The Fox and the Faculty X Files

There can be no doubt that Fox Broadcasting Company has had a massive impact on culture, especially in the United States. While broadly this has been of a political nature, in their divisive news programming, the sitcoms and dramas produced in the early 1990s had a different but no less groundbreaking impact. The Simpsons, now the longest running program of its kind, is so ubiquitous that it has a sort of subliminal presence- Homer, occupying an archetype of the dopey American everyman, looms so large in the public psyche that one can't help but think the show has had unmeasured effects on the world. I am sure that I am not alone in finding that references to the show sometimes slip out almost unconsciously in conversation; and, further, the wide appeal of the show and its long run has been noted for its seeming ability to predict future events. While the simple explanation is that after decades of programs, the sheer volume of plots and gags would by statistical chance mirror future events, its no less cromulent to suppose that perhaps the writers managed to tap into a psychic pipeline in crafting the episodes. This very dichotomy is at the heart of the focus of today's meditation- Fox's own Fox Mulder, and his partner Dana Scully, the lead pair of FBI agents in The X-Files.

At the time of this writing, The X-Files is celebrating 30 years since its debut. While I'm certain that many who are interested in weird subjects like UFOs, ghostly phenomena, monsters, and conspiracies were profoundly effected or inspired by the show, it also brought a lot of these ideas to audiences who may not otherwise have interacted with them. In line with the aforementioned effects of both The Simpsons and Fox's news programming, whether these effects were good overall is really a matter of perspective. Still, there have been studies which have made a case for such things as The Scully Effect - the idea that by virtue of her presence in popular fiction, Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully inspired young women to pursue careers in the fields of science. Ever the level-headed skeptic, Scully always balanced Mulder's reckless abandon in pursuit of the most bizarre case files the FBI could offer. One can't help but to feel sympathy for Scully, who long suffers at the whims of a partner who valued discovery of hidden truths over all else. The dynamic is perhaps best captured in a scene from the episode "Quagmire" (Season 3, Episode 22) in which the pair (along with Scully's short lived pup, Queequeg), go in search of a lake monster called Big Blue. Stranded in the dark, out in the lake at night, Scully compares Mulder's monomanaical obsession with truth-seeking to that of Ahab's in Moby Dick. Everything, she says, "takes on a warped significance" to suit Mulder and justify his actions. Mulder quips immediately by asking her is she's coming onto him.

She is correct, as is often the case on the show. If Fox Mulder is a hero, he's a tragic one; and much like Captain Ahab he would rather stab at the mysteries of life from Hell's heart in his dying breath than simply live with it. Just look at the body count in any given episode, and how many of those deaths are collateral damage to his efforts. Look at his lack of a social life, which eventually becomes mirrored by the same in Scully's life. Mulder was an obsessive paranoiac, but the difference between him and the average tinfoil hat researcher is that the government paid him to be that way. This is not to say Mulder didn't have his admirable qualities; of course he did, and as much as Homer Simpson came to symbolize the everyman Mulder came to be an avatar for truth seekers and DIY researchers of all walks of life. The irony seems to be that in choosing him as a role model, real-life pursuers of the Truth-that-is-out-there miss the subtle cautionary tale inherent in the story. The history of Ufology in particular includes many examples of those who have discarded their lives - whether intentionally or otherwise - under the pretense of revealing the Truth to the public. Many today in the Disclosure movement would do well to heed the warnings offered by Mulder's example, but, as is often the case, he is instead idolized as an example to follow. The path that Mulder's flashlight illuminates is one that leads to madness; one should, instead, seek the yin and yang of both lead characters together, rather than one or the other.

Speaking personally, one particular episode that embiggened my consciousness in the same subliminal way Simpsons references occasionally manifest in my speech is "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" (Season 3, episode 4). The episode is written by Darin Morgan, who wrote all of my favorite episodes of the show. These include "Jose Chung's From Outer Space", which is perhaps the single best fictional presentation of high strangeness and the difficulty inherent in making a cohesive story appear from it; "Humbug", which centers on circus and carnival characters; and, when the series returned for a brief run, the two best episodes "Mulder and Scully Meet the Weremonster" and "The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat". In addition, he appeared on the show in "Small Potatoes", and played the Flukeworm Man in the episode "The Host". 

If all of that isn't enough, he also helped to write the aforementioned Ahab dialog in "Quagmire", although he didn't write the main episode. Morgan has a way of tapping directly into the quintessence of the great mysteries, by way of well-crafted stories in which Mulder and Scully are forced to contend with the purely absurd. Often funny and always charming, his contributions in the form of "Monster of the Week" episodes utilized that very humor and charisma to convey the nature of anomalies in a way that few dramatic interpretations can ever hope to achieve. 

Such is undoubtedly the case with "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose". Peter Boyle guest stars as the titular character, an insurance salesman who is worn down by life and feels he is cursed with psychic abilities. Mulder is able to sense this about him, and Bruckman reluctantly agrees to aid he and Scully in the investigation into murders of fortune tellers in his native Saint Paul, Minnesota. His main ability seems to be knowing precisely the manner and time of a person's death, well before it happens- so of course, he sells life insurance. He seemingly predicts Mulder's death with an off-hand comment about auto-erotic asphyxiation, and famously tells Scully that she doesn't die. The part of the episode that impacted me, and my worldview, went largely forgotten for years and was only discovered when I revisited the series long after originally seeing it. 

Bruckman explains how he developed his abilities, more or less by accident, after hearing about the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. He explains that in 1959 he had a ticket to see the three rock and roll legends play what would have been their next stop, had their plane the American Pie not crashed. He was particularly excited to see the Big Bopper, known for his song "Chantilly Lace"- and found out later that the only reason the Big Bopper got a seat on the plane to begin with was that he had flipped a coin with someone else for it. (In real life, this did happen, only it was Buddy Holly who had flipped the coin to win a seat on the plane. We can forgive Morgan for this inaccuracy though!) Bruckman became obsessed with the coin flip, and realized that all of life is composed of little moments that lead to something so small as a coin flip- which could mean the difference between life and death for even so great a personage as the Big Bopper. His obsession with causality, and imagining the myriad factors and variables which manifest in everything that can be said to happen, eventually led him to accurately determine when someone would die- and how. "I know it sounds crazy, but I swear it's true!" he says, "I was a bigger fan of the Big Bopper than I was of Buddy Holly."

I never necessarily considered myself to be psychic, but I have long believed that all human beings (and all life forms, for that matter) have some degree of sensory perception that is as yet not understood by modern science. Some are naturally more adept at accessing the information, while for others it takes dedicated practice- but each of us has some germ of omniscience within us. Colin Wilson calls this idea "Faculty X", in his excellent book The Occult: A History, which I always recommend to people who are only beginning to explore occult ideas. He supposes that ancient man, unfettered by the distractions and conveniences of modern life, would have had innate extrasensory perceptions that enabled him to survive in a chaotic and dangerous world. Some remnant of that still exists, and there are many schools of thought about how one harnesses this awareness. I felt pretty clever for years, thinking I had just stumbled on the idea that simply by considering causality I might have some inkling of future events. It was never easy for me to explain, which was fine because I rarely had anyone sympathetic to whom I could explain it- but the nature of Time, whibbly and wobbly as it is, is merely illusory. We experience it in a linear way because otherwise, our minds would break. By perceiving all that is happening now- by really paying attention and noting what's going on in your immediate environment, in meditative silence, one just might be able to perceive what has happened and what will occur. Further, by considering why everything you perceive at any given moment is occurring, you glimpse a bit of the machinery, which trains the mind to anticipate how that same machinery will operate moving forward.

As I type this now, in my living room with my small dog curled up next to me on the couch, I can see outside that the storm is winding down to a light drizzle. Birds are chirping in the distance. My wife has gone out shopping, which inspired me to start typing this. All of these present affairs are intimately interrelated. Had it not stormed today, my wife would have insisted on going to the flea market- or, perhaps, would have preferred to go shopping further away- but since she doesn't like driving in the rain, she stayed closer to home. Had we gone to the flea market, I wouldn't be writing this right now- and if I wrote it later, it would undoubtedly be a very different meditation indeed. These are small examples of immediate awareness of the NOW, which is a window into the WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN- and, quite possibly, also a window into WHAT WILL BE.

The preceding paragraph is an homage to Wilson. When I first read The Occult, I found myself getting irritated as his asides about his personal life. In explaining Faculty X, he would often say "As I sit at my typewriter in my home in Cornwall..." and for some reason I just found it tiresome. One day while reading it I became sleepy and went for a nap. I fast fell into a dream, in which I opened a door and suddenly all that I could recognize as my own dreaming was gone- I found myself in a small room, built of stone with large windows letting soft light in. It was large enough for a few benches, on which sat Colin Wilson. He smiled, and shrugged, and as though answering a question I hadn't asked said "It's about honesty, isn't it? Are you being honest, that's the main question. Everything else depends on that." I woke up mystified. I wasn't sure at the time that I even knew what Wilson looked like- my copies of his books didn't have author photos. I eventually remembered an obituary of his in an issue of Fortean Times, and dug it up- and there he was, older than the Wilson of my dream but recognizable. A few google searches later found photos that looked much more like the man in the dream. 

Ever since then, I have always endeavored to be honest with myself first and foremost, and honest in my approach to writing in particular. This sounds easy, as most of us like to think we're naturally honest people- but when you really examine it, you realize that there are little lies you tell yourself all of the time. Confronting these demons, as it were, and banishing them, also helps to promote Faculty X. This digression and admission of potentially psychic activity is oddly difficult for me to express. It sounds crazy. In the interest of being honest, however, it felt natural to include it- and for the record, I'm a bigger fan of Buddy Holly than I am of the Big Bopper.

It was wild then, for me, years after digesting a great episode of such an iconic series of The X-Files, to realize that so much of my way of looking at the world was inspired by the fictional character of Clyde Bruckman. (The real life Bruckman, as it happens, is a tragic character in the history of old Hollywood. The name stuck in my memory because I recognized it from the credits of old Laurel and Hardy or Three Stooges films... This is a running theme in The X-Files, which I will have to write about another day. The writers seemed to love referencing old comedies.) One wonders, had I not seen that episode when it first aired how different my life would be. If one does wonder that, than one has caught on to the idea of causality that I'm describing, that I learned through Darin Morgan's writing.

These themes weave themselves through the so-called "Monster of the Week" episodes in a way that is only apparent to the real nerds who pay attention to such things. The episode "Monday" (Season 6, episode 14) is a Groundhog Day-esque time loop tale, wherein events that come to pass largely due to lasting effects from the temporal jiggery-pokery that occur in "Dreamland" (2 part story, episodes 4 and 5 of the 6th season) cause Mulder to continually end up at a bank while it is being robbed, and repeatedly die in an explosion. Since Bruckman's insights might have saved Mulder's life in that episode, it seems by virtue of the fact that future events were disrupted a ripple effect had a lasting influence later in the series. Also, the dog called Queequeg was introduced in "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose"- and done away with in "Quagmire". The dog's name is what inspired the Ahab comparison in that episode.

In 30 years the legacy of Mulder and Scully, and other characters like the Lone Gunmen and the sinister Cigarette Smoking Man have loomed large in our public consciousness when it comes to anomalies, and in particular to UFOs. To this day, when news stations cover a UFO story, they can't help but insert the theme song, much to the chagrin of dedicated and serious researchers. I hope that future generations continue to discover the show, and perhaps with hindsight glean some of the subtler lessons the show had to teach. A major Truth that is out there for any of us to catch is that being serious all of the time does not necessarily bring one closer to their goal. Perhaps the quote to end with would be the line Leonard Nimoy gives, at the start of the X-Files / Simpsons crossover episode, "The Springfield Files": 

"...and by 'true', we mean 'false'. It's all lies. But the lies are told in an entertaining fashion, and in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer is no."

 
 

Forteana for a Froggy Evening

    Frogs hold a special place in the annals of Forteana - Charles Fort documented cases of frogs falling from the sky in his book that started it all, The Book of the Damned. Among the many instances of "damned facts and evidence" he collected, the frogs were only one example of things falling from the sky that seemed impossible. These odd events provided him a great platform from which to lampoon the attempts of scientists to explain them away. The rational explanation usually involved a waterspout pulling aquatic or amphibious creatures from the water and depositing them with rainfall elsewhere; the animosity between the rational approach of scholars at the time and Fort's sarcastic material agnosticism is a hallmark of all manner of Fortean subjects to this day.

    Other notable frogs within the weird fringe literature that can loosely be called Forteana are of course the Loveland Frogmen, who may not have even looked all that froggy at all. Various descriptions had been given for these odd creatures, which were reported in Ohio in the 50s, the 70s, and more recently - none of which matched the official explanation that someone's pet iguana had gotten loose, lost its tail, and was mistaken for a flying saucer occupant. Further, though not immediately evident of frogginess, there's the Hook Island Sea Monster photo. Evidence overwhelmingly suggests that this photo of an injured sea serpent is a hoax, but to this writer's eyes it looks like an enormous tadpole. Of course, such a tadpole would imply the existence of a Gargantuan Sea Frog. Imagine how large such a frog would be, how it would live, and what it would eat! We've now cast off from familiar shores out into the waters of pure imagination and conjecture, a place that might be requisite for appreciation of this blog.

          Yet another example of frogs posing unique questions to the Fortean mind is the phenomena of entombed animals. Claims dating back to the mid-19th century have documented instances of live frogs (and sometimes lizards) being freed from inside a lump of coal or a rock. This sounds absurd in the extreme; while frogs are known to hibernate encased in mud for several months, the amount of time it would take for mud to turn into rock would be far too long for any animal to survive, especially without food or water. In most reports, the frog dies shortly after being liberated from the stone. This phenomena is mostly discredited these days, but since we're still adrift in the numinous tides of speculation we won't let that concern us too much. Whether this is a 'True' phenomena or not, it provides a perfect segue for the main subject of our Froggy Night Feature: High Strangeness!

        The 1955 Warner Brothers cartoon "One Froggy Evening" may seem at first glance to have nothing to do with Forteana or High Strangeness. It's a weird premise for a cartoon, but it's a classic and a very funny one. The plot shows a construction worker at a demolition site who discovers a time capsule in the cornerstone, in which there is a living (and very lively) frog. The frog then proceeds to dawn a top hat and perform a song and dance with a cane. Michigan J. Frog can be interpreted as an "entombed animal". There is evidence to suggest this cartoon was inspired in part by the tale of Old Rip the Horny Toad, a horned lizard that allegedly survived being kept in a time capsule for 31 years in Eastland, Texas. Chuck Jones, the legendary cartoon director who managed this particular piece, gives the credit for the character and plot to his friend, writer, and gag man Michael Maltese in his autobiography Chuck Amuck. "The quirky brilliance of his ready wit was never neutral.", he said of Maltese; "He disdained facts as useless-- only the odd, the unusual, the hilariously peculiar interested him." Regardless of Michigan J. Frog's provenance within the varying fields of the weird, we can use him as a totem for how the phenomena of high strangeness acts - and how we interact with it. 

    After all, many of the strange events that those of us who have an interest in such things research really are "hilariously peculiar", which has in recent years led to fertile grounds for jokes on paranormal podcasts. A great many UFOlogists over the decades have dismissed the cases that seem too "out there", or omitted the laughably strange details from reports in an effort to present the case seriously. This applies also in ghost hunting and cryptozoology; often the desire for the case to be presented as worthy of honest investigation means it must be trimmed of anything that makes it sound too bonkers. Worse still, witnesses will fail to report the exorbitantly strange details of an event, even if they will generally share that it happened. 

    So what are we to do when we encounter the Singing Frog of High Strangeness? The events of the cartoon show us a few possibilities, each of which is echoed by examples through the history of investigations into the very weird. The Worker, who is never named, initially thinks only of the money to be made off of such a discovery - only to find that the frog will not dance on command for others. Hucksterism, grifting, and opportunist entrepreneuraliasm are rife within the history of all manner of weird subjects, as is the unrepeatability of odd effects. Places famous for their monsters see a lot of tourism purely for that reason, which is all the more reason to promote the mystery. It's not surprising that some who possess a Singing Frog would seek to profit from it, and although they sometimes do, they never really can prove that it's genuine. A good deal of experiencers and researchers have had their hopes of cashing in or even just getting recognition dashed to pieces by an uncooperative phenomenon.

    Witnesses to genuine events are met with doubt because of the fleeting nature of weird phenomena. Like a frog that only dances when no one else is around, witnesses can only describe the experience, not reproduce it. They generally have to be taken at their word without evidence to bolster it. The average person is not generous enough to do that, and although a lot of these ideas are becoming more mainstream they are likely to be shown the door- just like the Worker when he brought the frog to the Talent Agency.

    The mind-bending weirdness of some of these accounts is exemplified well by the "diabolical frustration", as Jones put it, that Michigan drives the Worker to. He rents a busted old theater, fixes it up and invites the public to come see. No one is interested until he puts a sign out that says "FREE BEER", and - alas! - he is unable to open the curtain in time for the crowd to see the frog sing. Where one man sees an extraordinary, phenomenal miracle others simply see a mundane, croaking frog... and they proceed to pelt him with fruits and vegetables. It all feels reminiscent of the revelatory claims in the ever-impending but never arriving government Disclosure of UFOs, or any bold pronouncement of conspiracy theorists. The average person has to be bribed into caring at all, and the reasonable among them will scoff when results fail to appear. Likewise, some phenomena seems awfully performative while at the same time very particular about its audience. The Worker in the cartoon is a lot like "repeaters" in UFOlogy, or those who have many varied stories of otherworldly encounters. For whatever reason, there are those seemingly genuine people who attract strangeness, or are perhaps more cognizant of it- but not in a way that can be confirmed by others. Diabolical frustration, indeed.

    Incidentally, there is a precedent for diabolical dancing frogs- as illustrated here from the 6th edition of J. Colin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal. Frogs were often associated with witches, and thought to be demons posing as frogs. Also, frogs were thought to be potent ingredients in magical workings.

    "One Froggy Evening" in this sense becomes a cautionary tale about how best to interact with a bizarre, highly strange situation. Perhaps the funniest moment comes when the Worker, now destitute and miserable, sits on a snowy park bench while Michigan belts out "Largo al factotum" from the opera The Barber of Seville. This attracts the attention of a police officer walking the nighttime beat. The cop, investigating the loud singing, is flummoxed by the Worker blaming it on the croaking frog. He is then left with no choice but to drag the man off to the Psychopathic Hospital, where Michigan continues to serenade him.

    The funniness of this scene has a much darker correlate in the avenues of investigating, researching, or simply living with highly strange events or circumstances. It really can drive one crazy, or at least lead outsiders to assess a witness as such. People of all walks of life can become obsessed, entirely invested in proving their claims or in more tragic cases, seeking help. Many anomalies seem to exist to fulfill the function of being anomalous; many mysteries will never be solved. Trying even at the expense of one's well-being to be the one who solves these mysteries is a path that often leads to madness. A good deal of witnesses and experiencers become ostracized from their communities, lose their jobs, and have their lives turned upside-down by the act of telling the truth as they know it. Some of them are likely lying, or mistaken, or cognitively disadvantaged. The fact remains, however, that strange encounters really do change people - for better or worse.

    The cartoon ends with the Worker seeing the opportunity to ditch the box with Michigan J. Frog in it at a construction site, and it goes right back into a cornerstone. 101 years later, the Future Worker once again liberates the Singing Frog and the cycle starts again.

    The diabolical frustration and madness of what can broadly be called The Phenomena is contagious, and the old stories appear over and over again with every new generation of Forteans, UFOlogists, ghost hunters, legend trippers, and weirdos. Our reactions to it may change, and that is for the best. How different would it have been for the Worker to just take the frog home and enjoy the song for himself? It would have been a boring cartoon, but the Worker would have been better for it. There's no right or wrong way, necessarily, to engage with weird stuff when it happens to you. There is perhaps a way to interpret your experience in a way that is deeply personal- and that means it doesn't need to be widely shared, or proven. Some phenomena is meant for you and you alone; you may watch the frog sing, but don't let it break your mind! 

Nessie-a-Day #7 - Fair Wetherell Friends

As the Nessie-a-Day entries wind down, I thought it only appropriate to get back to that photo - the Surgeon's Photo, which inspired the series. This is the final entry, and I could go into the story of the hoaxing of the photo, but that can be found on innumerable websites in almost verbatim fashion. What strikes me in each case is that the same photo of "big game hunter Marmaduke Wetherell" appears every time - wide eyed, stationed behind a camera, with what appears to be a stuffed monkey sitting on it.

What a character he appears to be! For some reason, upon seeing it, my first thought was of the Abbott and Costello movie Africa Screams. As it happens, old Duke here was actually in the movies, so I guess my intuition was right on the money. An actor in silent movies filmed in England, he went on to direct with minimal success. He couldn't exactly be faulted for this - In the 1920's British films languished in comparison to the much more popular American movies, so much so that in 1924 many movie studios in the U.K. closed down. Ironically, one of the major stars of American films at the time was Charlie Chaplin - a Brit. Embedded is a Wetherell adaptation of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, starring Marmaduke Wetherell.

With his movie career behind him, was he seeking new exploits? Was it his celebrity that prompted the Daily Mail to hire him to track down the beast? And furthermore, was he behind the hoax?

The story goes that he was humiliated after turning in tracks made by an ashtray or umbrella stand, which was made out of a hippopotamus foot, to the Natural History Museum. It's not clear whether he was fooled by a prank by someone else, or if he staged the prints, although some sources claim that the umbrella stand belonged to the Wetherell family. I'm not prepared to rule out an umbrella stand moving of its own volition down the beach... But surely a "big game hunter" estimating an animal so big as 25ft in length would understand that the weight of such an animal would create a deeper impression than a human hoaxer would manage. I'm dubious about whether he was a big game hunter at all - or if he just played one in the movies.

Wetherell Looking at a Map of Loch Ness

The film directing, acting, and producing angle does raise questions - was he there to put on a show? Was the Surgeon's Photo an example of early movie magic? Maybe he was naive enough to try to pass off a taxidermied hippo foot imprint for Nessie tracks, because in a movie it would have looked just fine. The first film appearance of a fictional Nessie, after all, was just a big iguana... fairly lackluster, I must say.

I'm sure someone has asked these same questions and perhaps got answers. With my self-imposed deadline of daily posts I have only managed to get the same limited info on M. A. Wetherell over and over again. Most of the information concerning a hoax attached to the photo comes from a 1975 Sunday Telegraph article with an admission from Marmaduke's son, (also an actor), explaining how the hoax was achieved with a toy submarine model. This was later found and expanded upon in the book Nessie-- The Surgeon's Photograph -- Exposed by David Martin and Alistair Boyd, a review of which can be found here. Perhaps reading that book in its entirety would help me suss some of this stuff out, but I rather like the illusion - shaken though it may be, like the disproportionate ripples on a miniature scene set adrift. True believers still maintain that the photo is genuine, and I'm generally open to possibilities. I sure hope that Nessie's out there, I still get excited about the idea of it. If nothing else she's given me a week straight of writing material, and that in itself is some manner of existence. 

In closing, this week of Nessie posts has taken some turns that even I didn't expect, and if you took the whole ride I heartily thank you. You may now return to your significantly less weird life!

Nessie-a-Day #6 - Conjecture Time

via GIPHY

So far in the series of daily Loch Ness Monster posts, I've covered a few of the many people involved in the history of studying the mystery animal. I've also tended toward more metaphysical or downright magical explanations that have come from the likes of Ted Holiday, 'Doc' Shiels, or others who would link the monster to Crowley. To balance things out, today's post is less research intensive as it relates to specific investigators, authors, and the ideas they have; today's post is almost 100% pure speculation and conjecture about what Nessie IS. (Isn't that what we all get into Forteana for anyway? Doesn't each of us secretly think we've got it "all figured out" or that our ideas about a given subject are so much more informed than the next guy's? No? Just me? Oh. A-hem...)

The most popular depiction of the Loch Ness Monster is that of a living Plesiosaur. As a young boy that's what attracted my interest to Nessie, as I was obsessed with dinosaurs - the idea of a flesh and blood, living aquatic reptile that appeared during the Triassic Period and flourished all over the world up until the extinction event that eradicated the dinosaurs. The 'living dinosaur' theory is a very nice one, but it raises serious questions. For one thing, such a creature would presumably need to come up for air often, and thus would likely be seen more often and accepted as a natural fauna of the Loch. In addition, similar beasts have been seen in lakes much smaller than Ness - leading some toward the more magical explanations explored in previous posts. Loch Ness does open to the sea, (kind of), and I've always liked to think of it as a spawning ground for Plesiosaurs or other such like prehistoric monsters living in the ocean most of the year. That the mating period just so happens to coincide with tourist season in Scotland is neither here nor there...

Other accounts of living dinosaurs have come up from time to time through-out history, from the Thunderbirds of the Americas to Mokele Mbembe of the Congo. The lack of evidence for this as a solution is often a source of derision for skeptics who would seek to debunk the monster sightings. Meanwhile, true believers often point to the Coelacanth, a fish thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago and eventually discovered as a living specimen. The ocean may well be a fantastic place to hide creatures long thought extinct, and Loch Ness has its secrets in the murky depths as well. I've always thought perhaps there were underwater caverns, leading to a vast cave system or perhaps some manner of Hollow Earth. In the documentary Hellier, it's noted that the Mammoth Cave system on the eastern end of the U.S. is massive, extending from Kentucky up into New England. One wonders if subterranean waterways could also exist, accounting for the more landlocked lake monsters like Champ, or Ogopogo. Also, Hollow Earth theory might sound crazy, but in light of the scope of a cave system like Mammoth Caves, it starts to sound more reasonable...

Scientists are only just learning recently exactly how old some creatures in the ocean are. New methods to help determine the age of sharks like the Greenland Shark have shown, in recent years, that they can live to be somewhere between 270 to 500 years old. It's thought that they don't even reach breeding age until age 150. If some sharks can live for centuries, it makes one wonder how long a Plesiosaur might have lived. Also, various clams in the ocean are thought to have the longest lifespan, and actually become less likely to die as they age! And plant life can live on replicating itself through vast networks with other plants... I'm not suggesting Nessie is an amorphous glob of sentient peat moss, but I'm not ruling it out either!

We touched briefly on Holiday's tullimonstrom gregarium (giant slug) theory, and Shiel's elephant squid theory, which are both great because they involve invertebrates who would leave nothing behind in the way of fossilized bones, and also would conceivably not need to come up for air. And of course there is the more logical explanations of what people are seeing - otters, seals, swimming deer, logs, and whatever other no-fun dismissive reactions. But to take a step in an even wackier direction than living dinosaurs and Hollow Earth Theory, what about Time Slips?

Suppose a prehistoric aquatic creature pokes its head above water, and finds itself 150 million years ahead of where it swam up from? Then, having had a glimpse of the future, it goes right back the way it came to tell all its friends about the cool castle ruins of Loch Ness's coast. Then it writes a book on its experience, and none of its friends believe it as they've been to the Loch and never seen such things. Old prehistoric Nessie lives out her days wondering "Just what the Hell was that?"

With all the research going on in physics these days related to quantum field theory, retrocausality, and potential paradigm shifts as to the nature of space-time I tend to believe more and more that Time Slips like the one described in Versailles around the turn of the century to be a real possibility. Frankly, all of the quantum physics stuff is above my pay grade, but it makes for fun thought experiments...

Join me tomorrow for my seventh and final Nessie-a-Day installment - same Ness time, same Ness channel!

Nessie-a-Day #5 - East of the Loch, as the Crow(ley) Flies...

The Loch Ness Monster is many things to many people - to some, those perhaps with a tendency toward magical thought, Nessie may well be a dark entity or demon. As referenced in my previous entries, Ted Holiday came to believe that his Great Orm was something of another Goblin Universe, and was present for the exorcism of the Loch; Janet and Colin Bord postulated that 'Doc' Shiels' invocation rituals, as (intentionally) silly as they were, may have in fact created Tulpas - thought forms represented not only by Nessie, but by ABCs (Alien Big Cats), Black Dogs, and flying creatures. In Alien Animals, they note the proximity not only to Loch Ness but to a place called Boleskine House for a few major ABC events. Boleskine House was the scene of a legendary botched magick ritual by a young Aleister Crowley, who bought the estate in 1889. He had intended to call upon his Holy Guardian Angel, in a sacred ritual from the 1500s - the Sacred Ritual of Abramelin the Mage. The story goes that young Crowley summoned and then lost control of shadowy figures from Beyond, or that he abandoned his 6 month preparation program too soon - a full and well-written account of these events by Greg Newkirk can be found here, in a 2011 article for the wonderful Week in Weird website. But a lot has happened at Boleskine since 2011, and more has come to light regarding the rituals Crowley was engaged in.

The day of this writing, a BBC article appeared concerning Boleskine - that it is up for sale again. The house and property changed hands many times over the years, adding to the legend that Crowley's black magic had made it an evil place. Most notably, it was owned by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page. In 2015, a fire broke out in the remote estate which reduced it nearly to rubble. Some would argue that the place was cursed, so a fire seems a fitting end to the building itself. But the question that is just too good and too weird to not ask is did Crowley conjure Nessie?

The Bords argue that although the modern phenomena of a monster in the Loch kicked off in 1933, stories of a monster went back centuries. Holiday also acknowledges tales of dragons, or Orm, in his second book The Dragon and the Disc. The ABCs occurring as a result of botched magical workings have precedent in occult literature - to King James I it was the Devil himself, choosing a form he liked - a lion, an ape, or a dog. The Ritual of Abramelin did involve calling forth evil entities, so the story goes, and bringing them under control after union with the Holy Guardian Angel. This is reportedly where Crowley ran into trouble.

Crowley was a complicated man who really divides people in opinion about him. Often thought of as a well-to-do kook who lived for infamy, he has just as many (or more) devotees, admirers, and people who respect and fear what he brought to the table. In addition to his aforementioned association with the Loch Ness monster, there's also his contacts with an inter dimensional being called "Lam", who seems eerily similar to our modern concept of Grey Aliens. In addition, I've noted before that his death was right around the time of the first major Flying Saucer flaps - 1947. Whatever your thoughts about Crowley might be, it's not unfair to say from an objective standpoint that his life was chaotic. Thus, it's not beyond the pale to blame him for a bungled ritual. But that might not be the whole story...

In recent years, a new translation of The Book of Abramelin has been released by Ibis Press. In 1897, S.L. MacGregor Mathers had translated the ritual from an incomplete French version of Abraham von Worms' original grimoire, and this would have been the version that Crowley brought with him to Boleskine House. Is it any wonder that his working would go sideways on him, if the book he was working with was translated from an unreliable source? In the foreword by Lon Milo DuQuette, he goes to great lengths to stress that Mathers actually did a great job of translating the French text - it's just that the French text did a poor job of translating from the original German. It seems an Erisian twist of fate that Crowley may have really done everything to the letter - but the letter itself was wrong! The famed 6 months of preparation, it turns out, should have been 18. It would seem that small discrepancies can do a lot of damage...

Also worth noting, in the spirit of Name Game synchromysticism - the Magician who authored The Book of Abramelin is called Abraham von Worms. Holiday referred to Nessie as an Orm, which can also by Worm or Wyrm in English folklore. Of course, "von Worms" as a moniker simply means that Abraham was from Worms, Germany - but that has synchronistic value as well. Worms is the setting for the first part of the Nibelungenlied, in addition to other German folktales tracing their roots to the Kingdom of the Burgundians in the the early 5th century. The legendary hero Sigurd, or Siegfried, is prominent in these tales. Siegfried is, of course, notable for having killed a dragon, before being murdered himself...

In closing, if anyone wants to loan me (or just give me, preferably) $650,000 to buy Boleskine House estate, I'll be your best friend!

References

• https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-47936223?SThisFB
• http://weekinweird.com/2011/04/11/the-boleskine-house-loch-ness-other-stranger-monster/
• The Book of Abramelin - Abraham von Worms, compiled and edited by Georg Dehn and translated by Steven Gutch. Revised and expanded edition 2015. www.ibispress.net
• Alien Animals - Janet and Colin Bord, 1981
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worms,_Germany
• Magic, Mysticism and the Molecule - Micah Hanks 

Nessie-a-Day #4 - Tony Shiels... What's up, 'Doc'?

Tony 'Doc' Shiels is one of the most fun and colorful characters I've come across in all of my strange reading. And that's saying something! He seems to round all the bases of my various weird interests - first and foremost, as he would prefer according to interview segments I've read, the man is an artist - a Surrealist painter who came to call his conceptual continuity (to borrow a term from Zappa) works of "Surrealchemy". He has been a busker, musician and performer; a stage magician and the Wizard of the West; a trickster and a sincere lover of spectacle - but for the purposes of the Nessie-a-Day series, he's the man who coaxed the Loch Ness Monster out for a photo shoot!

Tony Shiels was born in 1938 in Salford, where he developed an early affinity for sleight-of-hand and learned some tricks from his family. At age 16, he began attending Heatherly School of Fine Art in London, thereafter beginning a promising career as an artist in St. Ives, Cornwall. He played blues piano, performed magic, and generally had a good time in the counterculture scene. Eventually he would write columns in such magic magazines as Linking Ring and The Budget, developing what became known as "Bizarre Magic" - spookier magic tricks that worked in occult elements (ie card tricks utilizing Tarot cards) that broke the mold a bit for the tastes of stage magicians at the time.

All of this is very interesting to me - the blues, Surrealism, the occult, sleight-of-hand, 60s counterculture are all long-term fascinations of mine. But my introduction to the Doc included none of these details - I was drawn in by his appearance in a book called Alien Animals, by Janet and Colin Bord.

In the interest of fairness, I sought this book out after seeing a picture of it online - that cover art is FANTASTIC. As it happens, it's a great book that explores all manner of mysterious out-of-place (hence, alien) or unknown creatures from all over the world. Janet and Colin Bord have written many books on a variety of Fortean and folkloric topics, and are the stewards of the Fortean Picture Library. In a 2017 interview Janet credits Shiels' Nessie photo (printed in the Daily Mirror, shown above) for being the first of many that made up said library...

In the book, published in 1981, 'Doc' Shiels comes up repeatedly with very little explanation as to who he is - he's described as a Wizard, one who does experiments in "monster raising" with a trio of nude witches - an experiment that apparently yielded results. How could I do anything other than dig deeper into this story??? The photographic evidence seemed to indicate that his efforts were efficacious, leading the Bords to question whether the creatures were summoned, or created out of thin air in the manner of a Tulpa (as described by Alexandra David-Neel in Magic and Mystery in Tibet).

Skyclad Witches inkvoke Morgawr - if nothing else, 'Doc' knew how to throw a party!

1976 was the year of the skyclad witches and their swimming rituals to lure in sea serpents - the monster Morgawr was reported during this time at Falmouth Bay in Cornwall. The Owlman of Mawnan was also reported around this time, and by '77 Shiels had developed his monster raising techniques into a network of participants, willing monsters into existence in an experiment called Monstermind. A lot of reports came out during this era, a lot of photos as well; Shiels gained a bit of notoriety (and perhaps infamy) in the press as the busking Wizard who had Nessie under his spell. Most of the photographic evidence from this era is considered a hoax now, and many of the reports were thought to be a product of Shiels himself - often they were in the form of a letter, and original witnesses weren't interviewed. Shiels maintains that he never hoaxed any of the monsters - his conjurations he credited, in 1981, to his "strong desire for success".

Interestingly, the Wikipedia entry for Shiels has been edited between the time I first viewed it and the time of this writing - last year, the entry seemed to be a damning indictment of Shiels as a fraud, while now it has a more generous and fuller account of his personality. If you're reading this in the future, it may have changed again! But such is the nature of our amorphous reality, when information is as malleable as a bunch of ones and zeros in a computational code...

The best way to really get to know 'Doc' Shiels is by reading the biography written about him by Rupert White - Monstermind: The Magical Life and Art of Tony 'Doc' Shiels.

The 1977 experiments were cut short due to "Psychic Backlash" - an effect reportedly experienced as a sense of fatigue following encounters with Nessie by F. W. Holiday and Tim Dinsdale, among others. That and, according to Shiels, it had already been a success as photos had been produced not only of Nessie but of other monsters around the world. The antidote to this backlash effect, as prescribed by the 'Doc' was, in keeping with his trickster nature: humor. The protection offered by a sense of humor, he says, "has to be paid for. So, although my humourous wizardry is successful, it is not taken seriously by the monster hunting establishment." Truly a man after my own heart!

He wrote continuously for the Fortean Times, as heavily quoted in my previous entry, in his column "Ask a Wizard". He eventually came up with a cephalopod theory about Nessie, that the monster was actually a form of elephant squid!

In his long and varied career of various careers - from monster-raiser to artist, musician to magician, he's been an amazing figure that it took me far too long to find out about. There's a list of books that he's authored that I someday hope to get my hands on... and he's still out there, creating art and has made television appearances in the past few years. Long live Tony Shiels- thanks for all the entertaining and thoughtful fun!

Nessie-a-Day #3 - Sail into the (Synchro)Mystic

Today's Nessie post is a bit of a mind-bender and one I probably put way much thought into. It involves a bit of the Fortean "Name Game", and plays on words from the old Fortean Times magazine, with a nod to cryptozoologist / author Loren Coleman's Twilight Language, which he defines as "the study of hidden meanings and synchronistic connections via onomatology (the study of names) and toponymy (study of place names)". And Mr. Coleman, if you're reading this, I apologize in advance for what may be a sloppy version of the work you do - and by no means do I wish to diminish it!

In the aforementioned Fortean Times issues, the game was "Lexi-Links", coined by Anthony Bell. It's the pun-like repetition and distortion of names and symbols linked to anomalous phenomena. And given the F. W. Holiday synchronicity alluded to in Nessie-a-Day #1, and all the ado given it's due, let's do the thing and proceed.

The "Surgeon" in question, who is allegedly took the photograph this series is celebrating, is often referred to in reports as a Dr. Wilson, or Kenneth Wilson, but the man's full name was Robert Kenneth Wilson. (It's likely to my mind that he preferred to go by "Kenneth".) Well as a devout Discordian (except every other Thursday, when I choose a religion randomly out of a hat to ascribe to) it's hard to see that name without thinking of Robert Anton Wilson, the author of  Illuminatus! and Episkopos, Pope and saint of Discordianism.

He was actually born Robert Edward Wilson, a year or so before the first major Nessie sightings. Technically, he earned a PhD in psychology from Paideia University in 1978 - making he, too, a doctor - but that particular university is now closed, and was unaccredited in the time he spent there. R.K. Wilson was a gynecologist, and was described as someone who "enjoyed a good practical joke" - The story behind the surgeon's photo is that it was staged by the nephew of the humiliated would-be monster hunter Marmaduke Wetherell, and given to Wilson who could play the role of a more reliable and unbiased witness. Compare this to R.A. Wilson, a notorious prankster who, along with popularizing Discordianism, was one of the driving forces behind Operation Mindfuck - which often involved prank letters printed in magazines and newspapers...

The two Dr. Roberts above made me think of the Beatles song from the 1966 album Revolver, which made me think of the "Mr. Wilson" reference in the song Taxman from the same album, which made me think of the hit single Yellow Submarine - which reminded me of the VIPERFISH, a mini-sub piloted by Dan Taylor in the Loch in 1969 in search of Nessie. The sub was yellow... I wasn't sure any of that was significant, but I tend to think that I'm an Idiosyncratic Synchromystic whether I admit it or not. So my thought is: Every particular thing is significant, except for those things that aren't. Looking into the recording details of the song Dr Robert, it was recorded on April 17, 1966, and the vocals were recorded April 19th - the 32nd anniversary of the shutter click heard round the world. Also worth noting - 1966 is the year Paul McCartney died, if you believe the Paul is Dead theories. I'm with RAW, who said "belief is the death of intelligence"...

I'm not the first to note the confluence of Wilsons - self-proclaimed Wizard, Artist, and raconteur Tony "Doc" Shiels (who is intimately tied to Loch Ness - he famously "summoned" the monster and will absolutely be covered in a future post) wrote in the Autumn 1982 issue of Fortean Times:

'W' is the 23rd letter of the alphabet...twenty three skidoo, Weishaupt and Wilson! Wilson (viz: Robert Anton, Kenneth, and Colin) is a name with weird worm and wizardry associations, so we will keep it in mind: 

Of course, he also includes Colin Wilson, who I mentioned in the F. W. Holiday post as being responsible for Holiday's The Goblin Universe being published - which examines the whole of weird phenomena as a network of otherwordly symptoms - synchronicity prominent among them - all having a common cause, or controlling force. The word "goblin" is thought by some to be associated with a later term, "gremlin", which brings me to the next Wilson on my list...

This Robert Wilson isn't a doctor, in fact, he's presented as a recently discharged patient. He goes by "Bob" instead of "Robert", and his other distinguishing characteristic is that he's entirely fictional. Bob Wilson is the name of the character played by William Shatner in the classic 1963 Twilight Zone (Twilight - Language, Zone!) episode Nightmare at 20,000 Feet. Wilson is on an airplane, alone in his awareness of the monstrous gremlin on the wing threatening to kill everyone aboard. It's a bizarre and truly nightmarish scenario, where the line between sanity and reality is unclear for everyone involved. It is, also, a great metaphor for monomaniacal pursuits of various Fortean phenomena - always seeing things or knowing things that you can't easily communicate to the average person, like a sighting of a lake monster, or spending a Saturday night deconstructing a Twilight Zone episode to make it relate to the Loch Ness Monster...

via GIPHY

Eventually, the episode culminates in Wilson stealing a revolver (!) from a sleeping policeman and opening the emergency hatch to fire on the creature, which then departs. In the end, he's vindicated by the physical damage to the fuselage, but is wheeled away in a straightjacket all the same. In 1983, the story was done for the movie version of the Twilight Zone, with Jon Lithgow playing John Valentine. The only name I could relate this to was Michael Valentine of Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, but I couldn't grok any real meaning out of it so I abandoned it. It's worth mentioning simply because it extends the Fortean metaphor; Valentine attempts, in desperation, to get a Polaroid photo of the gremlin, only to have the flash thwart him and leave him with a picture of his own sweaty, frenzied face - echoing Holiday's observation of Nessie's eerie aversion to being photographed... Deep, man...

The most recent offering from Jordan Peele, Nightmare at 30,000 Feet, is more of an homage to the classic story, and is quite different. I won't go into too much detail, as it's still new and I wouldn't want to spoil it, but the lead role is played by Adam Scott, and instead of Valentine or Wilson the character is named Justin Sanderson. Old school Forteans will recognize the name Sanderson - Ivan T. Sanderson wrote a great deal of literature on weird phenomena, as well as the foreword to Holiday's The Great Orm of Loch Ness... as for the name Scott - Sir Peter Scott was a respected naturalist who studied the Loch for signs of a hidden beastie and was the one who named her Nessiteras Rhombopteryx - Latin for Ness Dweller with a Diamond Shaped Fin. It was noted not long after that the term is also an anagram for "Monster Hoax by Sir Peter S". That may well just be the Goblin Universe having a bit of fun with us... Shiels notes that it also can be "Tony's ESP beats hex... Mirror" and that Scott is a name long associated with magic (Michael, Reginald, Sir Walter).

Of course, prior to Richard Matheson's fictional tale of a man on the wing made television history, there were reports of gremlins tinkering with planes. The phenomena is almost as old as aviation itself. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, reports of gremlins messing with aircraft were so common the Ministry had a service manual written by "Gremlorist" on how to handle them!

1940 began with a bang, or perhaps a splash - though not specifically gremlin related, a New Year's even training flight over Loch Ness resulted in a Wellington bomber sinking into the depths. The bomber was numbered N2980, but the nickname was - ready for it? R for Robert. The sunken WWII bomber was discovered in 1976 during the sonar surveys of the Loch, 230 ft below the surface. In the mid-eighties, efforts were conducted to retrieve the lost bomber by an organization called the Loch Ness Wellington Association, headed up by chairperson Robin Holmes.

Which brings us to our Nessie-a-Day #2 entry about the movie prop -from a Sherlock Holmes film- that was found twice during surveys of the Loch - the sunken monster, which was, in the movie, a submarine disguised as a monster, and was intentionally sunk at the end. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was a 1970 movie by Billy Wilder, while in 1975 Gene Wilder starred in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother... The filming by Wilder on location at Urquhart Bay was in 1969, and was assisted by a submarine called the Pisces II, while the yellow submarine VIPERFISH was also in the Loch, hoping to catch a piece of Nessie... The same year Abbey Road was released, with the "28IF" license plate on the cover...

This is now degenerating as these things tend to do - this has been an exhausting post and I hope you made it this far. I'll leave you with one more snippet from Tony "Doc" Shiels, again from a Fortean Times magazine which also features articles from Loren Coleman and Robert Anton Wilson...

The names Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson can be anagrammatized into such telegrammatic lines as "O NO! WHAT? JOHN KEEL LANDS COY LOCH NESS ORM!" or "JOKE ON LOCH NESS AND LOCAL MONSTER, OH, WHY?"

References / links / further reading:

• https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2015/07/the-real-gremlins-of-wwii/
• https://copycateffect.blogspot.com
• http://www.donttakepictures.com/dtp-blog/2017/4/19/the-loch-ness-monster-turns-83-the-story-of-the-surgeons-photograph
• Monster Wrecks of Loch Ness and Lake Champlain by Joseph Zarzynski, 1986
• Fortean Times - issues 37 and 38 (Fall 1982 and Spring 1983)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Robert
• https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorials/3555152/flight-fright-richard-mathesons-nightmare-20000-feet-many-adaptations/
• Alien Animals by Janet and Colin Bord
• Alien Dawn by Colin Wilson

Nessie-a-Day #2 - The Loch Gets Wilder

In spring of 2016, an underwater robot caught a picture of a monster in the loch - but this monster had been photographed before, some say, by Robert Rines and the Academy of Applied Science (AAS). Of course, this monster was made to be put in the movies - turns out all it needed to do was act naturally!

In 1969, the Billy Wilder movie The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was filmed on location in Urquhart Bay. The plot involves secret submarine tests in Loch Ness, with the test sub disguised as a lake monster - Sherlock's brother Mycroft (played by Sir Christopher Lee) is wrapped up in all of this. It seems that Billy Wilder didn't like the double hump of the Nessie model and had it removed - unfortunately, the design of the humps were part of what allowed for buoyancy for the 40 foot beastie. So, as it was towed out into the bay, it sank beneath the waves and was abandoned- the scenes involving the movie monster used a rebuilt head and neck at a London water tank.

The AAS continued to believe that the underwater photo they captured in 1975 showed a genuine living creature, despite the insistence by the press and skeptics that they had simply found the movie prop. Also, the area where the model was recently found has been a hotspot for Nessie sightings in recent years. Maybe the sunken model is something of a roadside attraction, or a sacred idol to the monsters of the Loch? Perhaps Nessie simply wants a selfie with her Hollywood double...

Joseph W. Zarzynski's 1986 book Monster Wrecks of Loch Ness and Lake Champlain covers this and other stories of sunken boats and crashed planes in both lakes, and is certainly worth reading for the lake monster fanatic. For more information on the underwater robot mentioned at the top, look here.

That wraps up Nessie-a-Day #2!

Nessie-a-Day #1 - F. W. Holiday

I thought it appropriate to begin my week of Nessie celebrations with a name I came across in every book that goes into the Loch Ness mystery, even slightly - Frederick William Holiday, known to his friends as Ted. He was a journalist and wrote books on fishing before his infatuation with the Loch Ness monster began in 1941, which culminated in a trilogy of books that chronicle his evolving opinions on the nature of the beastie. His adventures on the Loch in pursuit of the creature took him down a path of High Strangeness as well - he would, over time, become wrapped up in enigmas involving UFOs, synchronicity, and Men in Black!

His first book on the subject is "The Great Orm of Loch Ness", in which he posits that Nessie is a type of giant slug - an over-sized Tullimonstrum Gregarium, in fact. To me it's a sound theory; a long-necked veriform invertebrate thought to be extinct (and not nearly that large when it did live) could conceivably go undetected. Having no bones, it would leave no fossil record either. As materialist explanations go, it's a fine one... but Holiday soon got other ideas. For one thing, the monster seemed to know when a camera was present, and avoid having its picture taken, which Holiday ascribed to a possible telepathic sense Nessie possessed. Also possible was the idea that Nessie was a projection of human thought, an immaterial or supernatural creature. He brings together ideas of lake monsters, Flying Saucers, folklore and archaeological sites in his second book "The Dragon and the Disc", along with the beginnings of the idea that UFOs and lake monsters might have an underlying cause... which led ultimately to his posthumous book "The Goblin Universe".

It seems that Holiday, somewhere along the line, fell prey to the kind of maddening High Strangeness that other researchers like John Keel have. Colin Wilson, who wrote the introduction to and was responsible for the publishing of "The Goblin Universe" recounts much of Holiday's personal journey with the so called "phantom menagerie" in his book "Alien Dawn". Along the way, he did see Nessie, but couldn't get a picture; he encountered poltergeists and apparitions, and had several UFO sightings. He was present for the exorcism of the Loch by clergyman Rev. Donald Oman, and experienced strange precognative and synchronistic events in his search - which he ultimately ended up questioning the entirety of, with the convincing photographing evidence of Robert Rines appearing in his later years. The underwater photos - including the famous flipper photo - suggested that Nessie was a flesh-and-blood creature after all, bringing the whole crazy journey full circle, like a serpent biting its own tale, or a disc, perhaps.

"Synchronicity and the forces that control it never give up." This line appears in "The Goblin Universe", which Holiday had reservations about publishing. But it seems that Holiday also never gave up - he began writing another book much more in line with "The Great Orm of Loch Ness", and in the meantime collaborated with BUFORA investigator Randall Jones Pugh in writing "The Dyfed Enigma", which chronicled a bizarre flap of UFO activity in Wales. He includes in this book his comparison of ley lines with locations of sightings, building upon his Goblin Universe worldview - UFOs, ghostly black dogs, lake monsters and synchronicity - all things "neither physically solid nor organic in any known sense of the word" that we still yet encounter.

Ted Holiday died of a heart attack in 1979, leaving behind a legacy of weird ideas and haunting the margins of every anthology on the paranormal like a phantom from the Goblin menagerie. He's easily one of my favorite researchers on any weird topic, but then again, I'm biased with a predisposition toward anything Nessie related. Those who enjoy Keel would do well to track down Holiday's books, there are definite similarities in their work. Long live Nessie, and long live Ted!