A UFO Sighting in Malden: Reality, Daimons and Hoaxes

Did a UFO land outside Boston earlier this month?

According to MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network), a Malden resident reported seeing something strange the evening of December 10 in the skies over either Malden or Revere. (The two towns are adjacent so I understand how it could be hard to tell where it was.)

The witness was out walking around 11:00 pm when he saw something unusual flying above him. The object was described simply as "an odd light" which hovered and then landed on the ground. After it landed the witness saw a red light shining through the trees but was unable to make his way to it.

It was dark and too far away to see it, but I swore I saw a red light on the ground. So I tried to get closer to it, but the only way was through a forest and it could have been miles away. I was unarmed and had no flashlight so I did not proceed, but I am in the morning. Waited to see if it would go back up for a few minutes. It didn’t and I went home.

I have a lot of friends who live in Malden and have been there innumerable times, so I definitely find this story interesting. The town is densely settled but also has a lot of forested land. In particular I'm thinking of the the Middlesex Fells, a 2,500 acre park that is partially located in Malden. It has lots of rocky hills, woods, lakes and even some open fields that might be large enough for a UFO to land in. It's also a great place to hike!

A photo from Woonsocket, Rhode Island taken in 1967. Real or fake? From this great site.

I have two initial and immediate reactions whenever someone claims to have seen a UFO.

First, I ask myself, "Did they really see something mundane and mistakenly think it was some kind of weird flying craft?" Maybe it was a plane, or a meteor, or a satellite. The MUFON website itself notes: "Please remember that most UFO sightings can be explained as something natural or man-made." The witness in this case claims that it was definitely not an airplane or helicopter. They are familiar with those because a relative was in the Air Force. Interestingly, when the witness tried to take a photo with their iPhone it immediately lost all power. Hmmm. I don't think your standard 747 makes phones shut down...

Second, I ask myself, "Is this person playing a hoax?", which might be the case here. I'm not sure what an anonymous hoaxer gains by posting something to an online UFO site, but there are plenty of hoaxes online. The details in this report are a little hazy which does make me a little suspicious. For example, where was the witness when they saw the UFO? How could they see the light on the ground if it was miles away and in the woods?

After I have those two immediate reactions I will sometimes think about this passage in Patrick Harpur's 1994 book Daimonic Reality:

Charges of fakery, lies and hoaxing are leveled at all paranormal phenomena. ... It is nowhere more true than in UFOlogy, where debates run for decades about whether "contactees" really contacted aliens or whether they were lying. I suspect that, reality being what it is, the they themselves don't know half the time. In other words, I prefer to see hoaxing as a daimonic quality inherent in, and continuous with, anomalous events - which are neither "genuine" nor "fake" but, in a deeper sense, both. 

Oooooh! That's a philosophically shifty paragraph if there ever was one. I tend to think of things as being either real or fake. Were there really weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Do vaccines really cause autism? Is the Earth really round? We should be able to determine what's true or false.

The key word in Harpur's argument is "daimonic," which refers to the daimones, minor spirits in ancient Greek mythology who filled the world. The singular form is daimon, which the English word "demon" is derived from. The daimons weren't necessarily evil, though. Some were good, some were bad, and a lot them were just tricky. They could bring dreams to people who were sleeping, or visions to those who were awake.


Harpur claims that although we think of these daimons as purely mythological (if we think of them at all), they are still here, but rather than flying around in the material world they are now lurking in our psyche waiting to play tricks. He quotes Jung to support his argument:

There are no conclusive arguments against the hypothesis that these archetypal figures are endowed with personality at the outset and are not just secondary personalizations. In so far as the archetypes do not represent mere functional relationships, they manifest themselves as DAIMONES, as personal agencies. In this form they are felt as actual experiences and are not "figments of the imagination", as rationalists would have us believe.

Harpur further claims that these daimons want our attention, but since we ignore them they tend to show up as weird anomalous phenomena like Bigfoot, ghosts, spectral animals, and of course UFOs.

Sometimes they show up on their own, but sometimes the daimons will unconsciously urge people to imitate them or pretend they have seen them. They get humans to do their work for them. So that guy who dresses up like Bigfoot to tromp around the woods may have been inspired to do it by the daimons. That UFO hoaxer who posts a fake sighting online might have been inspired by these tricky spirits as well. A good hoax serves the daimons' purpose: to remind us that not everything is rational and that weird things still lurk out there in the darkness.

You may not buy Harpur's theory, but I find it interesting. It's exciting to think that strange entities are still out there in the world, either hiding in our psyches or in the woods in a Massachusetts town with two subway stations.

PS - It seems like there are a lot of UFO sightings in New England during the winter. Does anyone know if that is true? Is it just because it gets darker so much earlier? Please share your thoughts on this subject if you have any. 

Ephraim Gray, the Immortal Man of Malden

Tony and I have a lot of friends who were either born in Malden, Massachusetts or live there now. On Friday we saw three friends - one was born in Malden and two live there now. On Saturday, we met a group of people out at a bar, and there were at least five Maldonians there.

Malden plays a significant role in my life, but oddly I don't believe I've ever shared any Malden lore on this blog. To rectify this, here's the story of Ephraim Gray, the immortal man of Malden.

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Ephraim Gray was a reclusive man who lived in Malden in the 19th century. He lived in the center of town in a big house, which he seldom left. Whenever his neighbors did see Ephraim he never looked them in the eye, and just grunted when spoken too. Ephraim didn't have any family, and lived only with a single manservant. The manservant would handle all the complex interactions with the outside world, like shopping and paying the bills.

Ephraim lived quietly for many years, until one day his neighbors noticed foul odors emanating from his house. Occasionally they would see the manservant open the windows to let out plumes of noxious, chemical-scented smoke. A modern person would suspect that Ephraim was cooking meth, but Ephraim's neighbors just chalked the fumes up as another one of his eccentricities.

The strange odors went on for many years as well, until one morning in 1850 Ephraim's manservant appeared at the police station. Ephraim Gray was dead.

The servant explained that for many years Ephraim had been trying to create an elixir that would grant him immortality. Unfortunately, even though he had quaffed many test brews, Ephraim had lost his race against time and died before he perfected the formula.

However, the servant also explained that he believed Ephraim's experiments would preserve his employer's body perfectly. Ephraim Gray was therefore to be buried immediately with no embalming or other mortuary preparations. The servant was quite firm on these conditions because he would only inherit Ephraim's estate if they were fulfilled.

Ephraim Gray was buried in a small crypt in a cemetery in the center of town. The servant lived in Ephraim's home for a few years before he too passed away. But the stories about Ephraim's quest for immortality lived on, and in 1870 reached the ears of two Harvard medical students. The students were curious to see if the rumors were true, and traveled out to Malden one dark night and broke into the crypt.

Olde Time Malden!

When the students pried the lid off Ephraim Gray's coffin they were amazed to see that his body was perfectly preserved. Ephraim Gray had not decayed at all in the last twenty years! Their curiosity satisfied, they resealed the coffin and returned to Cambridge.

Well, at least that's what they told people. In 1900 the cemetery needed to be relocated to make room for a new road, and all the bodies were moved to a new location. But when the workmen came to move Ephraim's body, they were surprised to see that his coffin was empty. No trace of his body could be found and it has never been located to this day.

Hard-headed skeptics claimed that the Harvard students had stolen the body to dissect, but other people in Malden whispered that perhaps Ephraim's immortality formula had really worked. Maybe it had just taken decades for it to kick in, and that he had finally awoken from his dormant state. Since he was a loner, he probably just walked out of the graveyard without saying a word.

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I have a few thoughts on this story. It appears in quite a few books, including Joseph Citro's Passing Strange and Weird New England, and Ceri Revai's Haunted Massachusetts.  Joseph Citro also mentions that Edward Rowe Snowe wrote about Ephraim Gray in the middle of the twentieth century. I can't find any record of the story that is older than that, but if someone knows where it originated please let me know.

I searched through Births, Marriages and Deaths of Malden, Massachusetts, 1649 - 1850 which is on Google books. There were records for a few people named Gray in it, but nothing for an Ephraim Gray. Maybe he was born someplace outside of Malden, which could explain why his birth is not listed. Maybe his death is not listed because he never really died!

Last week I wrote about Harvard students raising the Devil. This week it's Harvard students robbing graves. What will those kids get up to next?

Snake Mania for Spring

A garter snake on top of our hedge this past September. The garter snake is the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' official reptile, and serves an important function in the eco-system.

On the night of March 17 I had a very vivid dream. I was walking up the path to our house, and noticed three big garter snakes emerging from the dirt in our yard. This dream made me very happy.

The next day I realized I had dreamed about the snakes on St. Patrick's Day. According to legend, Patrick drove all the serpents out of Ireland. I guess he sent them some to New England, because in addition to the dream snakes I saw my first physical garter snake today in the park. He was very cute! It's been unseasonably warm, so I think he woke up early this year.

I've posted about snake lore a few times in the past, but there's just so much of it. Our cultural ancestor in New England were fascinated by snakes, and obviously feared them and also respected their natural (and supernatural?) power. Here are a few serpentine tidbits to start your spring right:

• New England used to be home to many, many rattlesnakes. I was going to say "infested with rattlesnakes", but that sounds too harsh. In the Boston area, Charlestown was notorious for having a lot of rattlers. For example, in 1630 Governor Winthrop decided to move the colony's capitol from Charlestown to the Shawmut peninsula (now Boston) because it was free from "the three great annoyances of wolves, rattlesnakes and mosquitoes." (We lived in Charlestown in the 1990s in a house with old window screens - the mosquitoes were still there.) John Josselyn reported seeing a rattle snake as thick as a man's leg eat a live chicken outside a tavern in 1674, but this may be an exaggeration.
• By the 1820s, the rattlesnakes had moved to Malden, where a man named John Elisha claimed he could tame them through magical means.
• Some African slaves believed rattlesnake buttons, or pieces of the rattle, could ward off tuberculosis. A slave in Suffield, Connecticut named Titus Kent wore four rattlesnake buttons over his lungs for this purpose. "These he considered a sovereign remedy for consumption, and of course valued them highly, as more of his best friends had died of that dreaded disease." Titus lived a long life, and didn't die of consumption.
  
• There is a reputed connection between snakes and the weather. Nineteenth century Yankee farmers said if you hang up a dead snake, it will rain. If you bury it, the weather will be fair. The Penobscot of northern New England thought that the thunder spirits, who were seen as either giant birds or superhuman warriors, waged a perpetual battle against turtles and snakes, their ancient enemies.
• The Penobscot also advised against telling legends in the summer. The reason? If a snake overheard and was offended by the story, it would bite the story-teller.

On that note, I'll stop telling stories about snakes. Snakes deserve our love and respect, so please don't kill them!

My sources for all this snake mania were Thomas Palmer's fantastic Landscape with Reptile, the Dublin Seminar's Wonders of the Invisible World, 1600- 1900, Johnson's What They Say in New England, and Frank Speck's article "Penobscot Tales and Religious Beliefs."