The Very End of Oliver Lerch

As you all know, I like to chase footnotes. Sometimes that pans out and you read the results here. Sometimes it goes nowhere and there is no reason to publish it here. And sometimes someone will send me a note that launches a bit of a search that leads to a footnote chase that was initiated by someone else. That is the case here.

But, before we get to that, let me say that I was interested in the disappearance of Oliver Lerch from the moment I read about it. Here was a true mystery and I wanted to learn more. I think it was Morris K. Jessup, in his book, The Case for the UFO that first alerted me to the tale. Jessup had written that the documentation was available for all to see in the South Bend Indiana Police Department. You can read about my search for the data here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/disappearance-of-oliver-lerch-larch.html

I won’t keep you in suspense. According the information I received from the police department, their records did not go back any further than 1920. There had been a fire that destroyed earlier records, which would have included those about Oliver Lerch, regardless of the date of his disappearance, reported as either 1889 or 1890.

Article that appeared about the Lerch disappearance in which the relatives were interviewed about the story. Written in 1957, it is clear that Sherman Lerch's father would have been around at the time of the disappeared. There is nothing in the article to suggest that there is any truth to the story. First page of the article printed here for the appropriate citation.

I was able to chase this back to 1906 in something called The Scrapbook. But that isn’t the earliest known telling of the tale. It seems that Theo Paijmans and Chris Aubeck might have chased this to the very end publishing their results in the Christmas 2015 edition of Fortean Times (pages 42 – 47). You can read about their journey at:

https://bizarrevictoria.livejournal.com/160730.html

Now, I’m going to assume that those of you really interested in this, have read my earlier blog post so that I don’t have to go into great detail here. I will note that according to the legend, Oliver, who was somewhere between 11 and 20, had been sent out to draw water from the well because his father was hosting a Christmas party (I always liked one of the sources telling us that throats were parched from singing but not telling us how he knew that). Anyway, somewhere between the door and the well, he was grabbed a bunch of useless speculation) had got him and his voice came from somewhere above the ground. Oliver was gone forever.

Paijmans and Aubeck tell us that one of those who wrote about the story in Fate in 1950, Joseph Rosenberger, said he had made it up for a quick buck. Jerry Clark said that he had information that the story was told to another writer in 1932 and, of course, we know about the 1906 version, so Rosenberger, who apparently plagiarized the tale thought it better to admit the hoax rather than admit the plagiarism. At any case, Rosenberger wasn’t the original source.

Paijmans and Aubeck found that some rich guy in New Zealand thought so much of the tale, he would spend his entire fortune to finding what had happened to Oliver. This was in 1914 and he might not have found anything, saving him his fortune.

More importantly, they found a story published in the New York Sunday Telegraph in 1904 by a man named Irving Lewis [who is apparently C. I. Lewis] that gave them a ray of hope for the veracity of the tale. Bizarrevictoria, told us that Paijmans and Aubeck had found:

Lewis’s story had stayed much the same after 50 years of retelling. What was different – and extremely important – however, was that Lewis included a sworn statement [ahh, those sworn statements from more than a hundred years ago… are any of them true?]at the end of the story signed by ten people claiming to have witnessed the disappearance of Oliver Lerch.

The authors [Paijmans and Aubeck] then looked into the identities of the witnesses listed in the 1904 article. To my extreme disappointment (because, come on, I know you, too, are holding your breath, hoping the sworn statement was legit [parenthetical statement in original], all of the witnesses were either completely made up, or (assuming census records revealed the existence of people by those names) could not have POSSIBILY been in the area at the time or known the Lurch [sic] family. The sworn statement was a giant load of hooey.

This should drive the final stake through this tale. We’ve chased it to the end or rather Paijmans and Aubeck have chased it to the end. I found many flaws in the tale when I wrote about it on this blog years ago. Others have found other flaws in the reporting of it which suggests it was untrue. Just a tale invented for whatever reason. Now, Paijmans and Aubeck have found additional information which suggests that Ambrose Bierce had inspired the tale. In 1888, Bierce wrote an article that contained three stories of strange disappearances and the Lerch story was just one of them. The end of the trail, or in this case, tale, has been reached. 

The Bermuda Triangle and ABC Evening News

In the category of “What Isn’t News,” we have the ABC Evening News on Sunday night (February 9) telling us that scientists have come up with a solution for the Bermuda Triangle. Really? I thought it had been explained more than thirty-five years ago, and in fact, on this very blog several years ago I offered an explanation that I thought was reasonable.

Here’s the deal. Back in the mid-1970s, when I was much younger and believed that those writing books and magazine articles actually engaged in original research and first-hand reporting, I thought there was something mysterious about the Bermuda Triangle. One day, in the local bookstore, I saw a paperback copy of Lawrence David Kusche’s book, The Bermuda Triangle – Solved (copyright 1975). I bought one because I believed that if I was to argue successfully against the Skeptics, I should know what they had to say.

Kusche convinced me that he had solved the mystery. His book, unlike so many others, didn’t rely on what others had reported. He went to the original source material. He found the original insurance papers, the original investigations and the original newspaper articles. He named names and sources so that those of us who followed wouldn’t have to sort through piles of irrelevant material, but could see, for ourselves, exactly what was going on and why Kusche was right when so many others were wrong.

I have found that too often others writing on a topic will look at what the other writers have said, but do not search the original sources to verify the information. Case in point? The disappearance of Oliver Lerch from South Bend, Indiana. Morris K. Jessup, in his book, The Case for the UFO, told us that the facts of the Lerch disappearance were written down at the police department for anyone who cared to look.

Well, I cared to look, and the South Bend police told me that their records didn’t go back into the 1880s. There had been a fire in the 1920s that destroyed most of them. Jessup was wrong about this and I don’t know where he got his information but it was repeated in several other books.

Oh, I checked with the newspapers and searched for other documentation, but none ever surfaced to prove the case. In fact, the available documentation showed that nothing like it had ever happened in the South Bend area. The Lerch story was a hoax but it had been reported as fact by those others who apparently didn’t care to look.

And this is the situation with the Bermuda Triangle. Each mistake was copied by the next writer until it seemed that something truly mysterious was happening in the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche, on the other hand, checked the original sources and offered plausible and well researched explanations for some of the most mysterious of the disappearances. In one incredible case, the ship hadn’t disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. It had been lost in the Pacific Ocean.

And now ABC News tells us they have the solution. It is bad weather in the area. Well, of course, that played a role in many the disasters, but the real solution is all those others who didn’t bother to do any original research. It is those others who didn’t look at weather records and didn’t look at official reports and didn’t bother with the insurance papers. That was the source of the mystery and that is what supplied the solution.

I just thought it was strange that in a news broadcast that has, what, twenty-two minutes to give us the important information of the day, would waste time telling us something we’d known since the middle of the 1970s.

I wonder if they heard about the Internet? That might have told them something about the case that would have suggested that this wasn’t news. 

Plagiarism in UFO Writing

I saw, the other day, in the Skeptical Inquirer, an article by Benjamin Radford about plagiarism in paranormal writing. He was suggesting that some “writers” lift case reports from others and report as if they are their own. I know these things happen in the world of the UFO and the one instance that springs to mind is a line written by Ed Ruppelt in his The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. In writing about the fabled Estimate of the Situation, Ruppelt said, “The situation was UFOs; the estimate they were interplanetary!” (Page 58, Ace paperback).

I have seen that very line in several other UFO books. It is a case of straight plagiarism. And while it is true that facts cannot be copyrighted, it is also true that the specific words used to describe those facts can be. You cannot copyright the telephone directory because that is an assembling of fact, but if you add any “sweat equity” to it, that is some creative way to present those facts, then that can be copyrighted.

Or, for our purpose, you can copyright your particular interpretation of facts around a specific UFO sighting, but you cannot copyright the facts themselves. Everyone is free to use the facts of the Roswell case, for example, but they cannot lift, verbatim, the specific words that I use to describe the case.

As I say, Radford’s article got me thinking about this, and what I find in the world of the UFO is not the plagiarism, but the use of case “facts” that simply are not facts. This is the real problem in writing about UFOs.

For example, many years ago, I was writing a magazine article about mysterious disappearances, and I had found the tale of Oliver Thomas who had disappeared from his home in Wales around the turn of the last century. This case sounded suspiciously like that of Oliver Lerch who allegedly disappeared from South Bend, Indiana sometime in the late 19^th century. Brad Steiger had written about Thomas and at that time, meaning long before the Internet and all the electronic sources available, I knew the secret for finding Brad Steiger. I called him to ask about the case and he said not to use it. He had since learned that it was a hoax.

And I learned a lesson with that telephone conversation. Sometimes the information published in the books is not accurate. Sometimes the writer learned, after publication, that a case was a hoax, that the information was wrong in some fashion, or that the spectacular details did not match the facts when the case was carefully examined. In the last few weeks I have published a number of cases like that. The best example is probably the report of a formation of disks seen over Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Although the case was recounted in several books, including those of respected researchers, I learned that the witness was not in Cedar Rapids and the only connection to Cedar Rapids was an article in the local newspaper actually identifying the location as another city in another state but giving all the relevant information.

The point, you ask?

Well, if I hadn’t attempted to take the case to its origins, I would have reported the errors of those other writers and researchers and people would think there was a pre-Arnold sighting in Cedar Rapids. I would have copied the original errors and added to the misinformation. We all now know the origins of this sighting and can give it the attention it deserves (which is just one more of those reported after the Arnold sighting and little else.)

But this wasn’t plagiarism, or as one person suggested, “Plagiarism is using one source but research is using two…” And even with that, I would have still published the inaccurate information because none of the sources I had (five in total) had the original story right.

Here’s the real point. We all have the ability to do this. We all have the ability to take these cases back to the original sources. Too often we just don’t do it. We get the information we want… and it doesn’t matter which side of the coin you find yourself, that is debunker or proponent… and we end the search. We don’t ask that one additional question. We don’t look for that one additional fact. And we can change that.

In the world today, we need to take everything back to the source. When I found myself in Lubbock, Texas, I took the time to research the Lubbock Lights and image my surprise, in the early-1990s, to find Carl Hart, Jr. in the telephone book. Or while in Fort Worth, I went through the newspaper’s morgue, looking for information on old UFO sightings and found some interesting though obviously fake reports of the Great Airship.

If there have been some spectacular or not so spectacular sightings nearby, check them out. Talk to the witnesses. Search the original sources of the information, and let’s see if we can clean up the landscape. If nothing else, we can remove much of the clutter as we move toward some sort of an answer.