Another forensic professor, Keith Mant, summed up the current state of scientific thinking in the 1984 edition of Taylor’s Principles and Practice of Jurisprudence.
It seems that the probable course of events in these cases is that the victim collapses, for instance from a heart attack, or from carbon monoxide poisoning, and falls so that part of the body comes into contact with a source of heat such as a small domestic fire. This part of the body, usually the head, is thus ignited, and adjacent body fat when melted soaks into the layers of clothing, which, the victim being an old lady, are likely to be present in abundance.
The clothing, acting as a wick, melts the next zone of adjacent fat, and the process is repeated along the length of the body. If floorboards beneath the body are ignited, they will be burnt through, and the sudden increase in draught which results will considerably raise the temperature and incinerate the rest of the body. By the time the lower legs are reached there is less fat and few, if any, layers of clothing, so the process ceases.
The scenario is as plausible as the evidence allows. But for the sceptic there remain ample imponderables. Can such great heat be generated as to pulverize bone too, and yet not burn surrounding combustibles – cloth, paper, even hay and straw? What about flames coming out of the victim’s stomach? What about those fearful cases where people catch light suddenly in front of friends and passers-by? What about the shrunken skull?
The manifestations of the heavenly fire still throw up questions which have not yet proved amenable to the inquests of the laboratory and the bunsen burner.
Arthur C. Clarke comments:
The Strange Powers television programme devoted to fire-walking and religious rituals such as hanging on hooks was broadcast in Sri Lanka (where much of it had been filmed) on 17 October 1986. I had rather hoped that my – and still more, Professor Carlo Fonseka’s – ‘debunking’ of fire-walking would promote the ire of the professionals. Not a bit of it. In fact the only local criticism I received was from Mr A. C.B.M. Moneragala of Kelaniya (not far from Colombo, and the site of a famous Buddhist temple). He complained that we didn’t do a thorough enough job of rationalizing, and enclosed an article he had published in the Ceylon Daily News for 16 October 1981, entitled ‘Natural Pain Killers’. This discussed the recently discovered natural opiate, beta-endorphin, which the body appears to produce in direct proportion to the severity of the pain suffered.
To quote from Mr Moneragala’s article:
Apparently, powerful and awesome religious emotions are able to release this natural narcotic … controlling both physical and mental pain … In the presence of death and in the fearsome havoc of the battlefield beta-endorphin is released into the limbic area of the brain and gruesome injuries and death are faced with apparent indifference … [When] one of Napoleon’s generals had his legs badly shattered by a cannonball they were amputated on the battlefield itself, without an anaesthetic and then thrust into a cauldron of boiling tar to be disinfected. All this time the general showed no sign of pain. His only antidote was his cigar which he smoked continually during this ghastly butchery …
I have little doubt that some such explanation is correct -and quite marvellous. All we have to do now is to explain the explanation. And that is a matter of no small importance, for it may lead to results of immeasurable value to the human race – the Conquest of Pain.
As for the ‘human candles’, in the Introduction to Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, I classified mysteries into three categories, according to our current level of understanding:
Mysteries of the Third Kind [I wrote] are the rarest of all, and there is very little that can be said about them … They are phenomena – or events – for which there appears to be no rational explanation; in the cases where there are theories to account for them, these are even more fantastic than the ‘facts’.
Perhaps the quintessential M3K is something so horrible that -even if the material existed – one would prefer not to use it in a television programme. It is the extraordinary phenomenon known as Spontaneous Human Combustion.
There have been many recorded cases, supported by what seems to be indisputable medical evidence, of human bodies being consumed in a very short period of time by an extremely intense heat which has often left the surroundings – even the victim’s clothing!
– virtually untouched. The classic fictional case is in Dickens’ Bleak House, but there are dozens of similar incidents in real life – and probably a far greater number that have never been reported.
The human body is not normally a fire hazard; indeed, it takes a considerable amount of fuel to arrange a cremation. There seems no way in which this particular mystery can ever be solved without a great deal more evidence – and who would wish for that?
Well, since I wrote those words, more evidence has -tragically – become available. And I am indebted to Dr Geoffrey Diggle of Croydon for reference to experiments that suggest that, in his words, ‘this previously baffling phenomenon has now been elucidated and shown not to require any preternatural explanation. In other words, the M3K had graduated to an M1K!’
I am still not completely convinced, despite the experiments which have been conducted in attempts to solve this bizarre mystery. I know of nothing else in the whole range of ‘paranormal’ literature that gives me such a feeling of unease. Some of the evidence seems beyond dispute – yet, if accepted, it hints that there are forces in the universe of which we know nothing. And even that there may be something in the old horror movie cliche: ‘Such knowledge is not meant for Man …’
Here is a somewhat lighter, perfectly genuine and possibly relevant item from the British Medical Journal for 12 December 1964.
I recall a case referred to me many years ago. The patient was a parson who became alarmed when he noticed that his breath took fire every time he blew the altar candles out. I performed a Polyagastrectomy for a duodenal ulcer causing pyloric stenosis, following which he was able to carry out his duties in a more decorous fashion – I am, etc., Stephen Power, Royal London Homeopathic Hospital.
The Ships In The Ice
No picture in this book has a more compelling fascination than one of the photographs in the colour illustrated section.
It shows a dead sailor buried beneath the Arctic ice for 140 years. The hands, manicured, immaculate as though they had just recently scrubbed the planked and caulked deck; the eyes open as if in life; the teeth shining. Only the forehead and nose show the blackening of frost. The corpse is as perfect as that of the baby mammoth found in the Soviet north just five years before. It seems as if only some special stroke of lightning from out of the tundra skies would be needed to reanimate the young man in his icy coffin.
These pictures (brought back from Beechey Island in Canada’s Barrow Strait, far beyond the Arctic Circle, in the summer of 1984) are, however, merely the latest clue to the greatest enigma of Arctic exploration – the fate of Sir John Franklin and his ships after they entered the northern ice in the summer of 1845.
The dead seaman is Petty Officer John Torrington. He was only nineteen years old when he sailed with Franklin to try to find the North West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which had eluded explorers for two centuries. Professor Owen Beattie of the University of Alberta, who exhumed Torrington and also Able Seaman John Hartnell, said: ‘The bodies were extremely life-like, with skin almost normal and hair intact. It was a very touching experience. We felt very close to a moment of history.’
Professor Beattie was leading the latest of scores of expeditions which have tried to solve the Franklin mystery. At one time, in the summer of 1850, there were no less than ten ships searching for Franklin. Bodies have been discovered, cairns, even messages left behind, but the two ships Erebus and Terror have never been found, and many of the clues merely seem to add to the mystery.
Franklin was already sixty years old when he left Britain in May 1845. The ships had provisions for three years, as it was expected that they would be imprisoned in the ice for at least one winter, perhaps two. After calling in on the west Greenland coast, they were last seen by the whaler Enterprise leaving Melville Bay. None of the 129 crew of the two ships were ever seen alive again. But the deaths of Torrington, Hartnell, and Marine William Braine so early in the expedition – they appear to have died of either scurvy or lead poisoning – less than a year after they set sail, only add to the puzzles of a baffling expedition.