Posted on 10/09/2022 6:28:49 AM PDT by lowbridge
The 1973 film The Exorcist was based in part on a family with close ties to St. Louis. The child that inspired the movie, Ronald Hunkler, grew up to work at NASA, the government agency confirms.
He joined NASA in February 1962 to work in the spacecraft technology division. It is located at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
“His work with the high-temperature resistant ceramic compound was detailed in a Goddard News article,” said Sean Potter, Public Affairs Specialist. He said that a photo of him was published along with the article in the 1964 edition.
“He is also mentioned in a February 1965 NASA Tech Brief on the above topic,” said Potter.
Hunkeler worked with NASA for 40 years. Furthermore, he helped with the Apollo missions of the 1960s that put US astronauts on the moon in 1969.
Hunkeler was the boy who inspired the book The Exorcist in 1971, and then the movie of the same name.
The Skeptical Inquirer stated Hunkeler as the 14-year-old boy in the St. Louis exorcism case. They announced this after Hunkeler’s death on May 10, 2020. He was previously known as Roland or Robbie Doe in the many news articles about the exorcisms.
Saint Louis University says that the actual events that inspired the novel happened in 1949. Hunkeler’s family lived in the Washington, DC area. His aunt from St. Louis introduced him to Spiritualism, the occult. After she died, he tried to contact her with a Ouija board. That is when strange things started to happen in his family’s home.
(Excerpt) Read more at fox2now.com ...
Stay away from occultist aunts and ouija boards!
One of the Jesuits involved in the exorcism was our dorm chaplain at SLU. He told us that an angel appeared in the choir loft of the college church when the demon was cast out.
Rather ironic as it is said demons were angels at one time
I stay far, far away from the occult. That stuff is dangerous. It’s deadly, most people don’t really know how deadly it can be. I have learned to shun All Hallows Eve.
My grandmother was a so called spiritualist, not sure things ended up so well for her soul.
To this day, I get spooky dreams and I am 51, soon to be 52.i am a man of the woods (slide:Had bigfoots chunk rocks at me, seen weird things in the sky, but the spirit stuff chills my bones.
Demons are angels. They are angels who reject Gods will
Magic 8 Ball fortune teller is the closest we got in our household.
Bigfoot threw rocks at you? Please tell us more.
The boy’s family lived in Cottage City, MD, between the DC line and the Anacostia River and between Bladensburg Road and Rhode Island Avenue. Bladensburg is directly across the river. Back in a more gracious era, it was a trolley line suburb, served by the Rhode Island Avenue Trolley that ran from DC up to Hyattsville and College Park.
The boy had been suspended from Bladensburg Junior High School for his odd behavior. The family was Lutheran. The father was a career government employee, back in the era of the civil service exams, so he was presumptively reasonably competent and had good medical coverage by the standards of the time. One of the unexplained oddities of the case is why the Lutheran pastor referred them to the local Catholic priest. Perhaps the pastor and priest were simply good friends. But this still strikes me as quite unLutheranlike behavior. “Hey, I’ve got a tough case here, so I’d better call the Catholics” is not the response I’d expect from a Lutheran pastor.
As I understand the story, the boy’s mother was the true believer that he had been possessed. The father was apparently never convinced. The Lutheran pastor may have also been unconvinced, but the priest saw it differently and started the process for exorcism.
It would be fascinating to know the details. This is not a case of Father O’Gullible out in the back of beyond trying to deal with something above his paygrade. This started in 1949 in a just-across-the-city-line suburb of Washington, DC. Catholic University with its phalanx of seminaries and theologians is 2.5 miles away. The boy had been suspended by the local school officials. In addition to the neighborhood pastor and priest, he was seen by doctors and psychiatrists. The exorcism was started in the Georgetown University Hospital, so he was seen by more docs and shrinks there. I don’t know how tight the Catholic protocols on authorizing exorcisms were in 1949, but big league expert resources were available.
The GU exorcism was halted after the boy yanked a coil spring out of his rollaway hospital bed and stabbed a priest. The mother then took him to St. Louis, where she had family. The point that intrigues me here is that this created a Team A/Team B situation. They go to St. Louis: a different archdiocese, different bishop, different priests, doctors, and psychiatrists. Team B concurred with Team A and continued the exorcism, which was very extended but ultimately successful.
One of my good friends is an argumentative agnostic tending towards atheism. He is a radical skeptic on such matters. He insists that the supposed “victims” either have some extreme psychiatric condition or are faking the symptoms for their own gratification/amusement. But in this case, the boy was 13 years old when it all started. There were a lot of adult eyes on him, many of them very sophisticated in different fields, with two independent teams reaching the same conclusion. What exactly were they seeing?
Yep. I listen to George Noory once in a while and he is a good, calm, interesting host. He get’s rather agitated when speaking about Ouija boards. I don’t want that crap in my house with kids....
“Your momma sews socks that smell!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8dKnFU5LUE
This is Part one and Part two of an excellent piece written by David Jeremiah.....
https://davidjeremiah.blog/angels-and-demons-in-the-bible-part-one/
https://davidjeremiah.blog/angels-and-demons-in-the-bible-part-two/
Here is something related to this that you may find interesting in the Genesis 1 account of creation…
The creation story is detailed in this chapter as God created all the elements we know on planet Earth over the course of 6 days. Since God created ‘light’ itself on Day 1 and with that, the concepts of day and night, this means that Day 1 was established at the same time as the structure was created for the concept of ‘days to even exist’. But I digress….
For each of the 6 days when distinctive elements of God’s creation were brought into being, Genesis 1 says “and God saw that it was good” although on Day 6 when ‘man’ was created this is described as “VERY good.”….. but there is one exception and that is Day 2 for which the concluding statement of the other days (“and God saw that it was good”)…..is not there. Why is that?
On Day 2, God created the firmament (verses 6-8) which seems to indicate that the rough form of earth created on Day 1 was originally covered or surrounded in some form of water (see verse 2). Verses 6 to 8 seem to indicate that ‘water’ was separated into liquid and gaseous states and the atmosphere of what we call ‘air’ was created… one can read many things into the text, and it would be stupid to be dogmatic in a position about this but verses 6-8 in conjunction with other verses in Scripture seems to indicate what this means.
So why was the creation of our atmosphere not considered to be good? It seems that the answer to this lies in other verses found in scripture…
- Job 1 is a very interesting chapter that amongst other things, contains a discussion between God and Satan. Here are verses 6 and 7… “Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them. 7 And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.”
- 1 Peter 5:8 says this… “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:”
- And Ephesians 6:12 says this… “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”
So…. Why is the creation of the atmosphere that we live and breathe in not described by God as ‘being good’? I think scripture makes it clear that this is where Satan and the rest of the fallen angels (demons) were put into when God cast them out of heaven, and this is where they reside (Revelation 12:7-9. How can it be considered good when this is the abode of Satan and his host of demons?
A friend from the 90s who was in Law School said there was a room up a flight of stairs, which was kept locked up without any entry allowed, where the incident occurred. Either in the Library or Chapel, I forget. Reportedly haunted.
Materialists are simply terrified of anything spiritual. The psychiatrists are the hitmen to explain away anything that violates materialist dogma even to the point of murder (ECT, lobotomies, etc).
Well, except for stuff flying around the room, it could be mental. I know people who did spiritual possession for money(Bob Larson).
Zoomers collect mental illnesses like baseball cards. It is possible it could open a door for demons.
A key warning is in this paragraph about the dangers of Ouija boards.
“His aunt from St. Louis introduced him to Spiritualism, the occult. After she died, he tried to contact her with a Ouija board. That is when strange things started to happen in his family’s home.”
Here is a man’s experience with Ouija boards and the dangers of them: Limit The Effects — When and why I quit using the Ouija Board. (1964-03) http://bswett.com/1964-03LimitEffects.html
I also recall a priest in college telling me that the story behind the Exorcist was real, as he knew the priests involved in it. He said that the movie put in things to ‘grab the audience’ that didn’t happen, but it was a true case of possession by a demon.
Now that the principals are all dead, it would be cool if someone made a movie that sticks close to what we know of the actual story. It was not quite as bizarre as “The Exorcist,” but still pretty spooky, as I understand.
That is what I’ve been told, but ‘spooky’ isn’t exactly the word to be used, but I’m at a loss for a better one that would include the spiritually harmfulness of the case. Of course “spooky” is stuck in my mind as related to the Bearnstein’s children’s book “The Spooky Old Tree.”
For anyone interested in digging a bit into the matter, focusing on Frs. Bowdern and Halloran, check out “Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism” by Thomas Allen. It’s taken from the diary accounts, is pretty well written, and quite interesting on a few levels. Interestingly, it also mentions some of the things folks here are talking about, i.e, the appearance of an angel at the possession’s end and the locked room in the chapel.
Thank you for posting this article about a very current and relevant topic.
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