"Black Holes" Devour People
A group of 150 people disappeared within one minute
Witnesses clearly saw that a glimmering cloud shrouded the people who entered a small valley. Then the foggy mass lifted off and disappeared in the blue carrying along the first battalion of the 5th Norfolk regiment of the British army - all soldiers to a man were gone...
Vanished in a cloud
The event which occurred on August 21, 1915, when an entire battalion was gone in the presence of other people, had been an official secret for over fifty years. Only in 1967 the documents containing the testimonies of twenty witnesses to this incident, which happened in the Southern Europe near Dardanelles, were made public. A long search for the vanished soldiers was mounted. But none of them had been found neither among the dead, nor among the POWs released by Turks after the war.
Mass disappearances of people are among the mysteries in the world history which are most hard to explain. So far scientists cannot offer a lucid explanation for such strange things, as the disappearance in 1590 of about a hundred men, women and children, who lived in an American colony on Roanoke Island. When the soldiers marched in the village, they saw burning candles and tables set for meal in the huts, but with no settlers around. The first idea was that Indians had killed them, but no drop of blood or dead body could be found anywhere. Only a few words were left carved seemingly in great haste on a tree near the priest's house reading "it doesn't look like... ".
The search for six hundred inhabitants of the settlement Hoer-Verde in Brazil, who disappeared on February 5, 1923, was given up a long time ago. The police thoroughly examined the vacated small town. At school, they noticed a gun, which was apparently used the day before, lying on the floor and words "there is no salvation” written on a blackboard.
“We can only guess why such mysteries happen, but so far we have failed to find any scientific explanation for them,” said Zong Li, Doctor of History from Harbin, who had been investigating cases of mass disappearances in China for many years. “Well, how can the disappearance of 3, 000 Chinese soldiers near Nanking, where they held their positions on a December night in 1937, be explained? Next morning, radio communication with this unit was suddenly lost, and a reconnaissance group dispatched quickly did not find any trace of the people. It appeared as if they had deserted, but around there were posts of armed guard and the soldiers could not escape unnoticed. Recently, an investigation in the city archive produced evidence of the 12th company 100 strong of the Soviet NKVD forces disappeared in November 1945. The group was heading for the railway station and did not come back. A search yielded only slight traces like tents put up for a halt, or an extinguished fire. That same year, a train carrying hundreds of passengers traveling from Guandun to Shanghai was lost halfway to its destination, leaving not a single nut. Where might all the passengers have gone?
The Ominous God
Researcher Richard Lazarus suggests that meteorites are behind these mysteries. During their fall on the ground, celestial bodies are charged with a potential as high as billions (!) of volt. On hitting Earth's surface they explode with a violent force, as it happened near the River Tunguska, Siberia. But sometimes meteorites fall apart before they reach Earth, hitting it with a huge wave of energy that creates electrostatic levitation. Under these circumstances, large groups of people, ships or even trains may be lifted up and transferred across vast distances.
Ancient Greeks of the city-states situated in Italy attributed the disappearance of people to the deeds of god Proteus. Consisting of protoplasm it dozes underground and once in 50 years wakes up to have a meal. Proteus could transform into any thing and was imagined as coming to the surface from volcanoes. So, people had to sacrifice to it a hundred of virgin slave girls leaving them near a volcano. And they disappeared without a trace, leaving behind only their fetters. The well-known American writer Dean Koontz in his horror book Phantoms favors a theory of the incorporeal god and believes that Proteus existed in realoty.
“It is an enormous mass of protoplasm covering maybe an area of some square kilometers,” explains Koontz. “Some millions years of age, it is probably one of the very first forms of life existing in the entrails of Earth or deep in the ocean. Once or twice in a century it eats people dissolving and digesting them almost entirely. Deep pools of water were found in the huts of Roanoke colony. A Chinese pilot searching for a missed train spotted from air a small lake that seemed to emerge from nowhere. Frozen water was found in the huts of an abandoned small Eskimo village on the shores of Lake Anjikuni, Canada, in 1930. The human body is 90 percent water, and that was perhaps all that was left of the dissolved victims of Proteus.
Missing ships
Stories about crews vanishing with their ships are known worldwide. The story of the brig Mary Celeste found in 1872 drifting between the Azores and Portugal is a classic example. A boarding party dispatched from another ship discovered unfinished smoking tobacco pipes, prepared meals, mugs with dried up beer... and not a single sailor onboard.
