Whatever happened to Sir Robert?

catsmate

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Whatever happened to Sir Robert?

In 1935 a 38 year old RAF Wing Commander, Robert Victor Goddard (usually Victor and he wasn't Knighted until 1946, but 'Sir Robert' sounded better) was solo piloting a Hawker Hart light bomber from Edinburgh to Andover. Shortly after passing over a disused and abandoned RAF station near Edinburgh he encountered a severe storm and then a "swirling vortex" somewhere over the Firth of Forth. After recovering he found himself passing over the same airfield, but now refurbished and obviously operational.

Goddard looked down and saw yellow-painted aircraft and what he described as a modern monoplane; neither of which were then in RAF service. The mechanics he could see were wearing blue coveralls instead of the RAF brown de rigeur in 1935. The formerly dilapidated buildings had been renovated and more had been constructed.

The implication of these apparent discrepancies is that Goddard had been propelled forward in time a number of years, to the early stages of World War 2; by 1939 the airfield (then Drem) would have been populated with the Hawker Harts (by now relegated to training duties) and Airspeed Oxford monoplanes of 13 Flying Training School.

Now in the real world the explanation for this is prosaic. Firstly the story doesn't make sense. 13FTS didn't operate the aircraft Goddard described, and certainly not painted yellow. There was no corroborating evidence, just Goddard’s account, first published after his retirement in 1951. He may have misremembered the year of the incident or aspects of what he saw on the ground at the time, though he was a trained military pilot.

It's likely that after the blind flying and violent maneuvering brought on by he storm, Goddard was seriously disorientated and ended up above a completely different airfield (Renfrew Aerodrome, home to the Scottish Flying Club is a good candidate); remember aerial navigation in the 1930s was primitive (dead reckoning, map and compass and landmarks). While Renfrew is more than 100km from Drem such a navigational error in a journey of approximately 700km in a bad storm is far from impossible, especially given the sudden storm.

Goddard is a fascinating character, who really fits well into fiction or gaming set in the 1935-1965 period. He was interested in the paranormal, wrote (his 1975 book Flight Towards Reality is his best known work) and spoke about it after retirement (and there's a hint that his beliefs may have caused his early retirement, at 54, in 1951) and coined the term "ufology". Was he pushed out due to his oddities? Or to run a Secret Government Project dealing with UFOs, aliens, time travellers and such matters.
  • As an aside in my Who gaming Goddard was the man behind 'Chunky' Gilmore and the ICMG. They occasionally meet over an excellent lunch in those of-so-comfortable armchairs of the Hourglass Club.
Or maybe Goddard used (knowingly or not) as a stalking horse? Did he publicise the story to see what would happen, and not just attract kooks but actual time travellers?
Especially after the film, The Night My Number Came Up, was released in 1955.

The "time displacement" incident (which is mentioned in numerous works on the paranormal, is only one of three odd incidents in Goddard's life.
The second occurred years before the supposed 'time displacement'. In 1919 an official RAF group photograph of his squadron was taken in early 1919 (the RAF having been formed only a year earlier), just after the Great War ended. The photograph portrayed some 200 men who'd survived the fighting. And one who didn't...

After the photo was developed, it's been placed on the squadron noticeboard so that those who wanted copies could sign up for them. However there was an extra face in the photograph; the grinning and hatless Airman Freddy Jackson, a mechanic who'd died by heedlessly walking into a spinning propeller two days before the squadron posed for
the photo and had been buried that day.

  • Alas there are no extant copies of this photograph. Obviously They suppressed it.

The third incident, obviously Goddard had the Weirdness Magnet disadvantage, is probably the best known as a film (the aforementioned The Night My Number Came Up, was made about it). The film is based on another strange incident that Goddard
experienced, this one in January 1946. Goddard arrived at a party in Shanghai and
overheard an officer talking of a dream in which he (Goddard) was killed in a plane crash; in the officer's dream the plane iced over and crashed on a pebbled beach near mountains, with two men and a woman on board.
Goddard himself was due to fly to Tokyo that night on a DC-3, but the details of the flight didn't match the dream. However by the end of the evening he was persuaded to take two men and a woman with him. The plane iced over and was forced to make a crash landing on the Japanese island of Sado. The crash scene, a pebbled beach near mountains, resembled that described in the precognitive dream. However, unlike the
dream no-one was injured.
Was there some lingering effect (Artron energy buildup?) from the time vortex in 1935?
 
Belz... said:
Are these threads to discuss the actual events? You mention gaming repeatedly in your posts.
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The events as describes happened; Goddard claimed to have travelled in time, seen a dead man in a photograph, witnessed a prophetic dream, the Zebrina's crew disappeared et cetera.
They feature in my collection of such oddities, several hundred atm, that I use for gaming inspiration.
 
catsmate said:
The events as describes happened; Goddard claimed to have travelled in time, seen a dead man in a photograph, witnessed a prophetic dream, the Zebrina's crew disappeared et cetera.
They feature in my collection of such oddities, several hundred atm, that I use for gaming inspiration.
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May I ask what sort of gaming?
 
theprestige said:
Why do you keep bringing up prosaic mysteries as if there's some sort of serious paranormal question?
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How about I just preempt the OP's next effort, possibly the most famous of these tales?

Moberly–Jourdain incident

Moberly%E2%80%93Jourdain_incidentWP

The Moberly–Jourdain incident (also the Ghosts of Petit Trianon or Versailles, French: les fantômes du Trianon / les fantômes de Versailles) is a claim of time travel and hauntings made by Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924).

In 1911, Moberly and Jourdain published a book entitled An Adventure under the names of "Elizabeth Morison" and "Frances Lamont". Their book describes a visit they made to the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, where they claimed to have seen the gardens as they had been in the late eighteenth century as well as ghosts, including Marie Antoinette and others. Their story caused a sensation and was subject to much ridicule.
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The story grew in the telling.

There is a reasonable mundane explanation.

NEXT!
 
I want to thank Martin Gardener and my ninth grade Civics teacher for helping me to stop taking such narratives seriously.
 
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I mean, I get the value of using such incidents as seeds for stories in a role-playing campaign or similar. But if catsmate isn't going to discuss each incident as a paranormal question per se, maybe the should be blogging these ideas instead? Or putting them all in one thread?

ETA: Also your worldbuilding gets kind of weird if you end up attributing a paranormal cause to every single unexplained disappearance.
 
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If he was that disoriented and flying the wrong way (why would he be out over the Firth of Forth and then all the way across the Central Belt to Renfrew otherwise?) to get to Andover, how the buggery bollocks did he know that it was the same airfield he flew over which had been "modernised" and all the rest?

Lacking in basic credibility.
 
Here is a basic test you can apply to stories of this nature.

"Can this incident be explained by someone lying?"

If the answer is "yes", the story is of no value or interest.
 
I often listen to NPR’s “To The Best Of Our Knowledge”. Usually, this show has rather decent interviews with folks in a variety of fields, quite informative.
But occasionally they indulge...
Just this last Sunday they had a segment on a woman who’d been struck by lightning, and survived, though with some injuries. Nothing unusual there...
But the woman claimed that during the two minutes she was unconscious, she spent two weeks in a heaven-like garden, conversing with a spiritual figure who tutored her on all sorts of things, and then indicated (as in so many of these stories) that it was her choice as to whether to “go back” or not.

No mention of “dissociative states” in any of this or the fairly-common phenomena of personality disruptions that occur with electrocutions and lightning strikes..... Just credulous acceptance.
 
PursuedByABear said:
Here is a basic test you can apply to stories of this nature.

"Can this incident be explained by someone lying?"

If the answer is "yes", the story is of no value or interest.
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They don't actually have to be "lying". They can, and often are, "mistaken". The more amusing part is where, after having been given a definitive explanation, they persist in believing.
 
catsmate said:
Now in the real world the explanation for this is prosaic. Firstly the story doesn't make sense. 13FTS didn't operate the aircraft Goddard described, and certainly not painted yellow. There was no corroborating evidence, just Goddard’s account, first published after his retirement in 1951. He may have misremembered the year of the incident or aspects of what he saw on the ground at the time, though he was a trained military pilot.
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No, but he was mistaken. He was actually looking through a wormhole into a parallel universe. It wasn't in the future (obviously, since time travel is impossible) but an alternate Earth where technology is a bit more advanced than ours.

After the photo was developed, it's been placed on the squadron noticeboard so that those who wanted copies could sign up for them. However there was an extra face in the photograph; the grinning and hatless Airman Freddy Jackson, a mechanic who'd died by heedlessly walking into a spinning propeller two days before the squadron posed for the photo and had been buried that day.
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This is also explained by the other universe, as a small wormhole to it drifted in front of the camera just as the photo was taken. You see, in the alternate universe Airman Jackson didn't die two days before. It's a pity that photo was lost, because a close examination would have revealed other subtle differences that nobody noticed.

Goddard arrived at a party in Shanghai and overheard an officer talking of a dream in which he (Goddard) was killed in a plane crash; in the officer's dream the plane iced over and crashed on a pebbled beach near mountains, with two men and a woman on board. Goddard himself was due to fly to Tokyo that night on a DC-3, but the details of the flight didn't match the dream. However by the end of the evening he was persuaded to take two men and a woman with him. The plane iced over and was forced to make a crash landing on the Japanese island of Sado. The crash scene, a pebbled beach near mountains, resembled that described in the precognitive dream. However, unlike the dream no-one was injured.
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And the explanation for this is - you guessed it - that same parallel universe! The officer's 'dream' was actually a psychic link to his counterpart in the other universe, where this incident really did happen. But why did Goddard also crash in our universe, and why did the details not match up? When wormholes open up between parallel universes, information leaks through which gradually synchronizes them. So events aren't identical in every detail, but over time our histories tend to converge. That airman who didn't die before his photo was taken? He actually did die two days later, in a freak car accident.

Now you might ask how I know this. The answer is simple. I am from that other universe! I was sent here to find why wormholes have recently started shrinking. That was in 2008. Unfortunately all the wormholes have now shrunk, preventing me from returning to my own universe. However I did find out what was causing the wormholes to shrink. Since 2004 the US government (this government, not the one in my universe) has been generating a powerful reality distortion field that is causing our worlds to lose synchronization. At first it was just little things, but over time the cumulative effects have been quite devastating. For example in my universe Hillary Clinton was elected president in 2016, and a coronavirus outbreak there was contained in a couple of months with very few deaths.

I am hoping we can reverse the effects so I can return to my own universe, but for that to happen the reality distortion field must first be shut off. The current administration has it turned up to 11 in an apparent attempt to create a post-reality world. This won't work of course - all it will do is blow up the generator, with catastrophic effects when it all comes crashing down on them. I have informed the next president, and he assures me that turning the dial back to reality will be his top priority once elected.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
How about I just preempt the OP's next effort, possibly the most famous of these tales?

Moberly–Jourdain incident

Moberly%E2%80%93Jourdain_incidentWP



The story grew in the telling.

There is a reasonable mundane explanation.

NEXT!
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Nah, there multiple time-slips in Liverpool are far more interesting.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
No, but he was mistaken. He was actually looking through a wormhole into a parallel universe. It wasn't in the future (obviously, since time travel is impossible) but an alternate Earth where technology is a bit more advanced than ours.

This is also explained by the other universe, as a small wormhole to it drifted in front of the camera just as the photo was taken. You see, in the alternate universe Airman Jackson didn't die two days before. It's a pity that photo was lost, because a close examination would have revealed other subtle differences that nobody noticed.

And the explanation for this is - you guessed it - that same parallel universe! The officer's 'dream' was actually a psychic link to his counterpart in the other universe, where this incident really did happen. But why did Goddard also crash in our universe, and why did the details not match up? When wormholes open up between parallel universes, information leaks through which gradually synchronizes them. So events aren't identical in every detail, but over time our histories tend to converge. That airman who didn't die before his photo was taken? He actually did die two days later, in a freak car accident.

Now you might ask how I know this. The answer is simple. I am from that other universe! I was sent here to find why wormholes have recently started shrinking. That was in 2008. Unfortunately all the wormholes have now shrunk, preventing me from returning to my own universe. However I did find out what was causing the wormholes to shrink. Since 2004 the US government (this government, not the one in my universe) has been generating a powerful reality distortion field that is causing our worlds to lose synchronization. At first it was just little things, but over time the cumulative effects have been quite devastating. For example in my universe Hillary Clinton was elected president in 2016, and a coronavirus outbreak there was contained in a couple of months with very few deaths.

I am hoping we can reverse the effects so I can return to my own universe, but for that to happen the reality distortion field must first be shut off. The current administration has it turned up to 11 in an apparent attempt to create a post-reality world. This won't work of course - all it will do is blow up the generator, with catastrophic effects when it all comes crashing down on them. I have informed the next president, and he assures me that turning the dial back to reality will be his top priority once elected.
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:thumbsup::D
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
They don't actually have to be "lying". They can, and often are, "mistaken". The more amusing part is where, after having been given a definitive explanation, they persist in believing.
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They don't have to be lying, no. But if they could be, there is no point, for me at any rate, wasting any more time on it. I really don't care whether they are lying or mistaken, and have no interest in findiing a prosaic explanation showing they could be mistaken if it can be explained by them simply making it up.

When you have a situation where a random group of 40 or 50 people would all have to be lying simultaneously, that option probably becomes a bit more interesting.
 
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Bikewer said:
But the woman claimed that during the two minutes she was unconscious, she spent two weeks in a heaven-like garden, conversing with a spiritual figure who tutored her on all sorts of things, and then indicated (as in so many of these stories) that it was her choice as to whether to “go back” or not.
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Did she actually mention what she was tutored in?
 
PursuedByABear said:
They don't have to be lying, no. But if they could be, there is no point, for me at any rate, wasting any more time on it. I really don't care whether they are lying or mistaken, and have no interest in findiing a prosaic explanation showing they could be mistaken if it can be explained by them simply making it up.

When you have a situation where a random group of 40 or 50 people would all have to be lying simultaneously, that option probably becomes a bit more interesting.
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You want witnesses? I'll give you 30,000 / 40,000 / even 100,000 witnesses.

Miracle_of_the_SunWP

Don't stand out in the hot sun, soaking rain without any food for hours. And in particular Do Not Stare at the SUN. You're welcome.
 
PursuedByABear said:
When you have a situation where a random group of 40 or 50 people would all have to be lying simultaneously, that option probably becomes a bit more interesting.
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Maybe. But groups aren't usually random. Most are at least self-selected on some basis of commonality.

And there is a well-known characteristic of human behavior, that people will go along with an untrue narrative if the people around them are also going along with it.

Show me a group of fifty people all claiming to witness a physical impossibility, and I'll show you a group of five people taking the piss, forty people bowing to peer pressure, and five people who are legitimately confused.
 
catsmate said:
The events as describes happened; Goddard claimed to have travelled in time, seen a dead man in a photograph, witnessed a prophetic dream, the Zebrina's crew disappeared et cetera.
They feature in my collection of such oddities, several hundred atm, that I use for gaming inspiration.
Click to expand...

It strikes me that Goddard is a good story teller who wouldn't let a little thing like the truth get in his way.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
You want witnesses? I'll give you 30,000 / 40,000 / even 100,000 witnesses.

Miracle_of_the_SunWP

Don't stand out in the hot sun, soaking rain without any food for hours. And in particular Do Not Stare at the SUN. You're welcome.
Click to expand...


I am not sure, from the tone of your reply, what you thought I was saying. If we have witnesses in numbers we need to find an explanation other than simply consciously lying for the hell of it, and that can be interesting in what it says about people and mass delusions. What in that makes you think your example is somehow revelatory to me?
 
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theprestige said:
Maybe. But groups aren't usually random. Most are at least self-selected on some basis of commonality.

And there is a well-known characteristic of human behavior, that people will go along with an untrue narrative if the people around them are also going along with it.

Show me a group of fifty people all claiming to witness a physical impossibility, and I'll show you a group of five people taking the piss, forty people bowing to peer pressure, and five people who are legitimately confused.
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Indeed, most groups are self-selected,which is why I said "random".

And my point is that when we have a number of witnesses we can look for some explanation as to why they say they saw something strange, and if that is peer pressure, self-delusion or misinterpretation of a natural phenomena, then that can be interesting. Forty people bowing to peer pressure on account of five taking the piss is interesting in what it says about human behaviour.

One person, not so much. They are almost certainly just lying for attention. Nothing interesting in that.
 
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PursuedByABear said:
I am not sure, from the tone of your reply, what you thought I was saying. If we have witnesses in numbers we need to find an explanation other than simply consciously lying for the hell of it, and that can be interesting in what it says about people and mass delusions. What in that makes you think your example is somehow revelatory to me?
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I reread what you posted. Your are only interested in situations where a number of people are simultaneously lying? OK; ignore what I said. :con2:
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
I reread what you posted. Your are only interested in situations where a number of people are simultaneously lying? OK; ignore what I said. :con2:
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No, you are still not getting it.

One person telling a stupid story is not interesting. They are almost certainly just an attention seeking liar. This happens a million times every day.

Two hundred people telling a stupid story is interesting. This happens more rarely. We can learn something about human behaviour from it by looking at what might have caused them all to tell the same stupid story, whether lying, deluded or mistaken. Or, we might be able to learn about some phenomena they have all misinterpreted. At any rate, there might be something there of some value that is worth spending a little time digging for.

One person, not even worth digging. They might not be lying, and there might be something real and interesting that has caused them to have their delusion, but the chances are so small that the reward to effort ratio just isn't there.
 
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Goddard apparently was a Spiritualist who also told stories of ghostly encounters. He argued that UFOs were not spacecraft, but paranormal apparitions, and he told a story about a precognitive dream about his making an emergency landing, but it was evidently uncorroborated.

As for time travel, the concept is called "time slip," a trope in which a character somehow without intending to travel in time finds himself/herself either in the past or future. An early example is Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Sometimes the time traveler is somehow transported in time by an Earthly vehicle--an early Twilight Zone episode was "A Stop at Willoughby," story by Rod Serling, 5/6/1960. A New Yorker upset by the pace of modern life discovers he can board a commuter train that travels back in time to 1888 and the quaint Ohio town of Willoughby. After a trip there and back again, he determines to go back to Willoughby and stay there. Similar concept--a train instead of a plane, but the vehicle travels in time as well as in distance.

In 1948, the radio show Quiet, Please broadcast the episode "One for the Book," 11/21/1948. In 1948, an Aemerican pilot takes off, flies through a strange part of the sky, and lands in 1938.

The Twilight Zone often used this trope. "The Last Flight," script by Richard Matheson, was from the story "The Flight" {pub 1950) by Richard Matheson, 2/5/1960. A British pilot heading for his aerodrome passes through "a strange cloud, like a vacuum" in 1917, and emerges in California in the 1950s, where he lands at a USAF base. In the end, he takes off again and he and his biplane vanish.

And also from TZ, "The Odyssey of Flight 33," original idea and script by Rod Serling, 2/24/1961. In 1960 a British airliner flying from London to New York passes through a vortex and emerges first in the Jurassic, where the crew and passengers see dinosaurs, and then go around again but are low on fuel and emerge over New York in 1939.

The point is not that Goddard imitated these stories. It is that in 1951 the concept of a time-slip activated by an airplane flight was not new and that Goddard spun other tales that sound more fanciful than real.
 
PursuedByABear said:
Two hundred people telling a stupid story is interesting. This happens more rarely. We can learn something about human behaviour from it by looking at what might have caused them all to tell the same stupid story, whether lying, deluded or mistaken. Or, we might be able to learn about some phenomena they have all misinterpreted.
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Fascinating.....so those 1.2 billion Hindus who talk about Hunuman, the monkey king are misinterpreting a real phenomena.
 
Matthew Ellard said:
Fascinating.....so those 1.2 billion Hindus who talk about Hunuman, the monkey king are misinterpreting a real phenomena.
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That's absolutely not what I said at all, is it.

I gave that as one potential possibility. Are the words "or" and "might" new to you?

(Besides which few of those claim to have seen Hanuman. If 1.2 billion simultaneously claim to have witnessed him, I would find that interesting.)
 
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catsmate said:
Mostly Doctor Who hybrid, with a detailed and extensive history of odd happening, mysteries, meddling by various groups and various factions interacting.
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This is off-topic, so I apologize. I googled "Dr. Who hybrid game" and only got results about the TV show. Are you developing your own game and trying scenarios out on the board to see how they go? That sounds fun.
 
carlitos said:
This is off-topic, so I apologize. I googled "Dr. Who hybrid game" and only got results about the TV show. Are you developing your own game and trying scenarios out on the board to see how they go? That sounds fun.
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Not exactly. The base game is AITAS by C7, and our main campaign has been going for nearly ten years. However in the same way that the Whoniverse has expanded far beyond the TV series (hundreds of audioplays, books et cetera) and it's spinoffs (of which there are many), the campaign has added new elements; such as the Hourglass Club (mine), the Alexandrian Society (Jez Miller) along with many new characters, devices and bits of background.

The AITAS forum (of which I'm an active member) has developed a series of unofficial sourcebooks covering the deuterocanonical works (which you can find here if you're interested). Currently were working on a book oif scenario seeds/ideas, one for every day of the year.

Late last year I started a new campaign, with a slightly different premise, but set within the Whoniverse, called The Thing in the Basement where a group of UCB students in 1998 find an abandoned time portal project and are swept up in events while trying to work out what's happening, and experiencing the complications of time travel in a manner rather underused in Who.
This campaign has moved online due to certain unforeseen events but continues apace, with "season one" about to come to a rather explosive finale in August.

Currently on hiatus is the Evil Doctor Chronicles, a twisted version of the Whoniverse with a simple premise.

If you;re interested there's an incomplete list of my historical ideas here.

Feel free to drop in an join the forum.
 
Thanks. I’m trying to wrap my head around how this works. My only concept is something I saw on Big Bang Theory where they were rolling dice and moving through scenarios.
 
carlitos said:
Thanks. I’m trying to wrap my head around how this works. My only concept is something I saw on Big Bang Theory where they were rolling dice and moving through scenarios.
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It's 'Lets Pretend' with rules. Develop a simulated character and have them proceed through a scenario/adventure. Dice (or other methods) introduce a level of chance.

ETA:
Roleplaying games are shared storytelling. You playthe part of your character, but you don’t need to dress up and leap about (well, not if you don’t want to). You get together with a group of friends and create your own Doctor Who adventure, taking the heroes to any location in the universe, at any time. The action takes place in your imaginations, and the story is told through your interaction. You’re in control and you can do anything, go anywhere, be anything. All that limits you is the power of your mind… and, if you’re a Time Lord, that’s a lot of power!
Click to expand...
 
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