Imagine the horror: Civil Defense puppets

I don't know where these eerie civil defense short films were shown: probably on TV, though they're specifically geared towards a rural audience. I don't know why a rural audience would be particularly susceptible to nuclear holocaust warnings dramatized by the most hideous marionettes ever created. Perhaps the marionette cow would make more sense to them than this dead-faced, thread-trailing farmer from hell. These spots would no doubt be extremely cheap to make, as the set and main character (nameless, almost faceless) are laughably primitive. And yet. The message was being sent out daily, and I remember it. These were supposedly from 1965, which seems late for such a ludicrous production. I was eleven years old.

Did you ever have a crumb of memory - a corona, just the edge - a whisper, some fragment of a whole - and find that it led all the way back to your early childhood? My childhood was full of terror, for some reason, although the big reason was the Iron Curtain and Walter Cronkite and Civil Defense announcements ("This is only a test") and that godawful BOOOOOOOOOOP that seemed to go on forever. 

I've been thinking lately about the Emergency Broadcasting System. IS there such a thing, and if there ever were an emergency, an earthquake or a - God, we won't say it! - would it really kick in? How COULD it kick in, if there was no electricity and everyone were buried under rubble? Is it one of those things created just to give us the illusion of security?

And how would we find it? What frequency on the radio, what channel on the TV, what app (for surely the Emergency Broadcasting System has an app)? Maybe, as in a dream I had once, it would just start playing on ALL the channels, ALL the time, all over the world.

Hi, folks. It's the end of the world. Nice knowing you.

I must have been really small when I became terrified of certain ads. I didn't understand them. One of them seemed to be about poison ivy and how you could die from it. It was one of those smudgy, dreamlike, black-and-white animated things, the characters made up of sticks and circles, and it had a child (who had already been sternly warned!)getting mixed up with poison ivy - or was it something else? Radioactive material? - then growing sick, and sicker, then lying in bed, then lying in a grave with a mound and a cross on top. And x's for eyes.

I was terrified of this thing.

Another one - I may have been all of three years old, certainly no older than four - showed a man behind prison bars, clasping the bars in his hands and sort of slowly sliding down them with a horrible sagging expression, as if he was melting. Terrified me. I now put some pieces together and realize it may have been about drunk driving. But that is the adult me, jumping in with an interpretation. I really don't know.

This one really scared me, and I had no idea what it meant: a TV announcer was reading the news in a crisp, authoritative voice. Suddenly from the right-hand side of the screen, a man with his face obscured jumped out and clapped his hand over the announcer's mouth. He tried frantically to keep talking but couldn't make a sound. I had no idea  what had happened, why it had happened, and I had no power to ask.

Again, my adult mind jumps in now and fills in the pieces. This was likely another Cold War drama depicting the gagging and muzzling of freedom of speech by the insidious forces of Communism. Of course! It's creepy, a creepy way of illustrating it, but I am fairly certain now that's what it was. 

Now that I see it, though, the man in jail may also have lost his precious freedom due to the forces of Communism. This was the McCarthy era. Drunk driving was standard, along with smoking. So it's a safe bet that ALL these ads or dramas or announcements, or whatever they were, were actually about Cold War terrors and the threat of ideological suffocation, loss of freedom and ultimate annihilation.

So THAT'S all it was? 

I was a Cold War baby

                               This is only a test.

Trust no one!

This is one of the weirdest things I've ever heard, and inspired a flurry of paranoid gifs, and even an animation (featuring paranoid stills). I think "politone" is meant to be "polytone", because the only definition of "politone" I can find is:

Politone

Politone may be available in the countries listed below.

Ingredient matches for Politone
Pioglitazone

Pioglitazone hydrochloride (a derivative of Pioglitazone) is reported as an ingredient of Politone in the following countries:
Taiwan

← International Drug Name Search

 To me it sounds like shoe polish, but never mind.

(These do play, by the way. I just like the look of them stuck together. Try playing them all at once.) Anyway, this group, this ENIGMA2000, is very X-Files, very paranoid, very into the mysterious numbers-sequence broadcasts that were covered so well on William Shatner's Weird or What? (and GOD how I miss that show, it was tons of fun. Remember that little chihuahua, and the way he came riding up on a horse?)

I randomly came across this politone stuff and it scared the living shit out of me, so I just had to know more. Pretty soon I didn't want to know more. This is some sort of weird espionage thing, spy versus spy, even though it goes by an innocuous name. Some think it even has a paranormal aspect. There are lots of examples on YouTube of numbers being read out loud, random tones, even bits of music, coming from all over the world. Nobody quite knows why. I keep thinking it's a bizarre sort of Emergency Broadcasting System, a frequency left open in case the world ends and the political bigwigs of the world want to say goodbye.

According to Wikipedia: "A numbers station is a shortwave radio station characterized by broadcasts of formatted numbers, which are believed to be addressed to intelligence officers operating in foreign countries. Most identified stations use speech synthesis to vocalize numbers, although digital modes, such as Phase-shift keying and Frequency-shift keying as well as Morse code transmissions are not uncommon. Most stations have set time schedules, or schedule patterns; however, other stations appear to broadcast at random times. Stations may or may not have set frequencies in the HF band."

It goes on, but we know enough already, don't we? These number sequences would appear to mean absolutely nothing, but they MUST have meaning or they wouldn't still be broadcast after something like 90 years. The Politone guys (for I can't even imagine a chick doing this - these fellows remind me of the Lone Gunmen on the aforementioned X Files) have their own newsletter, so dated-looking that it's even worse than mine for obsolete-looking formatting. None of it makes a damn bit of sense, so it's obvious these guys don't get out much. The photos are about an inch square, and the '90s-font text goes all the way across the screen, so that your neck is out of joint after reading a paragraph.

Anyway. I've written before about how I "hear things" in my neighborhood, particularly at night. It's disturbing. Right now things are quiet, but I have no illusions they will stay that way. It's aircraft, obviously, but WHY? and what, even? Must be the RCMP, but what would they be doing buzzing around in helicopters over my sleepy little town? And if it's the military, God help us all.

I had a thought today - something from Apocalypse Now! flashed into my head, and suddenly I realized there has to be more than one helicopter. Maybe that's why it's so loud? There's a resonant frequency between all of them which threatens to make my skull explode.

I just had to express my paranoia in an animation (below) which I call Cold War One.  It is, mercifully, silent.

Visions of a Cold War Kid

When I was a kid, back in the 1960s, everything was The Future. I was constantly hearing about what life would be like "In The Year 2000".

It was a never-ending refrain: "By the year 2000, we'll" (all be walking around on the moon, have domed cities with climate control, zoom around in flying cars like on The Jetsons, have our living room rugs vacuumed by a robot).

And computers. Yes, computers were a definite menace. Every episode of The Twilight Zone had a computer in it, and man, they were EVIL. They always turned out to be the villain, the dark force behind every bad thing that had happened in that smudgy, surreal, black-and-white half-hour. 

It was almost as bad as Star Trek, where by the end of the show the evil computer would start to smoke and jibber as Captain Kirk managed to convince it to self-destruct in order to save the universe. Though why computers would have smoke coming out of them is anyone's guess. Call Bill Gates, something must've shorted out.

In this futuristic scenario, convenience and sterility meant everything. There was no food. Of course not! Food came in the form of pills. Green pill, vegetable. Red pill, meat. Etc. I used to brood in my morose child-way (for even then, as now, I was deeply depressive and fearful, though I told no one) about the demise of food. How food was, as my Dad used to say, "going out of style". No, actually, what he said was my brother Arthur was "eating like it was going out of style" when he attacked a giant stack of Aunt Jemimas. And I took it literally, that eating really WAS going out of style: something I could readily believe, with all that talk of pills. Soon one of my favorite activities, something I always thought I could depend on, would become obsolete.

I was a Cold War kid, though I had no idea there was ANY kind of war on, cold or otherwise. Walter Cronkite, who knew everything, often talked about something called The Iron Curtain, and I knew it was all the way over on the other side of the world, but I didn't know what it was.  I knew something about the Great Wall of China, and maybe even a little bit about the Berlin Wall, so all these things got conflated into a massive, completely solid, miles-thick curtain, a ramparts cutting across Russia and keeping all the Americans out, or the Russians in.

Communists were bad, but not as bad to us as they were to the Americans. We had a funny attitude towards the Americans then, though no funnier than it is now. We felt sorry for them, and we feared them slightly, though because Canadians always "stand on guard" (it's in our national anthem about 18 times), we held on to our values pretty securely. Americans were crazy: they were The Beverley Hillbillies, they were Dragnet, they were The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Though I knew a lot of people who cried when Kennedy got shot, at one point my mother told me quietly "he wasn't our President, you know," and it gave me a sense of perspective.

No one talked about this, but around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis (which I knew absolutely nothing about: only that I woke up screaming every night for weeks), the TV stations from Detroit would frequently do A Test of the Emergency Broadcasting System. "This is only a test." A logo would flash on the screen: Civil Defense, a name I found inexplicably terrifying. Then came this bone-penetrating sound: BOOOOOOOOP. When I posted a slowed-down version of an old computer dial-up modem, every hair on my body stood up because it reminded me of This Is Only A Test. I would freeze in place, go numb. I don't remember another person ever being in the room with me when this happened, and I told no one about it. I was sure that the world was about to end.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s, when - I swear this is true - I heard a very loud air raid siren outside. Yes! Just like in the movies when the bombers are swooping down on London during the Blitz. Droaaaannnnnnnn - that doomy sound. (You know what I'm talking about.) I phoned up my friend and babbled. I heard it, I heard it, I heard the siren. What siren? It sounded like an air raid siren from an old World War II movie. Oh - maybe they were just testing it out.

Oh.

I wonder now: as with the Emergency Broadcasting System, the sirens are there to be used, not just "things" or abstract concepts. It made me wonder - still does - if every city has air raid sirens or some mysterious way of alerting its citizens of certain doom. For some reason, what comes to mind is what my scientist husband told me about NASA. Before every prolonged space flight, each astronaut is given a cyanide capsule in case they get stuck out there and can't get back.

Growing up doomy leaves marks on you, it does. My joy is always darkened. Recently I had to take down a post that literally sent my very modest readership scattering for cover. Four longtime readers bailed in just a few hours. No kidding, they left. The only reason I could think of was what I had just posted. It truly was a sort of vision of how Armageddon might unfold. And it might. Although I realize we all have to live as if it won't.

Climate change, terrorism, the nuclear weapons we all seem to have forgotten all about - and human evil - the collapse of the power grid - and the other thing no one mentions any more (though it was discussed incessantly in the 1960s), OVERPOPULATION - these things could converge on a fragile, already-overburdened world. And I don't want it to happen, folks. Don't ever think that. But back in the '60s we bickered and fumed and wrung our hands about the planet being choked with humanity at two billion people, and - strangely, very strangely to me - we virtually never think, talk or write about it now that it has exceeded seven. 

It's lonely putting your work out there, where there is this unpredictable response, or even non-response, along with wildly uneven exposure. Once in  a while I go back into old posts, unable to find something, and I see that a post has gotten something like 10,000 views (one on footbinding in China, for example, or Carrie Fisher and her electroconvulsive therapy). The next post will get, like, 15 views. I've tried to figure it out. Someone told me to use more intriguing search terms, but what if it's a video with a cat and a rabbit? 

But I find I can't write "popular" or go by a formula. I write because I have to, because I don't feel whole without it. It is what I have always done to survive and to try to make sense of the world. This matters more to me than format - or it must, because everyone else's blog is now solid white with huge lettering, and mine isn't. Though I changed the name of it at one point because someone told me Margaret Gunning's House of Dreams was "embarrassing" (hey! Not to me! It was satire. It's awful when someone doesn't "get" satire and says YOU'RE the dummy), I haven't substantially updated the site since I started it, it's still in the old brown-paper-bag format that I find easy to use and "not plastic" (as we used to say in the '60s). 

Recurrent themes run through personal blogs like this whether you want them to or not. Certain obsessions pop up again and again. Blogs are supposed to have a theme, and this one doesn't, but is nevertheless (in view of my obsessiveness) always in danger of becoming repetitive. One definitely-recurring theme is paranoia and the end of the world, as previewed by the Emergency Broadcasting System tests that broke into my Quick Draw McGraw cartoons. BOOOOOOOOP. And sirens going off that aren't supposed to. Or maybe they're just testing them out.

Food being replaced by pills never took off as a concept. Not even close. No one could have predicted the current truly astonishing levels of obesity back when 250 pounds was considered grotesque and horribly unhealthy. Computers are ubiquitous and run everything, but if they're as evil as we thought they would be, no one notices any more. They HAVE taken over our lives, just as Rod Serling/Gene Roddenberry tried to warn us, but now we aren't afraid of them any more. We like it just fine.

If George Orwell were alive today - but he wouldn't be. I think he would have committed suicide at the developments in surveillance that are now completely standard. Like frogs in hot water, we not only don't notice we're being boiled, we kind of like the sensation of the heat.

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Vanishing point: The Wrigley Zoo

Clap hands, one, two
Let's take a trip to the Wrigley Zoo
Chitter, chatter, yakety-yak
When you talk to the animals they talk back.

We'll talk to Bobby Bear today,
Let's hear what Bobby has to say:
If you ask me there's nothing wrong
With eating honey all day long
But that's not how my mother feels
She says I must eat healthy meals.
And for a treat, she gives me some
Delicious Wrigley Spearmint gum
It helps to keep teeth clean and bright
And never spoils my appetite.

I found this on one of those message boards, the kind with a lot of pointless stuff on it. It's not the first time I've seen it, but it's the first time in 50-some years. I love old TV ads, watch them on YouTube all the time, even buy DVD sets of them that my granddaughter Caitlin avidly watches with me. I had this buried memory - repressed memory or something, except it wasn't quite repressed. It was about a series of television ads from the early '60s for Wrigley's gum, and it featured the "Wrigley Zoo", with several different animals featured. For literally years I couldn't find out anything about this. I mean, there was nothing. In near-despair, I went on YouTube and asked about it in the comments, and a number of people said, "Yes, oh yes, I DO remember that ad! Whatever happened to it?" So I knew I wasn't completely crazy. But there's no trace of these ads on YouTube anywhere, though I do hold out hope.

Someone remembers this lyric, God knows who, so the rest of it must be out there somewhere.

I'm working up to something here (so "bear" with me).  Of the many strange things I discovered while searching/researching Harold Lloyd's life for my novel The Glass Character, this was the strangest. It was a site, a very plain one with no identifying marks on it, old-fashioned and rather primitive in setup, a brown-paper Blogger site like mine. The title of it was Psychic Bridging, and it was mighty strange stuff. Now I wish I had copied and pasted it and kept it somewhere, because my memories are so strange I don't know if I can trust them. It was all about a form of time travel where you don't even leave your armchair: like remote viewing, you can stay in the here and now, yet see things from the past and the future. How? Hell if I know.

The guy who wrote all this was named Paul Simon - "not Paul Simon," he assured us, "Paul SIMON." That name led me to a YouTube video he supposedly made, so poorly lit and shot that it was hard to understand. Also very long and monotonous. 

The site was extremely garbled. It talked about spirits being trapped in cell phones and other electronic devices, a theory I have never heard before or since. But it mentioned Harold. It mentioned Harold as being somehow involved in psychic bridging, which I gather was being used experimentally by the government during the Cold War. Or whatever.

This is beginning to sound like an episode of Weird or What?, but I'll continue. I remember fragments only - this was six or seven years ago, and the web site soon vanished without a trace. I can't even google psychic bridging now because NOTHING comes up. Google toothpaste sandwich or goldfish tennis shoes, and you will likely get something, but not this. As I said, it mentioned Harold. It said that "the actor Harold Lloyd became self-detached while filming in the 1940s and had to be hospitalized." This was as weird as the haunted cell phones. Self-detached?

Strange to say, Harold WAS filming then, the last movie he ever made, a flop called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock. Preston Sturges, egged on by Howard Hughes, had convinced him to come out of retirement to make one more film, but it was a sad end to a brilliant career.

I'd brush the whole thing off as the rantings of a nut, except. Except that Harold was fascinated with the arcane, had a tremendously powerful mind, loved his country and would have done anything to serve it, and had the curiosity of a child genius. Through his deep involvement in freemasonry, which is now thought of as some sort of Satanic conspiracy deal rather than just a dull men's club, he could have found out about this stuff, or even been approached. It is not that far-fetched when you look at some of the experimentation that went on in that era, behaviour modification, LSD, sleep deprivation, psychological torture, etc. And probably worse.

Was Harold involved in this weird shit? He was involved with Howard Hughes, though not happily.  AND William Randolph Hearst, though to survive in Hollywood back then you didn't have much choice. I just don't want to rule it out, though as with the Wrigley Zoo, I have no proof. The site is gone, and that video - I just tried to look it up, and it looks like it has vanished too.

Weird. Or what.

Post-whatever. As usual, I did find more. Strangely, a record exists with five commercials from the Wrigley Zoo series (so it really did exist!). We have audio, but I don't know what happened to the video - confiscated by the CIA, perhaps?

WRIGLEY ZOO ~ rare 1960's 7" + cover (5 commercials)

Share on twitterMore Sharing ServicWRIGLEY ZOO Soundtrack

WRIGLEY ZOO SOUNDTRACK
Words and Music from Wrigley Zoo TV Commercials

(Wrigley B-3099)

Rare original 1960's one-sided compact 7" 33rpm record, featuring five vintage "Wrigley Zoo" TV spots. Includes the commercials for Buster Beaver, Bobby Bear (not to be confused with the country singer), Melvin Monkey, Clara Camel and Susan Seal. "Clap hands, one-two / Let's take a trip to the Wrigley Zoo / Chitter-chatter, yakety-yak / When you talk to the animals, they talk back".

Record is VG++, plays very cleanly and sounds great. Labels are near mint. Cardboard stock picture sleeve is VG++. Scarce collectible in top condition.

Winning bidder pays shipping costs as follows:

US rates for one 7" record are $2.95 for first class or media mail, or $5.95 for priority mail. You may combine multiple items to save costs -- shipping is only 50 cents per each additional 7" record. For more than 8 records shipped together, media mail replaces first class.

Airmail shipping to Canada is $2.95 for the first 7" record and $1.00 for each additional.

International airmail shipping (other than Canada) is $4.95 for the first 7" record and $1.50 for each additional. Rates for multi-record sets or EP's with heavy cardboard covers may be slightly higher. Please note: unfortunately, due to rampant mail fraud and unreceived items, I DO NOT ship to Italy or South America. All records are securely packed with extra cardboard stiffeners for extra protection. If you use PayPal for multiple items, please make a single payment for all auctions combined. Otherwise, combined shipping rates will not apply. Please check out my other auctions or For a large selection of additional CD's at bargain prices, please visit my partner mousewink's eBay auctions. 04.04.004

And as a bonus, I found some info on a series of pop-ups - books or cards or something (? - not clear exactly what they were, except they popped up). There are a few photos of them, for sale on eBay and the like.

Attached to one of these sites was a stanza about Melvin Monkey, whom I don't remember very well. Were these ads censored for some reason? Ye gods.

Clap hands, one, two,

Let’s take a trip to the Wrigley zoo,

Chitter chatter, yakety yak.

When you talk to the animals they talk back.

We’ll talk to Melvin Monkey today,

let’s hear what Melvin has to say:

“My mummy says I should realize

That monkeys all need exercise,

But teeth need exercising too

And my mum makes it fun to do,

For when I swing she gives me some

Delicious WRIGLEY’s SPEARMINT GUM

It helps to keep teeth clean and bright

And never spoils my appetite.

My mum’s my favourite swinging chum,

We both like Wrigley’s spearmint gum. “

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

This is only a test

   

(From Ask MetaFilter):

An old memory of color TV? Color on a black and white TV? What?! (1950s filter).

My dad was born in 1952. Recently, we went out to lunch. The conversation covered a variety of topics. At one point, he recalled a tale from his youth...

Essentially, this: He grew up outside of Detroit, and he positively recalls that his family owned a black and white television set. He says that periodically the television network or local broadcast partners would attempt to deploy new technologies that might transmit a color signal to a black and white set, and that these attempts would be prefaced with an on air announcement. Essentially, "We will be trying to send color to your black and white TV sets. If anyone sees color, please call us and let us know."

I find many aspects of this story super strange, and also potentially fascinating. However, parts of it also don't add up. Like... what!? Does this ring a bell to anyone? Perhaps there's a kernel of truth buried inside a story that has otherwise "grown" a little bit over time?

(From Some Science Forum Thingie)

Something happened that reminded me of this tonight, and I think I have finally made sense of something seen as a kid. For some odd reason it just hit me. When I was fairly young and living in the Los Angeles area, there was a test done one night on a local TV channel that was supposed to produce a color picture on the black and white TVs commonly in use. And I can recall seeing some color; I think mostly green. From time to time I have thought about this and wondered what it was that I saw. In fact at times I have doubted the memory as it didn't make any sense, but I can remember the event very clearly. Tonight it occurred to me what they were probably up to. I bet that they were strobing the white to produce a false color image, as is done with alternating black and white dots on a rotating wheel [I don't recall the name of the effect]. The idea is that each pixel on the screen would be strobed at the frequency required to produce the desired color for that dot. Does this make sense? I'm not sure what the strobe rate is that produces the false color effect, or if this was doable on B&W televisions, but it is the only thing that has even threatened to make any sense here. Is there any other way that one can imagine producing color on a B&W screen?

Why do I remember these things? I must have been an embryo or something, or else very very little. The TV both fascinated me (it was a magic box that was just about the only thing that could pry me out of boredom) and scared the living bejeezus out of me cuz every so often, there would be a Test of the Emergency Broadcasting System, with a terse-sounding announcer coming on to say, "This is ONLY a test". There would be this Godawful official- looking logo on that said CD, probably for Civil Defense, then for half a minute or so there would be this BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOP sound that gave me nightmares. I would literally wake up screaming,my head dripping with sweat. This "only a test" stuff, routine as it was supposed to be, seemed to escalate at certain times, which I new see coincided with things like the Cuban Missile Crisis. My brother "played war" all the time,which was no doubt his way of coping with it all, but too often I was the one playing the prisoner, further stoking my tiny paranoia. But this, this - I really thought I had dreamed this! My TV was always doing strange things, like cancelling Howdy Doody, flipping like crazy, or refusing to broadcast anything but a tiny dot of light so that the TV repairman had to come over and replace the picture tube. But this was even more bizarre. An announcer would come on - God, how far back I must dig to retrieve this one! Anyway, an announcer would come on, and as he talked a picture would come on of, say, a scene in Hawaii with palm trees swishing around, and around the border of the shot would be a strobing, flashing pattern. The announcer  would say, "Do you see color on your TV?" (I guess assuming no one had color TV at that point, maybe because it was 1958). I don't know if I saw color, but the flashing, strobing patterns and the stupid meaningless Hawaii scene scared me almost as much as the announcer, whom I was sure was THE SAME GUY who did those Civil Defense announcements. Now I find these two posts from science forums (note, one of them would not post because it turned completely transparent on the page - heh-heh, no ghosts here - so  attempted to re-paste it in color,, and good luck reading it), you know the type, done by guys with glasses held together with tape, and they're saying, maybe it was real. But everyone has the same feeling: I probably imagined this, it probably didn't happen. There is even a sense of embarrassment about it: it must've been a joke, I was fooled, I made it up! The memory always seems to be hazy and there is a weird feeling of unreality, even isolation. We got all the Detroit channels, so the mention of "outside of Detroit" (if you can read it) seems significant. They were always doing weird things in Detroit, like rioting and broadcasting Poopdeck Paul and Milky the Clown. Now at least I know I'm not completely insane to remember this. I wonder what they proposed to do: frame the black-and-white shows with dancing borders of flashing color? Sounds like about as much fun as having a migraine to me. I think maybe I did make this up. Or maybe the memory was implanted telepathically into several thousand brains by evil Russian scientists: "This is only a test."

Order The Glass Character from:

Thistledown Press 

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Glass-Character-Margaret-Gunning/dp/1927068886/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1395534131&sr=1-1&keywords=the+glass+character

Chapters/Indigo.ca

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%2520glass%2520character%2520margaret%2520gunning&ikwsec=Home

Silent screams in space

(From YouTube notes about Lost Cosmonaut video, posted above):

This is a supposed recording of a Soviet space flight in 1961. In it, a Russian woman can be heard complaining about the increasing temperature inside the craft before it is destroyed attempting re-entry.

This was recorded by the Judica-Cordiglia brothers in 1961. It is reportedly one of many transmissions intercepted by the two brothers that prove the existence of the lost cosmonauts.

The following is a translation of what the woman is saying:

five...four...three ...two...one...one
two...three...four...five...
come in... come in... come in...
LISTEN...LISTEN! ...COME IN!
COME IN... COME IN... TALK TO ME!
TALK TO ME!... I AM HOT!... I AM HOT!
WHAT?... FORTYFIVE?... WHAT?...
FORTYFIVE?... FIFTY?...
YES...YES...YES... BREATHING...
BREATHING... OXYGEN...
OXYGEN... I AM HOT... (THIS)
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
ISN'T THIS DANGEROUS?... IT'S ALL...
YES...YES...YES... HOW IS THIS?
WHAT?... TALK TO ME!... HOW SHOULD I
TRANSMIT? YES...YES...YES...
WHAT? OUR TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... THIS WAY... OUR
TRANSMISSION BEGINS NOW...
FORTYONE... YES... I FEEL HOT...
I FEEL HOT... IT'S ALL... IT'S HOT...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT...
... I CAN SEE A FLAME!... WHAT?...
I CAN SEE A FLAME!... I CAN SEE A
FLAME!...
I FEEL HOT... I FEEL HOT... THIRTYTWO...
THIRTYTWO... FORTYONE... FORTYONE

AM I GOING TO CRASH?... YES...YES... I FEEL HOT!...
I FEEL HOT!... I WILL REENTER!... I WILL REENTER...
I AM LISTENING!... I FEEL HOT!...

OK, gentle readers. So what's my take on all this? I found this eerie recording on a Top 10 List of Eerie Recordings (from a site called Top 10 Lists of. . .), and haven't been able to stop listening to it. I couldn't even get to sleep last night, it creeped me out so much.

Way leads on to way, and I found much more information about these notorious Judica Brothers, along with a million mostly-amateurish-and-absurd conspiracy-theory videos claiming the moon landing of 1969 was a complete hoax. The best of these is a clever satire (taken seriously by many, which was the whole point: to show how naive and idiotic these theories are) called Dark Side of the Moon. Watch it if you are at all interested in this subject, as it will show you how "convincing" these arguments can be (until they collapse in a heap of incoherence, or perhaps sardonic laughter).

So how valid is this claim that two young Italian guys, obviously smart and innovative, were able to pull down signals and even voices from remote space using cobbled-together, Heathkit-like amateur equipment? The documentary I watched, Space Hackers, makes a convincing case. There is no doubt that these guys were brilliant, and since two heads are better than one, they joined forces in an odd sort of fused-together, codependent manner. Suffice it to say they didn't get out much, and would have fit in nicely on The Big Bang Theory.

All this started with the commonly-heard beeps of Sputnik, the first Soviet satellite launched in 1957 (which I remember, though I was only 3 years old at the time: my brother Walt, a science junkie, dragged us all up on the roof of my father's store with a powerful telescope to try to see Sputnkik, which we didn't. Then we all went out and had a Spudnut, so that I forever confused the satellite with a doughnut hurtling through space.)

OK. . . confusing stuff, but some of it is compelling. Sputnik was just a start: the Judica brothers then supposedly picked up the heartbeat of Laika, the doomed dog the Russians shot into space. Then morse code SOS signals that read like howls of agony in the inferno. Mumblings from cosmonauts, full of suppressed panic, most of them in hopeless peril. The gasps, rapid heartbeat and what sounded like the death-rattle of another cosmonaut. And on it goes.

It's all Caught On Tape, folks, and last night, recovering from the worst migraine I've had in years, I was in an Oliver Sacks-ish state that can only be described as altered consciousness, my neural wiring sticking out all over my head and audibly sizzling.  (As a means of enlightenment, I don't recommend this, because it hurts like hell and makes you throw up). So I watched all kinds of things, including something that totally debunked the Judica brothers' recordings - or most of them - as fakes.

It's true that the female cosmonaut in the video I posted doesn't sound like she's speaking in the terse, formal military language of space - but was it in place back in 1961? And was it common to send women into space back then? Well, they sent a dog. The Americans sent a chimpanzee. Maybe she was the next logical step before they risked sending a man. (The photos, by the way, depict the official "first woman in space", Valentina Tereshkova, launched a few years later after they had got the major bugs out of the system: i.e. re-entry without hurtling back to earth in a blob of molten metal.)

The Judicas had an enigmatic, playful quality about them (but then, doesn't Howard Wolowitz with his dickies and his brisket and his Billie-Burke-ish girl friend also strike you as a bit dippy?). Nevertheless, as the brothers' notoriety grew in the Italian press, NASA invited them for a "friendly" visit to headquarters so that they could pose a few "friendly" questions.

Their answers are nowhere on the record, nor do we know of any attempts to harness their amateur brilliance in the service of spying on the Soviets.  It could be they were dismissed as chippers with a vivid imagination and a love of publicity. Maybe they were just attempting to score some chicks.

But if these guys really did even a fraction of what they claimed, it's astonishing.  At one point they were supposedly able to compress a long series of secret signals broadcast from Russia - a code no one could crack - and found that it was, in fact, a few phrases of music taken from the opera Boris Gudenov. (No relation to Boris Badenov of Rocky and His Friends. Come to think of it, that IS a weird coincidence.) Another time they were able (supposedly) to crack a band of frequency by calculating the exact length of an antenna they saw in a photograph.

Or. . . are they having us on, after all?

There are those who believe we went to the moon. There are those who believe we went there, but didn't land and come back because it was technically impossible. There are those who believe we had to fill that visual gap somehow (with footage shot by Stanley Kubrick?). There are those who debunk, and those who debunk the debunkers. It becomes very convoluted, to the point that an obvious satire like Dark Side of the Moon (a sendup of the "I want to believe" earnestness of those conspiracy nuts) is taken at face value.

In some cases, it just makes people angry. "Those people (the filmmakers) were lying to us! Henry Kissinger did NOT say those things!"  This speaks volumes about the IQ level of the average citizen. Like Brontosaurus, maybe their brains are in their butts.

So what do I think? Oh, I don't know. I watched the "moon shot" from a cottage on Lake of Bays, at Bondi Resort, a heavenly sort of place that nevertheless didn't have TVs, so we had to borrow one from somewhere. We had a wine-and-cheese party to celebrate the event, and suffice it to say I didn't pay much attention to the cheese.

My parents had allowed me to have wine with dinner since age 13, and after a gruelling Oxfam walk my Dad brought a glass up to my room containing a couple of ounces of Scotch mixed with orange juice.  But this time I was drunk, really drunk, though I was only 15 years old. My parents kept filling up my wine glass over and over again, and when they cut me off, my much-older siblings kept right on pouring until I was stupefied. They must have thought that seeing me drunk was kind of cute, like watching a monkey that had got hold of a bottle of beer.  After all that one-small-step-for-man business by Neil Armstrong (which should have been "a man," not that anyone cared), I remember lying on a hillside staring up at white-hot stars, disturbingly close, that wheeled and whirled like something out of Van Gogh.

Back then we all took this moon shot stuff at face value, of course. But one reason all these theories (most of them loony) are popping up now is that we're starting to realize how incredibly primitive the equipment was that launched these guys, got them to the moon and (even more incredibly) brought them back. The average SmartPhone has a thousand times more computer juice, a quantum leap (if you'll pardon the expression) beyond that dinosaur technology with its hair-raising risks.

Really, shouldn't all of them have blown up? Weird, isn't it. Just a coincidence? Sheer luck? Why did two Challenger missions end in flaming disaster, when the only Gemini/Apollo fatalities took place on the ground? (And just what did Gus Grissom have to hide? Jesus, I've got to get off this subject.)

Think of it now. What if those men had landed, made their historic moon walk and dramatic pronouncements, then couldn't get back? (My husband the science wiz, who seems to have inside information about some of this stuff, tells me that each astronaut was given a cyanide capsule before they launched.) I think even Walter Cronkite would have been at a loss for words.

The deeper you delve into all this shit, the crazier you feel. I am certain that NASA, not to mention the Soviets, did some spin on this stuff, maybe hid some things, minimized them or downplayed them. It's more likely the Soviets did coverups, just because of the nature of the Iron Curtain culture (which, by the way, I thought was a literal iron curtain, kind of like the Great Wall of China. Well, I was five.) There are those people who seem to think everything to do with government and/or the military is a conspiracy: it fills the endless hours while they wait for a girl friend (someone ditzy enough to tolerate all this shit). Oh, bring back the X Files, please.

Meanwhile we have this haunting, almost pleading voice, repetitious, so blurry it could mean almost anything. We hear what we want to hear. My own brother had Heathkits and telescopes and bunsen burners (which we used to melt lead, I am not kidding, I did it at age eight). It was trendy then to be an amateur scientist, a space geek. I married one, after all.

The documentary I saw was very strange because the brothers, now old men, still have all their dusty, creaking old equipment with the dials and chugging reel-to-reel tape recorders.  The men seem like relics who haven't kept up, their one encapsulated moment of fame now stowed in a museum of obsolescence.

And yet, and yet. At one point there was some film footage of their "antenna", or at least one of them. I expected a rod with a little bulb on it. You know, an antenna. But this was a massive structure that spread out to cover the roof of their subversive little lab. It looked like a space station up there. How had they figured that out? You couldn't get that shit from a hardware store, now could you?

To hear these old men speak, which they did in Italian with subtitles, was sheer poetry. They described how the American press dismissively thought of them as "just pizza and mandolins". Einstein (whose theory of relativity was obviously a load of conspiracy-driven bullshit) would have appreciated this. Enigmatic, rumpled, otherworldly as E.T., he had that same dreamy, subversive quality, the uncanny power of men who have stared into space, reached out in childish curiosity and pulled down the stars.

(Note. This is a summer repeat of one of my, well, don't I have the right to think so?, best pieces. It isn't really summer, but this sure is a repeat. But it's my birthday, and I can do anything I want. And if *I* didn't remember it, YOU sure as shit won't.)

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