Spontaneous Human Inflation
On the crisp, sunny winter morning of 22nd January 2020, Graham Donaldson began his usual daily round of reading water meters in the small town of Wellingboro Connecticut. His first call was to the well-known “blond bombshell” of the district: Dr Jane Ingoldsby, admired from afar by many a red-blooded male for over a decade.
Spontaneous Human Inflation
On the crisp, sunny winter morning of 22nd January 2020, Graham Donaldson began his usual daily round of reading water meters in the small town of Wellingboro Connecticut. His first call was to the well-known “blond bombshell” of the district: Dr Jane Ingoldsby, admired from afar by many a red-blooded male for over a decade.
Graham was in the “best gay friend” category to many a woman, and the good doctor was no exception, so he felt no qualms about opening the door and calling Jane's name when he found it open. Mildly surprised to get no reply, he went downstairs to the basement to read the meter. A curious lilac fog hung in the air, thickening as he walked down the stairs. Scattered about the walls, floor and ceiling of the basement were tiny, peach-coloured fragments adhering to various objects in the room, mainly to the room itself. Dr Ingoldsby did not seem to be there. Then Graham turned the corner to the location of the water meter. What he saw mystified him.
There in the corner of the room was a pile of shredded multicoloured spandex and a pair of trainers, about ten feet apart. An aerobics video was running on a nearby display along with a camera pointed at the pile of clothing. Its blinking LED indicated that it too was still active. Graham called Dr Ingoldsby's name again, searched the house and found no trace of the woman. Finally, he contacted her office, only to be told that she had not arrived that morning. Since she had never missed a day's work in her life, all concerned were worried. Then he called the police.
On examining the evidence, particularly the video on the camera, detectives were able to piece together what had at first appeared to be a possible crime. The content of the video was almost impossible to believe.
Dr Ingoldsby had been in the habit of recording herself doing aerobics in order to improve her technique and avoid injury. Her final video, still recording when Graham had arrived and fortunately providing substantial evidence of his innocence, showed her undertaking what started off as a normal aerobics session, clad in her usual brightly-coloured unitard and trainers. Approximately two minutes into the video, however, her usual svelte form began to alter noticeably – she was starting to look distinctly pudgy. As the video continued, a loud hissing sound ensued and she stopped exercising, staring down at her body in evident incredulity, which by then was looking quite swollen. Then, over a period of about a minute with a look of increasing panic on her face, she appeared to inflate like a balloon, becoming rapidly immobilised, until she literally exploded. Another strange effect of this already exotic phenomenon was the complete lack of blood or gore in the explosion. Instead, her body simply popped like a balloon, disintegrating into a mass of confetti-sized fragments and leaving a dense purple cloud which rapidly dispersed.
The detective involved used just one sentence to express her horror:
'Dr Ingoldsby blew up like a balloon until she popped.'
Graham Donaldson was the first witness to an extraordinary phenomenon: spontaneous human inflation, in which a living person inflates from normal size with a mysterious non-toxic violet gas before bursting into tiny fragments with no trace of the internal organs other than the gas. No two cases are exactly alike, but some of the usual features are: the speed and intensity of the process, often associated with a mysterious gas which cannot be expelled from the body before the explosion, the disappearance of the internal tissues, the maintenance of full consciousness throughout the process, the inevitability of bursting and the disintegration of the body into small rubbery fragments which stick to nearby surfaces.
It is an oddly personal cataclysm, only observed in humans. Medically, it appears to be theoretically impossible. There seems to be no known way in which the human body can generate a gas of this nature and the continuation of consciousness combined with the transformation of the tissues is paradoxical. On the few occasions when the matter is raised in professional circles, the term “catastrophic idiopathic distension” is preferred, since the spontaneous generation of the distending gas is another theoretical impossibility, and it is grudgingly agreed that there are some rare cases of this, none of which occurred before the third decade of the twenty-first century.
However, the process whereby this occurs is completely unknown, and the phenomenon can be seen as an example of the mysterious volatility of today's world. The case of Dr Jane Ingoldsby was particularly well-observed and since it was of a medical practitioner there has been considerable personal motivation among some of her colleagues to arrive at an explanation. The attempt was made to connect her activities at the time to the events, in particular her practice of aerobics. One suggestion was that the excess of aerobic respiration involved in her exercise led to an unusual enzyme-mediated process entailing the excessive production of a gas by Dr Ingoldsby's mitochondria, the cell's “batteries” responsible for releasing energy from sugar by the controlled combination of oxygen and the production of carbon dioxide. However, on analysis of her genome, it was found that there were no unusual enzymes active in her tricarboxylic acid or glycolytic pathways and that they were entirely normal even in that combination.
Above all, why was there so little left of the body? The forensic team were unable to locate any more than the elastic shreds remaining after the explosion, and their total mass amounted to about seven grammes. In more conventional accidents and explosions, the mass of tissues left is generally significant. It was also found that the density of the fragments themselves was considerably lower than any ordinary solid substance and even most gases. The remnants were found to drift upwards towards the ceiling. This observation has been used to explain the startling tendency for victims of spontaneous human inflation to float upwards during their ordeal even though no gas exists with enough buoyancy to cause this.
This almost total disappearance of the body is a major unsolved problem. In a later case of human inflation, the remnants of Mr Martin Reece were found one March evening in 2031 by a neighbour in Pensacola, Florida, when alerted by a loud bang. He had died on his couch, which was also destroyed along with a nearby coffee table in the explosion. Along with the previously seen adhesive fragments, the furniture concerned had been powerfully splintered and shredded. As with Dr Ingoldsby, the footwear and clothing remained, but the majority of fragments were on the ceiling of the floor above, a hole having been punched through the living room ceiling with considerable force.
Hence something beyond the normal effects of distension with gas evidently takes place, and considering the various accounts of spontaneous human inflation, it is clear that although broadly similar, each case is in some way unique, almost as if the phenomenon was attempting to avoid an explanation. Another early explanation was that it was caused by a combination of flatulence and intestinal obstruction. However, it is sometimes theorised that the case of Dr Ingoldsby was not the first, since both Roald Dahl and J K Rowling mention something similar in their writing as the fate of their characters Violet Beauregarde and Marge Dudley.
There are a few even rarer cases of survival. Professor Naomi Jacobson of the Engineering Department of the University of Lincoln seems to have averted a similar fate in 2027. While at work on a zero point energy generator, Professor Jacobson began to experience sensations of gassiness and bloating and a feeling of air being sucked into her body via her mouth and anus. Being an avid Yoga devotee, she found herself able to expel the gas by adopting inverted postures and lying on her stomach while continually burping and exhaling. After about two hours, her body began to return to normal.
It is unclear how many indisputable cases there have been in the past three decades. Sandra Ivanovna, the Russian Fortean researcher, compiled a list of three dozen from various sources, which she stressed was incomplete – in fact, many cases of disappearance could be explained thus and she also hypothesised that since the sizes of the fragments are usually small that there are probably many cases which leave no trace other than the effects of an unexplained explosion and an apparently missing person.
Even so, it is obviously an uncommon event of which very few rigorous studies have been made. A link with dark energy has been suggested by the Austrian Gunther Leitner in an article for the site unexplainedinvestigations . He took as his base the distribution of vacuum energy devices in different parts of the globe and the dates of their adoption in different places within specific countries along with the levels of energy they generate, and found a close correlation with both their proximity and their frequency of use to these incidents. This is particularly clear with Professor Jacobson, but interestingly Dr Ingoldsby happened to be an early adopter of a Casimir nanograticule which she used to power the lamps in her basement.
This could be a worthwhile foundation for a theory explaining the phenomenon. Dark energy was first posited by Albert Einstein as the “cosmological constant” to explain the expansion of space and the current enthusiasm for the apparently clean, free and highly efficient use of zero point energy does involve the exploitation of symmetrical counterparts of the now established repulsatrons responsible for the inflation of the cosmos. There is of course said to be no such thing as a free lunch and the operation of vacuum energy generators has popularly been said to be “too good to be true” even before they were invented, rather like their nuclear predecessors of a century earlier.
In spite of this, this can only be a predisposing rather than a precipitating factor. Cases of spontaneous human inflation are still very rare and no explanation is forthcoming of the details of the process, which still seem to make little or no sense. Plainly, all of the cases share apparently inexplicable features which are hard to reconcile with known features of human biology or even the laws of physics.