THE “HYDE PARK HILL” INCIDENT
On the third Sunday in April, the crowds of men and women listening to the open-air orators giving their pitch at Marble Arch, suddenly saw passing overhead the shadow of an invisible obstacle mysteriously interposed between the Earth and the sun. A few seconds later, from the park railings to a point some three or four hundred yards inside the park, there occurred an abrupt upheaval of the ground. Trees were uprooted and pedestrians tumbled over and were buried, while those who were on the edge of the disturbed area were dumfounded to observe that a great funnel at least three hundred feet deep had been scooped out, the soil from which had been thrown up to form a hill of corresponding height.
A policeman, giving evidence next day at the inquest on victims, said, “It all happened just as if a giant had been wielding a spade in the park. Yes, it was just like someone using a spade, because the outer edge of the cavity was trim and smooth, while the edge on the side where the hill came consisted of crumbling loose soil, with half-cut heads and bodies protruding from it.”
Over three hundred citizens walking in the park had been buried alive. Some who had only been covered with a light layer of earth managed to extricate themselves with difficulty. Some, too, suddenly lost their senses and rushed down the steep slope of the new hill, uttering dreadful shrieks. On the summit of the mound there appeared the upright figure of a Salvation Army preacher, Colonel R. W. Ward, who, with astonishing presence of mind, still shaking the dirt from his hair and clothing, began to bellow: “I told you so, brothers! You have sacrificed to false gods, and now the Lord God is angered with his people, and the hand of the Lord God has fallen heavy upon us....”
And indeed this inexplicable event bore such a likeness to certain divine punishments as described in Holy Writ that skeptics among the bystanders were instantly converted, and began lives of practicing religion to which they have from that moment been steadfast.
The episode enabled people to appreciate the virtues of the Metropolitan Police. Three members of the force were among the victims, but a dozen others, arriving instantly on the scene, set to work at digging with great courage. Telephone messages were sent out at once to the military authorities and fire stations, and General Clarkwell, the Commissioner of Police, took command of the rescue forces, and within four hours Hyde Park had resumed its normal appearance. Unfortunately, the dead numbered two hundred.
Scientists gave the most varied explanations of the disaster. The theory of an earthquake, the only reasonable one if the supernatural were ruled out, did not seem plausible, for no shock had been recorded by any seismograph. The public was fairly well satisfied when the experts informed them that it had been an earthquake, but an earthquake of a very special sort which they had labeled a “vertical-montiform seismic variant.”
THE HOUSE IN THE AVENUE VICTOR HUGO
The Hyde Park incident was followed by a considerable number of similar occurrences, which attracted much less public attention because they caused no human fatalities. But at different points these strange mounds were seen taking shape with die same swiftness, each of them bordered by a precipice with sheer, clean-cut fall. In certain places these hills are still in existence: as for instance the one in the plain of Ayen in Périgord, that of Roznov in Wallachia, and that of Itapura in Brazil.
But the mysterious spade which was thus apparently wielded on bare land was now, alas, to attack human erections.
About midday on April 24, a strange noise, compared by some who heard it to that of a whizzing blade, by others to that of an extremely fine and powerful water jet, astonished the passersby in the region of Paris bounded approximately by the Arc de Triomphe, the Avenue de la Grande Armée, the Avenue Marceau, and the Avenue Henri Martin.
People happening to be opposite the building known as 66 Avenue Victor Hugo saw an enormous oblique cleft appear across it; the house was shaken by two or three tremors, and suddenly the whole of the top story, occupied by the servants’ rooms, seemed to crumble away as if under powerful pressure. The frenzied inhabitants appeared at the windows and on the balconies. Fortunately, although the building was literally cut in two, it did not collapse. Halfway up the staircase the rescuers came upon the fissure produced by the invisible instrument. It looked exactly as if a blade had cut through the wood of the steps, the carpet, the metal balustrade, following a line at right angles to these. Everything in its path—furniture, carpets, pictures, books—had been cut in two with a clean stroke, very neatly. By a miracle nobody was injured. A girl sleeping on the third floor found her bed sliced obliquely across; but the cut had just missed her. She had felt no pain, but did experience a shock like that of a weak electric battery.
In this case, too, there were numerous explanations. The word “seismic” was again produced. Certain newspapers accused the architect and proprietor of the building of having used faulty materials in its construction. A Communist deputy raised the question in the Chamber.
THE TRANSPORTATION PHENOMENA
Like the Hyde Park occurrence, the accident in the Avenue Victor Hugo was followed by several almost identical in kind, which we shall not recount, but which ought, as we now see, to have convinced observant minds of a hidden will engaged in the furtherance of a definite plan. In numerous countries, houses, great and small, were sundered by an invisible force. Several farmhouses, one in Massachusetts, another in Denmark, another in Spain, were raised into the air and dropped back onto the ground, smashed to pieces with their inhabitants. The French Building in New York was cut in two. About fifty men and women met their deaths in these occurrences, but as they took place in very different countries, each isolated case being responsible only for a few victims, and also as nobody could provide an explanation, very little was said about them.
It was different with the subsequent series of happenings which kept the whole planet in a ferment of excitement throughout May and June, 1954. The first victim was a young Negress of Hartford, Connecticut, who was leaving her employers’ house one morning when a postman, the sole witness of the accident, saw her suddenly soar into the air, uttering terrible cries. She rose to a height of three hundred feet and then crashed to the ground. The postman declared that he had seen no aerial apparatus of any sort overhead.
The second case of “transportation” was that of a customs official at Calais, who was also seen rising vertically and disappearing at high speed toward the English coast. A few minutes later he was found on the Dover cliffs, dead, but with no visible injuries. He looked as if he had been laid gently down on the ground; he was blue, like a man hanged.
Then began the period of the so-called “successful transportations.” The first victim to arrive living at the end of his journey was an aged beggar, who was seized by an invisible hand when he was begging for alms in front of Notre Dame, and ten minutes later was deposited in the middle of Piccadilly Circus at the feet of a stupefied policeman. He had not suffered at all, and had the impression of having been conveyed in a closed cabin to which neither wind nor light could penetrate. Eyewitnesses of his departure had observed that he became invisible immediately after he was raised from the ground.
For several weeks longer these “transportations” continued. Once they were known to be quite harmless, they were regarded as rather comical. The choice of the invisible hand seemed to be completely whimsical. Once it was a little girl of Denver, Colorado, who found herself set down in a Russian steppe; another time a Saragossa dentist turned up in Stockholm. The “transportation” which caused most talk was that of the venerable President of the French Senate, M. Paul Reynaud, who was picked up in the Luxembourg Gardens and deposited on the shore of Lake Ontario. He took the opportunity of making a journey through Canada, was triumphantly welcomed back at the Bois de Boulogne station, and this unsought publicity was probably largely responsible for his election as President of the Republic, in 1956.