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Weird War Tales

What springs to my mind is the occassion whrn a Vietnam veteran made the mistake of posting his account on the Telephone Wierdness thread hsre.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Thought it reminded me of another Fortean account.

The captain of UB-85 claimed a collision with a sea monster resulted in his submarine's incapacitation.
Speculation as to whether the outlandish tale was an invention to cover the captain's blunders:

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.da...oat-condemned-depths-savaged-sea-monster.html
Click to expand...

The UB-85 incident has been discussed in the Sea Serpents & Monsters thread back in October 2016:

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/sea-serpents-monsters.52363/page-8
 
EnolaGaia said:
The UB-85 incident has been discussed in the Sea Serpents & Monsters thread back in October 2016:

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/sea-serpents-monsters.52363/page-8
Click to expand...

Must be where I recalled if from almost 2 years ago.

As for the winged woman of Vietnam, my first thought was stressed, sleep-deprived (and possibly stoned) soldiers getting freaked out at their first sighting of a particularly large and inquisitive megabat. With wingspans approaching 6 feet, a close encounter with one of these strange creatures could well feel quite Fortean.
 
maximus otter said:
One that comes immediately to my mind is the Winged Woman of Vietnam. ...
Click to expand...

NOTE: If anyone wants to search for more on this particular sighting, be advised the mystery figure is not always labeled a 'Winged Woman'. Some accounts and discussions refer to it as 'bat-woman' and others refer to it as a 'bird-woman'.

Under all labels, the story traces back through The Mothman Prophecies to a piece authored by Don Worley and published in Flying Saucer Review (June 1972). Worley interviewed a witness (Earl Morrison) sometime in 1972. Worley's account of the August 1969 incident is the one that's widely quoted (with or without attribution).

FWIW I've never seen any other interviews with, nor personal statements from, this Earl Morrison. Worley seems to be the single point source for this story.
 
The video should have been more accurately titled Wartime Monsters None Of Which Were Caught On Camera.

oldrover said:
What springs to my mind is the occassion whrn a Vietnam veteran made the mistake of posting his account on the Telephone Wierdness thread hsre.
Click to expand...

Can you tell us more? I've had a look on the phone weirdness thread & it's not there.
 
I've tracked down Worley's original published article. It was published on pages 14 - 16 in:

Flying Saucer Review
Case Histories
Supplement 10, June 1972

This issue is accessible as a PDF file at:

http://www.noufors.com/Documents/Bo... Review - Case Histories/FSR-CH 1972 N 10.pdf

This seminal account refers to the figure as the 'Winged Lady in Black' - a label I don't recall being copied in subsequent accounts.
 
oldrover said:
What springs to my mind is the occassion whrn a Vietnam veteran made the mistake of posting his account on the Telephone Wierdness thread hsre.
Click to expand...

hunck said:
Can you tell us more? I've had a look on the phone weirdness thread & it's not there.
Click to expand...

The Vietnam vet's story was mis-posted to Phone Weirdness, where it helped ignite a progressively out-of-control series of exchanges forcing the mods to kill the postings involved. Stuneville once posted that the posts involved were dead and gone in response to an earlier query about the story.

Having said that ...

You each owe me a drink at the Troll's Head, because I found it ...

The veteran's story still exists as post #1 in this thread:

Have you ever had the s*** scared out of you?
http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/have-you-ever-had-the-s-scared-out-of-you.40771/

... and the subsequent posts there clearly indicate it's the Vietnam story mis-posted to Phone Weirdness.
 
Top work again Enola. Sending a virtual drink your way. That's a great thread.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Must be where I recalled if from almost 2 years ago.

As for the winged woman of Vietnam, my first thought was stressed, sleep-deprived (and possibly stoned) soldiers getting freaked out at their first sighting of a particularly large and inquisitive megabat. With wingspans approaching 6 feet, a close encounter with one of these strange creatures could well feel quite Fortean.
Click to expand...

Reading more about the "winged woman" sighting in Vietnam, I see that it occurred at night and am more convinced of the likelihood that it was a misidentified megabat.

Megabats (aka giant fruit bat or flying fox) are found in Vietnam.
They are nocturnal.
They range in colour from tawny brown to almost black (although at night would all look virtually black).
Their wingspan can approach 6 feet.
They have a tapetum lucidum which makes their eyes highly reflective.
Diet or fruit detritus on their fur or, in some cases, disease can result in a degree of fluorescence on the body and wing membranes.
 
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I have a book somewhere about weird war stories, with premonitions of death in battle, crisis apparitions and so on. Used to read it in the garden so it's probably in one of my sheds.
 
"One of my sheds"

hark_at_her.jpg
 
Speaking of Vietnam, I came across this link recently when I was trying to find some sensible information on the kinds of spiders that live around here. Clearly, my google skills are not as good as I thought. It has it all: the bird-woman, bulletproof spiders the size of dinner-plates (which I assume is the standard arachnid measurement, along with olympic-size swimming pools for volume and areas the size of Wales for asteroid impacts and the like), BHM, sea serpents... The only thing missing is a huge pinch of salt.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Extensive collection of weird accounts from soldiers who fought in Afghanistan:
Click to expand...

“...the arm melted back into his form, like it wasn’t an arm at all, but some kind of extendable proboscis that was meant to look like an arm from a distance.”

Excellent!

maximus otter
 
maximus otter said:
“...the arm melted back into his form, like it wasn’t an arm at all, but some kind of extendable proboscis that was meant to look like an arm from a distance.”

Excellent!

maximus otter
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And I was struck by the commonality of accounts in which strange figures could only be seen in night-vision goggles. In the absence of any technical explanation for such sightings, it raises the possibility that there are far more ghosts around than you think - but which cannot be seen within the normal human visual spectrum.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
And I was struck by the commonality of accounts in which strange figures could only be seen in night-vision goggles. In the absence of any technical explanation for such sightings, it raises the possibility that there are far more ghosts around than you think - but which cannot be seen within the normal human visual spectrum.
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My brother used night vision systems of some sort in the Balkans, and hated them. He got horrible headaches (which may have had more to do with the weight of them back then - rather than optical issues). He also believed that the narrow field of view somewhat buggered up your sense of proportion, and reckoned that after a while you couldn't really tell what you were looking at any more.

Maybe he just didn't get on with the technology. But it would be interesting to know if any studies have been made on the effect that long periods of use have on the user.
 
Spookdaddy said:
My brother used night vision systems of some sort in the Balkans, and hated them. He got horrible headaches (which may have had more to do with the weight of them back then - rather than optical issues). He also believed that the narrow field of view somewhat buggered up your sense of proportion, and reckoned that after a while you couldn't really tell what you were looking at any more.

Maybe he just didn't get on with the technology. But it would be interesting to know if any studies have been made on the effect that long periods of use have on the user.
Click to expand...
That sounds similar to the effects that many users of virtual reality goggles have reported.
I'm wondering if looking at the world in this way requires an extra burden on the brain, something we're not yet adapted for (but in the course of time, we may adapt to it).
 
Spookdaddy said:
... Maybe he just didn't get on with the technology. But it would be interesting to know if any studies have been made on the effect that long periods of use have on the user.
Click to expand...

Yes - and not just in the context of protracted use ...

Night vision technologies have always entailed human factors problems of diverse types - some relating to the specific technologies employed, others relating to the apparatus itself, and others relating to environmental / perceptual issues in the use context.

For example, here's a 2000 study addressing human factors issues noted among helicopter pilots and aircrews:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3742/f53a805740a7233bed79d97848b27d4e5b24.pdf

(There's a lot more out there, but this is a reasonably representative example from almost 2 decades ago. Such R&D work extends much farther back in time ... )
 
Mythopoeika said:
That sounds similar to the effects that many users of virtual reality goggles have reported.
I'm wondering if looking at the world in this way requires an extra burden on the brain, something we're not yet adapted for (but in the course of time, we may adapt to it).
Click to expand...

The issues are considerably worse for VR, and worst of all for close-coupled VR devices.

Yes, it involves burdens on the brain and its operations - the most serious of which extend deeper than conscious thought processes.

No - there's no chance of fully adapting to it unless one can close-couple the full range of your sensorium (total set of sensory / perceptual inputs) so as to supplant every such bio-based sensory input with an artificial one.
 
EnolaGaia said:
The issues are considerably worse for VR, and worst of all for close-coupled VR devices.

Yes, it involves burdens on the brain and its operations - the most serious of which extend deeper than conscious thought processes.
Click to expand...
I'd love to know a little more detail about this if you can point me at something.
 
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