The Blue People of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky: The Story of an Appalachian Malady
T. Peter Park
http://www.rootsweb .ancestry. com/~kyperry3/ Blue_Fugates_ Troublesome_ Creek.html
THE BLUE PEOPLE OF TROUBLESOME CREEK
The story of an Appalachian malady, an inquisitive doctor,
and a paradoxical cure.
by Cathy Trost
©Science 82, November, 1982
Six generations after a French orphan named Martin Fugate settled on the banks of eastern
Kentucky's Troublesome Creek with his redheaded American bride, his great-great- great great
grandson was born in a modern hospital not far from where the creek still runs.
The boy inherited his father's lankiness and his mother's slightly nasal way of speaking.
What he got from Martin Fugate was dark blue skin. "It was almost purple," his father recalls.
Doctors were so astonished by the color of Benjamin
"Benjy" Stacy's skin that they raced him by ambulance from the
maternity ward in the hospital near Hazard to a medical clinic in
Lexington. Two days of tests produced no explanation for skin the color
of a bruised plum.
A transfusion was being prepared when Benjamin's grandmother spoke up. "Have you ever heard
of the blue Fugates of Troublesome Creek?" she asked the doctors.
"My grandmother Luna on my dad's side was a blue Fugate. It was real bad in her," Alva
Stacy, the boy's father, explained. "The doctors finally came to the conclusion that Benjamin's color
was due to blood inherited from generations back."
Benjamin lost his blue tint within a few weeks, and now he is about as normal looking a
seven-year-old boy as you could hope to find. His lips and fingernails still turn a shade of
purple-bluewhen he gets cold or angry a quirk that so intrigued medical students after
Benjamin's birth that they would crowd around the baby and try to make him cry. "Benjamin
was a pretty big item in the hospital," his mother says with a grin.
Dark blue lips and fingernails are the only traces of Martin Fugate's legacy left in the boy;
that, and the recessive gene that has shaded many of the Fugates and their kin blue for the past
162 years.
They're known simply as the "blue people" in the hills and hollows around Troublesome and
Ball Creeks. Most lived to their 80s and 90s without serious illness associated with the skin
discoloration. For some, though, there was a pain not seen in lab tests. That was the pain of being
blue in a world that is mostly shades of white to black.
There was always speculation in the hollows about what made the blue people blue: heart
disease, a lung disorder, the possibility proposed by one old-timer that "their blood is just a little
closer to their skin." But no one knew for sure, and doctors rarely paid visits to the remote
creekside settlements where most of the "blue Fugates " lived until well into the 1950s. By the
time a young hematologist from the University of Kentucky came down to Troublesome Creek in
the 1960s to cure the blue people, Martin Fugate's descendants had multiplied their recessive
genes all over the Cumberland Plateau.
Madison Cawein began hearing rumors about the blue people when he went to work at the
University of Kentucky's Lexington medical clinic in 1960. "I'm a hematologist, so something like
that perks up my ears," Cawein says, sipping on whiskey sours and letting his mind slip back to
the summer he spent "tromping around the hills looking for blue people."
Cawein is no stranger to eccentricities of the body. He helped isolate an antidote for cholera,
and he did some of the early work on L-dopa, the drug for Parkinson's disease. But his first love,
which he developed as an Army medical technician in World War II, was hematology. "Blood
cells always looked so beautiful to me," he says.
Cawein would drive back and forth between Lexington and Hazard an eight-hour ordeal
before the tollway was built and scour the hills looking for the blue people he'd heard rumors
about. The American Heart Association had a clinic in Hazard, and it was there that Cawein met
"a great big nurse" who offered to help.
Her name was Ruth Pendergrass, and she had been trying to stir up medical interest in the
blue people ever since a dark blue woman walked into the county health department one bitterly
cold afternoon and asked for a blood test.
"She had been out in the cold and she was just blue!" recalls Pendergrass, who is now 69 and
retired from nursing. "Her face and her fingernails were almost indigo blue. It like to scared me to
death! She looked like she was having a heart attack. I just knew that patient was going to die
right there in the health department, but she wasn't a'tall alarmed. She told me that her family was
the blue Combses who lived up on Ball Creek. She was a sister to one of the Fugate women."
About this same time, another of the blue Combses, named Luke, had taken his sick wife up to the
clinic at Lexington. One look at Luke was enough to "get those doctors down here in a hurry,"
says Pendergrass, who joined Cawein to look for more blue people.
Trudging up and down the hollows, fending off "the two mean dogs that everyone had in their
front yard," the doctor and the nurse would spot someone at the top of a hill who looked blue and
take off in wild pursuit. By the time they'd get to the top, the person would be gone. Finally, one
day when the frustrated doctor was idling inside the Hazard clinic, Patrick and Rachel Ritchie
walked in.
"They were bluer'n hell," Cawein says. "Well, as you can imagine, I really examined them.
After concluding that there was no evidence of heart disease, I said 'Aha!' I started asking them
questions: 'Do you have any relatives who are blue?' then I sat down and we began to chart the
family."
Cawein remembers the pain that showed on the Ritchie brother's and sister's faces. "They
were really embarrassed about being blue," he said. "Patrick was all hunched down in the hall.
Rachel was leaning against the wall. They wouldn't come into the waiting room. You could tell
how much it bothered them to be blue."
After ruling out heart and lung diseases, the doctor suspected methemoglobinemia, a rare
hereditary blood disorder that results from excess levels of methemoglobin in the blood.
Methemoglobin which is blue, is a nonfunctional form of the red hemoglobin that carries oxygen.
It is the color of oxygen-depleted blood seen in the blue veins just below the skin.
If the blue people did have methemoglobinemia, the next step was to find out the cause. It can
be brought on by several things: abnormal hemoglobin formation, an enzyme deficiency, and
taking too much of certain drugs, including vitamin K, which is essential for blood clotting and is
abundant in pork liver and vegetable oil.
Cawein drew "lots of blood" from the Ritchies and hurried back to his lab. He tested first for
abnormal hemoglobin, but the results were negative.
Stumped, the doctor turned to the medical literature for a clue. He found references to
methemoglobinemia dating to the turn of the century, but it wasn't until he came across E. M.
Scott's 1960 report in the Journal of Clinical Investigation (vol. 39, 1960) that the answer
began to emerge.
Scott was a Public Health Service doctor at the Arctic Health Research Center in Anchorage
who had discovered hereditary methemoglobinemia among Alaskan Eskimos and Indians. It was
caused, Scott speculated, by an absence of the enzyme diaphorase from their red blood cells. In
normal people hemoglobin is converted to methemoglobin at a very slow rate. If this conversion
continued, all the body's hemoglobin would eventually be rendered useless. Normally diaphorase
converts methemoglobin back to hemoglobin. Scott also concluded that the condition was
inherited as a simple recessive trait. In other words, to get the disorder, a person would have to
inherit two genes for it, one from each parent. Somebody with only one gene would not have the
condition but could pass the gene to a child.
Scott's Alaskans seemed to match Cawein's blue people. If the condition were inherited as a
recessive trait, it would appear most often in an inbred line.
Cawein needed fresh blood to do an enzyme assay. He had to drive eight hours back to
Hazard to search out the Ritchies, who lived in a tapped-out mining town called Hardburly. They
took the doctor to see their uncle, who was blue, too. While in the hills, Cawein drove over to see
Zach (Big Man) Fugate, the 76-year-old patriarch of the clan on Troublesome Creek. His car gave
out on the dirt road to Zach's house, and the doctor had to borrow a Jeep from a filling station.
Zach took the doctor even farther up Copperhead Hollow to see his Aunt Bessie Fugate, who
was blue. Bessie had an iron pot of clothes boiling in her front yard, but she graciously allowed
the doctor to draw some of her blood.
"So I brought back the new blood and set up my enzyme assay," Cawein continued. "And by
God, they didn't have the enzyme diaphorase. I looked at other enzymes and nothing was wrong
with them. So I knew we had the defect defined.''
Just like the Alaskans, their blood had accumulated so much of the blue molecule that it over-
whelmed the red of normal hcmoglobin that shows through as pink in the skin of most
Caucasians.
Once he had the enzyme deficiency isolated, methyleneblue sprang to Cawein's mind as the
"perfectly obvious" antidote. Some of the blue people thought the doctor was slightly addled for
suggesting that a blue dye could turn them pink. But Cawein knew from earlier studies that the
body has an alternative method of converting methemoglobin back to normal. Activating it
requires adding to the blood a substance that acts as an "electron donor." Many substances do
this, but Cawein chose methylene blue because it had been used successfully and safely in other
cases and because it acts quickly.
Cawein packed his black bag and rounded up Nurse Pendergrass for the big event. They went
over to Patrick and Rachel Ritchie's house and injected each of them with 100 milligrams of
methylene blue.
''Within a few minutes. the blue color was gone from their skin," the doctor said. "For the first
time in their lives, they were pink. They were delighted."
"They changed colors!" remembered Pendergrass. "It was really something exciting to see."
The doctor gave each blue family a supply of methylene blue tablets to take as a daily pill. The
drug's effects are temporary, as methylene blue is normally excreted in the urine. One day, one of
the older mountain men cornered the doctor. "I can see that old blue running out of my skin," he
confided.
Before Cawein ended his study of the blue people, he returned to the mountains to patch
together the long and twisted journey of Martin Fugate's recessive gene. From a history of Perry
County and some Fugate family Bibles listing ancestors, Cawein has constructed
a fairly complete story.
Martin Fugate was a French orphan who emigrated to Kentucky in 1820 to claim a land grant
on the wilderness banks of Troublesome Creek. No mention of his skin color is made in the early
histories of the area, but family lore has it that Martin himself was blue.
The odds against it were incalculable, but Martin Fugate managed to find and marry a woman
who carried the same recessive gene. Elizabeth Smith, apparently, was as pale-skinned as the
mountain laurel that blooms every spring around the creek hollows.
Martin and Elizabeth set up housekeeping on the banks of Troublesome and began a family.
Of their seven children, four were reported to be blue.
The clan kept multiplying. Fugates married other Fugates. Sometimes they married first cousins.
And they married the people who lived closest to them, the Combses, Smiths, Ritchies, and
Stacys. All lived in isolation from the world, bunched in log cabins up and down the hollows, and
so it was only natural that a boy married the girl next door, even if she had the same last name.
"When they settled this country back then, there was no roads. It was hard to get out, so they
intermarried, " says Dennis Stacy, a 51-year-old coal miner and amateur genealogist who has filled
a loose-leaf notebook with the laboriously traced blood lines of several local families.
Stacy counts Fugate blood in his own veins. "If you'll notice," he observes, tracing lines on his
family's chart, which lists his mother's and his father's great grandfather as Henley Fugate, "I'm kin
to myself."
The railroad didn't come through eastern Kentucky until the coal mines were developed
around 1912, and it took another 30 or 40 years to lay down roads along the local creeks.
Martin and Elizabeth Fugate's blue children multiplied in this natural isolation tank. The
marriage of one of their blue boys, Zachariah, to his mother's sister triggered the line of
succession that would result in the birth, more than 100 years later, of Benjamin Stacy.
When Benjamin was born with purple skin, his relatives told the perplexed doctors about his
great grandmother Luna Fugate. One relative describes her as "blue all over," and another calls
Luna "the bluest woman I ever saw."
Luna's father, Levy Fugate, was one of Zachariah Fugate's sons. Levy married a Ritchie girl
and bought 200 acres of rolling land along Ball Creek. The couple had eight children, including
Luna.
A fellow by the name of John E. Stacy spotted Luna at Sunday services of the Old Regular
Baptist Church back before the century turned. Stacy courted her, married her, and moved over
from Troublesome Creek to make a living in timber on her daddy's land.
Luna has been dead nearly 20 years now, but her widower survives. John Stacy still lives on
Lick Branch of Ball Creek. His two room log cabin sits in the middle of Laurel Fork Hollow.
Luna is buried at the top of the hollow. Stacy's son has built a modern house next door, but the
old logger won't hear of leaving the cabin he built with timber he personally cut and hewed for
Luna and their 13 children.
Stacy recalls that his father-inlaw, Levy Fugate, was "part of the family that showed blue. All
them old fellers way back then was blue. One of 'em I remember seeing him when I was just a
boy "Blue Anze", they called him. Most of them old people went by that name the blue Fugates.
It run in that generation who lived up and down Ball [Creek]."
"They looked like anybody else, 'cept they had the blue color," Stacy says, sitting in a chair in
his plaid flannel shirt and suspenders, next to a cardboard box where a small black piglet, kept as a
pet, is squealing for his bottle. "I couldn't tell you what caused it."
The only thing Stacy can't or won't remember is that his wife Luna was blue. When asked
ahout it, he shakes his head and stares steadfastly ahead. It would be hard to doubt this gracious
man except that you can't find another person who knew Luna who doesn't remember her as being
blue.
"The bluest Fugates I ever saw was Luna and her kin," says Carrie Lee Kilburn, a nurse who
works at the rural medical center called Homeplace Clinic. "Luna was bluish all over. Her lips
were as dark as a bruise. She was as blue a woman as I ever saw."
Luna Stacy possessed the good health common to the blue people, bearing at least 13 children
before she died at 84. The clinic doctors only saw her a few times in her life and never for
anything serious.
As coal mining and the railroads brought progress to Kentucky, the blue Fugates started
moving out of their communities and marrying other people. The strain of inherited blue began to
disappear as the recessive gene spread to families where it was unlikely to be paired with a similar
gene.
Bewnjamin Stacy is one of the last of the blue Fugates. With Fugate blood on both his mother's and
his father's side, the boy could have received genes for the enzyme deficiency from either
direction. Because the boy was intensely blue at birth but then recovered his normal skin tones,
Benjamin is assumed to have inherlted only one gene for the condition. Such people tend to be very
blue only at birth, probably because newborns normally have smaller amounts of diaphorase. The
enzyme eventually builds to normal levels in most children and to almost normal levels in those
like Benjamin, who carry one gene.
Hilda Stacy (nee Godsey) is fiercely protective of
her son. She gets upset at all the talk of inbreeding among the
Fugates. One of the supermarket tabloids once sent a reporter to find
out about the
blue people, and she was distressed with his preoccupation with
intermarriages.
She and her husband Alva have a strong sense of family. They sing in the Stacy Family
Gospel Band and have provided their children with a beautiful home and a menagerie of pets,
including horses.
"Everyone around here knows about the blue Fugates," says Hilda Stacy who, at 26, looks
more like a sister than a mother to her children. "It's common. It's nothing.''
Cawein and his colleagues published their research on hereditary diaphorase deficiency in the Archives of Internal Medicine (April, 1964) in 1964. He hasn't studied the condition for
years. Even so, Cawein still gets calls for advice. One came from a blue Flugate who'd joined the
Army and been sent to Panama, where his son was born bright blue. Cawein advised giving the
child methylene blue and not worrying about it.
Note: In this instance the reason for cyanosis was not methemoglobinemia but
Rh incompatibility. This information supplied by John Graves whose uncle was the father of
the child.
The doctor was recently approached by the producers of the television show "That's
Incredible." They wanted to parade the blue people across the screen in their weekly display of
human oddities. Cawein would have no part of it, and he related with glee the news that a film
crew sent to Kentucky from Hollywood fled the "two mean dogs in every front yard" without any
film. Cawein cheers their bad luck not out of malice but out of a deep respect for the blue people
of Troublesome Creek.
"They were poor people," concurs Nurse Pendergrass, "but they were good."
References
1. Cawein, Madison, et. al. "Hereditary diaphorase deficiency and methemoglobinemia" . Archives of Internal Medicine, April, 1964.
2. Scott, E.M. "The relation of diaphorase of human erythrocytes to inheritance of
methemolglobinemia" , Journal of Clinical Investigation, 39, 1960.
3. Cawein, Madison and E.J. Lappat, "Hereditary Methemoglobinemia" in Hemoglobin, Its
Precursors and Metabolites, ed. by F. William Sunderman, J.B. Lippincott Co., Philadelphia
PA, 1964.
T. Peter Park
42 years ago yesterday, on Saturday, July 15, 1967, I was a graduate student in European History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, working on my doctoral dissertation. One of my close friends at U.Va. was a graduate English major named Alex Theroux. He is now a highly regarded novelist, author of the critically acclaimed novels Darconville's Cat, An Adultery. and Laura Warholic, or the Sexual Intellectual. That night, Alex and I went to a local pub, the "Gaslight," along with a young Swedish parapsychologist, Nils Jacobson, whom we'd just met earlier that day. Nils Jacobson, then a medical student specializing in psychiatry, was doing his psychiatry internship at the U.Va. Hospital that summer. He had come from Sweden to the U.Va. Hospital specifically to study and intern under its noted reincarnation researcher, Ian Stevenson of the hospital's Neurology and Psychiatry Department. Nils and I had both been drawn to Alex's room that afternoon by some Irish folk music records he was playing on his record player on the lawn just outside his campus room.
Alex Theroux, Nils Jacobson, and I had a few beers and some dinner that night at the Gaslight. Jacobson had to leave, but we soon ran into some of Alex's friends who invited us over to their own apartment for an "after-party." Shortly before midnight, Alex and I left the Gaslight to drive over to his friend's apartment. As we were walking across the Gaslight parking lot to Alex's car, I happened to glance at the sky over downtown Charlottesville, to the Southeast.
To my astonishment, I saw a huge bright three-pronged purplish-pink glow in the night sky, covering about 20 or 30 degrees of arc. It was shaped like a Mercedes-Benz logo without the circular rim, or like a peace symbol with the middle leg missing. A jet fighter was flying in its direction. I pointed it out to Alex, who exclaimed, "My God, a UFO!" We didn't see any more, however, as we then got into Alex's car to drive to his friends' place. Later, however, we both drew identical drawings of it. For the next week or so, I scanned the Charlottesville, Richmond, and Norfolk (major Virginia cities) papers every day for mentions of the UFO and the plane "buzzing" it, but found nothing. It made me wonder if there might have been an Air Force cover-up of the incident!
For whatever the coincidence is worth, I saw my 1967 Charlottesville UFO at a time when I was starting to fall madly, hopelessly in love with a very bright and likable but badly disturbed schizophrenic girl, Barbara K____. Barbara was an ardent "peacenik," and also very self-conscioously Jewish. These passionate identifications, I've often thought, would be quite aptly symbolized together by a paranormal appearance recalling both a peace symbol and the logo of her people's arch-enemy Adolf Hitler's car, the Mercedes-Benz! And, on top of that, Alex and I had gone to the Gaslight that night with the Swedish parapsychologist Nils Jacobson, whom we had both met earlier that day!
Somehow, I've always thought, my feelings for Barbara K_______, Barbara's own preoccupations, and the presence with us that night of a parapsychologist all contributed that night to generating a psychic "Gestalt" manifesting the appearance of that three-pronged celestial glow recalling both a peace symbol and a Mercedes-Benz logo! Maybe there was no nuts-and-bolts starship from Zeta Reticuli or Tau Ceti over Charlottesville on the night of July 15, 1967--but there was a psychodynamic relationship involving myself, Barbara K_____, Alex Theroux, and Nils Jacobson! If nothing else, seeing a UFO at the time I was falling madly in love was a remarkable Jungian acausal synchronous coincidence!
T. Peter Park
In 1893, two years before his classic 1895 novelette The
Time Machine, H.G. Wells' speculated on future human evolution in
an article on "The Man of the Year Million," portraying far-future
humans quite different from the decadent childlike Eloi and brutish
underground Morlocks of The Time Machine, or the once-human
hopping rabbit-like herbivores of "The Grey Man." I find Wells'
far-future humans remarkably reminiscent of the "Grays" described by
modern alien abductees. However, Robert Schneck (who recently
discovered the cartoon) and Loren Coleman have rather compared an 1893
New York newspaper cartoon from an article satirically spoofing Wells'
"Man of the Year Million" to eyewitness's drawings of the "Dover Demon"
seen by four teen-agers in Dover MA in April 1977 and investigated by
Coleman. Here is an on-line summary of Wells' 1893 article:
In 1893, H. G. Wells wrote an obscure little article called "The Man of
the Year Million", in which he speculated about what the human race of
the year 1,000,000 AD would look like.
It's not a very pretty picture. According to Wells, the development of man's technology has meant that he relies less and less on his body and more and more on his brain. Wells argued that just as the invention of the knife and fork has made the human jaw redundant when it comes to tearing and ripping food apart, eventually technology will produce machines that will take care of all of the chewing and digesting of food so that the human digestive system will be literally as simple as that of an intestinal parasite that soaks up its food by sitting in a bath of nutrients.
All the modern conveniences, motorised transportation and the like will mean that legs, torsos and practically all muscles will become useless and will wither away until our descendents become little more than huge brains that walk about (when they do walk) on their hands.
And it doesn't stop there. Working on the principle that what can't be exploited is a competitor, Wells asserted that once man figures our how to recreate photosynthesis in the laboratory, then all plants and animals and even the microbes on the Earth will become pointless or a threat and will be eradicated in their turn until man is the only creature left on a dead world.
It isn't a very cosy place, the world of 1,000,000 AD. In keeping with the best science of the day, Wells foresaw a planet that is cooling slowly and relentlessly until the human race is forced to retreat underground after the receding warmth of the Earth's core. While the surface is a lifeless expanse of ice, the cities of our descendants live in reveal,
(A) dome of pure crystal across the translucent surface of which flushes of the most glorious and pure prismatic colours pass and fade and change. In the centre of this transparent chameleon-tinted dome is a circular basin filled with some clear, mobile amber liquid, and in this plunge and float strange beings. Are they birds?
They are the descendants of man-- at dinner. Watch them as they hop on their hands-- a method of progression advocated by Björnsen-- about the pure white marble floor. Great hands they have, enormous brains, soft, liquid, soulful eyes. Their whole muscular system, their legs, their abdomens, are shriveled to nothing, a dangling degraded pendant to their minds.
If this is a condition that can only be bought at the price of giving up all pork chops and walks in the woods, I'll hold on to the chops and the trees, thank you.
T. Peter Park
Whether he explicitly realized it or not, H.G. Wells in the 1890's was a participant in the fin de siècle European discourse of "degeneration," both in his descriptions of future all-around general human evolutionary degeneration in his 1895 tales The Time Machine and "The Grey Man," and in his seemingly more optimistic 1893 prophecy of big-brained but nevertheless physically reduced future humans in "The Man of the Year Million." The themes of "degeneracy" and "decadence" were quite fashionable in the 1890's and early 1900's, as we can still recall with the term "Decadents" for so many poets and novelists of that era. In 1892, early in the "Mauve Decade," the journalist, physician, culture critic, and Zionist Max Nordau (1849-1923) helped crystallize fin de siècle European moral and and cultural anxieties with his best-selling book Die Entartung (Degeneration), Nordau's Degeneration was a moralistic attack on so-called degenerate art and literature as well as a polemic against the effects of many of the rising social phenomena of the period, such as rapid urbanization and industrialization, and what many writers of the time saw as their effects on the human organism and nervous system. As a physician, he interpreted it medically as a combination of two well-defined disease conditions then quite popular among physicians, degeneration and hysteria, of which the minor stages were designated as neurasthenia. Nordau saw these as manifested in late 19th century Europe in "degenerate," "decadent," Symbolist, and Naturalist art and literature, in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and in such social or political movements as anarchism, feminism, and anti-Semtism. His book described numerous case studies of artists, writers and thinkers (e.g., Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche), all cited to bolster Nordau's basic premise that society and human beings themselves were degenerating, and that this degeneration was both reflected in and influenced by art and literature. Nordau did not himself coin the expression or the idea of "Entartung." according to "Wikipedia." It had been steadily growing in use in German-speaking countries during the 19th century. Nordau's book reflected the views on a degenerating society held by many Europeans at the time, especially in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the early 20th century, the idea that society was degenerating, and that this degeneration was influenced by art, "led to somewhat hysterical backlashes" according to "Wikpedia," as evidenced for instance by the conviction of Austrian artist Egon Schiele for "distributing pornography to minors". This cultural construct, often used to describe anything which deviated in any way from conventional norms, was legitimized in the late 19th century by the pseudo-scientific branch of medicine called "psycho-physiognomy," according to "Wikipedia," and "degeneration" was widely accepted as a serious medical term. Not until Sigmund Freud, and the rise of a new age of psychoanalysis, was this idea seriously questioned. Freud remarked in his 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that "It may well be asked whether an attribution of 'degeneracy' is of any value or adds anything to our knowledge."
T. Peter Park
Max Nordau's views, it has been noted, were in many ways more like those of an 18th than a 19th century thinker: a belief in Reason, Progress, and traditional, classical rules governing art and literature. The irrationalism and amorality of philosophers such as Nietzsche and the flagrant anti-Semitism of Wagner (to say nothing of German, Austrian, and French yellow journalists and gutter demagogues) struck Nordau as proof that society was in danger of returning to a pre-Enlightenment.era of darkness and irrationality (as the rise of Hitler and Mussolini immediately after Nordau's own death amply proved correct!)
T. Peter Park
From H.P.
Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu," 1926, quoting a Louisiana Bayou
Cthulhu cultist interrogated by Inspector Legrasse:
<<Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.>>
Sounds like Hitler and Mussolini, written by HPL in 1926--and also of Charles Manson! What would have Max Nordau thought?
MorganScorpion
Regarding "The Man of the Year Million". Did H G Wells subscribe to the Lamarckian theory of evolution? Namely the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Because such a scenario would be impossible according to Darwin's theory of evolution.
regards
Morgan
T. Peter Park
H.G, Wells studied biology under "Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley from 1884 to 1887, so it's rather doubtful that he would have been a Lamarckian in the 1890's when he wrote "The Man of the Year Million" and The Time Machine. In 1929-1930, he co-authored The Science of Life, with an extensive section on evolution, with biologist Julian Huxley and his son G.P. Wells. Julian Huxley later became a harsh critic of the Lamarckian Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko, promoted in the 1930's and 1940's by Stalin, who persecuted anri-Lamarckians like Vavilov.
Cheers,
T. Peter
MorganScorpion
T. Peter Park
MDS wrote:
If I could tap into the list member's collective wisdom and esoteric
knowledge, I am looking for a word to describe the study of strange
beliefs. For example: Nazi UFO bases in Antarctica, Ancient Astronauts,
Hollow Earth, The Rapture, Elvis/Princes Di/Michael Jackson are not
dead, 9/11 was an Illuminati conspiracy, Bigfoot is responsible for crop
circles, Cricket was brought to England by extraterrestrials, and so on.
We've all heard of these (ok, I made up the one about Bigfoot). Some,
such as The Rapture, do have their own name (eschatology)
Others? Is there a general term for an interest in, or the
study of
strange beliefs?
And, if there isn't, what would be a good candidate term?
Perhaps:
Xenodoxasiology? (It rolls off the tongue with a little
practice.)
The Xenodoxasiologist is interested in the ideas, their history,
sustaining groups, perhaps motivation of supporters. But, not
really
concerned about disproving, debunking, critiquing. Folklorist
may
encompass this.
Dr. JG replied:
I sympathise. I have been fascinated with what I sometimes
think of
as a
kind of parallel academy. There is alternative history, alternative
science, alternative politics, and so on and so on. And they have a
kind
of parallel academic attitude: a fascination with enormous numbers
of
footnotes, huge bibliographies and so on. (Though strangely the
fascination is with the appearance rather than with the reality,
almost
like children playing at doctors. There is no recognition of the
importance of respect for sources, critical handling of them, and so
on.)
The word I use informally for all this is para-knowledge. It's like
knowledge, it runs alongside knowledge, it parallels knowledge in
many
of its formal aspects. But it's not knowledge...
Terry W. Colvin
Ladphrao (Bangkok), Thailand
Pran Buri (Hua Hin), Thailand
http://terrycolvin.freewebsites.com/
[Terry's Fortean & "Work" itty-bitty site]
T. Peter Park
T. Peter Park
<http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1204196/Dr-Who-like-monster-stuns-sunbathers-washes-Welsh-beach.html >
Pictured: The revolting 'Dr Who' sea monster that terrified tourists
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:34 AM on 05th August 2009
A mysterious 'alien like' creature horrified holidaymakers after it
washed up on a beach on the Gower Peninsula in Wales.
The writhing mass of tentacles, which measured at least 6ft from end
to end, was described by a zoology expert today as 'like something out
of Doctor Who'.
Hundreds of people flocked to Oxwich Beach near Swansea to catch a
glimpse of the monster.
The mysterious 'alien like' creature measured 3ft long
But fears of a UFO invasion were put to rest as scientists revealed it
was a seething mass of goose barnacles that was swept up from the
depths of the ocean by bad weather.The barnacles - long writhing
stalks or pendulates, tipped with shells - are normally found deep
below the waves, but were washed up clinging to a log.
Professor Paul Brain, of Swansea University, said: 'One child screamed
out that it resembled something from Dr Who and I would have to agree
with her - it made very bizarre viewing.
The mass of writhing tentacles was washed up on Gower Beach
'In fact they were probably the biggest specimens of free-floating
goose barnacles I've seen.
'The log is about two metres long and as thick as a telegraph pole so
I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of thousand barnacles
on there.'
Holidaymaker Rebecca Porter said the log was like 'a large living sea
monster'.
She said: 'The stalk on which the puffin-shaped head sat on was soft
and rubbery and moved like a snake.
'They appeared to be attached to a piece of driftwood but it could
hardly be seen as it was densely covered with these huge tentacles
that opened and closed, thrusting out fronds like uncurling ferns.'
The mass of writhing goose tentacles are reminiscent of the 'Ood' from
Doctor Who
The tentacled creature relies on water motion for feeding - leading to
it frequently being washed up on shore.
The barnacle extends its fan-like array of limbs to catch plankton,
and attaches itself to surfaces by its stalk - leaving it unable to
move from the point it is fixed.
There was also a second barnacle-covered log, measuring around 1ft in
length, which washed up alongside the bigger one.
Professor Brain said: 'They tend to live in the oceans and can attach
themselves to the bottom of ships.
'It's normally found in quite deep water but occasionally they can be
found on debris that has become dislodged from the sea bed and has
washed up on the shore.
'I would think the bad weather caused by the jet stream in the past
month has probably dislodged these barnacle infested logs from their
resting places, giving people a rare look at them for free on the
beach.'
Professor Brain added: 'They're actually a delicacy in Spain although
I haven't seen any Spanish people trying to chisel them off.
'Back in the old days, people thought barnacle geese hatched from
them. A Welsh monk in the 12th century, Giraldus Cambrensis, even
claimed to have seen geese hatching from them.'
In Portugal and Spain, the barnacles are a widely consumed and
expensive delicacy known as percebes. They have a briny taste and are
served steaming hot with their triangular shells still attached.
T. Peter Park
http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/dysonFAQ.html
The Dyson sphere (or Dyson shell) was originally proposed in 1959 by
the astronomer Freeman Dyson in "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources
of Infrared Radiation" in Science as a way for an advanced
civilisation
to utilise all of the energy radiated by their sun. It is an artificial
sphere the size of an planetary orbit. The sphere would consist of a
shell of solar collectors or habitats around the star, so that all (or
at least a significant amount) energy will hit a receiving surface
where it can be used. This would create a huge living space and gather
enormous amounts of energy.
A Dyson sphere in the solar system, with a radius of one AU would have
a surface area of at least 2.72e17 km^2, around 600 million times the
surface area of the Earth. The sun has a energy output of around 4e26
W, of which most would be available to do useful work.
The original proposal simply assumed there would be enough solar
collectors around the star to absorb the starlight, not that they would
form a continuous shell. Rather, the shell would consist of
independently orbiting structures, around a million kilometres thick
and containing more than 1e5 objects. But various science fiction
authors seem to have misinterpreted the concept to mean a solid shell
enclosing the star, usually having an inhabitable surface on the
inside, and this idea was so compelling that it has been the main use
of the term in science fiction.
A third kind of shell would be very thin and non-rotating, held up by
the radiation pressure of the sun. It would consist of statites (see
below, in the section about stability). Essentially it is a "dyson
bubble", where reflecting sails reflect light onto collectors for use
in external habitats. Its mass would be very smalll, on the order of a
small moon or large asteroid.
In the following I will call solid Dyson spheres Type II or dyson
shells and independently orbiting spheres Type I.
Freeman Dyson was born in 1923 in Crowthorne, Berkshire, England. Dyson
received his bachelor of arts degree in mathematics from the University
of Cambridge in 1945. He completed fellowships at Cambridge's Trinity
College from 1946 to 1947, at Cornell University in 1947 and at the
University of Birmingham from 1949 to 1951. He returned to Cornell to
become a professor of physics in 1951, leaving in 1953 to join the
Institute for Advanced Study, where he is now professor emeritus.
Dyson is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the U.S. National
Academy of Sciences, a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of
Sciences, a honorary fellow of Trinity College and an Associé Etranger
de l'Académie des Sciences. He is president of the the SSI (Space
Studies Institute).
Among his numerous awards and honors, Dyson received the Oersted Medal
from the American Association of Physics Teachers, the Phi Beta Kappa
Award in Science for Infinite in All Directions, the National Books
Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, the 1981 Wolf Prize in physics,
the Lewis Thomas Prize and many other honors.
Was Dyson First? No, he admitted himself that his original inspiration
came from The Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon, written in 1937.
"As the aeons advanced, hundreds of thousands of worldlets were
constructed, all of this type, but gradually increasing in size and
complexity. Many a star without natural planets came to be surrounded
by concentric rings of artificial worlds. In some cases the inner rings
contained scores, the outer rings thousands of globes adapted to life
at some particular distance from the sun. Great diversity, both
physical and mental, would distinguish worlds even of the same ring."
Stapledon, in turn, may have got the idea from J. D. Bernal, who also
influenced Dyson directly. Bernal describes in The World, the
Flesh,
and the Devil spherical space colonies:
"Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the
lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new
molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of
gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any
magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made
would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of
the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller
asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial
stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will
probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred yards or so
diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed
material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell
could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable
substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its
thickness. The globe would fulfil all the functions by which our earth
manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has,
perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life
inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through
its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an
enormously complicated single-celled plant. "
"A star is essentially an immense reservoir of energy which is being
dissipated as rapidly as its bulk will allow. It may be that, in the
future, man will have no use for energy and be indifferent to stars
except as spectacles, but if (and this seems more probable) energy is
still needed, the stars cannot be allowed to continue to in their old
way, but will be turned into efficient heat engines. The second law of
thermodynamics, as Jeans delights in pointing out to us, will
ultimately bring this universe to an inglorious close, may perhaps
always remain the final factor. But by intelligent organization the
life of the universe could probably be prolonged to many millions of
millions of times what it would be without organization. Besides, we
are still too close to the birth of the universe to be certain about
its death. "
According to Stefan E. Jones Raymond Z. Gallun, an American SF author
may have come up with a similar concept independently.
As described above, the amount of collected energy would be immense,
and the living space simply unimaginable. Dyson pointed out that so far
the energy usage of mankind has increased exponentially for at least a
couple of thousand years, and if this continues we will soon consume
more energy than the Earth receives from the sun, so the natural step
is to build artificial habitats around the sun so that all energy can
be used. The same goes for population in the long run (it should be
noted that this is not a solution, just a logical result of growth). It
is also possible that the Dyson sphere simply stores the energy for
future use, for example in the form of antimatter.
Even if cheap and efficient fusion power can be developed, eventually
the waste heat has to be radiated away by a Dyson sphere-like cooling
system.
Other proposed uses have been for security (although it is hard to hide
the infrared emissions; energy could be radiated away in certain
directions, but thermodynamics places some limits on it), or just for
the fun of it (if you have a sufficiently advanced technology
megaengineering could become a hobby activity; after all, ordinary
people today perform engineering or crafting feats far beyond the
imagination of previous eras).
A Type I Dyson sphere would probably not cover the star perfectly, so
occasional glimpses of its surface would be seen as the habitats
orbited. A type II Dyson sphere would be totally opaque (unless it had
openings). The spheres would hence be invisible from a distance, just a
black disk on the sky. But they would shine powerfully in the infrared,
as the waste heat from the internal processes radiate away. The
apparent temperature would be
T = (E / (4 pi r^2 eta sigma))^1/4
where E is the energy output of the sun, r the radius of the sphere,
eta the emissivity and sigma the constant of Stefan-Boltzman' s law.
This would correspond to an infrared wavelength of lambda = 2.8978e-3 /
T m (assuming a blackbody sphere) which for reasonable sizes lies in
the infrared. Dyson predicted the peak of the radiation at ten
micrometers.
The curvature of the "ground" would be even less than on Earth, so to
an observer close to it it would look perfectly flat. In a solid dyson
sphere with atmosphere, the atmosphere would limit the range of sight
due to its opacity, and the horizon would be slightly misty.
The sky would be filled with the surface of the sphere, giving the
impression of a huge bowl over a flat earth, covered with clouds,
continents and oceans although for a real Dyson shell these would have
to be immense to be noticeable. The angular size of an object at a
distance d and diameter l is 2arctan(l/2d) . For an object of diameter
10,000 km (like the Earth) at a distance of a 100 million km (around
120 degrees away from the observer on the shell), the angular size
would be around 10^-4 rad or 0.005 degrees, roughly the size of a pea
100 meters away.
It should be noted (as Richard Treitel has pointed out) that even a
very dark surface will shine intensely, making the sky much brighter
than on Earth. The albedo of Earth is around 0.37, so an interior with
an earthlike environment would have a sky where each patch reflects a
noticeable fraction of the sunlight.
In a type I Dyson sphere roughly the same things would be seen: a plane
wall of orbital habitats, solar collectors and whatnot stretching away
into what looks like infinity (although here the curvature may become
noticeable for observant viewers) and a hemispherical bowl covering the
rest of the sky, centered around the sun. Solar collectors would have a
very low albedo, but it is still likely that the interior will be very
bright.
T. Peter Park
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/20/scholars-rescue-image-john-dee Scholars seek to rescue image of John Dee, last royal wizard He was accused of sorcery, but many claim John Dee was one of the most original thinkers of his day * Maev Kennedy * guardian.co.uk, Sunday 20 September 2009 14.33 BST A group of international scholars are meeting in Cambridge today to rescue the reputation of the last royal wizard, Dr John Dee, from the false charge of sorcery that has dogged him for 400 years – undoubtedly fuelled by his use of a crystal ball to communicate with angels, and collaboration with a conman who assured him the angels had suggested a spot of wife-swapping. Dee is variously regarded as one of Europe's greatest scholars and scientific thinkers – and as the man who cast horoscopes for Queen Mary and her Spanish husband, Philip, suggested the most auspicious date for the coronation of Elizabeth I, and called up the wind that scattered the Armada. He may also have inspired Shakespeare's Prospero in The Tempest, and Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. Objects he owned that are now in national collections have not helped clear his reputation, including transcripts in the British Library of dialogues with angels, and his crystal ball, wax tablets inscribed with magical symbols, and black obsidian mirror, in which he hoped to see the future, at the British Museum. "There was never a single blockbuster discovery with Dee as with Galileo or Newton, because his interests spread so wide," said Jenny Rampling, who is organising the two-day conference at his old college to celebrate him as a forgotten hero of English intellectual life. "So if you're looking for a founding father of modern science, he's probably not the man. "But if you're looking for one of the most original thinkers of his day, in touch with all the major intellectuals of Europe, consulted by princes, right at the cutting edge of mathematical theory, author of the preface of the first English edition of Euclid, owner of the greatest private library in England and one of the best in Europe, that's Dee. But even by the 17th century that part of his reputation was overshadowed by the stories of sorcery and conjuring." He is credited with coining the phrase "the British empire" and advising on some of the great Tudor voyages of exploration, including the search for the North-west Passage through the Arctic. He also proposed the reform of the Julian calendar to bring it into line with the astronomical year, which would take another two centuries to implement in England, and he presented Mary with a detailed plan for the first national library. Rampling concedes that "scrying" – contacting spirits through a crystal ball or mirror – was never regarded as orthodox science. "But in many other ways what now seems like magical mumbo jumbo was then seen as perfectly proper scientific inquiry," she said. Dee wrote that he had no powers himself as a medium, which is why he worked with the conman and self-declared medium Edward Kelley. Rampling added: "He was very interested in a comet which was seen by Elizabeth's court, but he believed himself that it might foretell some momentous happening, though he reassured Elizabeth that it did not mean imminent disaster." The conference will be held at St John's, the college where Dee became an undergraduate aged 15, and suffered the first of many accusations of sorcery after a spectacularly successful stage effect for a production of Aristophanes's Pax. Although speakers will recall many aspects of Dee's life and work, Rampling has not been able to arrange a recreation of his giant flying dung beetle carrying an actor on its back – "it's a shame," she said.
george...@fuse.net
I read Dee's Diary years ago and the experience left me with little if any doubt that the man was a believing Christian.
Sincerely,
George Wagner
george...@fuse.net
Lvxnox
thing from Christianity per se. There is no doubt Dee, like many classical
magicians, believed in the divine, and called on a pious belief in 'God' to
assist him in entering and investigating the unknown realms of angelic and
demonic forces. As a practising magician of over 25 years' standing, who
has worked with Dee's Enochian system extensively, I can say that the
Christian element to all this is but a thin overlay on what is essentially
ritual magical practice.
Leigh Blackmore
george...@fuse.net
The question is whether Dee was an occultist who spread a thin veneer of Christian terminology and ersatz spirituality over the recremental deeps of his ritual magic or a Christian (most likely from a very early age) who engaged more and more (and however unwisely) in occult experimentations. You seem to belive it is the former while I am MUCH more comfortable with the latter.
Sincerely,
George Wagner
george...@fuse.net
T. Peter Park
reminded me of Wilbur Whateley in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich
Horror," as well as of Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan"--TPP
(from The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 28.09.09)
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,26134803-13762,00.html
'Evil powers created half-man, half-goat creature'
AN African village is reportedly shellshocked after the birth of a
bizarre faun-like creature said to have the combined features of a
man and a goat.
Bild reports the creature, which died just a few hours after birth in
Lower Gweru, Zimbabwe, had a huge head and face which resembled a
human, as well as goat legs and a tail.
Villagers said the end product was so scary even dogs were afraid to
go close to it. They burned the corpse fearing it was an evil sign.
"This is indeed a miracle that has never been witnessed anywhere,"
elder Themba Moyo said.
The goat's owner called police after the birth.
"It's the first time that my goat did this. I have 15 goats and it's
this goat that gave me birth to most of them. My goats often give
birth to sets of twins," he said.
Related Coverage
The Zimbabwe Guardian reports that Midlands Governor and Resident
Minister Jason Machaya is adamant the creature is the result of a
coupling between man and goat.
"This incident is very shocking. It is my first time to see such an
evil thing. It is really embarrassing,
" he reportedly said.
"The head belongs to a man while the body is that of a goat. This is
evident that an adult human being was responsible. Evil powers caused
this person to lose self control.
"We often hear cases of human beings who commit bestiality but this
is the first time for such an act to produce a product with human
features."
A vet didn't have the chance to investigate the creature, but after
inspecting photos, he told Bild he believed it was a child suffering
from hydrocephalus, or water on the brain.
"The condition would have accounted for the abnormally large skull
and for the chin, nose, ears and other body parts having shifted
during development,
" he
reportedly said.
Half-man, half-goat creatures like fauns and satyrs are popular in
Greek and Roman mythology.
-----
T. Peter Park
Machen is the forgotten father of weird fiction
Arthur Machen might be little read today, but his ideas lie at the
heart of modern horror writers Stephen King and Clive Barker
When first encountered, the publications of Tartarus Press seem almost
as numinous as the supernatural tales they contain. The simple
elegance of their presentation, hand-stitched hardback bindings
jacketed in uniform cream covers with only minimal decoration, recall
an earlier age when books were as rare and treasured as jewels.
These are not commodities to be piled high on three-for-two tables,
but rarities which remain hidden unless sought out (hidden in this
case in the dealers' room of the British Fantasy Convention). The
stories hoarded in their pages are so little known you might be
forgiven for wondering if you have dreamed them. The Triumph of Night
and Other Tales by Edith Wharton. The Supernatural Tales of HG Wells.
The Lost Poetry of William Hope Hodgson. And dozens of other titles by
authors both famous and obscure which taken as a whole form a secret
library, a catalogue of weird fiction from its roots in Victorian
Britain through to the modern day.
Perhaps the most significant but least well remembered of the Tartarus
writers is the Welsh author of supernatural, fantasy and horror
fiction Arthur Machen (1863-1947). Many contemporary authors of weird
fiction will see their own struggles reflected in Machen's life and
career. Born into the social hinterland between the privileged upper
classes and the poverty of the working class, he received an excellent
early education but lacked the money to attend university. Nonetheless
he pursued a career as a writer, working as a journalist and tutor and
writing through the night, hard work that led in his thirties to
Machen establishing himself as an author of "decadent horror".
But this success would turn sour when his association with genre
fiction made it impossible to find a publisher for his writing as it
grew in sophistication, leading to much of his best work remaining
unpublished for many years. By the turn of the century and following
the death of his first wife Machen had abandoned fiction writing
altogether. But his work continued to speak for itself, and his
growing following led to a major resurgence in the 1920s and his
return to writing.
The qualities which made Machen's work important are the same that
have driven the tradition of weird fiction. From his early story The
Great God Pan, through his acclaimed masterpiece The Hill of Dreams to
his later work on The Secret Glory, Machen remained determined to take
readers into worlds of mysticism and the supernatural. In a society
gripped by Christian zeal, he drew on pagan and occult ideology to
energise his writing. At a time when scientific rationalism was coming
fully to the fore, Machen and other writers of weird fiction continued
to argue for the mystical experience as an important tool for
understanding the modern world. It is an argument which is still being
made today.
Machen's writing may now be little read, but his influence lives on in
other writers of weird fiction. HP Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos was
heavily influenced by Machen, and through it Machen's ideas are at the
heart of the modern horror genre and the work of writers like Clive
Barker and Stephen King. British comic book writers of the 80s and 90s
including Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman were also influenced by Machen in
their own explorations of the supernatural and occult.
And novelist Graham Joyce, five-time winner of the British Fantasy
Award, places his writing in the tradition of Machen and weird
fiction. Joyce's stories illustrate the power of weird fiction to
delve into the most primal aspects of life and find meaning there.
That is why weird fiction in all its guises continues to fascinate us
as readers today.
Posted by Damien G Walter Tuesday 29 September 2009
T. Peter Park
AS WELL AS HORROR OE FANTASY FANS:
Basically, Charlie Stross thinks
"Star Trek" (and "Battlestar Galactica," etc.) aren't really
science-fiction at all.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/10/
why_i_hate_star_trek.html
October 13, 2009
Why I hate Star Trek
I have a confession to make: I hate Star Trek.
Let me clarify: when I was young — I'm dating myself here — I quite liked the original TV series. But when the movie-length trailer for ST:TNG first aired in the UK in the late eighties? It was hate on first sight. And since then, it's also been hate on sight between me and just about every space operatic show on television. ST:Voyager and whatever the space station opera; check. Babylon Five? Ditto. Battlestar Galactica? Didn't even bother turning on the TV. I hate them all.
At his recent keynote speech at the New York Television Festival, former Star Trek writer and creator of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica Ron Moore revealed the secret formula to writing for Trek.As you probably guessed, this is not how I write SF — in fact, it's the antithesis of everything I enjoy in an SF novel.He described how the writers would just insert "tech" into the scripts whenever they needed to resolve a story or plot line, then they'd have consultants fill in the appropriate words (aka technobabble) later.
"It became the solution to so many plot lines and so many stories," Moore said. "It was so mechanical that we had science consultants who would just come up with the words for us and we'd just write 'tech' in the script. You know, Picard would say 'Commander La Forge, tech the tech to the warp drive.' I'm serious. If you look at those scripts, you'll see that."
Moore then went on to describe how a typical script might read before the science consultants did their thing:
La Forge: "Captain, the tech is overteching."
Picard: "Well, route the auxiliary tech to the tech, Mr. La Forge."
La Forge: "No, Captain. Captain, I've tried to tech the tech, and it won't work."
Picard: "Well, then we're doomed."
"And then Data pops up and says, 'Captain, there is a theory that if you tech the other tech ... '" Moore said. "It's a rhythm and it's a structure, and the words are meaningless. It's not about anything except just sort of going through this dance of how they tech their way out of it."
SF, at its best, is an exploration of the human condition under circumstances that we can conceive of existing, but which don't currently exist (either because the technology doesn't exist, or there are gaps in our scientific model of the universe, or just because we're short of big meteoroids on a collision course with the Sea of Japan — the situation is improbable but not implausible).
There's an implicit feedback between such a situation and the characters who are floundering around in it, trying to survive. For example: You want to deflect that civilization-killing asteroid? You need to find some way of getting there. It's going to be expensive and difficult, and there's plenty of scope for human drama arising from it. Lo: that's one possible movie in a nutshell. You've got the drama — just add protagonists.
I use a somewhat more complex process to develop SF. I start by trying to draw a cognitive map of a culture, and then establish a handful of characters who are products of (and producers of) that culture. The culture in question differs from our own: there will be knowledge or techniques or tools that we don't have, and these have social effects and the social effects have second order effects — much as integrated circuits are useful and allow the mobile phone industry to exist and to add cheap camera chips to phones: and cheap camera chips in phones lead to happy slapping or sexting and other forms of behaviour that, thirty years ago, would have sounded science fictional. And then I have to work with characters who arise naturally from this culture and take this stuff for granted, and try and think myself inside their heads. Then I start looking for a source of conflict, and work out what cognitive or technological tools my protagonists will likely turn to to deal with it.
Star Trek and its ilk are approaching the dramatic stage from the opposite direction: the situation is irrelevant, it's background for a story which is all about the interpersonal relationships among the cast. You could strip out the 25th century tech in Star Trek and replace it with 18th century tech — make the Enterprise a man o'war (with a particularly eccentric crew) at large upon the seven seas during the age of sail — without changing the scripts significantly. (The only casualty would be the eyeball candy — big gunpowder explosions be damned, modern audiences want squids in space, with added lasers!)
I can just about forgive the tendency of these programs to hit the reset switch at the end of every episode, returning the universe to pristine un-played-with shape in time for the next dramatic interlude; even though it's the opposite of real SF (a disruptive literature that focusses intently on revolutionary change), I recognize the limits of the TV series as a medium. Sometimes they make at least a token gesture towards a developing story arc — but it's frequently pathetic. I'm told that Battlestar Galactica, for example, ends with a twist ... the nature of which has been collecting rejection slips ever since Aesop (it's one of the oldest clichés in the book). But I can even forgive that. At least they were trying.
The biggest weakness of the entire genre is this: the protagonists don't tell us anything interesting about the human condition under science fictional circumstances. The scriptwriters and producers have thrown away the key tool that makes SF interesting and useful in the first place, by relegating "tech" to a token afterthought rather than an integral part of plot and characterization. What they end up with is SF written for the Pointy-Haired [studio] Boss, who has an instinctive aversion to ever having to learn anything that might modify their world-view. The characters are divorced from their social and cultural context; yes, there are some gestures in that direction, but if you scratch the protagonists of Star Trek you don't find anything truly different or alien under the latex face-sculptures: just the usual familiar — and, to me, boring — interpersonal neuroses of twenty-first century Americans, jumping through the hoops of standardized plot tropes and situations that were clichés in the 1950s.
PS: Don't get me started on Doctor Who ...
Posted by Charlie Stross at 11:01 AM
T. Peter Park
all non-King James versions of the Bible, and the works of Billy Graham and Mother Teresa! In that
DeGrandin story (unfortunately I forget the title), DeGrandin and his sidekick Trowbridge
expose a fanatical "Christian" fundamentalist cult trying to take over Harrisonville, the fictional
New Jersey town of Quinn's DeGrandin stories. The cult, which denounces dancing, drinking,
smoking, lipstick, jazz, and short skirts as wiles of Satan, turns out to be actually an undercover
Communist cell out to deliberately discredit Christianity by making it look like a religion of
narrow-minded fanatical killjoys and blue-noses. Similarly, somebody today with a conspiracist
turn of mind might almost suspect that the Rev. Marc Grizzard and his 14-member Amazing
Grace Baptist Church might really be a cell of fanatical atheists out to discredit religion and
especially Christianity by making it look ridiculously narrow-minded and fanatical. The same
goes for the "Rev." Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka,
Kansas. Somebody could write an amusing story about Richard Dawkins and Christopher
Hitchens secretly bankrolling both Grizzard and Phelps! :-) Anyway, here is the story I just
read about Pastor Grizzard and the Amazing Grace Christian Church:
http://cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/player/popup/?rn=3906861&cl=16066248&ch=4226713&src=newshttp://rawstory.com/2009/10/n-c-church-to-burn-satans-books-including-works-of-mother-theresa/
A Baptist Church near Asheville, N.C., is hosting a
"Halloween
book
burning" to purge the area of "Satan's" works, which include all
non-King James versions of the Bible, popular books by many religious
authors and even country music.
The website for the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, N.C., says
there are "scriptural bases" for the book burning. The site quotes Acts
19:18-20: "And many that believed, came and confessed and shewed their
deeds. Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their books
together, and burned them before all men: and they counted the price of
them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew
the word of God and prevailed."
Church leaders deem Good News for Modern Man, the Evidence Bible, the
New International Version Bible, the Green Bible and the Message Bible,
as well as at least seven other versions of the Bible as "Satan's
Bibles," according to the website. Attendees will also set fire to
"Satan's popular books" such as the work of "heretics" including the
Pope, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham and Rick Warren.
"I believe the King James version is God's preserved, inspired,
inerrant and infallible word of God," Pastor Marc Grizzard told a local
news station of his 14-member parish.
Grizzard's parish website explains that the Bible is the "final
authority concerning all matters of faith and practice," for Amazing
Grace Baptist Church. In the Parish doctrinal statement, Grizzard
expounds that "the Scriptures shall be interpreted according to their
normal grammatical- historical meaning, and all issues
of interpretation and
meaning shall be determined by the preacher."
The event also seeks to destroy "Satan's music" which includes every
genre from country,rap and rock to "soft and easy" and "Southern
Gospel" and" contemporary Christian."
David Lynch, a resident of nearby Asheville, N.C., told Raw Story "it's
a little disconcerting how close this is to my home."
"They are burning so much stuff I've dubbed them the hypocritical
Christian Taliban," Lynch said in a phone interview with Raw Story.
"Just the scope of all the information they want to destroy is pretty
disturbing."
Church leaders did not respond to Raw Story's requests for comment, but
the website notes they will be providing "bar-b-que chicken, fried
chicken and all the sides" at the book burning.
T. Peter Park
As Cecot notes, it is "possible to view Washington Irving as a story teller who stumbled upon an account of some 'strange' event which took place in the Catskill mountains of New York State." As with "modern day alien abduction stories," Cecot remarks, "the people of Irving's day would have had difficulty understanding what actually took place and putting the event into words." Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" folktale, he observes. "may have been the result, and the use of the fictitious character, Diedrich Knickerbocker, may have been a convenient way for Irving to relate this story without repercussion." Even "to this day," Cecot adds, the Catskill Mountains are filled with tales of anomalous events." From "strange lights in the forest to 'little people' such as fairies and elves," he observes, "the mountains have a certain 'otherworldly' quality to them, bewitching to anyone who finds himself within their wooded slopes." In other words, the Catskills seem to be a "window area." Thus, "Rip Van Winkle" may be of interest to researchers looking for early pre-World War II "Close Encounter III" and abduction accounts.
www.iraap.org/articles/RipVanWinkle.htm
Rip Van Winkle: Twenty Years of Missing Time
A literary perspective
by Raymond W. Cecot, Organizational Director, IRAAP
Foreword - As a student of English Literature in college, I have always been fascinated with certain authors, especially some of the American writers. Once I became interested in "unusual" phenomena (such as UFOs, alien encounters, etc) I kept a close eye on Washington Irving's tale Rip Van Winkle, and began to relate some of its aspects to the alien abduction concept. At first I would bring this up in my talks on the UFO subject, always wanting to eventually put into writing my thoughts on Rip Van Winkle's possible alien encounter. I have finally done so. Although it is not the definitive work on the subject, you may find it interesting enough to provoke further investigation. Whether you have read Rip Van Winkle before or not, I hope this inspires you to pick it up, and enjoy it from an entirely different perspective. -Ray
The concept of "alien abduction" has become the object of much scrutiny and research among UFO enthusiasts during the twentieth century. Beginning with the famous Betty and Barney Hill case in September 1961, right up to the present day, countless witnesses have come forward claiming to have been taken against their will by beings not from this earth. No one knows the cause of this abduction phenomenon -- whether it is extraterrestrial in origin, spiritual, interdimensional, or merely some sort of psychosis -- any explanation may hold the answer. Yet, the history of alien abductions in UFO research may go back as far as the advent of man on this planet.
Ancient literary works have been interpreted as alluding to visitations by alien beings and their interaction with mankind. References to visitors from space can be found in texts as far back as ancient Sumer and India, down through Greek and Roman civilizations, the Bible, and into the Middle Ages. This theme continues on with the discovery of America and its growth as a nation. Washington Irving's The Sketch Book contains a work which has become a favorite among scholars of American Literature. Rip Van Winkle, with all its simplicity and enigmatic overtones, has been read and studied by students from grade school to post-graduate level. It has been translated into numerous languages including French, German, Polish, Yiddish (to name a few), often with elaborate illustrations. Although studied from various viewpoints including historical authenticity and significance, allegorical value, humor, folklore, and politics, Rip Van Winkle is rarely, if at all, mentioned in UFO literature. If so, it is with a humorous, tongue-in-cheek air. However, Rip's apparent twenty year nap may be seen as a representation of the now familiar "missing time" syndrome. If other literary works can be viewed in this light, thenRip Van Winkle also has the potential for such an interpretation. To do so, it is necessary to approach the story, not from a traditional literary analysis, but from an underlying message which lies waiting to be revealed.
Folklore inevitably contains a kernel of truth upon which a particular story is based. In the case of Rip Van Winkle, the tale contains many elements of the modern abduction scenario. It is possible to view Washington Irving as a story teller who stumbled upon an account of some "strange" event which took place in the Catskill mountains of New York State. As with modern day alien abduction stories, the people of Irving's day would have had difficulty understanding what actually took place and putting the event into words. The folktale of Rip Van Winkle may have been the result, and the use of the fictitious character, Diedrich Knickerbocker, may have been a convenient way for Irving to relate this story without repercussion.
To this day, the Catskill Mountains are filled with tales of anomalous events. From strange lights in the forest to "little people" such as fairies and elves, the mountains have a certain "otherworldly" quality to them, bewitching to anyone who finds himself within their wooded slopes. Diedrich Knickerbocker, said to be an old gentleman from New York, was very curious about the Dutch history of the area. As presented by Irving, Diedrich Knickerbocker's research was not derived so much from books as it was from his personal contact with the local residents, who were found to possess a wealth of information regarding Dutch history and folklore. His chief merit was his scrupulous accuracy. With this allegorical perspective in mind, the examination of Rip Van Winkle in light of the alien abduction phenomenon becomes one of interpreting both the literal text and the underlying meaning. It may very well be that Irving is trying to relate a story which is as difficult to accept as it is to understand.
In order to keep the events in the Rip Van Winkle story close to the alien abduction perspective, the relationship will best be seen by juxtaposing the various components as they unfold. This will be seen by use of the terms RIP (Irving's story) and ABDUCTION (relating to the abduction phenomenon) before each segment.
RIP
The
story opens with a description of the "Kaatskill" mountains, an
offshoot of the Appalachian chain. The mood is quickly set by placing
the reader in a location filled with "magical hues and shapes" amid the
"fairy mountains." Residing in one tiny village is a man named Rip Van
Winkle, "a good-natured fellow [and]... a kind neighbor." His main
character flaw is described as an "insuperable aversion to all kinds of
profitable labor." This may have been in part to his overbearing and
nagging wife. Nevertheless, Rip found it impossible to keep his farm in
order. His fences were in continual disrepair, his cows would wander
out of the pasture, and weeds found a way to overcome his crops. In
short, his farm was in the worst condition in the area. In his defense,
Rip is always seen to be helpful to others in need, especially to the
good wives of the village who regarded him with great favor. "The
children ... would shout with joy whenever he approached ... not a dog
would bark at him throughout the neighborhood." "He would never refuse
to assist a neighbor even in the roughest toil, and was a foremost man
at all frolics for husking Indian corn, or building stone-fences; the
women of the village, too, used to employ him to run errands, and to do
such little odd jobs ..." Certainly, any man assisting in building a
stone fence should not be considered "lazy." Obviously, Rip's lack of
enthusiasm stemmed from his abuse at home.
ABDUCTION
Abduction
research is replete with a sense of "otherworldliness," referred to as
a "Zone of Strangeness" by Dr. Thomas E. Bullard, an abduction research
analyst. Abductees often enter a state where the laws of nature no
longer seem to apply. The realm of the fairies has the same quality, as
related in many of the tales surrounding these beings. Yet, Rip Van
Winkle, himself, is a man who lives in the reality of his world. He is
well liked throughout his village, recognized and respected by man,
woman, child, as well as beast. He is hard working when it comes to
lending a helping hand to a neighbor in need. On the home front,
however, he is in a continual state of ridicule, his wife seeing him as
worthless and lazy. Some abduction researchers may see this aspect of
his life as a formation of an "encounter-prone personality" where an
abused individual may be predisposed to an encounter with alien beings.
Although the research in this area (as with most aspects of the
abduction scenario) is difficult to label as definitive, some abductees
have been found to suffer from a high degree of "childhood abuser"
trauma. Rip Van Winkle definitely falls into the category of "abused"
from the tongue-lashings of his wife, abuse which may or may not make
him a "high risk" for an alien encounter.
RIP
The
abuse at home grows worse as time goes on. Rip Van Winkle's "sole
domestic adherent" is his dog, Wolf, who shares the insults of Dame Van
Winkle with his master. Wolf is described as "courageous an animal as
ever scoured the woods." Eventually, Rip is "reduced almost to
despair," so to avoid any further vituperation, he heads for the
mountains for a day of squirrel shooting, his gun in hand, his dog at
his side. With the sheer joy of being alone with his canine companion
and the sounds of nature -- not to mention the lack of his wife's voice
to interrupt his peacefulness -- Rip finds that he has mused too long.
Darkness would be upon him before he would be able to return home. He
quickly begins his descent from the peaks when he hears "a voice from a
distance, hallooing, Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!'" At this point he
looks around for the source of the voice, but sees nothing but a "crow
winging its solitary flight across the mountain." Thinking he imagined
the voice, the same cry is repeated. This time, Wolf reacts by
bristling "up his back, and giving a low growl." Wolf skulks "to his
master's side, looking fearfully down the glen."
ABDUCTION
Once
the abuse at home reaches a point where it becomes unbearable, an
individual often takes measures to either rid himself of the abuse or
find a means of coping. Some shut down, closing their feelings off as
much as possible. Others, unfortunately, may resort to murder or
suicide. Fortunately, Rip Van Winkle decides to spend the day in one of
his favorite pastimes, squirrel shooting. Inadvertently, he stays too
long in the mountains and becomes stressed and "he heaved a heavy
sigh," when he realizes he will invoke Dame Van Winkle's wrath in
getting home after dark. [Relate this to the "encounter-prone
personality" above.] He twice hears a voice calling his name. It is
possible that the voice could have been "heard" in his head, a possible
telepathic communication. This "voice," whether audible or telepathic,
becomes a "Drawing Force" often found in the abduction experience. This
drawing force lures the potential abductee to a UFO or alien being. Two
items are worthy of note here:
1. At the first instance of the
voice, a crow is seen flying across the mountain. This is significant
because many alien encounters are prefaced by the witness seeing an
animal of some sort: a deer, an owl, etc. Why this occurs is unknown
and the subject of much conjecture. Some theorize that aliens may be
"shape-shifters," showing themselves as something familiar to lessen
the abhorrence of an encounter with an unfamiliar being. Others
speculate that the "image" of a familiar object is mentally placed in
the victim's mind. A variety of theories exist in this regard and may
all be equally valid. Researchers have a difficult enough time proving
abductions actually occur, without giving definitive reasons as to why
animals may often be associated with them. We will see the reference to
animals later on in the story after Rip has his encounter with the
strange little men.
2. After the second call, Rip's dog reacts.
The reaction of an animal to a UFO event is significant because it
lends some validity to the occurrence. An animal's reaction proves
something is taking place in our physical realm. In Wolf's case, his
reaction is one of fear. (Remember that in the story he is described as
courageous.) He emits a low growl and his fur bristles up on his back.
He finally skulks beside his master, perhaps using him as a shield to
stand between him and whatever is nearby. This is not the normal
reaction of a domestic canine to the presence of a stranger. Usually,
once the "defense" mechanism is triggered, the dog would stand between
the intruder and his master. Wolf's timid reaction is indicative of
something that is out of the normal course of events.
RIP
"Rip
now felt a vague apprehension stealing over him," and looking in the
same direction as his dog sees a "strange figure slowly toiling up the
rocks." The figure's back is bent over as he carries something quite
heavy. Rip, being a helpful soul, thinks it might be a neighbor in
need; however, as the stranger approaches nearer, Rip is surprised at
the oddity of the stranger's appearance. He is equally surprised to see
any human being in such a "lonely and unfrequented place." "He was a
short square-built old fellow, with thick bushy hair, and a grizzled
beard." He is dressed in what could only be described as "antique Dutch
fashion - a cloth jerkin strapped around the waist - several pairs of
breeches ... He bore on his shoulder a stout keg ... and made signs for
Rip to approach and assist him with the load." Rip does assist with
carrying the keg and together they continue to climb up the mountain.
Only what Rip believes to be an occasional peal of thunder disturbs the
scene.
ABDUCTION
Abductees
are beset with the strangeness of their situation during the abduction
experience. At the onset there is often a feeling of "vague
apprehension" that something is about to take place. In many abduction
cases, it is the little grey beings who actually bring the abductee to
the craft, either by allurement or actual force. Rip Van Winkle is
filled with apprehension even prior to seeing the little man approach.
The small being is reminiscent of dwarves and other little
forest-inhabiting creatures from stories of long ago. He also reminds
us of the little Greys associated with modern day abductions. Notice
that there is no verbal communication between the man and Rip. There
seems to be some gesturing, but Rip understands perfectly what he has
to do. This may reflect some telepathic communication, as well. The
gesturing has an aspect of "sign language" used by the deaf. In the
abduction scenario, there have been reports of the use of sign language
by alien beings.
RIP
Eventually,
the two came to "a hollow, like a small amphitheatre, surrounded by
perpendicular precipices..." It is stated by Irving that Rip and his
companion "labored on in silence ... there was something strange and
incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired and checked
familiarity."
ABDUCTION
It
is important to recall at this point that Rip Van Winkle has always
been friendly to all of the neighboring folk in his area. It is not in
accord with Rip's character to let himself remain unfamiliar with his
companion. Yet, the story states that due to the "strange and
incomprehensible," any type of familiarity was held at bay. Certainly,
this is consistent with UFO abductions. Abductees are generally treated
more as objects to study, rather than beings with whom the aliens wish
to become familiar and establish a relationship. Notice, also, the end
of their journey brings them to a sort of "hollow" with "perpendicular
precipices," not unlike an "amphitheatre." Although this may seem
insignificant at this stage of the story, it is important because after
Rip wakes up from his sleep, this structure is no longer to be seen.
The amphitheater-like, perpendicular structure is not unlike the inside
of a space ship often described by abductees. Once inside a craft, an
abductee often speaks of an examination room that is circular or curved
(amphitheater-like). The walls are usually perpendicular.
RIP
Once
inside the amphitheater, Rip notices other things which are a wonder to
him. There are a group of odd looking little men playing "nine-pins."
These men are dressed in similar garb to the man Rip helped in carrying
the keg up the mountain. "There was one who seemed to be the commander
... What seemed particularly odd to Rip was, that though these folks
were evidently amusing themselves, yet they maintained the gravest
faces, the most mysterious silence, and were, withal, the most
melancholy party of pleasure he had ever witnessed. Nothing interrupted
the stillness of the scene but the noise of the balls, which, whenever
they were rolled, echoed along the mountains like rumbling peals of
thunder."
ABDUCTION
Once
inside the circular enclosure (amphitheater), Rip notices other men
similar to his companion. They are involved in playing what Rip
believes to be nine-pins, a type of bowling game popular at the time.
The sound of the rolling ball reminds him of the peals of thunder he
heard while on his journey up the mountain. Notice too, that the men,
although seeming to amuse themselves in Rip's estimation, have on the
gravest faces. There is absolute silence, except for the noise of the
rolling ball. Abductees often speak of the Greys as being very
methodical in their approach to the abductee. They are described as
"focused" on what they are doing, almost as if their task is of the
utmost importance and nothing will deter them from accomplishing it.
Perhaps the nine-pin game is something Rip cannot understand, so he
identifies it with something familiar to him. Whatever the little men
in the story are doing, they are intent on getting their job finished,
so much so that they labor on in deafening silence. One of men is
referred to as the "commander." Often abductees speak of a being,
unlike the Greys, who comes on the scene and appears to have an air of
authority. This being seems to be obviously in charge of the situation.
The Greys give this authority figure the respect due a central figure.
RIP
Rip
and the little man approached this remarkable scene with their keg. All
activity ceased and they "stared at him with such fixed statue-like
gaze, and such strange, uncouth, lacklustre countenances, that his
heart turned within him, and his knees smote together." The contents of
the keg were emptied into large flagons. His companion "made signs to
him to wait upon the company. He obeyed with fear and trembling." All
this was done in the most "profound silence." Soon the little men
returned to their business at hand, and when they were not observing
him, Rip ventured a taste from one of the flagons. One taste led to
another, until "his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined,
and he fell into a deep sleep."
ABDUCTION
Aliens
have been known to have a deep, penetrating stare which can both
comfort and instill fear into an abductee. As Rip approaches the busy
scene, all activity stops, and each face stares at him with a
"lackluster" countenance. There is no real expression here, no sheen or
vitality. Aliens are often described as being emotionless, with no
concern for their captive other than the work they have to finish.
Whatever the work is, Rip is told to distribute some of the liquid to
all present. He does so "with fear and trembling," not knowing what it
is he is giving to the men. Notice that at this point in his encounter,
Rip still has not heard any words spoken. There is gesturing, and one
can almost assume some "mental" communication. In fact, throughout
Rip's entire encounter with these strange entities, there is no oral
communication at all. There are numerous allusions to possible mental
telepathy and the use of sign language; however, actual verbal
communication is non-existent. This silence does seem to cause Rip some
degree of consternation. Eventually, Rip becomes bold enough to sample
the beverage he had been serving, but it soon overpowers him and he
falls asleep. Whether his captors wanted him to drink is not known in
the story, but it looms as a definite possibility. Here ends the actual
abduction experience. What follows is the aftermath.
RIP
"On
waking, he [Rip] found himself on the green grass knoll whence he had
first seen the old man of the glen." The day is sunny, the birds active
in their singing and an "eagle was wheeling aloft." Rip believes he
slept the entire night on the mountain, and even recalls the events
before he fell asleep. His thoughts fearfully turn to his wife, who no
doubt is ready to make his life more than a little unpleasant when he
returns home. He searches for his rifle, but finds only "an old
firelock lying by him, the barrel incrusted with rust, the lock falling
off, and the stock worm-eaten." His dog is nowhere to be found, but Rip
is sure he merely wandered off after a squirrel or some other interest.
He whistles after the dog, even shouting his name, but there is no
response.
ABDUCTION
There
is a term used in abduction research called "Doorway Amnesia" which
refers to the temporary lapse of memory an abductee has upon entering
or exiting a spacecraft during the encounter. Rip seems to have no
recollection of leaving the scene of his previous night's meeting, only
of some of the events with which he was involved. He recalls the little
men and the flagons of beverage. Again, as in the moment immediately
preceding his encounter, an animal is also seen upon his awakening. He
notices an eagle soaring overhead, and numerous little birds hopping
about. He cannot accept what has happened to him, and is quite ready to
blame the little men who he feels have played a trick on him.
RIP
Rip
"is determined to revisit the scene of the last evening's gambol," and
is ready to demand that the men return his rifle and dog. Upon rising
up, he finds that he is stiff in the joints. He finds the area where he
and the little man ascended with the keg, "but to his astonishment a
mountain stream was now foaming down it ... At length he reached to
where the ravine had opened through the cliffs to the amphitheater; but
no traces of such opening remained. The rocks presented a high
impenetrable wall..." He calls again after his faithful dog, but the
only answer is "the cawing of a flock of idle crows ... who, secure in
their elevation, seemed to look down and scoff at [him]."
ABDUCTION
Many
abductees find themselves driven to understand what exactly happened to
them, and Rip is no exception. He seeks out the location of the
previous night. Although he finds the path he climbed with the little
man, it has now become a stream. He follows the stream to where the
amphitheater existed on the previous night; however, the amphitheater
is no longer there, only high rocks which will not allow passage. Could
the amphitheater have been the inside of a spacecraft, as previously
explained ? Surely whatever was there before is no longer to be found.
RIP
As
Rip approaches the village, he meets a number of people, but is
surprised that he does not recognize any of them. Being of a gregarious
nature, he finds this lack of recognition confusing, for he thought he
knew everyone in the village. Even what the people wore seemed a bit
odd to him. The villagers in return, looked at him as unusual, stroking
their chins as he passed by. This chin stroking was done so often that
soon Rip put his hand to his own chin only to discover that "his beard
had grown a foot long!" The children, strangers all, "ran at his heels,
hooting after him and pointing at his gray beard. The dogs too, not one
of which he recognized for an old acquaintance, barked at him as he
passed." The village is completely changed, possessing rows of
unfamiliar houses and populated far beyond what Rip is able to recall.
"His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the
world around him were not bewitched." Although he is able to see the
familiar Hudson River and recognizable peaks of his beloved Kaatskills,
all else is perplexing to poor Rip Van Winkle.
ABDUCTION
Once
a person experiences an abduction, life is never quite the same.
Everyday life is somehow different. Often a feeling of "isolation"
accompanies the aftermath. Fear of telling anyone about the event only
increases the "aloneness," for to reveal something as bizarre as an
alien encounter surely lies in the realm of insanity. Rip acutely feels
this isolation. He is now alone in his once-familiar world. Notice the
story tells that Rip's beard has grown to a foot long. This has an
interesting aspect to it. Hair grows at the rate of approximately
one-half inch (a little over a centimeter) a month. In a year's time it
grows about six inches. If Rip slept for twenty years, as the story
says, his beard should be nearly ten feet long, not one foot. Even
given the fact that hair growth may slow down as the length increases,
Rip's beard should be much longer than a foot after twenty years. This
leaves us with a unique possibility. Wherever Rip was for those twenty
years, he most likely was not in a place where time passed on a par
with time on Earth. Earthly time shows a passage of twenty years, but
according to Rip's beard, only two earthly years are accounted for.
Where had he been?
RIP
Rip
is puzzled by how much life in the village has changed. He finds
himself perplexed when confronted with terms such as "Federal" or
"Democrat." He is unable to understand many of the questions asked of
him. Finally, when asked to name some of his old friends, he finds that
many have either died or moved away. "Rip's heart died away at hearing
of these sad changes in his home and friends, and finding himself thus
alone in the world. Every answer puzzled him too, by treating of such
enormous lapses of time, and of matters which he could not
understand..." The only answer that Rip could make to the many
inquiries is "I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the
mountain, and they've changed my gun, and everything's changed, and I'm
changed, and I can't tell what's my name, or who I am!" Eventually
those around him return "to the more important concerns of the
election." Rip goes to live with his daughter." It was some time before
he [Rip] could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made
to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his
torpor."
ABDUCTION
The
feeling of isolation increases as the reality of the abduction
experience begins to take hold. Everything that was once familiar may
take on a totally different perspective. Abductees begin to see
themselves as "changed" in their outlook on life, their philosophy,
their desires, their needs and wants. They make a supreme effort to try
to understand what has happened to them, and/or cope with the entire
episode and its consequences. Although everyone acquainted with the
abductee may be sympathetic, for them it is just a story and they
quickly return to their everyday affairs. Not so with the one who has
had the unusual experience. It may take a long time, as it did Rip, to
return to the normal way of life.
RIP
"He
used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr.
Doolittle's hotel. He was observed at first to vary on some points
every time he told it, which was doubtless owing to his having so
recently awaked ... Some always pretended to doubt the reality of it,
and insisted that Rip had been out of his head, and that this was one
point on which he always remained flighty. The old Dutch inhabitants,
however, almost universally gave it full credit."
ABDUCTION
Once
abductees are able to come to grips with what has happened to them,
they are more easily able to tell someone about the event. In fact, to
do so may have some therapeutic value. As in Rip's case, there will
always be those who doubt the sanity of the teller. On the other hand,
there are those who give these stories their "full credit."
AFTERTHOUGHT
Rip Van Winkle is a story placed in a definite period of American
history and thus has the value of presenting the reader with
a description of the times in which it is told. However, beneath the
surface lies a tale which relates to today's experience known as "alien
abduction." It is important to place this folktale among the collection
of literature which has a relationship to today's alien abduction
phenomenon. The following statement from Diedrich Knickerbocker at the
end of the Rip Van Winkle tale makes the story even more enigmatic:
"The
story of Rip Van Winkle may seem incredible to many, but nevertheless I
give it my full belief, for I know the vicinity of our Dutch
settlements to have been very subject to marvellous [sic] events and
appearances. Indeed, I have heard many stranger stories than this, in
the villages along the Hudson; all of which were too well authenticated
to admit of a doubt. I have even talked with Rip Van Winkle myself,
who, when last I saw him, was a very venerable old man, and so
perfectly rational and consistent on every other point that I think no
conscientious person could refuse to take this into the bargain; nay, I
have seen a certificate on the subject taken before a country justice
and signed with a cross in the justice's own handwriting. The story,
therefore, is beyond the possibility of doubt."
Although Irving's character of Diedrich Knickerbocker is fictitious, he may have been used by the author as a type of literary agent to express the strange tale of a man who had been "missing" for twenty years. Washington Irving would not have been able to explain the story in light of extraterrestrial contact. He therefore expressed it in the language of his time and in terms which he was able to understand.
Sources:
Fowler, Raymond. The
Allagash Abductions. Wild Flower Press, 1993
Fowler, Raymond. The Watchers. Bantam Books, 1990
Fuller, John G. The Interrupted Journey. New York: The Dial
Press, 1966
Jacobs, David M. Secret Life. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1992
Litchfield, Mary E. Irving's Sketch Book. Boston: Gin&
Company, 1901
Ring, Kenneth. The Omega Project:Near Death Experiences, UFO
Encounters and Mind at Large. W. Morrow, 1992
Thompson, Keith. Angels and Aliens. New York: Fawcett Columbine
Books, 1991
Vallee, Jacques. Passport to Magonia. Chicago: Contemporary
Books, Inc, 1969
Copyright ©2006 IRAAP.org.
T. Peter Park
T. Peter Park
Local dad spoke only Klingon to child for three years
http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/11/dinkytown_dad_s.phpT. Peter Park
Local company creates Klingon dictionary
http://www.mndaily.com/2009/11/17/local-company-creates-Klingon-dictionaryThe Minnesota Daily (University of Minnesota/Minneapolis/St. Paul/mndaily.com)
Amy Gee.
With the birth of his son 15 years ago, dedicated linguist d’Armond Speers embarked on the ultimate experiment: He spoke to him only in Klingon — the language of the alien race of “Star Trek” fame — for the first three years of his life.
“I was interested in the question of whether my son, going through his first language acquisition process, would acquire it like any human language,” Speers said. “He was definitely starting to learn it.”
So when Ultralingua, a dictionary, translation and grammar software company in Dinkytown, honored requests from customers to create applications for a Klingon dictionary, they turned to Speers, a self-employed software consultant.
“It was right square in my sweet spot,” said Speers, who graduated from Georgetown University in 2002 with a doctorate in computational linguistics.
Ultralingua, located in the University Technology Enterprise Center for the past seven years, specializes in developing software and Web-based language learning tools, including 16 different dictionaries and four grammar and spelling checkers.
The company has grown rapidly over the past two years due to the success of its iPhone applications as well as its Mac and Windows software. Applications for mobile devices like Palm and Windows Mobile have also been successful, and partnerships with Blackberry and Android are in the works.
The products are helpful for students learning foreign languages, because they are maintained by professional linguists and don’t require an Internet connection, Ashleigh Lincoln, marketing generalist and recent University of Minnesota graduate, said.
For her college Spanish courses, Lincoln said she used translation Web sites that didn’t always give correct definitions.
“Every student has stories about looking something up online, putting it in your paper and getting it wrong,” she said, adding that while there are thousands of digital applications out there, most are unreliable.
The company’s digital dictionaries include French-English, Spanish-English, Spanish-German, Italian-English and English-Portuguese, as well as several monolingual dictionaries.
To create the dictionaries, Ultralingua purchases the rights to existing data sets, which its software engineers then combine with their software. Before a product is released, the software undergoes rigorous testing to check for bugs and to make sure it won’t crash and is user-friendly, Lincoln said.
Ultralingua created their Klingon dictionary around the Simon & Schuster’s data set and developed applications for the iPhone in May and for Mac and Windows computers over the summer. The software includes a conversational phrases component, featuring audio clips of Lt. Commander Worf, the Klingon from the “Star Trek” television series, “The Next Generation,” speaking phrases such as “All of you are boring” and “I’ll have the black ale.”
“The group interested in that is small but loyal,” Lincoln said. “They’re passionate about their language.”
Before the end of the year, the company plans to release its Mandarin-English dictionary applications, which will give users the option of either drawing the Chinese characters to be matched with the corresponding English word or typing the desired word into a specialized keyboard, general manager Loring Harrop said.
Ultralingua’s products attract a wide range of consumers, from students, linguists and translators to larger entities such as HarperCollins Publishers, the Peace Corps, the United Nations and the Canadian government.
“Communication itself is a big part of the field that makes business go, makes any kind of relationship go,” Harrop said.
Partnerships with large businesses are in the works, including a laboratory that needs complex health care terms translated in multiple
languages and a global insurance company that needs a consistent set of terminology across its locations.
“Poor communication slows businesses down; it makes them less efficient,” Harrop said. “So it’s a money matter.”
Ultralingua began in 1997 when a French linguist and a college professor created a French-English dictionary from scratch for students at Carleton College. The success of the dictionary inspired them to sell it and eventually create more dictionaries.
“It was sort of the classic, ‘couple guys in a garage’ kind of deal,” Jeff Ondich, owner and co-founder, said. “We were doing it on the side, it grew, eventually we needed employees and here we are — it’s still going.”
Ondich, a computer science professor at Carleton, said the ability to speak, read and write in other languages is valuable — and Ultralingua is one of many tools to help people do that.
As for Speers, who still gets nostalgic when he recalls singing the Klingon lullaby “May the Empire Endure” with his son at bedtime, the experiment was a dud. His son is now in high school and doesn’t speak a word of Klingon.
Although some of the things he’s done lead people to believe he’s a “Star Trek” fanatic, Speers said it’s actually a passion for language that attracts him to Klingon.
“I don’t go to ‘Star Trek’ conventions, I don’t wear the fake forehead,” he said. “I’m a linguist.”
T. Peter Park
T. Peter Park
T. Peter Park wrote:
T. Peter Park
T. Peter Park
by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith
It's been the year's strangest trend – horror 'mash-ups' of classic novels. Stephanie Merritt enters a blood-spattered world.
Stephanie Merritt The Observer, Sunday 6 December 2009
(Photo can be viewed at the link below)
http://www.guardian .co.uk/books/ 2009/dec/ 06/pride- prejudice- zombies-grahame- smith
PHOTO: An illustration by Roberto Parada from the deluxe gift edition of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a brand as successful and limited as the Jane Austen industry must be in want of diversification. (It is a further truth that anyone writing about Austen must begin with a variant of that sentence.) Even the relentless adaptations machine, which seems to produce remakes of her best-known novels while the previous remake is still in post-production, finds itself necessarily constrained by the fact that Austen wrote only six complete books, of which one – Pride and Prejudice – is by far the best known. While the public appetite for Austen remains unsated, she herself remains stubbornly unable to produce any more in the series. For an enterprising publisher, therefore, there was really only one solution: give Austen's characters a new lease of life by splicing them with another, equally popular genre.
Literary-horror "mash-ups" are probably the strangest trend to have landed in our bookshops this year, led by the phenomenon of Seth Grahame-Smith' s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Quirk £8.99, pp320). First published in the spring, the book immediately became a New York Times bestseller, with more than 700,000 copies sold worldwide to date, and film rights bought up by Hollywood. It has just been reprinted in an illustrated deluxe gift edition for the Christmas market ("now with 30% more zombies!") and has, naturally, spawned its own legion of imitators keen to jump on the bandwagon.
The original idea was the brainchild of Jason Rekulak, an editor at Quirk Books, a tiny independent publishing house based in Philadelphia. Inspired by the "creative copyright violations" abounding in other genres, with people conflating songs, film trailers or television shows on websites such as YouTube, he began compiling a list of classic works of literature in the public domain which might benefit from an influx of pop culture figures such as pirates, ninjas or zombies. "Once I drew a line between Pride and Prejudice and zombies, I knew I had a title," he said in a recent interview. He called Seth Grahame-Smith, an LA-based television writer, who takes up the story in his introduction to the new edition. "I told him it was the most brilliant idea I'd ever heard."
The premise is simple: early 19th-century England is menaced by a plague of the undead; the five Bennet sisters are accomplished martial arts warriors, having been trained by their father (Mrs Bennet remains reassuringly obsessed with finding them husbands); Fitzwilliam Darcy is a renowned monster-hunter possessed of superior Japanese fighting skills. The surprisingly wide appeal of the book is less easy to understand, although it must be based primarily on the comedy of incongruity, which itself depends on familiarity with the original. Austen's characters – their pursuits, their language, their careful mannerisms – are so instantly recognisable either from the books or their film versions that they lend themselves beautifully to absurd juxtapositions, as in the recent ITV series Lost in Austen, where a modern young woman disillusioned with love collides literally with the world of Elizabeth and Darcy.
But Lost in Austen had an obvious target audience – single women in love with the romance of Austen's world – while Pride and Prejudice and Zombies seems a more unlikely marriage of fan bases. The success of any pastiche lies in its ability to capture the tone of that original, and in this Grahame-Smith has succeeded admirably. By inserting his zombie battles into Austen's text in appropriate style, the structure and the bulk of the book's contents remain hers:
"Apart from the attack, the evening altogether passed off pleasantly for the whole family. Mrs Bennet had seen her elder daughter much admired by the Netherfield party. Mary had heard herself mentioned to Miss Bingley as the most accomplished hapkido master in England; and despite having their gowns soiled with blood and bits of brain, Catherine and Lydia had been fortunate enough never to be without partners, which was all that they had yet learnt to care for at a ball."
Whether the monster mash-up will blossom into a fully fledged genre or prove a one-hit wonder remains to be seen. Grahame-Smith, despite having told the BBC earlier this year "I don't want to follow this up with Sense and Sensibility and Vampires, because I could easily box myself in as being the mash-up guy," has since signed a deal with Grand Central books for an alleged $575,000 to write a life of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter". Meanwhile Quirk Books are attempting to repeat their success with the recently published Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (Quirk £8.99, p344) by Ben H Winters.
Here, the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne, are exiled to a small island off the Devonshire coast, where polite society does its best to maintain propriety in the face of terrors of the deep. As with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on some level the monsters are not entirely inappropriate: the society Austen depicts is highly predatory on both sides, with young girls ready to be picked off and devoured by unscrupulous men such as George Wickham, and equally rapacious women bent on capturing their often unwitting prey. It might be argued that the mash-ups only make the metaphorical literal.
While Marianne grows feverish over the dashing Willoughby, who saves her from a giant octopus, her less attractive but ultimately more durable suitor, Colonel Brandon, is presented as a benign man-monster with "a set of long, squishy tentacles protruding from his face, writhing this way and that, like hideous living facial hair of slime green… but his countenance was sensible and his address particularly gentleman-like. " Naturally, Brandon proves himself a true hero, and Marianne learns to love the beauty of his heart (though in this version she also makes a pleasing discovery that brings her "certain marital satisfactions" ).
In a recent blog for the Huffington Post, Winters laid out some golden rules for collaborating with dead people, beginning with: "Pick a really famous dead person" and "pick a really famous book". With this, you can't help feeling, he has put his finger on the genre's inherent flaw. Pride and Prejudice is so famous that even people who have never picked up a copy know its essentials. Even Austen's less-read novels don't have that kind of reach, and other hopeful authors are expanding the idea to famous figures in history, such as AE Moorat's recent Queen Victoria, Demon Hunter (Hodder £7.99, pp400), a clear attempt to get in ahead of Grahame-Smith' s Lincoln. Moorat (a pseudonym for author Andrew Holmes) has draped his very funny tale of the marauding undead over a solid framework of historical detail, beginning as the 18-year-old Victoria takes the throne of a country beset by succubi, demons and reanimated corpses. Fortunately, the feisty young monarch is taught her craft by Maggie Brown, the sturdy Scottish demon hunter. As with the Austen adaptations, it is the women who are bold and quick-witted enough to take on the monsters, a nice reversal of the passive victim role traditionally handed to young women, in horror as in history.
But the other obvious problem with monster mash-ups is that the joke very quickly grows old. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is often very funny, but by the third or fourth chapter you've well and truly got the idea; by the time you come to Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the novelty has thoroughly faded. Winters himself sums up the future of Austen mash-ups on his blog when he says: "Confidentially, when Austen and I started collaborating, she wanted to do Persuasion and Sea Monsters because it's got loads of boats in it. I had to sort of gingerly explain that people don't read that one so much any more."
guardian.co. uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
T. Peter Park
"The Case For Pluto," by Alan Boyle
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2009/12/the_case_for_pl.html
December 06, 2009
Sunday
I attended Alan Boyle's book release signing tonight amongst a group of familiar faces. As such things go, this one was a great deal of fun as attendees were actually rather familiar with the material and the debate to which Alan has taken the 'Pluto is a Planet' side. If you are interested in the history of the whole debate over what is a planet according to astronomers, this is a worthwhile addition to your shelf.
Alan's book release also presents me with the excuse I have been waiting for to throw in my tuppence in this 'debate'.
For astronomical purposes, the reclassification of Pluto to officially be a scare quoted 'Dwarf Planet' is useful. I can also admit their classification of every element other than Hydrogen and Helium as a metal might also be useful... to them. On the other hand, neither classification is of much use to anyone else. Oxygen might be an astronomer's metal, but to one like myself whose undergraduate degree was in Electrical Engineering, this method of sorting elements is rather silly. astronomer's definition of planet is likewise rather worthless outside their discipline.
For those of us who look upon space as a place for settlement, commerce, and a source of resources to feed a solar system wide industrial economy, knowing whether a body clears its orbit of other matter is a "So what?" issue. Settlement and industry have different concerns and will most likely require a more complex system of classification. A planet with a thousand kilometer deep atmosphere that gradually turns to a liquid and then a solid phase is not useful for the same things as a body with a rocky surface. There may be temperate bodies out there covered with hundred mile deep oceans of water; there may be ones with molten rock surfaces. Each presents unique characteristics to the future explorer or industrialist.
From my point of view a planet has sufficient gravity to make it round-ish. Ceres and many of the new bodies outside of Pluto's orbit are therefore planets in my book. I propose that just as Electrical Engineers ignore the astronomer's definition of metal, the rest of us should ignore their definition of planet as well.
Steve Verba
How about a classification system based on degree of potential for horror fiction?
I always thought the planet visited in the movie Alien was about as creepy as any ever depicted – and it resembled Pluto the most of any solar system body.
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T. Peter Park
Steve Verba wrote:
How about a classification system based on degree of potential for horror fiction?
I always thought the planet visited in the movie Alien was about as creepy as any ever depicted – and it resembled Pluto the most of any solar system body..
From: T. Peter Park [mailto:tpete...@erols.com]
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 3:57 PM
To: My-Lovecraf...@googlegroups.com; T. Peter Park; poliztiuhrxq; Chris Perridas; Justin Kidd; George Wagner; Sam Inabinet; Annie Douglas
Subject: YUGGOTH!--"The Case For Pluto," by Alan Boyle (book on still calling Pluto a planet)
HPL fans should find this continuing debate on "Yuggoth" interesting--TPP!
"The Case For Pluto," by Alan Boyle
http://www.samizdat a.net/blog/ archives/ 2009/12/the_ case_for_ pl.html
December 06, 2009
Sunday
The Case For Pluto
Dale Amon ( Belfast , Northern Ireland / Laramie , Wy)
I attended Alan Boyle's book release signing tonight amongst a group of familiar faces. As such things go, this one was a great deal of fun as attendees were actually rather familiar with the material and the debate to which Alan has taken the 'Pluto is a Planet' side. If you are interested in the history of the whole debate over what is a planet according to astronomers, this is a worthwhile addition to your shelf.
Alan's book release also presents me with the excuse I have been waiting for to throw in my tuppence in this 'debate'.
For astronomical purposes, the reclassification of Pluto to officially be a scare quoted 'Dwarf Planet' is useful. I can also admit their classification of every element other than Hydrogen and Helium as a metal might also be useful... to them. On the other hand, neither classification is of much use to anyone else. Oxygen might be an astronomer's metal, but to one like myself whose undergraduate degree was in Electrical Engineering, this method of sorting elements is rather silly. astronomer's definition of planet is likewise rather worthless outside their discipline.
For those of us who look upon space as a place for settlement, commerce, and a source of resources to feed a solar system wide industrial economy, knowing whether a body clears its orbit of other matter is a "So what?" issue. Settlement and industry have different concerns and will most likely require a more complex system of classification. A planet with a thousand kilometer deep atmosphere that gradually turns to a liquid and then a solid phase is not useful for the same things as a body with a rocky surface. There may be temperate bodies out there covered with hundred mile deep oceans of water; there may be ones with molten rock surfaces. Each presents unique characteristics to the future explorer or industrialist.
From my point of view a planet has sufficient gravity to make it round-ish. Ceres and many of the new bodies outside of Pluto's orbit are therefore planets in my book. I propose that just as Electrical Engineers ignore the astronomer's definition of metal, the rest of us should ignore their definition of planet as well.
T. Peter Park
Students Discover Thomas Jefferson Letter
Among Thousands of Items Donated to Library
Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091205110758.htm
ScienceDaily (Dec. 7, 2009) Two University of Delaware graduate
students recently stumbled upon a letter written by President Thomas
Jefferson while sifting through thousands of documents and other items
donated to the university's library.
Jefferson sent the letter, dated 1808, as a condolence correspondence
upon the death of another patriot, John Dickinson.
The letter, addressed to Dr. Joseph Bringhurst, of Wilmington, Delaware
was sent in response to an earlier letter by Bringhurst informing
then-president Jefferson of the death of Dickinson, a delegate to the
Continental Congress, a signer of the Articles of Confederation, a
president of Delaware and an architect of the Constitution.
"Thomas Jefferson is one of the reasons that I got into history," said
History graduate student Amanda Daddona, one of the students who
discovered the letter. "It was quite an exciting day and I had no idea
I'd be finding that when I came into work that morning."
Daddona and fellow student, Matt Davis, are cataloging the archives of
the Rockwood Museum, a collection that was recently donated to the
university by New Castle County.
The Rockwood collection is huge and diverse, containing thousands of
documents, maps, letters, photographs, albums, diaries, deeds, business
records, ephemera and other items from the 17th century until the late
1970s. It may be assumed that many if not most of the older items in
the collection have not been examined for several decades or longer.
"Processing a Special Collection is a process of discovery," observed
Susan Brynteson, Vice Provost and May Morris Director of Libraries.
"What a thrill for the graduate students who discovered this during
their work at the University of Delaware Library! A memory always to be
cherished."
T. Peter Park
As I just said. I thought that some of the galaxies in Fred Hoyle' s slides somewhat resembled protozoa--and reminded me of the living nebulae in Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker. I just looked up the passage in Stapledon's book. In Star Maker, Chapter XIII, "The Beginning and the End," Section I, "Back to the Nebulae," on pp. 399-400 of the 1968 Dover Publications omnibus paperback edition of Last and First Men (1931) and Star Maker (1937), had his astrally universe-exploring 1937 English narrator, merged after countless out-of-the-body wanderings and adventures with the "Cosmic Mind" and further exploring all past and future space and time as part of the "Cosmic Mind," telepathically contact the nebulae at a very, very early period of cosmic evolution, many billions of years ago, shortly after the "Big Bang," when they were still vast tenuous gas-clouds before the coalescence of the first stars and planets.
"At first" Stapledon's narrator "supposed" that he had "inadvertently come into touch with sub-human beings in the primitive age of some natural planet, perhaps with some very lowly amoeboid micro-organisms, floating in a primeval sea." Gradually, however, he discovered that he had "made contact" mentally "not with micro-organisms, nor yet with worlds or stars or galactic minds, but with the minds of the great nebilae before their substance had disintegrated into stars to form the galaxies," when they were still tenuous gas-clouds slowly developing into lens-shaped disks with more and more complex internal structures. He witnessed "these greatest of all megatheria, these amoeboid titans...waken into a vague unity of experience," though by "human standards, and even by the standards of the minded worlds and the stars," the conscious mental "experience of the nebulae was incredibly slow-moving." Ultimately and trafically, however, he also telepathically saw these mentally and spiritually awakening nebulae start dying as more and more of their substance began coalescing into stars and planets, starting some 20 billion years ago, until by our own time all the nebulae had died. As Stapledon's narrator summed it up:
<<Presently I was able to follow their history from the time when they had wakened, when they first existed as clouds of gas, flying apart after the explosive act of creation, even to the time when, with the birth of the stellar hosts out of their substance, they sank into senility and death.>>
Anyway, when Fred Hoyle showed those slides of curiously protozoan-like galaxies at his September 1969 U.Va. talk, I immediately remembered that section of Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker! I wonder if Hoyle had ever read Star Maker, or ever thought about the curiously amoeboid or protozoan-like appearance of many galaxies?
Steve Verba
This brings back my earliest memories of beginning to read in this genre, spending an hour at the drug store book stand deciding which sci fi paperback to purchase with my 50 cents, I picked “The Black Cloud” by Fred Hoyle. This must have been 1960 or 1961....Completely forgot about it until reading this fascinating post.
Here’s is a link for the book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cloud
On a related note, there is the peculiar notion of an incomprehensible planetary intelligence in both versions of the movie Solaris based on the Stanislaw Lem story. The Black Cloud and Solaris both emerged at the advent of the 60’s when there was a lot of the incomprehensible to consider anyhow. Just like Stapleton’s book occurring around the great depression and the rise of Nazism in the 30’s when Lovercraft was warning of cosmic horror.
As for strange galaxies, there is always the Arp catalog....Sort of an “Incovenient Truth” for astronomers.
steve
--
T. Peter Park
What do any of you think or feel about high-intensity, halogen, and xenon (bluish) car headlights? Do you believe their advantages outweigh their disadvantages, or vice versa? I'm specifically thinking of the glare question.
Some of my friends and I believe that the glare from these super-bright headlights far outweighs their purported advantages. Seeing these very bright headlights shining into your eyes from cars coming at you can momentarily blind you--it's not only very uncomfortable and even painful, but it can also make a driver momentarily lose control of his or her car. Against this, advocates of these headlights claim that it helps their use see the road ahead of them, including obstacles and pedestrians, more clearly. It's evidently a question of the advantage to drivers of cars with such headlights themselves, versus the disadvantage to the momentarily blinded drivers of oncoming cars. I myself believe the disadvantage to drivers of oncoming cars outweighs the alleged benefits to those headlight users. However, what do you all think?
Incidentally, I also recall hearing or reading that while those bluish xenon lights are not intrinsically brighter than ordinary headlights, they do radiate mostly in the blue part of the spectrum--which is said to be particularly irritating to the human eye.
Also, I would greatly appreciate any input or information on just who or what is behind those super-bright or glare-rich headlights. Is it the preference and demand of consumers themselves? Is it the car makers--and if so, mainly foreign or domestic car companies? Is it pressure by government bureaucrats claiming the new super-bright headlights to be more energy-efficient? Is it the Obama administration? Is anybody familiar with any literature or research pertaining to these questions?
Any input or insight on these questions would be vastly appreciated! Please do make an effort to reply within the next day or two.
Thanking you in advance for your help,
T. Peter
T. Peter Park
I'm in Wikipedia now! Here's the
"Wiki" article on me, published on January 16, 2010. In keeping with
Wikipedia policy, the article is anonymous--but it was contributed by
one of my e-correspondents, Scott Zimmerle.
T. Peter Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
T. Peter Park (born Tiidn Peter Park,[1] 1941) is an historian, a former librarian, and a prolific, Fortean commentator on anomalous phenomena.[2] According to Chris Perridas, Park is "a foremost Fortean authority on H. P. Lovecraft and the cultural impact his writing has had on our culture through folklore."[3]
Born in Estonia, Park has lived most of his life in the United States. He received a Master's degree from the the University of Virginia in 1965. His Master's thesis was a comparison of the racial views of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. In 1970, he received a PhD in Modern European history from the University of Virginia.[4] His PhD dissertation, entitled "The European reaction to the execution of Francisco Ferrer," described and analyzed the protests to the execution of a Spanish anarchist educator.[5][6][7] He has a strong interest in anomalous phenomena, philosophy, linguistics, social psychology, and the history of social and scientific world views.[8] He currently lives on Long Island, New York.
In an email to a Fortean LISTSERV, Park described his approach towards anomalous phenomena as "basically 'open-minded hard science'".
I find cultural attitudes toward anomalous phenomena as intriguing as the phenomena themselves. I think many Fortean mysteries (e.g., ESP, ghosts, UFO's, abductions, "Bigfoot" and other "Hairy Hominids," "Nessie" and other Lake Monsters, etc.) do involve genuine, fascinating scientific or even cosmological puzzles--but also reflect social and cultural attitudes, tensions, and conflicts, as well. I have a basically "open-minded hard science" approach to things like UFO's, abductions, "Hairy Hominids," and "Lake Monsters," tending to favor extraterrestrial and unknown-animals explanations for whatever defies a more mundane explanation--but I'm also still open to parapsychological, "paraphysical," or "metaphysical" explanations as well, for the more truly weird and bizarre cases. However, if "psychic" or "metaphysical" explanations don't seem to be really called for, but something rather unusual was still seen, I would still favor a "nuts and bolts" ETH ufology and a "flesh and blood, fur and feathers" cryptozoology in preference to occultist approaches. I think the modern "mainstream" scientific world-picture is mostly correct so far as it stands, but also quite incomplete--with paranormal and "Fortean" phenomena pointing to some of its gaps and omissions. In my own outlook and orientation, I personally very much straddle the "Two Cultures" of "mainstream" academic, scholarly, scientific, and literary "high culture" on the one hand, and of parapsychology and Forteanism on the other.[9]
In an 2006 article in Fate magazine entitled "Little Men, Hobbits, and Ultra-Pygmies", Park discussed the Homo floresiensis find with cross-cultural legends of little people.[10]
[edit] Notes
- ^ [1]
- ^ Kevin D. Randle, "Book reviews" The Society for Scientific Exploration
- ^ Chris Perridas, "Interview with T. Peter Park, Fortean authority on H.P. Lovecraft" horrorlibrary.net
- ^ "Too Many Anomalies, Not Enough Time"
- ^ The Escuela Moderna Movement of Francisco Ferrer:" Por la Verdad y la Justicia" GC Fidler History of Education Quarterly, 1985 - jstor.org
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ "Too Many Anomalies, Not Enough Time"
- ^ "Introducing myself to fo...@yahoogroups.com"
- ^ [4] FATE magazine, August 2006 Volume 59, Number 8, Issue 676
[edit] Works
- Untitled letter in response to "Air Force Academy" Harpers Feb 1963
- "Thomas Carlyle and the Jews" Journal of European Studies, Vol. 20 (1990), pp. 1–21.
- "Jews", "Ireland", "Edward Gibbon" and "France" in The Carlyle Encyclopedia, edited by Mark Cumming Fairleigh Dickinson University Press ISBN 0-8386-3792-2 [5]
- John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, and the U.S. Civil War The Historian, 1991 Volume 54 Issue 1, Pages 93 – 106
- "Too Many Anomalies, Not Enough Time"[6] The Anomalist:5 (1997) p. 4-7
- "Carlyle and the American Civil War" Carlyle studies annual, p. 124 (1999)
- "H.P. Lovecraft's 'Innsmouth' and Real-life Merbeings"
- "A Little Church Around the Corner: Rambling Reflections on Religious Pluralism"[7]
- "H.P. Lovecraft: An Abductee?"[8]
- "Two Forteanisms: Scientific Vs. Fringe"[9] UFO Evidence "Unsorted Documents 4"
- "The 'Lincoln Legend': A 'Forme Fruste' Urban Legend"[10] The Anomalist 1999
- "Vanishing Vanishings"[11] The Anomalist 7 Winter 1998/99
- "Sky Visions, Ghost Riders, and Phantom Armies" in The Anomalist, No. 10 (2002)
- "Cycles fortéens: adieu sirènes, bonjour crop circles?"[12] La Gazette Fortéenne Volume 3 (2004)
- "Proto-World Languages and Pidgins/Creoles as IAL Models"[13] The World Language Process Symposium at AILA 15th World Congress of Applied Linguistics August 24–29, 2008 University Duisburg-Essen Essen, Germany
Darren Lee Mitton
MorganScorpion
chris perridas
From: T. Peter Park <tpete...@erols.com>
To: T. Peter Park <tpete...@erols.com>
Sent: Fri, January 29, 2010 10:47:56 PM
Subject: My Wikipedia debut
T. Peter Park
NB--The article, however, omits
mentioning the suggestion that the Jersey Devil legend might have given
horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) the inspiration for his
novella "The Dunwich Horror," though HPL moved the setting of his tale
from the New Jersey Pine Barrens to the backwoods of Massachusetts--TPP
Jersey Devil A Legendary Creature
http://www.ordoh.com/?p=4564
The Jersey Devil is a legendary creature or cryptid said to inhabit the
Pine Barrens in southern New Jersey. The creature is often described as
a flying biped with hooves, but there are many variations. The Jersey
Devil has worked its way into the pop culture of the area, even lending
its name to New Jersey's team in the National Hockey League.
There are several suggested origins of the Jersey Devil legend. The
most accepted origin of the story, as far as New Jerseyans are
concerned, started with Mother Leeds and is as follows:
"It was said that Mother Leeds had 12 children and, after giving birth
to her 12th child, stated that if she had another, it would be the
Devil. In 1735, Mother Leeds was in labor on a stormy night. Gathered
around her were her friends. Mother Leeds was supposedly a witch and
the child's father was the Devil himself. The child was born normal,
but then changed form. It changed from a normal baby to a creature with
hooves, a horse's head, bat wings and a forked tail. It growled and
screamed, then killed the midwife before flying up the chimney. It
circled the villages and headed toward the pines. In 1740 a clergy
exorcised the demon for 100 years and it wasn't seen again until 1890."
"Mother Leeds" has been identified by some as Deborah Leeds. This
identification may have gained credence from the fact that Deborah
Leeds' husband, Japhet Leeds, named twelve children in the will he
wrote in 1736, which is compatible with the legend of the Jersey Devil
being the thirteenth child born by Mother Leeds. Deborah and Japhet
Leeds also lived in the Leeds Point section of what is now Atlantic
County, New Jersey, which is the area commonly said to be the location
of the Jersey Devil story.
The Jersey Devil legend is fueled by the various testimonials from
alleged eyewitnesses who have reported to have encountered the
creature, from precolonial times to the present day, as there are still
reported sightings within the New Jersey area.
The physical descriptions of the Jersey Devil appear to be mostly
consistent with a species of pterosaur such as a dimorphodon.
Skeptics generally believe the Jersey Devil to be nothing more than a
creative manifestation of the original English settlers, and a
modern-day urban legend. The aptly named Pine Barrens were shunned by
most early settlers as a desolate, threatening place. Being relatively
isolated, the barrens were a natural refuge for those wanting to remain
hidden, including religious dissenters, loyalists, fugitives and
military deserters in colonial times. Such individuals formed solitary
groups and were pejoratively called "pineys", some of whom became
notorious bandits known as "pine robbers". Pineys were further
demonized after two early twentieth century eugenics studies depicted
them as congenital idiots and criminals. It is easy to imagine early
tales of terrible monsters arising from a combination of sightings of
genuine animals such as bears, the activities of pineys, and fear of
the barrens. Other skeptics believe that the Jersey Devil is nothing
more than an !
old time Bogeyman, stories created and told by bored Pine Barren
residents as a form of entertainment and told to children who stayed up
past their bedtime.
Outdoorsman and author Tom Brown, Jr. spent several seasons living in
the wilderness of the Pine Barrens. He recounts occasions when
terrified hikers mistook him for the Jersey Devil, after he covered his
whole body with mud to repel mosquitoes.
Another school of thought is that the Sandhill Crane, which has a 7
feet wingspan, roughly matching the descriptions of the Jersey Devil,
is the basis of the Jersey Devil stories, although descriptions of the
Jersey Devil do not match most of the characteristics of the Sandhill
Crane.
T. Peter Park
The world's only immortal animal
The turritopsis nutricula species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world to have truly discovered the fountain of youth.
Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span. Scientists say the hydrozoan the jellyfish is the only known animal that can repeatedly turn back the hands of time and revert to its polyp state (its first stage of life).
The key lies in a process called transdifferentiation, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell. Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nutricula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again. Researchers are studying the jellyfish to discover how it is able to reverse its aging process.
Because they are able to bypass death, the number of individuals is spiking. They're now found in oceans around the globe rather than just in their native Caribbean waters. "We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion," says waters. "We are looking at a worldwide silent invasion," says Dr. Maria Miglietta of the Smithsonian Tropical Marine Institute.
Bryan Nelson is a regular contributor to Mother Nature Network, where a version of this post originally appeared.
T. Peter Park
Jersey Devil: Horrific Fantasy or Genetic Mutant?
At least that's how legend and folklore describe the creature known as the Jersey Devil. (Not to be confused, by the way, with the New Jersey Devils, the professional hockey franchise named after the legendary creature.)
At the Paranormal Museum in Asbury Park, N.J., a recently opened exhibit features a variety of artifacts, including reproductions of a Jersey Devil skull, drawings and relics.
Museum owner Kathy Kelly says the story most associated with the Jersey Devil involved a woman who, in the 1700s, prayed for her 13th child to be born a devil. "Shortly after the child was born," says Kelly, "he transformed into a creature that was twice the size of a full-grown man, with cloven feet, wings and talons for hands, and he killed the midwife and then flew off into the Pinelands, where he has terrorized people ever since," according to the story.
The Pinelands area of New Jersey, according to the National Park Service, was established in 1978 as the country's first national reserve, covering more than a million acres of farms, forests and wetlands -- a perfect environment for an unknown animal to hide in.
Archaeologist Paula Perrault has seen alleged Jersey Devil skulls with both straight and curved horns, and says the Pinelands has a history of "genetic malformations, even in mammals, serpents and humans. A lot of the portrayals in any culture seem to define evil as a serpent crossed with something else -- it's never just a serpent."
Some animals of this Garden State location have been found with abnormalities, including odd colorations, extra appendages and even lizards with extra heads.
>From an archaeological perspective, Perrault speculates that there is "some kind of mineral deposit in the area, made up of heavy metal that could be one thing that might cause genetic differences."
Later this year, Perrault plans to trace the various trails along New Jersey's Route 30, where "supposedly there are many petroglyphs [rock carvings dating back thousands of years], and some of them lost over time, where Native Americans depicted an entity that has reptilian features."
"There may or may not be a Jersey Devil creature," says Angus Gillespie, a professor of American studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "But from a folkloristic standpoint, it's a fact that the story exists -- this story has been in oral circulation in south Jersey ever since 1735," making it possibly the oldest reported "monster" in America.
Gillespie says many people are reluctant to step forward with their belief for fear of ridicule. He cites a 1909 episode of a number of sightings in the Camden County area.
"Strange tracks were found in the snow, and as a result of these sightings, teams of illustrators and reporters were sent out from various Philadelphia newspapers -- no photographers, just illustrators.
"Apparently, these urbanized city-slicker reporters took a satirical and patronizing attitude and wrote disparagingly of it and illustrated it with cartoon-like characters," Gillespie says. "The New Jersey residents reacted, saying, 'Well, if we're going to be ridiculed, we're just not going to talk about it to outsiders.'"
So what exactly are we dealing with here? It kind of depends on a combination of legendary stories, science and your personal point of view.
Kelly, who also owns Paranormal Books & Curiosities in Asbury Park, says there are two schools of thought about the creature. "You have the kind of paranormal, supernatural idea, which suggests that this is actually the son of the devil. And the other possibility is that this is some sort of mutated animal that has not yet been identified by science."
Perrault agrees, saying, "I think it's an animal that's been deformed in some way. There's a lot of things we haven't seen -- just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there."
As she tries to piece together the puzzle of what this particular animal may turn out to be, Perrault doesn't rule out the possibility that it could be an aberration of a quite normal animal.
"From the size, and from the reported physical appearances throughout the ages, I would say it might be a deer, based on the reported skulls, the hooves and the bone structure," she says.
The archaeologist adds that if the Jersey Devil is, in fact, a family of deformed deer that has terrorized New Jersey citizens for centuries, there's a simple answer to why it's been reported as standing up to 8 feet tall on two legs.
"If you go into the woods and come across deer and startle them, they'll stand up on their back feet and get ready to run, and if you find a deer that's injured, he will paw at you and try to attack you," Perrault says.
So if you happen to see a deer in the dark and are frightened by its curved or spiked horns, you may just be misinterpreting something in the shadows or moonlight.
Folklorist Gillespie acknowledges that one of the problems of trying to prove the existence of the Jersey Devil is the lack of any photographic evidence.
"We don't have a photograph, bones, fur, droppings -- there's an absence of hard data," he says. "But the absence of positive proof does not prove the lack of existence of the creature, philosophically. It's just that we may have missed him."
T. Peter Park wrote:
T. Peter Park
C.M Kornbluth's "The Cosmic Charge Account" depicted a sweet little old lady running an occult and "metaphysical" bookstore in a small Pennsylvania town, who actually develops real psychic powers after reading a rather run-of-the-mill "psychobabble" word-salad. A financially desperate German refugee philosophy professor had written Practical Applied Epistemology as a cynical money-making venture (likr Bertrand Russell's popular books in Ludwig Wittgenstein's view), hopimg it might help relieve his financial straits by selling a few hundred or thousand copies to readers with "metaphysical" leanings dumb or gullible enough to think it actually meant something. Well, it turns out to awaken the latent real paranormal powers of the owner of "Ye Olde Occult Book Shoppe." She uses her newfound powers to create a slowly expanding psychic force-field around herself and her bookstore, within which everybody becomes a moronically blissed-out zombie, incapable any more of rational or critical thought, walking around with a perpetual silly grin. One of her good customers develops delusions of royalty, calling herself the "Duchess of Carbondale (PA), after the nearest bigger town, driving an old jalopy she calls her "chariot," welcoming the cheerful homage of her "subjects."
The Army places a quarantine around the little town with its slowly expanding force-field, sensing that something mighty peculiar and potentially very dangerous is going on, without the slightest notion of just exactly what. Somehow (I forget just exactly how) they trace the phenomenon to the German refugee professor and the literary agent who helped market his book/ The professor and his agent are flown to the town and dumped near the bookstore--where they manage to resist the proprietor's euphoric spell by deliberately quarreling with each other, heaping insult upon insult at each other. Finally, as I seem to recall, they inadvertently ki;; the little old lady and the Duchess of Carbondale. The force field collapses, and everybody in town reverts to their nastry or at least realistically rational normal human selves.
T. Peter Park
Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li! Did even
bigger cousins waddle around in ancient Antarctica's Mountains of
Madness? :-)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11420635
30 September 2010 Last updated at 19:41
Ancient giant penguin unearthed in Peru
By Katia Moskvitch Science reporter, BBC News
The fossil of a giant penguin that lived 36 million years ago has been
discovered in Peru.
Scientists say the find shows that key features of the plumage were
present quite early on in penguin evolution.
The team told Science magazine
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/science.1193604>
that
the animal's feathers were brown and grey, distinct from the black
"tuxedo" look of modern penguins.
It was about 1.5m (5ft) tall and nearly twice as heavy as an Emperor
Penguin, the largest living species.
The bird, named Inkayacu paracasensis, or Water King, waddled the
Earth during the late Eocene period.
It had a long, straight beak, much longer than that of its modern
relatives.
'Pedro'
The fossil was found in Reserva Nacional de Paracas in Peru. The
scientists nicknamed the penguin "Pedro" - after a scaly character in
a Colombian TV series.
One of the highlights of the study was the presence of well-preserved
feathers and scales.
"Before this fossil, we had no evidence about the feathers, colours
and flipper shapes of ancient penguins," said Julia Clarke, a
palaeontologist at the University of Texas, US, and lead author of the
study.
"We had questions and this was our first chance to start answering
them."
She explained to BBC News that the fossil also shows that penguins'
main physical features evolved millions of years ago, but the colour
of penguin feathers switched from reddish brown and grey to
black-and-white quite recently.
Great divers
It is the particular shape of flippers and feathers that makes
penguins such powerful swimmers.
During wing-propelled diving - the so-called aquatic flight - these
birds are able to generate propulsive forces in an environment about
800 times denser and 70 times more viscous than air.
Julia Clarke The team excavated the fossil in Reserva Nacional de
Paracas in Peru
"One thing that's interesting in living penguins is that how deep they
dive correlates with body size," said Dr Clarke.
"The heavier the penguin, the deeper it dives. If that holds true for
any penguins, then the dive depths achieved by these giant forms
would've been very different."
To get an idea about the colour of the feathers of the long-dead
penguin, the team examined melanosomes - microscopic structures in the
fossil, whose size, shape and arrangement determine the colour of a
bird's feathers.
"Insights into the colours of extinct organisms can reveal clues to
their ecology and behaviour," said co-author Jakob Vinther of Yale
University, US.
"But most of all, I think it is simply just cool to get a look at the
colour of a remarkable extinct organism, such as a giant fossil
penguin."
The researchers say that the find, together with some other recent
discoveries from the same area, is just another evidence of a rich
diversity of giant penguin species in the late Eocene period of
low-latitude Peru.
"This is an extraordinary site to preserve evidence of structures like
scales and feathers," said Dr Clarke.
"So there's incredible potential for new discoveries that can change
our view not only of penguin evolution, but of other marine
vertebrates."
-. . .- -.. -- .
http://genesistrine.wordpress.com/
T. Peter Park
By Diane C. Hundertmark
Ah, October in Rhode Island. Clear crisp windswept nights, perfect weather for inspiring just the right sort of Halloween spirit. Still, if you are looking for something more to get you into the proper mood, you need look no further then some of the quiet towns of Rhode Island to find your inspiration. These are the very same places that many researchers say Bram Stoker drew some of his ideas for Dracula.
Beginning in 1799 and ending in 1892 you can find various accounts of six local vampires. Some of the records are very detailed and with some, there is only a simple short statement to be found. All these stories have one thing in common; the Rhode Island Vampires were all women in the first blush of youth. They are gruesome accounts of family tragedies and brutal mutilations in often failed attempts to stop and kill the vampires.
The first record is a short cryptic request made by a Mr. Stephen Staples to the Cumberland Town Council in 1796 to "try an experiment" in an attempt to save one daughter's life by digging up his other daughter who had recently died. There is no explanation of what the experiment was, but reading the other accounts of how vampires were dealt with, we can assume it was similar.
The next vampire case was recorded in 1799. Sarah Tillinghast's fate was revealed in a prophetic dream her father Stuckely "Snuffy" Tillinghast had some months before tragedy struck the family. A dream in which half of his orchard died. The Tillinghasts were well to do farmers in Exeter, and Sarah was the first of the Tillinghast children to die. Soon others fell sick, and all complained that Sarah was returning at night to press on their chests. By one account, six of the 14 Tillinghast children died and a seventh was taken ill before neighbors convinced Mr. Tillinghast to dig up those who had died.
When they did so, Sarah was found to have fresh blood in her heart and veins. Unlike European tradition wherein the vampire was killed with a stake through the heart, in New England the solution was to burn the vampire's heart.
When the gruesome task was done, the bodies where reburied, but still some accounts say the seventh child died. Other records show only four of the 14 children died, and some researchers speculate the others were added in legends to match the dream.
The reports of vampires moved to Foster in 1827 when the body of the 19-year-old daughter of Captain Levi Young was exhumed after others in the family became ill. The remains of Nancy Young where burned and the fumes inhaled by the family members as a cure and protection, still four more of the family's eight children died.
Peacedale was the next town to be struck. Believing his recently deceased daughter Ruth Ellen to be a vampire, William G. Rose had her body exhumed and her heart cut out and burned in 1874.
Onward the vampires and the gruesome solutions marched to West Greenwich. There in Rhode Island Historical Cemetery No. 2 you can find the grave of Nelly L. Vaughn who died at the age of 19 in 1889. Legends hold that nothing will grow on her grave and it is cursed.
Finally, we come to perhaps Rhode Island's most famous vampire, Mercy Brown. Accounts in the Providence Journal at the time documented her story. In the midst of a bitter cold winter in 1892, Mercy died at 19 years of age, following her mother and sister to the grave, both of whom had died of a mysterious disease in 1883. Unable to dig through the frozen ground, Mercy was placed in a crypt. Soon people reported seeing her walking about town. When her brother Edwin became ill soon after Mercy's death, George Brown obtained permission to exhume all three of the women.
On March 18, 1892, family and friends gathered at the Cemetery behind the Exeter Chestnut Hill Baptist Church to complete their grisly task. To their horror, of the three women, Mercy was found to look alive and she seemed to have moved in her coffin. Fearing she was indeed a vampire, family members cut out her heart and were horrified to find it full of fresh blood. Here too, the solution was to burn her heart on a nearby stone. They then mixed the ashes with some of Edwin's medicine and had him drink it, in the hopes of curing him. Alas it failed, Edwin died two months later. You can visit Mercy Brown's grave at Rhode Island Historical Cemetery No 22.
Clippings from the Providence Journal about Mercy Brown were discovered among the papers of Bram Stoker after his death, leading many to speculate that he based many items in his novel Dracula on the Rhode Island vampire stories. He was not the only writer to find ideas in these stories. Even Rhode Island's favorite son of the weird and macabre, H.P. Lovecraft, got into the spirit. In his short story "The Shunned House" published in October 1924, he retold the stories of Mercy Brown and Sarah Tillinghest with his own special flair.
So now, you have two gravesites to visit, and now you can read Dracula and "The Shunned House" knowing the inspiration came from our own Rhode Island towns and byways. Perhaps standing on the hilltop in Rhode Island Historical Cemetery No 22 on Route 102 in Exeter with the gloomy woods around you looking down at Mercy Brown's grave, you'll find the perfect Halloween mood. Of course, all the Rhode Island vampires were dispatched hundreds of years ago, and there is nothing in the graves but dust . . . .
However, there still is that epitaph on Nelly Vaughn's gravestone. It is there for all to see in Historical Cemetery No. 2 in West Greenwich. Strange and disturbing words -- "I am waiting and watching for you."*
For additional information about Rhode Island Vampires, see two books by Christopher Rondina: Vampire Legends of Rhode Island (1997) and Vampire Hunter's Guide to New England (2000).
*Because of vandalism, the gravestone of Nelly Vaughn has been removed from the cemetery.