Joseph G. Murphy

Birthplace: Kansas City Missouri
Lifespan: 1928 - 1994
Occupation: Geologist

Joseph G. Murphy served as a US Army Staff Sergeant during a tour of duty in Korea and was granted an honorable discharge in 1948. After leaving the armed forces Joe attended the University of Oklahoma where in 1951 he received a Bachelor of Sciences Degree in Geology. In 1953 he moved to Alberta Canada and Settled in Calgary. He retired from professional geology in 1987. Joe's resume includes work as Seismic Interpreter, Lab Instructor, Photo-geologist, Consultant and Senior Staff Geologist. Joe's scientific background made him skeptical of cryptoarchaeology and the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis ( AAH ).

However, one thing he was not able to fully explain was an incident he had involving missing time. The incident occurred during 1962 in the mountains west of Calgary while Joseph was hiking. He had been following a trial carved into the side of a cliff when he came upon a divide formed by a large crack in the cliff walls. The trail continued on the other side of the crack at a lower level and he estimated that he could jump the divide fairly easily. He made the leap and landed squarely on the other side.

Unfortunately the trail ended around a bend only a short distance later and the vertical cliff walls above and below prevented any further advancement. So Joseph headed back the way he came. Unfortunately, upon returning to the divide, Joseph discovered that jumping back over the divide in the opposite direction was a different kind of challenge. Due to the elevation difference it meant that instead of jumping down and over the gap ( a relatively easy task ), it required a leap both up and across, which was not possible to do safely. Consequently, he found himself trapped on the mountain ledge.

Nevertheless Joe was freed from his lofty predicament, and therein lies the mystery. When asked how he made it back, he said, "I simply found myself back on the other side. One minute I was looking over at Duffy ( the family dog who had stayed on the other side ) and wondering what I was going to do. The next thing I remember, Duffy and I were on our way back down the trial on the other side. I was tempted to retrace my steps to see if I could figure out what happened, but it had suddenly become late in the day, so I just kept going so that I could get back to the car before it got dark."

Throughout his career as a geologist, Joseph had hiked extensively, surveying maps and staking claims in remote areas. He was no stranger to field work and he loved geology. He was not the type of person to get spooked or confused when out in the wild. Like many other people who feel that their reputations might be affected by reporting anomalous phenomenon, Joseph did not share his story until after he retired from professional geology over 25 years later.

Although Joe indicated that nothing like this had happened to him before or since, his wife Ellen reported that during a family vacation around the same period, she, Joseph and their young boy Randall were driving along a narrow mountain road in British Columbia when a logging truck suddenly came barreling down on them. According to Ellen, she thought they were all going to die, but instead of colliding with the huge truck, the vehicles seemed to interpose in a ghost vehicle like manner. Several years later, their son J.R. Murphy would also experience missing time and a host of other paranormal phenomena.

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