Tuesday, 11 August 2015

Gremlins

Many people, including me, enjoyed Joe Dante's 1984 comedy horror movie Gremlins. The creatures depicted therein are similar in form and nature to many reported real paranormal phenomena, but there is a real phenomenon that goes by the name "gremlins" which is in fact totally different. Real gremlins are a fairly recent addition to the file of the fantastic; in fact they were not reported until the invention of high-flying aircraft because they seem to come from a habitat of some considerable altitude up in the sky. This is strange because there are no known organisms that live permanently in the air, except some microbes and fungal spores etc. There are birds, bats and flying insects of course, but they all periodically come down to the ground. Gremlins are vaguely humanoid, but much smaller than a grown adult; often they're depicted as reptilian or covered in fur. Sometimes they're reported as having wings growing out of their shoulders. This is very interesting because winged humanoids are a recurring paranormal and mythological archetype; see background links below. During World War II when aviation suddenly became far more common for military reasons, gremlins were commonly reported by pilots; but there's an earlier tale that doesn't use the word "gremlin", but has a lot of similarities. It took place during the famous 1927 flight of Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic Ocean non-stop, the first time that had been achieved. He relates how a mysterious presence in the cockpit of his aircraft kept him awake and alert. Lindbergh was suffering from exhaustion and sleep-deprivation and so had more than one supernatural encounter on his famous flight; he also had an out-of-body experience. In most other stories the gremlins are far less helpful. They're prone to mischief, and can even be destructive. In fact they're said to close in on a passing aircraft and sabotage them. They tear pieces off the fuselage, fiddle with the engines, drain the fuel tanks, and sometimes invade the cabin and harass the crew. Some pilots have blamed air crashes on gremlin attacks. See: http://www.toonopedia.com/gremlins.htm. One of the episodes of The Twilight Zone- Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, is based on such an attack. It was more famously remade in 1983 for Twilight Zone- the Movie, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctHltBauGc8.

Roald Dahl and Walt Disney have both written stories about gremlins and in Dahl's novel James and the Giant Peach similar beings are depicted as "cloud men". These also control the weather. The sky is a strange and mystical place. Most people who take a journey on a high-flying aircraft marvel at the sight of the clouds below them and the sky, a darker blue than how it looks from the ground. Could something be living up there? If not a physical biological being, then something else. Could chemtrails be an attack on whatever it is? Or are gremlins simply a figment of our imagination caused by altitude sickness and tiredness? I'm not so sure, especially since modern aircraft are pressurized and heated and still people report them? Could it be an effect of radiation or some other problem associated with our brains when we're far higher in the atmosphere than we're supposed to be? Another supernatural experience that might be related to gremlin sightings happened to the actor Vincent Price. On November the 15th 1958 he was flying aboard an airliner above New York USA when he saw some words written on the surface of one of the clouds beneath the aircraft; the words were: "TYRONE POWER IS DEAD". Tyrone Power was a fellow actor and friend of Price. As it turned out Tyrone Power really was dead. He'd had a heart attack during Price's flight. In those days there were no seatback phones or internet consoles on passenger aircraft so there's no way Price could have known by conventional means. I've spoken before about lost or unknown worlds underground, for example see: http://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/caves-under-nottingham.html and: http://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/gilmerton-cove.html. Could there be another mysterious hidden realm in the opposite direction, above our heads? I'll be saying more about this in a future post.

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