Monthly Archives: October 2007

Dr. Bill Bass, forensic anthropologistUnder normal circumstances, one would expect a wandering throng of students to demonstrate animated displeasure upon encountering a human corpse in the woods; particularly a corpse as fragrant and festering as that which was found on an August afternoon in Knoxville, Tennessee. From a short distance the male figure almost appeared to be napping among the hummingbirds and squirrels, draped as he was over the pebbled ground. But something about his peculiar pose evoked a sense of grim finality– the body language of the deceased.

The students knelt alongside the slumped form, seemingly untroubled by the acrid, syrupy tang of human decay which hung in the air. They remarked on the amount of decomposition that had become evident since their last visit, such as the sloughed skin and distended midsection. The insects which feasted upon the decommissioned man were of specific interest, prompting a number of photographs and note-jottings. After surveying the scene to their satisfaction, the students strolled across the glade to examine a considerably more decayed corpse in the trunk of an abandoned car. Their lack of alarm wasn’t altogether surprising, for they were part of the organization responsible for dumping these corpses– along with dozens more– throughout the otherwise serene forest. They were forensic anthropology students from the University of Tennessee.

[Editor's note: What follows may be unsuitable for the squeamish, read on at your risk.]

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Every year around the end of the October, the red crabs of Christmas Island begin their march. Up to 100 million individuals leave their burrows in the forest and head to the shore in a scarlet tide of legs, claws and carapaces extensive enough to be seen from the air. They are driven by the most basic of biological imperatives: to spawn.

The islanders take the crustacean migration in good humour, closing roads and erecting diversions in an effort to curtail crab casualties and the tattering of motor vehicle tyres. After all, the annual show is a symbol of the distinctiveness of the Indian Ocean territory, and a big draw for tourists, naturalists, wildlife photographers, and documentary-makers worldwide.

Many visitors are impressed both by the size of the migration and by the islanders’ obvious concern for the crabs. Indeed, an outsider could be forgiven for believing that the spectacle has been an annual occurrence at Christmas Island since time immemorial, one surely destined to astonish countless future generations.

But the grand scale of the annual march– if not its very existence– is threatened by a foe far more ferocious than road traffic or the clumsy feet of camera-wielding tourists. And the origin of the migration itself is perhaps more recent, and more tainted, than many would believe. The story is one of inter-species meddling, conflict, and extinction, set in the context of a fragile island ecology. It involves protagonists of a two-legged, four-legged, six-legged and eight-legged variety.

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NORAD – Keeping an eye towards the sky to protect the United States.In the early dawn hours of November 9th, 1979, just a month and a half after the inexplicable Vela Incident, crews manning the underground missile silos along the American Great Plains received an urgent alert. Early warning satellites had detected that Soviet nuclear missiles were in flight, soon to rain apocalyptic fire and death upon the United States. This was not a drill (repeat, this was not a drill!). The soldiers manned their stations, and braced themselves for the unthinkable: the possibility of launching their ballistic nuclear missiles in retaliation. There was little time for considering options, as there were apparently hundreds of megatons worth of atomic weapons en route at high speeds. It seemed the world was about to end, courtesy of the world’s superpowers.

This alert was not limited to the US intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) force. The entire U.S. air defense interceptor force was put on alert, and at least 10 fighters took off. The National Emergency Airborne Command Post– the “doomsday plane”– also took to the sky, although the president was not on board. The United States was falling into its doomsday contingency plan, preparing for the worst.

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Juan Fernandez IslandNow available in the Damn Interesting fragrance department: Ben Taylor’s “New Writer Scent.”

It’s a small spot on the map. Below the thirty-fourth degree south latitude, the island of Juan Fernandez casts a modest shadow in the vast eastern Pacific Ocean. In 1704, Alexander Selkirk, shouting from the beach of this forgotten island, saw a western breeze carry his ship and crewmates into the October horizon. His next four years would be in solitude as he struggled for survival and, in time, inspired Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

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Vela SatelliteOn 22 September 1979, sometime around 3:00am local time, a US Atomic Energy Detection System satellite recorded a pattern of intense flashes in a remote portion of the Indian Ocean. Moments later an unusual, fast-moving ionospheric disturbance was detected by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, and at about the same time a distant, muffled thud was overheard by the US Navy’s undersea Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). Evidently something violent and explosive had transpired in the ocean off the southern tip of Africa.

Examination of the data gathered by satellite Vela 6911 strongly suggested that the cause of these disturbances was a nuclear device. The pattern of flashes exactly matched that of prior nuclear detections, and no other phenomenon was known to produce the same millisecond-scale signature. Unfortunately, US intelligence agencies were uncertain who was responsible for the detonation, and the US government was conspicuously reluctant to acknowledge it at all.

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