In Serpico, Al Pacino plays the part of an honest cop who is trying to cope with the rampant and widespread corruption of his colleagues in the New York Police force.

It’s a confronting and tense drama – one that saw Pacino nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1974 [1].

What it isn’t, however, is the sort of movie in which you expect to encounter a fairytale; and yet, in a scene in which Serpico and his girlfriend, Laurie, are talking about his dilemma, the following story is told:

On the surface, the "Story of the Wise King" is simply another way of expressing the phrase, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them.’ In the movie, Serpico struggles to maintain his ideals in the face of growing hostility and mistrust from the very people on whom his life depends – the other cops in his precinct. Laurie, his girlfriend, suggests that maybe it’s time to think of his own safety first – drink from the well, join his colleagues in their corruption. Then his safety would no longer be at risk from them.

But there’s a more nuanced observation in this fairytale. In the story, the poisoned people think the King is mad, even though he is the only one who hasn’t drunk from the well. By drinking from the well, the concept of what is ‘normal’ has changed for the people, and now as far as they can tell, it’s the King who is insane, because he is no longer like them.

In the movie, Serpico’s colleagues have drunk from the poisoned well of corruption. From their perspective, Serpico is the villain. He threatens their sense that, ‘we aren’t really hurting anybody by stealing money from bad people.’ He also threatens their safety – if he refuses to take dirty money, then maybe he will testify against them. He refuses to drink from the well, challenging their idea of what’s ‘normal’, and as a result he’s the bad guy.

Of course, the audience understands the story differently – we see Serpico struggle to maintain his honesty and integrity, we see him attempt multiple times to do something about the corruption surrounding him; and, as the story unfolds, we see the consequences of his decisions.

In the end, unlike the Wise King, Serpico chooses not to drink from the well. He doesn’t regain his reason by joining his colleagues in their corruption, and unlike the fairytale, there is no rejoicing and no happy ending.

Footnotes:

1.	He lost to Jack Lemmon in “Save The Tiger”.
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According to the article, legends have circulated in the area for almost 120 years that somewhere in the Supersitions the location of an incredibly rich gold mine has been lost. The legend says that the last person to know the exact location of the mine was a Dutch immigrant, who left clues to its whereabouts to 3 people on his deathbed. Since then, according to George E Johnston of the Supersition Mountain Museum, people have come from all over the world to search for the mine.

Sadly, it appears that an obsession with this legend may well have led 3 adventurers to their deaths…

For the article: 3 hikers on treasure hunt in Superstition Mountains feared dead, The Arizona Republic

Footnotes:

1.	Probably one the most aptly named mountain ranges in the world for this story.
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Historically accurate or otherwise, it would be madness to deny the impact the Arthurian Legends have had on folklore and literature throughout the UK and Europe and other parts of the globe.

So, I thought you might be interested to discover that some historians believe that they may have discovered Arthur’s legendary ‘Round Table’ — except, that it’s not a table…

But rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

For the whole article, vist: Historians locate King Arthur’s Round Table, Daily Telegraph

According to an article on the NationalReviewOnline site, authorities in the UK have tied World Cup matches to an approximate (and appalling!) 30% rise in domestic violence in the UK.

However, the article explains that all is not as it might seem with this statistic, or the public awareness campaign that accompanied it. It also explores a similar possible legend surrounding the popular belief that domestic violence skyrockets in the US during Super Bowl Sunday.

For more from the article: The World Cup Abuse Nightmare, NationalReviewOnline.

If you are concerned about domestic violence in your situation, please do a search for local resources that can help you. There are also many online communities you can reach out to for support and advice.

Aside from making me very thankful that I have never had to spend a night on an island like Shutter Island, the movie got me thinking about why islands feature heavily in scary stories.

What is it about islands that makes scaring the pants off people such an easy task?

Far away from anywhere familiar…

To begin with, scary stories are usually about isolation.

This isolation isn’t always necessarily physical – at times it can be emotional or psychological – but in most scary stories the main characters are cut off from the ‘normal’ world in some way.

Perhaps they work late at night in a spooky building when everyone else has gone home; or perhaps they took a wrong turn down a country road and they are now far away from anywhere familiar. Regardless of exactly how the story delivers the characters into the scary situation, one of the basic rules of many scary stories is that the characters must be cut off from the world they understand.

Islands, then, are a perfect setting for a sense of isolation. What could be more isolated than being physically broken off from the ‘normal’ world by savage and dangerous seas? Being stuck on an island means that any real escape is much more difficult, if not entirely impossible – and so the characters must make a stand against the menace that is threatening them.

The only rule is that there are no rules…

Another common element of scary stories is that the ‘rules’ are changed. The characters can’t expect to be able to solve problems in simple, ‘normal’ ways. They must cope – or, in stories where characters are killed one-by-one, fail to cope – with the fact that they can’t rely on familiar mechanisms to save them.

In scary stories set on an island, it’s very easy to change the rules. All you really need is a very bad storm, and suddenly an isolated setting is entirely cut off from the outside world.

When the bad storm hits the island, the phone lines are down, the seas are too dangerous to navigate, the power generators have been destroyed, help can’t reach you for hours or perhaps even days. You are stuck on the island and there is simply no hope of rescue.

The rules of the ‘normal’ world no longer apply, and you must now fight for your very survival [1].

Like the back of his murderous hand…

And a final element that makes scary stories set on islands even scarier is the fact that the bad guy often knows the island much better than the main characters.

Because an island represents a limited landscape, the bad guy can move from place to place with relative ease. He knows exactly what to do to eliminate any remaining remote chance of escape or rescue [2]. He knows when to attack, and where to hide when the tables are turned. He can fade like a ghost into the forest, and he can make his way into locked rooms through secret tunnels and passages that everyone else has forgotten about.

For most of the story he is seemingly invincible, and the island almost seems to conspire with him to eliminate the characters, one-by-one.

Back on dry land…

For all that islands often represent a menacing locality in books, television series and movies, the comforting reality is that very few psychos have gone about murdering entire island communities during very bad storms.

In fact, after trolling for a couple of hours through newspaper databases, I haven’t been able to find a single reference to a situation that seems anything like the standard ‘remote island, bad storm, psycho gets stabby with everyone,’ plot.

When you think about it, that’s probably a good thing, because something like that would be hell on tourism.

That isn’t to say that there have never been any disquieting mysteries relating to islands. If you’d like to explore the topic further, you might like to read about the entire colony that vanished from Roanoke Island, North Carolina, somewhere between 1587 and 1590, or perhaps about the mystery of what, exactly, is buried on Oak Island, Nova Scotia.

Footnotes:

1.	In fact, the plot device of ‘the very bad storm is on its way’ is so common in scary stories that if I lived on an island, I think I’d be pushing my boat into the water and heading for the mainland on any days when it was even just slightly cloudy…
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2.	The two-way radio is destroyed, the boats in the harbour are sunk, the lighthouse has been disabled.
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Urban Legends are fascinating things – they can spread across the globe like wildfire, or they can occupy a small but important place in the culture of a local community.

At Drury University in Springfield, Missouri, there’s a story that is told to explain why the University cancelled its football program many years ago.

According to Dr Bill Garvin, a popular version goes something like this:

A persistent “campus legend” here at Drury is that Drury’s football program was canceled after a student was killed playing in a game.  One common variation of the story is that a rich alumnus was so horrified by the death of the student that she gave a million dollars to the college on the condition that Drury’s football program would be shut down.

There is something oddly charming to me in this tale. Yes, at it’s core, there’s the sad death of a young man, but there’s also the sense of an unofficial tradition of passing the story from one year to the next, until it has very probably outlived anyone who was alive at the time the tale is thought to have taken place.

Dr Bill Garvin again:

Like many urban legends, this campus legend does have a grain of truth to it. A Drury student was killed playing football in 1899. It would be decades, however, before Drury’s football team would be disbanded, and by that time the death of John C. Allen would be a faint memory.

Urban Legends often grow to fill a void, as though the collective conscious demands, even hungers for an explanation; any explanation. Of course, the truth is often much less stranger than fiction.

Dr Bill Garvin:

Campus legend to the contrary, the death of John Allen had no effect on the football program at Drury. The sport wasn’t dropped until 33 years later, after the 1932 season, when the hardships brought on by the Great Depression made it increasingly difficult for Drury College to field and fund a winning team.

I’m sure almost every institute of education has its own ecosystem of extraordinary explanations — if you happen on this post and you’d like to share a similar tale from your own days at university or college, please feel free to do so in the comments below!

Link to Dr Bill Garvin’s article: Reflections from the Past

Linkage: Murray’s Google Buzz Profile

Footnotes:

1.	Despite my inexcusable neglect of it over recent months! Seriously, it amazes me that anyone still visits…
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You might not, however, immediately think of dentists.

And yet, according to a popular piece of ‘common knowledge’, dentists apparently suffer a suicide rate several times higher than any other profession, making dentistry one of the most dangerous professions out there, and not just because you spend all day with your hands in the mouths of people with questionable oral hygiene.

But is there any truth to it?

To get to the root of this particular urban legend, I turned to the wonderful pages of Cecil Adam’s Straight Dope column.

Cecil looked at this legend back in 2001, and his research indicated that dentists actually are likely to commit suicide at a rate slightly higher than the general population, however medical doctors reportedly had a higher suicide rate than dentists. Neither profession, however, was several times higher than the general suicide rate.

In all fairness, it’s difficult to be 100% accurate about comparative suicide rates. There is no central reporting and statistical analysis body responsible for maintaining these statistics, and not every person who sadly takes his or her own life will have his or her profession reported. But at least we can say that of the stats available, there isn’t some bizarre upward jump in suicide rates among dentists.

Interestingly enough, I’ve personally heard this same claim made about Air Traffic Controllers and Teachers, and the simple fact that there are multiple versions of this story floating around should give us enough reason to be at least cautious about its credibility.

Linkage: The Straight Dope – Do dentists have the highest suicide rate?

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Have you heard this story? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Footnotes:

1.	Obviously I’m not being completely serious here. After all, what’s dangerous about being an astronaut?
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It came as no surprise, then, that a quick Google search this morning for "Air France 447 Bermuda Triangle" turned up a number of hits, including some from reputable news sources.

Of course, many of these posts and articles are simply drawing a comparison between the mystery of Air France 447′s crash and other famous aircraft losses, including those that happened within the region of the Atlantic Ocean known to us today as the Bermuda Triangle [1].

But there are other sites drawing more than a casual connection between the tragedy of Air France 447 and the shadowy forces some believe to be behind the Triangle’s history of loss and disaster.

Which left me wondering — is there anything really to the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle?

Sunny Days, Calm Seas, Storms From Nowhere

I didn’t really give it any thought at the time, but I actually lived within the boundaries of the Bermuda Triangle for a few months not too many years ago. I spent most of that time on various islands within the Bahamas, and my experience of the region was one of long sunny days, crystal blue waters, and sudden tropical storms that made me fear for my life.

During my time in the Bermuda Triangle I caught flights on large and small planes, and took trips on boats. I never felt at any risk, nor did I feel that the people who lived on these island paradises or who flocked to them for holidays were at all concerned about a mysterious and perhaps sinister threat to their safety.

Perhaps this was simply a matter of ‘out of sight, out of mind,’ but the life I lived and observed within the Bermuda Triangle was much the same as any other part of the world in which I have lived or visited.

Let’s Call It The Bermuda Polygon. No, Wait…

Most people probably don’t realise that the concept of something out of the ordinary taking place in an area of the Atlantic Ocean — defined by connecting Miami, Florida with the islands of Bermuda and Puerto Rico — is only a little more than 50 years old.

In fact, it wasn’t until 1964 that the name of "The Bermuda Triangle" was first attached to this region, and it wouldn’t be until the 1970s — the decade in which an interest in the paranormal became truly fashionable — that it gained real popularity as a topic for authors focussing on the supernatural and the bizarre.

Since then, an amazing number of theories have been spawned to explain historical disappearances and tragedies in the region. Official accounts have been fictionalised, transcripts have been modified, and in many cases the fictional accounts have themselves come to be considered the authentic versions through repetition in many different sources.

The most popular ‘The Truth Is Out There’ explanation for tragedies within the Bermuda Triangle is, of course, that it is the site of hostile UFO activity. Others have suggested instead that the ‘lost’ civilisation of Atlantis [2] can be found beneath the waves of the Caribbean, or that remnants of their advanced technology, protecting a race that died thousands of years ago, is to blame.

Others of a more skeptical bent have attempted to explain Triangle phenomena through combinations of rare natural events or as a result of pure human error, or both.

Here There Be Dragons. Also, Occasionally Mermaids.

Despite it’s reputation, The Bermuda Triangle is by no means exclusive in being the site of maritime and aviation mysteries.

From the mysterious fate of Amelia Earhart in 1937, to the wildly fictionalised account of the abandoned Mary Celeste in 1872 [3], history brims with strange and unexplained incidents in the air and on the sea.

One chilling example, which matches anything reported out of the Bermuda Triangle, was the mysterious disappearance of Frederick Valentich while piloting a Cessna 182 on a routine flight across Australia’s Bass Straight on October 21, 1978.

According to transcripts from Valentich’s communications with air traffic control in Melbourne, he encountered a strange aircraft at approximately 7:06pm that evening. From his questions to traffic control, it’s obvious that Valentich initially thought he had experienced a close call with another, larger passenger aircraft. Melbourne Air Traffic Control, however, was unaware of any other aircraft in his immediate vicinity. A few minutes later, Valentich speculated about whether the craft was of military origin. And what followed was a conversation in which Valentich described the aircraft playing a cat-and-mouse game with him, buzzing his plane, hovering above, accelerating away at incredible speeds, until at approximately 7:12pm, 6 minutes after Valentich first reported his concern, all communication ceased.

Frederick Valentich was never seen again, and no wreckage from his plane was ever discovered.

The Truth Is In These Files?

One of the most interesting developments in recent years to those who follow UFO sightings and conspiracy theories was the decision by the UK Ministry Of Defence (MoD) to release its so-called ‘X-Files’ in a series of batches.

Last year, in 2008, the MoD released two batches of files, containing reports of, and investigations into, UFO sightings and experiences across the United Kingdom.

While these don’t appear to contain content relating to the Bermuda Triangle, they do represent an insider look at a government’s approach and response to the unexplained.

An accompanying article by Nick Pope on the X-Journals web site, explains what it was like to work on these files.

For 3 years Nick Pope headed up the MoD’s department charged with investigating UFOs, and he describes a day-to-day reality far removed from the glamorous dangers and intrigue of Fox Mulder and Dana Sculley.

In fact, it’s obvious in Pope’s article that the expense and manpower required to serve the general public’s interest in UFOs far outweighed the budget available to investigate the vast majority of sightings. You can sense his frustration that many reported sightings were dealt with by form letters, since the department simply couldn’t afford to open investigative cases on them. This is not to say that major events were overlooked, but in this case it does appear that fiction was far stranger than reality, rather than the other way around.

Having said which, I personally found it fascinating to realise that regardless of the explanation (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) of these phenomena, there were and perhaps still are people in positions of responsibility for investigating UFO sightings who consider them a potential face-value threat to public safety…

Everything Looks Strange, Even The Ocean

Of all the mysteries attributed to the Bermuda Triangle, the story of Flight 19 — and the lesser known story of PBM-5 BuNo 59225, which disappeared the same day while searching for the stricken pilots of Flight 19 — still makes my skin prickle with disquiet.

I’m a skeptic, and I have had a lifelong interest in the normal explanations of seemingly extraordinary things. My belief is that we may never know what truly happened with many unexplained events, but that often we believe things because we never truly choose to go looking for real explanations. It’s often easier, more interesting, and more self-validating to simply believe the strange and bizarre.

Despite this, I can’t help wondering what really happened to Flight 19 that day in December, 1945. Combined with the crew of 13 on PBM-5 BuNo 59225, which was part of the search for the Flight, 27 people disappeared without a trace that day.

27 people who left behind friends, colleagues, loved ones and a mystery that will probably never be solved.

Still, it’s worth remembering that while the known events of December 5, 1945, are strange enough, this hasn’t stopped authors from peppering official accounts of Flight 19’s disappearance with alarming details of their own, as with the claim that Flight Leader Taylor’s final communication was: "We are entering white water, nothing seems right. We don’t know where we are, the water is green, no white."

Back On Dry Land

Despite the mystery of Flight 19, and other disappearances within the area of The Bermuda Triangle, there’s a piece of ordinary, everyday information that tells a different story about that infamous stretch of ocean.

You might not expect to turn to an insurance company to debunk a persistent story of frequent alien abductions or ancient underwater technology, but in the case of The Bermuda Triangle, this is perhaps the best place to look for a rational point of view.

Quoted in an Independent article from 21 December, 1997, Norman Hooke — a spokesperson for Lloyd’s Maritime Insurance company — explained that Lloyd’s charges no more for maritime vessels charting through The Bermuda Triangle than through other stretches of ocean.

Statistically speaking, vessels passing through the Bermuda Triangle are at no greater risk of mishap than when sailing elsewhere.

Does this close the case on The Bermuda Triangle as a place of undying mystery?

For me, despite the strange tale of Flight 19, I think it does. At least, I believe it puts the stories of the strange and unexpected from that region into a broader perspective: mysteries happen everywhere, and sometimes explanations will never be known. The Bermuda Triangle has been a lucrative industry for authors who write about tales of mystery and imagination, but real-world evidence suggests that it’s just a stretch of ocean, much like any other; albeit one that has definitely had it’s fair share of unexplained tragedies.

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We may never know what happened to Air France 447 to cause it to crash. Perhaps it will join the ranks of mysteries that will haunt and challenge professional and amateur investigators and theorists for years to come. While some people are suggesting bizarre and paranormal explanations for its loss, air crash investigators being reported in the press are almost universally talking in terms of the plane and / or crew experiencing a series of contributing events, currently unknown but not theoretically unexplainable, that led to this tragic disaster.

If anything, the loss of Air France 447 should serve as a reminder that for all the technology we have available, there are still large holes in what we can know and learn when disaster strikes.

Footnotes:

1.	Or, even more chillingly, as the Devil’s Triangle!
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2.	I say ‘lost’, because of course no-one has established to date that Atlantis in any form ever truly existed.
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3.	Here’s a piece of trivia for you — the legend of the Mary Celeste and the mystery surrounding the disappearance of its crew owes a huge debt to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, best known for his many stories featuring the private detective, Sherlock Holmes. In 1884, Conan Doyle published a story called "J. Habakuk Jephson’s Statement", in which he drew heavily from the known accounts of the Mary Celeste, but in which he also added many of the details — including the warm, uneaten meals, the freshly brewed coffee, the unruffled cat etc — that most people now accept as being part of the true, known facts of the state in which the vessel was discovered when found floating abandoned in the Atlantic Ocean.
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