Re: Can we really spontaneously combust? If so, how?

Dear Andrea,

Hurray for you! You and your friends are SO RIGHT!! Of course poeple cannot 
spontaneously combust. Most of us are about ninety percent water. Ever 
tried to set fire to a bathtub full of water?? What never ceases to amaze 
me is how so many people will believe something because they read it in a 
newspaper or see it on TV.

Fire is not so mysterious. It needs a source of heat to get going, it needs 
fuel to keep burning, and it needs oxygen to combine with the fuel. What 
"fuels" these superstitions about spontaneous human combustion are a few 
peculiar cases in which people jumped to very unscientific conclusions. 
There have in fact been a few cases where a person WAS burned to death in 
a room that didn't burn up itself, with not much remaining of the victim 
but charred remains. BUT IN EVERY CASE, the person was alone; there was a
source of fire (like a candle or a fireplace); there was a reason the 
person would not wake up or escape from the fire (like being totally drunk, 
being epilleptic, etc.); and there was plenty of fuel present (like being 
very obese - fat burns!, or having heavy robes on). So the people did in 
fact burn up, usually kind of slowly. It's gross, but their fat melted and 
burned slowly like a big candle, and that cooked away the rest of them!

There is an organization that examines all kinds of claims of such 
superstitious events, from psychic phenomena to the Bermuda Triangle. It's 
called CSICOP (the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of 
the Paranormal). One of their members wrote a great article about the 
subject of spontaneous human combustion in the Summer, 1987, issue of their 
magazine, The Skeptical Inquirer. Your library should be able to get you 
the magazine, if you want, so you can read it yourself. They have a website 
you might want to visit where you can search for different subjects. It's 
address is

http://www.csicop.org/

Congratulations for not getting suckered!

Paul Odgren.