How did Jean Hilliard recover after being frozen solid?

CASE DETAILS

December 20, 1980. On bitterly cold morning in Lengby, Minnesota, a man opened his back door to find his 19-year-old neighbor, Jean Hilliard, laying in the snow. She was literally frozen solid.

The night before, Jean’s car had ran off the road and gotten stuck. Jean was trying desperately to reach her neighbor’s house. The temperature was twenty-five degrees below zero.

At the small local hospital, Dorothy Killian of the nursing staff was stunned:

“She was so cold, it was like reaching into a freezer, like picking out a frozen stick of wood. Her face was absolutely white. Just this ashen, death look. We did hook her up to the monitor, and we got this agonal rhythm– like one beat. It was just like one and nothing. Then two. We knew that we had something, but that’s a death rhythm.”

Dr. Ryan Kelly was called in:

“She was severely frostbitten. None of her limbs would bend or move. And, really, things looked very grim. When a person gets frostbite, what we’re basically talking about is freezing of the limbs. That actually means ice crystals forming in the cells, and in so doing, they destroy many of the cells of the body. After the hands and feet maybe start the initial stages of frostbite and the core temperature of the body drops, the heart, the lungs, the internal organs of the abdomen, the brain, when those start to cool, it becomes more and more difficult for them to perform their functions, until finally they stop. At that point, the patient would more than likely die.”

The hospital staff was doing everything it could. But Rosie Erickson, a hospital office worker, worried it wouldn’t be enough. She knew that Jean needed a miracle:

“I called the pastor of our church and I stated simply that Jean Hilliard from the Lengby area was brought into the hospital in a frozen condition, very critical, and that she needed prayer.”

With the blessing of the family, the word went out. A prayer chain started about 9:00 that morning. Within 10 minutes, more than 30 people were praying for Jean.

The odds against Jean were enormous. But two hours later, Jean suddenly went into violent convulsions. It was a good sign, but the danger was far from over. Doctors worried that even if Jean regained consciousness she might have serious brain damage. And the frostbite was so severe that amputating Jean’s legs seemed inevitable. Then Jean regained consciousness:

“I woke up in the hospital about noon. Things were kind of hazy and people were asking me questions as to who I am and things like that. And I couldn’t figure out why they were talking to me that way or why they were treating me that way. Of course, I knew these people. Of course I knew who I was. I mean, what’s the big deal?”

Sandra Klicker, Jean’s sister, was there:

“When Jeanie first came to and we knew that she was going to live, it was an extreme relief. But what was more miraculous to me was her legs recovering. Every time we lifted the sheet, we could see the white just moving down. The black was disappearing little by little, and to me, I still think that was just unbelievable.”

Jean spent 49 days in the hospital. In defiance of everything her doctors knew about frostbite, she recovered completely. Dr. Ryan Kelly was amazed:

“It was enough that she survived. That was a wonderful enough thing. But to have this added gain of not losing any fingers or toes, and in fact, just having what I guess would be minor scars, this is remarkable.”

Jean credits her survival and astonishing recovery not only to the doctors and nurses who cared for her, but also to the friends and neighbors who prayed for her:

“There are other people across the nation that same night that were found in the same condition I was in. And they died. I just think without all those people that I might not have survived.”

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Do dogs have the power to detect when their owners are ill?

CASE DETAILS

Dogs have been domesticated for thousands of years and many breeds are prized for their keen sense of smell. Whether finding someone who’s lost, tracking a fugitive, or sniffing out explosives, the strength and accuracy of a dog’s nose is legendary. Marty Becker D.V.M., co-author of “The Healing Power of Pets”, is an expert on the subject:

“If you were to take a gigantic football stadium that NFL teams play in and fill the entire stadium with yellow tennis balls, and had one white tennis ball, dogs can smell the one white tennis ball in that entire stadium.”

Using this powerful sense of smell, is it possible a dog can actually diagnose life-threatening illness? Several dog owners have found persuasive evidence that dogs can save lives in mysterious ways.

Nancy Best of Garberville, California, seemed to have it all. She was the mother of three healthy children and owned a successful coffee shop called The Java Joint. In fact, business was going so well, that she had recently opened a second store. Despite Nancy’s hectic lifestyle, her yellow lab, Mia, was always near-by. Nancy had gotten Mia as a puppy:

“Mia was the first dog that ran up to me. At the time, I didn’t know if I wanted a boy or a girl. Until she came up to me and I fell in love with her instantly.”

Nancy’s mornings were spent running the coffee house. But at about 1:00 P.M. each afternoon, Nancy set aside time just for herself and Mia. Then one afternoon, out of the blue, Nancy noticed that Mia was acting strangely:

“She came up and started sniffing and licking at my breast. And because she was eight months pregnant, I thought maybe she was kind of wigging out, so I didn’t pay any attention to it. I just went and told her to lay down.”

But Mia was persistent. The following evening, as Nancy was struggling to fall asleep, Mia began tugging at Nancy’s bedcovers:

“She started biting my shirt away like a dog bites fleas, little tiny nibbles and was trying to pull my shirt away from my body. I was starting to get upset with her.”

Desperate for her much-needed sleep, Nancy banished Mia to the backyard. The following day, during Nancy’s afternoon break, Mia did the same thing. Nancy couldn’t believe it:

“Mia jumped up on my lap while I was sitting up and dove with her nose into my chest. And the force of the pressure of her nose made me rub it because it hurt. And, when I rubbed it is when I felt the lump. I had had a negative breast exam by a physician just four months prior. There was no cancer in my family. I was 39, not old enough for a routine mammogram. So I was thinking this couldn’t be cancer, but the lump felt very odd. It was quite large.”

Medical tests found Nancy had a cancerous tumor in her breast. A lumpectomy confirmed the worst: she had a stage two invasive ductile carcinoma, a very aggressive form of breast cancer. Marty Becker found out about how she discovered the lump and started to do a little research:

“When I first heard about Nancy Best’s case, I talked to an oncologist at the Mayo Clinic about it. And one of the things that we surmised there was that there was a certain smell that was being secreted. The type of tumor that she had in her breast may have had a certain kind of an odor. You have to remember, this kind of breed of dog is actually used for hunting. They have a very sensitive nose.”

Nancy had a partial mastectomy. Months of chemotherapy and radiation therapy followed. Since 2000, Nancy has been cancer-free. She thanks her dog Mia for potentially saving her life:

“The doctor believes that had this cancer not been detected at this time, within six months it could have entered my lymph nodes and I would have died.”

If it’s possible for a dog to sniff out cancer, are there even more profound life-saving powers a pet can offer? Darlene Werremeyer of Spokane, Washington, thinks so. She believes her dog, Shadow, is a prime example:

“He was the best medicine that I could’ve ever taken. If it was in a pill form, he’d be a miracle drug.”

After Darlene was diagnosed with diabetes in 1991, she had a series of medical setbacks. While recovering from open-heart surgery, she suffered a stroke. For a while, she lost her ability to speak. After several years of therapy, Darlene recovered her speech but had a problem with stuttering. At a family reunion, the anxiety of being in a crowd made that stutter even worse. Darlene Werremeyer:

“I was so nervous. I couldn’t talk again. And this little schnauzer named Maggie came up to me and started licking my hand. I started petting her. She got in my lap. And I noticed as long as I petted her, I could talk so much easier. It was phenomenal.

So phenomenal that as soon as she returned home, Darlene had to tell her neurologist:

“He said ‘Yeah, I know about dogs. I know how they can help. There have been lots of studies done.’ So he wrote a written prescription for a dog.”

So on doctor’s orders, Darlene adopted a schnauzer of her own, which she named Shadow. The bond between Darlene and Shadow quickly grew and Darlene’s speech improved. Dr. Carol Wysham, MD, was Darlene’s physician:

“We don’t fully understand why dogs have such an effect on people. But in Darlene’s case, she felt very calmed by the dog. Perhaps paying attention to the animal, petting and the sensory effects of that, could be actually just putting her more into a meditative trance.”

Soon after adopting Shadow, Darlene learned what an extraordinary animal he really was.
One afternoon, Darlene laid down for a nap and quickly dozed off. But Shadow was alarmed by something and would not allow her to sleep:

“He started pawing at me. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I sat up and the room just spun.”

Uncertain why Shadow was upset, Darlene checked the glucose level of her blood; it was dangerously low. If a diabetic’s blood sugar level drops too far, it can trigger unconsciousness or even a coma. Dr. Wysham:

“Shadow has helped Darlene in many different ways. Not only in her safety as far as being able to detect the low blood sugar, but also in her general life. Darlene now is able to walk without a cane. She is able to function and do the things that she wants to do on a daily basis.”

Darlene Werremeyer and Nancy Best have no doubt that they are alive because of the mysterious powers of their dogs. Marty Becker is equally amazed by the abilities of man’s best friend:

“The ability of these dogs to detect a seizure or detect cancer is probably equal parts their incredible sense of smell, their incredible ability to read body language, and then, also, what I call not just a sixth sense, but a ‘sick sense’. That’s that ability to know when something’s just not quite right. And then, the ability to draw near to help them. We should not be so amazed that pets are able to do this; we should be amazed by the amount of things that we don’t yet know they’re able to do.”

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season seven with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

A strange clear goo falls on the town of Oakville, Washington.

CASE DETAILS

Oakville, Washington. Population: 723. Clouds fill the sky here daily, bringing rain on average of 149 days a year. So when it began pouring on the morning of August 7, 1994, no one was really concerned, until they realized it wasn’t raining rain. It was raining tiny blobs of gelatinous goo. It came down in torrents, covering 20 square miles. And it made people sick, including Maurice Gobeil:

“I got sick, my wife got sick, my daughter, everybody that lived here got sick.”

Beverly Roberts:

“Everybody in the whole town came down with, like, a flu, only it was a really hard flu. It didn’t last, like, 7 days. It lasted 7 weeks, 2 or 3 months.”

Officer David Lacey was on patrol with a civilian friend at 3:00 AM when the downpour began:

“We turned our windshield wipers on and it just started smearing to the point where we could almost not see. And we both looked at each other and we said, ‘Jeez, this isn’t right.’ I mean, we’re out in the middle of nowhere, basically, and where did this come from?”

Officer Lacey pulled into a gas station to de-goo his windshield. As an added precaution, he put on a pair of latex gloves:

“The substance was very mushy. It’s almost like if you had Jell-O in your hand and you could pretty much squish it through your fingers. We did have some bells go off in our heads that basically said that this isn’t right, this isn’t normal.”

Local resident Dotty Hearn was equally puzzled. By the time she stepped outside that morning, the storm had ended but the blobs were everywhere:

“It looked like hail laying on top of the wood box and everywhere else. So I just went over, and I touched it, and it wasn’t hail. It was a gelatinous-like material.”

That afternoon, Officer Lacey suddenly became ill:

“I was to the point where I could hardly breathe. I started to put it together that, possibly, whatever the substance was, it made me violently sick like I never had been before, to the point where it just totally shut me down.”

Across town, Dotty Hearn was sick also:

“I started feeling dizzy. Everything started moving around and around, and it got worse, and, as it did, I became increasingly nauseated.”

An hour later, Dotty’s daughter and son found her sprawled on the bathroom floor.
Sunny Barclift is Dotty’s daughter:

“She was cold, drenched with perspiration. My mom had been vomiting. She had extreme vertigo. She complained that she had difficulty with her vision, her vision was blurring.”

Dotty spent the next three days in the hospital. The diagnosis: a severe inner ear infection. But Dotty’s daughter had a different idea:

“For some reason, as we were going out the door, I remembered the substance and I wondered if perhaps it might have had some sort of an effect on her, if it might have made her sick. So I opted, at that moment, to take a sample of this gelatinous material to the hospital.”

A lab technician found a startling clue. The substance contained human white blood cells. But exactly what it was and why it fell from the sky could not be determined. The goo was immediately sent to the Washington State Department of Health. It was examined by microbiologist Mike McDowell:

“It was very uniform. There was no structure that we could see visibly or with a microscope. I set it up on various microbiological media and attempted to isolate bacteria.”

Mike McDowell discovered that the sample was full of two species of bacteria, one of which makes its home in the human digestive system. Sunny Barclift wondered if it was human waste dropped from an airliner:

“The FAA ruled that out, because under the regulations, human waste is dyed blue. The substance was not blue. It was crystal-clear in color.”

The blobs rained down on Oakville six times over a three-week period. Dozens of people got sick. Several dogs and cats died after coming in contact with it. Nearly a year after Dotty Hearn’s illness, she took a sample of the material she had stored in her freezer to a private research lab. Tim Davis is a microbiologist with Amtest Laboratories:

“I saw what I think was a eukaryotic cell, which is, basically, a cell that has a definable nucleus, and is found present in most animals.”

Translation: the goo was alive. But where did it come from? Sunny Barclift recounted one theory she heard:

“Someone theorized that since the navy had been conducting live bombing runs at sea, they might have blown up a school of jellyfish. And, of course, this jellyfish would have been thrown up into the air and floated 50 miles inland and, over a period of 3 weeks, fallen 6 times. I find that somewhat preposterous.”

The Air Force confirmed that practice bombing runs were being conducted over the Pacific. However, they denied any knowledge of the unknown substance or any involvement in creating or dispersing it. But some locals were not reassured. Sunny Barclift:

“We had a significant amount of military aircraft flying over the home prior to this happening.”

Dotty Hearn:

“Every day almost, we had slow flying bombers, helicopters, all black in color, and we kind of thought maybe it might’ve come from them.”

Maurice Gobeil:

“They let off things in the air all the time here. There’s testing done all over the place. There are a lot of places you can’t go into.”

Beverly Roberts:

“Maybe we were a biological experiment of some kind, a small one, maybe just to get people a little bit sick to find out, say, if an enemy did come over here with a biological bomb or something and dropped it, maybe it was just a test run to see how, what would happen.”

Today it’s impossible to say what the goo was or where it came from because all the evidence has disappeared. The Washington Department of Health says it can find no record of what happened to the samples it received.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season nine with Robert Stack and in season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Can a bee sting cure multiple sclerosis?

CASE DETAILS

Most people try to avoid any contact with bees. However, to some people, honey bees are miniature flying drugstores that could reverse the course of multiple sclerosis. It is a controversial treatment known as bee venom therapy.

Kelly Ames was in high school when multiple sclerosis crept into her life. By the time Kelly was 22, her symptoms became impossible to ignore:

“One day I was at work and I was walking down a flight of stairs—there must have been, like, 12 stairs—where I just lost the feeling in my feet… and I fell down a flight of stairs. And the women in my office… I explained to them that my feet sometimes get numb.”

Medical tests revealed the cruel truth—Kelly had MS. The unforgiving disease first robbed her of the ability to walk alone. Before long, the disease attacked Kelly’s eyes:

“Within that week, I lost the vision in my left eye and I had no control over my muscles. It was just very devastating. I hated to depend on other people, but, at times, I needed other people to help me.”

Kelly’s doctor put her on steroids. These potent drugs can temporarily relieve the symptoms of MS. But for Kelly, the steroids could not stop the advance of the disease:

“Having the steroid dripped into my arm, I would sit there for an hour and a half looking at other MS people coming in the wheelchairs and wondering if that’s going to be me someday, in that wheelchair.”

Then Kelly met a woman who had literally walked away from her wheelchair after stinging herself with honeybees. For Kelly Ames, it was a last ray of hope. Kelly’s father brought her to a local beekeeper who had been helping MS patients for years. The rest would be up to Kelly:

“He told me that he didn’t want to be bothered by me if I wasn’t serious about it. He said, you have to do this for six months straight every other day, faithfully. He scared me when he said that because I realized I really had to take the responsibility of sticking to this. And I did.”

Kelly and her boyfriend set up a morning routine. He placed the bees at specific spots on Kelly’s body, spots where nerves running to the damaged areas were most accessible. For Kelly’s failing eyesight, that was behind the ear. Bees were also placed on Kelly’s lower back to treat the weakness in her legs. They were left in place for as long as 15 minutes to allow all their venom to penetrate the skin. Kelly’s nervous system had been so ravaged by MS that she was stung several hundred times before she actually felt the pain of the sting:

“I could actually feel what a bee sting felt like, and it hurt. It really hurt. I was screaming. I had my head in my pillow, and I was screaming. And I was screaming because I was happy because I could feel again. Within a week, my eyesight started to slowly come back. I didn’t depend on my cane as much. And right then and there, I just knew, finally, this was kicking in, and it was working for me.”

While some doctors dismiss the therapy as little better than voodoo, Kelly’s remarkable recovery is hardly unique. Kelly went on to teach bee venom therapy to others suffering from multiple sclerosis. One of her students was Maureen Naughton:

“When I decided to do bee venom therapy, we kind of kept it a little hush-hush because I didn’t know what other people’s reactions would be. I know what the reactions of my doctors were. So I figured, you know, we’ll keep it a little quiet. I was always afraid of bees and being stung, but I just felt that this was my only answer.”

Maureen began to experience the symptoms of MS shortly after the birth of her second child. By the time Maureen began bee sting therapy, MS had numbed her feet so thoroughly, that she could hardly sense they were there:

“Within minutes, my foot was warm. You could feel the venom going through, and the blood felt like there was life in my foot again. It was just an incredible feeling. I knew, right from that moment, that something good was happening, and I felt that this was going to help me.”

A photo of Maureen and her son was taken six weeks after she began the bee venom therapy. In the photo, Maureen had just crossed the finish line in a seven-mile MS Walk-a-thon. Should we prize bees for their sting as well as their honey? Mainstream science has hardly begun to address the question, though some doctors believe bee venom therapy is far too promising to be ignored.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season nine with Robert Stack and in season eight with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Is it possible for someone to spontaneously burst into flames?

CASE DETAILS

For Kay and Mike Fletcher, February 11, 1996, was a morning they’ll never forget.
Out of nowhere, a cloud of smoke suddenly erupted from Kay’s body. According to Kay, she thought her sweater had caught fire:

“I said, ‘Take a look at my back,’ because I’m thinking, do I have blisters or what? And he said, ‘No, it’s just red.’ We really were frantically looking through the clothing, you know, arm and back, and just looking it over very carefully and we found absolutely no discoloration, we found no sign of any kind of fire damage.”

Michael Fletcher claimed the source of the smoke was Amy’s body itself:

“It was actually coming off of her skin. But there was no flame. The smoke was so thick that we had to turn on the fan and open the window, just to get the smoke out of there. Now, earlier in my life, I had worked at a crematorium and the smell was that of burnt flesh.”

For the Fletchers, the entire episode was hard to comprehend. Had Kay survived the bizarre phenomenon known as spontaneous human combustion? If so, she was one of the lucky ones. Most cases end in death.

On March 26, 1986, Kendall Mott hadn’t heard from his father George, all day. A retired fireman, George had serious lung problems and needed an air pump and face mask just to help him breathe. Even before he went inside George’s home, Kendall knew something was wrong:

“The windows were all brown and I noticed that the door handle was warm when I grabbed it. It was real dark inside the house and it smelled like it had been burnt.”

According to Kendall, when he found his father, all that was left was a scattering of ashes, a few splinters of bone, and a fragment of skull:

“It’s scary to find somebody like that, to walk in and find somebody that you love all burnt like that, with no explanation as to why, or what happened.”

Larry Arnold is the author of a book about spontaneous human combustion entitled Ablaze:

“There was incredible localized damage done to the body. George Mott was incinerated to an extent that, we have been told by forensic experts, could only be replicated inside a crematorium operating at 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit or more, for twelve long hours.”

The Mott burn area had all the weird inconsistencies of a classic combustion case. The TV had melted, but much of the bedding was undamaged. Nearby, a box of wooden matches was still intact. And air was still pumping through George’s face mask.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that non-believers, like Joe Nickell of Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, say there’s a rational explanation:

“Now, do I know exactly what happened? I don’t. But let me reconstruct a little bit. We’re told that Mr. Mott was a former drinker, and a former smoker, but that he had reformed. He was depressed. Just suppose that he said, ‘What the heck, I think I’ll have a cigarette.’ This would explain him taking off the oxygen mask, while the unit would still be left running, and it would explain why the matches were there. Now, if that’s the case, then this is just another case of smoking in bed, and is not mysterious, and is a rather mundane case.”

But even a confirmed skeptic would not use the word mundane to describe the next incident. In December of 1966, gas company meter man Don Gosnell made an unpleasant discovery at the home of Irving Bentley, a 92-year old retired physician. As he always did, Gosnell had let himself into Irving’s basement:

“When I got to the bottom of the steps, there was a pile of ashes on the floor and there was an odor, something I’ve never encountered before, it’s kind of a sickening, sweet odor. And then I looked up and here there was a hole burnt through the floor right above me. And I stood there and I looked at that hole and there were little red embers all around the hole, still yet.”

Gosnell rushed upstairs, but nothing could have prepared him for the gruesome scene in the bathroom:

“All there was was part of one leg. It was so discolored, I couldn’t tell if it was a human being or a mannequin until I got right down close and looked at it. And when I got the picture, I left, right then.”

Such scenes are nothing new to Larry Arnold:

“What is so profoundly perplexing to mainstream science about the scene that Dr. Bentley left behind is the incredibly intense fire that consumed his body, quite literally, to powder, leaving behind only his head, a knee bone, and a lower left leg as mute testimony that this had once been a human being. The rest of his body was ash in the basement below. We believe that Dr. Bentley answered a call of nature. While standing in front of the toilet, suddenly, spontaneously, he became a human fireball. The nature of the fire, and we kind of use fire in quotes, here, failed to produce enough thermal energy to melt the aluminum walker, failed to produce enough heat to blister paint on the bathtub inches away. And yet was quite capable of directing its energy downward, through the oak beams, through the flooring, and into the sub floor beneath, into the basement.”

Where Larry Arnold sees a paranormal mystery, skeptic Joe Nickell sees an unusual, yet possible, solution:

“The case of someone like Dr. Bentley is very understandable, in the sense of him being infirm; he had a history of setting his clothes on fire, from his pipe. His clothing was pockmarked with burns from his pipe. In many of the cases, the person’s own body fat can contribute to the fire. If we imagined Dr. Bentley with his body on fire, he falls to the floor, there is linoleum on that floor, and linoleum, once it catches fire, is a very powerful flammable material. The flooring burned. The subflooring burned. And beams—there’s beams underneath. There’s a tremendous amount of wood underneath his body to act as a funeral pyre. Mysterious? Not really, not scientifically mysterious. Unusual, yes.”

Larry Arnold says that debunkers could perform a very simple experiment:

“Take a cadaver, put it on a tar-based linoleum flooring, put an aluminum walker over the top of it and drop a cigarette on it. If it burns to powder, we’re gonna be real impressed, and that person deserves a Nobel prize in physics. But I’ll wager money, that experiment’s gonna fail.”

Arnold theorizes that some cases of spontaneous human combustion may be an explosive aberration of the electrical current flows naturally present in the body:

“We have the potential of hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity coursing through the body. Instantaneously. If the amperage is sufficiently high, then the body would literally become its own electrocution mechanism. It would fry itself out from the inside, electrically.”

Not in the world Joe Nickell lives in:

“This is crackpottery of a very high order. There is not a single reasonable theory for spontaneous human combustion. There is no convincing scientific evidence of it. And so the mystery mongers ought to shut up and get a life.”

Is spontaneous human combustion real or can every case be explained away? The jury is still out. Unless, of course, it happens to you.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season nine with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

The dangerous and even deadly results of sleepwalking.

CASE DETAILS

The mysterious world of sleepwalking is often portrayed as harmless or even amusing. But in reality, it can be dangerous and sometimes, even deadly.

In Iowa City, Iowa, Jarod Allgood was a talented football player during his waking hours and a habitual sleepwalker at night. According to Jarod’s mother, BeckyAllgood, it all began when Jarod was a young boy:

“He was a major sleepwalker, and all of my boys are. And that scared me. And I’d talk about it, and I’d ask the doctors about it, and they would just pretty much pooh-pooh it, like it’s really nothing.”

When Jarod went to college, his sleepwalking continued. But nothing serious happened until the night of February 9, 1993.

Jarod got out of bed and ran out of his apartment. His eyes were wide open, but he was not awake. He ran more than a mile barefoot on the icy pavement. Witnesses later reported that he sprinted with the intensity of a runner at the finish line.

Dr. Mark Mahowald studies sleep disorders:

“People who have these episodes spontaneously, like Jarod, get stuck in the state between wakefulness and sleep; awake enough to perform complex behaviors, not awake enough to be aware of what we’re doing or responsible for what we’re doing.”

Somehow in his sleep, Jarod managed to weave around parked cars and turn corners. Then he ran in front of a moving car and was struck. Jarod died instantly. Initially, authorities speculated that he had committed suicide. Jarod’s mother didn’t buy it. She talked to her son’s roommate and learned that Jarod was having a recurring dream about running in a race.

Becky recalls what the roommate told her:

“Jarod said, ‘It’s a crazy dream. I’m running a race with a man from Bertrum, only the man is in a car, and I’m on foot running a race as hard as I can run.’”

Some might dismiss this as just a coincidence. But Jarod was killed as he was running down a road that leads to the town of Bertrum.

Becky Allgood was absolutely convinced that her son had not taken his own life.
Dr. Mark Mahowald agreed:

“There was not one shred of evidence that he had depression or any other reason to commit suicide. There was no evidence of drugs or alcohol involved. The only reasonable explanation is that this was yet just another one of his sleepwalking episodes.”

In the end, authorities also agreed. Jarod Allgood became the first person in Iowa history whose death was attributed to sleepwalking.

Like Jarod, Heidee Ruiz is a chronic sleepwalker:

“When I hear stories about Jarod Allgood, I think, that possibly could’ve been me. And that scares me to think that.”

Also like Jarod, Heidee is a dedicated athlete. In 1991, she was attending college on a track and field scholarship and felt a tremendous pressure to perform. That pressure seemed to seep into her dreams and she once found herself running while sleepwalking:

“I wasn’t running from a particular person or thing. I was just running because I felt like it was the end of the world. It was like a monster inside me trying to get out.”

Bonnie-Kay Calder, Heidee’s mother, witnessed two of the most violent episodes:

“I heard a blood-curdling scream. Bang– two big hits, where I could hear her coming through doors. I have to tell you, the force of her running through that hall I will never forget because of the terror, the look of terror on her face was so incredible. And for a mom to not know what to do in order for her not to be able to hurt herself again was a real scary thing. Real scary.”

Heidee once injured herself while sleepwalking:

“The biggest episode was in my mom’s house back in August of ’95. Must’ve gotten out of bed and took one step and bolted straight into the wall.”

The impact tore open Heidee’s forehead. She gashed her wrist as she fell to the floor.
The episode was a turning point for Heidee:

“I decided I couldn’t handle it anymore. I was terrified, and I said, ’I need to go seek help.’”

Heidee was tested at a world-renowned sleep clinic in Northern California:

“I had electrodes all over my head. I had a pulse on my finger. I mean, I was hooked up, like, I felt I was from Mars. It was very, very uncomfortable, but it was an extensive test, and they had to see what was going on.”

Heidee was examined by Dr. Clete Kushida of the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic & Research Center:

“We wanted to see if we might be able to capture a sleepwalking episode. But that can be rare because it might not occur every night. But, secondly, we also wanted to rule out the possibility that it wasn’t something else, such as seizure activity, a sleep-related breathing disorder, or even leg movements that were causing the person to waken and triggering off the attack.”

Dr. Kushida could find no physiological causes for Heidee’s sleepwalking. But he was able to pinpoint what is likely to trigger an episode:

“There’s a lot of different triggers. One of them is sleep deprivation. Secondly, stress can also increase a chance that the person might have sleepwalking.”

Both Heidee Ruiz and Jarod Allgood fit that pattern. Their sleepwalking flared up under heavy emotional pressure and lack of sleep. Heidee now has her sleepwalking condition under control through medication and careful stress management.

Although the world of sleep and dreams has been the subject of decades of extensive research, scientists are still left with more questions than answers.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season nine with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Has carbon testing finally revealed the age of the Shroud of Turin?

CASE DETAILS

The face of Jesus Christ has inspired artists throughout the ages. But how did they know what Jesus looked like? A piece of linen may hold the answer. It is called the Shroud of Turin. Many believe it is the actual burial cloth of Jesus Christ, and his image was imprinted on its threads. Fr. “Kim” Dreisbach, Jr. has spent the majority of his career studying the shroud:

“When I first began to study the Shroud of Turin, I was convinced it was a crock and it would take me probably less than two hours to put away this pious fraud. After all, anyone with an I.Q. 100 or over knows that all relics by definition are frauds. But I must admit, here I am some 17 years later, I who came to scoff, have stayed to pray. My own personal belief is the shroud is probably authentic.”

The shroud was first exhibited publicly in France during the Renaissance period. No one seemed to know where it came from. Then in 1578 A.D., the shroud was moved to Turin, Italy, where it was rarely shown in public. Three centuries later, in 1898, the shroud was photographed for the first time. According to Fr. Dreisbach, the photographer’s negatives showed more detail than could be seen by the naked eye:

“He was to write of this experience years later and would never forget that as he lifted that glass plate, he believed he was the first person in 2,000 years to have seen the face of Jesus of Nazareth.”

From that point on, the Shroud of Turin became more and more an object of scientific inquiry. Dr. Robert Bucklin, a forensic pathologist, has examined life-sized photographic negatives of the shroud:

“The body shows a number of injuries. On the head we see a series of bloodstains around the forehead, high in the scalp and along the posterior portion of the scalp. These are consistent with the application of a crown or a cap of thorns. On the chest area, there’s a rather unique wound. It is quite consistent with a puncture type wound made by an implement which entered the chest cavity and produced an outflow of blood and water. In the region of the left wrist, there’s a puncture wound, which was clearly made by some implement, which passed into the tissues of the wrist and produced bleeding.”

The crucifixion of Jesus has traditionally been depicted with nails driven through his palms. But according to Fr. Dreisbach, modern research has confirmed that at the time of Jesus’ death, nails were driven through the victims’ wrists:

“The Romans did enough of these, sometimes 500 a day, to be excellent anatomists. And like a butcher, they knew where the bones were. They put it in the wrist and it held the body and held it well.”

In 1978, the shroud was made available to a number of scientists for the first time. Using particles lifted from the shroud with adhesive tape, biophysicist John Heller and chemist Alan Adler determined that there was blood on the cloth. They found chemical evidence of severe torture, consistent with crucifixion. Their findings however, are not universally accepted.

Some scientists, like Dr. Walter McCrone, have claimed that the shroud is a forgery—the work of a highly skilled artist who painted with tiny brush strokes:

“When I first started working on it, I expected it to be authentic and I looked for body fluid… that’s where I started. But the red turned out to be red ochre and another pigment, vermillion, common artist pigments. There’s no question in my mind that it is a painting.”

However, Fr. Dreisbach disagreed with that theory:

“Many copies of the shroud were made. It was felt by pious people at the time that if you touched the copy to the original, it would give the copy extra sanctity. It’s called a brandiums, the technical name. When they were touched, of course some of that pigment ended up on the shroud. And that is what has been discovered. But it is not responsible for the image, let alone the whole body image, total front and total back.”

In recent times, other scientists have used computer technology to study the shroud. Optical specialist Kevin Moran claimed his computer analysis revealed that the image has unique optical qualities that confirm the shroud’s authenticity:

“When I take a normal photograph… you can immediately see a very distorted figure, the nose with respect to the cheek is totally distorted. And this is because this is a reflected image. This image is made by reflected light. This is not what we see on the shroud. The shroud is a very different type of image. The image immediately comes into a three dimensional form, the eyes, nose, mouth relationship are all clearly recognizable. The image on the shroud is so unique that it almost enters a scientific faith factor all by itself. There simply is no way that we can duplicate this image, even today… and people have certainly tried.”

In addition to Moran’s findings, believers claimed that the absence of brush strokes on the shroud proves it is not a painting. However, skeptics have pointed out that Leonardo da Vinci’s brush strokes were often invisible. In an effort to resolve the controversies surrounding the shroud, the Vatican allowed samples to be cut from its outer edges in 1988. Three universities were given a tiny piece of linen for carbon dating.

Dr. Paul Damon, at the University of Arizona, headed the carbon dating team in the United States. His findings placed the shroud’s origin between 1290 and 1360 A.D.:

“Within less than five minutes we could see that it could not possibly be 1st century. The difference between 14th century and 1st century is so great that you could see it within minutes, in the first measurement. We made quite a few measurements, like 16, but that was enough.”

The Vatican accepted the results of Paul Damon’s carbon dating. At the same time, carbon dating tests in Switzerland and England confirmed Damon’s findings. Since then, questions have been raised about the carbon dating process. The Vatican has refused to allow further testing, but it did approve a major restoration. Critics say that restoration will make further research even more difficult. But for true believers, further testing will make little difference. For them, the shroud has always been a matter of faith.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season four with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Who created the mysterious lines of Peru’s Nazca plateau?

CASE DETAILS

In South America, monumental drawings have been etched into the desert plain. Were they created to calm angry gods, to map out the heavens, or perhaps to welcome visitors from another galaxy? Welcome to the Nazca plateau, 100 square miles of unanswered questions in western Peru.

On the eastern corner of the plateau is a drawing of a spider. It’s formed by a single line that starts and ends in the same place. But for what purpose? Another drawing is of a gigantic monkey that could fill two football fields. More than 800 straight lines shoot across the plateau. Laid end to end, they total 1,000 miles. Evidence suggests that the ancient Nazcas, famous for their ceramic art, inscribed the giant drawings between 1,500 and 2,500 years ago. However, the Nazcas left little behind that tells us the meaning of the figures or reveals how they were made. Nearly a thousand lines, geometric shapes, and figures are tattooed across the Nazca plateau. When they are mapped and catalogued, the images form an astounding body of work.

In the late 1960s, author Erich Von Daniken proposed an interesting theory to explain the drawings. He claimed that some of the markings were nothing less than giant landing strips for alien spacecraft. In his book “Chariots of the Gods,” Von Daniken suggested the ancient Nazcas had regarded the aliens as gods and had constructed the runways under their direct orders.

However, Dr. Johan Reinhard of the Field Museum and Mountain Institute disagreed with Von Daniken’s theory:

“Scientists aren’t against the idea of necessarily extraterrestrials per se, but we do expect some evidence before we then start doing a lot of research in that direction.”

Dr. Reinhard and other scientists believe that the plateau is an immense outdoor cathedral. But that theory still doesn’t answer how the drawings were created?

Then in 1982, archeologists tried to figure out how the Nazcas made the lines. They decided to replicate the whole process using the simplest of tools. Dr. Anthony F. Aveni, a professor at Colgate University, was among the group of archaeologists:

“We pirated a couple of broomsticks from the local hotel, some pieces of string, laid out a line, and we proceeded to clean and sweep away the surface of the line. It took us, a group of 12, one morning to make a line about 20 yards long, two yards wide, clear it completely, and here was a brand-spanking-new Nazca line.”

Dr. Aveni’s line looked similar to some of the other figures. But how did the Nazca artists accurately model gargantuan figures like the sprawling monkey while looking at them only from ground level?

According to Dr. Reinhard, creating a simple Nazca line that was 20 yards long and the giant sprawling monkey were two entirely different tasks:

“It took the tremendous leap of imagination to make these large models on the ground, which they themselves presumably did not see, not being able to fly.”

Jim Woodman, a British author and explorer, argued that maybe they did fly. To prove his point, Woodman hired a Peruvian craftsman to stitch together a hot-air balloon from materials that would have been available to the ancient Nazcas. A raging campfire provided the requisite hot air. Perhaps for the first time in centuries, the figures were seen from a hot air-balloon hundreds of feet above the desert.

However, Dr. Aveni still believed that the lines were meant to be experienced from the ground:

“The straight lines look like roadways. They start from someplace, they lead to someplace. So the idea that the lines are meant to be walked on seems to me to be a much more feasible one then the notion that somebody had to look at them from above. The animals are made out of a single… continuous line that begins and ends at the same point. I can imagine that a worshipper of a deity would walk around one of these animal figures to pray to the god or gods that had to do with that animal, that probably some invocation to the gods would’ve happened here.”

In the end, there are still no answers. Those who created the wondrous artworks of Nazca have been dead now for centuries, buried in tombs that ring the plateau. Over the years, their bones have been carelessly scattered by grave robbers. However, the ancient mysteries of Nazca will in all likelihood, remain undisturbed forever.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season eight with Robert Stack and in season one with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Children in a small Nevada town are stricken with leukemia.

CASE DETAILS

For many who lived in Fallon, Nevada, it seemed like the perfect place to raise a family. But there was something terrible happening to the children of Fallon. It all began with Dustin Gross. According to his mother, Brenda, she was giving her son a bath when she noticed bruises on his back and arms:

“I asked him what was he doing? Why did he have these bruises? And he told me he was playing with his friend on the Big Wheels. And I thought, OK, that makes sense, that’s where the bruises came from. But then the next day, my husband had noticed a lot more bruises and brought it up to my attention. I saw he had bruises all over his body, his arms, his legs, his stomach, his back, and little red blood specks on the surface of his skin, and I knew that something was wrong at that point.”

Brenda took Dustin to the local hospital and he was immediately transferred to the UC Davis Medical Center. Blood was drawn and according to Brenda, a diagnosis was made:

“The doctor told us that Dustin had leukemia. I knew what leukemia was, I knew it was a cancer but I didn’t actually realize how severe.”

Brenda soon learned the seriousness of Dustin’s condition. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia strikes children, usually between the ages of two and nine. It causes the production of millions of defective white blood cells, destroying the immune system, and can be fatal. Dustin underwent aggressive chemotherapy:

“Seeing him lie there so lethargic and so lifeless. I think that’s probably the hardest thing that I’ve ever had to deal with. It was not easy.”

Within weeks of Dustin Gross’s diagnosis, two more local children were also found to have leukemia. The cancer treatment facility at the local hospital, run by Barbara deBraga, was overwhelmed:

“Even at that point I was just thinking, it’s just a coincidence. It’s just a terrible coincidence, but it’s just a coincidence. But then shortly after the third, we got a referral for a fourth.”

Barbara deBraga feared she was looking at an epidemic. It appeared to be what experts call a “cancer cluster.” She contacted the state assemblyperson for the Fallon area and an official investigation was launched. As the disease struck victims number five and six, state epidemiologist, Dr. Randall Todd prepared an all-out inquiry:

“A couple of days after, a seventh case was diagnosed. And so, this started to kind of make the hair on the back of my neck stand up a little bit. It was a frightening time.”

An alarmed Dr. Todd immediately sought a common denominator shared by all the victims that might explain the epidemic. However, interviews with parents produced no answers. And Dr. Todd watched helplessly as new cases continued to appear. Zach Beardsley was the ninth child diagnosed with childhood leukemia. Zach’s mother, Tammi Beardsley, was shocked when she heard the news:

“When I heard I was number nine in a cancer cluster, at that time my child was so ill that all I could think about was how do I get out of this mess with a healthy child?”

The search for the common denominator continued. What did all these children share that might explain their illness? Tammi Beardsley opened her house to scientific investigators to help augment the investigation:

“There was a team of people that came into our home and vacuumed, took dust samples, air quality samples, water samples, biological testing, blood tests.”

But these tests were inconclusive. Perhaps the problem was not in the children’s homes but in the surrounding environment. Was there something unique about Fallon that could explain why a cancer cluster appeared there? According to Dr. Todd, researchers began with the water:

“The one thing that makes this community sort of stand out is that they have one of the highest rates of naturally occurring arsenic in their water supply of any place in the nation.”

Researchers also found mercury in a nearby lake and several canals—places where children were known to play. There were other possibilities, as well. Pesticides had contaminated nearby farms and underground atomic testing during the sixties had left traces of radiation. But according to Dr. Todd, scientists failed to link any of these factors to the cancer cluster:

“Working on this really is like trying to do a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. What we can say, is that we likely will not have the complete puzzle put together at the end of this investigation.”

There was one other possibility. Fallon is located ten miles from a naval air station used to train fighter pilots. According to Dr. Todd, the jet fuel contains benzene, which is known to cause cancer:

“There is a pipeline which transports jet fuel. The pipe comes right through and underneath Fallon and winds up at the Fallon Naval Air Station. We wondered, was there fuel getting into the water supply? But we didn’t find any evidence that the water had been contaminated with jet fuel.”

While authorities searched for answers, the parents of the children tried to remain optimistic. After two years of intensive chemotherapy, Dustin Gross celebrated his “end of treatment” party. According to his mother, Brenda, her son’s cancer was finally in remission:

“I am worried for my family and my other children, and for Dustin still. I will never give up on pushing the research to find what has caused childhood leukemia in a cluster in this community. Obviously continued research is going to get us closer and closer. And I feel that we will find it, but we cannot let up.”

A total of 16 children developed leukemia in a span of five years. Experts now believe that ground deposits of cobalt and tungsten may have caused the outbreak in Fallon.

External Link: The Nevada Department of Health

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season twelve with Robert Stack and in season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Do some mothers have a telepathic or psychic link to their children?

CASE DETAILS

January of 1974 was a blur of diapers and dishes for Carolyn Hebert, a mother of two. But she will remember one day, in particular, for the rest of her life:

“It was in the evening. I was in the kitchen doing dishes. My husband was down the hallway reading the newspaper. My daughter, Monica, was doing her homework. And Sarah, our little baby, was playing with her toys. And you know, your mind is not really usually very far away from your children. You think about them. This night, I was thinking about Sarah, and suddenly, I had a feeling that there was something wrong. It was a very focused feeling. And in my mind, I saw that she was choking on something. I didn’t know what.”

Carolyn says that she sensed her eight-month-old daughter silently choking on a balloon:

“You think about the ‘what ifs’. What if I hadn’t listened and just thought, well, I’ll go in a few minutes? But this was not that sort of a feeling. This was, ‘get there. You’re needed.’”

Call it mother’s instinct. Call it ESP. Call it simply the power of love. Accounts of extraordinary intuition of mothers have been handed down for generations. Such a bond seems to defy the limits of time and space, and while it may never be scientifically proven, it is far too compelling to be denied.

In 1983, business had taken Elaine Emmi and a neighbor, Sharon Krakker, to Palm Springs, 110 miles from their homes in Los Angeles. They were just sitting down to eat when Elaine was seized by an overwhelming sense of dread about her four-year-old son:

“It was like being hit by a wave. It was a very powerful feeling, both emotionally and physically… I knew something was wrong with Matt immediately. And it wasn’t just a foreboding. Sometimes people get a strange sense that something’s not right. It wasn’t like that. It was a very definite feeling, something that you couldn’t just shrug off.”

Elaine immediately called home, but there was no answer. Convinced that something terrible had happened, she phoned Sharon’s husband, Tom. Tom hadn’t heard from Elaine’s husband or seen anything unusual at their house just across the street. According to Sharon, Elaine began to panic:

“She wasn’t what I would consider out of control, but just her mannerisms gave me the impression that she was very concerned and knew that there was something very wrong. So I said, ‘Why don’t we just have lunch?’ She said, ‘No. There’s something wrong. We need to go home.’ And that’s what we did.”

Twice during the trip back to Los Angeles, Elaine stopped to call home. Still no one answered. It was the longest three hours of her life. When she and Sharon finally arrived home, Sharon’s husband had stunning news—Matt was in the hospital and being prepped for surgery to reattach severed tendons in his arm. Matt had fallen and crashed through a plate-glass door at the very moment the sense of dread had swept over Elaine:

“I was feeling what Matt was going through. No doubt about it. I don’t think I ever questioned that. I’m not sure why I was able to feel that. But I know, without any doubt, what I was feeling and what I was experiencing.”

Elaine and her son had been separated by more than 100 miles. But it was as if she had seen the accident with her own eyes. Dr. Thomas Verny had a theory for why Elaine’s bond with her son was so intense:

“I think this connection starts in the womb. I think, even in the womb, some children and some mothers are more connected than others, and if they are really connected, of course, then it will continue for the rest of their lives.”

If Elaine Emmi does have a psychic bond with her son, it seems logical that it originated in the womb. However, many adoptive mothers, like Linda Babb, have also reported similar experiences:

“Simply the fact of having adopted a child doesn’t mean a woman’s divested of all her instincts. And I believe that women have instincts—a woman’s intuition, whatever you call it.”

In March of 1987, Linda Babb and her husband Dirk—already the parents of four—were looking to adopt for the second time. Linda said that at around that time, she had the most incredible dream:

“I saw a young woman. And she was in labor, a light-headed woman that was fair-complected. And I didn’t know who this person was, but I did see she was at the point of giving birth. And as she pushed, I saw the baby’s head crown and then be born. He had lots of dark hair on his head. I remember that, and he was dark-complected. And at the moment he was born and began to cry, I woke up from the dream. I felt startled because it was a very vivid and realistic dream. I had never had a dream so vivid. And I looked at my clock on my bedside table and it was 2:59 in the morning on March 8th. Six weeks later, we had a call from our adoption agency. We had applied to adopt. And they called and asked us if we would be interested in adopting a baby boy.”

At the agency, an adoption agent brought in the baby for Linda to see:

“He had beautiful golden-brown skin and a headful of dark hair. He looked very much like the infant in my dream. Then when she told me the baby had been born March 8th at 2:59 in the morning, I was stunned. For a moment, I was just speechless. I turned to Dirk and said, ‘That’s the same time and date of that dream I had.’”

Taken at face value, these three stories—and countless others like them—point to an apparent telepathic link between certain mothers and their children. While such a connection may never be fully explained, if you someday get the prickly feeling that your child is in danger, it might not hurt just to wander over and take a look.

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season six with Robert Stack and in season six with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.

Does a meteorite found in the Antarctic hold evidence of life on Mars?

CASE DETAILS

Deep Space is the last great frontier. Each new image captured by telescopes brings up the age-old question: Is there life somewhere else in the universe?

Some imagined the answer would come from a spaceship carrying aliens from a faraway civilization. But, in fact, the truth might be hidden in this ordinary-looking piece of meteorite known as Rock #84-001. It came from the planet Mars and traveled millions of miles over millions of years until it slammed into Earth. Richard Berendzen, professor of astronomy at American University, says it may forever change the way we view the universe:

“This meteorite, if it should prove true, would be literally one of the turning points, one of the defining epochs in all of human exploration and discovery. I think it’d be almost an icon for the twentieth century.”

Kathie Thomas-Keprta is a planetary geologist with Lockheed Martin;

“It still shocks me that we have found what we’ve found, and we’re able to present it. I would have never dreamed anything like this in a million years.”

Some scientists theorized that the seeds for life on Earth were planted by microorganisms from Mars. Ironically, what may prove to be the most remarkable discovery in the history of mankind began with a completely unremarkable event. In December of 1984, Dr. Robert Score was among a team of American scientists on a geological expedition searching for meteorites in Antarctica. Dr. Score picked up the rock now known as #84-001. It weighed only 4.2 pounds and was the size of a large potato. No one paid much attention to it. For eight years, it sat on a shelf gathering dust. Donald W. Goldsmith is the author of “The Hunt For Life On Mars”:

“This meteorite was essentially misclassified, or not very carefully classified, as an ordinary Earth meteorite. And only later, when a geologist named David Middlefeld looked at it more carefully, did he realize, no, this is characteristic of a Martian meteorite. It has just the precise ratio of certain isotopes that make it clear that it came from Mars.”

As it turned out, 84-001 was only the 12th Martian meteorite ever found. It is 4.5 billion years old, almost as old as our solar system, and existed at least one billion years before life on Earth began. A team of NASA scientists finally analyzed the rock. Deep within, were what appeared to be signs of life: the fossilized remains of dozens of incredibly tiny microorganisms. Dr. Everett K. Gibson is senior planetary scientist with NASA:

“It’s not a smoking gun, as we said in our paper. We have not found proof of living biogenic activity in this Martian sample. But we have a trail of evidence.”

For a scientist, “a trail of evidence” is like a map to buried treasure. However, this map goes back in time as well as taking us to a different place. It suggests a remarkable journey that began on Mars, four and a half billion years ago, when our solar system was just taking shape. At the same time that #84-001 was being formed, Mars was being bombarded by a catastrophic meteor storm. Its surface was left covered with craters and crevices. Dr. Everett K. Gibson:

“Early in the history of Mars, we feel it was warmer and it was wetter. There was an abundance of water on the surface of the planet. The atmosphere was more dense, liquid water moved across the surface of the planet, it also percolated down through the cracks.”

Over the next 500 million years, chemical reactions in this “primeval soup” apparently produced a primitive life form. As the water evaporated, the microscopic life forms were enclosed in rock and became fossilized. According to Everett Gibson, one such rock may have been #84-001:

“Then it sat on the surface of the planet for a period of time, up until 16 million years ago, when a large meteorite, or comet possibly, slammed into the surface of Mars, with enough energy that it caused it to be lifted off the surface of Mars and escaped the gravitational field of the planet. It traveled through space for 16 million years, and 13,000 years ago, fell on the ice fields of the Antarctic. It lay on the ice fields until in 1984, Robbie Score picked it up, and the rest is history.”

While the organisms in #84-001 were fossilized, it’s quite possible that other meteorites carried living organisms all the way to Earth. These organisms could have been the source of all life on our planet. Author Donald Goldsmith says that the origin of the human race may, in fact, be Mars:

“There’s no doubt that life could have originated on Mars and come to Earth billions of years ago. This kind of process, where something hits Mars and knocks pieces loose, it’s just as possible more or less that life could have originated on Earth, and gone to Mars.”

The possibilities are enough to excite even the most skeptical scientist. But they warn that #84-001 is not definitive proof of life on Mars. Richard Berendzen says a follow up mission is needed:

“What we really need to do is to send a sample return mission, dig up Martian soil, dig up a rock, ideally from a meter or two beneath the soil, bring it back, chemically analyze it in a pristine lab, find a cell, it’s done.”

On December 4th, 1996, the unmanned Pathfinder spacecraft took off for Mars. During its nine month visit to the “Red Planet”, Pathfinder collected more than 17,000 images and performed more than a dozen chemical studies of rocks, soil and weather data. But to look for signs of life, says David McKay, we’ll have to dig:

“We’re really intrigued by the possibility that life may still exist on Mars. And if it does exist, it almost has to exist underneath the surface.”

Geologist Dr. Robert C. Anderson with JPL:

“Now that doesn’t mean little green men or UFOs, or anything like that. But it does mean that scientists really do believe that life does exist in other places, and we just have to find it.”

NASA scientist Everett Gibson:

“I never dreamed that I would have the opportunity to work on a problem of this magnitude. This is a tremendous awakening to mankind that, hey, we might not be alone in this vast universe in which we reside. Perhaps there are people out there on these other bodies that are also searching for life.”

During its Phoenix Mission in 2008, NASA landed a robotic spacecraft on the surface of the planet and tested for traces of water in the soil and atmosphere. Scientists still hope to get one step closer to answering the age-old question: Are we alone or is there any other life out there?

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Watch this case now on Amazon Prime in season five with Dennis Farina. Also available on YouTube with Dennis Farina. Various seasons available now on Hulu.