Captain Bill Miller dives into the Tampa Triangle’s eerie mysteries, from the 1980 Blackthorn buoy tender’s unexplained capsize—despite clear radar—and the ghostly Greyhound bus with 35 trapped souls reliving its Sunshine Skyway Bridge crash, to Mary Harder Reeser’s spontaneous combustion in St. Petersburg, leaving only her foot and a lingering perfume scent. WWII’s U-166 submarine, found in the late 1950s with tanned corpses in one room and skeletons elsewhere, hints at government secrets, while Patterson Road’s phantom jogger vanishes nightly near Tampa. Gulf Breeze’s cloud apparitions, including a towering "Mary" figure on Clearwater’s finance building, defy skeptics, suggesting unexplained energy or messages. These cases blur science, history, and the supernatural, leaving even experts baffled by forces beyond conventional explanation. [Automatically generated summary]
Do you have any idea by your logbook or by any other method of measurement where you lost the three days?
unidentified
I have no idea because amongst other things in my logbook, I keep track of shortwave radio programs, you know, in case I decide to send off for a QSL card.
Well, Bob, I want to thank you because it kind of leads into where we're going.
Mysterious things seem to happen down around the Tampa area and on up into the Bermuda Triangle.
And I guess you just, you have nothing to offer in terms of what you think it might be.
unidentified
No, not at all.
In fact, it was, I had heard about the Bermuda Triangle and all that and sailing through it.
You know, some of the strange stuff started happening, you know, in the beginnings, I started looking into it, and I've never found any explanation for anything.
He sent me some email, and he maintained an absolutely meticulous log on a trip from Tampa up to New York in three days.
Went away.
Three days.
Now, this is not the only kind of thing that goes on there.
In a moment, you'll hear a lot more about the Tampa area because coming up, Captain Bill Miller, he's a United States Coast Guard licensed captain, has authored a book called The Tampa Triangle, and that's where we're going next.
Are you overweight?
Would you like to lose an author called The Tampa Triangle?
And from the St. Petersburg Times, I'm going to read a little bit of an article entitled Tales of the Unexplainable.
From chupacabras, titch hiking, ghosts, it seems the Tampa Bay area is one weird little place.
Not so little, actually.
And it begins, imagine Rod Serling is standing before you, his hands clasped in front of him, his eyebrow cocked, he speaks.
Consider, if you will, a series of extremely bizarre events.
Taken individually, they're noteworthy, but not especially alarming.
A woman bursts into flames while sitting in her living room.
Fishing boats disappear without a trace from the Gulf of Mexico.
A young blonde woman is repeatedly seen to be hitchhiking on the Sunshine Highway of Make That Skyway Bridge, but she too keeps disappearing.
A Nazi submarine sinks in the Gulf of Mexico during World War II, and more than 50 years later, people still refuse to even talk about it.
And then, of course, the Chupacapra sightings, the ghost sightings at the Don Cesar Resort, and Haslam's bookstore, and the people who swear they've had a close encounter with old Hitler, a hammerhead shark the size of, get this, a Ford Explorer that originally patrols the bay.
These events did not occur in various cities across the country.
No, they all occurred in the same place, Tampa Bay, Florida.
And from Tampa Bay.
Well, actually, not from Tampa Bay at the moment.
I think he's probably in New York.
Here is Captain Bill Miller.
Captain.
unidentified
Good evening, Arch.
Good evening, Dreamland listeners.
Yes, I'm calling from Staten Island, New York.
I'm up here working on a dredge survey job on a boat in the harbor.
Well, we've moved a little bit away from what we really wanted to talk about, and that is Tampa.
Oh, we know about the Bermuda Triangle.
the Tampa Triangle and then further what That's pretty ominous.
What do you mean, Dead Zone?
unidentified
Okay.
Well, Tampa Triangle describes the atmosphere of paranormal activity in the Tampa Bay area.
And the Dead Zone is an actual stretch of shipping channel in the Tampa Bay shipping.
The Tampa Bay shipping channel is 48 miles long, and yet one small stretch of channel, four miles long, there's been over three major maritime disasters with a loss of over 58 lives.
And when you consider, a lot of people say, well, you know, gosh, there's shipwrecks all the time.
Well, I'm up here in New York Harbor.
There's tons of bridges.
There's all kinds of ships coming and going like crazy.
And yet they don't have anything like the shipwrecks we've had in this short little benign stretch of shipping channel in southern, lazy southern Tampa Bay, Florida.
So they really had to find an official way to sort of spread the blame around and not clobber anybody.
But the truth was they simply could not explain it.
unidentified
Right.
And then three months later, an inbound light freighter, an inbound light freighter is coming up the bay, and it runs into the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and knocks it down.
You mean they died because they plunged into the water?
unidentified
Yes.
The Greyhound bus plunged over the abyss where the center span of the bridge was knocked down, and the bus plunged 150 feet to the water, and all aboard were killed.
But people have seen the ghost of the Greyhound bus.
Fishermen have been fishing out on the Skyway Bridge out there early in the morning.
It's foggy.
They hear the high-pitched sound of rubber tires, big truck tires on the pavement.
And they turn to look, and they see the bus coming.
It's a Greyhound bus.
And as it approaches closer, they can see the driver.
And his hands are gripping the wheel, and he's looking straight ahead, and he looks scared.
And then as the bus goes past, they see all the passengers in the bus, and they're sitting in their seats, and they're all staring straight ahead, except for the last window.
The last window on the side of the bus, there's a woman looking out, and she's smiling, and she's waving her hand mechanically.
You know, you can't imagine how that freaks me out.
It launches me into a discussion about what a ghost is.
I mean, we all imagine we have a soul and that when we die, it moves somewhere else, hopefully in an up direction.
But I hear stories like this, and it sounds like a place of the damned, you know, having to relive some horrible, horrible end again and again and again.
unidentified
We have a local psychic named Caroline Hart.
She's a wonderful woman, and she's worked with several of the families of passengers who were aboard the bus that morning.
And she says, a quote from her is that Caroline Hart says, in regards to the visuals that the fishermen are getting about the bus, load of people looking straight ahead, it may be the collective consciousness of those spirits that are still trapped in the energy field of the bus.
It creates a visual scene based upon the awareness of impending disaster, which is held on to by the spirits of those that went into the water.
But it doesn't answer the question about whether the immortal souls of these poor people are really trapped Doing this again and again, or whether it's some kind of weird echo left from a tragedy.
It's a question I've been trying to answer about ghosts and poltergeists and those sorts of apparitions, which seem damned to go through the same thing again and again and again.
And I can only hope that it is not really the soul of these people, but some sort of...
Yeah, it's an important question, particularly if you're the family of one of those people, or I suppose one of those people.
All right, Captain Miller, stand by.
We'll be back to you.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
Again, you know, let's stick on the subject of ghosts for a few moments, because this has been driving me absolutely crazy.
It's, frankly, one of the reasons that I do this program.
In other words, we look into life after death in lots of different ways.
And one of them, obviously, has got to be ghosts.
If you can prove there are ghosts, then I think that you prove that there is an existence beyond the physical.
So it's very, very, very important.
And there are other examples down within the Tampa triangle of ghost activity, aren't there?
unidentified
Yes, sir.
In fact, right on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, the same place where the ghost of the Greyhound bus is frequently seen, is the ghost of the blonde hitchhiker.
Now, in the folklore of ghost literature, there's many instances of hitchhikers that are ghosts.
But we have one on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge that is seen by so many people that it's become regular for cars with out-of-state plates to pull up to the toll plazas on either side of the bridge and report this ghost.
And what they describe as this, they say as they're driving along the road, usually these are senior citizens or older people or professional people, people who would normally not stop for a hitchhiker.
And yet they see this young woman standing by the side of the road and she looks like she's disheveled or maybe she's just had a fight with her boyfriend or something.
Perhaps they're reminded of their own daughter.
So they break with their normal rule of not picking up hitchhikers and they stop and they pick this young woman up.
And she gets into the back seat of the car.
Now they say that she appears to be dressed in 70s fashion.
She has a white peasant blouse and I think a jean skirt and long blonde hair which appears to be disheveled.
And she climbs into the back seat of the car and they continue forward and they have conversation with this woman as they crest the bridge, as they're going up the incline to the top of the bridge.
And then as they get to the apex of the bridge, the top of the bridge, they hear no noise in the back seat.
The woman's not talking.
And when they turn around to look, they don't see her.
And they think, well, gosh, perhaps she's passed out or something.
So then they stop at the Tall Plaza, which is on either side of the bridge, and they tell what happened to them.
And the Tall Plaza people have had so many people stop and tell them about this that they're pretty blasé about it.
And they say, yes, yes, we'll tell the Highway Patrol and go on about their business.
In fact, one of the Tall Plaza, the lady that is the manager of the North Tall Plaza on the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, has actually seen the ghost herself.
You're supposed to be here telling ghost stories, but let me tell you one that I've had verified by literally hundreds of people, and this one gives me the Eeebie Geebies.
The story comes from San Antonio, and I can't recall the name of the road, although I knew it.
It involves a railroad crossing.
I wonder if you know this story.
A school bus full of children got stuck on a between the railroad tracks.
It got stuck right on the tracks and in between the things that come down or there were none there.
And I'm trying to recall this exactly right.
A train hit that bus.
It killed, I forget how many children.
I believe all of the children in the bus or the majority of them.
And every night of the week, you can go to that location and you can stall a car on the tracks.
And I mean so that the engine will not start.
You can stall it, even though a train is not coming.
And you can get in your car.
And people have, to be sure of this, they have taken calcum powder and spread it across the back of their car.
And guess what?
You get into your car and something pushes your car out from sitting on top of the tracks as if it doesn't matter whether your brake is on or whatever.
And this is a true story.
And inevitably, you go back to the back of the car and you look and there are small handprints on the back of the car.
It's a worrisome story, along with what you've told.
In other words, those children or the spirits of those children appear to be there pulling people out of danger.
So the same thing, obviously, cannot occur to them.
And it goes back again to what the heck is a ghost?
If it's an immortal soul caught in some sort of damnation, then we've got a lot to think about, don't we?
If it's just some sort Of weak echo of what happened, and doesn't really mean the soul of that person is doing it again and again, then perhaps it's something else.
It's one of the mysteries I would like to solve.
Anyway, back to the Tampa Triangle.
unidentified
Let me tell you real quick about the ghost of the romantic trout fisherman.
This is a ghost, the spirit of a man who's only seen by women.
And there's a park right out by the Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
And women report going out to the park, and they're out there fishing, and they report seeing a very handsome man in his late 30s or early 40s, and he's wading along the flats, casting his lure out, trout fishing.
And he gets closer to him, and he's kind of smiling at him and kind of flirting and winking, but he doesn't speak.
And when he seems to get closer, you know, they kind of move down the shore trying to get a little closer, hoping maybe he'll speak to them and they can get something going.
And as they get closer, he disappears.
And the women have gone to the bait shop and talked about this and mentioned it to the bait shop clerk.
And the bait shop clerk says, oh, you saw Dalton, the ghost of the romantic trout fisherman.
As a matter of fact, I've got some photographs of one doctor, for example, who burned up.
They're very gory up on my website, and all that you see is this spot.
He was in the bathroom doing his thing at the moment that he burned.
And all that's left is his leg and the charred remains of a very incredibly intense fire that occurred locally.
Didn't even set the house on fire, charred it.
In fact, burned right through the floor, but didn't set any of the rest of the house on fire, but burned him up completely with the exception of one leg.
Pretty horrible, but it's a real photograph.
And I understand there was a combustion incident in the Tampa Triangle, wasn't there?
unidentified
That's right.
Perhaps one of the most studied scientifically instances of spontaneous human combustion did occur right here in St. Petersburg, Florida, in the heart of the Tampa Triangle.
It was the case of Mary Harter Reeser.
And, you know, what you're saying is right.
It just takes incredible heat to consume a body.
Funeral directors say that to cremate a human body, it takes temperatures of at least 2,500 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours to reduce the body.
And even then, they have to put the bones and the leftover parts into, like, a big dryer that's got steel balls and it pulverizes everything.
So to get a human being to dust requires what you just described.
unidentified
Yeah, incredible, incredible heat.
And yet, in these cases of spontaneous human combustion, the thing that's most baffling is that very flammable objects right next to the person are maybe covered with a little soot or grimy with smoke, but they don't go up in flames.
And we're talking about curtains and drapery and, you know, simple things that would go up in a heartbeat.
And she was sitting, in fact, this happened right around the corner from my sister's house.
This happened in the early 50s.
She was sitting in her easy chair and just went up and smoke.
And the amazing thing was that there wasn't a lot of smoke that came out of the apartment or anything.
None of the furnishings were damaged, and all that was left was her foot.
Everything else was washed.
Yeah, all that was left with it.
When the fireman came in, her landlord did smell smoke in the morning, finally.
But it wasn't like it was.
In fact, the landlord thought that the insulation on the irrigation pump had overheated or had burned through.
So it wasn't a major smoke that she was smelling.
And so when they finally opened the door to Mary Harder Reese's apartment and went inside, they found this burned easy chair and a foot and nothing more.
Firemen say, you know, that if somebody, they go to a lot of places where people have died from smoking in bed or whatever, and they talk about this one fire captain said, well, you know, it's kind of like meat that's been burned on the barbecue grill or something.
It's burned, but it's not consumed totally to ash.
Now, it's incumbent on me as we discuss these stories to ask you, how do you document that things are occurring in a specific area at a more frequent rate, internal human combustion, ships plowing into bridges or into each other, more so than down in the Florida Keys or up there in New York, where you are right now.
How do you come to the conclusion that you've got a special area?
unidentified
Well, that's a real good point.
A lot of people say, well, geez, it's just a shipwreck or something like that.
And then, of course, you look at New York Harbor where there's tons of shipping and they have relatively few shipwrecks or only fenderbenders.
And yet, in this one small stretch of channel, we've had three major maritime disasters.
And as I started looking at those three, in fact, that's how I started writing the book or writing the story, was about how things happen in threes.
Well, Captain, I have a kind of a theory about these things, and I don't know whether you want to hear it or not.
It involves, I wrote a book called The Quickening, which, by the way, folks, please don't call.
You cannot order it right now.
It's not even available.
It's all sold out.
The idea, Captain, is that things on this earth are human behavior, social human behavior, the way we're treating each other, our economy, our ecology, the environment, in other words, everything, the weather, you name it, everything is getting faster.
Everything is speeding up at an exponential rate.
And we're headed toward an event.
And as we get closer to this event, things like apparitions, marion apparitions, and that sort of thing are increasing.
And they definitely are.
And that's my theory about that.
I believe we're being given a message of some kind.
I'm not exactly sure what or what we're being told, but I suspect it has something to do with straightening out our act or else.
And one other that I want to read for you, Captain.
You'll enjoy this.
Maybe you even know about it.
Iart, I thought your guest, Captain Miller, should know about a very strange marine incident that occurred not far from where he's located on Staten Island, Friday, September 15th, 1995.
Listen now, folks.
The passengers aboard a Staten Island ferry boat were astonished to witness a huge object just to the left of their ferry as it was coursing to the south toward Staten Island.
The object apparently simply rose out of the water between the ferry and Governor's Island.
It paced the ferry for about eight to ten minutes and then simply disappeared from view.
All the witnesses reported that the water was, quote, boiling, unquote, underneath the object.
It was as tall as a six to eight story building.
It was even seen by police on the shore, and the 911 facilities in New York City received multiple calls from other individuals who also saw it.
Further, a videotape about the incident has been produced and aired in the New York area.
I've got a copy of it.
Very interesting.
I've talked to many of the individuals who were aboard the ferry who witnessed the object, and their stories are spindling, very sincere.
Thought you might like to know that the captain is sitting very close to the site of that event.
Have you ever heard of that, Captain?
unidentified
No, but that's an exciting story, and I was on the Staten Island Ferry today.
That's really a great story.
Governor's Island is, of course, the Coast Guard base here, too.
You know something also about the chupacabra, don't you?
unidentified
Yes, that's right.
In fact, there's been several sightings of the chupacabra in the Tampa Bay area.
I'm sure all your listeners are familiar with the Chupacabra story.
It's very popular in the Hispanic community who've seen many sightings of it.
A lot of people feel that the Chupacabra, which is, I think it's been described as three to four feet tall with spines coming out of the back of its head.
It's a blood-sucking type animal.
It's particularly tough on farm animals and livestock.
There's been many sightings in Puerto Rico.
A lot of people have suggested that the chupacabra is perhaps a chemical weapons experiment by Castro or some other government that's gone bad.
If you remember your discussion with Mark Taylor Canfield about sonoluminescence, where sound waves were propagated through liquid, which caused within a hundredth of a second the liquid to heat within 10,000 degrees.
If for some reason sound waves could start a chain reaction in a human, it could superheat the blood, which could heat to that 10,000 degrees.
I guess that's as good an explanation as any, but not good enough.
In other words, I still, in my wildest dreams, cannot imagine what something made mainly of water can suddenly just burn to a cinder, leaving everything around it basically untouched.
It's wild.
Speaking of wild, wild card line, you're on the air with Captain Miller.
I'm looking here Tuesday, June the 16th, 1992, from Associated Press.
This pertains to the submarine that you mentioned that disappeared.
Yeah, it says here, 50 years ago, Nazi team invades Florida.
It says that the Germans are welcome on the Florida beaches these days, but four who slipped ashore at the then-deserted northern Florida beach 50 years ago today came by submarine, not an airliner.
In the early morning of June 16, 1942, four paddled a rubber raft ashore from U-Boat 584.
They struggled with four large waterproof cases containing enough explosives to level factories, blow up bridges and canals, and terrorize Americans in stores and train depots.
They were part of a Nazi Operation Pistorius, which had begun in the United States before the war.
The plan was for two teams to rendezvous in St. Louis July the 4th and begin a campaign of sabotage and terrorism that would be joined by later waves of German agents.
The four who landed on Long Island were arrested in New York City.
Two members of a Florida group were arrested in New York City, and the other two were picked up in Chicago.
The arrest occurred between June the 20th and June the 27th.
The eight were convicted by a secret military tribunal on August the 2nd, 1942.
Six of them were executed August the 8th in an electric chair in Washington, D.C. The two others, who had cooperated with authorities, were imprisoned, then deported to Germany in 1948.
All right, that'll put us straight into a story from Captain Miller.
Captain, there was something, wasn't there, about a Nazi submarine?
unidentified
That's right, and I'm familiar with his story.
That's absolutely right.
German submarines, Nazi submarines, were very common in the Florida waters in the early part of the war.
In fact, they picked off our shipping like sitting ducks because at that time we didn't have the blackout regulations in effect, and the tankers would go past Miami or go up the coast.
And the suns would have to just go out where they'd get up on the surface and knock them out of the water.
So sub-traffic in this area was very strong.
I turned up, as I grew up in Tampa Bay, one reoccurring story which always interested me was the story of the sunken German U-boat that was supposed to be sunk off Tampa Bay.
And every few years it would kind of pop to the surface and we'd all talk about it when we were fishing and stuff.
But I never really got to detail.
So when I started looking into this book, that's one of the stories I researched.
And it's the story of the U-166, which is a 1XC-class German submarine.
And its mission was to come over and lay mines in Tampa Bay to disrupt the shipbuilding effort.
They had some shipbuilding factories up in Upper Tampa during the war.
It came to the surface, and this just happens to be, it was Halloween night in 1942.
And it was late in the evening, and it had been under, it had been submerged all day running on batteries, and it came to the surface just before dark to charge its batteries.
And it just so happened that a U.S. naval blimp was in the area and saw its surface.
And of course, they radioed headquarters right away.
And headquarters radioed out to a destroyer escort to attack the sub, track it down and attack it.
Several hours of deck charging followed, and the sub ran out of power and ended up on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico.
It was forgotten until the late 1950s, when a fellow named Jim Hall, who's one of the greatest hardhat divers in the United States, was out doing what he calls junkyard diving.
And that means he had some relatives who were in the Navy, and they had locations of wrecks, and he'd go out and search him for anything that might be of value.
Anyway, about this time, the government starts getting in touch with him.
And they say, Jim, you got to leave this submarine alone.
And Jim, who's dove on many wrecks, says, what's the big deal?
He says, there's sunk subs all around the coast of Florida, and there's several of them.
And the government admits they're out there.
What's the big deal about this one?
And he was told, Jim, we don't care about the submarine.
It's what's near it that we're afraid people will stumble over when they're looking for this sub.
And because Jim Hall was making so much money working for the government and doing other stuff, he had to leave this sub alone.
It's really quite an interesting story.
And he wouldn't really say what he thinks is sunk out there near that sub or what is near that sub.
So that's open to question.
But there's been a huge cover-up, which I meticulously researched and documented in my book of where our local congressman, Congressman Young, inquired with the Navy Department about that sub, and the Navy Department came back and told him it wasn't out there, that it was off Louisiana.
We'll tell you how to get Tampa Triangle dead zone when we come back from the break.
In the meantime, I just want to drop a quick one on you here.
We have two cruises coming up.
Cruises.
I live in Tampa, and I'd like to share a story with you and the captain.
I delivered papers for the St. Petersburg Times for about eight months starting last August.
My paper route encompassed an area northeast of Tampa called Odessa that's sparsely populated in some areas and completely devoid of streetlights except for the occasional house light in the distance.
One road in particular gave me the shivers at 4.30 in the morning, particularly when listening to your program.
It's called Patterson Road.
It's not only dark, but it winds with several 90-degree turns that can catch an unsuspecting driver by surprise.
It's not very uncommon to find cars along the road twisted around trees at these dangerous turns.
Well, when I began this route, a fellow delivery person who recently gave up the route asked me about a female jogger that she would see every night along Patterson Road.
She told me that she almost hit her every time since she would just appear out of nowhere.
I didn't think anything of it until my wife filled in for me about a month after I began in passing.
She told me about a jogger that she almost hit while she was driving on Patterson Road the next night.
I drove very slowly to try to find the jogger, to no avail.
Again, I simply forgot about it, the jogger, until my wife subbed for me again and told me about the incident again.
I thought hard about it.
And I came to the conclusion that I was taking a different route, and therefore I'd drive down Patterson about half an hour earlier than my wife would.
I decided to take her route one night and arrive at Patterson Road at exactly the time she normally would.
Well, that night I found the jogger appearing instantly as my wife had described, and I was shocked when I saw her, needless to say.
After I passed her, I decided to turn around and go back to investigate further.
I had my suspicions about this mysterious jogger, and guess what?
As I headed back, the jogger disappeared just as she had appeared.
Perhaps the captain has heard of this ghost, and if so, could he elaborate it all?
That's from James in Tampa.
Captain?
unidentified
Well, it gives me chills.
I haven't heard about that particular ghost, but it's certainly a good story, an interesting story, and a spirit that's being seen by several people, too.
Somebody could take offense to this, and even though you're not an agent of the government, you certainly are licensed by the government.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Captain Bill Miller.
Hi.
unidentified
Hi, Captain Miller.
I have a satellite question.
I'm calling from Sonoma County in California.
My name is Bruce.
Good evening, Bruce.
So how you doing?
Terrific.
Now, I got this, there's a guy, PhD named David Allen Lewis.
He wrote a book called UFO.
Now, he started independent research.
He's an archaeologist when Operation Blue Book started doing its research, the Air Force.
But he relates one story in his book, and it talks about an unmanned orbiter that the Russians, the USSR, sent up.
It orbited Mars.
And he said on the Malta Peace Accords between Gorbachev and President Bush, number two on the agenda was UFO discussions.
And the Soviet Union was bringing to the table information that they had made contact on Mars.
Their unmanned orbiter somehow was contacted by alien life forms.
And after the message was transmitted, the whole system was shut down on their satellite.
And they lost communication with the satellite, but they did receive the communication they were supposed to deliver.
Have you ever heard anything so extraordinary?
Well, it doesn't surprise me.
And, you know, recently there was talk about sending a mission up to explore one of the frozen oceans on one of the moons of Mars, I think it was, up there.
And all of a sudden, that got squashed real quick.
You're just not going to believe the quality of some of what we're getting in here.
Dear Art and Captain Miller, my name is, and I'm going to eliminate it, and I'm a pilot for a major airline.
Having been interested in aviation all my life, I have, over the years, compiled a nice aviation library.
Most professional pilots, like myself, particularly enjoy reading the technical information like model development, test pilot reports, and so forth.
While reading The Spirit of St. Louis by Charles Lindbergh, I came across something rather interesting in the log of the spirit.
After Lindberg completed his historic Atlantic crossing, he and his airplane went on an extended tour of the U.S. and neighboring countries.
The entire log of the Spirit of St. Louis is contained in the appendix of the book, and the entry for February 13th is as follows.
February 13th, Havana to Lambert Field, St. Louis, Missouri, 15 hours, 35 minutes.
Both compasses malfunctioned over the Florida Strait at night.
The Earth inductor needle wobbled back and forth.
The liquid compass card rotated without stopping.
Could recognize no stars through heavy haze.
Located position at daybreak over Bahama Islands, nearly 300 miles off course.
Liquid Compass card kept rotating until the Spirit of St. Louis reached the Florida coast.
The spirit made two more flights and then was retired to museum for life.
I feel this gives a certain amount of credibility to the Triangle legends, and I think it's interesting that none of the authors of the Triangle books have ever, at least to my knowledge, mentioned this in any of their books.
Thought you might find it interesting.
He gives the name of his airline and his name, which I will withhold.
I used to be a bridge tender back at the time when the boat that he was talking about that crashed into the boat.
To a certain extent, yes.
I was, to give you real quick, there's a Bayway Bridge, which is like right across the channel basically from that bridge, and I could see the skyway from where I was at.
And that particular morning, he was right.
It was really strange how a storm came up rather quickly.
But one of the interesting things that happened, there was a car with a couple of golfers that were heading toward Sarasota that particular morning.
And they come to a screeching halt up on top of the bridge just inches from the edge.
And when they showed the pictures in the newspaper, here is this automobile.
I mean, this metal grating up there at the top is where the old bridge used to be.
And these two golfers, you know, they climbed out.
And the only thing he did, he went back to get his golf clubs.
He had had them locked up in the trunk.
And it was just kind of really amazing how just inches from himself and his partner going off the edge.
And he used to run a story in the times that this man, until he passed away, I believe a few years ago, every year commemorating the accident, he would go up there and leave flowers.
So basically, you verify the story the captain told about the collision and the bridge and all the rest of it.
unidentified
Yeah, I have friends.
I used to work for the Department of Transportation, and the friends that I worked for actually went out there and helped pull in many people who had passed on, and some of the people that were actually survivors that fell off the bridge.
There was one incident where a man was driving a little pickup truck, and the roadway actually fell down onto the ship that hit the ship, and he bounced and actually survived.
The first part was one time I read a story about up in, I think it was on the Suwannee River up in northern part of Florida.
There were some sightings of some giant birds for a short period there.
Some sort of prehistoric penguin or something.
It was really a weird story I read, and I was just wondering if y'all had ever heard about that.
Captain?
Well, you're starting to get close to Gulf Breeze now.
That's what I was thinking.
Yeah, it might be more than giant birds.
Yeah, well, you know, like I say, it's a pretty unusual story, and of course, I'm interested in the subject anyway.
But the other thing I just want to tell you, this is a personal thing, when you was talking about ghosts earlier.
Yes, sir.
My father died two years ago in the VA hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio.
And the day before he died, I drove up there and visited him for the last time.
And the next morning I came home, and my mother lives here with me at the time, and she left at 3.30 in the morning going to work.
But at 5 o'clock, something woke me up.
I heard footsteps in my house, and I was the only one here.
I'd already knew my mother had done gone to work.
I'd heard her leave.
I went back to sleep.
At 5 o'clock, I heard footsteps.
Somebody walked around in my house.
Now, for some reason, it didn't bother me.
It felt natural.
I dozed back off.
And the phone rung at 20 minutes after 5, and it was the doctor at the VA Hospital in Cincinnati called me and said my dad had died at 5 o'clock that morning.
Let me ask you a question, because this reminds me of something that I'm looking into now, and that is, does the body lose weight at the time of death if a soul escapes the body?
Well, for many years, Captain, I looked and I looked and I looked and I searched.
And there was a rumor of a medical report indicating that, yes, at the instant of death, there was a three-quarter ounce loss of weight to the physical body.
And this story remained myth until a physician somehow, out of an obscure medical journal, found a medical study indicating this was exactly so and proved it in a medical study.
And I posted that up on my website.
Now, I'm sure it's still there somewhere.
And I suppose if you go to the website and enter a keyword soul or something like that, you might be able to find it.
But the answer is in one big medical study.
Yes, three quarters of an ounce at the instant of death.
And they go into all kinds of gory details about gases and things escaping the body.
And they were very careful to scientifically be sure that none of that, which is what everybody always tries to say, had anything to do with it.
So you tell me.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Captain Bill Miller.
I would think it would be your conscious mind blocking it out and your subconscious seeing it as if, you know, have you ever seen anything sort of at the edge of your peripheral vision?
It's there and then it's gone when you turn and look.
Maybe something like that.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Captain Bill Miller.
I said, if you had an opportunity to go to a place where you could see one, where things were constantly occurring, would you make the conscious choice to go and see it, or would you think about it and stay away?
Spontaneous human combustion is actually the phrase, but it occurs apparently instantly.
Captain, in the story you told us, was there any way to know how quickly that person immolated?
unidentified
Well, she went to bed about, she was last seen, I believe, around 9.30 or 10 o'clock that night, maybe a little bit later by her son, who gave her a sleeping pill.
And then she was discovered the next morning around 6.30, I believe, 6.30 in the morning.
Interestingly enough, librarians are one of my favorite source of information.
And there's a librarian in St. Petersburg who told me about a second case of spontaneous human combustion.
I looked it up in the files, and sure enough, there was another woman that spontaneously human combusted in St. Petersburg in 1968, the same night that Janice Joplin was ripping up the stage in Tampa and getting arrested for swearing at the cops.
Well, you heard, I think, what I said about it earlier.
Let me ask you, Caller, why do you think we're having so much of this now?
What's your best guess?
unidentified
Well, for those who, you know, many messages come, or the messages come in many different forms, I suppose, and that touches a certain segment of the population.
And, you know, I'm not Catholic, but I, you know, consider Mary quite important.
And, you know, that was something that was pretty interesting to see in person because it's been there for so long.
And it really can't be explained away as far as I can tell because it is about three stories tall.
And now they say that the finance building that it is on is going to be turned into some religious building when they're through the current documents are done with it.
Spontaneous human combustion in the east, I've heard it to be a yogi trick of death as far as to dematerialize your body.
You send all your energy out of your solar plexus and your body dematerializes.
And also an interesting piece I read in a book was this guy who saw this National Geographic show and he saw the Tibetan monks there steaming off wet towels, ice wet towels, sheets of their bodies using self-heat.