Speaker 1: Welcome to this edition of The High Strangers Factor, copyright
in on the Paranormal UK Radio Network. I'm your host,
Steve WD along with Susie Bastile and Andy Mercer. The
High Strangest Factor was created about half a dozen years
ago and we have covered all aspects of the paranormal.
Andy and Susie tell us a little bit about yourselves
and what's going on and how people can can contact you, ladies, Well.
Speaker 2: People can't contact me, sorry about it, but anyway, I
had questions for you guys actually before we started, so
yesterday I was thinking about Lemon spaces and the theories
that paranormal activity happens in these liminal spaces because it's
an area of transition and things like that. And I
was wondering, do you think that's why there's so many
toilet ghosts and bathrooms.
Speaker 3: That may be an American phenomena that.
Speaker 1: You don't have to I'm glad somebody thought to ask
that question.
Speaker 3: Any number of reasons for that.
Speaker 1: Well, let's let's hope they're not around. They have no
business being there. But anyway, Uh, go ahead and tell
us a little bit about yourselves. We already already just
found a lot out a lot about Susie, but we'll move.
Speaker 3: On disconcerting at least.
Speaker 4: Well as you know. I'm still plugging. Like one next
book I'm working on at the moment, which should be
out of mid spring. It's a transcription of a handwritten
GRIMWAF from the eighteen hundreds which hasn't been published before,
so I'm working on that and discovering the various other
versions of it that are out there, and compiling a
sort of an essay that will go with the book,
talking about the development of this particular manuscript, which is
keep me very busy, which I've enjoyed.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: I'm quietly living in the West Country, in a little
village away from the bright lights of London and Essex
where I used to live. I'm enjoying the piece and
quiet out you which is very cool. Because my wife
Many is away for the weekend. She's off rain dark
costly music view once, I have the house to myself,
which is very nice.
Speaker 1: In need SUSI, so I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't have too much of anything going on. My
muggle job has been getting in the way of having
too much fun and I'm about to be an empty nester.
In the next couple of months. My son will be
going off to college in deserting me, but hopefully, you know,
getting rich so he can support me in my old age.
So I can't complain too much.
Speaker 1: You're getting into your excursion season where you go exploring
now with the weather getting a little bit more easy
to take.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was the air outside no longer hurts your face.
So hopefully I can get in a weekend adventure soon
and actually probably usually the first stop of the year
is Anawon Rock, which is up in Rehoboth Math, which
is part of the Bridgewater Triangle. It is it's near
where the Redheaded Hitchhiker is spotted. But Anon Rock has
known for like phantom drumming, and there's been phantom fires
there as well. Of course I haven't seen anything there,
but that's generally my first stop in the springs. So
if I finally do see something, you guys will be
the first to know.
Speaker 1: Well, you be an exclusive for the high strangeness factor.
I attended the Frogman Conference yesterday in Loveland, Ohio. The
story goes back in seventy two. There were two different
police officers separated by I think two weeks Ray Shockley
I think was one of them. They saw this strange
amphibian creature climb out of the Little Miami River. Somebody
had seen something like that in nineteen fifty five. And anyway,
these guys barely show up and they've got their own festival.
And yeah, you know, Mothman took decades to get his festival.
It just doesn't seem right somehow. But it was interesting.
You know, it's just the fourth outing. It's just incredibly crowded,
and people are dressed in wearing frog ears and wearing
frog costumes and so forth. There's a lot of books
and artwork and so forth being sold, and some pretty
good speakers too. Chad Lewis is someone I know from
the Van Meter Visitor Festival, and he talked about the
connection between strange lights and some cryptids, and James Trivett
he talked a lot about various folklore in Ohio. So
it was I didn't see all the speakers, but it
was really a good time. So now let's introduce our
guest if I can just find.
Speaker 3: I have to say I'm very jealous of you guys.
Speaker 4: All these conferences you have almost every weekend is very
little like that over here we have the occasion conference
I spect on a few weeks ago, but the sheer
volume number of you guys have in the States just
astounds me off. I'm quite jealous.
Speaker 5: Well, I might begin by making a comment on Anawan
rock that's not too far from the location that h
he Lovecraft went to to observe Howie's comment in nineteen ten,
a little bit closer into to Providence than the Ino
one Rock. But he also was in his teenage years,
he and some friends at a clubhouse out not all
that far from in a one Rock, where they would
go and uh and have fun. I don't know that
he ever store any any spirits or phantom fires or anything.
Speaker 3: However, I don't think he's a strict non believer.
Speaker 4: If I remember correctly left Craft, I had no real
belief in any of the paranormal, was caught supernatural or anything.
Speaker 3: From what I remember reading.
Speaker 5: He was quite a materialist. I had sent him a
montage of book covers, and he may be getting into
trouble trying to display that.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Okay, every time, I guess I was able to do this.
I was able to find Horace's intro. It's a great
intro and without losing my image. But Horace, why don't
you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Since
I can't seem to. I keep disappearing, which is not
a good thing.
Speaker 5: I grew up in Connecticut, not all that far from
where SUSI grew up, though, though in the metropolis of
willamant It, Connecticut, and got an education in astronomy there,
and astronomy has been my career professor of astronomy and
physics here at Michigan State University up until the point
I retired and became an emeritus professor, and eventually they
kicked me out of my office. I'm just working from home,
but have interested in a variety of subjects, from strange
things seen in the sky to historical astronomy to more
academic sub such as post sitting stars. And I became
very interested in HP Lovecraft at a rather early age,
and was particularly interested in his own interest in astronomy.
Many of you may know, in case you have any
people in the audience who don't know, it should be
Lovecraft was one of the foremost writers of weird fiction
in the first part of the twentieth century, and has
influenced a lot of people subsequently, but it's not always
viewed favorably by some because he was rather xenophobic in
terms of not approving of the melting pot of American culture.
And it is well one of the things disappoints one
when if one is a Lovecraft fan. But nonetheless I
thoroughly enjoy his writings and I've tried to track him
down a little bit, and that is the origin of
one of my books with co author Edward Guiemott, who
I think was at one time on Susie's old show
as well, wasn't he?
Speaker 2: And I actually I just went to a Nearer conference,
a New England's Antiquities Research Association, and it was out
of college, and I kept saying, I know someone who
works here, And the whole time I'm there, I'm thinking,
I know, I know someone that works here. As soon
as I got home, I realized it was Eddie, and
I so upset that I didn't take that chance to
visit him there. But yeah, he was on the show.
He told he told the story of the what it
is the Gloaucus, which is a local cryptid here in connected.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, well it's now I believe chairperson of the
Department of History at Bristol Community College, not far from
the the Bridgewater Triangle there, and he is just finishing
up a book on the history of I'm trying to
remember the title of it. I think it's the Power
of the Flat Earth, idea about people through history. I
believed in the Flat Earth, and that will be coming
out next year by I think Paul Grave McMillan, publisher.
Speaker 1: And how did you first discover this year?
Speaker 5: Now, Lovecraft, I may have read one or two short stories,
but mainly in nineteen seventy I walked into a department store,
found the rack of paperback books sitting on the shelf
and said, this is a pretty cover. And it was
The dream Quest of Unknown Cadaf, which is one of
his kind of Dunsanian works where it's kind of a
dream world. And I read it and said, wow, I'm
going to read some more of these and others. Some
of the other things were quite different in style than
that one, but it was great fun to read. I'm
not even sure whether it was published in the real
publication during his lifetime. A number of the of his
longer work it's like, ah, I remember the case of
I was dext Ward were not published in in any
widely available source during his life, and he was mainly
known for short stories that appeared, many of them in
Weird Tales magazine and a number of them, a few
of them in what was it Astounding science fiction at
the time, And toward the end of his life he
began to be shifting perhaps a little more toward science
fiction with public with stories like at the Mountains of Madness,
but not the kind of science fiction that many of
the people at the time are writing.
Speaker 1: Imber, go ahead, go on. I had the first story.
I think it was in the seventies. I can't remember
the name of the paperback company, but they started reprinting
a lot of Lovecraft. And prior to that, I know
that August Drylth had created Arkham House and it was
republishing Lovecraft in a lot of hardcovers. And then they
started to go out of print and started to just
you know, skyrocket. But I had a collection. My first
story was Late at Night was The Color Out of Space.
And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, you know, this
is a it's like a horror story, but actually when
you boil it down, it's science fiction, so he had
this interesting blend of horror and science fiction in many stories.
Speaker 5: Right. The Color Out of Space is one that he
particularly thought well of. Begins with a person walking by
going by an old town that's been flooded to make
a new being flooded to make a new reservoir, and
these gets hearing old stories as to what had happened
in the later eighteen hundreds. This was set in the
nineteen twenties, that would be the time when he wrote it.
Lovecraft himself was born in eighteen ninety died rather young
in nineteen thirty seven. In fact, in one more week
it'll be eighty nine years since he passed away, And
so he was writing these stories, in many of them
in the nineteen twenties into the nineteen thirties. That was
the contemporary time he was writing about. But in this story,
The Color Out of Space, he's securing old tales from
the late eighteen hundreds where the strange meteorite had fallen
on the town outside of town, on this farm, and
the whole story is what happens to the people on
that farm in the time after the meteorite falls, and
it's not like the blob they don't they don't pick
up the media right and get this blob growing on them.
It's it's a little more subtle than that. But it's
a very interesting fun story to read.
Speaker 1: Uh when when we talk more about the When the
Stars Are Right by H. P. Lovecraft? And would you
pronounce your co author's last name again please? Okay, that's
that's my favorite.
Speaker 6: Well, that hit that punched every button.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just just love it. The uh the
references to other you know, science literature and science fiction
and uh, I I never never realized that Lovecraft was
so fascinated by astronomy, and you know, it's it's such
an interesting time. Well, they didn't have uh you know,
there were there were some powerful scopes in other parts
of the country. There was one in California. Nothing matched
what we have today, and so they were really kind
of in the dark ages. But you know what it
meant that they I guess they Your book says that
they didn't even know if there was more than one galaxy.
They didn't know about the life of stars.
Speaker 5: That's right. When when when Lovecraft? Lovecraft started out as
an amateur astronomer, when he lived in Providence, the town
he always loved, and he had his own small telescope,
but he used to go visit the lad Observatory, which
is still there today it's part of Brown University, has
the telescope, which to him seemed very large, was not
large compared to what we have today, had a lens
twelve inch is in diameter. And he would became friends
with the the director of the observatory, who allowed him
to come in and not so much use the telescope.
I think it is used the library, and he used
the self. After that, the self publish his own astronomy
and science magazines that it would he and right hectograph
back in the day. Is anyone remember hectographing? I remember
still when I was in school, occasionally instead of getting mimeographs,
would get the even more simple method of hectograph. Well
more laborious probably, but but could be done with just
a without a meograph machine. And he would make maybe
twenty five copies of these magazin scenes that would go
to friends and relatives and fortunately for us, and many
of them are kept today at the at the Library
of Brown University and our online and you can read
them today if you want to see what a teenage
HP Lovecraft was penning in his youth before. He was
also doing some early stories at this time, but didn't
really get into the stories. He wanted to become an astronomer.
He had dreams of becoming an astronomer, but he said
he ran into mathematics and.
Speaker 3: That he was.
Speaker 5: Couldn't get beyond had trouble with algebra, and so he
couldn't get beyond that. And in fact, some people think
it was that that was partly responsible for a kind
of a mental breakdown he had in nineteen o eight
when he realized that he would not be going on
to become an astronomer. He never actually even graduated from
high school in Providence, let alone made it into Brown University,
and he was rather for the few years after that breakdown.
This maybe the only time that he could really be
considered something of a reculus. But as in later years
he had a lot of friends by letters, he was
one of the world's greatest letter writers. He is reat
thousands of letters to friends, many of which have been
published today. And I think Eddie Gimont said that if
you were alive today, you can see him writing all
kinds of things on Facebook and oh Instagram, and being
a real social media person. I don't know if that's
true or not, but he was certainly use the ability
the techniques of the time to to spread his thoughts to.
Speaker 2: Friends, probably Yelp reviews for sure.
Speaker 5: He may, he may.
Speaker 1: I have a volume of letters with here with Clerk
Ashton Smith, another one of my huge favorite writers of
weird fiction bizarre short stories. I have a lot more
questions on this book, but I want to I know
that both Susie and Andy have some questions for you,
so I'm gonna step back a little bit, but I
want to get back to when the stars are right
just and the fascination that Lovecraft had with the Uh,
with Venus and the moon and so forth. But guys,
go ahead and ask some questions.
Speaker 2: So, Horace, when you were on my show, we talked
about your feelings towards Charles Fort, and I was just
right now, as we're talking, I was reminded that I
had an archaeology professor that had similar feelings towards Lovecraft
as you do towards Charles Fort. New England, we have
what we call New England lore or Yankee lore around
the stonework in New England and there's rumors that it
was built by the Phoenicians or Irish monks is another
big one, and he attributed a lot of that to Lovecraft,
but never explained why. So I'm curious to know if
you know why he would feel that way.
Speaker 5: Not quite in the sense that Lovecraft didn't have stones
in New England built by people sailing in from from
Europe so much, but he did have in some of
his stories, like the Dunnich Horror, he would have stones
on mountaintops, but there was supposed to be old stones
going back to ancient times and around which supernatural events
and the rituals could be held. So the stones, in
that sense were were not natural, but they weren't anything recent.
And in some of his tails there were mountains where
the people supposed to stay away, as in The Whisper
and Darkness, because they were visited by the Migo, these
alien creatures that kind of interacted with the early Native
Americans who learned not to go near those places where
the migo. Well, although the Migo did interact with some
people and had their minions to do their work, so
I wouldn't think that directly one should think of Lovecraft
as being responsible for that many of these old tales,
constructions by the people coming over from England or the Vikings,
go back long before Lovecraft's time, back many of them
into at least the nineteenth century, if if not earlier.
So I think Lovecraft is getting a bit of a
bum wrap in that from your professor. Now, on the
other hand, Charles Fort, Charles Ford, if you've never read him,
he wrote, lived in from the eighteen seventies to he
died in nineteen thirty two, so he did overlap with Lovecraft.
And he became most famous for the book The Book
of the Damned, which is a collection of strange things
that he thought had been damned by science that is
not included in the usual corpus of scientific knowledge. And
he had some other books after that, like New Lands.
But astronomers were Charles Fort's real, real bete noir where
he was. He didn't think much of astronomers and what
they professed to know about the solar system of the universe.
And as an astronomer, I feel obligated to return the
sentiment and uh, say Charles Fort, Uh, astronomy, much of
astronomy has been proven right since your time. So take
that you Charles for I wrote a little thing about
that once, but I never got it published anywhere, so
I just still haven't.
Speaker 3: Known my files.
Speaker 2: I just sent my mother a copy of your book,
Williemann Exkui's Ah, and she she had a couple of stories.
She wanted me to tell you.
Speaker 1: This is very important happy.
Speaker 2: So she thinks these both took place in the late
fifties early sixties. But the first one was her mother
had sent her out. She grew up on a dairy
farm and they had an outbuilding where they kept milk.
Her mother had sent her out to go get a
bottle of milk, and she had seen a meteor shower
when she went out to get that milk. Now, this
was obviously well before the Internet, and she had no
idea what a meteor shower was, and she thought it
was some kind of like signed from God, right, because
that's she I think she was. She would have been
like single digit age at this point. And then there
was another time where she went out at night to
use the outhouse and saw it. Yes, because we didn't
have indoor plumbing and lebanon yet Horace, they only had
that in Willimane. But she saw what she now knows
is the northern lights, but at the time thought it
had to have been some other kind of you know,
celestial signal, because she just had no idea that was
something that happened.
Speaker 5: The nineteen fifties were a great time for northern lights
because it was a peak of solar activity. There was
one of the strongest peaks of solar activity that we've had.
And in about nineteen fifty seven, my mother took me
out on the back steps and pointed to the north
where I could see these rays rising up in the sky,
going up and down, and I was told there were
northern lights. And within the next few years I was
able to see a number of displays. When I was
a dusty kid and mostly just dragged out and pointed up,
there was some brilliant displays with bright red showing overhead,
some really fun northern light displays that I I didn't
know they were anything that all that spectacular. I mean,
as a little kid said on northern lights, hmm, that's
that's pretty Uh, those of us happen all the time,
but uh, but I've been following them ever since. And
here in Michigan we've had a few nice displays of
the past few years some have been strong enough to
go into the south and and I don't know whether
Steve has seen any lately or if if any of
you have seen them in the past couple of years.
Of course we have to in Michigan, we have to
hope it's a queer sky too, yeah, exactly, which is
far from being the case on many occasions.
Speaker 2: First time sights in Connecticut the last couple of years
in England in the south, which is very unusual.
Speaker 4: It's not uncommon to get him in Scotland or out
the other the country, but down southwest it's very unusual
the last couple of years, if you were visible, which
is surprising.
Speaker 1: My first time seeing them was the horse was up
on Voice Blank Island in the Straits of Mackinaw, you know,
not too far from obviously Mackinaw Island and the bridge.
We used to My grandmother used to earn property up there,
so we would vacation up there were One time, as
we would as kids, we would have a bonfire on
the beach and we're sitting around and I'm looking up
at the sky and the whole sky is on fire.
Now there wasn't for some reason, there wasn't much cover
in them, but I did figure out that these must
be the Northern lights. But the whole sky was lit
up with these shimmering lights from horizon to horizon. And
then one other time, my then wife and I we
were driving up north and the Lower Peninsula, and we
weren't all that far north, but we started to notice
the Northern lights and there was color green and red
and so forth. And they've even been down here, but
of course I missed them down here in West Virginia.
But yeah, it was pretty amazing to see them.
Speaker 5: If you have your camera out and take a time exposure,
you'll often find it shows the color a lot more
than your I can see. And partably that's because if
the Northern lights are faint, they don't activate the color
sensors in your eye. They have to get up to
a certain brightness to do that. And so if you
have a faint Northern lights glow and you take a
picture with your camera, it'll often show green, for example,
but your eye might just see a ghostly uh grow well,
funny enough, that's exactly what I could see looking out
the window.
Speaker 3: Were actually holiday in a little coastal time. I can
see what like static clouds across the.
Speaker 4: Scow very strange and its online about the northern lights.
Take with our cameras off and iPhone someone we both
had some really spectacular pictures. Again, it's slightly time today
to get the effect. But yeah, hardly visible to naked eye,
but he's very visible to the camera.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: I got a quick question for regarding sort of going
back to the Lovecraft. I'm a very big fan of
Arthur Mackham.
Speaker 5: Have you come across Oh, yes, I have read his
stories and I enjoyed them very much, as well as
did the Lovecraft, who was a great admirer of him.
Speaker 3: Definitely, and uh.
Speaker 5: Hes uh. This story has tended to be more tied
to some of the places over and in in Britain
and Ireland. Right the settings are I'm unfamiliar with. I
although I've visited over there, I've never been off looking
at the places where it's likely there was set his tales.
Speaker 1: But uh.
Speaker 5: Uh. In the way that Lovecraft imbus the stories with
with New England and Providence, mac and I think has
imbued his stories with some of the background of the
areas of the British isles that he was living.
Speaker 3: In particularly in South Wales.
Speaker 5: So Wales sounds like a great place for a haunted
stories and the apparitions.
Speaker 3: This hometown of Kellyon.
Speaker 4: But I went there last year and I went to anniversary,
stayed in the hotel and didn't realize it is actually
next door to his house, which wasn't That was very
as well, Yes, and it's the kind of thing I
think we identify South Wales often in his stories and
some of the local there's a Roman villa nearby.
Speaker 5: Is was he Welsh? Was mac in the Welsh?
Speaker 3: Absolutely? Yeah, myself are very proud of that.
Speaker 4: Yes there was, were there kind of constituted there, but
really highlighting your own local area has been the.
Speaker 3: Area of most interest New England.
Speaker 4: Mac in the South Wales, but Wells and London for
a long time as well, and was related into London too.
So also I'm part of the exciting Robert Chambers, if
you have an opinion, whose work too.
Speaker 5: I have a little, but not so much. Was he
the fellow who wrote the The King and Yellow or differently.
Speaker 3: No, absolutely The King of Yellow.
Speaker 4: That's probably his main falling into some of the more
weird fiction type writing. To talk about his writing became
much more conventional later on. But in those early stories,
particularly the King in Yellow series, very I found them fascinating.
There was a I like the style again. Obviously love
cross board a little bit some of the ideas. But
this seems normal usus reading. And they'll tell you some
very strange happens which concerning He's just very matter of
fact that it's very odd observation about something going. I
always found that, particularly enjoy chambers of early writing. Okay,
that same kind of stuff as well.
Speaker 5: Lovecraft wrote a a short book which is you can
buy today. It was just published. The serial during his
lifetime from most but called Supernatural Horror and Literature, which
gives his views of a number of these writers, those
known to him. Uh and of course people only up
to the twenties or whenever he wrote the thing. But
but Macin is in there. It brought Blackwood, Elgernon Blackwood.
Speaker 1: Oh my god.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and the Willows he liked, Yeah, and Montagu wrote James.
Lovecraft sent a letter to James with one of his publications,
but evidentely h James was not that big of a
fan of Lovecraft's work, so the admiration was not mutual.
Speaker 1: Have you, gentlemen, read The Wind to Go by Elgermon Blackwood?
Speaker 5: Yes, I have a man, what a what an.
Speaker 1: Amazing story that is? And who wrote the Great God Pan?
Was that marching?
Speaker 3: That?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's good. The Willows I like, and uh the
Wind to Go and uh I do like some of
Montaca wrote James's books, but they do tend to be
a little bit repetitive if you sit down and read
a series of them all at one time. Many of
them have kind of the same kind of ghostly appearance,
so they're fun, but I'd read them not all in
the in the Night m.
Speaker 1: Susie. Was there a something that some information you had
on the mysterious pook Wedgies.
Speaker 2: Oh, last time we talked, Harris, you had asked me
if I knew anything about how I think Cotton Mather specifically,
but the Puritans in general felt about Puckwagies.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I looked into it a bit. There was one reference
that I had thought was a Puritan. It turned out
to be a merchant. So during that time period, the
merchant probably wasn't a Puritan but had just come over
to make some money. But he had called puckwagies, little devils.
But after some research, what I have come to think
was that the Puritans just did not care because it
wasn't them. It is kind of the impression I got,
like those are, you know, the native people's things. They're
bad because it's not ours, and we're not going to
think about it.
Speaker 4: Is kind of.
Speaker 2: The idea I got from what I've read.
Speaker 5: Well that willemantic Sky's book does have a chapter of
the first chapter that connects Cotton Mather up with northern lights,
and it goes back to seventeen nineteen when in a
dark December night, suddenly these lights began to appear in
the sky, and many people around Boston and all of
New England were quite affrighted by these lights. It just
how they hadn't seen northern lights much before, because it
was during the month before that had been the time
of the Manda Minimum, where the sun was very quiet,
and there were so many northern lights at middlelanitude. So
this was a not only an astounding thing to see
as thoas is, but something that was fresh for them.
And Cotton Mather wrote a book a pamphlet about it
called A Vice from Heaven, where he said, yeah, this
is the Northern Lights, and it's a natural phenomena, but
it could also be a sign from God. He was
that was on the lookout for evidence for the imminent
Second Coming, and he said, if these Northern lights could
awaken us the righteous sorts thoughts of the righteous, they
would be doing some good. So his Northern Lights is
rather different than my own, and he had some rivals
at the time who viewed them as more of a
purely natural phenomenon, Thomas Roby for one. But it's interesting
to see how striking them all the lights appeared when
there'd be been largely absent from New England for decades
before the return seventeen nineteen.
Speaker 1: Before we get back to when the stars are right when,
I definitely want to do that because one of my
favorite all time Lovecraft stories, actually it's almost a short novel,
The Whisper and Darkness, and that kind of ties in
with his fascination with astronomy. But I have to ask
you you mentioned and some of the things you'd like
to talk about about your interest and fascination with nineteen
fifties as much science fiction and horror movies, all those
sort I grew up on and loved.
Speaker 6: Did you go to like a local theater that had
Mattine's where they showed these or they did in Willamantic.
Speaker 5: There were two theaters mattine Theaters when I was a little.
One of them closed fairlier. It was called the Gem Theater,
and that was kind of the cheapest the theater around
for matinees anyway, you could get in for a dime
or fifteen cents. And the Capitol Theatre was the other one,
but that was a little bit more ritzy, was slightly newer,
and we're to go into the Gem Theater and they'd
be showing Rodin or or Earth versus the fine Saucers
or giant car alconom My critical faculties were not too
extreme at the time. When I was five or six
or seven, I can even remember seeing Plan nine at
the theater, and I didn't think there was anything that
extraordinary about it, that bad about its tombstones that wobbled
when someone fell against him, or fighting sauces that were
clearly just things held by strings and set on fire.
So one should think my critical faculties were limited. One time,
I've told this before on a different program. One time
I went with my sister and our father came to
the Saturday matinee that turned out not to be perhaps
the best thing. I think it was Rodin, though it
might have been Jack Card that we were watching. And
it's the middle of it. All the kids are excited,
Rodan is this giant I should say reptilian flying monster.
It's a Japanese movie. And all us kids are sitting
on the edge of seats, thrilled by the appearance of
the giant flying monster, and my father lets everyone's quiet hushed,
and my father lets out in the loud voice, well
this is the silliest blanky movie I have ever seen.
But he didn't see his blankety blank.
Speaker 1: I'm afraid he didn't find it gripping then, huh, he
did not.
Speaker 5: And I don't know how many of the kids were
shocked by his language. But after that, it is better
if if dad didn't go along to those Saturday matinees.
Did you have a screaming kids?
Speaker 1: Did you have a local horror host on television in
those days, like on a Friday or Saturday night showing
uhr movies?
Speaker 5: I don't remember one because I couldn't stay up to
probably when they were on. But what I did, yet
I did when I was a little bit older, and
this is probably around nineteen sixty or so. I would
go in once a month or once every couple months,
depending upon how many dimes I had in my pocket,
and I would purchase some magazine famous monsters of.
Speaker 7: Film, Forrest j Ackerman, Forest Day Akermen, and he would
have There would be pictures in there, not only of
the monsters, but of horror hosts.
Speaker 5: And I think that was my first introduction to the
horror house. It was only when I got a little
older and could stay up a little later that I
began to encounter them myself, and by that time they
were perhaps past the peak on the local channels. So
I wish that I had stories, childhood tales of horror hosts,
but I didn't really have them at the time.
Speaker 1: Well, I have to tell you I went. I was
in the Navy in the early eighties and a friend
of mine had moved out there from Michigan. He lived
in Bloomfield Hills before that, and he became friends with
Forrest j Ackerman. So I went up to h I
went to Los Angeles from the Debates via bus, and
I went into the Acro mansion. Now this is before
they moved all this stuff to it like a museum.
But man, I was just I was bumping into walls.
He had the blasters from Forbidden Planet, he had parts
of the dinosaurs from King Kong. He had an amazing
collection of books, obscure science fiction books. Man, and it
was just and he was he was a great guy,
and I was just my head was spinning.
Speaker 5: I gather he was a somewhat controversial character in some
ways with some riders, but I don't know really the
story there. But I would have loved to have seen
that array of material from those movies and and would
have been delighted to have been able to do that. Now.
I guess it's been broken up somewhat now, and I
don't know how much of it is all retained in
one place anymore.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I don't know either, But boy, he really had
a collection. As an assign I have to tell you.
I attended Wayne State University for a while and I
took Astronomy one oh one, and I thought, oh, this
is great. And then I took took Astronomy one O
two and I ran into that that math thing, which
was kind of a roadblock so I thought, Hey, I
want to talk about spaceships and planets and so forth.
I don't want to. I don't want to do algebra.
Speaker 5: Unfortunately, if you get too far into astronomy, if you
want to understand the why a star as a lifetime
it does, and not take people's word for it, you
have to do the math and calculate it for yourself.
I am a little surprised that Lovecraft couldn't have gotten
through that. But he was often very much self taught.
I don't think he liked learning and classes all that much.
He did very well in physics in high school the
classes he took. He did very well in chemistry, but
I think he knew more of that on his own
then he learned in the classes he took there. But
when he got to a point where he couldn't teach
himself the math all that well, then it seemed to
be a roadblock to him. Right.
Speaker 1: He was early on he was fascinated by the Moon
and Venus as well. Venus, the planet that is hard
to see now because of his cloud cover, was really
hard to see them. And he was fascinated by what's
the name of the crater Aristosanes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I get that right. There was a Harvard astronomer,
William Henry Pickering, who in the later eighteen nineties and
into the early nineteen hundreds was arguing that he had
seen signs of life on the Moon, and there were
these changes in the shadows and lights on the floors
of certain Craterstasines was one of them, that were signified
the growth of plant life at least maybe even the
motions of migrating critters during the course of the lunar
day from full moon to the next full moon. And Lovecraft,
when he got his small two and a quarter inch telescope,
said I'm going to see if I can see this,
and for a while he thought he was going to
be a great discoverer with the small telescope of that
that life on the Moon and of the then unknown
rotation period of Venus. Later on he realized, no, with
this little back telescope, I can't really do that. But
he published a number of things at time, and for
a while he thought he he was seeing changes in there.
Aretosnees that that we're indicating life on the planet. Later on,
when he got his somewhat bigger telescope, he said, I
can't verify all these things I was seeing with my
little telescope, and he became much more critical. I don't
know if the people he knew at the lad Observatory
were kind of pushing him that way, or saying, no,
you're you're with your with your telescope there, that's only
two inches across. You're not really being able to see
all these details on the Moon and Venus set people
with bigger telescopes are seeing. And he became more skeptical.
But he toward the end of his life he was
back enjoying immature astronomy again. He went to meetings of
the Skyscrapers the Immature Nomy Club in Providence in the
last year of his life, and I'm sure had he
lived long enough, he would have enjoyed the space age.
Early on in his life he was actually pretty realistic
about what would be needed to go into space. You
read science fiction and all these people of the nineteen
twenties and all these people just jump in their spaceship
and go zooming off. But Leftkoff said, well, he thought
that people would eventually go to the Moon, but might
take another century. And he was betting that the first
people who tried, would probably die along the way. And
it was a little bit more realistic to the viewpoint
actually than many people at the time who were science
fiction enthusiasts. But I'm sure him had he lived to
the day of SPOTNK, you would have been out there
in his backyard looking up, watching to see the satellites serily,
satellites go over.
Speaker 2: What do you think you would have thought of? What's
it called? The three I atlas a vlobes thing that
has been going around.
Speaker 5: The av Lobe is looking at this inter stellar comment
that came in. Now this is uh, this observed initially
identified as a comet, and when you tracked it slaw it.
So it wasn't just within our own solo system as
most comments are. It had come in to the Solar
System from from beyond, kind of like if you've read
the author of C. Clock's story Rendezvous with Rama Yep,
where a spaceship comes in from beyond the Solar system
and heads out again. Abby Lobe was wondering whether this
could be something like that, and he made a list
of things that were odd about this comment that atlas. Yeah,
and there are a number of things that are odd
about this comet. But on the other end, we've only
seen three interstellar meters or comments kind of an asteroid.
But this is some outgassing, so you call it a comet,
I suppose. And it's not clear that they were any
really any signs of it being an artificial object. So
I think it's likely natural, and I think we're gonna
find more of these fainter ones. The Vera Ruben telescope
down in Chile has recently gone into operation that over
a few nights, skims the whole sky down to a
deep level, and I think we're going to find faint objects,
lots of faint asteroids and things more readily than we
could before. Now it's not going to be so good
for looking for If ray Harry Howsen fine saucer flew over,
it wouldn't get that because it's pointed that too small
a part of the sky and too narrow. I did
see something odd when I was observing down in Chile once.
This is back in the nineteen seventies. I'm down at
Sarahtoola Interamerican Observatory on the mountaintop in the Andes in Chile,
and I'm out looking at the night spectacular night sky
from that loca in the center of the galaxy passes
nearly overhead from that location. But what I saw is
this a little fuzzy thing, kind of like a smoke ring,
moving across the sky and it comes up. I didn't
catch it right when it appeared, but it was already
there and moved over, kind of maybe expanding a little
bit as it went. So as a UFO for me,
but I bet it was probably something to do with
a space launch at the time, and that what I
was seeing was material released. Because we didn't have the
internet back then, you can just look up what was
going on in the sky so easily. So I think
I actually sent a report on that to j L
and Heinech is Aque Center, but I don't know. I
just got a brief acknowledgement, so I imagine they thought
it was just a outgassing from a satellite thing too. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Unfortunately, all of the UFO sightings in the Bridgewater Triangle
the past couple of years have been almost definitely starlink
sightings and not alien related. Unfortunately, there are.
Speaker 5: So many satellites now it's hard in the evening and
before dawn in the morning to be out there without
seeing a bunch of them going over not so astronomers
are not so happy with that because they're taking their
photos and you have all these satellite trails going through.
Speaker 2: It's like skytrash at this point. And even like with
all the light pollution we have, you can't. And I
live in a much larger town than I grew up in,
about twice the size now, but without the light pollution,
you can't just go outside and look up at the
sky and enjoy it like you used to be able
to as much.
Speaker 5: Right even from the town of Warmantic when I was
a kid growing up, you could see fairly faint objects
in the night sky. Ah, but the lighting has grown
much brighter and you can't anymore, which was a disappointment.
Speaker 4: Advantage a snech in the West Country of England, it
is pretty dark outside.
Speaker 3: It's not a little light pollution, thankfully, so to care
that moment, I.
Speaker 4: Had a lot of stars, But unfortunately they're going to
be building on the field behind me in the next
year or so. All going to change, fortunately for me.
I have a question with the throwing, which in honest
I thought we're kind of related. I'm quite fascinated with
the whole concept, the faster than light travel, the possibilities
or the non possibility. Is it becoming a reality only
what your thoughts are on that we will achieve that
or not.
Speaker 5: Funny thing about that. When I was a sophomore in college,
I spent this summer working on the physics of tachions,
which are faster than light particles. I didn't really know
what I was doing, but someone had a summer program
and I was in there. They have imaginary rest masses,
so they're odd particles, but they always go faster than
the light. They can never go slower than light, but
alas they've not been detected so far. So some people
working on the physics of something analogous to warp drive,
and sometimes they seem to get physics that works but
takes an impossible amount of energy or something on those sides.
So I think I'd love it to be true, because
I'd hate that we had to just trundle and spend
thousands of years getting from one star to another. But
I don't know that it's true. However, some people have
suggested that even if you're limited to lower than light speed,
you send out thousands and thousands of robotic space probes
that don't mind trundling along from star to star for
thousands of years, and eventually they find an interesting star
system and they investigate it and then report back to you.
And maybe some civilization has the ability to do that.
But it's something that would love to be true, but
then I can't say is true. Now, Uh, you've had
some There are interesting visitors from somewhere that are in
the in probably in all your neck of the woods.
I think of Steve's area in particular. And uh, where
is the the was it the flat Woods Monster.
Speaker 1: In? Uh? It's near Sutton in flat Woods, West Virginia.
What's that so Soussie? Okay, it's it's about maybe an
hour and a half, maybe a little longer from Point Pleasant,
West Virginia.
Speaker 5: Now is there a flat Woods Monster Museum?
Speaker 1: Yes, there is, Uh, not as not as fast as
the Mothman Museum, but uh it's They even have their
own festival. You know, everybody is h is celebrating their
local monsters these days. From the Loveland frog Man that
you know. I mean, I'm not begrudging him a festival,
even though they only showed up a few times. But
let me do the brief intermission. Here you are listening
to The High Strangeness Factor, copyrighted on the Paranoble UK
Radio network. Today we are talking to Horace Smith about
his writings which cover Meteors Lovecraft, his writings and Lovecraft's writings,
and his interest in astronomy and much much more. I
have to tell you again, my favorite all time story
of Lovecraft is The Whisper in Darkness, which is basically
about a a an evasion from space and a little
spoiler there, but uh, so I was I have to
tell you again. I'm going to mention boys Flank Island again.
I was reading this story at about two in the
morning in a cottage on boys Blank Island in the dark,
and man, oh man, I had to make a pilgrimage
to the little boys room and I did not want
to leave the bedroom. But it was uh and in
the uh and it was it was written around the
time that Pluto was discovered. And I'm still a little
bit ticked off that they demoted Pluto from a planet,
but anyway, that that was uh, it was just it
was just that was kind of the conclusion of the story.
The the protagonist is kind of freaking out because he's
thinking that these beings are now allowing their planet to
be seen, and what does that mean the.
Speaker 5: The planet he called it jagath Yep, And when the
Pluto was found, he actually wrote to some of his
friends saying, this new planet they found is obviously from
my story. The other thing about that the wistmer in
darkness is if you follow the h the pattern of
the moon in the story, and you're very careful, the
creatures come around the house more in the dark of
the moon. He's very accurate in doing his moon phases
and the time when the moon he was always critical.
The stars had to be right and the moon had
to be right, not only in terms of when Great
Kohu Thulhu, however you choose to pronounce it, comes back,
but the stars had to be right in people's stories
so that they matched what you would actually see in
the sky. And he actually sent some little starmap planispheres
rotating star maps to some of his friends who were
also authors. They would be able to get the stars
right in their short stories, which he said they hadn't
done in some of his earlier work. So I think
Frank net Long and some of the others got this
a little bit of chastising from Lovecraft for not getting
the stars of the moon or other things right he was. However. Lovecraft, however,
was far kinder than Ambrose Bierce, who wrote an essay
called The Moon in Literature that savaged some people, particularly
h writer Haggard, for getting the moon all messed up
in King Solomon's mind. Minds, And there's no doubt Haggard
did get the moon all messed up in King Solomon's mind,
but Berce was not going to let it pass with
just a few notes, savaged them over that.
Speaker 1: Now you have to. Now, another thing that just fascinated
me about that time is that, you know, you mentioned
the watching the craters and the what they thought it
changes in the shadows, and that perhaps it maybe reference vegetation,
maybe even construction, and of course Mars and the canals
and so forth. That was really a time when they
thought maybe just maybe there was life on the Moon
and or even on Mars and so forth. But you know,
you've got to tell us about the Great Moon hoax.
I actually bought the book where I can read about
the about the claims that were made and the people
that were suckered into it.
Speaker 5: This goes back to I believe in the eighteen thirties
and one of the chief astronomers of the time was
the son of William Herschel, who had discovered the planet Uranus.
He was John Herschel, and the southern sky had not
been seen as deeply with telescopes as the northern sky.
So John Herschel went down to the Cape, South Africa
and took with him built there a relatively large telescope
for the time, and he's going to survey the southern sky.
So people knew he was going down there. But back
New York City, the writer for the was a New
York's son, I believe newspaper Yes, took advantage of this
and said, Okay, not only is John Herschel observing the
heavens from down on the Cape, we have reports back
from him. And what he's seeing are He's got this
fantastic telescope with multiple lenses. You give these incredible views
of the Moon. And what he's seeing are creatures on
the moon. Uh, these these winged creatures that fly around.
There's life on the moon there, there're civilization there. These
I don't have the picture right now. There's some drawings
that were made to go with the the articles and
the sun, showing the inhabitants of the moon.
Speaker 1: Then he have a rangetans with wings.
Speaker 5: I think there were hairy creatures and down there, but
they were a crust between the rang and things and
people kind of And this is fabulous for sales for
the Sun. The sales of the newspapers zoomed up. Of course,
no one could just send a telephone call or a telegram,
even to John Herschel, to say if it's true. You'd
have to wait for a ship to go down and
come back, so that there was no way to immediately
debunk the stories. Eventually, I don't know how long it
lasted before the story of of the.
Speaker 1: I think it was a six part article, but I
don't know what the span of time was. But didn't.
Speaker 5: Poe, who some people have accused of being responsible for
creating part of that tale, turned out to be a
debunker two of it. If he was, because he was
an amateur astronomer too. Actually he did some writing that
actually contributed to the progress of astronomy, though it's very
oddly written, and he eventually I'll say, no, this can't
be right, and the sales. Everyone agreed it was a
hoax eventually, and alas for the Sun, their sales went down,
but no one was ever took. I think there was
no admission of trouble. As I remember that it was
a hoax and set the pattern for others in the
nineteenth century, I think to try to duplicate it. But
I don't know if any New York newspaper ever was
able to achieve the celebrity of the Great Moon Hoax
of the eighteen thirties. By the time you got into
the later eighteen hundreds, people could send a telegram and
get an instant debunking. Wasn't the same later on. And
alas those flying orangutan humans whatever they were, the moon
men where were not real And sure would be nice
to have a telescope that would show that amount of
detail on the Moon, But even John Herschel didn't have that.
Speaker 1: Sort of like H. G. Wells short story The Crystal.
Speaker 5: Egg, We're all say, a view through to the planet Mars,
right right, yeah, and it said he just founds finds
it in a antique shop or something.
Speaker 1: Is it right right?
Speaker 5: Uh? Yeah it h I don't know if the Martians
were using that to get information for their invasion in
the War of the World.
Speaker 1: They look quite a bit different. The invaders were looked
a little more like occupy then I think the things
that they were H. G. Wells was talking about in
that particular.
Speaker 5: Story, that's true, but it's a fine little story. And yeah,
if you've only read H. G. Wells major novels, The
Time Machine, The War of the World's uh, The Invisible Man,
that the science fiction which he's most famous, I would
encourage you not to miss his short stories too. A
number of them are very interesting. There was one I
recalled that he had a man who was suddenly given
the power to be omnipotent, but unfortunately it was not
all wise too, and it and all kinds of trouble
with his omnipotence.
Speaker 1: Well, another another great thing that you guys do in
the novel you go through many many authors that may
have had may have touched and an influence you know what,
it may have influenced some of Lovecraft's writings. And you
talk a lot about various really obscure stories and novels
about the moon, not just h not I mean, not
just Jules Verne from the Earth to the Moon. But uh,
it's you know, I mean you you hit everything you
hit aker Rice Burrows, the Moon made, and and and
so many. I kept I kept reading your book, and
I what I do is I put I put these
these books in my my Amazon shopping cart for later,
and then I once in a while I total them up,
and I think, no, I'm going to have to re
mortgage my house to buy all this stuff. So we're
not going to do that. You even mentioned Edmund Hamilton,
one of my favorite authors of all time. Lovecraft didn't
like him very much, and you know, he was a
little bit repetitive, and he was kind of the guy
that he and his wife Lee Brackett kind of created
space opera, didn't he one of the early The Earl
was early on.
Speaker 5: I should say that Eddie Gimmott is responsible for tracking
down and finding many of those obscure uh stories that
I mentioned. But Edmund Hamilton became famous early on, I
think partly because he had a lot of catastrophe Earth
being destroyed by stories before he began to to get
him on into space opera. And I seem to remember
one where he had someone built giant robots in the
wilds of Pennsylvania that were in the way there and
sudden were released to to destroy the towns. And there
was one where someone invented, I think, as is Edmund Hamilton,
a way to connect up with different times in the past,
and suddenly dinosaurs are walking down this, uh the street
of this town and causing similar havoc.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 5: So I enjoyed some of those early tales that are.
Speaker 1: But they called the world savor Hamilton, I think for
a while.
Speaker 5: Yeah, someone always had to come up with a way
to keep the Earth from being totally destroyed by by
whatever creature or or monster or whatever or comet or
whatever it was that was going to wipe us out.
Speaker 1: But you know his uh, he would he would do
formulas sometimes, but I think that his imagination was was
so good that he kind of uh surpassed that a
little bit. He wrote.
Speaker 6: Did you ever read any of the Captain Future stories?
I did not, unfortunately.
Speaker 1: I actually I actually have the original pulp magazines of
my collection, but I first started reading them in in
the reprinted paperbags. Huh.
Speaker 5: Well, I remember when I started reading, uh, my introduction
the space Opera was the Skylark Smith and.
Speaker 1: Things like that. I that for the people that don't
know who Captain Future was. He was more believable than
Flash Gordon, not quite as believable as Captain Kirk. And
it was it was so much fun because all the
planets were inhabited, and he tooled around in his spaceship
to comet. He had his on the moon. He had
an android, a robot, and uh a scientist. Who's the
guy's just a brain in a in a cube, a
translucent cue that would fly around on tractor beams, and
uh it was. It was one of these deals like
like Doc Savage, where a uh the the publishing company
would set it up. They would create the characters and
then they would hire a writer, usually under a pen name,
not always to write the stories. And so he was.
He had to put in something there about sports every
time the villain had to escape three times. So he
was he was restricted in that way. But I always
thought he came up with, uh, you know, interesting stories,
and uh, I just I still uh still love Captain Future,
even though Captain Future is quite impossible.
Speaker 5: Maybe I shall have to read him.
Speaker 1: Uh you'll get a kick out of him. Oh, go ahead,
go ahead for us.
Speaker 5: I was just gonna say the Golden age of science
fiction was still hanging around but getting passed into the
New ages. I started reading in the nineteen sixties. I
came across the science fiction magazines that were so prominent
at the time and have mostly disappeared today. A few
of them are left, things like Analog Worlds of If Galaxy,
stories like that that. Many of the major writers would
have their stories appear in those magazines before they were
came out in paperback books, and it was wonderful to
come across them at that time. And I also would
also occasionally have non fiction, and two of my favorites
kind of went against each other in different magazines. One
of those isoc asim Off would have a a monthly
I think it was monthly at the time, or almost
monthly article. And Willie Lay, who was a cryptologist Sought
to Know, would also have in Galaxy magazine, he'd have
his non fiction tale and they were so very different
in style that you can enjoy reading them, even if
they covered by accident the same subjects. But Willie Lay
I used to get all his books if I when
I could afford them, and he was an expert in
the space age, rockets, missile and space travel at the time.
But he also was interested in zoology and what on
would think of as cryptid stories today. What is the
creature on the but there's the dragon like creature on
the gates of the the old fortresses in Baghdad, or
or things like that. And I enjoyed him very much.
I don't know how much of his cryptid work has
stood the test of time. Probably we know a lot
more about many of those topics than they did in
his day, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.
Speaker 2: Excuse me, does Michigan have any cryptids?
Speaker 5: Oh, of course it has scripteds, but I don't know
if there are any around me that are particularly local
to the area.
Speaker 1: There a big man man, there's some Battle Creek area sidings,
but most of them are up around Traverse City, or
you know Bigfoot that that guy just shows up everywhere.
I don't know if I remember the reports in Monroe,
Michigan back in the mid sixties. I think that was
a hoax, though I think that was was before I
was in Michigan, So okay, all right.
Speaker 5: The thing I heard from about Michigan was earliest, was
probably the swamp casts UFO siding. I knew it was
in Michigan, I didn't have I have no idea where
the town is. And if you go to the place today,
it's pretty much built over. It's been developed so well.
The UFO was seen in the in the Swamp Gas Tales.
Speaker 1: Yes, that was a March of sixty six. Doctor J.
Aalen Heinech was still attached to Project Blue Book, and
they kind of wanted him to defuse it, to bunk it.
So he suggested that some of the sightings in Hillsdale,
for example, might be swamp gas, and of course that's
all they needed to solve the UFO mystery. But I
actually saw him Horace ten years later at a Michigan
upon meeting at the Weber Inn in Ann Arbor, and
he had left Blue Book started the Center for UFO Studies,
and the name of his talk was Swamp Gas plus
ten and counting.
Speaker 5: I wrote a book which a little book which was
the history of our campus of observatories on the campus
of Michigan State University called Stars over the Red Cedar,
And at one point J. Allen Heinech enters the tale.
Because in the nineteen fifties, a late fifties. Excuse me,
there was a Moonwatch station set up here. Now. I
don't know if you remember Project Moonwatch, but this was
amateur astronomers mostly who were gathered together to be helped
track the first artificial satellites, and one of them was
set up upon the Physics building of the time, it
must have been much darker than than there is today
around that building. And when they were setting it up,
jo and Heinek was actually involved in helping to direct
the organization of these amateur satellite working groups, and they
sent a letter to the Michigan group when they were
being organized, saying, now you're so like you have everything
you need to get going. You're accepted into the Moonwatch group.
Why don't you tell your your local papers and TV
people because you have some news that is worth telling.
He was trying to get publicity for the Moonwatch teams
at the time, and that's the letter I came across
when I was doing the history of the Moonwatch project.
And they actually did see some of the moon, the
early moons, the artificial moons, but they weren't the US
ones that they were expecting to be watching. The first
one they saw were Russian satellites, so that it's an
interesting story. Nonetheless, and they're probably unidentified objects hidden in
those Moonwatch records because they would make get together at
certain times and make the equivalent with the little Moonwatch
telescopes of a picket fence across the sky waiting for
objects like satellites to cross through when they know when
and where the satellite crossed. And that was before everything
could be done with the radar right and later on,
so occasionally I'm sure they must have seen things cross
through that were never matched up with any satellite or
non object.
Speaker 1: The last time you will go ahead? Were you finished
with your thoughts?
Speaker 5: That SE's all I need to say, Probably more than
I needed to say.
Speaker 1: I can say as much as you want, no extra
charge that the last time you and I were on
a show, I brought up the Curious book Shop on
the main Drag in East Lansing, And how I used
to haunt that all the time. And uh, I mean
for Pulp Magazine's UFO books. Uh Lovecraft sometimes in hardcover
and and and some of the authors that published Lovecraft
style stories. But did you ever go to the Ableman
Bookshop in ham Trammick?
Speaker 5: I do not think I did. Of course, a curious bookstar,
I was that many a time.
Speaker 1: And the.
Speaker 5: Archived bookstore when it was around later on, and the
number of the ones in the n Armor, I don't
think I ever went to one in him tramm Well.
Speaker 1: For people that don't know, Ham Trammick is a captive
suburb in Detroit, just a couple of miles down, and
there was this it's not there anymore, but this two
story ableman bookstore, dirty dusty. It had you know, paperbacks
and books on the lawera. I would go and ask
the guy if I could go upstairs because that's where
all his pulp magazines were. Oh my god, I mean
I had to. I didn't have a lot of money,
but I bought. I got a lot of issues of
things like Amazing Stories, startling stories, you know, way before
these went to a digest size. And I got, you know,
some original stories by Ray Bradbury. I have a story
in a beat up Weird Tales by Robert D. Howard,
a Conan story, and it was I found some some
I've found some very hard to find, the hero pulps
like Doc Savage and the Shadow, but I found a
few of those so that was, Uh, well, I take
my my Measley pay check and go there. I should
have been saving my money, but you know, hey, you
only live once. So I would go there and just
dole out a few bucks, and uh I built up
a nice little collection.
Speaker 5: So that was a hard bargain.
Speaker 6: Nowadays there's oh good lord, too many things on the web.
And know what they have, Andy and Susie, any any
any other questions? Parting words?
Speaker 2: I thought I did want to mention that in honor
of Lovecraft, I am drinking the official drink of Rhode Island,
which is coffee milk.
Speaker 5: Loved coffee and with lots of sugar. In his case
he was a teetotal or other in terms of alcohol,
but coffee he loved with lots of sugar.
Speaker 2: And for anyone not from New England, coffee milk is
it's almost like chocolate milk or strawberry milk, where you
have a concentrated coffee flavored syrup that you mix in
with milk. It's a New England delicacy that pairs very
well with a fluffer nut or sandwich. Recommendation.
Speaker 7: Everyone.
Speaker 5: I'm sure that Lovecraft would would appreciate.
Speaker 1: That very good and uh Andy, any any parting words,
any questions, both.
Speaker 3: Conversation to give up weird fiction.
Speaker 4: I've really I'm a big fan of the last few
years especially you've got really gone back into just one
brief thing. Have you ever come across the Dark Adventures
radio theater? They hate love Crofts.
Speaker 5: I have, and they have listened to a number of them.
Speaker 3: I think I would recommend their version of Lookers Through
to anybody because it turns into it as you know
you heard. It turns up a story with characters actually
speaking of their experiences rather than just a narrative. What
we did with that would make a brilliant movie. I
think it is fantastic.
Speaker 1: Well, Horace, we're gonna have to have your back. I mean,
we just barely spashed the service, and uh, this has
just been a lot of fun, you know. I And again,
I know we all have our favorite books here, but
ladies and gentlemen, when the stars are right, uh HP
Lovecraft and Astronomy. Horace a smith and Edward with his
last name said, Okay, very good. I'm glad you said it. Okay,
but it's just it's just a fascinating book. It covers,
uh like in some of the areas we talked about tonight.
It just covers everything, and it is such a fun book.
And you don't even really necessarily have to be a
fan of Lovecraft too. I mean, if you enjoy h
history and and uh you know the past and how
they were, uh, you know, they were so new at
trying to explore the heavens.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 1: This is just a fascinating book. So I guess with
with that, we'll close it out and let you have
any parting words. Horace.
Speaker 5: No, I'm very glad to have been here, and we
could go on all night, but we better.
Speaker 1: Not, especially since Andy is in Uh. I don't know
how many time zones he's away, but he could just
pass out any second. I could pass out any second.
That was a that was a wild trip to Frogman.
But I'll go ahead and close out the show. Thanks
everybody for being here. The High Strangeress Factor was created
by Steve Ward and Andy Mercer and his copyright on
the Paranormal UK Radio Network. Our Fearless production team Steers
Steers the Rudder for the network. Andy Mercer is the
producer for The High Strangest Factor along with other shows.
I can be heard on a panel on Paul Dale
Roberts Show from time to time, and I do some
Mothman one on one shows which go way beyond the Mothman.
Andy Mercer completed the ending for the show and Brian
Zilver composed the opening theme for the High Strangers Factory.
And I am Steve Ward along with Andy Mercer, I
am a displaced Michigander deep in the Ohio Valley, living
on the same road that the Mothman chased cars back
in the middle sixties. Thank you all for listening and
we will see you again soon.