Lindbergh took off at 1:35 a.m. on Feb. 13, 1928, on the last leg of an around-the-Gulf-and-Caribbean tour. He would fly from Havana to St. Louis in what, for him, should have been a long, but routine flight. It would also be the first-ever direct flight between the two cities. “It should’ve been an easy flight—about a third the distance from New York to Paris,” he wrote in his 1978 book, Autobiography of Values. However, that’s not what happened.

He climbed to an altitude of 4,000 feet and settled back to enjoy the night flight. “But halfway across the Straits of Florida my magnetic compass started rotating, and the earth–inductor-compass needle jumped back and forth erratically. By that time, a haze had formed, screening off horizons.”

Only one other time had he seen two compasses fail simultaneously. That was during a storm in the Atlantic en route to Paris, and his magnetic compass only oscillated back and forth, so he was able to calculate his direction by the central point of the oscillation. But this time the magnetic compass spun in circles and the inductor compass was useless. “I had no idea whether I was flying north, south, east, or west.”

Lindbergh started climbing toward the clear sky that just minutes before had been above him. If he could find Polaris, he could navigate by the stars. But the haze thickened as he gained altitude. So he descended to less than a thousand feet, but the haze followed him and he could barely see the ocean.

Just before dawn, he spotted a shadowy island and assumed that he’d reached the Florida Keys. But after crossing a narrow body of water, Lindbergh saw a long coastline bending to the right, the opposite way that the land curved on his map of Florida. “But if I was not flying over a Florida key, where could I be? Was it possible I had returned to Cuba, that my attempt to read the twirling compasses had put me one-hundred-eighty degrees off course?”

The coastline ended and he saw more keys ahead. He realized that if he wasn’t over the Florida Keys, he was over the Bahamas. That meant he had been flying at a 90-degree angle from his proper heading and that he was about 300 miles off course. Once the sun was high enough above the horizon, he determined east and headed through the haze in the opposite direction, toward the Florida coast. The magnetic compass stopped rotating as soon as he reached the mainland. He passed by dozens of heavy squalls as he moved through Florida and Georgia, and headed on to St. Louis to complete his flight.

Lindbergh never talked publicly about his strange experience in what was to become known as the Bermuda Triangle. No doubt he survived the experience because of his incredible abilities as a pilot. That flight would be merely an interesting footnote to his flying career and celebrated life, and nothing more, were it not for the fact that he documented a case of an aeronautical encounter with a rare but often deadly phenomenon that remains a scientific anomaly.

Forty-two years later, I encountered a similar fog. In some respects, my flight was even more harrowing than Lindbergh’s. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Route Map andSequence of Events

Charles Taylor was in charge of the Flight-19, the five avenger bomber planes. It was a training flight. However they were soon lost and never returned to the Naval Base. The map below shows the following details after Flight 19 took off from the Navy Air Station (NAS) Fort Lauderdale of Florida on December 5, 1945: 

Check out Flight-19 Mystery know about the entire story of the Flight-19 avenger bomber planes that never returned to their naval base.

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1) Bermuda Triangle Incidents

2) The facts and Myths of Bermuda Triangle

3) Bermuda Triangle Theories

One damned letter. And a juicy story.

It’s not Lister. It’s Litster. Thayer got it wrong. Lots of internet sites get it wrong. Not Lister, Litster.

John Litster was born 30 April 1886 in Alva, Scotland to George Litster and Janet Romanes. Litster says his father was in government service, and when John was three, the family relocated to South Africa, where he lived for thirteen years. He attended college in Scotland, then returned to Johannesburg, working in mining until he was twenty-three. He had contracted malaria, and at that time it had developed into blackwater fever; doctors told him he needed a change of scenery. Litster chose Denver, Colorado, where he could continue to work as a mining engineer. Almost all of that history comes from Litster’s own report; I’m only confident that he was born in 1886, and that he did live in Scotland when he was about 15—at least, there’s a John Litster of that age in the 1901 Scottish census.

After Oregon, Litster said, he moved south, to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he changed careers again, writing advertising copy. Supposedly he was in the area for five years, which in context puts him in the region from about 1925 to 1930. (I cannot find him in the 1920 census.) He recalls making good money and publishing a book of poetry, The Golden Years in 1928. All of this comes from the same article in an Oregon newspaper published in the 1930s, after he made a Fortean amusement park. And so there may be a bit of, um, let’s call it, self-serving omissions. Because this is where the official records start to be of use, and they intimate a different story.

To understand, we have to jump ahead in time a bit, to 1939, when he published a book of poetry called Gold Hill, or Vagabond’s Testament (which I have not seen). It republiched some works which he had originally published under a pseudonym, Alva Romanes—clearly the name of his home town and his mother’s maiden name. As it happens, there were several books of poetry published by Romanes in the late 1920s: The Great Awakening (1927) and, possibly, a book called Mistakes in 1929. And in that interview, Litster writes that he published The Golden Years in 1928, that also went out under that pseudonym. So the connection is there, and the problem is not just one damned letter, but a whole damned name. The poetry was a minor success, getting quoted in a few newspapers and religious tracts.

The first of these books, The Great Awakening, was supposed to have been written when Lister was a prisoner at San Quentin. They are a mishmash of some conventionally pedantic prosody as well as a few that are a bit more searching—though none of it would qualify as good. The appendix has several letters of support, from David Starr Jordan, a judge, a DA, and San Quentin’s Warden. It is worth noting that prison reform was of some interest in the 1920s, and involved several Forteans, notably Maynard Shipley and Miriam Allen DeFord. Romanes’ book, though, stopped short of calling for any reform, only suggesting, obliquely, that prison was too harsh, depriving inmates of books and following the laws of man, which were not as just as those of Divine ones.

A search of San Quentin’s records, however, reveals no one incarcerated there by the name of John Litster, Alva Romanes, or even John Lister. So, what’s going on? Was this all a pose, Lister never actually jailed, just using the story to help his poems? Perhaps, though only 2,000 copies of the book were published, suggesting there was never a real push for publicity. (Admittedly, the publishing run is from the book itself, and could all be part of a con.) However, an Oregon encyclopedia does say that he spent time in jail during the 1920s, which suggests there is some record of his incarceration. And a broader search of the records revealed something potentially interesting. There was a Lister from England held at San Quentin from 1924 to 1927, which fits with the rest of Litster’s life story. The birth date was off by a few years—1891, instead of 1886—and the first name was different, George, not John. Could this be the same guy?

There are reasons to believe so. First, and the weakest, George also went by the name Jack Evans—Jack a diminutive of John—and the penchant for name-switching fit with his later use of a pseudonym. Second, while I could not find John Litster in the 1920 census, I could find a George Lister, living in Sausalito (just north of San Francisco), working for a railroad. I could not, however, find any other records for this Lister, before or after. (His birthplace, incidentally, is given as the United States, as are his parents’—nothing more specific than that, just the United States.) There are, of course, multiple reasons for this potential lack of records, but among them is that the identity was created de novo. Third, the records for George Litster include a physical description and pictures—which match those of later pictures of John Litster. The match is not perfect, but there is a more-than twenty-year spread between them. Finally, the poems in The Great Awakening strongly suggest the author was put behind bars for financial crimes, and George Lister—well, he committed a big one.

George Lister made off with $14,000. He had been working as a messenger for American Express railway company and, in March 1924, vanished with the money. A nationwide alert went out and he was apprehended later in the month. Lister plead guilty in May, hoping for parole; although the probation plea was unopposed, he was sentenced to 1-14 years at San Quentin. Lister admitted that he had spent the money “on cabaret girls and cafe attendants along New York’s Broadway.” The sentence ended up being just shy of three years—the 1927 discharge fitting perfectly with the 1927 publication of The Great Awakening and the rest of John Litster’s life story.

The second book—the one he called out in his later reminisces—The Golden Years is subtitled A Lyric Story of Love. And it was written about the time that Litster was falling in love—I haven’t seen the book, so can’t make the connection definitively.  It is true, though, that Litster married in 1930—his wife was Mildred Forsyth, aged 36—seven years 

Listster’s junior (though only two years younger than George Lister). She was the daughter of John Forsyth and Mabel Hall. At least that’s what it said on the marriage certificate. Other records indicate that she was born as Julia. I cannot find her under either name in the 1920 census, though, and so am not sure what she was up to. At any rate, the certificate has Litster living in Los Angeles, Forsyth in Berkeley, and the two getting married in Alameda on 21 March 1930.

Other records complicate that story. John Litster appears twice in the 1930 census. He’s listed as living in southern Oregon, and divorced, as of April 1930—a month after he was married. That same month, he’s living with his in-laws in Berkeley. The 1930 census has a space for age at first marriage—it is not filled in for the Oregon Litster, but given as 43 in for the California Litster. Neither give any indication why he gave his home as Los Angeles on the marriage certificate. Perhaps he and Mildred divorced after only a month? It’s possible, but that juts makes the rest of the story confusing. In both cases, Litster gave his profession as writer.

The story continues murky for a couple of years. At some point, Litster purchased an old assay building in Gold Hill that had slid down a mountain over the years, leaving it cattywampus. Stories about Litster have him buying the land in the early 1920s—which is possible—and conducting thousands of experiments there—which is also possible, albeit unlikely. But there are no records of that, and he seems to have had more pressing work in the 1920s, what with his copywriting, poetry, and prison time.

His own account, at least as told in 1937, has him only taking ownership right around 1930, and having conducted no earlier experiments. He said that his San Francisco doctor told him, Because of his lungs, he needed to live in the country. So he returned to southern Oregon and found some land in Gold Hill, filing a claim on 20 acres known as the Berkeley Square mine, as well as some surrounding land, including the dilapidated assay office, slipped down the hillside toward Sardine Creek. It was a two-room building, about 12 by 30 feet. For the record, I have not found any mention of the Berkeley Square mine, except in Litster’s account.

John Litster changed careers again. He became proprietor of “The House of Mystery.”

According to his own account, he noticed that plumb lines were deflected seven-and-a-half degrees from perpendicular; that glass and other non-magnetic materials were pushed away from magnetic north; that balls thrown toward a fence did not go over but returned. He said that there was a long record of oddities associated with the place: birds refused to nest in the area, locals thought the place was hoodooed. It’s not clear that any of this is true, or that the stories predated Litster owning the proper and setting out a sign directing travelers to the mystery house. It is quite possible to explain these phenomena as optical illusions created by the shack’s crazy angles.

Litster dismissed this possibility, as did many Forteans, and others who came to the place later. Lister said that he did experiments, but over the years the number attributed to him has grown ridiculous: 14,000 is commonly reported across the internet. As a result of these experiments, the new owner did not think the physics-defying anomalies were illusions: he thought there was a force of 25 pounds pushing objects away from magnetic north. The center of this force was in the shack. He suggested at times that perhaps the mineral composition of the hill caused the deformations. John Litster alternately claimed that scientists had investigated the area, and come away confused, and that he hoped some day a scientist would investigate and explain the phenomena.

John and Mildred were tireless promoters of the vortex—despite the reports of the 1930 census from Oregon, John was decidedly not divorced. He claimed in 1937 that 35,000 people visited the house in one year, which seems like an incredibly large number. The 1940 census had him giving his primary career as owner of the attraction. By 1948, he published The House of Mystery: Located Within the Famous Circular Area, the Oregon Vortex, with Its Unique Phenomena. It was expanded in 1954 and a posthumous version was published in 1960 as Notes and Data, Relative to the Phenomena at the Area of the House of Mystery, Sardine Creek, Gold Hill, Oregon. I have only seen the last, and it is not so much an argument as a bunch of pictures showing short and tall people reversing their respective sizes depending upon where they stood. Over the years, the area of this activity expanded, a circle of varying circumferences.

I don’t know how Litster became associated with the Fortean Society, although there are hints. He is first mentioned in Doubt 14 (Spring 1946), which was about a decade-and-a-half after opening his roadside attraction, and two years before the first edition of his pamphlet. Thayer—calling the proprietor John Lister—notes that he is already a member by this point. Thayer was unimpressed by the house: he’d visited similar “crazy houses” at Coney Island and amusement parks. Other Forteans, though, were more excited, and likely they had drawn him to the Society—in particular Albert E. Page, the Santa Rosa postal carrier and expositor of the vortex atom. Thayer noted that Page had been out to Gold Hill some time before, and decided that the phenomena was caused by a vortex. Indeed, it’s likely that Page inspired Litster to call the place “The Oregon Vortex,” as he does not do so in the 1937 newspaper piece.

The immediate cause of Thayer’s article in Doubt, though, was Frederick Hehr. The maverick Bay Area physicist had just visited Gold Hill and investigated. (It’s possible that Litster and Hehr knew each other from the Bay Area, but there’s no evidence of that.) He didn’t think vortexes were responsible. Rather, he surmised that a machine had been buried below Gold Hill in prehistoric times. Maybe it was Atlantean, he suggested; maybe it was extraterrestrial. (Thayer let his feelings be known when he mentioned that Hehr was on intimate terms with beings from Venus.) All of this was before the flying saucer craze, and space beings were still understood in vaguely Theosophical ways.

Litster seems to have inspired others—and this was cause for his second, and final, appearance in Doubt. In 1941, “The Mystery Spot” opened in Santa Cruz, featuring similarly obscured sightlines and the same kinds of phenomena as Gold Hill. Then, eight years later, “Confusion Hill” opened in Piercy, California, about 250 miles to the southwest. The Litsters were not happy by the development, and sued the proprietors of Confusion Hill for an injunction and a little more than half a million dollars. In turn, the Litsters were countersued for $8,000. (The same year saw a legal battle between The Mystery Spot and “Curious Canyon”.) Thayer dismissed it all as good publicity for what were basically carnival attractions.

That attitude may be why John Litster didn’t contribute more to the Society; it may also be that Litster merely thought the Society a good source of ideas for describing his attraction. It is not clear whether he really believed in the theories he was putting forth, or whether he was just drawing on his advertising background and trying to make a living by selling a con.

John Litster died in 1959. The following year, Mildred sold the property. It continued to attract attention through the rest of the century, but has increasingly fallen on hard times.

The feeling for just about everyone is discombobulating.

There’s a feeling of disorientation, maybe even dizziness.

But it’s more than that.

It’s hard to describe.

One tourist said it was kind of like wading through fast moving water and feeling that water swirl around your legs.

In the house, is a platform to stand on as if the house were level.

Joe climbs on the platform to demonstrate.

« When you raise your head you see I’m not standing straight, » he said. « I’m leaning forward a couple bubbles off center. »

But the house is more than just crooked.

There’s a powerful force here.

Visitor Rick Cano sits down next to the wall and feels it immediately as he tries to push forward from his chair.

Rick finds he can’t move.

« The more I attempt to move forward, » he said,  » the more pressure I feel pushing me backwards. »

Zachary Passieri’s experience is similar as he swings a chained weight that’s plum with the field.

He pushes it in the direction where the floor is sloping downhill.

In that direction, he said, « it feels like it’s maybe two or three pounds. »

But pushing it in the other direction, said Zachary, « it feels like it’s maybe 20 or 30 pounds. »

Here, marbles appear to roll uphill, and brooms have a mind of their own.

Joe places a broom on the floor.

It stands up straight on its own.

« We taught him how to sweep the floor a few years ago, » he joked. « Now he just stands around and won’t do any work. »

Take a photo inside, and you’re likely to see missing parts or strange images embedded with the picture.

Kortni Neavear took a picture of her husband Sam.

The picture shows Sam with an image of what appears to be a window in his torso.

It’s weird outside the House of Mystery too.

Joe places a level on the ground to show that everything is level.

A marble placed there proves it.

Source: https://nbcmontana.com/news/montana-moment/montana-vortex-and-house-of-mystery-may-redefine-laws-of-physics

RAY: The thick forests of the Pacific Northwest are rumored to hide a secret so unbelievable, so captivating, that on first glance, it would seem to be nothing more than a campfire story. Sasquatch has left an incontrovertible mark across North American legend and pop culture. Could there be an unknown giant hominid yet undiscovered to science?

[Sample of Sierra sounds]

RAY: These recordings of reported Bigfoot vocalizations captured in the 70s by businessman Ron Morehead and journalist Al Berry deep within the Sierra Mountains are truly nightmare inducing. The recordings could be some of the most conclusive evidence for the existence of Sasquatch. Ron Morehead told us more about this encounter. 

Ron Morehead: I started this Bigfoot thing in 1971 when I was invited to a camp in the High Sierras …But really, I none of us were looking for Bigfoot or anything about it. We were just there as a hunting camp…And most of us didn't talk about what went on up there at the time, only to our friends and relatives. It was kind of kind of weird, to be honest with you. Some of it was.

RAY: Known as the Sierra Sounds their story is compelling, controversial, and truly a Strange Phenome non. 

Dr. Jeff Meldrum, professor of Anthropology at Idaho State University, is convinced that there is enough evidence to warrant consideration to the existence of an unknown hominid in North America. Dr. Meldrum is one of the eminent scientists pushing for serious inquiry into the subject. He runs a peer reviewed paper called the Relict Hominid which publishes papers on the topic and is available for free online. He also owns one of the worlds largest Sasquatch footprint collections, much of which he inherited from the late Grover Krantz, a respected anthropologist. 

Jeff Meldrum: Sasquatch is is a name and anglo-lasized form of a indigenous name derived from particularly from the tribes of the British Columbia coast, the Pacific Northwest, which which translates essentially as wild man of the woods. And throughout history, we have evidence of a fascination by human cultures with the possible existence of non-human humanoid creatures that usually are denizens of the forests,

Jeff Meldrum : so we're talking in this case about a relic hominid, as I would refer to it, a persistent population of of in this case, very large, you know, averaging anywhere from six and a half to nine and a half feet tall, hair covered, but but otherwise, generally humanoid looking in appearance only in the sense that it stands upright, you know, vaguely the outline of a human. But there's so many aspects where we go on and on about the distinguishing characteristics, very large in physique, very robust, very, very ape like in many of its qualities, but resembling humans in that it stands and walks and runs on two legs.

Stories of Sasquatch have existed in North America for centuries. Different Native American tribes have various names for the creature, but they all essentially describe the same thing.. A giant, hairy, wild humanoid creature who lives in the forest.

Jeff Meldrum : Even tribes that occupy areas now that seemed very constrained and atypical of where one might encounter Bigfoot, their oral traditions and legends extend to times when their their population may have occupied areas that were ecologically appropriate… In addition to their big size and and the fact that although they haunt the you know, the nether regions of the mountain is forested areas there, they're feared oftentimes because they often are attributed with abducting adults, especially women and also children and eating them their cannibal giants. 

RAY: The most common evidence for the existence of Sasquatch are eyewitness reports. There are thousands of accounts from credible witnesses spanning decades. Even Jane Goodall weighed in on the subject. On NPR she said, “Well now  you’ll be amazed when I tell you that I am sure they [sasquatch] exist. . . I have talked to so many Native Americans who’ve all described the same sounds; two who have seen them.”  Other than eyewitness testimony, what other evidence exists?  Depicting the most iconic imagery of Sasquatch to date, the Roger Patterson film shows a large hairy humanoid creature crossing a creek. The authenticity is still hotly debated nearly 50 years later. Mysterious giant footprints are found all throughout North America. Casts of these footprints have been captured, with some of them even showing dermal ridges within the toes.. Dermal ridges are the details found in fingerprints, and are incredibly convincing evidence of a real life creature.

Along with footprints, the Skookum cast was captured in Southern Washington, and represents what some claim to be the lower half of a Sasquatch who knelt down in the mud. 

Anomalous hair samples have been found, yet the DNA results have all been too inconclusive to  prove what animal they came from. There are a plethora of photos and videos beyond what Roger Patterson filmed, many of which are too low-quality to identify if they are a hoax or not. Audio recordings of reported Sasquatch vocalizations are rare, which make the Sierra Sounds even more unique.

Dr. Meldrum gave us more background on Sasquatch sightings in the Sierra mountains. 

Jeff Meldrum (47:50): if you go to one of the online databases, like the Bigfoot Field researchers organization, you get a you get a sense. I mean, that's not the end all by any means. But it does convey a sense of of the number and type of or the relative frequency, put it that way. The relative frequency and type of encounters be the footprint finds are bumps in the night or visual encounters. But up and down that, you know, from northern California all across the state and then down the spine of the Sierra Nevada Mountains south of Lake Tahoe. Yes, lots of encounters. I have had a few instances where people have contacted me directly. There was a gentleman who who often, you know, he was a trail runner and he haunted the areas just north of Yosemite and he encountered footprints and they were quite, quite convincing. They were about 14 inches long and very, very interesting set of footprints.

RAY: Joe Hauser, an environmental consultant and biologist, told us about a personal encounter he had in the Sierras:

Joe Hauser: We're in a remote gold mining camp in the Sierras, and we were up there mining for the summer and. After we finish mining, we were sitting around the campfire after dinner…All of a sudden up the canyon from us, we heard two very loud screams, almost like a howler monkey on steroids. And that was followed by a very large whoop. And I kind of came off my chair and I looked at my partner. I go, I go. Herman, what the hell was that? He just looked at me very matter of factly and said, Oh, that's Sasquatch. Bigfoot, you haven't heard one. I said, No, I haven't. And then we threw some more logs on the fire and proceeded to have a conversation about his experiences in the Sierras in and around the area that we had been gold mining in

RAY: Sasquatch stories are entrenched in the region, with many credible witnesses reporting seeing something they can’t explain. In fact, not many years before the Sierra Sounds were recorded, there was a rash of bigfoot sightings in the same area. 

An article written in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1965 called it the “Terror of the Toulumne”. Toulumne County covers the area between Tahoe and Yosemite. The article reads, “There is mountain testimony that giant man-animals may be roaming the remote forest and mountains of the northwestern part of the United States. Two men in responsible positions have told this reporter they encountered the hairy sub-humans at different times and places. There exist tape-recorded interviews with others who have either seen one of the monsters or heard it's hideous scream or smelled what they described as “the foul stench” of its body. These creatures, they said, appeared to be half ape and half man and weighed more than 500 pounds.”

One report which was published in the Union Democrat in 1963, and is archived in the Bigfoot Field Research Organization database has eerie parallels to Ron and Al’s own encounters. The story involves two police officers in Toulumne County, William Huntley and Elbert Miller. The two were responding to a call from a man who said he saw something 9-10ft tall. The anonymous caller said, “It was moving around. It appeared to be human but was the most awful thing I have ever seen. I'm scared. I'm an adult and I'm not crazy. I'm not drunk. I don't even drink”. 

When the officers arrived they reported hearing what sounded like a human in distress. The sounds seemed to shift from human to animalistic, similar to the recordings captured by Ron and Al, as heard here:

[Sample of Ron and Al’s recordings]

In the end, the officers had no explanation for the sounds and were unable to find any evidence as to what was making them. This is just one of many reported Sasquatch encounters in the Sierras. Not long after this, the encounters at the Sierra hunting camp began..

It was August of 1971 when the Johnson brothers headed to their deer hunting camp deep in the Sierra’s, at an undisclosed location. The family still uses the hunting camp to this day so the exact location has been safeguarded, but it sits somewhere within Toulumne County. 

Ron Moorehead: That evening they experienced some really raucous noises and they thought it was a bear. But then they realized that bears don't make sounds like that. So the hunters had been visiting this camp since 1958 and they're going there hunting and they went outside. After all, the commotion stopped and see a huge five toed footprint of the mud. And they came out and told the other guys, which I wasn't part of the group at that time, and they all wanted to know what was going on

RAY: One of the hunters, Donald, was so terrified by the noises he left early the next morning, while the rest of the group, including his brother Bill , stayed behind. When the hunting party didn’t return as planned, he enlisted the help of friend Ron Moorehead to make sure nothing had happened to the group. Ron was intrigued by these stories of an unknown monster tramping through the camp and was curious to learn more for himself. 

Ron Moorehead: I took the hike into camp. It's about an eight mile trek, pretty aggressive. And in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and deep into the wilderness, and it's about eighty four hundred feet, the elevation so pretty difficult to get to, but we got there, the guys are OK. 

RAY: By this point talk of Bigfoot was spreading through the camp.

Ron Moorehead: I, I seen a big track tho. I said, well, that's a big foot. So therefore it's kind of a Bigfoot.

Ron Moorehead: All the creatures had the same type of splayed footprint that people see now that I posted. This is the same prints we've been seeing for years up there. And since I've been going up there for the 50 years now studying this phenomenon.

RAY: Warren Johnson, one of the brothers who owned the camp, was quoted at the time saying "I can't describe the feeling. Suddenly we got scared all over again. Oh, we'd heard about this bigfoot thing- I guess I had read about it in a magazine several years before, but neither of us ever talked about it or were the least bit interested. But there the prints were… there was no other rational explanation.”

The encounters at the camp continued over the months and the vocalizations and large human like footprints were unlike anything the group had ever seen.

Ron Moorehead: We have a shelter up there, which we go into. It's kind of a makeshift shelter, or logs maybee got some cables that were up around a tree and put some dead fall across the top of it and put plastic over that. So we're huddled up inside this little group of trees. We'll call it the shelter. And we would stick our microphones outside or outside the shelter, generally through the dead fall logs, normally. Wait for them to come around, we a cassette recorder. That's all you had. I had a top notch one of the best you could buy at the time

Ron Moorehead: Wasn't until winter of 71 when Warren Johnson, the leader of the group he contacted Ivan Sanderson

Ivan Sanderson is a British biologist who is considered by many to be the founding father of Cryptozoology, the study of unknown animals.

 And Ivan Sanderson read the letter, that Warren wrote him, 23 page handwritten letter, and he thought it was probably a hoax somebody pulling his leg, but he sent it out to Peter Byrn who…studied Bigfoot. And so Peter's read it. He felt the same thing, but he thought it send it out to Al Berry, who was in California where we lived and Barry got it and started coming out to interview us.

RAY: Al Berry, an investigative reporter with the Record Spotlight, decided to join Ron and the others on a trip to the camp. Al was certain this was all a hoax, but was eager to find evidence and   prove it as such.

Al has since passed away, but we were able to connect with some of his colleagues at The Record Spotlight. Gilbert Moore was able to tell us about Al as a reporter:

Gilbert: I'm 83 years old. I'm a retired newspaper man, which is, of course, a line of work that is becoming less and less relevant in the modern world

Gilbert: I hired Al Berry on on on the basis of thinking he would make a good reporter because he seemed to have a very, which turned out to be absolutely true, a very dogged style.

Gilbert: Al really was a straight shooter.

Marc Beauchamp, who was 17 and worked with Al briefly, was able to add more color: 

Marc : he was a big guy who was interested in the outdoors things, he wasn't one of the.. He wasn't a flashy fellow. He didn't talk a lot or tell a whole lot of stories in the newsroom like some other guys did. He didn't hold court. He was a guy, just did his job and did it well enough that he was, uh.. Expected, or called upon to to to take on stories on deadline, like murders and the like.... And he was well-liked by the other members of the staff. 

Joe Hauser would later become friends with Al Berry and said this about his friend: 

Joe Hauser: And he basically he went up there trying to debunk the sounds. He was convinced that maybe these guys were pulling the wool over his eyes or something like that. But once he got up there and set up his equipment, he actually recorded several hours of sounds.

Al Berry himself, spoke in an interview on an episode of In Search Of from the 70s:

“It was a remote, high mountain area, and I was aware that there had been some strange goings on in this area from accounts for the people who had been there. And it was a long hike in. And I got in there in the late afternoon. I set my tape recorder up, I put my mic, taped it to a tree a little ways away from where I'd be bedding down, and then proceeded to wait along and see what develops.

Later on that evening after dark, I was tired from the hiking and I had begun to doze off when all of a sudden I was awakened by some strange sounds. It was very startling. I didn't know what to think. I had very mixed emotions on one. And I was wondering, well, could somebody possibly be out there doing it? Some human being. And on the other hand, viscerally, my knees were shaking and my insides were turning a bit. And I was wondering if maybe what I was hearing was some creature that was stranger than anything that we knew.”

Al had become totally convinced that there were Sasquatch visiting the camp, and Ron and Al were even able to capture incredible audio recordings of the vocalizations that had terrified the hunters. 

[Audio sample]

Ray: The recordings have drawn much scrutiny and are considered controversial due to the dramatic nature of what they claim to represent. 

For years Ron never actually saw what was producing the noises, it wasn’t until 1974 that he actually caught a glimpse of one of them for the first time.

Ron Moorehead: I saw one in 1974 when we were just covering the camp. And I write about this in my first book, Voices of the Wilderness

Ron Moorehead: We got in and started unpacking, and that's when I started having this encounter. And that's when I saw one that night and I started recording. I got my little recorder saddlebag and I get home a big one at a time and. The cassette recorder and started recording my interaction with them and a couple of woodknocks we say it is woodknocks, I've never seen one knock on a tree, but here there's knocks and they're rhythmic. We were recorded were ryhtmic

[Play sounds of Ron’s woodknock recordings]

 and we also hear them pop rocks together the same way. And then you hear whooping. Different types of whoops will go around and that's how they interact with each other before they start jabbering their chatter. And they do chatter very rapidly when they get into chattering.

Ron Moorehead: That night I saw one, like I said, made a big samurai cry behind me, you know, crossed so fast. I can't tell you the details of this very big, very smooth run through the woods like that. I don't know. 

Jeff Meldrum: of all of the recorded sounds or vocalizations attributed to Sasquatch, I think the Sierra sounds, they are to to sound recording what the Patterson Gimlin film is to is to photograph. They are just kind of head and shoulders up there. Now, there remains questions about it. And of course, if you don't if you don't aren't open to the possibility of the existence of Sasquatch, you'll focus on all of the other potential explanations and and hoax conspiracy theories.

Jeff Meldrum: whatever it is, is is producing very loud, high volume vocalizations. There are there's, you know, growls and grunts and chatter. Some of the most interesting have been referred to as samurai chatter because they sound like that very very guttural Japanese utterances that that, you know, you hear on some of the World War two, my mean samurai movies and so forth. And but one of the one that caught my attention more than anything was the whistle. Yeah. There's a point where the witnesses are. They whistle trying to call them in. And there's a response. You can clearly hear the human, the kind of muffled sort of whistle and whistling between their teeth, which I cannot do. But the response comes back loud and clear. But it's different. It sounds like it has a harmonic like there's an an overtone to it now that's been described.

[Sample of the whistle interactions]

 I know there is one paper that's been published. It's published in the proceedings of a conference that was held up at University of British Columbia. And it to authors Kollin and Hertel. They're not linguists or biostatisticians or but they have skills in sound analysis. And they do point out that it is possible to generate that kind of harmonic if the microphone is saturated. In other words, that the sound is so intense and so close to the microphone that it can create this apparent harmonic. Or the other explanation is that it represents a much shorter vocal tract than the other very loud vocalizations, suggesting that they're creating this sound by also employing their their pharynx. So they're not whistling through their teeth or through their lips, but they're whistling back in the back of their throat, which is really quite interesting. I mean, it, you know, like a bird would sing with its syrinx, it's called in and it there are some examples of human humans capable of creating an undertone. The throat singers of Juv and the Eskimos have a way of singing where they create this. 

Jeff Meldrum: that was fascinating to me because that actually suggests the potential for some, you know, some extra laryngeal air sacs and in the Sasquatch, which wouldn't be unexpected at all because they're present in the other three groups of great apes. You're seeing chimps and gorillas to the greatest extent in the orangutan, to the least in the chimp. And so in humans, they're very rare, but they do pop up every once in a while.

Jeff Meldrum: one of the other hesitancies I have about the whole thing is the footprints. I mean, my yeah. My litmus test is the footprint…It measures of 20 inches long. I think most of them were came in. That state has been 18 inches. But the thing about it that causes concern is, is the sole the foot looks extremely triangular with a heel that's fairly narrow and five toes displayed, almost like those notorious Easter eight inches and across the square across the end of the foot. So squarely that I can't tell you if it's a right or left foot. Interesting. And Ron has graciously shared photos of other footprints. There was a photo in his in his book Voices in the Wilderness, which also was cause for concern because. It it doesn't look like a spontaneous footprint. It has a little ridge of pine needle duff all the way around it like it was shaped, you know, and I'm not pointing fingers at anyone or passing judgment. I'm just saying that it makes me uneasy that there's not a a compelling corroboration by very credible looking footprints associated with this event.

Ron Moorehead: I asked Dr. Meldrum, Jeff Meldrum, who is a footprint expert, and he wanted to see him, but I see no upside to that because he based everything on the Peterson track, which I don't think compares at all. He shows them the midtarsel break in those and ours didn't seem to have that. But again, we don’t have the same turf, decomposed granite or pine needles all over the place. I just didn't didn't let him look at them, didn't give them to him. He could see pictures of them, but I'm afraid he would use a classical science to try to judge them and thinking they have to compare the Paterson tracks, so they're not real. And we knew they were real. Whatever was up there was real. And nobody's pulling it out his leg. And how can anybody be after year after year after year, showing the same type of footprints? And they're different sizes because we are different size creatures.

Jeff Meldrum: Ron is a very, very mild mannered man. He he comes off very credible, very believable. He has some different ideas about Sasquatch and its nature than I do.

Ron Moorehead: These things are more than that, a lot more. And they started doing some things up there that we could not put the finger on, you could not figure out how they did it and what was going on. Lights and sounds and things. It just had no classical answer in classical science anyway. Al Berry having a masters degree in science said don't tell people about this stuff it says or they won't ask you to speak anywhere because we didn't talk about that for quite a while. But I do now because I think I found the science that might might help people understand more about what these things could be. That's quantum science.

Jeff Meldrum: I think he's strayed a little into the weeds on his notion of quantum the application of quantum physics to the macro world. Yeah, but and how that would relate to the Sasquatch phenomenon. But, you know, I've had no reason to doubt him is his credibility. And it's always been a little an uncomfortable tension. My hesitancy to accept on face the footprint evidence and then the potential implications of what that would mean if they're not incredibly exciting. And so and so we you know, we I'm I'm usually pretty good at maintaining good personal relationships with individuals, even in the face of of differences of personal opinion. But, you know, I've had no reason to doubt him is his credibility.

Ray: Ron and Al reached out to an established organization to listen to their tapes to provide a professional opinion on what may have caused them. Fauna Communications Research Organization, which studies endangered animal communication, needed someone to visit the site of the recordings and provide a report on the surrounding area prior to them commenting. 

Joe Hauser was the one who submitted the report to the group.

Joe Hauser: after spending three days up there, my conclusion was based on the remoteness of the area and no evidence of faking it. I didn't feel that the films were faked. I felt they were actually real. And also, based on what I had heard in the Sierras, I felt that they were probably on the right track.

Ray: Al Berry even had the tapes analyzed by the acoustic laboratory Syntonic Research Inc, the same company who studied the Nixon Tapes. 

Ron Moorehead: He went to them and asked them if they could look into what they looked and said, the sounds are spontaneous. So they were taking at the time of recording studio. They were too powerful to a human made. And that was I.E. Tibo, t president of Syntonic Laboratory.

Ray: Dr. Lynn Kirlin, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with an interest in electronic speech analysis, conducted a year long study on the recordings. 

Kirlin: From what we could determine, there were no evidences of rerecording at slower speeds, definitely features in those sounds that were correlated to an extremely large human male measurement that you would expect seven to seven and a half feet tall. 

Ray: The tapes were also analyzed by Nancy Logan, a human speech expert, who stated: 

“I believe that some of the primitive communication is going on in the form of primitive language. The first time I listened to the tapes, I thought it was linguistically a little more sophisticated than I do now. After listening to them again, I think that the creatures are a little more animal sounding, but I still think it is a language. I challenge anyone to make those exact same noises with the exact same pronunciation at that speed.”

Nancy wasn’t the only person to think the vocalizations on the tapes represented a language. In 2008, Ron received a unexpected phone call from Scott Nelson, who had stumbled upon the Sierra Sound recordings and was stunned when he too recognized elements of language on the tapes

Scott Nelson: I'm a 20 year veteran of the U.S. Navy. As a linguist in an interpreter of Russian, Spanish and Persian, 

Scott Nelson: . And you know, what we were trying to do is to listen into communications. You know, whatever our target languages were. But also to be able to identify languages that were not, you know, our target language,

Scott Nelson: I know. Maybe probably two guys, uh, that have listened to more human voice on tape than I

Scott Nelson: ...and then when I got out of the Navy, I started teaching and that's what I did for 20 years in those languages. 

Scott Nelson: my son Steven had the day off from school, but we did not. So he came to school with me and that's school. We're sitting in my classroom and he had a project to write a paper on, something of his interest. So I called 12 year old boys right there. Well, I want to on Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster or UFOs to take your pick. OK, so you said Bigfoot. So we started Googling Bigfoot.

Scott Nelson: So we were finding stuff, and he says that. What do you think bigfoots sound like?… Well, let's Google it. So I Google I literally Googled Bigfoot sounds, and that's when I came on up on Ron Moorehead. And the his tape recordings, him and Al Bery's tape recordings.

Scott Nelson: I think. I walked out of there with my son that day at school and I walked out and I was kind of in shock, and my son Stevie was like "dad what's wrong with you?", you know, so but almost immediately there were three things.

Scott Nelson: and that was... I was hearing a language Number one. And number two, it was not a human being. You know, yeah, and number three, it was not fake

Scott Nelson: And by the way, there's actually areas on the different parts of the tapes where we think they're referring to each other by name. Yeah, but in the first part of the big male. Almost seems to be telling a joke about the humans. And you can almost imagine him saying, oh, look at these little hairless apes, you know how we could kill them in a moment if we wanted to. And then he almost sounds like he actually laughs at his own joke.

[Sample that could represent language]

Scott Nelson: So that's part of the characteristics of language. You know, the expression of emotion. Yeah. You know, that all goes into, you know, the overall analysis of it.

Ray: Scott has become an advocate for the authenticity of the recordings, and is actually working on a project to transcribe what he hears on the tapes. He has yet to release his findings.

The encounters slowed down dramatically after 1974 when Ron and the group had to shoot a bear that would not back down in their camp. Odd things still happen to this day, but the dramatic vocalizations have nearly come to an end. Perhaps “they” were watching, and this act upset them… But then again, why would shooting deer not have had a similar effect? There is much about this story that may remain a mystery forever, but perhaps we aren’t meant to understand it...

Scott Nelson : I think that they have abilities that are way beyond us, especially out in the woods. I think I think the forest, you know, is their machine, you know, people claim that, oh, they don't have culture, they don't have technology. I say bullshit. The forest is their machine. And somehow they want to use it, in my mind to protect themselves, you know, and the number one thing that protects them is elusiveness from us.

Ray: While Ron won’t disclose the exact location of the hunting camp for those curious to have their own experiences, we did ask him if he has any advice for those looking to have their own encounter. He recommends going out to the woods and camping in areas where Sasquatch are commonly sighted:

Ron Moorehead: Go there and set up camp and don't change things around, just be still, and don't jump up and down when they start hearing something like a big crack and or big whoop or knock or something like this, just be still. That's why I think we got to see the that night in 74. Because we knew from our experiences in years past with these things that just be still. And just keep doing what you're doing. They don't think they got your attention and you're not going to jump up and down the shine a flashlight in the woods, that's the worst thing you can do. they don't think they got your attention. They'll keep getting closer and doing more, and that's what was happening with us that night.

Ron Moorehead: And don't try to trick them because they'll see right through that. We tried to trick them- so many people ask why didn't you get a picture? Well, you had so many experiences up there how come you didn't get a picture. It's not like you're trying to trick a bear or a mountain lion or something like that. They got a consciousness about them, an intuitiveness about us. And we don't we don't we didn't understand then. I do now. 

Joe Hauser: But most of the sightings that you are, most people that are having experiences and have experiences over the years are just kind of like at the Sierra camp are hunters out hunting, people camping, people down by the river, playing with their kids, having a good time. Their purpose is not out there to look for Sasquatch. And so I tell people go out in the woods or research areas through the BFRO, find an area where there's a lot of activity and go out in the woods and set up a camp and stay there and keep going back. And as you go back, if they're there, they get used to you. And my experience is eventually they will make some sort of contact with you.

Ray: The question remains, are the recordings real? 

Jeff Meldrum: Oh, I definitely think it could be, yes. I mean, I'm I, I. You know, I don't I wouldn't say I wouldn't use the word believe, but based on the evidence, I think the possibility is very real. And and it's very it's very probable that it represents I mean, given the the scrutiny that has been directed to it by comparison to some other recordings out there of supposedly Sasquatch talking or communicating, they are much more naturalistic sounding, much more what I would expect for a large primate than someone trying to, you know, concoct an artificial, you know, sham. But I you know. I'm not 100 percent put it that way,

Jeff Meldrum: I have perhaps a bit more reservation and that may stem in part, in part because of my lack of expertize on the vocalization.

Joe Hauser: People who are who are questioning the Sarah Sounds based on my research being at the Sierra camp and knowing Al Berry and Ron Moorhead for years, I know that this is an honest representation of what they recorded up there and the experiences they were having and based on the remoteness of the place and the time and technology at that time. I don't think there's any way that they could have been faked

Ron Moorehead: Well, I have experienced crazy things and 

Ron Moorehead: we're not the we're not top of the food chain as far as I'm concerned here.

[Sample of Sierra sounds

[END]

Source: https://www.strange-phenomenon.com/sierra-sounds-transcript

When experienced amateur pilot Ron Scott set out from Picton Airport in a Cessna 172 in the summer of 1975, there was no reason to suspect trouble.

The sky was clear. The wind was calm. It was perfect weather for a short pleasure flight over the shores of Prince Edward County. But as his plane made its way over Prince Edward Point, the peninsula at the county’s southeastern tip, something “unnerving” began to happen. Without any sign of turbulence, the plane banked sharply to one side and locked itself in that position.

“It was as if an invisible giant took hold of the wing,” says Scott. “I could not straighten it out.”

Without the ability to counter, Scott feared his plane would flip over entirely and fall into a spin, which at 1,000 feet would have been tough to pull out of. His plane began to right itself after about 10 seconds. Then the same thing happened with the other wing. Somehow, despite all the midair chaos, Scott was able to make it down safely, though he was understandably rattled.

“It shakes you up a bit. Like ‘what just happened?’” Scott, 46 years later, still wonders.

He has flown in just about every kind of weather imaginable, but he has no explanation for what occurred that day.

“It was just totally weird,” says Scott. “I’ve experienced nothing like that ever before or since. And I’ve never heard of anything like that … There are strange things out there.”

His story is hardly an isolated tale.

At nearly the same spot, in 1952, Royal Canadian Air Force pilot Barry Allen Newman plummeted from 20,000 feet into the lake in a P-51 fighter. His body was never recovered.

These days, Prince Edward County is best-known to visitors for its sandy beaches and up-and-coming wineries. But there is a much darker side to the region that few sightseers ever learn about.

Dubbed the Marysburgh Vortex, or alternatively “The Graveyard of Lake Ontario,” the small stretch of water off the shores of Prince Edward County has for centuries played host to shipwrecks, airplane mishaps, strange sightings and mysterious disappearances.

Global News has identified at least 270, and as many as 500, ships that met their watery end in this part of the lake. And at least 40 planes have met a similar grisly fate in and around these shores — a far higher concentration of shipwrecks and plane crashes than can be found in the famous Bermuda Triangle in the North Atlantic Ocean.

On May 28, 1889, the schooner Bavaria entered the final stretch of its journey hauling timber from Toledo, Ohio, to Garden Island, near Kingston, Ont.

The vessel was part of a trio of ships under tow by a steam barge. No sooner did the boats round the edge of Prince Edward County than they were caught in what Capt. Anthony Malone of the barge described in the papers as “a living gale.”

Unable to withstand the force of the heavy winds and mountainous seas, the tow line snapped, sending the Bavaria careening into one of the other schooners. Fearing the worst, Malone circled his ship back to the Bavaria to offer assistance. But there was no one there to assist. The Bavaria appeared to still be in working condition, but the entire crew, including Capt. John Marshall, was missing.

Even more mysterious was when the ship ran aground at a nearby island, it was found to be entirely undamaged, save for a missing lifeboat.

“Everything in the cabin is dry. Even a pan of bread, set in the oven to bake, is still there,” wrote Kingston’s the Daily British Whig.

The Oswego Daily Palladium noted that Capt. Marshall was “a good man, and one not likely to act rashly or without thought.”

What possessed a captain and his crew to jump ship in the middle of a terrible storm? Since Bavaria was carrying timber, it was never at risk of sinking. If the crew had simply stayed on board, investigators concluded, everyone would have been safe.

In total, eight men and women disappeared that day, and their bodies were never recovered. It was as if they had fallen through a crack in the lake, to borrow a common phrase in Great Lakes shipping lore.

Gateway to oblivion

The tragic fate of Bavaria’s crew is one of dozens of mysterious tales from the eastern shores of Lake Ontario that are documented in Hugh F. Cochrane’s 1980 book Gateway to Oblivion.

“The locals were aware of the strange stories that came out of this area,” says Picton-based storyteller and author Janet Kellough.

But it was Cochrane who came up with the name: the Marysburgh Vortex.

The Vortex is generally thought to encompass the eastern part of Lake Ontario, bounded by Prince Edward County on the west, Kingston to the east, and Oswego, N.Y. to the south.

The mysterious region includes, and gets its name from, the southern portion of Prince Edward County, historically known as Marysburgh Township.

“That name took on a life of its own,” says Kellough. “It became a code for anything that didn’t quite go right in your life. Like: ‘I’m late for work, sorry, I got lost in the Vortex.’ Or, ‘I mailed you the cheque. I don’t know what happened. It must have been stolen by the Vortex.’”

Kellough, a seventh-generation Prince Edward County native, has become somewhat of an unofficial chronicler of the legend.

“I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but every time anybody wants to talk about the Marysburgh Vortex they eventually end up coming to me,” she says.

Kellough admits she hasn’t spoken about the Vortex in a long time. Interest in the story has waned in recent years, as the county has become increasingly dominated by a tourism industry that seems largely uninterested in local history.

“I’ve spent my whole life collecting the history and the folklore and the stories and the legends of this place. And now I know why I was doing it. Because if somebody hadn’t done it, they were going to disappear.”

How many ships has the Vortex claimed?

While public interest in Lake Ontario’s maritime legends and lore may be fading, our knowledge of Great Lakes shipwrecks has never been more complete.

Discovering a wrecked ship may conjure up images of divers scouring the water with advanced sonar. But the reality is, the majority of new wrecks are now identified by internet sleuths poring over digitized newspaper archives and vessel registries.

The David Swayze Great Lakes shipwreck file, with additions from maritime historian Brendon Baillod, lists the details and general whereabouts of nearly 5,000 documented shipwrecks across the Great Lakes, though Baillod believes the true number may be as high as 8,000.

A Global News analysis of this database reveals that nearly half of Lake Ontario’s shipwrecks occurred in the eastern section commonly associated with the Marysburgh Vortex, a region that accounts for less than a quarter of the lake’s surface area.

In total, the database lists 270 shipwrecks within the Marysburgh Vortex, although this is almost certainly an undercount, given that the database is incomplete. If Baillod’s estimates are correct, the true number may be closer to 500 wrecks.

Charles Berlitz, scion of the Berlitz Language School empire, is credited with popularizing the legend. His 1974 best-seller The Bermuda Triangle sold nearly 20-million copies worldwide, and transformed the once-obscure bit of nautical lore into a household name, spawning an army of imitators in the process.

The Bass Strait Triangle in Australia, the Broad Haven Triangle in Wales and the Bennington Triangle in Vermont are just a few examples of the triangle boom of the 1970s and ‘80s.

Even the term “Bermuda Triangle” has become synonymous with the unexplained, and finds itself attached to places nowhere near Bermuda. There is the Alaskan Bermuda Triangle, the Mexican Bermuda Triangle, the Romanian Bermuda Triangle, the African Bermuda Triangle — even the Bermuda Triangle of Space.

It’s possible to view Cochrane’s Marysburgh Vortex as an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Bermuda Triangle by transposing it onto a Canadian locale.

It would be hard to believe that Cochrane was not influenced by the Bermuda Triangle legend. Both stories document a pattern of disappearing ships and planes over a roughly triangular body of water. Even the cover of Gateway to Oblivion is a mirror image of Berlitz’ original.

Still, many of the shipwreck stories featured in Gateway to Oblivion have been part of local lore, long before the Bermuda Triangle ever existed as a concept. And Cochrane writes with the breathless cadence of a true believer, blending densely packed historical anecdotes with an elaborate set of pseudoscientific explanations that are hard to pin down.

Cochrane himself, who, according to an acquaintance, passed away in 1999, is an elusive figure. Attempts to track down additional biographical details have been futile. Perhaps, as one Facebook commenter suggested, “the Vortex got him.”

Regardless of what became of the man, the legend of the Marysburgh Vortex lives on in the hearts and minds of Prince Edward County residents like Janet Kellough.

“There’s something very special about that area, and I think anybody who’s spent any time close to it feels that.”

Whether or not the Vortex is the result of supernatural forces is of less importance to Kellough. There are many mysterious places on this planet. But the history, geography, culture and experiences that inform this legend are actually quite familiar. They are the texture that makes life in this small corner of southern Ontario unique.

“It’s an absolutely wonderful story. And we have too few wonderful stories in this world.”