AgProv
Doctor of Disorientation Studies, UnseenUniversity
- Joined
- Apr 6, 2014
- Messages
- 1,340
- Location
- too North to be Midlands, too south to be North
Another read plucked from the pile at random.
Hoia-Baciu.
The author notes that the first researcher who devoted academic time to this region, a Professor Sift, died and his research papers "went missing". ("much of this material was lost following Sift's death"). Sift died in 1993, which was a time of some upheaval in Romania following the death of the dictator?
Also... you wonder how he got the go-ahead from the regime to do this research in the first place, which seems an unlikely topic of relevance and interest to a centralised Communist state. How did Sift get approval for this? What else might he have been doing in Hoia-Baciu, and would this explain why his research papers vanished on his death? This is just speculation and unformed thought, but he was a professor of biology and we're looking at an area where plant life has perhaps mutated and been somewhat "warped", a region where people went missing, and which earned a sinister reputation. (Again - no hard evidence. This is thinking aloud). Some trees are riddled with "cancerous" growths that look like some sort of parasitical infection. (I'm wondering - experiments in chemical and biological warfare?)
Secondly, (and i'm aware this contradicts the unsupported speculation in the previous paragraph). Later researchers in H-B have noted that the strangeness and warping of some trees seemed to suddenly end at a point in time and after that, growth has become normal.
When first recorded by Patrut, the tree had a branch system that exhibited unusual angles of growth and yet..... in recent years it has resorted to a standard upward pattern of development....could find no material reason as to why and so it remains a mystery.
This is in the context of trees which are twisted, mutiliated, arched, growing in the "wrong" direction, trees of different species making a sort of arboreal Rat King, described as a mystery as nothing like that grows in nature. Nothing like that does grow in nature - but I'm wondering about horticulturalists in the Far East who can make shrubs and trees grow in that sort of same twisty way by long and patient manipulation and training. People can and have done this, mainly because they could. Human intervention has changed the shapes of growing trees.
Also, the trees that grow weirdly for so long over a period of decades, and then return to normal growth patterns as if nothing ever happened. Could it be that somebody stopped playing with them, somebody who died in, perhaps, the early 1990's, and whose research papers are now "lost"?
Again, speculation.
Hoia-Baciu.
The author notes that the first researcher who devoted academic time to this region, a Professor Sift, died and his research papers "went missing". ("much of this material was lost following Sift's death"). Sift died in 1993, which was a time of some upheaval in Romania following the death of the dictator?
Also... you wonder how he got the go-ahead from the regime to do this research in the first place, which seems an unlikely topic of relevance and interest to a centralised Communist state. How did Sift get approval for this? What else might he have been doing in Hoia-Baciu, and would this explain why his research papers vanished on his death? This is just speculation and unformed thought, but he was a professor of biology and we're looking at an area where plant life has perhaps mutated and been somewhat "warped", a region where people went missing, and which earned a sinister reputation. (Again - no hard evidence. This is thinking aloud). Some trees are riddled with "cancerous" growths that look like some sort of parasitical infection. (I'm wondering - experiments in chemical and biological warfare?)
Secondly, (and i'm aware this contradicts the unsupported speculation in the previous paragraph). Later researchers in H-B have noted that the strangeness and warping of some trees seemed to suddenly end at a point in time and after that, growth has become normal.
When first recorded by Patrut, the tree had a branch system that exhibited unusual angles of growth and yet..... in recent years it has resorted to a standard upward pattern of development....could find no material reason as to why and so it remains a mystery.
This is in the context of trees which are twisted, mutiliated, arched, growing in the "wrong" direction, trees of different species making a sort of arboreal Rat King, described as a mystery as nothing like that grows in nature. Nothing like that does grow in nature - but I'm wondering about horticulturalists in the Far East who can make shrubs and trees grow in that sort of same twisty way by long and patient manipulation and training. People can and have done this, mainly because they could. Human intervention has changed the shapes of growing trees.
Also, the trees that grow weirdly for so long over a period of decades, and then return to normal growth patterns as if nothing ever happened. Could it be that somebody stopped playing with them, somebody who died in, perhaps, the early 1990's, and whose research papers are now "lost"?
Again, speculation.
Last edited: