All Episodes
Previous Next
April 12, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:40
Edition 627 - Larry Arnold, "SHC" Investigator
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
The following edition of The Unexplained contains detailed discussions of sudden human cremation, otherwise known as spontaneous human combustion.
Listener discretion advised.
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I've talked a lot about the weird weather we've been having recently.
You know, we had some lovely summer weather in March, then April began with a cold spell, and now as I look out the window, there's some lovely spring sunshine, but it's cold and blowing a gale.
I just don't know what's going on.
Maybe you can tell me, because I'm kind of stuck for explanations at the moment.
I'm still in.
If I sound a little shocked, there is a very good reason for it.
I've just come back from the dentist, and, you know, like a lot of people, I've had to leave dentistry for the last couple of years because of COVID.
You couldn't get an appointment only for emergencies.
So I've gone in now and I've known that I've had a number of things to deal with, but nothing prepared me for what happened about an hour and a half ago.
I am still in shock, and I mean it.
The dentist said to me, if you were to have everything that needs done doing, it would cost, and he was asking me, first of all, for an estimate of how much money I'd got, how I could afford or how much I could afford.
And he said, if you would have everything done that needs to be done, it would be up to, up to £30,000.
What's that in dollars?
Maybe $40,000?
Now, there is no way, having worked in radio, and some people get really lucky in radio, they get millions.
And many people work at the margins.
And I have to say, as a young man, I loved my work so much that I never asked for what I was probably worth.
In fact, one radio executive said to me, we don't pay you what you're worth.
It's only now at this stage of my life that I realize the consequences of that.
So if you're younger than me, and most people are these days, and you're starting out in life, I'm not a great one for giving advice.
I'm not a great one for taking it.
Please make sure that you're paid what you're worth because you will need money sometime and you may not have it.
And the only reason I'm talking about it is that I'm so shocked.
How on earth did we get here?
I don't know.
You know, we used to have dentistry that you could have on the National Health Service here in the UK.
There's almost none of that now.
So, you know, I don't normally talk about these things.
I'm sorry.
It's just because it's completely, utterly thrown me.
Hey, thank you very much for all of the emails, kind ones that have come in.
I'm just looking at the inbox today.
We're not doing shout-outs, but, for example, Elizabeth and Faith and Billy.
And there was one person who asked me to give them a shout-out.
I'll try and see as I'm doing the conversation here who that was.
If not, I'll do it on the next edition of this show.
And apologies if I don't do it here.
You know who you are.
Okay, now, let's talk about what we're going to talk about, if you know what I'm saying.
We're going to talk about the subject of spontaneous human combustion.
Very hard to find good guests on this subject.
I find it fascinating.
Maybe you do too.
I had one person talking about it with me, a guy who'd written a medical book about two years ago on the radio.
And that's about it, really.
So Larry Arnold in the U.S. is the guest on this edition.
We're going to talk about spontaneous human combustion on this edition of The Unexplained.
Thank you to my webmaster, Adam, for his work on the website, getting the shows out to you, all the rest of it.
The radio show will be going, by the looks of it, into video at the beginning of May.
There's some other stuff that I've got to tell you about that, but that's where that is.
I think that's basically all I've got to say, really.
If you've made a donation recently to the show, the online version, thank you so much.
Please do consider doing that.
Theunexplained.tv is my website, and you can follow the link and do that if you can.
And if you can't, then, you know, I've always tried to keep this show free.
And, you know, I understand.
There's no need to make a donation if you can't.
But if you can, that would be great.
And, you know, I know that there are various ways to monetize podcasts.
I see people charging, charging for you to ask a question.
You know, for you to send them a question and then they ask it.
They'll charge you a fee to do that.
Or they'll sell you baseball caps or extra content or something else.
And I've always tried to keep this available to people over the years.
It's been difficult, but it's been a labor of love for me.
Okay, enough talking.
Got to stop talking.
Let's get to the U.S. Larry Arnold Spontaneous Human Combustion.
Larry, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Howard, it's a pleasure and an honor for us to participate in a discussion of one of the world's weirdest phenomena with you and your audience.
Funny you should say that because it is one of the world's weirdest phenomena.
And, you know, the one thing that always strikes me is the difficulty that I've had and other people doing shows in similar genres and styles have had, finding people who have systematically researched this and, you know, can offer something that is worth hearing.
I think it's very difficult to find researchers in this field.
You must have come across that comment before.
We have, and your comment, your observation is quite valid.
It is much, much easier to find.
A great number of experts in the field of medicine and physics and science generally who are quick to deny and to debunk the concept of spontaneous human combustion.
We can quote Johann Casper from his handbook of forensic medicine, in which he says, it's sad to think that in an earnest scientific work in the year of grace 1861, we must still treat of the fable of quote-unquote spontaneous combustion, a thing that no one has ever seen or examined.
And we can update that to this century.
A few years ago, a retired medical examiner, Dr. Adelson, in Cuyoga County over here in Ohio, told us that he does not for a single second buy the overheated concept of spontaneous human combustion.
And we asked him why that is.
And he said, well, because it can't happen.
It's impossible.
We asked him if he had ever investigated a case that fit the definition of spontaneous human combustion.
And you probably won't be surprised to hear that his answer was no.
Right.
And I wonder why it is, you know, because I've read a number of reviews of work in this field, including some reviews, you know, of your own work in this field, why there is such reticence to want to even investigate this, you know, even if the conclusion come to by whoever it might be is that this does not exist or there are other explanations for it, like ball lightning or something, you know, that at least it's worth investigating.
Surely, like most things in this world, investigation is better than just outright dismissal, I would have thought.
Oh, we so concur with that viewpoint of viewers.
Spontaneous human combustion, as we define it and as history has defined it, is the ability of a body to blister, smoke, or burn in the absence of a known identifiable nearby external heat or ignition source.
Just the concept alone is bizarre.
It's eerie.
It's frightening.
It's horrific to contemplate, which is one reason it's so easy for mainstream science and orthodoxy to dismiss it.
They can't come up with an easy explanation, or at least an explanation that makes sense.
On the other hand, having looked at this phenomenon for now more than four decades, we find it not only bizarre and eerie and frightening, but it's also captivatingly fascinating.
It's fascinating in terms of biology, in terms of fire science, medicine in general.
And it's also been fascinating, as you allude to, in terms of human psychology.
We found that credentialed, exalted experts, many of whom have PhDs behind their names, are so willing to ignore the evidence, to falsify the data, to frankly delude themselves, and in some cases, outright lie about the subject that we're discussing with you today.
Of course, it is a big stretch, isn't it?
Just before we get carried away with ourselves, it is a pretty big stretch to entertain the possibility that, and we have to say this happens vanishingly rarely, but there are cases that have been attributed to this or have certainly been investigated for this.
It's such a big stretch to believe that you could just be sitting there in your armchair one night and burst into flames.
How could that be?
It does come across initially as quite nonsensical, and it's easy to understand why so many people can't cope with the concept of SHC, what you described would be a classic case of that you can be sitting in a chair, that you can be lying in a bed, that you can be walking down the street, or in one case, with your family in a boat in the middle of a lake, and suddenly you become a human fireball.
It sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel, and Stephen has written about the subject, but in our Book of Blaze, we write about the subject from a non-fictional viewpoint.
We've done our research.
We've poured through countless numbers of medical texts.
We've interviewed hundreds of first responders.
We've talked to medical examiners, physicians.
And most importantly of all, perhaps, are the photographs that we have amassed that document that what history has defined as spontaneous human combustion is indeed a real, but as you correctly say, quite rare phenomenon.
I can remember being a kid and being bought books for Christmas sometimes of strange but true, where you get weird happenings.
And sometimes, I mean, look, you know, things were not as censored as they are for kids today.
But, you know, in my day when I got these books, every so often you'd turn to a page in the book and there would be a photograph of somebody's fireplace and a rickety old armchair and just a pair of slippers.
I mean, this is horrible if you're made squeamish by these things turn off now.
But, you know, a pair of slippers and a lot of ash, and that would be it.
And it would say spontaneous human combustion question mark.
And that's basically all we knew about it.
So I think you're going to have to walk me through this, Larry.
What's the history of this?
We know it's a rarity, but how far back does it go, do we think?
It goes back at least several centuries, if not several millennia.
The earliest documented case that fits the definition of classic SHC, which you have described, but we prefer to call sudden human cremation.
It gets rid of that problematic phrase or word of spontaneous in the description.
The earliest account that we have from the medical literature dates to the early 1600s, involving a knight named Polonus, who was said to be quaffing a couple of ladles of spiritualist liquors and suddenly began to exhale flame and died on the spot.
If we look at mythology, legends, historical accounts from Rome and from Greece and from North legends, for example, we can find descriptions that fit classic SHC scenes that date back thousands of years.
So as we document in our book Oblaze, we believe this is an unrecognized, ignored medical human phenomenon that has plagued mankind for thousands of years.
Here comes a stupid question, probably, and maybe it's one you haven't heard before.
Maybe you have.
My parents used to take me to the circus when I was a kid.
And again, we're talking about a previous era.
There would usually be a fire eater at the circus.
Now, if it's possible for the human body to catch fire, how come that wasn't happening to the fire eaters?
That's part of the illusion that a fire eater creates.
He coats the mouth with flame-retardant materials, usually.
There are probably some other ways that can do it.
But that demonstrates, again, why common sense says that the human body is so difficult to burn up.
And indeed, in practice, it is.
And yet we have documented some 500 cases now in our database that fit the definition of sudden human cremation.
So rare as it is, because during that period of time, billions of people have lived and died and died, transitioned to human body, not by becoming a pile of powder.
Nonetheless, we have enough cases, and indeed the photographs attest to those cases, that we're looking at a real bona fide medical anomaly, a real enigma that deserves study.
Study.
It deserves study, not ignore, not dismissal, not explain away, which is what we usually get from the mainstream medical and scientific communities.
When one talks to firefighters, to first responders, as we have, when one talks to crematorium operators, as we have, and we learn how difficult it is to find a badly burned body in a structure fire, and how difficult and challenging it is to cremate a corpse in a crematorium retort,
and yet we go to a fire scene such as Mary Reeser left behind in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1951, or Dr. Bentley in our home state of Pennsylvania and Cowdersport in 1966, where a foot or lower leg is left behind to indicate that the rest of the body,
which is now transformed into literally a pile of dry powder, in an environment that is unaffected by heat or flame damage to surrounding combustibles such as stacks of newspapers, day-linen, linoleum flooring, or enamel paint, one has to scratch one head and wonder, what the heck happened here.
And, you know, what could it be that makes it such a specific, such a targeted phenomenon?
Because as you say, and as those photographs from those, you know, magazines and annuals used to indicate when I was a kid.
You know, the burning would be in a very specific area.
And even as a little kid, I would look at these pictures and I would think, well, that's got to be fake.
That's got to be made up because the rest of that living room would have gone up in flames too.
And that's not the case.
You know, in most of these cases, what you see, if you ever see photographs of this, are, as I say, the pile of ash, the pair of slippers, and a lot of intense burning in the specific area of the body, but not very much anywhere else.
You described the classic SHC fire scene perfectly.
We quoted Dr. Adelson earlier, or we'll quote him again, when he was shown the photographs from our collection, a few of the photographs that you have accurately described.
And he was asked, how do you explain this?
He said, my explanation is that these photographs are hoaxes, quote unquote, they're hoaxes.
And Dr. Adelson was asked, well, what leads you to that assessment?
You've not investigated the cases, but how can you tell that these photographs must be hoaxes?
His response to that was simply because bodies cannot burn this way, therefore the photographs must be faked.
These photographs were taken in 1951, 1966, long before the era of Photoshop technology.
They show, as we said earlier, perhaps the lower limb in Dr. Banley's case from here in Cowdersport, Pennsylvania in 1966, one half of one leg was lying tangential to a hole in his bathroom floor through which the rest of his body immolated and fell into a pile of ashes in the basement below, a pile of ash that measured about five inches in height, 14 inches in diameter.
That's mysterious enough.
When we spoke to the first responders who investigated this case, who discovered Dr. Bantley's ashen remains, they attested also that there was no odor of burned flesh at the fire scene.
In fact, it was described as a kind of sweet, redolent aroma that is, again, atypical of a conventional fatal fire scene.
As you correctly described, there was practically no other fire or heat damage beyond the body where the body fell through and burned through the hole in his bathroom floor.
We were at that fire scene.
We could touch the ceiling with our outstretched arm.
There was no singeing, no damage to the ceiling overhead whatsoever.
Next to the hole through which Dr. Bentley's body immolated, he burned down, he did not burn up, was his bathtub that was painted with enamel paint.
Inches away from the hole in which Dr. Bentley's body fell, that enamel paint was not blistered.
You can blister paint by holding a lit match against it.
So we have this incredible paradox of a fire scene that looks to have generated incredible amounts of heat.
And yet surrounding combustibles that should have singed caught fire.
In fact, as the owner of Dr. Bentley's home told us, he was a construction person.
He said this house was over 100 years old.
The tinder framing was dry, had ample oxygen accessibility.
The whole house should have burned to the ground in order for the body to burn, not even remotely close to what was discovered in Dr. Bentley's bathroom.
That's one of the big enigmas of the subject of spontaneous human combustion or sudden human cremation.
What is the nature of these fire scenes that allows a body to immolate to powder and burn more completely than in a crematorium, unless we have been told that crematorium is operating uninterrupted for 12 hours at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit?
You do not find that kind of an accelerated temperature in a normal structure fire.
So what do you think can cause temperatures that intense in such a targeted and very specific area?
I mean, this almost sounds to me, I mean, it does sound like science fiction.
It sounds like a sort of death beam that might do this.
But I don't know of anything.
Matches won't do it.
The accelerants, as they call them in the fire service, won't do this.
And as you say, and having spoken to people at crematoria, I know this.
The business of what they do at the crematorium is a very technical, advanced business.
And it's not a simple thing to incinerate a human body.
It isn't.
It's a very difficult thing.
And yet here we have something that purports to do the perfect burn.
You have surmised that accurately.
Let's focus on that for a moment for your listeners who might not know as much as you and we do about the crematorium process itself.
In a cremation process, the crematorium owner has to have invested perhaps $100,000 in a retort, in a cremulator, infiltration equipment, in zoning permits, and in 40 to 50 gallons of fuel oil or perhaps a million cubic feet of natural gas to Incinerate his customer.
What goes into a crematorium retort is the coffin and the body.
What comes out of the retort at the end of a normal cremation process is not just powdered remains, but bone fragments.
Those bone fragments are then raked out of the retort, put in a device called a cremulator, fancy name for a bone grinder, and the bone fragments are pulverized to powder to be put in an urn and given to the next of kin.
A retort will normally operate at 22 to 2,400 degrees for 60 to 90 minutes, and then the temperature of the retort is lowered for another hour to an hour and a half, we are told.
And yet at scenes of classic SHC, Dr. Bentley, Mary Reeser, and many others that we could discuss, though a lot of these cases happen in England, by the way, you have temperatures that appear to have exceeded what a grebitorium retort would produce, but in much shorter periods of time.
I understand that there was some research in the British Medical Journal in 1938 about all of this.
And this came up with, and once again, a warning to my listener, the details of this are not for children, I wouldn't have thought.
And if you're squeamish, they're not for you.
But this actually said that there were, I'm just counting the number of factors here.
Six factors, I think.
Number one, the victims are chronic alcoholics.
So the recorded cases have these things in common, quotes.
Alcoholics, usually elderly females.
The body has not burned spontaneously, but some lighted substance has come into contact with it.
The hands and feet usually fall off.
How horrible.
The fire has caused little damage, as we say, to combustible things in contact with the body.
The combustion of the body has left a residue of greasy and fetid ashes, but very little offensive odor.
So those were the six factors then.
Is that a reasonable summation?
It is not.
It was reasonable at that time, and that set of conditions has been posited since the, actually since the early 1700s in some of the reports in the medical literature that we've examined.
However, our research has refuted all of those conditions.
Some victims certainly are alcoholics, but others are teetotalers.
Well, yes, the predominance of the victims of this phenomenon in our database are elderly, i.e.
60 years of age or older.
And frankly, that's not too surprising.
The body tends to break itself down as the body chronologically ages.
We have victims in their teens, in their 20s, and in fact, the youngest in our database currently is a toddler who was said to be six months of age.
Either the body or the cribbing material spontaneously burst into flame.
We've already discussed the alleged fetid odor of these cases.
In many of our cases, there is either no odor present or, as we said in the Bentley case, a sweet, redolent, perfume-like scent is reported by the first responders.
We have a case from Bolingbrook, Illinois in 1979.
That's a city outside of Chicago, in which the son of the victim told us that when the house was first entered and the body of his mother was discovered in a very localized, self-contained blaze, the odor in the home was described as hickory incense.
Okay.
I mean, this is all bizarre.
I'm trying to find a word.
I don't think I have it.
That's a very accurate and appropriate adjective.
But also, the more I read about this, it is often claimed that cigarettes are often seen as the source of fire.
And the archetype of a bad situation is that somebody who cannot move out of the way, somebody who is fairly immobile, drops a cigarette or falls into a state of inebriation or just simply falls asleep.
The cigarette falls and then sadly the bed or the chair or whatever that person is located goes up in flames.
I mean, that is a very common explanation that I've seen.
It is indeed.
And we would ask the people who posit that explanation to consider the facts or talk to a first responder who has handled several fatal fire cases in his or her firefighting career.
In a case from southeastern Pennsylvania, Helen Conway, back in 1964, we talked to the fire chief, the fire marshal, and the deputy fire marshal in that case.
They all told us that they had all had experiences with fatal fires, several of which were caused by the dropped cigarette scenario.
In America, over 2,000 people a year die in fatal fires, sadly, many of those the result of smoking mishaps.
However, in those conventional smoking mishap incidents, you find a cadaver that can be picked up, put in a body bag, taken to a morgue, and autopsied.
You can look for signs of asphyxiation.
You can look for signs of foul play.
If the person had been murdered, for example, you know, stabbed, shotgun, wound, or something like that, and then the assailant attempted to cover up the scene of the crime with burning.
You can find all those situations because there's enough of the body left to autopsy.
In the case of Helen Conway, the chief fire chief, Paul Hagerty, told us that even though he had handled several previous smoking mishap fire fatalities, in the case of Helen Conway, it defied everything that he and his colleagues knew could happen and knew to expect when they were called out on a fire call.
In the Conway case, Mrs. Conway left behind two lower legs propped up against the front of her sitting chair.
Beyond the kneecaps, basically, the body was charred deep to the bone, and in several cases, part of her anatomy was burned right to the bone.
Our photographs that we obtained from the fire photographer who later became the fire marshal for that jurisdiction prove that what we're telling you is indeed fact.
She was a smoker, yes, but to have dropped a cigarette in her lap and then burned to the extent that the first responders discovered in a matter, and here's the really crucial point in the Conway case, In a matter of no more than six minutes from the time that she was known to be alive until the firemen arrived to a fire that had no flame really to put out.
You cannot, as Paul Hagerty told us, cause that depth of destruction to a human body by any known means attributable to fire in six minutes.
Now, Larry, this is an interesting thing.
My father worked for the police service for 30 years.
He saw everything in his lifetime.
I don't think he specifically saw a case like this, but I think he knew of them within people who were working around him, colleagues who were working around him.
Do you get the sense then, is the question I think I need to pose around this?
Do you get the sense that people who work in the emergency services, you know, we call them the blue light services here, the medics, the hospital doctors, the police and paramedics and people like that who attend scenes like this or have to deal with the consequences of scenes like this?
Do you think that actually this is a kind of elephant in the room, an open secret that they all know about, but just no one talks about?
We absolutely do.
We have actually, we found evidence for this in the investigations and interviews that we've conducted.
It comes back to what we said at the beginning of this wonderful interview about the fascinating aspect of the human psychology when it comes to this topic.
In the Bentley case, Dr. Bentley, for those of you who may not have seen the photograph, this is classic quintessential SHC.
Dr. Bentley is the poster child, if you will, for classic SHC fire scenes.
He's a gentleman who left behind half of his leg against the hole through which the rest of his body burned in his bathroom back in December 5, 1966.
This was so disturbing to the first responders that they talked about it only among themselves.
When the newspaper ran its front page obit on Dr. Bentley, they left out all the gory details.
Reading the obit on the front page, one would never know that Dr. Bentley died the way that he did.
In fact, this case was so hushed up in the local community among the first responders that Dr. Bentley's son did not know how his father transitioned his body until he and his wife were watching a program here in America in 1980 called That's Incredible, in which we documented on television for the first time this incredible, baffling burning of Dr. Bentley.
He had never been told the details, the mystery, the macabre nature in which his father had died.
We've spoken to other first responders who have been really reticent to discuss these strange fire scenes because they find it so unnerving and so incapable of fitting into the training and the expertise that they have garnered in their firefighting careers.
One of our recent trips to your wonderful country, following up some case leads, we sat down with a fire service professional at Scotland Yard, at New Scotland Yard, to ask if he could help us with any cases that he might know about to further our research into trying to understand how this phenomenon can occur, how it can be explained.
He was unaware that bodies could burn up to this extent, but he said he was going to try to incorporate in their updating fire service manual the possibility of cases like this being encountered by future inspectors, people in the Blue Lake community, as you describe it.
Whether that happened, we don't know.
There was a case, there are a number of cases in the Lincolnshire area that have intrigued us over the years.
And on one of our research trips back in 1979, we sat down with the Lincolnshire Fire Brigade Commander, introduced ourselves, explained why we were there.
The proliferation of cases in that general vicinity led us to think that maybe there could be more cases that we did not know about.
The fire brigade commander initially responded to us by saying, oh, no, no, that doesn't happen, you know.
And we kind of wanted to apologize for wasting his time.
But then we put some photographs in front of him from our files that we had brought with us and said, you know, you're the expert.
We're the amateur.
We're just an investigator.
Had you ever seen any fire scenes like this?
And his response immediately was, no.
Could you explain fire scenes like this?
Well, I don't think so.
But then he got really quiet and he pushed himself back from his desk.
And as we sat there watching him, it appeared as though he was processing something in his mind that he had deeply repressed and now found himself forced to confront it.
He pushed himself back up to his desk, turned to us, and said, well, you know, Larry, a couple years ago, we did have a case that maybe kind of was kind of weird and mysterious.
And looking at the photographs you showed us, it caused me to rethink about this case.
And in our book, Ablaze, we introduced to the world a burning that happened to a hermit in Kirkely-on-Bain back around 1972.
And what made this so outstanding for us and caused the fire brigade commander, Officer Shenton, to rethink it was what the first responders found after the neighbors of this hermit had not seen him at the residence for two days.
Fire department was called.
They went in.
They could not find the gentleman.
They came out.
The neighbors said, no, he's got to be in there.
We haven't seen him.
They went back in and finally realized that between stacks of unburned newspaper, and this was a tinderbox of an environment, the windows were basically oiled paper for window panes.
The walls were lined with dried-out newsprint.
There were stacks of newspapers and rags throughout the dwelling.
Amid the stacks of unburned newspapers, the fire department found a line of ashes.
That's a quote from the fire brigade commander.
A line of ashes where once the victim's legs and lower torso had been.
They found his upper torso above the shoulder blades and his head and two feet, But basically everything in between was now dry powder, just as Dr. Bentley in 1966 had left behind in his home.
Now, look, I mean, that sounds horrific.
And again, you know, the warning and the caveat for my listener, if you are squeamish about these things, then, you know, you've got to turn this off because, you know, I don't think we can have a conversation about this without going there.
You know, that sounds horrific.
It sounds terrible.
Do you think one of the reasons that people don't confront this stuff and people who know about it and the ones who've experienced what appears to be this don't talk about it amongst themselves is that if we don't understand quite what it is, then how could we ever prepare for it?
You know, I can make sure that I don't step in front of a bus.
I can make sure that I don't do risky things.
I can try and moderate my diet as far as I do and can, but that's a personal choice.
Risk in life we can ameliorate, we can moderate.
But the risk of bursting into flames, albeit extremely rare, we have to say, if you don't know what causes it, then you can't prevent it.
That's a good reason why some of the mainstream Orthodox experts can't intellectually cope with the evidence that we have amassed and presented in our research through a blaze.
SHC is classic xenophobia or the response to it.
It's fear of the unknown.
Firefighters, fire instructors, fire career officers, physicians as well who have spent a career developing knowledge and expertise and professional standing are confronted with something that just belies common sense and what they've been trained to think they know.
And it's easier to cover it up, to dismiss it, to ignore it, or to suggest incredibly facile, silly, inane explanations to demonstrate that they think they know what's happened.
As we said earlier, we found examples of this again and again in our research.
There's an extremely well-known forensic biologist, and he completely dismisses the idea, the concept of SHC.
And one reason he does this is to say that in forensic practice, there are no known cases in which internal organs of a burned corpse were damaged more severely than the outer parts.
That's a direct quote.
We have shown him evidence where bodies, in terms of the photographs, and the autopsy reports clearly prove that internal organs have been destroyed and yet external body parts, you know, forearms, hands, the head, the feet, remain intact.
But the victim leaves behind no heart, no lungs, no pancreas, no spleen, no liver.
So the evidence refutes his contention to dismiss SHC.
Well, obviously, you know, he persists.
And, you know, I would be very grateful if we don't name this person.
But, you know, you have been accused as doing research based on selective evidence.
I've got the quote here.
And arguing and arguing from ignorance.
Yeah, okay, yeah, we've heard that one.
Selective evidence, we suspect we know who's making that claim.
You know, in our book, we present some cases that were presented as being spontaneous human combustion.
And digging into those cases, we discovered that it wasn't.
That there was a conventional common sense explanation, and we dismissed those cases as being SHC.
So you look for more obvious, more known explanations first, then?
First, absolutely, absolutely so.
That's what a good scientist and a good skeptic should do.
You look at the evidence and try to fit it into what is currently known.
Only when you can't force-fit it into what is conventionally, commonly accepted and known do you need to go to something else, which is the unknown, the enigmatic, the mysterious.
And in this case, if you're honest with the evidence and truthful to the facts and believe in your research and in the people to whom you interview to acquire that documentation, then by default, if things don't fit in the conventional box, you need to look outside the box.
And that brings us in our field of research to things that history has defined as spontaneous human combustion.
Sorry, that's where the evidence takes one, if one is honest.
Okay, now you said you have to look outside the box, which you've done, and you've been doing for decades.
What have you found outside that box?
What do you attribute this phenomenon or set of phenomena to?
Oh, gosh, have we ever looked outside the box?
In terms of explanations, what we can absolutely tell you and your audience is that the most common explanation offered by mainstream science and orthodoxy to dismiss and explain away classic SHC fire scenes is the wick effect.
In other words, the body burns like an inside-out candle once it's ignited externally.
We have tried that experimentally many times, as have some of our colleagues.
It does not work.
Having said that, what might cause these incredible human fires to happen?
It might be a biochemical mechanism that medical science has not yet explained or discovered.
In many cases, we suspect that what we are looking at is a bioelectrical phenomenon.
The body, a living body, has tremendous electrical potential, and if the cells were to discharge across the membranes their individual electrical potential simultaneously en mass, potentially the body, we believe, can electrically short itself out.
This will explain why nearby combustibles don't burn, don't ignite, because there really isn't high temperature.
This is Not a biochemical mechanism or process.
We've looked at the science of quantum mechanics to explain, perhaps to theorize at least, why some of these cases can occur.
We've looked at geography at energies in the Earth, to lurk energies, and particularly in the United Kingdom.
We've discovered that more than 80% of the cases that we have been able to identify in the United Kingdom of property that spontaneously combusts enigmatically or of people or of animals that appear to have spontaneously ignited, more than 80% of those cases can be connected by straight alignments, sometimes connecting perhaps as many as a dozen points of weird fires across the landscape.
Hold on, you're going to have to give me that again.
Are you saying that there appears to be some kind of geographical, topographical link between cases and sites?
That is precisely what we were saying.
We devote in our book of Blaze two chapters to the cartography of combustion.
If you are at the right place but the wrong time, your body or your property may spontaneously burn.
We have numerous cases of fire-like energy erupting from the planet.
We have a case from Italy in which one of five ladies walking home from a day of work, the lady in the middle of the group spontaneously exploded in their midst.
Very bizarre, honestly, very frightening.
In fact, the Conway case that we alluded to earlier from southeastern Pennsylvania, Helen Conway, who cremated herself basically within no more than six minutes, we believe that better fits the definition of spontaneous or sudden human explosion, SHE, as opposed to simply SHC.
Explosion simply being a more rapid means of combustion.
Right.
This is all very, very hard to take.
And look, my knowledge of science, as my listener knows, is pretty rudimentary and limited to what I learned at school, and I wasn't very good at it.
But what I am aware of is that people do produce alcohol, don't they, within themselves?
I think we metabolize alcohol, or rather we produce by the digestive process and other processes within the body, we do actually produce alcohol within ourselves.
Is it possible that if we've got a certain amount of alcohol, we know that's flammable, and there's a charge of static electricity, then if in the wrong circumstances at the wrong time, which happens very, very rarely, you get that shot of static electricity and up you go.
Well, the static electricity could be the external ignition spark that would fuel such a blaze.
Now, is that possible to ignite whatever amount of alcohol is in a person's body, either from digestive processes or from consuming and imbibing a tremendous amount of alcoholic liquor?
Initially, that concept was dismissed.
It was dismissed back in 1850 by Justin von Liebig, who conducted an experiment because at that time, as you said earlier, it was believed that all victims of SHC were alcoholics.
That is not the case, but he did his experiments, as we have done also, and he proved or demonstrated that even alcoholic impregnated tissue will not sustain prolonged combustion and will not burn itself to powder.
We've been able to demonstrate the same conclusion.
Therefore, von Liebig declared that SHC cannot occur.
Well, that was a fallacious conclusion.
We explore in our book a bit about how aberrant breakdown of alcohol in the body could indeed become the fuel for some SHC cases.
Okay, so are we saying that this remains a mystery with certain explicable parts, or are you saying that actually you do have, you have come up with a reasonable one-size-fits-many explanation?
Interesting phrasing for the question.
We'll try to answer it this way.
We believe we have firmly documented beyond any credible reason to doubt the reality of spontaneous human combustion, aka sudden human cremation.
As to the cause, that is still wide open.
It is not the human wick effect, but beyond that, it's anybody's speculation as to how these hundreds of people over hundreds of years have been able to consume themselves in a very strange and atypical physical bodily transition.
In Ablaze, we offer more than 120 possible theories, none of which at this point, to our knowledge, could be taken into a scientific laboratory and replicated.
So that's one of the problems with this subject.
People look at this and say, well, if there's an explanation, we should be able to replicate it in a laboratory under controlled conditions.
And so far, that doesn't seem to be possible.
Whatever are the factor or factors that come together to produce this very rare phenomenon is something that so far, at least to our limited knowledge, is not able to be taken into a laboratory and reproduced under controlled observable conditions.
That's one of the problems of the subject and why it's so easy for so many to dismiss it.
And what is of those 120 possible scientific explanations?
Do you have a favorite or favorites?
Interesting question.
We do have a couple favorites.
Yeah, we like the work that we've done applying quantum mechanics to the energy levels that these fires, these events can produce.
We've applied quantum theory to the amount of energy necessary to dehydrate an adult human body.
And what we come up with is a particle that we believe behaves like a neutrino, of which billions have passed through your body and our body during this 45-minute discussion so far, presumably without ill effect.
But our Number crunching indicates that there is the existence of a hypothetical particle that we've called a pyrotron that is by a factor of 20 smaller than a neutrino but has incredibly high energy.
And if such a particle does exist and impacts a quark or part of an atom in your body, that direct collision can unleash so much energy instantaneously that it completely dehydrates the body.
That's one favorite theory.
It's a theory.
We cannot take that to the lab.
Even the Large Hadron Collector at CERN does not have the technological capability yet to discern a particle that small.
We also like a theory that kind of borders on at least Eastern medicine and touches on a few Western medical practitioners who have a very broad awareness, and that is kundalini.
Kundalini is a quasi-electrical energy that moves up and down the spinal cord.
And in talking to people who have used and controlled and channeled Kundalini consciously in their bodies, we've been told that when that energy becomes out of balance, it can create and does create tremendous amounts of thermal energy.
And as Gopi Krishna, one of the practitioners of Kundalini, personally told us, had he not the awareness and ability to rebalance the kundalini in his body when it became out of balance, he would have become a case for our research to document.
Okay.
Two quite complicated possible explanations.
I mean, the worrying thing from your point of view must be that if there are so many potential explanations and this thing remains a mystery after hundreds and hundreds of years, it seems to me that you're going to keep researching this and you've been doing it for decades and you're never going to find a proper, repeatable, solid, acceptable, concrete explanation.
You're just going to keep chasing your tail.
Am I being unfair when I say that?
No, no, you're not.
Now, we don't take offense at that.
What we hope to do before this body decides to vacate and go to another plane of reality is that we will have amassed enough evidence to at least convince the scientific community that there is a real phenomenon here that deserves more attention and more study than it presently has been given.
Another of the problems that we face is because the cases that we have been able to document and research are so varied that we do not believe at this point that there is a single explanation that can explain the hundreds of cases in our database.
And that's a problem that is pointed out to us by one of our critics who says, Larry, your problem is that you have cases, quote unquote, all over the place.
And for him, that's a problem.
He expects all these odd fires to look alike.
Our retort to that, to use a phrase, is why should we expect all cases that history has defined as SHC to look exactly alike?
Every human being alive is an individual with unique circumstances in his or her biology and physical attributes.
We were allergic to hayweed as a child and to products with eggs.
Not everybody suffers that.
Why should they?
We're all different.
So in something as already unconventional as is SAC, why should someone demand that all cases of it look alike and function alike?
Which brings us back to we do not believe at this point that we can ever find or anyone can ever find a single unique explanation that will explain the myriad details and variations in what history has defined as SHC.
Scientifically, that's a problem, but intellectually, it's incredibly fascinating.
That was exactly the word I was about to use.
These cases, as we draw the threads of this conversation together, are shocking, disturbing, and fascinating.
They are endlessly fascinating.
You know, I tried to find some newspaper reports about SHC, sudden human cremation, spontaneous human combustion.
And I think it was the Independent newspaper I found this in quotes.
The most recent death linked to SHC was that of Michael.
We're talking about Ireland here.
Was that of Michael Faherty, aged 76, died at his home in Galway, December 2010.
Comparatively recently, Dr. Kieran McLaughlin, the coroner tasked with explaining Mr. Fiherty's sudden death at his home in Ballybain, made the shocked decision of putting it down to SHC.
Mr. Faherty was found severe burned on his back with his head near an open fireplace.
Despite the blaze, the sitting room was untouched.
Clastic case from burns on the ceiling directly above him and on the floor beneath him.
Forensic experts who investigated the scene at Mr. Flaherty's home concluded the fireplace was not linked to his death.
Dr. McLaughlin said this fits into the category of spontaneous human combustion for which, quotes, there is no adequate explanation.
I'm sure that you're aware of this case, but that says it all, doesn't it?
It very much does, and it's a problematic case, at least for us.
When that case happened to Mr. Flaherty, we were on the phone almost immediately to Emmy McLaughlin, who was kind enough to talk to us briefly about it.
Obviously, he was being hounded by the media around the world because his determination of SHC as a medical examiner was groundbreaking, was newsworthy, of course.
He also said at the time that this was the only case like it that had happened in Ireland.
That was not true.
We have several cases that fit the definition of SHC that have occurred in Ireland.
Emmy McLaughlin indicated that he would be willing to talk to us further after the publicity tied down.
When we were lucky enough to visit Ireland back in 2016, we tried to meet with him.
He fiercely refused.
We're not quite sure why.
But we did have the opportunity to go to Mr. Flaherty's domicile, but not to enter it.
So we were outside the property.
The local Garda has been, shall we say, reluctant, to be kind, to share details of that case with us.
For your news clipping that said this was the most recent case that fits the definition of SHC, we will refute that.
A more recent case happened here in the United States in 2013.
We visited the scene.
We met with the next of kin.
We met with all the first responders that we could identify.
This is, again, very much like Dr. Bentley, like Mary Wieser, and perhaps like Michael Flaherty, a very localized human incineration.
In this case, the individual, a male, left behind a head, upper shoulders, and lower legs.
Items between those anatomical parts had burned to powder through the hole in his kitchen floor.
He was a heavy drinker and a known smoker.
But as the fire chief for the first responding company that worked with us, he said this fire began in and ended at the body.
No external ignition source could be identified or linked to the fire that consumed the victim.
So a mystery just as great as that one in Ireland.
I didn't know about that case.
There was another case that I found in a newspaper report.
This was in the UK.
Jeannie Saffin, 61 years of age, sat with her family.
Her brother-in-law said the flame shot from Ms. Saffin's stomach as she sat at her kitchen table in Edmonton in North London.
Quote, she was roaring like a dragon.
How horrific.
The kitchen was not damaged again, but her cardigan melted.
The inquest never sorted it out, I quote.
But I know what I saw.
Now then, another astonishing case.
It is astonishing, and we will tell you that we sat in the kitchen where that event happened.
We spoke to Jeannie Safin's relatives about the case.
You're quoting that the flame shot from her stomach.
We would dispute that.
That is not what the next of kin told us.
Jeannie's father, if memory serves father or father-in-law told us that the flame shot from her mouth, not from the stomach.
She was sitting at a kitchen table with her father or father-in-law when this happened.
Very bizarre.
As we said, we sat in the kitchen where this happened, conducting our interviews.
One debunker has said, well, Jeannie Saffin could not have spontaneously combusted because, of course, that just doesn't happen.
What really caused her to suffer her burn injuries was that a bypasser had flicked a cigarette and it landed on her lap or caught her clothing aflame.
Now, here's the bemusing part of how far debunkers and naysayers of SHC will stretch any reasonable consideration of facts to explain away the concept of SHC.
Having been at that house, we can tell you and your listeners the following.
If a bystander in a car or on the sidewalk had flipped a cigarette that landed on Jeannie Safin, this is what would have had to occur.
That cigarette would have to fly across the sidewalk, a distance of about 25 feet, go through the Domo Siles front door, presuming it was open, down another 20-foot hallway, and then make a 45-degree angle to end up in Jeannie Safin's kitchen and thereupon drop on her lap or hit her shoulder garments and cause them to ignite.
That can't possibly make any sense.
As bizarre as is SHC, that makes more sense than an explanation of a flex cigarette that had to traverse that kind of trajectory.
And to the best of your recollection, and I'm just trying to look it up here, do you know what the inquest verdict was?
You've got to test our memory.
I'm sure it was put down as accidental death.
She succumbed to injuries a couple days later in a hospital, we believe, if memory serves again.
It's claimed that she didn't have any burn injuries in the hospital, so therefore this whole story that you and we have been discussing was contrived.
We dispute that.
Again, one of the problems is because these cases are so varied, this may not have and probably almost certainly was not an oxidizing type of combustion fire.
It could have been bioelectrical or something that happened through other means at the cellular level in Genie's mouth that did not cause the kind of burn injury that you expect to find from an oxidizing flame.
Again, these cases are very strange, very problematic to investigate, and do not all follow the same pattern, which makes their study and explanation all the more challenging and difficult.
We have to say that the Saffin case was, as all of these cases, I think in their own ways, highly controversial, and the claims of SHC were subsequently refuted.
And, you know, this just goes to say, without going into a long debate about that, this is always going to be a controversial thing, isn't it?
It will be controversial until, as we say, some well-profile authority like Mr. Johnson in your country or President Biden in our country or perhaps Donald Trump is standing before a bank of microphones and cameras and suddenly goes up in flame.
At which point, it will probably be determined, oh, that's spontaneous human combustion.
We've known about that for centuries.
Yep, it happens.
No problem.
No mystery.
End of case.
Until that happens, yes, this is going to remain a highly controversial, highly disputed, and unfortunately largely dismissed phenomenon.
But hugely, hugely fascinating.
Thank you for talking with me about this, Larry.
And I'm very grateful to my listener, whose name, sadly, I forget, for suggesting you.
But I'm really pleased that the listener did that for me.
I'll check on his or her name and send them appropriate thanks for this.
One final thing.
You told me a story at the beginning, or you gave me a headline at the beginning, about one of these cases that happened on a boat.
Match Cumminsing of Memory Serves with the name.
She was on the Norfolk Broads with her family, and according to the accounts that we have, we did research a number of these cases in newspaper clips at the Collingwood branch of the British Museum.
So we're not making up this story.
We're not repeating some top scientific author's fully researched book.
She was with her family in the middle of the Broads, and according to the account that we read in the Collingwood branch, she went up in flame.
We have other cases where the body has been burned to what is described as firebrands, which would be basically what you get in a fireplace when a twig is burned to white powder.
The limbs, the fingertips have been burned to look like firebrands, and yet the fingertips burned as such are lying atop the garments, the clothing of the victim.
The clothing is unburned.
If you can duplicate that by the WIC effect in the laboratory, please send us an email.
We want to know about it.
We do not believe that can happen.
And speaking of, because so many of the cases in our database do happen in the UK, if your listeners over there know about cases that we've discussed or cases that we haven't discussed in this program, can give us more information, we would sincerely, eagerly welcome to hear from them.
Okay.
You have a website, do you?
And is there a way to contact you through that website?
Yes, the website is pariscience.com, P-A-R-A-Science.com.
That will give the email address.
The easiest one to use for this research is SHCHappens at Gmail.
We'd be happy to share information with your listeners who want to know more about this remarkable phenomenon.
And conversely, we are, as we said, eager to hear from anyone who can tip us off to new cases or give us their thoughts about how these bizarre yet fascinating fire phenomena can be explained.
Well, by the sounds of it, not all of those cases that you talked about by any manner or means can be just brushed off as being one of those things that happen and there's a logical explanation for that.
Doesn't sound like that to me at all.
And I have to sit in the middle about all of these things, but I'm saying that.
Larry, I'm glad we made connection.
Thank you very much for doing this, and I wish you well.
I hope we talk again.
Thank you, Howard.
We were delighted in that and bless you and your listeners.
And stay cool.
Larry Arnold, what a great guest here on The Unexplained.
A man who's obviously done his research and is continuing to do it.
And the listener who suggested this, of course, was Nancy in the United States.
Nancy, thank you so much for that.
And Nancy also gave me an email address for Larry.
So, you know, made me do it all the quicker.
If you have great guests that you think should be on this show, you know how to contact them.
Please don't be shy.
Go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and tell me all about them.
And if you have a contact number for them, then that would be fab.
I can get right on it, as they say.
Shout out.
I'd forgotten who it was.
It's Mike and Jackie in Yorkshire.
Mike and Jackie, thank you very much for the story that you sent me and for the great email.
And there's your shout-out.
Hope that you've heard it at the end of the show.
I will check on that just to make sure that you did.
I'm sorry if I sounded so shocked at the beginning of this edition.
That's just not like me to be like that.
But, you know, I had one of the shocks of my life today.
And I think I'm just going to have to calm down after it.
You know, I think with all the bills going up in this country, and maybe your country too for energy and everything else, I think we've probably all got more shocks to come one way or another.
But we keep smiling, as they say, as long as we've got teeth to do it.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name has been Howard Hughes.
Always will be as far as I'm aware.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection