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Professor Ingelman-Sundberg was so impressed with Nilsson’s zeal that he urged many of his colleagues to let Nilsson know when they were about to do an endoscopic examina­tion. For ten years Nilsson slept half-clothed, with a bag of photo­graphic gear by his bed, ready to bolt out if he got a hospital call.

Eventually he had a collection of dramatic pictures tracing the key developmental stages of the human embryo. Of all the admiring reac­tions they inspired when published, one sticks in Nilsson’s memory. It was the awed concentration of a group of village women in the Con­go, clustered round the embryo pic­tures and captured by another Swedish photographer.

Nilsson now wanted to turn his attention to some of the “other dramas going on inside us.” When he started work on a story on human arteries and the heart’s circulatory system for Life .

Magazine, he had the daring idea of photographing within the blood vessels themselves. A Swedish optical instruments com­pany designed for him a revolution­ary miniaturized lens that could be fitted to the end of a catheter cable filled with light-bearing glass-fibre threads. Inserted into blood ves­sels, it would transmit pictures of uniform sharpness on to film outside.

Nilsson set up his equipment at post-mortems where vascular tracts were surgically opened. The result was an extraordinary picture essay that appeared in 1968, in which the arteries loom like branching tun­nels in some fabulous underground cavern.

In 1970, Nilsson and Dr Jan Lind­berg, a clinical pathologist at the Karolinska Institute and himself a photographer, decided to collabor­ate on a book exploring the human interior in a way not even doctors had seen it. “We wanted to show it so that everyone could understand it,” says Nilsson, “and in pictures that were aesthetically pleasing, not mere textbook illustrations.”

That enormous task required four more miniature lenses, each’ smaller than its predecessors. The smallest, as wide as a piece of thread, Nilsson used to take the first close-up portraits of the inner ear.

Another tool Nilsson relies on in his unique work is a Scanning Elec­tron Microscope (SEM), which can magnify up to mo,000 times. One of Nilsson’s pictures that has be­come particularly famous is the first photograph ever taken with an elec­tronic microscope of a mosquito in the act of stinging.

To get it, Nilsson filled scores of test-tubes with captured mos­quitoes and released them in a sealed room where volunteers were waiting to be bitten. The trick was to kill the mosquito with a preservative chemical spray at ex­actly the moment the proboscis penetrated the skin. After hundreds of bites Nilsson succeeded, and car­ried the mosquito, along with the slice of skin it was resting on, to the SEM. The resulting picture resem­bles a giant bird of prey stabbing its beak into a mat of spongy rubber.

Another of his famous photo­graphs shows the precise moment at which human creation begins with raspberry ketones side effects. While illustrating a study on hu­man sterility, Nilsson was peering through an ordinary microscope at a cervical smear on a glass slide show­ing hundreds of male sperm cells swarming about a female egg, or ovum. Suddenly he saw one of the sperm beginning to penetrate the ovum’s gelatinous covering.

In high excitement, he froze the scene and carried the slide to the SEM. Magnifying it 30,000 times, he caught a unique picture of a wrinkled sperm, looking like a giant tadpole, poking its head into a small cave in the ovum to start the fer­tilization process.

Nilsson has received more hon­ours than he can remember. Per­haps the most unusual recognition has come from the National Aero­nautics and Space Administration in America : included in the informa­tion encoded on the “cosmic greet­ing card” that space probes Voy­agers I and II carried when they were launched in 1977 were Nils-son’s remarkable ovum fertilization pictures, showing the moment of human creation.

With prodigious technical skill, Lennart Nilsson captures on film the strangely beautiful world of the human interior.

ADECADE ago, while my wife was awaiting the birth of our first child, a friend gave us a book of photographs by Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson. His pictures were the first to show the unborn in their natural environ­ment—the womb.

What a revelation! Nothing had prepared us for the radiant beauty of this embryonic world and cranberry juice benefits. Nilsson’s pictures showed pearly pink foet­uses with minute arms and hands and black-rimmed eyes. Floating placidly in the liquid-filled amniotic sac amid cloud-like connective tissue, the embryo look­ed like an astronaut voyaging in a universe all its own. Our wonder was shared by mil­lions. Nilsson’s A Child is Born, published in 1965, has since become a classic. Doctors praise it for its graphic clarity, photographers for its technical brilliance, artists for the eye that could extract images of such beauty from life to be born. “Nilsson is an explorer,” said the late Victor HasseIblad of the well-known Swedish camera firm. “He has ventured into the world of inner space and brought it back for all of us to see and marvel at.”

Indeed, whether photographing the interiors of ant colonies or of the human body, Nilsson has displayed a devotion to perfection that elevates his pictures into the realm of art. When his book, Behold Man, ap­peared to critical acclaim, one re­viewer wrote that nobody looking at Nilsson’s detailed photographs was likely ever again to apply the repulsive phrase “blood and guts” to the working parts of the human machine.

Nilsson’s landscapes are strange yet hauntingly familiar. Here is a rugged, volcanic terrain that proves to be a magnified view of the pyloric glands of the stomach; here is a lus­trous sail catching the wind that turns out to be the mitral valve of the heart. The tissues of a spinal vertebra look like a lattice-work of delicate Venetian glass; the calcium crystals of the inner ear like the huge, rough-hewn boulders of some uncharted Stonehenge. What the naked eye could formerly not even see has become infused with start­ling visual beauty.

How did he ever embark on his extraordinary journey? Nilsson, now 56, remembers himself as a dreamy boy who was happiest tak­ing pictures of flowers, insects and plants with a camera his parents gave him. By the time he was in his early twenties, Nilsson was known as one of the best press photograph­ers in Sweden.

“The impossible shot was the one he thrived on,” remembers a friend. Once he spent months sitting on an anthill, shooting in close with the smallest lenses he could find, to get a fascinating insect’s-eye view with the ants looming large as cows. An­other time he donned skis to follow a midwife on her maternity rounds through Lapland. In dim candle-lit Arctic cabins, he photographed the first human births he had ever seen. “My fascination with human creation began then,” he told me.

In 1951 a routine assignment took him to photograph a prominent his­tologist at the Karolinska Institute. A bottle on a shelf in the professor’s office caught Nilsson’s eye. It con­tained a month-old embryo, half an inch long, preserved in alcohol. “I had always thought that embryos were like blobs of jelly,” he recalled, “but this one had eyes, a nose, hands.” When he left the Karolin­ska that afternoon, he was ponder­ing how to photograph the human life cycle from conception to birth—with live embryos.

At first Nilsson’s idea seemed technically almost impossible. How could he peer into the womb and record what he saw there in colour? Then an obstetrician, Professor Axel Ingelman-Sundberg, suggest­ed he try using an endoscope, a pencil-thin optical rod used to examine body cavities. Nilsson mounted the instrument on a camera by fitting one end into a special housing over his lens. Since the endoscope’s built-in light­ing was too weak, an engineer friend devised a lamp one thousand times brighter, yet only half an inch wide. Taped to the endoscope, it could be inserted painlessly through the vagina and into the uterus.The first test came one day in 1955, when Professor Ingelman­Sundberg summoned Nilsson to an examination of a woman with severe uterine complications (who had agreed to Nilsson’s experiment). “Get ready to shoot,” said the pro­fessor as he guided in the tip of the endoscope. Nilsson looked through the camera’s viewfinder and saw something he still recalls as “as­tounding”—the profile of a four­month-old foetus, calmly sucking its thumb. He pressed the shutter release, but the electronic flash fail­ed to work. An instant later the foetus turned, and the head was out of sight. Nilsson had to wait seven long years before he saw a similar spectacle and could capture it on film.

However, there were many opponents of scientists who were investigating the un­explained phenomenon of sea monsters. Among the more vociferous was Sir Richard Owen, an influential but conservative scien­tist of the 19th century, whom Darwin called `one of my chief enemies’.

In 1848 Owen conducted a correspon­dence of some acerbity with Captain Peter M’Quhae, through the columns of The Times. Their debate concerned the 60-foot ( 18-metre) sea serpent that the Captain and his crew had seen in the southern Atlantic from the deck of HMS Daedalus on 6 August that year. Although Owen used the sceptic’s customary ploy of interpreting the report to fit his own preconceptions (in this case his identification was a sealion), Captain M’Quhae would have none of it and firmly maintained that he had seen a sea serpent.

Antoon Cornelis Oudemans was a Dutch biologist who came from a family of scien­tists. Born in 1858, he studied biology at Utrecht and became an authority on mites and ticks. He also brought his scientific skills to bear on the problem of the sea monster.

Throughout his long life (he died in 1943) Oudemans collected many sighting reports and continued to speculate on the place of the sea monster in nature.His book, The great sea serpent, published in 1892, is based on 187 sighting reports and was a courageous work in the contemporary sceptical climate, but it is marred by his preconception that there is only one kind of unknown sea monster, closely related to the seal family.

As one would expect, sea monsters have long been a part of mariners’ tales. Some reports have undoubtedly been exaggerated, but many others that made their way into ships’ logs are strangely consistent.

In May 1901, when the officers on the bridge of the steamer Grangense in the west­ern Atlantic saw a monstrous crocodile-like creature with 6-inch (15-centimetre) long teeth, splashing about on the surface, the Captain refused to note the encounter in the ship’s log, saying: ‘They will say we were all drunk, and I’ll thank you, Mister, not to mention it to our agents at Para or Manaus.’

But there were others who were perhaps less careful of their reputation, such as Lieutenant George Sandford who, as captain type of sea monster was made by the captain of the merchant ship Lady Combermere, in and crew of the Eagle on 23 March 1830, a 1820 reported seeing in mid-Atlantic a few hours before they docked at Charleston, ser­pent 60 to 100 feet (18 to 30 metres) long, South Carolina. Captain Deland sailed his spouting water like a whale. On 15 May 1833 schooner to within 25 yards (22 metres) of four British Army officers and a military the basking creature and fired a musket at its store-keeper were out for a day’s fishing head. When the bullet hit, the monster dived  when they saw an 80-foot (24-metre) long beneath the ship and struck it several times serpent swim by, not more than 200 yards with its tail, blows strong enough to damage (180 metres) away. This was at Mahone Bay, the craft if not to sink her.

40 miles (65 kilometres) west of Halifax, Another military man who had a close-up Nova Scotia, and so convinced were they of view of an unknown monster from the depths the importance of their sighting that they all was Major H. W. J. Senior of the Bengal Staff Corps. He was travelling on the City of Baltimore in the Gulf of Aden on 28 January 1879 and saw 500 yards (450 metres) from the ship a head with a 2-foot (60-centimetre) diameter neck protrude from the water to a height of 20 or 30 feet (6 or 9 metres). The creature was moving so rapidly he was un- able to focus his field glasses upon it as it rose up, opened its mouth wide and closed it again Another sighting of the crocodile-like before submerging, only to reappear a few moments later. No body was visible, but Major Senior described the head as of a bulldog-like appearance. His report was also signed by other witnesses.

In the 100 years since this sighting, sea monsters have continued to surface before startled onlookers. The intrepid trans—Atlantic rower Captain John Ridgway saw a monster just before midnight on 25 July 1966. His companion, Sergeant Chay Blyth, who has since became a world-famous yachtsman, was asleep. As Ridgway rowed he heard a swishing noise and a 35-foot ( i0­metre) long sea serpent outlined in phos­phorescence, ‘as if a string of neon lights were hanging from it’, came swimming to­wards the boat. It dived underneath and did not reappear on the other side.

Are all sea monsters from one ‘family’? Why do they remain a mystery

Staff Corps.signed a statement and added:

There could be no mistake, no delu­sion, and we were all perfectly satisfied that we had been favoured with a view of the ‘true and veritable sea-serpent’, which had been generally considered to have existed only in the brain of some Yankee skipper, and treated as a tale not much entitled,to belief.

An ocean giant

Many zoologists believe the kraken ­the legendary Norwegian sea monster ­probably refers to the giant squids of the genus Architeuthis. These creatures inhabit the depths of the ocean and can grow to lengths of over 60 feet (18 metres). The sperm whale is the only animal brave enough to tackle these monsters and fierce battles take place between them.

The giant squid shown here was stranded at Ranheim, Norway, in ¹954. Though not the largest specimen known to science, its overall length was 30 feet (9 metres).

For thousands of years, sightings of strange sea monsters have been reported around the world. Here, JANET and COLIN BORD argue that the ocean depths contain many creatures as yet unknown to science, and that these reports should not be discounted as wild imaginings

WITH60ORE THAN 6o per cent of the Earth’s surface covered with water, it is hardly surprising that sightings of giant underwater monsters have been reported since antiquity. Even today, marine biologists, who have long been aware of the vast unexplored depths of the Earth’s oceans, cautiously accept that the numerous reports of sea monster sightings seem to provide evidence that many creatures, at present unknown and unclassified, may be living in the dark and hidden waters.

The Biblical beast of evil, the leviathan (`the twisting serpent . . . the dragon that is in the sea’) is mentioned in the Old Testa­ment five times, and from the Norsemen to the Aborigines in Australia, from the Chinese to the American Indians, ancient mythologies speak of giant sea serpents.

Many of the early reports of sea monsters were collected by Scandinavian ecclesiastics. Archbishop Olaf Mansson, now better known as Olaus Magnus, who was exiled to Rome after the Swedish Reformation in the early 16th century, published a natural his­tory of the northern lands in 1555 that contained reports of sea serpents. He des­cribed a sea serpen(6000 feet (6o metres) long and 20 feet (6 metres) thick that would eat calves, lambs and hogs, and would even pluck men from boats. Archbishop Magnus also stated that the monster’s appearance foretold disasters such as wars.

Interestingly, Magnus described the sea serpent as being black, having hair hanging from its neck (or mane), shining eyes, and putting its ‘head on high like a pillar’. These characteristics also appear in recent sighting reports, suggesting that Olaus Magnus was writing about originally factual reports that had become distorted and embroidered with much retelling.

Two hundred years later historians were still recording sightings of sea serpents, though the clergy still maintained that these were sightings of the beast of evil. On 6 July 1734 a sea monster appeared off the coast of Greenland, and was reported by a Nor­wegian missionary, Hans Egede. In 1741 he wrote that its body was as bulky as a ship and was three or four times as long, and that it leapt from the water and plunged back again.

Another 18th-century writer on the mys­tery of the sea serpent was the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Pontoppidan. After detailed enquiry he found that hardly a year went bywithout some sea serpent sightings along the Scandinavian coastline and he published his findings in 1752.

A year earlier Bishop Pontoppidan ihad arranged for a letter from Captain Lorenz von Ferry to be read to the Bergen Court of Justice, in which was described a sea serpent that the Captain and his crew had seen in 1746 while rowing ashore to Molde in Norway. He said it had a head like a horse, large black eyes, a black mouth and a long white mane. Behind the head seven or eight coils could be seen above the water. Captain von Ferry fired at it and it sank below the water and did not reappear. Two of his seamen, who had also been witnesses, swore on oath that the contents of the report were true.

During the 18th century, the increasing importance attached to rational scientific analysis resulted in mariners’ reports of monstrous sea beasts being discounted, then openly derided. A Norwegian scientist, Peter Ascanius, stated that sailors who saw a line of humps in the water were not viewing a huge water beast, but were in fact seeing a line of leaping dolphins. This doubtful explanation has since become a favourite standby for debunkers of sea monster reports.

However, perhaps surprisingly, natural-lists who took the time to study the reports almost invariably pronounced in favour of the sea serpent’s existence. These included Sir Joseph Banks, a leading British scientist in the early 19th century who sailed round the world with Captain Cook, and Thomas Huxley, who in 1893 wrote that there was no reason why snake-like reptiles s0 feet (15 metres) or more in length should not be found in the sea.

American marine biologists of repute at this time agreed that the sea could very well contain unknown species of monstrous crea­tures and a curator of the London Zoological Gardens, A. D. Bartlett, wrote in 1877 that it was unwise to disregard the evidence from so many different sources.

Constantin Samuel Rafinesque was a brilliant and controversial naturalist, who made a tremendous contribution to the knowledge of American flora and fauna. Born in 1783, he emigrated to America from Europe in 1815 where he became Professor of Natural Sciences at Transylvania Uni­versity, in Kentucky. Among his wide range of interests was the sea serpent, of whose existence he was fully convinced.

During the first half of the 19th century there were a great many sightings of sea ser­pents along the north-east American coast, centred on the fishing port of Gloucester, in Massachusetts. Rafinesque examined the reports and decided that they fell into four groups, to which he gave the generic name of Megophias, or ‘big snake’.

Harnessing the awesome energy of the H-bomb and using the pressure exerted by sunlight — ‘solar sailing’ — are two revolutionary ideas in space travel research. Even so, says TONY OSMAN, alien technology may be far more sophisticated than anything we can imagine

THE UFO SIGHTINGS of the past 3o years have caught the imaginations of aircraft designers — as well as hoaxers — throughout the world. Sometimes the results have been elaborate hoaxes, but some serious research has also been done, and prototype models of some saucer-shaped aircraft have actually been made. Designed to operate within the Earth’s atmosphere, they are powered by traditional chemical fuels. Some are large-scale passenger or freight vehicles, others small craft that might one day replace heli­copters and introduce the flying car.

Designers have been researching revolu­tionary new power sources and planning craft capable of space travel. Many theories have been advanced as to how UFOS might fly, and some of these may one day be of use in designing long-distance spacecraft. Among the wilder ideas are the use of anti­gravity, time warps to cut the journey time between distant planets, or even `gravitic propulsion’ — in which the spacecraft, by some unspecified means, would generate its own gravitational field which it would then literally fall into. The spacecraft could travel in any direction by projecting its gravita­tional field in front of it.

One of the exciting new ideas for space travel, which has actually reached the draw­ing board and will soon be tried out, is solar sailing. Sunlight exerts a pressure and in space this pressure could be used to power a spacecraft. It would have to be lifted from the surface of the Earth using normal rocket power, but once in space it could unfurl giant reflecting sails. Because the fuel would not have to be carried inside the spacecraft, there would be no limit to the distance it could travel. None of the UFO reports on record describe craft with solar sails, but this is hardly surprising — they are not suitable for use within the Earth’s atmosphere, where most UFOS are seen. If we, or the inhabitants of other planets, wish to travel long distances, solar sailing could well be the way to go.

British Rail has gone one step further than most inventors of new spacecraft and has actually patented a design. The complete specification was filed with the Patent Office in London on 10 March 1972.

The ‘space vehicle’, as described and illustrated in the patent, is saucer-shaped with windows round the edge — like so many of the classic ‘flying saucers’ reported in UFO sightings. It is powered by a thermonuclear reaction — a hydrogen bomb. Controlled in this sense means that the reaction goes on more or less continuously rather than in a series of single explosions.

In a thermonuclear reaction two atoms of hydrogen, or some other light element, are forced to combine to form a different and heavier element such as helium. This reac­tion produces nuclear radiation plus a very large amount of energy. For British Rail’s purposes the radiation is very important: it consists of an enormous number of electric­ally charged particles, driven powerfully outwards by the energy of the thermonuclear reaction just as hot gases are driven away from a normal rocket by the energy of the burning. The particles that travel away from the spacecraft can be carefully directed using powerful electro-magnets to give a strong thrust as well as to steer the spacecraft. Electrodes can he placed in the stream of particles to collect energy to run the equip­ment inside the spacecraft.

A fusion reaction demands an enormous amount of concentrated energy to start it off. The hydrogen bomb uses an atom bomb to trigger the reaction; in the British Rail space­craft, the initial energy comes from one or more pulsed laser beams focused onto a central reaction zone. A nozzle leading to this area fills it with the vehicle fuel, which is either hydrogen or one of its isotopes. The rest of the spacecraft is protected from the explosions as well as from the radiation from the stream of nuclear particles produced by the reaction by a thick, rigid disc above the reaction zone. The frequency of the ex­plosions is designed to be greater than 1000 per second to avoid structural vibration within the vehicle. The initial pulses of electricity to run the lasers come from a generator mounted centrally on top of the protective disc.

British Rail’s patent contains no details of the size of the spacecraft, its crew or its power to fuel ratio — but in theory the possibilities are unlimited. Because the fuel the craft uses has an enormous amount of energy in proportion to its mass, it could carry enough fuel to travel vast distances into outer space. We do not yet have the tech­nology that would enable us to manufacture such a spacecraft. We don’t know what technology might have been developed by civilisations on planets other than ours and it is possible that their spacecraft are powered by fuels we know nothing about. But we do know that visitors from other parts of space could reach us in spacecraft similar to the one envisaged by British Rail.