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