Peru-sing the Papers ...

I've always been prone to clipping odd reports. I was a Fortean long before I knew the word, or the guy it was named after!

Ever since I read a Scrooge McDuck comic-book story about the gold mines of South America, I knew why the conquistadores went wacky.

This article was clipped from the December 7, 1989 Daily Oklahoman.  Can anybody tell us if there's more to this story?

See you Thursday!

  

Welcome to ANTHOLOGY AUGUST 2026!

First off is a spacey one.

MA-31 - Eye in the Sky:

1 - Rockin' Chair on the Moon Bill Haley 1952

2 - My Satellite Jesse Belvin 1956

3 - Red Planet Rock Don Lang and His Frantic Five 1957

4 - Planetary Run Joe Montgomery 1957

5 - Rocket To The Moon   Tony Perkins 1957

6 - Rock It To The Moon Jackie Góetroe and The Scamps 1958

7 - Satellite Rock Joe Tate and the Hi Fives 1958

8 - Rocket To The Moon    Lenny Welch 1958

9 - Light My Rockets Neil Alan 1958

10 - Sputnik Dance The Equadors 1958

11 - Rockin' On The Moon Deacon and The Rock & Rollers 1959

12 - Like Out Of This World Rockin' Charlie 1959

13 - Satellite City Earl Wrightson 1960

14 - People From Another World Jive Five 1961

15 - Signals From Saturn Rose DuBats 1962

16 - First Man To Stand On The Moon Buck Griffin 1963

17 - Countdown The Crescendos 1963

18 - Rocket Ship Don Drummond 1964

19 - Space Race Gene and The Esquires 1965

20 - I'll Send You to the Moon Les Baroques 1966

21 - Hippy, Skippy Moon Strut (Opus #1) The Moon People 1969

22 - Santa's Rocket Tim Dinkins 1969

23 - I’m a Stranger Here Five Man Electrical Band   1973

24 - Galaxy War 1977

25 - Eye In The Sky Alan Parsons Project 1987

26 - Books about UFOs Husker Du 1987

27 - Interplanet Janet Man or Astro-Man 1996

28 - Return of the Attack of the Curse of the Son of the Astro Squid Part XIV Chapter 6   The Amino Acids    2004

29 - Hot Rod Ride to the Moon Hi-Fly Rangers 2006

30 - Martian Rendezvous Alu 2008

By the way, Track Five's performer is that Tony Perkins, the guy who a few years later worked for Mr Hitchcock on a little black-and-white exploitation film.

************

MA-151 - Four-Color Fantasies - Volume 1!!!:

01 - George of the Jungle - Scott Shaw - 1989  (2:24)

02 - Peter Parker - The Great Luke Ski - 2002  (3:23)

03 - Official Suburban Superman - Suzy Quatro - 1973  (3:06)

04 - Look Out for the Batman - Tony Eira - 1966  (2:39)

05 - Super Heroes - The Model - 1981  (3:11)

06 - Aquaman - Grandpa Griffith - 2006  (3:36)

07 - Barney Google - The Mellomen with Thurl Ravenscroft - 1949  (1:56)

08 - Superman - Allison McCallum - 1972  (2:29)

09 - Green Hornet - Mr Unique and the Leisure Class - 1984  (2:43)

10 - Parker - Victor Banana - 1989  (2:10)

11 - Lois Lois - Superman's Girlfriend - 1979  (4:53)

12 - Comic Strip Wobble - Joe Capp and the Starfires - 1962  (2:24)

13 - Dick Tracy - The Chants - 1961  (2:16)

14 - Magilla Gorilla - The Family Goat - 1969  (2:37)

15 - Up Up and Away - Jivin' Jean & the Jokers - 1959  (2:36)

16 - Dr Strange - Paul Roland - 1982  (2:56)

17 - Captain America - Jimmy Buffett - 1970  (3:20)

18 - Spiderman - Stikky - 1988  (0:54)

19 - Superman - Joyce Davis - 1962  (2:31)

20 - L'Invincible Batman - Batman - 1966  (2:30)

21 - The Phantom - The Super Dupers - 1966  (3:35)

22 - Iron Man - Vitamin Lounge - 2002  (3:55)

23 - Superman Love - Chet Bolins - 1981  (2:37)

24 - Deputy Dog - Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs - 1966  (2:49)

25 - Help Help! and I Had a Hamburger Dream - Jack Mercer, Mae Questel, and Jimmy Carroll - 1964  (2:16)

26 - (I Saw) Batman (In the Launderette) - The Shapes - 1979  (2:38)

27 - Supergirl - Readymades - 1977  (1:46)

28 - Stop Talkin' About Comic Books or I'll Kill You - Ookla the Mok - 2006  (1:46)

29 - Capt Kangaroo - Suburban 9 to 5 - 1968  (1:57)

Pay no attention to Track 28.  Keep talkin'!  See you Thursday.

  

I Onthe Thaw a Flyin' Thock-e-thur

That is a Bobby Goldsboro song I heard once on the Tonight Show. This time it applies to dee Kelley.

This is from the January 13, 1987 National Enquirer.

And above is from the June 16, 1987 Weekly World News.  I'd say the News simply lifted into from the Enquirer, wouldn't you?  It even l;ooks like the same photo!

See you on Monday for a month of compilations.  It's a date!

  

Puttin' on the Berlitz

Charles Berlitz (1914-2003), among other things, was a breathless presented of capital-M Mysteries.  Here are a few of his tomes from my shelves.

Ya got a lot of speculation and recounting of it-really-happened anecdotes, which I don't recall because it's been decades since I cracked any of these covers.

Nevertheless, I can tell you with assurance that if you leave your BS detector at the door, you WILL be entertained by Mr B.

See you Monday, fellow Mysterians!

  

You'll Be Gripped!

If that happens, tell those mean ole aliens to keep their hands to themselves.

Until then, check out this article:

These breathless whispers of freakiness are from the June 9, 1987 Globe.  And before you ask, I do not have the previous two parts of this world-shattering series.

The theories of the distinguished Rev Theodore Peters don't hold theological water, because his Lutheran faith (and Protestantism) maintains that God revealed himself through his son and the Bible, and that's all that's necessary to know what you need to know to learn God's ways.

You are free to make up your mind and/or heart about whether space beings (or other beings) are messengers of God.  You might even meet one on Sunday at church!  But don't hold your breath.

See you Monday!

  

Welcome to the MUSICAL MONTH OF MAY 2025

Yup, a new music comp every Monday and Thursday, mi compadres.

We'll commence with a celebration of Walpurgisnacht.

Many of these selections feature Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain," but not all.

01 - St John's Night on a Bare Mountain (Original Version) - Mussorgsky - Ukraine NSO - 1867  (12:48)

02 - Night on Bald Mountain (Full Metal Cover) - Mussorgsky - arr John Parrish - 2016  (10:35)

03 - Walpurgis Night Allegretto - Gounod - 1859  (1:26)

04 - Night on Bald Mountain - Mussorgsky - Mint Julep Jazz Band - 2015  (4:08)

05 - Dorothy's Rescue (Extended Version) - Mussorgsky - arr Herbert Stothart - 1939  (3:10)

06 - Die erste Walpurgisnacht - Overture (edit) - Mendelssohn - 1831  (6:34)

07 - Walpurgis Night - The Coffinshakers - 2007  (3:27)

08 - Night on Bald Mountain (Piano Solo) - Mussorgsky - arr Andrew Ray - 2012  (8:11)

09 - Walpurgis - François Rabbath - 1963  (3:19)

10 - La nuit de Walpurgis - Overture - Charles-Marie Widor - 1887  (10:13)

11 - From the Bohemian Forest - Walpurgis Night - Dvořák - 1883  (3:58)

12 - A Night on Bare Mountain - Mussorgsky - arr Leibowitz - 1962  (10:36)

You should find and listen to the entirety of Mendelssohn's cantata, Die erste Walpurgisnacht.  Among other things, it's a poke at rabid so-called Christians who see the devil everywhere.

THIS LINK GOOD FOR SEVEN DAYS.

PERMANENT LINK.

See you on Monday, fellow revelers!

  

Sea Monster in the Clouds

On October 15, 2022, I was comin' up to the intersection of SW 44th and May in good ole OKC when I saw a suspicious cloud in the east.

And that cloud reminded me of a photo of a water monster I had seen somewhere.

It was this 1977 photo of Champ, the rumored critter of Lake Champlain, a body of water shared by Vermont, Quebec, and Vermont.

Here's a closer view of the cloud.

Just for fun, here's another similar image, from page 79 of the oh-so-fun 1957 book David and the Phoenix, by Edward Ormondroyd.  You can read an interview with author Ormondroyd here.

I encourage you to read that book!  It's so much fun.

See you Monday!

  

Lotsa Spirits Around Here

This is from the March 23, 1971 Look magazine.

I cadged this article because of the lovely photos of mysterious ruins.  It’s interesting that the typography of the opening text omits several periods at the end of sentences, as well as leaving the “I”s undotted.  Captions on ensuing pages often, but not always, omit periods too.

Before you ask, I don’t know where the last page is, which would have contained the rest of the dark yard of Jerpoint Abbey.

See ya Thursday!

   

We're All Baffled Around Here

I don't think this was swamp gas.

This is from the October 11, 1989 Oklahoman.  Below is the article as printed, which I think is harder to read.

See you on Thursday, and keep watching the skies!

  

TimeTwist Tidbits!

 

SoonerCon 2009’s theme was “Slideways in Time,” and here are some of the text pieces I wrote for its Program Book.

“—All You Zombies—” is a science-fiction short story by Robert A Heinlein.  He dashed it off in a single day, July 11, 1958.  It was first published in the March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.  In this story, the first-person narrator is his own father, mother, and child.

Timescape is a 1980 novel by science-fiction writer Gregory Benford.  In it, doomed scientists from a dying Earth (in 1998) try to send a warning message to the past, in 1962.  The interesting thing about the message is that it doesn’t involve travel as such.  The scientists shoot a tachyon beam to the astronomical position of the Earth in 1962 with their message.

In the 1986 comics maxi-series Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons describe an alternate Earth, deviated for the worse by the presence of “real” superheroics.  If superheroes were real, they’d really screw the world up, Moore said.

The Star Trek episode “The Naked Time” ends with a cold-fusion restart of the Enterprise’s warp engines, which accidentally sends the ship and crew three days backward in time.  Fan rumor has it that “The Naked Time” was originally a two-part story and script, with the time-travel ending of “Time” leading into the Enterprise’s accidental arrival in 1969 for the beginning of “Tomorrow Is Yesterday.”  The beginning of the aired version of “Yesterday” blames the Enterprise’s time travel on the slingshot effect of a black hole’s gravitational field.

In Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the laconic Hank Morgan arrives in Camelot by simply waking up there.  At the end of the story, a jealous Merlin puts Morgan into a magical sleep until his own 19^th-century time.

In Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, an agnostic named Karl Glogauer travels from the year 1970 in a time machine to 28 A.D., where he hopes to meet the historical Jesus of Nazareth.  Eventually Grogauer becomes the Jesus of history, with his words on the cross—“It’s a lie, it’s a lie”—misinterpreted by as “Telestai,” which is Aramaic for “It is finished,” or “It is paid.”

The Terminator films and TV series posit a future where machines have become sentient and systematically begin to eliminate humanity.  Who’ll change their oil? I wonder.

In Ray Bradbury’s classic 1952 tale “A Sound of Thunder,” the killing of a butterfly on a Time Travel Safari to kill a Tyrannosaur changes history, a presidential election, and the spelling rules of the English language.

When Harlan Ellison turned in his original script for Star Trek’s “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the Enterprise crewman who escaped to the planet was a drug dealer on the run from a Security team.  While in the past, Jim Kirk made the decision to live in the past with Edith Keeler (the future be damned).  It is Spock who prevents somebody else (not Kirk or McCoy) from saving Edith’s life.

          In a March 1986 episode of The New Twilight Zone, a story called “Profile in Silver” tells of a history professor from 2172, a distant descendant of JFK, who returns to Dallas 1963 as part of a time-travel research project.  But things go awry when Professor Joseph Fitzgerald prevents the assassination and is taken into custody himself.  He produces a silver 1964 half dollar and then time starts to fall apart.  The professor realizes that unless JFK dies, nuclear war will end life on Earth now, in 1963.

          In Superboy 85, cover-dated December 1960, a very young and inexperienced Superboy decides to change history by time-traveling to prevent the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.  However, in Washington DC he first encounters an adult time-traveling Lex Luthor, who whips out a piece of Red Kryptonite that paralyzes the super youth.  Only after a commotion in the street draws Luthor’s attention does the villain realize that Lincoln has been killed, and comes to the horrible conclusion that Superboy wasn’t time-traveling to apprehend Luthor but to rescue Lincoln.  Luthor has, in effect, murdered our 16^th President.

Marvel Comics had several runs of a comic series What If? in which parallel-history stories wondered about what might happen if one or another piece of Marvel mythos were changed.  Topics wondered, “What if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?” or “What if Captain America Became President?”

The 2004 film The Butterfly Effect focused on the idea that subjectively tiny incidents might portend large deviations in time.  Ashton Kutcher starred as a fellow enabled to time-travel along his own life.  Each “correction” he attempts leads to a disastrous conclusion.

Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle is considered the fountainhead of alternate histories.  It matter-of-factly describes a North America carved up by the Japanese and Nazi Germany after the Axis Powers won World War II.

Several episodes of Babylon 5 featured the concepts of time travel or alternate outcomes, such as “War Without End” and “Babylon Squared.”

Dr Who’s TARDIS can travel anywhere and anywhen in time and/or space, depending on the skill of its pilot (and its maintenance schedule).  Don’t forget that TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space.

The perennial Christmas feel-good movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, is at its heart an alternative-history story.  What if George Bailey hadn’t been born?  How would Bedford Falls and its citizens be different?

The CBS comedy It’s About Time was a one-season 1966-1967 time-travel tale about a pair of US astronauts who end up in the Stone Age, which is populated by such characters as Joe E Ross and Imogene Coca.  Halfway through the (only) season, the astronauts returned to our time, accompanied by a Stone Age family.  This show’s premise allowed fish-out-of-water time jokes going both ways!

In 1966-1967, ABC provided a sci-fi show called The Time Tunnel, where two scientists became detached in time after the malfunction of the US government’s Project Tic-Toc.  Every week, while attempting to make their way home, they would end up in another crisis of times future or past.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a post-modern anti-war science-fiction novel dealing with soldier Billy Pilgrim’s experiences during World War II and his journeys with time travel.  Somehow becoming “unstuck” in time, he wanders up and down his life’s timeline, living out Vonnegut’s deterministic and anti-free-will viewpoint.

In her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K Le Guin tells of George Orr, who turns to drugs to quiet his disturbing dreams.  Dr Haber, his therapist, discovers that Orr’s dreams, when directed beforehand, can alter reality.  So Haber decides to use Orr’s dreams to “fix” the world, in each instance ending up with a worse result than before.  The novel was adapted for TV, in 1980 and 2002.

There was a young woman from Bight
Whose speed was much faster than light.
So she set out one day
In a relative way,
And returned on the previous night.

 

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today –
Oh how I wish he’d go away!

Robert Charles Wilson’s 1994 novel Mysterium concerns a county-sized chunk of America mysteriously transported into an alternate reality.  Here the world is ruled by a strange Catholic/Greek church-government and all independent thought and action is quickly stifled.  The transformation occurs in relation to a nearby military base’s experiments on a strange “quantum shard” from outer space.

See you on Thursday, fellow time travellers!

  

 Scary Books, Kiddies!

 The Mummy: Dark Resurrection.  By Michael Paine.  DH Press, 2006.  Cover painting by Stephen Youll. 

            Well, I’m sad to report that this is another of those books whose memory is lost to the time and tides.  It’s set in the present day, and ye olde Karloffornian Ardath Bey is once again dragging around as THAT mummy.  Ye gad!

           See you next time—mayhap with more verbiage, kiddies!  That's Wednesday -- It's a DATE!

Them Thar Feet Is Big

This hyar story from the local rag is about a hairy guy possibly living in our own Sooner State.

To me, "Boggy Bottom Monster" sounds like a villain in a diaper commercial.

This is from the July 30, 2006 Oklahoman.  Note the writer credit, a "staff writer."  I don't know how many of those the paper has today.  (Although the phone number at article's end has a Dallas area code.)

I like the felicitous phrase "fleeting furry freak," don't you?  See you Friday for some FICTIONAL monsters!

  

I've Seen the Saucers

... So says the 1974 Elton John song.

But long before that, I was fascinated by the idea.  As seen by my juvenile saucer blueprints, or first attempts at fiction.

But I had fun faking saucers, too!  This one isn't a mothership over our street in Bartlesville, it's (natch) a red Frisbee.  Still, I did a good job of snapping the photo after tossing the thing!

Here's an even closer encounter!  Fellow sixties kids will recognize this landed saucer as the primary hull of the U.S.S. Enterprise model from AMT, with some added "landing gear."  At the right is a very hard-to-see Matchbox vehicle I wanted to pass off as an alien landing craft.

Here's someone else's photo of the same toy.

Well, what do you think?  Weren't my kiddie pix -- umm, childlike?  At least you gotta give me points for fun!  See you Monday.