The aircraft carrier USS Hornet sits at a pier in Alameda, right across the bay from San Francisco, open to the public as a museum. She fought at the Philippine Sea and Okinawa. Her crews shot down 1,410 Japanese aircraft. In July 1969 her deck is where Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped back onto a ship after the Moon. And over her 27 years of service, more than 300 men died aboard her, from combat, from accidents on the flight deck, and from the ship’s own grim record of suicides, said to be the highest in the Navy.
The people who work on her now will tell you she is not empty. Sailors in dungarees are seen walking passageways and are not there when you follow. Hatches that take two hands to open slam shut on their own. Tools go missing from locked compartments and turn up in the sick bay. Visitors feel a hand on their shoulder on the hangar deck and turn around to nobody. The ship’s own staff keep a log.
One story repeats more than any other. A docent locking up alone hears footsteps on the ladder below, calls out, gets no answer, and then hears a voice from the empty compartment say, calmly, “I’m still here.”
She is a 40,000 ton steel city that carried thousands of young men through the worst nights of their lives, and a few hundred never walked off. If anything can hold on to a place, it might be a ship. What do you think?
What do you think about this? In 1995 more than a thousand animals in Puerto Rico were found dead in six months, each with puncture wounds and no blood left. A witness described a four foot upright creature with spines and gray skin. Mangy dogs came later. What drained the goats?
What do you think about this? The wall at Sacsayhuamán above Cusco is built of stones up to 120 tons, cut with twelve angles and fitted so tight a sheet of paper will not slide in. The Inca told the Spanish an earlier people built it. Lost skill, or a civilization we have not named?
What do you think about this? Bernadette of Lourdes was buried in a damp vault in 1879. When the Church opened her coffin in 1909 her body was intact and her limbs still bent. Opened again in 1919 and 1925, same result. She lies in a glass case today. Dry crypt, or something else?
What do you think about this? In 1969 explorer Juan Moricz swore under oath that a cave in Ecuador’s jungle held thousands of stamped metal plates. In 1976 an expedition with Neil Armstrong went in and found pottery, not plates. Moricz died without giving the spot. Still down there?
What do you think about this? On October 11, 1973, two men fishing the Pascagoula River said three gray creatures with claws floated them into a craft. Deputies left them alone with a hidden recorder, expecting a confession. It caught them terrified and praying. Hoax, or the real thing?
What do you think about this? The Dropa Stones, 716 grooved stone discs said to be found in Chinese caves in 1938 beside small bodied skeletons, telling of a crash 12,000 years ago. The 1978 book that spread the story was admitted to be a hoax. Pure fiction, or a truth wrapped in lies?
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