On the night of
November 10, 2005, one year ago
today, a young Chinese man
motorbiking through an
intersection on a green light was
struck down by a high-speed red
car running red light.
When the driver
learned the deadly crash, instead of
rushing the motorist to hospital, he
fled the scene.
What he didn?t realise
was that the accident was faithfully
recorded by a traffic surveillance
video camera at the section.
The motorist died. And
police hunt began.
In a bid to identify
the culprit, the video clip went to
air, and a number of phone calls from
the audience were quickly received.
It was not that they had identified
the car or the driver. They didn?t.
But they detected the presence of a
third party at the moment of the
crash.
The driver was
eventually captured, but not the
third one. In fact, police did not
even make an attempt to contact that
thirty party. It was until ten months
later, on September 17 this year,
police went on the Beijing television
to talk for the first time about this
mysterious presence.
"There is no
third party," said the police.
But just what had the
audience seen in the video?
It was a human skull.
And a skull with its jaw in motion as
if trying to speak out.
The Mortorist
approaching the intersection, a skull
in the background
The skull
The red car
approaching the mortorist,
with the motorist near the skull's
left eye socket
The moment
of crash,
the head of the car at
the skull's left eye
socket and the body of
the motorist at its jaw
That is why the
murmuring questions spread across the
communities about the fate and
destinations. And that is why the
delayed official response was
eventually delivered, claiming it
must be the reflections on the
computer screens and that to think
otherwise would be superstitious.
It in a way makes one
wonder if there is hidden wisdom in a
much-mocked quote that reads:
"As we know,
there are known knowns; there are
things we know we know. We also know
there are known unknowns; that is to
say we know there are some things we
do not know. But there are also
unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't
know we don't know."
Well, it does sound
like a wise advice, even though the
person who said this does just
opposite and doesn?t know he doesn?t
know.
An instance in
which a man did know:
In the latest edition
of Mao Zedong (1893-1976),
newly released by Chinese authority,
there is a passage proclaiming Mao
had prior knowledge about his own
death:
On October 1, 1975,
Mao did not read or sleep, but leaned
on the bed and fell into silent
contemplation. Then, he said to
himself, "This could be my last
National Day, last October 1." A
year later, on 9 September 1976, he
past away.
