Movies You Haven't Seen But Should: High and Low

Wiki:

High and Low (Tengoku to jigoku, literally "Heaven and Hell"^?) is a 1963 film directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshirō Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, and Kyōko Kagawa in the lead roles. It was loosely based on King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct police procedural by Evan Hunter (written under the pseudonym Ed McBain).

High and Low is told in two acts. The first act is about an executive named Kingo Gondo (Toshirō Mifune) who mortgages all he has to stage a leveraged buyout and gain control of a company called National Shoes, with the intent of keeping the company out of the hands of its other executives. Gondo disagrees with the executives over the direction of the company. One faction wants to make the company a modern mass market low quality manufacturer while the founder of the company tries to keep it conservative with good quality. Gondo believes he can split the difference by making high quality modern shoes. Then he learns that his son has been kidnapped. Gondo is prepared to pay the ransom, until he learns that the kidnappers have mistakenly abducted the child of Gondo's chauffeur, instead of his own son ....

Dark Roasted Weirdsville (flashback): I Don't Feel So Good ....

FOR SALE:
ONE ISLAND, OFF THE COAST OF SCOTLAND
ONLY ONE PREVIOUS OWNER (HER MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT)
CAVEAT EMPTOR

It's a nice enough place, this barren dome of rock between Gairloch and Ullapool. Conveniently close to the mainland, like most of Scotland it's not without a certain bleak charm. Just the place for a Heathcliff to do some Wuthering Heights or some Shakespearian witches to stir up a bubbling pot of trouble.

But if you'd landed on its shores just 17 years ago, you would have probably had a very different opinion, one formulated just before you began to suffer something kind of like a cold (high fever, aches, trouble breathing, etc.) and then ... well, how to put it?

You'd die.

For most of the world post-9/11, the word has an immediate stomach punch of frightening recognition. But well before some of it was sent out in envelopes piggybacking the terror of Al-Qaeda, anthrax has been tossed around as a weapon of last resort. There's only one problem when you toss anything around: you just might drop it.

Gruinard Island wasn't an accident, but it could be argued that the testing that took place there in 1942 exceeded the British Government's wildest expectations to a frightening degree. The special breed of anthrax, Vollum 14578l, that was released there via special bombs killed the flock of test sheep within only a few days but had the side effect of leaving that Scottish hunk of rock completely uninhabitable for close to fifty years. In 1990 the island was decontaminated and today it's considered safe for man and beast, though I doubt Gruinard will become a common tourist spot.

Once again, Gruinard can't really be considered an "ooops" if the island was intentionally turned into a terrifyingly lethal spot, though that doesn't really make it any easier to think about.

But then there's the town of Sverdlovsk, as it was called back in the days of the USSR (it's now called Ekaterinburg). Lovely little spot, I'm sure, full of all kinds of restfully quiet quaintness and charm, or maybe just the heavy grayness of a typical Soviet town. On a bad day back in 1979, though, Sverdlovsk got even quieter. It was close to a biowarfare lab; one that had an accident.

What happened to Sverdlovsk wasn't known until 1992 when the KGB finally released its death grip on the info. What came to light was this: because of Soviet slippery fingers, some people died from anthrax exposure.

Sixty-eight of them to be precise.

Another scary Russian spot is Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea. Ironically meaning "Rebirth," Vozrozhdeniya was used for extensive biowarfare testing. That is until the Soviet Union fell and researchers stationed there decided to walk off the job in 1991, leaving behind anthrax and bubonic plague containers. Bad enough, but what's chilling is that the containers weren't treated with the respect they deserved and many began to [shudder] leak. Vozrozhdeniya was cleaned up in 2002 but between 1991 and 2000, the island was simply
posted as a no-go zone. Vozrozhdeniya and Sverdlovsk are scary enough, without getting into the fact that anthrax and bubonic plague can survive for decades even i some very harsh environments, but consider this: we know about Sverdlovsk and Vozrozhdeniya. What about other places we don't know about?

The Japanese against the Chinese in World War II, Iraq versus Iran, Irag against the Kurds, the Holocaust, Germany against the allies in World War I, the Aum Shinrikyo cult against Japan, Russian troops against Chechen terrorists: all kinds of countries and groups have used chemical weapons in battle, or as an attempt at genocide, and what hasn't been used has been developed and stored as forms of chemical and biological Mutual Assured Destruction. In addition to the Russians and the British, we've also conducted more than our fair share of experiments with nasty bugs and chemicals. And although the U.S. hasn't had any accidents -- that we know of -- we've not been particularly careful with these nasties, either.

While anthrax is frightening because of its longevity and biological spread, for really scary stuff, dig into such delights as Novichok, the v-series, the g-series, and VX. Death in the animal kingdom is one thing, but if you really want to kill, leave it up to our own inventiveness: choking, nausea, salivating, urinating, defecating, gastrointestinal pain, vomiting, then comes the twitching and finally coma. Nerve gas exposure is not a fun way to go.

If reading about Vozrozhdeniya and Sverdlovsk leaves a bad taste in the mouth about the way Russia's handled its biological weapons, how about the way the U.S. has handled what could be potentially worse: until 1972 the military basically had carte blanche to dispose of nerve gas agents by dumping them into the ocean. Let's let that sink in for a moment. Nerve gas -- 32,000 tons of it. In the ocean. Not just any ocean, mind you, but in 26 dump sites off the coast of 11 states.

Bad? Hell yes, but it gets worse. "How can it get worse?" you ask. Well, how about this: we know where about about half those sites are.

But the rest, because of poor record keeping, are a mystery. Those drums are out there, right now, rusting and no doubt leaking, spilling nasty death into the sea, doing who knows what to crabs and lobsters, fish and ocean flora, and thanks to the food chain, probably even us.

Dark Roasted Weirdsville (flashback): Are You ... You?

So far you lucky readers -- if that’s really what you are -- have been treated to lost nuclear hardware, misplaced biological weapons, an18th century spiritualist and his clockwork ‘God,’ and recently, creatures great and small (mostly small) that can kill you faster than you can read this sentence -- even if you’re a slow reader.

But there’s an even more terrifying, creepy, freaky, disturbing subject we haven’t talked about yet: one that can make even the heartiest, stone-stomached of you clutch your tail-wagging doggies and purring kitties while rocking back and forth mumbling “nature is good, nature is good, nature is good …”

As you’ll soon read, however, even your loving pets can save you from the nightmare that is, more than likely, with you already.

Or, to be precise, living inside you already: parasites.

YouTube has far too many clips of botflies, tapeworms, or pinworms in all their disgusting glory: squirming and writhing from puss-glistening holes in their victims, squirming in the bellies of those unfortunate enough to have become part of their life cycle. But that’s not the worst.

We like to think we’re the masters of our destiny, that “I think I shall do (fill in the blank)” comes only from our minds and wills. But in some cases that’s just not true -- or, perhaps, that’s what the creature living inside me is telling me to say.

Welcome to the wonderful world of not just parasites, but parasites that directly influence or flat-out control their hosts.

(By the way, despite some clear similarities, this article is not connected to the conspiracy regarding the recently released novel, Me2, authored by an impostor claiming to be me. Only a desperate hack would tangentially promote his work in such a manner.)

Beginning big or at least not microscopic, the emerald cockroach wasp has a very unique, and rather frightening, method of supplying its pupal young with a meal. Like some other insects, the wasp feeds its young living prey: paralyzing the snack and then laying an egg on its still-living body. But the emerald isn’t a very big bug, unlike the monstrous tarantula wasp, so it can’t drag its prey back to its burrow. Instead, the emerald performs a type of on-the-go brain surgery, carefully stinging a roach in a few selected parts of its brain, disabling its escape reflex. The wasp then chews off the roach’s antenna, effectively blinding it. Hijacking the roach’s remaining stub of an antenna, it then leads the still-living and -- if roaches have a form of consciousness -- aware bug back to its burrow where it will be a still-living dinner for its offspring.

Yes, you may shudder. But it gets worse.

You’re just lucky you’re not a snail, especially one that happens to become part of a leucochloridium paradoxum ’s elaborate lifecycle. Beginning as eggs in bird droppings, leucochloridium enters the snail’s body and then proceeds into its digestive tract. After a bit of time there, it develops into a larva – and then things get interesting.

How, you might ask, does leucochloridium go from snails to birds? Well, we know how -- but you might not want to know the answer.

What leucochloridium does is make its way from the snail’s gut to one of its eyestalks. There it causes the stalk to become red and inflamed. But that’s not all. The parasite also distorts the snail’s light perception so that it doesn’t hide from light anymore. So, out in the broad daylight, one eyestalk brightly colored, it becomes a something very much like a grub or caterpillar -- which birds love to eat. So the whole cycle begins again.

Then there’s sacculina, a type of barnacle. It loves crabs, but not in a healthy kind of way. What sacculina does, while in the barnacle’s larval phase, is find a nice, juicy crab and land on it. Then it walks around the unlucky crustacean until it finds an unarmored joint, and injects itself into the crab’s tasty meat. But sacculina doesn’t eat the crab. Oh, no – it’s not as simple as that. After a time in the crab’s body, the barnacle reproduces and reproduces and reproduces some more until it emerges as something a lot like a female’s egg sac.

That’s important, because it’s not just the female crab this happens to. If you should happen to be a male crab then transvestitism is in your future. Sacculina messes with the hormones in the male crab, making it basically a female -- especially appealing to other male crabs. It even goes as far as adjust the male’s behavior so it actually begins to act like a female crab, all to attract a male crab that may or may not have other sacculina parasites to fertilize and keep the cycle going. Once sacculina has you, if you’re a crab that is, then you belong to it. Sterilized, you become nothing but a mother to its eggs. Until you die.

We’re not finished yet -- far from it. Just be lucky you’re not a grasshopper or a cricket. Spinochordodes tellinii (the hairworm) larva finds its way into an unlucky hoppity by being eaten. Once in the bug it grows -- but don’t think the worm just gets bigger. It gets so big that when the adult worm comes out of the cricket it can be four times longer than the bug. It’s how it comes out that’s going to give you the shivers. When it simply has had enough of the bug, having pretty much eaten all of it from the inside, the worm takes possession of the insect’s brain, causing it to single-mindedly hunt out water. When it does, the bug jumps in -- and that’s when the worm erupts out of the host and swims away.

Okay, so it’s not fun to be a snail, or a crab, or a cricket. But what about poor homo sapiens? Please don’t tell me you think we don’t have our own, completely unwelcome passengers. I’ve already mentioned botflies, pinworms and tapeworms. But they are just freeloaders. They aren’t driving the bus that is us like these other manipulative parasites do.

Hold that puppy close, cuddle that kitten -- but maybe not that close. Ever heard of toxoplasma gondii? No? Well you might have but it’s certainly heard of you. In fact I’ll bet dollars to donuts that it’s paying a lot of attention to these words right now. Feel like doing something else? Anything else but reading this?

Maybe that isn’t you. Maybe it’s toxoplasma gondii.

I love kitties. But after reading about toxoplasma gondii I think I’m going to become a dog person. Primarily a cat parasite, gondii’s a protozoa that enters the feline system when the animal eats an infected animal. Once in the system, the protozoa can then reproduce asexually, making life pretty damned easy for itself.

But not for its hosts. Although the protozoa is mostly a cat fancier, it also can infect rats and mice. When it does, it does something rather creepy: it directly screws with the infected animal’s brain, taking out Mickey’s fear of cats. Think about that for a second: not open spaces, not water, not something big and general. Gondii only takes out a mouse’s fear of cats -- making sure it’ll get eaten by one, its host of preference.

Like I said, I really like kitties. But is that really ‘me’ who likes cats? Rats and mice and other warm-blooded creatures can carry gondii. You and I and every other homo sapien are also warm-blooded. I think you see where this is going.

Here’s a number for you: 25%. That’s a rather benign amount until you think of 25% of humans. Especially when I add that it’s been theorized that 25% of human beings may be infected by gondii – a parasite that affects the behavior of its hosts.

Some researchers have suggested that men who have gondii in their systems have lower IQs, are more prone to ‘novelty seek,’ and more masculine. Weirdly, infected women come out with higher IQs.

Then there’s reproduction. Not only do some think gondii changes what we are personality-wise, but its also been suggested that women who are infected have a tendency to give birth to more sons -- and males are more likely to spread the infection.

We’ve lost nuclear weapons, contaminated whole islands with biological devices, created mechanical Gods, and have been killed by very small critters with very nasty venoms. But when you think about parasites, especially certain kinds of parasites, the question then becomes:

Who are ‘we’? And who are you?

If Found, Return To ....

Wiki:

Angikuni Lake or Lake Anjikuni is one of several lakes located along the Kazan River in northern Canada’s Nunavut territory. Ennadai Lake is to the south and Yathkyed Lake is to the north. The lake’s shore is notable for rocky outcroppings of the Precambrian Shield, being part of the Hearne Domain, Western Churchill province of the Churchill craton.

Barren-ground caribou migrate through the area. The lake contains Lake trout, Northern Pike and Arctic grayling ....

In 1930, a newsman in The Pas, Manitoba reported on a small Inuit village right off of Lake Angikuni. The village always welcomed fur trappers that passed through now and then. But during the year 1930, a man that was well-known in the village, Joe Labelle, found that everyone in the village was gone. He saw that the villagers left immediately because he found unfinished shirts that still had needles in them, and food hanging over fire pits. And even more disturbing was that he found seven sled dogs that were dead from starvation, and that a grave had been dug up. The fur trapper knew that an animal could not have done any of this because the stones that surrounded the grave in a circle had not been disturbed in any way. The fur trapper reported this to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who conducted a search for the missing people. No one was ever found. This is the story as it appears in Frank Edwards' 1966 book, Stranger than Science; other versions appear in Whitley Strieber's science fiction novel, Majestic (fiction) and Dean Koontz's horror yarn "Phantoms"; The Worlds Greatest UFO Mysteries (presented as fact) has an even more embellished version, as do other websites and books, complete with mysterious lights in the sky, empty graveyards, and over one thousand people missing.

The earliest version that was found is in the November 29, 1930 Halifax Herald, written by a journalist of questionable repute, Emmett E Kelleher. The article contained a "photo" later found to be from 1909 that had nothing at all to do with the story. The story appears to have been forgotten until referenced by Edwards' 1966 book.

The event is still considered "unsolved", though some believe the story to be a hoax because of inconsistencies.(Latta, 1991, pg.255)

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out ... and Turn Off

Wiki:

Turn-On is an American television series from 1969. Only one episode was shown and it is considered one of the most infamous flops in TV history.

Turn-On's sole episode was shown on Wednesday, February 5, 1969, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern and 7:30 p.m. in other markets. Among the cast were Teresa Graves (who would later join the Laugh-In cast that autumn) and Chuck McCann (longtime kiddie show host, character actor, and voice artist). The writing staff included a young Albert Brooks. The guest host for the episode was Tim Conway, best known for his long run on The Carol Burnett Show.

The show was created by Ed Friendly and George Schlatter, the producers of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, and picked up by ABC after NBC and CBS rejected it; a CBS official confessed, "It was so fast with the cuts and chops that some of our people actually got physically disturbed by it." Production executive Digby Wolfe described it as a "visual, comedic, sensory assault involving animation, videotape, stop-action film, electronic distortion, computer graphics—even people." The Bristol-Myers company bought advertising for a projected 13-week run.

The show's premise was that it was produced by a computer, though this was not the case. Distinguishing characteristics of the show were its synthesized music and lack of sets, except for a white backdrop. The show consisted of various rapid-fire jokes and risqué skits but no laugh track. The program was also filmed instead of presented live or on videotape. The production credits of the episode appeared after each commercial break, instead of conventionally at the beginning or end (Monty Python's Flying Circus similarly played around with presenting the credits).

• Two policemen say, "Let us spray," before spraying cans of mace at the camera.
• A firing squad prepares to shoot an attractive woman when the squad leader says, "Excuse me, miss, but in this case we are the ones with one final request." (As perhaps a sign of changing times, this skit was recycled in Schlatter's revival of Laugh-In in 1978, without complaints.)
• 'The Body Politic', shown three times during the episode, featured a buxom, reclining blonde saying things like "Mr. Nixon as President now becomes the titular head of the Republican Party."
• Conway wonders if a blonde is a "pot-smoking, jaded, wild-eyed, radical dropout." When she says she is, he replies, "I love you!"
• A sleazy TV pitchman promotes a breakfast cereal "soaked in mescaline." The same pitchman appears in a second spoof commercial selling women's shoes, though he is gradually revealed to be a foot fetishist.
• A diagram of a swastika is displayed as a narrator says, "You are now looking at the table at the Paris peace accords agreed to by General Ky."
• Several gay-themed messages scrolling across the screen, including "God Save the Queens", "Free Oscar Wilde" and "The Amsterdam Levee is a dike.".
• A pregnant woman singing "I Got Rhythm" (alluding to the rhythm method of birth control).
• A vending machine dispensing the birth control pill, with an anxious young woman putting coins into it and then feverishly shaking the broken machine.
• A figure of a draft-dodger holding a sign reading Sweden.
• Conway, dressed in a samurai outfit and speaking mock Japanese, is revealed to be university president/politician S.I. Hayakawa.
• A black man, face-to-face with a white man, says, "Mom always did like you best!" (an allusion to a popular catchphrase of The Smothers Brothers)
• One cop asks a second, "You want to take some of this pornographic literature home with you tonight?" The colleague replies, "I don't even have a pornograph!" The first cop then rips up a skin magazine and begins to chew the pieces.
• A commercial spoof shows Conway touting a masculine deodorant while lifting weights and working out. "When I'm all through, I smell like a lady," he concludes and is shown in drag.
• In another commercial parody, Conway is shown wearing a tuxedo, and massive eye mascara.
• A sequence (the show's longest) with the word sex flashing on and off in pulsating colors while Conway and actress Bonnie Boland leer at each other. Various stock photographs are displayed during the sequence, including one of Pope Paul VI.
• Conway as spokesman for "Citizens Action Committee of America," a group with the acronym CACA.
• The black programmer shown programming the computer supposedly generating the show says he dreamed he was a duck in Lester Maddox's bathtub. "I migrated," he says.
• A young woman in cap and gown is shown lobbing a hand grenade.
• Two men are standing at a globe. "Tell me," one says to the other, "where is the capital of South Vietnam?" The second man spins the globe and points, "Mostly over here, in Swiss bank accounts."
• A Catholic nun asks a priest, "Father, can I have the car tonight?" The priest replies, "Just as long as you don't get in the habit."
• Conway tells Graves, "I was so damned angry when I found out my kids were popping pills, I went out and got drunk."
• One message scrolled across the screen: ISRAEL UBER ALLES.
• A recurring series of skits with Conway as a marriage counselor in session with an African American husband and an Asian wife. The last state laws against interracial marriages were struck down only two years earlier. (In 1968, NBC debated whether to cut out of a Petula Clark variety special a shot of Clark merely touching guest Harry Belafonte on the arm.)
• Two men in Stetson hats defend the principle of Southern womanhood. One then says to the other, "Come on, big beauty," and they hold hands and walk out effeminately.
• A white Southern hotel guest phones the main desk about the Gideon Bible which states "'Moses married an Ethopian woman' ... in the Atlanta Hilton!?!"
• A puppet snake says, "Remember, folks, I could have given Eve the apple and the Pill!"

Conway has stated that Turn-On was canceled midway through its lone episode, so that the party the cast and crew held for its premiere as the show aired across the United States also marked its cancelation. The show was not officially dropped by ABC for several days, but two affiliates of the network, Denver's KBTV and Cleveland's WEWS, failed to return to the program after the first commercial break. The general manager of WEWS sent ABC network management an angry telegram: "If you naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls." Other stations in time zones behind Eastern and Central which had some forewarning, such as KATU in Portland, Oregon, never showed the program at all, while many others made the decision not to show it again as soon as the episode was over.

Many viewers and critics considered Turn-On too extreme for America's tastes at the time. The show featured rapid-fire gags with sexual innuendos, pastiche film clip sequences in questionable taste and bizarre non sequiturs that baffled viewers. Many assumed the show's title was itself an implicit reference to Timothy Leary's pro-drug maxim, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In fact, rumors spread among people who never actually saw the show that it contained full frontal nudity, something that no over-the-air commercial TV network in the United States has ever done.

"When In Uqbar Be Sure And Visit - "

Wiki:

Uqbar is best-known as a fictional place in Jorge Luis Borges's famous 1940 short story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius". Uqbar in the story is doubly fictional: even within the world of the story it turns out to be a fictional place. The story turns on the narrator's discovery of a Nihilartikel about Uqbar: that is, a false article in an otherwise legitimate reference work. Also, despite its overall fictional nature, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is loaded with references to real people and places and it playfully combines reality and fiction.

Consequently, on the one hand hoaxes about Uqbar abound, and on the other, many writers have claimed that Borges's Uqbar is entirely fictional. Nonetheless, there is at least one real place with the name Uqbar, in Algeria, as well as a town called Ukbara in Iraq, each of which seems to have at least some aspects in common with Borges's fictional Uqbar. These places may plausibly have inspired the name and some other aspects of the Borges's Uqbar, although Borges's description of its culture is of course fictional.

Books You Haven't Read But Should: Jack Finney's The Night People

A story of 4 people that a bored with the mundaneness of their lives. They have tried rock climbing, gone sailing and other "extreme" activities but they soon grow weary of them. They discover the eerie emptiness of the suburbs late at night. Together they find themselves going for 3 am walks on weeknights through deserted streets and plazas. The plot thickens from here on in as they get themselves into trouble.

Michael Masters has a nice synopsis of this great book here.

Mrs Hitler?

Wiki:

Unity Valkyrie Mitford (8 August 1914 – 28 May 1948), was one of the noted Mitford sisters. She was a prominent supporter of fascism and friend of Adolf Hitler ....

... on 17 December 2007 Bright published an article in The New Statesman stating that following his previous article he had received a phone call from a member of the public with an extraordinary new angle on the story. He claims to have been initially sceptical when the caller, Val Hann, claimed that during the war her aunt, Betty Norton, had run a private maternity hospital called Hill View Cottage in Oxford where Mitford had been a client. According to Hann's family legend, passed from Betty to Val's mother and then on to Val herself, Mitford had checked into the hospital after her return to England where she had given birth to Hitler's love child which had subsequently been given up for adoption.

Bright travelled to Wigginton where the current owner of Hill View confirmed that Norton had indeed run the cottage as a maternity hospital during the war. Furthermore he met with elderly village resident Audrey Smith, whose sister had worked at Hill View, who confirmed seeing "Unity wrapped in a blanket and looking very ill" but insists that she was there to recover from a nervous breakdown and not to give birth. Bright also contacted Unity's sister Deborah who denounced the villager's gossip and claimed she could produce her mother's diaries to prove it. Bright returned to the National Archives where he found a file on Unity sealed under the 100-year rule. He received special permission to open it and discovered that in October 1941, while living at the family home in Swinbrook, she had been consorting with a married RAF test pilot — throwing doubt on her reported invalidity.

Bright then abandoned the investigation until he mentioned the story to an executive from Channel 4 who thought it was a good subject for a documentary film. Further investigation was then undertaken as part of the filming for Hitler's British Girl including a visit to an Oxfordshire registry office where an abnormally large number of birth registrations at Hill View at that time apparently confirmed its use as a Maternity hospital but none were for Mitford, although as the records officer admits many births were never registered at this time. The publication of the article and the broadcast of the film the following week stimulated a media frenzy of speculation that Hitler's offspring could be living in the United Kingdom.

UFOs ... Before There Were UFOs ...

Wiki:

The Mystery Airships were a class of unidentified flying objects, the best-known series of which were reported in newspapers in western states of the U.S., starting in 1896 and continuing into 1897.

The reported ships were usually said to be a type of dirigible, and were usually differentiated from gliders or hot air balloons. The best-known wave of airship tales was largely confined to North America, but according to Jerome Clark, similar reports were made worldwide, early as the 1880s, and late as the 1990s. Of the 1896-1897 series of airship sightings, historian Mike Dash wrote,

Not only were [the Mystery Airships] bigger, faster and more robust than anything then produced by the aviators of the world; they seemed to be able to fly enormous distances, and some were equipped with giant wings ... The 1896-1897 airship wave is probably the best investigated of all historical anomalies. The files of almost 1500 newspapers from across the United States have been combed for reports, an astonishing feat of research. The general conclusion of investigators was that a considerable number of the simpler sightings were misidentification of planets and stars, and a large number of the more complex the result of hoaxes and practical jokes. A small residuum remains perplexing.

The best-known of the Mystery Airship waves began in California in 1896. Afterwards, reports and accounts of similar airships came from others areas, generally moving east.

Some accounts during this wave of airship reports claim that occupants were visible on some airships, and encounters with the pilots were reported as well. These occupants were said to be human, though their behaviour, mannerisms and clothing were sometimes reported to be unusual. One witness from Arkansas-- allegedly a former state senator Harris -- was supposedly told by an airship pilot (during the tensions leading up the Spanish American War) that the craft was bound for Cuba, to use its "Hotchkiss gun" to "kill Spaniards". (Jacobs, 10)

In one account from Texas, three men reported an encounter with an airship and with "five peculiarly dressed men" who reported that they were descendant from the lost tribes of Israel; they had learned English from the 1553 north pole expedition led by Hugh Willoughby.

At least two airship tales were taken as at least possibly genuine by generations of later ufologists:

• An account by Alexander Hamilton of Leroy, Kansas supposedly occurred about April 19, 1897, and was published in the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate of April 23. Hamilton, his son, and a tenant witnessed an airship hovering over his cattle pen. Upon closer examination, the witnesses realized that a red “cable” from the airship had lassoed a heifer, but had also become entangled in the pen’s fence. After trying unsuccessfully to free the heifer, Hamilton cut loose a portion of the fence, then "stood in amazement to see the ship, cow and all rise slowly and sail off." (Jacobs, 15) Some have suggested this was the earliest report of cattle mutilation (In 1982, however, UFO researcher Jerome Clark debunked this story, and confirmed via interviews and Hamilton's own affidavit that the story was a successful attempt to win a Liar's Club competition to create the most outlandish tall tale).

• An account from Aurora, Texas (as related in the Dallas Morning News) reported that an airship had smashed into a windmill-- later determined to be a sump pump -- belonging to a Judge Proctor, then crashed. The occupant was dead and mangled, but the story reported that presumed pilot was clearly "not an inhabitant of this world." (Jacobs, 17) Strange "hieroglyphic" figures were seen on the wreckage, which resembled "a mixture of aluminum and silver ... it must have weighed several tons.”"(ibid.) (In the 20th Century, unusual metallic material recovered from the presumed crash site was shown to contain a percentage of aluminum and iron admixed.) The story ended by noting that the pilot was given a "Christian burial" in the town cemetery. In 1973, MUFON investigators discovered the alleged stone marker used in this burial. Their metal detectors indicated a quantity of foreign material might remain buried there. However, they were not permitted to exhume, and when they returned several years later, the headstone -- and whatever metallic material had lay beneath it -- was gone ....

A Chicken-like Creature With Antlers ...?

Wiki:

The Elwetritsch (also spelled Elwedritsch) is a cryptid or mythical creature that supposedly inhabits the Palatinate of Germany. It is described as being achicken-like creature with antlers.

Like the jackalope, the Elwetritsch is thought to have been inspired by sightings of wild rabbits infected with the Shope papilloma virus, which causes the growth of antler-like tumors in various places, including on the head.