Spontaneous combustion - it's happening! (1 Viewer)

[Max Leung]

Ok this is strange - anyone have any ideas?

Blazing mystery is straight from the ‘X-Files’: Sicilian village spooked by seemingly spontaneous combustion.


Maybe there is a gas leak? Or one of those conditions that spawn ball lightning?

 

[Shawn C]

........or maybe some idiot is running around setting people's houses on fire......

 

[Brian Harnish]

Yeah...hasn't anyone ever heard of occam's razor? In light of two possibilities, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one: in this case some idiot's probably setting those houses on fire under camouflage (as mentioned in the post above). And that's making it look like spontaneous combustion.

 

[Max Leung]

Um. Did you guys read the article? Many of these fires started with witnesses around. It would be highly unlikely that an invisible man would set fire to a car/microwave/HT-equipment when someone is around.

On the other hand, there could be a prowler running around messing with people's electrical panels or crossing wires in an unattended car...then someone comes around, turns the device on, and POOF!

 

[Malcolm R]

Gotta love old European superstition.

 

[Holadem]

This thing has been under investigation since January. I would think any arson would have been discovered by now.

--
H

 

[Dave Poehlman]

I don't know why this is starting to remind me of a Monty Python sketch:

"Then, a black goat was brought in to be sacrificed - that fell down, died, and caught fire".

 

[Ricardo C]

Fecal gases, maybe?

What..? It's no more insane a theory than blaming it on the devil

 

[JamesCB]

Sounds like some publicity stunt. For what, I don't know.

I'll let you know when my un-plugged microwave bursts into flames, though.

 

[Max Leung]

Maybe it's the spirit of Nikola Tesla, back from the grave! And now he is terrorizing the population of that town - for there is a secret power source hidden (a gigantic Tesla coil, of course) which will grant him corporeal form - but it will only work when no humans are present, for human presence will muck up the electrical fields needed to reconstitute a suitable host body...

This is a job for the Scooby gang...Scooby Doo 3: The Wrath of Tesla.

 

[Shawn C]

Maybe it's the Taco Bell I had last night.

 

[Max Leung]

Oh another idea: Maybe the town is a major silica packet manufacturing facility, and the factory burned down and released megatonnes of silica particles into the air? It would be so dry that enormous static electricity builds up so frequently and with such force that when a person nears an electrical device, the charge between the person and the device is released causing combustion...

We must send in the Silica Packet Emergency Cleanup Krew (SPECK) IMMEDIATELY! Or else humans will be next in the combustion chain!

The children, we must think of the children!

 

[Jim_F]

Then it's there to stay. The village would never let anybody take that away. I can't imagine anybody wanting to have their Tesla coils removed.

 

[Rob Lutter]

I like the invisible man theory

 

[John Watson]

Could be a new outcropping of Sunnydale's Hellmouth.

Call Buffy back!

 

[EricKH]

Did you know that peppers are one of the foods that improve your memory. The day after you eat them, you will go into the bathroom and after a few minutes say. "Oh, I had peppers last night"

 

[Jay Taylor]

The part of the article that caught my attention was:



Uhhh... Let me see... should we check for faulty wiring from the nearby electric trains or sacrifice a goat and call the exorcist first?

 

[MarkHastings]

My question is, if this is the work of the Devil, why is he lighting fires in a tiny village in Sicily? You'd think with that kind of power, he'd be doing something better than this.

 

[Mary M S]

Wow, a quick check of worldwide quirky news, mainstream science and mystic psychic Nostradamus interpreters, tells me exactly what’s happing in the little town of Canneto di Caronia (if I compress a few time lines). Italy’s in for it, and maybe the globe.
Comet or Earthquake
Earthquake or Comet.

Okay now I've got it I just can't decide which comes first.
Acording to some Nostradamus affectionis. A BIG comet
(whoops we really should have spent more on that space program the last 50 years) is due possibly 2004 to devastate the earth. But before it hits near Greece. There will be warnings in central Italy and southern France like "strange fires" We will forget that Caronia is not in central Italy (gotta cut a mystic some slack when he's predicting way ahead).

And since we will cut him some slack, maybe he got the order wrong, the fires in Caronia are caused by electromagnitic disturbances which are igniting soil gas emissions which can originate from magma bodies, mantle degassing, metamorphism of limestone, or rock breaking sending up methane or carbon dioxide. All this is stirring in Italy because a BIG earthquake is about to occur, so large as to disrupte plates far into the core of the earth which will - due to the documented weakening of Earth's magnetic fields - create instant Pole Reversal in one month instead of thousands of years which - when factoring UCLA astrobiologists Bruce Runnegars therory about the possible consequences of extreme gravitational disruption causing the wobble in earths axis and kinks in inner planet orbits. Which might then (takes a deep breath) "pull chunks of rock out of the asteroid belt and send them hurtling toward Earth."

And when you recall that if Tesla really was not trying to send a message/test to an explorer which missed by 2 degrees and instead hit a forest in Russia, but believe instead as some scientists that the Tunguska object which evidently exploded above ground level and the comet in 1992 which missed us by only two earth diameters having estimated impact force of 15,000 megatons of TNT - ARE the beggining of "periodic clusters, (of comet impacts) separated by quietus centuries" (I take another breath)

WE ARE REALLY IN FOR IT.

Nevermind, Occam's Razor, gotta be a devil goat.