News Following the Centrahoma Visit

 

 

"'Miracle' Awes Hindus Worldwide" is the headline of a September 23, 1995 article in the Los Angeles Times.  Some paragraphs provide examples of a perspective that anomalous occurrences (or 'miracles')—even those witnessed by numerous people—are simply to be dismissed without any investigation whatsoever.  Despite some denialist responses to the event reported 20 years ago, there are parallels with testimonials published in case studies of 'supernatural' or 'paranormal' phenomena, including 'talking poltergeist' hauntings experienced by the 19th Century Bell family of Tennessee and by the contemporary Bell/Mc Wethy family in Oklahoma.  Here is the newspaper article, which I read the month following my research expedition to Oklahoma.

'Miracle' Awes Hindus Worldwide

⚫ India: Many believe milk-drinking statues are an act of God.  Others accuse controversial guru of orchestrating hoax.

By John-Thor Dahlburg

Times Staff Writer

NEW DELHI—Indians by the millions rushed to see, and believed.

Rumors began spreading with astounding speed throughout India and Hindu communities from Nepal to Britain—and even Los Angeles—on Thursday that the statues of Hindu gods were drinking milk dispensed from spoons.

"God has come down to gauge us, to see how many followers He has and to serve a warning upon us that He exists," said Nagababa Ujjain Giri, chief priest at the Shiva Temple in the New Delhi neighborhood of Chanakyapuri.

In enormous throngs, Indians rushed to temples in New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and other cities to offer milk to statues of the elephant-headed Ganesha, the deity of good luck, and his parents, Shiva, the mighty god of creation and destruction, and Shiva's consort, Parvati.

Milk virtually disappeared from New Delhi shops by noon.  The local government increased the city's milk supply by 25,000 gallons as prices rose as much as fourfold.

The outpouring of faith cut across caste and education.  "At first, I did not believe it.  But having come here and offered milk, I have no doubts left," a corporate executive, Parmesh Soti, told an Indian news agency in New Delhi.  "It cannot be a hoax.  Where would all that milk being offered go?"

In neighboring Nepal, thousands of people thronged Hindu temples.  Even King Birendra, who is held to be an incarnation of the god Vishnu, turned out.  In London, a statue of Shiva's bull, Nandi, at a temple reportedly began to quaff milk.

Scientists dismissed the idea that anything supernatural was happening.  Hari Om Updhaya of the National Physical Laboratory toured a number of New Delhi temples and found that the pious were failing to notice the thin white film of milk trickling down the statues, which often are carved from white stone themselves or wreathed in flowers.

The craze subsided on Friday as quickly as it had erupted.  At Giri's temple in Chanakyapuri, thousands of people had dispensed 50 gallons of milk on Thursday to small white marble statues; by 8:30 a.m. Friday, another 50 people had come, but the numbers dwindled rapidly.

Religion and politics are often inextricably tangled in India, and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu nationalist group, seized upon the happenings as a miracle.  Meanwhile, Welfare Minister Sitaram Kesri from the ruling Congress (I) Party accused two right-wing Hindu groups of kindling the rumor to "produce a surge of religious fervor" that could be exploited in the next elections.

The Indian Rationalist Assn., formed in 1949 to combat superstition, came up with its own explanation.  After an investigation by its 18 state committees, it concluded Friday that the unnatural wonder had been the doing of a controversial and well-connected guru, Chandraswami, who is now being investigated by Indian police.

Between 2 and 4 a.m. Thursday, said Sanal Edamaruku, secretary general of the rationalist association, telephone calls had been made to main temples around the country to organize what would appear to be a spontaneous and widespread act of God.

It reached as far as the San Fernando Valley.  Hundreds of worshipers, lured by word of mouth, phone calls from India and reports on CNN, flocked to the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center in Chatsworth on Thursday to feed milk to a small stone statue of Ganesha.  Unlike in India, however, the phenomenon continued Friday in Chatsworth, and hundreds more visited the temple.

According to Edamaruku, "It was a well-connected network.  Where there were no communications, there was no miracle.

"What [Chandraswami] is trying to do is make believe that, if he is interrogated or questioned, miracles will happen," he said.

On Sept. 15, the guru was arrested for alleged connections to organized crime.  He has been linked by an arrested gangster to the chief suspect in a series of bombings that rocked Bombay in March, 1993.

"I had invoked Lord Ganesha yesterday," Chandraswami told reporters after stories of the drinking statues began sweeping India.  "This is only the beginning of godly miracles."

Correspondent Nicholas Riccardi in Chatsworth contributed to this report.

More information about the 1995 'milk miracle' event may be found on You Tube and in articles linked to a Google search.

The following excerpt is from An Authenticated History of the Bell Witch (1894) by M. V. Ingram.

Mrs. Betsy Sugg called one morning to pay Mrs. Lucy Bell a visit.  The subject of milk and butter came up, and Mrs. Bell spoke of her new dairy house and invited Mrs. Sugg out to show her how nicely it was arranged.  She had just finished straining and setting the milk for cream, locked the door and put the key in her pocket.  The milk was set in pewter basins, vessels then in common use for milk, with wooden covers. Mrs. Bell took the key from her pocket, unlocked and opened the door, and to her surprise and chagrin there was not a drop of milk there, and the basins were turned bottom up and the covers placed over them.

There is also an account of a Bell family slave seeing milk running out of a cup and vanishing.  The incident is mentioned in "The Bell Witch of Tennessee and Mississippi," an article based on oral tradition in northern Mississippi "where descendants of the original family concerned still live."  The article was published in The Journal of American Folk-Lore (January-March 1934).  As with so-called 'poltergeist' cases, seance room accounts encompass descriptions of materializations and dematerializations of objects and people from an ascended realm of existence.  

During my August 1995 interviews of the Bell / Mc Wethy family in Centrahoma, Oklahoma, Bill Mc Wethy described one of the many bizarre experiences witnessed by the family involving the unseen and enigmatic 'Michael.'

One particular time I remember him being with us was once when we were out riding around on a Sunday afternoon and we stopped at the country store in Tupelo.  All the kids wanted pop so I jokingly said to him, "Okay, what do you want?"  And he said, "GET ME A SPRITE."  So I got him one.  I brought it back.  I set it on the dashboard between the front seat and the back seat.  Then, I popped the top on it and set it on the seat there in back.  I could hear him slurping that pop down.  The first thing you know ("HM HM HM HM") there's that much of that pop gone.

After noticing synchronicities involving the word 'bell,' an article I read in October 1995 caught my attention.  Here is the article as published in the Los Angeles Times.

 

Scientist Finds What May Be World's Oldest Animal Fossil

 

October 21, 1995 / From Associated Press

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. — An American geologist has found what scientists said could be the world's oldest animal fossil, the outline of a jellyfish-like creature that lived on the sea floor up to 600 million years ago.

Mark McMenamin of Mt. Holyoke College made the discovery in March in the Mexican desert, about 100 miles south of Tucson.  He was hiking when he came across the fossils, etched in sandstone and shale lying exposed on the desert floor.

The fossil shows the two-inch-long form of a new species of Ediacaran biota, which are among the oldest creatures that can be considered animals, McMenamin said.  The fossil clearly shows a central bell, like on a jellyfish, with apparent tubes radiating outward.

Stephen Rowland, a geologist at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and a leader in the field, said: "If the age turns out to be anywhere near correct, animal life may have evolved earlier than we thought."

He said the findings may help shift the search for early animal life from Australia, Russia and Africa to the Americas.

Normally, scientists measure the radioactive decay of volcanic crystals to date a specimen.  But the fossil did not have such crystals, and McMenamin estimated its date by comparing it with similar rock formations of known age.

Most other Ediacaran fossils are believed to be no more than 580 million years old, though some from Canada may be as old as 600 million years, scientists said.

However, scientists cautioned that the practice used to date the newfound fossil is not as precise as the radioactive decay method.

The oldest discovered fossil of any kind is a 3.5 billion-year-old bacterium.