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March 10, 1996 - Art Bell
01:17:03
Dreamland with Art Bell - Spontaneous Human Combustion - Larry Arnold and Linda Moulton Howe
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Tonight on Dreamland, an encore presentation from March 10th of 1998.
It's Art Bell with his weekly update with Linda Moulton Howe, followed by Larry Arnold on human combustion.
Look for a new edition of Dreamland next week.
And now, enjoy this encore presentation of Dreamland with Art Bell.
Welcome to Dreamland, a program dedicated to an examination of areas in the human experience not easily nor neatly put in a box.
Things seen at the edge of vision, awakening a part of the mind as yet not mapped, and yet things every bit as real as the air we breathe but don't see.
This is Dreamland.
It certainly is another Sunday evening in dreams, in a way.
Ah, life sometimes is funny.
As you know, we have this technology called Videon that allows the people with the software out there to call up and see me in the studio doing my program.
We're demonstrating that software now.
I know, I can tell you how to get it.
But there was just somebody online just before I came on the air.
As you know, I'm smoking again.
She saw me sitting here smoking.
She said, stop that!
I held the cigarette up to the camera.
She said, no!
I took a deep drag and blew some smoke at the camera.
I was watching the picture, and you could see the smoke cascading toward the camera.
It was funny, and this big line of nose comes across the screen.
Well, anyway, good evening, everybody.
It's good to be here.
Our guest tonight is going to be fascinating, and it's a program that I've been wanting to do for years, and I've never had the right person.
Well, I sure do tonight.
His name is Larry Arnold, and he has written an excellent book called The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion.
Actually, it's called A Blaze.
The Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion and it is fascinating and I've got some photographs and I want to add those who call tonight on video and I will try and hold up a very critical photograph that we're not going to be allowed to put on the bulletin board but we are going to publish in the newsletter.
It will be one of the cases Larry is going to talk about.
So all of that, Linda Howe, of course Emmy Award winning Linda Howe coming up here in just a few moments.
Uh, to begin the program as usual.
All right.
The, uh, documentary Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist looking into crop circles, animal mutilations, and stuff going on in Puerto Rico.
It's Linda Howe from Philadelphia.
Hi, Linda.
I'm here.
Good.
Okay.
Well, thanks, and tonight I have an update on the Puerto Rico chupacabras mystery and a very similar phenomena occurring also in the nation of Mexico that we have not heard much about.
Earlier today, I talked with reporters at El Vicero newspaper in San Juan about a recent police report in the town of Aguas Planas.
That's one of the places in which the chupacabras attacks have been reported the past few months.
This new police report is dated March 4, 1996, which was last Monday, and states that 30 fighting cock roosters, each valued at several hundred dollars, were found in their individual cages, dead with clean puncture holes in their back, along the spine, or on the legs.
The police used the term, quote, vampire bite, because there were two holes about an inch apart, and on some of the roosters, there were two pairs of bites, or four holes.
According to the police, there was no blood around the punctures, and despite the neatness of the wounds, violence had been done to the cages.
The police report said that doors had been pulled off or bent off the cages.
Other strange bird deaths have been reported, and recently I talked to Dr. Carlos Soto, who received his doctorate of veterinary medicine from Kansas State University in 1988.
He then went back to Puerto Rico to treat both large and small animals.
He has been very puzzled by some of the knee-crossings that he has done on animals allegedly attacked by this Tupacabras Including various kinds of birds.
This is Dr. Carlos Soto.
Turkeys and some guinea hens in which they had a puncture wound half a centimeter in diameter at the base of the skull.
So it's puncture right through the feathers into the tissue.
Exactly.
And the one that I'm going to explain to you It had two puncture wounds, one in the right and left thorax.
So, let's imagine again, we have a right and left puncture wound.
Right, and the bird is on its back.
On its back, and no more external puncture wounds, that's it.
Okay, two.
Two, right and left side.
Okay.
When I just opened the bird, okay, on its pectoral muscle, okay, it had four on the right side four additional wounds in which they
didn't appear on the outside of the skin. Okay and there was no bruising on the outside? No bruising
on the outside or anything.
Some parts of the liver were missing on that on that hand.
So in that animal and in others Dr. Soto has found tissue actually extracted from inside
the bodies of birds or of a goat without any excisions on the outside as well as these puzzling
four holes on the inside without four puncture holes on the outside.
And I saw photographs of exactly that phenomena and At the University of Puerto Rico Medical Center.
How would a pathologist try to explain that, the four inside holes without four outside holes?
Well, he's very puzzled and there right now there isn't a logical explanation.
We're all working on this and researcher Alfonso Salazar Mendoza sent me newspaper articles from the state of Mexico down in the nation of Mexico.
The newspaper is La Prensa, and they are calling their phenomena there the Vampire of Hartepec.
Antopec is a town southeast of Veracruz and nearly a hundred domestic animals there have been found since 1994 with four puncture holes in their necks.
These stories have not been filtering up to the United States.
I've just been getting them and finding that while we have been looking at Puerto Rico, very similar sorts of events have been happening across the water in Mexico.
And one of the farmers told La Prensa, this is a quote, We can't explain why the attacker just kills the animals and doesn't eat them.
And how it attacks the animals, and we don't know it.
The yearling calves, the horse, and the chickens that have died don't make a sound that wakes us up at night.
And what's more, the dogs don't bark.
Well, I've heard almost the identical sentences said to me in interviews in Puerto Rico.
How does this happen in some of these cases without anybody hearing anything?
In other cases, they hear birds fluttering and they hear sounds.
So again, we have those inconsistencies.
But Dr. Soto told me that he has looked at some of the punctured tissue under a microscope and he sees what he thinks is evidence of Which is very similar to what Dr. Altshuler and I and others have found in the animal mutilations that we've studied here in this country.
But when Dr. Soto sent the tissue onto the Dorado Lab in Puerto Rico and that was supposed to have been sent to a lab in the United States, the findings came back to him eventually as normal with no signs of burn.
He's puzzled by that also because he said, I'm looking at the tissue fresh under the in my veterinarian office and he said it looks to me like
it is has suffered heat or it could be chemical but the reports have come back
normal and he doesn't understand that either. So we're all trying to continue to
find out more.
Linda, what kind of cages are these and what kind of force would be required to either bend them or you said melt?
Bend or they were bent off or literally pulled off according to this police report.
And I interviewed two or three weeks ago, not for Dreamland because his Spanish-English was not good enough for us to understand here, but we were working through a translator on the phone.
And what I understood was that in a town that would be south of Dorado on the north end of Puerto Rico, and this goes back to August, There were, I believe it was 14 or 17 chickens that had been inside of a metal framed cage.
It had cyclone kinds of fence wire and it had cage.
And they found the cage torn apart.
And all of those chickens, uh, were dead with these same strange puncture holes.
And they said that the violence that had been done to the cage was puzzling.
And there have been other cases, uh, where they have said that, uh, uh, everything from chicken wires, uh, to metal cables have been torn apart, suggesting strength.
And yet, the animals themselves are not torn apart.
They simply have these puncture holes, which makes this truly a mystery.
What is the actual cause of death?
Are they able to determine it?
In one case that Dr. Soto investigated of a Doberman Pinscher female dog.
The cause of death was strangulation.
And the entire neck showed trauma.
He also found congested blood that would occur in the case of strangulation.
And yet the eyewitness, the owner of the dog, said that the creature that he saw with his own eyes attack his dog looked like, and this was the exact quote of the veterinarian, a large bat.
So now we're back to the description of something that When they say large, how large?
to the dog and the owner watched it and couldn't believe his eyes. When they say
large, how large? He said approximately three feet. That's a big bat. And yes, and there was
these descriptions of whatever these flying things are is not typical with
anything that is known to inhabit Puerto Rico and it also is not the same
description of the alleged chupacabras which is supposed to be sort of humanoid
like.
It's a very, very continuing, puzzling story, and it continues to occur.
This is driving me nuts and I'm sure it's driving you nuts too.
Well and also Art, to realize that the same kinds of puncture holes have been occurring
over in the nation of Mexico, across the water from Puerto Rico and south of us, shows that
a lot of places may be having this similar phenomena but it's simply not reaching us
Well something else to bear in mind now I had not heard about Mexico but if it's in Mexico when it's in Puerto Rico you might imagine this is something that crawled up out of the swamp there some new breed or you might imagine a lot of things but if it's in Mexico Then it could be here, right?
Well, there certainly have, over every once in a while, there have been these stories of strange, what we have called in the United States, biopsy punch holes.
There's a case I'm working on right now, we don't have all the lab tests back yet, I will eventually report on it, but I can tell you this, there is a horse in South Dakota that was found February 14th, a 6-7 year old female, and She had a one-half inch by two-inch hole right below the
ear and back of the jaw.
The horse is alive to date and that hole was in the process of healing.
And I learned that in Mexico, in one of these reports there in Jalapeque, a yearling calf
was found alive with four holes in its neck and the calf continued to live.
And that is even more puzzling.
What is it?
What is the reason for these puncture holes by whatever it is that does the attacking that is leaving basically the entire animal untouched after the puncture holes?
Well, whatever it is, I hope it doesn't come here.
Thank you very much.
Linda, a wonderful report as usual, puzzling as usual, but wonderful.
And give everybody a way to contact you, get your materials, whatever you would like to do.
Yeah, thanks.
From everything from whether it's unusual animal deaths or marks that could be in the crop circle area to the human abduction syndrome to all of the unusual phenomena in this planet.
I'd love hearing your reports and your comments and your questions.
My new mailing address is post office box 300 Jamison J-A-M-I-S-O-N, Pennsylvania, zip code 18929-0300.
My toll-free 800 number for information about my books and my documentaries,
and to leave a brief message, is 1-800-707-9993.
Again, that's...
800-707-9993 and for anyone who might want to fax, it's area code 215-491-9842.
Wonderful.
We shall be looking forward to your report next week.
And I want to know what that thing is.
All right.
I keep trying.
All right, Linda.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
Big bat.
Three foot bat.
They have little bats out here and they fly around sometimes at sunset and I go out and have fun throwing rocks at them, which never hit them because they always sense it and dart away.
But they're fun to throw rocks at.
Maybe I should reconsider if one of their larger family members makes it up this far.
One night someone Anyone sitting in front of the television is in an easy chair.
The next morning, he or she, nothing but a pile of ash and a sweet smell.
A shrunken head, perhaps an intact leg with a foot still in the shoe.
I've got that photograph here.
The chair has a burnt hole in it.
Maybe the phone on a nearby table, slightly melted but no evidence of an ordinary fire.
It takes an incredible amount of heat.
To shrink a skull thousands of degrees, literally, yet the living room around it remains untouched.
The above description reads kind of like plot for The Twilight Zone, but in fact it is true.
It is happening to unsuspecting people all over the world in a blaze, the mysterious fires of spontaneous human combustion.
Larry Arnold, America's foremost expert, that's right, On Spontaneous Human Combustion, or SHC, investigates hundreds of cases, both famous and obscure.
20 years of research has gone into this book.
Interviews with survivors, yes, some, firemen, coroners, morticians, as well as chemists, physicists, and biologists.
Arnold explores the effects on the fragile human body of television radiation, Alcohol and smoking, inactivity and anger, all of which can, under the right circumstances, cause people to burn to ashes in 30 minutes or less.
That is what's coming up.
Coming next, Larry Arnold, author of A Blaze and Mysterious Fires of Spontaneous Human Combustion.
I know, I think I've been close.
All right, we will break here and be back with Larry.
Stay right where you are.
So far this is Dreamland.
♪♪ ♪♪
Tonight on Dreamland, an encore presentation from March 10th of 1996.
It's Art Bell with his guest, Larry Arnold, on Human Combustion.
Look for a new edition of Dreamland next week.
And now, enjoy this encore presentation of Dreamland with Art Bell.
Bell again!
Here's Art Bell.
Here I am, and what we're going to do is front load our commercial continuity.
So we've got a good straight shot and then Larry Arnold.
Larry Arnold is America's foremost expert on spontaneous human combustion.
The book he's written reflects 20 years of research, contains 300 actual cases of SHC, spontaneous human combustion, ranging from the 14th century to pre...
Arnold founded Parascience International in 1976 to investigate paranormal topics.
He's also a founding member of Life Spectrums, a non-profit educational corporation devoted to spirituality and human potential.
Has appeared on numerous national radio and TV shows, including NBC-TV's The Other Side, Fox-TV's Sightings, American Journal, CBS-TV's The Fifth Estate, and five times on ABC-TV's That's Incredible.
Born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, after graduating work as an engineer for five years.
Since 1976, he's been documenting and investigating paranormal activities exactly like the one we're about to talk about.
And here he is from, I guess, somewhere in Pennsylvania, Larry Arnold.
Larry, where are you?
Hi, Art.
We're calling and speaking with you and your millions of listeners from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Harrisburg.
Very good.
Well, we're sure glad to have you on the program.
We're delighted to be with y'all.
All right.
I have been for years, Larry, looking for somebody who knew something about this, and it is not exactly a widely investigated topic, is it?
No, it's not.
It's not something that has been so easily dismissed as something that needs to be studied.
Not many people have chosen to look seriously at this alleged phenomenon.
Ooh!
Alleged?
Well, the debunkers would have us say that just to be cautious and intellectually honest.
Would you say that?
No, we would not.
Spontaneous human combustion, just to set up the premise and to define it for those who may not be able to think just what this entails, is the process and ability whereby the human body will begin to smoke or burst into flame without coming in contact with an external identifiable source of ignition.
Yes.
And mainstream science, not surprisingly, as we've already alluded to, says that this
is something that is simply impossible and doesn't even deserve to be thought about.
On the other hand, if that's the case, then we've got a very short program to deal with
the next several minutes.
You might have better call up Linda Hallen and get her to talk about something.
Well, you know, one almost might dismiss it that way, except for one little thing.
All the evidence.
Hey, there you go.
You've got the bottom line.
I like the way you think.
Well, I have eyes, and I have this photograph in front of me, and it is only one of many.
You included the black and white photograph of a doctor who apparently burned up.
It's in a bathroom, and it's pretty gory.
But all that's left is a leg, It does seem impossible, and what you've described is what we would call a classic scene of spontaneous human combustion.
It is horrible, it is eerie, but it's also downright fascinating.
And for something that sounds like the Twilight Zone, it is definitely that.
But it's also X-Files and Gothic Horror and Stephen King all wrapped up into one real-life flaming phenomenon.
All right.
I got a piece of email from somebody prior to the show.
We have a large email network.
And this person says, I've heard two possible explanations for spontaneous human combustion.
One is that the normal chemical processes in the body are assisted by a catalyst that somehow goes Uh, wild, I guess.
Uh, the other is that the body, uh, the clothes, rather, on the body acts kind of like a candle.
This one has been shown to be possible in a lab setting using a cadaver.
Um, and people go on and on here.
I've got a lot of comments on it.
Your best guess, what is it that causes this?
Boy, you're leaping right to the bottom line.
What could cause spontaneous human combustion?
I guess I am.
It is clearly an aberrant electrical discharge within the body or induced in the body from an external source that is not readily apparent.
And beyond that, we can get into more specifics later.
As far as your email that says, A, that this is possibly a chemical process that goes haywire, yes, we would support that.
And in our book, Ablaze, we offer a number of theories that become more specific as to how the biochemical and bioelectrical processes in the human cauldron, that is, our bodies, could engender tremendous thermogenesis very quickly.
To the other premise that this is explained away as the human can awaken, no, we'll go into it about that.
At least we think that we can quite vigorously.
I think they've also said, haven't they, Larry, that it's smokers, you know, laying in bed or the wrong place.
But, gee, I'm a smoker.
And I'll tell you, Larry, much as I hate the fact, I've dropped a few cherries in my lap, a couple of times even asleep.
And both times, it got my immediate screeching attention.
And you're obviously still here to talk about it.
Yeah, I didn't catch on fire.
Um, I got burned and I got very angry and so I refuse to believe that it's smokers.
I mean, and those burns probably hurt too, didn't they?
Oh, that's what I say.
It got my screeching attention.
I was jumping up and down.
People, people do die in smoking accidents.
Sometimes they're not always totally awake.
They may have had a heart attack or a stroke or for some other reason they're insensitive to their immediate predicament and they will burn up.
But they do not burn up in the conditions that define the classic scene of spontaneous human commotion.
They do not burn up and leave behind the scene that you just described in the opening of this segment, that which happened to Dr. Bentley here in Pennsylvania back in 1966.
In those cases of smoking accidents, the body is still left sufficiently intact that it can be picked up, transported to a morgue, and autopsied.
And then there's a cadaver left to be buried.
In classic, spontaneous human combustion, that is not the case.
The body will be reduced almost completely to a pile of dehydrated dust, leaving behind a few extremities, perhaps the lower leg or the forearms, for example, to prove to the observers at the scene that this pile of ash had once belonged to a human being.
Can you kind of give us the chronology or what happened to this doctor whose photograph I've got?
We'd love to do that, and that sets up a really complete understanding of this amazing phenomenon that we're going to be discussing for a bit with you folks.
In 1966, Dr. John Irving Bentley was a 92-year-old retired physician living in Cowdersport, here in North Central Pennsylvania.
Now, Dr. Bentley was beloved by the entire community.
He apparently had no enemies in the world.
The evening of December 4, about 9 o'clock, he was left by some friends in his home alone for the rest of the evening, apparently in good spirits and in good health.
The following morning, about 9 a.m., a local meter reader named Don Gosnell entered Dr. Bentley's home to go down to the basement to read the gas meter as is normal practice.
When Mr. Gosnell was down in the basement after he read the gas meter, he noticed that one corner of the earthen floor was a small pile of ash about 5 inches in height and 14 inches in diameter.
Mr. Gosnell, besides being a meter reader, was also a volunteer fireman.
So that pile of ash obviously got his curiosity up, and he walked over and kicked it with his boot.
There was no embers in that pile of ash.
It was clearly cold.
He noticed overhead, directly above this pile of ash, was a two-by-three-foot hole in the basement ceiling.
Well, he thought to himself, he told us later, that there must have been a small fire in Dr. Bentley's home that night, but it had to have been small because there was no fire alarm called in, and secondly, the fire had to be sufficiently small that it self-extinguished.
Well, his curiosity was still intact, and he went back upstairs.
This time, he noticed that there was a wispy smoke in the corridor of the home, and there was a sweet smell pervading the atmosphere.
Mr. Gosnell knocked on Dr. Bentley's door and did not get an answer.
Stuck his head inside the apartment door, peered into the living room, and saw nothing amiss.
Walked into Dr. Bentley's one-room apartment, which had an adjoining bathroom.
And when Mr. Gosnell peered into Dr. Bentley's bathroom, there he saw the other side of the hole that he just left in the basement.
Lying next to that hole, as you've already described to your listeners, was one half of a human leg lying next to the hole, intact, wearing its leather slipper.
Atop the hall was Dr. Bentley's aluminum walker.
And at this point, Mr. Gosnell told us that he realized what he had just kicked with his boot in the floor below.
That was the remains of Dr. Bentley's self-cremated body.
Gosnell ran from the house, white as a ghost, he told us, and yelled the understatement of the year to some of his co-workers, Dr. Bentley's burned up.
And indeed the good doctor had, but in ways that were completely unexplained and indeed unrecognized and unappreciated by the locals back in 1966 in northern Pennsylvania.
Dr. Bentley, in essence, had managed to do the impossible.
He had incinerated himself more completely than a crematorium can normally do under normal operating parameters.
In a room that was almost completely devoid of other fire damage, save for the hole in the floor through which his body had actually burned.
Next to that hole, besides his left leg, was a bathtub that had been painted with enamel paint.
We were at that apartment, we were in the bathroom, we checked the paint on the bathtub, it had not even been blistered by this incredible inferno that had incinerated Dr. Bentley himself.
Impossible.
That is quintessential spontaneous human combustion in our view, and it certainly cannot be explained so far as we've been able to ascertain in our 20 years of research by the so-called Human Candlewick or Drop Cigarette Theory.
Alright, look, the human body, and I can't quote the figure, but we're more liquid, blood, Whatever water then we are anything else aren't we?
That's true the human body is about 70 to 80 percent water depending on specific compositional weight of any individual.
I know my wife periodically claims greater content.
But you know no matter what whether it's 70 or 80 percent it seems to me that couldn't burn.
Well, that's one of the amazing paradoxes and quandaries of this phenomenon, and that's what common sense would tell you and would tell firemen initially.
The human body is mostly water.
And the reason that fire professionals like water so much is because it quells temperature, it lowers temperature, it puts out fire.
Right.
So when you have a substance that is composed of mostly water, then how in the world could it burn?
with that amount of water present, surely that water would preclude ignition and combustion rather than engender it.
However, in ablaze, we do explore some biochemical and bioelectrical means.
And indeed, look at the quantum physics of water and processes in the body that could explain how,
even with that amount of water present, that the human body could still self-combust and burn itself from within.
All right, I know that, Larry, when some people get older and they lose a mate, or they lose their reason or will to
live, they die.
Now, what about the psychosomatic aspects of this?
In other words, could it be that the individuals are either tired of living, Simply want to die and you know the brain is an amazing thing.
We use about 10% of it.
So as I say in a promo I don't know what makes us think we know it all.
Could there be something in the brain that actually triggers a chemical process because somebody wants to go?
That is a very precocious question and we think that there is indeed a connection.
We have found in a few cases where we've been able to quantify some psychological profile information about these victims, that indeed in many cases, though not all cases, the individual is morose, is very depressed, is having suicidal tendencies, quite often is a widow, a widower, which would tie in with the point that you just raised.
And we think that all those conditions come together in a state of consciousness that interacts with the biological and biophysical processes of that individual to set up inflammatory conditions.
In what percentage of the cases, I guess, you know, it must take a lot of careful investigation.
In other words, you hear of something like this, then you've got to begin looking not just at the scene, but at that person's life.
And recent influences, and you've literally got to go in almost as a forensic detective.
Yes, we do.
But the kinds of information that we've been looking for in an attempt to resolve the mysteries of spontaneous human commotion requires a degree of investigation and an approach to investigation that goes far beyond what normal fire science is accustomed to doing.
Firemen, when they mop up a fire scene, will be looking for mostly evidence of an accelerant.
And if they don't find an accelerant, something that would fuel the flames, you know, they
write it off as basically, you know, electrical fire or careless mishap.
If they find evidence of accelerant, then the next question that comes up to is either
it's foul play or it was, you know, intentionally willed suicide by dousing the victim with,
you know, gasoline or kerosene or some other flame-inducing material.
We have to go even far beyond that because first, spontaneous human combustion in its
classic sense burns the body more completely than can be done even if accelerants are used.
And in these cases, when research is done by the fire officials initially, they do not find an accelerant to begin with.
Well, that's what I was going to ask.
In other words, in the case, for example, of the doctor in this photograph, there's part of a leg left.
Right.
One presumes they would look very carefully at that for evidence and the surrounding floor and so forth of any accelerant.
And they would look for any evidence of, with what's left of the leg, gross as it may sound, some biological reason for what occurred.
Precisely.
Anything found?
Uh, nothing was found in the case of Dr. Bentley and in many other cases that are very much like his in the nature of the fire damage and the surrounding lack of fire damage to the immediate environment.
Again, no excellence are found.
And in fact, in some cases where autopsies have been conducted on the few remnants left of these victims, There's no liquid moisture content found in the limbs at all.
Not even any blood samples.
It's like the water content of the body has been completely dehydrated.
Oh my!
Now that is interesting.
That is interesting, and it provides some interesting clues as to the process and mechanism which may be unfolding in these people.
I mean, I've heard of dehydration, but that's ridiculous.
But again, no blood?
No blood.
What?
No moisture in the tissue?
That's what we are told by the forensic people who have conducted those investigations.
You sound speechless.
Well, I am a little bit.
I just...
You know, I can see in this photograph, gross as it is, that there is enough of the leg left that there should have been, in other words, it looks like what's left of a human being, clearly, and even, and though it didn't burn, and though it may have been warmed by the fire itself, there certainly should have been traces of bodily fluids left in the leg.
So what could do that?
What in the world could do that?
And, well, let me try this.
How many In a blaze, we list more than 300 cases that fit the definition of spontaneous human combustion.
Now, some of those may have normal, conventional explanations.
In many cases, these are old events from, you know, 150, 200, 300 years ago.
more than 300 cases that fit the definition of spontaneous human combustion. Now some of those
may have normal conventional explanations. In many cases these are old events from you know 150, 200,
300 years ago. So at that time you know insufficient evaluation and documentation of the fire scene was
done. However in the cases from the latter part of this century where in some instances very detailed
thorough investigation was done at the fire scene, we come up with amazing evidence that simply falls
outside the parameters and understanding of mainstream fire science and science in general.
And that's where we get into the mysteries of spontaneous human combustion.
This is a long-hidden medical malady that we believe has confronted mankind for several thousands of years.
Well, how does science, how do medical doctors and coroners and people like that treat it?
In some of the more obvious cases of real spontaneous human combustion, what do they generally list the cause of?
Do they ever list the cause of death that way?
In general, they treat it with disbelief.
Officially, they will write these deaths off.
As in the case of Dr. Bentley, his death... Keep in mind the fire scene that we just described to you and your listeners, and the photograph that you're showing on your new technology.
His death was described as that of asphyxiation.
Officially, that is how Dr. Bentley died.
Well, I suppose so, as he burned up.
As he burned up, at some point, yes, he suffocated, but when you read in a coroner's report on an autopsy document asphyxiation, you don't imagine or visualize a scene like we've described happened to Dr. Bentley.
and it's been found there. Of course not. So to put this in front of it to attribute
conflict of interest and association and a case like that, as we talked to the deputy coroner in
that case, he told us that if he were truly rewriting the autopsy report, he would say that
there was 99 percent destruction of the human body.
Now that goes far beyond asphyxiation.
It sure does.
In other instances, these accounts are written off as smoking mishaps, or as we talked about earlier, you know, a carelessly dropped cigarette.
Although, once again, that's not only disingenuous, it's actually dishonest to claim that.
We've talked to medical examiners who have considered spontaneous human combustion because what they encountered first defied everything that they've been trained medically to experience at a fire scene.
And yet they've told us that to invoke spontaneous human combustion is so bizarre and strains credulity to such an extent that they're terrified to put that down officially as cause of death.
All right, Larry, hold it right there.
We'll be right back to you.
This is Dreamland.
And now, enjoy this encore presentation of Dreamland with Art Bell.
I received this from Jamie.
This is just one of gazillions that I have, but this is a practical application for it, so I thought that I would read it to you.
You know, Art, it was bound to happen sooner or later.
And all I can say is I'm glad I was prepared.
The only thing I asked for as a birthday present this year was the Beijing AMFM shortwave.
Radio with a light.
Thankfully, my lovely wife knew how serious I was about wanting this appliance.
We call it an appliance.
Until last week, it was just an interesting conversation piece.
It is that, by the way.
I mean, you wind it, the radio goes for 30 minutes.
He says, interesting conversation piece that is, until the lights went out.
We were hit hard here in the Northwest.
By the Pineapple Express, and subsequently, the power at our house was knocked out for more than 24 hours.
Of course, one of the first things we did was set up the Bay Gin with a light.
The radio kept us entertained, informed throughout the course of the storm.
As a matter of fact, performed flawlessly.
Without a doubt, it's one of the smartest purchases I've ever, in capitals, made.
Jamie Walker, Senior Systems Analyst.
Thank you, Jamie.
Alright, getting faxes already for Larry with questions.
And we'll get to those in a second.
If you want to send a fax, it is area code 702-727-8499.
702-727-8499. 702-727-8499. Item 2, we are now on the internet.
Two locations, so to get to them, WOAI being the latest in San Antone, carrying real audio and carrying this program.
So go to my webpage at Art Bell, actually it's www.artbell.com, and you can actually hear the program running live.
www.artbell.com, and if you don't have the software for it, they will be able to download it to you at that location.
Now, back to Larry Arnold.
Larry, are you there?
Yes, we are, Art.
Oh, excellent.
Um, a couple questions by fax.
Art, could you ask Larry if he's heard or read of the story of the lady who died in Riverside, California, last year, whose bat-headed pet fumes made the hospital staff sick, and if he did, is there any relationship with SHC?
Yes, we do know about the Hernandez case.
Initially, we do not think it's a case of classic spontaneous human combustion.
It is very abnormal and to our knowledge, there are still medical problems being suffered by one of the operating room physicians.
And to our knowledge, no one has yet come up with an adequate explanation.
There's some interesting speculations that have been bantered about in Fortean Times, for example.
It doesn't fit the classic scene of spontaneous human combustion that much,
we can say with reasonable confidence. But it's quite anomalous what did happen there.
All right, here's a really interesting one.
one from Hawaii. Besides spontaneous self-immolation, is there any evidence to support that an individual
or group through psychokinesis could actually inflict this on another?
Delicate question.
We discussed that possibility in a blaze. We think the answer is yes.
Oh? Oh no. I say that from a talk show person's point of view.
you.
If somebody, I'm sure at different times during my show, if they could have caused me to go ablaze, they would have.
So you think the answer is yes, based on what?
Based on intuition first, based on a few historical cases that suggest that was a possible situation.
And based simply on the fact that the human consciousness is so diverse, so powerful, so untapped, and so un-understood,
and by most people, uncontrolled, that at this point we're not willing to put much of any limitations on what the
human consciousness is capable of generating in itself, or in itself, or in another.
Be that other, a human being, or an inanimate object.
We deal with a number of what we call tyropodicized fires, and ablaze, which is not classically spontaneous human
combustion in that the human body in most cases itself is not combusting at these fire scenes, but other objects
surrounding a usually a pubescent teenager will self-ignite under conditions that are just as bizarre and unusual as if
the human body itself had burst into flame.
In cases where calendars on walls, books on tabletops, bedding, mattresses, and so on spontaneously burst into open flame.
in the presence of fire officials who are completely bumfuddled by what you're encountering.
Kind of like the movie Carrie.
Very much like Carrie, yes indeed.
Uh, what about, I'll touch on it, the religious angle of this.
What about those who would say it's a god, it's an act of God?
Well actually that has been said, indeed said by the Biblical community.
Back in the 1700s, when this was a hotly debated subject, pardon the expression, in the medical community, there were physicians and scientists in general who said, no, the human body can't combust.
They had counterparts who said, yes, it does, because, well, here's the evidence, you know, how else do we explain it?
In those days, it was said by those who believed that spontaneous human combustion was a reality that, in most cases, these victims met the wrath of God.
They were visited by God's divine wrath because they were living an immoral and intemperate life, and this was God's divine retribution for their miserable lives.
Now, it's an interesting scenario.
We certainly can't support that scientifically today, but once again, we're dealing with biological proceeds, heavily intoxicated individuals, people who are obese, people who probably were depressed, and all those factors, as we suggested earlier, can set up a state of consciousness, which we believe can interact with the body's physio-biological processes to engender these very bizarre thermogenetic rises in their bodies.
What about the good doctor?
He was just an older fellow.
You said he was how old?
92.
92.
Had his walker here.
I suppose you might conclude that he was tired of living, but even that's a supposition.
Was he a drinker, a heavy drinker?
Do you know anything about the doctor that would have Dr. Bentley at one time did drink alcohol.
We were told that about 15 years before his death he had completely given up that habit.
He did smoke a pipe and initially the people at the scene said, well he must have dropped his pipe on his lap.
This is the explanation that is tended to get away from our conclusion that Dr. Bentley died of spontaneous human combustion.
The disbelievers, the skeptics, the debunkers of SHC say that Dr. Bentley haphazardly dropped a pipe on his lap.
However, as we pointed out earlier, dropping a cigarette, or in this case a pipe, in one's garment is not going to engender a temperature of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for 12 hours, which is what is necessary to ash and bone inside a crematorium.
And crematorium conditions were clearly not present in Dr. Bentley's bathroom.
Well, the whole house, you know, a temperature that hot, the whole house should have burned down.
Absolutely right.
We're so glad you made that point.
When a whole house fire burns the structure to the ground, temperatures rarely go above 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's about as hot as a structure fire gets.
In a structure fire, if someone is trapped in that blaze, the body, as we said earlier, can still be picked up, taken out to a Morgan autopsy.
Just this past week here in Harrisburg, we had a crime scene.
It turned out to be a crime scene.
Two people died in a house fire.
There was sufficient evidence left in their bodies of those two victims that allowed the police to determine these people had not died accidentally in a house fire, but they had been murdered, and the crime scene was torched to cover up the evidence of the murder.
Sure.
Now, in Dr. Bentley's case, the burning was far, far beyond that.
We could have never expected any forensics people to find evidence of murder in Dr. Bentley's case.
No, I'm looking at the photograph.
He's just flat gone.
Flat gone.
Disappeared.
Poof.
Pile of ash.
Secondly, in Dr. Bentley's case, while we said he was a pipe smoker, His pipe was found in its holder on a stand next to the chair where Dr. Bentley spent most of his days at night.
Now, Dr. Bentley had indeed dropped a pipe into his lamp and awoken himself to find his
garments ablaze as you described happened to yourself.
The last thing we think that Dr. Bentley would have done being a knowledgeable physician
would have been to reach into his burning lamp, pick up the pipe, put it over on a stand,
then try to get up out of the chair and with the aid of his aluminum walker, hobble the
five minutes that it would have taken to get him into the bathroom to find a pitcher of
water to douse the flame.
Well, to correct you a little bit, Arnold, I've never been ablaze.
Okay.
I have, as most smokers will attest, occasionally dropped a cherry in my lap.
You know what I mean?
The end of the cigarette dropped in my lap or on my pants.
I've ruined more than one good pair of pants that way.
But I guarantee you, the very second the cherry makes its way through the pants leg, I'm not jumping up and down.
Moreover, I would expect that if I was completely dead to the world, had a heart attack, that cherry would burn down through my What can you tell us about that one?
with the moist tissue beneath and go out.
We wholly agree with that.
That would be our conclusion.
Too much of a slap in the face to have it.
So then how do we come up with cases like that?
The family in 1966.
This is Patrick Goody back in 19...
What can you tell us about that one?
Oh, I can tell you a lot about Mrs. Goody.
On Christmas Eve, she and her husband were in a farmhouse and Pakistani villages attainable by miles southwest of
Chicago, Illinois.
Everyone was expecting to see the Roonies the following morning, Christmas Day.
Unfortunately, they left, uh, to the world a legacy, so to speak, um, that sounded more like a Halloween horror dance than the good time jollies of Christmas morning.
Um, both Mr. and Mrs. Roonies died in a blaze in their farmhouse during Christmas Eve night, early Christmas morning.
Mr. Rooney, we believe, according to the original newspaper documents that we've been able to acquire, died by asphyxiation.
What Mrs. Rooney died of is something quite beyond asphyxiation at a fire.
If we may quote from you, or to you and your listeners, the actual words by a Dr. Floyd Clendenin, a physician, I think that would be instructive because just prior to the last break, you asked us how the medical community responds to these fire scenes.
Sure.
And we stated that either they dismiss SHC outright or they mislabel it.
But there is a third response to SHC historically, and that's what Dr. Foist and Denham provide.
He said, upon removing their bodies, we found the skull, the cervical, and half the dorsal vertebrae reduced very nearly to a cinder.
Now, he's talking about Mrs. Patrick Rooney here.
Along with about six inches of a white penis, I'm not sure I like that.
The rest was reduced to a complete cinder.
The other parts of the incision were reduced to a very light cinder, having no shape of former body.
Now, here's why I marvel by this, because much like Dr. Benley did almost a hundred years later, Mrs. Rooney burned through her kitchen floor into the clasp gates beneath.
And yet, um, cable went in, you know, directly above the hole through which her body fire auger itself was not burned.
Now, the doctor said that the skull and the hip bone of Mrs. Moody were really the only evidence by which it could be proved that a human body had been cremated there.
Now, Dr. Clendenin used the word cremated.
Now, that's really profoundly interesting historically and in terms of medicine because the crematorium itself had only been invented nine years earlier.
And certainly a crematorium was not present in Seneca, Illinois, let alone in the farmhouse of Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Rooney.
Evidence of an accelerant?
No evidence of an accelerant whatsoever.
That, indeed, was looked for, and none was found.
Dr. Clayton Dennett.
Now, this is a professional medical physician back in 1985.
Pronounced cause of death.
He is not the only physician trained medically to say that people can, on rare occasions, die by this very aberrant, infrequent, and quite mystifying process.
All right.
Well, a lot of this is, by necessity, going to be a little gross, but I've got to ask about this.
I know a number of very obese people.
Thankfully, I'm not one of them.
But, you know, anybody who's ever seen a fat fire on the stove Well, the evidence that that has been said is copious.
and almost unstoppable. You can't throw water on it, you've got to smother it.
And so there have been a lot of people over the years, when this subject has come up,
who've said, well, it's human fat. How much evidence is there that it might be that?
Well, the evidence that that has been said is copious.
The evidence that what has been said can indeed explain these cases, we think,
requires a reserve of support.
Now we're always open to learning things that we don't know about, so maybe one of your listeners could set us straight here, but in 20 years of talking to forensics experts, firemen, medical professionals, and laboratory technicians, we have yet to find anyone who can give us one working example of this so-called human kindlewick theory actually proving true.
Experiments have been conducted, we've done them ourselves, trying to take a piece of well-marbled fatty tissue, whether it's dry or whether it's been soaked for months in alcohol, putting a match to it and coming back a few minutes later or a few hours later and finding that well-marbled fatty tissue reduced to a pile of dehydrated dust.
We have not been able to do that.
People who grill meats on barbecue grills have never told us of walking away from the grill and coming back to find their T-bone steak, T-bone and all, reduced to a pile of dry dust on the grill.
In fact, crematorium operators have told us that the most difficult cadaver to cremate and to retort is an overweight fatty body, which defies the proponents who argue that the overweight fatty This draws a lot of myths.
Is there any evidence to indicate whether there's a commonality of where the fire on the human body starts?
It would seem particularly difficult even if somehow the human body got ablaze.
You know, you would make a great fire investigator.
You're asking the kind of questions that, unfortunately, some well-paid fire professionals in this country and overseas have refused to ask themselves.
In many of the classic cases of spontaneous human combustion, the point of origin of the energy discharge appears to be in the solar plexus area, that is, in the lower abdominal region.
And what we suspect happens, and indeed in some cases confirmed by eyewitnesses, the energy that begins at that point in the body radiates outward like a human hireball Whatever is beyond the radius of that fireball escapes significant damage.
So the radius of that fireball beginning in the lower abdomen is perhaps one and a half feet.
So what is beyond that radius, say the lower legs or the forearms which are outstretched from the center of the body, would escape damage and that is indeed what we find in many of these cases.
Alright then, my brain says to me, what about What this person has digested, in other words, everybody remembers from high school, with the chemistry sets, that well, occasionally, when you would put the wrong things together, your little test tube would begin to smoke and get hot as a firecracker.
Now, is it possible that it's a combination of things ingested by a person?
Diet might indeed play a factor.
This is, again, something that fire professionals are not trained to gather evidence about at a fire scene.
We've attempted to obtain that information.
As you might imagine, it's very difficult to come by.
We have to, you know, speak to the next of kin and talk to them in this kind of a situation.
It's always a very delicate topic at best.
Of course.
In Dr. Bentley's case, we were able to get some information on his diet and friends of his told us that he'd spent the last two years of his life subsisting solely on a diet of shredded wheat and coffee.
Now, if we were Dr. Bentley's body, we think just out of spite we'd, you know, lash back, you know, fiery rage at him for subjecting us to such a horrible diet.
Yes.
But, precision this aside, you know, there may be some organic process that went on in Dr. Bentley's body with that accumulation of caffeine and fiber and some other factors that, you know, could have helped biochemically to his body to suddenly burst into a fiercely raging inferno that lasts probably for only seconds.
Do you think there could have been some sort of, that's a long diet of two things, and I wonder if that could have created some sort of permanent chemical change in the doctor's body?
It may well have been, but we'd have to work with some organic chemist who would know more about, you know, the actual mechanisms that such a diet would engender in the body.
At this point, we're not willing to rule out much of anything.
Um, is there any way, this is probably a silly question because you don't know what causes it, so how are you going to know what prevents it?
But I've got to ask, is there a way to prevent going up in flames?
Well, when we hear people talking about having explosive tempers, having red-hot anger and having fiery red rages lashing out at themselves or at others, we've alluded to earlier people seem to be depressed or morose in many of these classic cases.
We think all those factors again set up a state of consciousness whereby the body becomes more inflammably prone.
To avoid those conditions, we would suggest that one has a well-balanced Cool temper, good emotional outlook on life, maintain a good healthy diet, and beyond that at this point in our research, we really can't offer any real security.
Well, alright, that to me means there's lots of people ready to go up if it has something to do with temper.
Larry, hold on, we'll be right back to you and we'll begin to take telephone calls.
Spontaneous human combustion.
Right here.
Larry Arnold is my guest.
His book, about 500 pages long, will tell you how to get it.
Stay right there.
Stay tuned for more with Art Bell and his guest Larry Arnold on human combustion on
this encore presentation of Dreamland with Art Bell.
Stay tuned for more with Art Bell and his guest Larry Arnold on human combustion on
this encore presentation of Dreamland with Art Bell.
Stay tuned for more with Art Bell and his guest Larry Arnold on human combustion on
this encore presentation of Dreamland with Art Bell.
This is Art Bell and his guest, Larry Arnold on human combustion.
It's Monday night, Tuesday morning.
Back to the best of our best.
Now I'm wishing to the mountains and to the hills, and to the circle of my new hope.
So, so, journey of the light, and all the streets are gone.
Gone again, we bring you here, and at your door we stand.
Gone again, we bring you here, and at your door we stand.
We're talking about spontaneous human combustion.
And I guarantee, if you have seen the photographs that I've seen, and the rest in his book, it would give you great pause.
Believe me, great pause.
And Larry has given us permission Uh, not to put on the bulletin board because this is a copyrighted picture and apparently it's been ripped off in the past.
So we're not going to put it on the electronic media.
Uh, other than, uh, I'm showing it to some people on Videon, for example.
I just showed this to somebody, uh, who said, gross, yuck, nasty, what a way to go, oh my.
That was his response to seeing the photograph.
So, uh, we're going to put it in the newsletter.
He has given permission for that.
To get our newsletter, which continues to have these kinds of documentary evidence in it, to get our newsletter, you may call 1-800-917-4278.
We'll get this in the next newsletter.
We'll get this in the next newsletter.
Again, our newsletter number is 1-800-917-4278.
Alright, I'll tell you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to read facts I've got that I think Mr. Arnold will find interesting, uh, get to a couple of other facts questions, and then I'm going to open the phone lines.
East of the Rockies, the only number not given, it is 1-800-825-5033.
That's 1-800-825-5033.
1-800-825-5033. That's 1-800-825-5033. Mr. Bill, Larry, in the spring of 1964, I was
living north of Denver, Colorado, in an apartment.
I was single.
On a Saturday night, I'd been out drinking, dancing.
Got home around 2 in the morning.
It was cold, so when I got in, I sat down on the couch, about 6 to 8 feet from a gas wall heater.
I went to sleep sitting on the couch.
I woke up at about 4 a.m.
My right knee was hurting.
I just went in and went to bed.
I woke up Sunday at about 10 in the morning.
My knee was still hurting.
As I looked at my knee, I had two large blisters just below the kneecap on each side of my leg bone.
I figured I'd burnt myself some way, so I went out and got the pants.
That I'd had on at the time.
No sign of any hole burned in the pants or any sign of anything.
By Monday, these two burns were bad enough that I had to go to the doctor.
He couldn't give me a clue as to what caused them, but the burn holes went to the bone.
It took quite a long time to get them to heal.
The two scars are approximately the size of a dime and about an eighth inch deep.
I've never figured it out, but I've always wondered.
If you have the time, what does your guest think?
That's from Stanley up in Bothell, Washington.
So Larry, what do you think?
Well, we'd be conservative and initially say that we might want to consider attributing those knee burns to radiant heat from the gas heater that was about six to eight feet away.
Now, we'd also want to say that we'd like very much to know more from Stanley about the details of that case, if photographs were taken of the burns, because there are aspects of what he's described in that fax to you that sound like it could be spontaneous human combustion, which he survived.
This would not be the first time when individuals have suffered partial self-immolation and have lived to not only ponder the question, but to, you know, be completely baffled by what happened to them.
Can you give an example of that?
Somebody who's Begun spontaneous combustion and not combusted totally?
You bet.
Let's pick this one.
This is one that we happen to like a lot.
The date is October 1980.
The victim in question is Peter Jones.
He was living in Central California at the time.
Here's the scene.
He's sitting on the edge of his bed one morning, getting dressed.
His wife, Barbara, is standing beside him.
Barbara told us that she looked down and suddenly realized that smoke was billowing from the arms of her husband as though something was on fire.
She began to pound him around the back, and her husband assisted in trying to frantically put out the source of combustion, whatever it was, and suddenly the smoke dissipated and was gone.
There was no odor, there was no heat, there was no tissue damage to Peter, just gushing smoke.
Mrs. Jones implored, what was that?
And after she gained a modicum of composure, to which her husband retorted, beats the hell out of me.
For circumstances that neither of them understood at that time, his body began to gush smoke in copious quantity.
Now let's move forward a couple hours into the afternoon of that same day.
Peter was out by himself this time, sitting in his automobile with his hands firmly gripping
the steering wheel, waiting for a passing train to go by at the grade crossing, when suddenly for
the second time that day, the interior of his car this time began to fill up with dense bluish-gray
smoke gushing from both of his arms. Now Peter told us that his shirt sleeves were rolled off,
and yet the smoke was billowing from the flesh of his arms themselves. And the car's interior
quickly filled up with this pallet haze. And this time he told us the smoke had a distinctive
metallic taste.
Metallic?
And he told us next that as abruptly as the second episode began, his smoking ceased.
He rode down the windows of his car and the smoke naturally ventilated out.
He proceeded to cross the railroad crossing and never told his wife about that second incident for several months.
Now, if the Guinness Book of World Records has a category remaining common or higher, we would like to nominate Peter Jones.
Phew!
Here's another thing.
Many times, at the scene of what appears to be spontaneous human combustion, it's said there is a sweet smell.
Correct.
Well, I was in Vietnam, Larry, and I can tell you there's nothing sweet about the smell of burning human flesh.
So, why would there be this difference?
Um, I mean, it's... You have confirmed to us what, um... Oh, that's right.
Never.
Never forget it.
It only matters for a few months at a fire scene.
Sometimes even we've been told for years at a fatal fire scene.
Yes.
the back with oxygen and with the first human flesh. Never, never forget it. It only lasts for months at a fire scene.
Sometimes even, we've been told, for years at a fatal fire scene. However, spontaneous human combustion is not typical.
And one of the hallmarks of classic SHC is that there is a dearth, a complete absence of that normally characteristic noxious smell.
If there's an odor present at all, it's been described to us repeatedly as being perfume-like, redolent, sweet-smelling.
In one case in Illinois that we document for the first time publicly in our Book of Blades, the son of the victim told us that when he walked into the home of his mother, the whole house smelled as if it was pervaded with hickory incense.
Hickory incense?
Mm-hmm.
That was how he described it.
So that would, that would lead, that would give credence to the theory that there's a chemical Uh, change in the human body before it combusts?
Most likely, yes, indeed.
All right.
Um, our engineer up at the network sent me a fax here and wants to know, could it be a focused microwave frequency beam?
In other words, uh, indeed you can be cooked alive by microwave, um, or that that specific very narrow beam happens to be passing through the area where the person is sitting or whatever.
We completely concur with your technicians theory.
We have in our book cases where radar technicians have been burned by their radar equipment.
The PayPal radar units on Cape Cod in Massachusetts have been known to catch hang gliders aflame when they've flown in front of those very strong microwave transmissions.
Really?
Yes.
So that's a little esoteric theory, but it has historical precedent and we certainly cannot dismiss it.
We also speculate that the planet itself, under certain conditions at certain places, might produce naturally microwave-type radiation.
So that if a person is standing at the right place, but at the wrong time, Okay, Larry, when I was younger, I was a microwave engineer.
I did that for a lot of years.
And I used to work on towers, and I did some really stupid things in my time.
And I can recall being almost at the 300-foot level on a tower on top of a mountain, and I was standing there working on a VHF antenna mounting, and I was strapped in, and all of a sudden I noticed my leg was getting hot!
And getting hot and hotter and hotter and I looked down and I was standing right in front of a microwave dish.
So microwave definitely cooks the human body, there's no question about it, but in terms of causing it to go ablaze and then once again we get back to this problem of the amount of water present in the human body.
I can understand that I could begin to microwave my leg and if I stood there long enough literally cook it, but A blaze, and to consume the rest of my body?
It doesn't track.
Well, something has to generate enough heat energy in the body that is the equivalent of 34 million calories.
That's how much heat would be necessary to cremate a normal human being, say, weighing 160, 170 pounds.
34 million calories of heat energy is cremated in a piece of 14-inch plastic case.
Now, to answer the point, how can that be generated?
Where could the source of that energy come from?
We're going to go to the third chapter of the plan, looking at the physics, and indeed the quantum physics,
of spontaneous human combustion.
Now, when you come up mathematically with a source of that kind of energy
that could trigger 34 million calories, we believe, almost instantaneously in the body.
All right, we're getting down to the subatomic physics of the human body now.
Let the mathematics say that this can happen.
There is also a new science called new chemistry that is finding ways by which, organically,
temperatures of 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit can be generated instantaneously
at the nano level of the human body.
I'll see you next time.
All right.
Art, please ask Mr. Arnold.
This is, look folks, this is a little gross, so if you want to tune out, tune out.
But these are legitimate questions.
Please ask Mr. Arnold.
If you can provide information about a related destructive phenomenon, spontaneously exploding heads, I believe there was a case reported about a half year ago of a chess player whose head actually did explode while in deep concentration during a game.
All over the spectators, what a mess.
Bill and Monroe Washington.
Have you brought a piece of evidence?
Well, we've heard, I believe, of what Bill's referring to.
That was a report that was carried by the tabloid Weekly World News.
And as such, we give that report very little credence.
The Weekly World News is one of the reasons that most people think spontaneous combustion is nothing more than a chemoid mist.
And that paper in particular repeatedly runs stories about this phenomenon.
We've tried to track them down, never knowing where one might find a credible lead.
Of course.
And with only one exception have we ever found there to be validity to their stories.
The rest of them have no support, so far as we've been able to ascertain.
And the reason that we needed that credibility was because we had already investigated the case.
And, ironically, what they were able to do was absolutely nothing.
With regard to the case of Upstate New York in 1996, we saw a retired fireman,
It's almost 500 pages long.
It's well documented.
We devote an entire chapter and a place to his amazing internal incineration.
Alright, let's continue.
Your book is very impressive, Larry.
It's almost 500 pages long.
It's well documented.
It's got a lot of photographs of it.
It's a print of what you're saying.
Thank you, Larry.
I'm sure.
I'm sure.
There are two ways.
You can either go to the local bookstore and either purchase it off the shelf or in this
interview order the end.
This is indeed one of the hottest books of 1996.
Or as a favor to your millions of listeners, we'd be glad to send the book out directly
to them from our offices here in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Oh, really?
The price of the book at either location is $24.95.
It is hard cover, that's why it's hard.
Photographs, as you said, and you can get it in the book store.
I'm sure.
So I'm going to get back to the book store.
I'm going to get back to the book store.
I'm an author too, as well as an author.
I wrote a book.
count the front matter. If the listener is in Pennsylvania, you're going to have to add
a $1.50 sales tax. For United States listeners, we will pick up the shipping.
I'm going to ask you a question, Larry. I'm an author too, as well as an author. I wrote
a book. And I know that autographs are really, really valuable commodities.
Would you be willing to autograph copies for people?
Just sign your name?
Absolutely.
You would?
Absolutely.
If they order from you directly?
If they order from us directly, and they make that request that it be personally inscribed to whatever name they want in the front of the book, we would do that, no charge.
Oh, really?
Alright, then look out, because here it comes.
Alright, how do they order?
What's the number?
The address to order by mail is 1025 Miller Lane, Harrisburg, PA 17110-2899.
Make your check or money order payable to PSI and the amount again is $24.95.
If you're ordering from Pennsylvania, add another $1.50 for the sales tax here at PA.
For overseas or out of the United States orders, write to that address.
We'll send you a mailing form with all the necessary details and we'll post it out to
you immediately after getting the payment return mail.
Alright, is there a 800 number?
Unfortunately at this point, no there's not an 800 number.
Alright, then give the address again if you would please.
Miller Lane Harrisburg PA 17110-2899 and the phone number for people who would
like to call us either to request ordering information or to talk to us
about cases that might prove to be valuable leads to our research that
number is 717 That is an Eastern Time number and we'd appreciate calls during normal business hours.
hours 717-236-0080.
717-236-0080.
Um...
I've got an awful lot of faxes here.
About 15 years ago, my husband was preparing a salad in the kitchen when his back spontaneously caught on fire.
Everybody panicked, but it went out by itself as quickly as it began.
His shirt was not burned or scorched in any way, nor was his skin.
There was no fire nearby.
Don't know if this qualifies as spontaneous human combustion, but it sure was strange.
Well, our first response is, it certainly does sound strange, and it certainly does sound like many of the cases of spontaneous human combustion that we have already documented historically in our book of ways.
We would very, very much like to hear from this woman.
Specifically, in 1905, over in England, in the Lincolnshire area, there was a servicer who was swooping out the broom.
Swooping out the broom?
Getting a broom to swoop out the barn.
There we go.
Right.
The homesteader walked in and discovered that his maidservant had her back aflame.
Until that point, she was oblivious to her predicament.
Only when he started yelling at her that she was a fire did she realize that indeed her back, as this lady wrote in to you, her back was aflame.
So in many of these cases, this is a painless phenomenon.
To the person who responded earlier, who said that This is pretty gruesome stuff, and what a way to go.
Well, yes, it is indeed what a way to go.
It can be instantaneous or nearly instantaneous, unlike most forms of death.
And unlike many forms of death, it also appears, in most cases, to be painless.
Besides all those things, it gets you in a history book.
All right, well, that leads us into this, then, from Brian in Iowa.
Please ask Larry Arnold if any of the instances of spontaneous human combustion have been witnessed.
Yes, Brian, they have.
The case that we gave you a little bit ago about Peter Jones and his wife, clearly that was doubly witnessed once and singly witnessed a second time.
We devote another chapter in our book specifically to the eyewitness cases.
So once again, those who claim that spontaneous human combustion does not occur are going to have to deal with the eyewitness testimony.
People who have seen it happen in others, people who have survived it and reported seeing it happen in their own bodies.
In what percentage of the cases, Larry, Has it been documented that the people had really foul, fiery tempers?
The percentage is quite small because as we said earlier, getting that kind of information from the very get-go is extremely difficult to obtain.
But we have enough cases, enough individuals for whom we've been able to get psychological profile background that suggests that that can be a viable component to the onset of these amazing fires.
I'd say the total count is about in the range of 8 to 10 cases where we've got individuals who have told us Our relatives have told us, next to Ken, have said that these people were very angry, very depressed.
Hyperactive, you know, really classic type A personalities.
What about an actual, actually we're going to have to break off because we're at the top of the hour, but I'm going to ask you, and then we're diving into the phones here because every line is lit and we've got to get going on that, but I would think in some cases people would feel their body temperature rising and would have actually documented putting a thermometer in their mouth because they felt oddly and noted a rise in temperature before the awful event.
We'll ask about that when we come back.
Larry Arnold is my guest.
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