WHY DID AMERICA’S FBI spend seven months investigating the bizarre New Year’s Day deaths of two Australians on a riverbank in suburban Sydney? And why did the agency refuse, on ‘national security grounds,’ to release its file on the case? This is just one of the many riddles surrounding the strange fate of 38-year-old laserbeam scientist Dr Gilbert Bogle and his companion Mrs Margaret Chandler, 29. The corpses were found, early on a hot summer’s morning , by two teenage boys hunting for golfballs. The dead man, whom police subsequently identified as Dr Bogle, was lying spreadeagled and semi-naked. Someone [the murderer?] had covered him with a small strip of carpet. Nearby, in a ditch,lay Mrs Chandler - her face and torso bafflingly blanketed in beer cartons. The discovery made international headlines. It swiftly emerged that Dr Bogle, a brilliant specialist in solid state physics, had recently accepted a research post in Washington – and had been preparing to fly there, with his wife and children. Mrs Chandler, who’d worked as a nurse before her marriage, had been at the same New Year’s party with Gilbert Bogle the evening before. They had left separately. Scientists found that the pair had died of acute heart failure – but they could suggest no cause. There were no signs of violence: no smothering or strangulation; no hypodermic marks; no evidence, in the body tissues, of poisons, or radioactive substances of any kind. From the morning the bodies were found, the Bogle-Chandler conundrum would perplex the law’s keenest forensic minds...
Journalist and author John Pinkney devotes his career to investigating inexplicable events. In this acclaimed book, companion-volume to Australia’s Strangest Mysteries #1, he explores a further multitude of mysteries from the Curious Continent: MAN-MONSTERS OF THE BUSH When the first settlers invaded Australia, Aborigines advised them to beware the gigantic ‘man-animals’ that inhabited the brooding continent’s remote lakes and bushland. The new arrivals shrugged off the warnings. But for two centuries, right up to today, thousands of reliable witnesses have compellingly described encounters with hominid creatures of a nightmarish kind. Pinkney interviews a range of deponents, including academic naturalists, an ABC broadcaster, surveyors, farmers – also quoting major newspaper accounts from the past to our present century. HORROR OF THE BENDING HEADLIGHTS A young mechanic dies after his car runs off a rural road. Police treat it as just another regrettable accident. But then an eyewitness comes forward to describe a terrifying event at the same spot three days earlier. Police search the field where the mechanic perished – and find a circular depression suggesting something landed there... Plus: What Crashed Into Guyra Dam? [drilling a 20- metre tunnel into the rock]...Missing: the Yacht with a Deadly Name...What Formed the Forgotten Footprints?...Glowing Globes of the Outback...Lasseter’s Reef – Fantasy or Fact?...The Five Missing Men of Bermagui...Death from a Distance: the Killing Bone’s Uncanny Power. And much more.
These pages offer you enthralling insights into mysteries that have puzzled humanity across two centuries.