went to turn it off, she saw an orange light hovering over the garden, which gradually turned white while radiating a sound that she described as "Zee...zee...zee..." Then "three beings" floated past her and went through the open back door of her house. The winged creatures glowed with a bright light and hovered about a foot above the ground. They were wearing silvery-green tunics and silver waistcoats, with transparent "fish-bowl" style helmets over their heads. They had no eyebrows or ears. Their faces were corpse-white with glittering black eyes.

Sketch based on Hingley's description of her callers.

Amazingly, Mrs. Hingley did not run screaming around the neighborhood with her apron over her head. Instead, she petrified with fear, as did her Alsatian dog, Hobo. But then the fear went away, and she "felt as if I were lifted up...I felt as if I were a different person; as though I was in Heaven although I was still at home. I seemed to float into the lounge." There she saw the 3 attacking her little artificial Christmas tree, shaking and tugging at it, and when they were done, they floated around the room, touching everything.  

She asked them, "What are you going to do? What do you want with me?" (My note:  I'd have been pitching a fit right about now.)

They replied by manipulating something on their chest, and voices emerged from it saying, "We shall not harm you."
"Where have you come from?" Mrs. Hingley asked.
"We come from the sky."

The trio went back to shaking the tree. Then they started bouncing on her couch.  (My question:  Were they three year olds?) Anyway, she said she was "happy" in their company. "Do you want a drink?" she asked. They asked for water, and when she  brought it, they lifted the glasses, and a blinding "power light" came on around their heads. "I didn't actually see them drink but when they put the glasses back on the tray the water was gone." 

She asked them if she should tell people about them. "Yes. We have been here before. We shall come again. Everybody will go to Heaven. There are beautiful colours there." The beings said they had already visited Australia, New Zealand, and America. "We come down here to try to talk to people but they don't seem to be interested."  (My Note:  Try it these days and someone will call ICE.)

Then Mrs. Hingley went into the kitchen and brought out a tray of mince pies. "They each lifted a mince pie from the plate as though their hands were magnetic." But when she lit a cigarette, they leapt back and floated to the back door, carrying their pies. She followed, apologizing, and saw "an orange coloured glowing thing" in her back yard that appeared to be a space ship. It was eight to ten feet long and four feet high, with several round portholes. The ship had something like a "scorpion tail" at the back, and a wheel on top."  The creatures floated into the ship, flashed its lights twice ("as if to say 'Goodbye,'") and disappeared into the sky. Mrs. Hingley's dog finally came back to life and began looking for the creatures.

Her visitors left Mrs. Hingley feeling "warm and happy," as though she had been "blessed." When she told a neighbor what had happened, they advised her to call the police. She did, but the police didn't know what to make of the story. She also called her husband and told him that she'd had "visitors with wings." 
"Birds?" he asked.
"No. Men with wings."
"Why don't you go and have your hair done and tell the girls about it."  (My note:  it's hard to get much more British than that, unless he'd told her "why don't you just put your feet up and have a nice cuppa tea.")

Mrs. Hingley said that her eyes were sore for a week after the "close encounter," and she felt too unwell to work for some time. Cassette tapes handled by the aliens were ruined, and for a time her radio and TV ceased to work. But she loved it, saying, "Some people have written to say that they think the visitors were elves or beings from the Fairy Kingdom, or even robots, but I don't know what to think. I know I shall never forget them if I live to be a hundred."

Sources:  #1 the main source is from Undine's Strange Company:  A Visit to the Weird Side of History (LINK)  AND  #2 from Slacktivist (LINK).  I cannot urge strongly enough that you subscribe to one or both of them.

The Skull

"A million year old human skull may have belonged to a relative of the mysterious Denisovans and provides clues to the rapid evolution of Homo sapiens in Asia. It suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study.  It also shows that we co-existed with other sister species, including Neanderthals, for much longer than we've come to believe, they say.

"Genetic evidence suggests it existed alongside them, so if Yunxian 2 walked the Earth a million years ago, say the scientists, early versions of Neanderthal and our own species probably did too.  This startling analysis has dramatically shifted the timeline of the evolution of large-brained humans back by at least half a million years, according to Prof Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum, a co-lead on the research.  He said there are likely to be million year-old fossils of Homo sapiens somewhere on our planet - we just haven't found them yet.

"The earliest known evidence for early Homo sapiens in Africa is 300,000 years ago, so it is tempting to conclude that our species might have evolved first in Asia.  But there is not enough evidence to be sure at this stage, according to Prof Stringer, because there are human fossils in Africa and Europe that are also a million years old that need to be incorporated into the analysis."  (LINK1 and LINK2)

(MY NOTE: My deep genetic tests via the National Geographic Genome Project show that I am definitely Homo Sapien but also have Neanderthal (4.6%) and Denisovian (2.1%) DNA. My ancestors - and probably everyone's ancestors - fooled around with each other. A lot.)  

Now I have been practically popping opening champagne bottle over this news

because I have been postulating (if not preaching) for decades that intelligent hominids have been around for at least a megaannum (that's one million years, folks), mainly based on the fact that as soon as the last ice age (The Younger Dryas) ended around 11,700 years ago, humans started right up domesticating animals and plants, irrigation, pottery (the oldest so far is 20,000, from a cave in China), building, and erecting megaliths, and what may be (so far) the oldest temple found on earth, Gobekli Tepe, just as if everyone "knew" what to do to get what we would call a major civilization going again.  Same myths, stories, and "inventions".  And haunted memories of a paradise lost and/or a perfect city shattered by natural disasters.

It's almost like the ice melted, and humans were racing to get back to the Old Days, but without the Old Ones (read your Lovecraft like the rest of us).

But let's move on to the really weird stuff.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon

I think I've mentioned this book before, but I want to mention it again.  Seance on a Wet Afternoon was written in 1961 by Mark McShane, and a movie was made of it in 1964, which is about the time that I read it on my grandmother's front porch in Kentucky on a rainy afternoon from the paperback pictured to the right.  I've never seen the movie.  I don't want to see it, because I know they gave the movie a Hollywood ending, which the book (actually a novella) definitely didn't deserve. (As if, and this will become more relevant later on, CoPilot offered to finish the movie off for them.)  I consider the book (actually a novella, but back then you didn't have to write 100,000 words to have a novel) a masterpiece of suspense.  

Myra Savage, psychic, truly can see into other people’s minds, and can even sometimes sense the future, but her real goal is communicate some day with the Other Side, mainly because she knows that this would finally give her the fame (and fortune) that she deserves. So she concocts The Plan with the help of her husband Bill, unemployed due to his asthma, and will do anything Myra tells him to do.

The Plan is simple: Bill will snatch a child from her schoolyard and paste together a letter demanding ransom. After a few days of citywide panic, Myra will lead the police to the child and the money, and all of London will know her name. What could possibly go wrong?

If you can guess the ending, the real ending, you're more of a psychic than Myra, because this does not go where you think it will go...  

BTW, I hope that if the aliens ever come back, they don't encounter a Myra.  May it always be a Mrs. Hingley and her mince pies.

****

PS:  I am ecstatic to announce that I have finally found the way to get rid of that #*$%&@&* CoPilot on Microsoft 365.  You know, the one that keeps offering to write my essays or finish my sentence?  Well, the last straw was that one morning I was writing my dreams into my dream diary, and it offered what it thought should be the way the sentence went, and I blew my stack because my dreams are my dreams and I don't need anyone to tell me where my dreams, my stories, my plays, my essays are gonna go, and don't even TRY to tell me what I'm going to or should say next, dammit!

So, this is what you do, for those of you who don't know yet:  open Microsoft Word.  Hit "File".  Go down the column on the left to "Options" and click on it, and turn CoPilot off.  

Oh, what bliss...  

Ancestry and Me

by Eve Fisher

As many of you, beloved readers, know, I was adopted to this country from Greece back when I was 2 1/2 years old, and have lived here ever since.  I was naturalized by my parents when I was five.  I was told I was adopted when I was about ten, and I took it better than you might expect.  For one thing, I was starting to grasp that my red-haired, Scotch-Irish, blue-eyed mother was probably not a direct genetic link.  (Still not sure about Daddy, but that's another story...)  For another, things were already getting strange in the Velissarios household, and - eventually - it was good to know I didn't have to be like that.  It wasn't in my gene pool.

But, inevitably, the question arises, what is?  Other than thalassemia minor and arthritis?

Now growing up, I'd been told three different stories about how I'd ended up in the orphanage.

Me, in the orphanage, looking
as happy as I was going to get.

• The first one was that there had been an earthquake in my home town of Karditsa, my parents had died in it, and I - plucky little orphan that I was - was found in the rubble.
• The second was that I was illegitimate, and my biological mother had to put me in the orphanage because in 1950s Greece, there were no decent unmarried mothers.  (This sounded more real than the last one.)
• The third was that there was a female relative of my father's family who'd gotten in trouble, and I ended up in the orphanage.

Anyway, a few years after my parents died, I thought I'd look into it.  There were a couple of reasons why I finally decided to do this:

(1) I finally had all the adoption documents which my father had saved but never let me see before.  Included:  a Certificate that I "was taken over by the Athens Municipal Foundling Home of Athens on the 6th of July, 1955, and entered into our records under register serial number 44627."  (We will be coming back to this.)

(2) Loneliness.  You see, my parents had successively cut themselves off, through travel (when we moved to California, my father never contacted any of his relatives in NYC again), quarrels (my mother and her only brother didn't speak for the last 20 years of their lives), and a general indifference to family which I've never understood.  And that cut me off too.  Plus I'd done quite a bit of moving myself.  The end result was that somewhere in my 50s I realized that the only family I had was my husband and friends -

AND I AM EXTREMELY GRATEFUL FOR EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU!!!! 

But I felt like I was standing on the end of a thin wedge of rock hanging over an abyss.  So, being me, I decided to try to do something about it.  The research began.

And the first thing I found was a number of news stories about black market adoptions from Greece to America back in the 1950s.  (See New York Times, LA Times, and many more; just Google Greek black market adoption.)

Basically, what happened is that a very poor post-war Greece figured out that they could make a lot of money from selling babies to Americans.  And they were stealing them from poor Greek families - telling the mothers of twins that one of them had died in childbirth, or that their baby had died, period, or just taking them - and then laundering the babies through places like the Thessaloniki Orphanage or the Athens Municipal Foundling Home.  And then selling them to desperate American families for $1,000 and up (which back in the 1950s was a fairly large sum of money).  And telling the Americans back-stories about their new little toddlers like her biological parents died in an earthquake.  And giving almost all the little girl toddlers the same damn name as is on my original Greek passport:  Mariana.   (Emphasis mine.)

Well, after I gasped for a while like a fish on the bottom of a boat, I went to one of the websites that existed to reunite [perhaps] black-market adoptees with their birth mothers, and began the process.  It was all remarkably swift, and did not end happily.  I never spoke or wrote directly to my supposed birth mother; instead it was filtered through an intermediary.  At the end, I sent photos of myself in the orphanage and now.  The last response I got was "That is not my child.  Leave me alone."

And so I have.  Thinking back on it all, I don't know if any of it was true or not.  Whether the woman who did the search was actually in contact with anyone, or just answering out of her own head, for some obscure reason.  (No money exchanged hands, which makes it even weirder.)  Whether the supposed biological mother told the truth - she lost a child, but it wasn't me - or if she was lying because she did not want me back in her life.

But I never reopened that can of worms.  Instead, I moved on to the next one:  Genetics. 

John D. Croft at English Wikipedia

My first genetics test was with National Geographic Genographic Project, and the results were that I was 53% Greek, 24% Tuscan Italian, and 21% Northern (Asian) Indian.  It was the last that surprised me - Greeks and Italians have commingled for millennia, but what ancestor picked up a Kashmiri bride/groom?  Although it might have occurred back at the same time that my ancestors - a randy lot - were commingling with any hominid they could find.  My genome is 3% Neanderthal, 3.7% Denisovian, and 93.3% Cro-magnon, and if you'll look at the "Evolution and Geographic Spread of Denisovians" map above, you'll see what I'm talking about.

BTW, I am inordinately proud of my alternate hominid ancestry.  For one thing, it explains my unusual ability to spot wildlife wherever I go.  I was also pretty darn good at tracking before my knees gave out.  Plus I'm a great believer in diversity.  In my book, if all you've ever known is one thing - you're missing out.  

And then there's the story about the Greek Consulate.  At one point, I was thinking about going to Greece and searching, so I wanted to know a few things, like how long can you stay in Greece without them kicking you out and do I still have Greek citizenship?  After all, I still have the Greek passport that I came in with (along with a vintage TWA bag from 1957 that I have been offered serious money for).  So I was talking to them about this, and they said that it was just a travel passport, but did not prove my citizenship.  And, to confirm whether or not I was a Greek citizen, they would need the names of my biological father and mother.  I explained that I was an orphan, and I had been in the Athens Municipal Foundling Home.  That I had all the paperwork from the adoption and would be happy to FAX that to them, including the above-referenced Certificate.

But that wasn't good enough.  As the lady said - and I hesitate to repeat it here, for fear of giving Stephen Miller more evil ideas - "Just because you were in a Greek orphanage does not mean that you are Greek."  I told her I had a DNA test, but she was not interested in that.  Only the names of the biological father and mother would do.  I asked how orphans were supposed to come up with that information when they had been abandoned at an orphanage?  Not her problem.  What about the fact that apparently the Greek government had jurisdiction enough to sell me off for adoption and ship me overseas?  Irrelevant.  I finally asked her if that meant that Greek orphans in Greece had to apply for citizenship when they came of age, and at that point the conversation came to an end.  She suggested that if I had a problem with it, I should get a Greek lawyer, in Greece, and pursue it.  So there you go.  The ultimate Catch-22 for orphans, and how appropriate for the @#$^&! age we live in.

So, after that, I thought, what the hell, I'll do Ancestry.com's DNA test because they match you up with genetic relatives as well as the general heritage.  First off, they disagreed with National Geographic:  according to them, I'm 85% Greek/Balkan, and only 13% Italian.  The rest is kind of vague...  But here's the kicker.  I went to the list of DNA matches...  and I have none.  The closest I get is a short list of people who might be my 4th to 6th cousins.  What this means - looking at the chart below - is that while we might have crossed paths at an airport, no living relatives have shared bread, wine, or talk for probably 100 years.



My first reaction was that I was like a fox, looking for a hole in a fox hunt, and all the earths are stopped.
My second, was that I was back on that effing wedge of rock.
My third was that the universe was being very clear, and while I didn't like it, I was going to have to accept it.

And then, as Mr. Edwards said to Dr. Johnson, "Cheerfulness breaks in."

I called a dear friend of mine and told her the latest, and she said, "Oh my God!  You really are an alien!  You really are from some other planet!"  And we laughed our heads off.

So, now I have decided to embrace the truth:  Sometime after the Neanderthal/ Denisovian encounter, or at the latest after the little trip to the Kashmiri serai, my gene pool carriers took off somewhere else.  And then - after some trouble in that particular space-time continuum - dropped me off at the Athens Municipal Foundling Home.  Or so they say...

Will keep you posted.  Oh, and if anyone out there knows who the little girl below used to be, please let me know.