Larry E. Arnold | The Mysterious Reality Of Spontaneous Human Combustion

00:00 These days, so many podcast hosts just riff through unprepared segments until they get to the next ad break for pills they know nothing about cheap razors and whatever else they can get a buck from. But The Hiresite Chats does it differently! We succeed or fail on the quality of content and your desire to hear more of it So you're about to hear another free first hour episode. It's here to prove the two-hour shows are worth subscribing for five shows a month for just $8

00:38 Members get a mobile friendly website, a decade of archives, a dedicated RSS feed for the best podcast apps and a lot deeper discussion that a single hour can allow for. Sponsor free with more for thee! Get a free seven day trial of THC Plus at TheHigherSideChats.com Enjoy In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that society would recover from its troubled times. From 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration we offer a fresh conversation.

01:33 These are the higher side chats. Goodness gracious, great balls of fire people from sunny San Diego I'm Greg Carlwood and in contrast to the highly controlled and manipulated mono narratives of today's news networks there was once a time when the world saved room for mysteries in high strangeness Maybe the media mind control machine was less sophisticated. Maybe it didn't realize its full power, but in the pre-internet age of the mid 90s I recall seeing high strangeness stories and news segments on daytime TV right alongside everything else And one of those strange segments that caught my attention in between UFO sightings and Tales of the Bermuda Triangle was spontaneous human combustion. And despite interest in most other Fortean phenomena carrying on, something happened with spontaneous human combustion where it just seemed to go away

02:23 Which could easily lead one to conclude that the mystery is solved or that it just stopped happening. And the reality, dear listener, is that neither are true. Well today we have the world's leading authority and premier expert in SHC Mr Larry E Arnold After leaving Lafayette College and having a brief career in electrical engineering, Larry founded Parascience International in 1976 to pursue the exploration of fording anomalies and consciousness. He has authored three books entitled The Parapsychological Impact of the Accident at Three Mile Island, The Reiki Handbook

02:58 and ablaze the mysterious fires of spontaneous human combustion, a nearly 500-page masterwork that covers all known cases and all possible angles as to what could be the source of people mysteriously being reduced to a pile of ash from the inside out. He has been a guest on hundreds of radio and internet radio programs, including Howard Stern the Art Bell Show and multiple episodes of Coast to Coast. And now he reaches a new milestone with THC added to the resume Larry let's get into it The author of A Blaze Parascience International Investigator and Serious Sleuth Of Spontaneous Human Combustion Larry E Arnold Welcome To The Higher Side

03:39 Oh, Greg. We are delighted with that introduction! Bless your heart we're going to hire you as our promotional person. It is a delight and an honor to be with you and your listeners this should be a fascinating two hours of exploring something that is truly bizarre truly fascinating, truly horrific. And as you pointed out in your kind introduction for many people they think they've explained it away and we're going to suggest that that is a misperception. Yes absolutely I am psyched for this and it's absolutely true that the interest seemed to fizzle out the coverage of it seemed to fizzle out but the mystery still remains

04:21 I was trying to get creative and i started looking around, i found your book and then i saw the images of these people reduced ash and maybe just a head or an unaffected limb just sitting there next to a pile of ash they are hard images to look at. But that really re-triggered the mystery to me. And now that I'm older, from when I saw this stuff in the mid 90s, I realize explanations like a person smoking a cigarette in bed don't even make sense. Bodies are actually pretty hard to burn especially in a short time and open air all the way down through the bone so I am more perplex than I was and I am impressed with how much you know about this

05:02 But because it is such an odd niche in the Fordian soup, how did this subject end up becoming your forte? You mentioned Greg that you were exposed to the subject of Sponcom in the 1980s. We predate you a bit. We first learned about it in junior high school back in the early 60's so we can do the math on how old we are. read a book titled Stranger Than Science by Frank Edwards, the newspaper reporter. And in that book he had a chapter about the cinder woman, a lady named Mary Reeser who died by means quite unusual in St Petersburg Florida on the night of July 1-July 2 1951 and he said her death by fire fit the classic definition of spontaneous human combustion

05:51 We never forgot about reading that chapter. We gave a report to our classmates about it and of course eyebrows were raised when we came through college, we still did not have any professors who knew anything about it when they would ask them about it after working a couple years in the electrical engineering profession. We decided to turn our attention back to spontaneous human combustion and a whole field of other Freudian phenomena Lots of people at that time in the early 70s were investigating UFO's and cryptids, but we couldn't find anybody who was writing much about this thing that we read about in junior high school called spontaneous human combustion. We decided to go to the Library of Congress down in DC to see if they could find original newspaper clips from 1951 about the Rieser case to see if Frank Edwards had reported the situation accurately

06:43 or if he had made up the story to sell a couple of extra paperback books. What we discovered at the Library of Congress in filing through reels and microfilm was that in 1951, the officials in St. Petersburg Florida were indeed mystified genuinely perplexed by the fire that consumed Mrs. Reeser's body she was a widow who was a Pennsylvania native and had recently moved to Saint Pete Florida planning to move back to Pennsylvania. Her body weighed about 165, 170 pounds but overnight in early July of 1951 that body was reduced to a few pounds of ashen rubble one foot still found encased in a satin slipper two pieces of calcined vertebrae and what was said at the time by the first responders to be her head shrunk into the size of a teacup or baseball. To

07:41 Achieve that degree of destruction to the human body by fire would normally require a crematorium operating under controlled scientific conditions at temperatures exceeding 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for a couple of hours. If those conditions had been present in Mrs. Reese's apartment in St Pete in 1951 not only would her body and the chair on which she was last known to be seated have been consumed but the entire apartment building would have burned to the ground Clearly that was not the case. So there was a genuine perplexing mystery that baffled the local investigators, the local fire officials and the St Petersburg Police Department. We had the privilege of speaking to two of the first responders Walter Tipton who was assigned on his first day as a St Pete police officer to secure the premises while the investigation of Mary Wieser's death occurred inside the apartment

08:39 He told us that the officials were absolutely bumfuddled. They had no conscious clue as to how Mrs. Reeser could have burned herself so completely in an environment that was otherwise largely devoid of the kind of heat and flame damage that one would have anticipated." The other first responder, to whom we had the privilege to speak was Nelson Aders, one of the two firemen who responded to the fire call and actually helped shovel her ashes out of her apartment He told us in a lengthy interview that, to the best of his knowledge this had to be a case that would be defined as spontaneous human combustion. In his decades as a fire responder and firefighter in St Pete he had never before nor ever since been called a fatal fire scene that in any way remotely resembled the amazing fire scene that Mrs. Weiser left behind on the morning of July 2, 1951

09:41 We also had the opportunity in our investigation to interview Dr. Wilton Marion Krogman, a renowned forensic anthropologist who happened to be vacationing in St Pete at that time. He heard about the case and took personal and professional interest in it because he had done in his laboratory experiments studies on the effects of fire on various cadavers human and animal. You knew what you expect how much heat was required to incinerate a body to ash and powder So the conditions that he was led to believe happened in Mrs. Reese's apartment were completely baffling to him. He actually told us and wrote that if he had not studied the case, spoken to the experts at the scene at that time it reminded him of something that was macabre, something superstitious, something that would have been attributable to superstition back in the Middle Ages because such a fire scene should not occur

10:40 He was utterly perplexed not only by the degree of destruction to Mrs. Rieser's body, but as we intimated the localization of the apparent high heat that failed to incinerate not only stacks of newspaper but also daybed linen that was only inches away from Mrs. Riesers sitting chair in her apartment there is also the absence of the noxious odor of burned human flesh in fact the first responders told us that the aroma in this abuses apartment had a sweet redolent perfume like Presents. Which and that is very odd, right? Because firefighters will tell you the smell of burning flesh is definitely not something you miss so for it to not be present in these sorts of cases quite odd right? Quite odd extremely odd

11:32 In the many cases that we have had the privilege to research, document and speak to first responders. Oftentimes in cases that fit the classic definition of spontaneous human combustion either we are told there is no odor or burned flesh, no odor at all, or conversely a sweet perfume like redolent scent at the fire scene This is atypical of a conventional fatal fire scene, as it is every case that we have studied that fits the definition of classic spontaneous human combustion. Which exactly is death? It is the blistering smoking or burning up flesh in the absence of a known identifiable nearby external burn agent. That is if the first responders can rule out contact with an open flame

12:26 the absence of caustic chemicals, no radioactive material at the fire scene, no evidence of high amperage electricity and no nearby radiant heat source. If you can rule out the existence of those five criteria then by definition if you have an incinerated body you have to consider what history has called spontaneous human combustion or what we prefer to term sudden human cremation." Yes, and sorry to take you off your role with profiling that initial case. But that smell factor is just such a curiosity and I wanted to before we got too deep into this compare spontaneous human combustion with other types of fire fatalities or even how a crematorium processes the body so people can really understand how different these cases truly are

13:25 That is a great avenue to pursue at this point and we're happy to do that. When we began our investigation of fire phenomena back in the 60s, there were three classes of burn injury first second and third first degree was when the skin is reddened mild sunburn for example A second degree burn was when the skin actually blistered or severe sunburn if you will And third degree was everything else which is basically scarring and nerve damage More recently, there has been a category fourth degree burn which is designating when the underlying skin and muscle tissue was severely burned. And now some fire scientists are labeling of fifth and sixth degree burn even those categories which represent the most severe burned injury that fire science is presently readily unwilling to recognize does not define classic human combustion fire scene

14:26 These are, if you will now a seventh degree burn injury where the injury the damage to the body literally extends deep into the bone itself. The extent of the bonus calcine and hard powder that was pretty much the case with Mrs Reaser and it is very much the case for several other cases that we'll be happy to describe to you in detail As we said in a crematorium process, the retort temperature is usually at 22 to 2400 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour and a half to two-and-a-half hours. To understand how hot that temperature is, lava flowing from the volcano it's about 2000 degrees Fahrenheit so we're talking temperatures higher than will cause rock to become molten

15:13 And even that process in a crematorium doesn't justify the bones or all the bones, right? You're quite correct Greg. Yeah what is rigged out of the crematorium retort are not only ashes but bone fragments those bone fragments are then put in a device called a cremulator fancy name for a bone grinder and the bone fragments are ground physically to powder that is placed in the urn to be handed over to the next skin In classic cases of sudden human cremation, SHC the bone itself is calcined to powder. That was the case with Mrs. Weiser and the case of Dr. Bambi, the case of George Mott and many others that we can go into depth with you in the next hour-and-a-half or two hours. These incinerations are fearsome they are intense and they are complete

16:10 So complete that if a portion of the human anatomy were not left at the fire scene, the fire responder, first responder and fire investigator and arson scientist would probably not even suspect that a human was involved at these fires scenes. One of the characteristics that defines classic SHC is that usually there is an extremity or two fully identifiable as a human body part that has left and not consumed to powder So in the recent case you had the head, few pieces of calcined vertebrae and one foot. In other cases maybe a lower leg or the forearms for their hands are left intact but the center part of the body, the torso, the greatest body mass is consumed quite often dry powder

17:02 which might be a potential clue as to where in the body the fire starts. It doesn't seem to be the limbs and those images are really grotesque, to see a foot in a slipper or a whole arm just on a pile of ash it's you know not necessarily pleasant to see but it is mysterious and maybe it does come from the center mass We believe that to be the case in many instances of classic SHC. Yes, indeed Greg and obviously we'll get into all the possible theories but the thing that really kept me interested in this as I started to go down the rabbit hole again was learning that we do have cases of survivors! I had no idea but you got to tell people about one of these cases because it really highlights how weird and mysterious this is

17:58 Absolutely. So this is a subset of spontaneous human combustion that the naysayers, the debunkers really don't like to deal with because if you accept the testimony of the people that we have interviewed at great length who say they have experienced partial spontaneous human combustion, the debunker has to basically call them a liar and that raises some interesting aspects The first survivor case that we had the opportunity to document in depth occurred to Jack Angel, a traveling salesman who used his motor home as a traveling showroom. In November of 1974 he was in Savannah Georgia planning to meet with a potential client

18:44 parked his motorhome one evening in the parking lot at Ramada Inn, Savannah Georgia. Went to sleep in his motor home expecting to awaken the next morning have breakfast and meet with this client on some clothing hopefully he missed the appointment because you slept through it when he did come to conscious awakened state. He noticed that is right forearm had been burned black through the bone he told us And yet the sheets that he laid on, the pajamas that he wore neither fabric had been singed. He got himself up dressed exited in a motor home and into Ramada Inn and did something that he told us was uncharacteristic for himself and then lost consciousness when he regained consciousness he found himself surrounded by a team of physicians

19:37 at the Savannah General Hospital, all of whom were marveling about how their patient had burned himself to the extent that he had and in a way that seemed to present to them. We subsequently went with not only Jack Angel but both of the Atlanta-based attorneys who took upon the case on the basis that something had malfunctioned in the motorhome to cause burns so severe to Jack Angel's right forearm and indeed also produced damage to his vertebrae the disc in the spinal column. He had also burn injuries and an explosive type burn injury in his right chest, and also burned damage to his groin elsewhere on his body. Keep in mind all this occurred without any fire damage to his pajamas or to the bedding material which he slept in his motorhome. The motor home was basically torn down into a frame

20:32 looking for an external cause, some malfunction in the motor home that could be attributable to Jack's burn injury. The two attorneys in Georgia had a lot riding on this case it was potentially $3 million lawsuit and so far chump of money back in the 70s they strove diligently they told us to find an external ignition that could have claimed Jack's injury they could not come up with one The bunkers are quick to say that when Jack scalded himself on a hot water malfunction or water pump in his motorhome, those devices were investigated and found not to be attributable or connected to the burns that Jack Angel's body exhibited. We spoke to several motor home technicians all of whom told us that in that motor home a water pump could not have caused that kind of burn injury to Jack's body. In fact, the medical practitioners who attended to Jack's injuries

21:33 wrote on his medical documents, which we have on file that the burns were quote unquote internal in origin. That by medical definition says that Jack Angel burned from the inside out compounded that the attorneys could find and the engineers that they hired could find no source in the motorhome itself there was no lightning at the time that would explain the burn injuries No mechanical electrical plumbing hot water issues in the motor home that they could identify they could explain Jackson injuries. All this tells us that Jack Angel experience as he himself admitted to us, he had to include himself that he was a victim of and survivor of this incredibly rare phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion.

22:31 I do love that account because it just seems like it happened randomly. He didn't even feel much, he just kind of noticed his arm was burnt and it was burned so badly that it had to be amputated from the forearm down and he had all these other weird burn spots in his body and even the medical report says internal in nature. I don't know what else a person needs to know Something's going on here. And now that we really got people scratching their heads, I guess I would ask how often does this happen? How many cases do we know about and how far back can we take it a provocative question? And when to give you what we hope is an equally provocative answer in our database, we have identified some 500 cases now that fit the definition of spontaneous human combustion. Most of those cases are fatal

23:28 but we do have now about two dozen cases of survivors. When this happens is quite random, in most cases it appears which makes it all the more mystifying and in terms of science difficult to quantify and predict because we have yet to find any particular set of commonalities any set of factors that are present in the database that would allow one to predict when and where these cases are likely to happen with one exception, though we can get to that later perhaps in the second hour. It's quite provocative. The cases at one time did tend to focus on a 33-year cycle 1938 had a collection of them 1905 back then the preceding set was 1870 1871 there was a cluster of cases

24:25 that hasn't followed through to the present time. So either something changed that 33-year periodicity, that we were able to identify at one time or there are cases that have been covered up and we haven't heard about that has happened as to how long the phenomenon has been going on. The first case that we have been able to identify in the medical literature dates back to the 1500's probably It occurred to a knight named Polonus Horstius and that was chronicled by Thomas Partholini in a very rare 1674 booklet that he wrote. We have actually handled that book in our hands, it does exist and the case in point he said quote A Knight Polonus during the time of good queen Bona Sofa

25:14 having consumed two ladles of strong wine, vomited a flame and was thereupon totally consumed." That sounds like a match. It sounds like a match to us if we go farther back in history excluding the medical documentation but looking at good sources from chroniclers in Roman and Greek times we can try and report some instances that certainly fall within the purview and the definition of SHC that date back thousands of years. Our conclusion in our book of ways is that this is a malady, a medical condition, a Fourtean phenomenon that has plagued mankind for millennia. That it remains so fiercely denied to this day as both a frustration and a puzzlement to us

26:10 When it's argued that the body is 70% water, that is like trying to ignite a swimming pool. That's true! When it said that internal organs are always left intact? That is not true. One of our prominent naysayers says there were no known cases in which internal organs of a burned corpse are burned more severely than the outer parts of the body. On that basis he claims that SHC cannot has-not and never will happen Well, his statement is categorically false. So given that his criteria is wrong then we have to conclude as you said earlier based on the photographic evidence alone that these rare but clearly well-documented cases of human beings becoming piles of powder do exist and do pose a real medical quandary for medical science and for science in general

27:11 Yeah, definitely. And the 33 year cycle is interesting that sounds to me like ritual killings of some kind because that's such an esoterically potent number among certain secret societies but regardless let's go a little further into what the debunkers and naysayers have tried to present as conventional explanations and how we know they are unsatisfactory explanations Well, let's see. When we talk about the subject with those who have a different viewpoint and have arrived at a different conclusion than we have, we deal with people like toxicologist Dr. Smith and Fitous who say that spontaneous combustion cannot occur and no good purpose can be served by discussing it. Dr. Lester Adelson, who was our forensic medical examiner for Cuyahoga County in Ohio was handed some of the photographs that we have in our collection and he was asked to comment

28:12 And his response was, quote unquote. I do not believe for a moment in the overheated concept of spontaneous combustion ask about the photographs that he was observing holding in his hand. He said well these photographs have to be fake they have to be hoaxes because again quote unquote bodies don't burn this way is assessment When we spoke to Dr. Adelson after he made those statements, we asked him have you ever gone into a fire scene as a professional medical examiner look at one of these alleged cases that you dismiss? His answer was no, he had not the photographs that he was shown were of Dr. Bentley Mary Reaser and a case from Pennsylvania

29:04 that happened to Helen Conway in 1964. We can discuss those cases, we've already mentioned the Rieser case. The Batley and Conway cases are just phenomenal! The photographs we have the providence for. We know who took the photographs, we know under what conditions under which those photographs were taken. Those photographs were taken in the 50's and 60's in the days before Photoshop. These photographs are real historical documentation of a phenomenon that Dr. Adelson refuses to accept, it was easier for him to write off the evidence as hoaxes and fake news—we use our modern parlance—than to confront something that he was on train to mentally accept within his reality." That's too bad for him! He's entitled to say it doesn't happen! John DeHaan another

30:00 well-known and highly respected and highly regarded fire scientists in America takes the premise that all these victims of so called SHC, which of course he dismisses are truly victims of something called the human wick effect. Which in essence says that the human body functions as an inverted candle where the wick becomes the victim's clothing and once ignited externally, they heat will burn into the bodies adipose tissue which becomes the candle wax And over a period of many hours, the body was slowly emulated into a pile of powder without creating enough heat to ignite surrounding combustible materials like stacks of newspapers and paper. We actually have cases in our database where the victim's clothing is intact but the bone is burned to the extent that it has been described as like house on twig that you would see in a fireplace every very hot prolonged fire."

30:59 A retort to that, here's an interesting verb there is if it was so easy to burn a human body that way why do crematorium owners and operators who invest $100,000 or more in a retort have to buy licensing permits operated crematorium spend money to buy 40 or 50 gallons of fuel oil. And given the price of fuel today at five to six dollars a gallon for fuel oil and using 40 to 50 gallons of it, you're talking a significant investment there just in fueling the fire or buying the fuel that caused the fire to incinerate a body in a retort.

31:40 When, if you believe the proponents of the wick effect, you would only need a match and perhaps a cigarette. Lay it on the cadaver walk away come back a few hours later and have a pile of powder to scrape into an urn in hand to the next pin. Good point. Crematorium armor operators would love to do that because that is so easy and cheap to do there's a reason they don't do that is because history and practical experience has told them It doesn't work that way We actually had the unique privilege a couple of years ago to interview not only a fire department commander, but a commander who also owned and operated a crematorium. Until he met with us and had us show to him cases that we will be describing to you and your listeners on this podcast, he had no idea as a crematorium owner and as a fire chief

32:42 that bodies could burn to the extent that Mrs. Reuser and Dr. Bentley, and scores of others have done in an environment devoid of the kind of heat and flame damage that one would common sense expect to find." He was baffled he was mystified. He said as have many other first responders whom we have interviewed have said to us I don't have a clue Right and i've heard that in some of these tv specials where they did explore this for a while. And then they would talk to someone who would try to debunk it one of the things they did that is just kind of silly was burning pigs covered in gasoline and then like same thing and obviously thats pretty far from the same thing

33:37 Thank you so much for recognizing that and for being astute and observant. We wish fire scientists would be as clear-headed and open minded, as you have just proven yourself to be Gregg. We're going to get real specific with you we are aware of three experiments that have been televised using a pig as a substitute for the human body in an attempt to debunk so called spontaneous human combustion actually four experiments. Three of them have been done by John DeHaan, whom we mentioned earlier is a renowned highly regarded and highly paid fire forensics expert in the United States The first experiment he did was for the BBC in a program that also involved our participation if I recall the date correctly 1999

34:31 He used a pig as a stand-in for human body, which is a fair stand in. The pig will burn quite similarly to the human body so it's a fair substitute for human corpse however the first thing he did was pour a liter of gasoline on the pig and he said he had to do that because he needed to raise the heat of combustion sufficiently so that the adipose tissue would then become self sustaining and combustible As we pointed out, Murray Reeser and Dr. Bentley and all the other cases that we're going to discuss with you today did not involve any external application of an accelerant such as gasoline or kerosene so it was a really bogus experiment but at the end of it there was still certainly enough of the pig left that any competent forensic anthropologist could have identified the remains as being foreseen not human

35:25 John did two other experiments, if we recall correctly. Both of which erupted in large combustion events so that external suppression fire equipment had to be brought in to quell the fire otherwise the entire burn chamber would have burned down again. We don't find those situations with Mary Reeser and Dr. Bambino and the other cases that we detail in our book ablaze The episode that is most fascinating and most perplexing only we can tell you about because only we have the data to support improve the statement that we're about to make for you. The experiment that John DeHaan did, that is most revealing and reveals just the extent to which I debunker will go do not have to face the concept of spontaneous human combustion aka sudden human cremation is one that he did for the Learning Channel

36:22 In this experiment, to substitute for the human body he took a fistful of candles wrapped in cotton fabric laid it on a chair and ignited it. Shortly afterwards he stands in the burn chamber and points to a localized fire on the chair faces the camera and says look localized fire no surrounding material significantly damaged looks like classic SHC but clearly isn't. This is the wick effect, proves that SHC doesn't happen." That is his on-camera testimony and to every viewer of that program it would make perfect sense. Renowned professional fire investigator in a white lab jacket does the experiment produces the result he anticipates and debunks SHC Here's the problem

37:26 That is not what happened. How do we know this? Because the production company that did the filming with us and then for John's experiment, sent us the original DVD submission that they gave to The Learning Channel and there was a huge difference between what they filmed and what The Learning Channel chose to broadcast. What is that difference? It revolves around two points. First point is this Why would a renowned professional fire investigator substitute for the human body, a fistful of candles? The human body is not 100% paraffin wax. Everybody should recognize this! The reason candles are made with paraffin wax is because paraffin wax will sustain a low heat combustion process

38:25 The human body does not. The human body contains not just adipose tissue, but bone and bone is incredibly difficult substance to burn in old structure fires and gasoline fuel automobile accidents. Teeth and hipbone often are left intact to identify the incinerated victim in those fire situations. Second point of Mr. DeHaan's televised experiment. He did not have a self-contained, localized self extinguishing fire the original experiment on the DVD that the production company sent to us shows that this fire raged initially out of control there was a huge flaming open flame combustion process that was about to go flash over

39:27 That's when the air in a burned area is so hot that the room would literally explode instantaneously into flame. Fire suppression equipment was brought in to quench this raging inferno that was about to engulf the chair and all of the props Mr. DeHaan had set around the chair. For Mr. DeHaan, after that happened he walked back into that burn chamber, kneeled down beside the chair and said look localized combustion and imply that it was self-extinguished is nothing but an overt, blatant lie. And we have the evidence to support that statement if he wants to file a suit against us for making that statement, John DeHaan come at us because we will blow you away

40:18 I like it, stirring the spontaneous human combustion researcher drama pot. Let's go! Yeah let's go come at us unfortunately this is the extent to which the naysayers will go the lengths to which they were stretched evidence and untruths so that they simply don't have to face up to something that they are on trained you have to accept. Right, right well that is a thorough deconstruction of the debunkers and their attempts to duplicate or explain this stuff while we still have some time in the first hour I wanted to maybe outline another case maybe one that you consider a classic case? The book starts with Dr Bentley uh maybe tell people a little bit about that case We would love to tell your listeners

41:14 about Dr. Bentley because this is the case that convinced us that we were looking at something truly bizarre, truly unexplained and yet utterly fascinating up to this point we'd only heard about the Weiser case in any detail when we were tipped off to the existence of possible second case reminiscent of Mary Weiser that happened in our home state of Pennsylvania to Dr. John Bentley in Coudersport, Northern Pennsylvania back in 1966 we spent a weekend in Coudersport talking to everybody that we could identify who had any involvement in the fire fatality of Dr. Bentley. We spoke to the first responders, we spoke to the fire chief, we spoke to newspaper editor, we spoke to the coroner, deputy coroner

42:06 And our documentation of the Bentley death is so detailed that we chose to use it as the opening chapter in our book ablaze. And it was there that really for the first time, Dr. Bentley gets the notoriety and attention that his death warrants. Dr. Bentley was a 92 year old general practitioner in Cabbageport, Pennsylvania in 1966 spent most of his medical career there. He was beloved by the community He had broken his hip several years earlier and to look around his apartment he used an aluminum walker. He lived alone in a two-room apartment on the morning of December 5, 1966, bitterly cold winter morning in Coudersport Don Gosnell local meter reader for the gas company walked into Dr. Bentley's apartment at home on North Main Street in Coudersport to read the gas meter in the basement

43:00 Upon walking down the hallway past Dr. Bandy's two-room apartment, Don Gosnell noticed a sweet smelling aroma and wispy bluish white smoke in the hallway he thought it was curious but proceeded to the basement to read the gas meter upon turning to go back upstairs he noticed on the earthen floor a pile of ash about five inches in height 14 inches in diameter he told us Being a volunteer fireman as well as a meter reader for the local gas company, Don goes no was curious walked over picked them out with his work group and noticed nothing amiss. He looked overhead as to the location of the source of the ashes and notice they hold in that basement ceiling about two and half by three feet in size, some cherry red embers on the perimeter of that hole

43:51 Mr. Gosnell was more perplexed, went back upstairs and decided before leaving Dr. Bentley's home he'd knock on the door of Dr. Bentley's apartment just to make sure that the 92-year old gentleman was you know doing okay. He got no response as people at that time in Countessport tended not to lock their doors, thought open Dr. Bentley's apartment door peered into the sitting living room with Dr. Bentley saw the doctor's chair saw the doctor stand next to the chair but did not see the doctor Mr. Gosnell walked into the living room and stuck his head into Dr. Bentley's bathroom, and as Mr. Gosnell would tell us he forever after wished he had not done that because in the bathroom of Dr. Bentley he saw the other side of a hole that he had just witnessed from the basement next to the hole on Dr. Bentley's bathroom floor was half of a human leg which Gosnell first thought was the leg of a mannequin

44:50 but when he stooped down to peer closer, he realized it was not a mannequin's leg but a human leg. The linoleum on Dr. Bentley's bathroom floor had burned through and had not sustained combustion beyond that two-and-a-half by two foot hole. Paint on the bathtub directly above the perimeter of the hole was blackened but not singed. We were at that fire scene we were attest to that as fact. The ceiling in Dr. Bentley's bathroom was about seven and a half feet up, we could touch it with our extended forearm. There was not a scorch mark on the ceiling above the hole through which Dr. Bentley's body emulated. The remains of Dr. Bentley consisted of one half of one leg, a piece of patella, one knee bone—I'm sorry you know—one kneecap and possibly his head that was burned so badly that it is unrecognizable as they had by some of the first responders everything else

45:50 of Dr. Bentley's 175-pound body had burned to dry ashen powder that Don Gosnell had kicked in that mound on the fourth and basement floor below his bathroom." As we said earlier, typically characteristic of these classic SHC fire scenes there is a repeat sweet redolent perfume aroma at the fire scene this fire scene so unnerved Don Gosnell that when he called it in He ran down the street yelling the understatement of 1966 Dr. Bentley's burned up when the other first responders arrived at the fire scene he tried to discourage them from going and he said you don't want to see this is too emotionally psychologically disturbing, I would never go back in there with you. They could not believe what he told them was in their they went in and came back out shaking your heads as well

46:41 Very wild yeah no internal organs no lungs no liver just all the bones gone. It is pretty wild and just so we're leaving the first hour listeners with something i know the book covers a lot of possible theories what would you say as a summary of some of them or maybe, something that you think maybe takes the cake in terms of standing out amongst these possible theories. In our book, Ablaze we consider more than 120 different hypotheses suggestions that might explain any of the cases that history has defined and as redefined as SHC We have a couple favorite theories that involve bioelectricity quantum physics, geotelluric energies

47:37 places that one might be at an inappropriate time and we can discuss the cartography of combustion and some other possible ideas that could read them perhaps explain these fascinatingly bizarre fires in hour number two. Yes, they are quite wild! And in Dr. Bentley's case One of the details was really about the surrounding area. Are there commonalities to the surrounding area around these victims? Because it seems like sometimes we have cloth that should burn up, not and then also sometimes people burn right through the floor so this is really strange behavior for fire it seems. It is extraordinarily strange behavior for any fire to behave like this

48:31 There's a quote that we like from an American sci-fi author named Joyce Binge, who says the contradictions are what make human behavior so maddening and yet so fascinating all at the same time. And that certainly applies perfectly to the subject under discussion now. We have found geographically a commonality to some of the cases, and in Dr. Bamwick case in particular We have discovered that, as we said Dr. Bentley burned up or more correctly burned down to his bathroom floor in Countersport in 1966 and during research for a completely possibly unrelated phenomenon of places in the Potter County area where water would freeze in the summer and not crease into winter

49:23 We have found five areas where that happens. It forms a perfect triangle area centered around Cowdery's Fork, Pennsylvania. So in Dr. Bentley's case we had this astonishing juxtaposition of high heat thermal phenomena in the center of Cowdery's Fork surrounded by at least five locations where we have low freezing temperature anomalies Whether that has significance to Dr. Bentley's fiery demise, we're not certain but it raises some fascinating prospects for Earth energies that might have applicability to all kinds of thermal phenomena. Yeah! That is quite strange there's a spontaneous human combustion triangle that we didn't know about maybe several? Well happy to explore that concept in detail on hour number two

50:18 Sure, sure. Man do you feel in terms of just Fortean and general discourse? Do you feel like the term Fortean is kind of fizzled out several of the Fortean societies that were there are gone now or their websites are in shambles It's kinda sad man it seems like interest and high strangeness is more compartmentalized now and Fortean was much more broad and willing to look at anything that didn't even fit any category of any kind. And it just feels like there's a different tone to the paranormal researchers these days. You're making a very interesting observation, Greg. Reflecting on that perhaps so we continue to subscribe to Fortean times

51:09 what we consider to be the preeminent journal documenting all kinds of weirdness and deep intellectual thought and analyses of Freudian subjects that continue to plague the planet. But kind of like metaphysics, back in the 70s and early 80s, we were deeply involved with many metaphysical groups and they too have gone by the wayside. We've often said that spontaneous combustion is probably going to be denied heatedly if we may use until someone with high public notoriety, like perhaps the President of the United States goes up in a ball of blue flame in front of a bank of microphones and television cameras. And that's going to be oh yeah we know about this! We've known all about this for decades! Yeah sure it happens until that happens and probably not so. Blessedly there are still people out there who maintain a very active intellectual curiosity about all kinds of high strangeness kind

52:07 call out Nancy Polkin in California, who is one of your avid listeners and indeed we believe is how you first heard about our research and thought us to discuss this with you and your listeners for which were quite grateful. Right on! One of our favorite quotes by Eden Philpott's it's from A Shadow Passes in which he writes the universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for a witch to grow sharper That's a good philosophy that has guided us through decades of investigating weird stuff. We think we're not particularly gullible, we try to approach our research with an open curious mindset about applying scientific methodology if it can be explained by what is presently known bingo excellent put that on the solved shelf and find something that looks like it still belongs in the doobie solved shelf

53:05 And that particularly applies in the work that we've done with precognition, with thunderbirds and certainly with our decades of study of what collectively is called pyrophenomena. Strange fires that cannot be rejected except by those with closed minds. If you don't reject the evidence then automatically you must confront the fact and the situation that there is so much yet to be discovered about combustion phenomenon, about fire in general. Fire is thought to be man's oldest tool perhaps it is. It is certainly still one of man's least understood tools until we

53:59 and curiosity-minded individuals choose to look at the evidence honestly, and with great curiosity not with dismissal and denial and denigration and debunking. Then new things can be discovered, new understanding can be achieved, and progress will happen And we'll find something else that's 40th that could be explored and discovered. Learning should never cease, right? And the rabbit hole goes deep. Yes it does! Well cheers to that well said good place to pull it all together man I really had a blast this is certainly a mysterious thing that happens to people

54:49 Every once in a great while maybe every five years or so i'm maybe every ten years that's what happens rare enough that that's how people can forget about it but, it does happen and when you really examine the evidence of. The cases that you've outlined here, that you have in the book and what the medical examiners say and what fire experts say and what the photographs show. It's unbelievable! And it really is way more mysterious than people give it credit for and it should be. still in the Rolodex of weird stuff, I'd say. So here I am trying to put it back up there in people's minds and I appreciate you helping me do that and spending the time with me. Do you want to tell people anything more about the book or give them any other links before we call it? Absolutely! You have kindly and cogently synopsized the topic precisely. In terms of more information, we welcome it. We would be eager and anxious to hear from your listeners

55:52 with ideas, with thoughts, with suggestions, with sources and most wonderfully if they could tip us off to a case that we might not know about or that would happen in the future. The quicker that we can learn about these cases, the quicker we can get ourself out into the fire scenes make contact with first responders. The longer of the cases lay unaddressed and uninvestigated, the easier it is to cover them up and misrepresent them Our book is A Blaze, The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion. It is available through Amazon of course our email for contact is very simple s h e happens at gmail contact us if you'd like a personally inscribed book contact us through that email and we'll be happy to accommodate your listeners with that kind of request keep an open mind curious

56:53 Please contact us. And possibilities do happen and we're eager to investigate them to the best of our ability." I like it, and i hope people do have some logs to add to the fire so to speak and do contact you with any information they might have! And i'm also very lucky that i have a personalized inscription or i have an autograph from you in uh...the book that i got just straight off amazon so i don't know how that happened, but the book gods were smiling on me. So very cool and this has been a lot of fun so I don't know if we ever will solve it completely but if we do we'll have to talk again and take care out there keep fighting the good fight man! Thank you Greg wish I'd do that likewise to you all right Larry E Arnold the bona fide expert in spontaneous human combustion and or sudden human cremation

57:51 Honestly, I just wanted to bring this topic back into the paranormal fold because i thought it would be fun and unexpected. With everything being so intense and heavy right now... ...I really just wanted a break And I even thought to myself So what if its people who were falling asleep with lit cigarettes in their mouths? We can still make it fun! But is SO much weirder than that Obviously my 12 year old self could be fooled by the cigarette explanation But it's pretty clear now that, that is like the swamp gas explanation for what is a really weird phenomenon. Any adults should see right through it but the images are pretty gruesome! Just google image search spontaneous human combustion victims and you will see some of the black and white photos I'm talking about And its like holy shit I don't actually think I want to see this

58:47 But who knew there were survivor cases? Who knew the smell was sweet rather than repulsive. Lots of weird wild stuff in there Larry wrote a great book, he knows the cases really well If I was gonna try to cover this i'm glad I found him because it was about as good as it could be and there's not a lot more to say about it Now i'm glad we have a spontaneous human combustion show in The Archive! I'm sorry its taken so long And I hope you liked such a random wildcard episode. Several of the recent THCs have been more of the paranormal flavor rather than conspiracy, but we're about to swing back into heavy real-world, real time stuff If you heard me on Tinfoil Hat recently with Sam Tripoli, I previewed a lot of it because it's just what I'm digesting this week as I prepare for the next round of interviews

59:41 And preparedness is the word of the day. It's gonna be super important and I want to be able to sleep at night knowing that i did what I could To use my show, to get the right stuff out at the right time But if you want more SHC Larry's book ablaze looks great on any weird stuff bookshelf really good title too And in higher side news, still just playing catch up. But we did announce that I'm going to be doing a magic on the mountain event with the Gramerica guys it's gonna be an extended weekend hangout It's gonna be at Mount Shasta in February Spaces are pretty limited to about like 50 people but there is gonna be several speakers We're going to do

1:00:26 Q&A panel type thing and really it's just going to be hanging out. We're going to be going on a couple of hikes, we're gonna be drinking that sweet sweet water from the base of Mount Shasta which I've only been able to do one other time and i really am looking forward to getting back to that! I know a lot more about good quality water this time around but I just posted the link on Twitter...I think its contact at the cabin gramerica you just search that it will come up They've been doing these events once a quarter almost and it's really impressive so it is about time I get involved and do a joint event with them. They've got all the logistics worked out, and all the pricing... And you may have a little sticker shock when you see that pricing but you have to consider the fact that your room and board and meals are all in that! So if you were to take a vacation somewhere and you're paying for a hotel

1:01:24 And you're paying for your meals. I mean, it's very easy to spend three or four hundred bucks a day so consider that parse it out over the 4 and 1 half 5 days and I hope to see there and if we're going to swing over to the THC meetup calendar. I mentioned these last time but it's only been a few days since the last show July 22nd tomorrow The Milwaukee Metaphysical Society Season of the Crab send-off in Milwaukee, Oregon at the Beer Store. Also tomorrow Nashville Higher Ciders Happy Hour at the Tailgate Brewery location in Nashville Tennessee July 30th The Kansas Find the Others event at Sandhills Brewing in Hutchinson Kansas also July 30th

1:02:08 the New Orleans THC meetup at Dat Dog in Uptown and one more in the month someone just added the July 31st 719 local joint session meet up in Colorado Springs at The Public House. At The Alexander, Colorado Springs that's awesome I was born there well very cool! I hope you're all finding the right people that you can lean on in a pinch because it's going to get rough out there in the next 18 months If you need to extend your network, make a free event. I will mention it on the air and your new in-the-know friends will be there! But that's the show... I obviously got two more to throw at you in just the next nine days so I'm gonna get at it and I'll catch ya on the next one Big thanks again to Larry. I've done my part Your move Fire Within Feelers Instantaneous Igniters and Spontaneous Human Combustors You're fucking

1:03:05 Lucid dreams are so vivid, cause you go to bed at seven And your brain comes alive because you hate your nine-to-five You wake up with a dread and make sure your cats are fed Did your brain talk to a ghost who moved your coffee and toast As you listen to the higher side chats You get to your desk and your boss says it's a mess And your soul slowly goes To a place where nothing grows When you think he's not around, you insert a SETI sound The OM says turn it down and you say It's just the higher side chats Oh do you think you'd be invited? To Bohemia Grove. To a Bilderberg club Do you think you'd be invited

1:03:55 by a Rothschild to a party on a submarine. Diving down, to the center of the earth through the Marianas Trench your teeth begin to clench from the sulfurous stench The mask you're given doesn't fit cause you're not one of them Starting today, you'll make plans to get away. There's no one to hold you down and the what-ifs start to drown Then you wake to the glare of a cofluorescent stare And the light winks at you cause its life is almost through But it's holding on to quit time just like you It's time for The High Side Chats!

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1:07:02 We're trained to tip a waitress for bringing us a sandwich, but that tip doesn't give you access to a second sandwich. Really I'm not asking for any more than that and think I offer better service. Come get your second serving of tasty conspiracy goodness in exchange for that small token of your appreciation. Beyond that let it also be known we have grown and survived as long as we have by word-of-mouth I don't care so much about social media likes or follows, but tell the right people about THC. And not just listeners but the high-level figures who are better suited to sit down with me than most other hosts And if you can help me with any of these things I can work to bring you better shows which is just a win-win for both us. Informative, entertaining and action packed! It also never hurts to thank a guest you liked if you have the time either we want them to know people are listening so they're willing to come back down the road too Thank YOU for spending some time with me and cheers to a better tomorrow