Unexplained Fires in Italy (dredging up and old thread)

[Jim Davis]

About a month ago there was a short thread about unexplained, possibly
"demonic" fires in a small town in Sicily.  When that thread was active I
suggested that we might see an article in Skeptical Inquirer from Massimo
Polidoro, a regular columnist from Italy.

Well, my prediction was correct.  Massimo was asked to investigate the
phenomenon by a leading science magazine and his column in the May/June
issue covers the topic.

The article isn't online yet, but when/if it is it'll be here:
http://www.csicop.org/si/online.html

Anyway there were some interesting points made:

1) Apparently he saw mostly annoyance from the evacuated populace: they were
not under the assumption that this was demonic or anything other than
irritating.  In one case he saw a reporter lose his temper because a local
woman would not "scream and curse" on camera for him.

2) The "town" was not on fire, but rather a private road containing a few
houses; all in the space of about 350 meters.  All the houses affected were
owned by people related to each other.

3) Once the town was evacuated there were no more fires (except for one
extremely suspect singing of a man's shoe).

4) The local chief Carabinieri refused to consider fraud as an option.

5) At the time of his visit the wires had been pulled up for study.  However
he was later contacted by a local telephone company worker who was one of
the first to investigate the problem (when it assumed that the problem was
in the telephone wires).  That worker claimed that:

i) When inspected it was clear that the heat was coming from outside
the wire, not inside (copper gets discolored and brittle when heated to
point where the insulation would ignite).

ii) No damage appeared in wires inside walls, underground or that
ran higher than 3 meters.  In other words no damage appeared where it would
be difficult for a person to cause it.

iii) Despite reports to the contrary no damage appeared in
electrical appliances - only in the wires leading to them, and then only
spots along the length of the wire (the whole wire was not affected).

iv) The damaged wires all seemed to be burnt from a heat source
placed below the wire.  In fact this worker claimed that as an experiment
he, while alone, burned a spot of wire with his pocket lighter.  When he
showed the newly burned to the others they agreed it was identical to the
mystery cables.

I said in the original thread it could be pranksters... although nothing's
been proven the evidence presented here seems to back that theory up.

Jim Davis

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