Strange phenomena in the forests on Earth have sometimes a natural explanation, or they will be better understood in the future. Nevertheless there are phenomena which couldn’t be explained away, and they’re not only scary but sometimes deadly. Mysterious lights have been seen in many places, often regularly. The Brown Mountain Lights in North Carolina or in Hessdalen, Norway, appear a bit like strange weather phenomena. Unidentified lights in the sky are often interpreted as UFO-encounters, and they become “sightings”. The lights which were reported in Parnamara, Brazil, during the early eighties, however killed people, says UFO-researcher Jacques Vallee. Similarly the sightings reported in one of the most notorious haunted forests of the world, the “Hoia-Baciu-Forest”, in Transylvania, Romania, seem to have a life-threatening quality.
The investigative website “theparanormal.ca” mentions a man called “Patrut” “who is president of the Romanian Society of Parapsychology and since the early ’70s he has been studying occurrences in the forest such as unexplained splotches of light and luminescent orbs hovering in the sky. He says that when you spend too much time in the HBF, you can experience symptoms such as anxiety, insomnia, excessive thirst, nausea, vomiting and headaches”. The Hoia-Baciu-Forest is called the “Bermuda Triangle of Transylvania” and everything began with a UFO-Sighting. The stories about this famous forest sound impressing, however often if a place is well-known one should be careful to trust any reports about apparitions and other paranormal events.
Jacques Vallee’s reports from Parnamara in Brasil sound very serious and are extremely disturbing. Obviously there had been several cases in this forest region in North-East Brasil where hunters were “attacked” by lights during the night. The encounters in the forests and river valleys must have been bizarre and dangerous. The locals spoke of so-called “chupas”, which they say are looking like flying crates and made noises like refrigerators. Under these crates there was a light which sent deadly beams. In one case the “chupa” looked like a spinning car tire with headlights. Vallee mentions a witness, Ribamar Ferreira, who saw his friend Abel Boro dying after he was engulfed by a blinding light. Ferreira escaped and returned with the family of his friend. They found Boro dead and the body seemed to be bloodless.
In 1982 several people who had encounters with “chupas” felt ill and were changed forever. Another victim couldn’t speak any longer three month after the encounter, his hair became white and six month after the event he was mentally wrecked and behaved like a one-year-old infant.
The air-force of Brasil sent a team to investigate but it was never explained what really happened. Vallee speculates that the victims were exposed to some sort of radiation. Furthermore he says in his book “Confrontations” that the lights or other phenomena reported by the witnesses doesn’t represent what literally happened. He also says that for example microwaves could induce serious hallucinations.
It’s remarkable that these kind of dangerous phenomena which happen sometimes in forests are not a new phenomena. The reports and stories show a striking resemblance with older folk tales about the “elf stroke” for example in Scotland. Often a strange light is integral part of the story. I didn’t even know about that when I introduced a scene in my movie project about a dangerous light.
The important lesson here is that some accounts of paranormal encounters in the forests might not represent exactly what happened, but the events are definitely “real” in a sense that they could hurt or even kill people. Furthermore it might be good not to think of a certain forest as an evil or haunted forest – it is always the place. Some people speculate that “Hoia-Baciu-Forest” is a gate to another dimension. Maybe, in some sense, there is some truth here.
Algernoon Blackwood describes in “The Willows” a place where the borders between our world and the other world is thinner then elsewhere. In his stories the protagonists are attacked on a psychological level but there also something happens on a physical level. His description is very close to the reports of some real events.
The “dangerous lights” in the UFO-reports seem to work also on different levels. They could be windows between our and an extra-dimensional dimension. And if we get too close to such a window we are in grave danger.