Laetitia Toureaux - May 16, 1937

On the evening of May 16th, 1937, Laetitia Toureaux headed for a bus stop after leaving a dance hall in a Parisian suburb. She cut a striking figure as she boarded- 29 years old, in a green suit, white hat, and gloves. Twenty four minutes later, she arrived at a metro station, the Porte de Charenton, and boarded the first-class car bound for central Paris. While the other cars were full, the first class carriage was empty. The train departed at 6:26PM, and 45 seconds later arrived at another station, the Porte Dorée. Six passengers entered the first class car and found Laeitita Toureaux, mudered, with a 9 inch dagger in her neck. No one had exited, no one else was in the car. So who killed her?

Within days of her murder, police had uncovered strange information about her life. She worked in a glue factory by day and frequented dance halls or bal musettes by night. Some viewed Laetitia as a naive, innocent victim, but most saw her as a heartless social climber, marrying her late husband without his family's knowledge or assent. In addition, though she was faithful to him during their marriage, after his death she had numerous affairs. She also, strangely, was known by some acquaintances as 'Yolande".

Interestingly, Laetitia was also a sometimes informant for a Parisian detective agency "Agence Rouff". Bal musettes were known to attract pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers.

However, most beleived she had been killed by the French facist terrorist goup, Comité secret d'action révolutionnaire, also called La Cagoule. When the police raided La Cagoule on November 15th, 1937, several members claimed knowledge of Toureaux's murder, stating she had been an informer and had been identified.

"It appears that sometime in 1936, Laetitia, now known as “Yolande” and working for the police to infiltrate illegal, right-wing political groups, became the lover of Jeantet, the Cagoule’s arms smuggling expert. Jeantet ran a garage near Montmarte and commanded a fleet of cars he used to smuggle arms from Geneva to Paris. By the spring of 1937, the Cagoule began to suspect Toureaux of deceit and set a trap for her. News of an upcoming arms run was leaked to her, but when the car was stopped at the Swiss border, it was empty. The ruse cost Toureaux her life."

However, there has never been any arrest for her murder, and French police files on the case are sealed until 2038. Why was Laeititia killed, and by whom? If the police knew her killer, why was there no arrest? And how did a killer escape from a train car unnoticed?

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Ball Lightning

Ball lightning is an unexplained atmospheric electrical phenomenon. The term refers to reports of luminous, spherical objects which vary in diameter from pea-sized to several meters. It is usually associated with thunderstorms, but lasts considerably longer than the split-second flash of a lightning bolt. Many early reports say that the ball eventually explodes, sometimes with fatal consequences, leaving behind the odor of sulfur.

Until the 1960s, most scientists argued that ball lightning was not a real phenomenon but an urban myth, despite numerous reports throughout the world. Laboratory experiments can produce effects that are visually similar to reports of ball lightning, but whether these are related to the natural phenomenon remains unclear.

Many scientific hypotheses about ball lightning have been proposed over the centuries. Scientific data on natural ball lightning are scarce, owing to its infrequency and unpredictability. The presumption of its existence is based on reported public sightings, and has therefore produced somewhat inconsistent findings. Given inconsistencies and lack of reliable data, the true nature of ball lightning is still unknown. The first ever optical spectrum of what appears to have been a ball lightning event was published in January 2014 and included a video at high frame rate.

Descriptions of ball lightning vary widely. It has been described as moving up and down, sideways or in unpredictable trajectories, hovering and moving with or against the wind; attracted to, unaffected by, or repelled from buildings, people, cars and other objects. Some accounts describe it as moving through solid masses of wood or metal without effect, while others describe it as destructive and melting or burning those substances. Its appearance has also been linked to power lines as well as during thunderstorms and also calm weather. Ball lightning has been described as transparent, translucent, multicolored, evenly lit, radiating flames, filaments or sparks, with shapes that vary between spheres, ovals, tear-drops, rods, or disks.

Ball lightning is often erroneously identified as St. Elmo's fire. They are separate and distinct phenomena.

The balls have been reported to disperse in many different ways, such as suddenly vanishing, gradually dissipating, absorption into an object, "popping," exploding loudly, or even exploding with force, which is sometimes reported as damaging. Accounts also vary on their alleged danger to humans, from lethal to harmless.

A review of the available literature published in 1972 identified the properties of a “typical” ball lightning, whilst cautioning against over-reliance on eye-witness accounts:

• They frequently appear almost simultaneously with cloud-to-ground lightning discharge
• They are generally spherical or pear-shaped with fuzzy edges
• Their diameters range from 1–100 cm, most commonly 10–20 cm
• Their brightness corresponds to roughly that of a domestic lamp, so they can be seen clearly in daylight
• A wide range of colours has been observed, red, orange, and yellow being the most common.
• The lifetime of each event is from 1 second to over a minute with the brightness remaining fairly constant during that time
• They tend to move, most often in a horizontal direction at a few metres per second, but may also move vertically, remain stationary or wander erratically.
• Many are described as having rotational motion
• It is rare that observers report the sensation of heat, although in some cases the disappearance of the ball is accompanied by the liberation of heat
• Some display an affinity for metal objects and may move along conductors such as wires or metal fences
• Some appear within buildings passing through closed doors and windows
• Some have appeared within metal aircraft and have entered and left without causing damage
• The disappearance of a ball is generally rapid and may be either silent or explosive
• Odors resembling ozone, burning sulfur, or nitrogen oxides are often reported

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The Nazca Lines

The Nazca Lines  are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. They were designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 km (50 mi) between the towns of Nazcaand Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana about 400 km south of Lima. Although some local geoglyphs resemble Paracas motifs, scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 500 BC and 500 AD. The hundreds of individual figures range in complexity from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, orcas, and lizards.

The designs are shallow lines made in the ground by removing the reddish pebbles and uncovering the whitish/grayish ground beneath. Hundreds are simple lines or geometric shapes; more than 70 are zoomorphic designs of animals such as birds, fish, llamas, jaguars, monkeys, or human figures. Other designs include phytomorphic shapes such as trees and flowers. The largest figures are over 200 m (660 ft) across. Scholars differ in interpreting the purpose of the designs, but in general, they ascribe religious significance to them.

Due to its isolation and to the dry, windless, and stable climate of the plateau, the lines have mostly been naturally preserved. Extremely rare changes in weather may temporarily alter the general designs. As of recent years, the lines are said to have been deteriorating due to an influx of squatters inhabiting the lands.

Archeologists, ethnologists, and anthropologists have studied the ancient Nazca culture to try to determine the purpose of the lines and figures. One hypothesis is that the Nazca people created them to be seen by their gods in the sky. Kosok and Reicheadvanced a purpose related to astronomy and cosmology: the lines were intended to act as a kind of observatory, to point to the places on the distant horizon where the sun and other celestial bodies rose or set in the solstices. Many prehistoric indigenouscultures in the Americas and elsewhere constructed earthworks that combined such astronomical sighting with their religious cosmology, as did the later Mississippian culture at Cahokia in present-day United States. Another example is Stonehenge in England.

Gerald Hawkins and Anthony Aveni, experts in archaeoastronomy, concluded in 1990, the evidence was insufficient to support such an astronomical explanation.

Reiche asserted some or all of the figures represented constellations. By 1998, Phyllis B. Pitluga, a protégé of Reiche and senior astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, had concluded the animal figures were "representations of heavenly shapes". According to the New York Times, "she contends they are not shapes of constellations, but of what might be called counter constellations, the irregularly shaped dark patches within the twinkling expanse of the Milky Way." Aveni criticized her work for failing to account for all the details.

In 1985, the archaeologist Johan Reinhard published archaeological, ethnographic, and historical data demonstrating that worship of mountains and other water sources predominated in Nazca religion and economy from ancient to recent times. He theorized that the lines and figures were part of religious practices involving the worship of deities associated with the availability of water, which directly related to the success and productivity of crops. He interpreted the lines as sacred paths leading to places where these deities could be worshiped. The figures were symbols representing animals and objects meant to invoke the gods' aid in supplying water. The precise meanings of many of the individual geoglyphs remain unsolved as of 2013.

Henri Stierlin, a Swiss art historian specializing in Egypt and the Middle East, published a book in 1983 linking the Nazca Lines to the production of ancient textiles that archaeologists have found wrapping mummies of the Paracas culture. He contended the people may have used the lines and trapezes as giant, primitive looms to fabricate the extremely long strings and wide pieces of textiles typical of the area. By his theory, the figurative patterns (smaller and less common) were meant only for ritualistic purposes. This theory is not widely accepted, although scholars have noted similarities in patterns between the textiles and the Nazca Lines, which they take as sharing in a common culture.

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