Nexus - 0225 - New Times Magazine-pages

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The Mystery of Spontaneous Human Combustion Human Every year, unexplained deaths by fire are reported in sufficient numbers to warrant further scientific investigation. Judging by the wild theories proposed, the cause of this phenomenon may be stranger than fiction. acqueline had just finished her cookery exam. It was a cold late January day in 1985 in Widness, England, and Jacqueline was seventeen. She left the room to-wait by the door for several minutes for two classmates to leave. They met and headed off through the building complex. A couple of minutes’ walking took them to some steps and as they descended in the company of other students, Jacqueline's back burst into flames. Her two horrified friends afterwards described how it appeared that a ball of light fell down her back and broke out into fire. The flames were doused and she was rushed to hospital, but she died fifteen days later. At the inquest, the government chemist theorised that she must have leaned against a cooking flame which caused her catering jacket to smoulder unnoticed. He suspected that when she entered the corridor outside and down the stairs, draughts in the building caused the jacket to burst out in flames. However, no witness to the fire saw any smouldering nor smelt any smoke until the moment of the fire. A report by the local fire brigade disagreed with the chemist's assessment. The press seized on this extraordinary incident and called it a case of Spontancous Human Combustion. The official report blamed the smouldering jacket and left unan- swered the question of how a healthy seventeen-year-old could burst into flames in the open, in broad daylight, with no obvious cause. The case attracted ongoing media interest. It also sparked the interest of Jenny Randles and Peter Hough in doing some first-hand research into the mystery of Spontaneous Human Combustion (SHC). That research came to fruition in 1992 with the publication of their book by the same name. I'm indebted to them for the opportunity to draw much material for this article from their book. The very notion of a human body bursting into flames spontaneously, i.c., without any obvious or outward means of combustion, is a strange one. It's hard to believe that it could happen. It just doesn't appear on the front pages of newspapers every day. Where is the evidence? ere are all the bodies that burst into flame periodically to make this phenomenon believable? It might surprise you to know that, according to Randles and Hough, anything up to 100 SHC events per year may happen in the United Kingdom alone. That makes one every three days! Fire statistics in the UK for 1989 show 901 deaths from fire. More than half of these were from accidental fires in dwellings caused by smokers' materials and match- es. The highest death rates occur in the under five-year-olds and over sixty-fives. Accidental fires in households and other occupied dwellings totalled 110,159. Of these, 2,589 remained "unspecified", which means there was not even circumstantial evidence to allocate a cause. The "unspecified" fires resulted in 90 deaths and 466 non-fatalities (Randles and Hough, p. 245). Multiply that figure of 90 unexplained deaths by approximately 50 (UK's population is around one fiftieth of the world's), and you get 4,500 cases per year. This figure must be taken as a rough guess, but nevertheless it shows how the occurrence of SHC, while small on a global scale, may be more common than we realise. by Richard Giles Richard Giles is a freelance researcher, writer and astrologer, as well as a valued NEXUS staffer. His book on UFO phenomena is soon to be published by Gateway Books, UK. CHARACTERISTICS OF SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION By far the most common description of death by fire in unusual circumstances fits into the following. The person's remains are usually found in a burnt-out chair or bed. The furniture on which they were sitting or lying is often totally consumed. Often only a small part of the body is found—sometimes part of an arm or the hands, or just the bottom half of one or both legs. There are sometimes pieces of internal organs—some ashed bones or carbonised liver or other organ. The head is sometimes still intact or may be NEXUS ¢ 55 APRIL - MAY 1995 by Richard Giles