Posts Tagged ‘Conspiracy Theories’

Halloween Horrors: Mel’s Hole

Tuesday, October 10th, 2023

Here’s a nicely creepy borderlands of science/urban legend/conspiracy theory video about a hole that has no bottom.

80,000 feet worth of fishing line found no bottom. Plus animals avoided it, and radios went crazy, when they weren’t picking up signals from 30 years before.

Then the government took it over.

Much more paranormal weirdness ensues

Was it real? Well, as real as anything else with a Wikipedia entry featured on Art Bell.

Good luck finding it on map…

Library Additions: Four Reference Books

Saturday, August 18th, 2018

Don Webb was culling some books, and he came over to my house so I could paw through and triage them into what I wanted to keep, what to auction, etc. I will most likely be putting a few auction items up in September. These are the reference works I kept for myself, and all were $5 each except for the Delany, which was $20.

  • Delany, Samuel R. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village: 1957-1965. First edition hardback, a Fine- copy with just a trace of foxing to inside front covers in a Fine- dust jacket with just a touch of wear. Inscribed by Delany: “To/Don + Rosemary/in remembrance/of a wonderful/evening at/the County Line/from/Samuel R. Delany/Austin/Feb. 1988” The County Line is a local BBQ chain, and Delany came down for Sercon 2 that month. Nonfiction autobiography. Hugo Award Winner for Best Nonfiction. Supplements an unsigned copy (which I forget to bring when I had Delany sign all my hardback fiction firsts at Readercon in 2009).

  • Ruz, Bruce. Hollywood vs. The Aliens: The Motion Picture Industry’s Participation in UFO Disinformation. Frog Limited, 1997. First edition trade paperback original, a Near Fine- with a crease across back top cover. Conspiracy theory movie history. Don: “Well worth reading for the shock around page 120 when you realize that he’s serious.”
  • (Shaver, Richard) Toronto, Richard. War Over Lemuria: Richard Shaver, Ray Palmer and the Strangest Chapter of 1940s Science Fiction. McFarland, 2013. First edition trade paperback original, a Fine- copy that looks like it’s been read once. With review slip laid in. Book on the Shaver Mystery by someone who knew Shaver and published Shaverton fanzine.
  • Steiger, Brad. The Werewolf Book. Visible Ink Press, 1999. First edition trade paperback original, a near Fine copy with wear along edges, a tiny crese to bottom front corner, and a few bits of writing inside. Non-fiction book on werewolves and other shapechangers in folklore and media.
  • The Infowars Dating Service

    Thursday, April 25th, 2013

    No, really.

    But what I want to know is: How can you be absolutely sure that they won’t set you up with a Reptoid?

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

    Movies Howard and I Will Review: Iron Sky

    Monday, February 13th, 2012

    Assuming it comes to Austin sometime in 2012 (answer cloudy; ask again later), Howard Waldrop and I will be reviewing Iron Sky, AKA Attack of the Space Nazis. Here we have not one, not two, but three teaser trailers, arranged from oldest to newest.

    I’m hoping Iron Sky (which seems to have been made with a great deal of crowd-source funding) will be good, silly fun, as well as an amusing poke at the whole Nazi saucer mythos.

    A Quick Tour Around the Hollow Earth

    Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

    I can’t believe I missed this Jess Nevins piece over on No Fear of the Future talking about 19th century SF writer and astronomer Camille Flammarion (I have a couple of first English-language translations of his work) scheme to avert war by having all the armies of Europe dig a giant hole in the ground. This probably wasn’t the wackiest naive pacifist scheme to avert war in the 19th century (though it is even wackier than, say, teaching everyone to speak Esperanto; see Howard Waldrop’s story “Ninieslando” for more details on how that worked out…)

    But I’m also fascinated by the Hollow Earth theories propounded by John Cleves Symmes, Jr., who in 1818 proclaimed:

    I declare the earth is hollow and habitable within; containing a number of solid concentric spheres, one within the other, and that it is open at the poles 12 or 16 degrees; I pledge my life in support of this truth, and am ready to explore the hollow, if the world will support and aid me in the undertaking.

    As wacky cosmological theories, this one had a lot going for it (and certainly more than, say, the theories of Immanuel Velikovsky). For one thing, given the state of exploration and geology extent in 1818, it wasn’t clearly wrong. For another, the idea of internal worlds, of delving deep into the earth, has always fascinated mankind, from the Greek and Sumerian underworlds all the way up through The Mines of Moria, Dungeons and Dragons, and even Minecraft. (Not to mention those Denver airport and Dulce base conspiracy theories.)

    Not found in John Cleves Symmes' vision of a Hollow Earth

    Symmes theories even inspired a novel. (Note: The person who put up that e-text of Symzonia says even reprints are rare, but this is no longer the case, as Amazon and Bookfinder are lousy with POD editions.) And Edgar Allen Poe would use some of Symmes’ ideas in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

    Another permutation of the Hollow Earth idea was Richard Shaver’s Shaver Mystery. Shaver claimed to hear voices in his head while using welding equipment, and claimed that “detrimental robots” (or deros) lived inside the earth and beamed mind control rays at the surface dwellers. For a while Amazing publisher Ray Palmer had every crackpot in America writing letters to add to the mystery in the late 1940s, just when when the first wave of flying saucer mania was reaching its peak.

    Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar series is set in the Hollow Earth, and an ever-growing number of science fiction writers have taken advantage of the idea, from Howard Waldrop and Steve Utley’s “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole” to Rudy Rucker’s The Hollow Earth, which also features Poe.

    Believe it or not, there are some who still believe in the Hollow Earth theory. (Of course, there are still people who believe in a flat earth as well. And they’re looking for new believers once again!)

    For more information, I would suggest looking up Walter Kafton-Minkel’s Subterranean Worlds, but since Loompanics Press went out of business (the people currently using their website just picked up the domain name when it lapsed), it’s gotten a bit pricey. I have David Standish’s Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth’s Surface, but I haven’t read it yet.

    Crank Back Up Those Denver Airport Conspiracy Theories!

    Friday, June 4th, 2010

    Of all the wacky modern-day conspiracy theories, I must admit that the one I’ve enjoyed most (next to the shape-shifting reptoids, with which it overlaps) is the one about aliens under the Denver airport. Weird-ass murals, Masonic symbols, out-of-control baggage handling systems, airport runways laid out in a swastika, and decapitated Indians, just for starters. And those are the parts that are all more or less real.

    If you haven’t seen those murals (some of which have since been painted over), they really are something to behold. I mean, what air traveler wouldn’t want to be confronted with a giant gas-masked Skeletor standing in an arc of weeping women holding dead babies?

    I had also forgotten that the designer of the giant blue demonic horse outside the airport had been killed when part of it fell on him.

    But more entertaining than the real weirdness are the truly whacked-out conspiracy theories about the place. You know, the ones with the six underground levels with holding pens for the alien Grays to ship off people to their secret concentration camps on Mars. The great thing about it is the ease with which it’s tied into the other wacky conspiracies about underground alien bases, like the ones supposedly at Dulce, Roswell, etc. You know, the sort of mind-boggling, over-the-top theories that make Bob Lazar’s stories of alien technology at Area 51 and how Grays will use people as “containers for souls” look like models of plausibility by comparison.

    Good times, good times.

    Well, now comes word that they’ve erected a 26 tall statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, outside it. Supposedly they did this to promote a King Tut exhibit.

    Personally, I think they’re just taunting Alex Jones