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Conspiracies – Shut your mouth for a minute
Almost two decades ago I decided to take the leap into politics and run for Mayor of my hometown. I had made an earlier effort at the age of eighteen but that attempt was driven more by the energy of youth than an actual hope that I could affect change in my community. The year of my second and more serious attempt was 2000. As a person who was well-known through my community because of my lectures on paranormal/occult phenomena and conspiracy theories the campaign was sometimes a bit hyperbolic in nature. Alas, when the final votes had been counted I was not elected and I returned to my “normal”…
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The Wrongness of the Wrong
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Old Time Halloween Games for Finding a Lover
Halloween is, of course, filled with bats, spiders and ghosts but it’s also filled with opportunity to find love. Most Halloween parties, of the more turn-of-the-century variety, were simply excuses for men to touch women’s arms or for women to fondle a man’s mustache, how profane. These aspects of the Halloween season have been mostly forgotten, cast aside for plastic skulls and styrofoam gravestone but “no more”, I say. Let Halloween be returned to the lovers …or those who are destined to walk the dark roads of loneliness for eternity. Let the games begin It is said that before you go to bed you should dampen the sleeve of a…
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The Glow-in-the-dark Werewolf… maybe
The cold December nights of 1913 seem filled with a strange creature which only served to chill the blood of citizens in the Bronx more than usual. Some newspaper accounts labelled the creature a “Werewolf” and parents were told, by police, to keep a watchful eye on their children. As if a werewolf roaming the Bronx wasn’t odd enough this creature added a new supernatural spin to the old legends, it glowed. The Tail Tale Witnesses of the beast described it as having glowing and “gleaming, pale eyes” and some even said that the creature’s jaws shot fire and emitted “sparks” as it snapped its teeth. The “werewolf” attacks also…
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Big Toe and The Whatzit
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The Strange Saginaw Spook House
In the latter-half of the 1800’s newspapers in Saginaw, Michigan began reporting stories of a house which seemed, to the citizenry, to be haunted. For years families which moved into the location were allegedly “driven” from the house by encounters with spirits that wandered the grounds and knocked on the walls. With tensions running high a solution was found. In May of 1867 the “haunted” house was rented to a deaf man. As reported in the newspapers the result would be “anxiously watched by believers in the marvelous”. Very little is reported of the house after its new tenant took residence. Saginaw Solved? Five years later, in August, and presumable…
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Stand Up for All Weirdness – The Ghosts of Alien Bigfoot
Back in the 1980’s I would attend what were called “Metaphysical Conventions.” I would always get a Tarot card reading, take a photo of my aura, pick up the latest book on hauntings, watch some UFO films, and try to find a better VHS copy of the Patterson-Gimlin film than I had found the year before. The tables were filled with psychics, UFO contactees, Sasquatch seekers, witches, channelers, crystal gazers, ghost investigators, and any other manner of person who walked on the highest, strangest string connected to reality. Seeing all the sides After the convention many of us would find a local restaurant or coffee-shop and late into the evening…
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Sucker Money: An Exposé of the Psychic Racket, but not really
In 1933 film producer and original “shockumentarian” Willis Kent set his eyes on exposing what he saw as the phoney racket of psychics. Earlier in his career Kent had made a name for himself by producing the film “The Pace that Kills” a little film about dope, heroin, cocaine addiction and prostitution. His later films would be about things…even worse. The Psychic Racket Sucker Money, happily is a short little jaunt into what Willis saw as the grifty world of phony-bologna psychics. The film is billed as an “Expose of the Psychic Racket” but in reality is just a 60 minutes or horrible acting. In the movie the psychic Swami…
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Fifty-Thousand Dollars for a Ghost
Long before James Randi’s million-dollar psychic challenge, a wealthy South American mining tycoon offered $50,000 for any substantial “proof” of the afterlife. Buying a Ghost Remez de Romaldo was a well-to-do businessman in the early 1900’s and his wife was well-known among the spiritualist communities of that time. When his wife died of typhoid fever, in 1913, his grief exploded into action. Before returning to his homeland of Argentina he offered $50,000 to anyone, or group, who could supply him with satsifactory evidence of life after death. Keep in mind $50,000 in 1913 is equivalent to about 1.2 million dollars today so it’s nothing to sneeze at. Senor Romaldo’s wife…
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The Wrongness of the Wrong
As a person who has spoken and written about conspiracy theories for almost three decades I must now return once again to a topic which, it seems, sets me apart from the “louder” mouths who, it appears, do something similar to what I do. What I do Throughout the years I have never sought to convince anyone of any conspiracy. I have felt it more important to educate people to the wide range of ideas which in many instances include those which seem insane, outrageous, and sometimes scary. But, I have never implied that you should believe in any of them. History is fluid, it changes according to who is…
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Conspiracies – Shut your mouth for a minute
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If Everything That Is Living Is Alive
Life is a precious transient mysterious wonderful experience. Anything that is alive is living and any thing living will relatively soon die. Oddly, and so far as we currently know, the seemingly endless variety of physical forms which hold life within them are in a constant state of losing the life which inhabit them. There seems to be no way of returning life to a vessel which has lost it. Each individual specimen of life is unique to the cosmos; once it is gone it can never be replaced. From tree to bacterium to non-human animal to human animal — the uniqueness and importance of each living being is not…
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Just the Saucers, Ma’am: Jack Webb and Project U.F.O.
Most people know Jack Webb from his “real-life” police drama Dragnet, which between radio and television episodes numbered over 700. Webb was always fascinated with the men and woman who protected society so he created more shows, based in fact, to showcase these everyday heroes. Some of these shows were, Adam-12, Emergency, The D.A., O’Hara: United States Treasury, and Webb’s last television production, Project U.F.O.Real U.F.O. Cases? Project U.F.O. was based on the case files from the Air Force’s Project Blue Book which was formed to investigate claims of flying saucers. The show was co-produced by Colonel William T. Price who had head Project Blue Book for twenty-two years. Webb…
