Leprechaun sighting in Alabama!

A YouTube classic. My favorite part is the sketch made by an "eye witness".

Bigfoot jerky

Yowie is one of several names given to a hominid reputed to live in the Australian wilderness. The creature has its roots in Aboriginal oral history. In parts of Queensland, they are known as. . . 

quinkin (or as a type of quinkin), and as

joogabinna, in parts of New South Wales they are called

jurrawarra,

myngawin,

puttikan,

gubba,

doolaga,

gulaga and

thoolagal. Other names include

yahoo,

yaroma,

noocoonah,

wawee,

pangkarlangu,

jimbra and

tjangara.

(Gifs courtesy of a jerky company called Jack Links. Go figure.)

Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!

This is not a hoax: the Area 51 phone call

This is filed under the category of found, lost and found. I listened to it years ago, back when I was first beginning to take YouTube seriously and use it as a source of information rather than just stupid cartoons and 1950s soup commercials. 

And yes, I DO look at alien footage sometimes late at night when I need a thrill before going to bed. Most of it is so ridiculous that I can't even laugh at it. And I know a lot of it is deliberate prank stuff, but there's something about this particular call that doesn't sound prankish to me at all.

This is an archival recording much cherished by the conspiracy theory community. In 1997, someone phoned Art Bell's Dark Matter radio program, sounding as if he was facing the apocalypse single-handedly. Either this guy is the best actor in the world, or something horrific has just happened to him. Or he has experienced a psychotic break and is spinning into an abyss of paranoia (all that illuminati/survivalist/freezedried/freemason/jesus-in-the-cheese-sandwich stuff). 

What he seems to be saying is that he worked in the mysterious Area 51, the ideal picnic spot for extraterrestrials around the galaxy, before being forced to take a medical leave. According to the distraught caller, what we call "aliens" aren't just little grey men running around in parking lots, as they so often appear in these YouTube videos, or laid out on slabs being autopsied. They're some sort of evil mind-controlling entity that transcends the physical. The buggers must be beyond evil, or they wouldn't be preparing for some sort of mass destruction of earth's major population centres (why?). I suppose one could conjecture that these entities took over the minds of the pilots of those doomed planes on 9-11, but I'm afraid that lets us off the hook too easily. 

When somebody really doesn't want to own something, some evil deed or some horrendous trait they harbour, they can in some cases split it off, shove it away in a dark closet, where it doesn't die but takes on a murky life of its own. Suddenly it's not "me" or "we", but "THEM", Humanity can't be that bad, can it (?), so therefore someone or something else has to take up the slack, to become the witch or the incubus or the - alien. This habit of finger-pointing and demonizing has been around for so long that it seems inseparable from the human condition.

I don't know if it's a reaction to fear, however, so much as a way to get ourselves off the hook. Fear we can deal with, or think we can. It has always struck me as a curious thing how much humankind loves having the giblets scared out of it - look at the whole horror film industry, with people paying perfectly good money to be shocked, squeamed, squicked, even horrified. Those are all extremely uncomfortable feelings, are they not? And don't most people prefer being in a state of comfort? Don't they go out of their way to achieve such a state (alcohol, cigarettes, too much TV)? I'm just askin'. 

We obviously evolved with the need to make a quick exit whenever a predator suddenly appeared (the worst predators undoubtedly being other human beings).Was that flash of raw terror necessary for the human race to keep on moving forward (in a manner of speaking - though since Roswell, I think we've been moving backwards)? Is THAT where we first developed our addiction to having the jeezly Jesus scared out of us? It must have come from somewhere.

It was weird to find this thing again, because it had no identifying marks on it that I remembered. I didn't recall the name Art Bell, the content of the call, or the fact that the transmission suddenly went dead. I just remembered a very strange video with a black screen, no picture, and someone in a lot of distress. Maybe a radio show or something like that? Things are amazingly easy to find on the internet, however, so with a few almost random search terms, the thing popped up again.

Not true, however, of psychic bridging, another mystery I want to deal with once I figure out what to say about it. Back in about 2009, while researching The Glass Character,  I came across a very strange web site and an even stranger video - both of which have vanished without a trace - which purported to explain a very bizarre form of time travel sanctioned by the government during the Cold War. Moreover, Harold Lloyd was directly involved and suffered disastrous consequences. If there's any grain of truth in it at all, I could sell it to the conspiracy theorists and retire in eternal comfort. 

POST-BLOG. As so often happens, I have a few more things to say. That psychic bridging web site/video was one of the strangest things I've ever seen. In almost every case, no matter how weird the subject matter, you can google a topic and find SOMETHING on it. Not so in this case. I realize now I should have cut and pasted and printed out the content, which I probably could have done, but it was just so freaky that I kept avoiding it. The video was long and strange and, frankly, boring. It starred a dull young Englishman from an industrial town (the accent) called Paul Simon - not "that" Paul Simon. (Can't find that, either.) He went on and on about experiences he had with psychic bridging. I don't know how this relates to remote viewing because I really don't have much familiarity with it. All that tin-foil-hatted/Jiffy Pop-headed stuff does kind of make me disgusted, or at least extremely skeptical, because there are lots of nuts and fanatics out there who seem to WANT the world to come to an end. Maybe they crave excitement, like that Wallenda guy who seems to want to go on and on until he's half an inch deep on the pavement like his ill-fated granddad on that YouTube video.

So if there was or is such a thing as psychic bridging, and if it really is a form of armchair time travel (i. e. you don't exactly physically GO to these eras, but envision or view them from the present), what happened to it? Was it an experiment that failed? The Jiffy Pop-head league might seem so absurd as to be completely dismissable, until you look into the LSD experiments of the Cold War. Some of these were methods of keeping soldiers awake for days and days, but some of it was an elaborate form of spying. So imagine the possibilities of going back in time and spying on them Russkies before they even dropped the fat one on us! Maybe we could even do something about it, to make them stop. Better yet, look into the future to see what they WILL be up to. Sounds good, doesn't it?

But there are problems.

What would be the freak-out margin of someone going back in time from the comfort of their armchair and seeing THEMSELVES scurrying around, doing all the things they did in the past? What if you discovered you had the power to "bend" those actions somehow, to change the past - and here we run smack up against the time travel paradox that always makes me go "oh for Christ's sake" when I read science fiction novels.

It's a riddle trapped within an enigma inside a pickle jar. My husband is a certified Big Bang Theory-type scientist who knows all this stuff to a degree that is a little bit spooky. Over the years, he has evolved into a sort of science Yoda, folding philosophy into pure science through long reflection and experience. I sometimes ask him science questions, though one time he made me cry just by talking about Einstein's theories. I just couldn't help it, it was so beautiful and terrifying. Not long ago, I asked him in a come-on-it-can't-really-be-true way if you could really be in two places at the same time, and he said, "Oh, yes, of course you can. Theoretically, it's quite possible." In quantum physics, a particle can actually exist in two places simultaneously. Then I envisioned the alarming possibility of meeting yourself and wondering (as in Star Trek and so many other sci-fi dramas ) "which is the real Captain Kirk".

I didn't want to spend much more time on that subject, but I had to ask him about that related subject: time travel. "Yes, it's quite possible," he said, and if my hair could stand on end like Harold's, it would have. Time and space, he explained to me, are not etched in straight lines but infinitely curved. The folds can touch each other and double back like switchbacks in a road or river. And then there are wormholes! Like black holes, they really do exist. I knew it was true that an astronaut comes back from a space voyage younger than when he left, and if this went on for long enough we might see a fetus in a jar rather than a grown man. Time, like all the other immutable "laws" of physics, might not be the straight-ahead boring thing we assume.

I am reminded of Wiggs Dannyboy, the Timothy Leary-like "immortalist" of Tom Robbins' masterpiece Jitterbug Perfume, who claimed that the universe doesn't have laws: "It has habits. And habits," he went on to explain, "can be broken."

So I don't know if Harold Lloyd went nuts over Cold War experiments, but I do know that he had a fervent desire to serve his country which up to then had been thwarted by the severe injury to his right hand. (And that whole accident/bomb thing was murky, too. A plot by Charlie Chaplin to blow up his rival? After all, he turned out to be a flaming Communist, not to mention a statutory rapist.) As a magician and the highest muck-a-muck in the Shriners (Imperial Potentate - could there be a more Freemasony/Illuminati-ish name than that??), he may well have been open to alternate realities and the expansion of human consciousness. Or not - maybe it was just an accident.

Some nut, some Paul Simon wanna-be may have made up psychic bridging, or hallucinated it, or specifically cited Harold Lloyd for obscure reasons of his own. But he did mention that the breakdown occurred while HL was "filming" in the 1940s. Yes, he did make his last film in the 1940s, and it was a disaster, taken over by the increasingly weird machinations of its producer, Howard Hughes. (Do you hear the theme from The Twilight Zone? That strange popping sound on the stove?). The way he described it was: "Actor Harold Lloyd became self-detached during filming in the 1940s and was hospitalized."  That's all.

So did his brethren in the Freemason/Shriner community help him out there? What happened exactly, or did any of it happen at all? Probably not, but it's an odd one. The fact it all vanished is also odd. I do remember bits and pieces of the rest of it, something about spirit entities getting trapped in cell phones. Not a common belief in anyone except major psychotics. I remember when email was new, everyone seemed to think there was something mystical and a little intimidating about it. Someone wrote a popular novel, an absurd thing about a woman who began to receive emails from a mystic in the 17th century.

Oh no!

The movie version didn't fly, though for a while it looked like it might. Reminds me of the bristling paranoia in the old Twilight Zone series, with computers taking up a whole room, rattling and whirring in a menacing manner and sometimes even talking, not in the slightly fey and sinister manner of HAL in Kubrick's 2001, but sounding more like Mr. Ed or My Mother the Car.  Reams of paper would spew out like vomit, covered with earth-shattering messages of doom. Technology was coming, and it was the end of the world as we knew it.

And, as a matter of fact, it was.

POST-POST BLOG. Maybe it's the pale light of reason the next day - I don't know. But when you play the Art Bell Area 51 call again, it sounds phony. It sounds like bad acting. There WAS someone who called in later to say "I'm the Area 51  caller", but the voice didn't sound the same at all, leading the Jiffy Pop crowd to cry "Coverup! Conspiracy!" So now I don't know what to think. I don't know much about Art Bell's program except that it was extremely hokey. And they went through a suspiciously large among of Reynold's Wrap.

\

(and this is the kicker): Lord forgive me for adding to this, but it has been a while since I've written at length. My blog does not live by gifs alone, though you'd never know it sometimes. I found some interesting stuff on Wikipedia about the influence on pop culture of the infamous Area 51 call:

• This incident formed the basis of the song "Faaip de Oiad" by the rock band Tool which features said interview (with Art Bell's part cut out) dubbed in over frantic drumming and buzzing static.
• The interview was also sampled in Konkhra's track "Religion is a Whore", The Faceless's "Planetary Duality", experimental Texas quartetThe Paper Chase's "It's Out There and It's Gonna Get You", MC Lars' "Lars Attacks!" and Sweet Valley's "So Serene" (around the 22:40 mark).

Anyway, this is what I found in WIkipedia. I've listened to them all, and yes, they do exploit this poor gasping sobbing man (or actor - I swear it sounds actorish to me now) in all SIX recordings. Most of them aren't listenable to me, so I won't bother posting them.

Just ONE more eekie fact, which I found out on the Wiki entry for Art Bell: the mysterious Area 51 call was made in 1997. . . on September 11.

Fifty shades of black (a story of bondage)

 

 

She knew this was the last chance she was going to get to visit her favourite spot. Already leaves were curling under her feet, evening brought on a hint of frost, and she had put on the usual five or six pounds around her hips, a layer of bear-fat for the coming winter.

 

This special place of hers was called Burnish Lake, and she always liked the double-entendre in the name: the coppery surface of the water in the evening, the antique gold of early-fall leaves. Burnish Lake had lots of things going for it, but most of all it had ducks. Swarms of them, and due to the mild climate in these temperate parts they didn’t seem to migrate in the fall. No need. Being social animals, they congregated in swarms around the strange geometric wooden dock that jutted out into the shallow water where they all dabbled and splashed.

 

It was really just a big pond, and this dock – it was more of a boardwalk, really – went on forever. Besides the ducks, all there was to see around here were water lilies. She could imagine how the frogs must sound after dark.
 

 

The child in her came out when she saw those ducks, and she wished she had bread with her, knowing full well that feeding ducks made about as much sense as feeding bears (which she had done once. Cheesies, which the big guy had really relished, until he grabbed the plastic bag out of her hands and ate the whole thing.) Then they would truly swarm, revealing the rather nasty side of ducks and of birds in general, just dinosaurs reborn with all their primitive saurian instincts intact.

 

They were mostly female mallards, she guessed, with a few half-grown babies – juveniles – but no drakes. She looked and looked for the gorgeous iridescent green heads, but did not see one. What, no sultans to keep the harem in order? Guess not. She threw a few stones at them, meanly, watching them “waaak” and scatter.

 

She had her reasons to be mean, and her reasons for wanting to come out here alone and get some fresh air. She hadn’t had fresh air in a while. It hadn’t been her idea to go to the hospital, and in fact most of the time she felt just fine. Better than fine! She was exhilarated, and people were telling her things like, “You look ten years younger. What have you been doing?”

Yes. She felt special, more special than she had ever felt before. She wasn’t really going to act on those feelings, was she? But Burt thought she might.

 

When you’re in a certain state, you don’t know what effect you’re having on others. You’re oblivious. So even though she stepped on every sentence to the point that no one was willing to talk to her, even though she slept barely two hours a night, even though she had lost fifteen pounds (good!), even though she was one step away from sending out the mass email that would change everything (or was it Facebook?) – she didn’t think they needed to take that kind of drastic measure.
 

 

Something wonderful has happened, the email would begin, and I wanted to share it with all my closest and dearest friends. I have received some information recently that is very special, and very exciting. I have suspected this about myself for a very long time, but now it has been confirmed by a Higher Source.  I have been granted the ability to 

 

That was as far as she got. So what the hell was wrong with that? Or of thinking she saw Moses one day in the liquor store? If you think he’s Moses, he IS Moses, her writer friend said to her the other day. She wanted to see Moses again, to talk to him, to ask him just how he got that water out of the rock.

 

Burt kept saying she wouldn’t let him talk, that he couldn’t even get a word in, and that was ridiculous. Burt kept saying she was being abusive, that she was acting like a bitch, but didn’t she have it coming with all the rotten things that had happened to her as a child? Probably. But it bothered Burt to be called a cocksucking fuck-face in front of people.

 

So it was the hospital for a while, again, and medication, again, and more psychiatrists to beguile. She had been seducing psychiatrists (verbally, of course) since the age of fifteen, so she was awfully good at it by now. Most of their patients were so dull, she supposed, that her clever banter and sparkling irony must have been downright stimulating, if in a rather embarrassing way.

 

She hated to leave those ducks, but she had to go to the bathroom. She noticed there was nobody else around, just nobody, and thought it was odd.  Then she remembered the dates on the sign.  She was the very last visitor to Burnish Lake before the season ended. But what about the staff? Nobody around, but it didn’t matter, she didn’t like people anyway and was finished with them. They were all so full of shit.

 

She hated the bathroom here, so primitive, almost a privy. It was just a big plywood box with hardly any light, only a useless burnt-out bulb, and no windows. Just a slot for ventilation, up too high to be of any use. She used the smelly toilet, noticed there was no sink but only hand-sanitizer. Disgusted, she squirted some on her hands and rubbed it in.

 

Was that why the sliding bolt lock wouldn’t move, because her hands were so slippery?

 

Then she remembered there was a much larger sliding bolt on the outside of the door, for when they locked everything up for the winter. To keep out homeless people or whatever. But this was the inside lock, stuck. She wiggled it gently, then a little harder, then wiggled it some more.

 

Panic began to rise in her. Her worst fear, worse than falling or being raped or even of dying, was of being trapped, locked inside an unfamiliar building or unable to get out of some suffocating place. The worst feeling she had in the hospital was the sound of a big heavy institutional door clanging shut behind her. It seemed to happen every time.
 

 

She wiggled some more. Banged. Then shouted. Then shouted some more. But then she remembered that no one was there.


She screamed and screamed. Her throat began to grow raw. And it was getting dark out. The little ventilation slot was greying now, and the whole stinking room was turning into a black box.

 

She would die in here, alone, in a shithouse in the woods. They’d look for a body for a while, then give up. What would they find in the spring? Then she realized that by throwing herself so violently against the door, she had probably bent the bolt so badly that the lock was irrevocably jammed. Only a hammer or screwdriver would get her out of here, and even if there were somebody around, how would they get it to her?
 

 

It got dark so fast. She was tired. There was no air in this place. Panic turned to despair. She was like one of those stupid hikers who goes on a dangerous trail and doesn’t tell anyone. Who knew about Burnish Lake, anyway? Not Burt. He had never even heard of it.

 

It had nothing to do with the poetic word “burnish” anyway, but was the name of some hopelessly dull cocksucker of a statesman who’d been dead 100 years. Nobody gave a fuck about him anyway.

 

She had to fall asleep eventually: her quota was four hours at least, and she didn’t want to set herself back to her Healing the World campaign, in which people from all over the globe would come to her so she could lay her hands on them.

 

 

Bullshit thought, probably, but maybe not. She still didn’t see what was so wrong with it. Lots of those East Indian women all wrapped up in white gauze had people just flocking to them, and nobody said they were crazy. She had stopped a few people on the street and started to explain it to them, and they had pulled away, but weren’t most people full of it anyway? The average IQ is 100, her writer friend said to her, and they both laughed.

 

She had to sleep. She curled up on the dank floor, and all the meds she was on eventually pulled her under.
 

 

At the very bottom of the murky tank of her sleep, footsteps crunched on the grass outside, leaving deep imprints. Someone was humming to himself. He was a little bit happy, mind, but a little bit sad, too. This was always the final thing he did, the very last ritual before closing up for the year.

 

There was a fiddly noise, a wiggling. A little bit stuck, it was. He’d fix that. He gave it the special wiggle it needed to move. He had a way with this lock.

 

There was a thin screech of metal on metal, then the sure-handed slide and thunk of a bolt as it dropped into place. Satisfied, the man turned his head and looked around the place one last time, then headed over to his pickup.