Welcome to this edition of The High Strangers Factor, copyright in on the Paranormal UK Radio Network. I'm your host, Steve WD along with Susie Bastile and Andy Mercer. The High Strangest Factor was created about half a dozen years ago and we have covered all aspects of the paranormal. Andy and Susie tell us a little bit about yourselves and what's going on and how people can can contact you, ladies, Well.
People can't contact me, sorry about it, but anyway, I had questions for you guys actually before we started, so yesterday I was thinking about Lemon spaces and the theories that paranormal activity happens in these liminal spaces because it's an area of transition and things like that. And I was wondering, do you think that's why there's so many toilet ghosts and bathrooms.
That may be an American phenomena that.
You don't have to I'm glad somebody thought to ask that question.
Any number of reasons for that.
Well, let's let's hope they're not around. They have no business being there. But anyway, Uh, go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourselves. We already already just found a lot out a lot about Susie, but we'll move.
On disconcerting at least.
Well as you know. I'm still plugging. Like one next book I'm working on at the moment, which should be out of mid spring. It's a transcription of a handwritten GRIMWAF from the eighteen hundreds which hasn't been published before, so I'm working on that and discovering the various other versions of it that are out there, and compiling a sort of an essay that will go with the book, talking about the development of this particular manuscript, which is keep me very busy, which I've enjoyed.
You know.
I'm quietly living in the West Country, in a little village away from the bright lights of London and Essex where I used to live. I'm enjoying the piece and quiet out you which is very cool. Because my wife Many is away for the weekend. She's off rain dark costly music view once, I have the house to myself, which is very nice.
In need SUSI, so I don't.
I don't have too much of anything going on. My muggle job has been getting in the way of having too much fun and I'm about to be an empty nester. In the next couple of months. My son will be going off to college in deserting me, but hopefully, you know, getting rich so he can support me in my old age. So I can't complain too much.
You're getting into your excursion season where you go exploring now with the weather getting a little bit more easy to take.
Yeah, it was the air outside no longer hurts your face. So hopefully I can get in a weekend adventure soon and actually probably usually the first stop of the year is Anawon Rock, which is up in Rehoboth Math, which is part of the Bridgewater Triangle. It is it's near where the Redheaded Hitchhiker is spotted. But Anon Rock has known for like phantom drumming, and there's been phantom fires there as well. Of course I haven't seen anything there,
but that's generally my first stop in the springs. So if I finally do see something, you guys will be the first to know.
Well, you be an exclusive for the high strangeness factor. I attended the Frogman Conference yesterday in Loveland, Ohio. The story goes back in seventy two. There were two different police officers separated by I think two weeks Ray Shockley I think was one of them. They saw this strange amphibian creature climb out of the Little Miami River. Somebody had seen something like that in nineteen fifty five. And anyway, these guys barely show up and they've got their own festival.
And yeah, you know, Mothman took decades to get his festival. It just doesn't seem right somehow. But it was interesting. You know, it's just the fourth outing. It's just incredibly crowded, and people are dressed in wearing frog ears and wearing frog costumes and so forth. There's a lot of books and artwork and so forth being sold, and some pretty
good speakers too. Chad Lewis is someone I know from the Van Meter Visitor Festival, and he talked about the connection between strange lights and some cryptids, and James Trivett he talked a lot about various folklore in Ohio. So it was I didn't see all the speakers, but it was really a good time. So now let's introduce our guest if I can just find.
I have to say I'm very jealous of you guys.
All these conferences you have almost every weekend is very little like that over here we have the occasion conference I spect on a few weeks ago, but the sheer volume number of you guys have in the States just astounds me off. I'm quite jealous.
Well, I might begin by making a comment on Anawan rock that's not too far from the location that h he Lovecraft went to to observe Howie's comment in nineteen ten, a little bit closer into to Providence than the Ino one Rock. But he also was in his teenage years, he and some friends at a clubhouse out not all that far from in a one Rock, where they would go and uh and have fun. I don't know that he ever store any any spirits or phantom fires or anything.
However, I don't think he's a strict non believer.
If I remember correctly left Craft, I had no real belief in any of the paranormal, was caught supernatural or anything.
From what I remember reading.
He was quite a materialist. I had sent him a montage of book covers, and he may be getting into trouble trying to display that.
I don't know.
Okay, every time, I guess I was able to do this. I was able to find Horace's intro. It's a great intro and without losing my image. But Horace, why don't you just tell us a little bit about yourself? Since I can't seem to. I keep disappearing, which is not a good thing.
I grew up in Connecticut, not all that far from where SUSI grew up, though, though in the metropolis of willamant It, Connecticut, and got an education in astronomy there, and astronomy has been my career professor of astronomy and physics here at Michigan State University up until the point I retired and became an emeritus professor, and eventually they
kicked me out of my office. I'm just working from home, but have interested in a variety of subjects, from strange things seen in the sky to historical astronomy to more academic sub such as post sitting stars. And I became very interested in HP Lovecraft at a rather early age, and was particularly interested in his own interest in astronomy.
Many of you may know, in case you have any people in the audience who don't know, it should be Lovecraft was one of the foremost writers of weird fiction in the first part of the twentieth century, and has influenced a lot of people subsequently, but it's not always viewed favorably by some because he was rather xenophobic in terms of not approving of the melting pot of American culture. And it is well one of the things disappoints one
when if one is a Lovecraft fan. But nonetheless I thoroughly enjoy his writings and I've tried to track him down a little bit, and that is the origin of one of my books with co author Edward Guiemott, who I think was at one time on Susie's old show as well, wasn't he?
And I actually I just went to a Nearer conference, a New England's Antiquities Research Association, and it was out of college, and I kept saying, I know someone who works here, And the whole time I'm there, I'm thinking, I know, I know someone that works here. As soon as I got home, I realized it was Eddie, and I so upset that I didn't take that chance to visit him there. But yeah, he was on the show.
He told he told the story of the what it is the Gloaucus, which is a local cryptid here in connected.
Yes, yes, well it's now I believe chairperson of the Department of History at Bristol Community College, not far from the the Bridgewater Triangle there, and he is just finishing up a book on the history of I'm trying to remember the title of it. I think it's the Power of the Flat Earth, idea about people through history. I believed in the Flat Earth, and that will be coming out next year by I think Paul Grave McMillan, publisher.
And how did you first discover this year?
Now, Lovecraft, I may have read one or two short stories, but mainly in nineteen seventy I walked into a department store, found the rack of paperback books sitting on the shelf and said, this is a pretty cover. And it was The dream Quest of Unknown Cadaf, which is one of his kind of Dunsanian works where it's kind of a dream world. And I read it and said, wow, I'm going to read some more of these and others. Some of the other things were quite different in style than
that one, but it was great fun to read. I'm not even sure whether it was published in the real
publication during his lifetime. A number of the of his longer work it's like, ah, I remember the case of I was dext Ward were not published in in any widely available source during his life, and he was mainly known for short stories that appeared, many of them in Weird Tales magazine and a number of them, a few of them in what was it Astounding science fiction at the time, And toward the end of his life he began to be shifting perhaps a little more toward science
fiction with public with stories like at the Mountains of Madness, but not the kind of science fiction that many of the people at the time are writing.
Imber, go ahead, go on. I had the first story. I think it was in the seventies. I can't remember the name of the paperback company, but they started reprinting a lot of Lovecraft. And prior to that, I know that August Drylth had created Arkham House and it was republishing Lovecraft in a lot of hardcovers. And then they started to go out of print and started to just you know, skyrocket. But I had a collection. My first story was Late at Night was The Color Out of Space.
And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, you know, this is a it's like a horror story, but actually when you boil it down, it's science fiction, so he had this interesting blend of horror and science fiction in many stories.
Right. The Color Out of Space is one that he particularly thought well of. Begins with a person walking by going by an old town that's been flooded to make a new being flooded to make a new reservoir, and these gets hearing old stories as to what had happened in the later eighteen hundreds. This was set in the nineteen twenties, that would be the time when he wrote it. Lovecraft himself was born in eighteen ninety died rather young
in nineteen thirty seven. In fact, in one more week it'll be eighty nine years since he passed away, And so he was writing these stories, in many of them in the nineteen twenties into the nineteen thirties. That was
the contemporary time he was writing about. But in this story, The Color Out of Space, he's securing old tales from the late eighteen hundreds where the strange meteorite had fallen on the town outside of town, on this farm, and the whole story is what happens to the people on that farm in the time after the meteorite falls, and it's not like the blob they don't they don't pick up the media right and get this blob growing on them.
It's it's a little more subtle than that. But it's a very interesting fun story to read.
Uh when when we talk more about the When the Stars Are Right by H. P. Lovecraft? And would you pronounce your co author's last name again please? Okay, that's that's my favorite.
Well, that hit that punched every button.
I mean, I just just love it. The uh the references to other you know, science literature and science fiction and uh, I I never never realized that Lovecraft was so fascinated by astronomy, and you know, it's it's such an interesting time. Well, they didn't have uh you know, there were there were some powerful scopes in other parts of the country. There was one in California. Nothing matched what we have today, and so they were really kind
of in the dark ages. But you know what it meant that they I guess they Your book says that they didn't even know if there was more than one galaxy. They didn't know about the life of stars.
That's right. When when when Lovecraft? Lovecraft started out as an amateur astronomer, when he lived in Providence, the town he always loved, and he had his own small telescope, but he used to go visit the lad Observatory, which is still there today it's part of Brown University, has the telescope, which to him seemed very large, was not large compared to what we have today, had a lens
twelve inch is in diameter. And he would became friends with the the director of the observatory, who allowed him to come in and not so much use the telescope. I think it is used the library, and he used the self. After that, the self publish his own astronomy and science magazines that it would he and right hectograph back in the day. Is anyone remember hectographing? I remember still when I was in school, occasionally instead of getting mimeographs,
would get the even more simple method of hectograph. Well more laborious probably, but but could be done with just a without a meograph machine. And he would make maybe twenty five copies of these magazin scenes that would go to friends and relatives and fortunately for us, and many of them are kept today at the at the Library of Brown University and our online and you can read them today if you want to see what a teenage
HP Lovecraft was penning in his youth before. He was also doing some early stories at this time, but didn't really get into the stories. He wanted to become an astronomer. He had dreams of becoming an astronomer, but he said he ran into mathematics and.
That he was.
Couldn't get beyond had trouble with algebra, and so he couldn't get beyond that. And in fact, some people think it was that that was partly responsible for a kind of a mental breakdown he had in nineteen o eight when he realized that he would not be going on to become an astronomer. He never actually even graduated from high school in Providence, let alone made it into Brown University, and he was rather for the few years after that breakdown. This maybe the only time that he could really be
considered something of a reculus. But as in later years he had a lot of friends by letters, he was one of the world's greatest letter writers. He is reat thousands of letters to friends, many of which have been published today. And I think Eddie Gimont said that if you were alive today, you can see him writing all kinds of things on Facebook and oh Instagram, and being
a real social media person. I don't know if that's true or not, but he was certainly use the ability the techniques of the time to to spread his thoughts to.
Friends, probably Yelp reviews for sure.
He may, he may.
I have a volume of letters with here with Clerk Ashton Smith, another one of my huge favorite writers of weird fiction bizarre short stories. I have a lot more questions on this book, but I want to I know that both Susie and Andy have some questions for you, so I'm gonna step back a little bit, but I want to get back to when the stars are right just and the fascination that Lovecraft had with the Uh, with Venus and the moon and so forth. But guys, go ahead and ask some questions.
So, Horace, when you were on my show, we talked about your feelings towards Charles Fort, and I was just right now, as we're talking, I was reminded that I had an archaeology professor that had similar feelings towards Lovecraft as you do towards Charles Fort. New England, we have what we call New England lore or Yankee lore around the stonework in New England and there's rumors that it was built by the Phoenicians or Irish monks is another big one, and he attributed a lot of that to Lovecraft,
but never explained why. So I'm curious to know if you know why he would feel that way.
Not quite in the sense that Lovecraft didn't have stones in New England built by people sailing in from from Europe so much, but he did have in some of his stories, like the Dunnich Horror, he would have stones on mountaintops, but there was supposed to be old stones going back to ancient times and around which supernatural events and the rituals could be held. So the stones, in that sense were were not natural, but they weren't anything recent.
And in some of his tails there were mountains where the people supposed to stay away, as in The Whisper and Darkness, because they were visited by the Migo, these alien creatures that kind of interacted with the early Native Americans who learned not to go near those places where
the migo. Well, although the Migo did interact with some people and had their minions to do their work, so I wouldn't think that directly one should think of Lovecraft as being responsible for that many of these old tales, constructions by the people coming over from England or the Vikings, go back long before Lovecraft's time, back many of them into at least the nineteenth century, if if not earlier. So I think Lovecraft is getting a bit of a
bum wrap in that from your professor. Now, on the other hand, Charles Fort, Charles Ford, if you've never read him, he wrote, lived in from the eighteen seventies to he died in nineteen thirty two, so he did overlap with Lovecraft. And he became most famous for the book The Book of the Damned, which is a collection of strange things that he thought had been damned by science that is not included in the usual corpus of scientific knowledge. And he had some other books after that, like New Lands.
But astronomers were Charles Fort's real, real bete noir where he was. He didn't think much of astronomers and what they professed to know about the solar system of the universe. And as an astronomer, I feel obligated to return the sentiment and uh, say Charles Fort, Uh, astronomy, much of astronomy has been proven right since your time. So take that you Charles for I wrote a little thing about that once, but I never got it published anywhere, so I just still haven't.
Known my files.
I just sent my mother a copy of your book, Williemann Exkui's Ah, and she she had a couple of stories. She wanted me to tell you.
This is very important happy.
So she thinks these both took place in the late fifties early sixties. But the first one was her mother had sent her out. She grew up on a dairy farm and they had an outbuilding where they kept milk. Her mother had sent her out to go get a bottle of milk, and she had seen a meteor shower when she went out to get that milk. Now, this was obviously well before the Internet, and she had no idea what a meteor shower was, and she thought it was some kind of like signed from God, right, because
that's she I think she was. She would have been like single digit age at this point. And then there was another time where she went out at night to use the outhouse and saw it. Yes, because we didn't have indoor plumbing and lebanon yet Horace, they only had that in Willimane. But she saw what she now knows is the northern lights, but at the time thought it had to have been some other kind of you know, celestial signal, because she just had no idea that was something that happened.
The nineteen fifties were a great time for northern lights because it was a peak of solar activity. There was one of the strongest peaks of solar activity that we've had. And in about nineteen fifty seven, my mother took me out on the back steps and pointed to the north where I could see these rays rising up in the sky, going up and down, and I was told there were northern lights. And within the next few years I was
able to see a number of displays. When I was a dusty kid and mostly just dragged out and pointed up, there was some brilliant displays with bright red showing overhead, some really fun northern light displays that I I didn't know they were anything that all that spectacular. I mean, as a little kid said on northern lights, hmm, that's that's pretty Uh, those of us happen all the time,
but uh, but I've been following them ever since. And here in Michigan we've had a few nice displays of the past few years some have been strong enough to go into the south and and I don't know whether Steve has seen any lately or if if any of you have seen them in the past couple of years. Of course we have to in Michigan, we have to hope it's a queer sky too, yeah, exactly, which is far from being the case on many occasions.
First time sights in Connecticut the last couple of years in England in the south, which is very unusual.
It's not uncommon to get him in Scotland or out the other the country, but down southwest it's very unusual the last couple of years, if you were visible, which is surprising.
My first time seeing them was the horse was up on Voice Blank Island in the Straits of Mackinaw, you know, not too far from obviously Mackinaw Island and the bridge. We used to My grandmother used to earn property up there, so we would vacation up there were One time, as we would as kids, we would have a bonfire on the beach and we're sitting around and I'm looking up at the sky and the whole sky is on fire.
Now there wasn't for some reason, there wasn't much cover in them, but I did figure out that these must be the Northern lights. But the whole sky was lit up with these shimmering lights from horizon to horizon. And then one other time, my then wife and I we were driving up north and the Lower Peninsula, and we weren't all that far north, but we started to notice the Northern lights and there was color green and red
and so forth. And they've even been down here, but of course I missed them down here in West Virginia. But yeah, it was pretty amazing to see them.
If you have your camera out and take a time exposure, you'll often find it shows the color a lot more than your I can see. And partably that's because if the Northern lights are faint, they don't activate the color sensors in your eye. They have to get up to
a certain brightness to do that. And so if you have a faint Northern lights glow and you take a picture with your camera, it'll often show green, for example, but your eye might just see a ghostly uh grow well, funny enough, that's exactly what I could see looking out the window.
Were actually holiday in a little coastal time. I can see what like static clouds across the.
Scow very strange and its online about the northern lights. Take with our cameras off and iPhone someone we both had some really spectacular pictures. Again, it's slightly time today to get the effect. But yeah, hardly visible to naked eye, but he's very visible to the camera.
Mm hmm.
I got a quick question for regarding sort of going back to the Lovecraft. I'm a very big fan of Arthur Mackham.
Have you come across Oh, yes, I have read his stories and I enjoyed them very much, as well as did the Lovecraft, who was a great admirer of him.
Definitely, and uh.
Hes uh. This story has tended to be more tied to some of the places over and in in Britain and Ireland. Right the settings are I'm unfamiliar with. I although I've visited over there, I've never been off looking at the places where it's likely there was set his tales.
But uh.
Uh. In the way that Lovecraft imbus the stories with with New England and Providence, mac and I think has imbued his stories with some of the background of the areas of the British isles that he was living.
In particularly in South Wales.
So Wales sounds like a great place for a haunted stories and the apparitions.
This hometown of Kellyon.
But I went there last year and I went to anniversary, stayed in the hotel and didn't realize it is actually next door to his house, which wasn't That was very as well, Yes, and it's the kind of thing I think we identify South Wales often in his stories and some of the local there's a Roman villa nearby.
Is was he Welsh? Was mac in the Welsh?
Absolutely? Yeah, myself are very proud of that.
Yes there was, were there kind of constituted there, but really highlighting your own local area has been the.
Area of most interest New England.
Mac in the South Wales, but Wells and London for a long time as well, and was related into London too. So also I'm part of the exciting Robert Chambers, if you have an opinion, whose work too.
I have a little, but not so much. Was he the fellow who wrote the The King and Yellow or differently.
No, absolutely The King of Yellow.
That's probably his main falling into some of the more weird fiction type writing. To talk about his writing became much more conventional later on. But in those early stories, particularly the King in Yellow series, very I found them fascinating. There was a I like the style again. Obviously love cross board a little bit some of the ideas. But this seems normal usus reading. And they'll tell you some very strange happens which concerning He's just very matter of
fact that it's very odd observation about something going. I always found that, particularly enjoy chambers of early writing. Okay, that same kind of stuff as well.
Lovecraft wrote a a short book which is you can buy today. It was just published. The serial during his lifetime from most but called Supernatural Horror and Literature, which gives his views of a number of these writers, those known to him. Uh and of course people only up to the twenties or whenever he wrote the thing. But but Macin is in there. It brought Blackwood, Elgernon Blackwood.
Oh my god.
Yeah, and the Willows he liked, Yeah, and Montagu wrote James. Lovecraft sent a letter to James with one of his publications, but evidentely h James was not that big of a fan of Lovecraft's work, so the admiration was not mutual.
Have you, gentlemen, read The Wind to Go by Elgermon Blackwood?
Yes, I have a man, what a what an.
Amazing story that is? And who wrote the Great God Pan? Was that marching?
That?
Okay?
Yeah, that's good. The Willows I like, and uh the Wind to Go and uh I do like some of Montaca wrote James's books, but they do tend to be a little bit repetitive if you sit down and read a series of them all at one time. Many of them have kind of the same kind of ghostly appearance, so they're fun, but I'd read them not all in the in the Night m.
Susie. Was there a something that some information you had on the mysterious pook Wedgies.
Oh, last time we talked, Harris, you had asked me if I knew anything about how I think Cotton Mather specifically, but the Puritans in general felt about Puckwagies.
Yeah.
I looked into it a bit. There was one reference that I had thought was a Puritan. It turned out to be a merchant. So during that time period, the merchant probably wasn't a Puritan but had just come over to make some money. But he had called puckwagies, little devils. But after some research, what I have come to think was that the Puritans just did not care because it wasn't them. It is kind of the impression I got,
like those are, you know, the native people's things. They're bad because it's not ours, and we're not going to think about it.
Is kind of.
The idea I got from what I've read.
Well that willemantic Sky's book does have a chapter of the first chapter that connects Cotton Mather up with northern lights, and it goes back to seventeen nineteen when in a dark December night, suddenly these lights began to appear in the sky, and many people around Boston and all of
New England were quite affrighted by these lights. It just how they hadn't seen northern lights much before, because it was during the month before that had been the time of the Manda Minimum, where the sun was very quiet, and there were so many northern lights at middlelanitude. So this was a not only an astounding thing to see as thoas is, but something that was fresh for them.
And Cotton Mather wrote a book a pamphlet about it called A Vice from Heaven, where he said, yeah, this is the Northern Lights, and it's a natural phenomena, but it could also be a sign from God. He was that was on the lookout for evidence for the imminent Second Coming, and he said, if these Northern lights could awaken us the righteous sorts thoughts of the righteous, they
would be doing some good. So his Northern Lights is rather different than my own, and he had some rivals at the time who viewed them as more of a purely natural phenomenon, Thomas Roby for one. But it's interesting to see how striking them all the lights appeared when there'd be been largely absent from New England for decades before the return seventeen nineteen.
Before we get back to when the stars are right when, I definitely want to do that because one of my favorite all time Lovecraft stories, actually it's almost a short novel, The Whisper and Darkness, and that kind of ties in with his fascination with astronomy. But I have to ask you you mentioned and some of the things you'd like to talk about about your interest and fascination with nineteen fifties as much science fiction and horror movies, all those sort I grew up on and loved.
Did you go to like a local theater that had Mattine's where they showed these or they did in Willamantic.
There were two theaters mattine Theaters when I was a little. One of them closed fairlier. It was called the Gem Theater, and that was kind of the cheapest the theater around for matinees anyway, you could get in for a dime or fifteen cents. And the Capitol Theatre was the other one, but that was a little bit more ritzy, was slightly newer, and we're to go into the Gem Theater and they'd be showing Rodin or or Earth versus the fine Saucers or giant car alconom My critical faculties were not too
extreme at the time. When I was five or six or seven, I can even remember seeing Plan nine at the theater, and I didn't think there was anything that extraordinary about it, that bad about its tombstones that wobbled when someone fell against him, or fighting sauces that were clearly just things held by strings and set on fire. So one should think my critical faculties were limited. One time,
I've told this before on a different program. One time I went with my sister and our father came to the Saturday matinee that turned out not to be perhaps the best thing. I think it was Rodin, though it might have been Jack Card that we were watching. And it's the middle of it. All the kids are excited, Rodan is this giant I should say reptilian flying monster.
It's a Japanese movie. And all us kids are sitting on the edge of seats, thrilled by the appearance of the giant flying monster, and my father lets everyone's quiet hushed, and my father lets out in the loud voice, well this is the silliest blanky movie I have ever seen. But he didn't see his blankety blank.
I'm afraid he didn't find it gripping then, huh, he did not.
And I don't know how many of the kids were shocked by his language. But after that, it is better if if dad didn't go along to those Saturday matinees. Did you have a screaming kids?
Did you have a local horror host on television in those days, like on a Friday or Saturday night showing uhr movies?
I don't remember one because I couldn't stay up to probably when they were on. But what I did, yet I did when I was a little bit older, and this is probably around nineteen sixty or so. I would go in once a month or once every couple months, depending upon how many dimes I had in my pocket, and I would purchase some magazine famous monsters of.
Film, Forrest j Ackerman, Forest Day Akermen, and he would have There would be pictures in there, not only of the monsters, but of horror hosts.
And I think that was my first introduction to the horror house. It was only when I got a little older and could stay up a little later that I began to encounter them myself, and by that time they were perhaps past the peak on the local channels. So I wish that I had stories, childhood tales of horror hosts, but I didn't really have them at the time.
Well, I have to tell you I went. I was in the Navy in the early eighties and a friend of mine had moved out there from Michigan. He lived in Bloomfield Hills before that, and he became friends with Forrest j Ackerman. So I went up to h I went to Los Angeles from the Debates via bus, and I went into the Acro mansion. Now this is before they moved all this stuff to it like a museum. But man, I was just I was bumping into walls. He had the blasters from Forbidden Planet, he had parts
of the dinosaurs from King Kong. He had an amazing collection of books, obscure science fiction books. Man, and it was just and he was he was a great guy, and I was just my head was spinning.
I gather he was a somewhat controversial character in some ways with some riders, but I don't know really the story there. But I would have loved to have seen that array of material from those movies and and would have been delighted to have been able to do that. Now. I guess it's been broken up somewhat now, and I don't know how much of it is all retained in one place anymore.
Yeah, I don't know either, But boy, he really had a collection. As an assign I have to tell you. I attended Wayne State University for a while and I took Astronomy one oh one, and I thought, oh, this is great. And then I took took Astronomy one O two and I ran into that that math thing, which was kind of a roadblock so I thought, Hey, I want to talk about spaceships and planets and so forth. I don't want to. I don't want to do algebra.
Unfortunately, if you get too far into astronomy, if you want to understand the why a star as a lifetime it does, and not take people's word for it, you have to do the math and calculate it for yourself. I am a little surprised that Lovecraft couldn't have gotten through that. But he was often very much self taught. I don't think he liked learning and classes all that much. He did very well in physics in high school the
classes he took. He did very well in chemistry, but I think he knew more of that on his own then he learned in the classes he took there. But when he got to a point where he couldn't teach himself the math all that well, then it seemed to be a roadblock to him. Right.
He was early on he was fascinated by the Moon and Venus as well. Venus, the planet that is hard to see now because of his cloud cover, was really hard to see them. And he was fascinated by what's the name of the crater Aristosanes.
Yeah, I get that right. There was a Harvard astronomer, William Henry Pickering, who in the later eighteen nineties and into the early nineteen hundreds was arguing that he had seen signs of life on the Moon, and there were these changes in the shadows and lights on the floors of certain Craterstasines was one of them, that were signified the growth of plant life at least maybe even the motions of migrating critters during the course of the lunar
day from full moon to the next full moon. And Lovecraft, when he got his small two and a quarter inch telescope, said I'm going to see if I can see this, and for a while he thought he was going to be a great discoverer with the small telescope of that that life on the Moon and of the then unknown rotation period of Venus. Later on he realized, no, with
this little back telescope, I can't really do that. But he published a number of things at time, and for a while he thought he he was seeing changes in there. Aretosnees that that we're indicating life on the planet. Later on, when he got his somewhat bigger telescope, he said, I can't verify all these things I was seeing with my
little telescope, and he became much more critical. I don't know if the people he knew at the lad Observatory were kind of pushing him that way, or saying, no, you're you're with your with your telescope there, that's only two inches across. You're not really being able to see all these details on the Moon and Venus set people with bigger telescopes are seeing. And he became more skeptical. But he toward the end of his life he was
back enjoying immature astronomy again. He went to meetings of the Skyscrapers the Immature Nomy Club in Providence in the last year of his life, and I'm sure had he lived long enough, he would have enjoyed the space age. Early on in his life he was actually pretty realistic about what would be needed to go into space. You read science fiction and all these people of the nineteen twenties and all these people just jump in their spaceship
and go zooming off. But Leftkoff said, well, he thought that people would eventually go to the Moon, but might take another century. And he was betting that the first people who tried, would probably die along the way. And it was a little bit more realistic to the viewpoint actually than many people at the time who were science
fiction enthusiasts. But I'm sure him had he lived to the day of SPOTNK, you would have been out there in his backyard looking up, watching to see the satellites serily, satellites go over.
What do you think you would have thought of? What's it called? The three I atlas a vlobes thing that has been going around.
The av Lobe is looking at this inter stellar comment that came in. Now this is uh, this observed initially identified as a comet, and when you tracked it slaw it. So it wasn't just within our own solo system as most comments are. It had come in to the Solar System from from beyond, kind of like if you've read the author of C. Clock's story Rendezvous with Rama Yep, where a spaceship comes in from beyond the Solar system
and heads out again. Abby Lobe was wondering whether this could be something like that, and he made a list of things that were odd about this comment that atlas. Yeah, and there are a number of things that are odd about this comet. But on the other end, we've only seen three interstellar meters or comments kind of an asteroid. But this is some outgassing, so you call it a comet, I suppose. And it's not clear that they were any
really any signs of it being an artificial object. So I think it's likely natural, and I think we're gonna find more of these fainter ones. The Vera Ruben telescope down in Chile has recently gone into operation that over a few nights, skims the whole sky down to a deep level, and I think we're going to find faint objects, lots of faint asteroids and things more readily than we
could before. Now it's not going to be so good for looking for If ray Harry Howsen fine saucer flew over, it wouldn't get that because it's pointed that too small a part of the sky and too narrow. I did see something odd when I was observing down in Chile once. This is back in the nineteen seventies. I'm down at Sarahtoola Interamerican Observatory on the mountaintop in the Andes in Chile, and I'm out looking at the night spectacular night sky from that loca in the center of the galaxy passes
nearly overhead from that location. But what I saw is this a little fuzzy thing, kind of like a smoke ring, moving across the sky and it comes up. I didn't catch it right when it appeared, but it was already there and moved over, kind of maybe expanding a little bit as it went. So as a UFO for me, but I bet it was probably something to do with a space launch at the time, and that what I was seeing was material released. Because we didn't have the internet back then, you can just look up what was
going on in the sky so easily. So I think I actually sent a report on that to j L and Heinech is Aque Center, but I don't know. I just got a brief acknowledgement, so I imagine they thought it was just a outgassing from a satellite thing too. Yeah.
Unfortunately, all of the UFO sightings in the Bridgewater Triangle the past couple of years have been almost definitely starlink sightings and not alien related. Unfortunately, there are.
So many satellites now it's hard in the evening and before dawn in the morning to be out there without seeing a bunch of them going over not so astronomers are not so happy with that because they're taking their photos and you have all these satellite trails going through.
It's like skytrash at this point. And even like with all the light pollution we have, you can't. And I live in a much larger town than I grew up in, about twice the size now, but without the light pollution, you can't just go outside and look up at the sky and enjoy it like you used to be able to as much.
Right even from the town of Warmantic when I was a kid growing up, you could see fairly faint objects in the night sky. Ah, but the lighting has grown much brighter and you can't anymore, which was a disappointment.
Advantage a snech in the West Country of England, it is pretty dark outside.
It's not a little light pollution, thankfully, so to care that moment, I.
Had a lot of stars, But unfortunately they're going to be building on the field behind me in the next year or so. All going to change, fortunately for me. I have a question with the throwing, which in honest I thought we're kind of related. I'm quite fascinated with the whole concept, the faster than light travel, the possibilities or the non possibility. Is it becoming a reality only what your thoughts are on that we will achieve that or not.
Funny thing about that. When I was a sophomore in college, I spent this summer working on the physics of tachions, which are faster than light particles. I didn't really know what I was doing, but someone had a summer program and I was in there. They have imaginary rest masses, so they're odd particles, but they always go faster than the light. They can never go slower than light, but
alas they've not been detected so far. So some people working on the physics of something analogous to warp drive, and sometimes they seem to get physics that works but takes an impossible amount of energy or something on those sides. So I think I'd love it to be true, because I'd hate that we had to just trundle and spend thousands of years getting from one star to another. But
I don't know that it's true. However, some people have suggested that even if you're limited to lower than light speed, you send out thousands and thousands of robotic space probes that don't mind trundling along from star to star for thousands of years, and eventually they find an interesting star system and they investigate it and then report back to you. And maybe some civilization has the ability to do that. But it's something that would love to be true, but
then I can't say is true. Now, Uh, you've had some There are interesting visitors from somewhere that are in the in probably in all your neck of the woods. I think of Steve's area in particular. And uh, where is the the was it the flat Woods Monster.
In? Uh? It's near Sutton in flat Woods, West Virginia. What's that so Soussie? Okay, it's it's about maybe an hour and a half, maybe a little longer from Point Pleasant, West Virginia.
Now is there a flat Woods Monster Museum?
Yes, there is, Uh, not as not as fast as the Mothman Museum, but uh it's They even have their own festival. You know, everybody is h is celebrating their local monsters these days. From the Loveland frog Man that you know. I mean, I'm not begrudging him a festival, even though they only showed up a few times. But let me do the brief intermission. Here you are listening to The High Strangeness Factor, copyrighted on the Paranoble UK
Radio network. Today we are talking to Horace Smith about his writings which cover Meteors Lovecraft, his writings and Lovecraft's writings, and his interest in astronomy and much much more. I have to tell you again, my favorite all time story of Lovecraft is The Whisper in Darkness, which is basically about a a an evasion from space and a little spoiler there, but uh, so I was I have to tell you again. I'm going to mention boys Flank Island again.
I was reading this story at about two in the morning in a cottage on boys Blank Island in the dark, and man, oh man, I had to make a pilgrimage to the little boys room and I did not want to leave the bedroom. But it was uh and in the uh and it was it was written around the time that Pluto was discovered. And I'm still a little bit ticked off that they demoted Pluto from a planet, but anyway, that that was uh, it was just it was just that was kind of the conclusion of the story.
The the protagonist is kind of freaking out because he's thinking that these beings are now allowing their planet to be seen, and what does that mean the.
The planet he called it jagath Yep, And when the Pluto was found, he actually wrote to some of his friends saying, this new planet they found is obviously from my story. The other thing about that the wistmer in darkness is if you follow the h the pattern of the moon in the story, and you're very careful, the creatures come around the house more in the dark of the moon. He's very accurate in doing his moon phases and the time when the moon he was always critical.
The stars had to be right and the moon had to be right, not only in terms of when Great Kohu Thulhu, however you choose to pronounce it, comes back, but the stars had to be right in people's stories so that they matched what you would actually see in the sky. And he actually sent some little starmap planispheres rotating star maps to some of his friends who were also authors. They would be able to get the stars right in their short stories, which he said they hadn't
done in some of his earlier work. So I think Frank net Long and some of the others got this a little bit of chastising from Lovecraft for not getting the stars of the moon or other things right he was. However. Lovecraft, however, was far kinder than Ambrose Bierce, who wrote an essay called The Moon in Literature that savaged some people, particularly h writer Haggard, for getting the moon all messed up
in King Solomon's mind. Minds, And there's no doubt Haggard did get the moon all messed up in King Solomon's mind, but Berce was not going to let it pass with just a few notes, savaged them over that.
Now you have to. Now, another thing that just fascinated me about that time is that, you know, you mentioned the watching the craters and the what they thought it changes in the shadows, and that perhaps it maybe reference vegetation, maybe even construction, and of course Mars and the canals and so forth. That was really a time when they thought maybe just maybe there was life on the Moon and or even on Mars and so forth. But you know, you've got to tell us about the Great Moon hoax.
I actually bought the book where I can read about the about the claims that were made and the people that were suckered into it.
This goes back to I believe in the eighteen thirties and one of the chief astronomers of the time was the son of William Herschel, who had discovered the planet Uranus. He was John Herschel, and the southern sky had not been seen as deeply with telescopes as the northern sky. So John Herschel went down to the Cape, South Africa and took with him built there a relatively large telescope for the time, and he's going to survey the southern sky.
So people knew he was going down there. But back New York City, the writer for the was a New York's son, I believe newspaper Yes, took advantage of this and said, Okay, not only is John Herschel observing the heavens from down on the Cape, we have reports back from him. And what he's seeing are He's got this fantastic telescope with multiple lenses. You give these incredible views of the Moon. And what he's seeing are creatures on the moon. Uh, these these winged creatures that fly around.
There's life on the moon there, there're civilization there. These I don't have the picture right now. There's some drawings that were made to go with the the articles and the sun, showing the inhabitants of the moon.
Then he have a rangetans with wings.
I think there were hairy creatures and down there, but they were a crust between the rang and things and people kind of And this is fabulous for sales for the Sun. The sales of the newspapers zoomed up. Of course, no one could just send a telephone call or a telegram, even to John Herschel, to say if it's true. You'd have to wait for a ship to go down and come back, so that there was no way to immediately debunk the stories. Eventually, I don't know how long it lasted before the story of of the.
I think it was a six part article, but I don't know what the span of time was. But didn't.
Poe, who some people have accused of being responsible for creating part of that tale, turned out to be a debunker two of it. If he was, because he was an amateur astronomer too. Actually he did some writing that actually contributed to the progress of astronomy, though it's very oddly written, and he eventually I'll say, no, this can't be right, and the sales. Everyone agreed it was a hoax eventually, and alas for the Sun, their sales went down, but no one was ever took. I think there was
no admission of trouble. As I remember that it was a hoax and set the pattern for others in the nineteenth century, I think to try to duplicate it. But I don't know if any New York newspaper ever was able to achieve the celebrity of the Great Moon Hoax of the eighteen thirties. By the time you got into the later eighteen hundreds, people could send a telegram and
get an instant debunking. Wasn't the same later on. And alas those flying orangutan humans whatever they were, the moon men where were not real And sure would be nice to have a telescope that would show that amount of detail on the Moon, But even John Herschel didn't have that.
Sort of like H. G. Wells short story The Crystal.
Egg, We're all say, a view through to the planet Mars, right right, yeah, and it said he just founds finds it in a antique shop or something.
Is it right right?
Uh? Yeah it h I don't know if the Martians were using that to get information for their invasion in the War of the World.
They look quite a bit different. The invaders were looked a little more like occupy then I think the things that they were H. G. Wells was talking about in that particular.
Story, that's true, but it's a fine little story. And yeah, if you've only read H. G. Wells major novels, The Time Machine, The War of the World's uh, The Invisible Man, that the science fiction which he's most famous, I would encourage you not to miss his short stories too. A
number of them are very interesting. There was one I recalled that he had a man who was suddenly given the power to be omnipotent, but unfortunately it was not all wise too, and it and all kinds of trouble with his omnipotence.
Well, another another great thing that you guys do in the novel you go through many many authors that may have had may have touched and an influence you know what, it may have influenced some of Lovecraft's writings. And you talk a lot about various really obscure stories and novels about the moon, not just h not I mean, not just Jules Verne from the Earth to the Moon. But uh, it's you know, I mean you you hit everything you hit aker Rice Burrows, the Moon made, and and and
so many. I kept I kept reading your book, and I what I do is I put I put these these books in my my Amazon shopping cart for later, and then I once in a while I total them up, and I think, no, I'm going to have to re mortgage my house to buy all this stuff. So we're not going to do that. You even mentioned Edmund Hamilton,
one of my favorite authors of all time. Lovecraft didn't like him very much, and you know, he was a little bit repetitive, and he was kind of the guy that he and his wife Lee Brackett kind of created space opera, didn't he one of the early The Earl was early on.
I should say that Eddie Gimmott is responsible for tracking down and finding many of those obscure uh stories that I mentioned. But Edmund Hamilton became famous early on, I think partly because he had a lot of catastrophe Earth being destroyed by stories before he began to to get him on into space opera. And I seem to remember one where he had someone built giant robots in the wilds of Pennsylvania that were in the way there and
sudden were released to to destroy the towns. And there was one where someone invented, I think, as is Edmund Hamilton, a way to connect up with different times in the past, and suddenly dinosaurs are walking down this, uh the street of this town and causing similar havoc.
Uh.
So I enjoyed some of those early tales that are.
But they called the world savor Hamilton, I think for a while.
Yeah, someone always had to come up with a way to keep the Earth from being totally destroyed by by whatever creature or or monster or whatever or comet or whatever it was that was going to wipe us out.
But you know his uh, he would he would do formulas sometimes, but I think that his imagination was was so good that he kind of uh surpassed that a little bit. He wrote.
Did you ever read any of the Captain Future stories? I did not, unfortunately.
I actually I actually have the original pulp magazines of my collection, but I first started reading them in in the reprinted paperbags. Huh.
Well, I remember when I started reading, uh, my introduction the space Opera was the Skylark Smith and.
Things like that. I that for the people that don't know who Captain Future was. He was more believable than Flash Gordon, not quite as believable as Captain Kirk. And it was it was so much fun because all the planets were inhabited, and he tooled around in his spaceship to comet. He had his on the moon. He had an android, a robot, and uh a scientist. Who's the guy's just a brain in a in a cube, a translucent cue that would fly around on tractor beams, and
uh it was. It was one of these deals like like Doc Savage, where a uh the the publishing company would set it up. They would create the characters and then they would hire a writer, usually under a pen name, not always to write the stories. And so he was. He had to put in something there about sports every time the villain had to escape three times. So he
was he was restricted in that way. But I always thought he came up with, uh, you know, interesting stories, and uh, I just I still uh still love Captain Future, even though Captain Future is quite impossible.
Maybe I shall have to read him.
Uh you'll get a kick out of him. Oh, go ahead, go ahead for us.
I was just gonna say the Golden age of science fiction was still hanging around but getting passed into the New ages. I started reading in the nineteen sixties. I came across the science fiction magazines that were so prominent at the time and have mostly disappeared today. A few of them are left, things like Analog Worlds of If Galaxy,
stories like that that. Many of the major writers would have their stories appear in those magazines before they were came out in paperback books, and it was wonderful to come across them at that time. And I also would also occasionally have non fiction, and two of my favorites kind of went against each other in different magazines. One of those isoc asim Off would have a a monthly I think it was monthly at the time, or almost
monthly article. And Willie Lay, who was a cryptologist Sought to Know, would also have in Galaxy magazine, he'd have his non fiction tale and they were so very different in style that you can enjoy reading them, even if they covered by accident the same subjects. But Willie Lay I used to get all his books if I when I could afford them, and he was an expert in the space age, rockets, missile and space travel at the time. But he also was interested in zoology and what on
would think of as cryptid stories today. What is the creature on the but there's the dragon like creature on the gates of the the old fortresses in Baghdad, or or things like that. And I enjoyed him very much. I don't know how much of his cryptid work has stood the test of time. Probably we know a lot more about many of those topics than they did in his day, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading them.
Excuse me, does Michigan have any cryptids?
Oh, of course it has scripteds, but I don't know if there are any around me that are particularly local to the area.
There a big man man, there's some Battle Creek area sidings, but most of them are up around Traverse City, or you know Bigfoot that that guy just shows up everywhere. I don't know if I remember the reports in Monroe, Michigan back in the mid sixties. I think that was a hoax, though I think that was was before I was in Michigan, So okay, all right.
The thing I heard from about Michigan was earliest, was probably the swamp casts UFO siding. I knew it was in Michigan, I didn't have I have no idea where the town is. And if you go to the place today, it's pretty much built over. It's been developed so well. The UFO was seen in the in the Swamp Gas Tales.
Yes, that was a March of sixty six. Doctor J. Aalen Heinech was still attached to Project Blue Book, and they kind of wanted him to defuse it, to bunk it. So he suggested that some of the sightings in Hillsdale, for example, might be swamp gas, and of course that's
all they needed to solve the UFO mystery. But I actually saw him Horace ten years later at a Michigan upon meeting at the Weber Inn in Ann Arbor, and he had left Blue Book started the Center for UFO Studies, and the name of his talk was Swamp Gas plus ten and counting.
I wrote a book which a little book which was the history of our campus of observatories on the campus of Michigan State University called Stars over the Red Cedar, And at one point J. Allen Heinech enters the tale. Because in the nineteen fifties, a late fifties. Excuse me,
there was a Moonwatch station set up here. Now. I don't know if you remember Project Moonwatch, but this was amateur astronomers mostly who were gathered together to be helped track the first artificial satellites, and one of them was set up upon the Physics building of the time, it must have been much darker than than there is today
around that building. And when they were setting it up, jo and Heinek was actually involved in helping to direct the organization of these amateur satellite working groups, and they sent a letter to the Michigan group when they were being organized, saying, now you're so like you have everything you need to get going. You're accepted into the Moonwatch group. Why don't you tell your your local papers and TV people because you have some news that is worth telling.
He was trying to get publicity for the Moonwatch teams at the time, and that's the letter I came across when I was doing the history of the Moonwatch project. And they actually did see some of the moon, the early moons, the artificial moons, but they weren't the US ones that they were expecting to be watching. The first one they saw were Russian satellites, so that it's an
interesting story. Nonetheless, and they're probably unidentified objects hidden in those Moonwatch records because they would make get together at certain times and make the equivalent with the little Moonwatch telescopes of a picket fence across the sky waiting for objects like satellites to cross through when they know when
and where the satellite crossed. And that was before everything could be done with the radar right and later on, so occasionally I'm sure they must have seen things cross through that were never matched up with any satellite or non object.
The last time you will go ahead? Were you finished with your thoughts?
That SE's all I need to say, Probably more than I needed to say.
I can say as much as you want, no extra charge that the last time you and I were on a show, I brought up the Curious book Shop on the main Drag in East Lansing, And how I used to haunt that all the time. And uh, I mean for Pulp Magazine's UFO books. Uh Lovecraft sometimes in hardcover and and and some of the authors that published Lovecraft style stories. But did you ever go to the Ableman Bookshop in ham Trammick?
I do not think I did. Of course, a curious bookstar, I was that many a time.
And the.
Archived bookstore when it was around later on, and the number of the ones in the n Armor, I don't think I ever went to one in him tramm Well.
For people that don't know, Ham Trammick is a captive suburb in Detroit, just a couple of miles down, and there was this it's not there anymore, but this two story ableman bookstore, dirty dusty. It had you know, paperbacks and books on the lawera. I would go and ask the guy if I could go upstairs because that's where all his pulp magazines were. Oh my god, I mean I had to. I didn't have a lot of money,
but I bought. I got a lot of issues of things like Amazing Stories, startling stories, you know, way before these went to a digest size. And I got, you know, some original stories by Ray Bradbury. I have a story in a beat up Weird Tales by Robert D. Howard, a Conan story, and it was I found some some I've found some very hard to find, the hero pulps like Doc Savage and the Shadow, but I found a few of those so that was, Uh, well, I take
my my Measley pay check and go there. I should have been saving my money, but you know, hey, you only live once. So I would go there and just dole out a few bucks, and uh I built up a nice little collection.
So that was a hard bargain.
Nowadays there's oh good lord, too many things on the web. And know what they have, Andy and Susie, any any any other questions? Parting words?
I thought I did want to mention that in honor of Lovecraft, I am drinking the official drink of Rhode Island, which is coffee milk.
Loved coffee and with lots of sugar. In his case he was a teetotal or other in terms of alcohol, but coffee he loved with lots of sugar.
And for anyone not from New England, coffee milk is it's almost like chocolate milk or strawberry milk, where you have a concentrated coffee flavored syrup that you mix in with milk. It's a New England delicacy that pairs very well with a fluffer nut or sandwich. Recommendation.
Everyone.
I'm sure that Lovecraft would would appreciate.
That very good and uh Andy, any any parting words, any questions, both.
Conversation to give up weird fiction.
I've really I'm a big fan of the last few years especially you've got really gone back into just one brief thing. Have you ever come across the Dark Adventures radio theater? They hate love Crofts.
I have, and they have listened to a number of them.
I think I would recommend their version of Lookers Through to anybody because it turns into it as you know you heard. It turns up a story with characters actually speaking of their experiences rather than just a narrative. What we did with that would make a brilliant movie. I think it is fantastic.
Well, Horace, we're gonna have to have your back. I mean, we just barely spashed the service, and uh, this has just been a lot of fun, you know. I And again, I know we all have our favorite books here, but ladies and gentlemen, when the stars are right, uh HP Lovecraft and Astronomy. Horace a smith and Edward with his last name said, Okay, very good. I'm glad you said it. Okay, but it's just it's just a fascinating book. It covers, uh like in some of the areas we talked about tonight.
It just covers everything, and it is such a fun book. And you don't even really necessarily have to be a fan of Lovecraft too. I mean, if you enjoy h history and and uh you know the past and how they were, uh, you know, they were so new at trying to explore the heavens.
Uh.
This is just a fascinating book. So I guess with with that, we'll close it out and let you have any parting words. Horace.
No, I'm very glad to have been here, and we could go on all night, but we better.
Not, especially since Andy is in Uh. I don't know how many time zones he's away, but he could just pass out any second. I could pass out any second. That was a that was a wild trip to Frogman. But I'll go ahead and close out the show. Thanks everybody for being here. The High Strangeress Factor was created by Steve Ward and Andy Mercer and his copyright on the Paranormal UK Radio Network. Our Fearless production team Steers
Steers the Rudder for the network. Andy Mercer is the producer for The High Strangest Factor along with other shows. I can be heard on a panel on Paul Dale Roberts Show from time to time, and I do some Mothman one on one shows which go way beyond the Mothman. Andy Mercer completed the ending for the show and Brian Zilver composed the opening theme for the High Strangers Factory.
And I am Steve Ward along with Andy Mercer, I am a displaced Michigander deep in the Ohio Valley, living on the same road that the Mothman chased cars back in the middle sixties. Thank you all for listening and we will see you again soon.