Of Werewolves and War...

It’s very interesting to see how memories from our childhood get so intertwined with current events of the time and the strange bedfellows these connections create. Here’s a good example, a couple of weeks ago I was in McKay’s Books here in Nashville -- the local supermarket/dumping ground of used and no-longer-loved books. Now while the majority of what shows up at McKay’s is of recent vintage, some really oddball items can turn up at times, and so it was with this little gem that I found on the shelf for a mere six bucks.

The Book of Werewolves – Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition by the Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould is a collection of European folklore and legends concerning werewolves (well, duh…) that was originally published in 1865. This edition, a facsimile reprint of the first edition, was published in 1973 by Causeway Books, a small press out of New York who’s other publications included (according to the back of the dustjacket) such titles as Your Psychic Powers and How to Develop Them, The Book of Vampires, and Oragenitalism: Oral Techniques in Genital Excitation – all the fun stuff in other words.

Although Causeway Books were not carried on the spinner paperback racks of the drugstores I frequented as a kid, I did see this particular book for the first time around the start of 1975 when we would shop in Bowling Green or some other city that had an actual bookstore with a remainder/discount books section.

I was, of course, immediately drawn to the book, both by its title and the spectacularly creepy illustration featured on the dustjacket. Plus the 19^th Century text contained within made it look just like a book that Carl Kolchak might have consulted on Kolchak: The Night Stalker, my favorite TV show, which was then limping toward the end of its first and only season. After all, what would I do if a werewolf showed up in Dunmor, Kentucky? I needed to have knowledge and be prepared!

But despite these rock-solid reasons for purchasing the book, the creepiness that attracted me also worked against me, and the price tag, probably a whopping $2.99 or so after the markdown, also held me at bay. So even though I saw it on more than one occasion I continued to pass it by. However, fate had other plans…

In April of 1975, we left Kentucky for week’s trip to Connecticut to visit my dad’s brother and his family. When we got there I was to stay with the youngest  of Uncle’s kids, Andy, who was already a teenager and a horror fan. Andy had a collection of Warren Comics magazines Vampirella, Creepy, and Eerie, and for me, being just a few weeks away from turning 12, staying in his room in the basement was awesome indeed. But best of all, Andy also had a certain yellow and black book – The Book of Werewolves.

So here was my chance to read this intimidating tome with absolutely no cash outlay. Over the three or four days we were there I spent time in the mornings and evenings plowing through as many pages as I could.

"You mean the movie lied?"

The first thing I discovered was that traditional werewolf legends were quite a bit different from the “facts” as presented by the spinning, neon Universal globe. There were no tortured souls, cursed to become ravening wolves when the autumn moon is bright. Instead the stories I read dealt with no-goodniks who donned the skin of wolves for transformations or wanton females who rubbed their naked bodies (hot-cha!) with magic wolf grease before their murderous rampages – with their main victims being, more often than not, babies(!).

But while I devoured the tales of lycanthropy, real world tragedies were about to intrude upon me. I can distinctly remember sitting in my cousin’s bedroom the morning of the last day we were there and reading about werewolves with the radio on. When the radio cut to a newsbreak the main story of the day was the end of the war in Vietnam and the fall of Saigon -- forever cementing in my mind a link between the end of the Vietnam War and tales of bestial and murderous transformations.

Of course there’s probably a great metaphor here about the transformation of the American psyche in the wake of Vietnam. Or perhaps the shattering of illusions about Hollywood werewolf lore and the American self-image of righteousness,  but for right now I think I’ll just settle down with the good Reverend for tales of wolfish horror and baby-eating and finish reading the book I started over 36 years ago.

My Autumn of Aliens, or Why a Swiss Hotel Clerk Owes Me $1.25 (Plus Tax!) – Part 3

So as the seventies rumbled on my interest in UFOs and all manner of weird stuff continued. But along with my interest in the “weird stuff” came my growing interest in “slightly less weird stuff,” such as more conventional science (mainly astronomy and space exploration) as well as science fiction. While I was still a comic book collector, the number of titles I was buying began to slack off as I turned more of my budget to buying science fiction novels and magazines. Not to mention the explosion of movie magazines that began to appear in the aftermath of the release of Star Wars and the growing popularity of Star Trek.

In the fall of 1977, I started high school, and one my best friends was a big time science and astronomy geek. This association would only push me more in the direction of “conventional” science. Also, that fall the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released. At the time absolutely loved it, in some ways even more than Star Wars. It struck me as great science fiction with a really positive message about “man’s place in the cosmos.” (I should interject here that my opinion now is less glowing, but no need to get into that...) So I was rather surprised when one of my main literary heroes of the time, science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, came down so hard on the movie – criticizing it for promoting “pseudo-science” over “true science.”

And Asimov wasn’t the only one. I had also discovered astronomer Carl Sagan through his many appearance on television talk shows and documentaries, and he was fast becoming a hero of mine. Sagan was not only a brain, but he had a lot of natural charisma and really understood how to use television to his advantage. He was a staunch supporter of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial life, but could also be an incredibly harsh critic of UFO reports and many of the self-proclaimed “experts” in the field.

So for a while I was torn between two masters. Even though what people like Asimov and Sagan were saying made sense in a logical way, flying saucers and all the other associated weird stuff were just so darn cool. I finally settled on a middle ground where I felt it was good that someone was too skeptical, because that would be the only way the real truth could eventually come out. Yeah, that's the ticket...

"Just the facts, ma'am..." 

And Close Encounters had done its job well on the pop culture scene. Following the movie there was an immediate explosion of UFO books, magazines, documentaries and even TV shows. One my new favorites was the Jack Webb produced Project U.F.O., even if the show was a bit of a cheat at times. The typical episode would start off with some person witnessing an incredibly detailed sighting, often with occupants, but by the end of the episode Major Gatlin and Staff Sgt. Fitz would demonstrate how they had actually seen a flock of birds, swamp gas, or maybe a runaway balloon animal. Still, the Dragnet-just-the-facts formula worked for the show, and eventually the writers starting ending most episodes with some small bone that seemed to show what the person had seen really was unearthly.  (They just needed a big “THE END?” before the credits to make it complete.)

But the end to my days of high strangeness was approaching fast. As part of my new fascination with hard science I had discovered the truly excellent PBS documentary series, Nova. In March of 1978, Nova produced the special episode, “The Case of the Ancient Astronauts.”  While I expected some serious debating of von Däniken’s theories, I was not prepared for the epic smack-down that Nova delivered.

Point by point, the calm, collected narrator ripped the arms off ancient astronauts and beat them to death with their own detached limbs. The one that still stands out in my memory, and what I think was the tipping point for me, was the examination of the famous “spaceport” photo.  In Chariots of the Gods? von Däniken had presented the photo with the caption, “Another of the strange markings on the Plain of Nazca. This is very reminiscent of the aircraft parking areas in a modern airport.” Nova showed the lines from the exact same angle and then had someone walk down the “landing strip” to show that it was about two feet wide, and then pulled back to show that the lines were plainly the leg of a giant drawing of a bird!

What the TV Guide had to say about the smack-down of the millennium!

I was furious. This wasn’t just a matter of debating the interpretation of evidence. This was out and out fraud. And I had sacrificed six comic books for this? After the episode concluded I yanked my copy of Chariots of the Gods? off the shelf and took a black magic marker to spine in order to black the “Non-“ in the word “Non-Fiction.” Take that you lousy Swiss hotel clerk!

But my fury wasn’t totally reserved for ancient spacemen. Even though I didn’t take the magic marker to the rest of my library, the fun of UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts and the like seem to have vanished. Although there was not as clear of dividing line for the rest as there had been for ancient astronaut theories, the old thrill and appeal, not to mention the creepiness, just wasn’t there anymore.

Skip forward to the late nineties. Although my interest in weird stuff was occasionally sparked by episodes of Unsolved Mysteries or Fox’s incredibly goofy Sightings, not to mention the “Alien Autopsy” shell game or The X-Files, I never experienced a real temptation to return to my UFO “research.”  The skeptic in me was pretty hardened, not to mention the mythology that had developed since the seventies – abductions, the elevation of "Roswell" to scripture, “Grays,” government conspiracies, anal probes and the like – struck me as boring for the most part, and quite frankly, just not any “fun.”

It was on a road trip to Chicago in 2002 that my friends Jack Daves and Dave Conover got into an extended discussion about John Keel’s classic tome of weirdness, The Mothman Prophecies and the movie that had just been released based on the book. At the first mention of the word “Mothman” they had my attention – the old favorites never fail, and even though the book had been published in 1975 I had never encountered it.

When we got back from the trip I tracked down a copy and made several great discoveries. Keel was one of the first researchers to completely reject the extraterrestrial theory in regards to UFOs. Instead he postulated the UFOs were merely the latest “form” of a phenomenon that has been going on since the dawn of recorded history – and the way the phenomenon is perceived is determined by the culture and prejudices of the time. Of course this is a much oversimplified version, but the point is that both the skeptic and, even more important, the 10-year-old boy tucked away inside of me could accept this as a possibility.

But even better than a palatable theory was the fact that the book scared the crap out me.  Now, I love horror fiction and horror movies, but I’ve reached a point where they don’t scare me.  Maybe a small scare at the time I’m reading or watching, but not of the good old lying-in-bed-at-night-staring-at-the-ceiling-waiting-for-the-boogerman-to-get-me kind of fear. What I discovered was reading books about UFOs, bigfoot and the like really got under my skin – even in a case when I knew what was written was mostly B.S. It still gave me that old exquisite feeling of irrational terror.  And so my hobby of collecting pre-1980s UFO and bigfoot books began. And fortunately, I also found that a new generation of weirdness writers, who probably cut their teeth on books with “the font,” are rejecting the anal probes (can you blame them?) and conspiracies of the eighties and nineties and writing some fun and funky stuff.

But when it comes to von Däniken’s books, I won’t touch ‘em!  Us crackpots got to have some standards!

My Autumn of Aliens, or Why a Swiss Hotel Clerk Owes Me $1.25 (Plus Tax!) – Part 2

“A mild curiosity about UFOs can turn into a destructive obsession. For this reason, I strongly recommend that parents forbid their children from becoming involved. Schoolteachers and other adults should not encourage teen-agers to take an interest in the subject.” — from Operation Trojan Horse by John A. Keel

So my course was determined. I had to own a copy of Chariots of the Gods? no matter if the cost was equal to six comic books and a package of Wacky Packs (the preferred currency of the day…) 

Now of course, living in Dunmor, Kentucky, my only access to paperbacks were what happened to be in drugstores in the surrounding area. Even though the sought-after tome had been a bestseller, it had been out a couple of years, and that meant a trip to an actual bookstore. So the next time my mom made the fifty-mile trek to Bowling Green, Kentucky I was ready. Not even the always tempting stock of Aurora monster models at Woolco could distract me from my quest to secure the knowledge of ancient astronauts.

Grabbing the book from the wire rack in the bookstore I discovered that von Däniken had authored more than one book – Gods from Outer Space, The Gold of the Gods (which had awesome gold embossed letters in “the font” – but I knew I needed to start at the beginning, more advanced studies could naturally follow. Paying a grand total of $1.31 I left the store as a possessor of great knowledge. The photo section in the center of the book alone confirmed that my purchase was wise, and I wasted no time diving into the text.

And things were going fine until I hit Chapter 4: “Was God an Astronaut?” Being a good little Southern Baptist boy meant that I was no stranger to Sunday School, and Training Union, and Wednesday night prayer meetings, and revivals in the spring and fall, and church camp for a week in the summer and so on. I was totally hip to some ancient mythological Egyptian or Mayan “god” scootin’ down to Earth on a space scooter, but the mere suggestion that GOD could be anything other than, well, GOD was deeply disturbing to me in a way I couldn’t articulate.

Fortunately, I was soon able to resolve this conflict by using the same method that mankind has used to resolve religious contradictions and conundrums throughout history – I ignored it. Skipping over the chapters on biblical matters, I found myself back in the realm of faraway lands and religious beliefs not endorsed by my mom and dad – more comfortable territory. And although I was firmly convinced that aliens may have tampered with the history of mankind, the disturbing feeling I came away with in regards to any biblical hanky panky by alien angels sapped my desire to follow-up with any of von Däniken’s other books. Instead, I refocused my attention to current alien intrusions.

"That's the way it was" in 1973!

And the media of the day was only too glad to oblige me. Even though the massive wave of UFO sightings in the fall of 1973 began to subside, magazine and book publishers were only cranking into gear. Weekly Reader, the small magazine distributed to grade-schoolers kept the weirdness torch burning bright, but my biggest discoveries of 1974 would be the wonderful little book, Living Monsters: True Stories of Real Monsters by Ann Marie Drozd and the Gold Key comic book UFO Flying Saucers.

Living Monsters was pure B.S, but it was wonderful B.S.  Basically it was a quick cash-in book for kids that drew from the seventies craze for UFO and mysterious beasts. Ms. Drozd took a few bare facts about bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, etc. and turned them into short "gotcha" stories.  While not great literature, it did introduce me to two concepts that I loved dearly and still do to this day.

Weekly Reader and school book club books, all purchased
"off budget" of course!

The first was the cover story – “Mothman.” While the story in the book had more in common with “hook killer” urban legends than with the bizarre incidents and sightings that took place in Point Pleasant, West Virginia in 1966 and ’67, the big concept of “Mothman” got under my skin and burrowed deep into my psyche. Just the idea of the big bugman became a favorite of mine and remains so to this day.

The other story that got me was “Momo: The Missouri Monster.”  Basically it was the story of bigfoot sightings in Missouri and Illinois, but this one connected with me because those were both border states to Kentucky, which meant the odds of Momo in showing up in Muhlenberg County were much better than those of his northwestern cousin making the cross-country trip. And even better was the tidbit that Momo sightings were tied in with UFOs. Because, as everyone knows, alien mysterious hairy primates trumps plain ole Earth-based mysterious hairy primates any day of the week!

On the funny book side, Gold Key had some of the most erratic and nonsensical publishing schedules of any comic book publisher, and the title UFO Flying Saucers had only squeaked out three issues between the years 1968 to 1972. But after the UFO wave of 1973, the title returned and managed to keep a pretty regular schedule through the rest of the decade.

UFO Flying Saucers #4

The first issue I encountered, in the fall of 1974, featured a not-too-accurate but still chilling portrayal of the Pascagoula, Mississippi abductions from October of 1973. While the earlier issues had mainly focused on visual sightings of UFOs, the sheer number of occupant encounters from the 1973 wave gave the comic book plenty of creepy material to draw from, and Gold Key’s stilted artwork and strangely detached style of writing made the stories even more effective.

Looking through the back issues now, pretty much every major UFO case from the 1940s to the 1970s was adapted into the pages of UFO Flying Saucers (with the exception of the Antonio Villas Boas case, but since that one is all about boinking an outer space babe, I can see why they let it slide…) The comic book also inspired me to start my own career as a “UFOlogist” as I compiled records of sightings – mostly drawn straight from the pages of the comic book and supplemented by a few tall tales told to me by schoolmates.

So here I was, amateur UFOlogist, monster hunter, true believer. As the seventies continued, so did my love for this wacky stuff.  Little did I know that I was on a collision course with a disappointment of cosmic dimensions, but that’s what we’ll be getting to in Part 3.

My Autumn of Aliens, or Why a Swiss Hotel Clerk Owes Me $1.25 (Plus Tax!) – Part 1

Before I launch into this entry, a disclaimer of sorts: This blog entry is about weird stuff.  I mean really weird stuff.  Not just funny books, or scary movies, nope, we’re talking about UFOs, bigfoot and other such foolishness (or foolishness perhaps not?)

Yes, I admit I love reading about this stuff. Do I believe in all of it? I didn’t say that. I said I love reading about it. If you mention that you’re into this stuff people tend to automatically think you’re (1) crazy, and (2) that you must believe all the popularized stories – extraterrestrial invasion, abductions, probes (ouch!), Roswell, etc. etc. While number one may be the case, number two certainly is not the case. It’s kinda like the reaction I used to get when I mentioned I enjoyed watching Professional Wrestling –  “It’s all fake!”  Well, yes, perhaps a good portion of it is, but what does that have to do with my enjoyment of it?

UFO writer, researcher, and yes, B.S. artist, Gray Barker used to say, “I believe in everything and I believe in nothing.”  And that very zen statement pretty much sums up my current feeling on the subject. But there was a time that I truly did believe, with no disclaimers…



1973 was the year that aliens invaded America.

Sure, the “modern UFO age” began in June 1947 with private pilot Kenneth Arnold’s sighting of several mysterious objects flying at supersonic speeds over Mt. Rainier blah, blah, blah ad infinitum. But when the little alien buggers really took over and let their presence be known was in 1973, culminating in a mass orgy of WTF-ness during the months of October and November of that wonderful, screwed-up year.

It was the year of the year that a Vice-President would resign over scandal; that the word “Watergate” would enter our language, lead to the resignation of a President, and forever and change the way Americans thought about politics; the year the U.S. pulled combat troops out of Vietnam; the year of the OPEC oil embargos and gas lines; and the year of Yom-Kippur War between Israel and Egypt which we now know brought the U.S. to very brink of using nuclear weapons in the Middle East.  In other words, it was a VERY scary time to be an adult in America – everything that had falling part since the sixties suddenly seemed to be shifting into overdrive.

And then, just to spice up all this worry and stress, came the aliens. America had experienced UFO waves before, most notably in 1947, 1952, and 1965, but we had never seen anything like the year of 1973. Concentrated mainly in the southern and eastern U.S., reports of mysterious lights, strange aircraft performing impossible maneuvers, and best of all, sightings of all manner and variety of creatures – ranging from dwarfs, to reptilians, to hairy giants were popping up like some type of cosmic whack-a-mole game. (This was the “good old days” of UFOology before those wimpy-ass, little “Greys” became the accepted norm for saucer pilots). It’s hard to imagine what it was like now, but during the peak period of August to November that year UFO reports were on the nightly TV news, both local and national, several times a week.  And these weren’t just “here’s a funny story” fillers, they were quite often lead stories.

None of those panty-waist Greys in Mississippi, no sir!



I suspect that for many adults it was just one more sign that America was going to hell on a sled, but to be a kid, especially a ten-year-old boy who was already hooked on science fiction and fantasy, it was an awesome experience. Here was some anxiety that I could relate too. Incomprehensible wars in the “Holy Land” or political scandals in Washington were not something I could dig, but the chance to see a flying saucer taking off from a nearby pasture, or to be kidnapped by eyeless, claw-wielding alien-robots – that was the stuff of exciting times and exquisite nightmares.

At this point I can’t remember for sure when I first got turned-on to the notion of UFOs. My first exposure to the concept may have come much earlier (and in fact I have some vague memories of seeing the TV show The Invaders during its original run of 1967-68), but the magic autumn of 1973 was when the obsession took hold. And the pop culture machine of the time was only too happy to encourage me and millions of others. 

With most of my allowance going to my growing comic book addiction, I had to be very selective about what paperback books I bought. At that time most paperbacks cost between 75 and 95 cents – the equivalent of three to five comic books!  But I had discovered a method of getting around this budgetary problem thanks to the Weekly Reader and Scholastic book clubs. Since these were paperback books that were ordered through school I had managed to hoodwink my mom and dad into believing they were all “educational” books that I needed for school.  Nevermind that the selections I was making were limited to all titles related to the paranormal, monsters, Peanuts comic strips, or science fiction and fantasy.

Although this plot covered anything that was available through the book clubs, there were a lot of really cool looking books that were beyond my means.  Fortunately, the bookmobile that would visit our school every few weeks (Dunmor Elementary was a very small school – library? Ha!) kept a good supply of the latest paperbacks on UFOs, ghosts, bigfoot, the Bermuda triangle, and so forth.  And they were easy to spot.



1970s Paranormal Books with "The Font"



In the early seventies books about the paranormal were all the rage, and somewhere along the way block letters with shadows became the “official font of foolishness.”  I think Bantam Books may have been the first publisher to use this typeface, but many others followed. Even the Christian publisher that was printing Hal Lindsey’s books of Biblical prophecy (y’all remember the U.S. being wiped out by nuclear attack in the 1980’s don’t you?) jumped on the block letters bandwagon. I learned pretty quick to look for that type of lettering on the spine of a paperback book and creepy goodness would follow.

 But even with the bookmobile subsidizing my connection to weirdness, there were some books that appeared to be so important, the knowledge contained within so earth-shattering, that I must own them!  That was the case when I discovered an ad in a UFO magazine for Chariots of the Gods? by former Swiss hotel clerk (and convicted embezzler) Erich Von Däniken. Electric batteries thousands of years old ?! Cave drawings of ancient astronauts in space suits?!?! Landing fields for alien spaceships in South American deserts?!?!?! Holy crap, this was a book that most be owned!  I would need to consult the knowledge contained within over and over again!

However, the cost of this important tome was a whole $1.25!  But of course that just spoke to the value of the knowledge. I must secure a copy! 

Little did I realize that I was heading for the first spiritual crisis of my young life and eventually a spectacular fall from faith that would take me twenty years to overcome.  But we’ll get to that in Part 2…

Mr. Sandman, bring me a slithering, gibbering thing…

I love really wacked out dreams. The weirder the better – even if they turn into nightmares that’s okay. If the subconscious is running wild it’s worth the cold sweats and twisted covers. And last night paid off in spades…

Maybe it was the apocalyptic winter storm that was marauding across the Midwest last night, maybe it was repeated listening to the Louvin Brothers’ album Satan is Real last week, or perhaps it was the viewing of a Roy Rogers movie right before bedtime (those singin’ cowboys will get you every time), but last night was a lulu.

All night long I was swinging between Keelian visions of Mothman and shadow people and Lovecraftian slithering, gibbering, mind-blasting horrors. What does it mean? I’ll leave the interpretations and symbolism to others. I like to think it just means I’ve got some weird stuff in my noggin’, and it’s a blast when it all comes spewing out at once.

He sees you when you're sleeping...

Here’s the one dream I remember the most vividly:

I was in a very large movie theatre. The lights were dim, but you could still see fairly well.  I thought I was alone at first, walking up one of the aisles. Suddenly, I hear a voice behind me.

“Cough drop,” it says.

I look back and see a man, hard to make out, but he kind of resembles the old comic book horror host, Uncle Creepy.  I say, “I don’t have one,” and start walking faster.

“Cough drop,” the voice says again.

“I said I don’t have one!” not looking back this time.

Suddenly the man comes speeding past me, too fast to make out.  As he passes me, he shouts out, “IT’S TOO LATE!”

Looking back I see a slimy, amorphous blob that is gaining on me fast, making obscene sucking and slurping sounds. I take off running and wake up in a panic.  After a minute to re-orientate myself to reality, I think, “Good one…”