Monday, November 5, 2007

Murder Mirage and the Hiroshima Shadows




















{Spoiler Alert}

The Super Saga Murder Mirage (January, 1936) has a very interesting super scietnfic menace. It is an unknown radioactive element that causes a green "flash" which dissolves flesh and organic material leaving behind only metal artifacts like buttons and jewelry and the victim's shadow which is burnt into the ground.
This was a prescient predcition of Lester Dent which he made nine years before the Atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1946. the pictures above show some of the amazing shadows that were burnt into the landscape as a result of the atomic flash.

The most amazing ones are the two which show the shadow of a man who had been sitting on the steps outside his bank in Hiroshima waiting for it to open. He was within 0.3 miles of the atomic explosion. The man was totally disintegrated. Nothing was left of him except for his shodow on the steps. There were many of these death shadows found near ground zero. They captured people doing everyday tasks when the nuclear flash overtook them and they evaporated away.
The parallel between the Hiroshima Shadows and the Murder Mirage shadows are startling. I have found that Lester Dent was a great prognosticator. Almost frighteningly so. In The Secret in the Sky (May, 1935), Dent predicted that a faster-than-sound aircraft would make a loud booming noise when it passed over head analogous to the "crack" of a bullet as it passed by your ear. This was fully 12 years before Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier on October 14th, 1947 in the Bell X-1 rocket plane.






Lester Dent was clearly a man of vision and way ahead of his time.

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