CAN YOU TELL when someone is yanking your chain; that is, feeding you a plate of barbecued fibs? When it comes to the paranormal, because it is fantastic by nature, it is often difficult to tell fact from fiction. Is someone telling you about an incredible but true encounter… or is he spinning a tale from his imagination for who knows what reason?
Think you can tell the difference? Here is our little game of “guess the b.s.” Your task is to read the four stories below and on the following three pages. Three of the stories are true, according to our paranormal sources, but one of them has been completely manufactured by me. You must detect which is the false story and cast your vote accordingly, as you will be instructed.
Good luck!
STORY #1: THE TELEPORTING BOYS
There are several strange stories in the annals of the paranormal that relate instances of people who mysteriously travel great distances in impossibly short lengths of time. One intriguing case took place in the early 20th century and was published in a journal called Occult Review. The time is 1901 and the place is Bari, Italy, a medium-sized city on the Adriatic Sea. The people involved are two young boys, the seven- and eight-year-old sons of Mauro Pansini, an architect. Quite unexpectedly and inexplicably, the boys began to experience some bizarre travel habits.
“One day,” the article in Occult Review stated, “Alfredo and his brother were at Ruvo, at 9 a.m. and at 9:30 a.m., they were found in the Capuchin Convent, at Malfatti, thirty miles away.” According to a 1901 edition of the Annals of Psychic Science, the boys had arrived in a state of profound hypnosis.
Obviously, modes of transportation fast enough to have moved the boys in that space of time were not available to them, and their family was at a loss to explain how they made the trip. But that was not the only instance. Some time later, the boys quite suddenly and mysteriously appeared in a man’s boat in a Mediterranean harbor. The fisherman was astonished to see the Pansini boys “flop into his boat,” it was stated.
How and by what mechanism the boys were teleported is unknown. Did they together step into some kind of wormhole or interdimensional portal? If so, they made the paranormal trip without harm.
Next page: Story #2, Citizen Abduction
