Everyone here, it seems, has a theory about the Nasca Lines. The mysterious markings on the desert floor are a massive astronomical calendar. That's a popular one. Or maybe they point to hidden reserves of water, the source of life in the desert.Then there's my favorite: UFO landing site. Forty years ago, Danish writer Erich Von Daniken popularized that theory with his best-selling book Chariots of the Gods?...
Karl Pflock on the ETH
Karl always maintained that some UFO cases were visits from extraterrestrial visitors, but he was also convinced that "they" came here in the 1950s and 1960s, and then left - perhaps to return someday, perhaps not...
Man in black
Craig Myers did what UFO-believers always say newspaper reporters never do when it comes to sightings: He investigated. The deeper he dug, the more he found that called into question the legitimacy of purported spacecraft flying over Gulf Breeze, Fla...
You see dead people? Big deal. Join the club
"I see dead people,” Haley Joel Osment famously said in the film “The Sixth Sense.” If the current crop of similarly themed television series is any indication, so do a lot of folks...
Before the Wright Brothers... there were UFOs
Bigfoot on campus
At a glance, Professor D. Jeffrey Meldrum would seem to be a star on the Idaho State University campus here. A popular instructor, Meldrum has written or edited five books, written dozens of articles in academic journals, and ranged across the American West and Canada for his field research. Primatologist Jane Goodall wrote a blurb for his latest book, which she said "brings a much-needed level of scientific analysis" to a raging debate...
Does Bigfoot have academic freedom?
The Los Angeles Times reports on an Idaho State University tenured professor, D. Jeffrey Meldrum, who has written a book seeming to endorse the existence of bigfoot: "Sasquatch: Legend Meets Science." It's based on a Discovery Channel series, and published by a science fiction press. 20 colleagues wrote a letter worrying that Idaho State "may be perceived as a university that endorses fringe science over fundamental scientific perspectives that have withstood critical inquiry." There might be a danger of a threat to academic freedom here, if Meldrum is punished for having written this book, apart from his other work...
She hears dead people
When I watched the movie The Sixth Sense, I thought it was impossible to see dead people. I had never come across anyone talking about possessing this ability until a few weeks ago, when one of my students actually wrote about a similar extrasensory ability in her essay. This student can actually hear dead people. Creepy, eh? It’s true...
Exorcism: Psychiatry meets faith
Alone in her bedroom, the black-dressed woman thumbed through her binder of spells and contemplated her next victim. The baritone voice of Satan rumbled in her mind, enticing her deeper into the dark side. "Satan told me in a deep, demonic voice, 'You belong to me,'" said Samantha Wheeler, who believes she's been possessed since age 12...
The Bear Lake legend
Our local paper had a story about the Bear Lake Monster today. For those unfamiliar with Bear Lake, it’s located on the eastern Utah/Idaho border. Bear Lake is at an elevation of 5,904 feet, and is 20 miles long and 8 miles wide with a depth of 208 feet. The water has a beautiful turquoise hue which is caused by limestone particles suspended in the lake. It also has an alleged monster...
If not from space, where?
Cryptoterrestrial lore is replete with allusions to underground habitats, subterranean labyrinths navigable only to an enlightened few, and even modern-day below-ground facilities staffed, in part, by government operatives. From Richard Shaver's fancifully paranoid tales of the "Deros" to Bob Lazar's depiction of S-4 (allegedly a supersecret base a stone's throw away from Area 51), the "alien" meme challenges us with the prospect that our world is separated from the other by the merest of partitions . . . and that the CTs are almost as comfortable in our bedrooms and on our roadsides as they are in their own realm...
Was it a Shunka Warak’in?
In December 2005, a strange wolf-like animal started killing livestock in McCone, Garfield and Dawson counties, Montana. By March 2006, it had struck six herds of sheep in McCone and Garfield Counties, wounding 71 and killing 36 ewes. The thing had even reached the status of being named; it was called "The Creature of McCone County."..
Bigfoot and supermarket theory
It was startling self-evident I was completely wrong about my immediate impression of the locale after my first Bigfoot encounter. I remember so distinctly standing on a country lane bordered by corn eight feet tall on that first day. It looked like the typical Midwest countryside. I asked myself: "Why are they (Bigfoot) here?..
