Australia's Strangest Mysteries (ePub)

178,000 + words. Photographs. Illustrations.

DRIVER FRANK CLEWER sparked panic in his hometown - when he began to leave trails of scorchmarks and flames wherever he walked.

The Baffling Burning Man's brush with the impossible occurred in September 2005, and was chronicled by TV news crews and hundreds of witnesses. Astonished scientists at the University of New South Wales found that Frank was generating 30,000 volts of static electricity: a charge powerful ernough to melt synthetic carpets.

But somehow he survived the mysterious 'inner fire' without the slightest lesion on his skin - the only visible evidence of the colossal voltage he'd carried being a charred hole in a knee of his jeans.

Many media outlets treated the Clewer case as a one-off event. But SHC [Spontaneous Human Combustion] has been inexplicably occurring for more than 2,000 years, with one of the earliest recorded events dated 52 BC.

In this unique book, bestselling author and journalist John Pinkney describes the mysterious history of the 'flames from heaven' - a phenomenon which obsessed even Charles Dickens, who featured it in his novel Bleak House.

Pinkney also presents a new selection of some of the most tantalizing cases he has investigated during a lifetime's specialist research:

UNEXPLAINED DISAPPEARANCES, from the enigma of the vanishing heiress to the saga of the 'jinxed' ship, which vanished with 130 people aboard.

OUTBACK RIDDLES. The desert aboriginals whose astonishing song saved the life of a dying woman, 4,000 kilometres away...The uncanny invasion of Lake Eyre...the bush monster that guarded an abandoned potato farm...the terrifying UFO incursion into Queensland's Isla Gorge.

MYSTERIOUS DEATHS, including the fate of John Friedrich, 'the man who never was'...the American divers' diaries of doom...the horror in Sydney's dunes.

EERIE PHENOMENA Astounding case of the Shining Crosses...the Australian magazine that foretold the assassination of JFK...Lost, on a Road Without Shadows. And more.

These pages offer you intriguing insights into some of our planet's most perplexing mysteries.