Sunday 7 March 2010


Dot Boson-Higgins Documentary

Dot Boson-Higgins was born in Wamego Kansas in 1894. Orphaned as a child, she was brought up by her aunt and uncle.

Not much is known about her early life, but at the age of 14 she was sent by her aunt to Ferncliff Asylum, Kansas. Boson-Higgins had been suffering from a series of complex delusions since the age of six.

One psychiatrist’s report states;

“ Dot has told me that she has found the scientific formula to travel to another world, which she refers to as a parallel universe. When asked about this universe she can explains it in minute detail. Her creation of scientific terms and the complexity of her descriptions, lead us to believe that her delusions are of a most severe variety, however we believe that an intensive course of the revolutionary Electroconvulsive Therapy could help keep them under control.”

After six months of electroconvulsive therapy, Higgins’ willingness to voice her complex theory had diminished to the point that she was regarded as sane by her psychiatrist and released.

In fact, Higgins’ aforementioned delusions had diminished because she had found another way to voice her theories. She had been writing them down, and by the time she was sixteen she had penned volumes of text describing the foundations of quantum physics, including the first documented example of the form and purpose of the atom. All but one of these books was discovered by her aunt and destroyed.

A short time later Higgins moved to England, married a naval officer, Percy Higgins, with whom she had six children, and lived as a housewife in Plymouth until her death in 1985 at the age of 90.

After Percy’s death six years later, the house and their belongings passed to their children and grand children , it was then that Higgins’ remarkable secret was discovered.

Her grand-daughter, speaking in 1992 said;

“ Behind a wall in Gran’s pantry, we found a secret door. Behind it, there was a room, quite small about 7 feet across. In the middle she’d set up a writing table and put shelves up on the surrounding walls. One set of shelves were completely covered in books and the others were covered in all sorts of green ornaments.”

Most of Higgins’ books contain extensive theories on the generation of wind vortices, presenting the mathematical formula for air currents in a tornado. Higgins had discovered that under the right set of conditions, it was possible to use channelled air to transport objects through four dimensional space to parallel universes. The theories are so complex that many of them are still being deconstructed by physicists around the world.

The museum was offered the collection by the family in 1994, and we are currently cataloguing and transcribing all of the information contained in the room.

The most compelling twist in the tale is that experts now believe Higgins may have accidentally visited one of these parallel universes as a child. A neighbour of author L Frank Baum in Kansas, the young Dot seems to have relayed to him tales of a strange land she called Oz, a land that until now was believe to be Baum’s fictional creation. Higgins drew maps of Oz and detailed landscapes, as well as drawings of the people of Oz. All of the objects found in the room are green. Each one was numbered and the numbers are listed in a book alongside names, which on closer inspection were revealed as characters who appear in Baum’s novels - characters that some now believe could be real people.

There are 200 objects in the collection and the museum is currently recreating Higgins’ laboratory, with the help of her family. The exhibit is due to open in spring 1999.

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