Mystery Monday: Is this the tomb of Jesus Christ?

Is this the tomb of Jesus Christ? Nope.

This mystery solving is a lot easier than it looks, huh? So what's the story here?

Once upon a time, there was a television station dedicated to showing documentaries and other factual programmes. It was quite a good channel, but the executives in charge decided they would like it to have mass market appeal and started adding populist crap like Shark Week and American Chopper. Soon the channel decided to forego education and accuracy in favour of controversy and ratings.

So when an ossuary with a tenuous link to Jesus turned up in 2002, the Discovery Channel jumped at the chance to host a press conference with the Biblical Archaeology Society. The ossuary (a box for storing skeletal remains) had an inscription on the outside saying "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus". That the Biblical Archaeology Society are amateurs and that the owner of the ossuary had been suspected of forging biblical antiquities many times before didn't seem to bother them at all. The Discovery Channel were only too happy churn out a series of documentaries even whilst the owner, Oded Golan, was investigated and then arrested for forging antiquities.

Back in 1980, a tomb (yeah, that one in the picture at the top) was found in East Talpiot, Jerusalem. It contained ten ossuaries, six of them with inscriptions. The tomb was investigated by archaeologists under the aegis of the Israel Department of Antiquities (now called the Israel Antiquities Authority). The tomb had been found whilst digging foundations for an apartment block and, after the archaeological investigation was completed, the block was finished and the tomb carefully covered.

The entrance to the tomb as it is today

After the ossuary gained publicity in 2002, there was a relatively thorough investigation by the IAA (Israel Antiquities Authority) which concluded that the box was genuine, but that the inscription was a modern addition. It all became a lot more confusing when the Israel Geological Survey tested the box and found that the box had a patina consistent having been in a cave for a long time, but they also concluded that the same patina covered the lettering. So was it fake or not?

At the end of 2004, Oded Golan and four others were arrested on suspicion of faking antiquities for the last 20 years. They were charged with 44 counts of forgery, fraud and deception including the ossuary inscription. So you'd think the Discovery Channel would be keen to distance itself from any claims as to the origin of the ossuary until there was some consensus. Nah.

There was some suggestion that the ossuary had come from the Talpiot tomb, so a film crew gained access and filmed inside the tomb. Originally there had been ten ossuaries in there, but this time there was one missing and it corresponded neatly with the James ossuary, leading to speculation that, if the ossuary was genuine, that the tomb contained the members of Jesus's family and possibly even some relics of Christ himself.

Oded Golan and the James Ossuary

As is typical with pretty much all religious antiquities cases in the Holy Land, it's now descended into a clusterfuck. The IAA aren't able to produce any experts that are willing to conclude with 100% certainty that the ossuary is a fake, but maintain a public stance that it is so. Oded Golan has been mixed up in countless dubious finds of antiquities, there's even a picture of his home from several years before the ossuary was officially discovered showing what very much looks like the James Ossuary sitting on a shelf. Annoyingly uncritical TV stations like the Discovery Channel and the History Channel keep shoving out lazy, ill-informed speculation disguised as documentaries. Golan was finally tried and acquitted of forging the box, but the judge was very careful to point out that just because no one had proven the inscription to be a forgery didn't mean that it wasn't one; after all, no one had proved it genuine either. The judge was also scathing of the Israeli police forensics labs saying that the way they'd handled the box had made it impossible to run further tests. Golan continues to shoot his mouth off and it's surely only a matter of time before he "finds" another important religious artefact.

And that's where the story grinds to a halt. There was some DNA testing carried out on the remains in the tomb and it concluded that the bones that were maybe Jesus and the bones that were maybe Mary Magdalene (yeah, really) weren't related maternally. In other words, they didn't have the same mother. The Discovery Channel documentary (the uncritically-named The Lost Tomb of Jesus) claimed this showed they were husband and wife, but no one really believed them, apart from credulous TV viewers. But the confusion is great for business and the deluge of books and TV shows about Jesus's tomb will continue for the foreseeable future. Sigh...

Mystery Monday: Shangri-la

In an attempt to make life more difficult for myself, I'm going to try for themed days on the blog. Yes, it's not enough to come up with five articles a week, I'm now going to constrain myself to set themes on certain days. Let's see how long it takes me to crack. Today is, ugh... Mystery Monday - I should offer a prize for a better name.

A mystical lost mountain kingdom yesterday

Back in 1933, James Hilton wrote a novel named Lost Horizon. British diplomat Hugh Conway survives a plane crash in the Himalayas. He wanders through a snowstorm and is guided to the monastery of Shangri-la hidden in the peaks. The monastery itself is quite odd, having central heating, modern bathtubs, a grand piano, a large library and all kinds of other luxury items. Conway is shown the surprisingly snow-free valley below from where their food comes. It all gets a bit weird after that when Conway is told that the monks barely age and the High Lama reveals that he is dying and would like Conway to take his place. Obviously, Conway does leave and the whole story is actually told in retrospect whilst Conway is recovering in a Chinese hospital. He then buggers off, presumably to return to Shangri-la.

Oddly, the book didn't become successful until Hilton wrote Goodbye, Mr. Chips the following year, which was an instant hit. Odder still is just how many people took the idea of Shangri-la literally. Not long before the book was written, a number of accounts of travel in Tibet had been published in National Geographic magazine and many of the places featured bore a resemblance to the fictional Shangri-la of the book.

A lot of the other places mentioned in Lost Horizon are real enough. Muli, Kunlun and Chongqing all exist. Since the book became popular, Zhongdian in Yunan Province, China has now been renamed Xianggalila (Shangri-la) to attract tourists. It's funny that, in contrast to other mythical places, Shangri-la actually does exist.

It's all jolly pretty and a lot more accessible than Atlantis

Within Buddhist traditions there are mentions of the kingdom of Shambhala, a Pure Land (pretty much a Buddhist equivalent of Heaven). The concepts of Shambhala and Shangri-la are often thought to be one and the same. It's probably adapted from a Hindu myth (like so much of Buddhism) which  is part of the Kalachakra tradition. It's all a bit complicated, so feel free to look it up some time if you fancy a lot of tortuous reading.

The Shambhala/Shangri-la myth came to the West via Catholic missionaries in the 17th century, but it wasn't until the 19th century that interest really picked up. Hungarian scholar Sándor Kőrösi Csoma (yeah, every name in this article is unpronounceable) who travelled extensively in the region, wrote of Shambhala and even gave a geographical location: "a fabulous country in the north...situated between 45' and 50' north latitude." Following his description leads to the eastern region of Kazakhstan, which is characterized by green hills, low mountains and lakes in stark contrast to the barren mountainous terrain of Tibet and Yunan. Hmm.

Hard to believe that this waterfall could contain the essence of uber-nazis and
super-communists, but a surprisingly high number of people thought so

Theosophist Madam Blavatsky claimed to be in contact with Himalayan ascended masters (enlightened beings) and regularly mentioned Shambhala and Shangri-la, introducing them to a wider audience. Lost Horizon appeared at the time that the Theosophical Society's ideas had most currency with the public and at a time when Nazi Germany was rather interested in using German and Eastern mythology to promote the idea of a master race. In 1938, Heinrich Himmler sent an SS mission to Tibet (under Ernst Schäfer) to investigate Asian mysticism and try to find the truth of Shambhala and Shangri-la.

Whilst the German mission to Tibet is relatively well-known, few have heard of the similar Soviet mission. Senior intelligence officer and chief cryptographer Gleb Bokii (no, really) was fascinated by the teachings of the Theosophists and met with several Mongolian lamas. He gained a fascination with Shambhala and Shangri-la and organised an expedition to Inner Asia with his writer friend, Alexander Barchenko. They wanted to prove a link between Kalachakra-tantra and the tenets of Soviet Communism. Although their mission didn't go ahead, Bokii and Barchenko founded a laboratory (under the auspices of the secret police) to experiment with Buddhist techniques in order to try to create perfect communists. Crikey. They weren't the only Soviets interested in Shambhala and the the Soviet Foreign Commissariat did later send an expedition to Tibet. I don't know if they managed to make a super-Soviet-Buddhist-ubermensch, but I presume I'd have heard if they had.

Nicholas Roerich, Song of Shambhala: Thang-La (1943)

Today, you can visit Shangri-la for yourself on any number of package holidays. It's maybe not at its best right now though. Whilst making his 2005 film Wu Ji (The Promise), Chen Kaige and his crew built massive sets in Shangri-la and they got into trouble a bit afterwards for messing the place up. The Chinese government got a bit shirty after Chen and his boys cut down quite a few trees, destroying an entire local eco-system and then left behind massive sets, many of them made with concrete.

It was like that when we got here

A big boy did it and ran away

So there you go: Shangri-la is real and Shambhala might be. But if you want to find a mystical mountain kingdom, don't bother going to see Hitler or Stalin, just hire a Chinese film crew, but remember to tidy up after yourselves. What's especially annoyingly is that The Promise is a bit of a shit film. Ah well...

Mysterious mysteries of the mysterious: The Bermuda Triangle

Here's a joke reference with an audience of one. I should offer prizes

Many books have been published about the Bermuda Triangle over the years, with a lot of them attempting to solve the mystery. Titles like Limbo of the Lost and The Devil's Triangle came up with a variety of explanations that encompass everything from the sinking of Atlantis through ancient Incan magnetic technology to everyone's favourite: aliens. Oddly, not many book authors chose the explanation "Charles Berlitz just made it up," probably because that doesn't fill a page let alone fulfil a book contract.

Okay, so you're probably going to want a more detailed explanation than "it's bollocks" so I suppose I'd better write some more. Although the story of the Bermuda Triangle is quite interesting, the story of the story of the Bermuda Triangle (if you see what I mean) is much more fascinating. Wait - Charles Berlitz, the language course guy? Yeah, that one. I'll come back to him later.

Various Triangle boundaries - otherwise known as "desperately trying to get the data to fit the theory"

The first odd about the Triangle is it's location. One might presume from the name that it's in Bermuda and for most people it sort of is. Books about the Triangle tend to disagree with each other and the picture above shows various boundaries proposed by various authors. Note that some of them aren't even triangles and some of them don't even include Bermuda. Not a great start. The general consensus is that it extends from Miami down to San Juan (Puerto Rico) and up to the island of Bermuda.

In 1950, an AP press report on ships and aircraft lost in the area mentioned in passing the suggestion that the disappearances might be due to a mysterious cause. As one of the busiest shipping areas in the world, the amount of ships lost wasn't unusual and the AP report wasn't really taken up anywhere else. In 1952 an article in Fate magazine (a long-lived magazine about paranormal phenomena) entitled "Sea Mystery at Our Back Door" detailed the loss of several ships and planes in the area and made mention of the loss of Flight 19, which would go on to be one of the archetypal cases of mysterious loss in the area.

TBM Avengers - picture by Anynobody 

Flight 19 was a training flight of five TBM Avenger torpedo bombers which went missing off Florida in 1945. They were participating in a training exercise that was designed to teach dead reckoning - navigating without aids or instruments. The flight took off at 14:10 and flew out to a bombing practice area after which they were expected to follow a couple of other headings on their return to base. Fifty minutes into the flight, one of the students called for a compass reading and was told "I don't know where we are. We must have got lost after that last turn." Further enquiries amongst the students lead Taylor, the flight leader, to report "Both of my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Florida. I am over land but it's broken. I am sure I'm in the Keys but I don't know how far down and I don't know how to get to Fort Lauderdale." The weather worsened and radio contact with the flight became intermittent. The last message was heard from Taylor at 18:20 "All planes close up tight ... we'll have to ditch unless landfall ... when the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together." At the same time a tanker, SS Empire Viscount, radioed that she was in heavy seas and high winds north-east of the Bahamas, where Flight 19 was about to ditch. The aircraft were never found.

The article in Fate magazine ascribed a supernatural explanation to the missing aircraft and ships but was just the first of many. In 1974, Charles Berlitz published The Bermuda Triangle which became a best-seller and really brought the notion of the Triangle into the public consciousness. Berlitz was the grandson of Maximilian Berlitz, founder of the language company. As well as writing books on language, he had a keen interest in the paranormal and published a number of books on a variety of such subjects.

Berlitz became interested in the Bermuda Triangle, allegedly after hearing stories from passengers who refused to travel through the region. In his book, he included details of many disappearances and expounded a number of theories ranging from UFOs through to cosmic whirlpools although his favourite explanation was that it was somehow related to the lost city of Atlantis.

A year after the Berlitz book, research librarian Larry Kusche published The Bermuda Triangle Mystery: Solved. Kusche investigated and checked the details of every Triangle disappearance mentioned in previous books and found none of them warranted a supernatural explanation. He found that many of the disappearances simply hadn't occurred, many had happened well away from the Triangle, false details had been added to real events, different accounts of the same incidents contradicted each other and that many weren't mysteries at all.

Writers like Berlitz tend to cherry pick stories that fit their purposes and ignore any evidence to the contrary. Stories of yachts found adrift with no crew aboard sound mysterious and interesting and go right in the books, but the prosaic reports of moored boats being blown out to sea in storms tend get ignored in order to fill the pages. When the tanker the SS V.A. Fogg exploded and sank, it was reported in various Triangle books as being found with no bodies aboard except the captain huddled in his cabin clutching a cup of coffee. The US Coast Guard inspected the wreck, found several bodies and took extensive photographs which is ignored in favour of the more interesting rumour. That the Fogg actually sank off the coast of Texas and well away from the Triangle is also missing from the books by authors like Berlitz.

The most damning information in the Bermuda Triangle disappearances comes from Lloyd's of London. Lloyd's, as a leading shipping insurer, keeps extensive records of ships and their records do not show an unusual number of sinkings and disappearance despite the area being a busy shipping area and subject to tropical storms. Indeed, Lloyd's does not charge higher premiums for ships operating in the area.

The Bermuda Triangle simply doesn't exist and has been thoroughly debunked from the start. Despite everything in Berlitz's book being completely discredited less than 12 months later, neither he nor his publisher altered anything in it and reprinted it several times over the years. Many other Triangle books have been published since.

The rather funny 404 error page from diving website http://www.djldiving.com/

So what is it about the Triangle story that makes it immune to rationality? The public have a strong interest in paranormal subjects and publishers are more than happy to feed them a steady diet of books expounding such notions; that they are easy to write and thoroughly profitable only adds to their publishing appeal. There is an innate fascination and a desire to believe in magical mysteries beyond science. That none of them have ever really been borne out, doesn't ever dampen people's enthusiasm for them.

What's extraordinary about Charles Berlitz's book is just how much is asks the reader to believe and yet so many are prepared to do so. Berlitz accorded the disappearances to a number of forces, but his favourite was that it was a by-product of the cataclysm that destroyed Atlantis. So Berlitz is asking readers to accept that Atlantis existed, was destroyed by a force unlike anything known to science and that a by-product of this force still exists thousands of years later and that it selectively seizes planes and ships for no apparent reason. Any one of those claims seems pretty iffy and bundled together they are impossible to believe and yet they are appealing enough for people to suspend rationality in their desire to embrace them. And that's the real mystery of the Bermuda Triangle.

PS Thanks to Soulreaper for suggesting this article