Mysterious Deaths: Spontaneous Human Combustion

There's nothing quite like hearing the words 'mysterious death' to quicken the heart.

There are so many 'investigation' programmes on the TV nowadays that you would think that no death could possibly be mysterious anymore...

Not so...

There are many people whose cause of death has been established, however, the reason has not. These include the peculiar cases of certain UFO researchers who, for one reason or another, died in mysterious circumstances that have never been explained.

Mysterious and suspicious deaths among UFO investigators are not new. In 1971, the author and researcher Otto Binder wrote an article for Saga magazine's Special UFO Report titled 'Liquidation of the UFO Investigators'. He had researched the deaths of 'no less than 137 UFO researchers, writers, scientists, and witnesses' that had died in the previous 10 years, 'many under the most mysterious circumstances'.

The 'Church' of Scientology also have a similar case to answer.

The first building they bought was the 272-room Fort Harrison hotel in Clearwater, USA.

So many people have died in mysterious circumstances in this place that it would take months to research and discuss them here but, for further reading, whyaretheydead.net is a well-written, well presented website that offers some perspective...

So, it seems there are a lot of mysterious deaths that may not be that 'mysterious' at all.

However, there are lots that are.

The strange cases of Spontaneous Human Combustion have always fascinated me. The circumstances are usually very similar. The victim has usually burned at such a high temperature that nothing, not even bones, are left, apart from maybe a hand or a foot, which, strangely, appear to have escaped the heat. The victims never seem to have tried to move from where they are and things in the immediate vicinity are usually no more than singed... You might say that a human being could not possibly generate enough heat to achieve this, but I have read of a woman alive in the UK that can make a pan of water boil just by holding it in her hand. Strange indeed...But there's more:

Mysterious death is an interesting subject and one, I suspect, that will continue to intrigue us...

Sudden unexpected death syndrome (SUDS) or Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal death Syndrome (SUNDS) is the sudden unexpected death of adolescents and adults during sleep. This syndrome was first noted in 1977 among Hmong refugees in the US. The disease was again noted in Singapore in 1982 and 1990, when a (retrospective) survey of records showed that 230 otherwise healthy Thai men died suddenly of unexplained causes; in the Philippines, SUDS affects 43 per 100,000 per year among young Filipinos. The cause of this syndrome has never been explained.