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March 29, 2024, 07:32:58 AM
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Badmovies.org Forum  |  Movies  |  Bad Movies  |  OT: Spontaneous combustion « previous next »
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Author Topic: OT: Spontaneous combustion  (Read 7811 times)
peter johnson
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« Reply #15 on: April 29, 2005, 08:17:30 PM »

Or, as Charles Lamb posited, burn down an entire house in order to produce the perfect roast Suckling Pig --
I'm really glad ulthar is involved in the discussion here, because he's investigated real arson & real fires -- as he says, there is an "unknown" category on the forms, but they work very hard not to use it -- as should be so.
When ulthar points out that even very high temperature crematoria do not reduce bodies to ash, this is making my point:  In the cases wherein SHC is suggested, very frequently the entire body has been reduced to ash, with none of the accompanying bone chunks produced by regular cremation.  Or, stranger still, there will be all ash, along with an untouched leg or arm, or a skull shrunken to baseball size with nothing else but ash.
My point would be that what is looked upon as SHC by Fortean investigators & the like is some very very peculiar stuff, and, no, you don't get the same results by even immersing a body in a barrel of gin & then igniting it.
Rationalist explanations of SHC may neutralise discussion, but they do not account for all the known data.
The point is well taken about "the supernatural" being invoked, which is why Fortean philosophy gives a good model for approaching things like the appearance of The Virgin Mary, UFOs, Crop Circles, and SHC.  The model is first of all to recognize that there is some peculiar stuff going on in the world, then to accept every possible explanation as being possibly true.  Then by looking for the explanation that covers the most data on the given phenomena one can approach a model of truth.
Richard Dawkins -- an atheist scientist, the current scientific expert on Human Evolution, who mistrusts all and any supernatural claims -- posits a middle ground between the Paranormal/Supernatural and the strictly Scientific, which he terms the "Perinormal", meaning the phenomena orbits on the periphery of common knowledge & may at times take on the appearance of the Supernatural, because our current comprehension of the normal is insufficient to embrace said phenomena.  An example would be Meteors, which were observed by ignorant farmers to fall from the sky, but were rejected as coming from the sky by the most "scientific" minds of the time because it did not fall into the then current Scientific world model.
Ivory-billed Woodpeckers are extinct!  It is unscientific and ridiculous to believe otherwise!!  What?  Oops!!  Never mind . . .
I'm not emotionally invested in "proving" that SHC is ghostly, or caused by Elves, or anything else -- but what I do think is that the phenomena is genuinely odd & bizarre & deserving of high scrutiny by minds both scientific and prosaic.
peter johnson/denny crane
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odinn7
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« Reply #16 on: April 29, 2005, 09:33:06 PM »

Has anyone ever checked to see if these people that burst into flames may possibly live near or drink water from that pond in Germany that's causing the problem for the toads? Hmmm...a conspiracy is afoot.

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Writer
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« Reply #17 on: April 30, 2005, 03:17:31 AM »

Well, I've read some of the accounts myself, and what I can say for them is generally, you shouldn't trust either the skeptics or the believers on this one. The skeptics provide too-tidy explanations that fall apart on closer inspection, while believers are far too inclined to try probing for scientific explanations of what is, real or not, inherently unscientific. If there were a natural explanation, it would be repeatable and testable, as all real science (a.k.a. natural philosophy) is. If what we have here is a supernatural effect, then it is inherently untestable and humans cannot repeat it since the supernatural is not something we control.

I haven't seen any of these cases personally, so I can't speak for SHC specifically. I can say, however, that having experienced one thoroughly impossible and inexplicable event, I do firmly believe magic is real. While I've never heard of any specific spell for causing people to burn up, I do know that some murderous spells are a part of certain occultists' beliefs, so I think it entirely possible that SHC might be some extension of magic in general. Again, though, magic is neither testable nor repeatable, so people should not go looking for scientific explanations of it.

I seem to recall that the particular story in which Charles Dickens disposed of one of his characters with SHC was Bleak House. I'll have to go find a copy of that for myself to be sure, but something to keep in mind: as with Stephen King's Firestarter, it's fiction, and should not be taken as a genuine explanation of how the supernatural works.
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Mr_Vindictive
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« Reply #18 on: April 30, 2005, 09:02:41 AM »

As Writer said, Dicken's story about SHC was Bleak House but he attrubited it to alcohol as many did at that time.

Millions of college students have proven that theory wrong.

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trekgeezer
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« Reply #19 on: April 30, 2005, 02:45:20 PM »

Let's see, we find out what we think could actually be the cause of SC, so now how do we test our theory. I've never heard of any other animal spontaneously combusting so we'll need human volunteers.

Should we let them know what we are doing or just make up something? Hmmm, sounds like the makings of a B movie plot.

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And you thought Trek isn't cool.
Eirik
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« Reply #20 on: April 30, 2005, 05:50:30 PM »

"When ulthar points out that even very high temperature crematoria do not reduce bodies to ash, this is making my point: In the cases wherein SHC is suggested, very frequently the entire body has been reduced to ash, with none of the accompanying bone chunks produced by regular cremation."

I imagine Ulthar would put cases like this in the "Faked own death by burning some clothes and disappeared category."
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ulthar
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« Reply #21 on: April 30, 2005, 07:42:56 PM »

This is just speculation, as I have never actually done this experiment, but I imagine it MIGHT be possible to test the ash residue for 'human' remains.  Strictly speaking, ash is non-combustible material mostly comprised of inorganics (metal salts, for example).

But, I do know that we can test dirt/debris from around explosion scenes and find UNREACTED explosive; in no case is 100% of the explosive 'consumed.'  I've done chemical testing on enough fire debris samples to know that you find all kinds of stuff one might naively think would 'burn up' in the fire.

So, I would conjecture that in that kind of ash, it should be possible to test for organic residue, and POSSIBLE even pinpoint the residue to human.  I don't know that this has ever been tried in a SHC case, and of course our chemical testing technology has increased dramatically in the past twenty years.

It would be an interesting experiment.  I should do some reading to see if this sort of thing has been explored.

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peter johnson
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« Reply #22 on: April 30, 2005, 09:24:04 PM »

Point well-taken that Dickens was writing fiction --- However, all of his work was based upon things he knew of in his day, eg:  The ghosts in Christmas Carol.  It was a popular belief in 19th-Century England that the ghosts of the departed did watch over and care about the activities of the living.  The episode in Bleak House was based upon actual events reported in the newspapers of his day.
My point was that SHC isn't a "new" phenomena, but rather something that has been speculated about for quite some time.
Ulthar raises some interesting points, re. is the SHC residue confirmable as human.  Can some of the cases be instances of people faking their deaths & simply buggering off.  I don't know, but it's a damn good question.
And, yes, we really really DO need a B movie or 2 on this subject.  And frog falls.  And strange green children found emerging from caves . . . . etc. etc.
There is a lot of very odd stuff out there.
peter johnson/denny crane
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Eirik
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« Reply #23 on: May 02, 2005, 06:32:16 PM »

Why is it that after a week or so of intermittant internet research, every single case I find involves someone who was a chain smoker in loose-fitting pajamas or robes and who was described by friends as "careless" with their cigarettes and reportedly fell asleep while smoking a lot?  90% of them also mysteriously burned up while in their barcaloungers while the remaining 10% seem to have died while lying on linoleum (which is flammable).

You know how many people claim to have witnessed SHC during the entire span of human history?  Zero.  

None of this will sway those who want to believe - just thought I'd share what I learned.
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Mr_Vindictive
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« Reply #24 on: May 02, 2005, 06:33:42 PM »

One of the strange things about SHC is that a lot of the cases involve elderly people.  There are few cases of younger people having burst randomly into flames.

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odinn7
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« Reply #25 on: May 02, 2005, 06:37:01 PM »

Sometimes I get angry enough that I feel like I'm going to burst into flames...

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trekgeezer
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« Reply #26 on: May 02, 2005, 06:52:53 PM »

It is apparently a fact that no one has ever spontaineously combusted in front of witnesses.



Post Edited (05-03-05 07:46)
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And you thought Trek isn't cool.
Master Blaster
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« Reply #27 on: May 02, 2005, 06:54:33 PM »

Well of course not because then they'd learn the secret of the Alien heat ray there by unraveling the mystery of the exploding toads thereby exposing the Illuminati to the world!! Duh. : )
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Scott
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« Reply #28 on: May 03, 2005, 06:33:31 AM »

I use to play on a baseball team in the 70's that traveled to a town a couple times a year that claimed to be the first case of Human Spontaneous Combustion.  It is the town of  Cloudersport, Pa. It's the famous photo where you see a chair and part of a leg or something. Wouldn't that fire have to burn pretty hot to burn that body like that? How come the rest of the house didn't catch fire?

(The question may have been answered, but I didn't get a chance to read all the post. I just wanted to put my two cents in.)



Post Edited (05-03-05 07:21)
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Susan
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« Reply #29 on: May 03, 2005, 06:40:29 PM »

here's one possibly explanation for spontanious combustion:

Article

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